Observations that dive deep into life and come up with treasures for all

Whenever we as individuals or societies find ourselves in a double bind, which is another name for quagmire, the only way out is through a shift in consciousness. It is common experience that the mind that gets us into a double bind cannot get us out because problems that appear to have no exits are problems only in the context of the way we perceive the world, or our story.

We all have layers of stories piled up in our consciousness, but most are like sediment that lies beneath the surface of awareness. A story’s strength to shape us lies in how much of the story is beneath the surface of consciousness. We are only aware of the tiny tip of our stories, which float in our consciousness like huge icebergs. When our ship sinks, it’s because we ran into a sharp edge of our story that was below the surface of our perceived world.

Our top story is, of course, our personal story, and that is always about how we perceive ourselves, such as am I a controller or a victim, aggressive or passive, happy or sad, guilty or innocent, and this personal story will frame the way we interpret situations that happen to us.

Going deeper we have our gender story, our regional story, our national story, and racial story, our religious story, and our human story. Wow, what a layer cake. The world each of us experiences is cooked in this recipe, so that the same facts will have a different taste to people with different stories.

Is it possible, one would ask, to taste the world as it is and not as it is cooked up in our limited perspectives? Experience filtered through a story is like eating a gourmet meal with a cold. Stories are veils of the mind, or shaded glasses for the eyes.

So how does yoga contribute to these observations? Active meditation, where one practices continuous watchful awareness of the thinking mind, begins to slowly uncover the stories buried in our perception, and as these veils are discovered the act of seeing them are the hands that lift the veil.

Like a groom lifting the veil from the face of his bride, when we remove the veils of our hidden stories we see ourselves in the brilliant light of an innocent consciousness. No longer do we need to shape the world to support our separate identities and perspectives. No longer do we have to carry the burden of our opinions and beliefs, always having to defend them and feeling crushed when they are not respected.

No, when our storybook is shut, we are awake and aware and every perception we experience is a guide to our essential ground of being. When the story is over, we are no longer imprisoned in the past/future of thought. We are at home in the present moment. The function of the story is to give us a dream from which we can awake.

Posted under General Observations

Before I went to sleep last night it dawned on me that I had a problem with the story of Adam and Eve.  When I believe that the first man and woman were created by God as a complete species, and that I am a descendant of these first parents, that make me feel like an alien that was beamed down fully formed while all the other creatures on earth had to evolve through the mud and slime to become what they are. Hey, who gave us the right to a short cut?

It’s as though God built this company and then made us CEO. And look what we’ve done with our company. We’ve exhausted our company treasure (the natural resources), killed most of the employees (other species) paralyzed the company with departmental infighting, and have forgotten our purpose. Other than making our company grow at all costs, we don’t know what we are here for. The only passion we have left is for accumulating personal goods, fame and power.  And, finally, we have forgotten how to communicate with the company’s founder so we can get some instruction on what went wrong.

What’s wrong is the story that we think this company is based on. We need a story that connects us to the ground of our existence and the earth of which we are a part. Humans are only about 5000 generations old. But did we begin there? No, our mothers go back, all the way back to the cosmic soup out of which life was born, and then we were before that as part of the stars.

We hold in our DNA the traces of all life on earth. And now we stand at an evolutionary threshold looking into the abyss where our thought cannot go. Our story of separation and dominion, our Adam and Eve story of specialness has brought us this far, but it can take us into the unknown of our greater being and who we are meant to be.

Evolution has always been about the known dying into the unknown so a greater known can be born. Our time has come if we want to survive. What is missing in our story is the experience of connectedness with all life and the earth. Tribal cultures, which lived on this earth thousands and thousands of years before city state culture was born, lived in a story of cooperation and oneness with the earth. They saw the earth not as something to dominate but as a being to worship and respect. They rightfully experienced the earth as their body.

