Don’t believe any of it.

It’s not another night or another day.

It’s not another May or June.

It’s not another weekend or another Monday.

It’s not another year, or decade or century.

All of these measures of time are illusions that put us to sleep.

Every single moment is fresh, new, unique. It never repeats in any way.

It’s not another breath – it’s this breath!

There is nothing we put our eyes on that is not fresh and new. It is all changing.

Some things as fast as a chirping bird sound

Others as slow as the rise and fall of a mountain.

And in our internal experience – there have never been two identical moments.

You can try to think you are the same person you were at some point in the past – but it wouldn’t be true.

Don’t back off from the unknown elements of the Now. Embrace the unpredictability, the possibilities.

Live fully alive.

Don’t pretend you’ve done this before. Seen this before. Felt this way before.

Let’s get real.

Written on approximate universal date 5,029,492,544,323.9000

Is it true for you also, that you have had one self-identity your whole life and it just shifts incrementally and unnoticeable? But there is at least one constant in that self-identity. Separation. I am (you are) a separate something.

Consider that that constant, separateness, is not in fact true. And consider if it is possible to remove that false assumption.

Look at your belly button. It should be a reminder to us that we started out not being separate. Then snip. And since then we have been separate. At least it appears that way. What is not so obvious is that at about the same time that the umbilical cord was cut, a new dependency was started with the interaction of our lungs with the air. And if we take a moment to notice, that dependency has not stopped for our entire life and is going on right at this moment: breathing. At the same time we were cut from our mother, we became attached to the atmosphere of the earth. And here we are.

All of our mothers also had this connectedness to the earth atmosphere. All of our living mothers still have this connectedness. We are, along with all living and breathing beings dependent and connected in this same way. Always have been and always will be. It’s a fact. Can we integrate that fact into our identity?

I recently watched a dozen piglets sucking on their mother. Can you picture an earth sized mother pig and ourselves and every other breathing being sucking on it as if our life depended on it, which it does? If we can see this, we can see that separateness is a lie and connectedness is true.

The connectedness goes even deeper than this. What gives us our life out of this atmosphere is oxygen. And what puts oxygen into the atmosphere is photosynthesis. And this vitally connects us to the sun and all plant life. The sun is not separate from us. Trees, grass, flowers they are not separate from us. It is brutal, false, dishonest and deadly to hold an identity that is not connected to the light and warmth of the sun, the life in all the green living plants, the energy in each breath of air and to all the beings that live with us in this exact same dependency.

This shift of self-identity does not come automatically or easily. It is an immensely richer identity than that lonely, fragile and false separate identity.

This shift of self-identity changes everything. Without this shift of identity in great numbers of us, we are unlikely to survive this sixth great extinction. The separate identity is actually causing this extinction and has the ability to ignore and forget about the great extinction. The connected identity feels it constantly and applies ourselves toward protecting all life.

And that is why your and my efforts to shift our self-identity from separateness to connectedness is a life and death issue.

It’s Not A New Normal. It’s Abnormal.

It’s no longer Life-After-Life.

It’s now something unknown that comes after Life-After-Life.

The Chinese character for Crisis is composed of two Chinese characters signifying “danger” and “opportunity” respectively.

The danger part is pretty obvious. So what is the opportunity?

I’m thinking (on a macro level) the opportunity is to save humanity from near certain extinction.

Personally, the opportunity is going to have a unique look for every single person.

Don’t look for someone else to tell you your opportunity. It’s an opportunity to create a new self. A new version of yourself.

Let’s start with this question. Can you imagine yourself as a better self – as a super version of yourself?

If not, maybe this is a good time to give it some thought.

Ok. On to those of you who have given this some thought – maybe some of you have been thinking about this for a long time.

Then the question is this: How to make such a transformation?

You might have already found that there are a lot of efforts that don’t give the desired results.

It’s important to realize that our conscious efforts are about 5% of what goes on in our brain. If our conscious efforts run against the 95% of the brain that is unconscious, then the conscious efforts don’t stand much of a chance.

Our environment is reinforcing our old habits in thousands of ways that we don’t even see. It seems hopeless but it is not. It can’t be.

