Wide Awake Living

Does everyone know about Pangea Day? It is coming VERY soon. Check out www.pangeaday.org right away and learn all about it! Below is an intro…

The Pangea Day Mission & Purpose

Pangea Day is a global event bringing the world together through film.

Why? In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that – to help people see themselves in others – through the power of film.

The Pangea Day Event

Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

The 24 short films to be featured have been selected from an international competition that generated more than 2,500 submissions from over one hundred countries. The films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform, and allow us see the world through another person’s eyes.

I just wanted to let folks know that although Oprah and Eckhart are finishing up with their ten week webcast next Monday, there is still time to download all ten of the videos, either as ipod video format, larger video format or just audio. Whatever works for you. They are really lovely and 100% free. You can get them all if you go to the itunes store, and click on podcasts. It is on the most popular list. Or you can go to oprah.com and get them, but you have to join her book club to get them there.

The other thing I want to say about what Oprah is doing is that she is having something on her same online classroom that is called the “Soul Series” and they will continue on Monday nights. The night after Eckhart finishes, so that would be May 19th, she is having Jill Bolte Taylor on there. She is the brain-scientist who made that wonderful video about right and left brain about her stroke. I gave you the link to it a few weeks ago. After Jill, she will have a series of awakened teachers of various sorts–I’m not sure who, but I bet it will be worth watching for sure.

I started out to write this post by saying that I’d been hanging around being unemployed… I can’t believe I was even going to say that! It hasn’t been just hanging around idly, that’s for sure. I’ve been totally busy. There’s a lot of prep to get ready to do the initial pilot of the new “playshop” which is a WAY better word than workshop, don’t you think? And writing on a new book. And I took a workshop myself last weekend called Diamond Voice with Maniko (templeofsong.com) and Lori (ecstaticproductions.com) and it was fabulous! Anyway the playshop I’m creating is 6 hours long, 9-12 and 1-4. A wonderful place to have it has made itself evident and so the pilot will be there,and also a series following that. Once a month sounds good to me… the details are still being worked out. The pilot and will be on May 17th in Mountain View, California and the ongoing series will be there too, but I promise I will take it on the road. If you would like me to come to your town, let me know. The description is on the website, though constantly under revision as we approach the pilot, where it will be refined further.

And unemployed? Well, maybe, but only if you look at it from the standard work ethic perspective. But maybe even not then. I could be on my way to something far more wonderful than college administration. I’m just finding out what it is as I go along.

Its been a while (since the middle of my trip east) since I posted on the blog, and I apologize for leaving it so long, but A LOT has been going on.

Before my amazing trip to Chicago and the East Coast, my job at Stanford came to an end. I have always had a very hard-working, responsible (maybe over-responsible) personality type. There have been a series of things that have happened both on the trip and upon returning home that seem to be clearly steering me away from taking another full time job. Right at the moment it seems clear that I am preparing to do more booktours, and give the book more exposure in this first year of its life.

There is also another thing which is happening and that is the creation of a day-long workshop which seeks to combine a satsang-like talking format with experiential work to communicate this work to people in an embodied way. I am drawing on all the experience of my years of working with groups from Findhorn to the present and am ready to take this on the road with me also. Just yesterday I made the initial contacts for going to the LA area and the Sacramento area, and am thinking that I would also like to do a loop into the southwest in August and September.

I am in new territory with all this, but am feeling very supported by the things that are happening in doing this work. Of course this could all change in a millisecond, but for now, it appears to be how life wants to move in me right now.

Right now I am at home doing all of the preliminary work and am unusually available for working with people in a telephone mentoring capacity if people are interested in that. When I’m actually on the road it will be harder, though not impossible to be there for people in that way.

