Tasting a Tangerine

"Often, instead of tapping in to our direct experience, we substitute concepts. An exercise we sometimes do in one of my classes at Naropa University to highlight this phenomena involves mindful eating. Many Buddhist teachers encourage their students to try this exercise on a regular basis. In class, we might take a tangerine and begin by silently looking at it. We examine the texture, color, and shape of the particular piece of fruit in front of us. We pick it up and notice what it feels like in the hand. We might hold it up to our ear and see what sounds occur as we roll it in our fingers. Slowly, we begin to peel it. We sniff and notice its aroma. When thoughts arise of past tangerines or imaginings about how this one will taste, we notice them and let them go, by coming back to this tangerine in this moment. Carefully, but not too carefully, we separate out a section, and taking our time, we bring it to our mouth. We continue the exercise by noticing the spontaneous preparations that the mouth takes as the section of tangerine approaches. Then we taste it as if we've never tasted a tangerine before--and in fact, we never have tasted this tangerine before. We continue in this way until we've eaten the entire tangerine, letting each moment be unique.

This exercise highlights not only the details of the present moment of eating a tangerine; it also reveals, often rather pointedly, how often we miss the present moment. All too often, instead of tasting the tangerine, we taste our ideas about it. For example, I "know" that I don't like tangerines. I even have good reasons for my distaste: tangerines are acidic, they sting my chapped lips in the winter, they can be messy. However, if I just do the above exercise, and taste a particular tangerine, it is quite different from my mental tangerine."

-Karen Kissel Wegela from The courage to be present: Buddhism, psychotherapy, and the awakening of natural wisdom

Teach Me

I would love it if I could go to a website, type in something I'm interested in learning- say, "19th Century Philosophy" - and then immediately be taken to a curriculum composed entirely of on-line information -- articles, full texts, videos, lectures, tables & pictures. The curriculum would start with the most basic information about the subject - and once the visitor felt like they fully understood the basics they could graduate themselves on to the next level.

Right now I spend a lot of time reading books and watching videos that contain repeated or irrelevant information, and I'd like it if there were a service that arranged relevant information in a sequential & complementary fashion so I could learn it more quickly.

The article Every Shareholder Should Read This Now contains a suggested reading list of books on investing, organized in this way:

Emotional Freedom Technique - Tapping

I've done this the last two days, and I'm pretty much sold on it. It has already made me feel better about some things that were causing me stress.

Alan Watts - A Conversation With Myself

Thanks to Eric Dubay for the link, he has the entire thing posted here.

Dr. Quantum: Double Slit Experiment

Thanks to Cameron for the link

Waking Up: Liberation from Ego

"Waking up to the true nature of your being means essentially
only one thing, and that is liberation from the confines of your ego,
thereby letting yourself be more fully yourself and more responsible for
your personal experience of the reality game. Waking up does not
mean developing paranormal powers or anything mystical or
mystifying at all. It simply means liberating yourself from your ego
and thereby living a happier and more satisfying life. It doesn’t mean
you’ll be able to “manifest” anything you want, or “create your own
reality,” as are popular beliefs among New Age aficionados. Nor does
it mean developing psychic powers as Buddhism and Hinduism claim.
And it especially does not mean developing an ability to travel in astral
realms or visit alien civilizations or any such fantastical nonsense.
Waking up is simply about being fully present and authentic with your
energy at all times and is best described as being energetically open.
When you can do that, your ego will no longer have a hold on you.
When your ego no longer has a hold on you, you won’t be taken in by
fantasy and ego-projection. You won’t engage with others’ self-created
dramas and power-plays and you’ll understand how to avoid making
ones of your own. You will be happier and you will feel supreme love
for yourself and for God (which are one and the same). You will be at
peace."

Martin Ball, from Being Human

John Gray on Life

Eric's Esoterics

Eric linked me to another Eric:

http://ericdubay.blogspot.com/

Good stuff.

Venus's Orbit and Its Harmonic Relation to Earth

"Venus rotates extremely slowly on her own axis in the opposite direction to most rotations in the solar system. Her day is precisely two-thirds of an Earth year, a musical fifth. This exactly harmonizes. . . so that every time Venus and Earth kiss, Venus does so with the same face looking at the Earth." Eight Earth years equals, exactly, thirteen Venus years, the five kisses between them crafting a perfect pentagon, carved out of space. The numbers 5, 8, and 13 belong to the Fibonacci sequence, defining Phi.

Every 243 years, Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun twice in eight years-- a pair of "Venus transits," visible to the naked eye. In our own time, an initial transit occurred on June 8, 2004, to be matched by a second on June 6, 2012. The Venus transits also reflect the harmonic relation between the two orbits--in those 243 Earth years, exactly 365 Venus days will have passed.
-- From 2012 by Daniel Pinchbeck

The Weather Underground

A great documentary on the Weather Underground -- This really was an interesting watch for me after reading Dave Pollard's recent posts on serious resistance to the destruction of the Alberta Tar Sands combined with my hopes for an (r)evolution in consciousness.

From the clip above:
"I still have hope. I don't think we're going to have a revolution in 5 years like I did in 1970 but I definitely think that people never stop struggling and never stop waiting for the moment when they can change the things that make their lives unlivable."

Amit Goswami, Quantum Physics & Consciousness

The Roots of Consciousness

The Roots of Consciousness by Jeffrey Mishlove, PHD

Can't wait to read more - the section on Consciousness and the New Physics is very thorough.

Understanding Being

Please stop trying to understand Being. You have already had significant glimpses of Being, but the mind will always try to squeeze it into a little box and then put a label on it. It cannot be done. It cannot become an object of knowledge. In Being, subject and object merge into one.

--Eckhart Tolle, Power of Now, 88

Isolated and Broken

"A 2006 American Sociological Review study ("Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades") reported that, in 2004, 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant. (In 1985, 10 percent of Americans reported not having a single confidant.) Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, describes how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of U.S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization, commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased."
-- Bruce E. Levine

From Alternet.org "Are Americans a Broken People? Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression"
Thanks Dave for the link

How to do all things:

At any given moment in time, we are what we are; and we have to accept the consequences of being ourselves. Only through this acceptance can we begin to evolve further.
[...]
In general, mankind almost always acts with attachment; that is to say, with fear and desire. Desire for a certain result and fear that the result will not be obtained. Attached action binds us to the world of appearances; to the continual doing of more action. But there is another way of performing action, and that is without fear and without desire.
[...]
People often confuse non-attachment with fatalism, when in fact, they are opposites. The fatalist simply does not care. He will get what is coming to him. Why make the effort? But the doer of non-attached action is the most conscientious of men. Freed from fear and desire, he offers everything he does as a sacrament of devotion to his duty. All work because equally and vitally important. It is only to the results of work - success or failure - that he remains indifferent. When action is done in this spirit, Krishna teaches, it will lead us to the knowledge of what is behind all action, behind all life: the ultimate Reality. And, with the growth of this knowledge, the need for further action will gradually fall away from us. We shall realize our true nature, which is God.

Appendix II, The Gita and War
Bhagavad-Gita: The Song of God
translated and appendix presumably written by: Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood

.........

"My God, give me the grace to perform this action with You, and through love for You. In advance I offer to you all the good that I may do, and accept all the difficulty I may meet therein."

The Direction of Intention
St. Franis DeSales

Going to Salesianum (House of DeSales) High School, I had to say this at the start of every day and every class. Simple and profound, and highly compatible with the above sentiments.

Who's Crazy Here?

Are the mystics and sages insane? Because they all tell variations on the same story, don't they? The story of awakening one morning and discovering you are one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and infinite fashion. Yes, maybe they are crazy, these divine fools. Maybe they are mumbling idiots in the face of the Abyss. Maybe they need a nice, understanding therapist. Yes, I'm sure that would help. But then, I wonder. Maybe the evolutionary sequence really is from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, each transcending and including, each with a greater depth and greater consciousness and wider embrace. And in the highest reaches of evolution, maybe, just maybe, an individual's consciousness does indeed touch infinity—a total embrace of the entire Kosmos—a Kosmic consciousness that is Spirit awakened to its own true nature. It's at least plausible. And tell me: is that story, sung by mystics and sages the world over, any crazier than the scientific materialism story, which is that the entire sequence is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing? Listen very carefully: just which of those two stories actually sounds totally insane?

—Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything, 42–3


If what is at issue is not truth but happiness and freedom, why must philosophy have the last word? Why should not faith and myth have equal rights? Formerly philosophers sought peace of mind while pretending to seek the truth. Perhaps we should set ourselves a different aim: to discover which illusions we can give up, and which we will never shake off. We will still be seekers after truth, more so than in the past; but we will renounce the hope of a life without illusion. Henceforth our aim will be to identify our invincible illusions. Which untruths might we be rid of, and which can we not do without? -- that is the question, that is the experiment."
—John Gray, Straw Dogs, 83

Meditation Notes from the Writings of Ken Wilber

"Slowly begin to silently recite the following to yourself, trying to realize as vividly as possible the import of each statement:"

• "I have a body, but I am not my body. I can see and feel my body, and what can be seen and felt is not the true Seer. My body may be tired or excited, sick or healthy, heavy or light, but that has nothing to do with my inward I. I have a body, but I am not my body."
• "I have desires, but I am not my desires. I can know my desires, and what can be known is not the true Knower. Desires come and go, floating through my awareness, but they do not affect my inward I. I have desires, but I am not desires."
• "I have emotions, but I am not my emotions. I can feel and sense my emotions, and what can be felt and sensed is not the true Feeler. Emotions pass through me, but they do not affect my inward I. I have emotions, but I am not emotions."
• "I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts. I can know and intuit my thoughts, and what can be known is not the true Knower. Thoughts come to me and thoughts leave me, but they do not affect my inward I. I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts."
  
  

Affirm as concretely as possible:

• "I am what remains, a pure center of awareness, an unmoved witness of all these thoughts, emotions, feelings, and desires."

From http://www.integralworld.net/meditation.html

Jams and Jellies - Jefferson General Store Jefferson, Texas

A commercial I made for Jefferson General Store

What on Earth Could That Be?

Click here for article with a crazy video of this event

**An ominously beautiful spectacle, created by a failed Russian missile launch.

Thanks to Jesse for the link

K. Wilbs

Ken Wilber:

"There is nothing spooky or occult about this. We have already seen identity shift from matter to body to mind, each of which involved a decentering or dis-identifying with the lesser dimension... consciousness is simply continuing this process and dis-identifying with the mind itself, which is precisely why it can witness the mind, see the mind, experience the mind. The mind is no longer a subject, it is starting to become an object [in the perception of] the observing self. And so the mystical, contemplative and yogic traditions pick up where the mind leaves off... with the observing self as it begins to transcend the mind."

"The contemplative traditions are based upon a series of experiments in awareness: what if you pursue this Witness to its source? What if you inquire within, pushing deeper and deeper into the source of awareness itself? What do you find? As a repeatable, reproducible experiment in awareness? One of the most famous answers to that question begins: There is a subtle essence that pervades all reality. It is the reality of all that is, and the foundation of all that is. That essence is all. That essence is the real. And thou, thou art that. In other words, the observing self eventually discloses its own source, which is Spirit itself, Emptiness itself... and the stages of transpersonal growth and development are basically the stages of following this observing self to its ultimate abode."

Q: "How do you know these phenomena actually exist?

A: "As the observing self begins to transcend... deeper or higher dimensions of consciousness come into focus. All of the items on that list are objects that can be directly perceived in that worldspace. Those items are as real in [that] worldspace as rocks are in the sensorimotor worldspace and concepts are in the mental worldspace. If cognition awakens or develops to this level, you simply perceive these new objects as simply as you would perceive rocks in the sensory world or images in the mental world. They are simply given to awareness, they simply present themselves, and you don't have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out if they're real or not."

"Of course, if you haven't awakened to [this] cognition, then you will see none of this, just as a rock cannot see mental images. And you will probably have unpleasant things to say about people who do see them".^[10]

For Argh Moments, Like The Current One

Suffering the gloom, inevitable as breath, we must further accept this fact that the world hates: We are forever incomplete, fragments of some ungraspable whole. Our unfinished natures — we are never pure actualities but always vague potentials — make life a constant struggle, a bout with the persistent unknown. But this extension into the abyss is also our salvation. To be only a fragment is always to strive for something beyond ourselves, something transcendent. That striving is always an act of freedom, of choosing one road instead of another. Though this labor is arduous — it requires constant attention to our mysterious and shifting interiors — it is also ecstatic, an almost infinite sounding of the exquisite riddles of Being.

To be against happiness is to embrace ecstasy. Incompleteness is a call to life. Fragmentation is freedom. The exhilaration of never knowing anything fully is that you can perpetually imagine sublimities beyond reason. On the margins of the known is the agile edge of existence. This is the rapture, burning slow, of finishing a book that can never be completed, a flawed and conflicted text, vexed as twilight.

-Eric G. Wilson

Trading Meaning for Explanation

Indifference and skepticism are two potent forces in the modern mentality. We have elevated them to the status of values. They are part of the way we have learned to inure ourselves from shock--what Benjamin calls "the price for which the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock." They furnish us with a certain shabby level of comfort. Franz Kafka wrote: "there is an infinite amount of hope--but not for us." To be an "indifferent skeptic" is to have reached the end of a certain evolutionary line--for a passionate skeptic, or even an indifferent believer, there might still be hope. For an indifferent skeptic, all that remains is the piling up of fact and statistic, to be sorted into categories of explanation.

-Pinchbeck, 2001, p134

Needing a Return to the Feminine

From the Tao Te Ching:

Know the male,
yet keep to the female:
receive the world in your arms.
If you receive the world,
the Tao will never leave you
and you will be like a little child.


"Our one-sided fixation on mechanized progress is the result of our civilization's ingrained habit of prioritizing the "rightness" of masculine rationality, seeking to dominate nature, over the "leftness" of feminine intuition, preferring to surrender to it. Edinger writes: "Everything 'feminine' (earth, nature, body, matter) underwent a profound depreciation with the onset of our aeon.... The fact is that the 'depreciation of the feminine' is one of the ways by which the Western psyche has evolved; and we can only assume that it was necessary for the required sequence of events." The "depreciation of the feminine" includes, not only women, but the intuitive and shamanic forms of thought denigrated by our rigidly masculine rationality, as well as nature itself, which is treated as the soulless object of the scientist's alienated gaze. This domineering attitude continues to underlie--and belie-- our mechanistic progress." -- Daniel Pinchbeck, p114 of 2012

Our Psyche

"Technology, its poisonous by-products, weapons of mass destruction and inhumane repercussions are projections of the human psyche, expressing our current stage of development. They express not only our consciousness, but also our unconsciousness. "Look at the devilish engines of destruction!" Jung wrote, "They are invented by completely innocuous gentlemen, reasonable, respectable citizens who are everything we could wish. And when the whole thing blows up, and an indescribable hell of destruction is let loose, nobody seems to be responsible. It simply happens, and yet it is all man-made" -Daniel Pinchbeck, pg. 107 of 2012

It seems to me that the evil of the world is headed for a major downturn. The most innovative and popular technologies -- the Googles, Firefoxes, Twitters & Youtubes -- are projecting a much different psyche than the one described above. I'm confident that the psyche of my generation will be much different than the old-man psyche that gave birth to the destructive culture we currently live in. The fact is, the world we want is a much different world than the one we have, and I fully expect (in a very moral sense) for future technologies and business practices to reflect that.

**I realize this is an optimistic view, but it seems to me that an optimistic psyche has a better chance of success than a pessimistic one.

Mandelbulbs - Three Dimensional Mandelbrot Fractals

More images at http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html#renders

Thanks to Martin for the link

Rob Hopkins: Transition Movement Founder - TED Talk

Thanks to Dave Pollard for posting this

Belief Salad

Why are some things easier to believe than others?

We certainly believe in the things we perceive physically, and those which seem “obviously true/commonsensical” to us, mostly based on experience and tradition and consensual reality.
How are beliefs about the afterlife/lack thereof any different than those that characterize regional and ethnic struggles, those obvious struggles in which it is obvious to the outsider that neither side is “right”?

I have found belief in a great, vast, mysterious world outside our own limited, consensual reality because I have no choice but to believe. Fortunately, this vast world offers ample room for all competing ideas - where there is paradox, there is a greater system by which the opposing parts are assumed into a greater whole.

Ideas from every culture and every belief system have begun to fit nicely into my newly constructed framework: Christianity (the wisdom of Jesus, unlimited compassion, “being a child of God”, end-of-time ideas), Islam (submission to ‘God’), Buddhism (wisdom, reincarnation, karma, simple living), Hinduism (creative and destructive forces, the third eye), shamanism (connection to Earth, levels of consciousness, spirit realms), new age (healing, prophecy, universal consciousness), astrology, science, etc. Anything earnestly believed may reside in “true” reality without negating the others. At the very least all must at least be considered, no matter what your current beliefs (which tend to fall into a “this is it” type of assertion). Be careful though: much belief is human invention. It is important to find the kernels.

What about UFO encounters? These have recently moved from the realm of ridiculous to the realm of the sublimely possible (in my view).

