night window 2010 eve

sun's bank shot
off moon
glints
3 a.m. snow cover
into
brain pocket

soul lit by cosmic
ricochet

systems of thought

Systems of thought (theologies, philosophies, theories) are based upon intuition, upon an awareness that opens from a portion of our consciousness differing from sensation (the input of our physical senses) and from cognition (the thinking ratio-nal mind).

Our greatest systems of thought (Taoist, Buddhist, Hebrew, Christian, Islamic, Newtonian, Einsteinian, Confucian, Vedic, and so on) come from humans with the greatest intuitive capacity. The rest of us generally choose one (or more) of the pre-existing systems of thought and make it our own.

A system of thought is like a jungle gym, a workout frame for spirituo-cogno-philosopho exercise. We swing around within these workout frames, developing our spiritual muscles, opening our awareness to ever higher, wider realms.

Sometimes some of us get stuck in one, our personal favorite, and declare it to be the universal-forever-truth that should be the cookie cutter for all humankind (look out for any limbs or parts that don't fit the mold!).

My experience is they all point to one reality -- the reality from which all intuitions spring. One Ocean condensing, many rains falling, multiple streams streaming.

doubt

Doubt is a funny word. It looks as if it should be pronounced "doo-bit." Maybe it should be spelled with a "ght" like in "drought." Dought. But then I guess we might mispronounce it as "dough-tee."

Doubt has sometimes had a bad reputation. A "doubting Thomas" is often thought of as not a good thing to be. Well, I doubt that doubt is bad. Unless one gets stuck in it as a professional doubter and assumes the lifestyle of skeptic of everything (one's own skeptical stance excluded, of course).

Doubt means "Well, I don't know about that." That's reasonable. And truthful. As such, doubt is an antechamber to knowing.

Doubt is not "I don't know about that, so it's a lie." One has set oneself up as the Illuminator of the Universe, the God of All-Knowing. Laughable. Pitiful. A balloon waiting to be popped. A tough skin is usually developed so that one is less poppable. The defensive "doubter" floats through life inhaling his own vapors.

No. Doubt is honest not-knowing. A true doubter searches for knowledge. Take a look at Jennifer Hecht's Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson.

Doubt does not have to result in a quest for knowing. One can adopt the stance of "Well, I don't know about that, and I am not going to investigate it." This happens as commonly as when one is reading something, bumps into a word or concept one does not understand, then just skips over it. A minor form of unexamined doubt, but one that builds over time into an insulated world.

True lively doubt produces a quest. Thomas: "I'm not going to believe until I can stick my hands into his wounds!" A true scientist. He achieved his goal. He got some experimental results, but he decided to modify his procedure; he only had to stick his eyes into the wounds, not his hands.

May we pursue our doubts with vigor and with open minds! May we not become so enamored of doubt that we make it our religion.

the old style and the wisdom style

The old style was to stand in one's own point of view, defend it against all comers, and try one's best to get the other to see it your way. The wisdom style is to maintain one's point of view while simultaneously being converted to the other's view point. This is essential for the interreligious dialogue and interconsciousness dialogue needed in a global community. Ueshiba showed the practical embodying of this in his founding of Aikido: keeping one's own center while moving with the center of another.

winter solstice

The sun begins its return.
Dark has gone as far as it can go.
Find your swim suit.
Walk naked around the house.
Sing a song. Hum a tune.
Light-en up!

light beings

At this time of year we celebrate the return of Light into the world. This returning is something that takes place every in-breath of our lives, moving deep into our being and circulating within heart's blood.

The return of the Light is not out there somewhere. We are its returning. We joy in and join in the Light. Whatever our religion or belief system, we are a birthing of this Light. We are the Light born into the Darkness that we are.

This is the time of year for deep appreciation of the Light. We bathe in it. We store it up. It is a resurrection. Our cells illuminate, are luminous. With roots in Darkness and Mystery, we are beings of Light. We are becoming ever more aware that we are cosmic persons.

the adventurous

We are born, and though we have the societal scaffolding to help us figure this out, this who we are, this where we are, and what is going on, we still have to understand it for ourselves.

