Thinking Through

From the Eagle's Nest

2012-01-21T07:37:00.000-08:00

When a fledgling eagle gets a little too big for the nest, and the time has come for him to fly away and live on his own, he is understandably reluctant. Why would he want to leave? He has a soft, safe refuge from the frightening world. Through no effort of his own food arrives at his feet on a daily basis. There are few risks and ample rewards. But in her wisdom, the young eagle’s mother slowly begins to remove the soft, downy feathers from the nest, exposing the sharp and gnarled branches of the nest’s foundation. Soon the nest is no more comfortable and no more appealing than any other clump of branches, and the wider world suddenly seems much more interesting, much more possible. So too in our own lives, comfort is often the enemy of growth. It is our discomfort, our suffering that pushes us past stages of our life where we no longer belong. The problem is we don’t have eagle mothers. In fact, we work very hard to surround ourselves with soft, warm cocoons mistakenly believing that the purpose of life is to be comfortable. Fortunately, life has a way of shaking us loose even from the most carefully constructed cocoons.

Making peace with the inevitable disruptions of life is the work of every wise man and woman. The capacity to reframe loss as growth is a mark of our maturity. Coming to understand that suffering and dissatisfaction are soul-messages we ignore at our own peril is a vital part of our evolution from fearful, dependent beings into courageous, independent beings. The quality and depth of our life is directly proportional to our ability to recognize discomfort as a turn-signal – a call to a higher order of being.

Instead of honoring our uneasiness and heeding the call, we often take the opposite course. We self-medicate, we avoid, we deny, we slip beneath the undertow of the thought-stream, letting our endless excursions into the imagination seduce us into the lie that it’s o.k., at least we’re thinking about it. We gaze down from our lofty perch, seeing the wider world, but never daring to venture out into it.

Think back on those times in your life when you made the most dramatic changes, changes that resulted in new-found freedom, astonishing growth, the emergence of latent talents, the acquisition of new skills, and the realization of a deeper, more authentic joy. In almost every case were those necessary changes not preceded by periods of great uneasiness or worse? Like labor pains, did not your rebirth emerge at the end of process that was disorienting, painful and frightening?

When we look back and reflect on our suffering we often see a pattern. It turns out that life itself is our eagle mother. It relentlessly strips away the ephemeral comforts we thought would last forever and the tighter we grasped the more painful the inevitable separation. It is only when we look forward with eyes uplifted, wings outstretched, feeling for the subtle and invisible updraft that rises in response to our readiness that we finally come to understand that our highest good and our deepest joy were present all along – they were simply hidden from us by the fog of our own comfort.

On the hero’s journey of our lives we must leave the known world of childhood safety and enter the unknown, a place where none of the old rules apply and none of the old supports are in place. It is only in the great wide open that we feel our own latent strengths emerge. In the Wizard of Oz, the lion, the tin man, the scarecrow and Dorothy already had courage, a heart, a brain and the way home – they just had to have it scared out of them. When the wizard sent them to get the wicked witch’s broom he really knew what he was doing. It is only by running toward the thing we fear most, not away from it, that we die to our limited and limiting sense of self and realize our authentic nature. This is why the eagle mother pulls all of the down out of the nest – because she loves her chick so much and wants its life to be as magnificent as possible.

It is our nature to grow and expand, and growth requires the dissolution of earlier forms. As old forms crumble and fall away there is always a period of great uncertainty. What shape will the new forms take? Do I have the energy and the talent to manifest them, the graciousness to allow them, or the eyes to even see them? Uncertainty is a necessary condition. Expecting certainty is a disease of the ego, that part of us that wants to control every element, manage every turn and script every outcome. New forms emerge from a complex and untraceable confluence of streams of causation – suffice it to say that no single person or power is in charge. We’re all working together, mostly unawares, in the construction of this next now moment. And it is our collective suffering that conspires to co-create what’s next.

The wizard and the eagle mother do not give us our gifts. They merely help us create the conditions in which those gifts emerge from deep within our own nature. This is the sacred role of every teacher, mentor and guide – to see in their student the potential the student has not yet learned to see. And in the hero’s journey the mentor or guide always appears just when they are needed most, when the old way of being in the world is no longer working and a dizzying shift is underway. As the old Indian saying goes, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” It is our task then not to find a teacher, or the right book, or the right philosophy or ideology to subscribe to. We are only to make ourselves ready. Readiness means openness, humility and willingness. When we surrender to the call of our own authentic life, the right people, the right books, the right opportunities start finding us. And when you begin to live the life your soul is asking for, you feel a joy welling up in you that lights the path ahead. You may not know what the next 10,000 steps are, but you know what the next step is, and you take it willingly, faithfully, knowing that by honoring your authentic nature you are honoring the sacred nature of reality itself and moving into a deep and harmonious accord with all that is. This is a satisfaction that the fearful and nest-bound never get to feel.

There is nothing wrong with being young and scared. You unwillingness to change and grow is not your fault. It’s built in. Falling out of the nest before you have your feathers is fatal. But there comes a time when the habit of comfort no longer serves our best interests. It is in an eagle’s nature to fly high above the world and see things others will never see. None of that can happen in the nest. When we learn how to take risks and test the boundaries of our nature we give a great gift to ourselves and to the world. The world needs you and the gifts only you can bring. And when we learn how to live lives of artful service, our own joy comes to fruition. We have only to find the courage to finally feel our own feathers rise on the wind, and with a heart full of gratitude for those who nurtured us, leap from the eagle’s nest.

The New Atheism

2011-12-30T08:30:00.001-08:00

This article was originally published in the January/February 2012 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.

Atheism isn’t really new. It’s as old as the idea of God itself. At the dawn of history the first time someone said “there is a God” the guy standing next to him said “no there isn’t.” And we’ve been arguing about it ever since.

In the ten years since 9/11 a raft of writers have published best-selling books championing the well-worn idea that God is an invention of our over-active collective imagination, an invention humanity would be a lot better off without.

At the head of the pack of the so-called New Atheists is Richard Dawkins whose book The God Delusion, published in 2006, spent 51 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and has since sold over 2 million copies worldwide. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and has little patience for any truth-claim that cannot be supported by empirical evidence. For him, belief in the virgin birth, Creationism and the existence of an invisible cosmic overlord is utterly groundless and worse – “Religion,” said Dawkins in a recent New York Times interview, “teaches you to be satisfied with non-answers.” In other words, religion makes us stupid.

Dawkins is not alone in his critique of the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. He joins a brilliant and esteemed list of philosophers including Hume, Sartre, Camus, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Nagarjuna, Mill, Chomsky, Santayana and Foucault.

Other famous atheists range from the not at all surprising (Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud) to the unexpected (Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller). Thoughtful, inventive, creative and courageous people throughout history have, at sometimes great personal and professional risk, dared to question the central paradigm of western civilization – that the God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad is real.

But atheism doesn’t just ask questions – it asserts answers. By making a specific truth claim, namely that there is no God, atheism is vulnerable to the same criticism it levies against theism. Whether you claim there is a God or not you still have to supply evidence to support your claim and present that evidence in a framework we can all accept. The devil is always in the details.

Where Dawkins’s brand of atheism falls short is in its misestimation of the human capacity to know. For Dawkins, religion is a failed science – a science utterly without evidence or sound hypotheses. What Dawkins is unwilling to consider is the possibility that religion and science do not share a common epistemology. The process by which one establishes knowledge or certainty in science is utterly different from the process by which one establishes knowledge or certainty in religion. Scientific certainty is founded solely on empirical, that is, sensory evidence whereas religious conviction is founded on externally unverifiable inner experience. Religious claims are therefore prone to a host of criticisms from an empirical epistemological stance. To scientists like Dawkins religion is nothing more than a long list of misunderstandings amplified through time and concretized by tradition. Gone from even the realm of consideration is the possibility that there are ways of apprehending reality other than through sensory data and conceptual thought. What if non-sensory awareness or direct, unmediated experience carries its own epistemological weight? As Native American philosopher Vine Deloria puts it, “We may misunderstand, but we do not misexperience.” Learning to humbly trust the authority of our own inner-awareness gives birth to an epistemology unbound by mere intellect and the limiting mechanics of logic.

Ironically, atheism does religion a great favor by laying bare the absurdities inherent in any attempt to conceptualize the ground of being. If the formless ground of being that we commonly personify as God is the source of all reality, (including our conceptual minds), then of course any mere concept of God falls woefully short of the reality it purports to describe, leaving all such concepts susceptible to ridicule.

Whether we like Dawkins’s conclusion or not, any thinking person understands and appreciates the urgent importance of his inquiry. Throughout history, the God idea has done as much harm as good. Religious wars, oppression, conquests and crusades have left us battered and bloodied. Given the rise in popularity of atheism in the post 9/11 world it is clear that a great number of people are frustrated by religion, especially fundamentalism in all its many forms. Atheists like Dawkins capture a wide audience because they deftly skewer outdated and outmoded God-concepts that never really worked anyway. In other words, the God-concept attacked by atheism is a God-concept many of us have already left behind – the angry, judgmental, anthropomorphic God (think Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel) who commands unquestioning obedience to an endless list of confusing and often conflicting dictates administered by an authoritarian church. It’s a shame, however, that in their haste to abandon religion so many people have cut ties with their innate spirituality as well.

A genuinely scientific and open minded approach to the God question would allow for the possibility that while the existence of God cannot be proven within the narrow bounds of empirical science, God may still exist. In this sense Dawkins does not disappoint. Dawkins believes that evolution is progressive and inherently leads to increasingly complex forms. The emergence of conscious beings from the primordial ooze strongly suggests the possibility of significant future evolutionary development. If there was no God “in the beginning”, could there be one now or in the future? “Yes,” says Dawkins, “it is highly plausible that in the universe there are God-like creatures,” and if there aren’t, there could be someday. Such is the power and potential of evolution. Admittedly, these are not the sort of gods that populate creation myths the world over but are rather the result of a long, unguided process of mutation and natural selection of desirable traits – the culmination of evolution, not its genesis.

What Dawkins is unwilling to concede, despite eons of experiential evidence, is that God-consciousness is not just a future possibility, the end-point of eons of evolutionary progress, but the starting point of it all. If God-consciousness is the source of everything, and even more to the point the essential nature of everything, then it is impossible to turn God into a mere concept let alone a logically sound one. Trying to define God is like trying to see your own eyes. “The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness,” said Nisargadatta Maharaj in his classic of Vedanta philosophy I Am That. “To know the source is to be the source.” In other words, we cannot turn God into a thought because God is the very act of thinking itself. Asking us to explain God is like asking a fish to explain water. We cannot point to a disembodied thing called God because God is what everything is. This brand of religious philosophy, dismissively and misleadingly called pantheism by mainstream theologians, offers a third alternative to the tired theism/atheism debate.

By challenging an outmoded concept of God and the crippling propensity of mainstream religious doctrine to jettison rational thought Dawson is performing an invaluable service. Arguably, he is helping us all move forward out of millennia of dogmatic authoritarian hearsay and toward a spirituality grounded firmly in experiential knowing. As Jung famously remarked, “Religion is a defense against the experience of God,” and as such ought to be critically examined by all who wish to deepen their authentic spiritual practice. Dawkins’s well-reasoned attack on traditional religious belief is pushing us away from the shallow end of the pool and into deeper waters. From here we can see the other side.

In any debate, theological and other wise, the goal is not to eliminate dissention and compress the baffling complexity of reality down to a single, simplistic proposition. No matter how deep our longing, humanity’s search for meaning cannot be reduced to an up or down vote on the existence of God. The object of thoughtful discourse is to allow conflicting truth claims to polish each other to a shining luster in the rough and tumble give and take of rigorous yet mutually beneficial dialogue. And in the great sorting, the chaff is left on the granary floor, laying bare the wheat that nourishes us all on the long road to wisdom. Moving past simple scenarios of this or that, we finally begin to appreciate the need to grow beyond slavish attachment to rigid opinions or positions. Maybe the question of God’s existence can never be answered to everyone’s satisfaction. “The great and most important problems in life are utterly unsolvable,” said Carl Jung, “they can never be solved, but only outgrown.” Instead of childishly regarding the new atheism as either true or false, it is more likely that it is yet another facet of the unfolding of evolutionary consciousness, a welcome corrective to our natural tendency to cling to old narratives and conceptual frameworks that no longer serve our highest good.

Simple Misunderstanding

2011-12-22T07:55:00.001-08:00

At big family gatherings Aunt Sally always prepared a ham. As her older sisters watched, she would carefully cut a large chunk off the end of the ham before placing it in her over-sized roasting pan. Being gracious house guests, none of her sisters said a word, deferring to their host’s culinary wisdom. After many years the oldest sister Martha finally spoke up.

“Why do you always cut off the end of the ham before roasting it?” Martha asked.

“Because that’s how mom always did it,” Sally replied. “It makes the ham more delicious.”

Martha went out to the living room to fetch their old mother.

“Mom,” said Martha, “Sally cuts the end off the ham like you always did because you said it tastes better that way. Is it true, does that make it taste better?”

“Oh no dear,” said their old mother as she ambled into the kitchen, “I had to cut the end off the ham so it would fit into my tiny roasting pan.”

As individuals, families and societies, we are often bedeviled by past practices that no longer have meaning and worse – they’ve been clothed in the unassailable garb of tradition and now lie beyond reproach. Cutting off the end of the ham did nothing to improve the flavor. It was just an empty ritual based on a simple misunderstanding.

In his illuminating book Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond recounts the story of how we all got stuck with the QWERTY keyboard on our computers. Named for the first six letters on the left end of the upper row, the QWERTY keyboard was first designed in 1873 with the express purpose of slowing down typists. The levers of these early typewriters were prone to jam, so in order to make typing as difficult and awkward as possible the most commonly used letters were scattered all around the keyboard instead of being placed conveniently in the center. To make matters worse, the most common letters were placed on the left side where most people are weakest. Fifty years later in the 1930s the mechanical issues had been resolved and the hammers no longer jammed. Newly redesigned keyboards increased typing speed by 95 percent. But it was too late. The QWERTY keyboard was deeply entrenched into the culture, and there was no going back. The productivity of typists throughout the twentieth century was sacrificed to the tune of 95 percent on the altar of “but we’ve always done it this way.” Even computer designers utilized the horribly awkward QWERTY configuration for their keyboards. Introducing a new keyboard at this point would be commercial suicide. No one would buy it. We like our absurdly designed and maddeningly difficult keyboards just the way they are.

The larger question Jared Diamond raises in Guns, Germs and Steel is this: in the evolution of human societies, why do some cultures embrace technological innovation while others remain entrenched in old ways of thinking and deeply committed to outmoded and inefficient behaviors? The same question could apply to each one of us individually. Why do we mindlessly cut off the ends off the ham even though our pan is plenty big enough to hold the whole thing?

The answer is right in front of us. We are habitual creatures and do not embrace change, no matter how beneficial. We don’t like learning new things because we don’t like feeling incompetent and awkward. Both as individuals and societies we’ve become attached to our thought-systems and past practices.

Another dynamic that impacts technological progress is the fact that new inventions are sometimes ignored because they simply do not align with current cultural values or needs. Gun powder and guns were invented in Asia long before they were ever seen in the west. But as tools of warfare guns never caught on in medieval Japan. Guns were seen as crude and dishonorable under Samurai code, an ethos that celebrated the elegant choreography of swordsmanship and the rare courage of elite warriors. Killing your enemy from a distance by blasting lead balls through steel tubes dehumanized the ancient art of honorable combat. Technology must always serve the deepest needs of a people, not the other way around.

It is also the case that invention is rarely born from necessity. When Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 no one “needed” a phonograph. He was just messing around. He certainly was not trying to invent the music industry (although that’s what he did) – recording music was the last thing on his mind. As inventors often do, Edison completely misunderstood the wider applications of his own invention. He simply wanted to record the last words of dying people, record books for the blind, announce time and teach spelling. Edison was convinced the phonograph would have no lasting commercial value. It was only later that some ingenious entrepreneurs used Edison’s technology to invent the jukebox. Soon there were jukeboxes all across America in bars and restaurants, swallowing the coins of patrons thirsty to hear the latest popular song. The record industry was born and music would never be the same.

But it is never simple. Technological innovation does not drive culture as is often assumed. We embrace or reject new gadgets based on their affinity with our current value system. Sometimes rock throwing tribes do not adopt bow and arrow technology even though they’re surrounded by enemy tribes that do, simply because they prefer the old way of doing things. There’s no judgment here. Technological progress is not an unmitigated good. The Samurai settled regional conflicts by sending one warrior from each of the warring states to engage in a battle to the death with each side accepting the outcome. That would be like locking Rambo and Osama bin Laden in a room and whoever walked out would be the winner and no one else would have to die. Does anyone really think we do it better now?

The lessons from these stories seem clear. But that doesn’t make them easy to learn. On one hand, we sometimes embrace changes that erode our most cherished values, allowing technology to shape humanity instead of the other way around. In that case, change is bad. But most of the time, like Aunt Sally, our unwillingness to innovate, improve and change is rooted in a deeply irrational and unconscious attachment to ways of thinking that no longer serve our highest good. We simply do not have the eyes to see all the myriad ways we are caught in a web of ignorance, tradition and conformity. For some reason we do not have the wisdom to see when change is good. Maybe the Buddha was right when he characterized our attachment to old ways of thinking, being and doing as a disease of the ego. Along the way we came to believe that our current patterns of thought and behavior defined and embodied our identity, and to alter or abandon these patterns would be to alter or abandon ourselves. This was a fracture our ego simply could not endure. But down deep we know that we are not bound by our thoughts or our patterned behaviors. Beneath the layers of social conditioning and fear-based attachment we are infinitely free. Sometimes change is good. Sometimes change is bad. Wisdom is the capacity to discern which is which. Let’s hope we stop cutting off the end of the ham for no reason. Let’s hope we finally grow out of this simple misunderstanding.

The Wisdom of Winter

2011-11-20T12:58:00.001-08:00

Just as each of the seasons of our lives – infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age – bring their own challenges and rewards, so too each season of the year offers an opportunity to shift into deeper awareness and align our lives with the larger forces around us. Every season is an invitation to reorient ourselves to the wider world, and as the world changes around us, we too are changed.

Winter is subtle – it hides its treasures beneath a blanket of cold, grey stillness. It reminds us that nothing is ever known by its surface alone. We have to go deeper. And nothing invites us so powerfully into the depths of our own lives as the wisdom of winter.

Slow down. Winter teaches us to move differently. In the rain and snow we change our pace. Slipping and falling on ice is sudden – the first sign of trouble is your skull smacking the ground and your groceries skittering down the driveway. Haste does indeed make waste, and not just the spilt milk. Rushing ahead to some imagined goal, we miss the ordinary perfection of the here and now. Why we are so eager to abandon this now moment in exchange for an illusion is a mystery wise women and men have been pondering for eons. Even though it is counterintuitive and paradoxical, all our best evidence points to the fact that slowing down gets us farther.

Withdraw. In winter, plants and trees draw their energy down and into the roots. They drop their blossoms and leaves and take on a dull, dusky hue. No longer concerned with outer growth and attracting attention, they shift inward and settle down for a long, slow period of stillness. Safe in the knowledge that a far-away spring will one day awaken them from their dream world, they rest peacefully, nested where they stand. Winter is also a good time to drop our busyness, pull back from the realm of achievement, and retire from the ceaseless competition that normally characterizes our lives. It’s O.K. if you don’t answer every email, voice mail and text message. Your silence is answer enough for now.

Take comfort in simple things. The days grow short and the nights grow long. Cold winds bring rain and snow clouds from the north. Walking through your neighborhood in the falling darkness you see the lights of home and the smoke from the chimney trailing out across the stars. On the porch you kick the snow off your boots and inside you hang your coat on the hook by the door. The smell of the soup rises up like a prayer of thanks to the earth and you let it soften your heart and unwind the last coils of your busy mind. You break bread with the ones you love by the fire. No Taj Mahal or Palace of Versailles could possibly compare with the joy and comfort of your own four walls. A hot bath, a warm bed and clean sheets are all you need to ever know about heaven.

Learn how to wait. Winter places everything on hold. Time slows down to a crawl. It’s dark most of the time. There’s nothing you can do to change any of this. The bulbs of spring lay dormant under a blanket of snow. It takes some imagination to see a white snowfield as a colorful meadow of columbine, but that’s what it is – the two contrasting conditions separated only by time. Winter withers our demands by simply waiting them out. Winter helps us leave behind our tiny orbits of craving and satiation by lifting us into the infinitely generative cycles of the natural world. As we surrender to the larger forces around us we are liberated from our small-minded petulance. We let go of me-time and enter into the grace of eternity.

Learn how to trust. A hibernating bear surrenders to a deep unconsciousness, trusting in the safety of its cave. We too can learn to trust, safe in the knowledge that the wheel of the heavens is turning without our anxious interference. Trust is an opportunity waiting for us within the core of each moment. Religious people call it faith. Simply put, it is the consciousness of optimism – the knowledge that despite current appearances, the universe is by nature an abundant field of unlimited possibility. Contrary to popular usage, faith is not believing in things for which we have no evidence. Faith is a way of being in the world, an empty-handed acquiescence into the wonder of it all, a deep and joyful knowing that we absolutely belong here. Faith is the simple-hearted recognition that despite all the temporary set backs, in the long run the universe is conspiring in our favor.

Renew and restore. In winter the earth and all her energies turn inward because without this necessary time of rest, the bursting forth of spring and the bounteous fruition of summer would not be possible. Winter and summer are not two separate things – they are two points on one circle. The circle cannot be broken anywhere without damaging it everywhere. Taking the time to rest and restore your body, mind and soul is an essential and often-overlooked aspect of our productive creativity. It is literally true that sometimes the most productive thing you can do is nothing.

Let silence speak. In winter the world lies muted under a blanket of silence. The raucous frenzy of the spring mating season is months away. A few remaining birds stare silently from their frozen perches, their coal-black eyes set deep in their ruffled faces. The voices of hidden springs are muffled beneath thick drifts of snow. Only a faint wisp of wind high in the pines reminds us just how silent it really is. In our own lives, winter calls us away from the clatter and clamor of the world of commerce and so-called productivity, and invites us into the wide open space of our own weariness. We sit bone-tired on the bus, or stuck in rush hour traffic. We wait for the light to change. We stand in the driveway under a full-moon sky and taste tomorrow’s rain on the wind. We are inspired by the unexpected kinship we feel with these fellow travelers all just trying to go home, and with this moon, and with this wind, and with tomorrow’s rain. And we have no words, no clever thoughts with which to frame all of this unmediated experience. It feels right not to talk. Winter has shown us how. And in the silence we hear the words that can never be spoken, the melody that can never be sung, and the knowing that can never be grasped. And in that moment we are amazed, and we know now how to go on.

Winter gives us all of these things and asks for nothing in return. It doesn’t need anything. In fact, it is busy letting go of what little it has. And in the letting go there is a great freedom, a great emptiness, and great openness and a great clarity. We have only to slow down, wait, trust and feel ourselves awakening to the wisdom of winter.

The Wisdom of Music

2011-10-26T05:30:00.000-07:00

Music is an opportunity. Music is an invitation. Music is an open window to a world beyond the walls of our conceptual mind. For musicians and listeners alike, music cleanses our souls and washes smooth the rough edges of our lives. Music heals. If not for music, most of us would go insane.

Music is the most powerful and mysterious of art forms. We enjoy its intrinsic value, but we also learn from its potent presence. Music is a masterful teacher. After over forty years as a performing musician, here is what I’ve learned from the wisdom of music.

Practice. Transformation is possible if you are willing to discipline yourself and practice the behaviors you wish to embody. We become better songwriters by writing songs. We become more compassionate by practicing compassion. We become more courageous by practicing courage. There is no short cut. Just begin to behave like the person you want to be. New habits will form as old habits fall away. It isn’t mysterious at all. Action creates transformation. Do what you want to be.

Stay in the moment. Unlike other art forms, music happens only in this now moment. A painting, on the other hand, hangs statically on the wall and it is the viewer who controls the experience. We decide when and for how long to look, the eyes freely wandering across the canvas. Music robs us of this autonomy as we fall under its spell, drawn inexorably deeper into the present. In this sweet surrender we are unburdened of the exhausting task of egoic control and slip instead into a liberating selflessness. Usually caught up in the twin thought streams of past and present, we rarely experience the freedom of this now moment. Music reminds us and brings us back. What beauties would be revealed if we lived our life as music and surrendered to it with the same willingness?

Find the natural rhythm. When playing with other musicians, and even in solo performance, there is always a rhythm underway and it is our task to find it and fall into it. This requires deep listening, rapt attention and the longing for union. When you allow your own body’s rhythms to align with the rhythm around you, the walls of the limited self dissolve leaving only boundless awareness. Bringing this same attentiveness to all aspects of your life creates the opportunity to move into accord with the energies around you enhancing both your effectiveness and your joy.

Find the balance between effort and effortlessness. The best musicians know that the ideal is only realized in the mysterious alchemy where effort and effortlessness merge. Those who try too hard or not hard enough are equally doomed. A good rule of thumb is to put vigorous effort into the practicing process, but on stage let it fly. The same rule applies in life. Show up prepared, then get out of your own way.

Take the lead, but be guided. Having the courage to step forward and lead – in a difficult moment of parenting, in the struggle for social justice or in a guitar solo – is essential. But every leader knows that the most important quality in leadership is attention. Listen, perceive and feel with the utmost sensitivity and be willing to be guided by the truth of what is.

Play. There’s a reason they call it playing music. Despite the years of discipline and hard work that lay behind musical mastery, in the end it is from a deep sense of joy and fun that music arises. As Confucius asked, “Is it not after all a pleasure to express what one has learned?” Playing music with friends, dancing at a wedding or blasting your favorite song a little too loud in the car is just plain fun. And fun is the body’s way of rewarding itself for doing such a great job of staying alive all these years.

Let beauty happen. Something amazing happens when you awaken to the confluence of elements that make up this now moment. Beauty is not wrestled to the ground by muscle nor is it trapped by cleverness. Beauty, like happiness, is the natural byproduct of a well-lived life, born into fullness when you stop seeking and start allowing. Simply do what is yours to do, let go of the outcome and let the joy of the work sink in. Beauty is the eternal presence shining through the veil of the fleeting moments of our lives. It is seen, heard and felt; never grasped, possessed or controlled. When you try to hold it you lose it.

Become an instrument. Just as a guitar is a channel through which music flows from the musician to our ears, so too our bodies, thoughts, words and deeds are the instruments with which we play our life-song. The instrument does not make the music, the musician does. The instrument is the means by which the unmanifest is made manifest. As the composer weaves threads of memory, longing, melody, rhythm, and rhyme into a song so too the constituent elements that make up our lives are woven together by an unseen hand into a work of singular beauty and power. Find the courage to be your instrument, that is, live your life, in a way that honors its sacred source.

The courage of intimacy. Are you brave enough to let all your defenses drop? Are you willing to be seen as you are, unguarded, naked, bereft of all pretence? The courage to allow real intimacy requires a deep sense of self-acceptance – the conviction that who you are, just as you are, is enough. This is what makes master musicians so compelling. They’re fearless. We can’t take our eyes off them. They somehow find a way to let everything fall away except the truth of this moment, and their honesty becomes a mirror in which we see our own authentic life emerging.

Be tender and tough. Great music requires a light touch and relentless heart. Novice musicians often overdo it. They play too much, they play too loud and they play too hard. They mistake toughness for talent. Only later do they discover that real power lies in subtlety. Their eagerness is understandable – we all mistake bluster for mastery at first. In music, as in life, real strength lies in the ability to be tough and tender all in the same moment. Let there be silence and restraint, but strike boldly when the time is right.

Surrender. If we do it right, music overpowers us and takes us over. It sets the rhythm of our heart, binds the meter of our breath, flushes our face, fires our soul and frees us from the arid drudgery of our intellectualized existence. So too our lives can awaken from their dreary slumber when we stop struggling and surrender to the energies of the cosmos flowing through and around us. By opening our ears, our hearts and our minds – this is how we learn from the wisdom of music.

Ten Years

2011-09-23T15:56:00.000-07:00

I remember being ten years old in 1968 when Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sitting on the curb in front of my house on another long summer afternoon I wondered what my life would be like in 2001. It sounded so impossibly far away. I did the math. I would be 43. That’s practically dead. Would I be married? Would I have kids? Would my wife look like Cammie Ramelli from fifth grade home room, because that would be awesome. Would we have flying cars?

Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band was still a brand new album. Jimi Hendrix and The Doors and were the hot young things on the radio. David Gilmore had just replaced Syd Barret in Pink Floyd. Johnny Cash had just left his wife for June Carter and they wrote a little song about it called “Ring of Fire.” Both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had just been assassinated. A lot of my big brother’s classmates were dying in a place none of us had ever heard of called Vietnam. That’s a lot for a ten year old to absorb. I sat on that curb in front of my house a lot.

Ten years later I was a twenty year old pulling out of my parent’s driveway in my overloaded Datsun 510 wagon on the way to UC Santa Barbara. It was 1978 and The Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever soundtrack dominated the airwaves. An unknown band out of Pasadena called Van Halen and an obscure singer-songwriter named Elvis Costello both released their debut albums changing the way the rest of played guitar and wrote songs forever. Getting the most spins on my turntable that year was Bruce Springsteen’s new album Darkness on the Edge of Town.

By the time 2001 finally rolled around the world had changed so many times I’d lost count. The vinyl albums and turntables we’d used to play the soundtracks of our lives had given way to cassettes, CDs and mp3s. Although her name was not Cammie, my wife was gorgeous, we didn’t have any kids and we most certainly did not have a flying car.

2001 turned out to be a pretty big year. In May, after ten years of part-time teaching at various community colleges in San Diego, I finally landed a full-time tenure-track position as a philosophy professor at Southwestern College. In June, a few weeks later, I turned 43 years old in the Vista jail on my first and last DUI. That September brought the horror of 9/11. And in October the San Diego Troubadour was officially launched.

The Troubadour was hatched on the kitchen table of Lyle and Ellen Duplessie. They recruited their good friend Liz Abbott, an experienced artist, editor and graphic designer to captain the ship and Liz’s husband Kent Johnson to handle the crucial tasks of advertising and distribution. The four of them started calling everyone they knew lining up stories and writers.

Why bother? Why go through all the agonizingly hard work? Why launch another free weekly paper in an already crowded market? Clearly there was no real money to be made – this was a break-even project at best. But something had to be done, and somebody had to do it. Sometimes it’s just that simple.

Frustration is the womb of creation. The idea for the Troubadour was born out the frustration at the lack of media coverage for the music that mattered most to the Duplessies. San Diego had just come through an incredible decade of unprecedented musical output, the nineties, and the major papers in town had too many other things to write about to adequately cover it. San Diego had always had a vibrant music scene going all the way back to the dawn of rock and roll, but the nineties saw the rise of the coffeehouse circuit where venues like Java Joe’s and Mikey’s spawned a long list of acoustic singer-songwriters that went on to garner Grammy’s, White House command performances and gold records. Genres like alt-country, Americana, folk, jazz, gospel and roots music of all stripes were routinely overlooked in the mainstream media. Something had to be done.

So the San Diego Troubadour was born.

Ten years later, the Troubadour is a well-established musical mainstay in the San Diego region with a raft of contributing photographers, top-tier journalists and a reputation for humility, integrity and passion, three qualities not always found in the smarmy, oh-so-ironic hipster world of music journalism. Its DIY vibe and down-home feel stand out in an industry dominated by corporate media and revolving-door writers on their way to better and bigger things. One outstanding exception to the rule is San Diego Union-Tribune’s long-time music writer George Varga whose encyclopedic knowledge, nuanced insight and genuine love of music shines through every word he writes. Like many local luminaries, his professional excellence earned him a spot on the cover of the Troubadour in 2004.

By playing against type and reaching out to a vast clientele and readership grossly underserved by its competitors, the Troubadour has secured its place in San Diego journalism history. And the story’s just beginning. Having proven itself as a legitimate player in a crowded field, the Troubadour continues to expand its coverage and influence through digital, audio and visual media. Who knows what the next ten years will bring.

Ten years is a long time. Ten years is the blink of an eye. But what’s most striking to me is how a vision, born out of love – love for music and a keen desire to share that music with a much wider audience – spanned the chasm between the possible and the actual. Never letting the how interfere with the what, Lyle, Ellen, Liz and Kent and the great team of people they surrounded themselves with kept putting one foot before the other, never completely sure that any of this was going to work, but trusting in the knowledge that if you do good things, people will find you and support you.

It wasn’t always easy. In fact, in never was. In February, 2004 Lyle lost his beautiful and loving wife Ellen to a long battle with cancer. Four months later Lyle died of a heart attack while surfing with his family in Mission Beach. They both left us way too young. But they also left us with a vision and a passion and a willingness to keep doing the hard work of putting out a fresh edition every four weeks without fail, knowing that there are always more stories to tell, more music to share and more community-building to actualize.

