Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Letter to a friend May 2022

Friday, May 13th, 2022

My friend,

I am sorry to hear that.

You know, unless you are counting on reincarnation and additional lives, all you really have is your life now?  

There’s nothing more valuable. That is, if you, in fact, experience your life as having value.

If you are sure, however, that you are making the very best use of the time you have left, then good.  
But if not, then regret at the end is a terrible thing.

Many people work and work and wear themselves out trying to ensure that they have ‘enough’ and that everything is arranged perfectly.  They save and save so that their savings are always maximized.  Somehow, they imagine that all this preparation and saving will serve to help delay the arrival of mortality.

But, nothing, other than careful attention to our health, can actually stave off mortality.  And even then, the results are only temporary.

For many of us, failing health catches up with us and all of our preparations are meaningless.  
None of the things we’ve stock-piled can change our mortality.  

All the money we saved to use to do enjoyable things with when we retire, it all now gets spent on futile and expensive efforts to preserve what little failing health we still have.   

And in the end, we realize all we ever really had of value was just the time that we had left in our lives. 

It is unlikely that you will ever be in better health than you are now, that you will have better strength or better intelligence than you have now.  These days now, literally, are the best days of the rest of your life.  It all goes downhill from here as your days keep passing.

Saving more money or getting ‘everything arranged just so’ will not changes these facts.

At some point, before it is too late, you should give yourself permission to be the a little girl you once were and allow yourself to take immediate pleasure in your life.  

 Of course, you can and should make provisions for your son.  But, he is like a little paper boat with a bright, burning candle set in it.  You gave him life, you raised him and you love him.  But it is, and always was going to be, his life.  His to lead.

And once you’ve done what you can to push his little boat off into the stream of life, what about you?
Will you work 24/7/365 until one day you die?   Everyone gathers and says, “What a good hard working woman she was.”

And then you are gone, your house is emptied and most of what you collected is scattered to the wind.

And your boy loves and misses you but he moves on with his life, as it was always destined that he should.

As the Poet Kahlil Gibran says, 

Your children are not your children.They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself… You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow…”

Just some philosophical thoughts and advice from a friend of yours.   

Stop and reflect, my friend.  If you continue as you are now, you will arrive exactly where you are going.

 Or you can cup the years you have left like sweet water to your lips and drink it as you like.  You can do the things you always thought ‘someday’ about.  Someday is now and time can only grow shorter.

Fondly,

Dennis

Be here now?

Friday, December 24th, 2021

My friend,

I’ve read your E-Mail over several times and I’ve let my responses roll around in my mind – sort of like clothes tumbling in a dryer; waiting for one response or another to pop to the top and suggest a beginning response.

But mostly what arises for me is the feeling that I am in a thoughtless and immediate space.

And that I’m watching someone in a thinking space; thinking.

I am here pressed up against the plate glass wall of paradox.

The irony of it almost makes me want to laugh. (not at you, my friend, but at the absurdity of the paradox itself).

Have you seen this skit by Bob Newhart?

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=519168745237080

Thinking about our thinking to try to untangle the problems we feel that we have – because of our thinking.

Does that make you smile?

Or, perhaps, does it makes you want to squirm – and think about it a bit? (smile)

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not being cynical, critical or mocking you. I like you far too much for any of that. I highly respect your sincerity in all of this.

But, you are trapped in a paradox; from my POV.

Of course, you could just lead a life of staying busy and not thinking about things; but that will not serve you. You would get nowhere. And just wake up, decades later, no different than you were when you fell asleep.

But, just as surely, if your strategy is to try to sort things out by thinking about them and trying to understand them conceptually, then you will just end up like a conspiracy theorist. Who, after years of trying to see the ‘real truth’, finds nothing but evidence of evidence born of confirmation bias around him in all directions.

The more we think we can think ourselves into ‘seeing life directly and simply’, the further we will get from it.

But there is a place between denial and trying.

Calling it by one word or another is always a risk; because words can lead us back into thinking about words and what they mean.

‘Being’, ‘now’, ‘this’, ‘here’, ‘acceptance’….

Consider dropping the idea of cause and effect and its suggestion that the way forward is to ‘do things’ to ‘get results’.

Cause and effect, subject and object, this and that, now and then, here and there, and on and on. They will all lead you astray.

They all suggest that ‘this’, ‘now’, ‘here’ are not perfect. and they suggest that ‘that’, ‘then’ and ‘there’ might be better.

Again, I am not being critical. But I am trying to get you to see that the idea that ‘things are not perfect’ leads us to think about why things are not perfect. And no amount of subject-object consideration can untie the knot and the paradox of duality.

Two blonds are standing. One on either side of the river. One hollers over to the other, “How do I get over there?” And the other shouts back, “You are already over there!”

As Bob Newhart says in the skit, “Just stop”.

Say ‘yes’. It is what it is. You are you. This moment and how it is, is OK.

This moment, just like the past, is indelible – it cannot be changed. Only the future can be changed.

But we make too much of the distinction between now and the future.

Saying ‘yes’ to this moment’s unfolding does not mean that you give up all hope of manifesting a better future.

It means that you recognize that saying ‘yes ‘ to this moment cannot help but create a better future.

Your attitude, at the point of acceptance, is one and the same as your attitude at the point of manifestation.

There is no point in time other than here and now. So, there cannot be any other place from which we can manifest the future.

But our ideas of cause and effect inevitably pull us into ‘do this now and get that later’ notions.

But, in fact, accepting joy in your life at this moment creates a future with more joy. You are both the creator and the created; once you drop believing in the world being a cause and effect mechanism.

Like your life and your life will become more likable.
Like yourself and you will become more likable.
Trust the future and the future will become more trust-able.
Trust your instincts and your instincts will clarify your seeing.

Just stop.

Quit trying to figure it out. Accept and say ‘yes’ to how it is. Feel gratitude for how it is.

Don’t engage in trying to stop. Just stop.

Don’t try to stop thinking. Just stop thinking about thinking.

Don’t try to say ‘yes’ to how it is. Just say ‘yes’.

Don’t try to ‘feel gratitude’. Just feel it.

There is the trying. And there is the doing. One is cause and effect and the other is just … wordless, here and now, one thing, inseparable.

Let yourself pool into simple awareness that says ‘yes’. And look at the world through those eyes.