I’ve been listening to a series on Gaia – a Netflix like offering – called Rewired, narrated by Dr. Joe Dispenza. I first came in contact with Dr. Dispenza through the movie, “What the Bleep Do We Know?”

I carefully read his book, “Evolve Your Brain”.

For my part, I’m going to forget who I know you to be. I’m going to imagine each of you shedding an old skin or going into a chrysalis and the old you turning to soup that feeds the formation of a totally new you. A new you that is finding your place in the opportunity to save humanity from extinction.

It’s a long shot. But it’s the only shot we have.

Not what you think. Not like a game ending buzzer. More in the direction of time going into slow motion. Like in a car wreck or falling off a roof. (I hope you have more pleasant examples.)

In the book, “I Am That”, Nisargadatta Maharaj says “The real does not die, the unreal never lived.” So, while some consciousness gets wrapped up in schedules and deadlines and goals, other consciousness returns to its timeless roots. And what is that journey like? Most of that trip is the distance between identifying with the body and stuff and not identifying with the body and stuff. The end of the trip is the ancient city of Consciousness. The journey can take lifetimes, or it could happen now.

Georgieff taught his students how to ‘die before you die.’ We normally identify with so much that is not real. Make a quick inventory of all the stuff you own. It is said that what you own, also owns you. Try a brief exercise. Just now, imagine it is all gone. It might take a minute to really feel it.

Did you do it? And here you still are. This journey we’re talking about, must be traveled very lightly. You might work at it and get down to a few suitcases. Then with more work, you may get down to just a backpack. Then the backpack gets lost. And there is still more that must go.

For as long as you can remember, you have been carrying this body around. You don’t remember what it was like before that. You have identified with your body so consistently it has become an unconscious assumption. It’s probably true also that when those brief electrical storms happen inside your head (thoughts) we identify with them, too.

So, the instructions tell us that to reach the ancient city of Consciousness, we can’t even take “our” body or “our” thoughts. We get there when we float through the gate on absolute emptiness. In the city of Consciousness there is no time. The city is even much stranger than that. Everyone there has no boundaries. Also, there is no up or down or inside or outside. This is the place – the source – of where all things are possible. We find here the peace that surpasses all understanding.

You have already started this journey. You have let go of some things that hurt you. Maybe there is more to let go of in that realm. There is something right in front of each of us, where the work is to learn how to let it go. Of course, everyone works at their own pace.

Wishing you well and have a nice trip.

Global or World citizenship is the idea that one’s identity transcends geography or political borders and that responsibilities or rights are derived from membership in a broader class: “humanity”.

Stupid borders! Stupid countries!

The air you and I are breathing – is it Spanish air? Is it American air? Ridiculous isn’t it. You have eaten food grown in dozens of other countries. It has become your body. Our very bodies are world bodies.

What lags behind the reality of being world citizens, is our thought patterns. Habits of identifying as “Minnesotans” “Mississippians” “Missourians” “Americans” etc. These old, narrow and false identities are useless when it comes to solving problems that affect us all – like the heating up of the planet.

In the last two months, we first had neighbors from Western Canada, then a young Polish couple, then a Russian couple and now a couple from Quebec. It’s always like meeting family we hadn’t known about.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proposes a World Passport. Where everyone has the right to travel anywhere and return. Americans don’t notice this issue much because they can go so many places. There are a lot more restrictions for people from many other places.

One of the realizations that comes with Global Citizenship is how we are all interconnected and taking responsibility for how our decisions and lifestyle impact everyone else.

About 30% of the world strongly identifies themselves as “world citizens”. In the USA it is less than that, about 20%.

There are deep roots of this global identity. Let me leave you with some quotes:

‘I am a citizen of the world (kosmopolitês)’ Diogenes 412 B.C. Greece

“To us all towns are one, all men our kin.” The Tamil poet Kaniyan Poongundran

“my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” Thomas Payne

“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” Albert Einstein

“The Earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.” Bahai’s founder

I am so uncomfortable with the standard image: Old man, flowing robes, up in the clouds, white, sitting on a throne.

