Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket and the naked Indian whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength.
The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows a little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory, libraries overload his wit; the insurance office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christians?
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay Self-Reliance shakes the cobwebs out of our over-the-top mind quest to have more and to be more. We believe that our beliefs are the only thoughts that count in our ascension to the unknown land of eternal wizardry. We fail to see the eternal wizardry of being content in the moment. We cast our ego into the storm of materialistic chauvinistic racism. >br>
Our politicians flounder in a sea of narrow-minded righteousness, and our religious gurus continue to battle the Satan created by their separatist teachings. We float in a mass of soggy mental seaweed, and can’t sense the floor of knowing that the seaweed uses for nourishment. We blame others for sickness and criticize the system for holding us captive in a senseless dream we created for ourselves.
All this self-created contrast justifies our existence. All the pain we inflict on our self and others verifies our search for awareness. All the hatred we fling on the tips of our verbal arrows becomes boomerangs for the non-physical energy. Non-physical energy is creative activity, and it expands from the experiences of its counterparts. As a counterpart of non-physical energy, emotionally experience in order to sense the eternal expansion of consciousness.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Thursday, January 22, 2015
The Merry-Go-Round Of Objectively Painted Circumstances
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception.
David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, wrote those thoughts in his 1741 work Treatise of Human Nature. Hume does make us sit up and take notice of what we really do all day long. We fill our lives with perceptions that stem from beliefs, associations, and influences. One perception leads to another. We find our self on a merry-go-round of objectively painted circumstances that scream for some attention. Soothing our desire to function as taught, we sift through our circumstances and color them with a judgmental brush.
That judgmental brush is filled with the separatism that lurks under the covers of our religious righteousness. For the last two thousand years, we have experienced a religious wave, which infiltrates every fiber of our ego. We battle each other in the name of an almighty being that we created in our likeness. The battle rips us into segmented apostles that claim victory while we impose pain on those who do the same to us.
The merry-go-round of our circumstances is showing us that religion, as we know it, is reinventing itself. Religion in the very near future will not be a separated perception where the just kill the just. It will be a unified enabler. Our faith in the supreme will be accented by our self-awareness, and our perceptions of life will change. That change will not be just about religion, politics and values. It will be first and foremost about the nature of our consciousness.
David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, wrote those thoughts in his 1741 work Treatise of Human Nature. Hume does make us sit up and take notice of what we really do all day long. We fill our lives with perceptions that stem from beliefs, associations, and influences. One perception leads to another. We find our self on a merry-go-round of objectively painted circumstances that scream for some attention. Soothing our desire to function as taught, we sift through our circumstances and color them with a judgmental brush.
That judgmental brush is filled with the separatism that lurks under the covers of our religious righteousness. For the last two thousand years, we have experienced a religious wave, which infiltrates every fiber of our ego. We battle each other in the name of an almighty being that we created in our likeness. The battle rips us into segmented apostles that claim victory while we impose pain on those who do the same to us.
The merry-go-round of our circumstances is showing us that religion, as we know it, is reinventing itself. Religion in the very near future will not be a separated perception where the just kill the just. It will be a unified enabler. Our faith in the supreme will be accented by our self-awareness, and our perceptions of life will change. That change will not be just about religion, politics and values. It will be first and foremost about the nature of our consciousness.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
A Carp Scientist
When I was a child, I used to visit the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. I would spend hours fascinated by the carp, who lived in a very shallow pond just inches beneath the lily pads, just beneath my fingers, totally oblivious to the universe above them.
I would ask myself a question only a child could ask: what would it be like to be a carp? What a strange world it would be! I imagined that the pond would be an entire universe, one that is two-dimensional in space. The carp would only be able to swim forwards and backwards, and left and right. But I imagined that the concept of “up”, beyond the lily pads, would be totally alien to them. Any carp scientist daring to talk about “hyperspace”, i.e. the third dimension “above” the pond, would immediately be labeled a crank.
I wondered what would happen if I could reach down and grab a carp scientist and lift it up into hyperspace. I thought what a wondrous story the scientist would tell the others! The carp would babble on about unbelievable new laws of physics: beings who could move without fins; beings who could breathe without gills; beings who could emit sounds without bubbles. I then wondered: how would a carp scientist know about our existence? One day it rained, and I saw the raindrops forming gentle ripples on the surface of the pond. Then I understood.
The carp could see rippling shadows on the surface of the pond. The third dimension would be invisible to them, but vibrations in the third dimensions would be clearly visible. These ripples might even be felt by the carp, who would invent a silly concept to describe this, called “force.” They might even give these “forces” cute names, such as light and gravity. We would laugh at them, because, of course, we know there is no “force” at all, just the rippling of the water.