Firstly, a simple reading on the subject indicates the the phenomenon has much more depth, breadth, and width than I would have previously imagined. Skeptics more stony-hearted than I have been converted by direct experiences or accumulated knowledge of mystery.
Something has happened to these people to inspire belief. They’re not all bumpkins; they’re not all freaks; they’re not all followers. Considering that the idea of “abduction” has been reported throughout times in terms related to culture and period, I’m curious as to whether there is a outside-normality explanation.

If you don’t want to belief anything but the few sparse facts science has unearthed, that is, of course, your prerogative. But try, if you can, the alternative: living mythically and mystically, seeing meaning where you see it, and keeping a very open mind. Not all people whose ideas are unbelievably different than yours are crazy [, NTs I know].

Fractals, Coincidence, Prophecy, New Agey Weirdness

Coincidences happen, yes? “Do they have meaning?” is a more difficult question. Synchronicity, and by association the fractal nature of reality that is such a common vision for psychonauts, and is such a recurring motif for New Agers, intuitively holds the key. For this post, the question will be reworded as Is reality fractal? with the collarary being “Are coincidences meaningful in that they refer to a higher system of meaning?”

A constituent element of a fractal is the ability for the part to mimic or represent the whole. Any arm in a spiral fractal can be found to contain spiral arms of itself which in turn contain their own identical spiral arms, and so on.

Is reality much the same?

For example: I see the like/dislike spectrum of human experience to be very associated with negative and positive charges inherent in atoms themselves. Even on the smallest level, matter divides itself into “attract/repel”, two opposites with no consciousness of their own, but which perceive, and act on perception.

Also, I sensed it while tripping. So did Jeff.

Similarly, you see this in studies by which humans instantaneously are attracted to or repelled by an object or concept, only after which are they able to find reasons for the attraction of repellence - a type of reverse causality in consciousness. Perception is the true king, with rational thought following nude and silly as the Emperor.

Matter knows matter. On what level? According to astronomy, gravity entails every particle affecting every other as space-time bends. According to quantum mechanics, particles become entangled and never part perception, despite distance or time - it is possible that the entire universe is one entangled mess on the sub-sub-sub-atomic level. We’re all connected by the forces that govern the universe. What forces and laws do we not yet know? And what implications may they have?

This, incidentally, makes prophecy theoretically possible, if you accept that reality is fractal, and that the fractals can be perceived (usually in altered states of consciousness). By being able to sense the greater pattern’s rhythm and form (which has to be done on an intuitive level, considering the greatness and complexity of existence on our one planet, much less the universe), it may be possible to see how the lowliest and most mundane phenomena can be related to the future and past events on a grander scale. Reading such signs... is most likely impossibly difficult without using a different form of consciousness. Dreams? That's where a lot seem to come from, and it's where all my deja vu has its genesis.

Other people’s beliefs in these phenomenon give me hope. I‘d rather not divide the world into “rationals” and “others”, considering how the definition of rational has changed throughout history. It is a short-sighted person indeed who believes that not only can all be known, but that reality can be extrapolated by the things we’ve figured out in the last couple hundred years.
I think I’ll put my faith in what has been figured out in the last couple thousands of years.

And finally, do coincidences have meaning? THE ANSWER!!!!: maybe.

First 7 Insights from the Celestine Prophecy

From the Wikipedia page for The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (I edited parts of the following so that it makes more sense to me).:

• The First Insight... A Critical Mass

A new spiritual awakening is occurring in human culture; an awakening brought about by a critical mass of individuals who experience their lives as a spiritual unfolding, a journey in which we are led forward by mysterious coincidences [aka the fractal nature of reality].

• The Second Insight... The Longer Now

This awakening represents the creation of a new, more complete worldview, which replaces a five-hundred-year-old preoccupation with secular survival and comfort. While this technological preoccupation was an important step, our awakening to life's coincidences [aka the fractal nature of reality] is opening us up to ... real human life on this planet, and the real nature of our Universe.

• The Third Insight... A Matter of Energy

We now experience that we live not in a material Universe, but in a Universe of dynamic energy. Everything extant is a field of sacred energy that we can sense and intuit. Moreover, we humans can project our energy by focusing our attention in the desired direction, in that where attention goes, energy flows, influencing other energy systems and increasing the pace of coincidences in our lives. It is possible to see this energy enveloping all living things.

• The Fourth Insight... The Struggle For Power

To gain energy, we tend to manipulate or force others to give us attention and thus energy. When we successfully dominate others in this way, we feel more powerful, but they are left weakened and often fight back. Competition for scarce human energy is the cause of all conflict between people.

• The Fifth Insight... The Message of the Mystics

Insecurity and violence ends when we experience an inner connection with divine energy within, a connection described by mystics of all traditions. A sense of lightness or buoyancy along with the constant sensation of love are measures of this connection. If these measures are present, the connection is real; if not, it is only pretended.

• The Sixth Insight... Clearing the Past

The more we stay connected, the more we are acutely aware of those times when we lose connection, usually when we are under stress. In these times, we can see our own particular way of stealing energy from others [or having our energy stolen by others]. Once our manipulations are brought to personal awareness, our connection becomes more constant and we can discover our own evolutionary path in life, and our spiritual mission, which is the personal way we can contribute to the World.

Here the four main "control dramas"—the Interrogator, the Intimidator, the Aloof and the Poor Me—are discussed.

• The Seventh Insight... Engaging the Flow

Knowing our personal mission [can] further enhance [or enrich] the flow of mysterious coincidences [aka the fractal nature of reality] as we are guided toward our destinies. First we have a question; then dreams, daydreams, and intuitions lead us towards the answers, which [can be] synchronistically provided by the wisdom of another human being.

Eckhart Tolle, "The Current Economy"

Striving for the Mundane

"when we alter our state of consciousness, we can get closer to the baseline state that is pure God consciousness. From my personal experience, this is best achieved through the ingestion of 5-MeO-DMT and is far more effective than any meditation regimen or other “mystical” practice. 5-MeO-DMT is about as altered as any human being can get, but from the God perspective, that state of consciousness is simply the way things actually are. In other words, that state of consciousness of complete mystical union is actually the super-mundane state of reality. It’s the most ordinary, non-fantastical thing. It’s the reality game that we’re playing here in embodied form that is fantastical, given that it’s all a complex and grand illusion."

-Martin W. Ball from Being Human: An Entheological Guide to God, Evolution and the Fractal Energetic Nature of Reality, P38

Buy his book online here

Thoughts on a Blog / a Story

Reading over my first blog post is damning. Who am I arguing with? In my mind, probably my roommate. He has a "piss n' shit worldview" (his words), and my recent mental and psychic explorations are either offensive or pointless to him. So... I must argue my points in order for them to feel valid.

But I don't truly wish to argue. What I am going through right now is on a deeply personal level, and even if all the specifics are wrong, the quest of the thing opens up a new world of real possibilities [of life experience and knowledge].

Here is a brief story that holds all facets of the newfound quest:

During my trip, I perceived in my matter the greater universe, and suddenly all the religions, prophecies, science, mysteries, and philosophies I have ever mulled and dismissed unified into a coherent whole whereby the universe's structure and processes are both weirder and more complex than I could have ever imagined on my own. In my last post, I said no one knows The Truth, but what I really should have said is that the billions of Truths out there are all fragments of Totality.

So was I whacked out or what? In previous trips, I have made great personal discoveries, abandoned my fear of death, saw the Earth from space, etc... but I never ventured outwards. But this time, by the end of the night I started to believe in things that I never could before. A meaningful, full, complex universe full of unknown (but explorable) dimensions. The death of my parents at a young age eliminated all meaning besides perceivable, mechanical process. A purposeless universe made sense to me, because their deaths were very purposeless. Not to say there was no joy: at the very, very least I came from nothing to exist for awhile before the inevitable return to nothing. Joyful existensialism was what I called my philosophy (although it wasn't so joyful during my long and frequent bouts of despair and depression).

Anyway, this caused my a lot of anxiety in the following days. I was going to have to give up my sardonic irony and nihilism to embrace sincere, real beliefs. Were the mushrooms truly "mind-expanding" or was I just experiencing bizarre neurochemical interactions? Was the profound Truth I experienced during the trip real in any empirical way?

Reading Daniel Pinchbeck, Stanislaus Grof, and a couple other advocates for psychadelics made me take the idea seriously - these were people in similar situations who have compiled a large body of writing on the subject. The ideas matched up in very convincing ways - the spiraling, fractal nature of time, the approaching "new age" (bleh, too many connotations with that phrase, but close enough), the oneness of it all. Similarly, talking with Jeff about the experience made me realize even during that strange night, I was not alone in following impossible thoughts. But still... I wanted a sign. A real, unambiguous sign like I'd read about that if I opened my senses and consciousness, the universe would manifest to me.