The whole image is worse than useless. A much more expanded image is needed. One that really transcends images. Stephen Gaskin, a spiritual teacher from San Francisco, used the definition, “The container that contains all containers”. Try that on for size. That points to the scope of the image, but there are more dimensions.

Somehow, we have to find a way to break down this barrier that places God ‘out there’ – or even ‘out there and in here’. And here is where it is going to hurt a little because we hold onto some fundamental misconceptions about self and world.

Now imagining the vastness of the world is not the big hurt. You do know, don’t you, that there are more suns in the world than there are grains of sand on the earth. Now I’ve taken long excursions on the sand dunes of the Gobi Desert, the Sahara Desert, the Great Victoria Desert in Australia, The Mojave Desert in California, The Sechura Desert in Peru, and many others – there were even large sand dunes in the county where I grew up in Sherburne County, Minnesota. Don’t get me started on beaches. I know I cannot wrap my head around that number of grains of sand, or that many suns, or the much larger number of planets and even larger number of moons. If you really try to grasp it, it should surely blow your mind – and it should point to the naivety and arrogance inherent in the idea that we humans are the only intelligent life in the world.

Now the really painful misconception regards ‘self’. Right off, it flat out doesn’t exist. Our names? Made up fiction. Our possessions? More fiction. Our memories? Our thoughts? Temporary electrical storms in the grey matter. So what does exist? What creates these illusions?

Did you know that there are somewhere between fifty to a hundred trillion cells in each of these human bodies? (Notice I didn’t say ‘our’ bodies.) Nearly all these cells have a molecule that has been named deoxyribonucleic acid. Of course, each of these cells is too small to see and the molecule of acid (DNA) is just a couple nanometers in size. To put it mildly these DNA molecules are a bit complex, like three billion base pairs in each one. They are all bundled together rather tightly, but if one of them were to be stretched out it would be about two meters long – about as tall as a person. And if all the DNA in one of these human bodies were to be strung together like that, it would be about twice the diameter of the solar system. Did you know that most of these cells in these bodies are not even human cells? There are about 10,000 different organisms that make up each of these bodies. These bodies that we call ‘ours’.

Now, the particular body that is reading this, ‘your body’, started out as a sperm cell and an egg cell. And that one set of DNA molecules contained all the instructs to build ‘you’. The important point here is that no ‘self’ got added later at some point. Every cell in all the sense doors (eyes, ears, tongue, etc.) and every cell in the nervous system – including the brain – has this inherent intelligence that contains all the instructions for how each and every one of these cells is to function.

Science has figured out how some of these DNA base pairs work. About 1% of them. We should feel humbled and in awe of what we know vs. what we don’t know. So what I am trying to say is that these instructions in DNA have everything to do with how you are receiving this information and how you are reacting to this information. In fact, every thought, idea, attitude, belief, desire, emotion – all of it – behind all of it is the DNA of cells expressing their intelligence.

These human nervous systems are processing 400 billion bits of data every second. We are only conscious of about 2,000 bits per second.

There is so much more going on than what we are conscious of. I truly feel in awe and humbled.

I believe that eventually we are going to learn a lot more about the intelligence in DNA. I also believe that some of what we are going to come to understand is that:

• DNA exists throughout the universe
• DNA is now and always has been in constant communication with all other DNA
• That even our experience of space and time are mere constructs created by DNA

So to bring this full circle, this new understanding and respect for the ungraspable intelligence that is expressed by DNA puts me in a much more correct relationship to God. It annihilates ‘me’ and everything is God-saturated, or rather I see the unfathomable depth of intelligence operating on every level of all things. No there is not some old man in gowns in the clouds directing DNA. The direct experience of being conscious in this sea of infinite intelligence is a totality. No fictions need to be added to it.  I have surrendered myself totally to this intelligence as a fact – as the ‘me’ was an illusion to start with. And one other thing I think we are going to come to understand in a new way:

All things are possible.