Changes

Friday, June 11th, 2021


We all have changed over the years and I’m not an exception.
Maybe I wondered a lot in the past about the future. But I don’t much these days. If I have a motto that expresses what I feel now, it is this: “It is what it is”.
I know we are not getting out of here alive and I feel at peace with the fact.
I know that the more I’ve learned about existence, the more I know I will never understand it. It is increasingly a mystery.
Many years ago, about the time I graduated University, sitting in the screened in porch in the house where Rose and I lived on Dawson Street just around the corner from the Art Theater, you and I were discussing higher consciousness and enlightenment. I recall clearly that you said to me, that if you knew anyone who was going to achieve it (enlightenment), then it would be me. I think you were referring to my unrelenting drive to know and understand things.
Well, all these years later, I think there was some truth in what you said. But like so many things, the imagination of it before you have it, never measures up to what it is like in actual fact.
These days, I don’t think there is ‘enlightenment’ in the glamorous, extreme and magical way most folks think about it. But rather, there is a simple and deep acceptance of “it is what it is”.
There is a dropping of belief in your own Ego and personhood.
There is an untangling of all the voices in your head that were placed there by your family, your church, your school, your society, the media and your friends. And this untangling involves a discarding of all the ‘shoulds’ that permeate us. Dropping them one by one (or adopting them as our own, if they are good) until there is nothing left but our own inherent ‘wants’. And at this point, we can say that we ‘own’ ourselves and that we are the real chooser of what we choose.
There is a steady dropping of beliefs, hopes, fears and opinions. All of these things are simply ways that we try to ‘negotiate’ with existence.
They reflect that we cannot simply accept existence as it is. But rather, that we want shape it to be as we want to it to be.
Existence, seen without beliefs standing between us and it, can be a frightening thing. A thing of mystery, omnipotence and a thing that is utterly unaware of our existence.
So, we ‘fear’ when it may be as we don’t want it to be. And we ‘hope’ that it will be as we want it to be. And we form ‘beliefs’ and opinions about how it is.
Belief systems like reincarnation, Islam and Christianity.
And these belief systems seem to frame the nakedness of reality and make it a more palatable thing for us to deal with. Our beliefs give us the feeling that there is purpose and meaning to our lives and that existence cares about us.
Least you think I’ve fallen into a Nihilist hole and cannot get out, it isn’t so.
Day to day, subjectively, I feel like one of the luckiest people I’ve ever met. I deeply love my life and how it is going. I feel deeply blessed – though I haven’t a clue why it is so.
But I’m not in Mary Poppins land. When I look at the world, I see it is a huge, and getting worse, mess. We humans are showing sure signs of moving towards a global disaster and a major reset. I can see this as clearly as I see the letters on the screen in front of me.
So then, the question might be what can we do about it? And I think the probable answer is, ‘Not much”.
We are not the authors of it nor will we be the ones to repair it. We are simply the ones born here and now and who will see what unfolds. It is what it is.
So how can we still enjoy our lives in the midst of all this?
Cherish being alive and try to make someone else happy – just because. After all the complexity of our university educated lives, this must seem far too simple.
But we are just like fish leaping free for a moment from the surface of the sea of mortality. We take ourselves seriously and that is a lot of the problem we create for ourselves and our potential happiness.
It is what it is. Let it be as it is and say ‘yes’ to it. Just as we did when the acid began to get into us and disassembled our egos and made us feel everything directly and intensely.
We can resist or we can say ‘yes’. We can be unhappy that reality isn’t as we want it to be. Or we can embrace it ‘as it is’ and treasure the moments we still have left.
The voices that tell us that we cannot simply stop and accept things as they are are not ours. They are ‘shoulds’ still operating within us after all these years.

Awareness of Awareness

Tuesday, May 18th, 2021

18 May 2021

A friend of mine sent me an interesting article the other day. It was entitled, “Persuading the Body to Regenerate its Limbs“.

It concerned a researcher named Michael Levin who is intensely interested in how electrical currents help shape our bodies. He calls it the ‘Bioelectric Code‘. He has been able to convincingly demonstrate how the mechanisms, some lower creatures use to grow and repair themselves, can be significantly altered through the judicious use of electric currents. And further that these changes are due solely to the introduction of the electric currents themselves; as the genomes of the creatures are not touched.

We’ve known for a long time that electric fields are an integral part of biology. Cells have ion channels that allow their inner and outer charge environments to be balanced in ways that are optimal for the cell’s health and functioning. Cells signal back and forth with other cells via electrical impulses via axons and dendrites. It is becoming ever more apparent now that cells employ the bioelectric spaces between them as a kind of inter-cellular Internet; they use it to build intricate and extensive communication networks that control the transcription of genes, the contraction of muscles, and the release of hormones.

The concepts of how creatures develop are moving away from earlier and simpler paradigms in which biological science visualized that genes defined proteins and proteins combined to create cells and that was much of the story of biology.

But we’ve known for some time that large parts of the morphogenesis puzzle were missing. How and why do some stem cells become livers and others become arms or eyes?

It was tempting, early on, to imagine that hidden inside of our genomes were intricate instructions, which we hadn’t discovered yet, which guided a entity’s development from its initial zygotic stage to its full expression as a mature creature.

But matters have turned out to be far more complex than that.

The things that have been accomplished in Levin’s lab are pretty amazing. One of his postdocs noted that in frogs, certain electrical patterns developed in areas where later features like faces and eyes would develop.

As an experiment, the postdoc imposed the electrical pattern that predicted an eye onto the developing frog’s stomach and, amazingly, an eye appeared there. And, once the eye was present, the frog’s nervous system began building optic nerves to connect the new eye to the brain by way of the spinal cord. Clearly, Levin and his students are onto something.

But, exactly what they are on to is still under debate; as you will see if you read the paper itself.

Levin’s former advisor, Clifford Tabin, says he is “agnostic” about how Levin’s “bioelectricity” should be understood. Levin would have bioelectricity be the be-all-and-end-all which largely explains how morphogenesis unfolds.

But others, like Daniel Dennett think that there are also many other moving parts required to make up the full picture. He feels that genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, bioelectricity, biomechanics, anatomy, psychology, and probably still other still unrecognized factors, are all acting together; each playing an integral role, to control and shape the unfolding of biological morphogenesis.

If you’ve read this far, you are probably wondering, by now, what any of this has to do with this piece’s title, “Awareness of Awareness“?

Well, we’re going to get to that. But there are still more pieces to tie in.

Dennett thought that genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, bioelectricity, biomechanics, anatomy, psychology, and probably still other unrecognized factors, are all acting together; each playing an integral role, to control and shape the unfolding of biological morphogenesis.

His list would indicate that the interactions between cells involve a lot more than just the magic of bioelectricity as Levin envisions it. But I don’t think we’re done yet drawing in relevant factors.

As many simpler units come together, Emergent Properties can come forth.

Ants, which are quite simple in and of themselves, combine into colonies which have quite complex behaviors. And it is these new behaviors which seemingly manifest from nowhere. No amount of study of individual ants would ever give a researcher the ability to predict the behaviors and properties of ant colonies. You can read more about all of this in Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop.

So, we have all the factors Dennett mentioned as ways that cells intercommunicate. And we also have a vertical functional assemblage that progresses from a few local cells into larger groups of cells organized as specific organs like livers, eyes, brains and hearts.

And through all of these organs and their inner organizations and their external communications and co ordinations are all the interactive communication technologies Dennett listed and probably more.

It gets harder and harder to hang on to to all these points at once. One strategy open to us is to realize, through logic, decomposition and analysis, some sort of a simplified picture of what our biological beings are.

But another and deeper insight is to see all of this coordinated movement of many parts as an all-at-once flow that is happening in the immediate now. A non-dualistic immediacy that has no notion of, nor need for, our decompositional analysis in order to simply do what it does.

