new paper

There's a new paper by Sangharakshita and Subhuti that I've been reading.

The paper is about a lot of things centering around the use of imagination in the spiritual life.

The way I think about enlightenment, the best way I can make sense of it from my unenlightened perspective, is that enlightenment is creative and not reactive. It takes imagination to be creative and not reactive. The imagination is very active in creativity, because you have to be able to imagine without confining habits.

So as far as I know they don't say that in the essay, but that puts this essay in context for me. I'm reading the essay slowly because my life is fractured, and because it's a difficult essay at times.

I found the part below quoted interesting. He writes here something that was very similar to what I wrote the other day:

"Of course it is very difficult to feel the life in nature when living in the midst of a great city, in which the natural world has been held at bay – albeit overflowing with other humans. The whole trend of life today towards technologically mediated experience in the artificial environment of a city alienates us further and further from the natural world and therefore from our innate empathy with it." (p. 16-17)