Thursday, September 18, 2008

Those who fear life can only love the unborn

Last night I could not sleep. Many Americans are being seduced by the appearance of Palin as a strong women. These thoughts came through.


Yours, Ruth Gould Goodman, Venice CA


For Palin only the Unborn Idea of Life is pure enough not to be Sacrificed on the Altar of War and Profit


Oh My America please do not be seduced by the brittle appearance of strength from Mrs. Palin even though she is in a woman’s body, has breasts and a vagina and has given birth. Sarah Palin is the same old tired solutions to our world’s problems as the old tired men who you are finally realizing do not have any solutions to your real everyday problems. Just because these ideas are being expressed by a female is no reason to suddenly become excited by them.


Sarah’s ideas are tired and old and incapable of solving the problems we face in the world. They are divisive, not integrating and non-cooperative and deadly. They thrive by stifling the personal freedoms of many while giving complete impunity to the elite. They speak of a top down authoritarian spirituality that places the divine and the sacred far away in the sky somewhere. These ideologies are incapable of recognizing the god force inside of anything but an unborn baby and other people who belong to the same church they belong to.


Animals, forests, oceans; in fact all living things are fair game to be sacrificed on the altar of their perceived entitled dominion to use this earth in any way they see fit to make a profit. Who cares if all the animals go extinct and leave this planet; to hell with the polar bear, the wolf and the elk? Animals are not worth of saving. They are not Christians. They do not matter. The deaths of women and children of a different color or religion all over the world and in this country as well are dismissed as collateral damage. It is o.k. to sacrifice any life but fetuses and other “Saved Christians” on the alter of maintaining the “American Way of Life”. This completely irrational self-righteous, infantile, entitled mentality is incapable of recognizing the sanctity of life itself. Obviously it can only see the pure god force in that which is ‘the unborn’ (not yet arrived on our planet). The implication being once born to life on earth you are a sinner unless you are saved.


I am tired of people talking from both sides of their mouth about the sanctity and the preciousness of the life of the unborn while the other side of their mouth rationalizes dropping bombs on people, separating young children from their mothers in immigrant raids, polluting the earth with the waste of oil and coal extraction. They are so disconnected from life that they cannot feel the loss to this planet if the great animal species go extinct.


They do seem to be able to feel the god force of the bottom line, for the real god they worship is the profit margins necessary to satisfy the stock holders.


The same people who cry for the unborn fetus shout for more police, more bombs, and more war. They refuse to raise taxes for schools, health care for children and working families. It is a cynical joke that the people who would self-righteously jail or even shoot another person to protect the life of the unborn fetus have no qualms with starting a war without provocation. I think they use the euphemism “pre-emptive” to justify their forays into other lands and cultures. Their self righteous ideology demands the sacrifice of blood. The ultimate cynical blasphemy.


To the right-wing pro-life position, the sacrifice of life to prove your religious ideology makes perfect sense. There is a coherence of belief. Those for whom war is the one and only answer for what ails our country would kill to protect the “life of the unborn.”


I am terrified to watch so many of my fellow human beings, my fellow Americans swept away in this angry ideology. I ask myself is this the real face of my American or is this the face that is being generated by the media to sell this face to America. I do not know. For me all life is a precious miracle.


I ask myself why and these thoughts come. Perhaps people including Sarah Palin and John McCain unconsciously are really terrified of the awesome power, mystery and beauty of life. Instead of facing their fear of the power of that force as it moves through their own flesh and blood, they project their denied fear onto everything outside of them that is different from them that they cannot control.


Only to "The Idea" of life turns them on. That is why they focus all their saccharine sentimental care and love on the unborn. Their unconscious fear of the sacred in the real flesh and blood of life as it lives and dies makes them unable to identify and relate to life. What they cannot control they hate. Any direct contact with the awesome unfathomable beauty and mystery of "Real Life" terrifies them. Direct connection immediately hardens their heart so they do not have to feel the vulnerable truth of their own interconnectedness with life.


The hardening to protect from feeling the pain of their self generated disconnection activates a self-protective desire to control and dominate life even more.