Another book is also wanting to happen, and so my time is more than full as I rise to meet all of what wants to happen here. I also feel a bit like a genie that has been let out of a bottle, since I have all this time been working full time and doing everything else on the side. To tell the truth I couldn’t make this change until I had fully processed my personal survival stuff. I could say it took me a lifetime to do that, but it would also be valid to say that it has taken me six months of delving deeply into the human striving for survival as I find it in myself, and letting go to the point where now it feels like “whatever life wants of me, that is of course what I want also”. Including all the usual stuff about being a bag lady or being hungry or cold when I’m old. Whatever life wants of me, I’m ready. This is not pie in the sky. We are talking about dealing with major auto and dental bills just this week and how good it feels to let the energy of money flow as it will without fear. And there is also the beautiful gifts that are being given to me at the moment, from a wonderful break in my cost of living to the beauty of a deep meeting with a friend, or an email from someone touched by my writings. I can’t say all this without also noting the beauty of the world around me as an ongoing gift also. I am so very blessed.

After a very full time of doing several group meetings back to back along with the radio interview, and then doing a LOT of visiting and photography, I think I’m going to just get a rest time now, being with my parents in Exeter New Hampshire. I will share some of the photos below that I have been taking around New England. This time in the spring is so special here, as the earth reappears after being buried all winter under all the snow, and little rivers are trickling everywhere. Today it got up into the 50’s, which was the warmest they have had around here lately, but tomorrow is supposed to reach the 60’s so is cause for great relief and celebration. Spring is here.

I thought that I would be able to write more often on this trip but it has been an extremely full time. The Chicago experience was amazing. I arrived a day earlier than I needed to, to attend the Oprah Winfrey show about A New Earth, and what happened in that day (besides resting up) was the filming of two hours of conversation with Richard Miller who has already made 24 of these conversations with others for Chicago Public Television. Richard is creating a wonderful archive of conversations with spiritual teacher types of people and they are available to all if you go to video.google.com and search “Never Not Here”. It is a wonderful resource for all and I will put a link to it on my website when I get home.

The Oprah Show the next morning was an amazing experience, but they didn’t ask me to say anything at all. The entire audience consisted of people who were related to the A New Earth webcast in some way. Many of them were people who had written in asking questions. The show itself was 100% on A New Earth, and was already pre-orchestrated with 8 chosen participants Skyping in who had experienced major shifts recently from reading A New Earth. One was a soldier in Baghdad who was currently experiencing incoming rockets and having to periodically hide underground to protect himself from the enemy fire. His mother was in the live audience. So was Elizabeth Lesser and a woman who was a Catholic lay minister. Each person of the 8 Skypers had a particular story about a recent shift and they all fit together beautifully. My favorite was a woman in Ontario who was in late stages of cancer. She was so inspiring the way she talked about how she had been so negative and angry and now she was living in the awareness of how precious and beautiful every remaining moment of her life was. The show will air on Wednesday April 9th in the regular Oprah Winfrey show time-slot in your area.

As soon as the cameras would shut off, Oprah was so personable and talked to us all as if over a cup of tea in her kitchen. She told us a couple of remarkable things in those commercial breaks and afterwards. She traced the whole trajectory of her career with us and ended up making the point that ALL of it seemed to her to be directly leading to and making possible this work that she is doing with Eckhart Tolle. She says it is the most important thing she has done in her life. She also said that she intends to hold off naming any more books to her book club for at least a year in order to keep the focus on A New Earth and see what the year brings. Isn’t she something? I’ve really got to hand it to Oprah. What an amazing woman. What an opportunity she is giving the world.

Now, a few days later, I am writing from Vermont. I am staying with a dear friend in Guilford Vermont and there is still 3 feet of snow on the ground at her house! Vermonters are still waiting for spring, and looking forward to it very much after one of the longest and snowiest winters in a very long time. There are still 20 foot piles of snow here and there on the north sides of big barns and places where the sun doesn’t often reach.

I have already done two evening book events/groups and both have gone wonderfully with about 25 to 30 people attending. The event in Amherst Mass takes the record for length, having started at 7:00 and the last people not leaving till almost midnight. There was also a radio interview on the local station WKVT with local DJ Steve West who did a wonderful job interviewing me about the book, and has given me the recording on a disc, so I will be able to post it on the website at some point in the near future. There is one more event this afternoon in Westminster West (Vermont, north of Brattleboro) and then a lot of visiting around with old friends. This is the area where I have lived for most of my adult life and raised my family. I lived around here right up until moving to California in 2004. On Monday night I will visit the woman who created the beautiful cover that you see on Life Beyond Belief, and on Tuesday I return to see more of my parents who live in a wonderful Senior Community in Exeter New Hampshire called RiverWoods. Because of the Chicago adventure, I arrived to see them at the beginning of this trip just in time to borrow their car and leave again. So Tuesday through Saturday will be the time to be a better guest than that, and to enjoy and be with them until my return to California on the 12th.

