Friday, September 11, 2009
Friday, July 31, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Children's Rights
Albie Sachs, arguably the world's most famous judge, was fleetingly in the UK last week, primarily to tell the story behind the judgment he made in South Africa not to send a woman to prison because it would infringe the human rights of her three children. Even by the standards of a judge responsible for some of the most progressive legal judgments, such as ruling that it is unconstitutional to limit marriage to a man and a woman, the case of S versus M, now being cited in courts worldwide, is remarkable. "Judges are the storytellers of the 21st century," says 74-year-old Sachs, who told an international audience of human rights lawyers in Edinburgh that the first mindset that needed to be changed in the now historic case was his own.
At first sight, he had intended to throw out an appeal on behalf of Mrs M, who was facing four years in jail for up to 40 counts of credit card fraud that she had committed while under a suspended sentence for similar offences. "I remember drafting an extremely dismissive response. I said: 'This doesn't raise a constitutional question. She simply wants to avoid going to jail. She doesn't make out a case, and her prospects of success are zero.' " It was a female colleague, another of the 11 green-robed judges in South Africa's constitutional court, who insisted that the case be heard. She argued that the human rights of the accused woman's children were not being looked at separately. "She said: 'There is something you are missing. What about the children? Mrs M has three teenage children. She lives in an area that we politely call fragile, an area of gangs, drug-peddling and a fair amount of violence. The indications are that she is a good mother, and the magistrate gave no attention to the children's interests.'
"The minute my colleague spoke to me about the importance of the three teenage children of Mrs M, I started to see them not as three small citizens who had the right to grow up into big citizens but as three threatened, worrying, precarious, conflicted young boys who had a claim on the court, a claim on our society as individuals, as children, and a claim not to be treated solely as extensions of the rights of the mother, but in their own terms." As a result, Sachs created a legal precedent in 2007: a woman who otherwise would have gone to jail did not have to, because of her children's rights. "We could have said the children's rights must be considered but sent Mrs M to jail anyway, perhaps for a lesser term. But that would not have changed anything."
At the time he was drafting the judgment, Sachs did not know of any country that took the rights of offenders' children into account, but he subsequently discovered that similar ideas were being framed in Scotland in a report by the then children's commissioner, Kathleen Marshall. "This was astonishing," Sachs told the audience. "In a totally different legal system, in a totally different society, a conclusion was being reached that is almost identical. It showed that the time has come for new ways of thinking."
Sachs says that South African courts are also taking a new approach to dealing with young offenders. "We use as much diversion as possible from the criminal justice system. We try to use the family and the community. We try to find ways of helping them to live together in the same neighbourhood, and we use apology and reparation and reconnection, rather than institutionalising and isolating the offender from the community and placing the offender with other offenders in a youth culture of marginalisation and anger. Offenders are encouraged to see themselves as part of the community."
At first sight, he had intended to throw out an appeal on behalf of Mrs M, who was facing four years in jail for up to 40 counts of credit card fraud that she had committed while under a suspended sentence for similar offences. "I remember drafting an extremely dismissive response. I said: 'This doesn't raise a constitutional question. She simply wants to avoid going to jail. She doesn't make out a case, and her prospects of success are zero.' " It was a female colleague, another of the 11 green-robed judges in South Africa's constitutional court, who insisted that the case be heard. She argued that the human rights of the accused woman's children were not being looked at separately. "She said: 'There is something you are missing. What about the children? Mrs M has three teenage children. She lives in an area that we politely call fragile, an area of gangs, drug-peddling and a fair amount of violence. The indications are that she is a good mother, and the magistrate gave no attention to the children's interests.'
"The minute my colleague spoke to me about the importance of the three teenage children of Mrs M, I started to see them not as three small citizens who had the right to grow up into big citizens but as three threatened, worrying, precarious, conflicted young boys who had a claim on the court, a claim on our society as individuals, as children, and a claim not to be treated solely as extensions of the rights of the mother, but in their own terms." As a result, Sachs created a legal precedent in 2007: a woman who otherwise would have gone to jail did not have to, because of her children's rights. "We could have said the children's rights must be considered but sent Mrs M to jail anyway, perhaps for a lesser term. But that would not have changed anything."
At the time he was drafting the judgment, Sachs did not know of any country that took the rights of offenders' children into account, but he subsequently discovered that similar ideas were being framed in Scotland in a report by the then children's commissioner, Kathleen Marshall. "This was astonishing," Sachs told the audience. "In a totally different legal system, in a totally different society, a conclusion was being reached that is almost identical. It showed that the time has come for new ways of thinking."
Sachs says that South African courts are also taking a new approach to dealing with young offenders. "We use as much diversion as possible from the criminal justice system. We try to use the family and the community. We try to find ways of helping them to live together in the same neighbourhood, and we use apology and reparation and reconnection, rather than institutionalising and isolating the offender from the community and placing the offender with other offenders in a youth culture of marginalisation and anger. Offenders are encouraged to see themselves as part of the community."
Guilt
The following article is excerpted from The Eight-Circuit Brain: Navigational Strategies for the Energetic Body, forthcoming from Vertical Pool Publishing in October, 2009.
Unchecked, repressed, and overwhelming guilt may be the greatest impediment to genuine relating. Guilt inhibits the flow of spontaneity that actual relating demands. Guilt binds consciousness to the past while corrupting our capacity to be fully present with another person. Guilt distorts our personality with excessive self-consciousness that embarrasses us and leaves us feeling socially inept. Left unattended, guilt doesn't go away but turns into resentment and finally, a toxic emotional sludge. Guilt sucks. Guilt sucks the life force right out of your body.
As long as we suffer from a guilty conscience, we cannot truly relate openly and directly. Before social intelligence can be increased, guilt must be dealt with. If we think we don't feel or have any guilt we may have effectively repressed it and if so, an unconscious guilt complex may be pulling our strings. Some of us manage to escape guilt through the toxic magick of the psychopath. Others temporarily alleviate their guilt by pretending it's not there. What is guilt? Guilt expresses a negative emotional reaction to betraying someone's moral or ethical code that we have been conditioned to care about.
Morality and ethics: two terms commonly confused to mean the same thing. I understand morality as any code of conduct inherited from society, family, and church/religion that defines, sometimes in black and white terms, what exactly constitutes bad behavior and good behavior, a good person and an bad or evil person. Each of us was raised and conditioned by the morality of those who acted as our parents. Whether they were genetically related or authority figures in foster homes, the church, state prison, the orphanage, military school, etc., these moralities share a common reward and punishment system. Violate the code and you are punished by feeling like a no-good person ie. you eat moral guilt. Conform to the code and you are rewarded by feeling good ie. you eat moral pride.
Ethics, as I use this term, express an internal code of conduct developed by making a series of tough decisions based on our personal assessment and judgment in determining the right course of action. When I say "right course of action," I mean according to the individual making the decisions. As these tough decisions continue being made, a personal ethos eventually consolidates and forms the bedrock of our conscience. When we learn to abide by this code, our conscience becomes a guiding principle in our lives. The degree to which we do not define and live by our own ethical codes is the degree to which the guilt complexes inherited from external moralities continue their grip on our psyches. To your own conscience be true or continue regurgitating the moralities of society, family, and church. Developing a real conscience is obviously not for everybody. Not everybody is ready to take a stand and speak their truth, regardless of whether or not it finds agreement with the consensus.
I see two basic types of guilt: spontaneous and mechanical. Spontaneous guilt stems from violating your own ethical code; mechanical guilt stems from violating family, societal and religious morality. Both guilts can feel similar with the exception of one significant difference. Spontaneous guilt happens before you violate your code, while mechanical guilt happens during or after an external code is violated. See for yourself. The next time you feel the onset of guilt, ask yourself if it's happening before the intended act or behavior, or during and/or after it. When the feeling of guilt arrives before taking action, you know you're about to do something that you personally disapprove of. The warning signal of spontaneous guilt also means you have not been punished yet. When the guilt happens during and/or after the act, it is too late; there was no warning. You have been punished.
If you proceed to violate your own code of ethics, you will probably feel remorse and regret for betraying yourself. If you violate an externally-imposed moral code, you will probably feel the automatic oppression of a punishing guilt. Mechanical guilt comes from violating a code that you did not create yourself and that was manufactured by external sources. Mechanical guilt can be traced back to family, societal and religious morals that we passively and unconsciously absorbed without ever questioning whether they were actually true for us or not.
We all undergo similar kinds of conditioning as children until we succumb to its machinations or rebel. Yet it may not be enough to just rebel if we do not replace the old robotic morality with a freshly minted code we can live by. Defining your own ethical code constitutes a creative act. This is why betraying your own code produces spontaneous guilt and not the mechanical guilt resulting from violating an externally-imposed, pre-fab morality assimilated long ago that you may no longer believe in, or never believed in the first place.
Family guilt keeps the kids in line and close to home with the ties that bind. Some of us suffer more family guilt than others. These are the late-bloomers in life whose burden of excessive family guilt complexes require more time to sort things out and differentiate themselves from the matrix of clan identity. For some, these ancestral moral traditions serve them well and there is no need to change anything. For others seeking liberation from the ties that bind, the way out is through the gauntlet of defining your own code of ethics and demonstrating the audacity to live by it. As we define and live by our own ethics, we step outside the boundaries of consensus morality and risk social banishment with labels such as "criminal," "artist," "hooligan," and "misfit." Those who continue fighting and rebelling against the established dominator moral culture risk persecution and scapegoating by the enforcers of herd morality.
Fighting against "the man" or "the machine" proves as futile as a fruit fly caught in the web of a giant spider; whatever we fight against absorbs us. Those who wake up and wise up to a more progressive revolt have discovered what is actually worth fighting for. Whatever is worth fighting for defines the good fight. When we know what is worth fighting for, there is no point in wasting our time and energy fighting against anything or anybody. As for me, the good fight amounts to fighting for consciousness itself and its unfettered expansion. As consciousness expands, we perceive more reality. As we see more, we are better informed about what we actually care about and what we honestly don't care for (trying to care about everything ends up caring about nothing). Unfettered expansion of consciousness evolves into conscience, a code that guides us according to our vision, not the unconscious dictates of inherited moral considerations.
Unchecked, repressed, and overwhelming guilt may be the greatest impediment to genuine relating. Guilt inhibits the flow of spontaneity that actual relating demands. Guilt binds consciousness to the past while corrupting our capacity to be fully present with another person. Guilt distorts our personality with excessive self-consciousness that embarrasses us and leaves us feeling socially inept. Left unattended, guilt doesn't go away but turns into resentment and finally, a toxic emotional sludge. Guilt sucks. Guilt sucks the life force right out of your body.
As long as we suffer from a guilty conscience, we cannot truly relate openly and directly. Before social intelligence can be increased, guilt must be dealt with. If we think we don't feel or have any guilt we may have effectively repressed it and if so, an unconscious guilt complex may be pulling our strings. Some of us manage to escape guilt through the toxic magick of the psychopath. Others temporarily alleviate their guilt by pretending it's not there. What is guilt? Guilt expresses a negative emotional reaction to betraying someone's moral or ethical code that we have been conditioned to care about.
Morality and ethics: two terms commonly confused to mean the same thing. I understand morality as any code of conduct inherited from society, family, and church/religion that defines, sometimes in black and white terms, what exactly constitutes bad behavior and good behavior, a good person and an bad or evil person. Each of us was raised and conditioned by the morality of those who acted as our parents. Whether they were genetically related or authority figures in foster homes, the church, state prison, the orphanage, military school, etc., these moralities share a common reward and punishment system. Violate the code and you are punished by feeling like a no-good person ie. you eat moral guilt. Conform to the code and you are rewarded by feeling good ie. you eat moral pride.
Ethics, as I use this term, express an internal code of conduct developed by making a series of tough decisions based on our personal assessment and judgment in determining the right course of action. When I say "right course of action," I mean according to the individual making the decisions. As these tough decisions continue being made, a personal ethos eventually consolidates and forms the bedrock of our conscience. When we learn to abide by this code, our conscience becomes a guiding principle in our lives. The degree to which we do not define and live by our own ethical codes is the degree to which the guilt complexes inherited from external moralities continue their grip on our psyches. To your own conscience be true or continue regurgitating the moralities of society, family, and church. Developing a real conscience is obviously not for everybody. Not everybody is ready to take a stand and speak their truth, regardless of whether or not it finds agreement with the consensus.
I see two basic types of guilt: spontaneous and mechanical. Spontaneous guilt stems from violating your own ethical code; mechanical guilt stems from violating family, societal and religious morality. Both guilts can feel similar with the exception of one significant difference. Spontaneous guilt happens before you violate your code, while mechanical guilt happens during or after an external code is violated. See for yourself. The next time you feel the onset of guilt, ask yourself if it's happening before the intended act or behavior, or during and/or after it. When the feeling of guilt arrives before taking action, you know you're about to do something that you personally disapprove of. The warning signal of spontaneous guilt also means you have not been punished yet. When the guilt happens during and/or after the act, it is too late; there was no warning. You have been punished.
If you proceed to violate your own code of ethics, you will probably feel remorse and regret for betraying yourself. If you violate an externally-imposed moral code, you will probably feel the automatic oppression of a punishing guilt. Mechanical guilt comes from violating a code that you did not create yourself and that was manufactured by external sources. Mechanical guilt can be traced back to family, societal and religious morals that we passively and unconsciously absorbed without ever questioning whether they were actually true for us or not.
We all undergo similar kinds of conditioning as children until we succumb to its machinations or rebel. Yet it may not be enough to just rebel if we do not replace the old robotic morality with a freshly minted code we can live by. Defining your own ethical code constitutes a creative act. This is why betraying your own code produces spontaneous guilt and not the mechanical guilt resulting from violating an externally-imposed, pre-fab morality assimilated long ago that you may no longer believe in, or never believed in the first place.
Family guilt keeps the kids in line and close to home with the ties that bind. Some of us suffer more family guilt than others. These are the late-bloomers in life whose burden of excessive family guilt complexes require more time to sort things out and differentiate themselves from the matrix of clan identity. For some, these ancestral moral traditions serve them well and there is no need to change anything. For others seeking liberation from the ties that bind, the way out is through the gauntlet of defining your own code of ethics and demonstrating the audacity to live by it. As we define and live by our own ethics, we step outside the boundaries of consensus morality and risk social banishment with labels such as "criminal," "artist," "hooligan," and "misfit." Those who continue fighting and rebelling against the established dominator moral culture risk persecution and scapegoating by the enforcers of herd morality.
Fighting against "the man" or "the machine" proves as futile as a fruit fly caught in the web of a giant spider; whatever we fight against absorbs us. Those who wake up and wise up to a more progressive revolt have discovered what is actually worth fighting for. Whatever is worth fighting for defines the good fight. When we know what is worth fighting for, there is no point in wasting our time and energy fighting against anything or anybody. As for me, the good fight amounts to fighting for consciousness itself and its unfettered expansion. As consciousness expands, we perceive more reality. As we see more, we are better informed about what we actually care about and what we honestly don't care for (trying to care about everything ends up caring about nothing). Unfettered expansion of consciousness evolves into conscience, a code that guides us according to our vision, not the unconscious dictates of inherited moral considerations.