Now, we are getting close to the point of this article, “Awareness of Awareness“.

If small groups of cells, as Levin asserts and I’m sure Dennett would agree, tend to coordinate their activities through bioelectric fields (and all of the other listed mechanisms) for their own greater good, then wouldn’t such a beneficial organizational mechanism repeat at all levels of organization?

Does not the heart regulate it own activities for the benefit of the heart, directly, and for the benefit of the overall organism, indirectly? And would not every sub-component do the same for itself and for the overall organism?

And what of the sense of self that pervades your overall organism? Is this not the highest level of communication among your disparate parts? Does it not act for the highest good of the organism it represents?

Does it matter if we can say if it is bioelectric or any particular mix of the other contributory items that Dennett mentioned?

From here, a hundred roads and a hundred questions beckon us. Questions about awareness vs. self-awareness. About duality and non-duality. About Free Will and Determinism. But all of them are arising from the dualistic side of us. The mind of cognition and abstraction. The side that decomposes in order to attempt understanding.

But none of that, as endlessly fascinating as it is to the mind, is what I’m interested in here.

I want to talk about the sense of self we feel when our awareness is aware of itself and aware of this material being which hosts the awareness.

Just as a few cells communicate and coordinate among themselves, think of the communication and coordination that occurs when you sit for a moment and empty your mind and let a feeling of peace and well being permeate through you – all of you.

Think of the signal sent for the benefit of the sender when you stop and consciously give thanks for all of the good things in your life.

Think of the message you are sending when you gaze at your body in the mirror and give sincere thanks and gratitude for this material being that hosts your awareness.

Truly, our awareness helps to maintain the boundaries of our existence. Not just because of its flight or fight capabilities but also because it coordinates and directs the sense of well being that serves to optimize our continued existence in the body.

To get to this place where these effects can be beneficently directed, much of the collateral confusion that arises, as a side effect of the mind’s conceptual, linguistic and abstraction capabilities, has to be discriminated and intentionally isolated.

It isn’t that these mental abilities are not valuable. They are immensely valuable and we would not have them if it were not so. But they are tools – they are not what we are.

The self aware, but untrained, mind is like an echo chamber or a mirror. And it is almost inevitable that our burgeoning awareness should mistake the contents of the mind (the concepts, the language and the abstractions) for itself. Many of these contents are instilled into us before we are mature enough to defend ourselves and to question and possibly reject what is being imprinted upon us.

At some point, if we are lucky, we become mature and independent enough to control the further inward flow of ideas. And then, if we experience unease at all the inner dichotomies and inconsistencies, we may begin to sort through the mess.

And, as the mess is cleared and we begin to increasingly identify with our awareness of awareness and to dis-identify with the contents of our minds and our egos, we can being to focus on the message we are sending when we consider ourselves and our bodies and give sincere thanks and gratitude for this material being that hosts us.

It is awareness intentionally giving loving concern and integration to the physical entity that hosts it for the mutual benefit of both.

Let us make a small aside here, to acknowledge all the religions, masters, schools and traditions which have tried unrelentingly for thousands of years to awaken us from the illusion that we are the contents of our minds. And who promised us, that if we could but realize the primacy of our awareness as being what we are, that we should then experience a deeper and more pervasive sense of subjective peace.

I am deeply grounded in science. And I am also deeply grounded in non-duality. I appreciate the power of the mind as a tool. And I also appreciate the immediacy and essential truth that manifests when I stop my mind and see this existence as an immediate and inseparable flow; that I am an inseparable part of.

Following the threads implied in the “Persuading the Body to Regenerate its Limbs” paper has enabled me to cobble a tentative connection between how the physical systems of our biological bodies function to communicate, coordinate and preserve themselves and the ideas of higher consciousness that arise from the meditative, spiritual and non-duality worlds in which this same preservation of what we are is deeply honored.

Letter to a Grandson

Thursday, August 30th, 2018

My dear Grandson,

I want to wish you a very happy birthday. To say that you are showing every sign of being the brightest light of our extended family would not be an exaggeration.

Someday, if not already, you will realize how immensely blessed your life is. The time and place where you were born, your parents, your grandparents; Bernie and Sally, your faith, your intelligence, your curiousity, your excellent body and mind and so many other factors have made you lucky among the billions of we human beings. But, above and beyond that, you have not rested on your luck but, rather, you have taken your good opportunities and used them well. Brilliantly even, I think.

I am deeply curious to see what you will make of your life.

If I might presume to offer you some hard-won advice from my own experiences?

Always question things. Do not simply believe what others tell you. And even if you’ve questioned a thing and think it is good, Go back, in a few years, and give it another good look and see if it still makes sense.

It is natural that the people who teach you give you their best in terms of facts and interpretations of those facts. They are good and sincere people. But there is little that is absolute in this world. History is largely written by the victors and the laws of science are constantly being refined and, at times, reworked as better understandings are gleaned. And, of psychology and philosophy, one can only say that it is as if we have a small candle in our hand as we move into a darkness that is far bigger than we can imagine.

Humans seem intelligent and rational but that is largely an illusion. Compared to the complexity of the existence we find ourselves in, our intelligence is small. And the more we understand, the more we understand how little we understand. The very ideas of who we are and what our place is in this universe are to be questioned and questioned again. And, with sincere inquiry, the scales will fall from your eyes again and again.

Truly, we live in a place of infinite mystery. And what we think we understand today will be shown again and again to be an illusion tomorrow. But, this is not bad because every illusion we drop or see through takes us another step closer to the truth – whatever that might be.

But know that the more you trust yourself and your own vision and the less you trust the vision of the crowd, the more you will move into a form of isolation from your fellows. It is inevitable. Measure yourself by your own yardstick.

I like the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. God said they should not eat the Apples from the tree of knowledge. But, tempted, Eve did and they were thrown from the Garden of Eden.

My interpretation of this story is that once you have chosen the path of knowledge, you cannot un-see the things you will come to understand. You will become responsible for what you know. So, what is the saying? “Stay out of the kitchen, if you can’t stand the heat.”

There are thousands of signals hitting us daily. Suggestions about what to believe, how to look, how to act, how to speak, how to dress for success and an and on. Nearly all of them are manipulative. It is rare, indeed, that anyone would sent out such signals without their own motivations and self-interests as the cause of their doing so.

I am not saying this with distain towards them. This is a natural thing. Almost everyone is acting in their own self-interest. When you realize this, it will free you from so much that most people are confused and mesmerized by.

Instead, watch for people you admire. Study them and try to understand what they think and why they act as they do. And when you see things you like in others, make them your own. Intentional self-creation is a powerful art that is little practiced in this world.

Be kind, always, to those who understand less than you do. People may or may not be doing the best that they can. But, really, it is not your business because the only one you are responsible for is you.

And when you want to inspire others, act by example. It is usually far more powerful than words.

And be rigorous in avoiding the “quid pro quo’ traps. Never give a gift, if you are thinking about what you will get back. Give to others what you would like to receive. But do it with no expectation or thought that it will change their behavior.

