I thought you might be interested in a recent experience that we’ve had: We decided to promote our new book, One-Two-ONE, and the DVD, Couple’s Illumination, both about relationships, by taking a tiny booth (7 feet by 7 feet) at a large public trade fair — huge showroom, ceilings 40 feet high, 120 booths, a special room with 50 psychics at 50 square tables (with a chair for the client – the line formed quickly each morning to sign up for these readings of all sorts), clairvoyants with microphones on one of three stages, purveyors of fine chocolate, aura jewelry, exercise equipment, etc., all sorts of loosely connected things and services, also Scientology and aura photographs! Over four days, 17,000+ people came through. It was exhausting and fascinating to watch all the different kinds of people. We put up a sign that said “Free Brief Relationship Tune-Up,” and had dozens of people come in for this little exercise (“In Whose Name”) from our book – totally fun, and we think very useful to many. We met some great people, and in the end, we don’t think we’ll ever do that again. Our two back-ups got sick, so we were there all day every day. We might help out with such a venture in the future, but not do it all day every day. We gave two talks on two different stages, well attended, and that felt positive.
On another note, we are singing a lot – in a 40-person come-one-come-all choir that sings some simple stuff (Beatles, even Cole Porter) as well as some complicated four-part pieces, also in a nine-person a capella group with much more complicated material, and Lila and I are singing together duets with our music teacher. So we sing to the mountain, who is our tutor for this life-stage.
Lila is writing as am I, one of the means whereby we open to the creativity flowing so freely here.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Why Ceremony? (part 1)
By David Tresemer, Ph.D.
Why ceremony? The StarHouse offers many ceremonies throughout the year. Why attend a ceremony? Who benefits? How? I’ll give my answer now, and then explain. The answer is, for the individual: Ceremony can make you a much better person, much more awake, much stronger and more resilient, and more ready for the unexpected acts of heroism—large and small—that life demands of you.
I present my reasons for this answer in the form of very personal notes and observations gleaned over time.
Neuroplasticity
You have in your nervous system something like a hundred billion neurons, each with many connections to other neurons. Every encounter you have through your brain’s agents—those extensions of your nervous system called your senses—causes new connections to be made and old connections to be pruned away. Every sensory moment results in thousands of neuronal adjustments and many millions of chemical alterations. Yet this describes only the hardware part of your brain. The software extends beyond the brain and its agents to other places, and even to other times, in ways that are known vaguely to many people. Some people have trained these capacities for extended sensing.
Changes in your nervous system—increasing complexity, developing new capacities, such as clairvoyance and wisdom—continues until the moment of your death. You are never the same as yesterday, you are never “all grown-up” in the past tense. You are never “there” or “arrived” or “finished” or “retired,” but rather always engaged with the growth of your neurological complexity. A rule of thumb, “You grow until your last breath,” reminds you of your responsibility for that growth.
All the siddhis, or powers, of the yogis are possible. As the psychic explorer, Robert Munroe, once told me about extra-ordinary abilities, “If one person can accomplish something, then it’s possible; if two people can accomplish it, then it’s teachable. After that, the many.”
One can ask, “Why would I wish to do those things—fly across the room, know what someone is going to do tomorrow, lift a thousand pounds?” It’s good to ask these questions, because over time, your brain will accommodate by wiring you for the capacities that you routinely emphasize: That’s neuroplasticity. The genie of your brain, when the lamp is found and rubbed, offers you what you wish. Thus, right from the beginning, you have to ask yourself, “Why? What do I wish for? What is the purpose of existence?”
Purpose
You may not be able to answer the question of purpose of the ceremony or the questions from which it stems, “What is my purpose, what is my destiny, and what is the specific deed I’m supposed to accomplish in this lifetime?” Most people have little idea about the purpose of their lives beyond some vague general ideas that they get from church—“be good”—or from popular culture—“get rich.”
You can approach a sense of purpose by understanding your intention for attending a ceremony.