Good journalism tells the truth. Great journalism reconnects us with the things that matter most. As we read these stories and see these pictures we are looking into a world very much like our own – filled with everyday heroes who plug away at their dreams, willing to risk it all on the off chance that passion really is worth living for, no matter how depleted our checking account becomes. Always a passion-first and a business-second endeavor, the San Diego Troubadour stands as an inspiration to anyone willing to take a chance on something they believe in, no matter how many consultants tell you it’ll never work. As you gather around your kitchen table with friends to consider your next move, ask yourself a few important questions. What’s frustrating you these days? What does the world need? Is there something trying to emerge, trying to be born? Are you the one to help midwife the next stage of our collective evolution? What if we let go of our fear and lived our lives instead from wonder and joy? Maybe tonight around a kitchen table somewhere a new project is beginning to take shape. And ten years from now we’ll all wonder how we ever lived without it. Where will you be, who will you be and what will come through you in these next ten years?

Remembering 9/11

2011-09-09T07:16:00.000-07:00

This article was originally published in the September/October 2011 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.

We knew it would come. We knew that one day the hurt, the anger, and the confusion would recede like tide sliding back into the sea. We knew that pain so explosive and so blinding couldn’t last. One day, we would have to start breathing again.

Ten years ago, in the moment before the attack, America was a profoundly different place. But everything shifted at 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, when the first plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. When the second plane hit the south tower at 9:03, our hearts turned to ice and our heads struggled in vain to comprehend the inconceivable reality of large-scale warfare in lower Manhattan. When the Twin Towers collapsed to the ground our innocence collapsed with them.

Nothing we had ever experienced could have prepared us for the horror of that morning. News from the Pentagon and from the Pennsylvania crash made it clear that this was a concerted attack and that America was in fact at war. And it was not just an attack on America. Among the 3,000 dead that day were citizens of fifty six countries and members of all faiths, including many Muslims. On the seventeenth floor of the south tower there was an Islamic prayer room where devout Muslims from all walks of life met for daily worship. The murderous brutality of the attack staggers the imagination and defies logic. Across the country and around the world a crushing grief descended on us like a plague.

The stages of grief and healing unfold on their own schedule. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance each take their turn at the wheel. In our spiritual practice we focus on the last stage, acceptance, and for good reason. The consciousness of acceptance is both the end and the means of our deliverance unto wisdom. When we let go and surrender to what is, we move out of confusion and into clarity. But it takes time. It takes time for silt to settle back to the bottom leaving the water clear. It takes time for waves to soften into stillness. It takes time before the moon can once again be seen reflected on the surface of the water.

But it doesn’t just take time. It takes effort. After we let the body’s knowledge lead us through the necessary seasons of our grief, feeling fully every wrenching seismic shift, we gradually find the courage to take our lives back. Our prayer and meditation practice opens windows to the light. No longer satisfied to be a leaf in the wind we find our inner compass, that part of us that longs to thrive and be well, that yearns to heal and be a part of the healing of others, and we step boldly forward not knowing where the road will take us, but knowing that up ahead lies something beautiful and true.

We know that all forms arise and all forms fade. We know that to everything there is a season. We know that death and birth are two names for one circle. And we know that Life, in all its myriad forms, will go on forever and ever. We even know that this body we call our own is made of dust and will return to dust. But knowing all these things doesn’t stop the heart from longing. We long for that crisp taste of apple, that first kiss, the feel of sun on our skin. Life is just too beautiful to let go easily. But the beauty itself holds the key. Behind the veil of the world’s fleeting forms lies a Divine Ground, a changeless source known as God, Brahman, Tao or the Nameless. It is out of this formless Source that the world of forms arises. The beauty of the world is the beauty of the Eternal shining through the surface of things. It’s the apple we love, but it is the orchard, rooted deep in the ground, that expresses itself as the apple. When with sickening finality the Twin Towers collapsed we saw with our own eyes the undeniable truth of the impermanence of all things. And yet in precisely that moment, we knew in our hearts that the love and truth that gives rise to all things can never be broken, no matter how many apples fall to the ground in the storms of autumn.

When we come together to pray and sing and breathe in the silence, we stand on the shore of a sea of knowing that goes down and down and down to the place where we are all one. It is from this knowing that forgiveness and acceptance arise. Together, in our families, in our spiritual communities, in the boundlessness of nature, we feel beyond thoughts and know beyond words that despite the horror of the foreground, in the depths of the Source there is a peace that surpasses all understanding and we have only to allow it to carry us. When we stop struggling we feel ourselves begin to lift like a wing on a wind not of our own making. Let these hands hold us. Let this love lift us. Let this wisdom lead us. We cannot stop the arising and fading of forms any more than we can seize the setting sun. But we can feel in our bones the peace of acceptance.

Tragedy and loss are universal. When a terrible fire swept through 17th century poet Mizuta Masahide’s property, with characteristic Japanese minimalism he wrote his most famous two-line poem: “Barn’s burned down, now I can see the moon.”

With every loss we have an opportunity to see things anew – wonders that were right in front of us but for one reason or another we overlooked.

This is how we heal. By opening our eyes and our hearts to what is, knowing that none of this is ours, that everything we own and everything we love is only on loan to us, and that we must give it all back, every bit of it – often without warning. Wisdom means living in the consciousness of gratitude that we ever even got to touch any of it. Be patient and forgiving. Let your life be a proud testament, not a sad apology. You belong here, but only for a while. Stand up and be amazing. Release your mistakes. Rise out of the ruins.

We remember the dead and we will always love them. But memorials aren’t for the dead. The real purpose of memorializing is to affirm and celebrate the infinite value of this baffling mystery called life.

We have lost so much. But now we can see the moon.

The Ends of Things

2011-08-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

It’s been ten years since the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed under their own terrible weight taking all of our innocence with them. The unmitigated horror of that day knocked the breath out of us. Many of us kept walking – life goes on – but our souls still linger at the killing ground where so many lives of incalculable beauty were crushed and destroyed in the name of an ideological beef. But the militant extremists who planned, funded and carried out that attack were not just killing Americans – citizens of 56 countries died in the towers that day including many Muslims. On the seventeenth floor of the south tower there was an Islamic prayer room where devout Muslims from all walks of life met for daily worship. Not that it mattered to the killers. When your heart’s set on killing, nothing matters.

What we learn from loss is this: fate can take everything from us – our husbands, our wives, our children, our home, our money, everything we love, and yet just beyond the veil of this incalculable suffering is a still-point, a changeless refuge, an island in the stream. We cannot name it, conceptualize it or understand it, but there it is nonetheless. Some teachings call it serenity, others call it the peace that surpasses all understanding, and still others call it acceptance. Some have tried to describe it as nirvana, the kingdom of heaven, moksha, satori or sat-chit-ananda. Wisdom traditions all over the world and across the centuries have zeroed in on this universal aspiration: how to navigate this treacherous minefield called life and come out unscathed. The answer? You can’t.

The point is not to avoid suffering. The point is to feel the pain and live your life anyway.
The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is that life hurts. Everything that comes into being goes out of being. Because we live in linear time everything is in constant flux. The ends of things hurt. The one fundamental experience we all have in common is loss.

Among the many gods of the Hindu pantheon one god stands out – Shiva. He is charged with the task of destruction. Like any gods, the Indian gods are simply personifications of the many powers of the one power and presence in the universe, the divine ground, the sacred, cosmic intelligence of the matrix out of which all forms arise and to which all forms return – what George Lucas called the Force. Why then would the act of creation stand out as more sacred or more important than the act of destruction?

In the most common depiction of Shiva he is shown dancing on one foot surrounded by a ring of fire, his other leg sweeping before him like the wing of a bird. In one of his four hands he holds a tiny drum with which he metes out moments of time. In his other up-raised hand he holds the flame of transformation which will consume all forms.

His other two arms sway sinuously near his waist, each hand formed into a gesture, a hand-sign called a mudra. One of the mudras is an invitation to liberation, an opportunity to join in the dance and say yes to change, yes to loss, yes to the inevitable cycles of creation and destruction that swirl in and around us. The other mudra means “don’t be afraid.” Surrender your fear and live in the knowledge that all forms are temporary. Know that beneath the waves of change lies a depth undisturbed. Be liberated from the gut-wrenching illusion that we own any of this, that we have the right to possess or cling to anything. Everything we see, everything we touch, everything we own, everything we love is only on loan to us, and we have to give it all back, sometimes suddenly and without warning. Stay in the consciousness of surrender to this truth and feel your appreciation for the beauty and value of everyone and everything increase. Fall in love with the world and all its folly. Get ready to laugh and love and feel more deeply than you ever have before. It may seem counter-intuitive, but when you let go of everything you will feel closer to everything than you ever have before. It is only in the consciousness of surrender and acceptance that you become truly capable of loving. As Gandhi said, the opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of love is fear, and where there is fear there cannot be love and where there is love there cannot be fear. The two states are mutually exclusive. The consciousness of loving-kindness is just another word for freedom from fear. This is why Jesus, like Shiva, continually told his students to “be not afraid.”

The seed must die for the tree to be born. Shiva is ultimately a creation god – destruction is merely the means by which he creates. That we celebrate birth and fear death is evidence of our limited understanding of how things really work. The ends of things make way for everything we are trying to create, everything we are trying to become, everything yet to be.

Fear and anxiety are the disease. Surrender and acceptance are the medicine.

In the grace beyond judgments of good and bad, where the lion lays down with the lamb, where tears of joy and tears of sorrow flow together and no one counts them up, there is a deep and final forgiveness where all the thoughtlessness, cruelty, self-centeredness and ignorance fall away leaving us once again awash in our original oneness, returned at last to remain in that state we have only visited in our dreams.

Don’t try to understand it. Feel your way through the thicket of thorns. See, even in the eyes of your tormentor, the frightened child walking within all of us, barking orders and sacrificing beauty on the altar of self-protection. Once we know that our essential self needs no protection because it is imperishable, we soften our grasp, open our hands and release our resentments. Those who were once our enemies are now seen in the light as victims of their own illusions, and with compassion we begin to move out of conflict and into cooperation. Life hurts, and there are enough tears to go around. Let us breathe into the knowing that we are free to choose our thoughts and free to bring to bear on anything we encounter the wisdom dwelling within all of us. We already know how to feel joy and gratitude for the beginnings of things. Let us expand our awareness to embrace with joy and gratitude the ends of things as well.

The Wisdom of Water

2011-07-09T10:27:00.000-07:00

Water permeates and shapes everything it touches. It carves mountains into sand and swells seeds to fruition. It grows forests and destroys cities. It fills our bodies, builds our blood and bathes our cells. Nothing is as simultaneously ordinary and miraculous as water. But like a draught of forgetfulness, its ever-presence lulls us into complacency. It is so like us to forget to pay attention. When we reawaken our imagination, however, water offers up its lessons freely. Let us soak in the wisdom of water.

Follow the natural line. Unlike us, water doesn’t conjure up cravings in a vacuum and then impose them on the world. Instead, it humbly feels for open channels and falls effortlessly through them. Like water, find the openings and be led by something other than fear and craving.

Don’t struggle. Water doesn’t strain or strive. The power of water comes not from willful assertion but from the unintentional force of its presence. Your true power comes not from the ego and its schemes but from your ability to manifest the one presence and power that runs through everything.

Go around obstacles. When a stream comes upon a boulder blocking its path it doesn’t freeze, panic and spiral into resentment and victim-consciousness. It just goes around. Like water, avoid struggle by simply going around problems.

Be soft in your strength. When it is time to exert force, be fluid. You harbor a great store of life-force which is capable of manifesting itself mentally, physically and spiritually. When it’s time to assert yourself, blunt the edge of your attack and be willing to bend and absorb the myriad influences of the energies around you. You accomplish far more in cooperation than you do in dominance.

If you want clarity, be still. Wind and waves stir up silt and make water murky. Only when the wind and waves subside does the silt settle back to the bottom. Then the surface becomes a mirror and the depths become visible. So too we can deepen our insight only when we grow silent and still. Moving out of the narrow channels and endless agitation of the thought-stream and into the boundless stillness enables us to quietly perceive signals drowned out by the day to day noise of our lives. Things that were hidden in plain sight are revealed.

Circulate, don’t stagnate. Stillness is important, but don’t hide. Cut off from the flow, stagnant pools fester and rot, drowning in their own imbalance. Healthy, clear water stays engaged in the flow of life and scrubs itself clean by breaking open to oxygenation and transformation. Like a healthy river, find ways to balance periods of languid stillness with vigorous activity, letting each of the phases of your life inform and nourish the others.

Persistence is stronger than insistence. A frenzied flurry of activity is never as effective as long-term persistence. Slow and steady wins the race. Over time, a tiny, trickling stream erodes a deep canyon. Take a high pressure fire hose to a granite monolith for an hour or two and see how far you get.

Allowance is stronger than resistance. When you stab your fist into water it doesn’t fight back or resist, and when you pull your fist out, the water closes over as if you were never there. By allowing your fist to pass through, water exerts much less effort and experiences far less harm than if it had mounted a complicated counter-offensive. In our own lives, resistance to things only makes them stronger. By defining events as “problems” and people as “enemies” we manufacture conflict where there was only confluence. When Jesus says “resist not evil” he is trying to teach a very elusive notion: what you resist persists. Instead of resisting and fighting back, let powerful storms pass until they expend their wild energy and settle back into the peaceful flow of life all on their own.

Be needed. Nothing surpasses water for its usefulness, therefore it is valued everywhere. In your creativity, in your work, in your generous service, give people what they genuinely need. This way you will always get paid, you will always get fed and you will always have friends. Become an inextricable part of people’s lives by carefully perceiving their authentic needs and fulfilling them.

Be humble. Water always seeks out the lowest places and quietly goes about its business. Water is often underground and hidden from sight. Ninety nine percent of the water in the ocean lies beneath the surface. You can accomplish far more behind the scenes than you can in the spotlight. Let others grab the glory. Be a part of the support system that makes it possible for others to blossom and shine.

Don’t give problems anything to hold onto. You can’t grab water with your fingers or catch it on a hook. By living in a state of deep acceptance of whatever is happening in this moment, you achieve the slipperiness of water. Events arise and fall. Difficult people assert their ludicrous demands and fade away like flares. By remaining fully present in this now moment you rob both the past and the future of their power to distort immediate experience by imposing both unrealistic expectations and egoic cravings on the perfection of this.

Resonate. The waves crashing on the shore aren’t the only waves in the sea. Sound waves also travel great distances through water. The low frequency songs of humpback whales travel thousands of miles around the curvature of the earth through the oceans, guiding other humpbacks on their migration routes. Like water, stay open to the energy frequencies that reverberate around us. Let yourself be inspired. Let your consciousness be a conduit of that which is best in all of us. Identify the values you hold dear – kindness, generosity, willingness, courage, compassion – and amplify those values in your own actions. “Universe” means “one song”. Let the song of the universe resonate in you, through you, as you.

All is one. A raindrop only seems to be separate from the other raindrops. As it falls from a cloud high above the sea the force of the wind around it keeps it separate from the other drops. When it hits the surface of the ocean it does not cease to exist; only its temporary boundaries dissolve as it loses its illusory individuality, returning to the source from which it and all other raindrops come. So too we and all things arise from the divine ground and stand apart for a while as seemingly separate entities. As beautiful as this dance may be, it must one day come to an end. But Consciousness doesn’t end. It simply expresses itself anew as evolving, evermore mellifluous beings of sound and light. Let your brief time here be worthy of the source. Let your life be a breathtaking expression of the grandeur of the cosmos. From time to time, move into the stillness and brush up against the wordless understanding of oneness, an understanding that can never be reduced to a concept, just as water can never be defined by the vessel containing it. These miraculous bodies we inhabit are comprised of nearly eighty percent water. Isn’t it natural then to allow yourself to be an expression of the wisdom of water?

The Wisdom of Trees

2011-06-15T08:17:00.000-07:00

Summer time is a good time to go outside. There’s nothing like a walk in the woods to clear away the debris of worry and woe. Sometimes the best teachers are the ones who say the least, and in the silence of their presence we feel innate wisdom welling up through the cracks of our own lives. The best teachers might be trees.

Feeling stuck? Feeling sad? Feeling nothing at all? Find a winding path through a canopy of trees, leave your worried mind behind and let the voices of the wind lead you deep into this present moment. As your awareness begins to shift, you will notice, gradually at first and then suddenly, that trees are silent teachers and the lessons they offer would change our lives if we had the patience and courage to learn them.

Here is what trees know.

Grow where you’re planted. We do not choose our parents, our families, our birthplace, our century, our genes or any of the other accidents that inexorably shape our lives. Like trees, we must learn to accept the things we cannot change and thrive where we are. As a tree grows from a tiny seed and rises up through the challenges of its environment, adapting adversities into advantages, wisdom begins with acceptance and self-knowledge and ends with ascension and transcendence.

The invisible is the source of visible. Unseen beneath the surface, roots grow deep giving trees the stability to stand tall and reach for the light. Trees instinctively know this, and put far more energy into root growth than branch and trunk growth in the early stages of their lives. Only when the roots are firmly established do the upper branches and leaves unfurl. We too should attend first to our inner growth before we get top-heavy with adornments and accessories.

Young and old have different needs and different gifts. A tiny sapling is weak and tender and needs protection from hungry mouths and trampling feet. The same tree, many years later, is able to provide protection, shelter and sustenance for others. Our roles change as well as we age and grow. But no matter what our stage of development, strength comes out of our own nature, not our busy efforts. Stand in the truth of who you are at this moment in time. Accept help when you need it, but don’t stay helpless and dependent forever. Allow yourself to grow so big that others take refuge in you.

Strength comes from struggle. Twenty years ago when scientists built Biosphere 2, a vast, enclosed ecosystem in the mountains of Arizona, they planted, among other things, trees. The trees inside the sealed enclosure grew more rapidly than their wild cousins outside. But they were thin and weak with underdeveloped root systems. Some even fell over from their own weight. At first scientists were mystified. Why would trees not thrive in this “perfect” environment? Then they realized that the trees were weakened by the absence of the one thing not included in Biosphere 2: wind. In the wild, trees must withstand strong wind and as a result develop what botanists call stress wood – strong, fibrous wood that vastly improves the quality of life for a tree. In our own lives, it is hardship and struggle that spurs our growth and strengthens our core. As we work hard to overcome the difficult people and challenging situations that threaten our serenity and steal our comfort, a toughness develops within us that informs everything we do. In light of this truth, gratitude, not resentment, is the wisest response to the forces that oppose us.

Nature is more cooperative than competitive. Survival of the fittest is true up to a point. Life begins with self interest. Inevitably, however, organisms, both within and between species, realize that their own survival is deeply intertwined with the survival of others. We’re much stronger together than we are apart. The well being of others becomes our own well being. The lie of individuality is laid bare by the truth of interconnectedness. Just as the cells of your own body work together to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts, we too are cells in a wider ecosystem utterly void of boundaries. Life is one vast phenomenon – conscious, aware, perceptive, intelligent, creative, adaptive – systems nested within systems without beginning or end. As individuals, if you can even call us that, we are simply one momentary expression of the vast field of consciousness that expresses itself as stars and dandelions and blue whales. To not know this is to remain deeply ignorant of your essential nature.

Nothing is wasted, everything has value. In nature, there is no such thing as trash. Last year’s leaves become next year’s soil. Every individual form arises out of material left behind by previous organisms. There is no new matter. At the molecular level, matter simply reforms and recombines into new aggregates and arrangements. Nothing is ever lost. In the forest, there is a thin, diaphanous veil between birth and dying. Consciousness moves through the veil like the in and out breath of a sleeping god. In our own brief lives we too are formed from the materials of those who went before us, just as the things we cast off are re-embodied. Nothing is ever thrown away. There is no such place as “away”.

Be only who you are. Cedars don’t come from apple seeds. Have the courage and humility to surrender to your own nature. Don’t waste time trying to be something you are not. Without pretense or guile trees effortlessly express their own nature. They make it look easy. But it is not. For us, a thousand threads of desire, envy and illusion tug at our hearts and pull us away from the simplicity of our essential core. It takes discipline and humility to learn how to distinguish between the authentic energy of our own nature expanding and the inauthentic egoic cravings and desires rooted in fear, anxiety and ill-founded feelings of inadequacy. Do you want to become a singer because singing is your authentic calling or do you want to become a singer to salve a wound caused by feelings of inadequacy? If the latter is true, no amount of fame and glory will ever heal that wound. If the former is true, the music itself will fill you with satisfaction. In other words, is singing rooted in your authentic nature, and end in itself, or is singing a means to an end, namely self-aggrandizement? Before you embark on any strenuous journey, be it a career in the arts, a marriage or any other attempt to craft a life of joy and meaning, deep soul-searching is needed to sort this out. Spend some time under a big, shady tree. Life isn’t long enough for a thousand wrong turns.

Don’t be afraid to grow. Trees never apologize for growing new leaves and branches. They don’t intentionally stay small in a misguided effort to appear humble. You don’t do anyone any favors by shrinking, holding back or hiding your gifts. Let what is trying to emerge through you emerge. Become a channel through which the creative energy of the universe can sing one more song. But go slow. A tree never hurries, and every movement is in keeping with its current strengths and abilities. There is no need to struggle and strain. Natural effortlessness is far more effective than hurried grasping.

Chances are there are woods not far from your home. The forest is lush, green and full of secrets. Take a day and walk alone through shafts of light and fragrant breezes. There is so much to learn from the wisdom of trees.

California College Commencement Address

2011-06-10T11:44:00.000-07:00

The following commencement address was given at Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, San Diego, California on June 9, 2011

Good afternoon graduates.

I am very aware that as a commencement speaker I am the one thing standing between you and a well-deserved evening of fun and celebration.

But as a teacher I also realize that, even though you have been sitting still and listening to teachers your whole life, this might be the last time you sit still and listen to a teacher, and I feel a certain obligation to not let this moment pass by without one last attempt to say something important, or try to.

I am a philosophy teacher.

I have spent my life trying to understand what wisdom is.

Here’s what I’ve come up with.

Wisdom is not something you know – wisdom is something you do.

You don’t attain wisdom by simply agreeing with all of the right theories.

Wisdom is not something you get only after you’ve read all the right books.

Wisdom does not even mean having an answer for everything.

Instead, wisdom is a way of being in the world.

Wisdom is the accumulated depth within you, born of ten thousand choices and actions made in the course of a thoughtful, deliberate life – and if your life is anything like mine, a life full of missteps and mistakes and damage sometimes so profound it can’t be fixed – we can only walk away from the wreckage saying, “well, I won’t do that again.”

And wisdom is not just an intellectual event; it is the child of many mothers, the most important of which is action.

If you are tired of the way fear interferes with your life, if you’re tired of the way fear holds you back from achieving the goals your soul is asking for, if you’re tired of the way fear robs you like a thief of your happiness, and you want to become more courageous, how do you do that? What does wisdom suggest?

Wisdom suggests that if you want to be more courageous you simply have to act more courageously. You have to ask yourself, the next time you feel afraid, “what would a courageous person do right now” and then do that.

If you want to be more compassionate, act more compassionately. Ask yourself, “what would a compassionate person do right now” and then do that.

If you want more self-discipline in your life, and you’re tired of the way laziness and procrastination and runaway cravings get the best of you, simply ask yourself, “what would a disciplined person do right now” and then do that.

Wise people know that we become what we do. Personal transformation is not mysterious. Our lives are the sum of our choices and actions. We are responsible for the consciousness that we bring into every situation. What at first sounds like an accusation or a condemnation is actually heard, with the ears of wisdom, as a call to freedom – that no matter what is going on around us, we are free. With every breath we are free to choose our responses to the events around us. And with freedom comes responsibility. We are responsible for our responses.

Our thoughts shape our words, our words give rise to our actions, our actions repeated become habit and our habit constructs character. Our lives are the sum total of our thoughts, words, choices and actions.

We become what we do. And this is how wisdom begins to emerge.

Choose your thoughts and your words and your actions wisely, in the fully awakened awareness that when you choose your thoughts, your words, your actions, you are in fact choosing yourself, inventing yourself, creating yourself out of the raw materials your ancestors gave you.

Every one of us is free today – free to begin living the life we so richly deserve. Commencement means beginning – and today each of us begins again, unhindered by the past. Every day of our lives is a commencement. Yes, our past choices and actions got us here, but in this next moment, we are utterly and completely free. Wayne Dyer puts it this way, “The wake does not drive the boat.”

The past has no power in this present moment. Only our thoughts about the past have power. And we can choose new thoughts.

And as I look out at all these graduates today, I am looking at a group of people who knows that everything I just said is true. You don’t need guys like me to tell you this stuff. Wisdom is not something anyone can give you. It is discovered within; it wells up through the cracks of our everyday lives. You have let go of the past. You have chosen and acted wisely. You have decided to feel the fear and do it anyway. You have decided that you are worth it. And you have freely chosen to open yourself up to the possibility that life holds for us even bigger dreams than we dared to dream for ourselves.

Now, teachers have been asking you to do stuff for decades. And I ask you today to do one more thing for me. I ask that you stay humble.

You have every right to be proud of your accomplishments. Feel proud. What you have done is no small thing. All of us here know that. But never forget that the professional skills you have mastered do not make you better than anyone else. Each of us is a being of infinite value, even the least among us, and you and I are no better than anyone else, no matter what our accomplishments. Nor are we beneath anyone else. Never believe for a moment that anyone is better than you. Everyone you will ever meet is a being of infinite value, and we walk alongside our sisters and brothers, not before them, not behind them, and every single one of us brings a unique and vitally important set of gifts to the world.

If anything, your hard-earned professional skills enable you to be of greater service to your fellow human beings. And that is why we come to college, and work so hard. Not just to make more money or to prove that burned out high school counselor who told us we’d never amount to anything wrong, or for some other egotistical reason.

We don’t go to college to heal old wounds of inadequacy or to feel superior to others.

The real reason our soul wanted to go to college was because our soul knows us better than we do – our soul knows that what we really want is to be a part of the healing of the world. And we come to college to gain the knowledge and the skills and the wisdom to more ably be of service to a world that so desperately needs us, that so desperately needs us to show up strong, brave, masterful, aware, willing, compassionate and committed to something bigger than ourselves.

And wisdom also knows that the old dichotomy between self-interest and altruism is a lie. We do not have to choose between serving ourselves and serving others. In the depths of our wisdom we already know that giving and receiving are two names for one circle, and that the best way to increase our own happiness is to cultivate the happiness of those around us.

We receive only what we give.

We thrive only when those around us thrive.

So as you go forth on this beautiful summer day and begin your life as professionals, please remember that all work is service. Cleaning bathrooms, balancing account ledgers, changing diapers, managing teams of people, writing computer code, mastering the minutia of lab protocols, caring for the grievously ill and dying, helping our new neighbor carry a couch upstairs – all of it is service. With each act of work you are bringing order out of chaos. You are binding the wounds of the world together with your love and your skill and your kindness and your presence. Walk into every situation with the awareness that there is no other place, no other time – there is only here and now, and this moment is where we have our best shot, our only shot at bringing the ideal of heaven down into this now moment, into these real lives we share with each other.

This is it. No more rehearsal. No more what ifs. No more some days.

It all matters. It’s all important – every meeting, every email, every moment. Now you can step proudly into the life you have worked so long and hard to create, knowing that with every thought and word and deed you are shaping yourself and shaping the world around you.

Finally, I believe the fruit of wisdom is happiness. That’s what we’re all in it for. And happiness is never a private affair. Our happiness is forever bound up in the happiness of those around us. So make your work a sacred offering. Look the people you meet in the eye, and really see them. Let them know, not by your clever words or practiced gestures but by your open heart that you really care. Slow down. Be the presence of healing in this world, no matter what your chosen profession is.

And once in a while – promise me this – once in a while, stop. Just stop. And feel the joy of the work sink in.

Graduates, and all the people gathered here who love them, remember this moment. Remember this perfect June evening when you took the time out of your busy lives to join together in a ritual honoring all that is best in us. Take this honor and this dignity with you and into all of the struggles and dark nights of the soul that lie ahead, and know that the world needs you only to be exactly who you are, nothing less and nothing more.

Thank you for this opportunity to be a part of your celebration this afternoon. I’m proud of you, and I’m inspired by you, and I’m deeply honored to witness this beautiful wave of humanity rolling out into the world. It’s staggering really to contemplate how many lives will be changed for the better by meeting you, by the love and the mastery and the service that you will bring to everything you do, everyday, for the rest of your lives. It’s overwhelming, and I know you feel it too.

And I know I speak for all teachers when I say, that we have learned as much from you or more than you have learned from us. And for that we are forever grateful.

Thank you.

Letting Go

2011-05-24T07:50:00.000-07:00

So the world didn’t end on May 21, 2011. This isn’t the first time. Ever since the Bible was written thousands of end-times predictions have come and gone. Despite the consistent and continual failure of all end-times prophecy people seem perennially willing to buy into the next one. Why is that?

The promise of impending disaster clearly feeds a deep psychological need. The zeal with which people foster and foment doomsday scenarios – catastrophic and irreversible environmental disaster, the collapse of the global currency market, the Biblical rapture, and all other forms of apocalyptic expectation – is evidence of the deep attraction disaster-scenarios hold for us. Something inside us wants to let go of the illusion of control – it’s not working anyway – and feel the freedom of surrender and non-attachment. Since we’re not very good at cultivating surrender and non-attachment consciously, the unconscious takes over. We unconsciously long for something or someone to come along and tear it all down.

We know that we live in a world of perpetual change. We know that all forms arise and all forms fade. We’re exhausted from trying to keep it all going. We want to let go but we don’t know how.

Learning to let go means willfully overriding tens of thousands of years of human evolution where fierce attachment and anxious worry ensured survival. Qualities that once served us now stand in the way of well-being.

Given the difficulties of retraining a mind shaped by the glacial forces of evolution, most of us don’t bother. We stay stuck in the consciousness of clinging, craving and conflict, drunk with the delusion that it is only through our own strenuous effort that anything good gets done. Some of us find our way to one or more of the world’s wisdom traditions which all invariably teach us to surrender and relax into the wonder of it all. The rest of us want to stay angry and resentful.

But the soul never for a moment stops asking for what it wants, what it needs. Our soul longs for the surrender of peace, but our mind refuses to give up the fight.

Things have a way of working themselves out. If truth is not realized in the conscious mind, it has a way of welling up from the unconscious mind. So powerful is our longing for surrender that out of the collective imagination fanciful scenarios emerge where everything is taken from us and everything is lost – the end of the world.

Most of us watched with bemusement as the recent doomsday prediction came and went. But what struck me was the powerful hold such prophecies have over their believers. Apparently reasonable people – writers, realtors, teachers, business owners – sold their businesses, said goodbye to their unbelieving family members and spent every penny of their savings in the days leading up to May 21, 2011. Many of them reported a deep peace welling up within them as all their worldly worries were lifted. “I’m not thinking about retirement funds anymore,” said one financial planner, “you know, 401Ks, annuities, commodities, stocks, the bond market or tax strategies. I’m living in the moment. I feel like a terrible weight has been lifted off of me.” We may find his belief system baffling, but this much is true: collective end-time mania has at least taught a few people the benefits of non-attachment.

Entering into the consciousness of surrender and acceptance frees you from the bonds of your own ego – there is no one there to do the controlling, no one to aggrandize by diminishing the other. Because you surrender to the reality of your own infinite value and the infinite value of the other, the idea of trying to control any of it seems ludicrous. All is as it should be, no matter what is happening. And frankly, it’s just exhausting trying to run everything, isn’t it?

The need to control is born from the consciousness of fear and the mistaken notion that we have to fight, claw and struggle our way through this world. An agitated, fearful and conflict-oriented mind experiences everything through the lens of its own violence. A gracious, surrendered mind finds its way through life’s challenges the way water flows through a boulder field – only effortlessness will prevail. Most of us are too busy trying to move boulders with our bare hands.

If unacknowledged, this soul-longing for tranquility and peace can deviate into dangerous pathology. Our unconscious longing to surrender control often manifests itself in unhealthy ways – drugs, alcohol, random sex, reckless driving, mindless consumerism, slavish devotion to gurus and other ideologues, and a myriad of other self-destructive, high risk behaviors. There’s nothing like diving off a bridge high above a river gorge with a bungee cord wrapped around your ankles to, for a moment anyway, free yourself from the tyranny of the busy-mind and drive you deep into the knowing that your joy lies in the surrender of letting go.

If we consciously acknowledged this, it wouldn’t manifest itself in such destructive and ludicrous ways. We would no longer need to concoct and cleave to elaborate impending disaster narratives that forcefully strip us of all control. If we made non-attachment our conscious practice, a new-found freedom and joy would arise. Gradually the destructive impulses would be replaced with an utterly ordinary sense of well-being.

In the pursuit of our careers, in the cultivation of our mastery as artists, musicians, teachers, doctors, lawyers, scientists and entrepreneurs, in our continuing drive to deepen our relationships with our husbands, wives, parents, children and friends, we must allow our innate longing for peace and surrender to manifest itself in healthy and meaningful ways. When we stop struggling and learn how to live in accord with the deep currents flowing forever around us we awaken the ancient dream – a dream retold in every wisdom tradition – to put first the kingdom of heaven, to accept as your birthright the peace that surpasses all understanding, to still the mind until, like a lake, all the silt has settled leaving nothing but clarity and depth. All of our endless grasping and clutching only stirs up mud clouding our vision and robbing us of our simplicity. The more we cling, the more we struggle, the more we suffer. The busy-mind works tirelessly to perpetuate the illusion of its own importance. When we awaken to the reality hidden just beneath the surface of the illusion, we move into wisdom. And wisdom means letting go.

