Looking Glass

Deals

2011-02-24T19:09:00.002-05:00

I made deals with my parents

To parent them

If they would love me

The currency of an economy misaligned

The country where no passport gains entry

Today I make deals with men

Hard currency hides black market exchanges

Protect me, help me, save me

The language foreign or frightening

They walk away

Postcards on the Search

2011-01-24T16:28:00.005-05:00

These lines were written originally to describe the ways men can get lost when journeying through the world in search of their authenticity. Now the lines apply to both genders as men and women enter the "Unreal City," walk the trembling tight rope and decide to seek meaning or remain locked inside the familiar.

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many.

I had not thought death had undone so many.

- The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot

(he) climbs the building, kicks the football, boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

...Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.

The strutting show-off is terrified.

- The Heavy Bear by Delmore Schwartz

Sometimes a man stands up during supper

and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,

because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,

stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,

so that his children have to go far out into the world

toward that same church which he forgot.

- The Middle Passage by Rainer Maria Rilke

According to Jung, the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.

The Lord Cometh Indeed.

2011-01-02T12:15:00.003-05:00

From The Friends Journal, January 2011:

The great mistake those of us who sit at God's left hand make is our insistence that all religions have equal value, that one is as good as the other, that it doesn't matter what we believe. This simply isn't true. When an entire segment of Christianity is looking forward to a cataclysmic battle in the Middle East that will usher in the second coming of Jesus, actually praying to God for a worldwide battle that will annihilate billions of people so a relative few can be transported to heaven, something is drastically wrong with that.

The Meaning of Universalism by Phil H. Gulley

Our Collective Shadow

2010-12-30T17:19:00.007-05:00

Nuclear submarine. Trident.

In the sudden silence, the conning tower I had mistaken for a building glided past, then a shadowy body like some ancient, light-eating beast barely visible beneath the sea, blacker than any black I have every seen.

"I would like to have seen it," said Sean, my fiance, when I told him about it later. He had read more than I ever hoped to know about that ship. He told me it could keep going all the way around the world, and around again maybe two or three times without ever having to surface. He said it carries twenty four missiles each of which has eight or ten warheads.

"Do you know that every one of those warheads has five times the capacity of the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima?"

I did not know. I bit my lip and looked at the floor, calculating. A thousand Hiroshimas. Fifteen times the number of Jews murdered in Nazi Germany. A submerged black shadow, waiting to destroy ninety million people.

We the people of the United States have created Trident. Not They - not an impersonal agency of government - but We - I, my family, my friends, and all the other citizens of my country.

Sean and I calculated that every man, woman and child in the United States is responsible for 4.5 cubic inches of that ship, a total of 18,700 tones of the psyche's nuclear power, consisting of all the unacknowledged destructiveness, hatred, rage and other rejected and denied qualities of 230 million people.

Saturday's Child: Encounters with the Dark Gods by Janet O. Dallett, 1991

Fear: The Great Diminisher

2010-12-24T08:53:00.003-05:00

From Trying To Be Human by Cheri Huber:

When you sit still with compulsive behavior, what you confront is the underlying fear. Then you are onto something manageable.

Through meditating you will be able to experience the sensation in your body that you call fear. What would that sensation be without the belief system that goes with it? What is fear, actually?

“Well, I’m afraid I’m going to die.” You are going to die, that’s true. Are you dying in this moment? Not so that it shows.

So, is the fear an experience you are having, or an idea you are holding? What would that sensation be without that idea, the label, those beliefs, that conditioning? You can begin to learn that in meditation.

Watch how the process works in your mind. You wake up in the morning and everything is fine. Then a thought comes through, fear follows it, voices kick in with conditioned responses, and you are off and running straight into suffering.

In meditation you begin to watch that kind of process. You see the relationship between the sensation and that label; you see your reaction and the belief system that goes with it. And you begin to suspect that what’s really going on has nothing to do with what you think is going on. You begin to see that there are certain times when these patterns happen; you notice that they are in fact patterns, and you no longer believe them. You bring your attention back closer and closer to the sensation that actually triggers the pattern.

And you discover that there is no such thing as fear.

Hardcore Zen

2010-12-21T05:51:00.003-05:00

From Brad Warner's Hardcore Zen - Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality:

"Religions...have never offered anything more to me than sophisticated methods of avoiding the truth, of building elaborate fantasies in the place of reality. As far as I'm concerned, religions obscure reality rather than reveal it more clearly. They serve up vapid platitudes in place of answers to the genuine and crucial questions that burn in our guts.

"And philosophy, the academically sanctioned state religion of the Western world, isn't any better. Philosophers offer clever suppositions phrased in five-dollar words. Sure, philosophy can lead to a deep-ass insight or two....but soon enough you look around and the world is still the same old screwed-up mess.

"Politics? Politicians can't solve the problems of how to find their own asses with two hands and a flashlight, let alone figure out anything more complex or subtle.

"Fame, fortune, really great sex - maybe those'll cure all your ills. But beautiful people with loads of money are just as confused and miserable as anyone else...You can master tantric yogic poly-orgasmic Wonder Sex but you're still gonna die alone. There has to be something more.

"My own quest for truth began because I knew there had to be some way to see the truth that didn't involve following all the other cattle to the slaughterhouse."

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

2010-12-19T08:33:00.003-05:00

From Jack Kornfield's book After the Ecstasy, the Laundry:

"...Suzuki Roshi said, 'Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.' This remarkable statement tells us that enlightenment cannot be held by anyone. It simply exists in moments of freedom.

"Pri Valayat Khan, the seventy-five-year-old head of the Sufi Order in the West, confides his own belief: 'Of so many great teachers, I've met in India and Asia, if you were to bring them to America, get them a house, two cars, a spouse, three kids, a job, insurance and taxes...they would all have a hard time."

2010-11-29T05:41:00.003-05:00

I have found the writings of Jose Saramago to be some of the most powerful and compelling stories I have enjoyed in my reading life.

These excerpts are from "The Cave." I make them without commentary as is the usual approach in these postings in order that you might draw your own conclusions.

However, I would urge you to ponder them for more than a moment. They are powerfully packed with meaning and commentary about our brief stay here.

"Sometimes I think we might be better off not knowing who we are...Yes, I imagine a dog knows less about himself than he does about his master, he can't even recognize himself in a mirror."

"And this is where we humbly return to that business about breathing into nostrils, and here we will have to recognize how very unjust and imprudent we were to take up and adopt as our own the heretical idea that the said god coldly turned his back on his own work. Yes, it is true, that no one ever saw him again, but he left us what was perhaps the best part of himself, the breath, the puff of sir, the breeze, the soft wind, the zephyr..."

"Not a single piece of pottery made by the Algor family remains in the Center's warehouses, apart from the scattering of red dust on the shelves, it is always as well to recall that the cohesive nature of matter is not eternal, if the continual rubbing of time's invisible finers can so easily destroy marble and granite, what will it not do to mere clay..."

"On principle and as a precautionary measure, a dog should always bark at any surprises life throws at him, because he has no way of knowing beforehand if the good surprises could turn bad or the bad cease to be what they were..."

"...so it is with all things in this world, words, for example, which are not things which merely designate things as best they can, and in doing so shape them, even if employed with exemplary correctness, always assuming that this could happen, words are used millions of times and rejected as many times again, and then we, tails between our legs, like the dog Found when he shrinks with shame, must humbly go in search of them again, like the pounded clay that they are, kneaded and chewed, swallowed down and regurgitated, the eternal return really does exist, but no in that form, in this."

The Buddha and the Surgeon General

2010-11-01T19:53:00.002-04:00

Here's a link to a talk I gave at the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Brevard, North Carolina: The Buddha and the Surgeon General.

Nuggets of Non-Wisdom

2010-11-01T08:12:00.003-04:00

I came across this passage in Jose Saramago's "The Cave." It reminded me of another conversation I have been having with a friend about the tyranny of the power of positive thinking, which fits into the class of poorly thought out, blindly unenlightened cliches or "self help" thought systems we perpetuate on one another.

"Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are a malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth. We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there's a will, there's a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end."

By the way, if you have not explored the writings of Saramago, you are missing a depth and meaning seldom visited on us in these days of "bestselling" one-dimensional pulp from the publishing house mill.

Unlocked Doors

2010-10-20T10:41:00.003-04:00

The people you meet behind unlocked doors are tired of talking about the weather. These are people tired of safety. These people have remodeled too many houses. These are tanned people who’ve given up smoking and white sugar and salt, fat and beef.

They’re people who’ve watched their parents and grandparents study and work for a lifetime only to end up losing it all. Spending everything just to stay alive on a feeding tube. Forgetting even how to chew and swallow.

These men and women sitting behind unlocked doors know a bigger house is not the answer. Neither is a better spouse, more money, tighter skin.

“Anything you can acquire,” she says, “is only another thing you’ll lose.”

The answer is there is no answer.

- Choke by Churck Palahniuk

Death by Order

2010-10-09T15:17:00.006-04:00

The Mommy, she used to tell him she was sorry. People had been working for so many years to make the world a safe, organized place. Nobody realized how boring it would become. With the whole world property-lined and speed-limited and zoned and taxed and regulated, with everyone tested and registered and addressed and recorded.

Nobody had left much room for adventure, except maybe the kind you could buy. On a roller coaster. At a movie. Still, it would always be that kind of faux excitement. You know the dinosaurs aren’t going to eat the kids. The test audiences have outvoted any chance of even a major faux disaster.

And because there’s no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we’re left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention. The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won’t get any better.

This is all stuff the Mommy used to tell him.

- Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

Seeking A Cure For Knowledge

2010-10-04T13:20:00.004-04:00

Above them, a mountain held itself against the sky, catching clouds and coated with pine trees and then some snow higher up. It was so big that no matter how long they walked, it was still in the same place.

The Mommy took the white tube out of her purse. She pinched onto one shoulder of the stupid little boy for balance and sniffed hard with the tube stuck up one side of her nose. Then she dropped the tube onto the gravel edge of the road and just stood looking at the mountain.

“Tichloroethane,” the Mommy said. “All my extensive testing has shown this to be the best treatment for a dangerous excess of human knowledge.”

“That mountain, for example,” she said. She took the boy’s stupid chin between her thumb and forefinger and made him look at her. “That big glorious mountain. For one transitory moment, I think I have actually seen it.”

For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations. She’d seen the mountain without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She’d seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains.

What she’d seen in that flash wasn’t even a “mountain.” It wasn’t a natural resource. It had no name.

“That’s the big goal,” she said. “To find a cure for knowledge.”

- From Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

Patterns Repeating Beyond Knowing

2010-09-26T16:52:00.004-04:00

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.

If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.

What we call choas is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.

There is no free will. There are no variables.

"There is only the inevitable," Fertility say. "There's only one future. You don't have a choice."

The bad news is we don't have any control.

The good news is you can't make any mistakes.

- Survivor, a novel by Chuck Palahniuk published in 1999

Comment:

Either all things are as planned or there is no plan. Randomness is either chaos visited on every aspect our lives or it is the word used to describe patterns we do not understand.

