Jim Dollar's Published Works

Learning to be Individuals

As a species, we are moving out of the tribal orientation of group think

—where no one had an idea of her, of his, own,

and everyone lived the way life had always been lived before them

—where everyone knew how it was supposed to be done, because nothing new was ever done

—where the rules were strictly imposed, and deviation was severely penalized.

We are moving away from that orientation, and moving toward a community, or communal, orientation

—where the group exists to support and sustain the birthing, the coming to be, of the individuals within the group.

We are moving from a telling, doing, obeying orientation to more of a listening, experimenting, being and being-with orientation.

Jesus broke the mold and set the tone with his “You have heard it said, but I say unto you,” approach. Before Jesus, the religious teachers of the day had no mind of their own. They were simply receptacles of the teaching that had been passed along to them, and they passed it, unaltered, along to their disciples.

This is in the tradition of the Yogi masters who are, in the words of Joseph Campbell, “a clear pane of glass” through whom pass the wisdom and the instruction of the ages, without alteration or improvement, and without the personal imprint of the individual guru. The work of the disciple in this tradition, is to disappear, to cease to exist, to become a mindless carrier of the tradition, in the manner suggested by the writers of the Bible, “neither adding, nor taking away.”

Jesus comes adding and taking away. “You can’t pour new wine into old wineskins,” he says, and, “Every scribe fit for the kingdom brings out of his treasure something old and something new.” “Who do you say that I am?” he asks. And, “Why don’t you decide for yourselves what is right?”

With Jesus, comes the idea of new ideas that cannot be contained in old constructs. His disciples didn’t get it, and quickly acted to close off the possibility of anyone thinking something the disciples didn’t tell them to think, but “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” is heard, even in the wilderness, and once heard, there is no forgetting what has been said.

Jesus calls those who follow him to respond to this moment right now in light of the possibilities and needs of the moment—perhaps by doing things that have never been done, and may never be repeated. Jesus does not simply stand aside, and allow the traditions of the past free and easy access to the moment of his living. Jesus stands between what always has been done, and what needs to be done, and says, “Love your enemy,” and, “Whoever is without guilt can cast the first stone.” With Jesus comes responsibility for one’s own living, for one’s own acting, for one’s own choosing and deciding in the moment that calls for action. With Jesus, “the old has passed away and, behold, the new has come.”

But, it doesn’t come all at once and that’s that. It comes in fits and starts over long stretches of time. It comes, but then it depends on us to pick it up, and carry it forward. It is much too easy to allow the tradition to do our thinking for us. We need the right kind of community on our side, because we don’t have what it takes to do the work of independence independently from those who are also doing that work. We need one another in order to think for ourselves.

This is the primary work of the right kind of community—enabling individuals within the community to find their own voice, sing their own song, tell their own story, and live the life that is theirs to live. The work of the right kind of community is to enable individuals within the community to be who they are—to be true to themselves—to live authentic, genuine, straight-from-the-heart lives. It is the work of the right kind of community to enable disciples to become like the Master in following no master. The community exists to bring to life the life that is waiting to come to life within each of us. It does this by not-knowing what that life is, or who we are supposed to be, and by listening with ears that hear, seeing with eyes that see, and comprehending with hearts that understand who we are that stand before it, wondering who we are and what we are to do.

The right kind of community doesn’t have a clue about what should be. We all enter each moment, not knowing what will be asked of us by the moment, or what will be called for in the moment, or how we will respond to the moment. Maybe we will fulfill the moment’s needs, and, maybe we will fail the moment. How to be true to ourselves within the context of the moment here/now is the perennial problem of the community, and of the individuals making up the community. There is no formula for solving the problem of knowing what to do, when, where, and how, apart from sitting still, being empty/quiet, listening intently to the silence, self and moment, and waiting for what arises, emerges, appears, occurs to us, calls from the silence to light the way and elicit/evoke our response.

Ideally, the right kind of community would stand before each of us, not-knowing who we should be, or what we should do, or how we should live our life, but listening to each of us—lovingly, mindfully, attentively—trusting the power of compassionate awareness to provide what is needed for us to be who we are. The minute the community presumes to know what we should do, who we should be, how we should live, the community ceases to be the right kind of community. The right kind of community imposes nothing, but provides what is needed: Caring space in which we might hear what we are saying and see what we are looking at.

