The Gift to be Simple

The problem with the secret of life is not that it is too difficult for us to understand but that it is too simple for us to believe in.

We humans are great complexifiers who easily overwhelm ourselves with layers of hedges, doubts and what-ifs.  This is especially true when the ultimates of existence are laid on the table.  We try so hard to be brilliant, profound and comprehensive that we bury ourselves in caveats, quibbles and subtleties.

But, contrary to our ego-driven need to be profound, the rules of the game are simple and they can be simply, if coarsely, expressed.

The world of appearances seems to be overwhelmingly multilayered and complex.  The deeper we dig, the more layers of complexity that we find.  There is no limit to this unfolding of richness on the path of discovery.  This is a case of infinite regression, mirrors mirroring mirrors.  It is a mental game based upon the principle of “seek and ye shall find”.  The process of seeking itself creates the complexity that is “found”.

If, instead of being entranced by appearances, we begin to notice the patterns behind them, appearances become comprehensible without losing any of their richness.  The discovery of Fractals in Chaos Theory is a prime example of this kind of comprehension.

The foundational inspiration for peeling back the layers of reality is the intuition that I am not in the Universe but that the Universe is in me.  I sense that, by modulating awareness, I am able to create the entire Universe that I inhabit.

Each sentient being, each point of awareness, creates an entire universe according to its species or flavor of awareness.  A human universe is not a dolphin universe or a bee universe or a worm universe.  Each species of universe is created by a particular manner of modulating the raw, unfeatured awareness that is the essence of all being.  Each species of awareness is a particular kind of music, a unique flute song, made from the same wind.

The only constant in the experience of living is awareness itself.  If I close my eyes, beneath thoughts and bodily sensations, I find that silent “is-ness” that I know as “me” if I give it any name at all.  I could make the nonsensical statement that, “is is” or, to be more personal, “I am”.  In short, I am aware of being aware.  This has always been so and will always be so.  My constantly changing ego self is inhabited by this unchanging, aware presence, which is constantly awake inside me.

I sense that we all share the same “self”, the same core awareness.

Zoom in from the focus on ultimate reality to the nitty-gritty texture of everyday life.  What we choose to pay attention to determines the nature of our experience of the world.  What we pay attention to determines what happens to us, how our life unfolds, how happy we are, what we “get”.  This is baldly stated but essentially true.  We spend our entire lifetimes figuring out how it works and tinkering with the details. 

The punch line is that we have some ability to choose how we modify awareness in our quirky and personal ways.  Each one of us is unique in the history of the universe.  We are here to compose our personal flute song and voice it with the wind of being.  That is the contribution that each of us makes to eternity.  Once created, nothing is ever lost.

Now it is time to focus on practicalities.

Meditation is spending time in the presence of raw awareness.  That is why it is so nourishing to us.  Meditation is just spending time with our real self.  Meditation is our default state, our silent center.

Controlling what we pay attention to is the way we steer our lives.  What we allow in to our awareness becomes our inner environment, the mental world that we live in.  We can choose heaven.  We can choose hell.  Or, we can visit any of the neighborhoods in between.  The point is that we, each one of us, gets to choose.  We are here on Earth with the ability to do just that.

Setting our intention for how we choose to live will allow us to attract congenial companions and happy outcomes.  “Setting our intention” sounds formal but we, all of us, do it whether we ever think about it or not.  Our temperament, mixed with early conditioning, sets the stage for our likes and dislikes in the world.  These unexamined preferences act as our “intention”.   Once we have reached the age of reason, we can consciously choose our preferred path and thoughtfully set an intention for our lives, or we can choose not to.  Not  choosing is also a choice.  Since we are creators of our personal universe rather than passive consumers of reality, it makes sense to put our order in for what we really prefer.  One outcome is not better than another even though each one of us thinks that our way is the best way or the “right” way.  It is just the way that we personally like best.

The intention that rules our choices will largely control what seems interesting or valuable to us and, therefore, what we want to pay attention to.

These three things, meditation, attention and intention, taken together, become the basis for creating a loving and joy-filled life if that is what you want.  The plan is simple.  To be centered and present is practiced in meditation.  To be careful about where attention is pointed tunes the contents and emotional flavor of daily experience.  To be clear about desires (intention) determines the power and quality of the energy that the individual gives out.  Taken together, these three, presence, input and output create the vibration that attracts matching counterparts to itself.

It is the adventure of a lifetime to compose our own special music.  It may take a lifetime to practice our instrument to learn how to do that well enough but, at all stages, music is being played.

