https://awakin.org/read/ iJourney passages are a weekly email service that delivers a little bit of wisdom. It all started with couple folks getting together on Wednesdays in the Silicon Valley. en Wed, 06 May 2026 18:36:53 -0700 ServiceSpace iJourney passages are a weekly email service that delivers a little bit of wisdom. It all started with couple folks getting together on Wednesdays in the Silicon Valley. ServiceSpace tow@charityfocus.org no tow@charityfocus.org (ServiceSpace) https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2783 A friend and I often greet each other with the Arabic words, “Ishq Allah.” Ishq is passionate love for God. Crazy love for spirit in matter and matter in spirit. The Sufi-dervish-wonder that whirls and says, Ishq Allah ma’būd lillāh, God is love, lover, and beloved ... Our pointer-dogs, Sara and Bartie hike with me in the mountains where Sara brings a special brand of Ishq. Whenever she senses a bird, she freezes in a perfect point. Time stops as she leans forward, her front leg bent, her stubby tail extended. It’s dog yoga, downward pointing God, as she claims union with her ordained purpose. I hold my breath. The earth holds its breath. Then Sara hears a sacred starting gun, discernible only in dog-land. She barrels into the underbrush. Twenty grey quail fling themselves up out of the bushes, no chirping, only the sound of insistent wings that say, “I Am.” I inhale the sound of wings and say, “So Am I, beloved quail—I Am.” Sara barks at the quail then races back down the mountain to share her excitementwith Bartie and me. “You are the beloved, too, sweet dogs,” I say. Together, we continue our ishq-intoxicated hike. What did I do to deserve this microcosm of audacious grace? Who created a dog that points so clearly and dearly? What offers a flock of quail the adventure of a shared get-away? How do air, feathers, and flight conspire to break one’s heart into beauty with sounds only love can hear? Who submits us to this drunken recklessness? Ishq allāh ma’būd lillāh, God as love, lover, and beloved ... What a privilege it is to listen to the three in one. No definitions, no reasoning required. Simply wonder in the wordless wings. Love, lover, and beloved sing to us constantly. But will we listen? Will we hear? With love’s help, I’ll try and listen better. I’ll start with the high school band that rehearses every day, inches from my house. I’ll fall in love with their raucous On Wisconsin. I’ll shimmy to the salsa version of Beethoven’s Für Elise. I’ll dance to the drum line. I’ll trust love to transform out-of-tune band music to the sound of teenagers pointing their clarinets and saxophones toward the intangible angle of grace. I’ll know the music hasn’t changed. Thebeloved changes me. The lover tempts my ears to hear differently. And the alchemy of love transforms annoyance into amazement. With practice, we can learn everything is love, lover, and beloved. Dissonance and grace; the New York Philharmonic and the Santa Paula High School band—It’s all the sound of wings. It’s all Ishq Allāh ma’būd lillāh. Everything is intoxicated rapture calling us home—home to heaven on earth, precisely, where we belong. tow-2783 Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700 A friend and I often greet each other with the Arabic words, “Ishq Allah.” Ishq is passionate love for God. Crazy love for spirit in matter and matter in spirit. The Sufi-dervish-wonder that whirls and says, Ishq Allah ma’būd lillāh, God is love, lover, and beloved ... Our pointer-dogs, Sara and Bartie hike with me in the mountains where Sara brings a special brand of Ishq. Whenever she senses a bird, she freezes in a perfect point. Time stops as she leans forward, her front leg bent, her stubby tail extended. It’s dog yoga, downward pointing God, as she claims union with her ordained purpose. I hold my breath. The earth holds its breath. Then Sara hears a sacred starting gun, discernible only in dog-land. She barrels into the underbrush. Twenty grey quail fling themselves up out of the bushes, no chirping, only the sound of insistent wings that say, “I Am.” I inhale the sound of wings and say, “So Am I, beloved quail—I Am.” Sara barks at the quail then races back down the mountain to share her excitementwith Bartie and me. “You are the beloved, too, sweet dogs,” I say. Together, we continue our ishq-intoxicated hike. What did I do to deserve this microcosm of audacious grace? Who created a dog that points so clearly and dearly? What offers a flock of quail the adventure of a shared get-away? How do air, feathers, and flight conspire to break one’s heart into beauty with sounds only love can hear? Who submits us to this drunken recklessness? Ishq allāh ma’būd lillāh, God as love, lover, and beloved ... What a privilege it is to listen to the three in one. No definitions, no reasoning required. Simply wonder in the wordless wings. Love, lover, and beloved sing to us constantly. But will we listen? Will we hear? With love’s help, I’ll try and listen better. I’ll start with the high school band that rehearses every day, inches from my house. I’ll fall in love with their raucous On Wisconsin. I’ll shimmy to the salsa version of Beethoven’s Für Elise. I’ll dance to the drum line. I’ll trust love to transform out-of-tune band music to the sound of teenagers pointing their clarinets