You Must Sing Your Truth

Bruce Cockburn

The whole point of writing songs is to share experiences with people, says Bruce Cockburn. Cockburn's collected work is a journey - both moody and revelatory - into the dark night and the sweet laughter of the soul, around the world with vivid imagery and unflinching observations of human cruelty, greed, courage, and survival through faith, and back home to the peaceful forests and vibrant cities of his native Canada.

It's the wheel going around, he says. The stuff from the '70s was a product of inward-looking exercises, and then it got very much outward directed through the '80s, and started to swing back so that you get some of both in the '90s, and by the end of the '90s, it's back to internal again, but in what I hope is a deeper way. It's not my idea that love is at the center of everything, but I believe it is, and I understand a lot more about that than I did in the '70s.

Born in Ottawa in 1945, Cockburn set his sights on a career in music after growing up listening to Elvis records. He landed at Berklee College of Music in Boston in the early '60s, but found he was too spiritually restless to settle into studies of jazz guitar and composition, and in 1965 he moved back to Ottawa to play in a series of rock 'n' roll bands. Cockburn eventually found his voice as a songwriter drawing upon instinctive spirituality, a keen eye for detail, and a wry sense of humor. By then he had also developed a highly personal finger-picking guitar style that merged Mississippi John Hurt blues with modal jazz harmony as well as melodic lyricism and cycling rhythms that suggested an ear for Indian, Asian, and African music.

Ten albums later, Cockburn moved beyond his identity as the folk muse of eastern Canada. The 1979 song Wondering Where The Lions Are was a national hit in Canada and a wake up call to the world. It reached the top 25 on the Billboard charts in America. The song blends Cockburn's sunny guitar work with reggae backing by Jamaican musicians in Toronto. Its dream-inspired lyrics about ferocious lions suddenly turned friendly grew out of a conversation Cockburn had had with an acquaintance in Canada's security establishment. A conflict was brewing between Russia and China, and his friend warned that they might wake up the next day to the end of the world. We woke up the next morning, Cockburn recalls, and it wasn't the end of the world, so that was the beginning of the song.

It was also the beginning of Cockburn's international career. A year later, in the song Tokyo, Cockburn reflects on the jarring experience of witnessing a car wreck at the end of his first Japanese tour. From the transitional album, Humans, this song finds Cockburn opening to the world, and also to new brands of rock 'n' roll, which he had shunned in the early '70s, but now returns to with open ears. Love songs like The Coldest Night Of The Year are a perennial feature of Cockburn's repertoire, but driving, orchestrated electric-guitar pieces like The Trouble With Normal, brimming with anger and outrage, mark a turning point in the early '80s, an embrace of global realities and urban sensibilities. Cockburn's electric guitar work further revives and updates his taste for rock 'n' roll, and Jon Goldsmith's keyboard work and Hugh Marsh's soaring electric violin solos also announce a boisterous new era in Cockburn's ever evolving sound.

The 1984 album Stealing Fire was a peak, the centerpiece of what Cockburn now sees as his north-south trilogy, three musically adventurous and politically engaged mid-80s albums. Stealing Fire grew out of Cockburn's travels in Central America, particularly Nicaragua. Lovers In A Dangerous Time was inspired by watching his daughter play with friends in the school yard, and contemplating the frightening world she would grow up in. It also played as a meditation on the dawning reality of AIDS. But the album's most significant song was the most painful to write. If I Had A Rocket Launcher arose from Cockburn's experience in a refugee camp just over the Mexican border from war-ravaged Guatemala. The specter of helicopters crossing that border to strafe desperate refugees awakened deep anger, and Cockburn's honest expression of that anger came very close to a call to arms.

I wrestled with it so much before I recorded it, Cockburn says, morally, I mean. I had this song that was my truth, but it just seemed utterly shocking the idea of singing that for people, and the risk that it might incite the wrong kind of emotion in listeners seemed too big. So the learning experience there was the understanding that to not sing your truth is wrong... a kind of self-censorship. To Cockburn's surprise, Rocket Launcher received more radio play than any other song in his career, and its video became a regular on MTV. The song also deepened a growing rift with Christian organizations that had once embraced Cockburn's music. One such group had actually been funding Guatemala's murderous government and saw Stealing Fire as Cockburn's endorsement of Godless communists. All of a sudden there was this gulf between us, recalls Cockburn. They were saying I was wrong. And I'm going, 'I' m not wrong. I went there and I saw it for myself.You guys shouldn't be doing this.' But they didn't want to hear that.

If anyone thought the Rocket Launcher experience would mellow Cockburn's anger about the victims of the world economic order, they found out otherwise when he released the rocking, raging Call It Democracy the following year. The song is as good a manifesto of the anti-globalism movement as rock 'n' roll has ever produced. But in the late '80s, Cockburn did begin to mellow. The wistful Waiting For A Miracle puts a reflective coda on his Nicaragua experiences. It was a tenet of Marxism that the human being is the crown of creation, says Cockburn, and yet here they are, the crown of creation, out there slaving in this field and worrying about whether they're going to survive this day.

Cockburn was pleased when Jerry Garcia covered Waiting For A Miracle. Over the years, artists as diverse as Barenaked Ladies, Jimmy Buffett, Anne Murray, Maria Muldaur, The Rankins, Dan Fogelberg, Holly Near, and Chet Atkins have interpreted Cockburns work, but he was particularly flattered to get the nod from Garcia. He describes the moment when the two met: [Garcia] said, 'Oh, man, that's a beautiful song. I hope I didn't get the lyrics too screwed up.' And I said, 'Well, I was actually planning to wait until the second time I met you to bring that up.' Cockburn's 1989 album Big Circumstance marks the start of a trend back to a more acoustic sound palette and more personal themes. The single If A Tree Falls puts an environmental spin on Cockburn's rage at global capitalists. Its tough, spoken-word verse and anthemic, sung refrain decry the destruction of the world's rain forests.

After that album, though, Cockburn hit a songwriting dry spell. Part of it was the fact that all I could think of was stuff I had already done, he says. I didn't know where to go next, so I took some time off, and then I ended up writing the songs on Nothing But A Burning Light. The lead track on that album, A Dream Like Mine, is a spare distillation of Cockburn's rock and folk instincts, with lyrics inspired by a Canadian novel about a archetypal warrior figure who rises from a lake to fight for the survival of native people. Cockburn's next album, Dart To The Heart, draws on what Cockburn describes as misadventures of the heart. The single, Listen For The Laugh, fills out his clean new sound with a punchy horn section, and celebrates the laughter of love, the most important kind, says Cockburn, somewhere between a kind of mocking Nietzschian laughter and Rumi, that heart laugh that the Sufis have.

These two early '90s albums were produced by T-Bone Burnett and recorded in Los Angeles. Cockburn learned a lot about the art of recording from Burnett, and for his 1996 album, The Charity Of Night, he decided to try his hand at producing. He recruited a band member, singer/guitarist Colin Linden-a technology wizard-to co-produce with him, and together, they created Charity and also the award-winning 1999 album Breakfast in New Orleans Dinner in Timbuktu. The songs from these albums reveal a mature, seasoned outlook on life, especially Pacing The Cage, a perfectly crafted evocation of those times when one feels confined by the life one has created. Sometimes the only way you can see getting out of it is imagining death, says Cockburn. But the simple beauty of the melody and music suggests transcendent hope, putting a poignant twist on what might otherwise seem a bleak message.

The film noir-tinged Night Train was the fruit of a night spent drinking absinthe. Cockburn says the highly alcoholic beverage is famous as having both inspired and destroyed generations of French artists, adding, I embraced the absinthe experience and it produced 'Night Train.' It also produced a horrible hangover.

In 1999's Last Night Of The World, Cockburn returns to a cherished idea, that love trumps all. He imagines himself sipping champagne with his lover on the eve of the apocalypse. Listeners interpreted the song as a comment on the then approaching millennium, but Cockburn says it's one of those songs that never goes out of style.

Anything Anytime Anywhere also includes two newly recorded songs, the title track, a lost love song reinvented with help from the Fairfield Four, and one fresh composition, My Beat, featuring guest vocals by Patty Griffin. It's about riding my bike around Montreal, and being in the moment, which is still the internal, and eternal, thing, part of that ongoing exploration of what it means to be alive.

step through forever
into this very moment
the heart is pumping
and the heart rocks

~~~~

The Freedom to Not Know

"Something extraordinary occurs when we allow ourselves the freedom to not know, because it is then that everything opens up. It is then that the experience of life becomes profoundly joyous and unthinkably mysterious. When we surrender the need to know, we discover that things often work out in marvelous and unexpected ways that we could never have previously imagined. Only when we transcend the need to always be sure of what's going to happen in the future will there be room for that which is extraordinary and miraculous to be known.

"What would the experience of life be like if we were no longer seeking for any security whatsoever from the future? Everything would open up, everything would become possible. Why? Because we wouldn't be waiting any longer for the experience of life to become complete. When we realize that everything is possible, then the way we respond to life begins to literally break boundaries. Suddenly, all that seemed fixed is undone, and that which was previously unimaginable reveals itself."

Andrew Cohen

pools of sorrow, waves of joy
come drifting through my opened mind
possessing and caressing me

~~~~

The Freedom to Not Know

174

The Power to Evoke

David Halberstam on the music/poetry of Simon & Garfunkel:

"The time is I think early 1967, and I am driving north through the Mississippi Delta, a part of the country which I have covered on and off for 12 years and where I never feel safe. I am, as is my wont down there, keeping my eye on the rearview mirror to be sure that no pickup truck with a whiplash antenna is following me, and I am fiddling with the car radio with my right hand. As I do I pick up a sound that is at once pure and oddly haunting, even though I have never heard it before. I am immediately struck by the beautiful quality of the voice of the lead singer and the lyrical quality of the writing - if you are a writer and your business is words then there is no greater pleasure than hearing a song and knowing that it is the work of a real writer, or in this case, a distinguished American poet.

"I am hooked: there is a quality to the voice, Art Garfunkel's, that recalls something I had already come to love in the early Everly Brothers work, a certain clarity and purity, that makes me think that is the way the olde English balladeers sang two and three hundred years earlier. Added to that is the beauty of Paul Simon's writing, which both then and now has a capacity to make me pay attention and listen carefully, not just to the beat, but to the words, for the words with him always matter, and are never obvious, always full of surprises. My friend Russell Baker, the writer, who is also an admirer of the music, swears that he can hear shades of T. S. Eliot in Simon's writing. The song is over, and I find myself singing in the car, "And the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls..." as I head towards the Memphis Airport.

"I was immediately in its power, and I have stayed that way for well more than thirty years. The music of Simon and Garfunkel still has a special power over me - the power to evoke another time and place. Music after all is the background score to our lives, not merely surviving in our memory banks long after so many of our other seemingly stronger memories have faltered, but serving to remind us of who we were at a given moment of our lives, where we were, what we dreamed of, what we feared and, of course, who we loved. So it is for me with the work of Simon and Garfunkel: though they are not ostensibly political, they are woven so deeply into the fabric of a special moment that I am always transported back in time. When I hear them I am brought first and foremost to that period of the late sixties and early seventies when this country was alive with political challenge, both on civil rights and on Vietnam, and I was a much younger reporter, deeply involved in covering both, two great stories which were oddly twined as America in conflict with itself, and the country seemed to be torn between two very different definitions of itself, each challenging the other for supremacy. It was above all else an exhilarating time to be alive, and to care about things which were bigger than you were, and their music seemed to form the background music for so much of it; beautiful, challenging, yet not so angry as to be discordant.

"Now, more than thirty years later, their music still has its own special haunting quality, and though for young listeners it obviously stands of itself, for those of us who lived through that remarkable time, it has an additional power - the power to evoke."

Hello, darkness, my old friend

I've come to talk with you again

~~~~

The Endless Thrill of the Possible

"The spiritual energy that runs through my veins has always been calling me to a new expression of enlightenment - one that is free from the timeworn shackles of the great mythic traditions, shackles that inevitably get revealed as they clash with the values of modernity and postmodernity. It is an enlightenment that by its very nature can never be content with the way things were in the past, no matter how glorious that past may have been. It is an enlightenment that can also never be content with how things are in the present moment, even at those rare instances when everything seems like it couldn't be more perfect. It is an enlightenment that is defined by a ceaseless and ecstatic reaching forth towards an as-yet-unborn and unmanifest potential - a constant stretching towards a future perfection that will always lie just beyond one's fingertips. My inner eye and heart is captivated by the freedom of that mysterious place between the immediacy of the present moment and the endless thrill of the possible."

Andrew Cohen

~~~~

Spirit is Higher

"Everybody seems to already know that the nature of God or Spirit or Consciousness or Being is higher in meaning, value, and inherent glory than the separate ego or the unique objects that make up the world around us. But I think we tend, more often than not, to overlook or just not see the profound implications of that simple truth."

In this blog, Andrew Cohen beautifully illuminates the nature and the face of Spirit - the Unmanifest and the Manifest, the One and the Many. He describes the evolution of human consciousness as a process in which ever-greater complexity and higher integration continually arise out of previous levels, and suggests that our personal evolution "depends upon our willingness to strive consistently to make philosophically and morally challenging distinctions".

"If Spirit, or God, is that which is always Highest, then how does that affect our perspectives and our judgments? Are they always informed by the natural hierarchy inherent at every level of the very fabric of the cosmos?"

Good question.

there's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
and she's buying a stairway to Heaven
when she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed
with a word she can get what she came for

~~~~

Pay Attention

"People think it's more effortful to do things mindfully... In fact, it's not, and it's more fun. Mindfulness is a way to create passion."

A few months ago a psychologist and conductor collaborated on an unusual psychological experiment - using a full symphony orchestra.

In an article for Miller McCune Online Magazine, Tom Jacobs reports how members of the Arizona State University Orchestra were asked to play the Brahms’ First Symphony twice. The first time, they were given the following instructions:

Think about the finest performance of this piece that you can remember. Play it that way.

The second time, these were the instructions given to the orchestra:

Play this piece in the finest manner you can, offering subtle new nuances to your performance.

Before reading on, stop and think about the likely effect on performance of the two sets of instructions. Do you think there would be any significant difference between the two performances? Would you expect either performance to be better or worse than the other?

To see how this experiment turned out and what this means to you, click here for the full article from LateralAction.

all your life, you were only waiting
for this moment to arise

~~~~

Don't Settle

Flipping through a magazine at the hairdresser's today, came across an article which had some quotes which I thought were worth writing down. The article was about taking risks:

"You may be surprised by what happens when you commit to an uncertain outcome - your strengths will reveal themselves."

"Peer into the unknown and you will find yourself face to face with possibility - and potential."

then later that same day, settled down into cyberspace and got this from Lateral Action - article is very short and to the point, and comments are so moving... hey, as long as you're reading this post, it's not too late!

Here's the Lateral Action message:

When I was young, I wanted to be a rock star.
Not a pseudo-celebrity social media rock star...
A real rock star.
I didn’t become a rock star because I didn’t try.
I told myself I couldn’t do it, or maybe I was simply afraid to fail.
Knowing what I know now, I know I could have done it.
Knowing what I know now, I know I can do anything I truly want to do.
Not that it’ll be easy… just that it’s doable.
Listen.
Skip directly to what you truly want to do.
Don’t substitute.
Don’t settle.
Do it.

For the comments, click here. Myself, if I have any regrets at all in my life, it's not about what I did, but what I didn't do.

There's also an excellent article (manifesto) on the ChangeThis site called alternately How to Be Creative or Ignore Everybody - it's a rather long article (pdf format) but the author has some very interesting strategies for living the life you want - one of my favorites, apart from the advice to ignore everybody, is the "stop-doing list" - similar to a "to-do" list but, well I 'm sure you can figure that out.

nothing is confined except what's in your mind

~~~~

Evolutionary Enlightenment 101

Andrew Cohen, EnlightenNext Magazine:

"The Authentic Self is Eros, which we experience at the highest level of our being as the urge to innovate and create that which is new. The Authentic Self is the spiritual impulse, the mysteriously felt urge to evolve at the level of consciousness itself. It's experienced as a compulsion to become more conscious, more awake - more in touch with life at the deepest level. And it's the drive toward the new enlightenment - what I call Evolutionary Enlightenment. It's not the old traditional aspiration towards enlightenment, which was a longing to transcend the life-process, but is, in fact, the very opposite. It's the drive to become one with the life-process.

"In this new enlightenment, the reason we are driven to become one with the life-process is not merely to experience some form of mystical oneness with everything - a nondual integration with the entire display of manifestation. We strive to become one with it for the biggest reason there could be - so we can ultimately take responsibility for where it’s going. And the reason this aspiration is so significant is that, if we succeed, the very process we endeavor to take responsibility for literally begins to awaken to itself through us. What could be more important than that?

"But in fact, that’s just the beginning."

Take a walk on the wild side with this blog post from Andrew Cohen, spiritual teacher and founder of EnlightenNext magazine.

images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes
they call me on and on across the universe

~~~~

Creative Elegance:

The Power of Incomplete Ideas
Matthew E. May, ChangeThis

"It is nearly impossible to make it through a typical day without exchanging ideas. Whether deciding on something as simple as a restaurant for a long overdue night out, or as complicated as the design of an entirely new product, we are forever involved in sculpting and selling our creative thought. Conventional wisdom says that to be successful, an idea must be concrete, complete and certain. But what if that's wrong? What if the most elegant, most imaginative, most engaging ideas are none of those things?"

"A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally what is not. It is in the discipline to discard what does not fit - to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort - that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company, or most important of all, a life."

"In the Zen view, emptiness is a symbol of inexhaustible spirit. Silent pauses in music and theatre, blank spaces in painting, and even the restrained motion of the sublimely seductive Geisha in refined tea ceremonies all take on a special significance because it is in states of temporary inactivity or quietude that Zen artists see the very essence of creative energy."

Click here to link to the full Manifesto (pdf format).

and the most she will do
is throw shadows at you...

~~~~

What's a blog without a blonde joke?

Professional Courtesy

A blonde woman was speeding down the road in her little red sports car and was pulled over by a woman police officer who was also a blonde. The blonde cop asked to see the blonde driver's license, who became progressively more agitated as she dug through her purse.

"What does it look like?", she finally asked. The policewoman replied, "It's square and it has your picture on it".

The driver finally found a square mirror in her purse, looked at it and handed it to the policewoman. "Here it is", she said. The blonde officer looked at the mirror, then handed it back, saying, "Okay, you can go. I didn't realize you were a cop".

~~~~

The Person Behind Myself

When it comes to introspection, how many versions of yourself do you listen to?

Checking out the SoulPancake site, came across this interesting post touching on coincidence, synchronicity, ego vs soul, forgiveness and the idea of "multiple selves". The article concludes with discussion on how we might navigate the route from powerless to powerful, inviting comments on the question, "When you are struck by a random event, how do you mentally turn things around for yourself?"

"So, looking at random events as something not random at all, but rather events you drew to yourself as the result of prevalent thought patterns will show you more and more the power your thoughts truly have."

In the magical universe there are no coincidences
and there are no accidents.
Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.
- William S. Burroughs

~~~~

The Real Internet

"I wake up in my apartment in Brooklyn. I slap the snooze button on an alarm clock made in the Philippines. For a few moments I lie on a bed manufactured in New Jersey, on sheets woven in Mexico, under a blanket from India, reluctantly gathering the mental energy necessary to rise and face another day in NYC. With a deep breath I get out of bed and make coffee with a French press, the way my mother taught me. I grind coffee beans grown on a Puerto Rican plantation. I boil water that comes from a number of reservoirs in upstate New York. This water has pulsed through an intricate web of ducts and unseen pipes that some forgotten engineers constructed decades ago, so that the tens of millions of people in the metropolitan area can stay alive for yet another day. When the coffee is ready, I pour it into a mug manufactured in China that says "Don't Mess With Texas". I add the requisite milk that a few weeks ago pooled inside the udders of cows on a huge industrial farm in Pennsylvania.

"Right now, though, I'm not thinking of any of these places, or the people and animals in them....."

An excerpt from Ethan Nichtern's first book, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence - as one reviewer remarked, "arguably the first truly 21st century dharma book". I have not read the entire book (yet) but was fortunate to have heard a reading of this section at a meditation program last winter.

"....Within this system, if someone should happen to smile at me - even by accident - I might smile to the rest of the world for hours, spreading warmth along the sidewalk like a lip-curling virus. If I bark at people mindlessly, they might infect twenty other innocent bystanders with their frustration before they even make it to lunch. This is the real Internet - the organic network that transcends cyberspace - and we're all connected to it and through it."

I am he as you are he as you are me
and we are all together

~~~~

A Wary Invitation To My Future Child

A poem by Ethan Nichtern

A Wary Invitation To My Future Child

1. The Disclaimer

let me just say I'm not expecting you for awhile
except by tragedy of bubble-burst latex
you won't come wailing anytime soon
so if all goes according to the Plan
according to which nothing ever goes
you should be slowly wrapping things up in your last life right now
taking long walks and talking nonsense to strangers and drooling a little bit
trying to untie mental knots
making temporary peace with those apparent contradictions
getting affairs in order
just so that others may grieve what I welcome
maybe you're a satin-clad Goddess who rides a long-tusked elephant
or maybe you just got world peace declared on the Planet Zolton
or maybe you're that eccentric horseshoe crab misunderstood by all the other horseshoe crabs whose genius as a horseshoe crab will only be recognized long after a lonely death in a lonely horseshoe shell
I hope you're not a consultant

2. The Fine Print

aggression still tantalizes us
(I'm sorry)
attachment's like a bungee cord
(I'm sorry)
ignorance emits a steady hum
(I'm sorry)
your father's a crazy Buddhist
(I'm sorry)
kids don't get to make any decisions
(I'm sorry)
parents argue over money and then slam doors shut
(I'm sorry)
adults make three lists: one short list called "friends", one longer list called "enemies" and one really long list called "who cares?"
(I'm sorry)
old people scream "I wish I could have done more!", which nobody understands because their words are slurred by strokes and tears
(I'm sorry)
if two people look each other in the eye it's usually by accident
(I'm sorry)
when people dance they get embarrassed
(I'm sorry)
when people speak they get self-conscious
(I'm sorry)
when people smile they feel guilty
(I'm sorry)
we have this little thing called propaganda
(I'm sorry)
we have this big thing called poverty
(I'm sorry)
we have these huge things called armies
(I'm sorry)
there's no escape from your own mind - believe me, I already tried everything
(I'm really, really sorry)
you will become what you hate - it's inevitable
the only way I've found to deal with this is to expand the scope of what you love
but this isn't about wishful thinking
it's about courage and training
(that's the one thing I won't apologize for)

3. The Invitation

where you are now do they have cartoons?
where you are now do they scream philosophy and sip caffeine?
where you are now do they have paintings where the oil leaves a 3D trail across the canvas?
where you are now did they reinvent the wheel a thousand times?
where you are now are there kaleidoscopic cities?
where you are now are your fingers mesmerized by the grey texture of the mortar which holds a brick wall together?
where you are now do they have Bob Dylan?
where you are now does your body come with two of everything just in case?
where you are now do genitals interlock so perfectly and then separate like defective velcro?
where you are now do all your teachers sneak up into the crawlspace between thoughts and haunt you?
where you are now do friends sit cross-legged in a circle playing conga drums until a half-hour past a cloudy dawn at which point they all get up together and cook Eggs Overtired with salsa and say as a matter-of-fact in between yawns and mouthfuls: "let's save the world"?

4. PostScript

At the bottom of a cardboard pile in a just-sold house in Arkansas is a pristine photograph of a grandfather who dies of a fourth heart attack just as his grandson reaches the ripe old age of negative 1 (Earth years). He holds a baby girl and he looks just like me. Or I should say that I look just like him, that is, if we want to be polite and pretend that a circle is a line.

Brooklyn
2002

~~~~

If you're finding yourself with too much time on your hands...

yeah, like in case you have finally transcended those annoying time-pigs such as eating and sleeping - here are some sites & blogs you might wanna check out:

kurzweilai.net -- futurist Ray Kurzweil's website for cutting-edge thoughts on technology, consciousness, evolution and immortality. And don't miss the virtual hostess, Ramona, who guides you - knowledgeably, humorously and sometimes cheekily - through the site.

scienceandreligiontoday.blogspot.com -- Perhaps the internet's most in-depth exploration of the ongoing tension between Bibles and Bunsen burners, this blog is especially noteworthy for its weekly posts featuring the guests of Robert Lawrence Kuhn's PBS series Closer to Truth.

soulpancake.com -- This entertaining social-networking site was created by comedian Rainn Wilson (The Office). Featuring funny videos and discussion forums to "chew on life's biggest questions", the site's mission to "de-lameify" spirituality is a welcome addition to the web.

enlightennext.org/parliament -- A new EnlightenNext site presenting unpublished video interviews conducted at the 2004 Parliament of the World's Religions. Twenty-six featured visionaries, including Ammachi, Michael Lerner, Jane Goodall and Deepak Chopra, share their thoughts on the future of religion.

let's go surfin' now
everybody's learnin' how
come on a safari with me

~~~~

Need A Hug?

Free Hugs - No Limit Per Customer

Here is a wonderful feel-good, make-ya-smile video thanks to my friend & fellow blogger David B.

I'd like to teach the world to sing
in perfect harmony
I'd like to hold it in my arms
and keep it company

~~~~

And Now For Something Completely Different

Boomeritis - a novel that will set you free
Ken Wilber

Movin' on - just read first two pages of this book and know I'm gonna love it...

"I am the bastard child of two deeply confused parents, one of whom I am ashamed of, the other of whom is ashamed of me. None of us are on speaking terms, for which we are all grateful. (These things bother you, every now and then.) My parents are intimately conjoined in their displeasure with the present; both want to replace it - quickly - with a set of arrangements more suited to their inclinations. One wants to tear down; the other to build up. You might think they were made for each other, would go together, hand in hand, a marriage made in transformational heaven. Years after the divorce, none of us is so sure.

I am cursed with an eye from each, and can hardly see the world at all through two orbs that refuse to cooperate; cross-eyed I stare at that which is before me, a Picasso universe where things don't quite line up. Or perhaps I see more clearly precisely because of that? My father's eyeball in my head sees a world of pluralistic fragmentation, ready to disintegrate, leaving in its riotous wake a mangled mass of human suffering historically unprecedented. My mother's eye sees quite another world, yet every bit as real; we are increasingly becoming one global family, and love by any other name seems the driving force.

I share neither of their views; or, rather, I share them both, which makes me nearly insane. Clearly twin forces, though not alone, are eating away at the world: planetization and disintegration, unifying love and corrosive death-wishes, bonding kindness and disjointing cruelty, on a colossal scale. And the bastard, schizophrenic, seizure-prone son sees the world as if through shattered glass, moving his head slowly back and forth while waiting for coherent images to form, wondering what it all means.

"don't mean shit"
- Mr. Natural (High Times comics)

~~~~

Some Parting Words from Al Gore

from the Conclusion of Earth in the Balance

When considering a problem as large as the degradation of the global environment, it is easy to feel overwhelmed, utterly helpless to effect any change whatsoever. But we must resist that response, because this crisis will be resolved only if individuals take some responsibility for it. By educating ourselves and others, by doing our part to minimize our use and waste of resources, by becoming more active politically and demanding change - in these ways and many others each one of us can make a difference. Perhaps most important, we each need to assess our own relationship to the natural world and renew, at the deepest level of personal integrity, a connection to it. And that can only happen if we renew what is authentic and true in every aspect of our lives.

I believe also that - for all of us - there is an often poorly understood link between ethical choices that seem quite small in scale and those whose apparent consequences are very large, and that a conscious effort to adhere to just principles in all our choices - however small - is a choice in favor of justice in the world. By the same token, a willingness to succumb to distraction, and in the process fail to notice the consequences of a small choice made carelessly or unethically, makes one more likely to do the same when confronted with a large choice. Both in our personal lives and in our political decisions, we have an ethical duty to pay attention, resist distraction, be honest with one another and accept responsibility for what we do - whether as individuals or together. It's the same gyroscope; either it provides balance or it doesn't. In the words of Aristotle, "Virtue is one thing."

For civilization as a whole, the faith that is so essential to restore the balance now missing in our relationship to the earth is the faith that we do have a future. We can believe in that future and work to achieve it and preserve it, or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to inherit our legacy. The choice is ours; the Earth is in the balance.

too much monkey business, like Mr. Berry said
drugs and oil and money, there'll be nothing when you're dead
at the risk of being subversive, nothing left to do but shout
open up the window - let the bad air out
- Bruce Cockburn

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A Tribute to Thomas Berry

The renowned eco-theologian Thomas Berry died in the early morning of June 1st at the age of 94. Berry was greatly influenced by the evolutionary cosmology of French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. A Catholic priest himself, Berry will be best remembered for helping the religious traditions to recognize the ecological crisis as a deeply spiritual issue. The following is an excerpt from his article The Spirituality of the Earth (1990):

We need a spirituality that emerges out of a reality deeper than ourselves, even deeper than life, a spirituality that is as deep as the earth process itself, a spirituality born out of the solar system and even out of the heavens beyond the solar system. There in the stars is where the primordial elements take shape in both their physical and psychic aspects. There is a certain triviality in any spiritual discipline that does not experience itself as supported by the spiritual as well as the physical dynamics of the entire cosmic-earth process. A spirituality is a mode of being in which not only the divine and the human commune with each other, but we discover ourselves in the universe and the universe discovers itself in us.

To listen to a special tribute to Berry by evolutionary biologist Connie Barlow, click here.

you are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars
you have a right to be here
and whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should
- Desiderata

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Eco-nomics: Truth or Consequences?

from Earth in the Balance by Al Gore

The hard truth is that our economic system is partially blind. It "sees" some things and not others. It carefully measures and keeps track of the value of those things most important to buyers and sellers, such as food, clothing, manufactured goods, work, and indeed money itself. But its intricate calculations often completely ignore the value of other things that are harder to buy and sell: fresh water, clean air, the beauty of the mountains, the rich diversity of life in the forest, just to name a few. In fact, the partial blindness of our current economic system is the single most powerful force behind what seem to be irrational decisions about the global environment.

Consider the most basic measure of a nation's economic performance, gross national product (GNP). In calculating GNP, natural resources are not depreciated as they are used up. Buildings and factories are depreciated; so are machinery and equipment, cars and trucks. So why, for instance, isn't the topsoil in Iowa depreciated when it washes down the Mississippi River after careless agricultural methods have lessened its ability to resist wind and rain? Why isn't that loss measured as an economic cost of the process by which our grain was produced last year? If the rate of topsoil loss is high enough in a given year, the nation may end up poorer, even if the value of the grain produced is taken into account. Meanwhile, our economic reports assure us that, to the contrary, we are richer for having grown the grain, and richer still because we didn't spend the money required to grow it in an ecologically sound manner and thus keep the topsoil from washing away. This is now more than economic theory: largely because we failed to see the value of growing grain in an ecologically sound manner, we have lost more than half of all the topsoil in Iowa.

