Spirituality and the Search for

Sanity
By admin | May 10, 2013 | self-recovery

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I could make a very strong argument, based purely on

philosophical reasoning, about the urgency for a new conception
of spirituality. Briefly put, it is about making religion promulgate
sanity rather than salvation; transforming its mission from saving
the soul to healing the psyche. If I am healthy in this life, I will
have no fear of what awaits me in the next. Someday I hope to
be able to deliver a lengthy and compelling case to that end; but
for now, a personal and illustrative story will have to do.

………………………………………………….

I’m having an argument with the universe. This is meaningful not

because it is rare but because it is quite common. It is one
feature of my character that especially qualifies me as a psycho-
spiritual teacher: I make mistakes and sometimes fight against
the very Source of truth and spiritual growth.

But you may disagree.

You may prefer to have one who “practices what he preaches,” as

the old bromide has it. Well, I suppose you can keep looking for
such a Diogenes; I wish you all the best, with all my heart. I
sought for decades and never found such a character; if I did, I’d
either not recognize him or would be filled with suspicion.

So I’m having this tiff with the cosmos. Now I’m aware enough to
know how these battles always turn out. I am the John McCain to
the universe’s Obama; I don’t just lose, I get hammered. Every
goddam time.
My beef today is about what it’s been for most of this calendar
year. I’m running like the proverbial hamster on his treadmill,
wanting only to see a finish line at my belly. I have given up
asking for a miracle — a job, the Lotto, a hand coming out of the
sky with a fistful of green bigger than what the CIA’s been
handing Karzai. I just want closure, ending, a turning of the page.
I’m tired of swinging in the wind, waiting to see if I can last
another week before the landlady calls in the city marshal to
throw my ass out into the street. It is now time to do something,
go somewhere, make a dramatic and definitive move.

This morning, I cast Hexagram 31 of the I Ching, with lines 2 and

3 changing. Here is the text (the original Wilhelm translation at
left, the R.L. Wing interpretation on the right):

2. The You may feel compelled to move, to take some kind of

influence action, yet you really don’t know what you’re doing. It’s a
shows itself little like sleepwalking. Avoid action until you wake up to
in the calves what’s going on. Otherwise there is some danger of getting
of the leg. into trouble.
Misfortune.
Tarrying
brings good
fortune.

3. The You must gain control of yourself. Don’t run this way and
influence that on impulse in an attempt to influence others or indulge
shows itself in your many whims. You will ultimately be humiliated by
in the thigh. such unconsidered actions. Set up a few inhibitions for
Hold to that yourself and operate within these limitations while you
which follows develop some self-control.
it. To
continue is
humiliating.

So the shape is this conversation is fairly well defined here —

that, by the way, is something I can, should, or may someday be
grateful for, should my shoes finally drop out of the air and find
me still with working and receptive feet. The encounter goes
something like this:

BRIAN: How deep do I have to keep digging this friggin’ hole I’m
in before the sides collapse and bury me alive?

UNIVERSE: Shut up and keep digging.

BRIAN: What if I just drop the shovel now and walk away?

UNIVERSE: Go ahead. I just told you what will happen if you do.

BRIAN: Can’t you just knock me out a while, pick me up and

carry me to a better place in life, like what happens in
that Footprints story?

UNIVERSE: That’s better — have a couple of laughs. But keep

digging.

………………………………………….

There’s a point in this somewhere, and it has to do with how we

can communicate with the Ineffable. I tend to doubt whether I’m
the one capable of making that point, but since no one reads this
thing — and since my job application as a Religion Editor at the
Huffington Post has met with silence — why the hell not try?

The principle of communication with the guiding, teaching voice

of the universe should be the same in good times or bad. But in
practice, emotions tend to gum up the works when one feels
troubled or threatened. And there are few things in life so
threatening as the loss of one’s independence. Borrowing money,
accepting handouts, sitting on a steep and greasy slope toward
living in someone else’s house — these are realities that tend to
clip your inner wings. In this dawn of a new millennium, all
around the world, wings lie on the ground of nations like a fine
and numberless dust of loss and desolation.

So spirituality (as I mentioned in my cover letter to my HuffPost

application) has to do a better job of leading us through rough
times than it ever has, than it has ever dared to before. It has to
show us ways of relating to the Source of our being that go
beyond parochial ideologies and gilt-lettered black leather books.
It has to cut straight into the heart of each individual who
approaches the task of communicating with the invisible energies
of Life, Love, and Eternity. It must, in a word, be actually useful
— to real, living, suffering human beings.

My experience, for what little it’s worth, is that this is a matter of

reduction more than addition; of stripping away excess so that
the essence may be revealed and given room to move and act
within us. What, then, must be reduced or stripped away, that is
specific to our topic here of making and maintaining a genuine
connection with the cosmic Reality that both embraces and
transcends us? The following possibilities may be worth a few
minutes’ consideration…

• Priests, ministers, masters, gurus…trash ‘em

all. They’re a lot like cops — always oppressively present
when you’d rather they weren’t, and never there when you
need ‘em. And usually they’ve got an outstretched palm in
your face that wants some grease. You can easily live your
inner life without their help; you can in fact thrive without
them. If you want rituals, make up your own; if you need
that fatherly sort of advice and insight that people have
traditionally sought in human spiritual masters, take up an
 oracle or another practice that delivers verbal guidance and
inspiration. Sure, there are good priests out there. There are
good cops too. I’m not saying you can’t get to know one;
just don’t imagine that you need one. Spiritual
communication is a lot like finding a lover or having a child:
you can manage it a lot better than you think you can. If I
need to learn a new computer programming language or
how to drive a car with a standard transmission, I’d better
find an expert to guide me. But for communicating with the
heart of creation and tapping the universal mine of blessing
— that path is just wide enough for one. A great American —
Ralph Waldo Emerson — once told us the same thing: “the
only true church has a congregation of one.”
• Don’t try to imitate God. About 600 years ago, a fellow
named Kempis wrote a book about doing this. Fortunately,
he wrote it in Latin, so it’s not widely read anymore. But that
notion of being like God still sticks, and it has led to some
fairly decadent and murderous behavior on the part of world
leaders, corporate behemoths, and miscellaneous psychotics
in media, the military, and private life. The whole point of
communicating with the hidden world is not about becoming
more like God, but becoming more truly yourself. If you pay
attention to the messages arising within and around you,
you’ll learn a lot about yourself, and unlearn even more.
That’s what will guide you forward and lead you into the life
you would seek if you had the vision and depth of the cosmic
Mind. It is our good luck that we only need to deepen our
awareness of being a part of that Mind; we do not have to
become it, through either imitation or aggrandizement.
• Nurture flexibility, especially in your attitude. In
English, “faith” is always a noun. When it comes to spiritual
practice, we typically speak of having the noun, the thing:
I have faith. Faith is problematic not merely because it is
fixed belief that has no support from or relation to lived
experience; it falls short because it is a thing, an object,
never an inner action. Trust, however, works as both noun
and verb; it is flexible both linguistically and practically. Our
trust is continually tested in the crucible of experience; faith
 is the chain we wear willingly in the hope of some future
compensation in the afterlife for the pain it entails in our
present life. So to develop a real and living relationship with
the Ineffable — a relationship that grows, deepens, and
nourishes both yourself and your Source — trust is a better
attitude than faith. This leads to the next point…
• Imagine a spiritual democracy. That is to say, try
working with the All, the Great, the Source — God, if you
will — from a basis of fundamental equality. I know, it
sounds too weird; maybe it is. I remember having what I
thought was a lighthearted debate with a serious Buddhist
once about the Dalai Lama. She was saying that he deserves
to be treated as a God of sorts, since he’s directly descended
from the Buddha himself. I said that I’d prefer to imagine
myself sitting in a tavern with him over a few beers; that I
wouldn’t dare think of him as a god or demi-god because
that would rob him of his most precious quality — his
humanity. The lady got a little offended at such a notion, so
I let go the argument, but thinking of it now relates to this
point, that a more democratic attitude towards the leading
energy of your inner life would make the relationship a lot
easier and more productive. It would also take the matter of
fear out of the encounter: the one thing about religion that
has always mystified me is the idea that we can and even
should fear the very entity that we believe is the ground,
source, and essence of Love. It has been my experience that
fear and love are the oil and water of the psyche. In any
event, it makes sense to strip away the notion of a Superior
Being, because that makes you an inferior being. It builds a
vast distance between you and your Source — a distance
that make communication difficult if not impossible.
• Kill your inner flagellant. I suppose there are still a few
Catholics who continue to physically whip themselves. But
for most of us, the problem that remains is an emotional or
ideological self-flagellation. When it comes to ordinary
modern spirituality, guilt and sin are still whipping us and
bleeding us, just as they have done for centuries. So in our
meditations and other spiritual practices, it would make a lot
 of sense to regularly kill the voices and thoughts that feed
us the poisons of guilt, sin, and the need for penance. The
better we can destroy guilt in our relationship with the All,
the saner and more nourishing will our human relationships
become. Remember, the encounter with your Source is a
relationship between mind and Mind; heart and Heart; lover
and Love. Guilt and sin obstruct and inevitably destroy such
a relationship. If you can pull the treasure of your own body
out of the prison of Original Sin, and clear away the rotten
and eternal stain of Guilt that you supposedly incurred
because some folks once talked to a snake and ate an apple
— well, just clear that garbage out of yourself and your
conversations with Eternity will make a lot more sense. And
your mistakes will actually be fewer for your not carrying
them around like millstones around your inner neck.
• Blow up the wall of the external and destroy spiritual
racism. You might think that we’d grown out of the old
white man in the sky; the young white male hippie
performing miracles; the male prophet streaming light and
glory out of a book from a mountaintop; and all the other
images of color and gender specificity that are attributed to
our gods and other spiritual bosses. But this crap persists,
and it creates an abyss — a vast and impossible distance
between who we are and the Consciousness that is our
source and destination. How you go about exploding this
wall that divides you and the All is up to you. I sometimes
hear a voice during meditation that tells me of some phrase
or image within me that still bears lies about the fixed form,
gender, color, or hierarchical rank of the Ineffable. At times
like these, I’ll ask for help in destroying that fabrication, and
then I’ll do a physical workout that brings my body into the
work and burns the delusion out of both my physical and
energy bodies. However you do it, make a conscious effort
at pulling down the walls of separation and racism that
divide you from a natural communication with the Great.
• Remove the abject and self-abasing attitude from
prayer. Sure, we’ve all had the experience of falling down
on our knees in desperation, begging for understanding or
 deliverance or sanity or love or truth. But by and large, the
cosmos does not respond well to dramatics. The relationship
and your communication with the universe will only deepen
and broaden when the call for help is heartfelt yet without
that dissonant tone of despair to it. Hopelessness should not
be coded into prayer; yet that is exactly what I hear and
read in many people’s prayers. I imagine that God responds
no better to us when we prostrate ourselves or pull our hair
or crawl before the altar like bugs than otherwise. Try
making your tone level, your attitude confident, and your
self-perception clear and vibrant when you make your
requests of the invisible world. Ask the universe for its
guidance and blessings in a similar way that you’d ask your
lover or spouse for sex, and I’m betting you will enjoy both
the experience and the outcome much more.
………………………………………………………

Now I return to my conversation that I described above. I am

being given a cosmic gift: a view of my current situation from a
greater and clearer perspective than I can achieve with my
limited perception and my turbulent emotions. An oracle does not
tell us the future, for the future is not a script written into a stone
of linear time. It gives us something even better: an
encompassing view of the consciousness of the present, of this
moment in our life; and as a result the opportunity to self-create
a transformative future.

The same may be said of visions, epiphanies, and other cosmic

openings of consciousness. As with all intimate relationships, the
quality and depth of the truth of such openings, the meaning and
guidance that we receive from them, are determined far more by
our attitude than by our possessions. The quantum world doesn’t
care what good works I can do, what changes I can force upon
myself in exchange for its blessings, or what other spiritual coin I
have to offer as barter for my answered prayers. It merely wants
me to give in exactly the measure as it gives: with sincerity,
humility, and love in my attitude. Let us try and feel as if we have
at least that much in common with the invisible realm of being.

So I know my task: I must strip away the mistrust, the fear, and
the suspicion born of hopelessness that I brought into my
relationship with the universe. Once again, it is more a matter of
reduction within the self than of making offerings. The cosmos is
not interested in my deals; it already has everything it needs. But
if I can deepen my trust and further open my awareness, then
both I and my Source will be enriched. Thus, I return to the inner
work that must be done to make this so on my part; and if I
persevere, then my life and the Life of which I am a small yet
essential aspect will both advance and endure in that pervasive
harmony of peace and blessing.

Reviving Transcendentalism
By admin | May 8, 2013 | Uncategorized

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A number of years ago I wrote a book that is, I am afraid, on the

whole not very good, but whose Introduction may yet contain
something useful to our current moment. For it traces the social,
political, and psychological needs of our time to another historical
moment of incipient violence, internal strife, and social corruption
in America — the time of the birth of a movement that was
known as transcendentalism. Indeed, one thing I’d like to see
develop in modern America is a regeneration of
transcendentalism. That is, I want to see it not merely live again
but live anew. Since I spent a considerable part of last
week’s essay on Self Restraint by quoting transcendentalism’s
most prominent authors, it may be suitable now to reproduce
that Introduction from the book…

……………………………………………………………………………
The core message of this book is, in a word, independence; or
perhaps more accurately, inter-independence (please forgive the
neologism). That is, the recovery of the uniqueness of your self,
and thereby, of your natural connection with your society, your
species, and Nature at large. For if we are to learn a single thing
from the experience of philosophers, seers, and poets of ages
gone by, it is that the clearest path to the universal is
through the individual. This was the message imparted to us
by people as culturally and biographically diverse as Lao Tzu,
Sappho, Pythagoras, Galileo, the Buddha, Socrates, Da
Vinci, Basho, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Martin Luther King,
Rumi, Wordsworth, Rilke, Einstein, and Gandhi. Here in America,
this message was crystallized in the writings of three men whose
teachings came to be known as “transcendentalism”—
Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman1.
Their clear, uncluttered insight into nature and the human place
within the fabric of the universe was so revolutionary in both its
depth and its expression that it is still being discovered today.
Transcendentalism needs a rebirth today, because it has so much
to teach us about the survival of our species on our now
marginally-habitable planet. This is why, for want of a better term
(and perhaps as a foil to the “neo-conservatism” that dominates
our political landscape today), I have been calling for a holistic
revival of sorts, that I refer to as “neo-transcendentalism.” We
need take the name itself no farther, because one of the
messages of this book is that we need to discard all the “ism’s” of
our lives. So the name is a handle, not a monument. Emerson set
the tone of transcendentalism in the first lines of his classic essay,
“Self-Reliance”:

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you
in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius…A man
should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes
across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the
firmament of bards and sages.
Then he contrasts this sensitivity to the natural inner light with
the societal commandments and limitations that are imposed
upon us from the cradle onwards:

Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe
again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable,
unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable… These are
the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and
inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in
conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.
Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree,
for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to
surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most
request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not
realities and creators, but names and customs.

Transcendentalism was a teaching centered on the erasure

of divisions; therefore it is no coincidence that it arose at a time
when America was split, geographically and ideologically, with
such a violence as would soon destroy the lives of half a million of
its youth in a period of five bloody years — the Civil War. Thus,
the spiritually guided lessons of the Unitarian minister, Emerson,
were given fresh life in the work of Henry David Thoreau,
who extended them into the realm of political action. Emerson’s
essays appeared in the decade of 1840-1849, and Thoreau’s most
significant works arrived in 1849 (the three essays collectively
titled Civil Disobedience) and 1854 (his classic guide to
the transcendental life, Walden). That is to say, during the 20
year period in which the malignant divisions culminating in the
Civil War fomented, these transcendentalists were teaching
Americans—not just from a pulpit or a magazine masthead, but
from lived experience in the field of social action—that there is no
real division between a life in tune with the cosmic song of Nature
and the voice of a free citizen calling for justice amid the halls of
power. When Thoreau wrote about the conscience of a free
citizen of a nation, he was making the same point as Emerson
made on the spiritual will of an individual who frees himself from
the trap of group belief:

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign
his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience
then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as
for the right.

It is no accident, then, that Walden opens with a chapter

called ”Economy.” Thoreau taught that “conscience” and “the
right” exist and act in those very fields of human life where we
are conditioned to believe they are not. Thus I say that every life
is a crucible of individual nature, not of belief. We divide the body
and its generational organs from the life of spirit at our great
peril, as has been demonstrated for us through the sunken
sexual decadence of priests and the insane fundamentalist
violence of mobs poisoned by the madness of theocracy.

To separate money from meaning, and economy from inner truth,

is to awaken similar demons: for then we are trapped in economic
warfare, in which the haves further oppress the have-nots, and
thereby invite their often murderous resentment. This, I suspect,
is the violent core of every insurgency, every so-called revolution.
Natural revolution, however, consists in a turning around or
within. A revolving life effortlessly discards what is unnecessary
to growth, with a kind of inner centrifugal force.

The demons of belief, prejudice, and adherence must be killed

within ourselves before we can the more pointedly discover them
amid the institutions around us. This is why Thoreau needed to
retreat into the woods beside Walden pond for a time; it is why
an old Chinese poet named Lao Tzu had to exile himself at the
end of a long career in government; it is why a prince named
Gautama, afterward known as the Buddha, had to live in hermetic
isolation before he could emerge and hold aloft the flower of
transmission that was recognized in a wordless instant by a single
individual.

These people killed their demons and thus discovered

themselves. Then they pointed out the way of self-discovery and
showed us that it is open and unforbidding, to everyone. It is now
time for each of us to claim his and her path back to uniqueness,
to the independence with which we were born, and which is the
link in the universal web that connects us all in the community of
Nature.

———————————————————-

1Those familiar with the poetry of Emily Dickinson will no doubt

agree with me that she deserves inclusion among the
transcendentalists; for though she never counted herself among
their number, her work — itself influenced by Emerson’s Essays —
bears the same stamp of truth and poised individualism.

Truth, Despair, Transcendence: a

200th Birthday Tribute to Soren
Kierkegaard
By admin | May 6, 2013 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

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A brief essay on truth, in honor of the 200th birthday of Soren

Kierkegaard

……………………………………………………………………………
Truth is data married to insight; facts guided by perception;
evidence managed by compassion. Thus, genuine learning is
never passive. For the plainest facts and the most compelling
evidence are inert until they are given the energy of insight.
Teaching from data alone is a fool’s mission. Every teaching, if it
is to touch the light of wisdom, must become yours. It must take
its own life within you, or else it is dead information with no
purpose or breath.

Metaphorically, we can say that a fact is what physicists refer to

as potential energy; and further, that truth corresponds to kinetic
energy. PE describes a thing’s position and structure; KE
describes its motion. So a fact is a potentiality of the truth which
is kinetic. Both are of consciousness; but truth, being kinetic,
carries the palpable flow of life — its movement and its unique
transformation within each individual who receives and influences
its motion.

This concept can be taken further still: data represent the

formed, the things and beings of Nature — from subatomic
particles to cosmic nebulae. Truth is the formless, the energy of
insight and connection that embraces and then transcends data.
Truth is the breath of expression in the physical body of data; it is
the flow of energy across cells or entire systems of cells.

Embrace and transcend; potential and kinetic; formed and

formless: this is the way of all genuine learning and teaching. The
duality is merely apparent, not inherent. These two realities are
in fact not at all two. Dividing them is one of the first and fatal
mistakes of ego, in both its individual and institutional forms.
When this division takes place, facts are delivered as truth. We
may as well be serving ourselves plates filled with rocks for
dinner. Data have no nourishment; only truth does.
This is something we need to remind ourselves and one another
of regularly, especially in difficult times. When emotions are
running hot and wild, a splitting of the self and of awareness can
occur. My own current experience of long-term unemployment
and the descent towards poverty illustrates this point: there is a
stark and pervasive sense of helplessness; of barren exposure; of
sterile weakness. It is easy to imagine oneself a victim, and from
there it’s a short inner step to perceiving oneself as the enemy,
the cause of all this failure and loss. The forced division of
awareness has already begun.

Once that has been given room to be; once the walls within the
self have risen; inner communication is blunted and finally closed.
The splintered pieces of the self have no air left for either breath
or expression. A vast, raging, helpless silence descends like a
flaming asteroid of shadows. This is the phenomenon that
Kierkegaard called Despair: The Sickness Unto Death. Despair is
defined and driven by the complete loss of the living self.

Such things cause little stir in the world; for in the world a self is
what one least asks after, and the thing it is most dangerous of
all to show signs of having. The biggest danger, that of losing
oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing:
every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc., is bound
to be noticed.

There is no quick fix, no pill to take, and no amount of money

that will get it back. The recovery of the self is as unique a path
to each individual as is the search for truth. The way onto that
path, the energy that opens it, is a matter of approach rather
than system; of direction rather than doctrine. The walls that
have fragmented your being must be identified, examined, and
then destroyed.

Fortunately, they are not real. Those walls are only shadows,
hanging shrouds of darkness that appear to isolate and trap every
aspect of your total being. This is how they work: they make you
feel microscopically small, insignificant, and unworthy by
splintering your original wholeness. If you cannot undertake the
work of their destruction, then you will inevitably wind up with a
guilty self, an abased self, an evil self, a loveless self, a victimized
self, an enemy-self — a multiplicity of tiny, scattered selves, but
not a whole and integrated self.

So we must come back to truth, return to that realm within where

data are joined to and nourished by insight. It is not enough to
say, “it is what it is and that’s the way I am.” For the fatalistic
self-image embodied in such a data-based admission is itself part
of the pathology of despair. Perhaps the first step in the recovery
of the self, the destruction of these inner walls, is to tear down
the moldy, darkened self-portraits that hang on them.

You will see many such strange images that you carried but never
stopped to observe. You will hear voices speaking a foreign
language of thought that you’ve heard often but never
questioned. Fetid smells and acrid tastes will reach you from
within — the same ones you lived with for so long that they came
to feel normal. You will feel the touch of your body, of your flesh,
and wonder one day how you could have imprisoned it into a
cage called Sin.

The walls begin to weaken the moment you stare at them with
the light of awareness; the moment you cease to accept their
claim to reality and to Nature. The key, it seems, would be to
prod every fact, dissect every belief, analyze the illusion of the
fragmentary self with the laser light of a dispassionate scrutiny —
all the while trusting in the outcome of this autopsy of your total
being; that there is life yet in that seemingly dead and broken
corpse. It only needs to be revealed.

You will know the truth of yourself when you release it from the
shadows. You will feel it move within you. That’s the sense you
will want to trust the most. Thought is a wondrous thing, but
without feeling to guide and support it, intellect is inert. Your
brain is a soft, gelatinous, electric organ that can bounce and
dance and sparkle with insight — but only when it is fed and
enriched by the heart.

My Caturday Contribution
By admin | April 27, 2013 | Uncategorized

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I freely admit it: I’m a cat guy. Can’t recall ever meeting one I
didn’t like. There is a kind of regal resignation in their adjustment
to life among the humans. They get along all right with us, but
they make it quite clear which is the superior species. And that
gives me a vague, fleeting sense of hope for the future.

This black one here is my owner. Night is her name. I feed her,
brush her, keep her litter box in pristine condition, clean up after
her, and otherwise do my best to serve her. It is a profoundly
simple relationship whose only ambiguity is this: which of us
is Jeeves, and which Bertie Wooster? We seem to be comfortable
in exchanging those roles regularly. It all makes sense to me, in a
way that marriage and corporate servitude never did.

Anyway, here on the Intarwebs there is a tradition among geeks

that Saturday is Caturday — a day for posting pictures and
miscellaneous encomiums to our feline superiors. Thus, my
contribution:
Beyond Salvage: Creating Mental
Health
By admin | April 26, 2013 | Uncategorized

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Update, 5/2/13: A week after I wrote this, the Times

published these statistics on suicide in America.

………….

My walks are now a kind of farewell tour of Brooklyn and New

York1, and today I passed by the office of a man who is arguably
the most aptly-named psychiatrist in the nation.

Mental health is frequently a “salvage” operation, all right. I think

it was the British psychiatrist Anthony Storr who compared the
psychotherapist’s job to one who is pulling people out of the
water downstream with no time to think about who is dumping
them in upstream.

These days, in America at least, the stream overflows with the

lost and the floundering, from every imaginable segment of
society. The military with its insane suicide rate and PTSD
population; corporate America and its shrinking, overburdened
middle class work force; the working poor; the unemployed and
long-term unemployed; women, minorities, immigrants; and of
course the elderly as the baby boomers go well into their 60′s.
Perhaps the most ominous social group affected by mental illness
is children, who suffer at a roughly equal rate to the adult
population.
No matter how you slice or spin the statistics, the story is deeply
disturbing. Insurance companies effortlessly climb through
loopholes in the law to avoid delivering coverage for mental
illness, and that is not likely to change under Obamacare.
Meanwhile, our culture’s general attitude merges that traditional
shame-repression complex with pharmaceutical dependence. If it
cannot be resolved with a prescription, then it is not illness. So
just tough it out. The problem there, of course, is that with
mental illness, more than with any other kind of human ailment,
this mindset breeds suffering far beyond the single person with
the disease. But if our culture has trained us in self-denial, we will
extend that training to our own pathology, usually at the expense
of those closest to us.

As the politicians say, we have to do better. But new and

improved institutions or social services won’t do it by themselves.
To the extent that they reflect a real commitment, then more
funding (exponentially more) and reformed institutions will no
doubt help; first, however, we need a fundamental change of
attitude to ensure that public money and services are being used
genuinely to create a more stable, healthy, and self-healing
citizenry.

Money and pills alone can’t make inner healing happen; if that
could be so, then Prozac could be added to the water supply
(research on whether this is accidentally happening anyway is so
far ambiguous as to both extent and effect). When it comes to
mental health, our science is at an infantile or at best adolescent
level of development. Next month, it brings us a new bible of
pathology — the DSM-V, which will tell us again how many ways
we can be sick, yet with no guide as to what mental health
actually is or how it might be strengthened. That, it appears,
must become a common effort — crowdsourced, if you will. One
of the founding documents of our nation insists that government
allow us the “unalienable right” to seek happiness; but no state
or institution can actually deliver it.
In fact, we could use a fresh document — a Decalaration of Inter-
dependence, perhaps — that sets forth a common understanding
and an acceptance of the critical challenge to our mental health
as a people. In short, we need a plan; a plan that contains the
outline of a common-sense view of the realities and the potential
before us. What follows are a few suggestions for the major
components of such an outline.

• Mental illness is real, and its danger to the individual,

family, and society at large can scarcely be overstated. We
can no longer turn our backs on this vast and socially deadly
problem. We can’t confine it to a coffin of myopic vision,
which has but two sides: if it responds to a pill from a major
pharma company, it counts as illness; if not, it’s “all in your
head.” The more we insist on somaticizing, mechanizing, and
reifying mental illness; the further will we be lost, and the
more that stream of Anthony Storr’s will clot with drowning
bodies. The mechanical model of mental illness, which is
precisely what the pharmaceutical industry is selling us, is a
fairy tale, a nebulous fantasy sold to the credulous — as
infantile a pile of delusion as any 14th century yarn about
the sale of indulgences for eternal salvation. The sooner we
reject this pabulum, the sooner we make our first strident
move toward health.
• Treatment of mental illness is, and must be, multi-
dimensional. This obviously follows from the first point, but
needs to be reinforced in the public mind. I am not against
pharmaceuticals: they are a part (though not even a major
part) of a solution. When I was afflicted with depressive
illness over a decade ago, I sought and obtained a
prescription for an SSRI (“selective serotonin reuptake
inhibitor” — Prozac-class drugs). The pills were really useful
— they took the neurochemical edge off my suffering and
gave me enough energy to keep pursuing my own course of
self-treatment (the insurance I had at the time wouldn’t pay
for the kind of counseling I needed, so I did that part of it
myself). Before I had emptied the second bottle, though, I
 was ready to taper and then discontinue the medication; and
I have not had need of it since. This points, by the way, to a
more general problem in our society: we have become
culturally dependent on medicine. It is too globally assumed
that once you’re on a drug, you’re on it for life. Exceptions
aside, the rule for medicine should remain: it exists to
release the sufferer from illness, so that he may release
himself from the need for the medicine. This should be
especially true for the vast majority of mental illness. If
someone needs to take pills for depression, an anxiety or
personality disorder, and even for certain cases of psychosis
for years or decades or for life, then there is something
inherently and fatally flawed about the entire system in
which that person is diagnosed, treated, and managed
medically. We may open a free and no doubt vigorous
debate about what specific kinds of treatment are medically
viable for different forms of mental illness; but there should
be no debate about the need for a multi-dimensional
approach to treatment. There is more — much more — to
becoming healthy than taking pills.
• Teach mental health with a focus on self-healing. I
could make a very strong argument that teaching mental
health is more important than teaching math or science. If
your emotional life is not balanced and vibrant, then your
intellectual life will also suffer. The neurotic mind rarely
makes sound judgments or calculations.2 So we need to
make some commitments as a society, such as: children
should spend at least double their time at school studying
and exploring mental health as they do preparing for
standardized tests. This fresh emphasis on teaching mental
health needs to be comprehensive, crossing every socio-
economic and professional stratum and being tailored to
every demographic it touches. For when it comes to mental
health, we have a unique window of opportunity wide open
before us: when you increase understanding of this stuff,
you increase the very kind of self-awareness that supports
self-healing and self-maintenance. Imagine soldiers,
students, church parishioners, prisoners, corporate
 professionals who are taught to recognize signs and
symptoms of illness in themselves and their colleagues and
peers: how many tragedies of suicide, domestic abuse,
perversion, violence, and even homicide might be
prevented? But there’s more to it than that: it is not merely
a matter of forestalling decadence but of promoting and
nurturing health through simple awareness. Thus, we’re not
talking here about a complex regime of technical or medical
knowledge. The DSM is not the textbook here; life is. There
are already a number of good models to follow in this
context; I like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s approach, which teaches not
mental health or physical health, but just health. This
perspective is given a fresh approach in the work of Carol
Anthony and Hanna Moog — note how they weave nature
and nurture into a “carpet of consciousness.” This leads
directly to the next point…
• Destroy the division of body and mind. This is a rare
point on which science and genuine spirituality can agree. I
am neither a scientist nor a doctor, yet I can see that body
and mind are not two3. When necessary as a matter of
clarity, yes, we have to speak of them separately; yet if
we experience them as divided, we soon become lost. We
have to make this a matter of both teaching and treatment.
The science here is virtually unassailable: meta-analyses
and other broad-based studies clearly show a relationship
between factors such as stress and immune
dysfunction; anxiety disorders and heart disease; depression
and an array of physical ailments. Those of us who teach
and practice a non-ideological, non-sectarian form of self-
development and psycho-spiritual self-healing are right in
line with the direction of that research. If we can agree as a
society on the importance of breaking down the wall of
prejudice that separates body and mind, to the same extent
and with the same consensus as we’ve reached (or are
approaching) on topics like smoking and heart/lung disease
or global warming and environmental awareness — I think
this will be nothing short of a quantum leap in human and
societal evolution.
Promoting and teaching mental health in a society has more than
the obvious and manifest benefits (a more productive work force;
better students with higher graduation rates; decreased incidence
of workplace and domestic violence; exponentially lower rates of
both mental and physical illness accompanied by better recovery
rates and lower medical expenses; etc., etc.). What we are
talking about here is similar to the promise of repairing and
renewing our nation’s physical infrastructure of roads, bridges,
public transport, etc. But when it comes to making mental health
a focus of society’s total energy, we are talking about the repair
and renewal of our human infrastructure. A society that is healthy
within will be far more likely to make sound political and electoral
decisions; to develop a healthier and more balanced economy;
and to treat its international neighbors and the planet at large
with intelligence, vision, and wisdom. When we are healthy and
aware within, all those things that we typically fight and argue
about lose their poisonous edges. Judgment improves; common
ground and consensus are more easily achieved; relationships
form and even break within a web of respect and understanding;
conflict finds resolution; and the air above Storr’s stream is no
longer thickened with the black bile of hatred and prejudice.

