Awakening to Numinous Joy

Conscious Evolution

2009-05-09T13:46:00.004-05:00

Welcome back to my blog. I know it’s been ages since I’ve posted anything here. My goal is to post something new once a week.

I am fascinated by the concepts of personal growth, inner evolution, spiritual development, awakening, and the human potential movement. Perhaps this looks like a lot of different words, but to me they are saying the same thing -- the essence of our existence is to realize our highest potential within our lifetime, and this potential is realized in an ongoing process of evolution.

When I use the term “evolution” I’m not talking about Darwin’s theory or about scientific materialism or about the creationism debate. By evolution I’m talking about one’s inner process of growth or development, our potential to reach higher states and stages of consciousness, which is at the heart of any esoteric understanding of the Gospels or any other spiritual tradition. Evolution occurs within us intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, and so on, through many different aspects of our humanity and consciousness. Every living being, and even societies and groupings of things, goes through stages of development. The seed does not remain a seed forever.

Evolution rarely follows a straight line. How often do we set goals for ourselves only to immediately fall out of our discipline and struggle to get back on our path? How easy is it to fall into a stagnant state of inner and outer lethargy if we do not constantly learn new things or challenge ourselves to keep growing, evolving, and thinking in new ways?

In the past three or four months it has become even more apparent to me how powerful the human mind is in creating one’s perception of reality, one’s emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Much of who we think we are has already been programmed or ingrained into us during our childhood, before we were consciously aware of what was happening to us; before we could make a conscious decision whether such programming was constructive for our future well-being or not. I believe part of one’s process of inner evolution absolutely requires that we take a deep look at the way our mind operates, what it focuses on, believes, values, creates, and so on. If we do not truly examine ourselves and begin to consciously think on our own, then we risk going through life as mindless robots, automatons, programmed to keep repeating the same mistakes and sufferings over and over again, within our own life and over generations. We are not truly free or autonomous in such a situation. We become an automatic response mechanism prodded by external events and circumstances, blaming the outside world for our sufferings when really the problem begins within our own minds. We are asleep and will continue to remain asleep until we consciously decide (or allow ourselves) to open our consciousness to new avenues of growth and potential. We must take responsibility for ourselves and for what our mind creates. In spiritual terms, our old self must die in order that a new, greater self can be born. This is evolution in the deepest sense.

But what a struggle it is to find a way to kill our ego (our false sense of self) or to surrender and allow our old self to die! Our egos are greatly attached to the illusions of what we ‘think’ is important, much of which may not even be our authentic thoughts or beliefs anyway, but just programming. We think we feel a sense of safety by holding on to what we know, even though it is not healthy for us to continue living in that way; we end up holding ourselves back, blocking our own way from our greatest potential. We become like the seed that has fallen on rocky ground, starved for nourishment. The spiritual teacher, G.I. Gurdjieff writes:

[Man] is attached to everything in his life; attached to his imagination, attached to his stupidity, attached even to his suffering -- possibly to his suffering more than anything else. He must first free himself from attachment. Attachment to things, identification with things keeps alive a thousand I’s in a man. These I’s must die in order that the big I may be born. But how can they be made to die?... It is at this point that the possibility of awakening comes to the rescue. To awaken means to realize one’s nothingness, that is, to realize one’s complete and absolute mechanicalness, and one’s complete and absolute helplessness... So long as a man is not horrified at himself, he knows nothing about himself.

We have enormous power to create the life we want, if only we wake up to it in time. It is possible to consciously choose, decide, and take responsibility for our own lives, beginning with how we use our minds. But it must start with becoming consciously aware of our own thoughts, emotions, behaviors, opinions, etc. We need to become "horrified" by our false self so much that we are forced to change. We must step back from ourselves in our own minds and observe how our minds operate. Question everything. Question whether your thoughts or opinions are really your own. Question why certain ideas, people, or events make you upset or why others satisfy you. It IS possible to change yourself once you become aware of how your mind works. You are not a slave to it unless you remain unconscious. Take it apart and find out what’s there. Observe your own thoughts and feelings without judgment. Discard anything that holds you back from your highest potential. Focus on what you truly want.

When you take on this responsibility and challenge of delving into your own mind you begin to take an active part in the process of your own evolution as well as the unfoldment of Spirit itself. This is the gateway to true development and growth and the heart of any spiritual path to your greatest Self.

As the Catholic priest and Zen master, Willigis Jager, wrote in Mysticism for Modern Times:

Mysticism says, “The world is born anew in each moment.” It assumes that this ever-new creation is not achieved through the hand of a creator standing outside of evolution. It occurs by itself, following its own impulse. In the view of mystical or evolutionary theology, God is not the initiator of evolution, acting from outside. Evolution is God unfolding himself.

Teilhard de Chardin

2008-11-18T20:24:00.006-06:00

The Catholic Tradition has such immense depth and beauty! There are not enough lifetimes to really study and learn from all of the saints, theologians, writers, Desert Fathers and Mothers, not to mention the Bible itself, with its layers of esoteric meaning and symbolism.

Since I'm in the mood of finding my true self (easier said than done), here is a quote from Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) that I found to fit in well with my earlier post on soul searching. I found this quote in George Maloney's Mysticism and the New Age. Originally, the quote is from Teilhard's The Divine Milieu (confused yet? Sounds like a meta-quote, a quote inside of a quote!):

We must try to penetrate our most secret self, and examine our being from all sides. Let us try, patiently, to perceive the ocean of forces to which we are subjected and in which our growth is, as it were, steeped... I took the lamp and, leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything seemed clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates. But as I moved further and further away from conventional certainties by which social life is superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet... At that moment... I felt the distress characteristic of a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and stars. And if someone saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel... speaking to me, from the depth of the night: It is I, be not afraid.

Makes me think of Russian nesting dolls or the chrysalis that transforms into a butterfly. Could it be that we are made up of many selves, layers of selves, like layers inside an onion? As we go through life, through many stages of growth, we become something a little new and different at each higher stage. We could look back to when we were 20 years old, or 10 years old, or 3 years old, and at each phase we were different, but yet, paradoxically, the same. So, too, spiritually: we have our external outer form, our body, our appearance, and we have our inner world, our interior life, perceptions, memories, and experience. Inner and outer forms change over time, yet what we are deep down, inside our depths, is that which is eternal, our God within.

In the quote above, Teilhard says, "I took the lamp and, leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything seemed clear, I went down into my inmost self." This reminds me of St. John of the Cross' Dark Night of the Soul, a famous poem and commentary you can read online that describes the journey of the soul towards God. The "lamp" could symbolize the "light of the senses," our physical senses which we use to perceive the world; Teilhard has metaphorically turned the light away from the outer, external world, to find an inner light into his inner abyss. St. John of the Cross also talks about going into the abyss within, "Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart."

It is said in many different spiritual traditions, that at some point one must stop relying on one's physical senses so as to be able to turn inward. Our physical senses are useful and necessary, but they can distract us from discovering the immense universe we have within our own souls. Here is Chapter 12 from the Taoist classic, The Tao Te Ching (translation by Feng/English):

The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.

Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.
He lets go of that and chooses this.

In esoteric Christianity, there is a correspondence between the five senses and the Five Wounds of Christ. Our five senses bring us our experience of the outer world, linking us with its joys and sufferings. The symbolic death of our senses is, then, a sort of gateway, an interior resurrection, that unites us with Christ and our own true self.

Soul Searching

2008-11-16T21:52:00.002-06:00

A Gangaji quote, from The Diamond in Your Pocket, relevant to my life at the moment:

In its power and simplicity, the question Who am I? throws the mind back to the root of personal identification, the basic assumption, "I am somebody." Rather than automatically taking that assumption as the truth, you can investigate deeper.

It is not difficult to see that this initial thought, "I am somebody," leads to all kinds of strategies: to be a better somebody, a more protected somebody, a somebody with more pleasure, more comfort, and more attainment. But when this very basic thought is questioned, the mind encounters the I that is assumed to be separate from what it has been seeking. This is called self-inquiry. This most basic question, Who am I? is the one that is the most overlooked. We spend most of our days telling ourselves or others we are someone important, someone unimportant, someone big, someone little, someone young, or someone old, never truly questioning this most basic assumption.

Who are you, really? How do you know that is who you are? Is that true? Really? If you say you are a person, you know that because you have been taught that. If you say you are good or bad, ignorant or enlightened, these are all just concepts in the mind.

I've reached a place in my life where I am starting to question some of the most basic labels that have been attached to me (whether by myself, by others, or learned through conditioning) to define who I am. I am questioning all of my goals and dreams, wondering how I decided that these were "my" goals and "my" dreams. Who is the "I" that chose them? What if the goals and dreams were changed to something else? Would it matter? Who creates the meaning, or decides which goal or dream is better or worse than another one?

An interesting conversation came up in my life recently about whether my comfortable, non-challenging, non-threatening, middle-class existence really boils down to a life of mediocrity. Is there such a thing as a life that is too easy, too simple, and too comfortable? Does this lead to sleep-walking through life? Can even one's spiritual life, in such a lifestyle, become a mediocrity as well; a hobby to be pursued in one's spare time like everything else? What would an extraordinary life look like, as opposed to a mediocre one?

