Reincarnation

This is a topic that people either really love, or they have a really hard time with. There is a part of us that so thoroughly identifies with this meat body that we have, that it is obvious to us that when this body ceases to function, we’ll cease to function too, so, how can there be anything past death?

Furthermore, there have been studies of what the lack of oxygen does to the brain, and it matches very closely with what people who have had near-death experiences report of their experiences.  So, if we are to believe these studies, then WE are just some sort of electrical impulse bouncing around the synapses of our physical brain, and will perish when it does.

NOT!

I’ve had too many experiences in this life that have shown me that there is or are many things that are way beyond this little reality we call home.  I talked about this once in a post about a Dream House I once dreamed about.  Reincarnation is only a problem, logically, if we think about the physical aspect of it.  We experience reincarnation several times each night in our dreams.

If you practice meditation and self-discovery, over time, you will begin to be much more lucid in your dreams.  You will remember them in vivid detail, and perhaps even act consciously in those dreams.  In each dream, you will be a slightly different person.  In one dream, you might be a clown, in another a  police man, in another a backpacker walking through the woods.  But, in all of them, there is a sense of familiarity;  like seeing a familiar actor playing different roles.

When you wake up, or when you shift to another dream, that dream character vanishes, they cease to exist.  Because they never really existed in the first place… they were just a projection of your mind.

If you dreamed that you were a backpacker, and that you got chased through the woods by a large bear, that large bear is also a projection of your mind.  It doesn’t really exist outside of your own mind… but in the dream world, it really seems real, so, you’d better run!

So, what if THIS life were but a dream?  (the refrain of ‘row, row, row your boat gently down the stream’ playing in the background)  What if all the scary boogeymen of life, like the IRS, or Al Qaeda, or Cancer, or Very Large Bears are just projections from some very Large Mind out there… which is really our mind, but we’re not yet lucid enough to recognize it?  What if?

What if you could be chased by a bear in your dream, then realize that the bear was just a projection of your own mind, and that it didn’t really exist, and so you would stop, turn around, grin, and stop the bear dead in its tracks (perhaps even make it vanish, or at least kick it in the nads).  Then, you would have true power my friend. Over dreams, and over life, and even over death!

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Happiness

I was on a subway train the other day, and a young woman across from me was reading a book called The How of Happiness.  I don’t know much about the book but I like the title.  She had her backpack on the seat next to her, which is how riders discourage others from sitting next to them.  But it is pretty selfish, as open seats on a subway car are rare.  A really tall guy got on and sat two seats away from her, but since he was so big, he spilled over into the seat with her backpack in it.  She moved it incrementally.

She noticed that he was sitting on one of the straps of her backpack, and she made some comment to him about it.  He replied something about how the backpack should not be on the seat in the first place.  She countered with a comment about how his butt was taking up two seats.  I guess she hasn’t gotten to the practical section of the book yet.

My heart goes out to people like this, because they are unhappy, and they don’t know why.  They don’t know how much their attitude and behavior contributes to their unhappiness, and that it is within their ability to change that at any time.

When we focus too much on ourselves, that is when we are the least happy.  We’re selfish, self-centered, ego-centric.  We are identifying with our limited self, our ego, rather than our infinite self, our true nature.  It’s like we have a really really huge foot, that we’ve crammed into a really really small shoe.  We are in incredible pain, and yet we don’t know how much pain we are in, because it has always been like that.  If we ever manage to take that shoe off, even temporarily, it’s a revelation!

To be happier, focus outside of yourself.  Be kind to others, be generous, be funny, be helpful, be thankful for all you have and all others have done for you.  Do this a little bit, and you’ll feel a little happier.  Make this your way of life, and you will be a lot happier, all the time.

I’m not sure what scientific explanations the book gives for this, but in the world of meditation, we know that these thoughts and behaviours raise the frequency of our vibratory energy.  As your ‘vibe’ raises, so does your level of consciousness.  The higher your level of consciousness, the closer you are to your infinite self, your true nature, and the happier you will be;  because our true nature is absolute bliss. We’re just not very aware of it.

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Balance

There is a family of aerialists known as the Flying Wallendas.  They’ve performed in traveling circus acts for over 200 years as acrobats and more recently as high-wire artists.  They perform these incredible 3 level pyramids on the wire without a safety net.  This takes serious balance!

Balance is so important to living a happy and healthy life.  To balance a scale, you put equal weight on each side.  To balance our lives, we need to give equal weight to each part of our life.  If we focus too much on work, and not enough on home or family life, we become unbalanced.  If we over-focus on family and not enough on ourselves, we’re unbalanced again.