For the adventurous, it is a continuing comprehension.

It is tempting to succumb to
the deep-seated sofa of dogma for relief,
butts and heads deep-sprung, locked in,

but the future of humankind lies with the adventurous,
those with ever-expanding vision and the nerve
to surf nakedly with loving heart on the immediacy of now.

the batter in the mixing bowl

Using age-old metaphors, I speak. Man has been cast into the outer darkness of his own singular individual thought and tries in vain to recapture the common language of the Babylon Babble-On Tower, when all spoke as one and communication was instantaneous. At that time, man was a giant hive of open buzzing communion with no thought. No thought. Pre-logical. Participation mystique. A buzzing hive of endeavor that looked to build a tower, a giant termite mound to the heavens. And once again, as in the Eden Fall, the heavens said we cannot let them do this. And knocked man back down into the mixing bowl from which he was trying to climb -- now put on reverse spin, a paradoxical mixing bowl of separation. Each now thinks their own thoughts, marching to a different language from all others. Knocked down twice. Kicked out of Eden. Tower destroyed. The batter is still up with two strikes and a lot of balls. What will be the next pitch? Do we hear it coming even now? As we stand at home and look to knock that sucker right out of the park and into overdrive.

what does christmas mean to you, little boy?

Sitting here in the wee hours of the morn, I assigned myself a task. Or rather, it seemed to come unbidden. "Georgie boy, what does Christmas mean to you?"

Hmmm... The excitement of the child I was who believed in two magic and supernatural figures, much more powerful than the Tooth Fairy but of the same order: Santa Claus and Jesus. I had learned from the adults that Jesus was born into our hearts but Santa Claus actually came into the house! Scientific evidence: the milk and cookies were gone.

The time of year when as a psychologist I knew a time bomb was being planted that would explode in early January when distressed folk would be coming in from having faced their extended families once again. Old wounds would have been opened either through new raw encounter or through deep-seated memories. Post-Christmas months are a boom time for psychologists.

The joy of winter solstice, of knowing that despite all appearances, the dark had gone as far as it could go and the light was now returning. The memory of open bonfires in large back yards and all-night joyous celebration.

The blessedness of the Light of Awareness born on earth in the form of the baby Jesus.

Lights, lights, colored lights everywhere! In yards, on houses and lampposts and trees.

A tree brought inside the house! Then festooned with bulbs and icicles and ornaments.

Mistletoe for kissing any feminine being within reach.

Most of what I have written so far is based upon the sights and sounds and smells of memory. What does Christmas mean to me now as an older fart sitting here typing?

Pretty much what every day feels like. Joy at being alive and in interaction with all beings, both visible and invisible, that make up this earthocosmic existence. Feeling the magic of it all.

renewal of spirit

Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. Psalm 24:9

This verse is a formula for increased spiritual energy if one reads it with one's heart and not just with one's eyes. We are not to walk along, eyes downcast to the ground, nor lie within on a sickbed of despair. We are to lift up our heads, and by lifting up our heads, be lifted up.

We can start by lifting up our physical heads, looking toward the heavens and toward the far horizon. The spiritual body is affected by the stance of the physical body.

When we lift up our physical and spiritual heads, as "everlasting doors," the life energy surrounding us, in which we live and move and have our being, has room to enter. We walk and move and speak with renewed energy.

It all begins with a simple postural change. As the body goes, so goes the soul and spirit. The reverse is also true. Lift up your spiritual head and your body will follow.

Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in!

situation

The simplest way to say it is that people who live in separation, who firmly believe they are separate beings living in a world of separate objects are dangerous to themselves and others. People who know, who experience themselves as a dynamic interflow with others are the salvation of the world. The first live in fear and hostility held in check by a sense of ethics and morality, a veneer of socialization, but always scheming, consciously or subconsciously, what's in it for me? The second are spiritual warriors who live in joy and harmony, and face the world of division and separation created by the inharmonious; practicing a spiritual discipline based upon a unique combination of will, life force, and love.

merge-inity

If you sit quietly, you will notice you have a front and a back. To the front of you is the "external" world -- your arms and legs and body, the room or outdoors, the world of humans, the earth, the solar system, the universe -- extending beyond infinity. That is your front. All of this is your front.

