Saturday, October 23, 2010

Attacking Causes Rather than Effects

-Imagine a man sitting atop a box, which is full of salmon. Long ago this man hired armed guards to keep anyone from eating his fish. The many people who sit next to the empty river starve to death. But they do not die of starvation. They die of a belief. Everyone believes that the man atop the box owns the fish. The soldiers believe it, and they will kill to protect the illusion. The others believe it enough that they are willing to starve. But the truth is that there is a box, there is an emptied river, there is a man sitting atop the box, there are guns, and there are starving people.-

The passage above explains how perhaps, the interminable problems (economic, political, social, environmental, etc.) that we hear about every day in classrooms and news programs- problems that have indeed been occurring for thousands of years [exploitation of classes; environmental degradation; horrible disparities]- are outgrowths of broader, overarching systems: industrialization/westernization and, at the root of this obsession with growth and development, the collective conceptions of self and world. Year after year, despite infinite legislation, political squabble, environmental groups, corporations expressing their eternal dedication to social responsibility, food banks, military conquests, psychiatrists, and investments in education and healthcare, the problems we attempt to mitigate remain; some would argue they return even more intense and acute.

What we have not attempted to change year after year is our conception of reality- our understanding/consciousness of what is and what is not. What I mean by this is that, in Western culture, we are indoctrinated to believe that spewing toxic materials (from vehicles and machines) that are harmful to human life (as well as other species’ lives and the environment [both of with which we are inextricably linked and mutually dependent]) is NORMAL. Many things that we view as common or standard in this culture, such as oil drilling and working for nine hours a day to receive green pieces of paper (money), would be viewed as insane in other cultures. It would probably be insane within our culture as well, if we could only strip away the cultural biases through which we operate (conceptions that form behavior & cosmologies that form perceptions).

So, within each subjectivity of the mind- the values/perceptions of reality that define our belief systems- a unique external landscape presents itself. If a man looks at a tree and sees dollar bills, he will treat that tree a certain way; if he looks at a tree and sees a sentient, breathing, beautiful ethos of energy he will treat it a different way. If a man looks at a woman and sees orifices, he will regard that woman one way; if he looks at a woman and sees a sensitive, thoughtful, loving companion he will treat her a different way. In this way, the world is a precise reflection of our inner cosmologies/lenses through which we understand. In Western culture, our science tells us that we are separate and discrete from everything else; that we live in a dull, lifeless world of merely matter competing to survive. This is an inner cosmology. The external reflection manifests as destroying entire ecosystems in the name of human progress (imagine!) and relegating poverty to the category, “unfortunate by-product”. The underlying cosmologies that guide our everyday behavior have transformed a planet of tremendous beauty into a corporate-controlled prison of disparity and suffering, for humans and non-humans alike.

To tear down factories, to elect new public officials, to improve housing complexes, to oppose polluting industries, to start Microfinance institutions, and to continue these “intra-systemic solutions”, is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. Perhaps if we work to alter our belief systems- our lenses through which we really do create the external world- then good things will come, and deeply-rooted solutions will arise.

Derrick Jensen & Jesse Hardin

---Jesse Wolf Hardin’s work and life are all about feeling. He has written that “we know that we live in order to feel- and feel in order to praise and celebrate that life. We sense and relate to the world through the complex symbiosis of emotion and instinct we call the heart, through the ‘five senses,’ and those unmeasured faculties like intuition and precognition that scientists have lumped together as the ‘sixth sense.’ While we can benefit by learning the “facts” about any chosen bioregion or terrain, we can never really know a place by reading a book on the subject, or by thinking about it. We only come to know it like a baby, humbly and appreciatively touching and tasting the world we’re a physical, integral part of… Our natural response to our being born is to pull the substance and meaning of the world closer to us, by grabbing a hold, to pull ourselves ever closer to it. In this way life ‘makes sense,’ and our senses make the experience of life.”----

Derrick Jensen: You’ve written: “To become native again is not to emulate Native American or any other past or existing cultures, but instead to recall and relearn our own connection to and responsibilities to the regions where we presently reside.” What does that mean?

Jesse Hardin: We’re native to the degree that we enter into reciprocal relationship with the living land we’re each an integral part of. To the degree that we are not only in love with- but loyal to- the place that supports, nourishes, sustains, informs, and inspires us. To be native is to give back our full sentient presence and artful acknowledgement, our protection and affection to repay the gifts of food, home and wisdom with personal activism and heartful prayer, with restoration and celebration; to repay with our fullest living of life, while we’re alive… and with our bodies when we die.
What is essential is that we be open to the directives of the ecosystem. That we become conscious of its needs and troubles, character and flavor, integrity and health. Conscious of the essence and spirit of place.

DJ: Let’s back up a second. It seems that before we can talk about inhabiting a place, we need to talk about home.

JH: To “lose our place” is to lose our way home. Home is the heart in deep relationship with the land. And it is the place that calls us most insistently, instructs us loudest and best. The place we inevitably miss when we leave, the partner to our pain, and reason for our joy. Home is not only where you want to live, but how you want to live. And it is the place where you want to be when death finally claims you.
Let me put it this way: the source of all psychological, social, and environmental dis-ease is our illusion of separateness. And the first step in mending that artificial schism- that deep, damn wound- is to try to bring ourselves back to a place of engagement with our authentic beings, in the vital present moment.

DJ: I don’t understand.

JH: The opening to the experience of the universe, is through intimacy with a living planet, Gaia. The doorway to the experience of Gaia is through our sentient animal bodies and our feeling hearts. And the journey- the work, the realization- can only happen in immediate present time. Reindignation begins with reinhabitation of our awakened bodies and roiling emotions, in the “now”. Much of the natural world, and our own wild spirits, are dying as a direct result of our alienation and abstraction, from what I call our “great distancing.” And perhaps most tragically of all, we are dying without having fully lived.

DJ: That reminds me of a quote you use from H.G. Wells: “One can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities the sweat of your deathbed.” What does this mean?

JH: It’s all too easy to acquiesce to the status quo, to the latest trends, and to our habits and fears. To give up our dreams for a meaningless career. To seek distraction in the television set and salvation in the sky. To compromise on a mate, and to pretend we’re a victim of something called fate. To reside in the busy mind, and thereby avoid the pain of the neglected body and the anguish of an untended heart. To flounder around in the superficial rather than risk the frightening depths. To accept and acquiesce rather than discern and confront. To settle for comfort and safety instead of sensation and response-ability. We civilized humans are as tourists in our animal bodies except during certain moments in the midst of the sex act… or when scared for our lives. All too often, it’s only when we face mortal or psychological destruction that we come back to the body that feels, runs, retaliates, or relieves. Back to ourselves, back home.
Clearly social and environmental activism isn’t enough, unless we can somehow change the way we as a species perceive and relate to the natural world, to land and place. We can claim all these small, short-term victories but the fact is that the world is being deforested ever faster as we speak. More toxic chemicals are being released into the ground and water than ever. We’re changing the climate. And genetic engineering poses what is perhaps the single greatest threat to the health and integrity of life on Earth.

DJ: Are we losing?

JH: I’m afraid so, at least in the short term. But the trick to right relationship- and to really being worthy of this blessing called “consciousness”- is to do what is right, what matters most, regardless of the visible results. We seldom see the ramifications of all the good we do, but more importantly, we need to make the grand effort not because we imagine we’ll succeed, but because it’s right to do so. Because it really, deeply matters to us! And in a way, even discouragement and disgust are potentially good signs. They’re evidence of an awareness of the odds stacked against us, and it is acting in spite of them that makes one’s life heroic.

DJ: Are you saying results don’t matter?

JH: Of course they matter. But we watch for results in order to figure out the best actions to take, not for a reason to act. And sometimes we’re able to accomplish the impossible. When Crazy Horse saw his family and village under attack by the U.S. Army, he could see that the odds were stacked against him, and that any resistance could be futile. In spite of this he unsheathed his weapon and rode headlong into the fight, inspiring other braves to follow his example, and breaking the enemy ranks with the sheer intensity of his effort, his investment and risk, his life and love.
To keep from feeling discouraged it helps to look past the nest two generations of getting kicked in the teeth again and again. What I live for is the realization of an epoch after technocivilization has met its ignoble end, blowing itself up, or slowing wasting away. For a time what wildlife takes back the ruins of our cities. When wild creatures stalk the shells of office buildings and malls, when the plants start growing up through the cracks in the pavement. We can’t expect to see that.

DJ: But we do. You see it all around yourself. You got the cows off of this land, and the cottonwoods and willows have come back. It’s beautiful.

JH: True. In a way I’ve been able to protect and restore more wilderness by working my butt off for it- by standing up to trespassers and developers and every other threat for all these years- than I ever did blocking logging roads. But even this single victory remains in jeopardy. I can’t find a land trust willing to take on this special riparian refuge without an attendant bank account for monitoring it. I can’t sign a conservation easement, if no one will accept it. It’s protected for now, through sweat and threat, dumb luck or an assist form the spirits. And more than that, it’s reveled in, honored, restored and resacramented… and yet there are no guarantees it can last. The best we can do is to wake up each and every day, giving thanks for being alive and aware in this enchanted place. Being who we really are, and doing everything we possibly can, for all the right reasons.

DJ: I’d like to go back to the notion of reinhabiting one’s body.