The Most Common Intentions
When people attend a wedding, I observe that they don’t know what to do with themselves. They don’t know what to expect or to intend for their experience, and very few understand that the ceremony relies on their quality of attendance to make the wedding sparkle. In speaking with people, many seem to concentrate on the party and drinks afterwards, or seeing old friends. Some emphasize the words of the vows, some the kiss at the end of the vows, and some the entire spectacle of The Dress and The Flowers. In a wedding, people feel obliged to be present, to witness what occurred, to say they had been there. Beyond that, the intentions are many and varied. Thus the common intentions, especially for familiar ceremonies, are confused.
When people come to a lesser familiar ceremony, for example, an equinox ceremony at StarHouse, I have observed that they come because they want something from the ceremony for themselves, a big step from the diversity of reasons to attend a wedding. Not only do they want something, they want something big, very big, some big flash of an experience that would make it worthwhile to have come to such an event. This is a fine goal, and tends to make for more wakeful people. However, there are some pitfalls with this demand that, in order to understand, we have to put a few more pieces in place.
Getting your Intentions Straight
Though people often feel that a ceremony is there to carry them, with its music and decoration and movement and words, actually the ceremony depends on the witnesses for its success. All witnesses are participants. No one hides in a seat or pew or in the bushes. The quality of the preparation of the participants shows in the feeling of the ceremony. As one actress I worked with summarized in a talk-back to the audience after a performance, “If you want a good play, be a good audience.” You can begin by making some choices. This may seem to lead afield from the question of why ceremony, but come along for the ride.
Choice #1: Observe beliefs that cripple you. This includes general attitudes—“Bad people lurk around every corner.”—and specific beliefs—“Anyone wearing red must be promiscuous.”—and judgments about the present gathering—“These people are all stupid.”
Beliefs that cripple you also include entire systems of thought. For example, Darwinism has led many to believe that human beings resulted from chance mutations that had different survival rates in an aggressively hostile world, and that humans slowly developed from monkeys (more accurately the ancestors of present day monkeys), who came from little mammals, who came from amphibians, who came from smaller organisms, on down to pond scum. Darwinism leaves one with the feeling that this all took place by random—and thus meaningless—events on a minor planet in a minor solar system in a less-than-average galaxy in an infinity of galaxies, thus diminishing each human being to laughable insignificance. There is much to recommend the theories of Darwinism in its explanation of how some kinds of change occur. However, there is quite enough evidence in the scientific world, and heaps of experience in our psychic worlds, to show that Darwinism is a belief system, a bearer of Truth in a small area of inquiry, but beyond that one of several belief systems from which one can choose.
When you observe what you actually believe and hold to be true, you can come in for some surprises. Many people discover, for example, that they don’t like their own body. How useful is that?!
Bringing the inventory of beliefs to the surface to be recognized can lead to the spontaneous shedding of old beliefs that disempower you and mechanize the world.
Some beliefs will need more attention. Then you can go to Choice #2.
Choice #2: Choose love; do not choose hate.
An empiricist—one who watches consequences of actions and beliefs that spawn those actions—has no difficulty in seeing that hate leads nowhere. At some point you will have the experience that love truly does compose the stuff of the universe, and then you will know that hate is an aberration, not really even a separate choice. This paragraph summarizes years of work on my part, and is not meant to suggest quick adoption.
So how do you deal with hate in yourself? A sage once told me, “Attachment leads to detachment.” That is, don’t try to grapple with the unwanted hatreds so you can shove them out the door. Don’t try to repress them, and stuff them into a corner. Rather refocus your attention on what you’d like to create. Affirm your interest, your love, your passion. You will notice that the unwanted beliefs, which exist only apparently, will diminish and disappear.
Once you choose love, not hate, your participation in a ceremony changes. Rather than sitting back, arms crossed, waiting to be touched by energy, with the suspicious attitude of “prove it to me,” you begin to add to the situation. A lecturer can spot those people who glow with energy rather than suck energy. The emanators understand Insight #3 from James Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy, that emanating is easy, as it comes from the abundance of love, the free energy of the universe. Emanation improves the lecturer’s delivery and thus the experience for oneself, and for everyone.