Here I am in the windy city, having been deposited here a day early by the twists and turns of plane ticket costs and resting in the wonderful hospitality of a community of spiritually oriented people who gather in Chicago. I am resting as I write this in a most comfortable and quiet guest room, listening to Joan Tollifson talk on a video that a filmaker named Richard Miller has made of her sharing her awakened perspectives on life. I wondered why life wanted me to come to Chicago a day early. Maybe just to rest for a day I thought innocently. I am resting. But I’m off on another adventure this afternoon, riding the trains across the Windy City to find the home of Richard Miller and do a couple hours of filming a conversation about life.

Check out Richard’s work at video.google.com by searching “never not here”.

Then its up early early tomorrow morning to get to Harpo Studios for 7 AM. I’ll let you know what happens with that. Perhaps it will be nothing. Perhaps I really came to Chicago to make a video or to be a part of Richard’s work. Or maybe life wanted me to meet Tom who has opened his home to me. We don’t know, do we? We really don’t know which things we do are the ones that “matter” in some larger way than the everyday. In another way, it all matters and none of it does, but it also seems like in any one life that a few things will be the things that shift things in some way. Tip things in a new way and start a new trajectory. Perhaps for example we just say something to someone at a perfect moment for them, and their life rolls out differently and the course of the world is affected. We never know which of our actions have those kind of ramifications, do we? So we just go along without knowing which moments are like that. Perhaps they all are!

I just finished listening to Oprah and Eckhart’s fifth class tonight, and I just wanted to say, did everyone catch that there have been eleven million downloads of their class worldwide?  Eleven Million!!!!!!!!  What more can I say? Thank you Oprah for this unprecedented event!!

Early tomorrow morning I will be catching a flight east that I bought several months ago. My job at Stanford came to a finish last week, and I planned to visit family and friends in New England. It just so happened that there was a plane change in Chicago in the middle of the trip. Just a few days ago I received a big surprise! I was invited to come be in the audience for an Oprah Winfrey show in Chicago that will be focused on A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle.

I know almost nothing more than this still, but the synchronicity of the invitation to come to the show at the same time when I just happened to be in Chicago anyway made it hard to say no. So I will be stopping in Chicago on my way east and will let you all know what that is like on this blog when I have the chance. I had been talking by email to Joan Tollifson, who has lived in Chicago for years and is planning to move to Oregon, and so asked her what hotel to stay at in town. Well, that night she just happened to have dinner with someone who is one of the subscribers to the Wide Awake Living newsletter and who evidently has a very nice guest room where I have now been invited to stay during my time in town. Oh my goodness. It sure looks like life wants me to go to Chicago! I am not someone who ordinarily would ever see the inside of a TV studio. It’s funny how when you let go of the reins of your life, you really had better mean it, because you might just end up doing things that you never would have done otherwise. This has a similar feel to it as the experience I had of being “moved” from Vermont to California. The context it falls in is one of having numerous job applications and interviews for my next position at Stanford, and nothing coming of it so far. Interesting. Mind wants to know what’s going on, but it just doesn’t know. I’m just doing the next obvious thing all the time and seeing where it goes. Maybe if life doesn’t give me a job, its an opportunity to put a lot of focus on writing the next book. But what’s up with this Chicago thing? I know better than to try to guess.

On the second web-cast of Oprah Winfrey’s phenomenally large online class with Eckhart Tolle, the stand-out for me was when Eckhart talked about making the present moment the focal point of our lives. Eckhart has a wonderful way of saying inspiring things using such plain language that we can all get it, no matter what our spiritual or religious background might be. We can see into the meaning of his simple words, and connect with the reality that they are pointing to.