and saxophones toward the intangible angle of grace. I’ll know the music hasn’t changed. Thebeloved changes me. The lover tempts my ears to hear differently. And the alchemy of love transforms annoyance into amazement. With practice, we can learn everything is love, lover, and beloved. Dissonance and grace; the New York Philharmonic and the Santa Paula High School band—It’s all the sound of wings. It’s all Ishq Allāh ma’būd lillāh. Everything is intoxicated rapture calling us home—home to heaven on earth, precisely, where we belong. https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2782 Believe me when I say I wish I could offer you something like an instant parting of the clouds, a single sentence or practice that would return you immediately to peace. Something simple and universal. A one-size-fits-all path back to center. But the truth is, being human doesn’t work that way. There isn’t one doorway that fits everyone. There isn’t one instruction that lands the same for every nervous system, every history, every heart. And I don’t want to add more noise to the pile. Because lately it feels like everywhere you turn there’s someone telling you how you should be navigating. How you should feel, respond or act. The “shoulds” are endless. Open any news feed or social platform and there’s another voice prescribing the correct spiritual posture, the right emotional response, the proper way to be awake or aware or evolved. Of course, it is exhausting. So instead of offering something new or clever, I find myself returning to a couple of very old, very quiet phrases that have stayed with me for years. One of them is this from my practitioner teaching days:Even in the apparent absence of…Even in the apparent absence of peace, there is peace.Even in the apparent absence of order, there is order.Even in the apparent absence of God, there is God. If that’s true - if peace or order or presence hasn’t actually disappeared - then the question becomes personal. Not: What must they do?  But: What must I do to sense it again? How do I soften enough to notice what hasn’t left? How do I untangle myself from the noise long enough to reconnect? Another phrase that has steadied me lately is even simpler:Everywhere I look, I see what I’m looking for. If I’m scanning the world for proof that everything is broken, I’ll find it instantly. If I’m looking for outrage, there it is. If I’m looking for fear, it’s everywhere. But if the only thing I choose to look for is God - or love, or harmony, or intelligence, or care - then that is what begins to appear. So the only real choice I seem to have is this: What am I looking for? And if I can’t see it? Then maybe I’m being asked to be it. To be the calm, the listener, the steadiness. To be the hands and feet of the very thing I say I believe in. Not as a performance or some conceptual strategy, just quietly, in the way I move through the day. I’m not grabbing for followers or outcomes or trying to win arguments. And I’m not pushing anyone away either. I’m practicing being present in the doing. No chasing. No clinging. No retaliation. Just trusting that what is mine to do will reveal itself when it’s time, and that the right people will find their way here, and others won’t, and that’s okay. It has to be okay. Because maybe peace was never something we manufacture. Maybe it’s something we remember. tow-2782 Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700 Believe me when I say I wish I could offer you something like an instant parting of the clouds, a single sentence or practice that would return you immediately to peace. Something simple and universal. A one-size-fits-all path back to center. But the truth is, being human doesn’t work that way. There isn’t one doorway that fits everyone. There isn’t one instruction that lands the same for every nervous system, every history, every heart. And I don’t want to add more noise to the pile. Because lately it feels like everywhere you turn there’s someone telling you how you should be navigating. How you should feel, respond or act. The “shoulds” are endless. Open any news feed or social platform and there’s another voice prescribing the correct spiritual posture, the right emotional response, the proper way to be awake or aware or evolved. Of course, it is exhausting. So instead of offering something new or clever, I find myself returning to a couple of very old, very quiet phrases that have stayed with me for years. One of them is this from my practitioner teaching days:Even in the apparent absence of…Even in the apparent absence of peace, there is peace.Even in the apparent absence of order, there is order.Even in the apparent absence of God, there is God. If that’s true - if peace or order or presence hasn’t actually disappeared - then the question becomes personal. Not: What must they do?  