Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Where Nothing Is Done

Less and less do you need to force things, Until finally you arrive at no-action Where nothing is done, nothing is left undone… The Master does nothing Yet… leaves nothing undone.

Lao-Tzu was a philosopher and the father of the Tao. He understood the expansion of nothing. His thoughts about spiritual reality have been translated, dissected, and respected by humans for the last 2,500 years. No one is really sure what his view of nothing was, but it’s safe to say that the nothing that Lao-Tzu mentions contains the energy of consciousness without physical attributes.

Consciousness and nothing are truths. These truths extent beyond our physical dimension; they are constants, which cannot be destroyed or eliminated. These truths are true in all dimensions. Our truths are flexible and always changing. Truths in this dimension are beliefs that are firmly rooted in the absolute, and above questioned. But we always question them as we expand in awareness.

Everything is true to the believer and those beliefs continue to mutate as the consciousness of each believer continues to express and experience the essence of being physical. In that process, beliefs continue to be flexible and expedient to the believer.

Basic beliefs like religion, science, sex, relationships, perception, the senses, duplicity, physical creation, emotion, and truth, create our reality. Beliefs are like a birdcage that holds birds or influences. The birds can be called sub-beliefs. The birds or influences within the birdcage are expressed as beliefs about ethics, politics, marriage, drug use, laws, taxes etc. Those influences create other truths in our mass reality. When we focus on specific birds or influences, we discover other birds hiding behind the birds we recognize. Those beliefs also play a part in creating what we experience.

Our human experience is based on a complicated individual belief structure, so each individual experiences truth in their own way. When we begin to focus on our birdcage of beliefs, as well as the birds that mix and mingle in that cage, we realize that we are creating what we experience.

In our belief system nothing is void, blank, inert, unconscious, and empty. But in other realities, nothing is a truth that holds other truths. It is present in all dimensions, and aware of itself and all there is. The energy of nothing links physical and non-physical consciousness together in a plethora of actions. It is the force that does without doing in our reality.

Friday, January 27, 2012

Reality Is Being Remodeled

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Joseph Campbell, the 20th century educator, philosopher, and myth aficionado, wrote those thoughts in his 1988 book, The Power of the Myth. When we think about Campbell’s thoughts, we realize that the meaning of life is not as important as the awareness of life itself. Meaning rests in the awareness of each experience. Experiences are the manifestations of thoughts and beliefs.

Seeded within those thoughts and beliefs are choices that contain a plethora of probabilities. Within those probabilities are links of consciousness that manifest energy. The intensity of that energy is measured by our inner feelings, and those feelings are the measuring sticks for our experiences.

In this segment of linear time, we are creating new experiences that are beyond the confines of our focused reality, and the shift is the source event that is altering our pool of probabilities. The basic construction of our reality is being remodeled; it is not being destroyed. The physical expression of our emotions and sexuality will remain the same, but how we engage other aspects of their design is being tweaked.

We are becoming simultaneously more aware of what we are doing, and what we are feeling, and we are expressing those feelings not for gain, but for what we want to innately feel. Our choices are becoming more comfortable, and they are presenting new tones of consciousness in the probabilities we choose. That energy generates a stronger focus on the process within our experiences, and outcome is not as important as the engagement of the process.

In other words, we are painting each experience with a goal-oriented brush, but we are so involved with the process that we play down the outcome. We are more concerned with our creation, and the process of creating rather than what each experience will become. We are listening to the alternate selves that are guiding us through the shift, and we know the outcome will be what we expect.

The meaning of life is in the process of creating the experiences that expand the awareness of our essence, and the expression of our multiplicity.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Fraying Attachments

It is wonderful to move To a new place every day. It is wonderful to flow Without ice and mud Everything my friends, Is gone with yesterday. All the words are gone. Now is the time to say something new.