JH: Your door to the entire world is located where your feeling body touches the giving ground. Your bare feet, your rear end, the few square inches of absolute contact are points of connectivity between yourself and millions of years of organic process. And the way to fully experience that connection is by disengaging our mental tape loops, our voice tracks, the constant commentary that keeps us perpetually anticipating the future or criticizing our self about the past rather than tasting the muffin we’re eating right now. Then we can experience the world around us- as well as within us- like the awakened, hungering, feeling, responding, caring creature selves we really are.

DJ: So reihabiting one’s body is tied intimately to reinhabiting the present moment.

JH: We can’t feel our connected to the sentient body, or participate in the processes of the natural world, anywhere but “here,” and “now.” And we can’t really be either if we’re forever residing in our brains, engrossed in the movies of our minds. All the while reality waves its arms and wings and cloud forms like flags trying to win back our attention, trying to give us back our lives. I mean, there’s a reason why they call it a “present:” because it’s a gift we’re fools to miss.
Most of us have read that old science fiction classic where the professor departs his basement shop astride his “time machine,” leaving nothing behind but a ring in the dust on the floor where it once stood. In the same way civilized humanity is often out of touch, absent, unreachable by a world of unfolding presence. Our bodies remain in place like that impression in the dust, while our minds orbit backwards and forwards through the years, inhabiting every period of time but now, and every place but here. Too often we dwell on our desires and worries, rather than dwelling in the present, in place. And meanwhile things like industrial development and environmental destruction are largely accomplished out of time, by future-looking planners and bureaucrats who are oblivious to the purrs and the pleas, the rewards and challenges of the beckoning present. What we need is a conscious, collective high-dive into the always decisive moment- reimmersing ourselves in the sensations and responsibilities of the real world- now!

DJ: How does one begin to do that?

JH: Reach out to what is real- a leaf, a chair, a friend- emissaries of the present glad to reconnect us to the now. If something exists for the sense, it exists in present time. Wake up from the nightmare of past events and far away places, peer into the gradations of black in the unlit bedroom, focus on the pressures of covers against skin, or give yourself over to identifying any smells making their way to you through darkness. Try showers hotter and colder than you think you can stand, focus on the lover you’re with until there are no others. And if all else fails, there’s nothing like a loud boom, the sudden screeching of brakes, or a genuine near-death experience to bring us back into bodies ready to run or have fun.
There’s so much distraction and obstruction we have to remain fiercely focused and totally insistent. Because almost everything in society calls you away from yourself. The clamor and bright lights, standing in lines or working in offices, going to movies or making small talk. For the unplacated few, our society can seem like a very lonely place. The average Joe doesn’t seem to want to smell as deeply or love as much. Or to risk deeply caring, because it might mean he has to act on those things he sees and feels. Even the friends you’ve known forever might not affirm something that is a little bit heavier, a little deeper, than they may want to go. Maybe you becoming more of who you are mirrors something in themselves they don’t want to deal with, and so they try to keep things light. Becoming yourself makes you momentarily the loneliest person on earth, but as you walk through that door you realize that you’re part of everything. And that in the end, it’s impossible to be alone. That’s the kind of assurance and wisdom that nature affords: intimate knowledge of this moment, this tree, this place, this home.

DJ: And it seems to me to take a long time. I’ve been living on the same land now for about three years…

JH: And you’re just starting to get introduced.

DJ: Yes.

JH: This courting and bonding requires not only commitment but presence and attention, day after day after day. If we’re only home seasonally, or if we’re gone five days out of the week, it’s not the same. Deepening relationship requires we get to see the sun come up in a slightly different place each and every day through each of the four seasons. I’ve got so many friends who live in cities, who work all day indoors, and some of them don’t even know which way the sun sets. Until we’re oriented, until we know where we are, until we know what direction is East, how can we know what direction to take our lives? And it takes time to recognize the ecological cycles, as many of them are long. There are seven-year cycles for different insects, and there are different flowers that come up only every four to eight years. Patterns of rain and drought. New species moving in or disappearing. Miss a single week in this enchanted canyon, and you could miss the bulk of the wild mulberry season. No single sunset will ever be repeated again, quite the way it shined today.
This intimacy of relationship, this narrowing down of focus actually expands what it means to belong and to be alive. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that such a deep relating and reinhabiting will ever be compatible with making an income or covering one’s medical insurance.

DJ: Why not?

JH: They require we do work that takes into account the integrity and needs of our bodies, our communities, other species, the air, water and land… and that’s a hell of a way to try and make a living. This System rewards its citizens who acquiesce, compromise and conform. We’re usually paid not only to do what we’re told, but to “look the other way”- away from the effects of our tasks on our bodies, our families and our world. In fact, the more meaningless or destructive the position, the more money and benefits we can make. Corporate heads and politicians, geneticists and nuclear engineers, army generals and real estate developers are highly paid. Writers and dancers, preschool teachers and counselors, environmental activists and those who run food programs for the poor, wilderness restorationists and sage poets are lucky to be paid at all. Or else they’re volunteers.

Bu there’s an upside to this. Since the fields that require caring help pay so little, they tend to attract the most sincere people. People who are doing their service for the purest of reasons.

DJ: What’s your story?

JH: There never really was a time when I felt like I fit in. There was never a moment I didn’t feel alienated from the social agreement.

DJ: What social agreement?

JH: That if we mind our “p’s” and q’s” everything will be alright, medicine will find a cure for death, science will erect bubbles over our cities to purify the air, we’ll meet Mr. or Ms. Right, the oil companies will come up with new forms of inexpensive energy, taking away our privacy is their way of protecting us, building more missile systems will make us safer, Social Security will really take care of us when we get old, and we can all have lots of babies with no serious effects on the environment or our quality of life. And in the end, if we play by the rules we’ll all go to heaven where there are no endangered species or slaughtered Hutu tribesmen, nor wives being beaten by husbands with no self-respect.
The agreement is that we’ll smile even if we don’t like someone or something, and gather on Christmas and give presents even to those family members who happen to resent us the rest of the year. That we’ll ignore the child abuse we know is going on across the street, and have secretive affairs rather than be honest with our spouse about our feelings and needs. That we won’t talk about the effects of pesticides we sprayed in our well trimmed yards this afternoon, the percentage of poor uneducated kids in the military, or the reasons for unwed mothers and chemically deformed babies.
Do you remember a magazine in dentists’ offices when we were kids, called Highlights? Do you remember the page where they’d show a picture with something out of place, like a hammer hanging from a tree, and you were supposed to figure out what was “wrong with the picture?” From the time I was a toddler it’s felt like that to me. It’s like tapping on the rocks and discovering they’re hollow, finding mold marks and seams once we look close enough at trees. It’s like we’re all living in a big theme park… and we have to pay to get out.
When I started running away from school at age fourteen, I found bouts of hunger more stimulating than daily doses of tasteless frozen dinners, and liked being lost better than always thinking I knew where I was going. Safety was a numbing straitjacket, so I embraced risk. I welcomed the pain, because I couldn’t stomach denial anymore.

DJ: Are you talking emotional pain? Physical pain?

JH: Both. The pain of feeling isolated and misunderstood. Of empathy- for mumbling bag ladies on the streets, Hispanics jacked up by the police, the little kids that no one takes the time to listen to. Empathy for the forests cleared, for expatriate wildlife and seeds left crying beneath four inches of pavement. Even getting in fights or falling from a motorcycle had a certain refreshing honesty, functioning as calls to sensation, as adamant reminders that I was alive. Anything to know I’d escaped the paradigm of comfort, pretense and denial.

DJ: At what point did that process of cultivating pain turn over? When did you start reaping the benefits of being present?

JH: Immediately. It’s clear that the more we’re willing to feel our pain- and the agony of other people, other creatures- the greater our capacity for bliss, communion, and love. The eyes that willingly look into the faces of the suffering are more likely to take notice the value of a smile, the shifting shapes in clouds above, or the poetry of a falling leaf. Ears that find sirens unbearable, can better appreciate the whisperings of a river and the quiet squeaking of grandma’s rocking chair. The heart that really knows the meaning of bliss has been sensitized by despair.

DJ: Let’s talk about this place. (Where Hardin lives..)

JH: The Sweet Medicine Sanctuary is a restored riparian wilderness, an eighty acre inholding surrounded by millions of acres of Aldo Leopold’s Gila forest, in mountains that were one of the last refuges for free Apaches including Victorio and Geronimo. This particular bend in the river is place of power, and served the Mogollon pithouse dwellers as a site for ritual and worship for tens of thousands of years. Since the willows and cottonwood trees filled back in, we’ve seen the return of herons and ducks, owls and eagles, deer and elk, lion and bear.
When I first saw this land I fell helplessly in love with it. I sold the engine out of the school bus I lived in in order to get money, with no idea if I could get up the rest of the down payment that I’d offered.

DJ: How did you know this was the place you needed to be?

JH: Finding our home, like finding our destiny, is a matter of getting in touch with our intuition and instinct, and then learning to trust it and follow it. You can’t pick a home by comparing the facts and maps in some atlas anymore than you can find your “medicine animals” by drawing cards from a deck. Home, like adventure, is something that becomes possible whenever we suspend our plans and criteria and feel our way to where we most belong. It’s not only the place our souls need, but also the place that most needs us.
The events leading me to find, buy and preserve the Sanctuary have been nothing short of miraculous, convincing me without a doubt that I was meant to be here serving this place. And anyway, we can sense where we belong in the compass of our bones. Whenever we leave home we feel like we’re going the wrong way. And when we turn back, we know in every cell of our being that we’re headed in the direction of home.
As a youngster I preferred multiple affairs to lasting communities, variety of experience over depth. I tried to love every place I traveled through in the same way, finding the “goddess” in each, promising to none. Coming here was the end to that, the moment of pledging allegiance, of marrying the land, entering into a reciprocal agreement that demands as much from me as it gives.