Now notice your back, what is behind. Not the objects you may envision there if you turn around; that would be your front if you did so. Drop visions of an imagined front and attend to the you that is behind your front. It is a void, an abyss, an openness extending to infinity and beyond. This is the realm of the intranaut. This is inner space, the space behind your front. This vastness is where thought is born. Thoughts arise and disappear. Images form and dissipate. Emotions surge and vanish. Spiritual energy, the flow of the life force, moves through. The wellspring is here.

Infinity to the front of you. Infinity behind you. The you that you have been conditioned to think you are is the gateway between the two infinities. When you shut down and walk around as an individual with a social security number, as a skin bag of flesh and bone, the gate is closed. When you let go of that, you are a gateless gate and the two infinities merge as one.

intranaut two-step

1. The inner infinity is as vast as the outer infinity.
Our inner world is as as vast as the outer world.

2. The inner infinity and the outer infinity are one infinity.
Our inner world and the outer world are one world.

We are the gateway between two infinities.
It is only when the gate is closed that we have a problem.

taking off your habit

habit: outward appearance; attire; dress; hence, a garment

If one looks with an unbiased eye as possible at the many different religions in the world and their subdivisions (Garrison Keillor wrote once that his church kept splitting until finally each person was sitting in a room by themselves), one lets go of the extremes of mockery of all religion and its opposite, exclusivity (my religion is the only true path), and can open to the consideration that the cosmos itself is trying on different attire for expression of morality (right relationship), compassion, and wisdom; that the cosmos itself is manifesting in ways that fit the current consciousness of humans. Water takes the shape of its container.

Each religion continues to evolve to greater awareness with the evolution of human consciousness. Smaller consciousnesses (awarenesses) inhabit (are clothed by) more closed-minded understandings and interpretations of their religion than do transcendental awarenesses (consciousnesses) within the same religion. "When I was a child I spoke as a child ...."

Religions that are alive, grow. That doesn't mean get fatter, expand outward. It means grow up, like a tree or lotus, seeking ever more light. Light-seeking increases until there are no more bounds, only light. When there are no more bounds, all religions merge. The cosmos stands nakedly transparent once again.

sureness

A friend of mine (who in his own terms is somewhere between a skeptic and an absurdist) is concerned about my sureness. Of what am I so sure? Whatever words one uses to answer this question are immediately subject to attack. For example, I am sure I am here. Volumes can be and have been written on what "I" and "I am" and "here" mean. "I" have read and reflected upon many of them. I do not wish to replicate their arguments and counter-arguments here. In fact, the wisest course for me to take would be to say nothing at all, to keep silence and just be. But I write books and blogs. I am foolish. I speak up. I speak of what I am so sure.

I understand the game of science -- of hypotheses derived from theories, of hypothesis testing via experimentation, of statistical probabilities in weighing one's results, of open disclosure of one's findings to one's professional peers, of peer review and critique, of subsequent theory modification with newly formed hypotheses, and so on. I have played that game. Successfully. It is a good game with a major object being not to fool oneself. It promotes a certain kind of sureness. But this is not the sureness of which I speak.

"Science" means "knowing." The science I trust and follow is experiential. My life is my experiment. I have made it a point to place myself in many situations with many types of people. My experience is my data. The results are coming in all the time. I come to certain conclusions and publish them for peer review in my blogs and books (and in conversations with a few close friends).

This is what I know so far. Of this I am sure.

