The Roving 'I'

2009-07-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

Hey there consciousness fans...

Check out http://TheHigherConsciousness.com . Some awesome mind-provoking stuff.

peace..............ag

Chapter 8: Silverman Finds A Groove

2006-01-17T15:39:00.000-08:00

Silverman was back at the computer and it felt strange. Not the sitting in front of a terminal and pounding on the keys part. That he was doing that every day at his new job downtown. What felt strange was trying to get back into the writing mood, it had been so long since he'd been there.

He glanced out the window and saw the sky beautifully overcast, one of those thin layers of marine air that allowed just enough sunlight to force its way through, creating a silver aura that lit up The Convent's courtyard and the facades of the Victorians across the street. It was a delicate balance, a little more sunlight and the atmosphere brightens, a little less and the mood turns grey and gloomy. There was only a narrow band on the spectrum that produced this fairy tale effect and even as he watched the moment passed and normalcy returned. He, in turn, returned to his keyboard and the ideas churning through his brain.

Life had been coming together nicely since the last time he had put finger to keyboard, (nobody put pen to paper anymore), and he wondered how much of what had occurred in his life was worth someone else's time to read and how much was merely his own ego seeking immortality. He shrugged. If that were all it were he wouldn't be the first author to be found guilty, not by a long shot.

Where to begin the current reality check? His selves were beginning to merge so deeply and so completely one into the other that at times it was hard to keep them apart, hard to know which was manifesting at any given time.

"You're weird," Shelly had told him when he first described the feeling to her.

"I know," he had answered, "but it's a gentle weird. That's why you love me." They had been getting along wonderfully for the past six months ever since starting his current job. Amazing, he thought, what a regular income, even the wildly uncertain one of a commission only salesman can do for a relationship.

The Pottery Barn gig had long since passed into history, followed by stints on the phone setting sales appointments for a building maintenance firm, and then, when he realized how much more the salesman earned than the appointment setter, selling printer cartridges, foreign language tapes, and management consultants’ services. He had always owned the gift of gab and buoyed by an ever growing friendship with his new friend and alter ego, ag, he was discovering that when properly focused with a given end in sight, that gift could be used to generate a decent income indeed. In fact, for the first time in his entire life, he was finding his services in demand. It felt good.

The current client had him talking on the phone to attorneys throughout the country, helping them achieve their professional goals (read income) by hooking them up with clients who needed their services. He was the oldest one in the office and by choice worked only four days a week, making less calls, acting less frantic, yet closing with the best of them. In fact, he was one of the best of them. And unlike the rest of the sales force, he was getting Social Security. Shelly sent it to their investment counselor as soon as it came in.

Shelly had even smoked with him a few times in the past several months. "I've always enjoyed getting high with you," she said as they sat on the couch in their sweats sharing a bowl, "I like the unique way we relate, not to mention the sex," and her voice trailed off. "I just didn't want to support an addict in his addiction. Now that you have it under control, an occasional night of alternative reality isn't all bad. I just wish there were some other way to ingest this stuff. My lungs are getting too old for this."

He smiled through clenched throat, nodded in agreement, and blew a lungfull of yutz out into the room. The contrast between the good and bad pot produced made him chuckle. Everything in balance, he thought, and he was drawn back to his visit to the dentist earlier that week.

Dr. Harry had found a deep pocket on the inside flesh next to one of his molars the prior time he had gone for a cleaning and on closer inspection had discovered calcium deposits forming on the tooth that were pushing the gum away. He had described a new technique of going under the gum line, scraping off the buildup, polishing the tooth smooth, and then squirting an antibacterial glue into the pocket. "We really should set an appointment and hope it works" he had told Silverman. "If it doesn't, the periodontist is next and that's no fun at all." Silverman was weighing his options two weeks later when the pocket became infected and it was no longer an option.

As usual he had taken gas instead of a shot. Not that he was afraid of needles, but why go numb and feel nothing when he could get a good high and a legal one at that. Dr. Harry had positioned the nosepiece and started the flow and Silverman had inhaled deeply and fully, anxious for the gas to take effect, for the tingling sensation to get to his brain and take him to that place he was, sadly, still unable to reach completely on his own.

"Feel anything yet?" asked Dr. Harry.

"Nope," said Silverman, who was definitely getting a buzz. Dr. Harry turned the gas up slightly. "I've got to remember not to talk," thought Silverman. Last time, during an extraction, he had mumbled something incoherent about the 49ers and Dr. Harry had lowered the gas. He wouldn't make the same mistake again.

He went over. Instantaneously. Into that indescribable feeling where nothing changes yet everything changes. Escape from Flatland, new dimensions of Being, it's not what I know, it's what I know I don't know, yes, that's it, the human condition, what separates us from the beasts, not knowing and knowing that we don't know, to balance in the middle of polar complementaries, to experience both sides at once, the farther apart the better, up/down, in/out, yin/yang, yes!!! This is it. Nirvana. This is what I wanted to experience. Heaven. Bliss. Bli…

And that's when he realized he was experiencing bliss in a dentist's chair with a tube sucking blood from his mouth as a sharp metal tool six millimeters under his gumline scraped away parts of his body.

Yeah, he really was weird. Even he had recognized it then.

But, dammit, wasn't that the very thing he was calling the ultimate human experience? The ability to look at complementaries not just from the outside, imune from both, but to experience them from within, the place in between? He shook his head to clear the brain and went into the kitchen to find somnething to eat.

Back at mission control with a plate of cottage cheese and raw veggies, Silverman widened the lens of his reality check. He had let Shelly make a series of medical appointments for him and had come out with flying colors. They had joined a gym and three times a week after work he cycled and ran and rowed and stretched and swam and lifted weights. And that was on top of the twice a week yoga classes and the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises he did every day on arising.

Then there was the food. He was paying attention to what he took into his body based on other factors than flavor, monitoring proteins and carbs, controlling sugars, and surprise of surprises, actually losing weight. Plus, he'd given up coffee and was drinking green tea in the morning and hot water at work during the day. And, oh yes, no hard liquor! Almost five years now. That transition had surprised ever him.

He had been pouring a vodka and tonic and describing to Adam how vodka was virtually tasteless. "So you only use it to get drunk", his son had asked?

Silverman stopped, thought, poured out the drink and hadn't had any hard liquor since, no alchohol other than wine and beer. This was definitely not the Silverman he'd been living with for so long.

"Don't you have any vices left?", Dr. Smoltz had asked during the physical exam?

"Plenty," Silverman had assured him. But, aside from the pot and some of the websites he surfed with the shades down when Shelly wasn’t around he was really beginning to wonder. Was his lifelong goal of being the best Silverman he could be actually possible? And if it were, how old would he have to be to for it to manifest?

* * *

ag's Story

2006-01-10T21:21:00.000-08:00

I been selling all my life. Started back in junior high when I worked for a florist during school vacations and sold Easter lilies or Christmas trees depending on the holiday. When I got out of school I started doing it for real and I been a salesman ever since. Big companies, small companies, water filters, nutritional supplements, solar heating panels, industrial printing, collection services, home study courses, custom T-shirts, airplanes. I done it all.

Meanwhile, I been screwed all along the way. Like I can’t even tell you how many times a manager fucks up and the only way he can keep his job is by getting rid of mine. Or I get stock options in a company where the president embezzles from his own firm, or I build up someone else’s business from scratch and get canned when things get rolling because the guy’s wife has a cousin who needs a job. I’m tired of being fired, I’m tired of being downsized, I’m tired of being over promised and under delivered, I’m tired of being screwed. I’m just plain tired. But I still like to sell and I need the money cause I know how to spend it just as good as I can make it.

So a couple years ago I land this job with a company selling aluminum replacement windows. It’s not the best job I ever had and it’s not the best company I ever worked for and the rest of the salesmen are butt heads, but the potential is there to make some big bucks and a good salesman is never out of work so I say what the hell.

It’s 100% commission, no draw, no advance, no expenses, no nothin’. Just sell and get your money. Real simple. Leads are scarce and I’m the new kid on the block so what can you expect, they give me crap. One night I get an old immigrant couple from somewhere in Slobovia living in a four-room one-story bungalow on the other side of the river. I give up dinner and drive thirty-five miles through a cold driving rain to get there.

Now not to toot my own horn, but I’m a pro and the scene is classic textbook. They are on the couch in the living room and I’ve pulled over a straight backed chair and am facing them from three feet away. My miniature sample window and looseleaf binder with pictures of the home office, Better Business Bureau certificate, and reference letters are on the coffee table facing them, just like they are supposed to be. I give the canned pitch perfectly.

"Ooh, dat's a lot of money", says the old guy when the numbers come up at the end and the room is filled with a loud deafening silence. Mama and papa are holding hands would you believe, staring at me with great big eyes like deer caught in the headlights. I have done my job good, they want the windows, they just can’t afford them. No shit. Who can?

I play the scene just right, savor the moment, furrow my brow and purse my lips. I am searching deeply for a solution to the problem this sweet old couple is experiencing.

"Now just to clarify my thinking", I speak slowly and rub my fingers across my chin as if I have never run into this situation before, "if I can figure out a way to put these windows in your home this week without your having to pay anything at all then we got a deal, right?"

"Sure", says papa and I reach into my case, withdraw the order pad and fill in the pertinent information while I go through the no money down extended payment plan according to the book, according to the law. I turn the pad one hundred and eighty degrees and place it on papa's lap. “So that takes care of the problem, right?” I say, nodding my head up and down as I speak and extending the pen. "Put your name, here"

"Dat's still a lot", says mama squeezing papa's hand and I switch into high gear. This is a closer, a perfect sale. I can even justify it, legit. I mean there’s a miniature windstorm blowing right through their house in the middle of a cold wet upstate New York winter. Why the hell do you think I suggested they sit on the couch instead of at the kitchen table. Because that's where I feel it coming in the most when I did the walk-around. They need these windows and I need their signature. "I don't know", says papa, the pen poised in place. "Fourteen years payments, dat's a long time."

I am not going to lose it. I redo the savings on fuel, the low-low financing, the optional insurance, the comfort, the peace at night and safety from intruders. I lean forward, make eye contact, modulate my voice. I am perfect. By the book. The old man’s hand comes down to the surface of the paper. It is a done deal and I am three seconds away from a $1500 commission.

He makes a single vertical stroke on the page and then stops. "But dat's still so much every month", he says. They are screaming their poverty through every pore of their body. "We are poor and old. What good are fuel savings over the next fourteen years if we have trouble putting food on the table now? We won't live long enough for your windows to make a difference." I can hear them even though they are only shouting it through their eyes.

I breath deeply, reach for a second wind. I have been perfect, absolutely perfect and I AM going to sign them. I am not going to lose this sale, by God, I am NOT going to lose it. "What are you talking about?" I say with an edge to my voice I never heard before. "You don't want your wife to get sick from cold coming in while you're sleeping? Do you? You know it’s cold. She could die. You know what you need. You started to sign, just finish what you started so we can do this for you and make her safe."

I know what happens next, the one who talks first loses and I... will... not... lose. They sit there trembling. The old man looks at me and turns away, stares down at his lap and up again into my face. Our eyes touch and I look down at the pen then back up at his eyes. My eyes say “take it and sign”. “I can't," says papa's eyes, "I can't."

And that’s when I see what I've done. I see their fear of this smooth talking, neatly dressed, well fed representative of the system, with the official looking papers, who walked into their home an hour ago and is trying to walk out taking what little savings, what little income they have, and all for their own good. Yes, their windows are leaking, but they can stuff a towel around the edges and wear sweaters. Who am I kidding? I saw the remnants of their can of dinner when I came in. I know they can’t afford the prime product I am offering. But I want the sale and in order to get it I am scaring them to death.

I am peddling fear. I can keep up the pressure and close them, I know I can, but only by using fear. And then I hear my voice ring in my head, “You vill sign these papers! Und you vill sign them now!! Sig heil!!”

Something goes limp inside me, something I never felt before. Sure, I missed sales, but never when I knew so clearly I could win, and never never because I felt pity. My head is spinning and I mumble something about being sorry it didn't work out and I close up my kit and walk out into the night. I even think I said "God bless you" as I left. On the ride home I wonder where my weekly check will come from. I don't know. I only know it will not be coming from the old couple I just left who needs it more than I do.

The next day I turn in my kit and quit and I haven’t sold anything for years. That’s why I took this job. It’s not selling. It’s taking orders. I figure I’ll get back into it slowly.

* * *

Games of Consciousness - How Do We Know That We Know That We Know

2005-12-28T22:46:00.000-08:00

How do we know that we know that we know? Before heading into inner space to look for consciousness we must become fully aware and comfortable with the feeling of ‘knowing’, itself. We’ll need to have that answer so we can recognize when we have found what we're looking for.

At issue is not what parts of the brain perform the functions of knowing. That answers the question of how we know in a technical way that can be left to the cognitive scientists to map out. Of interest to us here is the question of how we, as functioning human beings, are aware that we know in an experiential way. What does ‘knowing’ actually feel like.

One way to go about looking for the feeling of knowing is to compare it to the feeling of not knowing. Asking questions is a good place to start. When there is something we do not know we ask questions about it. Lack of questions, of course, does not mean we actually know. We may think we know or we might not care to know about a particular subject, but that’s another story. However we can be pretty sure that when we hear ourselves asking questions it’s a clue that there is something we do not know.

Sometimes questions are directed externally toward others as we look outside ourselves for the answer. “Do you know where the library is?” Sometimes they are inner directed as we seek the answer within for something we know we knew but just cannot seem to remember. “What was the name of that movie?” The feeling is the same.

Thinking and knowing should not be confused, for they are two separate and distinct experiences. Thinking, like asking a question, may lead to the point of knowing, but it is not the experience of knowing, itself. Thinking is a sequential process that focuses on the particular subject in question and feels as if it is taking place inside our heads.

Knowing on the other hand is sudden, a...

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...feeling that seems to be located in our solar plexus and is the same no matter what the question.

We know that thinking and knowing are different because when we get the answer we are looking for, i.e. when we experience knowing, we stop thinking about the particular subject we had been focusing on. And we stop asking questions about it, too.

