The World Is Not Such a Violent Place

The world is not such a violent place. It is really quite lovely. And it's not on the verge of extinction.

Research indicates that "a smarter, more educated world is becoming more peaceful in statistically significant ways." In one of several new books about the decline of violence in our world, Harvard scholar Steven Pinker writes, "The decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species." ('The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined'). 

According to Pinker and other researchers: 

* The number of people killed in battle – calculated per 100,000 population – has dropped by 1,000-fold over the centuries as civilizations evolved. Before there were organized countries, battles killed on average more than 500 out of every 100,000 people. In 19th century France, it was 70. In the 20th century with two world wars and a few genocides, it was 60. Now battlefield deaths are down to three-tenths of a person per 100,000.

* The rate of genocide deaths per world population was 1,400 times higher in 1942 than in 2008.

* There were fewer than 20 democracies in 1946. Now there are close to 100. Meanwhile, the number of authoritarian countries has dropped from a high of almost 90 in 1976 to about 25 now.

So why do so many of us feel emotionally jolted, with a sense that the world is on the brink of chaos? It's partially do to the media, of course. Given a thousand stories about peace-making and one about violence, the media repeat the violent image 24-7 and ignore the other stories.

But the media is just imitating an age-old trick of human thinking. We project the shadows of our own mind on the world outside, and see what we want to see.

People in the anti-war movement are vested in seeing a world at war: it gives them an identity. Religious fundamentalists are vested in seeing a world of evil: it gives them a sense of righteousness. Marxist ideologues want to see rich people exploit the poor. It makes them uncomfortable to meet wealthy men and women who are generous and kind. In the same way, laissez-faire capitalists who read Ayn Rand look for poor people who are lazy and deceitful, disregarding any evidence to the contrary.

We perceive the world, not as it actually is, but according to the predilections of our ideology; and we look for conflicts that correspond most readily to our own conflicted thoughts. Most of today's warfare is not in the material world but inside us, on the plane of emotional energy and mental imagery. It is astral warfare, not physical.

That is why humanity's problems cannot be solved merely by political or economic activism: for they are not essentially political-economic problems. They are spiritual problems, solved by the inner activism of mindful and heartful practice. If we do not accompany our politics, our protests, and our Occupy movements with inner activism, we'll just kick the same can round and round.

If you think the world is such a violent place, take a walk down your street. Walk all day through the town and countryside. You'll be hard-pressed to experience a single act of violence.

Now go to the most troubled nation on earth. Even there, the vast majority of people live perfectly non-violent lives. Kids are playing in empty lots. Women are walking down the street together. Men are sitting in village squares, smoking, laughing, sipping tea. Folks are working at their ancient daily tasks. Many of the poor are quite happy. Many of the wealthy are quite miserable. 99% of the time, in 99% of the places, the earth is not violent: it is quite peaceful, and quite ordinary.

In those few places where violence does break out, the press sets up its cameras. By the evening news, they've convinced us that the whole world is on the verge of Armageddon.

A Chicano friend of mine recently told me what a fun place Mexico City is. "I thought it was very dangerous," said I,"with all those drug cartels and murders." He looked at me with pathos, knowing that, as an "educated" U.S. citizen, I am misinformed by a ceaseless barrage of skewed information guaranteed to inflame my prejudices and confirm my suspicions.

I traveled up and own the coast of West Africa as a Merchant Marine seaman, visiting seven different countries. They are nations which the American media portray as violent and dangerous. I certainly experienced a constant buzz of potential violence from American seamen aboard the ship, who were often in advanced stages of alcoholism. But when I went ashore, I walked through cities and villages, nourished from the well of hospitality that is the heart of African people. Fed with friendship and generosity, taken into huts at night by the poorest of village people, I never felt more safe.

TED Talk by Steven Pinker

Freedom is Non-Resistance

Do you want to know my secret? I don't mind what happens.
~J. Krishnamurti

The gist of ignorance is believing that we have some control over what befalls us. The future is not an option, not a choice. I have no idea what will happen, and neither do you. Our only freedom is to be, or not to be, in the present moment.

Suffering is resistance to change.  ~Maharshi Mahesh Yogi

 Of course, I can't control the present either, because it's already happening. Freedom does not lie in choosing what happens, but in choosing how to receive it. I can embrace what is with spacious love, or I can resist. 

Do not resist.  ~Jesus, Sermon on the Mount

Our culture claims to be Christian. Yet the One we call savior said, Do not resist... the meek shall inherit the earth. Yet ours is a culture of resistance. Resistance is chic. Resistance is politically correct. Our schools teach the intellect to protest, to object, to argue. They do not teach our hearts how to surrender to Presence. Our government is all about resisting the opposition. Our religion consists in resisting the world, the flesh, and the devil. Our medicine constantly battles drug-resistant bacteria. Our economic system is the survival of the fittest, where every business competes with every other. This regards non-resisters as cowards and weaklings. Yet resistance only deepens our suffering.

Is it possible for us to evolve from a culture of resistance to a culture of non-resistance? To open up, bend our stiff joints, expand our embrace, and become empty?

Emptiness laughs and nods in agreement. ~Zenrin Kushu

Hope lies not in controlling the future, but in embracing the present. Let the fierce onslaught of now, containing the whole freight train of the past, flow right through you. Eternity doesn't resist time, any more than the sky resists clouds. What arises and dissolves is the world, not you.

