Big mind, small mind, same.

"That everything is included within your mind is the essence of mind. To experience this is to have religious feeling. Even though waves just arise, the essence of your mind is pure; it is just like clear water with a few waves. Actually water always has waves. Waves are the practice of water. To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one. Big mind and small mind are one. When you understand your mind in this way, you have some security in your feeling. As your mind does not expect anything from the outside, it is always filled. A mind with waves in it is not a disturbed mind, but actually an amplified one. Whatever you experience is an experience of big mind." - Shunryu Suzuki, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind"  

Or - I'm a wave in the big mind.

some tea thoughts....

Tea embraces the embodied paradox that we live moment by moment.

There's no struggle, only calm joy arising from the recognition of the simple practice which frees the mind into the heart, the expanse of being in the interior of our embodied experience. Apparent limitation, density, contraction and matter are seen as a continuum from tea cup to our lips to our being.  We flow from the finite to the infinite and back again, spiraling into presence through a simple act of bridging nature into humanity, through the meeting of all time and space into a simple cup of tea.

Tea, the moment of the dance, the bridge, the nexus, the crucible of calm joy, living souls experiencing immortality through the most limited experience unlocking the expanse of cosmic awareness.

As the poetry in motion, flowing through the cup, each drop separate or connected? Each leaf in your cup, separate or united? Or both? These are the insights which arise from the joy of the leaf meeting water meeting human meeting nature.

Here we are – all in our "separate" times and spaces, yet the paradox of tea connecting us all together – joins us in the day to day living – with technophiles – and technophobes – alike – all joining in unison with the merging of the interior of space as we watch the tea fall into the abyss of being through the portal of our lips.

Taking responsibility is essential to overcome challenging parts of our personalities and achieving authentic power.

From Spiritual Partnership

"Taking responsibility for your experiences means reminding yourself, whatever is happening, 'This is happening for a reason. I may not be able to see the reason now. My intention is to learn all that I can about myself. How can this experience help me heal the fear-based parts of my personality?' Taking responsibility for your experiences is the fundamental challenge to every frightened part of your personality, because none of those parts feel responsible for what they do. The angry parts, for example, are convinced that their anger is caused by others and justified. The jealous parts are convinced that their jealousy is caused by others and justified. The overwhelmed parts are convinced that their overwhelm is caused by circumstances and justified, and so on."

"When you take responsibility for all of your experiences, you put yourself in the very powerful position for being able to discover which of your choices created which of your experiences and therefore capable of re-creating them or not. Instead of assuming that others or circumstances create your experiences (this is how a victim sees the world), you assume that your choices create them (this is how a creator sees the world.)"

"Some frightened parts of your personality are so familiar that they seem to be 'who you are,' and the idea of changing them appears impossible because that would require changing your very essence. This is not accurate. Your essence would surprise you and fill you with joy and wonder without the distorted perception of the frightened parts of your personality. Taking responsibility for your experiences enables you to find and heal all of them."

Inspiration from Jesus to address the inequality of our time....

"The Gospels record that Jesus came to fulfill the prophecies of the Jewish nation to preach a new understanding of God's continuous presence with the community - the poor, the oppressed, and the disenfranchised. The radical content of this message was illustrated when Jesus overturned the moneychangers' tables in the Temple, upsetting the status quo of the elite cult of corrupt priests - 'the shepherds who pasture themselves instead of the sheep.' (Ezek. 34, Jer. 23). The Jesus described in the Gospel stories is an antiestablishment hero, an incarnation of the spirit of wisdom, gentle and compassionate toward the poor and a champion of justice. It is this Jesus who is the role model for the life of the true Christian." - Margaret Starbird from her book "The Woman with the Alabaster Jar"

Bird dance

Crickets played slow down sound like Angelic Choir

Love Now....

TIme to reflect on ourselves and our paradigm for true evolution to occur....

Here's an excerpt from Hazel Henderson's 1978 book "Creating Alternative Futures" which points to the need to evaluate our perspective as a core mechanism of progress....

