Whether you are part of the Trump resistance or a Trumpeteer, hating or getting angry at the opposition is neither a cultural nor a personal solution.

Here we are, mostly asleep, and in the middle of the fastest and largest of the 6 big extinction events in the long history of our planet. If we don’t wake up en masse and quickly, we as a species will be included in the annihilation.

I have come across a new way of looking at both cultural and personal development, that I want to share as a model that can lead to a transcendence of this dire situation.

This new view is based both in biology and quantum physics, and it doesn’t require a Ph.D to apply the insights.

Let’s start with the biological root. We all know about the amazing transformation of caterpillars becoming butterflies and other flying creatures. Fewer of us know the details. Here are the details in a nutshell:

The caterpillar gets into a groove of eating leaves voraciously. It grows rapidly until it reaches a point where it taps out its capacity to keep it up. It finds a place to attach itself and hangs upside down. Inside the caterpillar is where the magic is brewing. Of the billions of cells inside, there are some cells – that have the same DNA as all the rest, but they vibrate at a different frequency. When the caterpillar identifies these cells, it’s immune system attacks them and kills them off. But these cells (which biologists call ‘imaginal cells’) keep appearing. As the caterpillar gets bloated, these imaginal cells start getting the upper hand. They start connecting and communicating with each other and form ‘imaginal disks’. They transform from single cell organisms to more complex multi-cell tissue. They begin to use the cells of the overstuffed caterpillar as nutritive soup to continue their growth and development. As they develop, they become the body parts of the flying creature that eventually all comes together as a butterfly or moth or whatever.

Now the cultural analogy of this process is pretty obvious. There is an identifiable group of well over 50 million humans who identify as cultural creatives and are busy creating a new world in every way. And just like in the caterpillar, the old society finds all kinds of ways to fire up its ‘immune system’ and thwart these cultural creatives. But they persist.

What, until now, has not been brought to light is this same process taking place inside each of our mind-bodies.

And this brings us to quantum physics. Studying quantum physics is a great way to destroy mercilessly every idea you have about the world you live in. To take just two aspects of this area of study, lets bring up the uncertainty principle and the observer effect. For our simplified needs, the uncertainty principle tells us that at the quantum level, we can not precisely either nail down the location or the momentum of an object. And the observer effect says that the act of observing an object, changes that object.

Ok. Now the question. Do we human beings have imaginal cells? I think the answer lies in these laws of quantum physics. If you have never looked for them and believe they don’t exist, then for practical purposes they do not exist. But, on the other hand, if you look for them and believe they can possibly exist, I believe that you will find them.

When I found them in myself, I found that they were responsible for the moments of awareness and unconditional love and the part of my life that is based on those experiences.

And even though for nearly twenty years I have said every day these words, “I promise to rededicate my life to being loving, kind and present” there are still many, many moments each day where that promise goes unfulfilled. And why is that?

For the answer, we need an expanded understanding of the human immune system. Do you know what would happen if all your or my moments were filled with awareness and unconditional loving kindness? Our ego, that part of us that thinks it knows who we are, that part would end. So our immune system, with our ego as the director in charge of conscious and subconscious patterns, fights these imaginal cells with all of its tools. These tools include: addictions, distractions, disease, confusion, worry, doubt, negative emotions, beliefs and more. A powerful arsenal. Yet imaginal cells persist.