Certainly there are examples throughout history of people who've awakened in their lives, stepping out of mediocrity into something else. The Buddha comes to mind, walking away from a carefree, sheltered existence in search of essential, naked truths. Yet for you and me, ordinary people working 9-to-5 jobs to pay the mortgage and buy groceries, it is hard to imagine dropping everything - literally everything - and running off to live in a hut on a mountainside, turning one's life upside down in order to get shocked out of complacency. Is it necessary? Is it required before one can truly, radically, evolve? What is the difference between an outer shock (radically changing one's physical life in the world) versus an inner shock (radically changing one's mind, feelings, attitudes, or beliefs)? Do we, those of us who live lives of seeming mediocrity, fool ourselves when we believe we can transform ourselves solely through internal means?

My husband, George, gave me a real Gangaji-moment last week when he asked me: What if, right now in this moment, you had attained all of the goals you had imagined for your life? What if you had a PhD, if you had written many books, composed lots of music, and so on? How would you feel right now? What would that change about you? How would you be different? -- And in all honesty I realized that nothing at all would change about me. Even if I had accomplished all of these things that I thought I had cared about, none of these things ultimately matter! My true self is not about accomplishments or goals or "my story" of what I have done or not done with my life. This was such a gigantic realization for me - how insidious our ego behaves, convincing us that there is always "one more goal" that needs to be finished before we can feel at peace or complete about our lives. We identify ourselves, our self worth, so much through what we do, but ultimately it is all illusory. Our "story," which makes us think that we are "a somebody," is yet another mask we wear to cover up our fears of emptiness and meaninglessness. We're afraid to really look inside and discover that we are not who we thought we were.

If we are not our story or our thoughts, then who are we?

Seeking by Not Seeking

2008-09-20T13:14:00.005-05:00

Again and again I keep coming back to one fundamental mysterious theme about life: the idea that life as we think we know it, as we think and believe we experience it as individual personalities, is ultimately an illusion. Behind our beliefs and thoughts and attachment to our little individual ego-self, there is a vast hidden reality - the infinite reality of God-consciousness. Between our ego-self and that reality is a veil obscuring our comprehension of that reality.

I believe the ultimate purpose in life must be to cut through that veil to the other side and realize the full truth of who we are (this is what is meant by "waking up"). But the ultimate-ultimate truth behind even that concept, is the truth that there is really no veil at all and never has been. What we are is really not separate from God-consciousness. We, asleep in our ego-self that experiences life as a separate personality, have created that veil. This veil helps to keep us in the illusion of our separate-self inside this world and universe of material forms.

Our experience as an individual ego-self is really the story of the Prodigal Son: we are God's child, gone off on a journey (pilgrimage) to a seemingly distant place (the universe/world of form) to come to know what it is like to have the experience of being an individual self. The underlying reality is that we are still and always have been One with God. We are not separate forms. We are Consciousness evolving and coming into Being. God is coming into Being in and through us, experiencing Himself in you and me and in each and every form, experiencing birth and death and birth again, endlessly. We are the eternally infinite experiencing a finite changing universe. Eventually our form will come to an end, bringing us back, Face to Face with the Father, with our True Self.

But what joy if we can realize this truth while being on the journey, inside the dream! To know that you ARE the Prodigal Son and that it is possible, at any moment, to know, realize, experience, that you and the Father are One? That is the big dilemma and paradox! We seek after this reality not realizing that to seek is to lose what you seek. To seek by not seeking. How can we do it?

Here's a profound quotation from Gangaji in her book, YOU ARE THAT! It's in the form of a dialog, with the student's words italicized:

I know in my mind that these formulations, this body, all these things that I do, are not the truth of who I am. Why--

Knowing this intellectually is insufficient.

I know that!

Stop knowing anything. Stop the search for intellectual understanding. Stop asking why. Every time why arises, it only takes you deeper into intellect. The only answer for why is why not?

You are being called to that which is beyond mental knowledge. You are being called to direct experience. You are hungry for direct experience, and direct experience is not found in any formulation of intellect.

Be still, and then more still, and even more still.

Be still beyond belief. Then that which cannot be known reveals itself, both fresh and ancient, beyond any polarity of knowing or not knowing.

What is needed in stillness?

What survives stillness?

Stay here. Let stillness dissolve belief in any substantiality of independent existence.

Then there is no way to really know, because if you know, your mind is interpreting what consciousness is.

There is pure being, which is where individual being gets its power. There is pure consciousness, which is where limited, individual consciousness gets its power. Pure knowing is not known, nor is it storable, because it is bigger than what can be known from past memory or categories. It is immaculate. It leaves no tracks. It is what space is in, so it is even subtler than space.

And here is a quote about Gurdjieff's ideas, written by Jacob Needleman, from the Introduction to The Inner Journey (an excellent anthology on the Gurdjieff Work by PARABOLA magazine):

Man, Gurdieff taught, is an unfinished creation. He is not fully Man, in the sense of a cosmically unique being whose intelligence and power of action mirror the energies of the source of life itself. On the contrary, man, as he is, is an automaton. Our thoughts, feelings, and deeds are little more than mechanical reactions to external and internal stimuli. In Gurdjieff's terms, we cannot do anything. In and around us, everything "happens" without the participation of an authentic consciousness. But human beings are ignorant of this state of affairs because of the pervasive and deeply internalized influence of culture and education, which engrave in us the illusion of autonomous conscious selves. In short, man is asleep. There is no authentic I am in his presence, but only a fractured egoism which masquerades as the authentic self, and whose machinations poorly imitate the normal human functions of thought, feeling, and will.

It sounds very dualistic - life comes down to whether we realize we have the potential to wake up, and then do what we can to achieve it (seeking by not seeking), or whether we will go through life asleep, an automaton, mechanically reacting to stimuli, mistaking this dream-world and dream-self as reality.

Incremental Growth

2008-08-01T16:35:00.003-05:00

July was a weird month for me. Half of it was spent being knocked down by a nasty flu, with much exhaustion; and the rest of the month was a lot of tumultuous running around and busy-ness and hectic stressful feelings.

I am amazed, yet again, at the human tendency to fall back into old patterns and dysfunctional ways of behaving and thinking. Eckhart Tolle refers to "conditioned thought patterns" -- those ingrained old ways of thinking and behaving that were learned in the past as part of one's coping mechanism. Such patterns can stick around for a very long time and inhibit us from growing into the person we were meant to be. Melody Beattie refers to this backward movement as "recycling" and as a necessary part of a recovery process. She states in Beyond Codependency:

Recycling is a chance to do our recovery work. It's a way to discover what we need to work on and work through. It's one way we figure out what we haven't yet learned, so we can start to learn that. It's a way to solidify what we've already learned, so we continue to know that. Recycling is about learning our lessons so we can move forward on our journey.

Recycling, or regression back into old patterns we thought we had conquered, can feel like banging one's head against a wall over and over and over again. Falling in and out of an exercise routine is but one example. Life should be a process towards self-development and improvement and perfection. Yet there are times when it seems like we're just spinning our wheels, falling backwards along our path. Growth can take place when we catch ourselves in these recycling patterns, learn from what happened, and then move forward. We may fall backwards a little bit, for a little while, but there is still growth, even if only incremental growth.

I am dedicating the month of August to getting back on track, learning from my mistakes and focusing on accomplishing a few key goals. I am determined to observe myself with greater awareness; to become proactive rather than reactive.

As Jack Canfield and others have stated: Take 100% responsibility for your life, your thoughts, your feelings, and your behaviors.

Here's a nice quote from Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:

Reactive people are affected by their social environment, by the "social weather." When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don't, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.

The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values -- carefully thought about, selected and internalized values.

Proactive people are still influenced by external stimuli, whether physical, social, or psychological. But their response to the stimuli, conscious or unconscious, is a value-based choice or response.

As Eleanor Roosevelt observed, "No one can hurt you without your consent." In the words of Gandhi, "They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them." It is our willing permission, our consent to what happens to us, that harms us far more than what happens to us in the first place.

Disidentifying from Thoughts

2008-06-27T22:21:00.011-05:00

For the past month or so I have enormously enjoyed and benefited from the recorded discussions between Eckhart Tolle and Oprah. More than a dozen hours of discussion can be found for free on Oprah's web site, focused on Tolle's new book, A New Earth. You can download mp3 audio files, watch videos, or read the PDF transcripts of the discussions. I highly recommend checking it out! Usually I do not follow the adventures of Oprah or the topics on her TV show. I haven't owned a television for years. But recently I learned she was following a 21-day vegan diet, and that really piqued my interest. If Oprah can enlighten the mainstream masses towards a more compassionate diet and promote a higher state of consciousness, then I am all for it! Gives me a glimmer of hope for humanity's future.