There is also a different kind of thinking that we do just for the pleasure it gives us, evoking an image of a person or place we like, or the inner sound of some music we enjoy. But this is more of a memory of prior experience rather than a questioning process working through to an answer. It does not turn to questioning until we come to a part of the memory that is a blank, that we do not remember. "Where did that happen?" "Who said what?" In that case we have to think in a questioning sense, to bring back to mind what we want to remember that we know we previously knew.

And this brings up the question of how we know what we already know. How did we get the information we have placed on the blank mental screen with which we started life. Clearly, there must have been many moments in space, points in time, when we did not know something and then we found the answer and suddenly...

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...we knew.

Each of us has memory experiences we can tap into where we remember the feeling of not knowing someone's name, directions to a particular location, or some bit of academic information and then getting the information and knowing it. The content of that experience is different for each of us, but the container of the experience, the feeling of completion that accompanies that knowing, is the same.

Memory and knowing converge. Since there was a point in time when we did not know what we now know, without the memory that we once knew a particular bit of information, there would be no reason to presume that we know it now. Let’s face it, there was a first time you learned that 1 + 1 = 2. Before that, you didn’t know it.

We can also pretend we know something, like when the professor starts talking about an assignment we were supposed to have read and we nod our head in agreement. Even though he does not know that we did not read it and do not know what’s in it, we know... we know that we do not know... and that is what matters as far as self-awareness goes.

Interesting, is it not, that it is possible to know that we do not know. In fact our knowing that we do not know produces a definite feeling of not knowing. This feeling, however, is something we know. As a result, the phenomenon of knowing we do not know feels the same as that of knowing we know. Fascinating.

When it comes to the experience of knowing, what we think about does not matter. That is just content. And as we’ve discussed, to know content, we simply think... that is, we focus on the subject and ask questions until finally something clicks and...

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...we know it. Or not. Sometimes, we give up from mental fatigue, from chasing some elusive answer that just does not want to reveal itself. That is when we know that we do not know, just as assuredly as we would know that we know, if we knew. Confused?

Luckily, knowing about knowing is not nearly as hard as talking about knowing. And so we will stop talking long enough to experience it via an experiential game, called ...
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* * *

THE KNOWING EXPERIENCE

Rules of Play:

Answer the following questions one at a time. Proceed as rapidly as you can, however no guessing. Knowing is important... knowing that you know... or not.

Option 1: If you know you know the answer to a given question, say "I know the answer," out loud, with conviction... but only if you know you know. Note what it feels like to know you know and where that feeling is located. Then go on to the next question.

Option 2: If you know you do not know the answer to a given question, say "I do not know the answer," out loud, with the same level of conviction... but only if you know you do not know. Note what it feels like to know you do not know and where that feeling is located. Then go on to the next question.

Option 3: If you are unsure about whether or not you know the answer to a question, take a few minutes to try discover it by whatever means you wish. As you do, note what it feels like to search for an answer and where that feeling is located. After finding the answer, or deciding you do not wish to spend any more time searching for it, with conviction say, "I know the answer," or "I do not know the answer," whichever is the case. Then go on to the next question.

Note: Take time to play the game, otherwise you will only be able to talk ‘about’ knowing without really ‘knowing’ it.

Here are the questions:

. How much is two plus two?

. What are the colors of the American flag?

. Who was the first human in space?

. What is my wife’s middle name?

. How many squares are there on a chess board?

. What did you have for dinner two nights ago?

. What does a zymometer measure?

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If you played the game and were paying attention to what you were experiencing as it was happening you should now be able to talk about knowing from within an immanent, shared, human experience.

For those questions you knew you know, you probably just said "I know the answer," with conviction without thinking. Similarly, where you knew you did not know an answer, it was just as easy to say "I do not know the answer," with the same conviction. In either case, there was no questioning and no thinking about the response. The feelings were gut reactions and should have felt just as certain even though one answer had content and was a knowing, while the other was blank and a not knowing.

However, the feeling when you knew for certain one way or the other was probably different than the feeling when you were unsure and had to go searching. That is when the mind came into play as you thought about what you know to see if it matches up with what you were looking for.

The chances of finding all the answers in one reference source were slim, not even counting the question about your eating habits. If you reached up on the shelf for an encyclopedia, you still had to look in different volumes, or at least different pages. More likely you undertook several different Google searches. In other words, the focus of your attention varied based on the content of what you wanted to know, even though the process of looking was the same.

Upon finding an individual answer to a question you had not known before, you no doubt acted the same in each case, regardless of which question you were working on. You lost interest in what had captured your attention to that point and moved on to the next question. Why shouldn’t you? You knew the answer.

When you tried to find answers by looking them up internally in your brain/mind instead of externally in books or on-line, your intentionality still had to focus in different directions even though the looking process was the same for each question. And the moment the answers came there was that immediate and comfortable gut feeling of completion, of knowing. Then you let go of that question and went on to the next one. And that feeling was the same no matter which question you had just answered.

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Therefore, having played the game, you should now be able to say with complete conviction that you know several facts about knowing that you may not have known before, not because you read it somewhere but because you experienced it personally. You...

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...that...

1) Knowing is different from the content of knowing;
2) The feeling of knowing is the same regardless of the content of knowing;
3) Knowing we do not know is an experience of knowing.

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[Just in case you had not experienced the flush of knowing to the above questions, aside from the one about your dinner which only the ’I’ reading these words can know, or not, the answers are: four, red white-and-blue, Yuri Gagarin, Mae, 64, and degree of fermentation.]
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[[There, now you know.]]

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[[[provided these are the correct answers]]]

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They don’t have to be, you know. It is my author's privilege to give any answer I want. The only way you can know for certain whether they are right is if you already know them on your own, or if you go look them up somewhere else where they do not play mind games like this.

Yet there is a method to this madness. You do know that if I had not just warned you that I might have given false answers, chances are such a thought would have never crossed your mind. You would now think you knew somethings and conceivably would have told them to a friend as truth adding, "Oh, I read it in a book somewhere," the very kind of knowing Descartes' rules of reason bracket out.

Liars can write and liars can preach. This is why you should no longer feel you know something just because you read it in a book or someone else told you so. Absolute knowing remains an individual experience. We must experience it for ourselves, from the inside out, at least everything we really want to say we know for certain.

* * *

Chapter 5: Silverman Takes A Break

2005-12-28T15:53:00.000-08:00

Silverman rubbed his eyes and let his mind wander away from the words on the screen in front of him to the current status of his life’s vital signs.

The book was coming along nicely, he was just finishing up the fifth chapter, he and Shelly hadn’t had any major blowouts recently, possibly because they were spending less time together, work was going well and he was even getting in some serious reading, Vonnegut and Calvino mainly, on the job between phone calls. Short chapters were best, it was hard to keep any intellectual or emotional momentum really going with the headset randomly bbbrrriiiiiinnnggging in his ears...

“Pottery Barn, this is David. How can I help you?”

“Good God”, he thought as he read what he had just written. “It’s becoming reflexive!”

A friendship had also begun to spring up at work between him and ag, another late night Pottery Barn denizen. Not only was he enjoying ag’s company during the breaks, he was actually learning something about himself from this edgy little man at the other end of the motivational spectrum.

Silverman looked at the clock and grimaced. It was 7pm and he had to be at work in 3 1/2 hours. The nightshift meant a whole new way of living. He shut down the computer and headed into the bedroom to take a nap.

* * *

Scene: the typical bland break room of a typical bland business office in several shades of grey. On the right of the entrance is a copy machine. In front is a table and a refrigerator. A first aid kit hangs on the wall. To the left is a set of cabinets topped by a formica counter top, a stainless steel sink, and an automatic three pot drip coffee maker. On the back wall is a glass enclosed bulletin board holding forms required to be displayed by the state, a listing of current job openings in the company, and a notice that sacharine and other artificial sweeterners have been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals and are not recommended for use by pregnant women. On the table is a tray filled with bags of coffee, tea, chocolate, and sweeteners (including sacharine), along with paper cups, lids, and stirrers. No laboratory animals or pregnant women are present.

Time: 1:15am on a typical weekday morning.

David Silverman is standing in front of the sink trying to remove a three year old dark brown stain from the inside of a coffee pot. ag, a small wiry man with an almost imperceptible twitch at the corner of his mouth, is sitting on the edge of the table dangling his feet and listening to Silverman rant.

“Now here’s the question de jour. Am I a writer who is taking phone orders for a catalog company in order to earn extra money for the holidays, or am I a telephone order taker who thinks he’s a writer?”

“Is there an absolute here or do I get to choose?”

“That’s the point. Am I both, am I neither, and if so, who gets to make that decision, me or the person looking at me? And whatever the answer turns out to be, why does it sound so much lamer than when the Taoist, Chuang Tzu, asked whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man?”

“What?”

“It’s really very simple. Am I what I think I am or what other people think I am? You listening to me rant and rave, the company bookkeeper checking my timecard, the reader processing the marks on this page, or my wife pissing and moaning about the money we don’t have.”

“Ya know David, you think too damn much. Why does there have to be an absolute? Why is it so important that you make a name for yourself?”

“It’s not about making a name for myself. That’s not the point. I’m not even using my real name, if you haven’t noticed. It’s about using all my skills to their fullest, about making the biggest impact on the world.”

“Why don’t you jump from a real high place?”

“That’s not what I mean by making a big impact.”

“That’s what you said. You’re the writer who’s big on words.”

“So, you think of me as a writer?”

“I don’t know. You tell me you are. So I’m giving you strokes. To me you’re an order taker like I am. I just said you were a writer because you want to hear it. I’ve never read your stuff. How the hell do I know whether you’re a writer or not? Why is it so important?”

“I don’t know. When I’m home and thinking about what I do for eight hours a night it all seems so stupid, selling useless trinkets over the phone. It’s as if I’m serving time and I just want to get it over with. Like before I left for work tonight I told Shelly that I’d already completed 20% of my time here. Boy, was she thrilled to hear I was counting the hours and I knew I’d screwed up as soon as I’d said it. I tried to salvage what I could by telling her my goal was to get something more lucrative and regular before this job ended, but I don’t think it worked.”

“Way to go silver tongue. Allow me to present you with the 1995 Sandpaper Award for Smoothness.”

“But that’s the thing. Once I’m here it feels different. It’s what I do for eight hours a night, taking orders over the phone. It becomes more important. I just sent a birthday present from a guy in New York to his girl friend in California, got it gift wrapped, helped him write a card, made sure it would get there on time. I’m making people happy. That’s what I’ve got to remember.”

“Right. And you’re earning money which makes your wife happy which keeps her from kicking you out of the house which makes you happy. Right? Sounds like a win-win-win to me. That’s what you’ve got to remember. Don’t make it more complicated than it is.”

* * *

Scene: the same
Time: 3am

“That’s it. You’re right. It is all about money. In fact all I do is work with money. People call and give me money and I give them goodies in exchange. Fifteen years ago when things were so bad the kids were getting free lunch at school, I remember sitting at the dining room table crying my eyes out and bawling “I can do everything but make money”. Hell, it’s a piece of cake, if I only knew then what I know now. Just send people goodies and they call from around the world and send me money. Well not me exactly, I just get $8.33/hr of it. That and all the fresh brewed coffee I can drink. That is what this is all about isn’t it? Money and brown stuff masquerading as coffee?”

“I won’t vouch for the brown stuff but you’re right about the money. Maximize the bucks, that’s what it’s all about. And you’re no different than anybody else even though you’d like to think you’re above it all. So now that you admit you’re down here in the mud with the rest of us, how would you like to get a raise?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean what do I mean? How would you like to get more money for doing what you’re doing? What’s so hard to understand word man? Would that give your life more meaning?”

“Well more money would give me less grief and that’s means something. Are you suggesting I hit them up for a raise? I just started. Lots of luck.”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. God, for somebody as smart as you are you are really dumb. Just take advantage of what’s available. How many specials did you sell last week?”

“Specials?”

“Yes, specials, upsells, those weekly items the company over-ordered and then cut in price to push out the door, Christmas tree angels, N O E L stocking holders, wine rings, photo cubes. You know you get $1.00 for each one you sell, don’t you?”

“Well, yes...”

“So how many did you sell last week?”

“I don’t know... six, seven. People don’t ask for them. I usually get about one or two a night. How about you?”

"A hundred and forty."

“What?!!!”

“A hundred and forty. Now divided by forty hours that’s an extra $3.50 an hour. Last week you earned $8.33 an hour, I earned $11.83 an hour for doing the same thing. That makes my time here a lot more meaningful than yours the way I see it.”

“But how? How did you get people to buy that crap?”

“That’s the problem. You can’t let them think you think it’s crap. It’s stuff somebody somewhere wants and is willing to pay for. All you gotta do is assume that each person who calls is gonna buy at least one special after they place their order.”

“I get embarrased trying to sell stuff people don’t want just for the money.”

“Wrong thinking, smart guy. You don’t know who wants what. Somebody out there wants the stuff and you just have to find out who it is. Besides, the company wants you to sell it. That’s why they give you the incentive. The money is your reward for doing a good job. Hell, the people on the phone called up to spend money in the first place. Help them spend more. They’re sitting ducks. Especially the insomniacs we get this time of night.”

“You make it sound so calculating.”

“It is calculating. And it’s fun. Try it. Let’s see who can get the most specials before quitting time.”

“Give me a handicap.”

“You’re your own handicap. But I bet I can double whatever you get, okay?”

“You’re on. By the way, if you enjoy sales so much, why are you doing this short term holiday sales instead of the kind of sales where you can make really big money. Isn’t it all the same?”

“That’s a good question. I’ll tell you tomorrow night. Meanwhile, it’s time to get back on the phones and make some money.”

* * *

David glanced at his reflection in the night window, bearded, longhaired, overweight, glassy eyed, lightweight headphones with built in microphone poised one inch from wherever he turned his head. He could be a switchboard operator or a radio DJ or a tank commander or an airplane pilot or a police dispatcher or the wizard of OZ... or a hot shot sales rep for a catalog company.

