Category: Thoughts

Yoga of Edible Weeds

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I remember reading a short parable in a Zen book years ago, it went something like “To Weeds, Flowers are Weeds.”  We humans like to discriminate, we go to the fruit market to buy fruits and vegetables, most of us are unaware that around us, many of the weeds that we pass by are edible, they haven’t made it to the great hipster worshiping status that kale has, but they are just as nutritious.  And yes the ‘disclaimer’, we need to know the difference between the munch-able  ones and  those that will put us in a hospitable bed.
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Keeping the Community Clueless
Here is one dictionary’s definition of ‘weeds’: a valueless plant growing wild, especially one that grows on cultivated ground to the exclusion or injury of the desired crop.  The word ‘valueless’ is something that catches my eye here; the reference to ‘valueless’ clearly defines the culture we are a part of, it’s a Biblical ‘wheat and chaff’ attitude.  Anyone who has traveled in the 3rd world will notice the way that objects are recycled and reused in the most extraordinarily inventive ways.  The 3rd world to me means,  ‘countries rich in resources and ancient culture which are being robbed by multinationals where the residents are being tricked into thinking and acting like Europeans’. Weeds are possibly one of the best kept secrets in the world,  in a way it’s a bit like all those people who run around everywhere looking under rocks for God, missing the obvious.
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One of the major factors that defines the supposedly intelligent human species is discrimination,  our ability to reason and make what sometimes are described as informed decisions.   However, when we dig into things we may find that our ‘informed-ness’ comes from a long line of programming, what we ‘know’, we take things for granted, we have curiosity but are entangled in numerous quests for wealth, position in the community, to look right, to fit into an insane world, to be our best version of ordinary; if people are too unusual they are treated like weeds, discarded and given the chop.   I am reminded once again about the sage Ramakrishna, he was a great man, his student Vivekananda helped bring an awareness about Vedanta to the West.  Ramakrishna was curious about a church in India, he tried to peep through the door, because he looked like a beggar, ‘a weed’, he was chased away.  The Catholic faith apart from being a Jesus worshiping institution that self righteously places its clergy between God and man, has many persons they hold in high regard, Saints and Sages, some real, some charlatans, some pedophiles, and here at the doors of the place of worship in India they chased a great sage away; they missed their moment.  It is easy to forget what is important and waste away our days with trivialities; filling our minds with violent movies,  petty dramas, useless bling; life is rich but we often seek what has little value, we stuff our beings with lifeless food. Food has become a form of entertainment to many of us instead of being something that ‘makes us’.
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Isolated in the World 
We live in bubbles now, the buildings around us are almost like incubators that protect fragile newborns. Air conditioned spaces; we’ve poisoned the air outside, the ocean, the earth is littered with our throw-outs, and there is also space junk. There would be plans to ship our waste to other planets ASAP if it currently didn’t cost $22k per kilo to complete the process. Here back on planet Terra, we have the disharmonious noise of the city; people yelling to get above the poorly designed acoustic cafe spaces, environments are usually only designed to look swank or hipster;  the sound of musicians who can almost play their instruments adequately, oozes  out of the HiFi system at an uncomfortable volume, it all reminds me how far we have moved from nature.  Mother nature the majestic Being who holds us; we build structures to protect ourselves from her, we isolate ourselves and keep at a slightly uncomfortable distance; we have disinfected the area around us to the point where nothing wants to live near us, the microbes say ‘we are outta here’. We wonder why there are hyperactive children, the youth are addicted to agitation, energy drinks  supply regular doses of legal speed, and sugar fries the brain.  Our feet don’t touch the earth, we live with stress and anxiety as a ‘normal’ and crave silence, nature’ s abundance and are magnetized to the wheel of ‘life as we know it’, slaves to a story of ‘how we believe things must be’, entrapped in systems.
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Transient Trance Life
We have evolved into a species who are hypnotised into living out our days as if we had no other choice.  A version of other peoples lives is streamed to us live through the electronic social media grid, we eat the info that comes to us as if it is more important than our lives, our experiences, we ruminate over it, it dominates our consciousness.  To say we “have lost our way” seems fair, if not obvious.
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There is a need to ‘come back to ourselves’, to become educated about the world around us, to understand how ‘thought’ sidetracks us; to see the value of weeds and waste-able stuff.  We may have to just slip off in another direction when no-one is looking while the world is building empires and gathering fools gold; and  leave the world where people know ‘a lot about nothing’, where trivia and bling steal the limelight, to seek what truly has value.
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Tilopa 2.0

 

The Yoga of Contemporary Nomads

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The world is not so solid, pondering this could easily bring about a change to the way we live, it may impact how we feel about things, we can loosen the strings that tie us down and head off on a new journey.  It’s an unborn future in every direction, our destiny is the horizon which moves away as we step closer to where we think it is, the Universe unfolds as we move through it.
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Wanderers Wayfarers
In a way, many of us have become nomads; family structures have broken down, we don’t all have the ‘traditional’ home to go to, the village where we may have grown up has become part of the urban sprawl, where we used to play there is a supermarket and other blingy shops full of slightly useful objects; the stream morphed into a drain and graffiti reminds us that peoples thoughts are screaming to get out, even if it looks like gibberish, humans  struggle with the noise in their heads, it’s city-stress-syndrome.
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Many religious people are very challenged now, they try to fit the world around us into models that they are comfortable with, however it’s like the bottom of a bucket dropping out; family units are shattered; the dog, the couple of kids and a picket fence are no longer the standard; single mums and dads, mix and match families; gay couples; introverts living out ‘alone’ lives in the city, homeless wear their experiences engraved in the lines on their faces, strangers live  next door, people die and no-one notices, they just slip into other parts of the bureau of statistics database, life moves on.
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Flipping it Over Concept
One trick I have mastered in my life is the ability to turn what looks like disaster into something that is fruitful, nurturing and abundant. This is not something that happens instantaneously, it comes later after the chaos settles.  When we are in crisis the waves crash down on us, we hold on for dear life; but I am reminded that there is always a calm ‘centre’ even if thoughts are wild, even if despair is about to break us, something looks out at the show of life and almost mockingly says “is that so?”  Pema Chodron the western Buddhist nun  has an expression, “learning to STAY”, one way this translates is the ability to ‘hold’ oneself, not to act, to ride it through, to trust that in some way things will sort themselves out.  Once we are past our dark night of the soul, we can recycle our experiences, extract what is of value and head into new territory.  It is quite normal to feel deep emotions and feelings in response to structures coming apart, but we have a choice on whether we make it a problem or not.  I choose the latter.
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Beyond Chaos Theory
What may look like chaos to us, if we dig into it we can find something glorious. This breakdown of the community around us can lead us somewhere quite unexpected, if we can get past the feeling of ‘everything is broken’, life becomes interesting; a dull mind won’t be comfortable with change, sharpening our thinking and attitudes is something worth pursuing.  From the view of a Jnana Yogi (simply put: non dualistic perspective that everything has a glue joining it at the middle) the world is held together by thought, this idea is in conflict with what most people think; there is no way I would push it as a philosophy, to me philosophy doesn’t mean much, changing the way we view things is where wisdom lies.  Unlike some other yogis of the past, I am hesitant to say ‘the world is a mirage’, there is a lot of baggage and misunderstandings with that phrase, it’s not quite right.  It would be slightly more correct to say “every molecule is in motion and it’s only there when we look at it, or name it” it has a sense of ‘there-ness’. Things are named for convenience, we have a common language that allows us to reference moments on a timeline; but really EVERYTHING is in TRANSIT; and this is where freedom lies.
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Freedom is the ability to detach from our story of the world, to dissolve what has gone before and allow the ‘new’ to emerge.  With the breaking down of traditional family structures there will be turmoil, great confusion, questioning arises,  the ground beneath us fractures and if we are alert there will be a type of seeking, a search for meaning, and without giving the game away, that does not necessarily mean there is meaning, but the need for stability and understanding takes over if we have a certain amount of personal power and don’t indulge in our brokenness. When we indulge too much in ‘thinking about our response to a problem’, our thinking processes freeze up. Communities, the human civilisation we are part of is hypnotised by belief and self imposed limitations; the breakdown of the traditional structures although painful is the very thing that may bring about the change needed in the world. And saying this I am not opposed to community whether it be old or new, it has taken me a lifetime to learn to value ‘community’, and community is not necessarily what we assume it is.

Urban Gypsies
We are a community of nomads, wanderers; some say we are on a journey from ‘self to SELF’, from unknowing to KNOWing, personally I wouldn’t want to complicate things with philosophical fantasies, it’s a sidetrack and moves us away from ourselves.  Most religion and Spiritual practice moves us ‘away’, we chase ourselves.  The idea of reaching a goal in the future is part of the great play of life, the labyrinth of ‘becoming’ is endless.
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The beauty in the world fracturing is it is like an egg cracking, if the bird laments the loss of the egg, it may forget the baby chick.  New birth comes from change and ALL our suffering comes from failure to embrace change, to want things to be as they were or the way we want them to be. The less solid the world is in our thoughts, the greater potential there is for going past the limited known.  When the world we know breaks down, we are forced to either die, whittle away or look for other ways of doing things.
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What on Earth can we do?
So how do we approach the world we live in when it breaks? How can we find that thing, a sense of belonging, the NEW community we need that will nurture us?  Although the answer may be different for each one of us, there is one commonality,  that very thing is by saying ‘yes I accept you as this’, ‘I embrace you regardless of our differences’.  It is deeply programmed into human nature to not like.  It is okay to feel uncomfortable with what is outside what we accept at this moment.  However, it is important that our hearts crack open a little more each day, and we move at our own pace.  People come and go in our lives, each moment is precious.
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Tilopa 2.0