Meaningful Work

2011-04-22T08:33:00.000-07:00

In my role as a professor I have the opportunity to counsel many young people as they face the endless options before them. What should I major in? What kind of career should I work toward? Should I do what I love or make a living? I’m not there to tell them what to do or who to be. In my counseling work I don’t try to change people. I help them tell the truth to themselves about themselves. The healing comes from that.

When students agonize about their majors, their college choices, their careers – in other words, their futures – what they are really agonizing about is a far more fundamental question, the most important question of all: who am I or even more to the point what am I? No other question so effectively clears out the accumulated debris of years of fear and misunderstanding leaving us clarified and ready to act in accord with our essential nature.

Although he is terribly out of fashion and much maligned, the philosopher Karl Marx made a powerful point when he suggested that instead of homo sapien, our species would be more aptly named homo faber. Homo sapien means “man the thinker”. Homo faber means “man the maker”. For Marx, the single most defining characteristic of our species is not our ability to think but our ability to shape the world around us. Yes, birds make nests and bees make hives, but human beings reach into the ground extracting iron, oil and other elemental substances and then with our opposable thumbs and creative visions we turn the earth’s elements into space shuttles, heart valves and iPads. Like gods we pick up clay and breathe our essence into it. In the alchemy of transformation, work is our talisman.

It is in our nature to work, to create, to combine, to innovate, to synthesize and to build. The things we make, whether they are songs or skyscrapers, are externalizations of our essence. And as we shape the world after our own visions, the world in turn shapes us. It is hard to know where our consciousness ends and the world begins. When we invent the world we are inventing ourselves. And work is the sacramental act that binds it all together.

A former student recently wrote to me through Facebook and relayed a struggle he was having. His heart and his gut were telling him to major in religious studies but he knew that with only a BA he wouldn’t be able to teach or in any other way earn a living with that degree. Grad school in the foreseeable future was out of the question and without a Masters degree his fear was that he would have to settle for some menial job outside his genuine interests – something just to pay the bills. As he framed it, the dilemma was between making money and meaningful work. He asked me what to do.

When a philosophical dilemma arises the problem is often rooted in the way we frame the issue. In other words, to make any headway on this dilemma we must first step back and examine the words we are using. What are our underlying, unexamined assumptions? What does “meaningful work” really mean?

What we have are two conflicting truths. On one hand is the notion that each of us must realize our passion by finding work that is deeply and personally meaningful for us. By finding a career that aligns with our deepest purpose we realize joy. From this perspective, the greatest blunder is selling-out for the almighty dollar and letting our sacred purpose wither.

On the other hand is the equally compelling notion that any work, so long as it does not profit from the suffering of others, can be profoundly fulfilling if the attitude of the worker is deeply committed to the consciousness of service. In this truth the so-called dilemma between making money and meaningful work dissolves. Any work can be meaningful work because meaning is found in the consciousness of the worker, not in external conditions or circumstances. It is this second possibility that often gets short shrift from both career counselors and spiritual advisors. The idea that any work can be meaningful is just not as sexy as following your bliss.

But not everyone gets to be an astronaut or a rock star. Very few earn a living at poetry or painting. Mystics and monks may get manna from heaven, but money? Not so much. And last time I checked, mothers don’t earn a dime. Clearly there must be a way to shift our consciousness into realizing that the sacred nature of work is only incidentally related to income stream. If your dream job has not yet materialized and you find yourself having to take whatever kind of employment comes your way to put food on the table and a roof over your head, consider this. There is great honor and dignity in being a part of something bigger than you, even if that something is an assembly line, a muffler shop, an office suite or a corner café. Some of the most deeply fulfilled people I’ve ever met are humble people with simple jobs – taxi drivers, janitors, warehouse workers, shipping clerks, gardeners.

When you surrender yourself to the choreography of your work, you slip into the now moment where you encounter other human beings, beings of infinite value, and you have the momentous opportunity to bring your training, skill and compassion to bear on their suffering and unmet needs. Making sandwiches, filing paperwork and cleaning rooms may seem like humble work, but it is no less essential than rocket science – without either one the world would be immeasurably poorer. No matter the nature of your work, realize that you are playing an essential role in bringing order out of chaos. As you trim hedges and stock groceries and wipe tables and deliver packages you are participating in the healing of the world. You are mending hearts. You are creating beauty. You are bringing people out of darkness. You are feeding them body, mind and soul. With every kindness you are restoring the faith of the people you serve. Your work is the connective tissue of the body of humanity. To recast an old theater adage, there are no small jobs, only small workers.

Whether we are called teachers or not, all of us teach. The way we treat other people teaches them who they are and who we are. Every encounter, no matter how mundane, is a holy meeting.

So while it is true that we must follow our bliss it is also true that we must guard against the tendency of the ego to hijack our hearts and twist our minds into thinking that we are too good for menial labor. When the Zen student complained to the master that after three weeks at the monastery he had still not learned a single thing about Zen the master asked, “Have you eaten?”

“Yes,” said the student.

“Then wash your bowl.”

All work is service. And service is the work of heaven. Who would think themselves too good to perform the work of heaven?

It is right in the midst of these everyday chores that we realize wisdom. Sweep the path. Wash the sheets. Lift up those around you who have fallen. Let go your empty dreams of fame and glory. They were only the projections of your fears and self-aggrandizement. Instead, embrace your role as a part of the whole, not beneath anyone else or better than anyone else. This is our meaningful work.

Real American Folk Music

2011-03-25T13:53:00.001-07:00

One by one they walked up to the microphone, each taking a turn. The stone amphitheater carried the sound deep into the canyon. High overhead a red tailed hawk soared across the sky in unraveling spirals. From our seats we could see deep into Mission Gorge where the San Diego River winds beneath a canopy of sycamores and oaks, through the heart of the ancient homeland of the Kumeyaay. For 10,000 years the original Americans lived in these canyons in the stillness of the pre-industrial world.

This was a very different kind of open mic. There wasn’t a guitar case or a folk singer to be seen. Guitars are after all the instrument of the conquest, brought here by the Spanish. Instead, this was an open mic celebrating the original American folk music – Native American flute.

For thousands of years Native Americans have played a simple five or six-holed flute. Designed and crafted to play a pentatonic scale (the black keys on a piano), they are relatively easy to play. Their simplicity is deceptive. No other instrument has the power to evoke so much with so little. In the right hands, these humble wooden flutes call forth, like all great art, the full measure of the grandeur of the land, the sky, the sweep of time and the boundless consciousness that connects all things in a sacred web of being.

I first met Benny Mullinax at the Potrero Library in the tiny hamlet of Potrero, California, fifty miles east of San Diego just north of the Mexican border. I was playing a concert – just me, my acoustic guitar, my folk songs and room full of the good people of Potrero whose warm hospitality made me feel like a long-lost friend. After the show I visited with the locals, swapped stories and sold more than a few CDs.

Life has a different feel in the backcountry. Things move a little slower. People take their time with each other. There’s really nowhere to hurry off to. The sun shines a little brighter, the night sky is a little deeper, and the sound of the wind through the trees is like a spirit voice that calls all of the names of everyone you’ve ever loved. It’s easy to see how people who come to visit sometimes never leave.

Benny was a Native American flute player. I told him I was a huge fan of the music, often playing my R. Carlos Nakai CDs all day long in my office. He invited me to come to their monthly meeting. I asked him where it was, thinking Potrero was a little too far to drive for a Native American flute circle.

“San Diego,” he said, “Mission Trails Regional Park, the amphitheater near the visitor center.”

“That’s a mile from my house,” I said.

“The second Sunday of every month, from 1:00-3:00, we meet there and play. Flute players from all over come and swap songs – some real pros and some folks just starting out. You should come.”

So I did. And I ended up buying two flutes from Benny.

Now I get the genuine pleasure of beginning.

Starting out on a new instrument is always exciting and illuminating. After years and years of playing guitar, I remember the first time I played dulcimer and dobro and banjo and mandolin, fumbling around in a terrain just familiar enough to make me feel hopeful, but alien enough to make me feel utterly lost. Persistence, patience and a playful willingness eventually opened the door enough for me to get at least one foot in. I eventually smoothed it out enough on all of those stringed instruments to even use them in recording sessions. But apart from harmonica, I had never played a wind instrument. My older brother John is an accomplished clarinetist. I grew up watching him make unexpectedly beautiful music by blowing hard across a paper-thin reed on the end of a tube with about a million holes in it, each hole covered with a felt-lined stopper attached to an intricately complex system of rods and levers. What he was doing seemed impossible to me. I reached for my guitar and never looked back.

So now, all these years later, I’m finally braving the world of wind instruments. But I’m starting small.

The Native American flute first came to prominence in 1983 with the release of R. Carlos Nakai’s first album Changes. Nakai was a classically trained trumpet player with an ear for jazz until a car accident injury made it impossible for him to do the tightly controlled and challenging lip work of trumpet playing. Of Navajo and Ute heritage, Nakai eventually completed his Masters degree in Native American Studies at the University of Arizona, while simultaneously pursuing mastery of the Native American flute. With seven Grammy nominations and over 40 albums under his belt, Nakai has almost single-handedly brought Native American flute into the mainstream. Before Nakai, the Native American flute was largely unknown by the general public, loved only by a few New Age spiritualists and Native Americans far off the beaten path.

It’s wrong to say that Nakai’s car accident was a good thing, but without it, the world of music would be a very different place.

Now my wife Lori and I both have our own Native American flutes. We don’t play them together because they’re in two different keys – hers is in A and mine is in G – but it’s a beautiful thing to hear a plaintive melody ringing out from across the house, a melody thousands of years old, a melody older than this or any other empire. Some musicologists say that the Native American flute is the third oldest instrument on earth after the drum and the rattle – perhaps 60,000 years old. The simplicity and clarity of its tone, the timeless quality of its primal melodies, the way its song rises and falls like wind – the Native American flute is perhaps the mother of all music. It is humanity’s first attempt to make a singing tool, a tool that gives men and women the voices of birds. Its simple call connects us to the deepest elements of our collective consciousness and burnishes the sacred shine of all things ordinary and sublime. It speaks of a time before the conquest, before the Europeans arrived with their breast plates and swords, their Bibles and crosses, their guns and guitars. In other words, Native American flute is real American folk music.

The second Sunday of this month and every month, from 1:00-3:00, they’ll gather again under the open sky in the amphitheater by the visitor center in Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego. One by one they’ll descend the stone stairs to the stage with their hand carved flutes, their pre-historic melodies drifting out over the ancient homeland of the Kumeyaay like circling hawks. And a few of us will be there just to listen.

Are All Religions the Same?

2011-03-13T12:32:00.000-07:00

Mystics of all traditions have long held that the doors of the world’s numerous religions open into one room. “The Truth is one,” says the ancient Rig Veda, “though the sages call it by many names.” For Joseph Campbell, the endless masks of God hide the one face. And today, a thriving interfaith movement seeks new ways to embolden this ancient dream of unity. What if we are moving into a post-religious age, where our theologies and doctrines dissolve into one? When asked about his religion the Dalai Lama famously replied, “I don’t have a ‘religion’. My religion is kindness.” What if it’s just that simple?

But it’s not that simple. It’s one thing to imagine and intend a bright ecumenical future where all religious disputes are laid to rest. Creating such a world, on the other hand, is a tall order. Mystics, with their dreams of oneness and universal love are invariably heretics within their own traditions. There is considerable push-back from the mainstream which sees mysticism as a threat to its autonomy – a threat it is often willing to meet with force. Jesus wasn’t the only one killed for claiming God-consciousness.

Sometimes in our zeal to find the underlying unity beneath all faiths we overlook important differences – differences that deeply impact the lives of billions of people and shape civilizations. Religion does as much to divide us as it does to unify us. Without first confronting the fundamental differences between the world’s religions we cannot move past them. Denial and ignorance never solved anything.

Let’s look at three central questions and explore how the world’s religions have traditionally answered them. But before we do, a word of caution is in order: sweeping generalizations are dangerously misleading because they obscure the natural diversity of thought found within every religion. Saying “all Catholics belief this” or “all Muslims believe that” distorts the truth by rubbing smooth the complex and multifaceted array of positions found within any faith community. Nevertheless, generalizations, if used lightly and provisionally, help us begin the process of deepening and clarifying our thinking about the world’s religions.

Who or what is God?

Joseph Campbell made a useful distinction. In the religions that originated east of Iran, ultimate reality is generally understood as an immanent, impersonal energy within everything whereas west of Iran, ultimate reality is understood as a transcendent being, a personified entity above and outside the created world. This fundamental distinction would have far-reaching effects.

In Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism this immanent source is known as Brahman, Buddha-consciousness and Dao, a reality beyond all concepts and definitions – the mystery behind the masks. All existence, including the gods, flows from this ultimately nameless source. In Hinduism this is particularly apparent. The many gods of the Indian pantheon are part of the created world, not its ultimate cause.

West of Iran a very different understanding of God or ultimate reality emerged out of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Here, God attained personhood and stands above and outside the created world. We are not manifestations of God-consciousness; He is the creator and we are merely creatures. This fundamental dualism shapes all of the other elements of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic worldview.

In the fundamentally non-dualistic eastern worldview the spiritual path is comprised of realizing one’s unity with this divine source, a realization covered over by ignorance. God-discovery is, in a very real sense, self-discovery. The purpose of religion and spirituality in the east is to awaken us to who and what we really are.

In the western traditions the spiritual path is one of obedience to a set of divinely revealed doctrines, beliefs and practices designed to bridge the chasm between us and a distant God, a God who cares, but a God who we have exiled through disobedience.

Another important difference between east and west involves the issue of inclusion and exclusion. If all is one as the eastern view claims, then we can realize Oneness through any number of means just as a summit can be reached from many different directions. No paths are excluded. If, however, there is only one tribe or creed the transcendent God favors, then joining the right religion becomes a matter of eternal life or death.

Understanding God as the divine Ground of Being within us and all things leads to one particular vision of human nature and human purpose. Understanding God as a personified deity outside the created world and ourselves as profane, disconnected products of that God leads to another.

What is a human being and what is our purpose?

In the western view, a human being is a mixed bag – made in God’s image yet terribly limited at the same time. Higher than the animals, lower than the angels, we are here to live as best we can in accord with God’s love and fulfill our divine appointment with as much dignity as we can muster given the mixed qualities of our nature. Jewish law, Islamic law and the guidelines of Christianity set the boundaries of authorized behavior. Obedience is rewarded and defiance punished. All three western faiths share the notion that we are called to be co-creators with God, working diligently for the good including practicing wise stewardship of the earth and its resources. Sacred service – giving our time, talent and energy for the good of others – is our highest purpose. When we participate in the healing of the world we are the hands of God.

Traditional, mainstream Christianity holds that because of our sinful nature we are adrift in self-imposed exile from God. All of the descendents of Adam and Eve carry within them an internal, irreparable flaw. We can’t think our way out of it, will our way out of it or wish it away. The only thing that can restore our severed connection to God is God’s grace. For Catholics this grace is accessed through membership in the Church and willing participation in its sacraments. For Protestants this grace is accessed through faith, belief and adherence to the word of God as recorded in the Bible. In Christian thought, thinking that you can “save yourself” is a grievous sin: pride. Without a relationship with the Christian God and adherence to Christianity’s codes, all is lost.

On the other hand, there is no doctrine of original sin in Judaism or Islam (or in Mormonism for that matter). In these faiths sin is understood as an event, not a condition; a lapse in judgment resulting in a violation of God’s law, not a genetic inevitability. This view of sin was also found in the early Christian church and advocated by some bishops like Pelagius, a British contemporary of Augustine who today is known mostly as the namesake of the Pelagian heresy. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin won the day and became Christian dogma. Pelagius and his followers were condemned and drummed out of the Church.

In the eastern view the nature and purpose of humanity is understood quite differently. If all is one, then every aspect of creation is an expression of the Divine, especially human beings with their capacity for reflection and self-awareness. The fact that most human beings are utterly unconscious or asleep to this fact in no way diminishes its veracity. Closing one’s eyes does not make the sky go away.

The tension in eastern religion is between ignorance and wisdom, not sin and salvation. We do not need to be “saved”, we need to be awakened. Buddha devoted his life to teaching a very effective awakening process, and countless gurus in the Hindu tradition did the same. In the great classic of Indian spirituality the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches Arjuna a variety of methods for seeing past the illusory separateness of surface perception to the underlying unity of divine reality. We can attain this unitive wisdom through selfless action, through devotion and love, through study and through meditation, depending on one’s individual proclivities and preferences. The point is to awaken to who and what we really are and live authentically from our inner being, leaving behind the ignorance of our former lives, bound as they were by karma and the repetitive cycles of conditioned thinking. Shifting our identity from the surface ego in perpetual conflict with everyone and everything to the divine inner Self frees us from ignorance and opens us up to a life of compassion and joy.

What happens when we die?

Just as distinctly different philosophies of life emerge from the world’s religions, so too distinctly different philosophies of death chip away at our lazy assumption that all religions are the same.

While the Hebrew Bible is nearly silent on the issue of life after death, later Judaism arguably absorbed the powerful influences of Christianity and Islam on this issue so that today, all three western faiths share a similar understanding of the life and death process. God created our souls at a certain point in time (we have not always existed as the Hindus claim), then He put us into a human body where we live one life. At death our souls are judged and a determination is made regarding our eternal residency – cut off from God forever in hell, or basking forever in the beatific vision of God in heaven.

The eastern traditions are considerably more complex. In the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna learns from his teacher that death is not real. “There never was a time when you did not exist,” said Krishna, “nor will there ever be a time when you cease to exist.” The divine Self exists beyond time and space, beyond the duality of life and death, taking on many bodies in a lengthy succession of reincarnations. In the field of time everything flowers and fades, but beyond the temporal veil lay a vast changelessness. And that is where our true Self resides, whether we know it or not. Just as we cast off worn out clothes and put on new ones, so too we cast off these bodies and take on new bodies. The wise, said Krishna, see beyond the suffering of the physical realm to the implacable peace beneath all of these tumultuous processes. “All forms arise and all forms fade,” said the Buddha, and shifting our identity from the ephemeral flux characterized by craving and suffering to the underlying wisdom of Buddha-consciousness is the work all of sentient beings.

The urgency of the west, with its one life scenario and imminent divine judgment is entirely absent in the east. You have a long time to work out your wisdom. And no one needs to save anyone else.

These and many other differences between the world’s religions point out the difficulty in upholding a simplistic “all religions are the same” perspective. But what if beneath the cacophony of these very real and problematic conflicts a deeper stillness awaits? What if beneath these doctrinal variations a trans-rational, experiential reality stands ready to burn away all of our oh-so-interesting intellectual distinctions? Perhaps the Dalai Lama was right. Maybe it is simple.

Mystics of all traditions agree. Like white light through a prism, Truth splits into many colors when run through the prism of human understanding. A fundamental characteristic of wisdom then is the ability to see that behind all the conflicting truth claims lays a deep and unspeakable unity.

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This article was previously published in the March/April edition of Unity Magazine under the title "Religion: A to Zen", and is reproduced here by permission.

Things You Don't Have to Do

2011-02-19T16:56:00.000-08:00

I know you’re busy. Everybody’s busy. We are being crushed by our to-do lists. Maybe I can help. Here’s a whole list of things you don’t have to do.

You don’t have to do everything. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to right every wrong, heal every wound and bridge every gap between what is and what should be. You don’t have to fix all of the broken things.

You don’t have to understand everything. You don’t have to figure everything out. You don’t have to force the uncarved whole into tiny conceptual boxes.

You also don’t have to explain yourself. You don’t have to reduce the mystery of whom and what you are to a category, a type, a box checked on a government form. You don’t have to force your boundless nature into a mold someone else made.

You are not defined by your race, your gender, your ethnicity, your national origin, your political affiliation, your sexual orientation, your ideology, your body, your strengths, your weaknesses or your endless lists of opinions, preferences and aversions. What you really are lies beyond all of those layers of window dressing.

You don’t have to worry about the future. You don’t have to waste one more iota of energy carefully imagining every possible negative outcome and then struggle to avoid those imagined outcomes with tools forged from your own cleverness. You don’t have to bear the burden of every conceivable what-if and yeah-but. You can put them down. As the old Zen saying goes, “How refreshing, the whinny of a pack horse unburdened of everything.”

You don’t have to be someone you’re not. You don’t have to compare yourself to everyone you meet, measuring their best qualities against your worst. You don’t have to violate your own nature in a vain attempt to emulate someone else’s.

You don’t have to match anyone else’s timeline. You don’t have to march alongside anyone or anything else. You don’t have to force the natural flow of events and seasons into the rows and columns of anyone’s timetable spreadsheet, including your own.

You don’t have to believe your harshest self-assessment. You don’t have to believe your own definitions of failure. You might be wrong.

You don’t have to be afraid. You don’t have to assume that the universe is a dangerous, hostile place. You don’t have to believe the worst about other people.

You don’t have to buy the next newest thing. You don’t have to want what corporations, marketing departments and salesmen tell you to want.

You don’t have to obey every craving. You don’t have to believe that happiness only comes later, after every need’s been met.

You don’t have to keep running away. You don’t have to keep avoiding the simple truths that are trying to catch up to you. Slow down. They will find you.

You don’t have to be deaf to that still, soft, inner voice. You don’t have to stay so busy, so distracted, so overwhelmed that you remain forever knocked off balance. You don’t have to allow the noise of your busyness to drown out the quiet truths arising in the stillness at your center.

You don’t have to manage everything. You don’t have to scrutinize, assess and manipulate every piece of the puzzle. You don’t have to write the master plan.

You don’t have to keep eating when you’re full. You don’t have to believe the lie that it’s never enough.

You don’t have to get drunk or high. You don’t have to repeat forever habits you picked up when you were young and scared. You don’t have to obey your fear.

You don’t have to shut down when you feel your feelings arise. You don’t have to push away what you cannot control. You don’t have to make your heart an empty, hostile place full of shadows, open wounds, self-doubt and endless hunger.

You don’t have to be lonely. You don’t have to hide. You don’t have to feel unsafe outside the four walls of your cage.

You don’t have to be unhappy.

You don’t have to struggle against change and strain to hold on to things that are trying to fade away.

You don’t have to have an opinion about everything. You don’t have to mistake your own fleeting judgments for truths.

You don’t have to have a perfect family, whatever that is. You don’t have to feel deep, warm and vibrant connections with all of your relatives, or feel guilty and ashamed if you don’t. You don’t have to force your family to conform to a fictional, idealized fantasy.

You don’t have to eliminate all anger and pain from your life. You don’t have to iron out every crease, soak out every stain or chase away every confusion. In the waves of life, you don’t have to define every peak as a success and every trough as a failure.

You don’t have to agree with anyone else’s ideology. You don’t have to accept anyone else’s definition of God, no matter how earnest their pronouncements, no matter how ancient and hallowed their tradition. You don’t have to abandon your own deeply held inner convictions because they conflict with a mass movement or popular theology.

You don’t have to belong to any groups because they’re said to be important. You don’t have to blindly ascribe to any nationalisms, especially if they draw their strength from a sense of exceptionalism or superiority. Empires come and go. Humanity knows nothing of empires. Plant your flag in something that lasts.

Life is short. Don’t waste these precious hours, days, weeks, months and years on things that don’t matter. Do the work that has been given to you to do. Find a way to let go of your fears and live the life your soul is asking for. Let what is trying to emerge through you emerge. Become a part of something larger than yourself. Your bliss depends on it. Shed your limited and limiting definition of yourself. Pledge that you will no longer cling to ways of living that do not serve your highest good. Promise yourself that you will stop waiting for the right time. Now is the right time. There is so much we have yet to do. Each of us has our small part to play. Drop everything that doesn’t matter. Don’t waste another second doing things you don’t have to do.

Love

2011-01-26T07:09:00.000-08:00

“Let yourself be drawn by the pull of what you really love.” – Rumi

Let’s talk about love. In this season of Valentine’s Day, when flower growers and chocolate makers have their best month of the year, hearts and minds turn to the mystery of love. On one hand love is just a four letter word, and on the other hand love is a Pandora’s Box of pleasure and pain packed tighter than a clown car. Love is a cluster of conflicting experiences; a cacophony, a harmony, an indeterminate blur. Love doesn’t hold still long enough for anyone to get a good look at it. Love is a crime scene where every witness gives a different description, everyone is a victim and the police are on strike.

In English, all of this chaos gets saddled with one word – love. In our longing to understand all of the disparate experiences gathered under the banner of love, let’s leave English behind and turn instead to ancient Greek. The Greeks had three words for love: eros, philia and agape.

Eros is sexual or biological attraction. It is love not born of the soul or the mind or the heart. It is what Joseph Campbell calls “the zeal of the organs for each other.” In eros there is no choice – it chooses you. It wells up out of the bio-chemical ooze and takes you over – body, mind and soul. And here’s the tricky part. It’s not personal – in fact, it doesn’t really matter who the other person is. In many ways, eros doesn’t want to know. The less talk the better.

Eros is the love of possession. Eros wants to own what it sees. James Joyce calls it pornographic love, all craving and no connection. The object of your love is just that, an object. It is about power and control. It is, in the end, a fundamentally solitary experience void of any real bond. The other person is just an actor in your private drama. If she sprains an ankle and her understudy steps in – no problem.

Philia is love of a higher or nobler order. Philia is the kind of love we have for our families, our friends, our country or our tribe. It is the feeling of belonging to something, that feeling of kindness and acceptance and warmth. It is the love that soldiers have for each other in battle. It is the love that team members have for each other in victory as well as defeat. It is priceless to know that somewhere in this crazy world there is a place where you are welcomed, where you are understood, with no need to defend or explain yourself. I remember the first time I was in the Netherlands, where my parents emigrated from eight years before I was born. Walking down the street in Amsterdam, surrounded by a crowd of Amsterdamers on their way to work, all of those tall, blond people, I suddenly felt a deep and unexpected sense of belonging. Even though I was in a strange land and couldn’t understand most of what they were saying, I felt it in my bones. I was home.

Agape is a third type of love. Unlike eros with its impersonal, physical craving and philia with its heart-felt camaraderie, agape is a decision. It is the decision to work for the good of the other without any expectation of anything in return. Rooted in free will, agape is choosing to treat others with kindness, compassion and love regardless of how you feel. It’s easy to love when you feel like loving. But can you be kind when you are hurt, angry or afraid?

It should be clear by now that our experience of love bears many strains. In romantic or marital love there is, ideally anyway, a synthesis of eros, philia and agape. We retain the sexual energy of eros without its impersonal possessiveness. In fact, in romantic love, it matters a great deal who the other person is – it is a very specific and unique individual that we fall in love with. They become your tribe, so philia is in full bloom. Your lover is your best friend. And as you enjoy the sometimes calm, sometimes stormy waves of eros and philia, it is agape that holds it all together, the conscious commitment to be kind, respectful, compassionate, supportive and above all selfless. This only works, by the way, if you partner agrees to the same deal.

Agape can also expand to become universal love, boundless love, love for all. It’s what Jesus and Buddha and all of the great spiritual teachers are talking about. When Jesus asked us to “love our enemies” he was not asking us to like them. He was just suggesting a baseline of kindness, humility, compassion and understanding despite our feelings. Attempting to put Jesus’ teachings into practice, Gandhi showed that remaining firm in the stance of non-violence requires monumental courage and will power – you have to override millennia of conditioned response mechanisms to fight back – yet in the end loving one’s enemies is a power far greater than any weapon. And Buddha taught that as we train ourselves to overcome our instinctual viciousness we must include ourselves on the list of those worthy of unconditional love. “If your compassion does not include yourself,” he said, “it is incomplete.”

Ultimately, love is not a feeling, love is what we do. We become what we love, and what we love becomes us. Our work, our dharma, our service, becomes a channel through which love enters the world. The way we garden, the way we cook, the way we create the spaces we live in, the way we serve others, the way we talk, walk, sing and dance, all of it is a manifestation of love. “Work,” wrote Kahlil Gibran, “is love made visible.”

Real love is never about possession. Possession is rooted in fear. Where there is fear there cannot be love, and where there is love there cannot be fear. Love is complete faith and trust that no matter how disheveled and incoherent things may appear, beneath the surface there is a deep and abiding order. Love is a message. As sunlight draws the rose out of the soil, from seed to full bloom, so too love draws us out of our indeterminate nature and toward the fullest realization of our deepest potential.

Beyond the grasp of our intellect and beyond the horizon of our limited vision is a vast and infinite source that nourishes and sustains all that we see. Whether you call it God or not is of secondary importance. Of primary importance is the fact that we live and breathe and have our being there – it is what we are. And when we love, we allow our authentic being to well up through the rickety structure of our so-called life, the carefully constructed façade our ego builds to cage us in. In the end, our longing for love is a longing for transcendence, to know once and for all that we are more than this, more than our bodies and minds and thoughts and fears, more than our shabby pile of things, more than our proudest accomplishments, more even than our deepest dreams and visions. Like a blinding noonday sun, love washes away all of the shadows and leaves us bathed in the light of unity, the nameless knowing that we are not lost, not forgotten, not insignificant, and that we are held in a timeless embrace where all is forgiven, all is exalted, all is well. Let us give this gift to each other. Let us love.

Through the Cracks

2010-12-22T08:15:00.000-08:00

“No one should abandon duties because he sees defects in them. Every action, every activity, is surrounded by defects as a fire is surrounded by smoke.” – Krishna, Bhagavad Gita 18:48

In every creative act – from planting a garden to writing a song, from baking a cake to raising a child – you fall short of the ideal. Nothing ever comes out quite the way you thought it would.

The aim for perfection sharpens our decisions and hones our actions. But in the end we must abandon perfection and surrender to what is. There is no shame in acknowledging limitations. We have to learn to let the accidents along the way lend their hand to the shape of things. We don’t control most of what happens. None of us does anything alone. Every act of creation is an act of co-creation.

I was writing a song the other day. I had a couple of good verses, but I needed a chorus. I tried and tried and tried to wrest one from the ether, but I just couldn’t find it. I settled on a woefully inadequate place-holder chorus, a stand-in until the real chorus came along. Each time I sang the song I cringed. I thought the chorus was awful. Then something odd began to happen. As I sang the song over and over, the place-holder chorus started sounding better, as if it had been the right one all along. The chorus wasn’t the problem. The problem was me.

I recently performed the song for the first time in front of a packed house. It got the loudest applause of the night. After the show, that was the only song people mentioned to me, again and again. My initial, knee-jerk rejection of the chorus, based on who knows what, was way off.

It’s important to discern the good from the bad, the effective from the ineffective, to separate the wheat from the chaff. But playful humility leavened with a dose of patience frees us from the tyranny of our prejudice. It is often in our best self-interest to admit that we are wrong. What we initially misjudge as bad might turn out to be a hidden jewel not entirely of our own making.

As a six year old boy living in Canada, Neil Young caught polio, a frightening disease of the nervous system that often left its victims without the use of one or more of their limbs. He recovered, but he was never the same. I sometimes wonder if Neil Young would play guitar the way he does had he not contracted polio. Would he hunch over his Les Paul a little differently? Would he have become more of a finesse player instead of settling on his trademark thumping claw hammer style? Would he have written hundreds of brilliant songs about the pain of isolation and loneliness had he not suffered the terror of a life-threatening disease at such a tender age? “Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain,” sang Bob Dylan in his song It’s Not Dark Yet. It is from our wounds and imperfections that beauty arises. If we really understood this would we rush to mask every flaw, numb every pain, and sand smooth the sharp edges of our lives? “There is a crack in everything,” sang Leonard Cohen in his song Anthem, “that’s how the light gets in.”

There is an old Indian story about a young girl whose job it was to fetch water for her village. Every morning she would walk down the long path to the river and fill two large clay jars. When they were full she would fasten them to both ends of a yoke and lift the yoke onto her shoulders for the long walk home.

One morning when she reached the village she noticed that one of the jars was a lot lighter than the other one. She looked behind her and saw a thin line of dark, damp soil alongside the path. One of her jars was cracked.

“What a shame,” she thought, “what a waste. My stupid, leaky jar has wasted water and wasted my time.”

She told her grandmother about the leaky jar.

“It’s o.k.,” she said, “just do the best you can.”

Everyday for many weeks the young girl continued to do her best, but everyday the jar over her right shoulder leaked all the way home from the river. She became increasingly frustrated. She even began to hate the leaky jar. She felt like a failure.

Then one day the young girl woke up with a terrible sickness. She was so weak she couldn’t stand. No one in the village knew what was wrong with her. For two weeks she laid in her hut feeling awful. She didn’t know what was worse, the sickness ravaging her body or the shame of not being able to fulfill her duty.

Finally her strength returned. Her grandmother came into the hut.

“Come with me little one,” she said, “I have something to show you.”