A Madman's Final Facebook Post

I wanted to meet my Facebook friends in the flesh - over a thousand of them in one mad party at dawn.

So I dipped my computer, like a giant pale cherry, in bubbling bittersweet chocolate. I coated thousands of tiny wires with caramelized sugar, turning them into nerves. Layered in thin silicon chips like syrupy baklava, my hard-drive morphed into a living hypothalamus, pulsating with networks of sizzling copper. A reticular activating system of melted plastic and tungsten tubes trembled with reptilian desire. Sleek brown bubbles floated off my desktop through the monitor, right into my bedroom. Out of each liquid bubble popped a naked Facebook friend, slathered and dripping with chocolate.

"Sweet!" I shouted, then got busy dividing them into two lines, like sheep and goats. Any one who pretended to be a guru, an intuitive savant, or a spouter of left-wing political angst, I sent back into the virtual vacuum. Pop! They disappeared. Anyone who just wanted to party, I welcomed into the mambo line.

We grasped each others hips, swaying, rocking out of cyberspace into the multi-dimensional sensuality of my bedroom, smelling like burnt honey and milk chocolate, with that sour scent of moaning sweat that only the makers of Hershey's candy kisses know how to brew. And whenever my friends opened their grinning teeth to sing, rare birds flew out of their cavernous mouths like feathered ancestors.

I grabbed a set of buttocks and joined the line. We danced downstairs, past the Christmas tree, out the front door, Willy the apricot poodle barking in a frenzy, hobbling after us with one of his four legs in a green cast, my wife screaming, "So these are your friends! My God, what's happened to you?"

Around the block and down the street, our smoking feet imprinting the black ice, our hot chocolate bodies each haloed in sugary steam, we mamboed serpentine past the home of the traumatized Congressional Medal of Honor winner who never opens his door, past the lady with melanoma who bravely walks her crippled schnauzer every morning, wondering which of them will be first to die, past the duplex with the wife and three kids whose husband never came home from Afghanistan, and the old couple who shout lovingly at each other all night, because their hearing is so bad they think they're whispering.

I yelled to the neighbors, "Wake up! Come out and dance, even though its Winter! The sound of the turtledove is heard in the land, and a lot of other weird birds. Arise! Even though the stock market is plunging and Republicans are taking over! Even though the calender is coming to an end and we're all screwed! Its the dark before the dawn: come out and mambo with these people! They're my Facebook friends and they're more steaming naked, sweet and real than you are!"

Sure enough, we made the sun rise. The neighbors staggered out of doors and windows as if it was Day 1 of the new revised Mayan calender. Nobody called the police. Crazy rare birds hovered around us, their anal sphincters relaxing Winter's yogic bandha, dropping warm poop in ecstatic song, the Scarlet Ibis and Green Honeycreeper from Trinidad-Tobago, the Masked Booby and Wedge-tailed Shearwater from the jungled shores of Thailand, the Motmot and Paradise Flycatcher, the Red-Bellied Parrot and rarest of all hummingbirds, the Peruvian Spatuletail, orchid-tiny, probably drunk on rain-forest hallucinogens, spinning around my head like a favorite song from the sixties.

"These are my friggin' friends!" I kept yelling. "They're from cyberspace and they want to party, especially the ones from the other side of the planet, where it's midnight right now!"

A mysterious Facebook belly-dancer from some nation I cannot even locate on the map, who keeps posting love poetry in Arabic, looked aghast at me and cried, "You're really quite ugly!" Then she kissed me on both cheeks and said, "So this is what it's like being in America?"

"No way!" I replied. "This isn't what America's like at all. This is what the Earth is like!"

We all needed breakfast. No Indian restaurants were open that early. So we went to Denny's, all one thousand seven hundred and forty two of us, and had pancakes.

You're probably wondering if this really happened, and when, and why you weren't there. Right?

But you were there. Don't you remember? You will. You will remember. It was the morning of Now, when everything we imagine comes true.

I Don't Know

"When you seem to understand a situation and label it, This is how it is, that is the beginning of your problem. Problems arise from knowing, not from not knowing. Suffering is a product of limited knowledge.

"When an event occurs, there could be many possibilities to explain it. You label it wrong from limited knowledge. But when there is amazement, patience and joy, you are in a state of I don’t know, may be, and life shifts from the limited I know to all possibilities.

'Stop seeing intentions behind others' mistakes. Then you stop bearing grudges. Your mind drops craving and aversion, and you become free.'    ~Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Thank you, Beloved Teacher. Humbling me, you expand me. Emptying me, you fulfill me.

Peace

Peace to you...

The Peace that only comes when the mind is quiet, and the heart spills over with the innocence of a newborn child.

This morning, every body is flawless, every atom is pure, every photon of light is perfect, and there is nothing that is not made of this perfect light.

In the whole cosmos, the only thing that is not perfect is the thought, "This is imperfect."

Celebrate the birth of divine love in the human heart. All holidays, all rituals, are just re-enactments of love's breath.

With a mind spacious and free from judgment, with an innocent heart and the eyes of a newborn child, observe what is; deeply, deeply observe what is.

Peace be yours...

For only the action that flows from Peace, makes Peace.

Christmas Message of the Hubble Snow Angel

Learn the lesson of a single snowflake.

Isn't every flake flawless in its unique and sacred geometry? The intelligence who perfects a snowflake designs this whole creation.