The imaginal cells have some tools of their own. The direct experience of a moment of awareness with loving-kindness brings with it, peace, equanimity, a sense of connectedness and oneness, relaxation, a healthy healing energy, lowered stress and blood pressure levels. When you are in this state and in the presence of someone else in this state of loving awareness, there is a high vibration communication that energizes each of you. The imaginal cells express themselves through ideas in the mind as well. There is a deepening belief in the idea that there is such a thing as a ‘critical mass’ where the imaginal cells within oneself and within humanity can reach a strength such that a rapid and powerful transformation takes place that goes beyond ones’ wildest imagination. Another idea from imaginal cells is a rewrite of the E = MC² equation. The equation simply becomes E=M. Energy or Mass. It’s a choice. Imaginal cells urge us to see the world through the lens of Energy. Another influence from imaginal cells is expressed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

As moments of awareness or presence increase and deepen, the altered states of jhana begin to appear. These states further weaken the ego, which begins to lose the battle of defining reality. I think of some lyrics from Jefferson Starship’s Paul Kanter referring to the Nixon White House. The song is called Mau Mau. The entire song points to this transformation we are describing, so I think it is fitting to leave you with poetry. Here is the last half of the poem/song.

Hey dick
Whatever you think of us is totally irrelevant
Both to us now and to you
We are the present
We are the future
You are the past
Pay your dues and get outta the way
‘Cause we’re not the way you used to be
When you were very young
We’re something new
We don’t quite know what it is
Or particularly care
We just do it – you gotta do it
Let the music do it, take you there
Do it, do it, do it gotta do it
Something new, something new, something new
New, new

Open your eyes there’s a new world a-comin’
Open your eyes there’s a new world today
Open your hearts people are lovin’
Open it all we’ve come to stay
I said, open it all we’ve come to stay
I said, open it all we’ve come to stay
People, hey you people, everybody
Us young people come to stay
I said, people, on relief
We’ve all come to stay
Open your eyes there’s a new world a-comin’
Open it all we’ve come to stay
Yeah, yeah, yeah, open it all
Open it, open it, baby,
Now open that door

I was taught to pick three or four qualities that I wanted to amplify in my life and in relation to others. I happened to pick happiness, peacefulness and freedom. So the traditional way of phrasing this in meditation is, “May I (you, they) be happy.” “May I (you, they) be peaceful.” And “May I (you, they) be free.”

But I took this to mean that I want conditions to be right so that I (you, they) would be happy, peaceful and free. And it is true that humanity generally operates under the laws of cause and effect, such that if pleasant, calm and liberating features are happening in our environment we tend to experience more happiness, peace and freedom.

But wishing for conditions in this way is a very weak and ineffective way of applying our minds. I have changed how I do loving-kindness meditation.

I now actually say, “May I remember to create happiness.” “May I remember to create peacefulness.” “May I remember to create freedom.” Can you see the immense difference?

We have been programmed all our life to believe that happiness (to take one of these three) is a result of happy situations and experiences – and some of our personal experience supports this. But the greater truth is that in any (and all) moments we can just flat out choose to be happy.

Again we have been programmed to believe this self-generated happiness is not, ‘real happiness.’ That it is ‘fake happiness.” But that is just part of the messaging of programming us to believe material things and external experiences are the key to happiness.

The sages of old are in agreement that true happiness comes from inside. And it is so strong that external conditions are too weak to defeat it. When I (you, we) radiate this quality of happiness, it becomes a force in the world that really does cause those around you to experience more happiness. And maybe they will intuit that they too can simply choose to generate this quality of happiness.

In this same way I (and you and we) can generate peacefulness and freedom. A special word about generating freedom. There are degrees of freedom that continue on and on and go right off the charts of our imagination. But where the “rubber hits the road” in regard to generating freedom is to take a very close look at what wants and desires we are holding on to in this moment. Then finding a way to hold on to them more loosely or to let them go entirely.

We just returned from a week in Malaysia, a Muslim country. We’ve spent time in several Muslim countries: Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Jordan. And we’ll be in Qatar in a few hours.

There is so much harm being done in the world by American political demonizing of Muslims. The harm shows up in Americans as unreasonable fear and suspicion and prejudice. To a lesser but still significant extent there is some of this same prejudice against Muslims expressed in many European countries. The harm also shows up in the consciousness of Muslims who mostly do not understand this American centered hatred toward them, but nevertheless feel the pain of that negative bias.

