just be it Just Be It is a practice of presence that recognizes the limits of language. When aware of silence there is a state of inner still alertness. You are wholeheartedly present.

From where does my action or seeming inaction come from?  If I perceive threat from another desiring me to conform to their desire, what’s the shape of my resistance or allowance?  How can I cause the least harm to them as me or me as them?  In all instance, when my wisdom to act arises from the heart there’s a strong chance for positive result.  Contrarily, when I react from fear, or when my non-doing is fear based, the result is more likely to have an unpleasant result.

Are there any guarantees?  Absolutely not.  Yet, when we commit to the process of love and awakened ‘doing’ outside the realm of duality, we find that compassion and deeper listening are keys to diffusing potential threat.  This dedication to our interdependence upon one another sponsors our courage to show up, pay attention in awakened doing, responsibly do our best, and most importantly, to be easy on ourselves when things don’t turn out as we expected.

This is learning to live a life of love without grasping.  It’s knowing the elements support us…the ground, air, water, and fire.  It’s knowing there’s someone else inside of us that carries the wisdom of loving action, in harmony and rhythm to the flow of life.  The residence for this wisdom is in the heart, not the head or stomach.  Some have called this nonviolent mindfulness.  It’s a space of compassion,  where when I look in your eyes I experience me.  It’s a space of forgiveness, where I’m open to the completeness of the arising moment, no matter what comes up.  It’s a space of gratitude, where I’m forever aware that this form I carry is gift and all moments are surprise and gifts arising.

September 15, 2009

So what’s up?  What’s ‘the action’?  What’s the story?  Moving down the river of life, the journey of discovery and deepening takes many turns.  The challenge seems to be found in my dedication to cultivate awareness to the birthing of each moment’s arising.  In a universe filled with distraction, with attempts from others to draw us from our heart’s authority, with the challenges of our restlessness…this is not easy.

It now seems more clear that the quality of my life, the story I bring, sources from ‘feeling’.  The feeling births thought.  The thought births emotion, the blend of feeling and thought.  This is what fuels my action.  The action seems to build my story and character, which contributes to soul’s destiny, once again bringing me full circle to the ‘feeling’.  A healthy practice would revolve around dedication to feeling of well-being.  A sense of interconnection, or core being, births feelings of joy, compassion and gratitude.  This seems healthy food for combating the arising of negative feelings from our struggles with impermanence and uncertainty.  I lose my grounding when caught in my notions of ‘belief’, thinking I’m right.  Negative feelings feed a need for action to change what is to what I think ‘should’ be.  Moving from fear and insecurity I’m at risk to injure others in my attempts to persuade and ‘fix’.  Moving from positive feelings of compassion, I just ‘am’.

Silence is integral to this practice.  My head is continually filled with thought.  Thought corrupts genuine feeling, racing here and there.  Undisciplined thought has gotten me into much trouble, many times resulting in action I wish I hadn’t taken.  Yet, when the gap between thought is cultivated to the deeper sense of connection with everything, my needs to persuade, defend, fight, and judge dissipate.  This silence gives me strength to stand solid in the experience of uncertainty.  Strong in this space of silence, I’m now ready to listen.  The listening is to my heart, to the deeper message from others, and to mindfully observe thought’s arising in preparation to skillful action.

In this dedication to awareness within the silent moment, I’m ready to step outside that with which I identify.  Purpose and meaning remain.  Attachment to what I’ve done and what’s accumulated dissipates.  The real work is found in dedicating to a practice aimed to deepen awareness in gratitude for the opportunity to participate.

Today I’m fifty-nine years old.  In one year I may have lived long enough to carry the wisdom of a baby elder.  At this stage, I know my life’s easier the less I say.  My work is to hold joy.  My aim is to hold true to my heart’s authority in the face of those who exert force to get me to violate it, to deepen my practice in meeting the magic of the moment, to touch the surprise of the familiar, and to forever drill deeper as I journey the river of life in honor and respect to everyone’s varied journey.

When our doing is grounded in Being, it comes from the heart.  So much of authentic living is our attempt to move from ego’s draw to thought and doing from the head.  When our doing is from the heart, it’s from positive feeling and our deep listening to the moment’s call.  Listening to the mind, thoughts are caught within time and space, drawing us to actions associated with belief systems, achievement, accomplishment, recognition from others and the material.  We’re further drawn to what we identify with at the risk of missing the heart’s draw.  So where is your ‘doing’ coming from?  When it’s from the heart, no harm is done.  When it’s from the head we risk a disconnection from heart’s ‘knowing

Life’s spiritual journey seems to tie to our capacity and willingness to join larger circles of belonging.  When I stop in my sense of righteousness, I’ve stunted my depth.  When I open in my willing curiosity, to both the light and the dark as one, the journey deepens.  The strength I have, the dedication made, to embracing this present moment, no matter what, directly relates to the quality of this life experience.