Do the things you do because they are inherently right in-and-of-themselves and need no further justification.

Think about the differences between your ‘shoulds’ and your ‘wants’ and strive, over time, to weld them into one thing so that you can be of one mind.

Intelligent and inquiring men and woman have been seeking to understand this existence for many thousands of years. Much of their wisdom, from back in our deep past, has been swept aside in this modern age; as we humans have been quite impressed with the new worlds or science and technology that we’ve created.

And make no mistake, much of what was believed in the past was made of superstition and myth.

But, there was genuine wisdom as well.

It is no coincidence that many brilliant, famous men of letters and great achievements in our modern world turn towards the ancients as they come to the latter part of their lives.

In spite of the fact that the ancients lived without science and were surrounded by superstition and myth, some of them spent much of their lives seeking into questions like: what is consciousness, what is existence and what is the meaning of all this that we see around us?

The stories of what they thought and their conclusions still exist; though they are mostly ignored by our world of technology obsessed humans. These are, collectively, called the Mystics, the Enlightened, the Saints and many other names. The holy books of the world’s major religions are filled with their insights; woven in among the superstition and myth.

Someday, when you have cut an arc through all that this modern life offers you, and success, wealth and freedom are yours, then perhaps you will still be motivated by deep curiosity and the urge to know, “What else is there?”

I leave you then with this small gem that I find myself thinking about most days:

If you understand,
Things are just as they are.
If you don’t understand,
things are just as they are.

~ a Zen saying ~

With much love to you,

Grandfather Dennis

On Enlightenment

Wednesday, January 10th, 2018

Non-Duality, Enlightenment, Awakening, Nirvana, … or whatever we want to call it, is a promised-land Shangri-la that’s out there. It has all sorts of powerful and mystical associations that swirl around it. It is one of the preeminent mythologies that has circulated among humankind for thousands of years. Gurus, books, meditation groups, charlatans, respected masters, and the practices and scriptures of several faiths, have, and are, all calling us to ‘the’ path; ‘a’ path, ‘their’ path, the ‘true’ path. And all of them are advising us what to do to ‘get there’. And all of them have different stories and different advice and a lot of it seems pretty cryptic and faith-based.

And, in the end, until you actually ‘get there’ no one can really tell you precisely what ‘it’ is.

The reasons for all the confusion are basically two.

The first reason is that experiencing ‘it’ is quite different from how most of us experience our lives. And it is not easy to transition from our normal/default experiences to the type of experience ‘it’ offers. It is difficult because to make the transition, much of what you think is real, who you think you are, and what you currently believe in – all has to be abandoned.

The second reason is that the state one obtains seems so different, at least initially, is that folks all down through history have idealized it. They have put it on pedestal and elevated it to something magical, mysterious, special. All of this reverence implies that it is somehow discontinuous with our normal life and experiences. They’ve made it into a thing to be spoken about in hushed voices.

But, this idealization of ‘it’ is unnecessary and it ends up obscuring things. Yes, it is difficult to ‘get there’ and, yes, it is a profoundly different experience once one does ‘get there’. But these difficulties and differences are still all just part of the full range of experiences available to us here in this existence that we find ourselves in. There’s nothing magical, supernatural nor discontinuous about ‘it’.

The reverence about ‘it’ seems to arise because many seekers experience a long struggle as they try to drop their beliefs about themselves, the reality around them and to abandon their ego-centric point-of-view. Such struggles can literally take years of meditation and effort. And, after such a long effort, when they finally do ‘get it’, they often feel as if they’ve made a massive breakthrough into a new awareness that is new and discontinuous with everything they’ve ever known before; and quite special. But this is not true.

And to compound the problem, when they have made their breakthrough, the things they begin to say can seem exceeding mysterious and hard to understand for the rest of us. And this leads us to think that they have, indeed, gone ‘somewhere else’ discontinuous with the world we see around us.

They will say things like, “I meditated and studied for years and, in the end, when I finally awoke, I found that I really hadn’t gone anywhere and that there never had been anywhere to go nor anything to do to achieve true realization except to see that I was already there and to stop trying to get there.”

After hearing such a mysterious pronouncement, the mystique and the mystery just grows for the rest of us.

I think there’s a lot of unnecessary confusion about all of this. Non-Duality, Enlightenment, Awakening, Nirvana, … or whatever we want to call it, is just another way that the awareness in each of us can be experienced. It is not mysterious, mystical, discontinuous or magical.

As the transition of an awareness filled with egoic beliefs migrates towards being an awareness that is empty of such beliefs, its regard for the existence it finds itself in is more and more infused with the truth that “It is what it is”.

But, awareness hasn’t gone any place. It has just exercised its option to become “…an awareness that is empty of such beliefs….”

Advice to the Guardian

Sunday, July 19th, 2015

– Recently, the Guardian Newspaper, which I read, asked its readership what it should be doing.  The occasion of asking was the posting of a new editor-in-chief there.  I wrote them the following:

– dennis

= = = = = = = = = = = = = =

What’s missing in today’s news is a sense that it is unbiased. The very fact that the Guardian seems to report a number of stories that fly in the face of how the powers that be would like to see the world explained to the average man, speaks well of the paper’s independence.

But left open are still the questions of (1) whether or not you are simply recognizing an under-served part of the market and serving it. (2) whether you are focusing on a type of sensationalism that works because it goes against the grain or (3) you are actually trying to report the news in an unbiased manner because that is what best serves all of us.

Many of us perceive your reporting as arising from motive (3). If that is so, you need to recognize that this is what makes you special and you need to accentuate it, defend it and promote it. But most of all, you need to really do it by walking your talk in everything you do. Build your brand on it.

In a world where the reader can trust nothing they read in the media because it all seems to be shrouded in spin serving various factions, the reader will simply give up and society’s self-awareness will fragment and dim.

Humanity does have a right to clear, unambiguous information about the state of the world. And we have this right whether or not is it codified anywhere. People who speak the truth, in spite of the peril it costs them, know this instinctively. And those of us who align ourselves with the good of all, rather than the personal good of the few, recognize such truth-speaking as heroism and as being the best of us.

Be that paper and be it with a vengeance.

Spiritual Marriage – Mukti’s awakening

Saturday, July 18th, 2015

– This in an interview with Mukti, wife of Adyashanti, about her awakening experience.  It reminds me of some lines in Dylan’s song, ‘Tangled Up in Blue‘.

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue

– There was a time, a few years ago now, when I meditated daily, and sometimes deeply.  

– One of my most memorable experiences took me to the place Mukti described here.  I characterized it as ‘stopping time’ but I recognize it now as the same place she’s talking about.  Movement ceases, is’ness is all there is, and the sense of being a timeless and empty mirror is complete.

– Something always stayed with me from that time. And, someday, I will return to that place and drink of it again.

