Accessing the Subtle

The world is filled with subtleties. By a subtlety, I mean something that is difficult to detect; something that requires patience, quietness, concentration, focus, and time. Noticing subtle differences between plants or a subtle change in the weather are things that the casual observer will miss, as well as someone highly focused on a goal to be accomplished. Accessing the subtle requires the absence of a specific goal; the only goal being to see what is there. The mind must be open so as not to miss what we did not expect.

Just like the physical world, our mind is filled with subtle knowing - what we often call wisdom. Our mind accumulates millions of tiny experiences each day, and they get stored somewhere, seemingly inaccessible. Yet, when we stop to sense those subtle feelings and experiences, we discover that a knowing arises. This knowing may create some conclusion we hadn't thought of until that moment. Through quieting ourselves, focusing, and remaining open, we can gain access to knowledge that the busy mind may never have known.

We have different ways of focusing. One such way is a masculine focus that concentrates on one thing, obliterating all else - we focus on accomplishing the goal, and we deliberately ignore all irrelevant information so that we are not distracted from our goal. This is unarguably a powerful and necessary kind of focus whose achievements serve us well. However, accessing the subtle requires a more feminine kind of focus - one that is still intense but diffused, aware of everything, setting nothing aside as irrelevant, yet allowing nothing to take center stage. This kind of focus keeps listening for something that we can't anticipate. We don't know the goal until we have found it. 

The characteristics we need in order to access the subtle are lack of anxiety, lack of urgency, calmness, a focusing over a wide range, a noticing of nuances, a willingness to hold any discovery lightly, and a continual watching and listening.  We scan over a situation and take in a lot of stimuli. 

We then begin digging inside for feelings that are relevant.  As the awareness of our feelings increase, we may discover a need to articulate the feelings. We need to articulate, not necessarily to another, but at least to ourselves. That forces our knowledge into a rational form that we can solidly grasp.  As long as it remains feeling, it is difficult to do anything with it; but when we can put it into a rational form, a sentence, then we can work with it.

Inquiry is a way of opening yourself and settling yourself to start to acquire subtle information about a given subject. A question seeks an answer; an inquiry is content with the question. What color is your shirt? Red. The answer is gotten, the question satisfied, and we can go on with our business. An inquiry, however, is a call to gather subtle information. It is like a suggestion, almost a hypnotic suggestion, to enter a different state of mind, a different relationship with the field of inquiry. That relationship is less about analyzing and more about observing, noticing, and learning.

The deepest questions of life cannot be answered by analysis; they are rather accessed through deep inquiry into the subtle.

The Intellect

The intellect is not to be used as an escape from dealing with real life, nor to be shunned as a block to spirituality, but to be embraced as a critical tool to bring us into a deeper understanding of the world.

The Greatest Commandmant

As a child growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household, I would sometimes try to piece together all the morality and rules I had been taught into one principle that could provide a foundation that would hopefully make sense of all the other "should's" and "shouldn'ts".  As an adult, having long abandoned my childhood religion, that quest has remained - a desire to find and express a basic foundation upon which to build and orient my life.

Occasionally, I have gone back to look at what my religion had claimed to be the greatest commandment - to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, mind, and strength - but could no longer relate to the concepts there - commandment, Lord, God.

Independently, one day, I happened upon the concept of "loving life", and it struck a deep chord within me as the answer to my quest, the original motivation for all that we consider valuable.  My mind went back to the concept of "loving God", and I started to wonder if what was meant by "God" in that verse might have been closer to what I meant when I used the word "life".  "Loving life" is more universally understandable, and does not have the pitfalls that the word "god" creates.  I decided to freely retranslate the rest of those verses, specifically Mark 12:19-21, and came out with this:

"The highest principle of all is this: Be mindful, all you living energies, that all of life is connected. And allow the love of life to fill all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your body. And the second principle is really the same thing: know that loving others is the same as loving yourself."