BBBoooiiiiinnnggg.

“Pottery Barn,this is David. How can I help you?”

On his very first call he sold two specials. By the next break he was up to seven. The money was rolling in.

***

Epiphany

2005-12-28T11:53:00.000-08:00

My career path after college was checkered to say the least. But you already know that and how I quit the corporate world in 1970 to be a writer. "You have to be happy with your work", I said by way of explanation, “or else you spend too much of your time looking for other work where you will be happy.” At least I’ve been consistent in my search for the ultimate.

I wrote freelance, articles, poetry, and fiction, selling the occasional piece occasionally enough to keep me motivated, also becoming the editor of a regional magazine which folded after several years because the owner was inept, as did a silk screen printing business which I started. I did substitute teaching in local high schools but that didn’t bring in enough income to keep the family fed and I was forced to take the only jobs I could get to support our growing family, commission sales. I was not happy as a salesman, I knew it was not "why I was here", but no income at all would have been worse. I continued to write at nights. This checkered pattern of semi-survival ebbed and flowed for about six years.

In the mid 1970's my sister, whose husband had died tragically several years previously, began attending meetings of a Hindu spiritual group. She claimed it gave her a certain comfort and peace of mind that she needed in her life.

My mother, the athiest, called me on the phone. "Will you find out what your crazy sister is doing?", she asked, and I immediately called my sister who sent material on meditation and the practice of yoga. It was my first exposure to either of these subjects and though I took it all with a large grain of salt, I could see how practice of what it taught could produce the beneficial effects my sister was experiencing.

In 1977, another death in the family caused me to read Raymond Moody's, Life After Life, a book describing the experiences of over a hundred-fifty people who had been declared clinically dead and then ressuscitated. They brought back with them stories of tunnels, lights, and consciousness outside of the body and the similarity of their reports piqued my intellectual interest. Logically and rationally, if the stories were pure fiction, there was no reason why they should have been so consistent.

"What if the body and mind really are separate?", I asked myself in the only leap of faith I have ever taken.

I began to reread the material from my sister, which seemed to be saying a lot of what was being described by Dr. Moody's patients. The connection was too close to deny. And, although I did not realize it at the time, in the same manner that one can walk up one side of a see-saw and upon reaching the fulcrum tilt the entire apparatus with only the slightest shift of weight, so did my one tiny question lead me into a whole new area of inquiry that was to set a completely new direction for my life.

I began meditating and found that yoga seemed to come easily for me. One evening as I focused on a candle flame with the breath forcefully expelled, I suddenly experienced a beautiful melodic ringing beteen my ears and found myself looking down at the top of my head from just under the ceiling. I was astounded, though completely lucid and unafraid.

My mind was racing. "If I am up here then who is that down there? Or, if that is me down there, who is this up here?" The sensation lasted only a second or two before I gulped in air and reentered the body seated on the floor. But, as with the flashing red and green lights of so many years before, I knew what I had experienced.

Reasoning that the experience had occurred because of oxygen deprivation, I figured that if I could keep air out of my lungs for a longer period, I would experience even more. The following Sunday, April 16th, 1978, I decided to repeat the experiment. It was almost nine months to the day from the time I first questioned the separation of body and mind.

Lying on my stomach on the bed, propped on my elbows, I vowed not to breathe until I separated from my body, knowing that should I become unconscious I would involuntary take in air. I did not do anything stupid, such as taping my mouth or nose.

I took three deep breaths, forcibly exhaled, and waited to see what would happen. The second hand on the clock made a full circuit, then another one. My rib cage began to ache but I refused to breathe. Two minutes and forty-five seconds was the last timing I saw on the clock as the pain became unbearable.

I rolled on my back, shaking uncontrollably, then perspiring, then burning up, the first three sensations in the dying process I was to learn later upon reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Yet even without that knowledge I knew I was dying and a terrible fear gripped me. "NO!", I screamed in my mind, "God will not let me die while I am searching for Him!".

At that moment three things happened at once. I began gulping air, I fell off the bed, and a pinpoint of light appeared at the crown of my head. Anyone looking at me writhing on the floor would have seen what appeared to be an epileptic fit. The fact that my mother and uncle had both experienced their first seizures at age thirty-nine, and I was at the time thirty-seven, would have lent credibility to that assumption.

Though my body was flailing about uncontrollably, inside I was experiencing a state of ecstasy and peace and perfect and absolute lucidity. The pinpoint of light was getting larger and I remember thinking, "This is what the people whom Dr. Moody interviewed must have described as going through a tunnel." Closer and closer it came, larger and larger it grew, finally exploding within my brain as a clear white light, more brilliant and more powerful than anything I could have ever conceived of. I also felt wires in my brain being pulled from their sockets much as telephone operators used to disconnect callers on old manual switchboards.

During the thirty minutes or so that I remained in this state, enveloped by the light, I never lost the sense of my body or awareness of my individuality, never lost the sense of "me", and the feeling that everything that was happening was taking place within my skull, within my brain. Yet I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt, for no shadow of any kind could have withstood the brilliance of that light, that what I was experiencing was, indeed, the Absolute.

The Divine was making a house call, so to speak. And with the conviction that can only come from from knowing something directly and personally, I knew that the ultimate question of the existence of God would no longer be a question for me, quite an amazing conclusion considering my history.

The light inside began to dim and I saw myself lifted off the ground and zooming out into space. Back and back Earth receded, a blue-green ball that became a huge yin-yang symbol and just as suddenly became Earth again as I hurtled back towards its surface, the nature of the duality of material existence becoming indelibly impressed upon me in the process. My body functions were returning and I found I could play with them. Lean to the left and I was in my room, lean to the right and I went off into space... left/right, in/out, Earth/space, back/forth. There was zero fear. I was having fun.

Eventually the wires that had been pulled began to be reconnected, but I could tell they were going back into different locations than they had come from, that I was being rewired as a changed person from who I had been.

When all physical functions returned and my mind and body snapped together once more into a functioning unit, I found myself on the floor on my knees hands clasped in prayerful supplication speaking the words, "I am reborn. I am reborn in God." While I knew that what I was saying was true, I still remember a part of me feeling totally embarrased by the words coming out of my mouth.

Since that day I have never doubted the existence of God nor been afraid of what I might meet in inner space.

* * *

Games of Consciousness - Meaning and Measurement

2005-12-23T13:33:00.000-08:00

Just over three hundred and fifty years ago René Descartes looked around at his world and realized there was a lot that did not make sense, especially when he applied his method of experience, reason, and logic to the prevailing view of the day. Contrary to that view, which called for blind and unquestioning faith in the dictums of those in authority, truth to him was what his own experiential reasoning and logic told him was true, whether it agreed with what others said or not.

Even today, in the midst of an era of scientific dominance and supposed reliance on "facts", it is not easy to do that. We are not taught to think for ourselves and experience our own reality. From our earliest learning experiences we are told "this is right" and "that is wrong", "this is so" and "that is not", "don't argue" and "do what I say". We lose track of what we are sure we know because we have discovered it for ourselves, and what we think we know because someone else told us it is so. While there certainly is no need for each of us to reinvent the wheel, an awful lot gets accepted as truth only because it was said by someone in power, be it a teacher, preacher, politician, or parent. This also goes, of course, for the words of authors challenging the prevailing paradigm.

It is particularly important that the source of what we accept as real be remembered in dealing with non-material subjects such as consciousness. In the recounting of individual conscious experiences there are no controlled experiments eliminating supposedly extraneous elements, no lists of data that can be examined, no numerical facts to be coldly and statistically replicated. There is only the word of the experiencer. Even the mystic genius Rudolf Steiner noted that the genuine spiritual investigator, (which we can read as "consciousness investigator"), could never expect to have his words met with blind credulity, but could only share his experiences and let others experience them for themselves.

However, this does not make such experiences unverifiable or unreproducable. Steiner considered his teachings scientific because he believed anyone could consciously cultivate the spiritual knowledge he had by practicing his method, in the same way that Descartes believed anyone could discern truth by applying his method. Using the same tools, in other words, produces the same result. Yet, both Descartes and Steiner knew full well that the truth of which they spoke, was theirs alone until verified individually by their readers.

The prevailing scientific paradigm has trained us to believe that our individual internal experiences are subjective and cannot be relied on, merely the result of individual misinterpretation of what is outside and objective. The external, we have been told, is absolute, real, and most importantly true for everyone if we would only get ourselves out of the way.

Why has science placed so high a value on the outer reality rather than the inner one? The answer is simple, the outside reality can be measured, and that is what science does. Without an ability to measure and quantify, science could not even exist. As a result, it is only that the inner reality cannot be measured that makes it "unscientific". If it could be, it would be.

Measurement in the outer world is easy. Take sounds, for example, where microphones can pick up the vibrations caused by speech. We can register the shape and amplitude of the waves being transmitted, and apply electrodes and sensors to ears and brains to measure the extent to which those waves have made it safely across the space between speaker and listener to the other side. All that can be measured scientifically.

There is, unfortunately, no way to measure precisely what meaning that sound is given by the person sending it nor what meaning it is given by the person receiving it... that is, how that sound is interpreted by any particular individual on the screen of inner reality. We just do not know, although we can guess, and often try to, by putting numbers on those guesses and calling them scientific.

We can say, for example, that statistically speaking "most people" interpret particular words in one way or another. Or we can say "most American men" or "most Black women", or "most teenage children in dysfunctional families living in urban settings who have not graduated from elementary school and for whom English is a second language." We can devise any number of qualifiers to try to limit the variety of parameters affecting how the external measurable transmission is going to be interpreted by any given individual. Political spin doctors do it all the time when they are working with aggregates. The fact of the matter is, however, when it comes down to any specific individual... we just do not know.

This concentration of science in the outer world is not a problem, except for a built-in assumption on the part of many practitioners of science that the inner reality does not even exist. Denying non-physical reality is no smarter than the ascetic who swears that only unchanging God is real and the material world is illusion. Each is only looking at half the picture.

The feeling of 'I', the unifying human conscious experience capable of accessing both inner and outer reality exists somewhere in-between the two. We combine the measurable and the meaningful. Therefore. a more comprehensive way of viewing total reality, emerging with the new paradigm, is to say that…

1/…the physical outer world is provable and non-intuitive;

2/…the spiritual inner world is intuitive and non-provable.

We, as humans, experience both and both are real.

This is why as this book proceeds, I will not only share my experiences with you, but present experiential exercises that allow you to have your own experiences. Do not take my word for it. What is said here will be meaningful to you only as you experience and feel it resonate with everything else you accept as real.

* * *

Chapter 4: Silverman Turns the Corner

2005-12-15T15:55:00.000-08:00

David Silverman hardly recognized himself. Wearing slacks and button-down in lieu of jeans and T and straight as a rail, (other than any residue they might find in his urine) he had shifted hats and become one of twenty new recruits in the Pottery Barn catalog sales training class. Much to his surprise, his classmates on the whole were an older, well spoken crowd, and at fifty-seven he was neither the oldest nor the greyest. As introductions were going around he found himself becoming duly impressed by the quality of the people in the room.

There was a young woman getting her master’s degree in sociolology and a lawyer who had just taken her bar exam and was going to answer phones while she bit her nails and waited for the results. There was a scuba diver coming up for air and the owner of a bed & breakfast that had fallen on hard times, assorted teachers, students, retirees, and massage therapists, and one psychic who was slowly returning to the phones from a severe bout with burnout...

“I liked the talking to people on the phone but after a while I couldn’t get into their problems anymore. I began losing interest in the people who were calling in and that’s not good.

“And the business got rough. I was working for several psychic services at once depending on what you want... love life, health tips, pick the daily lottery, whatever. But I couldn’t tell which service it was by the ring.

“So one time this guy calls and I say “What line are you calling for?” and he yells at me, “You’re the psychic, you tell me!,” and hangs up.

No one confessed to wanting to be in catalog sales all their lives. This might be a rocky moment, but it was not a Rocky moment. Several folks did say it was a nice steady job to retire into, and some probably would. What all did agree on was that since they had to do something, this was a positive and gentle something they could live with, at least for the next three months. As he listened to their stories he felt like an intellectual snob. And I thought it was just me. What an ego.

When it was David’s turn he said he was an unemployed philosopher doing this because all the classified ads in the paper under Philosophy were missing. Everybody chuckled, including the instructor, a large man who visually fell somewhere between Santa Claus and Blackbeard.

David had already decided that he was in this to maximize the money, so he signed up for the 10:30pm to 7:00am time slot. That had an additional 15% over base, up to $8.33 an hour. It was a nice incentive, but he would have done it anyway even without the money once he found it was available, fueled by the memory of his long ago summer job running freight elevators on Madison Avenue in New York City.

Third shift was special, quiet, peace, watching, waiting, couples staggering home, drunks staggering somewhere, car sounds careening off concrete towers...

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrhhhhh!!!

...tires squealing, whirring steel revved to its limits as the first newspaper truck of the morning flies around the corner on two wheels spewing out tommorow morning’s here and now at his feet. Bags of bagels left by the deli door. Life goes on. Third shift is a nice time to be alive, a nice time to be. For David there was still something romantic about midnight to eight. And yeah, he could do this. He really could.

* * *

Three days later, trained and ready to go, David Silverman was back in front of a computer, only this time in an ergonomically designed chair, at an ergonomically designed work station, his fingers resting on a customized ergonomically designed keyboard. Off to one side at an ergonomically designed reaching distance from what should be proper ergonomic posture sat a telephone keypad with its own LED, and he was connected to the telephone via headset. On his other side vertical slots held copies of the latest catalogues for Pottery Barn and its sister companies as well as blank forms, a list of office telephone numbers, and cheat sheets that explained everything he was supposed to do step by step, just in case he forgot. What else did he need? The clock switched over to 10:30. He signed on and waited.

Over 200 such work stations filled the carpeted, grey walled, second floor open space in a neat and orderly fashion. A few were surrounded by movable partitions. That’s where the supervisors sat. Over 50,000 calls a day were expected during the peak holiday season and the company was gearing up and ready to go. But at the moment only three people animated the surroundings. David, Pamela, a young Philipina who was the overnight supervisor, and ag, a short nervous man whose station was far across the room from David’s. He hadn’t been in David’s training class.

bbbrrriiiiinnnggg…

“Pottery Barn, this is David. How can I help you?”