So I believe we must let go of Adam and Eve now and grow up to the idea that we are larger than we think we are. Our myth of separation only has one purpose now—as a dream from which we must awake.

Posted under General Observations

While on the way to the grocery store my 96-year old mother asked, “What’s all this stuff about The Secret? It’s in Newsweek and on TV.” I hadn’t thought about The Secret since my daughter was here last month and we watched the latest download rage, which you bought online that revealed the secret of happiness, or unhappiness, for that matter.

The Secret is about the law of attraction and our thoughts being powerful magnets that create the world we each live in. If you visualize and affirm that you have a BMW, your thoughts will attract a BMW. Mind over matter—is it possible?

For some odd reason this question has intrigued and befuddled the reason dominated mind of man since the Middle Ages. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence and magician shows and personal accounts, along with studies of the power of Indian yogis, to demonstrate that mind can control matter, but science never gives in. No matter how many spoons are bent or BMWs appear in a driveway, science will eventually pooh-pooh the finding, and the mind over matter advocates will shake their heads and walk off in disgust. “What will it take? “ they wonder.

My reaction to the Secret was not so much with the Law of Attraction but the way in which it was pitched, which was more like an Amway sales meeting instead of a discussion of spiritual truths. By the end of the movie, which consisted of about 25 well known spiritual professionals giving their pitch or spin on the secret, I expected a sales pitch, “And you can have this Secret for only $29.99.”

The secret to the Secret to me was that it was directed to the Wal-Mart customer in a tabloid format. “Now you can have that diamond necklace you’ve always wanted. It’s that simple.” The Secret was presented as just another means for the ego to get more.

The way I understand and experience the Secret is that the power behind affirmative thought is love. Whatever love wants, love gets because God is love. Whatever ego wants…well, if ego’s desire is not in tune with God’s desire, then ego’s desire is running up against God’s desire, and guess which one wins.

Since God’s desire is always love, getting one’s desires in alignment with love for the earth and one’s fellow man is affirmative thought and the law of attraction. It is always Thy Will be done, not my will be done. Making these wills identical is the trick. And, here’s the real secret, when you get in alignment with the Totality, you have no desires for more. The joke is on us. When we actually have the power to make our desires come true, we have no desires for ourselves. “Who needs a BMW,” asks God?

“Not me, Lord. I’ve got You.”

“Okay, you can have one anyway, just because I love you.”

Posted under General Observations

This morning I received an e-mail from Soni Fitzhugh, a freelance journalist and the Southern Regional Coordinator for Humanity’s Team, which is a spiritual movement “whose purpose is to communicate and implement the belief that we are all one, so that the behavior of humanity may shift to reflect this understanding.” This movement is called the Civil Rights Movement of the Soul. It was inspired by Neale David Walsch, author of Conversations with God.

Here is my e-mail response.

Dear Soni: Thank you for connecting with me. Your letter comes like a knock on the door when I didn’t know I was expecting a guest. I am interested in starting an HT study group because it fits in with what I’m already doing with my life here in small town Blackstone, Virginia. I am determine to find a recipe that works for new spirituality here in the Southside of Virginia, a region with a rich culture of cooporation and family. There is also a deep hunger here for a wider connection to God and family and work that will transcend the grinding monotony of just “doing what one is supposed to do.”

I have registered as an Eckhart Tolle center, but little has happened. And it is difficult starting something just on one’s own because it seems like I’m trying to create a cult of me. I’m currently experimenting with a recipe for Stress Busting that mixes a blend of yoga and Buddhist wisdom teaching, and sprinkled with a little Jesus to make it fit the local taste. Next week I try this dish out in a Woman’s Day workshop at the local community college. Check out my website for details.

I also write a spiritual journal every morning, a practice that has been going steady now for almost two years. I’m getting about 800 unique visits a month now, with an average of around 80 visits a day. This has been my own version of “conversations with God,” and thanks to Neale D. Walsch leading the way, I have been able to allow this daily writing to become my teacher, and each day my practice is to surrender and allow it the space to have something to say.