We also need to balance the energies that we allow to flow through our energy body.  In a post about Chakra Meditations, I mentioned the importance of giving equal attention to each chakra so that you do not release too much energy of one type or another.  In our society, there is a tremendous focus on sex and (will) power, which involve the second and third chakras respectively.  So, we need to balance that out with a conscious focus on the heart for love, and the third-eye for wisdom.

We also need to balance the energy we pickup from our physical environment.  I spent the holidays out in the mountains of Vermont.  The quiet and peacefulness of the place on both a physical and energetic level reminded me that I’ve got to get out of the City more often!  However, if I lived out in that wilderness, it would be just as important for me to go into the (big) City often too.  Too much weight on either side of the scale causes imbalance!

The key to balance is not losing it in the first place!  And so, we need Mindfulness to keep track of what is going on inside so that we can make small, immediate adjustments in our life to keep us up on that high wire.

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New Years

This time of year has always been very important to me.  First of all, there is the Winter Solstice, the most powerful day of the year.  If you have the day-to-day affairs of your life in order, and can meditate well for the few days before and after the Solstice, it can fill you with tremendous energy.  And that energy can help you make major breakthroughs in your life.  If your day-to-day affairs are not so in order, or if your consciousness is a little sloppy, then that same tremendous energy will bounce your mind all over the place and you’ll experience many challenging emotions and states of awareness, and you may come away from the Solstice in worse shape than you went into it.

Then comes Christmas.  Recently, I commented on what Christmas is like for me.  I don’t like the commercialism that stokes the consumer fires this time of year, but I think it is great that people focus their minds on giving.  So, I can’t complain.

To cap off the holiday season, is the celebration of the start of the New Year.  My teacher taught that it is very important to put your full attention into everything you do, and to finish everything you undertake with your best awareness.  Because the awareness you end one task with is the awareness that you will begin the next task with, and that awareness will either help ensure the success of the next task, or doom it to failure.

When he washed his dishes and put them away, he arranged the cupboards perfectly, with all the handles of the tea cups pointed in the same direction.  Food was organized and arranged perfectly in his refrigerator.  His clothes were clean, contracts signed, and his bills were paid.  He said that if you are sloppy in the details of the most mundane things in your life, then you’ll be sloppy with the more important things in your life.  And if you are sloppy with the more important things in your life, then you will likely arrive at the end of your life in a worse level of awareness than you had at the start.  And, you will carry that lower level of awareness with you into your next incarnation.  Setting up a downward progression in your conscious evolution.

So, the New Year’s celebration always reminds me of this teaching, and I strive to get my act together before the end of the year (and the end of the incarnation).  I clean, I fold, I pay my bills, I meditate more, and then I try to have some fun.  This year was a challenging year for me, but I achieved some important things, and most importantly, I’m in the best state of awareness I’ve been in all year (with a couple of minor detours around the Solstice).

So, I’m going to do a little snowboarding, a little celebrating (just a little, hopefully), a lot of laughing, and try to start off the New Year right.  The following week brings my birthday, which is the most powerful day of the year for an individual.  So, the challenge for me is to ride the energy of all of these most powerful days well into the New Year and ensure its success!  Happy New Year everyone!

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Inaccessibility

(editor’s note: a lot of people have a hard time with this topic)

What’s the difference between you and a celebrity (of course, assuming that you are not a celebrity… if you are, then just answer ‘nothing’!)?  For all of us, really, the answer is ‘not much’;  they might have a larger bank account, spend more money on their appearance… but really, the one major difference you will notice is that they are less accessible than we are.

If some deranged fan wanted to see us, they would be able to google our address (or get our complete domestic profile through Intelus for $19.95) and walk up and knock on our front door… and we would probably answer it, personally.  Celebrities (or rich people) don’t do that.  First of all, they have a gate, and security, and a maid or butler who is trained on how to deal with the public… and, if they are uber-celebrities, then they will have multiple houses and the general public won’t even have a clue, where they are going to be and when.

Why are celebrities so paranoid?  Well, I don’t know that they are, or maybe they are.  What’s that line from Mel Gibson’s Conspiracy Theory?  ’Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t trying to kill you.’  And with all the celebrity stalker cases recently, it’s a pretty convincing argument.  Celebrities have more to lose.  So, they become ‘less accessible.’

