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

Life should be like exploring unknown lands. You are in a canoe and the river turns around a bend and a whole new vista opens up, and you say, “Wow, isn’t that beautiful,” and immediately the river of the past is forgotten. No explorer compares this moment’s discovery with yesterday’s find. When venturing into the unknown, everything is new, everything is fascinating, and everything has untold potential.

But in the conditioned mind of our civilization and it members, there are few gold nuggets in our present moment. To us all our treasures are buried in the past, and we spend all our efforts in keeping our inheritance intact. We store our gold and conserve it, and if we spend it recklessly, then we crash because there is no more gold. We live a life of defense and protection, and fear keeps us from turning that next bend in the river where the nuggets are lying on the ground ready to be picked up.

For the explorer, every turn in events is an opportunity. So we need to took at the current water fall our economy is going over as an awesome event that because of its greatness has even more potential power waiting to be developed. We are experiencing great energy in our civilization now—the energy of a giant earthquake—and as the ground shakes we feel the power of the unknown ground that we thought was secure. But that power is not good or bad energy—which is a relative judgment measured by the past—that energy is available energy ready to be tapped to lift our awareness to the next level of our onward march of human consciousness. This is true for each of us individually and as a society.

Great trauma is great energy, and its potential is entirely up to us to see and use it. In this universe every event is part of the whole, and in the whole there is infinite potential because that is what life is, pure, unconditioned potential. While we as individuals can’t do much about the economy except vote wisely, we can do everything about our own lives. Be a fearless explorer that welcomes this turn in the bend as an integral part of the voyage. We are here to discover life and its perrennial secret that in ever down there is also an up.

Posted under General Observations

As the financial system melts down and the politicians blame the other party and my photography business tanks and my credit card bils mount, why am I so happy? Well, happy is not the best word because happy is associated with good things happening. A better word is happily okay. I’m okay no matter what happens. The world cannot take away my inner peace. It’s tried. Oh, it’s tried, and each time it tries and fails I get more inner happiness because it’s failure reinforces my freedom from the world.

Now I know this is strange talk because in our modern world we are supposed to be affected by external events and spend every effort in trying to make the world go our way. But try as I might to be as I’m supposed to be, I fail. That’s it. I’m a failure in being fearful. I’m a failure in letting worry attack my mind. I’m a failure in being normal, if normal is being fearful. Now this doesn’t mean that I won’t feel some pain as I’m affected by the melt down, but there is gold inside that just doesn’t melt from the heat of the world.

Posted under current events

It is so easy to be fearful these days as our “fortress America” crumbles around us. Everyday seems to be another version of 9/11. When Obama keeps pointing to Change, one can almost hear the universe shouting in our ear with a megaphone. Disaster is the only way the universe can communicate with us. God is non-verbal. You can’t hear God; you have to read God. Take my cats. I can’t talk to my cat and expect an verbal answer, but I can read what my cat is trying to say. The same way with God or the living universe (both the same). God is talking to us all the time, but all we hear is our own verbal noise.

So I’m optimistic now, very optimistic because our pride in our castles are being broken up like crackers in the soup. America has to change. America has to get with the wave of energy that is transforming human civilization. America has to right itself and become the role model it once was. Our principles are still strong. Our values remain the only engines for higher consciousness, but we have been seduced by lesser and weaker values and have forgotten our destiny and greater calling. America must keep transcending itself or we crumble into the dust of history. Life is transcendence, and only a civilization that is alive survives. And to be alive is to welcome change.

But to welcome change we have to see how we have become fearful of change. The major, perhaps the only obstacle to change are the ideologies of the mind. First we are spirit, then we are mind, then we are body. Get that out of order and we begin to worship fear and avoid change by falsely assuming we are changing. Where fear prevails, life retreats.

So I’m optimistic because I know we’re going to rise to the challenges change is bringing. We have no choice now. Change (life) is here whether we like it or not. But if we leap over the cliff like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, fearlessly embracing the unknown, we’ll discover that there is nothing but change and the joyous life. America is only America when it bravely rides the wave of change. We must die to our past in order to have a future.

Posted under General Observations

If our nation could speak, would it not be saying that it is having a nervous breakdown. We breakdown when enough of our systems fail. When our body’s systems fail, we call it a heart attack or stroke; and when our mind fails, we call it a panic attact. Then we either go to a hospital or a therapist to get our systems repaired. But in our linear thinking we tend to fix the effect and not the cause. Give me a pill to take away the pain, but don’t  make me change the conditions that created the breakdown. A breakdown is a great teacher, but it’s wisdom is always our choice. We can’t change, we can’t heal unless we sweep away the conditions that created the breakdown.

It seems to be no accident that this perfect storm in our economy is occuring within sight of our election. Imagine where we would be if it occurred in the first year of the last Bush term. So now we have a choice. It’s all most like our country is with a therapist who helps us see our errors and our false assumptions, and then says, “You have a choice to create a new world now that you have seen the totality of the old one.” When we see the real, the unreal just disappears.

Posted under current events

The debate is over and I wonder what all the hype was about. It’s kind of like the Super Bowl that pumps you up for a cosmic event, and it ends up as just another football game. Our media is just like the mind. Desire, hope for happiness or fulfillment, and the belief that the end of suffering is near churn away like a hurricane in the Atlantic. And then when the great event arrives, it never measures up to it’s expectation, and soon dies down into just another windy day. What’s next, the mind begins to wonder in the aftermath of its pleasure storm.