While the community doesn’t know what should be done in the moment of our living, the community does know how to know. The community possesses the vision of the How of Being. The community knows about process. It knows, for instance, that we are to live with compassionate, mindful, non-judgmental, non-willful, non-opinionated awareness—to listen with loving, attentive presence, to the silence of our life, and see where it goes. No expectations. No agendas. No plans. No opinions.

We have to become comfortable with not-knowing. We must practice relishing playful experimentation. We practice refraining from taking things personally, and practice taking very few things seriously.

We are not to be burdened with having to be pleasing. We are not to be undone by our mistakes and failures—or by those of others. We are not to focus on what we can’t have, on what we can’t do, on what can’t happen, but on what we can have, on what we can do, on what can happen.

We are to laugh a lot, and spend time doing the things we love to do. We are to drink deeply of life, to live as fully as we are capable of living within the time and place of our living, so that, when it is over, we will not die wishing we had had the courage to do what needed to be done.

The community, when it is being the right kind of community, is with us to enable the life that we are capable of living, to bring out the new thing that is “us,” and to set us about the business of being alive, rejoicing and delighting in the wonder of being—in the wonder of “us”—throughout the years of our living.

Creating a Worthy Life

Brooks Vance advised his wife, “Don’t add up the liabilities, Louise. It will only depress you.” This is not denial. This is recognizing the futility of rehashing what has been done to us, of living with our backs to the future and our arms reaching out to that which cannot be. The spiritual task is to let go what’s going and to let come what’s coming. May it be so with us all!

Of course, we grieve what must be grieved, and mourn what must be mourned, but grieving and mourning are not to become our life. We do not live to wail. We wail and go on. To what? To the next thing. To the next thing that needs us. To what needs to be done in the situation as it arises. To the construction of as much good as we can create with what we have to work with, within the context and circumstances of our lives.

Our work is the creation of the good, not the remembrance of the long-gone-good, not the eternal mourning of the loss of the good, not resentment for the good that never was. Yes, we can be devastated, traumatized, overwhelmed, and undone by the impact of life. Yes, all that we have can be taken from us. But, if we sit lost in our losses, we also lose the moment of our living.

The task of life is always “What now?” “What next?” We have to find ways over, under, around, and through the barriers and blockades, the traumas and catastrophes, that come our way. We live as much “in spite of” as “because of.” We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of dreams of snuggling down with life as we like it, of sealing ourselves into a nice, cozy, little nest, where things are just right, and will be forever. We are in the business of creation, not preservation. It is the business of life to emerge, unfold, evolve. Flat, straight lines are death.

The loss of everything to hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, forest fires and floods in recent years point us toward what is needed: resources for the surviving victims, and help over time. We need to provide survivors with the wherewithal required for the next step, the next thing. We help them with food, clothing, shelter and the means of making their way in the world after the loss of their world. We supply them with the physical, psychological and emotional resources for life, with the expectation always being that they will live on, that they will wail, and go on, that they will recover, regroup and reorient themselves toward the best they can imagine in the wake of all they have lost.

One of the psychological/emotional tasks of survival is the deliberate act of moving beyond the numbing, all-consuming nature of traumatic events. We have to draw a line. We have to stop contemplating our losses. We have to go on with what remains of our lives. This is letting go of what is gone. This is the defiant refusal to submit endlessly to the impact of grief, loss, and sorrow. We will not allow our past to rob us of our future.

This does not mean we forget what we have lost. We may wail repeatedly over time, over the rest of time. We may mark anniversaries with tears, sadness and sorrow. We may hold ceremonies of grief and remorse in which we remember our losses, and mourn that which is no more. But, we do not cease to live because of what we have lost. We refuse to give into the constant ache of numbing sorrow, and bring our attention to bear on this moment now, and what needs us here, and what we can do to serve the good, with what we have, where we are.

We do not turn our backs to the idea of the good, in spite of the evil we have experienced. We do not withhold ourselves from the service of the good, even though evil is real and much too present a force in the world. We do not reject the good as a useless, pointless, futile waste of time—but live to bring good forth in our life, anyway, nevertheless, even so!

