Business and wisdom

Today business is the greatest power on earth. The churches and temples are small compared to the world's office towers. Business ethics is now reduced to mere survival tactics. Too many business leaders never stop accumulating wealth and power -- without any hope of true satisfaction or happiness. There's an addiction to constant accumulation for its own sake. This corrupts free markets, governments, media, culture and the human soul. The Halls of Congress are filled with hungry business representatives from corporate boardrooms. Can anything be done? I say "settle down" and meditate. Businesspeople at all levels need to spend time looking within -- to see who they really are. This does more than all the ethics rules and government regulations people come up with. With clear insights, true ethics is spontaneousness -- as we begin to see that we are not in survival, but actually have enough to look beyond self-interest. It's about love; saying "Yes!" to doing business as love and service.

Civilization, Terror, and Real Security

Today, the biggest "temples" are skyscrapers devoted to office work; no cathedrals at the center of town devoted to worship of a Higher Power. The true religion of world civilization is money. The attack upon of the World Trade Center in New York City was not just an "attack upon America" but an attack upon the current modes of world civilization. Terrorism challenges civilization, just like street crime challenges a local community. Crime is a symptom of a social sickness; terrorism is the surface symptom of systemic disorder in civilization.

What's wrong with civilization now? We must ask and dig into this question. This question has been asked since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And, needs to be asked even more now. The terrorism that we suffer now is happening as a tension between the oil producing and oil consuming parts of our civilized modern world. I have no answers, but ask that we just look at this tension in all its dimensions.

Modern global civilization depends on freeways, cheap petroleum, making lots of stuff, shipping stuff here and there, extensive personal and business travel, telecommunications and computer networks. These are the wonders, and potential downfalls, of our age.

Our money-oil based global civilization undermines the Earth itself. Without Life on earth, the notion of "economy" is meaningless. Our governments, businesses, and households assume "growth" as the prime measure of a healthy economy. Earth has finite resources. Humans are now hitting Earth's walls. It's time to renew our models of economic health to include the health of all life on the planet -- not just humans. Economic grow alone is very dangerous at this time.

Commuting in private cars to work is not an acceptable form of civilization. Freeways are the backbone of modern urban civilization. They encourage sprawl - commuting from one city to another. Freeways, in the morning are clogged with cars in both directions -- going to work where you do not live sometimes one or two hours away. Pedestrian communities need to become the norm. Work, live and play within walking distance of your bedroom.

The consumer economy with its advertising and marketing system, encourages spiritual bankruptcy to increase the making, selling and buying of "goods" to create satisfaction that never stays. So we must go on to consuming more.

Security will come from little actions. Little actions change the world. Save a bit of a tree by NOT using the wood coffee stir stick to mix the half-and-half in. You know that the cream will swirl around by itself. Drive a little less, walk more. You'll be healthier and have cleaner air. Don't just air travel on a whim, even if you can afford it. Stay near home; become a tourist in your neighborhood. Find work near home. Life will become more relaxed. Share cars. Go for "growth in value", not growth in consumption. A new kind of consumerism is needed: a consumerism of knowledge and wisdom rather than things. Place more value on time with friends and family rather than exchanging gifts. Remember that you buy your money with the time in your life -- time that you could have used for real relationship with friends and family instead of buying things and experiences.

This post-consumer world will not be so wealthy in material, but will be much wealthier in spirit -- we'll have more time for being and creativity. This could become the basis of a real security, of a world that does not breed terrorism. A world where the tension between oil production and oil consumption is not the fuel of politics, religious wars and hate campaigns.

Civilization as we know it now will either collapse or transform. I vote for transformation; for the gradual changing of our ways of life until we get to a life positive form of civilization. This post-consumer world will also be a world without terror as we know it now. It will be a kinder place.

Published in Berkeley Daily Planet, July 3, 2007.

Image from Eagle Rock Trading Post.

Overbooked

While holding a corporate job, I decided to start a healing arts center. It was my first business start-up. It seemed a worthy cause – to promote holistic health and healing practices. My wife and I saw ourselves as healers. Unfortunately, I was not ready for the “busyness” of business.

I became overwhelmed with organizing, marketing, and money. In the end, I could heal no one, not even myself. My peace of mind was completely shattered. Something was wrong. I dropped the healing center and began a deep self-examination.

I had gone through the basic problems of economic society – a complex world with many demands. Nothing is done in isolation. Government regulations, financial issues, marketing and sales – all these and many more issues had to be addressed in starting and maintaining a business. Most start-ups don’t last more than a year or two. Parents and spouses usually want you to go to work for a solid company with a regular paycheck.