Divine Mother pours perfection upon us, and weaves the very molecules of our flesh from the fibers of her beauty. She is not only Holy Mater, she is Holy Matter. Like a snowflake, each sub-nuclear spark of the physical world is an instantaneous revelation of God, and a momentary effulgence of heaven on earth.

Merry Christmas from the inconceivable, born in every photon of your perfect body. Though you dwell in form, form does not confine you, for each particle of you is boundless, and eternity infuses all that appears to change and die. Physicists confirm this: an electron is surrounded by a photon-cloud in which each instantaneous photon of light has an energy charge that is infinite. Your body is made of no-thing but the boundless self-luminosity of the void.

The illusion of imperfection arises because I resist the ordinary, I react against the suchness of what simply is. The master, MMY, once told us, Suffering is just resistance to change. When I relinquish my resistance to the tidal wave of this present moment, eternity washes over me in waves of time, and this finite body dissolves into galaxies of bliss-consciousness.

Each one a masterpiece of pure mathematical intelligence, millions of perfect snowflakes fall around me. Do I appreciate the fact that I am inundated with miracles? Or do I take the miraculous for granted and call it ordinary?

When I was living in a Trappist monastery, I discovered that the liturgy of daily chant and mass are called the Ordinary of the Seasons. It is only in the depths of the ordinary that we find miracles.

But such is the gift of freedom that I super-impose my own mental qualities on the fresh miraculous suchness of the earth. I see what I choose to see. And what I too often choose to see is a drab and fallen world.

Seeing is an act of creation.

When the busy innkeeper met Mary in Bethlehem, he saw a pregnant, homeless, immigrant girl and offered her no resting place. But when the simple-hearted shepherd and the Eastern sage met that same lady, they saw a mother of God.

Reason is a Hoax

Thoughts that feel good in our hypothalamus and reticular activating system we call rational. Thoughts that don't feel good we call irrational. The gist of our thinking is more often determined by what we had for dinner last night than by any inherent quality called reason. The most radical wisdom requires no thinking, no reasoning at all.

Reason is a hoax. For example, the invasion of Iraq felt good to millions of Americans in 2003. Thus it felt perfectly reasonable to bankrupt our economy, exhaust our military power, kill a million people, and hand Iraq over to Iranian influence. This idiotic scheme seemed rational because thinking was simply a disguise for sweet feelings of revenge in our primitive brain.

On the other hand, when Osama bin Laden sent us a message in 2004, explaining the reasons for his antipathy toward U.S. foreign policy, we heard it as the ranting of a madman. What he offered was to end the war if America fulfilled three conditions: show neutrality rather than prejudice in the Israel-Palestine conflict, withdraw military bases from Muslim holy lands in Saudi Arabia, and stop supporting oppressive Arab dictators. These were perfectly rational ideas, but not to Americans.

Here is a case in point for why, if we wish to survive, human culture must turn from the value of thinking to the value of Awareness.

Neither reason in the cerebral cortex, nor emotion in the primitive brain, have anything to do with Awareness. Awareness is the infinite self-radiant space that was already here before the brain or the elements of this body were formed. And Awareness will be here long after human physiology has dissolved back into the cosmic soup.

Have you considered the possibility that you can shift your attention from thinking to Awareness?

You can relax from the tangled skein of your neurons, which is the primitive web of karma, into the pure space that pervades the atoms and the galaxies. For Awareness is never trapped in a nerve cell or contained in a thought, just as water is never caught in a net.

This very moment, as Awareness, you are already free. You are neither the mind, the body, nor last night's dinner. You are all-pervading clarity and joy.

The solution to our conflicts is Awareness, not reasoning.

Photo, Indra's Net, by Doug Benner: Link

'I Have Too Many Thoughts'

"I have too many thoughts in meditation."

So what if you have a thought? A thought is just a wave in the sea of silence.

Like right now, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, and Sarah Palin covered in hot melted chocolate wrestling an elk, and Laotzu floating in an emerald sky, playing his pearl-encrusted violin from which stream melodies of silk connected to every star, as a radiant winged donkey with the eyes of Jesus alights on my brow, whispering lyrics of unpublished Elvis songs, which I will sing only to the children of the 60's who remember how we wept by the waters of Babylon, and hung our harps from the willows there, smashed on buds that sprang like green nipples from the sugary bosom of the Great Mother, whose black body of starry Silence dissolves all limits between form and formlessness, allowing us to dance in fractals of Delight, the only energy that is.

Welcome to the mirage, where boundless awakened space pervades every ripple of mind.

What Do You Say?

99% of what gurus say, you could say. You just don't have the white robes and long hair going for you. 

99% of what college professors say, you could say. You just don't have the capital letters after your name. 

99% of what politicians say, you could say. But you're too intelligent to talk like that. 

What I'm saying is, you are the supreme authority in your life, and no one else. What do you say?

My most exciting discovery on this journey is that spirituality has nothing to do with authority. Spirituality is an adult issue; authority is an infantile issue. 

Many follow a guru, a pope, a holy book, a charismatic preacher, not because they want to be free, but for precisely the opposite reason. They want a surrogate daddy. They want to give their innate authority away to someone else. The infantile comfort we get from giving up our self-authority accounts for much religious behavior.

I love my Guru: I do not give him authority over my life. My surrender to his Presence gives me infinite freedom to be myself, wherever I am. Real devotion, bhakti, flowers in a realm beyond should and should not, beyond authority.

I do not ask the Guru what I should do or believe. I do not ask anything. I let my heart dance in the breath of his divine silence.