There is an inscription on a New England tombstone that reads, “It is a terrible thing to love what death can touch.” It is a worse thing to not love what death can touch. It is crucial that we refuse to allow the terribleness of love’s loss to keep us from loving. The spiritual task is to love, wholly, fully, completely, over and over, “what death can touch.” That is who we are. That is what we do. We are here to love what death can touch, as terrible as the impact of loss may be.

We cannot reject the path that is ours to walk. We cannot refuse to walk it with grace and compassion. We cannot forget that the rest of our life is in our hands. How do we want to spend the time that remains to be lived? How do we want it to play out? What do we intend with the life we have left to live? What do we mean by the way we live our life?

There is a sense in which we are no different from the displaced persons, the refugees, of every age. We have more personal resources at our disposal, and it is easy for us to think that we are not as they are. But all of us are putting a life together, whether we know it or not. All of us have to live for the rest of our time upon the earth. What form will our life take? What shape will it assume? What will people, looking at our life in the time that is left to us, think we are living for? What will they think we are trying to express, exhibit, bring to life?

Our life is our work. We owe it to ourselves to craft the best life we can imagine! We have what remains of it to complete our work, to shape our life, to produce the best we have to offer as a boon to the world. This what all hero’s returning from their journey offer to the people who welcome their arrival. Our work is who we show ourselves to be through the process of living our life. It has no necessary connection with what we do to earn a living. Our work is who we are. It is how we carry ourselves through the day. It is what remains of us in the minds of those who know us long after we are gone. In what ways will we be remembered? What will our legacy be? What about us will be missed? How are we living to keep our presence alive in the lives of those who out-live us?

Kindness and compassion were a part of the mix that was Jesus and the Buddha. As were identity, integrity, sincerity and authenticity. They said what was on their mind. They had an accurate sense of direction. They knew what was right and what was wrong—regardless of what the social code of their day said. They knew what was true and what was false. They knew what was important and what was only pretending to be of value. They saw into the heart of things. And they bore well the pain of being alive.

They lived out of their own take on things. They had their ideas about how life should be lived, and they were right-on with each of them. Time has borne them out. They did not come espousing a particular view of morality. They did not recommend asceticism. They did not advise a particular religious doctrine. They came exhibiting, expressing, disclosing their understanding of peace and justice as the foundation of right relationship. They made wherever they were a good place to be. Jesus and the Buddha knew that how we treat one another is more important than keeping the law, and so, did what they knew needed to be done, and let the outcome be the outcome.

Jesus and the Buddha lived to respect and honor all people. They treated everyone as a person of worth. The Buddha would have agreed with Jesus as he identified himself with the lowest of the low, saying, “In as much as you do it to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do it to me.” No one was invisible to Jesus or the Buddha. They saw everyone as being of equal worth, and they treated everyone as though they were. Samaritans, women, and children had no place in Jewish society, they held no rank, they were ignored to the point of being “disappeared,” but Jesus saw them, received them, welcomed them, elevated them to positions of honor and said, “The first will be last and the last will be first.” The Buddha proclaimed, “Cease to do evil; learn to do good, cleanse your own heart; This is the teaching of the Buddhas.”

Whom do we treat well? Whom do we ignore? Who is safe with us, and who is unwelcome in our company? The straight way and narrow gate is to have a really, really big heart. That is what the church has missed with its emphasis upon morality, true belief, and right doctrine. Jesus, and the Buddha along with him, would say, “Believe anything you want to, but have a really, really big heart.”

The work is to develop a big heart. This is the spiritual task. It is not believing in Jesus so much as it is being Jesus—not believing in the Buddha, but being the Buddha (And so the Zen saying, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!”). We live to be as big-hearted as Jesus and the Buddha were. One approach to that work is to become aware of how little our hearts actually are. Catching ourselves in the act of littleness, in the act of being little-hearted, is a step on the way to a big heart and a worthy life.

Walking Two Paths at the Same Time

Distractions abound. I am continually amazed at, and dumbfounded by, how little it takes to switch me from the main track into the trackless wasteland. We have to be mindful of the distractions swirling around us, avoid those that can be avoided, wake up to those that blindside us, and bring ourselves back to the task at hand: Being who we are, doing what needs to be done with the gifts/specialties/daemon/shtick/virtues/character/abilities/etc. that form our original nature in the time and place of our living.

