One revolutionary change in modern times is that we are now becoming able to notice the way we take on particular perspectives about the things we know about. This is possible because we are beginning to be able to clearly observe how our inner processes work. In the past such patterns of thinking have been unconscious. However our growing ability to observe our own thought processes allows us now to watch what our minds are doing critically and see if our old ways are still helpful to our well-being or not.
Our interpretations, beliefs and assumptions (which we are now able to be more or less aware of) have been fit together in a very automatic way to create perspective. We take a stand mentally. We adopt a position on issues that are important to us, deciding who is right and who is wrong, and whose opinion is the closest to truth as far as we can tell.
We may adopt the opinions of others because they feel right to us, or we may adopt independent positions directly from our own thinking processes. In both cases, what we are doing is relying on our mental processes directly or indirectly to tell us how to position ourselves in relation to the issues of our day. After all, having a personal perspective has been equivalent to more or less inflexible positionality up until now.
Without it being about right or wrong, our perspective on a simple object like a tree or a flower depends on where we are standing when we observe it. Similarly (until we are ready to move beyond this way of being) our perspective on the Israeli-Palestine conflict depends on what mental structures we are utilizing to think about what is happening. If we grew up in Isreal we would naturally as children have taken on the prevalent beliefs and assumptions of our families and communities in an age-old survival based maneuver designed to help us fit in. Our genes perhaps, but also certainly the social and cultural forces around us when we are developing our thinking naturally lead us to hold the perspective that we are given.
Another way of saying this would be to say that we are trained to conform to our genes and our cultures in order to survive to adulthood. If we were brought up in the Palestine we would also do this because we are also human, but the end result of course would be the taking of an opposing perspective.
A way out of the continuing conflict between two such opposing perspectives would be revealed when human capabilities began to develop to the point where the building and holding of perspectives is revealed as self-constructed and not reflecting the full reality of what is occurring. In fact whatever perspective we take reveals only a fraction of what is actually occurring until such time as we are able to hold them much more lightly and view situations from varying perspectives. This would be like an observer viewing an object from various angles, allowing it to be more fully seen, something that we naturally do with objects.
First book: “Life Beyond Belief, Everyday Living as Spiritual Practice” available on Amazon, as a kindle book, other ebook, or at your local bookstore by request.
“Although there is a lot of argument about the word evolution regarding the origin of the humanity (evolution versus the other creation stories) we will stand aside from the fray here and look at the subject a bit differently.
“If we consider human evolution in terms other than purely biological (such as in terms of our ability to learn new behaviors in order to survive) it is easy to see the movement of it all around us in our individual experiences. We are developing new thought processes, behaviors, skills and capacities as we go through whatever our lives bring us, both individually and collectively. This is the kind of human evolution that plays an integral part in our daily lives, only it shows up in such small increments that we rarely bring it into focus.
“We are taught in school about ‘natural selection’ and ’survival of the fittest’ in regards to evolution, but giving some focus to the ‘adaptation’ involved is a broader and less biological way to explore the relevance of evolution to our everyday lives. Adaptation is the capability we and other organisms have to adjust ourselves to new conditions when they appear in our environment (in order to be naturally selected or to survive). It is the ability to alter our way of life, our habits and our behaviors when it is necessary to do so for survival or for other things that matter to us. It is about our ability to meet each moment freely and creatively and to let go of old habits of thought or behavior.
“This world situation that we are facing is inviting us to let go of old fear-based thinking habits that have in the past formed our ways of thinking about the world and its problems. Our old ways of thinking have brought us to this point - a point beyond which they are no longer able to help us survive and thrive. Through seeing ourselves and the world from a perspective outside of our old filters and frames, our perceptions are altered and we naturally are freed from old outworn thinking and behaviors that no longer serve us. We are then able to adapt ourselves to the new environment presented by the times we live in, and become creative in our relationship with it.”
First book: “Life Beyond Belief, Everyday Living as Spiritual Practice” available on Amazon, as a kindle book, other ebook, or at your local bookstore by request.
The story below has been circulated around the internet since it happened in 2005, but I thought it worth re-reading if you have seen it before. I verified it at The San Francisco Chronicle website.
If you read a recent front page story of the SF Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale that had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines.
She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped around her body, her tail, her torso, a line tugging in her mouth.
A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the Golden Gate ) and radioed an environmental group for help.
Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her.
They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her.
When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles.
She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them, pushed them gently around…she was thanking them. Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives.
The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.
May you, and all those you love, be so blessed and fortunate
to be surrounded by people who will help you get untangled
from the things that are binding you.
As the old year melts away like an icicle in the sun, the future unfolds moment by moment, simply as whatever is happening next in our ordinary lives. Each moment is a movement from mystery to miracle when we see the world as it really is, without the overlay of our minds telling us that what we are observing is ordinary, irrelevant or uninteresting.