Either way - you and I have no control. We don't even have freedom in the sense it is usually defined - i.e., the ability to decide our own external fate. That reads well in a print but it simply is not true.

We are not free in that sense. Yet we are completely free in all the ways that can matter.

Low Turn Out At The Crucifixion

2010-09-25T08:59:00.004-04:00

"You realize people take drugs because it's the only real personal adventure left to them in their time-constrained, law-and-order, property-lined world. It's only in drugs or death we'll see anything new, and death is just too controlling.

You realize that there's no point in doing anything if nobody is watching. You wonder, if there had been a low turnout at the crucifixion, would they have rescheduled?"

- Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk, 1999

What To Leave Behind?

2010-09-08T18:26:00.006-04:00

At a certain time in your life, you think about death in a serious way, and you think about it often. You see your eyes and mouth impacted by dirt, your clothes a moldy receptacle for water leaking through the topsoil. You see a frozen mound backlit by a wintry sky, a plain of brown grass with tumbleweed bouncing across it. Inside the mound, if your ears could hear, they would tell you the shovel that raises you into light again will do so only for reasons of scientific curiosity.

When you see these images in your sleep or experience them in your waking day, you know they do not represent a negotiable fate. The images are indeed your future, and not exception will be made for you.

During these moments, when you try to push away these images from the edges of your vision, you have one urge only, and that is to somehow leave behind a gesture, a cipher carved on a rock, a good deed, some visible scratch on history that will tell others you were here and that you tried to make the world a better place.

The great joke is that any wisdom most of us acquire can seldom be passed on to others. I suspect this reality is at the heart of most old people’s anger.

____________________________

When I place my hand in a cold pool and fingerling salmon nibble the ends of my fingers, I know the pool will freeze over and the fingerlings will live under the ice until May, when the ice will thaw and the adult salmon will swim into the river’s main channel and eventually work their way out to sea. All of these things will happen of their own accord, without my doing anything about them and for some strange reason, I take great comfort in that fact.

Swan Peak, by James Lee Burke

What Are You Settling For?

2010-04-25T20:13:00.002-04:00

"The life I settled for is the one I got." - from the short story "Open Mike" by James Nolan.

Does this statement make you feel sad? Noble? Confused? Is it intended that we settle and do our duty even if it was not the life we "planned."

Is it that we "hope" that if we are skillful enough at settling we can one day break free to claim the life we want? That day does not seem to come for many.

Maybe we are "different." Maybe not. Maybe we are all kidding ourselves. Whistling past the graveyard because there will be a graveyard.

That is settled.

Theology of Randomness

2010-04-23T06:11:00.004-04:00

I suggested to some friends that we get together for a Saturday afternoon or three to discuss randomness. My ulterior motive was to capture them in a room with only one door - which I could block - to discuss how the ever present role of randomness should inform any pondering we do about the feature of our existence many call God. I proposed to my friends we conduct these Saturday excursions under the title of the "theology of randomness."

The "theology of randomness" may be a self-destroying term - matter and anti-matter in one package canceling one another out. How can we ponder any sense of a higher power or presence or force if whatever we think about that force might, in fact, be flawed by our assumptions about what is normal? There are other problems with a "theology of randomness" but this is the one most central.

If I corner my friends in a room for this discussion, I will first have to make a disclaimer concerning the baseline of my own beliefs. I am a poor, undisciplined disciple of a teacher who seeks no followers and would probably disdain any who professed to follow his way. My teacher is Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His views on randomness have profoundly - and sometimes very disturbingly - changed my life. I do not profess to understand all he asserts but I have gotten enough of it to see that while my brain craves the predictable, I increasing live in a universe where meaning - if it can be determined at all - can only be extracted by a clear understanding of what inherently cannot be predicted.

My theology of randomness derived from reading the books my teacher has written is as follows: The universe is defined more by its randomness and chaos than any patterns that repeat. The universe is so random and chaotic that it sometimes appears to have order. Humans crave order and therefore attached to these patterns and then extrapolate from this flawed assumption various predictions about what life will be. Call this sin. The approach appears to serve the need to make sense of life until randomness and chaos intersect the timeline creating suffering.

The only freedom from sin and suffering is to resist the temptation of being fooled by randomness into thinking there is an order or a plan to any of what you see around you. What does it mean then, that our existence will be shaped more by what cannot be predicted.? What does this mean to the two great questions at the core of any theological exploration - who am I and why am I here?

Well, you would have to be willing to be locked in a room for a couple of Saturdays with a few of us interested in exploring the question.

I Knew Jesus Before He Was A Superstar

2010-03-21T11:41:00.008-04:00

I teach a class called "Jesus BC (Before Christianity)."

The idea is to discuss what, if any, glimpse can be had of Jesus of Galilee before he became lost in Jesus the Christ. It draws a very interesting crowd of people.

Of course, the real question is can we even catch a glimpse of Jesus of Galilee. He is not really what the Jesus Christ story is about. His is only its backdrop - the stage set, if you will - to be moved around to help tell the story the institutional church wants told.

Lately I have been reading one of my favorite once radical not lost to time theologians - Thomas J. J. Altizer ; specifically his "The Descent Into Hell: A Study of the Radical Reversal of the Christian Consciousness." Dr. Altizer makes a very good point concerning the story told by the institutional church and how it relates to the tone as well as tenor of the New Testament.

The New Testament has a baseline that is apocalyptic. There is a tone that is decidedly eschatological coming from the mouth of Jesus the Christ. Sometimes the writers "whistle past the graveyard." Sometimes they hit it head on.

However, it is clear that the "end" of this world and the dawning of a radically different world is a viable option still in play when the words were penned. But that concern and debate was morphed over time by the institutional church into concepts about another world beyond death - heaven and all that.

Too bad, really. More on that later.

Human Sacrifice

2010-03-21T07:24:00.009-04:00

Listen, now, you’re going to die, Ray-mond K. K. K. Hessel, tonight. You might die in one second or in one hour, you decide. So lie to me.

Tell me the first thing off the top of your head. Make something up.

I don’t give a shit. I have the gun.

Finally, you were listening and coming out of the little tragedy in your head.Fill in the blank. What does Raymond Hessel want to be when he grows up? Go home, you said you just wanted to go home, please.

No shit, I said. But after that, how did you want to spend your life? If you could do anything in the world. Make something up. You didn’t know. Then you’re dead right now, I said. I said, now turn your head. Death to commence in ten, in nine, in eight.

A vet, you said. You want to be a vet, a veterinarian. That means animals. You have to go to school for that. It means too much school, you said.

You could be in school working your ass off, Raymond Hessel, or you could be dead. You choose. I stuffed your wallet into the back pocket of your jeans. So you really wanted to be an animal doctor. I took the saltwater muzzle of the gun off one cheek and pressed it against the other. Is that what you’ve always wanted to be, Dr. Raymond K. K. K. K. Hessel, a veterinarian?

Yeah. No shit? No. No, you meant, yeah, no shit. Yeah. Okay, I said, and I pressed the wet end of the muzzle to the tip of your chin, and then the tip of your nose, and everywhere I pressed the muzzle, it left a shining wet ring of your tears.So, I said, go back to school. If you wake up tomorrow morning, you find a way to get back into school.

I pressed the wet end of the gun on each cheek, and then on your chin, and then against your forehead and left the muzzle pressed there. You might as well be dead right now, I said. I have your license.

I know who you are. I know where you live. I’m keeping your license, and I’m going to check on you, mister Raymond K. Hessel. In three months, and then in six months, and then in a year, and if you aren’t back in school on your way to being a veterinarian, you will be dead.

You didn’t say anything.

Get out of here, and do your little life, but remember I’m watching you, Raymond Hessel, and I’d rather kill you than see you working a shit job for just enough money to buy cheese and watch television. Now, I’m going to walk away so don’t turn around.

Raymond K. K. Hessel, your dinner is going to taste better than any meal you’ve ever eaten, and tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your entire life.

This is a passage from the book Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. It is a book with a cult following. It is a very uncomfortable book to read on a number of levels and too many of them have to do with more than just the storyline.

The scene above is a good example. Get it? The human sacrifice is not the act that never happens - i.e., Hessel murdered. The human sacrifice is Hessel accepting a dead in job because pursuing his dream is something he accepted as being too hard, out of reach.

Amazing what clarity a schizophrenic with a personality order and a gun can provide.

That Splinter In Your Mind

2010-01-24T08:52:00.006-05:00

Morpheus: I imagine that right now, you're feeling a bit like Alice. Hm? Tumbling down the rabbit hole?

Neo: You could say that.

Morpheus: I see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, that's not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo?

Neo: No.

Morpheus: Why not?

Neo: Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life.

Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?

A friend of mine recently sent me an email that reminded me of this scene in the movie "The Matrix." Her reference had to do with a different kind of splinter. It centered around this quote by Robert Rabbin: "Most feel oppressed with insufficient meaning, erratic motivation, and some degree of dissatisfaction or sadness. They want to seize the day and capture the moment, but the day slips through their fingers and the moment from their grasp. In these conversations, I always ask one question: What do you want? With this proviso: And tell the truth."

What if what we wanted had nothing to do with it? What if it was really more about our inability to see what is in front of us, to trust our intuition that is suggesting something right before our eyes is wrong, is an illusion, perhaps a dangerous one?

Here's another clip from the same scene from The Matrix referenced above:

"You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."

Your call.

Ecumenical New Year Thoughts

2009-01-03T11:05:00.002-05:00

1. If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

2. Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

3. Drink tea and nourish life; with the first sip, joy; with the second sip, satisfaction; with the third sip, peace; with the fourth, a Danish.

4. Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.

5. Accept misfortune as a blessing. Do not wish for perfect health, or a life without problems. What would you talk about?

6. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single Oy.

7. There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?

8. Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis.

9. The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao is not Jewish.

10. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.

11. Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as a wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.

12. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.

13. Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.

14. The Torah says, Love your neighbor as yourself. The Buddha says, There is no self. So, maybe we're off the hook.

2008-12-20T16:29:00.003-05:00

And now a math lesson.

Some definitions for the equations I want to share:

• What If = WI

• If Only = IO

• What Really Is = WRi, Reality = WRi

• Suffering = S, S = Unsatisfactory Life, Unsatisfactory Life = Suffering

• Satisfactory Life = SL, Freedom = SL, Satisfactory Life = Freedom.

Here’s the math I believe in:

• Equation A: WI + IO = S

• Equation B: S = (WI+IO) – WRi

• Equation C: SL = WRi – (WI+IO)

• Equation D: SL = WRi

Here’s the explanation:

• Equation A: What if (WI) this or that happens, will I be happy or sad? If only (IO) this or that happens, then I will be happy or sad! This mental maelstrom is suffering (S) or, said in less abstract terms, leads to an unsatisfactory life (S). Starving is not suffering in the same way that this equation expresses suffering. The suffering referenced here requires more than a meal to drive it away.

• Equation B: The unsatisfactory life (S) is created when what if (WI) and if only (IO) are practiced without understanding what really is (WRi), now, here. This is the root of suffering (S) – i.e., living in the what if (WI) and if only (IO) without what really is (WRi).

