January 18th, 2007
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This talk is about mastering perspectives. It assumes that someone capable of seeing more perspectives is better informed, and more able to act appropriately, happily, and well.
There are many perspectives to any situation. Every moment there is your point of view, someone else’s point of view, and third person perspective as well. There are also historical perspectives, we perspectives, singular and plural perspectives, inner and outer perspectives, emotional perspectives, and even imagined perspectives. To simplify, there are many ways to look at things.
So the practice then becomes to relate as fully as possible to the moment by being aware of as many perspectives as possible. Learn all the different perspectives, and work to integrate them into your life. It may sound like a lot of work to do this, but it becomes very natural. Also, in the beginning, it may be useful to apply this only when in conflict. It’s a great tool to use when you’ve hit a wall.
I suggested learning about Integral Theory for a deeper understanding of perspectives. I also mentioned that “Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you” is really just an ancient perspective teaching. We’re not all aware that there are many perspectives, and we certainly don’t often act from more than our own point of view. Learning about and applying perspectives can help us grow.
Referenced: Integral Theory
Mastering Perspectives:
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November 1st, 2006
How do we remember what to do when we feel lost in our daily lives? Metaphor can be a great teaching tool to anchor ideas into our reality. “Connecting to the vine” is a great way to describe connection to oneness.
What happens when a leaf gets cut away from a vine? It tends to wither and die. This talk discusses this idea as a spiritual metaphor. If we consider the expression of oneness as the vine, then our identification with self is cutting ourselves off from that vine. While identification with self can feel quite cut off, it is often called an illusion because we can never leave oneness. We can only identify away from oneness, not actually be away from it. Changing our identification back to experiencing life directly, we reconnect with the vine.
It’s simple to do. We can use times when we’re stuck in line, or in a traffic jam, to bring our focus to the physical sensation of life and reconnect to being. We can make the effort to truly listen to coworkers, instead of thinking of what we’ll say next. This allows us to be present while with others. Whenever we need to walk somewhere, we can bring our attention to the physical sensation of walking to bring ourselves back to the vine of being. And of course we can chose to allow a more formal space for connecting to the vine through meditative or introspective practices.
In this talk I also discuss Jesus and the idea that he was the expression of being connected to the vine. If we change our concept of Jesus from needing to go “through him” to understanding that he was showing us “how to be” connected, we can actually begin to emulate how he lived. If we leave it as an idea, we won’t be able to express his love.
Referenced: Jesus
Connecting to the Vine:
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August 28th, 2006
Today I want to discuss evolution. There are many ways to think about evolving:
- Individual evolution, societal evolution, human evolution
- Evolutions like Homo Erectus to Homo Sapien, etc.
- Agricultural age, to Industrial Age, to Information age
- An individual growing through identification with self to identification with society
- etc.
A good definition of evolution is this: A gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form.
What is the type of evolution I’m talking about today? Making a habit of coming back to our breath is only the beginning of the deep shift I’m referring to. The evolution would be the significant shift in the capacity of the average human to express and hold onto the state of mind that lives outside of time. Humans would need to learn to be the expression of presence and stillness. We don’t need to stay in that space all the time, but we need to learn about it and make it a larger part of our lives.
Stillness is more significant than just a way to deal with problems. It can have an amazing impact both on the individual, and also society.
We have made massive technological changes. Those can all be thought of as external. We’ve learned to bend the world to our wishes to a certain extent. Learning our own minds, learning about time and how we relate to this moment would be an internal evolution. The external changes and progress can and will continue, maybe even faster than it has to date.
Fostering stillness is where the mind needs to go. All of our problems arise out of attachment to concepts that come from being unaware. We need to understand that practicing stillness is a bigger deal than just dealing with our own simple problems. It is actually dealing with all problems. So it is important work that we’re doing.
The world I see involves all these evolutions (each one would be an evolution in it’s own right)
- Much less need to express ourselves violently
- Higher desire to appreciate and create art and live creatively
- People become more physically healthy, because our joys won’t come as much from physically detrimental substances (smoking, drinking, drugging, eating poorly). Our joys will come from deep connections to being.