The following is just one amazing quote from A New Earth:

What you may be aware of as a voice in your head that never stops speaking is the stream of incessant and compulsive thinking. When every thought absorbs your attention completely, when you are so identified with the voice in your head and the emotions that accompany it that you lose yourself in every thought and every emotion, then you are totally identified with form and therefore in the grip of ego. Ego is a conglomeration of recurring thought forms and conditioned mental-emotional patterns that are invested with a sense of I, a sense of ego. Ego arises when your sense of Beingness, of "I Am," which is formless consciousness, gets mixed up with form. This is the meaning of identification. This is forgetfulness of Being, the primary error, the illusion of absolute separateness that turns reality into a nightmare.

So the trick is to realize that when we become so totally identified with our own thoughts, and the emotions that can arise from them, that we have lost touch with our true self, our authentic "sense of Beingness." We have confused our identity with our thoughts. Descartes' famous statement, "I think, therefore I am," really describes the ego, not the true self. As Tolle points out, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre responded with, "The consciousness that says 'I am' is not the consciousness that thinks." Tolle interprets this as, "When you are aware that you are thinking, that awareness is not part of thinking. It is a different dimension of consciousness."

Any thought or opinion we hold dear can be ripe for examination. It reminds me of some wise words in the movie Fight Club:

You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

We could add plenty of other common false identities:

You are not your health problems.
You are not your political affiliation.
You are not your prejudiced viewpoints.
You are not your religious beliefs.
You are not your mistakes.
You are not your successes.
You are not your depression/anxiety/fear.
You are not your hobbies.
You are not your lack of hobbies.
You are not your nationality/culture/race/gender.
You are not the television shows that you watch.
You are not your sense of victimhood.
You are not the ideology you think you believe in.
You are not the diet that you follow.
You are not your face/body in the mirror.
You are not the success/failure of your children.
You are not the experiences of your childhood.
You are not your family's history.
You are not your opinions.
You are not your perceptions.
You are not your feelings.

So if you're not any thing, if you're not a collection of labels or roles or accumulated experiences and conditioning, then what ARE you? As Tolle suggests, your REAL you is that which observes your thoughts. The real you is in the stillness between what your body perceives with its senses and the thoughts that arise in your mind. The real you is the sense of aliveness or Beingness that is having this experience of being a human in this body at this time and place, in this present moment.

Now, this is not to say that the items in the list are not important or that you shouldn't care about anything or not deal with your feelings, opinions, or experiences, or not make an effort to improve the world. The problem arises when you get so absorbed into your thoughts that you confuse your identity with your thoughts. If you hold an opinion so strongly that you get terribly offended or emotional when someone attacks your opinion or disagrees with it, this would be one example in which you have mistaken your opinion, your thought, and made it into your identity. Your ego has decided that your actual opinion is YOU, your identity, and to have your opinion attacked is to be attacked personally. This is an illusion and a terrible cause of much unnecessary suffering.

Become the observer, the witness, of your own thoughts and feelings and see what happens. This is the beginning of disidentification with the ego, your artificial self, the mask that hides the real you inside. This is also the beginning of "salvation" or "enlightenment" which the great religious traditions attempt to lead us towards.

Lost Christianity

2008-06-13T11:45:00.004-05:00

I just finished reading Lost Christianity by Jacob Needleman. The following is a quote from Father Sylvan, a mysterious, spiritually-advanced monk who crossed paths with Mr. Needleman. The author received the monk's journals, using them to explore the deeper levels of Christianity. From Father Sylvan's journal:

The idea of levels of Christianity may never again be known in the West. There is an intermediate level of Christianity which teaches the way that the higher level becomes distorted. We need the intermediate level. We need to observe how we lose Christianity, lose mysticism, lose the energy of God. Here lies the origin of sin and repentance, on the border between heaven and hell.

Modern people do not understand that the Christian ideals to which half the world attempts to conform comprise a description of the results of a specific inner act and inner inquiry. Mysticism is a result, a great result perhaps, of the inner inquiry; but everything is corrupted when I confuse inner work with the results of inner work.

To experience love for God or my neighbor, even for an instant, is no less a result than mystical experience. To be virtuous is a result. To have faith is a result. Similarly, wisdom and compassion are results.

All corruption of tradition begins with the confusion and mixing of inner work with the results of inner work. Jesus saw that the Judaism of his time had fallen into this confusion and that no one was practicing the inner discipline free from the expectation or assumption of results.

And another quote from Father Sylvan:

In a certain sense, the problem of Christianity is not that something has been hidden, but that not enough has stayed hidden.

Fascinating stuff! I think this connects very well with what Maurice Nicoll explores in The New Man:

The idea behind all sacred writing is to convey a higher meaning than the literal words contain, the truth of which must be seen by Man internally. This higher, concealed, inner, or esoteric, meaning, cast in the words and sense-images of ordinary usage, can only be grasped by the understanding, and it is exactly here that the first difficulty lies in conveying higher meaning to Man. A person's literal level of understanding is not necessarily equal to grasping psychological meaning.

And this, also from The New Man:

The Gospels are from beginning to end all about this possible self-evolution. They are psychological documents. They are about the psychology of this possible inner development - that is, about what a man must think, feel, and do in order to reach a new level of understanding. The Gospels are not about the affairs of life, save indirectly, but about this central idea - namely, that Man internally is a seed capable of a definite growth. Man is compared with a seed capable of a definite evolution. As he is, Man is incomplete, unfinished. A man can bring about his own evolution, his own completion, individually. If he does not wish to do this he need not. He is then called grass - that is, burned up as useless. This is the teaching of the Gospels. But this teaching can be given neither directly nor by external compulsion. A man must begin to understand for himself before he can receive it. You cannot make anyone understand by force, by law.

So if we take what Father Sylvan and Maurice Nicoll have said, we get an impression that what we think we know about Christianity could be only a very simplistic and superficial understanding, maybe even a grossly distorted understanding. The depth of truth concealed in the Gospels has probably been beyond the comprehension of the vast majority of humanity for centuries, let alone much of the hierarchy of the Church which has tried to convey those truths. Contrast this with Ken Wilber's concepts of the states and stages of development in Integral Theory. Western civilization has only recently started to emerge from the mythic/ethnocentric stage of development in the past century or two (perhaps as much as 70% of humanity is still at the mythic stage today). If the Gospels are read and comprehended from a mythic, ethnocentric stage of consciousness, then it would make sense why much of humanity has failed to grasp the deeper meaning of the Gospels. This is not to criticize people at the mythic stage. All humans and societies and civilizations progress through stages of development, from lower to higher. But what do we do with this situation, if anything? How do we help that 70% move up to a higher stage of consciousness? Should they be helped or not? Can the "lost Christianity" be rediscovered and be a catalyst for humanity's spiritual development?

Eudaimonia

2008-06-05T12:59:00.005-05:00

There's a wonderful little article on the Oprah web site about five traits of happy people. Here is a quote from the article:

Cobbled from the Greek eu ("good") and daimon ("spirit" or "deity"), eudaimonia means striving toward excellence based on one's unique talents and potential—Aristotle considered it to be the noblest goal in life. In his time, the Greeks believed that each child was blessed at birth with a personal daimon embodying the highest possible expression of his or her nature. One way they envisioned the daimon was as a golden figurine that would be revealed by cracking away an outer layer of cheap pottery (the person's baser exterior). The effort to know and realize one's most golden self—"personal growth," in today's lingo—is now the central concept of eudaimonia, which has also come to include continually taking on new challenges and fulfilling one's sense of purpose in life.

I think this is such a wonderful concept! I hadn't heard of eudaimonia before but it really resonates with me as encapsulating something I have been seeking since childhood. I think part of the path of becoming a fully conscious and enlightened human being involves this innate drive towards perfection and fulfillment; of striving towards the best that you can be and fulfilling your life's purpose.

The idea of the "baser exterior" that hides "one's most golden self" can also refer to the way in which our ego, desires, appetites, and attachments, can obscure and block us from getting to know our true inner self (part of the classic conflict between the animal nature versus the rational mind). It makes sense that if you begin to crack apart that false outer layer that you start to tune into that authenticity of knowing your true self, which in turns directs you toward following your life's purpose, which in turn brings real happiness. I am reminded again of Joseph Campbell's famous statement, "Follow your bliss."

Eudaimonia might also correspond to one of the major ideals in Freemasonry, represented by the metaphorical stone of one's self. Through inner work and right conduct the stone is transformed and perfected. What was raw, wild, and unfocused, given to us as a gift by God and nature to carve into being, becomes something beautiful, real, and perfected. The challenge and the path for all human beings is to recognize that this work needs to be done. To leave one's stone, one's self, undeveloped and unknown is to abandon the great potential that we have been given. To only see the "outer layer of cheap pottery" and to mistake it as our true self is to waste our potential and only live within a superficial experience of being.

Goal & Activity Log

2008-05-30T15:04:00.005-05:00

The above image is a snippet of a spreadsheet I use to keep track of my progress on certain goals. The overall purpose is NOT to try and accomplish each goal every single day. Instead, it is an observation tool to see how much balance I'm creating in my life. Making a little bit of progress each day on a few goals is better than very sporadic or infrequent progress or no progress at all. Consciousness and awareness of one's actions is key. After a period of time the chart shows me if I have neglected any goals or if I have spent too much time on certain goals but not on others. A balanced life leads to fulfillment.