• Equation C: The satisfactory life (SL) requires one to see what really is (WRi) without the influence of what if (WI) and if only (IO). Notice the words “without the influence.” This is not the same as “without” only. This equation does not suggest that the desires that fuel what if (WI) and if only (IO) cease. These are normal attributes of human life. The satisfactory life (SL) is not a passionless life. It is not a life without desire or emotions – whether they be desires of love or lust, love or hate, peace or war. The satisfactory life (SL) requires the ability to see what really is (WRi) even in the face of desires that create illusions to the contrary. It is not normal, healthy or sane to allow what if (WI) and if only (IO) to define reality. Reality is only what it is – nothing more or nothing less. That includes what if (WI) and if only (IO) but it is not what if (WI) and if only (IO).

• Equation D: The satisfactory life (SL) is the life lived in what really is (WRi). This equation is the proof for the “It Is What It Is” (ISWIS) theorem. The ISWIS theorem is not nihilistic. That is jumping to a conclusion you should never trust someone else to make. Rather, ISWIS is the “enlightenment” theorem. Until you see things for what they really are rather than for what you hope they will be or what someone else has said they would be you are not free. Such freedom is enlightenment and enlightenment is nothing more or less than a satisfying life. Anything more or less refers back to Equation A for it is merely another form of what if (WI) and if only (IO).

Spend some time with this math.

Don't Hold Your Breath

2008-12-14T13:02:00.005-05:00

Avoid meditation as typically defined – i.e., as some type of self-help regime designed to help us with our existential woe.

Take a tranquilizer – it’s quicker, more honest.

Or, find the means that works best for you to look within and directly experience what’s there.

This is not mystical, mantra chanting, prayer saying stuff but if there were a single phrase to capture the gist it would be “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”

We don’t even have a good fix on what the hell that means available to us in our outwardly, other focused societal context – whether the other means another or, more likely, a thing (i.e., possession, power, prestige).

The fact is, we see everything as separate from us – even and especially our god, however defined, in most cases. We even think of emptiness as having something to do with being empty when in fact it is about knowing fully.

Brad Warner in Hardcore Zen gets at how hard it is for us to understand this concept of direct experience or anything alleging to describe it when he writes, “And there is always some kind of exchange. Even breathing is a matter of exchanging one thing for another – carbon dioxide for oxygen, old breath for new, death for life and life for death. Nothing lives in any other way. When you get right down to it, most people’s idea of paradise involves the equivalent of somehow just inhaling and never again breathing out.”

Brad’s a Buddhist, a Zen Buddhist to be more precise. His version of Buddhism is a shade or two non-traditional, which immediately gains it some creds as tradition is the byproduct of institutions and institutions the refuge of old, musty, outdated things that must be preserved to keep someone or something from the cold wind of doubt.

However, it is important to note that the word religion is not limited to serving as the definition of some institutionalized pseudo-faith. In fact, the Latin word that is the basis for the word we so regularly abuse and misuse today is religere. This word means to pay careful attention, to pay heed, to give careful thought to something . Its antonym is neglegere from which the word neglect comes.

To have a religious outlook – to practice a religious life – has absolutely not a thing to do with what we do on Sunday. In fact, if we only do it on Sunday, it cannot be religious – by definition. A religious life means a life that is attentive, aware, characterized by clarity, integrity and…doubt. Without doubting there is no awareness – only acceptance usually of what someone else has said, done or believed.

A religious outlook sounds a good deal like what I mean when I mention meditation not as it is typically defined or practiced. Not something confined to a particular posture or pillow or master but rather harder than that.

About the meditation practice unconventionally – as in constantly, as you live and move in reality – about these things, be religious. They are worthy of your devotion for they come from within and around you, part of a continuous consciousness that is not individual but collective.

Don’t rush to call this practice godly or label the feeling that might rise up as a god. In fact, doubt that most of all. The problem with gods is we create them in our own image or in the image of what we believe the ideal to be, then wait around for them to “save” us from ourselves.

Silly really.

Avoiding Meditation

2008-12-01T11:07:00.003-05:00

Doubt everything.

Practice anarchy.

Avoid meditation.

At least as it is normally defined. The world is not inside your head. Consciousness does not arise from some chemical brew inside your noggin. Reality is beyond your thoughts or at least outside of them.

This is the very reason why it is necessary to doubt everything – especially your tendencies, intentions, emotions, reasoning…anything that arises from within you. This is not consciousness. It is habit and training.

This also is the reason why you must practice anarchy by refusing to give any authority to anything outside of yourself. Obedience to what is outside of us is just the acceptance of someone else’s tendencies, intentions, emotions, reasoning. This is only the shirking of responsibility.

Meditation is not about inquiring within and the truth does not exist outside of us. We do not “achieve” enlightenment. We cannot “pursue” – we have no need to “seek” – the truth. We need only observe what happens when we doubt everything and practice anarchy. Out of this strange act of alchemy arises the substance of our lives. It is not something someone gives to us, not something we learn, not a profound insight. It has been there always – waiting for discovery.

This is meditation and it matters not where you do it – on a pillow in front of a candle with some incense burning, walking the dog, shopping on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. You don’t need a “master” or a meditation “leader.” You don’t need to sit in an uncomfortable position. You need only do whatever you need to do to regularly practice the anarchy of doubting everything.

For me, it works best in the morning over my first cup of coffee. I am a coffee addict. Every morning there will be a cup of coffee! If I take that first cup of coffee to sit and observe all about me – my thoughts, the dogs, sounds outside the house, my thoughts, the dogs, the smell of the coffee, sounds insides the house, my breathing, the dogs, my thoughts, that feeling – is that fear?, the dogs, what am I afraid of, the to do list for today, why does that make me anxious, doubt everything, whose authority, is that anger just beyond the horizon?, noises outside, inside.

Get the idea?

Find the best place and time for you. Do that.

I am inherently lazy (and a workaholic – a not uncommon pairing by the way). Therefore, anything that I might find “hard” to do (hard means not a habit for me) I need to do first thing in the morning. Thus, the cup of coffee thing works for me because it is first thing in the morning. By the way, following the first cup is at least one cup with my spouse, then exercise in the form of walking the dogs. My personality is such that if I don’t see to my relationships first thing – with my spouse, my body, my dogs – I won’t see to them later.

You see, instead of trying to “remake” myself according to someone else’s idea of what I am supposed to be (how the hell can someone else know what I am supposed to be?), I must remember to accept myself as I am. This is a much more useful, skillful place to start.

Anything else smells of that most unenlightening of theologies – original sin – which is inherent in most all “religions” - west and east.

You need to determine what works best for you. Ignore the local guru’s schedule or the weekly gatherings at the church. Find your own rhythm first. If you let others determine when you tend to these things, you are not taking responsibility for yourself. In other words, you are not practicing anarchy. You are not doubting everything.

A mind not doubting, not embracing anarchy learns nothing lasting, nothing new - no matter how close its owner comes to a full lotus or praying unceasingly.

Embrace Chaos, Achieve Anarchy

2008-11-28T09:59:00.006-05:00

"No matter what authority you submit to - your teacher, your government, even Jesus H. Christ or Gautama Buddha himself - that authority is wrong. It's wrong because the very concept of authority is already a mistake. Deferring to authority is nothing more than a cowardly shirking of personal responsibility." - Brad Warner, Hardcore Zen

I don't know about you but one of my favorite little neurotic tendencies is to conform to the wishes or requests or authority of another then complain about about it. This is the path of a coward.

There is no authority outside of our own authority. Therefore, when we conform to the wishes of external authority out of habit, hope, fear or because mom and dad told us to or not to, we commit the original sin of our species. We trade that precious gem that is our free will for a pocket full of rocks that ensure we will drown in life’s miseries.

Doubting everything means everything - especially our tendency to surrender our authority to power figures, religious teachers, saviors, charlatans or the guy who fixes our car. Conformity is not about how we dress or the music we listen to, it is about where the decision to wear those clothes or listen to that music is located. Is it within or outside?

Before we answer too quickly, we need to realize we are geniuses at convincing ourselves that the authority we are welding is our own. Most of the time we are lying to ourselves. How do we tell when we are lying to our own reflection in the mirror. Doubt everything. Your conformity, your non-conformity, your Buddha, your Jesus and your deepest convictions especially.

Why does it matter? Anarchy is the natural state of things. If you don’t believe so, you simply have not lived long enough and/or have not been attentive enough to see the evidence of this truth in your own physical body. From the minute we are born, systems begin to rebel and ultimately the rebellion results in our death.

Chaos is the catalyst for creativity. As soon as you find something to believe in, blow it up and look at the pieces. Build the next thing to believe in out of that and before you get carried away by it, blow it up too. Repeat this process until the Grim Reaper calls on you. Because, when the Grim Reaper calls on us, there is no one there but us.

I certainly have spent too much of my life conforming to external authorities because it was the safe thing to do, because I was afraid of what might happen if I stood up for who I was inside. I have spent too much time arguing about small-minded matters with small-minded people. I have sacrificed too much in service to what was considered "proper" or "polite" and been unsuccessful at being either polite or proper in the meantime.

Commit a true act of chaos every day. Embrace your inner anarchist each morning over your first cup of coffee. Weigh your allegiances to external sources of authority - your banker or your Buddha or both - and consider your cowardice. Look inside doubt your deepest convictions. Consider the feelings that arise as you watch your convictions evaporate.

Doubt Everything - Especially Yourself

2008-11-24T05:13:00.006-05:00

A friend of mine from the business world recently challenged me to consider broadening my teaching efforts by building an online community of like-minded sorts.

His theory was if President-elect Obama can raise hundreds of millions of dollars via the Internet from everyday people who believe in his message, I should be able to make a living discussing with others the trail signs encountered on our journey through this particular slice of space/time.

I am not sure my friend - whom I worked with for several years in the financial services software industry - knows much about what basic precepts I have come to count on along the way.

I doubt they are marketable in a society that seems to prefer quick solutions to complicated issues and that has a tendency to prefer being told the answer rather than finding it for themselves. That is not to say that these societal traits are wrong or "unskillful." They may be absolutely the clearest possible path to whatever the goal of life is.

Yet, they are not what I have found to be interesting or helpful to me so I could not convincingly proffer them as guidance. Still, my friend got me thinking about what precepts I do hold as being basic to my life as lived out in the day to day details that comprise it. So,in honor of my friend, this is the first of what may be several blog entries outlining what I would tell people if they wanted to know "what I believe in."

Precept One: Doubt absolutely everything - especially anything I write in the next few blog entries. Doubt is the absolute key to freeing ourselves from the illusion that anyone - including us - knows anything for certain.

When I worked as a minister in the United Methodist Church I often commented that I wanted to start a Sunday School class called "The Doubting Thomas Club." All I ever got from the members of my congregations was a sympathetic look, the type you give the crazy uncle who visits once a year during the holidays during his furlough from the puzzle palace.

The basis for my comment was my experience with traditional classes where people were told what to believe and seldom paused to challenge it. Doubt is more fascinating than belief, certainty, the absolute. Less dangerous, too.

Brad Warner in Hardcore Zen writes: "It is only when people believe that their beliefs are above questioning...that they can be as truly horrible as we all know they can be. Belief is the force behind every evil mankind has ever done."