I had a dream:

I was at a party thrown by the Christian God of the Old Testament (at my Godmother's house). Wild revelry, drunken spectacle, late into the night. Eventually the party wound down, and I made my way downstairs to the basement with a man and a woman.

The basement was filled with mutilated corpses. As we stood there, God came down the stairs and shot his arm T-1000-style into the chest of the man and ripped out his heart. I knew I was safe, and so did the woman, but all three of us (woman, God, and myself), knew that what he had done was wrong.

As we sat silently, suddenly my cellphone rang. I took it out of my pocket and looked at the caller ID. It said, bursting with "meaning":

DETECTIVE
217 - ..............

I could only make out the area code. I answered, and a voice told me he was coming for God. God glared at me with blazing eyes, and I knew in that moment that He wanted to kill me.

I woke up sweating. I rarely remember my dreams, but I had asked for a sign, and I had received a name and number. I wrote them down and fell back asleep, thinking that I would find 217.

Two days later, I lay in my girlfriend's bed, looking at her bookshelf. On it was a Bible, and I figured that it would be worth looking at, considering all the Christian imagery in the dream. I flipped to page 217, but there was nothing there - not that I was expecting there to be, page numbering was too arbitrary. My mind wandered to a conversation I had with my Grandmother the night before. I had never humored her borderline fundamentalist beliefs before, but before the call ended we had gotten into a conversation about Acts of the Apostles - she was going to Bible Study that night, and it was the book they were analyzing. If there was one book I should check (before I ran to the bus to get to work), it would be that one, my inner something said. I found Chapter 2, Verse 17 and an electric shock ran through me:

Acts of the Apostles 2:17 And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.

There could not be a more meaningful or unambiguous passage to describe what I was going through.

The meaning of the dream became clear. I was the detective, and I must do what a detective does: search for truth.

It could be a coincidence. As I've said, none of us know. But... if it is a coincidence, it is the most profound of my life, right when I asked for it.

Now what?

Blogging, I guess.

Acting Mythologically

In the "in-itself" there is nothing of "causal connections," of "necessity," or of "psychological non-freedom"; there the effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule or "law." It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed "in itself," we act once more as we have always acted--mythologically.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

Quoted in 2012 by Daniel Pinchbeck p50

Eric Has Landed (Somewhere)

Thanks, Jeff. Glad to be here.

Now...

I am tired of using my forebrain. It's still new (evolutionarily speaking), and the kinks have not yet been worked out. My emotions affect my reasoning, as does the weather, the people around me, my health, and my location. So do about a million other things, too varied and subtle to name. Cultural bias, yes, strongly. Genetic wiring of the thinking hardware, definitely. Hormones, color, music, stress, peer pressure. Context.

Value judgments. They are subjective, entirely. "Good" and "bad" are not empiric qualities. You feel first, rationalize second. You didn't like "Titanic"? A lot of people did. They're not wrong. You're not right. It simply is, and all value-laden adjectives are a projection of your own values and personality. It's a post-modern world out there, and no one has a clear view of it all (although everyone thinks that they do).

I yearn for the world beyond words and reason. The insane chaos of existence we try to keep at bay with technology, comfort, mind-numbing drugs, and sureness in our beliefs. Do you yearn, friend?

I do not know how many people intuit naturally. I suspect it is present in all to some degree. But how do you interface the truths that bubble out of your subconscious with that which your mind/history/psychology tells you is actual truth? The forebrain speaks in words. Your intuition has no need for such prisons of meanings - but it speaks nonetheless.

Recently, my life has changed. My intuition went into overdrive on the last trip I was on with Jeff, and I realized that I could/should no longer suppress my deepest feelings with culturally-biased mental-rationalism regarding the reality that was presenting itself to me. It is a reality that is not of myself (I hope), but of the Earth/universe working through me, a amalgam of ancient matter that can perceive and feel and perhaps understand itself on a global/universal level. I wish to transcend the realm of context, and know the all/one.

What this means both practically and spiritually... will be the subject of the next ten thousand blog posts.

Am I writing to anyone? For anyone, or against anyone? I do not yet know. I am simply writing for anyone who peers around the edges of modern "reason".

Evolving our Awareness

"Many [scientists] have spoken powerfully regarding the type of intent needed to give rise to a more integral science. For Bohm, the imperative is to evolve our awareness, so that it might naturally become more whole, more in line with our connectedness to the world. Without such awareness we're blind to the impact of our current ways of thinking. "Thought," as Bohm often said, "creates the world and then says, 'I didn't do it.'" Einstein spoke of the "optical delusion of our consciousness," whereby we experience ourselves "as something separate from the rest." "Our task," he said, "must be to widen our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." Maturana's work embodies his commitment to "a manner of co-existence in which love, mutual respect, honesty, and social responsibility arise spontaneously from living instant after instant." He says that we become more human through realizing "that we do not see the world as it is but as we are" and reminds us that "no human being has a privileged view of reality." When we forget our contingent view of reality, we lose our capacity to live together; as Maturana says, when one person or group asserts that only they see "what is really going on," they are actually making a "demand for obedience.""

From Presence by Senge, Scharmer, Jaworksi & Flowers, p 202-203

New Contributor

My good friend Eric will now be contributing thoughts to the spot-
Welcome, buddy!

A Trip, Some Conclusions

Psychedelic mushrooms heighten whatever my natural reaction would be to a given scenario. So if a certain conversation makes me uncomfortable, that same conversation would make me really uncomfortable while on mushrooms; or if something is beautiful to look at normally, it would be strikingly beautiful on mushrooms. One other effect mushrooms have on me is that they allow me to see more clearly the causal (or fractal) nature of the world and my mind-- I am able to see more clearly the causes of my thoughts, the consequences of my words, the effects of stimuli, and the natural emergence of life.

I posted this quote from Ernst Casserer, two posts ago:
"Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves, man is in a sense conversing with himself. He has so engulfed himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythic symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything without the interposition of an artificial medium"

David Abrams in The Spell of the Sensuous says that the big leap in man's symbolic activity occurred when man invented alphabetic language. Before the existence of alphabetic language, man would say a word and it would have a direct relation to the physical thing:
Word ---> Physical thing
After the invention of alphabetic language there was an artificial intermediary, the alphabetic word:
Word ---> The alphabetic word ---> Physical thing
At first this seems like a trivial difference, until you realize the profound consequences it has. Suddenly, the mind can stop short of the physical thing, and operate in a completely human realm -- it no longer needs the physical landscape from which all language sprang. Thus, "man is in a sense conversing with himself"

It is important at this point to note that the argument above isn't stating that once symbolic activity is invented, physical reality immediately disappears- but rather there is a proportional shift; as our use of symbols advances, physical reality recedes. The invention of alphabetic language is just one of the most notable historical occurrences of the advancement of symbolic activity.

When I recently took mushrooms, I noticed a causal (fractal) link between symbolic activities and deep feelings within me of stress and discomfort. When my mind strayed to things like advertisements, office jobs, fashion, pop-culture, or comedy bits, I would find myself in a deeply uncomfortable mindset; which, as I said previously, is just a heightened version of my normal reaction to these things. On our trip we walked to the lake; The walk there, along Belmont, was intense & stressful- but as soon as we arrived at the lake the stress and discomfort fell away from me. I was suddenly overcome with feelings of deep pleasure, comfort and belonging-- again, a heightened version of my normal reaction. While at the lake, my mind wasn't cluttered by any symbols and so I was able to clearly experience the moon appearing just above the horizon, I was able to smell the fallen leaves, to hear myself breathing, to feel the air on my skin, feel the ground beneath my feet-- i felt as if I was no longer chained by the world of symbols but free to be myself: a physical, sensuous being in a physical world.

At that moment it was abundantly clear to me that symbols have no real existence. When I give them power, they overwhelm me and pull me away from the world where I feel most at home. As such, I have lost all patience for people or institutions who force their symbols and subsequent stress & discomfort into my life. I just can't be a victim to a non-existence force-- so I'm taking the reigns to my life back. I'm going to be more forceful in the acquisition of the things I need to be happy and more discriminating in the activities I involve myself in.

Using Drugs to Find Your Authentic Self

http://entheogenic.podomatic.com/entry/2009-10-26T16_55_21-07_00

I'm a little embarrassed with how much I find myself believing what this guy is saying.

**Update, I'm no longer embarrassed.

Google Wave

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html#video

Google's long video about Google Wave

The future!

As Symbols Proliferate, Physical Reality Diminishes

"Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of this artificial medium."