His very first call, was a man from Juneau, Alaska who purchased gifts to be sent to friends in Texas. His second was a woman in southern California and his third, a lady from Colorado named Silverman. He smiled as he typed her name into the computer. Compared to a lot of the connections that popped up in life between him and the cosmos it wasn’t big time synchronicity, but at least it was fun, what with all the other names out there. I mean what are the odds? It gave him a feeling he was where he was supposed to be.

bbbrrriiiiiinnnggg...

“Pottery Barn, this is David. How can I help you?”

There was a lady from New Hampshire who called at 1:30am his time, 4:30am hers. “You’re up late”, he said by way of small talk and she spilled out her guts about why she had insomnia because she lives in a small town and everyone is shunning her after finding out she is having an affair with a man ten years younger than she is. She wanted to know what he thought about it and placed an order for a bedspread. He told her it was okay with him, he lived in San Francisco where anything goes between concenting adults and she could expect delivery within five to seven working days.

It was nice and quiet, just the way he had hoped it would be on the third shift with the message board registering 000 calls in queue and 0.00 waiting time. During the day, he had been told, there could be as many as 50 to 60 calls lined up waiting for a sales rep to take the order. It was nonstop. And to think they were actually paying him an extra 75¢ and hour, not to mention making it possible for him to find a space in the parking lot.

At 2am additional crew arrived and plugged into the stations around him. The east coast would start calling in soon and the pace would pick up. The idea was never to have a caller hang up because they got tired of waiting.

On break he went into the lunch room, brewed a fresh pot of coffee, and refilled his cup. Free coffee he thought, nice perk. He was forced to take half an hour off for lunch, or rather the company was forced by law to give him a break in the middle of the eight hour shift. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do and he had already told himself that eating a meal at 3:00 in the morning every night for three months would not be a good idea.

He hadn’t brought a book, a situation he planned to correct starting tomorrow night. As a last resort he headed to the product room to look at the items from the catalogue spread around on tables up close and personal, though he felt a slight ambivalence at doing it off the clock.

Sales reps were encouraged to look and to touch, to learn what the company carried so they were better able to answer any questions a customer might ask. “Have fun”, Pamela said when she suggested he do it, so he took the individual letter stocking holders that spell N O E L and moved them around. When he left, P E A C E, J O Y, and L E O N were on display and he wondered if anyone would notice.

There is such a potential for intellectual snobbery within me, he thought as he headed back to his station. Why do I look down on “things” and people who like “things”? Why do I think it is more important to help someone find their way onto the path of conscious awareness than to help someone buy the right gift or set an attractive holiday table? Doesn’t the Dalai Lama say that the purpose of human life is to serve for the benefit of others as much as one can? Why should it matter how it is done?

As usual, the internal dialogue played through. Because it’s an issue of what I can do with all my talents, all my skills, all my gifts, all my abilities, he answered himself. All of me, why not take all of me? I’m not putting down order taking. He could hear himself already excusing the elitist way these thoughts would project onto paper. It takes common sense, concern for others, even disposition, pleasant phone voice, and one week’s training to do this. There are a lot of people out on the street who can’t do this job and I’m sure Pottery Barn turns down the majority of people who apply.

But I know what I’ve been given, I know what I have. It’s not that I’m so special that the world can’t get along without me, it’s just that I’ve heard that what you are born with are God’s gifts to you and what you do with them are your gift to God. I’m just trying to be realistic and use myself to the max. That’s why taking phone orders doesn’t seem so fulfilling, I know I can do more. I know...

bbbrrriiiiiinnnggg...

“Pottery Barn, this is David. How can I help you?”

The sound in his ears and the lights on the keypad intruded on his thoughts as they would for the next three months. He took the order, signed off, and keyed in the transaction code, automatically putting him on line again ready for another incoming call.

bbbrrriiiiiinnnggg...

“Pottery Barn, this is David. How can I help you?”

You want this... you want that... you need this... you need that. How many... what color... yes, I think they would look good together though I have no idea why you are asking me... yes, we can get it to you by next Thursday... yes, I’ll have the driver leave it around the back if you’re not there... yes, it’s all taken care of... yes, it is amazing how easy it is. I just need your credit card number please.

bbbrrriiiiiinnnggg...

“Pottery Barn, this is David. How can I help you?”

I am Santa Claus, Santa Claus wearing a headset. What’s wrong with giving people things that they want in exchange for something they obviously value less than what they’re exchanging it for? Money. Nothing, that’s what. Who am I to place value judgements on what is or isn’t important in someone else’s life? No one, that’s who. I’m not always sure what’s the most important thing in mine. The purpose of human life should be to serve for the benefit of others. Well that’s what I’m doing. Exactly what I’m doing. How can I help you? Where do you want it sent? And the expiration date?

At 7am David ran the coded badge he was wearing on a chain around his neck through the time clock and headed home. Too tired to write the weekly Papagram to Adam, he photocopied an old one and sent it instead.

* * *

God and Guinea Pig

2005-12-14T15:57:00.000-08:00

There have always been two major forces operating in my life, a desire to be happy and a fierce skepticism of what could not be proved.

Born on the lower west-side of Manhattan in 1940 into a working-class family of atheist Russian Hungarian Jews, I received no religious training, other than mockery of what was considered to be pure superstition. I could not have been more than six when my grandfather, whose lifelong dream was for a world of "universal understanding and perpetual peace", sat me on his knee and told me with the voice of authority:

"God is the sum total of man's ignorance. We used to think the Sun was God. Then we learned how the Sun works. Now the Sun is not God anymore. Someday we will know how everything works. Then there will be no more need for God."

The family moved out of New York City to suburban New Jersey when I was five. My father was a bookbinder who brought home all the damaged and misprinted books he could for my mother who read anything she could lay her hands on except novels. "There is too much to learn to waste time on fiction," she would say.

I was taught to read before entering kindergarten, no mean feat in the days before Sesame Street. In first grade, while the rest of the class was discovering Dick, Jane, and "Run Spot Run", I was sitting in the back of the room, going over the front page of the previous day's New York Times, circling words I did not know. After two months of this, they promoted me to second grade. But that cut no slack at home. "Think," my mother would exhort me if I was slow to understand the meaning of a word she thought I should know. "Think."

You already know what happened at my eight year old birthday party.

When I was in high school my parents joined the Ethical Culture Society whose humanist philosophy was, "Since you cannot prove there is a God and I cannot prove there is not a God, why waste time talking about God when what we should be doing is improving humankind's lot here on Earth." It resonated.

My college career was not particularly distinguished, a budding math major shriveling in calculus and turning to economics to avoid dying completely. I did not take a philosophy course as an undergraduate, but believing that if you argue against a position you should know it at least as well as those who argue for it, I did take an elective in Religious Studies to fortify my stance in the all night bull sessions with my church-going fraternity brothers, "If I flunk this course do I go to hell?," I asked Reverend Abernathy on the first day of class. I was not always the most tactful in those days.

I reveled in my freedom and made it through the days and nights of books and coeds and pizza and beer far less the scholar than a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, the English thinker who stated that people only do what maximizes their pleasure and minimizes their pain. That, too, resonated.

Looking back to that time from the perspective of now, I can see that the single college experience that would most affect my future being was one that stands tangential to what seemed important at the time. It began as I was walking across campus on a lazy Saturday afternoon in 1960. There was this sign:

$5 - GUINEA PIGS NEEDED FOR
PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT - $5

I followed an arrow through the door, signed a release, and entered a maze of desks and dividers leading to stations where I was questioned in turn by a bevy of graduate students with theses that needed statistics. The last station was in a room where four other students were already waiting. "Ah, at last," they chimed together as I walked in, "Okay, here's the one we need.” "Let's go."

"Everyone take a seat," said a voice coming through a speaker, "we have the right number, we can start." I saw five desk-high panels with red and green lights and buttons underneath and chairs in front, one of which was empty, so I sat down. The desks were separated by partitions and faced a corner of the room where there was a glass enclosure. Inside, a professor wearing a lab coat and holding a clip board, was speaking into a microphone.

"This is a test of hand-eye coordination. I will push a button in here which will simultaneously activate either the red or green light. Everyone's will be the same. As soon as you see a light, push the button under the one that flashed. The flashes will come faster and faster and we will continue as long as no one in the group makes an error. Do you understand?" We all nodded.

I riveted my attention on the panel in front of me. There was a red flash...I hit red. A green flash...I hit green. The flashes came quicker and quicker but nothing I could not control... green, red, red, green, red. Then a buzzer sounded, the flashes stopped, and the professor said it was over. Someone had just missed and pushed red when it had been green.

"Who pushed red?" asked the guy on the end.

"I did," I said. "Mine was red."

"It couldn't have been," he came back. "The professor said they would be the same for everyone, and mine was green. Yours must have been green, too."

"Well it wasn't," I told him.

"Mine was green," said the woman on my other side.

"Good for you," I said. "Mine was red."

"Mine was green," said the woman next to her.

"Me, too", added the fourth student.

"Tough," I said. "I saw red."

The first guy stepped toward me with a direct challenge, "Are you telling me your light was red when all the rest of us saw green? That can't be true. You fucked up, admit it."

I exploded. "How dare you tell me what I saw! Who the hell do you think you are?" Once again I was seeing red.

"You wanna make something of it!" he yelled back, and fists clenched, shouting epithets, we took steps toward each other as the student in the seat between us dove for cover. Just before we came to blows I felt a strong pull on my shoulders pinioning my arms from behind. I struggled to escape, turned, and saw it was the professor out of the glass cage.

"There, there, son, it's okay. You were right it was red. Relax. Calm down. This wasn't a test of hand-eye coordination. It was really a test of how well someone stands up to peer pressure. So take it easy. You did real well. Now take this ticket to the desk at the end of the hall and you'll get your $5."

I was enraged at having been duped but left without further comment, pushing the test and the feelings it had evoked out of my awareness for decades. It was only years later, after the first out-of-body experience and my trip into the Light, that I recalled and recognized the ultimate importance of having validated my own experiential reality.

* * *

Games of Consciousness - The Principle of Conscious Continuity

2005-12-05T13:59:00.000-08:00

A new type of consciousness is emerging on Earth, a way of perceiving reality that is destined to revolutionize life on our planet. It’s not that this is the right type of consciousness or even a better type of consciousness than what exists now. It’s just that the new consciousness is more inclusive than the current one and seems to be evolving out of the first in the same way that human consciousness evolved out of pre-human consciousness so long, long ago.

This different type of consciousness is not just a subject to talk about but a way to be, a way to act, a way to experience the world and self that puts a new dimension on what is currently accepted as experientially real.

Computer generated 3-D art can serve as a metaphor for the new consciousness. Someone may tell us there is a picture hidden in what appears to be a mere mass of color and abstract pattern, and we may stare and squint and cross our eyes till we get a headache, but the image remains hidden until we actually see it. And when we do, suddenly there it is, a picture that had been there all along, hidden only by the fact that we did not know how to look. Once we see it, of course, we can always go back and see it again, for now we know how to focus our eyes.

Such is the case with the new consciousness. Nothing need change in the external world for awareness to take place, only our view of that world must change, and what we bring to our meeting with that world. Yet as a result, it will be possible to experience life in a way that adds new perspective and meaning to what is commonly viewed at present as a mere mass of confusion and random happenings.

Application of the new consciousness in our daily lives will not only change us but will allow us to change the world in ways we can only dream of today. We will no longer see ourselves as alientated, separated beings, scratching and clawing to survive while competing with each other for limited economic resources. Earth will be treated as the true benevolent mother she is, creating enough for all her children to live without want. And an attitude of peace, impossible to fathom in today’s fragmented society, will mark the new way of being.

The new consciousness is available to anyone who wishes to find it. It does not require great training, nor study, nor advanced degrees to access. Nor does it require any particular form of belief system, religeous or otherwise. In fact, deeply entrenched belief systems can create blinders that hide it from our sight. What is necessary for experiencing the new consciousness is an open mind, a willingness to explore that mind, and the strength of will to affirm what you experience in that exploration, even if it goes against the nay-sayers, the vast majority who fear any change from the status quo. But why shouldn’t there be change? Look at the change in consciousness that has taken place on the planet so far.

Even though we know in our minds that humans did not always walk the Earth, it is not part of our natural thought process to realize that this means once upon a time rocks were the most evolved beings around. And although plants do not demonstrate the most evolved level of consciousness existing today, there can be no question of the great planetary breakthrough in consciousness that occurred when that form of life first appeared. Similarly, animal life and human life each brought the level of consciousness to new and hitherto unimagined experiences.

Indeed, humans are so far beyond the levels of consciousness that used to rule Earth that we tend to consider ourselves the ultimate development of evolution just as we are. With only a recent and cursory nod in the direction of whales and dolphins, we believe our experience of conscious reality to be the highest evolution of brain and mind possible. Some have even referred to humans as the goal of all creation.

. . . Surprise! . . .

Despite our protests to the contrary, and even accepting that we might be the most complex development consciousness has as yet produced, there is no reason to assume the evolutionary process has come to an end with us as we currently exist. For just as conscious awareness evolved in a constant continuum through the physical forms of mineral, vegetable, animal, and human in turn, so is this new level of consciousness currently manifesting on Earth. And just as each evolving level of consciousness demonstrated all the capacities and capabilities that preceded it, so does this one start from the conditions of human awareness and build from there.

Were this a physical change taking place, something as obvious in external reality as the emergence of a sixth finger or a new blood type that never existed before, we would not doubt its reality. It would be easy to see with the naked eye or some fancy instrument of technology, and we could observe and measure its evolutionary progress. But this development is proceeding in the immeasurable conscious awareness internal to humankind. Its existence cannot be measured and can only be experienced individually, though its effects and the results of its application can be recognized collectively.