Christmas Card

Stop sending yourself postcards:
"Having a great time, wish you were here."
It's the picture of happiness we send ourselves
that makes us miserable.
You don't even know your address:
how will you get the Christmas card
you put in the mail box years ago,
full of sleigh bells and snowy farms
and mothers who never get mad because
they have no job but gazing at babies?
Fuck these Christmas lights.
You break one, and they all go out.
There's a better kind of light,
fainter but always glowing
in the darkness of your aching heart.
This light is never born
and never demands perfection.
It's your real home.
Rest here.
Don't send pictures.

The Mind Hates Truth

Our media culture is clanging with conspiracy theories. A sense of betrayal by the highest authorities haunts us. We feel a premonition that the powers who pretend to protect and guide us are actually misleading us: powers of government, religion, the military, the corporation, the guru, the coach. Never before have we distrusted institutional authority more.

Yet our distrust of authority may be a sign that we are awakening from a long sleep. These conspiracy theories may reflect the intuition of a deeper, more inward betrayal. Conspiracy theories are projected shadows of an interior deception, the conspiracy of our own mind to deceive us.

Yes, our own mind, upon whom rests our science, our education, our jurisprudence; this very mind who claims to watch over us, warn us of danger, guide us to truth; this mind we call our intelligence, actually conspires to lead us further and further away from the truth we seek!

The mind hates truth. This is the real crisis, the origin of every other: economic, environmental, or political. The mind's very nature is to deceive us whenever we defer to its authority, which we have been doing now for centuries. The mind invariably cons us into searching and seeking: into searching elsewhere for what is right here, seeking anywhere for truth but where it actually is, in the heart of Presence.

Truth is always already at rest as our very being: this is what our mind does not want us to know. Why does the mind hate truth? Because truth is the end of the mind's dominion over us, the silencing of thought.

When our attention finally comes to rest in Presence, there is nothing more for the mind to seek, and no more work with which it can struggle. The mind's very identity is the importance of struggle, the affirmation of lack, the need to find something else. When the lack is filled and the need to find is snuffed out by Presence, the mind feels robbed of its identity. In the dawning of Presence, the mind senses annihilation. Of course, this is precisely when the mind becomes a useful tool for practical problem solving. But our mind does not want to be a tool. Once having tasted control, it became the ego, and would not relinquish its power over us. Just as dictators, priests, generals, and money-lenders fear losing power over us, so our mind desperately fears that if we rest in Presence, it will lose control.

We need not fear the power of generals, popes and corporations. We had better concern ourselves with a deeper, more insidious power: the power we give our own mind when we imagine that thinking will lead us to happiness.

Surely, you have had moments of home-coming, Om-coming to now. Moments when your soul no longer needed thought. Moments when your awareness flared up as a pure blue flame of Presence, burning away past and future in an instant, like balls of cotton touched by a spark. Magnificently grounded in the commonplace, your awareness became free from memory, worry and desire: this is precisely what your mind does not want you to experience.

Yes, for a brief instant, subtler than a feather brushing a bubble, you felt at home in a world that was whole, where spirit and matter collapsed into a unity, where heaven and earth collapsed into a radiance, with no name. Presence has no name because it can only be lived. While you name it, Presence has already moved on.

We have all had such nameless moments of grace. But almost immediately the mind tricks us again, casting us out of Eden, out of the garden that is always now. The ever-twisting serpentine mind, who loves to entangle us in the Tree of Knowledge - knowledge of good and evil, past and future, above and below - seduces us into a journey away from the center of the garden, away from the Tree of Life, toward a future we will never find, for it is never present.

The moment we center down in this dynamic stillness, and our search dissolves in the holy quietness whose edgeless circumference expands forever, the mind shouts, "No! This is too easy! You're not working hard enough. You must struggle to find truth. It's a long journey. You must climb higher. And this journey requires me: endless thought! Besides, you are unworthy. Tranquility is only for saints and gurus. You have not yet earned the right to give up the quest."

Aren't these the themes of our self-doubt, the themes of which we continually re-mind ourselves? Struggle, journey, ascent, unworthiness, and the requirement to earn happiness rather than receive it. Are these not the perennial themes that seduce us into a never-ending pilgrimage of discontent, led by the mind?

There is only one crisis, after all. Not a crisis of the economy, or the government, or war, or environmentalism, but a crisis inside us: whether to live in the Kingdom of Presence, or remain vassals under the reign of the mind, who conspires against our liberation, to lead us on a fruitless journey away from our true home, here, where seeking dies and wonder is born.

Secret Wanting

Secretly, I want faith.

Secretly,  I want to bow to the poor old god of my fathers, begging at my heart's door.

Secretly, I want to fill the bones of the ancient temple with my marrow.

Secretly, I want to hear the commandments as if whispered by a sweetheart in the darkness.

Secretly, to be silly as a wrinkled crone kindling her thousandth candle at the shrine of the Blessed Virgin.

Secretly, to kneel at my bedside with pressed palms, to abandon fine learning and pray to the twilight with the voice of a child.

Secretly, to perform the old round ceremonies, and empty myself the way suns and planets orbit their wombs of darkness.

Secretly, to circle my own heart, so that people feel a stillness in me.

I want to remember the rites of breathing, the sacraments of moonlight, the rosary of seasons.

I want to return again and again like Spring.

However many mistakes I've made, I want my lover to treat me like Adam in the morning of the world.