Friday, July 24, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Inspiration
"Inspiration offers a new paradigm for communicating, away from force and manipulation. Shared human perfection, the bedrock of successful communications, is nothing less than love; while cynicism blocks evolution." JM Roberts
Seeking to improve the world is a futile game built on a lie. If we want to be transformative communicators or leaders we need to work through the self. In other words, if we want to make the world a better place, we start by looking at ourselves - that way there will be one less scoundrel among us. In order to communicate in a really transformative way, we've got to get over our need to change and fix people. If our intention is to really accept the world, and the people around us as they are, then we become naturally inspiring and transformative - its the paradox of transformative leadership and transformative communication. We do not inspire people by trying to make them better - it usually just annoys them - we inspire them by witnessing their inherent perfection.
Seeking to improve the world is a futile game built on a lie. If we want to be transformative communicators or leaders we need to work through the self. In other words, if we want to make the world a better place, we start by looking at ourselves - that way there will be one less scoundrel among us. In order to communicate in a really transformative way, we've got to get over our need to change and fix people. If our intention is to really accept the world, and the people around us as they are, then we become naturally inspiring and transformative - its the paradox of transformative leadership and transformative communication. We do not inspire people by trying to make them better - it usually just annoys them - we inspire them by witnessing their inherent perfection.
We are on the forefront of something big, and really fascinating - we realize that we have to look inward in order to solve our external problems. We are starting to get that most of our external problems actually start within us. We are trying to learn how to turn inward, find the source that animates us, and recognize that actually we created all this. We created our life, our relationships; all the problems that we have. To some extent our problems are a twisted tribute to our own creative power. Evolutionary biologists describe how the human mind has developed to be a great short-term problem solver. Catch the food, build the fire. We did not evolve to be long-term thinkers yet here we are at a place in history where we need to access and live out long-term priorities. It seems that sadly, even tragically, we are just not that species yet. Yes, the only way we can even survive in the short term is to start thinking about sustainability, and long-term perspectives.
Now when it comes to the realm of communication and sustainability, if we just take the simple common sense assumption that people consist of a mind, a body, and a spirit; we can see that there are really only three ways a human being can communicate with another human being. One would be from the level of the body to the body. That would be force. Say I wanted to get you to move a rock, I could force you to move a rock with my body. Another level would be that I could convince you to move the rock by using my mind to convince your mind to make your own body do it. That would be persuasion. Then at the top we would have inspiration, which is when I somehow access that shared creative intelligence; that nature within me to ignite the creative intelligence in you to make your own body move the rock. Inspiration would be the only way of communicating that does not have that backlash; that is sustainable. When people feel inspired to move a rock, they will keep doing it.
Enter the law of resonance; this is where a message is going to be heard at the same message level from which it is sent. If I send a message from the body, it is going be heard that way, or from the mind. I could say inspirational stuff, but if I am trying to manipulate it, if that is my intention, then it is not going to be inspiring. Conversely, Until we are willing to re-experience whatever fear we have not properly digested from our past, it will continue to clog up our experience of the world. And we will project it onto the world around us as judgment and cynicism. Cynicism is just undigested pain. Until we encounter, embrace, and overcome our own cynicism, we are going to be locked in the persuasion of force no matter what we say or do. This sounds like very ancient wisdom. It sounds Greek; it sounds Buddhist; it sounds like the Hebrew prophets. The hard way that gets easy rather than the easy way that gets hard.
Let's consider cynicism, because it's a potent enemy right now. People feel it is hip to be cynical, resigned, and somehow un-hip to be an inspired person. We all go through periods where we are afraid to be positive, because its not cool within the group. Why does this happen? It is because we cannot distinguish false positive from true joy. When we start to see that the mainstream has a lot of in-authenticity in it, we see a lot of what is actually desperation, masking as positive thinking. We start to mistrust positive statements. We see how even really great wisdom can be abused. Phrases can be abused to serve inauthentic ends. So we become mistrustful of anything positive, and we almost start to realize that the only cool people are the ones who have the courage to see the truth of life - which is not being stated in the mainstream. We have to forgive the mainstream for not being authentic at times, and not use that as a way of poisoning our own selves or keeping our own selves from being happy. Forgiveness is really where it is at.
Neither can we inspire another human being if we are coming from a place of scarcity ourselves. Flipping that around, if you are coming from a position of truly having faith in the universe operating through you and of you having more than you need; if you are coming from that place, it is hard not to inspire other people at all. It is like giving water to someone who is crawling in the desert. We have been hypnotized into scarcity-based thinking. At every corner of our society, there is a conversation revolving around how there is not enough to go around. If you can, in an unauthentic way, embrace the world, and engage the world with that faith; and that conviction of the ultimate abundance of life, you will change the world. You will, and you will not be trying to change it, and you'll be having fun. You will look at everyone that you encounter with gratitude that they are there. You will be thinking: "What an amazing person this person must be for being in my space, because I know that I am being a part of this amazing life and they must have been sent to me for some sort of reason." There is so much unsaid power in something as simple as the look in your eye. You look at people through that lens, and they feel uplifted by you.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Shocking Nature
"Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. The lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination." Alan Watts
How we respond to real life shocks often determines the degree our experience turns negative or positive, painful or joyous, destructive or creative, good or bad. Is it possible that shocks are neither bad nor good by nature, but neutral? To assume that shocks are not neutral but always negative or positive suggests that the universe is either out to get us and burn us - the negatively inflated paranoid bias - or that the universe is out to bless us - the positively inflated messianic bias. Both biases express self-delusion. If we value a choice-centered life of increasing autonomy and self-responsibility, how we respond to shock may have more lasting value than any initial shock itself. Here, responsibility is revisioned as our response-ability, our ability to respond.
Shocks are only "shocking" to the degree of our naïveté around the objective truths of ecstacy, uncertainty, indivisibility and impermanence. Ecstasy expresses our most natural state of being when unburdened by over-identification with the anxiety, guilt and suffering resulting from unsolved survival problems. Uncertainty refers to the truly unpredictable nature of life, of not knowing what will happen next, as a liberating and highly creative state. Indivisibility expresses the dissolution of arbitrary divisions revealing the basic unity of all life forms. Impermanence means all things pass; everything once alive eventually dies.
Real life shocks can happen anywhere, anytime and to anybody; nobody is exempt. Examples: sudden housing eviction, getting fired from work, marriage, divorce, childbirth, parenthood, loss of loved ones, natural disasters, sudden kundalini activations, death of parents, death of children, falling in love, unexpected financial windfalls, terrorist attacks, any move of residence, police arrest, incarceration, big employment promotions, social betrayals, family disintegrations, automobile accidents, hospitalization, surgery, spiritual epiphanies, cardiac arrests, strokes, epistemological crisis, heroic doses of magic mushrooms; the list goes on and on and on...
Shocks act as turning points for Self-initiation, of engaging the separatist ego in a confrontation with the archetype of the Self. And, as Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung suggests, "The experience of the Self is almost always a defeat for the ego." As more outside shocks are absorbed and integrated, we become initiated as human shock absorbers transmitting initiatic shock to others. We become as initiates, men and women of power; if that is what we want. Some of us undergo this Self-initiation process instinctively without any conscious plan or knowledge, while others approach it on purpose; either way, when outside shocks are absorbed and integrated, we are transformed by the transmission of their presence to the world.
Shocks come in basically two forms: inside and outside. Inside shocks are shocks we can administer ourselves. For example. By choosing to intentionally inconvenience ourselves amid daily activities, we can administer small shocks to our habitual routines by going against the grain of habit and altering the expected. Any way we are able to shock ourselves constitutes an "inside shock." However, there is only so much we can do by our own efforts alone. Armenian philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff called "outside shocks" those event arriving from any place beyond our personal control and comprehension.
Outside shocks tend to be far more effective in transforming and shaking things up than any self-created inside shock. Implementing inside shocks can, however, encourage enough flexibility to help us navigate and manage the greater forces of outside shocks when they arrive. Any state of shock naturally manifests some kind of an internal emergency state where, as a survival reflex, our senses open up to get more information. This escalation of awareness can also occur on small scales such as whenever we become emotionally upset, or lose our physical balance and fall, or are mentally thrown into bewilderment.
In these instances the ego wobbles as our awareness of uncertainty increases. We experience ourselves as more fluid, volatile and unstable. In this marginal state, we may be more open to taking on new directives and values. If the new direction takes and holds, it can be maintained with applied effort and a supportive environment. It can be strengthened by a series of challenges designed to test the integrity of our new patterns. In this way, the state of shock can initiate a creative state given the commitment and will of the individual.
How we respond to real life shocks often determines the degree our experience turns negative or positive, painful or joyous, destructive or creative, good or bad. Is it possible that shocks are neither bad nor good by nature, but neutral? To assume that shocks are not neutral but always negative or positive suggests that the universe is either out to get us and burn us - the negatively inflated paranoid bias - or that the universe is out to bless us - the positively inflated messianic bias. Both biases express self-delusion. If we value a choice-centered life of increasing autonomy and self-responsibility, how we respond to shock may have more lasting value than any initial shock itself. Here, responsibility is revisioned as our response-ability, our ability to respond.
Shocks are only "shocking" to the degree of our naïveté around the objective truths of ecstacy, uncertainty, indivisibility and impermanence. Ecstasy expresses our most natural state of being when unburdened by over-identification with the anxiety, guilt and suffering resulting from unsolved survival problems. Uncertainty refers to the truly unpredictable nature of life, of not knowing what will happen next, as a liberating and highly creative state. Indivisibility expresses the dissolution of arbitrary divisions revealing the basic unity of all life forms. Impermanence means all things pass; everything once alive eventually dies.Real life shocks can happen anywhere, anytime and to anybody; nobody is exempt. Examples: sudden housing eviction, getting fired from work, marriage, divorce, childbirth, parenthood, loss of loved ones, natural disasters, sudden kundalini activations, death of parents, death of children, falling in love, unexpected financial windfalls, terrorist attacks, any move of residence, police arrest, incarceration, big employment promotions, social betrayals, family disintegrations, automobile accidents, hospitalization, surgery, spiritual epiphanies, cardiac arrests, strokes, epistemological crisis, heroic doses of magic mushrooms; the list goes on and on and on...
Shocks act as turning points for Self-initiation, of engaging the separatist ego in a confrontation with the archetype of the Self. And, as Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung suggests, "The experience of the Self is almost always a defeat for the ego." As more outside shocks are absorbed and integrated, we become initiated as human shock absorbers transmitting initiatic shock to others. We become as initiates, men and women of power; if that is what we want. Some of us undergo this Self-initiation process instinctively without any conscious plan or knowledge, while others approach it on purpose; either way, when outside shocks are absorbed and integrated, we are transformed by the transmission of their presence to the world.
Shocks come in basically two forms: inside and outside. Inside shocks are shocks we can administer ourselves. For example. By choosing to intentionally inconvenience ourselves amid daily activities, we can administer small shocks to our habitual routines by going against the grain of habit and altering the expected. Any way we are able to shock ourselves constitutes an "inside shock." However, there is only so much we can do by our own efforts alone. Armenian philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff called "outside shocks" those event arriving from any place beyond our personal control and comprehension.
Outside shocks tend to be far more effective in transforming and shaking things up than any self-created inside shock. Implementing inside shocks can, however, encourage enough flexibility to help us navigate and manage the greater forces of outside shocks when they arrive. Any state of shock naturally manifests some kind of an internal emergency state where, as a survival reflex, our senses open up to get more information. This escalation of awareness can also occur on small scales such as whenever we become emotionally upset, or lose our physical balance and fall, or are mentally thrown into bewilderment.
In these instances the ego wobbles as our awareness of uncertainty increases. We experience ourselves as more fluid, volatile and unstable. In this marginal state, we may be more open to taking on new directives and values. If the new direction takes and holds, it can be maintained with applied effort and a supportive environment. It can be strengthened by a series of challenges designed to test the integrity of our new patterns. In this way, the state of shock can initiate a creative state given the commitment and will of the individual.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
I Am That I Am
Delight is the secret. And the secret is this: to grow quiet and listen; to stop thinking, stop moving, almost to stop breathing; to create an inner stillness in which, like mice in a deserted house, capacities and awarenesses too wayward and too fugitive for everyday use may delicately emerge. Alan McGlashan
The mind thinks of the future; the heart mourns the past. But the body always is. Rooted in its present experience, it frees the self from the mind. It calls attention back to what is actually happening, with sensitivity as subtle as one is able to cultivate. As attention sharpens in its acuity, the body gradually reveals that concepts ordinarily assumed to be real are illusory: "walking" is a composite of a thousand gradations of movement, "joy" is but a summary; "consciousness" merely the illusion produced by a well functioning machine, like the images at the cinema which seem to be so whole.
Thus the body awakens one not only to the facticity of present experience, but also to its unity. As we closely raise, inspect, and drop the phenomena of the body, each reveals itself to be a concept only, a useful label without separate reality, existing only according to the level of abstract seeing. What, then, is real, in the sensation of a breeze gently caressing your face? If "the body" and all its constituent parts are real only as labels, what is?
Beginning as they do from the premise of divinity, the sages of Kabbalah often speak in a language moderns cannot understand. They start with what we would deem the conclusion, if the proofs were satisfactory: that God exists, and is Infinite. From there they proceed down the chain of being, through the emanations of the One to the Many, and then back again. Thus they ask, if God is infinite, then what is your body, your heart, and your mind, but God itself? What are joy and terror, open fields and pits of darkness, other than the skin of the Infinite?
We meet - rabbis beginning from the transcendent, and contemplatives from the immanent - in Being itself. The label of "God" makes no factual difference, for God is not a figure within the ground of the universe; the universe is a figure within the ground of God. What is, is; Being, not separate selves; truth, not superstition. We cannot help but divide perception into pieces: we see a tree, not God; feel our fingers, not God; experience pain and bliss, not God. Yet in a sense, there is only one thing in the universe.
"Just Being" is a subtractive aspect of ordinary consciousness, a gradual loosening of the grip of concepts. In the body, it is becoming mindful of experiences too subtle to note ordinarily. Pressure on the back, sounds being heard, the expansion and contraction of the chest. And then: just pressure, just sound, just expansion and contraction. Slowly the mind quiets, the body rests in repose, and there is a cessation - first of the most gross of desires, later from subtle ones, and at the culmination of the spiritual path, even from consciousness itself.
Only upon relinquishment of the will to arrange the conditions of the world to enable our maximum happiness does true happiness appear. As Byron Katie says, what we really want is to want what we have. Or, in the words of the Jewish text known as the "Ethics of the Fathers": who is rich? He who is happy with his share. Not doing, not changing, not thinking or talking or arguing - just being.