As for myself, I’m not big on partying for New Year’s. I like to take the transitional moment as a time to review, wrap up and clean out from the old year which always entails things like file cleaning and accounting. Then I like to look forward to what the new year may be wanting of me and get a general sense of direction.
This year I was given a Kindle for Christmas which was very fun because I had put a lot of effort into reformatting my book “Life Beyond Belief” into a Kindle edition, but had never even held a Kindle in my hand before. I’m loving my new Kindle and loving the publishing revolution that it and all the other e-book readers will for sure be bringing to us. These e-book reading tools open up the publishing world even further, so that anyone who has something to say that others are interested in can participate in the planetary conversation. Next I’ll be working on making my blog available as a Kindle blog that can be subscribed to on Amazon.
So, to all of you who got Kindles this Christmas along with me: Besides downloading my own book in Kindle format at Amazon, also check out Adya’s latest book, End of Your World here. Adya’s book is a very wonderful guide to what he calls embodiment, which is really what Wide Awake Living is all about: bringing one’s awakening down into the everyday thoughts, actions and interactions that our daily family, community and work lives consist of.
In 2010, the Wide Awake Living website will be seven years old. It all started when a tenant who was also a friend lost her job and couldn’t pay rent so she paid part of it by teaching me how to make a website. I had experienced a major shift in the fall of 02 and was just starting to write about it. The original writing is still up there online, but the site has grown a lot since then and it led to this newsletter.
Lately I’m learning how the internet is a way for all the people who are working with the various aspects of the next evolutionary leap for humankind to connect up and stay connected. It may be that this newsletter and the various things I do on Twitter, Facebook etc can be a support to people who are themselves making this evolutionary leap out of the mind-made self that has hitherto confined us, and into the awesome wonder of what is.
A New Earth
Stand up, wake up!
New possibilities have arrived
For these lives we had thought were our own.
The possible human stands free now
Of its past constraints,
The cage it grew up in, that served it well,
Trembling now with wonder at what it sees.
Old habits of mind fall away like old skin
No longer needed, no longer helpful
Outgrown and abandoned.
A different world, a new earth
Comes into view, fresh and alive
By a change of perception,
A new way of seeing.
We are joined together now
In a new maturity
A new awareness of how it is,
How we are carried on a new wind,
And a new response stirs.
Old habits of mind
Want to box and label
What is seen,
Safely containing
All things, all experience,
In the known world.
But a new wind
Blows through the mind
Not looking for refuge from life.
Seeing beyond itself
Into the alive world
Of happenings and presences,
Mysterious and unfathomable.
So far beyond thought
That mind lies down
In the deepest bow possible
Dumbfounded and reverent.
Then rising again,
From its bow
In hopeful adoration
Only wanting to serve
What it doesn’t understand.
“The world situation that life is presenting us with in the 21st century is a natural outcome of the state of consciousness that has created it.
“People having an internal system for understanding life that is based on limited thought processes and giving a view of themselves as separate and insecure individuals, naturally creates a world full of conflict and fear.
“But consider that this may also be part of a perfect unfolding!
“This may be how life works, that each stage of consciousness along the way in our development brings with it its own crisis.
“Each crisis forces individuals to question their current reality system, and to try to find a new stability by stretching into new versions of themselves with fuller capabilities and by outgrowing any old habits that no longer support them.
“Life creates situations that cannot be solved at their own level because the ways of seeing and knowing that have brought us to this point aren’t working anymore. Our old paradigms and models are failing us and we are forced to let go of our old ways of constructing reality and look again to see what we have missed.”
The above is an excerpt out of my upcoming book, a book without a name as yet. It seems clearly to be about how the world situation is both a support for and a motivator into the next steps in our development as a species. I will include more excerpts over the next few months as I am actively writing it.
Is living
In the moment
A walking of a tightrope
Between past and future?
Is it a peeling away
Of all the escape routes?
A letting go of the possibility
Of getting what we want
At some other moment
When we might be more mature,
Or more ready?
Or have put in enough work?
A falling from the
Imagined tightrope?
A vertical descent
Into whatever life has in store
Without control or containment
Of the perpetual disaster
That is life at its worst and best
All at once.
How is it
That having fallen thus
We have left behind need
For escape,
Need for a future
To come through for us,
Even the everpresent
Need for love?…
Finding ourselves
Instead, surrounded
Embraced by richness
Beyond measure,
Completely beyond our
Wildest imagining.
All our ideas
Of the past pale
Next to the vibrancy
Of life met without
The intermediary of
Ideas about what is
Being seen. Life stands
Forth as radiant and
Fulfilling already,
Even as some things
May be dying in agony
While others are
Being born.