Ernst Cassirer
quoted in Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

How to organise a Children's Party

Pulled from Chris Corrigan's website

The Answer is in Physical Reality, not a Utopian Vision

the practice of realignment with reality can hardly afford to be utopian. It cannot base itself upon a vision hatched in our heads and then projected into the future. Any approach to our current problems that aims us toward a mentally envisioned future implicitly holds us within the oblivion of linear time. It holds us, that is, within the same illusory dimension that enabled us to neglect and finally to forget the land around us. By projecting the solution somewhere outside of the perceivable present, it invites our attention away from the sensuous surroundings, induces us to dull our sense, yet again, on behalf of a mental ideal.

David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, p 272

Example of Symbols

If I say that I live in the "United States" or in "Canada," in "British Columbia" or in "New Mexico," I situate myself within a purely human set of coordinates. I say very little or nothing about the earthly place that I inhabit, but simply establish my temporary location within a shifting matrix of political, economic, and civilizational forces struggling to maintain themselves, today, largely at the expense of the animate earth. The great danger is that I, and many other good persons, may come to believe that our breathing bodies really inhabit these abstractions, and that we will lend our lives more to consolidating, defending, or bewailing the fate of these ephemeral entities other than to nurturing and defending the actual places that physically sustain us.

David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, P 265

"We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human"

From an animistic perspective, the clearest source of all this distress, both physical and psychological, lies in the aforementioned violence needlessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of the planet; only by alleviating the latter will we be able to heal the former. While this may sound at first like a simple statement of faith, it makes eminent and obvious sense as soon as we acknowledge our thorough dependence upon the countless other organisms with whom we have evolved. Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth-- our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, p. 22

Analytic Knowing v. Primary Knowing

In the "analytic picture offered by the cognitive sciences, the world consists of separate objects and states of affairs, the human mind is a determinate machine which, in order to know, isolates and identifies those objects and events, finds the simplest possible predictive contingencies between them, stores the results through time in memory, relates the items in memory to each other such that they form a coherent but indirect representation of the world and oneself, and retrieves those representations in order to fulfill the only originating value, which is to survive and reproduce in an evolutionarily successful manner."
By Contrast, "primary knowing" arises by means of "interconnected wholes, rather than isolated contingent parts and by means of timeless, direct, presentation" rather than through stored "re-presentation." "Such knowing is open rather than determinate, and a sense of unconditional value, rather than conditional usefulness, is an inherent part of the act of knowing itself," said Rosch. Acting from such awareness is "spontaneous, rather than the result of decision making," and it is "compassionate... since it is based on wholes larger than the self."
As Rosch told Otto, all these attributes--timeless, direct, spontaneous, open, unconditional value, and compassionate--go together as one thing. That one thing is what some in Tibetan Buddhism call "the natural state" and what Taoism calls "the Source."

From Presence by Senge, Scharmer, Jaworksi & Flowers - Quoting Eleanor Rosch - p 98-99

Jim Henson

“I cannot say why I am good at what I do, but I can say
that I work very hard at it. Nor am I aware of any
conscious career decisions. I’ve always found that one
thing leads to another, and that I’ve moved from project to
project in a natural progression. Perhaps one thing
that has helped me in achieving my goals is that I
sincerely believe in what I do, and get great
pleasure from it. I feel very fortunate because I can do
what I love to do.”

-Jim Henson

"Giving in is so damn comforting

and so we go on with our lives
We know the truth but prefer lies
Lies are simple,
simple is bliss
Why go against tradition when we can admit defeat?
live in decline
Be the victim of our own design
The status quo, built on suspect
Why would anyone stick out their neck?"

The Decline by NOFX


This song really spoke to me as a 17 year old & the part above still hits home.

Lucky the Dog

read the story of Lucky the Dog:
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/04/02.html#a685


"We are all, in a real sense, like Lucky. Most of us, all over the world, struggle every day, and put up with a huge amount of stress and unhappiness in our lives. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who lived for millions of years before modern civilization, we work much harder and longer to make a living, we face much more physical and psychological violence (in our neighbourhoods, in our workplaces, in our war-torn world, and sometimes even in our homes), we suffer from many more physical and psychological diseases and illnesses, we live in crowded, polluted, mostly run-down communities, in constant fear (of an infinite number of things, most notably not having enough), and we are oppressed with hierarchies, laws, rules and restrictions that would have driven our ancient ancestors quite mad.
Why do we put up with it? Because it's the only life we know." -Dave Pollard

Life Itself

"Becoming equals the shifting combinations of varying configurations of "power constellations" interconnected at higher and lower levels. At certain points these constantly changing combinations yield sorrow for an individual from his or her perspective, at other points these changing combinations yield joy. The totality of these shifting combinations is *life itself*."

http://caae.phil.cmu.edu/cavalier/80254/Nietzsche/W_P_2.html

Jeff Vail - A Theory of Power

Jeff Vail's - A Theory of Power

http://www.jeffvail.net/atheoryofpower.pdf

-- Free online book, 50 pages long, things everyone should understand about the world we live in


"With genes and memes manipulating us, using neurochemical releases and emotional states to ensure their survival, we find ourselves faced with difficult, penetrating questions about our identity. What does it mean to experience a feeling if we can rationally understand that the emotion stems from nothing more than a chemical response evolved to ensure that we act as efficient hosts and vectors to genes and memes? What of our hopes and goals? Do these hopes truly belong to us, or do they serve as nothing more than effective strategies to propagate bits of cultural code? Would we still love our children if the resulting nurturing didn’t increase the chance of our genes’ survival? What of our egos versus the reality of genetic and memetic power-relationships: do we exist as nothing more than vectors for power-complexes? Do we have free will and an individual identity, or should we see our individuality as merely a construct of how our genes and memes use us to propagate themselves through the unconscious mechanism of natural selection? These represent difficult questions. The scope of their impact on our lives serves as an indication that we stand to uncover fundamental relationships governing our existence. At this point the ego and rational understanding come into direct conflict—will we retreat back to a comfortable but now conscious delusion, or continue this exploration?7 Can our ego survive if it learns the form of its own inner workings? Inside the psychological maze of self-knowledge stands the unknown; the path out may lead to fulfillment or misery. We will come to appreciate the concept of blissful ignorance as we press our inquiry." p.14

Mr. Furry Fur Fur and his friendly earth friends

A childrens show with environmental themes -- created by two amazing new friends.

buy their DVD:

http://www.friendlyearthfriends.com/

The Importance of Living

A practical guide for good living:

The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang

Google book

Authentic Leadership

"When we are authentically present and true to our own internal compass, we are able to bring out the best in others. We are able to communicate without pretense and manipulation because we are not hiding behind ego or driven by fear. We are confident because we trust in the natural intelligence and goodness in ourselves and others. Seeing clearly what is and what could be, we are able to act decisively and effectively."

-- from the Authentic Leadership in Action Institute website
http://www.aliainstitute.org/institute/about.html


Thanks to Elliott for pointing me to it

What if your work achieves nothing?

From Margaret J. Wheatley's Eight Fearless Questions -- mentioned on Dave Pollard & Chris Corrigan's sites:


What if your work achieves nothing? Thomas Merton, a great writer and contemplative in the Catholic tradition, said, "Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not, perhaps, results opposite to what you expect.

"As you get used to this idea of your work achieving nothing, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there, too, a great deal has to be gone through, as, gradually, you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything."

Creatures of Circumstance

"Today we feel good because things are going well; tomorrow we feel the opposite. Where did that good feeling go? New influences took us over as circumstances changed: We are impermanent, the influences are impermanent, and there is nothing solid or lasting anywhere that we can point to. What could be more unpredictable than our thoughts and emotions: do you have any idea what you are going to think or feel next? Our mind, in fact, is as empty, as impermanent, and as transient as a dream. Look at a thought: It comes, it stays, and it goes. The past is past, the future not yet risen, and even the present thought, as we experience it, becomes the past."

Sogyal Rinpoche from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, (27)

http://www.gandydancerproductions.com/videos/solution.mov

http://growthechange.blogspot.com/

"My instincts are propelling me forward, to make even more changes, to simplify my life dramatically, to become truly the space through which stuff passes:

... a part of the unfathomably complex dance of all-life-on-Earth, learning to improvise which of that passing-through stuff to touch, and which to just let go. "Ah, I know how I can make this better, or clearer, or more interesting, or more useful, or more innovative, or more fun -- there!" Just being the space, and touching the right stuff in just the right way as it passes through.

I am filled with impatience, with fury, with a sense that my own fears are holding me back from this journey, from what comes next, what is meant for me. What underlies that fear is all the gunk that I have acquired over the years, gunk telling me what is the correct and incorrect way to behave, and live.

