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

“There’s still some coconut on the sidewalk,” my wife said when she came from her morning walk. We had picked up what we could see yesterday when my son left home for Myrtle Beach and a new life on his own. Instead of breaking a champaign bottle, in our family we break coconuts when a new venture begins. Coconuts are much better because you can’t drink any champaign after you break the bottle, and who wants glass all over the place.

The coconut represents the hard shell of one’s karma, the old barriers and boundaries that keep us locked up in a tiny room of sameness. When the time is right, when the wind is at your back and the tide is outgoing, you set sail into your dream of what can be, and you break the container that had kept you life at a standstill.

And then you get to eat the coconut. Everyone who sets sail after many false starts knows that all the errors of the past, our karma if you will, become the very sails that harness the wind of change. Success feeds on the mistakes of the past. So we break the coconut with one swift full action, like a sword coming down to cut us away from out cord to the past. We break the coconut and we are free.

Posted under current events

Today I’m taking the course outline and some other required papers to the local community college where I’m teaching a course on yoga next month. It’s not unlike fitting a square peg in a round hole. Institutions cannot function without plans and without the detailed outline of the means to a particular end. Education has become a Xeroxing process. Like the mind, institutions are afraid of blank spaces.

But yoga is freedom from this treadmill of compulsive thinking. So how does one teach the freedom from institutional thinking within the institution? Is it possible?

Yoga is union with freedom by becoming aware of one’s innate freedom that his hidden beneath the copies of information in our minds. We have papered our minds with the thoughts of others, and lost the belief in our own freedom. We think freedom is the freedom to choose among the thoughts of others.

Freedom is having your own original thoughts, thoughts that are unique and true to you, thoughts that have no argument and no choice, thoughts that have no doubt.

Posted under meditation help

The reason we in the west have difficulty understanding the eastern paths to freedom and happiness is that they are reversed paths. It’s like this, to use a simple metaphor of a shovel. When told to find wholeness and fulfillment in the west, we take our method of choice and start adding what we need to our wheelbarrow. We love to shop.

In the east with yoga and Buddhism, we take the shovel and empty the wheelbarrow of what we have accumulated, especially in the mind. Meditation is the shovel. We want to uncover our basic goodness.

In the west we want our wheelbarrow to be full of good things and thoughts. Therapy is the shovel we use to acquire sanity and wholeness. The west starts with the belief that we need something to be full, while the east starts with the belief that we are already full—so any effort to obtain the fullness we already have is just stuffing our selves with suffering. The west believes  addition is the best formula; the east believes subtraction is the only way.

And if you look closely at the teaching of Jesus, didn’t he say that the Kingdom of God was already within you? And what about the rich man, the addition man, who can’t get into the kingdom? We are really not that far apart. If you go far enough into the west, you come to the east.

Posted under meditation help

When my Saturday bride asked me to dance with her at her reception, I realized how much I enjoyed photographing weddings and being there for the girl when she is transformed into the Bride. In my poetic mind a magical transmutation takes place: there are the individual girls, the unique personalities and body shapes, and there is the one bride, and she is eternal. She is the Goddess.

For a day—through the getting ready, the ceremony, and the release and celebration of the reception—the girl is the goddess and the center of the universe. And after the wedding she goes back to her worldly personality in time, but always larger than she was before.

This morning—if I let my mind leap over its boundaries of common sense—I feel as though I was dancing with the Goddess at that reception, the Bride of all brides. This is the lady I’ve been working for these last 20 years. I finally met her.

This metaphor cuts through the gathering reluctance I’ve been having for weddings this year, and my passion for photographing brides is getting a new wind. This is what I do. Even at 71, I am too young to retire. I just need to get a lighter camera, that’s all.

I sent out a prayer to the Goddess (my boss) this morning: “Send me your brides,” I told her. I will love them and take care of them for you, and when they look back on their wedding day through my images, they will remember you and the joy that you gave them—and they will feel loved by you and everyone all over again.

A wedding day is not a one time thing; a wedding can happen any moment you remember the Goddess.