If you place yourself outside and above life, then you must attempt to control life. Then the only function of women is to be the fertile womb to supply life for men who are so terrified of the mystery of life that they are compelled to sacrifice their own sons and daughters on the alter of their ideologies to a god high in heaven some where other than right here, right now. Those plagued with the pain of their self-righteous disconnection believe this sacrifice will somehow save their souls from the darkness of the unknown.


Women of America, wake up.


Sarah Palin is a Trojan horse with breasts who worships at the altar of a male war god. She is ready to fight a holy war to deny the right of a mother to choose whether she should be able to take the responsibility to bring a child into this world. She is ready to pillage the earth, kill wildness, and take us to war. War talk sounds sassy coming from a young sexy woman.


Women of America it is easy to project your anger and fear and frustration onto that “Sassy” and think that it is the answer. Beware! That sassy is the same old same old pugnacious that is making a mess of your lives, killing your sons and daughters and destroying the living systems of our planet. It is destroying the true democratic values of the America I Love.


Beware! Sassy from a pretty woman is cute until you look beneath the surface and see the ugly face of contempt for life as a living inter-related system, until you see the denial of your own personal freedom in the rhetoric and the call to continue sacrificing your sons and daughters for some idea of a god that allows a rationalization for certain people to grow very rich and others to loose their right to a descent place to live and enough food to sustain their body and their children’s bodies.


Right to Life????


First protect Life as it is being lived before you demand that women bring babies they are unable to care for into this difficult warring world.

Monday, July 14, 2008

BREATH: Exploration of a Sacred Lesson

You may ask, “What could the breath possibly have to teach me?” I will tell you that the breath is the path and the way to hold your effort and intention in right relationship with the rhythm and pulses of the vast universe of which we are but one cell.

When we are asked to accomplish a task, we hold assumptions about the learning process and what we must do to accomplish what we set out to do. Most of us are educated to put learning on as a piece of clothing that we acquire. We are not taught to access learning from within ourselves. In fact, the thought that there is inherent wisdom and knowledge written into the living system of our body/being is, in fact, rather alien concept. Though the breath is something that is so close to us that if we stopped we would no longer be living in our body, we rarely acknowledge its primacy. There is an implicit assumption that we must impose a technique to breathe correctly. We seem to have lost the capacity to have a direct relationship with the miracle of our own breath. In beginning such a relationship, our very own breath becomes our greatest teacher.

We think that our stories matter and we keep paying attention to our stories. Our stories embody our belief systems. Our belief systems create the containers of the fluid energy of life. The atmosphere of these shapes in turn reinforces our stories, which in turn creates our lives. We forget that we are choosing the stories we want to make real. If a particular story is dysfunctional and does not see us expressing a healthy and vital life, we must understand the technology which will allow us to go underneath the story to the basic fact of our life and consciously choose to rewrite the story we want to create.

We bring our attention to the breath by activating our senses to the body as it is being breathed. We begin to know our body as present moment breathing aliveness that is constantly pulsing like the waves of the ocean. Once we give our attention back to the present moment experience of the breathing body we gain access to choose to step out of the old stories of the reactive mind and create new stories that place us in a universe that allows us to grow and learn and be in positive relationship with everything.

With the breath as the focus of identity, we become a fluid system. We bring our conscious awareness on the breath. The breath is breathing through the whole body. The quieter we become, the deeper is our capacity to listen to deeper and deeper levels of the breath. Not only are the lungs breathing, but also every cell in the body is breathing. The skin is breathing. We are totally interconnected to everything in every breath to the space we are living in and that space in turn touches everything

In aligning our consciousness with the pulse of the breath as what identifies us, we finally rest ourselves in the living pulse of the rhythm of our unique life force. Your breath is your portal to come back to a state of innocence. Though your breath, you can access the technology of how you are creating yourself in the present moment.

Innocence and beginner’s mind: The Portal to Beauty

Innocence and beginner’s mind: The Portal to Beauty

The experience of the breath will allow you to enter the garden of your own being. It is very easy to miss beauty. We look everywhere for beauty but right in front of our noses.

To witness the miraculous means to dissolve the blinders to the very fact of your own existence. I wonder how it is that people take their own bodies for granted. There is not a human being on this planet that can express the intelligence and beauty and power of the very body they are using to examine the world. There is an implicit assumption that we must do something to improve upon what has already been given.