That gunk has a name: Culture. The very word, with its agri-roots, implies control, tending, keeping in line. Culture tells us what others have a right to expect of us, and what we must do to live up to those expectations. Culture tells us that the punishment for not doing these things is social ostracism -- loneliness, unacceptability, unpopularity, reproachment, exclusion, abandonment, rejection and punishment. You must be obedient, says our culture, or there will be dire consequences. Without us, says our culture, you cannot survive -- you will starve, freeze, wither away. You will be left alone.
...
The answer does not lie in activism, in counter-culture, in revolution. Despite Heath and Potter's wishful thinking, solutions "compulsory for the entire population" will only be forthcoming in a totalitarian state, and then not in the interests of that population. And certainly the answer does not lie in technology -- as John Gray has argued so eloquently, every new technology creates many more problems than it solves.

The answer lies not in salvos from, or experiments on, The Edge, but beyond it, over the edge, the precipice. And, horror of horrors, we have to go over it, plunge into the abyss, alone. We have to walk away, and start over. Give up on everything we believe, everything we fear, scrape off all the gunk that is sticking to us, holding us back. Inviting those we love to walk away with us, knowing that they will probably decline, because they are still addicted to the culture, still believe that counter-culture, elections, revolutions, activism, collective consciousness, education, faith or technology will somehow work, transform the culture in time or allow some tiny new culture to survive in its nuclear shadow."

Dave Pollard
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2009/02/04.html#a2324

Bonobo Monkeys

Susan Savage-Rumbaugh Ted talk:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/susan_savage_rumbaugh_on_apes_that_write.html


Susan Savage-Rumbaugh works with Bonobo monkeys. She calls them the happiest species.

Some interesting things about the Bonobo:

-- They are remarkably human & can even walk bipedally for long distances.

-- They are learning tasks from humans -- starting fires, writing, playing video games, playing music, cutting hide -- by watching (not by being taught/trained).

-- "Sexual behavior is not confined to one aspect of their life that they set aside. It permeates their entire life, it's used for communication and for conflict resolution."

What Susan Savage-Rumbaugh has learned from these monkeys:

"I think that as we look at culture we kind of come to understand how we got to where we (humans) are and I don't really think it's in our biology. I think we've attributed it to our biology but I don't really think it's there."


above image from: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1729362,00.html

The Neutral State Between Pleasure & Pain

I read somewhere "The neutral state between pleasure & pain is pleasure."

I think the opposite, more pessimistic, view -- "The neutral state between pleasure & pain is pain"-- is more prevalent; especially in western culture.

If we view our neutral state as a pain, we must continually strive to achieve happiness. This leads to the striving -- the need for continual improvement -- that is so ingrained & revered in our culture. (This way of thinking leads to sustainability issues & relates to Straw Dogs' myth-of-progress thesis.)

"Living The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness." - From the Tolle quote, previous post.

If we can achieve a baseline of pleasure, there's nothing else we need to do.

Living in the moment

"The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for. Everybody’s life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness. The present moment is always small in the sense that it is always simple, but concealed within it lies the greatest power. Like the atom, it is one of the smallest things yet contains enormous power. Only when you align yourself with the present moment do you have access to that power. Or it may be more true to say that it then has access to you and through you to this world."

– Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose

Quote pulled from "Living in the Moment" by Brad Bollenbach
http://30sleeps.com/blog/2007/12/31/living-in-the-moment/

Empathy

"First, look at the dying person in front of you and think of that person as just like you, with the same needs, the same fundamental desire to be happy and avoid suffering, the same loneliness, the same fear of the unknown, the same secret areas of sadness, the same half-acknowledged feelings of helplessness. You will find that if you really do this, your heart will open toward the person and love will be present between you."

Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Pg 175

"We are all in the same cart, going to execution; how can I hate anyone or wish anyone harm?"

Sir Thomas More

"Whenever a wholesome thought arises, acknowledge it: "A wholesome thought has just arisen." If an unwholesome thought arises, acknowledge it as well: "An unwholesome thought has just arisen." Don't dwell on it or try to get rid of it. To acknowledge it is enough. If they are still there, acknowledge they are still there. If they have gone, acknowledge they have gone." - The miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh.

"You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence." - Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"The art of living in this 'predicament' is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past and the known on the other . It consists in being completely sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive." - The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts

All pulled from http://www.43folders.com/2006/04/07/mindfulness

found through Elliott http://del.icio.us/trent_napier

Flow & Improv Comedy

"Csikszentmihalyi's [pronounced "Cheeks sent me high"] big discovery is that there is a state many people value even more than chocolate after sex. It is the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one's abilities. It is what people sometimes call "being in the zone." Csikszentmihalyi called it "flow" because it often feels like effortless movement: Flow happens, and you go with it. Flow often occurs during physical movement--skiing, driving fast on a curvy country road, or playing team sports. Flow is aided by music or by the action of other people, both of which provide a temporal structure for one's own behavior (for example, singing in a choir, dancing, or just having an intense conversation with a friend). And flow can happen during solitary creative activities, such as painting, writing, or photography. The keys to flow: There's a clear challenge that fully engages your attention; you have the skills to meet the challenge; and you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step (the progress principle). You get flash after flash of positive feeling with each turn negotiated, each high note correctly sung, or each brushstroke that falls into the right place. In the flow experience, elephant and rider are in perfect harmony. The elephant (automatic processes) is doing most of the work, running smoothly through the forest, while the rider (conscious thought) is completely absorbed in looking out for problems and opportunities, helping wherever he can."

The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt, pg 95-96

I was trying to figure out a common characteristic that great improvisational comedians have and I came up with the term 'angelic precision'. In my opinion great improvisers' choices appear angelic in that they are pure -- honest, not contrived, conceived spontaneously, in the moment. Their choices are also precise -- they have honed a craft and are able to consistently present something purposeful. It's the harmony between elephant and rider. If the rider tries too hard, choices seem contrived. If the rider is unaware of the implications of his choices then his performance will lack purpose and seem sloppy. When an improviser can make a pointed yet natural choice, it reveals our robotic nature; our elephant. And we have a neat mechanism for dealing with that revelation: laughter.

Reality - Dreams = Animal Being
Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism)
Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism)
Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism
Dreams + Humor = Fantasy
Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom

Lin Yutang's self-labeled "psuedo-scientific" formulas: from The Importance of Living, pg 4.


I finished re-reading Straw Dogs and I've been noticing the prevalence of idealism in our culture -- People really are drawn to the idea that striving to be better is a virtue. Conversely, they see acceptance of imperfection to be laziness and a lack of strong distaste for imperfection to be apathy. I tend to side with John Grey & Lin Yutang who seem to hold living in the moment without large romantic ideals of progress as being better than constantly striving to make life as ideal as possible.

So I'm brought back to John Grey's description of the Taoist idea of the good life in Straw Dogs.

Rider on an elephant's back

"[The rational part of our mind] is a rider placed on the elephant's back to help the elephant make better choices. The rider can see farther into the future, and the rider can learn valuable information by talking to other riders or by reading maps, but the rider cannot order the elephant around against its will. I believe the Scottish philosopher David Hume was closer to the truth than was Plato when he said, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

In sum, the rider is an advisor or servant; not a king, president, or charioteer with a firm grip on the reins. The rider is Gazzaniga's interpreter module; it is conscious, controlled thought. The elephant includes the gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, and intuitions that comprise much of the automatic system. The elephant and the rider each have their own intelligence, and when they work together well they enable the unique brilliance of human beings."

Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, pg. 16-17

The good life

"For Taoists, the good life is only the natural life lived skilfully. It has no particular purpose. It has nothing to do with the will, and it does not consist in trying to realise any ideal. Everything we do can be done more or less well; but if we act well it is not because we translate our intentions into deeds. It is because we deal skilfully with whatever needs to be done. the good life means living according to our natures and circumstances. There is nothing that says that it is bound to be the same for everybody, or that it must conform with 'morality'. "

"Seeing Clearly means not projecting our goals into the world; acting spontaneously means acting according to the needs of the situation. Western moralists will ask what is the purpose of such action, but for Taoists the good life has no purpose. It is like swimming in a whirlpool, responding to the currents as they come and go. 'I enter with the inflow, and emerge with the outflow, follow the Way of the water, and do not impose my selfishness upon it. This is how I stay afloat in it,' says the Chuang-Tzu. "

"For people in thrall to 'morality', the good life means perpetual striving. For Taoists it means living effortlessly, according to our natures. The freest human being is not one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonising over alternatives he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must. Such a human being has the perfect freedom of a wild animal -- or a machine. As the Lieh-Tzu says: 'The highest man at rest is as though dead, in movement is like a machine. He knows neither why he is at rest nor why he is not, why he is in movement nor why he is not.'"

