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.

Fabric of the Universe

Modern quantum physics suggests that 
uncertainty is woven into 
the fabric of the universe. 
Each of us reflects the 
wholeness of all that is. 
Can't be certain 
we'll be here tomorrow.  
Statistically, chances are good 
for being correct when saying, 
"See you tomorrow morning." 
That's not absolutely determined. 
So be humble. 
Nothing is certain - 
not even death and taxes.

Being Lost

What's it all about?

(In mid-2008, I had a compelling dialogue on The WELL with people I never met in person on the topic of "What's It All About?" Here are my own posts. All the other responses are deleted, following the rule that "you own your own words" applies to posts on The WELL. It's the unquoted writers who took me to deeper levels of understanding - they drove these notes into being!)

Life has taken me into many phases and experiences. I'm sixty years old now. Long enough to know what little I know; long enough to feel that I have lived. I am thankful for that.

What's it all about? Each day the answer to this question could be different. Death and limitation have been the most powerful teachers. As we age, people around us get sick and die. I was thinking about some of those people this morning. One was 20 years older and like a father to me. He came to memory. I realized that in a way - this was how he "lives on" - in the memory of friends and relatives. His motto was, "Life is good!" I try to remember that one.

Last year, two people that I work with lost their children (one was eight and the other thirty years old). It was unspeakable. I was deeply affected. Death pushes us out of abstraction. (Wow! and this statement is an abstraction). A big problem with philosophy is that philosophy "wants" to abstract. But, reality is not abstract - reality is real. :) Death must be painful because we love.

I think "it's all about love". I remember an opera with a song that goes, "Love is the heartbeat of the Universe." I think so. Without love, we have nothing, nothing at all. Even all the jewels and gold hardly make it worth it. Is not the meaning of life Love? And, yes, I have been hurt in love; and have grieved because of love - through death and separation. Love comes in all forms: with job, God, children, mate, etc....etc.

It's like this: Love to be love that is real love is love that sees the self in the other. Thus, the Golden Rule follows. But, love that is conditional to "me being more important than you" as fundamental - that is love perverted. Even bankers can be loved, once we see them as they really are - as, perhaps, misguided. In ancient days, it was something to have dinner with tax collectors. Yet, they, too, could be loved. Anyway, I believe there is a high path of love that holds the universe and the human world together. A love that is even stronger in the long run than hate. Mundane matters, yes! Love is totally mundane - it is what holds the world together. Our mundane work is tangible love. Deep nature is a dynamic balance of attractive and repulsive forces; so, suggest the laws of physics. This balance of forces sustains our everyday macro world - that we mostly take for granted. I come to this conference because I love philosophy; and, I love to run into other people (YOU) who struggle with difficult, hard to pin down ideas. Is it not love that brings us together?

Perhaps, this question "What's it all about?" cannot be answered. But, it is in the "answering" that love is. Love is like the background, like the air that we take for granted. Most mundane, most divine it is. I have seen many wish to be transported and transcending. This is not much better than taking drugs or alcohol. The real thing, I believe, is to be-here-now. It takes real love to really be-here-now with what-there-is."Attentiveness" is as close as possible to being honest with the experience of being human in our world in all its dimensions as possible. That's why I am not comfortable with the idea that we "are just evolved mechanisms that are useful to the replication of our genes". I have no problem with the genes being part of what we are attentive to, but genes are only part of the show on one of the many levels of reality which we live in. I don't have a conflict with the genetic explanation as long as it is not a reductionist program that makes the experience of being-human "nothing but" the play of genes. The genetic is deeper level below the subconscious mind of the human; and, of course, the quantum level is deeper than genetic. That does not mean, however, that these levels are more real than human. But, I am not sure that the human experience is fundamentally real. It is, however, our experience - the experience that we start with as we grope for what is beyond human.

You know, to live without a narrative might just be total freedom, total enlightenment. Narratives are either internal monologues or "polylogues" among people. For example, we could have a narrative that explains everything (yes, "what's it all about?") in terms of genes. And, why not? We can "reduce" everything (i.e. map it) to any level of another or reality. The main advantage of not reducing everything to genes is to keep the narratives simple for humans to understand human life in human-terms not genetic terms.

Poetry reduced to genetic relationships would require a lot of decoding to be meaning to one living an ordinary life. Daily life requires a narrative. Without narratives we would slip either into the absurd & schizoid or cosmic consciousness. You know it's interesting that recent cosmology talks about the "sound of creation" - that ripples in the early Universe produced a sound, a kind of music. This accords with mystical Hindu concepts of the universe beginning with a sound; like God in the Bible speaking the Word. Vibration, sound, light. Even before there are genes.

What's it all about? What do we know, anyway? :) Even if it is just chaos or actually intelligent design - it might just come down to interaction. There's no "final answer" - it's a journey that takes us beyond questions and answers. I believe that everything by change or by law is totally interrelated, so everything must be interacting.

I love interaction. That's one of the reason I love The WELL. I've the greatest respect for "logo therapy" as developed by Viktor Frankl in his book *Man's Search for Meaning*. It taught me that I am my own meaning maker; and, also to respect other people's ways of finding/making meaning. If memory is right, he discovered in a German concentration camp during WWII that those who found a specific meaning had a greater chance of making it out alive. I figure that may be true for all of us: with meaning we have a greater chance of getting out alive!

