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.

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.

Political Chaos

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!

Happy Birthday, Professor.

 You are still missed and loved by so many...

To My Daughter

There is so much in this world to learn and your daddy is growing too. You will bring out the best in me as I will help you do. I will teach you the best I can in awe of how little that I knew. When you have gotten older and no longer need my hand, when you are no longer crawling but using your own two feet to stand, I will give you room to grow as you play with buckets in the sand.

On your first day of preschool sweetheart, while I am happy, I might still cry.

So if you see tears in daddies eyes while glancing back to blow a kiss, know that you have not made me cry it's just that baby I will miss.

I love you,

- Dad

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

Ultimate

Going past images and sounds – a “you”, non-you, opens another way of “seeing”. Mystics and scientists extend themselves into such extraordinary extra-dimensional views. 

We buy food, entertainment, and things – not happiness. Daily contemplation of basic truths, prayer and meditation – in the morning, afternoon and evening; ease and happiness spontaneously arise.  

By good example and state of being, those around you will be encouraged. Your happiness belongs to everyone. No need to convince anyone. Blossom like a flower; the rest takes care of itself. 

Coming of Age

Coming toward old age is easy - it happens. Coming to terms with advancing old age is difficult. There are many unexpected changes in health, habits, and powers. Fortunately mother nature gives us time to anticipate and adjust. Difficult goodbyes coming upon one upon another with accelerating velocity. Become aware of the minuses and pluses of aging. 

• Cooling of passions brings new freedom from complexity.
• Wisdom dawns.
• Spiritual senses open to eternity.
• Long friendships truly valued.

Blank Page

Blank page. Openness. 

All possibilities still here. 

Add a line, mark, letter or word

and infinite possibilities fade

into finite actualities.

Eucalyptus Grove

There's a eucalyptus grove on the UC Berkeley campus. I take students there on a march across the campus. Best to visit that Eucalyptus grove in the late afternoon. While we dialogue on truth and justice and the environment, the sun slowly sets down. The day's natural cycle now apparent - light streaming through the trees.  

How can students "know" the earth if they are always encased in technology's air conditioned classrooms with florescent lights.
   
Studying our environment only in a classroom is an abstraction. Existential honesty requires walking out of the classroom! Again, let us walk outside like the ancients and the aborigines. Feeling earth below, the sky above, and body breathing-moving. Feeling life all around and within.
  
A place is not “just a place” - it is a constant, a ground, a marker in spacetime – around which time dances as events and stories.
   
I knew this grove when it was twice as large. I saw half of it taken to develop a new life sciences building. It was quiet place back in the 1970's – while now in 2010's the sound of air conditioning units competes with song birds. Returning again and again to this eucalyptus grove defines memories and change.   

The Future is Unknown

The future is unknown. We estimate what is possible. Our times demand social and technological change. Let love take over. Minimize the use of machines to do our walking. Let "Social status" drop away and replace by love. We can't change the world overnight, but can start from where we are. Kindness matters. A gentle word would allows for a great flowering of philosophy, art, care for self, compassion for others. Beyond that, care for all living things and the earth.

Getting It All Done

GETTING IT ALL DONE is impossible. Sometimes I feel as if my world will fall apart if it all does not get done right away. This "getting it all done now" idea is mostly self generated - and passed around to children, parents, friends, mangers and subordinates. Does "it" really have to be done? Now? Later? Never? Be realistic.

Wonder and Mystery

We are so fortunate to be alive and conscious. 

Awareness is the cream of the universe. 

Feel the wonder and mystery. 

Rise above the tasks of the day.

 

Maze of Life

We are all lost in the maze of life. There is no way out except death. In the meantime, the issue is to live as well as possible. It takes courage to stay awake for the greatest show on earth: our own lives. Staying awake is the key to life more abundant. Everyday, grab hold of moments of stillness and quiet. Let the stillness seep in slowly until arriving at deep stillness. Suddenly, one may hear white noise in the the ears. Awareness of the body becomes more obvious. It’s different each time. That is part of the wonder of being-here-now. Relax deeply into It, there’s no other place we need be. Just here and now complete with forces of distraction all around! You become stillness!        