I think there is a disservice we do to all sacred texts: we assume they have some mystery that is not already inside of us. We assume that we are missing something, we are incomplete, and we have to search outside of ourselves to find wholeness, rather than searching deeper within ourselves and our direct experience of life. If we assume that all scripture is saying something that is universal and not new, something we already know and have access to, it gives us a greater freedom to take that internal core knowing as the true representation of the universal principles that religions have struggled to express.

Completing our stories

Many of the wounds I have from childhood are from incomplete stories. A simple example: my mother used to punish me severely for things that I had no idea were “wrong”. Not only did I go through physical pain, but I was tormented by the abrupt withdrawal of love, and the horrible confusion over what had happened and why.

In a vain attempt to complete my story and make sense out of it, I concluded at various times that I must be bad and must have deserved the punishment; that the world was a dangerous place where I could never predict what would make someone angry and hurt me, that I was incapable of trusting my insides to tell me if something was right or wrong.

Incomplete stories carry a deep passionate energy to try to make sense out of them, an allure to bring them to some kind of resolution. And in our attempts to make sense of them, we recreate a scene, set it up with characters from the present without their permission, and start to act out the roles, looking for answers. Thus, those battered as children tend to unconsciously recreate the drama by becoming involved with someone where the feelings of being battered are present once again - hoping this time to do it differently, to find a happy ending. They hope to finally get mother to love them, or to be good enough this time, or to not be weak, or not be strong, and maybe this time they will get what they really needed.

The process to try to complete my story went on unconsciously in my adult life in forms of vague feelings and irrational beliefs. I did not have the benefit of the conscious mind to guide me, with its logic, accumulated experience of the real world, wisdom we have accumulated about relationships. Instead, the unconscious mind tries the old child-like solutions once again - we are bad, they are bad, life is unfair, don’t do anything to anger anyone, get them before they get you.

Today, I now see that the story was not complete. There were many pieces to the puzzle I did not know as a child. My mother was unhappy and lonely, having a husband who could not talk about feelings any more than her own father had been able to. In her world, men were incapable of bonding, and she desperately wanted a girl to share her life with. Being the last of two sons, I became her last hope for the family she wanted to badly - and thus a disappointment.

Another piece to the puzzle came from studying the harsh child-rearing system popular at the time, and espoused by the church, which she was devoted to. She believed that harsh punishment was the best thing to do, and unwittingly injected me with fear of anger and violence that hinders me to this day.

As I have worked through understand my past and its effect on my present, and applying adult knowledge and reason to it, the story starts to make sense. Instead of the story illustrating how dangerous the world is, or about how bad I am, the story illustrates the tragedy of lack of self-awareness, and the pathos of destruction and pain wrought by it. It is about a mother who make horrible mistakes in raising her child, and how her disappointment at having a son transformed into abusive anger, that caused unmeasurable pain throughout her son’s adult life. The story is a greek tragedy, not a good-guy, bad-guy story - it is not there to teach simplistic moralistic lessons. Instead, it is the tale of human weakness and ignorance, and the harm that can come from it. It is there so we can fully absorb the pathos of tragedy, to feel again our own pain, and ultimately to know that it is just a story.

Today, rather than continually questioning if I am okay, I grieve over the tragedy of our family. Today, rather than the insecurity of the unanswerable, there is peace after a good cry.

Regret vs. Shame

Shame has to do with giving authority to other people's opinions, and believing we are bad because someone else has that opinion. However, there is another kind of shame that we experience when we violate our own values, and it is important to see the difference between the two. When we find we have acted contrary to our own values, rather than the opinions of others, we may feel shame for lack of integrity. However, the deeper feeling is regret.

Regret is the acknowledgment that we have acted contrary to our values. We may also have shame, fearing that we will be judged for having acted contrary to the values of others.

It is easy to not recognize our regret, and become distracted by shame instead, and then become defensive. If we do this, we lose the most important point - an awareness of our own values and how much we are in integrity with them. For it is in living consistent with our own values that ultimately brings satisfaction, not living consistent with the values of those around us.