The other night I witnessed a woman stand up and start dancing in front of an amazing live band.  No one else was dancing and few were even moving.  Yet, she had the courage to engage with movement.  I commended her on her courage later on.  Expecting the typical surface interchange, she looked me in the eye and said she was soon to be seventy years old.  I found her attractive, even though her face wore the evidence of years of living.  She then said something that was hard not to react to.  She said she wish she would have died when she was fifty.  I chuckled, thinking a joke punch line was coming and she focused on me and  said, “No, seriously, I really wish I had died when I was fifty.”  My mind filled with judgment.  At that moment I wanted to slap her and say, “How dare you?”   I didn’t, and politely listened to her rant about her miserable life.  Here was a mobile, attractive woman, out dancing on a beautiful evening in June, and the first thing she could say to a complete stranger was, “I wish I were dead.  I’ve been wishing this for twenty years.”  I now wish I would have given her a hug and invited her back to this precious present moment.  I’m filled with mercy for her.  Her pain is mine and somehow the invitation to our bigger belonging hurts, yet fills me with a stronger, larger YES to this gift of big belonging.

I wish someone would have taught me the Second Law of Thermodynamics when I was in grade school.  It’s really not that difficult to understand and states, “Energy spontaneously tends to flow only from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused or dispersed and spread out.” The ‘big deal’ about this is that, “all types of energy spread out like the energy in a hot pan (unless somehow they’re hindered from doing so) They don’t tend to stay concentrated in a small space; they flow toward becoming dispersed if they can — like electricity in a battery or a power line or lightning, wind from a high pressure weather system or air compressed in a tire, all heated objects, loud sounds, water or boulders that are high up on a mountain, your car’s kinetic energy when you take your foot off the gas. All these different kinds of energy spread out if there’s a way they can do so.”  Frank Lambert has fully elaborated on this law at  HYPERLINK http://secondlaw.oxy.edu/   It’s a law that helps us accept the natural tendency for people, animals, elements and all things to disperse energy and break down.

This law explains scientifically why we ‘tend’ to engage in behavior that may not be healthy.  It can explain our tendency to not follow those instructions we know are healthy for us.  We can speed our ‘entropy’ through ingestion of toxic foods or drink, drugs, smoking, mindless TV, sexual misconduct, stealing, war and violence or any other number of common addictions.  Or we can slow the dispersion of energy by ‘practicing’ the teachings common to most ancient wisdom.  By slowing our disintegration we actually speed our evolution to a higher being. Interestingly, this process requires ‘action’, the application of certain ancient laws that have been passed down through the ages.  So what are these laws?

Perhaps the best test of whether an action was destructive or health promoting is a review from the future.  We place our actions in a higher level of consciousness when we project forward, concluding we’d take the actions again if given the chance.  It means our actions will carry integrity when we pause to project into the future an image of our satisfaction just prior to initiating the action.  With this increased consciousness we move from our lower self and inhibit actions stimulated from negative emotion.  Ancient wisdom often directs us to take actions on our neighbor as though that same action were to be taken upon ourselves (The Golden Rule).  The main Law of Huna wisdom states that the action must be done for the best interest of all concerned with no harm to anyone.  All ancient wisdom stresses the “practice” of gratitude and forgiveness, yet we continue to destroy ourselves and one another through our lack of appreciation and our inability to let grudges go.

Actually, the truth test on whether an action inhibits entropy can be found in whether it’s “working” or “not working”.  Clearly, fear and anger have shown to never be effective except when one’s immediate physical well being is threatened.

Universal wisdom shows that ‘what we put attention to grows stronger’, so if we put our attention to ‘dis-ease’ and wishes to return to ‘normal’, we’ll grow our ‘dis-ease’.  If we put our attention to ‘wellness’ and those actions that promote health, we’ll grow in gratitude to health.  There are entire communities where elderly people recite their health ailments like a daily mantra.  As a society dedicated to ‘comfort’, ‘ease’ and ‘pleasure’, we’ve been raised outside the power in “use it or loose” function.  Without proper body use we’ve grown to a nation of obesity.  Our addiction to TV, computer games, spectator sports, gambling and other forms of ‘mindless’ consumption has resulted in the speeding up of our energy dispersion…of the entropy of a nation.

The solution to the natural pull of entropy is in “the practice” of the ancient laws.  Belief systems and thoughts without disciplined practice only hasten entropy.  When all ancient spiritual teaches direct us to reverence for life, why do we continue to war with one another?  When wisdom tells us conflict resolution comes only from love and listening to one another, why do we hold to the ‘belief’ that our security will come from weapons and war?  When we know our children’s happiness can always be sourced to gratitude, why do we not teach our children to say ‘thank you’ as a stimulus to their happiness?  When we know all grudges must be ‘cleared’ for health, why do we continue to prevent our healing?  When we know drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, fatty foods, sugar and heavily processed foods hasten our entropy, why do we continue to destroy our bodies with them?