These steps seem so simple. Why would society make them difficult? Many reasons, the chief one being that there is money in it. If you think that your life is random and meaningless, that most people are out to get you, and that the best you can do is choose the lesser of two evils, then you might choose to desperately seek release, “escape” (the catchword for all vacation resorts), pleasure, and comfort. There is big money in the provision of pleasure and comfort.
Choice #3: Give Divinity a chance.
Perhaps you feel that Divinity is simply superstition, beliefs fitting for the poor and ignorant. Your repetition of this belief that Divinity is superstition wires your nervous system so that you do not notice the wonder of creation that you may have enjoyed as a child. You can reason yourself through this dilemma, perhaps following the steps of others who have traveled the path of open-mindedness. Let’s follow these steps quickly: A true scientist, one who knows the world through measurements of the senses’ experience, can come to realize that the capabilities of the nervous system cannot be explained by Darwinian “natural selection.” That may progress to the question, “How does it all work?,” leading to an openness in the observer. Then an experience or series of experiences can arise that affirm the interconnection of consciousness with an immense intelligence, far vaster than human capability, yet discernible by the human being. Then one realizes the obviousness of creative intelligence, what some call God, though the term “God” may be too overburdened with meaning from those who abuse the sense of wonder in service of their own agendas. Try “Organic Light” (proposed by John Lash in Not in His Image) or Shining Light (the meaning of the Sanskrit root of the word Divinity) or Great Intelligence. The notion of a personal god, one who speaks to you in your language, can trap you—into delusions of grandeur when you make up something wonderful or into a sense of abandonment when you experience silence. Simply open to experience of the grandeur of creation.
From there, you can build up your capacities of insight and intuition to find a pathway of communication, or communion, with Divinity, not a chatty conversation but rather a sense of inter-merged interaction. You become not a separate entity from the whole, but realize that your thoughts and flashes of vision, your deepest feelings of joy and compassion, and your deeds in the world, are embedded in a spiritual world too. Again, this is the fruit of many years of experience.
Choice #4: Ask about your purpose. The preliminary choices begin you on the path to finding your true intention and eventually your purpose. You can ask about purpose, though don’t expect an answer in words—perhaps in pictures or inner knowings. The best result of asking about purpose is to open up any situation from its tiny niche of time and space. You are always interested in the larger picture, the antecedents of the actions and feelings of this moment from the distant past, and the consequences into the distant future.
(More in part 2 coming)
By David Tresemer, Ph.D.
Why ceremony? The StarHouse offers many ceremonies throughout the year. Why attend a ceremony? Who benefits? How? I’ll give my answer now, and then explain. The answer is, for the individual: Ceremony can make you a much better person, much more awake, much stronger and more resilient, and more ready for the unexpected acts of heroism—large and small—that life demands of you.
I present my reasons for this answer in the form of very personal notes and observations gleaned over time.
Neuroplasticity
You have in your nervous system something like a hundred billion neurons, each with many connections to other neurons. Every encounter you have through your brain’s agents—those extensions of your nervous system called your senses—causes new connections to be made and old connections to be pruned away. Every sensory moment results in thousands of neuronal adjustments and many millions of chemical alterations. Yet this describes only the hardware part of your brain. The software extends beyond the brain and its agents to other places, and even to other times, in ways that are known vaguely to many people. Some people have trained these capacities for extended sensing.
Changes in your nervous system—increasing complexity, developing new capacities, such as clairvoyance and wisdom—continues until the moment of your death. You are never the same as yesterday, you are never “all grown-up” in the past tense. You are never “there” or “arrived” or “finished” or “retired,” but rather always engaged with the growth of your neurological complexity. A rule of thumb, “You grow until your last breath,” reminds you of your responsibility for that growth.
All the siddhis, or powers, of the yogis are possible. As the psychic explorer, Robert Munroe, once told me about extra-ordinary abilities, “If one person can accomplish something, then it’s possible; if two people can accomplish it, then it’s teachable. After that, the many.”