And then the boundaries of self slowly become transparent, for without purposefulness, the self loses its definition. Not to regress - but to transcend the slavish delusions of need. Ending, for once, the competition.
Nonduality includes both doing and non-doing, but is best known through the latter. At some later time, there can be the return of the monk to the marketplace; the descent of Moses from Sinai; a return to the material, where the Infinite puts on masks of distinction. But practice is required to ensure that our return is not a regression, that it maintains an almost transparent knowing -- that all this is real, that none of this is real. Ironically, it is the most physical, the most separate-seeming part of the material world, which is the greatest vehicle for remembering. Spiritual states may come and go, but the body endures for a lifetime.
One cannot get beyond the body except through the body, in the body itself. Otherwise there is still something to be denied, or utilized, as if "we" are merely inhabiting our bodies, trapped souls waiting for release into paradise. The pious will argue that some desires are loftier than others; hedonists will reply in kind. But all the while, Being will be unfolding, just out of range of periphery, in the shape and form of the ordinary. It is, in a way, a solitary path, for there is, in the truest possible way, no one else here. But then again, you aren't either.
There is only Me, God or Spirit says. You are not alone, because this ego, this "you," is not what is ultimately real. These sensations that are happening to the body - who are they happening to, if consciousness is but a phenomenon of the brain? Who is really here? And how do "you" know anything? In the end, the solitude of the nondual path is only as temporary as the intimacies of the alternative - because when the true Self is known, suddenly there is love within the fabric of being itself. Not beyond, not denying, not leaving behind the substantial; but in it, as it, inviting you to join heaven and earth. And promising, in a silent and intimate vow: Be faithful to Me, and I will show You love.
The mind thinks of the future; the heart mourns the past. But the body always is. Rooted in its present experience, it frees the self from the mind. It calls attention back to what is actually happening, with sensitivity as subtle as one is able to cultivate. As attention sharpens in its acuity, the body gradually reveals that concepts ordinarily assumed to be real are illusory: "walking" is a composite of a thousand gradations of movement, "joy" is but a summary; "consciousness" merely the illusion produced by a well functioning machine, like the images at the cinema which seem to be so whole.
Thus the body awakens one not only to the facticity of present experience, but also to its unity. As we closely raise, inspect, and drop the phenomena of the body, each reveals itself to be a concept only, a useful label without separate reality, existing only according to the level of abstract seeing. What, then, is real, in the sensation of a breeze gently caressing your face? If "the body" and all its constituent parts are real only as labels, what is?
Beginning as they do from the premise of divinity, the sages of Kabbalah often speak in a language moderns cannot understand. They start with what we would deem the conclusion, if the proofs were satisfactory: that God exists, and is Infinite. From there they proceed down the chain of being, through the emanations of the One to the Many, and then back again. Thus they ask, if God is infinite, then what is your body, your heart, and your mind, but God itself? What are joy and terror, open fields and pits of darkness, other than the skin of the Infinite?
We meet - rabbis beginning from the transcendent, and contemplatives from the immanent - in Being itself. The label of "God" makes no factual difference, for God is not a figure within the ground of the universe; the universe is a figure within the ground of God. What is, is; Being, not separate selves; truth, not superstition. We cannot help but divide perception into pieces: we see a tree, not God; feel our fingers, not God; experience pain and bliss, not God. Yet in a sense, there is only one thing in the universe.
"Just Being" is a subtractive aspect of ordinary consciousness, a gradual loosening of the grip of concepts. In the body, it is becoming mindful of experiences too subtle to note ordinarily. Pressure on the back, sounds being heard, the expansion and contraction of the chest. And then: just pressure, just sound, just expansion and contraction. Slowly the mind quiets, the body rests in repose, and there is a cessation - first of the most gross of desires, later from subtle ones, and at the culmination of the spiritual path, even from consciousness itself.
Only upon relinquishment of the will to arrange the conditions of the world to enable our maximum happiness does true happiness appear. As Byron Katie says, what we really want is to want what we have. Or, in the words of the Jewish text known as the "Ethics of the Fathers": who is rich? He who is happy with his share. Not doing, not changing, not thinking or talking or arguing - just being.
And then the boundaries of self slowly become transparent, for without purposefulness, the self loses its definition. Not to regress - but to transcend the slavish delusions of need. Ending, for once, the competition.
Nonduality includes both doing and non-doing, but is best known through the latter. At some later time, there can be the return of the monk to the marketplace; the descent of Moses from Sinai; a return to the material, where the Infinite puts on masks of distinction. But practice is required to ensure that our return is not a regression, that it maintains an almost transparent knowing -- that all this is real, that none of this is real. Ironically, it is the most physical, the most separate-seeming part of the material world, which is the greatest vehicle for remembering. Spiritual states may come and go, but the body endures for a lifetime.
One cannot get beyond the body except through the body, in the body itself. Otherwise there is still something to be denied, or utilized, as if "we" are merely inhabiting our bodies, trapped souls waiting for release into paradise. The pious will argue that some desires are loftier than others; hedonists will reply in kind. But all the while, Being will be unfolding, just out of range of periphery, in the shape and form of the ordinary. It is, in a way, a solitary path, for there is, in the truest possible way, no one else here. But then again, you aren't either.
There is only Me, God or Spirit says. You are not alone, because this ego, this "you," is not what is ultimately real. These sensations that are happening to the body - who are they happening to, if consciousness is but a phenomenon of the brain? Who is really here? And how do "you" know anything? In the end, the solitude of the nondual path is only as temporary as the intimacies of the alternative - because when the true Self is known, suddenly there is love within the fabric of being itself. Not beyond, not denying, not leaving behind the substantial; but in it, as it, inviting you to join heaven and earth. And promising, in a silent and intimate vow: Be faithful to Me, and I will show You love.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Quotation Nation
"It is our own transformation that creates the best climate for change. Others are more likely to reflect on their own behavior as a result of witnessing our self reflection than to yield to our desire for them to be different."
Peter Block - "The Answer to How is Yes".
Peter Block - "The Answer to How is Yes".
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Servant Leadership
Servant-leadership can be understood as bridging the modern necessity to work and lead within complex organizations and environments; with the call for tapping into ancient wisdom that is absent from such settings. The servant-leader’s role is like that of the Peruvian chakaruna - one that bridges the core reality of sacred ecology with that of civil society. Shamans have called upon chakaruna to mediate between what is called the dream of the world (global economic system) and the dream of the earth (embedded ecology). In terms of our world’s vernacular (that is, as educated members of the global system), a chakaruna is a “servant-leader,” one who serves life, but also knows how to leverage the system that he or she works in. The servant-leader has a foot in both worlds in order to bring them into harmony.
An aspiring servant-leader is called to become a kind of neo-shaman within whatever profession they are working in; their desire to serve comes from a primal source. Like the plotline of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, the future servant-leader’s ordinary world is turned upside down, and then they are called upon to venture into the underworld in order to rebalance the world. First the servant-leader becomes a pilgrim before taking on the role of healer, or put differently, they must heal themselves first before directing the energy outward to the general community. As MIT management theorist Otto Scharmer points out, “The Indo-European root of the word lead and leadership, *leith, means to go forth, to cross the threshold, or to die.”
There is another important link with shamanism: it is the default position for servant-leaders to midwife the universal energy of creation, and therefore honor that spirit. Shamans are imbued with great power and responsibility because they have the skills to enter into border worlds of nature and consciousness to retrieve elixirs of power in the service of healing. They must follow the ultimate golden rule: don’t do onto others that you would not want done to yourself, or, what goes around comes around. According to community activist Chris Maser, this requires engaging a reciprocal reality: “Reciprocity is the self-reinforcing feedback loop that either extends sustainability to or withholds it from a community and its landscape.” To serve ego and greed rather than life is the difference between being a healer and a black sorcerer. We wouldn’t apply such harsh terms to the managers of global finance, but in essence, those in the world who wield great power, especially through the mastery of electricity’s great magic and its media system, are subject to the same laws of karma as those practicing petty witchcraft.
Not surprisingly, there is a direct connection between service and spiritual enlightenment. One of the first exercises you do as Buddhist practitioner is to perform generosity. This can manifest in different ways, but when you give something to somebody you begin erasing the boundary between you and the “other.” The disconnection we normally experience with other people and nature is at the root of all our major problems - environmental, financial, political, etc. If the universe wants you to serve life, than life will respond in kind once you surrender to it. Thus, the core ethic of any servant-leader is the same as a healer: we are to serve life above all other. Naturally, then, servant-leaders ultimately also support the cause of sustainability, which is the opposite of the culture of death that manifests as our current economic system.
It is appropriate that the concept of servant-leadership is actually a bridge between ancient wisdom and modern corporate management. For example, a connection between Buddhism, which derives directly from a radical engagement with nature, and servant-leadership can be found in Herman Hesse; whose story "Journey to the East" inspired Robert Greenleaf to start the servant-leadership movement. The character of Leo, who was the guide and servant of the book’s protagonist, moved Greenleaf to rethink leadership. After the protagonist’s long search for a spiritual teacher, at the end of the story we learn that Leo was actually the leader of the order he was searching for.
Corporate leadership consultant Joseph Jaworski argues that servant-leaders first need to shift their model of the world from mechanistic thinking to one that engages “a universe that is open, dynamic, interconnected, and full of living qualities.” Next, he argues, we have to change our relationship with relationship - “the organizing principle of the universe” - in which we experience intermediate states in a network of interactions. Once committed to these principles, and a cause that serves them, then the right resources come together in a magical way that Jaworski calls “synchronicity.” This is not without its risks. Jaworski stresses that this ultimately requires cultivating a state of being, not one of doing. When ones ego or other emotional traps intervene into the process, the “flow” can alter course or cease altogether.
Such “flow” states are not easily grasped or communicated until experienced. Which makes learning and teaching servant-leadership a somewhat treacherous task, because on the one hand you want to develop a kind of space where amazing things can happen, but at the same time not be attached to peak experiences that characterize states of “grace.” Just as some meditations seem like “bad” ones, and others feel really peaceful, there is no distinction between the two on a fundamental level because in each encounter the sitter is experiencing the true nature of their mind. However, when under deadline and pushed by time constraints to complete projects with a product, it can be a strain to force “magic” to happen. Accordingly, Maser proposes, “If one, as a leader, is truly detached from the outcome, one will find equanimity to be one’s touchstone. Equanimity, the outworking of detachment, is reflected in the calm, even-tempered, and serene personality of one who is simply open to accepting what is.”
Its tempting to paraphrase an overused cliché - servant-leaders are made, not born - but there’s truth to the statement. In Buddhism it’s no secret that nothing changes without sitting on the cushion. In Buddhism one remakes their consciousness through practicing dharma, an architectural model for change, but it is something one learns through effort, testing and experience. Effective leadership comes from self-knowledge, an awareness that can come about from a variety of toolsets, with “mindfulness” being a middle way for leaders of all kinds. In "Primal Leadership", Goleman, Boyatzism and McKee point out: “Great leaders, the research shows, are made as they gradually acquire, in the course of their lives and careers, the competencies that make them so effective. The competencies can be learned by any leader, at any point.” The authors stress that such skills can be mastered through understanding cognition. One must know thyself, in particular how the mind functions during various states, be they stressful or pleasurable.
One aspect of the servant-leadership equation should be the notion of Gandhi’s concept of swaraj, which entails self-rule, self-governance, self-organization. This ties servant-leadership to social justice and deep democracy, both aspects of Buddhism and activism that have contributed to this perspective. Buddha inspires because he was the first historically known do-it-yourself educator of servant-leadership. Noah Levine said "Sid" (Siddhartha Gautama aka Buddha) was history's earliest rebel by advocating for social change through his philosophy of empowerment, both individually and within the spiritual community. Buddha went against the prevailing attitude of his time by eschewing the caste system and inviting women, criminals and the poor into the teachings. Buddha developed a user interface that is personal and open source.
In terms of relating this to leadership the Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan said; “As we evolve, we’re able to transform the situation and the people around us by helping them to fulfill their purpose. Our purpose is to enlist the purpose of other people. That is really the secret of leadership.” In Greenleaf’s terms, “The best test, and most difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons?” Likewise, you can find a similar philosophy in a get rich quick book called "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind". In it T. Harv Eker says the most important ingredient for prosperity (aside from applying yourself) is that you design your business around the idea of helping others solve some kind of problem. This is not the normal kind of ethical guideline you read in a business book; in fact most ethics textbooks deal with how you should react to certain situations, not how to create a space of potential in which others can benefit, grow and fulfill their promise. But this, indeed, appears to be a common thread in the writings about servant-leadership.
Whereas Maser and Scharmer directly address leadership for the benefit of sustainable action, unfortunately management books like "Primal Leadership" or "The Difference" do not address ethics. In Buddhism, ethics and mindfulness go hand in hand. The Five Precepts is largely a guideline of morality because the path to enlightenment means one must surrender to the flow of life without being clouded by mental and physical toxins generated by immoral behavior. (The simplest example is that if you repeatedly lie, you cease to discern the truth.) The critical question a servant-leader should ask before engaging in any task is, does this action serve life? This query concurs with Maser’s Prime Directive: “Planetary citizens are to live in humility and harmony on Earth while simultaneously minimizing interference with any of Nature’s evolutionary processes.” However, the call to serve others must be done authentically, Maser argues, because leaders must also be true to themselves: “What do I personally have to offer those who are struggling to find their way? Am I living my life honestly, freely, and boldly as I am urging others to do?” In Gandhi’s oft-repeated phrasing, “You must become the change you seek to create.”
There is another important link with shamanism: it is the default position for servant-leaders to midwife the universal energy of creation, and therefore honor that spirit. Shamans are imbued with great power and responsibility because they have the skills to enter into border worlds of nature and consciousness to retrieve elixirs of power in the service of healing. They must follow the ultimate golden rule: don’t do onto others that you would not want done to yourself, or, what goes around comes around. According to community activist Chris Maser, this requires engaging a reciprocal reality: “Reciprocity is the self-reinforcing feedback loop that either extends sustainability to or withholds it from a community and its landscape.” To serve ego and greed rather than life is the difference between being a healer and a black sorcerer. We wouldn’t apply such harsh terms to the managers of global finance, but in essence, those in the world who wield great power, especially through the mastery of electricity’s great magic and its media system, are subject to the same laws of karma as those practicing petty witchcraft.
Not surprisingly, there is a direct connection between service and spiritual enlightenment. One of the first exercises you do as Buddhist practitioner is to perform generosity. This can manifest in different ways, but when you give something to somebody you begin erasing the boundary between you and the “other.” The disconnection we normally experience with other people and nature is at the root of all our major problems - environmental, financial, political, etc. If the universe wants you to serve life, than life will respond in kind once you surrender to it. Thus, the core ethic of any servant-leader is the same as a healer: we are to serve life above all other. Naturally, then, servant-leaders ultimately also support the cause of sustainability, which is the opposite of the culture of death that manifests as our current economic system.