A summary explanation of the goals:

Exercise - about 10 minutes of bicycle and then some strength training and back exercises.

Holosync - my meditation program on audio CDs. Usually a half hour or hour long.

Journal - keeping my handwritten diary up to date.

Catholic Formation - this includes going to church, studying with a private tutor to become a Catholic, spiritual reading, learning, and prayer. There are some really great online study groups at CCEL.

Big Mind or Shadow - these are practices from Integral Life Practice. You could say that the Big Mind meditation helps you experience god-consciousness. Shadow work (i.e. the 3-2-1 Process) involves dealing with difficult people, emotions, memories, situations, etc.

ACIM Lesson - study of one of the daily workbook lessons from A Course in Miracles.

Learning - listening to audio or viewing videos from the Integral web sites, Gnosis.org, Theosophical Society, Speaking of Faith, Eckhart Tolle with Oprah, LibriVox.org, and anything else I find interesting that adds to my knowledge. It helps to use my pocket MP3 player so I can listen and do chores at the same time. The Internet is really a treasure trove for learning!

Write my book - progress towards writing my book on esoteric Christianity.

Compose music - progress on writing about 20 minutes of music for a small string ensemble.

Blog post - writing posts for my blog, like this one!

Morse Code - now that I've got my ham license, I want to learn the code before I get on the air. I'm still mastering the alphabet.

Special Projects - this relates to a list of various special chores around the house, such as organizing all my photographs into albums, cleaning out closets, redecorating, etc.

Volunteering - time spent helping my condo association; and eventually I would like to volunteer at a nearby hospital.

Friends & Family - hanging out with people.

Dining out - not necessarily something I want to do too much, as it can get very expensive very fast. By monitoring my activity I can help to avoid excessive spending.

Library, Park, Museum - free fun activities that get me out of the house. With 6 months off from a day job it could be easy for me to become a hermit at home. I have to watch that I make sure to get outdoors, enjoy the weather, and socialize.

Mindfulness

2008-05-29T19:42:00.004-05:00

The older I get, the more I find that my level of mindfulness determines my level of happiness. I would also include related qualities, such as having clearly defined goals, self-discipline, mental clarity and concentration. Without mindfulness (i.e. the awareness of one's own thoughts, feelings, and actions), the mind can just wander off all over the place, skipping from one association to the next, one fear or memory after another, a tendency that Buddhists vividly refer to as "monkey mind". Without mindfulness you can feel as if your life is passing you by, as if you have no control and time is being "stolen" out from under you. And everything starts with the mind first - if the mind is a mess, then the feelings and actions that result will also be a mess (and vice versa).

When I was a teenager and had unlimited free time during summer vacations, I found that if occupied myself with working on my goals and interests that time would just fly by very joyfully. My mind would be so wrapped up in accomplishing goals or learning something new that I didn't wander off into other thoughts or concerns. My mind kicked into gear and focused on one thing and that was the happiest time of all. Such experiences are often described as being in a state of "flow".

But why is it so hard to maintain mindfulness? Without self-discipline to put mindfulness into practice, one can fall into a lesser passive state - sitting for hours watching TV, browsing the Internet, playing video games, drinking alcohol, etc. After wallowing in the passive state you can end up feeling like you didn't accomplish anything. The time flew by with little or no benefit and you might as well have been asleep! Now, this is not to say that mindless leisure and relaxation do not have a valuable purpose. I am all in favor of a little daydreaming or mindless fun activities once in a while to recharge my energy level. The problem comes when you realize that copious amounts of time escaped into nothingness! Weeks, months, years!

Here are a couple of nice quotes from Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

To control attention means to control experience, and therefore the quality of life. Information reaches consciousness only when we attend to it. Attention acts as a filter between outside events and our experience of them. How much stress we experience depends more on how well we control attention, than on what happens to us. The effect of physical pain, of a monetary loss, of a social snub depends on how much attention we pay to it, how much room we allow for it in consciousness. The more psychic energy we invest in a painful event, the more real it becomes, and the more entropy it introduces in consciousness.

And this:

The only way to take over the ownership of life is by learning to direct psychic energy in line with our own intentions.

And this fits in well with another life-changing book I love, The Success Principles by Jack Canfield. A quote from the very first chapter:

If you want to be successful, you have to take 100% responsibility for everything that you experience in your life. This includes the level of your achievements, the results you produce, the quality of your relationships, the state of your health, and physical fitness, your income, your debts, your feelings - everything!

One part of my daily mindfulness practice now includes a spreadsheet in which I monitor the status of my current goals. Every day I check off whether or not I spent some time working towards each goal. This has really helped me tremendously to see where my time has been going! In the past I would create "to-do" lists or schedules, which invariably always seemed to fail. I would not do what I told myself to do, leading to guilty feelings and further procrastination; a vicious feedback loop of failure. But this is different! It is simple self-observation of one's actions and use of time. If you can simply observe yourself, without judgment, you can see what you have been doing with your time and then make adjustments or changes as you go along. It helps to create balance in your use of time, which in turn helps to facilitate the "flow" experience, leading to a higher quality of experiencing life itself.

Tomorrow I will share with you a screen shot of my spreadsheet chart and goals.

Gratitude of Former Paid Employment

2008-05-09T20:18:00.007-05:00

Today was the last day of the “day job” and it still doesn’t seem real. Maybe because it has been yet another week of sleep deprivation, making me feel like a zombie (a lamentable condition of unreality). It feels like I have been going to the day job, day after day after day, since forever. Hard to believe that when Monday morning comes along I will not have to get up before the crack of dawn, jump on a bus, hike many a block of Minneapolis skyway to fill a chair in a cube farm, and stare, glassy-eyed, at a computer monitor for 9 hours straight. Now I have the leisure to stay at home and stare at my own monitor for as many hours, days, and weeks on end as I can tolerate (hopefully NOT – I am getting tired being chained to computers! Especially with the tantalizing edge of summer emblazoning the sky with warmth and electrifying the grass in hues of vivid green!).

I am so grateful to have met my coworkers. Lots of really excellent people, and the best supervisor anyone could possibly ever imagine. I feel a twinge of regret that even after spending about a year and a half with these people that there always remained a few fascinating characters that I never really got to know at all; and even the ones I thought I knew, still left me wondering how much more was hidden in their hearts that I would never know. Our lives intersected these many months and now I am moving on to other things; and, in turn, each one of them will be moving on and inhabiting their own realities as well, going about living their individual lives, intersecting with other people in an infinite web of connections. It is so true that you don’t realize what you have until you’ve lost it. Now that I contemplate this latest turning point in my life, I feel immense gratitude that my life intersected with all of these beautiful, genuine people. I hope I can keep in touch with them in the future, or at least keep them in my thoughts and prayers from time to time, wondering where they are, what they are doing. Bless them all!

If only life were long enough and deep enough that we could know other human beings in more authentic ways, in their souls. How many times do we pass by our co-workers, people with whom we spend an enormous portion of our waking life, making idle chat that only touches the surface of lived experience, when each person holds within himself or herself an unfathomable world of consciousness, memories, perceptions, and potential greatness? It is impossible for any of us to know what it is like to be another person, to be inside their eyes and minds and perceive the outer and inner worlds from their unique viewpoint, as well as vice versa. When I think about this, I am awestruck by the immensity of life! Each human being a self-contained universe, known only unto itself! Such a wonder!

I passed the test

2008-05-03T14:30:00.003-05:00

A shiny new copy of a Morse code key, similar to one used by my great-grandfather as a telegraph operator for Western Union. This is the famous Vibroplex "bug".

I took the exam for the Technician class license of Amateur radio this morning. I passed it! In about 15 days I should be able to find out my callsign from an FCC website. This is so exciting! I've been thinking about joining Ham Radio since I was a kid. Getting a callsign will be like getting a new name or identity.

It was a little awkward (and funny) for me at the testing site. I was the only female in a room full of about 30 or 40 middle-aged white guys, and probably one of the few under the age of 40. Once we were allowed to begin our tests, I zipped through mine in about 2 or 3 minutes at most, raised my hand, and had my test graded and reviewed by the examiners. One examiner made a humorous glance at another, bugging his eyes out, and then later giving me the thumbs up signal that I had passed. I was the first to finish my test. I didn't stick around to see how long the others took. Taking a zillion practice tests on this site made a big difference, but I already knew most of it just from playing with shortwave radios over the years. Plus the Technician exam is super easy anyway.

Now my next goal is to master the code this summer and save up for a key, antenna, and HF rig by the end of the year. The Vibroplex bugs look cool, and would certainly be nostalgic for me to connect with my great-grandfather, but I'm thinking an iambic key would be easier to use. These keys look pretty spiffy and are expertly-crafted works of art.

Theosophy & Morse Code

2008-04-30T22:47:00.004-05:00

The past few weeks have been so hectic! Yet also so rich with possibilities and glimmers of joy and a vision for greater potential and endeavors in the next few months. May 9th will be my last day at "the day job," with six glorious months of freedom to pursue some old and new dreams.