The very fact that your body is animated by breath is miraculous. Instead of using mind efforts to control the breath to do it right (the assumption being that it could not possibly be perfect without your conscious mind directing it), take the attitude to learn from the breath. The only effort that is necessary is to direct the consciousness to behold and be in a state of wonder that the breath of life is breathing through you.

When our mind finally stops trying to control our breath and simply witnesses the exquisite refinement and infinite variation and depth of the breath, we have finally woven our minds back into a relationship of innocence with the present moment.

Innocence is certainly the domain of the child, but it is not the child about which we are speaking. While children have the quality of innocence, so does every expression of the natural world. We are apart of the natural world except that we hold ourselves apart in the way we structure our reality in our conscious mind.

It is the adult human mind that must reawaken to the sacred in all things. The most primary place we can reawaken is the breath. It is a simple shift of attention to come back to the breathing pulse that is with us from birth to death. It is alien to surrender ourselves to something that is so close to us.

When I shift and hold the primacy of my breath in my consciousness, I am immediately taken out of the noise of my mind into the unfolding present. Conversely, when I unconsciously give my attention to the virtual thinking reality of my mind, my intellect, I place myself in a two dimensional universe in which I am no longer in the present. From the thinking mind, I am either in the past or the future where I have no control to creatively interface with the present moment. We become victims of our future/past story, we have removed ourselves from the possibility of our true creative potential which only lives in the present moment. Our relationship with our breath is our primary access to the present moment.

In the present moment I am breathing, connected to all things, created by the divine will, which has created all things. We are all divinity breathing itself into existence. Everything and everyone is miraculous and wonderful. Everything comes from the activation of the breath of divine principle.

Only in so far as we are lost in the dark stories of our two-dimensional thinking, outside the reality of innocence and wonder, will we see the Other as enemy. We can only see the Other as enemy if we cut ourselves from wonder, if we have made our own innocence—the sacredness of our own body—an enemy. We do this when we hold our mind outside of our aliveness and then fiercely and desperately attempt to control life. It is a natural response to tighten our efforts to control life if we have lost trust, because we are out of contact with the higher organizing principle of the oneness of all being.

As soon as we correct our relationship with life and allow life to breathe us into the present moment, we can experience the wonder this creation. Immediately, the need to manipulate and control others falls away and there opens a space for the heart to soften. The heart is the direct connection to direct knowing of the interconnectedness of all being.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Feminine enlightenment: Celebration of Life

An awakened consciousness from the Deep Feminine recognizes the divine mystery in everything manifest in our world. How does it do this? In your awareness, you bridge the polarity between the focal point and the vastness of empty space by holding them both as equal. With the dynamic tension between the polarities of emptiness and the focal point balanced in your attention, the generative and creative impulse of Existence fills the space of the empty womb with Life. If we dishonor this dynamic tension, we take ourselves out of the equation of life. The dance between empty space and focal point generates the exquisite play that produces the fecundity we call Creation.

Feminine enlightenment thus celebrates the fruition of the potency of the union of the womb and seed, the empty space and the focal point. In the state of love outside of fear, emptiness fills with fullness. When you accept you are both a finite being whose physical body will die and that you are a part of the infinite play of the polarities of existence, you fulfill a positive relationship with Life. Instead of shutting down to the inevitable death of the physical body, you accept the whole journey—including the death of your body with grace. An enlightenment model balanced with feminine consciousness inherently knows everything is placed here for a purpose.

Enlightenment is thus defined by the capacity to consciously respond with gentle compassion to the unfolding drama of Life as it grows toward the awakening of all beings. It is the nature of Life itself to grow to be free to be itself. Gentle compassion to the unfolding drama of Life allows you to recognize the urge towards awakening, no matter what appearance the drama takes. An enlightenment process that includes the feminine polarity models a relationship of mutual recognition. It sees divine presence in everything experienced in the physical world. It trusts, includes, aligns, and forms relationship with the irrational, wild, seemingly chaotic forces that generate physical existence. Feminine consciousness knows that “Matter matters.” What is created awaits our recognition of the divinity residing at its deepest causal level.