For those of us who grew up in days when everything was neatly labeled as animal, vegetable, or mineral, it comes as a shock to discover that there are viruses, bacteria, and other micro-miniature entities that cross over categories and defy definition. Such beings, however, both illustrate the continuity of the process of evolution and open up the exciting reality that the new emerging level of consciousness is accessible to any being currently demonstrating normal human consciousness. It is an exciting thought.

* * *

The Principle of Conscious Continuity

First premise...

.Consciousness exists in everything everywhere,
always has, always will.

This means that consciousness exists ‘out there’, whether we know it or not, and also ‘in there’ whether we know it or not. It is both inside and outside each and every one of us and each and every atom of everything that exists in whatever size universe we can imagine. And if we can theoretically visualize a reality between `inside' and `outside', it would fill that space, too.

Consciousness exists independent of the physical body but not separate from it. We exist in it and it exists in us in much the same way that water exists in a living sponge and the living sponge exists in water. And like the water in relationship to the sponge, consciousness doesn't care whether we know it is there or not. Which is to say, consciousness exists independent of its being known, independent of our awareness of it, and independent of our being able to measure it. Consciousness just ‘is’.

Second premise...

.A being's material nature determines how and to what extent
consciousness is experienced.

The relationship between consciousness and material beings is similar to the way radio waves, passing unnoticed through space, are only made manifest by machines both designed to receive them and tuned to their particular frequency. Consciousness, needless to say, has many different frequencies and is infinitely more complicated than radio waves.

It is the receiver that determines what frequencies of total consciousness are received and with what clarity. As consciousness flows through the things of the physical world and the things of the physical world flow through consciousness, they interact in direct proportion to the evolutionary level of the thing of the physical world.

Thus, the nature and evolutionary development of each physical thing determines how many, what kind, and to what degree the capacities and characteristics of total all pervasive consciousness are registered and processed. From another view of the same relationship, it is the nature and evolutionary development of each physical thing that determines how much of total all pervasive consciousness that thing manifests in the physical world. It is only those aspects of consciousness that do manifest in the physical world that can be measured.

For example, total consciousness flows through rocks, trees and dogs just as easily and just as completely as it flows through humans. However, it is the amount of consciousness a thing picks up, processes, and displays that determines how evolved we, as humans, think it is. And since we, as humans, have more ways available for interacting with consciousness than rocks, trees, and dogs, we tend to think we are more advanced than they are. And since we think we are more advanced, we destroy them for our benefit. But that's another story.

* * *

That’s it. Simple. Yet the Principle of Conscious Continuity presents a way of looking for and at consciousness from within consciousness, via reproducible, experiential phenomenology. Those scientists willing to apply Conscious Continuity to their work will discover that the entire body of already existing scientific research becomes subject to whole new approaches of interpretation without changing the factual results of that research. How fascinating. Simply by looking from a different perspective, information and findings already available will lead to new understandings.

Such controlled experimentation, falling outside the scope of these writings, are simple, rational, inexpensive, and applicable to any particularized field. It requires only a recognition that consciousness is a process more than an object and that any externally oriented approach cannot help but be limited to a partial understanding of the totality.

Consciousness awaits explanation of its material unfolding in all of its manifestations from the inside out by any imaginative thinker who can look at the sun moving across the heavens and see Earth turning round.

* * *

Chapter 3: Silverman Bites the Bullet

2005-11-18T11:33:00.000-08:00

David Silverman’s guts, lines of small black glyphs on brittle yellowing paper, were spread out on the desk in front of him. The hand written words so familiar to his eyes, emerging deep from the back of the bedroom closet and a long gone era, rolled past his conscious awareness competing for attention with the ever present knowledge of his headlong rush towards the opposing realities of his wants and his needs.

He glanced at an entry from the first page of a 1968 journal open on the desk.

I am 28 years old, white, male, American, agnostic, married, the father of a one-month old son. I own a home in Dutchess County, New York, and am earning $14,100 per year.

Different, same, same, same, different, same, different, different, different, he thought. Adam was now twenty-nine and Alison, who hadn’t even been a glimmer when those lines had been written, was twenty-six and about to be married. And of course, he now rented a flat in San Francisco and wasn’t earning squat. $14,100 had been decent money then.

It was uncanny how he could remember writing those words, neatly printing them in pen on the blank lined paper, consciously creating a time machine to be sent out into the future. What had he been thinking? Why in hell had he thought it necessary to snapshot a point in space so he could go back and replay it somewhere down the road? Where did he think he’d be when he read them? Had he anticipated patting himself on the back, “Way to go, David. What a trip it’s been, baby.” Older... Wiser...? Yeah, right!

Had he ever earned more than $14,000 a year since 1968, he asked himself? He knew the answer and cringed. The time machine had worked even if he hadn’t... and didn’t... and wasn’t.

He hit save and headed to the kitchen for some more coffee.

Back at the computer another realization hit home. If Shelly were really going to throw him out of the house as she threatened then he would need a job not for Shelly, not for the kids, not to buy cat food for Issac, but for himself. She could do it too, he realized, she was that pissed. And he wouldn’t fight her. It wouldn’t be fair.

The realization was intense and mind altering. All the times she had said “stop trying to get a job for me, get a job for yourself”, he had missed the point. Now, for the first time he could feel a change in intensity. It is a hell of a lot different feeling to want a job in order to keep someone you love happy than to want a job to keep your ass off the streets.

The Sunday paper lay on the coffee table. He picked it up and leafed through the want ads... a large display ad several pages in caught his eye…

Need Extra Holiday Cash?
We have: seasonal employment taking customer orders on incoming lines.
We offer: paid training , flexible hours, shift bonuses, merchandise discount.
If you like people and have a pleasant telephone manner...
Call for an appointment.

... and brought him back again as he started to turn the page. Why go further. What the hell was he looking for if not this? He wasn’t seeking a career out there in the Sunday want-ads any more. It was too late for that. You don’t start a career at fifty-five. He was simply looking for money... pure money... money to pay the bills... money to get his wife off his back... money to save his marriage... money to save his ass.

If you like people and have a pleasant telephone manner...

Yeah, he could do that.

And he would, too! He had to do something, that was certain. He owed it to Shelly and it beat pumping gas. Tomorrow, he would get up early, call, and go downtown to fill out an application. He would make it happen... he would make it manifest. It was starting to happen. He could feel the polarity shift within him and he decided to write about it. That part of his life could happen, too. No need to make the shift too fast.

He continued to leaf through his pile of old writings and found an article called Doing Your Thing Over Thirty, which he had written in 1973. Thirty had seemed so old back then.

Everybody wants to enjoy life as much as possible and does what they can to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain. Only each person's values are different and that is why two people in the same situation may choose to do two different things.

The world is full of great people, brave people, martyrs, who have elected physical and mental pain and suffering rather than taking the easy way out. But when you really stop to think about it, each one consciously made the decision that the physical pain which would be inflicted was less than the spiritual pain that would result from denying their heritage, birthright, or code of ethics.

Even the sado-masochist whose body is covered with whip marks, rope burns, and bites isn't choosing pain over pleasure. For to this person, caught in a web which most of us cannot understand, the sensual pleasure of sexual torture is far greater than the accompanying physical pain.

No one, I repeat, NO ONE ever chooses pain over pleasure!

David smiled at the all caps and exclamation point of his earlier writing, as well as the reference to S & M... but style and content aside, he still felt the same about pleasure and pain. The issue at hand, however, was earning a living within that framework and he picked up another article he had written in 1975 called The First Step to Inner Peace.

Inner peace. That elusive feeling that spells the difference between a happy life and mere existence. Why is it so hard to come by?

Five years ago as I sat behind my desk in the plush offices of a major computer manufacturer, I felt my world about to go splat! Sure, I was earning over $14,000 a year with job security, medical payment plan, stock options, and a prestige position where people said "Good morning" to me before I said it to them. For some reason, however, things weren't as smooth as they should have been...

For years parents, teachers, friends, employers had tried to mold me to their ideas as to how a young man coming of age should behave. For years I had tried to fit in, to play the corporate game, to earn the biggest salary, to owe the largest mortgage. But it never quite worked, because it wasn't me. Their thing wasn't my thing. And so I never really found happiness, true happiness based on inner peace, until I took the giant step and followed my own leanings and desires.

Long before that day when I said, "I quit", turned on my heel and walked out of the boss' office, I knew it had to happen. But, like all good integrated members of society I couldn't help feeling guilty. Was I the only one who wasn't ecstatic over my nice safe corporate job? I began asking around, my friends, my co-workers, and even chance acquaintances, I simply had to know.

"What would you do with your time if you were independently wealthy", I asked, hoping by that phrasing to free the responder from worrying about whether what he wanted to do was economically practical. The responses were amazing!

"I'd like to crossbreed cucumbers and develop the perfect pickle", said a computer programmer.

A neighbor of mine, an accountant, answered, "I'd be a bird watcher in the summer and a ski patrolman in the winter".

"An actress", mused the head of the secretarial pool.

Out of several hundred people questioned only two said they would do the exact same thing they were doing at the time. Both were college professors doing independent research. While other people worked at something they didn't like in order to earn money so they could play on weekends, these two were playing all along.

As he entered material from his old article into the computer, David shuddered, remembering an interview he had seen on TV several weeks before. It was Take Your Daughter To Work Day and the morning newsman was interviewing a young girl on the way to her mother's office.

"And what do you want to do when you grow up", he had asked.

"I want to be a secretary during the week so I can do what I want on weekends", she had answered, and David had gotten sick. Thirteen years old and already buying into the system. Some things never change, he thought, people's gullibility and his views. What a schmuk he was thinking that his views were somehow better. Maybe he was simply lazy. It’s not like he hadn’t heard that thrown at him over the years. He went back to inputting his article.

"Rangers in our national parks earn a living", I told the bird watcher, "their children are raised in the midst of natural beauty, and in the right parks you can do a lot of skiing in the wintertime."

"Sell that $80,000 house of yours and buy a small farm", I suggested to the pickle man.

"Take a three month leave of absence", I advised the actress, "and try your hand at summer stock."

"What about you?" they asked me in return. "What would you do if you were independently wealthy?"

"I'd be a renaissance man", I replied. "I'd experience and learn about as many things as I could and then write about them."

"Okay", they responded, going back to work, "You go first".

And so he had.

Silverman sat back and looked at what he had just transferred from paper to hard drive. It still amazed him every time he thought about it. What cheek he had back then to think he knew what it was all about. What gall, what ego, and yet...

Everything he had done in those days, his beliefs, his drives, all the roads he had followed, all the passions that had driven him, all had taken place without any overt knowledge. The defining actions in his life that had led him to where he was now, for good or for bad, for poor or for poorer, had come about long before that life altering day, before he understood how the process actually worked. That had still been light years away, so to speak.

He dived down into the box of old writings again looking for one special creation. It had been over twenty-five years since he had designed the Job Satisfaction Flow Chart- [D&G10-9] for his novel, David and Goliath, Round Two, the story of a young man’s escape, his escape, from corporate America. Ah, he thought, if he’d only known then what he knew now... he still would have made the break.

[He also made a note to scan the Flow Chart into his computer so he could insert it here into the blog.]

The chart seemed dated, designed for an era when you stayed with a company from your first day out of school to your first day of retirement. Growth was still the order of that day and corporate loyalty still the norm. Now neither held true. Downsizing was the norm and numerous listings on a resume indicated rounded experience rather than the inability to hold a job.

It was not as easy to find a job as it had been back in the seventies, but that only magnified the importance of finding what you wanted to do. Helping that to happen were the numerous authors and job counselors who were now echoing David’s earlier words, preaching to the masses what he had shouted into a vaccuum. How many times he had been too far on the leading edge.

Emitting a long loud sigh, the result of too many hours in front of the computer, he saved what he had written and called Shelly at work to ask when she’d be home. He was planning to make eggplant parmegana and if she were really hungry and needed to eat right away he wanted to have time to prepare. She was cool but civil.

He said, "this is not the night for miscommunication. Dinner at 6:30, right?" She said right and he said "Bye, Moo" and she said "Bye". He was aware that she had omitted "Moo," the first word they had ever said to each other and still their code word for "I love you," and he was aware that she was aware. There still was a lot of tension between them.

* * *

Dear Shelly,

I was centering myself earlier today and trying to feel exactly where the two parts of my world can best come together. I know they do... they have to... they were designed that way. It’s just that I am responsable for making the connection and it is a long slow docking procedure that is not yet over... especially when viewed from the vantage of day to day problems and day to day needs.

Well maybe this will help speed up the process. I have just taken a job answering telephones and taking catalog orders for Pottery Barn during the Christmas rush. They’ve got a place across town over by Pier 39. I’ve been there twice, filling out an application and taking a test, and I actually passed. In fact, I got the call today, they want me, and tomorrow is the first day of class.

I know it’s only temporary and only pays $7.25 an hour. But it’s a start. At least something will be coming in and if I can earn even $3000 this holiday season it will be more than I’ve earned over the past five years combined.

I love you very much. Think of it as pumping gas.

...Moo

She pinioned him with her eyes, “Is this your way of telling me you’ve got a job or is it some vision you got while you were out centering yourself full of pot? Don’t play games with me. Just go out and bring in the money. And I don’t appreciate the smell of smoke.” She turned on her heel and marched out of the room.

He sighed and went back to writing about the incident for his book. Another good idea up in smoke.

* * *

The Silver Rule

2005-11-18T09:17:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, more than I actually care to count, I was blessed with the perfect tenth-grade geometry teacher. I don’t think I realized it at the time but looking back from here she was the quintessential model of what God would want a geometry teacher to be.

For starters she looked the part, a strong angular woman in her fifties with silver hair and steel rimmed glasses. She stood straight and tall, always perfectly groomed in tweed skirts and starched high collar blouses. And even her name was perfect. Miss Rule. Miss Mary Rule.

In class she was stern and precise, just what you’d expect. But after school when she was alone correcting papers and I’d come in to ask her about something she’d taught that day, we’d sit facing each other across the corner of her desk and she would smile.

We talked about theorems and proofs and what I wanted to do with my life, and oh, the places she took my active and curious mind were wondrous. She opened me up to whole new ways of thinking and being. I loved her class and am grateful to this day to have been her student.

