Letting go of spiritual books makes me feel lighter

I lost quite a bit of weight today. Both mental and physical. 

The poundage was in the form of books I culled from the shelves that hold most of my spiritual, philosophical, scientific, and religious titles.

I ended up with three boxes of books that will be donated to the Salem Library Foundation, which holds an annual used book sale. 

This wasn't something I'd planned to do today. The urge just became overwhelming after I put a few books back on the shelves and idly looked at their neighbors.

"Why am I keeping this book?," I thought. "I don't believe in this stuff anymore." 

Once I started, it was hard to stop. Kind of like eating potato chips. I kept saying to myself, "OK, this is the last shelf... no, might as well see what can be given away on this shelf also." 

Some books were easy to put into a box. I remembered not liking them.

But many others had post-it notes and other markers scattered throughout the pages, reminders of passages I wanted to look at again. Along with copious highlighting. 

Many of those went into the giveaway boxes also. 

Zen books. Advaita books. Nonduality books. Medieval Christian mysticism books. Even a thick Vivekananda book that I'd owned for decades. 

It felt good to make my bookcase meld better with my mind, v. December 2013. I realized that I'd been hanging onto a lot of books out of habit, not out of desire. 

Picking up a book, usually it only took me a few seconds to tell whether the author and I resonated on a similar reality wavelength.

I'm no longer interested in reading about someone's personal spiritual experiences, which they magnify into grandiose "This Is the Way It Is" conclusions about universal truth.

Of course, this is what almost all religious, spiritual, and mystical books are -- descriptions of subjective awarenesses that are taken to be reflections of objective reality. 

Not surprisingly, I kept some books in the "there's nothing to realize" genre.

Only the best ones, though.

Sometimes, like with this book, I'd start off enjoying an author's celebration of the unknowable deepest mysteries of the cosmos, then be irritated to find that, in later chapters, he or she claims to have unraveled the supposedly unravelable mysteries.

I kept all of my neuroscience books. And those dealing with mindfulness and meditation. Plus my physics, cosmology, and evolution books. 

When I'd finished filling up the three giveaway boxes, I enjoyed seeing how the bookcase looked now. It had empty spaces on the shelves, rather than being crammed full to overflowing.

Which is how I want my mind to be now in these churchless days.

Open. Receptive. Ready to entertain fresh ideas. Getting rid of the old -- whether books or beliefs -- makes it a lot easier to be receptive to the new. 

Comments

[Antonio Selvaggi]

Sorry about my English, I'm not a native speaker. I'm just "native" to this theme, and would like to add a few thoughts that just occurred to me after reading the mission of the Mind and Life Institute (MA, USA). I'm into Buddhism, as I've read and practiced extensively to be able to feel and understand better my own existence and my place in Existence, and found out that these folks who practice and study Buddhism have come closer to the real stuff. Coming closer to the real stuff is no prerogative of Buddhism, but my feeling is that these guys have done most of the hard work in that direction. They enlighten me and add to my natural enquiries. However, there are a few things that make me keep some safe distance from deeper involvement, and make me enjoy sites such as this one, with no religious allegiance: I don't want to train to become a better person. That's very Tibetan, I believe. They believe in training. I know that training works, I know that we are constantly "trained" into consumer society, for example, most of the time, without any conscious knowledge. I know that another kind of training may be healthy to show alternatives to rooted social and individual problems. But I can't accept training as a conscious means to become something else, not even better. After all, what is "better"? For whom? When? All I need is to have a greater perception and understanding of life and myself in life, with all its complexities and paradoxes, and to see how it's just one side of the coin, as opposed to another which roots us all together. I see friendliness and competitiveness, and we all know that they go together, they arise together in existence. And we can't train to be what matters most: to have discernment, wisdom. This applies to context, and we all live in context, all the time. The only way to train to be wiser may be to enquire and enquire further to get to know what there is and what we are – an unending job which just requires living. So I'm against training to be better. Let all inner and outer forces live and lead us to where we need to go. I don't want to be a conscious agent for any particular force. I just want to see life as it is. In that sense, I'm very close to Zen Buddhism in thought, although I want to be far away from their monastic training!

[Roger]

"Let all inner and outer forces live and lead us to where we need to go."

---Today, I need to go over to the Mirage and observe the dolphins play. An outer force is directing to such.

On the other hand, a damn inner force is directing me to Planet Hollywood casino resort. There are many really hot babes at the Planet......

So,would these forces please leave me alone!!!!

[Juan]

On the other hand, a damn inner force is directing me to Planet Hollywood casino resort. There are many really hot babes at the Planet......
….The inner force is the Divine Force which always takes one in the right direction.
“Viva el Vino y las Mujeres, por algo son regalo del Señor”.

[777]

Centripetal is more helpful
than centrifugal
and we go where our heart already is.

777