I want to bow to my barefoot lady, press my fever to those pale immaculate toes.

Secretly, I want to return to the village of my ancestors, to a place I remember but have not known, and receive a gift of laughter, a gift of tears.

Awake

Jesus said, 'I am troubled. I need you to hang out with me. Stop your work and come to the garden.' 

So I stopped work and went to Gethsemane, where I gave Jesus all my prayers. He said, 'I want your friendship, not your worship.' 

Then I told him my ideas about happiness, and gave him all the advice I could think of. He said, 'I love your presence, not your opinion.' 

I offered to serve him day and night, ending poverty, fighting for justice, cleansing the earth of corruption.' He said, 'I cherish your being, not your doing.'

Then I dozed off. After some time, his voice gently spoke again: 'I just need you to stay awake. That's all I ask. Just be with me, without going to sleep.'

Between the Notes

Winter morning, between two junco songs. Wait, listen: a moment of silence is a note in the melody of Presence.

This momentous sliver of silence between sounds, between words, between thoughts, is treasure overflowing, inebriating nectar, and eternal healing. You can drink from this source any time of day, the infinitesimal serenity at your windowsill. If humanity practiced such listening for brief moments, we could transform the world very quickly.

Yet our schools and colleges never taught us to hear silence. From earliest childhood, they taught us to hear only the noise and sort it out, analyze it, argue with it, then make a louder noise to win the argument. None of our teachers said, "Listen to the silence between your thoughts."

That is the silence where we become waves instead of particles, waves of one another.

If you want your children to be creative, take them on a journey into the back yard. Show them the vast space between blades of grass. Then teach them to vanish through the portal between one junco's twitter and the next. In that brief Winter nothing is the first moment of creation, the silence that is always here before God says, 'Let there be light.'

Painting: "Winter Birds," Delilah Smith

No Place More Luscious

No place is more luscious than where you are. The suchness of your present condition is incomparable. The inner juice of Now always sparkles, regardless of the shape of its husk. Nothing limits the infinite fertility of this moment but a thought, "this is not enough." Don't gaze at your neighbor's rose: plant a tiny seed right here. Almost all suffering starts with comparison. The mind that is free from comparison stops moving up or down, left or right: it dwells at the center, in living stillness. This stillness creates everything, and reveals sweet work for you to do.

Warrior's Return

You enter my kingdom by ten thousand roads of death.
Each chariot wheel rolls toward its center.
No restless search for honey in some other garden,
but this dark syrup, blood thickening to stillness.
Some pray until dawn. Some ask, "Who listens?"
But you have become a wonder without words,
eyes dazed wide, worshiping the lance that pierced you.
Never crying, "Withdraw it!" you seek no immortality,
the whisper of your ebbing breath, my Name.
The song swells up your throat, a voice
that is yours and not yours, the way
smoke curls from a wick just blown out.
Then you return to my lips.

Christmas Before Christianity

"God became human so that humanity could become divine." ~Saint Athanasius, 2nd Century

Before it became an imperial religion at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, Christianity was no more nor less than the unconditional embrace of our own humanity as the dwelling place of God. There was no New Testament: the Word of God was our breath. There was no cathedral: the temple was our body.

Christmas is a story about the commonplace, full of objects that have absolutely no esoteric significance: a stable, a feeding trough, a baby, quiet animals in the hay. The Good News is clear: Incarnation is a gift. This body is not a limitation on our consciousness, but a vehicle to express the Spirit in form.

Rejoice in the grace of your humanity. Rejoice in the luminous suchness of things as they are. Only in the depths of the ordinary is salvation born.

Be infinitely local, be absolutely you, and you will be vast.

Ten Joyful Commandments

I've noticed that we Americans are often energetic, creative, smart, hard-working... and unhappy. That may sound like hitting four out of five, but if you're unhappy, the rest are zeros. You can have a lot zeros, but they aren't worth anything until you place a One in front of them. We need to return to the One, and place that One first in our lives.

Here are 10 joyful commandments designed for chronically-stressed, over-scheduled, hyper-active people. You may call them religious practices, but I regard them as survival techniques, intended first to get us in touch with our Joy, and second to restore our community. What is a community, after all, but. a place where people enjoy each other?

(1) Keep Sabbath

The Hebrew word, Sabbath, does not mean Sunday. It means rest. Its root means to stop doing. Keeping Sabbath means keeping a regular daily time of conscious rest, when we shift our gears from doing to Being. Conscious rest is not sleep or day-dreaming. It is gently focused, calmly alert, intensely refreshing silence. Conscious rest nourishes every cell in your body, sharpens your perception, makes your action more efficient. In the Bible, even God rests. Through rest, God enjoys his work. Work is sanctified in rest that returns us to the silent source of creation. From that source, Joy springs up. This Joy does not have to be earned; it is simply there.

(2) Breathe

Breathing is the first art we practiced in this life. We must learn how to breathe all over again. Breath indicates our mental state. Angry tense people breathe differently than people who are relaxed and happy. Many chronic illnesses can be healed by conscious breathing. In the Bible, the word for breath is also the word for Spirit. Breathing in, experience new life! Breathing out, expel the toxic worries, the stale past. To be in touch with the breath is to be in touch with the healing gifts of the Spirit, right here in this body. Just to breathe is the simplest form of prayer.