Like the day in class when she presented a proof contradicting the Pythagorean Theorem. You know the one, that the squares of the two sides of a right triangle are equal to the square of the hypotenuse, a2 + b2 = c2, probably the best known theorem in all geometry.

“I’m going to show you how Pythagoras was wrong," she said in a very stern voice. Rising from her desk she walked to the blackboard and picked up the chalk. “Pay attention.”

First she drew a right triangle on the board, labeling the corners A, B, and C, the sides a and b, and the hypotenuse c. Then she marked the midpoints of the sides, D and E, and drew perpendiculars from those points to where they met on the hypotenuse, a point she labeled F. She spoke and wrote on the board at the same time.

There was now a square, B,D,F,E, inscribed within the original triangle, flanked by two smaller triangles, ADF and FEC. “AB equals AD plus FE. BC equals DF plus EC. So AB plus BC equals AD plus DF plus FE plus EC," she said. "Are you with me?”

She paused, turned towards us and looked around the room. The room was silent and I leaned forward just a bit from my third row seat to be a little closer to the action.

She then bisected lines AD, DF, FE, and EC, and drew new perpendiculars to the hypotenuse within the smaller triangles ADF and FEC similar to the ones she had previously done. "This distance, too," she said, following the step pattern that had been created on the blackboard, "is also equal to AB plus BC. Are you still with me?” I sat there mesmerized. Something was happening here that didn’t feel right. I just didn’t know what it was.

Again she inscribed a square within each of the newly formed small triangles, dividing every line in two. She was facing the board as she spoke, drawing more and more triangles on the black surface, triangles that obviously kept getting ever smaller.

"We can keep doing this,” she said, pausing between phrases to give her time to draw a new set of bisected lines and ever smaller triangles on the board, “the lines getting ever smaller... ever closer together... narrower than the width of the chalk… eventually… becoming impossible to draw...”.

She turned and rubbed the chalk dust off her hands. "Finally, they become infinitely small, becoming at that point, for all practical purposes, equal to c, the hypotenuse.” She looked around the room for an objection, but there was none. “Therefore, a + b = c, not a2 + b2 = c2. So Pythagoras was obviously wrong," She stated this last with a triumphant smile at our dumbfounded expressions and put down the chalk with a flourish.

My mind was racing. No! This couldn’t be! Logic had become an enemy. Something was wrong. Something had to be wrong. She had spent all semester beating Pythagoras into our heads. She couldn’t be refuting all of that now, just like that! Could she?

It looked like the lines were equal but just because you couldn’t see something didn’t mean it wasn’t there! Right? All those little bisected lines couldn’t just have disappeared? Could they? No. No.

Yes!!! Suddenly there it was, in my mind, clear as could be.

"Miss Rule, Miss Rule," my hand was waving wildly even though I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. “Maybe you can't draw all those little steps because the chalk is too thick. But they’re still there. You just can’t see them.” My mind was spinning. “And, and… there are so many of them, even if they are so small, they’d still add up to the length of the sides, AB + BC. They’re always there. So a2 + b2 = c2 still works. You see?” My chest was pounding. I’d contradicted my favorite teacher in front of the whole class. I was going to get it now for sure.

Her stern face melted into a smile, "Of course. Very good. That's the whole point. As you approach infinity, the laws of logic go out the window. Don’t be fooled by trusting only what you can see and measure. Anyway, this was just for fun. Let’s get back to some real work.”

That afternoon, on the way home from school, I zig-zagged across the empty lot at the corner.

Somehow, as a youth I knew it intuitively. There are limits to what we can see with the external eye. And not seeing something does not mean it isn’t there. Within ourselves, as within the depths of a geometry class blackboard, infinitesimal steps reach out in a meaningful, non-measurable direction towards an intuitive reality we know to be true, but cannot measure in material terms.

* * *

Games of Consciousness - The Light In The Astrodome

2005-11-15T22:17:00.000-08:00

You are a highly trained, technically aware, international operative representing government and commercial interests on the leading edge of the study of consciousness and the human mind. Your assignment: find out how consciousness works. Tracking down a hot lead late one night in the laboratory of a competitor, you are attacked from behind, knocked unconscious…

POW!

...and come to lying on your back in complete darkness, unable to see anything, with no idea of where you are and no memory of how you got there. You shake out the cobwebs and with the determination of a true scientist, set out to discover the nature of your environment.

Using the senses that work, feeling the ground, calling out and listening for echoes, sniffing the air for telltale odors, and so on, you come to the conclusion that you are inside a very large building that arches high above your head. Images of the Astrodome come to your mind and you stare straight upward with dilated pupils in an attempt to catch any glimmer of light as you process the information you have and wonder what to do next.

Suddenly a powerful and brilliant light floods the darkness from above and you are momentarily blinded by the contrast from the absolute blackness you have been experiencing.

You reflexively close your eyes and turn away. But the light has made it possible for you to see and as your eyes adjust you note that the assessment of your surroundings is confirmed. You are, indeed, inside a large, completely enclosed, dome shaped building which is now illuminated by a single source of light, too strong to look at directly, located at the apex of the building far above your head.

Looking up to the top of the dome, to the source of the light, all you see are rays and light and energy so bright and brilliant that you have to avert your eyes just to keep from being blinded. Fascinating how the light is illuminating everything in the building but itself.

Lying there on the ground, unable to look directly at the light, there is no way you can answer any questions about it with any degree of certainty; how it works, where its source of energy comes from, who if anyone is in charge. Without further facts, whatever you come up with is merely speculation and your academic training and scientific rigor will not permit you to make unsupported claims.

In fact, there is nothing about the light you know for sure, except, of course, the one thing you experienced personally and first hand. It had been dark. Now it is light. The light had been off. Now it is on. Whatever else you may not know, THAT MUCH YOU KNOW! Right?
…
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(answer before reading further)
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...

Well, not quite...

You can certainly say as a result of your direct experience that you had experienced darkness and now you are experiencing light. And with the English penchant for nominalizing process, you could even say 'it' had been dark and now 'it' is light, whatever ‘it’ is.

However you cannot say with absolute confidence that a light which had been off is now on. Although a reasonable explanation, it is only supposition since there is at least one other scenario that could have occurred and produced the same existential results.

What if a lens shaped aperture had suddenly opened up in the ceiling above your head revealing a brilliant and powerful light source, already on, located just above the roof? The opening of the lens would have flooded the building with light from this already illuminated source and if the light were larger than the opening and positioned close enough to the roof, the pattern of diffusion of light rays within the building would be the same as that produced by a light the size of the lens positioned just below a roof without an opening.

Lying there on the floor below, wouldn't your experience be the same in either case, a sudden change from darkness to light? And since you are unable to look directly at the light would there be any possible way for you to tell which of the two processes had actually taken place and changed your world?

What matters here is not even which process is the 'real' one, the one lighting up your otherwise dark surroundings. What does matter is the realization that once it is clear that there are two equally valid and equally logical possibilities that yield the exact same sensory experience, it becomes impossible for the rational and logical mind, (i.e. the scientific mind, your mind) to hold onto any one explanation as being the only possible one.

Let us apply this logic to the issue of consciousness. Science has clearly established the relationship between mind and brain. The more evolved the brain, the more evolved the mind. Human brains are developed beyond those of dogs which in turn are developed beyond those of frogs which are developed beyond those of slugs and so on down the line, with the perceptual and cognitive capacities and capabilities of each level mapping a clear direct relationship with the development of the brain. This is observable fact.

However, what has been presumed to be a logical conclusion within the scientific community, that as the brain evolves and develops it creates the attributes of consciousness we call mind, turns out to be pure supposition. There is another explanation of the brain/mind relationship that is just as valid and just as possible as the causal explanation of modern science. And this explanation leads to completely different conclusions about the nature of consciousness.

What if the brain, through its measurable development and evolution, rather than creating an internal light of consciousness out of dark nothingness, was opening us up to an awareness of a light of consciousness that already exists external to us?

What if the evolution and development of the brain did not turn on an ever increasing internal light of cognition and perception within but rather operated as a lens which opened us up ever wider and ever more clearly to an external consciousness that already exists in totality? Is it possible? Why not?

Why not, indeed! Back when we were inside the building, looking up at the light, we could not tell whether it was coming from a source under the roof or whether it was coming through a hole from a source above the roof. In an exact parallel, inside our body looking at the source of our own consciousness, there is absolutely no way of knowing whether it is self-contained within us or flooding us through an aperture from an external source. Think about it. From within, there is no possible way we can tell the difference. And if we cannot tell for sure about our own consciousness, there is certainly no way we can claim to know about anyone else's.

All the scientific studies ever done that demonstrate the relationship between brain and mind are still valid. The observable features still hold, the more evolved the brain, the greater the capacity of the mind. Only now the brain is viewed not as a mechanism whose development, like the operating of a rheostat, turns on a light and makes it ever brighter; it becomes a mechanism whose development, like the operating of a camera lens, widens and allows ever greater access to an already existing brightness.

What matters here is not even which process is the 'real' one, the one lighting up your otherwise dark surroundings. What does matter is the realization that once it is clear that there are two equally valid and equally logical possibilities that yield the exact same sensory experience, it becomes impossible for the rational and logical mind, (i.e. the scientific mind, your mind) to hold onto any one explanation as being the only possible one.

Yet surprisingly, only one of these two equally possible explanations of what we actually experience has dominated western scientific thinking for the past several hundred years. This shortsighted supposition has led us to view humans as having the right to rape nature and dominate other species because 'we have consciousness and you don't!'. It sounds silly when it is said that way, but that is exactly what has happened.

Yet aren't we missing something here? Something so obvious that we keep overlooking it? After all, this suggests a major paradigm shift that would reshape all of western thought if it were discovered to be so. Isn't that a pretty big step?

Well, yes it is, but it's not as if such a shift has never happened before. There was a time when everyone was sure Earth was flat and then suddenly people started sailing home from places where they should have fallen off.

And we were sure the sun circled Earth, that we were in the center of things. We just had to look up, for goodness sake, and we could see it was true with our own eyes! But one small change in consciousness such that our mind sees the sun holding steady while Earth rotates, and though everything still looks the same, our understanding shifts making possible the comprehension of an even greater reality.

We have made quantum leaps of awareness before that moved humanity out of the physical center of what was happening to a place on the periphery. Back then the church was in the power position, claiming the ability to verify for everyone what was true or not. Church fathers kept a lid on new ideas that went against what they held as sacred because they had a vested interest in preserving the status quo. From today's scientific perspective, we can look back and know that reality seen through a lens of theology clearly biases how we perceive what we see.

However the eye of science, while freeing us from the distorting lens of theology, has nontheless colored our subconscious reality in the exact same way with a distorting lens of its own. Everything must be measurable. And just as those trapped in a theological mind set couldn't conceive of there being another way of viewing reality than theirs, so it is with us of the scientific mind. We don't even recognize that our view is skewed.

Remember what you just experienced. Like the light in the Astrodome, there is no way to tell for certain whether our own consciousness is being generated from within our brains or coming in through an 'opening' from outside. Once it is in our heads, it is too late to find out where it came from.

Thus, it behooves us humans to focus, for a while at least, on the other equally valid alternative to the nature of consciousness just to see if it would make any difference in our understanding of who we are and the way we interact with life, each other, and the world around us. After all, anything less would be unscientific.

* * *

Chapter 2: Silverman Hits The Wall

2005-11-14T16:51:00.000-08:00

The afternoon breeze coming in off the ocean swirled gently through The Convent’s lush courtyard, careening off white cala lily, yellow iris, pink azalea, purple bougenvilla, and foot long black blooms of a thirty foot Bird of Paradise that hugged one white stucco wall. Then, having added a mixture of soft floral aromas to it’s salt sea base, it shinnied over the red tile roof to continue its trip downtown. David Silverman, seated in a third floor window overlooking the gardens, fountain, walkways, and graceful iron gate that often framed the faces of wandering tourists, saw none of its gentle and welcoming aura. Staring straight ahead at the blank screen before him, all he could hear were spasms of uncontrolled laughter coming from inside his head...

“Ha... Ha... Hoo... Hoo... Hee... Hee... Check out Silverman and what he’s going through this time. Ho... Ho... Ho... Hoo... Hoo... What a panic. And if you think it’s fun from out there, you should see it from in here. Talk about convoluted. Yuk. Yuk.”

An unbroken string of economic failures projected themselves on the blank screen behind his eyes and they all led to blanker walls where the future was supposed to be. Automaton-like, his fingers moved and confessed his sins and weaknesses to the rest of the world.

He had been a good writer once, had sold short stories and poetry and how-to’s and all the rest of the freelance repertoire to some of the best magazines in the country. But Collier’s and Life and Look weren’t around anymore. And humor. He used to be good at humor. It’s just that nothing was funny anymore. At least not to Silverman.

Author? Right there in front of him, hiding in the bowels of his computer were at least half a dozen books lined up just waiting to be placed on the front rack of bookstores, right next to the check out counter. But the agents didn’t see it that way. Was it all the publisher’s fault in not being willing to take a chance, as he wanted to believe, or was it because he just wasn’t in tune with what people were interested in reading about?

He remembered having this same thought a number of years earlier, reading about the book at the top of the New York Times’ best seller list. It was an exposé by a couple of baseball wives on what life married to a sports’ star is “really” like. He had cringed at the time, both from what he viewed as the banal level of median human intelligence on one hand and how much of a snob he was for thinking so on the other. He cringed again at that memory and the realization that nothing had changed. He still wanted to write about what he wanted to write about and nobody else seemed to care.

Book editor? Why not? Hadn’t one of the books he’d edited been nominated for a Pulitzer? Sure, and he’d gladly do it again if someone would hire him out of the blue, but that had already happened once this life and you never step in the same pile of shit twice.

As for commercial editing gigs on magazines, he’d done that, too, for a fancy New York slick. But it wasn’t enough just to be a good editor anymore, to help a writer organize ideas into a coherent, cogent work. These days it required specialized computer knowledge of systems and graphics and web pages and internets and a whole bunch of technology that kept changing so fast that it wasn’t enough to be an expert in writing, you needed to be an expert in computers. Staying on the leading edge even of editing was something for the kids, the young ‘uns, not for him.