We work with the day everyday. In each day, we have to remember what is important, what we are doing, and allow the day to bring us forth in meeting the day, while being who we are and remaining true to ourselves, within the circumstances of our time and place. The day brings us into focus. The day clarifies for us the things we need to be clear about: What are the gifts and characteristics—the qualities of heart and soul—that we are working to bring to life in our lives? The day enables us to see how we are doing, and where improvements and alterations need to be made, and elicits/evokes the right response to each moment of each situation as it arises.

The day provides a steady stream of encounters and information that we can use in making mid-course adjustments on the path to wholeness. The day shows us where we are in relation to where we have been, and where we need to be. It may start with oversleeping, or with the dog barking a warning to a dog on the other side of the window. We come into focus in the smallest details of living.

The Spiritual Life is lived on two levels at once. This is called “Walking two paths at the same time.” The Two Paths are seen everywhere we look. There is the “in the world but not of it” way of doing things. There is the “what to do level,” and the “how to do it when level.” The what to do level is about what is happening and what needs to be done about it. If we miss the bus, we may have to find a taxi. “What now, how?” brings the present moment into sharp focus, demanding that we assess the situation and come up with a plan of action for dealing successfully with it—using, relying on, the gifts, preferences, interests, enthusiasms, aptitudes, talents, etc., that come with us into the world. And through it all, the fundamental strategy for walking two paths at the same time is to always keep an eye on the other path while we navigate the sharp realities of this path, the one we are walking at any given time.

We are born as a bundle of latent knacks and abilities. As we grow up, the hope is that we will gravitate toward what we do best, and that our lives will be proving grounds where we experiment with who we are, and develop an increasingly clear notion of what is “us” and what is “not us.” We aren’t born knowing what that is, but there’s a homing device, of sorts, within us, and we know “when we are on the beam, and when we are off of it,” when we are on track with our lives and when we are off track, when we are where we belong, and where we belong-not.

Writing has always been “it” for me, and I have fought my way through a lot of internal resistance, and a pronounced lack of external encouragement, to write no matter what. I can say now, after all these years, that writing is “it” for me. I got here through trial and error, which is how we all get where we are going.

It has been a long and curious route that has brought me to the place of writing no matter what. The process could have been assisted, shortened, and improved with the right people in my life at the right time, but the process was going to unfurl somehow, some way, over time no matter what. Carl Jung said, “We are who we always have been, and who we will be.” Who we are born to be is always a part of who we are, and who we will be, and is always waiting to be more fully realized, recognized, received and loved into being. It takes a lot to block the process of our growing into the person we are to be in the world. That process is life itself. It’s the dandelion growing through the asphalt. Our lives are about being who we are no matter what. If we live long enough, we will get there. It only takes living to figure it out. We all learn to listen over time.

One of the paths we walk each day is the path of the What: What needs to be done today? What gifts, aptitudes, abilities do we possess that need to be brought into play? Now what? What now? We miss the bus. Now what? We are being asked “What are you going to do about this, here/now?” constantly throughout our day. We assess what is happening and what needs to happen in response, and what skills we possess to deal with the situation. Then comes the How? part of the equation.

What we do is one track of the spiritual journey. The other is how we do it. We work throughout our life to do what needs to be done the way it needs to be done, when it needs to be done. The How is as important as the What.

How we do it is about the spirit, the attitude, the demeanor, the manner, the shape and form, the style and tone, etc., that we exhibit in doing what we do. How we do it is about the qualities and characteristics of heart and soul, and the way in which we bring them to life in our life. Generosity and compassion; grace, mercy and peace; awareness, and mindfulness, and attention; love, joy, hospitality, kindness, gentleness, a propensity for living with good faith, and doing what’s right, to mention a few, are essential requirements of the Spiritual Life. Never was there a saint who wasn’t kind and compassionate. Never will be.

It may be easier for some of us to be kind and compassionate (etc.) than others of us, but it isn’t easy for any of us all of the time. Kindness and compassion (etc.) do not come naturally. Snatching and grabbing, whining and pouting, snarling and grouching, complaining and moaning, running and hiding—these are the things we can do without trying. Anybody can do them without practicing. It takes no effort to be all sour and crabby, withdrawn and sullen, hidden and afraid. For some of us it’s as easy as oversleeping.