– dennis

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

~Spiritual Marriage~

Q. Tell me something about your background and your understanding of spiritual marriage.

MUKTI: That which is awake was calling since I was very, very young. I was raised Irish Catholic and felt that a love of God and Christ was foundational to my life. There was a tremendous yearning to know God. When I was seven, my parents found the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, and, with that, new perspectives opened up for me. As a young adult, I heard a talk by one of Yogananda’s disciples, Brother Anandamoy, on spiritual marriage. I must have listened to this talk on tape dozens and dozens of times. And the one line that deeply penetrated me was, “The purpose of spiritual marriage is to find that the One in me and the One in my husband or wife is the same One in all of life.” I knew this was my deepest yearning.

Later, soon after I was married to Stephen Gray, now Adyashanti, we attended a satsang (teaching) with a teacher named Gangaji. Right away Adya got up and spoke with her from his perspective. I could see that the dialogue that ensued was from a shared, awakened perspective of knowing Oneness, and that it was a dialogue in which I was not able to participate. As I witnessed their exchange, something came fiercely alive inside me, saying, “In order to have a true spiritual marriage, a true meeting of Adya, I must know this perspective.” And my seeing this didn’t come from a place of jealousy. It just came from a knowing that this must be—it was as though within myself, without literal words, my Being was saying, “This must come to pass. So that I too can meet my husband from this perspective.”

This knowing kicked off a real fire within me. In the past, I’d come from traditions of faith and trusting in the guidance of a savior or guru. But this was different. I think it was the first moment when something in me knew that it was time for me to be truly serious, to truly engage the issue of realization for myself.

Q: To become what you were witnessing in them…

MUKTI: Become that and to no longer waste time. It was as though something just clicked inside me that took me out of a sense of “Whatever God wills” to an intense inquiry: “What is God? What is this?” Before that, when I had a savior or a guru, I would place my trust in their wisdom, their divinity.

Q: Their enlightenment.

MUKTI: Their enlightenment. I believed that if I emulated them as best I could or followed the teachings that they’d set out, then maybe I would come to know what they know. But in this moment, what happened was it went from following the teacher to “this must be.” There was just something inside me that made not knowing no longer an option, and in that sense it was as though time had run out. Sharing Adya’s perspective had to be in order for this marriage to be what it must be for me, the only thing that will be satisfying for me.

It shifted from wanting to know God to seeing God in these two people interacting, to seeing that they looked out of those eyes of God. And my saying to myself, “I will not be satisfied unless this is my perspective,” changed something. It no longer was about wanting to know God (as an object). I wanted to be that. So this inquiry began…“What is that? What is that perspective?” And the word that Gangaji and Adya were using for the One was “Truth.” So, it ignited something new. As opposed to wanting to know love or bliss or the joy of union with God, the movement came to wanting to know the truth of that perspective, of Oneness.

And so, this became my inquiry, a very, very alive inquiry for months. And I had to do it for myself. The outward, more routine spiritual activities I did, such as attending services or meditations, became arenas where I would dive into these questions. I think it’s important to emphasize that something shifted inside me where I had to know. It’s not something that I can take credit for. Something in me just turned.

And yet, one of the distinguishing features of that moment was that the marriage itself became part of the motivation to say, “I can’t stop here. I’ve got to go where I can meet this being where he is.”

If I’m going to be a married person in this world, I have got to know what true marriage is. That conviction was fierce within me. It just had to be. So, that was the drive. Then, after maybe five months passed, I attended my very first silent retreat, which was also Adya’s first retreat teaching as a teacher, in July 1997. I was the retreat leader in charge of the logistics of the event. A few days into the retreat he gave a talk on “stillness.” I knew that he was speaking from a perspective of stillness that I didn’t know. My mind had an idea of stillness, but I could tell it wasn’t matching up with how he was speaking of it. And the way he was speaking of it was mysterious to me. It was unfamiliar but intriguing.

When the day ended and people had gone on to bed, I stayed in the hall to meditate and really dove into that question “What is stillness?” “What is it?” And that was the inquiry that brought me into direct experience of stillness, which flowered into a knowledge that that is Self. That is the nature of Self. Although stillness moves as form, it is the one constant. It is the One. Stillness is the perspective of permanence, of that which does not come and go, even as it comes and goes as form. I think, part of the inquiry that may be of interest to people was that I truly didn’t know what Stillness was. I had completely set aside any ideas that I had about it. And with all of my senses I followed the sense of stillness in my body, and really traced all movements within my body as I was sitting, until my body became more still than I’d ever known. And then my attention went to the outer world, and I sensed what Stillness was in the outer world.

Q: Tracing outer form back to whatever was behind it, which was non-form, the non-movement behind movement. In that inquiry—this is just more of a personal question—did you feel guided by any kind of inner voice or not—how did that tracing phenomenon happen? Was something telling you how to do this or was there just a settling in and of itself?

MUKTI: I did not hear a voice. I guess it just seemed the most obvious place to start…to sense stillness as I was sitting in meditation. Perhaps because some of my main teachers had come from traditions of meditation and had had some of their innermost dialogues with the Divine in meditation, I was drawn to meditate. When I wanted to know something of this order, I would sit and meditate. That was my training. And so, when I went to sit, I sat in meditation posture, as was part of that training.

So, the outer body, of course. was still.

It was still, but I always had experiences of really not truly being still inside. But on this evening, it just seemed obvious that the first place to look was “Is stillness here? Even in the midst of activity of mind and body?”

Including breath, heartbeat, thought, feeling, sensation—all that moves, changes.

Yes. So it was not an inner voice but a natural curiosity to start with, a curiosity about “What is most immediate in my own direct experience of stillness of body-mind?” And the inquiry itself invited a dropping of that question into my Being, not posing it to my mind.

Q: The question, “What is Stillness?”

MUKTI: Yes. “What is Stillness?” I dropped the question “What is stillness?” into my being, into my innermost being, down into my gut. Then I began to sink into a sense of stillness in my body, and all the movement within my own form began to settle and become quieter and quieter, and there remained a very quiet, still watching of all this settling.

Q: And then, there is still another leap beyond the perspective of the watching?

MUKTI: Yes. As my energies were withdrawn from movement, that which is aware of movement became prominent and was experienced as stillness. It also became clear that there was no perceivable difference between that which was aware of movement and all that was in motion. One could say that subject and object were experienced as one.

At the time, this did not register as an insight of oneness, it simply was what I experienced that evening…at which point I decided that any more efforting to inquire would be the antithesis of stillness, and so I went to bed. I was fully aware of all of the sounds of the outer world, and I went into deep sleep which later, when I reflected back upon it, was unlike any other sleep I’d had in that I was completely unaware of the world of form at a certain point. I don’t recall even moving. Then I heard the morning wakeup bell, and I went about my functions of the day. I don’t remember much of them to speak of, other than that I fulfilled my duties—but without a sense of self-consciousness, without any sense of self-reflecting. I’m using both of those terms to say that I was not aware of a sense of “me.” Then, after breakfast a woman bowed in “namaste” to me. In fact, she did a complete prostration before me and that was when a sense of the awareness that was looking out of my eyes at the world of form recognized itself as emptiness. And the laughter! I felt utter delight at this magic trick of what is completely empty and without form appearing before my eyes as form and appearing specifically as the form of a woman who was bowing to me as if I was something.

