Whereas vision, the lead sense for most of us, seems especially set up for perceiving separation (“This is not that”, “These two things are disconnected from each other”), sound is much more available to be perceived as waves washing over us. It is much more feasible to not separate this sound from that sound, to let it all join together as one unbroken tapestry of sound.
This is obviously not automatic. Our mind still likes to identify, categorize and name the sounds we hear. It's fairly difficult to absolutely tune out this part of our brain that wants to identify and even make value judgments about the sounds we hear. I love doing this exercise as I am walking around town, but I do notice this identifying and judging process in my brain: bird sounds – good, car sounds – bad, expressway sounds – very bad.
But it is pretty doable to at least partly to unhook from this conceptual process, to go back to the raw data – especially if we choose to do this and invest just the slightest bit of mental discipline around it.
Today is a windy, raw, early March day. When I let go of my griping about the weather, especially the wind, that very wind stirs up some very cool sounds (still identified by me, but after at least a brief moment of just hearing): leaf skittering across the sidewalk, stop sign rattling, wind blowing across my ears. A couple of the coolest sounds sat unjudged – even unidentified - only for a moment: paper bag crinkling under a car tire, plastic cup making its noisy way down the street. After that delicious moment of just hearing, the judgment “litter – bad” asserted itself. But, because I was so much grokking sounds during that walk, it was really not that hard to let go of the mentalizing and drop back into the gloriously diverse sounds.
Just a few minutes earlier, I was really having a ball surrendering to the sounds in a coffee shop where I was sitting with some friends. There were two separate conversations burbling along among my friends – one at 2 o’clock and one at about 11. One way I love to release myself from the conceptual part of my brain and thirstily drink in the sounds around me is to let go of decoding the words and conversations I hear. It is easier to do this when I don’t know the conversers – somehow, some part of me feels it is “supposed to” be a “good listener” when friends are talking, but in the coffee shop just now there were so many other threads or eruptions of sound that it was really not too hard to stop “listening to” my friends’ conversations and simply hear them.
Some of the other sounds I did identify and partly decode, but not completely: other conversations in the room, a musical soundtrack (more seducing me to “understand” because there were lyrics, not just sound). But the juiciest sounds were all the little rattles, bangs, thumps and tinkles coming from behind the counter. They were so much fun partly because I literally did not “know” what they were. I could speculate about their origins, if I chose (and sometimes I did): refrigerator door closing, lattes being whipped by that little wand they stick in them, etc. But, combined with all the other sounds in the room, it was relatively easy to just let them rise and then fall away, just as the sounds they were – no identity.
I had really a lot of luck just letting my hearing swim around the room – words at 11 o’clock, music, bop at three o’clock (behind the counter), words at 2 o’clock, words also at 2 o’clock but somewhere further back in the room (sometimes I couldn’t stop myself from looking to see what table I thought they were coming from, but that less disrupted the ocean of sound than actually being able to make out the words - and sometimes I also let the origin fall away into irrelevance).
I think my friends may have thought I was stoned (especially since they were, for some synchronistic reason, talking about marijuana – which I have laid off for a lot of years, but, surprisingly, most of them in this conversation, which – yes – I was at least intermittently decoding, apparently still actively partake of). So I was behaving somewhat oddly (another judgment), sitting outside the conversation and looking a little maybe aloof, maybe spaced out, maybe just disengaged. At one point, one friend – directly across from me, so he maybe saw my unusually floating presence – said, “You’ve got to stop interrupting so much, Majo.” I didn’t have much trouble coming back with, “I can’t help it, I’m just a buttinsky”, then dropping out again to the symphony of lush coffee shop sounds.
Here at work now in my little gift shop in a big downtown hotel, I’ve gotten caught up in a couple of (really pretty fun) conversations, which have pulled me back to the world of meaning, as opposed to simple audition. (These sounds are all auditioning and none of them have been voted out yet.) But I think the conversations have been so much fun partly because I have brought an easy, free presence to them – and I’m showing up this way just because of my somewhat extended, luxurious sound bath.