Rumi, the 13th century poet and mystic, delivers an important message with those words. The self is constantly moving in and out different realities as we focus on one. The creative genius of consciousness is transforming our belief system constantly. We are gradually recognizing the multiplicity of the self, and sensing some aspects of our genuine self. Our genuine self has been covered by a tangled web of attachments and associations. But these self-created beliefs are fraying, and we are beginning to see beyond them. Our new age shift is all about discovering, exploring, and expressing our genuine self.

In the present shift, our passions are becoming less goal-oriented in terms of receiving egotistical self-gratification. We are beginning to pay more attention to the energy we are projecting, and the energy we are reflecting. The way we react to those reflections is changing. We are slowly sensing what we have rather than what we don’t have, or have not expressed physically. Our desires are changing the way we create our reality. We are more aware of the type of energy we are projecting, and how we react to that energy. We are feeling other aspects of self in this now, and those aspects are changing how we feel about what we are creating.

Outward expressions as well as inward feelings are more acute in this shift. Our thinking or translating process is becoming less distorted, especially when it comes to old associations and attachments. There is less separation between what we project and what we reflect, which means what we create outside is a product of our inner genuine self.

Instead of concerning our self with what is right, or wrong, or what we should do or not do, which are all goal-oriented thoughts, we are now interested in who we are and what we want to express. We are interested in exploring the self, and want to know why we want to explore it.

New explorations are not about right or wrong because there are no past associations attached to our inner discoveries. These discoveries are new within the perspective of what is known, and that perspective is seeded in the genuine self.

We are dipping our toes into an expanded ocean of awareness, and we are embarking on a new journey of discovery in that ocean. This new adventure is creating new ways to interconnect with others. We are beginning to embrace our interconnectedness, and appreciate it for the support it gives us.

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Thursday, January 19, 2012

The Self Is Not Singular

The Wait

It is life in slow motion, It's the heart in reverse, it's a hope-and-a-half: Too much and too little at once.

It's a train that suddenly stops with no station around, and we can hear the cricket, and leaning out the carriage door, we vainly contemplate a wind we feel that stirs the blooming meadows, the meadows made imaginary by this stop.

Rainer Maria Rilke, one of Germany’s beloved poets, was born in Prague in 1875. His spiritual poetry and physical journey through time are lesson in awareness. Rilke believed there was something more to him than the self woke up every morning, and his mission was to identify that something. He used a fluid blend of thought and words to achieve that task. Rilke’s poems have their own life and death, their own birth and discovery, and their own silence. The silence is the vibration of neighboring realities. Those realities are filled with the wisdom of a cricket's voice, and the magnificent of a meadow filled with blossoms of consciousness.

To know different aspects of the self, we must stop our train of thoughts where there is no train station. We must stop our motion in the middle of our own projected tracks, and listen to the nothing of silence. In that place, we find a subtle invitation, and we sense the self’s multiplicity. Once we accept that invitation we immediately embark on a heightened journey of awareness. We discover that the self is not singular experiencing a physical life of duality; it is an endless number of selves that intersect and connect as individual and mass events unfold from our pools of probabilities.

Life is a joint-stock company and the board of directors is alternate selves that experience the probabilities that develop from our choices. We live in the complexity of consciousness just like a beach filled with grains of sand. And, just like the beach, part of us lives in one world, and other parts thrive in other worlds. We are never too much or too little, and like the wind we are exactly what we need to be in order expand our beach of consciousness. Endless blooming meadows of consciousness align with elements our essence in infinite patterns. We express our individual pattern using intents, desires, and purposes. Our metaphoric symbols create one reality, and we focus on it.

These symbols originate in our dreams, and immaculately other selves manifest. We feel a cricket vibrating in our own silence, and know that our physical life is but one life. That life is lodged between the hairs of the cricket’s legs.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Ritualistic Manner

A certain tendency to insanity has always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if they had been “blasted with excess light.” The trances of Socrates, the “union” of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of George Fox and the Quakers, the illuminations of Swedenborg, are of this kind. What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment has, in innumerable instances in common life, been exhibited in less striking manner.