We are finding that we have to fight through these biases to reach out in kindness to Muslims, to start conversations, to ask questions, to learn customs and beliefs. But after making the effort we find the rewards of sharing warm hearted experiences with people who we have so much in common with.

Everyone wants to be happy. Everyone wants to be loved. Everyone wants to have a peaceful and healthy environment for their families. Everyone wants to learn about and understand the world around them. Everyone wants to live free of fear. Everyone wants to feel secure.

Charlotte is particularly good at engaging with all kinds of people. This is what is at the core of citizen diplomacy. It will take millions and millions of positive, compassionate personal interactions between Muslims and us Europeans and North Americans to undo the damage that is spewing out from the American administration.

It is our hope that all of us use every opportunity to heal connections between people that seem different. We should not let hating and prejudiced people divide us. The people of the world do not have enemies. We are united. Those who support wars, those who support economic slavery, those who try to divide us by race or gender or religion or anything else, those are the ones that need to be removed from power.

We have traveled so much these past twenty years. Over fifty countries. We are starting to get a taste of what is happening to humanity.

With our home base in the USA, it is hard to see a phenomenon that is the cause of so much suffering all over the globe. The phenomenon is so pervasive in the USA that every citizen is like a fish swimming around and not realizing we are in this huge artificial tank. What I’m talking about is the successful marketing that connects personal happiness and success with the accumulation of material things and money.

In the 1950’s, marketing got enhanced from simple persuasion techniques to a science of connecting to and manipulating basic human needs and emotions. For the last seventy years the science of manipulating human needs has been honed to a level that most of humanity is totally unaware of.

We all naively think we are making hundreds of decisions ourselves every day – about what to do, what to say, where to go, what to buy, etc.  But after over a quarter million ads digested, we need to understand that we no longer know that person inside us that does not have this thick advertising overlay.

Because of this bombardment of carefully crafted messages, it is reasonable to be suspicious about every want and desire and decision we experience.

On a global scale, we see the end result of this saturation of marketing messages as ever-expanding desire for material things and increasing wealth. I see it in China, SE Asia, India, Central and South America. Basically everywhere.

I am not talking about raising the standard of living of a population. What is happening is quite different from that. Those billions of people who are under the spell of marketing are not motivated to ensure basic human needs are met by the people around them. The marketing is programmed to create consumers whose motivation is personal gain, not community gain.

So is the situation hopeless? Are we going to continue eating up the resources of the planet to satisfy these material pursuits? Will the climate become unlivable? Will wars that are increasingly transparent grabs of resources continue to grow?

Of course each of us can’t be an agent for solving this problem if we ourselves are under the marketing spell. So the first order of business is to free ourselves.

When I first became aware of this issue, I believed I would have to flee to the pampas area of Argentina to get away from the marketing. I soon realized that the rural Ozark area would do as well. And gradually I have learned that the process of freeing ourselves from marketing can be done anywhere.

It is a gradual release that takes time, but anyone can pursue this path. James Joyce, in his novel “Ulysses”, talked about a character who lived a couple feet from his body. Not only are most of us not in touch with the direct experience of being a body, our minds are hinged on the past and future, when the only real experience is this present moment.

The process of getting free of the ‘fake news’ of marketing, often goes by the name of meditation. But it is much simpler than that label implies. Right now or any time (and regularly) you can close your eyes, relax, and place your attention on your breathing or any actual real sensation anywhere in the body. Your mind will resist and head off into the past or future, just keep bringing it back. Eventually your center of gravity will shift to more presence and less la-la. It’s when your mind is in la-la land that marketing slips into your being and sets to work manipulating your thoughts, desires and actions. You will find yourself more and more avoiding places, devices and situations where advertising is dominant.

As you continue to practice this focus on what is real, you will build up a bit of resistance or immunity to most of the effects of marketing messages. Marketers realize there is a certain small (less than 10%) of the population that is already virtually unreachable by all their methods. You can gradually move deeper into the ground of the ‘unreachables’.