Now the other conversers have departed. I’m in my little conceptual bubble of writing. But I’m almost finished with this little piece. Once I have let go of the headlong momentum of this writing, maybe I’ll just drop back into the sounds around me. Maybe. I’ve got a little list going of other pieces pushing through to be written today by me – a big turn-on for the writer in me – but maybe I’ll just let some sounds visit me first.
We’ll see.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Saturday, March 3, 2007
What is "spiritual"?
Lots of people in my circle like to say that they are not “religious”, but “spiritual”. I understand how someone might not want to be identified with any specific religion – but what does it mean to be “spiritual”?
We like to think that certain activities or experiences are somehow more spiritual than others – maybe meditation, prayer, chanting, etc. We even think that some people are more spiritual than others. Then we complicate the whole mess further by using terms like “very spiritual”, “deeply spiritual” or – my favorite mess-creator – “spiritually evolved”.
Let’s come at it from a different angle. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. This one works for me. But what does it mean?
For me, the fundamental spiritual reality is that all of life is totally connected – there is no seam, no in/out, no better/worse, no higher or lower. Seeing life in terms of those antagonistic pairs is dualism – I wrote about this in an earlier post.
Having a human experience means that we got crammed into a body, with a sensory apparatus that sees things as separate - and a mind that functions largely by analysis, by taking things apart, by assigning things to categories. Our language supports this: subject – verb – object. This separate being does something to that separate being. In science, the mechanistic view of the universe (being challenged now by quantum physics) sees the world in terms of billiard balls enlessly bouncing off of each other. Causality – this caused that.
The spiritual perspective is the dawning awareness that all truly is one, that nothing is separate. Every bit of the mix is totally connected with everything else.
Then, from this viewpoint, what thing or experience could be more spiritual than anything else? Who could be more spiritual than anyone else? A “spiritual experience” might actually be the momentary glimpse of a reality where no experiences are any more spiritual than any others. It’s the big game of hide and seek. We get progressively more peeks, intuitions, subtle messages that there is something more going on under the hood.
Someone who totally gets it, so that now their awareness of this oneness never wavers, is called “enlightened” or “Self-realized”. They realize that, under their small s self, there is this one ocean of life that is all of us. Being enlightened, they take their small s self lightly – they know that it’s not who they really are.
It’s all connected, but the game we got plugged into makes it look like we are separate, different. Why did it get set up this way? Maybe so that, when we get it about our essential connectedness, we really get it.
The Course in Miracles says that we all have already come home to this awareness, the game is over and life (which is all of us) has won – but we are still caught up in a big dream of separation, a dream from which we gradually wake. Some quantum theorists say that it’s all happening at the same time.
If everything is connected, that would mean not just everything now, but everything, period – regardless of what time tag it has on it. When we have a precognition of some event that, when we separate the present from the future, has not yet happened, we’re not really psychic. We have access to that information because we are completely connected with all that is.
Same thing for centuries-old memories. We don’t have to posit “reincarnation”, we don’t have to think, “That was me back there.” If nothing is separate, then “we” have access to all that information, all the time. When people ask Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master, about reincarnation, he points to the ego-trap in thinking that there is some fundamental “me”, separate from the endless flow of life. He says “I teach that I am not the same now as I was a minute ago. So who is it that would be reincarnated?”
One of my teachers liked the metaphor that we all came out of one big batch of cookie dough, but we got shaped, pulled apart, cut up into all these different pieces. Then we walk around thinking we are all different.
Is it the taste or the smell that breaks down the illusion? Is being caught in the illusion somehow less spiritual than starting to see through it? Ah, there’s that dualistic trap again. We want to break off one experience from another. Oh, well, little by little….
We like to think that certain activities or experiences are somehow more spiritual than others – maybe meditation, prayer, chanting, etc. We even think that some people are more spiritual than others. Then we complicate the whole mess further by using terms like “very spiritual”, “deeply spiritual” or – my favorite mess-creator – “spiritually evolved”.
Let’s come at it from a different angle. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. This one works for me. But what does it mean?
