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    • Prairie Tidings (Church Blog)
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    • Little Druid on the Prairie (Rev. Lauren's Blog)
  • Policies
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Mountain Ancestors Grove, ADF

A Year of Contemplation

Don’t Trust the Senses (Day 66)

3/7/2019

 
Picture
Image Credit: Pixabay

​We practice awareness to tune ourselves in to reality and cosmos, untainted by ego-rooted opinions and emotion-linked decisions. In self-awareness practice, we seek to know our own habituated thoughts, feelings, and actions… and once known, to navigate our inner and outer experience in such a way that we are not affected by ourSELVES. 

With the subject of today’s contemplation, I’m left asking myself: 

With what senses to we perceive mind and spirit? 

How do we utilize senses designed to intake data from beyond ourselves? We cannot. 

Heraclitus called self-deception an awful disease and eyesight a lying sense” 
(Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 9.7)

We can’t trust our standard-issue senses to come to a place of self-knowledge and self-awareness: Why? On one hand because they’re external, and on another because we have egoic opinions on every bit of data we intake from those senses. We don’t just *sense* the *thing*. We have thoughts and feelings about the *thing*, whether we want to accept that or not. They’re there. Subtly. Running deep in the untrained subroutines of the mind. 

However, there is a way to short-circuit the habitual patterns of unconscious living. 

Take a pause, then a breath. Feel it leave your body. 

Practice patience; the same kind needed to see the ripples in a pond come to stillness again. 

Awareness is a tricky business, but like Heraclitus said, self-deception is an “awful disease”. 

May we have what it takes to seek the cure in perpetuity. 

(See y’all tomorrow) 

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    About the Blog

    Awakening the desire to explore Stoicism, and how it relates to his existing beliefs, Rev. William committed to working through the text, The Daily Stoic, a year-long journey to awaken the Stoic mind. 
    How things are structured can be found in the first post. 

    About the Author

    Born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, Rev. William attended Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado where in 2007 he graduated with a degree in Religious Studies, minoring in Psychology. Currently residing in Longmont, CO, he is one of the Priests and founder of Mountain Ancestors Grove.  He spends his time playing mandolin (and some guitar), writing, engaging in LGBTQIA+ advocacy and education, community service, and sharing a larger vision of how a polytheist perspective can lead to greater human understanding, acceptance, and gods be good, peace. 

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