Mental health is one of those rare phenomena, one of those few

issues, that permit and invite everyone’s involvement. There is no
possible perspective from which you can be disinterested.
Whether you’re the CEO or the janitor; the President or the
village dog-catcher; the accountant or the poet; the geek or the
guru — you have a stake in this ground; mental health matters to
you. So now we have to work at regenerating our society so that
mental health is no longer a salvage operation but a
comprehensive, interactive, and enduring creation.

________________________________________

1They say that when you leave New York (for me, that would be
next week), you can never come back. It’s been my home for the
better part of 30 years, and I suppose that truism applies here: I
do not expect to be able to return. Not in this lifetime. But I have
been far luckier than many others who have been dislocated or
disenfranchised amid our Brave New Economy.
2Please don’t remind me that Newton had bipolar disorder. If
we’re going to talk about what makes a better society, we can’t
reach any agreement by arguing from exceptions. My only point
on this, however, would be that troubled geniuses invent and
create in spite of their illness, not because of it.
3In this context, my philosophical difference with the mechanical
view that I criticize in the first bullet point would amount to this:
body and mind are not two, but neither are they one. They are
simply undivided in the field of lived experience. I prefer to take
the mathematics out of the question entirely, because the unity I
refer to is beyond number or anatomy. My mind is not the
gelatinous substance inside my skull that is wired to my spinal
column; that is a necessary but not sufficient definition of mind.
There is mind throughout and beyond the physical, material
space of my body. But this is a topic I’ve covered in more detail in
previous essays here.

The 140 Character Wisecrack

By admin | April 23, 2013 | Uncategorized

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I fully recognize that I tend to be humorless here. Be that as it

may, I do like to get silly, and Twitter seems to be the ideal
platform for my brand of silliness. The tweet above is a comment
on a genuinely meaningful debate about whether the motives of
the Boston murderers qualify them as “terrorists” or “enemy
combatants.”

Twitter just seems an ideal environment for jibes and wisecracks.

The 140 character limit defines the tone: get your barb on the
wire and be blunt about it. Last week, a number of wiseasses like
me were busy, led by the U.S. Department of Fear (@Feardept):

…and my response to that last one:

My favorite of the week was this one from @teacherdude. You

have to know a little of the past decade’s foreign policy history
(and some geography) to appreciate it:

As with all humor worth the name, there is a serious point behind
all this shit, but I don’t want to make it here. I think it was
Benchley who said that “the analysis of humor is the pastime of
humorless people.”

But for anyone who wanders through here and is contemplating a

new or greater presence on Twitter, a few thoughts based on my
sporadic experience there. There appear to be two overall
strategies for using Twitter:

• You can follow few or none amid the twittersphere and just
track content via a few of the categorical listings known as
hashtags (e.g., #Boston). The Fear Dept. only follows two
other accounts but has 25,000 followers of its own; so I
assume it tracks hashtags and surfs the web to gather
topical material.
 • Or you can follow other accounts1 and keep your focus
mainly to what comes from them. I’ve taken this approach
because the hashtags are often too general, too insular, or
just too goofy to gain much from. One mistake I made early
on was gathering too many accounts to follow; then I’d
typically see 100+ posts at a time for every glance I gave it.
I’m just not serious enough about Twitter to spend time
poring over hundreds of posts per day; so I’ve narrowed my
field of the followed and filtered out those who post
obsessively and thereby do nothing more than create clutter.
Finally, a note on perspective: for a number of reasons, I tend to
focus on mental health and what some would call spiritual
development. I’m not getting younger, and I’ve lately been
backed into a corner by circumstance2. Your personal tao of the
moment will no doubt vary from mine (I hope!). But I tend to ask
the same question of my technology as I do of everything else I
encounter in my social environment: can it help me maintain and
support sanity, and how best can I use it toward that end? I’ve
been led to trust in the way of destroying the wall, annihilating
the divide between body and mind; materia and spiritum; matter
and energy. Anything that aids that process, that further opens
that path; that widens its scope and broadens its light — that is
what I’ll use and how I’ll use it. And for shattering walls and
bridging the chasm of fear and ignorance, there is nothing quite
like humor.

____________________________________________________
_______

1As I discovered today, it sure does help to follow some actual

hackers. I follow Anonymous @YourAnonNews — these folks
suspected the hack of the AP twitter feed within seconds, before
it was even confirmed as a hack by AP. So while the stock
market was going into its temporary panic-collapse, I already
knew the true story. How many brokers and hedgies do you
imagine follow Anonymous?
2I avoid delivering the details because frankly, my troubles don’t
rate on the popular scale of comparative misery (which,
incidentally, I reject based on my experience working with clients
in psychotherapy). Suffice it to say that I’ve been estranged amid
the New Economy of our 21st century reality.

5 Tips For Inner Survival at Work

By admin | April 23, 2013 | Uncategorized

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The signs for the corporate-funded “Lakeside” project at

Brooklyn’s Prospect Park avoid the word “meditating” in favor of
“relaxing.”

Let’s set aside the concerns over faith and religion for a moment
— after all, painting the Om symbol on that Lakeside sign would
be, from a legalistic perspective, equally problematic as putting
the cross or other religious symbol there. I grant that, fine. But
using the word “meditation” should raise no such concerns — for
Chase, the city government, or anyone else.

The problem, I suspect, has more to do with the corporate

backing than any government position on meditation. In the
corporate sphere, any behavior outside of some very narrow
norms is sternly judged. I found this out once at AIG, where I
was called on the carpet because I had developed a practice of
closing my eyes for brief periods during meetings. As I explained
to the boss who rapped my knuckles for it, I was focusing on
sounds and sensations in the room, especially when emotions ran
high — for example, at a meeting where conflict arose or
deadline/budgetary issues were hot. I learned a lot by settling in,
closing my eyes, and experiencing the confrontations and fears
present in the room from a position of emotional stillness.
Anyway, the manager brushed all that aside and grunted, “well,
people will think you’re asleep or maybe meditating or
something…”

“In fact,” I replied, “I learned some of this by meditating — and,

of course, from having been round the block a little in this arena,
you know.”

The manager got serious now: “that meditation shit won’t work
here — people don’t accept it and when it’s talked about you’re
going to find out just how uncomfortable it makes the bosses
feel. Don’t wait for that time to come…shut it down now.”

Now it may be true that in some sectors and industries (health

care, non-profits, certain areas of media or publishing, etc.), a
meditative mindset or interpersonal style may gain some
credibility. But in the big time — financial services, banking,
insurance, and most major sectors of technology — personal and
interpersonal behavior is rigidly codified and regimented. The
rules may not all be written down in the employee manual or
code of conduct, but they’re fixed in the corporate mind all the
same.

So if you’re like me in that you rely on your inner life, your

private well of truth and deep senses (which, by the way, we all
have access to); and you have to deal with these kinds of
restrictions on your image and behavior inside those revolving
doors — well, there are a few points you can remember to help
you along…

• Search, Locate, and Use Safe Havens: Most of the time

you’ll have to keep it outside — on the subway or bus on the
way to the office; in a park during lunch; or a public space
inside the building but outside the office. But if you pay
cautious attention, you’ll find places inside that don’t involve
sitting in a stall in the bathroom. Secluded spots in the
 corporate cafeteria; dead cubicles or nooks in an unused
portion of the office space; supply closets; stairwells — any
spaces that promise private slices of time (5 minutes is often
enough) are worth checking out.
• Adapt Your Practice: Let’s say you’re a Buddhist who goes
to temple, sits in a formal or stylized way and is used to
certain rituals. Obviously, you can’t take that stuff into the
office. So you have to build a slimmed-down practice that
you can still rely on to keep you centered, focused, and
productive (it’s a common joke among meditators that the
corps ban the very practice that could do them the most
good in terms of getting the most out of their workforce).
That office-practice is actually best prepared and tested
outside — at home or in whatever retreat or center you
commonly go to for meditation. The point is that you don’t
want to be doing this groundwork under the gun; you want
to develop it outside and then bring it into the office as a
mature, studied program. Let your awareness of the
environment and your personal needs as to time, part of the
day, and other factors guide you in adapting your practice to
the workplace. For example, at one assignment I found that
before and after meetings was a crucial time for me to have
5 or 10 minutes alone in quietude; it opened me up to what
was really going on and guided my outer responses. So I
prepared my office practice around those exigencies; and
my follow up work, emails, and post-meeting
communications were a lot sounder than they would
otherwise be.
• Find Company if You Can: If you’re fortunate enough to
make friends or just like-minded allies (even one would be
fine) with whom you can do your corporate inner work, then
go for it. In an office setting, two or more people moving
together tend to have more freedom to move around
without being noticed or questioned. It’s just one of those
oddities of the corporate mind: a pair or group of people
are going somewhere or doing something; a solitary worker
is wandering, loitering — WTF is he up to now?
 • Always Have an Excuse Ready: Let’s face it, you’ll be
caught. So be ready. You’re not feeling that well, but trying
to tough out the day. You just had to handle an important
private call (nowadays I’ll always have the cell in my hand
while meditating on the job). Your bad knee just locked up
on you and you had to stop a minute. Whatever — just have
something prepared for the benefit of interlopers.
• Finally: Be Flexible: Most corporate work is driven by the
unpredictable and the distracting. There will be times,
frequent times, when you can’t do your own thing at the
moment you feel the need to do it. Your lunchtime zazen at
the waterfront will be summarily canceled by a meeting, a
problem, or just a colleague needing some company. Get
used to this: the brighter and more vibrant your inner life,
the more in demand you’ll be both as a professional and as a
person. That’s 80% blessing and 20% pain in the ass. But
you also know that your practice makes you more flexible,
not less — more adaptable and more tolerant of change and
ambiguity. That’s why you started meditating after all: you
learned that it promotes both mental and physical health,
which is defined and guided by flexibility, inner agility, and
poise.
You may have noticed that I refuse to argue in any detail the
point about why a practice that is so natural, so beneficent, and
so productivity-enhancing as meditation should be frowned upon
in most workplaces. Why in the name of Goldman Sachs and
every other demon of Hell can I not sit in my cubicle for 5
minutes 3 or 4 times a day to center myself, focus, and call on
the helping energies of the universe to guide me in my work? If
I’m not burning incense, hanging prayer flags, adopting weird
postures, or otherwise presenting an obvious distraction — then it
should be nobody’s business that I’m doing inner work. After all,
I am working, just at a different level than I do the rest of the
day there.

Well, it’s a question I’ve long since given up asking openly. What I
do and how I do it helps me, my colleagues, and my employer. If
others can’t see or accept that, then that ignorance is theirs, not
mine. But ignorance isn’t something you can fix or dispel as a cog
within an institutional machine. I’ve learned instead to adjust and
adapt my own inner life to make it portable yet safe; intact yet
invisible to others; trustworthy yet transparent. I have been, and
can be again, a damned good worker. But to be that, I have to be
myself as well.

Microsomia
By admin | April 22, 2013 | Uncategorized

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Here’s a fairly safe prediction: there is in the city of Boston and

its environs a desperate need for psychological healing that will
go just as unrecognized as a similar need was some dozen years
ago here in New York. Throughout last week’s events it was
plainly evident, and probably never more so than during the
jingoistic exuberance of the celebrations that closed America’s
latest Week From Hell.

I have nothing more to add of any remotely authoritative

substance on those events than that. Instead, a different kind of
offering follows; something that may reinforce an urgent
recommendation I’ve been making online for nearly a decade —
that it is past time that the people of this nation turn within and
join together in clearly and honestly addressing their deepest and
most pervasive fears, through the exposure and rejection of false
belief.

Good things come to those who are sane. This is a message that
I’ve been receiving persistently, despite my disposition to ignore
it. Let’s go back again, then, to the question that we have asked
recurrently here: what is sanity? That is, what is sanity made of;
what are its essential ingredients?

We can agree that self-awareness is a big one. I have mentioned

that a stripping of the self to a state of psychological nudity is an
important practice in opening self-awareness; but I have probably
not been clear enough. It is time for an example, a snippet from
a life story, if you will.

Nights had become difficult for me. Very difficult. Sleeplessness

followed by a sinking into unconsciousness, which was spattered
with dark images, nightmares, night terrors — brain waves
pouring through a black sinkhole of crushing randomness.

One night (actually morning, an hour or so before sunrise), I

awoke with a crushing feeling that a psychiatrist had once
described for me with a single and unfamiliar word: microsomia.
Microsomia, he had told me, is psychologically a sense of
disproportion and disorientation in which a person can feel
abnormally small or insignificant. But there is more to it: not
merely do things — walls, furniture, the very air itself — become
overlarge and threatening; they also move, pressingly, loomingly,
you might even say malevolently, against the one suffering from
this microsomia. Familiar objects become daunting and strange
enemies; one’s whole environment turns into a crowded realm of
physical oppression — suffocatingly heavy, airless, isolating. It is
as if one is, at a purely psychological level, being buried alive.

So, this is microsomia. I had experienced it, once again. I

remembered that it had been a motif in my psychology, going all
the way back to childhood. Already, a window of healing was
opening before me: I was presented with a pathology that had
been daunting me, on and off, for nearly half a century! The time
had come to pick up this thread and summon the minimal
courage needed to follow its trail.
One tool I have learned to use is the ancient Chinese oracle text
known as the I Ching (or Yijing in the Pinyin transliteration).
Thus, as I sat awake amid that sense of oppression known as
microsomia, I asked for help and cast the I Ching.

One word first about this call for help: it is not a prayer. It wasn’t
for me, at any rate. For it was far less a call to some
ideologically-defined God or other Presence and more a mere
acknowledgement of my vulnerability, my helplessness, and
therefore my openness. There was no direction or delineation to
my call for help; it was simply a whole-body, whole-being cry for
guidance — from who, what, or where, I knew not, and didn’t
think to care.

The hexagram of the I Ching that I cast was No. 15, which is
usually translated as Modesty. The first three of its six lines were
“moving,” or “changing,” meaning that they held a particular
message for me and this moment I was in. Here is the main text
of the Modesty hexagram, along with those three initial lines:

Modesty creates success. The superior man carries things

through.

1. The modest person may cross the great water. Good fortune.
2. Modesty that comes to expression. Being firmly correct brings
good fortune.
3. The superior man of modesty and merit carries things to
conclusion.

As I meditated on the text and its images, the dissonance

between our western concept of modesty and this other, Asian
vision of it filled me up and seemed to ask me questions. The
beliefs that I had been fed since childhood began talking to me:

• Modesty is chastity.
 • Modesty is self-denial.
• Modesty is feminine.
• Modesty keeps your evil side, your animal nature, in check.
• Modesty accomplishes nothing.
• Modesty is for losers.

The I Ching, as can be seen from its text, has a very different
view of modesty. It is not a passive, dependent, self-denying, or
chaste attribute. Modesty is, in fact, an active virtue — it “creates
success,” “carries things through,” “comes to expression,”
“crosses the great water,” brings “things to completion,” and is
intrinsically related to merit as both a personal and social
attribute.

Thus, the message of this moment had already begun to clarify

within me: if you would like to be sane, to free yourself of your
fears and your demons, then find a way free of the prejudices
and oppressive (“microsomiac”) attitudes and assumptions that
feed those fears and have fed those demons for so long. I was
being directly asked, indeed urged, by the cosmos to liberate
myself of those falsehoods that had been the very fuel of my
terror; which had formed the substrate of a lifetime’s worth of
inhibition and dread.

The cosmic mind that speaks through the I Ching (and through
the events and encounters of our daily lives) was throwing me a
psychological lifeline. You don’t have to live with this shit
anymore, it said. You can get it all out of you, starting now. Make
it into a conscious act — free of ritual, mystery, dependence on
priests and masters, and the obsession with appearance and the
perceptions of others. Openly and consciously reject, with all the
energy of your total being, the lies and imprisoning self-images
that have made fear your consort and self-denial your life’s very
aura. This is the way back to your natural body, the way clear of
dread and inhibition, the way out of microsomia.
I cannot and do not ask that the people of Boston, New York, or
any other city, region, or hamlet of this nation take this story to
heart and try to cut their own way free of the net of delusion and
into the heart of self-awareness. But I will insist on one point: if
you believe what the television is telling you about the
psychological meaning of what happened last week, in Boston or
anywhere else — you are living in a darkened room of the mind.
Do not be surprised if you start feeling as if you’re shrinking and
the walls start closing in upon you. And always remember:
you do have an option, many options; right before and within
you.

Of Self-Restraint
By admin | April 18, 2013 | Uncategorized

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One principal reason that I practice and presume to teach

meditation is that it reveals and nurtures critical skills in practical
living. An example of such a skill is one that is generally unknown
amid those in public life: self restraint. Often, this remarkable
skill manifests as the simple ability to shut up before one makes a
step-on-my-dick type of mistake. You can pick up the newspaper
of any day to find instances of what I’m talking about; here are a
few from the past 24 hours or so…

• CNN reporters stomp on theirs

• The NY Post slices its own off
• Padres CEO cudgels his own
• Mike Rogers does it in the basement
There’s no end to it — there are entire websites, blogs, and
twitter entities devoted to catching this stuff; and it keeps
Stewart’s and Colbert’s writers very busy. Now to return to my
theme today, that a regular practice of meditation can help with
this problem: I’m afraid we have to make a few seemingly
gratuitous assumptions, viz…

• This kind of behavior, and the malignant idiocy that produces

it, is not rewarded or reinforced by our culture;
• People — most people, at any rate — genuinely dislike being
exposed as malignant idiots;
• Self restraint is not merely a virtue; it is a natural attribute
of humanity.

These would appear to be bold and even ludicrous assumptions. I

will not argue that point. It is entirely possible that there never
was a natural American affection (let alone idealization) towards
the “strong silent type.” It is arguable that men such as Thoreau,
Lincoln, and Gary Cooper stand as large exceptions to an even
greater rule. On that point, I can only beg for a disavowal of
circumstantial evidence and then ask the reader’s introspective
indulgence: we do like to see ourselves in the mirror and know
that a fool is not staring back at us; we do prefer to believe that
we are capable of discretion, trustworthiness, and poise; and
we know we have the capacity for self restraint, for we have
experienced it within ourselves.

This, after all, is the point I have been leading to, that when we
look within, our greater, more natural, and universal abilities arise
and let loose their light — the glow undimmed by the rank and
blinding glare of arrant folly and cowardly display. The strong
silence of self restraint is just a different, organic voice that
measures words as the master chef does spice. Thus the ancient
poet reminds us:

Be sparing in your speech,

And then return to silence.
Be truly a part of Nature:
Its storm-brought winds do not outlast the dawn;
Its rain drums and sings upon the thirsty earth,
And then the clouds recede before the sun.1

Reflection takes us to the well of wisdom, whose clear and liquid

depths connect to Nature. Noise is not foreign to Nature; neither,
however, is it Her prevailing voice. The mightiest voice of the
universe is heard in its silences. We are made of the same cosmic
breath as suffuses the muted winds of spring. To develop and
mature one’s self is not a matter of learning such strength, but of
liberating it.

How, then? How can you open the gates of freedom and make
the journey back to your atavistic self — the person whose face,
as the Zen masters tell it, is the one you had before your parents
were born?

This is not the stuff of an instructional manual.

As Krishnamurti told us, we can teach one another how to build a
computer or cook a souffle; but we cannot make a fixed process
out of liberation. I can join you, go with you — each of us walking
his and her unique path, in the confidence that the Earth still
joins us. When the individual calls upon himself, the universal
need not be summoned; it is always there, holding us together.

We may sit together in the same room; we may walk together

through streets or gardens; we may stand within the same crowd
or share an electronic presence here in this vast web of
connectivity. Still we each go alone; I can no better steer you
onto my path than I can make an exclusive claim to our common
ground. The purest truth is found in the coexistence of solitude
and society, as Emerson wrote:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people
think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life,
may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and
meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those
who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It
is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in
solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the
midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the
independence of solitude.

We can learn to unlearn all the fears and fabrications that have
been written into our bodies as worms and viruses are written
into our machines. We can look within ourselves and then toward
one another and agree: conformity is the spawning ground of
fear. When I attempt to think what my government tells me or to
fear what my television fears, then my grave is already half-dug,
and Death’s scythe has already claimed my heart. But if I have
known the strength of my own silences, then my life is my own,
no matter how meager its stature in the eye of the collective.

Thus, self-restraint is not a mere matter of keeping one’s trap

perpetually shut, as if such a thing were possible. Restraint is not
a passive or fearful position; it is rather a kind of action that
bears an energy free of pretense. For pretense, as with all types
of conformity, is born of fear. Read again the links posted above:
the reporters lusting after the scoop as to the dark-skinned agent
of Terror or the executive’s and the politician’s stereotyped
branding of his imagined Enemy — can you not taste the fear
driving them all? Every form of display, every breed of arrogance,
is fed by fear.

This is what we work with in our meditations. Obviously, you and

I have different fears, different prejudices, and variant histories of
darkness to dispel. But though our paths may separate, our
direction is shared. We may build the homes of our distinction in
the confidence of a common foundation.
Another common thread to the links above can be found: racism.
If I can clear away the dust of destruction, the smoke of isolation,
and the rusted chains of group allegiance; then it is of no
moment to me whether the bomber is brown-skinned or green;
whether the pitcher has a remote history of mental illness; or
whether the Internet is a population of teenage boys in
basements. The men telling those lies of prejudice are living in
rotten houses that are not their own, and never were. They have
not made the minimal effort of clearing away what is derived,
borrowed, trained, and corrupt.

They may never be able to; so deeply into the swamp of fear
have they sunk. Our chances are better. One thing we must
remember about racism in particular is that it has very deep roots
in that swamp of fear. This is another reason why we practice
meditation: as Thoreau told us, “There are a thousand hacking at
the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

It is so with racism: our cultural institutions hack at its branches

and ignore its roots2. To do so requires a strong and silent
courage. Not the heroic, noisy, arrogant courage of which news
and movies are made; but the personal and private courage of
the one who can shatter the chain of conformity to a prejudice so
pervasive that it is no longer examined, let alone challenged. This
is the prejudice of anthropocentrism — or, as I call it, “cosmic
racism” — which I have covered in another essay. In the context
of today’s discussion, a paragraph from that essay applies:

What this separation from cosmic racism does — what it did for
me, anyway — is that it removes the drama, the ridiculous
hyperbole, from both inner and outer life. The drama-queen of
anthropocentrism is knocked off her throne, and her crown of
causation, dominion, and lordship over the Earth and the universe
clatters comically along the stone floor of the palace of shadows.
As I’ve begun to accept and then embrace this experience, this
realization, I have also come to a fresh and clearer understanding
of both my human potential and my responsibility.
Again, looking over the stories at the links above, we see a third
common thread: a forced and artificial drama that collides with
both fact and sensibility. To separate from the belief in which the
drama is rooted is to free oneself of its web of formative delusion.

This, too, is the way of self-restraint: when I succeed in rooting

out the hyperbole of human arrogance from within myself, then
the dignity of my individual life and that of my species is
simultaneously affirmed amid the quietude of reflection. As with
truth, dignity never has to be forced, proclaimed, defended with
noise or aggression, or thrown onto a distant and exclusive
pedestal. It has only to be experienced, in the silent inner spaces
of that fortress of inner truth that is both the unique possession
of every individual and the common ground of the universal that
unites us all. To feel this regularly, within and throughout your
being, is to actualize the greatness of self-restraint.

—————————————————————————-

1From Lao Tzu, Ch. 23 of the Tao Te Ching, in my own

unpublished translation
2Dave Zirin, the excellent sports columnist of The Nation has a
review of the new film about Jackie Robinson that illustrates this
point. Zirin’s insight is that translating a complex and still-
prevalent social problem such as racism into the heroic banalities
of Hollywood does nothing substantive to solve the problem or
give us greater understanding. A similar note is struck by
Jonathan Rieder in a recent Times editorial on the 50th
anniversary of Dr. King’s letter from the Birmingham jail. We will
never be able to destroy social cancers such as racism by diluting
or distorting their meaning or their scope.

5 Minutes of Ordinary Philosophy

By admin | April 18, 2013 | Uncategorized

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This one’s a reading of my recent Easter Sermon post. It’s sort of

about revealing your own personal resurrection. This video
appears as the intro trailer at my youtube channel.

10 Minutes of Ordinary Philosophy

By admin | April 15, 2013 | self-recovery

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A reading from a recent post, with some additional

extemporization.

The Why Files: The Truth is In-

Here
By admin | April 4, 2013 | Uncategorized
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Along with millions of my fellow 1990′s Americans, I was a fan of

The X Files. Like all sci-fi, it was goofy, silly, loaded with
clumsiness as to plot and the random deus ex machina. Yet every
so often during its first five or six seasons, it could be
unexpectedly, astonishingly brilliant.

I was recently able to watch a few old favorites again (thanks to

The Pirate Bay), and the show’s humor was again refreshing. It
gently mocks its culture — the conspiracy theorists, the political
corruption, and the apocalyptic mania. Fans of the show will recall
that last year, 2012, was the date set for the final alien invasion/
colonization of Earth; and it was chosen with the well-known
Mayan calendar expiration date in mind. It was fun to see again
characters such as Deep Throat, Cancer Man, and the Lone
Gunmen geeks. When Carter and Spotnitz (producers/frequent
writers) and Manners (frequent director) were at their best, they
occasionally demonstrated an art that exceeded the capacity of
the idiot box. It was always worth slogging through some of the
dopey episodes to encounter something like “The Post-Modern
Prometheus,” a beautiful adaptation of the Frankenstein tale shot
in panoramic black-and-white.
I also liked some of the show’s clarion political statements — I’m
fairly certain, in fact, that JFK, RFK, and MLK (among others)
were murdered by government operatives or government-
controlled corporate syndicates. In a more general sense, I liked
the notion — presented throughout the series — of rumor
manufacture as a tool of diversion from the really critical threats
to humanity. I am again convinced that this entire deceit-by-
distraction game continues unabated to this very moment. And
above all else, perhaps, I liked oil as the symbol of evil and
dehumanization (the “black oil” that infects and enslaves people,
destroying them from within; poisoning their bloodstream and
darkening the light of their eyes). By now it should be obvious to
any thinking person that if territory and religion were the causes
of our species’ old wars; there is but one cause of our more
recent wars — and we are as addicted to that subterranean liquid
darkness as ever.

The details are less important, however, than the discussion of

art’s place in all this. It might seem fair to question whether such
truths should be told or exposed by any fiction, let alone a fiction
about an alien colonization of the Earth via an oily virus carried
by bees and surrounded by layering webs of conspiracy. My point
is that this is not merely the province but the specialty of art and
particularly of fiction. There is a very long list of playwrights and
novelists who, going back to pre-Christian times, exposed the
deceit and inhumanity of states, corporate gangs, and other in-
groups led by cynics, misanthropes, and liars.

The point leads to a critical understanding about the way to truth.

All those authors of human history — a number of the ancient
Greek and Latin writers, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hugo, Tolstoy,
etc. — are individual voices calling down the lies and
depredations of the powerful. This is why I repeatedly say that
every life needs art: the individual consciousness is the only clear
path through deception and toward truth; and the proof of that
pudding is in our art. So I offer this correction to the famous
slogan of The X Files, which is born out within its narrative: the
truth is not “out there,” but “in here.”

The show quickly reveals that the entity for which the two heroes
of the program work is not itself the force for truth. In fact, the
FBI continually represses and punishes Mulder’s and Scully’s
search for truth. It is the group impulse to work against truth by
concretizing whatever it labels as truth; thus truth’s life-blood,
that which animates it and thereby nourishes us, becomes as
sticky and toxic as that oil that infects the bodies of the human
victims in the stories.

OK, I get it: “out-there” is part of the humor of the show. As in

outer space or as in too-weird-to-be-believed. The same goes for
the other motto placed underneath the picture of the flying
saucer: “I want to believe.” This one goes even further by
bringing in the spiritual impulse: it is eventually revealed, via the
discovery of the alien ships in Africa and Canada with their
ancient, cuneiform-type writing, that all our human culture,
religion, and even genetic identity arose from alien visitations of
millions of years ago. This leads certain of the show’s characters
to make the connection between these visitations and the voice of
God. Thus, “I Want to Believe” becomes a slogan for more than a
desire, but for a primordial human instinct.
Still, the phrases are what they are; and so must be examined.
“Out-there” suggests the external; and externalization is a good
part of the bedrock of neurosis. When we imagine that all or most
of the causes of our pain, suffering, ignorance, and violence are
“out-there,” then the seeds of mental illness have already been
planted. The externalization compulsion is the primal delusion,
the one universal feature of all neurotic, depressive, and
psychotic disorders. In one of my books, I described it like this:

Neurosis: A Practical Definition For the Rest of Us

No, this is not “neurosis for dummies”: it is simply a practical
definition that we can all refer to in understanding the meaning of
the intense torment we often feel amid the conflicts of
modern life. The goal here is not to construct or support a school
of thought or a theory of the personality—as if such a thing were
even possible. Our objective is simply to have words that
can help us in expressing our suffering and finding a conceptual
orienting point that connects thought and feeling,
unconsciousness and awareness, in a way that will help to lead us
out of the darkness of estrangement. To this end, then, our
working definition of neurosis, summarized:

• Neurosis is characterized by inner conflict—a painful sense of

discord within the psyche, usually from we-don’t-know-
where, that feels like a splitting of the self into competing or
even warring components.
• Neurosis is unconscious—we’re either completely unaware or
only vaguely conscious of the source, direction, and meaning
of our feelings of discord and conflict. We’re very conscious
of the pain and inner combat that’s going on within us, but
we’re not aware of its cause; we lack a
conscious perspective on what the pain is telling us.
• Consequently, neurosis leads us into that form of projection
known as externalization: we blame other people, events,
things, or abstractions (such as a malevolent God, an
indifferent universe, society, Nature — including human
nature — or just a dark star following our life’s course) for
 our misery, our sense of bitter estrangement.
Externalization only further separates us from self-
understanding and spirals us into darker and more
malevolent conflicts, which in turn lead us into a deeper
cycle of division, splitting, and estrangement— both from
others and from our true nature. Neurosis, at its worst, is
the dark and recurrent atonal noise of inner death.
Perhaps now you can see why it is crucial to self-understanding
and to the improvement of human relationships of all types and
sizes that we make a single affirmation: the truth is in-
here. Truth comes from and is kept alive by the individual human
mind and heart; and it is as individuals that we monitor and
police our institutions, which have an unhappy tendency to kill
truth by claiming it as group property. Truth that becomes owned
is thereby enslaved and is already falsehood, deceit, delusion.
Churches, states, and corporations are the bodies that most
commonly require vigilance in this respect, though any in-group
will tend to make truth the victim of an externalization impulse.

Now we come back to that second phrase: “I Want to Believe.”

The most common form of truth-ownership is through belief. So
wanting to believe becomes a voice of that inner conflict
mentioned above, that is projected via the externalization-
compulsion. So we offer this correction: “I Don’t Need to
Believe“. Belief leads us fast into the muddy trench of faith; and
we have all seen what history tells us about the violence that
proceeds from competing faiths.

The problem with faith is not necessarily how it feels but in what
it portends. Sure, faith can feel great — faith in a family member,
lover, spouse, church, leader, nation, or institution. But faith
doesn’t need to be proven or regenerated via experience; it is by
definition perpetual. Trust is a different animal: it must be won
and then affirmed by experience. So maybe we could amend
Mulder’s poster with the motto, “I Want to Trust.”
But that, too, would be superfluous to reality, to lived experience.
We don’t have to desire trust or create some artificial yearning for
trust. It is already there, the capacity and sensitivity to trust. In
the clear-minded individual, trust is earned and verified without
any need for training, cultivation, or catechism. It is no accident
that the words “truth” and “trust” start with the same three
letters: they are both derived (probably) from a similar Old
English root.

This leads to the third of The X Files’ famous mottoes: “Trust No

One” (or, in the double-entendre title of one episode: “Trust No.
1″). There is always someone to trust — even Mulder and Scully
have each other (and more often than not, their sometime-boss,
Skinner). I think the key is to strip away the inner impediments
to trust. Delete faith and its half-brother, cynicism, from your
mind, and the crust of blind belief will also crumble. Once that
happens, the natural energy of trust is given free rein to take the
leadership of your life and its relationships.