The shaman had brewed a batch and had it in an old Dr. Pepper plastic bottle someone had found floating down the Pastaza River. Floating down from a civilization this community knew almost nothing about. We were on the border between Peru and Ecuador over 100 miles from the nearest road living with people who knew nothing about countries, or plastic, or sugary commercial drinks. No contact with electricity, TV, radio, newspapers or written language.
I drank my shot of what the Achuar tribe called Natem. A few minutes later I was watching a show of neon colors. Eight sided patterns. The colors changing faster toward the center of the pattern. I could sense that near the center the changes were happening faster than my perception could keep up with.
About this time the poison kicks in. I was ushered out of the lodge and held as intestinal retching kicked in. Vomiting removes the toxins. I couldn’t do it. I had trained myself from the age of 8 to not ever, ever throw up. At that time I was in a Catholic grade school with horrible lunches. Kids threw up every day. The nuns made them clean up their messes. The bathroom and any where near it was a toxic zone that actually caused many more heave-ho’s. I had prided myself on this ability to not throw up. Now it was about to kill me. Eventually they laid me on a large banana leaf. I laid there for hours, under the bright starlight of the Milky Way, making unearthly guttural sounds that scared everyone around me.
Charlotte and two other travelers had taken the ayahuasca. Charlotte was blowing everything in her out both ends. She had two helpers and embarrassment was the least of her concerns. She could hear what I was going through. Must have thought I was dying. Her helpers told her not to worry about me to just worry about herself, but she insisted, “Don’t tell me not to be concerned about him. He is the love of my life, I will be concerned about him!”
By the middle of the night I was exhausted from the convulsions and still freaking everyone out with sounds that should never come from a human or be heard by other humans. The shaman had me brought back into his lodge.
I sat before him on a small stool. He reached in my mouth and pulled my tongue out as far as it would go. With a small straw he began sucking with all his might on different parts of my tongue. I was barely conscious, but I had no choice but to fully trust that this was the right treatment.
Back to the banana leaf and slowly the retching subsided. By morning, I was weak, could barely walk with help, but recovering.
All that drama was on one level. But there was another level that happened that night. I would summarize it as gaining direct confidence in the total oneness of everything. Whoever I thought I was when the night began, that somebody got left behind. I was out of my mind. The nearest I can describe it is as though I was in my DNA. I was DNA. And actually there was no clear edge of ‘my’ DNA and ‘not my’ DNA. All the DNA in other people there, in the plants, animals and bugs – no edges of separation. And quite amazing to me was that all DNA is in constant communication. I was staring up at the Milky Way and realizing the entire universe is filled with DNA – and in constant, instantaneous communication. And I realized that this DNA consciousness was greater than time or space. Time and space were mere constructs inside this DNA consciousness.
All this was 11 years ago, in 2008. Maybe Natem doesn’t ever entirely leave you once you’ve ingested it. That certainly feels true in my case. It’s a leap to go to oneness from daily western civilization consciousness with all our assumed separations, but there is something persistent inside of me that keeps me trying to restructure my reality into the oneness model. I know oneness is the truth. Realizing it is what the inner life is all about for me.

Energy or Matter: It’s a choice

I was walking around the Harvard University campus wearing my favorite dark blue t-shirt. In yellow letters on the front it said E = M. ‘That’s not quite right’, most minds might habitually react. On the back of the t-shirt, it said “Energy or Matter. It’s a choice.”

OK. First of all, almost all of us are stuck deep into matter. What choice?

I used to teach meditation. One of the exercises I had all the students do was to spend five minutes laying on a Chi Machine. You lay on your back and place your ankles on this device that wiggles your legs back and fourth. When the movement finally stops, a rush of energy encompasses your consciousness. And in those moments, you are energy.

The worlds of energy and matter are so very different. I don’t need to tell anyone about the world of matter – we all know it all too well. But the world of energy, that’s the one that is so elusive to us. First off, there is no space or time here. There is only a “here” and a “now”.

Second, we are all one. That’s a hard one, isn’t it. To experience it, we have to dissolve our personal self and all the boundaries and borders that go with it. And then we have to see everyone else in the same light. In the world of energy it is all connectivity. There are patterns and change, but there are no walls or borders.