• I am born out of a great mystery.
• Western science says this mystery birthed this universe about 13 1/2 billion years ago.
• I am part of that birthing. I can trace my ancestry back to that birthing and before that to the mystery that gave birth.
• This birthing continues, called by some scientists an unfolding. Hence my statement: I am the cosmos unfolding.
• I feel at home in the universe, a cosmic citizen.
• This unfolding feels like a loving act, a graciousness.
• The great mystery, the source is birthing me (and all that is).
  
• I am the energy of the source, embodying.
• I identify with that energy and as that energy more than I do this current embodying and its societal manifestation.
  
• When my physical being gives way, as it surely will, the energy that I am will return to the source.
• I am happy.

These statements are not a theory, not a religion, not a philosophy, though they could easily be made into any of those. I could get a preacher suit, some backup singers, and hop on TV and get some good times rolling with a jazzed up crowd. But that is not my calling.

My sureness is based upon experience. I could recount my specific experiences but they would still be my experiences and would be unconvincing to the unsure. Nor do I wish to convince anyone. Everyone must find (and be found by) their own convincing.

Lao Tzu ("Old Dude") sums it up quite well:
Those who flow as life flows know they need no other force.
They feel no wear, feel no tear, need no mending, no repair.

He was and is surely correct.

thought bubble arrangements

As intranauts taking a look at inner space, an obvious sight is thought bubbling out of nowhere. The arrangement of these thought bubbles and their content in a certain order is known amongst humans as reasoning.

When one arranges these thought bubbles in a certain pre-determined order, an order keeping one's thoughts within one's particular corset of understanding, this is called pre-judged reasoning. No thoughts are allowed which the corset cannot contain.

When one shrugs off all all corsets (strait jackets) of understanding imposed by society and its members, thoughts can and will arrange themselves according to the life force which births us. This is called intuition.

When one takes a position (personal, religious, philosophical, emotional) and then uses only thought bubble arrangements that support that stance, one is approaching life bassackwards. One is becoming a cyst in the organic flow. A certain rigidity occurs and one is living death.

When one moves out of pre-judged thought bubble arrangements and thereby becomes un-reason-able (no longer having a pet reason to defend), one opens to creative arrangements of thought produced by the life force itself. This is relatively new to the human species which is ruled mainly by emotion and pre-judged reasoning.

Opening to the life force and the vital knowledge it contains and offers washes away the usual mind sets to which we fall prey and allows fresh new understandings to emerge. We are the life force streaming and the knowledge and the wisdom it contains.

incarnation

In embodying, we condense the vast awareness that we are into a single space-time locale. Incarnation is an exploratory journey in space-time: the n-dimensional encapsulated in roughly 3 dimensions.

Upon incarnation, we tend to get lost, forgetting the true range and scope of our awareness. It is as if we are in a deep-sea diving bubble and begin to think the bubble is our bounds.

In actuality, the "bubble" is transparent, permeable and open to transmission and reception from all realms.

worship

The best way to worship a duck is to become the duck.

poetic stances

I cut through all the theistic and a-theistic stances by pointing to what seems to me the obvious fact that we are the universe embodying. All metaphors conjured atop this fact are pure poetry. These poetics have value in the beauty and the energy they provoke. It is in the rigid belief in one's poetics as THE TRUTH that difficulties arise, as has been proven time and again in the various and seemingly unending religious and ideological wars.

We are the universe embodying. All of us. Human and non-human. The mythopoetics we concoct to describe the nature of the universe and our "place" in it will be ongoing. I simply wish we could appreciate each other's poetry and not get so all-fired stubborn and outrageous with the stance that my poem is the best and only true poem.

prayering

All this is the Source sourcing and there is no Other.
We are always at home in endless opening.

If there is no Other, and only This, to whom do I pray?

My prayer reverberates to infinity.
From whence does it, my prayer, come?

From the same infinity to which it goes,
a mobius strip of prayer,
traveling endlessly while always here,

moving forever to infinity
while rising from the wellspring
to which it goes.