While getting back to writing again after a long pause, something has been coming up that seems to shed a lot of light on my own and other’s stories of awakening. The title above reflects what it is all about, and it is being a rich and fascinating exploration for me that I would like invite you to join in with as you read on.
What I notice in relation to my own awakening is that there are many areas where the actual living of the newly awakened perspective has been as easy and natural as water running downhill. But there have been other areas in daily life where earlier stages of development seem to naturally take over and temporarily hijack me into re-identification with familiar patterns of reaction and discomfort.
I had read that, once realization came, all the reactivity and discomfort would be finished. In an absolute way, that statement is totally true—it is all finished (based on the new identification with my always-already-awake Self). And yet at the same time, there still can be moments of disconnect from that awareness and then there is reactivity. Yes, this reactivity and discomfort are seen in the context of being a part of the grand perfection of everything, and yet that doesn’t mean that they are to be ignored as they are transcended.
The discomfort that arises is functioning as an attention-getting device that is part of a constructive process of gradual personal acclimation to that perfection, in order that it may be more fully lived.
A cognitive framework that allows discomfort and reactivity its place in the perfection of things then becomes important. If our internal thought structures are open enough to allow for anything and everything that shows up to have a legitimate part to play in life, (and we don’t reject some things and disassociate from them) then everything in life becomes a support for awakening.Life can naturally move towards greater and greater capability of the individual person to fully live in daily life that which we have realized ourselves to be.
I am fascinated to be giving the field of human development an overview, and am especially fascinated to see it correlating with the recent developments in both neuroscience and child development. It seems that we humans are at an amazing transition-point in history because we are now able to see and make sense of our own development over the eons in a clear way that has not been cognitively possible before. As we have developed the capabilities of our neo-cortex (pardon my oversimplification here) this has allowed us new perspectives on who we are and changed the world that we see.
Along the way, the increasingly complex ways in which we construct thought-based knowledge have also revealed themselves, as have the mechanics of perception. This obviously pertains to the way that we construct the personal self in its entirety. This self-construction process that has occurred in us as individuals is the bedrock that lies under all the rest of our thinking. It serves as a foundation that allows or doesn’t allow whole spectrums of experiences in any particular life.
These new perspectives also bring in a new possibility—that we may be able to allow life to deconstruct parts of our personality structure that are outgrown and no longer helpful. This means that the real Self is now more able than ever before to maintain a personal identity (a small me) that is operationally functional at a high level, in that it is serving the real Self and allowing the One which is awake to live through the personality more freely.
One of the ways that our personal thought structure can potentially hamper us pertains to the way it integrates ideas about spiritual awakening (by any name). It may even go so far as to firmly disbelieve that such a thing could ever happen in our own life, or it may be more subtle than that. Some of our assumptions and beliefs are closed systems with set interpretations of everything and these kinds of closed systems do not allow for the openness or space in which awakening can occur. The uncomfortable moments in life are faithfully offering us clues to ways in which we may be hampering ourselves, interfering with life’s inherent tendency to develop itself through us.
How our personality structure interprets what happens to us is significant in terms of our ability to actually live the realization that becomes available to us. Whether we have pursued realization through one of the great traditions, been outside them, or whether awakening has seemed to pursue us, the outcome (awakening, enlightenment, gnosis, self-actualization, Christ-consciousness, et al) will, at least in terms of our ability have it available back to our daily lives, be dependent on the structure that we use to interpret, understand, know anything in our lives.
For instance, if we operate through a thought-based personality structure that is totally dominated by the need to be right and have others be wrong , then any experiences of non-egoic awareness will be interpreted and contained by those structures. The outcome would almost inevitably be a difficulty in even seeing anything that lies outside those structures. Through our thought we draw meaning from our experiences, and create the world that we experience by a necessary censorship of our sensory input that guards us against overwhelm.
Similarly, if the conceptual structures that build the individual personality have, throughout that person’s lifetime, ostracized the “bad” parts of who they are, then those parts need to be included somehow within the whole in order for the realization to be fully lived. This disowning of parts of ourselves is a major contribution of psychology to the spiritual seeker’s dilemma. I have recently discovered that new information from the field of psychology describes very well the pattern behind the arising of these disowned parts of my own psyche that I described in the latter parts of my book. Knowing about this cognitively gives me a framework for allowing the reclamation process to proceed with a higher degree of comfort. It lets me relax.
This exploration seems to be about how the structure of any individual’s thought-based personality has a role to play in allowing space for awakening and how it can provide a conducive environment for awakening both before, after and during any realization of who we really are. These thought-based capabilities of the “small me” seem to now be offering themselves to be wielded as a tool in the hand of that newly discovered Self and are coming into alignment with the movement of life itself as it animates the individual person.
We live in a monumental time, and the dying of the old ways of operating need not cloud our perception of what is arising in its place.