They walked out onto the dusty path. The young girl couldn’t believe her eyes. On one side of the path, the side where the leaky jar had spilled, a long line of beautiful flowers grew. Orange poppies and deep blue lupines wound along the path all the way down to the river, as if the orange sun and the blue sky had poured themselves out onto the earth.

“See,” her grandmother said, “there are no mistakes. The Great Spirit moves through all things and works with what is, not with what should be. Remember this when you are sad and angry at your own imperfections.”

Inevitable flaws and unintended outcomes plague all of our actions. Some of the outcomes are good, like flowers nourished by a leaky water vessel. Some outcomes are bad. Feed the homeless and you create a destructive cycle of dependency. Write reasonable laws to protect people from poison and you fill the jails with harmless drug addicts. Send humanitarian aid into war-torn regions and you enrich local warlords. The laws of karma are beyond anyone’s control. No event stems from a single cause, just as no event results in a single effect. The best we can do is to try to do what’s right, and let go of the outcome.

As we embrace our imperfection we know that there will always be collateral damage as well as unintended beauty. It is our sacred duty to draw on the fire of our hearts and minds to light the world. And where there’s fire there’s smoke.

Perfectionism prevents action because no outcome is ever perfect. Only those willing to make peace with imperfection, only those willing to let there be cracks in the world, only those willing to let their work be flawed leave space enough for the good to get in. If you say no to imperfection, you rob the world of the light that gets in through the cracks.

The Bridge Generation

2010-11-12T09:18:00.000-08:00

The low sun of December casts a long shadow. There’s more darkness than light. But the darkness holds a promise. Something is waiting to be born.

I’ve been thinking about the twentieth and twenty first centuries, how we are the bridge generation between the two – born in one, living and dying in the next, one foot in the old world, one foot in the new.

It was only ten years ago that the great twentieth century – the most violent century, the most inspiring century – came to a close. A time of unprecedented brutality and catastrophic environmental degradation, the twentieth century stands forever as a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when we put a narrow sense of tribe and short-term profits before the needs of the earth and the human family. Yet the twentieth century was also a time of hard-won gains in basic human rights, a time when entire categories of people began to emerge from centuries of oppression, a time when the sciences and the humanities joined forces to envision and manifest a world that works for everyone – in short, a time of awakening.

What will the twenty first century bring? We’re ten years in, and it’s still too soon to tell. If we’ve learned anything, it’s the complete unpredictability of the future.

Yet here, in the early morning of the twenty first century, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re awakening from a long dream, and in the gradual dawning of our new awareness, we are re-imagining our core values and the social structures and institutions that emerge from those values. We are redefining success. We are redefining peace. We are redefining prosperity. We are learning how to let our vision lead and our practicality follow. We know that a small group of people can change the course of history – we’ve seen it happen too many times to ignore. And we know that no matter how dire the situation, no matter how dark the night, there is within every human heart enough light to illuminate the whole world.

We don’t trust government as much as we used to. We know that we cannot wait for others to solve our problems. We know that within each of our homes, our families, our neighborhoods and our spiritual communities, it is we who lead, it is we who set priorities, it is we who articulate values, it is we who vote with our dollars to support businesses that uphold our vision of the good.

It is our growing conviction that each of us has wisdom within us, wisdom that emerges as insight, intuition and compassionate action each time we are faced with injustice and needless suffering. It is drawn out by our increasing awareness of the tremendous need around the world. We no longer think of ourselves as just Americans or just Mexicans or just Canadians, but as citizens of the world proud of our local affiliations, but not bound by them. Old institutions are crumbling and new institutions are taking their place. New technologies are shattering barriers that used to keep us apart. We are no longer beholden to powerful information distribution systems however well-meaning they may have been. Just as in the twentieth century the train, then the automobile and then the airplane closed great distances, today the internet (and whatever’s next) has destroyed the very concept of distance itself. With each cataclysmic change much was lost, and much was gained. We have had to learn to let go, over and over again. And we have struggled to adapt new technologies to the service of our humanity, not the other way around. With each change, the underlying constant remained – us. It is the indomitable human spirit that springs forth forever new from the dissolving forms of the past.

And here we are ten years into the new century, on the verge of the teenage years. I believe we have a choice. I believe that each of us has the power within the privacy of our own conscience, our own decisions, our own actions, to co-create with those around us the world we hold in our visions. We know that our intentions have creative power. We know that evolution isn’t over. We know that something is emerging, and we get to decide what that is.

Evolution has been going on for a long time. It’s absurd to think it has stagnated or that we have reached the end. If anything, we are in a period of accelerated change. This is not the final stage. As we continue to fall forward into the ever-new world, we carry with us the values and convictions that serve our deepest sense of the good. We let the old ways fall by the wayside. We take what we need and leave the rest. We buy less and give more. We move into smaller houses. We drive smaller cars. We consume fewer resources. We finally believe that there’s nothing more we really need, and that our wants are often born from the wound of spiritual dissatisfaction, and so we learn to feed ourselves not at the mall, but at the well that springs from the sacred source deep within us and all things.

Maybe you’re discouraged. Maybe you’re moved to despair by the endless bad news streaming into our awareness. Make sure you’re looking in a balanced way at the information you use to reach your assessments. Yes, there is abundant evidence of brutality and misery. But there is also ample evidence that we live in a time of great transformation where change-agents famous and obscure are working tirelessly around the world and making real progress. Find a place to lean in and help us push away the debris of the old forms that no longer serve us. Make a decision: stay caught in the disease or be a part of the healing.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world,” wrote Margaret Mead. “Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

We won’t always agree about how to change the world. But we share the conviction that it is our sacred duty to do so. If not us, who? If not now, when?

We are the people born in a time of great pain and promise. We are the people born in an age of unprecedented change. We are the people who remember where we came from, and hold a vision of where we are going. We are the people who know in our bones that it is possible to give birth to a world that is environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just. We have been given all the tools we need. We have each other. We have trust, faith, hope, love and wisdom. We can span the distance between the world we imagine and the world we behold. We are the connection between what was and what will be. We are the bridge generation.

A Light Sense of Self

2010-10-25T08:53:00.000-07:00

Is the ego our enemy, our friend, or just another tool in the box?

Even the most casual student of the world’s spiritual and philosophical traditions knows that self-centeredness is the blade that cuts us off from wisdom and well-being. We must relinquish selfishness the sages tell us. Egotism is the enemy. And yet a nagging cluster of questions remain: Is my innate desire to learn, grow and create egotistical? Is my sense of identity such a bad thing? Don’t I need personal ambition to get anything done?

These questions arise in any walk of life, but they seem particularly acute in the arts, especially the performing arts. If you’re going to get on stage and demand people’s time and money, you’ve got to believe that what you’re offering has value. You need a strong, clear sense of self. Nothing is more important on stage than confidence, which, by the way, is very different from arrogance.

What is the ego? It is that thing we refer to when we use words like I, me and mine. It is a concept of self, an identity that is separate from everything else. It is one of the truths about us. But there are other truths.

In the spiritual and philosophical wisdom traditions of the world a few recurring principles arise again and again. Aldous Huxley called these recurring principles “the perennial philosophy”. Foremost among these universal ideas is the concept of Oneness, the notion that behind the veil of differentiation there is an underlying unity. All separate things, then, are expressions of the One. Whether you personify and deify the One or think of it as an impersonal force is purely a matter of preference. Some call it God, others call it Dao or Brahman or Spirit or Source or Divine Mind. “The Truth is One,” says the Rig Veda, “the sages call it by many names.”

Why the One became the Many is the great mystery of existence. We don’t know why. But it did. As humans evolved, spiritual traditions emerged, girded by philosophy and clothed in mythology. Imbedded in these traditions are maps left for us by those who went before, maps that make clear that realizing our unity with Oneness is the highest form of wisdom; to rise up out of the consciousness of separateness characterized by agitation, fear, competition, scarcity and craving and into the consciousness of unity characterized by serenity, clarity, kindness, community, abundance, compassion and gratitude. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism and countless other truth-traditions all lead by different paths to the same summit.

In this context then the ego is neither good nor bad – it is simply one aspect of a complex array of energies and faculties nested within the phenomenon of consciousness. The ego, that sense of separateness, is a necessary construct. The ego serves us well. It encourages us to invest considerable time and energy into the maintenance of our own lives, materially and spiritually. I enjoy being me. Initially, I may think that I’m doing all this for myself. But it’s equally true that as I get stronger, smarter, more creative and more skillful I’m equipping myself for greater acts of service. Maybe the ego with its love of achievement, accomplishment, competition and attention is all part of a larger plan. By cultivating our own excellence we are adding to the wealth of the world. As I expand my capacity for self-expression, I am simultaneously deepening my connection to the Source and becoming a widening channel for Source to express Itself through me. In this way the false dichotomy between my individuality and the One begins to dissolve.

All one hundred trillion cells in your body emerged from a single cell, the egg. After fertilization, it quickly divided into two, then four and so on. The rapidly multiplying and expanding cells began to specialize – some becoming bone, others becoming skin, still others becoming brain tissue with the capacity for self-awareness. Deepak Chopra asks an excellent question. Are the heart and the brain different? Yes. Are they separate? No. They are differentiated expressions of one, unified organism. Differentiation is not separation. In this same way then all of reality is One, despite appearances to the contrary.

The problem arises when we mistake the ego for our entire being. We may fault the ego somewhat for playing along with this self-serving delusion, but it is certainly not the ego’s fault. It’s just doing the job for which it was designed – leading the parade. But thinking that one lousy drum major makes a parade is a big mistake.

“Person” and “personality” come from “persona”, the Latin word for mask, specifically the masks actors wore on stage in Classical plays. Our personality is the mask we show to the world, behind which lurks all the immeasurable mystery of our little slice of the One consciousness. Our identity, the way we are known to the world, is a cluster of associations made up of a complex and interwoven tapestry of threads – race, age, ethnicity, profession, looks, skills, mannerisms, voice, preferences, opinions and so on. This cluster of elements we call a “person” is led by an ego, an organizing principle that ties together all of these otherwise disparate elements. In this sense then the ego is our friend. We would be hopelessly fragmented without it. Before we demonize the ego it is probably wise to remember that the ego is, after all, yet another manifestation of the One.

Still, the dangers of egoic attachment are very real. Mistaking the ego for the entire depth and breadth of our being is the source of all our suffering. Putting the ego in charge of our lives is like letting a flea rule the world. In the end, neither the flea nor the world prospers.

What if we re-conceptualized our ambition as emergence, our hunger for more as sacred expansion, our yearning to be heard and understood as holy communion? “You have the right to work,” Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, “but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward.” The Buddha also counsels non-attachment in the midst of deep engagement. And Confucius says, “The inferior person asks ‘what’s in it for me?’ The superior asks, ‘what is the right thing to do?’” The highest form of action is selfless action rooted in the ground of Being. When the ego recedes its as if the clouds fall away from the sun – the whole world is enlightened.

Cultivate your excellence. Revel in your expansion. Don’t hide your light for fear of appearing egotistical. What matters most are your intentions. Are you working for egoic glory born in the consciousness of fear, or are you working in the consciousness of service, joyfully allowing Transcendence to express itself in you, through you, as you? Make something happen. Be a channel of the creative manifestation of the sacred energy of the universe. Participate in the healing of the world. Co-create your own best life out of the raw materials within and without you. Do it with a bold sense of Oneness. Do it with a light sense of self.

Bring it Back

2010-09-19T17:34:00.000-07:00

In 1983 at a talk called Explorations delivered at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, Joseph Campbell revisited one of the central themes of his lifework. He claimed that the artist plays an essential role in the formation and maintenance of the psycho-spiritual health of the human race, and that artists far from being mere entertainers or decorators have a sacred duty to brave the depths of the unconscious and bring back treasures that inspire us all to realize the depth and beauty of our own lives. In other words, for Campbell, art is as important as the air we breathe. But unlike air, art does not fall out of the sky ready-made. We have to make it.

How does the artist minister to the psycho-spiritual health of humankind? By setting before us the archetypal symbols of our own awakening and drawing us into ever-deeper forms of self-knowledge.

It begins with a long apprenticeship. Every chance encounter, every tug of the heart, every starry sky, every word, sound and moment forms a sea in which the fledgling artist swims. The artist’s greatest skill is discernment – what to leave in and what to leave out. From nothing less than the entire sphere of human experience the artist begins to mold her vision of beauty. But she must first learn the techniques of her craft. She must find a teacher.

After mastering the vocabulary of her medium she reaches the first crisis. As her own unique voice begins to emerge the teacher becomes obsolete. She must break away. Art is so much more than mimicry. It is time to move on.

With her apprenticeship behind her and a growing body of high quality work taking shape, the young artist stands at a threshold. No matter her medium – paint, sculpture, dance, photography, film, poetry, prose or music – she must brave the hero’s journey into the underworld of the unconscious and face the dangers of madness, loneliness and poverty in order to reach the transcendent goal: nothing less than the realization of unity, integration and the resultant healing of the world.

According to Campbell, there are three main realization symbols: the heiros gamos, the atonement with the father and apotheosis. The heiros gamos or sacred marriage is the profound healing and integration of the animus and anima, the male and female energy found within each of us. This often takes the form of boy meets girl. There’s a reason there are so many love songs. On the surface they’re about finding someone to love. Deeper down, they’re about healing the rift between the conflicting energies of our own souls. The second realization symbol, the atonement with the father, is the satiation of the universal longing for the source. As Luke Skywalker goes searching for his father, we all want to know where we came from as a means of finally answering the primal question, what am I? If we knew what made us, we would know our own essence. This is why we love songs about the road and songs about home. It turns out take me home country roads isn’t really about West Virginia after all. And finally, apotheosis means realizing the divine nature of our own essence, as Buddha experienced under the bodhi tree when all his illusory mental constructs and so-called understandings faded away in the bright light of the realization that he was one with the universal consciousness from which we and all things come. All of us, whether we realize it yet or not, want what Buddha has, what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven, where we realize that in the depths of our own being we are one with the Father. Great art can give us these three gifts, sometimes all in one overwhelming moment.

It is the challenge of every authentic artist to bring these gifts out of the depths of their own understanding and re-present them to us in new and relevant forms. “The point is that what you have to bring,” said Campbell, “is something that the world lacks – that is why you went to get it. The daylight world doesn’t even know that it needs this gift you are bringing.” So this isn’t going to be easy. In fact, at this stage of the journey, the artist faces a perilous decision. As she struggles to create works of art should she stay true to her own private invention and vision, or should she speak in the pedestrian language of mass culture? Should she be an artiste or a hack?

Should she stand in the corner of an art gallery in Manhattan and caterwaul like Yoko Ono or should she go to Nashville and churn out the next formulaic hit? Should she paint what her soul sees or should she paint Thomas Kinkade fairy houses? If she’s true to herself she runs the risk that no one will care. Art for an audience of one (the artist) is a lonely life. At this point she may flee to a cabin in the woods to paint the masterpieces nobody wants in the hopes that some future generation will lionize her as they did Van Gogh. Or she may utilize her extensive skill to give the people what they want, thinking to herself, when I make enough money painting this commercial slop, then I’ll paint what I want. But that day never comes.

The third and most courageous alternative is to find a way to stay true to your depth vision and develop a vocabulary that hooks the public without pandering. Campbell calls this the pedagogical path. Here, you help your public connect with their deepest needs and initiate them into a process of realization by bringing your silent answers into alignment with their unspoken questions – the artist as teacher.

In the language of the hero’s journey, the hero must go into the underworld to retrieve the boon or the prize. In the first scenario, the artist who refuses to communicate and hides in the woods is guilty of what Campbell calls “the refusal of the return”. It’s a common pitfall, to dismissively condemn the untrained masses and blame them for your failure. In the second scenario, the artist returns but doesn’t deliver anything; they simply give the public more of what they already have which doesn’t help them at all. In the third scenario the hero returns with the boon and finds a way to deliver it to the masses in correct proportion to their ability to receive. This, says Campbell, requires great sensitivity and compassion on the part of the artist. Having the patience and skill to draw your audience in is a loving, ego-less act. It’s so much easier to hold your audience in contempt, take your toys and go home. Or become a soulless panderer. But the path with heart, the sacred opportunity, is to bring the treasure right into the marketplace and integrate us all in the process. If you are an artist, do you have the patience, loving-kindness and courage to do this? When it comes to transcendent wisdom, do you have the guts to go get it and the compassion to give it away? There is so much need for healing. Develop a voice, believe that there is something worth singing about and be that voice. Trust that you are the one we all need. Then without ego, grounded in the profound depth of humility, find the treasure and bring it back.

Runaway Train

2010-08-22T09:04:00.001-07:00

How do you stop a runaway train? How do you break that racing chain of thoughts and worries and plans and schemes? How do you stop the spinning kaleidoscope of all-possible-scenarios that flood the mind’s eye with a dizzying array of fragmented colors and lines that lead nowhere? If the mind is such a powerful part of life, why do we over-think everything to death?

From the perspective of evolutionary biology, it makes sense that the early human beings who worried a lot and excelled at imagining elaborate worst-case-scenarios would have a better chance of survival. The hyper-vigilant hominid perpetually anxious about whether or not there was a saber-toothed tiger in the bushes was far more likely to survive and pass on his genes than his more lackadaisical brother, you know, the one they call “Tiger Food”. Traits like the capacity to worry were naturally selected by the process of evolution. The result? Modern humans have an inordinate capacity to vividly imagine every conceivable negative outcome and spend a lot of time worrying about the worst possible future, a place where everything goes wrong, everything is lost and everyone hates you. Early humans who worried about scarcity of resources would work harder to store up food. They would envision future problems and work hard to prevent them by creating elaborate plans. As a result, they would be far more likely to survive than their live-for-today neighbors who never worried about a thing and died from easily preventable missteps. We are the children of worriers.

So here’s the problem. We modern humans have plenty of food and adequate shelter and extremely long odds on the possibility of saber-toothed tiger attack, yet we still carry around with us this vestigial and irrelevant conditioning. Our capacity for worry and fear far outstrips our actual risk factors. The mind, once our greatest asset, is now our greatest liability.

Have you ever woken up at three in the morning, mind racing, thoughts crowding, worries bearing down on you like angry bees? It’s dark. Everyone’s asleep. You’re lying there perfectly safe in your bed. You’re not thirsty and you don’t have to pee. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. And yet there you are, adrenalin-sopped, heart racing, blood pounding, desperately envisioning endless possible negative outcomes, inventing problems and emotionally inhabiting them for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It’s all just conditioning playing itself out, echoes of once-useful impulses. There are no saber-toothed tigers.

Maybe it’s time to turn these giant brains of ours back on themselves. Maybe we should do a little thinking about thinking.

The first thing you have to do is laugh. It’s all sort of silly how the thought-stream sucks us into a vortex of anxiety despite the absence of any legitimate cause. And when you laugh, the death-grip of the mind is loosened. I always worry a little when I visit churches or synagogues or mosques or classrooms or satsangs where no one’s laughing, where a desperately serious and self-important air hangs over the entire room and every soul in it. Without laughter, people too easily fall prey to the ever-pervasive thought-stream. When we laugh, the whole charade is exposed and we, for a moment anyway, return to our original selves, free and easy, as we were before these giant brains took over. That’s why laughing feels so good. It is a glimpse of freedom.

The second thing to do is decide to set into motion some different patterns. Now that the shackles of the busy mind are no longer hidden, it’s time to search for the right key to unlock them for good. Techniques like meditation, centering prayer, physical exercise, music, dance, immersion in the beauty of nature, practicing loving kindness toward others – these are all proven and effective methods for breaking the tyranny of the thought-stream. There are also a whole host of other remedies that are far less effective: television, shopping, drugs, alcohol or any other form of sensual escapism. The problem with these “solutions” is that they tend to create as many or more problems than they solve. Some people realize this after the first bong hit. For others, it takes thirty years of addiction for the bloom to fade from the rose.

My friend the spiritual teacher Will Newsom uses the analogy of a compass. When we are trapped in the thought-stream, drowning in currents of worry and fear, it’s as if our compass needle is jitterbugging all over the place. How do we get the needle to settle back to truth north? How do we restore our original inner-peace, our naturally joyful equilibrium? We cannot force the needle to go where we want it. In other words, you can’t solve the problem of over-thinking with more thinking. “A problem cannot be solved,” said Einstein, “with the same consciousness that created it.” Like trying to see your own eyes or bite your own teeth, we cannot cure the mind with the mind.

Wayne Dyer writes that a sign he saw on the wall of a church basement where he attended his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting burned into his psyche like a brand: “Our best thinking got us here.” Relying on the mind to cure the problems of the mind is a fool’s errand.

Does it help to replace bad thinking with good thinking? Certainly. Does it help to set positive intentions and craft a plan of action? Naturally. Right thinking is a necessary preliminary step in the process of restoring sanity. But it is only a preliminary step. Right thinking alone is insufficient.

Instead, Newsom and many others suggest a far simpler approach.

Quiet down, rest in the silence and wait.

You don’t have to fix anything or solve any problems. That’s just more mental manipulation. Instead, sink beneath the mind. For most people, meditation and centering prayer are the best paths to this goal and are profoundly effective if given a chance. When we meditate or practice centering prayer, we practice presence in this now moment and drop down beneath the level of thought. Deepak Chopra calls it entering the gaps between thoughts. Don’t try to stop your thoughts. Resisting them only makes them stronger. Instead, simply notice them, laugh, and settle down like a rock sinking to the bottom of a pool and watch your thoughts slide by above you on the surface as if you were watching clouds drift by in the sky. You are not the clouds; you are not your thoughts. In the content-free, thoughtless silence your compass needle will naturally return to true north all by itself, through no effort of your own. In the same way that we do not consciously digest our own food, grow our own hair or heal our own cuts, inner peace is not an achievement of the mind. It happens only when you break free from the tyranny of the mind.

Great spiritual teachers from Jesus to Yoda all make the same promise: peace is possible – as individuals, as families, as communities and as a planet – if we somehow learn to get off of this crazy, runaway train.

Smooth as Stone

2010-07-20T13:36:00.000-07:00

I have a smooth palm-sized river stone on my desk, right beneath my computer monitor, a nice juxtaposition of high tech and no tech. I sometimes hold it in my hands when I don’t have anything to say. Silence is the language of stones.

It feels heavy and cool on my skin. I feel it pulling toward the ground, waiting for my wrist to twist or my fingers to part so it can slip from its perch and return to mother earth. I never let go. Stones teach patience.

No rock begins this way, smooth and round. Rocks begin jagged. Then sand and water and other rocks bash and scrape and grind away at the edges until only the smooth round middle remains. Everything unessential is gone. Songs and poems and people and ideas and nations and marriages begin the same way; messy, unfocused, complicated, overwrought, cluttered. Then along comes the scouring. Without the friction and the conflict and the constant, painful cutting away, the beauty of the final stage is never revealed, cloaked forever beneath peripheral layers of obfuscation and detritus. The secret of life is learning to love the cutting away.

As we strive to create our best lives, as we endeavor to hone our craft, fortify our fortunes and magnify our excellence, we learn the art of intention and practice the law of attraction, thinking that by drawing toward us everything we lack we will eventually be fulfilled. Manifesting situations, conditions and objects out of the field of pure potentiality is a worthy goal. But lost in this model is the simple truth that we already are everything we seek.

Maybe we have it backwards. Maybe instead of adding this skill and that quality and this new piece of equipment, we ought to be letting things fall away, jettisoning everything that isn’t genuinely, authentically real. When we let slip the limiting labels we use to define ourselves, our essence begins to emerge. 13th century German mystic Meister Eckhart said that we become who we really are not by a process of addition, but by a process of subtraction.

In a famous anecdote about the sculptor Michelangelo, he was asked by an admiring patron how he managed to create the masterpiece “David”.

“When I approached the marble,” he replied, “I simply removed everything that was not David.”

Like most philosophical advice, this is easier said than done. How do we cooperate with the forces around us, the forces that will peel back the cocoons of our own becoming?

How did this river rock reach this stage of its own beauty? By bumping up against the messy world, by following the flow of larger currents, by letting itself be pulled away and dragged and dropped until it lost all sense of separateness. With each encounter it left its mark on others, at the same time feeling the shape of its own life change. People often try to change all by themselves. Rocks do it together.

We do not have to know what all the steps are. Nor do we have to choreograph them. We only have to willingly surrender to the yearnings of our own deeper nature, then step forward courageously, humbly and in the consciousness of service. Let the river do the rest. Life will meet us head on. Difficult people will scrape up against us. Circumstance will rip away all our carefully constructed comforts. Our own misguided instinctual drives will draw us into destructive decisions and actions that will take years to repair. Pain will shatter our façades and death will flag our every step. But throughout the rough and tumble of this watercourse, we grow smoother and smoother every year as the disingenuous artifice is ground away by the hardships of our lives. “The trials we endure,” wrote Epictetus, “introduce us to our strengths.” In our dawning maturity, we thank our enemies and honor our failures, for without them, this growing wisdom would have fallen stillborn to wither on the bright plains of our misspent youth.

“All first drafts are shit,” said Ernest Hemingway. Having the backbone to cull the garbage from your writing, your song, your poem, indeed your life is the mark of a great artist. The only thing worse than a half-baked song is a half-baked songwriter. If our lives are our masterworks, then everything is at stake. We have been given an opportunity in the march of these days to step to the beat of our own drum or follow the beat of another. From the copious bounty of our lives we draw the sustenance that will fuel our muscles for the march, knowing that there is always another meal and another cool drink of water around the bend. Letting go of thoughts and behaviors that no longer serve us, mindfully culling the clutter from our homes and to-do lists, leaving room for new growth to rise up, take root and bloom – these are the gifts we receive on the road toward our awakening, this joy is the fruit of our renunciation, this verdant emptiness is the silence out of which the music of our lives emerge.

“Pay attention to your enemies,” wrote Antisthenes in the 4th century B.C.E., “for they are the first to discover your mistakes.” As a devoted protégé of Socrates (and witness to that tragic ending), Antisthenes taught that misfortune and opposition ultimately serve us better than easy living and blind support. Unlike friends and lovers, enemies have no stake in our fortune – they’re success is utterly unhinged from ours. In this light, difficult and abrasive people are a profound gift; they are sandpaper to our soul leaving us lighter, smoother and more deeply beautiful.

Would we rather be rough-edged, difficult to warm up to, loud, caustic, inelegant, chaotic, bloated, overblown, ineffective, awkward and hard to love? Or would we rather be simple, smooth, graceful, centered, grounded, powerful, clean, elegant, quiet, concise, clarified and effective? Let life wear away your sharp edges. Thank your enemies. Honor your challenges. Know that when you lose, you win. Welcome the struggle. Let it bring your essential, authentic self to the surface. Learn to glide. Let everything that’s false fall away. Become who you really are. Become as smooth as stone.

Endless Becoming

2010-06-29T08:49:00.000-07:00

The San Diego County Fair comes around every June and wraps up right after the 4th of July. An annual summer ritual, the fair brings over a million people together on a prime piece of real estate in a coastal estuary just north of Del Mar, California. Warm sun and cool ocean breezes play tag while fairgoers part ways with their hard-earned cash in exchange for wildly inappropriate and oddly compelling food items like chocolate covered bacon and deep-dried butter.

The fair, like the top car on a Ferris wheel, comes around every year without fail and we file in knowing that everything will be exactly as it was the year before – the same sheep in a row, the same magic mop demonstrations, the same greybeards in Hawaiian shirts playing geezer rock – and yet we keep coming back year after year. There’s something comforting, even beautiful about the symmetry of it all. Going to the fair is like stepping into a time machine, a very particular time machine – not one that delivers you to the past or the future but one that delivers you to a realm completely outside of linear time. The fair is an eternal, changeless moment that we fall into summer after summer. We don’t go to the fair to return to our childhood. We go to the fair to stop the wheel of time entirely and experience, for a while, the wide open freedom of timelessness. “Time,” Plato wrote, “is a moving image of eternity.” And I think I saw him on the midway in a Harley-Davidson bandana handing out cotton candy to kids, beaming with joy, the kids and Plato.

I have a friend who never goes to the fair. “It’s just the same old crap year after year,” he says.

“That’s why I like it,” I say.

Not going to the fair because it’s the same old crap year after year is like saying why go to the beach, I’ve seen waves breaking before, or why go to the forest, you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen ‘em all.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” wrote Thoreau. “I drink at it; but while I drink, I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” Beneath time’s shimmering surface there lies a depth that goes down and down and down. We long to swim in those waters, but the only way to them is through the surface. Only by letting go of the rope swing and plunging through to the depths will we know the full measure of the beauty of our own ephemeral lives.

The fair, like any hash mark on the wheel of time, is a sticky-sweet reminder of the simple pleasures, the bounty of the land and the chance to come together as a community to celebrate each other. And besides, it’s fun. “The secret of life,” sang James Taylor, “is enjoying the passage of time.”

There is an innate human tendency to celebrate and honor the recurring moments in the annual cycle of time. Lent, Yom Kippur, Ramadan and Groundhog Day are just a few examples. As with the fair, we don’t celebrate these events year after year in order to return to the past. We celebrate them in order to move into a deeper consciousness of the fundamental unreality of linear time. We celebrate them in order liberate ourselves from the tyranny of time. “The distinction between past, present and future,” said Einstein, “is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” The apparent relentless march of time, which we normally allow to tyrannize and torment us, is temporarily lifted when we enter into the joyful celebration of these annually recurring events. Birthdays, anniversaries and the like restore us to our original purity as beings of infinite awareness and infinite value. That sort of thing gets washed away by the torrent of time.

The same pattern, the same apparent, but ultimately illusory dichotomy between motion and stillness occurs in music. A good song has to accomplish two contradictory aims – it must be fresh and familiar. It must be rooted in the known while breaking new ground. If new music does not somehow fall within the parameters of familiar tonal and rhythmic spectrums while also delighting and surprising us with something novel and unique, we turn away. From Bach, Handel and Haydn Mozart learned where the boundaries were, and then he pushed them. Carl Perkins, Little Richard and Bob Dylan showed the Beatles the road to their own genius, and they never looked back. Everyone who’s ever written a song or played in a cover band knows that if you really want to move an audience you must take them on a journey, but you must also always bring them home, home to the heart of their own lives. People want to be moved. But when it’s over they want to sleep in their own beds.

Life itself turns on these same illimitable laws. All forms arise and fade but the totality remains unchanged. Each year we grow older. Our faces continue to change right before our eyes. But the I within, the silent witness, knows nothing of the passage of time. Past, present and future are all continually occurring in this eternal moment. The mind cannot understand this. The mind is just a squirrel strapped to a rocket, convinced that it’s steering. Poor squirrel.

I turned fifty two last month and am, on my better days, deeply grateful to be alive. I’ve been to too many funerals of friends my age and younger whose lives were cut short by hard living, heart defects or the vagaries of cancer. I’m also grateful to my parents for many things, foremost among them good genes. Bollands tend to stick around awhile. When I talk to my eighty eight year old father I feel the full width and breadth of his life – the maddening struggles, the heroic choices, the simple beauties – and I know that none of us has forever. And yet we do. These transient forms around us – that song on the radio, these vibrant bodies, the warmth of the hand we hold as we walk through the midway of our lives – these will all slip from our grasp. But behind the shimmering veil there is a constancy far more real than any passing image. Developing the ears to hear it, the eyes to see it and the heart to feel it is the lifework of any lover of wisdom. Only then, in the timelessness of this eternal moment, are we freed from the wrenching sorrow of the world with its endless cycles of birth and death. The fair, like a good song, can only last so long. Like a long, slow ride on the Ferris wheel, life winds down. Below you the midway lights shine on clusters of teenagers careening though the barkers and the colored balloons. The sun is sinking into the sea. It’s time to go home. It’s time. But if you let it, time opens a door through which the flood waters of eternity pour, holding us and nourishing us like amniotic fluid in the wombs of our endless becoming.

To Live Deliberately

2010-05-22T09:59:00.000-07:00

The campfire faded down to a bed of embers. Lori had already crawled into the tent and fallen asleep. I heard her deep and steady breathing.

Lying on the ground and looking up at the stars I felt the pull of gravity pining me down like a moth on a corkboard. A warm desert wind moved through the sage. The stars spread out in a vast field from one rim of the horizon to the other, too many to count. The darkness seemed insignificant in the light of all those blazing suns.

A deep and timeless silence fell over the desert.

I shifted.

Suddenly I was looking down at the stars.

They were spread out beneath me in a vast emptiness. Normally we think of the stars above us and the earth below, but in a surprising reversal of relational perspective, I was certain that I was glued by gravity to the bottom of the earth, peering down into a pool of boundless space below me.

The vertigo passed in an instant, eclipsed by a warm sense of peace and a deep surrender. I felt oddly safe and entirely lucid. The earth above me and the sky below – I wondered why this had never occurred to me before.

And with this came a knowing – all perspectives are relative. There is no such thing as up or down, over and under, above or below. Those terms only make sense from one limited point of view. If you move out of your own perspective (or any singular point of view) and take on instead a universal perspective, all orientations dissolve and there is only here, now. In other words, if you drop your local awareness and adopt a non-local awareness, you see in one singular moment the incomprehensible oneness of all existence. Freed from a parochial, provincial orientation where one ego-identifies with a particular time and place, you move instead into the formlessness of Being itself, an expanded consciousness where the ego recedes to its rightful place, as a captain of a tiny vessel, not lord and master of all it surveys. You don’t have to go anywhere to get this awareness. You’re always in it. You have only to shift. But going to the desert helps.