In this place of the unreachables, you will find some pleasant surprises. There can be a bonding between unreachables that doesn’t happen when minds are in la-la land. There are sometimes deep agreements and consensus that seem to arise in unreachables as if they were part of the organic structure of the natural world (they are). We may even find that there is a critical mass that can be reached, where the world as we know it can be fundamentally altered.

You are in control of reality. You get to decide how your world works. Happiness does not depend on external situations. You can generate happiness by making the decision to create happiness. To create love. To create peace. To create freedom.

Living in Bali these past two months, I see an entire culture practicing resistance to rampant materialism. Four million people here and basically all of them are making daily offerings, “canang sari”, where it is a meditation to create these offerings, place them, and activate them. The offerings are meant to invite the positive and deter the negative and develop deep harmony with man, the earth, and the world of unseen forces. Even with five million tourists visiting each year, their culture remains strong, and they export happiness and send well wishes to all. Its an inspiration to know the work these people are engaged in.

 

Now that we have two very young grandsons, I want to record some of the stories from my life so they can enjoy them at some point in the future. Like you, I bet we would all love to see and hear our grandparents or great grandparents talking about how their life was ‘back in the day.’
So one of my retirement projects is going to be to make a series of YouTube videos to share with my new grandchildren – and who knows maybe their children and beyond too.
I want to start with the stories that had the most impact on me and I’ll share a written version of the first one here with y’all…
I want to tell this story, so it is in the record at least somewhere. The video version is here.
I believe it was the summer of 1960. I was living at 729 Irving Avenue in Elk River Minnesota. I’m not sure of the date, but it was during the summer and it was an almost clear day with very little breeze. I was in little league and had just played a game at what was then the Handke Junior High School down in the hole where we had an ice skating rink in the winters.
I was riding my red Schwinn bicycle back to home in the mid to late afternoon. I turned off Jackson avenue on 7th street and got on the alley to come the last block. I had on my red Texaco baseball cap (they were sponsoring my team) and I had my baseball glove in the front bent up metal bin.
As I approached the middle of the block, I jumped off my bike and began to walk it through the thick sand in the alley at the Madsen family house. As I got through the sand and came to our property, I looked up.
What I saw was a huge round object partially behind the north-most of our three large elm trees on 8th street. It was drifting, silently and slowly to the southeast.
I ditched my bike by the small Russian olive tree at the back of our yard and ran around the small hedge to get a better look.
The object was now beginning to go directly over our house. It was less than 100 yards away from me – maybe around 50 yards away. It was somewhat larger in diameter than our house was long, which would make it around 75 feet across. It was maybe 30 feet tall in the center. It was mostly a golden-brown color with some blacker areas. The panels around the edge were smooth. I didn’t see any windows. There were a couple thin silver or silver-black pole like objects coming out the top near the center. The object was barely rotating, if at all.
It was drifting just above the treetops, I watched it as I walked quickly toward Irving avenue. It went just above the row of tall poplar trees on the far side of Irving avenue. I stood at the top of our property on Irving avenue and watched it drift over the new addition and finally out of sight.
It seemed like a very long time, but it was probably less than 3 minutes that I saw it.
That evening at dinner I asked my parents about what I had seen. I was excited that it must be some new experimental aircraft that I hadn’t heard of. Neither of my parents could tell me what I had seen.
The next morning, very early, I went down to the post office before sunrise to get my bundle of Minneapolis Tribune morning papers to deliver. I usually spent a couple minutes reading a bit of the paper. On page 2 in the very leftmost column was a story about what people had seen and reported in the sky the previous day. The reports were mostly from northern suburbs of Minneapolis and included eye witness reports from police officers. Minneapolis northern suburbs were exactly in the direction I saw the object going. Their descriptions were like mine.
The newspaper called the object an ‘unidentified flying object’ – a UFO.
An experience like that is not easy to forget or dismiss. I really wanted a better answer to what I had seen. When I was a senior in high school I wrote my thesis on the UFO question.
A life time of thinking about this question has resulted in some shifting of my reality away from the consensus reality.
Are we the only intelligent life in the universe?
Once I understood how vast the universe was, it was clear to me that it was extremely unlikely that we would be the only intelligent life. And beyond that, it occurred to me that it was also extremely unlikely that we were the most intelligent life in the universe.
Has that intelligent extraterrestrial life made contact with earth?
That also seems extremely likely and it has probably been going on for many millenniums.
So, although most people are not inclined to give these questions much thought and simply subscribe to the consensus reality that we alone are the only intelligence in the universe, I live in a world where we human beings are of very limited, even primitive intelligence.
If we had just a smidgen more intelligence, we would see racism, war and suffering from poverty all go away. I have faith that much of humanity is moving, slowly, in that direction.
We think it quite stupid now to think the earth is the center of the universe, but that is what humanity assumed until just a few hundred years ago.
Soon after that, the notion that the solar system was the center of the universe collapsed.
And more recently it became clear that even the Milky Way Galaxy is not anywhere near the center of the universe either.
Someday, I hope very soon, we will realize that the seat of universal intelligence does not rest inside the human race on Earth. And with that realization we will see we have a long and exciting path of evolution ahead of us.