DJ: You’ve written that we can’t own the land, that land owns us. What is your contract with this canyon?

JH: How can we own that which contains us, predates us, and outlasts us? I didn’t contract for this place so much as with it. We enter into a relationship sealed in blood and tears, sweat and semen, an equitable giving and taking that’s clearly spelled out, and duly sworn to. The land is pledged to give wholly of its authentic self, to offer home and shelter, beautiful groves and stunning Mountains, the food and water we need, inspiration and instruction. We promise gifts in return, like our attention and presence. We promise to try and feel her needs, and meet them. To support her in her fullest flowering. To defend her integrity and honor from all threats including those that come from ourselves. To appreciate, and celebrate.
It is, as much as anything else, a marriage contract, bound by love rather than law. I’ve stood before these orange and purple cliffs many times and repeated my vows. That I’ll do everything I can to restore her.

DJ: This may seem strange, but when I was walking down this canyon, before I came up here to do this interview, the one thing that was missing was a lover. Had I been here with a human lover, we would have had no choice but to make love.

JH: Of course! Everywhere we look we see the eroticized natural world both consuming itself and making love to itself through its constituent parts: pollen-laden flowers pierced by wild bees, the mating calls of the sex-addled elk, insect orgies and intertwining grape vines. We’re drawn to participate in this lusting and cuddling, inspired to add our own variations of partnering and pairing. There exists what Terry Tempest Williams and I call an “erotic’s of place,” the charged field we evolved from, and that we subconsciously long to penetrate again. My wife Loba lost a woman lover moving here to this paradise, but the canyon has become her feminine paramour. You can see it in the way she touches each lichen-padded rock on the way down to the trail. The hurt look on her face if she breaks the grasses she steps on. Her look of ecstasy as the shallow river carries her slowly downstream. And the way her voice rings out on a moonlit night…

DJ: When she asked what would be required of her if she stayed with you here, one of the things you said was, “Sing praise to the canyon.”

JH: The land doesn’t just need us defending it. It needs our hands-on care. Needs us to sing ritual and prayer, gratitude and celebration. From the time my sweetheart first got here, she’d stand above the river in front of a small wind cave, and sing out a cascade of trills and bars. I feel the whole canyon rising to take it in, the way a cat raises its back when you reach down to stroke it.

DJ: One of the things I love about your work is that activists generally do restoration, some new age types sing praises, but you do both. It’s very evident how much work you’ve done here.

JH: You’re a gentleman for saying so. Restoration and resistance can be arts, just like music and poetry- if we infuse them with passion and prayer.
The most adamant and beautiful work seems to emanate from the reptilian cortex, from caring souls and expectant flesh. From the Earth, and Spirit. The rational mind really only serves this work to the degree that it functions as an honest translator.

DJ: You said that people come her on quests…

JH: We offer resident internships, retreats with fasts and shelter, and wilderness quests: quests for a deeper experiencing of life and truth. For clarity. For ways of being, and doing. We don’t’ call them “vision quests,” partly because the people who come here are already equipped with a vision, or they wouldn’t have made it this many hundreds of miles from the nearest airport, and several river crossings from where they parked their car. The quest allows them to be away from the distractions of that other world. Out of this intentional experience, one hopes, comes a deeper recognition and acceptance of who they really are, their real feelings and useful intuition. If people can capture that here, hold on to that and take it with them, then the right path will be obvious, and their choices clear.

DJ: What do they physically do?

JH: Counsel. There is a day of purification, of slowing down the prattle of the mind, focusing on presence, gathering for the sweat lodge, infusing every rock, every piece of wood with our intentions and prayers. A night of tending the fire beneath the sacred cliffs, causing a sweat so hot it pushes us out of our minds and into body and earth. We get all the way into the cold river after each round. We stand in the first dawn light with the steam pouring off our skin. Then up to four days and nights of fasting and opening in a favored spot near the water or up on a rocky peak. We suspend our disbelief, exceed our imagined limitations, and open up to the experience and instruction of the seamless whole.

DJ: You talked earlier about finding a “place of power.” What does that mean?

JH: All of the Earth is sacred, with an accessible spirit and persona, and every place offers the same essential body of wisdom. But there have always been locations with a special ambiance, such as the confluences of rivers, mountain peaks; landmarks where the energy seems more palpable, where our feelings, fear and hopes are reflected back to us. And where the lessons are harder to avoid. This canyon is like that, which is why it was a place of ceremony for the Sweet Medicine People for so many generations. These are places that need to be protected from encroachment, commercialization, and misuse.
At the same time, by focusing on the Black Hills and Machu Pichu, Mesa Grande and Sedona, we risk missing out on the magic of the familiar and mundane, the miracle of outlaw dandelions pushing their sunny little heads up through the cracks in the pavement, and the living character of a neighborhood park.

DJ: In your book Kindred Spirits you write about learning from the land, and the lessons are far from the Disneyfied version where nothing or no one ever gets hurt.

JH: Wilderness is a largely benign and beneficial experience, but it has its dangers that force us to be fully awake, to be careful, full-of-care. Our strength is a product of those challenges we pull against. Our ancestors’ speedy reaction time resulted not only from running after food, but running away from trouble. The experiences that are most unforgettable are intimations of death, and reminders to live. We were never more alive, never more fully present and aware as when we were stalked by cave bears and giant cats.
I’ve often stepped a few feet off a mountain trail, to let a noisy covey of hikers pass. I smile as they shuffle by staring at their feet, talking loudly about the next peak they’re going to “bag,” or the last woman they “had”- without them seeing me there, standing in plain sight. In grizzly country, they could end up lunch meat. It only takes one look at a grizzly’s claw marks high up a tree to get us to pay a little more attention to our surroundings. Eyes alerted to spot bear tracks are more likely to notice the little flowers budding up through the clover, and the way the wind passes through the tall grass. Ears listening intently for the sound of the great bears, are more likely to hear the tinkling of a rain seep, and recognize the subtleties in a river’s song.

DJ: How does death fit into this picture?

JH: Fear is a reason for increased awareness, and potentially, fuel for movement and change. In the same way, death is an ally that constantly reminds us of the real world around us, and of what’s most important. If you think you only have a few weeks or months to live, you’ll unlikely want to spend any of that time under fluorescent lights, quibbling or worrying. You’ll try to spend time in your favorite places, or where you most belong. You’ll revel in the moments you have with your loved ones, savor every scent and sound. But if you think you have several years left, you’re likely to loiter in your mind, put off that trip to your beloved ocean or desert, suffer the cubicle lights to pull in a few more paychecks, miss precious hugs and giggles and winks with your kids and lovers. The more time you think you have, the more likely you’ll postpone your spiritual work, your assignment, your purpose… the very living of life.
We already have a hard time being present and in-body- already treat the Earth as if it were a lifeless and limitless resource- knowing we’re lucky if we have seventy years of relative good health. Just imagine how careless we’d be with our lives, and the lives of other species, if we could count on biomedicine to guarantee us fifty to a hundred years more. Sensitivity, compassion and gratitude are rooted in the awareness of mortality.
In this way, the big bears are our Buddhas. And even viruses are agents of humility and love.

DJ: We’re not the top of the food chain.

JH: Dirt is at the top… because it gets to eat everybody! If we really want to feel like part of the endless cycles of life, we need to get used to thinking of ourselves as food. In this society people usually live their lives as though they were somehow separate from nature, and then they employ embalming fluids and metal lined coffins to try to keep nature out after death. Attempts to forestall decomposition, like science’s search for immortality, signify our unwillingness to surrender to the very processes we arose from, extend our of… and return to.

DJ: Facing death, like facing life, takes a lot of courage.

JH: Courage is being willing to feel, no matter what the costs. And doing the right thing- acting on those feelings- in the face of all obstacles. If we are courageous it is because we love something enough that we’d take risks to save it, help it, nourish it. The ultimate courage comes from the certain knowledge that we are an inseparable part of the Earth. We must learn to live lives that, like death, affirm the sacred connection between us and the land.

DJ: I’ve come to realize that there is no such thing as anything separate from land.

JH: There’s no such thing as separate. That’s the whole point. Every problem in the world, every social dis-ease, every environmental imbalance, every screwed up personal problem is because we’re somehow able to imagine separation between our mind and our heart, between our mind and our body, between our body and this place, between ourselves and our loved ones, ourselves and our community. There is no original evil, only original imagined separation. The cure for that is love. And the way to manifest that love is through the courageous embodiment of our decisive responsible selves. Our natural selves, in partnership with what’s natural in this world.

DJ: For the longest time I tried to define what is natural, and here is what I finally came up with: an institution or rule or artifact is natural to the degree that it reinforces our understanding of our embeddedness and participation in the natural world, and it’s unnatural to the degree that it masks all of that.

JH: Exactly. And we’re natural, to the degree that we embrace our embeddedness, and act out of that animal/spiritual sense of connectedness, interdependence, and inseparability.

DJ: When you say there’s no separation, do you mean that everything is good? Do you mean that chainsaws and corporations are…

JH: I mean there is no separation between physical and energetic bodies of the Earth destroyers and the Earth defenders, though we might wish there were! We will all be rejoined in fact, stirred and folded back into the great Gaian soup. Likewise the metals in the chainsaw will in time corrode back into seams of earthen ore, and even the abomination called plastic will break back down into native sediments and organic gases. That doesn’t make the callous developer or arrogant geneticist any less accountable, or the Tupperware parties any less bizarre. But responsibility comes from the awareness of interdependency. In the long run, we’ll need to make the corporate polluter and de-forester aware of their place in the web, and the results of their acts.

