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

Life can deepen if we choose to give it the space, but that is difficult because we have become so crowded in our modern age, and everywhere we are filling up. What is happening outside in our visible world first happen within; the out is a reflection of the in. Our culture is a Pac Man devouring space and time. There an empty lot, built something; there is some open time, fill it. Dreaming about the good old days and complaining that they are gone does no good. And imaging some utopia in the future is also a waste of time. What can one do?

The first step is to begin to notice the external world as if we were just dropped here from outer space. Notice everything without judgment, and notice the demands and the perceived attacks on our self inside the space suit of our body. Billboard, TV, signs, radio, people at work and family, and then turning inward, thoughts come at us from the past and the future in little bombs of guilt and fear.

If we were to just notice all this without involvement, but with great attention and interest, something new would occur in our life. Some space would begin to open, and time would begin to loose its grip. That space is our thoughtless awareness, the consciousness that is the field in which the world of form arises. Gradually, our life would begin to have a depth to it, as if we were waves suddenly aware of the ocean upon which we have our being.

That ocean is the space of our own consciousness, and the waves are our thoughts and the forms that our thought thinks about. Being aware of the ocean allows us not to take the waves so seriously, because we know that we are more than the waves. Being aware of the ocean brings a great and vast peace into our lives, a peace that supports the waves, even when there is a hurricane on the surface.

All we have to do is start noticing, and the ocean will take care of the rest.

Posted under General Observations

Have you ever noticed that when we wake in the morning there is a brief open window in the mind where there is no thought and just awareness? Visually, this moment is popularly illustrated by the person who gets up and looks out the window to a bright new day. In that open window of pure awareness we are perfectly present. There are no problems, no fear, no regrets, no anxiety, just the open window and the awareness of being alive, and being that is enough.

Then before we notice it, the window shuts and the mind stream that we left at the edge of sleep the night before, grabs us up like a rip tide, and we are off into the day’s worries and troubles. The future, which is the current of the mind, pulls us into our projections of what should be or what should not be, and all the fears and hopes that we wrap the future in.

The day begins. If you remember the Bill Murray movie, it’s Ground Hog Day. We don’t have to be a Buddhist and believe in reincarnation to notice that we are actually reincarnating every moment we leave the open window of thoughtless awareness and disappear into the mind form of the future to take the life we have projected there. We live waiting for the next moment, the next thing to do, the next thing to avoid; we are never here; we are always there.

And when we get with other people, the mind stream gets so powerful that we forget everything, and sometimes we find ourselves doing something we never had any intention of doing, and when we stop and open the window of awareness, we can’t believe what just happened.

The practice of meditation is learning how to keep that window of thoughtless awareness open, a little longer here, a little more there, until finally we can open the window in the morning, drink in the beauty of the day, feel the fresh breath of life filling our being, and stay there throughout the day, always at rest no matter how busy the world gets. And when the mind streams come by, trying to pull us into the future, we just watch because we know we have a choice. That is freedom.

Posted under General Observations

“Ouch,” I said as the sting hit my finger. “What was that?” I thought as I reached for the outside wireless phone on a sheltered shelf in the corner of my deck. Something had stung me and I had no idea what. A week later, the same thing happened, but this time I saw a small wasp flying away. I looked under the shelf and there was a hanging nest crawling with a family of wasps. So I got a long stick and knocked the nest loose, then quickly jumped behind the porch door. The next day, I saw them rebuilding their nest on a ceiling rail of the deck awning, and I debated whether to knock them loose again or let them be. There was a time when I would not have had this debate. I would have just picked up the Hot Shot and nuked them.

So I went up to the wasps and made a deal. “I won’t bother you if you don’t bother me. Can we live together?” There is great talk about living in harmony with nature, now that nature is threatening to turn against us if we don’t. But it remains just talk unless we practice it at home in the details of everyday life. After all, life is made of details. Every big picture is made of little dots.