Posted under General Observations

You have to be here to appreciate this, and you say, well, of course, I’m here. Everybody says that. But what do you mean when you say, “I’m here.” When the roll call in a classroom comes to your name, you say, “Here.” Or you may say, “Present.” But what does that mean? For most it means my body is here, but my mind is anywhere it wants to be, and I can’t say where at the moment because I rarely pay attention to what my mind is doing. So we think we are here because our body is here, and that’s it.

But that is just the half of it. If the mind is separate from the body, if thought is churning up chit chat like an Internet forum, are you really here? To be really here means to not be divided between mind and body, between thought and life around us, or even between taking heads in one’s own mind. To be here is to be still.

As you read this are you aware of the sounds playing around you? Are you aware of the sensations of the inner body, the energy in your feet, your face, your posture, the pressure where you body rests in the chair, your breath as it flows in and out? Are you aware of your body at all? And are you aware of your larger body, your body in relationship with your environment. If you see a chair in front of you, what you are really seeing is the sense perception of the chair. Are you seeing the chair before your mind labels it chair, or are you just seeing the concept of chair? Does that chair have presence? Does it have it own being? Or is it just one of many things in your mind, something old and boring, so that the mind is always moving to what’s next.

We are not here if this moment has no depth and no presence. We are not here if we are thinking about this moment because thinking is an abstraction of this moment—just a thin slice of conceptual pie that pretends to be the whole pie.

So stop reading these words now, and stop thinking. Just be where you are as your are and enjoy the moment. It’s all we’ve got.

Posted under General Observations

Now I don’t mean physical pain, like cutting your finger or getting a tattoo (although some might think that pain is good, otherwise they wouldn’t keep doing it). The pain I’m talking about is psychological pain—the pain when a friend hurts your feelings, or even a stranger for that matter. When my sensitive ego gets a cut, that’s a good pain to me.

All of my expansions have come from hurt feelings. Pleasure will never do the job. Praise and pleasure can’t make you grow in your truth, but it can make you grow in your delusion. Pain is a check and balance. Pain lets you know you have over extended. Pain lets you see the shadow your ego is casting on the light.

So only friends, family, strangers, and even enemies can give us the pain we need to grow in our truth, to know who we really are, and to find our basic goodness upon which the giver of pain and the receiver of pain both stand. The only way to find that basic goodness is through forgiveness.

Pain gives us the opportunity to forgive and find wholeness. Pleasure never will.

Posted under up lifting

“You belong to the people now,” I whispered to my hungry bride at the reception last night as she fought for a moment to just eat a meatball. Friends and family were lining up for a hug and a blessing from her radiant being—but that’s the way it is with brides. When the girl gets married, she cannot know what it will feel like to be a queen, even if it is for one day.

“Dance with me,” the bride said late in the reception, as I was getting ready to leave. I’ve been photographing brides for 21 years but I’ve never danced with the bride. It has never crossed my mind. But tonight she asked me. I don’t know if it was because my wife stayed home with a bad knee, or if it was the special relationship I had with this bride, having been to her home to take her bridal portrait there.

I photograph weddings because this seems to be our culture’s last ritual that connects us all to the divine, no matter what our race or religion. Everyone goes to a wedding. In the wedding you can see the whole show: God and the Goddess, Christ, the Church, death, creation, love, family, sacrifice, all of existence and the dance of life as it renews itself eternally. And so in my poetic mind, Life tapped me and asked me to dance. The Queen picked me out of the crowd and said, “Dance with me.”

Posted under current events, up lifting

The greatest discovery in the world is not a new medical miracle or invention that changes our life. The greatest discovery is peace and that one’s world has stopped making war on you. You can’t aggressively get to this peace place. You have to come upon it by accident, usually by making a wrong turn, which of course, turns out to be the right turn.

All of our plans for peace are aggressive in that they seek to impose a desire or a new order on life. We want to gain something with our plans. But all plans are aggressive because they are always in conflict with what is.