Doubt has a much better track record. Doubt causes people to pause. Sometimes if freezes them on the couch to consider deep and unnerving questions about themselves, their lives, their abilities, their choices, their practices, their habits. Human beings frozen in doubt on the sofa just don't harm as many people as those mobilized by certainty and belief.

Here's the hard part: Doubt your own motives, intentions, assumptions, conclusions - most of all! It is easy for most of us to doubt organized religion, the politicos, our neighbors (especially those that don't agree with us or dress like us or take care of their house like us or....). It is another thing altogether to look inside ourselves and hunt down every assumption, grab it by the throat, refuse to let it go until it proves itself to be worth retaining and then choking the shit out of the ones that don't pass the test.

Most of the time when we speak of enlightenment or salvation or nirvana or the kingdom of God, the images are pleasant, happy, peaceful, serene. In fact, enlightenment - and all other real or imagined states of awakening - is built on this daily, moment by moment practice of hunting down your beliefs and certainties, demanding they explain themselves and destroying those that don't.

In the emptiness created by this process, we doubt. In the doubting, we open ourselves up to creative energy that is much more about chaos than order. It requires faith to dwell in this place for any length of time and, to make sure we are clear on this point, faith has nothing whatsoever to do with belief. Faith is all about doubt. Get that and you probably don't need to spend another moment reading any books about the meaning of life.

Once you reach this location on the map, you will realize that truth is not something you seek. It isn't precepts, creeds, dogmas, philosophies, political ideologies. The truth is right now, right here once you learn to doubt everything standing in the way of experiencing it.

It may be a bummer to realize you cannot take the truth and whack those who disagree with you over the head with it. It may even be scary to confront a truth that does not bring you certainty but rather doubt. Clearly, the level of fear and anger in the world would suggest at least a few folks don't find such truth very comforting.

If this is what you experience, get back on the couch and have someone put you in a full set of restraints so you don't hurt the family pet, your neighbor or anyone else because you will - left to your belief that truth is something you possess rather than something that possesses you.

Stay there until you doubt your way to finding truth as it is. You cannot run to it or from it. You cannot think it. If you are seeking it in your life, STOP IT RIGHT NOW! You can only be the truth and to be it has to be an experience built on an understanding that truth is a communal, connected event. Everything contributes to it even and especially that which opposes it, misunderstands its nature, tries to use it as a weapon of divisiveness - in other words belief, dogmas, etc.

Summary: Doubt everything. This will lead to an understanding that truth is not a thing but a condition, not something to be argued but something to be experienced. Truth seen as such connects everything, even that in opposition.

P.S. - To get to this point, be prepared to suffer without the aid of pharmaceuticals.

Conscious/Unconscious

2008-11-13T07:29:00.006-05:00

ALVA NOË is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He works principally on the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, with special interest in the theory of perception. The following is from a report about his work on Edge:

What is a human being? What is consciousness? There is a tremendous amount of enthusiasm at the moment about these questions.

They are usually framed as questions about the brain, about how the brain makes consciousness happen, how the brain constitutes who we are, what we are, what we want—our behavior. The thing I find so striking is that, at the present time, we actually can't give any satisfactory explanations about the nature of human experience in terms of the functioning of the brain.

What explains this is really quite simple. You are not your brain. You have a brain, yes. But you are a living being that is connected to an environment; you are embodied, and dynamically interacting with the world. We can't explain consciousness in terms of the brain alone because consciousness doesn't happen in the brain alone.

We should reject the idea that the mind is something inside of us that is basically a calculating machine. There are different reasons to reject this. But one is, simply put: there is nothing inside us that thinks and feels and is conscious. Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do.

So, when we seek to be conscious or - as is described by some religions and philosophies - to be enlightened, we must explore dwell not on our inner landscape while sitting on a pillow in a meditation hall and not in the wholly other external but rather in that space in between the two.

We must live in the interface between our interior and exterior worlds. We must recognize and name what we are experiencing in that space without judgment (our own or that put on us by institutions, society, family). Then - and only then - will we know the music of our own personal dance.

NOË continues: A dancer is locked into an environment, responsive to music, responsive to a partner. The idea that the dance is a state of us, inside of us, or something that happens in us is crazy. Our ability to dance depends on all sorts of things going on inside of us, but that we are dancing is fundamentally an attunement to the world around us. And this idea that human consciousness is something we enact or achieve, in motion, as a way of being part of a larger process...

To reflect on experience is not to look inward, it is to pay attention to what you are doing, and to the way in which what you are doing is world and situation and environment involving. Suppose I am a hiker. I walk along and move my legs in all sorts of subtle ways to follow a path along a trail. But the steps I take and the way I move my legs are modulated by, controlled by, the textures and bumps and patterns of the trail itself. There is a kind of locking in. To study experience, to think about the nature of experience, is to look at this two-way dynamic exchange between world and the active perceiver.

One Day More

2008-11-03T05:22:00.007-05:00

If you have not, check out the link to the video on the left "One Day More."

For those of you strung a little too tight about things political, maybe you shouldn't.

One day more and the noise of two years will be replaced by the noise after the fact. Whoever wins - McCain or Obama - will come under immediate attack by the opposition and the campaign will begin for 2012. Most of the noise before and after the fact of an election shows Americans not at their finest moment but at their poorest, their most self-centered.

In fact, the default setting for most political positions seems to be the "what serves me - the individual - best" mode. A candidate who raises taxes (when in fact they all do one way or the other) is vilified because they are taking "what's mine." A candidate who speaks in support of war is turned into a cannibal who eats "my son or daughter."

In the movie Matrix Reloaded, the infamous Agent Smith declares, "Me, me, me." That is the political landscape of America. What's in it for me? This type of self-centered thinking threatens our country, its democracy and even our species. It is the default setting given us by evolution and it doesn't work in an age of thermonuclear weapons and wide-spread poverty.

David Foster Wallace writes, "The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the 'rat race' - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing."

This is not the stuff of politics and not the way democracy is practiced. We vote and pontificate about what is best for us, not others. Where there is fear in modern society there is the desire of homo erectus to save his or her own ass, even if someone else gets eaten by the tiger lurking outside the cave. Of course, the tiger simply waits, still there.

This lack of far-sightedness in our political rhetoric speaks to our country's problem with death. If you realize that this whole matter before us - this life - is finite, even prone to sudden unpredictable exits that leave no sign you were here, you live differently. It is possible to live with that awareness. It is a choice not to.

In an article on All Saints' Day celebrations, Thomas Lynch wrote: "here in the United States...we whistle past our graveyards and keep our dead at greater distance, consigned to oblivions we seldom visit, estranged and denatured, tidy and Disney-fied memorial parks with names like those of golf courses or megachurches...The dead get buried but we seldom see a grave. Or they are burned, but few folks ever see the fire. Photographs of coffins returned from wars are forbidden, and news coverage of soldiers’ burials is discouraged. Where sex was once private and funerals were public, now sex is everywhere and the dead go to their graves often as not without witness or ritual."

Please note, for those who are prone to see everything as a political slight or promise, dead soldiers are the cost of war. It does not mean wars should or should not be fought. The point Mr. Lynch is making is that the cost should be visible so the decisions are made fully informed.

Actually, Mr. Lynch's point is much broader. He is suggesting that we have lost our way to living lives that rise above the mundane (e.g., sex - great stuff but even your dog knew that before the surgery!) because we have forgotten that this universe we have constructed out of our own egos - politics and all - is temporary and, in the worst case, damning.

The German filmmaker Herzog responding to a question about one of his works that paints a particularly bleak picture for homo sapiens said, "I listened to many voices of scientists, not just in climate change, but people who are vulcanologists, working in neutrino research, biologists, evolutionary biologists, etc. And it’s almost like one single voice that you hear – that the presence of human life on this earth is not sustainable. Climate change may be one of the things that will trigger our demise."

For those of you (many on the left of the political debate) too quick to see climate change as purely the byproduct of human activity, please note the planet has gone through any number of cataclysmic changes before our presence here began to impact the biosphere.

It is not so much the threat of extinction or mass population reductions that is so unique about our situation. It has happened before to other species. Ours, please note, does not get a pass on the laws of physics.

What is more interesting is that our species is the first to be able to investigate, explore and understand (in a rudimentary sense) climate change. We are the first species that might - with enough commitment to our own general welfare in the longer term (i.e., not commitment to making sure our right to own a SUV is protected) - be able to work with the planet to sustain ourselves longer than might otherwise have been the case.

Yet, as long as we are just a walking clone of Agent Smith (me, me, me) from the Matrix Reloaded, then Herzog is right - we are doomed. But it's not the cataclysmic end that should be worrying us. It is the wasteland of meaninglessness between the present moment and that time.

Every time the left vilifies the right and the right does so to the left, we heap more dirt on our heads extending our sentence to this wasteland.

Each time we chose based on what's best for us or what's best for America (which in every sense as demonstrated lately means, "what's best for me) we condemn ourselves to an early appointment with the executioner not of our bodies but of our souls.

The Real America

2008-10-27T08:44:00.010-04:00

Who Colin Powell endorsed on "Meet the Press" is a distant second to what he said to those who listened about America, the "real" America. He told Tom Brokaw that he was troubled by the fact that some people were insinuating that Barack Obama was a Muslim.

Powell said, “ Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim. He’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no. That’s not America. Is something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?”

In a climate where a derisive "us vs. them" has become the rallying point of a politics of hate that characterizes some parts of Virginia as "communist," Powell sets the record straight. America - the "real" America - is not about capitalism or even democracy but rather equal rights and opportunity.

Capitalism is not a perfect system. Better than socialism and communism but surely as we have come to know recently - flawed. Democracy - a favored buzz word used improperly by most who fling it about - is functional on local levels but at the highest levels cannot be trusted. There we function as a "republic" via the Electoral College. What sets America apart is the guarantee of equality protected by the law - this is where juris prudence functions at its highest level.

America has stumbled here as well making the content of someone's character secondary to the color of their skin, their gender, their sexual orientation and their religion. Slavery tars our past. Patriarchy prevented women from voting and continues to try to limit their potential in the marketplace. Racism is at the forefront of the current political landscape where it is getting the kind of attention that can help us overcome our natural tendencies - black, white, brown, yellow, red et al - to fear that which is different from us.

Progress - though slow, too slow - has been made and must continue. There is work still to do but Powell may have done more than anyone lately in moving the needle concerning religious freedoms. In America, you are free to follow the convictions of your faith where they take you. For Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan that freedom lead him to sacrifice his life for his country.

The truth is this much freedom is just too much freedom for some who fancy themselves as "real" Americans. Sadly, they are simply prisoners of a fear and rhetoric designed only to fuel a totalitarian view of life, faith and society.

I have in my mind the image of two men who attended one of my workshops on human consciousness. Both exceptionally bright, active readers, scientific in their search for the truth. Yet, when one turned the conversation to terrorism they both quickly descended on Islam as the source of all that is not America.

Never mind Timothy McVey - a facist Christian. Never mind the recent economic terrorism effected by radicals flying in corporate jets and wearing Italian suits. Never mind to young men like Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan with his awards — the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star- for service to his country and the ultimate sacrifice made with his life.