I am also interested in how you go about being a “freelance journalist.” I was a feature writer for the local paper here for 8 years, and for 20 years after that I built a photography studio, without writing a single creative sentence during that time I think as I look back. In July of 2005 my higher self came back like the moon returning from its long night, and along with it my creative writing and passion to serve on a spiritual level. I seem to have cleared out the dark clouds in my consciousness now (I’m 70), and I live under a bright full moon with a sky full of stars.

So I would ask for some input on two areas: (1) suggestions on how to get a study group started in this area, and (2) whether you think my style of writing and what I have to say (visit journal) can be expanded beyond what I’m doing now.

FIVE STEPS TO PEACE of Humanity’s Team (from web site)
∑ Permit ourselves to acknowledge that some of our old beliefs about God and about life are no longer working.
∑ Explore the possibility that there is something we don’t understand about God and about life, the understanding of which could change everything.
∑ Announce that we are willing for new understandings of God and life to now be brought forth, understandings that could produce a new way of life on this planet.
∑ Courageously examine these new understandings and, if they align with our personal inner truth and knowing, enlarge our belief system to include them.
∑ Express our lives as a demonstration of our highest beliefs, rather than as a denial

Posted under General Observations

We stayed up to watch the Oscars last night even though we had only seen the Sunshine movie this year. These thoughts came to mind this morning.

Great movies are great teachers. While India and Buddhist countries export spiritual masters, America exports wisdom teachings in movies. The truth messages of movies, unlike sermons, are wrapped in what we call entertainment. We enjoy the experience of the message when the mind’s watchdog, the ego, is asleep and does not think about the movie as it is being watched. After we leave the dark theater and walk back into the bright everyday world of our thinking ego, we know the movie was good if we forgot ourselves for a couple of hours. It’s like deep sleep; we know it was good even if we weren’t dreaming.

The Oscars are the awards we give to people who successfully anesthetize the ego and implant a wisdom teaching that will work like a time-release capsule for the awakening of the soul. Egos are critics of wisdom, and you can be sure that when wisdom is around, it won’t stop thinking, comparing, contrasting, and creating an opinion that demands if not a superior position at least equal time.

Movies—since our massive egos have crucified all the wisdom teachers in our culture—have become our fail-safe shelter for truth. The ego can’t penetrate the walls of a great movie because the story is so compelling that it forgets to think, and for a while its dominance over the soul is suspended. Through this fence hole in the mind, the soul watches with the wide-eyed wonder of a child and takes in every bit of the story.

The soul sees a movie on all its levels as a totality composed of the seen and the unseen, what is said and not said; the soul sees the whole truth because it is truth, while the ego critic only sees partial truth. The soul loves a good movie because it sees itself on the screen. All the soul ever wants is to see God.

So give the ego a box of popcorn and a drink and tell it to stop thinking, then sit back and allow the soul what it hungers for—the experience of Oneness.

Posted under General Observations

Our wedding yesterday reminds me, as all our weddings do, of the depth in the rituals of the weddings that we so often take for granted as just the way things are done. Many brides want their wedding to “be real” so they tinker with the ritual with the idea that reality will flood in if the veil of the ritual is lifted a little. But in the majority of weddings we do the ritual is followed exactly for fear that if the ritual is altered, the marriage will have “bad luck.” A good example of that is the law that the bride and groom should not see each other before the ceremony.

But this taboo was broken yesterday and, frankly, as a photographer I liked taking all the formal pictures before the ceremony. The wedding party got to the reception without delay as immediately after the ceremony, the bride and groom ran the gauntlet of candles and rose petals, got in their Chariot, an antique 57 Chevrolet, and left for the gala ball at the Castle, which was once a private school cafeteria.

All weddings are about the Prince and the Princess and the Kingdom and living Happily Ever After, and like a veil this dream is dropped down over everyday reality with all its limitations and imperfections, and for a moment we believe that fairy tales do come true.