On Your Mark Get Set…Stop

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There is an old story that comes from the Indian subcontinent, it seems to define human nature, the craziness of the thoughts that fluctuate with intensity in our mind-spaces.  It is said that if you give a monkey a ladder it will run up and down all day; this analogy is often used in explaining how a Mantra works in controlling thoughts; whenever the mind wanders, step back on the ladder. Without going into detail, as most people would know, a Mantra is a word or phrase repeated in meditation to keep oneself busy.
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The nature of thought is to hop, skip and wobble; each thought particle is a bit like a piece of driftwood travelling from one side of the ocean to the other, going nowhere in particular, encountering mammoth waves, getting dunked, resurfacing, floating calm for a while, only to be lashed against the rocks and maybe end up on an empty beach.
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The Boat Into Eternity
My father made a driftwood boat when he was a young man, it sat on a sideboard and sometimes on a table in our house as a child, it always intrigued me, how something that nature ‘threw out’ into the vast world would end up as an ‘artifact’ far from where it began, it was my teacher.  It had a dryness about it, with only a small cut of a saw and some mild reshaping it became something of curiosity for me, it taught me how to dream, how to see through the solidness of the world around me and to find value in what people may discard. It showed me beauty is in our imagination, and how ‘what is left out’ can give something its shape, in the same way that a great musician  understands it’s the silence, the space that gives the beauty to sound; it is the backdrop of the heavens that allow us to dream of the distant stars as they dangle on the backdrop of forever-ness.
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Mooring the Boat
Coming to rest seems like the goal of many people. This is a reasonable quest. There is much confusion going on in the Spiritual circus of the world.  There is the idea of seeking a peaceful mind, a restful place either here or beyond is perceived as the goal, and although there is a partial correctness in this, it’s just a piece in the larger picture of the cosmic game.  It is true, the need to tame the raging bull of the mind , without giving some attention to all the wayward thought, it is difficult to function.  However, if we use the analogy of the boat, it is something that takes us to our destination, and when it comes to the Spirit, the port of arrival is always ourselves.  So where to from here?  Is that it? So what we were seeking was ‘stillness’?
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The Uncarved Block
Where we are going is forever-ness; our dreams shape the un-carved block.  The idea that our destination is written in the palm of our hand, that God has work for us, is rather spiritually pubescent when it comes to the big picture.  I am not denying the existence of an Underlying Consciousness that drives the Cosmos, I am just claiming it back from the doctrine-smiths, the religious zealots, those control freaks who dis-empower humanity by using the lives of great men and woman as a foundation for belief systems and ‘story’ of the world, they then enslave humanity with their religious concepts.
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Coming Home 
When the boat comes into port, then we are in a new country, one where we can begin a different dream, we leave behind what we knew, let the past sink like Atlantis in the depths of the ocean or hidden under the ice in Antarctica.
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We are always running on automatic, forgetting to question many things, we fill in the endings of the story by habit.  On your mark, get set…. stop.  Let’s go the other way. When we look at the chaos of the world it becomes reasonably clear that what has been going on just doesn’t work.  There is great potential in things that we discard if we just look at them differently.  Like my father’s driftwood boat.  I will give thanks for what others have forgotten and find beauty elsewhere.  This is the essence Yoga.

Tilopa 2.0

The Wisdom and Freedom of the Wind

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Most of us would have dreamed that we could fly, craving the freedom of not being bound. We are ‘supposedly’ stuck in a body and have a love hate relationship with our senses, we enjoy the tingles, textures and flavors, then in those moments of pain and sickness we crave an escape; man fears death, and understandably so, the ‘unknowing’ for most is more frightening than the known.
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The Wisdom in Nature
The Wind does things differently to most humans, it embodies much of what I think we need to know. How to live with detachment is in the Wind Being’s teaching, how to not cling, to be loose and flexible; it has a way of making adjustments, it side-steps objects, dances with pieces of paper… floats colorful leaves, leans trees over and stretches their spine, reshapes hairstyles, bounces clouds and gives birds something to push against or use as a power booster.
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If we can escape our thoughts from daily troubles, trivia and distraction, get ourselves out of the limited chaos of the play of life, we can be the wind, develop many of the same attributes. The wind is on a backdrop of the endless sky, and the sky is a part of the Greater Mind that encases everything; the endless forever is inside and outside of us.
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Eternity Now
In the magnificent book Tales of Power by Carlos Castenada, the follow up to masterpiece Journey to Ixtlan, Don Juan says to Carlos,
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“I’m going to utter perhaps the greatest piece of knowledge anyone can voice. Let me see what you can do with it. Do you know that at this very moment you are surrounded by eternity? And do you know that you can use that eternity, if you so desire?
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There! Eternity is there! (Don Juan pointed) All around! Do you know that you can extend yourself forever in any of the directions I have pointed to? Do you know that one moment can be eternity? This is not a riddle; it’s a fact, but only if you mount that moment and use it to take the totality of yourself forever in any direction.
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You didn’t have this knowledge before, now you do. I have revealed it to you, but it doesn’t make a bit of difference, because you don’t have enough personal power to utilize my revelation. Yet if you did have enough power, my words alone would serve as the means for you to round up the totality of yourself and to get the crucial part of it out of the boundaries in which it is contained.
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Your body is the boundary I’m talking about. One can get out of it. We are a feeling, an awareness encased here. We are luminous beings and for a luminous being only personal power matters.”
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On reading this text of Don Juan, our thoughts and or logical way of processing information could easily head off into a story about whether he and Carlos Castaneda’s teacher Don Genaro were fictitious, some may even ask “does one’s guru say something similar”, or whether our understanding of God and scriptures confirm such a view. We love distraction, ‘away-ness”, when we encounter wisdom, often there is a tendency to make excuses, to look for fault in it; the false sense of ‘I’ is challenged, the false sense of ‘I’ has no substance, it is just thought, and always wants to remain centre stage, all posers do this. People talk about there being an ‘ego’, from my perspective this idea of an ‘ego’ is questionable and is not so important; it is easy to sort if we look at the first line of the Dhamapada (the sayings of Gautama Buddha), if we are astute and look closely at it, without a fuss the text annihilates the concept of the ‘ego having real substance’ in one swoop. Although there are many translations of the Buddhist text, the one I prefer says, “All you are is all you have thought”, it takes care of that ‘ego’ thing, it dis-empowers the false notion in one swoop, leaves us empty and can remove much of our pain and self-obsession, once we know this truth there is nothing to hold on to. And it’s ok, we won’t collapse, we are the experiencer and in a similar way to if we were sitting on the beach watching the tides slowly rise and fall, knowing there is an order in nature, we can trust that the ‘thoughts’ that are on our screen of life which construct the sense of ‘I’ do not hold us together, we can function quite nicely without them. Really, the image of who we believe ourselves to be is just a story, a very convincing one because it’s familiar, it’s uncomfortably comfortable, it’s like a permanent set of clothes that is glued on and wrapped around us and creates limitation.
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Detach Detach Detach
There is a great similarity between the fluidness and elasticity of the wind, and a person who does not cling to thought; although the idea of detachment is often associated with Buddhism or Taoism, it’s not, it’s universal in nature. The idea of ‘not sticking’ to things is a core principle that belongs to our inbuilt intelligence and does not require a religious philosophy for it to flower. Both Buddha and Lao Tsu (Taoism) obviously moved with this fluidity and have tapped into this type of intelligence, the ‘isms’ came later and there are numerous wise people historically who have managed to see clearly the affects of ‘attachment’; nature is our teacher and it is not rocket science nor does not require any great intellect to see such a basic thing as the trouble of being ‘overly attached’. If we can quiet our thinking a little and look clearly without too much judgement, a gradual transformation will come about, and I guess when the penny drops for some, it may be a quantum leap for some.
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Someone who continuously detaches from what presents itself in their thoughts and has the flexibility to move around obstacles, to have a type of adaptability that resembles the wind will be open to new experiences and not bogged down with old limited worn-out thought. A lightness of being is something worth aspiring to. It can be complex for some of us because information is ‘hard-wired’ into us and we are addicted to ‘what’s wrong with the world’, chasing rainbows, how to be ‘a better person’, how to fit in, not offending people, how not to be ‘hurt by people’; there are so many hooks that prevent us experiencing the wonders of life, and when we look at them we will see they are mainly ‘thought constructions’. And that is why coming back to and contemplating“all you are is all you have thought”, it will loosen the glue a little and help us to disentangle from destructive thought.
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The Beauty of Emptiness
What we can do is practice ’emptying ourselves’, lying down, no we do not need to sit like a Buddha statue. Emptiness is about annihilation, getting rid of all concepts and abandoning the known. The problem with the ‘known’ is it is most probably wrong, it’s just a story, look at the trouble it has got us into. When we lie down and empty ourselves there are no boundaries, there is no tomorrow, no past and I will go one more level than the new-age-flippy-floppers and say ‘there is no Now’. Now implies that there is a central point holding itself together; we need the bottom to drop out of the bucket, the water to run everywhere. When we routinely practice ’emptying’ it gradually creeps through our being and we begin to realise that the body is ‘inside us’ it is not outside, the stars, the galaxies are inside us. The body is a container we use to experience the world around us, it is only a small part of us, we need to care for it and treat it with respect but ultimately our nature is closer to that of the wind; then when the storm blows in our lives, we can find a type of invisibility, we will have the flexibility to move through it because we understand as the wind does that ‘everything is in constant motion’, that we have the knack of getting through or around whatever presents itself.
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There is not only beauty in nature but wisdom, nature can become our guru.

Will the Revolution Be Televised?

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We live in a time not only of great change but of endings and a new emerging humanity. This stirring in the hearts of man is bringing to the surface a need to remove what is no longer ‘workable’ to allow our personal futures and the evolving human species room to blossom.  There are many ways of doing this, some fraught with danger and they seem to add to the chaos.

When we look at the word ‘revolution’ it is often associated with force, violence, our news media and history books reaffirm this definition; but it doesn’t need to mean this, a change of system can come about in many ways.  When we hear of a ‘revolutionary new idea’,  if it’s really that good we will in most cases go for it, it will gradually be absorbed into our world.  Sometimes things are transparent and we absorb it unknowingly, like definitions of God.  A forceful revolution always has casualties, and although change is often essential, there is a need to consider the price paid and the consequences of violent uprisings.  What we need to ask is, “Can there be a change which benefits us that has minimal amount of suffering for the broader community?”
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The Maze of Life
We are caught in a maze, a mousetrap so it seems.  The world is divided by religion, false Gods, maybe some real ones, zealots, cult-heads, robe wearing people entrenched in ideas from the past being resold as paths to liberation and enlightenment, some are even offering glorious wisdom that is extremely useful in dealing with the endless stress of everyday life which has now reached epidemic proportions.  Governments rise and fall, mismanaging their responsibilities to the communities they are elected to serve; in their roles they have become slaves to private agenda, ‘hidden bankers’ who are not so covert any more and corporate greed.  Lies in the media, and the opiate of the people now seems to be ‘distraction’, anything at all to move attention away, trivia 24/7. Buddhists and some others say ‘Be Here Now’, attempting to remind us that we are absent and missing the beauty of life; the religious fundamentalists tell us we are doomed because we don’t fit into their shape of ‘the faithful’, some totally misunderstand love and the obvious fact that families come in all shapes and sizes; they evangelise and lecture us, and insist that if we don’t serve and worship their God, we will burn in hell, regardless that most of them do not know the history or the crimes committed by their religions.  There are those who mistakenly think the world is divided into spiritual on one side and material on the other, as if the world is ‘Boolean’, ones or zeros, true or false, us and them.  We are in this together.
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“The wise man looks into space and he knows there is no limited dimensions.”
There is a beauty in Taoism, the wisdom in the words of Lao Tzu are humbling. It is clear to me that we can find a comfortable place in the endless expanse of the cosmos without lessening the quality of what we are, what I mean here is ‘humility’ is about expansiveness, the ability to embrace everything as having value and place ourselves beautifully among it all, as opposed to shrinking into the definition of humility of ‘not being worthy’ and cow-toeing like a peasant before a tyrant king .  I am not a Taoist, nor a Buddhist, but I find that when I look through these windows there are things that I would miss if I was just peering out the skinny telescope of the culture I grew in, that limited view of some Christians ‘we are working towards the afterlife’, the promise of future paradise, always tomorrow, ignoring the fact that we are magnetised to a big rock floating in space, and also missing the obvious that the only constant is ‘everything is in motion’, nothing is solid or static apart from emptiness, the living void that sits under everything.
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Dumbing Down the Masses
The elite (and I won’t even bother about arguing their existence, we are a generation or two past that now), those tyrants who put themselves and their private agendas first, and sit behind those in the seats of power and the systems that keep the global community suppressed, their greatest enemy is ‘an intelligent and informed community’.  That is why misinformation is their most useful tool; if you spread misinformation, in its naive innocence a non-alert mind will easily submit and believe anything; it is so busy trying to do the basics in his or her world, to get enough money for shelter, food and entertainment; a dull mind does not have the energy or in many cases the sharpness to discern what is true and how ones liberties, rights and sovereignty is being eroded away by the signing of documents by politicians. Keeping people distracted with shiny sparkly things that are always just out of reach, works beautifully in dis-empowering communities.  If you create havoc in countries by overthrowing the government, supporting them publicly and are also funding the enemy to overthrow them, the destabilisation model works well, you can steal their wealth, sell them weapons, and then create structures to help yourself to what you want, then publicly make speeches on the humanitarian crisis at hand.   When some nutter with a religious fixation or bee in his bonnet goes rogue and does something to undermine the community, you can then target the issue in the media, create greater paranoia and xenophobia, divide your community, tighten your security and then funnel more funds to where you want them; away from the very people who needed them in the first place, erode the society and create more social problems to be shaped into political policies.  Is there a conspiracy? Seriously? Well, it comes down to ‘which one?’ The problem is everything has become so ‘normal’, what was once was considered conspiracy has crept in and become a natural part of life.  Is this true? Absolutely and it’s not even debatable any more, I gave up discussing it about 30 years ago because it was so obvious then, it is up to the individual to educate him or herself or suffer the consequences of being asleep, almost comatose.   Based on what I consider as true, what on earth do we do? 
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Create the Problem and People will Swallow Your Solution
All cults work around the model of ‘tell people the problem, then supply a solution’ with themselves at the centre. We need to be aware of this, otherwise we will be fooled, not just by religious cults and organisations, but the political cults of private agenda who tell the world how to think, offer a story that is a lie but is perceived as truth.  In my case I am putting forward the problem, I have no cult, is there an agenda?  Maybe if there is one, it is point out that we need to think for ourselves, to question everything, to discern, to be able to develop a type of intuition that ‘feels’ with a combination of commonsense, being well informed and have an ‘alive sense of internal monitoring’ that can quickly ascertain if something is’true or false.’  The great ‘lies’ are a mix of true and false; the classic model of getting people to give up the chase is to put out the combo of false-true-info, prove the false to be an untruth, and then people turn off the sniffer dogs and the truth gets lost in the mix.   Once this happens a number of times, people give up and go back to trivial distraction.  The UFO phenomena has been a perfect example of this, it is a masterpiece of deception, thousands of incidents explained away, complete with a chorus of people who intentionally create fake phenomena and then go public on how they do it.  The ‘wall of laughter’ grows and those who have seen something out of the norm become the focus of ridicule.  This is not an article about life forms way beyond human comprehension who dart across the sky; when I think it through, I would say it is about the great lie, the dumbing down of humanity while the worlds resources are stolen from under our noses and words on pieces of paper enable armed thugs to commit atrocities against human beings who have a natural right to food, water, shelter and other things that contribute to joyous lives.
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Nicely Dressed Criminals
The governments are generally run by thugs in suits; although they are elected to SERVE the PEOPLE, they abuse the roles entrusted to them and carry on as if basic human rights and needs are privileges that are to be carefully distributed only to those who they see as worthy recipients; all others are vilified as if they are worthless vermin who must be corrected and adapt or pushed into shape to become worthy citizens of the ’empire’.
Those who are ‘slightly comfortable’ and a little cashed up and are duped by the system, they often target the distressed and broken and see them as being undesirable and a burden on the community they are in; when in truth it is the very structure and divisiveness of the system they live under that creates the problem.  By blaming the downtrodden and those that some  see as being dysfunctional, the attention is moved away from the governments and those with a responsibility to uphold the well being of the community.  Many in the community have an attitude of ‘what’s in it for me’, ‘if i am okay, well why aren’t you okay?’, ‘if i could do it, why can’t you?’  People do not understand that trauma runs deep and although it doesn’t immobilise everybody, many people fall through the cracks.  I question whether a society based around an inbuilt ability to acquire wealth is a fair system; each of us has a different set of skills, should people be discriminated against if they don’t have a natural skill to put into place things that allows them to acquire wealth and care for themselves?  This may be considered that I have an attitude of ‘create a world of bludgers and sponges who are leeches on the community, it’s not.  I think we need to find ways for people to be cared for and help them contribute if they can, and some people just can’t; the extensive social problems that come from the traumatised and the broken, need to be sorted at the source, not at the end of the chain of experience.  What we need is our sense of humanity to be restored.
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What is a Real Revolution?
Maybe we need to reconsider the meaning of ‘revolution’; I think revolution starts with ourselves, claiming back our power, and that means our self-worth, not being a slave to limited thought, recognising that there are opportunities, there are other ways of doing things. We have become hypnotised and indoctrinated by the Hollywood worldview, as if everything needs to be a victory and one man standing on a hill at the end among devastation, the hero against all odds, and he’s usually an American; there are other ways, everything is not so EPIC.  We are bombarded by news articles that highlight the tyrants, their crimes, the injustices and mobs running rampant attempting to overthrow the leaders, their thugs, the military and police that they use to control those who are not party to their agenda. The thinkers, educated emotionally intelligent people, those who analyse what is going on and the creative minds are their biggest enemies.  The petty tyrants are scared of consciousness breaking through, they want a dumb semi-comatose community, they want people to be enraged by the injustices so they can flex their muscles and say ‘I told you so’, they want people to meet them on their terms, with might, with violence.  As each incident happens they put into place tighter laws and have greater control.
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With Made Up Contracts They Have Taken Away Our Basics Rights
We live in a world where the water is being stolen from us, there are many places where you can’t collect rainwater, it is illegal, there are those who say we have no right to it, or no right to have an open fire, obviously someone who is careless may start a bush-fire; mowed lawns with neat edges have a preference over gardens of food; in some places it is now illegal to live off the grid; every inch is being mapped to be part of a greater system, documents telling us that somebody can take away the right of living in nature .  Groomed dogs in nice jackets have become wimps and social ornaments, they’ve lost their doggy nature, they can’t even shit without a support team, they are not allowed to swim at or visit many beaches, man has gone crazy. We humans are expected to be part of this system, to use the power, the water, the roads, by doing this we are indebted and dependent… and dependence means control, and control means we are dis-empowered.
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Revolution Starts in the Mind
Although every so often we hear conspiracy stories about mind control, which no doubt would be true in some cases.  We have something that the ‘elite’ are most troubled about, it is the last frontier that they cannot enter, it is the ability to control the mind; it aint going to happen, there is a temple inside us that can survive all hardship, this is a critical thing to realise; regardless of propaganda, misinformation and all shiny and sparkly objects, our ‘mind- space’ is a fortress. The rivers are dammed, the water is stolen, numerous crimes against humanity under the guise of economic growth, austerity packages, genocide, governments intentionally breaking the back of the man in the street with inhumane policies to make the community dependent and squashed into shape, they steal the wealth for their own projects, their underground cities and off-earth agenda, these exist, research it, wade through the conspiracy nonsense with discrimination; gray men in suits meeting to manipulate global agendas, the over-throwing of sovereign nations, the dumbing down of education, incarceration of people for petty crimes when those who commit transgressions that violate human rights wander freely to add more mayhem to communities we live in. Many people are broken, but there is something extraordinary emerging.
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A Different Revolution
Revolution, and claiming back our power is not about protesting in the streets; and saying this I would not criticise anyone’s methods or right to be heard; all that burning of cars, being violent, uncontrollable anger built up from anguish, frustration and a sense of injustice, hatred of the elite, overthrowing governments, it creates fear and terrorises everybody, the thugs want this, so they can do the ‘told you so’, and create harsher security.  What is required is an evolution in consciousness, it is related to abandoning the known, walking away from limitation, seeing something undreamed of in a future time and stepping into it; to some it would sound unrealistic and Utopian. However, the future is unwritten, and we are active co-creators; if we are in fear, we cannot add our portion to the future. Although Mother Earth and the stars have their own destiny that will undoubtedly unfold in its own way, and is untouchable by our will, we do have the ability to create something that is ‘not part of our known’, an unwritten script is there for us to pencil the way forward. Regardless that the Mother Earth may shake her garment to bring back her beauty, we do not need to be a casualty of the change, we can chart another pathway.  This would sound like new-age-flippy-floppy, but I am confident we are not powerless.
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Recycled Thought
Our mind-spaces are full of refuse, old garbage is continuously being recycled; we constantly take the known limited worn out thoughts and ways of doing things, reuse it and shape it into other useless things;  we keep redoing things that just don’t work, if it wasn’t painful, I am sure an alien species watching on would find it hysterical.  But there is tragedy in reality, we keep on overeating, filling ourselves with intoxicants, drinking the poisons of life, stuffing in misinformation and trivia, violent imagery as entertainment; we know what is good for us but there is an internal saboteur that undermines us, something inside says, “go right”, we head left without even blinking ASAP.
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We Hold the Power
Bringing our thoughts under control is where the power is, it is where we can claim back our sovereignty; the mind-space is untouchable by others. There is a need for us to throw a lasso around the raging bull of the mind, to tame it, not kill it but to be a master of it, not the slave.  The ‘show’ on the stage of life will change, but the restful mind can remain a fortress. Without a peaceful uncluttered mind-space it is impossible to see ahead, and if we can’t see forward, the creative potential which is natural to us, can’t click in.
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One of the issues that I see that we have is that many people are traumatised, those coming out of war zones and disasters are in such a state, it is near impossible for them to see something in the future that is not colored by the experience they have gone through, this is not an unreasonable view. And seeing they are so unstable, it is critical that we create something in the future, they are incapable of doing it at the present time.  I won’t hesitate to state that the disruption and creation of fear in the global community is not an accident, or just a result of human nature , it is intentional, and although it sounds like a conspiracy theory, it is not too far fetched to say that there are always people who are focused on self interests and have a private agenda that allows them to benefit from a destabilised global community, I do not need to roll out a list of those who committed crimes against humanity..  It may sound a little odd, but to assume that only people who have a positive agenda for themselves and others have the ability to use and understand the concept of our endless creative potential, would be very naive.  The world has had numerous tyrants throughout history who against all logic and what we as a community consider to be the right way to treat each other, have managed to commit atrocities without blinking an eyelid, they have done hideous things that undermined our well-being; to say these people no longer exist or are not in any places of power or are able to influence various world events, would be extremely foolish and naive, just watching the news there would be enough food for thought on this issue.
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The Giant Screen of the World Around Us
The screens have changed now,  no longer is it just the ‘box’ as the TV was once known as before it became flat and ‘plasmic’, one of my teachers at school called it the ‘idiot box’. The screens now come in all shapes and sizes, they deliver in real-time; fortunately it is not just one source of news we receive; although we still get the ‘agenda’ view belted at us via the television, online news media giants and newspaper publications, it is an ‘intentional’perspective of those who have a ‘big picture’ agenda which is at times difficult to pin down as it has so many tentacles and faces, but it seems to be implemented by governments everywhere who are slaves to the moguls of finance who keep the politicians wallets nice’n’chunky and feed their hideous desires.  With the expansion of information delivery from multiple sources, there are now other options to consider as possible truths.  Like a kid in an ice-cream shop who in his excitement could chomp on anything that looks okay, developing a sense of what is worth digesting is imperative, as is choosing what pops up on our screen of choice.  The screen is closely related to our mind-space; the idea of ‘we are what we eat’, can be altered to include, see, think, feel, imbibe from all directions. This is our food, what is coming on our screen is shaping our future. The revolution we are seeking needs to be on the screen of our mind, because THAT IS WHAT WE HAVE CONTROL OVER.  And this does not mean to look away from the chaos and pretend it is not there, but there is a need for us to keep it in its place, in the same way as when we meditate or pray, if the mind wanders we bring it back into focus.