For me, the fundamental spiritual reality is that all of life is totally connected – there is no seam, no in/out, no better/worse, no higher or lower. Seeing life in terms of those antagonistic pairs is dualism – I wrote about this in an earlier post.
Having a human experience means that we got crammed into a body, with a sensory apparatus that sees things as separate - and a mind that functions largely by analysis, by taking things apart, by assigning things to categories. Our language supports this: subject – verb – object. This separate being does something to that separate being. In science, the mechanistic view of the universe (being challenged now by quantum physics) sees the world in terms of billiard balls enlessly bouncing off of each other. Causality – this caused that.
The spiritual perspective is the dawning awareness that all truly is one, that nothing is separate. Every bit of the mix is totally connected with everything else.
Then, from this viewpoint, what thing or experience could be more spiritual than anything else? Who could be more spiritual than anyone else? A “spiritual experience” might actually be the momentary glimpse of a reality where no experiences are any more spiritual than any others. It’s the big game of hide and seek. We get progressively more peeks, intuitions, subtle messages that there is something more going on under the hood.
Someone who totally gets it, so that now their awareness of this oneness never wavers, is called “enlightened” or “Self-realized”. They realize that, under their small s self, there is this one ocean of life that is all of us. Being enlightened, they take their small s self lightly – they know that it’s not who they really are.
It’s all connected, but the game we got plugged into makes it look like we are separate, different. Why did it get set up this way? Maybe so that, when we get it about our essential connectedness, we really get it.
The Course in Miracles says that we all have already come home to this awareness, the game is over and life (which is all of us) has won – but we are still caught up in a big dream of separation, a dream from which we gradually wake. Some quantum theorists say that it’s all happening at the same time.
If everything is connected, that would mean not just everything now, but everything, period – regardless of what time tag it has on it. When we have a precognition of some event that, when we separate the present from the future, has not yet happened, we’re not really psychic. We have access to that information because we are completely connected with all that is.
Same thing for centuries-old memories. We don’t have to posit “reincarnation”, we don’t have to think, “That was me back there.” If nothing is separate, then “we” have access to all that information, all the time. When people ask Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master, about reincarnation, he points to the ego-trap in thinking that there is some fundamental “me”, separate from the endless flow of life. He says “I teach that I am not the same now as I was a minute ago. So who is it that would be reincarnated?”
One of my teachers liked the metaphor that we all came out of one big batch of cookie dough, but we got shaped, pulled apart, cut up into all these different pieces. Then we walk around thinking we are all different.
Is it the taste or the smell that breaks down the illusion? Is being caught in the illusion somehow less spiritual than starting to see through it? Ah, there’s that dualistic trap again. We want to break off one experience from another. Oh, well, little by little….
Friday, March 2, 2007
Fortune Cookies
I never put much stock in fortune cookies, until about 20 years ago.
My friend Mark and I were having lunch in a nice, very informal little Chinese restaurant just down the street from me. (If there were such a thing as a Chinese diner, this would have been it.) Mark and I had a fairly strong relationship, including him at one point renting office space from me in my really too-large office suite – and also, after his girlfriend threw him out, staying with me for a while in my equally-too-large rented farmhouse on a lovely piece of land about 15 minutes from downtown Syracuse, NY. (One of the joys of Syracuse – which almost made up for the long, snowy winters – was having such easy access to nice country.)
Taking in housemates helped my social needs – and helped me pay the rent. The house also had a huge living room, which I used to host a variety of personal growth workshops. I even gave the place a cute little name, Harmony Farm, and a nice little map that showed it as being located halfway between Syracuse and California.
Mark had moved back into town – he was essentially a city boy, who mostly did not appreciate our idyllic, bucolic location. As we finished our meal, he was asking me how things were going out at Harmony Farm. I was exactly in the middle of telling him how much I liked my current housemate and how good the vibe was out there, when I opened a fortune cookie that said, "Harmony in the home”. Now that got my attention. If it had said, “Happiness in the home”, “Harmony in your life”, etc., it would not have seemed like such extraordinary synchronicity. I started paying more attention to these little strips of white paper inside these virtually inedible crunchy little cookies (with mostly nothing better for dessert in the typical Chinese restaurant).