It is appropriate that the concept of servant-leadership is actually a bridge between ancient wisdom and modern corporate management. For example, a connection between Buddhism, which derives directly from a radical engagement with nature, and servant-leadership can be found in Herman Hesse; whose story "Journey to the East" inspired Robert Greenleaf to start the servant-leadership movement. The character of Leo, who was the guide and servant of the book’s protagonist, moved Greenleaf to rethink leadership. After the protagonist’s long search for a spiritual teacher, at the end of the story we learn that Leo was actually the leader of the order he was searching for.
Corporate leadership consultant Joseph Jaworski argues that servant-leaders first need to shift their model of the world from mechanistic thinking to one that engages “a universe that is open, dynamic, interconnected, and full of living qualities.” Next, he argues, we have to change our relationship with relationship - “the organizing principle of the universe” - in which we experience intermediate states in a network of interactions. Once committed to these principles, and a cause that serves them, then the right resources come together in a magical way that Jaworski calls “synchronicity.” This is not without its risks. Jaworski stresses that this ultimately requires cultivating a state of being, not one of doing. When ones ego or other emotional traps intervene into the process, the “flow” can alter course or cease altogether.
Such “flow” states are not easily grasped or communicated until experienced. Which makes learning and teaching servant-leadership a somewhat treacherous task, because on the one hand you want to develop a kind of space where amazing things can happen, but at the same time not be attached to peak experiences that characterize states of “grace.” Just as some meditations seem like “bad” ones, and others feel really peaceful, there is no distinction between the two on a fundamental level because in each encounter the sitter is experiencing the true nature of their mind. However, when under deadline and pushed by time constraints to complete projects with a product, it can be a strain to force “magic” to happen. Accordingly, Maser proposes, “If one, as a leader, is truly detached from the outcome, one will find equanimity to be one’s touchstone. Equanimity, the outworking of detachment, is reflected in the calm, even-tempered, and serene personality of one who is simply open to accepting what is.”
Its tempting to paraphrase an overused cliché - servant-leaders are made, not born - but there’s truth to the statement. In Buddhism it’s no secret that nothing changes without sitting on the cushion. In Buddhism one remakes their consciousness through practicing dharma, an architectural model for change, but it is something one learns through effort, testing and experience. Effective leadership comes from self-knowledge, an awareness that can come about from a variety of toolsets, with “mindfulness” being a middle way for leaders of all kinds. In "Primal Leadership", Goleman, Boyatzism and McKee point out: “Great leaders, the research shows, are made as they gradually acquire, in the course of their lives and careers, the competencies that make them so effective. The competencies can be learned by any leader, at any point.” The authors stress that such skills can be mastered through understanding cognition. One must know thyself, in particular how the mind functions during various states, be they stressful or pleasurable.
One aspect of the servant-leadership equation should be the notion of Gandhi’s concept of swaraj, which entails self-rule, self-governance, self-organization. This ties servant-leadership to social justice and deep democracy, both aspects of Buddhism and activism that have contributed to this perspective. Buddha inspires because he was the first historically known do-it-yourself educator of servant-leadership. Noah Levine said "Sid" (Siddhartha Gautama aka Buddha) was history's earliest rebel by advocating for social change through his philosophy of empowerment, both individually and within the spiritual community. Buddha went against the prevailing attitude of his time by eschewing the caste system and inviting women, criminals and the poor into the teachings. Buddha developed a user interface that is personal and open source.
In terms of relating this to leadership the Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan said; “As we evolve, we’re able to transform the situation and the people around us by helping them to fulfill their purpose. Our purpose is to enlist the purpose of other people. That is really the secret of leadership.” In Greenleaf’s terms, “The best test, and most difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons?” Likewise, you can find a similar philosophy in a get rich quick book called "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind". In it T. Harv Eker says the most important ingredient for prosperity (aside from applying yourself) is that you design your business around the idea of helping others solve some kind of problem. This is not the normal kind of ethical guideline you read in a business book; in fact most ethics textbooks deal with how you should react to certain situations, not how to create a space of potential in which others can benefit, grow and fulfill their promise. But this, indeed, appears to be a common thread in the writings about servant-leadership.
Whereas Maser and Scharmer directly address leadership for the benefit of sustainable action, unfortunately management books like "Primal Leadership" or "The Difference" do not address ethics. In Buddhism, ethics and mindfulness go hand in hand. The Five Precepts is largely a guideline of morality because the path to enlightenment means one must surrender to the flow of life without being clouded by mental and physical toxins generated by immoral behavior. (The simplest example is that if you repeatedly lie, you cease to discern the truth.) The critical question a servant-leader should ask before engaging in any task is, does this action serve life? This query concurs with Maser’s Prime Directive: “Planetary citizens are to live in humility and harmony on Earth while simultaneously minimizing interference with any of Nature’s evolutionary processes.” However, the call to serve others must be done authentically, Maser argues, because leaders must also be true to themselves: “What do I personally have to offer those who are struggling to find their way? Am I living my life honestly, freely, and boldly as I am urging others to do?” In Gandhi’s oft-repeated phrasing, “You must become the change you seek to create.”
Friday, March 27, 2009
My Years With Ayn Rand
Psychologist and philosopher Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D. is a founding member of Integral Institute and author of twenty books on the psychology of self-esteem, romantic love, and the life and thought of Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand. His work has been translated into 18 languages and has sold over 4 million copies, and includes such titles as Taking Responsibility, The Art of Living Consciously, A Woman's Self-Esteem, and the 1969 classic, The Psychology of Self-Esteem.
In a joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month-Club, the #1 book that has made a difference in people’s lives is, no surprise, the Bible. But the #2 book is Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. And #5? Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. In other words, two of the five most influential books written are from the hand of Ayn Rand. Meet the man who Ayn Rand considered to be the living embodiment of the principles of her Objectivist philosophy; in other words, meet Nathaniel Branden.
Nathaniel begins his story at the beginning: a boy of fourteen who stumbled across a copy of The Fountainhead lying on the coffee table. "I disappeared from this earth for the next two days, until the book was finished. It was an electrifying experience." Little did he know then that as a young man, a shade under twenty, he would actually meet Ayn and soon begin one of the most passionate and turbulent romantic relationships of his life, the effects of which would touch the lives of thousands.
As Nathaniel recalls: "I could hardly believe that this person who I had regarded as a goddess since age fourteen, saw me for all practical purposes as the apotheosis of everything she was writing about." Ayn and Nathaniel began an intense, romantic (and largely secret) relationship—she in her forties, Nathaniel in his twenties—that has become the stuff of legend and at least one movie. It is rare that any influential movement begins in such a way; rarer still to have an eyewitness report of one of the two involved parties.
Of course, when the relationship did end, it ended in an enormously difficult way. So difficult that in certain circles of Rand’s followers, Nathaniel’s contributions to the movement have been denied or ignored. But Nathaniel played an instrumental role in helping form and popularize Objectivist philosophy as a world-wide movement. Having founded the Nathaniel Branden Institute to help educate interested students in Objectivism, he was responsible for teaching distance learning courses in over 80 cities world-wide. To this day, Rand’s books sell over 400,000 copies per year.
We are fortunate to have this opportunity to listen to Nathaniel’s account of the life and times of one of the twentieth century’s literary giants. He was on the ground floor of a philosophical revolution still being felt today. (Example: it has been said that the most powerful man in the world is the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. That position was held by Alan Greenspan, one of a dozen members of the early circle with Ayn and Nathaniel.)
But there is a reason that Ayn invested so much in Nathan, as she called him, and it is that, in a peculiar way and from the beginning, Branden was his own man. He brought as much to the movement as he got out of it, as his long and distinguished career demonstrates. The Nathaniel Branden Integral Life presentation is the story of that astonishing career that has now lasted five decades, from age 23 to 73.
This wide-ranging conversation deal with the Ayn Rand years—utterly important, formative, movement-creating, and earth-shaking, certainly for a young man. But, as they say, go ahead and listen to the Ayn Rand years, but keep in mind, you ain't heard nuttin yet....
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Paradigm, Oh Paradigm...
As a hypothesis, I propose that humanity may be undergoing a rapid transition from the biological to the psychic phase of species evolution in the next few years. The inertia of physical forces, chemical processes and cellular mechanisms, precisely coordinated over billions of years, has brought us to this make or break point. In order to continue our evolution, we need to reach a deeper level of species consciousness and self-awareness, transform our planetary culture and social systems so they serve the entire community of life, and integrate and anchor psychic capacities as part of a new paradigm and mythological substrate. This shift would also require a different approach to technological progress. We would use technology to create long-term benefits for people and planet, rather than shortsighted profits for individuals and corporations.
As individuals, we have the choice to contribute to this process in essential ways. We can shift from passive spectators to active participants, taking full responsibility for our own development and the unfolding of the whole. Currently, the first wave of individuals who are part of this tipping point phenomenon are learning to observe themselves as participators within the cosmos, and to act in our earthly realm with impartiality and compassion.
As individuals, we have the choice to contribute to this process in essential ways. We can shift from passive spectators to active participants, taking full responsibility for our own development and the unfolding of the whole. Currently, the first wave of individuals who are part of this tipping point phenomenon are learning to observe themselves as participators within the cosmos, and to act in our earthly realm with impartiality and compassion.
According to this hypothesis, as this level of presence crystallizes among the few, it will become increasingly available to wider circles of humanity, until it encompasses the entirety. We will supersede the confusion and destruction caused by the modern process of individuation by establishing new models of inclusive collaboration. As one aspect of this phase shift in consciousness, we will see a shift from hierarchic to holarchic models of social organization, and the melding of masculine rationality with feminine intuition. The form of the modern nation-state, obsessed with defending its own insecure boundaries, will be outmoded by a global direct democracy in which local communities realize themselves as fractal expressions of the whole, like healthy cells of the planetary organism.
Many mystical traditions propose that what we experience as reality is actually a kind of waking dream, projected from an infinite source of consciousness. According to this hypothesis, each of us can identify with our personal ego -- the dream character in the dream play -- or switch our center of identification to the projecting source. While the ego is trapped in limitation, the projecting source is infinite and free. Given the right marketing campaign, the awareness of our connection with this infinite creative source could permeate the global mind in the same way a new pop song or advertising jingle insinuates itself into the collective subconscious.
The uncertainty that many of us feel right now is, in itself, part of this transitional process. Whether we like it or not, the responsibility for the future of the species has now been placed in our hands. If we don't answer this call, our species will experience traumatic outcomes and cataclysms as the negative feedback loops of climate change, species extinction, resource depletion, fundamentalist violence and overpopulation create hell on earth, perhaps leading to our own extinction.
As I have discussed in previous works, there are good reasons to think that the positive feedback loops could also come together and self-reinforce to create a successful outcome -- what Buckminster Fuller described as a "win-win" situation for global humanity. It appears that successive transformations of human civilization happen at exponentially faster rates of linear time: while the agricultural revolution took thousands of years, the industrial age took under two hundred years, and the knowledge or information age required only a few decades. By this model, as Peter Russell has suggested, the next revolution in human society could happen in two or three years. This would be a revolution of wisdom, of consciousness, that could, potentially, open the gates to the psychic phase of our development.
More and more people appear to be experiencing psychic phenomena -- synchronicities, intuitive realizations, telepathic episodes and even occasional phenomena such as sudden manifestations or telekinesis. Anecdotally, I also encounter many people now undergoing classic Kundalini experiences, which were once extremely rare. A number of scientists have proposed that the solar system and the earth are undergoing a transition to a higher energy state. The level of electromagnetic activity may be increasing on our planet, accelerating and intensifying our psychic evolution. We may find that there is a non-dual relationship between changes in our lives on earth and processes happening throughout our solar system and the galaxy.
The correlations between ancient mystical traditions and the discoveries of quantum physics and other modern scientific disciplines could be firmly established, and presented in popular media so that they become socially accepted. The empirical tools of modern science could be repurposed to facilitate the development of psychic awareness, while our communications technologies transmit a new understanding around the planet in an extremely concentrated timeframe. At the same time, we could use the mass media and the Internet to disseminate the best techniques for growing food locally, for producing renewable energies, for reinventing industries and creating complementary currencies, and so on.
Of course, I don't know if this hypothetical outcome will come to pass. However, I see no reason why it couldn't. The tools are there for us. All that is required is the individual and collective will to make use of them.
Monday, March 16, 2009
Singularity University
Is the world ready for an academic institution based on an event in history yet to come? NASA and Google think so. They teamed up to launch the interdisciplinary institution Singularity University. It's mission is to "assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to addresshumanity’s grand challenges."
The Singularity denotes the theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, when advances in computer hardware, molecular nanotechnology and biotechnology, and artificial general intelligence ignite an "intelligence explosion," total integration of communications and information, mass societal change, and, potentially, self-improving technology.
Located on NASA's Ames Campus in California's Silicon Valley, Singularity University officially opened its doors in January 2009. Though it is not an accredited year-round university, it will offer an annual nine-week postgraduate summer course beginning in June 2009 (now accepting applications!). Students can choose from ten different academic tracks, including future studies and forecasting, networks and computing systems, biotechnology and vioinformatics, nanotechnology, medicine and neuroscience/human enhancement, AI/robotics and cognitive computing, energy and ecological systems, policy/law and ethics, and finance and entrepreneurship. Singularity U will also run three- and ten-day executive programs eight times per year.
But is SU itself prepared for the coming Singularity? After all, their webserver crashed within mere hours of its launch due to their failure to post usage limits - an amateur mistake in the eyes of the "blackbox" programming elite. But its all-star faculty lineup and promising opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration are reason enough to keep an eye on its future progress. As faculty member and Stanford Media-X Research Network leader Paul Saffo writes: "The vast challenges facing us require new institutions capable of understanding and responding to the new technological hazards, and opportunities, that we face. Singularity University is just such an institution."Monday, December 29, 2008
A Quantum Life
Quantum physics and it's subsidiary discipline, quantum mechanics, is connecting the empirical world of science with the ephemeral realm of consciousness. This discussion includes the following luminaries:
-William Tiller, Professor Emeritus of Material Science and Engineering at Stanford University
-Dr. Amit Goswami. Worked with Deepak Chopra and is employed by the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
-Dr. John Hagelin, Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University of Management, professor of physics at MUM since 1984, and Minister of Science and Technology of the Global Country of World Peace.
-Dr. Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, author, and associate director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona
-Dr. Andrew Newberg, assistant professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, and physician in nuclear medicine
-Dr. David Albert, a philosopher of physics and professor at Columbia University.
-Miceal Ledwith, author and former professor of theology at Maynooth College in Ireland; Daniel Monti, physician and director of the Mind-Body Medicine Program at Thomas Jefferson University
-Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, well known psychiatrist, author and professor.