One of the great services wilderness provides is this opportunity to leave behind our small view of the world. As we leave the city and head into the hills we enter a realm of existence where nature reigns and the arising and fading of forms unfolds in an endless symphony utterly apart from the machinations of human activity. Stepping out of the car and walking into the woods or the desert or along an empty shore brings you into direct contact with a timeless presence untrammeled by the human mind, well, until we get there anyway. Spending time in nature gives us a chance to take a break from the torrential thought stream and its oh-so-important assessments and judgments. And when we do, we have a shot at recovering our original simplicity, our primal purity, our childlike awareness, that Garden of Eden consciousness where we walked in the cool of the evening with God, and we didn’t even know that we’re different from anything we saw.

It’s not our mind’s fault that we’re so easily trapped in an illusion of separateness. It’s just doing what it’s supposed to do – naming everything, judging everything, ascribing value to everything, craving, pushing away and attaching to everything. Bravo mind. Nice job. Keep it up. We need you. But once in a while, it’s nice to remember who’s really in charge. Once in a while it’s nice to say, mind, you work for me, not the other way around. Thanks for everything you do, but go ahead and take the rest of the day off.

In Walden, everybody’s all-time favorite back-to-nature manifesto, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” To deliberate means to cautiously reason our way toward the ideal. And how can we live deliberately if we don’t understand the essential facts? For this process to work, we have to have good information. As you deliberate about the big questions like what is the good life, what is the purpose of life, what is the purpose of my life, what should I be doing with these few short years I have left, isn’t it supremely important to first understand the most important question of all: what am I? Only in nature, or better yet, wilderness are we unceremoniously stripped of all our careful constructions and reduced to our essential core – simple, unadorned, non-local awareness. We are no long defined by the social roles and definitions that layer over us like sediment. We realize that beneath all the layers we are pure, undifferentiated consciousness. With this essential fact in hand, we can re-enter the human world of family, job, duty, citizenship, moral obligation, creativity and community with a new-found sense of direction and purpose. We know now what this is all for. Our priorities have been re-ordered. Our eyes are firmly set on what really matters. And we are willing to let the rest go.

Wilderness has always been our greatest teacher. For millennia, humans have known that despite the comforting safety of our shelters, it is only when we step out under the sky unprotected that we emerge like birds from the confines of our shells. We need the nest, but we need the sky more.

Although it’s been years, I carry with me that night in the desert when I, for a few fleeting moments, saw the stars spread out beneath me like a sea of pearls. That one shift, that reorientation, forever loosened my attachment to the fleeting forms of the world and the careless devotion we place in our limited perceptions, assessments and judgments. I know now that there are not only two points of view for every problem – there are millions. I know that I can set myself free anytime I want from the Promethean chains that bind us all to a dangerously small view of the world and of ourselves. I know now that it is not only possible, but it is absolutely necessary for my survival and for the survival of the entire planet that we learn to live from the core truths of our existence and not the surface trivialities, that we learn to live as if it mattered, that we learn to live deliberately.

Paying the Price

2010-04-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

Violin virtuoso Friedrich Kriesler was approached by an admiring fan after a concert.

“I would give my life to play violin like that,” the woman gushed.

“Madam,” said Kriesler, slowly measuring his words, “I have.”

Kriesler’s droll response succinctly sums up one of life’s great truths – that evolution toward the ideal, whether of an individual or of an entire society, is never quick and easy. And yet so many of us act like it is.

If we put even a fraction of the energy we waste on envy, coveting, resentment and victim-consciousness into the process of cultivating our own greatness we would be amazed at the beautiful butterfly we have become. But we love our cocoons too much.

The Stoic philosophers of ancient Rome called it paying the price. Craving something that you are unwilling to work for is the height of folly. And from there it’s a steep slide into misery.

Wondering why you can’t keep your weight down while refusing to exercise and reduce your food intake is a prime example of wanting the prize without paying the price. Idly wishing you were a rock star while doing little or nothing to further your mastery of musicianship, singing, songwriting, arrangement, recording technology, stagecraft and the intricacies of the music business is nothing more than a pipe dream. Wanting a lucrative and rewarding professional career without sacrificing years and lots of money toward education and training is simply unfair. Whatever you were doing those six years when you could have been in college and grad school, well, that bore certain fruit too. Every decision and action plants seeds. And there is always the harvest. You can count on that.

Every choice entails sacrifice. When you say yes to something, you are saying no to everything else. That’s what makes choosing so torturous. Kierkegaard, Sartre and the other existentialists are fond of pointing out that we are radically free and that we invent ourselves with every choice. When we refuse to choose, that too is a choice. There is no escape from our freedom.

Let’s not waste any time on remorse and regret about the wasted years and the way fear robbed us of our joy. Own your choices. Forgive yourself. You have a good life. Don’t be tortured by all of the paths not taken. You did what you felt was best at the time. You paid whatever price you were willing or capable of paying. And now you’re home looking in the shopping bag at what you got. It’s too late to complain now. But it is not too late to begin making different choices. Set a new wheel in motion.

It is natural for us to compete with one another. Our tendency to feel envious of others is understandable. We can’t help but notice the amazing lives others have created and wonder, why not me? What do we do with this feeling of envy? Do we let it eat us for lunch, or do we let it jolt us awake and spur us toward the life we so richly deserve? We stand at a fork in the road. Down one road lies a life of creativity, emergence and mastery. Down the other lies a life of safety and regret. Let your envy drive you like a lash. Let it pitch you out of your fear and into your love. Gandhi said that everything we do is driven by one of two things, fear or love. Which road will you choose?

Now it’s time to get to work. Instead of envy, feel inspired. Let the success and accomplishment of others convince you that so much more is possible. The only thing holding you back is your limited and limiting vision of yourself. Success has little to do with manipulating objects and events in the outer world. Begin within. Success is an inside job.

Believe that you deserve it. Trust your instincts. Know that there are people all around you willing and able to contribute in powerful and unforeseen ways to your emerging sense of purpose. Show up in the spirit of cooperation and co-creation. None of us are alone, even when it feels like we are. Feeling alone and isolated? You aren’t. Snap out of it. That’s just your fear trying to take back control.

Do three things everyday to further your dream – just three. By the end of the month, you’ll have completed ninety concrete, specific tasks. Put a few months together and see the inevitable progress. Three years from now a whole new life will have taken shape.

There were three brick layers at a construction site. A passerby asked, “What are you doing?”

The first one said, “I’m laying bricks.”

The second one said, “I’m building a wall.”

The third one said, “I’m building a cathedral.”

Which one do you think is going to do a better job? Which one is going to work through the exhaustion and tedium? Which one invests each stroke of the trowel with love and precision? Which one sets each brick as if it were the single most important thing they’ve ever done? Which bricklayer are you?

There is no secret. This is not mysterious. The tools for building a great life are lying all around us. We have only to pick them up.

Are you wasting time and energy on regret? Are you drunk on the poison of envy and resentment, caught in the grips of fear, defeated by the delusion of powerlessness? Or are you awakening to your own boundlessness? Are you sick and tired of feeling sick and tired? Are you reaching for the tools with which you will build the life of your dreams? Don’t deny your own infinite potential. What a tragedy, the Afghani saying goes, to die like a pomegranate with all one’s seeds still locked up inside.

The world desperately needs you, the real you, to show up. But it’s going to take some work. Like Friedrich Kriesler, are you willing to sacrifice your life for something amazing, something bigger than any one of us? Are you willing to pay the price?

Ten Steps to a Great Marriage

2010-03-31T10:50:00.000-07:00

It’s coming up on wedding season. Many young and not so young couples are planning their summer nuptials. Everyone loves a great party, and while it is sensible to put some thought and energy into all of the details surrounding catering, décor and bridesmaid gowns, it is far more important to think deeply about what marriage itself actually means. A lovely wedding does not a marriage make.

I am no expert on marriage, although Lori and I will be celebrating our twenty-fifth anniversary this June, and I suppose that counts for something. Along the way we’ve gotten a few things wrong and a lot of things right. It really isn’t that mysterious. As a wedding present to all of you soon-to-be newlyweds, please allow me to share some of the things I’ve learned. Let’s call this Ten Steps to a Great Marriage.

1. Never Stop Being a Girlfriend/Boyfriend

I’m often shocked at the utter contempt some married people display toward each other. They act as if their spouse is the least important person in the world, little more than an annoying roommate, sibling or co-worker. This is easily remedied. Remember how you acted when you were dating? Do that. Put your best face forward. Call them on the phone for no reason. Put erotic notes in the pockets of their coats. Pack them a lunch. Bring home their favorite candy bar. Take care of your self, keep the weight down, dress nice, bathe. Look them in the eye. Listen. Act like you care, because you do, don’t you?

2. People Don’t Change – Choose Wisely

Don’t marry a musician then complain because they’re gone ten nights a month. Don’t marry an artist then resent their poverty. Don’t marry an ambitious go-getter then complain that their career always seems to come first. Don’t marry a momma’s boy then act surprised at his weakness and indecision. Don’t marry an assertive man then whine to your friends that he’s too controlling. Don’t rescue a damsel in distress and resent her for not being a powerful, competent life partner. Don’t marry a quiet man then complain because he never talks, or a talkative woman, then complain because she never shuts up. Those traits were there in full display the first day you met. Perhaps they were hard to see through the fog of your own denial, desperation or fantasy but you chose this person out of the billions of people on earth. There was something about those traits you wanted, even needed. Try and figure all of this out before the wedding bells chime.

3. Be Kind

No matter what’s happening, find a way to be gracious and kind. Your anger is your problem. Try to avoid using your spouse as a garbage disposal, a convenient place to dump all your darkness and bile. This is the one time when it makes sense to treat your spouse like a stranger, that is, restrain yourself. Courtesy and decorum pave the way for genuine bonding.

4. One Bank Account

Real intimacy has nothing to do with taking your clothes off. Real intimacy is pooling all of your resources and blending your fates into one. Only when you know you are responsible for the whole damn thing do you rise up out of your childish selfishness and become a full grown man or woman, someone who practices good communication and is intimately acquainted with prudence, restraint and generosity. If you can’t let go of control, you aren’t ready to be married.

5. On Big Decisions, Everyone Has Veto Power

Respect your spouse and believe with all your heart that this person really does have your back. Trust their judgment. Honor their opinion. On the really big decisions, everyone has veto power. What are the really big decisions? To have kids or not, to have a dog, where to live, major expenditures, vacations, religion, money. Again, all of this should be fully explored before you shove wedding cake into each other’s faces. And by the way, don’t shove wedding cake into each other’s faces. That is so over.

6. Let Your Spouse Be Who They Are

Naturally, you both need to put the marriage before your own childish desires. Foolish obsessions that pull you out of the marriage are to be avoided. You might have to let go of those World of Warcraft all-nighters. But this most certainly does not mean you are a slave to the other. Set your spouse free to be who they really are. Not all of your interests have to align. In fact, it would be weird if they did. A good marriage is a safe place to be true to yourself. To some extent, have separate lives.

7. Avoid Danger

We’re only human. Be smart about situations and environments that erode loyalties. This is controversial I know, but it’s pretty risky for married people to have close friends of the opposite sex. Intimacies develop. Attachments form. Secrets are shared. Pretty soon, lines get blurred. Good people go bad. A world of suffering can be avoided by simply avoiding certain situations. Some married couples have one shared email address. Not a bad idea.

8. Sex is Not an Option

This just in from the Obvious Department: sex is an essential, profoundly transformative experience. Open and honest sexuality between committed partners cements bonds in ways that no one really fully understands. Regular and frequent sex creates an atmosphere of trust, celebrates generosity, concretizes love, bolsters self-acceptance and heals wounds you didn’t even know you had. Sex makes everything better. A sexless marriage is a three-legged dog – it still gets down the road but it isn’t pretty. And here’s a surprise you don’t hear much in popular culture: married sex is way better than single sex. It is. And if your sex life starts to lag there’s a simple reason: you’re lagging on steps one through seven.

9. Men and Women are Different

Men and women have different needs and different ways of doing things. Wise women know that men are simple – if a man knows that he is loved and admired by his woman, he will do anything for her. Wise women also know that men show affection by mowing lawns, washing cars and painting mailboxes. Wise men know that women are complicated, and that satisfying them is a mysterious art requiring intelligence, awareness, vigilance and an almost preternatural sensitivity to the subtlest of non-verbal cues. Husbands, pay attention. Get out of your head and into your heart, then feel your way. You’ll be fine.

10. Mindfulness in Action

Marriage is a microcosm of the whole world. The same energies and actions that create a great marriage create a better world. Cultivate the sensitivity to hear what the other is saying as well as what they’re not saying. Ask questions. Say what you mean without drama and embellishment. Ask for what you want, but keep it simple. Be willing. Stop saying no all the time. When you’re feeling lonely and misunderstood, come out of yourself and give. When you wake up in the morning, ask yourself, what are three concrete, specific things I can do today to make my spouse’s life easier, better and more beautiful? Then do those things – and watch your own joy increase. That’s the most beautiful thing about a great marriage – you realize that your well-being and happiness are forever intertwined with the well-being and happiness of others. Loving is an action that does not know the difference between giving and receiving. Giving and receiving are two names for one circle.

These are the ten steps to a great marriage. Share them with your fiancé and have a nice long talk. Then after that you can get back to the important things, you know, napkin rings or linen origami?

Have a wonderful wedding. But have an even more wonderful life.

The Hidden Meaning of Easter

2010-03-22T06:58:00.000-07:00

“Death is not the opposite of life. The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.” -- Eckhart Tolle

Lately I’ve been trying to grow cilantro. Having an inexpensive and unending supply of the versatile herb is very appealing to me. But it happens every time. As soon as there are enough leaves for one good harvest the plant goes to seed, shooting up a thick leafless seed stalk. Cilantro doesn’t seem too concerned with what I want, or its own survival for that matter. All it cares about is the next generation. Its sole purpose seems to be to produce seeds, then promptly die. The fresh, pungent leaves that perfect my guacamole and chicken pad thai seem an incidental side effect.

Out on the patio, bent over another failed planter box of cilantro on a radiant spring morning, I can’t help but ponder the circling spiral of birth and death framed by the one changeless constant – forms may come and go but Life itself is eternal.

In world mythology and religion there is a long-standing tradition of drawing images and metaphors, and indeed entire theological scenarios from the world of nature. For Laozi the Dao is like water or a tender blade of grass. For Krishna, Brahman is like the sea that never imposes its own shape but takes on the shape of the shore as its own. For Jesus, God’s love is like rain, the Kingdom Heaven is like seeds, Jesus is the vine, we are the branches and by our fruit we shall be known. Jesus knew how to talk to farmers, even disheartened backyard cilantro farmers.

Every year in the spring billions of Christians all over the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. Many believe it was a literal event – that Jesus actually came back from the dead. For others, the story is a metaphor signifying the undying nature of Spirit. Either way, Easter signifies the triumph of life over death, a theme ancient agricultural people would have no trouble understanding.

Even a cursory glance at the world’s mythological and religious traditions reveals the widespread presence of the dying god motif, the archetypal tale of the gift-giving god whose sacrificial death brings rain or corn or eternal life. From Osiris to Quetzalcoatl to Odin to Attis to Dionysus to Jesus the god must die, often hung from a tree and then buried in the ground, planted like a seed only to rise again. The loss becomes a gain. The seed becomes grain for the bread of life. Sacrificial death, initially seen as an act of destruction, becomes an act of creation. As old forms dissolve, new forms arise. The tomb becomes a womb.

It is no accident that the dying god motif originated in early agricultural societies. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that early farming cultures, bound by the seasons, would recognize the cyclical nature of birth and death. Seeds are the source of new life and it is only in the death stage that plants produce seeds. Life comes only from death and from no where else. It becomes clear that death and birth are simply two points on a circle. The yin-yang symbol, the archetypal image of the snake eating its own tail as well as the mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism, Navajo sand painting and Jungian psychology all illustrate the universal awareness of this essential principle.

Also prevalent in early agricultural societies is the archetype of the Mother Goddess. Intimate with the generative energies of the earth, early farmers began to characterize the earth’s powers as feminine. Like mother earth, human mothers give life out of their own bodies and then sustain and nourish that life from their own bodies. The alignment of the twenty eight day lunar cycle and the twenty eight day menstrual cycle further concretizes this primal symmetry.

It is the Mother Goddess who ushers us into the world of forms. Every human being who ever walked the earth emerged from the body of a woman. From the goddess we come and to the goddess we return. The burial ritual is clearly a carry-over from this ancient realization. The dead, in burial, are taken back into the body of the earth-mother like seeds, completing the circle and thus overcoming the apparent finality of death. Circles, by definition, have no beginning and no end. As Krishna told Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, “there never was a time when you did not exist, nor will there ever be a time when you cease to exist.” Rebirth is not only suggested by the burial rite; it is assured, at least in the minds of its participants.

Since it is the Goddess so to speak that gave birth to us all, it should come as no surprise that gods too have mothers. The Mother Goddess sends forth her son, the dying god, as a willing sacrifice – a short-lived spark from the eternal realm bringing light into the darkness of the world. This fundamental narrative is repeated all over the world on every continent and in every mythology. Some dying gods, like Odin, Dionysus and Jesus are hung on trees (or manmade structures resembling trees like crosses) before they are buried underground or journey to the underworld. Jesus goes into the tomb for three days, the same length of time Jonah was in the belly of the great fish. Three days is also the length of time the moon is dark before beginning its journey back to fullness. Astronomical and physiological analogies abound. To modern people perpetually insulated from the night sky by their well-lit homes this may seem merely curious or even insignificant. To ancient people living under the stars for tens of thousands of years these alignments were as real as the night was long.

Central to the dying god motif is the theme of generative sacrifice. The death or suffering of the god always results in tremendous benefit to the world at large. In explicit violation of Zeus’s wishes Prometheus steals fire from Mt. Olympus and gives it to humankind, enraging Zeus and earning himself a horrible punishment. For all eternity Prometheus must remain chained to a rock while his liver is ripped from his body by vultures, only to grow back overnight with the whole process commencing anew in the morning. Talk about sacrifice. If given the chance to do it all over again, even with his infinite suffering, Prometheus wouldn’t change a thing. That’s just what gods do. And he isn’t the only one. Gods all over the world gave their lives in order that we might have corn or fire or everlasting life. Native American mythology is particularly rich with the theme of the gift-giving god who relinquishes his form yet somehow lives on.

In his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow recounts an Ojibwe myth about the hero Wunzh (who Longfellow called Hiawatha). In the tale, Wunzh embarks on a heroic quest with all the requisite elements – hardship, danger, struggle, prayer and visions followed by electrifying encounters with monsters and magical beings. Just another day at the office, right? As Wunzh grows weaker and weaker he is approached by a mysterious figure called Mondamin, a youth “dressed in garments green and yellow…plumes of green bent o’er his forhead and his hair was soft and golden.” Mondamin is, naturally, a personification of corn, the primary food source and sacred substance of numerous Native American peoples. But Mondamin doesn’t just hand himself over. Wunzh is going to have to fight for it.

In a luminous Great Lakes twilight, Mondamin challenges Wunzh to a wrestling match. Weak from fasting, Wunzh agrees and the two grapple and fall to the dusty ground in a twisting, flailing embrace. Somehow, just touching Mondamin fills Wunzh with a renewed strength. For three sunsets they wrestle and struggle, Wunzh growing stronger and stronger with each encounter. On the third night, Mondamin congratulates Wunzh for his courage, conviction, purity of mind and perseverance. Then he makes a startling offer. When I return tomorrow evening, Mondamin tells Wunzh, you will kill me, and when you do, you must bury me in the ground and protect my grave from all disturbances. On the fourth night, just as Mondamin predicted, Wunzh prevails and buries the lifeless body of Mondamin as instructed. Soon, small green shoots of tender corn begin to peek from the ground.

Mondamin’s “death” was a self-directed, willing act of sacrifice that not only saved Wunzh from imminent starvation; it gave the Ojibwe their primary food as well as the central object of their ritual life. It isn’t lost on any of us that the very marrow of our life is won only through struggle, and yet the persistent vision remains that we live not in a hostile universe but in a profoundly nurturing and cooperative one. On the surface – struggle and scarcity. Beneath the surface – endless abundance, infinite creativity and a deep, resounding harmony.

In the Jesus story we see an amalgam of all these elements – the willing and self-directed sacrifice, the death and resurrection, the bringing of gifts and the presence of a divine order beneath the vale of tears.

But there is still a deeper layer yet to be uncovered.

What if the story of Jesus isn’t about Jesus at all?

To re-cast a famous Joseph Campbell saying, what if each of us is the dying god of our own lives? What riches are uncovered if we read the dying god stories not as literal, historical events but as metaphors for our own evolution from material, biological beings bound by instinctual conditioning into spiritual beings of awakened consciousness? Is it any wonder then that the dying god is so often born of a virgin or through some other non-biological process? Horus was conceived as his mother Isis hovered in the form of a hawk over the dead body of her husband Osiris. Mithra was born spontaneously from a rock. Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Jesus, Quetzalcoatl and many others were born of virgins. The hero, the gift-giver and the dying god live and have their being in higher consciousness, not in the lower realms of ego, competition and conflict. In the Gospel of John, when Nicodemus asks for Jesus’ advice, Jesus simply says, “you must be born from above.” In other words, each of us must shift from lower consciousness to the higher plane of God-consciousness within. The virgin birth signifies that each of us, at the level of our divine essence, was not born from the union of sperm and egg but are identical and unified with the eternally Real, what Krishna called “the unborn” and what Jesus called “everlasting life”. Shifting out of body and ego identification is the work of every spiritual tradition.

If the purpose of myth is to teach us how to live our own lives, then what have we learned?

In Buddhism the central metaphor is that of awakening from the sleep of ignorance, suffering and conditioning. In Christianity the central metaphor is death and rebirth, coming out of our animal nature with its instinctual drives of acquisition and conflict and rising into the unitive experience of God-consciousness, transcending all boundaries and limitations. Resurrection is transformation. Rebirth signifies death to the ego, to limitation, to space and time. Rising from the “grave” of our lower nature embodies the realization of awakening.

Beneath the crests and troughs of the ocean’s waves lies an immense stillness, a stillness that is both the source of the waves and their destination. Is it not true that we “die” every night? Were it not for sleep, this cyclical, recurring “death”, this immersion into the sea of unconsciousness, our life would cease. Just as the silence between notes makes music possible, so too the empty formlessness of the Void makes possible the vibrant fullness of our conscious, waking life. In the end, the inner and the outer are the same. The surface mirrors the depth. The tomb is a womb. Nirvana is samsara, and the kingdom of heaven is lying all around us, only we do not see it. Not only is there a correspondence, there is an identity. Life, in essence, is synonymous with the eternal Ground of Being, the Real, what we in the west call God, and as such it is ultimately untouched by death. “Death is not the opposite of life,” Eckhart Tolle writes in Stillness Speaks. “The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.” Despite centuries of theological calcification it is still be possible for us to exhume the universal spiritual wisdom of the Christian story, that each of us is the presence of God-consciousness in the field of forms. Only, as Buddha pointed out, we don’t know it. Like the sun breaking over the horizon at countless sunrise services throughout Christendom this Easter, we too are gradually dawning to the truth of our divine nature. Dare to say it out loud. Let your sun rise. Let the wisdom within you shape your thoughts and words and actions. Become, finally, who you really are. This is the hidden meaning of Easter.

This article first appeared in the March/April 2010 issue of Unity Magazine

Growing Pains

2010-02-25T07:17:00.001-08:00

Spring is bursting out all over. New buds are pushing out through the bark of last year’s branches. Roots bore deeper into the earth while new leaves like pendants wave in the wind. Sun and rain chase each other like birds across the brightening sky. The whole earth seems to be awakening from silence and shadow. With the patience of Job, life emerges from the dormant forms of last year’s leavings, rising like the sun and moon – inexorable, indomitable, selfless and unafraid.

In our own lives we too feel the restless stirring of new life emerging. We sat down to write a quick note to our dads and a nine page letter poured out. We began humming a tune under our breath at an important meeting and wrote a song walking back to the car. We stopped at the grocery store on the way home and threw ourselves into a favorite recipe, the whole house cast under the spell of roasting garlic and rosemary. We faced down our old two-headed enemy resistance and avoidance and finally tackled that ugly pile of papers on our desk, reveling at last in the clarity afforded by uncluttered space and asking ourselves, why did I put that off for so long? Then we pick up the phone and make that difficult call – the one that’s been haunting us for months, even years – and learn the truth that by simply cultivating willingness we allow the irrepressible healing of love and forgiveness to well up and wash clean the wounds we have made.

It is the nature of all life to expand. In Indian philosophy, the word for ultimate reality is Brahman. The Vedas, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita teach that Brahman is not a god; it is the undifferentiated source of all things. Our idea of God is a stop-gap measure, a mere personification of this primal energy. Brahman is the underlying nature of reality itself, beyond all the dualities of being and non-being, existence and non-existence, God and not-God. Brahman is the ground of being, the sacred, formless source from which all forms are made. It is within all things. Everything is a manifestation of Brahman – every object, every thought, every particle of light. The whirling of electrons around nuclei, the energy of consciousness, the poppies in the field, the blue whales in the sea, the spiraling galaxies in the endless night, even the fabric of space and time itself – these are all Brahman. Therefore, so are we.

The etymology of Brahman is clear and revealing. The Sanskrit word Brahman comes from brih which means “to expand” or “to grow”. It is the nature of God-consciousness to continuously move outward, to manifest itself as ever-changing forms. We are one of those forms. When we come to understand this, we can finally be at peace and stop resisting the never ending restlessness within us, that unsettling habit of never being satisfied, of always wanting more, of feeling that no matter how great this moment is there must be yet another accomplishment to achieve, another mountain to climb, another song to write.

And in our calm and clarity we move closer toward understanding another fundamental truth: growth hurts. There can be no growth without the necessary dissolution of previous forms – forms that once meant so much to us. Growing means forever letting go.

Seeds burst and die as new sprouts emerge. Flowers whither and fade as fruit takes form. Growth is always a kind of death, and to deny this is to live forever in a debilitating lie. We must say yes to loss and transformation. We have no choice.

With every new achievement comes a host of new problems. You want fame? Now you can’t go anywhere without people bothering you. You want money? Now you long for the simplicity of the lean years. You want success and mastery? Now the demands others place on you become staggering. But they can never equal the ridiculous demands you place on yourself – the nagging, haunting worry that you are never good enough, no matter what you do.

But all of this is healed in the light of wisdom – the wisdom each of us holds deep within the folds of our awareness. We are enough, because we are the presence of God-consciousness in the world. We are the Presence of eternity in the field of time. While the forms may come and go, that which we really are was never born and will never die. Brahman is Life. “Life is not the opposite of death,” writes Eckhart Tolle. “The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite.”

Jesus, Buddha, Krishna and every other wisdom teacher worth his or her salt spent their whole life begging us to acknowledge this truth – we are not who we think we are. Wisdom means breaking free of our limited and limiting perception of ourselves and moving into the deeper realization of our identity with the infinite, eternal ground of being, what Jesus called the Father, what Buddha called Emptiness and what Krishna called the Self. When asked how he healed people Jesus answered, “It is not I who do these things, but the Father in me. And all of these things you could do, and more.”

Creating is costly. It hurts to be more. Most of us spend our lives cultivating comfort, asleep to the fact that comfort is the enemy of greatness. To expand and grow into what and who we really are is to stretch beyond our former bounds. Sometimes we feel like we’re breaking apart – and we are. Learning to love discomfort is the final hurdle. When we cross that hurdle and transcend our childish complacency we are born into a realm of limitless possibility. Knowing this, we can weather change with serenity, equanimity, generosity and compassion. The next time you find yourself surrounded by abundance, yet still yearning for more, you can smile and know that two contradictory truths are at play: we already have everything (because we already are everything), yet still feel the ceaseless expansion of our natures. The temporary forms that make up “the world”, including us, are forever emerging, expanding, colliding, conflicting, aligning, receding, dissolving and re-forming. It is our sacred right and duty to participate in this glorious emergence, this concert of co-operation. We are not to fear, avoid or resent this process. We are to practice loving-kindness, even and perhaps most especially toward ourselves. We are to join in and guide with a light touch this flowering and fading of which we are an inexorable part. This is our beautiful, glorious, heartbreaking life. These are our tears. These are the things we make. This is the light we bring with the flame of our growing awareness. These are our gifts. These are the things we must in the end let go. These are our growing pains.

Artist, Heal Thyself

2010-01-30T08:14:00.000-08:00

What exactly do we want from our artists? The distraction of entertainment? The clarity of hard truth? The tingle of titillation? The scouring release of deep-tissue catharsis? Maybe what we want most from our artists is risk.

Artists take risks. They don’t have steady incomes. They don’t have health insurance. They don’t own homes. They can hardly make the rent. They hang all their fears, hopes, dreams and fantasies out in the open for public disdain. They walk into every room naked. They’re high on a tightrope without a net. Living vicariously through our favorite artists anchors us in the realization that life is dangerous – a realization that hopefully propels us to craft our own best lives. We risk little. But we ask our artists to risk it all.

The myth of the artist as noble hero is not entirely genuine. Sometimes people just fall into the arts because they’re not very good at anything else. Too wounded and self-absorbed to ever stand up straight, the artist makes a business out of selling their pain. In many ways the life of the artist is a life of perpetual childhood. Beholden only to whimsy and free without a moment’s notice to walk away from any and all commitments – these are the genetic traits of the artistic life. Yet despite all the potential for narcissism and havoc, artists still inspire us with their fearless commitment to themselves, their craft and the maddening quest for beauty and meaning.

More than anyone else, Vincent van Gogh has come to represent the quintessential archetype of the modern artist. Articulate, brilliant, visionary and utterly mad, van Gogh captures our imagination like no other. Fluently trilingual (Dutch, English and French), a voracious reader, deeply spiritual and unapologetically carnal, van Gogh lived a little bit larger than the rest of us. And yet his life was a muddled fog of isolation, poverty, obscurity and despair. Were it not for the continual financial and emotional support of his beloved brother Theo, Vincent would have accomplished little or nothing – as it is, he is the most recognizable, influential and admired painter on the planet.

Van Gogh did not invent the marriage between madness and art, (think Goya), but he certainly perfected it. It is from van Gogh that we get the now-trite narrative of the artist who abandons all restraint and sells every drop of sanity to buy one more inch on the road to genius. Even a cursory glance at art history reveals a long list of artists who flamed out young and died broken, and in the music business it’s a particularly crowded club. This is the question: to make great art do we have to sacrifice everything else? Does it have to be either/or?

The idea of the artist as genius was born in the Renaissance with the emergence of Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Before then, painters enjoyed the social status of laborers. Michelangelo belonged to a trade union of house painters.

With Raphael, the idea of the artist became synonymous with genius. Along came fame, wealth, glory and the birth of something with which we are all too familiar – celebrity culture. Raphael, like a rock star, enjoyed every privilege and unlimited access to every salon, parlor and throne room. Wealthy nobles competed to be seen with the young genius. Hard living, megalomania and boundless appetite take their toll. He was dead at 37.

Vincent van Gogh died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound at 37. Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix died from drug and alcohol abuse at the age of 28. Kurt Cobain killed himself with a shotgun at the age of 27. John Keats was only 26. Sid Vicious, 22.

The die was cast. To this day we reward our artistic masters with infinite wealth, endless indulgence and open-ended forgiveness. Only Michael Jackson can allegedly molest children and simultaneously enjoy near-universal adulation.

Must artists, like vampires, entirely abandon normal life to gain their heralded powers? Must they sell their souls? Does the voracious and parasitic nature of artistic genius always kill the host? Isn’t there any other way?

In ancient China a different model emerged. Perhaps because of the pervasive influence of Confucianism, the idea of the individual beholden to no one never really took hold. The ideal human life was one of connection, community, humility, responsibility and cooperation. The single biggest mistake a person could make was to not be useful and productive; the greatest shame, to be destructive to the harmony of the whole.

In ancient China then, the idea of the artist as celebrity never happened. Art is just something you do. Everyone is an artist. When the accounts are balanced, accountants paint. Housewives design living spaces. Bureaucrats play music on the weekends. Being artistic isn’t reserved for the petulant few, it is the birthright of every human being – every meal a masterpiece, every conversation a poem, every garden a handmade heaven, every gesture a dance.

This vision of art is a long way away from the notion of art as self-indulgent and destructive. Instead, art, like breathing, is innate and natural. There is no need to pathologically set it apart from the rest of life, thereby relegating an entire category of people – artists – to the confusing and paradoxical binary status of masterful geniuses and bumbling knaves. Rather than art being a way to wrest beauty from nature and place it on the canvas or in a sculpture or in a song, art becomes a way of celebrating our integration with the natural world. Nothing special. Everything special.