Shame on those two friends of mine. Shame on politicians who practice hate and divisiveness in their lust for power. They are better than that. America is better than that. Kudos to General Powell for daring to say as much.

Evolve or Die

2008-10-22T10:04:00.006-04:00

This is not so much for those that insist on the contrary but rather for those interested in improving their own awareness of tendencies that limit and damage the world at large and the individuals in it.

Racism - along with a number of the other “-isms” that manifest in our societies and cultures - is a byproduct of an evolutionary imperative toward fear of the unknown or different.

Those who say they are not racist or sexist - regardless of their race or gender - are suffering from denial about a basic tendency. Awaking to that tendency is the first step to freeing oneself from its limitations.

So, here’s the premise: The presidential campaign this year is an example of both denial and our own predisposition towards stereotyping that which is different or threatening. One way to test the premise is to switch things around a bit and see what conclusions we might draw about the candidates if they suddenly became one another except in terms of the color of their skin.

Take the following for example and ask yourself how it might change what people thought or how people voted? Would the election be as closely contested or the campaigns as given toward inflammatory rhetoric?

What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?

What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?

What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?

What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident?

What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?

What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?

What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem?

What if Michelle Obama's family had made their money from beer distribution?

What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?

This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one person and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference. The same thing happens with gender, sexual preferences, socio-economic strata.

There are many, many people who will miss the opportunity to awaken themselves to these features of our evolutionary programming that may have served us well in caves but threaten the existence of our species as a whole today.
 
There are some whose eyes will open to this - perhaps more than might have otherwise thanks to this campaign season. It almost makes the commercials and calls worth the aggravation.

The Shack

2008-10-18T05:39:00.007-04:00

Recently - through a series of pushes and nudges - I finally started reading The Shack.

If you have been to seminary, served as a minister in a mainstream denomination, taught comparative religion and held forth on the ills of institutionalized "faith", it is the kind of book people you know tend to ask if you have read.

During the first hundred pages or so, I was moved. Being a father, I felt the horror of Mack's loss of his daughter to a serial killer. The invasion of this unthinkable suffering is one of the most painful manifestations of randomness any human can contemplate. While saving one of his son from drowning, Mack loses his daughter to a sick, damaged, deranged devil animal who makes a practice out of torturing then killing children.

Being familiar with the general structure of the story, I was curious about the weekend Mack was called to spend in the shack with God - presumably to get an answer to the why of such brutality. The images the author assigned to the triune aspects of the Christian deity were clever, creative and even theologically compelling - a black matronly woman for God the "Father", a ethereal Asian female for the Holy Spirit and a plain - not too attractive - Jesus with a big nose. Not an old white male in the bunch.

In particular, I was so moved by the image of the character called Sarayu (who symbolized, in the storyline, the Holy Spirit) wiping away Mack's tears ("...we all collect things...I collect tears.."). I wept with Mack as I read this passage - out of my own pain and for the pain of our species, this planet, the creation. The suffering that is part of existence became a collective event in that part of the story and the sharing of the pain was a clear path toward making it bearable, even redemptive.

But, alas, it is hard to "sell" that concept.

So, sadly and predictably, the author then went on to turn his clever story line as a cheap religious tract for the old white man's religion. The reader is pushed, poked and prodded through the contortions that are the doctrine of the trinity, the theology of an omniscient, omnipotent God and the great blame game of original sin. A classic and disappointing bait and switch.

At that point, I wanted to take the gun Mack brought to the shack, in case he encountered the degenerate that killed his daughter and plug the author of the book. A strong reaction and deep. Over a day of reflection I realized that the passion of the response lay within my fatigue.

I am tired of one of the most powerful stories available to humanity - the gospel of Jesus of Galilee - being reduced to a system of superstition that encourages weakness, dependency and oppression, that provides cover for our fear of death and that ultimately cheapens life.

Is there little wonder that under the influence of such shoddy thinking our species has found its way to the brink of its own destruction? Heaven awaits! Let's hurry the process along! Sadly and frighteningly, this has been the thinking of more than one cabinet level or higher member of our government in my lifetime alone. It is not unique to Christianity - such apocalyptics - but that makes it no less flawed.

The author of The Shack - true to his roots as a son of missionaries - unapologetically makes clear his view that Christianity is the way - the best way, the only way - to salvation (whatever that is). He cheapens the suffering of his main character by allowing Mack to have a supernatural view of his murdered daughter safe in the next world (something - as far as I know - no parent who has lost a child to such tragedy has ever been afforded). He props it all up with the greatest get out of jail free card given to any deity - original sin.

It is disappointing and nearly criminal mostly because it had so much promise, because it could have been more.

Sure, The Shack makes the point that your beliefs manifest in your actions more than your words and the book deals more than a couple of body blows to the ostentatious nature of organized religion as practiced by too many but there is no news in this. This is the main message in the original teachings of Jesus which did not include an afterlife, a theology (beyond his own Judaism) or a call to prostelytize.

How many times are we going to murder the God who collects our tears in favor of a god who massages our egos, blames us for the mess and pacifies us with a promise of eternity that cheapens the meaning of life we have been given?

Apparently many, many times.

Boomsday

2008-10-14T06:32:00.008-04:00

"You know what the Boomer concept of sacrifice consists of? Three-day ground instead of overnight air delivery on your fifty-inch plasma screen high-def TV." - Christopher Buckley, Boomsday.

No generation is immune from its own frailties. Even the Greatest Generation - my father-in-law's band of brothers and sisters - while grand in many ways still possesses its own defects.

My father-in-law is a great member of this Greatest Generation because he knows this. He doesn't romanticize his generation or let others do it too long around him. Most of all - though a decorated veteran of WWII serving in Patton's battalion - he never glamorizes war or speaks to those days as being about other than a grim necessity.

Baby Boomers - my generation - seem to have their own special endowment of character liabilities. These traits have been exposed readily by the recent financial unpleasantness and, more specifically, by the run up to it (See: Irrational Exuberance).

These times have shown that many Boomers - middle class and up - run a gambit between theories of entitlement and being spoiled. This generation - that has made all previous definitions of self-indulgence look like understatement - needs what appears to be coming if it has any soul left to save.

There is a terrible fast food commercial (see it here) - the kind that makes you change the channel to watch a Scrabble tournament (recently on ESPN - maybe there will be encores). Without sound would make for a good piece of performance art about these "last days."

Two men in business attire complete with notebook computers are being pushed in a stroller by a woman when suddenly they realize they are hungry and begin to wail like spoiled children. The woman (there's always a woman - be it the motherly or trophy type) brings food to calm their upset. After they have the food, they then fight over it, though there is plenty for both.

That's my generation. Boomers through and through.

Boomsday. Pick up Christopher's book. Pick up all of his books. His satirical wit and outlandish characters are the stuff political campaign commercials should manifest. When you have had enough of the current lies de jour used by the candidates, imagine Buckley in an editing suite his wit and insight close at hand. Diogenes would be proud.

Of course, there are certain segments of the society who simply won't "get" Buckley's point - either due to IQ deficiency or that related condition known as "taking myself too seriously."

There are plenty of people who think The Simpsons are comedy rather than satire after all.

The "Natural" Is Not Always The Desirable

2008-10-07T10:05:00.008-04:00

A friend of mine sent a link to an article from an Israeli newspaper that offered an opinion about hate and race in politics. The content of this article was shared with a broader audience of people generally felt to be open-minded if not aligned with the same political theories. The reaction was interesting.

It ranged from anger to a decision to ignore the question with a prepared answer having nothing to do with the issue (a favorite of politicos of every stripe). It is interesting that such a range of reactions can still be elicited from people who have a good bit of common sense and a lot of what my grandmother called "book learnin."

Racism and hatred are part of our evolutionary wiring as much as self-defense and love of family. This does not make racism and hatred desirable - especially when the goal is for the species to expand its ability to survive in an interconnected and crowded environment - but neither does the undesirability of these features of our make up erase them from our thought process.

Evolutionary biologists have demonstrated that many tendencies among homo sapiens are easily connected to our not all that distant cave dwelling ancestors. For example, male homo sapiens maintain a desire to spread their genetic make up across as wide a selection of sexual mates as possible.

This tendency has been less prevalent in female homo sapiens who - 250,000 year ago (see On Losing One's Way for a look at just how recent 250,000 years ago can be)- needed the support of a male to protect and provide for her and her children in patriarchal societies.

Yet, only a male homo sapien who truly takes direction from somewhere besides his prefrontal cortex and who has a lawyer on retainer will pursue this mating strategy today. Sooner or later, most (not all) men "get it" though admittedly some are slower than others.

Our biology is outfitted for sensing risk and getting ourselves away from it as soon as possible. It is worth noting that we are not very good at applying these skills in modern financial markets, apparently. Nonetheless, we are wired to distrust differences in one another and to assume that different skin colors and sex and a host of other characteristics might impose a risk to us.

We are wired to be racists (regardless of the color of our skin), sexist (regardless of our gender) and nationalists (regardless of the fact that we hide this under the veil of patriotism). That does not mean, of course, that we have to respond to this wiring but we would be swimming against a significant tide in science to suggest it is not there.

Unfortunately, what I have learned today is that a large body of my fellow homo sapiens - across many time zones and continents - are in denial. They have short circuited their wiring by pretending to be something other than they are.

Most of these folks are not people who believe the world was created in a week (with a day for rest) by a white-bearded, male (oops), omnipotent, omniscient deity. Not all of them believe Darwin gets a hundred on his theory but they understand and endorse the idea that today we carry tendencies that served our ancestors well.

Until, though, we understand these are our tendencies, we stand no hope of rising above them whether we explain away politics of race and hatred with the old saw "that's just another tool of the left or right fringes" or ignore our own feelings thereby letting them control us. With a world in the shape ours is in - financially and otherwise - both tacts seem far too shortsighted if not irresponsible and dangerous.

On Losing One's Way

2008-10-04T07:26:00.004-04:00

"Store up treasure for yourselves in a heavenly account, where moths and rust do not consume, and where thieves cannot break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there you heart will also be." - Jesus of Galilee, Source: Q1.

The trick is not to lose your way, to become something other than what you are, to trade a more immutable treasure for something that rusts after the first heavy rain. It is quite a trick.

The pressures of daily life - whether in current times or the distant past - tempt us to forget the difference between that which lasts and that which doesn't. Evolution, it seems, has a focus.

Though we fancy ourselves to be quite advanced, in fact we are undoubtedly still strongly influenced by the basic instincts that drove our cave dwelling ancestors.

In fact, if you equate the estimated age of the earth (4.5 billion years) with a 24 hour clock (starting point 00:00, current point in time 24:00), homo sapiens made an appearance about 4.8 seconds ago (250,000 years). Homo erectus? That ancestor made an appearance 32.6 seconds ago.

What is astounding is not that we exhibit our most basic instincts (though we are clever enough to disguise them with our religions, politics and nationalism), it is rather that some (not as many as think they have) have risen above these instincts to point to a different way. By the way, those that have are not just the figures held up to us as spiritual heroes.