When I started this topic, I had no idea where this question would lead. to me it is a matter of mystery and wonder. human beings appear to have evolved out of the soup of matter and life. it's a wonder we are gifted with reflective consciousness. it's worth asking such questions just for the pleasure of expanding reflective consciousness and solving problems and much more.....

I mix God and consciousness into the strew here. Suppose God as some kind of pure Source Energy did utter a Sound, a vibration that caused the Big Bang. If so, the whole of creation is infused with consciousness seeking to organize itself itself here and there. That self-organizing here and there leads to all kinds of practical results - until consciousness seems to have holographic capacities for resonating with the whole universe back to the time of the Big Bang.

The Whole Thing

Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e., the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Culture and Value
Translated by Peter Winch

Life Is Uncertain

We really don't know much
life is uncertain, to assume anything else
is the epitome of stupidity

  

Collection of Audio Teachings

One SoundCloud system user collected many of my audio teachings into a single page on the Internet Archive. Quite amazing format!!! Everything is untitled. I recommend sampling at random. I  speak spontaneously as intuition informs me. Explore randomly, as if flipping the pages of a book at random. Live link: archive.org/details/Americ_Collected_20171027

Eternity Eternity Eternity

                                                                           ~ Sikha

Aloneness & Oneness

Enter fully into

your aloneness

for a moment,

then you experience

the oneness of all things.

~ Adyashanti ~

Bliss

When I was young and a graduate student in philosophy, I started pursuing bliss. That was good and bad. The distraction of the pursuit of bliss became all consuming; driving me toward experiences of great pleasure and pain with little peace of mind. I grew older and wiser, discovering that being alive was already enough. Gradually settling down to the such-ness of existence itself. Be humble. It's a big world out there - we are little in comparison.

PAPAJI - Consciousness Alone Is

Wonderful video; in ten minutes Papaji sums up consciousness in relation to all-that-is.

Holographic Wholeness

Realize interconnected holographic wholeness. The ordinary and the cosmic meet everyday but we forget, get lost. Pay attention again and again to the miracle of existence that is you, me, and us. We easily fragment life. We started as oneness, we can return to oneness. Here and now. Life was here before us and goes on without us. As we get less human-centric it becomes clear that life is universal even when we don't see it. Once humans believed the earth was the center of the universe - now it's so not so.  From the view of love, of spirit, it is All One.

Alan Watts: OM The sound of Hinduism part 1a

Worth listening to. Alan Watts is classic. He opened so many people up to Eastern religion. He was an important part of the "beatnik" era. The man for the job - having been a former Episcopalian minister.

You-niverse

Each moment, each moment, each moment.
Each moment is new,
is yours.
This is all-
for you.

There is no room for regret without a past.
There is no room for worry with no future.

       so what's here?
You-niverse.
       what will I do?
Be.
       how do I be?

Perhaps this is the end of seeking.

    where will I go?
Anywhere.
    what will I do?
Anything.

Perhaps this is the end of believing.

    what will I have?
Me.
    what will I be?
Free

Sometimes I think I remember

Sometimes I think I remember
     creating myself
it was long ago in a mist,
    in the beginning,
        there was no time,
only the grand feeling of birth arising.
I was looking down upon myself,
the Universe smiling at the fantasmagoric life ahead
Earth beckoned you
the world was pulling us inside out
each moment a new opportunity
so glad I am awake today,
and thank you for being here
so that I can Love those things
that call out in suffering:
it's the only thing bigger than the Universe--
there's nothing left to do but love you

Freedom

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing,
there is a field. 
I'll meet you there. 

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

~Rumi

Universe

We're so lucky

to live in the 

universe.

Primary Miracles

That the universe exits.

That there is consciousness.

That there is self-reflective consciousness.

That there is cosmic or transcendental consciousness.

Simplicity Now

Meditation can bring the mind to
utter simplicity. Being quiet within is
the ground of simplicity - even
when we have to perform
action in the world.

"All is one"; "feeling the
oneness of all things". Such
expressions are absolutely true.
It's as if you are
at the end of a great
journey - and you come to
a place where you can
absolutely rest in peace;
and all your desires are
fulfilled. You are here; and
that's enough. That's all
there is. That is it.
All is one. Peace. Peace.
Now - extending to
the "next" movement,
the moment no longer in time - so it's
only just this external, eternal moment.
Being mindful of all that
is. Which is just this.
All is one. Simple. Easy.
Ah! Yes! Here! Here
now and forever

"as it was in the
beginning is now
and forever"

peace

Being of Beings

"God" too often feels like
either a taboo or cliche word
in most public circles.
But, for me "God" is God - a word
that points to the Way,
the Mystery, the Source,
the Sense of Presence of All-that-is.
I feel God by turning my
attention to this moment
here-and-now: the wondrous sense
of there being anything at
all! A miracle that there
is a universe with
consciouseness enough to sense
a Universe. That's amazing!
The mere act of sensing
being-present here-and-now is
the essense of what's usually
called worship. To appreciate
existence is to love God; and God
meets our love the more we
enjoy, praise and love the
presence of being-here-now.