Saturday, April 28, 2012

Conceptual Reality

Do not believe in what you have heard; do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations; do not believe anything because it is rumored and spoken of by many; do not believe merely because the written statement of some old sage is produced; do not believe in conjectures; do not believe merely in authority of your teachers and elders. When you accept your truth and live it awareness presents itself.

Those thoughts came from Buddha. There were written in the Karma Sutra. Buddha believed that nothing in the exterior world manifests unless it appears in the mind first. We are examples of the great creativity of consciousness. Everything is connected in the energy of spontaneous cooperation. From the highest to the smallest, to the greatest and the lowest, between every atom and molecule there are qualities of the conscious mind in action. The feeling-tones of the world manifests from the consciousness that creates them.

The deep and abiding rhythms of these ancient feeling-tones create thoughts, and they lay on a bed in the mind. These creative portions of the psyche manifest in individual patterns and they become expressions of life. The mind expresses inner knowing and unknowing, and it constantly surprises the self. The unconscious unknowing is just as knowing as the conscious knowing in the inner world of the psyche. We project and then reflect our own thoughts, and they become experiences of some kind. Buddha talks about our reflections and how we create a revolving ego that tries to alter those reflections in order to conform and experience physical desires. We live in a picture, and we paint the self in various ways. That picture changes as the ego becomes aware of itself. The ego is connected to the unknowing, and it constantly falls back into the unconscious to sip the nectar of unknowing. That action creates another ego, which blooms and expresses perceptions, which contain more knowledge.

The truth that Buddha talks about is rooted in the fact that the ego is always changing. It dies and is reborn constantly. The ego we called the ‘self’ five or ten years ago is not the same ego expressing the self now. The creative psyche creates and re-creates the ego as we expand in awareness. Our beliefs are the foundation for our experiences. If those beliefs are reflections of distorted truths, we live in a conceptual reality. In a conceptual reality truth becomes a flexible commodity that impacts awareness. A conceptual reality is the individual choice of consciousness. At some point conceptual reality blends with the unknowing, and the truthful nectar saturates it.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Significant Facts

The diverse response and grades of significance that an object elicits can be illuminated this way: An animal may see an oddly shaped black and white object, a tribal person a rectangular flexible object with curious marking. To a western child it is a book, while to an adult it may be a particular type of book, namely a book that makes incomprehensible, even ridiculous claims about reality. Finally to a physicist it may be a profound text on quantum physics.

Roger Walsh M.D., Ph.D. wrote those thoughts in his essay, Hidden Wisdom. We all know, but sometimes overlook the fact that awareness occurs in stages. Our beliefs as well as the new knowledge we digest contribute to our present state of awareness. Walsh makes us aware that stages of awareness are rooted in what we believe reality to be. Reality is not a fixed state; it changes as we change our perceptions and the significance of our perceptions. A good example of how these stages work is our current belief about war, poverty and disease. Our thoughts about these facts generate our experiences that are associated with them. Our energy, concentration and focus on these facts, and others like them, make them real to all of us in different ways. Significant facts vary quite a bit depending on our immediate awareness and the associations we attach to those facts.

The Buddhist economist E.F. Schumacher explains how facts should be understood this way:

Facts do not carry labels indicating the appropriate level at which they ought to be considered. Nor does the choice of an inadequate level lead the intelligence into factual error or logical contradictions. All levels of significance up to the level of the meaning in the example of the book are equally factual, equally logical, equally objective, but not equally real. When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.

Schumacher’s explanation of reality is a valid one when we consider the vacillating perceptions that surround facts. Self-conscious righteousness accepts facts through a narrow slit in a controlled pre-conceived reality. That reality rejects and even condemns facts that exist outside of that judgmental path. There is a sense of stagnation in that path, and the result is a clear separation in perceived truths. Each and every reality opens a doorway, and through that doorway we are able to experience our desires and expand our psyche.

