Wisdom Wonk

Obvious vs, Oblivious (cont. from last blog)

2009-01-10T12:17:00.000-08:00

The camera tells a story of distraction and of a frenetic world that doesn’t have time for beauty. In a place of transit, like a train station, a place deemed a mere antecedent to the all-important workday, we are not as open to the flutter of wings from the confused lark flitting about the tunnel columns, nor are we inclined toward the flash of fugues flying around the newsstands, nor toward the sprite that throws off those bright ribbons out into the concrete caverns from his miraculous horsehair wand.
Hey, sorry, but we have places to go… things to do. Can’t be bothered with that right now. Straight ahead. Chop chop.
I think I’ve figured out that old conundrum about “If a tree falls in the forest, will it make a sound?” The answer is “No.” If there is no capacity to process vibration into cognition (by an ear and a brain) then the sensory effect called “sound “ simply does not occur.
Likewise, the answer to the question, “Is it art if no one even stops to acknowledge its existence.” is, again, a resounding “No.”— at least not for those millions constantly checking their watches and Blackberries (and their ears at the door) as they scramble toward their next appointment with destiny.
But the answer is also a resounding “Yes!”— yes, that is, if the artist herself is cognizant and, maybe even, transported by the act of making the art. Unlike a tree falling in the forest, a musician has ears and can be, therefore, a packed arena all unto herself. If musicians didn’t feel this way, they wouldn’t enjoy practicing as much as they do. Sometimes, even for Joshua Bell apparently, only the four-year-old boy being dragged along struggling to get a peek at the man making the magic sound seems capable of acknowledging the remotest possibility of beauty amongst the newstands. Nothing personal, Maestro, ‘twas ever thus.
The true maestro, doesn’t mind. She knows that the rose blooms not for the odd passerby that might stop to take a whiff, it blooms because the earth and the rain and the sun and the mystery of DNA compel it to bloom. Music was meant to be shared but it is the way of the cosmos that the elements of beauty, the remote field of poppies, the melancholy call of the last loon on the lake will always be present even when the eyes (and ears) meant to behold their beauty are not.
Sadly, in these addled, highly conditioned times, such faculties may not be present even among a crowd of thousands. Offering one’s art to the world is not for wimps. Still if I’m to settle for only a couple of patrons on a given day, God and myself will suffice.

Nothing is Obvious to the Oblivious

2009-01-02T12:29:00.000-08:00

One of the better articles to come out of American journalism in recent years was Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer Prize winning piece exploring the highly subjective nature of our appreciation of art. It was entitled “Pearls Before Breakfast” (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.htm) and it was more than an article, really. It was an experiment designed to highlight the psychological elements at play that impact our capacity to be inspired by the world.

The question to be answered: could clear and present artistic brilliance be recognized by an educated populace if it were showcased outside its conventional venue of celebrated auditoriums during the distracting hustle-bustle of the usual business day?

The set up: Have an indisputably fine violinist play for tips in a D.C. subway station and video tape the response of over a thousand passersby.

Stacking the deck in favor of recognition of artistic brilliance:
1. The “busker” chosen for this experiment was world-renowned concert violinist Joshua Bell— whose playing Interview Magazine once gushed "does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live." When composer John Corigliano accepted the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score for “The Red Violin”, he credited his success to Bell, who was the soloist on the project. He said, quite simply, Joshua Bell "plays like a god."
2. The music chosen for the performance is widely recognized as some of the greatest music ever written. Example, the ditty Bell decided to start with was "Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect.” 19th century composer Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann concurred "On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind." If Brahms dug it, it deserves a listen Like Chaconne, all the pieces Bell chose to play (i.e. Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria") were arguably immortal. Joshua Bell would leave nothing to chance.
3. . The instrument Joshua Bell chose for his performance was his 3 1/2-million-dollar Stradivari, hand-crafted during the master violin maker’s “golden period”. In Weingarten’s view, “No violins sound as wonderful as Strads from the 1710s, still.” If the performance didn’t resonate with the audience, the artist certainly couldn’t blame his tools.

Stacking the deck in favor of non-recognition:
1. The performance was staged at the L’Enfant Plaza Station “against a wall beside a trash can” in D.C.— not in the ostentatious trappings of, say, The Kennedy Center.
2. Bell was dressed not in black tie and tails but a long sleeve tee shirt, jeans and a baseball cap.
3. The time was rush hour, 7:51 on a Friday, a time when the pressures of the work day have already lodged themselves firmly in the typical commuter’s mind— profoundly effecting his ability to perceive anything outside the chronic drama of his own little everyday story.

Still, you would think that most people couldn’t help but be struck by the electricity of genius ping ponging around the walls of that station that morning— what with Bach, Bell and Stradovari coalescing so spectacularly on those immortal Ides of January early on a frosty morn. But, alas, the camera tells a different story. (cont.)

Derrik's Adventure Continued

2008-09-04T15:22:00.000-07:00

Jordon accepted the challenge. "I needed to bring lots of recording gear with me: mics, mic stands, a Mackie mixer, two good stereo mics, a DAT machine, cables, lots of DAT tapes and blank CDs. Just packing all the gear was a huge project. I had to fit everything into two boxes, along with my clothes, my looper, and a small amplifier for the violin." Senegal has a different kind of electrical system than the U.S., so he also had to take lots of voltage converters. He didn't have room for a laptop, but was assured that he would be able to use a travel buddy's Mac.

Jordan would use Garage Band, the Apple recording program bundled with all Mac computers, to record, edit, and master tracks and burn CDs for the musicians. No problem – except that he'd never learned to use it. But, hey, studying a software manual is a good way to pass the time during a long flight to Africa.

The plan worked better than Jordan could have imagined. Not only did he make numerous CDs for musicians during his ten days on the ground in Senegal, including Pape Sahko, Barou Sall, Moise Agnessa, Massamba Diop, and the Sobobade Drummers, he made life-long friendships, as well.

It was an exhilarating experience, Jordan recalls. "First I met singer and kora player Pape Sakho… I'll never forget the look on his face as he listened to a recording of his music for the first time." Once Pape started showing his CD around to his friends, other musicians asked Jordan to record them, too.

Soon, he was too busy to sleep. "I wrote music from 12 midnight until about 3 in the morning every night. The malaria medicine I was taking helped keep me awake – I was only getting about three to four hours of sleep a night."

At the end of the week-and-a-half trip, Jordan paid his new Senegalese friends for their musical contributions and brought the original compositions he'd scribbled in his notebook back home to Vermont.

It's not surprising that this musical goodwill ambassador would make the right connections to keep his African project on an upward trajectory. Even his kids helped. "Upon arrival back in the states, my daughter introduced me to her high school classmate Helen Kerlin-Smith, a recently adopted orphan from Ethiopia." The sixteen-year-old became essential to the project, contributing soaring vocals on three of the cuts in her native language of Amharic.

Jordan's stepson had introduced him to a school chum, Milad Sourial, some time before. As luck would have it, Sourial had been made music producer for a feature film called "Desert Flower," based on the life story of Waris Dirie (due in theaters next February).

The daughter of Somali desert nomads, Waris was subjected to the cruelest inflictions women can experience in that country. As a girl of thirteen, she escaped and found her way to England, where she worked as a cleaning woman. After being "discovered" by a photographer, she eventually rose far above her brutal beginnings, becoming a supermodel, a James Bond girl, a U.N. special Ambassador, and a best-selling author.

When Sourial played Jordan's CD for Dirie and the film's other producers, it helped crystallize their vision. They recently made Jordan musical co-producer. Meetings are scheduled for June to work out contract terms and budget details.

Jordan started with a high risk-idea – haul a ton of recording equipment to Africa and do a ton of trust building, improvising, and recording over the course of twelve days. Bring home the results, see what you've got, and one way or another keep moving forward.

From such acorns, mighty oaks grow. It's incredible where talent, perseverance, and good intentions – plus some well-deserved amazing grace – can take you. Just ask Derrik Jordan – or Waris Dirie.

In the meantime, the irrepressible Jordon is not resting on his laurels. He has recently accepted a commission to write a piece for the Vermont Symphony Orchestra and has just won the Shakuhachi Chamber Music International Prize for 2008.

"SuperString Theory Goes to Senegal" is available at www.derrikjordan.com.

Derrik Jordon's African Adventure

2008-08-28T14:32:00.000-07:00

I met Derrik Jordan at the Harmonizing with Humanity positive music festival in Phoenix this past March. I missed his solo performance of original pieces but was impressed with the string work he lent to other artists' performances (electric violin is his first instrument). His playing was sensitive, generous, and supportive – no ego, no agendas.

Late one night, relaxing in the lobby of the hotel, we talked about music, the world, and teaching (we're both part-time "music mentors"). I found Jordan to be amiable and engaging, in keeping with his collaborative style on stage. When he told me about the making of his latest CD, "SuperString Theory Goes to Senegal," I realized that his gracious approach to music and life has been as important to his success as his talents as a violinist, guitarist, songwriter, singer, and percussionist.

The story began when Jordan joined some fellow teachers on a cultural exchange tour called The Senegal-American Project. Jordan is a devotee of World Beat music – he has written, performed, and produced a double CD of Brazilian-inspired tunes called "Braziliance" and won top honors for the 2002 Reggae Song of the Year from Just Plain Folks, the world's largest songwriter organization. He has journeyed to Brazil, Trinidad, Ghana, and Senegal to fine tune his World Beat chops.

He knew his second trip to Africa was an opportunity to record with some great Senegalese musicians. But he also knew that he would have to plan the project carefully, like a safari into uncharted territory. First, there was the issue of establishing good faith with the musicians. Jordan wanted to avoid any whiff of the controversies that accompanied Paul Simon's "Graceland" project.

"I saw the problem as me being a white American guy," Jordan says. "How was I going to be able to build trust with these Africans who might not believe that I had their best interests at heart? I worried that they would think I was trying to rip off their music."

If he had been David Byrne, with the backing of some big music corporation, he could just offer irresistible sums of money and lawyer up if misunderstandings surfaced later. But this would not be Jordan's way, even if he had such means at his disposal. He envisioned the perfect win-win situation: He would offer to make CDs of the local players' music, gratis, then invite them to play and improvise with him and record the sessions. The plan required a huge leap of faith on several levels, and the execution would be challenging.

(Next: Derrik Jordon's adventure continues with a fascinating conclusion.)

The Big Oooh...

2008-08-02T14:59:00.000-07:00

This is it.
This is what Eckhart Tolle was talking about. "You have all this important stuff to do," you're ego stews," but you're stuck in the grimy showroom of the Big O Tire store waiting ad infinitum for a set to be put on your car. Your ego would love to highjack your equanimity and get all indignant and irritable because once again "real life" has ground your "real life's purpose" to a halt. But you've been down that dead-end street before and are determined to show that committee of neurotic reactionaries that like to run things in your head (when given the chance) that you're a big boy now and can transcend the slings and arrows of mere circumstance.
And so you notice the air slipping in and out through your nostrils. You feel the weight of the clipboard resting on your thigh... the cool of the fan on the back of your neck. You recall the saying you once noticed on the wall of a Zen Center on the Marin Coast. It said, "Drinking a cup of tea, I stop the war."
Therefore, being a pacifist at heart, you drink in the sunlight glinting off the tile floor, careening off the hubcap displays. You feel the warmth of your body. Hear the rattle of the fan overhead. Take note of the psychological trick of comparative value. This moment is just as valuable as any other— in fact, more valuable than most because you're actually aware of it, You can actually see through the oversized primary-colored lettering on the store front window the pastel retro-fashions on the manikins in the second-hand boutique across the street. It's all there for you— the colors, the sounds, the smells.
No longer trapped in the everyday world, you can peer into it from a vaster dimension called being. Soon the everyday world becomes more like an interesting, innocuous diorama. Emersed in the Big Om that permeates the Big O, you can imbibe of this world without being drowned in it.

Abandon All Hope…for something better

2008-03-20T13:49:00.000-07:00

These days, it being an election year, we hear a lot of talk about hope. Little wonder. With the dollar on the verge of free fall. Financial “behemoths” like Countrywide and Bear Stearns needing white knights and government intervention to avoid collapse and dire warnings that it’s already too late to save the world from the ravages of global warning (and even Eliot Spitzer down the tubes in disgrace), “hope” seems as rare and valuable a commodity as the gold we are now supposed to invest in. I can understand the sentiments of the scraggly bearded man in the cartoon who carries the sign that reads., “Abandon hope. The end is near.” In fact, I agree whole-heartedly with the first part of the message. By all means, abandon hope! Hope is part of the problem.

Think about it. The concept of hope is rife with fear and helplessness. It’s full of desperate longing for intervention from some outside force beyond one’s control because the intrinsic belief of the hoper is that his personal influence on the situation in question will inevidably be insufficient.

Charles Fillmore, the cofounder of the Unity movement said that hope was “intellectual faith” and therefore “subject to doubt”. If you want to awaken the laws of attraction, you have to be centered in the kind of consciousness from which an unwavering intention can spring. Once you are, you'll know that your fondest desire is a foregone conclusion. The soul-grounded faith that Fillmore is talking about makes the shallow mental faith of “hope” seem tepid at best.

Whether you are a true practitioner of almighty “faith” or are simply relegated to the feeble stirrings of “hope,” revolves around your definition of “you.” You must know that your intentions are part of an evolution much larger and more powerful than the humble trappings of your personal persona. Are you a microscopic bug at cross purposes, in the cross-hairs of a hostile world, or are you a microcosm of a universal law operating at full-force in the universe? If it’s the latter, what law are you the expression of? The one that goes, “Isolated, half-steps are doomed to failure.” or “ There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”? Again, if it’s the latter, are you truly living like an idea whose time has come? Are you an actor who won’t take no for an answer? Are you a uniter, a motivator, a skillful coordinator of people who share the cause you cherish? Are you “creativity and determination” personified— always learning and adapting, always moving forward? If so. then what you call “you” is not a lonely voice in the wilderness but a tsunami— the fabled irresistible force that cannot fail to save this planet. And, if such is the case, then that “you” is a godsend. And I'm sure I speak for all of us when I say, thanks for being you!

In a recent interview on Bill Moyer’s journal ex- reporter Sarah Chayes was asked if the natural skin care product cooperative she’d founded in Afghanistan as an alternative to the opium trade could really hope to survive the violence, corruption and warlord mentality of that country. Her response was. “I don't think that hope is relevant. I think determination is all that counts. You just have to try. It doesn't matter if you hope you're going succeed or not. You have to keep trying.” No Hamlet-syndrome here, no idle speculation, just the undeterred facilitation of outcome. A dream coming true.

In an interview in Common Ground, Deepak Chopra expressed it this way. He said, “I don’t believe in hope. I think hope is a sign of despair. You know, only people who are in despair use the word hope. You have to be in a state of consciousness that is beyond hope and despair, which means a state that is creative, peaceful, not melodramatic, not hysterical, anchored in sobriety and in touch with your soul. Transcendence means beyond hope, beyond despair, beyond pleasure, beyond pain and yet still being conscious of choices you can make that are creative. The best way to change the future is to be fully in the present and to practice intention.”

Be fully in the present. The present is the solid ground upon which we construct the fulcrum of intention that can move an entire planet. It’s the bedrock beneath the shifting sand of conventional wisdom, recent studies, over thinking, current statistics, pundits, and the testimony of “expert” witnesses.

It’s the job that needs to be done and the doing of it. Period.

So quit your skylarking about whether you’ve got a chance in hell (or not) and just put your shoulder into the task until success is yours. No doubt, along the way, you will encounter many amazing happy “accidents” but rest assured that when all those uncanny unintentional consequences slip into place, they will have been lubricated by the continual flow of deliberate intention combined with good old elbow grease. The immutable law of attraction is simple. It’s faith in action. Nothing more. Nothing less.

(original image can be seen at dpad.gotfrag.com)

The Nature of Heaven

2008-02-08T12:12:00.000-08:00

One of the most rewarding things I do for a living is teach English as a Second Language to adults part-time. Adults understand the value of education so the feeling in the class of hope determination and gratitude is often palpable. It makes for favorable working conditions no matter how old and crumbling the facility we are in.

One of the lessons I enjoy teaching is a reading lesson that centers around a true story of a four year old girl named Desiree dealing with the recent death of her father. She doesn’t really understand the concept of death so when her father’s birthday rolls around she asks, “How can we send Daddy a birthday card?” her grandmother comes up with astute idea to tie one onto a helium balloon and release it to the heavens. Airmail to the Pearly Gates, as it were.

The girl picks a balloon with a picture of The Little Mermaid on it, they attach her birthday greetings with the request that “Angel Dad” send Desiree something back for her birthday. They let the balloon go with the adults, no doubt, clinging to the desperate hope that a deepening understanding of the situation will somehow dissolve Desiree’s expectations of “return mail” before her next birthday comes around.

What happens? The mermaid balloon, released in California, catches a jet stream and is express mailed to a little lake in Canada four days later and 3000 miles away where an old hunter is hunting ducks. He finds the balloon and takes it home to his wife who buys a present and sends it to Desiree explaining that Desiree’s father wanted the couple to go shopping for him since there are no stores in Heaven. What followed was a heart warming relationship with the couple filled with letters, phone calls and visits that helped tremendously to ease the little girl’s transition into life without a father. The name of the small body of water the balloon landed in? Mermaid Lake.