Why do we need to be less accessible?  Well, in the ocean, there are small fish swimming around, and there are larger fish too.  And, all too often, the larger fish eat the smaller fish, and possibly a larger fish still eats the large fish.  It’s an adversarial world.  The bigger fish are able to eat the smaller fish because they are more accessible, the bigger fish have ‘stalked’ them… they know their habits, they know where they live, what time they are home, when they sleep, where they eat, (and the bigger fish can swim faster than the smaller fish).  And, they can use this information for their own advantage.

Whatever sized fish you might fancy yourself to be, there is possibly a bigger fish out there who will pounce on you if they get the chance, so, why give them the chance? Become inaccessible.

Don’t tell everybody (or anybody!) what you’re going to be doing and when, and how often. Rather, KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT.  Foster some mystery.  It will be more exciting for you and for them.  Cancel your Facebook account, or at least stop updating your status regularly.  Can you do that?  You will find that it is difficult. Because others don’t want you to do that.  You will find that this pisses off your loved ones the most.  They like to  keep tabs on you, psychically, and if they are unsure of your whereabouts, your habits and schedules, they can’t quite get a fix on you… ah-ha!  Now, we’re getting somewhere!

If you’re accessible physically, then you are accessible psychically.  People can touch you (energetically), hold you, mold you, impress upon you any idea they want to… if they can find you.  So, don’t let them find you.

Inaccessibility is something that Don Juan talks a lot about in the books by Carlos Castaneda, about the study of knowledge and power.  Since we are so much more psychic than we realize, the thought forms of other people affect us much more than we may realize.  So, if some otherwise well-meaning parent wants you to be their conservative son or daughter and not become a lawyer for the ACLU, but rather marry a rich conservative from your home town and settle down and have lots of babies.. (whether this is something you’d want for yourself or not), you might feel this inexplicable desire to do just that… except it isn’t your desire… it’s their’s… but they were able to get to you, because you were too accessible.  If they can’t find you inwardly… they can’t manipulate you!  And even your dearest loved ones will try, whether they are aware of it or not.

We need to be inaccessible, because we will feel the subtle pressure, from outside of ourselves, to be something we’re not, yet we will unconsciously conform.  We really want to be free to grow in our own natural direction, but we can’t if we bend to other influences.

Even more importantly, we need to be inaccessible to ourselves.  If you know what you are going to do tomorrow, or next week, or next year, then  you, yourself, are impressing some static personality onto your fluid self, and you will limit your chance for growth considerably.  You need to become a mystery… to yourself!

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Coming Out of your Shell

We’re creatures of habit.  We form little routines to solve our ‘problems’ and we tweek the routines until we get something that works for us.  Take the ‘problem’ of commuting to work.  I used to live in the suburbs, and the most convenient way to work was to drive.  So I tried different driving routes until I found the right combination of factors… shortest route with the least traffic, but somewhat scenic, a less expensive place to park and I would walk by a great coffee stand on the way to the office.  So, I’d found the optimal routine, given my limited approach to commuting to work, for my preferences.  But, is this the absolute best way for me to commute to work?  I may never know, because I’ve arrived at a comfortable solution.  In statistics they say I’ve reached a ‘local maxima’.

If you have a limited number of solutions to a problem, you can plot them in a graph which may appear like the graph below.  A series of bell shaped curves, or what I think looks more like little turtle shells.  The highest point in each shell is called the local maxima, meaning the best solution in that vicinity.  If we are able to plot all of the possible solutions, then it is easy enough to look for the highest point in the highest shell (curve), and that is the ‘best’ solution.  This approach is called a ‘brute force’ search for a solution.  However, there are many problems that have billions of possible solutions.  Some, in fact, have an un-computable number of possible solutions, so you can’t possibly consider all of the solutions.  So, you won’t know if the good solution you have come up with is the best of all possible solutions, or just a local maxima.

In computers, they have an entire field of study called ‘search algorithms’.  This doesn’t mean searching the internet with something like Google.  A search algorithm is a computer program or technique that employs various equations to search through the ‘problem space’, the possible solutions, looking for ways to arrive at better and better solutions (now, Google likely does employ search algorithms in its internet search function).  But many of these algorithms get hung up when they reach a local maxima.

There is one search algorithm I’m particularly fond of, which is known as a ‘genetic algorithm’.  This computer program simulates the way genetics works with DNA to arrive at the optimal characteristics for survival, only it substitutes the characteristics for the solution of your problem instead.