I don’t think the bride seeing her groom before the ceremony diminished the story one bit. In fact, before the formal pictures were taken, the couple secluded themselves in a room and had a few private moments to themselves.

I don’t know what went on in there because they even kicked me out. I told family members outside that they were doing their honeymoon early too.

Posted under General Observations

Sinking the Slave Ship

RICHMOND, Va., Feb. 25 (UPI) — The Virginia General Assembly has unanimously expressed “profound regret” for Virginia’s role in slavery.

The House approved this resolution 96-0 (Imagine what hell would descend on anyone who refused to apologize), but we can be sure that there will be many who believe it is non-sense to apologize for a wrong someone else did. That would be like a wave apologizing for a storm that sank some ships years ago. “I wasn’t there, so don’t blame me,” says the wave.

“Ah, but aren’t you a temporary form of ocean water,” one might ask, as we look a little deeper into this event. Is there more here than meets the surface eye? The deep ocean currents of the collective mind, the mind that each of us becomes part of in our society, still carry the broken pieces of that slave ship far beneath the surface waves of our current moment in time. While no one alive today actually stood on a slave block as either the sold or the seller, each of us can still hear the auctioneer’s gavel hit the block to signify that another human soul has been sold.

Each time we see a black or a white face, does the thought that this face is different cross our screen of consciousness? Is there a tiny speck of fear, so tiny that we just blink and it is gone?  What is rising up from the depths of the mind? Our history, that’s what, and it still speaks to us in these small, unnoticed thoughts that creep into our minds under the guise that they have no significance and that these are just the way it is. Most of us don’t act consciously on these thoughts, but we all do unconsciously.

Every unnoticed thought is outside the pale of our awareness, and it shapes the way we perceive our world in ways that we don’t want. An unconscious thought that divides our human family is an unforgiven thought. To make aware without judging ourselves that the sounds from the slave auction still ring in our minds and that we are responsible for these thoughts, is to forgive these thoughts. Apology and forgiveness is the same act, and to accept ourselves as a living part of our history is to forgive ourselves for that history.

Without our personal acceptance and forgiveness of our social past, we are doomed to repeat it, and like the Flying Dutchman, the mythic ship of the dead, the old slave ship will keep rising in our minds and the moans that we hear will be our own soul. Without forgiveness we are all slaves.

Posted under General Observations

Last night we watched The Body, a 2001 movie with Antonio Banderas that raised the question that has haunted Christianity since its beginning: What if Jesus had died like a man and left a body? Wouldn’t that be the end of Christianity? I read the other day on the Internet that a documentary is being made in Canada about archeologists who had found what they say is the tomb of Jesus. Of course, there is no body in it. One can find the tomb, but not the body.

So, as is my bent, I ponder such questions and wonder why Christianity has built its church on this foundation, and stated unequivocally that one must believe that Jesus rose physically into heaven or spirit in order for him to be a portal into the after life, i.e., Jesus is God. But if the remains of the body of Jesus were found, then would that door slam shut? Would Jesus then be just like us, doomed for the worms instead of everlasting life?

The movie doesn’t answer the question one way or the other, but the hero priest does finds personal liberation by finding his truth balanced between these two opposite positions. Does it really matter? For me this movie should shake the house of cards anyone has built that depends on a historical fact for its floor. Spiritual truth cannot depend on material form for its validity, because spiritual means no form, not material.

So if one builds their spiritual foundation on a particular form, then what one has built is not truth but an illusion, and all illusions must be constantly defended against any suggestion that its foundations are subject to change. Is it logical to say that all forms change except one, or that all historical facts are subject to interpretation except one fact? History is the realm of relative truth; spiritual truth is the realm of absolute truth.