DJ: And you also, presumably, want to stop him.

JH: The moment we’re aware of an injustice, we have a responsibility to do absolutely everything in our power, legal and extralegal, to prevent or rectify that wrong. But we shouldn’t kill a plant or animal to eat without feeling empathy for its death, without feeling both intimacy and sadness, because you know you are connected to what you eat. By family. By flesh. And similarly; we shouldn’t strike a blow against an enemy, no matter how egregious his acts, without recognizing the degree to which he is of us, and in us.
We do this work of activism, social change and wilderness restoration in the most compassionate, graceful and aesthetic ways possible.

DJ: What is the role of art in cultural transformation? Where does art come from?

JH: There’s a spirit in all of us that likes to draw, handle a sharp pencil, splash water colors or get our hands into sculptor’s clay. That longs to make a statement, and have an impact. It’s rooted in the creative urges of a planet, imbued with the passion of evolution. One never really manufactures either adventure or art. We are confronted by it, consumed by it, and remade within it. It always has a purpose, and is willingly given away. Life mortal flesh. Like these golden cottonwood leaves. Like Hopi sand paintings intricately crafted, and then blown and blended by the wind. But then it’s not in the completion of some project that we become fulfilled. It’s in the making of our art, in the living of our lives that we’re made whole.
Some art reflects what is, good and bad, and forces us to engage or confront both. Other arts are ways of living grace and balance, dancing them into the hearts and minds of an audience that has forgotten what it is to be Gaian respondents and participants in beauty. It’s for us to make sure our arts are not only decorative but meaningful, contributing to greater awareness, sensitivity, understanding and response. And that our every act, from civil disobedience and litigation to the way we live or make love, be as artful and significant as we make them. Deep art comes from deep seeing, and deep feeling. It becomes a deliberate mission to express our authenticity, our experience, our connectedness in a way that is as beautiful as possible. And then to give even our lives away. The result again is reconnection, as our art and practice weaves us back into the material of our experience. Together with the ritual efforts of others, we co-create the living fabric of culture, jointly paint on that fabric the story of our struggles and accomplishments, our love and our hope. And it’s so important to recognize the art, beauty and meaning in the mundane, the simple, the plain. We’re surrounded by art every day. And it’s trying, like the rest of natural world, to communicate with us. What we need is not only the ability, but the willingness, to recognize it for what it is.

DJ: Walking up the canyon I took a friend to smell a ponderosa pine. At the base were some ant lion cones. He’d never seen one before. We hadn’t noticed them as we were walking, until we stopped to pay attention. The patterns of their cones were so beautiful. Everything seemed so utterly alive. Lately it’s seemed to me that even fires are just as alive as hummingbirds or humans. Have you ever thought about this?

JH: Everything that’s a part of the living whole must in its own way be alive. Mute energies, unthinking rocks, all part and portion of a life: Gaian Earth. And in turn, that Earth is a part of a larger universe that must also be alive. I don’t sense any awareness in fires, but I don’t measure life by whether it’s conscious or not. People have the capacity to be ultra-conscious, but we can be some of the least enlivened.

DJ: I’d like to change the subject. You’ve said that you lilve in one of the most famously anti-environmental counties in the country. What’s that like?

JH: This is one of the few counties where folks have talked about seceding from the Union, and the Catron County Ordinance asserting local jurisdiction over federal agencies has been adopted by several other Western communities. Of the Mexican Gray wolves recently reintroduced into this area, a half dozen have been shot by locals afraid for their livestock and their livelihoods. The local saloon advertises Spotted Owl Stew.
It’s been difficult, being the only self-confessed tree-hugger for miles around. I suppose if I’d been looking for alternative community I might have ended up in Cave Junction, Oregon, or Asheville, North Carolina instead. But I was looking for wilderness, adventure, magic… And in the end it wouldn’t have mattered what I wanted, because I was being called here.
I had little respect for carpenters until I had to figure out how to build this cabin, or for mechanics until I tried to keep our truck running. Then over the years I grew to see the value in a farmer’s early morning schedule and the attention he pays to the rain. As upset as I get over the effects of public-lands grazing, I look up to the way the old-time ranchers ride the range everyday, do what they need to do without whining, and can fix almost anything with fencing pliers and a coil of bailing wire. In addition, these folks are quicker to express their true feelings. They’re generally honest. They do what they say they’re going to do, and they expect me to do the same. And there are ways that they’re in touch with the land that my city environmentalist friends will never be. I would even support their resistance to being governed by a distant and out of touch elite, if only they wouldn’t take advantage of their liberties to further strip the old growth forest, or kill off the native predators.

DJ: Freedom without responsibility is tremendously destructive.

JH: Teaching responsibility and inspiring stewardship is part of the assignment. And the only way to accomplish this is through an exploration of common ground.
The majority of the articles I write are in magazines for an audience that are already believers. Folks read Talking Leaves or Earthlight because they love the environment, or they’re interested in spirit, or they’re moved by personal and social change. It’s more challenging to teach about sense of place in a piece for Backpacker, or sentience and sacrament in a food magazine. And the hardest pieces have been those written as a columnist for the local paper, trying to reach the hearts of my rural neighbors.

DJ: What kind of responses have you gotten?

JH: Mostly positive, oddly enough. I don’t know how deeply I touch them, but I know how important it is to try. I call attention to our common threats, like condominiums and gentrification. I advocate wildness, by reminding readers of their respect for the unbreakable stallion, and explain the interdependency of nature by comparing it to the cooperative bonds of a healthy family. In one article I pointed out how easy it is to diss the old homestead as soon as they can afford a new doublewide- but then how much they’d miss it if the bank called in their loans, or if for some reason it burned down. Suddenly they’d recall the handrailings burnished smooth by their grandparents’ hands, and remember the story behind every mark on the walls. I talk about how we may not fully appreciate a home until we’ve lost it, or a spouse until they’ve died or left us. And how it’s the same with the loss of the last wild places.

DJ: Common ground is an interesting subject.

JH: I’ve always had a soft spot for honest confrontation because it polarizes things, and thus makes the choices clearer. But I’ve also come to see the advantage of focusing on those values and priorities that we share.

DJ: I think that before we can even talk about commonality we need to acknowledge polarities that already exist.

JH: I see common ground in terms of the actual land we share: our settings, ecosystems and environments. As a community we’re all affected by what affects our watershed. We breathe the same clean or dirtied air. We face the same basic threats. We depend on the same sources of food. And we hopefully have a very similar love and affection for the place that we call home. It’s this necessity, and this affection, that can bind us together.

DJ: I work a lot with independent loggers and farmers, and I’m always honest with them: we both want to take down the big corporations, and I want to take down civilization. So we work together in the short run, and in the long run maybe we don’t.

JH: I have a vision of a world that is so wild that it can survive even our mistakes, even our insensitivities. We won’t get that again until long after the fall, long after the population drop. Until then, we’ve got to individually make our lives a quest for reconnection, a quest for right livelihood and right living- even if we lose our credibility and careers, the support of our parents, the acceptance of our children, or the understanding of our mates- in the course of regaining our lives, our passions, our souls.

DJ: That’s a hard sell.

JH: It will always be more popular to hand out “blessed” chocolates and get-into-heaven-free cards, and no call to sentience and responsibility can compete with selling prayers for angels that are willing to do all the karmic work for you. Hardly anyone wants to be told that they’re in charge of their own lives, and that the fate of the natural world will largely depend on what we do or don’t do.
I offer students and visitors nothing but the truth, and their self: authentic and responsive, empowered and assigned, content and fulfilled. But they have to be willing to pay the price of admission to this, “the real world, muchacho!” The truth can seem to “cost us everything,” but it gifts us with who we really are, and gives us back the fullest experiencing of the world we’re part of. This is insight with no borders, no convention, no pretense, no apologies. I don’t ask for perfection or enlightenment from those I work with, only whole and heartful effort, a fierce focus and love. And a willingness to get up when you fall. We’re a “no ropes” course: a chance to be aware and responsible, with nothing holding you down, and the knowledge there are no nets to soften our mistakes. It’s supposed to hurt, so we know where and when we went wrong. Instead of “12 Steps,” we’ve narrowed it down to two: Rebecome your most authentic, feeling self- and the manifest that self for the good of All. Therapists want you to have the “skills” to keep your traumas and unment needs from interfering with your ability to “function productively” in society. I have no intention of making it easier for anyone to tolerate the hypocrisy and meaningless around them, or to ignore their needs and wounds. I try to give them back the will and power to resist what needs resisting, change what needs changing… and feel absolutely all.
There are schools happy to take your money year after year without graduating you. Priests will absolve you, and gurus give you a mantra to help you transcend. Counselors will process you endlessly, and never demand any major shifts. Not so with the teachings of the inspirited Earth, of primal instinct and intuition… and not so with us. Every “class” results in graduation, every lesson put to work for the good of not only one’s self but other people, other species, and the sacred land. You can be redeemed and fulfilled, but not absolved, for the aware have a responsibility. We will ask you not to transcend but engage. And we will expect you to change- into becoming more who you really are: needy as well as giving, vulnerable as well as strong, physical as well as spiritual, angry as well as happy, determined as well as afraid. I will do my best to keep any politically correct timidity or New Age escapism from interfering with your fullest realization, even if it occasionally discomforts you, insults your sources, or threatens your preconceptions and plans. It’s the least I can do.

