Is this a great time to be alive or what? Who is thinking this question? How is this sense of self generated? Are the thoughts of this self simply habits triggered by cues? How does the brain and all of those synaptic processes create an external and internal reality?

Ah, questions! Are there really any answers? Have you read these four books?

• The Social Animal by David Brooks
• Mindsight by Daniel Siegel
• Habit by Charles Duhigg
• The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger

Each of these books use information and insight from neuroscience and what we are learning about the brain, cognition and perception to open our eyes to who/what/when we/reality really is – or they at least give us a very interesting lens to look at enlightenment & awareness through.

Reading these books and the accumulated affect of them on my consciousness reminds me of “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson.

Here’s a quote from The Ego Tunnel:

Presence is a necessary condition for the conscious experience. If the brain could solve the One-World Problem but not the Now Problem, a world could not appear to you. In a deep sense, appearance is simply presence, and the subjective sense of temporal immediacy is the definition of an internal space of time.

Is it possible to transcend this subjective Now-ness, to escape the tunnel of presence?

Is that great, or what?

The debate over whether we are just a bunch of chemical & electrical reactions in the brain vs. are we something more subtle and eternal outside of space and time continues. For me, these books have just made things more exciting and mysterious – and that book on habit is actually a great owner’s manual on how to make those changes you always wished you could.

The Evolution of Consciousness & Enlightenment

A couple of recent Enneagram conversations with new friends resulted in me observing that some of the point 8 character traits are still functioning in my psyche.

My first encounter was with someone who had attended an online webinar with David Daniels (an enneagram person I haven’t seen in 20 years or so). My conversation partner thinks they may be an 8 on the enneagram. We managed to spend several hours chatting about most things under the sun without resorting to arm wrestling or shouting – proving once again that 8′s aren’t all aggression all of the time.

The point 8 enneagram trait that was first to jump into my conscious awareness was – we’d rather have bad news than no news.

Those 8′s – are they a riot or what? Eights have this connection with truth, but that doesn’t always play out in a good way as they can be prone to “my way or the highway” and “might makes right.” The significance of which can lead to distorting the “truth” to a relative position or perception. In my case, it was simply a matter of wanting clear communication.

In my first conversation, I made several references to how important communication is to me, especially in regards to friendship. Being forthright is an art to cultivate. Just blurting things out won’t do, but it’s one place to start if that’s all we have going for us. Developing sensitivity, steadfastness and a non-judgmental attitude are  essential – and it seems, a life-long endeavor on my part – that sensitivity thing, what a challenge! I may actually have to be more present in life – what’s up with that?

The second encounter with the enenagram occurred at Roast & Toast, a local coffee shop. I was sitting down at a table when I noticed a gent next to me, had a copy of Richard Rohr’s book on the Enneagram. I hadn’t seen that book in years and I said so to the gent. As it turns out, I was speaking to a local minister who is using the book to help with research on his Ph. D.

We had a long chat which ultimately left me feeling very sad. The conversation opened around the enneagram and the power of silence for transformation ( perspective on this can be found in The Void). The conversation turned toward a recent incident in the church… What was sad, was how entrenched & fixated some of the people involved were… leading to another member having to resign a position. All of this in the name of God & morality.

Aha, that 8 thing – wanting to pick up the sword in defense of the underdog and take off a few of those sanctimonious heads! Alas, all that practicing presence seems to have taken a toll on me as I simply felt sweet sadness…

I found it quite interesting to find myself in 2 enneagram conversations in one week with total strangers. Perhaps stranger things will happen.

The other day I had an insight into an experience that happened 43 years ago. That experience rocked my world and set my feet on a journey that has yet to end – but, is no longer dominated by going, getting or becoming. I used to think of that experience as my first “spiritual experience.”

I was 19 and hanging out with a bunch of my college friends. I asked a simple question, received a simple reply, and the strangest thing happened… I felt a thick substance descend into my body from the top of my head. When it reached my shoulders a feeling of “welcome home” flooded me… I felt comfort, acceptance and peace. When the substance reached my heart, it felt a single point penetrated my heart. The sensation was ecstatically painful. A radiance flooded out of that point. The experience turned on a dime as something in me set out in search of itself…

And that is where I see that things went askew… as I now see how my separate self, ego-self, normal self/mind reacted to that experience, immediately engaged it and enmeshed itself in a life-long journey and search. I wonder what would be different if a teacher had been present – one who knew of essence and the point of existence. How would my journey have unfolded if in that moment of time I had the wisdom and support to simply settle into the immediacy of that experience instead of picking up the “flame of the search,” I might have simply recognized then that there is no where to go. The experience was a revelation about what is here, always here – mostly hidden by our beliefs, ignorance, assumptions… what the heck, I was 19 – it was a blessing just as it was/is.

