Podcast:

This week's podcast features:

This week we feature a pre-recorded talk that Mystical Positivists, Rob Schmidt and Stuart Goodnick, gave at Many Rivers Books & Tea on Thursday Jan. 3, entitled To Create and Sustain a Habit of Open-Heartedness. The pre-talk publicity describes the talk this way:

The meme of our time is obsession with human perfection. Focusing upon perfection, we soon find how pervasively we fall short of our high standards. Unconscious acceptance of this meme leads to fixation on our compulsive habits, faults and failures, along with the existential despair that asserts compassion and love are simply words people use to manipulate one another. It leads to a gnawing sense of restlessness operating just below the surface of awareness.

For some, redirecting attention toward drugs, video games, careers, or other distractions more or less succeeds in numbing the growing restlessness with the gulf between ideal and real. Another common strategy to address this restlessness imagines that its resolution will be found in the application of the latest quick fix technique of mind or body. The industries of 'personal growth,' 'healing,' and 'transformation' focus upon 'consumers' seeking immediate change. By so doing, these consumers strive to experience bliss, joy, and satisfaction by attuning themselves to readymade truths linked to a variety of modalities and practices deriving from spiritual and therapeutic traditions. For such industries, quick fixes are the stock-in-trade. Yet how many customers truly find what they seek?

Authentic training in the Alchemy of the Heart that transforms unconscious habits into food for a genuine expansion of consciousness requires time, commitment, sweat, discomfort, and persistence. It cannot be bought, but must be paid for. Join us for a discussion of how a sustainable habit of open-heartedness, in contrast to a habit of grasping after growth, might be created.

After the talk, Rob and Stuart add some concluding observations from the studio.

More information about Tayu Meditation Center can be found at:

Many Rivers Books and Tea Website: www.manyriversbooks.com

Tayu Meditation Center Website: www.tayu.org/~tayu/

Old Many Rivers Blog: www.manyriversbooks.com/blog1/

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