But: What must I do to sense it again? How do I soften enough to notice what hasn’t left? How do I untangle myself from the noise long enough to reconnect? Another phrase that has steadied me lately is even simpler:Everywhere I look, I see what I’m looking for. If I’m scanning the world for proof that everything is broken, I’ll find it instantly. If I’m looking for outrage, there it is. If I’m looking for fear, it’s everywhere. But if the only thing I choose to look for is God - or love, or harmony, or intelligence, or care - then that is what begins to appear. So the only real choice I seem to have is this: What am I looking for? And if I can’t see it? Then maybe I’m being asked to be it. To be the calm, the listener, the steadiness. To be the hands and feet of the very thing I say I believe in. Not as a performance or some conceptual strategy, just quietly, in the way I move through the day. I’m not grabbing for followers or outcomes or trying to win arguments. And I’m not pushing anyone away either. I’m practicing being present in the doing. No chasing. No clinging. No retaliation. Just trusting that what is mine to do will reveal itself when it’s time, and that the right people will find their way here, and others won’t, and that’s okay. It has to be okay. Because maybe peace was never something we manufacture. Maybe it’s something we remember. https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2649 What became clear for me is that we cannot control the volatile tides that life brings, but maybe we can learn to build better boats. I needed a better vessel -- a sacred vessel. I would do this for myself and for my people -- my daughters, my mother, and my extended community -- so that we could navigate the harsh conditions of life without being torn asunder. And so I went in search. What I discovered is this: Suffering comes with the experience of being human, and one’s perspective can determine how one experiences and works with it. Suffering is psycho-somatic pain, meaning that it impacts the mind, body, and spirit of a person. Sometimes suffering is multigenerational, genetically coded, or situational. It sometimes hides out in the subconscious realms of our psyche and muscle memory, like a kid’s game of hide-and-seek. Life experiences, painful encounters, and anxiety can trigger and awaken moments of trauma or suffering. I have come to realize that there is no logic when it comes to suffering. Because it is a type of pain, we try to make sense of the pain. We ask: Is there a reason for the pain? What does the pain mean? Is there a cause for my suffering? Is it the result of a choice I have made? While there may be answers for simple forms of temporary suffering, when it comes to more complex forms, adequate answers are more elusive. In these instances, a person and loved ones must come to terms with suffering as a permanent resident in their lives. In these instances, suffering persistently nudges the sufferer and/or loved ones to ask heart-wrenching questions about the meaning and purpose of life. While not all do so, some choose to wrestle with suffering rather than retreat into denial or bitterness. These sojourners follow a rabbit hole into the dark tunnels of life’s mystery, where only questions illuminate the path in front of them. It is a lonely and isolating inward journey, because only they alone can fully experience their suffering. Encounters with the ultimate source of suffering, however, can lead to transformation, new insights, wisdom, and healing to share with those who might face similar encounters. For me this journey was intimate and private, but at the same time I found wise guides, teachers, and counselors to accompany me as I descended into the luminous darkness of my own emotional memories. Howard Thurman was one of those guides: The individual enters a fellowship of suffering and the community of sufferers. The only point to be held steadily in mind is that, despite the personal character of suffering, the sufferer can work his way through to community. This does not make his pain less, but it can make it inclusive of many other people. Sometimes he discovers through the ministry of his own burden a larger comprehension of his fellows, of whose presence he becomes aware of in his darkness. They are companions along the way. Wrestling with my suffering was necessary in order for me to reckon with the gut-wrenching pain of my own experience in hopes of discovering an illumined path of healing and transformation to share with others. Again, Thurman’s words resonate: This is why we very often see people as profoundly changed by their suffering. Into their faces has come a subtle radiance and a settled serenity; into their relationships [comes] a vital generosity that opens the sealed doors of the heart in all who are encountered along the way. Such people look out upon life with quiet eyes. Openings are made in a life by suffering that are not made in any other way. Serious questions are raised and primary answers come forth. Insights are reached concerning aspects of life that are hidden and obscure before the assault. I discovered an ancient, underground river of truth that rises up in all of these traditions. I discovered that faith and certainty are not the same. Too much certainty about what, why, and how God works gets in God’s way. tow-2649 Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700 What became clear for me is that we cannot control the volatile tides that life brings, but maybe we can learn to build better boats. I needed a better vessel -- a sacred vessel. I would do this for myself and for my people -- my daughters, my mother, and my extended community -- so that we could navigate the harsh conditions of life without being torn asunder. And so I went in search. What I discovered is this: Suffering comes with the experience of being