Men and women in every walk of life, in every socio-economic layer, of every color skin make decisions daily to rise above their instincts and emotions. However, if you see someone appearing on a talk show to essentially profess their enlightenment or accepting an award from their peers for behavior that seems to suggest a higher quality of human - they aren't amongst these few. Using your "goodness" to achieve position, power, money, prestige - that's been done to death across the millennia. Even our cave dwelling ancestors knew of that ploy.

Thursday night in Charlotte, NC I witnessed the fact that we are still just cavemen (and women) in suits (and skirts). There in a city shell shocked by the failure of its marquis financial institution (Wachovia), I watched drunkards and the lecherous (mostly one in the same) of both sexes determine what might make the best mating strategies in these strange times.

I saw the equivalent of chest pounding, butt sniffing and worse. Here's the kicker - I was there amongst them not participating directly in the behavior but playing the game. I was there to try and raise money for my startup alternative energy company. I came away wondering if I had lost my way.

Maybe we never lost our way. Maybe we just haven't found it yet. The question is will the species survive an environment where our base instincts are applauded and amplified - that is the modern world where fear is used to capture political position, keep parishioners in line and foster ignorance. The whole matter may hinge on whether we wake up to the fact that we are what we are. That has to precede any hope of being more.

By the way, for all those who believe the Flintstones are a true story, don't let such ponderings as these disturb your sleep.

Tolerance Vs. The Dangerously Underdeveloped Thought

2008-10-01T17:51:00.007-04:00

Being tolerant is admirable - as long as the thing being tolerated is of no consequence or has no impact on anyone other than the practitioner who is entitled to his or her own misery.

Tolerating ignorance is often beyond my abilities even when it falls within the boundaries noted above. When ignorance is held up as something admirable (or conversely intellect deemed some sort of liability) I usually cannot restrain myself.

That a significant part of the population in our country eligible to vote operates with such a complete absence of logic or even the pretense of needing the basic tenants of reason to defend their stances is simply frightening.

Personally, if the current trend continues, the vision painted by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale will seem such a probability that there may be justification in seeking asylum in a developed country.

Nothing like a good theocracy to cause nightmares. Ask Bonhoeffer how that theocracy thing works out. Oh yeah, you can't. Hitler killed him. In case anyone has forgotten, the swastika is a cross. No, wait, history and theology (at least the kind that requires thinking) - they have no real relevance when God is on our side.

I am feeling a little less tolerant these days.

The truth is that allegiance, faith, patriotism, publicy policy, political platforms without thoughtful reflection should not be tolerated with the "well everyone is entitled" excuse. They are not "entitled." They are dangerous.

Bonhoeffer said it best, “First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”

Maybe a little less tolerance would be a prudent thing.

Ten Guidelines For Living In A Random World

2008-09-29T05:35:00.006-04:00

Nassim Nicholas Taleb offers these ten guidelines for living in a random world (the one we live in qualifies) in an interview in The Times (London):

1) Skepticism requires effort. It is better to be skeptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2) Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3) It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4) Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behavior. You will always have the last word.

5) Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. For example: Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’ one way or the other.

6) Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximize trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7) Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8) Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9) Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10) Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Perspective

2008-09-17T09:42:00.007-04:00

Before and after Hurricane Ike, there were interviews with people who planned to stay behind and/or did stay behind. A common reason for staying related to their number of years in the community.

"We have lived here for 30 years," some said without elaboration. Others provided additional information, such as, "We've lived here for 30 years and we stayed through Hurricane Allison."

Thirty years in the live of a human is a significant amount of time. Using current average life span estimates, it is nearly one-half of a homo sapiens' lifetime if that member of the species lives in a developed country.

However, in terms of meteorology, 30 years is an inadequate sample for making life and death decisions such as whether to ride out a catastrophic hurricane in your house on stilts sitting in a flood zone on the edge of a giant bath tub otherwise known as the Gulf of Mexico.

Professionals - in this case meteorologists - perpetuate the tendency to understand when the perspective being taken is valid or absurd. Regularly, meteorologists measure rainfall levels based on last year's total or, best case, 50 year averages. Temperature averages are measured based on similar criteria. Flood zones are defined on 100 year cycles.

Science is a good thing. Scientists are dangerous. To the degree that meteorologists are scientists, they may be the most dangerous types of all (with the one exception surely being social scientists). Our planet has had numerous atmospheres in its lengthy life. Our brains are still hardwired with the habits and tendencies of our cave dwelling ancestors. How meaningful is it to make comparisons across 30, 50 or 100 years.

The problem is we do this in our own lives. We assume that our good fortune means we are on a roll. We start believing in our own uniqueness, even the brilliance of our conclusions, possibly that it was "meant" to be. Contrary to what we may believe stands the fact that a single life is way too small a sample from which to make sure extrapolations. The same goes with misfortune.

The fact is one does not need God, Yahweh or Allah to explain the capriciousness of life. Life is not capricious. It is random. Capriciousness implies an intent. Our lack of perspective and our tendency to think the universe revolves around us (Copernicus be damned) is a symptom of taking too small a sample for our research.

Our Original "Sin": We Are Not Rational Beings

2008-09-15T08:44:00.003-04:00

The followers of the Buddha arranged his teachings into four truths. These truths are that we live a live of suffering, that this suffering comes from our attachments (emotive in origin), that we can end this suffering through detachment and that detachment is learned by following the eightfold path.

The eightfold path is the Buddhist equivalent to the way of salvation through Christ that the Christians offer. The equivalent but not the same except in one aspect - you are broken. For mainstream Christians this is an original flaw. For Buddhists there can be an argument made that this brokenness is characteristic of the environment into which we are born. In other words, society/culture/parents (think psychoanalytically) changes our otherwise healthy spirit into something that is tortured, more or less.

The evolutionary psychologists simplify the matter far too much but the Christians/Buddhist perspective goes too far in the other direction. We are our emotions. Period. The idea that humans are predisposed to rational thinking is - alas - an fallacy that has been proven scientifically in fields as far flung as economics, biology, sociology, even biochemistry. We are what we feel.

Trying to "overcome" this tendency (detachment) before admitting that one is primarily an emotive being is what keeps religions in the money. It is better to embrace, accept, even attach to the fact that humans are emotional first and foremost (attachment here with the reality of our emotions not our tendency to think owning an iPhone will make us happy).

Starting here gives us a chance to use various tools to help us choose rationality when it is merited (and when our emotions allow us a pause to do so - meditation is helpful for cultivating this pause). Note: It is not always merited and it is many times overrated rationality. Life is not a math experiment and when math is used to explain life then there is a suffering even the Buddha could not imagine visited on us.

There Are None So Blind

2008-09-12T07:01:00.006-04:00

Whether an accurate description of life or not, I must live, act, assume that no truth is held to exist. Truth, by its very non-conditional state, excludes. Uptopia excludes its anti-thesis. To exclude is to err. To err is to sin...unless it isn't...as to exclude such a possibility is exactly the point.

I want to believe in truth, to have faith in this absolute or that certainty. I am biologically driven to desire to be part of the group, the pack, the herd. To not believe in absolutes makes one in the best case not desirable company and in the worst a candidate for the suicide watch. People want to believe in determinism, absolutes, truth irrefutable. To not do so makes one poor breeding stock.

We are uncomfortable sitting in our living rooms looking around at the trappings and the biases they express as products of chance. We prefer to see cause and effect misunderstanding the flow between them, mistaking these details of our lives as the result of our profound and powerful theologies, philosophies, politics, economic theories. All, not one, as they are very seldom travel solo.

So in our certainty we never fully consider the opposite as a possibility - that our trappings choose the theology, philosophy, political party, economic theory. Most never get to this possibility. Their truth eliminates it from consideration. The rest get few invites to socialize and are looked at as one does the crazy aunt or the occasional prophet mumbling to himself on a bench on a street in anytown.

Some remain tortured by the need in their genes to be part of the herd but unable to accept the blindness they see - unable not unwilling - to eliminate possibilities for convenience or comfort, not heroic but heuristic. Not living quietly desperate but rather desperately quiet for to speak is unwelcome.

Chasing The Sun

2008-09-11T07:20:00.005-04:00

I rise before dawn to chase the sun traveling East in search of food moving West at end of day. Morsels gathered are discounted by a mind that torments me with a too long view of what could be. Randomness intersects purpose creating chaos from which I struggle to distill meaning.

It is all randomness. Determinism is the bedtime story we tell ourselves because we cannot stand the idea of chance playing such a role in how we live and where we die. Yet, it does. Underneath all the ideas of will and purpose brought to chaos and the random by some higher power, purpose, being is but a tranquilizer.

Yet, the universe breathes in and then out. It does not shrug or laugh or hope. It simply is and does and expands at an ever increasing rate boggling our ideas about atrophy after the Big Bang. We are a molecule, a dot, a spot, a speck.

The canvas is painted with colors seen too often as dark and depressing but here lies the light and the new day. Randomness is the order of things. Chaos is the movement through this order. Meaning is ours to discover inside our hearts not beyond the stars in some holy other that explains away our fears.

Choosing Good Over Evil

2008-08-23T19:59:00.007-04:00

“The sacrifice which causes sorrow to the doer of the sacrifice is no sacrifice. Real sacrifice lightens the mind of the doer and gives him a sense of peace and joy. The Buddha gave up the pleasures of life because they had become painful to him.” - Gandhi

The idea of sacrificing oneself for a "greater good" is in the fabric of nearly every spiritual teaching past and present. It is considered a higher calling. Any semblance of it in life forms other than humans is generally attributed to instinct though on occasion the dolphins, whales and elephants are given some credit for sacrifices driven by something deeper than biology.

The idea that bacteria might be able to destroy themselves in service to a "greater good" - instinct or otherwise - has little precedent. Researchers, however, have found that such a phenomenon is common practice with samonella.

ScienceDaily reports: Inside the gut, the samonella bacteria forms two groups that engage in job-sharing. A first group invades the tissue, triggers an inflammation, then dies. A second group waits inside the gut until the inactivation of the normal intestinal flora gives them an opportunity to strike.This second group then multiplies unhindered.

This raises a question much larger than may be obvious at first. If the universe creates us - moment to moment - and free will is not about the details but how we respond to them, then can we speak in any absolute sense about our role in the creating of the details or evaluating them good, bad or otherwise?

Is there any real sense to which anything we do is absolute in any sense as nothing we do is outside the scope of creation as it occurs moment to moment? In other words, does anything we "do" matter nearly as much as our "being?" What would the world "be" like if what we "did" was secondary to who we are in the present moment?

This is very difficult to grasp because we are taught from the moment we exit the womb that even who we are is about what we do - the good child, the wild child, the honor student, the punk, the employed, the unemployed, the double-wide dwellers and those gated. You can even see this deep confusion manifest in the words written in this blog especially in the last three entries. The author is "doing" philosophy not experiencing a love for wisdom, not telling you about the dark nights of the soul and the thin light of dawn that were the labor pains for making these realizations authentic in his life.

In Taoism, some sages talk about "being outside the Tao." This is impossible. There is no "outside" to the Tao. When you are outside it, you are still in it. We cannot step outside the universe, creation, the presence of God. To live is to be in it and to be in it is to participate.