Some might say it’s too bad there isn’t really a heaven from which the father could correspond. But maybe there is. It’s just that the real Heaven may be subtler that the one described in catechism. I like the Buddhist teaching story that describes hell as a bunch of people at a big table that's groaning with delicious food that no one can eat because the handles on the forks are so long they cannot be used to feed one’s self.

Heaven happens when the people at the table discover that they can use the forks to feed each other. God is not some Dark Lord that taunts us with desires in a world incapable of fulfilling them. She is the intelligence required to understand how common interests are served through selfless action. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says that heaven, contrary to popular belief, “is spread out over the Earth”. We are its exalted or fallen angels depending on our attitudes and behaviors from moment to moment.

So when I receive those meager checks for teaching English to my beloved students, I don’t complain because I know that somehow, perhaps at this very moment, I am getting my reward here in heaven.

See an enlarged version of the above image at www.paulscharffphotography.com/ capebeauty.htm

Doubters Anonymous

2008-01-28T15:03:00.000-08:00

I was performing at a very progressive spiritual center called Unity of Berkeley last Sunday and the Reverend Patricia Keel began her talk as though she was sharing at an AA meeting.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Patricia and I’m a doubter.” It was then that I noticed that that Sunday’s program had a quasi-12 step program printed on it under the title “Doubter’s Anonymous.” All the places where the word “alcohol” would have normally appeared were left blank to be replaced by the word “doubt.”

For instance, the First Step read something like “Admit that we are powerless when it comes to doubt..” The Second said “Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.”The Third— “Make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.” Pretty brilliant analogy, really.

Cynics like to indulge themselves by claiming that the only grounded viewpoint is their viewpoint… the negative one. But when we couch doubt as just another self-destructive habit like drug addiction, it’s easier to understand that “sinking thinking” is not something to take pride in, it’s something to grow out of.

Easier said than done, however. How can we rise above doubt when doubt is intrinsic to the very thought patterns that make up the ego that is trying to escape it? It’s like trying to remove your own brain tumor. We need help from outside the infected ego structure to do this. And this is where the power greater than ourselves comes in.

You don’t have to believe in a Big Daddy God to get in touch with a power greater than yourself because the real you, the real us, is the Power greater than the self. Beyond the old assumptions, and circular arguments and dried up streams of thought is an ocean of consciousness where all wisdom and empowerment reside. We don’t have to climb out of the box, we simply have to realize that we are already out of it with the help of our practice, our spiritual community and our essential Buddha nature.

We re-enforce the realization through prayer, and through meditation— even the kind of meditation that simply separates the silent witness from the thoughts it is witnessing. (i.e. “This is not reality. This is a thought. This is not me. This is a thought.”)

From the perspective of The Witnessing or the field of infinite potential, as Deepak Chopra would phrase it, all things are possible. But we need to check in with that field frequently, like an addict with his sponsor, so we don’t slip back into insanity.

We’ve all heard that old chestnut that goes “When you assume, it makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”. Likewise when you transcend old assumptions, you bring the “trance” to an “end.”

(for a full-sized view of the graphic go to http://www.bimmermail.com/Believe2.jpg)

Ode to Good Songwriting

2008-01-11T14:18:00.000-08:00

I’m no poet. But I am a songwriter. And like a lot of poets, I sort of write musical odes to things that get me off. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and Pablo Neruda wrote odes to a lot of other ordinary things like dogs, cats, violins, guitars, and dictionaries— things that he thought were “way cool” and way under appreciated. That’s pretty much what I do (except, of course, when I’m processing some inner turmoil or commenting on the human condition, etc., through composition).
Odes always have the underlying message that if people could just get more enjoyment out of things that didn’t cost so much, the not-so-necessary things that people send their children to war for (i.e. extra petrol, for the Hummer knock-off), the world would be a better place.
That’s why I think a song about surfing promotes world peace a lot better than a song about drag racing (Brian Wilson take note). Who’d have thought “Catch a wave and you’re sittn’ on top of the world” would have political implications? (As opposed to “Control the oil fields of the Middle East so you can blow as much of the Persian Gulf out your tail pipe as you damn well please… and you’re sittin’ on top of the world).
Buckminster Fuller dubbed the preferred direction of technical innovation, the one in which we strive to get more and more from less and less, “ephemeralization.” The idea is to pursue this path until we can eventually get “everything from nothing” as the Bucky wrote. The poet promotes the same principle in the field of enjoyment. We need to eventually learn to be supremely happy with things that cost next to nothing to obtain. Appreciation practice is key to this dharma.
So what kind of subjects do I think worthy of a song? Myriad stuff. How ‘bout:

Great parking places and deft inline skaters,
Excellent cooking that won’t kill me later,
Passionate lovers that don’t require bling,
These are a few of my favorite things.

Or just amusing ditties people like to sing.
I say create world peace by nurturing a deeper enjoyment of the little things, the real things in life. One of my songs goes “Be no need for feeding greed when the moon and stars are ours.” Who needs blood diamonds when you’ve got heavenly bodies, right? Not me.

Happy Now Year

2007-12-31T14:53:00.000-08:00

"Everything is as it is. It has no name other than the name we give it. It is we who call it something; we give it a value. We say this thing is good or it's bad, but in itself, the thing is only as it is. It's not absolute; it's just as it is. People are just as they are."
-Ajahn Sumedho, "The Mind and the Way"
We place values and assign positive or negative thought and emotional states to everything that enters our field of consciousness. This is due to our conditioning and mental habits. It is not because there actually is an intrinsic value to any thing in particular.
We live our life with an emotional laundry marker between our ears. Light load. Dark load. We lose the incomperable beauty of the moment because we are always dealing with our cognitive dissonance concerning the impurity of our predetermined happy happenstances vs. our unhappy happenstances. I'm going to work. OK. I'm glad I have a job but I'd rather be sailing therefore I can't be happy now,,, maybe when I make it to the weekend.
We name the moment "a not happy moment" and our fate (for the moment) is sealed. What if we changed our perspective to "I'm still alive right now! So I get to practice the dharma, the mindfulness, the discipline, the art of happiness. What luck! Watch me as I navigate all the frowny-faced distractions that want to pull my attention from the infinite bliss state that under pins everything.
Can we feel for the lost soul we give a dollar to on the street, witness the self-rightious cruelty of the zealot to the infidel, get cut off in traffic without being knocked off kilter and turned into the all-day sucker of curmudgeonliness? Find the escape route through the watching. Everything's fine. Keep watching. Keep seeing. Keep being. The mind is quiet. the mind is agitated, returns to the breath and is quiet again. Not naming, Not blaming. This is the way we live the life, live the life, live the life... of the bodhisattva. Celebrate the New Year but ask yourself, "As opposed to when? What moment is not brand-spanking new?" Celebrate a Happy Now Year every single moment.

Fabulous Beast

2007-12-03T12:37:00.000-08:00

Walking the dog can be a walking meditation of sorts Dogs wake us up to the preponderance of the invisible. They are so interested in things we take for granted, things we never think about… or… are ever aware of.

You’re treading the levee at sundown with your trusty terrier by your side. The wind has stilled and all that’s blowing across the fallow fields and pear orchards are those warm-hued photons sweeping toward you from the soft orange glow on the horizon.

Then a slight tug on the leash releases you from your daydreams and an electrical impulse completes the circuit between your brain and Whitley’s nose… and a whole new world opens up for you, rife with traces of organic presences, evidence of events hitherto unknown. — all thanks to that vital, primordial intelligence pulsating just beyond your fingertips.

You’ve become like a fabulous beast from Greek mythology— half-man, half-canine prowling the moors at dusk, the powers of two joined as one.

Dogs are our periscopes into a world apart from ordinary human perceptions. They broaden our sensibilities. They humble us with their graceful navigation of invisible worlds. They are our teachers.

Leaping Religious Rifts in a Single Bound

2007-11-19T13:12:00.000-08:00

I spent the weekend with a number of longtime men friends. And amid the hiking and cooking and guitar jams we had some deep and sometimes heated discussions. One of the questions that came up was “Is it possible for me to commune on a deeply spiritual level with someone who believes God wants me to burn in hell for eternity because I haven’t accepted Jesus as my personal savior?”
I expressed doubts about the prospect. First of all, anyone who accepts whole cloth a doctrine that Jesus himself never put forth in the first place, is not likely to be a critical thinker, is not a contemplative whose thoughts would have a lot of value to someone who is delving sincerely into the deeper nature of spirit. If you won’t even question doctrines that seem preposterous at the outset like “It’s God’s will to hurl billions of new souls every year into the cauldrons of never-ending agony because they happen to have been born in non-Christian cultures.” then I’d be an idiot to inquire about the deeper nature of spirit through a discussion with you.
One of my friends said this sentiment revealed a prejudice toward Christians. I had to wonder. If I’d have said that it would be fruitless to have a discussion about the deeper nature of spirit with a person who believes that it’s God’s will to torch all Jews, would he say I’m prejudice against Nazis? I don’t think so. Just because you slap the label Christian on your forehead doesn’t mean anyone who detects a defect in your thinking is a bigot. Is a Muslim a bigot to question the thinking of Islamic extremists for blowing up innocent people deemed “infidels”? Just because a fire-and-brimstone Christian’s parallel rational is not as overtly violent, doesn’t mean he’s not unclear on the concept of what constitutes a loving God. Call me a prejudice rat bastard but I’ll be seeking counsel on such issues as compassion and unconditional love elsewhere.
Still, upon further reflection I amended my opinion on a number of levels. “Is it possible for me to commune on a deeply spiritual level with someone who believes God wants me to burn in hell for eternity because I haven’t accepted Jesus as my personal savior?”Yes.
One doesn’t have to be blocked from an insight into another’s or one’s own Buddha nature by the half-baked ideas that come out of a person’s mouth, We are not our thoughts and beliefs The deeper nature of spirit may be revealed through our generosity, grace, capacity to love (despite the restrictions put on that practice by our dogmas.) Our natural radiance, the music we make, the light in our eyes when we are excited, the tender ministrations we give to a pet are the true revelations of essential spirit regardless of any mean-spiritedness that may have been drummed into our heads. We are all emissaries of the light despite our “selves.” We just have to remember that we can share in deep spiritual inquiry better with some people by talking to them about the weather than by talking to them about God.

Doing the Beauty We Love II

2007-11-13T14:11:00.000-08:00

I count myself lucky. I took early retirement from an inner city school district that, bless its desperate heart, provides life-long health insurance to retirees. As long as the district doesn’t go bankrupt (again), my wife and I can enjoy some peace of mind regarding healthcare that citizens of other developed nations take for granted. More good news: New computer programs have given people like me the means to produce books and recordings on a scale unprecedented in the history of artists. Plus now there’s the Internet, of course, which enables us to market our works worldwide without corporate entertainment vendors calling the tune. It’s a new day.
Some of my friends are mystified that I would risk economic instability at this time in my life in order to serve that jealous mistress called “the muse.” Conventional wisdom says you work full-time at your day job until they escort you out the door, beefing up your pension well into decrepitude. Then, just maybe, you won’t end up on the dole one day.
I try to explain that if my life is rich, I don’t have to be. I may never be able to fully retire, but if I’m doing what I love for a living, why would I want to?
To paraphrase an old country tune, I see most of humanity looking for happiness “in all the wrong places” They mindlessly ravage this lovely, fragile Earth in a confusion of fear, delusion and zealotry. They grope blindly for a little ray of joy in gas-guzzling mini-tanks, bank account breaking homes, and blood diamonds. How can I go along with this madness when I know a certain kind of poetry set to music, or a particular story well told, could reveal a whole new, happier, less self-destructive approach to life that would be better for all concerned. This is my cause and I’m sticking to it.
Remember Julian Sands in “A Room with a View,” howling his creed from atop that spindly sapling? “Truth! Beauty! Freedom!” he cried before the young tree collapsed beneath him. If he mentioned “Financial Security!” I must have missed it.
The Bhagavad Gita, one of India’s sacred texts, says, “It is better to do your duty badly than to do another’s perfectly. You are safe from harm when you do what you should be doing.” I believe that. The universe seems to take care of characters like Henri Rousseau, who didn’t pick up a paintbrush until his forties, or Henry Miller, who wasn’t published until about that same age. Goethe’s oft quoted adage – “Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has beauty, power, and magic in it” – applies to people of all ages. And so, as Rumi, that ancient Sufi master, wrote, “Let the beauty we love be what we do.”
Until the world understands that real security doesn’t come through building missile defense systems or investment portfolios at the expense of the planet, but through developing the insight to know better, I’ll be writing my songs and stories and blog posts, letting the beauty I love be what I do. So here’s to Truth! Beauty! Freedom! And the boldness to champion them at any age.

Tad Toomay’s first CD “Touch the Sky from Where You Stand” is available at www.cdbaby.com. Learn more about his work at www.tadtoomay.com.

Doing the Beauty We Love

2007-11-09T15:40:00.000-08:00

I’m at an interesting juncture in my life. While many of my friends are winding down their chosen careers, I’m finally trying in earnest to get mine started.
When I was younger I made my living as a musician. I had passion and talent for this calling but apparently not enough to overcome its inherent challenges. My dream of playing meaningful original music to thoughtful, appreciative crowds never progressed much beyond a steady series of lounge gigs playing to rude regulars at gin-soaked watering holes. Night after night I found myself “Stuck in Lodi Again,” trying to please people whose idea of a fun night out was to perch on vinyl stools talking fantasy football while occasionally acknowledging the existence of the performer in the corner— but only on the condition that he focus his gifts on tunes already run into the ground by a thousand radio stations. When catering to the culture of “gimme the usual,” one’s labor-of-love original work remains a wad of folded paper lodged deep in the bottom of one’s back pocket.
The lounge scene can be rough. I know of major label performers who’ve been forced to stop in the middle of a song to ask the throngs to quiet down so the few people who wanted to listen actually could. This is why The Beatles stopped touring – and they weren’t even playing honky-tonks. Willy Nelson tells stories of playing on stages surrounded by chain link to avoid being cold-cocked by flying Coors bottles.
When playing at bars feels like playing behind bars, you know it’s time to make a change.
So suffering the neglect felt by many a worthy minstrel, I pared back my gigs, moved to an obscure little town on the coast of California, and began to pursue my other passion – writing – with new determination. A couple of years later I had penned 300 pages of tightly crafted, fast-paced, vibrant and timely fiction. In other words, I was flat broke with no prospects and finally had to get a real job. So again I followed in the footsteps of many world-weary artists before me and became a full-time teacher.
Ever hopeful, I envisioned leading deep discussions about life-changing literature amongst inquisitive young scholars. But, sadly, being an educator today more likely involves doing five hours of en masse behavior mod with reluctant readers, followed by five-plus more hours of teacher meetings, committee meetings, parent meetings, lesson planning, test prep and grading. Something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be my sanity. So I moved on from my day job and, over the course of the past several years, fashioned a part-time career in education that I truly enjoy: teaching adults how to speak English. No behavior mod, no grading, no attitude. Instead, I earn an adequate hourly wage and have a student body that looks upon me as a liberator, not a jailer. Best of all, I have time again to tend to my creative life, long since gone to seed and weed.

(On Tuesday: Goethe wrote – “Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has beauty, power, and magic in it” In "Doing the Beauty We Love II" we discuss the beauty, power, and magic of boldness!

Dia de los Perros II: The Further Mysteries and Mythos of Dogs

2007-10-31T18:48:00.000-07:00

Not all myths and stories cast canines in a positive light. Dog-like anima have always cased the shaded borderlands of our psyches. The mutant mongrels and werewolves that prowl vast stretches of that fearsome place are strange and varied. Anubis, Egyptian god of the underworld, had the head of a jackal, and Cerberus, the guardian at the gates of the Greek underworld, was a three-headed dog. This myth was borrowed by J.K. Rawlings to create the three-headed giant, Fluffy, guard dog of the Chamber of Secrets in Harry Potter. Conan Doyle’s classic Hound of the Baskervilles also tells of our darker projections onto dogs.

If our dogs be truly magical, then in late October and early November, when the veil between this world and the next is said to be tissue thin, let us keep them close so they can alert us to things indecipherable by our feeble human faculties. Not only can they hear and smell with more acuity than we can, they also have a well-documented sixth sense. According to the research of Rupert Sheldrake in his book, Dogs that Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, many dogs can sense impending natural disasters, threats to their owners, insulin reactions, and epileptic seizures. Obviously, dogs move gracefully through worlds that remain completely hidden from us.

So in this season of dimming light, pay close attention to the canine by your side. When you walk him in the evening, take note of each twitch of his nose and twist of his ear. What could he be sensing? One of your dearly departed friends or relatives returning to pay a Halloween visit? A packmate long past, divided from him only by that wispy curtain called time?

If you can’t find a clay dog to place on your Day of the Dead altar, perhaps another ritual will do. Sit quietly and remember the names of all your dearly departed canine allies. Imagine them somewhere deep in the darkness, sniffing the breeze for your scent, eagerly awaiting your reunion for one last, great adventure.

Note: The evocative illustration is by Alison Smith

Dia de los Perros: The Mystery and Mythos of Dogs

2007-10-29T22:37:00.001-07:00

This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Bay Area dog monthly Bay Woof, under one of my pseudonyms, Colin Ortiz.