The capacity to not follow thoughts, impulses and feelings, but to rather stay in the immediacy of the experience with no predisposition to “getting” anything from it – seems to be more of what is happening as I sit. More and more revolves around relaxing – allowing the body to relax, feeling the psychic structures and allowing them to relax… relaxed awareness in the now – no journey, nowhere to go. There’s interest, but not in being able to describe or understand my experience – most of that is driven by the past – thank you very much superego, your love and protection is no longer required.

Don’t disintermediate the teacher, disintermediate the separating boundary – be with immediacy. What happens then?

I recently received this email from a fan of Open-Secrets:

John there are many nondual psychotherapists, among them Stephan Bodian, author of ‘Wake Up Now’, and the authors of ‘The Sacred Mirror’ and ’Listening From the Heart of Silence’.  who criticize all progressive approaches.  They say to put all ones resources into realizing oneself AS  aware Presence first and then return to embody the Realization into ones personality afterwards.  
 
They claim that the Diamond Approach keeps one endlessly mired in one’s history and is sort of an endless treadmill that never really crosses the gateless gate.  It can be too easy for the ego to think of these states and stations as attainments for the personality, and that the direct approach cuts through the ego activity much cleaner. 
 
I understand and agree with Hameed that this seems like pushing oneself into a condition that might not be the natural unfoldment of the souls dynamism, and that by surrendering to where one is in the moment is much more appropriate. 
 
I only say this because they have started an online journal that looks very interesting and are asking for contributions from bloggers and others interested in the field of nondual psychotherapy.  I would personally love to see a discussion started on the benefits and shortcomings of the direct / progressive paths.  I really like your blog and would love to see someone with a background in the Ridhwan school represented in the journal.

if you are interested the web address is  http://undividedjournal.com/    Thanks for your awesome blog. 

I make no claim of being established in nondual realization, though I have had enough experience of the nondual to recognize it and compare that state with others.

Here’s where my curiosity leads me in regards to the above:

• I’m curious about why this has significance to the author of the email. It’s an interesting point that he brings up, but people have been misunderstanding and taking exception to A. H. Almaas and the Diamond Approach for years. In addition, the DA is just one of many valid teachings and paths that assist people in moving toward the truth and realization of reality.
• My experience is that many people have experiences of the nondual, but then reify their experiences into intellectual understanding which can then be debated for the rest of time. Rumi had the same problem with intellectuals of his day.
• I have no idea if Stephen Bodian lives and abides in the nondual and I am making no assertion about him. If he does have the position stated above, then my curiosity wonders about “nondual positions” an oxymoron in its own right, and the answer to this question – Is there no value in learning and developing skills and insight that move one in the direction of reality and help to ease daily suffering?
• It’s true, some people become endlessly mired in working on their object relations. Some get endlessly mired in meditating, or efforting toward nonduality. Ego identity, loves the muck and the mire – intellectual debate about the merits of anything can be a mire.
• Almaas does not see nonduality as the end-all of the spiritual journey. It is just one manifestation of the infinite potential of True Nature. No one manifestation of TN has any more or less merit than any other – except to the subjective consciousness of the experiencer. Almaas has, over the past 6 or 7 years, been teaching more and more about Total Being and Freedom. This is what he refers to as the 4th turning of the wheel of the Diamond Approach. The 3rd turning of the wheel is associated with nondual awareness.

These are a few of my first response thoughts. Now, I am returning to…

BTW – Almaas will be speaking at the 2012 Science & Nonduality conference in October – sounds like a reat opportunity to get his personal take on all of this.

Two days ago I learned that another friend had committed suicide – this on the heels of two other friends’ suicides in February. Here again, I experienced a shock and a why – though, I suspected what the precipitating circumstances were in this case, and I was correct – love, relationship and loss – more complicated than this.

During the night and the next day  I found my mind and heart circling the big WHY? of suicide and the sadness that seems natural when life ends too early and too tragically.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) nn 2007, suicide was the tenth leading cause of death in the U.S., accounting for 34,598 deaths. The overall rate was 11.3 suicide deaths per 100,000 people. An estimated 11 attempted suicides occur per every suicide death.

Almost four times as many males as females die by suicide. I wonder if that is because so many men are more estranged from their feelings than women.