We create each time we draw a breath. We have no choice. Creating is not an option. It is the only absolute for in nature, science and even the abstract world of ideas when we destroy we create regardless of whether we intend to or not. Take nihilism for example - the absence of a belief in anything. The ultimate destruction of faith, even hope, yet the absence of a belief in anything is....a belief. The absence of hope, despair, sets up its own kind of dark longing.

What we do have a choice about is how we experience the moment of being we are aware of just now. Here we must avoid labels like good, bad, beautiful, ugly, etc simply because they suggest a separation that does not exist. When we are good, we are bad as well. The two are one. All we can do is have the experience as we find it most meaningful. This is as troubling to us as the idea that there is no choice in the details only in our reaction to them. We need, want, desire and are attached to labels that compare, measure, evaluate because they feed our ego need for elevation, separation, isolation.

Victor Frankl is a great read regarding meaning. Victor - who was in the concentration camps of World War II - taught that we can't do anything about the life we are in or the death that comes to us...but we do have choice about how we act and react in it.

Our dogs do not appear to have a type of consciousness that allows for this choosing. They are instinctual animals. Bacteria that self-destruct to serve the needs of the many are most likely responding to something hardwired within them - they have no choice.

We appear to be able to go against our instincts in allegiance to something that is not bound by the moment but arises in it. We can choose to die in a noble fashion even when the situation bringing our death is ignoble. We can live in seemingly hopeless situations and maintain a hope that does not delude us but does empower us. Even a few can find in success and wealth meaning, though as Jesus noted this is a harder thing than working toward meaning a life made of needs not wants.

Though, even this free will we do not want to elevate to an extreme lest we create that "terminal uniqueness" that is the ego. We always must remember that we do not know enough to judge whether our dogs or samonella are acting out of instinct or choice expressed in a way we do not understand. After all, cross species consciousness is tricky, tricky business.

For now, though, it would be liberating just to surrender our illusion that we are somehow more special or more central to the universe than any other element or life it is calling into existence just now, just here. When I look into my heart for the feelings that accompany such a surrender I find an unwillingness that is the proof of the point. The ego is a mechanism, a tool, a software application that is present in us to serve a limited function. When we make it the operating system for our existence, we suffer.

Size Matters

2008-08-23T04:34:00.007-04:00

Soon, it was equally difficult to judge the “least” from the “first.” Each citizen had housing, health care, food, clothes, and basic necessities. There was no security in amassing great proportions of anything and no insecurity in having just what was needed and no more. The great estates became beneficent care centers for elders, for the sick, for the lonely.

Public parks, green spaces, and communal gathering places abounded in what were formerly exclusive clubs. Pastors and priests moved their congregations from great cathedrals and churches to prisons, the only remaining institutions, where the interaction brought rehabilitation and redemption to both sets of congregants. Hoarded valuables were freed from their suffocating safety-deposit boxes and glimmered in the light of day.

Great works of art and the contents of private libraries were shared, engendering more great works. The environment recovered from the toll of conspicuous consumption and from the corporate mindset of profits at any price. Violence subsided. Drug dealers, losing their impoverished clientele to Hope and their bored mega-rich customers to Meaning-Filled lives, joined ad men and lobbyists, home security system techs, and the IRS to be re-trained for useful employment.

Other nations, observing the booming economy and the well-being of a politically involved and needs-met citizenry, began to follow suit, thereby enabling diplomacy to replace military intervention, and freeing up huge portions of the national budget for domestic needs. - Robin Carter, The Great Leveling

A friend responded to the last post with a quote concerning the idea that we (humans) are able to co-create the universe before us. The human tendency toward control is attracted to this concept and there is some science behind it in quantum physics with its entanglement of observer and observed.

However, always troubling to the theory that we co-create our lives through some application of intention is the child starving to death in a famine, dying of cancer, or suffering from physical/sexual/emotional abuse. The causal aspects of these situations are not difficult to sort out. Famines are byproducts of weather and economics. Cancers have a strong link to environmental conditions - i.e., the presence of certain toxins in almost all cases introduced through human activity. Children are broken and beaten by the adults around them for reasons that are usually directly linked to the treatment the adults doing the breaking and beating received when they were young.

There are people with strong attractions to the idea of intention and co-creation who attempt to explain how a child chooses to create such conditions for him or herself. These explanations are unsatisfying to me rooted as they are in an idea about free will that is clearly ego-centric. We do not choose to create and therefore can judge one to be more skilled at creating this or that than another.

We cannot help but create. The canvas we find to paint on may not be our choice but to paint on it is the very nature of life. The painting can be dark and destructive or full of color and light but all of this is creation - good, evil, light, dark. To breath even but for a second is to create in some dimension, in some capacity.

The problem with the whole idea of intention or will (God's, ours or otherwise) is it seems too closely rooted to the super-serving tendencies of our egos. The idea that we co-create our lives, for example, is terribly grandiose especially since most who espouse it live very privileged lives. I have never heard a homeless person or someone being crushed by the poverty speak about intentionally co-creating the universe and I reject that enough positive thinking on their part will change the tune of the song playing out in their lives.

It might be more interesting (and philosophically sound) to flip the question. How do we not know that the universe is creating us? Isn't more logical to suggest that the rocks, trees, animals, air, economic systems, political structures, skin color, gender, sexual preference - all of these things - are calling us into being? Isn't that far more likely and much more "right-sized" when it comes to considering our position in the universe.

Why do we think we have any more control over what happens to us in the complex adaptive systems we move through - from the miracles of our bodies to the orbits of the galaxies - than our dogs? Their bodies are just as miraculous and the galaxies just as influential to their fates (one stray asteroid will get all of us - dogs, cats, people) yet not too many people make a case for these critters creating the intention or attracting the will that manifests in their lives?

If the universe creates us, if we have no choice but to participate, if our intention has no influence on the actual details and if the power that flows through the cosmos (call it God or whatever you wish) is not uniquely focused on us, what of free will? Are we simply living a predetermined existence some more fortunate in the details than others?

No.

Again there are scientific reasons for an answer in the negative. Complex adaptive systems and the details of chaos theory tell us that each moment at various levels of reality subtle, random shifts are made that even if we could know all of them down to their last nanosecond, the outcome is not predictable. This is not because our processing power is too limited but rather it is the nature of the universe. Its destination is unknowable.

That is where the metaphysics (beyond physics) comes into play. The destination of the universe is unknowable because the universe is not "going" anywhere. It has no destination. It simply is. Now. Here. This is key to understanding free will. Free will is not about the ability to choose our situation or our destination. Rather it is about choosing how to respond to the present moment, to the universe as it is creating you and me now, here, in this place with all of its details.

If the rich and poor thought of their lives in this fashion, they would both cease to exist - there would be no basis for materialism, no tolerance for poverty. No one is keeping score because there is not end to the game. Indeed, there is no game, no end game, no destination. No even death.

The Anti-Christ

2008-08-22T05:27:00.007-04:00

Accordingly, since nothing prevents the earth from moving, I suggest that we should now consider also whether several motions suit it, so that it can be regarded as one of the planets. For, it is not the center of all the revolutions. - Copernicus

It's not so much the "God" thing that creates the problem. The confusion - and the damage - come from separating God's will from God's power.

A power greater than my individual capacities - more comprehensive than the collective power of our entire species - clearly exists in the cosmos as we have come to know it (which is hardly at all). Call this whatever is at hand - God, Big Bang, Creative Force, It Is What It Is, Higher Powers, Science - but when doing so understand the complete scope of it.

We can and might destroy the planet and this probably would impact the solar system but the galaxy and larger universe would normalize the whole matter in an hour and half (relatively speaking). Copernicus should have changed forever our perceptions of where we fit in the greater scheme of things. Not at the center but part of the whole. Connected not elevated.

There's the rub. If this God, Big Bang, et al has a will why must it be about us as opposed to about everything that is? Herein is the source of wars, suffering and all manner of what would only be called evil were it not wrapped in religious garb. The concept that God's will is a personal event that funnels God's power into this situation or that. This is the very reason we should never elect a leader who even hints at the idea that God or Allah or any other deity gives him or her marching orders. Buckle your seat belts Dorothy cause Kansas is going bye-bye.

Unfortunately, the reaction to the manifestation of this theology often has been as damaging as the theology itself. Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ would make a Freudian and Jungian smile (Nietzsche's father was a minister) as it should but the real tragedy is the "tossing the baby out with the bath water" that characterizes some existentialism.

Existentialists and nihilists have a fondness for shouting "you are alone, completely alone." and then adding in a "it is all meaningless" for good measure. This is no more sound in its logic than the theology of God's will walking around inside too many people's heads.

Clearly, I am not alone - look around - and neither is it all meaningless - though arguably my meaning and yours may not be the same in any fashion (which troubles those who like power over as opposed to power with). Just as clear is the fact that this universe is not about me (or you or the human race). It's about the universe as a whole animated as it were with power we have yet to even find a source for much less a cause. God's power, if you like, or something else that suits your point of view.

Copernicus, however, told us a truth that we still too often refuse to accept - we are not the center of the universe. God, science, philosophy, theology - pick your poison - should not be sought as some form of personal pacifier. It discounts that which is sought and the seeker particularly.

The Genius Myth

2008-08-18T14:43:00.005-04:00

But I have observed that the genius-myth belongs to the very young. Those who insist on dressing up in it after fifty become slightly grotesque. By then one has survived, presumably. And one has settled for ding what one can, as well as one can, and taking the rest, so far as possible, as a joke on one's own pretensions. - May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep

Lord of the Flies

2008-08-15T19:39:00.011-04:00

From The Movie: The Life of David Gale

David Gale: So, basically, you feel, to choose another quote, 'society must be cleansed of elements which represent its own death.'

Governor Hardin: Well, yes. I'd have to agree. [laughs]

Governor Hardin: Did I say that too?

David Gale: No, that was Hitler.

"Which is better--to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?" - William Golding, Lord of the Flies, Ch. 11

Cowards become what they fear. Fear itself is not the problem. Fear is no different than a smell one finds interesting or even disturbing. It is an indication of something that may require action or may not.

Cowards react to fear by lashing out at others. They must reveal their own impotence. Those who are not cowards respond to fear by looking within at what they are afraid of and determine who they want to be - now, in this moment, faced with these fears.

This from current events:

Several members of Congress who disagree with the President on foreign policy especially Iraq, individuals who have written books critical of the Bush administration, the 9-11 hijackers along with Saddam Hussein (even though all are dead), decorated army officers (including a General who holds the military's highest honors), John Anderson (a seven year old from Minneapolis) and a million other folks are on the terrorist watch list.

Yet, the most wanted terrorists in the world are not on the list. They are in the system but the TSA does not want to allow anyone outside of their agency to see the names.

The U.S. government can seize your laptop, cell phone or PDA as you enter the U.S. and download all your private information—all without a warrant or probable cause.

Approximately 20,000 new names a month are added to the Terrorist Watch List.

Welcome to the Lord of the Flies.

Middle Passage

2008-08-03T06:43:00.009-04:00

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.

I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.

