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.
Letter to a friend
August 23rd, 2021Changes
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
May 18th, 202118 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.
Has the Cyberwar begun quietly?
August 17th, 2019There have been a number of stories over recent months that do not add up to much by themselves. But together, they may represent the emerging tip of a future iceberg of major import.
Nation states are well aware of the fact that crippling each other’s infrastructure through Internet-based attacks is a much cheaper way to inflict damage on an enemy at a distance that any sort of physical attack; with the probable exception of nuclear weapons.
Can you take down their electricity grid? Can you take down or destroy the turbines in their electricity generating stations? Can you cause the major router stations in their Internet to shut down? Can you cause the traffic lights in many of their major cities to malfunction? Can you mess with the systems that coordinate the comings and goings of trains that have to time-share their tracks? Can you cause the GPS signals over their country to become unreliable? Can you cause a melt-down the just-in-time inventory systems that control the resupply of their major market chains? Can you cause fires and destruction in their oil refineries and oil pipelines by interfering in their many interlinked control systems? Can you interfere and confuse their military control and communication systems? Can you shut down the ATMs and banking systems of their larger banks?
Think water pumping stations and sewage works. Think petrol stations.
The list goes on and on. And, whether you believe it or not, our vulnerabilities are high and the stakes are far higher still. And most high tech nation-states have had highly competent and professional teams quietly working on such things for years
This following link will take you to all the articles on my Samadhisoft Blog that are about Cyber Warfare. Follow it if you want to read earlier background material, i.e., about things that have preceded the more recent events that I’m going to talk about here today. Take a good browse – there is a lot there.
But, coming back into the present – consider the following things which have occurred recently.
Playing with GPS
A few months ago, I began noting articles about how the Norwegians were complaining that GPS in their area was not working correctly.
See: This and This and and This and This.
Then, some months after that, I saw very similar similar complaints being made by the Israelis:
See: This and This and This and This.
Interesting, eh?
Playing with Airline Systems
More recently, a major British Airline (BA) has had not one but two major IT meltdowns within a week. And both times, chaos ensued.
See: July 31st and August 7th.
And Stock Markets
Here are two stories about a stock market meltdown in Britain: Story1 – Aug 17th. and Story2 – Aug 17th.
So, do these events I’m citing make a pattern, do they indicate something?
Maybe and maybe not. Maybe they are just chance events. Or, maybe they represent ‘proof-of-concept’ exercises by various cyber players.
If Russia, or some other player, wanted to test out their ability to throw the global GPS system off by running a few tests like this, then what we’ve seen here makes sense.
And considering Iran’s current disagreements with Britain over the oil tanker that the UK seized in Gibraltar and over sanctions against Iran in general, then maybe Iran is just flexing its cyber-muscles a bit in the UK’s cyber space? Say an airline system hack here a stock market disabling crash there?
This has all been going on, quietly, for some time. Consider this article from 2013 in which U.S. power stations were found to be infected.
Consider as well this article from 2010 which discusses how the U.S. destroyed many of the Uranium-enriching centrifuges that Iran was using to prepare nuclear materials.
Do you think it is just a coincidence that Russia and Iran have taken active steps to be able to isolate their entire national Internet systems by throwing a few switches? See this.
Does all this seem far fetched to you? It doesn’t to me.
In fact, I am certain that most major technically capable nations-states have long since infiltrated the infrastructures of the other nation-states that it considers to be potential enemies.
So, if a war breaks out, we can fully expect that every embedded bit of malware in our nation’s infrastructure will trigger and most of them will cause a lot of essential things to break or shut down. The only consolation will be that if our cyber-warriors are good as well, the enemy will likely suffer similar consequences.
And, just as certainly, folks on each side are working intensely to detect and disable all the infiltrated malware that they can even while they are trying to work out how to hide our stuff ever more cleverly. It is truly a major clandestine cat-and-mouse game
So, will it be limited to big ticket items? No, I don’t think so. Remember the “Internet of things”? Abbreviated as IoT?
Here’s a story that will make you squirm. The IoT includes such innocuous things as Baby Monitors: Read this.