When you think about it, it's not surprising that dogs and doglike creatures are so prevalent in the ancient wisdom traditions. Since the first wild dog crept out of a moonless night to join prehistoric folk ‘round their campfire, our species has related canines with the mysterious unseen world. This belief has generated both affection and fear in the minds of human beings for ages.

On the positive side, finally a powerful ally had appeared to accompany us on our anxious patrols into the shadows. Dogs – with their special gifts of heightened hearing and smell, strength, courage, speed, loyalty, and intimidating built-in weapons – were embraced as furry demigods who could be counted as comrades in encounters with dark forces. As comforters, protectors, and living advanced warning systems against all things that go bump in the night, dogs became bonded with humans in one of the tightest symbiotic relationships on Earth. It’s a bond that has survived for 15,000 years.

In the twilight zones of our hearts, where the mysteries of the changing seasons and the hovering presence of the afterworld are felt on chilly October evenings, we still yearn for the sound of four steady paws padding out before us into the unknown.

For most of recorded history, humans have valued the comforting presence of dogs so highly that we’ve even tried to take them with us beyond the portals of this life, knowing they would aid us in whatever journey awaited. For instance, ancient Egyptians often mummified dogs so they’d be there to help them along in the afterlife.

In a similar vein, Aztecs often were cremated with small dogs tied around their necks. Joseph Campbell wrote of this ritual in Hero with a Thousand Faces: “The departed swam on this small animal when he passed the river of the underworld.” After four years of passage, braving “mountains that clash,” “a giant serpent,” “eight deserts of freezing cold,” and “winds of the obsidian knives,” together man and dog would arrive before the god of the underworld, who would admit them both to “the Ninth Abyss” (but only if their paperwork was in order). To this day, many who celebrate Dia de los Muertos add a clay dog to the altar in a nod to this ancient custom.

Indigenous Americans also honored dogs in their pantheon of mythic beings. Their trickster god, Coyote, provided them with one of Nature’s most powerful forces – fire – having used his cunning to steal it on their behalf.

Of course, dogs have not always benefited from the human belief that they are privy to the ultimate mysteries. The Greeks and Romans regarded canines so highly that they stamped their visages on coins, but they also sacrificed them to placate the Immortals.

Despite our generally positive feelings about dogs. clearly our psychic relationship with them has been macabre in many ways— especially where they play on our doubts and fears. On Wednesday— Caninoids from the Underworlds in Dia de Los Muertos II.

Be Hear Now

2007-04-07T19:51:00.000-07:00

I read an essay by music critic Peter Gutman in the Wall Street Journal about John Cage’s work “Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds.” Anyone who is familiar with Cage’s work knows that his stock and trade was pushing the envelope of conventional musical sensibilities. Gutman describes “a prior work in which [Cage] had prescribed an adjustment to the volume and tuning of a dozen radios, with the result dependent upon the frequencies and formats of local stations.” Cage was a master of concert concept art. He often liked to carefully script elements of his pieces while leaving other elements to chance in order to create musical versions of Rorschach ink blot tests, the point of which were to aid the audience to a deeper insight into themselves and their perceptions of the world. 4’33’’ is such a piece.

Gutman describes it this way. “In a typical rendition a musician comes on stage, sits at a piano for the four minutes and thirty-three seconds of the work’s title, occasionally sips some water or turns some pages, and then bows and leaves…4’33’’ is considered a ‘silent’ piece but it isn’t at all.” Of course. Those of the audience who have really been listening understand this because in the absence of noise coming from the stage they begin to notice what meditators notice all the time, the rhythms of the pulse and breathing, the ringing of one’s nervous system in the ears, the restless rustling of the devotees shifting in their seats, the counterpoint of street noises and the dynamics of our internal monologues as they fade in and out of this very existential, slice-of-life “piece”. Gutman considers 4’ 33” a masterpiece.

An "old school" critic might find the whole display a bit “precious.” Cutesy. Little more than a transparent conceit. But Cage has done an interesting thing in the creation of 4’33”. Imagine the vaulted ceilings of the concert hall filled with hundreds of modern music aficionados poised in reverent silence at the feet of the man in the tux seated at the oh-so-grand piano. Then all that rapt respectful attention is quietly shifted away from an artistic diversion to, lo and behold, the moment at hand— what the Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hahn called "the most precious thing of all." Cage’s great respect for his audience was reflected in his high expectations of them. While other artists struggled to imitate nature, Cage attempted to go one step further, to include "the model" within "the piece." He essentially held up the picture frame and bid the art lover to look through it at the marvelous but seldom noticed land/mindscape in which we are emersed— the deeper art from which all "artistic expression springs.

He reminded us that, sure, art is wondrous but what about the tree in the courtyard— the tree that made the piano? What about the reverberant empty space of the concert hall through which the sound waves travel to our ears? What about the space between our thoughts that allows that miraculous music into our souls to do its mysterious healing work?

I woke up in the middle of the night last night thinking on these things and I opened at random a book of quotations I have on the shelf called The Little Zen Companion and, I swear to God, it fell open to these two pages. The first contained a quote from the Tao Te Ching: “We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.” The facing page was a quote from the pianist Artur Schnabel, “The notes I handle no better than many pianists, but the pauses between the notes— ah, that is where the art resides!” Maybe my next entry should just be a blank page.

Cage shows us that a musical performance is like an aural pentamiento and if we scrape away the top layer of coloratura we find another movement of everyday sounds. Delve beneath that and there are the internal sounds that remind us that we are living in a body. Peal away another layer and we hear the mental processes jumping from one aspect of our personal story to another like a dozen radios tuned to different stations. Allow the gap between the thoughts to widen and you begin to experience the lush “string wash” of consciousness that underlies it all. Then we really begin to sense as the physicist John Hagelin said, “The whole universe is just a symphony.” and that “We’re all just waves of vibrations of this underlying unified super string field.”
For the sage, the silence is symphonic.

Got Real News? Got Public Financing?

2007-03-03T11:24:00.000-08:00

In an article entitled Maybe We Deserve to Be Ripped Off By Bush's Billionaires By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. he points out,“While America obsessed about Brittany's shaved head, Bush offered a budget that offers $32.7 billion in tax cuts to the Wal-Mart family alone, while cutting $28 billion from Medicaid.”

Interesting commentary. The one part I don't agree with is the "conventional wisdom" that most people are more interested in Britney's hair-do than the fact that they're being ripped off for billions. If stories like Bush's budget were written in the proper context, editors know such stories would be sensational enough to draw eyeballs. But you won't see headlines like BUSH WANTS MASSIVE CUTS IN SERVICES TO ELDERLY AND NEEDY TURNED INTO MASSIVE TAX GIVEAWAYS FOR SUPER RICH on the front page of any dailies anytime soon even though it's a very relevant and unequivical fact. Why? Not because no one cares. The fact is that corporate news blames Joe Sixpack for the inanity of its coverage while burying the lead and obfuscating the drama of the story's true implications. The agenda is obvious.

We’re not too stupid to realize that corporate news owners benefit handsomely from budgets like Bush’s in which estate taxes are slashed to the bone. And editors are not too stupid to know that if they used their resources to peak readers interests in such information they would soon lose their jobs.

How do I know the public is not too stupid to detect corporate news’ unspoken agendas? Because its obvious grasp of the situation is reflected in the surveys that show that the media's credibility has tanked and most people under 55 now get their news from the internet where they can skirt the dross and cut to the chase.

Frontline did a great series on this issue called "News Wars". The gist was that because stockholders want a 20% profit margin from the newspapers they own, the publicly traded news organization is becoming less and less viable as a legitimate news gathering model. Because to operate at a 20% profit margin you have to cut staff below what is required to collect serious news.

The unstated inference to me is that since real news is as important to a functioning democracy as a defense budget, maybe the country should help finance the takeover of a couple of major newspapers that have been made irrelevant by corporate greed. Then create a body to run them at only a 5% profit margin in order that they can maintain sufficient news staff to gather the information required to inform our “citizen deciders” how best to run their democracy.
The publicly financed model works. This is why NPR is the most trusted news source in the country and PBS (purveyor of Frontline) is the most trusted TV news provider. No wonder Bush wants to cut their budgets. A functioning democracy might funnel too much out of his base's trembling fingers.

We need legitimate newspapers (whether or not they are actually diseminated in paper form) to collect the news that the internet (read: savvy consumers in the form of bloggers etc.) organizes, analyses, and prioritizes. Who's gonna pay for that? As usual, we do in one way or another. So let's remove the mismanagement of corporate profiteers and hand papers like the L.A. Times that have been victimized by such characters back to publishers that give a damn. There will still be plenty of News Corps around to glorify fluff and the Republican party. But public financed news gathering organizations could guarantee that everyone will be served and not just a few.

If Brittany wants those cameras that are driving her crazy off her back in a hurry all she has to do is walk up to them and say, "Well, as long as I have your attention, did you hear about Bush's budget?" Believe, me the editors in charge of those news teams will quickly make an executive decision that the public is not interested in Brittany's shaved head.

Don't-Know Mind

2007-02-18T16:01:00.000-08:00

The question “Who were you before you were born?” is a fundamental koan in zen teaching. Zen masters often ask questions like, “What does your original face look like?” or “Where have you come from?” Of course, one of the purposes of such questions is to jog the initiate out of cursory answers like, ”I’m a professor”, “a mother”, or simply a flesh-and blood automoton of electrochemical stimuli and responses.” etc. Because beyond the thoughts and emotional responses and fleshy parts, there is that unknowable essence known as pure consciousness, sky blue mind, The eye beyond the “I” found outside the realm of questions and answers. The silent witness transcendent of conditioning and assumptions. What the masters call “don’t-know mind.”

Zen Master Seung Sahn said our purpose in this existence is to understand “don’t-know mind.” We don’t do it by reading a bunch of books which are limited to the opinions and dogmas of others but by dwelling in “the primary point” “before thinking”. “Keeping a don’t-know mind 100% you and everything are already one.” he said.

Easier said than done, of course. Even in my deepest meditations my babbling brook of constant thought actually subsides into a pool of stillness only for a moment or two. And yet, to borrow a metaphor from Majarishi Mahesh Yogi, it only takes a moment of dipping the cloth into the dye to change the cloth indelibly. Then you hang the cloth in the warm sun of the everyday world where it fades somewhat. Then dip it in the dying vat again before exposing it again to the heat of the light of day. Repeating this process over and over, the color deepens and becomes fast.

Satsang (sitting meditation) is not the only path toward don’t-know mind, It also helps to contemplate what we aren’t— a process that Krishnamurti calls “negation.” One thing becomes clear. We aren’t our thoughts. And once we come to this realization, we are forced to eliminate all forms of conception from our definition of self or anything else really. Soon one realizes that, since any definition can only be a product of thought, any attempt to capsulize consciousness into a concept is futile. All concepts, words, symbols, and ideas about observers and the observed are but maps, not the territory— as alien to the true nature of the thing they describe as a four color atlas is to the vast stretches of complex terrain it vaguely refers to.

Seung Sang points out that when a dog barks Koreans say he makes the sound, “Mung! Mung! Mung!” Japanese people say it says, “Wong! Wong!” Polish say it’s “How! How! How!” and Americans say it’s “Woof! Woof!”…”But this dog never gives his sound a name; he only barks. Human beings make this word and sound an idea, and become attached to it. Then they cannot see the world as it is.”

So if you ask me to describe my original face, my answer is, “How! How! How!”

Astonishing Hypothesis or Just Astonishing Hype?

2007-02-07T16:57:00.000-08:00

In a recent article in Time magazine entitled “The Mysteries of Consciousness” Stephen Pinker, a psychology Professor at Harvard, attempted to explain why most neuroscientists believe consciousness is merely a quirky byproduct of brain function— what he snarkily termed “a terrifying prospect” for “ many nonscientists” because “it strangle[s] the hope that we might survive the death of our body.”

He tried to prove his point by listing various ways in which electrical probes, drugs and oxygen deprivation can produce different thoughts and perceptions in a subject, all indicating, in his mind (and apparently the minds of many of his colleagues), that “Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.”

All he had really proven, however, is that he and many other academics confuse the content of consciousness with consciousness itself. The “‘astonishing hypothesis’— the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the brain” has been old news to meditators for thousands of years.

Indeed one of the purposes of meditating is to calm the “activity in the brain” so that the sediment of thoughts and emotions can settle and separate itself from the medium it obscures and is suspended within, the translucent liquidity of consciousness. Allow this to happen and it becomes crystal clear that pure consciousness is not the activity of the brain. In fact it is best detected when such activity has diminished considerably. Stir up the sediment with electrical probes and you’ll only confuse the issue.

Pinker attempts to refute the inference of out of body experiences that might suggests that essential consciousness is independent of brain activity by briefly mentioning a recent Swiss experiment in which neuroscientists created the illusion of out of body experience “by stimulating the part of the brain in which vision and bodily sensations converge.” He dispatches the subject with a few dismissive sentences but, again, what did he really prove?

Just because you can reproduce many of the sensations of flight with a flight simulator doesn’t demolish someone’s assertion that they’ve actually flown at one time or another. And what about the fact that certain out-of-body experiencers have gathered information from places at the same moment their body was in another place? The fact that Pinker would try to palm off such wispy arguments as “oxygen starvation” as the final word on OBE causes one to wonder how much hubris plays a part in his viewpoint.

And what about the inferences of past life experiences— accounts of people who have inexplicably intimate knowledge of events and situations they could not have known about without having been someone long departed from that time and place. Do such phenomenon infer consciousness transcending brain function? Pinker doesn’t touch on such inconvenient considerations but he would probably say that such anecdotal evidence does not conform to the rigors of scientific method.

In reality the rigors of scientific method have not been properly applied to past life or out of body experience or the phenomenon of the clear light of death (see previous blog entry) or a host of other possible pathways toward a better understanding of the issue of consciousness because such inquiry is politically incorrect in the extreme to the conventional scientific community.

Is there consciousness (as opposed to brain activity) outside of physical phenomena? How do you find out if you only use instruments that measure physical phenomenon? The lack of effort by most of the scientists that claim to be interested in the subject to develop a methodology that might actually address the challenges of such an inquiry brings to mind a famous Sufi teaching story: A policeman comes upon a man searching for his key late at night under a street lamp. The officer asks where the man lost the key and the man points to a dark corner a considerable distance away. The officer asks, “If you lost it over there, why are you looking over here?” The man replies, “Because the light’s better.”

If the man was an academic required to publish something authoritative on the subject on a regular basis, I wouldn’t be surprised if he soon threw up his hands and wrote a treatise claiming that he’d proven the key a figment of our imaginations all along.

The Finger Pointing at the Moon

2007-01-22T10:37:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading The Universe in a Single Atom by The Dalai Lama.
It’s a very thoughtful and meticulously written book by a man who clearly reveres science along with its methods and accomplishments. And, of course, he is also one who understands the value of other ways of knowing. The branches of science discussed in this book range from quantum physics to the ethics of the new genetics.

The book advocates “a collaborative endeavor [between science and spirituality] that has far-reaching potential to help humanity meet the challenges before us.” Einstein had his famous “thought experiments.” The Dalai Lama proposes a series of experiments in “no thought,” if you will— experiments that combines the first person experiences of meditation with the third person data collection of modern scientific method and tools. We could, no doubt, find a rain forest of panaceas right between our ears with this sort of research.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know a few things about “the clear light of death,” for instance. His Holiness writes “My own teacher Ling Rinpoche remained in the clear light of death for thirteen days; although he was clinically dead and had stopped breathing, he stayed in the meditation posture and his body showed no signs of decomposition.” Such occurrences are certainly not unprecedented. The book mentions another meditator that left his body in death and “for seventeen days in the tropical heat of high summer in eastern India.” remained in a meditative posture without decomposing. There are worlds waiting to be explored. But they won’t be until science opens to the possibility of their existence.

The Dalai Lama emphasizes the common goals of science and spirituality. At their best, they both forge a ”union between wisdom and compassion.” At their worst, rigid and unaccountable to the interests of a fragile world, they can create hell on earth.

When scientific thought gets too full of itself, its quest for deeper truths gets sidetracked. The Dalai Lama writes. “…recognizing the limits of scientific knowledge, I believe, is essential. Otherwise our conception of the world including our own existence, will be limited to the facts adduced by science, leading to a deeply reductionist, materialistic, even nihilistic worldview.

“My difficulty is not with reductionism as such…The problem arises when reductionism, which is essentially a method, is turned into a metaphysical standpoint…a Buddhist text reminds us that when someone points his finger at the moon, we should direct our gaze not at the tip of the finger but at the moon to which it is pointing.”

So does your method of looking at the universe offer you the moon? Or just give you the finger?

Sunday In the City

2006-12-18T10:22:00.001-08:00

It was one of those Sundays when there was magic in the air from the first light. When I wake up, a melody replete with chords, downloads into to my brain in the first three seconds of consciousness. I get up and tip toe off to another room to write it down. It sounds like a rollicking Irish ballad and it sets the tone for the whole day.

When I come back to the bedroom my wife, still luxuriating in sleep, is hugging a pillow like a long lost niece with her long blonde hair cascading behind her. I turn on the camera to take a picture but the chirping of the device wakes her up. I crawl back into bed briefly to smooch her into further consciousness.

After a week of rain and gloom the sun is streaming through the window demanding our attendance amidst its glories so I announce that I’m going out for coffee. Soon we are dressed and in the car and winging towards the heart of Berkeley on the freeway toward Café Trieste.