DJ: What worries you most?

JH: The epidemic insecurity of our kind. We’re in some kind of collective denial about the fact, but there is no single greater influence on our activities, no single greater factor in the repression of our native humanness and the distortion and destruction of nature. The drunk in the gutter, and the extrovert developer, are both responding to gut-wrenching self-doubt. The building of absurd skyscrapers and the beating of wives, are attempts to compensate for a lack of self worth.
The world would be a saner, healthier place if only we could learn to really, truly love ourselves. But this self-love can only come when we begin to recognize and experience our lives as truly, deeply significant. It grows proportionately with every challenge we rise to take on. It roots and strengthens with each difficult, selfless quest we see to completion. And it bears noble fruit, as we being to fulfill our most meaningful purpose. Real self worth is determined by our capacity to share, not by how much we own- not by the amount of skills we have, but by the ways in which we employ them.

DJ: How do you define “secure”?

JH: One can’t be secure “from” something, only “in” something. We’re never truly secure from pain or poverty, hatred or harm, abandonment or libel, death or disease. We can be secure in who we truly are, in the reality of our weaknesses as well as the truth of our gifts. In the innocence of our hearts and the sanctity of our souls. We can be secure in the love we have available to give, if not always in the affections we hoped to receive. In our connection to all that is, to all that ever was, and to all that will ever be. In our blessings, our love, and our purpose.

DJ: What else scares you?

JH: The idea of a world robbed of wilderness. An end to the playground of evolution. The neglect or destruction of those places of magic and instruction that could lead us back to health and balance, self and home. We’re rapidly losing the openings, the opportunities for personal reconnection and assignment. My fear is that the last natural places will be commercialized or destroyed, and that even words reflecting and spreading this earthen wisdom will be lost. That there will no longer be a demand for things wild and real, in a culture of artificiality and control. And that we may soon lose the capacity to tell the difference. The coming generations will be starving not only from lack of food and space, but an absence of grounded advice… and the forgotten lessons of inspirited place.

DJ: What about hope?

JH: I expect nothing… and hope for miracles. I find hope in Loba’s unflagging compassion. In the faces of little children, the angst and anger of troubled teens, and in the determination of Zapatista women. In the efforts of Indian traditionalists, neodruids, and radical pagans, spiritual activists and environmental ethicists. In small presses and regional zines. In urban gardens, and herbicide-resistant weeds. I find hope in the insistence of my students, and the concern of our resident interns. In my dear apprentice Scot, and the promise of a renewed lineage of protection and sacrament. And of course, I find it incredibly hopeful- that after the worst that technological civilization can do, life will spring back in all its diversity and glory for as long as the sun shall shine!

DJ: I’ve got a line in a book: “Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam.” That’s because salmon are dying not from a lack of words, but from dams. Does writing help?

JH: It helps- at least to the degree we raise a reader’s awareness of the pain and bliss of life, and help incite their honorable responses. If we remind them not to let any intermediary stand between them and God, or between them and direct experience. If they’re more empathetic and grateful after reading our words, more likely to dance and less likely to “sit this one out.” If they cry more, laugh more, feel more. If they never knew how to have fun, and they play more afterwards. If they were never serious about anything, and they end up dealing with the really heavy shit. If we can keep them from stubbing their toes on the same obstacles twice, and get them to chance new mistakes they can learn and grow from. If they read about all the things we learned from a certain mulberry tree, and then go out right away and eat berries! If they’re a little less tolerant of evil and the artificial, and a little more willing to take risks. If we provoke or seduce them to go barefoot, taste their food, say “I love you” more often, or discover divine creation in even a single backyard flower.
It’s an old metaphor, but we’re all planting seeds. And this takes us back to the question of whether we can hope for results. A person putting our seeds can’t stand around and wait and see what grows in every situation. Sometimes they might come up the first year. Others might take ten or fifteen generations, and come up when there is just enough sunshine, just enough moisture, just enough compost for the seed to sprout and bloom.
But these are just words. The essential thing is to re-become who we really are, opposing the destruction and lies, embracing the natural world, working and playing as if life itself depended on it. Once we do that, there will be no more quandaries, no more need to “process,” no confusion about wrong or right, or wondering if we’re on our path of heart. We’ll feel, we’ll care, we’ll respond. We’ll express this wholeness in acts of integrity, and beauty. We’ll give everything… and that will be enough.

The Quiet Brewing of Ideas

“All through school and University I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and the seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps.”

E.F. Schumacher


It is indisputable that since the advent of modern civilization, a vast complex of dangerous problems has arisen never before seen in almost 5 billion years on this planet. Now we’re not talking about the natural cycles of species extinction that have been occurring since the birth of this celestial body, nor are we talking about the habitual planetary shifts of axis rotation, or spontaneous alterations in atmospheric, climatic conditions- these phenomena are governed only by the higher faculties of universal jurisdiction, beyond the control of species representing mere specks on the beautiful surface of planet Earth. No, we’re talking about the grossly atypical heating of the atmosphere caused by human industry, commercialization, and mass production; we’re talking about the unnatural elimination of life organisms because of colossal dam construction, sweeping deforestation, and expansive mineral resource excavation; we’re talking about fundamentally altering the course of entire ecosystems, conducting our lives in the most harmful, unhealthy, inefficient, purposeless, reckless (not to mention exhausting!) way than any other living organism has in the history of this planet. This system based upon exploitation, violence (albeit sometimes transparent), material wealth, overindulgence, and anthropocentricity has evolved into a savage virus – a destructive cancer that cannot possibly sustain itself without draining the world of all its life. What’s even more ominous is that our way of operating- the strategy humanity has been pursuing for the past 10,000 years- has become so deeply embedded and entrenched in our minds as the one, right way to live! Is it so inconceivable that a child might not have the desire to sit through 15 years ingesting facts and figures from some “sovereign authority” that is supposed to be telling them about the world? Economics is not the world. Politics is not the world. Children becoming depositories of information, much of which they have no inherent interest in, is not healthy. Is it so unimaginable that instead of contributing our lives to a morbid wage economy (or any economy at all), toiling away our lives for some chimerical goal of fiscal sufficiency, all we contribute as human beings is love and care for the community of life on Earth? As Derrick Jensen contemplates in his work, A Language Older Than Words:

“What if the point of life has nothing to do with the creation of an ever-expanding region of control? What if the point is not to keep at bay all those people, beings, objects, and emotions that we so needlessly fear? What if the point instead is to let go of that control? What if the point of life, the primary reason for existence, is to lie naked with your lover in a shady grove of trees? What if the point is to taste each other’s sweat and feel the delicate pressure of finger on chest, thigh on thigh, lip on cheek? What if the point is to stop, then, in your slow movements together, to listen to birdsong, to watch dragonflies hover, to look at your lover’s face, then up at the undersides of leaves moving together in the breeze? What if the point all along has been to get along, to relate, and experience things on their own terms? What if the point is to feel joy when joyous, love when loving, anger when angry, thoughtful when full of thought? What if the point from the beginning has been just to be?”

I think Jensen’s assertions are very important, because they represent a speculative shift in both our consciousness and how our views are reflected in the external world- a shift from the complicated to the simple, from what our hopes and dreams and fears project to what actually is, from an outdated mindset constantly emphasizing progress, advancement, and improvement to a worldview fostering affection and pleasure with what each individual life form is inherently comprised of.

We, as humanity, must decide what our priorities are; what is truly important to us as human beings? Is it the automated, involuntary desire to burgeon an economy, which in actuality, is just an abstract, man-invented contrivance fabricated to measure “success,” not a sensitive life form that grows and becomes strong like a child or a horse or a mountain lion. Why are the GDP and the amount of green paper in our treasuries the foregone indicators of a country’s wealth? Why are we spending $726 million on a nuclear-attack submarine when we could send 5 million Third World children to school for a year? Why are we committing $285 million to every B-1 bomber jet when we could be providing basic immunization treatments to the roughly 575 million children in the world who lack them? For what the world spends on defense every forty hours, about $4.6 billion, we could provide sanitary water for every human being who currently lacks it. What the fuck are we doing? The insanity of our senselessness and unconsciousness has become all too pervasive. Never once in the history of life on Earth has a species placed more emphasis on aggression and defense against theoretical conflict- or conflict that has no direct effect on that species’ life- than the guardianship and devotion to one’s own family. We are all part of the same community of life on this planet: the trees, birds, frogs, rivers, grass, wolves, bees, air, oceans, that fern outside your house, that ladybug strolling across the sidewalk, that squirrel clambering up the bark of a Chestnut… it’s about time that we put a priority on protecting and caring for these brothers and sisters.

It seems that this culture has isolated and detached us from the rest of the living world; it’s almost as if we, as humans, perceive ourselves as the rulers of the universe- a superior form of life on this planet, not subject to the principles that govern the natural world. We pretend we are not animals, whereas in reality the laws of ecology apply as much to us as the rest of “God’s Creations.” We pretend we’re at the top of a great chain of being, although evolution is nonhierarchical. We pretend that death is an enemy, although it is an integral part of life. Science, politics, economics, and everyday life do not exist separately from ethics. But we act like they do. This imperious perception our culture subconsciously propagates is not difficult to understand: we pretend that anything we do not understand- anything that cannot be measured, quantified, and controlled- does not exist. We pretend that animals are resources to be conserved or consumed, when, in reality, they have purposes entirely independent of us. What gives us the right to control livestock or mass produce the crops that we choose on any land that we deem suitable for planting? Who put humans in charge of locking up animals in zoo cages away from their accustomed habitats? Why can Bechtel and Nestle claim ownership to springs and lakes and rivers, when all forms of life should be entitled to Earth’s belongings? And that’s exactly what the water, air, trees, plants, animals, rocks, and mountains are: they belong to the Earth, and so do we; it’s not the other way around. The planet is willing to share its beautiful foundations of life with all its children, and to have the sheer arrogance to claim ownership of something as rudimentarily essential for existence as water or trees or soil is desecration to the universal order.