Everywhere in history religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church, the revival of the Calvinistic churches, the experience of the Methodist, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay The Over-soul explains that every individual has the energy of the universal soul within them. The energy to create is the natural expression of the universal soul. We tend to discount what we create unless it is recognized by a group of peers. We believe confidence rests in the thoughts of others, and that belief is the cornerstone for religious and political control. We discount Individual creations unless they have special ritualistic attributes. These exceptional expressions are viewed as spoon fed epiphanies from a judgmental God that we worship in a ritualistic manner.

Personal impulses, which are transformed into thoughts, are experienced in rituals. Those thoughts interact with different projections, reflections, associations, and influences. So our beliefs form a ritualistic manner.

Ritualistic events create conformity, and conformity restricts the expansion of our belief structure. Rituals are separatist acts that turn our focus to a specific channel. While we experience these events, we immerse the self in a hierarchy of acceptance, so we believe nothing outside of that accepted channel. We try to eliminate diversity and destroy beliefs that challenge our ritualistic state of mind.

Rituals are products of the psyche. The psyche forms events like the ocean form waves. These psyche waves splash out into our mass psychological reality, and create individual events.

Rituals become accepted channels for knowing even though the atoms and molecules that create those channels do not understand these events. But, they cooperate fully in this vast venture, and that makes these event real and palatable.

The separation that exists within physical consciousness is fueled by rituals as well as our projections and reflections. Even in our ignorance the psyche and the soul still mingle with the universal soul and mind. Every quality and intensity of consciousness contains molecules from the stream of consciousness, and those molecules manifests through the doors of our personal belief structure.

The blended self exists within the universal soul even though the stymied enthusiasm experienced without ritualistic behavior is viewed as a tendency towards insanity. Insanity may be considered uniqueness in self-expression, or a quest to experience more of the self in the world of the psyche. In that world, religious rituals, and senseless salvation are individual beliefs that actuate the personal expansion of an individualized self.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Commonwealth of Convenience

As anyone knows who has been part of a movement, a demonstration, a campaign, or a strike, struggles undertaken for the most limited and prosaic goals have a way of opening the most profound and lyrical sense of possibility in their participants. To experience even briefly a movement’s solidarity, equality, reciprocity, morality, collective and individual empowerment, reconciliation of individual and group, is to have a foretaste of the peaceable kingdom… Once we have experienced solidarity, we can never forget it. It may be short-lived, but its heady sensations remain. It may be still largely a dream, but we have experienced that dream. It may seem impossible, but we have looked into the face of its possibilities.

Ronald Aronson in his 1995 book Beyond Marxism reminds us that dreams help create our physical experiences. We dream and create, but we forget our ability to do so. Joseph Schumpeter, the mid-century Harvard economics professor, said that our dream of a perfect democracy would eventually lead to some form of socialism. In his book, Capitalism Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter said that there is a creative destructive factor innately association with capitalism.

Schumpeter’s dream of socialism is far beyond the social concepts of Marx, and his successors. It is a system described by William Morris in his 1884 book, Justice. Morris explained his dream system this way:

What I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers nor heart-sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all — the realization at last of the meaning of the word commonwealth. Commonwealth is a familiar word, but most of us have no idea what it means. Morris defines it in terms we understand. A commonwealth is a utopian state where all individuals take responsibility for their actions in one way or another, and each person helps expand the system in a unified way.

Liberals and Conservatives want to experience a commonwealth of convenience that doesn’t make waves in their established and comfortable system. Both parties negate the true meaning of a people’s commonwealth. They fight against a people’s commonwealth using jaded words and iconic symbols that have little intrinsic value. They use prejudice and judgmental mental ovens filled with partial truths to produce half-baked results, and then take no responsibility for their inept results―it’s always the other party’s fault. They consider the people and their needs after they conform to the political lobbyists that control them. The tail of government is wagging the people, and the people lick the bones of a disintegrating system.