The Future
Once we take responsibility for our actions and start to bring into focus things that have some type of positive potential and change, as the wheel of life revolves, what will emerge will be a real revolution, one from the inside, not one that is destructive.  It is ‘the one of the emerging new civilisation’ that many seers have spoken of, it is not a picture created by the prophets of doom, gloom and destruction.

Yes, the Revolution Will Be Televised, it is up to us to bring it onto our screen.

Earth Changes – A Common Sense Approach

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Most of my life I have been preparing to ‘go’, not in a normal ‘death’ sense where a person has that sensation of ‘giving up’ and wanting to escape pain, to evade life’s suffering because it seemed too much; it’s something very different. It would be easy to say that maybe I read too much Bible doomy and gloomy as a kid and inherited the attitude of ‘anyone who loves his life will lose it’, a quote from a very poorly translated Christian scripture that makes people feel extremely paranoid and scared of life it’s not that. However it would be easy if there was no further investigation to be dismissive about anything relating to the subject of Earth Changes.
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Let’s look at our world
Generally the broader community is very uninformed or is looking away. Our history books and news media gives us a paint-by-numbers view of the world and bypasses a lot of the quality stuff, this keeps a lid on new knowledge that challenges the story of the world as we know it.  Many people don’t even realise that classical physics has been updated by quantum physics. If you are interested in Archaeology you’d have an idea that there are new finds on a regular basis that don’t make it into the mainstream media, remains of mysterious civilisations every so often are popping their heads up from under the earth.  If you are science or tech savvy, or watch TED you may know that Satellite Remote-Sensing Infrared is now being used to map the subtle changes on the surface of the earth, it seeks out irregularities that would be missed by the eye with the more traditional methods of research and excavation, it puts a few brakes on the endless intrusive digging that is both time consuming and unnecessarily potentially destructive.  There are long lost cities, relics and civilisations under the ocean off the coast of Japan, India, the Bahamas and other places, complete with an equal amount of fantasy and plenty of debunking.  Regardless of who was here in the past, what they achieved and the stories about them, real or imaginary, it would be unreasonable to say there had not been any well developed communities  who left a trail in the sand, there are things that ‘just wont blow away’, these time capsule things remind us of their existence, our temporariness and it creates a challenge for us to update our history books and also maybe we could even reconsider the myths and legends of what was previously perceived as backward cultures. Many of these ‘backward’ cultures did a great job of fitting transparently and comfortably into the Eco-systems for thousands of years; some mysteriously disappeared… well it is a mystery to us when we try and make sense of them now.
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Possible Futures
We keep hearing dooms-dayers talking about things such as the world is going to shift its axis, movement of the magnetic polls, tsunamis, we could get hit by a comet, some say we’ll fry, others say Northern Europe will freeze over, if that’s not enough to fill senior nappies then what is?  Are these people total nut-jobs?  Why can’t they just enjoy life like everyone else?  And then there are the conspiracy theorists, we better throw them into the mix.  Some say the ‘elite’ are building spacecraft to vacate the planet and the worlds financial resources have been stolen and channeled into their projects because they know what’s coming and there are underground cities. Stargate people say the elite will be stepping into other worlds without us and then there are an endless array of Jesus possibilities. He’s arriving in the clouds, grabbing those who did the right thing and then heading off to somewhere else, the chosen ones near their Beloved while everyone else eats hay.  So what can we make of this?
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Lots of Ways to Die
We don’t have to think back too far to see there is instability. I am reminded of years ago when I was in Nepal a women said to me, “these tourists are crazy, they don’t realise there is a jungle out there, they think just because there are a few tourist restaurants and shops they can wander off anywhere and be they’ll be OK.  It’s not safe, there are tigers out there”.  Strangely enough, that was an eyeopener, it pointed out to me that just because we can ‘frame’ things a certain way, doesn’t mean that we have control over nature, we are in many ways vulnerable.  In 2004 we had the big tsunami, there were three hundred thousand deaths. In 2005 there was Hurricane Katrina, it wasn’t way off somewhere in a remote desert, it hit New Orleans a city with 370 thousand people.  Then we had the earthquake that triggered the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident, it polluted the oceans, killed people, created devastation, a combination of nature and man-made problems kicking our asses, we know the impact and flow on will affect us for centuries.  And yes there is a shift in the magnetic poles, apparently  this is a normal thing for this planet we live on, I don’t think we need to develop pole paranoia, but when we do a little looking around, we can conclude it’s not too far fetched that a magnetic pole shift could disturb a lot of things.  The coastlines are moving, some people invested their money in building mansions overlooking the sea, they never considered that their palaces would one day be uninhabitable.  We can look back to the Chernobyl accident which was a human stuff up and while on catastrophe I may as well mention the devastation in Syria, in 2013 it was estimated there were at least four million homeless. There is also the whittling away of the Amazon Rain Forest and let’s throw in the Greek Austerity Package and the economic chaos, I won’t even start to point the finger at who and why, this would be a totally different discussion but it is  yet another example of the mad fragile world we are in.
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What’s Your Salvation Package Flavor?
Often when people talk about Earth Changes there’s usually some type of religious or spiritual banter that goes with it. Some reckon a God Being is going to save the day or in other people’s versions of the ‘truth’ the ‘Chosen Ones’ are going to magically ascend into another state of consciousness, while those left behind will suffer the fate similar to Lot’s wife (a character from the Bible, her hubby told not to look back, else she would turn into a pile of non-Pink-Himalayan Rock Salt … and curiosity got the better of her).  In this frail world it’s easy for people to get caught up in fear and to create a ‘redemption pathway’, a feeling of hope for the future-life and trust in what they believe to be God’s promise, in their thinking they become ‘one of the elect’ who will survive the tribulations, fire and brimstone.  Some are so confident they are not concerned about the world around them because it’s going to be totally trashed soon anyway, so what’s the point? And of course there are the millions who are comfortably uncomfortable and confident that Global Warming will impact on multiple aspects of life on the planet, their bottom line is if we don’t take a left turn or if there’s no intervention we and many of our animal cousins are going to be part of Planet Earth’s history, not future, so it seems.
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What to Do? 
So what do we do with the predicament we are in? Whether we are scientific about it, devoutly religious or one of those who are arrogant enough to refer to themselves as ‘the faithful’, not even realising it implies that members of other faiths are not perceived as faithful, a disciple in a pyjama wearing whacky cult, a New Ager waiting for some type of transformative redemption or we may just be an average social network user being bombarded daily with pictures of polar bears sitting on large ice blocks in the Arctic or a subscriber to the alternative news site that covers crimes against humanity happening from one side of the globe to the other and end up confused because at times it is impossible to work out who on earth are the good guys and have become so cynical we assume that everything on the mainstream news is propaganda with an ulterior agenda and maybe there are alien lizards ready to gobble us.  Regardless what ‘take’ is on it all. it’s not looking pretty out there. How can we live?  Do we just dumb ourselves down with drugs, alcohol, lose ourselves in a maze of objects, chasing sensation after sensation, stuffing more exotic food in and fill our worlds with digital bling?
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So what happens if there is a break down in society, what happens if the electronic grid goes down, communications networks fail?  Have you ever been locked out of an apartment because someone has vandalised the electronic security of the building? That gets annoyingly difficult, particularly if you live on the sixth floor like I do.  Our fire alarm gets triggered every so many days and dozens of people end up on the street in their night gowns, people holding babies looking confused.  Have you ever been in a situation where the transport network suddenly gets interrupted and stops, you’re stranded?  People get feisty, really irritable very fast. Or have you ever been in a bush fire or flood? The shelves on the supermarket empty out rather fast, baked bean share price peaks overnight, people suddenly become rather self centred, it’s every man for himself until the calm sets in and the community works together in a school hall and acts of kindness start filtering in from those outside.  Have you ever lived somewhere where the water has become undrinkable or the power goes out and everything starts to freeze over, when the cold starts to hurt your bones?  Or if you lose your ID and can’t do anything because the ‘system’ won’t let you, you don’t exist.  Or have you been alienated, an outsider where it’s impossible to do basic things? This all sounds a little depressing, but most people who have been on the planet a while and traveled would have found themselves in crisis states of various levels resembling some of the things mentioned here.
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Let’s Look Ahead
We know from experience that people can be a little difficult in times of crisis; it brings out the crazies, and we also are well aware there are kind people on the planet who carry out phenomenal acts of bravery, they may even lose their lives trying to help others.  And also we have all had religious people shoving pamphlets in our faces or knocking on the front door attempting to save our souls because it is their understanding of ‘truth’ and like the Blues Brothers they are on a ‘mission from God’.  In times of a great Earth Change calamity (pick your disaster here, we have a few options) these people are going to come into their own; “we told you, we warned you, the Lord, He’s-a-coming” ; there would be great chaos and this would be seen as the final window of opportunity to ‘do the Lord’s work’. With fire and brimstone at the doorstep (or other option), if that’s not convincing, what is?  Temporarily it’s a fair argument in moments when the world we know around us is destabilised.
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The World Ends Today … Nahh it Doesn’t
I think this last minute evangelising needs a little consideration, I see it as a given, it’s definitely going to happen one day somewhere; I consider there to be some serious problems with that attitude. A religious or spiritual man and I use the word religious here as meaning ‘someone who follows a set of principles that are virtuous’ (I will exclude the word ‘morality’ as it has other connotations and changes from sect to sect) is not rooted in fear. Fear is natural part of human nature but having it as the foundation for a relationship with a God is something I would seriously question. From my window, my understanding of the Underlying Principle that sustains the Universe is, it is benevolent, nurturing, not something to cringe from, but I best not get caught up on detail and personal preferences and flavours. Real religion or spirituality or however you care to define it is about NOW not just about the ‘future life’; I see that evangelism may have a weak argument for last minute recruits but if we look closely, there is some substance missing.
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Finding Integrity and Humility
When we attempt to live with integrity, with empathy, with compassion, we leave a trail of beauty throughout space-time; it reaches into the depth of our being, spreads to the world around us, back through our past and way out into the unborn future; it is constant, it may fluctuate but it has a solidness about it.  What I would define as a religious or spiritual man (woman or other) is somebody who dips into the well of the wisdom of life, seeks it out and attempts to perceive it in those around him and extracts the ‘juice’ from the experiences he passes through. Exclusive religion and spirituality has a bad odour about it, it has a temporary hypnotic euphoric feeling but it is insular and separative.  To be in a crisis, in a serious Earth Change moment of some type and not find our humility, to not understand and embrace a suffering humanity and instead, to consider oneself as God’s spokesperson, someone to correct the behaviour of others is extremely arrogant; I do understand that a religious fundamentalist would disagree. People have the whole of their lives to develop a deep understanding and live with integrity; the idea of at the last minute attempting to convert people and save their souls is totally missing the point and is elitist.
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Caught in the Mouse Trap
In a time of Earth Change of any type, there would be those who are incapable of doing anything else apart from complaining, surrendering to fear and grief, this is understandable considering the lifestyles we all lead, we’ve dumbed down our relationship with the ‘living being we are a part of and move in’. Our micro-worlds are often controlled by remotes; some of us eat food ‘nuked’ in the microwave, devoid of nutrition; mechanical automated objects do everything for us, we are ‘away’ from nature, the earth and we move in a fabricated world. City people as a rule fit the model a touch more closely than country folk.  For many, everything is push button and there is movement from one air-conditioned space to the next, we eat out because it’s convenient, forgetting that what goes into us creates the ‘future us’ and we imbibe the feelings of others and whatever chemicals and garbage may be in the food.  Cities are full of people shuffling numbers and papers throughout the day, it’s the information age, so many of us are dealing with virtual objects, things that aren’t real or solid; lifestyle is based around consumer culture where money gets us what we want, “just keep it comin’ baby the old one’s not good enough”; even those with limited funds buy cheap pre-made food and accumulate piles of useless junk (says he with a dozen guitars); the world of objects is bulging at the seams. Is it any wonder that the living being Mother Earth would object?  Of course, if and when the ‘compost hits the Earth Change fan’ a person would seem overcome and bewildered, things would suddenly be ‘TURNED OFF’. Our dependencies would be screaming at us saying ‘feed me, gimme gimme gimme’. EVERYTHING would collapse.  Am I paranoid? Straight ‘no’, I am quite grounded. Whether a person be a scientist, a religious zealot, a doomsdayer or an off-the grider-bunker-hippy, we are in serious strife.
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What to Do?
Based on the various sources, some true and others that may be a fantasy, if we see or can assume what may be coming to the world around us, how do we prepare?  Do we need to go ‘full bunker-man’ with Elma Fudd complete with shotgun in hand? Do we just lie down? Do we really need to do anything?  Will signing up with a religious group and hoping we get it right be enough?  Will the spaceships come and take us to inner-earth, then to outer space and other dimensions?  Or if there were another Ark, with so many pairs of species who might eat each other, will there be room for us, will we be on the list?  Is there enough space for us?  Or shall we just let things be?  Or is it better to go full native? Are we chosen? Have we done enough for a God to say, “yep take that one, hop in the right queue”?
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Losing Control
Have we lost control of our lives?  If we look around at the lifestyles and dependencies we have, in most cases, the straight answer is ‘yes’, this is undeniable in many cases. There are attitudes of ‘if it is coming, why bother anyway?’, and ‘I just want live my life and not worry about the future.’  Although the approaches can’t do anything so why bother? and live in the ‘NOW‘, are both reasonable responses, of the two the attitude of live in the ‘Now’ has the foundation of something worth exploring if we are sensible about it. I consider ‘can’t do anything‘ to come from a dull mind, and in a way represents how a person already lives, it lacks the wonder of life. Life’s experiences lead us to wisdom; if we were to scale things back and have ‘gratitude’ for anything, maybe it’s ‘life’ itself that we need to give thanks for, there is a wonder in our very existence, and incredible potential in the hidden unborn future.  What if older civilisations that lived on just said, “I’m finished, I give up?” As I have had serious trauma in my life, I know that at the other side of it, beyond despair there is a place  we get to when the grief subsides, it is glorious.  And that is why I consider it important to not have an attitude of ‘lie down’ and give up.  Trauma and grief leads us to a place to readdress everything, how we live, what is important, how to ‘drop’ things, how to extract the flavor of life when it seems hopelessly empty and dry.
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Rethinking Living Now
The ‘Living Now’ idea has a lot of flippy-floppy New Age connotations; if a person doesn’t dig into understanding this phrase from the pseudo-New-Age dictionary properly, it can turn into something that a person pulls out of his or her pocket when needed and may not have a lot of substance; much in the way that people say “it’s all God”, or “it’s about Love”.  ‘Now’, does not mean no future, to have no creative destiny; in ‘Now’ is gratitude, respecting the present,  and I don’t mean just staring at flowers and over-checking out the details.  It is deeply entwined with letting distraction subside, embracing what is possible and disregarding and accepting what is happening that we cannot change.  An example of something we cannot change would be, if our loved one moves on and doesn’t include us as part of his or her life, there is no need for us to dream what will never be; we can do our natural grieving but still allow life to unfold as it will and develop ways to keep our thinking in check; nor is there a need to keep running back into the memories because we are unknowingly addicted to suffering.  Living with an attitude of ‘Now’ eradicates the unnecessary meanderings in thought and in the clarity and space that is created by not being a slave to our wandering thoughts, creative possibilities come about in our future when we detach from the unnecessary things filling up our thought-space . The nature of thought is activity and its fruit is the ‘world we move into and through’, a useful underlying life-principle is to redirect the thinking so that what we do have control over takes shape in a manner that is beneficial; if we don’t address what I would refer to as ‘unnecessary thinking’, what we create in our future comes from our old repetitive subconscious thinking patterns.
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Dumbing Down and Giving Up
Where the ‘dull mind’ is at fault is it cannot see a positive future, it sits in the ‘known’, wallows in it and uses what it knows, what I call its ‘Story of the World’ as a benchmark for all experience.  I am always fascinated and inspired by those people who can see a business opportunity in anything, they see hope where others miss the potential.  The (late) comedian George Carlin once did a skit about ‘nail two things together that have never been nailed together before, and someone will buy it’.  If you ask two electricians who have different personalities, ‘is there much work on at the moment?’, one will say, “it’s coming out my ears”, another will despondently respond, “nothing doing” and proceed to tell you everything that is wrong in the universe and it will probs include a list of health problems, a bit on politics and how stuffed the world is.  This in itself tells me that the experiencer in some way has a lot to do with what unfolds in the world around us that we move in.
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Getting Off the Grid
Do we need to go ‘off the grid’, to get out and not be a slave to the system that locks us in?
What do we really need, what are the essentials? Clean water, food, shelter, warmth and a few sticks to rub together to keep us warm and yes companionship and chocolate, coffee and plenty of guitar strings. Someone said to me “if you set up something, surely someone is going to turn up with a gun and take it from you”, maybe, but my mentality is not centred around Mad Max and Hollywood. When I walk out my door I don’t expect to get run over by a car, but I know that it does happen.   Personally I see a potential in the future even if Earth Changes (what ever version) were to arrive.