Over the next many years, I got some fortunes that seemed stupid and irrelevant and some that genuinely strove to be meaningful, but related to my life in no way that I could come up with. And some real winners. Actually, well more than half the fortunes I have opened up since then have seemed interesting at least – and many that have hit me right between the eyes, that have seemed at least as much tailored for my specific life situation as that original “Harmony” fortune.
In the last 20 years, I have almost always had one or more cool fortunes taped above my desk. My current posted fortune was opened about two years ago, shortly after moving from Chicago to Asheville, NC. Part of what kept me going in this new town, where I moved knowing not one soul, was the constant support and well-wishing from my friends back in Chicago and other parts of the country. This fortune said, “Friends all joy in your success.” I suppose that could have fit for lots of people, but it seemed especially meaningful to me. Not the kind of knockout synchronicity as “Harmony in the home”, but I still really liked it.
A few months ago, a customer at the gas station where I was working as a cashier, came up eating one of those little Dove chocolates, individually wrapped in foil – and gave me three. (She was a regular and did, I think, already know of my monster sweet tooth.) These individual chocolates carry their own little fortunes, inscribed on the inside of the foil.
The three she gave me were pretty amazing.
I was at that point facing some pretty significant challenges in my life – more even than usual – and was consciously struggling to embrace this juncture, to trust that nothing was going wrong, that life really only meant me well. So the first little enfoiled message said, “Dare to love completely.” Again, really something that could be meaningful to anyone at any point in his or her life, but I liked it a lot.
The second felt even more specifically pointed towards me. In the context of all these life challenges, this guy who usually would be characterized as a go-with-the-flow type, was telling my friends that I was pushing hard to get through this period, that it seemed I needed to, if I was possibly going to reach some calmer, easier shore. So this little chocolaty message (chocolate being my favorite food group, by a long shot) said, “Go against the grain.” This seemed a lot less generic than loving completely – and I could think of no previous period in my life when this message would have fit for me.
But it was the third message that totally knocked my socks off, that left me giving the other fortunes even more credence.
I for many years have not liked red clothes. I was told by someone along the way that my natural coloring was winter, or something like that, and that red was not a good color for me. And, with my ruddy Irish complexion, red – especially shirts – never looked good on me. (I suppose red pants would not have looked all that great, either.)
But there I was, standing at the window of our little booth at this gas station, wearing my red uniform shirt. So this fortune says, “Guess what, you look good in red”!! Now, how the hell do I explain that? Even the sassy little introduction, “Guess what”, seemed to emphasize that life was having a great little joke with me. I immediately, after shaking my head and walking around the little booth, muttering something like “Now, how in the hell…?”, taped that round little bit of foil above the window. My two colleagues, neither of whom liked our uniform shirts, got a kick out of it, too.
So, now I repeat, “How in the hell…?” – or maybe heaven. I left that fortune at the gas station and took the other two home, where they still adorn the top of my bathroom mirror. Since I got through that especially difficult period, I’m not sure that “Go against the grain” still has significance for me, but it feels like it somehow does. Maybe not so globally as to fight against the difficulty of my life, but for those moments when going with the flow truly does not feel like the right response.
And “Dare to love completely” remains a key little mantra for me. Again, probably a nice bit of coaching for anyone, at any point in their life, but – paired with that crazy little message about looking good in red – my response is basically, “OK, life, I get the message.”
Now, I’ll say it again, “How in the heaven…?” What’s going on here? Is there something especially magical about fortune cookies and Dove chocolates? I don’t think so.
I really do believe that synchronicity is everywhere around us, all the time – we just don’t see it or pay any attention to it. Then sometimes we do pay attention. I’ve written in an earlier post how birds sometimes get my attention – how seeing a particular favorite bird (especially ones you don’t see every day, like great blue herons) at a particular moment seems to signal something like, “It’s ok, the truth of life is not the chaos you now see. Everything is connected and you can trust the moment”. And that’s how I think fortune cookies work. Birds get my attention because I have invested them with synchronistic properties. Fortune cookies get my attention because they claim to have significant little messages.