Today, many physicists believe that we are the carp swimming in our tiny pond, blissfully unaware of invisible, unseen uni- verses hovering just above us in hyperspace. We spend our life in three spatial dimensions; confident that what we can see with our telescopes is all there is, ignorant of the possibility of 10 dimensional hyperspace. Although these higher dimensions are invisible, their “ripples” can clearly be seen and felt. We call these ripples gravity and light. The theory of hyperspace, however, languished for many decades for lack of any physical proof or application. But the theory, once considered the province of eccentrics and mystics, is being revived for a simple reason: it may hold the key to the greatest theory of all time, the Theory of Everything.
Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist specializing in the String Theory. He also teaches at NYU and the City College of New York. Kaku’s carp story is food for thought. He opens a door of possibilities, and we step into it. We find ourselves up to our waist in questions, but we are scared to answer them. We use our familiar life-line of beliefs to reassure us that Kaku and others like him are crossing into sacred territory without a permit. But, when we think outside of our religious beliefs, we realize there’s nothing sacred about our quest to know what life means and how we function in spite of our ignorance.
Our ritualistic blinders are tight. We pull the covers of religion over our heads and hope the talk of other universes and realities goes away. The best, we want to offer our inquisitive mind, is faith. The faith that God will stand firm and show us his truth. The interesting fact, we all miss, is God does show us his truth every time we expand or tweak our beliefs. In the awareness of that expansion, lies the face of God. God’s face is our face expanding in the experience of living in the magnification of our pond of beliefs.
I would ask myself a question only a child could ask: what would it be like to be a carp? What a strange world it would be! I imagined that the pond would be an entire universe, one that is two-dimensional in space. The carp would only be able to swim forwards and backwards, and left and right. But I imagined that the concept of “up”, beyond the lily pads, would be totally alien to them. Any carp scientist daring to talk about “hyperspace”, i.e. the third dimension “above” the pond, would immediately be labeled a crank.
I wondered what would happen if I could reach down and grab a carp scientist and lift it up into hyperspace. I thought what a wondrous story the scientist would tell the others! The carp would babble on about unbelievable new laws of physics: beings who could move without fins; beings who could breathe without gills; beings who could emit sounds without bubbles. I then wondered: how would a carp scientist know about our existence? One day it rained, and I saw the raindrops forming gentle ripples on the surface of the pond. Then I understood.
The carp could see rippling shadows on the surface of the pond. The third dimension would be invisible to them, but vibrations in the third dimensions would be clearly visible. These ripples might even be felt by the carp, who would invent a silly concept to describe this, called “force.” They might even give these “forces” cute names, such as light and gravity. We would laugh at them, because, of course, we know there is no “force” at all, just the rippling of the water.
Today, many physicists believe that we are the carp swimming in our tiny pond, blissfully unaware of invisible, unseen uni- verses hovering just above us in hyperspace. We spend our life in three spatial dimensions; confident that what we can see with our telescopes is all there is, ignorant of the possibility of 10 dimensional hyperspace. Although these higher dimensions are invisible, their “ripples” can clearly be seen and felt. We call these ripples gravity and light. The theory of hyperspace, however, languished for many decades for lack of any physical proof or application. But the theory, once considered the province of eccentrics and mystics, is being revived for a simple reason: it may hold the key to the greatest theory of all time, the Theory of Everything.
Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist specializing in the String Theory. He also teaches at NYU and the City College of New York. Kaku’s carp story is food for thought. He opens a door of possibilities, and we step into it. We find ourselves up to our waist in questions, but we are scared to answer them. We use our familiar life-line of beliefs to reassure us that Kaku and others like him are crossing into sacred territory without a permit. But, when we think outside of our religious beliefs, we realize there’s nothing sacred about our quest to know what life means and how we function in spite of our ignorance.
Our ritualistic blinders are tight. We pull the covers of religion over our heads and hope the talk of other universes and realities goes away. The best, we want to offer our inquisitive mind, is faith. The faith that God will stand firm and show us his truth. The interesting fact, we all miss, is God does show us his truth every time we expand or tweak our beliefs. In the awareness of that expansion, lies the face of God. God’s face is our face expanding in the experience of living in the magnification of our pond of beliefs.
Monday, January 12, 2015
Balance Of Power
Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken.
Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket and the naked Indian whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay Self-Reliance digs a deep trench in the synapses in our brains. We are on a three-dimensional balance of power roller coaster that takes us for a ride up the hills of renewal and deposits us in valleys of fear. We are lock in sidecars of doubt and are covered with the inconsistencies of religious politics. We ride and ride until brakes of awareness throw us in another cryptic moment. We are educated ignoramuses that reject anything that conflicts with our judgmental and conforming complacency.
The valleys of fear shroud us in sameness and transform us with bitterness. We blame our difficult adjustments not on choices, but on our associations. Our influences blind us from seeing the ruin of self-responsibility. Skin color and religion defines us and hatred brands us. Our self-created dilemmas confuse us and power separates us. We are sinking in worship, and we are drowning in rituals that make little sense.
