Peering Out Into The World

Peering out into the world, I sit in joyful anticipation of all which is unfolding. I have no idea where I'm going, but I don't need to know. The journey is satisfying enough.

"If you bring forth what is within you
what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you
what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

~ The Gospel of Thomas

Intentionally Intending

What would happen if every morning for the next 30 days, I intentionally intended? What if I intentionally intended to bring my life's desires into my life by saying "yes" to my intuition...by saying "yes" to all that which I want...by saying "yes" to all my soul's desires and believing they are on their way to me?

The thing is that I've been doing this for almost 2 months now and I can't help but giggle by what's showing up in my life these days. 'Tis so exciting.

So, every day, I meditate on what I'd like to have in my life, give thanks for it and then release it into the world with the knowledge that it will come back to me.

The energy known as Abraham recommends we say the following each morning: "I intend to see; I expect to see, no matter who I am with, no matter where I am, no matter what I am doing, I intend to see what which I want to see."

Yep. Couldn't say it any better than that! So, what would happen if you tried this for 30 days? Imagine the possibilities!

Naming the Nameless

One theme which continues to pop up in my studies of Jung, Schopenhauer, Campbell, Tolle, Saint Patrick, et al is this theme of "interconnectedness", "collective unconsciousness", and "oneness." These are not new themes I'm discovering, as they have long played a role in my life; however, what *I am* finding incredibly fascinating is seeing how each of these individuals grappled with the idea and then how they chose to describe it. Talk about synchronicities!

I think one of the interpretations of this idea that I like best comes from the Tao Te Ching, chapter 25, which is entitled "Naming the Nameless." I'm including the whole of it here for your happy perusal! Enjoy! Namaste!

"What preceded life? The earth.
What preceded the earth? The universe.
What preceded the universe?
The soundless and shapeless, origin of origins,
ever transforming and having no beginning nor end.

This Mother of the universe is boundless, and nameless.
But if we wanted to share with you anything
about this remarkable non-executing executor,
we must invent a name for it.

We will call it the Tao because Tao means great.
Incredibly great because it occupies infinite space,
being fully present in the whole universe, and in every infinitesimal particle.

Because this Great Integrity created the universe,
and the universe created the earth,
and the earth created us, we are all incredibly great.

Life derives from the nature of the earth.
The earth derives from the nature of the universe.
The universe derives from the nature of the Great Integrity.
And the Great Integrity is the omnipresent, omnigenous omniform,
the universal material and spiritual abundance,
and the holoversal interlinkage and coition of existence."

Meditations on Beauty

Rose, June 2008.


I've decided to take my love of flowers one step further -- from admiring to purchasing. In celebration of this week's full moon and tomorrow's solstice (both celebrations of light and illumination), I saw these luscious, gorgeous roses and quickly brought them home.

They remind me that life passes swiftly and that fragility is all part of the cycle. In the meantime, I give thanks for these roses and for the ability to experience them will all my senses.

Oh, for they are so sweet!

Synchronicities!

I continue to be amazed at the amount of synchronicities occurring in my life these days. Then again, I should not be so surprised because I'm actively inviting them into my life. Still, the rate at which they're occurring is so amazing that I can't help but giggle sometimes.

Let me share with you what I mean.

Lately, I've been consumed by the writings and teachings of Schopenhauer (thanks to a recent dream I had), Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. Jung himself was particularly intrigued with this idea of synchronicity -- "the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality" (Webster's Dictionary).

Today I was reading Sharon Franquemont's "You Already Know What To Do", which speaks of ways to invite yourself into the intuitive life. At one point in the book, Sharon suggests that the reader close his or her eyes and ask the question, "Why is it important for me to invest in my intuition?" or (as I often ask) "Please show me what I need to know/see right now for my own personal development."

So, I closed my eyes, centered myself and started flipping through the book, feeling pulled to stop on a particular page. Once there and with eyes still closed, I allowed my finger to move along the two pages until it decided to stop. Here is what I found:

"Method #4: Situation Comedy and Synchronicities" and the lesson began with a young woman, Paula, who felt compelled to move to Oregon. My finger rested upon these words: "

Paula was having a series of what Carl Jung called synchronicities, meaningful coincidences which are not related by our normal understanding of cause and effect...Synchronicities occur in a variety of contexts, not just those where important decisions are being reached. Sometimes their greatest gift is sheer laughter" (p. 142).

Duly noted, Universe! Duly noted! I *am* laughing, and I giggle with future expectation of more of this to come!