Our technology, created to give us power over nature, is all too ready to also destroy nature simply because it may sting us—simply because we are not being mindful of where we put out hands. Our conditioned reaction to every inconvenience or discomfort is to nuke the problem. “You got terrorists. Nuke ‘em. You got drug addicts. Nuke ‘em. You got illegal immigrants. Nuke ‘em. You got abortionists. Nuke ‘em.”

Our amazing technology—which is mostly weapons of some sort or another—has been born out of a warrior stance with nature. “This is a war and we are going to win,” says the modern technological man. When you have an infallible reason and a science that can solve every problem, you don’t have to learn how to cooperate; you just fix the problem by changing its form into what you believe it should be.

What this posture forgets, however, is that we are in relationship with nature—the external world of form and thought—not as a subject separate from the object, but as a polarity like the opposite ends of the same stick. In reality, whatever we do to nature, we do to ourselves because we can’t escape the essential truth that we are nature. We are nature being aware of itself. However, if we are aware of ourselves being separate from nature and not a part of the totality, then we are trapped in an illusion, and no amount of fixing will bring us home. In fact, as we are learning now, all out attempts to fix the world from this perspective just make us get stung all the more.

Our nation—no, our collective modern ego—has become a huge giant running around the globe with a can of Hot Shot in its hand. No wonder the wasps are angry.

Posted under General Observations

The full moon of July is celebrated in India and spiritual traditions where the Guru or spiritual master is honored, but for Tilly and me it has special significance because it marks the day of our second wedding, one performed by Swami Muktananda, our guru, in South Fallsburg, NY, in 1980. So when we stepped out on the front porch last night and saw the bright orb hanging over the trees of South Main Street, we kissed and bathed in its grace, because this second marriage has been very blessed.

Our first marriage down the street at the Blackstone Baptist Church in 1960 was like the new moon, full of the darkness of a night sky that as yet had little light of the moon of awareness. And through the years—and a divorce in the 70s— the moon gradually waxed into its full brightness, until now there seems to be little darkness left in our relationship. No matter what enters the field of our relationship, that full moon helps us keep our balance and sense of humor, and we dance in that light that has chased away the darkness.

The full moon reflects the sun perfectly, and so our marriage reflects this symbol as it always tries to stay in the light of God’s love, for in that light there is always unconditional acceptance of each other and a smile behind every bump when we brush against each other without being mindful. When the full moon bathes you in its magic light, there are no problems in marriage, because everything is just part of the dance.

Posted under General Observations

Having central air is an education for us in our house of many climates. Where each room used to have its own temperature, now the whole house has one feel, and that is comfortableness. There are only two climates now, outside and inside, and it also a surprise when we leave one and enter the other. “Oh, it’s so hot out here,” or “Oh, isn’t it cool in here.”

I’ve also learned from Tony Bradford, our excellent AC guru, that furniture helps the house stay cool once the air conditioning gets the heat our of the house. “One man wondered why his new house was hard to cool,” said Bradford, who informed him that the reason was he had no furniture.

This reminded me of the days when I was still trying to change my interior climate, and whenever I went home I found my temperature changing from “just right” to “I’m uncomfortable with myself.” It was all that emotional furniture from my past. My conditioning brought me back to the old climate I thought I had escaped.

So the lesson from the “Mother House,” (that’s what I’ll call our house now), is that if you don’t want to change your interior climate, keep all your old emotional furniture in place. But if you do want to find your true comfort zone that is consistent no matter where you are or what is happening, then start throwing out all the mental furniture that keeps your from changing.

It’s easy, once you get the thrill of it.

Posted under General Observations

This chart is a shocker because it visibly shows a wave of obesity washing over our nation like Katrina flooding New Orleans, and it is rising quickly. (See chart) Is it just because we love our fat? Or is it our lifestyle with everything being controlled by remotes so we don’t have to move anymore? I think it’s our religion.