But lo, across the bay, San Francisco is swathed in golden haze and the digital traffic sign indicates that it is only a traffic-free 10 minutes further to downtown SF. Can’t miss this opportunity so in no time we are arching toward Treasure Island and beyond, through the chill shadows and brilliant light of the concrete canyons downtown praying to the parking angels to be merciful. They grant us a boon not too far afield from our destination, the perfect North Beach coffee house known as The Café El Greco, and we find ourselves trekking up past Washington Square full of elder Asians flowing to the silent strains of a Tai Chi Rhapsody into the Italian Quarter.

And here we are musing at the hustle and bustle of Columbus Avenue, foamy coffee drinks, bagels cream cheese and salmon before us with a side of greens. One of those days when the whole world seems to have been plated (excellent presentation!) for our pleasure. Later we go to The City Lights Bookstore and pick up a collection of author interviews from the Paris Review for my dad.

We will walk to Fisherman’s Wharf to visit the pelicans, sea lions and mimes dancing mechanically on milk crates. We’ll tootle the penny whistles at Lark in the Morning, a music store in The Cannery, window shop at Ghiridelli Square, take the cable cars to Union Square (as hip as the city appears to be, it’s really full of squares). At the square we listen to a Hebrew rock and roll band trying to get equal time under the giant Christmas tree.

We buy a few more presents, have sushi in the food court in the cellar of Macy’s while watching old 49er quarterback Jeff Garcia having another fine day with the Eagles, then back on the trolley to our parking place and back over the Bay Bridge to home. Wow, what a whirl! The one thing we didn’t do is stroll to Chinatown to have dinner at our favorite vegetarian bistro, The Lucky Creation Café. Would have been appropriate.

Sunday In the City

2006-12-18T10:22:00.000-08:00

It was one of those Sundays when there was magic in the air from the first light. When I wake, up a melody replete with chords, downloads into to my brain in the first three seconds of consciousness. I get up and tip toe off to another room to write it down. It sounds like a rollicking Irish ballad and it sets the tone for the whole day.

When I come back to the bedroom my wife, still luxuriating in sleep, is hugging a pillow like a long lost niece with her long blonde hair cascading behind her. I turn on the camera to take a picture but the chirping of the device wakes her up. I crawl back into bed briefly to smooch her into further consciousness.

After a week of rain and gloom the sun is streaming through the window demanding our attendance amidst its glories so I announce that I’m going out for coffee. Soon we are dressed and in the car and winging towards the heart of Berkeley on the freeway toward Café Trieste.

But lo, across the bay, San Francisco is swathed in golden haze and the digital traffic sign indicates that it is only a traffic-free 10 minutes further to downtown SF. Can’t miss this opportunity so in no time we are arching toward Treasure Island and beyond, through the chill shadows and brilliant light of the concrete canyons downtown praying to the parking angels to be merciful. They grant us a boon not too far afield from our destination, the perfect North Beach coffee house known as The Café El Greco, and we find ourselves trekking up past Washington Square full of elder Asians flowing to the silent strains of a Tai Chi Rhapsody into the Italian Quarter.

And here we are musing at the hustle and bustle of Columbus Avenue, foamy coffee drinks, bagels cream cheese and salmon before us with a side of greens. One of those days when the whole world seems to have been plated (excellent presentation!) for our pleasure. Later we go to The City Lights Bookstore and pick up a collection of author interviews from the Paris Review for my dad.

We will walk to Fisherman’s Wharf to visit the pelicans, sea lions and mimes dancing mechanically on milk crates. We’ll tootle the penny whistles at Lark in the Morning, a music store in The Cannery, window shop at Ghiridelli Square, take the cable cars to Union Square (as hip as the city appears to be, it’s really full of squares). At the square we listen to a Hebrew rock and roll band trying to get equal time under the giant Christmas tree.

We buy a few more presents, have sushi in the food court in the cellar of Macy’s while watching old 49er quarterback Jeff Garcia having another fine day with the Eagles, then back on the trolley to our parking place and back over the Bay Bridge to home. Wow, what a whirl! The one thing we didn’t do is stroll to Chinatown to have dinner at our favorite vegetarian bistro, The Lucky Creation Café. Would have been appropriate.

Spiritual Window Shoppers

2006-11-24T13:40:00.000-08:00

There's a Rumi poem (translated by Coleman Barks) that starts:

"These spiritual window shoppers who idly ask,
"How much is that?
Oh, I'm just looking."

These window shoppers have a few Buddhas in their gardens and a couple of African tribal masks on the walls of their studies but haven't invested much beyond the acquisition of an interesting collection of spiritual artifacts. They are like those bachelor types that can't stay interested in a woman beyond the six-month grace period that typifies the first flush of love.
But passion is like a bonfire. It needs to be lit and relit before it can begin to build upon itself.

Rumi says in another poem (via Barks):

If you can't pray a real prayer, pray
hypocritically, full of doubt
and dry mouthed
God accepts counterfeit money
as though it were real.

In other words, fake it until you make it. Any form of homage to the unknown— prayer, worship, a few sincere strains from an old hymn— could at least be a way to get some distance from that arthritic stance of superiority that proclaims, "It's not digified to humble myself before something that hasn't passed the check list of my intellect." How could the mystery pass the muster of your constricted little criteria? You don't even know enough to ask the right questions. How could you even compose a question about something that is beyond words?

I know, you don't want to be associated with the sort that falls down and cries "Miracle!" at the sight of any gnarled turnip that vaguely resembles the face of the Madonna. I understand. We're not talking about that. The religious hysteric doesn't honor the mystery either because he, too, is always super-imposing his little dogmatic template over everything on God's green Earth.

Your intellectual dogmatism is not superior to the hysteric's dogmatism because all dogmas are inferior. Mark Twain said, "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so." Prayer, at least prayers of celebration, praise, and gratitude, aren't about dogma. They're about cognizance and passion. Get a little cognizance and passion in your life. Otherwise you'll wind up like Rumi's window shopper:

Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."

If you find depictions of the Christ as basically another long suffering, blood spattered, pin cushion of brutality melodramatic and smarmy don't throw the babe in the manger out with the bath water. Paint your own vision of how the Messiah should be. What's the gospel according to your soul? As Rumi says at the end of his window shopper poem:

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah,
It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.

Breezing Through the Wine Country

2006-11-19T15:02:00.000-08:00

The weekend after the election the clouds melted away leaving the air clean and bright. My wife and I were still trying to open up to the possibility that the people had actually beaten back the tide of fascism for now and perhaps a long time to come.

The internet had served its purpose beautifully where mainstream media had largely failed and now big media had no choice but to play catch up. The investigations long suppressed were now beginning in earnest. We could breathe again. In the back of our heads a little ditty was playing incessantly. Ding dong the witch is dead. Hey, we can dream can’t we?

And there we were cruising through the gold and rouge colored vineyards of the Sonoma wine country on a gorgeous fall day excited to be visiting our old friends in their beautiful homemade home fed by spring water and sun power high in the coastal mountains of Cazadero.

We glimpse the Russian River sparkling below the shimmering yellow leaves of the Maples. We stop at the Korbel Vineyard Deli to get a cup of Joe just long enough for me to see a couple of highlights of the Cal/Arizona game on the TV over the bar. I’m happy to see the highlights are of two Cal touchdowns. Outside the deli Japanese tourists with the latest camera phones are taking pictures of the rununculas cascading down the old brick walls. God’s in Her heaven and all’s right with the world.
Soon we are veering off the Russian River Road past the llama farms and climbing up and up into the forests along Austen Creek. I see a buck foraging by the waters edge.

We are immersed in a wonderful moment. We know it’s temporary. We know that corporations still call the tune in this country. We know we’re far from out of the woods yet. And I know one’s mood shouldn’t be predicated on the outcome of a football game (Cal ended up losing the game, of course).

Only one thing is certain— change. It’s the quick or the dead in this life… “quick” meaning quick thinking. This being so, the universe seems to reward intelligence. If this condemns man to the disaster of his own selfish stupidity then so be it. But it also may mean that in the end we will be forced to adhere to thoughtful determination as opposed to blind brute force. So… expect a miracle but remain unattached to outcome.

It’s going to be a long fight that may not succeed. But in any guerilla war of attrition those that can draw sustenance from their environment will be the ones who endure. And so, despite knowing we are merely enjoying the peace that attends the eye of the storm, we take sustenance from that peace and let our gratitude bolster us for the challenges to come. We revel in this day, a dazzling proof that grace happens.

Note: Image is from picturethisgallery.com

Real Regime Change

2006-11-10T14:06:00.000-08:00

Ronald Reagan once said, “Government can’t solve the problem. It is the problem.” And then he proceeded to prove his point by showing us how bad government can get. Ever since, ideologues of a similar bent have followed in his footsteps trying to prove his point by governing just as badly. But one is not proven prescient just by winning a bet on a race he's fixed.

So now the supposed reform party has regained a modicum of power and a corrupt system will be steered in “a new direction.” There are developments to be excited about. I am encouraged that Barbara Boxer will be chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee— succeeding a chairman who still thinks global warming is a hoax. Thank God there are politicians in office that I can actually believe are still motivated by a passion to promote the common good and that they are in positions to finally fulfill such dreams.

But how can the common good remain the focus of a system that is so dependent on institutions of such extreme self-interest as the corporations? Just to run for a mid-level office today requires such an astronomical amount of concentrated capital, it is impossible for influence peddling not to be a prominent feature of our governmental process.

Reform? It will always remain true that there will be no lasting reform without campaign finance reform. Yet both the major parties insist that requiring a king’s ransom to run for office is a good thing— a fundamental tenet of free speech. Not the best outcome of bipartisan cooperation one might hope for.

Do they really think that defending the oil company's perogative to spend 95 million dollars on a campaign, allowing them to buy up every second of ad time on television, and bludgeon our sensibilities with misinformation to the exclusion of all other perspectives is the way to protect our free speech rights? I guess Democratic leadership, despite all evidence to the contrary, apparently considers the thesis that saturation propaganda has a devastating effect on ones ability to make an informed choice at the polls also a hoax— like global warming and evolution are for others deep in denial.

One of the major hurdles to reform has always been, as Upton Sinclair once pointed out, that certain people have a hard time believing what they are paid a good salary not to believe. Still, if we want to get some real integrity in the real world, we need to get real with ourselves one day soon. Regime change doesn’t just start at home. It starts in the heart. Being a democrat is not enough. But, one would hope, it's a step in the right direction.

Rejecting Reptilian Reactionism

2006-10-09T14:29:00.000-07:00

It’s easy to get in a funk about our day and age. Sometimes it seems people are stupider, meaner and more self-destructive than ever. We don't have to look to the Middle East to find irrational, vicious behavior. We just have to look at members of the political party across the aisle. Or listen to shock jocks across the dial. No wonder we are so desparate and paranoid at times, constantly reacting from the most reptilian parts of our brains. Our movies are vicious. Our video games are vicious. Our sports are vicious. Our news is vicious. No wonder the world seems like such a malevolent place. It's exhausting.

The key word here is "seems". We have to remember that the operative phrase of consumer culture is "Ha. Ha. Made you look." Drama, not subtlety, draws the most immediate attention and so, regardless of the medium, if the purveyors of that medium are jonesing for eyeballs because they have some sort of sales quota to make, then blood, explosions and pathos will always be the most readily exploited attention-getting devices. It doesn't mean that the world is predominantly made up of such elements. It just means that the filter of consumer culture is. When we forget this fact, we are most vulnerable to a meltdown of morale.

The other day my wife was caught in a long grocery line feeling a bit of this morale meltdown and also a bit of what she calls “hurry-scurry mind”— that sense of oppression you get when you're caught in a traffic jam of one sort or another with the lurching Godzilla of time hot on your heels. Then she found herself face to face with a baby being held by the woman in line in front of her.

Now you know how babies are. Whatever they are feeling comprises the entire universe for them . When they’re cranky the whole world is a hell realm. but when they are just being quietly interested in whatever is before them, they are so much more than just little beings. They are the essence of being. This is the way this child was. This infant was clearly free of the brand of temporary insanity that my wife was experiencing as it stared wide-eyed straight into her soul.

My wife decided to treat this moment as a gift and opened her mind to be touched by the baby’s unpolluted attentiveness. Very soon her heart was also quiet and, she said, she began to feel as if she were shining.

Opening to the child’s innocent purity reconnected her to her own. With a little skill, The Natural Great Perfection, as the Dzogchen Buddhists call it, is always available to us. So relax. As Suzuki Roshi once said to his students, "You're perfect. And you could use some improvement."

Living Large

2006-09-28T11:56:00.000-07:00

Part of the Eastern spiritual sense of the deeper reality is termed “emptiness.” It is the realization that there are really no singular things. There is only “One without a second” as the Rishis put it. There is the continually changing process of material and nonmaterial existence with all its sub-processes. And there are substantless versions of Mind arbitrarily labeling stages of the process with various nouns as though those stages were actually permanent entities. But as Pablo Picasso once said, "There are no nouns, only verbs." Every thing is merely an asseblage of parts, causes, effects and conditions with no inherent essense of its own. "Essence" is simply projected upon the assemblage by the mind of the beholder. It's all processes melting into other processes.

Still emptiness is not about nothingness. It’s about the sense of spaciousness that comes when you realize that the borders that separates “you” from “everything else” is not the thin envelope of your skin. You are Big Mind peering through a singular perspective called... whatever your name is. But in fact there are no real borders between “your person” and “the other” because 60% of “you” is the rivers that supply the water that make up your bodily fluids. You are the forces that make up the fabric of the material world, the air pressure that keeps your fluids from boiling away, the electromagnetic forces that are sparking the very thoughts that create the sensation of a you in the first place. You are the 15 billion year process from the big bang to the present day that forged the iron in the cauldron of the stars that now courses through your blood.

If your impressed with this universe then give yourself a hand because when you think about it, you and the cosmos are one and the same. Duality is a duel with ones own gigantic shadow. So emptiness isn’t some nihilistic notion that there is just nothingness and that there is certainly no “you”. It’s the transcendent realization that there is nothing but you. "I am you... and we are all together." as the walrus might say. Why do you think they call it the “You”-niverse? Gregory Bateson, the famous systems theorist called this insight “the delimiting of the self”. So… be all you can be, which is everything there is! It’ll make you a much bigger person.

In a City of Fallen Angels

2006-09-16T23:54:00.000-07:00

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is asked by his disciples, “When will heaven come?” He replies, “It won’t come by waiting for it, because Heaven is spread out upon the earth but people don’t see it.” A color blind person wouldn’t know a street made of gold if it smacked him in the face. He might even think he is trapped in a city consisting of nothing but poverty and desperation where any brutal act could be justified as a survival tactic. Such people can't see heaven. They see hell and project their horrific hallucination onto this miraculous blank canvas of pure potentiality we call existence and through reactions and attitudes paint something resembling Edvard Munch's Scream over Monet's Water Lilies.

Instead of making lemonade out of lemons they make spitoons from the pots of gold that bookend the rainbow. This is how hell is born of our own blindness. True, the streets of our earthly heaven may not literally be paved with gold but they are strewn with gold-colored leaves, golden late afternoon light, gold-eyed cats, golden-haired women, golden delicious apples and golden-hued souls shining all around. The real heaven's gold is warm and alive not cold and metallic.

A little skill. a little gratitude, a little mindfulness practice and a little emotional discipline and the world becomes a thinly-veiled paradise. And not only is she gorgeous, she's easy. She's head-over-heals for us. And so for the lowly poet she'll drops her veils at the drop of a hat. You see, the trouble with this heaven of ours is that the real God is no segregationist. He doesn't bus the the confused, needy, mean-spirited people to some project called Purgatory. Those projects were leveled long ago to make way for the ever-expanding urban renewal project of our universe.

The trouble is this heaven of ours isn't a gated community for saints and angels only. God has a very big heart. He'll let anyone in. Even you and me. You don't have to be a Buddha. You only have to have the potential to be one. So if we want to clean up the neighborhood we have to develop our Buddha nature by nurturing the development of other Buddhas. It's up to us. We live in heaven but we need to learn to see through the hell in our heads to realize it.

So one of the most fundamental purposes of our existence in this heaven is to remove the scales from our own and others eyes, not an easy task in a place where fear and hatred are so vigorously promoted in order to divide and conquer. One of our most fundamental purposes in this man-made world of illusion, mind-made world of doubt is to dispel the darkness by practicing optimism, cheer, open-hearted affection— no matter how out of vogue it may seem. Be happy anyway. Celebrate anyway. Be generous anyway. Sing anyway. Expect a miracle anyway.

Sure some people may think you’re crazy but like Zorba the Greek said, "A man needs a little madness or he never cuts the rope and is free." Practice the high art of happiness. Practice, practice, practice. Because practice makes perfection.

Jesus and Buddha: Compare and Contrast

2006-09-03T16:33:00.000-07:00

We went to a Unity service in Berkeley today. I was impressed by the alter which sported statuettes of both Buddha and Jesus. No wonder they call it Unity. Of course, Jesus and Buddha have a lot in common. They were both Awakened Ones trying to enlighten the world. They espoused similar principles that emphasized transcendence from the delusions that inevidably dog a self-centered self-concept. Compassion was also a favored theme of both masters as was nonviolence and the renunciation of materialism.