This Saturday, May 3rd, I will take the exam to get my first Ham radio license. This has been a dream of mine since probably the age of 9 or so, when my Grandpa Martin gave me his old Zenith Trans-Oceanic shortwave radio and a clunky old crystal-powered police scanner. Ever since then I have been hooked to shortwave radio, scanner radio, CB radio, and amateur ("Ham") radio (with offshoots into astronomy and playing with electronic kits). For years and years I was either too desperately shy to pursue the Ham license or too busy wandering off into other hobbies (Taoism & Chinese, anyone?). One of my goals this summer is to master Morse Code thanks to a really nice guy's excellent resource, so I can chat with people around the world and exchange QSL cards. Sure, people are chatting 24 hours a day on the Internet, but there is still just something magical about stringing up some flimsy little piece of wire and tapping out an esoteric language through the atmosphere on a few watts of power. It is miraculous!

Speaking of esoteric, I have also joined the Theosophical Society and look forward to attending my first local meeting in a few weeks. I feel a greater urgency to expand my search after the deeper truths in life, something that can't simply be found from sitting around at home reading books all day. You can have lots of nice thoughts and philosophical musings, but a genuine, deeply lived experience of the Divine is the ultimate goal in life. I sense an inner expansion of awareness, a desire to get out and find fellow-seekers on the path to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Life is so much more than what we perceive so superficially with our physical senses. I'm not talking about psychic powers or auras or flying through the air or things of that nature (not that I'm against such beliefs; but such things really don't resonate with me). I'm referring instead to an inner knowing, a divine spark in which you just know, deep down in an intuitive-heart way, that there is so much more to life beneath the surface. As William Blake famously said,

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

In a way there is an overlap between the mystical vision, of seeing the world, everyone and everything, with a new perception, and using Morse Code to communicate through our globe's invisible atmosphere, zipping at the speed of light across continents. Both require a new awareness, a mental clarity or vision. Both are like a newfound world, a new language, a new sense of self and other. Damn, isn't life so kickass fantastic and exciting?! Let's live every moment!

What makes you excited about life? Do you ever wonder that if you should die tomorrow whether you had truly lived? Life is always here, right now, in this present moment. The question is whether we can wake up to it in the now-moment or whether time will run out before we can fully realize it. I believe that is why we exist - to seek and find that answer.

Time & Interiority

2008-04-16T16:28:00.005-05:00

Our time is hungry in spirit. In some unnoticed way we have managed to inflict severe surgery on ourselves. We have separated soul from experience, become utterly taken up with the outside world and allowed the interior life to shrink. Like a stream that disappears underground, there remains on the surface only the slightest trickle. When we devote no time to the inner life, we lose the habit of soul. We become accustomed to keeping things at surface level. The deeper questions about who we are and what we are here for visit us less and less. If we allow time for soul, we will come to sense its dark and luminous depth. If we fail to acquaint ourselves with soul, we will remain strangers in our own lives.

- John O'Donohue, from his book, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

I am starving for free time; for simple, basic, unstructured and open-ended free time that allows the mind to wander into secret uncharted territories. Our society is too obsessed with keeping busy and doing rather than being. Every minute has to be somehow "productive," as if we are our own mini factories of industriousness. Even after all these years without a television to devour my few free hours, I'm still catching myself being a slave to the clock and judging my use of time. There should be a law against the 40-hour work week. Supposedly the people of the Medieval ages could get by just fine working for 20 hours a week to sustain life. How is it we have become so much more uncivilized today than those people back in the "Dark Ages"?

Silence, daydreaming, and stillness. These things are as vital to me as air and water. If I go along for too many days, whisked away into busyness and socializing and chores, without a chance for my spirit to catch its breath and my mind to find stillness, my inner sense of sanity starts to crumble. I get anxious and frantic, like a trapped animal. It is hard for me to imagine how others can constantly be on the move, or socialize for hours day after day, or find quiet alone-time to be lonely and scary. If I could get away with living as a hermit in some far remote place I think I could do just fine.

Here is a tip from Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn:

The essence of mindfulness in daily life is to make every moment you have your own. Even if you are hurrying, which is sometimes necessary, then at least hurry mindfully. Be aware of your breathing, of the need to move fast, and do it with awareness until you don't have to hurry anymore and then let go and relax intentionally. If you find your mind making lists and compelling you to get every last thing on them done, then bring awareness to your body and the mental and physical tension that may be mounting and remind yourself that some of it can probably wait. If you get really close to the edge, stop completely and ask yourself, "Is it worth dying for?" or "Who is running where?"

View of Catholicism

2008-04-03T18:17:00.003-05:00

I submitted a response to a survey from the NPR program, Speaking of Faith, on a potential future radio program on "The Humanness of Catholic Identity." Here were the questions they asked:

If you are or were Catholic, we'd like to hear your perspectives on what anchors and unsettles you in this vast tradition. We're also interested in the hopes and concerns you have for the church, now and into the future. What do you take solace in and find beautiful about this faith of nearly two millennia and more than 1.3 billion members spanning all the cultures of the globe? What hopes, questions, and concerns are on your mind as you ponder the state of the Catholic Church and its future?

Any my response:

I find solace and beauty in the esoteric dimension of Catholicism. The focus by the media, and the overall public perception, seems almost exclusively centered on the external, dogmatic aspects of the Church (i.e. prescriptions on behavior, morality, arguing over "right" versus "wrong", etc.). There is a place for dogma and rules, but, to me, the heart of Catholicism is experienced in its inner truth, its mysticism, esotericism, and contemplative practices; it is about coming to the realization of a genuine, lived experience, within one's own being, of God or Christ-consciousness, an experience far beyond following rules or commandments on pieces of paper. I find solace and beauty in the Liturgy, contemplative prayer, Gregorian Chant, the rosary, architecture, and art. I find solace and beauty in the saints and writers like St. John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, Teilhard de Chardin, Meister Eckhart, the Desert Fathers, as well as contemporary theologians like Thomas Keating and Willgis Jager. Through centuries of tradition I find a deeply profound connection to my European cultural background and ancestors; I can participate in the Mass and experience a realization that I am part of something larger than myself; a connection to Spirit that binds me to God and to my human family in the past, present, and future.

Yes, there are both good and bad aspects to the Church. Yes, there has been much evil done in its name, all of which should be recognized and atoned for and learned from by the Church’s members and leadership. Like a family, there have been and always will be segments of the Church that don’t get along, with skeletons hiding in closets, and areas begging for reform or healing. Yet somehow the Church keeps going strong, accepting and integrating diversity, differing cultures, and differences of opinion. I find beauty and solace in the miracle that such an institution has lasted for two millennia. My hope is that the Church, in moving forward into the future, will be able to look at itself honestly and address any neglected issues it needs to face.

We live in an age that is terribly polarized, and that polarization has infected the Church as well. My hope for the Church is that we will find the patience and wisdom to step back and examine ourselves deeply; to look at where we have come from and where we are going. In the words of the American philosopher, Ken Wilber, the Church might find a way to move forward by "transcending and including" those aspects of itself that have become polarized or marginalized. We can include and integrate the liberal and conservative expressions of Catholicism while still recognizing and validating those differences. We can include and integrate the rational and mystical minds, finding value and meaning in both, moving forward holding both. My hope is to one day see a healthy, holistic, "integral" Catholic Church, comfortable in both its dogmatic and mystical aspects. A Church that is proud of its traditions, practices, and cultural expressions, yet mature and honest enough to learn from its mistakes, take what is good, true, and beautiful, and throw out what does not serve Christ’s ultimate message of "love one another as I have loved you."

Looking Ahead

2008-04-01T20:29:00.002-05:00

Time is flying by so fast but I'm looking forward to a carefree 6 month period to do anything I want, hopefully starting in a month or so. Creativity requires complete and total uninterrupted time; complete and total time for contemplation and spiritual exploration. My two main goals are to (1) write a non-fiction book in the overall area of spirituality/philosophy/self-help, and (2) compose enough music to fill an entire audio CD of around 60 to 70 minutes (yes, of course quality should be more important than quantity, but I feel I am really lacking in the quantity area for the past decade).

Sorry for this short post! I leave you with a quote from one of my all-time favorite books, The Outsider, by Colin Wilson:

We can summarize [William] Blake's argument briefly: All men should possess a 'visionary faculty'. Men do not, because they live wrongly. They live tensely, under too much strain, 'getting and spending'. But this loss of the visionary faculty is not entirely man's fault, it is partly the fault of the world he lives in, that demands that men should spend a certain amount of their time 'getting and spending' to stay alive.

The visionary faculty comes naturally to all men. When they are relaxed enough, every leaf of every tree in the world, every speck of dust, is a separate world capable of producing infinite pleasure. If these fail to do so, it is man's own fault for wasting his time and energy on trivialities. The ideal is the contemplative poet, the 'sage', who cares about having only enough money and food to keep him alive, and never 'takes thought for the morrow'. This is a way of thought that comes more easily to the Eastern than to the Western mind.