Power of Myth -- II

My fascination with Campbell continues, so I thought I would share more of his musings (and my own) here in this space. As I was sharing with my friend, Lynn, this evening, my hunger for these teachings and others I'm encountering is so voracious and palpable that I cannot seem to download the information fast enough.

***

One of the leitmotifs which skips through Campbell's teachings is the importance of recognizing and honoring our divine natures. Campbell says we must "wake up to the divine which resides within each of us." In doing so, we recognize that we are not really these bodies or these minds or even these experiences. Instead, when we choose to see who we really are, we can transform our lives (and those around us) instantly.

This concept that we are all flames of the same divine spirit is among the reasons why I am so intuitively drawn towards the Indian greeting of "Namaste", which means "that which is divine and holy in me recognizes that which is divine and holy within you." In choosing to see each other's transcendent and divine natures, it becomes easier to observe and interact with each other's human physicalities without attachment or judgment.

Joseph Campbell put it this way:

"God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere...and the center is right where you're sitting and the other one is right where I'm sitting and each of us is a manifestation of that mystery."

Among the benefits of honoring our divine natures is that the ego cannot reside there. It cannot reside in stillness because it is of restless action. It cannot exist where there is divinity because there is fullness. And, the more we choose to see each other's divinity (the "thou") and our resulting interconnectedness, the less the ego can survive. Campbell tells us, "The ego that sees a 'thou' is not the same ego that sees an 'it'." This recognition alone can dramatically change one's psychology. Eckhart Tolle frames it this way: "So every ego is continuously struggling for survival, trying to protect and enlarge itself. To uphold the I-thought, it needs the opposite thought of "the other." The conceptual "I" cannot survive without the conceptual "other" (p. 60).

So, by removing thought constructions of "the other" or "it", we remove the obstructions between each other. We realize we are all one in the same. We realize we are the same spark of the divine flame or the same breath of the Creator or God or Source Energy or whatever your preferred mental construct is on this point. Perhaps then we can move away from outdated modi operandi and into more fulfilling modi vivendi.

Vibrational Escrow

I've been spending the past 6 weeks or so studying the co-creative work of Abraham-Hicks and have really aligned with the message of vibrational escrow -- namely, that with each new experience in life, we send out rockets of desire for things/people/experiences we would like to have in our lives; however, until we align with the frequencies of those desires, we will be unable to receive all that sits in vibrational escrow waiting for us.

Think of it in this way -- if you set your car radio dial to AM, you can only receive AM stations. It is absolutely impossible to receive FM stations while tuned into AM frequencies.

So, too, is it in life. We may want certain things/people/experiences to manifest in our lives but they will not happen until we attune ourselves to the frequencies of those particular desires.

What I find absolutely liberating about this idea is this: I am creator of my life and its resulting experiences. I create my reality but I can also choose to change it at any moment. What a liberating thought! There is nothing to limit me but myself, and I've decided not to do that anymore. The secondary benefit of this realization is that it encourages one to re-empower oneself. So often in the past, I carelessly allowed others access to my power (a.k.a. my essential nature) and even gave it away to still others; however, not anymore. I've recalled it all and am already reaping the benefits of that action.

One lesson I've learned through this active creating is that the best results occur when you relinquish control over how these desires will arrive into your life. Simply put, manifest them but let go of attachment as to how they will show up. You can't imagine the delightful surprises which will find you with this practice.

So, I challenge you. What is it that's been eluding you in life? Meditate on that desire. Examine what conflicting thoughts you may have around that desire. Do what you can to remove them, as they are interfering with your chosen desire. Release expectation as to what the arrival of the desire will look like -- may come differently than you think and in a different package. Sit back with the knowledge that this desire is already on its way to you. Imagine the joy you will feel upon receiving it. Feel the joy in your current experience because it is already yours. Relax. Smile. Give thanks. When interfering thoughts surface, do what you can to release them. Continue this practice as often as you need to until the desire appears. And then...give thanks, give Thanks, give THANKS.

The Importance of Reading

Voracious reader that I am, I was dismayed to read in the July/August edition of The Atlantic magazine that reading is so heavily on the decline -- not just of books but of periodicals and newspapers, too. The article, entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", follows the downward trend of reading in America, something that is receiving more and more attention these days.

The author, Nicholas Carr, argues that Google's speed of return and instant access to material makes most folk less inclined to power through a book or even finish reading a newspaper article. Bruce Friedman, a pathologist on faculty at the University of Michigan Medical School, was quoted as saying, "I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print...I can't read War and Peace anymore...I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it" (p. 58).

