Tag: worldview

In Love

It’s all just one big love story, you know. And we love it. We love every second of it. The ups, the downs, the twists, the turns, the heartaches, the triumphs… all of it. As I will point out again and again and again, our story is our world. We tell the story that we do, and live the story that we do, because we are in love with this thing called life. Forever seeking to get ever closer to its core, its heart, its mind, its essence, which at the end of the day is nothing but our own. The world reflects us back to ourselves perfectly. Even though we often don’t like what we see in that mirror, we intuitively know that there is something more, much more, beneath the surface image. So we keep engaging in an effort to find it, to find ourselves. 

Sometimes we make up stories that don’t reflect our true nature, or the nature of the world that we inhabit. It’s o.k., we all do it, and perhaps have to in order to come to understand what we are not. I do tend to think that is a necessary step on this crazy journey called life. One by one we can, through a process of deduction, cross off this and that as not the real me. Eventually there will be nothing left standing but the real you. Paradoxically, of course, that will be the same moment that you come to understand that there is nothing that is not you. Go figure. Ah, but what a moment of sweet liberty, and of complete responsibility at one and the same time. There is no escaping this end, but go ahead and try if you must. 

Houston is a swamp. There, I said it. The founders of Houston were speculators who sold it as something other than a swamp, something more like a new beginning in paradise. The Place upon which they laid out their new town, however, likes to send up reminders every so often. “I am a swamp,” she says. Houstonians pay her no mind. We are too busy writing a different story. We are busy creating a different version of paradise, which requires transforming the swamp into something that it is not. The swamp has her own mind with her own ideas about the paradise she once was, so in protest she sends out more frequent, more stark reminders. “I am a swamp!” The city floods. We think we must conquer this swamp thing once and for all, and so we try even harder to do so. This will not end well. The swamp will win. 

The swamp will win because you can’t fight millions of years of ecology, much less the billions of years of geology that it rests upon. We are infants in comparison to their hard earned wisdom. We would do better to start by examining our own story. Is it in alignment with what we now know to be true about the world and our place in it, or is it off somehow? When we begin to deeply ask that question, to face our unexamined assumptions, we begin to unearth not only ourselves, but everything we have buried alongside us. To jump to the chase, we must face that the worldview, the very foundation upon which Western civilization has been built, was off about the nature of reality: 

  • The world is not an objective place, separate from our subjective experience of it.
  • The world is not made up of dead, mechanistic matter that has been imbued with an extraterrestrial spirit (in the case of humans only).
  • Life is not a competition. 
  • Life does not unfold in a linear process of cause and effect. 
  • We are not separate entities.

Yet while we may have been mistaken about these assumptions, our path has not been a mistake. We had to come to know what we are not before we could move into what we are:

  • The world is intelligent and in a constant state of co-creation with everything in it.
  • Matter and energy (spirit) are one and the same thing.
  • Life is a collaboration.
  • Life emerges out of a complex, integrated network of interactions such that every little action effects the whole in ways that we cannot predict.
  • We are inextricably interconnected. We are One.

We have written this world into existence:

  • We wrote patriarchy (hierarchy with its associated powerlessness) into existence.
  • We wrote separation into existence.
  • We wrote exploitation into existence.
  • We wrote shame into existence.
  • We wrote oppression into existence.

…and on and on. We can, therefore, write a different story. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, “When you know better, (write a better story).” 

The house that I now call home was a camp first built by a guy named Jack Murray in the late 1940’s. Jack loved both nature and culture, as evidenced by the library of photos that he left behind of his extensive travels (which we now possess). He also painted. His painting of his beloved Lake Hortonia still hangs in our house. Jack was a neighbor of Shannon’s family when she was growing up in Brandon. He shared his beloved spot with them and they, too, fell in love. Understanding this, Jack essentially willed his camp to them as one of his final acts of love. Shannon spent her summers here for most of her childhood, but summers frankly weren’t enough. They wanted to live on the lake year round, so out of this love they built up and out. They winterized and moved in. Permanently. Being good Vermonters, they did all of this themselves utilizing only the skills which resided within the family. They built their dream. They created a new life for themselves.

They created to the best of their understanding, skills, vision, imagination, and resources. They knew nothing of nutrient pollution into the lake. They knew nothing of species depletion. They knew nothing of climate change. They knew nothing of the dismantling of collective life. They knew nothing of the oppression that is associated with our way of life. But now we do. It is therefore up to us to imagine a better future, to write a new story, and to create a new reality. 