Can one build the latter on the former and not find them selves standing on a shaking ladder? If we fear when our truth is attacked, do we have truth? Fear is a sign that we have mistaken a relative truth for an absolute truth, and if this were true, then the form with which we have identified could die.

For me the Resurrection means what is possible every moment. When we suffer because of attachment to history, like relationships and even our body, we are on the Cross of ego. When we give up our attachments and release the Will of God, whether the surrender is large or small, we experience a Resurrection. What happened 2000 years ago is just a pointer to what is happening now—if we choose to experience it.

The body of Christ is this earth, this family of man, and each of us. This is the real body we are looking for, not the bones of Jesus. Each of us is a player in this eternal story of death and resurrection; but we miss the mark if we think it is in history, or if we think we know God if we just believe Him.

One can’t believe in Christ objectively to know Him; one has to subjectively do Jesus/Christ and realize that he or she truly is both human and God at the same time.

Posted under General Observations, reviews

If I have a fetish it is this: I love vacuum cleaners, especially perfect ones. I’ll bet I went through a vacuum cleaner every two years until I found the Dyson a few years ago, and I haven’t wanted another one since.  When the hand-held Dyson came out recently, you bet I was interested, and yesterday a nice surprise from my wife arrived. A Stress Buster!

This little vacuum really sucks. If nothing else, it’s good to say that in a positive way. And it came just as we’re launching our Stress Busters program. This vacuum looks like something from outer space that could suck up stress.

I think I just like intelligent machines, so when you use them or look at them they please one sense of perfection and you can rest with the thought that there won’t be a better one coming down the technology funnel. Just think, if all our tools and toys reached the level of intelligent perfection, we wouldn’t have to buy any more and the economy would collapse.

I guess that’s why incompleteness and imperfection is built into modern life.

Posted under General Observations

Last night I found myself in a horseshoe table around which sat 13 people with little digital cameras all looking at me with the expectation that I would be able to show them how to take beautiful pictures. This is the digital age when everything comes with an incomprehensible manual, and it looks so easy on television or the magazine ad. It was a mixed group, with some barely knowing where the shutter button was (I rarely do myself), and a few with big cameras that made the other digitals down the table look like toys. In order to smother the sprouting seeds of camera envy, I told them it was not the camera that took the beautiful picture, but the eye behind the camera.

The first part of the two-hour class went okay. The laptop I brought didn’t connect to the projector, nor was there a TV that I could show camera pictures on, which left me for two hours in a gym with 13 different levels of camera know-how.. Their homework was to take natural light pictures of objects in their house as if they had never seen them before, focusing on the texture and lighting, and bringing their pictures back to view in class.

I quickly discovered that after my little talk on discovering the hidden beauty and interest in one’s own home, and going over the basics of natural light photography, that I had no idea what to say next.

Since each camera had a completely different set of settings and capabilities, did I stop everything and go through the manual with each student, leaving the rest to themselves? Did I launch into the intricate relationship between shutter speed and aperture (I didn’t even spell this right when I put it on the board), and how these are affected by ISO ratings? And if I did, what for, since most of their cameras were so automatic that it was impossible to regain control of the settings without having to take a course like this.

Suddenly, my confidence in my ability to “wing it” flew out the widow. Now I spend a lot of time and words talking about having an “empty mind” or being in “no mind,” well, I’m here to tell you, “It isn’t any fun.” My mind shut down, and I was in the spotlight of 13 pairs of eyes watching as I became aware that I had no idea what to say or do. Comics have noted this experience as the dreaded “bomb” when you know you aren’t connecting and the audience thinks you suck. One could say it is self-consciousness to the point of self-destruction where one becomes just a shattered mirror of one’s former self-image, and the whole universe knows it.

At any rate, I recovered enough to finish the class by helping a few individual students find the directions to ISO ratings in the manuals, but beyond that I couldn’t do much, since manuals and I have never been fast friends.

“Please, God, just let me teach enlightenment. This photography stuff is too hard.”

Posted under General Observations