It  boils down to ‘conscious’ living.  Do the actions we take hasten or slow the natural tendency for things to disperse energy?  It’s about ‘awareness’.  Perhaps the biggest steps we can take to slow our entropy would be regular meditation, exercises for strength, flexibility, and endurance, mindful consumption, and a disciplined practice to ‘review our actions’ with full consciousness before we take them. In the tradition of Hawaiian Huna, our actions either build positive or negative energy.  They promote positive speech, frequent contact with nature, gratitude and forgiveness, and harm to none with service to others.  When we’re uncertain it behooves us to ‘wait’, clear our thoughts and direct our request for clarity from the heart.

Good morning, good night.

Dear Heart, from which the Divine Arises

We acknowledge the precious Nature of the Divine, in all of its manifestations

In full appreciation to the power of Divine intention

We pause in wonder at the gifts of the moment…this daily bread of opportunity to participate…to belong…to breath in recognizing we’re alive…to breath out in full smile for this gift and our responsibility to contribute to the health and care of this life, individually, within the family and throughout the community.

Heart is filled with happiness as our gratitude grows for this gift of opportunity

Within our acceptance of impermanence we find capacity to ‘let go’ attachment to negative thinking as we learn to forgive others as we would have them forgive us

With our ‘arrival’ to deep understanding and love we find the discipline, courage and power to live mindfully…beyond temptation to destroy, to violence and ingestion of those substances and actions that are toxic in nature.  We take great care to live life in wonder, nurturing the positive seeds of happiness, hope, love, peace and harmony as we participate in the healing of the universe in honor to the Divine, clearly listening to the voice of the Heart in our pursuit to live deeply for great enjoyment in responsibility to others….beyond notions of birth and death, being and non-being, right and wrong, existence and nonexistence.  Breathing in we silently scream “yes” in affirmation to life.  Breathing out we silently say “thank you” for this gift.  Amen.  12/01/03

Hmmmmm?

We enter the mystery of life, and spend a great deal of time attempting to make sense from our universe.  With this in mind, it can be helpful to distinguish our beliefs, our faith, and what we accept through consensus learning.  We try to organize our world through language and just how we structure our thoughts can have a very profound effect on our relationship with others and our universe.  This is why ancient Toltec wisdom suggests we be impeccable with our words.  Brother David Steindl Rast suggests we go through the following exercise before we speak:  a. What do I mean?, b. How do I know (suggesting that if it’s not through direct experience, keep silent), and c. Even when it is knowing from direct experience, so what?  Such honest appraisal of our expression brings us to a humility and openness seldom found, but so deeply craved for in our ‘right’ vs. ‘wrong’ knowing universe.  Greg Braden speaks to this in his book The Spontaneous Healing of Belief.  He sites a runner who’s had direct successful experience in completing several marathons.  When asked if he believes he can do it again, he replies, “I believe I can do this”.  It’s based on his past experience.  Yet, what happens when the questioner adds new information, saying it’ll be run at 14,000’?  The belief weakens with the introduction of uncertainty outside of past experience.  While he doesn’t have direct experience with this, he still may have faith that he can do it.  His assumptions and possibly second hand information and inference from others may strengthen his faith.  He could sample run at 14,000’ and add some objective information that would strengthen or weaken his faith.  Yet, his belief can’t be fully substantiated until he actually runs the entire race at that elevation.

This dilemma is perhaps most evident in our various global faiths about what happens when we die.  There’s simply no scientifically documented account from a human who left their body for several days and then came back to tell us what happens.  Each religion carries myth and ritual and various traditions feed the faith of their followers.  The belief in ‘knowing’ what happens when we leave our bodies is not based on direct experience.   It’s based on faith in second hand information.  It’s not based on common consensus from documented scientific study.  This brings us to one of life’s most perplexing issues.  How do we determine truth in matters of deep mystery?  Over the centuries, those wielding the most power dictated societal ‘truth’.  Whether accurate or not, the person in the most powerful office could simply command authority of belief over those subjected under him/her.  This parental attitude of “Because I say so” seems to be dramatically challenged in this day of rapid change.  It begs us to all examine the nature of authority and decision making.

The Program for a New American Century played a huge influence in the Bush administration’s belief that it had world dominant authority to take offensive actions against other nations.  It forces us to examine where authority to intervene in another nation’s affairs comes from, particularly when it’s from a preemptive attitude rather than from a retaliatory position.  America intervened with a belief about what’s best for government in the Middle East. It did so without the consensus belief from other nations. Today, as we face governments that appear intent on gaining power through means of threat, we come to question the alternative to the Bush doctrine of force without consensus from the global community.  