With its inherent fecundity, the Feminine aspect of consciousness celebrates all the physical expressions of Life. It celebrates family and relationships, food, children, water, sky and all living things. It celebrates that we are all here together and finds the sacred in everything. It is full and rich and pregnant with the beauty of life. It knows Divine presence would never create this world if it were not to be enjoyed and consciously celebrated. It is time for our human race to reclaim its innate capacity to create and to be in a sacred enlightened relationship with Life.

Saturday, May 31, 2008

I of II: Shattering the Illusion of Separatism

The Interconnectedness of all Being is not just a poetic metaphor, but a description of the deepest truth: We all come from the same source, and we each are unique expressions of the creative play of that one Intelligence. What is also true is that the vibrational frequency of the whole Universe is evolving. No one can hide from the intensity of the mirrors reflecting our selves back to ourselves. The power to manifest through our intention is speeding up. It is time for every human to wake up to our true godly nature, for in fact we are coming into such a great power. We must recognize our power. Otherwise, we will do as we are in fact doing—creating irresponsibly against others out of fear.

It is impossible for natural intelligence to create anything that does not arise out of Wholeness. Humans, on the other hand, are lost in the appearance of the separateness of the physical body. Our whole human race must expand our minds to facilitate a deeper perception of the functioning of whole systems. The functioning of any individual part is an intrinsic aspect of the whole body of creation. Just as our body is an intricate organization of many complex systems that are completely interrelated and interconnected and dependent upon one another for the optimum functioning of the whole, so the body of our planet earth is an even more complex level macrocosm of the body of creation of which each human, animal and plant is a living cell. Each and every cell must be healthy in order for the whole body to be healthy.

Human fear generates defensive intellectual constructs which must then establish separation and differentiation from other forms of life to protect itself. We define other humans who express different aspects of creation as lesser then ourselves. We judge them as inferior, less intelligent, and having lesser moral capacity. We project that these people do not feel pain the way that we feel pain, and that therefore we have a right to make them suffer. Our assumed moral superiority makes us feel we have a right to control these people and to create borders against them, to protect ourselves from realities we perceive as different.

We must awaken to the truth that it is only our perception creating these differences. It only serves the power of people who want to control others to divide and conquer. It does not serve the essentially free, egalitarian and interconnected nature of all things to judge, divide, pillage, conquer and exploit. Those who define themselves as being on top of the mountain, those who think they are elite and above the law of the common being, spend great energy defining boundaries with money, armies, police, guns, bombs, check points, gates and all manner of ways to generate division. It should be evident to all but the most thick headed that we all live on one planet. Every system of life on our planet is connected to every system of life, and all parts are equal to the positive functioning of the whole. There is no garbage, there is no “away” or “over there,” and the health of any part depends on the health of all other parts.

II of II: A Spiritual Perspective on Globalism

The well-being of a child in Iraq, Palestine, Sudan or Darfur, is a part of my dream of life and a part of your dream of life, even though you do not recognize it as so. The child matters not because I am a “do-gooder.” The child ‘over there’ is your child, for we are speaking of the zeitgeist of our culture. The way we view an Iraqi child is the way we view the unformed child in front of our own noses in our culture. Any child matters to me, because I recognize by the universal law of the Oneness of Being that my well-being, my future, and the future of life of life itself, is inextricably bound to the dream I am creating for every child. This truth also applies to the animal and plant kingdoms. We are all part of the same dream.

If you must have a graphic example of our current society's distorted reflection as it has come home to roost, observe the levels of juvenile lock-up in our society, the lack of health care for families, and the willingness to feed children food that will generate diabetes, obesity, and other expressions of the epidemic of financial greed. If you can rationalize sacrificing any child, you will be willing to sacrifice all children to that monster.

III of III: The End of the Nation State

It is time for the end of nation states and it is time to recognize each being as a unique expression of the whole. Being from Jewish descent, it is interesting for me to consider the definition of the word Hebrew, which means “border crosser.” Border Crosser is a biblical definition of the Hebrew people. Hebrew was meant to represent being the guest in whatever land they were settled. They were meant to hold the message of this next stage of development of the human race. Hebrews are the thread through time of the possibility of living from a more highly integrated consciousness that recognizes the god consciousness of all things. There is a great leap from this spiritual purpose to an assumed identity of a ‘nation-state’ that divides itself against others and then feels it must generate war (get them before they get us).