It feels like a safe statement to call this time in our history transitional, even though we don’t know exactly what we are transitioning to.
Change is being thrust on us (irrespective of who we currently blame or credit) and our politicians, economists, scientists, etc are just trying to keep up. All the systems we rely on are changing at full speed to keep up with the new requirements.
Change is in the wind, whether we like it or not! For some this is frightening. For others, we may welcome it but we still have to deal somehow with personal losses and with a new uncertainty. Many of us may wish that we could freeze our lives back at some earlier point in history where life was simpler, but we don’t seem to have that choice.
The stress that we feel in times of change can clearly be about getting to know our attachments. Without life staying the same, how are we to know if we are going to be allright? We therefore attach habitually to what has seemed to provide stability in the past. It is a natural search for a way to be sure that we are going to survive. We are programmed for survival, and this is not a bad thing, but it is only one of our capacities, and we either balance it with our other capacities in transitional times, or we feel a lot of stress.
We also have the capacity to turn our attention away from our self-centered survival mechanisms that are hard-wired into us when we see that those mechanisms are no longer helpful.
Stop a moment and see if this is true for you.
I say we are no longer simply reacting to the world in pre-programmed patterns. A major change has occurred quietly. Some would call it meta-cognition maybe? I don’t know. It seems to be an ability to be aware of our thinking, to observe it and change our relationship to it. The same with our emotions.
So we see ourselves reacting to change and uncertainty about the future with fear-based thinking. Yet after we’ve observed this behavior enough times, it doesn’t grip us the same way. We stand apart, noticing the fear, rather than overtaken by it. We see what we are doing. We have reached a tip-over-point. Awareness of fear feels different than blind absorption in it. We are outgrowing our programming and the world opens up wider. We have a spectrum of possible responses to what we have become aware of — not just the fight or flight options we had before.
When we talk to people who lived through the Great Depression, one of the things that we hear is that it was a time when people had so much taken away that a new appreciation of the non-materialistic aspects of life naturally surfaced. One can hear things like this today on the news. When catastrophe hits, people are surprised by how happy they can be just to have each other, or just to see another sunrise. Change and difficulty seem to give us the opportunity to step back, become aware of ourselves in new ways, and return to what is really important to us.
Where does that take you?
I get taken to “That which doesn’t change”, both in me and in the world. The swirl of change in the world takes me to awareness of my conditioning sometimes — that’s fine too. But by welcoming that, I am taken farther. I am taken into a solid and unchanging reality that lies behind the play of light and sound on the surface of life, to the perfect Peace, the vibrantly alive Love, that is completely beyond my comprehension.
If we were to go from being a millionaire to a pauper, or from well to sick, happy to sad, or visa versa, there is something in us that doesn’t change when those things change. Life thrusts us back towards something more essential, something behind the window-dressing of life. This is where we find the deep nourishment that all the outer circumstances and material possessions couldn’t give us. This is what we were looking for all along. And this is where all the troubles of our lives finally manage to bring us (in spite of all our objections).
So I say, if our changing world has brought you stress, then let your troubles be your friends, and see what they are showing you about who YOU, are.
LIVE WEBCAST on Never Not Here TV with Alice Gardner. You are invited to participate in a conversation about living your awakening in the midst of your everyday life, and how your current circumstances are exactly perfect, just the way they are.
April 12th
1:00 pm Pacific time,
3:00 pm Chicago Time,
4:00 pm Eastern time,
9:00 pm London time,
10:00 pm on the continent.
We would love to hear from you, so check your phone rates to Chicago (the # will be posted on the day) and put this online visit on your calendar for Easter afternoon!
“Who we think we are is only ever a thought. Only by stepping outside the world of thought, can the reality of the one-life be seen. This reality is what everything rests on, what thought rises from and falls back into. It is what is here before birth and after death. It is what we all simply and really are.
“When we realize what else there is beyond our ideas about everything, there is often a gap where we don’t yet have a sense of how to live this–how to bring it into our busy modern lives, our families, our workplaces and our concerns about world issues. We are not immediately able to embody the Truth that we have realized.
“Through exposure to the experience of others in an awakening process, we can relax the old ideas about “enlightenment” being something that can only happen to special people who live in monasteries or caves. We can embrace the existence of our own awakened presence, right in the midst of our everyday lives. Where else could it be? It was right Here all along!”
–A. Gardner from Life Beyond Belief, Everyday Living as Spiritual Practice
One revolutionary change in modern times is that we are now becoming able to notice the way we take on particular perspectives about the things we know about. This is possible because we are beginning to be able to clearly observe how our inner processes work. In the past such patterns of thinking have been unconscious. However our growing ability to observe our own thought processes allows us now to watch what our minds are doing critically and see if our old ways are still helpful to our well-being or not.