"The dreams of technology-based hedonism, where machines would work and people would be trained for leisure, were, I believe, premature and based on inadequate ecological models. They will remain beyond our reach until we learn to control our population, reduce the impacts of our technology, and share our resources more equitably. It is time for the science and technology of industrialism to realize it's conceptual limitations. The stakes have never been higher for human survival. We need a new scientific paradigm, more suitable for a science that stands at the brink of nuclear disaster and genetic manipulation, a science that has the potential of enhancing human evolutionary possibilities or turning us into a race of what John Leonard calls, 'bionic junkies.' This new scientific approach must be self-reflective. The old, innocent view - 'scientist observing phenomenon' - will no longer suffice. Today we must pull back one 'photo frame' and include a new composite view: 'scientist observing her or himself observing phenomenon.' This reflective paradigm exists in psychology, where those seeking to practice psychoanalysis on their fellow creatures must themselves submit to a prior psychoanalysis."

"Now, perhaps we should urge all scientists to undergo psychoanalysis to understand their own deeper motivations, impulses, and ego needs....

.... Perhaps William Irwin Thompson is right when he notes that we need to rediscover the Pythagorean tradition in science rather than to continue to pursue today's Archimedean science with its seeking to control nature through prediction and experimentation. Thompson notes that he Pythagorean approach embraced a mystical view of science that was integrated with art and religion. Fritjof Capra, in "Tao of Physics" draws the same conclusions and shows how physics has progressed in this century to an ever more metaphysical world view, more consistent with the direct, experiential insights of Eastern religious traditions than with the atomistic, mechanistic view characteristic of the now receding industrial age. Dr. John Todd of the New Alchemy Institute typifies the new reverence which now must inform our scientific enterprise. He sees evolution not as pre-programmed, but as a continual sacred dialogue with our planet.  Radical horticulturalists Alan Chadwick and John Jeavons of California share this view of their methods of producing astonishing yields. Such augmenting of natural productivity and reintegrating our activities into biospheric processes is already leading to a design revolution and a rethinking of many problems of production and of energy and materials management.....

... Our own capabilities and imaginations will be stretched by our current crisis. Millions of us are transcending our old fragmented viewpoints and rising to anew levels of human awareness and many academic fields are undergoing creative ferment. Time is short; but we can all do no less than play our part in this human evolutionary struggle."

Longing for a true soul mate? Spiritual partnership is a path for true intimacy, true fulfillment....

"There is no security in spiritual partnership. Spiritual partners are together to grow spiritually, not sooth one another's fears. On the contrary, they support one another in experiencing their fears and healing the sources of them. Spritual partners are patient and caring, but patience and caring are not enough to keep them together. They appreciate one another, but appreciation is not enough either. They love one another, but even love is not enough. Only commitment to creating authentic power can keep spiritual partners together through the challenges of unearthing, experiencing, and healing frightened parts of their personalities. Five-sensory individuals in old type relationships commit to one another, their relationships, and their five-sensory goals. Spritual partners commit to growing spiritually into supporting one another in growing spiritually." From the book "Spiritual Partnership" by
Gary Zukav photo source Ren on pinterest.

Core of groundbreaking book: "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False"

Here's the full text of the New York Times Article by Thomas Nagel

"This is a brief statement of positions defended more fully in my book “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,” which was published by Oxford University Press last year. Since then the book has attracted a good deal of critical attention, which is not surprising, given the entrenchment of the world view that it attacks. It seemed useful to offer a short summary of the central argument."

"The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time."

"We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything."

"However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all."

"So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. Further, since the mental arises through the development of animal organisms, the nature of those organisms cannot be fully understood through the physical sciences alone. Finally, since the long process of biological evolution is responsible for the existence of conscious organisms, and since a purely physical process cannot explain their existence, it follows that biological evolution must be more than just a physical process, and the theory of evolution, if it is to explain the existence of conscious life, must become more than just a physical theory."

"This means that the scientific outlook, if it aspires to a more complete understanding of nature, must expand to include theories capable of explaining the appearance in the universe of mental phenomena and the subjective points of view in which they occur – theories of a different type from any we have seen so far."

"There are two ways of resisting this conclusion, each of which has two versions. The first way is to deny that the mental is an irreducible aspect of reality, either (a) by holding that the mental can be identified with some aspect of the physical, such as patterns of behavior or patterns of neural activity, or (b) by denying that the mental is part of reality at all, being some kind of illusion (but then, illusion to whom?). The second way is to deny that the mental requires a scientific explanation through some new conception of the natural order, because either (c) we can regard it as a mere fluke or accident, an unexplained extra property of certain physical organisms – or else (d) we can believe that it has an explanation, but one that belongs not to science but to theology, in other words that mind has been added to the physical world in the course of evolution by divine intervention."