The conflict in Israel with the Palestinians will never be resolved until we humans learn to think from another place—from the heart that is capable of perceiving the underlying unity in the appearance of surface differences. For that to happen, we will have to recognize that we all are ‘border crossers,’ for this planet is in fact, round and connected. Borders and walls are a figment of a contracted, fear-infected imagination; an archaic mode of thinking that has not registered the incredible capacity our human race has to create a Shambhala, a Garden of Eden, a Paradise Found—if we would but remove the veil from our eyes and live from the living truth of the abundant interconnectedness of all being, the true nature of our planet Earth.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Two Sides of the Same Brain: Insights from Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke Experience

PART ONE

Irony: A Neuro-Anatomist’s Stroke

One morning, a Harvard neuroscience researcher named Jill Bolte Taylor had a profoundly ironic personal experience: She had a left brain cerebral hemorrhage stroke. On TED Talks, an on-line community offering high quality talks and performances on technology, education, and design, Jill recounts her fascinating experience. When the hemorrhaging in her left brain began, Jill watched as her language and sequential logic capacity (where she had mainly abided as a scientist), as well as her sense of time and space, all stopped functioning. As the massive hemorrhage progressed, Jill suddenly found herself feeling profoundly peaceful, curious, and blissful. For a moment, she even accepted the possibility of losing her life. Although Jill logically understood that her cerebral hemorrhage was life-threatening, she explained that her right brain orientation was allowing her to drop into a seemingly illogical state of being for what was occurring. She felt peace, interconnectedness, divine acceptance and child-like curiosity as she attempted to communicate with the outside world with none of her left brain function. Re-telling the story of her physical descent and spiritual ascent, Jill’s final message was that if we want create a peaceful world, we have to understand how to access the right hemisphere of our brain.


In my own words, her basic insight seemed to be that so long as we function from our whole brain, peace is innate and lives within each of us as a potential actualization. With her profound experience, it seemed to me that Jill had been to the mountain. She had also found her way back. Her full recovery was apparent through her transformed role as an eloquent and animated speaker. Though returning from the mountain to deliver her message, however, this Harvard-trained neuron-anatomist did not seem to have a technology to guide people there. Hearing Jill’s scientific explanation of the right brain orientation, the obvious question becomes “How do we get there and how do we choose to stay?”


The Key: Understanding the Right Brain as the Seat of Peace

Upon hearing Jill’s talk, I was very excited because I could see how her insights perfectly dovetailed with the functional spirituality emerging out of my own mind-body work of nearly three decades. Jill’s explanation of the right brain as the Seat of Peace helped me to further clarify what is occurring during what I have experienced as a spiritual embodiment process. Before hearing her explanation, I had understood that enlightenment was available and immediately accessible to everyone, if only we fully returned our mind back to the natural physical universe of our body. I believed that though enlightenment is innate and part of the nature of existence, humans have a special challenge because of the individuated nature of our mind.


In my own personal story, I needed to heal deep emotional wounds that plagued me most of my life. I sought many therapies and spiritual paths to help me find my way back to self-knowledge. My unresolved emotional anguish brought me to my knees, forcing me to enter my own body in a desperate attempt to understand and clear the pain I felt. I explored my body through dance movement and vocal sound meditation. As I learned to directly enter my body, I found my body accessed a great cosmic intelligence.


I began to teach about consciousness through movement. I developed a mind-body integration technology which had its own precise physical language. My spiritual exploration of my body had accessed an innate state of enlightenment. To move into states of ecstatic reverie and joy, all I needed to do was to completely inhabit my body. At first, it was tricky for me travel beyond “thinking about my body” to actually “feeling my body.” The more I was able to drop into these states, however, the more I understood that enlightenment is right here and indigenous to life itself. I began to know that Enlightenment is accessible because Life Itself is already enlightened.


I was able to test my immersion into this ocean of creative intelligence through my own healing practice. Over and over, I discovered that full entrance into my body also brings precise guidance which in turn, assists my client. This technology is also what guides my clients to reside in their body. Inspired by Jill’s “peaceful” stroke experience, I now understand the logical progression that inadvertently opened to me in my own awakening. It goes like this: The more I trust, the quieter I become. The quieter I become, the stronger my connection to the knowledge moving through me. The stronger the signal, the easier it is to put the noise of fear and mistrust aside. Eventually, I stop giving fear my attention. This, in turn, allows me to experience an even stronger connection to the guidance of the message. I then find myself receiving directly from life. From this place, I am able to direct my intention to heal myself and others without the distortion of hesitation and doubt.


