I love technology, I always have. I got my first computer back in the early days of computing in 1980 (shit I’ve just dated myself) and was swept away by it from then on. It was the most basic machine compared to today, I was thrilled when I was able to program it to display “Hello World” on my small green and black monitor. I spent over 12 years since then working as a computer systems engineer and in the last few years as a freelance web designer leveraging the power of the web to help people in my community express their vision. My Macbook Pro is one of my most important material possessions. As I’ve walked my path and unfolded the practice of being a more conscious, more fully awake alive person I’ve met many like mined people who demonize technology and point to its evils including its destructive impact on the environment and society and its amplification of modern warfare. Many of them hope for or at least long for a change back to a simpler life. Some people I know even have expressed hopes that somehow our technology will be wiped out (maybe by a solar flare or something) and we’ll have to live without it. I am not one of those people.
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Embracing conscious technology
June 5th, 20112012, the new age rapture?
May 30th, 2011
Are you waiting for the end of the world? The recent prediction of the rapture and end of the world this year by a fundamentalist Christian preacher got me to ask myself that very question. Oh course I didn’t take it seriously because you know they do that all the time don’t they but it also go me thinking about what is behind such predictions. Well there was no rapture but it was surprising how seriously some people took it, even selling their possessions and moving to a ‘safe’ place. It was hard for me to not just write them off as ignorant, gullible and sad but that would be nothing more than my own self important judgement however they may just represent a powerful collective pattern. A pattern that has been going on for millennia. How could I really blame them because life in mainstream society is pretty damn lousy so why wouldn’t people want to let that all go for a life of eternal bliss? I mean you work at a job which even if you like it you have to admit that if you weren’t being paid you wouldn’t be there. Well then theres money which is why most people ‘work’ and you can never seem to get enough of the stuff. But at least theres relationships and love right, bliss, uh kind of but you also get trauma, disappointment and divorce. We’ve got war, we’ve got violence, inequality, a dying environment….yada yada yada….I could fill the entire post with this, it pretty much sucks the big one. So why not have a rapture and leave this cesspool behind for an eternal life of bliss?
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Got compassion?
April 21st, 2011
We hear so much about compassion these days and having practiced in the Buddhist tradition for so many years I’ve been steeped in it. However my perspective on what compassion is and what it means to practice it has changed dramatically as I’ve walked my path. I think its very important to be clear on what we mean by the term compassion because after all its just a word and like many words much misused with all sorts of meanings for different people. For most of my time on the Buddhist path what I thought was compassion was really pity and my own self-importance and that’s what most of what passes for compassion out there is in my view. One of my Buddhist teachers called that idiot compassion. A good deal of people’s efforts to help others (including my own) is not really compassionate but manipulative assuming we know what someone else needs or whats best for them or helping them because the state they are in makes us uncomfortable and we really want them to be different. Suffering people remind us of our own suffering even if its just under the surface so is helping them a way to make them stop reminding us of our own pain? This made me question compassion altogether feeling that maybe its all bullshit and we can’t really be concerned with others at all without in some way manipulating them. I’ve become pretty wary of people who are out there to ‘help’ others.
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Freeing ourselves from problem consciousness
March 31st, 2011Hey! What’s your problem? Have you ever been confronted with that? I have except now I regularly confront myself with that question. You see my life has been filled with problems. In recent years, the problems have appeared to grow bigger and bigger until they have become things that have threatened my very survival. Problems like not having a place to live, not having enough money, problems with my relationships, with what I do for work. Jesus its problems with everything, with life itself. In working with all of this in a very intense way its pushed me to realize a number of things because I’ve had to ask where all these problems are coming from. To answer that question I can project their cause externally which I have done but that has only ever lead to more problems and suffering.
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Walking our own path
February 19th, 2011
As I sit here beginning a week long retreat I embrace the unknown within before I step deeper into the unknown on an outer level. I’m struck by how much there is to let go of in order to truly walk the path of freedom. As human beings we’re conditioned to engage life by holding onto or clinging to ‘things’ (things being anything that can be conceptualized such as relationship, career, money, beliefs, opinions, validation from others, places, community, material things). There is a great cosmic joke in this however since life is a constantly changing flow with nothing to hold onto. Thus you have the suffering of the human condition. Most people who engage some form of spiritual path are familiar with the act of letting go and have probably even put it into practice to some degree. However to walk in freedom requires a complete letting go or the act of letting go in every moment of every concept. Letting go becomes way of directly engaging existence itself and restores life to its natural flow but only when it becomes our primary focus.
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Women in the new paradigm
February 2nd, 2011
As we move further into the new paradigm and further out of the old, one thing I’m repeatedly and intensely struck by is the power of the Divine Feminine and the role its playing in the process of the transformation into the New Earth. The old paradigm has been very much one of the destructive masculine, the manifestation of the masculine when it is disconnected from the feminine and takes the form of reckless ungrounded action. We see that all over the place from war to the destruction of the environment to the totalitarian governments that dominate this planet. The destructive masculine is also dominating because it is disconnected from the the true power of the feminine so we get the subjugation of women and the destruction of mother nature as the disconnected masculine reacts with fear to the very power it so desperately needs, the feminine. Both men and women can embody the destructive masculine although it has been primarily men because of their masculine embodiment.