John Gray's, Straw Dogs, p.112-115

Illusions

"The I is a thing of the moment, and yet our lives are ruled by it. We cannot rid ourselves of this inexistent thing. In our normal awareness of the present moment the sensation of selfhood is unshakeable. This is the primordial human error, in virtue of which we pass our lives as in a dream." pg 78

"If what is at issue is not truth but happiness and freedom, why must philosophy have the last word? Why should not faith and myth have equal rights? Formerly philosophers sought peace of mind while pretending to seek the truth. Perhaps we should set ourselves a different aim: to discover which illusions we can give up, and which we will never shake off. We will still be seekers after truth, more so than in the past; but we will renounce the hope of a life without illusion. Henceforth our aim will be to identify our invincible illusions. Which untruths might we be rid of, and which can we not do without? -- that is the question, that is the experiment."pg 83

John Gray, Straw Dogs

Jill Bolte Taylor: My Stroke of Insight

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jilltaylor

Art, poetry, religion

"I can see no other reason for the existence of art and poetry and religion except as they tend to restore in us a freshness of vision and a more emotional glamour and more vital sense of life. For as we grow older in life, our senses become gradually benumbed, our emotions become more callous to suffering and injustice and cruelty, and our vision of life is warped by too much preoccupation with cold, trivial realities. Fortunately, we have a few poets and artists who have not lost that sharpened sensibility, that fine emotional response and that freshness of vision, and whose duties are therefore to be our moral conscience, to hold up a mirror to our blunted vision, to tone up our withered nerves. Art should be a satire and a warning against our paralyzed emotions, our devitalized thinking and our denaturalized living. It teaches us unsophistication in a sophisticated world. It should restore to us health and sanity of living and enable us to recover from the fever and delirium caused by too much mental activity. It should sharpen our senses, re-establish the connection between our reason and our human nature, and assemble the ruined parts of a dislocated life again into a whole, by restoring our original nature. Miserable indeed is a world in which we have knowledge without understanding, criticism without appreciation, beauty without love, truth without passion, righteousness without mercy, and courtesy without a warm heart!"
The Importance of Living, Lin Yutang, p141

Sentimental nature

"Somewhere in our adult life, our sentimental nature is killed, strangled, chilled or atrophied by an unkind surrounding, largely through our own fault in neglecting to keep it alive, or our failure to keep clear of such surroundings. In the process of learning "work experience," there is many a violence done to our original nature, when we learn to harden ourselves, to be artificial , and often to be cold-hearted and cruel, so that as one prides oneself upon gaining more and more worldly experience, his nerves become more and more insensitive and benumbed--especially in the world of politics and commerce. As a result, we get the great "go-getter" pushing himself forward to the top and brushing everybody asid; we get the man of iron will and strong determination, with the last embers of sentiment, which he calls foolish idealism or sentimentality, gradually dying out in his breast. It is that sort of person who is beneath my contempt. The world has too many cold-hearted people. If steralization of the unfit should be carried out as a state policy, it should begin with sterilizing the morally insensible, the artistically stale, the heavy of heart, the ruthlessly successful, the cold-heartedly determined and all those people who have lost the sense of fun in life--rather than the insane and the victims of tuberculosis. For it seems to me that whiel a man with passion and sentiment may do many foolish and precipitate things, a man without passion or sentiment is a joke and a caricature."
The Importance of Living, Lin Yutang, p.99

Never regret what you've done

Believing in yourself makes you sexy. Don't judge your own choices. Never regret what you've done. It's OK to apologize for unfortunate outcomes... but remember you are doing the best you can. All you can ever do is learn from choices and outcomes & it doesn't make sense to obsess over missteps.


4-15-08

Comedy: an escape from illusions

"If comedy is an escape from anything, it is an escape from illusions. The comic, by using the Voice of Reason, reminds us of our True Reality, and in that moment of recognition, we laugh, and the reality of the daily grind is shown for what it really is - UNREAL... a JOKE. True comedy turns circles into spirals. What before seemed a tiresome, frightening, or frustrating wall, the comic deftly and fearlessly steps through, proving the absurdity of it all. The audience is relieved to know they're not alone in thinking, "This bullshit we see and hear all day MAKES NO SENSE. Surely I'm not the only one who thinks so. And surely there must be an answer..." Good comedy helps people know they're not alone. Great comedy provides an answer."
~Bill Hicks

Irony

"The historic avant-garde (but here I would also consider avant-garde a metahistorical category) tries to settle scores with the past. "Down with moonlight"--a futurist slogan--is a platform typical of every avant-garde; you have only to replace "moonlight" with whatever noun is suitable. The avant-garde destroys, defaces the past: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is a typical avant-garde act. Then the avant-garde goes further, destroys the figure, cancels it, arrives at the abstract, the informal, the white canvas, the slashed canvas, the charred canvas. In architeture and the visual arts, it will be the curtain wall, the building as stele, pure parallelepiped, minimal art; in literature, the destruction of the flow of discourse, the Burroughs-like collage, silence, the white page; in music, the passage from atonality to noise to absolute silence (in this sense, the early Cage is modern).
But the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go no further; because it has produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impossible texts (conceptual art). The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently."

Umberto Eco, "'I Love You Madly,' He Said Self-consciously", The Truth About the Truth, Pg. 32

The addiction

"Civilization is our Pusher. It's The Man who keeps us hooked on consumption and debt, The Man who holds the key to our prison and gives us our illusory rush of elation when we buy and use His addictive product. The Man who seduces us back even when we have decided that life in His prison is insane, self-abusive, worse than death. The monkey is our addiction, without which we cannot live. And we wander the streets of civilization's artificial world in a daze, never really home, wondering what is missing, why we feel so lost. Civilization is our ghetto, a whole world of six billion homeless people, setting fires on every corner for warmth, ganging up and stealing everything we can get our hands on to pawn for our fixes, breeding babies already drug-addicted at birth.

So the next time you see a homeless person, or an addict, don't be frightened, angry, or filled with pathos. You are looking in the mirror. It is we who are homeless, and addicted. What will it take before we break the habit, walk away from The Man, and find our way home?

How can we break the habit when all of us are addicts, even The Man? When we have all forgotten what it's like to live without the monkey? When we have all become the hollow, empty, desperate shadows of men that the monkey leaves behind?

When I become too theoretical, when I ask with too much vehemence why people work jobs they hate, why so many earn their living by deforesting, or mining, or working other destructive jobs, my friend reminds me: "Sixty days", he says. "That’s how long it takes before people in the civilized world begin to die of starvation. Dave can’t quit his job because in sixty days his children will die. That's the primary reason most of us do not rebel. We have too much to lose". Ours is a politics, economics and religion of occupation, not of inhabitation, and as such the methods by which we are formed and governed have no legitimacy save that sprouting from the end of a cannon, from a can of pepper spray, from the rapist's penis, from the travesty of modern education, from the instilled dread of a distant hell and the false promise of a future techtopia, from the chains that bind children to beds and looms and from the everyday fear of starvation -- as well as an internalized notion of what constitutes social success or failure -- that binds us to wage slavery. The responsibility for holding destructive institutions, systems and culture accountable falls on each of us. We are the governors of this prison as well as the governed...

- Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words

There's no methadone for the stuff we're hooked on. And no one left to administer it even if there were."


Dave Pollard, How to Save The World, "He Can't Hear You Anymore"
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2004/12/20.html#a990

The human mind: knowing where not to look

"In the 1960s, Lestor Luborsky conducted an experiment in which he used a special camera to track the eye movements of people whom he'd asked to look at a set of pictures. This tracking allowed him to tell precisely where they looked. What he discovered was that if a photograph contained images that the people found morally objectionable, or that threatened their worldview, their eyes oftentimes wouldn't stray even once to those images. For example, one of the photos showed, in the background, an image of someone reading a newspaper, while the foreground contained the outline of a woman's breast. Many of those who found nudity morally objectionable did not look even once at the breast, and when asked about it later, could not remember that there had been a breast in the photograph. It seems reasonable to suppose that some part of their minds must have known--they must have seen out of the corners of their eyes--that something there would disturb them, and so, like Shem and Japheth, they chose not to look. I cannot say whether the decision not to look was made consciously or unconsciously by Shem and Japheth, but it seems pretty clear from the reactions of those who did not--could not--look at all the parts of the photograph that their decision to not see were made on an entirely pre- or unconscious level. The point is that in nearly all circumstances we each know precisely where not to look in order to have our worldview remained unthreatened and intact."

-Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

Objectivity in America

"There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV.

But in the secondary America we've been through, of back roads, and Chinaman's ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasn't much feeling of loneliness. That's the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. I'm undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true.

Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices...TV, jets, freeways and so on...but I hope it's been made plain that the real evil isn't the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It's the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. That's why I went to so much trouble to show how technology could be used to destroy the evil. A person who knows how to fix motorcycles...with Quality...is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesn't. And they aren't going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time." [Pirsig, Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Part 4, Chapter 29, Paragraph 20-22]

Non-human neighbors

"From an animistic perspective, the clearest source of all this distress, both physical and psychological, lies in the aforementioned violence needlessly perpetrated by our civilization on the ecology of the planet; only by alleviating the latter will we be able to heal the former. While this may sound at first like a simple statement of faith, it makes eminent and obvious sense as soon as we acknowledge our thorough dependence upon the countless other organisms with whom we have evolved. Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth--our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human."

David Abram The Spell of The Sensuous (p. 22)

Mystery of life

"As humans, we are well acquainted with the needs and capacities of the human body--we live our own bodies and so know, from within, the possibilities of our form. We cannot know, with the same familiarity and intimacy, the lived experience of a grass snake or a snapping turtle; we cannot readily experience the precise sensations of a hummingbird sipping nectar from a flower or a rubber tree soaking up sunlight. And yet we do know how it feels to sip from a fresh pool of water or to bask and stretch in the sun. Our experience may indeed be a variant of these other modes of sensitivity; nevertheless, we cannot, as humans, precisely experience the living sensations of another form. We do not know, with full clarity, their desires or motivations; we cannot know, or can never be sure that what we know, they know. That the deer does experience sensations, that it carries knowledge of how to orient in the land, of where to find food and how to protect its young, that it knows well how to survive in the forest without the tools upon which we depend, is readily evident to our human senses. That the mango tree has the ability to create fruit, or the yarrow plant the power to reduce a child's fever, is also evident. To human kind, these Others are purveyors of secrets, carriers of intelligence that we ourselves often need: it is these Others who can inform us of unseasonable changes in the weather, or warn of us of imminent eruptions and earthquakes, who show us, when foraging, where we may find the ripest berries or the best route to follow back home. By watching them build their nests and shelters, we glean clues regarding how to strengthen our own dwellings, and their deaths teach us of our own. We receive from them countless gifts of food, fuel, shelter, and clothing. Yet still they remain Other to us, inhabiting their own cultures and displaying their own rituals, never wholly fathomable."

-David Abram The Spell of the Sensuous

Racism & benefiting from exploitation

"I admit it: I'm racist. The other night I saw a group (or maybe a pack?) of white teenagers standing in a vacant lot, clustered around a 4x4, and I crossed the street to avoid them; had they been black, I probably would have taken another street entirely. And I'm misogynistic. I admit that, too. I'm a shitty cook, and a worse housecleaner, probably in great measure because I've internalized the notion that these are women's work. Of course, I never admit that's why I don't do them: I always say I just don't much enjoy those activities (which is true enough; and it's true enough also that many women don't enjoy them either), and in any case, I've got better things to do, like write books and teach classes [at a prison] where I can feel morally superior to pimps. And naturally I value money over life. Why else would I own a computer with a hard drive put together in Thailand by women dying of job-induced cancer? Why else would I own shirts made in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, and shoes put together in Mexico? The truth is that, although many of my best friends are people of color (as the cliche goes), and other of my best friends are women, I am part of this river: I benefit from the exploitation of others, and I do not much want to sacrifice this privilege. I am, after all, civilized, and have gained a taste for "comforts and elegancies" which can be gained only through the coercion of slavery. The truth is that like most others who benefit from this deep and broad river, I would probably rather die (and maybe even kill, or better, have someone kill for me) than trade places with the men, women, and children who made my computer, my shirt, my shoes." [The Culture of Make Believe, Derrick Jensen Pg. 69]

Pain, Learning a Lesson

"Is it not manifest that there must exist in our midst an immense amount of misery which is a normal result of misconduct, and ought not to be dissociated from it? There is a notion, always more or less prevalent and just now vociferously expressed, that all social suffering is removable, and that it is the duty of somebody or other to remove it. Both these beliefs are false. To separate pain from ill-doing is to fight against the constitution of things, and will be followed by far more pain. Saving men from the natural penalties of dissolute living, eventually necessitates the infliction of artifical penalties in solitary cells, on tread-wheels, and by the lash.
...
The current assumption is that there should be no suffering, and that society is to blame for that which exists" [Herbert Spencer, The Coming Slavery, Pg. 81]

"the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives), but their theory was wrong--half fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry. The more earnest they were, the farther it led them astray." [Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers, Pg. 117]

Community+Coversation+Love

"Life's meaning emerges from conversation in community with people you love."
"When there is love, conversation has purpose, context, engagement, trust (while, without love, conversation is sterile and selfish)."
"The best conversations are a form of 'making love' -- empathetic, collaborative, even erotic."
"The best conversations are also polyamorous (all participants love and trust each other) -- this provides safety from hurt and cruelty, and this safety encourages openness, honesty, courage, and true innovation." (1)

"In a completely generous and genuine natural community that is emotionally healthy, where everyone loves everyone else and love is abundant not scarce, love pervades everything and is demonstrated in cooperative work, in conversation, in art and science endeavours, in discovery and imagination, and in sensory and sexual exploration of others in the community. There are no exclusive pairings, because there is no need for them. Physical and sexual caresses may be frequent, but they are also fun, casual and pleasurable, and never possessive. They are just another way of saying 'I love you'." (2)

"I think the difference between a polyamorous community and a group of promiscuous people is an important one. Commitment to community should be a deep commitment, and if a member is unable to fulfill their desires for love within the community, that suggests either the member lacks commitment or the community lacks members with certain needed qualities that would allow the member to find what s/he loves within it." (3)

Life of human invention

"Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghost and more ghost. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living." [Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance]

Learning from the Past?

"While it is true that certain historical examples of goodness may be brought to bear for the moral education of children and the elevation of their minds in order to impress them with what is morally admirable, it is also true that the destinies of nations and states--with their interests, situations, and complexities--are a different field of knowledge. Rulers, statesmen, and nations are told that they ought to learn from the experience of history. Yet what experience and history teaches us is this, that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, nor acted in accordance with the lessons to be derived from it. Each era has such particular circumstances, such individual situations, that decisions can only be made from within the era itself. In the press of world events, there is no help to be had from general principles, nor from the memory of similar conditions in former times--for a pale memory has no force against the vitality and freedom of the present." [GWF Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Pg. 7-8]

Deviation from our Instincts

"Every animate creature stands in a specific relation to the external world in which it lives. From the meanest zoophyte, up to the most highly organised of the vertebrata, one and all have certain fixed principles of existence. Each has its varied bodily wants to be satisfied - food to be provided for its proper nourishment - a habitation to be constructed for shelter from the cold, or for defence against enemies - now arrangements to be made for bringing up a brood of young, nests to be built, little ones to be fed and fostered - then a store of provisions to be laid in against winter, and so on, with a variety of other natural desires to be gratified. For the performance of all these operations, every creature has its appropriate organs and instincts - external apparatus and internal faculties; and the health and happiness of each being, are bound up with the perfection and activity of these powers. They, in their turn, are dependent upon the position in which the creature is placed. Surround it with circumstances which preclude the necessity or any one of its faculties, and that faculty will become gradually impaired. Nature provides nothing in vain. Instincts and organs are only preserved so long as they are required. Place a tribe of animals in a situation where one of their attributes is unnecessary - take away its natural exercies - diminish its activity, and you will gradually destroy its power. Successive enerations will see the faculty, or instinct, or whatever it may be, become gradually weaker, and an ultimate deneracy of the race will inevitably ensue." [Herbert Spencer, The Proper Sphere of Government, pg.49]

Absence of independent existence

"Look still deeper into impermanence, and you will find it has another message, another face, one of great hope, one that opens your eyes to the fundamental nature of the universe, and our extraordinary relationship to it.

"If everything is impermanent, then everything is what we call 'empty,' which means lacking in any lasting, stable, and inherent existence; and all things, when seen and understood in their true relation, are not independent but interdependent with all other things. The Buddha compared the universe to a vast net woven of a countless variety of brilliant jewels, each with a countless number of facets. Each jewel reflects in itself every other jewel in the net and is, in fact, one with every other jewel."

"Nothing has any inherent existence of its own when you really look at it, and this absence of independent existence is what we call 'emptiness.' Think of a tree. When you think of a tree, you tend to think of a distinctly defined object; and on a certain level, like the wave, it is. But when you look more closely at the tree, you will see ultimately it has no independent existence. When you contemplate it, you will find that it dissolves into an extremely subtle net of relationships that stretches across the universe. The rain that falls on its leaves, the wind that sways it, the soil that nourishes and sustains it, all the seasons and the weather, moonlight and starlight and sunlight--all form part of this tree. As you begin to think about the tree more and more, you will discover that everything in the universe helps to make the tree what it is; that it cannot at any moment be isolated from anything else; and that at every moment its nature is subtly changing." [The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Soygal Rinpoche, pg. 37.]