One can ask, “Why would I wish to do those things—fly across the room, know what someone is going to do tomorrow, lift a thousand pounds?” It’s good to ask these questions, because over time, your brain will accommodate by wiring you for the capacities that you routinely emphasize: That’s neuroplasticity. The genie of your brain, when the lamp is found and rubbed, offers you what you wish. Thus, right from the beginning, you have to ask yourself, “Why? What do I wish for? What is the purpose of existence?”
Purpose
You may not be able to answer the question of purpose of the ceremony or the questions from which it stems, “What is my purpose, what is my destiny, and what is the specific deed I’m supposed to accomplish in this lifetime?” Most people have little idea about the purpose of their lives beyond some vague general ideas that they get from church—“be good”—or from popular culture—“get rich.”
You can approach a sense of purpose by understanding your intention for attending a ceremony.
The Most Common Intentions
When people attend a wedding, I observe that they don’t know what to do with themselves. They don’t know what to expect or to intend for their experience, and very few understand that the ceremony relies on their quality of attendance to make the wedding sparkle. In speaking with people, many seem to concentrate on the party and drinks afterwards, or seeing old friends. Some emphasize the words of the vows, some the kiss at the end of the vows, and some the entire spectacle of The Dress and The Flowers. In a wedding, people feel obliged to be present, to witness what occurred, to say they had been there. Beyond that, the intentions are many and varied. Thus the common intentions, especially for familiar ceremonies, are confused.
When people come to a lesser familiar ceremony, for example, an equinox ceremony at StarHouse, I have observed that they come because they want something from the ceremony for themselves, a big step from the diversity of reasons to attend a wedding. Not only do they want something, they want something big, very big, some big flash of an experience that would make it worthwhile to have come to such an event. This is a fine goal, and tends to make for more wakeful people. However, there are some pitfalls with this demand that, in order to understand, we have to put a few more pieces in place.
Getting your Intentions Straight
Though people often feel that a ceremony is there to carry them, with its music and decoration and movement and words, actually the ceremony depends on the witnesses for its success. All witnesses are participants. No one hides in a seat or pew or in the bushes. The quality of the preparation of the participants shows in the feeling of the ceremony. As one actress I worked with summarized in a talk-back to the audience after a performance, “If you want a good play, be a good audience.” You can begin by making some choices. This may seem to lead afield from the question of why ceremony, but come along for the ride.
Choice #1: Observe beliefs that cripple you. This includes general attitudes—“Bad people lurk around every corner.”—and specific beliefs—“Anyone wearing red must be promiscuous.”—and judgments about the present gathering—“These people are all stupid.”
Beliefs that cripple you also include entire systems of thought. For example, Darwinism has led many to believe that human beings resulted from chance mutations that had different survival rates in an aggressively hostile world, and that humans slowly developed from monkeys (more accurately the ancestors of present day monkeys), who came from little mammals, who came from amphibians, who came from smaller organisms, on down to pond scum. Darwinism leaves one with the feeling that this all took place by random—and thus meaningless—events on a minor planet in a minor solar system in a less-than-average galaxy in an infinity of galaxies, thus diminishing each human being to laughable insignificance. There is much to recommend the theories of Darwinism in its explanation of how some kinds of change occur. However, there is quite enough evidence in the scientific world, and heaps of experience in our psychic worlds, to show that Darwinism is a belief system, a bearer of Truth in a small area of inquiry, but beyond that one of several belief systems from which one can choose.
When you observe what you actually believe and hold to be true, you can come in for some surprises. Many people discover, for example, that they don’t like their own body. How useful is that?!
Bringing the inventory of beliefs to the surface to be recognized can lead to the spontaneous shedding of old beliefs that disempower you and mechanize the world.
Some beliefs will need more attention. Then you can go to Choice #2.
Choice #2: Choose love; do not choose hate.
An empiricist—one who watches consequences of actions and beliefs that spawn those actions—has no difficulty in seeing that hate leads nowhere. At some point you will have the experience that love truly does compose the stuff of the universe, and then you will know that hate is an aberration, not really even a separate choice. This paragraph summarizes years of work on my part, and is not meant to suggest quick adoption.