Our houses are becoming full of IoT things: refrigerators, smart TVs, garage door openers, heating systems, our fancy mobiles, heart pacemakers and multi-line phones. And the list goes on. And we assume, when we buy such things, that the manufacturer has done their research and given us devices that do not leave us vulnerable. Do you really think that’s true? As they tread the fine line between (1) giving us equipment that has been strongly researched to protect us and (2) maximizing their profits, where do you think they will walk?
Any guesses why the U.S. and several other countries are so adamantly opposed to allowing Chinese manufactured Huawei equipment to be allowed to underpin their next-generation 5G mobile systems?
Given that I’ve spent a lifetime working in IT, I am pretty certain that most folks have very little idea how the router that brings the Internet into their house even works. Much less knowing what to do to change its passwords and check that they are protected. And that’s just the household router. How do you know that your IoT devices are not hackable? How do you even know if the new widget you just bought “is” an IoT device?
The road signs are flashing, “Fun times ahead”!
My business card says on it that I am a “Futurist”. Of course, no one appoints anyone as a futurist so the appointments are self-done. And you, dear reader, have no way to know if I am wearing a tin-foil conspiracy hat here or pumping out gospel quality news of the future.
I get that. Ask around. Look around. And see what you see. The future is going to belong to all of us.
An Enlightenment
September 3rd, 2018On the morning of what he calls his “real awakening,” Adyashanti wrote the following to his teacher, Kwong Roshi –
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“Roshi, today was a very special day. I woke up at 5:30 a.m. as usual to sit for a few hours before going to Los Gatos. I lit a candle, o?ered incense and bows and sat on my cushion.
Suddenly I heard a bird chirping away outside. The sound entered me in a way it had never before and a voice within spontaneously asked ‘Who hears the sound?’ Instantly the whole world, my perception of it, ?ipped 180 degrees. Everything dropped away. Everything.
I was the hearing. I was the bird. I was everything and I was nothing at all. It’s just like waking up from sleep. Nothing special at all. No excitement. No thrills. Nothing like I thought it would be like. Its like going home. Finding home. Being home. So very ordinary and yet so new. Like being born for the very ?rst time.
Every breath, every step, every thought, every perception is new. The Self returns to the Self, actually the Self realized the Self, but its so ordinary, so natural. Who would have thought there was a common belief that there is going to be a lot of ?reworks, lots of emotion, lots of dazzle, but this waking up is so silent, so quiet, so profound, so present in everything, has everything.
I felt something coming on for months. During the day I would be constantly laughing to myself because everything seemed to be transparent, so impermanent. Everything seemed to be falling away in front of my eyes. A huge void was looming in the background, swallowing everything up, every moment, every perception, almost as soon as it appeared, but I was not afraid at all. In fact, I was excited at watching it all happen.
Energy and conviction grew more day by day. Inside it felt as though all my old ways of perceiving the world and myself were just dissolving into nothing, into nothing. I kept investigating this nothing and this dissolving more and more deeply. Eventually even my questioning was dissolving as soon as it arose.
In some ways I felt dead, but joyously so. On and on it went for weeks, months and then last night the last thought I had was ‘I’m ready.’ The words just spontaneously came to mind, not as anything special, more like a simple fact. I thought nothing of it and went to sleep. The next morning when I heard the bird, everything dropped away and the next thing I knew I was the bird. I was the listening. I was everything. Everything and Nothing. So ordinary.
[A poem he wrote the same morning:]
Today I awoke, ?nally I see the Self has returned to the Self.
The Self is none other than the Self.
I am deathless. I am endless. I am free.
The birds outside sing …
The birds outside sing and there am I.
The seeing of leaves on the trees, that seeing am I.
The body breathes, breathing am I.
I am awake and I know that I am awake.
Seen from the old eyes, everything is asleep, a game, a delusion.
But now I am awake. I am the play. I am the game. I am the delusion.
I am the enlightenment I sought, looking everywhere.
Nothing is separate, nothing is alone.
I am all that I see. All that I smell, taste, touch, feel, think and know.
I am awake and this awakeness is the same as Shyakyamuni Buddha’s.
Today the leaf has returned to the root.
I am all name and form and beyond all name and form.
I am Spirit, no longer trapped in a body.
I am free. I am free because I am awake.
So ordinary. Who would have thought? Who could have guessed?
I am home. I am really home. Ten thousand lifetimes.
Ten thousand lifetimes but today I am home.
his is not an experience. This is me.
I am awake. Finally, I am awake.