They were both skilled teachers that excelled in the instructive techniques of parable and metaphor. They understood that to become truly enlightened one must at some time abandon a conventional lifepath and "go forth" in solitude to seek deeper understanding of the human condition in order to become one with a higher intelligence. They both left their families to find a deeper realization and founded spiritual communities dedicated to this realization.

It is also important to note that most of what was written about the two is unverifiable historically and so many myths and fantastical stories have naturally accumulated around these two magnetic figures like charged particles might around two great dynamos. There is very little we know for certain.

For example, it is unknown whether Jesus was actually crucified, although I suspect it is likely he was since he lived under a repressive regime that would have felt threatened by anyone that could fill a town square like he could. Also nothing real or fictional was written about his life beyond his mid-thirties which indicates that he was either dispatched around that time or had to go underground rather hastily to avoid such a fate.

In contrast Buddha supposedly lived to be eighty and founded many sanghas that were enthusiastically and generously supported by the potentates of the time (with perhaps one conspiratorial exception). Buddha's story has many more chapters than Jesus'. Also Jesus was supposedly born of common folk, while Buddha was of the priviledged class and chose the life of a humble seeker voluntarily.

These differences are superficial. The important thing is that they both tapped a common source of wisdom beyond words residing in the realm of spirit. And they dedicated themselves to guiding others along the path toward this realm with unparalleled skill.

Historians will never know what was real and what was invented about there lives but the authenicity of each detail of their biographies is not nearly as important as the authenticity of their messages. And if we do have a spark of the divine within us, as both teachers claim, then we should in time be able to divine their truths from the tall tales of others by asking some simple questions like: "What did they say that resinates for me? Which message helps quench the fires of hatred, ignorance and greed within me?" Then it doesn't matter if the water springs from an oasis in the Sinai Desert or an artesian well in a forest in Bodh Gaya, a fountain in Mecca or a falls in the Sierras. A thirsty soul knows what it needs.

The Big Questions

2006-08-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I’m just a guy contemplating, meditating and digging for information about the big questions— questions like:

• What is the essential nature of physical reality?
• Is everything a form of conscious spirit as the eastern philosophies and American indigenous cultures have intuited?
• Or is it all just a series of random happenstances that created a dog-eat-dog cosmos that is already dead in essence— reactive, mechanical, where any sense of deeper meaning is the result of wishful thinking
• Just as important: Is the average Joe capable of deep lasting happiness without destroying, one’s fellow beings and oneself in the attempt.
• Is the average Joe capable of perceiving a reality that transcends the electro-chemical nuero-firings of the old grey matter like Rumi and Krishnamurti and other ecstatic aesthetics whose names end in a small “I” have claimed?

Big questions and, like I said, I’m just a guy. I don’t have any advanced degrees like Ken Wilbur or Deepak Chopra or Stephen Hawking. But then again if that were a requirement then only bishops could determine anything pertinent about the sphere of the spirit and Jesus and Buddha would have been arrested for contemplation without a license.

But if, as some say. the spirit indwells us all, well, that and a public library, a world-wide web and some committed mindfulness and maybe some good discussions with like-intentioned fellow inquirers should yield up some big answers. Or at least some big inferences.

And, in fact, they have. There’s incredibly good news— good enough to make a lifelong skeptic jump for joy.
Enough to lift the heart of a committed curmudgeon? Of course, not. Because as the Buddha said, “With your thoughts you make the world.” — especially with your projections of the world. But anyone capable of honest, open-minded and determined delving will find excellent prospects for immeasurable joy and eternal gratitude.

These scribblings are not only an argument for such a vision, but also an exploration of the practices required to see through old thought habits to that infinite luminosity waiting just beyond those habits. These notes are also a celebration of the great gift of this existence. It is an e-sangha for the spirit. Emaho! Give and partake! Ain’t life grand?

Of course, being the bearer of good tidings is not a job for wimps. Everyone is understandably suspicious. They’re asking themselves, “What’s this guy smokin’?” What cult has brainwashed all his critical thinking skills down the drain? Don’t get me wrong. I’m painfully aware of the ubiquitous tragedy that forever characterizes “the real world”. Greed, hatred and ignorance have blinded most to the glorious spectacle of the unveiled here and now and of the vast potential good snoozing in every person.

But we’re not here to point out the obvious. We’ll leave that for a gazillion other blogs. We’re here to highlight the subtle but all-pervasive fact of a benevolent universe existing just beyond the nightmare of Greed, Hatred and Ignorance (G.H.I.). We’re here to point out the fact that since time immemorial people in power have tried to convince the minions that G.H.I. is the dark star around which existence forever orbits so we’d better face the fact that it’s us against them and that a major part of the human endeavor will always be devoted to building arms and dying to defend ourselves from people who” hate our freedom.” Blah, blah, blah. What a momentous crock.

But people are still falling for that age-old wheeze. It’s happening as we speak. Terrorists are the new communists under the bed. Self-anointed “independent thinkers” are mouthing the Cant of Can’t exactly as they’ve been instructed and they don’t even know it.

Don’t confuse being dour with being grounded. “Grounded” also refers to crippled aircraft that are incapable of flight.As Annie Philpott once wrote, “The world is a miraculous garden waiting patiently for us to awaken to its splendors.” Sometimes the best way to end a nightmare is to wake up.

The Practice of Loving Life

2006-08-13T22:00:00.000-07:00

Life is simple, really. We’ve been given an assignment on this Earth — to love as much as you possibly can while learning the lessons that make you a better lover knowing the most devoted lover loves to pay close attention to the object of her affection. And so lovers of life love to take in the scenery that is their beloved. How fortunate to always be surrounded by the things you love— namely everything.

Of course, to truly appreciate life, you have to learn to enjoy the more embarrassing prickly ego-popping parts of it. When I find myself continually rehashing an exchange I’ve had with a friend that could have gone better and my self-absorbed side worries that I’ve been irrevocably misunderstood and frets about what it will do to my reputation (blah-blah-blah), I can continue in this cycle, siphoning off my energy toward ludicrous and wasteful mental habits, or I can interrupt the pattern with the amused laughter of recognition. “God luv ya, you’re doing it again. Forgetting that there is no “you” to defend or worry about." As Buddha pointed out, “I” is just a convention— a very, very arbitrary convention. It’s nothing but a collection of perceptions and impressions morphed into an ever-shifting semblance of an identity by a crazed combo of genetics and conditioning. What’s the real “you”? Getting to know you is getting to “no you”.

Every sit-com needs a running gag; Frasier has his boorish snobbery, Will and Grace, their fragile self-esteem. Occasionally trying to second guess what people might be thinking about me is one of my old patterns. Busted again. Smile. You’re on candid camera.” The best running gags generally grow out of a character’s more persistent peccadilloes.

Even the tragic-comic nature of the ego can give us something to enjoy in this life we love so well. When we realize the laughs are not really at our expense (since there’s no you) it’s easier to join in the merriment. We should feel happy when we become cognizant of our thought pattern’s machinations. Another feather in our Karma cap to tickle ourselves with when we need it. The first fruit of mindfulness is recognition. Practice is not changing the habit per se. It’s watching how it works. The watching itself will mutate the behavior more deeply than rigid abstinence from the pattern. If it’s done earnestly with commitment watching alone can change our lives. Like I said, life is simple. Love the watching and get over yourself and it’s a beautiful thing, worthy of wonder and worship as is anything beloved.

I love the image of the Beloved that is an ancient reference in Sufi and Hindu spiritual literature. The miraculous cosmos you exist in is your beloved. Your relationship is all-embracing cerebral, visceral, motherly, child-like, spousal, orgasmic — a symbiotic matrix of completely integrated circuitry culminating in The-Great-All-Everything.

Our job is to open to this realization by clearing a space between our incessant thoughts — the mental reactivity that creates the arbitrary divisions between whatever and whatever — always impeding our union with the now and forever. The Beloved, though often veiled, is always with us — waiting patiently, yet eagerly for us to rip the veils away and be dazzled by her full - on radiance. If that's my assignment while I'm here, I'm all over it.

Ah, Life… what’s not to love?

Imagine.

2006-08-03T10:21:00.000-07:00

Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” G.B. Shaw wrote “People see things the way they are and ask “Why?”. I see them the way they never were and ask “Why not?”. Who knows what things might be if our imaginations had been encouraged a little more?

I remember babysitting my two nieces a couple of years ago— two Waldorf kids— smart, affectionate, positive, caring. The six-year-old riding her little purple bike with the training wheels— the ten-year-old practicing on her unicycle for the school circus. She had it down. It’s interesting to think there are members of the younger generation that can do things I can’t do. I guess I’d better start getting used to it. She can also play the clarinet and read music. I should have gone to Waldorf.

But the girls’ confidence and accomplishments merely enhance their finer qualities. Their bright and gentle natures, easy laughter, simple happiness. Always a song on their lips. Their chatter quickly fading into rhythms of pretend. The older one hides behind a tree from the younger. The younger sees her and asks, “What are you doing?” the older says “I’m a squirrel.”

Younger yells, “Get out of my garden!”

Older. “I’m climbing up the tree.”

Younger. “I’m a dog. I’m chasing you up that tree!” Later the younger one takes some mail out of the mailbox and riding around on her little bike becomes the mailman. She stops in front of me and shows me a letter. “Pardon me. Is this your name?” The envelope is addressed to Alliance Benefit.

“Why, yes.” I intone. “But you can call me A.B.”

It strikes me that unselfconscious pretending could be a pretty good replacement for small talk. Instead of feigning interest in things we can’t do anything about like the weather or our corporate job with its infantile boss, we should break into a little street theatre more often. Stop playing the part of “you” all the time and play “someone else” once in a while or you’ll typecast yourself and never be allowed to play anyone but who you think you are. Besides polishing your acting skills, a regular regime of pretend practice might even help you in that corporate job with that infantile boss.

Later inside the house, my nieces start pulling clothes out of various closets. Suddenly they become pirates, kings, witches and elves. They act out their little skits for me with elaborate gestures and grandiose speeches. A big hulli balloo as they tickle themselves with pillows full of silliness.

It’s instructive being around this curious, endlessly amused energy. Why not laugh and smile at the littlest thing? What’s the use of qualifying every little joy? We say to ourselves “Oh, yes, your momentary exhileration is all very fine as far as it goes but don’t forget, [1.] you have to go to work tomorrow, [2.] you could lose a few pounds and… what else? Oh, yeah, you’re going to DIE SOMEDAY!!!) Self-absorbsion can be so exhausting. We need some new thoughts. Pretend a little everyday. I’m grateful to my nieces for reminding me of this essential credo. As Wordsworth wrote, “The Child is father of the man.”

Like the hats and scarves in our parent’s closet, we need to try on new paradigms, flex and stretch our stiffening belief systems. When did we become so brittle about who we were and who we could be? Babes babbling in the cradle can utter every sound ever required by any language. But a long habit of monolingual monotony can erode our linguistic potential irrevocably. Likewise dropping into a single calcified mindset while foreswearing alternative modes of being will put such a crick in our necks, we’ll only be able to stare straight ahead at the place our fhought-habits have pointed us toward as though it were the only place left to go. We are doomed to fate only when we become imprisoned in inertia.

Pretend you have a crowbar. Pretend you’re using it to bust yourself out of your pretend soul cage. Try some sound effects as you do it. “Pop. Crick. Cr-r-r-rack. Clink. Clank.” Good. Now laugh triumphantly, “Ha-ha! I’m free! Free! Free of me! Free to be... anything!” Good. Good. It’s a start.

A Year in Erik's World

2006-07-17T13:47:00.000-07:00

The Buddhists have a rule of thumb: whenever you say goodbye to someone, do it as if for the last time… for it may very well be the last time. I wish I’d observed this rule of thumb with Erik Kleven (pictured far right). Surely I’d see him around, I thought. He was ubiquitous in the Sacramento music scene. When he played bass in my band he was also playing in about four other bands. He was always in demand. How could you miss seeing or hearing him somewhere someday? We take these things for granted.

Then my sister called with the news that at 3:00 Sunday afternoon Erik was killed driving to a gig when a Volvo coming from the opposite direction crossed the lane and hit him head on. Instantly someone who routinely touched countless people every day and night had vanished forever. Such incidents jar us awake (briefly) to the fact that we are like the smoke curling from one of those American Indian cigarettes Eric used to smoke. In a twinkling, the slightest whiff of breeze can scatter us to the winds.

Time and circumstances can also remove someone from one’s life. I moved to the coast and started writing a book and when I heard about what happened it dawned on me that I hadn’t seen him in a decade. It didn’t matter. Once you’ve gotten to know this guy he’s like something lodged in your chest. The news knocked the wind out of me.

He was always a bit of an icon for me. The bass player of choice for the local musicians I admired— musician's like Shelley Burns, Henry Robinett, Chris Webster, Jessica Williams. As we got to know each other he remained an icon— the consummate professional, the bemused older brother with the knowing smile, quiet and self-possessed. The boys in the band had their rock and roll dreams. Eric already had what he wanted— family, a good gig teaching bass and tuba (He called it the “blow bass”), his books, his maturity, playing music with his friends.

Once I groused to him that though the band had gotten tight enough to record an album we weren’t making enough money to make that album. He said, “It’s not about the money. It’s about the music.” It was certainly true for him. Though I always made sure my musicians got paid a decent wage (even if I didn’t) Erik worked for a number of bands in which creative satisfaction was often the only remuneration.

Of course, he was right. Our rehearsals were just as much fun as the gigs— the joking, the camaraderie, the common determination to fuse our talents into something extraordinary. Exciting times. This was Erik’s life 'til the day he died.

In my mind it was more than a band, of course. It was my music support group. That group provided a defining experience for me. Erik will always be a part of who I am because of it. I’m sure many others could say the same. In this and other ways, he lives on. Let the Eric sightings begin.

I am currently working on an album that includes many of the tunes I played with Eric. I find myself listening to tapes of our live performances to remember how he played those bass lines. Always straightforward. Simple. Elegant.

I feel so fortunate to have a few studio quality recordings of us playing together. I remember he always turned the treble knob of his bass to zero so the engineer could never “funkify” his sound. And I remember he always nailed his track on the first take.

If we’d have known that Erik was going to be taken from us so suddenly I’m sure we would have cheered a little louder after each song he played. But it wouldn’t have mattered much to him. He wasn’t there for the applause. As he said, “It’s all about the music.” He was a very Zen character. If the rhythm was right, he would have been gratified by the sound of one hand clapping.

Erik was like the beat he kept. Rock steady.

Trusting Your Inner Mystic

2006-07-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

An important thesis of the book The Gospel According to Jesus by Stephen Mitchell is that the New Testament, far from being a faithful retelling of the life and words of Jesus, has been compromised by the agiprop of the early church and that the actual sayings of Christ, this great light unto the world, need to be separated from the smoke-and-mirror-speak of the ancient theocratic hustlers that weasled its way into the text.

Mitchell wasn't the first to "cherry pick" The Bible. Thomas Jefferson also attempted to de-churchify The New Testament. The result was a slim volume that some call "The Jefferson Bible". He sent a copy to every member of Congress. Then there was "The Jesus Seminars" in which numerous scholars and historians tried to separate the historically accurate sayings and doings of Jesus from the frequent inventions. Mitchell's efforts rendered about thirty-two pages that reasonable people could actually be expected to believe.

Think about it. there's no way the New Testament hangs together without some serious editing. How could the same spiritual master say, "Relax. God's gonna take care of you just like He/She does the lilies in the field because God cares for you with a love that is absolute in its purity." and then cackle menacingly, "but if you don't take Yours Truly as your personal savior My Dad and I are going to make sure you writhe in agony for eternity! Ha ha ha ha ha!" This kind of inconsistent character development always happens when you give the publishers too much creative control.

Of course the fundamentalists fume that you can't mess with the Holy Writ of God!" It's all Divine Revelation, after all!" they'd assert. "Therefore to edit is to second guess the word of God. How do we know the Bible is holy? Because, dim wit, it says right there on the cover... 'Holy Bible'. God said it was holy and that's all I need to know. How do we know God said it was holy? Cause the Bible said God said it was holy and the Bible doesn't lie. God said it doesn't lie. It says it right there in the Holy Bible."

Circular arguments should be consigned to the circular file.

It's just hard for me to believe without question in a book that says if a family member ever suggests it might be relaxing to play finger cymbals and sing "Hari Krishna" once in a while that you should immediately "...kill him [or her]...strike the first blow in putting him to death...since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God..." Does this sound like the insight of a divine being interested in promoting compassion and tolerance in the world? Or does it sound more like the pronouncement of a jealous prayer cloth vendor worried about the fickle nature of market forces? Read Deuteronomy 13:7-11 and judge for yourself. Is the oldest profession really that of the sex worker? Or the sect worker?

It would be so much easier to have somebody with a real certificate from God Herself just tell us what to do. Unfortunately God didn't award anyone with such all-seeing authority. Look carefully. That Yahweh signiture on the bishop's certification? Too frilly. Nothing but an excellent forgery.

Some people feel utterly incapable of discerning what's true from what's false. In fact we all feel this way from time to time. But that doesn't mean we're doomed to such a fate. Most insanity is temporary. There's no such thing as original sin. In lieu of Divinely Approved Mediaries, we are not forever alienated from the heart and mind of God.

Jesus said we are God's children which means he believes the blood of the divine is flowing through our veins already. We are more holy than any collection of pages bound by the hand of man. So since we are God's children, we show trust in Our Father by trusting in the gifts he gave us, By knowing we have the power to discern what is true for ourselves at any given moment.