Trust has the effect of taking competition out of the field of

relationship. Faith and belief will tend to compete and even go to
war if provoked. But trust, like truth itself, has life: it can freely
move in or out; advance or recede; plant its roots or take flight.
It has a unique energy that neither makes nor accepts claim.
Without claim, it has no need for contest; thus, natural trust
never goes to war. It simply goes away, but always with the
option of returning under better circumstances.

So one future in which I place my own trust is that aliens from

outer space, once they encounter us, will not be enemies or
colonial conquerors, as they are mainly (though not exclusively)
painted in The X Files. I figure they’ll be much as described in the
various histories of Star Trek — specifically, the Vulcan arrival on
Earth after Zefram Cochrane’s initial warp-drive flight. They will
find us puzzling, strange, somewhat prone to barbarism, and
psychologically unfinished — developed to a rather adolescent
stage of emotional evolution. But they won’t want to kill, poison,
or enslave us for that. Indeed, perhaps such visitors will be just
what we need to take our next evolutionary quantum leap:
someone to trust, who can lead us beyond belief and toward a
clearer and more vibrant truth. We can anticipate both their
arrival and our own growth by affirming, right now, that the truth
is in-here.

Lao Tzu’s Gateway

By admin | April 3, 2013 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

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The universe described

is not quite the timeless Origin.
My word for the Nameless touches
but cannot hold the Essence.

Beyond the empty division

of heaven and earth
lives the wordless All!
The living ground of being.

The Nameless bears the Essence;

names reveal the functions
of all the numberless forms of Being,
born of the vast and silent Mother.

Release your attachment to the visible,

And the Tao breathes within you.
The manifest and the immanent
Are of the same Cosmic Origin—

The living, teeming dark.

Eternal, shimmering dark,
Reflecting itself in transformation,
Beyond all form and name—
Through the gateway of your heart.*

Scientists infer that about 80% of the known universe’s mass is

comprised of what they call “dark matter.” No one really
understands what this stuff is or why there’s so much of it; it is
not even clear whether the current conceptualization of it is at all
accurate. What seems clear is that the matter we know — stuff
that emits and/or absorbs light — accounts for a minority of the
mass of the whole. The dark, therefore, is not merely a principle
of matter, energy, and life — it is a prevailing reality of the
universe.
In the opening poem of his collection of 81 poems known as the
Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu leads us to an appreciation of this principle
of the Dark. I think he wrote this introduction with a very specific
purpose that is revealed throughout the 80 poems that follow.
Like every true artist, Lao Tzu wanted his audience to receive a
first impression that opens “the gateway of the heart.” I want to
spend a few minutes in studying his approach, because every life
contains the potential energy of Art, though few see or feel that
energy made actual and kinetic.

Lao Tzu begins his life’s defining work self-reflectively —

contemplating the exact meaning and function of the very stuff of
his art, language. I think his approach shows a remarkable
artistic courage, which is revealed via comparison to a very
famous declaration from Western scripture:

The universe described In the beginning was the Word,

is not quite the timeless and the Word was with God, and
Origin. the Word was God.
My word for the Nameless
touches
but cannot hold the
Essence.
Like an astronomer peering into his telescope, Lao Tzu seeks
equally the potential and the boundary of his work, his art, his
capacity for understanding. The Christian text (John 1:1), on the
other hand, strikes a sledgehammer blow of claim: not merely
can the word touch God, it is God.

I think that the variance here is more than merely conceptual; it

is substantive, life-defining. For Lao Tzu is asking us to
experience a unique form for the Ineffable: something that is
both universal and personal; something that lives, moves, and
perpetually evades claim and belief; something that brushes
beside our words in the way a woman’s dress flows near and then
beyond me like light amid a dance in a darkened room. It turns
out that the universe is not defined by a battle between light and
dark, spirit and science, soul and body. In his first poem, Lao Tzu
asks us to awaken from the nightmare of “empty division of
heaven and earth.”

Lao Tzu writes in the present tense; the gospel, in the past. Lao
Tzu wants us to feel, or begin to feel, the presence, the
immanence, the living reality of this All, this Essence, this Tao. He
doesn’t want us to feel this as some distant and pre-ancient
history, which must now be taken as an object of mere faith. He
wants to introduce us to an experience, something that another
later poet called an “intimation of immortality.” Lao Tzu urges us
to Now; the author of John paints a solitary landscape of the
past.

Lao Tzu develops this experience in the next few stanzas: this
nameless, wondrous All is of the heart; it can have no other
residence. Our words may describe what it does, how it may
appear amid the forms we see and sense; but they cannot
contain it, cannot hold it like a flag or a sword. You may as well
attempt to capture and contain each breath of your life as own
the Truth; for the truth you seek, the truth that matters most, is
too mobile and changing to be held by a story, a word, a claim.

So Lao Tzu doesn’t try to tell us a story of gods and men; of birth
and death; of war and peace. He urges us to leave the realm of
those opposites and take a different journey. He holds up the
mirror of Art and asks us to look, but not with the eyes or the
visual cortex of our brain. From the first words of his song, he
urges us to reach within for another kind of vision that relies not
on belief but on experience; not on received truth but on personal
awareness; not on faith but on the trust engendered by that
experience, that awareness. Lao Tzu is an artist who paints on
water; the John of the gospel is a craftsman carving stone.

For me, the formative lesson of the Gospels is that if I can

discover my own life, my own direction, my own uniqueness, then
Christ’s message will become my own; His truths will be clear to
me; and His story will have some meaning, even as His Book
remains superfluous. Lao Tzu’s message is much clearer in this
respect: look into this mirror, gain from it what will further your
life, and then cast it aside. The Sage makes no claim of either
belief or adherence upon us; the universe does not demand
allegiance, only attention.

Thus, Lao Tzu closes his opening, this Introduction to Tao, by

reminding us that light and dark are no more divided or opposed
than are the visible and invisible; formed and formless; life and
death; word and meaning. The dark matter of the universe teems
and shimmers; it is a majority only in quantity but not in quality.
And quality, as Robert Pirsig revealed so clearly in his own
philosophical masterpiece, is not to be fixed by a commandment,
a story, or a set of beliefs.
Finally, Lao Tzu introduces us to the possibility that hierarchy is a
corruption, a mistake of human ego. There is no Ruler: no one
and nothing owns the word, the whirling dance of transformation,
the truth. For these are simultaneously of the individual and
universal heart; and no god, no church, no book, no story, can
ever own that sacred and timeless space within you.

——————————————————————

*Chapter 1 of the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, in my own

unpublished translation.

In Search of Wisdom’s Skin

By admin | April 3, 2013 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

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Sometimes when I meditate on developing the third eye, I
actually envision an awning growing out of my brow instead. So I
understand and respect the need for reticence, shadow and
solitude. I suspect it is a universal, if occasional, disposition; and
some of us find it so deeply nourishing that we tend to rather
over-rely on it.

So I am cautious about extending my personal predilections and

faults onto the rest of my species. I would rather not be liked
than be alike. Fortunately, our choices do not come down to such
vulgar dichotomies. This is a principle as universal as it is
neglected: when you next find yourself in another position where
you see only two options, two paths, two responses — drop both
and seek the third. Then invite the discarded twain back in and
watch all of them communicate, coalesce, and multiply. Making
decisions is only courageous when preceded by the wisdom of
perceiving all the options.

Wisdom itself is uncommon: it is a clearing of light and sanity in a

dense, dark wood – a pellucid place where the trails of
awareness, humility, and love converge. It is, on occasion
(though less frequently than we might imagine), a temporal point
on the journey of experience — a diamond wrought amid the
pressure of age and perseverance. But age is, far from being a
requirement, often an impediment to wisdom. Take a tour of
Washington or of executive row at most any Wall Street tower,
and the point tends to make itself. Age does not by itself create
experience (let alone wisdom) — there must be awareness in
company with the years.
But in our culture, it is too often acceptable and even preferable
to wear the crisply-ironed or fashionably ragged images or
clothing of sagacity and experience. Any claim of either tends to
leave the essence buried in a landfill of ignorance. “Been-there-
done-that” often carries an implicit “learned-nothing-from-it”. The
appearance of experience is usually the wrapping of folly. Either
arrogance or ignorance in isolation can be managed and even
occasionally tolerated; but when they join forces there is no God
in Heaven who can withstand let alone conquer them.

The solution I prefer to this is what I call “unlearning” — doing

away with the hidebound (one might say “hide-obsessed”)
prejudices of derived and blank belief. Here’s one that touches
that exact metaphor: the desire to be or to appear “thick-
skinned.” As if toughness were some crystalline virtue, and
arboreal ambitions (to have a layer of bark over one’s feelings)
were a higher pursuit of mankind. In a society where numbness
wins points, aggression will become the favored tactic. It is a
game in which all who play must inevitably lose.
So if I retreat into my own shadow more than I should, it is less
to be apart than to remain autonomous. When independence
departs, dignity rushes out behind it, like the wake of a boat
leaving harbor. To sacrifice one’s human and animal sensitivity to
a studied group-image is already to cut the hull of integrity away
from the pier of self. Yes, I may remain silent and withdrawn —
perhaps even inscrutable. But if I cease to feel then my grave has
already been dug three feet deep, no matter my state of physical
health. Better that I endure with my wounds than that I make a
pretense of anesthesia.

When I write of stripping oneself to psychological nakedness, this

is exactly the point: to undress oneself of images, beliefs, and
trappings of toughness is to feel the natural skin and body of
emotion – to nurture the kind of genuine experience that is
nourished by awareness, toned by gentleness, and continually
renewed by compassion. It is the right and natural way to both
remain young and grow old.
My Easter Sermon
By admin | March 31, 2013 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

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I seek only truth, not perfection. As desperately as the world

appears to require resurrection, I also realize that the imitation of
Christ is the primordial fool’s endeavor. If I can strip away that
which is not myself, I will reveal what is. If I am to see my true
raiment, I must discover my psychological body in all its naked
beauty.

Perhaps this is the message of Keats’ famous poem: he speaks to

the clear-eyed sight of psychological nakedness, which sees every
living being as its essence, the double helix of that molecule of
pure thought and vibrant sense, DNA. To see that is to embrace
impossibility with the grasp of inevitability: all is truth, all is
beauty. That is all you know and all you need to know.
It is a matter of becoming naked. The robe must be left behind
on the stony bier of death and ugliness and falsehood. Every
resurrection entails undressing — not in an imitation of Christ or
anyone else, but in an affirmation of oneself. Any other form of
resurrection is merely a cheap parlor trick.

Nakedness is a fit metaphor on this experience because it

reminds us of the centrality of body. Even God recognized this:
the body is not in the tomb; it has been transferred to a new
realm of being, presumably as pure energy rather than the
matter-energy admixture that we know. There is no God who
owns either matter or energy; body or mind. These are already
yours to be revealed.
A proper resurrection demands that we grow intimate with body.
It is not, as the priests claim, a mere shell for soul or spirit. Or, if
it be a shell, then let it be one as the electron orbits are the
atom’s shell; as stratospheric ozone is the shell of our Earth; as
the liquid membrane is the shell of the living cell. The essence of
all life is found not within a stone tomb, a wooden cross, or a
heaven-reaching tower; it is the soft, dancing curves of the
double helix.

Again, I return to the song of Keats: the “foster child of silence

and slow time” is not the urn but its art. What is outwardly seen
is not the art, not the rapture of union with the universal, not the
enduring resurrection that holds and then surpasses the muted
march of time. For though the object be two or three thousand
years old, its art remains a child — a glowing orbit of growth and
continual transformation. Beauty and truth are not objects to be
possessed, tagged, and enslaved; they are children of the
Creative — products of the resurrection-mind within us all that
effortlessly transcends the illusions of ugliness, falsehood, and
death. Let this reality be revealed just once in a moment of
psychological nakedness, and the old gods of pain, fear, and guilt
will flee the temple and cede the sacred to the children of Nature
— truth, beauty, and body.

So I seek not perfection but truth: let me not look for the beauty
of Christ or listen for his truth. They will find me well enough, if I
can only reveal what is the truth and beauty of myself. But if I
cannot strip myself to the natural body of my resurrection, then
the God’s robe will only burden my life like an iron shroud, and I
will never know the real truth of deathlessness. In this, my vision
and the Nazarene’s converge: become the naked child of silence
and time, whose truth and beauty have never been or will be
again.

A Necessary Blasphemy
 By admin | March 18, 2013 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

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Impoverishment is relative. That is to say, relativistic in the sense

that Einstein intended it. Neither space nor time is a separate
dimension of any reality; they can only exist cooperatively as a
continuum of experience and meaning. I may be thrown out of
my apartment or I may endure another month — the space and
its time cannot be divided, even if they are measured discretely.
If only in my own experience, I must find a way beyond the
mechanical as my measure of the whole. Even visible weeds have
quantum roots.

The pressure of impending loss cannot be denied; but its

emotional physics may be understood somewhat differently than
is common in our culture. I do not know what truth there may be
in any of that; I only seek a certain wisdom in desperation,
because the frigid pressure of this imperious austerity would
otherwise crush me. I must find a way beyond survival and a
path into living. No matter who or what else might be involved,
that path must take form within me. This is the connection
between the dispersal of false belief about the cosmos and the
ordinary struggles of an impoverished life down here.

I see that the most active planets and nebulae appear silent and
cold; and I know that this is exactly what I have been. There is
necessity even in failure: this has been my only self-defense amid
my pillar-to-post stagger of submission to loss and estrangement.
I hold nearly everything within, reasoning that we cannot reveal
much when we are poor. I must be cold and still, or else risk
tainting others with the stain of my collapse. If my orbit has
broken, then I alone must bear the responsibility and the
consequences. Expression must recede as currency dwindles.

And so I quail before the most common and trivial of

conversation: “how ya doin’?” becomes a mystery greater than
the sound of the last trumpet (Cor. 15:51). But it is more than a
matter of not troubling the still waters of others’ sensibilities; that
is only part of it. We live on bread — not because it is the staff of
life (John 6:35), for it is not. Bread is, in fact, an ugly metaphor
on the essence of God. The modern poor understand this. For
while it is true that we do live on bread; we consume it because it
fills and bloats us cheaply. Many of us eat it because our teeth are
too rotted and broken for a crisper, more diverse and nourishing
sustenance. Whenever surveys are done of the uninsured, the
dentist is commonly rated first or second among the medical
providers most sorely missed.

The decayed remnants of our social philosophies lie exposed on

the board of want; even pabulum cannot be chewed when there
are no teeth. But again, we cannot speak of these things; they
open too wide a gulf between with and without; between have
and have-not. There is no space in our discourse for the
examination of assumptions. Certain things must be politely
assumed or God will tumble out of heaven like the last drunk
thrown from the tavern; the government may crumble before its
time; and the television will go dark and quiet amid the temblors
of awareness and compassion.

In this age of the Internet, search has some meaning — it

delivers information and sells advertising. But to seek does not
become us. Our searches must be for cold data and stop there.
We are content with facts and have no need for truths. A fact can
lie dead, stiff, and bare before us, like a corpse beneath the
undertaker’s hands. Truth, however, vibrates with life and is
therefore more elusive. It takes more energy just to touch, let
alone hold truth than to discover a fact. What is dead can be
claimed and owned; but truth can only be loved, shared, and
then released. Release is half the act of sharing; and sharing is
the essence of compassion. Truth’s light and joyous movement
evades the iron point of possession’s flagstaff. The search box
delivers ready information; the seeking heart promises
understanding. It is not a technological choice; our machines
have no advice for us there. And so we remain marginally free,
for the moment.

My landlady and my ex-wife want to know where their money is

and why I do not pay. There is an oppression of shame in the
inability to pay. The chains of poverty thicken and multiply with
time, and write their sentence into our skin: abandon the dream
of building bridges across the chasm of separation; getting and
spending is all the quest your life needs. The Corporate Church
teaches that compassion and survival are enemies. So grab as
much as you can reach; survival allows for no other recourse. No
wonder, then, that the poor are reticent: they have violated the
great commandment.

In any event, our questions fade under the thickening ice of want.
The vision of desperation goes blind under the glare of judgment:
you are a lazy parasite within the belly of society, a leech on the
back of the collective. The judgment must be accepted, the
poison ingested, if there is to be any hope of re-assimilation. Just
remain on or close to the surface and you will not be isolated. But
go further: seek any depth beyond the veneer and you will be
lost, trodden underfoot, crushed by the ice or drowned amid its
melting.

Again: we cannot speak of these things. Though there may still

be millions of us in this boat, it is only the surface of the water
that matters. Think outside the box, the Corporation tells me; but
do not dare try to tip it over or look beneath it. Speech may be
nominally free, but listening is restricted and often forbidden.
Today, both the iconoclast and his audience are extinct, except as
mere images. Otherwise, all strive to be insiders within the
Corporate Body of God and His org-chart hierarchy of Heaven.
The outsider declined rapidly under the weight of that tower
supported by the stone columns of power and subjection; guilt
and salvation; original sin and the commerce of absolution.

Transcendence has no place in a world where everything can be

bought. There is no one left outside whose heart can be felt or
heard inside; iconoclasm has no further place among us. If you
dare to speak strangely or uniquely — should you risk the work of
tipping over the box to expose the vermin beneath it — expect to
be either cast out of the tower of shadows or lifted onto its top;
the net effect is the same. Christ sits there now, atop the tower
of belief and worship — isolated, distorted, and imprisoned —
functionally as silent as if he had been buried under the frozen
ground with all the others. He is lost amid those distant clouds:
thus, the money-changers’ tables are safe from harm.

I am here below, with the others, the numberless horde pressed

beneath the ice of disenfranchisement. I do not speak about it; I
no longer ask why I cannot contribute; why I have not been able
to see a doctor in over a decade; why I have no place or message
for those on the inside, except as a warning against the price of
dissent; why debt must be my present identity and my future
legacy; or whether giving and receiving might not be the proper
and natural leaders of getting and spending. These questions
have no place in the silent order of shadows.
No, I do not talk about it anymore — not to family, friends, or
even strangers. My voice goes cold and still in that sunless air,
even before the thought can find sound. But here, in an
electromagnetic space of anonymity, it may still be spoken; the
questions may still be asked. The irony is only superficial: to write
on the Internet is like walking through a great city — you can be
visible to millions and seen by none.

Again, the realm of Search does not admit of seeking. It must

also be recognized that philosophy — certainly Western
philosophy — has been largely a failure. Plato and Spinoza mean
no more to us than the numberless walls of Facebook; the
government at least reads the latter. Philosophy surrendered itself
to the tyranny of abstraction as, with few exceptions, it allowed
its living heart to be consumed amid the ice of oppression. It
gave up speaking to people when it insisted on talking to itself.

This is perhaps the barest and most broken form of Poverty: we

no longer ask what it means to be a citizen either of the universe
or a nation; we look instead for that point of subjection wherein
survival but not life reside. It is as far as our minds dare reach.

Still, it is worth recalling that both greatness and folly lack

constancy. The same is true of reality and delusion. These are all
subject to the same principle — a law of transformation rather
than of randomness. The wheel of fortune spins on the surface of
the random; the breath of transformation flows through the entire
body of the universe, embracing space and time within a single
quantum reality. There is in nature no fixed state of wealth or
poverty. Only belief is inscribed in stone; truth lives and moves —
but it takes more energy and a greater commitment than belief.
This is the point of a poem I once wrote, a prayer of sorts “To the
Goddess of Transformation”:

Please come in: go all the way back

to the old closet past the kitchen
where the priests left their wine-stained robes.
Where the arms and legs of hallowed toys
that never worked, never played
are buried in the graveyard of lies.

Let the drunken robes sleep on, undisturbed;

but clear away the empty bottles of belief.
For every time I touch them, I bleed
onto the edges of their granite labels.

Perhaps we who are poor do not speak of our condition because it

needs no words. To talk openly of ourselves and our state would
be to touch the granite label of Fortune’s two-dimensional wheel.
We may as well surrender ourselves to the rigid chaos of the daily
Lotto drawing. The bipolar axis of Hope and Dread dwells lifeless
and frozen within each, like the binary poles of a sunless asteroid.

To be a have-not is at least to have an identity within the

collective, even if it is as its refuse. A society’s garbage is as
much of its essence as is its gold. We are fed the hope that
transmutation between those two states is possible. To say that
this is an illusion, and that the actual rule is proven by its
exceptions — that is the greatest blasphemy possible within the
temple of acquisition. It is this blasphemy that must be spoken
now, and loudly.

Of the Journey Downward

By admin | March 11, 2013 | photography, self-recovery, Uncategorized

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I write, in part, because it distracts me, diverts me. This is more
than about “keeping me off the streets at night.” The diversion is
not away from external reality, but towards my own. It is about
seeking — and occasionally finding — meaning within where there
is none around me. If you have ever been unemployed and
somewhat impoverished for a time, perhaps you may understand.

In fact, any sort of misfortune — poverty, loss, divorce, illness,

estrangement from one’s family or society — tends to turns us
within. That is its purpose, its calling, if you will. We merely have
to listen for its message, squeeze it as the winepress does the
grape, and then let it go. That is to say, misery is not meant to
become identity but orientation. Let me hear its lesson and I will
not have to accept its sentence.
It is easy to hear such a teaching voice during a change of
seasons. Now, the austere breath of winter passes away; buds of
incipient growth appear on the trees. Life takes another turn —
from stasis or even from desolation — towards regeneration,
renewal. That last word itself reveals much in its very structure:
the “new” within the “real” (that is, the first and last two letters
of “renewal” spell “real” and “new” is within them).

Each of the seasons is unique in its arrival and passage, even if

their quarterly manifestations appear fixed according to our
calendars and almanacs. Nature moves towards that which
supports it in its time. She whose very body flows with the
quantum arcs of transformation need have no fear of change.
The parallel to this in human experience is most easily found in
art. It is a matter of finding and then embracing one’s place in the
natural order, while also recalling that new seasons find new
positions. The cloudy heights are not my domain; I must go
underground. If gold is to be forged into the gleam of beauty,
there must somewhere be workers in the mines. To seek
greatness is a trifling vanity; it may find us if we just keep
working. Whether that will be or not, dignity best flourishes free
of the fluorescent sheen of renown.

Stripped to its essentials, writing is a record of experience, just as

science is a record of observation. In either case, the work is the
water of a personal well: so why poison it with ambition? I cannot
make the world see me as I am; if my own perception be clear,
there is already abundance. Going underground is often solitary,
though it need not be lonely or desolate. I have heard that stars
can be seen in a midday sky from the bottom of a well.
Thus, again: the diversion is not from myself or my
circumstances, but from the distortions of ego. If I can stay off
the neatly paved streets of conformity, I may find a deeper and
even firmer ground of truth. Pavement must be broken for the
earth to be rediscovered. I am not here to walk where others
have or do. If I can mine what is true of myself, the universal —
that which unites me with people and the other creatures of
Nature — will appear; just as gold is found amid mud or dust.

The work and the worker become one: there is grit in each. This
is what the ancient Chinese authors of the I Ching referred to as
“perseverance.” Throughout its poems, we are assured that
“perseverance brings good fortune.” That’s because it already is.
The process is self-rewarding: breaking pavement, going down,
stripping falsehood in the trust that a treasure lies there beneath
it all — this grit of both effort and substance is itself renewal,
though no voices ring in recognition.
In our culture, mental health has little pride of place. The soldier
returns from war, puts a gun barrel between his teeth and pulls
the trigger. A man loses his job, his wife, or his home, and senses
death in it; though he hasn’t learned to ask what has died, or
must. The pavement, the shell, the hard veneer, is our reality;
what lies beneath must be ignored if it cannot be made quiet with
a prescription. We affirm the topmost layer and call it real, while
denying everything underneath, merely because it cannot be
seen, struck, or measured. We build towers to the sky as if the
gold were to be found there. If we think for a moment of going
under, within, below the surface; we shudder in isolation. None of
our leaders is there — they are all on the surface or in the
towers. The underground is a realm of fear, failure, and the fires
of Hell. If you go there, you go alone.*

I write about where I have been. It is not a depressing place: I

haven’t had to take a pill to inhibit reuptake of my serotonin in
more than a decade. As with the living earth, there is tremendous
energy — heat and light and movement — below. It supports and
nourishes everything else that can be seen and touched and
controlled. There are no presidents, pundits, or priests to lead
you on that journey downward — the only voices of authority you
will hear from there will be calling you, urging you back to the
surface. And if you ignore them and stay too long, dig too deeply,
they will fold their arms and turn their backs.
My experience of the underground has been different. My
experience has been of a place where there are no Masters, but
many guides. The further down I go, the brighter the glow of
connectedness becomes — contact with people of the past and
the present; with the beings and life of Nature; with the formless
light of the quantum world; with the untrodden path of myself
that stretches past the myopic reach of ambition’s vision and
intersects with the journeys of all the others around and within
me. Of course it is a solitary voyage, for no one before me has
taken it. But it is not lonely.

_______________________________________

*This was the experience of Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Here is his experience (from a
2006 interview):

Pirsig was treated at a mental institution, the first of many visits.

Looking back, he suggests he was just a man outside his time. ‘It
was a contest, I believe, between these ideas I had and what I
see as the cultural immune system. When somebody goes outside
the cultural norms, the culture has to protect itself.’
The Trouble with Tardigrades
By admin | March 7, 2013 | Uncategorized

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So, who’s the cute little teddy-robot, and how did he lose his
head?

Well, if you follow APOD (click the picture to be sent there), then
you know that this is an electron micrograph of a tardigrade, or
water bear — that is, a living creature on this living Earth. This
one was observed on a piece of moss.

The tardigrade is one of those creatures most likely to survive

well beyond the anthropocene era of our world. If and when we
destroy ourselves — via human-induced climate change, global
nuclear war, or some combination thereof — animals such as the
tardigrade will find their way along without us. The tardigrade can
live at extremes of temperature, pressure, and dehydration; it
can withstand levels of radiation that would be lethal to most life
forms; it has survived in outer space and can repair its own DNA.
Fans of Star Trek and the Prime Directive may squirm a little at
the idea of shooting life forms out into space to either slowly die
or perhaps land on some random planetoid to initialize a random
evolutionary sequence. I’d bet, in fact, that some…uh…
enterprising sci-fi writer has already scripted a tale of a
tardigrade population on a probe landing on a planet or asteroid,
encountering some subspace anomaly amid the journey, and
hyper-morphing (and perhaps time-traveling) into an inter-
planetary race of beings that leave their new planet and return
home to wreak havoc and threaten a premature end to the
anthropocene era.

As diverting as such a fantasy may be, I’d like to think a little

about that other, and very real ability, of the tardigrade: the
capacity to repair its DNA. If I were an actual scientist, a
biologist, that’s something I’d want to study long and hard for its
potential as a model we could follow in promoting health in the
individual and survival within our species. In fact, I have a feeling
that it’s something we could do on our own, without having to
wait for a scientific miracle to be fabricated in a research
laboratory or pharmaceutical plant.

DNA is one of those phenomena of Nature that can be

experienced (and therefore conceived) both materially and
ideationally. That is, we can see it as “stuff” — physical molecules
composed of nucleotides — or as information, data, cosmic
thought. In fact, it appears essential to equally maintain both
perspectives on DNA; just as physicists need to work with the
phenomenon of light as both photon particles and wave-forms.
Even casual observers like myself are aware that the DNA of all
life-forms that we know about is defined as much by its
peculiar shape as by its chemical composition. That is, a relative
abstraction such as shape (the famous double-helix) is as
definitive to the DNA of an organism as a planet’s orbit — its
relation to other spatial bodies in its movement through the
space-time continuum — is to its existence within a galaxy.
Nature abhors entropy.
One primary lesson of sciences like quantum mechanics, relativity
theory, and microbiology would appear to involve our need to
surpass mechanical thinking. As the old saying goes, when all you
have is a hammer, everything you encounter is perceived as a
nail. One area where our technology is now taking us is a place
populated by much more than mere nails. We are just reaching a
perspective that lets us see the quantum, the micro reflected in
and influencing the macro. Computers that will be able to employ
quantum processors are already being tested; and a few
experiments have been run on storing and retrieving computer-
generated data into and from live DNA.

What I sense in this is a third level of perception and meaning.

Again, phenomena like light and DNA can be conceived as both
substance and data; as particle and wave; as matter and energy;
as form and formlessness. But we can’t and won’t succeed, in
science or in life, by jumping back and forth between these two
poles of sense and meaning. We need a third level of awareness
that allows us to embrace and surpass the polar, the dual, the
realm of opposites. We do not have to wait for scientists to show
us how to reach this level of perception, this orbit of self-
understanding. We must experience it for ourselves.

Let’s return to that micro-macro relationship: it is fairly well

established, using standard scientific research methodologies,
that DNA can be damaged by both physical and psychological
stimuli. In children, neglect and emotional abuse can harm DNA
in the same way as physical abuse and environmental toxins.
The functional effect is similar to that seen in aging: as a reaction
to psychological and/or physical stress, critical structural
components of DNA can be made to change as if they’re being
subjected to aging. I would argue that, at least to some extent,
the process is reversible.

It has been my experience that every effective therapy is able to

call upon that primordial ability of creatures like the tardigrade —
the capacity for repairing damaged DNA. Such repair can be
manifestly physical (drugs or other physical medical intervention)
or noumenal (self-therapy, talk therapy, meditation, or other
forms of non-physical treatment). In terms of psychological
therapy, I think it’s a matter of bringing oneself or another to that
third level of self-understanding, in which body and mind are held
together and then raised to a fresh plane of experience that
includes and surpasses both. This is also true, by the way, of
working with physical therapies as well: I can work with the
“consciousness” of a drug (and certainly of those who deliver it to
me) and thereby discover a greater therapeutic benefit from it
than I might by seeing it as a mere mechanical intervention.

Our sciences have an unpleasant impulse to deny or even

demonize such an experience. That “placebo effects” occur in
nearly every form of therapeutic research is well known — often
with an alarming statistical frequency. We have to stop being
embarrassed by this phenomenon and start understanding it. The
sooner we begin, the faster we will progress.

It’s not a matter of either/or: we obviously don’t have to abandon

Newtonian physics; mechanical models of anatomy; or traditional
models of logic. But if we’re to overcome the challenges posed to
us by phenomena like quantum mechanics, relativity, and
genetics; then we’ll have to reach a clearer plane of perception —
both of ourselves and our world.

Check out the biographies of some of the scientists featured in

the recent New York Times story about the discovery of the Higgs
boson. Artists, musicians, students of Eastern “mysticism” who
became scientists leading what is arguably the most significant
scientific discovery of a generation. Do you imagine it’s a random
coincidence that people with such backgrounds were drawn into
this transformational story of scientific breakthrough?

So I’m merely saying that we can have the same experience,

reach the same level of transformative possibility within our own
lives. Healing is as primordially natural to our species as
destruction appears compulsive to our institutions. That capacity
for repairing our DNA is a gift of our evolution, going at least as
far back as the Cretaceous-era descendants of today’s tardigrade.
The problem, the challenge, and the opportunity all lie in trusting
that primordial ability and then using it in a modern way: we will
have to learn how to hold that primordial within a presence of
potential.

Why should it be so strange? Our model can be those two helical

strands that wind around the same axis to create the perfect
shape and synergy that is, so far as we know, the universal
molecular foundation of all life. Our knowledge can only become
understanding when it achieves that third level of a surpassing
awareness.

Van Cliburn’s Lesson

By admin | March 4, 2013 | Uncategorized

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One of the trending topics in New Age circles is the notion of the
“spirit animal” or “animal guide.” You can even find your own
“power animal” online now.

I suppose there’s a lot to be gained from such an interest,

especially if you can enter such a path with humility and sincerity.
I just think we may need a broader view of such connections with
our fellow creatures of Nature. What would be so unusual about
finding one’s guide in a tree, for instance?

Here’s mine. I call it the “tai-chi tree”: it lives in Brooklyn’s

Prospect Park, fairly close to Grand Army Plaza. During the warm
weather months, it attracts New Agers doing tai chi, yoga, chi
kung, and general meditation. I like it because it has all the
attributes of beauty: balance, grace, poise, endurance, and
gentle, effortless action. It has recently been deeply wounded yet
remains as beautiful as ever: two years ago it lost one of its great
limbs amid hurricane Irene (you can see the scar of that wound in
the pictures). Thus, it is not only a living teaching on beauty, but
on wisdom as well.