Q: I remember you said that her ” namaste” was no more significant than if she had bowed to a blank place in the room.

Right, or bowed to a toilet! It was amazing that she actually believed that there was someone in front of her. I mean, it would be as funny as one hair on your head jumping up and bowing to another hair on your head and dancing back and forth, bowing, worshiping each other. It was just delightful and humorous although ultimately those words fall short.

In the moment of the bow, in the moment of somebody in front of me interacting with me as though I were a something, all of a sudden the heightened awareness popped in that I’m not a something; I’m emptiness looking out of this form. And in that moment emptiness was born as an experience. What I am, what life is, what you are, what everything is, was seen as all that is, the one reality. All of this is being perceived from emptiness and clearly there was no “me” in this experience—this experience of myself as no-self or emptiness. And then, as the day went on, that experience opened, registering in my human consciousness as if to say, “This emptiness is this fullness that I’m looking at. This formlessness behind my eyes is what’s looking and is what’s looking back at me. This formlessness is this form, and it’s all arising as one thing. That which is perceiving, that which is sensing life, and the movement of life, the forms—all of them—are arising simultaneously.”

Q: How about after this experience of awakening out of identification with form—how were you different?

MUKTI: Some of the conditioned mind, concepts that separate or cause a sense of a “me,” that create a center or position in relation to life—some of this returned. But a lot of it just mysteriously dissolved. It’s the seeing that has the power to dissolve conditioning.

Q: In the work that I do with people, sometimes insight alone is enough for a pattern to dissolve. More often, however, insight is not enough. Without the experience of awakening, patterns have much more tenacity. I would imagine that, after the experience of awakening, when conditioned mind arises, there is a new perspective that lets you know “this isn’t real”?

Yes.

MUKTI: So, the conditioned thoughts and beliefs have a much shorter lifespan.

It’s more efficient. I guess what I was really left with was a sense that “me” lives only in thoughts that are believed.

Q: So, in a sense, having awakened to the reality that what you are does not depend on believing the thoughts you have about yourself, those beliefs can drop away more quickly. Prior to awakening, we might investigate a defensive behavior pattern (for example, avoiding intimacy) and find the beliefs on which it is based (for example, a belief that “If I let someone close to me, I’ll be rejected”), but there is still a tendency to justify the belief because of an underlying assumption that the “me” has substance and can be hurt by others. Whereas once you’ve had an experience that who you really are doesn’t depend on a “me,” and that who you really are cannot be hurt by anyone, then, when the feeling of “me” being threatened arises, we can question it from a whole different perspective, which allows it to dissolve more quickly.

MUKTI: Yes, it does. And, there’s no desire—at least I don’t experience a desire—to make it go any faster. When there’s a dawning that it’s all yourself—even the illusion—it’s not something that needs be rooted out. But there’s a natural curiosity to see what the illusion is. There’s this whole fundamental aspect of consciousness—meaning life, reality—that moves to know itself in form, even if that form is a belief or a feeling of threat or suffering. There also seems, from everything that I’ve seen, to be inherent in all of experience a movement towards freedom. So if there’s, let’s say, a painful emotion; that emotion responds. It moves to be seen, felt, heard, experienced. In a sense it’s born to be experienced, and once it’s seen and experienced directly, not suppressed and not embellished, but seen in its exquisite suchness, just as it is, it has served its own life’s function, and it dissolves. You could say it’s been freed.

There is a felt sense that life is living itself, and it’s showing up as feelings. It’s showing up as everything, which includes feelings and beliefs; those are directly experienced, and then life goes on. I’m free to experience these things as they arise. It’s showing up for the whole thing, as all of it. Sometimes people are kind of in a hurry to be free of things, and they miss the freedom of being a human being, of getting to experience the miracle that anything can even occur out of nothing. I want to add as a reminder that everybody’s totally unique. Some people may experience some of the things I’ve shared that happened to me after awakening, such as a greater capacity to see personal beliefs and patterns which cause suffering; yet many people see such patterns long before awakening. There are those common questions “How does awakening unfold? or What does it look like?” Well, it can look all sorts of ways—from a more gradual dawning of what’s real to a sudden dawning of what’s real.

Perhaps there’s seeing an object and knowing oneself as that object, or as another person, or as all of life, or as nothingness. Perhaps there is a dis-identification from the sense of “me,” or perhaps the “me” is seen to not exist at all. In the absence of “me” one may know what they are not. This knowledge can exist with or without the knowledge of what one is. In other words, there are all kinds of awakenings and seeings, my story is just one. There are no two alike.

Q: Can you tell me anything more about what has changed in your relationship with Adya?

MUKTI: I think the biggest thing that this shift of perspective affected, certainly initially, was how I heard things and how I communicated. A lot of my life’s experience had been that of wanting to be understood and of defending how I acted in the world. For example, feeling like I needed to justify why I did what I did or to explain why I was having the experience that I was having, so that I could be understood or accepted. And a lot of that fell away, so I was able to also listen in a way that wasn’t listening through that defensiveness. That was a huge change. At the time of the awakening I was in a program studying Chinese medicine. As I student I thought I had every ailment that I studied! But because the fundamental fear of death fell away with the awakening, it changed my whole relationship to health. As a result, a lot of the conversations I would have with Adya about my health just stopped. This freed up a lot in terms of energy and time that Adya and I spent together.

I’ve always had this sense of Adya, especially when he was a new teacher; he always felt like a real maverick to me. It wasn’t too long after that movie Top Gun came out, and in that movie there were these people who fly fighter planes and they just respond like this (snapping her fingers). They possess some internal navigational skills that are highly instinctual and intuitive. And Adya felt very much like that; he’d respond immediately to what life offered, and easily reverse direction. Now, within myself I feel that the more this awakening is deepening and unfolding, the more I have a sense of suppleness and ability to shift more quickly. Life is turning this way, “Okay,” and then you turn this way. And then comes its next curve or turn, and it feels a little bit more like somehow the whole ride is being ridden.

Q: You said that the point of spiritual marriage, is for the One in you to recognize the One in the other and together to come to the knowledge of the Oneness that we are. Is this now more available to you?

MUKTI: Yes, to see that the One in me and the One in my husband, in this case, is the same One in all of life. So, it’s not that we need to see that together. But I think the recognition that that’s the same One in all of life came at the exact same time as seeing that it’s the same One in my husband.

Q: Do you think you serve the same function for Adya?

MUKTI: Everything serves that, absolutely.

Spiritual Marriage: An Interview with Mukti
By Susan Thesenga

To the original:  

 

Some personal communications

Wednesday, July 15th, 2015

I was talking with some friends of mine, recently, on-line about whether or not Representative Democracies are the best option we have to deal with the world’s increasingly critical problems.

One of them said said:

“Frankly, I think representative democracy is the best tool available to deal with modern 21st Century social and public policy given that democracy is very imperfect form of government but the all the alternatives are far less desirable. Of course, I am all ears if political theorists and politicians can conceive and implement a new form of governance than those over the last several millennia.”