Physical life is a mixture of significant and non-significant facts that blend into a potpourri of perceptions and choices that produce different stages of reality. The source of the psyche’s strength is interwoven within the fabric of expanding realities. The level of the knower is a subjective choice. We choose how we want to experience facts, and from those choices we expand our beliefs. Those beliefs may not be reality to all, but they are a valid reality to the consciousness that is creating them.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Physical Actions

In the same way that we today think that the slave trade and colonial exploitation were inhuman and inconceivably bestial ways of acquiring riches, there is no doubt that coming generations will think that our form of world trade and distribution of the world’s benefits were just as inconceivable and inhuman.

Eric Dammann was born in Norway in 1931. He wrote the 1979 book, The Future in Our Hands. Dammann established the 1970s movement, The Future in Our Hands, which promoted personal, political and social change. The goal of the movement was to enhance the sense of freedom that individuals expect in a modern society.

Every generation tends to look back and judge the decisions made by former generations. We use secondary information as the measuring stick for the present. We forget that our beliefs form the reality we experience. We function in a survival mode because the reality we create is filled with negative energy. The responsibility to create a reality that is rich in freedom without using the tools of injustice and pseudo-economic well-being is lost in the ruble of our conscious objectiveness. Social acceptance is a top priority, but it is wrapped in a lot of self-defeating strings that stress our body consciousness. The desire to express emotion, even if it is negative emotion, is the fuel of life.

The time to firmly grasp our own reality and then acknowledge and accept it as our own is beating its head on our creative doors. It’s time to sort through our belief structure and weed out the beliefs that are responsible for the negativity we shower ourselves with every day. Self-conscious righteousness is a narrow bridge that only allows limited traffic through the channels of individual reality. When we give our innate emotions the opportunity to expand our belief structure, we begin to experience a surge in our physical energy. The desire to create new experiences using other aspects of our consciousness is the formula for tapping into vast regions of the psyche that want to express objectiveness in unique and productive ways.

As we tap into these new areas of the self, past fears, failures and catastrophes are accepted and understood. They are in our reality to expand our awareness of the self. Each generation creates their own formula for traveling through time, and that formula becomes a measuring stick for the future expansion of awareness. We guide the self through the maze of physical explorations and issues to experience the energy of consciousness. Consciousness is always in an expansion mode. Consciousness constantly brings the present self to the door of awareness. When we recognize the power of the innate energy that is within the door, our physical actions change. Our physical actions become a blend of different aspects of consciousness that vacillate between the present, past and future.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

In The Mystery

Asking yourself the deeper questions opens up new ways of being in the world. It brings in a breath of fresh air. It makes life more joyful. The real trick to life is not to be in the know, but to be in the mystery.

Fred Alan Wolf Ph.D., the award winning author, has the ability to explain quantum mechanics in simple terms. Fred was featured in the movie, What the Bleep Do We Know. The mystery of life surrounds us in our physical reality, and we have been trained to accept it as something we can never fully understand. We tend to fear the mystery so we usually depend on secondary experiences to fill us with information about how we should live, and how we should act and react in the mystery. We rarely depend on our actual contact with our inner environment, and our emotional senses that guide us as we experience certain aspects of that mystery. We have trained ourselves to believe that what we read, watch and discuss is much more real than what we imagine and dream.

Our consciousness is much more than our conscious mind. But, the body has been wired to receive clear assessments from that conscious mind in order to perceive space and time. The body depends on that knowledge to construct the influences and associations that attach themselves to our individual belief structure. Our cultural conditions are established by these secondary influences, and the body mechanism becomes distorted by this objective information. Reading about danger and disaster propels the body into a state of fear when no danger or fear actually exists within our individual reality.

Reading about a natural disaster is different from actually being a part of that disaster, but our ego projects us into that disaster and we feel the danger. We ignore the feedback from our primary consciousness in the present moment, and create pseudo-creature reactions that invade not only the present, but our future experiences. We rob ourselves by limiting our personal ability to act meaningful and with purpose in the now. We begin to believe that the most negative prophesies are the most practical ones even when our conscious mind is telling us we are innately safe.

The body is not designed to act tomorrow, today. Our conscious mind is not designed for extinction nor are we designed to live in fear. Our experiences can be filled with contrast, but there is an innate genius in all of us that guides us. We create the mystery Fred mentions in order to sense other aspects of the self that exist within the conscious mind.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Resurrection Of Our Own Religion

Zen is what makes the religious feeling run through its legitimate channel and what gives life to the intellect. Zen does this by giving one a new point of view of looking at things, a new way of appreciating the truth and beauty of life and the world, by discovering a new source of energy in the inmost recesses of consciousness and by bestowing on one a feeling of completeness and sufficiency.

