Size matters not

It's neat how much good meditation you can get done on an airplane. You're basically trapped in your seat for a few hours with little to do. Even the laziest spiritual practitioner would be tempted at the opportunities there.

Aside from the captivity, there's a lot of perspective available on an airplane high in the sky.

At the level of "The Witness", when you are paying attention to that part of yourself, it's not that things are Big or Small. It's that size becomes irrelevant. The Oneness that exists behind everything does not have a size. Size is not an issue at all. Rather, size is something expressed by that Oneness as it wraps around itself and forgets itself, giving birth to what most people think of as the real world.

Thus, it does not matter if you are meditating in a 5' x 5' room, looking at a blank wall, or whether you are in an airplane looking at the entire 200 mi coast of New Jersey. It's all the same.

This is what some Buddhist circles refer to as being able "to drink the entire ocean in one gulp".

One and the same...

Sometimes when I drive to work on a nice day, I listen to the birds chirping outside.

Life is much like a single bird chirp.... a fleeting trill absorbed by a bright quiet morning.

A simple thought

Time and again, the Dalai Lama refers to himself as "a simple monk", yet he is a person at the forefront of changing the world. As influential as he is, he sees himself as just a simple guy in a monastery, living his life.

Isn't it funny how the rest of us, who are FAR less influential than him, all want to be "something" or "change the world"?

Perhaps it is time to rethink our goals. Greatness isn't a single big action, and people who seek greatness don't usually find it. If they did, there would be a heck of a lot more "Great" people on the planet. Those who are Great are that way because of many little actions, and they usually performed those actions for other reasons than simply becoming great.

In your face

Here's a big clue on how the universe works. It is a no-brainer, really. You may have seen this happen to you millions of times, and when I point it out it should seem obvious.

If you have a lesson to learn, and you ignore it, you might get away with it for a while. However, if you keep ignoring it, eventually it will get in your face so much that it becomes impossible to ignore. That's really just the way it works. Duh.

Evolutionary units

It has been a while since I have had anything to write. Life has been going at break-neck speeds, and I have just sort of surrendered to it, along with all the things that go with that. They say that learning goes in waves, and for a while I have sort of been at the bottom of a wave, stagnant, just using what I know and doing what I do. It's no big deal.

One thing that occurred to me upon reflection recently is that evolution is not just about the individual. People "work on their development" and "strive", or they do the other thing and "be"... It does not matter how you view it or where you are at in that regard. The point is that those are all individual terms. The ultimate Oneness is being viewed through the colored-glasses of the individual. Of course that is fine, and many people do this with great results. That is all "1st Quadrant" stuff, or "I" stuff.

However, there is an other aspect... looking at it from the 2nd Quadrant, the quadrant of "We". If you have a group of people, let's say a family, the group has a collective state of consciousness or level of awareness as well. The level of awareness is essentially the average level of awareness of all the members of the group. If you are a member of the family, you could raise that either by working on your own awareness, or helping other members with theirs.

If I have a wife and children, there is a collective awareness there equal to the average of our individual awarenesses. If mine goes up, the collective goes up. If the children's awareness is brought up through child-rearing, the collective goes up. I'm told the opposite is also true, where the collective awareness can bring up the awareness of an individual, if the group's level is at a higher state than the individual in question.

That makes sense, in light of some previous posts, where I talk about teachers and the concept of Bracha and how it rubs off on the student.

The whole 2nd Quadrant is about expanding the area of concern from individual, to family, to race, to nation, to world. So everything here applies to those larger groups as well.

Dan Millman on Saving the Earth

On Dan Millman's blog there is a great post on his take for "saving the earth".

Wow! He put into words what I have been trying to say, but have been too angry at the environmentalist-tree-hugger types to express.

In a nutshell, the notion that we should all go back to living like cavemen or natives in teepees is bunk. That's not to say that we humans do not put strain on the environment, sometimes more than we have to, and sometimes we humans have little regard for the big picture. That's all true.

However, fixing that is not about going back to the "good old days." In the "good old days", no one seems to remember that the average life expectancy was 40-something.... even as little as a century ago. No one also seems to remember that people who were not related to each other that met randomly in the wilderness would try to kill each other, simply to control resources and take slaves or new breeding stock. Many environmentalists romanticize these eras, and forget the brutality that we have actually left behind in those years.

Things are better today than they were. People live longer, if nothing else, yet even if we humans never redeem ourselves and wind up destroying our own race, from the Earth's perspective.... Who cares?

The "Big Picture" is bigger than us. The Earth will go on whether we are here or not. Environmental damage can conceivably repair itself, certainly over millions after our extinction. From the Earth's perspective, it really does not matter what we do. Longer-lived species than us have died off before.

Nevertheless, there is still something to be learned from environmentalism.... if it can be done with awareness. The pollution and over zealous negativity that we humans put out into the world is a reflection of our mental disease. The more chatter we have in our brains.... the more we get sucked into our own emotional dramas.... the more we lose ourselves in the pursuit of excess.... the more the Earth becomes clouded with our garbage.

Environmentalism is not about cleaning up garbage. It is about curing our disease by becoming aware and learning to observe our mental chatter and emotional outbursts. You will never manually put a stop to the chatter or the emotions. You are not supposed to. However, you CAN learn to observe them without judgment and just allow them to be.

When that happens, the environment will improve on its own because human behavior will automatically change.

So....

Sometimes there's these awkward pauses in a conversation with someone, especially someone you don't know well. Ever have those? People are uncomfortable with silence. They think they have to fill it. Or, more correctly, their egos think it must be filled.

In actuality, the silence contains Reality, and egos are scared shitless of Reality. By becoming aware of the silent presence that lingers over and throughout everything, you can become aware of the Present Moment, the Now, You..... and it's scary at first! The awkwardness covers up the fear.

So too it is with writing. Recently, I have found myself a little guilty about not having any compunction to write more on this blog. But you know what? There's nothing to write sometimes! That's just how it is. I want to make sure that this blog only gets things written that need to be written, rather than filling it up with my own chatter. That probably means sometimes I will not have much to say!