But the truth, I more and more believe, is that all of life is always astonishingly, magically interwoven – and that sometimes we are just more in tune, or more needing to have life get our attention. It certainly is clear to me that the more I read about, write about, journal about synchronicity, the more I see it all around me. Call me a goof, a budding mystic, or simply more and more recognizing the underlying truth of life – call me whatever, these fortunes, foil wrappers and birds really do work for me.
My friend Mark and I were having lunch in a nice, very informal little Chinese restaurant just down the street from me. (If there were such a thing as a Chinese diner, this would have been it.) Mark and I had a fairly strong relationship, including him at one point renting office space from me in my really too-large office suite – and also, after his girlfriend threw him out, staying with me for a while in my equally-too-large rented farmhouse on a lovely piece of land about 15 minutes from downtown Syracuse, NY. (One of the joys of Syracuse – which almost made up for the long, snowy winters – was having such easy access to nice country.)
Taking in housemates helped my social needs – and helped me pay the rent. The house also had a huge living room, which I used to host a variety of personal growth workshops. I even gave the place a cute little name, Harmony Farm, and a nice little map that showed it as being located halfway between Syracuse and California.
Mark had moved back into town – he was essentially a city boy, who mostly did not appreciate our idyllic, bucolic location. As we finished our meal, he was asking me how things were going out at Harmony Farm. I was exactly in the middle of telling him how much I liked my current housemate and how good the vibe was out there, when I opened a fortune cookie that said, "Harmony in the home”. Now that got my attention. If it had said, “Happiness in the home”, “Harmony in your life”, etc., it would not have seemed like such extraordinary synchronicity. I started paying more attention to these little strips of white paper inside these virtually inedible crunchy little cookies (with mostly nothing better for dessert in the typical Chinese restaurant).
Over the next many years, I got some fortunes that seemed stupid and irrelevant and some that genuinely strove to be meaningful, but related to my life in no way that I could come up with. And some real winners. Actually, well more than half the fortunes I have opened up since then have seemed interesting at least – and many that have hit me right between the eyes, that have seemed at least as much tailored for my specific life situation as that original “Harmony” fortune.
In the last 20 years, I have almost always had one or more cool fortunes taped above my desk. My current posted fortune was opened about two years ago, shortly after moving from Chicago to Asheville, NC. Part of what kept me going in this new town, where I moved knowing not one soul, was the constant support and well-wishing from my friends back in Chicago and other parts of the country. This fortune said, “Friends all joy in your success.” I suppose that could have fit for lots of people, but it seemed especially meaningful to me. Not the kind of knockout synchronicity as “Harmony in the home”, but I still really liked it.
A few months ago, a customer at the gas station where I was working as a cashier, came up eating one of those little Dove chocolates, individually wrapped in foil – and gave me three. (She was a regular and did, I think, already know of my monster sweet tooth.) These individual chocolates carry their own little fortunes, inscribed on the inside of the foil.
The three she gave me were pretty amazing.
I was at that point facing some pretty significant challenges in my life – more even than usual – and was consciously struggling to embrace this juncture, to trust that nothing was going wrong, that life really only meant me well. So the first little enfoiled message said, “Dare to love completely.” Again, really something that could be meaningful to anyone at any point in his or her life, but I liked it a lot.
The second felt even more specifically pointed towards me. In the context of all these life challenges, this guy who usually would be characterized as a go-with-the-flow type, was telling my friends that I was pushing hard to get through this period, that it seemed I needed to, if I was possibly going to reach some calmer, easier shore. So this little chocolaty message (chocolate being my favorite food group, by a long shot) said, “Go against the grain.” This seemed a lot less generic than loving completely – and I could think of no previous period in my life when this message would have fit for me.
But it was the third message that totally knocked my socks off, that left me giving the other fortunes even more credence.