One of the features of genetics is mutation, where a gene pairing is changed randomly, causing an unpredictable result.  Usually, this mutation is counter productive…  say it produces two heads!  But sometimes, the mutation gives the species a new trait that makes them much more successful than before, say a fish with a lung capable of breathing air on land.  Mutation, either in physical genetics, or applied to other ‘problems’ through computer algorithms allows the search to break out of local maxima and possibly find higher maxima; coming out of your shell, so to speak.

So, applied to our world of routines, it means that occasionally, we should break our routines, try something completely different (as Monty Python says).  In commuting, perhaps I should try taking the train instead of driving.  Though the commute may be longer, I would be able to do a couple of hours of work on the train, and be able to leave the office that much earlier, giving me more free time at home.  Or, better yet, maybe I can tele-commute, which would save much more time, save on expenses, reduce my carbon emmissions and help the planet.  But, I’ll never encounter these better solutions, if I stick to my routines.  I’ve got to come out of my little shell once in a while and try something completely different!

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Giving

On the occasion of ‘Black Friday’, I’ve been thinking a lot about giving.  People give for a lot of different reasons.  Some give because it’s fun to do.  Some give to impress other people and get their names on buildings.  Some give because there is a need and they just happen to be there at that moment.

Commercially influenced giving has put me off for a long time.  Carefully orchestrated seasons for giving, which are slowly creeping their way all around the calendar.  This sort of commercial hype can lead to giving out of obligation, or with the expectation of getting something in return.  If someone you love tends to give you expensive gifts, then you may feel that you need to give them something of equal or greater value; like an arms race, it sparks a gift race!  I saw a commercial the other night encouraging us to give someone a Lexus.  I think I would hate to receive such a gift, because how could I top that?  This sort of giving, I believe, causes more pain and frustration than it does warm feelings of generosity and love.

I enjoy giving personal things that I have made specially for the recipient (if I have the time).  But then, that sort of gift leaves us with little treasures that we feel we need to display and/or store for the rest of our lives.  Better yet are gifts that are consumable;  a night on the town, a weekend in the country.  Once enjoyed, we store only the warm memory.

Thanksgiving always reminds me of the best gift that you can give.  And that is the gift of food.  If you’ve never gone hungry, count yourself lucky; there are many people, whole families in fact, who go hungry every day.  One easy way is to donate canned food (or any food that doesn’t need to be refrigerated) to a local food bank (contact the local food bank near you for details).  If you want to be more involved, I’ve volunteered for organizations that provide meals to shut-ins during the holidays.  Volunteers deliver the meals, then sit and chat while the recipient enjoys their meal and your company.  I’m sure there is one in your area.

And sometimes, if I stop in for take-out food, I’ll order two or three additional meals, and hand them out to people in need, on my way home.  Mostly, for the selfish joy I get from seeing a face light up at the prospect of a warm meal.  Give yourself the gift of giving!

 

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Practice (cont)

A good meditation practice consists of meditating daily, twice a day if possible, but at least once a day.  When you meditate, you should practice one of the techniques I’ve outlined, or another that you’ve found helpful to you.  And when you meditate, really work at it, concentrate.  During the rest of the day, you should practice mindfulness.  Pay attention to what you are allowing through your mind, don’t dwell on the past or worry about the future.  Stay in the present moment.  And, in the present moment, focus on positive things.  Don’t allow hate, anger and negativity to dominate your thoughts.

If you do these things diligently, then your consciousness will continually improve and you will live a happy and healthy life.  As mentioned in the last post, there are times when we go on auto-pilot, and don’t put as much effort into our practice, but even a half-hearted meditation keeps us going.  Then, there are times that we fall off the path completely (well, I don’t believe you are ever off the path, because falling off of it IS part of the path).  There are times you may stop meditating entirely, and stop practicing mindfulness.  And one day you wake up and notice you’re in pain.  Life sucks, and you’re not happy at all.

This is where your practice can really pay dividends.  You don’t have to wonder why you’re not happy.  You don’t have to wonder what to do about it.  You know exactly what you have to do.  Start practicing again.  Put on your “beginner’s mind” hat and dig out the instructions for basic meditation exercises and approach meditation as if you’d never done it before.  In re-learning it, you may grasp some concepts or techniques that you missed the first (or the fortieth) time around.

Practice is your best friend that always has your back, and never lets you down, even if you’ve ignored him for a while.

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Anger

The topic of anger has popped up in a couple of different venues, so, I guess the Universe wants me to ponder that for a while.  When I was a college-aged kid, I had a pretty quick temper.  I didn’t express it very often, it would just seethe below the surface.  It often reared its ugly head when out driving.  I’d get behind someone who drove impossibly slow, and I wanted to go faster, and they just wouldn’t let me by, so I would tailgate them, honk, flash my lights.  Typical road-rage.

