Yesterday I saw someone wearing cowboy boots and carrying a yoga mat. It's good to practice yoga, any kind of yoga, unless the only goal is to avoid complete insanity, or look good in your swimsuit. As a kid out west, I grew out of a few pairs of boots, but I can't see as there's much call for them in Brooklyn.
When I was a kid, there was no environmental movement to speak of. There was very little awareness or consideration of what the exploitation of our global resources might lead to. Everything seemed to be such a long ways away, and it appeared that there would always be plenty to go around.
It's easy to see how someone might think that sitting in meditation would be a terribly boring thing to do, just sitting there doing nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Trying to think of not thinking. Of course, that particular thought (like a lot of them) couldn't be further from the truth.
Bill Moyers became disillusioned with government and quit to become one of the very few major-media journalists with a real conscience. He's always been a hero of mine; a true gift to followers of reason. His interviews with Joseph Campbell changed my life – and a lot of other peoples' too, I know, since consciousness-expanding ideas had really never made it to primetime until then.
Easter is always a good time to consider what "resurrection" actually entails – what it is we might have really found, or lost. Institutional Christian mythology began as a function of veiled political intentions, created to control people at the level of their deepest needs and potential.
Earlier, I briefly described my three "Near Death Experiences" and what I learned from each of those distinctly different passages about our evolution – the apparent structure of our lives here, on this Earth, and now, in the Eternal Moment, stretching beyond this physical being...but they left it to me to realize the Why?
It isn't often that you hear someone describe what it's like to die – that's an experience rarely reported; but I have the dubious qualification of having survived three distinctly different "Near Death Experiences," and I'd like to pass on what I learned from them in hopes that you'll never find the need to try this at home. They weren't much fun, but they were very informative.
Well, it's 2012 already, and if everyone's going to be looking for a big unveiling by Christmastime, we have to get busy right away. The biggest problem we face isn't just with the one percent we rarely see, it's with the twenty-seven percent...and we all know some of them.
Scientific studies conclude that dolphins should be treated as "non-human persons." Crows possess "human-like intelligence" and have an elaborate and nuanced language; as do elephants, whose slow, infrasonic speech when speeded up sounds distinctly articulate...plus, they can hear other elephants six miles away!
"When we look at unity through the instruments of the mind, we see diversity; when the mind is transcended, we enter a higher mode of knowing...in which duality disappears. This does not mean, however, that the phenomenal world is an illusion or unreal. The illusion is the sense of separateness."
Eknath Easwaran
Surfaces create a great many of this world's problems, especially when that's all you're looking at. Since they're the most visible aspect, and the one we seem to interact with, they're easily mistaken for being the most compelling, the most important part of life – but that's not at all true.
There's a jackhammer in the distance, outside my window. My darkened smartphone makes watery drip tones each time an e-mail wants me to look at it. I hear big trucks pulling up in front of the corner supermarket to unload shrink-wrapped palettes of canned black beans. There's an ambulance siren on the horizon, wending its way to King's County Hospital. The Q train downstairs is running on time.
We often think of evolution writ large, as a sweeping movement across species and worlds – and so it is; but for me, my own evolution is personal, it's something I can only experience in the quality of my relation to Life, to others, and to my self. It's a spiritual evolution on every scale, writ as large as the entire planet, or as small as, well...as small as I Am.
"The fact that the mass of a particle is equivalent to a certain amount of energy means that the particle...has to be conceived as a dynamic pattern, a process involving the energy which manifests itself as the particle's mass."
Fritjof Capra
'Muhammed says, "God does not look at outward forms,
but at the love within your love."'
Rumi
With all the warnings about what "they're" doing to me; all the terror incessantly and vigorously being struck deep in my heart, and all the blame I might feel as a result of "not doing anything about it," here's a couple quick things I think I can do about it:
I offer you a simple, sort of old-fashioned resolution that everyone can make to improve their new year; and to help bring about nothing short of a new world in 2012...
"None of the means employed to acquire religious merit...has a sixteenth part of the value of loving-kindness. Loving-kindness, which is freedom of the heart, absorbs them all; it glows, it shines, it blazes forth."
The Buddha, Itivuttaka Sutta
"Banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we have been waiting for." — Hopi elders