Nothing has changed, but I am awake.
Before I tasted the root many times and felt how delicious.
Today I became the root. How ordinary.”
~ Adyashanti (20th-21st century American mystic)
Letter to a Grandson
August 30th, 2018My 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
South by South-South
August 25th, 2018I write, occasionally, for the Sky Valley Chronicle in Washington State in the United States; where I used to live up until 10 years ago. Here’s an article I just wrote for them.
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Amid the clatter of many dozen keyboards, the constant smell of coffee and a steady influx of reports arriving from the Chronicle’s bevy of international correspondents, I have, I believe, the honor of being the Chronicle’s southern-most correspondent. That is unless they’ve hired someone to cover Antarctica and they’ve failed to tell me.
I’m a former resident of Monroe, Washington, and the Sky Valley area; where I lived for 20 years. But in 2009, I moved to New Zealand and settled there in the city of Christchurch on the country’s South Island.
New Zealand is out in the midst of the South Pacific Ocean 1000 miles east and south of Australia. It could easily be considered the world’s most remote advanced western democracy. The country’s two major islands, called the North Island and the South Island, are together about the size of Colorado.
You’ve heard of the place and you say Baaaaaaa? Yes, you are right. There are about seven sheep here for every person.
The country makes its way, financially, with tourism, agriculture and forestry. But, remote or not, it has all the same high technology attributes that the other advanced nations have.
Occasionally, in the years since I left western Washington, I’ve written pieces for the Chronicle discussing my New Zealand travels and also some of the other places I’ve visited to in the 10 years since I left.
In this story, I want to share a trip with you that I took recently right here on New Zealand’s South Island. You might say this was a trip to the “South of the South” because I went right down the southern end of the South Island. This trip was partly for fun and tourism and partly because I’m thinking abut the future and where I might want to own land for my family. I’ll share a few of those thoughts as we go along.
But first, let’s get you oriented.
New Zealand is a long country that stretches basically north and south. If you laid the entire country alongside the U.S.’s west coast, at the same latitudes, the southernmost, or coldest, part of New Zealand would fall about where Astoria, Washington is. And the northernmost, or warmest, part would be about where Los Angeles is.
Where I live in Christchurch on the South Island falls at about where Eugene, Oregon, is.
This country is a place of incredible beauty and low population. About 4.5 million people live here.
When you think about the weather, try not to let the fact that the southernmost end of the South Island falls about where Astoria is fool you. The weather here is quite different from Astoria – or anyplace along the U.S.’s west coast.
You see, New Zealand sits in what is called the Great Southern Ocean. If you look at a globe or a world map, you’ll see that once you get south of the world’s major land masses, there’s a huge sweep of ocean that goes right around the southern part of the world. This is the Great Southern Ocean. Other than the southern tip of South America, there’s nothing else down here at these southern latitudes; except little New Zealand. And without significant land masses to block the southern weather systems, they sweep powerfully around the world from west to east unimpeded. These southern waters are some of the wildest oceans on the planet.
So the weather in New Zealand, especially in its more southerly parts, can change three times a day quite easily as the systems come roaring in from the west. It can be hard country with huge rains; similar to what happens along the Pacific Northwest’s coast. And snow is not at all uncommon, which might seem like an odd idea when you think of an island in the South Pacific. But you have to remember just how far south we are and how unrestrained the Great Southern Ocean’s weather systems are.
There are some tremendous mountains here as well. These are the Southern Alps. They are relatively new ranges so they are still freshly risen, sharp-edged and jagged. Great ranges of them rise along the South Island’s entire west coast from north to south. Among them, Mount Cook and twenty other peaks rise to above 10,000 feet.
But, farther south along this island’s western coast, there’s a very special country to be found. It is a country with mountains, thousands of square miles of virgin forests and deep fiords like those in Norway. And all of this sits pristinly within an enormous national park that occupies the entire southwestern corner of the island. This park, the Fiordland National Park, comprises over 8% of the South Island’s total area. And, except for one road in the northeastern corner of the park from Te Anau (tay-ah-no) to Milford Sound, there simply are no roads at all. If you want to get into the inner spaces of this vast park, it is going to require hiking, a helicopter or a float plane. Or you’ll have to come around by sea and into one of the deep fiords. This area is truly one of the world’s better kept secrets.