“Say you’ve got an executive passionately committed to the idea of his own fundamental goodness. That person would have a terribly difficult time seriously entertaining the notion that the corporation for which he’s worked over the course of a lifetime, and indeed the entire corporate system of which he’s a part, is responsible for terrible destruction of humanity and in nature. To acknowledge that would be to acknowledge that he has in fact lent his talents to genocide and ecocide. Be he can’t do that- it’s a very difficult thing to do. He’s spent years building up a career. His prestige and sense of self-worth are closely tied to his success, to how much oil he has discovered or how many cars he has produced. Given all this, serious consideration of the moral status of the work would create profound conflict between his morality and his financial as well as his emotional/social needs. The money, by the way, is no small matter. It may seem in a very real sense that he has everything to lose and nothing to gain from that sort of serious examination, and so his unconscious will protect his sense of self from a very painful conflict by dismissing or ignoring any evidence that he’s participating in these atrocities.” --- David Edwards, How Shall I Live My Life

Many trends and patterns of ideology are deeply embedded into the mental processes of our culture. These cognitive tendencies are established at very young ages within members of our modern industrial civilization, and slowly metabolize into our cerebral complex as we grow and develop with the status quo- a blueprint of life that is formulated for every one of us when we are born into this culture.

(Nota Bene: It is critically important to note that the word “culture,” in this context, does not denote humanity in its entirety, but merely one way of life that exists on our Earth (and one that is savagely extinguishing all other ways of life as well). The Bushmen, Dongria Kondh, and the Guarani do not represent ethnic strands of our culture; for one, these indigenous tribes and others like them have formed inextricable bonds of reciprocity and love with their habitats for tens of thousands of years, before this culture began poisoning the Earth with industrial toxins and exterminating all sentience but itself.)

When every human is born into this culture, each being radiates the organic vitality of the universe- an infinite life energy that comprises every single molecule and cell of the cosmos. This dynamism is an omnipresent element of all existence and space, and it pervades the very flesh and bones of our fragile bodies. When I look at a child, I see a powerful life form bursting with a boundless vibrancy and passion for life and its miraculous beauty. I see a boy jumping up and down on a grass field, pounding the hard earth with his feet in euphoria and jubilation. I see a young girl gazing up at a towering oak with a certain tenderness and affection that burns a hole through her heart. I see school kids strolling down the sidewalk, without a care in the world, feeling as free and weightless as the soft cumulous floating gently overhead in the powder blue sky. What happens to this fierce love for the world, a love so vast it echoes across the heavens and within the deep fissures of Earth’s core; the same love that flows from rivers and streams, that trickles, oozes, and seeps from the bark of redwoods and sprouts up from the thick, moist soil? Why is this all-encompassing life energy repressed instead of embraced as a child grows and develops? Our culture would tell us that “growth” and “development” require children to split with their silliness and immaturity, and their juvenile, unsophisticated games. It would tell us that the elimination of this “childish naïveté” is just part of life, and part of growing up. It’s part of going to school and getting good grades; it’s part of getting into university and finding a well-paying job; it’s part of settling down, forming a family, paying bills, working nine hours a day, and battling the enervating daily grind that is, well, just part of life. And we all affirm this notion. We all conform to and uphold our culture’s framework of living, its structure and system declaring how we ought live. It’s quite a paradox that people will defend to the death a lifestyle that is crippling the very essence of living and happiness.

“I know we’re creating a scene, but creating a scene is not illegal. You were born free, you will live free, you will die free. You’re allowed to scream for joy, you’re allowed to complain, you’re allowed to cry, you’re allowed to love people, you’re allowed to hug people. We’re starting to live in a world where we’re starting to feel scared, we’re starting to forget just how divine and special we are as human beings. Every single one of you is the ONLY example of you that will ever exist, and there’s not a single authority in this world who can tell you how to behave at any time, any place, anywhere.”
--- Everything is OK, youtube.com

We live in a police state designed and fabricated to instill fear in every human being that lives in this “developed” mode of existence- an artificial matrix in which arbitrary laws, edicts, and statutes are instituted by politicians and corporate lobbyists to fuel and sustain a destructive culture that only benefits the top 2% of anthro-society. How can anyone dictate how you behave on this planet except you? Each human being is a complex, sentient life form that is composed of the same molecules and atoms that shape and comprise the bark of a maple tree and the surging froth of a flowing river. Could any living entity possibly tell a deer how to live? Could any species authorize a certain way of life?


A group of blind people encounters an elephant for the first time. One grabs the tail and says, “An elephant is like a snake!” Another grabs a leg and says, “An elephant is like a tree!” A third grabs an ear and says, “An elephant is like a big leaf!” To the materialist, the fable shows how misinformed all three blind people are, for a sighted person can plainly see how the “snake,” “tree,” and “big leaf” connect together into an elephant. To the idealist, the fable says that we all have our ideological blindness, and that there is no fully sighted person who can see the whole elephant- that we are all blind people wildly grasping at the illusive truth of the world.
→ Michael Mayerfeld Bell, “An Invitation to Environmental Sociology”

What we believe depends on what we see and feel, and what we see and feel depends on what we believe. The world is a vast, wonderfully extraordinary place, and it would be foolish to presume that we, as humanity, can fully understand and comprehend the remarkable ecological dynamics that comprise the universe, let alone Planet Earth. It is a paradox that in the elitist sphere of academia, any knowledge or carnal enlightenment that isn’t derived from scientific, peer-reviewed material from the lens of anthro-empirical vanity is not viably credible in terms of developing our intrinsic cognition and perceptions of the external world. It would be foolish heresy in our culture to believe one knows anything about Earth’s natural creations without having studied biology, physics, chemistry, etc. in an educational system, which, frankly, is from the perspective of a destructively self-centered species. The Bushmen of South Africa can’t tell you the biochemical makeup of chloroplast in various eukaryotes; the Kayapo of Brazil won’t be able to outline the genetic DNA sequences of mammalian reptiles; nor would the Kutia Kondh be capable of defining the thermodynamic structures of volcanic formations. But these indigenous peoples could communicate the world to you in a way modern science, technology, and culture will never be able to express. They feel the Earth’s everlasting rhythm pulsing energetically through every vein, every strand of warm flesh. Ask a nomadic Tuareg tribesman, and he’ll truly tell you about the world, how the trees and rivers and stones and birds speak to him, and how he listens, as he is one with the universally boundless life energy that invigorates every living cell in the cosmos, and that unites the community of all life on Earth. The only thing systematic scientific and empirical approaches to learning have resulted in is humanity’s detachment and isolation from the rest of the natural world. We have used science to commodify every living thing on this planet, putting a price tag on any thing that would be productive to our economies, and our annihilative lifestyles. The CEO of Weyerhauser could tell you how many redwood trees would need to be uprooted from the soil to construct a military base, but assuredly he has never gazed up in awe at the tallest living species on Earth, breathing into his lungs the crisp, pristine scent of Sequoia bark, filled with an undying unity and devotion toward the tree, just as the tree is willing to give its undying love and sanctity to him, only if he’d let her.

Being Here Now

Phaedrus wrote a letter from India about a pilgrimage to holy Mount Kailas, the source of the Ganges and the abode of Shiva, high in the Himalayas, in the company of a holy man and his adherents.
He never reached the mountain. After the third day he gave up, exhausted, and the pilgrimage went on without him. He said he had the physical strength but that physical strength wasn’t enough. He had the intellectual motivation but that wasn’t enough either. He didn’t think he had been arrogant but thought that he was undertaking the pilgrimage to broaden HIS experience, to gain understanding for HIMSELF. He was trying to use the mountain for his own purposes and the pilgrimage too. He regarded himself as a fixed entity, not the pilgrimage or the mountain, and thus wasn’t ready for it. He speculated that the other pilgrims, the ones who reached the mountain, probably sensed the holiness of the mountain so intensely that each footstep was an act of devotion, an act of submission to this holiness. The holiness of the mountain infused into their own spirits enabled them to endure far more than anything he, with his greater physical strength, could take.
To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then IT will be “here”. What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it IS all around him. Every step is an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.

Acceptance of the NOW

Q:    You mentioned "surrender" a few times. I don't like that idea. It sounds somewhat fatalistic. If we always accept the way things are, we are not going to make any effort to improve them. It seems to me what progress is all about, both in our personal lives and collectively, is not to accept the limitations of the present but to strive to go beyond them and create something better. How do you reconcile surrender with changing things and getting things done?


  Response:

To some people, surrender may have negative connotations, implying defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of life, becoming lethargic, and so on. True surrender, however, is something entirely different. It does not mean to passively put up with whatever situation you find yourself in and to do nothing about it. Nor does it mean to cease making plans or initiating positive action.

Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is. Inner resistance is to say "no" towhat is, through mental judgment and emotional negativity. It becomes particularly pronounced when things "go wrong," which means that there is a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of your mind and what is. That is the pain gap. If you have lived long enough, you will know that things "go wrong" quite often. It is precisely at those times that surrender needs to be practiced if you want to eliminate pain and sorrow from your life. Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects you with Being. Resistance is the mind.