We’re also at pivotal points in consensus belief in key issues dealing with personal freedoms.  Exactly when does the soul/personality enter the human form?  Just as we’re learning more and more about what happens when form leaves, we’re also learning more and more about how soul comes into form.  These insights from quantum physics have more congruency to ancient spiritual wisdom and conflict dramatically with the old dualistic paradigm and authority dictated from various religious organizations.  Issues of abortion, gay rights, capital punishment, preemptive war, and gun control, etc., continue to draw billions of dollars from various church and political organizations attempting to sway community consensus on these issues of belief.  Real attempts to steward the health of a nation are often sidetracked by these issues of belief and the emotive fights that ensue around them.

Society’s greatest challenge is to hold peace in these areas of uncertainty, as consensus assigns authority, yet holds an open mind to ever changing information and conditions.  As we look at the harm done from holding beliefs of bias against race, gender and religion, we can see the dramatic evolution in changing mindsets with an accelerated change in landscape.  The dominant consensus for authority in the executive branch of government was to give authority to a man of color, intelligence, and apparent sincere desire to collaborate.  This is a tremendous shift in orientation from the forceful Bush approach of “Because I say so”.  There’s willingness to open to participation from others.  There’s recognition that our global community is changing at a pace never before experienced and creative input from all corners will be invited.

Are we finally coming to a shift in how we determine our acceptance of belief?  Can we move beyond antiquated notions that things don’t change?  Can we accept the scientific facts of entropy…that energy disperses?  Can we recognize the now scientifically documented belief that everything is connected, everything affecting everything?  Can we finally move to that space where we once again touch the commands of all ancient spiritual traditions…the command to act with others with the knowledge that we are each other?  Can we move beyond forceful authoritative stances of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and start dedicating our resources to exploring deeper questions?  In effect, can we move from persuasive monologue to open listening and dialog?  Can we move from our strategies of cleverness from the mind to actions from the heart?

It’s my contention that when we openly move to actions from the heart we touch divine authority.  When we can surrender our beliefs and fixed notions of ‘knowing’ to the deeper collaborative circle, God provides the healing response.

Peace is an ongoing practice.  My fixed notions of belief jeopardize peace.  Whenever I stand in judgment of another’s sense of ‘knowing’ I jeopardize peace.  In practice, my most responsible approach to peace may be to simply question my perceived adversary with the question of, “So where do you find the authority of your belief?”  This may then be followed with, “So where do you find the authority to command that I believe what you believe?”  In matters that are not solidly founded in scientific research, the only response may be to defer to the laws of the land as voted upon by the people.  In dictatorships, the people have this freedom taken from them.  At this point a higher global authority needs to be invited in.  And so we struggle with our Rowanda’s, Serbia’s, Darfur’s, Sri Lanka’s, and Burmas.

I’ve personally had years of conflict with adversaries holding different beliefs about our agreements.  They employ tactics of anger, intimidation and threat to encourage acceptance of their belief system.  My most successful response is to non-emotionally hold to the question of authority.  Simply put, “From where do you find your authority to make the demands you do?”

It’s like they say the sky is red.  I see the sky as green.  Our judicial system is set so we all spend thousands of dollars trying to persuade an ‘authority’ that the sky is indeed red or green.  The authority (judge, arbitrator, or jury) then is vested with power to determine the color of the sky.  They have authority to rule from their ‘belief’.  The sky may be blue, however, given the persuasive arguments presented, we have agreed to live by their ruling that the sky is red or green.  Some of life’s greatest pain comes from our later discovery that the sky is indeed blue, even though we live under the belief that it’s red or green.  Certainly, there was a long period of transition before people accepted the notion of a round earth.  Unfortunately, in most legal disputes, we’ll never have the absolute evidence that documents the blue sky.  Without DNA, accurate video recordings of events, etc., we’re asked to rely on the plastic, inaccurate memories of the parties in dispute.  The more we learn of our limitations of memory, the more we discover the lunacy of accepting eye witness reports as factual evidence to be used as sole evidence against another.

It’s a low level vibration that claims truth from the dictum of “Because I say so”.  At higher levels of vibration, we speak of our direct experience (knowing) from the heart.  We listen without judgment, with curiosity to further explore the unknown.  We carry faith that a richer answer will be provided from a deeper collaborative question.  We recognize the pitfalls in taking things personally, in feeding ego’s desire to fixate on an answer, and we drive in deeper courage to face life’s uncertainty.  We recognize the responsibility we have to participate, to show up and pay attention, to do our best to collaborate, and to be at peace in knowing the result is always surprise.

In summary, our deepest gratitude can come from flexibility in our belief system.  Our greatest courage comes from our deepest humility, in forever holding curiosity to another’s sense of knowing and not knowing.  A life dedicated to power accumulation, persuasion, and dominion over the freedoms of others may ultimately turn out to be the most constricting prison imaginable.