So how do you deal with hate in yourself? A sage once told me, “Attachment leads to detachment.” That is, don’t try to grapple with the unwanted hatreds so you can shove them out the door. Don’t try to repress them, and stuff them into a corner. Rather refocus your attention on what you’d like to create. Affirm your interest, your love, your passion. You will notice that the unwanted beliefs, which exist only apparently, will diminish and disappear.
Once you choose love, not hate, your participation in a ceremony changes. Rather than sitting back, arms crossed, waiting to be touched by energy, with the suspicious attitude of “prove it to me,” you begin to add to the situation. A lecturer can spot those people who glow with energy rather than suck energy. The emanators understand Insight #3 from James Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy, that emanating is easy, as it comes from the abundance of love, the free energy of the universe. Emanation improves the lecturer’s delivery and thus the experience for oneself, and for everyone.
These steps seem so simple. Why would society make them difficult? Many reasons, the chief one being that there is money in it. If you think that your life is random and meaningless, that most people are out to get you, and that the best you can do is choose the lesser of two evils, then you might choose to desperately seek release, “escape” (the catchword for all vacation resorts), pleasure, and comfort. There is big money in the provision of pleasure and comfort.
Choice #3: Give Divinity a chance.
Perhaps you feel that Divinity is simply superstition, beliefs fitting for the poor and ignorant. Your repetition of this belief that Divinity is superstition wires your nervous system so that you do not notice the wonder of creation that you may have enjoyed as a child. You can reason yourself through this dilemma, perhaps following the steps of others who have traveled the path of open-mindedness. Let’s follow these steps quickly: A true scientist, one who knows the world through measurements of the senses’ experience, can come to realize that the capabilities of the nervous system cannot be explained by Darwinian “natural selection.” That may progress to the question, “How does it all work?,” leading to an openness in the observer. Then an experience or series of experiences can arise that affirm the interconnection of consciousness with an immense intelligence, far vaster than human capability, yet discernible by the human being. Then one realizes the obviousness of creative intelligence, what some call God, though the term “God” may be too overburdened with meaning from those who abuse the sense of wonder in service of their own agendas. Try “Organic Light” (proposed by John Lash in Not in His Image) or Shining Light (the meaning of the Sanskrit root of the word Divinity) or Great Intelligence. The notion of a personal god, one who speaks to you in your language, can trap you—into delusions of grandeur when you make up something wonderful or into a sense of abandonment when you experience silence. Simply open to experience of the grandeur of creation.
From there, you can build up your capacities of insight and intuition to find a pathway of communication, or communion, with Divinity, not a chatty conversation but rather a sense of inter-merged interaction. You become not a separate entity from the whole, but realize that your thoughts and flashes of vision, your deepest feelings of joy and compassion, and your deeds in the world, are embedded in a spiritual world too. Again, this is the fruit of many years of experience.
Choice #4: Ask about your purpose. The preliminary choices begin you on the path to finding your true intention and eventually your purpose. You can ask about purpose, though don’t expect an answer in words—perhaps in pictures or inner knowings. The best result of asking about purpose is to open up any situation from its tiny niche of time and space. You are always interested in the larger picture, the antecedents of the actions and feelings of this moment from the distant past, and the consequences into the distant future.
(More in part 2 coming)
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Avatar and Quality of Relationship
The movie Avatar has demonstrated its popularity by its grand income. Thus many have discussed it. Some praise its point of view, some warn against its philosophy. I have not yet seen the most important point to me, which is not content. "The medium is the message." Beyond whether or not pantheism is a good idea, or whether an indigenous society has been properly portrayed, or whether this is an attack on the US military or on all military thinking, or how the term Avatar has been inappropriately taken from something quite wonderful (a person who has come from heaven in full consciousness to assist humanity's evolution), or whether the biology is accurate -- beyond all of these, I have to note how this film has, more than any other, stuck with me. Hands of technology have entered into me more deeply than before (large screen, High Definition, 3-D, surround sound, subliminal input both through vision and sound) and it has been more difficult to reawaken into this world.
The "Avatar Depression" has been described, with many people expressing despair that "this world" is not as good as "that world," and that they wish to be in "that world," even to the point of suicidal thoughts to disconnect from "this world."