The world we know is changing, we need to consider this seriously if we value ourselves, our loved ones, where this will lead us, OUR future yogi already knows, being a slave to fear is not what we need here, it is our creativity and sense of brilliance that needs to kick in.

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What isn’t God?

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The Dyslexic Dog…
I have started this article by asking “What isn’t God?” Normally people may ask, “What is God?”  I thought a good point to come from might be to ask the opposite, to flip the question. When a dyslexic looks at the words,”What is God?”, he or she may see something that has a totally different meaning, it may read ‘What is Dog?’ Thinking it through, all humanity is just as confused as your average dyslexic in trying to understand either question; God is the greatest enigma. The brilliance of dyslexics (if they do not feel overly disadvantaged by not having the world of words sorted) will be in their ability to function comfortably in the world and solve problems in creative ways by looking at situations and finding a solution in a manner where they can wander unnoticed in the world of men and ‘things’ without a fuss.  The issue of being able to address / make sense of  God properly, is very similar to the dyslexics who, out of necessity have to learn to navigate the world differently; the more we explore the notions of God, it seems like the less capable we are of getting God to fit into a logical view, the crazier it gets.
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The Problem with Academics
We could study hard, gather all get all the academics of the world together to write papers on the subject, and still be confused.  When I glance across to the Indian Subcontinent to try to make sense of the issue and look for some of the wise men who have lived there, I find that in the not too distant past there was a sage called Ramakrishna, a simple man. Although he and I have very different perspectives, I find him to be of great interest. Often, whenever somebody asked Ramakrishna a question on spirituality, he would say ‘go ask Vivekananda’.  Vivekananda was his student, and a scholar, a key figure in introducing some of the Indian Philosophies to the West. Ramakrishna was an experiencer of something sublime and wasn’t overly interested in the intellectual side of things, there was no need for him to be.  This scenario gives me a hint, confirms what I already understood, or it is better if I say ‘assumed’ that it is probable that the intellect is not the right lens to look through to see or experience God.  Although it is only one man’s perspective; something I have heard over and over again, the analogy of trying to fit the ocean into the bucket is a perfect description of the dilemma we have.
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The Hopelessness of Zen
Anyone who has seriously explored the Zen Koan approach to self-transformation would have a deep understanding of not only why the system exists, but the (if I may say so) futility of the quest and trying to resolve the un-resolvable.  For those who are unfamiliar with Zen Koans, traditionally in some schools of Buddhism, a teacher would give a disciple (disciple = an horrendous and misleading description) /student a puzzle such as, “Why is a mouse when it spins?”,  another example would be,”What is the sound of one hand clapping, out of time?”  🙂 or some other, what would seem nonsensical puzzle to sort. Generally but not always, the teacher or Master would regularly check on the progress of the student (the word Master here means ‘one who has mastered him or herself’, in the same way as Jesus said to Peter, ” I am not your Master” when Peter addressed Him as Master”).  My reason for saying that the Master Teacher will not always check the progress is because most students would be out of there (the dojo/monastery) pretty fast, when they started to get a deeper understanding and an inkling of what was going on, that is unless it was natural for them to stay. Someone with half understanding would continue, and half-understanding is not knowledge, it is opinions, suppositions; awareness is not about opinions, it is about perception, the perceiver or experience; although anything is possible it would be seem a rare event for someone who had gone through the transformation process to stay in the environment, unless they were in some way incapacitated, very old, or were the future teacher who would take over the role as the Master, only fools wish to be Master.  As I see it, a Master emerges out of the depth of consciousness and has no agenda .  Many spiritual aspirants delight in showing how advanced they are spiritually, which in itself tells the world where they are really at. Monasteries and Dojos are for teachers and students, not for free men and women. Religious outfits represent what ones ‘limitation’ is or what one has aligned their thinking with, and is generally not about depth of experience, it expresses the tools that one is clinging to. They are halfway houses.
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Believers and Faithers
In the last two paragraphs I have stated that the intellect is not the tool for getting an understanding of what I will refer to as the Sublime Consciousness.  Neither by studying the scriptures intensely, nor by the use of reason to unravel an enigma given by a teacher can we arrive at God; this is a strong statement, I don’t mind if you disagree, but it needs consideration, this is serious stuff.  So, what can we do? If it is true what I say that logic or attempting through contemplation of ‘a great Teacher’s puzzle’ to resolve what the dyslexic Dog is, is not going to work; maybe we ought to look at faith for a solution.  Faith is a fascinating thing, it differs from belief, in some cases it may crossover into being the same, this is a individual thing.  But, faith and belief are very, very different.  Belief we could get by default from our family, our ancestors, they stamp our bums at birth; we may have fear of damnation and grab on to what we think is the best choice available; or convinced by a good God salesman; we may be even tricked with smoke and mirrors and end up following a shonky guru because his story of the universe sounded fantastic and appealed to our emotions.  Faith seems to have a bit more street-cred (credibility), a person could have had some type of deep experience and from it, he or she is convinced and then uses the response to the experience as fuel for motivation. People of faith can come in all sorts of packets, some are zealots, extremists, and others will be the kindest most compassionate being you will ever met, and there are many flavours in between. Believers are different, and a lot of them don’t think too deeply, if they researched the crimes committed by the hierarchies of their religions, they would never go back, their conscious would eat away at them.  The thing with faith is it gives us a reminder that ‘something is doing I don’t know what’, a hint that there may be something beneath the surface of every day life.  And I am not saying that ‘believers’ don’t have character, there are lots of variations, but I will quite clearly say (and it will sound arrogant) believers are on the surface of religion.  They are attached to the ‘story’ of the founders of their religion/Faith,  and I am quite comfortable saying “it’s not IT”.
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One Word, a Million Meanings
I have added belief to my list; I will be cautious about Faith, and this is because I consider ‘faith’ to be built on something else, it requires a little more thought.  But we need to be careful, interpretation is something that needs to be addressed.  When we say the word ‘Love’, we all have a different story about it, it may mean something tender to one person, to someone else it could include a mortgage, a white dress, couple of kids, whereas if you discuss it with Shams the teacher of Rumi, or Jiddu Krishnamurthi,  you may find yourself in unknown territory, you could easily be entering the doorway of transformation of your whole being.  Take the word Jazz for example, what comes to mind to someone may be oompah paaah, to others they may envisage old people eating lunch to the sound of overplayed instrumental musical standards resembling piped elevator music, and there are the hipsters who consider it to be blowing (improvising) over chord changes in a bar where you’d expect Miles lookalikes to sneak down the stairs at any moment. Interpretation is in the limitations of the brain capacity and awareness of the beholder. When we bring something to mind, there is always a ‘story, a history, often we come to a resolve that hasn’t had much exploration.  This is the problem with God.
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Looking in Another Direction
I like the idea of looking at the questioner, turning it around on oneself.  In India, there is a great tradition of Self Inquiry, looking at oneself.  The problem we have with traditions is they come with a story, it may be true, it may be false; even if it’s true, something else arises, it’s not ours.  It may give us a goal post to aim at but in a world of charlatans where there is is self-interest and self-indulgence, half truths and personal agendas, it is a minefield; as we move down this ‘imaginary’ road, we need to step carefully.  We know from experience that even if something looks good, sounds good and is packaged well, it may not be what we think it is.  The spiritual road is scattered with refugees, casualties and those who have given their whole being, only to find out they have been duped.
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Sorting the Questions
Although the questioner may ask questions, they are endless; it’s not unlike a child who wants to know everything, “Mummy, daddy, what’s that, what are you doing, where are we going?”, there are many valid questions, an anxious fearful mind can find a never-ending stream of them.  The mind (or more specifically it is better I say “that which creates thought”) is always pulling up things, stories and ideas,  that’s its nature; although the mind-space is essentially empty, there is something in that space, a part of us that loves movement, is always seeking, always reaching outwards, and continues to bring some kind of logical order to things.  Let’s look at a way of possibly resolving the questioning in some way, we can break it down to bring the ‘agitated thinker within’ to rest.  If we can create some peace and harmony within ourselves, our thinking, it will be easier to deal with the underlying issues and bypass the unnecessary nonsense.
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So firstly: Who is the questioner?
Let’s address the age old question of, ‘who am I?’ A cave man, if he was asked, would have answered simply with a few grunts, then gone about his business, club in hand, chasing a bison around a big rock or running from wild beasts of the field who consider caveman a delicacy.  He would have been too busy to be distracted and comes into his moment of ‘what is essential’. It would be easy to say the caveman is dumb, he hadn’t developed his brain like modern man, that’s fair, but his intelligence helped him survive; if we turn of the power and communication grid, who will survive now?  Tens of thousands of years later we are stuck with the same enigma that billions have pondered over; some have made claims of solving it, some have even said they were God; heretics or Godmen?  Yes, humanity has evolved in some ways but many of those belonging to our species are still violent, outrageously self-centred and disrespectful to the world around us.  I am also reminded that the old Zen or Chan Masters may have also responded to the question in a similar way , “What is Buddha?” with a reply of “Go eat your rice?’ When we look to both those scenarios, of cave-person and Zen Teacher, the common thread is to ‘Bring back our awareness to where we are.’ Without over complicating it, this for me is a bit of a give away of where the answer may lie.  I could roll out a series of quotes from scriptural texts that address the issue but there is really no need to.  In essence, we are a point of Awareness,  maybe how we name it is not so important.  A face is a face whether it has a beard or is wearing make-up, a mask or a helmet, the perceiver at the heart of experience is what is critical.