We heard in his earlier book “The Power of Now” about the importance of the present moment—about how the past and the future are not real in the same way that this present moment is real—past and future are just ideas that are programmed into our minds. This must have resonated with many of us, because the Power of Now has been on the best seller lists for so long. Now Eckhart has written A New Earth and it has already sold 3.5 million copies, even before Oprah started this class. We must have an abiding interest in this message! And we want to know—after exploring our interest and enjoying these wonderful books, is there a way that we can actually experience this reality that Eckhart is talking about in the midst of the commotion of our busy daily lives?

What would it really mean to change the focal point of our lives to the present moment, and to stay living in the world? If we are willing to really have that happen for us, what would it mean for our lives? The content in each of our lives is different obviously, so the exact details of what would change would be as unique as we each are as people. On the other hand, there are universal patterns about this inner shift that Eckhart is referring to. One of these is expressed so succinctly by the description he uses of having a space develop between our sense of self and our thought processes. This space occurs and expands as we disidentify with our thought processes, and relate to them instead as a wonderful tool that we (an identity outside of them) use. In our lives up to this point, we have been fused with these thoughts that go through our minds, as if our ideas about ourselves are actually equivalent to who we are. When we stay in the present moment and notice that our thoughts are arising and are something quite separate from who we are, then a space is appearing. At first it may seem vague and fleeting, but over time if we keep giving this our attention, the space seems to widen and become permanent and “normal”. We notice our thoughts as if from a slight distance, as only being thoughts and not having anything to do with who we are. We no longer look to our thinking processes to provide us with crucial information about who we are, and so are freed in a wonderful way from reliance on our thoughts, feelings or circumstances conforming to our preferences. They no longer affect us in the same way.

This lack of reference to thinking for clues about our identity, doesn’t leave much possibility for using the past and future as focal points for our daily living. Past and future turn out to not exist outside of our thought processes. We can watch our thoughts creating both. Meanwhile it is all happening in a present moment that seems to be pregnant with possibility and vitality. When we stay with it enough to recognize the incredible beauty of the life force expressing itself around us in a myriad of forms, it can feel quite overwhelmingly and radiantly beautiful, no matter what the content of it is.

If what we are going to do today or how we are going to behave in a particular situation has been a compulsive recreating of the past (making today be much like yesterday and projecting that into tomorrow) we become freed from that. Although such freedom from the past is generally felt to be wonderful, what is sacrificed to get there is the knowing of what will be happening in the future. To the mind, this tends to be a profoundly unacceptable situation because of its need to control life, and mind may be making noisy complaints about that. The noise, however, is occurring on the sidelines of awareness once we are experiencing the space that we have been referring to. It is just mind doing what minds do, making noise and being a tool that is trying unsuccessfully to retain control over its rightful master, you. It no longer is needed for that particular job. You already know who you are.

As we allow the present moment to be the focal point of our lives, we are freed from the domination by our thoughts that has been the normal human condition for thousands of years. We are freed to live our lives without compulsive referencing to ideas about what is possible and the world opens up to us. We use the mind to reference practical things—we don’t want to forget our phone number or forget how to cook dinner. Mind is the most amazing and practical tool when it comes into its rightful place of serving something beyond itself. And when it is not needed, it can rest. What is here in this focal point of the present moment then, is the simple yet vitally alive world that surrounds and includes us. We feel the wind in our hair again. We see the incredible vitality in the world around us—we see God (or call it Life, or Love) peeking at us out of everything. We experience the joy that every birdcall has all along been offering us. The veil of thinking has been lifted off of the world, and life as it is, including our own, can now be experienced.

Experiencing the world in this way is such an overwhelmingly wonderful experience that once it is felt, it forever remains as a motivation for the sometimes time-consuming process of learning to live it in the midst of everyday life. At first it may be that even little disturbances like a harsh word or a traffic jam with jump-start mind into such compelling noise that the experiencing of the present moment may not be possible until that event is long passed. But gradually over time, with steady attention to who we really are, we are able to stay conscious in the little things and only more charged and potent events can throw us. Gradually we come to live our whole lives in this new world. We have changed the focal point of our lives to the present moment, and our world reflects back to us the incredible gift of the Life that we have been given and that we are.

© 2008 Alice Gardner
Author of “Life Beyond Belief, Everyday Living as Spiritual Practice”