human, and one’s perspective can determine how one experiences and works with it. Suffering is psycho-somatic pain, meaning that it impacts the mind, body, and spirit of a person. Sometimes suffering is multigenerational, genetically coded, or situational. It sometimes hides out in the subconscious realms of our psyche and muscle memory, like a kid’s game of hide-and-seek. Life experiences, painful encounters, and anxiety can trigger and awaken moments of trauma or suffering. I have come to realize that there is no logic when it comes to suffering. Because it is a type of pain, we try to make sense of the pain. We ask: Is there a reason for the pain? What does the pain mean? Is there a cause for my suffering? Is it the result of a choice I have made? While there may be answers for simple forms of temporary suffering, when it comes to more complex forms, adequate answers are more elusive. In these instances, a person and loved ones must come to terms with suffering as a permanent resident in their lives. In these instances, suffering persistently nudges the sufferer and/or loved ones to ask heart-wrenching questions about the meaning and purpose of life. While not all do so, some choose to wrestle with suffering rather than retreat into denial or bitterness. These sojourners follow a rabbit hole into the dark tunnels of life’s mystery, where only questions illuminate the path in front of them. It is a lonely and isolating inward journey, because only they alone can fully experience their suffering. Encounters with the ultimate source of suffering, however, can lead to transformation, new insights, wisdom, and healing to share with those who might face similar encounters. For me this journey was intimate and private, but at the same time I found wise guides, teachers, and counselors to accompany me as I descended into the luminous darkness of my own emotional memories. Howard Thurman was one of those guides: The individual enters a fellowship of suffering and the community of sufferers. The only point to be held steadily in mind is that, despite the personal character of suffering, the sufferer can work his way through to community. This does not make his pain less, but it can make it inclusive of many other people. Sometimes he discovers through the ministry of his own burden a larger comprehension of his fellows, of whose presence he becomes aware of in his darkness. They are companions along the way. Wrestling with my suffering was necessary in order for me to reckon with the gut-wrenching pain of my own experience in hopes of discovering an illumined path of healing and transformation to share with others. Again, Thurman’s words resonate: This is why we very often see people as profoundly changed by their suffering. Into their faces has come a subtle radiance and a settled serenity; into their relationships [comes] a vital generosity that opens the sealed doors of the heart in all who are encountered along the way. Such people look out upon life with quiet eyes. Openings are made in a life by suffering that are not made in any other way. Serious questions are raised and primary answers come forth. Insights are reached concerning aspects of life that are hidden and obscure before the assault. I discovered an ancient, underground river of truth that rises up in all of these traditions. I discovered that faith and certainty are not the same. Too much certainty about what, why, and how God works gets in God’s way. https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2576 I’ve been a graduate student in physics for almost three years, but I only recently figured out why. I had to tackle a simple question do so: Why does this matter?  I avoided asking myself this question because I knew the answer would be painful. I ended up in physics through stubbornness, and an unusual willingness to suffer for the sake of grades. As an undergraduate, I was not particularly passionate about quarks, quasars, or quantum mechanics, but I was academically very competitive, and once I’d settled on physics as my major I determined to place myself at the top of my class. I did so by throwing myself into the hardest classes and putting in the hours required to ace the tests. This was, to put it mildly, a bad idea. I got a sort of grim pleasure from vanquishing my classmates in these academic slogs, but I was basically miserable. So why’d I keep it up? When multiple people are striving towards a shared goal, they often rank themselves by progress within their peer group. This was my mistake — I swapped an absolute goal (figuring out how bits of nature work) with a relative one (scoring higher on tests than my classmates). Later, when I found myself unhappy, I couldn’t leave without feeling like I’d lost something. That social capital sunk cost was the first part of the trap I found myself in. The second was a positive feedback loop that encouraged me to spend ever-increasing amounts of time on my work. Humans inherit convictions mimetically from each other — we learn what to value by imitating our peers. As my desire to excel academically grew, I spent greater amounts of time in and around the physics department. The more time I spent there, the greater my desire to excel. I’d never given physics much thought at all before my senior year in high school — but once I was surrounded by other physics students, competing for the same pool of grades and research positions, I could think of little else. This inherited desire was unchecked because I had no life outside of academics — no fixed reference point. Although quitting would have made me happier, I felt like I had nowhere to quit to. My tunnel vision left me with few concrete notions of alternative pursuits, and without a destination, I could not seriously contemplate leaving.  