The journey of the human is to find the way back to the innate enlightenment of life itself through the body. My conclusion goes against many traditional spiritual practices, which often teach that we must struggle to transcend our ‘low, unworthy’ body to reach the height of our spirituality, or we are told to study with a priest or guru and that it is a great struggle to attain enlightenment. Entering my body with my own attention showed me something very different. I was in awe of the deep intelligence I encountered from within my being. My body showed me I already am enlightened—if only I overcome my fear of the unknown parts of myself. The more I directed my attention to the flow of energy within my body, the more I learned to trust the unfolding intelligence to inform and grow me. Simply, I stopped being afraid of the unknowable mystery of my body.


Embodiment as “Back Door” Access

Through Jill Bolte Taylor’s neuro-anatomical explanation of her stroke, I now understand that the embodiment guidance processes I have developed actually provide a “back door access” to the powers of the right brain. I did not realize it at the time, but my embodiment experiences had enabled my right brain to actively participate in the creative process of my life. When Jill explained how the activation of her right brain brought her to a state of peace and joyful interconnection, I realized that it is my right brain I contact when I enter my body. As the natural seat of enlightenment, entering my body became a technique to gain access there. Anchoring my attention to my body actually quiets the noise that normally activates my left brain. Released from the ‘static’ my entrenched fear loops allows the present moment consciousness of my right brain to activate. A vast creative potential then becomes available to my being. Residing in this awareness, I then know exactly how I must adapt to meet the challenge of the present moment—just as Jill was able to communicate her needs despite her loss of speech and articulation during her stroke.

Two Sides of the Same Brain: Insights from Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke Experience

PART TWO

The Choice We have to Make

The first step is to let go of the belief that you must do something to prove yourself worthy. This thought immediately misaligns and separates you from experiencing your Oneness and equality with all. We do not have to attain anything to be enlightened, but we must understand how to move past our fear. To do this, we must solve a paradoxical riddle to find our way back to the Garden of Eden. I now understand that my right brain orientation is not activated if I have even one fear thought.


The cause of our most primary fear is experiencing the finite life of our body.


When we feel separate from Life, we observe our body from our left brain. Our left brain discrimination can cause us to feel frightened of the vastness of Life. By itself, the left brain perceives an essential threat to the integrity of our being and will and attempts to assert control over our life. Since it is impossible to control life, fear of life becomes a primary experience. When we cede control to the left-brain orientation of our mind, it asserts a dominator relationship with our body. If our most primary fear is of the physical limitation of our own body, then the most basic healing can occur by directing our attention to have an unmediated experience with the life of our body. The moment we do this, we cease abandoning or judging our body. We quiet our most primary fear, and our right brain becomes immediately available to our consciousness. This shift is very fragile and sensitive.


Sometimes we hear things we know are important, but we cannot apply the knowledge because we do not yet have the right context to apply what we have heard. Before hearing Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk, I could only intuitively explain the right-brain/left-brain relationship to my own work. Now, Jill’s sharing has provided a scientist’s explanation of what happens when I align my breathing process with my body. Precisely tracking my breath as it moves along my central channel takes me on an extraordinary journey of recapitulation of the complete cycle of my birth and death. As described in the pulse of my breath, I discover the basic format for everything in life: My inhalation creates my exhalation, and my exhalation in turn generates my inhalation; an endless never-ending synergy in which each thing magically arises out of its opposite.


On the other hand, the domain of my left brain describes everything as alien. If I forget that I am one with the infinite creativity of the universe, there is everything for me to fear. Thus, access to the innate enlightenment is determined by my basic orientation to Life: Am I one with All, or am I separate? If I believe I am separate, then all I can do is attempt to manipulate and control my world from all the things that are separate from me and can do me harm. I live in the over-controlling disempowerment of my futile attempts to manipulate the past and future.