The results, of course, will vary depending on how connected we are with the clear light of unsullied perception at that moment. This is why we must practice open-mindedness. Work to understand the foibles of our old thought habits. Watch it all intently without attachment to "self". It's a big responsibility but nothing the child of a divine being can't handle. So...don't shift your responsibility to others no matter how lofty they may appear.

Sometimes the truth will be, we need council, and sometimes it may even be we should simply do as we're told for awhile. But it will never be that we should abandon our God-given inner knowing to do things that are clearly wrong. We don't slaughter innocents because a war has been deemed holy. We don't hide behind the flag because our victims accidently wander into our free fire zone.

When the Bible preaches cruelty, remember that that adjective "Holy" that appears on the cover is really just a four letter word. It's not legally binding. God gave us the power to discern, to "cherry pick" that which we know in our gut to be true from that which we sense instinctively to be misguided. To deny this power is to deny God's genius. What messages from life, from any and all books resinate with your inner mystic? Which ones don't? Claim your divinity by honoring your inate wisdom. Open your heart as much as you can while opening your eyes as much as you can. You may not possess perfect prescience at every moment. But we must still practice and trust in the brilliance of our own attentiveness. That attentiveness will always be more omniscient than blind obedience.

a couple of footnotes: 1. The beautiful painting of Christ meditating is by Swami Tadatmananda. They're for sale on the internet. 2. When I use the term "God" I am speaking in the most general terms about the transphysical intelligence of which all is formed. I am not talking about some Omnipotent white alpha male with long whiskers and a penchant for robes and vindictive pestilences.

Cafe at the Heart of the Cosmos

2006-07-02T21:13:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the Café Trieste knowing I should develop a theme for my next blog post, I am resistant. I am too at ease on my day off to impose any particular meaning on the surrounding phenomenon. I'm of a mind to just be with it. Merely witness. See the coffee aficionados cued up at the bar to order their drinks— such an amusing line up of the usual coffeehouse suspects, some in camaflage, others in tie-die, leotards, jeans, barets, hoop earrings, hiking sandals and even a Greek fisherman’s cap (haven't seen one of those in a while). All these cultural remnants and raments that refuse to go out of style. Just be with it. Be with the pictures of Pappa Gionni, the founder of this little institution. Witness him hobnobbing with many of the great Italian artistes of our day Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Francis Ford Coppolla, Pavoratti.

There are the ubiquitous Latino men taking care of business behind the counter and the scene in general, quietly keeping California, the world’s sixth largest economy, humming (when white men aren’t mucking it up with sweetheart deals like energy deregulation).

Just sitting here being Being... amidst the stained wood, painted bricks, rafters, cultural clutter and John Coltrane blowing jubilantly in the background—a bohemian dream. Don’t think. Drink your coffee. Don’t even be here now. Just be (irrespective of any considerations of time and place or individual identity) Be leather jackets and lace undershirts. Be swirling conversatios. Be frenetic sax solos and ride cymbals. Be squeaky doors and the sound of clinking cups, rumbly refridgerated cold cases full of pastry. Be grey beards and henna hair and muffled traffic noise.

Every phenonomenon is the tip of the iceburg of the infinite processes of the universe—the culmination of 15 billion years of continously incredible dumb luck (or brilliantly designed good fortune). Witness another enthralling variation on God’s master plan unfolding in the 360 degree sensurround theatre of the moment. Who knew this latest sequel to the Big Bang could be such a pleasantly engaging experience.. so as long as you’re up, get me a refill will you? Why rush of when we're already at the café at the heart of the cosmos?

God's Fingerprints

2006-06-24T12:57:00.000-07:00

In many ways modern science affirms the existence of a cosmic intelligence. As science writer Sharon Begley notes in her introduction to the book, The Hand of God, "The cosmos seems fine-tuned for existence, in an almost too-good-to be-true manner. To some, this 'fine-tuning' of the laws that govern the universe is no less than proof of a designer." The intro goes on to mention several examples of these proofs.

For instance, if the strength of gravity were slightly greater the clouds of gas that condensed into life giving stars would have collapsed into lifeless black holes. If gravity were slightly weaker, stars like the sun would be unable to hold a solar system in orbit.

Another example is found in the catylitic nature of the subatomic particle known as the nutrino. The necessity of the nutrino in the creation of our universe lies in the volitility it creates in collapsing stars. The heavier elements necessary for life as we know it, elements such as oxygen, lithium, carbon and iron, are formed in burning stars. But these elements would be trapped in the intense gravity of a collapsing star were it not for the nutrino. If the nutrino interacted slightly less with other matter it could not create the vast explosions necessary to project the heavier metals beyond the grasp of a doomed star's gravity. Then those elements would not be available to form the gas clouds, planets, atmospheres and eventually the living beings we enjoy today (so try to enjoy these precious phenomenon a little more today, please). Without our beloved little nutrinos there would be nothing but hydrogen and helium floating around beyond the event horizons of black holes and the cosmos would be a very wispy place indeed.

Also of note is the mysterious formation of carbon— the element upon which all life on this planet is based. British astronomer Fred Hoyle discovered the extremely delicate situation required for such an occurrance, an infintesimally chancy simultaneous collision of three helium nuclei. But the chance is significantly increased when the carbon exudes a strange kind of energy called "resonance". Hoyle deemed the phenomonon "a monstrous series of accidents." He suggested "the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside the stars." and mused that the universe appeared to be a "put up job."

Three more ways in which scientific discovery has increased the body of evidence supporting cosmic intelligence. Add them to evidence discussed in previous posts. And yet one's individual universe will always be formed more by the limits of one's assumptions and perceptions than it will by actual facts and figures.

Buddha said, "Think and the world arises." How has your world arisen? What do you think? Is your universe the product of incredibly dumb luck that somehow dialed itself into "being" after an eternity of misfires? Or are the phenonena of the physical universe just too miraculous, its laws too concisely honed to produce life to be the product of mere dead mechanics somehow lining up the numbers perfectly on a million different levels? The simple fact that we're here lends creedence to intelligent design (Of course I'm not talking about the fundamentalist coersion of the term). The purely-by-chance falling together of all the bizarre physical laws required for existence suggested by The Theory of Dumb Luck certainly seem most likely to be the product of unfounded assumptions and a blind faith in Almighty Chaos the Ungod of Nihilism.

The Highest Purpose of All

2006-06-16T11:58:00.000-07:00

Chapter 20 of the Tao de Ching (as translated by Stephen Mitchell) says:

Stop thinking and end your problems…
Must you value what others value
avoid what others avoid?
How ridiculous!

…Other people have a purpose;
I alone don’t know,
I drift like a wave on the ocean,
I blow as aimless as the wind.

I am different from ordinary people.
I drink from the Great Mother’s breasts.

It’s the American way to be on purpose 24/7. We’ve all been installed with that monkey on our back that constantly chatters “Never stop applying yourself and you could get a hot car, a hot wife, a righteous buzz, a big house. Global empire, even.” Put another 200 billion dollars into this war and you’ll have all the cheap oil you’ll need so you can get that Hummer and be another Arnold. Think how powerful you’ll feel rumblin’ down the road blowing all that black Persian gold out of your car’s exhaust pipe. How lucky to live in the land of “I got mine.” Just put those blinders on and stay on purpose.

Okay, if you suck up the world’s resources there may be a lot of guys without jobs who sit around in a Jihadist funk all day dreaming up ways to waste a few of us (They’ve got to have a purpose too.) but that’s why we spend 106,000 dollars per year per American on our military— so we can pretend we’re immune to the consequences of our actions.
But even if we keep a few terrorists at bay we’ve still shot ourselves in the collective foot. Our massive federal debt drives the interest rates up so we can’t buy that hot car or that big house (or any house) after all. The myriad multi-purposes of “our great purpose” in America have become cross-purposes.

Desire leads us down the primrose path of fleeting satisfaction, perpetual frustration, denial, exhaustion, disappointment and confusion. We holler over and over again “Support our troops!” as we send thousands to their deaths and fifty thousand (and counting) to be maimed. But, hey, get tough, Sparky. Americans know that that’s the price of freedom. That’s why we’re the greatest country in the world.

True, our administration lied to get us in this war and our Congress and our corporate media backed the lie and then claimed ignorance of the facts while filtering out all contradictory info but tolerance of misinformation (disseminated for a higher purpose, of course) is also the price of freedom (or at least the price of politics and business as they know it). And the 150,000+ Iraqi’s that have died? How many times do I have to say it? Price of freedom.

Dr. Robert Hare on his “Psychopathy Checklist” includes the inability to feel remorse, a grossly inflated view of oneself, a pronounced indifference to the suffering of others and a pattern of deceitful behavior as bullet points for “the compleat psychopath”. It also sound like the basic requirements for today’s government-approved patriot. Or perhaps just the resume of your typical All-American go-getter. For those that believe the end justifies the means, suppression of empathy is just a sign of moral strength not an indicator of ethical compromise. Maybe we need a higher purpose than “the higher purpose.” Maybe the highest purpose of all is purposelessness. An American company urges you to “Obey your thirst.” and drink their soda. But maybe it’s time to question the authority of our conditioned thirsts and “drink from the Great Mother’s breasts.”

Swallowed by a Whale

2006-06-10T11:43:00.000-07:00

Big apologies to my beloved blog. I haven't checked in for a while because I was swallowed by a digital whale. It's burped me up for the moment but it's still fast on my kicking heals. The whale, more specifically, is a recording project that I've jumped into with both feet. And once that Garageband software has sucked you into its maw, it could be weeks before you see the light of day. Suddenly the world turns into mike levels, retakes, mixdowns, plug-ins and the occasional mysteriously timed techno-glitch. The glitches come seemingly at random moments like a mindfulness bell to remind you to take an occasional break from the fever dream and breathe.

Though recording can closely resemble obsessive behavior it can also be a kind of mindfulness practice at times. You set up the equipment, push the record button and you have a few seconds to grab your pick and play that difficult passage on your guitar perfectly. The urgency of the moment forces you to concentrate, to leave distracted mental activities behind and quickly pare your world down to a few essentials— rhythm, execution, intricately dancing fingers, focused breath control, intent listening. For the duration of that little red light's prompting, one becomes a samarai of fine-motor skills. So you hover between "doing-not doing" and flat-out obsessing.

The recording process does intensify one's ability to listen, of course (at least until it make you go deaf entirely). You're constanly trying to tease out the little flaws amidst the multiple tracks that are going to drive you nuts years later once you've listened to the recorded rendition of the song for the umpteenth time. In Sinatra's later years when he was singing with a voice that was pretty much threadbare, he couldn't stand to listen to any of his recordings.

When you're away from the studio jogging down the bike trail you find yourself discerning the placement of various instruments your hearing on your iPod. Hmm. They've panned the congas just to the left of center and the bongos to the right. Interesting. You're always analysing in your mind what might make your piece sound better. Maybe a string wash. Write it. Record it. Live with it a few days. Nope. Adds dynamics but sounds too "elevator music."

This is the way my sonic worlds evolve, not with a bang but a tinker. The recording process is microcosmic. The Buddha said, As you think, so the world arises. It all starts in your head. The rhythm arrangements, the melody, the bass line, the lead line, the lyrics that sketch out the imagery, point of view and emotional coloration. the evolution of the the sound suggests new possibilities. They're tried and either endure or die slowly or quickly away depending on how they contribute to the whole — not unlike the way the universe was formed— a few fundamental ideas underpinning many ever-evolving interconnected systems and hierarchies resulting in soul wrenching symphonic music forever. After all, everything is really nothing— vibrating on a zillion different audible and inaudible levels. God's recording project.

In the studio we are all micro-God wannabees. No wonder we get distracted from our blogging duties. More on this later.

We See What We Are By Seeing What We Aren't

2006-05-18T15:08:00.000-07:00

We need to learn to get out of our own way. In other words. Observe dispassionately the small self with all its desires, aversions, identifications and nonidentifications (duality) until we truly percieve the filmy transparency that is our "self-concept". Once we get ourselves out of the way we can observe our inner process in much more detail. Once we’ve stopped defending ourselves each time we discover an unflattering wart in our make up we can sit still long enough to see the seams of pure consciousness shining in between the thoughts. We see that the thoughts themselves are not those bolts from the True Blue that is our essense.

The thoughts that make up our self-concept are merely electro-chemical discharges in our brain that project an image of the world. It's shaped by input from outside stimuli, our particular nervous systems, biochemistry, and previous habits of thought. That’s it. That’s “us” the terrestrial self…those ephemeral sparks between the dendrites and there attendant sensual/emotional thought events. Once we've gotten that, it becomes easier to acknowledge that there’s really nothing and no one to defend, nor anyone there that should be feeling superior, inferior, guilty or innocent. Then we can more fully devote our attention to the prime directive— the most sacred of acts: the watching…the deep witnessing of Creation (and of the content of our consciousnesses that make up a vital part of that creation). Watching your own reaction to an insult or innuendo, to praise or intimidation gives vital insight into the make up of the processes and reactions of the surface self. And insight is power.

Much of our watching will be of our own little ego world because by seeing how its perceptions and manipulations construct its universe, we begin to separate ourselves from that entity that separates us from everything. Soon the almighty thought construction called “self” with all its distracted need-charged agendas, loses its credibility and its once-powerful ability to seduce us into paying homage to its drama queen self-absorbtion.

We have to watch it as it builds its little house of notions, emotions, grudges, nostalgias, hurts and dreams. We need to notice how wispy and translucent the structure looks when the light shines through it. Then we don’t have this urge to avert our eyes when we look at “ourselves” because we’ve finally realized that the small self is no more “us” than the flora a botonist observes in the field.

But, then again, we are the “lilies of the fields” and we are the self. We are everything… and everything is in flux. We can nurture or poison ourselves depending on what we include within our own "skin". The wise person knows that what is in the skin is merely a subset of the systems that comprise one's existence. We are also the sky. Don't think so? I’d like to see how long you’d last without the air that makes up the sky or how compromised your life would be if you filled your oxygen supply with sulfuric oxide from unregulated industry. We are the river that supplies the water project that supplies our cells with the H2O of which they are mostly composed. Our circulatory system encompasses the entire planet. We are the sky. We are the river. Just because you can’t feel it at the moment, doesn’t mean it’s not a vital part of you. You can't feel your liver and you consider it a part of you. The nutrients that make up the cells of that liver are just as much a part of you as the filtering system we call a liver. What isn't you? ...the notion of "you" as opposed to everything else. What is you? Everything else.

Ah, yes! when the light shines in, what a picture it is. Miracle heaped upon miracle until it boggles the senses. A million koans per square inch. The body, a spacesuit fit for a god with its immune systems, nervous systems, skeletal systems, digestive systems converting plant pulp into energy, flesh and bone, muscles, movement, perceptions, dreams, eros, entire universes of sensation and thought.

We are the world and we are the world-wide witness watching the small self trying to convince us that it alone is the only world that has any true relevance to us. The small self is a part of us but no more a part than the rest of the world. Just watch closely and it will lose its hypnotic sway over your life, Let its gauzy curtains lift like a moody haze and evaporate into the growing warmth of an ever-clearing sky-blue-mind.

And that’s just inside our skins . What about our extended body, our biosphere. What about the system of marketing and distribution that determines what foods are available to you? And the system of values that determine which foods you will choose to build you body from? Think about it, your local food store is pulsing through your blood stream at this very instant. “Daddy? What are little girls made of? Well, Li’l Missy, after that second Oscar Meyer Wiener you had for lunch, I don’t think you really want to know.”

But she does want to know. I like the phrase, “healthy curiousity.” We need to be more curious if we’re going to survive at all (let alone be healthy). May the enlivening elixir of wonder warm us from the inside out, healing us and freeing us from any delusion that we have anything here but a full-throttle, smack-you-in- the face, explosion of a universe! If only.

If only we’d open up to it, let it in, and let it do it’s stuff, If only we wouldn’t keep forgetting to listen to our own miraculous life-giving breath. Feel the pavement under our feet, if only we could find ourselves once and for all, reflected in the eyes of every being we‘ve ever encountered.

We’d count our blessings then. We’d dance in the streets, laughing loudly at nothing in particular, spout poetry to the moon, hug ourselves like we were the whole of creation stopping for one small moment (or millinia) to give itself a very heartfelt, humongous caress.

Don’t be afraid. Don’t fight the feeling. Love is in the air. Let the tingle of being, bubble away your blues. Sense that faint fizz of blissful existence that overlays every sound you’ll ever hear. Listen. Watch. And count your countless blissings.

The Way of Wat Ching

2006-05-09T16:55:00.000-07:00

What is Wat Ching? A Tai
wanese marshal art? A recently discovered sacred text? A meditation technique? A secret cult? Actually, it’s just my little joke. And a reminder. Wat Ching is a mischievous mystification of the word “watching.” It is a reminder that all methods, writings and sects are merely fingers pointing at the moon, not the moon itself. The witnessing of the whole enchilada being cooked up before our eyes right now and now and now...that’s the moon. It’s all about deep watching. The Silent Witness. Seeing as the essence of being.

All the words, concepts, and pearls of wisdom gleaned from all the sages of antiquity are about as precise as a screeching pack of monkeys when it comes to articulating the cognitive transformation produced naturally by one’s own moment-to-moment attention to one’s inner and outer worlds. Sooner or later we’ve got to put down the books and just watch what’s happening without judgement, without preconception, with every fiber of our being.