 

(3) Move from your head to your heart

When you find yourself stuck in worry or anger and your mind is just too busy with thoughts, then shift your attention from the head to the heart. I mean this quite literally: trust your body, particularly the heart. It is more than a physical muscle: it is a center of consciousness. Sink down with each breath. Feeling the heart's warmth, give it room to beat. This will short-circuit the destructive thought patterns you are locked in. You will open up the kingdom of the present moment and change your vision of the world. From the heart's eye, we see each blade of grass as a miracle!

(4) Let your feet touch the ground

When we walk, our mind is usually elsewhere. We are disconnected from our body and from the ground we walk on. This is the source of all our other disconnections: in relationships, politics, ecology. If our mind is not connected to our own body and to the earth we walk on, how can we be connected to our friends, to the poor, to the suffering in other nations? A Lakota medicine man said, "Let every step you take upon the earth be as a prayer. So take a walk every day. Be present. With each step, feel your sole touch the earth.

(5) When you eat, just eat (no committee meetings during lunch)

If you are too busy to eat, then you are too busy. One danger sign of an unhealthy community is that people fail to eat together. Even when they stop to eat, they don’t really stop; their minds keep doing business. Healthy people take time to acknowledge the gift of food, the nourishment of the body. During lunch, instead of doing business, chew. Taste. Enjoy the company of friends. Be there. This is your most important business meeting.

 

(6) Spend time with a child

Every week, if not every day, take a walk with a child. Or just sit down in the grass and Be with a child. Listen to her. Look into her eyes. Imagine your way into her world. You may catch a glimpse of something deep inside that you have lost or denied for many years.

(7) Leave blank spaces in your schedule

One sign of truly unhappy people is that they are chronically out of time. They deny their unhappiness by packing their schedules even fuller, and trying to fill ours too. Maybe you pride yourself in your busy-ness, but if you really want to accomplish something, leave some time unstructured and unplanned. In fact, leave a whole hour, a whole day! During this precious time, breathe and walk and be present on this earth, seeing through your heart. Because of this one hour, you may enjoy the rest of your life.

(8) Look at the sky

While it is still blue and clear, spend a few moments every day looking deep into the sky. Don’t look for anything, just look. See as far as awareness can fathom, intimately knowing the blue Unfathomable. Then close your eyes and experience the same depth inside.

(9) Drop all judgment

"Judge not, lest you be judged," said Jesus. We drain our energy passing judgment on other people, blaming our unhappiness on them. But our unhappiness is our own creation, and it is our very judgment that is robbing our Joy. Dropping all judgment, become light and free! We can never find Joy by trying to perfect others. Joy must be found in your own heart. Only then do we have something to give. Give people your Joy, not your blame.

(10) Talk to God

I don't say think about God or reason about whether God exists. And I don't care what religion you practice. I don't even care if you are an atheist. I advise you to call a moratorium on all that sort of thinking and just talk to God. Most of us do this at one time or another when things are going badly, when we run out of money or friends, when the earth quakes under our home, when we are at war. In such emergencies, we don't debate science and faith: we just start talking to God. Why wait until then? You can talk to God just as you are, with all your doubts, as you would talk to a good friend. God isn't interested in your reasons for believing or not believing: God is interested in your friendship. And when you are finished talking, as you fall silent in that deep blue sky at the center of your soul, you can hear God talk back to you. Not in an audible voice, but through sparkling streams of feeling that run through your heart, flowing from a Within more within you than your self. If people spent more time talking with God and less time arguing about God, the world would look very different.

To Breathe Is To Pray Without Ceasing

"Pray without ceasing..." (1 Thessalonians 5:17)

When I take a breath, what's the motive? Just asking this question for a moment allows me to become aware that breath is a gift of grace. Breath comes without motive or effort. The more I am aware of my breath, the less motive I need to breathe. When I have no motive at all, I don't need to take a breath. Breath is given.

Observing the givenness of a breath as it flows in, I offer it back in gratitude. Simply observing this process is the purest worship. I am the priest of my breath. As Spirit-breath descends into the Host of my heart, Christ-consciousness incarnates in the temple of body. The word for Spirit and breath are the same in Western scriptures, just as they are related in Eastern traditions.

Receiving the divine gift of breath on the inhalation, and offering it back to God on the exhalation, is original temple sacrifice, before any temple was built in Jerusalem. This two-fold offering is the essence of the Holy Eucharist, the central rite of Christianity, without any cathedral. As I give this exhalation back to the Source of Breath, it becomes the sacramental offering through which I surrender the pain of this and all bodies, the turmoil of this and all human minds, every past deed and each particle of the earth.

As often as I breathe in remembrance of Christ-consciousness - that is, in mindfulness - I worship. And wherever I breathe becomes the Holy of Holies. Walking through a marketplace, watching by a sickbed, in home, hospital, forest or city, I am in deep wordless meditation just by shifting my attention to the gift of breathing.

This sacrament was built into our human form as a means of natural communion with the divine. We so take breathing for granted! Demanding neither effort nor belief, neither dogma nor ceremony, conscious breathing is just a gentle shift of awareness back to the most fundamental child-like process in the body. Yet this imperceptible shift of attention delivers us from hell to heaven: from craving, which is the source of suffering, to gratitude, which is the kingdom of God.

Just to breathe is to pray without ceasing.
_________________

Painting: Detail from Bottichelli's 'Birth of Venus,' where the God and Goddess of Wind represent the Holy Spirit breathing on the form of divine love, who is the feminine aspect of Christ in the artist's use of Greek mythical symbols to represent Christian themes.