I too feel a lingering ache in my body for "that world," as if I had seen Spirit-Land and long to return there. Even in the movie, at the end the "takers" (they are us) are banished back to their dying world where they have "killed the mother." Deep down, they and we long to return....
The worthy themes of the content -- the beauty, the message of the existence and activity of the divine feminine, the loyalty to each other, to community, to the divine feminine... -- are actually secondary to the medium which has worked its way down into me very deeply. (Even the previews of the next HD, 3-D movie, an intrusive fantasy of the perverse and disturbed experiences of Alice in Wonderland, with no justification of redeeming qualities in its content, have stayed with me.)
Discussions of points in the content of this film are interesting -- whether it has done more work than the Copenhagen climate gathering to alert people to the environment, etc. -- but those concerns are the sugar-coating of a bitter pill of technological intrusion into our psyches. As long as I remain in the fantasy of the film, I remain drugged and unable to connect with the values apparently portrayed there -- relationship with another human being, with community, with the earth, and with the beauty and power of Sophia, the divine feminine wisdom underlying all of creation -- values that are portrayed but paradoxically made more remote by the medium of the film itself.
It has required more attention than usual for disengaging from fantasy and re-engaging with "this world," finding the inherent magic of "this world." One must quite seriously utilize antidotes to the medium of the film -- time in Nature, and not five minutes but hours. "Time in Nature" while remembering scenes from the movie requires many hours for Nature to have effect. "Time in Nature" where you look closely at the sand, the bark, the petal, the trailing wisp of cloud -- smell everything, taste everything, hear everything. Note the quality of the light (and note how it differs from the light in the movie theatre). Offer yourself to gardening or to a house plant, and tend its living-ness, even ask it to work with your healing. Gaze into the eyes of your beloved, stroke each other's arms, rub each other's back. Again, not just for five minutes with any of this, but with concerted effort to re-orient yourself to the wonders of "this world," "this body," "this lover," "this soul."
I have observed a young man design two seconds of animated movement of a dinosaur in a video game. He said it took him ten hours to get those two seconds right.He showed me the complicated grids hidden beneath the final image. Most importantly I saw his devotion to the computer screen, and observed a flow of his life energy into the screen. Where does that energy go? Does it work as nutrition for some being? Is it expressed into the world every time that video dinosaur makes that particular movement? When I saw the credits for Avatar, the hundreds of technical people who poured their being into their computers, I realized that this is what the anthropologist Leslie White would call an energy-capturing device ... but to what end? When millions of people watch this film, and merge with it, and enter into it, they are pouring their own precious attention energy into it. Where does that go? These are questions that (with Willie Bento and Robert Schiappacasse) I ask in Signs in the Heavens: A Message for Our Time. And the antidote, beyond what I've shared above, comes in the newly released One-Two-ONE: A Guidebook to Conscious Partnerships, Weddings, and Rededication Ceremonies, written with my wonderful real-life "this world" beautiful Lila Sophia.
These issues are not side issues, not something to be heaped over with new content in order to obscure the old images. The message is not in the content, but in the medium -- how someone else's psyche has gotten so deeply into mine. Marshall McLuhan called radio a "warm" medium as it required so much participation on the part of the listener to participate in imagining what the speakers and the scenes described look like. He termed television a "cool" medium because you've been given so much that your imagination is not engaged. This has now come to a new level of "coolness" and you are not warmed by it. If you feel yourself, it may be agitated after such a movie, yet cold.
I highly recommend that you rivet your attention to the real, the growing living warm plant and animal and sky, the beautiful, the good, the here, the now, for these are where your soul speaks to you. Find a piece of earth -- and it need not be glorious, as in a thousand-foot tall tree -- stand there and find the communion that your life offers right now. Find its inherent sacred character and let your heart be filled with the abundance-to-flowing-over of the actual world.
The "Avatar Depression" has been described, with many people expressing despair that "this world" is not as good as "that world," and that they wish to be in "that world," even to the point of suicidal thoughts to disconnect from "this world."