The work is to go against the grain; to swim against the current; to do what’s hard; to be generous, when it would be easier to be a jerk. To be compassionate, when we want to tell them a thing or two takes practice to master.The spiritual journey is a walk toward who we are called to be. The Promised Land is a metaphor for what we are here to do and the spirit with which we are to do it. We live toward that every day of our lives. The days are filled with opportunities to assess how well we are doing, and provide convenient places to practice doing it, as we work to get it down.

What We Get Is Who We Are

Wholeness is the goal. Wholeness is a function of integrity, sincerity, congruity, at-one-ment with ourselves, and with each other. It is the hardest thing. To say “God is one,” is to say all we need to say about God. When God speaks to Moses, and Moses asks the name of God, so that he, Moses, might tell the people who told him to go to Egypt to rescue the people, God said, “Tell them I Am Who I Am sent you.” Integrity and sincerity are as close to God as we can get, and is God. Is divine. Is the ultimate in holiness. An experience of numinous, holy, reality. Just being who we are is holiness come to life. Amazing.

Joseph Campbell talked about the importance of being transparent to ourselves (seeing/knowing who we are, what we are doing) and that being the key to doing what needs to be done in each situation as it arises, and how that is the simple stipulation for being “transparent to transcendence.” So that, along with Jesus, we exemplify the truth that “the father and I are one.” We are one with Transcendence when we are transparent to ourselves, at one with our original nature and the innate virtues that are ours to serve and to share in doing what needs to be done, moment to moment over the full course of our life.

“You must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect,” says Jesus in Matthew 5:48. He means whole, seamless, fully integrated, complete, so that who we are on the inside is who we show ourselves to be on the outside. The Spiritual Journey is the work of integration, reconciliation. We live to be who we are—to know who we are—to be transparent to ourselves—and in so doing, we become “transparent to transcendence,” and exhibit godliness throughout our life.

God is at one with God, and we are to be at one with ourselves, and with each other. This doesn’t mean identical twinsies with everyone. It means recognizing that all of us together—with each of us being who we are individually and personally—are more God-like than one of us alone. It takes the integration of all those differences to produce a whole that is worth having. And the integration of our differences is the work of Yin/Yang through time, balancing our opposites, harmonizing our strengths and weaknesses in an “Every mountain shall be made low and every valley shall be lifted up” kind of way.

The idea of Jesus as my own personal best invisible friend, who died for me, who saves me, who pilots me, fails quite completely to take into account Jesus’ on words, “Wherever two or three are gathered, I will be there.” Another place the Bible is misquoted in this regard is the phrase “The kingdom of God is within you.” A better translation is “among you.” The kingdom is among us all, waiting for us to recognize it, and live together in ways that exhibit it. Or, as Jesus said in the Gospel of Thomas, “Even now the kingdom is broadcast over the earth, and people do not see it.” “Seeing it” is participating in it, being it, being at one with it–knowing, doing, being at one with ourselves and one another and all others.

It is the community that is God in the world. If we are going to bring God to life, we have to bring community to life. The right kind of community. The right kind of community recognizes that the kingdom of God is found among the individual members of the community, and helps each person make the connection with that larger “kingdom” in which we live and move as fish in the sea. And, this is not something we try to do, or something we could do by trying. It is automatic, spontaneous, in those who live sincerely, spontaneously, with integrity and good faith in all that they do.

The right kind of community is a community of innocence, with no agenda in mind beyond asking us to be true to ourselves while remaining respectfully in touch with one another, particularly those who aren’t like us. This is not easy. We cannot be true to ourselves (Which requires congruence, integrity, living in ways that are integral to, and aligned with, that which is deepest, best and truest about us), and stay in touch with others without compromising some essential aspect of ourselves.

Being true to ourselves while staying in touch with one another is the fundamental requirement of the right kind of community, necessitating the right kind of intimacy, and the right kind of vulnerability—the right kind of awareness, and the right kind of boundaries. The Rumi observation applies: “If you are not here with us in good faith, you are doing terrible damage.” And his poem “The Guesthouse,” is the paradigm for participating in the “kingdom on earth.”