Restless

2008-03-09T21:37:00.002-05:00

The past month or so has been very inwardly tumultuous for me. I am restless and anxious. I feel like I'm on the edge of some important and necessary changes in my life; a period of chaos before I can evolve to a higher stage of development. Sometimes I catch myself feeling so joyous and excited about life! There is so much I want to do with my life! And then there are always a million things to worry about, the chores to maintain one's life, the day job, etc. the basic stuff of life that can be rather boring. There is always the constant struggle between one's mundane life and the desire for an extraordinary life. I feel I am getting closer and closer to "following my bliss" or even that I might have found it already and have been living in it for a while and wasn't consciously aware of it. I am so grateful and amazed about life!

A recap of what I've been doing and thinking lately. It has been a whirlwind period:

I've been working on some music I'm really excited about. As soon as I have it completed (hopefully in a month or two) I will post a link here.

Books I've been reading: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, The Life We are Given by Leonard & Murphy, Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and The Spiritual Guide by Michael Molinos. Soon I will read A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber, and A Guide for the Perplexed by E.F. Schumacher.

Saw the film, Into Great Silence. Amazing, real, beautiful, and deeply lived lives. The guys in this monastery probably have a deeper experience of life in one year than most of us do in a lifetime! This reminds me I need to get back and pay a visit down south to this place. Stunning! If only we could all live our lives with such focus and intensity.

Visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and focused intensely on three rooms full of Medieval and early Renaissance art. I've been spending some time learning about the Middle Ages, its art and history. I didn't really know much at all about these subjects. I hope to make future trips to the museum, ideally once every couple of months. It is so worthwhile and meaningful to learn new subjects and really spend a lot of time learning and thinking. It is so easy to get stuck with a few interests or hobbies. I need to break out into new territories of learning.

I experienced a terrible phone call at my day job a month ago. It really disturbed me and shook my foundation. I need to do some shadow work on it. I will share my writings on that in the future. It is still percolating and reverberating in my psyche.

I've decided I want to write a book! I am currently brainstorming topics I'd like to write about before narrowing it down into something specific, with chapter contents and a main title. I've wanted to write a book for years and years. Life is short and isn't going to stop for me to get my act together! Now is the time.
Continuing to make progress with my ILP Kit. Almost daily exercise and meditation are now part of my routine, even after a week with a nasty flu. If I go a day or two without exercise I really start to miss it, a feeling I never had before. And I can tell how much of an impact exercise has had in rehabilitating my back from the herniated disc. I have had absolutely no lower back or leg pain since early February! It is miraculous!
I'm really excited about the whole idea of an integral life! There is something great about pursuing and applying an integral approach to life and living. One of my biggest goals in life has always been to live life to the fullest and cultivate myself to my highest potential. Why else are we here on this Earth? Is life not a fantastic opportunity?

Gratitude & Surrender

2008-02-12T05:54:00.000-06:00

I am again amazed at life. A month ago was another trial of pain, infirmity, and uncertainty. Even after the facet block procedure, I was not sure I would ever feel normal again or stand up straight. Things like going bowling or learning how to dance seemed like pretty unrealistic activities for the foreseeable future. But now, after ten consecutive days of consistent, intensive exercise, I almost feel as good as new, maybe even stronger than before. It is miraculous that one day you can wake up and barely move or walk without pain, and on another day feel like nothing happened, as if the past few months were just a bad dream or a little annoyance. The pain is almost 100% gone, and the stiff muscles have almost entirely disappeared as well. I have gone from feeling bent and broken, to feeling fluid motion and strength and vibrancy. So strange! And I'm not complaining, of course! Just very amazed at how quickly things can change! I am very grateful!

What am I to make of this overall experience? Certainly I do not want to take good health for granted. There is no guarantee that I shall not have relapses in the future. And on the other hand, I don't want to forget what I went through either. I believe there was real value in the entire experience. It was a doorway to different states of being and perceiving. It has forced me to take better care of my physical health (not that I really neglected it; I just hadn't paid much attention to my body or made consistent effort to exercise regularly), and even to realize there is a spiritual dimension to one's body. There are the so-called divisions of body, mind, and spirit, but I am starting to realize more and more that these three realities co-exist integrally, in an inter-dependent way. The body is not just an organism or collection of biological systems, separate from mind and spirit; it is, instead, the intersection or crossroads of the mind and spirit united together. The body is the material, visible manifestation of mind and spirit. Outward and inner work together.

The mind is really the most powerful tool we have in this life. I truly believe that if I had had a very different attitude about my experiences with back pain (such as anger, or a sense of powerless victimhood), I would still be struggling to walk to work every morning, or jumping out of my skin every time I coughed. I think we, as a society, really underestimate the power of our minds to create (or destroy) our health. The power of our minds must also extend into everything else, our perceptions of reality, our perceptions of each other, other cultures, other nations, other religions, and globally, towards the environment and the planet.

Lately I have also grown to appreciate the spiritual notion of surrender. By spiritual, I am referring to the positive sense of the term. I think there is some confusion that leads most people to assume that it ONLY means to give up, or accept things as they are (and usually counter to one's desires), to stop trying to make things different; it usually has a defeatist connotation, which I believe is missing the point of the deeper meaning.

Surrendering can be practiced in different ways, outwardly versus inwardly. To me, "to surrender" can refer to one's mental and spiritual attitude, as an inner state, separate from one's outward behavior or external actions. In the positive sense, I can surrender my attachment to a certain outcome, rather than getting upset that life isn't going the way I want it to. I can surrender my definitions of what is "right" and what is "wrong", and rest in the acceptance of the present moment; I can just allow everything to be as it is, observing it, witnessing it, without needing to attach labels or judgments on experiences, people, or events.

In the case of my back pain, I really tried hard to stop wanting or wishing for any different outcome other than what I was experiencing in the moment. Now, this does NOT mean that I also stopped trying to change the situation outwardly. Outwardly I still went to the doctor, the physical therapist, and added more exercise, healthier foods, and so on. Outwardly, I made every possible effort to remedy the situation. Yet, inwardly, I surrendered my desires and attachments to specific outcomes. I rested my mind and heart and energy. I rested in the mystery of life and God. Since I didn't really know what was going to happen, one way or the other, I found it much easier, inwardly, to rest in a state of not knowing, not attaching and not desiring. It's like the weather - you could be caught out in a sudden torrential rainstorm - does it change anything to curse the rain, or wish for it to stop? The rain just is, it exists, it's happening in this present moment. It is neither good or bad, unless we attach a label to it. Inwardly, to surrender to the rain is to accept the fact that it is raining and just let it be itself; yet outwardly one can calmly and peacefully grab an umbrella or step into a building. We can do what we need to do without the mental agonizing of unfulfilled wishes. A clear, uncluttered mental and spiritual attitude can make it easier for our actions and behaviors to flow naturally and seamlessly. Life is only difficult when we add our mental baggage into the mix.

Hodge Podge of an Update

2008-02-04T13:57:00.000-06:00

All sorts of things going on with me lately. Here is a breakdown of various things:

My back pain has improved considerably. The facet block procedure worked to a large extent, erasing the pain from my lower back. Still some minor aches and constricted muscles, but at least it is manageable to live with. I'm continuing to do exercises recommended by my physical therapist, plus I have added 10 minutes of exercise bike daily.
For the last couple of weeks my husband and I have been steeping ourselves in the Integral Approach of Ken Wilber. I got a bunch of his books, joined Integral Naked and Integral Spiritual Center, plus started listening to 12 hours of an interview with Wilber on audio CDs. We can hardly wait each evening to sit down and listen to the next installment! Integral theory is so fantastic! I really think it is the new frontier for making sense of ourselves and of humanity. It provides a multi-dimensional map for charting growth, development and evolution from an individual, societal, and global perspective. It is really amazing. I will write more on integral in future posts. Check out this Wiki page on Ken Wilber. For beginners, read A Brief History of Everything.
Speaking of integral, we're continuing to use our Integral Life Practice kit, renewing commitments to exercise, meditate, and eat healthier. Despite the day job, I am using Holosync much more consistently. There really is increased mental clarity and focus from regular listening to Holosync.
I've been composing more music lately, as well as cultivating a more intuitive, spiritual approach to composition. More on that later.
Wednesday is already the start of Lent. I'm still trying to figure out what extra spiritual practices I want to add into my life. I'm exciting to participate more fully this year.
Books I've been reading lately:
- a translation of Meister Eckhart by Matthew Fox
- Integral Spirituality by Ken Wilber
- Swami Nijananda's commentary on Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence

More later on the Integral Approach!

Transcending the self for the Self

2008-01-25T12:25:00.000-06:00

The following quotes are so exciting! I came across the technique of "witnessing" many months ago through the work of Bill Harris, of Holosync and Centerpointe. The following exercise and quotes, however, are from Ken Wilber, in his book, No Boundary. Basically, there is the idea that our true "Self" (as opposed to "self" with a small letter 's'), is who we really are, our eternal soul, which ultimately is part of, or one with, God (look up the concept of panentheism, as opposed to pantheism). The small-letter "self" is our ego-identified self, the self we've created and grown attached to. We get attached to that "self" and think that it's the only reality. Our ego-self masks who we really are. If you can get in touch with your authentic, eternal Self, you will ultimately see that there is nothing to fear and that there is no loss, no death, and no separation. Our ego-self is an illusion, masking our oneness with God and with every one and every thing.