So this tree is a guide for me. It doesn’t strive to be great; thus,

it is. I think this utter absence of ambition is what draws seekers
to its shade in the summer. I visit it regularly year-round,
because its voice, its presence, its teaching are as strong in
winter as any other time of year. I love it especially for its ability
to be damaged and to suffer yet still to both express and inspire
joy. It has that active, deeply energetic stillness that I identify
with the virtue of humility and the beauty of Art. That is, it can
appear to be doing nothing, going nowhere, to the casual human
observer; but it is actually accomplishing wonders of growth,
transformation, and endurance every day, every season, every
year. For any being of Nature, this is the heart of wisdom.

I was thinking about these things as I passed my tree the other

day, after hearing about the death of a great American, a classical
concert pianist named Van Cliburn. For this was a man who, like
my tree, had been wounded. He was made into a Cold War hero
after his victory at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Russia. The
expectations, adulation, and distortion that pursued him from
that triumph eventually drove him into psychological distress and
retreat throughout many of what should have been his most
productive years. But when he was allowed the space to focus,
center himself, and to just be a musician free of the images and
projections of Cold War America — he was as great as anyone
who ever put their hands to a keyboard. Anyone.
Over the past half-decade of our economic recession, it has often
been noted that America is a greedy nation — a land of obesity,
materialism, money-lust, and senseless, often criminal
competition and corporate dominance. What is more rarely
discussed is our emotional greed, our culture’s tendency to
parasitically identify with and emotionally drain whoever we fix
upon as our heroes. Van Cliburn became such a hero, and
suffered many of the effects of that emotional greed. That he was
gay in the 1960′s couldn’t have helped much, either.

It’s bad enough that we treat soldiers, athletes, and politicians

like this — with projected aggrandizement, nationalistic hubris,
militaristic imagery, and all the other distortions of group ego. But
to do it to an artist is emotional rapacity. Van Cliburn came back
from Russia as the idol of a cult of group hatred. But he had not
gone there to bring the Commies down a peg or two; in fact, he
went there to celebrate their music. He came back with his heart
overflowing with love for Russia — its culture, its art, its music,
and its people. Yet once he came home, he had to endure being
that idol of Cold War hatred as well. It wounded him deeply; it
often wounded his art.

I don’t see it as much of a random coincidence that America’s

gradual loss of place and direction in the world of classical music
began during Cliburn’s life. The missiles of emotional greed arc
back to their origin; the mouth of the monster in the temple of
nationalistic hubris inevitably consumes its own body. Art, of all
things, can least thrive in such a setting.

But it can endure. That is what art does; that is its nature. Like
my tree in the park, it goes on. Orchestras go bankrupt;
musicians struggle to survive; the once-thriving cultures of entire
cities drift or drain from their centers. Yet the roots of art are
deep; its life goes on amid its wounds. As a people, we must keep
seeking that life, whether or not the institutional manifestations
of that art are as great and as strong as the time when Bartok,
Rachmaninoff, and Stravinsky lived a few block apart in the same
American city; or when Toscanini, Horowitz, and Rubinstein all
lived and worked here; or when a young pianist from Texas went
to Russia in 1958 and won the admiration of a great musical
nation. If we can just let ourselves be drawn to that great tree of
art, without regard for any personal or nationalistic prejudice,
then its beauty and wisdom will never be lost to us. That would
be a fitting and enduring way to remember the life of Van Cliburn.

A Journey from Spirit to Presence

By admin | February 21, 2013 | self-recovery

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Imagine that you are somewhere deep in the mantle of the Earth,
around 100km. below the surface. You have positioned yourself
under a great river — perhaps the Nile, Amazon, or Mississippi.
Assume you’ve figured out a way to stay alive down there and that
you’ve got the right equipment: now imagine that you can sense the
presence, content, and course of that river far above you. Your
technology even allows you to influence the river, its shape,
direction, and flow. You can’t touch it; you can’t feel the water or the
earth of the riverbed; you can’t even see or otherwise sense the
river’s living body. But you have contact with it; you can read its
currents, sense and communicate with its animal inhabitants, all of
its components right down to the molecular level. Therefore, though
you do not have a direct sensory connection with that river, you are
in tune with its life, its reality, its living presence.

One of my primary criticisms of institutional religion is the

weakness and opacity of its metaphors. We fail to reach a
comprehensive feeling for the invisible world because we are
trained to imagine it separate, distant, superior — driven by the
engines of might, power, fear, and control. Something rigid,
domineering, and far away is imputed to be the Master of
alternate dimensions — God, karma, spirit — they rule and
therefore inhibit the possibility of any experience we might have
with what lives beyond our senses and beneath our memories. So
we live either in ignorance or disdain of what is unseen and
ineffable.

It seems as if we need fresh, clarified metaphors to help us see

and sense the possibility of distinct yet undivided dimensions of
being, of presence. The one I offer above is intentional in its
environmental setting: no big hand or bearded male face in the
sky; no cruciform cloud-borne host or kingdom; no angels flitting
around like waitresses at a celestial topless bar. Instead, in the
example above, you’re under, or more accurately, within the Earth
— in contact with its presence yet distinct from its physical
manifestation.

This, for me, is a much better vision of the relationship between

realities, between dimensions of being — if you like, between the
formed and the formless, the living and the dead. I hope it’s
obvious that this is not offered as a matter of belief but of
experience. It seems we need to drop faith back into the
ideological mud where we first found it, and then go on instead
with the inborn, natural capacity for trust. Faith is based on belief
in something external, foreign, conditioned — faith is a studied
blindness that shuts off every light around and within us but the
faint, flickering candle that was handed to us by a priest, Master,
or teacher.

That candle is not enough for me, not anymore. And so, in
defiance of the old bromide, I do ”curse the darkness” — or at
least question it. For if our instinct for exploration is given room
to live, we can reveal and inspire the trust which is our birthright.
The foundation of trust is experience rather than belief. Thus, the
more we “curse the darkness” (question blind belief), the more
light dawns, around and within us.

It is only an apparitional paradox that, as I keep pulling down the

shrouds of belief, I learn a fresh respect for its sources. I discover
a lost energy in the teachings of Christ and Buddha that cannot
be found in their ideological, ritualistic settings. It is a wonderful
revelation of personal experience: that I can honor the insights of
gods and saints and Buddhas and prophets, the moment I stop
believing in them. As long as I worship them, however, their
voices are estranged from my own, for in my worship I have
robbed them of their greatest treasure, their humanity.

I would like to feel as if I can sit in a tavern with the Buddha, or

in a dimly-lit, early morning diner with Jesus; debating karma and
deconstructing doctrine. Yet it is far more important to my life
that I go underground and trace the distant river’s course as if it
were a hand’s breadth away; that I clearly sense the presence of
another universe even as I continue my life in this one; that I
fully experience — now, in this lifetime — the dignity of equality
between realities, dimensions, among the many layers of ordinary
sacredness.
And so I drink alone the bloodless wine of meaning and
recognition, for it nourishes me, teaches me, enriches me. I drink
the water of the river, toasting those I can no longer touch or
hear or see or sense; for I know and feel more clearly their
enduring presence, from somewhere in the mantle of the Earth,
somewhere in another dimension of being that is equal to and
vibrant as my own. For how can I not trust it, my own experience
— this taste of the draught of Eternity?

I have shattered the neon darkness of the gods and the prophets,
and thereby awakened the illumination of Nature. I have gone
from spirit to presence; from hierarchy to equality; from belief to
experience; from faith to trust. Even as I sit beside the river, I
sense that presence — as clear as this water, as manifest as this
table, this bottle beside me — the world and the time that reside
in both distinction and union with this place and this moment. I
close my eyes and ask that the hidden Ineffable be there for and
with me, guiding and supporting the course of this lovely and
ephemeral river of Life.

Achieving Orbit
By admin | February 19, 2013 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

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The mind of ambition inhibits genuine growth. To obsess on

gaining the heights not only impairs but actually precludes the
self-awareness essential to growth. The incessant climb makes us
dizzy, and finally blind. Consider for a moment the spiritual
geography of the Judeo-Christian religion: would not Satan have
a better and clearer view of Heaven than God Himself? Even the
fairy tales of religion have something to teach us if we will adopt
a fresh perspective.
To do so, it seems necessary to reject the linear and take orbit
instead. When I achieve an orbit on my life, my experience is not
of height but rather breadth. In an orbit, altitude becomes
incidental: a view of a planet from 10 km. can be clearer and
fuller in its detail than another from triple the height. An orbit,
once achieved, tends to endure; but vertical existence is weak
and ephemeral. When you are so fixed on height, you lose depth;
and your options — as man or God — become limited.

We must use circumstance as well as altitude as the true measure

of our life’s orbit. The breadth of your vision need not encompass
everything, but only that which matters to your moment. Be true
to the present and eternity will take care of itself.

Presence is only challenging because it is unfamiliar. We do not

teach it, to ourselves or our children. We regret or long for the
past; we pursue the future either in yearning or in dread. In both
cases, it is expectation — a narrow, coffin-shaped projection that
closes off possibility and self-fulfills its selfish or dreadful
prophecies. If we would survive, we must reject expectation; if
we would live, we must affirm our invisible potential.

Therefore, it is not enough to kill what is decadent or derived

within us — falsehood, fear, self-images, guilt, or collective belief.
To say No to what bleeds or blocks your true self is merely a
beginning, a first arc of orbit. Each act of negation must call forth
a response of affirmation. If I reject expectation, I must then
embrace innocence, openness, the crystalline continuum of
possibility. If my aim is clear and true with No, then its energy’s
wake will draw Yes into its orbit.

The scientific reality is the best metaphor: to achieve and

maintain orbit, an object must, in addition to height, have
tangential velocity — an energy that keeps it moving sideways —
even as it is simultaneously attracted to what is below (gravity).
So to attain a clear perspective on my life and my world, I must
use the energy of No to maintain distance — height and the
vector of freedom; while I also remain in touch with the
gravitational attraction from that which I need to understand. The
last factor is critical because, in the context of inner life, it is the
most forgotten or lost: no matter how dark or abysmal its time or
circumstances may appear, the gravity must be held, even
embraced. That gravity between the satellite of awareness and
the body of experience is the love of life. It is the strongest force
in the universe of meaning.

Thus, an orbit is defined not by its height but its balance. Stability
rather than distance must be the measure of my insight. The
force that propels me apart from the false must be matched by
gravity toward truth. I can see most clearly not from a linear
mountaintop or the most distant rung of a spiritual org-chart. No:
for the view from Heaven is of a single dimension only. I need
enter the others if I am to know perspective; otherwise I am left
only with an illusion.

So I must move upward, sideways, even as I feel the pull of

depth. And to hold my orbit of self-insight, I also need to be in
time — not in expectation or in reminiscence, but in presence.
The science of my experience and of Einstein’s vision again
coincide: space and time are not separate realities. If I can be
present, alive in the immediacy of Now, then I need have neither
fear nor hope of Eternity. The paradox is only appearance: it is
my perpetual movement in orbit that holds me to the stillness of
the moment. The conscious propulsion of No and the gravitational
pull of Yes hold me to and within presence.

This is the reality of a life guided by insight; it is what we can

achieve in meditation. The life of action is led by contemplation.
Meditation is not an escape from life — the scientific metaphor
again applies: an “escape velocity” actually throws you out
of orbit. Such an escape defeats the gravitational pull; denies the
love of life. I do not wish to escape life but only those thoughts
which force it into one or two dimensions.

Orbit is movement; it rejects, through its essence, fixation,

cessation, termination. Life, too, is defined by movement. If my
reflection would be clear, it must be in motion: I must be ready to
see from below as well as above. True vision has no prejudice
toward direction.

Thus I return to ambition: of any variety — material, spiritual,

societal, psychological — ambition defeats its own professed end.
It in obsession with height, it loses all else; in its monomania
towards soaring, it only strays; it gets lost in the darkness of
distance; in the empty space where that gravity, the love of life,
becomes ever weaker, ever stranger.

Achieving orbit, I see that there is as much of Heaven in my life

amid its ashes as in its highest and brightest flames. Where truth
vibrates, the music of success can be heard. That tangential
movement from a height — the orbital effort — this is what adds
comfort to the climb. It steadies the rise and makes movement
itself effortless. In orbit, aggressive ambition becomes gentle
perseverance. Experience and reflection; action and stillness;
attainment and reception — these become one and complete in
the elliptical path of motion that is guided and embraced by the
gravity of Love.

Tagged orbit, science, self-development, tao

Resistance is Not Futile

By admin | February 17, 2013 | Uncategorized
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As any of my colleagues in the unemployed sector of the work

force will tell you, the job search is not a barrel of laughs.
However, every so often an LOL moment arrives, as illustrated
here in this Monster posting of a job opportunity for the position
“Computer.”

Its appearance made me think of my recent tour of memory lane

on the final frontier. Star Trek’s most endearing and multi-layered
characters were either completely or partially non-human. In The
Next Generation, the saga of the android Commander Data is
arguably the most intriguing tapestry of character development in
that series. In Voyager, the opera-singing, iconoclastic
holographic Doctor is equally compelling; along with the ex-Borg
mega-hottie Seven.

I have to admit to having been somewhat repelled by the blatant

soft-porn cheesecake of Seven’s character when I first saw
Voyager (it ran from 1995-2001). I was, after all, more attracted
to the softer beauty of the Kes character, who was killed off
before Seven arrived. But having gone back to the series recently
has helped me see the fascinating depth of Seven, which includes
yet surpasses her sexuality. She is also, along with the Doctor,
the vehicle of much of the show’s humor.

Jeri Ryan, the actress who played Seven, has a story in her
biography (according, at least, to Wikipedia) that is an amazing
whirl of coincidence, as intriguing as any plot in all the Star Trek
series. The Ryans were married in 1991 and divorced in 1999.
Apparently, in 2003, “Seven’s” ex-husband, Jack Ryan, was a
Chicago politician running for an open Senate seat in Congress.
However, during his campaign, details from their divorce came
out into the open and were found to include bizarre sexual
behavior, including public S&M-type stuff. As a result of these
revelations, Ryan withdrew from the campaign and the Senate
seat for which he had been campaigning was won by an obscure
Democrat named Obama.

Well…anyway. The remarkable development of both Seven and

The Doctor in the Voyager program gives them both a greater
depth than can be found in most television characters. The
writers of the show were fairly skillful in charting their journeys
from machine to humanoid; from computer to character. And the
actors involved (Ryan as Seven and Robert Picardo as The
Doctor) were reasonably adept at giving this developmental
process some life. Over the course of several seasons and dozens
of episodes, Seven moves from Borg-unit to human presence, as
The Doctor continues to add elements to his holographic program
and depth to his character. If you have time to watch the series
again, especially seasons 4 through 7, it’s fairly rewarding and
enjoyable.

And in a strange way, revealing. For, as illustrated by that

Monster posting above, our culture would appear to be on the
opposite track from that taken by Seven and The Doctor. While
their path went from machine to human, ours tends toward the
other direction. Are you a developer, an engineer, a technician?
No, you are a computer. We ask so much of our technology that
we force it to displace our personalities.

If this process of the self-machination of a culture, perhaps of an

entire species, were the only problem; it might be manageable,
subject to a simple adaptation. But it conceals another and more
insidious process: the subjection of the individual to the Borg-
cube of a mass collective. For we who seek re-entry to the
workforce, it is especially manifest: we become petitioners rather
than entrepreneurs; dependent subjects rather than free agents;
parasites rather than resources.

We are commonly set against one another. Recruiters will

typically ask me to agree to a rate that is often more than half
what I earned a decade ago, just to make me “more competitive.”
And more often than not, I consent, though the pundits,
economists, and media talking heads all assure me that the
recession is long since over.

You may imagine that I am blaming it all on our corporate

culture, on society. But if and to the extent this is true, what is
the solution? Revolution? Reformation? Institutional change? The
reality, however, is that our culture is to blame only insofar as we
conform to its illusions. And reforming or changing institutions is
more likely than not to be a deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic situation.

There are basically two layers of conformity. I can consent to the

material form of that culture of servitude, of machination, even
as I reject the demand to conformity at the other level, where my
inner autonomy as well as my outer service is claimed. If I can
successfully and consistently reject that neurotic claim upon my
true self, then I can add to the energy of transformation to a
degree that a hundred revolutions could not match. I realize this
is a difficult principle to understand, but only because it is so
rarely and imperfectly experienced. But because something has
not happened does not mean it cannot be.

I have a daughter to put through college; a life of my own whose

modest material needs must still be met. So I go through the
process of being perceived as a machine, a disposable servant, a
petitioner for the royal favor of serfdom. When subjection is the
only form of trade, one must bargain according to its terms. But
once hired, once among my peers in a collaborative work setting,
autonomy must assert itself. By autonomy I only mean the
human presence and its interaction with a living environment.

So if I choose to accept a job for less than half what I earned a

decade ago, it is less a matter of subjection than of selection. I
make no sacrifice by it, only an investment. If I relent as as to
what I make, that cannot affect who I am. I am not a computer,
not a machine, not a serf in a feudal cube of hierarchy, wires, and
disposable parts. To the extent that we recall this — to ourselves
and to one another — we break the power of the Illusion that
claims us, that subjects us, that defines us as so much less than
what we truly are.

Resistance, after all, is not futile. But it must arise from that part
of ourselves that is itself indomitable.

Growing Down
By admin | February 9, 2013 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

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A few years ago, during another job search, I felt some

frustration with the resume. I saw that it is an inherently
dysfunctional way to represent oneself in writing, as literature. I
remembered the Latin phrase used for international resumes
— curriculum vitae: the course of my life. I decided to try such an
approach, and wrote an “alt-resume” for myself. I have never
shown it to a potential employer.

One of the things that I am, which is mentioned in my alt-resume

but not in any other, is a parent. That is, I have spent much of
the past two decades in the effort of helping another to grow up.
Fortunately, I was able to realize early on that maturation is a
gradual process of letting go. For parents, this is the essence of
the challenge. But it has been a longer path to the understanding
that this applies also to the child herself. It is something we don’t
teach very well, in either our homes or our schools: that growth
is as much letting go as it is accumulation or attainment. It is a
perpetual process of cleansing and renewal, rather than a matter
of getting bigger and smarter.
This leads directly into a related and larger point — one that I
missed, or rather touched only with my intellect instead of my
body’s complete intelligence: our culture’s language of growth
misleads us, limits us, confines us. While I was researching
material for my book on the Tao of Harry Potter, I came
across James Hillman’s expression: growing down. He was
pointing out a critical directional flaw in the language of our inner
lives, one that particularly infects Western culture. We speak only
of growing up, though much of the natural process of maturation
is growing down. The tree grows its roots deeper and wider as its
external, “above-ground”, conscious appearance rises and
expands. Without the growing-down, the up-movement is weak,
superficial, even dangerous.

Hillman’s metaphor on this concept of growing down is the birth

process itself. Being himself a Jungian, Hillman chose
an archetype — an idea or experience that is universal to a
species and becomes a part of its cultural DNA, its “collective
unconscious.” The act of birthing is a downward movement — the
child must find her way down, from the uterus to her destination,
the dual-ported gateway to her new world. For while it is true
that we have myths of babies being born out of the mouths,
heads, and directly through the navels of gods, the current
universality of the experience in Nature, its downward
momentum, prevails.*

Our problem as a culture, however, is that we use our language

to displace reality. Our obsession is with the upward, the higher,
the linear ascent from something low to a magnificent height. We
look away from the roots as we fixate on the elevation. We deny
or distort our own depths. The lower and the downward is where
Hell and Evil reside; it even infects our financial measurements of
self-worth: down is where the fiery and hellish red lines of loss
and impoverishment lurk.**
We are drunk on the nectar of the gods and the godly. We
worship (or counter-worship) our leaders, be they deities or
demons in our minds. Power, wealth, fame, and might compel our
adulation, our attention — we adore the airy heights, identify with
their denizens, and seek to gain some sense of inclusion in that
realm, even if it is a merely symbolic or vicarious membership in
The Elevated. And again, the fixation is as likely to be toward the
heights of devilry as of deity: we will more readily listen to the
stories of mighty demons — Satan, Hitler, Osama — than to any
fanfare for the common man.

Leadership itself becomes twisted, demented. We deny or repress

the language of our own nationalistic creed: “we the people” is
distorted into “He, the Leader.” As we have seen in recent years,
power becomes the prerequisite of personhood. In our law, the
corporation — be it ever so vast, dissipated, and criminal — has
attained both the legal substance and rights of the human.
Somewhere amid our obsession with the climb toward the
heights, we have left the greater part of ourselves behind, below
— abandoned to a fatal neglect. Even as we reach for the next
upward rung — far below and within us, our foundation rots.

And so the climb defeats us, exhausts us. The individual or

society that can only grow up has measure but not substance;
height and width without depth. It is missing a critical dimension.
So we must learn again to grow down. We must teach it in our
schools; give it a voice in our media and our arts; even allow it
pride of place in our business and political affairs. For this is not
merely about raising children and leading them toward and into
the realm of adulthood: it is about changing ourselves. The
experience of growing down is as essential to the elders of a
society as it is to its children; if the former lose touch with it, the
latter will rise in weakness, perpetually haunted by a sense of
incompleteness. No matter its age, whatever lacks roots must
wither; whatever loses its foundation must crumble.
 …………………………………………………..

Recently I experienced a series of dream images that seemed to

be showing me some small aspect of the way toward a better and
more complete sense of maturation. What follows are some notes
on these images, in the context of the present discussion.

A live rabbit appeared to me amid a roomful of other

possessions. Someone close by, a voice rather than a body,
advised me that this rabbit was the most valuable of all these
things around me. This symbol of the rabbit points generally to
the animal nature, specifically to sexuality. To grow down is to
remain in touch with that aspect of ourselves, that foundation of
our total being. Again, this applies to all ages and to societies as
well as to individuals. Indeed, one excellent measure of a
society’s overall health can be found in its attitudes toward its
animals, the physical body, and especially to sexuality. The self-
abasement and shame we are taught in these areas; along with
the denial or demonization of our animalism, found in most
Western religions, comprises the force that opens wide the door
to every form of perversion, not to mention more common and
oppressive forms of psychological illness, such as depression,
anxiety, and dependence. To firmly reject and uproot these
sources of perversion and illness is to “cherish the rabbit” and
grow down and into our animal bodies.

I was cleaning up a space within my home and found a

golden ear or earpiece that seemed to show some signs of
partial neglect. I picked it up and held it, listening to a voice
that said, “this is yours; hold it.” Images of hearing or listening in
dreams are often an evocation of the body’s formless reality, its
inner truth. The body is not a merely physical presence; it is not
just the “stuff” surrounded by skin that we imagine to be the
body’s substance and boundary. As I’ve mentioned in my
discussion of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the body is formlessness
as well as form; energy as well as mass. To grow down, we must
feel this reality; that we, too, are bodies in space as described by
Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the famous equation
that reveals matter itself to be an expression of energy and light.
Obviously, such an understanding cannot be achieved through a
merely intellectual effort (that is, in fact, the “sign of partial
neglect”). To hear within requires a more complete mode of
listening, one which embraces but also surpasses intellect. When
we can regularly “hear” the resonance of our energy-bodies, we
come into contact with the universal harmonic. This is another
aspect of growing down.

I was playing baseball; pitching to a batter who, after two

pitches, picked up home plate and moved it a few steps
toward me. I tried to throw again to the new “home” but was
dissatisfied, and demanded that the dish be put back where it
was. I was then immediately transported to a room above the
field, where someone older and wiser showed me that my
disorientation was unfounded and unnecessary. Home is the
image of one’s total self; of one’s identity, reality, his sense of
truth and of duration. As such, it cannot be a fixed entity, locked
into a concrete place or point on a grid. Any identity that is rigidly
defined according to fixed parameters is a false self-image, a kind
of narrow pedestal, from whose height one can only move by
falling. When we thus make our distances, our boundaries, stiff
and changeless; when we stand on our external heights (the
pitcher’s mound) and demand that everything of our lives remain
pat and apart; when we refuse to try a differing perception of self
— we sink into rigor mortis well before our physical bodies die.

…………………………………………………..

Any attentive reader who has followed me this far (my gratitude
to you!) may have noticed that all three of these images refer to
or encompass the image of home, of personal space. This is
entirely natural and appropriate: for to grow down means first to
perpetually return to the totality of our life-space, to recognize
and gratefully accept its transformations; and second, to equally
embrace every dimension of our lives. Neither space nor
maturation are correctly defined two dimensionally, as lines going
upward, northward, or heavenward. To grow down is to deeply
feel and to understand that home is a living place; that its life has
depth and width as well as height. There is as clear and profound
a view available to us from below as from above. Perspective is as
much a matter of dimension as it is of direction. Any fixation of
my focus, in any direction, will inevitably limit me, confine me,
exhaust me.

Socrates told us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Part
of what I think he meant by that is: growth or maturity is not a
narrow period of time or space that has a beginning and an end.
Growth is not the boot sequence of a computer that rushes from
inception to completion in a forced series of repeated actions,
standardized tests, and compressed cycles of movement. I focus
here on growing down because it appears to be the lost or
neglected aspect of maturity that has the most to do with its
endurance, with its natural evolution. That is, when we truly and
fully learn to grow down, as individuals and as societies, we feel
Socrates’ truth deeply within us, and understand that the
examination is never complete; and that the path of growth is
always open.

——————————————————

*One interesting question in this context remains to be answered

in the same way other aspects of our universal experience might
alter our cultural DNA; viz., how our technology may either
transform or muddle our archetypes. Obviously, the question in
this context centers around the so-called Caesarian birth (named
after another myth): what if it should become more common and
even prevalent? But my point remains: to the extent that we
ignore or deny our archetypes in favor of a uni-directional and
unnatural ideology, we lose touch simultaneously with our
individual uniqueness and our universal connectedness.
** Even science stumbles here. We are taught that our “lower
brain” is frequently called the “reptilian brain.” Well, that base
reptile is responsible for much of what keeps us alive and healthy,
as individuals and as a species — sensory functions, balance, and
maintenance of critical life processes from sexuality to blood
pressure to the sleep/wake cycle. The point here is that we can’t
confuse position with preeminence — the “higher brain” of the
cerebral cortex is not “better” or “greater” any more than the
display of a computer is loftier or nobler than its power supply.
That is, we must learn to speak of higher and lower without
reference to hierarchy or comparative value. There is as much
value and beauty in my pons and medulla as in my frontal lobes.

Tagged dream interpretation, grow

down, Hillman, maturation, maturity, Socrates

Fear and Appliances: KPMG

By admin | February 1, 2013 | Uncategorized

2 Comments

Well, what is your favorite household appliance? What

are you most afraid of? KPMG wants to know; it’s for your
protection, after all.

Years ago I would get myself into a right twist over the depraved
banality of corporate America. But now it’s more fun than it is fur
for me. As I went through the convoluted process of applying for
work at KPMG, the thought struck me: somebody got paid for
thinking this shit up…and I had to laugh (click the image for an
enlarged view). You have to have some stealthy admiration for a
corporate behemoth that can make a man turn toward the
kitchen and measure his love for the microwave versus his
devotion to the fridge.

The psychotherapist in me marvels at that kind of mental

manipulation. KPMG is the primary sponsor of a Hall-of-Fame
golfer named Mickelson who made headlines this week when he
whined publicly about the taxes he must pay on his $180M
fortune.

So what psychology is there in that, aside from the obvious

connection between the golfer and the sponsor known for
its slipshod accounting of Wall Street barons? Well, we all like to
have a narrative, a storyline to our lives — a kind of golden
thread that gives life the dignity of perseverance, the gritty
endurance and conquest of the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune. No matter how comfortable we may be, how minimal the
availability of substance for complaint; we look for challenge,
adversity, even conflict. And if it is not there, we can make some
up.*

But we will leave the golfer there, back in his proper arena
(where yesterday he opened the tournament in Phoenix within a
hair’s breadth of the magical score of 59). However, if KPMG had
been wise enough to hire me, I would have seen to it that those
“challenge questions” would have included something like, “what
is your favorite club in the bag?” or “dacron polyester or nylon?”

But they haven’t hired me, and the other big animals of the
corporate zoo have similarly ignored me. It’s a shame, because a
fellow like me really thrives in that setting and brings a lot to it.
You see, when they’re in the wake of another accounting scandal,
and they come up with a new marketing slogan such as “our
people are our passion” or some similar nonsense; they can really
use having someone like me around. Every assignment I’ve been
sent on in corporate America, I’ve always made people the focus
of my efforts and attention.

That, after all, is what I’m about; it is what I do naturally and

well. While others study the org chart, procedural manual,
compliance guidelines, or code of conduct; I seek out the folks in
the trenches who really make things work. I bond with them,
learn from them, and offer them teachings from my two decades
of experience in that realm. The years I spent at AIG — amid
both the accounting shennanigans of Maurice “Hank” Greenberg
and the Financial Products disaster that nearly (and should have)
sent the company to its grave — they were fun, fascinating, and
often productive times for me and for most of the individuals I
worked beside. For when you touch the human chord, no
darkness or dissonance can defeat you.

But now I look down the barrel of my own financial ruin, one
brought on largely by the same corporate monsters whose
bumbling feet of greed, gracelessness, and incompetence have
kicked millions of us to the gates marked Loss and
Disenfranchisement. Yet still I feel the lure of their psychological
magic as I turn and wonder: the toaster or the blender — which
could I not possibly live without?

——————————————————

*The really odd thing about Mickelson’s case is that he does have
some substantive sources of challenge and struggle in his life —
his wife’s cancer, which he turned into an extraordinary cause
that raised a lot of money for research and treatment; and his
own recent battle with arthritis. Thus, why he imagined that
moaning in public about his personal finances was necessary will
remain something of a mystery. The obvious explanation is
political: pro golfers are among the most right-wing class of
athletes in professional sports. Their paychecks mostly come
directly from major corporations — insurance companies, financial
service giants, Wall Street banks, accounting firms, and Big
Retail. And, with one very notable exception, the ranks of pro golf
are the white and wealthy. I believe it was Upton Sinclair who
said, “you cannot get a man to understand something when his
job depends on his not understanding it.”

Tagged AIG, corporate America, KPMG, Lefty, PGA, Phil MIckelson

Spiritual Democracy: Why it
Matters
By admin | January 29, 2013 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

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I’m sure you’ve heard the old New Age bromide: religion is for
those who fear they’ll go to Hell; spirituality is for those who’ve
already been there.

I used to like that one, but have moved on, or perhaps added a
codicil to it: the way of Nature is for those who see it all —
religion, Hell, spirituality — as illusion. That is: there is an
invisible, quantum reality that is not hierarchically ordered; that
has no tribal predilection; that is not mysterious or strange or
sacred, but quite ordinary, refreshing, welcoming. It is not a
realm that denies or conflicts with Reason; it includes and then
surpasses it.

I’ve touched before on the problems that I’ve come to perceive in

spirituality. Pabulum such as “all religions are true” just makes
things worse by denying the corruption in all of them.

So we need a new model for our approach to the Ineffable. In

fact, nothing “new” is needed: we only have to strip away some
layers of falsehood and corruption, and the correct model will be
revealed. That is, we must make self-knowledge our priority over
knowledge of God.

This has to be done primarily within the heart of each individual

— in that respect, I agree with Emerson, who said “the only true
church has a congregation of one.” But we also have to take our
understanding back into the public square and share impressions,
compare notes. The more of us join in, the clearer will consensus
become. And imagine a world guided by such a consensus, in
which the name and behavioral profile of one’s tribal god or
prophet cannot be offered as an excuse for oppression, butchery,
war, or the enslavement and dislocation of peoples.

Perhaps there will be other excuses, other ruses, other games;

there already are. But religion leads the way in barbarity. Its
model of leadership runs backward (paradoxically, the Latin root
of the word religion means “linking backward”). It places blind
trust — the phenomenon known as faith — ahead of self-
awareness. But before we can trust God, we must first learn to
trust ourselves.