A Radical Proposal for Sustainable Manufacturing

In most of our history on the earth as human beings, the objects and substances we have created have not been significantly altered from their original forms.  Building homes from logs was simply a rearrangement of wood, and given time, the wood did what wood would always do - decay, and become food for insects, and return to the natural cycle of things.  With a few exceptions, such as pottery, metals, etc., all we created naturally returned to its original forms within a few generations, and the few things that did not were inert substances that behaved like rocks - simply stayed in their form, buried in the earth, having no effect on its surroundings.

However, in the last 100 or so years, we have started creating objects, substances, and life forms that have never before existed on the face of the earth, that have an impact on its surroundings, and that won't disappear, in some cases, for thousands of years.  We have fundamentally altered the chemical nature of our environment, with effects and consequences we are only beginning to realize.  We are rapidly creating change that nature was never designed to undo, and we are unconsciously re-engineering the composition of our planet with so far little thought of the results of those changes.

When we first started manufacturing substances alien to the earth, nature seemed so vast that it was hard to imagine that anything we could do would have a real impact.  We were used to living in a world where any mistakes were rapidly forgiven by nature, and things would return to normal in a relatively short time.  Even if we permanently destroyed some part of the earth, the planet seemed so vast that we could always move to another part that was not spoiled.  It has taken us some time to grow powerful enough to overwhelm the ability of nature to recover from our changes, and then again some time for us to realize that that has happened.  Today, we are trying to compensate and undo the effects of some of our "sins" against mother nature.

However, we still see this as a few mistakes we have made that need to be corrected, rather than a lifestyle change.  Reduce carbon emissions, stop putting mercury into our soil and water, stop cutting down the Amazon, and everything will right itself again.  Right?

Wrong.  We are at a stage of power and growth where pretty much anything we do as a species will impact the planet, and there will always be some consequences that will be unexpected, and some of those consequences will be critical to the survival of the planet.  It is not enough to fix the problems we have created; we need a new way of relating to the earth that prevents us from continuing to create new problems.

So, when it comes to the things we manufacture, here is the proposal:  Everything - every object, chemical, life form, substance - everything we produce out of the natural elements of the planet must be made with a plan on how to eventually return that object or substance back to its natural form.  Anything we do as a species, we do in large quantites, and if the effects cannot be reabsorbed back into the natural system, it will alter our environment, and that can always have unexpected consequences.  Every object and substance must have a sunset clause - how it is going to be returned to nature, if it is not going to naturally biodegrade back to a natural form.

And since some objects and substances are very expensive to return to natural forms, the cost of doing so must be assumed by those responsible for creating the objects and substances in the first place.  In other words, the cost of destruction must be built into the price of the cost of creation, which will get passed on to the consumer, who is the one making the manufacturing desirable.

So, you manufacture a new form of wooden kitchen spoons?  No problem, they get tossed in a landfill and in no time they are like a branch fallen from a tree, and nature does the transformation for us.  But you manufacture plastics?  Just how are you going to make sure your creation will return to nature?  The manufacturer could pay for the cost of all the plastic recycling efforts and a chemical process that returns plastics to a natural substance, like oil, plus the costs of storing that oil somewhere where it does not damage the environment.  Originally that oil was deep under the soil where it did no harm.  Someone has to put it somewhere, and make sure all the plastic trash of the world gets put somewhere, where it returns to its natural harmless conditions, or where it is treated in a way that does not impact the earth.  The manufacturer needs to be fully responsible for anything they produce, from birth to death, and pay the costs to be sure the ending of the lifecycle of its products has no impact on the earth.

The effects of this?  The costs of some manufactured objects would instantly skyrocket, because the costs of the cleanup of those substances are huge.  But we, the world, are having to pay for the costs of cleanup now, through taxes to governments who are bogged down in political wrangling and who have too many vested interests to effectively make change to ensure a stable world.  If the manufacturers are held responsible for the sunset of all of its products, their prices would made a radical shift in how we, the consumers, would choose what things to buy.  It would reward companies that make biodegradable products by being able to have lower prices which would attract more buyers.  And it would put the cost on the party creating the problem.  