A Revolutionary Act

Even if you don't "think" your laughter is real, just laugh and it will be. Your body is the channel of joy, not your intellect. Your flesh knew the beauty of its smile before you ever conceived of  "happiness." Smiling takes you to your source. It is a revolutionary act.

Your laughter is more ancient than your cerebral cortex. It bubbles up your spine and flowers on top of your brain stem, which is the tree of life in the wildest garden of your physiology. New research in neurology indicates that consciousness reflects in the cortex only when the cortex is flooded by energy from the hypothalamus and reticular activating system of the ancient brain.

Whatever the problem, simply wrap it in a belly laugh and you will see the problem, quite literally, in a new light.

Be Space, Not What Fills It

This time around, we're not here to focus on the content. We're here to focus on the space around it.

To guide a person's attention from the heaviness of thought to the weightless expanse of awareness: what greater service can you perform? To liberate the sky from the boundaries of its clouds: what greater freedom?

You may be one of those who are called to this work, but until now you've felt useless on this planet. Perhaps you tried to be like all the others, but your interest just wouldn't stay fixed on money, sex, war, or political debate. You kept returning to one thing, yet it seemed like nothing: because in truth it was no thing, but the transparency of consciousness itself. You passion was to explore the nature of your very awareness, the mirror and not what it reflected: a field of endeavor unrecognized by your society, so nobody gave you any encouragement. You couldn't speak about this work because your education gave you no vocabulary for it. So they called you a dreamer. They even diagnosed you with attention "deficit." But in truth, your mind overflowed with a super-abundance of attention!

Jesus had the same problem. They wanted him to fix the content of their lives: their history, their religion, their poverty, their political powerlessness. But he wanted them to expand the container, not to change the content. He wasn't giving them a better concept of god: he was shattering all concepts, and guiding them into the space around all gods.

Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world." They thought he was talking about another place. But he wasn't talking about a place. He meant space itself. He said, "I am not here to deal with your stuff, the stuffing of your thoughts. I am here to awaken the space in which those thoughts arise and dissolve. I do not fill your mind with any religious doctrine whatsoever. I remove every doctrine. I do not replace one belief with another: I awaken the one who believes, so that awake, she needs no belief at all."

Those who heard him weren't ready for this, so they crucified him.

Now many are ready. Weary with political, economic, and technological promises that don't solve the problems they pretend to; weary of religion too, which is all content; many are ripe for a shift, a mere shift of attention from thought to the space around thought. We are ready to become aware of awareness. And this is the greatest evolutionary step that humanity has ever taken.

In Milton's words, "They also serve who stand and wait." You have been waiting, but now your time has come. Speak the simple truth when they ask you, "How can just being aware solve our problems?"

You will answer, "Find out for yourself. Become aware of awareness."

"How?" they will ask again. Then you will teach them meditation. And they will discover a space within them that has nothing to do with thoughts - a space that is silent, boundless, self-clarifying, eternal, free from past and future, overflowing with innate joy. This space is who we really are.

Don't hesitate to tell them clearly what all the great prophets taught: God is consciousness, and consciousness is the source of everything else that is.

In the past, we obsessed over the names which prophets gave to this vast space of  consciousness. Now it is time to acknowledge all those names, then let them go. The previous age focused on the Word. Now we focus on the Silence from which the Word is born. Every sacred name that attempts to name this Silence dissolves into it. That is precisely what makes the name sacred! But whether it be Shiva, or Buddha, Allah or Christ, these names are just content. The truth that sets you free is the space that contains all names and forms. This space has no other name but YOU.

Awakening your own awareness will awaken this same Presence in others. Humanity is asleep. Sleep walking, we tread heavily on the earth. We stumble over its greenery, its delicacy. We trample each other. But if we awaken the natural beauty in ourselves, we will bow down to the miracle of life around us. This is the ecology of meditation.

The work of meditation has no political, philosophical, or religious message. That is just content. We help people polish their mirrors: it is none of our business what they reflect. We teach meditation to East and West, the artist and the executive, the believer and the non-believer, the pacifist and the soldier. We do not teach Buddhist meditation, Yoga meditation, Christian meditation, Earth-centered meditation, or the Science of meditation. These labels are just content. If we label our meditation as anything other than pure Being, we are not really meditating.

Does this mean that we must repress our thoughts, or create conflict with the mind? Not at all. The misconception that meditation must be without thoughts causes much strain, and even more thoughts! Thoughts come and go during meditation. But in meditation, the silent background of thoughts, the spacious sky of awareness itself, becomes the foreground. Thoughts become mere background noise that gradually fades. As we continue to enrich silent space with our attention, instead of attending the thoughts that pass through it, silence without content becomes its own luminous and blissful content.

Beneath all names and forms, yet permeating names and forms, silence glows with its own mysterious effulgence. Yet the glow of silence has no name or form. It is what scripture calls, "the light that shines in darkness, though the darkness cannot comprehend it." (John 1)

The world's real problem is not war, injustice, wealth or poverty. These are only the symptoms. The problem is that we are asleep. Our mirror is clouded over: awareness does not know itself. This mental disorder throws all our actions into disorder.

Give your friends and enemies alike the solution to all problems. Teach them to cleanse their mirrors with meditation. When each of us cleanses our own mirror, we reflect the sun of God upon the earth. Do this for those you love. The world doesn't need your busy-ness: it needs your consciousness.