But after I had reached a mountain's foot,
At that point where the valley terminated,
Which had with consternation pierced my heart,

Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders,
Vested already with that planet's rays
Which leadeth others right by every road.

And lo! almost where the ascent began,
A panther light and swift exceedingly,
Which with a spotted skin was covered o'er!

And never moved she from before my face,
Nay, rather did impede so much my way,
That many times I to return had turned.

The hour of time, and the delicious season;
But not so much, that did not give me fear
A lion's aspect which appeared to me.

He seemed as if against me he were coming
With head uplifted, and with ravenous hunger,
So that it seemed the air was afraid of him;

And a she-wolf, that with all hungerings
Seemed to be laden in her meagreness,
And many folk has caused to live forlorn!

She brought upon me so much heaviness,
With the affright that from her aspect came,
That I the hope relinquished of the height.

And as he is who willingly acquires,
And the time comes that causes him to lose,
Who weeps in all his thoughts and is despondent,

E'en such made me that beast withouten peace,
Which, coming on against me by degrees
Thrust me back thither where the sun is silent.

Blessings

2008-08-02T06:18:00.013-04:00

Sometimes a man

stands up during

supper and walks

outdoors, and keeps

on walking,

because

of a church

that stands

somewhere

in the East.

And his children

say blessings on

him as if he

were dead.

And another man, who remains inside

his own house, stays there, inside the dishes

and in the glasses, so that his children

have to go far out into the world

toward that same church, which he forgot.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

I want to stay home, inside the dishes and glasses, leave the journey East to my children who must have a better stomach for suffering and salvation than I.

But there is no choice really. Soul and self know truth from lies. They rise to destroy one in service to the other caring not for collateral damage.

I hate this journey East. It is raw, revealing and a damnation. Surely man created God for just this - to plead for relief and to curse when it does not come.

Dogma, Drugs, Discipline, Dis-ease

2008-07-27T20:32:00.005-04:00

The first half of life we serve society - engagement. The second half of life we turn inward - disengagement. - Joseph Campbell

I often - too often and nearly always - find my gaze fixed outside myself. Looking for that which is missing, for the answer needed, for the meaning of life.

It is a reflex well developed. An infant’s vulnerability fixed my orientation toward the all powerful and external. Childhood and the extended adolescence of Western civilization sans rites of passage confirmed it.

Not here, inside. Out there. A god, a guru, a girl. Someone, something carries my personal grail.

Now, just now, it is starting to feel all wrong. Five decades into this whateveritis - looking, straining, hoping desperately - it has the taste of fouled meat. To continue will make me deathly ill.

Terminally ill, actually. It is for many - and maybe for me - a terminal illness. The Middle Passage is where the terminally ill seek a cure or an escape.

The illness, like cancer, a life turned against itself. A childman only playing by the book, the only book given. Reads and memorizes then finds the book contained the pathogen.

Again, I look outside to find someone to make it “right.” It is unfair, this. Unfair to parent, child, man, woman. We do what we are told is expected and adjust to the limitations of our nurturing. For this effort, we are granted the gift of dis-ease.

If we are lucky.

Meaning if poverty, neurosis, psychosis, racism, sexism, accidental, physical, bacterial, viral illness does not crush us...then we get a chance to suffer soul sickness.

Here I sit with a sick soul, sick unto death soul, sick of the rack soul, sick of the bullshit and noise and screaming, devouring rage.

And though I know that the cure is inside, I look outward for a drug, a dogma, a discipline.

2008-07-26T09:31:00.004-04:00

...one turtle swimming in ocean. Swimming, swimming. All alone, ocean so vast. And somewhere, somewhere, floating on the ocean, a kind of …ring. Floating, floating. So. One time - every hundred years - turtle comes up to surface of ocean. What chance, you think, turtle will come up through ring? What chance? Very small, I think. Very, very small. But to be born as human being - this is an even smaller chance. Much smaller! Better chance of turtle coming up through ring than of a sentient being taking a human rebirth. Understand? So what this means? It means this: Human life is very, very rare. Very, very precious. And if you understand how precious, and how rare, you will never waste. - Tibetan Buddhism

I am a misanthrope. My fellow humans disgust me with their trivialities, their banalities, their simple mindedness, their fear of original thoughts - all worn like a badge of accomplishment in the service of "being happy."

Cows to the slaughter. Consuming they are consumed, manipulated, fed into sausage grinders called war and poverty. Numb and dumb, the majority. Believing they are creation's highest calling. Tranquilizers to make them better cogs in the machine. Sedatives to bring sleep without dreams.

I hate them. I envy them. I am one of them.

So absorbed in my own horizons that I cannot, do not, will not embrace the meaning of the ring floating on the water. Here, now, this and these rarer than any gem - the worst of them - rarer than any gem.

The Idiot

2008-07-23T08:35:00.005-04:00

"But, look here, are you a great hand with the ladies? Let's know that first?" asked Rogojin.

"Oh no, oh no!" said the prince; "I couldn't, you know - my illness - I hardly ever saw a soul."

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

I watch myself, disengaged but not detached.

As I boy, detached I watched other children ride the roller coaster, my horror at such heights and depths hiding the fact that the tracks held firm, the destination known to them.

Now, disengaged I watch not others but my life, as its choices and chance shape the ride of a trackless coaster plunging into bottomless pits rising to glimpse the sun. Night without stars replacing all in the next instance.

How is it that even in the brightness of day, the darkness is implied, known...while when in the grips of the Absence not even the faintest glimmer of light can be hoped?

2008-07-22T19:58:00.002-04:00

We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.

We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy...

He felt her there, he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of cataract unseen but suspected far behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a pray mantis from dieting, and her flesh like white bacon. He could remember her no other way.

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

2008-07-21T07:54:00.004-04:00

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. - Wendell Berry, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

The old white man creates an old white god. The angry woman creates an angry goddess. The rich create a god that "gives them what they deserve." The poor create a god of the oppressed.

Black - black god. Yellow - yellow god. Red - red god. Communist, socialist, capitalist - god or godless according to the economic need. Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Zoroastrians...gods for each by each serving each.

Prisons of a point of view.

Tool and translator for meaning moral, immoral, amoral. A shell game for hiding intent from the player and the played. A worn, dirty, moth-eaten blanket that pretends warmth in the coldest, darkest night.

I am not warmed.

No One

2008-07-20T13:02:00.004-04:00

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well,
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
- Those Winter Sundays, Robert Hayden

Rain on the morning breeze from the east. A locust lands near my feet, tries to rise, revealing a wasp stinging its soft underside. Life and death are not carefully timed for the locust or the wasp. They unfold in a dance between chaos and cause.

The is no One keeping score, pulling strings, manipulating the details, arranging for meaning. I look out of a tower on a hillside naming what I see but it is only me, only me. It is obvious but well hidden behind tools parading as truth.

The locust eats the leaves on the tree, burrows into the bark. The wasp eats the locust. The birds the wasp. I search for some truth or for elevation from the solitude of it. Make myself mighty, separate from the wasp, the locust. Give myself a God to bless or blame.

No One is keeping score, minding the game, calling fouls, awarding points, protecting from injury, preventing the cheat. And that is the good news.

The very good news.

The Absent Presence

2008-07-18T19:18:00.004-04:00

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t.

….civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency.

(God) manifest himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times he manifested himself as the being that’s described in these books. Now…he manifest himself as an absence…

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability.

- Aldous Huxley, A Brave New World

Owl Visit

2008-07-18T15:53:00.008-04:00

He lay on the couch night after night,
mouth open,
the darkness of the room
filling his mouth,
and no one knew
my father was eating his children.
- Saturn, Sharon Olds

Early, before dawn, an owl comes near and calls repeatedly. Haunting the space around me with songs of the dead.

This owl comes to mark the entrance to a darkness in my soul that I no longer hide, because I cannot. The doors are closed, the windows are shut, the air inside stifles the breath.

The owl does not know me or care about my soul suffering. This is beyond its knowing. It only moves as it must riding clouds that are hidden and hide the moon.

The owl grants a rite of visitation to despairing places from which I cannot imagine sunshine or the dancing of butterflies or even the beauty of those I cherish.

Then by that same chance, a curtain is lifted, a window opened, I gulp in the cold air of winter dressed in bright sunlight. I can no longer imagine the wasted land that possessed me.

But I remember. It is neither inoculation nor vaccine.

2008-07-17T08:45:00.005-04:00

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success or money and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears. - Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

I dream of drowned animals - my dog, raccoons, foxes - of bears with wounded paws (wounded by my actions) and of wolves angry, threatening. I read Native American mythologies about these animals and find in these messengers suggestions of treasures lost.

The dog drowns and takes with it the ability to heal emotional wounds, to understand the duality of faith and doubt, to love, to know the sensual, to protect, to smell trouble. The raccoon lies dead and with it the ability to use disguises, employ dexterity, a willingness to seek guidance, a deep confidence, a questioning without fear, a balancing curiosity.

Perhaps the fox, bear and wolf are the deepest wounds. The fox is a cunning, intelligent and providing animal. A bear’s paw the symbol of direction and power. The wolf a teacher of new ideas and wisdom, source of intense loyalty balanced with independence, teacher of cooperation, protectiveness and the value of extended families.

Why am I shown these? Why are they dead or injured and what killed them? The death and injury disturbs me deeply, fills me with grief, fits the landscape of carnage I see as my life sitting in a dark valley after sunset.

I do not think of striking back at who or what committed these acts perhaps because I know I am the perpetrator. I only sit on the verge of weeping wanting to believe in resurrection, awaiting new guides.

Rage Against The Machine

2008-07-15T04:01:00.004-04:00

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections, And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly,that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repeantance, long, difficult repentence, realisation of life's mistake and the freeing of oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify. - D.H. Lawrence, Healing

The Other End Of Night

2008-07-14T10:07:00.010-04:00

Traveller, you have come a long way led by that star,
But the kingdom of the wish is at the other end of the night,
May you fare well, companero; let us journey together joyfully,
Living on catastrophe, eating the pure light.
- Thomas McGrath, Epitaph

Reincarnation In A Single Lifetime

2008-07-12T19:13:00.004-04:00

Siddhartha now also realized why he had struggled in vain with this Self when he was a Brahmin and an ascetic. Too much knowledge had hindered him; too many holy verses, too many sacrificial rites, too much mortification of the flesh, too much doing and striving. He had been full of arrogance; he had always been the cleverest, the most eager [ always a step ahead of the others, always the learned and intellectual one, always the priest or the sage. His Self had crawled into this priesthood, into this arrogance, into this intellectuality. It sat there tightly and grew, while he thought he was destroying it by fasting and penitence. Now he understood it and realized that the inward voice had been right, that no teacher could have brought him salvation. That was why he had to go into the world, to lose himself in power, women and money; that was why he had to be a merchant, a dice player, a drinker and a man of property, until the priest…in him were dead. That was why he had to undergo those horrible years, suffer nausea, learn the lesson of the madness of an empty futile life till the end, till he reached bitter despair, so that Siddhartha the pleasure-monger and Siddhartha the man of property could die. He had died and a new Siddhartha had awakened from his sleep. He also would grow old and die.

- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha