You Are What You Want

EXPRESS WHO YOU REALLY ARE
From Blue Truth by David Deida, Chapter 17

Every desire reveals your true nature.

Every day you want to do many things, from hugging your lover to earning money. Why? What feeling underlies all your hopes and dreams? This feeling is the tension between who you really are and who you assume yourself to be.

Consider your desire for intimate relationship. There are many reasons for engaging in a relationship. But you only feel utterly fulfilled in intimacy when you and your lover trust each other so much that you are willing to let down your guards, open your hearts, and love. This is your deepest desire in intimacy because, in truth, you are open as love—but you assume yourself to be a separate, isolated individual. So you scheme and dream to experience in your relationship what, in truth, you already are.

You want to enjoy financial security because, in truth, you are abundance, although you assume only effort will provide a feeling of ease. You enjoy dangerous sports because in every moment you are at the edge of death—the ultimate edge of winning or losing—and yet your assumed security makes you seek risks. You want to eat chocolate because, deep in your heart, you are blissful fullness, though you often close to its pleasure and so seek its taste.

Through your daily round, you seek to approximate the truth of who you are that you have lost touch with. This drama of approximation is the story of your life. You never quite succeed like you hope to. You never quite get the love you really want. And so you either try harder or give up trying. In either case, you are missing the point of existence.

The open expression of who you really are is the only thing that will free you from the stress of feeling incomplete. In truth, you are what you want.

The farther you wander from who you truly are, the more you crave the qualities you miss. Since you can’t feel the love that lives you, you look to your lover to cherish you. Divorced from your home of unlimited openness, you seek to expand the sphere of your power, the size of your portfolio, the borders of your country. Desiring the freedom of inherent ease, you try to discharge stress through masturbation, conversation, and secret habits of release. You miss the simplicity of being, so you seek it in the warmth of a heroin rush, a fluffy bed, or a ritual cup of coffee.

At times, you fret over your appearance, seeking to find the radiance you truly are. You think to yourself constantly, providing a reflection of your own presence. Yet, in truth, you are utter presence, whether or not you reflect yourself by thinking.

Whenever you are ready, you can stop trying to find what you are precluding and start being who you are in truth. To surrender so completely to be who you are is terrifying—your self-image instantly vanishes. Yet it is the only way to live that is real. Otherwise, in every moment of missing who you truly are, you create a self-image that isn’t the real thing. You feel a lack. This tension of deficiency can wind into an intense twist of desire. Eventually, you can become quite warped.

Craving the depth that you miss, you may find yourself engaging in crime, lying, self-abuse, and terrorizing others—or perhaps just sitting in front of the TV and eating cookies. No matter how extreme or mediocre your misplaced efforts become, you can always open as your source. In the midst of stealing, for instance, you can open as the abundance of life-force that you are. How will you act as abundant fullness? Open as you are, your twist unwinds.

In your most wound-up, naughty moments of sicko indulgence, as well as in your common round of daily drudge, you are only missing who you truly are. Through years of moment-by-moment practice, you can open as every twist and hope. You can live open as love, alive as spontaneous blessing.

What you want is who you are. Open as you are without hesitation.

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But here, right here,
between the birthmark and the stain,
between the ocean and your open vein,
between the snowman and the rain,
once again, once again,
Love calls you by your name.
- Leonard Cohen
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Open As You Are

DON’T WAIT FOR PERFECTION
From Blue Truth by David Deida, Chapter 14

You can be wide open and diseased at the same time.

No matter how sick you are in body or mind, you can still open. Disease may ravage your body and drugs may cloud your mind, and you can still open. Deep openness can encompass all states of body and mind.

Physical and psychological disorders need not obscure your openness, and your openness may not affect your pathologies. If you inherited nearsightedness from your parents, then spiritual openness probably won’t change your need to wear glasses. If your mind has adapted to habits of panic instilled by years of childhood abuse, then spiritual openness probably won’t eliminate your cringe at the sight of your lover’s genitals.

However, you can be a myopic neurotic and still open with the freedom of unbound love. You may squint and become nauseated as your lover disrobes, but the humor of your response can avail. Like a muscular tic or a snotty nose, your emotional responses are natural effects of your history—perhaps uncomfortable, running their course largely beyond your immediate control. Nevertheless, you can offer your love, laughter, and openness even as you sniffle, panic, or shriek.

Right now, unique as you are in body and mind, you can practice opening fully.

Even as you open, laugh, and love, the patterns of your body and mind have their own momentum. Heart disease, cancer, and even alcoholism have continued in the disposition of many deeply open men and women. Every kind of sexual style and twist can be found in the biographies of saints and spiritual teachers. Your openness can be real and profound, and still your bodymind ripples on, patterning itself according to past influence and present habit.

If your mother drank too much alcohol or was in a state of constant emotional stress during her pregnancy, then your nervous system is somewhat shaped by the chemicals that coursed through your embryonic growth, and there isn’t much you can do about that now. As a consequence of your mother’s actions, your body may be small, your mental acuity may be weak, and your emotional flow may be unstable. These are simply some of the patterns that you may feel and learn to open as, moment by moment.

If your father sexually molested you, then now as an adult you may react to your lover’s advances with numbness. Your posture may be hunched and your pelvis locked. The patterning of your bodymind is what it is. You can change it to some degree, but you can always open as it is, even now. Open now, offering your heart’s gift, and also do your best to live rightly through the present patterns of your past history.

Have you ever done something you wished you had done differently? If so, you can learn from your mistakes and try to do better next time. If the patterns of your bodymind cause undue suffering, in your life or in the lives of others, you can work to transform these patterns, heal them as much as possible, and grow more fully into a balanced, integrated, and healthy person.

But this growth is not the same as spiritual openness and depth. A balanced, healthy individual may serve to create positive changes in the world and yet be unwilling to open and feel fully. On the other hand, someone may be wide open and feeling all, yet appear to be a raving lunatic, lustful, and drug-addicted. Such a person may, in fact, be crazy, lustful, and drug-addicted—and yet be open so deeply their heart feels more than you can know and their love extends to you without bounds.

No matter how fully you open and live as love, your character is only slightly changeable. Your pre-birth influences are ingrained in your nervous system like rings in a tree. Childhood stresses still waltz in the chemistry of your brain and emotions. Even the evolutionary travails of your furry mammalian ancestors contribute to your so-called “spontaneous” desires for sex, food, and comfort.

You are birthed by, grown within, and taken apart by an immense and mysterious web of influence. The efforts you make to be healthy and helpful can be nullified by a falling rock caused by a sudden earth tremor or by a heart failure predisposed by the genetics of your father’s mother’s father. You may truly want to serve your 16-year-old daughter’s friend, and yet you can’t seem to shake the sexual desire you feel, or the guilt.

Integrity is well worth a lifetime of cultivation. Serving others is really the only way to live your heart’s truth. But you are not cured thereby.

Your body may remain bent and your mind may remain twisted. Still, love can extend through your distortions, uniquely twisted yet unbound. Great gifts of openness, love, and awakening can be given—have been given—through arthritic fingers and alcohol-drenched brain cells.

Even as lust, greed, and anger continue to arise in your emotional patterns formed by years of mammalian struggle, parental abuse, and self-torture, you can practice opening without bounds. You can practice opening and giving your deepest gifts in every present moment, however awry your body and mind—and the world—remain.

Feel whatever love you can in this moment, however small. Even if you are woozily soused or ravenous with lust, find a kernel of openness deep in your heart. Feel the place in you that wants to give love and be fully received in love, no matter how messed up you are. Locate your desire for love, for openness, for freedom, even if it is tiny. In the midst of your drunken stupor or wild ire, reconnect with this speck of openness.

Breathe in and out of this tiny gist of love, while you open your senses and feel the people and place around you. Even if you can only open a little bit to breathe through your heart and feel the people and world around you, this is a little bit more open than staying closed.

Practice opening a tiny amount while your body and mind reel on, numb, confused, spinning. Breathe love in and out of the feeling-space of your heart. Breathe the force of love deep down into your abdomen, opening the closures in your gut by inhaling full and filling your belly round. Feel the heart of those around you, look into their eyes, open your senses to all the world’s display, and offer your full-bellied love through your twists by degrees, in every moment you can remember to practice opening.

As slurred as your speaking may be, offer words of love. Through your shaking hands, offer openness through your service. Feel the hearts of those around you as they open or close in response to your gifts. As dim as your awareness may be fuddled, practice to feel the hearts around you and act to open them. Don’t wait for perfection—or even to get straight—to offer your deepest love, full-bellied and open hearted.

Offer your gifts right now with the deepest integrity you can through whatever kinks may remain, always feeling and breathing the hearts of others as you act. Do your best to heal yourself and others, remembering that habits and history may budge very little. Nevertheless, this present moment comes and goes open, just as it is.

Purchase from Amazon

I Just Called To Say I Love You

Reflections on the Multiple Meanings of Love
a new article by Andrew Cohen

One of the things I like about Andrew Cohen is that his spiritual teachings celebrate the union and subtle interplay of absolute and relative truth, and at the same time honor our unique ability as humans to integrate and manifest these apparently opposing views.  As some of you know, I am a huge fan of the relative world, the vibrant world of objects and people, where stuff is real and where what you do or don't do matters.  At the same time I deeply appreciate that everything that appears in my consciousness - including consciousness itself - everything that gives my life joy, meaning and purpose - everything that I love - arises within that absolute space of emptiness, awareness and luminosity.

But what about love?  How can we as humans embody and express love in all its dimensions - absolute, relative and beyond?  Well, you'll have to read the article to see what Andrew Cohen has to say about that, but here are some highlightss...

One fundamental distinction that I have found helpful for navigating this challenging territory is this: some forms of love are relative, and others are not. Spiritual love, for example, is non-relative, impersonal, and absolute. It is permanent, unwavering, and always vibrates with the infinite. Love that is relative or non-absolute is impermanent and changing; it is always connected to that which is personal or unique to the individual and his or her culture.

In order to understand what love really is, we need to be able to place its various forms and expressions within a hierarchy of values. Spiritual love, the nature of which is non-relative or absolute, is at the top of the hierarchy. Non-spiritual love, the nature of which is always relative (no matter how powerful the emotional experience of it may be), always comes second in this hierarchy. And within that category, some forms of non-spiritual or relative love have greater value or importance than others. For example, my love of my wife obviously has greater value than my love of my little Yorkshire Terrier; my love of music has greater value than my love for corn on the cob; and so on. These simple value distinctions are ones we can probably all agree on.

However, the larger distinction I am making, between relative and absolute love, is not always so easy to discern.

Cohen shares a fantastic account of his first spiritual awakening as a teenager, and a similar experience some years later after having met his guru.  I cannot possibly do justice to his description of those events, but those of you who take the time to read it may experience a profound shock of recognition...

How to describe the indescribable? For no apparent reason, the doors of perception opened wide and suddenly I lost any and all sense of boundaries. My experience of awareness grew and grew to such a profound degree that I quickly found myself drowning in an infinite ocean of love and bliss that seemed to be absolute in its nature. In it, I could see no beginning and no end. It was as if the entire universe and everything beyond it had awakened to itself in an instant, and my experience was of being not separate from the ground of that consciousness that was making it possible for me to behold the enormity of what I was bearing witness to. It was like the infinite nature of the creative process was already self-aware and I had suddenly woken up to that dimension of reality. In this higher state, the very center of that awareness expanded in all directions. The center was where I was and paradoxically it was also everywhere else at the very same time. There was awe and wonder at the majesty of the entire panoramic display that was physically overpowering

In that exalted state, it became clearer than clear that there never has been nor ever could be such a thing as death. There is only infinite becoming. And not only that, but it was obvious that there was absolutely nowhere that one could really go in space or time. That was because any place, anywhere, that one could conceive of going could always only be that same one place that one could never leave. We are all always in the very same place, no matter where we go or what we do. The most significant gift that this unexpected visitation from the unknown bestowed upon me was the clear and tangible recognition that there was a miraculous and seemingly self-conscious intelligence that is inherent in the entire process. The love and ecstasy that was surging through me felt like pain because it was just too much to bear. Under the weight of this kind of intensity, one feels like one is on the verge of dying.

Once we experience this absolute nature of spiritual love, Cohen adds, our understanding of what love is and what it means changes forever.  We no longer mistake that which is personal and relative and that which is absolute.  Having already spoken of distinctions within the realm of personal or relative love, he takes us on a journey back in time to reveal the source of absolute love...

Before the Big Bang, before the universe was born, there was no time and no space. Impersonal, absolute, always overwhelming love is the nature of that timeless, formless, unmanifest realm from whence we all came.

But as this unmanifest domain awakens to and experiences the friction of contact with the manifest world of time and space, that very friction causes the simultaneous arising of that love which is absolute. Absolute or non-relative love is the manifest expression of that infinite eternal ground as it encounters the world of form and time. This love is the experience of consciousness as it perceives the world of time and form from the perspective of its own eternal nature. This is what we, human beings, experience as the love of God. The experience of this love is beginningless, endless, and ever-new. Because of its infinite nature, it always transcends any notion of individuality, any feeling of uniqueness, or any separate sense of identity whatsoever. It is the perennial, mystical awakening to “One without a Second.” In that love without another, there is only THAT.

That's the part that leaves me breathless - for me what he is describing is that razor's edge, the vanishing point where the absolute and relative meet and come alive - where the infinite eternal ground meets the world of form and time.  But there's a lot more to come.  Cohen goes deeper into this love of God to reveal that God is not only at rest, God is also active...

If Being is the nature of God at rest, Becoming is the nature of God in action—God as Eros or the desire to exist in time and form. What is the defining quality of the absolute desire to exist? Urgency. Ecstatic urgency. The creator God is experienced by human beings as simultaneous ecstasy and urgency. Eros is the experience of that ecstatic urgency. When do we experience it? First and foremost, we experience it as the desire to procreate, the sexual impulse. But we also experience Eros in more profound and significant ways, at higher levels of our own being. Human beings are the only life form that is compelled by an inner impulse to innovate and give rise to that which is new.

The love of God that emanates directly from the Ground of Being is the source of what is commonly referred to as unconditional love. This love recognizes no differences and makes no distinctions. It is the spiritual wellspring of all true healing, both of individuals and also of the entire world. The love of God that is Eros, however, has a different quality. It only ever seeks to create and give rise to that which is new, at any cost. And the more we awaken to it, the more we experience its powerful demand to give wholeheartedly to the evolutionary process. It is a force of nature, a vertical impulse in consciousness that creates new ideas, new inventions, and new worlds. It perpetually gives rise to higher potentials. Our understanding of what absolute love is must always contain both dimensions of this ultimate paradox.

So again, dear readers, I am grateful to Andrew Cohen for being able to speak the unspeakable, to explain what cannot be explained, and to put it out there in a way that it goes straight and clear to my very being.  I know more clearly now what I have had inklings of before - that what I long for lies neither solely in the realm of the absolute nor solely in the relative world, but at that indescribable, ecstatic place where they meet - that place where this unmanifest domain awakens to and experiences the friction of contact with the manifest world of time and space.

Love is indeed a difficult thing to talk about... in the end, it is up to each and every one of us to heroically aspire to become a powerful expression of our own highest recognition of what love truly is.
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HERE is the whole article

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when I came back from where I'd been
my room, it looked the same
but there was nothing left between
the Nameless and the Name
all busy in the sunlight the flecks did float and dance
and I was tumbled up with them in formless circumstance
I'll try to say a little more
Love went on and on
until it reached an open door
then Love itself, Love itself was gone
- Leonard Cohen
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What Gender is Truth?

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Who would we be as man and woman if we were not attached to the fact of our biological difference, and yet at the same time were not denying or avoiding that difference or whatever that may imply? I'm speaking about an unselfconscious, utterly natural state of being that simply allows the natural expression of gender to reveal itself.
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As we begin, Please answer Yes/No to two questions:

1.  Are you a man or a woman?
2.  Do you want to be free?

If you answered Yes to both questions I invite/urge you to read on, and to follow the links to three amazing articles. First up:

A Feminist Who Has a Male Spiritual Teacher
by Elizabeth Debold, Senior Editor, EnlightenNext

As Elizabeth's journey unfolded through feminist activism, consciousness raising, psychotherapy, assertiveness and the dynamics of human development, she discovered that her searching had come down to two questions:  how true partnership and equality between the sexes could become a living reality and what that meant for women and their development.

Then she met Andrew Cohen.  And in her telling of that meeting, her story became my story.  She describes her disappointment that the idealism and genuine desire for transformation that had been the driving passion behind the women's movement had  "hit a dead end in the path toward a genuinely new future";  that the search for voice, empowerment, deeper relationship and self-worth was  "somehow remedial and rooted in victimization, rather than transformative."   She began to feel that the movement had become narrowly focused on only two possible models - women either became more like men or we became more different. 

We were caught between two poles, poles that had been defined by the opposition that created the biases and dynamics between the sexes in the first place.  Nothing truly new or liberated existed in either position.

She continues:  "In meeting Andrew Cohen another possibility awoke in me - something that at the time I couldn't articulate but found so compelling that I had to pursue it."   What she realized a few days later about that first encounter was:

He wanted nothing from me.  He only wanted my liberation.

In an instant, I saw that every encounter that I had had with men was tangled up in an unvoiced reciprocal web of wanting - and I don't simply mean sexual desire or flirtation.  It went deeper than that - as though in every encounter there were subtle trade-offs by which we constantly validated each other and created each other as the women and men we are now.  In the next second, I realized that this was true, but in a different way, in my relationships with women.  But Andrew wasn't part of that suffocating web of need and want.  He was free of it.  And in that recognition simultaneously was my own freedom.

More importantly, in standing in that freedom together, I knew that men and women could meet on entirely new ground.

At one point Cohen said to her, "If you realized that I am a man, and through me you have realized liberation, that could take you all the way."  These words bashed around inside her for days, rudely challenging her assumptions of herself as a woman and a feminist and of Cohen as a man.  She came to understand that she had not simply happened to find a male spiritual teacher - she had actually needed one.  She concludes:

Suddenly I got it: the fact that in meeting him I met the new, the unconditioned and free in myself ... in that place there is no separation, no opposition between male and female.  In fact, there is no Other.

Amazingly, I've come to realize that Andrew being a man is essential to my liberation.  Why, said one well-intentioned feminist friend, if you wanted to dive into the spiritual life, couldn't you have found a woman teacher?  But had I done so, I would have clung steadfastly to my identification with being a woman first as the most essential aspect of who I am.  And it is not. 

In this dimension of freedom, this place before and beyond time that is who we all are most deeply, there is no gender, because freedom has no history.  It has no past, and in the spiritual work we are doing, that freedom from the past is the first step.

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Men and women together have a lot to learn from Elizabeth's story, and again I encourage you to read the full article HERE.
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Liberation Without a Face  is a conversation in EnlightenNext Magazine between Elizabeth Debold and Andrew Cohen.  If what you read here showed you something about yourself and/or your relationships that you needed or longed to see, I encourage you with all my heart to take the time to read this one as well - if you think you can't go much deeper into the man/woman realm than Elizabeth has done alone, I dare you to take the plunge with her and her teacher together.

It's only by coming together that something can change because our separation - from both a spiritual and cultural perspective - is what holds everything in place. ... (Andrew) reveals a radical reality that challenges each of us individually and collectively to go beyond our known identities into the revolutionary heart of an unknown possibility for human being that destroys separation and otherness.  There may be nothing else on the planet more important than this.

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Liberation Without a Face is Total Revolution  is a shorter essay by Andrew Cohen along the same theme - if you're pressed for time, this one's for you (but promise me you'll read the other one sometime).  Here's a clip:

Finally liberated from the ceaseless distraction and fascination with difference, we can constantly realize and freely be who we are, as woman, as man, without fear, free from the need to assert the significance of difference over the ultimate fact of truth.

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Truth has no gender. It has no name and has no face. That’s why it is a mystery and that’s why it will always be a mystery…. Through that mystery, an enormous potential is born that releases us from the limitations of who we have been–personally and culturally. It is up to us to make good on that potential. And then discover and create who we are as women and men based on that truth that has no gender.
- Andrew Cohen
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Blought For Today

From Chris Guillebeau at AONC:

It's very difficult to motivate yourself to do something. It's much easier to leverage what you are already motivated to do.
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Dead Things Look Different

Chipper dodges a bullet.

Earlier this evening I was out in the yard puttering around when I heard my boy cat make his "Look Mom I Killed Something For You" noise, looked over to see him standing proudly over a chipmunk that lives in the yard and who I call Chipper (yeah, I know, really original).  My immediate reaction was - oh no, you didn't kill Chipper!  I had grown very fond of the little guy/girl in the many months that he has been hanging around, keeping me company when I'm outside with his constant saucy chatter and that cute way they have of standing up with their little hands folded on their chests - they look like a tiny prairie dog.

So I go over to where the cat is standing over his prize, beaming and waiting for me to tell him what a brave boy he is.  The usual routine after that is that he calls to his sister, and if she comes he gives it to her to eat, but if not he eats it himself.  Crunch, crunch.  But at that moment I caught a certain glint in Chipper's eye. OMG he's still alive!  (See post title for how I knew that.)  I touched him gently to be doubly sure (dead things also FEEL different), at which point, suddenly and miraculously re-animated, he made a break for the little wooden structure that covers my well - that's his house.  So I'm screeching and grabbing at the cat, who of course darted after him. Chipper almost made it to the safety of his little house but something, maybe all the commotion and the shock of whatever injuries he had, made him veer away - more screeching and cat-grabbing - till finally he ran up the big spruce tree in the yard, so high that I couldn't see him.

I just looked out now, about 15 minutes later, and Chipper is standing outside his little well house.  A stiff wind has suddenly come up and five large ravens are cawing and flying around the yard.  Last I saw the cat he was running up the lane, fleeing either from the ravens or from the wind.  Cats don't like wind, or at least they don't like the sound it makes in the trees - maybe they think some monster is in the trees or maybe that the trees themselves are coming after them.  Hard to say what cats think.

But my little buddy Chipper is still alive.  I do hope he gets smarter about the cats.  I've tried to teach them that it's okay to kill mice but to please leave squirrels and chipmunks alone but they don't get it.  It's a cat thing - they are, after all, exquisitely designed killing machines.

The photo was taken about half an hour after Chipper's brush with death.
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Free Advice - Worth More Than $.02

Well, seems I just can't get enough of Chris Guillebeau these days. A short post arrived today entitled Free Advice, where he takes old and new rules or sayings, some of them his own, and turns them on their head. Here are a few of my favorites:

The customer is always right.

~ Actually, sometimes the customer is dead wrong. Sometimes you don’t want the customer, and if you go out of your way to please one of them, you’ll disappoint the others.

You should ask people what they want when developing a project.

~ Henry Ford said: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

Never check email in the morning.

~ You don't have to feel guilty if you like checking to see what people have to say to you. Who knows -- maybe that's even the most important work of the day?

Slow and steady wins the race.

~ Some races go to the slow and steady; others go to the fast and furious. See Mario Andretti:  "If you think that you're in control, you're not going fast enough."   Maybe not your style, but I think there's a time and a place for it.

Good things only come to those who wait.

~ Some good things come to those who wait; others come to those who go out and get them. If what you want is in the second category, what are you waiting for?

You must have a local support team to succeed.

~ I think a support team can be very helpful. But what if you're on your own and no one around you believes in your mission? Those people sound like a non-support team to me. If you have to choose between a non-support team and going it alone, I suggest going it alone.

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If you enjoyed this, here's an excellent companion piece by Chris that might turn you on: Unsolicited Advice.  I'm sure we've all been on both sides of the advice dilemma and it can feel like being caught between a rock and a hard place, particularly when we're being asked to give it, but there are perils as well when we ask for advice from others.  The article is interesting and insightful and the Comments are great - my (unsolicited) advice is to definitely check it out.
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Build Fewer Cages; Drop More Keys

Think about the times when someone has really helped you think or live differently. It was like they placed a key on the ground in front of you; you picked it up and unlocked a cage. You had to open the cage yourself, of course, but it was a lot easier with a key.
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Here's another insightful post from Chris Guillebeau entitled The Small Man Builds Cages for Everyone.  It's fairly short, so I present it here (almost) in its entirety, as I really have nothing to add.
~~~~

The sufi poet Hafiz wrote in the 14th century:

The small man
builds cages for everyone
he knows.
While the sage,
who has ducked his head
when the moon is low,
keeps dropping keys all night long
for the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners

~~~~

Some of us spend a lot of time building cages for people. This is accomplished by striving to make people small, so that we can feel bigger. Cage-building is protecting yourself and your interests, making yourself look good, and discouraging good ideas because you weren’t the one to come up with them.

Taking the credit for yourself, assigning the blame to others—that kind of thing. Mostly it involves thinking about the kingdom of Me.

Key-dropping, on the other hand, is making other people look good, building them up, expanding the pie. In other words, key-dropping is all about EMPOWERMENT, that beautiful thing of knowledge transfer and possibility.

Think about the times when someone has really helped you think or live differently. It was like they placed a key on the ground in front of you; you picked it up and unlocked a cage. (You had to open the cage yourself, of course, but it was a lot easier with a key.)

As I consider the work I’ve done over the past five years, I see a mixture of cage-building and key-dropping. As Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Accordingly, I see myself dropping more and more keys. But I can also see that I’ve built some cages.

The course of action to change this is simple: build fewer cages; drop more keys. What does that look like? Something like this:

• Before speaking up at a meeting, before sending an email, before publishing a blog post, whatever — ask the question, “Will this empower?”
• Give away your best work, and think about how you can give away even more of it
• Stop keeping score — or if you must keep score, make sure you’re always giving more than you take
• That thing you know how to do that everyone else marvels at? Show people how it’s really done.

You could probably think of examples that make more sense for your own situation. But whatever you do, don’t be the small man building cages. Be the sage, dropping keys for the prisoners.

What keys do you hold that could set a prisoner free? Why not start dropping those everywhere you go?
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What Makes You Come Alive?

Hello dear readers.  I had first called this post Fear and Permission, and it was going to be a personal story inspired by an article by Chris Guillebeau.  Then about an hour ago, while re-reading his post, out of curiosity clicked on a link which brought up this video by Jonathan Fields.  Chris and Jonathan were presenters at a TEDx Conference at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in April of this year.  The only instruction that each of them received was to deliver a compelling 18-minute talk on the theme "fearless".

Jonathan was the first speaker and as he puts it, his job was to warm up the audience.  Well he sure lit my fire, so without further ado, please enjoy this talk from Jonathan Fields on Turning Fear Into Fuel.  Oh, and please, please, watch it right to the end:




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Some links:
~ Chris Guillebeau - The Art of Non-Conformity
~ Jonathan Fields - awake@thewheel 
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Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.  You are already naked.  There is no reason not to follow your heart.
- Steve Jobs.
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Mother Nature's a Woman

This just in from my favorite garden blogger, Doug Green:

The reality in gardening is that Mother Nature will always win.
Always has – always will.
She’s like any other woman.
You can try to brute force her or you can embrace her.
You know which is more effective.
~~~~

Nirvana Is Not Enough

I admit to having felt some ambivalence towards Paul Levy. 

The man is extremely intelligent, eloquent and articulate in his story-telling, and astonishingly generous in sharing intimate details of his personal experiences.  However, at times I find his narratives heavily suffused with a victim mentality and this has tainted my appreciation of some of his writings.  In particular he presents himself as a victim of the psychiatric establishment, and indeed his story would, at least on the surface, support that interpretation of his experience.  Misperceptions and over-reactions do happen in psychiatry - it's not like fixing a broken leg - but having read a lot of Levy's stuff I came away with a feeling that there must have been another aspect to his experiences that he would not, perhaps could not, accept or articulate.

Then An Eye-Opening Synchronicity arrived in my Inbox.  As I began reading it was clear that something had shifted.  Levy writes:

It feels like the right time to share this, as it feels like it’s not just my story. On the one hand, this synchronistic experience was tailor-made just for me, while on the other hand, it wasn’t just my experience, a circumstance meant solely for my personal consumption. It feels like it is a revelatory experience that contains gifts for all of us. It feels more right to share it now because it has taken me this many years to digest it, and to integrate the meaning of what was being shown to me so that I’d be able to share the story without identifying with the role. It also feels like the time is right to share this miraculous-seeming event because I’ve developed the psychological fluency so that I can now describe what my experience was in a way that I imagine will be received and taken in, instead of judged. Being archetypal, my synchronistic encounter is a self-reflection for all of us, revealing a process that exists deep within each one of us.

This article is heavy going (no surprise to Levy fans). Reading the full piece is highly recommended - there's a link above and another at the end of this post.

Levy recounts how while sitting in meditation he experienced what he describes as "a flash of lightning", after which his behaviour became so uncharacteristic that a concerned friend had him taken by ambulance to the hospital.

I had become unself-conscious, at one with myself, as if I had stepped out of all restraints. It was as if I was released from any social conditioning, in that my actions were no longer a reaction to what I thought others thought. As if snapping out of a double-bind, I wasn’t limiting myself anymore. I wasn’t contracting against myself but simply getting out of my own way to let my light shine, as if I went from being a 75 watt light-bulb to being a million watt bulb.

Sounds wonderful.  Every meditator's dream in fact.  Here's the bit that really grabbed my attention:

This was a dangerous situation, however, as at the time I certainly hadn’t yet developed the container within myself to channel this energy in a way that was socially acceptable. I had so surrendered to what was happening, which was the only thing that made sense to do, and the only thing that I could do, that I had stopped trying to control the situation.

At this point Levy's spiritual awakening no longer moved along a linear path but kind of exploded.  The narrative continues with an amazing story of his encounter with a blind woman at the hospital, then proceeds to a most remarkable analysis and interpretation of that meeting in the chapter entitled "Dreamwork".  It's a fascinating segment, and I will leave it to you to read and absorb what you will.  Sufficient for me right now is to share my own thoughts on the two quotes above, the first describing his initial spontaneous opening, the second his realization (some time later) that he had had no way to channel the enormous energy that was released at that moment.

From that moment on, I was inhabiting a world of expanded possibilities, where even the seemingly impossible now seemed possible. It was as if I had fallen through a rabbit hole, stepped through the looking glass, or passed through a portal, and found myself playing a role in a cosmic, visionary drama that certainly had my highest attention. 

This world Levy describes so well could variously be called enlightenment, liberation, absolute reality or nirvana.  Most serious meditators, like Levy, have experienced flashes of this openness and expansion, and it's wonderful and amazing and it's tempting to try to hang out there.  It also perfectly describes a classic hypermanic state, which is highly enjoyable at the time, full of possibilities and potential and enormous, boundless energy (ever try cocaine?). Others would call it a psychotic episode or a break with reality, which in effect it is.  It's a break with one side of reality - the relative - what Levy calls "consensus reality" - the reality that we all share and that enables us to relate with each other as individuals, as a society and as a species. 

The intention of this post is not to debate what is real or not real, or which reality is better.  In my opinion the experience of transcendence Levy describes was as real as the fact that I am typing these words and as palpable as the pain I feel when I hit my thumb with a hammer.  I believe that when Levy realized in retrospect that at the time he  "hadn't yet developed the container within myself to channel this energy in a way that was socially acceptable",  he was describing his loss of connection to relative reality, to earth.  He was both literally and metaphorically lost in space, the absolute.  And to a lot of people, that looks like crazy.

Without Earth (the relative world), Heaven (the absolute) has no container; without Heaven, Earth has no energy.  We humans are the lightning rods between them - we are the conduits through which the energy of Heaven and the solidity of Earth communicate and find expression.  If we become over-attached to one or the other - whether deliberately or, as in Levy's case, "like a bolt of lightning" - then we lose touch with a part of ourselves, as Heaven and Earth are not "out there"; they are within us; they are our nature. These forces are meant to be balanced and flowing, like yin and yang, and when they are not, we experience all manner of dis-ease.

Nirvana is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

I am grateful that Paul Levy had the courage to look deeply into an experience that a lot of people would just as soon have forgotten.  I think his being able to share it now marks a giant leap both in his personal journey and in his ability to communicate his insights to the world; to, in his words, "... share the story without identifying with the role."  Good on you, Paul - keep it coming.

That's all I have to say for now.  If you're still reading this, thank you for your patience. There is a lot more to this article, and there may be further posts in the near future.  Check out the full monty, entitled "An Eye-Opening Synchronicity" HERE.

With your kind indulgence, let me share with you the last few sentences of his concluding paragraph, which I find particularly poignant:

All we have to do to see is open our eyes and look. We teach what we need to learn. I am in essence talking to myself. In finding the words I am helping myself heal my own blindness.

Thanks Paul.
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Karma's No Excuse

I feel sad when someone gives up trying to achieve something they claim to want, saying "I guess it just isn't my karma".  Often the reason they become discouraged and abandon their dream is that they have simply failed to take any action.

Karma is not fate.  Karma is not wishful thinking.  Karma in its simplest form is cause and effect. We might think that, for example, if we have a nice meal, the cause of that meal was that we chopped veggies, made a salad, set the table, etc., and that the effect of those actions was that we could enjoy the meal. We might go back further and include as causes the fact that we bought groceries, the farmer took the produce to the market, sun and rain caused the crops to grow and so on. 

While those actions are obvious causes and effects, what is often overlooked in this scenario, and without which the meal will never happen, is that at some point we formed the intention to prepare the meal.  It didn't just happen by itself because we fantasized about it or wished for it.  Intention is the energetic link between our ideas and our actions.  Intention is the first cause.

Steve Pavlina writes:

If you want to achieve a goal you’ve set, the most crucial part is to DECIDE to manifest it. It doesn’t matter if you feel it’s outside your control to do so. It doesn’t matter if you can’t yet see how you’ll get from A to B. Most of those resources will come online AFTER you’ve made the decision, not before.

It sounds so simple, yet time after time we fool ourselves into thinking that all the details need to be in place before we decide to do something.  So much time is wasted second-guessing the outcome, conjuring up all the imaginary obstacles, all the what-ifs - often to the point that we give up, effectively having convinced ourselves that failure is inevitable, that we simply don't having enough... (talent, knowledge, time... the list is endless).

This hesitation and resistance is based on fear - fear of failure, fear of success, fear of responsibility - essentially fear of change.  A lot of this fear comes from lack of trust in ourselves and in our world - what in Shambhala is called lack of trust in basic goodness.  Trust in basic goodness is what enables us to proclaim our intention and to open ourselves to the messages that will present themselves.  It is what enables us to move forward without knowing the outcome.  The truth is, we can never know what the outcome of our actions will be.  Steve again:

After I declare my intention, I wait for the resources and synchronicities to arrive. I just happen to notice things that may have been there all along, but now I see them in a new light, and they become resources for me that I never noticed until after I declared my intention. But many times it’s nearly impossible to explain such synchronicities as the result of my own subconscious action, even if I step back and try to look at them purely objectively. Sometimes they come in such unusual avalanches that I can only explain them as the result of superconscious action. On some level the universe itself is aware of my intention and is doing its part to help manifest it.

I also find that the more inviting I am of these synchronicities, the more easily they flow.

We need to learn to be aware of the messages that are constantly being given to us. To do that we must let go of our ideas of what will happen, what should happen, what could happen, and pay attention to what actually is happening - what Steve and others call synchronicities.  That unbiased present awareness is what invites these auspicious energies into our lives.

But unbiased awareness does not mean simply allowing ourselves to be blown about by every breeze that comes along.  Intention, commitment, action and openness are what allow us to align our actions with our heart's desire. 

And that, dear friends, is another brief lesson in How To Be Happy.  May it be of benefit.

~~~~
Some Related RoadKill Posts:
* Success and Failure 
* In the Driver's Seat 
* Unicorns and Virgins 
* Lose Touch With Your Inner Whining Artist  
* Carl Jung on Synchronicity 
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Steve Pavlina's article entitled:
Cause-Effect vs Intention-Manifestation 
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Make It So!
- Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
USS Enterprise / Star Trek
~~~~

If you can't do it with Love,

why do it at all?

This manifesto by Mark Sanborn on the ChangeThis website made me cry.  It's entitled The Four-Letter Word That Makes You and Your Work Irresistible, but its message extends far beyond the workplace.  It could just as easily have been called The Nine Greatest Gifts You Can Offer Yourself and Others.

What does love look like when it shows up for work?  If you pay attention, you'll notice it more often than you think.

To begin, we must reorient our conventional understanding of the term love, defining it as finding a deep-seated passion for what we do, the people we do it with, and the people we do it for.

Mark emphasizes that for love to make any difference, it needs to be demonstrated and not simply felt, it needs to be both attitude and action.  He uses the acronym P-R-A-C-T-I-C-E-S as a framework by which we can infuse the "irresistible ingredient" into our worklife and beyond, regardless of what work we do.  Click here to access the full discussion; here's what stood out for me:

Patience - Love is choosing to accept people where they are, not where we want them to be, being willing to set our own expectations aside.

Recognition - Love is paying attention.  Ralph Waldo Emerson says:  "Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be."

Appreciation - People need to know that they matter, to hear genuine appreciation for who they are and what they do.  But don't just think it - say it.

Counsel - Love is offering wise and insightful advice - thoughtfully telling people what they need to hear rather than what you think they want to hear.

Time - One of the most powerful love practices is making time to be fully present with another person.  Take the time.  It's one of the greatest gifts you can offer.

Instruction - Love is teaching someone else with gentleness, discernment and selflessness.  The most effective teachers walk alongside their students as they learn, appreciating their accomplishments rather than emphasizing their shortcomings.

Compassion - We are all broken, hurting, wounded people.  Acknowledging our weaknesses, mourning our losses and comforting each other through difficult times will strengthen our relationships like nothing else can.

Encouragement - We all need someone to cheer us on from the sidelines of our lives.  Notice when others do well, and hold them up when they fail.

Service - Love is serving others without expecting anything in return.  When we love what we do and pay attention to the people we serve, our actions flow naturally.

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I am so grateful to the people in my life who have offered me these gifts and continue to offer them.  I hope you know who you are, and that I love you.
~~~~

Another Kind of Love

A poem from my friend Madeline Schreiber

Some Things Take Forever

Some things take more than one day
They can seem to take forever
Some things go so deep
I wonder if they are hardwired
Some of them just need to come back
Again and again and again
My mother tried to explain
They are another kind of love
It took me years to understand

Again and again, bit by bit
Bring it on;  it's fine
We know what to do with this stuff
It's just some other kind of love
It's valuable and raw             

He had all a man could want
Yet still he craved and pilfered
Craving only hurt himself
But grasping caused him trouble

His lover laughed at another man's joke
He turned into a monster
He burned with hatred for three full days
Until she seduced him back

Someone saw her as less perfect
Than she would like to see herself
She was completely swamped in envy 
Until some new flattery drew her away
Her servant looked lovely in a ragged dress
She punished her and docked her pay

She was too clouded to know the consequences
Better do nothing lest she be blamed
Never reading between the lines
Never peeking through the cracks
Better to be safe than sorry
She wondered if this might be cowardly logic                               

He completely forgot she was alive
She never spoke to him again

Sometimes there are layers upon layers
All with their own original stories
Neither fight nor flight, right ?
Treasure it and count ourselves lucky
Sometimes more than one lifetime is needed

Madeline
Halifax
June 2010
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