I too feel a lingering ache in my body for "that world," as if I had seen Spirit-Land and long to return there. Even in the movie, at the end the "takers" (they are us) are banished back to their dying world where they have "killed the mother." Deep down, they and we long to return....
The worthy themes of the content -- the beauty, the message of the existence and activity of the divine feminine, the loyalty to each other, to community, to the divine feminine... -- are actually secondary to the medium which has worked its way down into me very deeply. (Even the previews of the next HD, 3-D movie, an intrusive fantasy of the perverse and disturbed experiences of Alice in Wonderland, with no justification of redeeming qualities in its content, have stayed with me.)
Discussions of points in the content of this film are interesting -- whether it has done more work than the Copenhagen climate gathering to alert people to the environment, etc. -- but those concerns are the sugar-coating of a bitter pill of technological intrusion into our psyches. As long as I remain in the fantasy of the film, I remain drugged and unable to connect with the values apparently portrayed there -- relationship with another human being, with community, with the earth, and with the beauty and power of Sophia, the divine feminine wisdom underlying all of creation -- values that are portrayed but paradoxically made more remote by the medium of the film itself.
It has required more attention than usual for disengaging from fantasy and re-engaging with "this world," finding the inherent magic of "this world." One must quite seriously utilize antidotes to the medium of the film -- time in Nature, and not five minutes but hours. "Time in Nature" while remembering scenes from the movie requires many hours for Nature to have effect. "Time in Nature" where you look closely at the sand, the bark, the petal, the trailing wisp of cloud -- smell everything, taste everything, hear everything. Note the quality of the light (and note how it differs from the light in the movie theatre). Offer yourself to gardening or to a house plant, and tend its living-ness, even ask it to work with your healing. Gaze into the eyes of your beloved, stroke each other's arms, rub each other's back. Again, not just for five minutes with any of this, but with concerted effort to re-orient yourself to the wonders of "this world," "this body," "this lover," "this soul."
I have observed a young man design two seconds of animated movement of a dinosaur in a video game. He said it took him ten hours to get those two seconds right.He showed me the complicated grids hidden beneath the final image. Most importantly I saw his devotion to the computer screen, and observed a flow of his life energy into the screen. Where does that energy go? Does it work as nutrition for some being? Is it expressed into the world every time that video dinosaur makes that particular movement? When I saw the credits for Avatar, the hundreds of technical people who poured their being into their computers, I realized that this is what the anthropologist Leslie White would call an energy-capturing device ... but to what end? When millions of people watch this film, and merge with it, and enter into it, they are pouring their own precious attention energy into it. Where does that go? These are questions that (with Willie Bento and Robert Schiappacasse) I ask in Signs in the Heavens: A Message for Our Time. And the antidote, beyond what I've shared above, comes in the newly released One-Two-ONE: A Guidebook to Conscious Partnerships, Weddings, and Rededication Ceremonies, written with my wonderful real-life "this world" beautiful Lila Sophia.
These issues are not side issues, not something to be heaped over with new content in order to obscure the old images. The message is not in the content, but in the medium -- how someone else's psyche has gotten so deeply into mine. Marshall McLuhan called radio a "warm" medium as it required so much participation on the part of the listener to participate in imagining what the speakers and the scenes described look like. He termed television a "cool" medium because you've been given so much that your imagination is not engaged. This has now come to a new level of "coolness" and you are not warmed by it. If you feel yourself, it may be agitated after such a movie, yet cold.