We have to know when community is possible, and when it is not, and refuse to waste our time trying to develop something that cannot be. Sometimes, we have to walk away, leaving the dead to bury the dead. It is very important to give toxic personalities a wide berth. Do not waste your time with those people who kill your soul. Get quickly away from deadly company. If you are ever going to listen to anything I say, listen to this. Get away from the company of those who are the walking dead, who suck the life right out of you. Get out of that town. And, shake the dust off your sandals as a sign against them, because they aren’t the kind of people with whom it is possible to establish community.

We are always thinking it’s our fault, our responsibility, our burden to make community happen. We can’t make relationship happen, much less community. We are always giving things up for the sake of relationship. We are always being asked to like things we don’t like, and not-like things we do like. Every bad relationship you have ever been in, at some point has said something along the lines of, “If you loved me, you would like sailing.” Or, “If you loved me, you wouldn’t like horses.” We think being in relationship with another person means being like the other person, becoming one with the other person as in becoming lost in the other person, so that no one, not even you and the other person, know where you stop and the other person starts. Oneness does not mean we lose our identity, our perspective, our particular—and peculiar—take on things. We do not stop being who we are. Right relationship enables us to become who we are. It gives us ourselves. It doesn’t take ourselves away from us.

At this point it in this essay, it all begins to flow together, and gets wonderfully messy. Language becomes a severe impediment because it is necessarily linear, and I can only say one thing at a time—but what is to be said is like a swirl of colors, or a wonderful blend of solids and liquids, like a margarita, say, with lime, lemon, tequila, triple sec, salt and a frosted glass all coming together to delight and amaze. You lose the magnificence of it if you just listen to someone talk about a margarita, listing the ingredients, one at a time, and asking you to imagine what he, what she, is talking about. And, you make a joke of a margarita if you separate the ingredients, and ingest one at a time, linear fashion, like language.

This spirituality business is exactly like enjoying a margarita. There should be a rule, no talk, just drink. Bottoms up! And, if I were half the bartender I pretend to be, I’d take my camera in hand right now and walk to the Canadian Rockies, leaving you to your own devices. You are not stupid. You can figure it out. You are at this point in your life, after all. You’ve come this far on your own. You can do the rest of it. Besides, you are practically there already.

The magic of relationship does not make either person dependent upon the relationship. To make either person dependent is to make that person needy, is to make that person an invalid, is to make that person in-valid, is to rob that person of her, of his, self, interests, point of view, person-hood. This is not what relationship is about. Right relationship connects the other with, establishes the other on, grounds the other in, the goodness of her, of his, own person, of her, of his, own being, perspective, point of view. It takes two, or more, “I’s” to make a “We.” And it takes a “we” to bring each other, and what has always been called God, to life in the world.

Now, there is compromise, and sacrifice, and a giving up of self, a handing over of self, for the sake of that which is more than we could ever be alone. Marriage and parenthood will kill you, or ask you to die, again and again. The old theme of death and resurrection is very much a part of every right-relationship, of every community, and I am not suggesting that we can enter into relationship, into community, with one another without dying, and we will have to talk about the nature of that death—remembering the margarita metaphor!

The kind of death relationship calls us—requires us—to die, is a giving, not a taking. One person does not do all the dying, does not die for the sake of the other always and forever, but all die for the sake of relationship. Here’s the other part of the deal: The commitment is to the relationship, not the other person. And, one more part of the deal: At stake here is not the relationship, but our own becoming, our own selfhood. The relationship is the doorway, the threshold, to selfhood. The dying is really a birthing. The giving is really a receiving. And, here is the final part for now of the deal: It has to be completely voluntary because we all grow up against our will, willingly handing ourselves over to that which is greater than we are, again and again, from birth to the end of the line.

Voluntarily offering what is needed to the relationship is quite different from being compelled to hand it over. We cannot be hurled into relationship, or drafted into relationship, or forced, or required to be in relationship. But, the other side of it is that we really can’t help ourselves, either. We have to be “in relationship,” in the right kind of relationship, because something within us knows that’s where the life is, and we are lost without it. If we know what we are doing, we will pay any price, make any sacrifice, for the “pearl of great price,” which is our own self, our own soul, which is buried in the depths of relationship, waiting for us to have what it takes to claim the treasure (Which, as we know by now, “lies far back in the darkest corner of the cave we most don’t want to enter.”