Perhaps it’s time to expand our constitutional power, and elect a group of social reformers who know the meaning of commonwealth rather than politicians who are shackled with the chains self-serving conformity and redundant thinking. Reformers are people who are not motivated by the fear that engulfs this wasteful system. They are not afraid to be part of a system that encourages and cultivate a stable commonwealth that serves the good of all.

When we look responsibility in the eyes, we see that most candidates stand on a platform of superficial change. They become pawns in a high-powered political party game that condones conformity, and ignores the voice of the people. Independence becomes dependence, and responsibility is shrouded in a veil of economic chicanery.

The book, Living Behind The Beauty Shop tells the story of how one man and his family change the dynamics of social, political, and economic life. Perception Farms is a commonwealth built on second chances and self-responsibility. Perception Farms gives people a chance to experience the real meaning of utopia.

Living Behind The Beauty Shop is about a Middle Tennessee boy who understands that greater reality where the psyche is able to communicate with the self that is experiencing other dimensions. The boy, Mase Russell, is living with Down syndrome. He is considered disabled in our normal reality, but he is far more enabled and connected than we are to that stream of consciousness that flows through all of us. He is able to communicate with other aspects of the self while dreaming, and he accepts his dream experiences as real. He is even able to remember those experiences and express them in his own way. His family begins to sense that his disability is a challenging gift not a sentence of suffering.

His family is like any other family. They experience the typical dramas that we all create in our waking reality. His grandfather, Warren Russell is a wealthy business man that lives on his family’s 2000 acre farm in Leipers Fork, Tennessee. The farm was a land grant given to his triple great-grandfather after the American Revolution. Warren and his wife Claire considered the farm their rite of passage until they both experienced a near-death experience on a trip to Florida in their Cessna. After the accident Warren decides to donate 1000 acres to a non-profit foundation he formed called Perception Farms. Perception Farms is a self-sufficient community off the grid that gives the homeless a fresh start.

His daughter Cindy realizes that she’s gay after she marries her college sweetheart. She returns home from California and finds an ex-nun, who is now called Margie, at one of Perception Farm’s fundraisers. Margie discovered her true sexuality when she was in the convent. They become partners and decide to have a child using the sperm of their friend Alan Sutton, a well-educated and athletic individual who works in the shoe business. Baby Mase is born with DS and the story follows his life and the experiences of the family as he becomes an accomplished poet and artist.

Years later, Mase finds Mischa Eddington who is another Down syndrome artist, in a local college art class, and they develop a close relationship. Together they watch members of the family experience the pains of getting older. They offer the family another perspective about that aging process. The family realizes that Mase and Mischa chose to be born with Down syndrome in order to help others see that there are no boundaries or limits in physical life unless we put them there through our beliefs and perceptions. They show us that other realities are just as real as our waking reality.

When we consider that consciousness does not have a beginning or an end in the non-physical world we can better understand that the people we call disabled or homeless are actually teachers who choose to experience life in extraordinary ways. They teach us that putting limits, judgments, and sterilized beliefs in action is the art of separating one aspect of the self from other elements of the psyche.

When that happens, we find ourselves living in the beauty shop of life, which is filled with exterior self-serving nothingness.

Monday, January 9, 2012

Collective Traumas

The Global crises we face today are unique in many ways, not only in their scope, complexity, and urgency, but also in that for the first time in human history each and every one of them is caused by humans. They are creations of our individual and collective behavior and can therefore be traced, in significant part to psychological origins: to our individual and collective beliefs, greed fear, fantasies, defenses and misperceptions. Our global problems are global symptoms, and the state of the world reflects the state of our minds.