"All four of these positions have their adherents. I believe the wide popularity among philosophers and scientists of (a), the outlook of psychophysical reductionism, is due not only to the great prestige of the physical sciences but to the feeling that this is the best defense against the dreaded (d), the theistic interventionist outlook. But someone who finds (a) and (b) self-evidently false and (c) completely implausible need not accept (d), because a scientific understanding of nature need not be limited to a physical theory of the objective spatio-temporal order. It makes sense to seek an expanded form of understanding that includes the mental but that is still scientific — i.e. still a theory of the immanent order of nature."

"That seems to me the most likely solution. Even though the theistic outlook, in some versions, is consistent with the available scientific evidence, I don’t believe it, and am drawn instead to a naturalistic, though non-materialist, alternative. Mind, I suspect, is not an inexplicable accident or a divine and anomalous gift but a basic aspect of nature that we will not understand until we transcend the built-in limits of contemporary scientific orthodoxy. I would add that even some theists might find this acceptable; since they could maintain that God is ultimately responsible for such an expanded natural order, as they believe he is for the laws of physics."

Dreamy surf film

DARK SIDE OF THE LENS from Astray Films on Vimeo.

Barbarians and Blockheads - a meditation from my friend Lorin Roche

This is a great little piece of medicine by my friend Lorin Roche from LA Yoga Magazine 

"BARBARIANS AND BLOCKHEADS
It's always the same.
Barbarians and Blockheads,
Rival queens and rival kings,
The drama rolls on and on.
When people honor you,
You are supposed to be glad.

When they disrespect you,
You are supposed to sulk in indignation.
One minute you are cruising on a throne in the sky,
The next you are standing on some bleak patch of dirt.

I say, the Sun regards all with a steady eye.
The force sustaining Earth and Sky
Calls everyone to awaken from this trance.
The whole world revolves around an axis, and I am that.

When you are friends with the Friend to All Beings
Nothing is the same.
Rich beyond measure, abundant beyond counting.
You can move through this life laughing.
Opinions of others have no rulership over you."

Translated from the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra

Loving service heals and nourishes all of us...

Loving service to uplifting those around us is deeply nourishing to the movement of "Evolutionary Changemakers" 

Service to others feeds the soul with meaning, and addresses core existential crisis outlined below which many of us feel in response to our society's challenges.

Through service we discover the world is alive with meaning and intelligence. Many of us have been caught, according to Richard Tarnas,

"between the inner craving for a life of meaning and the relentless attrition of existence in a cosmos that our rational scientific world view has assured us is empty, dead, devoid of all purpose."

"The great irony suggested here of course is that it is just when the modern mind believes it has most fully purified itself from any anthropomorphic projections, when it actively construes the world as unconscious, mechanistic, and impersonal, it is just then that the world is most completely a selective construct of the human mind. The human mind has abstracted from the whole all conscious intelligence and purpose and meaning, and claimed these exclusively for itself, and then projected onto the world a machine. As Rupert Sheldrake has pointed out, this is the ultimate anthropomorphic projection: a man-made machine, something not in fact ever found in nature. From this perspective, it is the modern mind's own impersonal soullessness that has been projected from within onto the world--or, to be more precise, that has been projectively elicited from the world." from "The Passion of the Western Mind"

Serve others with love and free your heart to evolve!

The question of the nature of consciousness in world process is not properly addressed by either science or religion....

Our modern mainstream culture has yet to arrive at a teleological understanding and cohesive way to incorporate the nature of mind and consciousness into a clear worldview.

Thomas Nagle in his book "Mind and Cosmos" addresses the topic head on:

"To sum up: the respective inadequacies of materialism and theism as transcendent conceptions, and the impossibility of abandoning the search for a transcendent view of our place in the universe, lead to the hope for an expanded buy still naturalistic understanding that avoids psychophysical reductionism. The essential character of such an understanding would be to explain the appearance of life, consciousness, reason, and knowledge neither as accidental side effects of the physical laws of nature nor as the result of intentional intervention in nature from without but as an unsurprising if not inevitable consequence of the order that governs the natural world from within.  That order would have to include physical law, but if life is not just a physical phenomenon, the origin and evolution of life and mind will not be explainable by physics and chemistry alone. An expanded, but still unified, form of explanation will be needed, and I suspect it will have to include teleological elements."

"All that can be done at this stage in the history of science is argue for the recognition of the problem, not to offer solutions."

Who's willing to recognize the question and recognize the problem with me?