And I agreed with that assertion, though I found it disappointing when juxtaposed with something else that he said (and to which I also agreed). He said:

“Regardless of governance type, I unable to imagine how public policy at the international level needed for global problems, such as climate change, can be addressed rapidly and effectively. The problem is simply too complex, the decisional bodies involved too diverse, and the combined resources required too enormous to do so.”

Earlier in the exchange, this friend had written a detailed discussion of how Representative Democracies work, and in that he referred to the fact that the actors at all levels in such Democracies are all (or almost all) making their choices based on their self interests. This includes the voters on the street, the elected officials and the lobbyists who represent special interests.

From this, I get that Representative Democracies are a method of governance in which competing self-interests have achieved a state of relatively stable balance.

But, self-interests are not the only possible inputs to governance.

Common interests could, and should, be valid inputs as well.

Indeed, we as a species are failing to come to grips with the problems we are facing globally because we haven’t been able to find a way to transcend our self-interests to work for our common good.

Of course the following criticisms of the common good idea could be raised at once:

1. It is extremely unlikely that any group or groups focused on common interests could wrest the power to set governmental policy away from the intrenched self-interests.

2. And hasn’t this been tried before? And wasn’t it called, in its purest form, Communism?

I haven’t any answer for the first criticism. Though I would love to hear some good ideas.

I do note that within our current Representative Democratic systems, there are many NGOs operating. And many of those are focused on issues concerning our common good. But I also note that while they are sincere, and while they do good work, they are nowhere near to wresting control away from the forces that focus on self-interests.

On the second point, I would assert that Communism is not the only system we can formulate that holds our common interests as its highest goal.

A system of governance could be conceived in which there was a Prime Directive (i.e., the highest priority) of governance. And that Prime Directive would be to maximize the quality of life for all of us; both for now and into the indefinite future.

That would certainly be in our global common interest. Singapore, is perhaps the one place I’ve seen that seems to have a glimmer of this.

But beyond the primacy of the Prime Directive, we would all be free to do as we pleased; each in accordance with his or her own special interests.

So, for example, if someone wanted to form a company to go out cut trees for wood, the government would allow them to do so – so long as they did not cut trees faster than they could grow back and so long as nothing they did resulted in a net degradation of the environment we all share.

Capitalists could still be Capitalists.

But their possible activities would be constrained by the Prime Directive if those activities came into conflict with the Prime Directive.

In other words, the common good would always trump self-interest. But, so long as the common good was not threatened, the freedom to do as you like would be guaranteed (Probably as the Second Directive).

I think you can all see the basic idea here which is that what we lack with our current Representative Democracies is any meaningful acknowledgement of our common interests.

And the lack of this puts us in a very untenable place indeed when you consider my friend’s two quotes, above.

—–

Postscript:

After I wrote this, another friend pointed out to me an idea that’s been known and discussed in academia and elsewhere for some time.  It is called “The Tragedy of the Commons” (see Here).  And, his comment was that this idea correlated, quite significantly with the ideas I’ve been exploring here.

So, I went and read the Wikipedia article on The Tragedy of the Common and I quite agreed – there’s a good match.

Something almost changed my life today

Monday, June 22nd, 2015

Backdrop

Guns and violence, as they seem to appear daily on the American stage, are anathema to civil societies.  Indeed, America is mocked and ridiculed among all the advanced nations for the degree of gun violence that unfolds there so frequently.  Witness the Dylann Roof story that’s unfolded in just the last day.

I get it.  I really do.

But I also find some logic in the idea that citizens have the right to be armed in defense of themselves; whether it be against their government – or their peers.

Unfortunately, the way that logic of the Second Amendment works out in practice in America makes a mockery of the idea.  I think many of the people with access to guns in America are simply too stupid, opinionated and volatile  to understand the purpose and sense of the Amendment and have perverted it into something else entirely.

All of this came to mind for me today because of something that happened that could have changed my life in a moment.

A premonition

We were coming up from the Crémazie Metro Station on our way to catch the bus to the Rockland shopping centre when we heard a commotion behind us.  There were loud out of control voices, -bully-boy voices.  As we were moving up the escalators, Colette looked back to see what was going on and said that she hoped all what ever it was wasn’t coming our way.  I thought the same thing.

When we got to the top, where the ticket turnstiles are, I thought I’d go over and mention to the ticket agent inside the secure office (bullet proof glass and etc.) that there was some sort of a commotion below and that they might want to alert security.  But, just as I was approaching, a woman stepped up to talk with the agent and I didn’t want to wait or butt in.  And Colette was already moving up the next escalator to the street level becausee she hadn’t seen me turn aside.

We got outside and walked to the bus stop and got into a line that was forming there.  We both glanced behind us but nothing was happening so we forgot it.

In a few minutes, the bus arrived and we all got on.  But, once everyone was on, the driver waited.  Apparently he waits to leave on a specific schedule.

Reality finds us

We bagan to hear the commotion again now behind the bus and approaching.  And, in a minute, a very large and solidly built man with short hair and a mean look appeared.  With him was a second fellow that looked like an a animated scarecrow.  Both of them were, apparently, seriously blown away on drugs of some sort. And ‘P’ or Meth, as some people know it, was the drug I would suspect.

The bigger one was simply belligerent to  everyone.  The scarecrow just followed him and clapped his hands with some sort of demented glee at everything the other one did.  But I could see that under the scarecrow’s performance, that he was somehow the vassal of the larger man and that he was terrified of him.

It was clear, that the larger man was looking for anyone to stand up to him or defy him.  He wanted a violent confrontation.  His body language and eyes were full of it.

He walked to the side of our bus, where the front entry door was still open, and stood just outside and began to address the driver.  Colette told me that he also addressed a older black man who was in the seat immediately behind the driver.  He mocked and insulted both of them verbally and with hand and body motions.  He was partially talking to them and insulting them and holding a conversation with himself as to whether he was going to get on and ride the bus or simply walk.

I think he wanted to driver to tell him not to get on and then he would have come aboard and bashed the driver.  As I was looking at this fellow, I had no doubt that that’s what was potentially playing out.

The driver didn’t say anything.  Colette and I were two seats back from the front of the bus on the right side.  From there I couldn’t see the driver’s face because of the barrier behind him so I couldn’t sees how he was reacting to the threat; whether he was making eye contact with the man outside or not.

On the bus

Everyone on the bus was riveted and terrorized – wondering if this madman was going to come aboard.  Surely, if he did it, was going to be deeply unpleasant for all of us and possibly violent, if anyone attempted to put up any sort of resistance or make any comment.

He kept talking to the driver and abusing him verbally while the scarecrow kept dancing, clapping his hands and laughing with each new volley.

Cut to the chase

Now, let’s cut to the chase, as they say, and reveal what actually happened.

The man debated with himself and then after abusing the driver and the black man a bit more as his partner clapped and danced, he turned and walked on.  And the driver, cool as ice, so far as I could see, shut the bus door and we simply drove on asthe man hurled more abuse at us as we passed him.