How to begin? With the foundations, of course. We must unearth our unexamined assumptions, bring them to light, and start over again with a new worldview based on our better understanding. Still in love. Still with a great sense of gratitude for the love that went before us. People ask us every day why we didn’t just tear the house down completely and start over. Well it’s because too much love had gone into that house to just throw it all away, into some landfill somewhere. Our job is to pay the love forward by constantly reaching not only for our true selves, but also for the true Lake Hortonia. There is a story that is true for everyone and everything, and it wants to be known. We must reach for it again, and again, and again, and again right up to our very end, so that we too may pass this place along to the next generation in our final act of love. 

Dreams

Dreaming much lately? I sure am. So is Shannon. So is Shannon’s mother. In fact, a few days ago I heard a promo for an upcoming segment on NPR indicating that a whole lot of us are. I am not usually a lucid dreamer, or at least I don’t usually wake up knowing that I have been dreaming much less remembering what I might have been dreaming about. There are exceptions, of course, but this is generally true. Not these days. I wake up so tired from dreaming that I wonder if I would have been better off staying awake!! While I don’t necessarily remember, or perhaps want to remember, what I was dreaming about, I am quite aware when I wake up that I have been lost in it. And “it” was weird.

Before I get into that, here is a quick update on our stay-at-home tiny house experience. As mentioned previously, we have no internet or cell service up here. That means none of our usual forms of entertainment, which largely consists of Netflix, are available to us. We also like board games, but we don’t really have room for boards! We do, however, have one game that we are quite fond of that takes up next to zero space in storage: Bananagrams (thanks, Sara, for the intro even if getting our butts repeatedly kicked by you was extremely frustrating!). So that’s what we do. We play Bananagrams. If you aren’t familiar, the game basically consists of utilizing a Scrabble-like letter set to race each other to make a Scrabble-like crossword puzzle. It’s fun, but I have to say that you can only near-tie each other so many times before hitting a bit of a wall. That’s when the creativity breaks out. 

Shannon and I some time ago had become tired of playing and just randomly started putting words and then phrases together. They almost always ended up being weird, funny, poetic, etc.  A few nights ago we reverted into that mode when Shannon had the idea of starting a phrase with “Jedi Sayz,…” That was all it took to set us off on a whole new obsession with playing Jedi Sayz. We are up to nearly 40 or so phrases at this point and are aiming for 108 good ones to share. The photo above is a sampling. For starters, we’ll share them one by one on our FB and Instagram pages. They are providing us with a whole lot of insight about where our psyches are. We hope you enjoy! 

Back to the dreaming, who in the heck knows what we are all dreaming about, but I find it fascinating that so many of us are. Even as we practice social distancing it indicates how inextricably interconnected we are. It points to a reality beyond the one that we comprehend through our usual frameworks. Those frameworks tell us that this is all terribly real, whereas what happens in dreams is some sort of residue from our conscious lives. It is our subconscious expressing itself. Maybe so, but I don’t think the “sub” gives dreams their full due. Let me explain.

In the framework that I do my best to live by, my soul (aka Self) abides (lives) in the Absolute realm (the non-embodied realm or field which I call God/Oneness/Consciousness). As such, it isn’t subject to my subjective experience in the relative world. It’s not that I am a separate entity from my Self, it’s just that the latter has a 360 view on What Is (aka reality) whereas the former only sees what it can see from the perspective of the life I am currently inhabiting. From this framework, it would be more correct to say that my self is a dream of my Self than the other way around. In other words, this is the dream (the world as we have created it), not the realms that we travel to when we manage to break free from what we perceive to be real. So to call the non-embodied realm sub to this one, in my view, is an incorrect framing. It’s the exact opposite. 

O.K., o.k., that may be a lot. So why stop now?? There is an indigenous tribe in South America called the Achuar. Their culture is centered around their dreams. When they wake up in the morning, the first thing that they do is gather to share and discuss their dreams. What they discover in their dreams then determines the course of their day. They let their dreams guide them. Now this may sound like crazy talk from the framework that we operate in, but it is not the least bit crazy from the framework that I described above. In fact, it is quite possibly the only sane way to proceed if we understand that our “dreams” are one of the best ways that our Self has to communicate with us.