As I look at the 2007 figures for suicides involving young people, I now remember that last May, a friend of mine was distraught because a close friend of hers daughter was believed to have committed suicide by jumping off a well-known bridge.

• Children ages 10 to 14 — 0.9 per 100,000
• Adolescents ages 15 to 19 — 6.9 per 100,000
• Young adults ages 20 to 24 — 12.7 per 100,000

When I think of my friend, I see her with a bright smile and a happy heart – part of what seems to fuel the endless why.

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Making the turn toward the real, reality, the truth, True Nature, God…. however you refer to that most sublime, all encompassing life force, is, for most of us, not an easy or simple thing. For most of us, it’s a process – a process of continual unfoldment as we turn, turn again, and again and again.

Turning toward the truth usually involves many instances of falling asleep, choosing a goody or two over the truth, the occasional inertia or better idea that takes us back to our habits, familiar life or comfort zone. Our ruts are deep, which leads us to believe that it takes effort to abide in the truth. It takes effort to get out of the ruts and increase our capacity for the truth – until the truth grabs us by the heart or dazzles our minds in a manner that the gravity of our ego life begins to ease up.

Another form of turning again and again toward the truth involves discovering and revelation as what we once thought of as “the” truth broadens and deepens. So, we continue to turn toward the truth as we are opened up and refined.

Fundamentally, turning toward the truth means reversing the mirror. The quest for reality or the life of truth is something to be gained. It’s not something we are going to achieve and put into practice in our life. The truth is the life. What we bring to the truth is our little ego-life – which seems pretty big and significant to us, since it includes everything we see and believe.

Turning toward the truth means bringing our life – moment by moment – to the truth, living in accordance and alignment with how we know the truth. What we read last night that hit home, what we learned in a workshop last weekend, what we experienced in our work sessions or daily practice – we bring that to the truth by applying it and living it in our daily lives.

I’m not not talking theory here. I’m talking rubber meeting the road, walking the talk – and not in an easy way, but in a life or death way. No room for excuses or the champion (judge, jury and executioner) of excuses the superego / inner critic.

Turning toward the truth means reclaiming my aggression if I’m aggression intolerant, standing my ground or staying the course if I’m weak-kneed — all-in-all — no matter what our conditioning, turning toward the truth involves a vulnerability far exceeding what we thought thought was needed when our heart or mind was touched by that first scent of the real that set us seeking.

All my life seeking

Answers, insight, meaning

Never here

For a second

Thinking about here

I’m elsewhere

Poor creature

Here is vulnerability

Beyond imagining

Recently, two of my business peers suicided in the same week.

My main source of income comes through Internet Marketing and specifically helping my brother and his wife with their real estate business in San Ramon, CA. It was a sad day when I heard that a friend and real estate colleague who I admired and liked had committed suicide. It took me aback as he always seemed so positive and he did so much to help others. According to friends, he had a history of depression and had recently broken up with a woman he was madly in love with. He went to his storage shed and put a gun to his head.

A few days later, I heard that another Realtor and colleague had also committed suicide. It seems his financial challenges brought him to a point of despair and hopelessness that led to suicide.

These aren’t my first intersections with suicide or death. In my family, suicide has always been frowned upon and carried a stigma of cowardice and personal deficiency.  I think my father contributed most to this attitude, which isn’t surprising being the military man he was – heavy on judgment and short on compassion and empathy.

As I reflected on the loss of these two friends, the lives and circumstances they left, and the shock felt in the local communities, I recalled the times I had felt so despondent and hopeless that thoughts of suicide entered my brain. As a teen, I think I had more than a few thoughts of suicide as I went through periods of inadequacy and feeling like nobody gave a damn about me and that my presence would not be missed. Those moments of angst were imbued with a distorted sense of martyrdom.

As an adult, I once followed a stream of suicidal thought into a very dark place. It was that exploration that helped me to see the value of deep psychological and emotional exploration. That inquiry has served me well as I have encountered other times when depression, emptiness and hopelessness seemed all-consuming.

What I notice with these two recent suicides is loss, sadness, love and appreciation for two very different, but the same, friends. I notice that my everyday separating boundaries become porous and the experience is more we than me and them. I am blessed to recognize no sense of judgment from my past conditioning.

There’s a lot of sweetness and appreciation for us all.