God is in the details. And the details of your life -- down to the silliest craving for pralines and cream or the most absurd hissy fit directed at that road hog SOB poking along in front of you -- are more important than the greatest architechural achievements, the latest Olympic records, or the most glorious battle ever fought for king and country.

Dig your life! Not the one that's built of happy abstractions. No, dig the one that’s right in front of you — that post-modern take on a Monet interior, rising up from behind your iBook screen, that world where a Norwegian Forest Cat is sprawled out on the butcher block table staring out a glass door at a black-and-white Tabby lolling in a garden tableau on a spring day by the bay. It’s all there. The colors and the flavors, the bright afternoon light and the cool marine breezes, the freeway noise, and the dainty white butterfly flickering through the roses..

Every abstraction pales by comparison to a totally committed emersion in the minutia of your own existence. So go for it. Go for an emersion that is so complete that duality itself washes off you like so much road dust. So complete that there is no experiencer experiencing the experienced. There is only the whirling, swirling dance of Seeing-and-Being …being its own big, beautiful Self.

Consciousness itself is the ultimate reality, if your unconscious self only knew it. It can know it, if it will allow itself to learn from its Self. It can become free… from Samsara, from the veil of notions… largely by watching those notions come and go, noting their effect without getting involved, and skirting the slip knots and tape loops that trail behind those notions, trying to catch us unawares,

Seeing (with all our senses) is simple and arduous at the same time. Deep seeing requires a quality of attention so complete that great passion and commitment and energy are needed. It’s not only attention to the outer world, it’s attention to the thought formations that steal our attention away from the bigger picture and drown us in endless stories, melodramas, and scenarios. Including stories like “This is my quest, to follow that star, no matter how hopeless…", to one day be (fill in blank) Rich? Famous? Enlightened?

We need to watch these processes diligently, not so we can learn something and become better people but because the watching itself fosters the state of grace that nurtures wisdom. When you attend intently, you are getting in touch with a powerful essence. The heart blood of the Cosmos — the curious and sensuous eye of the All — consciousness itself. Complete that circuit as often as possible and your confusion will be vaporized merely by the electrical exchange that is a standard feature of cognizance. Feel the mysterious power of the Wat Ching!

The Mind's Reset Button

2006-05-03T13:46:00.000-07:00

Nirvana, bliss, atunement, grace— they’re never far away. As children most of us felt it many times a day. Not having much experience with the roller coaster of our emotional states, having no sophistication about what actually constitutes a setback, we were easily knocked off our bliss track by small things. But one of the beauties of a child’s heart is that it doesn’t immerse itself in "water under the bridge" for long.

One moment a youngster may be full of rage, the next she’s ready to enjoy the very person that made her mad. Why do we struggle so hard to maintain some attitude of upset— all to justify some previous emotional reaction? Defending reactions all day long is exhausting and crazy-making. Children know this instinctively.

Unlike many of us, a child has no interest in identifying with the supposed injustices done to her. Why pick at old hurts when there are good times to be had? So, even though many children are knocked off kilter easily, they also push their attitudinal reset buttons early and often and get on with their lives. Soon they are completely absorbed by a ladybug crawling up a geranium stem– even though their cheeks are still streaked with tears. No problem. Stuff happens but wonder reigns supreme.

By contrast our "grown-up" minds are always so busy reassessing our current status on the path toward a hundred arbitrary goals and scurrying from various dreaded outcomes that we make ourselves tired, old and disillusioned before our time. We'll enjoy ourselves when we're rich. Though the traffic may be moving smoothly and the car purring like a kitten and the morning beautiful and the coffee in our to-go cups delicious, we're not allowed to feel blissful because the workday hasn’t even begun yet and the weekend is days away.

It’s like that line from Annie Hall, when the woman at the party says, “It’s not that I can’t have an orgasm, it’s just that my analyst says it’s the wrong kind.” If there is even a smidgen of a chance that events aren’t going to go perfectly (a given), happiness gets put on hold. Of course, such mental habits guarantee a lifetime of anxiety and frustration. Still, who has the time and energy to gain the emotional skills that would eliminate such problems? That’s why Prozac was invented, right?

We’ve nurtured the downside of childhood (lack of perspective) and forgotten the upside (the bliss state reset button). It’s not that you’re incapable of having a wonderful morning, it’s just that your inner analyst says that this state of happiness you’re tempted to indulge is the wrong kind. It’s not the guaranteed lifetime warranty kind.

Whatever happened to grace under pressure? Sensitivity is good, but not like the princess and the pea— more like the sages in the Tao Te Ching that see the nature of the problem so well they see right through it. Like it wasn't even there.

Appreciation Practice

2006-04-26T11:15:00.000-07:00

Reading an interview with His Holiness The Twelve Gyalwang Drukpa I find myself thinking, “I knew that. I know that. That’s not hard. Well, duh. No problemo. I can do that.” Thoughts like that. When asked about meditation His Holiness says, “the natural state is the main thing: awareness itself…Of course, we try to meditate daily” he says, “sitting, chanting praying. But I would say that not doing too much is the important thing…Consider nondoing, nonaction...My goal is not doing anything, ultimately. Just being. That’s it.”

Just being. To be… it’s not a question, Hamlet. It’s the answer. The Drukpa continues, “The essence of dharma is not to harm anybody…Realization is unconditional happiness…. You have to … appreciate [the harmful parts of our life and the world] anyway, as it is in reality… Maybe [‘the great gurus”] don’t especially…approve [of those parts], but…Acceptance and understanding [are] there at some level…For now you can walk, and think, and see. So— appreciate, appreciate, appreciate! There is no real reason you cannot be happy.”

If that’s true why does it seem so hard sometimes? Why, as Lama Surya Das points out in his questions, are we so often seduced by unskillful thoughts and emotions? His Holiness answers, “You need time in practice. You change your habits and change your mind and become more aware. You need to remember and to tell yourself again and again that this is the liberating teaching and to reflect upon it, and recall how and what to appreciate, to keep developing heartfelt appreciation and diligence.”

The practice is like watching your breath in meditation. You watch your breath and when you realize you’ve become distracted and forgotten your breath, you simply, gently bring your attention back to the breath. In everyday awareness you attend the miraculous gift of existence. The warmth of your clothing, the soft whir of this ingenious machine, your computer, sounds from outside reaching your ears, pulse, respiration, sensations, physics, light, shadow. We watch the miracle like we watch the breath and when we become sad and distracted by the confusion and violence of men, we reflect, understand, see how it’s all of a piece…a time bound process. The waves strike the rocks. There is backlash, counter forces, the deeper patterns emerge, the folly of attachment and fragmented perspective reveal themselves, we learn, clashing waves cancel each other out, and we gently bring our minds back to the miracle. Through this practice the world is liberated.

We are most effective and most happy doing nothing but being awareness, by going into the world and being awareness and letting action flow from choiceless awareness. No one’s doing it. The interplay of a greater intelligence in this life seems to flow from a centerless great perfection, where clarity abides. The most facile efficiency wells naturally from a serene knowing that transcends concepts. Sometimes there is the smooth equanimity of concentration and sometimes there is the cognitive dissonance of forgetfulness but the practice remains.

Bring the mind back to attention, witness dispassionately the mechanics of sorrow, notice how effortlessly shifting one’s energy to attention begins to deflate the most overblown fits of anxiety. We don’t need reasons to be happy. We mostly need to shift our psychic energy away from angst and toward attention. When you notice your fingers on the keyboard, dancing out the intricate steps of reflection, language, and passion, you’re back, beholding the miracle again, following the breathing of the You-niverse. Happy, enveloped in the arms of the Eternal Beloved… always conspiring to do you good. Back. Appreciating, appreciating, appreciating. But…you knew that.

An Infinity of Miracles

2006-04-16T22:29:00.000-07:00

As I've written before, scientific inquiry can be a spiritual practice. After all, the two contain the common elements of inspiration, attention, and questioning.

Likewise, spiritual inquiry can be approached scientifically.

In The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion, Ken Wilber suggests that we should approach the issue of spirit like we do any scientific inquiry, by applying “the three strands of valid knowledge” to the primary sphere of spiritual insight— the domain of contemplation and meditation. The three strands are (1) Injunction: Do the prescribed practice; engage in the appropriate experiment to elicit the knowledge; (2) Apprehension: Have the direct experience and collect the relevant data; and (3) Confirmation: Check the results with others who have also completed the first two strands.

But, of course, most people think they don’t have the time or the inclination to have a direct experience. Like the clerics that refused to look through Galileo’s telescope for fear of seeing something that might prove inconvenient, such people only have time to select the vestments of their beliefs off the racks of the second hand idea stores of the world. Fundamentalists flat out refuse to do the three strands of valid knowledge. That would be heresy. An open mind is a dangerous thing.

Wilbur suggests in his book that to have a direct experience of spirit one might execute the injunction of living in a Zen Buddhist ashram for six years. But if the seeker of the spiritual is like a fish looking for water at the bottom of the ocean, as the ancients say, direct experience must be closer at hand than a monastery in Kyoto.

In fact, the prescribed practice may be largely a matter of changing one’s perspective (granted often easier said than done). When asked “What is spirit?” my reply would be “What isn’t?” Sadly, sometimes it seems it would take a miracle to get many of my friends and family members to open to the idea of something beyond space/time. Walt Whitman wrote, “Miracles. Who makes much of a miracle? As for me, I know of nothing but miracles.” If they could truly sense the miracles that make up everything around them and inside them, they wouldn’t even have to ask about spirit. It would be self-evident.

But we are the victims of a societal campaign to negate real meaning— one in which the Navy blithely labels the whales it has killed “bionics;” where chemical-laden dairy cows are called “production units;” and where slaughtered civilians come under the amorphous heading of "collateral damage.” How could you get someone to work 60 hours a week if you didn’t dumb down his sense of the miracle of spending time with his kid? How else could you get that man to send his kids to die in a war? If we really sensed that we live in a world of miraculous beauty and wonder, we would be so filled with spirit that we would never doubt its existence again.

My injunction? Pray for wonder. Allow the smallest, most ordinary occurrence to fill you with wonder, the way the angle of the sunlight can change the entire emotional context of an experience. Contemplate the miracle of the millions of functions your body accomplishes as you walk along seeing the sights, whistling a tune, jingling your keys in your pocket as you digest lunch. Millions of electrochemical messages networking the body simulaniously leaving the speed of light in the dust of physical space. How does it all happen? Science is working on it and, halleluia, each answer they find reveals ten more questions and a thousand more wonders.

You are what you open up to, so open up to wonder. Open wide. Let the miracles come pouring in. When you look at that rose, allow the experience to engulf you, obliterating the distracting reactive mechanism of thought, even the notion that you are looking at a rose. Let the observer/observed thought habit fall away with the rest of your mind sets.

We can be liberated by a focused experience of a rose, a smile, or the sound of the ocean if we practice openness, allowing those experiences to wash over us as if nothing else mattered for the moment. Because for the most part, nothing does. The domain of the spirit is right here, right now — in the moment. In the realm of wonders overlooked.

As Annie Philpott wrote, “The world is a miraculous garden waiting patiently for us to awaken to its splendors.” Stroll the garden. Relax into wonder. Empty your cup of stale notions so it might be refilled with an infinity of miracles.

Deprogramming from the Cult of Scientism

2006-04-12T12:46:00.000-07:00

I have often counted my lucky stars that I was not born into a family of old-tyme religious literalists. Then I would be struggling with the same debilitating emotional issues that so many of my friends must deal with. I would contantly be wrestling with absurd questions like: If I eat the wrong food on the wrong day, will I burn in hell for eternity? If I rack up a little overtime on the Sabbath will I burn in hell for eternity? If I don't hate the designated spawns of Satan... you get the idea.

Then there's the notion that even if I don't sin, there's always original sin. Adam and Eve blew it for everyone. With the dogma of original sin it's basically "Damned if you do and damned if you don't." There's no getting around it, like Lou Costello said long ago, "I'm a baaaaaad boy..." All self-esteem is tainted with the sin of pride and no good deed goes unpunished.

As it happens, I was raised by a bunch of scientific materialists, so the painful process of rejecting such irrational programming every waking hour is not my fate. Or is it? One of the tenets of scientific materialism is that science has pretty much figured out that nothing, certainly not consciousness, exists beyond the physical universe. So, once your physical body ceases to be, then, no matter what you do, it's oblivion forever (Damned if you do and damned if you don't). So this is the question I wrestle with all the time, "Has science really determined that nothing exists beyond the physical universe?" Is that really true or just a dogmatic assertion of the cult I'm trying to deprogram myself from? I've been looking into it and here's what I've come up with.

Scientific materialists are stuck in a 17th-century idea that the cosmos is a dead machine where nothing exists beyond the mechanics of the physical universe. They believe, any sense that we exist independent of the processes of this organism we call a body is merely a quirky byproduct of said organism. They claim that since the soul can’t be verified through repeatable experiments it probably doesn’t exist. But, like all fundamentalist precepts, their suppositions are based on glaring assumptions.

The existence of electromagnetic force couldn’t be verified in the laboratories of the Middle Ages but surely it must have existed nonetheless or the universe would be so much cosmic dust drifting in clouds around the galaxy. Radioactivity no doubt existed before the Curie’s experiments and so, clearly, does spirit, though, to a scientific materialist, it has yet to be distilled into anything more substantive than alchoholic beverages. Reality soldiers on somehow, irrespective of our ability to grasp it.

We are indebted to scientists like Einstein who believed that “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. If he hadn’t, the whole idea of Quantum Mechanics might have been dismissed as so much intellectual claptrap and I’d be writing with a ball point instead of an iBook. Scientism claims that our inability to reproduce spirit in the lab is evidence of its nonexistence. I believe it is proof of a lack of imagination (and courage). But rest assured, not all researchers are content to ask the wrong questions or draw a paycheck lobbying for authoritative mind sets. Much intriguing data is being amassed.

Anyone who claims that we even know much about the physical universe needs to be better read. It is currently estimated that seventy percent of the mass of the universe is made of dark matter, and twenty percent is dark energy. Bottom line: by all scientific accounts, we’re pretty much in the dark. Here’s what we know. We’ve observed about five percent of the universe. The rest is simply highly contested theory. In order to account for the existence of pulsars and other dichotomies between quantum theory and the general theory of relativity, physicists have invented String Theory which postulates eight additional dimensions to the three we can detect with our five senses. Can you imagine? Me neither. Who knows?

One thing is certain. We’re groping in the fog. But that’s a good thing. To know enough to realize how much of a fog we’re in is an important step. And, of course, groping is always good, since the greatest treasure found will always be the search itself. To be curious, alive, engaged. Like Joshua Heschel says, we should always pray for wonder.

This is one reason I like to think of science as a spiritual practice, because it stimulates wonder. For every byte of information confirmed, ten more big questions emerge— questions like: Why is the outer fringes of the big bang accelerating out into space and not slowing down? Why is it that the early Big Bang expanded with the exacting perfection required to produce intelligent life in the universe? Prompting Stephan Hawking to comment, “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.” Who says there’s only seven wonders? Wonder is all there is.

When an SM (scientific materialist) says “You can’t prove there’s a soul.” My response is, “You can’t prove there isn’t a soul.” One thing’s for sure. We don’t just die and then disappear forever. How do I know? Because we’re here right now. We have just as much chance of existing in one form or another after we die as we did before we were born, And given an infinity of chances between now and the Big Crunch, the odds strongly suggest we will exist again.

To deny this probability is to invent a cosmic force (God?) which is charged with the duty of making sure no soul ever gets any “do-overs”. So by attesting that death is the void forever, the materialists are unwittingly advocating a post life entity that can be kept in a metaphysical coma so to speak, in stasis ad infinitum, A post physical entity, by the way, that pretty much fits the definition of a soul (albeit unconscious forever). Not to mention they are strongly inferring an invisible intelligence determined to keep this soul unconscious forever— as ludicrous a notion as any crackpot theology I’ve ever heard.

More likely the soul is similar to “the real world,” the physical universe sketched out by Quantum Physics. Like subatomic particles we are probably popping in and out of physical existence all the time. Where do we go when we’re not here? If we are like the physicists’ depiction of the subatomic particle “in stasis” — we dwell everywhere. Like the mystic said to the hot dog vendor, "Make me one with everything." Of course, we already are— except these second-hand minds we've got to work with are too small to see it. Too small to see that there is no death, only change. (More later... the image, by the way, is William Blake's depiction of Newton.)

Suchness II

2006-04-05T12:54:00.000-07:00

“The real thing” doesn’t come out of a pop bottle. It’s everywhere and it’s ours for the taking. The Great Tao is manifesting before your very eyes as we speak. You don’t need to watch some cheap digital magic trick on a Harry Potter movie, the most stunning transformations are happening all around us all the time. Water pressure at the Hetch Hetchy reservoir is being converted into electrical current that heats a filament in a vacuum globe above your head that explodes into a shower of photons that reflect off the surfaces of the room into your irises where it stimulates your neural apparatus to create forms and colors that represent a particular place and a particular time. And what’s happening in the sub atomic world or in the neuropeptide cellular universe to knock your socks off? Plenty. Don’t get me started. Believe me, reality TV’s got nothing on reality.