I for many years have not liked red clothes. I was told by someone along the way that my natural coloring was winter, or something like that, and that red was not a good color for me. And, with my ruddy Irish complexion, red – especially shirts – never looked good on me. (I suppose red pants would not have looked all that great, either.)
But there I was, standing at the window of our little booth at this gas station, wearing my red uniform shirt. So this fortune says, “Guess what, you look good in red”!! Now, how the hell do I explain that? Even the sassy little introduction, “Guess what”, seemed to emphasize that life was having a great little joke with me. I immediately, after shaking my head and walking around the little booth, muttering something like “Now, how in the hell…?”, taped that round little bit of foil above the window. My two colleagues, neither of whom liked our uniform shirts, got a kick out of it, too.
So, now I repeat, “How in the hell…?” – or maybe heaven. I left that fortune at the gas station and took the other two home, where they still adorn the top of my bathroom mirror. Since I got through that especially difficult period, I’m not sure that “Go against the grain” still has significance for me, but it feels like it somehow does. Maybe not so globally as to fight against the difficulty of my life, but for those moments when going with the flow truly does not feel like the right response.
And “Dare to love completely” remains a key little mantra for me. Again, probably a nice bit of coaching for anyone, at any point in their life, but – paired with that crazy little message about looking good in red – my response is basically, “OK, life, I get the message.”
Now, I’ll say it again, “How in the heaven…?” What’s going on here? Is there something especially magical about fortune cookies and Dove chocolates? I don’t think so.
I really do believe that synchronicity is everywhere around us, all the time – we just don’t see it or pay any attention to it. Then sometimes we do pay attention. I’ve written in an earlier post how birds sometimes get my attention – how seeing a particular favorite bird (especially ones you don’t see every day, like great blue herons) at a particular moment seems to signal something like, “It’s ok, the truth of life is not the chaos you now see. Everything is connected and you can trust the moment”. And that’s how I think fortune cookies work. Birds get my attention because I have invested them with synchronistic properties. Fortune cookies get my attention because they claim to have significant little messages.
But the truth, I more and more believe, is that all of life is always astonishingly, magically interwoven – and that sometimes we are just more in tune, or more needing to have life get our attention. It certainly is clear to me that the more I read about, write about, journal about synchronicity, the more I see it all around me. Call me a goof, a budding mystic, or simply more and more recognizing the underlying truth of life – call me whatever, these fortunes, foil wrappers and birds really do work for me.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
"It is what it is."
People throw this slogan around, much of the time – I think – not really understanding what they are saying.
In a period of five years, my stepbrother Dennis (just in his 40’s) was required to make the decision to take off life-supports, his youngest brother, Jim (complications from a kidney transplant) and his wife, Barbara (hit by a car). During this same five years, he was present at the hospital bed of his older bother, Pat (also complications from a kidney transplant – kidney problems run in the family), as Pat’s wife, Pam, had to make the same awful decision.
When, a couple of years later, I heard him say, “It is what it is”, it took my breath away. Here was someone who has faced the worst of “what it is” can be. If he has found within himself the courage and spiritual depth to hold this stance, then what of me? Can I find within me that level of spiritual surrender to the difficult realities of my life? Thinking of Dennis often helps me to get there.
In a period of five years, my stepbrother Dennis (just in his 40’s) was required to make the decision to take off life-supports, his youngest brother, Jim (complications from a kidney transplant) and his wife, Barbara (hit by a car). During this same five years, he was present at the hospital bed of his older bother, Pat (also complications from a kidney transplant – kidney problems run in the family), as Pat’s wife, Pam, had to make the same awful decision.
When, a couple of years later, I heard him say, “It is what it is”, it took my breath away. Here was someone who has faced the worst of “what it is” can be. If he has found within himself the courage and spiritual depth to hold this stance, then what of me? Can I find within me that level of spiritual surrender to the difficult realities of my life? Thinking of Dennis often helps me to get there.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Dualism
WRONG (Majo, Call Me Crazy, 2005)
How do you know when something is going wrong?