                                               ~  americ@well.com

Today's Destiny

Today! You have an appointment with destiny. The idea of destiny suggests some future great event that will happen to us. For a young person, perhaps, the day of meeting the love of their life; a mature person, the day a grandchild is born. Or, for a whole culture, the day the world ends. Destiny, however, is nothing greater than the meeting of the present with the future. When does that happen? That’s right now as the present meets the future – today. We don’t know when we’ll die. We can’t assume waiting for destiny as some “big event”; but, feeling totally present, today itself is a big event.

Being a Philosopher-at-Large

From time to time, I feel that I'm really a "philosopher-at-large". It's one of my jobs in this life. I reflect on things. I am not a writer, but more a speaker. That's why I use audio so much. That which appears real to me is often unspeakable and un-writable. The best I can do is sing or write a spontaneous poem. So here I am - reflecting on myself, in public, about this occupation of philosopher-at-large. Thankful for so many people who keep visiting this philosopher-at-large blog over all these years. You keep me going.

Time Monster

In the end, we get swallowed up by the time monster. Easy to think that time is not real. Time is personified by clocks, chimes, bell towers, time stamps, a side bar on computer screens, and much more. The price of life is time. But beyond time is eternity. People in jail are said to be "serving time". The events and stages between conception and death are the "story of our lives". Stories happen in time, like movies and novels. Life implies death; death implies life.

Stardust and lightening

We are stardust; we are lightning. --Joni Mitchell*

When I was a child in the first and second grade, a little girl named Sherry would play with me. She was an outcast. She had wild unkempt golden hair, and talked very softly. Other kids made fun of me for even talking with her. One day she brought a little book with a picture of a star. She said, “We come from there.”

We come from the stars, the very substance of our bodies is stardust condensed from the heavens. We are in the heavens already; someone else on some other star system could be looking our way. We are sparks from a central fire, a whole universe, forged by the power of that fire.

---

* From her song, “Woodstock”

Eternity’s Carpet

Time …

always lost

moment to moment

facing past

turning into

no time

hold on,

no way

step into

time

gliding on eternity’s carpet

~americ

The link to Americ's SoundCloud (It's wonderful to hear his voice)

https://soundcloud.com/americ

Walt Whitman - "Go Directly to the Creation" - Americ and Walts' Prediction for our future

Wonderful lines from Walt Whitman's preface to his 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . . The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured. . . . others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation.

"Time Poverty" Published in 2016 - Reposted now in 2024...per usual you were right Americ.

 We live in a technological world, where every eighteen months the power of computers doubles. But at the same time we live in a cultural world where expectations rise to meet the expanding possibilities of technology. So that as fast as we create new ways to save time, we find new desires to chip it away and distract ourselves even more.
If I was a wise man like Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus, or Krishna, I would not know, or even understand, what time poverty is. But I am not. I'm just an ordinary human being, with ordinary problems, faced with schedules, deadlines, bank accounts that rise and fall, and there is, all too often, this pressing sense of there not being enough time, not enough time to do all the things that need to be done. I can scramble around with different strategies to manage that time, so that the lists become prioritized, and I'm supposed to know what to do first and next. And yet no matter how much I try to manage that time, new variables, new events, happen continuously to disrupt that.

For me, not being wise, to rise above time is to ignore it for a while, and try to enter the space of what I refer to as eternity. For at all points in time, if I focus deeply enough into this particular single present moment, then I'm arrived, I have arrived, I am exactly where I should be at this particular instant. I'm fully present here, not having to be anywhere else, so that gripping sense of not having enough time fades away into the eternal moment. That is the way time poverty is transcended, by going right into time, through time, into what is timeless.