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When we see ourselves as ‘a point of perception’ it allows many possibilities to emerge; the changing worlds may take on numerous shapes or colours, but underneath it, the perceiver sits in silence and the show passes, it rises and falls.  The canvas of the Universes are in motion, but we, the ‘supposed me’ or us, is both ‘still’, ’empty’ and also I might use the expression for you to ponder, ‘an ACTIVE observer’ of the show (by this I mean we step into the puppet show of life).  This articulation of being dual in nature ‘still and something that changes’, is at the core of all experiences; for me when I dig in, the contrast is defined by Buddha’s teaching of Emptiness and Krishna’s elaborate / beautiful form as perceived by the Gopi’s,  or in a way is defined by the life of Jesus as he moved through the world and was a stream of compassion in action.
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Secondly -Do we need a religion or a God ?
I love this question and lookin through my window it is easy to answer; my response is not necessarily one that would suit many people, it’s not really a concern, one’s God or no-God is a personal thing. I will be bold and say, “Most Gods are false Gods”; OK maybe I will be softer in my language, “Most Gods are temporary”, or if I say it another way, “I consider most Gods are like trainer wheels on a bicycle”… and that probably gets me back into deep water, it may sound arrogant, but the idea of gradually ‘deepening’ our understanding is fair, as is a quantum leap in consciousness; or better still the combination of the two. The Gods people have are generally small.  On such an important issue, maybe we shouldn’t mess around, it’s not a problem if people disagree about God, it is the way we treat each other when we disagree that is important.  If God were real, why would God be offended by a questioning humanity?  I find it critical to explore and question, we do not need to come to the same conclusions or worldviews; we can ‘deepen’ by getting an understanding of others.  I am a Jnana Yogi, but I hang out with Bhaktas (This means I have a perception that we all move in God, whereas my friendly pilgrim neighbours are seeking God).
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Will the Real Jesus Stand Up Please
When I look at Jesus, from my window I see the greatest of men, some may call him God or a God, some may say his life was a a lie, a fabrication of the church to control the populace, and others will even say he traveled in Asia in the missing years between thirteen and twenty nine, married Mary Magdalene (who was not a prostitute and was the wisest of the disciples) .  When I keep looking, I see an institution that has grown around the name of Jesus, one with many different variations.  When I look further into history, I see anomalies, serious flaws, not with the person Jesus, but with what has happened over the last 2000 years.  The average man on the street does not know the history of the churches, the crimes against humanity, or where the scriptures came from, nor how they were chosen and complied.  If we are honest and look closely at religions and their Gods, the gurus and supposed Masters, we often see that there is a lot of hidden things going on that do not represent the values and ideals of the wise men that the sects have grown from; we are all aware of religious hypocrisy.  So what do we do, do we become atheists, skeptics, do we dump God?  The question asked earlier was ‘do I need a religion or a God?’ I could say quite confidently, “I don’t need religion, but I do need an inquisitive mind.  Answering about God, I will just say, “assuming that God were real, He/She/It will still exist without me, whether I am a believer or not”.  This thinking is leading me to a particular point, a resolve, and other questions arise, “If God is real, how do I experience God?”, although worship is important for some, is worship critical? It is not relevant to me, and I am not an atheist . I am not interested in the ‘story’ of God, it is ‘experience’ that is required.
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Religion Without God
We know that although Buddhism is a religion, and we often see statues of deity’s and forms of Buddhas, Buddhism is not about God.  When you strip it back, its essence is about the Four Noble Truths, these are at the core of the Buddha’s teachings. They are:
the truth of suffering,
the truth of the cause of suffering,
the truth of the end of suffering,
and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering.
We see clearly when we look into Buddhism that God is not necessary, and I am not saying there is no God, some type of core primal consciousness. The more I dig around in Buddhism I see it is about how we live my lives which is critical.  And although all religions are about ‘how we live our lives’, the focus changes within each religious institution.  I will also state that ‘truth’ is something to be cautious of, I see it as a temporary thing and a variable.
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Thirdly – What do I need to do to live a Spiritual Life?
We know from experience that people do all sorts of rituals, mysterious types of worship, dunking themselves in rivers, splashing babies with water and making them cry, rolling on the ground with coconuts, hanging from ropes with hooks through their skin, covering themselves in dirt, almost starving themselves, over eating because they call it Prasad, carrying crosses, kneeling for hours, burying themselves in the ground, overheating themselves in hot-houses, going on pilgrimages, wearing ridiculous outfits…. numerous ways of trying to grab God’s attention and showing their worthiness, sometimes even exaggerating their worthlessness to make themselves more appealing, the inverted-ego at its best, a twisted form of wannabe humility.  And there are methods which seem more practical such as prayer, meditation, mindful walking and contemplation, various methods for bringing the thoughts to a restful place. There is a smorgasbord to choose from, so how do we choose? What has substance and what is spiritual bling? What’s exhibitionism and what is transformative?  So what makes someone ‘spiritual’, supposedly Holy?  Is that a worthwhile question?
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Fourthly – What Supposedly Makes Someone Spiritual?
I have a problem, no not really, it is better that I say the world of men has a problem. Religion is divisive, spirituality can be incredibly arrogant, elitist; if we are not cautious it can fragment the community.  Religious people are often separating the human species into the ‘wheat and the chaff’, the holy and the profane, the saved and the lost; if they are are not doing it out loud, they are doing this in their thoughts, ‘us and them’ mentailty.
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If I come back to a basic concept that underlies many religions, there is one God, or even if there is no God mentioned, there is unity at the core.  I won’t even blink when I say this but, “if a religion divides the human community into us and them, those congregations need to rethink their values”. When we look at the civilisations that have come and gone, there are numerous gods who have been the centre focus for worship or religious practice;  we know the game of ‘MY GOD is better than your god‘, there are many people willing to argue this point, personally I wouldn’t bother, my response is going to be ‘get informed’, get an education about the various approaches to God and come back in twenty years.  The deeper we go into a faith or spiritual practice, the more we notice that the water comes from the same source, the wells are different, but water is the same… we are digging for pure water without the coloring’s or artificial flavors.
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What Really Matters?
I was asking ‘what makes someone Holy or spiritual?’  I think it would be better to ask “what makes a glorious human being?”,  “What makes our life worthwhile?”, “If there is a God, what would God value?” Or even if there wasn’t a God, “what is it best for us to value?”  I remember watching a television series about the Mahabharata; the Mahabharata relates to Hinduism. I am not a Hindu but there was a defining moment when Krishna spoke to eldest brothers of the two warring clans, one was a Pandava (good guy), the other a Kaurava (bad guy).  Krishna looked at them both and spoke the words, “although I love you both” and then he turned to the Pandava and said, “I must support you.”  For me, most of what I need to know is in that response.  I will take the liberty of saying,”if God were to choose something, someone, He/She/It would lean towards that which nurtures, that which brings harmony.”  We do know that the worlds we move in are a play of ‘rise and fall’, creation and dissolution, a contrast of light and dark, form moving on formless.
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What Are We?
We are feeling beings; this feeling-ness is something that goes way beyond ‘tingles’. Although we can get what I would call ‘false-flag-emotions’, things that seem like something with substance but are really just surface experiences; we have a part of ourselves that echoes wisdom from another place; the feelings, these deep emotions speak to us on how to live, what really has value, and what counts, what has substance.   I know from the experiences gathered through my life; empathy, compassion, kindness, detachment, a clear conscience, flexibility, forbearance, honesty are some of the fruits most worth nurturing. If someone asked me how to decide whether their religion or spirituality was working, personally I think they could measure the success of their faith or practice by the growth in these values and whether they are embracing more of a diverse of humanity or if their religion has separated them out as a ‘chosen ones’. When people are tender, vulnerable, at the ‘edge’, that is the time when ‘equality of being’ needs to come to the fore; no-one above or below; our sense of humanity can peep through and it is best we leave our designer Gods at the door; we are in this together, one species moving through space evolving.
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The Enigma of Being Human
The original question was ‘What isn’t God?’, we can ponder this deeply and the response will change shape from time to time, the unfolding process is like a tree that spreads out, old leaves and flowers fall off there is new growth; the roots of experience go deep into the ground and the trunk of our understanding becomes firmer.  There is an old Zen Koan which asks, “Does a Dog have Buddha Nature?”, this is also a very, very good question, it moves the focus of puzzle away from the individual, it nullifies our sense of ‘I’, the imaginary part of us which is what we believe ourselves to be; and like all Zen riddles, it is answered with our whole being, it is resolved in our transformation.  I will ask another pertinent question and it’s one we may ask ourselves each day as the sun rises, or for those of us who prefer to be up later starting the day with coffee and chocolate, “What does it take to be a human being who can add beauty the world, to be somebody who embraces both the religious man and the atheist, someone who has an open heart and leaves a trail of kindness wherever we travel?