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• Humility: the state of being humble
• Humble Origin: 1200–50; Middle English  ( h ) umble  < Old French  < Latin humilis  lowly, insignificant, on the ground. See humus
• Humus: < Latin:  earth, ground; akin to Greek chamaí  on the ground

Soul without Shame posted a quote on Facebook today about Self-Evaluation vs. Self-judgment. This got me to thinking about humility. My friend, Greg, tells me that humility is the objective assessment of one’s strengths and weaknesses. I hear this as a clear objective look at oneself or one’s situation… and I always include motivation to know more, to see more clearly.

We need to acknowledge our humility, which is not just being good and spiritual. Humility means to objectively see that you do not know, not to think that something is wrong with you because you cannot know. Nobody can know. You cannot know the mystery. The only thing you can know about the mystery is that it is unknowable and untouchable. You see it, you perceive it, but you do not know what it is. The moment you try to penetrate it, you forget you are trying to penetrate it. – A. H. Almaas – Diamond Heart 4: Indestructible Innocence

Taking note of the above, we could say that humility involves being on the ground, grounded. We could be aware of the vastness and magnitude of reality in relation to our limited perspective. We could see what we see – and want to know more, have more revealed to us, to get more intimate with ourselves, to be more in harmony with life or the divine. We might feel blessed or the presence of grace to have insight, frustration, confusion or even feeling lost.

Humility might include an understanding or intimation that we cannot “do,” an objective hopelessness that what we might feel is needed to satisfy or complete is beyond our capacity to do or even know what is needed next. So, humility, seeing things clearly, can include a profound vulnerability. We might be scared or full of wonder.

Just pondering humility…

Words can Kill

The world comes knocking
at the wise man’s door
like all good guests
laying problems at his feet
quietly, he feeds them
as gluttonous appetites
ravage the evening’s meal
bloated with their own assumptions
they raucously depart
hidden in the corner
a hungry servant
died on table scraps

Thought I would try a little poetry by Rumi (Coleman Barks – Like This) with images.

Did you get a chance to watch Thrive? If not, I recommend it. Did you watch Cancer: The Forbidden Cures?

It seems almost everyone is upset with the way things are being done and run these days – BIG Governement, BIG Business, BIG Pharma, BIG Banking, BIG Agra… There’s a lot of stress, energy and vocals, but very little effective action, it seems.

The Occupy Wall Street movement seems, to me, like a dismal failure. Why? My observation is that ranting and raving and getting attention is usually not very effective. It works for hungry 2-year-olds or even a 5-year-old with a cut or a bump, but that’s usually because someone who really cares is within hearing distance.

The reason that movements like Occupy Wall Street and others fail is what? – no one cares? the system is too entrenched? the BIGs are in control?

The Occupy Wall Street movements seemed to quickly devolve from a noble quest to just another scene for repressed anger and immaturity to run amok for individual acting out or to be co-opted by more focused anti-social elements. I didn’t see anything that I would characterize as effective action.

Imagine that every person that attended a Occupy Wall Street protest, or every person that found themselves on the wrong side of the mortgage melt-down, or every person that has been hurt by the economic down turn did something simple like take their money out of the Big 3 banks that are controlled by three large and powerful families and started using a local credit union or community bank. Imagine if everyone of those people help convince 5 other people to do the same.

In detective shows and novels they say – follow the money. Hit them where it hurts is another well-known phrase. Some make the case that our individual accounts are just peanuts to the big banks, so take the peanuts away. Doing something other than just bitching and complaining is a step.

Many feel cynical and fatalistic about changing the political system with its current entrenched emphasis on “political divide.” Voting for or against a particular Presidential candidate does seem very effective. Should we Throw Them All Out? Probably, it seems it may be the only way to get the message across that our representatives are elected to serve the country and not themselves… Did you see the 60 Minutes segment?

Here again, we probably need to first deal in peanuts and then work our way up. Local community and state governments as well as Congress.

The challenge is that it takes effort and commitment for the long haul, because change will not happen over night. Many of us are challenged in those areas. We want it now and thought it doesn’t change, we manage to eke out a little emotional discharge by sounding off or acting out in ways that support the positions of the “powers that be.”

I have or am in the process of closing down all my known ties with the big 3 banks. Chase Bank keeps sending me offers, telling how they want to serve my needs. This in spite of the fact that two years ago they, canceled to credit accounts because I wasn’t their type of customer. A recent incident with Chase Bank helped to reinforce my stance.

The reason I took the time to write this post is that I have several friends dying from cancer and it seemed too obvious that the way the AMA and Big Pharma are in business to keep cancer treatment alive and well as opposed to actually finding a cure is the same as the way the financial mess is being handled to support Big Banks at the expense of the consumer.

My money and my vote is moving away from BIG…