Insight — the perception of truth, the foundation of self-

knowledge — is a matter of transmission rather than origination;
of reception over creation. That is, I am not the source of my
life’s truth, only its nexus. Once I begin to imagine that I am the
source of my truth, I have made my first step into the vortex of
falsehood, into the dark waters of self-abasement and despair.

The water is, by nature, not dark; the precipice on which I see
myself standing is not at the brink of an abyss but of fresh
ground. But if we see only change, we will miss the
transformation; if we dread that our next step will be an Ending,
we will miss the new beginning. It is not an easy lesson to
incorporate, to make a part of one’s being. Then again, it does
not have to be hard, either.

The title of the essays and musings you find here comes from an
ancient Greek word, prolegein, which means “to say beforehand.”
Thus, a prolegomenon (plural prolegomena) is a brief prefatory
note, or a prelude to something larger, greater, or of more
moment. So the writing here is a mere preamble or introduction
to a renaissance, a great sea change within both individuals and
their society – something that is so momentous as to be
unrecognizable except to history. I made this point in something I
wrote nearly a decade ago:
One thing we have to remind ourselves is that a renaissance isn’t
identified as such until long after its people and events have
passed on and been recorded into history; often several
generations or centuries must pass until the honor of
“renaissance” is applied to a culture, its people, and their
achievements.

So we will have to explore this word in order to see what people

mean by it when they look back in time to another era,
another culture, another people, and say, “that was a
renaissance.”

The word is from the French, meaning literally, “re-birth” and

“born again.” As we shall see, it may be necessary for a number
of reasons to avoid the latter term, with its fundamentalist
Christian associations. After all, “renaissance” is a term that’s
been applied to many varying cultures with vastly differing
spiritual influences: to restrict ourselves to an idea of renaissance
as affiliated with any specific belief system would be to miss a
great deal of its meaning.

Still another reason to drop any attachment of “renaissance” to a

particular belief or doctrine is that the people who we find at the
center of renaissance movements are frequently found to have
lived and thought well off the beaten path of belief:
Giordano Bruno and Galileo are two examples of such people.
Bruno, who we will hear from a little later in this Introduction,
was burned at the stake for his ideas, and Galileo
narrowly avoided the same fate.

This leads us toward a clearer perception of what a renaissance is

all about: its metaphor is not of a parochially human rebirth, but
rather of a more universal burst of growth and freshness in
creativity. In other words, Spring. This is a natural—one
might say a cosmic—symbol for renaissance. Spring is a time
where the very earth around us seems to expand with creation,
and the air itself seems fresher and more nourishing. In fact, it
is: the new growth of plants that occurs each Spring creates a
restorative charge of oxygenated air, since plants and trees give
off oxygen as a by-product of their own growth process (known
as photosynthesis). Springtime, quite literally, brings with it a
breath of fresh air.

Obviously, fresh air cannot easily fill a home whose windows are
closed, or a society whose mind is shut to the nourishing breath
of transformation. Thus, any true renaissance must begin with a
commitment to self-awareness; for such a commitment itself
begins with openness, receptivity — the ability to accept that one
is not the Source, the Maker, the Origin of truth. When we throw
open the windows of the self, the oxygen of regeneration can fill
us; it will also cleanse us of the darkness that obscures self-
knowledge.

So I do not criticize religion because I think it is evil or the cause

of evil. I do not even criticize it for its falsehood and factual error.
Much science is or had been as riddled with error as any spiritual
cult.

No: I criticize religion for its misdirected model of leadership; for

its distortion of figure and ground; its reversal of cause and
effect. It arrives late, long after the work of insight has been done
by others, and pulls the cart of faith before the horse of self-
knowledge. It turns human beings into banners so that they
never learn who they really are. Religion’s great and tragic
mistake is far less a matter of substance than of order; of its
process rather than its goal; of its reference rather than its
reality.

In this I depart from the notable critics of religion in current

Western culture — Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens come to mind.
The truths expressed by figures such as Buddha, Lao Tzu, and
Christ are not themselves false or aberrant — but their deification
is. If we will know ourselves through them, we must first pull
down every god, every prophet, every saint from his temple, out
of the airy heights of delusion.

That is to say, we must have a spiritual democracy, in which all

the tabular hierarchies of belief and allegiance are destroyed. If
we begin our search, our journey of self-awareness, upon the
firm and sure ground of equality — then we will quickly overcome
the paranoid delusions of tribal superiority and the emotional
blindness of fear and guilt. If we begin with equality, we shall
soon arrive at Love. This, I feel certain, is the foundation, the
spark, the seminal energy of every true renaissance.

Tagged Buddha, Christ, lao tzu, religion, spirituality, theology

An Essay on NCC-1701-D
By admin | January 28, 2013 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

3 Comments

During a recent bout with the flu (which, I can assure you, is as
nasty as you’ve heard it is), I felt the need for some passive-
dependent diversion, something soothingly numb and mindless to
distract me from my physical miseries.

Naturally, my fancy lightly turned to thoughts of television.

But I don’t have a TV, haven’t had a working numbness-box for

15 years now. So I went online to seek old and vaguely familiar
television.

Perhaps I had been thinking again of my late brother and of the

years we lived together (with TV) in Park Slope back in the late
80′s – early 90′s. Perhaps amid my suffering my unconscious
mind had sought out old fantasies, such as the one involving a
connubial life with a fellow inter-galactic psychotherapist who was
also our galaxy’s most torrid babe.

Whatever the cause, I quickly landed on my diversion: Star Trek,

The Next Generation; known to Trekkies simply as TNG.

So during the two weeks of my illness, I watched, fascinated both

by the silliness and the marvelous quality of that program.

Most Trek fans compare it to the original, and there is, obviously,
no comparison. The production, direction, sets, writing, and
overall art of TNG took Star Trek into a realm of art generally
unknown to the original series; even as it drew on much of
Roddenberry’s primordial concepts. The acting of TNG is also on a
different level than the original: to set Shatner beside Stewart
(the original and next-gen captains of the Enterprise) is to place
the proverbial candle beside the sun.

But I was more interested in TNG on its own merits. I noticed

that whenever TNG attempted to be merely an adventure show
like its predecessor, it stumbled hilariously, evoking The Three
Stooges more than the four dimensions. Yet when it stayed true
to its unique mission as metaphysics and metaphor, it
occasionally touched the sublime.

As I watched episode after episode, the metaphysical dimensions

of this program enveloped me. In the original Star Trek, space
may indeed have been the “final frontier”; in TNG, that frontier is
Time.

The series (seven years long) begins and ends under the
guidance of the same surreal vision of a panoramic universe or
mini-verse, which struggles and sways under the ministrations of
a God named Q, who manipulates and challenges his humanoid
subjects in the field of time rather than space.

Q is perhaps the most delightful, precise, incisive, and

metaphysically satisfying image of an external, omnipotent God
that I have ever encountered over decades of studying religions,
the history of philosophy, and cultures of spirituality. He is, in
brief, a nearly-perfect God for the human race.

In the opening of the series, Q takes our heroes of the Enterprise

into the past, where he appears as a judge who is trying
humanity for being an incurably “dangerous and savage child-
race.” By the end of the series, in the final episode, Q pulls the
objects of his psycho-spiritual ambivalence through three
separate instances of a temporal distortion (within the “neutral
zone” that separates warring worlds), both destroying and
affirming them completely within each. The trial begun 7 years
earlier is completed; sentence is passed and executed; and the
illusion of both individual and species extinction is revealed.

Yet as Q reminds the Captain at the end, “the trial never ends,”
and the search is not for external discovery but for something
else — something that is not out-there amid the stars of battle,
struggle, conflict, and scientific inquiry. Q bends to whisper The
Answer into the pitiful human’s ear, pauses, and then separates
wordlessly. He retreats and disappears. It is as good as television
can probably get.*

Granted, there is no present or future space-art that will ever

match that of Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey); and TNG is no
exception. But that comparison would be as unfair to the creators
of TNG as the weighing of the various incarnations of Star Trek
itself. The success of TNG was that it got the utmost of its genre;
it gave television a sparkle, a glimmer of life, of true art.
How it succeeded is obvious to me: instead of adopting a
conceptual copy-and-paste of the original series, TNG actually
kicked Star Trek onto its backside, produced a knife of Art, and
sliced unmercifully into its thick body of superficiality, revealing
the secret depth that lay hidden within. Again, as action-
adventure and faux-science, TNG is just as silly and clumsy as
the original. There is often much of the same multi-syllabic
gibberish and conceptual nonsense as we had heard in the first
series.

Thankfully, however, the characters of TNG are unique,

memorable, and true to themselves and to one another. The
humor is also much better done, and this is nowhere more
evident than in the characters of Q and the humanoid robot,
Data, who is delivered with an astonishing depth and versatility
by the amazing Brent Spiner. Data reveals some of the multi-
dimensionality of Shakespearian characters, a few of whom he
actually reproduces in the episodes where he rehearses King
Henry or Prospero.

This brings up another point about TNG: at its best, it is as

intelligent as it is funny. When music is played, it is Chopin, Bach,
Mozart, or New Orleans jazz. When there is drama, it is
Shakespeare, Rostand, or the imaginary psycho-play of Frame of
Mind. There is a cameo appearance from Stephen Hawking;
imaginary conversations with Einstein, Newton, and other
legendary real and invented scientists.

But what appealed to me most about the show, as I watched it

under the influence of influenza and physical exhaustion, is its
psychological depth. This focus centers around, but is not limited
to, the heart-stopping beauty pictured above (Marina Sirtis).

I had not seen TNG or the character of Deanna Troi since having
had my own experience with an empath, so this fresh view of the
series was intriguing. Oh yes, they’re real, but not in the way you
might expect.

My own experience with one had come about a decade ago in my

counseling practice. The lesson I eventually learned from this
experience was that the empath’s way is not special or strange or
insular, but actually very ordinary and universal. At least it is
meant to be.

Perceiving the emotions and even thoughts of others is not the

stuff of science fiction; certainly not in the sense that subspace
communication and warp travel are to we puny 21st century
earthlings. For whether or not empathic reception is validated by
double-blind research studies (and I again remind readers that
the scientific basis of probability theory is barely a century old
and considerably weak); both common and clinical experience
persistently support its presence. Our problem as a society is that
we haven’t correctly or completely defined it; yet that is no
reason to deny it.

The psychological depth of TNG is entwined amid the depth of its

characters — even Data, Q, and the Enterprise itself are given
their unique psychologies. And very often, the time-travel aspects
of many episodes of TNG are the threads of its psychological
tapestry — whether in the “holodeck” playground of the ship’s
internal fantasy environment or out there in space amid quantum
distortions and interstellar fissures.

What was really impressive about this was the centrality of

psychology, not merely to the program’s stories but to its
message, its cultural milieu. Mental health is, even in this quasi-
military environment with the familiar hierarchical ordering of
ranks, with its uniforms, regulations, and martial language, a
focal point of orientation and meaning. Not only that: this focus
on mental health and the primacy of the individual human mind,
even in a military culture, is specifically highlighted as the
reflection of an evolution of both human society and the military
— Picard points this out to Q in the very first episode, during the
“trial” of humanity.

I also discovered a refreshing para-political topicality and

currency to TNG. The program was warning us about the dangers
of climate change, the malignant folly of torture, the hideous
costs of competing tribal religious superstitions, and the imperial
hubris of nationalism — a decade before 9/11; in the relative
infancy of the science of global warming; and amid the reign of
Reagan and Bush 1. Jean-Luc Picard and his “administration”
aboard the Enterprise saw further and more deeply into their
society than any president or politician has within ours.

As I watched it this time, I sensed the direction of the metaphor

of what is perhaps TNG’s most famous symbol, The Borg. This
“character” is the Orwellian collectivist organization that lives in a
giant cube of wires and darkness and ignorance. There is a daring
genius to this image: the program was exposing the insanity
of its own genre, television. It is holding up the great mirror of
Art to the very thing that gave it life. Wow.

Anyway. I have recovered from the flu, and am actually grateful

for its visit. Had I remained healthy, I would probably not have
bothered to go back to this extraordinary program of a quarter-
century ago. But now, armed with its insight and perspective, I
can return to my tiny presence within the 21st century, and set
my course with some help from its light. Engage.

——————————————

*I haven’t read any existing literature on the philosophy of ST (I

bet there’s plenty of it, though); so I’m not sure if anyone has
already made this point, but the meaning of Q’s name is clear to
me. In several moments during the series, he seems on the verge
of revealing The Answer to Picard, and always refrains. Thus, he
is “the Q” who never quite delivers “the A.” This is, to me, an
essential trait of any God worth the name.

Tagged Data, NCC-1701D, philosophy of Star Trek, Q, Star Trek, Star Trek
TNG, theology

The Life of Empty Space

By admin | January 18, 2013 | exercise, self-recovery, Uncategorized

1 Comment

Most people would recognize this drawing, though perhaps

without being able to say what it is or what it’s about. It is Da
Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. It is studied in art schools, among
philosophers, and even by medical students — you can open the
link to the Wikipedia article by clicking the picture and learn more
about the continuing fascination this image holds to scholars. My
interest in the image is somewhat more personal and pragmatic
than it is scholarly.

When I look at Vitruvian Man, I am drawn more to the empty

space within the circle than to the male figure within it. That
seemingly empty space is what I refer to as one’s “energy-body”,
which, combined with our more manifest physical body,
comprises what I call the “life-space.” This total-body, which
embraces both physical form and formlessness; mass and
energy; corporality and presence — this is the focus of my
exercise-as-meditation program, discussed in many of my
previous posts here. My experience has been that to merely
“work your body” is not enough in terms of either benefit or
motivation; but to clarify and strengthen your total presence as
both matter and energy is actually fulfilling.

This approach has its basis in a perspective that is virtually as old

as human civilization itself. The ancients of China recognized this
very well, from the Yellow Emperor’s medical writings to the
insights that inform practices such as Chi Kung and Tai Chi. The
best and briefest summation of this perspective is found in the
11th poem of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching:

Thirty spokes unite around a single hub:

Thus a wheel is made.
Yet it is the formless core
That makes the wagon roll.

Clay is formed and baked:

Thus a cup is made.
Yet it is the invisible interior
From which we drink.

Framed walls and brick are joined

To make a house.
Yet it is the open space within
That makes it livable,
That gives doors and windows
Their unique functions.

Therefore, make being your element,

But non-being, your life.

Lao Tzu is directly addressing the empty space in Da Vinci’s circle

around Vitruvian Man. That is the life-space, the total body. If you
were to take a class in Tai Chi, Chi Kung, or even some training
from a competent martial arts instructor, you would be taught to
focus on your life-space rather than your mere physical form. The
life-space includes and then surpasses physical form.

Such an approach to exercise in particular and experience in

general has very practical, deeply-felt benefits. When my total
presence is the focus of my work — whether that work is jogging,
lifting weights, or more familiar “work” such as driving a nail or
balancing a spreadsheet — I am engaging my complete self with
the activity, and it engages me in return. This is the cornerstone
upon which mature relationships of all kinds are formed. When
we learn to fully engage ourselves and the things of our world, we
also learn how to become better lovers, spouses, parents, friends.

It goes still further than that, even. For when our experience
embraces the life-space, the complete circle of Vitruvian Man’s
presence, then we discover something about the reality of what is
often (and I think misleadingly) called “soul” or “spirit.” For
experiencing and then conceiving ourselves as life-space rather
than the ashes-and-dust of conventional religious thinking takes
us into a more natural realm of spirituality that, in fact, surpasses
it.

Einstein demonstrated that mass and energy are functionally

equivalent (if you have Quicktime, you can listen to a very brief
recording of him speaking about his famous equation, from this
collection). What we can sense in that equation might help us
beyond the ideological prejudices that train us to essentially
slander our bodies by perceiving them as “inferior” or even “evil.”

For if what is imagined as “soul” or “spirit” is in fact something

that we already have and already are, in this life and this body —
well, that realization, that experience, would lead us to a far more
natural self-perception; a more vibrant and grounded sense
of who we are right here and now, rather than some vague and
self-abasing image that points distantly to some equally vague
“afterlife.”

The word “spirit” is, of course, derived from the Latin word for
“breath.” Thus, spirit’s roots are bodily; spirit was once a
reference to something physical, something of that circle in
Vitruvian Man. But over the course of centuries it’s become
entirely muddled with nonsense and distraction and self-negation.
I’m sure you’ve heard the old New Age bromide: religion is for
those who fear they’ll go to Hell; spirituality is for those who’ve
already been there. I used to like that one, but have moved on,
or perhaps added a codicil to it: the way of Nature is for those
who see it all — religion, Hell, spirituality — as illusion. That is:
there is an invisible, quantum reality that is not hierarchically
ordered; that has no tribal predilection; that is not mysterious or
strange or sacred, but quite ordinary, refreshing, welcoming. It is
not a realm that denies or conflicts with Reason; it includes and
then surpasses it. And it is of your current, earthly being right
now; there is no need to listen to the priests who tell you that
your body is a piece of dust, ashes, shit, and corruption which
must die (the sooner the better!) before your “good stuff” — the
soul and spirit — becomes free to go to Heaven and be pure.

I’ve touched before on the problems that I’ve come to perceive in

spirituality. Pabulum such as “all religions are true” just makes
things worse by denying the corruption in all of them. When we
really examine spiritual ideologies in the light of our total lived
experience, what we find, in fact, is that the corruption shoe is
quite on the other foot: the corruption is not in ourselves or our
bodies; it is in what we are taught to believe about them. Once
again, Lao Tzu:

Separate from spirituality;

erase the sacred scripts,
and there will be benefit for all.

Discard all pretense

to piety and benevolence,
and people will just help one another.

Shut down the temples;

extirpate the feudal rites,
and sorrow will be annihilated.
Banish investment vehicles,
impoverish the profit-takers,
and there will be neither thieves nor frauds.

These are the ornaments of my teaching,

but hardly the essence, which is this:
Rely upon your inner discernment.
Return to your natural purity.
Wear down your ego.
Break out of the circle of desire.

It might seem that we need a new model for our approach to the
Ineffable. But in fact, nothing “new” is needed: we only have to
strip away some layers of falsehood and corruption, and the
correct model will be revealed. For when we peel away the
prejudice, self-abasement, and general slanders against our
physical presence; when we stop denying the reality of our life-
space, of Vitruvian Man’s great circle and its reality in our lived
experience, then we arrive at the gates of the heaven that is
already within our bodies now. This is the moment when the last
illusion — the one for which religion, Hell, Heaven, spirituality,
and all the other fables of ego, were invented — is finally and
fully exposed and exterminated. That illusion is what we know as
Death.

On that note, we close with the great Western poet Rilke,

in Robert Bly’s translation:

I can hardly believe that this tiny death,

over whose head we look every day we wake,
is still such a threat to us and so much trouble.

I really can’t take his growls seriously.

I am still in my body, I have time to build,
my blood will be red long after the rose is gone.
My grasp of things is deeper than the clever games
he finds it fun to play with our fears.
I am the solid world
from which he slipped and fell.

He is like
those monks in cloisters that walk around and around;
one feels a fear when they approach;
one doesn’t know — is it the same one every time,
are there two, are there ten, a thousand monks, more?
All one knows is the strange yellow hand,
which is reaching out so naked and so close…
there it is,
as if it came out of your own clothes.

Tagged Da Vinci, lao tzu, religion, Rilke, spirituality, Vitruvian Man

A Blow to the Chest

By admin | January 17, 2013 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

1 Comment

The suicide of Aaron Swartz, disturbing in its own right, also

stirred up an old swamp of personal memory within me. Here is
my story, which I’ve carried around for more than a quarter
century and have never written down.

………………………………………………………………

I was living in a brand new building in New York’s Alphabet City.

Today, I’d never be able to afford such a place; in the mid 1980′s,
however, that neighborhood where the avenues are only identified
as A, B, C, and D was a sinkhole of crime, drugs, and
desperation. So, for $300 a month I had an apartment on the
10th floor of a freshly-built “townhouse.”
I was 20-something; my whole life lay before me. But all I saw
and felt was a massive weight of failure.

I saw myself as the poster-child of idiotic life decision-making.

With an abundance of educational choices before me, I had made
the goofiest selection that a young man could make on the eve of
a great recession (the one that began in 1980 and, until recently,
has been branded the worst since the Great
Depression). Philosophy.

But Reason was my God; I had always been rewarded for

intellectual performance. My sole passion was to prove and
display my mind; this passion became conflated with all others,
including those directed toward women. In my obsession with
Mind, I lost contact with everything else that lay, neglected and
darkened, within me. All I saw was that I had failed that one true
God; I had lost the game of Mind, and was therefore a fetid
swamp of Past where others around me had Future.

And so I stood one midsummer’s evening on the little terrace of

my 10th floor apartment between Avenues C and D. The details
as to what prompted my actions that night are unimportant: as I
mentioned in my piece about Swartz, the suicidal’s ultimate act is
virtually never a matter of causation but of cataract. That is,
insight becomes shut down as externalization takes over: insight
collapses under the weight of an oppressive “outsight.”

I was looking down over the railing of the terrace, down through
the murky light that muddled amid the heated haze of the asphalt
jungle somewhere below. Scattered sounds rose weakly and
faded; things and maybe people stirred like creatures of a swamp
that had no discernible surface, that seemed to assimilate the air
above.

I can remember what happened later; but my last sense at that

moment was of that muddy light being pulled or sucked into the
darkness below, of those distant sounds of life being physically
absorbed into a blackness that seemed to erupt straight toward
and into, around me (years later, I would encounter Plath’s
famous phrase about being “stuffed into a black bag”). My left
foot rose and settled on top of the rail; my right hand made a
lifting motion and my other foot was off the ground, ready and
moving. Then something hit me, right in the chest.

It all might have taken a minute or an hour, I couldn’t tell you the
truth of that. When I came to awareness again, I was sprawled
against a table a few feet away from the railing, shaking and cold
with sweat. I turned and fell through the open doorway inside. I
lay there on the floor, still shaking, until I fell asleep.

The days that followed were marked by a brutish, selfish air of

denial. I cast myself into every direction where self-indulgence
could take me from that moment. At work, I was the first one in
and the last one out. At home, I blasted the television with no
mind for what I was watching or hearing. In between, I sought
out bars and drugs and women. But something had penetrated
my darkness; an opening barely wide enough for a feeling,
perhaps the first genuine one I’d had in years. I continued to feel
that blow on the chest from that night, as if it were a physical
bruise. Maybe it was.

I wouldn’t begin to get it for years; maybe I still don’t fully

understand what it was that hit me, that pushed me backward,
into or at least towards life. But it wouldn’t leave me; I couldn’t
deny that. Whenever I thought about it, I realized that I had
done it — I had said Yes to the abyss and made my move to join
it, to escape its grip by falling in and through it and into the
asphalt peace of annihilation. And I understood that something
that I finally couldn’t rationalize had forced me away from the
brink.

Months later, I had awakened enough from that torpor of self-

indulgence and noise to see a psychotherapist. Until today, he is
the only person to have heard this story. He was visibly alarmed,
and made me make promises to him that I had only made before
to my parents or to a lover. I carried his home phone number, his
pager number, I knew where he lived and where he could be
found at certain points in the average day. He called me regularly
at odd times, “just to check in.”

Someone, it seemed, actually cared. I began to read the books of

Harry Stack Sullivan, because this therapist of mine was from
the William Alanson White Institute. I became interested in
clinical psychology, a field at which I’d often looked down my
nose before.

It was only, of course, a start; a sputtering, restless, beginning

that still fed frequently at the dark trough of denial. That young
therapist at the White Institute didn’t heal me; he couldn’t, and
probably made no effort to do so. But he showed me enough to
help me realize that whatever it was that had hit me in the chest
that night — whatever had forced me back from that abyss —
was worth getting to know, because it was not a foreign presence
or an illusion. It was, in fact, something more genuine and true of
myself than I had perhaps ever encountered; it was something
that Reason could not hold in its icy grip.

So that young fellow showed me this, and encouraged me to

explore it; he reminded me that in order to do so, I would need
to stay alive.

And I can’t even remember his name.

………………………………………………………………

So, as I read last week of Aaron Swartz’s suicide, I recalled my

own effort, my own attempt to escape the abyss by climbing onto
its ledge and leaping into it. I wondered why I had “failed” when
he had “succeeded.” After all, I had failed at everything I’d
touched in life by the time I’d reached and passed the age of 25:
I had failed in education, with women, at work. I had even failed
my one and only God, Reason.

And so, when I read of another young man who had succeeded,
and who seemed certain to have a long trail of success ahead of
him and his genius, I recalled that blow on the chest that I
received some 28 years ago. And I wished that something or
someone had hit him, touched him, before he had drawn the rope
around his neck…

Tagged suicide

Undermining Cosmic Racism

By admin | January 15, 2013 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

1 Comment

I tend to speak and write only for myself, because I do not know
if any (or how much) of what I teach has any use or application
to other lives. But let me submit one modest generalization, that
if pundits, writers, advisors, and policymakers on the Internet, in
media, government, and publishing could recall this principle to
themselves before they undertake each day’s work, much conflict
and error might be avoided.

With that point made, I can affirm the following on a solid

foundation of certainty: my path to maturity opened before me
the moment I settled on a series of related realizations, each of
which seemed to follow from the one before, viz.:

1. I cannot do it all by myself.

2. I cannot do any of it by myself.
 3. I am not the cause or source of my success. Or, of my
failure.
4. My species is not the focal point of cosmic existence and is
not the Governor of Nature.
5. I can best succeed by removing excess.

I’ve touched on each of these points in previous posts and bring

them together here as a matter of context. For there is an
overriding theme, a grand motif, if you will, to them all: the
destruction and dispersion of human arrogance.

To walk into this water just a little reveals why a path like mine
takes so long to travel, why it requires a certain daily
commitment and practice before it opens to light. For it has been
my experience that human arrogance almost always walks in a
lovely dress; its color tends to be bright; its bearing noble and
upright; its image gleaming and majestic.

Therefore, rooting out arrogance is not as simple as it seems.

Yes, you must first expose it — especially within yourself. But to
expose it, you must be able to detect it, to see its corrupt
nakedness beneath the magnificence in which it is robed. In a
society like ours, that can be a fairly tricky endeavor.

This is precisely why it all started, for me, with bullet point #1
above, which flowed naturally into #2. Once I understood, not
just with my intellect but with my intelligence — that is, from a
whole-being rather than a merely rational perspective — that I
could not walk the path of life-as-maturation alone, it was like
taking a cleansing breath of sanity, just outside the smoke-filled
room of ambition and isolation.

The difference for me was that there was no tribal or religious

component to this. I realized that it wasn’t a matter of having a
Master, a guru, a Shepherd, a Guardian Angel, or Lord dragging
me along or carrying me like some ponderous burden. And I was
too old for a role model or a hero to guide me. I realized, in fact,
that the search for these superiors had actually prevented me
from touching the true presences that could guide me. When we
seek help from whatever is superior to or more powerful than
ourselves — whether it be in the human or spiritual realms – we
create the distance and externality that actually reinforce our
isolation.

So that was a beginning. But where I really began to see through

the dress of arrogance was when that third realization began to
penetrate my heart. I am not the cause or source of my success.
Or, of my failure.

This understanding is a turning point in maturation because it

undermines one of the fundamental delusions of human
arrogance: anthropocentrism. Thus, it led me to bullet point #4,
in which the primordial human prejudice, our proto-arrogance, is
exposed; this is the phenomenon that I refer to in my books as
“cosmic racism.”*

The belief in human supremacy goes back to the formative

documents of our religion and law, in which an external God tells
the original humans to dominate the Earth and everything on it
(and Genesis is just one prominent example).

But if I’m not the primum mobile or source of what happens in

my little life; then neither is my species the cause or Governor of
Nature or the Savior of the Earth. I began to see the silly self-
absorption of some (though by no means all) environmentalists
and their talk of “saving the Earth;” and of the scientists who
write letters to the President about “the Doomsday Clock.” I
imagine that every nuclear bomb on the planet could go off at
once and the Earth would continue on its course through the
space-time continuum, perhaps lighter by an ark’s worth of
species, but certainly whole in a planetary sense (and probably
not even completely devoid of life, either).

What this separation from cosmic racism does — what it did for
me, anyway — is that it removes the drama, the ridiculous
hyperbole, from both inner and outer life. The drama-queen of
anthropocentrism is knocked off her throne, and her crown of
causation, dominion, and lordship over the Earth and the universe
clatters comically along the stone floor of the palace of shadows.
As I’ve begun to accept and then embrace this experience, this
realization, I have also come to a fresh and clearer understanding
of both my human potential and my responsibility.

To be sure, there is both potential and plenty of responsibility in a

life lived free of the drama of the anthropocentric. That point is
embodied in bullet point #5 above: success is not a matter of
accumulation, but of removing excess. To paraphrase Antoine de
Sainte Exupery: a life is not perfect when there is nothing more
to get, but when there is nothing more to take away.

Such a realization has, to be sure, certain material implications;

but only to the extent that it runs against the grain of
acculturation. Of course I want a job; but not one where I am
used and flushed like toilet paper. Naturally I’d like a home; but
not a palace of excess within a gated community of fear. Of
course I like technology; but neither do I wish to become a slave
to a device.

So when I speak of the removal of excess as the touchstone of

success, I am pointing myself inward. It is a psychological more
than a material principle. If my excess is successfully discarded
from within me, then the natural measure of that
path’s outer manifestation will be realized without effort or
sacrifice.
It is all, of course, a matter of choice. If what I have means
everything to me — my property, my status, my image, my
possessions as both profit and perception — then I am in the
proverbial Machiavellian trap. However I get it all, whatever
means I use to have it all, will be justified and indeed, incidental.

But if what I am becomes my life’s true measure, my hallmark of

success, then I must be led to strip away whatever is not-me. In
this case, both my ends and my means will be just: this path is
about embracing rather than abandoning my natural
responsibility. I will only need the courage to face the
consequences I may incur through stripping myself of what ego
says is my life’s essence — the fundamental beliefs and ambitions
of cosmic racism, along with its dark emotions of guilt, fear, and
self-abasement.

For whether I consider myself, by turns, supreme among

creatures or debased before God; I remain split, divided against
myself, estranged to Nature and therefore to my own nature as a
unique individual. But when I choose to strip myself of these
trappings of delusion; when I patiently and perseveringly peel
away that imperial clothing, the raiment of arrogance — this is
the moment when I begin to feel whole, to sense the breath of
the Universal within me.

That, after all, in as few words as I can muster, is the path I have
chosen. I can assure you that it is marked with error, occasional
self-doubt, a little worry, and passing loneliness. I do not
embrace the role of the iconoclast; that, too, is merely a self-
image that serves ego as easily as does compliance with its
illusions. Without the rebel the ego could not have its war.

So I seek not rebellion but rather separation from assimilation. I

leave the narrow field of opposition and ambition so that I may
experience the panorama of Nature, and embrace both its
physical and invisible presences. Whenever I am capable of it,
truly successful at touching the harmonic chord of the Ineffable,
then I am no longer alone; I no longer have to do it all by myself.
The cycle renews; the work continues beyond the bipolar plane of
hard and easy, self and other, life and death; and the living self of
both the individual life and the universal connection is revealed,
undivided.

_______________________________________________

*I’m hoping that the meaning of this term is obvious — that is,
the “racism” is “cosmic” in its scope rather than its source. When
we imagine ourselves superior to all other species and beings, we
have opened wide the door to every other form of racism —
ethnic, gender-based, nationalistic, sexual, and tribal racisms.
Thus, the prejudice of anthropocentrism is the primordial poison
of human arrogance; the proto-racism that enables all others.
Again, this is discussed in some detail in both of my books.

Tagged cosmic racism, prejudice, racism, spirituality

Walking: The 98% Solution

By admin | January 15, 2013 | exercise, Uncategorized

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The faster we go, the darker we get. As speed increases, neurosis

tends to deepen. Why is this so?

Let’s consider it from an evolutionary perspective for a moment.