“Go back to teaching economics. You did that before, you can do it again. You enjoyed that.”

Shelly’s encouragement was well meaning but equally unattainable. It had been ten years since he had taught economics and the flyers on the bulletin boards were not looking to hire instructors rapidly approaching retirement age. A fresh out of Ivy league youngster just itching to read freshman papers in an introductory course on the history of Western thought was the more likely scenario and he didn’t fit the bill. By following his inner visions and interests, he had studied himself into a corner and, for all intents and purposes, was valueless to the academic world.

“Ah yes, Silverman. And what have you been doing over the past few years?”

“Well sir, I’ve been studying philosophy, spirituality, and Eastern mysticism, since I truly believe it has much more connection to the root of reality and happiness than economics and business. However, I do need a job.”

With so many teachers out of work he would simply get passed over by candidates with more current curriculum vitae and more of an interest in the subject. Scratch that off the list.

So what else had he done in the past that he couldn’t fall back on?

City planner? Zoning officer? That was a lifetime ago, fresh out of college with his degree in economics and looking to avoid a job in sales. While other graduates in his department had received multiple job offers from big companies, he had scrambled around in the public sector, knocking on doors, sending out resumes. He had finally landed a position with a small town planning office, then joined the state department of development, and a private land use consultant after that. But what did it matter anyway. It was just an additional skill so old on the resume as to be meaningless.

A great sigh escaped his chest and filled the room with frustration and shaking his head to clear it, he reached for the coffee and took a gulp... the warmth of the outside of the cup entering his fingers as he drank of the warmth within. A rush come over him as he realized he was experiencing the writing urge again, the creative urge, and it felt so good. It didn’t bring in the income dammit. Not yet. Bt this in truth, was what he loved doing, what he had always loved doing, the yellowed manuscripts surrounding him attested to that.

Depressing as his thoughts were, he could sit like this for hours, letting those thoughts inside his head well up and come out through his fingers onto the screen in front of him. The only question was, did he have something to say, something worth while that others were interested in reading. He sighed a deep resigned sigh. Wasn’t there someone, anyone, who was also experiencing what it was that he was experiencing?

The ‘here and now’ closed in on him again. How useless he was. He couldn’t even go out and resume the well meaning career that he loved as a home health aide, even though he was state certified to do so. That was a more recent useless skill he had gotten into because of his blind friend Don, suffering from diabetic kidney failure and only sixty years old when he died. Once a week he’d go over to Don’s, taking him to dialysis, reading to him from the Bible, as well as from his own manuscripts. Don had put things into perspective...

“Ya know, David... if ya wanna write somethin’ that’s gonna take care of people’s souls, then ya really oughta learn somethin’ about takin’ care of people’s bodies.”

...and he had enrolled in a home health care course, earning minimum wage, class time included. He had been the only man and the only white skin in a group of sixteen. After certification he had worked as an aide for almost two years with stroke victims, alzheimer’s, parkinson’s, cancer, quadreplegics, feeding, bathing, changing diapers for $5.25 an hour. People will pay a mechanic $75 an hour to take care of their car, he often thought, but how little they are willing to pay someone to take care of mom or dad. But even that needed skill was beyond him now.

His back had gone out while lifting a quad and putting him onto the toilet. David had felt the twinge as soon as it happened but he couldn’t let go of his charge. Then, fifteen minutes later he had to take him off the toilet and put him back in the motorized chair. One hundred eighty pounds of dead weight. Living person, dead weight. There was no choice.

That was on Thursday. On Saturday David had fallen flat on his face in the garden with the lightening bolt pain in his back, unable to move his legs. His fifth lumbar had gone out in the line of duty said the doctors and after scores of tests and retests and forms and more forms he was getting lifetime chiropractic care from the State in exchange. Big deal. But he couldn’t lift stuff any more and that’s why he couldn’t do home care much as he loved it.

The string of blemished pearls went on and on, doubling back on itself mobius fashion, removing every possibility of meaningful desirable work from consideration. A voice rang out in his head. It was his own and he screamed at what he heard.

“I can always pump gas.”

It was the line he used with Shelly to claim that he wasn’t completely useless, that when push came to shove he really could bring in an income. Had it really come down to this? Was that all that was left?

What a fakeout. Looking in from the outside his reality really didn’t look so bad. It was spent at his computer in a San Francisco penthouse, overlooking a lush courtyard, a pot of freshly brewed coffee within easy reach, living the scene he had seen in his vision when he quit the corporate world twenty-two years ago to "become a writer".

And it’s not as if they were living hand to mouth, at least not at the moment. When they had sold the house in upstate New York to come here so he could go back to school they had paid off all their debts, zeroed out the credit cards, erased all the minuses, eliminated the red from the balance sheet. They had a little money in the bank, some small investments, a financial cushion. Was it forever type security? No. Is there ever any forever security? No, not at all, at least not in the material world.

Yet there was no escaping the seething discurrent of diametrically opposed energies between him and Shelly. Over and over, year after year, it had raised its ugly head, a cancer that ever threatened to rip them apart - present pleasure vs long term security. The grasshopper and the ant tearing at each other’s throats again. Not that they disagreed on how nice it would be to have both. That part was easy. But stuck in a life that hadn’t dealt them an unlimited supply of readily available resources, they weren't always in agreement on how to allocate the ones they had. That and the fact that his contribution to the family coffers had been next to nil, a fact she never let him forget.

It was so frustrating. Was he to blame that people paid her good money to sit in front of a computer terminal and play with numbers while they paid him bupkus to sit in front of his and play with words? Wasn't that what she wanted to do? No, not at all. He knew the answer even before he formed the question. Shelly wanted to play, too. To feel the freedom he was experiencing at that moment. He couldn't stop till she was where he was, only then could they be themselves.

He continued staring at the computer, suspended somewhere between inside and outside, inside where the thoughts and visions lived in his head and outside, where words representing those thoughts and visions kept appearing on the computer screen in front of him. Trapped between two worlds that were not very well in sync, he was diligently searching for an escape hatch in a life that was tearing him apart and closing in on him at the same time. Uncanny, he thought, how far he was being stretched in opposite directions by two sets of forces, both of which he knew to be real.

Of course he could always make things right in his next life, but that was another story and Silverman was not about to justify his fuck ups in this one by falling back on reincarnation, even if he did believe in it.

“It takes thousands of lives to reach perfection”, ochre robed gurus had told him as he sat on the floor cross legged in front of them. As if that made things easier. As if that were a palliative that could soothe his ego for blowing this life to smithereens.

“It’s all right, David. Everything is as it should be because, by my astrological calculations, you still have seven hundred some odd lives left to go before you reach enlightenment. Everything is just fine whether you screw things up this life or not because you are supposed to come back and do it over and over and over until you get it right. Get it? Got it? Good.”

Bullshit. Silverman wasn’t buying. What if this were the life where it was supposed to happen and this coming back again and again just an excuse for accepting weakness and coddling imperfection? What if?

His inhale was strong and he could feel resolve coming in with the breath. Why not, why not at all? Why shouldn’t he strive to live the perfect life, to be perfect, the perfect Silverman, the perfect reflection of God, the best he could be? He was no raw beginner. He’d been given too many gifts this lifetime, too many talents, too many incredible spiritual experiences, the kind you read about in the lives of saints for this to be his first time out of the chute. He’d been through this before, many many times. Hadn’t he learned anything? Enough already with clinging on just below the summit of the mountain by his fingertips.

Why shouldn’t he visualize himself as an instrument of the Divine, an active center of the dynamic world-spirit, a creative artist, an architect of new, higher values? Hadn’t his life been given him with all its impulses and urges, thoughts and emotions, talents and handicaps as the raw material for him to fashion into a thing of beauty and joy, by whatever means he could? What if this were the life where he was supposed to touch the absolute absolutely? What if it were and what if he blew it? What then, eh?

How cruel was God anyway? If he weren’t supposed to reach it why had he been allowed to see it? And if he could see it why shouldn’t he be able to reach it? And if he could reach it why was he so far away from it with his marriage, his finances, his health, his sanity all going straight to hell in a hand basket and every other stupid metaphor he could think of? Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Huh? Why? Why the fuck why?

The resonance of the front door swinging shut reached David’s awareness. He muttered a quiet heartfelt prayer and paused in his typing.

"You've been smoking again. We've got to talk." Shelly had returned earlier than expected and stood in the doorway, hands on hips. He looked at her and smiled. She had that look on her face that told him he had that look on his face.

"We were supposed to be together today and you're stoned."

"I'm not stoned. I’m high."

"Enough with the clever wordplay. You smoked. Don't deny it."

"I smoked. I won't deny it. But there is a difference between being high and being stoned, you know."

"I couldn’t care less. I just want to know why you smoked when we were supposed to be together today and you know how I hate you when you’re stoned?"

“I’m not stoned.”

“Whatever.” He could hear the level of frustration rising in her voice. “Why did you smoke?”

He took a deep breath and tried to come across as logical and rational sounding as possible. "You said you had things to do till three and we'd be together then. I knew I'd be back down by the time you got back home."

"Is that it? Anytime Rochelle walks out of the house you grab a puff because you can't do it when she's around?" David sighed as Shelly shifted into overdrive.

"You're stoned everyday aren't you? Every morning when I leave for work you smoke and stay high all day, don't you? I can tell when we talk on the phone. Well I've had it. You say you planned on being separate from me till three. Well, fine. I'm making myself something to eat and I'll eat alone.”

She stomped out of the room, pausing in the doorway to hurl the final missile. "You're going to have to choose between me or pot. I'm tired of being married to an unemployed addict. Either stop smoking and get a job or move out." The sound of her voice stayed in the room long after she left.

Dammit. He hadn't wanted this. All he had wanted to do was keep working on the book. He didn't get into these writing moods all that often and he felt like taking advantage of it while he had the chance. Well, it looked like he would have the chance.

* * *

Editor’s Prologue – cont’d

2005-11-14T12:50:00.000-08:00

Just a few more notes before we really disappear into the void.

The three of us have never met face to face, our partnership being a strange and oft confusing collaboration. It’s a zen sort of thing conducted entirely through The Roving ‘I’ with rules still not quite clear and constantly changing. As a new post is added by one of us, we each take a shot at integrating ourselves into it until there are no more additions, deletions, or modifications. Then the original author either leaves it alone or not, whatever feels right. And, of course, we always reserve the right to add individual comments. Yes, don’t forget to check out the comments that accompany each posting. They are sort of like the John Madden commentary in a football broadcast.

Sometimes, it’s hard to remember who’s added what to whom. And now with your participation in the creation process giving meaning to everything that follows, reality will be even more complex. Synergy run amok so to speak. But that’s the fun of it, eh? It just is what it is and what it grows into. However it is also quite clear that energy is changing mode right before our eyes and under our fingers, that more is being produced than would be the case on our own, and that, obvious cliches aside, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. (I personally, for example, would have never used such a chestnut, but under the groundrules what can I do?)

As the only one in the group with experience as a professional editor, I bear ultimate responsibility for the continuity and coherence, though not the content, of what you are now reading, difficult as that may prove and unenlightened as I may be as to whether I am actually doing anything of value or not. Dr. Andrej says not to worry, one day the light will shine. I trust him. ag says nothing and that’s good because I don’t trust him.

Finally, though it may not be immediately obvious, we actually share a genuine affection and mutual respect for each other’s life experiences, visions, personal baggage, and intelligence, if not the content of that intelligence, doubts concerning moral and ethical standards and the ability to tie one’s own shoes. (This last sentence, by the way, is typical of one that has had many editorial hits from all quarters, though I’m sure it's hardly necessary to tell you that. I won’t warn you again.) Enjoy!

Games Of Consciousness - Introduction

2005-11-13T17:10:00.000-08:00

I want to share my experiments with you... my experiments in consciousness. In one sense this should be no more difficult than the task faced by any researcher who has studied a subject and wishes to offer the objective results of that study to those fellow scientists who are interested. All I need do is to explain my methods, allow you to duplicate them in your laboratory, and let you come to your own conclusions.

What makes consciousness studies challenging to replicate, however, is the fact that each individual has a one-of-a-kind laboratory made of specific combinations of flesh and decimals, memories and DNA, images and experiences. Similar to the subtle, accoustic relationship that exists between sound waves and the interior of concert halls, each individual consciousness laboratory produces a slightly different experience for each researcher. Every set of unique combinations of who we are, what we are, and where we are coming from produces a unique framing for experiencing consciousness.

"How can you define consciousness?", asked a noted professor at a recent symposium on the subject. "You cannot", he answered himself, "it is too subjective".

As a result, no matter how hard I try to convey “exactly” and “precisely” what I want to share with you, your experience even if you follow my trail exactly, cannot help but be somewhat different from mine. As long as we look out through different sets of eyes, hear with different sets of ears, and experience reality as seemingly different individuals we can never make our absolute experiences absolutely the same.

Yet as fellow human beings we do share a lot in common and as we enter the subjective experience, past the point where individual social, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual differences matter in the experiment, we will approach a shared common ground. It's like Groucho Marx describing the "secret word" many years ago on his show You Bet Your Life, when he said, "It's something we do every day".

The harder part is that we shall be using an imperfect means in attempting to communicate this experience... words. Words evoke different meanings for each experimenter, affecting how we each think... what we think... and what values we place on the subject we’re thinking about. As Lao Tsu said, “The Tao that can be described is not the Tao.” Even more cogent are the words of Khana, a Buddhist monk who lived between the 6th and 10th centuries CE who noted that, "The path is blocked by vowels and consonants." We will be using vowels and consonents.

As a result, I cannot know for certain that a word means the same for me, the person writing it, as it does for you, the person reading it. In fact, I can be pretty sure it doesn’t. And since the attempt here is to have us share the ‘I’ experience, that poses a problem. We each are our own laboratory and yours and mine cannot resonate exactly the same however much we open them up for inspection through words. If you don’t believe this, try a very simple experiment.