For those deep in the culture of entrepreneurship, having a packed calendar of appointments is almost a sign of status, a sign that you are making progress. Yet, when I look back upon such times in my life, I can only wonder at all the time and energy used up. Had I been wiser, I would have done less and gotten a more solid sense of achievement. I was overbooking myself. Now, I see myself in a society that is overbooked all around, with not enough time for real human value in all the getting and doing, in the midst of plenty.

The madness of too many things to do will make you forget who you are. (That is what losing your soul is about.) Every moment is the first & last moment of your life. Your entire life comes to a head at this very moment.

The Self

I couldn’t live with myself any longer. And in this a question arose without an answer: who is the ‘I’ that cannot live with the self? What is the self? I felt drawn into a void! I didn’t know at the time that what really happened was the mind-made self, with its heaviness, its problems, that lives between the unsatisfying past and the fearful future, collapsed. It dissolved. The next morning I woke up and everything was so peaceful. The peace was there because there was no self. Just a sense of presence or “beingness,” just observing and watching.

-Eckhart Tolle's Enlightenment moment

Choose Life

LIFE is the deepest mystery. No one gets to the bottom of life. We live day by day, breath by breath. Philosophy, medicine, biology, and “rocket science” may all give us insights. The unfolding life mystery delights my soul. I love unsolvable, unanswerable questions. All I know is that with each breath we choose life.

Falling In Love With Wisdom

The roots for the word “philosophy” simply mean “the love of wisdom”. I fell in love with philosophy while taking a Great Books course in high school. We used a wonderful book of readings titled Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings. All the great philosophers were there and many other great thinkers, poets and general writers. All the great ideas seemed to be there. Everyone so wise. My mind and vision expanded to new limits. It was wonderful. Thereafter, I wanted become one of “those” writers or thinkers. I wanted to see, feel, and breathe in reality!   

∆

Old Men

Walking this early morning. Birds singing. I imagined great men turning very old in rest homes - with their minds slow and often confused. Their worldly powers gone. Many just lost. A few shining with the light of love in their eyes. Oh! What a surrender, a giving up - being weak meek and older and dropping away worldly powers and fame. Nothing remaining except treasures stored in the soul. Most will be so poor - with lives spent in achievements. A few learned harmony and wisdom along the way: going into the light with the greatest letting go, in love. May I become so fortunate. True humble greatness.

When You Fall in Love

When you fall in love
You recall over and over again the face and name of your beloved;
God smiles within the face and name of the beloved

As you love
Your life begins to join the one you love
Eventually you unite with your beloved
In a mystic union of effortless intense devotion

If you love money, you become like money
If you love time, you become like time
If you love life, you become life

Meditation and Society

At first glance, meditation appears to be purely personal, even selfish. It's about you sitting and looking within, letting go of thought-forms as they arise. At first glance it seems most personal, most selfish because it's about "you". At second glance, you begin to realize that your ego structures may not be fundamentally real. You start noticing that "others" are not all that separate from "you". As meditation practice deepens, the line between "self" and "other" begins to burr. Compassion, forgiveness, and love flowers. Judgement mind begins to drop away. Suddenly, doing meditation practice is an unselfish action that improves the world. I believe that  societies composed of people with "unselfish love" are healthier than societies of selfish people. Indeed, if enough people meditated long enough - over many years - enlightened societies may well arise. 

Merlyn Is Back

Wizard's never go away. 

Sometimes, however, they take long journeys.

Let's just say, I had a long vision quest.

A Budding Biologist (to Richard, wherever you are these days)

Poem by Richard Pauloo

---

hiking in the Berkeley hills

a seed crests by my body

white sphere of life

nearly weightless in the wind’s breath

i turn back with an urge to capture it

to understand its beauty

and dissect it with logic

i pause

ashamed

my hands cannot hold

the true beauty of the seed which is

its effortless waltz with gravity

its gentle surrender to the ground beneath

the promise of new life it carries

the first green sprout

the animals that will play

on its gnarled branches

the growth and decay

of a forest

all contained within the soft small shell

of a seed

trailing

in the wind

Café Samadhi

Café Samadhi

     sunrise a'coming

I sit back

     in quiet wonder

     hearing the OM

     of refrigerators

     soft morning wake up jazz

     workers making espresso drinks

Café Samadhi

     stillness within-without

     worlds motionless

     I am the motion

     I am the stillness

Friend!

     You are the One

     Remember that!

Kiva Time

Terry Penttengill cartoon
Click image to enlarge.