Later I took up the practice of meditation, and in that practice, you are instructed to look for the root of certain unhealthy thoughts or emotions, so that you can eliminate them at the source.  When I looked at my angry emotions, they were always caused by the frustration of not having things go my way.  I wanted to drive a certain speed down the road but someone else got in my way.  I wanted to sleep late but someone’s car alarm kept going off.  I wanted my burger with chili, cheese and bacon, and they gave it to me plain.  These things would inspire in me an almost righteous indignation; ‘how dare they…’.  As if I had a perfectly good reason for being livid.

My attachment to getting what I wanted was the trigger.  When that attachment was thwarted, it provided the stimulus, and anger was the response.  So, to eliminate anger, I had to un-learn this stimulus/response cycle.  The way to break any attachment, is to let go.  If your hand is attached to a doorknob, relax your grip and let it go.  If you are holding on to an old relationship, and the other person has already moved on, you have to say goodbye as well.

So, whenever I started to feel angry, I would ask myself, what is it that I want here, that isn’t going my way?  And when I identified it, I had to consciously let it go.  You come up on that slow moving, blue-haired lady on the winding mountain road, the frustration starts to rise, turns to anger because you are not driving as quickly as you want, then you tell yourself, “you know what, let’s drive slow for a while, enjoy the scenery a little, maybe even turn out at that scenic overlook ahead, and if we get the chance to pass, maybe we will, maybe we won’t, but let’s back off of this nice lady’s bumper so she doesn’t get nervous.”  When you let go of the attachment, the anger dissipates almost immediately.

The other night, I ordered a chicken quesadilla for dinner, and when they brought our food, they had made me a chicken sandwich instead.  I could have gotten angry, but that wouldn’t have solved anything.  I could have let go of my desire to eat right away and politely sent it back to be remade, without getting angry.  But I wanted to eat with my friend, and his food had just arrived too.  So, I let go of my desire for the quesadilla, and instead, happily looked forward to the chunked chicken with ranch dressing on a roll!

I hardly ever get angry anymore. When something like this happens to me now, I just smile and think that the Universe must have wanted me to have the sandwich instead of the quesadilla today, and who am I to question what the Universe wants?

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Grounded

There is an old saying that you should ‘keep your head in the sky, but your feet planted firmly on the ground.’  This is good advice!  In meditation practice, we tend to leave this world behind for a little while and if we are not well grounded, it is difficult to come back down to earth, so to speak.  If you visit enough spiritual communities you will often observe people who have this problem.  They have a dazed look in their eyes;  what the movie Full Metal Jacket called  ‘the thousand yard stare.’  They will talk kind of spacey and all spiritual-like and weave and bob a little bit as they stand there, talking not quite directly to you, but more over one of your shoulders.  This isn’t higher awareness, this is being spaced out.  People in this condition are more present in the astral dimension than in the physical dimension, and this is not very healthy.

Higher awareness comes from being fully present in multiple dimensions simultaneously.  So, it’s important not to lose your grip on the physical dimension, and we do this by staying ‘grounded.’  Grounded means that you are awake and conscious in this physical dimension, and you have your physical life more or less under control.  You pay your bills on time, you keep your house clean, your clothes washed, and your dog walked.  You take care of business.  When you are grounded, you have a firm foundation, a solid life here in the physical dimension.  Then, when you meditate, and shift your awareness through other dimensions, you will still feel that strength, that base, that foundation, and you will always be able to draw yourself back to that.  In fact, being well grounded will enable you to let go even more, to travel into even higher dimensions of mind, because you will not fear being able to return.

Carlos Casteneda gave us the terms ‘tonal’ and ‘nagual’.  The tonal refers to being grounded in the physical dimension.  The nagual refers to those higher dimensions of light and power.  And he stressed the importance of both in his books about the Teachings of Don Juan.  His books provide very good advice on how spiritual people can work on their ‘tonal’ through the practice of impeccability, applying your full attention to everything you do.  Impeccability means, not cutting corners, not taking the easy way out;  it means doing it right the first time.

If you have a very powerful car, the power can allow you to go very fast, but if you do not maintain perfect control at those high speeds, you may have a very bad crash.  When you meditate and pass through higher dimensions of mind, these dimensions can be incredibly powerful, and one wrong move can be disastrous, so, having tremendous self-control is very important.  By keeping your day-to-day physical life in perfect order, you’ll have that control when you really need it most!

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