I highly recommend that you rivet your attention to the real, the growing living warm plant and animal and sky, the beautiful, the good, the here, the now, for these are where your soul speaks to you. Find a piece of earth -- and it need not be glorious, as in a thousand-foot tall tree -- stand there and find the communion that your life offers right now. Find its inherent sacred character and let your heart be filled with the abundance-to-flowing-over of the actual world.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Prayers for the Needy
In an increasingly mechanical age, the tendency with something like Haiti (or the West Coast in the predicted difficult weather) is to watch the televised images and perhaps send some money via computer. More important is some computer-free communion in Nature with heart-felt support headed that way. Do not underestimate the power of such prayers. And do not estimate the power of time in Nature, and not plugged in. Forces exist that are eager for us to accept replications rather than the real thing. We can work with them, "Good morning, computer - I want to spend a half hour with you in communication with others, then calm down and go away." - but we need to balance with real time with real people in real Nature. Let your prayers for the needy include yourself, and those others whose lives are difficult right now.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Religion - its meaning
At the Parliament of World Religions (December, Melbourne), there were 240 religions represented, and many that did not come. I (David) was especially impressed with some about whom I had heard something, but here they were. The Dalai Lama brought the Gyoto monks, who created an intricate sand painting in one alcove, over the course of four days. As the painting was destroyed in one stroke, it was all about enjoying the present moment of a project, while not attached to its outcome. Indeed, I notice that our lives have many completed projects in the form of things in our lives, which have become cluttered. Thus, attuning to the monks who were making the sand painting, and their quality of intention as artists, was the best part of that exercise.
The Gyoto monks were on the general stage a few times, chanting, a group of four to illustrate their skill. They walked on in line, with their large curved yellow fringed hats, the closest thing to a Roman centurion’s helmet that I’ve seen. One of them must have been new, for on stage he had an irrepressible smile. He was dazzled by the audience, seven thousand people in front of him – he widely grinned and waved, as would a ten year-old. It was very sweet to see this kind of simple innocence, also demonstrating the skills that he had learned in toning and overtoning.
Famous spiritual leaders strolled the halls, in groups. Famous? To their own, certainly. In any case, you couldn’t get to the famous leader in the middle of a football formation, flanked by the admirers within the group. So I would sometimes go up to one of the followers, smile, and put forward my hand in greeting. “Hello.” I didn’t need to say my name as it was emblazoned on the name badge around my neck. “Hello, please tell me about yourself.” In most, but not all, cases, the result was a very dear interaction with someone from a completely different part of the world, who freely shared their philosophy. For example, I asked a Sikh, “I hear about the 5 K’s – what is that?” The man explained that this meant the five things that they must wear at all times, each item starting with the letter K – a small dagger (sometimes a sword), a wristband, one’s own uncut hair, a string around one’s waist – I think I got them right, though it’s not important because the man said, leaning over to me, “But the most important thing is the heart.” He pointed to his heart, smiled broadly, and nodded. I smiled back, and said, “yes,” and then he had to hurry to catch up with his group which had moved further down the hall.
The warmth of that encounter, and others like it, was more important than many of the words that were uttered. It became personal and intimate, across geography and dogma... it's all about relationship!!
The Gyoto monks were on the general stage a few times, chanting, a group of four to illustrate their skill. They walked on in line, with their large curved yellow fringed hats, the closest thing to a Roman centurion’s helmet that I’ve seen. One of them must have been new, for on stage he had an irrepressible smile. He was dazzled by the audience, seven thousand people in front of him – he widely grinned and waved, as would a ten year-old. It was very sweet to see this kind of simple innocence, also demonstrating the skills that he had learned in toning and overtoning.
Famous spiritual leaders strolled the halls, in groups. Famous? To their own, certainly. In any case, you couldn’t get to the famous leader in the middle of a football formation, flanked by the admirers within the group. So I would sometimes go up to one of the followers, smile, and put forward my hand in greeting. “Hello.” I didn’t need to say my name as it was emblazoned on the name badge around my neck. “Hello, please tell me about yourself.” In most, but not all, cases, the result was a very dear interaction with someone from a completely different part of the world, who freely shared their philosophy. For example, I asked a Sikh, “I hear about the 5 K’s – what is that?” The man explained that this meant the five things that they must wear at all times, each item starting with the letter K – a small dagger (sometimes a sword), a wristband, one’s own uncut hair, a string around one’s waist – I think I got them right, though it’s not important because the man said, leaning over to me, “But the most important thing is the heart.” He pointed to his heart, smiled broadly, and nodded. I smiled back, and said, “yes,” and then he had to hurry to catch up with his group which had moved further down the hall.
The warmth of that encounter, and others like it, was more important than many of the words that were uttered. It became personal and intimate, across geography and dogma... it's all about relationship!!
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