But we’re always missing the real show because we’re always watching bad remakes of the same old movie: Held Over for the 10,000th week in a row at the Cranium Theater… “Me, the movie. The Story of my Endless Quest for Survival, Respect and a Few Good Laughs in a Hostile World”. Like Roger Ebert says, “Save me the aisle seat.” I may have to walk out in the middle of this one.

It’s like Whitman and his poem “When I Heard the learn’d astronomer” The awesome facts and figures about astronomy are all very impressive but for the awake and aware, nothing will replace the experience of simply walking beneath the stars.

The same is certainly true of your little story. And mine. Isn’t it just so full of drama and pathos? And doesn’t it pale in comparison to the glorious culmination of all our stories plus the be-all end-all saga of all time, Being itself, ever-changing, everlasting, wondrous, the quiet witnessing of everything going down before us… forever?

No? You’re not sure? Never thought about it? Nothing like a good Cuban cigar you say? Maybe we need to acquire a taste for subtler kicks before we kick off entirely. We need to learn to savor the subdued delights of the swaying of the leaves on the trees. But no, that couldn’t be soothing or healing or a worthwhile expenditure of our time… to watch the boughs of the trees do their little live action hula dance? What are we? A bunch of stoned-out hippies? Why, it hasn’t been sanctioned. What major company has earmarked a million dollar ad campaign to promote that? Therefore what could it be worth? Where are there any anthems or hymns dedicated to it?

Why do the powers-that-be have to give their seal of approval to something before we can see the beauty in it? Are we that programmed? Are we that exiled from our simple, happy duckling selves bobbing on the waves of wonder.
Buckminster Fuller invented a concept he called ephemeralization. It referred to a healthy trend in technological development in which more and more is produced by less and less until eventually we can produce "everything from nothing". That’s ephemiralization.

We need to practice a kind of ephemeralization of our attitudes. We need to get more and more well being from less and less arbitrary stimuli until we can become supremely happy for no particular reason at all. Until we can draw great satisfaction from one breath of clean fresh air, we’ll be fouling the air all around in our desperate, ill-conceived attempt to smoke or four-wheel or industrially pollute our way to happiness. Ephemiralize the pursuit of happiness. Or make everybody miserable.

Part of this process will be to deprogram yourself from the pursuit of conventional happiness. You know, the big house, two cars, the trophy spouse and a couple of kids along with a prestigious and well-paying job? And, of course, with the conventional pursuit of happiness you’re going to need 100s of 1000s of dollars worth of education, loans, cosmetics, work and school cloths (not to mention years of psychotherapy) to accomplish all this. But at least this particular high maintenance approach to happiness just happens to be great for the GNP… I mean, as long as we’re at it, right? Amazing coincidence. Who came up with this strategy anyway? See that guy in the Armani with the Cartier watch?

There is a Hindu fable about an ancient king who decided that in order to save wear and tear on the feet of all his subjects he would have all the cattle in the kingdom slaughtered so he could pave the roads with leather. Fortunately his advisors convinced him that it would be more efficient and less bloody to simply strap a small piece of leather onto every foot in the kingdom, We need to stop the mass slaughter based on half-baked ideas. We need to fashion some spiritual sandals we can slip on whenever we venture forth on our great journey through life.

Get it? See awesomeness in the eyes of a friend and you won’t need to build the Tower of Babel to construct a sense of deep meaning. Ephemeralize the pursuit of happiness. But you’ve got to get your sensibilities in shape. Discard the training wheels of name brands, shiny motorboats, plastic surgery and single malt scotches (Spirits have always been a weak substitute for spirit.). Drop the crutches and walk to Papa. You can do it.

Delight in the play of shadow and light. Revel in the colors and aromas of vegetables sautéing in the pan. Soak in the vibes of the cat purring in your lap. Slow down and open up and you won’t need the incessant noise of a Play Station 2 to feel engaged.

See the miraculous in the seemingly ordinary. See the original beauty in every little thing! Has there ever been such a snowflake? Will there ever be such a snowflake again? This is the Zen idea of suchness. Appreciating the unique worth of every little thing. It’s not just a rock. It’s such a rock! Quintessential! Suffused with Buddha nature! As Lao Tsu said, “The sage does not measure one thing against another/ And the stone and jewel are honored as equals. ”This is suchness. The fact that even the smallest thing is a unique expression of the cosmos. As William Blake put it,

To see the world in a grain of sand
And Heaven in a wild flower
Is to hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

It’s been estimated that each person in the United States consumes 11,000 pounds of resources a year to maintain his/her lifestyle. If our high maintenance approach to happiness were really working we’d have to be the happiest people that ever existed judging from our dust alone. But the horrific reality is, we have an alarmingly high rate of murder, rape and child abuse compared to other nations. We’ve been led down a primrose path made of leather. And, personally, I'm not into leather.

There's a Japanese saying that goes, "He who knows not when he has enough is poor." If you don’t appreciate what you have already, what’s the use of accumulating more? Even with the best sports equipment money can buy, “you can’t roller skate in a buffalo herd” as Rodger Miller reminds. But, as Miller’s song continues, “you can be happy if you’ve a mind to”— if you’ve a mind that can see the world in a grain of sand or heaven in a wild flower. Getting such a mind might take a little gumption, but not nearly as many payments as the more highly endorsed, saturation advertized, conventional pursuits of happiness.

No Muchness like Suchness

2006-04-05T12:25:00.000-07:00

“What I want, I haven’t got. What I need is all around me.”
Dave Mathews from his song “Warehouse”

When we were children our delight was ignited by the simplest things. Joy was our natural state. We were empathetic. If others were happy we laughed out loud. If others suffered it saddened us. We didn’t repress our emotions, nor did we cling to them. We were simple, vulnerable and beautiful. Rows of ducklings bobbing on the waves of wonder. We were It. No worries, No agendas. No identity crises. We were aliveness and that was enough.

But we were also born into a world of hucksterism. into an economy based on hype, a world where promoters of every stripe sing their jingles and puff their slogans, where gurus chant their chants, and televangelists perform their prayers and sell their prayer cloths, and politicos make their reluctant but resolute declarations of war in hopes of drumming up a few more guilders for their corporate sponsors.

And if business interests exaggerate the importance of their product, and make the patsies lose their shirts or their lives, well, get a grip, that’s just life in the big city. You gotta crack a few eggs if you want to make an omelet. An’, sure, perhaps a few more of your eggs got cracked than mine, but, hey, look, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles And granted I may have gotten to eat almost all the omelet myself (Here, I saved you some toast.), but still, it’s nobody’s fault. Hey, Ken Lay didn’t know, alright? It’s all about market forces anyway. Darwin did it.

In other words we live in a world in which the dominant inhabitants have an extraordinary capacity to justify anything to others and to themselves. This makes them capable of anything. (Because their amazing ability to swallow their own guff renders them incapable of knowing just what the hell they wrought at any given time.)

And so, sadly, those sweet little ducklings we spoke of earlier, the children of the world, are the first and freshest game in their crosshairs because the very young are among the easiest to twist into the desired shape, like little pipe cleaners. Hey, it is not insidious. It’s business. American as apple pie. Just remember, as the makers of Barbie accessories and the tobacco companies have always said, “Program ‘em early and you got ‘em for life.”

Show them cartoons full of action (read; violence) in a way that confuses where the program ends and the ad for the action figure begins. Depict peer-aged children having ecstatic fun with the amazing robot that flies and knocks down walls on the show. Maybe the toy can do that too. Hey, Mommy, I want that! And, as easy as shootin' fish in a barrel, the “the nag factor” has been “installed”.

Twenty years later when the grown kid’s watching a TV program that’s still little more than a half-hour ad— home makeover, car makeover, face makeover— it's no longer enough to simply be “aliveness” any more. Aliveness has long ago become unbearable without a latest animated movie hero figurine from the local Mac Donald’s, or the $100 Nike’s or liposuction as seen on “The Swan”. Unconditional happiness is robbed from us by the hucksters of the world so they can sell it back to us wrapped in crinkly cellophane. Only their scale model replica of happiness is far from unconditional. Read the limited warranty.

If I were the devil and I didn’t have the personal power to destroy God’s little masterpiece, the Earth, what would my Plan B be? I’d get mankind to destroy the accursed little planet for me. But how would I get man to destroy himself along with his world, all for my amusement? I’d make him stupid and needy knowing how volatile that combination of neuroses can be.

If I were the devil, I’d have power hungry men directing billions of dollars and man-hours toward the purpose of fogging men’s minds. Suppressing any news or perceptions that might counter the ad blitz for Moore & Moore and More! International. Fogging men’s minds would be essential because as Richard Heinberg, the author of The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Society said, “Reality is bad for business.” I’d teach that neediness makes the world go round.

I’d disguise stupidity as virtue, thoughtfulness as cowardly, and might as self-evidence of righteousness. I’d get control of the airwaves and beam, Paris Hilton, Jerry Springer, Bill O’Reilly and Entertainment Tonight out there 24/7, wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast, sun up to midnight to prove my point.

Fog their minds so they think the pursuit of bling-bling is the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness as opposed to its antithesis— slavery through induced obsession disorder. Get them to think that worth is measured not by the things you create but by what you consume. Get nations to think that if they want prosperity they have to breed greed round the world. Advocate global rule by market forces. Inflate half-truths to the preponderance of natural laws. Like that monstrous unwritten law that says that real Americans are supposed to live as large as possible.

Creature comforts (as opposed to the comfort of creatures) has become our prime directive as was expressed so forcefully by President George H. W. Bush when he told the ’92 Earth Summit in Brazil flat out, “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” Ah, the American Lifestyle. Hallowed be thy name. As our magnificent traffic jam of Cadillac Escalades heads like a serpentine pageant into the orange haze of all the tomorrows to come, we sing a tear-streaked anthem to lies, libertines, and the pursuit of sappiness.

So how do we come off it? Stop letting our destiny be defined by a few big shots with weak ideas and wizened hearts? First we need to pursue our happiness someplace besides the aisles of Abercrombie and Fitch. Want possessions? How about trying to take possession of the most priceless commodities of all— our senses. Once we do that, we’ll be able to take stock of what we really have. We have to take possession of the gift of sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and then we can have a chance at the universe those capacities can get us in touch with— and when you have the Cosmos, you don’t need Beanie Babies. Stop trading treasure for trinkets. The world is already your oyster. Slurp up those Omega 3s and spit out the pearl (before you choke on it)! (Next time— "Suchness II")

Two Word Nerds

2006-04-01T10:12:00.000-08:00

I'm being forced to play scrabble against my will. My wife and I came to our favorite pub to do some cafe writing. When we settle in at our table she informs me she really doesn't have anything to write and she didn't bring a book, so she asks, "Wanna play Scrabble?" "No." I blurt. "I need to write. I have a blog to feed."

Then she plays the birthday card. "Not even for my birthday?" she mews. She's been milking this birthday thing all week. I've been trumped. "Do I have to get into the game 100%?" I waffle. "Are you going to try to write while you play?" she replies.

I barely hear her. I'm listening to this telephone lineman vegan obsessive sitting next to us. He's on a quest to find adequate canvas climbing boots to replace his steel-reinforced leather ones, I guess so he can assure anyone who asks, "no animals were harmed in the making of this call." He says he buys dozens of documentaries that expose the dark and slimy underbellies of the government and multi-national corporations (Super-Size Me, The Corporation, The End of Suburbia, Outfoxed) and donates them to small libraries in red counties. Cool idea.

Then there's the irritating English-prof-wannabe who surrounds himself with stacks of thick books. Young women (from the city college poetry lab he runs, I guess) sit down with him to be tutored in arcane poetry 101. He commences to read in a jolly, over-sonorous tone that is clearly meant for all to hear. He thinks he's sounding so erudite and tweedy while actually coming off as a bad Monty Python character. His officious reading of Milton and Spencer could turn the coziest pub into a paradise lost.

This place is a rich vein for people watchers and writers.

"Can I at least make notes>" I say to my wife. "Sure," she smiles.

But when she starts telling me what she's learned about Scrabble from this book she's been reading (Word Freak) -- that two letter words like "U-G" and "X-I" are legal and there are Q words that don't need a U -- I get a sinking feeling, like the proverbial teenage girl who's hoping against hope that she's only somewhat pregnant. I'm not going to get any writing done here. But I shut up and draw my letters.

She's such a word nerd. She writes her poetry and her cookbooks and edits other people's writing all day, and just when you'd think she's had it with words, she plays a game or two of Literati on the Internet with complete strangers.

I must admit I have some word wiggy-ness in my own nature. My fetish is song lyrics. I write them and have been known to obsess over some of the lyrics to my own songs for decades before I'm satisfied. I once interviewed Al Jarreau, the jazz singer, for an alternative weekly, and when I told him how important lyrics were to me, he called me a dinosaur, because no one cares about lyrics anymore. He was right. Pretty much all the songwriters I think are great -- Bob Dylan, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Tim Rice, Joni Mitchell (is she still writing lyrics?) -- are all over 50.

I guess it was words that brought my wife and me together. She found me in a restaurant bar singing my lyrics. We've been pretty much constantly together since. She proofread my novel, I contribute in my small ways to the preparation of some of her books, and I've written for various publications she's edited over the years. And we read to each other -- poems, articles, chapters from books.

The good news is that our common interest in putting things into words has helped us communicate well with one another. When we "have words" the outcome is almost always positive, unlike the outcome for many couples. We know that, depending on one's skills and intentions, language can be either a bomb or a balm. The only time we get combative with words, is on the Scrabble board.

Living Art

2006-03-24T16:55:00.000-08:00

Ever have one of those days when it feels like the universe is conspiring to do you good? Yesterday was like that for me. My teaching gig ends early on Thursdays and no sooner did I get home than a couple of dear friends from out of town popped in ready to have some fun. It so happened that the De Young Art Museum in San Francisco was having its annual Bouquets to Art event so we jumped in the car and crossed the Bay Bridge jones-ing for some serious eye candy.

Bouquets to Art is an ingenious fundraiser in which florists all over Northern California come to the De Young and choose a work of art in the De Young collection to interpret with a flower arrangement. Wow! Did these people get inspired! Flowers transformed into Aztec anacondas, gumball machines, molecular matrixes, abstract fever dreams of color. There was even a life-size rendition of a figure from an impressionist painting made of various hues of lichens and mosses. Floral-gasmic!

These kinds of events get unintentionally conceptual when you have a flower arrangement that pays tribute to a Georgia O'Keefe painting that glorifies flowers. Life celebrating art celebrating life celebrating art. The world as museum. Mundanity as masterpiece. Suddenly you get it. A flower is art, except, as my favorite mad scientist once said, "It's alive!"

As we left the De Young we made jokes about the Great Blue Heron poised like a still life in a nearby fountain. "What a finely detailed installation!" we enthused. Is it really a Great Blue, a good Blue or just a passing example of the Creator's blue period? Everyone's a critic.

Later when we were having dinner at a Oaxacan fusion joint on Chestnut Street I couldn't help myself. I left my companions momentarily, walked across the street to the flower shop and bought a spray of yellow tea roses, a rust orange lily, a blood red Gerbera daisy and a vase to grace our table. Suddenly the table became "tableau". Life again became art. Just as the Creator (or "curator"?) intended.

Escape from Mass Media

2006-03-19T13:36:00.000-08:00

A cautionary tale:

Joe Everyman lies in a pool of regret and despair in a hospital bed in Anytown USA, watching the cartoon pig on the television overhead yammer his epitaph with the giddy mirth of a drunken clown. As a loony tune bounces around in the background, the man hears, "That's all folks!" The phrase echoes over and over again in his head and he realizes to his horror that this obnoxious box blaring down at him has stalked him from cradle to grave like a blathering idiot Siamese twin attached inoperably to his skull.

The box was his first babysitter and, jabbering from the ceiling of every room in the ward, it will be the last thing he ever hears on this earth. As his last breath rattles out of his body, his life flashes before his eyes. What does he see? Just what you'd expect. Re-run after re-run: of Letterman having a spat with Madonna; Fear Factor contestants choking down blended maggot smoothies; self-righteous smirks from sleazeball pundits, news show hosts, and presidents with a license to lie.

And as Everyman sinks into the dark underworld beneath the onslaught of all the dreck he's ever absorbed, he must face it once and for all. He's wasted his precious days flipping the channels in a vain search for meaning, looking for truth in all the wrong places.

Lately I've been asking myself: Why is this commercial culture from top to bottom and wall to wall so utterly devoid of intellectual and emotional intelligence? The official answer, of course, is that the media are just accommodating the desires of a nation of morons. But in fact, they've made us stupid so they can sell us some snake oil from the back of their carnival wagons. They spread fear so they can sell protection; they instill doubt so they can sell confidence. The uber-corporations that own the media promote a violent, vengeful, fractious world view so they can sell their weapons and drugs and mountains of cheaply made stuff to fill the terrifying void people feel in their souls.

But I still find some basis for hope. And I still believe that in my last moments here on earth, the flashback of my life will be sweetened by images of unity, beauty, joy, dignity, goodness, and love.

I hold a vision of a grand, sweeping, heartfelt, soul-based, love-fed culture rising. Thanks to the Internet and the intelligence and heart of people all over the world, a positive change is underway. That's what this blog is intended to explore, celebrate, foment.

What makes me think so? It's already happening. Tune in next time.

"Let the beauty we love be what we do." -- Rumi
"Boldness has beauty, power, and magic in it." -- Goethe