No one would buy products that are unhealthy for the earth unless they are available and cheap.  And they are available and cheap because today, manufacturers do not have to pay for the deconstruction of the things they produce.  They can produce something for one dollar that takes 30 dollars to return to its natural state.  Who will pay the 30 dollars?  You and I, through taxes.  And our dislike of paying those taxes has no effect on the manufacturer's decision to continue to produce things alien to the earth, because they are not affected - they continue to follow the profit motive, and as long as it is profitable to produce some product, they will continue to do so no matter what the cost of undoing what they have created.

Yes, this is radical.  Yes, it would cause turmoil to our world if suddenly implemented.  Yes, no one can see today how many of our products could ever be returned to a natural state.  But in the long run, doesn't it make sense that anyone doing something that would eventually cause destruction to our planet, also be responsible for undoing their actions before it actually does harm?  Should not everyone, corporations included, be held responsible for the destruction of what is needed for the common good?  And the beauty of the free market is that when the cost is passed on to the one creating the problem, the market will rebalance itself very efficiently to the new rules.  No punishment is needed for what has been done - we simply need a new set of rules to live by and manufacture by.  Place the cost for preventing damage to our earth on those who are causing it.

There is no way of recycling a laptop.  All we can do is pass it on to others until it can't be fixed, then choose which landfill to put it in.  Think of what a huge task it would be to return a laptop's parts to their original substances. It was obviously designed without a single thought given to recycling.  Today, old computers wind up in third world countries, where they go to landfills to deteriorate and leech poisons into their land and water.  "Recycling" is not possible when it comes to things like laptops - all you can do is move them from one country to another, so that someone else has the problem.  Laptops contains a large number of poisonous chemicals, and no one has any plans on what to do with them.  

Imagine for a minute that the costs of decomposing a laptop is built into the price.  First, we would start to build laptops in a radically different way, with radically different substances, because prices on our current type of laptop would be astronomical.  Perhaps parts would be made to be taken out and reused rather than tossed, and other parts would be made to naturally disintegrate.  Recycling efforts would be paid for by the industry.  Ingenuity would reign, and manufacturer would put their best engineers to work reducing the new costs to stay competitive.  Maybe some parts will never be able to be recycled - then a fee could be charged for the space taken in a thousand year storage facility for unrecyclable items, or for shipping our trash to the sun for destruction.  When money is involved, people will pull out all stops to create new solutions.  Where governments are responsible for cleanup, there will be corruption, inefficiency, vested interests, wasted time, solutions that don't work, and the general failure we have come to expect of large bureaucratic governments.

We have a beautiful earth.  In some ways, we as a species have been caught by surprise by our ability to destroy our own home, and terrified to realize we may have already done so to a disastrous amount.  It is time we start to take responsibility for the impact we as a species now have, and start to make intelligent plans on how we can in the long run live on the earth in harmony with the natural cycle of nature.

A Conversation About Awareness

I was in a conversation yesterday about awareness.  We were all talking about how wonderful it was, and how the world needed it, and what philosophies were connected with it, and what methods we used to teach it and learn it, etc., etc., etc., - words, words, words, nodding, agreeing, all of us building a common story with which we could relate to each other and to the concept of awareness and to the world.

And in the middle of the conversation, part of me stepped back and noticed that none of us, not one of us, was even noticing what was happening beyond the concepts we were talking about.  None of us were noticing, or commenting on, these four people, standing in a circle, with various emotions, motives, stories, fears, defenses, and egos surging inside of each person, that were actually happening in the current moment. Here we were, all students and teachers of awareness in various capacities, all talking enthusiastically about the philosophy of awareness, and none of us were aware of what was actually happening as we stood there talking words.