The energy of prayer circulates,
mobius-iates forever.

embodying heaven and earth

American thought and thus, way of being in the world, is founded upon the supposition that each person, each individual, stands against the world. In this, American religions and American science agree. A person is a subject (from his/her point of view, the subject) and everything else is an object. We prize object-ivity. In doing so, we subject ourselves to trouble. We stand alone, heroic and tragic figures facing chaos which we forever vainly attempt to bring under our subjective rule.

My approach to life is radically different. (This may be why some have voiced difficulty in comprehending what I am saying.) If you think of the "objective" approach described above as a tree growing from earth upward, my experience is as a tree growing from the heavens downward. More accurately, I open out of the cosmos into and as this world. I long ago met "little Georgie" who was growing up and out from the earth and he and I have merged. In fact, we were never separate. Separation is an illusion.

American science and American religions hold the view that humans are self-directed units alienated from the cosmos (include nature here) that must somehow be reconciled while remaining forever apart. (Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall and all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put us back together again.) With the religions, there is hope there will be supernatural intervention.

My experience is that we are the cosmos embodying and there is no separation. All is an interwhirling, an interpenetration, a perichoresis. All is natural. What the religions call God is not supernatural, but is with us and within us all the time.

As a result of being the cosmos embodying, I do not make a living.
I am a living.

headmind and heartmind

Many of us keep ourselves from entering the inner depths of our soul through continuous attention to external matters and to thoughts with their accompanying emotion about those matters. These reveries about the external world can be called dreaming. We awaken out of a night's sleep into this dreaming, this continuous self-hypnotic revery.

To begin to enter the depths of one's soul is to leave the dreaming behind. The major point of entry into the vastness of the soul is the heart. To do so, one must get past the dragon that lives in the head -- the dragon of criticism, judgment, blame, and cynical mistrust.

And past the chattering parrot that perches on the shoulder of the certified accountant that takes stock of all and looks to make sure that the books are balanced in one's favor.

All three of these head-dwellers must be left behind.

One goes out of one's headmind (often thought, mistakenly, to be the bastion of sanity) and into one's heartmind.

One's heartmind is the opening to the depths and the radii-ations of one's soul, of the soul that one is. One moves beyond the body and away from the roof-top chatter of the head.

(To be continued)

spirations

Efforts to remain the same by such illusions as seeing oneself as a solid and unchanging entity in an everchanging world are in essence the holding of one's spiritual breath.

Seeing oneself as a fixed entity is en-sickening. One becomes a cyst, a hardening. And perhaps even rails at the world for not hardening with one, and in the same manner that one has chosen.

Spirit is breath, an inspiring and ex-spiring; the holy wind that comes and goes and ever flows in unpredictable fashion. One who lives in spirit is that wind, the wind everchanging.

Before the next inspire-ation can occur, one must ex-spire.
If one is living in-hell, one must ex-hell.

the swollen foot of the object of my affections

Healing from this foot surgery requires me to not walk very far, essentially confining myself to the house. Much reading has occurred in the last six weeks.

In reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, I was amused to find this poem given by one of the characters to a lady he was wooing. I change the gender.

On the convalescence of the swollen foot of the object of my affections

A captivating little foot,
Though swollen and red and tender!
The doctors come and plasters put,
But still they cannot mend her.

Yet, 'tis not for his foot I dread --
A theme for Pushkin's muse more fit--
It's not his foot, it is his head:
I tremble for his loss of wit!

For as his foot swells, strange to say,
His intellect is on the wane--
Oh, for some remedy I pray
That may restore both foot and brain!

I laughed aloud. My soul still grins.

response ability

Response-ability means able to respond. Each of us is responsible for our level of hassle and our depth of healing (wholeness, holiness). Other people do not hassle us. We hassle ourselves with them. Our situation does not hassle us. We hassle ourselves with our situation.

An old zen story is relevant here. A person was fishing in a boat anchored in the river. A boat came downstream and struck his. He spun around, flying into hassle mode to chew the person out, face red and contorted, muscles tensed, about to enjoy a strong outburst of righteous indignation. There was no one in the boat. He laughed, moving into healing mode.