In our culture, the iconic myth of the starving artist – someone who has given up the creature comforts to sacrifice it all for their art – is a vexing, tenacious paradigm which has long ago outlived its usefulness. Perhaps it’s time to celebrate a new model – a model that combines the best of the eastern and western paradigms. Maybe you don’t have to walk away from middle class comfort to make great art. Maybe it’s O.K. to stand on your own without patronage or poverty. Setting aside some money from the tip jar for catastrophic health insurance won’t compromise your artistic integrity.

We need our artists to take risks. They inspire us to test the self-imposed boundaries of our own lives. But we also need our artists to teach us how to cultivate the beauties of our own lives. As parents, as professionals, as butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, we want to be shown how to integrate art into real life. As you weave your intoxicating spells with sound and paint and clay and words and light, please show us also how to harmonize the often conflicting energies of our own lives. Dear artists, we need you to make your own life beautiful and healthy and whole. Are you willing to take the biggest risk of all – being happy? As is true for all of us, your life is your greatest masterpiece. If you would really serve us, you would find a way to stand strong on your own while searching fearlessly for beauty and truth. We need you to abandon the sorry notion that only through your suffering and your alienation can you create. Drugs, alcohol, poverty and dysfunction are not the requisite elements of the creative life. It’s time to let the lie die. Art, like any other form of truth-telling, is dangerous. But art, like truth, is also a healing energy. Show us our pain. But show us also our infinite capacity to grow and heal ourselves and heal those around us. It doesn’t have to always end in misery. Artist, heal thyself.

One Twenty Ten

2009-12-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

Just as every drop of the ocean carries the taste of the ocean, so does every moment carry the taste of eternity. -- Nisargadatta Maharaj

It’s often said that every ending is a beginning. So it must also be true that every beginning is an ending.

As we celebrate the beginning of the second decade of the 2000s we feel more keenly than ever the loss of what can never be retrieved or relived. The past has a way of doing that, of slipping away without even leaving a note.

Despite our increasingly effective (and intrusive) ways of capturing the sights and sounds that masquerade as our “experience”, there is still one unavoidable fact: no matter how many megabytes of audio and visual data we collect, there is no way to make any of it truly last. Our technology makes us clever archivists, but when it comes to stopping time we’re still knuckle-dragging primitives.

I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to live in a world before photography, film, video and sound recording. How has this relatively recent technology altered the way in which we experience the world?

Back when I used to shoot film, actual film, on my 35 mm cameras, I would carefully choose each shot. Film and prints weren’t cheap, and you only had 24 or 36 on a roll. You had to make each shot count. So you thought a lot about composition, lighting and most importantly, value – was this scene or image worth keeping?

Now that we’re all shooting digital we are no longer bound by these frugal restrictions. We shoot indiscriminately. Later, we’ll see if we got anything good.

But what does all this continual image-gathering actually get us besides the need for bigger and bigger hard drives? As we gain endless files of archived images, what do we lose?

Quantum physics affirms the vexing nature of image-capturing. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, also known as “the observer effect”, shows that the act of observing alters the observed. There is no way to look at something without changing the thing you’re looking at. Early in her career as a young anthropologist on the island of Samoa, Margaret Mead dutifully recorded the self-reported rampant promiscuity of her adolescent female subjects. Many years later the same girls, now old women, told another anthropologist, “we made it all up.” They said it was fun making up stories for the American scientist lady. And, they said, she seemed to eat it up. Mead’s influential work, based on her research in Samoa, touting the alleged harmlessness of casual sex had a profound effect on the twentieth century. The innocent lies of a handful of Samoan girls arguably contributed greatly to a sea change in the sexual mores of the modern world. Mead thought she was recording objective reality. It turns out there’s no such thing.

The act of observing alters the observed. But even more importantly, it alters the observer.

As a boy I used to shoot a lot of super-8 movies. It became an obsession. Everywhere I went, whether I was shooting or not, I noticed great compositions, I framed shots, kept a watchful eye on lighting conditions and logged locations into memory for future projects. My eyes had become mere accessories to my camera. The process took me over. I stopped shooting super-8 film many years ago, and to this day, I still have not purchased a video camera. I’m afraid of what might happen.

I am also in the habit of journaling when I travel. Whenever Lori and I go somewhere, I bring a blank composition book and couple of pens. As I drink my morning coffee I write for an hour or so about the previous day’s events. I love to write, and I love coming home with a detailed account of our time in Manhattan or on Kauai or on the windy moors of Cornwall. There’s just one problem. As we’re walking through Stone Age ruins or standing in front of Van Gogh’s Starry Night at MOMA in New York I’m thinking, hmm, what should I write about this tomorrow morning? Even without a camera around my neck I’m still strangled by the process of encapsulation.

No matter the technology, the fact remains that our attempts to capture reality have captured us.

Recently, I’ve initiated an experiment. What if I just stood in the middle of my life and stopped trying to record the “important” moments? What if I just reveled in the experience of the now? Rather than compose shots, design pan-zoom combinations or draft paragraphs, what if I just stood there and breathed the Navajo prayer, “beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty below me, beauty above me, beauty behind me, beauty before me; I walk the pollen path.”

Wherever we are, we are forever at the center of an ever-changing vortex of sacred transformation. None of it can be captured; none of it can be frozen and put on a shelf for later experience. This is it. Here and now. We are either present to it or not. You can’t have it both ways.

In our obsessive craving to possess everything we overlook the simple truth; we already are everything. This holy moment contains all the grandeur and majesty of the ages. We look incessantly outward, just beyond the grasp of our outstretched hands, blind and numb to the treasure within. “Without going outside, you may know the whole world,” Laozi writes in the Dao De Jing. Every drop of water contains the whole of the ocean and every moment holds the fullness of eternity. We don’t need to capture and cage the heartbreaking poignance of the fleeting moments of our lives. There is nothing to grasp or possess. Time, Plato says, is just the moving image of eternity. The eternal Presence is forever, unavoidably within us.

2009 was a blur. What if we brought a different, more awakened consciousness into the new year? If it’s anything like 2009, 2010 will be over before you know it. It’s already slipping away. Put down your camera and open your eyes. There is only going to be one 2010.

So This is Christmas

2009-12-07T16:32:00.000-08:00

So this is Christmas, and what have you done? Another year older, a new one just begun. -- John Lennon

In his immortal song Happy Xmas (War is Over) John Lennon asks an accusatory question, a profound question that cuts through the layers of treacle and tinsel like a chain saw – are you really living the life you want to be living? Really?

Whenever this song comes on the radio as I’m zigzagging across town on my oh-so-important errands I have to pull over. The swirling waltz tempo, the circular, ascending chords, the pendulous melody, the lyrical balance between solemnity and celebration all brought to life by the beloved voice of a long lost friend – has there ever been a more powerful Christmas song? (And the competition is stiff). Like a ghost in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, John Lennon comes back from the grave every Christmas to strum his Gibson, rattle our chains and drag us into an essential, transformative awareness. Are we living authentically, awake to every precious moment and opportunity that comes our way, or are we merely a cog on a wheel in someone else’s machine, going through the motions of our so-called lives like a sleepwalker? He never was one for beating around the bush.

With his opening lines Lennon pulls us into deep self-examination. Knowing that for many of us this a vulnerable time – our emotions are close to the surface – Lennon strikes to the heart with a profoundly powerful question. Here at the end of the year, as we reflect on the passage of time and more importantly, our use of that time, it is a very good time indeed to ponder the cumulative effect of our choices and actions. Our dreams, like ghosts that haunt the shadowed edges of our lives, are ever-present. We want something better than this. We long for love and connection and purpose. There is so much beauty waiting to emerge. Our potential mastery, prosperity and joy are waiting in the wings, waiting for their cue to take their rightful place center stage. All of these potentialities. Another year over, a new one just begun. And what have we done?

Each moment is an end, and each moment is a beginning. The circularity of the seasons reminds us of this. We are ever born anew. Yes, the past is what got us here to this present moment. But we are unbound. History is not destiny. We are not determined by the past. We are forever and infinitely free in this next moment to reemerge from the womb of our incompletion and stand tall as beings of infinite value. Do you dare? That is Lennon’s taunt.

And so this is Christmas, I hope you have fun, the near and the dear ones, the old and the young.

But let this not be a solemn process. We do not stand accused. Lennon’s goal is encouragement, not condemnation. Let us also celebrate the joys and gifts of being alive. And the depth of our happiness is only realized in community. We have met the enemy, and it is isolation. As we open our hearts and our arms and drop our fears, prejudices and limitations we find ourselves in the middle of warm, caring communities. Our friends, families, neighbors, colleagues and strangers alike stand ready to take our outstretched hand. Talk to somebody. Hear their story. Give the gift of time and attention. Love is not complicated. It is simply the act of presence, without expectation or demand. Let yourself be amazed.

A merry, merry Christmas and a happy new year, let’s hope it’s a good one, without any fear.

With the help of the children of the Harlem Community Choir and a bottomless Phil Spector wall-of-sound production, Yoko Ono leads us into the childlike simplicity of the chorus and the central theme of the song: the triumph of optimism over pessimism. It is a master stroke of casting. These utterly disarming voices form the perfect counterpoint to Lennon’s sage presence. For me, the emotional core of the song is the second half of the chorus, with its descending melody and stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks honesty. Rarely does pop music get this naked, this raw, this real. On the surface, a simple hope – at core, a ground breaking affirmation. No matter what lies in the past, there lies before us a sacred opportunity, the opportunity to realize the ancient dream of peace and dignity for all. With childlike innocence we claim the promise of the ages: the end of fear, the dawn of peace and the simple sanity of love.

War is over, if you want it, war is over now.

Underneath it all, woven through the fabric of the song like a golden thread, are the words of John and Yoko’s anti-war campaign. Taken verbatim from the billboards they created and put in major cities all over the world protesting the Vietnam War, this mesmerizing chant moves through the shadows like an unconscious thought. Affirming the infinite power of the collective conscience of humanity, John and Yoko share their boundless optimism that if the people lead, the leaders must follow. But we needn’t see this as just an anti-war song. It goes beyond politics and global conflict. As Gandhi taught, the real war is within. What are we doing to create peace in our minds, in our homes, on the road, in our offices, in our classrooms, in our marriages? What Lennon is really teaching is this, that reality is simply a product of the mind. Our thoughts create our words and our words create our actions and our actions create our habits and our habits construct our character. Our greatest gift this holiday season, or any season, is how we show up in our own lives. Who are you going to be? How does your presence impact others? What kind of world are you co-creating? War is not inevitable. Peace is possible. We are always creating, whether consciously or not. Let’s choose consciousness. Peace is not the destination. Peace is the journey. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”

And so this is Christmas, for weak and for strong, the rich and the poor ones, the road is so long.

We have an opportunity. We have a chance at deepening the reach of our own humanity, of broadening the scope of our vision, of expanding our sphere of influence. And Christmas is the right time to begin. All of us are hurting. We’re all struggling. Times are hard. There’s never enough money. There are health issues and relationship strains. Trouble at work, trouble at home. And the future is fraught with danger. But beneath all the waves of woe lies an infinite sea of stillness. Even an atheist like Lennon gets it. There is a sacred source at the core of all of these overlapping spheres of experience. We only need to sink down into the roots of our inner Being, available to us in each moment. We continually drink from the boundless source flowing forever from the center, and as we do, we are strengthened and encouraged to live the lives we have always imagined. Soon we will be another year older, and another, and on and on until the last ragged breath leaves our tired body. Then it will be too late. Now is the time to create the lives we all so richly deserve. You don’t have to fix the world. Don’t turn this vision into yet another egoic achievement. Instead, simply enjoy your life and find the myriad small ways to connect to the people around you through kindness, through song, through the healing touch of a hand. Draw the presence of the Real to the surface with intentional, conscious action. Whenever you get caught up in the harried, hurried pace of the madness of life, stop, take a good look around and sing to yourself, “and so this is Christmas.”

The Consciousness of Gratitude

2009-11-21T12:43:00.000-08:00

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” -- Cicero

I was standing at the kitchen sink washing the pots that wouldn’t fit in the dishwasher. My hands were deep in the soapy water, my head in a warm cloud of tea tree and lavender. Dinner was done and the kitchen was clean – as clean as it was going to be tonight.

Then it happened.

It began in my toes, moved up my legs and settled in my chest. It was not a thought, not an idea. It was a knowing.

I was suddenly and inexplicably happy.

Outside the window the last light of day was draining from the sky. The shadows were spreading out from under the trees and joining together in darkness. In the distance the dock lights flickered on the surface of the lake like floating flames.

Dinner was good, but then again, it always is. The view from the window was nice, just like it is every night. So why was this moment special? Why was I suddenly awash in gratitude and deeply in love with everything I saw? Why now did life seem utterly, ordinarily perfect?

The consciousness of gratitude – that deep and abiding feeling of aliveness, well-being, serenity and joy – is a singular pleasure that transcends thought and circumstance. It is not a philosophical tenet or a theological doctrine to be debated and honed by rational discourse. It is not just another good idea to set alongside all the others. It is an experience that wells up from the ground of Being beyond the reach of the mind and its conceptual field. The consciousness of gratitude is not so much a way of thinking as it is a way of being. It is not something we achieve as much as allow. One thing’s for sure. When you get one taste, you want more.

On Thanksgiving Day and throughout the holiday season a familiar ritual is repeated all over America. We go around the table and tell each other what we’re thankful for. Giving thanks for the things we have is a powerful starting point, but there is an even deeper dimension to gratitude our earnest pronouncements sometimes obscure. What if the consciousness of gratitude has nothing to do with what we have here in the outer world of forms? What if the consciousness of gratitude comes before, not after, we count our blessings?

Thanksgiving may be a uniquely American holiday, but its spiritual core, the consciousness of gratitude, is truly global. All of the world’s wisdom traditions share the notion that our consciousness is the field out of which the bounty of our lives emerge. And gratitude, as Cicero says, “is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”

Underneath all the diversity and complexity of the Indian traditions, often lumped together and called Hinduism in the west, lays one simple claim: there is only one reality and it is God. Brahman, as it is known in Sanskrit, the ancient language of the Vedas and the Upanishads, is the ground of Being from which all thoughts and forms arise. But Brahman itself is beyond all thoughts and forms, beyond all personifications and qualities. While it might be tempting to say that Brahman is present in everything, it would be closer to the truth to say that everything is the presence of Brahman. The goal of Hinduism is the realization of this truth – our complete and utter unity with Brahman. And when we realize our unity with the ground of Being, we realize that we lack absolutely nothing. All thoughts of separation and lack are maya, or illusion.

If all is One then there is no duality, no this and that, no me and mine, no other thing to posses. None of us owns of any of this. You don’t own your children, you don’t own your garden, you don’t even own your possessions any more than you can own a piece of the sky or the air in your lungs. All of these things are expressions of the One, of which we are already an inextricable part. There is nothing to possess because we are already unified with the eternal field of consciousness and all its manifestations. In light of this reality, the only sane stance is profound and continual gratitude.

Like Hinduism, Buddhism also calls us to awaken from the dream of separateness. In unenlightened consciousness we live perpetually in the future and in the past – anywhere but here and now. Our habitual, conditioned thought-stream is characterized by fear and longing. Buddha taught that our attachment to these erroneous thought-forms is the cause of suffering. Our attachment to self-serving portraits of the past and the future imprison us in the consciousness of scarcity and lack – a far cry from gratitude. It is only by awakening to this now moment that we experience release from the cycle of egoic craving and inevitable dissatisfaction. When we practice acceptance of what is, when we awaken to the infinite formlessness of the now, gratitude seeps up through the gaps between our thoughts like groundwater.

We are reminded many times in the first pages of the Hebrew Bible that the world is enough. With each new element of creation, Genesis sounds the refrain, “and it was good.” Judaism forcefully affirms the fundamental goodness of the world. We already have everything we need, only we don’t know it, lost in the anguish of covetousness. As with Hinduism and Buddhism, the problem is never an absence of external possessions. Our unhappiness is always and only the fruit of our own mistaken thinking.

In the 23rd Psalm King David sings out from the depths of his God-consciousness, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, He restores my soul.” But behind David’s resounding manifesto of gratitude is a real-world pragmatism. Life is not a bowl of cherries. There are conflicts. There are challenges. Powerful people are working at cross-purposes with us and with those we love. David is undaunted. “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies,” he writes. “You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” David reminds us that we needn’t be free of all problems in order to experience gratitude. On the contrary, gratitude is the stance with which we must meet our “enemies”, and in that light begin to heal our lives with the balm of our common humanity.

Like David, Jesus speaks of an undaunted intimacy with God. From the depths of his fully realized God-consciousness he calls us to uncover our own, knowing that only from a lived experience of the inner divine presence can we properly order the details of our outer lives. Instead of obsessively worrying about our possessions and circumstances here in the dusty world, Jesus enjoins us to be “born from above.”

“Seek first the kingdom of God,” he tells us in the gospel of Matthew, “and all else will be given to you.” In other words, only in the light of God-consciousness do we experience true abundance and gratitude. The good news is that we don’t have to go anywhere or ask someone else for the kingdom of heaven. It is within us. It is to be realized through the depths of our own loving, and even through the agony of our mistakes. Not one of our steps leads away from it. For both Jesus and Buddha, awakening consciousness is born from the seeds of acceptance and comes to fruition in the consciousness of gratitude.

The consciousness of gratitude is the central element of Islamic belief and practice as well. In fact, according to the Qu’ran, Muslims have only two obligations: gratitude and surrender. Islam teaches that we live in a world of endless abundance and any form of consciousness other than gratitude would be a cognitive error. The consciousness of gratitude is logical and rational as well as devotional. And the only way to experience this depth of wisdom is by surrendering – surrendering the ego with its incessant worry, craving and attachment to its own cleverness. As in the recovery movement, only through the admission of powerlessness do we shift from the impotence of the ego to the omnipotence of Spirit. It’s time to resign from the debating society and let the mystery be.

The world’s religions teach us that if we really knew who and what we were, if we fully realized our essential, authentic selves, we would fall on our knees in amazement. The realization of God-consciousness and the consciousness of gratitude are one in the same thing. In other words, as we practice gratitude, we move closer toward awakening to the divine within us and all things. Only when we cease living in the past or the future, only when we live in the fullness of this now moment, only when we live as the lilies in the field are we in the kingdom of God. The consciousness of anxiety and fear are the mind’s delusional attachment to future scenarios that have no reality. The consciousness of shame and regret are the mind’s attachment to an irretrievable past that no longer has any reality except in our thoughts. In the eternal Present, beyond the mind, shame and fear fade away leaving only the bright light of gratitude, of forgiveness, of wellness, of surrender to what is, of the realization that the kingdom of heaven is lying all around us only we do not see it, not when our eyes are turned to the worrisome future or the mournful past.

Gandhi was asked by a journalist to sum up his philosophy in three words. “Renounce and enjoy,” he said, paraphrasing the Isha Upanishad. To renounce is to surrender all attachments and give up the ego’s need to control everything, allowing the present moment to be as it is. Only then can we truly enjoy the infinite bounty of our lives and be at play in the field of forms without attachment to any of them. We are already one with everything. There’s no need to grasp or cling to any of it. And when we let go, our eyes and our hands and our hearts are filled with an abundance beyond the wildest imaginings of our limited and limiting ego.

In an old Zen story, a young man traveled to a far off monastery to learn about Buddhism. The monks took him in and showed him to his room. One week went by, then two, then three. In frustration the young man finally went to the head monk and said, “I came here to learn about Zen but no one has taught me anything.”

“Have you eaten?” the master asked.

“Yes.”

“Then wash your bowl.”

I’m standing in the kitchen again, up to my elbows in soapy water, scrubbing pots that won’t fit in the dishwasher. My stomach is full. Our dog Boone is asleep in the corner by the fire. My wife Lori is paying bills, making sure that what we have keeps flowing in the right directions. Outside a light rain is falling.

I know how to do it now. I know how to let go of the worry, the fear, the regret, the frustration. I simply breathe deeply into the core of my being the realization that I am not my thought-stream, and beneath the waves of worry and fear lay an infinite sea of Being, and I Am That, and I don’t have to be worried or afraid anymore. Everything is as it must be in this moment. Of course I can work for change and cultivate new areas of growth in my life and in the world around me. But tonight, right here at the kitchen sink, I can slip into the peaceful stillness of the consciousness of gratitude.

This article first appeared in the November/December 2009 issue of Unity Magazine

What Winning Means

2009-10-27T07:06:00.000-07:00

I used to think poetry contests were totally bogus. Then I won one.

I took third place for one poem and honorable mention for another. Two poems in one contest? What about all the other worthy entries? I felt greedy. Then I felt guilty. Then I felt stupid for feeling greedy and guilty. Then I felt confused.

What does it mean to win an art contest? As a songwriter and musician I’d won a few awards through the years, and now this. It was unnerving. The trophy shelf in my music studio was getting crowded. I had to figure out what was happening. Why was the least competitive guy I knew winning prizes?

Schopenhauer talks about how life, as it is being lived, seems random and chaotic, shaped by one accident after another. It is only in retrospect, looking back, that one sees a pattern, an undeniable order choreographed not by the individual will but by a metaphysical force beyond anyone’s control. All the chance encounters and unsought influences sculpt the course of our lives like a river carves a canyon. I can’t help but wonder along with David Byrne in the Talking Heads classic, well, how did I get here?

Naturally, it began with my family. My brothers and I grew up under the loving guidance of Hilbert and Amy Bolland, Dutch immigrants who brought their European sensibilities to the California shore. Our home was a place of music, conversation and art. Their wide-eyed wonder and belief in the infinite creative power of the American dream extended to their three boys. My parents made it clear that the only limitations we had were the ones we placed on ourselves.

Competitive sports were not a part of the picture, not at home anyway. I can’t remember a football, basketball or baseball game ever being on TV in my house when I was growing up. Not once. Of course we boys became irreversibly Americanized, but for me, sports never quite stuck. The only “sports” I liked were surfing, long meandering bike rides and aimless hikes through the hills, three activities that do not require, upon completion, that there be a loser.

If you were a Bolland, you were a musician. We all played. Cultivating, voluntarily or not, the discipline to master difficult tasks was an everyday activity in my house. But on the other end of all that hard work was something unspeakably beautiful and infinitely valuable. Not a bad deal. I never forgot that.

And I remember the letter writing. On weekends, my dad would sit on the patio and type long letters to his parents and siblings back home in the Netherlands. To this day, the sound of a clacking keyboard makes me feel connected and alive. In loving hands language becomes a fire that turns to ash the constraints of space and time.

And then there were books. When I was very young it was the Hardy Boys. Later it was Ray Bradbury. Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Martian Chronicles convinced me to my core that language was the most potent force in the universe. How could these lines and squiggles on this dry dusty page evoke such heartbreaking majesty, such wretched misery, such endless longing, such transcendent bliss? And then I read The Lord of the Rings – three times. I never looked back. I read everything I could get my hands on.

When I was about twelve I bought my first two poetry books with lawn-mowing money – Charles Bukowski’s Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The earthy grit of Bukowski and the celestial power of Whitman made plain the infinite range of poetry. Who knew that the English language itself could become a musical instrument?

In high school it was Herman Hesse. Me and my bookish friends read everything Hesse wrote. Was it any wonder we looked upon jocks and cheerleaders with such pity? We were peering into the abyss and touching the flames of the mystery of existence. They were chasing a ball around and singing silly songs about it. The condescension and arrogance of youth knows know bounds. Perhaps it was just self-defense for the way they looked at us, or I should say, didn’t look at us. To them, we were invisible while the entire apparatus of the school orbited around the heralded glory of their athletic achievements. We barely noticed, sticking our noses back into our books.

I remember one morning in elementary school the teacher asked for volunteers to read their one page story to the class. Before I realized what had happened, my hand shot up in the air. I’ll never forget that feeling, that feeling of reading my story out loud in front of the class and the way they leaned into it in rapt attention. They laughed at the funny parts and drew hushed breaths at the suspenseful parts. All I remember about the story is that it had something to do with a cow who rode a motorcycle to the top of the Matterhorn in Disneyland. But I do remember as if it were this morning exactly how it felt to wield the conjuring power of language and what it was like to possess, if only for a moment, the ability to mesmerize people with mere words. Experiences like that shape you.

In high school and college I wrote some poetry, most of it awful. Then I got into songwriting. I loved playing cover songs of course. Neil Young, Dylan, Gram Parsons and all the rest. I had great teachers. But I couldn’t stop myself from trying my own hand. I still write songs – it is one of the singular joys of my life. I’ve written about two albums worth of decent material since the last album California. With five albums behind me, it would be nice to keep it going. But these days I’m too busy writing poetry.

Three years ago I enrolled in Steve Kowit’s creative writing class at Southwestern College. I liked it so much I did it again the following year. Maybe it was Professor Kowit’s light touch and deep mind, maybe it was the exercises and deadlines, maybe it was the rich and insightful peer feedback in the weekly workshops – maybe it was all of it. In the alchemy of this humble but electrifying process lead turned into gold. Under the loving lash of Steve’s insistent encouragement, I began to submit poetry to journals for publication. He was right. They were good enough. It worked.

I published three poems this last summer. In the flush of that success I entered a poetry contest. You know the rest.

So what does winning a poetry or a music contest mean? It doesn’t mean you’re the best. It doesn’t mean you’re better than anybody else. It doesn’t mean you’re special or different.

It does mean that you’ve worked hard, learned some things and honed your craft. It does mean that your work has a living, emotional core and is not simply clever or well-made. It does mean that your poems or your songs have caught the attention not just of well-meaning friends and family but of total strangers who have no stake in your success and who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of excellence in their medium and genre.

But it also means this: now the real work begins. Winning awards for your artistic creations is as much a responsibility as a privilege. Getting admitted to the club means that your work will forever be judged against a higher standard. I’m an “award winning poet and singer-songwriter” for gods sakes. Yikes. No more drivel. No more mediocre, derivative treacle. From now on, just the good stuff. Time to get to work. That’s what winning means.

Visit http://www.perigee-art.com/ to read the winning contest entries Yosemite and The Last Battle of the Civil War.

Apollo and Dionysus

2009-09-21T16:45:00.000-07:00

Music is the result of an unlikely marriage of opposites: planning and spontaneity, control and surrender, structure and fluidity, order and chaos, crystalline clarity and purple haze. At the songwriting stage, the arrangement and instrumentation stage, the recording stage, the performance stage – every moment in the manifestation of music is guided by a mysterious confluence of paradoxical tendencies – the urge to deliberately create and the urge to effortlessly participate in a creation already taking place. In other words, successful artists learn how to marry their inner creative energies with the creative energies of the universe itself. We can’t, and don’t, do it alone. Nor does music make itself.

For the ancient Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus represented these two essential energies. Apollo was the god of music, prophecy and medicine. He was associated with intellect, deliberation, control, order, reason and clarity. Dionysus was the god of wine. He was associated with chaos, spontaneity, emotions and instinct. On the surface, Apollo seems the most admirable. It is our Apollonian tendencies that enable us to lift form out of formlessness, ordering the infinite possibility of this next moment into a concise, well-crafted stroke. Without discipline, deliberation and lots of sometimes tedious practice our creative juices drain away into shapeless puddles. On the other hand, without our Dionysian tendencies, our well-made structures would stand sterile and lifeless, void of the very essence of all great art – that nameless je ne sais quoi that falls forever beyond the well-creased cuff linked reach of Apollo.

Go into Guitar Center on any Saturday and you’ll see hordes of adolescent wannabe rock stars with ripped jeans, wallet chains and studiously tousled hair test driving Stratocasters through Marshall stacks, buying into the notion that their inner Hendrix is only a Visa swipe away. What most of them don’t realize is that before Jimi lit his guitar on fire at Monterrey, figuratively and literally, he spent ten years in his room practicing nine hours a day. The story goes that Hendrix’s seminal performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” early Monday morning on the last day of Woodstock was completely improvised. He had never performed it before. Jimi’s Dionysian side came out to play with a vengeance, yet never before had his Apollonian mastery been so patently obvious.

Before Eddie Van Halen burst out of the Pasadena house party scene to re-invigorate arena rock in the seventies and turn us all into a generation of tappers, he was just a quiet, studious kid. As a boy he took an old 45 r.p.m. single of Cream’s “Crossroads” and slowed it down to 33 r.p.m. so he could fastidiously learn every single note of Eric Clapton’s masterful performance. Patience, control, discipline, commitment – these are qualities Dionysus knows nothing about.

For the more thoughtful ancient Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus were not really gods living on Mount Olympus. They were merely personifications of energies, organizing principles and modes of consciousness found within the human psyche. Each of us comes bearing the gifts of Apollo and Dionysus. Which one do we call on most often? Which one are we suppressing?

Give in to either completely and watch yourself whither away. If you’re too Apollonian you have no passion. In your obsessive need to control everything you end up utterly disconnected from the meat and marrow of life. You live in your own head. Your disdain for the messiness of other people and for life itself locks you away in a dry, dusty closet of loneliness – a very neat closet, but a closet nonetheless. If you’re too Dionysian you’re just as ineffective, only worse. You hurt other people because you don’t even know they’re there. You worship at the throne of your own moods and feelings, trapped under the powerful sway of often destructive emotions – anger, resentment, envy, fear. You turn to drugs and alcohol, first for the sheer fun of it, then eventually as a daily maintenance program to keep from feeling your feelings. How ironic.

Either tendency, the Apollonian or the Dionysian, if embraced in isolation without its ameliorating opposite, becomes a parody of itself, a prison of its own device. Dionysian spontaneity becomes tired and empty ineffectiveness. Sure you can sing a good tune, but you can’t tune your guitar. On the other hand, Apollonian order and control becomes stiff and lifeless – there’s nothing left to control but the control itself, you’ve choked all the life out of life, like polishing furniture in a home no one lives in.

Legend has it that when David Crosby brought his friend Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead into the studio to play pedal steel guitar on “Teach Your Children” during the infamous Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young Déjà Vu sessions, Garcia set up his rig and told the engineer to push “play” so he could hear the song for the first time while he played along to get his bearings. Instead, under Crosby’s direction, the engineer pushed “record”. When the song ended, Garcia said, “O.K., I’m ready. Let’s take one.”

“Got it,” replied Crosby from the control room.

“What?” asked Garcia.

“Yeah,” said Crosby, “we’re done.”

Having never heard the song before in his life, Garcia played one of the greatest pedal steel parts ever recorded on a blind first take. Dionysian, right?

Yes and no. Garcia had spent the previous three years learning the pedal steel with great focus and discipline, sitting in with his friends The New Riders of the Purple Stage on countless nights in clubs all around the bay area. Garcia’s success on “Teach Your Children” was no accident. It was the perfect synthesis of Apollo and Dionysus.

Dig out your copy of Déjà Vu and listen to Garcia’s part on “Teach Your Children”. Ask yourself this: will you be ready when your time comes? Have you done your homework? Do you show up prepared? Have you mastered your craft? And then ask yourself this: are you ready to let go? Are you willing to abandon control and surrender to the moment? Are you ready to trust the sacred energy welling up within you and binding you to all things?

Are you willing to strike the right balance between Apollo and Dionysus?

In Common Hours

2009-08-28T07:26:00.000-07:00

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will experience a success unimagined in common hours.
-- Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau wrote those words 160 years ago but some things never change. The granddaddy of the self-help movement, Thoreau finds himself quoted by everybody from Wayne Dyer to Deepak Chopra. What makes his words so perennial? Why do we still hear in his voice our own best inner wisdom?

As each generation struggles to re-imagine and redefine the meaning of success the fundamental hunger to improve our lives remains. We want to let drop all that is unessential. We want to uncover our authentic being. Success has little to do with account balances and the approval of the herd. We know that now. But we want to grow. We want to move out of scarcity and into abundance. We want to expand into our highest vision for ourselves. We want to shed all of our limitations and surge up in the world as we were meant to be – genuine, strong, humble, masterful, generous, joyous and free. How on earth are we going to do that?

Thoreau suggests that we first simply advance confidently in the direction of our dreams. Stop waiting for your life to begin. It already did – a while ago. Start moving forward. Do something. You don’t have to know what all the steps are. Just take the next step. And find a way to embody confidence. Stop making excuses like I’m too old, I’m too young, I don’t have enough money, I’m too busy, I don’t have enough time, I will look foolish to others, it’s too late, I’m not qualified, I’ve waited too long, I’m not ready, I’m too disorganized, it won’t work. Stop basing your decisions on meticulous calculations of everything that might go wrong. Cultivate the eyes to see opportunity where others see problems. How do you become confident? You just throw a switch. Simply choose. And get clear about the difference between confidence and arrogance. Confusing the two is fatal. Arrogance is a false sense of entitlement based on an exaggerated sense of self-importance. It is often pathologically competitive and overtly hostile. Confidence is kind. Confidence is simply expecting good things to happen. No one else needs to lose so you can win.

Thoreau is talking about a deeply spiritual and intuitive process. This isn’t about pointless acquisition of material wealth. This isn’t about mindless ladder climbing or Machiavellian power grabs. This isn’t about proving your critics wrong. This is about manifesting and cultivating your highest good and your deepest dream – the dream in which your life is grounded in love, shaped by service, illumined by joy, buoyed by creativity and flowing in boundless abundance – a vision far grander than any fear-based fantasies of wealth and power born in the shadow of scarcity and nurtured by the wounded ego.