Through the witnessing technique, you take the perspective of your Transcendent "Self", observing your small-letter "self".

The "Witnessing" Technique for Experiencing your Transcendent Self:

I have a body, but I am not my body. I can see and feel my body, and what can be seen and felt is not the true Seer. My body may be tired or excited, sick or healthy, heavy or light, but that has nothing to do with my inward I. I have a body, but I am not my body.

I have desires, but I am not my desires. I can know my desires, and what can be known is not the true Knower. Desires come and go, floating through my awareness, but they do not affect my inward I. I have desires but I am not desires.

I have emotions, but I am not my emotions. I can feel and sense my emotions, and what can be felt and sensed is not the true Feeler. Emotions pass through me, but they do not affect my inward I. I have emotions but I am not emotions.

I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts. I can know and intuit my thoughts, and what can be known is not the true Knower. Thoughts come to me and thoughts leave me, but they do not affect my inward I. I have thoughts but I am not my thoughts.
[End of Exercise; additional Wilber quotes follow]

Thus, any emotion, sensation, thought, memory, or experience that disturbs you is simply one with which you have exclusively identified yourself, and the ultimate resolution of the disturbance is simply to disidentify with it. You cleanly let all of them drop away by realizing that they are not you -- since you can see them, they cannot be the true Seer and Subject. Since they are not your real self, there is no reason whatsoever for you to identify with them, hold on to them, or allow your self to be bound by them.

Thus, your personal mind-and-body may be in pain, or humiliation, or fear, but as long as you abide as the witness of these affairs, as if from on high, they no longer threaten you, and thus you are no longer moved to manipulate them, wrestle with them, or subdue them.

To witness these states is to transcend them.

Thus, we can understand why Patanjali, the codifier of yoga in India, said that ignorance is the identification of the Seer with the instruments of seeing.
If you are at all successful in developing this type of detached witnessing (it does take time), you will be able to look upon the events occurring in your mind-and-body with the very same impartiality that you would look upon clouds floating through the sky, water rushing in a stream, rain cascading on a roof, or any other objects in your field of awareness. In other words, your relationship to your mind-and-body becomes the same as your relationship to all other objects.

Transcendence in and through Pain

2008-01-20T17:56:00.000-06:00

A couple of weeks ago I had a pain relapse from my herniated disc. It returned to the debilitating state as it was when it all started in October 2007, and for a few days I could barely move or go to work. So on Thursday, January 10th, I had a minor medical procedure called "facet blocks" to cauterize some nerves along five sets of vertebrae that were channeling pain signals to my brain from the "slipped" disc. Mercifully, that procedure was largely successful, as the worst of the sharpest, stabbing pain was greatly reduced or eliminated. I don't feel 100% perfect now, but at least the situation can be endured and I can go to work and do some regular activities.

Not a day has gone by since October when I have not thought about pain, how to respond to it, how to fix it, and how to make sense of it. I have certainly had my days of frustration and anger and sadness. More and more I am getting the impression that Western medicine really doesn't have all the answers, or a quick fix (other than pills), and many of my experiences with doctors have been quite negative. Not only do treatment recommendations differ from one doctor to the next, but most doctors I have met (so far) were complete jerks (to put it mildly!), lacking even an ounce of compassion or humanity. Over and over again, I have also run into people who have dealt with back pain through surgeries, medication, and all the other usual Western methods, and it seems like one horror story after another. Many times the treatment only serves to make the condition and pain worse, or leaving the patient a veritable drug addict. I am currently really at a fork in the road when it comes to knowing where to go from here. My faith in Western medicine has never been lower (not that I'm not thankful for the facet block procedure, which was really minor and the least invasive action I could take, but it seems like my options from now on could lead to a lifelong quagmire of surgeries or experimental guesswork). Ultimately I think it rests on me to keep a positive attitude and cultivate a larger, spiritual meaning to make sense of this experience and to live with it. There must be a way to endure this positively and constructively. I do believe in the power of the mind to heal the body. I do believe things happen for a reason and that there is much for me to learn from this pain.

From a spiritual standpoint, I have found some new and beautiful ways for understanding pain. The following is a quote by Hazrat Inayay Khan, a Sufi mystic and author, from his book The Unity of Religious Ideals:

In reality God is within you, and as He is within you, you are the instrument of God and through you God experiences the external world and you are the best instrument of conveying yourself to God.

I also found a similar perspective from reading Willigis Jager: the idea that not only is God within us, but He is living through us and experiencing our lives in and through us. God is living through this pain with me; I am not alone in enduring it. It is like the idea of Christ's cross: that we each have a cross to bear in this world, but that it is imbued with even more significance if we can see it through Christ's sufferings. The experience of Christ is a mirror image of our own. If we can follow in His footsteps, pain can really become something that helps us evolve to a higher state of being and consciousness.

The Buddhist concept of karma also adds another dimension of meaning, and I really think it is not much different than the Christian idea of surrendering to divine providence. The following is an amazing quote from Ken Wilber:

I’ve dealt extensively elsewhere with the concept of karma and illness—in Grace and Grit, for example, and more recently in Excerpt A of volume 2 of the Kosmos Trilogy. But it remains one of the most confused areas of understanding imaginable. I’m not going to get into it at any length here, but just let me make a few very brief points. Many people hear of situations like this, or perhaps suffer similar ones themselves, and imagine it must somehow be retribution for some horrendous crime in one’s past. But keep in mind that karma doesn’t mean that what happened earlier in this life is finally catching up with you; the orthodox doctrine of karma actually means something that happened to you in a previous life. According to the doctrine of karma, in this life you are reading a book that you wrote in a previous life. Many people draw the erroneous conclusion that because, e.g., they used to yell at their spouses, they now have throat cancer—but that’s just not the way it works.

As a matter of fact, from at least one angle, the “bad things” that are happening to you now actually indicate a good fruition—it means your system is finally strong enough to digest the past karmic causes that led to your present rebirth. So if you were reborn—that is, if you are alive in a body right now—then you have already horrifically sinned, and unless you work it off in this lifetime, guess what? You’re coming back. Illness itself does not cause more karma; your attitude towards illness, however, does. Therefore, if you are undergoing some extremely difficult circumstances right now, and you can meet those difficulties with equanimity, wisdom, and virtue, then you are doubly lucky—the causes that led to your being reborn now are starting to surface and burn off, and you’re not generating any new karma while you burn them (as long as you meet them with equanimity and awareness).

I only mention this because all too often, people undergoing difficult circumstances of one variety or another add a type of New Age guilt or blame to an already difficult enough circumstance, and truly, that’s not only inappropriate, it’s inaccurate. If you would like to pursue some of these concepts in this more integral fashion, please check out Excerpt A. In the meantime, if you’re undergoing some sort of truly difficult or even horrific circumstances, please don’t kick yourself when you’re down. That, indeed, would create bad karma. The good news is that you are finally ready and able to burn off the karma that led to this rebirth, and this is good news indeed—if you meet it with love and openness and a smile.

From this perspective, the endurance of pain and suffering, and one's positive response to it, can become a very noble action, setting things right in the world, making corrections for past wrongs, turning a negative into a positive. This also seems to be the same message one gets from reading the lives of saints, Catholic or otherwise. Pain and suffering are facts of life and ultimately unavoidable. It's how we respond to it and make constructive use of it that make all the difference. We could either see ourselves as helpless victims of random chance, bad luck, or fate, or we could see it as a great opportunity given to us by God for a reason.

I will have much more to say on all of this in later posts. I am currently reading an analysis of Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence.

Jager on Religion, Spirituality & Esotericism

2008-01-07T06:30:00.000-06:00

The following quotes are from Benedictine monk and Zen master, Willigis Jager, from his book, Search for the Meaning of Life.

On spirituality versus religion:

I make a distinction between spirituality and religion. Spirituality teaches a path into experience and deals with what is experienced. Religion, by contrast, is instruction that has evolved into dogmatic theology. These dogmas do, in fact, derive from experience, but they have been absolutized, and only a few believers understand them in an experiential fashion. In esotericism there is instruction but no dogma. "Dogma" here relates to traveling a path to come to one's own experience.

These thoughts might give rise to the misunderstanding that esotericism could subsist all by itself. Not so. Religion needs the two pillars of esotericism and exotericism, otherwise it can easily fail to reach its goal.

A definition of "esotericism":

Ultimately esotericism is concerned with a new experiencing and grasping of reality. The true esoteric paths don't lead out of this world, but into the heart of the moment, into life. The point is to feel not contempt for the world, but an entirely new form of love for it. And with that we come to the essence of mysticism in both the East and the West: religion is life, and life is religion. When I experience the fact that my rising in the morning and putting on my slippers is a profoundly religious act, then I have recognized what religion is. But this is simply not possible without deep experience. In the Eucharist we solemnly proclaim that this is not just bread (in other words, not just form) but the essence of divinity appearing in this form. In the Eucharist we solemnly proclaim that nothing exists that is not God, which means that we actually ought to experience even our breakfast as one more way the Divine expresses itself. It is a sacred action to live one's life here and now. In the final analysis, the sacrament of the moment is nothing else but "living in the will of God." That is the way to happiness.