Loren Parmley  said as a comment to a video we posted on Facebook of this week’s rental space: “I don’t get it. Rich American’s live well in foreign countries while the native people’s are displaced or live in squalor. Is this what I have to look forward to as I get older?” https://www.facebook.com/luke.lundemo/posts/10157363978090299?comment_id=10157366483475299

Loren raises a deeply important issue.

Charlotte and I have traveled all over the world – every continent – with the aim of understanding and appreciating this amazing planet and its people.

For the last 20 years our ‘home base’ was in Jackson, Mississippi. While in the USA we worked hard on several causes we believe in:

Local Sustainable Food Systems

Renewable, Sustainable Energy Systems

Economic and Environmental Justice

Protection of the Climate and Environment

And more…

Everywhere we go, in the US or elsewhere we actively and directly work on these issues. We believe that if you are American and you are rich, you are not using your wealth wisely. You should be giving all the financial resources you don’t need to causes and organizations you believe to be doing the most effective work in relieving suffering. We have never paid ourselves more than $10.50 an hour and lived at the lowest level of middle class income and supported our two kids through college graduation.

As for being Americans, we believe it is much more important to identify as human beings. Becoming aware of our inherent privileges that we nearly all have should be a big issue for us privileged folks. With those privileges comes a responsibility to work toward a world with less privilege where basic needs of all people are provided.

Worldwide poverty is a moral problem. We can end poverty by redirecting military budgets to meeting real human needs. But in Mississippi candidates that have that morality either never make it to the ballot or get less than 1% of the vote.

So here is the bottom line for us. We are glad to be away from the US economy where we are no longer being consumers (as conscientious as we were) feeding the corporate greed that is destroying the livability of the planet and the main force behind obscene levels of income inequality in the US and around the world.

We now only own what we are carrying with us. We are closer in terms of possessions to the world average than we have been in fifty years.

We feel really good about putting a bigger portion of our money directly in the hands of people who really need it and will use it to directly improve the quality of their and their families lives.

As we get older, we are constantly trying to refine our lifestyle to be ever more effective agents of positive change. There is no reason for that to let up or stop because of age.

Wherever we are we can try to learn and understand the languages that people around us are using. We can try to understand, respect and appreciate their cultural values. We can use our skills, our intelligence, our privileges, our wealth toward the goal of reducing suffering.

It was easier to see, understand and work with suffering in Mississippi than in Minnesota where I grew up. It was easier to see, understand and work with suffering in urban Bali than in Mississippi. And now it is easier to see, understand and work with suffering in rural Bali than the urban, more Westernized areas.