Our access to our right or left brain orientations is thus actually determined by the identity that we choose. Again, are we one with everything and equal to everything, as is everything is one with us and equal to us? Or do we live in unstable world of separation and hierarchy, where our position is under constant threat and we must be continually vigilant towards everything we perceive as alien? If we define ourselves as separate from the power of everything else, how could we NOT justify our need to react violently and destructively??


Remember—the primary cause of our fear is our own abandonment of our physical body. This primary separation sets up the prototype of our dislocation from everything. If this is so, then there is a simple path to heal the disconnection of our dysfunctional beliefs that keep us from our enlightened birthright. The moment we quiet our fear, the innate enlightenment that lives in our right brain becomes available to us.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

I of III: WAKING SPRING - FIRST THOUGHTS

A wind is stirring from the East – the place of new beginnings, infinite possibility and choice.
Nothing anchors me in this time but my body.

I buy blackberries from Chile and onions from Peru. I can get everything from anywhere.What does it mean that I eat food grown from a totally different land and air than where I live? Am I a Peruvian, a Chilean, a North American or a Russian? I eat food I do not grow, harvest, prepare, or create.

The stock market falls…I knew it would.
The global market blankets investors like me who have no connection with growing food, with a false sense of physical security. I believe money will always feed me. I blind myself to the facts: Money is not food. Money is not life.

It is time to go inside….

The sun’s warmth feels good.
Breathing slowly and deeply feels good.
Outside, the picture I see -- of trees and green and sun --appears so calm and pretty.
My every action is rendered like fat -- to quantify its value, to identify what and how much can I consume? For what purpose? Of course! To entice me to consume more.
Pegged to data files, nailed into marketing slots that morph into images taking the shape of every hiddenfear and desire living in my reptilian brain.

I stand on the green grass in the center of a circle of palm trees in a public park where I do not have to pay a fee to choose to be. I breathe in deeply, feel my feet on the ground.

A price tag bar coded into everything. What is still free silently absorbs the oozing toxins and poisons created in production of mass quantitiesof stuff.
Billboards seduce me with sexual innuendo to mindlessly open my gullet wide to incorporateeverything. Must keep the stock market climbing.
Impossible not to grow Fat.

I ache for what is still free to cleanse itself of the taint of Human greed.
Ride a bike and you do not have to pay for parking or to work out at the gym.

Watch a flower bloom in the morning sun. Plunge the Body into the powerful pulse of ocean waves. Breathe Clean Air. Sit and walk upon Sweet Earth. Climb a mountain with the effort of my own buttocks.

Exchange a smile with a Stranger for no reason except to acknowledge our humanity.
Listen to the beating of my heart.

II of III: THE PLASTIC SEDUCTION OF CREDIT

I am afraid to look at what I really think. 
It is not very “New Age Positive” 
Fish are free if you catch them-- but they will kill you
if you eat them.
 
I hate how much I, as an American, have.  Boxes and
boxes of food, furniture and clothes made in some other
place, fill warehouses from floor to ceiling. I pull
out my plastic card from my pocketbook and it is
swiped on an electronic machine.  The machine
registers my credit, how much money I have spent and
whether my card represents a secure exchange. 
I do not like that in a nanosecond, all my personal information is
made available by this electronic transaction. 
 
It is not that I have anything to worry about. 
I have enough, but I feel the coldness of the exchange. 
I could still use paper money, but it is worth it to the credit card
company to pay me to use their card to track my spending. 
They know how to get me. It is simple.  
Offer me a few percentage of money back if I use the card.  
I, of course, am a lamb to the slaughter to obtain these few extra points. 
It is my own fault for using the card.
 
Then, there is the seduction of a plastic card as
money.  I cannot feel the money I spend in the virtual
world of non-form.  It is very easy to override my
physical limits. The temptation to spend even on
things I do not need or even worse, do not have the
funds to buy, becomes very great.  Marketing Gurus know
exactly how to get me to open my purse strings.  It is
called “Sale.” I must take advantage of the sale right
now, or the product will be gone.  The sale provokes
the economics of scarcity. Even though I am drowning
in the ocean of physical objects, sales entice me to
swipe my card in exchange for taking this object home.
Most of the stuff I buy at discount or on sale I do
not need or hardly ever use.  I wind up giving it
to the local thrift shop, which actually  turned
me away the last time because they were too full of stuff 
to receive any more.
 