Surrender is a purely inner phenomenon. It does not mean that on the outer level you cannot take action and change the situation. In fact, it is not the overall situation that you need to accept when you surrender, but just the tiny segment called the Now.
For example, if you were stuck in the mud somewhere, you wouldn't say: "Okay, I resign myself to being stuck in the mud." Resignation is not surrender. You don't need to accept an undesirable or unpleasant life situation. Nor do you need to deceive yourself and say that there is nothing wrong with being stuck in the mud. No. You recognize fully that you want to get out of it. You then narrow your attention down to the present moment without mentally labeling it in any way. This means that there is no judgment of the Now. Therefore, there is no resistance, no emotional negativity. You accept the "isness" of this moment. Then you take action and do all that you can to get out of the mud. Such action I call positive action. It is far more effective than negative action, which arises out of anger, despair, or frustration. Until you achieve the desired result, you continue to practice surrender by refraining from labeling the Now.
Non-surrender hardens your psychological form, the shell of the ego, and so creates a strong sense of separateness. The world around you and the people in particular come to be perceived as threatening. The unconscious compulsion to destroy others through judgment arises, as does the need to compete and dominate. Even nature becomes your enemy and your perceptions and interpretations are governed by fear. The mental disease that we call paranoia is only a slightly more acute form of this normal but dysfunctional state of consciousness.
Not only your psychological form but also your physical form- your body- becomes hard and rigid through resistance. Tension arises in different parts of the body, and the body as a whole contracts. The free flow of life energy through the body, which is essential for its healthy functioning, is greatly restricted. Bodywork and certain forms of physical therapy can be helpful in restoring this flow, but unless you practice surrender in your everyday life, those things can only give temporary symptom relief since the cause- the resistance pattern- has not been dissolved. There is something within you that remains unaffected by the transient circumstances that make up your life situation, and only through surrender do you have access to it. It is your life, your very Being- which exists eternally in the realm of the present.

If there is no action you can take to improve an unsatisfactory life situation, and you cannot remove yourself from the situation either, then use the situation to make yourself go more deeply into surrender, more deeply into the Now, more deeply into Being. When you enter this timeless dimension of the present, change often comes about in strange ways without the need for a great deal of doing on your part. Life becomes helpful and cooperative. If inner factors such as fear, guilt, or inertia prevented you from taking action, they will dissolve in the light of your conscious presence.
Would you choose unhappiness? If you did not choose it, how did it arise? What is its purpose? Who is keeping it alive? You say that you are conscious of your unhappy feelings, but the truth is that you are identified with them and keep the process alive through compulsive thinking. All that is unconscious. If you were conscious, that is to say totally present in the Now, all negativity would dissolve almost instantly. It could not survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence. You keep your unhappiness alive by giving it time. That is its lifeblood. Remove time through intense present-moment awareness and it dies. But do you want it to die? Have you truly had enough? Who would you be without it?


A Moment of Clarity

While she was backing her car out of the driveway onto the road, Winnie wondered where she would end up if she drove south on the road instead of north. She had never continued past the Woolever's home. And because of the leaves blowing from trees like torn brown parchment pages and thin ribbons of steel-gray diaphanous clouds stretching out of the horizon in trails of lost grandeur, Winnie drove south, following the winding road between irregular stretches of oak, birch, and pine.

The blacktop changed to gravel and the road narrowed, not well traveled. There were no houses. Neither were there signs of telephone or electric service.

The road narrowed again. She climbed a steep hill, turned left, then right, and descended into a valley marsh.

Cattails, skunk cabbage, wood asters, and thick-bladed grasses rose out of standing water on both sides of the road. There were few trees taller than hedge height, with the unsightly, bowl-shaped nests of herons lodged thickly in them. Three deer stood knee deep in a shallow pool, eating floating vegetation and staring at her car in wide-eyed disbelief, water streaming from their narrow, delicate mouths.

Still she could see no houses, driveways, or mailboxes. She drove over a narrow bridge with wooden planks, rusted iron sides, and a hand-painted sign in orange letters, EIGHT TON LIMIT. The wooden planks thumped loudly against her tires. On the other side Winnie parked next to a stand of sumac and returned with a doughnut to stand on the bridge above the little stream.

Not wanting to get her clothes dirty, she refrained from sitting on the planks and leaned against the iron railing. The clear, cold water ran beneath her brown shoes and she ate the pastry with great satisfaction after discovering the filling to be custard. Overhead, a skein of geese flew in a disorderly V-shaped line, calling in hoarse, plaintive tones. Once again she was reminded of her dream from the night before. Checking her desire to eat the remaining portion of her pastry, she tossed it into the water as an offering of thanks and watched in float downstream and around a switchback. Crisp autumn wind moved through her thin shirt, touching her skin. A sugary buoyancy filled her stomach. She contemplated both sensations on her way back to the car.

As she climbed behind the wheel she was startled to feel her name spoken. "Winifred." She climbed out and turned back to the bridge, hoping to find someone behind her. She was alone. But she was certain of having heard her name spoken in a clear voice with throaty personality. It had felt to her like the voice of her mother, yet not hers, a voice she knew yet couldn't place. Most of all, it had resembled her own voice speaking without the unusual interior echo- from the outside. She walked back to the bridge, stood in the middle of the planks, and listened.

Once again she heard her name spoken, this time in its more familiar appellation: "Winnie." Accompanying the sound came the sense of someone beside her, behind her, before her, around her, someone she couldn't see and couldn't touch, someone whose presence was intensified through the absence of anything to attribute it to.

The feeling of buoyancy she had earlier experienced in her stomach delightfully changed and spread through the rest of her body. She felt light enough to float. It seemed as if the breeze moving across the marsh could carry her with it. She held this feeling for a moment and then realized something very uncommon was happening. The grasses in the ditch appeared to be glowing. The red, cone-shaped sumac tops burned like incandescent lamps in a bluish light unlike any she had ever seen yet instinctively recognized. And the pleasure of recognition- discovering the familiar within the unknown- comforted her with its stillness. She looked at her hands and they seemed to be lit from the inside, her fingers almost transparent. The light glowing within the grasses and the sumac glowed within her, within everything. They sang with her through the light, jubilantly, compassionately, timelessly connecting her to past, present, and future. Boundaries did not exist. Where she left off and something else began could not be established. Everything breathed.

She understood her predicament: the world, experience, sensations, memory, time, and dream could not be separated. The realizations taking place were not taking place "inside her," but all around, everywhere. The problem lay not in establishing the objective truth of what she perceived but rather in establishing how the truth had come to be perceived- how otherness had been obliterated. She participated in being looked at as much as looking. She was not simply having a vision of something; she was something in a larger vision. A Great Omnipresent Looking had turned upon her and she looked through it. The whole world participated in awareness.

The miracle of consciousness, the hiding place of God, split open like a fruit too large for its peel. Time lost its linear appeal and assumed the form of the wholly holy. Events, forces, and mind were the same thing, creatively at work. The world and the Kingdom of God became factually identical; each existed one in the other. The sun reflected from the clouds in avenues of colored ideas. The contradiction of conceptual antagonists stood side by side, making sense. The solitary miracle of Pure Grace held everything else inside it, wonder and peace. Death stood before her and she recognized it- a mere shadow cast by life, not a separation; the breathing of life bound it up as shape binds substance.

She walked down the embankment and into the stream, where the cold rushing water swirled around her ankles, calves, knees, and thighs in such a happy, embracing manner that tears filled her eyes. The water was alive. And as her sense of herself as an autonomous individual migrated into everything around her, her sense of isolation and loneliness merged into belonging. She found her true home and her true home found her. There was no "other" place. The grasses were part of trees, part of the smallest organisms in the water, part of the water, part of the worms in the soil, part of the soil, part of the air, part of her. All were constantly changing into and out of each other. And all of these were part of God, that infinitely small and infinitely large spirit that loved her, whatever she was, whenever she was, without reservation, and the realization of this love brought the luminous splendor of divine, mobilized thoughts flooding through the world. It felt like waking from a nightmare of harsh and brutal illusions into welcome beyond measure. A banquet of celebration had risen up inside her and around her- more and more life, larger, richer, and more joyful life.

A white pickup came clanking down the narrow road, thumped and rattled across the little bridge, and came to a stop not far from Winnie's little car. A man in a work coat climbed out and stood for several minutes looking between Winnie's opened car door and Winnie in the creek. He climbed down the embankment and walked along the edge of the stream.

"Is everything alright?" he asked.
"Oh yes," said Winnie, the water rushing around her.
"Are you sure?"
"I've never been surer of anything in my life."
"You're crying."
"If I am, it is different than you think."
"I was afraid you might be having some trouble. My name is July Montgomery and I farm in Champion Valley. That cold water will ruin your health."
If only you knew how little those things matter."
"You're probably right," he said, and sat down on the bank beside a honeysuckle. "Come out of the water- just for now."

But Winnie didn't move. She didn't know what to say. This was the most important time of her whole life, but its importance was unspeakable. Words hadn't yet been invented to talk about it. What now filled her was understood through a long chain of lucidity that would break if she spoke about any single link. Nothing, yet everything, had changed.

The stranger sitting on the bank was no exception- he also glowed from the inside. She could feel both his kindness and his sorrow radiating from his face- feel it as her own. But she couldn't explain.