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The Day My God Died

Published on by Tilopa 2.0Leave a comment

Some of us do ‘broken’ better than others; some fracture from the inside out and they don’t recover, they find an uncomfortable peace in addictions, destructive distractions; others go about their business and leave it till later in life to deal with, they wear it in their skin, illness, even bitterness, a thud instead of a spring in their step, listlessness in place of a sparkle; some have a dependence on being ‘broken’ and prefer to loop it ’round and ’round, unknowingly recreating a set of experiences that give a similar ‘feeling’ to the previous one and live it out again and again in another scenario.
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Softening Our Heart
It would seem sensible for us as a community to learn to ‘hold’ each better, to recognise frailty, to be sensitive in what seems to be an outrageously unkind self-indulgent world, to go that extra bit with ‘unnecessary acts of kindness’, to be that big bellied Buddha wandering with a bag of goodies, spreading joy because ‘that’s the way we roll’, to maybe drop some of our differences of opinions at times and let people feel comfortable with what they have arrived at, to ditch our ‘king of the castle attitude’ – ‘right at all costs’ approach, to allow others to be, and do it without splintering our boundaries, by that I mean by not allowing breaches and crossing the line of what is acceptable behavior, some people take more than their share.
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I have never met anyone who hasn’t hit a crisis point, and by that i mean found themselves in a situation where everything seems bigger than them; the passing of a loved one, having to let go of something precious, dealing with abuse, or being in a situation of ‘impossible love’, where the heart says one thing but the stars don’t align, they shine and then bash into each other, the beloved’s course seems to be heading off into some other galaxy without them; there are numerous scenarios and situations that bring us to our knees.
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Finding an Ally in Things
Sometimes it is not people who hold us, we can feel too vulnerable to let people in, exposed, we don’t want to seem-needy, or can’t take that step to say ‘ouch f*cking ooooch’ for whadever sane or absurd reason, there is often a tendency to remain silent. Having an emergency crew (of things) ready with their ladders, fire extinguishers, life-buoys and gaffer tape is a good idea, every now and then we can be caught off guard. I don’t mean being hyper-vigilant either and having a SWAT team racing in with all their protective gear every time we cut our pinky…….. Me, I like chocolate, goooood coffee, the feeling of the sun on my skin, the gentle movement of the leaves in the wind, the shades of green – those brush strokes of the hidden master artist, an hypnotic melody that brings to memory something beautiful from my past, an inquisitive mind, seeing and feeling the future before it happens, the mystic poets, a silly sense of humor and something newish to learn, dissolving myself into music, singing mantras or dancing in my bedroom in the dark – occasionally bumping into things.  Things can hold us, particularly if we are people who are used to doing things solo.
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Untangling
I think it is important to be able to live in a manner as if everything were taken from us, our loved ones, our dearest possessions (the RING, Lord of the Rings comes to mind, that type of obsession permeates the community in subtle ways, we don’t want to be like that do we? Being a slave to objects), maybe we need to be stripped bare of the lot to find ourselves, or should I say to detach from the ‘known us’; and even if we are at 180 degrees from EVERYBODY else, to still know how to dig for and experience joy.  And this does not mean giving up everything, it is about our attachment to them, the power of the control people and things have over us, dependencies that we are slaves to. Some people might say, “well why would I want to live if I lose the lot?”  I reckon that’s the right question, and a very fair one.
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False Gods
When my son died, so did my false God. It took me a while to realise I had a number of ‘hidden’ Gods. I was born with the idea that God lived in everything, this in Indian culture-speak would be called Jnana Yoga, a non-dual approach, the One manifesting as many; when you break it down it’s not rocket science, don’t need to look too far, just join the dots… same water, same air, same species, same sun, same doughnuts, there are too many hints that it is quite astounding that we humans miss the obvious.  As I grew up, I was indoctrinated into false Gods, the supposed God of the Christians, and a Father God. A tradition had grown out of the life of an extraordinary being who lived two thousand years ago, in time the churches and men of low wisdom and in many cases men of minimal integrity who were seeking control and power, superimposed a God over everyone, this God was supposedly pulling the puppet strings of humanity, judging and dooming, sitting on the shoulders of every man, woman and child, like an annoying parrot who won’t shut up, monotonous information in the subconscious being fed into everyone that we all become immune to.  And I am NOT implying ‘there is no God’, but rethinking what God may be is the beginning of transformation.
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The Shattered World
It’s quite normal that we go about our business in a a semi-conscious state not overly questioning anything until our world explodes.  Experiences can break us, in fact let’s be clear here, traumatic experiences WILL break us, it’s WHAT emerges out of the ‘seed-pod’ embedded in the experience that we need to look at, explore, play with, and if we are serious, turn it inside out.  If I may, I will make an assumption that ‘grief, loss, despair’, the whole gamut of emotions which emerge from it are similar for most people, there may be slight variables in the intensity but they would be the same categories; it is the WAY we respond that makes the difference. So what do we do? Our world is shattered, we are so broken that we can barely move, everything hurts, the feeling in our chest is a throb, our every particle stings…
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Taking Control of Ourselves
I did something extraordinary when my so passed over, I asked everyone to go away, not to talk to me about it, I changed the language, I said ‘he passed over’, I avoided ‘he died’.  We all have moments of ingeniousness in our lives and this was probably mine.  My idea of Bonsai Gum trees for Japanese tourists would be way down my list from this spark of wisdom.   I’ve done some far-out things but this probably is the one wise thing that eclipsed everything else, I really have no idea what motivated me to tell everyone to ‘mind their own business’; I guess this was because I was on the precipice and something deep inside, the ‘future me’ spoke.  We are social creatures and in times of great trauma it seems natural to get the people close to us to gather around and ‘hold us’.  So what was it that was going on in the deeper part of me thinking?  I went 180 degrees… this for me is usually where the wisdom lies.
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The Past, the Present and the Future Now
I have something that I have always done, it’s a type of time-travel, not the H G Well’s jump in a machine and arrive ahead or back in time version of time-travel, it’s more  related to  my thinking. For a number of years now, I have gone back through my life from the present moment and visited the younger me and also gone to the future unborn me; this may not seem overly important and slightly absurd, but I would say, of all the ‘hey, what’s your secrets?’, this would be the one thing that if someone could bottle it, financially they would instantly be in the top 1% of wealthy bods.  It’s not just in my thought I do this, I imagine my whole being travelling back and forwards and out into the cosmos.  There is a close relationship between my ‘unborn me’, with the ‘go away’ technique I used when my son passed over.  If I jump around a little in ‘who I am’, or to be more specific, what this means “if I consider myself to be more than, or to have OTHER points of awareness apart from the ‘known’ everyday nine to five , three score and ten (75 years life expectancy) “, what I would also describe as the ‘I am a body with five senses limited being’, other possibilities for solving complex problems emerge.  It was Einstein who said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them,” Einstein was known as a physicist, but when I look at him, to me he is a visionary; without the inquisitiveness to understand the nature of things, we may as well just measure objects and archive the info; but when we have a deep passion for understanding, a desire to expand human consciousness, whether it be through science or mysticism, the spin-offs and benefits will open new vistas and humanity evolves.   The enemy of the ‘elite’ is an evolving humanity.
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Rethinking Death
Death was my problem, or better still ‘my reality’, my son passed over and I was at the cemetery standing next to his coffin all alone, how do we as ‘feeling’ people deal with this? This is not just MY problem, it is everybody’s issue, it’s going to slam everyone, our beloveds will leave here and eventually according to most logic, people say we must take this journey ourselves, we may have concepts of Gods, Saints or Holy Men/Women guiding us, but let’s keep it simple, we are going solo.  In life, we can have short term bliss, lovers, objects, sunsets, holidays, all sorts of passing moments, but when the pain is in our chest, when our heart is broken, what can we do?  We can’t run, even if we try, the shadow of death follows us, its sting seems to have no remedy, at this time when our dear ones pass over, we are on the edge of madness, some never recover.  So what do we do? Each of us has a ‘genius’ that casts a light over our world of shadows, at this time of despair my genii woke up, he said to everyone “f*ck off”, nothing personal, just “go way please, you are in my way”; I did not want other peoples half-assed stories of reality, either true or untrue.  Some may consider it to be one of those moments when we close down our emotions and become numb; in a way, in all honesty there was a hint of that, but at some other level beneath the surface, there was something different going on, something more powerful and sublime.  I will call it the future-me, my Future Yogi came into my present. This Yogi, Yoda-type lives outside the five senses, this is where the possibilities lie, this is where I went.
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The Power of Contrast
When we are in a dark room, there will generally be a tiny gap of light that shines through somewhere, obviously it would be missed in daylight in the same way that when we go about our everyday business, everything is ‘leveled’ over and the subtleties are bypassed; the stark contrast of a few small glowing particles of light against the blackness gives a lot of power to the brightness; suddenly what may have seemed meaningless, missed or insignificant at other times becomes greater.  In the darkness of trauma, there are small glimmers of luminosity; it takes a bit of courage to stride across a dark room and peep into the source of the light, but that’s the thing with grief and despair, it’s almost ‘do or die’, not death of the body but death of our feeling for life; people can continue to live but are numb,they  run on automatic and then lose themselves inside the ‘layers’ of the world; these layers consist of the ‘things that keep us busy, preoccupied ‘ to avoid feeling and questioning.
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The Future Now
The future is both unborn and already present,  that statement would resemble nonsense to some people and without clarification would almost sound a little ‘Zoolander’ (movie comedy about fashion models) the “essence of water is wetness.”  🙂  However, coming from someone who has risen above or should I say stepped outside, through or past trauma, I suggest that the statement ought not to be disregarded too quickly, it requires consideration. Some people wear trauma in a way that it ‘defines them’, this is understandable, but trauma can be approached in a way that it is trans-formative. We as a rule live in what most of us call the ‘present’; we could take a type of Buddhist stance and say ‘well our thoughts are over active and we are always off somewhere else, come back to the moment’ but keeping it simple, I will say the present means ‘look at clock > check time > that time is now’,  we will just try an easy definition without any new age interpretations.  But here’s where the brain explodes 🙂  and I could without too much trouble make this sound like a stoned rave, but as I am not a drug taker, it’s not.  ‘Now’ is constant along the timeline of life, we are always in ‘now’. this NOW, has an entrance and exit point EVERYWHERE.
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The Meeting Point of the Rivers
So how does the death of God fit into this? How does it all come together? What is the connection between time, trauma and God that I have mentioned?  For me the glue is in the ‘experiencer’, the point of perception at the heart of these three things mentioned.  The experiencer in his or her thought is stuck in time because of an over-identification with the body, this body-thing that we lug around is a bit of a trickster; if there is too much focus on it, we live in fear, we become unnecessarily preoccupied with how we look and create a world of objects to lose ourselves in, this over-indulgence takes the attention away from the ‘perceiver’, although he/she always knows that it is more than the body, there is a type of forgetfulness that we naturally drop into.  With trauma, the focus goes on the experience that the experiencer has gone through, a story emerges that defines the world of the experiencer and the story usually  ALWAYS ‘gets in the way’ of new emerging life.  This ‘God thing’ (without sounding disrespectful) also diverts the attention of the perceiver/experiencer away from itself, it is looking outward, seeking, God is often in the distance, by this I mean at some time in the future there may be a meeting or coming together with God, or in a way ‘God is looking down’ or watching over.  This understanding of God, although it may feel nurturing  to us and creates a feeling of safety, may possibly only be conceptual, a hope a dream.
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Coming Back
My God, my imaginary one died with my son Joshua.  For quite some time I had assumed God had betrayed me, and this was a serious dilemma, my life had always been about God since I was born.  However, as my beautiful life unfolded, I came to realise that this God was not real, it was a ‘learned God’, a false God.  The passing of my son led me back to something more sublime, something I had to find myself, something I was born with that was hidden from me for sometime by things that belonged to the world of men and false prophets. I am grateful for what I was given, and although it was at times a painful journey, I found my way home, back to myself.