Although being new in a country, a good deal of attention has to go toward getting settled in, finding a place to live and a community, learning the language and all the styles of living – at the same time a person can continue some of the easiest ways of being a social and environmental activist.

The single use plastics of the global petro-chemical industry are washing up on every shore in the world. Here is certainly no exception. We’ve collected and filled large bags full of plastic from beaches here. We refuse plastic bags. We support restaurants that use non-plastic straws and recyclable containers. We talk with people to build support for a ban on single use plastics.

More and more farmers here are buying in to another aspect of the petro-chemical industry and spraying their rice fields with poison. We seek out organically grown rice here in stores and restaurants.

We express kindness and respect to absolutely every person we meet – regardless of their economic standing. We use the services of people we have found to be community activists.

We use the Indonesian language every change we get and study it every day to increase our vocabulary. We support, respect and participate (to the extent allowed) in local religious ceremonies.

Financially every day we are transferring wealth from the US to Indonesia with a significant amount going directly or almost directly to local people with very little.

We have a daily practice of meditation which helps us keep focused on what is important and helps us to remember to also be kind to each other and ourselves.

To bring all this home, I’m going to slightly rephrase Loren’s comment:

“I don’t get it. Rich American’s live well in America while the Native American people are displaced or live in squalor. Is this what I have to look forward to as I get older?”

 

Does satisfaction with place depend on the place or does it depend on the mind?
Also, if the whole country goes silent, will it silent the mind?

Not everybody knows the answer to these questions.

On the Bali Day of Silence (Nyepi), I sat on our balcony and listened. It started last Saturday at sunrise. It is usually a pretty quiet time of day anyway. The insects had their deep background symphony going – that some people say is almost indistinguishable from the bioelectronic static in our brains. The roosters crowed. The morning doves, which are everywhere here, were cooing near and far. Ducks would occasionally do a crescendo of gaggling. And that was about it. No motorcycles. No aircraft. No cars or horns. No construction equipment sounds. No people talking.

The sun rose higher. Still nothing but nature sounds. Now this was getting increasingly odd. The natural world seemed to be slowly recognizing how odd this was. All the natural life was able to communicate without all the human induced static. The insects didn’t have to back off while somebody walked through them. As the day went on, all the species of life just kept getting stronger. Today was going to be a rare win for the DNA evolving on this island.

I thought about that as I sat quietly. In North America and really almost all of the world, every day of my whole long life have been days where nature lost – had to retreat back further. More poisons got dumped on the soil, more toxic emissions went into the air, pollutants drained into nearly all the streams. Every day, nature lost. The standings where I’ve lived my life show: Nature – 0, Human Polluters – 25112. Here on Bali it’s Nature – 69, Human Polluters – 25043.

On Bali, nature wins just enough to keep the memory of advancing the natural harmony of the islands DNA of life alive. But I wondered, in North America and elsewhere is the DNA of life starting to forget what it is like to advance?

I’m sure many humans on the island were appreciating the beauty of experiencing nature’s brief victory. But of all the days of the year, it follows the biggest exodus of people – mainly tourists – leaving the island. There is an attitude that it is a wasted vacation day, so tourists go to some other place nearby and return after Nyepi is over. Some who stayed said they felt like prisoners in their rooms. Bored with nothing to do. The ‘lucky ones’ had some internet service where they could entertain themselves, others saw their internet shut down for the day. Some business focused people saw it as a day ‘lost’.

I remembered the first 10-day silent meditation retreat I was dragged off to, not knowing what I was getting into. My mind in those days was consumed with political activism and questions like “How do we stop nuclear pollution?” After hours upon hours of watching my brain keep returning to these trains of thought, I went to the teacher and asked, “Is meditative awareness always appropriate?” I was thinking shouldn’t we give this stilling the mind thing a break once in a while. If I quit applying myself to the strategizing of political activism, I was just falling further and further behind. The teacher got right up in my face (which startled me). Cocked his head to the side, and said very clearly, “YES!”.