No News is Good News

So many of us are attached to the media storm of news that taking it in seems to be a necessary and normal part of everyday life.  We need to know what’s going on in the world.  Many of us start and end our day with a helping of the latest buzz about events.  It is the basis for conversations with our family, neighbors, co-workers and acquaintances.  It makes us feel connected.  We depend on it.  You might even say that we are addicted to it.  We feel we can’t do without it.

But, what is the news?  It’s somebody’s idea of what is interesting enough in recent human events to grab our attention and hold it long enough to sell us something.  But, what is interesting to us?  Generally things that will hook our emotions for one reason or another.  Especially things that will excite negative emotions like fear, anger, disgust or frustration.  There is a little room for sadness, pity and sentimentality, too.  That’s why the news is packed full of those things.  The stronger the emotion that a story arouses, the more useful it is to hold our attention long enough for us to absorb a sales pitch.  So, the news is a selection of bits of information that are specifically chosen to hook our emotions.  And, our emotions are most powerfully hooked by things that we find disturbing.  Is there any wonder that the news is upsetting to our peace of mind?  Of course not.  It is designed to be that way.

Can you have any real effect on the happenings that are reported in the news?  No, not really.  You are pretty much a passive observer.  You just get to be churned up about things that are not within your ability to effect or have any real contact with.

So, what is the net effect of ingesting all of this emotionally disturbing information?  I would guess that your peace of mind will have taken a hit and that you probably come away with a sour feeling about people and life in general.  If you start your day with this influence, you are getting off on the wrong foot.  If you end your day with it, you are harming the peacefulness of your rest and feeding your nightmares.

But, other than putting you in a bad mood, what harm does this news fascination really do?  In a nutshell, it sets you up for misery in body, mind and spirit.

If you realize that our thoughts create the world that we live in, you will not be so eager to dismiss the effect of chronic negative influences.  It is a law of the universe that what I pay attention to expands.  I get more of it, whatever it is.  My attention is a creative force.  Paying attention to the horror show of news stories guarantees that I will get more of those horrors.  The question is, “do I want that?”  Do I want to live my life soaking in the psychic sewage of the world?  There are consequences.

Until recently, scientists believed that our physical state was largely the result of the genes that we were born with.  Our physical well being was based on the luck of the draw.  That is no longer thought to be the case.  Scientists now believe that environmental factors trigger the expression of our genes.  That environment is mainly our inner environment of thoughts and beliefs.  It is those thoughts and beliefs that orchestrate the expression of our genes and create the physiological condition of our bodies.  Our physical health or lack of health is a product of our beliefs.  In short, we are what we think.

If ingesting news contributes to our thoughts about people, life and the world in general and if the main trend of that influence is negative, we pay a high price for staying informed.  We might want to reconsider our choice.  The news is bad news.

Most People Are Stupid

Most people are stupid.  Some few are born with limited gifts but most are intellectually capable.  Functional stupidity is acquired.  It is achieved through conditioning.  We learn to be stupid, then we live that way, inside the little boxes that we believe are enclosing us.  All of our thoughts and all of the actions that come from our thoughts are kept inside those little boxes.  Those little boxes are our world.  They are real to us.  We never doubt their reality.  We don't realize that we have created them.

The eager, vital, life-seeking organism that is the human infant mind is the recipient of all of the misdirection, dysfunction, confusion and wrongheadedness exhibited in the utterances and behavior of the fellow beings in her environment.  The pristine black velvet of the receptive open mind of youth collects the psychic dust and debris of its human surroundings.  Soon it exhibits the nondescript gray of its emotional environment and another stunted life path is ordained.  This mixed bag of recorded experiences, meticulously stored in the subconscious mind, becomes the operating system of a new life.  It shapes the behavior of the person throughout life.  The pattern is only interrupted by death.  By then, pieces of it have been passed on to new generations so that it persists throughout human history.  There are shifts and changes over time, but basically, humans as a whole remain just as functionally stupid as they have always been.  They stay within their boxes.

What if we could rewrite our own programs, those programs that run invisibly in our subconscious minds and control all of our behaviors?  What if we could re-form our operating system and reshape our lives?  The good news is that we humans are learning to do just that.  We do not have to live inside those little boxes that we have inherited.  We can be the sculptors of our own lives.  To do that, we have to stop running on automatic and put in some effort.  It doesn’t come free.  But, it’s not that hard to do either.  We humans have the ability to tune our lives toward joy and fulfillment.  We can make that choice if we wish.  What an adventure!