The occasion for this trip was my birthday. That, and the fact that I hadn’t yet seen this part of my adopted country. I’d been wanting to go down and see the area for some time – and this year was the year we went.
We? Yes, that would be myself and my Kiwi partner, Colette, with whom I’ve been living here in Christchurch for these last eight years.
We flew from Christchurch to Queenstown and then got a rental car at the Airport. From there, we drove to Te Anau, a town of about 2,000 folks. Follow this link for information about Te Anau.
This was in August which, in the northern hemisphere. would be high tourist season. But we are in the southern hemisphere and August here is like February in the U.S.
So, the town was quiet. About half the restaurants and hotels were closed for the season. But that all suited us fine. We are not into big crowds of people. But all the extreme beauty of Te Anau and its lake remained; and it was spectacular. Our holiday apartment was just beside the lake and the downtown area was only a 10 minute walk away. Mountains topped with snow stood around us in all directions.
Something that’s different about hotel rooms here in New Zealand is that they nearly all come equipped with kitchens and everything you might need if you want to stay in and cook.
Te Anau is truly at the end of the world down in the “South of the South”. Beyond it there is only the one road out to Milford Sound. And that road is a one-way-in and one-way-out affair with an interesting and rough-hewn tunnel that bores under the Southern Alps at one point.
We were enjoying all this beauty and reveling in having so much of it to ourselves. But I was also looking at the land around me and thinking about the future; as I mentioned earlier.
But, let’s backup a bit.
I came to New Zealand ten years ago for several reasons. Some of them had to do with the politics and the finances in the U.S. which I felt were really going downhill. And as much as I loved, and still love, the United States and its people, these things were really annoying me. And I also came because I’d seen New Zealand a few years before and I’d liked the smallness of it and the slower pace. No place is perfect and New Zealand is no exception; but it seemed better here. And last, but not least, I was already thinking then that the world was getting more and more unstable every year. And the idea of being far away from the crowds and tensions in the northern hemisphere was attractive.
So, if a person was looking for how to get out of harm’s way, I think by moving down to New Zealand, I’ve probably made a good start at it. But now that I’ve been here awhile, I find myself thinking about what’s next. About how things might change here in the future, how I can protect my decendants and about how we could all benefit from the coming changes.
So, I’ve been thinking about land down here. Land down in the South of the South. And our trip to Te Anau and Milford was my way of putting another piece into that puzzle.
The southernmost part of New Zealand’s South Island is, as I said, a largely unpopulated area. It’s remote from the cities and it is cold. But, I’m attracted to it because don’t think it is always going to stay that way.
On an trip a few years ago, I visited another area here in the deep south. It’s over on the southeastern corner of the South Island and it’s an area called “The Catlins”. Follow this link for information about the Catlins.
It’s another beautiful and remote area. Perhaps, it’s not as extreme as Te Anau and the Fiordland area for beauty and high mountains, but it’s intriguing just the same. Only 1200 people live there and it has hills, mountains, forests, rivers, harbors and land that is fertile and seas that teeming with life in this remote corner of the world.
A lot of people are saying that the world is heading towards some hard times. But really, not a lot has happened so far and things seem relatively intact. But I beleive things are beginning to change now slowly. And greater changes are gathering all around us. I recently read an article with a map that showed what the world might look like if the temperature rises another few degrees. And it was not a pretty sight.
But is all this actually going to happen? Yes, personally, I think so.
Consider that the world has a lot of problems. Problems that are building their way steadily towards critical. Just give a thought to religious fundamentalism, over population, resource depletion, pollution, growing wealth inequality, increasing political polarization, nuclear proliferation, food and fresh water shortages, pandemics, refugee migrations, the breakdown of the weaker nations like Somalia, species extinctions, and this little list is no where near exhausted – it goes on and on.
A few of these problems may sort themselves out. But I find it really hard to believe that all of them will come right. And for the ones that don’t come right, the clock is ticking until one or more of them go critical and the wheels start to come off.
If such a thing happens, do you think anyone really going to want to find themselves living in downtown Los Angeles or Seattle? I don’t think so.
But the truth is that people can pretend impending disaster isn’t real – if they don’t feel that they have any real options.
Here’s a quote by Tolstoy from War and Peace that gives some insight into this:
“With the enemy’s approach to Moscow, the Moscovites’ view of their situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger approaching.