-William Tiller, Professor Emeritus of Material Science and Engineering at Stanford University
-Dr. Amit Goswami. Worked with Deepak Chopra and is employed by the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
-Dr. John Hagelin, Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University of Management, professor of physics at MUM since 1984, and Minister of Science and Technology of the Global Country of World Peace.
-Dr. Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, author, and associate director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona
-Dr. Andrew Newberg, assistant professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, and physician in nuclear medicine
-Dr. David Albert, a philosopher of physics and professor at Columbia University.
-Miceal Ledwith, author and former professor of theology at Maynooth College in Ireland; Daniel Monti, physician and director of the Mind-Body Medicine Program at Thomas Jefferson University
-Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, well known psychiatrist, author and professor.
Nations Of Imagination
Imaginal practice is the inner art of self-managing the imagination, to defend it from forces that compromise, pollute, and sterilize it; and to cultivate those that illuminate and nourish it. Knowledge of this is essential to the story of human survival into the 21st century. The gist of it is that in previous eras the human imagination was much more attuned to the mythical dimensions of nature. This archetypal homeland, shared by all the tribes of creation, has provided a bandwidth of mutual intelligibility, a lingua franca, a commons of communication. A large faction of humanity has since left this commons, broken the agreement of respectful relationships, and left behind the heartfelt way to connect to others.
We moderns have created our own imaginal space. It is a skull-enclosed kingdom that plays the movie of our egoic projections, and the ‘rush world’ we’ve created. We’ve got the electronic media buzzing and flashing through our heads, broadcasting the normalcy of a busy hive mind in pursuit of purchased rewards in an advertised reality. We become saturated, overloaded, with these manipulated sounds and images, to the point where they block out and corrode access to the ancestral stratums of our humanity. It’s very difficult for the spirit world to dial into such an environment. Access is made even more challenging by our materialist assumptions that deny it, and others in the Devic realm, even exist. This situation has gotten to the point where the spirit world is starting to deny humans. This has all done great damage to the relations between the spirits and the humans, which percolates up into our various ills of disenchantment with the world. We need to reestablish a positive harmonic between the realms.
Practices that detoxify both body and mind as a prelude to its higher visionary gifts, are essential as it is best to be as clear and empty as possible. The traditional advice for preparing yourself (and taking care of yourself afterwards) is to avoid what are considered to be disruptive influences, such as sex, gossip, pork, alcohol, and spicy, greasy foods. In recent years the list has come to include such things as television, violent movies, and shopping malls. Why? Because they pollute your imagination, and what is in your head often becomes your visionary experience, or tryp (from ‘tryp’-tamine). It appears the spirits use the raw material of your imagination to craft much of your experience, and the quality of the materials you provide determines, to degrees, the quality of their co-creative (with you) handiwork.. More simply, you detoxify by confronting what you’ve entered into your head.
Here is an example of how ‘tryps’ become influenced by the way the imaginal world is ‘programmed’ in the weeks or months prior to a vision. 'M.T. Xen' used to teach university and on one occasion taught a course entitled “Sociology and Philosophy of Religions”. He used this opportunity to study and delve deeply into the right wing Christian fundamentalist mind, the one so deeply engaged in the war against nature. He was aided in this by a woman in the front row, of the fundamentalist persuasion, who used to shield herself with her bible whenever his lectures became too blasphemous. He thought he would be brought to task to work out his relationship with this woman. What he found was that he was to be granted what he had ‘asked for’. That is to say, the spirits decided to teach him about Christian fundamentalism. And in the spirit world you become that of which you seek to know, a kind of extreme empathy. In essence, he became a Christian fundamentalist, an experience that gratefully lasted less than two hours. This shapeshifting included visions of a Puritan figure, complete with Pilgrim hat. He witnessed the Puritan making a deal, a high order of black magic, with predatory forces that appear to feed on human greed, that offer the intoxication of power without responsibility. He saw this deal as the beginnings of a 500-year bad 'tryp' for much of humanity; and saw the confluence of these forces as a black metallic dragon, a thoughtform that has been dining on greed, largely served up by the American dream, for centuries.
What better disguise for this thought-form than as … god. This god will give you all that you ask, all the largesse and ego inflation of empire, in simple exchange for you to cease to think for yourself, for you to go into denial of the feeling wound inflicted by raping others of their rights to a peaceful existence. This god will do your thinking, and feeling, for you! And as the adherents of this god submit to its power, the plundering continues, more enemies are created, the world becomes more chaotic, and the winged juggernaut grows more fearsome and uncontrollable. As this scenario played itself out, 'M.T. Xen' became caught in a maelstrom of fear that followed in its wake. This was compounded by the effects of living in the U.S., with the perpetual cops on the highway, airport security, the drug war, corporate mafia takeovers of government, negative media, and so on. It reached a point where he became psychically unmoored. Adrift in anti-meaning and a growing terror of insanity, he heard the whispers of ‘nice’ people who are ‘right’. He gave into it and was welcomed by all these ‘right’ people into their world. And there he existed for a time, all the while thinking something wasn’t quite right, but not questioning it too much as he was so glad to be at harbor. However, the incongruities grew to the point that he had to question this god, which these people didn’t like at all; but gained him his imaginal freedom.
Understanding the Imagination
When we are put into a crisis, we have essentially two choices. To either: (a) use the opportunity to go deeper into self-understanding, the perennial tradition of “know thyself”; or (b) go deeper into denial and allow other people think for us; which invariably sweeps all the issues that created the crisis under the rug for it to ferment, and create a bigger stink. No blame. Being human isn’t easy, and we are all capable, at some level, of making the choices of those we so readily judge. However, the latter choice brings with it predictably unpleasant karmic consequences, the payback of a Faustian bargain we see in the world today. These two choices reflect two ways to understand the imagination. The more positive way defines the imagination as the ability of the mind to be creative and resourceful, the function of a spiritual faculty (as in ‘use your imagination’). The more negative one defines it as the part of the mind that subjectively distorts and fantasizes things, the function of an immature ego (as in ‘you are imagining things’).
The question then becomes: To what extent is our imaginal world a house of mirrors reflecting our own fragmented self, and to what extent does it tap into the wellspring of Creation, the anima mundi, the Source of our very existence? This question can be answered by the quality of one’s life, with misery and happiness attending each end of the imaginal spectrum. However, one can be stuck in misery and not motivated to move out of it because the fragmented self in contemporary life is considered normal, and many such normal people have no reference for a higher state of wellbeing. For those of us drawn to the prospect that there must be something better, we would do well to look for answers long exiled from our world, to such forgotten or suppressed things as spirits. For this, we need a more holistic worldview. We must see through the cracks of the 3-D empire and surface the deeper, more inclusive layers of consciousness, where all beings exist and all is interconnected. This is the ultimate purpose of the human imagination. It is to give expression to the creative matrix of nature, to allow the whole to become more conscious of itself. As cosmologist Richard Tarnas puts it, “The human imagination is itself part of the world’s intrinsic truth; without it the world is in some sense incomplete.”
This understanding of imagination and its applications to our lives is how we overcome what philosopher Jacob Needleman calls the “foolish realism that sees only facts of the outer world and is blind to the laws of the inner world.” It is how we can make sense of synchronicities, of the whole breaking through the trance of our separative existence. It is how we can understand inspiration, the pregnancy of the world wanting to birth itself through us. It is how we find our voice, by feeling into the collective unconscious and speaking what the community needs to hear. The whole will draw from us what is needed. This is how we come into our own power, into our humanity.
Imaginal Practice
It seems that while a rich, fertile imaginal life is a birthright, it has to be claimed – that is to say, the imagination has to be disciplined and developed. The carrier or the medium of imagination is our attention. Attention is energy, one that can be exercised like a muscle. The high arts of its development include the one-pointed concentration that comes of meditation, the energized focus of unselfconscious creative activity, and the merging of awareness and action in the present moment (often known as ‘flow’). If it is not disciplined or engaged in a healthy fascination, the attention wanders, is wasted, and often co-opted. The rise in Attention Deficit Disorders, the medicalization of a failure of the contemporary imagination and its mythos (as in ‘don’t understand it, medicate it’), is but one example. We find this reflected in the Internet as well, which has a downside of presenting information in a flurry of bits and pieces that likewise scatters our attention and weakens our skills of concentration.
A more visceral way to understand the imagination is as a clear or clogged channel, not unlike your intestines. When you feed yourself with junk ideas, become bloated with ideologies, create chronic constipation from identity fixations, and infest yourself with the parasites of media hype and its addictions, you cannot expect the nourishing flow of creativity to flow easily through your being and blush your life with its radiance. No – what is needed is to flush the system and repopulate it with the flora of rich archetypal perceptions and Divine visions. What is needed is imaginal hygiene! Knowledge of this and its application is essential to the story of human survival into the 21st century. Its practice is necessary for us to cultivate the visionary clarity and strength needed to achieve the great personal and planetary transformations that increasing numbers of us are being called to perform, for the capacity to transform is in direct proportion to the capacity to imagine.
The Ego Game
A brief overview of the ‘ego game’ will help us understand the root causes of the sullied imagination and give us guidance on its proper care and feeding. The immature ego is self-possessed. This creates a force field of contractions that distort everything in its range, resulting in anxieties, large and small. These are dealt with by reformulating reality to support various defense mechanisms, such as repression, denial, projection, and rationalization. This fills the imagination with memes of neurosis that interact with various other ego-based social agreements, such as basing an economy on scarcity, or national security on domination. The resulting warps in reality can be understood as growing pains of our self-awareness. It is a form of the timeless ‘hero’s journey’, whereby the adolescent must leave the family to go out, be tested through ordeals, and then hopefully survive and come home matured and able to serve and revitalize the community. As a young species in the society of nature; humanity has, to degrees, gone on a journey of separation from the Gaian community. We have been tested by the various ordeals of mind/body identification and the superiority complex that attends it. This crucible has alchemized a supple and expanding self-awareness in many of us that is leading us home.
As we, collectively, appear to be in the crisis phase of this initiatory journey, the ego-game has intensified in recent centuries. It has made us heir to a left-brain bias, which in its radiant, lopsided glory presents us with an exclusively patriarchal, rationalist, Cartesian, reductionist, and mechanistic-dominator model of existence. Everything else, all that has been cast out of this story of progress – the body, emotions, other cultures, other eras, other forms of life, the animal kingdom, the earth community, women, children – all become unconscious. Like buried gold, these are the elements that the impoverished imagination must rediscover to regain its wealth. Meanwhile, the globalization of empire has created even more inventive permutations of the ego game. It has spawned opportunistic forces that feed our fantasy lives to the point of obsession. Whether it be Internet porn, celebrity gossip, social networking, or sanitized news about a war, the imagination becomes severely degraded by the toxic brew of illusory pleasures mixed up by the control systems of empire.
Cycles of Addiction
A step on the path of cleaning up this mythic mess in our heads is to make us more fully conscious of the vicious cycle of addiction, symptomatic of the corrupted imagination. If we compare the healthy imagination to a verdant and diverse forest, its compromised state is equivalent to the aftermath of a clear-cut. The vacant ‘land’ can then be freely colonized, developed by forces with agendas all their own. A telling example of this kind of invasion is the traditional Chinese custom to protect houses by putting up poster-sized talismans on the front doors. Down the cobbled streets of rural towns, one sees posters with fierce, glaring-eyed Taoist deities brandishing swords. As the streets turned to pavement, two Mao-hatted army men on horses had replaced the deities. Later on came posters with three uniformed members of each of the Chinese armed forces standing at attention with arsenals of weapons behind then. Finally came front doors plastered with pictures of red-starred missiles. A colonized imagination is often installed with denatured replicas of, or references to, its former self, not unlike a housing development that names itself after what it destroys, like Hawk Ridge or Woodland Park.
This phenomenon can be described as the ‘Las Vegas effect’. It occurs when the sacred is used to promote secular ends, and results in a succession of diminishing returns. It’s the idea, that, because the sense of wellbeing based on money and its glamours is inherently short-lived; the only way to prolong the satisfaction is to create ever more novel and intensified stimulations (McMansions, reality TV, boob implants, etc.) to get a rise out of ever more numbed senses. Las Vegas, as the temple city of Mammon, is busily copying the world’s sacred sites and mythic icons; including the Gaza pyramids, great Sphinx, Taj Mahal, Camelot, and Oz, in attempts to milk what imaginal juice it can from the originals to impress its visitors, who in turn need ever larger doses of spectacular spectacles to keep them coming back. The Las Vegas effect permeates contemporary culture, as we seem to be particularly susceptible to the con. Democracy becomes a front for imperialist aggression, peace is used to justify war (even naming missiles “Peacekeepers”), and an economy is called healthy that destroys the resources that sustain it. In the throes of what eco-theologist Thomas Berry calls a ‘mythic addiction’ to commercial-industrial power, profit, and technological superiority; we continue to burn the bridges to the Divine and content ourselves with bridges to nowhere. Confronted with a spiritually barren culture, a meaningless cosmos, the only self-fulfillment left is to keep buying, to live to shop. The chronic attempt to satiate a spiritual hunger through empty materialism creates a viscous cycle of self-destruction, which begets more self-hatred, more desire for escape; and so it goes round in, thankfully, unsustainable fashion.
Strategies of Empire
In our attempts to keep our imaginal world healthy, and sovereign, it is useful to be aware of the various strategies the empire uses to keep us enmeshed in this cycle. The first is the danger of the news. There is a kind of psychological warfare perpetrated through the massive amount of manipulation that passes for the news. Huge negative thought-forms are created when great numbers of people sit fascinated with the latest disaster. When we willingly allow our attention to be used to strengthen these thought-forms, we perpetuate the assumptions that the world is a fearful place. We thereby waste the energy of our attention, which could be more gainfully directed towards enlightening our lives and the world. The second is the danger of advertising. Advertising is a form of spells. Spells comprise the magical power of language and image to effect changes in the world. When, like with advertising, they are used to compel someone to do something, they encroach on free will. They activate whatever of our energies are in the grips of consumer addiction and deplete the energies we have to counter this drive.
Advertising is one of the great tools of the corporate oligarchy to promote their mythology – not just in the commercial sphere, but also in they way they run governments. Essayist Gore Vidal identifies this quite plainly: “There’s no such thing as a war on terrorism. It’s idiotic. These are slogans. It’s advertising, which is the only art form we’ve invented and developed. It’s lies.” However the mass media may capture your attention, its intent is to program your imagination with the storyline of its sponsors. We all know the narrative, a certain version goes this way: ‘The European settlers were heroes; the indigenous people were either heathens or naive primitives, but in either case they were in the way of progress. Slavery was an unfortunate episode that was cleaned up eventually, though it has never been quite clear that the former slaves were ever meant to rule themselves, let alone anyone else. Colonial foreign policy has generally been benign, nearly always driven by either a God-given imperative to improve the world or a sense that the planet would be better off with an imported version of capitalism and democracy’. This is the self-image, the reality of the ‘real Americans’ referred to by Sarah Palin, the ‘real Zulus’ referred to by Jacob Zuma.