If you feel the urge to make positive changes in your life, you could talk to me about it.  I can show you how to begin.

Creation Song

Before time began, before space began, bliss was.  Consciousness was.  Consciousness became an idea.  The idea became an intention.  Consciousness banged the universe into being and time began, space was created and the game was on.  Consciousness expanded.

Eons of time passed as the young universe ballooned, suns coalesced and planets formed.  Life arose and began its long road of evolution.  All of these differentiations were local vibratory tunings of unitary consciousness as the great tapestry unrolled.  The universe and the abundance of forms that make it up are elaborations, articulations and permutations of the one eternal consciousness.  They are all patterns of vibration.  They are generated out of sheer delight, a bravura outpouring of orchestrated, exuberant bliss, the joy of creative self expression.  And so it continues.

Absolute stillness has not existed since time began.  All that is is vibratory in nature.  One so-called “thing” differs from the next only in its frequency of vibration.  A rock vibrates at a lower frequency than a plant.  A plant vibrates at a lower frequency than an animal.  Each representative of each “kingdom”, mineral, vegetable and animal vibrates within a certain band of frequencies.  There can be individual variations within the band.  Within the animal kingdom, humans are capable of the broadest variation of vibratory level.  Depending on a human’s mentality, he or she may vibrate at the level of an earthworm or of an angel or at any point in between.

Humans are the most self conscious of animals.  Humans are conscious that they are conscious.  Humans are learning that they can change their level of consciousness.  They can change their vibratory rate.  When their vibratory rate is changed, the individual’s experience of life is changed.  Perceptually, they live in a different world.  This world-changing is open to choice.   Humans may decide upon the nature of the world they choose to live in.  They have always had this ability but few realized that they did.

It is time to tell a story about human life.

The primal consciousness that some of us call “God” had an idea.  It wanted to experience love.  Love is like tennis, it takes two.  So God banged out a universe and time began.  Eventually, consciousness was manifested in organisms and, finally, in humans.  Consciousness has always been unitary.  There is only one but this one can be playful. It can play hide and seek with itself to experience the pleasure of reunion.  It creates characters from itself and plays are performed so the characters can experience all of the emotions.  It is like an author acting all of the parts of his own play.  At the end of each play, the characters forget the play by dying out of it.  In the green room, the spirits of all of the characters remember the play and what they have learned from it.  They concoct another script based on what they wish to experience and to learn.  They switch roles to accomplish that.  The father might become the baby girl and the mother, the mean uncle.  Then, they lapse into forgetfulness and get born into the new play.  Now, remember that all of the “characters” are really the One.  This One is the recipient of all of the experiences enjoyed by all of the “characters”.  That is the whole point of the game.  It has been going on for eons and it is still fun. (Some deities have a weird sense of humor.)

You and I are two of the characters in this repertory company.  We have chosen the circumstances of our lives to benefit our own spiritual evolution.  In other words, we have set up the stage or playing table to rig the game in favor of our having the experiences that we desire.  Once we have been born into the game, we have free will and the ability to create our own reality within the context of the rigged game.  This is all being done in benevolence.  Remember that we chose it.  There are no victims although some do play villains.  It is all done in love although the whole process may be incomprehensible to humans.  It can be, and often is, a horror show.  It is for me, too.

Obviously, this story is a myth.  A myth is a teaching story.  Its purpose is to communicate principals and broad ideas in ways that the listener can comprehend.  It is told in a cartoon-simple way to dramatize truths.  In a literal sense, it is not true.  In the metaphorical sense, it is.  The ideas to take away from it are these:  The universe consists of consciousness.  This one single field of consciousness manifests as patterns of vibration.  The patterns of vibration are perceived by humans as a world of solid objects and entities.  Humans are conscious of being conscious.  In this, “they are made in the image of God”.  Consciousness can evolve which means it can grow into greater complexity and subtlety.

There is an intention toward the evolution of consciousness at the heart of the universe.  Evolved consciousness is marked by the realization that there is only one and that that one is love which is experienced as bliss.  Before the beginning, there was bliss.  The end game is bliss as the universe crunches back into stillness.  It is a grand adventure that stretches from simple to simple.  But here is the difference.  The child, in her innocence, is simple.  The sage, through her carefully observed experience, attains simplicity.  We call the simplicity of the sage “wisdom”. 

The purpose of creation is the evolution of God.