Anatomically modern humans have flourished on Earth for
somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years; the earliest
bronze age civilizations arose about 5,000 years ago. This period
appears to coincide with the rise of the empire of speed — the
wheel and horse-drawn transportation.
Yet speed still showed no threat of outpacing evolution until about
200 years ago; and it has been only in the past century that
we’ve gone out of control. A few years ago, I was driving the
Taconic State Parkway here in New York with a friend. I muttered
a curse as I had to slow down for a long stretch of nasty, winding
curves that went through a steep, hilly region of Westchester
County. “Remember, Brian,” my friend reminded me, “that when
this road was built, a car topped out at around 35mph. So these
curves were perfectly safe for the vehicles of that era.”

He was talking about a period from about 75 years ago (the

details, for those who may be interested).

So let’s take a numerical overview, for what it’s worth: speed,

measured in terms of that achievable by the modern auto, train,
airplane, etc., has been with us for somewhere between 2% of
the known extent of civilization’s history, and a tenth of a percent
of the evolutionary trail of the modern humanoid. That is, for at
least 98% of the time we have flourished on this planet in
civilized societies, the dominant means of transportation has
remained what we started with — our own two feet.

This is why I walk. It’s not why I started — that was a different
and more urgent matter of personal evolution, something
directed more toward psychological survival than to maturation.
But it has developed into a process of going back and
recapitulating my species’ history within the parameters of my
own existence. Why and to what extent does that matter?

It matters because our species has deviated from a natural

evolutionary course. Clearly, this goes beyond judgment: it is
neither a good thing nor a bad thing that such a tiny, insignificant
slice of time has been marked with technological developments
that have basically estranged us from our roots, from the pace
that marked our progress for 5,000+ years.
Yes, I know: it is what it is. As my teenage sister used to yell at
my mother during their numerous arguments: I didn’t ask to be
born, here and now. That may be so, yet we are called upon to
also make “it-is-what-it-is” what it can be. For that, we have to
return, retreat, go back.

There is no working alternative that I can see. Presumably, our

biological clocks have not changed significantly over the course of
our evolution; we cannot say that we go back to stillness for 8
hours a night (and anyway, research in modern societies shows
we’re sleeping less now, anyway). Another thing that should be
obvious is that the couch and the television/computer have failed
us in this respect. The psychological obsession with
speed (action, adventure, sports shows; multi-tasking on the
device) overtakes us even in these realms of the sedentary. As
living beings, we need measured physical movement for there to
be sanity, for there to be maturity, for there to be true evolution.
Walking, for me, is that measured movement that unites body
and mind, promoting the health of both.

I am not against running: I run a little myself, gently and in short

stretches of less than a mile during my walks. But I watch the
joggers and I see how their speed becomes wrapped into layers
of self-absorption. They aren’t very aware amid their “runner’s
high” or whatever overtakes them: I have had numerous brushes
and near-collisions with them and their seeming inability to move
laterally. So I like walking because it brings me back to the
original movement of my species, to the primordial DNA of
human transportation. And because it is a more civilized way of
getting around.

The results bear out my impressions: the more I walk, the more
my old neurotic patterns of movement — racing, competing,
striving, compelling, pushing, forcing, grabbing, longing — fade.
The more I walk, the more my original sanity rises, the more
does the path of maturity open.
I am not the only person who has perceived this. One notable
recent example is the famous documentary filmmaker, Michael
Moore, who has made his daily walks into a Twitter trend. He has
nearly 1.5 million “followers”; I have barely a hundred. Yet we
have experienced something similar: walking — an activity that
has no specific goal, image, status, or industry connected to it —
delivers benefit that seems to surpass the cult of ambition, to
heal the neurosis of speed.

It does so, I think, by taking us back, not just to our evolutionary

beginnings — but to what, as demonstrated above, is really the
statistical totality of our history (98% is, at least from the
standpoint of probability theory, a virtual totality). When we walk,
we return to what we were and also to what we are — bipedal
(not bi-axial) animals.

Curiously — paradoxically, if you like — walking takes us outside

the boundaries of a realm that casual observers would consider
the essence of evolution: the realm of competition. Except in a
contest that takes place every four years and is otherwise ignored
by our sports media, there are no major events or contests in
which there are “champion” or “gold medal” walkers. Even in the
organized walking events that happen around here in New York
(usually for charity), I never hear about “winners” in the way you
read about the results of everything from a 5K run to a marathon.

We don’t walk to win something outside of ourselves; we often

don’t have any particular objective (I’ll sometimes walk the 3
miles or so to a favorite store to get some things and carry them
back; and that’s about as goal-oriented as I get). What we find,
in fact, is that objectives or goals tend to find us, whenever we
have stepped out of the orbit of ambition. Some of my best
photography has come to me amid long walks, when I slow or
pause my pace to take out the camera and “receive some
pictures.”
So the seeming paradox here is really just that: superficial.
Evolution, expressed either as the maturation and development of
an individual or as the growth of a species, is not really a matter
of competition. To focus on Darwin’s famous phrase: we don’t do
the “selection” — Nature does. That is, he didn’t call it
“human selection”; he called it “natural selection.” So think of it
this way: when you walk outside the field of competition, you are
entering a clear, ambition-free region of natural selection.

Perhaps that, after all, is the next natural stage of our evolution.

Tagged exercise, walking, workout

A Proposal After the Death of

Aaron Swartz
By admin | January 13, 2013 | technology, Uncategorized

1 Comment

One of the brightest and most promising lights of the Internet

generation is gone today, a victim of suicide brought on in part by
a program of government intimidation.

I say “in part” because there is virtually never such a thing as a

single-factor or uni-causal case of suicide. I have both graduate-
level training and experience in psychopathology and
psychotherapy, so I speak not from an agenda, from ignorance,
or from speculation.

The loss of this young man is a loss to every person who is

online, who cares about the quality, privacy, and independence of
their experience on the Internet. Others will be found to provide
the detail of Swartz’s career and his nearly limitless potential; I’d
like to focus on what happened and how it can be prevented.

Like nearly all other suicides, this young man was crushed by
isolation; oppressed by a darkness so implosive that it left him no
vision for any escape but one. To assume that such an ultimate
darkness could be caused by a single person, institution, or event
is to completely miss both the person and the message — the
complex entropy of the suicidal and his experience. If we can’t
accept that point, then we won’t learn from this or any similar
loss, nor will we get any nearer to preventing such tragedies in
the future.

I emphasize that point because there will be (and already is) a

vast outcry over the systemic aspects of this tragedy. That outcry
has its place and deserves a full hearing: I have written often and
critically about the cult of guilt, punishment, and violence that
drives our society and its institutions. There is little violence more
demeaning, threatening, and oppressive than imprisonment,
societal guilt, and the prospects of either to a person. Just a half-
century ago, another pioneer of technology (and war hero) was
treated with similar intimidation by his society, and, amid a
similar weight of isolation, chose death. His name was Alan
Turing.

Both Turing and Aaron Swartz deserved better of their respective

societies, if only for what they had given of their genius. But
governments are pitiless and ignorant: they are owned by the
men who build and profit from the prisons and the delusions that
drive them. They exist to resist both innovation and change: here
we are nearly 60 years after Turing’s suicide, and Western society
is still wrenching itself from the braindead muck of homophobia.
Who knows how long it might be before the reformations that
Swartz espoused, regarding the public availability of information
and the revision of antediluvian copyright law, can begin to be
realized?
We need another approach, one that centers upon the individual
and his experience in these dangerous realms. The cries of “down
the system!” will soon fade or be displaced; but the needs of
individuals who press at the rotten ideological boundaries of a
society trapped in the mire of money and complacency — these
needs will not fade, they will only become more urgent with time.

I therefore propose the formation of a support network of mental

health professionals and independent caregivers who can serve as
a lifeline to activists and others whose work and beliefs take them
to and beyond the border of danger with corporate and
government institutions.* Those of us who make a choice to join
such a network will, of course, need the training, experience, and
commitment to be present and to deliver when we are needed
most. We will also have to accept the potential of guilt-by-
association for our choice to support these people. Speaking
personally, if the government reaches the point where it
criminalizes compassion, then we will have reached a point where
any individual’s sacrifice to anything but the Collective will be
suspect. That will be the time of Revolution.

So we have to make ourselves available to anyone in a position

like Aaron Swartz’s — non-violent activists who are being
criminalized, threatened, or otherwise oppressed by their
governments. And we have to do it without strings attached or
reservations held in abeyance.

In the case of a depressed, isolated, or other person of even

remotely suicidal potential, our practice is built around a single
interaction: the pact. This becomes the core of the therapeutic
alliance. We make a mutual promise with our client: I’ll be here
for you, and you will remember me, no matter where you are,
what your circumstances, or what you’re about to do. It doesn’t
matter how far along you are — you will pick up the phone, even
if it’s to say good-bye. You will make contact and you will
consider it a responsibility toward me, toward our relationship.
You may be amazed at how often it works, how often it furthers
not merely survival but healing. My point in raising this proposal
now and in this specific direction has to do with the kind of people
represented by the likes of the late Aaron Swartz. Since the
inception of the various Arab Spring movements, and of course
accompanied by the rise of the Internet as a forum for activism,
such people — educated, intelligent, insightful, courageous, and
often emotionally unstable — have greater voice, better
connection, and consequently more plain physical volume in our
societies. That is, they’re multiplying.

But connectivity doesn’t overcome isolation; it can actually

reinforce it — especially when the forces engaged by the
connected respond with the full weight of oppression: guilt,
intimidation, threat, punishment, and surveillance. The whole
point of suspicion is isolation; the sole object of surveillance is not
correction but entrapment. Those who espouse and practice these
methods of observation know all of this very well; they are good
at achieving such objectives.

Those who trade in violence and in intimidation have their own

psychopathology (see the footnote below about the military); but
those who arouse and engage the practitioners of institutional
intimidation have very unique needs. My personal feeling is that
people like the late Aaron Swartz are those who push civilization
out of its potholes of stagnation and complacency and inner
death. They press us forward, outward; they can usually see a
horizon of change even amid a society’s deepest night. We who
work or have worked in the fields of compassion and
psychological support owe them our presence and our
commitment. I am ready to sign up.

————————————————–

*Years ago, at my former blog, I made a similar proposal (during

the Bush administration) relating to military personnel, at a time
when the disturbing suicide rates among war vets was just
becoming apparent to the media and to government institutions.
That need is even more urgent today than it was then; and
Congress continues to cut funding for mental health care, for
veterans and everyone else.

Tagged Aaron Swartz, psychology, suicide, technology

tl;dr — Not an Excuse

By admin | January 11, 2013 | exercise, photography, self-recovery

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More audio for the tl;dr set. This one combines two recent
essays: The Inner Fat Burn Resolution and Of Gain, Loss, and
Progress. Youtube copyright police please note: the writing,
reading, and photography are all by me.

Tagged audio, self-development, video

Some Campfire Philosophy

By admin | January 8, 2013 | literature, photography, self-recovery

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For those of the tl;dr persuasion: one of my longer essays, read

aloud.

Tagged cosmology, philosophy, Pirsig, Schrodingers Cat, Zen

Dao Duck
By admin | January 6, 2013 | photography, self-recovery, Uncategorized

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My camera spent several frames with this single individual out on

the pond. He appeared to be examining himself in the frozen
water, and naturally I thought of Lao Tzu’s Chapter 33, which I
happen to have recorded in a reading from my own translation…
Tagged lao tzu, Tao Te Ching

3 Great Models for Modern Web

Development
By admin | January 2, 2013 | technology, Uncategorized

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My 2012 numbers for walking are in; total distance comes to

1,400 miles for the year, a few hundred less than 2011. I take the
numbers with several grains of salt, not because they’re
meaningless but because (a) they’re approximations (i.e.,
pedometers aren’t exact measuring devices); and (b) at their
best they tell only part of the story of the quality of experience.

That principle, by the way, applies to most everything, even to

technology, especially here on the Intarwebs. As Pirsig teaches
with such complete and lucid beauty in Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance, quality is far more a matter of sensation
than calculation; of universal intuition than mathematical
abstraction. If you can’t understand this or choose to ignore it,
you are setting your own trap of failure, into which you will fall
repeatedly throughout your life as an individual or an
organization.

In my last corporate assignment, this folly was readily in

evidence, virtually from my first day on the job. They had
become obsessed over some statistical analyses that purported to
demonstrate the need for what they called “responsive web
design” — the ability of a website’s elements to resize or
reconfigure themselves automatically, according to whether the
site was being viewed on a desktop PC screen, laptop, tablet, or
smartphone. As with all obsessions, this one became generalized
to a fatal degree, such that it drove everything they were doing
and the order in which they did it. That is, guided by a 3rd party
vendor who had run the stats, they had committed to
reconfiguring all their web properties, sites, and pages according
to the mandate that everything be “mobile-friendly.”

I alerted the project manager to the danger I saw in the whole

scheme. The project had become basically unstable: back-loaded
and disordered as a result of this statistical obsession, and
trouble was afoot. This was a classic case of cart-before-horse
mentality; as a friend and co-worker of mine used to say years
ago: “in IT we too often try to put on our boots before our socks.”

They had already made some critical technical mistakes as a

result of this obsession: right around the time I was hired, an
adjustment to columnar distribution in support of this mono-polar
design fixation had caused some fatal failures in their CSS and
modular code for their CMS components. And it was all getting
worse.

Mind, I’m not against modifying and updating design to

accommodate changes in how content is consumed. What I was
objecting to was the monopolar approach, the fixation, and the
chaos it was introducing to the project. In any event, even
though I tried to keep my warnings confidential between myself
and the PM, word got around and I was labeled “not a team
player” (i.e., insubordinate). I lasted a month and was fired.

The point here is not that I know better than others how to do
this shit right; only that I’m probably more open than many in
corporate America to solutions that lie outside the narrow, either/
or range of obsession. That openness is where success can be
found, where quality in Pirsig’s sense resides.

Let’s stay with the topic I raised above: where might you find an
alternative to incorporating “responsive web design” into your
site, without making it into a mania? Well, you would look first
toward effective and popular (and profitable) models. On the
Internet, I like to look into three broad categories for such
models, because I know that much of the innovation and forward
movement on the web, from its earliest days, have appeared in
these realms. I am thinking of (1) gaming; (2) porn; and (3)
open source. Without getting into intricate detail, here are some
thoughts on each of these categories:

1. Gaming. This is often the first place I look to see what’s

happening on the web in terms of e-commerce,
presentation, and design. Even while that unfortunate
situation at work was becoming disturbingly apparent to me;
I happened to notice that one big gaming site had already
successfully solved its own “responsive web design”
challenge, without making it into a technological
monomania. Go ahead and click the link (it opens in a new
tab or window): that home page is an example of responsive
web design. View it on your PC screen, laptop, tablet, or
smartphone, and you’ll be given a perfectly viewable and
working version of the page. From there, if you have a
mobile device, you can click its link and receive content
optimized for your device. If you’re on a PC or laptop, you
can click to be taken into a sub-site that is dedicated to
content delivery on larger screens. So this is an example of
a company taking an intelligent approach to responsive web
design: instead of creating a mobile-device container and
forcing everyone into that obsession, they adopted a
common-sense, quality-focused approach. Their customers,
gamers, are commonly among the most tech-savvy of tech
users; they can also be among the most rebellious when
they feel they’re being short-shifted by a bunch of
marketers. So gaming companies often get this stuff right
before others do, because their bottom line depends on it.
2. Porn. Believe it or not, a lot of the innovation in stuff like
Flash video, javascript, moving GIF images, general image
quality and multimedia page design has been driven by
 porn. The best porn sites — the ones that succeed with their
audiences and with their, um, bottom lines — usually reside
at the leading edges of online tech. The ones at the top of
that list right now have multimedia portals that open
responsively and equally to devices of all sizes and types. If
you want to know where the commercial web at large will be
in a few months or a few years, with respect to things like
HTML5, IPV6, issues like server load balancing and overall
content streaming of all multimedia types, just keep your
eye on one or two of the top porn sites. Seriously.
3. Open Source. Enter a search term, any word or name that
comes into your head, right now in Google and hit enter.
What’s the first entry returned to you at the top of the page?
I’d make a fair wager that it’s likely to be a link to a
Wikipedia page. Even corporations have bought into the
wiki-model, and for good reason: the design is elegant,
human, consistent, and possessed of that simplicity that
truly blurs the line between craft and art. So many
corporations have adopted the Wiki model into their own
content presentation, especially for corporate Intranets and
employee training sites, where flexibility and versatility
within a common and reliable user interface are paramount
to successful usability and performance. It’s also why many
corporations are bringing Linux-based operating systems
into their infrastructures.

Again, this isn’t rocket science, kids; I don’t have a CS degree,

have never been a high-profile manager or executive, and I lack
the geek credentials to even apply for most development and
programming jobs in the corporate sphere. But I have studied
quality and the paths that lead to it; I understand what quality is
and what it isn’t; and ironically, my one area of academic
expertise — psychology — has guided me in quickly perceiving
situations whose dynamics are driving a project away from the
goal of quality.
In the case of my last assignment, that cost me big time. But, as
I explained to one manager there, if I’m not letting my PM know
when I’m sensing that a project is coming off its rails and losing
its focus, then I’m not doing my job, not performing an essential
part of the function for which I was hired. The problem here was
that the company had gone too far across that rickety bridge and
saw no way back; so they chose to demonize and expunge
anyone who dared to actually point out where their
monomaniacal obsession with a single driver, a final and insular
solution, had led them.

The last conversation I had there after I’d gotten the call from the
consulting firm that I’d been fired effective immediately (no one
from the company where I was actually working ever said a
thing) — my last interaction there was with a senior business
analyst responsible for graphic design. It was late in the day
(early evening, in fact), and we were the last two people in our
section still in the office. I told him what had happened and
sketched out my sense of why it had happened, and he grimly
nodded. “I struggle with it every day, Brian,” he told me, “and I
already know it won’t end well, for the same reasons you just
mentioned.”

Here was a fellow who, by the nature of his position, was charged
with defining and documenting the elements and processes that
would support the quality of the finished product — even he had
already given up. But that’s not my nature, either as a person or
a professional. I know that there is always a way back to quality,
no matter how far off the rails you may be at any given moment.
It all comes down to three factors: attention, communication, and
commitment. But in order for there to be attention (as to the
three models noted above) there must first be awareness; in
order for there to be communication, there must first be
openness — that is, you have to know how to listen. And in order
for there to be commitment, there must be ordinary, unheroic
human courage.
That, in essence, is my approach to project management and to
self-development. If you agree with that approach and have a job
to offer, let’s get in touch.

Tagged CSS, gaming, HTML5, open source, porn, project management, web
development

Brooklyn Fireworks
By admin | January 1, 2013 | photography, Uncategorized

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I walked over to the park late in the evening, and found a park
bench a little before midnight. Small groups of people were
walking into the darkened fields nearby; a distant and rising din
came from the bandshell a quarter mile up the hill. I began a
meditation on all that had been lost this past year, but the noise
rose to a pitch that told me it must be 2013. The first bomb out
in the distant meadow exploded, and I remembered I had the
camera with me, and that the goofy thing actually has a
“Fireworks” setting.

Strange to say, when I came home two hours later and saw the
pics, I liked them (see the entire album). They captured the true
violence behind such shows, and even the imperfections revealed
or suggested other images: some kind of cosmic monster
bleeding light into space; a few reminded me of the cover of a
Jimi Hendrix album or a 70′s sci-fi novel. For perhaps the first
time ever, I saw the art in fireworks.
Tagged 2013, fireworks, happy new year

Happy Renewal Year

By admin | December 31, 2012 | Uncategorized

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All weekend, I’ve been walking around Prospect Park late into the
night. It’s normally not the safest or sanest thing to do, but now
the place is crawling with NYPD. The first night I actually
wondered why cops would be covering the park of all places, then
I remembered: they’re guarding a large supply of bombs. Tonight
at midnight, the bombs will be set off. If you’re in town, the event
starts at 11; fireworks at midnight.

There is, even in an urban park, a kind of surreal beauty to the

winter suspension of Nature at night. This first image shows a
single swan moving across the moonlight reflection.

The Cosmos receives and responds to our human consciousness;

this is one of the principles upon which my inner work is founded.
It responds to Nature’s seasons, the moon’s motion, and the
dance of the universe in general; yet it also understands our
Julian calendar (and of course the lunar or so-called “Chinese”
calendar — Feb. 10, 2013 is New Year’s Day). So it is not a vain
self-indulgence or arrogance to communicate our gratitude and
aspirations to the cosmic whole on a night like this one.

One thing we can do to make those messages clearer and

stronger, within us and in our connection with the mind of the
universe, is to begin by cleansing ourselves of actual self-
indulgence and arrogance. These are beliefs and emotions that
we have been taught never to question, but must. Recently, I
received Hexagram 21, Biting Through, from the I Ching, with
lines 1 and 5 changing. Here are those lines:
1. His feet are fastened in stocks, so that his toes disappear. No
blame.

5. Biting on dried lean meat, one receives yellow gold.

Perseveringly aware of danger. No blame.

Unless you’re comfortable with metaphor and poetry, this may

seem like a load of gibberish. Let us allow a pair of true
experts to teach us…

The term “biting through” has to do with decisively ridding

oneself of slanders put on the nature of the Cosmos and the way
it works by the societal ego. A person often receives this
hexagram when he has accepted an idea or belief as true simply
because someone else has said so, or because it has been carried
down by tradition….

This line [line 1] refers to a person who has used power, either in
his thoughts, or through what he has said or done. The power
used has been through judging another incorrectly, that is to say,
from his ego. He may have had self-righteous thoughts, or acted
to chastise someone, or he may have engaged in argument or
striving to make something happen, or he may have encroached
into the other’s space, or in some way have pressed his cause,
his point-of-view, or his feelings or thoughts upon the other.
Power also refers to a person’s attempt to correct another
through physical force.

All such use of power violates the intrinsic space of others and
brings about the Cosmic reaction referred to by the phrase, “his
feet are fastened in stocks.” It is a metaphor for the Fate incurred
by a person’s incorrect thoughts, words, or actions . The Fate is
that his incorrect behavior is brought to a halt. This Cosmic Law
of Fate is invoked whenever a person violates the Cosmic
Harmonics. Being brought to a halt encourages the offending
person to reflect on his attitudes and actions….
The “dried lean meat” is a metaphor for a person’s demonized
animal nature. It has become dried out because it has not been
able to fulfill its natural function which is that of helping the
person renew his life force, or chi energy. It is his animal nature
that keeps a person connected with the Cosmos.

Receiving this line indicates that his life force has become
completely “dried up.” This is the fate created by the poison
arrow that has slandered his animal nature as evil, and has
consequently caused him to live totally “in his head,” separated,
figuratively speaking, from his body. The line informs the person
that this fate has run its course and has ended. As mentioned in
the general text of this hexagram, Fate also has the purpose and
effect to restore a person to his senses, which, in their totality,
make up his common sense. To fully free his common sense, the
Sage “bites on the dried lean meat,” after which the common
sense is able to say an inner No to the false idea that was put on
his animal nature. If the person affirms this rejection by
consciously saying an inner No to the slanderous idea that his
animal nature is the source of evil, he recognizes his true self for
what it is: his loving animal nature, here referred to as “yellow
gold.” (“Biting through” is a metaphor for saying No to a
slanderous idea.)

When a person deals with the poison arrow that has slandered his
animal nature, he is freed from an autonomous neurotic complex
(a self-justifying group of ideas that are based on one central
false premise). “Perseveringly aware of danger” is counsel to be
aware that if one has not dealt with the central idea upon which
the justifying ideas are based, it will remain a source of trouble.
For the person to make his freedom complete, he now needs to
say an inner No to that premise in full consciousness. It is the
idea that puts humans up as “special” because they have
language. Once he is put up as special over all the other animals
and things that make up the Cosmic Whole, he puts down his
animal nature and divides himself up into mind and body. He thus
loses his modesty and thrusts himself out of the Cosmic Unity.
This, in turn, makes him feel inferior and unworthy. In turn, he
begins to strive to become superior, and to embark upon the road
to vanity through the development of grandiose self-images.

The person receiving this line is also counseled to identify the

rationales that support the idea that humans are special, and to
say an inner No to them. This is vital since they remain active
and destructive so long as they are not recognized and rejected
by the fully conscious mind. Conscious rejection frees the person
from the neurotic complex through transformation.

The “neurotic complex” mentioned has to do with notions of

human superiority; the supposed human mandate to rule and
dominate Nature; the accompanying irony of how religious and
societal ideologies actually demonize or slander our animal
essence; and finally the guilt that is projected upon us, which we
are taught to believe is a consequence of our “evil side” — that is,
the very aspects of our being that connects us to Nature, our
bodily and animal functions and senses.

These beliefs, and the guilt they come saddled with, are the
“poison arrows” that we can safely discard from within. They
should be considered targets of our inner warrior, and given not a
breath of mercy or tolerance. It can help to write out a list of
these targets, to provide focus for our work. Here’s how I would
make such a list for this case; I refer to whatever list I have
“open” regularly, to guide my efforts in meditation and physical
exercise.

1. Your animal nature is the source of Evil.

2. Humans are superior to other creatures of Nature because
they have language.
3. We are divided by Nature — into body and mind (or body,
mind and spirit).
 4. We must accept this division, this splitting of ourselves, and
celebrate our Good Side (mind, spirit) while punishing our
Bad Side (body, sexuality, animalism).
5. Humans are guilty in the eye of God because of their animal
nature. This guilt can only be completely absolved after
physical death.
6. Anyone who honors their animal nature, especially their
sexuality, is guilty in the eye of God.

One of the greatest dangers of these beliefs is the thought, “Oh,

I’m above all that stuff, it doesn’t affect me.” Really? How certain
are you of that? Go deeper into yourself, into your memory, all
the way back to the earliest years of your life that you can
remember, and spend some time there. Then, if a trace of doubt
remains, revisit that list, rework it according to the wording of
those anthropocentric and self-divisive beliefs, as they appear
within you. And then make them a focus, a target, of your best
inner effort.

I think that if you can make such a cleansing practice a part of

your New Year observance, you may find that the universal mind
will be more attentive to whatever personal aspirations you may
have for 2013; and your new year will become something more:
a Renewal Year.

Tagged 2013, new year, self-development, self-recovery, self-revealing

The Inner Fat Burn Resolution

By admin | December 30, 2012 | exercise, self-recovery, Uncategorized

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The dead bodies are appearing in the park as they always do this
time of year. This one here’s a young one, barely four feet end to
end. So you celebrate a holiday dedicated to the birth of the
Prince of Peace by killing something young and healthy so that
you can display it for two weeks and then throw it out. And
people pay good money for these trees at a time when they could
walk into the park and have their pick of the lot of post-Sandy
damage, already lying there on the ground for them, free.
Humans are fascinating yet appalling creatures.

Anyway, the rest of the photos from that walk (a little over 13
miles) are here. Winter is an excellent time to remember to keep
walking. In fact, it’s an optimal time for it, especially if your goals
for physical exercise involve the burning of fat. Think about it:
assuming you live in a cold-weather climate, you have to work a
little extra come winter. More clothing in more layers (not to
mention boots) means more weight to carry; you’re both heavier
and more insulated when you go outdoors now than in summer.
Thus, more fat is burnt. The bonus comes when the snow arrives:
as I used to tell the ladies at work, if you’re really serious about
getting rid of fat in the thighs and butt, you’ll embrace every
chance at walking in the snow. The deeper, the better: a quarter-
mile walk in even six inches of fresh snow will have your glutes
and quads tingling with fat-burning energy almost instantly. Here
in Brooklyn, we have a mile-long stretch of grassland called the
Long Meadow; when it’s covered with snow, I’ll walk it vigorously
end to end and back.

When I’m done, I’ll typically feel like I’ve done the equivalent of 4
times the distance of a snow-free walk. Funny, I never see the
joggers out there with me. They remain out on the plowed
asphalt, apparently determined to make puree out of their knee
joints by the time they’re my age. To each his own.

But as I’ve already repeated ad nauseam in other posts here, the

true goal of physical exercise is the burning of inner fat. You
invite your body into the cleansing conversation with your heart
that is the practice of meditation. The “inner fat” that is burned
varies uniquely from individual to individual; but the principle is
universal: purge both your physical body and your energy-body
— what I collectively call one’s “life-space” — of false beliefs, dark
emotions, expectations (positive and negative alike), and self-
images. Here are a few things I’ve been working on recently —
these are my “inner fat” of the moment that I ask my body to
help me work out of my life-space:

• “You can’t succeed unless you’re proactive” (a belief of what

I call the “corporate ego”; aside from being a total line of
bull, it puts excess pressure on a job-seeker like myself)
• “Psychological self-cleansing only works if you believe in it;
but it’s not scientific or acceptable.” This is a cynical anti-
belief that falsely limits the extent of one’s personal
autonomy; and it forces everything into that coffin-like
container whose sides are belief and skepticism. Sure, belief
and skepticism have their occasional place in life; but if you
can’t trust your own lived experience, then what the hell are
you here for?
• “Fate is the judgment of an angry God.” This one has
probably festered inside me since childhood. Many such
beliefs, in which we were steeped or drilled from our earliest
years, can lie latent within us for decades; and they can
influence us subconsciously in a number of ways and
situations, in which their effect is invidious. This one came to
me in a meditation after I’d been reviewing this past year, in
which I mourned the loss of two brothers and had
experienced a number of personal conflicts and reversals of
fortune.

I could offer more such examples, since I do this work on a fairly

continuous basis. To me, it’s self-maintenance, self-recovery, and
it’s a process, not a set of insular tasks that have a defined
endpoint. Since it’s a life process, this kind of work isn’t hard, nor
does it require force or aggressive discipline. It merely needs a
level of commitment combined with the development of certain
habitual activities — that is, you treat this work of self-cleansing
as you do your daily bowel movement; your circadian cycle of
sleeping and waking; your eating patterns; and the like.

This is why bringing your body to it via physical exercise is

especially meaningful. We all know our body’s “up-time,” a period
within the 24-hour day when it is primed and ready for action,
movement, space, air, and exertion. Some of us may even be
aware of a time in the day when we are inwardly-tuned and
sensitive to the signals coming from our true selves — the time
when the white-noise of outer commitments and demands from
work, family, media, relationships, and personal obligations all
winds down to a dull din. Once you’ve identified these two
windows, you can bring some loosely-structured commitment to
them, and organize your personal practice around them.

One singular advantage to this approach is that the physical

exercise becomes easier to both do and repeat. That is, you can
keep it up and not fear being glued to the couch again in a
month. Why is that so? Because it puts more cheese and less
chalk on your table of commitment. Even today, after years of
doing this regularly, I often face the same thought before I go
out: “you’re going to spend the next two hours walking 10 miles
— for what? And when you have so many Very Important Things
to do in your life now.” Then I can remind myself: I’m not doing
this just to look better naked; I’m doing it to pull down the pillars
of darkness that hold up the iron shroud of ego and throw
shadows of delusion over who I truly am. I’m doing this to more
fully become myself, to live a full and decent human life that
honors the people and the invisible presences that gave of
themselves to lead me to this point.

One of the great scientists of the 20th century, R. Buckminster

Fuller, once wrote: “Nature is trying very hard to make us
succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the
only experiment.” So this is another reminder I give myself
whenever I’m waffling over taking the walk, lifting the weights,
doing the yoga or the Pilates exercises. If my body isn’t part of
my overall development as a human being, then I’m not holding
up my end with Nature, not cooperating with her, even as She
extends herself toward the success of my individual life and the
evolution of my species. If that seems a bit of a stretch to you,
then find another reminder that is closer, more intimate, more
meaningful to your life and learning.

The one thing that it does seem necessary to remember,

especially in the context of fat-burning, is that working to look
like something or someone just isn’t enough to keep your
motivation pure and true. That’s following a self-image, and that
ain’t you. So maybe that’s a place where you could start: “I’m
going out for a walk or a run, or headed to the gym or yoga
studio — and I’m going to burn off the desire to look like Tebow
or the Old Spice Guy or Mila or Rihanna.” If that’s what you’re
burning away from within yourself, I guarantee you that the
physical stuff will melt right after it. Not a bad New Year’s
resolution to try for 2013.