When we allow ourselves to be implanted with such a pre-packaged narrative, we eventually become dependent on it, as it erodes the creative drive to manifest our own reality. It is not unlike a heroin addiction. Just as the body responds to heroin by slowing the production of endogenous opioids (endorphins) to the point where the body ‘forgets’ how to produce them, an artificial reality conditions us to forget how to create our own. We then become dependent on the ‘reality in a box’, and at the mercy of the authorities that control the box. The withdrawal from this reality is very difficult when the creative drive to ‘know thyself’ becomes atrophied from neglect. There are in fact few things more dangerous than a person who refuses to change his or her reality story in the face of changes that make the story impossible to maintain. When our attention is captured, when our inner voice is silenced, a hostage mentality begins to manifest. Just as the “Stockholm Syndrome” tells us that hostages often identify with their captors as a form of psychological survival, we too easily give up our basic human rights, our prospects for a better future and all that would set us free, to be complicit with our captors.
The fear that underlies the hostage mentality clouds the reception of the energy currents that bring love and beauty into the world. When this happens we become so pre-occupied with our problems, themselves the projections of a captive imagination, that we become prisoners of our own design. Cramped, confined, frustrated, and confused, we see little but our own distorted interpretations. Fear begets fear and we see terrorists of every variety, everywhere. Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron tells a story that illustrates this. A woman once told her that her parents had a bought a house in a gated community for their retirement years. Contrary to expectations, they began to feel less safe then before. They became suspicious of every repair person or gardener who came through the gates. They quit going to the beach for fear of the uncontrolled possibilities, and reduced their trips outside the gates to a minimum. Similarly, the paranoid governments have done their best to turn whole countries into gated communities, with hundreds of kilometers of fence building in the works and stepped up harassment of foreign visitors.
Gardening the Imagination
Being free willed beings, we, of course, do not have to agree to all this – to live in the fear wards of the collective imagination. We can choose to live in the garden! The discovery of this not-so-secret imaginal garden comes as we bring the light of awareness to the unconscious. The world so re-integrated opens up a way of life, a path of personal and cultural renewal. In support of the garden path, what follows are just a few suggestions on how to cultivate an imagination that can flower and fruit in acts of conscious evolution. We may want to begin with pulling out some of the more invasive weeds. This could involve turning off (or better yet, getting rid of) the TV. A ‘haunted fishbowl’ flickering in so many homes, television is probably the single biggest negative influence on the group mind today. Besides being a prime organ of propaganda, it also shapes children’s imaginations to resonate with a hyperactive reality, leaving them less able to receive and grow with the subtle teachings offered by the world of nature. As most of us have grown up with the TV, and similar influences, it is helpful to re-pattern ourselves by spending quality time in untrammeled natural environments. This is where we can recover communication with the normally unheard voices, where we can refine our senses and learn to use them in a more balanced ratio to one another.
We live in a society dominated by visual (books and moving screens) and, to a lesser extent, audio information. Touch, smell, and taste are largely undeveloped or, more usually, numbed. With all five senses up and running in interactive relationship, we are restored to full-spectrum ecology of knowledge and gain a much truer perception of the world. For instance, we are not fooled by things that look or sound good, but don’t feel good. We thereby become more immune to the seductive wares of reality sharks, of the glamour spells cast by the Las Vegas effect. Working with systems of correspondences (like astrology, the I Ching, or the Tarot) educates the imagination in the language of the transpersonal layers of the psyche. Becoming fluent, or at least conversant, in the soul glyphs of the numinous realms, the apriori realities, allows us to make much greater sense of their expression in the life we see around us in the 3-D world. This helps us to read the world, to become literate in its symbology.
As nature imparts guidance to humans most directly through visionary experience, it is wise to familiarize oneself with the proper management of altered (or more correctly, restored) states of consciousness. The occasional rite of passage, of death and rebirth, provides us with opportunity to clear away the fixations that keep our imagination anchored to an outworn sense of self. Traditionally, this is done by creating a fluid state of being, not unlike the living soup found in a chrysalis. The human being in this vulnerable state must be held and protected in some kind of safe container. However, in a fear-based culture there is no trust; if no trust, there is no letting go; if no letting go, there is no death to the old self, habits, and ways – which means that there is no rebirth. Without ego surrender, the Source waters of spirit cannot easily flow through us, cannot refresh our souls and renew our lives. To avoid this path of stagnation, it is important to revision the universe as benevolent, as a great temple, and to live life as ceremony. These are cultural acts. They are inspired by these same Source waters (Its job), and takes perseverance, intelligence, and compassion to enact (our job). Sacralizing the world, however, is necessary for us to restore the relationships needed for us to safely, and gracefully, turn with the seasons of our lives.
Rites of passage happen collectively as well. Unfortunately, they are often reduced to the drunken revelries or staid formalities we associate with national and religious holidays. In contrast, the festivals, fairs, and similar gatherings that appear in the interstices and liminal spaces of mainstream society are often rich in the lost treasures of the imagination, for they allow the exiled archetypes, the forgotten deities, to reappear. These rise in power surges of creativity, for they carry with them the force of a system returning to wholeness, the momentum of nature rebalancing itself. Such gatherings are significant incubators for new cultural forms, and we would do well to take advantage of them; support their evolvement and, even better, create our own. Language is among the most important tools we have to tend the garden of our imagination. We want to work with a high ratio of verbs and metaphors, as these are the language of synergy, the magic of growth. Synergy comes when the combined action (a verb) of the parts of any ecology creates something greater than the sum (a noun) of its parts. It draws on the unifying gravity of spirit to effect wondrous, and often unexpected, results: like 1+1=3, or the alchemy of the good marriage. Jungian psychologist James Hillman illustrates something of this when he says, “For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, and boredom. Intimacy fails not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.”
The language of analysis and categorization, on the other hand, is something we need to very careful of, for it excites the ego. We are now collectively crashing our way out of (hopefully) a centuries-long bender of unregulated egoic tendencies that, enabled by the rich analytical language of English, has been chopping up the world in a rampage of self-importance. The world so ‘languaged’ fuels many nasty habits of culture such as racism, sexism, and species-ism; and rationalizes the ideologies of separation such as fundamentalist religions and economies, which tell us to keep doing more of the same. At root, this is all a gratification strategy, for the more people or things one is separated from, the more one can place oneself in a position of being ‘better than’ (or ‘less than’ – the ego doesn’t care, as long as it feels secure in its attachment to who it thinks it is). It’s the divide-and-conquer approach to reality. In contrast, a healthy imagination is fed by considering what things do have in common – by making connections, and finding similarities. Such an imagination comes to life and breathes with parables, analogies, poetry, songs, and metaphors. When we fertilize our language in this way, we synergize the world. Much like nature brings emerging properties into being – such as the wetness that comes of combining hydrogen and oxygen, lichen from algae and fungus, and humanity from the biosphere – we, too, can synergize zeitgeists from history, grooves from jamming musicians, and great love through communion with others. These emerge as verbs, processes and relationships, transformations and motion. If we choose to speak more in verbs and surrender to their flow, we will invariably run into the rocky outcrops of nouns so prevalent in the English language.
What, then, to do with all these nouns, with their flow-impeding dualisms? Some we can leave in our wake, while others are being worked on by popular culture. ‘Story’, ‘access’, ‘architect’, ‘voice’, and ‘message’ are just some nouns that are now converting to verbs. These are more signs that our collective imagination is organicizing – returning to the garden. That words such as ‘e-mail’, ‘Google’, and ‘YouTube’ have been rapidly verb-ified, is evidence that the process is going virtual, picking up speed. Work on (re)organicizing our reality is the growing edge of language development. To this beginning, it is useful to mow down some of the mechanistic metaphors we have inherited, such as those that have colonized time (e.g., ‘the engine of change’, ‘time is money’) and seed our speech with those that spiral us back round to Gaian lifeways (e.g., ‘the tides of change’, ‘time is a great healer’). To move from Machinetime to Dreamtime, it is also useful to make a conscious effort to ascribe life to all things. Name your car; say hello to your computer; and ask where things live, rather than where they are. Though some would say this is simply projecting human traits onto things, it is more about recognizing counterparts of our own traits in other beings, a kind of ‘Namaste’ approach to the world.
The Imaginal Commons
This leads us into the great work of the rebirth of organismic cosmologies, the true home of the spiritually evolving, heart-opening imagination. Also known as eco-cosmologies, cosmologies of resonance, ‘as above so below’ – in these all manner of atom, molecule, element, cell, plant, animal, ancestor, and deity appear less as ‘others’, and more as participants in the metabolisms of nested ‘bodies’, not only our own, but regional ecosystems; the earth, the solar system, and beyond. These nested patterns of resonance all work by the same principles, a kind of dharma of the universe that is expounded in all the world’s great scriptures. These scriptures can as well be ‘read’ at their source, in the living world, if one has the imaginal cognition to do so. This cognition is the ability to apprehend form via the vitalistic forces that create it (e.g., sacred geometry, the herbalist ‘doctrine of signatures’), to know the behavior of things via the spiritual energies that underlie them (e.g. astrology), and ultimately to understand the world completely transparent to its Source. It is a faculty of perception, developed by an imagination that has the vigor to come once again into the great commons of communication, and to engage in council with the tribes of Creation. For those of us who have not yet tuned into the nature channel in this lifetime, or only cursorily touched into it through various transpersonal encounters, let’s discuss what this re-engagement can look like.
The imaginal commons is a place of origin stories, tales of never-ending events. These arise through the Gaian mind as paths of creation that vision, architect and speak the surface world into existence. The mythic is the actual world behind the real world, the ‘actuality’ that generates ‘reality’. The stability of the turtle may offer itself as an island; the mercurial intelligence of jackals or dolphins can teach us to laugh and play tricks; the carrion-eating life of hyenas gives lessons in recycling; and the flow to a river may connect to the streaming tears of a forlorn woman, carrying away her sorrow. The mythical dimensions of these animals and elements carry the virtues, the power and the ‘medicine’ of their physical form. By knowing this internal topology of the world, all manner of divination, healing, sorcery, spiritual illumination, and shapeshifting, can be effected. This is done by linking an imaginative act to the spiritual power of a thing, and then directing it with an intention. This is essentially magic, a science of similarities. It effects change by bringing things together, just as reductionist science effects change by taking things apart. This often involves bringing two things with a mythic affinity (i.e., they come from the same place) together as two strands of an analogy; this to effect remembrance in the one that has forgotten its origins and purpose (and so, is dis-ordered) by connection to the one that retains the memory. For example, in an act of song healing the spark of light, the longing for peace buried in so many frozen hearts, can be freed by forging a vision between it and a dawning sun. By singing of this daily event and holding the image of its inevitable rising, the spark of peace will rise as the sun, thawing and melting the heart as it climbs the sky of the mind. There are countless ways to knit the world together through such subtle activism, the potential of metaphor to bridge the world of causality and result, vibration and form.
This magical science of the imagination has to be drawn upon to effect the changes needed in the world. It is a way by which poets and songwriters may reclaim their bardhood to birth stories of renewal, instead of using their talents to dramatize their neuroses. It can also involve scientists and philosophers with work on the higher calling of cosmological unification of the world, instead of feeding the academic industry that has grown up around analyzing irresolvable (and, largely, self-created) dualistic conflicts. The commons is calling to us, the spirits from the garden are banging on our heads, and though so many of us have lost the imaginal capacity to hear, we are all feeling it at some level. We, too, need to do our activating from that timeless place, from the commons. Once tuned in, we will find that our ability to imagine our future is inseparable from Gaia imagining hers, and we will gain a direction and power to manifest positive change in the 3-D world. We will find that the darkened times we are in are actually the necessary stimuli for the radical change in consciousness needed to evolve our species into something else. What is that something? Use your imagination!
(With grateful acknowledgement to Morgan Brent - educator, ceremonialist, medical anthropologist and spiritual ecologist)
We moderns have created our own imaginal space. It is a skull-enclosed kingdom that plays the movie of our egoic projections, and the ‘rush world’ we’ve created. We’ve got the electronic media buzzing and flashing through our heads, broadcasting the normalcy of a busy hive mind in pursuit of purchased rewards in an advertised reality. We become saturated, overloaded, with these manipulated sounds and images, to the point where they block out and corrode access to the ancestral stratums of our humanity. It’s very difficult for the spirit world to dial into such an environment. Access is made even more challenging by our materialist assumptions that deny it, and others in the Devic realm, even exist. This situation has gotten to the point where the spirit world is starting to deny humans. This has all done great damage to the relations between the spirits and the humans, which percolates up into our various ills of disenchantment with the world. We need to reestablish a positive harmonic between the realms.
Practices that detoxify both body and mind as a prelude to its higher visionary gifts, are essential as it is best to be as clear and empty as possible. The traditional advice for preparing yourself (and taking care of yourself afterwards) is to avoid what are considered to be disruptive influences, such as sex, gossip, pork, alcohol, and spicy, greasy foods. In recent years the list has come to include such things as television, violent movies, and shopping malls. Why? Because they pollute your imagination, and what is in your head often becomes your visionary experience, or tryp (from ‘tryp’-tamine). It appears the spirits use the raw material of your imagination to craft much of your experience, and the quality of the materials you provide determines, to degrees, the quality of their co-creative (with you) handiwork.. More simply, you detoxify by confronting what you’ve entered into your head.
Here is an example of how ‘tryps’ become influenced by the way the imaginal world is ‘programmed’ in the weeks or months prior to a vision. 'M.T. Xen' used to teach university and on one occasion taught a course entitled “Sociology and Philosophy of Religions”. He used this opportunity to study and delve deeply into the right wing Christian fundamentalist mind, the one so deeply engaged in the war against nature. He was aided in this by a woman in the front row, of the fundamentalist persuasion, who used to shield herself with her bible whenever his lectures became too blasphemous. He thought he would be brought to task to work out his relationship with this woman. What he found was that he was to be granted what he had ‘asked for’. That is to say, the spirits decided to teach him about Christian fundamentalism. And in the spirit world you become that of which you seek to know, a kind of extreme empathy. In essence, he became a Christian fundamentalist, an experience that gratefully lasted less than two hours. This shapeshifting included visions of a Puritan figure, complete with Pilgrim hat. He witnessed the Puritan making a deal, a high order of black magic, with predatory forces that appear to feed on human greed, that offer the intoxication of power without responsibility. He saw this deal as the beginnings of a 500-year bad 'tryp' for much of humanity; and saw the confluence of these forces as a black metallic dragon, a thoughtform that has been dining on greed, largely served up by the American dream, for centuries.