This political storm we’re in is a great meditation. We get to observe the stories being put out by each party, and watch events unfold—slowly checking with what little we see of reality —and connect the dots. “Does the story being sold ring true?” Last night McCain kept repeating his story line that Obama was uninformed and naive, yet he didn’t look uninformed. The dots of his story didn’t connect.

This is a time in our national life for getting real. We have to stop believing in our media stories and the hype of the super bowl mentality. This time it is obvious to all that reality is more important then fiction, and the what’s in the box is more important than the package.

Palin was a beautiful package, but now as her interviews are being dripped like poison into our national blood stream, her exciting story is turning into a greater story that includes her created image, and this larger story is scary. It’s all about connecting the dots so that the background picture comes forth and overshadows the foreground picture. The background or context contains truth, while the foreground or image that is created for our dreams and pleasure is always unreal. We fear giving up our stories, but this time in our national life, if we don’t, the book will close on our America.

Posted under current events

(Letter to Editor in Blackstone Courier-Record)

I may appear picky but I would like to point out that last week’s front page spot news photo of a McCain sign and the following two-column interview—excuse me, not in interview because there were no questions, but a soap box—with the sign maker was a Courier-Record point-of-view disguised as objective news.

Now the editor may defend its editorial-news by citing the Drill Baby Drill slogan as being news worthy and not a free political ad for McCain, and that’s okay because the editor always has the last word. But I would like to see the paper find an Obama supporter and give him or her an equal shout out. There are currently five Obama signs in one block of South Main Street

Posted under General Observations

Ocean of Dharma Quotes of the Week
We no longer regard a work of art as a gimmick or as confirmation. It is simply expression — not even self expression, just expression. We could safely say that there is such a thing as unconditional expression that does not come from self or other. It manifests out of nowhere, like mushrooms in a meadow, like hailstones, like thundershowers.

Posted under General Observations

Recent reading about the Chaos Theory of nonlinear dynamics helped me understand why spies in the CIA are going for Obama. But first, Chaos Theory simply put means a “mass of apparently meaningless data—for instance, dots—in which one can’t see any inherent organizing pattern. With the advent of advanced computer techonolgy, it was discovered that inner organizing patterns could be found by computer analysis in what looked disorganized—that which appears to be incoherent actually has coherence.” (Power vs. Force)

When I read this morning in Mother Jones that a team of former intelligence porfessionals have come together to advise Obama because of his open-mindedness and inclination to absorb new information in this complex world. They want him to “rethink the architecture of the intelligence community…and do away with the Bush legacy…to view complex international challenges in black-and-white terms.” in other words, they want our intelligence to be freed from the shacles of a simplistic world view that divides all data into good and evil, and that excludes any data that doesn’t fit the preconditions of its world view.

The Chaos Theory is the way each of us evolves our consciousness. We get locked into a pattern of behavior that generates suffering, and we remain trapped as long as we don’t see the larger patterns that hold us hostage, patterns that we in our limited world view create. All we see out there is the chaos of dots. Intelligence is being able to connect the dots so we can see the emerging picture of what is really happening. This is the way we transcend image to get to the substance. The image is always a limited pattern that hides the true substance of reality.

In a way we are all fundamentalists. When we hold to a singular view of reality and don’t connect the dots of chaos, we are fundamentally unconscious of the real and truth escapes us.

“Nonlinear dynamics has verified that there is really no chaos in the universe; the appearance of disorder is merely the function of the limits of perception.” (Power vs. Force)

Liberation is another name for connecting the dots.

Posted under General Observations

When ships make a passage around rocky shores, they need a lighthouse as a stable reference point to guide them through the night. When our world’s absolutes begin to turn into their own opposites and our reality compass swings between the real and the unreal, we need a lighthouse. When the mind breaks free from its safe moral morings, and right and wrong both have their believable logic, we need a lighthouse.

But where can the mind find a lighthouse that is outside the mind? Where is a reference point for thought? Who stands outside the stormy seas of panic to calm the waves? If we see a savior standing on the shore, what if that savior is only seen by the light of a specific religion? And what if that religion and its belief system with its savior begins to rock as our existence itself begins to change? Is there a lighthouse that stands outside religion? Is there a light outside of me?

Is religion also a ship we have boarded for a passage from one shore to another, from turmoil to peace? Is our savior inside or outside of religion? Is our lighthouse even beyond the idea of God? If religion is created by mind, is there a light that guides even all religions through the passage of time?

Spirituality is looking for that light. Liberation is finding it.

Posted under General Observations

I just can’t help but look at the current brink of disaster the  administration is shouting about as one half of a set of bookends. Remember Iraq and the brink of disaster we faced as Saddam was supposed to be making nuclear suitcase bombs for terrorists. Give me a blank check, Bush pleaded so he could save the country. And we did. And now at the end of his war torn administration he has another disaster and want another blank check, and for just about the same amount he has already spend in his war. Maybe instead of bookends, we’re being pressed between two sides of a vise. How much juice doesn Bush think he can get from us? And who is holding the cup beneath the vise? Who has benefited from Bush’s politics of fear? I don’t feel particularly enriched. But I do feel sqeezed.

Posted under General Observations