Wake

It's so crystal clear that each morning we choose to wake up or to wake back down. The moment we awaken, we can start looking for the same patterns of stress and negativity in the news of the world that the mind was mired in yesterday; or we can wake to the miracle of Presence, welcoming the revelation of a Winter sunbeam, the symphony of a raindrop. The mouse-mind is free to click on 'Yesterday' or 'Today.'

Take No Thought

"Take no thought." ~Matthew 6

Five times in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says, "Take no thought" (μὴ μεριμνᾶτε), which also translates as, "Don't worry." He says this with reference to our anxiety over food, clothing, the body, the future, and life itself.

Jesus offers us the stunning possibility of life free from care, without "taking thought" for even the most basic provisions. By today's standards, Jesus would certainly be considered irresponsible, and probably insane.

Even the most devout disciple replies, "All right, Master, I will enter the lovely silence of no-thought, after I have solved all my problems."

But what if the solution to all our problems is this very silence, free from thought?

Blame Doesn't Work

Americans are paralyzed by a culture of blame.

 

Right and left, rich and poor, 99 percent and 1 percent, we blame each other. The tea party blames labor unions. Liberals blame corporations. The occupiers blame Wall Street, and are so disdainful of government they refuse to join the political process to offer real policy changes. College graduates blame employers for not hiring, yet seldom ask themselves, “Why did I major in sociology instead of engineering?”

Blame loves to generalize. All bankers are crooked, all poor people lazy. All government programs waste money, federal regulations always dampen growth, and capitalism always makes people greedy. Our national IQ is hardly bolstered by such mindless stereotypes.

The blame game cripples our two-party system. But Steve Jobs observed, “The axis today is not liberal and conservative. The axis is constructive-destructive.”

Let Americans develop marketable skills instead of blaming scapegoats for our non-productivity. We are masters of getting and spending someone else’s money, but can we make anything?

The problem is not wealth or poverty. The problem is creativity. Here’s a radical suggestion: Learn to make something people actually want to buy, then sell it to them. And when we get really good at it, we can hire others to help us.

We were created in the image of a creator, not a beggar. We were created to create: not merely beauty and peace, but mutual abundance. Let Americans build things again. Valuing our own worth, we can value each other, instead of blaming each other.

Published in The Olympian, Olympia WA, 11/12/2011 

There Are No Levels of Consciousness

Levels of What?

Someone recently sent me an article about levels of consciousness. Evidently there are ten levels now. There used to be seven. I thought we got over this stuff in the 60's. Oh God, deliver me from levels of consciousness.

Are there levels of zero? Are there levels of empty space? There are certainly levels of mental masturbation: thought thinking about itself. But where are the levels of consciousness? Consciousness has nothing to do with thoughts, or worlds, that come and go within it.

The enormous hug of zero generates countless numbers from a mathematically null set. But zero is free of number and content.

The sky allows all weather to arise and subside, gentle rain, passing cloud, fierce storm. But space remains perfectly clear and empty.

The vacuum emits every particle of matter, light from darkness, yet pervades the material universe as its ground state of energy, a void.

Worlds appear and dissolve like mirages in our seeing. Some worlds appear outside us, as gross matter. Some appear inside us, astral or mental. But consciousness is not located in any world that we could possibly see. Consciousness is what sees.

The practical lesson here is simple. There is no higher level to seek. There is nothing to attain. Truth is simply the Cosmic Disappointment, followed by the Supreme Relaxation, relaxation into what merely is.

You must be disappointed to discover the all-pervading radiance of the pointless.

Vibrations of Pointlessness

When you are ultimately disappointed, you can relax. When you relax, you say ahhh. You don't have to say a-om, a-men, or a-llah. Ah is enough. All sacred names arise from the pointless ahhh. And ahhh is the first sound of every alphabet, the first sound of creation.

There is an eloquent expression of this in the Hebrew mystics. They say that the supreme God is ain-soph-aur, which literally means no-point-light. God is the creative power of pointless luminosity. And this pointless luminosity is the nature of your own awareness when you relax your search for any level of attainment whatsoever.

The universe spontaneously flows from totally relaxed awareness. The sound of the sighing universe is ah. As the universe unfolds, the vibration of ah playfully permutes into other frequencies. All ancient scriptures originate in this dance of sounds. The scriptures were not written at first, but heard through meditation as ecstatic hymns, resonating in the silence of pure awareness.

From this dance of cosmic sound were born divine names such as the Hebrew yah-hu, the Tibetan ah-hum, the Vedic ah-om, the Yogic so-ha, the Christian hai-su. A Vedic text declares, adau Bhagavan shabdah rasahih: In the beginning, God manifested as sound.

The Logos is ah. The Word that creates all things in the beginning is ah. The divine Name is not a secret in some higher level of consciousness, known only to initiates and ascended masters. The divine Name is the sound of your own awareness giving up the search.

From the permutations of the primordial sound come the alphabet. From the original alphabet come the mantras of the Rig Veda. From the mantras come the fluctuations of the vacuum. The fluctuations of the vacuum, according to quantum physics, are simply waves of pure mathematical probability. Yet from these vibrations of no-thing arise the sub-nuclear particles of the physical universe. This is what the word means: uni-verse, one Word.

Creation arises from awareness when you just give up the search and sigh. Ahhh.

Friend, seek nothing. Simply rest in your true nature. Bask as the boundless silence of all-hugging empty zero, bubbling up neutrinos through the laughter of God.