- Corporations will learn to be much more sustainable and fair (both ecologically and to people)
- Countries will come from a world view instead of a nationalistic view - lessening wars, learning to cooperate, etc.
- People will base their lives and goals more on finding and sharing meaning, rather then gratifying self (what Maslow thought was the more rare expression of mans purpose)
- We’ll have more technological advances as well because much of technology is creative
- etc.
Again, making a habit of coming back to our breath is only the beginning of the deep shift I’m referring to. The evolution would need to be the significant shift in the capacity of the average human to express and hold onto the state of mind that lives outside of time. Stillness is more significant than just a way to deal with problems. It can have an amazing impact both on the individual, and also society.
The Next Evolution of Man:
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June 19th, 2006
It seems many people want to get the idea of what enlightenment looks like. We’re all trying to "figure it out." I get many emails discussing understanding these ideas. This podcast is about doing them instead.
The "Now" has become very trendy. So let’s not get lost in ideas about it. We even have great philosophical minds telling us we don’t have time to be in the now, which is a bit ridiculous. What I think they are saying is that we shouldn’t be trendy about the Now.
Because we can play with words and ideas and labels at this level we should see that we will never "figure it out." Rather we should look at the desire that we have to figure it out. The idea of how to do this is less important than doing it. Our minds want to become experts, and so we look at all the possibilities of "getting lost" so that we can be sure that we will win "when those things show up." But that state of mind is already lost. The waiting, thinking, planning mind is exactly the mind we are trying to put down.
Someone comes across the idea of being at peace. And they are listening to these podcasts, and trying to meditate. And they realize they are not at peace. The mind that is trying to get to peace is lost in time. The mind that wants to "DO" peace is the mind that puts down expectations. This may feel very unnatural to us. We want to figure it out instead.
So when we "DO" peace, when we allow for peace of mind by coming to this moment, whatever it is, we are doing it "all the time". Because we start to realize that now is all there is.
The important concept is this: getting to this moment "is the end of it", EVEN if we leave this moment. Sounds like a cop out, and is hard to get your mind around, but it’s the truth.
So let’s look at the actuality of living in the Now. We don’t care if we can do it permanently, because that is another idea. We just want to do it now. When we come to the Now in this moment (whenever that is), we realize that this moment is always here. So that is all we have to do. The mind will kick up again and say things like "You won’t be able to do that in the future." And that may even knock us off a bit, but seeing that once we DO come back, there is no tally of how long we’ve been gone. So doing it now IS doing it forever. Because the illusion is the mind that creates a future that doesn’t exist.
So doing it in the now is as simple as coming to what you are, your breath, this moment, the sounds, the fears, the whatever, without worrying if you can do it again later. If you’re doing it now, you’re doing it forever.
Referenced: Pema Chodron, Eckhart Tolle
May 22nd, 2006
Making any kind of change is very difficult when we aren’t truly committed to it. So what is commitment and how do we find it?
I see people use meditation and become spiritual all the time to feel better when they are sad. But they often drop the practice once things get better. Finding commitment is hard to do, but we don’t want to get caught in the common loop of: being in pain, working to escape it, forgetting we were in pain. We can’t really escape pain fully until we learn to stay committed to change through all seasons.
Can you practice stillness when the world is good too? Can you “sacrifice” to try to stay awake at all times? This is not meant to imply that being awake isn’t fun. It’s only meant to show that commitment is necessary for lasting change.
How can we stay committed? We can use anchors. We can surround ourselves with books and podcasts and ideas that support our goals. We can commit to practicing meditation. But what is the thing underneath? It might just be our pain itself. Finding your reason to stay committed is really important. What happened to you that got you started down this road? What pain happened to you? Make a point of holding on to that.
People often mention that we can’t change other people. I disagree. We are all connected and intertwined. A change from you affects me. So if there is learning, if there is change, then we can point to something. We can find the “ah ha!” we can turn on a light switch for people.
In this talk, the light switch is the idea that being committed makes change easy. Finding commitment can be hard, but once we find it quitting smoking, eating differently, losing weight, meditation, all become simple. So what’s your reason to stay committed? Make that an “ah ha!” for you. Create new grooves of thought. Be awake to your pain. Change.
How Committed Are You:
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