And, while the internet allows us to read more, it has also changed how we read and process the information. Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, stated: "We are not only what we read, we are how we read." Wolf worries that the type of reading the WWW promotes ("efficiency" & "immediacy") may damage our ability to read things closely...to really dig into a book and form our own thinking about it. Essentially, the question is whether or not the internet is damaging our ability to really mull over ideas and think deeply about what authors are really trying to share with us.

Apparently, technology can shape the way we think about ideas, altering how we may have thought about the idea without the invention of certain technologies. When Nietzsche bought a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball typewriter back in 1882, friends of his noticed that his writing had become "tighter, more telegraphic" than his writing during the pre-typewriter era.

This development of technology was something that disturbed Socrates back in his time. Plato's Phaedrus has Socrates moaning about the development of writing. "He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue's characters, 'cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.' And because they would be able to 'receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,' they would 'be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.' They would be 'filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom' " (p. 63).

After Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century, humanists declared that it would make men "less studious" and weaken their minds! And, as Wolf would argue, there is no distinction between deep reading and deep thinking.

I agree with Carr when he says, "If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with "content", we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture" (p. 63). I agree, too, with playwright Richard Foreman's sentiment:

"I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and "cathedral-like" structure of the highly educated and articulate personality -- a man or woman who carried within themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self -- evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available"...[as we are drained of our] "inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance, [we risk turning into] "'pancake people' - spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button (p. 63)."

***

Trained in the humanities and as a former educator of the subject, I cannot plug often enough the importance...no...value of reading, especially the classics. While a 688 page book like Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo is a commitment and its major themes could easily be picked up in the film version, there is something to be said for reading the unabridged version and mulling around Dumas's humor and his insight into the complexities of the human psyche -- not to mention all the material the film leaves out -- like the fact that the Count had a Turkish slave (gasp!) and dabbled in medicine OR the strains of Orientalism that dot the landscape of its pages like little candles.

I've read the 1455 page War and Peace and delighted in its layers. I dug the dramatic landscape Stegner describes in his 592 page Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Angle of Repose. The point is that reading challenging works helps one to better understand humanity because the themes are so pervasive and largely unchanging.

What the internet deprives us of, then, is the journey and there's something to be said for arduous toil, even in the small act of processing words slowly. As a former yoga teacher once said, "If everything was easy, what would they be worth?"

In our fast paced culture, why not slow down a bit and commit to reading something longer than a few paragraphs on the internet? Why not actually go out and buy the paper and relish in getting ink-stained fingers? Why not spend time browsing through a bookstore or library and allowing your mind to see what's out there...to see what's beyond the internet? I, for one, would rather see humanity dotted with "cathedral-like" minds than flat "pancake" ones.

The Power of Myth

Lately, I've been watching old Bill Moyers interviews of Joseph Campbell , pulled towards them likely due to interest in understanding myth and the role it can play in our lives. Campbell has long fascinated me, especially his work done to interpret humanity's collection of myths -- his categorizations, explanations, and musings on the subject.

All cultures put forth an idea of a hero -- someone who has given himself over to something larger than himself and has returned to teach others. The hero throughout religion and literature has followed a formula, regardless of era, religion, or culture, and it is this: there is a departure of sorts, there is some sort of quest (whether physical or spiritual in nature), there is the fulfillment of this quest and then a return.

Campbell argues that the metaphors found within these stories are merely labels for things like the "unconscious" or "ego". For example, in the biblical story of Jonah and the Whale....Jonah enters into the whale and remains there for three days and three nights. Only after Jonah offers supplications to God and acknowledges that he has placed idols before his relationship with God was he released from the belly of the whale.

Campbell offers that this story is more about Jonah's journey into his unconscious than it is about the dangers of marine outings. Jonah finds himself adrift in water (symbol of the unconscious) after troubling times in his conscious world. He is swallowed whole by his unconscious and during his time within the whale (can also be interpreted as within himself), he gains consciousness and can then return to the world he knew with fresh eyes and a more clear understanding of what it is all about.

A similar metaphor is put forth with the dragon stories which originated in Europe during the medieval era. In these, a dragon is guarding either gold or a beautiful woman -- it cannot partake of either one and can only guard them from others. At some point, a young male comes to challenge the dragon and slay it, thus freeing the bound treasure.

Campbell says that the dragon has long been a symbol for the ego. It is the voice within us that says, "Oh, I couldn't do that...I couldn't be that." Its goal is to prevent us from finding the freedom we seek; our charge, then, is to slay it.