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The Beauty of Defects

Published on by Tilopa 2.0Leave a comment

Alan Watts the Zen guy, is my hero, one of a handful of people who have taught me to be myself.  He was a great writer, a speaker and a phenomenal non-thinker. It’s not that he doesn’t think, it is just that his view is at polar opposites to the rest of the community regarding his relationship with thought. In reality (this five senses one that we agree that things are named a particular way) he is a great thinker, it’s his understanding of the ‘gaps between thought’ that makes him what i refer to as a ‘non-thinker’. He, like most of the wise, see ‘thought’ for what it is and allow it to do its thing, without being a slave to it; or even if he was temporarily a slave to it, that ‘slaveness’ has a use-by date and  I guess he would return to ordered chaos without a fuss. He once said, “there are no straight lines in nature”, or if he didn’t say that exactly, he would have meant to say it, or implied it.  Much of what ‘hurts’ the thinking part of us, comes from ‘straightening’ the world around us, if we come to terms with this, everything changes.
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Rounding the Straight Bits
One of my favourite memories I regularly recall is from when I was camping. I am not a trekker, a ‘tenty’, a fisherman or seasonal vacationer; however, lying back in a dome shaped tent, the sounds of nature, the ocean rolling nearby,the smell of a wood fire, and my gradual adjustment to the lumps around me, and as I would settle in, there was a leaving behind  of all the things that are ‘straightened’ by the society we live in. The roundness of the tent ceiling relaxed me, it loosened the imaginary walls. We sort of hold ourselves together, working in jobs that are encased within the invisible barricade of a repetitious timezone, only to go home and look for ways of disentangling from it, and then jump back onto that timeline once again, prisoners of a matrix (not the movie). All these imaginary structures hold, or we ‘think’ hold us together.
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The Ridiculous Shape of Life
One of the great mysteries and idiosyncrasies of the private school system is the desire for a sense of order that is humanly impossible. This insanity is best expressed by the zealots who chastise teenage boys for having their shirts out. It’s one of those ‘ just aint gonna happen’ things; unless people were to sew their shirts to the trousers, or dress them in monkey onesies, it is an unsolvable ‘non-problem’. Any parent who has had to deal with the nonsense detentions their sons were placed on, would understand this lunacy. People try and have a sense of order, the odds of having a roomful of kids eating chips and tomato sauce (US translation = fries and ketchup?) and not end up with the bulk of them wearing the sauce, is unreasonable. The problem is, we are constantly trying to fit life into a shape that is not just possible.
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Entertain Me
We have become part of a machine run by madmen, caught in someone else’s dream, and we unknowingly have somehow been hypnotised into thinking ‘that’s the option we must take, as if we have an obligation to following a pre-written script’. Much of our suffering comes from feeling like a prisoner of a system that runs in the background, and out of fear of ‘the world will collapse if I don’t abide by normal way of doing things’, we find we are in conflict with what we are stuck in, and what we really want.  When what we really want is the space and time to work out ‘how to do things our way’ with a bit of guidance and support from others where need be. I am confident that this is the reason we humans run to drugs, alcohol and other escapism’s; the pressure of being out of sync is so strong, young men binge, hermits create cave apartments in a busy city, and the street-sleepers just give up and fall into a state of hopelessness. People don’t know how to be alone, to comfortably ‘do nothing’ and generally there is an assumption that all space needs to be filled with ‘head noise’, incessant thought.  This is the age of ‘entertain me’. Give me solitude any day, and I will enter the world when I am ready, I do not wish to take the world with me wherever I go.  I want the gaps between the musical notes and my heart to bleed when they emerge on cue.
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Robots
When we buy fruit and veges, so many of us go for the ones without glitches, perfectly shaped objects that resemble still-life photographs by master photographers and artists. Cities are full of men in gray suits, dodo birds with numbers in their heads, involved in a world that is ‘about’ things, the movement of ‘invisible stuff’, things that hold the system together but in essence are part of the fantasy, the monolithic monster of dependence that eats lives and packs graveyards with the broken lives of unfulfilled dreamers.  Every now and then we are reminded by annual holidays to ‘get out’, to go and get our feet into the earth, sadly it often turns into ‘still frame’ holidays, picture book experiences that when we look at snapshots, we could replace our image with anybody else’s; what is going on is we are often seeking experiences of ‘how things are supposed to be’ and not something that is new, an unborn new; we run from what is ‘here’ to an imaginary better ‘there’.
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One Size Fits No One
Our biggest problem with education is we train and squeeze information into children; they are empty, inquisitive, standing at the doorway of eternity looking out into forever. We stack children into an ordered list, the gonna-be-doctors at the top, and way down at the bottom the dreamers, the ones who sometimes don’t see the logic in things, the ones who will draw arms where we expect legs ought to be, or those who refuse to sit still.  And when we think about it, why should we make a child sit still if they want to move?  It’s like putting wooden shoes on someone to prevent their feet from growing, or tying rocks to a bicycle.
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So WTF Are We?
Although philosophers, yogis and dreamers will have numerous responses to the age old “who am I?”, a simple response to one aspect is, we are feeling beings, even if we are ‘visual’, underneath the picture in the mind is feeling.  We may ‘feel’ with our eyes, ears, through touch or some say with our ‘heart’.  There is confusion in society, an assumption that the intellect is the master; the world we move in is the slave of the senses; bold men, bullies dominate, they have fooled everybody into believing their story of what has value; magazines and marketing media have told us what beauty is, the curves and the size of the body, what colours work together or are a mismatch, what music is acceptable and what foods are good for us, only to be replaced by a new marketing campaign next week.  We try and bring order to disorder, to put things to rest because we are uncomfortable with their presence, we as man are attempting to place ropes around the moon, the planets and fit them into our world, to have ‘our relationship’ with them, they did pretty fine with out us for years, now they are in danger because we in our arrogance may pollute them, or some maniac may push a button and annihilate this region of the galaxy.
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Disassembling the World  As We Know It
I think if we loosen our belts a little (not in a fiscal way as they say in ‘political speak’), if we can stop trying to push the world into shape, things get easier.  Things, events will happen, it’s always our attitudes that make the difference.  People laughed at the hippies in the sixties, what they wore, but they laid the foundation a couple of generations later for businesses and offices to have ‘casual Friday’ where workers can dress like normal people (normal = not wearing penguin suits, unexpected objects, or white Anglo Saxons  not doing Indigenous dress-ups).  The gradual acceptance of the wisdom and ways of non-European white culture is a blessing, it allows us as a global community to have a ‘horizontal’ view of each other.  The British Empire and other hideous elitist empires had a method of dumbing down anything that didn’t fit into their criteria of measuring the world, these guys wrote the history of the world and embedded it into the subconscious of fertile minds of each generation.  They fooled everyone, completely stuffed everyone over.
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Taking Back Our Power
Claiming  back the ‘world’ is the responsibility of all of us; by just being ourselves and not attempting to overlay what is not us, is the trick, to be natural and embrace our bumps, bruises, to accept the various shapes and see the unity in diversity.  And then ‘defects’ are not seen as defects, they are variations and new possibilities.  So much is tied up with Self Worth and Self Esteem, and it is based in others ‘story of the world’, it is not ours and we need to claim back our power.
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