That is to say, Zen works miracles by overhauling the whole system of one’s inner life and opening up a world hitherto entirely undreamt of. This may be called a resurrection. And Zen tends to emphasize the speculative element, though confessedly it opposes this more than anything else in the whole process of spiritual revolution, and in this respect Zen makes use of phraseology belonging to the sciences of speculative philosophy.

In his work, Practical Methods of Zen Instruction, D.T. Suzuki tries explains the meaning of the word Zen, and he does a noble job. Zen or the action of inner consciousness is the catalyst that expands life experiences. Individual beliefs can restrict the action of Zen, but the intent and the desire to experience certain physical things can override beliefs. When old thoughts about new information and new thoughts about old information meet, our projection of Zen becomes distorted. Zen is restricted by our use of that information. Information from various outside sources can be inspirational as well as deceptive. Information may not necessarily be comprehensible, and it may not be useable knowledge so focus plays an essential role in physically activating our own Zen-ness.

Each thought is a mini-resurrection of some aspect of the self. The mind has many facets and they are expressed using different qualities of consciousness. Zen is the action within individual consciousness. It saturates thoughts with the stroke of genius. That is to say, Zen becomes another aspect of the self that brings new awareness to our reality. Zen may not conform to current beliefs or past information, but it can impact the way we perceive those beliefs and information. It is a form of energy that propels itself around our inner universe, and at some point in linear time it changes our personal reality.

Zen breaks down the mental roadblocks we construct during certain linear points of time. We often use this subjective aspect of our own being physically without cognitive thought, and our experiences become more than real. Zen brings us to the ledge of the vast universe that thrives within us. On that ledge, we realize we are a form of energy that exists within a certain region of consciousness. We are experiencing physical reality to expand that region as well as the stream that fuels all regions of consciousness. We can call this process an awakening, a resurrection, or our spiritual revolution. The miracle of overhauling our belief system and sensing other elements of the self is rooted in the action of our inner consciousness. Suzuki calls it Zen. We can call it the resurrection of our own religion.

Friday, April 6, 2012

The Hour Of Becoming

The hour is striking so close above me, So clear and sharp, That all my senses ring with it. I feel it now: There’s a power in me To grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real Without my beholding it. All becoming has needed me. My looking ripens things And they come towards me, to meet and be met.

No thing is too small for me to cherish And paint in gold, as if it were an icon That could bless us, Though I’ll not know who else among us Will feel this blessing.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours was published in 1905. He was twenty three when he started this work of art. The inspiration for this book of poems came from what Rilke called “inner dictation.” An inner voice spoke to him at different times during the day, and he listened to that voice. He manifested those deep seeded thoughts through his poetry. All of us experience this sort of innate electrical intensity, but we manifest these messages in different ways. Creativity is the product of life and we all have an endless supply of it. The energy we project comes back to us as reflections and we produce our reality, but we have been trained to believe someone or something else is doing that creating. That belief structure has kept us in the vacillating spiritual fog, and we call it a religious mystery.

The act of beholding our manifestations expands our beliefs as the creative enzymes become part of our reality. These creative enzymes spring from the stream of consciousness, and they embrace our senses in an intense dance of consciousness. The dance is immersed in energy, and a metamorphic resonance takes place. This action of consciousness changes as we expand our beliefs so reality becomes a pliable experience. A catechism of wisdom spews from our minds, and we live through our projections and choices. These molecules of radiant energy touch gravitational realism, and we build a story that teaches us something about the self, and all consciousness.

Creative energy leaves an imprint on the self, and all other aspects of the self experience that energy in unique ways. Energy is action that manifests in other realities as well as our own. The individual invisible wires of electrical intensity carry energy to each of us from several areas of consciousness, and we experience our own hour of becoming at certain points in linear time. When that happens, we begin to realize that becoming more than we believe we are is our desire in physical life.