Or take another situation, a little farther from home. When an underdeveloped nation cuts down a million acres of tropical rain forest in a single year, the money received from the sale of the logs is counted as part of that country's income for the year. The wear and tear on chain saws and logging trucks as a result of a year's work in the rain forest will be entered on the expense side of the ledger, but the wear and tear on the forest itself will not. In fact, nowhere in the calculation of that country's GNP will there be an entry reflecting the stark reality that a million acres of rain forest is now gone. This ought to strike anyone as alarming, if not absurd. Yet when the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, regional development banks and national lending authorities decide what kind of loans and monetary assistance to give countries around the world, they base their decisions on how a loan might improve the recipients' economic performance. And for all these institutions, the single most important measure of progress in economic performance is the movement of GNP. For all practical purposes, GNP treats the rapid and reckless destruction of the environment as a good thing!

Accounting blindness is not limited to the valuation of products alone, however. According to the First Law of Thermodynamics, neither matter nor energy can be either created or destroyed; natural resources are therefore transformed into both useful products, called goods, and harmful by-products, including what we sometimes call pollution. Not surprisingly, our economic system measures the efficiency of production, or "productivity", in a way that keeps better track of the good things we produce than the bad. But every production process creates waste; why isn't it accounted for? If a country produces huge amounts of aluminum, for example, why isn't the calcium fluoride sludge, an inevitable by-product, accounted for?

Classical economics also fails to account properly for all the costs associated with what we call consumption Every time we consume something, some sort of waste is created, but this fact is conveniently forgotten by classic economists. (See The Story of Stuff) When we consume millions of tons of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) each year, are they gone? If so, then what is eating the hole in the ozone layer? When we consume 14 million tons of coal each day and 64 million barrels of oil, are they gone? If so, where is all the extra carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere coming from?

Past a certain point it is impossible to put a price on the environmental effect of our economic choices. Clean air, fresh water, the sun rising through the mist on a mountain lake, an abundance of life on the land, in the air and in the sea - the value of these things is incalculable. It would be cynical indeed to conclude that because such treasures have no price, it is reasonable to make decisions based on the assumption that they are worthless. As Oscar Wilde said, "A cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."

On November 12, 1936, Winston Churchill grew so exasperated with the continuing failure of Britain to prepare for Hitler's onslaught that he charged in a speech to the House of Commons; "The Government simply cannot make up their minds ... The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."

IMF, dirty MF, takes away everything it can get
always making certain that there's one thing left
keep them on the hook with insupportable debt
- Bruce Cockburn

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How to Stay Motivated During a Recession

From Lateral Action

Mark McGuinness is a poet, creative coach and co-founder of Lateral Action.

You can look at the difficulties you face and see them as a challenge - right now.
You can look around you and reach out to support and encourage your friends - right now.
You can confront your enemy - whether in the external forces ranked against you, or inside you, in the voice of your inner saboteur counselling a timid retreat - right now.
You can be a hero, working to fix things and build them up again - right now.
You can pick up the gauntlet - right now.

The message of this article echoes that of Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber in a previous post (Freedom in the Face of Fear, June 3/09): when confronted by change and uncertainty from all directions, let your mind expand to connect with the creative potential in each situation rather than closing down into a contracted, survivalist mentality.

keep it open, keep it open
and help me keep mine open too
- Bruce Cockburn

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The Secret

The Spirituality of Narcissism
by Stuart Davis

In this blog post Stuart Davis exposes The Secret, Rhonda Byrne's "spiritual juggernaut", which claims that the Universe responds to our wishes, providing whatever we desire, and that we create our own reality with our every thought.

Davis offers a refreshingly sane, balanced perspective on this issue - "Your thoughts and feelings are not the source of reality, but two of its features. You do not "create" your reality, you participate in it, and in certain circumstances, under particular conditions, you can influence it. And it is good and useful to cultivate that influence, to positively nurture those portions as much as possible, in the interest of love."

picture yourself in a boat on a river
with tangerine trees and marmalade skies
somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
a girl with kaleidoscope eyes

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Integral Naked

"Hot Philosophy, Sexy Ideas"

Who could ask for more?

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The Times They Aren't A-Changin' - Yet

Just love this bad news/good news article from the Organic Consumers Association (especially the Dylan references)

"This is the only social movement in recent history that makes no demand, wants no power, and needs no master. It's been going on since the dawn of time and is finding a resonance and resurgence today. It's you. And me. No US -- just us. No THEM -- just thee. No WAR -- just like that. Seriously. No more or less than this. But that's a lot. More than enough.

Mutual interdependence among ourselves and with the balance of life on the planet isn't a question of wistful longing or even a matter of choice -- it's simply about survival and the basic design of things."

Come gather 'round people wherever you roam
and admit that the waters around you have grown
and accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone
if your time to you is worth saving
then you'd better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone
for the times they are a-changing
- Bob Dylan, c1960

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Another Reason To Grow Your Own Food

A message from the Organic Consumers Association
Canada, June 2, 2009

Three weeks ago some wheat farmers' associations in Canada, Australia and the U.S. announced they will coordinate acceptance of Monsanto's genetically modified (GMO) Roundup Ready wheat in their three countries.