* * *

The Say What You Mean Game

Draw something very simple such as a star, a dog, or a house. Don’t show anyone what you drew but ask several of your friends or coworkers to draw a picture of the same object.

Even after discounting artistic ability, what are the chances that all the drawings will be the same? For ‘star’ someone may draw a pentagram, another an asterisk, another a shooting star, another a sheriff’s badge. There will be big dogs and little dogs of all shapes and breeds, while houses can range from single family homes to apartment buildings, exteriors to floor plans. Someone once even drew a hole in a tree to represent a bird’s house.

It’s not that you communicated what you wanted poorly, or that the people you asked weren’t paying attention. It’s just that words are not the reality, they only represent the reality, and as such they represent different things to different people. So if that’s the result you get dealing with simple things, nouns and objects we all take for granted, what do you think the result will be trying to get agreement on emotionally charged words like, mother, or love, or freedom, or happiness? Imagine then what we can expect to find dealing with words representing non-concrete, non-material processes like consciousess.

Another problem with words is that they must be delivered sequentially and cannot convey the sudden, complete, ‘aha’ experience that occurs in work in consciousness. You cannot replicate a cognitive experience by merely observing the subject from the outside or intellectualizing a sequence of words describing someone else’s subjective experience. Following the trail of words can lead to that point of embarcation, but you must see the light for yourself to subjectively know it to be real. You must ‘grok’ it. [grok – from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger In A Strange Land, a Martian word meaning to understand something so well that it is fully absorbed into oneself.]

This is why I have created these consciousness games. Playing them offers a much better chance of achieving the desired breakthrough into the new consciousness than merely reading about it. Grok what I have to say yourself.

So with this apparent paradox in mind, the common experience of unique experiencing, shared via the imperfect medium of words, I open the doors of my lab, Conshus1, for your inspection. Come on in, enjoy your visit, and feel free to take anything back to your own lab for testing. Just please clean up after yourself.

* * *

Chapter 1: Silverman Smokes a Joint

2005-11-13T15:41:00.000-08:00

David Silverman, surprisingly depressed for this early in the day, glanced in the rear view mirror as the '84 Honda crossed Market Street, but Shelly had already disappeared in the crowd in front of Nordstrom’s. She had things to do all morning. He did not.

Breathing the sigh of a man set free, he turned left on Ellis, removed his seat belt and slowly, casually, with the grace of one who has done it many times before, reached for the wallet in his hip pocket and removed the joint neatly stashed inside. It was in the little flap just behind the picture of Ganesha. “Om gam Ganapataye namaha”, he intoned somewhat reverently to the elephant headed Hindu deity known for his power to remove the obstacles in life. “Do your thing”, he thought silently.

Directly ahead a white delivery van was double parked with its taillights blinking and its rear gate open. The driver was nowhere in sight. Peering over his shoulder, David moved smoothly into the middle lane, then slowed and stopped at the light at Larkin, reaching into the denim jacket's left inside pocket and pulling out a box of matches as he did. They were from Melody’s, one of the night spots in The City where Adam had a regular gig. Adam was a jazz musician and a good one, enough others had said so that he knew it wasn’t just his own bias.

David had been his first teacher, sitting at the old upright piano in the family room, pounding out basic blues chords in the bass as four year old Adam sat on the bench to his right.

”You do the top part”, David had urged. “Play a note”.

“What note should I play?” Adam had asked.

“Any note you want”, David had answered. “If it sounds good play it again. If it doesn’t, try another one.” That was twenty-five years ago. Adam had progressed beyond what David could teach him a long time ago. Adam also didn’t smoke pot. Adam didn’t smoke anything. Never had. Never would. Adam didn’t like David’s smoking. Neither did Shelly.

Checking out the drivers on either side and pleased that none was taking notice of him, Silverman raised a cupped hand and placed the crinkled paper cylinder between his lips. He pulled ahead as the light turned green and raising his left thigh till he could steer with it, let go of the wheel, struck the match, lit the joint, and inhaled. He felt the pleasant feeling of smoke in his lungs as he shook out the flame and took the wheel again in his hands.

Traffic was light and he was in no hurry, no need to play New York cabbie today and draw attention to himself. He kept to the speed limit and took another drag. Funny how he was taking the risk of being caught smoking pot in public just to avoid the risk of being caught smoking pot in private. He was engulfed in a thousand kinds of guilt, he loved her so much.

He and Shelly had met at college back in New Jersey, he a first year grad student at Rutgers, she a sophomore at Douglass. He didn’t smoke pot in those days. He probably wouldn’t have made it through college if he had.

"What do you want to be," Shelly had asked on their first date, “...when you grow up” being unspoken but implied. They had been talking across a table over ice cream sodas at Mal’s.

"I want to be happy," he had answered. This time his mother was not there and nobody slapped him. Shelly just smiled like she knew what he meant. "And you," he asked her in return.

"I want to live happily ever after", she responded without skipping a beat and he knew right away he had found his soulmate. Afterwards, they had driven down to Riverside Park and danced on the benches and tables till curfew, pretending to be Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Then they had gone back to her dorm and he had played piano in the lounge and sung to her. “When I faaaall in love...... it will beeee foreverrrr.......”. He hadn’t even tried to kiss her. He hadn’t needed to, he felt so great just being with her.

He proposed two days later on their second date, sitting on the stone steps in front of his off campus apartment on Bayard Street. She had said they couldn’t get together on Saturday because she needed to be in the lottery for next year’s dorm rooms. “You won’t need a dorm room next year”, he had told her, “we’ll be married by then.”

“Hey”, he had added, almost as an after thought, "I may not be the best husband in the world, but life with me will never be dull". She had laughed at the time and told him he was crazy, but they were married in six months.

“I should have believed you, you warned me, you really did. Why didn’t I listen to you?” she cried the last time they had a fight. Was it only last night? It had been a while since they had danced on tables.

He was driving through the projects of the Western Addition now. He knew that if any of the men in undershirts sitting on the upturned boxes playing cards actually looked in his passing car and saw him smoking pot, their only reaction would be "Hit me, man". Yet he remained circumspect. God, he was paranoid.

The pot was beginning to have an effect. That indescribable something was happening that took him over, that took him off to another place. He couldn’t deny that he was different stoned than not stoned. After all, changing the way he felt was why he smoked in the first place. Why else would he take that yutz into his lungs if it didn't have some positive effect on his being, on how he experienced reality. So yes, he had to admit, she was right. He did relate differently to Shelly when he was high than when he was straight.

But it's not like he turned into a Mr. Hyde or anything. He always stayed within control, didn't become loud, or violent, or nasty, or mean. He was still a loving husband, possibly even more so than usual because he was out of his intellect and into his feelings. That’s why he gave such good massages when he was stoned. Shelly liked massages. What woman doesn’t?

“But that’s not the point”, she had sighed. “You are missing the point completely. I've seen it over the years. When you are in a smoking stage nothing gets accomplished. When you are in a non-smoking stage it does.” The sigh became a sob. “When you smoke everything is just fine and dandy. The universe is just as it should be. You don’t earn any money because you don’t think you need to. I love you, dammit, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. But I do not intend to work until I drop. I'm tired, exhausted, burned-out, spent. I want to stay home and do whatever it is I want to do. Just like you do. I don't even know what it is I want to do anymore. You go out and bring in the money. You promised!!!"

That had been a low blow. Sure he had promised with all the fervor of his twenty-three year old heart to provide the income that would allow them both to play games together for the rest of their life. He had meant it, too. And he had tried, Lord knows he had tried, in fact he was still trying. It's just that nothing had changed in his job karma over the past thirty-two years and he was rapidly hurtling head first into economic oblivion. Ironic, wasn't it. He didn’t care about money. Shelly’s freedom and happiness were all he really wanted. But he needed money for that. His freedom and happiness depended on it.

He turned left onto Masonic and headed across The Panhandle. Was it wrong for him to still believe that he could get a job that paid him for doing what he wanted to do? Was it wrong for him to believe that he could still be one of the fortunate ones who gets to live his dreams? How can you settle for less than you want when you know it can still be achieved. And you know it can still be achieved because you can still vision it happening! It’s like seeing the top of the mountain and aiming for something else. And that made no sense to him. Why would you aim for anything other than what it is that makes you happy?

"The world is full of people who would like to get paid for doing what they want to do", a mentor had told him once. The guy liked David and was the Executive Director of a foundation where David had tried to get a job, but there were no openings. At least that’s what he had been told. A lot of people who liked David hadn’t given him jobs, and what the hell did that mean?

A vision of Cheech and Chong formed inside his head holding this same conversation several years prior.

"Hey man, this is fuckin' great. I'd sure like to get paid for gettin' stoned."

"Yeah, man, fuckin' great."

He took another drag. He also took a reality check of the world around him and the improbability of the ‘here and now' boggled his mind. Here he was, David Silverman, afraid to smoke in front of his wife, driving through the intersection of San Francisco's Haight and Ashbury Streets, the power spot that had given its name to the New Age hippie movement of the sixties, with the remnants of a joint dangling from his lips right out in the open. That was a fact. That was reality.

Another reality was that if anybody on the sidewalk or in a passing car saw a roach in his lips, nobody would care. Even the occasional policeman wouldn't care. What would they do? Run out in the street to stop his car and arrest him for smoking pot in the heart of Haight/Ashbury? Yeah... right. He felt suddenly relaxed and safe. He had definitely gone over.

Up ahead in the crosswalk, a young woman wearing army boots, torn granny skirt, gold camisole, and bright green hair crossed in front of him in earnest conversation with a man of indeterminate age dressed in maroon medieval garb complete with a black velvet Tower of London hat. “That, too, is reality”, thought David, “though highly improbable.”

"You cannot come to the Himalayas to escape your duties", the immortal Babaji had told Lahiri Mahasaya in response to his pleas, after opening the disciple’s mind to the Absolute. "Your role is to be a householder yogi, to show that it is possible to live a spiritual life while still participating in the world." The first time David had seen Lahiri's picture in Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi he had felt an immediate connection to this gentle looking man seated in lotus position, eyes turned inward. Only then did he read about him, about his job and his wife and his children and the enlightenment experience in his mid-thirties and how he had wanted to run to the mountains but knew it was impossible. This is the way it had happened to David, too and why he thought of Lahiri Mahasaya as his guru even though Sri Lahiri had died half a century before David was even born. “What I did in India in the last century you do in America in this one” the tiny voice inside had chanted. Lahiri's picture was in his wallet, right behind Ganesha. Lahiri had probably never smoked ganja.

He suddenly realized his mind had wandered off inside into a world far from the streets on which he was driving. He refocused on the world around him and continued to drive slowly up Haight, taking in the street musicians, Vietnam vets sitting in doorways, college kids on break, homeless women pushing shopping carts, black leather silver chained punks huddling on the corners. This was not the sixties of flower children but the new millennium of whatever you wanted to be. Inside David's head he could hear the Sesame Street song he and Adam used to sing together, "Oh, who are the people in your neighborhood... in your neighborhood... in your neigh... bor... hood...".

One of them was a stoned fifty-five year old writer driving an '84 Honda, with plans to enjoy himself for the next six hours. He took another drag but the joint had gone out.

* * *

Editor's Prologue

2005-11-09T15:10:00.000-08:00

This is a work in progress, aimed as far as we can figure towards four distinct and differing ends. Ours, which are, in no particular order...

…a chance to finally bring in a decent income so Shelly can quit working and once and for all get off my back...

…a way to add value and meaning to a life that has focused solely on personal gratification or maybe just have some fun...

…a seminal work that can lead humanity into a new millennium of peace, understanding, and personal self enlightenment and fulfillment.

…and yours.

Whether these goals are truly compatable is yet to be determined. We think they are, or at least can be, or we wouldn’t be doing this. However, this is where you come in. Without your presence these words are just meaningless wavy squiggles on a computer screen. So rest assured your intellectual, emotional, and psychic participation in this project is critical to the success of ours. Hopefully ours will prove similarly useful to you and whatever your ends. May the benefits be mutual.

ag brought us together. He originally placed an ad on Craigslist looking for an editor to give feedback on his writing. I responded hoping for a little income and he contacted me drawn by the obvious connection in our names. That was followed some months later by his answering Andrej’ ad on the same site looking for marketing know-how for his work. We began emailing back and forth discussing our projects; a novel entitled Manifest Destiny; a group of essays called Gut Feel; and a how-to manual with the working title Pragmatic Integralism: Shifting the Consciousness Paradigm.

When it came out that each of these writing projects was designed to fill what we had to admit were major gaps in our lives, well, that’s what led to the painful admission that since working alone hadn’t worked, perhaps we could only achieve as a unit what we each desired most as individuals. Hence, this unusual collaboration of varied style, content, and purpose, fueled by a trifurcated, occasionally hostile jealousy that persons so different and antithetical to our individual selves should not only be necessary to our own success, but have already achieved the goals each of us so desperately desires. It is safe to say that if we felt we could go it alone we would.

But enough prologue. In the words of the three of us…

"Poof! We’re off and running."

"Om gam Ganepataye namaha."

"Whatever."

Guess who said which?

Ritual

2005-11-04T23:06:00.000-08:00

“As you get up in the morning, before starting the day’s activities, sit down for a while quietly and in a relaxed mood. Then concentrate upon your true self as an instrument of the Divine. Or, as an active center of the dynamic world-spirit. Or, in case you have inwardly revolted against all religion and philosophy, you may concentrate upon yourself as a creative artist. You are an architect of new, higher values. Your life has been given to you - with all its impulses and urges, thoughts and emotions, talents and handicaps - as the raw material to be fashioned into a thing of beauty and joy, by whatever creative ability you can summon.”

- Dr. Haridas Chaudhuri
Philosophy of Meditation

The Meaning Of Life

2005-11-02T22:08:00.000-08:00

At my eighth birthday party Aunt Clare asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I want to be happy,” I answered.

My mother was walking past at that moment. She stopped long enough to cuff me along side the head. “You can’t be happy,” she said. “You have to be something.”

Forty-seven years later I realize that may have been the defining moment of my life.