In the early 1990’s, Achuar shaman and elders began having disturbing dreams about the health of the Earth and in particular the devastating impact that humans were having on it and themselves. So, in true form, they began wondering what to do with this information. The guidance that they received was that they needed to reach out to Westerners and to start co-creating a new dream for the earth and humanity’s role in it. At the same time, a group of Westerners including Bill and Lynne Twist got the same call from the other end. They heeded that call and sought out the Achuar. Together they initiated the Pachamama Alliance. The network that they have built, while still invisible to our society at large, is extensive. I am part of it having first completed their “Awakening the Dreamer” course and then having gone through the training to lead that course. These days all of this coursework can be found online, with multiple more programs to choose from. If you find yourself with disturbing dreams these days, perhaps the best thing that I can recommend is to put that energy into taking one of the courses. You can check it out here:

Pachamama Alliance

To take this one step further (you knew I would!), I would make the case that if we are to chart a new course for humanity and for Gaia, then that guidance is going to have to come from the level of our soul/Self. As my good friend Chausey Leebron Jameson says, we simply don’t have the altitude from where we sit to know how to navigate ourselves out of this maze. When we work and push and fight for change, those efforts are more likely to lock us into the reality that we have created rather than catapulting us out of it. That is because when we do these things we are often operating from within the same frawework/worldview that was utilized to create this world, all while expecting a different outcome. It’s not going to happen that way. Sure, there may be a power transfer from one group to another, but the resulting dynamics will be the same. In order to create a reality that does not resemble the one we are trying to evolve out of, we need to reach beyond the frameworks with which it was constructed. We have to reach into the realm of pure potential, where our souls live.

That doesn’t mean that you will or should stop showing up in whatever way that you do. Maybe you are an activist. Maybe you do amazing, transformative work in the world. Maybe you do your best to take care of your family, friends, and community. I’m not suggesting that any of that stop. I am saying that all of our actions will be better serving if they are sourced from the non-embodied realm: from the field of pure potential, from Consciousness, from Oneness, from dreams, from God, from Self. To tap into that requires not a concentrated effort, but a letting go. Mind you, one of the best ways that we have of reaching a state of letting go is to exhaust ourselves in the concentrated effort, so in that sense… fire away on all pistons! Just pay attention and watch for that moment when you have reached your wit’s end and honor what is conveyed to you in your surrender. That is where the answers will come from.

Jedi Sayz, “Happy dreaming!”

Human Things

Rated T (for theory)

There are heavy things and there are light things in life. My last two posts demonstrate that. How we experience anything, however, is related to one common thing. That common thing is our worldview. Our worldview, in turn, is supported by a “sponsoring thought” about the world. That sponsoring thought is what enables us to believe whatever we believe in the first place. I teach a class at PVAMU called Ecology and Man. The purpose of it is to walk students back through their worldview and the sponsoring thoughts beneath it in order to reconsider our entire notion of “self,” where it comes from and what it could be. Let me just go ahead and say it now for the light hearted among us, this is going to be a heavy lifting post. The work that I am doing via this blog is the same work that I ask of my students. It is the collective work of humanity at the moment. That said, I am doing my best to treat this as a marathon, not a sprint, even though the moment feels urgent. I’ll walk us through the theoretical stuff as gently (which may not feel so gentle) and as slowly as I can, one step at a time, with plenty of breaks in between for experiential life stories. If a post like this proves too much, just put it aside for now and come back to it later when you feel ready. If you have questions, just ask. Dialogue is good.

What led me to wanting to address this notion of humans and things was Micki’s comment to my “Umbrella” post. Micki, incidentally, is that crazy extrovert from hell best friend of mine that I described in my “Friendship Guide” post. She also happens to be a gifted Jungian psychotherapist. Here is what she said:

I heard a teacher say one time “The greatest spiritual lesson is to accept the humanity that we all are. You can’t be so busy being spiritual that you forget your humanity- That is the highest lesson.” 

Just hold that thought for now. I have something to tell you. If you are a Westerner, your worldview is supported by the same sponsoring thought as every other Westerner. That is to say that the same sponsoring thought has given rise to Western religious, spiritual, agnostic, and atheist worldviews. Easterners are not immune either, although it may be less complete in its domination due to Eastern wisdom traditions. This sponsoring thought came to us courtesy of René Descartes, the French philosopher/mathematician/scientist, in the early 17th century. Um… that is to say that we are operating on a 400 years old understanding of what is what! Please let that sink in. He didn’t necessarily pull this idea out of the blue- there were precedents- but he did solidify it with the phrase “I think, therefore I am.” The phrase has become so ubiquitous that it needs explaining.

What Descartes did was to definitively separate the material world (matter) from the mental/spiritual world (mind). Henceforth these became two entirely separate realms. The world was reduced to a place of mere objects, that were inherently only mechanical (dead) in nature. Mind, as he defined it, included only what we today call “higher consciousness.” Higher consciousness, the ability to remember the past and project into the future, was afforded only to humans. Frankly, the science of the time couldn’t explain where consciousness came from, so it relegated it to some other non-material realm, the realm of God. That is to say that because science couldn’t explain it, it was simply removed from the scientific equations that sought to understand the world.