May we move through the day as if there is no one in those boats.

c.h.a.n.g.e.

A series on healing is emerging. Here is the first installment.

Each of us is experiencing change at all times. In fact, we are change. Thoughts flow, blood circulates, emotions surge, breath varies in rhythm, relationships wax and wane, life's meaning crystallizes and disappears. We are in process. We are process.

Change for each of us can be either Continuous Hassle Amidst Newly Generated Energy or Continuous Healing Amidst Newly Generated Energy. We are the ones who decide whether it is hassle or healing.

How do we do this? What is the process by which we choose a sickening hassle or an enlivening healing? I am not so interested in why we hassle ourselves as to how we do it and how we can shift to a healing mode. (Less whyning, more howling.)

Mister Buddha said if you have a poisonous arrow stuck in you, you want to get it out, not sit around and talk about the arrow's history, quality of workmanship, why it is stuck in you rather than someone else, and such. You want to get it out.

We either hassle ourselves or open to healing within five realms of being: physical, mental, emotional, interpersonal, spiritual. These realms of course are not independent of each other. The goings-on in one realm will affect all other realms.

For example, you may believe that folk don't know what you are thinking, but your thoughts are continually expressed through your physical posture and expression, the emotional energy you release, the rhythm of your interpersonal dance, and that subtle yet powerful realm we call spirit.

The energies of the five realms move as one. Hassle in one produces hassle in all. Healing in one produces healing in all. You might say it is a CHANGE reaction.

(To be continued)

the create and the uncreate

I am the created and the uncreated.

The uncreated moves through me, gives me sustenance,
calls me into being, promotes my understanding,
my comprehension, my awareness.

The uncreate is outside space and time and is eternal.
The create is its fruit and will ripen and drop from the tree.
The uncreate goes on. The create has its life span.

It is from the uncreate that boundless energies flow,
bearing wisdom and light.



Since my awareness extends in all directions without end,
the world is within, is a subset of my awareness.

Since my awareness extends in all directions without end,
the universe is within, a subset of my awareness.

Meanwhile I walk down the street.
I am vastness while a mere creature.

the crux of the matter

I was sitting on the sofa the other morning minding my own business as usual and thinking about something I think about off and on, trying to comprehend it. And all of a sudden I got that urge I know so well to start writing because when I start writing the thoughts seem to come. This is what I wrote:

If you get freaked out by Jesus talk, hang on! Don't get your shorts in a wad. There's treasure here. What does it mean to die daily? What does it mean to deny yourself, take up your cross daily, and follow in Jesus' steps?

What does it mean to follow the crucifixion path? Why should you even bother? Aren't you supposed to amplify the splendor of you infinitely and eternally? What is this crucifixion stuff?

Whatever one's theological or atheological beliefs, the image of the Source of all being deliberately assuming human form and enduring more intense suffering than any of us will ever experience or can begin to imagine, and not just enduring but moving through with a heart of forgiveness and love into an overcoming of hell and death, is a powerful one.

Our suffering is put into perspective and a way through and out is shown. In Jesus' journey, the universe itself has modeled this path for us.

Drop your prejudices for or against christianity for a moment (christianity is beside the point here) and take a look.

You may not have thought of it this way, but you are nailed to the spot you are in. X marks your spot. The situational weather around your cross (X) may change, but you are always where you are, in fixed position, unable to move from your cross except by dying, and dying is what shall surely happen, is what you shall surely do.

Meanwhile, you labor and you suffer and you love. While nailed to the spot you are in, while being the nailing you are, you labor to keep an open heart from which you suffer and which is the true source of love.

You do not seek suffering. Being a human on earth is enough.

To deny yourself and take up your cross daily means exactly that. Rather than falling for the glamour of personification of yourself as misunderstood tragic hero(ine) or whatever your favorite image, icon, idol of yourself may be, deny that and take up your cross. Stand fully present in your spot and face and deal with whatever comes, whatever arises. This is our labor. This is our suffering. And from this we know and can fully express love.

Well, there you have it! That's what came.