Profound Holosync Experience

2008-01-06T09:28:00.000-06:00

Over the last couple of weeks I have been pretty successful at returning to a regular daily meditation with my Holosync meditation CDs. I originally started Holosync around May 2006 and managed to listen almost daily for six months. Then with a change of job, and an addition of a commute, my listening became sporadic; maybe only a handful of sessions per month. I always longed for a way to get back into my Holosync and see the same sorts of growth and peak experiences that I had had in those first six months. I could really feel and see positive changes from Holosync, which I believe have lasted up to the present time. Those first six months were really amazing, and brought so much positive change, mental clarity, and emotional equilibrium.

So this morning's session was very nice. I've been listening to Awakening Level 1, Disc 4, for the past two weeks, half an hour per day, as recommended by the instructions. Today's session was so beautiful that I continued on for the full hour. During the end of the first half hour I experienced the sensation that my body just disappeared. It was like my mind was falling down into itself and my body just melted away and became a subtle, pulsing wave sensation. It was really incredibly beautiful and blissful; a feeling of just pure being-ness or wave-like energy. Perhaps it was a taste of the void or nothingness. It lasted for several minutes, into the second half hour. A few times I would catch myself observing myself, thinking, "Hey, this is cool! Let's keep this sensation going!"

I also observed, as usual, my thoughts wandering all over the place (from remembering certain chores I need to take care of today, to random thoughts, worries, and memories). Every time I would catch myself wandering, I would bring my focus back to a mantra, usually just the beginning phrase of the Rosary, "Hail Mary, Full of Grace". I've found that when I get focused on repeating a mantra while listening to Holosync that it can increase or maintain the blissed out feeling that Holosync creates. I think there is real potential for combining Holosync with other mental exercises for intensified growth.

Then as the hour of Holosync was gently fading away, I could hear the Sunday morning church bells softly pealing outside my window (I live near some churches). It was so beautiful and amazing! Today's Holosync meditation was truly exquisite.

10 Questions Video

2007-12-30T15:40:00.000-06:00

My brother sent me the following link and asked me what I thought. Here's the YouTube video:

10 questions that every intelligent Christian must answer

This was my response:

Thanks for the video! I used to ask exactly the same sorts of questions about 6 or 7 years ago, and would get very angry with Christianity, until I learned that there are higher states of consciousness, awareness, perception, and interpretation. There are many ways to see and comprehend our existence and many ways to explain why life exists. This topic (i.e. the credibility of faith, religion, believing in God, etc.) is HUGE and would be very interesting to discuss in person over some delicious wine or other beverages. :-)

Before I point out a few things, I would just like to say that I do not have any agenda. I am not interested in proving that I am right and you are wrong, or that everybody should convert to Catholicism. I am still and always have been very open-minded and tolerant. I used to call myself an atheist. I dabbled in Buddhism and Taoism. I see value in all spiritual paths and even the path of no path. I'm just going to try and explain a little bit where I'm at spiritually these days, and how I would respond to such questions as are in the video.

Again, the topic is so huge that I really cannot convey, in an e-mail, all of the ways of looking at religion, or Christianity in particular. But here are a few points to think about:

The video is clearly coming from a very rationalistic, scientific point of view. There is nothing wrong with that, but that's not the only way of comprehending reality. We in the Western world, since the time of the philosopher Descartes (who came up with the concept of "I think, therefore I am" which put a very powerful mental dividing line between body and soul, matter and spirit), have stopped seeing the world from a unified spiritual or transcendent perspective. Instead, we are all taught to dissect and explain everything with a rational, scientific mindset. People in our society are concerned with proving that something is true or false. This also, in turn, leads people to read the Bible literally (and actually that was the kind of response that created Christian fundamentalism: some Christians got scared of science but ironically ended up applying the scientific ("prove it to me") mindset onto the Bible itself to prove, in the terms of science, that the Bible is true; the same can be said in radical Islam - fundamentalism is a radical rejection of scientific materialism and modernity).

The mistake in all of this is that you cannot take the Bible, God, faith, spirituality, etc., literally. Of course you cannot prove there are such things as miracles or that God exists. Of course God is not going to regrow an amputee's arm or give you a raise rather than feed the starving children. God is not some fairytale creature who magically dispenses healing or rains down punishment (the "angry Father" type of God of the Old Testament is a primitive projection, showing the stage of development of the people who wrote it at the time). That is taking the miracle stories literally, which misses the point of religion and leads people to ask the wrong kinds of questions.

Certainly it is fine to read the Bible on the literal level or as poetry or as a piece of literature; but there are many more levels than that (which, by the way, Freemasonry, leads you to experience). Virtually all spiritual texts, as far as I know, contain an inner (esoteric) truth and an outer (exoteric) truth. Remember watching Joseph Campbell? The same is true in mythology (and yes, Christianity is a mythology, too; mythology contains truth, especially inner truth). The outer truth is what everybody is getting hung up on. The outer truth is to take the words of the Bible literally, or to apply blanket black-and-white thinking like "My God is the right one and yours is an idol" or "Gays are going to Hell", etc. People love to argue at this level, and many think that that is the only level there is in religion. The outer level is also where most of the arguing about morality and ethics takes place.

But it is the inner truth that people should really be concerned with. If you read the Bible in the mindset of that inner esoteric truth you will find that concepts like "miracles" are referring to an interior state of consciousness. Take any story in the Bible, whether it is the birth of Christ, Noah's ark, the tower of Babel, whatever it is - these things are not necessarily literally true (they may or may not be - that's not the point and it's actually not really that important!!), the key is that they point to an INNER truth. You apply these stories inwardly, to your spirit, heart, or mind. It is about your inner development as a human being, realizing your divine nature and oneness with all that is. It is NOT about proving whether there really was a Noah or not, or even a real Jesus. The purpose of religion is to guide you, your mind, heart and spirit, into a greater awareness of the divine nature in you and in all of creation. It is to learn, experience, and apply a transcendent form of love that includes all beings. This is a transcendent awareness or consciousness. This is what God is really all about - that experience of oneness, that is true reality.

This type of consciousness is beyond rational understanding or proof by scientific means. Of course science is going to poo-poo and say this is all garbage. Science is good for explaining things within the realm of science (i.e. the material world, bodies, planets, things, physical existence). But it is a misapplication of science to try and use it to explain spirituality or the transcendent mindset of God consciousness. The West has gotten into trouble by deciding that the scientific mindset is the ONLY valid mindset, the ONLY way to interpret reality, and that it can be used to explain EVERYTHING. That is not true. Science is very limited and cannot explain everything. If we could break out of that viewpoint and see that there are higher stages of being, higher states of consciousness, awareness, perception, and interpretation, we would stop fighting over the lowest levels of consciousness (literal fundamentalism), and start to realize there are larger realities we have been missing. Science has validity in the realm in which it is concerned - science, but we shouldn't use it as our sole foundation for explaining everything.

What are your views?

Myths of Modern Times

2007-12-16T14:59:00.000-06:00

The following is a fun quote from Myth and Reality by Mircea Eliade, regarding the power of myth in our modern times:

Mythical behavior can be recognized in the obsession with "success" that is so characteristic of modern society and that expresses an obscure wish to transcend the limits of the human condition; in the exodus to Suburbia, in which we can detect the nostalgia for "primordial perfection"; in the paraphernalia and emotional intensity that characterize what has been called the "cult of the sacred automobile." As Andrew Greeley remarks, "one need merely visit the annual automobile show to realize that it is a highly ritualized religious performance. The colors, the lights, the music, the awe of the worshippers, the presence of the temple priestesses (fashion models), the pomp and splendor, the lavish waste of money, the thronging crowds - all these would represent in any other culture a clearly liturgical service... The cult of the sacred car has its adepts and initiati. No gnostic more eagerly awaited a revelation from an oracle than does an automobile worshipper await the first rumors about the new models. It is at this time of the annual seasonal cycle that the high priests of the cult - the auto dealers - take on a new importance as an anxious public eagerly expects the coming of a new form of salvation."

Interesting to contemplate! Can you think of any other myths generated by our society and consumerist culture? I think the key to personal evolution, intellectual development, and spiritual growth, requires that we stop and take a deeper look at the images and messages being fed to us. Especially in the United States, we are bombarded, practically from birth, with messages from the mass media, the government, the educational system, and corporate interests, to look, behave, conform, and consume in certain ways. If an individual doesn't stop to question the validity of such messages it would be very easy to succumb to them and develop a false sense of self, not to mention a mindless sheep mentality. We must each learn to think for ourselves, to ask critical questions, and develop our own unique identity, separate from the demands others. Life is too short to squander it by behaving as a puppet or a slave of others. We must seize our personal destinies and make the most of every second to develop ourselves to our fullest potential, to help each other, the planet, and all living things. Tune out the noise and false reality. Find your true inner self.