Plans are never plausible until they contain specifics, and implausible plans tend to be discarded. Many of my peers in physics only added incredulity, consciously or otherwise. The result was a reality distortion field — quitting was not just painful, but unimaginable, unthinkable. I ended up in graduate school not because I wanted to toe the bleeding edge of natural science, but because I simply couldn’t imagine doing anything else. That’s the mimetic trap in a nutshell: it hurts to leave, and there’s nowhere to go. It decouples the social reward signal from the rest of objective reality — you can spend years ascending ranks in a hierarchy without producing anything that the rest of humanity finds valuable. If you value the process itself, that’s fine. I didn’t. Cowardice kept me from acting on this, and after a while I came to believe I had to succeed in this field I’d fallen into essentially by chance. “Why does this matter?” is an excellent way to gauge if you’ve drifted into a mimetic trap. If you find this question impossible to answer honestly, you’re probably wasting your time. Getting out is the hard part — that requires courage and diligent planning. It’s much easier to avoid falling in. But in either case, you’ll benefit from building a system that steers you towards productive, meaningful activity in the long run. tow-2576 Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700 I’ve been a graduate student in physics for almost three years, but I only recently figured out why. I had to tackle a simple question do so: Why does this matter?  I avoided asking myself this question because I knew the answer would be painful. I ended up in physics through stubbornness, and an unusual willingness to suffer for the sake of grades. As an undergraduate, I was not particularly passionate about quarks, quasars, or quantum mechanics, but I was academically very competitive, and once I’d settled on physics as my major I determined to place myself at the top of my class. I did so by throwing myself into the hardest classes and putting in the hours required to ace the tests. This was, to put it mildly, a bad idea. I got a sort of grim pleasure from vanquishing my classmates in these academic slogs, but I was basically miserable. So why’d I keep it up? When multiple people are striving towards a shared goal, they often rank themselves by progress within their peer group. This was my mistake — I swapped an absolute goal (figuring out how bits of nature work) with a relative one (scoring higher on tests than my classmates). Later, when I found myself unhappy, I couldn’t leave without feeling like I’d lost something. That social capital sunk cost was the first part of the trap I found myself in. The second was a positive feedback loop that encouraged me to spend ever-increasing amounts of time on my work. Humans inherit convictions mimetically from each other — we learn what to value by imitating our peers. As my desire to excel academically grew, I spent greater amounts of time in and around the physics department. The more time I spent there, the greater my desire to excel. I’d never given physics much thought at all before my senior year in high school — but once I was surrounded by other physics students, competing for the same pool of grades and research positions, I could think of little else. This inherited desire was unchecked because I had no life outside of academics — no fixed reference point. Although quitting would have made me happier, I felt like I had nowhere to quit to. My tunnel vision left me with few concrete notions of alternative pursuits, and without a destination, I could not seriously contemplate leaving.  Plans are never plausible until they contain specifics, and implausible plans tend to be discarded. Many of my peers in physics only added incredulity, consciously or otherwise. The result was a reality distortion field — quitting was not just painful, but unimaginable, unthinkable. I ended up in graduate school not because I wanted to toe the bleeding edge of natural science, but because I simply couldn’t imagine doing anything else. That’s the mimetic trap in a nutshell: it hurts to leave, and there’s nowhere to go. It decouples the social reward signal from the rest of objective reality — you can spend years ascending ranks in a hierarchy without producing anything that the rest of humanity finds valuable. If you value the process itself, that’s fine. I didn’t. Cowardice kept me from acting on this, and after a while I came to believe I had to succeed in this field I’d fallen into essentially by chance. “Why does this matter?” is an excellent way to gauge if you’ve drifted into a mimetic trap. If you find this question impossible to answer honestly, you’re probably wasting your time. Getting out is the hard part — that requires courage and diligent planning. It’s much easier to avoid falling in. But in either case, you’ll benefit from building a system that steers you towards productive, meaningful activity in the long run. https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2554 Narration, with the teacher as narrator, leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated account. Worse yet, it turns them into “containers,” into “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teachers. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are. Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. [But] education can begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students. Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly (for there are innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are serving only to dehumanize), fail to perceive that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality. But sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality. They may discover through existential experience that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human. They may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation. If men and women are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation. But the humanist revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to materialize. From the outset, her efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power. To achieve this, they must be partners of the students in their relations with them. tow-2554 Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700 Narration, with the teacher as narrator, leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated account. Worse yet, it turns them into “containers,” into “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teachers. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are. Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system. For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. [But] education can begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students. Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly (for there are innumerable well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are serving only to dehumanize), fail to perceive that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality. But sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality. They may discover through existential experience that their present way of life is irreconcilable with their vocation to become fully human. They may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation. If men and women are searchers and their ontological vocation is humanization, sooner or later they may perceive the contradiction in which banking education seeks to maintain them, and then engage themselves in the struggle for their liberation. But the humanist revolutionary educator cannot wait for this possibility to materialize. From the outset, her efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power. To achieve this, they must be partners of the students in their relations with them. https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2600 The energy is expressing itself because you stored it in there. Every way you think — "I've been this way since I was little" — that's because something happened and you got patterns. Your mind is not your enemy. Your lower heart is not your enemy. They are actually the same as your body, trying to push impurities out. That's why you get a fever, that's why a boil comes up. We don't like it, but it's trying to push impurities out. Your mind is doing the exact same thing, and your heart is doing the exact same thing. They're saying: you stored all this stuff inside of me — stuff you didn't like, stuff you're not comfortable with — and I need to push it out. So if you can learn to not get pulled down into these energies, but to allow them to be and just let them come up, the natural process of transmutation is going to take place. What does that mean? The energy was lower. It was anger. It was fear. It was embarrassment. That's what got stimulated from inside, from the past. What are you going to do about it? You relax and realize this is stuff from the past coming up inside of you. And so you relax. Well, what happens to that embarrassing energy? All of a sudden there's nothing pushing it back down. There's nothing resisting at all. It comes up. "But now I feel a lot of embarrassment." Relax. "Now I feel the most embarrassment I ever felt. My God, it's really hot." Relax. Keep your hands off. And all of a sudden it becomes love. The energy came up to a higher level. It's all the same energy. There's only one energy in there. It's just expressing itself differently because of these different patterns you carved inside yourself. As you let it go, now it doesn't have to be in there anymore. The energy that's behind it — pushing this pattern out of the way — all of a sudden you start to feel Shakti. It will turn into Shakti. That's called transmuting the nature of the energy. It was expressing itself as anger, as fear, as embarrassment or guilt. And because you were willing to say, "Come on up" — get the blockage out of the way — behind the blockage is Shakti, and you will start to feel that more and more, until eventually you realize that's what this is all about. tow-2600 Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700 The energy is expressing itself because you stored it in there. Every