Roger Walsh wrote those thoughts in his 1984 book, The Psychology of Human Survival. Global issues are front and center in the thoughts of millions of people around the world. Finding a solution for global warming, starvation, repression, and an assortment of other social and political issues is complicated, or at least we think it is. We try to solve these issues using the same thinking process that created them. We search for solutions from science, religion, and other external sources, and as we do, we begin to realize that these collective traumas teach us something about the nature of consciousness.

Our beliefs are catalysts for physical action. We want to wage war, destroy, and conquer what we fear and don’t understand, but those actions only create more of what we focus on. The more we push against these perceived enemies, the more we experience them. Resistance is the oil that keeps us frying in our own greasy perceptions. The world is a collective environment, and it is created by individual and mass impulses. Impulses are manifested non-physical energy. We catalog impulses in our physical beliefs system, and they become part of who we are.

Consciousness expresses energy using different qualities, organizations, and diverse forms in order to experience physical reality in some way. The chaotic world we experience is the result of a great merging and mixing of consciousness, and a continual exchange of non-physical information, which results in an open-ended exploration of physical possibilities. From that non-physical consciousness concoction, mass and private events emerge, and we experience physical life using choices, perceptions and desires.

There are many kinds of consciousness, and they combine in an endless fashion. Our consciousness is not one thing; it is a conglomeration of different aspects of consciousness that swamp together to form an identity. Our individual consciousness mixes with other forms of consciousness in several ways. That process creates a sense of individuality as well as other psychological realities, which we do not focus on. We count on products of consciousness like religion, science, and cultural tendencies to triumph over our self-created environment, but they only form a mosaic pattern filled with the cut-glass of our beliefs. Our beliefs hide the messages that are transmitted by our psychological environment, and that sets a worldly stage where perceived events of all types occur. That stage shapes mental events, and expands the nature of our consciousness.

Monday, January 2, 2012

Servant of the Intuitive

The Guest House

Darling, the body is a guest house; Every morning someone new arrives. Don’t say, “O, another weight around my neck!” Or your guest will fly back to nothingness. Whatever enters your heart is a guest From the invisible world: entertain it well.

Evert day and every moment, a thought comes Like an honored guest into your heart. My soul, regard each thought as a person, For every person’s value is in the thought they hold.

If a sorrowful thought stands in the way, It is also preparing the way for joy. It furiously sweeps your house clean, In order that some new joy may appear from the Source. It scatters the withered leaves from the bough of the heart, In order that fresh green leaves might grow. It uproots the old joy so that A new joy may enter from beyond.

Sorrow pulls up the rotten root That was veiled from sight. Whatever sorrow takes away or causes the heart to shed, It puts something better in its place. Especially for one who is certain That sorrow is the servant of the intuitive.

Rumi, the 13th century Sufi mystic, explains how we expand in awareness as we travel through time. That is the nature of all consciousness―it continues to expand. Our emotions hang on fragile branches of the self, and they fuel our expansion. Wisdom beats on the door of our body consciousness, but we turn the volume up on our belief CD, and ignore the essence that guides us through our self-created storms.

Beliefs are changeable thoughts that carve experiences for us to perceive. When we allow wisdom to move through those experiences we sense a consciousness or what some of us call Zen, and it wraps itself around our impulses. Bursts of unexplainable energy propel us to expand, and connect to other aspects of the self. We can call these aspects other guests. These guests arrive from a place where time and space hang on the tip of an impulse. We name these new friends experiences of the body and mind, and we begin to own them physically. We define the self using these friends, and add a touch of truth which lingers from our perpetual connection to the stream of consciousness. We are injected with a sliver of God potion, and it begins to boil in the manifestations of our own choices.

Choices and the probabilities still mark our sensitive ego with emotional images, but the growing awareness of another group of selves begins to swallows us, and we psychically swim into an abyss of knowing where time follows its own pattern. In that non-physical place, we see the self dressed as a servant of the intuitive. That self empowers the physical self, and it begins to regard resistance as a vehicle of expansion.