With that doubt removed, my mind did get more silent for the remainder of that retreat. And I volunteered for (and even organized) many 10-day silent retreats in the following years.

So the answer to the question, Does a whole country going quiet, does that quiet the mind? That’s a clear No. If one is open and leaning into quieting their mind, then yes, the country going quiet supports that leaning. But if one is resistant to quieting the mind, then the country going quiet is pretty irritating.

On to the more personal and larger question.

Does satisfaction with place depend on the place or does it depend on the mind?

There are so many millions of people who are living in a place they don’t want to be. It is a very big part of human suffering. So why don’t they just move? Well, of course if you are living in prison – it’s just not an option. But for everyone else? There are many who intend to move but have to just keep putting it off for one reason or another. There are some who would move but really don’t know where to move to. And there are even a big number of people who have moved and find the place they have moved to still evokes dissatisfaction.

I really want to believe that there are people who were living dissatisfied in one place and after moving to another place saw the dissatisfaction fall away. Maybe someone reading this is saying, Yes – that’s me.

Yet, I just need to say this. There is a very common human quality that rejects what is. When the mind is rejecting what is, there is often a comparing going on – the mind saying, “Things should be like this instead of that!” The mind imagines that the world should be different in some way. And the mind imagines that somewhere in the world, the world actually is different in that way. Sometimes the mind is right. There actually are places where late winter snow storms just don’t happen.

But it is also very often the case that our habit of rejecting what is – that habit – goes with us no matter where we go. If that is the case, there is no place on Earth or beyond, that will end that personal suffering.

And it just might be that the difference sometimes between ‘hell on earth’ and ‘heaven on earth’ happens in that place between our ears.

It is starting to feel like that. Ask and you shall receive. Charlotte had gone two weeks without any chiropractic or deep tissue massage help. The marathon sessions on airplanes. A couple six-mile treks. Long car rides. Heavy luggage. Turns out western style chiropractors can no longer practice in Bali – maybe all of Indonesia. I don’t know the whole story about that. There are deep tissue massage practitioners. Quite a few of them. Thanks to the internet and people who leave reviews about their experiences with each practitioner, we were able to do a lot of research. We narrowed it down. And then one person at Ubud Bodyworks Center looked to be clearly a very good pick. Mr. Ketut Arsana. You can Google him.

This morning we met the Australian photographer and his wife that live next to us. They knew Mr. Arsana and said he is the best. His hands are magic, they said.

Pak Ketut Arsana. Charlotte got an appointment with him today at noon. I waited for her in the most wonderful space at the Bodyworks. An outdoor small pavilion. Distant flute and drum music. Bamboo chimes dancing with the wind. Running water fountain. Birds. Staff quietly going about their work. On a soft bench with cushions, I sat cross-legged, closed my eyes and with a slight smile began following my breath. An hour quickly passed.

Something subtly changed. Charlotte came down the stairs from her session, followed by Ketut. Charlotte had a bit of a glow. Said the session was very good. A lot of pain, but learned a new mantra, “Embrace your pain.” I got to meet Ketut and it is so easy to melt into his presence. I am scheduled to have a session with him next week.