way you think — "I've been this way since I was little" — that's because something happened and you got patterns. Your mind is not your enemy. Your lower heart is not your enemy. They are actually the same as your body, trying to push impurities out. That's why you get a fever, that's why a boil comes up. We don't like it, but it's trying to push impurities out. Your mind is doing the exact same thing, and your heart is doing the exact same thing. They're saying: you stored all this stuff inside of me — stuff you didn't like, stuff you're not comfortable with — and I need to push it out. So if you can learn to not get pulled down into these energies, but to allow them to be and just let them come up, the natural process of transmutation is going to take place. What does that mean? The energy was lower. It was anger. It was fear. It was embarrassment. That's what got stimulated from inside, from the past. What are you going to do about it? You relax and realize this is stuff from the past coming up inside of you. And so you relax. Well, what happens to that embarrassing energy? All of a sudden there's nothing pushing it back down. There's nothing resisting at all. It comes up. "But now I feel a lot of embarrassment." Relax. "Now I feel the most embarrassment I ever felt. My God, it's really hot." Relax. Keep your hands off. And all of a sudden it becomes love. The energy came up to a higher level. It's all the same energy. There's only one energy in there. It's just expressing itself differently because of these different patterns you carved inside yourself. As you let it go, now it doesn't have to be in there anymore. The energy that's behind it — pushing this pattern out of the way — all of a sudden you start to feel Shakti. It will turn into Shakti. That's called transmuting the nature of the energy. It was expressing itself as anger, as fear, as embarrassment or guilt. And because you were willing to say, "Come on up" — get the blockage out of the way — behind the blockage is Shakti, and you will start to feel that more and more, until eventually you realize that's what this is all about. https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2607 In English, to “cook something up” means to prepare food, but also to invent stories or schemes, to concoct something out of fantasy. When I first started writing, I also baked a lot, mostly on days when the writing wasn’t going well. It soothed me, alongside the slow and intangible creation of a novel, to cook up something that was quickly ready and edible. A cake can bring simple, instant self-gratification and appreciation from others, whereas writing – for all its rewards – is always accompanied by self-doubt. Moreover, the reactions of others, even when positive, are rarely enough for me. I am perpetually hungry for some extra validation, which nobody in the world can give. Only in the act of writing is that hunger satisfied, for I become, briefly, bigger than myself, capable of hosting the world and yet treating every single person in it as if they were my only guest. This feat feeds and sates my ravenous self, my need to be and to have everything. Stories enact a form of mutual hospitality. What is story if not an enticement to stay? You are invited in, but right away you must reciprocate and host the story back, through concentration: whether you read or hear a narrative – from a book or a person – you need to listen to really understand. Granting complete attention is like giving a silent ovation. Story and listener open, unfold into and harbour each other. A recipe is a story that cannot be plagiarised. Compare cookbooks and you will find recipes that are almost identical, distinguished by minor variations of quantity or slight deviations in procedure. Debts are gladly acknowledged, sometimes in the name – “Julia’s Apple Tart” – or in a sub-line – “Adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi”. Recipes represent one of the easiest, most generous forms of exchange between people and cultures, especially now, with food blogs abounding and once-exotic ingredients available at your local supermarket. Recipes are the original open source, offering building blocks that may be adjusted across time, place and seasons to create infinite dishes. You only need to successfully make a recipe once to feel it is your own. Make it three more times and suddenly it is tradition. No wonder different societies claim the same food as their definitive, national dish. In the Middle East, hummus may well be the most contested case in point. Fed up of the endless, inconclusive debates about the true origins of this popular chickpea dish, a group of Lebanese aficionados decided to settle the matter once and for all by setting the record for making the largest tub of hummus ever, in the hope that the feat would irrevocably associate hummus with Lebanon above all. The idea of consolidating their credentials by producing such an excess is fitting in the context of the famously profuse Arab hospitality, summed up in the half-joking warning to guests: you will need to fast for two days before and two days after eating in an Arab household. Being asked how you made something is the ultimate compliment for most cooks. Recipes passed on this way come marinated in the memory of previous incarnations. Recipes can be both continuity and change. Stuck