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.

Become Peace

Spiritual consciousness looks inward to the “self” for the causes of problems. It offers no solutions to social problems, but the radical root of a sound foundation for good religious and political action.

Religious consciousness works with inter-personal relationships as the causes and resolutions of problems. Religious consciousness without a strong link to the spirit easily takes over behaviors of groups – so that we have the “letter but not the spirit of the law.”

Political consciousness is “world” centered. Politics is just a step beyond religious consciousness. The same feelings that are religious interchange with religious patterns of behavior and thinking. Religious groups often try to take control of politics; or, politics tries to control religion. The founders of the American Constitution insisted on the separation of church and state for these reasons.

Some years ago, a friend of mine took me to task on my political activism, pointing out that “first we must change ourselves, before we can change the world.” Eventually, I understood his wisdom.

I admit it – I want a peaceful world, where people live in harmony. Not a very exciting vision. Peace is a precondition for happiness. To get there, I need to stay with the first step – which is to learn to be peaceful myself. Than learn to share that state with others around me.

In other words: be the peace that I want to see in the world.

Political Chaos