Everything seems backwards and I am caught.  It would
take a great effort to change my life to no longer
participate in this madness.
 
I am afraid the housing market will keep falling and that I
will no longer be able to sell my house. I am afraid
the stock market is once again being manipulated to
cream profits off the top.  (Actually, the creaming has
already happened and the bloat in the stock market,
the result of a strategy that allowed so much money 
to go into the hands of so few, has already happened. 
I am watching the downward spiral.) I knew it
would happen.  I know the system was sick and could no
longer support itself. And I did not follow my
instincts.  We all swim in the same ocean.
 
I am jumping all around, because the illness I see is all so interconnected.
Everything comes from a belief in the primacy
of money as the reason for Being. 
 
My personal diatribe continues. There are so many blaring inconsistencies:
I no longer grow my own food or build my own house. 
There is absolutely nothing that I have to do.
All Time is created for me to watch my TV, consume product and
grow fat. Thank God our human bodies rebelled by growing fat. 
We realize something must change.
 
The solution is to exercise.
 
Palaces of exercise machines are everywhere.  Mirrors
reflect our images back to us as we sweat and peddle
and row and lift weights. But does any one notice
that the center is taken out of the exercise?
 
What was once intrinsic in the action of being human
in a community of others-- to hunt, grow food and build
together, no longer motivates the movement of our
bodies. Now, it is the fear of growing fat because of
the temptation of all that we can consume. We sweat to
keep our bodies from growing sick and fat, to ward off
the basic intention of our culture, which is to consume. 
Even exercise becomes an act of consumption.
 
If there were not so many homeless people and so many
slums needing attention, I would not be ranting so. 
This is my dilemma. I vision human communities
generating structures of work, effort and power that
help each of us make our city glow with beauty. To
align the effort of the muscle on our backs to create
a world together, instead of working individually just to avoid 
a collision with the world of fat -- or feeding the narcissism to 
generate an external image as our identity. 
"Creating for no reason but the sheer joy of doing" 
becomes a forgotten radical idea. 

III of III: THE RACE: WILL WE LET OURSELVES WIN?

We blame the immigrants doing all the work that gives us the leisure to get fat, for all that is wrong in our world. Good may arise out of our misguided effort to not allow immigrants into our country: Immigrants generate the wealth in our economy. Maybe when people do their own gardening and their own child rearing and cleaning their own house, a new balance will come.

Immigrants are the scapegoat for the greed of a few people who are silently sucking the wealth of ourcountry off the public table into their private off-shore fortunes. The wealthy elite think they can isolate themselves from the destruction of the fabric of the society inwhich they live.

They believe they can beat death. Their definition of who they are is as deep as their skin. Clone a few stem cells. Reproduce their clone lineage. Maintain control of the world. Trapped in a thought loop, they think the loop is who they are. Even if you patent DNA, DNA belongs to the Cosmos.

The superficial identity of power over others cannot see with its heart. Heart is the deep intelligence forming the sacred text of DNA that informs the cellular generation of proteins generating the particular form we are.

I yell to the men who think they control the world, who assume the right to step upon the backs of millions of other humans to arrive at the top of the mountain. Now on top, they think God anointed them and gave them the right to destroy the planet that supports all of us.

I shout to all of you. You think you can cloister yourselves from the toxic poisoning spewn upon the four corners of this earth through that very same mis-begotten technology that has birthed your monsters. So blind with power you have forgotten the biological miracle you already are is deeper than your twisted thinking. Even you at the top are a part of the whole universe that insists we all awaken. The whole universe wants everything to awaken. Awaken to Oneness -- to a true democracy that recognizes the equality of every thing to everything. The tower comes tumbling down in your mind through the messages of your own DNA talking to your cells: Vibrate with the frequencies of the evolution of Cosmos.

The race is on. Who will win?

Life always wins. But will my Human race Align with life or death? It remains to be told. The challenge is our Mind. Will we learn to master our fear? Will we learn to open our heart? Will we recognize the Truth?

The challenge is to master our own mind. The challenge is to recognize the power everything represents. The challenge is to take responsibility for what we create with our power. The challenge is to choose Love and create a world in celebration of our recognition of the divine sacred intelligent origin of everything.