What better disguise for this thought-form than as … god. This god will give you all that you ask, all the largesse and ego inflation of empire, in simple exchange for you to cease to think for yourself, for you to go into denial of the feeling wound inflicted by raping others of their rights to a peaceful existence. This god will do your thinking, and feeling, for you! And as the adherents of this god submit to its power, the plundering continues, more enemies are created, the world becomes more chaotic, and the winged juggernaut grows more fearsome and uncontrollable. As this scenario played itself out, 'M.T. Xen' became caught in a maelstrom of fear that followed in its wake. This was compounded by the effects of living in the U.S., with the perpetual cops on the highway, airport security, the drug war, corporate mafia takeovers of government, negative media, and so on. It reached a point where he became psychically unmoored. Adrift in anti-meaning and a growing terror of insanity, he heard the whispers of ‘nice’ people who are ‘right’. He gave into it and was welcomed by all these ‘right’ people into their world. And there he existed for a time, all the while thinking something wasn’t quite right, but not questioning it too much as he was so glad to be at harbor. However, the incongruities grew to the point that he had to question this god, which these people didn’t like at all; but gained him his imaginal freedom.
Understanding the Imagination
When we are put into a crisis, we have essentially two choices. To either: (a) use the opportunity to go deeper into self-understanding, the perennial tradition of “know thyself”; or (b) go deeper into denial and allow other people think for us; which invariably sweeps all the issues that created the crisis under the rug for it to ferment, and create a bigger stink. No blame. Being human isn’t easy, and we are all capable, at some level, of making the choices of those we so readily judge. However, the latter choice brings with it predictably unpleasant karmic consequences, the payback of a Faustian bargain we see in the world today. These two choices reflect two ways to understand the imagination. The more positive way defines the imagination as the ability of the mind to be creative and resourceful, the function of a spiritual faculty (as in ‘use your imagination’). The more negative one defines it as the part of the mind that subjectively distorts and fantasizes things, the function of an immature ego (as in ‘you are imagining things’).
The question then becomes: To what extent is our imaginal world a house of mirrors reflecting our own fragmented self, and to what extent does it tap into the wellspring of Creation, the anima mundi, the Source of our very existence? This question can be answered by the quality of one’s life, with misery and happiness attending each end of the imaginal spectrum. However, one can be stuck in misery and not motivated to move out of it because the fragmented self in contemporary life is considered normal, and many such normal people have no reference for a higher state of wellbeing. For those of us drawn to the prospect that there must be something better, we would do well to look for answers long exiled from our world, to such forgotten or suppressed things as spirits. For this, we need a more holistic worldview. We must see through the cracks of the 3-D empire and surface the deeper, more inclusive layers of consciousness, where all beings exist and all is interconnected. This is the ultimate purpose of the human imagination. It is to give expression to the creative matrix of nature, to allow the whole to become more conscious of itself. As cosmologist Richard Tarnas puts it, “The human imagination is itself part of the world’s intrinsic truth; without it the world is in some sense incomplete.”
This understanding of imagination and its applications to our lives is how we overcome what philosopher Jacob Needleman calls the “foolish realism that sees only facts of the outer world and is blind to the laws of the inner world.” It is how we can make sense of synchronicities, of the whole breaking through the trance of our separative existence. It is how we can understand inspiration, the pregnancy of the world wanting to birth itself through us. It is how we find our voice, by feeling into the collective unconscious and speaking what the community needs to hear. The whole will draw from us what is needed. This is how we come into our own power, into our humanity.
Imaginal Practice
It seems that while a rich, fertile imaginal life is a birthright, it has to be claimed – that is to say, the imagination has to be disciplined and developed. The carrier or the medium of imagination is our attention. Attention is energy, one that can be exercised like a muscle. The high arts of its development include the one-pointed concentration that comes of meditation, the energized focus of unselfconscious creative activity, and the merging of awareness and action in the present moment (often known as ‘flow’). If it is not disciplined or engaged in a healthy fascination, the attention wanders, is wasted, and often co-opted. The rise in Attention Deficit Disorders, the medicalization of a failure of the contemporary imagination and its mythos (as in ‘don’t understand it, medicate it’), is but one example. We find this reflected in the Internet as well, which has a downside of presenting information in a flurry of bits and pieces that likewise scatters our attention and weakens our skills of concentration.
A more visceral way to understand the imagination is as a clear or clogged channel, not unlike your intestines. When you feed yourself with junk ideas, become bloated with ideologies, create chronic constipation from identity fixations, and infest yourself with the parasites of media hype and its addictions, you cannot expect the nourishing flow of creativity to flow easily through your being and blush your life with its radiance. No – what is needed is to flush the system and repopulate it with the flora of rich archetypal perceptions and Divine visions. What is needed is imaginal hygiene! Knowledge of this and its application is essential to the story of human survival into the 21st century. Its practice is necessary for us to cultivate the visionary clarity and strength needed to achieve the great personal and planetary transformations that increasing numbers of us are being called to perform, for the capacity to transform is in direct proportion to the capacity to imagine.
The Ego Game
A brief overview of the ‘ego game’ will help us understand the root causes of the sullied imagination and give us guidance on its proper care and feeding. The immature ego is self-possessed. This creates a force field of contractions that distort everything in its range, resulting in anxieties, large and small. These are dealt with by reformulating reality to support various defense mechanisms, such as repression, denial, projection, and rationalization. This fills the imagination with memes of neurosis that interact with various other ego-based social agreements, such as basing an economy on scarcity, or national security on domination. The resulting warps in reality can be understood as growing pains of our self-awareness. It is a form of the timeless ‘hero’s journey’, whereby the adolescent must leave the family to go out, be tested through ordeals, and then hopefully survive and come home matured and able to serve and revitalize the community. As a young species in the society of nature; humanity has, to degrees, gone on a journey of separation from the Gaian community. We have been tested by the various ordeals of mind/body identification and the superiority complex that attends it. This crucible has alchemized a supple and expanding self-awareness in many of us that is leading us home.
As we, collectively, appear to be in the crisis phase of this initiatory journey, the ego-game has intensified in recent centuries. It has made us heir to a left-brain bias, which in its radiant, lopsided glory presents us with an exclusively patriarchal, rationalist, Cartesian, reductionist, and mechanistic-dominator model of existence. Everything else, all that has been cast out of this story of progress – the body, emotions, other cultures, other eras, other forms of life, the animal kingdom, the earth community, women, children – all become unconscious. Like buried gold, these are the elements that the impoverished imagination must rediscover to regain its wealth. Meanwhile, the globalization of empire has created even more inventive permutations of the ego game. It has spawned opportunistic forces that feed our fantasy lives to the point of obsession. Whether it be Internet porn, celebrity gossip, social networking, or sanitized news about a war, the imagination becomes severely degraded by the toxic brew of illusory pleasures mixed up by the control systems of empire.
Cycles of Addiction
A step on the path of cleaning up this mythic mess in our heads is to make us more fully conscious of the vicious cycle of addiction, symptomatic of the corrupted imagination. If we compare the healthy imagination to a verdant and diverse forest, its compromised state is equivalent to the aftermath of a clear-cut. The vacant ‘land’ can then be freely colonized, developed by forces with agendas all their own. A telling example of this kind of invasion is the traditional Chinese custom to protect houses by putting up poster-sized talismans on the front doors. Down the cobbled streets of rural towns, one sees posters with fierce, glaring-eyed Taoist deities brandishing swords. As the streets turned to pavement, two Mao-hatted army men on horses had replaced the deities. Later on came posters with three uniformed members of each of the Chinese armed forces standing at attention with arsenals of weapons behind then. Finally came front doors plastered with pictures of red-starred missiles. A colonized imagination is often installed with denatured replicas of, or references to, its former self, not unlike a housing development that names itself after what it destroys, like Hawk Ridge or Woodland Park.
This phenomenon can be described as the ‘Las Vegas effect’. It occurs when the sacred is used to promote secular ends, and results in a succession of diminishing returns. It’s the idea, that, because the sense of wellbeing based on money and its glamours is inherently short-lived; the only way to prolong the satisfaction is to create ever more novel and intensified stimulations (McMansions, reality TV, boob implants, etc.) to get a rise out of ever more numbed senses. Las Vegas, as the temple city of Mammon, is busily copying the world’s sacred sites and mythic icons; including the Gaza pyramids, great Sphinx, Taj Mahal, Camelot, and Oz, in attempts to milk what imaginal juice it can from the originals to impress its visitors, who in turn need ever larger doses of spectacular spectacles to keep them coming back. The Las Vegas effect permeates contemporary culture, as we seem to be particularly susceptible to the con. Democracy becomes a front for imperialist aggression, peace is used to justify war (even naming missiles “Peacekeepers”), and an economy is called healthy that destroys the resources that sustain it. In the throes of what eco-theologist Thomas Berry calls a ‘mythic addiction’ to commercial-industrial power, profit, and technological superiority; we continue to burn the bridges to the Divine and content ourselves with bridges to nowhere. Confronted with a spiritually barren culture, a meaningless cosmos, the only self-fulfillment left is to keep buying, to live to shop. The chronic attempt to satiate a spiritual hunger through empty materialism creates a viscous cycle of self-destruction, which begets more self-hatred, more desire for escape; and so it goes round in, thankfully, unsustainable fashion.
Strategies of Empire
In our attempts to keep our imaginal world healthy, and sovereign, it is useful to be aware of the various strategies the empire uses to keep us enmeshed in this cycle. The first is the danger of the news. There is a kind of psychological warfare perpetrated through the massive amount of manipulation that passes for the news. Huge negative thought-forms are created when great numbers of people sit fascinated with the latest disaster. When we willingly allow our attention to be used to strengthen these thought-forms, we perpetuate the assumptions that the world is a fearful place. We thereby waste the energy of our attention, which could be more gainfully directed towards enlightening our lives and the world. The second is the danger of advertising. Advertising is a form of spells. Spells comprise the magical power of language and image to effect changes in the world. When, like with advertising, they are used to compel someone to do something, they encroach on free will. They activate whatever of our energies are in the grips of consumer addiction and deplete the energies we have to counter this drive.
Advertising is one of the great tools of the corporate oligarchy to promote their mythology – not just in the commercial sphere, but also in they way they run governments. Essayist Gore Vidal identifies this quite plainly: “There’s no such thing as a war on terrorism. It’s idiotic. These are slogans. It’s advertising, which is the only art form we’ve invented and developed. It’s lies.” However the mass media may capture your attention, its intent is to program your imagination with the storyline of its sponsors. We all know the narrative, a certain version goes this way: ‘The European settlers were heroes; the indigenous people were either heathens or naive primitives, but in either case they were in the way of progress. Slavery was an unfortunate episode that was cleaned up eventually, though it has never been quite clear that the former slaves were ever meant to rule themselves, let alone anyone else. Colonial foreign policy has generally been benign, nearly always driven by either a God-given imperative to improve the world or a sense that the planet would be better off with an imported version of capitalism and democracy’. This is the self-image, the reality of the ‘real Americans’ referred to by Sarah Palin, the ‘real Zulus’ referred to by Jacob Zuma.
When we allow ourselves to be implanted with such a pre-packaged narrative, we eventually become dependent on it, as it erodes the creative drive to manifest our own reality. It is not unlike a heroin addiction. Just as the body responds to heroin by slowing the production of endogenous opioids (endorphins) to the point where the body ‘forgets’ how to produce them, an artificial reality conditions us to forget how to create our own. We then become dependent on the ‘reality in a box’, and at the mercy of the authorities that control the box. The withdrawal from this reality is very difficult when the creative drive to ‘know thyself’ becomes atrophied from neglect. There are in fact few things more dangerous than a person who refuses to change his or her reality story in the face of changes that make the story impossible to maintain. When our attention is captured, when our inner voice is silenced, a hostage mentality begins to manifest. Just as the “Stockholm Syndrome” tells us that hostages often identify with their captors as a form of psychological survival, we too easily give up our basic human rights, our prospects for a better future and all that would set us free, to be complicit with our captors.
The fear that underlies the hostage mentality clouds the reception of the energy currents that bring love and beauty into the world. When this happens we become so pre-occupied with our problems, themselves the projections of a captive imagination, that we become prisoners of our own design. Cramped, confined, frustrated, and confused, we see little but our own distorted interpretations. Fear begets fear and we see terrorists of every variety, everywhere. Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron tells a story that illustrates this. A woman once told her that her parents had a bought a house in a gated community for their retirement years. Contrary to expectations, they began to feel less safe then before. They became suspicious of every repair person or gardener who came through the gates. They quit going to the beach for fear of the uncontrolled possibilities, and reduced their trips outside the gates to a minimum. Similarly, the paranoid governments have done their best to turn whole countries into gated communities, with hundreds of kilometers of fence building in the works and stepped up harassment of foreign visitors.
Gardening the Imagination
Being free willed beings, we, of course, do not have to agree to all this – to live in the fear wards of the collective imagination. We can choose to live in the garden! The discovery of this not-so-secret imaginal garden comes as we bring the light of awareness to the unconscious. The world so re-integrated opens up a way of life, a path of personal and cultural renewal. In support of the garden path, what follows are just a few suggestions on how to cultivate an imagination that can flower and fruit in acts of conscious evolution. We may want to begin with pulling out some of the more invasive weeds. This could involve turning off (or better yet, getting rid of) the TV. A ‘haunted fishbowl’ flickering in so many homes, television is probably the single biggest negative influence on the group mind today. Besides being a prime organ of propaganda, it also shapes children’s imaginations to resonate with a hyperactive reality, leaving them less able to receive and grow with the subtle teachings offered by the world of nature. As most of us have grown up with the TV, and similar influences, it is helpful to re-pattern ourselves by spending quality time in untrammeled natural environments. This is where we can recover communication with the normally unheard voices, where we can refine our senses and learn to use them in a more balanced ratio to one another.
We live in a society dominated by visual (books and moving screens) and, to a lesser extent, audio information. Touch, smell, and taste are largely undeveloped or, more usually, numbed. With all five senses up and running in interactive relationship, we are restored to full-spectrum ecology of knowledge and gain a much truer perception of the world. For instance, we are not fooled by things that look or sound good, but don’t feel good. We thereby become more immune to the seductive wares of reality sharks, of the glamour spells cast by the Las Vegas effect. Working with systems of correspondences (like astrology, the I Ching, or the Tarot) educates the imagination in the language of the transpersonal layers of the psyche. Becoming fluent, or at least conversant, in the soul glyphs of the numinous realms, the apriori realities, allows us to make much greater sense of their expression in the life we see around us in the 3-D world. This helps us to read the world, to become literate in its symbology.
