Carolina Wren Blue Jays Cardinals Doves

Also spend time botanizing. The tree with the most lovely name: Carolina Silverbell. The leaves of wild ginger are beautiful.

In the discussions of conflict and fear today, peaceable ness wasn’t spoken about. The problem of human violence is as much about what the human body and soul holds and learns as much as in the external world. The only winnable war is the war one much wage to refine the quality of the self. All the external wars, beginning from violence that we inflict on one another at personal level, to the violence we inflict as societies on other societies are futile. The question remains how do we resolve conflict should it occur? Again the strongest and the most meaningful way is dialogue, with the self and with the other.

One of the ways, as written in the Gita, to attain enlightenment is through knowledge (jyana yoga). However this is possibly the hardest way towards perfection. Saint Shankara said the way of devotion (bhakti yoga) is surely much easier. And on reflection he is right because through devotion (to an idea, to work, to a person) perfect knowledge is also attainable.

Christian theology is largely so caught up in the idea of salvation that church ceremonies in part, to me, resemble large scale “sin” relieving shrink sessions for the masses. Then the other issue is that of separation of god from human, god as the third person always external, leading to incomplete understanding of the way to reach God. However given that there has also been a rich tradition of contemplatives with the Christian tradition these problems must then be that of the mainstream religious “businesses”.

The problem with mostpeople (e. e cummings’s usage) is that most people don’t think about a single issue which is “external” to them in the course of the day. Thus the sorry state of democracy in this country and elsewhere.