That was a good outcome and I’m extremely happy that it worked out that way.  But that’s not why I’m writing this piece.  Here, I want to explore the other pathways; the ones that  almost happened.

Meanwhile, down the other path

As the man raved outside, my mind worked through several scenarios about what might happen if he came aboard.  Colette and I were very near the front so I thought it highly likely that we’d get tangled in it if thing got violent.

In one scenario, I thought of standing up and asking all the able-bodied men on board to help me repel this guy.  But it occurred to me that most people will reman passive and I might end up standing there alone after having declared myself an opponent.  That didn’t seem smart.

I also considered just remaining passive, like the driver, in hopes that things could be kept at a level below violence.  So what if a few of us were insulted?  It would rankle but no one would get hurt.

But it was a volatile situation and there was definetly another path events could follow and that was that he would board and violence would ensue.

Options and the law

At this point, I want to refer you back to the beginning of this piece where I’m talking about citizens having weapons for self-defense.  There can be valid reasons to have weapons for self-defense and I was looking at one right in front of me.

As I’ve indicated, I’m torn about this issue because I think the proliferation of weapons in America to mentally unqualified people has made the country’s Second Amendment a thing of mockery to the rest of the world.

But, personally, I  feel that I have the right to defend myself and I really don’t care what anyone else thinks about it.  The right is simply mine, granted to me or not. I’m taking is as an absolute given because this is my life and no one else cares about it like I do.

The laws we have can make it difficult to be both a legal law-abiding citizen and to defend yourself effectively.

For example, the law says that you can defend yourself, if someone assaults you first.

And it also asserts that you can use reasonable force to defend yourself.

I suppose in many situations, in a civil society, these two rules make sense.  After all, most of us understand why we have laws for the common good and most of us try to play nice.

But I found it all this to be slim comfort sitting in the bus waiting to see if this madman was coming aboard and wondering what I was going to do, if anything.

If push comes to shove

This fellow looked like he was on something like ‘P’ and I’ve read, multiple times, that people on such drugs can be tasered with little effect. And it can take several strong men to physically take them down and control them; powered by the drug and by unreasoning rage as they are.

Parts of this ran through my head as I watched him abusing the driver and debating with himself if he was going to come on the bus.

I was hoping that, perhaps, he’d move on.

Or hoping, that if he came onboard, he’d just be content to just abuse everyone verbally.  The experience would undoubtedly grate on our nerves and egos, but we’d survive that.

But it was the case that he’d come onto the bus and begin bashing people that I was really worried about and thinking about – because the other scenarios would, essentially, take care of themselves.

And this is where we get back to the right to self-defense because I could see that this might shape up to be an extreme case.

This could become a case where someone puts you into a corner where either you had to submit to a beating (or watching someone else get beaten) or resist.

And it could be that there was going to be precious little room to maneuver outside of those two possibilities.

Consider, as well, that the man was very probably raging on a powerful drug. Nothing about a confrontation with him was going to be subtle.

What to do?

So, should one wait to be struck first before considering that one could engage in self-defense?

Should one’s response to being struck be a measured response so that you didn’t respond, according to the niceties of the law, with an unreasonable amount of force?

Well, dear readers, I’ll confess to you that I wasn’t thinking much about any of that.  Most of that sort of stuff was after the fact thinking.

I’m not going there…

I was thinking to myself at that moment that any response to this fellow was going to have to be violent, sudden and it was going to either have to severely disable him or kill him.

Anything less, given his state, might put me and others in a spot wherein some of us were going to be severely beaten, crippled or killed. And don’t forget, that Colette was sitting just beside me.

As I alluded to a moment ago, much of this description of my thinking, which I’m laying out here, was actually after the fact thinking.

As the fellow was on the brink of coming on the bus, I was working out these possibilities, including the most extreme and violent ones, in a very immediate and visceral way.  It was like seeing several futures unfold in front of me all in a moment. And knowing what I’d be doing in each of them.

I wrote a poem many years ago that, perhaps, gives some of the sense of the moment:

Balance, the poised and easy flexing
to meet experience as it comes
Tai Chi on the high seas
while the lightening rips.

No fear to act, none to wait,
each as appropriate.

Will to avoid the ocean of error
least you never hear
the thunder’s laughter.

gallagher
28 Nov 84

How it was going to be

I knew several thing, intuitively:

If he began bashing, I wasn’t going to wait to be bashed.

If I went against him, it wasn’t going to be a measured response.

And, if at all possible, I wasn’t going to allow myself to get trapped in my seat with him over me in the aisle.

I also instinctively knew that if I was standing in front of him in the aisle and the game was on, how I was going to take him down.

Unpleasant images ahead

My apologies, dear readers, if this is graphic but I want you to remember that in this scenario this man is younger than me (I’m 67 now and he’s probably in his 30’s) and heavier than me and he’s very probably in an unreasoning drug induced rage.

I carry a Leatherman tool on my belt. It’s a multipurpose tool with, among other things, two separate knife blades; one standard and one serrated; both just under three inches long.

If it came to it, I was going to take him down violently and probably fatally.

Knife handle in the left hand with the blade facing to the left.  Left hand sweeps up and to the right in a tight arc, right hand comes and cups the base of the knife’s handle and then a short, sharp and violent drive into the left side of his neck driven by my right arm and then driving left to right across his neck.  The object being to cut through the front of his neck and windpipe and one sudden violent move.

He might stand and lash out for a few moments after that but he’d be on his way to the floor soon.

Something almost changed my life changed today

Afterwards?  Well, that would have been a life changer.

I would have waited for the police and I would have been hoping that the other folks on the bus were going to back my account of the events.

I would have been sure that the next few months, and maybe more, were going to be a nightmare for me as the Canadian authorities worked out their opinions of what had happened on the bus and if I was culpable for defending myself and the others on the bus.  The issues of self defense and unreasonable force would not have failed to come up.

The remaining part of our vacation to Vancouver for July and August would have been blown as well as our trip to the U.S. West Coast in September and, in all likelihood, Colette would have to return home while I worked things out.

Summary

I was a bit quiet over the next few hours, after that bus ride, just thinking about all that might have followed, if things had gone just slightly differently.

I would have deeply regretted the end of our vacation and the ensuing chaos in our lives.

It could have had a bad effect on our relationship.  I have no idea how Colette might have absorbed the idea of me killing someone right in front of her; regardless of my justifications.

As for the guy on drugs who was out of control. I have to say I’d have had no regrets.  I think when people step beyond certain bounds and force others into extreme acts of self defense, that they have abrogated their own rights.  All things considered, I think the world would be far better off with one less of the type who would permit themselves to trod that path.

Post-script

I want to say that in my three months in Montreal, I’ve never encountered a ‘hardcase’, other than this one fellow.

This story is not meant in anyway to deminish my admiration for Montreal. It is a peaceful, lovely, and law-abiding place which I have come to love.

Idiots, like this hardcase, can occur anywhere.

It is nice, because we live in civil law-abiding societies, that the half-life of people like this on the street, is generally pretty short.