Let’s face it; one’s religion is what one does, not on Sunday but everyday of the week. And what do we do? What do we really believe? We believe in more. More is our God. Our religion is called Consumerism, and it is spreading over the globe through our good missionaries: television and movies. We have faith that we can find God through identification with form, and the best form is food because it tastes so good. We are super sizing ourselves through our churches that we call corporations, and each church has a mandate from the god of consumerism to grow and replenish the earth. Stock profits are our communion.

So we pat our bellies as they grow and fall over our belts as if this extension were proof of the good life we are living through the grace of consumerism. But for a religion to be powerful, it must have a vigorous sense of sin, and there is no sin greater than being fat. We are caught fast in a double bind. Our religion tells us to get fat and feel guilty for doing it. Wow! This is beautiful. And the sin makes us buy more stuff that promises to relieve us of our suffering. Fantastic! Who could have thought this one up?

We are good for our economy, but our economy is killing us.

Posted under General Observations

Last night we watched The Sand Pebbles, the award winning classic in which Steve McQueen played a “China sailor” on the USS San Pablo, which was a fictional account of the American gun boats that patrolled the Yangtze River in China to protect American interests during the Chinese Revolution. My father, an Annapolis graduate of 1929, was on one of those gun boats for three years, but left before the dramatic sinking of the USS Panay in 1937, which almost ignited a war with Japan.

He told me that the story of the USS San Pablo (called by the crew Sand Pebbles) was a composite of events, which he had seen or heard about. But he never sat down and helped me relive that part of his life, other then an occasional story that popped up unexpectedly. I think he always resented his assignment to China because he felt it delayed his ascent up the navy career ladder. “This is not the way it was supposed to be,” I can image him saying as he watched his dreams of battleships and aircraft carriers fade in the backwaters of China.

My mother, a Norfolk girl, was introduced to him through mutual friends who felt sorry for this destroyer officer who never left the ship, which was my father’s next assignment after China. It was 1935 and now he was patrolling the North Atlantic, again protecting American interests. He never got shore duty in the United States until 1950, when he was in charge of a reserve center in New Jersey, and he retired in 1957 without ever becoming a captain of a ship of the fleet.

For those of you who never saw The Sand Pebbles, it is now restored to DVD, and cost only $12.95 at Costco.

Posted under General Observations

I found this daisy double in my yard this morning. Nature will sometimes remind us of its balance that is maintained by opposing positive and negative forces (the yin/yang or pairs of opposites).

Posted under General Observations

Our friend who spent 10 months in China is back, and she said she left a few things there that she doesn’t miss. “I left my impatience, there, she said, naming one, because “nothing in China happens the way you think it should.”

As she adjusts to our culture—where we make a religion and way of life on fulfilling expectations—her stories of China will drip into our waiting cups. I told her to just give us a little at a time so we could enjoy each sip. Maybe I can get her to post some of them here, so you can enjoy them too.

Posted under General Observations

Why has so much effort and expense gone into fixing up this old house in this late stage of my life? Central air and heating, tiled kitchen, a new driveway, meditation room, insulated windows, landscaping, on and on, as if something were driving this place to flower.

I love this house. It has had so many lives over the last 100 years, the first being that of Dr. Land, who owned the Courier Record before the Coleburns bought it. My wife’s family lived here from the early 40s, then it was sold and my mother-in-law bought it back and happily stayed here until she died in 1997. We bought the house and built a photography studio, and now it is growing into a meditation center. This good Baptist lady might have questioned this 20 years ago, but now, with Wal-Mart selling yoga mats, she would probably give her consent. I know she would like what has happened to her house.

As my pond guru said about the pond, “Build it and the frogs will come.” And come they did, from somewhere. Maybe it rained them. And so this old house takes a new birth, a new incarnation as a place where people can find direction and purpose in their lives. It has certainly been that for me. Until I came here I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, I mean, what was my life’s true purpose? And like a great mother, the wise house said, embracing me with love,  “Have I got just the space for you.”

Purpose can only be discovered in the context of service. Purpose is the form in which Love decides to flower.

Posted under General Observations