Then, a week later, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine dropped a bombshell study which states, "GM foods pose a serious health risk".

The AAEM paper also notes, "Multiple animal studies have shown that GM foods cause damage to various organ systems in the body".

This is a scary article and a great website for information on organic products, fair trade, food safety, farm issues and many other topics related to what we eat.

well they used to grow food in Kansas
now they wanna grow it on the moon and eat it raw
I can see the day coming
when even your home garden
is gonna be against the law
- Bob Dylan, Union Sundown

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If A Tree Falls...

From Earth in the Balance, by Al Gore

“Most biologists believe that the rapid destruction of the tropical rain forests, and the irretrievable loss of the living species dying along with them, represent the single most serious damage to nature now occurring. While some of the other injuries we are inflicting on the global ecological system may heal over the course of hundreds or thousands of years, the wholesale annihilation of so many species in such a breathless moment of geological time represents a deadly wound to the integrity of the earth’s painstakingly intricate web of life, a wound so nearly permanent that scientists estimate that recuperation would take 100 million years.”

“In the daily battle between a growing, always ravenous civilization and an ancient ecosystem, the ecosystem is losing badly.”

Gore adds: “The key to reversing the current pattern of destruction and beginning the process of restoration and recovery is to dramatically change attitudes and to remove the constant pressures exerted by population growth, greed, short-term thinking and misguided development.”

rain forest
mist and mystery
teeming green
green brain facing lobotomy
climate control center for the world
ancient core of coexistence
hacked by parasitic greedhead scam
from Sarawak to Amazonas
Costa Rica to mangy B.C. hills
cortege ribbon of fallen timber
what kind of currency grows in these new deserts,
these brand new floodplains?
if a tree falls in the forest, does anybody hear?
does anybody hear the forest fall?
cut and move on
cut and move on
take out trees
take out wildlife at the rate of a species every single day
take out people who’ve lived like this for a hundred thousand years
inject a billion burgers’ worth of beef
grain eaters
methane dispensers
through thinning ozone, waves fall on wrinkled Earth
gravity, light, ancient refuse of stars
speak of a drowning
but this, this is something Other
busy monster eats dark holes in the spirit world
where wild things have to go
to disappear
forever
if a tree falls in the forest
does anybody hear?

- Bruce Cockburn, Toronto, 1988

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Freedom in the face of Fear

Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber discuss the challenge of staying connected with a higher spiritual perspective when humanity's very survival hangs in the balance.

Here are some excerpts (sorry, this one is in printed form so there's no link).

Cohen: Often, the human beings who are able to really make a difference in these times are those who are able to see these very real crises and global events in the biggest developmental context - to see it all as part of a larger process, which itself is indestructible. Never losing touch with that perspective is critical, because the problem is that when we lose touch with the bigger perspective, we lose touch with the best part of ourselves. That's the big challenge at times like these. One needs to have a deep samadhi, a powerful focus, a steadiness of purpose, an evolutionary worldview, and this all needs to be cultivated.

Wilber: That is the challenging task, especially when in a psychological, cultural and economic sense the world is going through a great depression. It's happening in all four quadrants, as we would say - the psychological, the cultural, the social, the biological. It's almost as if a subtle energy of consciousness is itself getting contracted, and that's what's getting transmitted to all of us. That's what happens during survivalist times. So being aware of that and keeping the big picture in mind is exactly what needs to be done. That's why these times are opportunities, in that sense, to be able to find this being awareness even in the midst of the survivalist self-contraction and to be able to affirm that unqualifiable, infinite, joyful, radiant, timeless presence in ourselves, even as we go about taking seriously the issues in the manifest world that need to be responded to. That's not to say we only want to be in touch with spiritual values and ignore the crisis. We're saying to be in touch with both - with samsara and with the troubles that are going on there and with nirvana, which is the ultimate great liberation.

One of the good ways to look at our present predicament is that the ecological crisis is basically the first worldwide crisis, the first one that affects every man, woman and child on the planet. That type of crisis hasn't happened before, and what it's starting to show us is that in terms of the evolution of social structures, we have reached the limit of what the nation-state can do. There are three things that nation-states no longer can control: they can't control global climate issues in the great commons of the entire planet; they can't alone control monetary issues; and they can't control war. So those issues are pushing evolutionarily against the limitations of our present form of social organization, and new forms of social organization that are global and planetary are going to start emerging.

Globalization, in both the positive and negative sense, is here, it's on us, and it really is showing that there needs to be a transition into the next form of human organization, one that will have to include some sort of world federation and have global issues at its heart. So we are just at the beginning of that, and it's a very frightening and exciting period in spiritual evolution.

When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego,
and when we escape
like squirrels in the cage of our personality
and get into the forest again, we shall shiver
with cold and fright.
But things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our
bodies taut with power.
We shall laugh, and
institutions will curl up
like burnt paper.
- D.H. Lawrence

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Uniting The World on YouTube...

...in Dance

A guy named Matt inspires us to think about how we're all connected -- one earth, one humanity, through YouTube and a goofy dance...

we can dance if we want to
we can leave your friends behind
cause you friends don't dance
and if they don't dance, well, they're
no friends of mine
- Men Without Hats

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