The Power of I Am

The strong declarative statement “I am” acts like a magical incantation.  Whatever follows it is called into being.  The statement becomes a prophesy about what I expect and believe to be real.  It is a self-fulfilling prophesy.  It is an attractor of whatever it names.

If you say, “I am afraid”, your reward will be to feel more fear.  If you say, “I am sick”, you will experience more sickness.  Anything you name after the incantation, “I am” will come into your experience.  If you state, “I am powerful” or “I am healthy” or “I am happy”, you will attract those attributes as well.  So, be careful where you point your “I am” statements.  They are always loaded.

These statements are not magic.  They are simply focused comments about what is real to you.  The power to attract experiences into you reality does not lie in the words.  It lies within you.  You are the powerful creator of your experiences.  The words merely focus and express your desires.  It is those desires, those expectations, and the emotions that drive them that summon what they name.  That is why fears often manifest so efficiently.  An idea driven by strong emotion is forceful, the stronger the emotion, the greater the force.  The greater the emotional force, the greater the attractive power of the statement.

If you find yourself saying things about yourself that you do not want to materialize, change your statement to something that you do want.  “I am sick” can become, “I am healing”.  “I am afraid” can become, “I am finding the courage”.  Lay claim to whatever you choose to experience. Put your order in for it.  Make it an “I am” statement and confidently expect your intended outcome.  You will get it.

If your “I am” statements merely report your experience of the moment, you will create more of that.  You will still be creating but you will be creating by default and merely creating more of the same, the same, the same.  It is vital that your “I am” statements mirror what you want and not merely what you see.  It is important that you resist the urge to be “realistic” by giving voice to momentary conditions.  If you want to see change, you must claim it with an “I am” statement that names what you want.  Use “I am” to summon what you want rather than to simply report where you are at the moment.

You can do this.  It may take a little practice, but paying attention to your “I am” statements will pay off as your outcomes in life begin to match your deep desires more and more.  It is well worth the effort.  The universe is your mirror.  Choose the reflection that you wish to see.

What's the Difference?

Why bother figuring out what the truth of life is?  Other than satisfying my curiosity, what is it good for?  And, how can I know whether my ideas hold water anyway?  Why not just cut out all of this intellectual theorizing and get on with it?

Here’s what I think.

I want to have a good time while I’m here on the planet.  I want to have the best time that I can have.  I want to feel good.  The best way that I can do that is to know what I’m dealing with so I can make the best moves to get me what I want.  Simple.

I want a map, a nice clear map.  I want to cut down on the wrong turns and get to the good place.

A clear picture of reality is that map.

If my map is good, I’ll find out right away.  If it’s not good, I’ll change it.  It’s my map and I can do what I want with it.  I can fool around with my map until I get to where I want to be.  Even if it’s not perfect, it’s better to have a map than not to.  At the very least, I make better guesses that way.

What about you?

The Future Creates the Present

The common way to think of the continuum of time from past to future is to see it as a directional arrow or a stack of building blocks.  What has been experienced provides the foundation for what is being experienced.  What is being experienced provides the foundation for what will be experienced.  It’s a nice, closed deterministic system and a kind of mental prison.  If I believe in this ladder-like sequence, I am pretty much trapped in an extension of where I have been and where I am now.

It is only my belief in this pattern that makes it real.  If I believe that my future can only be a continuation of my present, I have locked myself into a pattern that seems inevitable.  It feels as if I have no choice but to play out a scenario that is rooted in my present situation which, in turn was rooted in my past situation.  That seems to be the logical result if I believe that I am inevitably thrust into the future by the momentum of past experiences.

This tidy scheme of causality leaves out two essential elements.  One is the element of choice.  The other is the bedrock truth that the present is the only time that exists.  The past is a memory.  The future is a fantasy.  I am conscious now, and only now.  Each new moment of now is full of unlimited potential.  It is not determined by what was unless I choose to believe that it is.

What I expect is what I get.  If I conceive of a radical new future for myself I will steer my present in that direction.  Every expectation will color all of my choices.  My vision of my future will become a self-fulfilling prophesy.  In every potent moment of now I can choose to validate and reinforce my vision of the future and continue to create it or I can shift it to a different one and begin to create that new one.  Every moment is pregnant with possibility if I choose to seize it.  I can continue to watch the same program or I can change the channel to one that I like better.  The point is that I get to choose.  That is how the future creates the present.

Choose a future that your heart desires and be the self that you want to be.  You have that power and you may invoke that power at any moment.  Your life is your own work of art.  Create boldly. Do it now.