Lenses Through which to View the Universe

1. The 'Handful of Sand' in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us- these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road- aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of [details] we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

__________________

at any given moment in time, your conceptions/physiological reactions to a situation can be altered. your perception is a mere slice of the various possible realities. It is malleable. it's just a matter of scooping up a different handful of sand. when you feel discouraged or frustrated or defeated, remember: these feelings are fragments of ONE, SINGLE handful of sand amidst ...an infinite, boundless landscape of awareness. what blissful freedom it is to realize that you dictate your own reality.

when one believes his/her handful of sand to be the whole of reality, there is disorder and disease. in this culture, it manifests as sacrificing ecosystems (i.e. life), relationships, and balance to maintain a story, to maintain a grip of this handful of sand. the next phase in human consciousness is arriving: releasing these grains of sand and exchanging them for something new.


2.  Loving Unconditionally

Love everything the way it is. The universe is perfect in every way; it only needs your unconditional acceptance and love to manifest itself as what it really is: the beautiful, essential relationships of beingness. Be free in your head, act out of love, and do what feels good. There is no action that is always right or wrong: the only true variable is the love with which you act. As you open your awareness, life will improve of itself, you won't even have to try.

The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at ever moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people- eternal life. It is not possible for one person to see how far another is on the way; the Buddha exists in the robber and dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin. During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman. Therefore, it seems to me that everything that exists is good- death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding; then all is well with me and nothing can harm me. I learned through my body and soul that is was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it.

Siddartha, Hermann Hesse

____________

Love as much as you can from wherever you are. You may not want to love what you feel or see, you may not be able to convince yourself that you could love at all. But just decide to love it. Say out loud that you love it, even if you don't believe it. And say, 'I love myself for hating this.' 

Love it the way it is. The way you see the world depends entirely on your own vibration level. When your vibration changes, the whole world will look different. It's like those days when everyone seems to be smiling at you because you feel happy. The way to raise your vibration level is to feel more love. Start by loving your negative feelings, your own boredom, dullness, and despair. You take yourself with you wherever you go. As they say in Zen: If you can't find it where you're standing, where do you expect to wander in search of it? The direction of change is this: getting deeper into what you are, where you are, like turning up the volume on the amplifier.

Love yourself. Much of what we think of as ourselves- our bodies, our minds, our emotions- involves billions of other beings. When you love your self you are in truth expanding in love into many other beings. And the more loving your are, the more loving the beings within and around you. In another sense, loving yourself is a willingness to be in the same space with your own creations. How contracted would you become if you try to withdraw from your own ideas?

-The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, Thaddeus Golas

___________

God is Love. And Love must love. And to love there must be a Beloved. But since God is Existence infinite and eternal there is no one for Him to love but Himself. And in order to love Himself He must imagine Himself as the Beloved whom He as the Lover imagines He loves.

Beloved and Lover implies separation. And separation creates longing; and longing causes search. And the wider and the more intense the search the greater the separation and the more terrible the longing.

When longing is most intense separation is complete, and the purpose of separation, which was the Love might experience itself as Lover and Beloved, is fulfilled; and union follows. And when union is attained, the Lover knows that he himself was all along the Beloved whom he loved and desired union with; and that all the impossible situations that he overcame were obstacles which he himself had placed in the path to himself.

To attain union is so impossibly difficult because it is impossible to become what you already are! Union is nothing other than knowledge of oneself as the Only One.

- The Everything and the Nothing, Meher Baba


3. The 'Surrender' in Power of Now and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

Q:    You mentioned "surrender" a few times. I don't like that idea. It sounds somewhat fatalistic. If we always accept the way things are, we are not going to make any effort to improve them. It seems to me what progress is all about, both in our personal lives and collectively, is not to accept the limitations of the present but to strive to go beyond them and create something better. How do you reconcile surrender with changing things and getting things done?


  Response:

To some people, surrender may have negative connotations, implying defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of life, becoming lethargic, and so on. True surrender, however, is something entirely different. It does not mean to passively put up with whatever situation you find yourself in and to do nothing about it. Nor does it mean to cease making plans or initiating positive action.

Surrender is the simple but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is. Inner resistance is to say "no" towhat is, through mental judgment and emotional negativity. It becomes particularly pronounced when things "go wrong," which means that there is a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of your mind and what is. That is the pain gap. If you have lived long enough, you will know that things "go wrong" quite often. It is precisely at those times that surrender needs to be practiced if you want to eliminate pain and sorrow from your life. Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects you with Being. Resistance is the mind.

Surrender is a purely inner phenomenon. It does not mean that on the outer level you cannot take action and change the situation. In fact, it is not the overall situation that you need to accept when you surrender, but just the tiny segment called the Now.

For example, if you were stuck in the mud somewhere, you wouldn't say: "Okay, I resign myself to being stuck in the mud." Resignation is not surrender. You don't need to accept an undesirable or unpleasant life situation. Nor do you need to deceive yourself and say that there is nothing wrong with being stuck in the mud. No. You recognize fully that you want to get out of it. You then narrow your attention down to the present moment without mentally labeling it in any way. This means that there is no judgment of the Now. Therefore, there is no resistance, no emotional negativity. You accept the "isness" of this moment. Then you take action and do all that you can to get out of the mud. Such action I call positive action. It is far more effective than negative action, which arises out of anger, despair, or frustration. Until you achieve the desired result, you continue to practice surrender by refraining from labeling the Now.

Non-surrender hardens your psychological form, the shell of the ego, and so creates a strong sense of separateness. The world around you and the people in particular come to be perceived as threatening. The unconscious compulsion to destroy others through judgment arises, as does the need to compete and dominate. Even nature becomes your enemy and your perceptions and interpretations are governed by fear. The mental disease that we call paranoia is only a slightly more acute form of this normal but dysfunctional state of consciousness.

Not only your psychological form but also your physical form- your body- becomes hard and rigid through resistance. Tension arises in different parts of the body, and the body as a whole contracts. The free flow of life energy through the body, which is essential for its healthy functioning, is greatly restricted. Bodywork and certain forms of physical therapy can be helpful in restoring this flow, but unless you practice surrender in your everyday life, those things can only give temporary symptom relief since the cause- the resistance pattern- has not been dissolved. There is something within you that remains unaffected by the transient circumstances that make up your life situation, and only through surrender do you have access to it. It is your life, your very Being- which exists eternally in the realm of the present.

If there is no action you can take to improve an unsatisfactory life situation, and you cannot remove yourself from the situation either, then use the situation to make yourself go more deeply into surrender, more deeply into the Now, more deeply into Being. When you enter this timeless dimension of the present, change often comes about in strange ways without the need for a great deal of doing on your part. Life becomes helpful and cooperative. If inner factors such as fear, guilt, or inertia prevented you from taking action, they will dissolve in the light of your conscious presence.
Would you choose unhappiness? If you did not choose it, how did it arise? What is its purpose? Who is keeping it alive? You say that you are conscious of your unhappy feelings, but the truth is that you are identified with them and keep the process alive through compulsive thinking. All that is unconscious. If you were conscious, that is to say totally present in the Now, all negativity would dissolve almost instantly. It could not survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence. You keep your unhappiness alive by giving it time. That is its lifeblood. Remove time through intense present-moment awareness and it dies. But do you want it to die? Have you truly had enough? Who would you be without it?


4. Residing in the Realm of Quantum Realities

What a journey it is to realize that you are creating the external reality before you. Your brain is receiving these sensory signals (taste, touch, smell, hearing, sight, etc.) and transforming these signals- electrical pulses that travel along neural fibers- into a comprehensible, palatable perception/insight of reality. This is an understanding that we can relate to given our limited capacity to grasp the full extent of what is (taking n dimensions of reality and filtering it down into n-1 dimensions). You are literally creating the world. Every vibrant shade of color, every ripple of sound, every subtle scent, every nuanced texture is manufactured within your self (both culturally and biologically created self) and generated as your own 'reality tunnel'. We are not operating in some unfamiliar, alien world of uncertainty- this world is indeed you and you are indeed it.

See:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVC0FcSRxL8 (Robert Anton Wilson on subjectivity of reality)


5.    Seeing yourself as the Universe and the Universe as You.

This is a stone, and within a certain length of time it will perhaps be soil and from the soil it will become plant, animal or man. Previously I should have said: This stone is just a stone; it has no value, it belongs to the world of Maya, but perhaps because within the cycle of change it can also become man and spirit, it is also of importance. That is what I should have thought. But now I think: This stone is stone; it is also animal, God and Buddha. I do not respect and love it because it was one thing and will become something else, but because it has already long been everything and always is everything. I love it just because it is a stone, because today and now it appears to me as a stone. I see value and meaning in each on of its fine markings and cavities, in the yellow, in the gray, in the hardness and the sound of it when I knock it, in the dryness or dampness of its surface. There are stones that feel like oil or soap, that look like leaves or sand, and each one is different and worships Om in its own way; each one is Brahman. At the same time it is very much stone, oily or soapy, and that is just what pleases me and seems wonderful and worthy of worship.

Stone becomes soil; earth becomes flesh and bone; flesh becomes soil again- everything existing as a continuous cycle of unified matter and consciousness, constantly dying and becoming reborn as the same fundamental entities. Life is like a flowing river-all is everlasting, perpetuating itself and manifesting as distinct but similar parts... unique undulations and patterns in an infinite, unyielding mosaic of cohesiveness and oneness. As Bill Hicks says, "All matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration; we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves."

Type 'Alan Watts' into Youtube.






"But I will say no more about it. Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another."- Siddartha