Wisdom of the Ancients: We are blessed Children of Light in the Heart of the Earthly Mother (and Heavenly Father)

From the Essene Gospel of Peace, Book Two

"Blessed is the Child of Light
Who knoweth his Earthly Mother
For she is the giver of life.
Know that thy Mother is in thee,
And thou art in her.
She bore thee
And she giveth thee life.
She it was who gaveth thee thy body,
And to her shalt thou one day
Give it back again,
Know that the blood which runs in thee
Is born of the blood
Of thy Earthly Mother
Her blood falls from the clouds,
Leaps up from the womb of the earth,
Bubbles in the brooks of the mountains,
Flows wide in the rivers of the plains,
Sleeps in the lakes,
Rages mightily in the tempestuous seas,
Know that the air which though dost breathe
Is born of the breath
Of thy Early Mother.
Her breath is azure
In the heights of the heavens,
Soughs in the tops of the mountains,
Whispers in the leaves of the forest,
Billows over the cornfields,
Slumbers in the deep valleys,
Burns hot in the desert.
Know that the hardness of thy bones
Is born of the bones
Of thy Earthly Mother,
She whose flesh waxeth yellow and red
In fruits of the trees.
The light of thy eyes,
The hearing of thy ears,
These are born
Of the colors and the sounds
Of thy Earthly Mother,
Which doth enclose thee about,
As the waves of the sea enclose a fish,
As the eddying air a bird,
I tell thee in truth,
Man is the Son
Of the Earthly Mother,
And from her did the Son of Man
Receive his whole body,
Even as the body of the newborn babe
Is born of the womb of his mother,
I tell thee truly,
Thou art one with the Earthly Mother;
She is in thee, and thou art in her,
Of her wert thou born,
In her dost thou live,
And to her shalt thou return again.
Keep, therefore, her laws,
For none can live long
Neither be happy,
But he who honors his Earthly Mother,
And keepeth her laws.
For thy breath is her breat,
Thy blood is her blood,
Thy bone is her bone,
Thy flesh is her flesh,
Thy eyes and thy ears
Are her eyes and her ears.
He who hath found peace with his Earthly Mother
Shall never know death,
Know this peace with thy mind,
Desire this peace with thy heart,
Fulfill this peace with thy body."

Goddess Loves, God Lives.

Goddess Loves, God Lives

Gratitude embodied,

we celebrate the Flow 

Of Love Energy 

From the Great Heart

of the Goddess

Goddess Loves,

God Lives 

In Her Heart

Child Awakens

In a Dream of Golden Love Light

As a Golden Lotus

Emerging from her Heart Womb

We Love

We Live

In the Heart

Of Love

God Loves, Goddess Lives

Through Us

Evolving

Love

Eternally

The world is sacred....the world is my body. The world is perfect, I must serve it.

"The world is sacred.

It can't be improved.

If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.

If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it." 

- from the Tao Te Ching as translated by Stephen Mitchell

Byron Katie elaborates on this verse "A Thousand Names for Joy - Living in Harmony With the Way Things Are." She says:

"The world is perfect. As you question your mind, this become more and more obvious. Mind changes, and as a result, the world changes. A clear mind heals everything that needs to be healed. It never be fooled into believing that there is one speck out of order.

"But some people take the insight that the world is perfect and make it into a concept, and then they conclude that there's no need to get involved in politics or social action. That's separation. If someone came to you and said, 'I'm suffering. Please help me,' would you answer, 'You're perfect just the way you are,' and turn away? Our heart naturally responds to people and animals in need.

"Realization has no value until it's lived. I would travel to the ends of the earth for the sake of one person who is suffering. The desperate, the hopeless, and unenlightened cells of my own body. It's my own body I'm talking about - the body of the world is my body."

God(dess) becomes the world...

"If the world did not exist in the form of consciousness as undifferentiated from the light of I-ness, how could that world come, out of that consciousness, into being without such requisites as material, etc.? Because according to the revealed text 'Just as the big tree of Banyan is found potentially in it's own seed, in the same way is this whole world, of the movable and immovable, in the heart-radical' and according to the foresighted argument 'of the Lord dwelling inside the self' this world is located in Him appearing as identical with Him.

Hence this God consciousness evolves the world as a materialisation of Her own nature."
- Spandaninaya 

Bug Magistry.

Soul Connections Are Eternal. And available everywhere with all life. All the time.