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The trap of self importance
January 26th, 2011
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from the bow of a ship without ever having felt sorry for itself. ~D.H. Lawrence
In Buddhist terms the root of human suffering is our belief and investment in a non-existent self. We take ourselves to be solid, real and substantial even the center of our individual universe yet the reality of what we are is fluid, changing, insubstantial and interconnected with everything else. We work very hard to maintain this sense of self and suffering results because we can never fully secure this fragile illusion since it is in conflict with reality. We become obsessed with this self which requires so much work to maintain. It always seems to be threatened by something which makes the world seem incredibly cruel and dangerous leading to self pity, our poor self can never seem to get a break and even when it does it doesn’t seem to last.
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The tension of the opposites
January 22nd, 2011
As I dredge up deeper and deeper “stuff” to work with on my path I’ve recently gotten into a place where I’m dealing with some of my most core issues involving relationship, money and work and addiction. The last couple of months have been difficult because I’ve noticed myself bouncing back and forth between extremes with these processes. For example with my work I seem to either be in a state where I am working very hard and making money but quickly getting burned out and exhausted by the struggle or I’m in a space where I’m overcome by lack and not really able to get much work done. With relationship this has manifested as going through intense periods of dating where I’m consumed by sexual energy and romantic feelings leaving me depleted or I avoid romantic connection all together and focus on my work and my path leaving this aspect of life ignored and relegated to the unconscious.
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Fear and Power
January 8th, 2011
We’ve all felt fear many times in our lives and its one of the most powerful emotions. It can cause us to take the most extreme actions and it can paralyze us leaving us unable to act at all. The usual response to fear is to flee, whether its running away from a dangerous situation or avoiding an activity which brings up fear in us. While it makes sense to flee from a truly dangerous situation in the moment, most of our fear does not have to do with any real or immediate danger. Most of the fear we experience is entirely in the mind. Running away from or avoiding this kind of fear leads to one of the most common and most destructive states a human being can be in, disempowerment.
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Breaking open the wound, becoming a warrior
December 30th, 2010
I recently had an intense insight into the core of my process of feeling like a worthless and undeserving human being. We had a holiday gathering where many members of our community came together to celebrate and infuse some light into the field. As the evening progressed we moved from socializing and partying into a dream circle, a place to share and get reflection on our processes which is part of what our community is based on. I was really enjoying the evening with my dear friends and had no intention of sharing or getting to anything in particular, was just flowing with the moment.
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Living in the moment free of the illusion of time
December 24th, 2010
Have you ever stopped and considered what this thing we call time is and what role it plays in your life? Well I have and the results of that contemplation have changed my life. You see, the more I contemplate time the more I realize that it doesn’t exist in and of itself. It is man made or rather mind made. As I sit here writing this the clock on my computer reads 10:38pm but that is just the play of light and patterns on a computer screen, a collection of numbers for my mind to interpret in some way. Is time just the read-out on a clock? No matter what time the clock says I always look at it now. We normally think of time in terms of its measurements; years, months, days, weeks, hours and minutes. These however are just labels some of which roughly relate to natural phenomena such as a revolution of the earth on its axis or one of its orbits around the sun but nature delineates no such measurements. Day does not stop and become night, day flows into night and night flows into day. Our minds create the boundaries.
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The Sun as a catalyst for transformation
December 21st, 2010
The above image of the Sun was taken yesterday by NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft using its Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT). NASA has several spacecraft currently monitoring the Sun’s activity from various positions and using a variety of scientific instruments. This has been going on since the mid-1990s but recently NASA spacecraft have observed some rather unusual or really astounding solar activity.
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The hidden wisdom within addiction
December 18th, 2010
I’ve had a number of people in my life who have struggled with various forms of substance addiction. I myself have struggled with it at different times in my life. One of the most significant qualities of substance addiction is the obsessive desire to consume the substance of choice and the longing to change ones state of consciousness. There is a consistent feeling of aversion to the usual state of consciousness which can involve painful emotions the addict has suppressed and is not prepared to deal with often related to unresolved past trauma. A dissatisfaction with the usual state of consciousness. This is also present in people who choose to take psychoactive substances to alter their consciousness although in non-addicts there is a lesser degree of aversion to the normal state as well as the absence of the compulsive quality. Almost everyone consumes substances to alter their state of mind, consider not only alcohol, marijuana and psychedelics but also coffee, tea, sugar etc. So there is nothing particularly unusual about this.
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Fully engaged relationship
September 15th, 2010
In my process of letting go of old patterns and stepping into a new life of fully engaged living I’m finding that I’m having to start from scratch in many areas, especially relationship. This is because the way I have been in relationship in the past no longer serves me as it was very much about attachment and getting needs met. Now that I am letting go of that and more able to fulfill my needs within the door is open to a new more free and open form of relationship. I’ve been contemplating the different dimensions of relationship and how I engage them both with myself and with others and there is incredible potential to deepen each dimension if relationship can be fully engaged in a conscious way.
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Healing the masculine and feminine: A lesson in unconditional love
September 6th, 2010
Like so many others I’ve struggled with relationships my entire life. With my partners I’ve experienced the greatest bliss and the greatest pain. Part of my personal struggle with relationships has been incredible anxiety and attachment. My pattern involved becoming interested and connected with a woman and growing more anxious about losing the connection the closer we got resulting in a fear of intimacy. The anxiety and fear of loss would be so intense at times it would almost reach the level of a panic attack. It felt as if holding onto my lover or partner was a matter of survival. That there was something I desperately needed from them in order to be ok and at peace. And yet I could never seem to get it, I would still feel anxious and upset and eventually the relationship would end and I’d be left devastated only to start the process all over again. This really became a habitual pattern which was incredibly painful because I am a very passionate and loving person and relationship is important to me but I could never seem to make it work to my satisfaction.
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