How do you know anything?
One can only “know” things that are real.
“Going wrong” is made up.
Dualism refers to breaking life into two’s – good and evil, God and the devil, right and wrong, better and worse, going right and going wrong, good guys and bad guys, you and me, me and God.
Our sensory apparatus is hopelessly, permanently hooked on seeing things as separate. Especially seeing. Sometimes sound can feel like an ocean washing over us. But even there our minds will construct what’s going on as something out there washing over us, here.
There we refer to the real culprit – our minds. Our analytical mind just doesn’t know how to function without dropping things into different buckets, categories.
Even calling the mind the culprit is dualistic. It comes from the belief that some things, e.g. categorizing, are better than other things. We may believe that a unitary view of things is more accurate, but categorizing (“dualizing”) is simply part of the evolution towards seeing the essential oneness of things.
So what exactly is non-dualism? Our language is never going to do a great job of capturing it, because our very language is, in its very structure, dualistic. Subject-verb-object. “I do x to you”.
But let’s hack away at it, knowing that we will inevitably fall short. Non-dualism is recognizing that, under the skin of life, under the appearance of separation, all truly is one. Lots of spiritual, maybe especially New Age folks, like to say that “All is one”, but they don’t really mean it, don’t actually get it.
They may in the next breath, refer to the “Hero’s Journey.” With all due respect to Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, looking at the world in terms of heroes and non-heroes may be helpful for some people at certain points in their lives – but not for others at others.
First, if each person’s path is totally unique, then there is no basis for comparison. Perhaps everyone is always being heroic in his or her own way. If we are all different, then no one has a roadmap. We are all making it up all the time.
It may also not be true that we, ourselves, are more heroic at some times than others. If we could really walk not just a mile but a lifetime in someone else’s shoes, we would understand that what they are doing right now is exactly the only thing they could possibly do. If we trace back the roots of what we consider our most individual, creative, “heroic” acts, we may find that there are many factors in our past that directly explain our current actions.
There’s lots more to be said about non-dualism. A.H. Almaas wrote a series of four very dense, very brilliant books on the topic – and only scratched the surface. I could write here about non-dualism and depression, and God, and lots of things – and probably will in future posts. I’m likely to start from scratch another time and come at non-dualism from a different angle, with completely different and equally inadequate words.
PREFERENCES (Majo, Call Me Crazy, 2005)
When my preferences no longer matter
When my biases are all exposed
In their wild and glorious inaccuracy
When, beaten down,I lose the will to pick and choose
Ah, then, then I can begin
How do you know when something is going wrong?
How do you know anything?
One can only “know” things that are real.
“Going wrong” is made up.
Dualism refers to breaking life into two’s – good and evil, God and the devil, right and wrong, better and worse, going right and going wrong, good guys and bad guys, you and me, me and God.
Our sensory apparatus is hopelessly, permanently hooked on seeing things as separate. Especially seeing. Sometimes sound can feel like an ocean washing over us. But even there our minds will construct what’s going on as something out there washing over us, here.
There we refer to the real culprit – our minds. Our analytical mind just doesn’t know how to function without dropping things into different buckets, categories.
Even calling the mind the culprit is dualistic. It comes from the belief that some things, e.g. categorizing, are better than other things. We may believe that a unitary view of things is more accurate, but categorizing (“dualizing”) is simply part of the evolution towards seeing the essential oneness of things.
So what exactly is non-dualism? Our language is never going to do a great job of capturing it, because our very language is, in its very structure, dualistic. Subject-verb-object. “I do x to you”.
But let’s hack away at it, knowing that we will inevitably fall short. Non-dualism is recognizing that, under the skin of life, under the appearance of separation, all truly is one. Lots of spiritual, maybe especially New Age folks, like to say that “All is one”, but they don’t really mean it, don’t actually get it.
They may in the next breath, refer to the “Hero’s Journey.” With all due respect to Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, looking at the world in terms of heroes and non-heroes may be helpful for some people at certain points in their lives – but not for others at others.