Third, you will have no control in the energy world. There is some kind of order, but it will be beyond understanding. It’s a magical, dreamlike experience where images, thoughts, feelings arise and disappear and nothing gets held on to.

At this point, you might think, “What’s it good for?” Ah. The magic. If you get comfortable moving into the energy world, you will increasingly be able to broadcast a feeling. And there is one feeling in particular that will widen the passage for those you love to experience this state. It is the feeling of universal loving-kindness.

I realize everyone who reads this is in their own unique relationship to the world of energy. There are those more experienced that I, there are those about at my same experience level and there are many who are more distant from the state in a number of ways.

One thought that helped me draw nearer to this state is something you can find on a bumper sticker.

Wayne Dyer and Stephen Covey attribute this quote to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin but it actually comes from an earlier source, G. I. Gurdjieff. The quote can inspire in you a shift in your center of gravity.

The material world of matter and how humans experience it is in a dire situation. And this is partly because so many beings are making the shift to the world of energy. We are nearing a tipping point in this regard. It will seem like a miracle that the world can be transformed so quickly. The quickening happens when you look into the eyes of ‘strangers’ and either you or they or both of you are in the energy state. It is these moments of overcoming all fears, that we can be united and we can further realize the peace and comfort – the love – that we all seek.

Mostly people experience new places by their generic airports.

The next deeper level of experiences are the tourist hotels and the tourist sights.

Rarely does it go further.

Now even in the place where you have lived a long time, if you have a car, you might not be as intimate with your place as you could be.

The last 16 months, we’ve been living for months at a time on every continent, away from the tourist traps and without a car or motorized anything. Every day we jog and walk and this is how we get to know the place where we are living.

Where cars can isolate you from the weather, we get to know the temperature from directly experiencing the winds, the clouds, the sun, the moon. We get to know the terrain of the streets and sidewalks. We become part of the environment for the local birds, the stray dogs and cats and other critters. We develop relationships with the street musicians and artists, the women with children begging, the disabled beggars. The scammers and drug dealers – “hashish?, marijuana?” The street vendors and parking attendants and shop keepers, the security guys, the dumpster recyclers, the street cops, the park maintenance staff and the other folks who walk or jog every day.

We get to know a place by how it smells – the good and the bad.

Every place has its depth. But there is no shortcut to seeing it or experiencing it. It’s layer after layer of revealed patterns – one experience taking you to the next experience. There is a ‘why’ and a ‘reason’ that keeps moving one deeper and deeper into the essence of a place. The long-time residents don’t usually reveal these secrets, until they trust that you can understand and appreciate what they reveal.

It is about love. “Love is the bridge between you and everything” – Rumi. Love is what takes it all in. Love is what connects the people with the things and the places. To explore a place, again from Rumi, “Your heart knows the way. Run in that direction.”

A meaningful existence. Evolving. Loving. Contributing.

There is not much meaning in daily maintenance. Get up. Get cleaned up. Eat something. Work. Eat something. Work. Eat something, relax, go to bed. Repeat. Eventually life is over.

The three lines of work – which show up in religions, philosophies and spiritual paths – provide meaning, when maintenance fails in that regard.

Another way of expressing these three areas of placing our attention is:

1. Inner work. Staying present. Letting go. Mindfulness. The opposite of being bored in each moment.
2. Relationships. Can we deepen our love and compassion each time we interact with another being? This is the second line of work.
3. Service. When the situation arises, can we step up and make a contribution toward relieving general suffering.

Ram Dass expressed these three lines this way: Love, Serve, Remember.

Daily life maintenance can occupy a huge amount of our attention. However, it can be overlaid in every moment by work on at least one of the three lines of work.

A huge obstacle to meaningful existence is what several have called the ten thousand distractions. These are mind moments where our attention is grabbed by something that has nothing to do with the three lines of work. It could be watching TV, or getting high, or consuming, playing games, or Facebook, or gossiping, or… (the rest of the list of 10,000). Can you catch yourself in a moment and ask, “Is this a distraction from a meaningful life?” Becoming aware of a distraction can be the beginning of turning a life toward more meaning.