It is our quiet time.
We do not speak
because the voices are within us.
It is our quiet time...
We do not walk
because the earth is all within us.
It is our quiet time.
We do not dance
because the music has lifted us to a place where the spirit is.
It is our quiet time.
We rest with all of nature,
we wake when the seven sisters wake.
We greet them in the sky
over the opening of the kiva.

- Kiva Time (from the Cliffdwellers)

With what do we buy our money?

With what do we buy our money? Many years ago, I was giving a talk on wisdom in the world. At the end of the talk, I was approached by an old man. He came up to me and said, "I want to ask you a question." I said, "What's that?" He said, "With what do you buy your money?" I thought about it for a minute, and said, "With your life, of course." He said, "You're right, and I wish I had known that when I was much younger. For all my life, I worked for money. I put all my time into working for money that I thought I would enjoy later on."

He explained that he just never thought about anything else except working to save money, to put money away, to plan for the future. And the future had arrived, and here he was, an old man. And he expressed that he had a sense of bitterness about that, that he hadn't achieved an earlier understanding about the importance of living life, and that he had indeed bought his money with his life.

Philosophy in My Life

In my last year at the University of California at Irvine, I switched majors from biology to philosophy. Friends asked me, "What good is philosophy?" What they really meant was, "Can you make any money at it?"

I knew people with lots of money, but little meaning in their lives. They seemed to be lost in games and pastimes. They worked without questioning the purpose or value of their work. I was interested in meaning, not money, but the people around me didn't share my feeling. Most of them believed that only money was real.

In my search for meaning, I first turned to the study of logic, mathematics, and science. In my teenage years I encountered logical positivism. Logical positivism was an early 20th Century school of philosophy that claimed all the grand questions of traditional philosophy were meaningless. Questions like "What is the meaning of life?" or "Is there a God?" were meaningless, logical positivists asserted, because the answers cannot be verified. But questions like "Does the moon have an opposite side?" are meaningful because we can construct tests to prove or disprove any answer. We can build a rocket to the moon. But how can we verify the meaning of life, or the existence of God? The logical positivists saw no true/false test for these matters.

Of course, just because we can't prove or disprove God's existence doesn't mean He doesn't exist! Logical positivism lost its hold on me while I was a graduate student at San Francisco State University in 1970. I was moving toward 'meaningless' questions like: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the purpose of life? Why is there evil in the world? Then I discovered Buddhism and other ancient spiritual traditions that addressed such questions. I was beginning to find real philosophy.

Philosophy is not a word game. It is, as Plato explained, the "love of wisdom". Few students get to study real philosophy at college. Philosophizing is an extraordinary act. It requires re-thinking issues at the most fundamental level -- right down to questions of being. One winds up asking simple-sounding, childlike questions like "What is real?"

The world is adrift, without meaning. That is why so many become victims of political ideologies and extreme religious viewpoints that offer a sense of meaning at the expense of compassion, truth, and justice.

All the really amazing jobs I've held came from my grounding in philosophy. I became a computer programmer because my boss assumed that philosophy made one logical. I got promotions to higher levels of responsibility because I saw the "big picture" in the organizations I worked for. One day I found myself the acting CEO of several small technology companies in trouble. Why? Because my philosophical perspective gave me a high tolerance for ambiguity, which allowed me to go into unknown and almost unknowable situations again and again. So yes -- philosophy can help you make money. But meaning, understanding, and wisdom are the real payoffs.

A Vision

In forests, deserts, plains, mountains, and valleys – the ancient healers of soul, mind and body knew Grace, Power, Wisdom, and Love. They lived before civilization – directly with the sky, earth, sun, rain, fire, and seasons. Now few know the sky, instead looking at reports on the news, reading books, and other media. Few of us understand or live primal ways of life.

Agriculture brought cities; and the flowering of poetry, writing, politics, and the division of work into complex social arrangements. Some went back to the forest and deserts to connect with the elemental powers. The playful Krishna, the cool wise Buddha, the heartfelt Jesus, the long-lived Lao-Tzu, the messenger Mohammed – each one spent time in the wilderness away from civilization; plus, so many others now unknown to us. They returned to their communities speaking and teaching of the Way, the One God, and Enlightenment.

We quest for the stars and knowledge of atoms, forgetting the primal knowledge of Life and soul; and, recklessly ruling the earth and each other.

What did the ancient ones know and teach? Did they cut through all illusions and see truth behind the blinding power of ego? Can we weave these personalities, these archetypes, together into wholeness? Can we? Dare we not? This is the age of a new alliance between humans, all life, earth, cosmos and humble understanding of the All-in-all.