to, modified, lost, recovered … recipes are records of individual or national defeats and conquests. In this sense, little is strictly “authentic”: everything is influenced by someone or somewhere else. This is true for food, and for culture as a whole. The quest for authenticity is often more of a crusade for authority, an attempt to exclude, single out and thus narrow things down – the very opposite of hospitality. [...] Hospitality, were I to draw it, would be a series of potentially endless concentric circles extending outwards from each of us. In their crisscrossing and overlapping, in the expanse of their reach, might be the critical pattern of our time. A pattern revealing – just as contour lines on a map indicate the gradient of the land – the true topography of a society: its landscape of reciprocity, its borders of generosity, its peaks and depths of give and take. Yet, however far those circles spread, unconditional hospitality remains outside their furthest perimeter. It lies, for the most part, in unknown territory, off the map. tow-2607 Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700 In English, to “cook something up” means to prepare food, but also to invent stories or schemes, to concoct something out of fantasy. When I first started writing, I also baked a lot, mostly on days when the writing wasn’t going well. It soothed me, alongside the slow and intangible creation of a novel, to cook up something that was quickly ready and edible. A cake can bring simple, instant self-gratification and appreciation from others, whereas writing – for all its rewards – is always accompanied by self-doubt. Moreover, the reactions of others, even when positive, are rarely enough for me. I am perpetually hungry for some extra validation, which nobody in the world can give. Only in the act of writing is that hunger satisfied, for I become, briefly, bigger than myself, capable of hosting the world and yet treating every single person in it as if they were my only guest. This feat feeds and sates my ravenous self, my need to be and to have everything. Stories enact a form of mutual hospitality. What is story if not an enticement to stay? You are invited in, but right away you must reciprocate and host the story back, through concentration: whether you read or hear a narrative – from a book or a person – you need to listen to really understand. Granting complete attention is like giving a silent ovation. Story and listener open, unfold into and harbour each other. A recipe is a story that cannot be plagiarised. Compare cookbooks and you will find recipes that are almost identical, distinguished by minor variations of quantity or slight deviations in procedure. Debts are gladly acknowledged, sometimes in the name – “Julia’s Apple Tart” – or in a sub-line – “Adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi”. Recipes represent one of the easiest, most generous forms of exchange between people and cultures, especially now, with food blogs abounding and once-exotic ingredients available at your local supermarket. Recipes are the original open source, offering building blocks that may be adjusted across time, place and seasons to create infinite dishes. You only need to successfully make a recipe once to feel it is your own. Make it three more times and suddenly it is tradition. No wonder different societies claim the same food as their definitive, national dish. In the Middle East, hummus may well be the most contested case in point. Fed up of the endless, inconclusive debates about the true origins of this popular chickpea dish, a group of Lebanese aficionados decided to settle the matter once and for all by setting the record for making the largest tub of hummus ever, in the hope that the feat would irrevocably associate hummus with Lebanon above all. The idea of consolidating their credentials by producing such an excess is fitting in the context of the famously profuse Arab hospitality, summed up in the half-joking warning to guests: you will need to fast for two days before and two days after eating in an Arab household. Being asked how you made something is the ultimate compliment for most cooks. Recipes passed on this way come marinated in the memory of previous incarnations. Recipes can be both continuity and change. Stuck to, modified, lost, recovered … recipes are records of individual or national defeats and conquests. In this sense, little is strictly “authentic”: everything is influenced by someone or somewhere else. This is true for food, and for culture as a whole. The quest for authenticity is often more of a crusade for authority, an attempt to exclude, single out and thus narrow things down – the very opposite of hospitality. [...] Hospitality, were I to draw it, would be a series of potentially endless concentric circles extending outwards from each of us. In their crisscrossing and overlapping, in the expanse of their reach, might be the critical pattern of our time. A pattern revealing – just as contour lines on a map indicate the gradient of the land – the true topography of a society: its landscape of reciprocity, its borders of generosity, its peaks and depths of give and take. Yet, however far those circles spread, unconditional hospitality remains outside their furthest perimeter. It lies, for the most part, in unknown territory, off the map.