Oh, of course, we need technology and making our life better. We need plans to make the world a better place, but these plans don’t reveal the greatest discovery. Now we seem to be reaching a place in human life where our best plans just create more chaos and the need for better plans. “What’s you plan,” we ask the politician who promises to bring peace. And we then get in a war of plans.

But it’s all thought, isn’t it, and thought can’t come upon real peace because real peace has no aggression in it. Peace and thought are not compatible. You can watch this in yourself if you want to. Thought is never satisfied with what is. This chair could be better. The weather could be better. My wife or husband could be better. My job could be better. Thought compares, and thought wants something more, something better.

But peace is content with what is. Peace says this is okay but I can change it if I want to. One has a choice when there is peace. Thought has no choice but to think about what’s wrong. Peace says I can think or I not think. Peace says I can be still or move. Thought is always moving. If thought were to sit still it would disappear; it would die. And that is fear. Only thought can fear. Peace never fears.

So the greatest discovery in the world—in your world because discovery is always personal for it to be real—is that peace is always right here wherever you are at this moment. It is easy to find. All you have to do is stop looking for it.

Posted under meditation help

A conservative friend wrote me the other day why Obama scares him. But at the end of the list he admitted, BUT I HATE HIS OPPONENT. I’m sure glad I’m not a Republican. I think it really boils down to a case of the known vs. the unknown, and the unknown by its very nature is scary. In fact, we will go to any extreme, even embracing our familiar pain and suffering—even staying in prison after parole—to avoid the fear of leaving the security of the past. Security vs. change is a old, old battle.

The problem with the unknown is that it is a blank screen and our mind—which can’t stand a vacuum or a blank space— will throw its projections on it, making monsters where nothing exists. The unknown future  becomes a nightmare for the fearful mind.

Why does Obama scare people? Well, for one, he is an unknown. There has never been a candidate like him. There have been rock stars like him, but not a presidential hopeful. But Obama seems to be more than just an interesting personality with a unique story. Obama is more like a whirlwind, a vortex of energy that makes you realize that something real is going on, something new, and something scary. You just can’t have the new, the untried, and real change without it being scary. Life is scary. Life is change.

Realty is scary because it’s real. but before we jump in, it’s always scary. The unknown itself is not scary, but standing on the edge of it and looking into the abyss is scary, and we naturally pull back. “No, I’d rather stand where it’s safe,” we say. We cling to the old, but life pulls us like an enchantress whispering, “Let, go, let go.” We are caught between a rock and a hard place.

So this whole Republican campaign is about those on the board walk at the beach making those at the edge of the incoming ocean fof change feel scared about jumping in. “Stay here where it’s safe,” they say. “There are sea monsters out there in the ocean.”

Posted under current events

I watched Obama in Berlin and cried. It was not the speech but that wall of joyous faces and eager hands reaching for a touch from Obama that squeezed my heart and brought the tears. Here was a wall unlike any walls I have seen. A living wall of hopeful humanity was reaching to touch a hope, a possibility within them that was awakening. Obama was just a circuit connector that was sending their own energy and hope back to them.

Obama moved down the wall, reaching and connecting with as many hands he could find, and you could feel the energy grow and connect back with itself—something was alive, something was being released, and something was being awakened.

And then it hit me. Seventy years ago in 1938 the grandparents of the people in this wall of faces were reaching out to touch Hitler, probably on this very spot, and they too felt that something was alive and being awakened. But it was collective ego nationalism that was being born; it was an “I’m special” mentality that was being forged. Seventy years ago these hands were building a wall that would divide the family of man and bring millions to death and ruin.

But Obama talked about tearing down the walls and freeing man from the artificial boundaries of the mind that divides the family of man. It’s not the walls of brick but the wall of thought that divide us now, he said. How far these faces have come, these Berlin faces that hoped for a world without walls. We have to experience the suffering walls create before we can tear them down. Walls have a purpose when they make us see beyond. And Berlin has seen both sides of the wall.

And so Obama comes with a wrecking ball and a truck full of hammers. “Come on world,” he says, “let’s tear down these walls. Now is our moment.”

Posted under current events