Tagged fat burning, inner fat, self-recovery, tao

Of Writing and Editing

By admin | December 30, 2012 | literature, Uncategorized

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“A writer,” said Thomas Mann, “is a person for whom writing is

more difficult than it is for other people.”

I get the idea behind Mann’s irony; it’s one reason why I don’t
consider myself a writer. My work here is an activity of self-
maintenance, of therapy on the self, if you like. Thus, I do not
seek out readers since, as with my physical exercise practice, I
am not seeking a public image or an income but instead am
working to repair or reveal myself. Days will go by where,
according to WordPress’s stats function, not a soul comes by here
to read or even glance. This is why I say that being on the
Internet is like walking through a big city such as New York,
where I live: You can go out and be visible to millions but seen by
none.

The web has changed writing, and I have no judgment yet on

whether it’s for the better or otherwise. I sometimes think that
online work such as mine may be a victim of the “tl;dr” mindset
that appears so common to our hand-held device culture (there
are extensions for web browsers made to accommodate this). It
means “too long; didn’t read”.

I don’t even consider myself particularly old-school about this — I

generally like the ultra-short trend. I’m on Twitter and use it fairly
often (2,500 tweets to date). There is beauty in brevity. Those
who use Twitter well, such as Professor Reich here, can say more
in 140 characters than many writers can in 14,000 words. But I
also suspect that, in the twitterverse, Reich is an exception that
proves a certain rule.

A good tweet is effective in the same sense and for similar

reasons that make for a good essay. The average length of my
pieces here runs between 1,200 – 1,500 words, or less than 10
typewritten pages. It seems a fair and digestible size for the
topics I’m led to explore. Both tweet and essay, to be useful to
readers, must compress a message that might otherwise be the
terrain of a book-length manuscript into a format that can be
consumed with a sip of one’s coffee or in the time required to
enjoy a full $4.00 tank of latte. In both cases, there can be no
sacrifice of meaning or context, and there should be room made
and encouragement given for deeper exploration.

To this point, the online model is of course Wikipedia, the much-

maligned creation of Jimmy Wales (I remember once remarking
in a blog post from a few years back that Wikipedia and
masturbation are a lot alike in that so many who “do it” deny or
ridicule the practice). All Wiki articles — all the good ones,
anyway — contain links and footnotes, references that can be
checked for accuracy, context, and further research.

One of the singular features of many Wikipedia articles and

similar web content based on the open source model is that
they’re never “done” — contributors from the general public are
free to add, revise, correct, and update content. This, I think, is
generally a virtue, though it requires the presence of a now-
vanishing breed known as the editor.

I’ve edited a few print books, a fair bit of online content,

corporate material, and of course my own work. An editor is a
background specialist whose name does not appear on any
covers, flyleaves, banners, or blurbs; and whose importance can
only be perceived when he or she is absent. Even good authors
who refuse or lack access to a quality editor will be inevitably
cornered by their blind spots or tangled amid their secret hubris.
Indeed, some of the mightiest geniuses of literary history have
slipped amid their otherwise soaring flights of brilliance when
they lacked editorial guidance. The Cervantes of the second half
of Don Quixote comes to mind; the turgid courtroom speeches
near the end of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov spatter
what is in all other respects a nearly perfect novel; Hugo’s
masterpiece, Les Miserables, remains for good reason one of the
most frequently abridged novels of all time; Tolstoy’s War and
Peace lags occasionally where Anna Karenina does not;
Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again runs scattershot in places
because he wrote it without an editor. Even when an editor is
technically present, other factors can disable his or her proper
influence on the quality of the work. Compare, for instance, the
crisp flow and tight movement of the early Harry Potter novels
with Rowling’s later, more rambling efforts in that same series:
her fame and that dominant control she came to exert over an
entire industry tended to induce her editors to drop their blue
pencils from fear of interrupting this literary juggernaut.

The editor is both coach and cheerleader; doctor and

commiserator; leader and follower. One thing the editor is not,
ever, is the creator. He is the sounding board, but never the
music. To paraphrase the old proverb about God: the editor
proposes, the writer disposes. Thus, the primary virtues of the
competent editor are: empathy, curiosity, and perseverance.*
Empathy represents the supportive function, and includes an
interest in the material being written. Often, that entails a
willingness to learn, to research, cross-check, and verify.
Curiosity is the explorer’s nature: the ability to open views to
alternative paths, to experiment, to offer varying approaches to
the author(s). Perseverance is the directive function that
embraces the author’s vision, the work’s purpose, and makes
these the touchstone of the effort. In this respect, perseverance
must always be guided by humility.

The single character trait that informs and supports all these
virtues of the editor is flexibility. When I was working on my first
print book, I found that some rules, which I had been taught
were immutable within the writer’s art, were in fact malleable. As
the manuscript developed, I saw that it was turning into
something enormous: it would eventually become bigger by at
least a factor of three over nearly every other work in its genre.
Yes, I worked with the authors to trim the scope of the thing as
far as was possible and acceptable; but I ended by recognizing
and supporting their vision of the work, a vision that entailed a
greater size and scope than was customary. I also found that
these authors regularly and persistently employed a passive voice
in their prose, which went against the grain of

another Creative Writing 101 commandment about preferring the

active voice over the passive. Again, I had to arrive at an
understanding of the authors’ purpose here, because it aligned
again with their vision, in which they identified themselves not as
moving forces to the formative messages of the book but as its
intermediary receivers. The experience as a whole taught me that
in a valid and committed editorial process, teaching and learning
merge into a dynamic organism of communication. That is, roles
are not abandoned; they are simply never fixed or prosaic.

In that kind of a professional encounter, the truth of Thomas

Mann’s aphorism weakens (and he plainly meant it with tongue in
cheek anyway). Writing is not hard; nor is it easy. All art worth
the name departs from that and any other dichotomy. Writing and
editing have but a single hallmark that guides them throughout
the creation of any work: the commitment to quality in the
context of the author’s vision and purpose. Where that
commitment is present and is given the place of leadership, hard
and easy go sailing out the window, along with all their relatives
in the family of self-consciousness.

Given that, we could perhaps change one word of Mann’s remark

and have something to work with as a foundation for
distinguishing professional writers and editors from their amateur
counterparts: ”A writer is a person for whom writing is
more important than it is for other people.”

——————————————————-

*The casual reader may note that there is nothing in there about
the editor as “expert” (in spelling, grammar, prosody, the
business of publishing, etc.). Obviously, an editor’s quality as an
expert wordsmith is assumed, and most editors who work for
large corporate publishing houses are well versed in the
commercial details of their industry. The focus here is on the
editor’s interpersonal and even psychological skills which, for
large projects and long-term relationships, are as or more critical
to authors than technical skill.
Tagged editing, literature, writing

Dad's Lost Teaching

By admin | December 26, 2012 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

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Someone who styles himself a “CEO” wrote a piece at the popular

professional site Linkedin about parental career influences, and
then asked others to contribute their stories. I remembered my
own in an instant, and wrote it down. Here it is:

A long time ago, in the mid-80′s, I got my first corporate job. I

was going to be employed by one of the biggest real estate firms
in NYC, working in a gleaming midtown tower and doing
Important Things in a suit and tie. The shirt whose buttons could
withstand my pride had not yet been invented. To celebrate
before I started, I went home to bask in the glow of
accomplishment amid family. In short, I imagine I was thoroughly
insufferable.

Anyway, shortly before I left to return to New York and begin my

corporate career, my old man took me aside. “Brian,
congratulations again, and I mean that,” he said, smiling. “I
just want you to understand one thing before you start.
The company will ask for your loyalty — demand it, in fact.
It will give you none in return. The company will ask for
your sacrifice, and give you none in return. The company
will ask for your trust, and give you none in return. How
much of these things you give the company will depend on
you and your judgment. Just don’t expect anything back
except the paycheck. Do your best, but expect nothing in
return from the company.”

That lesson, that message has run in and out of my

consciousness, like a child through the back porch screen door on
a rainy summer afternoon, these three decades. In and out, out
and in, never quite settling or maturing. Only in the past five
years has its insight, its prescience, become clear to me.

The truth is that I ignored my father’s advice far more than I

honored it. The fact is that, for much of my professional career,
I’ve delivered loyalty, sacrifice, and trust — in precisely the terms
and measure of his warning. Unconditional. Excessive.
Vainglorious. Servile.

From a socio-economic viewpoint, this points to a chicken that is

coming home to roost — pay particular attention to the chart in
that link, which shows an obvious disparity between the
increasing productivity of workers and wage stagnation. But for
me, the enduring lesson of this is psychological, because it leads
to the very root of much of the self-destructive behavior and
emotional suffering in our culture.

You hear a lot about greed, profit-mania, and selfishness,

especially in connection with the behavior of corporations like the
one in the picture at the top of the page. Yes, HSBC laundered
money for drug dealers and terrorists, all because of greed (and
because they knew they’d get away with it, which they have). But
for most of us, there is a different problem in our professional
lives: giving too much of ourselves. Whenever we give in excess,
something inside us — our heart, our animal nature, our deep
senses — it knows, and it is repelled by the act. Nature may
abhor a vacuum, but it is sickened by excess. And it is probably
no coincidence that this topic has occurred to me during the
holiday season.

Whatever the gift — a card, money, a garish tie, or something

even more precious such as our loyalty, commitment, or trust —
if there is no heart behind it, then it is no longer a gift but a lie.
This applies within families and within the “persons” known as
corporations. You can sometimes fool the receiver of such a gift;
but you cannot fool your own heart. It knows the truth, and will
call you out in its own way. It is no coincidence that the kind of
loyalty, sacrifice, and trust that my father warned me against is
evocative of the proverbial “type A” personality:

The theory describes a Type A individual as ambitious,

rigidly organized, highly status conscious, can be sensitive, care
for other people, are truthful, impatient, always try to help
others, take on more than they can handle, want other people to
get to the point, proactive, and obsessed with time management.
People with Type A personalities are often high-achieving
“workaholics” who multi-task, push themselves with deadlines,
and hate both delays and ambivalence.

Now I’m not entering the debate over personality types and heart
disease, cancer, or kick-the-dog syndrome. I prefer to keep the
discussion here on a level of plain common sense. My personal
opinion, unsupported by any research findings or other academic
buttresses, is that there are many kinds of personality, but
no types. I have met many self-consciously self-sacrificing
professionals and parents who have angina and deliver a fair
amount of it to those around them. Most of us have experienced
this; the quantification discussion can be easily found elsewhere
on the Intarwebs.

So I speak of the heart metaphorically, as a whole-body sense

that knows the difference between sufficiency and excess;
between loyalty and servility; between a worthy sacrifice and a
throwing away of one’s self. If you give falsely, excessively, or in
the wrong direction, the heart will raise its alarm — physically,
psychologically, or experientially. And if the alarms are ignored
frequently and repeatedly, the heart will find another way to show
its distress.

This is why I say that meditation is not some off-hours practice to

keep confined to the yoga studio, Zen temple, church, or tai chi
classroom. It belongs in the cubicle, at the construction site, on
the factory floor, and every place where work is done from
executive row to the mailroom. For meditation is merely a
conversation with one’s heart.

One of the focal topics of my own meditations is the self-image.

Virtually everywhere I have found excess within myself — that is,
whenever I’ve been able to hear my heart’s alarm — I have found
a false, derived, and rather pathetic self-image behind it. The
loyal employee, the selfless leader, the sacrificing parent, the
straight-A student, the obedient child, the hard worker…they
seem to be a legion approaching the infinite. Yet if we turn within
and seek them out, then destroy or banish them from our life-
space, we can defeat them. That is to say, we can surpass them,
and then become our natural selves.

In my book about the life lessons contained within the

extraordinary Harry Potter stories, I have a particular meditation
on overcoming self-images (inspired in part by the great Mirror of
Erised chapter from the first of Ms. Rowling’s tales). But the
essence of this teaching was written in a tiny poem some 2,500
years ago: it is the 46th chapter of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching:

When the Tao suffuses man and Nature,

Swift horses nourish the fields with their dung.
When people abandon the Tao,
The horses are bred for battle,
And Nature is defiled.

The greatest disaster is to lack contentment.

The greatest curse is wanting more than you need.

Therefore the student of the Sage

Feels exactly when he has enough,
And thus receives perpetual contentment.
I now believe that this is really what my old man was trying to
tell me a long time ago. He was telling me that giving an
employer more than it deserves is an act that comes from a vast
and obsessive ego-want; a desire (as my fellow Potter-philes
know, the “Erised” of Rowling’s famous mirror is the word “desire”
spelled backward) to be perceived as Great — to pour all of one’s
self into the mold of that ultimate yet inevitably foreign and
poisonous self-image of The Hero.

That desire to so deeply and selflessly merge with the group — be

it the family, the company, the nation, the Cause, whatever — to
the point where one becomes its apogee, its avatar, its Ideal, its
halo; that desire is repulsive to the heart. Thus, the hero has no
place in the life of the heart, in a life guided by a conversation
with the heart. Even the greatest writer of the hero’s journey
recognized this — I quote from my Tao of Potter:

Sometimes, it seems we must come to the brink of such an

extreme in order to realize that the outward-gazing fixation on
the heroic, the god-as-other, can no longer be justified. Joseph
Campbell recognized this, even in his own literary celebration of
the mythology of heroism — he concludes this marvelous book by
finding that the mythic hero of ancient, monumental spiritual
belief needs to be pushed off the stage of our ever-diminishing,
ravaged planet. At last, he calls upon each of us to recover the
precious autonomy of inner life, “in the silences of his personal
despair.” He urges that the modern person “cannot, indeed must
not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear,
rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding.” (The Hero
With a Thousand Faces, p. 391).

This is the realization to which Harry Potter is led through his

years at Hogwarts: Harry, when read as a heroic character, is a
literary dinosaur, as much a relic as the totem gods of antiquity.
But when we see him as a person on the journey of inner
discovery, as a spiritual child seeking the way to true growth
through the identification and disburdenment of the acculturated
self-images within—as a person, in Campbell’s words, “through
whom the ego is to be crucified and resurrected” as an undiluted
self—then Harry has something to teach every one of us.

Tagged corporate America, LinkedIn, loyalty, self-development, work

A Single Photon of Being

By admin | December 25, 2012 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

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It has been, in many respects, a year of night. No doubt our

human species has had its share of it at large — unceasing and
expanding war, recession, and our continuing ignorance of the
environmental destruction that could fatally undermine the
habitability of our planetary home by the end of this century. By
denying our vision we obstruct our evolution. But as Anais Nin
once wrote, “societies in decline have no use for visionaries.”

But I am thinking in more personal terms at the moment. My

night began 13 months ago, when one brother died, and
continued in March, when a second left us. What I had thought
was all the darkness I could bear — long term unemployment and
a seemingly unceasing walk along the precipice of poverty– had
been, and remains, a mere dusk-like prelude or backdrop to that
surreal pain of mourning.

Still, darkness tends to merge with itself. The job that I thought
would raise my boat and carry me into a new year of light — it
lasted a month and was gone. I wondered if I had irretrievably
lost something; whether I had been made weak and ineffectual
by that persistent gloom; so accustomed to darkness that I
became a stranger to light. I seriously wondered if I had become
the cockroach in the sink who runs down the drain when someone
switches on the light.
This is not exactly consistent with what I teach, what I offer to
others as insight. Is that then all a pretense? A mere parade of
wisdom, a pabulum of expression that has no possession? If that
is so, then there is justice in my namelessness as a writer, and
poverty would be a fair fate for me. I will not have long to find
out: unless Congress performs a miracle of truly providential
scope and design, my unemployment benefits end next week
(along with those of about 3 million others in this nation).

Yet on this day — whether by the intervention of Him whose

birthday is observed, or by some broader and less tribal visitation
— another thought arises. In Nature, darkness has a way of
attracting light. That is, the dark and the light are not by nature
opposed or combating elements of reality. Dr. Hawking assures us
that a black hole is actually a portal to other dimensions,
probably other universes. The light that appears lost or destroyed
as it touches the event horizon has been drawn there, that it
might be transformed or cosmically transported, rather than
terminated.

It is, in its way, as difficult and weird a concept as, for example,
the story of the virgin birth of a man-God in a stable amid a
desert in an insignificant portion of the Roman Empire. For
though the mathematics may favor Dr. Hawking’s remarkable tale
of light’s cosmic transmigration, the current weight of popular
opinion would favor the physical birth of a God from the uterus of
a very human woman’s body, which had never been visited by the
semen of an all-too-human male.

It all seems as impossible as, well, the prospect of finding and

keeping a job in these times; as agonizingly strange and surreal
as the realization that there will be no holiday visits or phone
conversations with those two men with whom I shared both
genes and home, from my earliest days on this planet nearly six
decades ago. Again, darkness merges, coalesces; and somehow
coexists with and even attracts light.

Scientists also tell us that the dark-adapted eye can detect the
presence of a single photon of light in a darkened room. And
again, I try to imagine such a thing, such an experience — seeing
a single particle of light amid an otherwise oppressive and
suffocating darkness. A single, unique presence which embraces
and then surpasses both Form and Formlessness; whose very
essence is both massless form and substantive wave. The photon,
it would appear, is itself the transcendent sperm that conceived
the birth we celebrate today. It is the thing that is no-thing; the
absolute reality that surpasseth understanding.

Of course, science’s advantage — what I would hope is its

definitive and prevailing advantage — is that it does not inscribe
its truths into stone, or close them between the covers of a black
book that admits no light. Science, it must be confessed, too
often becomes stuck in a pit of ideology; that is a failing, a
fixation, of human ego rather than of knowledge. Yet even as
each pit of science’s history has become both familiar and
oppressive, the paradigm shift has appeared, allowing science to
resurrect, to rise from its premature grave and move forward,
outward, once more. Science may occasionally sleepwalk; its
history even includes a few of what might be called near-death
experiences. But religion’s coma only and ever deepens; for in its
obsession with The Answer, it stops asking questions.

The man of our holy-day would understand that; he was, so far

as we know him, a man of the paradigm shift. He called foul on
the legalistic and commercial obsessions of the religious
ideologues of his day: he treated the Pharisees with the same
scorn as Socrates offered the Sophists and as Buddha gave the
Brahmans. It is worth adding that, were He to return today and
dare to touch the money changers’ tables once more, he would
receive the same treatment as his fictional counterpart
in Dostoevsky’s famous parable of the Grand Inquisitor. For there
remains a single form of darkness that unwittingly attracts but
never tolerates light: its name is Power.

So, it is worth recalling that Christ was not a King until he had
been made a God, decades after his death. Every tribal ideology
has arisen over the ashes of its purported founder, who was never
given a say in the matter. I am fairly certain that Lao Tzu would
firmly reject Taoism; equally sure that Buddha would find fault
with Buddhism; and would bet all I have left in this world on the
certainty that Jesus would kick over the money changers’ tables
that we collectively call Christianity. But the light of these sages is
no longer in this universe; their light endures amid another
thread on the web of space-time.

Another thread, another string. I am reading the string-theory

physicist Brian Greene’s latest book, The Hidden Reality, in which
he attempts to describe, both mathematically and metaphorically,
the elements of a cosmos populated with multiple and perhaps
infinite universes. Like every paradigm-shifter before him, he
begins his book with a stringent claim of empiricism: he is a
scientist with no interest in what cannot be objectified or
demonstrated. And then he spins a mind-whirling tapestry of
concept and image as the most abstruse mythologies of
Vajrayana Buddhism could not match.

Yet it all, as far as my weak intellect can approach (let alone

embrace) it, makes sense. That the fundamental stuff of All-That-
Is cannot be dots of matter in space, but rather strings of being
— vibrating energy-bodies that can cross dimensions at will and
populate multiple universes without losing their essence, their
place as either theory or reality, their identity as either mass or
mathematics. And I wonder if the story of the massless vibrations
of infinite energy-bodies creating everything we know and feel
and all else that we cannot — I wonder if this is as much as we
need contemplate about what might have happened 2,012 years
ago when a woman named Maria pushed a baby out of her belly
in the darkness of a manger in a desolate corner of imperial
Rome.

The thought of the strings calls me back. I wonder if Stephen and

John — the two brothers whose lives were so deeply bound with
my own and now are, or appear, gone — I ask whether they are
there, here, amid a dimension or universe too small, remote,
compressed, or inaccessible for my human bodily senses to
touch. I wonder if the same strings that can make a photon dart
along at 186,000 miles per second, or inspire a thought to move
(albeit at considerably slower speeds), or somehow attract mass
to its energy-body and become a formed thing like me — could
these strings, both the potential and the actualization of all
consciousness, could they be so formed and invisibly directed as
to become guides, hidden leaders, helpers?

I choose this possibility, this potential. Not because it is proven or

empirically demonstrated; but because I can feel the alternative
to it. The name of that alternative is what Kierkegaard called
Despair, the darkness that consumes light yet is not nourished by
it; the darkness that feeds only on what it stolen and then
distorted; the darkness that has no vision but for its own
oppressive Night.

The clearest light is that which exposes such darkness; this is the
natural function of the visionary, whose ability is neither insular
nor elite. We all have it, but are trained to doubt it. Nevertheless,
that single photon of awareness is always near, always vibrating,
around and within us. Thus I ask for the light to enter me, fill me,
guide me amid my own darkness. Even if it be but a single
photon — how many strings, what harmony and resonance of
purpose, what worlds, what universes might it contain within that
single quantum breath?

Tagged Brian Greene, Christmas, Kuhn, paradigm shift, photon, Stephen

Hawking, string theory
Of Evolution
By admin | December 19, 2012 | self-recovery, Uncategorized

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There is a stark beauty in Nature amid the last days of autumn.

Action appears suspended; only a soft shudder of quiescence can
be sensed in the air. The leaves are now a blanket of stiffening
moistness; they no longer dance with the wind, but settle and
merge into the very earth. The only actor with any energy in such
a scene would seem to be the darkness itself — relentlessly
earlier, stronger, denser.

But it is merely a different kind of action, guided by the energy

that Lao Tzu called wu-wei. Some have translated that expression
as “no-action” or “inaction”; I prefer the term “unforced action.”
For there is action indeed amid these days, but not the bustle and
display of our human movements. Lao Tzu drew this distinction in
the 37th poem of his Tao Te Ching:

Unforced action, constant and eternal:

Tao ceaselessly moves,
But appears to be still.
When the hearts of the president
And the power-broker perceive
And accept this truth,
It will be the dawn of an era
Of transformation.

Throughout this evolution,

If the old impish projections
Of manipulative action appear,
They could be firmly dispersed
With the aid of the Primal Presence –
The nameless, formless One –
The teaching Heart of liberation
From attachment.

Could those magnates just renounce,

Once and for all,
Their old habitual attachments,
Then like a clear and cleansing rain,
Peace would fall on man and Nature.

The poet finds the discovery of wu-wei to be nothing less than a

matter of social and political evolution. Lao Tzu was, by trade, a
government official. His poems were written at the end of a long
career of public service. Thus, his work, his message, speaks
back from that experience to the world he was leaving behind. He
wanted his fellow politicians to see how close they were to
realizing the potential within their campaign rhetoric; and he was
very specific about how that realization — the creation of a
human civilization in accord with Nature — might be achieved. If
we wish to actualize the potential of democracy in society, we
must first discover it in Nature — and by extension, in our nature.
It is, he saw, the only place we can look for what we seek.

So the old poet urged us — urges us — to renounce the “old

habitual attachments” to ideologies of control, subjection,
violence, oppression, and death. Since such a renouncement
would first require the identification of those attachments, Lao
Tzu asks us, throughout his poems, to look relentlessly within for
them — to turn inward both as individuals and as societies.

What sort of attachments would he have been pointing us toward,

specifically? Toward any belief that leads us to regard Nature as
our enemy, or as our slave. In Lao Tzu’s world, such beliefs were
present in the work of the Confucian pundits; but the poet would
have seen the same error in our defining Western delusions,
which run like cockroaches under the sun of Nature in the first
chapter of a black book that has driven virtually all of our law and
our common life into darkness:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:
and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the
fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and
over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God
created man in his own image, in the image of God created he
him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them,
and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish
the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the
sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that
moveth upon the earth.

The ruling word in this passage from Genesis is critical: dominion.

It means power, property, ownership, forced control, oppression,
enslavement — as in domination. Lao Tzu saw that there can be
no peace when the primal command of your Creator is violence;
no freedom when God demands oppression. When the primordial
marching orders of an entire species are to “subdue” and to “have
dominion over…every living thing that moveth” — well, the next
step is already implicit in that command. That next step is the
subjection and domination of and among ourselves.

But again, Lao Tzu saw how close we were — how close we are —
to that destination, that goal of societal transformation; for it is
already inside us, among us. It doesn’t have to be forced into
being — all we need do is renounce the myths that mold us, the
delusions of self-denial that imprison us; and those of self-
aggrandizement that isolate us. The poet saw that every impulse
of control is based on a denial or distortion of our nature.
Anything that I must control must be defective, or it would not
have to be controlled. War as the way to peace is what is
defective; subjugation and blind obedience as the hallmarks of
freedom are the “old impish projections of manipulative action”
that must be dispersed before there can be genuine freedom and
peace.

I choose to think, along with Lao Tzu, that we are very, very close
indeed; that we stand upon the doorstep of transformation. Just
as we did some 2,500 years ago, at the time Lao Tzu wrote those
poems as a gift for the hospitality of a border crossing guard.

Obviously, we seem on the surface of things no nearer a point of

societal transformation — it is even arguable that we’ve
regressed a step or two, just as our modern customs agents are
not the sort of folk that you’d be inspired to gift with poetry.

But that surface, with all its violence, decadence, and

maturational regression, is itself indicative of something deeper
and transmutative. For just as the burning heat and misery of a
viral infection are at their most violent and painful at the very
point of passage, in which the body’s immune system has at last
overcome the invader — so will the rage and infantilism of our
world seem at their apex of hate and destruction as we approach
the moment of healing and growth. It is all a matter of
perspective combined with response and supported by
commitment and flexibility.

That is to say, when we assess our experiences, our lives,

measuring the quality of events is not enough. We must be
guided by the quality of our awareness amid the tide of events. If
I can clarify myself, then there will be clarity within my
relationships. Let me relentlessly pull up the roots of my own
arrogance, and the greatest tree of dominion, prejudice, and
suffering will fall.

Tagged evolution, nature, self-development

Gain, Loss, Progress

 By admin | December 15, 2012 | Uncategorized

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Remorse disappears.

Take not gain and loss to heart. Undertakings bring good fortune.

Everything serves to further.

The quote is from the fifth line of an I Ching hexagram whose

title is “Progress.” Each hexagram, or chapter, in the old Chinese
oracle presents a specific theme — an aspect, goal, or challenge
of human life in its broader social or even cosmic context. Thus,
here in the 35th chapter of the book, the topic is progress: what
it is, how it is to be achieved and nurtured, and perhaps most
significantly, what progress is not.

Progress, it turns out, is not “gain and loss,” for these are not of
the heart; not, at any rate, of its essence. Gain and loss are the
icy calculations of a narrow intellect; the illusions of ego’s pipe-
dream of permanence and ownership. Gain and loss comprise the
reality of Wall Street and any other denizen of what the Buddhist
teacher Sogyal Rinpoche calls “the hungry ghost realm.”

But the heart rejects the primacy, the dominion, of gain and loss;
wealth and its absence have but an incidental or subsidiary place
in the realm of the heart, which includes but also surpasses the
world where gain is sought and loss suffered. The material has
value to the heart only insofar as its dynamic is receptive: the
heart does not cling or grab; it receives. There is no external
attachment that is natural to the heart, no clutching to its
essence. The heart is not a “hungry ghost;” it is a living,
receptive vessel of natural prosperity.

What, then, is progress? In a word, evolution: the personal

evolution known as growth, and the societal evolution of common
prosperity in which each individual’s growth is experienced as the
core of a benevolent cycle of mutual development. So, if you wish
to find the full measure of a society’s health or rate of progress,
you must study its individual components. An examination of
institutions, political bodies, and economic systems will, by itself,
provide a weak and often deceptive view.

This is one reason why economics is justly termed the “dismal

science.” Its knowledge is obsessed with gain and loss; it has no
place for the evolutionary concerns of the individual human heart;
economics measures progress according to mass rather than
energy; its story is of collective distribution and comparison, not
of individual identity and meaning. So economics cannot tell the
real story of progress (there are, by the way, different ways of
saying this).

To be clear: I do not believe that economics has no value; only

that it cannot provide us with our value, because its perspective,
its focus, its “karmic vision,” to borrow another of Sogyal
Rinpoche’s terms, is limited and often distorted. Commerce is not,
or at least was not designed to be, the cornerstone of your life, of
your life’s progress. When we allow commerce such a place in our
lives, we lose our own place in Life — as Lao Tzu warned us two
and a half millennia ago:

Pursuing knowledge: daily accumulation.

Following Tao: daily unburdening.

Decrease, diminish, deprogram:

Continue in this till power is dead.
For when action lacks force,
Nothing is left unaccomplished.

Rely upon your true eternal nature,

And you will never have to strive again.

But let your life become

A game of inner commerce,
And you will never cease with making deals;
You will never feel fulfilled
In this or any other world.

One of the most glaring abnormalities I see in our current culture

is this generalization of commerce into the most intimate streams
of life. We allow the commercial to become the interpersonal,
until every relationship becomes “a game of inner commerce,”
and we “never cease with making deals.” Thus, our lives are lived
on a shallow and slippery surface; we “never feel fulfilled”
because we are trapped in the “realm of the hungry ghosts.” We
lose touch with our roots as we count our leaves.

But I am not here to rant against token economies, behaviorist

psychologies, prenuptial agreements, and the like. These are all
but symptoms of an underlying disease; it is this that demands
our attention. This disease is the attachment to the self-image. In
our obsession with what we have, and with what appearance that
having presents to others; we lose what we are, as Wordsworth
warned us two centuries ago:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,

For this, for everything, we are out of tune.

Thus are we returned to the I Ching’s perspective on progress,

and to Lao Tzu’s urgent direction on how we might reveal it within
ourselves. For to make ”remorse disappear,” it is necessary to
reject the obsession with accumulation and enter the path of
“daily unburdening.” Incidentally, the connection here between
the poets of two disparate cultures separated by some 20
centuries is remarkable: to “take gain and loss to heart” is “a
game of inner commerce” that produces “a sordid boon” in which
“we have given our hearts away.”

These artists are not decrying possession, but attachment — a

neurotic clinging to possession that arises from that “hungry
ghost” realm of ignorance. They object that we too often put the
cart before the horse of life, reverse the figure and ground of
prosperity, when we preoccupy ourselves with gain and loss. If
we do not know first who we are, we will never understand what
we need, and we will lack the ability to avoid excess.

If I were to nominate a single motif of Eastern wisdom that is

especially difficult for the modern Western mind, it would have
nothing to do with meditation practices, mudras, mantras, poses,
or any of that esoteric stuff. It would be this: the simple teaching
that a successful and fully aware life is defined and guided by
diminishment, release, elimination, disburdenment. But, as we
see in the case of Wordsworth (and as I’ve previously pointed out
in the case of Kierkegaard), this insight is neither unique to the
East nor a stranger to the West. It was, after all, yet another
prominent Western writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who wrote:
“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add,
but when there is nothing left to take away.”

So again, it is not about glorifying poverty — that is an error of

falsely spiritual ideologies that actually tend to concretize the
obsession with gain and loss rather than take us beyond it.
Poverty can often teach us, but it does not ennoble us, does not
place us higher on the grid of spiritual hierarchy than the
comfortable or the well-heeled. If we are going to evolve, if we
are going to be led out of the coffin whose sides are gain and
loss, then we will need to equally reject the idealization of both
poverty and accumulation.

Unfortunately, our pedagogical, political, and corporate systems

tend to reinforce that primordial ignorance, which the I Ching,
Lao Tzu, and Wordsworth expose. Does any school teach children
to discover who they are before they define what they must
have? It is hardly taught in many families. And does any
corporation study what its role and responsibility is to its society,
to the Earth, to the future, before it outsources, downsizes,
or invests heavily in crime? So this is a different teaching that we
present here; it is not for the institutional or the corporate or the
political. It is for the individual; it is the I Ching’s “undertaking
that brings good fortune.”