Along these lines, Campbell offered the following:

"If the person doesn't listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you're gonna have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life and it is not one the body is interested in at all...the world is full of people who are not listening to themselves at all...follow your bliss."

***

Kelly, as many of you know, means "warrior" in Gaelic and it has come to have incredible meaning for me in my life. However, a warrior's role is not to inflict pain on others with his or her sword. Instead, my role is to use the sword upon the ego and its thoughts of fear and delusion, slicing them to non-existence, and freeing myself in the process. The beauty of this practice is that I am free and it is entirely delicious.

My buddy, CJ, cross-country skiing out in Harriman Park with the Tetons in the background.

Ice and snow must be on my mind today -- likely due to 4 days of a heat index hovering between 100-110 degrees -- because when CJ sent me this picture, I knew I had to post it. Breathe in ice and snow, exhale humidity and heat!

In keeping with this theme, I am in the process of completing the book The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule by Joanna Kavenna. This book is fantastic and I've been mesmerized by Kavenna's writing and travels through Shetland, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, Greenland and Svalbard. Loaded with readable history and beautiful passages, it has been a delicious way to pass time in the heat.

Here is an excerpt taken from her musings on Iceland:

"The road turns to rubble at times; it passes through lush green valleys; it rises into grey mountains, past lunar slabs of rock in pastel shades. The mountains become multi-tone--the whiteness of the snow stark against the orange sand-cones and the dark ash slopes. At the coastal towns everything is coated in mist and the dull shapes of farms loom from the whiteness. The road runs past the silver waters of lakes, over the table mountains. When the mist falls away, there are rivers and a few slender firs, clinging to the rocks. There are hotels, surrounded by baroque basalt pillars. The mists swirl across the plains. When the light dwindles, patterns begin to emerge from the lava, the piles of rocks like stacked-up coals, the deep blue river carving a channel through the valley, the conical peaks jutting out of the uneven ground. The lowland plains are coated in grasses, scattered with boulders; the mountain slopes are delicate layers of ash rock, with snow dusting the higher peaks. All these cracked slopes stand with the clouds casting shadows across them, the empty road winding under them" (p. 94).

Snow Cone, anyone?

Yellowstone Lake before the thaw...courtesy of CJ.

What is "mine"? What is not?

I've been spending much time lately thinking about this idea of self-empowerment. Following this, I have come to believe that each of us is wholly responsible for our own lives -- our happiness, our immediate realities -- and because of this, we cannot blame others for unhappiness or hold them responsible when our lives do not go the way we anticipated. Do so would be to give some of our own power, our creative power away and to fall into sloth and false thinking. I say this because I believe we create our our worlds through our thoughts. We think, therefore, we create. So, everything we have in our lives is a product of thought -- whether mine or another's.

What adds a layer of complexity to this idea is our own humanity. I feel that we inherently possess duality because we are human. It seems to come with the terrain. What do I mean? I mean that we simultaneously exist in this Earth plane with both our divinity and our humanity, neatly packaged in one human body. The challenge and perhaps lesson of Earth is to integrate this duality and co-exist harmoniously.

How do I know about this duality? I know that when I am quiet, I recognize a part of myself which is timeless, which transcends this world, and which is wholly and perfect, and I have come to know this entity as "me". For much of my life, I have called this awareness the "soul" but I've also heard it called "the observer" or the "subtle awareness being".

However, there is also our humanity with which to contend, more specifically, our human minds. This thinking, reasoning part of us allows us to make sense of our physical world and its societal and cultural norms, which can be both helpful and productive. However, many freedoms aside, it can also bring us much pain and destruction. Herein lies the rub...it is only when our human mind begins to think thoughts which are not our own -- which are not in line with our divinity -- that we find ourselves in pain.

Let us take this one step further.

When I am still, I find myself tuning myself into the thoughts my mind is producing. Some of them are in-line with my divine self and I know this because they bring me peace and blissful joy. Others, I can only describe as being more "cold prickles", leave me feeling depressed, self-conscious and anxious.

Because I have slowed down my thought processes and have turned my attention inwards, I know that these "cold prickles", these thoughts which cause me pain, are really not my own.

Don't get me wrong. I know that I am thinking them; therefore, I accept responsibility for having allowed them into my mind. Still, in the same breath, I can acknowledge that my divine self is incapable of thinking these thoughts. It is observing them, to be sure, but it is not thinking them since it is beyond the realm of thought.