To this end, Thoreau then suggests that we endeavor to live the life we have imagined. In other words, move out of the realm of imagination and into the field of action. If you want to be a writer, write. If you want to be more compassionate, practice kindness, especially when you least feel like it. When caught in the grip of fear ask yourself what would a courageous person do and then do that. To endeavor is to move confidently through the unfolding process of intention, action and realization. Want it, do it, be it. If you want to be a singer, sing.

Thoreau was a deeply spiritual man though he had little patience for religion. Thoreau’s theology, if it can even be called that, was a kind of pantheism – the idea that the entire cosmos and everything in it is an expression of divinity. This means that, according to Thoreau, you’re just as likely to access divine wisdom in a snow field as you are in a sacred text. It also means that each of us, in our essential core, is in perpetual partnership with the generative, divine intelligence of the universe. That is why his formula for success works. Your own highest good is already trying to come into being, with or without you, and sometimes in spite of you. We need only cooperate with it by disengaging from our fearful, worried minds and moving forward with optimistic confidence. By embodying the qualities today that we someday hope to have we cheat time and bring into the eternal now the truth and beauty of our highest nature. Be what you are. Let everything else drop. Move calmly and confidently toward your highest vision for yourself. If you do, you will experience success unimagined in common hours.

Breathe Into It

2009-07-22T13:39:00.000-07:00

“Breathe into it,” the yoga instructor said, her arms and legs braided like an unbaked pretzel. On rows of rubber mats students strained into the pose with varying degrees of success. The sinuous sounds of Deuter washed over the room like gentle waves of warm green tea.

Breathe into it, I thought, what the hell does that mean? But instead of arguing, I tried it. At the deepest point of my stretch I felt a sharp knot of tightness that told me I had reached my limit. I could go no further. Then I breathed into the tension. I inhaled as if my breath was going directly into and through the tightness. Something mysterious happened. It loosened. With the next exhalation my pose deepened all on its own, beyond where I thought I could go. What I had failed to accomplish with effort was realized effortlessly.

Like anyone else, I was accustomed to the old idea that if I was ever going to accomplish or achieve anything it would be through persistent and strenuous effort. Only a bold and willful decision followed by vigorous and assertive action could move a mountain. If I didn’t do anything, nothing would get done.

Of course intention, will-power and effort all play a part. But until we allow the larger forces already at work (or is it play) to align with and buoy our efforts, no amount of straining is going to move even a molehill.

When we cut our finger the healing begins immediately and without our consent or intention. There are systems in place of which we are only observers. What if we allowed ourselves to slip gently into the realization that we are partners with larger energies around us? The ancient Indians called this energy prana, the life force within us and all living things. Prana is the Sanskrit word for “breath”.

In the second creation story of Genesis, (yes, there are two), God made Adam “from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being.” Like scores of other creation stories, Genesis tells us that human beings are a mysterious combination of inanimate matter and the breath of life, an indefinable force rooted in a vast intelligence far beyond human control let alone comprehension.

Speech and song are made of breath. It is through the power of speech that God called the universe into being when he said, “Let there be light.” The Navajo don’t consider a newborn baby fully human until it has taken its first breath, or better still, made its first sound. And if you’ve ever heard Eve Selis sing, let alone stood on stage with her and looked into the eyes of an audience caught in the grip of her powerful voice, you would know – it is through the power of breath that the beauty of life is made manifest.

Now consider all the difficulties and challenges we face. Many of us are caught in overwhelming financial crises. There are daunting health challenges. Some of our relationships seem damaged beyond repair. Or maybe there are dreams unfulfilled, crushing burdens, towering tasks and impossible obstacles. Perhaps it’s something as simple as a general, vague sense of incompletion, dissatisfaction and sadness. We can’t seem to fix all the things that are broken no matter how hard we try. Despite all our good intentions and best efforts we fall short. It might be time to try another way.

There is an old Chinese parable about a rice farmer who was so eager for his crop to grow that every morning he tugged on each tiny shoot. In the end, he uprooted every plant. He didn’t harvest one single grain of rice that year.

“The world is ruled by letting things take their course,” says Laozi in the Daodejing. “It cannot be ruled by interfering. In the universe the difficult things are done as if they are easy. In the universe great acts are made up of small deeds. The sage does not attempt anything very big, and thus achieves greatness.” Letting things take their natural course and come to fruition in their own time is not only effective, it also creates lasting serenity and joy. If we really understood this perennial principle a deep and vibrant humility would well up in us and heal so much of our dissatisfaction and stiff-necked restlessness. We would become lithe and fluid like water. We would accomplish everything without doing anything. Paradoxically, our softness would become our strength. “A tree that is unbending,” says Laozi, “is easily broken.”

The only thing in the way of this new consciousness of allowance is our old pattern of thinking, the one that says life is nothing but struggle and strife. When Jesus counseled his students to be like the lilies of the field he was clearly teaching this same principle. Whether you subscribe to a personified God or prefer your Source less defined and localized, there is a common thread running through all these teachings. This has little to do with theism or atheism. Leave that debate in the college cafeteria. Our mental machinations and busy bee schemes often do little but interfere with the inherently generative course of nature. Something is always trying to grow through us. Are we interfering or allowing? Are we anxious and constricted or breathing easy?

No matter the difficulty, when all our best intentions and efforts seem ineffective, maybe it’s simply time to surrender. Bring yourself into alignment with the inherent intelligence of the universe. The next time you bump up against a problem, lean forward, let go and breathe into it.

Thin Places

2009-06-20T07:56:00.001-07:00

If there is one universal theme that runs through the world’s religious and mythological wisdom traditions it is probably this, that there is an invisible plane hidden from us by the visible plane, and that the invisible plane is in fact the source of the visible plane. Some call the invisible plane God and personify it as a conscious being. Others resist personifying it and prefer thinking of the source as Tao or Brahman. For them, it is the hidden order of the world, the logos, natural law, the ground of Being behind the veil of the phenomenal world of forms. As such it is not subject to the vagaries of belief or disbelief. It simply is. No need to argue. Arguing about definitions of ultimate reality is like arguing about driving directions. If I MapQuest directions to Disneyland from my house and you MapQuest directions to Disneyland from your house, we will both have very different sets of instructions. But I’ll see you at Disneyland.

Whatever God is, the mystics tell us, is beyond all concepts and words. Naturally, being thinking animals with a belligerent streak, we construct thoughts about God, then bind our egos to our thoughts arguing with anyone who threatens our precious ideology. But, as Lao Tzu reminds us, “the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” And in the tradition of Zen Buddhism, all our thoughts and words are merely “fingers pointing at the moon.” Only an idiot would confuse a finger with the moon. Hungry? “The menu,” as Alan Watts says, “is not the food.”

If there is a reality deeper than the one our senses present to us, and if this deeper reality is in fact the source of the perceptual world, how can we access it? In primal culture, it was the shaman who traveled at will between the two realms. He was gradually replaced by priests and institutionalized religion. Then it was the guy who sold you that little bag of mushrooms at Burning Man.

What if we could make conscious contact with the Real, the source of the phenomenal world, without going to mass or choking down illegal fungi? What if there were places where the two worlds shimmered into one, where in the midst of our everyday, mundane existence the transcendent broke through, even if only for a moment? The ancient Celts called these “thin places.”

Thin places are everywhere. For the Celts they were often found in wilderness – this sacred lake, that rock outcropping, the mountain summit at dawn. In the Carlos Castaneda books, Don Juan called them power spots. We’ve all felt them. Triggered by a fortuitous arrangement of natural shapes, scents, sounds, colors and textures we slipped for a moment out of our busy minds and into the still and quiet stream forever flowing around us – a stream our busy minds block from our everyday awareness – and we experience an expansiveness, an aliveness, a deep and abiding significance far exceeding the beauty of the perceptual field. Although an unrepentant atheist and materialist to the end, even Freud, as a scientist, had to acknowledge this “oceanic feeling.”

It happened to me just the other day in of all places the frozen food section of Costco. What would normally be a somewhat unpleasant situation, a crowded big box store with all the architectural charm of a bomb shelter, suddenly became the stage for an unfolding of unintended and beautiful humanity. I felt what I can only describe as a deep tenderness welling up in me as I looked at the people around me, awash in our abundance, unconsciously kind to one another, bravely living our lives despite the odds. The little retired ladies with their white plastic aprons and hairnets serving chicken fingers and pot stickers to eager children, the slicked back hair guy in the golf shirt talking loudly into his Bluetooth as he crashed his cart into mine, the teenagers from the church camp or maybe the halfway house loading their flatbed cart with enough food to feed a village. In the way they carried themselves I saw their quiet, unsung heroism. Life didn’t turn out the way any of us expected it to. But here we are on a Tuesday, living it as bravely as we can. I saw a woman who the Department of Health would categorize as morbidly obese put her arm around her fourteen year old daughter in a way that taught me, more than any sermon or learned book, about the redemptive power of love, and how it is only in the way we treat others that we ourselves are healed and forgiven for our weaknesses, no matter how glaring or hidden our imperfections. Suddenly there were no strangers here. I knew these people. I was these people. I stopped. There was water in my eyes. I had stumbled into a thin place.

What are you supposed to do when you fall in love with everybody? You close your eyes and you silently vow to try to remember this feeling, to hold onto it, but you never can. Soon you’re back in your worried mind, inventing reasons to be unhappy, caught in the thick of things.

Driving home you realize it has nothing to do with Costco of course, or any place at all. Everyplace is a thin place. If you can get it in the frozen food section of Costco, you can get it anywhere. The 18th century British mystical poet William Blake said that “if the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see things as they truly are, infinite.” What we need is a big Costco-sized barrel of perception cleanser. What aisle is that on?

But life is thick. We’re all so busy. There is so much to worry about. Yet underneath the surface of our glittering lives of achievement and acquisition there is a deep river of beauty. And our toes aren’t even wet.

It is the job of the artist to create thin places. Artists must create arrangements of sight and sound that shine light through the membrane between the worlds and illuminate our own infinite significance. Great art grants us the vision to finally see ourselves as we really are, unlimited.

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said that he could not clearly define hard-core pornography, then famously added, “but I know it when I see it.” What makes a great song? I don’t really know, but I know it when I hear it. I call it the hair-on-the-arms test. When the hair on my arms stands up, it’s a good song. It’s that simple. That’s all there is to say. Your soul knows. You can talk about it till dawn, but all your words are just fingers pointing at the moon. Your soul took flight with the opening chord and was in full lunar orbit by the chorus while your mind fell in love with its own cleverness and has been lost in space ever since.

But don’t count on the artists to do all the heavy lifting. Our perception of the world is largely a creation of our own thoughts. Our life, Buddha taught twenty five centuries ago, is a creation of the mind. Choose your thoughts wisely. When you feel the thickness closing in, remember to step out of the stream of your busy mind and sink down into what the poet Mary Oliver calls “the soft animal of your body.” Feel the subtle energy coursing through you. Hear with new ears. See with new eyes. The ground of Being, that source from which we came and to which we will return, is always with us. Even, and perhaps especially, when you are caught by the bustle and thrum of the marketplace, remember where you came from. In the unrelenting march of your life, from time to time, take a side step into the thin places.

10,000 Hours

2009-05-27T07:33:00.000-07:00

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the pull of what you really love.” -- Rumi

Jack Kerouac, literary luminary, Uber-beat and American legend, had a secret. Only one of his famous friends, the poet Philip Whalen, knew. Not Ginsberg, not Burroughs, not Ferlinghetti, not Snyder. Kerouac kept his secret hidden his entire life. In a brand new book published by the Jack Kerouac Archive at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, author and curator Isaac Gewirtz reveals the truth. All you bookish, skinny-armed English majors better sit down. Ready? Jack Kerouac was a sports fanatic. That’s right, and he went to college on a football scholarship – so much for the carefully nurtured enmity between jocks and the literate crowd. But that’s not the secret part. No one knew a thing about the baseball players, horses and jockeys that really enthralled Kerouac. It was all in his head.

Kerouac created a rich and elaborate alternate reality – a wide world of sports that only he knew about. He went far beyond the fantasy baseball we know of today, a beast of an entirely different stripe. Kerouac invented leagues with fictional teams and full rosters, engaging them in “games” and writing about all of it, play by play, in endless detail. He created baseball cards for his made-up stars. He invented an elaborate symbolic language to record play combinations and statistical analysis. Then he did the same thing with horse racing, analyzing everything from horse-jockey combinations to track conditions. He wrote broadsides, designed charts and illustrated posters. There are boxes full of this stuff. From a very young age Kerouac reveled in the intoxicating power of storytelling.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book, “Outliers: The Story of Success” he argues that genius is not innate. Rather, it is simply the product of 10,000 hours of intentional, focused practice. In other words, the Mozarts, Claptons and Kerouacs of the world are not born, they’re made. Our old, apparently erroneous notion of genius has finally been debunked. Of course genes play a role – you should have at least an above average predilection for music or language or sports or whatever it is you want to master, but the rest is all hard work.

According to Gladwell’s calculations, it takes about ten years to get 10,000 hours. That averages out to about three hours a day. If you can only do an hour and a half, give it twenty years. By the time Kerouac sat down to write some of the most defining novels in American literature – “On the Road,” “The Dharma Bums,” and others – his 10,000 hours were long behind him.

Thinking back on my own life, I see a pattern. Very early on I fell in love with storytelling. In fifth grade Mr. Martini would have us write one page stories. Then he’d ask for volunteers to read theirs aloud in front of the class. Like any other nine year old I may have been shy at first, but as the weeks wore on I grew increasingly eager. Soon my hand was the first in the air. I’d step to the front of the class and read my story, suddenly unusually confident. I remember like it was yesterday the silence that fell over the room, the way the other kids leaned forward, their faces playing out the feelings I fed them. They laughed at the jokes, gasped at the surprises and applauded long and hard at the end. I was hooked. At my poetry readings, my musical performances and in front of my philosophy classes, I’m still that awkward nine year old kid, suddenly and inexplicably transformed into a joyfully confident storyteller and solicitor of truths.

Throughout elementary school my best friend Mark Harriman and I were huge Mad magazine fans. So we did what seemed perfectly logical at the time. We created our own humor magazine. We drew cartoons, wrote film and television parodies, had recurring features, agonized over graphics and layout design. We worked with single-minded focus and abandon. We didn’t know we were working. We were just having fun. The hours flew by. We laughed till we cried. We thought we were brilliant.

Also during these early years I began playing piano and guitar. At first it was only because my mom made me. I hated practicing piano. I remember sitting at the piano playing scales with tears streaming down my face while the other kids played outside. Now I realize that it was much harder for my mom than it was for me – the last thing a mother ever wants to see on her son’s face is tears. But she knew that on the other side of my temporary discomfort was an abiding joy. I am endlessly grateful that my mom offered her discipline until I could come up with my own. Once I got over the awkward early flailing and uncovered the joy of music, I never stopped. I fell in love.

Sometimes people ask me, “How did you become a songwriter?” I just smile and say, “I really don’t know.”

In the “Bhagavad Gita” Krishna says that we become what we love. Love creates longing. Longing becomes intention. Intention becomes thought. Thoughts become words. Words become actions. Actions repeated become habits. Habit constructs character. We become what we do. In this way our inner purpose, what Aristotle called our entelechy, conducts the moments and events of our lives just as an orchestra conductor draws the disparate elements before him into a singular work of beauty and grace. The most effective way to construct a joyful and effective life of value and purpose is to become a co-creator, to cooperate and collaborate with your own inner drive. “Follow your bliss,” Joseph Campbell always told his students, and when you do, the universe begins to collude in unforeseeable ways. When we let ourselves be silently drawn by the pull of what we really love, as Rumi suggests, we can’t help but begin to move in the direction of our dreams. The line between work and play dissolves. Our joy knows what to do. We have only to do it. For at least 10,000 hours.

Why Susan Boyle Matters

2009-04-23T19:05:00.000-07:00

By now fifty million of us have seen the viral YouTube video of Susan Boyle’s remarkable performance on the BBC show Britain’s Got Talent. It’s the most widely seen video clip in world history, surpassing previous skyrockets such as “Bush vs. Shoes” and “Tina Fey as Sarah Palin”. The footage is absolutely gripping on many levels because it holds a mirror to contemporary culture revealing what is best and worst in us. But mainly I’m writing about this because every time I watch it I cry and I’m trying to figure out why.

Susan Boyle is an invisible 47 year old woman from a tiny cluster of villages in Scotland. She’s the kind of woman you look right past – frumpy, unkempt, one of the many, not one of the few. In the years since her father died, Susan shared a tiny apartment with her ailing mother. Then her mother died. “I live alone with my cat Pebbles,” she told the show’s hosts. “I’ve never been married, never been kissed.”

“How old are you Susan,” Simon Cowell asked as she stepped on stage.
“Forty seven,” she said. Cowell rolled his eyes.
“O.K.,” he said, barely containing his boredom, “what’s the dream?”
“I’m trying to be a professional singer,” she answered. Cut to a tight shot of a young woman in the audience shaking her head disdainfully and turning to her friend in commiseration.

Then Susan Boyle began to sing. The song was “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables. It is the heartbreaking lament of a wounded-in-love woman whose youth, innocence and trust were repaid with disrespect, disregard and pain. And yet there is a note of defiance, of transcendence, of victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. It’s not in the words – which are unremittingly dour – it is in the proud clarity and upturned eyes of Susan Boyle’s magnificence. Looking at her face you can easily imagine – whether it’s autobiographical or not is irrelevant – that the song is about her, so perfectly does she channel its wrenching truth, that the world often mistakes and abuses beauty in its blind pursuit of vanity and insignificance.

Three seconds into her performance the mood in the room powerfully shifts. In one of the most spontaneous and explosive moments I’ve ever seen on television, the audience is swept away by wave after wave of shock and awe. People leap to their feet, their chairs no long able to hold them.

When the song ends, Piers Morgan is the first judge to speak. “Without a doubt, that was the biggest surprise I have had in three years of this show. When you stood there with that cheeky grin and said ‘I want to be like Elaine Page’, everyone was laughing at you. No one is laughing now. That was stunning, an incredible performance. Amazing. I’m reeling from shock…”

Then it was Amanda Holden’s turn. “I’m so thrilled, because I know that everybody was against you. I honestly think that we were all being very cynical, and I think that’s the biggest wake up call ever. And I just want to say, that it was a complete privilege listening to that. It was brilliant.”

Simon Cowell rounded out the panel with his usual panache, ending his remarks by saying, “Susan, you can return to the village with your head held high. That’s three yeses”.

Susan Boyle matters. She is a walking rebuttal to all the bullies who ever walked the earth, preying on the weak, demeaning the different, imposing their arbitrary definition of “cool” on the rest of us. The only people who are really cool, the people who define cool, are the people who are absolutely oblivious to the very concept of “cool” itself. They are so cool they don’t even know what cool is. Even the bullies in the audience were wiping their eyes and rising to their feet in thunderous applause.

The entertainment industry needs Susan Boyle. As record executives scramble to foist upon us the next cookie-cutter Barbie doll pop star, we the people have spoken through the pure democracy of the New Media. And here is what we said: all we really want is the Real. We don’t care what package it shows up in. We just want Truth and Beauty, you know, all that stuff Plato wrote about twenty five centuries ago, “even if in the form of an unlovely husk.”

Susan Boyle empowers and encourages us with her unapologetic presence. She exhibits the perfect combination of fearlessness and humility. She demonstrates that courage and arrogance are wholly unrelated. In fact, arrogance and machismo are usually sure signs of the utter absence of confidence and mastery. Real greatness is humble. She reminds us that it is enough to show up and simply do our best.

Most importantly, Susan’s unintended beauty reminds us in no uncertain terms of our own unrealized beauty. Through her we realize our own magnificence. I’m convinced that’s the real reason her performance breaks us open. Look at the faces of the people in the audience. Look at the lump in Piers’s throat. Look at the wonder in Amanda’s eyes. Look at the warmth, even the love on Simon’s face. We’ve never seen that face on American Idol, never, not even once. Susan’s bold presence triggers something deep inside us, something we have kept well-hidden; a profound and abiding self-acceptance, even self-love. It is a love we have been withholding. Her beauty breaks the anchor chain and we drift into the light of the knowledge that we are beings of infinite value. After all the years of drought, suddenly we are awash in love. This is what Susan has given us. That’s why there are tears. And that’s why Susan Boyle matters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D5DgQi2oqA&feature=related

Around the Block

2009-04-08T10:38:00.000-07:00

Normally, I have no problem coming up with topics and concerns to explore in this blog. But this month, I’m stuck. Maybe the two books I’m working on have drained all the words from me. Maybe it’s because I’m getting on a plane tomorrow to play a show in Washington D.C. and all the arrangements for that are eating all available brain waves. Maybe I’m just, for once, speechless.

Writer’s block is a mysterious beast. There are, naturally, numerous websites devoted to helping writers work through this strange malady – something to read while you’re not writing. It’s almost as if the language centers of the brain have collapsed in on themselves, like one of those awful third world high rises after an earthquake, and all the words are stuck inside, dead or dying.

The problem is manifold. Some say its lack of focus or purpose. No clear goal or goals. If you were passionate about your subject, they say, this wouldn’t be happening. There’s probably a metaphor in there for how I should live my life, but I’m too tired to find it.

Or it could be a sudden onset of shyness – you’ve grown weary of revealing your private observations, values and opinions to a vast, faceless legion of strangers. What, suddenly now you’re shy, after all these years of nakedness?

Any kind of creativity has its snags. It’s unrealistic to expect the flow to be perennially vigorous. Rivers and streams have their dry seasons. The trick is to somehow get across the sandbars, through the shallows and down stream to the source. The ocean, thankfully, shows no signs of drying up.

My favorite image of writing will always be my father. My parents emigrated from the Netherlands to America after World War II. There were few opportunities for a young married couple in Holland after the Germans got through with it. They landed in New Jersey and eventually settled in Ventura, California. I grew up without any cousins, aunts, uncles or grandparents. Outside of our little home, every Bolland we knew was far across the Atlantic. Apart from the occasional phone call, the only substantive link was the written word.

My dad would sit in the sun on the patio in our backyard with a portable typewriter on his lap, carefully typing nine page letters to the family back in Holland. He needed two copies, one for his parents and one for my mom’s parents. This was the sixties. There were no copy machines. He’d put a sheet of black, oily looking carbon paper between two sheets of very thin white paper (it was called “onion skin” back then – very thin and light to keep the air mail costs down) and carefully begin typing. No rewrites, no white outs, no mistakes. Total commitment. Just say it and move on.

I’ll never forget his quiet focus, his reverie, his near trance-like state as he hunched over that Olivetti crafting long stories of how us boys were growing up, or what the orange blossoms smelled like, or how the California sun felt on your skin. These accounts were my grandparents’ only link to their far-flung children and grandchildren living half way around the world. This wasn’t mere reporting. This was writing as an act of love.

This went on for years. There must be hundred of pages of this stuff. All four of my grandparents are gone now, and most of my aunts and uncles too. My dad has the letters. What’s most haunting is that they were all written in Dutch, a language I cannot read. My dad and I have often spoken about getting them translated, but it’s such a daunting task. There is just too much material. I feel something slipping away.

Whether it’s songwriting, prose, poetry, fiction or non-fiction, the process seems to be the same – if there is no compelling purpose for writing, no discernable reason to put pen to paper (or cursor to doc), then why bother? Art without hunger is art without truth. No matter how elegant the composition or fortunate the arrangement of elements, if there is no beating heart, no radiance shining through the fabric, no music, then it’s all just sound and fury signifying nothing. The key to overcoming writer’s block is hidden deep within the folds of this insight. It’s almost as if writer’s block is doing you (or your readers) a favor – it’s preventing you from writing a word until you’re in touch with what’s real.

My dad never had writer’s block. That’s because he wasn’t trying to write anything. He was up to something far more primal, more elemental. He was reaching out across the miles and joining lives together. What if we let that goal guide all our art?

We humans are by nature communal creatures. We need to tell each other our stories. I need you to know what I saw, what I heard, what I thought, what I felt. If I clamp it all down and keep quiet, something dies a little inside. And if I ever stop listening to the people around me, if I ever grow dismissive and tone-deaf to their music, a loneliness will well up around me and drown me.

The absurd popularity of social websites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace testify to this incessant need to speak and be heard. Next time you compulsively log onto Facebook or sneak a furtive glance at your Twitter page during an important meeting, take inventory of how it makes you feel. There’s something going on there we haven’t quite grappled with yet. For all its lamentable ills, the interscape, as Jon Stewart calls it, plays a vital role in our communal human experience.

We no longer sit in the sun with portable typewriters on our lap and a sheet of carbon paper sandwiched between two onion skins. But we still utterly rely on the power of language to keep our love alive, whether it’s half way around the world, or half way around the block.

He Played Real Good for Free

2009-02-27T07:19:00.000-08:00

He opened his case and took out his violin. He sat on a stool in the metro station and began to play. It was a cold January morning. The good people of Washington D.C. hurried by on their way to catch a train or make an important appointment. Rush hour.

A few people glanced over at the musician. One middle aged man slowed down, pausing for a few seconds before moving on. A minute later a woman dropped a dollar bill into his open violin case without missing a step. Soon another man stopped to lean against a wall. Then he looked at his watch and walked on, late for work.

Children seemed to be the most interested – especially one three year old boy who was being pulled along by his mother. He stopped to listen. His mother yanked him away without even looking. The boy never once took his eyes off the violinist as his mother pulled him on through the crowded train station. This happened again and again. All the parents, without exception, dragged their children away from the music.

The violinist played for 45 minutes. He collected $32.17 from thirty two people. Everyone who gave him money continued walking – they never even slowed down. Out of the 1,097 people who passed by, only seven people stopped to listen. When the music stopped, no one applauded or even noticed. He packed his violin and left.

It had all been an experiment initiated by Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten in January 2007. The violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played six of the most challenging and beautiful pieces Bach had ever written for the violin. The violin itself was a 1713 Stradivarius worth 3.5 million dollars. A few nights earlier Bell had performed to a sold-out crowd in Boston where the average ticket price was $100. Bell plays over 200 sold-out shows a year.

Weingarten’s and Bell’s experiment shows us many things. Marketing experts have long claimed that packaging is everything, and research bears them out. When you take two identical products and place them side by side, people invariably prefer (and will pay more for) the product in the fancier package. It’s not that people are stupid – it’s just that we’re particularly vulnerable to illusion. We don’t see the “real” world. We see the world our pre-conceived notions show us. Perception is never an objective event – it is profoundly colored by our emotional conditioning. To our enduring embarrassment, we are easily and willingly played, despite all our proud protests to the contrary.

On a deeper level, another truth is revealed. If we don’t stop to hear a free Bach performance by Joshua Bell on a Stradivarius (because the context is wrong), what else are we missing? How much beauty are we walking right on by?

Musicians often talk about these problems because we’ve all had the same experience over and over again. When we charge $5 for a show, seven people show up, and when we charge $15, a hundred people show up. On the surface none of it makes any sense. Obviously there is a dynamic of perceived value at work here. Economists call it the “price point”, that magic number at which you create the heightened allure, the maximum perception of “hey, this costs a lot so it must be good” without tipping over into “hey, I ain’t paying that much for that”. If you charge $5 for CDs you will not sell twice as many as when you charge $10. In fact, you’ll sell fewer. But $20 is just too high these days when people can download your entire album off iTunes for $9.99.

Nevertheless, any artist struggling to reach a wider audience ought to pay close attention to the Joshua Bell experiment. Ask yourself several important questions. How do I present myself, on and off stage? What kind of rooms do I play? What do my photos look like? What am I doing to create a milieu, an environment in which my art can really be seen and appreciated? As artists we need to gently wean ourselves from the unexamined assumption that quality and beauty will be instantly recognized and rewarded by a discerning public and that we needn’t give any thought to packaging or context. You have to do more than write great songs, play brilliantly and sing with power and grace. You have to mount those jewels in the right setting. It’s one thing to be good. But what are you doing to create the perception of quality? The Bell experiment shows us that even the greatest music in the world gets overlooked in the wrong context.

We all know artists who after years of struggle slip deeper and deeper into contempt for the very audience they purport to seduce. Perhaps all this pain can be avoided by gaining appreciation of the subtle and insidious psychological dynamics at play. Artists must be willing to expand their sphere of creativity to include the entire environment in which they ply their art. You’re not just making music. You’re creating a multi-dimensional reality.

And for those of us in the audience, the Joshua Bell experiment raises some equally challenging questions. Perhaps we need to gently wean ourselves from the unexamined assumption that pretty packaging signifies quality content. Let’s meet artists halfway. Be willing to do the foot work. Maybe the best songs aren’t on the radio or at the giant amphitheater. Grow better ears.

Thirty nine years ago in 1970, Joni Mitchell addressed this issue powerfully in her song “For Free” from Ladies of the Canyon. In it she portrays a successful, wealthy musician (a not so subtle self-portrait) who wistfully laments her own apathy as she passes by a brilliant street musician. “Nobody stopped to hear him, though he played so sweet and high. They knew he had never been on their TV so they passed his music by…he played real good for free.”

It’s the catch 22 of the fame game. No one comes to see you unless you’re famous. And you can’t get famous until people come to see you. New artists are forced, initially anyway, to create the illusion of popularity. But these are the very dynamics of celebrity culture so many of us lament – the ubiquitous and dehumanizing blare of tabloid journalism and the subsequent erosion of kindness and depth. Manufactured “stars” who haven’t (yet anyway) created one damn thing of value clog the airwaves and prevent real quality from breaking through. (I won’t name names – a whole list of celebrities is springing to your mind without my help). Yet it is the very world our collective psyche has created. We have each laid a brick of this edifice with our own hands. Our habitual inattention and unexamined consumerism had a baby – and it’s called pop culture.

On that cold January morning in the Washington D.C. metro, only 32 of the 1,097 people who walked past Joshua Bell put money in his case. Only seven people stopped to listen. Only one person recognized him. And he played real good for free.

Life Lessons from the Obama Presidency

2009-01-23T06:47:00.000-08:00

On January 20, 2009 Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. Reflecting on the significance of this event and the long years that preceded it, ten inescapable truths emerge, truths that have the power to transform our lives.

1. Nothing is Impossible

There is never a shortage of well-intentioned (and not so well-intentioned) people eager to tell you your dream is impossible. Characterizing themselves as sober realists, (and by implication everyone else as drunken dreamers) naysayers take pleasure in their own cleverness and in holding you back. Give them a hug, thank them, and go about the business of accomplishing the impossible. Just a few months ago, let alone two years ago, you couldn’t spit without hitting someone saying “Obama’s great, but he’ll never make it to the White House”.

2. Assume the Best in People and That’s What You’ll Get

Barack Obama won the presidency largely because he reached out to people traditional political operatives counseled him not to bother with. Entire states the Gore and Kerry campaigns skipped over became ripe recruiting grounds for Obama’s operation. Obama and his team believed it was stupid and self-defeating to write off entire regions, as if human consciousness is bound by state lines. Obama lives by this truth: you teach people how to treat you by the way you treat them. His deep respect for the common man and woman is genuine. People feel it, and they respond. It is an unshakable spiritual law that you attract not what you want, but what you are. Obama teaches us that our most pressing and effective task is self-cultivation. His not-so-secret weapon: the only real way to inspire people to their own greatness is to cultivate your own.

3. Hope and Faith Trump Despair and Fear Every Time

Despair and fear seem to be our default setting, the way digital clocks flash 12:00 when you unplug them. Obama’s presidency invites us to plug back in and set our own attitudinal clocks. Despair and fear may be cheap and easy but they create nothing. Nothing was ever built with the consciousness of scarcity and lack. Hope and faith, on the other hand, are the twin engines of transformation both on the personal level and the global level.

4. Our Assumptions are Usually Wrong

In light of these first three truths, it seems clear that we have a problem. Perhaps the problem is not with the world. Perhaps the problem lies within the way we see the world. Our attitudes, biases and assumptions are the biggest barriers to our own success and happiness. Many people assumed Obama had too many obstacles to overcome, namely, that not enough white people would vote for him. In fact, the opposite occurred. White people put him in office. The ascendancy of Barack Obama reminds us that we are more often wrong than right. And this begs the obvious question: what are we wrong about today?

5. There is Deep Wisdom in Common People

Our arrogance and cynicism prevent us from seeing a simple truth: either everyone has the light or no one has it. One of Obama’s strengths is his willingness to look past appearances – the circumstances of his own life taught him that. One of the most challenging and beautiful principles of democracy is the conviction that every single human being is a being of infinite value, a rational agent who if left to their own volition will seek the good. Especially if inspired by the aspirations of those around them. We move forward, lashed together like the logs of a raft, bound by the strength of our convictions and our common fate. Even the least among us adds to our strength.

6. If the Game Seems Rigged, Start a New Game

Early in Obama’s presidential aspiration it became clear that he could not compete with Hillary Clinton’s fundraising machine. As a young unknown he lacked the connections to adequately tap into the traditional streams of political cash flow, streams the Clintons had nurtured for decades. He could not win that game. So he started a new game. He went directly to the American people and bypassed the usual deep pocket sources. By raising five dollars, ten dollars, twenty dollars each from millions of individual Americans who had never contributed a dime to a political campaign, he changed forever the way politicians raise money. The new game put a black man in the White House. If the old game isn’t working in your life, go around it.