Andrew Cohen just posted his latest article "A Meeting that is Forever" it's worth a quick read.

He shared, "Soul connections are eternal. Every other relationship we have, no matter how sweet, kind, intimate, or apparently meaningful, will in the end be revealed to be only temporary. And this truth can be hard to bear, especially when we experience this in relationship to people we have felt very, very close to. It’s only when we meet another in the mutual recognition of life’s ultimate mystery, that liberating metaphysical truth which transcends anything and everything relative, that we experience a connection that is forever." -

When I have tuned into the depth of my deepest relationships, either new or old - the eternality of the soul connections is palpable. I trust you know what I speak of.

Haven't you found the same transcendence in your deepest connections?

Isn't it delightful when we meet a friend after many, many years and simply pick up where we left off as if we had just seen each other minutes before?

Actually, I have found this kind of soul connection is possible with EVERYONE we meet - if we allow it.

Sometimes, finding such "soul connections" is more apparent with long time friends and family where the fabric of the relationship is deeper, resonant and juicier. Yet when we open to the possibility of finding this intimacy in all relationships we'll find it expand everywhere around us.

Regardless, I have found supreme joy, satisfaction and intimacy with friends old and new by simply allowing the directness and openhearted connection to arise naturally - by simply focusing on the resonance of love, trust and connection.

The deeper I trust myself, and simply allow myself to be more of myself, the more joy and contentment I find in opening to deep connection.  I have this possibility in every relationship whether the relationship is in the context of my business, social or family circles.

When we trust our heart and we trust the possibility of profound connection in every context we find ourselves in, with no agenda but loving kindness, we find richness of life and relationships flourish in every way.


Albert Einstein shared:

 “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Today I wrote a little poem to a new friend I met through a client, we found that our collaboration in business activities has been deeply enriched by our openness to a profound "soul connection."


*** One Heart, Evolving ***


One heart, many eyes
who see myriad forms of love expressed

One heart, many perspectives
who's tapestry of of light scintillates
like a gem in the sun

One heart
we are dancing in the music
of our love song
evolving
together

*****************


It appears that Hafiz found this centuries ago:

*** All the Hemispheres ***

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadow and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.
Make a new watermark on your excitement
And love.

Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.

****************

Would you join us now in the your heart, the great circle of You?

Come celebrate in the deeper connection present and alive right now with all of your reality!

one heart, evolving

One heart, many eyes
who see myriad forms of love expressed

One heart, many perspectives
who's tapestry of of light scintillates
like a gem in the sun

One heart
we are dancing in the music
of our love song
evolving
together

Refreshing perspective from a modern rational philosopher on the nature of consciousness.

I'm just getting into book called "Mind and Cosmos - Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False" written by a well respected philospher Thomas Nagle.

This book is the latest in his critique of reductionism, in which he argues against a reductionist view, and specifically the neo-Darwinian view, of the emergence of consciousness and the nature of mind in relationship to the cosmos around us. A key quote from the book which puts the whole of reality into a palatable context is:

"The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well. Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself."

Awesome image by Alex Grey

Is scientism a religion? Rupert Sheldrake's provocative TEDx talk - which was banned....

Art is our religion?

"Who would rather live in an earlier time when the artistic choices were so limited and constrained by tribe and religion. Yet unlimited freedom makes no demand of personal and social responsibility to honor or portray the interdependence of the individual within the larger of community and planet. Only rarely do artists demand such responsibility of themselves." Alex Grey from his book The Mission of Art.

"Inner Worlds, Outer Worlds" a film about you.

In order to evolve our world view, we must understand it...

I feel it's crucial to understand that our world view is one of many that have lived over time, and to understand the historical development of paradigms. The parts of history which are deemed important to study are more a reflection of world views, values and perspectives. Self reflection in our culture to evaluate our own paradigm is the most evolutionary step we can take to integrate the gifts of history. The book Passion of the Western Mind - Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View is essential reading....

We're spiraling in galactic vortex....

The cosmos is within your imagination - so imagine it awesome

Using our power to remember connection and to forget the illusion of separation....

Nothing we believe is actually the way the world actually is. It's all about perspective, and we have a choice to shift our perspective eternally.  Therefore - be love, now. If you're reading this now, it's time to make the shift. It's time to use your power to increase the frequency of love and connection and forget the illusion of separation. 

A favorite line from the film: "Individuality is an illusion." 

Love now.

Living in accord with our natural way of being....leads to joyous living.