This leads to a point where I find difference between my own

experience and the Buddhist teaching (“disagreement” may be
too strong a description for this; it is more a matter
of perspective). In his book, Sogyal Rinpoche defines ego — the
very thing that Lao Tzu commends us to “diminish” and
“deprogram” — as “incessant movements of grasping at a
delusory notion of ‘I’ and ‘mine,’ self and other, and all the
concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false
construction.”

But as Lao Tzu points out in his poem, you do have a “true
eternal nature” — a self, an enduring and original inner truth —
upon which you may rely. In this, we find the single object of true
attachment — to what Wordsworth beautifully refers to as “This
Sea that bares her bosom to the moon.” That is, our unique self
and its connection to the universal Whole, the great Sea of
cosmic Infinity and the pervasive, ineffable quantum gravity of
Love.

You have this connection; you are this connection. If you can strip
yourself psychologically naked and reveal that light, that self,
which lies vibrant and quiescent beneath the ideological shroud of
gain and loss, then you will have received your first and only
meaningful, enduring possession — that of your “true and eternal
nature.” Once you have this, you will be able to easily receive the
other possessions of life without attachment, longing,
expectation, or demand.

It is a process. It takes time, some work, and above all,

commitment. That is to say, there is no such thing as “outpatient
ego-surgery” or some magical hoodia pill to melt away the fat of
ego and its appetites. On the other hand, it isn’t a hard or
impossible process made only for saints, adepts, and arhats. That
is, you needn’t worry about finding enlightenment, Nirvana, or
some supreme (and rather exclusive) Realization or Revelation.
You are only searching, after all, for what you already have —
your self.

So the process itself is self-renewing, since its benefits can be felt

and enjoyed virtually from the moment you commit to that
process. Each self-image that you strip away; each derived belief
that you eliminate; each fear, dark emotion, claim, and self-
abasing myth that you destroy and banish from your life-space —
every step reveals more of your original light, generates a greater
sense of personal freedom, and leads you further beyond the
coffin of gain and loss.

Tagged I Ching, nature, self-development

Enduring
By admin | December 4, 2012 | Uncategorized

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Near the end of a recent essay, I attempted a practical definition

of psychological health, led by the idea of experiencing life-as-art.
This week, it occurs to me that I might have tried something like,
“the capacity to endure and even embrace the surreal.”

I am unemployed. Again. Someday, when I am ready to tell it,

the story will make a passing entertainment. For the moment,
however, it is too recent and gruesome a memory; we leave it
there for now. But we can think about finding a lesson in trouble,
so this can be our topic now.

My response to distress is by now fairly ingrained: I ask for help;

I keep my body busy; and I look within for answers and direction.
I’m not saying this is the best or only response to adversity. I
offer it only on the basis of some annoyingly broad and persistent
experience with trouble. So let’s go into the details of those
points…

• Ask for help: The call for help may entail “reaching out” (as
they say ad nauseam in corporate America) to fellow
humans or even to institutions. But the primary call for help
is toward the invisible or quantum world. Such a call arises
from a dual inner recognition, which itself is the foundation
of humility: (1) I can’t do it all by myself; and (2) I can’t, in
fact, do any of it all by myself. When this realization is fully
 experienced, throughout your body, psyche, mind, heart,
brain, and your total being at large, it is uniquely and
potently restorative, supportive, regenerative. It gives us
the strength necessary to just go on.
• Keep the body busy: I walk fairly long distances regularly
(15 miles today, for instance). I also do yoga, chi kung,
Pilates, and I lift weights. Everything I find, both within
myself and through ego-influences from without, that must
be broken down and discarded — stripped and cast away —
can be far more easily released through the body’s active
participation. Thus I say that exercise is meditation.
• Look within for direction: Such a habit overcomes the
externalization-impulse I’ve talked about before here. In our
culture, we too easily and reflexively seek whipping boys
and agents of evil out-there, whenever misfortune comes to
visit us. This is not to say that malignant external influences
do not exist; they sure as hell do. But when your first
response to trouble is to look within to ask the question,
“where was my error, and how can I become free of the ego-
influences that caused that mistake?” — when that’s your
primary inquiry, then you can more easily achieve and
maintain inner balance. Both meditation and exercise (as I
practice it, anyway) are about balance rather than strength.
When you have stability, strength tends to take care of itself
and develop without effort. The practice of starting with your
own part in the cause of the reversal at hand also tends to
repel the entry of ego’s dark matter — guilt, fear, and self-
blame. Such a habit will then add clarity and perspective to
your assessment of the outer forces that brought you into
this mess.

Another aspect of such situations has to be emphasized, because

it answers to one of the most frequent mistakes made by
sufferers — one made all too many times by this one, that’s for
sure. It’s brooding — staying too long with the pain, humiliation,
loss, or misery. We, like our companions in the animal kingdom,
are designed by Nature to live with a problem or crisis long
enough to hear its message, make our correction, and move on.
Once this is accomplished; our mandate is to let the damned
thing go. To hold onto or lie under a misfortune beyond its limit of
useful presence is like unto a mother nursing a child into its
teenage years. Nature demands better of us than that.

Mind, this is not about “getting over it.” As if trouble were a

hurdle, and as if your being, already exhausted and strained from
the crisis, would have the energy to bound and leap over your
distress. “Get over it” is just as bad a metaphor on dealing with a
life-challenge as it is in working through the mourning of a death.
As with virtually everything else, our language, our self-talk here
matters, because it sends the messages that our inner selves will
receive and make the basis of decision and action. So let’s talk
instead about “working through it.” This is more practical a
metaphor on our psychological process of transcending suffering.

Transcendence itself, it turns out, is not a matter of soaring above

and beyond our pain; it is about going inside and then through it.
The energy of our presence, our commitment, and our growth is
right there, “on the ground” as they say in the military. The
experience and its information, the data of transcendence, are all
there within and in front of you; there can be no illusions or
fantasies about somehow soaring over our crisis. In the world of
the mind and the heart, virtually all flying is the stuff of denial.
And denial is itself made from the fabric of fear. Maintain your
balance and stay down on the ground with your strife, and you
will pass through and beyond it more fully and quickly. And you’ll
better know exactly when the moment has arrived to let it all go.

Finally, and maybe even most critically: kick expectation of every

kind out the door of the mind whenever trouble finds you. Don’t
expect pain; just experience it while it is there. Don’t expect it to
be hard (or easy); just be with and in the water’s depth of any
moment. Expectation has a demonic quality: amid adversity it
tends to turn every mountain into a volcano; every dark cloud
into a tornado. So expectation has to be dealt with sternly: just
kill it, suffocate its whining, doom-obsessed voice. In this, your
physical practice will be your strongest ally: remain active, and
the demons will inevitably lag and fall back.

If, amid the darkness of expectation and the pain of misfortune,

you persist with the call for help, the energy necessary to endure
will arrive. Humility has a certain pervasive and unrelenting
strength that willpower, stick-to-it-iveness, toughness and other
forms of stereotyped bravery all lack. Don’t worry about what
others may think of you or what you would have thought of
yourself a week ag0, before this ton of bricks came down on the
head of your life. Reason, ideology, and conventional wisdom
won’t get your through that mass of rubble that used to be the
structure of your life. Some moments call for the total energy of
our being, and that energy includes your connection to the
formless, to the supra-personal, to the universal. Everything you
need to survive, endure, and surpass this crisis is already within
you. Trust it, just this once, and it will lead you again and again,
ever more surely and confidently, through good times and bad.

Kenya Believe It?

By admin | December 4, 2012 | Uncategorized

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Huh? What? Where’s the last “A”? Well, naturally, he left it back in
Kenya, or else it would be Keny. And who wants a country called
Keny?

(Seen during a walk of the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, NY)

Tagged Brooklyn, Obama, photography, Red Hook

Of Claim
By admin | December 2, 2012 | Uncategorized
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Karen Horney, the post-Freudian psychoanalyst, had an

expression that informed much of her work, her contribution to
the still-evolving process of retreat from the Freudian religion.
Her term for one common source of the psychological distress she
encountered in patients was “neurotic claim.” I guess my only
complaint with it would be that it’s kind of
redundant. For every claim is neurotic, particularly the claims
made between individuals. The moment you claim another as
your own, you have made your first step into the abyss of
delusion, of walking death. And the moment you submit to
another’s claim upon yourself, your life becomes locked in a
prison of expectation. Let your limits be defined by the laws of
your being, not by the claim of another.

In our culture, marriage is the biggest scale on the back of the

dragon whose name is Claim. It is not a random coincidence that
more than half of marriages end in divorce, while so many others
trudge on in name only amid the prison of claim. Consumerism
similarly entangles us, imprisons us — of that I have written at
length before. There is also the neurosis of claim in many of our
other social relationships — work, military service, group and
political affiliations, and, of course, religion. If we can kill the
dragon of claim within ourselves — and I am convinced that we
can — it would be a quantum leap in our evolution both as
individuals and as a species.

To do that, we must be led towards the very heart of this dragon,

to the poisonous organ that feeds its vile, burning breath. This
organ has the name Guilt.

…the function of the guilt spell put upon people by the collective
ego…is to enslave them into its service, and garner their life
energies through their striving. All self-images, regardless of the
type, cause a person to strive….A self-image, though something
we often try to ‘live up to,’ is more often something we really ‘die
to.’
– Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog, I Ching: The Oracle of the
Cosmic Way, p. 371

If Guilt is the heart of neurosis; then Fear is its blood. If we can

stab that dragon’s heart, its blood will cease to flow. Guilt is the
invisible foundation of neurotic attachment; it is the fundamental
claim made upon the individual: it says, “I own you, and my
blood of fear drives you — there is no other energy available to
your life.” Then it papers that claim over with lies about self-
sacrifice and the Greater Good and duty and service to God. In
our society, we are taught to fear both God and the Law. We must
“abide by” the latter and live in terror of the former (that is, be
“God-fearing”, as if it makes any sense to fear what is purportedly
the Source and Essence of Love) — there is no other kind of
invisible leadership or truth available to our lives than these.

This is the drill of what I call the “medieval ego.” That drill is
really an iron shroud, thrown over the self from the cradle to the
grave. And that medieval ego is an insular cabal, a corporation of
ideology that builds the caskets of belief into which we must all
fit. These coffins are what Anthony and Moog refer to as the self-
images that we must “die to.” For it turns out that the life of Law
and the god of Guilt are really the tools of death and oppression.
When you submit to either, you accept the self-image and your
life becomes an agony of striving to become one of the scales
upon the back of the dragon of Claim.

The Way Beyond Claim

You already know the way out, the way free of the dragon’s
flaming, toxic breath. You do not have to learn it, acquire it, buy
it, or become worthy of it. It is yours, as free and abundant as
the light of Nature. It only needs to be revealed to be discovered.
The chaos of lawlessness and the sin (original or derived) of
godlessness is not your real nature — these are the medieval
ego’s lies that claim us, that oppress us, that kill us even while
we appear to walk and breathe and work frantically to become
another scale of sameness on the dragon’s hide. Again, to kill that
dragon and to thus reveal our selves — to bring down its massive
but illusory body of claim, we must stab its heart of guilt and stop
its blood of fear. To do that, of course, we have to go there.

We begin with a commitment: to strip ourselves psychologically

naked, in the trust that our nakedness is not shameful or sinful;
that whatever we find along the way, whatever we strip apart and
away from ourselves, is not who we are but rather something
false, derived, or cast upon us (thus Anthony and Moog’s choice
of the word “spell”).

There is another aspect to this trust in our original beauty, the

beauty of our inner nakedness, which becomes a trust in the
process, a trust in the path. There are two points to remember in
this: (1) nothing that is true of your self, or your real nature, can
be stripped away — we may as well speak of trying to tear off our
own physical skin as of attempting to strip off what is genuine to
our inner being; and (2) you will discover a natural order and
deep sense to the process: in any moment, you will peel off only
what you are capable of discarding — you will never be made to
strip away a belief, a teaching, an illusion whose absence will
leave you emotionally raw, exposed, or in danger.

The rest is a matter of perseverance. For as you strip away more

and more, as you come nearer to the source of your natural light,
your true being, your original and free life-space; the dragon’s
breath will grow ever hotter and more emotionally violent.
Remember the last time you had the flu or a similar viral or
bacterial infection: how its heat and pain and misery seemed at
their apex of violence and danger just as the infection itself was
breaking, dispersing, dying. As of the body, so of the mind and
the heart, for there is no separation between them.
With each step, each successful inner cleansing, you will find that
the medieval ego’s hired thieves — guilt and fear — will seek
another opening through which to enter and rob your true home,
your personal life-space. If you have shut the door of law, they
will seek entry through the gate of religion; if you have closed the
windows of nationalism or group affiliation, the robbers will find
the more intimate opening of family, which may include those of
ancestry and Tradition. It is not in the nature of a thief to be
compassionate or deferential.

This is where the presence and assistance of a human guide may

be of use to you. For while the ability to reveal your life’s purpose
and your true and uninhibited nature is already complete and
inherent to your original being, there are challenges built into
that process of psychological stripping that a psychotherapist or
counselor can help you to overcome. The only point you have to
recall about such a relationship is that there is no hierarchical or
proprietary aspect to it: the true guide, the genuine leader of the
revolution known as self-discovery (or, as Maslow called it, self-
actualization) is your true self and its connection to the quantum
source of truth and healing. The human medium is not an
Illuminati or a guru or a Master or a doctor of perfection; he or
she is merely one who has already started such a journey as
yours and has the experience to deliver support, encouragement,
and direction to your quest, which is the search for what you
already have, and are.

The challenges of this path are not there because of something

that is wrong or pathological about you. They are there merely
because the medieval ego, and the collective (to the extent that
the medieval delusions have been accepted into collective belief)
have had thousands of years of practice in the way of oppression
and inner death. The dragon of claim has grown large, but it is no
less of an illusion for that — this is why I frequently use the term
“monument of shadows” to describe its body of guilt, fear, and
falsehood. Its very size is a lie — it is great only in appearance;
but when it is exposed to light, the monument crumbles and
collapses.

This is where the restorative breath of Art can support us. It is

the very nature of Art to reveal truth by stripping away
falsehood; to find the source of healing within the very body of
agony; to touch the universal through the creation of the
individual. I have written about this before as well, but one point
bears repeating: every life needs art, for art is, in its essence, a
rejection of claim. Thus, art rises above and apart from neurosis
— yes, even art that is made by neurotics surpasses its individual
creator’s illness by connecting with the cosmic wellspring of
healing and truth.

Your path of stripping yourself psychologically naked, of revealing

your unique and original self, is perhaps itself the primordial act
of creation, of artistic endeavor. There is an old bromide among
us psychotherapists that psychological health is generally
unmeasured and undefined — there is no 98.6o or 120/80 for
psychological health — so our measure for such health must be
purely subjective. One common phrase I’ve heard in professional
conferences and conversations is, “the ability to tolerate
ambiguity.” That’s not bad, but I think a more inclusive definition
for psychological health might be “the ability to embrace, and
then transcend, apparent contradictions; the capacity for healing
through the complete experiencing of pain — which includes
rejecting its claim upon the self.” My shortest such definition
would be: “the ability to create and to experience one’s life as a
work of living art.”

Once again, art. Every work of true art — the poems of Homer or
Dante; the plays of Shakespeare; the operas of Mozart or the
Toccatas of Bach; the paintings of Van Gogh or Picasso — any art
of any era or genre arises from this capacity to tell the story of
transcendence; to point the way through and beyond suffering,
falsehood, and the emotional darkness of guilt and fear, simply
via the rejection of their claim upon us. Thus I say again: every
life needs art. It is not merely a matter of possibility, but of
urgency, of the necessity of Nature. Your future as an individual
life whose like has never been and never will be again; and our
future as a species — as a living instant of the breath of Infinity, a
note of its eternal music — depend upon it.

Of Hierarchy
By admin | November 24, 2012 | Uncategorized

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We actually don’t get much graffiti here in the Kensington

neighborhood of Brooklyn. So, seeing a little today, I
photographed it. Once home, I gave it some thought and vaguely
recalled Goethe having been drawn to some such quasi-Masonic
sect in his time. Wikipedia came to the rescue with more of the
details.

Those who know me would be aware that I couldn’t give a rat’s

ass whether the old Bavarian cult has somehow survived and
morphed into a 21st century hidden hand of oppression led by
Cheney or Obama or Tebow. But our neighborhood graffitist did
cause me to think a little about hierarchies.

Every hierarchy is false and destructive. Whether it is a hierarchy

of power and privilege or a hierarchy of suffering and loss, it is
the same thing, and we need to make ourselves free of it. The
second kind is especially interesting, because it is so uniquely
dangerous to ordinary people like me and you.

As you know, we’ve been having some distressful times in the

New York City area recently. The other day, I got a long note from
a friend who had been volunteering at one of the city’s
impromptu homeless shelters for those displaced by hurricane
Sandy. Here’s a part of that note:

Tuesday, I felt run down and sat in my chair wrapped in blankets.

Not sick, but not well, feeling bad about having the luxury to sit
in the sun in my lovely living room with wonderful kitties purring
all around me. Why would an act of kindness get invaded by
guilt? And why would it fuel aversion? Other people’s misfortunes
make the air visible and thick. It makes it difficult to hold your
own vibrance. It can be suffocating.

This is more, I suspect, than mere “survivor’s guilt.” That is to

say, the guilt is symptomatic of a more fundamental illness or
psychological injury. That injury is the training in, and subjection
to, hierarchy. Here, it takes a surreal twist, based on the
preoccupation with appearances combined with a dose of the
victimization mythology of religion: my suffering doesn’t measure
up — it’s not as “rich,” as “wealthy” a plenitude of pain as that of
these victims over there. And so we open ourselves to guilt, and
seek victimization as a bizarre form of expiation.

We are not merely taught this shit; it becomes, over the course of
generations, coded into our cultural DNA. And it is perhaps the
primary inner mandate of the modern individual in Western
society to get it out, now. To put an end to this suicidal cycle of
guilt=absolution and victimhood=salvation. To blast away the
pillars holding up the monument of hierarchy — the hierarchies of
power and of suffering.

Just to start, to commit to this path of personal cleansing is to

feel the first restorative breaths of freedom. Of course it’s not an
easy journey. Sure it will take you into some dark places of your
past; into some memories riddled with pain and powerlessness.
The key, I have found, is knowing that there will be help; that you
will have a sense of being guided through. Even if you undertake
this journey by yourself, you won’t necessarily be alone. There
are other companions than those we can touch with our outer
senses. There is a communication possible with the invisible world
— not with a Boss-God or with deified prophets or saints or other
entities that sit on cloud-borne thrones far above us in the
hierarchy of Eternity. No, not with them. Instead we can connect
with co-equal units of cosmic creation that are made of the same
or similar stuff as ourselves — consciousness, inner truth, light,
and the quantum gravity of noumenal attraction that we
experience as love.

When you begin to destroy the hierarchies of mind, you may have
a feeling of isolation, of chaos, of disorientation — a feeling that
you’re alone, without direction. This is natural. You are, after all,
deconstructing one of the dominant beliefs of our culture — that
there must be bosses, people more powerful and more privileged
than yourself, for there to be order and peace. But think of it for a
moment in the context of that other kind of hierarchy discussed
above, and the nakedness of this Emperor is revealed. Pick a
random figure from your society’s hierarchy — any authority
figure will do. Let it be the priest, minister, or televangelist from
the manifestly religious sphere; the judge in his priestly robes
from the world of Law; the President who is sworn in with his
hand on the Bible; the criminal corporate CEO proclaiming that he
is “doing God’s work” — don’t these disparate characters all
reinforce the same delusion within us, that there must be Guilt
that there may be Law; that there must be Sacrifice that there
may be Prosperity; that there must be War that there may be
Peace?

Our religions drive our institutions of Law; and both drink from
the same toxic well of self-deception, of self-abasement, of self-
denial. This is where your inner journey will inevitably take you,
even if you begin from a more private, deeper, more intimate and
painful personal place. For no matter where you are on this path,
you are in the process of cleansing that cultural DNA of those
prejudices, those slanders against who you truly are and what the
essence of Life really is, whenever it is stripped of delusion, guilt,
blame, and victimization.

Truth, we finally discover, is not an object, a stone tablet held by

a privileged tribe, nation, group, God, or other Boss to the
exclusion and intimidation of others. Truth is living consciousness,
so it has no owner, no metal mount for a flag or marble altar for a
book. Truth soars, transforms, even transfigures in response to
generational shifts and the evolution of cultures. There are no
Illuminati; but there are individuals who are illuminated. As
Emerson pointed out, the only true church has a congregation of
one.

So as you stand amid the inner rubble of your hierarchy-free self,

do not imagine yourself alone or isolated, but rather joined with
others who are taking a similar though unique journey of self-
discovery. In the way of Nature, light is not private property; it is
universal prosperity. Truth is not capital; it is abundance. Every
darkness attracts light; that is the nature of darkness. Nothing,
and no one, is ever lost. This is the fresh foundation that can
replace the fallen house of cards; this is how we can begin, again.

Sandy vs. Stegosaurus

By admin | November 11, 2012 | photography, Uncategorized

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When she was little, my daughter called this the “stegosaurus

tree” for its obvious resemblance to the Jurassic critter. As you
can see from the recent image at bottom, it lost much of its
“back” under the blasts of Sandy.

Th
e
St
eg
o-
tre
e
aft
er
Sa
nd
y

Return From a Short Distance

By admin | November 3, 2012 | Uncategorized

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Hello, old city. Hello, darkened, wounded giantess. Hello, you

dimmed and battered beauty.

Thus did I greet my city as the plane carrying me penetrated the

clouds and gave me my first glimpse of home. It was a more
emotional moment than I’d expected. I realized that though I
have been here in New York for three decades, I have rarely
understood that I also live here. It required some time away to
reach that understanding.

I’ve been away the past week, working on a new assignment in

Illinois. It’s a nice gig with a great company, State Farm
Insurance; and the location is nice. But it ain’t home.
This past week has been, for me, a lesson in the developmental
value of being wrong — even of being foolish. It all began with a
line from an I Ching hexagram I received last week:

Return from a short distance. No need for remorse. Great good

fortune.

I didn’t understand the import of this message for awhile — not,

in fact, until today. But it all began to gradually become clear
yesterday as my plane cut through the cloud cover and started its
descent towards LaGuardia. Mistakes are not just a part of the
learning process; they are essential to it. Without mistakes and
even folly, there can be no growth. Mistakes are the manure that
feeds the green shoots of self-understanding. But we need three
elements to make such development possible:

• Awareness: plain, simple consciousness that is open to

itself and to Nature; to the man in the mirror and to the
feelings within both situations and other people.
• Receptivity: this arises when awareness is naturally open
and reasonably clear; we become receivers, rather than
takers or owners, of understanding.
• Sincerity: this is the active core of inner truth, the
mitochondrion of awareness; it reveals us clearly and
without false self-images to ourselves, as who we naturally
are — thus, it keeps fear, guilt, and self-doubt at bay.

So, what happened? What was my mistake? Well, I made a false

assessment of both a situation and of myself. First, I assumed
that I was too old to be a “road warrior” — a fellow who travels,
regularly or even perpetually, to earn his living and keep the boat
of his life on the water. Second, I imagined that I was going to
have to move both physically and psychologically into this new
setting in order to work successfully within it.

Both these conclusions were not only wrong, but foolish. The
number that separates this year from our birth year does not
make us old; assumptions do. And the desire to become someone
different from who we are in order to “fit in” or “become part of
the team” is a vain wish, a hiding behind a mask. This is the
straying or self-betrayal that, fortunately for me, was only for “a
short distance.”

The “return from a short distance” is the most elemental,

seminal, and regenerative return possible: the return to one’s
own unique and essential self. That includes both your cosmic and
your geo-cultural endowment, for these two are not truly
separated.

I am a New Yorker. I have lived in this city for three decades. It is

an often foul, gruesome, bloated, self-indulgent cesspool of
darkness and deceit. It is the home of Wall Street fat cats and
political blue dogs. Its police force is violent and racist; its mayor
a conniving, opportunistic billionaire; its institutions obese with
corruption and incompetence. The city is often as cold,
complacent, and cynical as its most privileged citizens.

But as I got onto a city bus at the airport (there was no question
of taking a cab this week), I saw where I live. The bus was
packed with poor and lower middle-class people, residents of the
borough of Queens. As we crossed the bridge into Harlem, I saw
more of where I live: people with no advantage or privilege
except what is within and among themselves. A young woman
got on with a small child; I stood up and motioned to her to take
my seat.

I saw a number of people moving up and down the stairway of a

subway entrance at 125th St., so I got off the bus. The train was
equally crowded and stopped in midtown. End of the line; all was
darkness further downtown, thanks to Sandy. Back in the street,
there were pulsing throngs moving, searching, groping through
the immensity of a broken and bewildered city. I glanced at the
lines going around the block, lines of people waiting and striving
to get on a bus that might take them into Brooklyn. I actually
felt, for a moment, the impulse to join that competition.

And then I realized that this was a time for which the cosmos had
been training me, physically and inwardly, these past four years.
When you can sense, and then turn away from, that impulse to
compete within your own home, you can begin to truly
experience it, and to love it. I knew that it was time to walk.

As I began, I saw that I had plenty of company. We are New

Yorkers: when it is too tough to ride, we walk. When the needs of
others are greater than our own, we get out of the way and go on
alone, without complaining. We tend to rely on ourselves, without
a lot of grousing, without any sense of victimization. Sure we are
edgy, but most of us do not cut or harm.

It was a lovely walk, twelve miles from midtown to my home in

Brooklyn, over the Manhattan Bridge. As I went down Third
Avenue, I saw bike riders, joggers, mendicants, corporate
workers, and wanderers, drifters like myself — the sidewalks
streaming with them all, as the darkened streets held their quiet
logjam of slow-moving traffic grimly in place.

Further south, as I entered the East Village, an amazing thing

happened: lights began to come on. It was stunning. People in
the streets began quietly talking, even celebrating.

The Manhattan Bridge was delightful, both for its uncommon

crowding on the walkway and the silence from the lack of
subway trains that are usually going over its middle section.
People who rarely walked except for the spaces between home or
work and subway, bus, or cab were walking, just as I have amid
the desolation of unemployment these past four years. There was
a wordless bond among us: our city, our home, has been
ravaged; its infrastructure shaken; and we are going on. I slept
well that night, purring inwardly as my beloved cat beside me did
audibly.

Today, I visited Prospect Park legally (it had been closed until this
morning, though I crossed its Long Meadow last night on the last
leg of my journey home). I sought out the nature trails, though
several of these were still closed off — I climbed over and around
the barriers, as New Yorkers often do. I wanted to see how these
modest woodlands of my home had suffered from Sandy’s
assault.

Though there was considerable damage, it was less than I had

expected. It was certainly less than the destruction I had seen
last year after Irene’s visit. Much of the cleanup work had been
done: trucks and teams of men with heavy equipment and chain
saws were still visible everywhere. I cleared away tree limbs and
brush from the trails I walked, and wished I’d had an ax on me to
do more.

My consulting firm’s rep called me during my walk, and though I

had still not made my “return from a short distance,” I was well
on my way back. We talked a little about the upcoming week and
the logistics involved in getting me back out to Illinois. We agreed
to talk more later after I’d gotten home.

At every point of the nested journeys of these past two days, that
movement — going home — both as outer action and as
metaphor, has made all the difference. This is what “Return”
— Hexagram 24 — is all about. Returning to your natural self, to
who you are both as a blooming of cosmic creativity and a citizen
of your earthly social world and its ethos — your ‘hood, as it
were. And so I came home.
I realized that I could contribute to my employer’s work and
business needs not by pretending to become a midwesterner but
by remaining a New Yorker. It finally got through to me that my
age was a weak projection, a derived conceit, perhaps fostered in
part by the youth cult of advertising that is fed into our
televisions by — yes, Madison Avenue. I laughed at my own folly:
I was going to allow an influence from one of my city’s darker
corridors of privilege and ignorance to overpower that of its
prevailing strength, which is the relentless and indomitable might
of the individual’s freedom, no matter his or her numerical age.

Now I understood, at last, that it was time to suck it up and to

learn to become a good road warrior. I saw that my city and its
people had suffered and still kept on, still kept going, still found a
way through. I had made a mistake, a temporary failure of
judgment and self-awareness. And yet I had found, or, more
accurately, been guided back, returned from a short distance. I
had been given the gift of awareness; had been led to a place of
receptivity; had entered a clearing of sincerity. I had found my
way home.

A Letter to My Brother
By admin | October 27, 2012 | Uncategorized

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Dear John,

I’m remembering that last conversation we had on the phone,

what, two weeks before you died. I’d been out of work — again —
for about six months and was feeling old and passed by, not to
mention kind of hopeless. I had recently finished in second place
on a job interview for the third time that year. You told me one of
your old baseball stories from your teenage years. You recalled
how bad a hitter you were, how you always struck out, wildly,
pathetically. One day, you said, you decided to just stop swinging
and see if you could work a walk, just to get on base once. And
you struck out looking. So old Jack Havlik, the coach, took you
aside and told you: John, I want you to keep swinging, no matter
what. You’ll make contact. But if you stop swinging, you never
will know if you can make contact. And sure enough, in your next
AB you swung and made contact.

You finished telling me that story and urged me: just keep
swinging, keep trying, you will make contact. That was about the
last thing you said to me.

I can’t exactly say I followed your advice truly or consistently. In

fact, without you here, and having lost two brothers in a space of
five months, the energy for life itself, let alone the job search, felt
scattered, dissipated. Sure, I wanted to honor your memory, and
Hank’s, by finding some outer success. But I also realized that no
job, no material achievement, would be a sufficient tribute unless
I turned inward first and awakened to the silent voice within us all
that can reach across dimensions and touch the formless. So
rather than making a mark in the world, I sought to reveal the
light within my own, by which I could possibly glimpse the beauty
of your life and the meaning of your death.

I came back from your funeral, some 700 miles away, with copies
of sheet music for many of your songs and compositions. I gave
them to my daughter and asked her to take them with her to
conservatory, so she could play them, give them fresh life, and
bring your music to another world, another era. I wanted to do
something to help give some of your life’s creation a chance to
endure.

I also wanted to know what else of you and Hank would endure,
beyond the words, the notes, and the memories. So I kept
turning within, peeling away the raw skin of the demons of pain,
fear, guilt, cynicism, and desolation. I wanted to see, to
experience, what those demons had covered, what they had
obscured. Many of the essays I’ve written here have been oblique
records of that process.

During one of the last meetings we had in person — when you

came up here for Hank’s funeral, some 20 weeks before your own
— you told me that if I believed that Hank had gone to some
heaven or other distant, untouchable, remote place in the sky or
wherever, I would be making as big a mistake as if I imagined he
— his living consciousness — had been irrecoverably terminated,
snuffed like the flame of a candle. “He’s right here, most likely,
B.” you told me, reaching a hand out straight in front of you; “but
it’s just that you can’t touch him with this hand.”

I have started — only, barely started — to understand. If our

bodies here were just these organs, these cells, these objects,
these grasping hands — well, we would be right to imagine that
they are nothing more than dust and ashes, corrupt vessels of
impermanence, as our religions tell us they are. But if our bodies
are as much energy as they are mass; if we are noumena as well
as matter; if we have not just weight but also presence; if we are
quantum as much as we are volume — why, then, there is after
all a way to touch that formless space in which you endure, and
the Mystery slowly dissolves. Again, I am still working on it; I am
only a beginner.

Meanwhile, on Monday I go back to work. Somewhere amid my

all-important inner work, a call came from a recruiter one day. I
tried to ignore it, to chase away this invasion of materiality. But it
persisted, developed, beckoned, and finally made me an offer. It
was as if it had some energy that both included and surpassed its
grossly material, physical, worldly weight.

Again, I can’t claim I followed your advice. For I didn’t find this
job; it found me. Maybe I just got lucky and drew a walk. Or
maybe — another of my silly Zen jokes — I stopped swinging only
because I became the ball.
I can hear your barking laughter now, rending, crackling the very
air, the space that separates us, that draws us ever closer, ever
nearer, in this living moment. Until we make contact.

Love always,

Brian