So I stopped, and listened for a while, and listened inside.  I noticed a feeling, quickly growing in me, of wanting to run away.  I watched myself smiling and nodding and agreeing, while inside, I noticed that I felt lonely, disconnected, alienated.  As I zoomed in a bit closer on those feelings, I noticed that I had a huge fear of being honest with them about what was happening inside - here I was, looking connected, looking like I was "one" with everyone else, while the painful reality is that I felt very separate.  And, being too afraid to speak out, now I saw that I was holding a secret from everyone else, a secret about who I really was in that moment, afraid to show it for fear I would disturb the wonderful glow of oneness everyone else seemed to be experiencing.  And holding that secret was itself contributing to my feeling of being alone.

The discomfort built and built, and now I could barely stand it.  Clearly, no one had a clue of what was going on inside of me - no one was aware of my turmoil.  Everyone seemed so caught up in their fantasy that we were all in agreement that no one was even looking at my body language, or noticed that I had fallen silent, or noticed that I was no longer smiling or nodding.  I felt shut into my own world, alone, unnoticed, and painfully aware of the irony of the situation.

Then I realized that I, by not sharing my reality, was contributing to the illusion.  By standing there silently when I desperately wanted to run away, I was speaking as loudly as if I was saying, "Yes, we are all one, yes, isn't it wonderful", and my very silent presence was a lie.  I did desperately want to share, but it was so intimate - intimate in the sense that revealing my alienation was very personal, and made me very vulnerable to rejection, misunderstanding, and even more loneliness than if I just remained silent.  Did I want such intimacy?  I always said I did.  And I knew these were probably safe people.  Yet I probably stood for 10 minutes, sweating, not daring to expose who I really was in that moment.

Finally, during a poignant moment, where it looked like people were basking in the full glory of the oneness of agreement, I spoke.  I told them of my alienation, of wanting to run away, of not feeling at all one with them, of withholding my secret because I was so scared.  I spoke of my fear of being rejected by them, of how hard it was for me just to be honest with them.  I desperately wanted to explain, excuse, theorize, anything to get away from the intense personal energy of the moment, but instead, I stopped talking and let the awkwardness of the moment sit heavy in the air.

We stood in that silence for a while.  Finally, someone else spoke heavily, as if they were trying to break through a fog.  They also talked about their alienation from the conversation.  They spoke of their anger at feeling controlled by others in the group.  Awkwardness and tension grew more, at least inside of me.  Okay, we were trying to be real, but what would come of it?  This did not feel good at all.  There were a few attempts to go back into our heads, where it had been so safe - saying how wonderful it was that we were able to express our feelings, how safe this must be to let ourselves do this - but the sense of hiding ourselves behind our words hung heavy in the air.

Slowly, painfully, inch by inch, each person started looking more inside, and noticed what they were doing, what they had been doing for the past 30 minutes without noticing.  We started to tune into the actual energy pulsing between us, to what our minds and emotions were doing.  We started to abandon concepts and theories and congratulations and hopes.  Each of us started to speak of our state in the moment.  You could see the struggle as each of us tried to deal with our own habits of mind, in order to live up to the goal we had silently set for ourselves - to be fully present to each other and to the current moment.

Then, slowly, we fell silent again - for myself, I started to feel how useless words were for our purpose.  Something important was happening, but any words we drew upon to try to describe it took us immediately away from it, and it seemed that only by standing in that awkward silence could we stay fully present to ourselves, and to each other.  And now when I looked inside, I discovered a calmness where there had been fear and separation - a silence where there had been tension and anxiety.  We soon separated with few final words, I imagine to attempt to not lose the experience of what had just happened.

The experience left me with many stories and interpretations which I would love to expound upon. But underneath, remembering the final silence within, the ending of chaos, seemed to be what I needed most to learn.  And even these words feel like a distraction, like the finger pointing to the moon rather than the moon itself.  But I can't cut and paste the moon into this text.

Words are a damn poor substitute for experience.