JOYFUL WANDERING -- 15

+ updated at 9:44am ESDT on Thursday, April 28, 2011

+ Spirituality and Practice offers an excerpt from The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle.  Here are two excerpts from the excerpt:

The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now — that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. Slipping away from the present moment even for a second may mean death. Unfortunately, they come to depend on a particular activity to be in that state. But you don't need to climb the north face of the Eiger. You can enter that state now.

The whole essence of Zen consists in walking along the razor's edge of Now to be so utterly, so completely present that no problem, no suffering, nothing that is not who you are in your essence, can survive in you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve. Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.

Read it all.

+ ChurchLeaders offers "The Popularity Of The House Church (Nearly 4,000 In The U.S.)" by Andrea Bailey Willits. Excerpt: "'Generally speaking, what today’s Church is doing isn’t working,” claims John White, a house church coach in Denver. 'According to recent Barna statistics, during the last 50 years, there has been more Christian activity than any time in history, and yet the church’s impact on the culture and quality of discipleship in the churches has continually declined. There are certainly exceptions, but overall, the system is broken.'" Read it all.

+ Inner Frontier offers "Exposing the Illusion" by Joseph Naft.  This is the fifth in his series on The Path of Liberation.  It begins: "Eventually we reach a tipping point, where enough moments of directly seeing and accepting the truth about our identification with personality, about its illusory nature, have accumulated and purified our view of ourselves sufficiently to prepare us for that singular moment of particularly clear seeing and letting go, the moment when freedom, permanent freedom, dawns." Read it all.