First, if each person’s path is totally unique, then there is no basis for comparison. Perhaps everyone is always being heroic in his or her own way. If we are all different, then no one has a roadmap. We are all making it up all the time.
It may also not be true that we, ourselves, are more heroic at some times than others. If we could really walk not just a mile but a lifetime in someone else’s shoes, we would understand that what they are doing right now is exactly the only thing they could possibly do. If we trace back the roots of what we consider our most individual, creative, “heroic” acts, we may find that there are many factors in our past that directly explain our current actions.
There’s lots more to be said about non-dualism. A.H. Almaas wrote a series of four very dense, very brilliant books on the topic – and only scratched the surface. I could write here about non-dualism and depression, and God, and lots of things – and probably will in future posts. I’m likely to start from scratch another time and come at non-dualism from a different angle, with completely different and equally inadequate words.
PREFERENCES (Majo, Call Me Crazy, 2005)
When my preferences no longer matter
When my biases are all exposed
In their wild and glorious inaccuracy
When, beaten down,I lose the will to pick and choose
Ah, then, then I can begin
Friday, February 23, 2007
Apologies
Apologies can be useful to let the other person know that you care about them and do not wish to hurt them or cause them difficulty. When you are lucky, you or the other person will remember that you aren’t the doer - that life is dancing its endless perfect dance though you. When you’re really lucky, you will both be hip to this truth. Then, when one of you apologizes to the other, you will just wink at each other and maybe smile a foxy little smile.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Under the Hood
Living in this physical universe, we see the world as separate objects. That car, this dog, me, you, her, him.
- Separation is imbedded in the structure of our language: subject-verb-object. You do X to me, I do x to you.
- Our five senses perceive things as separate objects – especially our visual sense, which, for most of us, is our most dominant link to the world around us.
- And our physics (aside from the quantum mavericks of the last couple of decades) has been solidly mechanistic – billiard balls bouncing endlessly off each other, cause and effect.
Let’s, for the moment, leave out quantum physics – about which I am, for the most part, unable to intelligently comment. What else in our experience can point our attention towards connection under the appearance of separation? What’s going on under the hood?
In his novel V, Thomas Pynchon laid out a fabulous metaphor for these invisible linkages. In the book, we encounter a mysterious underground mail system. This unexplained postal web would leave you messages when and where you least expect them: under a rock that you happen to kick over, on the back of a door, inside your McDonald’s burger wrapper. These messages could be an exact answer to a question you have had on your mind or a decision you need to make. Or they may simply point you in a direction, without further explanation: proceed east or go to x location – and await further instruction. Or the message might be completely indecipherable to you, with the information or awareness you currently have available to you. Like a Zen koan, this message inserts itself inside your conscious and/or unconscious mind, there to work its whammy in ways you may never understand or even be aware of.
- Separation is imbedded in the structure of our language: subject-verb-object. You do X to me, I do x to you.
- Our five senses perceive things as separate objects – especially our visual sense, which, for most of us, is our most dominant link to the world around us.
- And our physics (aside from the quantum mavericks of the last couple of decades) has been solidly mechanistic – billiard balls bouncing endlessly off each other, cause and effect.
Let’s, for the moment, leave out quantum physics – about which I am, for the most part, unable to intelligently comment. What else in our experience can point our attention towards connection under the appearance of separation? What’s going on under the hood?
In his novel V, Thomas Pynchon laid out a fabulous metaphor for these invisible linkages. In the book, we encounter a mysterious underground mail system. This unexplained postal web would leave you messages when and where you least expect them: under a rock that you happen to kick over, on the back of a door, inside your McDonald’s burger wrapper. These messages could be an exact answer to a question you have had on your mind or a decision you need to make. Or they may simply point you in a direction, without further explanation: proceed east or go to x location – and await further instruction. Or the message might be completely indecipherable to you, with the information or awareness you currently have available to you. Like a Zen koan, this message inserts itself inside your conscious and/or unconscious mind, there to work its whammy in ways you may never understand or even be aware of.
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