7. Hard Work Works

Obama got into Columbia and then Harvard Law School on sheer merit. No one handed him anything. As a boy his mother used to wake him up at 4:00 in the morning to do his homework before school. He would often complain bitterly. “Do you think I want to do this?” his mother asked him. “I don’t like it any more than you do.” Obama learned early on that what you feel like doing and what you should be doing is not often the same thing. Disciplined effort teaches us that despite our appetites to the contrary, we can always choose excellence and craft lives of power, beauty and joy. Hard work works.

8. You Don’t Need a Perfect Past

Nothing before this moment matters. We all come from somewhere. We’ve all been hurt. We all lack things others have. Estranged from his African father, raised by his single, white mother and then his white grandparents – being made painfully aware of his outsider status was just another day for Barack. But he found love and support where others saw enemies. Why do we cling to our story and allow the past to shape this next fluid, formless moment? Why not create something new from the wreckage? What some people call shit, others call fertilizer.

9. Stay Humble, Respect Your Opponents

Power need not be arrogance, mastery need not be condescension, assertion need not be divisive. True greatness is always humble. Great people recognize the light in all people, even their ideological opponents. Because each of us has only partial access to truth, we rely on others, perhaps especially our most vigorous and vocal opponents, to shed light on the corners of truth we had not yet considered. Real wisdom always manifests itself as flexibility and fluidity, traits often misunderstood as weakness by lesser minds who confuse strength with rigid, defensive inflexibility. Like his hero Lincoln, Obama intentionally seeks the counsel of those who disagree with him. Lincoln even appointed his political foes to his cabinet. How, in my own life, can I manifest this untapped inlet of insight?

10. Cultivate a Life of the Mind, but Trust Your Instincts

The presidency of Obama represents the triumph of intellect and reason over fear and irrationality. I’m not making a policy argument – I’m talking about the man himself. Obama’s success proves that cultivating our reasoning skills and learning how to read and write at a high level are perhaps the most liberating forces we can muster. “Emancipate your selves from mental slavery”, Bob Marley sang, “none but ourselves can free our minds.” Reading good books, learning how to use language persuasively and truthfully – these skills are the tools that will liberate us from the private and public prisons to which our better natures have been sentenced. Shedding the light of the mind on these dark times gives the Divine Mind a chance to do its work. We may not have to fix the world ourselves alone, but it sure helps if we show up with clean tools ready to work. As we assess both the hindrances and generative powers of our own lives, we find great cause for celebration. Vow today to not slip back into the lazy chair of despair and hopelessness. Allow the dream to live itself out through the choices and beauties of your own life.

Ten Ways to Deepen Your Life

2008-12-22T09:44:00.000-08:00

The party’s over. We’ve taken down the lights, recycled the wrapping paper and returned the battery powered reindeer sweater we got at the white elephant office gift exchange. Hey, it was fun while it lasted. The holidays consumed us. Now it’s back to the business of living the rest of our lives.

Feeling a little disconnected? Are you skittering over the surface of things unable or unwilling to take hold? Feel like you’re missing something? Want to get down to the sweet stuff? Here are ten way to dig down deeper into the significance of your own life.

1. Slow Down

For a seed to take root it has to hold still. Is there any stillness, silence or emptiness left in your life, or have you filled it all with pomp and circumstance? Step out of the incessant stream of doing and sink down into the pool of being. The good news is you don’t have to create depth and significance in your life. It’s already and always there. You only have to slow down enough to sink into it.

2. Read Good Books

Good books are like a lit match in a pool of gasoline. Set aside twenty minutes a day for reading – maybe first thing in the morning when your mind is still open, unformed and available. The best books don’t indoctrinate, they liberate us from all doctrines. Like shafts of light in a dark forest, they illuminate our own hidden knowing. They give us to ourselves. “Every writer,” said Lu Chi in the second century A.D., “is an entrance into the mystery.” What are the great books? That’s your search my friend.

3. Listen

Most of us spend a great deal of energy maintaining our story. We talk a lot about our past, our problems, our resentments and all of the reasons why things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to. Every chance we get we tell ourselves and anyone else who will listen about our grievances and fantasies of entitlement. Instead of dwelling on your own story, lean into someone else’s. Listen, really listen. This is harder than it sounds. That is until you realize how easy it is. When you really listen to someone you bring a wordless presence into the room. You both feel it and are healed by it. You don’t have to do a thing.

4. Let Art Open You

Make time in your life for great art. Educate yourself about what that means if you need to. See important films. Listen closely and with full attention to good music. Read poetry. Attend a dance performance and sit as close as you can. Go to the theater. Stand in front of great paintings. Do any of these things and feel your smallness disappear. Feel yourself pulled into larger orbits. Let great art usher you to the head of the table at the sacred banquet of your own life. Let it challenge you, strain you, teach you, feed you, remake you, break you open with tears of remembrance. Let it heal you and draw you in from the cold. Let it make you glad you are a human being.

5. Cultivate Your Spirituality

Spirituality has little to do with religion, dogma or theology although many people find it through those things. Spirituality is just an awkward word we use to describe an experience – the experience of something larger and more beautiful than ourselves. It may well up as you contemplate the eternal laws of nature or the sudden rise of the moon. Or when it hits you that we, like the moon, are beings of light. Our bodies are literally composed of the food we eat, and the food we eat is made by photosynthesis, that is, by the sun. Therefore, we are literally made of light. Try contemplating that and not feeling spiritual.

6. Find Teachers

In all the hero myths there are always mentors. Luke had Obi Wan. Frodo had Gandalf. Buffy had Giles. In each case, the teacher was a familiar person the hero had overlooked and underestimated. Who are you overlooking and underestimating? When you are on the right path, the right people come into your life. Be ready and step toward them. They need you too. You fulfill each other’s purpose.

7. Accept Help

You are never more powerful than when you admit your limitations. But humility is not the same thing as humiliation. Get that figured out. See a therapist if you’re confused. Join a sangha. Build a community of like-minded, conscious, positive people around you. Let this raft of souls carry you to distant shores. When you open yourself and show your vulnerability, you draw out the innate kindness in others. Ask for help and accept it. We inspire each other with our honest admission of powerlessness. And then miracles start to happen – miracles that lonely, isolated and prideful people can only imagine.

8. Face What Needs Facing

Start telling the truth about who and what you are. Without drama and the need to place blame, simply admit the facts. Without an honest recognition of the problem, no healing can take place. Life’s too short to stay sick on purpose. Let the truth set you free.

9. Cultivate Discipline

Honor and recognize your part in the creation of your own life. Yes, once you plant the seeds they grow by themselves. But you have to earn the seeds, hoe the rows, amend the soil and dig the irrigation channels. We do not create water, but we do create the openings through which it can flow into our fields. All of this requires scheduling, goal setting and hard work. Cultivate new habits. Studies show that if you do something for twenty one days in a row it will become a habit. First comes discipline then comes naturalness. Most people try to skip the first stage and go right to the naturalness. Their fields are fallow.

10. Surrender

When the work is done, let the infinite creative energy of the universe take care of the rest. The farmer who tugs anxiously on his seedlings is sure to uproot them. Let things unfold in their time. Surrender to what is. You don’t have to run the whole world anymore. Quit trying to control everything – what other people do, how they drive, what they say, how they live their lives. Accept as deeply as you can the truth that below the inevitable conflicts of life lies a hidden harmony, a deep unity, and that everything is, after all, okay. Give your ego the year off. Live in the timeless presence of this moment. Allow grace to well up through the cracks in your old way of thinking. There are deeper waters. Let them rise. Drink deeply. And feel your own life deepening as well.

Hard Work

2008-11-22T10:27:00.000-08:00

A lot of people think art is all about inspiration. They think people who accomplish great things are carried there on a magical cloud of divine intervention. It’s not true. Inspiration is overrated. “I always thought inspiration was for amateurs,” says eminent visual artist Chuck Close, “the rest of us just show up and get to work.” Inspiration is the refuge of the undisciplined. Waiting around on the sidelines for inspiration to suddenly strike is a formula for failure.

Of course inspiration is real and powerful and important, but it does not occur in a vacuum. Before inspiration visits you, three preliminary stages must be crossed. First comes love, then comes thought, then comes hard work. What use is gasoline if you don’t have a car to burn it in? Let’s build the car, then look for a gas station.

The first step is love. Only do what you love. Don’t confuse this with enslavement to base appetites or superficial desires. Instead, give the soul what it is asking for. “Follow your bliss,” Joseph Campbell told his students, and don’t let anyone or anything throw you off the beam. Following your bliss changes you. And it opens doors you didn’t even know were there. In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna told Arjuna, “you become what you love.” In other words, love is a particularly effective form of focused consciousness. Thoughts have transformational power.

It’s natural for our thoughts to swirl incessantly around the things we care deeply about. That’s normal. That’s why it’s important to care about the right things – true things, real things. When we do, our thoughts become intentions and affirmations and they begin to manifest in the material world. The universe has no choice but to respond to powerfully focused conscious intentions. Thoughts may not manifest in the way you think they will, but they will manifest. “All that we are is the result of what we have thought,” said the Buddha in the Dhamapada, “our life is a product of our mind.” It is a grave error to underestimate the capacity of consciousness to construct reality. “Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal,” said Thomas Jefferson, “and nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.” For Henry Ford it was this simple: “If you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”

From thoughts come actions. Actions repeated become habit. And habit constructs character. Our lives are the results of our thoughts and actions. We become what we love, we become what we think, we become what we do. Our choices set into motion complex webs of causation that interface with the lives of countless others and the consciousness of the universe itself – what some people call God. One-pointed love, conscious intention and disciplined action are an unstoppable force. Cultivating the habit of hard work is the single most important element of success in any endeavor. “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work,” said Thomas Edison. Squeamish about work? Then don’t complain about the gulf between you and your dreams.

Stop looking for the magic formula or the right self-help book. You’ve read enough. You’ve prayed enough. You’ve thought enough. Now get to work. “Every habit and faculty is preserved and increased by its corresponding actions,” said Epictetus in the first century, “the habit of walking makes us better walkers, regular running makes us better runners.” Want to write better songs? Write songs everyday. Want a better gig? You know what to do. Want to break the cycle of addiction? Act like a sober person. Want to overcome fear and cultivate compassion? Ask yourself, what would a courageous, compassionate person do, and then do that. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Aristotle, Judaism and Confucianism all make this point loud and clear: action precedes internal transformation. Fake it till you make it. Act as if. Act as if you were talented, fabulous, gifted, creative, powerful. It’s one of life’s most delicious paradoxes. Yes, thoughts and intentions give rise to actions and behaviors. But actions and behaviors also shape consciousness. It’s a never-ending feedback loop. Thoughts give rise to actions and behaviors in turn transform consciousness. That’s how we become what we do.

And finally, when we fully engage in a life of action, that’s when the inspiration hits. Inspiration can never be the goal. Inspiration just happens when we show the universe that we are willing to do our part. We pay our dues. We show up prepared. We do our homework and learn our craft. We demonstrate our readiness in our everyday actions. Writers write, singers sing, lovers love, painters paint, creators create. And in the abundance of our fully-realized commitment, miracles happen. “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” said Edison. Stop searching the sky for that bolt of lightning. Keep your eyes on the work in front of you. Let the universe make miracles through the work of your own hands. In the end there’s only one thing that delivers us to the life we long for and so richly deserve: hard work.

Playing Small

2008-11-02T08:31:00.000-08:00

Like all artists, musicians are caught between two conflicting fears. We’re afraid no one will come to the show. And we’re afraid they will. We can’t decide which is worse: failure or success.

We need an audience, but we really want to be alone. We loath the anonymity of failure almost as much as we fear the utter exposure of success.

If you aspire to be anything in this life – a teacher, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker or, God forbid, a singer songwriter – you’re going to have to negotiate this paradoxical minefield. Many of us are paralyzed. We don’t take the next step because we don’t want to get blown up.

But what is it really that’s holding us back?

The common assumption is that we fear failure. We don’t reach for greatness because we’re convinced we’ll fall short. We don’t want to look stupid. It’s so much easier to hold still, risk nothing and nurture the illusion that we’re satisfied with our incompletion. We wear our dissatisfaction like a badge.

But there’s another, subtler fear that lurks behind the more obvious one. Fear of failure is one thing. What about fear of success?

Marianne Williamson, in her bestselling book A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles in A Course in Miracles, wrote very powerfully on this subject. This quote has been circulating the internet for years. It is often mistakenly attributed to Nelson Mandela. That’s because he adapted this passage for his inauguration speech in 1994 when he was elected the first black president of South Africa, a country painfully emerging from the mud of apartheid. Mandela had been imprisoned by the white regime for twenty seven years. He had a lot of time to think about the big questions. What holds us back? What moves us forward? How can we heal ourselves, heal our nation and heal the world? One can only speculate about how this passage affected Mandela. As you read it, ask yourself, is this about me? Williamson writes,

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? […] Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you… And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Our practiced unwillingness to cultivate our own greatness deserves deeper reflection and contemplation than we normally allow. What if she’s right? What if the possibility of our wild success is more paralyzing than the possibility of our utter failure? Why do we feed, day after day, on the bitter bread of our own indifference, our own apathy, our own resentment? Why, now, have we given up? Surely the fear of failure is an inadequate explanation.

Where did we get the message that our greatness was threatening to others? Where did we learn the lie that the best way to help other people feel good about themselves was to mute our brilliance? Who told us that we did not deserve love, prosperity, health and joy? And why did we so readily believe them?

Somehow we confused mastery with arrogance, creative abundance with egotism, brilliance with narcissism. We are right to guard against arrogance, egotism and narcissism. But we are wrong, dead wrong, to eschew mastery, creative abundance and brilliance in the name of a distorted notion of humility.

On the contrary, is it not ultimately more egotistical to hide our light for fear of looking foolish? What are we protecting? Real humility would be to get our ego out of the way and honor the gifts we have been so graciously given by the all-knowing mind of the universe – to cultivate the courage and discipline to live fully, fearlessly and authentically, full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes.

We stare through the bars of our fear-wrought prison; we torture ourselves with doubt, confusion and false humility. But don’t despair. Mandela lived in a literal prison. He was routinely tortured. Yet he ultimately triumphed. Mandela believed in the light, and in the power of ordinary people to be great.

By cultivating our greatness we are better able to serve others. And then the real miracle happens: “as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others”. Far from intimidating others with our light, we inspire them. Cultivating your authentic, creative, generous self is your greatest gift to the world. In fact, it’s your obligation and your duty. Not for ego, not for glory, not for fame and not for money. All those things may or may not happen incidentally. They were never the goal. The real goal is and always has been service. By cultivating your authentic, creative self you are participating in the sustenance of the universe. And we can’t do it alone. We need as many people as possible to cultivate their own greatness. Perhaps we are reaching the tipping point as more and more people are liberated from the chains of limited thinking and fearful ignorance. As we awaken to our deeper reality, others are inspired to awaken as well. We serve nothing but our own fear-based ego by playing small. Living our dreams, dreams planted deep within us when the dream of the universe was born, is our sacred duty and honor. Live the life of your dreams. Risk everything. You have nothing to lose but your fear and your egoic confusion. Trust the light. Live big. Live bright. Your soul is crying for it. The time has passed for playing small.

The Silent Church

2008-09-21T18:06:00.000-07:00

On August 18, 1963 Jean-Luc Poirot set out of Boston Harbor in a fully stocked thirty two foot schooner, intent on sailing solo around the world. He was never heard from again. Twenty years later, in 1983, a merchant vessel blew off course in a storm near Malaysia and spotted a signal fire on a tiny, uninhabited island out in the middle of nowhere. Drawing closer they saw a man with a very long beard jumping up and down on the beach. It was Jean-Luc Poirot.

The captain of the merchant vessel and a few of his men dropped a skiff into the water and ferried over to the island. They landed and stepped out onto the beach where Jean-Luc stood in disbelief, tears of joy streaming down his face. As the men helped Jean-Luc gather up his meager belongings to take back to the ship, the captain noticed that Jean had built three beautiful huts from drift wood and palm fronds, decorated with shells and strands of betel nut and dried flowers. The captain was very impressed.

“What is that building there?” the captain asked, pointing to the first shelter.

“That’s my house”, Jean said proudly.

“What’s that second building?” the captain asked.

“That’s my church,” Jean said, a hushed sense of reverence coming into his voice.

"Then what’s that third building?” asked the captain.

“Oh,” Jean said, “that’s the church I used to go to.”

I have to laugh every time I hear that story. Many of us have “churches we used to go to”. And some of us, if we ever went at all, stopped going to church a long time ago. About 50% of Americans attend a weekly worship service of some kind – a mosque, a synagogue or a church. That number is much lower in Europe, especially northern Europe where in some countries it hovers well below 10%. And like Jean-Luc, most church goers are not attending the church they used to go to.

In the 19th century American Christianity began to split into nearly infinite variety. Buffeted by wave after wave of immigration and a steady stream of new ideas and practices, American religion became as fractured as American individualism. Alternate spiritualities spread like fire through the dry and desiccated theologies of our forefathers. By the twentieth century the transformation was complete. We became a nation of seekers. A new paradigm of religion as an individual path of discovery replaced the old paradigm of religion as a socially binding tribal affiliation. The gale force winds of religious freedom had blown down all the doors. Our individualism and commercial consciousness turned spirituality into a marketplace and each of us into shoppers.

Many of us call ourselves “spiritual”, not “religious”. We are no longer fed by the old institutions and rituals, preferring instead the direct experience of spirit in manifold forms. We know that the God of our understanding, and the God that surpasses all understanding, is bigger than any church. That’s what makes Jean-Luc’s story so funny.

Some of us feel the sacred presence in nature, and as we walk alone in the woods or on a lake shore we sense an infinite expanse no scripture or doctrine could convey. As Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, “scriptures are of little use to the illumined man or woman who sees the Lord everywhere.”

Some of us broke down the walls of our perceptual prisons with drugs. Like Carlos Castaneda, and usually without the tutelage of a Don Juan, we roamed the desert stoned out of our minds, seeing the world with new eyes and riding waves of consciousness to distant shores and back again. Then, after time, the drugs themselves became a prison, dulling our sensibilities and driving us deeper and deeper into lonely lives of isolation. We grew small and hunkered down into the long night, a beer in one hand, a bong in the other, caught up in the pseudo-rapture of our own egoic fear, craving and resentment until the only thing we really cared about was the next buzz. Sometimes you need medicine. And then you get sick from the medicine.

Some of us uncovered our spirituality in recovery. In church basements and cafes, AA and NA and other 12-step movements presented a new vision of freedom, a vision the ego has no chance of understanding. Laying bare the mechanics of our compulsions, we learned that it is only through surrender of the ego that real joy emerges. The discursive mind chafes against the illogic of gaining power by admitting powerlessness, but through direct experience we came to understand.

Some of us found the truth in organized religion. Faith communities centered around a specific scriptural tradition gave us the necessary framework within which we could experience the divine. We all remember Dylan’s born-again phase. Sometimes a powerful theology and more importantly the community that embodies it draws us into its loving embrace. At its best, this approach heals us and softens us into our deeper humanity. At its worst, this approach leads to provincial or even bigoted thinking and the delusion that one’s religion is better than all the others. As Joseph Campbell quipped when asked to define mythology, “Mythology is other people’s religion.”

Some of us find our joy in service. Through the attainment of professional mastery we cultivate skills that enable us to be of use to others. We become doctors and lawyers and writers and musicians and builders and counselors and creators of all kinds. We use our work to experience the depth of our connection to the source energy that runs through all things. In a life of duty and service we feel a vast, divine presence gently wresting the reins away from our fading ego.

Some of us draw profound sustenance from a life of study. We read great books by poets and philosophers and geniuses of all disciplines and through their polished lenses we come to see a little farther and deeper than before. Religious experience is not always about leaving the intellect behind. “The mind is indeed our prison,” the Maitri Upanishad says, “but the mind is also our liberator.”

Mohandas Gandhi was asked by a journalist once to sum up his philosophy in three words. “Renounce and enjoy,” he said, quoting the Isha Upanishad. Surrender the ego, give up attachment to this outcome or that outcome, release all petty desires, learn to love the world and all the imperfect people in it just the way they are. But stay fully engaged, vitally alive and completely committed to the creative path you have been given. Grow your business, write your book, heal the wounded, plant an orchard, harvest the fruit. Make something beautiful out of the seeds you have been given. Then give it away. You will be paid in full in ways your ego can never even imagine.

You might not need the preacher’s sermon or the theologian’s doctrinal argument. You might not need the ancient scriptural passage. You might not need the sacred ritual or the solemn hymn. Each of these are spokes of the great wheel, and all spokes lead to the center. But none of them contains or fully expresses the mystery of the center. “We shape clay into a vessel,” Laozi writes in the Daodejing, “but it is the emptiness within that holds whatever we want.” We grow attached to the outer forms of things – our doctrines, our churches, our ideas – and we forget the treasure those forms were made to hold. Emerson remarked, “I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching,” and we know exactly what he meant. Out of the depths of our own being, heard only in silence, we hear the one wordless voice, the voice that speaks to each of us in our own language. As we walk our paths, sometimes alone, sometimes together, sometimes in song, sometimes in silence, we finally realize that in all our restless seeking not one of our steps leads away from the truth. Your true church is right where you are.

15 Things You Have To Do This Summer

2008-07-23T14:16:00.000-07:00

Feel like summer passed you by? It’s not too late. There are still plenty of prime time summer days stretched out ahead of you. But you’re going to have to make the first move. Here are fifteen things guaranteed to jump start your summer.

1. Go barefoot

We all love our many shoes and flip flops, but once in a while leave them behind and feel the curve of the earth beneath your feet. Cool grass, white sidewalks, wet sand, smooth pebbles, that brown dirt path down to the lake – don’t let your shoes get in the way of these things.

2. Drink water from a garden hose

Some well-meaning health department wonk probably warned you not to, but “health” has many meanings. What about soul-health? We lost a little of our moxie when we put down the hose and picked up the pomegranate flavored vitamin water. Next time you’re thirsty step outside, grab that hose and crank it up. I don’t know why, but it’s liberating. And free.

3. Go swimming in the ocean, in a lake, in a river and in a swimming pool. Repeat.

Let your body slip under the water and remember, if not consciously then at least at the cellular level, the first nine months of life when you floated blissfully in embryonic fluid. Drift downstream and feel what it’s like to fly. Oceans, lakes, rivers and pools all have their different flavors, literally and figuratively. Make sure you hit them all. Do whatever it takes. Make it happen. If you only do one of the things on this list, make this the one.

4. Fall asleep in the shade under a tree

The blue sky light speckles beyond the leaves. Shapes without names. A thousand shades of green. The simple Being of a tree. Rootedness. The way it lives its whole life in one place, satisfied, purposeful, full of grace. If you let go of your incessant thinking and do this right, you will feel the earth turning beneath you in space as you slip into unconsciousness.

5. Hike the backcountry

Head for the hills and move under your own power over fields and streams, the way we moved for hundreds of thousands of years before we invented those confounded bicycles and automobiles. Feel the machinations of your routinized life dissolve and reconfigure into more natural shapes. Get reacquainted with your mother earth.

6. Make sandwiches and show up at a good friend’s workplace and kidnap them for lunch

Chance meetings and surprises are the sweet spots of life. As far as I know, there’s no rule against orchestrating these chance meetings just a little. Show up at your friend’s work with a picnic and whisk them away on an urban adventure. (Spouses, lovers and exes are also prime targets). An egg salad sandwich, potato chips and a crisp pickle on a bench overlooking the San Diego River can do wonders for a mid-week slump.

7. Wander around on foot downtown with no agenda for four hours

Get out of that glass and steel bubble called your car and see the city at eye level at three miles an hour. Stumble onto bookstores and cafes and Greek restaurants you didn’t know about. Get a little lost. Look up. Makes friends with architecture. Marvel at what busy humans have accomplished. Feel vicariously proud.

8. Rent a kayak and paddle around

Summer is the time when even novices are welcome, even expected, on the water. Take a sailing lesson, rent a row boat on a lake or paddle a kayak out through the surf at La Jolla Shores and explore the sea caves at the base of the cliffs. The sound of water lapping on a hull needs to be fresh in your mind if you know what’s good for you. You’ll kick yourself for not doing this sooner.

9. Go to a library and read poetry

Sure newspapers and websites and magazines and novels are all important, of course they are, but don’t forget where it all begins. Nothing celebrates the power of language like poetry. Language is our best attempt to get a handle on the wild and winsome energies of the universe and poetry is language distilled down to its most potent essentials. Good poets are magicians who wring the cosmos like a rain-soaked bandana and paint the page with its mercurial drops. Rapt in their shamanic spell we see with new eyes the transcendent, blessed ordinariness of our own lives. Then come the cleansing tears.

10. Pick up an instrument you don’t know how to play and try to make music with it

Caught in a rut of tedious proficiency? Tired of being so damn good at everything? Return to what Zen Buddhism calls “the beginner’s mind”. Make god-awful music on an instrument you know nothing about. Drop your ego, stop assessing everything and let your childlike fumblings wrest something new from the uncarved block, the field of pure potentiality that practiced artifice obscures.

11. Write a nine page letter to an old friend

Don’t think too much about what you’re going to write. Just start. Around page four you’ll start getting to the good stuff. You know what I mean. You might not even have to send it.

12. Visit a sacred place

I know, every place is sacred. But some places are more sacred than others. Find an ashram, a meditation garden, a labyrinth, a monastery, a church, a temple, a mosque – but go there when it’s empty. Emerson said, “I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching.” Sit still a while. Get out of your head. Slip into the space between thoughts, between words. Let the wooly eared theologians wrangle doctrine out in the parking lot.

13. Walk in the desert at night

Don’t fall off a cliff or stumble into a bed of cholla, but there’s nothing quite as cleansing as hot desert wind in the dark. Blood warm gusts swirl out of the sky like the breath of God, thick with the smell of stone and moonlight. Stars hang like sparks in the indigo between the mountains. Wonderful things begin happening to your skin and your muscle tissue and your troubled mind – a deep, profound stillness seeps into you like a drop of ink in water and your heart begins to beat in time with the rhythm of the earth’s deepest dream.

14. Go to a farmers market and buy some summer fruit

Buy some ugly little organic white peaches that flood your mouth with the fragrant flavor of river-fed orchards and blue summer skies and dew on the sage and poppies and lavender and bright Monarch wings and the morning star all distilled down into a fuzzy little ball that fits in the palm of your hand. Miracles come in small packages. Buy some for your neighbors and leave them on their porch. Refuse to take credit.

15. Get out of town for three days

Drive at least two hours (preferably more) in any direction and stay there a while. Hit the hotel pool. Get some sun. Read the local paper with an anthropologist’s eye. Watch the worst local TV news you can find. Make fun of the weatherman’s hair. Read maps and learn the names of new places. Make frothy drinks in the blender. Eat tacos. Watch old movies. It doesn’t take much to see that all our problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Catch up on your sleep. Feel your so-called real life slip back into due proportion. Feel the swelling of your self-importance recede. Let summer unwind you and leave you calm and collected, held by sensible boundaries, home at last in right-sized dreams. We do good work. We do important things. People are counting on us. But for now, let summer take you over. Live your life as if it were precious and brief and incomparably sweet. It is.

The Love of Wisdom

2008-05-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

Philosophy is one of those words we’re supposed to know the meaning of, but don’t. Most people think it simply means one’s point of view, as in “my philosophy of life”. For others it conjures up a memory of some awful philosophy class they had years ago in college where a kindly but uninspired professor droned on and on about ontology, phenomenology and the categorical imperative. For most everyone else, philosophy is just a vague abstraction they’d just as soon forget. I’ve been teaching philosophy for seventeen years to over 7000 students, and I’m still not sure what it is.

When I tell people what I do for a living they nod politely and ask “where” and “for how long” and things like that. I see by the look in their eyes they’re intrigued, but reticent. Part of me wants to launch into an introductory lecture that neither of us could endure and part of me just wants to hug them and tell them it’s alright to not know what philosophy is. Really, it’s O.K. Philosophy, by its very nature, is difficult to get a handle on. It’s thinking about thinking. It’s using the mind to try and understand the processes of the mind. It’s like trying to see your own eyes. Try it right now. Try to see your own eyes. You’ll go mad. Now you know why philosophy graduate students look so crazy.

Philosophy means the love of wisdom. (philo: love; sophia: wisdom) It is just the name of a longing that lies deep within us, a longing for what it true and real. Despite the best efforts of academic philosophers to render philosophy utterly incomprehensible to everyone but themselves – I know, that’s not what they’re trying to do, but that is the most evident result of their endless toil – philosophy is in essence a fundamentally innate universal human experience, like breathing or dreaming. It is not the sole purview of specialists – it is the birthright of every living, breathing, dreaming human being. It’s time to rescue philosophy from the philosophers.

If philosophy is the love of wisdom, then what is wisdom? Wisdom is different from practical knowledge (how to make an omelet) or theoretical knowledge (understanding the laws of thermonuclear physics or the causes of the Civil War). Being a master omelet maker, a thermonuclear physicist or a Civil War expert does not make one wise.

Wisdom is the ability to live a good life – a life of depth, of value, of purpose, of dignity, of kindness, of creativity, of beauty, of mastery, of humility, of joy. To be wise is to thrive in a state of well-being where one’s potentials are fully realized. This requires great risk taking – embodying the courage to grow beyond one’s fear-based and self-imposed limitations. Life is both staggeringly difficult and unspeakably beautiful. How are we to negotiate these treacherous twists and turns, not hurt our selves or others, and still enjoy the beauties of the way? That’s going to take some wisdom.

If philosophy is a yearning, then when do we feel that yearning most keenly? One has only to look at one’s own experience. Standing in a cemetery and watching a casket lowering into the ground. Feeling the grip of the tiny hand of a newborn child. Lying on the asphalt along the interstate with paramedics hovering over you, smoldering wreckage scattered for a quarter mile. Standing by a campfire on the bank of river and watching glowing embers soar up into the darkness of a desert sky, turning into stars. Sitting in a tiny doctor’s office and hearing the word “cancer”. It is in these moments that the trivia of life drops away leaving a startling clarity – a clarity that seems to transcend thought. We are now in the field of pure awareness, liberated from our incessant thought-stream. And from this perspective, usually quite fleeting, we see with new eyes the challenges and beauties of our lives. We shift back into our deeper awareness – a silent, still witness that is usually hidden behind the thicket of our incessant thoughts and we catch a glimpse of something grander, something wider than our work-a-day world with its ill-timed troubles and endless pursuits.

These moments of awakening are the bricks and mortar of philosophy for it is from these insights that we begin to build a path to truth. “The unexamined life is not worth living” said Socrates, and in these moments of nameless clarity we know just what he means. Life, as it is normally lived, is like a dream. Part of us is completely caught up in the dream, attached to the imagery and invested in the delusion. But our deeper nature knows there is something more, something lasting and precious beneath the shimmering surface of the perceptual field. Seeing through the illusory nature of surface consciousness and drawing sustenance from the eternal presence it conceals – this is the central lesson of the world’s wisdom traditions. But we haven’t been very good students.

Throughout history remarkable individuals have experienced wisdom and tried to teach it to others, with varying degrees of success. Most of them are lost and long forgotten. A few of them live on in the words and teachings they left behind and in the traditions that arose around those teachings. Each of these teachers used the imagery and context of their own cultures to illustrate the path to the timeless presence beneath the surface of our unexamined minds. Some personified it and called it God. Others split the infinite energy of the universe into pantheons of countless gods, in conflict with each other. Still others preferred to leave the source nameless, fearing that if we name it we will become attached to the name and forget the reality to which the name refers. And in the deeper, mystical currents within each of these wisdom traditions lies the same essential claim – that we are one with the source, that we are identical with the ground of Being. Only we don’t know it. We are caught, for now, in a dream of separateness, enslaved to our lower nature, gripped by fear and lost in illusory loneliness.

Wisdom then is the ability to navigate the boat of our lives through these waves and into the far harbor of our ancient home. There are many maps and charts. But each of us has an internal compass as well, and must chart a course of our own. “Truth is a pathless land”, said Krishnamurti, and indeed, we cannot simply mindlessly follow the path of another. Wisdom defies formulization. Doctrines and dogmas can point the way, but they must ultimately be left behind.

To study the history of philosophy then is to study the history of love. We humans are philosophical animals – we tirelessly seek the object of our love, namely, wisdom. Our mythologies, religions and philosophies are, at their best, attempts to close the gap between us and the ground of Being from which we and all things come. Religion comes from the word religio meaning “to bind together” or “to connect”. We are tired of feeling alienated, alone, cut off. We want to awaken to the eternal energy of life coursing through us and all things. We want to feel at home in our own skins. We want to transcend and leave behind our divisive ideologies and awaken from this dream of separateness. We want to overcome ignorance and illusion. We want fall at last into the arms of our beloved. That is why we study philosophy.