Slowing down my thought processes even further, I have been able to name the owners of these thoughts which cause me pain. I can say to myself, "Oh, the root of that thought goes back to the 6th grade when so and so said that to me about ______________ (fill in the blank)."

Upon identification, I find freedom and release. I find forgiveness. I can let go of it and reclaim the power I gave away to entertain that thought in the first place.

Still, this process raises interesting questions for me, such as "Why did I allow myself to adopt that thinking as my own?" "What compelled me to do so?"

Even more interesting, "Why did I allow my mind to adopt thoughts coming from another person's mind?" "Why would I choose to align myself with diseased thinking?"

I say this because if my theory here is correct, then it would be impossible for another's divine self to address my divine self in such a way. However, it is very possible for a human mind to do so and for my human mind to receive it.

It seems, then, that this brings us to to the realm of diseased thought patterns of the human mind. And, the amazing thing about this is that it allows me to welcome compassion into those thoughts which are not my own, console them, and then send them back to their owners.

We often speak of balms for the soul, but I think we would do better to think of balms for the mind. This is beyond pharmaceuticals. This is about allowing our divine selves into the forefront of our minds and allowing the necessary healing to take place. It is about surrendering to our divinity and letting go of our humanity. The first step, methinks, is the realization that this is all part of the journey of humanity. It is our human lesson.

And, once we accept this, we can move into integration. Integrating our divinity with our humanity and avoiding idolatry -- the act of making our humanity higher than our divinity.

Turning back to the practice of slowing down our thoughts, we would do well to ask ourselves in the presence of thought -- is this thought my own? My mind's? Another's? We could ask ourselves "How would my divine self approach this thought?" "What would my divinity say to my humanity in this moment?"

In this way, then, can we move towards balance and healing...to bring ease to dis-ease...love and compassion to suffering. We would be on our way to creating an existence more in-line with that which is timeless and less with that which is limited.

Stepping Into The Flow

In the most recent edition of "Poets & Writers" magazine, I was struck by the article "Way, Way Too Much Information." The title alone pulled me into the writer's musings on the subject because I think there is such a thing as too much information.

I think there is also something to be said for getting inundated with more information than you bargained for...unsolicited information.

I mention this because I'm writing again, and it's my deep desire to get one of the two books I've already written published within the next year. It is also my deep seated desire to bring to life the 5 other story ideas I have brewing in my mind -- some, of course, more advanced than others. I'm aligning with that desire and know it's just a matter of time until the books are in print and enjoyed by others. It's already in the process of happening!

However, what is needed for creativity? Some quiet time -- made possible by choosing to unplug on a regular basis. Less outside distractions...more internal quiet.

In the article, author Frank Bures has this to say:

"There is another, perhaps more important consideration for writers: the loss of creative space. In his book Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less, Guy Glaxton cites several studies that point to an "unconscious intelligence," which works while our mind is disengaged or working on something else entirely. Ideas emerge from a kind of creative womb, one that works while we are focused on some mundane physical task, like walking, or riding a train, or staring at the ocean. Just letting the mind run.

"But if simply staring at the ocean and allowing your unconscious intelligence to do its work is difficult in this age of too much information, there is another state beyond that, which has become--speaking for myself, at least -- even harder to attain: flow. As described by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, it's a state of mind in which you are so engaged in an activity that you lose track of time -- even lose track of yourself. You forget about everything around you and wake up kind of surprised to find yourself back in your room. The state of flow is when you get your best work done, and when writing really becomes fun."

***

I understand this idea of flow because it's happened to me on several occasions. In fact, when I wrote my longer book, it flowed out of me in about 3-4 days of nothing but continual writing. Looking back, I don't really remember sleeping or eating...I just rode the waves of the creativity and gave birth to something I wasn't expecting. The story was IN me and all I had to do was sit in front of a computer or a piece of paper in order for it to just come tumbling out.

Because it is my desire that this happen again and again, I know that all I need to do now is to put aside some "writing" time each day and wait for the stories to surface. And, I know they will, too, as they've just been waiting for the invitation to appear.

I welcome the "flow" and wait for it.

Wisdom from a tea bag

Even my tea bags have wisdom for me these days! I had to laugh to myself when my Celestial Seasonings tea bag had this to say:

"And what he greatly thought, he nobly dared."

~ Homer

Hear! Hear! Homer. Hear! Hear!

My daily wish

Wouldn't it be nice if every interaction we had with another human being left him or her feeling better or about the same than before he or she met us?

Wouldn't it be nice if no one was left feeling worse?

'Tis my daily wish!