As nature imparts guidance to humans most directly through visionary experience, it is wise to familiarize oneself with the proper management of altered (or more correctly, restored) states of consciousness. The occasional rite of passage, of death and rebirth, provides us with opportunity to clear away the fixations that keep our imagination anchored to an outworn sense of self. Traditionally, this is done by creating a fluid state of being, not unlike the living soup found in a chrysalis. The human being in this vulnerable state must be held and protected in some kind of safe container. However, in a fear-based culture there is no trust; if no trust, there is no letting go; if no letting go, there is no death to the old self, habits, and ways – which means that there is no rebirth. Without ego surrender, the Source waters of spirit cannot easily flow through us, cannot refresh our souls and renew our lives. To avoid this path of stagnation, it is important to revision the universe as benevolent, as a great temple, and to live life as ceremony. These are cultural acts. They are inspired by these same Source waters (Its job), and takes perseverance, intelligence, and compassion to enact (our job). Sacralizing the world, however, is necessary for us to restore the relationships needed for us to safely, and gracefully, turn with the seasons of our lives.
Rites of passage happen collectively as well. Unfortunately, they are often reduced to the drunken revelries or staid formalities we associate with national and religious holidays. In contrast, the festivals, fairs, and similar gatherings that appear in the interstices and liminal spaces of mainstream society are often rich in the lost treasures of the imagination, for they allow the exiled archetypes, the forgotten deities, to reappear. These rise in power surges of creativity, for they carry with them the force of a system returning to wholeness, the momentum of nature rebalancing itself. Such gatherings are significant incubators for new cultural forms, and we would do well to take advantage of them; support their evolvement and, even better, create our own. Language is among the most important tools we have to tend the garden of our imagination. We want to work with a high ratio of verbs and metaphors, as these are the language of synergy, the magic of growth. Synergy comes when the combined action (a verb) of the parts of any ecology creates something greater than the sum (a noun) of its parts. It draws on the unifying gravity of spirit to effect wondrous, and often unexpected, results: like 1+1=3, or the alchemy of the good marriage. Jungian psychologist James Hillman illustrates something of this when he says, “For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, and boredom. Intimacy fails not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.”
The language of analysis and categorization, on the other hand, is something we need to very careful of, for it excites the ego. We are now collectively crashing our way out of (hopefully) a centuries-long bender of unregulated egoic tendencies that, enabled by the rich analytical language of English, has been chopping up the world in a rampage of self-importance. The world so ‘languaged’ fuels many nasty habits of culture such as racism, sexism, and species-ism; and rationalizes the ideologies of separation such as fundamentalist religions and economies, which tell us to keep doing more of the same. At root, this is all a gratification strategy, for the more people or things one is separated from, the more one can place oneself in a position of being ‘better than’ (or ‘less than’ – the ego doesn’t care, as long as it feels secure in its attachment to who it thinks it is). It’s the divide-and-conquer approach to reality. In contrast, a healthy imagination is fed by considering what things do have in common – by making connections, and finding similarities. Such an imagination comes to life and breathes with parables, analogies, poetry, songs, and metaphors. When we fertilize our language in this way, we synergize the world. Much like nature brings emerging properties into being – such as the wetness that comes of combining hydrogen and oxygen, lichen from algae and fungus, and humanity from the biosphere – we, too, can synergize zeitgeists from history, grooves from jamming musicians, and great love through communion with others. These emerge as verbs, processes and relationships, transformations and motion. If we choose to speak more in verbs and surrender to their flow, we will invariably run into the rocky outcrops of nouns so prevalent in the English language.
What, then, to do with all these nouns, with their flow-impeding dualisms? Some we can leave in our wake, while others are being worked on by popular culture. ‘Story’, ‘access’, ‘architect’, ‘voice’, and ‘message’ are just some nouns that are now converting to verbs. These are more signs that our collective imagination is organicizing – returning to the garden. That words such as ‘e-mail’, ‘Google’, and ‘YouTube’ have been rapidly verb-ified, is evidence that the process is going virtual, picking up speed. Work on (re)organicizing our reality is the growing edge of language development. To this beginning, it is useful to mow down some of the mechanistic metaphors we have inherited, such as those that have colonized time (e.g., ‘the engine of change’, ‘time is money’) and seed our speech with those that spiral us back round to Gaian lifeways (e.g., ‘the tides of change’, ‘time is a great healer’). To move from Machinetime to Dreamtime, it is also useful to make a conscious effort to ascribe life to all things. Name your car; say hello to your computer; and ask where things live, rather than where they are. Though some would say this is simply projecting human traits onto things, it is more about recognizing counterparts of our own traits in other beings, a kind of ‘Namaste’ approach to the world.
The Imaginal Commons
This leads us into the great work of the rebirth of organismic cosmologies, the true home of the spiritually evolving, heart-opening imagination. Also known as eco-cosmologies, cosmologies of resonance, ‘as above so below’ – in these all manner of atom, molecule, element, cell, plant, animal, ancestor, and deity appear less as ‘others’, and more as participants in the metabolisms of nested ‘bodies’, not only our own, but regional ecosystems; the earth, the solar system, and beyond. These nested patterns of resonance all work by the same principles, a kind of dharma of the universe that is expounded in all the world’s great scriptures. These scriptures can as well be ‘read’ at their source, in the living world, if one has the imaginal cognition to do so. This cognition is the ability to apprehend form via the vitalistic forces that create it (e.g., sacred geometry, the herbalist ‘doctrine of signatures’), to know the behavior of things via the spiritual energies that underlie them (e.g. astrology), and ultimately to understand the world completely transparent to its Source. It is a faculty of perception, developed by an imagination that has the vigor to come once again into the great commons of communication, and to engage in council with the tribes of Creation. For those of us who have not yet tuned into the nature channel in this lifetime, or only cursorily touched into it through various transpersonal encounters, let’s discuss what this re-engagement can look like.
The imaginal commons is a place of origin stories, tales of never-ending events. These arise through the Gaian mind as paths of creation that vision, architect and speak the surface world into existence. The mythic is the actual world behind the real world, the ‘actuality’ that generates ‘reality’. The stability of the turtle may offer itself as an island; the mercurial intelligence of jackals or dolphins can teach us to laugh and play tricks; the carrion-eating life of hyenas gives lessons in recycling; and the flow to a river may connect to the streaming tears of a forlorn woman, carrying away her sorrow. The mythical dimensions of these animals and elements carry the virtues, the power and the ‘medicine’ of their physical form. By knowing this internal topology of the world, all manner of divination, healing, sorcery, spiritual illumination, and shapeshifting, can be effected. This is done by linking an imaginative act to the spiritual power of a thing, and then directing it with an intention. This is essentially magic, a science of similarities. It effects change by bringing things together, just as reductionist science effects change by taking things apart. This often involves bringing two things with a mythic affinity (i.e., they come from the same place) together as two strands of an analogy; this to effect remembrance in the one that has forgotten its origins and purpose (and so, is dis-ordered) by connection to the one that retains the memory. For example, in an act of song healing the spark of light, the longing for peace buried in so many frozen hearts, can be freed by forging a vision between it and a dawning sun. By singing of this daily event and holding the image of its inevitable rising, the spark of peace will rise as the sun, thawing and melting the heart as it climbs the sky of the mind. There are countless ways to knit the world together through such subtle activism, the potential of metaphor to bridge the world of causality and result, vibration and form.
This magical science of the imagination has to be drawn upon to effect the changes needed in the world. It is a way by which poets and songwriters may reclaim their bardhood to birth stories of renewal, instead of using their talents to dramatize their neuroses. It can also involve scientists and philosophers with work on the higher calling of cosmological unification of the world, instead of feeding the academic industry that has grown up around analyzing irresolvable (and, largely, self-created) dualistic conflicts. The commons is calling to us, the spirits from the garden are banging on our heads, and though so many of us have lost the imaginal capacity to hear, we are all feeling it at some level. We, too, need to do our activating from that timeless place, from the commons. Once tuned in, we will find that our ability to imagine our future is inseparable from Gaia imagining hers, and we will gain a direction and power to manifest positive change in the 3-D world. We will find that the darkened times we are in are actually the necessary stimuli for the radical change in consciousness needed to evolve our species into something else. What is that something? Use your imagination!
(With grateful acknowledgement to Morgan Brent - educator, ceremonialist, medical anthropologist and spiritual ecologist)
Friday, December 26, 2008
Inner Landscapes
AKAirways is an art group based in New York City, led by Anakin Koenig. Their focus is sculpture/installation centered on inflatable objects. The installations are transient and ephemeral, dependent on interaction and engage the environment in which they are deployed. These dynamic works are constantly changing and evolving. The group's work has been presented in a variety of contexts, from the Museum of Modern Art to underground raves, from NASA to the Whitney Biennale.
Friday, December 12, 2008
The Present of Presence
Most people have not yet fully processed the magnitude of the economic crisis that will continue to deepen in the next years. Our lives may depend upon working through the causes and logical consequences of this disaster, which can be blamed on the greed and ineptitude of the ruling elite. The short-term prognosis is devastating. The hundreds of billions, potentially trillions, of dollars created by governments for bailouts should lead to hyperinflation and a sharp rise in the price of basic goods. At the same time, analysts are predicting that some governments will be insolvent by next year and forced to declare bankruptcy.
One consequence of the credit freeze has been that many farmers around the world, who often live on narrow margins and depend upon loans to see them through the annual harvest, have not been able to get credit. This could lead to diminished production of food at a time when climate change is reducing the amount of arable land. Last year, there were already hunger riots in a number of countries, and by next summer we may see famine on a larger scale.
Hunger may also become a problem in the developed world. While layoffs and mass foreclosures continue and economies contract, a large segment of the populace (who have no savings and much debt) could become a new pauper class. We have already seen over a million homes turned over to banks in the US alone. One can only wonder where those people, and the millions more soon to join them, are going to end up.
Meanwhile, the turmoil in the markets will continue, potentially getting much worse. Apparently, hundreds of trillions of virtual dollars spin in the roulette machine of the derivatives market, which is beginning to disintegrate. The collapse of the housing market may be followed by mass waves of credit card defaults. The world economy was a house of cards, based on the extraordinary premise that ever-expanding debt was a desirable product, and it is now falling down upon us.
We are facing a time of great change and spiritual challenge. Those of us who have undergone a process of awakening and initiation during the last decades will be called upon to act as truth-tellers, leaders and compassionate caretakers for the multitudes that have been duped and deluded by the system. We may have to abandon our comfort zones and personal ambitions to be of service to the situation as it unfolds.
In the time available to us before the situation becomes critical, priorities include strengthening local communities and disseminating techniques of self-sufficiency, such as getting many more people to grow their own food. It is tragic that our mass media continues to act as a mechanism of distraction. The media could be used to explain to people how our world is changing, to teach them the basic life skills that we forfeited a few generations ago, and to imprint new behavior patterns based on sustainable life-ways. Perhaps public broadcasting, at least, can be repurposed for this necessary effort.
The partial nationalization of financial institutions around the world reveals the failure of capitalism; the end of capitalism in its old form. In the future, it should be obvious that capitalism was a transitional system for our global community. Capitalism meshed the world together through networks of trade and communication, while maintaining monstrous inequities and irrational misuse of resources.
The question that faces us now is: what comes after capitalism, and how do we get there? In the short term, we may see dangerous efforts at authoritarian control. The longer-term answer may be a collapse of centralized structures of authority and the blossoming of a new form of global direct democracy; what the anthropologist Pierre Clastres called "society without a state." By necessity, our future system will be collaborative rather than competitive.
If the crisis now confronting the human community is mishandled, vast populations will experience untold suffering and starvation in the next few years. If "we the people" can rise to the occasion, we may be able to radically change the direction of human society, along with the basic paradigms and underlying operating systems of our culture, in a rapid timeframe. This appears to be the message of many prophetic traditions which have anticipated this climactic passage in human affairs - as has been said:"We are the ones we have been waiting for".
As we approach the holiday season and the Gregorian New Year, we can give thanks for having been born into this extraordinary, precious time. Our actions over the next few years could have tremendous consequences for humanity's future on this planet. At such a juncture, the best present we can give to the people around us is our authentic presence; our willingness to listen, learn and remain open to transformation, as the pace of change quickens around us.
One consequence of the credit freeze has been that many farmers around the world, who often live on narrow margins and depend upon loans to see them through the annual harvest, have not been able to get credit. This could lead to diminished production of food at a time when climate change is reducing the amount of arable land. Last year, there were already hunger riots in a number of countries, and by next summer we may see famine on a larger scale.
Hunger may also become a problem in the developed world. While layoffs and mass foreclosures continue and economies contract, a large segment of the populace (who have no savings and much debt) could become a new pauper class. We have already seen over a million homes turned over to banks in the US alone. One can only wonder where those people, and the millions more soon to join them, are going to end up.
Meanwhile, the turmoil in the markets will continue, potentially getting much worse. Apparently, hundreds of trillions of virtual dollars spin in the roulette machine of the derivatives market, which is beginning to disintegrate. The collapse of the housing market may be followed by mass waves of credit card defaults. The world economy was a house of cards, based on the extraordinary premise that ever-expanding debt was a desirable product, and it is now falling down upon us.We are facing a time of great change and spiritual challenge. Those of us who have undergone a process of awakening and initiation during the last decades will be called upon to act as truth-tellers, leaders and compassionate caretakers for the multitudes that have been duped and deluded by the system. We may have to abandon our comfort zones and personal ambitions to be of service to the situation as it unfolds.
In the time available to us before the situation becomes critical, priorities include strengthening local communities and disseminating techniques of self-sufficiency, such as getting many more people to grow their own food. It is tragic that our mass media continues to act as a mechanism of distraction. The media could be used to explain to people how our world is changing, to teach them the basic life skills that we forfeited a few generations ago, and to imprint new behavior patterns based on sustainable life-ways. Perhaps public broadcasting, at least, can be repurposed for this necessary effort.
The partial nationalization of financial institutions around the world reveals the failure of capitalism; the end of capitalism in its old form. In the future, it should be obvious that capitalism was a transitional system for our global community. Capitalism meshed the world together through networks of trade and communication, while maintaining monstrous inequities and irrational misuse of resources.
The question that faces us now is: what comes after capitalism, and how do we get there? In the short term, we may see dangerous efforts at authoritarian control. The longer-term answer may be a collapse of centralized structures of authority and the blossoming of a new form of global direct democracy; what the anthropologist Pierre Clastres called "society without a state." By necessity, our future system will be collaborative rather than competitive.
If the crisis now confronting the human community is mishandled, vast populations will experience untold suffering and starvation in the next few years. If "we the people" can rise to the occasion, we may be able to radically change the direction of human society, along with the basic paradigms and underlying operating systems of our culture, in a rapid timeframe. This appears to be the message of many prophetic traditions which have anticipated this climactic passage in human affairs - as has been said:"We are the ones we have been waiting for".
As we approach the holiday season and the Gregorian New Year, we can give thanks for having been born into this extraordinary, precious time. Our actions over the next few years could have tremendous consequences for humanity's future on this planet. At such a juncture, the best present we can give to the people around us is our authentic presence; our willingness to listen, learn and remain open to transformation, as the pace of change quickens around us.
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