We battle brothers and sisters and exile them in shame. The quest for power drains our ambitions and control sentences us to distasteful compliance. Ambiguous amelioration comes from the surrender of power, and we label our position free. The health of our nation is being siphoned off by the organized idiosyncrasies of government and the money-hungry vultures that banter in isolation.
The balance of power is skewed by subtle domination. Our physical and mental health is compromised by our irrational push against our innate wisdom. All these issues create the expansion we need for change and change we will in spite of our egotistical shenanigans. The balance of power roller coaster doesn’t stop at the top for long, and it always rises from the valleys as it reaches the continuous straight line of soulful expansion.
Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil and a bill of exchange in his pocket and the naked Indian whose property is a club, a spear, a mat and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay Self-Reliance digs a deep trench in the synapses in our brains. We are on a three-dimensional balance of power roller coaster that takes us for a ride up the hills of renewal and deposits us in valleys of fear. We are lock in sidecars of doubt and are covered with the inconsistencies of religious politics. We ride and ride until brakes of awareness throw us in another cryptic moment. We are educated ignoramuses that reject anything that conflicts with our judgmental and conforming complacency.
The valleys of fear shroud us in sameness and transform us with bitterness. We blame our difficult adjustments not on choices, but on our associations. Our influences blind us from seeing the ruin of self-responsibility. Skin color and religion defines us and hatred brands us. Our self-created dilemmas confuse us and power separates us. We are sinking in worship, and we are drowning in rituals that make little sense.
We battle brothers and sisters and exile them in shame. The quest for power drains our ambitions and control sentences us to distasteful compliance. Ambiguous amelioration comes from the surrender of power, and we label our position free. The health of our nation is being siphoned off by the organized idiosyncrasies of government and the money-hungry vultures that banter in isolation.
The balance of power is skewed by subtle domination. Our physical and mental health is compromised by our irrational push against our innate wisdom. All these issues create the expansion we need for change and change we will in spite of our egotistical shenanigans. The balance of power roller coaster doesn’t stop at the top for long, and it always rises from the valleys as it reaches the continuous straight line of soulful expansion.
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
Creative Activity
To be of the Earth is to know
The restlessness of being a seed
The darkness of being planted
The struggle toward the light
The pain of growth into the light
The joy of bursting and bearing fruit
The love of being food for someone
The scattering of your seeds
The decay of the seasons
The mystery of death
And the miracle of birth.
John Soos wrote that poem. How incredible it is to see how the Earth displays different elements of its consciousness. Like the Earth, we all go through the stages of life and death every day. Ideas are born each minute, and some of them die in the stream that leads to other probabilities. Ideas are seeds, and the mind is the soil that nourishes them. The impetus for growth lies in the conviction of our choices, and the water for continued growth is our desire to experience what we believe.
We fear the mystery of death, but there is no mystery in that act of renewal. We prepare our self for death when we dream. We see our self in those dreams as clearly as we feel our self in this wakeful world. There are miracles in every choice and desire in every thought. We know not the face of creation, but we live to create every moment. In those creations lies the face of our soul. The creative activity we call the soul brings us face to face with God, and we wonder why.
The wonder of decaying seasons lies in the rubble of our forgetfulness. Our past sit there and wait for another creative act that sparks our zest for expansion. In that expansion we feel the glory of being one with the Earth, with the seeds, and with creativity activity we call the soul.
The restlessness of being a seed
The darkness of being planted
The struggle toward the light
The pain of growth into the light
The joy of bursting and bearing fruit
The love of being food for someone
The scattering of your seeds
The decay of the seasons
The mystery of death
And the miracle of birth.
John Soos wrote that poem. How incredible it is to see how the Earth displays different elements of its consciousness. Like the Earth, we all go through the stages of life and death every day. Ideas are born each minute, and some of them die in the stream that leads to other probabilities. Ideas are seeds, and the mind is the soil that nourishes them. The impetus for growth lies in the conviction of our choices, and the water for continued growth is our desire to experience what we believe.
We fear the mystery of death, but there is no mystery in that act of renewal. We prepare our self for death when we dream. We see our self in those dreams as clearly as we feel our self in this wakeful world. There are miracles in every choice and desire in every thought. We know not the face of creation, but we live to create every moment. In those creations lies the face of our soul. The creative activity we call the soul brings us face to face with God, and we wonder why.
The wonder of decaying seasons lies in the rubble of our forgetfulness. Our past sit there and wait for another creative act that sparks our zest for expansion. In that expansion we feel the glory of being one with the Earth, with the seeds, and with creativity activity we call the soul.
Thursday, January 1, 2015
Grateful
A Spark Of Gratefulness
Lights The Eternal Presence
An Act Of Peacefulness
Brings Love To Separation
The Glow Of Thank You
Magnifies A World
Of Beauty
Lights The Eternal Presence
An Act Of Peacefulness
Brings Love To Separation
The Glow Of Thank You
Magnifies A World
Of Beauty
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