At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.“
Of course, many of us hope that things will hold together for the rest of our lives. And maybe they will.
But, I find myself thinking, what about our kids and their kids? What are they going to do in this future world? A world that is looking more and more dangerous.
Thoughts like these were, in part, on my mind when I moved down to New Zealand ten years ago. But, New Zealand wasn’t my only option back then for getting out of harm’s way. And in fact, if I’d have stayed in the U.S., I would have still had some good possibilities available to me. If you are following my line of thought about all of this, some of these thoughts might be of interest to you.
If I was still living in the Pacific Northwest now, I’d be seriously looking towards the Alaska Panhandle area. It has all of the following advantages:
The panhandle is remote with low population. It’s in the U.S. so you’ve got every right to move there. It’s cold; but that’s OK because things are going to get warmer. It’s got mountains and wildlife so you’ve got water, hunting possibilities and building supplies close by. It’s by the ocean which is a food source and it keeps the temperature swings a bit mellower than further inland. It is well worth a look.
But now that I’m here, it’s the South of the South that I’m considering.
You see, if the climate predictions of increasing warmth hold true and the world does get warmer, a lot of things are going to change. The primary bread-basket growing areas in the U.S., places like California’s Central Valley and the U.S.’s midwest, are going to start migrating north. That will probably spell the end for California’s growing capabilities and what’s working well now in the U.S.’s midwest will begin to shift towards the Canadian plains.
The same things will occur here in the southern hemisphere but just reversed. And that has made me realize that the southern South Island, that now seems so cold, remote and sparsely populated, is going to come into its own as the shift gets moving. And I’m thinking this is worth considering before the land rush begins.
We’ve got another problem here in New Zealand that most people, even in this country, haven’t thought a lot about. You see, New Zealand and Australia have a long-standing agreement that allows folks from either country to freely move to the other one.
This hasn’t been much of a problem so far but temperatures in Australia are already ramping up and they are facing ever more severe droughts. Even at the best of times, Australian agriculture has been a marginal business and things are getting worse.
If you look at Australia on the map, with its 20 million people, the vast majority of them are gathered along the coasts because nearly all of the country’s interior is simply a desert wasteland. As temperatures rise, our little clean and green New Zealand is going to start to look pretty good to a lot of Australians. And this makes me wonder how many of the 20 million can come over to a small country of 4.5 million before New Zealand is overrun. Again, it is another reason to think ahead and to get moving ahead of events.
For the moment, I am strongly favoring the Catlins. I’d like to buy a large piece of land there and just sit on it as a future-proofing investment. At the moment, the place is too remote and cold for many people to be interested. But, as I said, I’ve got a lot of reasons for thinking that will change.
So, did you know that some of the wealthier people in the U.S. are already seeing the future I’m taking about and they are coming down here now to New Zealand to establish “Bolt Holes”? Yep, they are buying land in New Zealand as an insurance policy so they’ll have a place to run to if the wheels start coming off up north.
Peter Thiel, the American Billionaire and one of the founders of PayPal, essentially bought his way into a New Zealand citizenship recently.
And here’s another story about Americans coming down.
A lot of wealthy folks are beginning to smell the coffee and they are planning where they want to be, if things get bad.
I feel quite lucky in that I am already here and I’m a New Zealand citizen now. So I’ve done a large part of what I can do to get out of harm’s way. But buying land down in the Catlins for my kin would hopefully give them a shot at a good future because they would own land in an area that can only get better as the climate warms..
But, my American readers, what are your options? Moving to the other side of the planet to a place like New Zealand is only going to work for you if you are young (you cannot get in after 55), educated (they have a points systems that favors those with college degrees) and you are wealthy enough to be able to absorb to cost and turmoil of shifting half way around the world.
You might console yourself by thinking that having two weeks of food and water stashed out in your garage as a hedge is going to sort things out for you. But, I don’t think so.
Think about what you are going to do. Think about water and food, if everything should go to hell. Buy some remote land and build a strong cabin that can be securely locked up. Stash some stuff there or nearby. This might be the best insurance policy you could ever buy for you and those who come after you. Some day your descendants may give thanks for your forethought.
If I was still living in Western Washington, I’d be looking towards the Alaska Panhandle.
On Enlightenment
January 10th, 2018Non-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….”