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=4dpRPTwsKJs (On Quantum Theory)

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk2DeTet98o&feature=related (Waking Life trailer)

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

Beauty in Language

Why will you take by force what you may have quietly by love?

-Powhatan

Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,

We fell them down and turn them into paper,

That we may record our own emptiness.

-Kahlil Gibran

Lens of Scientific Materialism

What do the rational, mechanistic, objective tenets of science have to do with violence and social unrest? Sure science has given us incredible machines and technologies that have compressed space and time beyond basic human capacities. But through the rationality of scientific methods and industrial age, we have also developed certain lenses through which we view the world. Capitalism and governments are results of scientific rationality. Education is an outgrowth of mechanistic objectivities that presume all children learn in the same ways, according to some predetermined model. ‘If all matter is fundamentally identical, then, put through identical experiments (“education”), it should turn out identical.’ Why are we surprised all children don’t excel in the same environment? Since the birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago (probably before), we have been struggling to control an infinitely diverse reality (nature) with dogmatic efforts to ‘finitize’ the world and subdue it with scientific rationality- a tool simply made up by this culture. We didn’t discover the laws of the universe; we saw what every species has seen for millions of years and called it something different. And for what benefit? Today’s society is the most unequal in the history of the planet (both between humans and between species [with humanity subjecting all other species to its audacious quests of ‘progress’ and ‘enlightenment’. ]). 2% of the population owning 50% of (what all culture calls) “resources” is NOT progress. There are more slaves today that EVER before. 90% of original forests are GONE, and ½ of all waterways are undrinkable. This is not enlightenment. We’ve gotten more ‘intelligent’, yet all the more ignorant of how to live without destroying one’s own habitat. ‘But we can make changes to the system; we can create technology to cover up our mistakes; we can turn the rain on and off; we can live in bubble cities not subject to the uncontrollable elements; we can cure all diseases, and finally, conquer nature once and for all.’ This is the dubious ‘Ascent of Humanity,’ the quest of modern science and technology to control, rather than form relationships [symbiotic and interdependent] that value the Earth for what it is: a living, breathing organism that gives us life. Depression rates increase every year; violence increases every year; social unrest is becoming more acute- all in the shadow of this ‘progress;’ all in the shadow of these ideologies of rationality that disparage the sacredness of the world and transform it into a sanitized laboratory. But… we’re only looking through one microscope. What we see and feel depends on what we believe. It is through these ‘belief templates’ that we truly do create our reality. We can change it whenever we want. When one template begins to create suffering- that spans across ALL species- it’s time to change the template. Do you believe that LOVE is a mere chemical reaction between ‘neurons’ in the brain?

Subjectivities and Culture

From the moment we are born into this culture (and any culture), we are fed a story. This story informs us about everything; indeed the very nature of existence. To fail to acknowledge this is to be blind to reality (the only true reality is that there IS NO objectively true reality). Robin Anton Wilson has said that true intelligence can be defined has taking a step back from one’s conventional reality tunnel, and merely being aware of it- the majority of human beings rarely discover this awareness, and live their entire lives confined to one reality tunnel. Underneath the dogmatic disapproval and condemnation of psychoactive substances by Western authorities, lies a powerful source of love, passion, understanding, awareness, and insight. This source has been deeply respected and experienced by most indigenous groups for hundreds of thousands of years. Adolescent psychedelic quests/journeys are very common in these aboriginal tribes; children discover themselves, and their own interpretation of existence, at a very young age. After all, at the age of nine years old, most indigenous children are capable of independent survival (no needs from adults).  Psilocybin fungi, peyote cacti, ergot derivatives, Ayahuasca, and various other natural plants, are invaluable spiritual elements within today’s detached, isolating, and disoriented culture. Within our living systems (political, educational, social, etc.), the pace and velocity is ever accelerating. Institutional schooling (which was initially created during the Industrial Revolution to ‘produce’ robotically identical, mechanized, automated workers) indoctrinates children at a very early age into believing this culture’s story- a story of scarcity, survival anxiety (get a job and work in a glass/metal cage for 9 hours a day to receive green pieces of paper), fear, and illusion. Human beings ensnared in Western life (today, about 98% of world population) usually never get a chance to truly identify themselves, to locate their inner ‘beingness’ and underlying passion. As briefly highlighted in “Thoughts”, before entry into adulthood, children emanate a universal life energy that is squandered when they are told to “mature” and “grow up”. Psychoactive plants infuse this life energy back into the soul. It’s like being reborn again into the magic of life- a transformation in consciousness occurs. This metamorphosis is not at all alien or unfamiliar. Actually, quite the opposite. It’s like returning to a warm, intimately known reality that was, until now, a dormant fragment of consciousness waiting to emerge. This feeling and way of being has been smothered and inundated for so long by what Daniel Quinn calls, ‘Mother Culture’, that sometimes we forget that it’s always there, and it’s always BEEN there.

Revolutionary Recommendations

Here are some things that I do, have done, or know people that do...Many of these things have profoundly impacted my life, and I love to share cool things that I find, so that others may experience them too, so here are a few awesome things, that you may explore, experiment, and experience;

Revolutionary Recommendations




1. “The Three Seeds” – An amazing essay by Charles Eisenstein which allows us to see the profound changes in our world from a different perspective: http://www.realitysandwich.com/three_seeds



2. Go wwoofing! http://www.wwoof.org/



3. Read “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle. This book is packed with life-changing spiritual teachings explained in a very easy to understand way.



4. Wish random people a Happy “day of the week”



5. Meditate daily; I recommend sitting in a semi-comfy chair with back straight. Putting your feet so the sides are touching and the palm of your hands atop each other with the thumbs touching. I like to repeat “Hummmm” (similar to OM) and also feel the energy in my body.



6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKdN8cfc1ak Watch this Terence Mckenna video in full screen mode



7. Look into a child’s eyes, and imagine what type of world we are creating for our coming generations. Then, take action accordingly…



8. Join a Transition Town in your area or create a new one!



9. Visit an Eco-village or permaculture site near you, or start one with some friends. http://www.permies.com/



10. Use the power of intention and affirmations to create the world you want to live in.



11. http://www.realitysandwich.com/invisible_paths Read this phenomenal essay by Charles Eisenstein which explains the feelings we often have living amidst a crazy world.



12. Fast for a day, and/or stay awake for an entire day, and then watch the sunrise in nature.



13. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UA0FSFABmw watch this full screen



14. If you would like more recommendations of cool things, I made a video compiling many more than these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKkWyL2euPg