The sponsoring thought is this: being is a mental/spiritual state that comes from a divine realm that is completely separate from the material world which is itself nothing more than a mechanical/dead universe. If you are of the religious/spiritual persuasion, this is already starting to resonate with you. Just wait atheists and agnostics, your turn is coming. It is important to note that neither animals nor plants were considered to be sentient at the time, which is to say that they were as dead as doornails although they had acquired some ability to appear otherwise. Due to their lack of being, it was perfectly o.k. (virtuous even) to reduce them to resources that existed only for the benefit of humans. Matter became the realm of science/technology, consciousness the realm of religion/spirituality, and the two were expected to stay within their newly defined boundaries.

And these were newly defined boundaries. The original human spirituality was animism. Animism held no such separation. In animism, every single material thing (even a doornail) is spiritual, is sentient. To be clear, matter doesn’t have spirit, it is spirit. Matter and spirit (consciousness) were not separate things, they were the same thing. God wasn’t in some other place watching us with disgust or perhaps chuckling at our clumsiness, God/spirit was right here in us and as us through and through- in physicality. The Cartesian split was a radically different sponsoring thought. As it played out, people took sides. You kind of had/have to. The religious/spiritual identified their “self” with mind/spirit. Want proof? “I am a spiritual being having a human experience.” The implication here is that the human side of the experience, the part of the experience rooted in matter, is not really being at all- at least not in the divine sense. It says that our divine nature is not of this world. It is a temporary state of confusion at best. The material world, in this sense, is imaginary. I’m pushing buttons, I know. Breathe. It’s o.k. You are divine beyond your wildest imagination. There is much more to say about this which I won’t cover in this post.

The atheists (many of whom are of the scientific persuasion, although not all scientists fit this bill- such as Einstein) identified their “self” with matter. As science gained more and more confidence in its ability to explain the material world, mind was pulled back into the material realm, albeit this time as a phenomenon that is itself nothing more than mechanical in nature. From this point of view it was spirit that was imaginary- an illusion rising out of material processes for reasons we don’t quite understand. In short, God was dead. Therefore, when your physical self goes, you’re gone too. Incidentally, science has to date proven no such thing, it’s just that some scientists (positivists) are confident that they ultimately will be able to prove what they believe to be true. On the other hand, science has made a great deal of progress such that the boundaries between the two realms of matter and mind/spirit are colliding in on each other. Actually, they have been for over 100 years. I’ll leave that for another time. To get back to my main point, no matter what side you fall on these days, you are doing so under the assumption that there are two separate realms in the first place. Pick your side, and there you will find your definition of “self.” Oh, and as for you agnostics, lest you think that you have avoided this debate… you refuse to take sides, but you continue to believe that the sides exist.

Of course I am speaking in generalities. Our worldview is now shifting, so you may find yours in some in-between state. My point is that the Cartesian sponsoring thought is still dominant, and therefore we are all responding to it in some way. Now let’s return to Micki’s observation above. Even that observation, although getting closer to what I believe to be the truth, is still based on the Cartesian split. It says that you have to at least balance your spiritual seeking with your human seeking and that somehow the two are related. It is pointing out that the downfall of seeking only spirit (enlightenment) is that it is attempting to escape our embodied nature, our humanity. It is trying to escape being here, as a material thing. Yet maybe now you can see that this is only true if you are operating with the Cartesian sponsoring thought that matter and spirit are separate realms. If you were seeking spirit with an animist sponsoring thought, then your spirit-seeking would actually take you deeper into your material being. And, incidentally, your physical body would not be just a human thing, because nothing is just an objective thing. Everything is both matter and spirit. Everything is both/and. The separation of the two was a bogus assertion in the first place, in the opinion of many people working on the outer edges of consciousness. And yet, that bogus assertion is still ruling our worldview today… even as science and spirituality inch closer and closer together in their observations about the world. What I would say is that healing this split is the crux of every challenge that we are currently facing. To do that, we have to reconsider the validity of our sponsoring thoughts.

This was a lot for one sitting. So I’m going to leave it at that for the moment. Just know two things. 1) There is much more that needs to be said to understand where our worldview is today, how we got here, and where we are going. 2) You are all correct from the perspective from which you are looking at it. If you want to discover more on your own, there are three books that I would recommend. Each of these books will walk you through the history of our sponsoring thoughts and associated worldviews:

The Ascent of Humanity, Charles Eisenstein

The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision, Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi

You are the Universe, Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos

That’s enough for now. Just sit with it. Or, feel free to ask any burning questions you may have. Lastly, you matter (pun intended).