Although we had clearly put this meeting into motion, there was an added dimension of fortuitousness or serendipity. The sense stayed with me (us?) as we left Bodyworks and headed down the narrow sidewalk along the narrow busy street in Ubud. A driver hailed us from across the street, he wanted to drive us. It was a common proposition and we told him we wanted to walk and experience the shops along the way to the supermarket where we intended to look for a more suitable sized luggage. We told him maybe we could use a ride from the supermarket back to our place. He was up for that and gave us a decent price. We continued walking and taking in the sights of all the quite unusual shops. It was like a new age smorgasbord, vegetarian cafes, yoga studios and artistic handicrafts of all types. We walked further than we thought the supermarket was and asked someone for directions and they said we had walked too far, so we turned around to backtrack, when a Japanese couple who overheard the conversation came to us and said, “No”, they gave you wrong information. It’s another 5 minutes or so in the direction you were originally headed. We thanked them and continued on our way. Our driver had been following us apparently and caught up to us and talked us into taking a ride the rest of the way. He waited for us as we did our shopping and then drove us back toward home. There was a huge traffic jam with no cars moving, so he took a detour of about 5 km to get us home. In talking with him we learned his name is Dharma. Yes, really. It turns out he is a master woodworker. He showed us pictures of some of his work and it was impressive. He had been to San Francisco and Minneapolis. The Clintons had bought some of his work and had them displayed in the White House. He lives in a small community not far from Ubud that is famous for woodworking. He is part of a large collective of woodworkers. We arranged to meet again a few hours after the Day of Silence and he will take us to rice fields, waterfalls and his woodworking community. This is interesting in that one of our roles here is as representatives of Fair Trade Green – a business that purchases hand made products from collectives all over the world and ensures that the producers get a living wage for what they make and find a market for their products in more affluent places (Yes, even Mississippi qualifies as more affluent!)

So this evening, I am reviewing these events, and wishing that this sense of easy unfolding would continue and grow. Thinking that maybe feeding my heart, meditating, and being careful to being kind, maybe that might keep this sense of being guided alive. To have good things unfold with very little effort is such a blessing. We’ll see.

Lissa Rankin M.D. takes a close look at the role of discernment in trying to know when guidance is happening.

Here is an invitation.

Join us for the Balinese “Day of Silence” from 6am Saturday, March 17 to 6am Sunday, March 18.

The Day of Silence, here called Nyepi, is the holiest day of the year in Bali. It is the start of a new year.

If you can imagine, during this 24-hour period:

Nobody leaves their family home.

All roads are deserted.

The international airport in Denpasar is shut down.

Radio and TV quit broadcasting.

No fires are lit.

Nobody goes to work.

Lighting is kept to a minimum.

All entertainment takes a day rest.

The government and local religious leaders are considering also shutting down the internet, but others in government say people on their own should just refrain from internet entertainment. Many people take this as an excellent time for prayer and meditation.

In the 3 days preceding Nyepi people prepare by taking all their shrines to the nearest river and wash them. Then on the day preceding Nyepi there are huge processions with nasty looking monsters with eyes bulging, long fangs and scary hair. These represent the demons in our lives. After the sun sets, the demons are burned.

Then the day after Nyepi, people visit each other and forgive each other any transgressions. It is also a day for Dharma study, reading holy texts.

Join us in this meaningful celebration as much as you can.

 

There is really no way of knowing how thick our cultural assumptions are – or how dependent we are on them.

A science fiction writer might have developed the kind of mind that can imagine radically different sets of cultural assumptions, but most of us don’t bother with that kind of exercise. Instead our most common experiences with this issue might be things like that tech whose accent we can’t decipher. A food description on the menu that means nothing to us.

Travelers, cultural adventurers, dabble further. A place where English is not understood. Everyone agreeing to drive on the other side of the road. Miles are gone – it’s kilometers. Pounds are gone – it’s kilograms. Fahrenheit gone – stays in the 20’s (Celsius). Dollars are gone – it’s, well, something else. Here it’s rupiahs. The months have traded summer for winter and winter for summer.  Your sunsets are our sunrises. Your today is our yesterday. And all of this is just on the surface.

Is there a rice deity that controls the harvest?

Is absolutely every thing and every body a manifestation of an all powerful force, Brahmin, mysterious beyond knowing?

And is living a life of Dharma the only liberating path through life?

And is the goal of this path a merging with Brahmin where there is no longer struggle with ‘what is’?

So here is an island of over four million people, constantly making offerings, constantly trying to find and follow Dharma, and in this part of the island they have tourists in front of them that for the most part are totally clueless to this world view.