Archive for 2021

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.

Posted in Personal, Philosophical | No Comments »

Letter to a friend

Monday, August 23rd, 2021

My friend,

I found the article on Karl Popper’s ideas interesting the other day.  But, they left me dissatisfied as well.  And I’ve thought more about my reaction since then.

“So lost in the trees that one cannot see the forest”, is the aphorism that comes to mind.

A friend in the U.S. just referred me to Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized. I haven’t read the book; though I did read a Wikipedia summary of it.

Not unlike Popper’s thoughts, Klein’s book is a deep analysis of the world that Klein find himself in.  I.e., the world of U.S. politics and the deep and widening gap between the liberals and the conservatives there.

And wasn’t this, again, just the same with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?

And can we not think of others, again and again, trying to decipher their world and their times to make sense of things?  

Just pick a country and a period of time.   And there will have been someone in that place trying to understand and make sense of their local world.  I think that implicit in each of their attempts to understand, was an assumption, that if we can understand, then we can have some hope of solving the problems described.

But there’s another aphorism that comes to my mind at this point:  “Arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”.  And this fits into the earlier aphorism; about not seeing the forest because of all the trees.

Systems thinking has come far enough now to be ubiquitous for most intellectuals.  We all know now that we live within systems within systems. 

For those of us, who really want to be effective at working on the world’s problems and not just to end up as footnotes redolent of the small times and places we found ourselves in nationally and philosophically, we need to refocus on our world’s problems on the largest scales.

We need to think about transcending nationalism, local-ism and ‘isms of all kinds.

If we cannot refocus on and strive to solve our global system level problems concerning how humanity can adapt to live within this planet’s resources sustainably, then we are simply rearranging the deck furniture, pointlessly.  And, in the end, all that we do and all the excellence that we do it with, will be wasted.

There are an abundant number of reasons why we humans are poorly equipped for refocusing like this.
 
I’m thinking now of core issues to do with our human nature, which is, itself, derivative of our evolutionary heritage. (see: https://samadhisoft.com/transcending-our-biological-imperatives/)
  
And I’m thinking now also of our minds and our perceptions; which we are inordinately proud of.  But which we really understand the limitations and shortfalls of so very poorly.

I’m not at all confident, my friend, that we are going to manage the refocusing I am saying is necessary.  But I am utterly certain, that more books composed of deep analysis of local problems and local systems are not going to help.

As always, I am interested to hear you thoughts in response to all of this.

Posted in The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

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.

Posted in And Now for Something Completely Different, Personal, Philosophical | 1 Comment »

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.

Posted in General, Personal, Philosophical, Science | 1 Comment »