Of Dreams and Treasure

Pursuing the dream, we stumble upon the treasure. Will we recognize the value of that which is more valuable than the dream? We sail west looking for a short cut to India, and run into the New World. And see it, not as a treasure, but as a barrier to the dream, and keep looking for India.

The Northwest Passage was supposed to take the early explorers to the Far East. Then, they heard rumors of the Lost City of Gold, and the Fountain of Youth, and trudged past wonders looking for the new dream they had in mind. They sold Louisiana, and all that went with it, because what they were looking for wasn’t there. What they had was worth more than what they sought, but they couldn’t see it because they were in the grip of their idea of what mattered most.

Nothing has the power to transform our life like changing our mind about what is important. How does that happen? We call illusion “reality” until we hit the wall enough times to get to the end of our rope, and there, if we are lucky, we change our mind about what is important. A lot of people don’t. And that is just one of the tragedies of being human and having to figure things out on our own. Too many of us simply are not equipped to figure things out on our own, or don’t have what it takes to bear the pain of seeing how things are, and doing what needs to be done about it, anyway, nevertheless, even so.

On a photography trip to Maine, I drove to the top of Cadillac Mountain at 5:50 AM. Sunrise was to happen at 6:45, but the good stuff, photographically speaking, is over by the time the sun actually comes up, so you have to be there early, to watch, and wait. When I got there, there were, maybe 50, maybe 80, photographers already there, setting up tripods, finding a spot, with more coming behind me. I wedged in between a couple of guys and settled in for what looked to be a promising sunrise. At 6:02 the fog moved in, and I couldn’t see the fellows at my elbows. The show was over. The people who gathered to photograph the sunrise, looked at each other, as well as they could, shrugged, packed up, and headed for breakfast and a cup of coffee. Three of us packed up and headed to Jordon Pond for shoreline compositions in the fog, which turned out to be better than the sunrise could have ever been. On our way to the dream, we found the treasure. Will we know it when you see it, is the question.

We have be looking beyond the treasure revealed by the dream. We have to know the tricks the Tao can play, and look beyond what we see—beyond what we have in mind—in order to see the value of what else is there. What can we do with what is there? How can we work with what we have? If we can’t realize our dream today, what can we do? If we can’t have the dream, what can we have? What can we do with what we have to work with?

Remain open to the possibility that something is there that is more valuable than the dream. Keep in mind that the dream may be our soul’s way of getting us going. The idea of sunrise on Cadillac Mountain is the ruse that gets us out of bed. Once in motion, we stumble onto Jordon Pond, and our soul smiles. That’s is how life works sometimes. For it to work, though, we have to play along. We have to be a good sport. There is more to life than what we have in mind. Don’t miss the treasure on the way to the dream! Or the photograph, on the way to the photograph!

The treasure we stumble upon doesn’t rule out the dream we have in mind—it doesn’t cancel out the dream. Maybe there will be a day when I get a sunrise on Cadillac Mountain, or the dogwood on the Middle Prong of Little River. The dreams keep us going. The trick is to keep our eyes open for the treasure along the way. That which is truly valuable is that which brings us to life, which brings to life that which is struggling to come to life, to unfold, emerge, within us.

The spiritual task is the unfolding of the self. Self-realization is the Promised Land of the scriptures. All of the scriptural themes—as I have said–exile and restoration, bondage and freedom, guilt and redemption, death and resurrection—play themselves out in the lives of those who take up the spiritual task, and live toward the unfolding of the self—the waking up to who we are and also are—within the context, and circumstances, and relationships of our lives. We are here to experience, explore, express the self we are built to be, called to be. We are here to be who we are, to be true to ourselves, to fulfill our destiny within the context, and circumstances, and relationships of our lives.

We are more of a treasure than any dream we seek in the treasure troves of the world.

That isn’t the gospel as you have ever heard it, but it’s the Gospel. It is heaven, and it is hell. I don’t know what the Greek word for “bad news” is, what the polar opposite of “evangel” is, but that’s what I’m telling you here. The best and worst thing you will ever hear is that you are here to be true to, and fulfill, your destiny within the context, circumstances and relationships of your life—that you are the dream/treasure you seek. It is an easier path to believe those who tell us that we will go to hell if we don’t obey the ten commandments, and believe in the atoning sacrifice of God’s only Son Jesus Christ our Lord. That gets it off our back. The position of the church has always been, “Give the cross to Jesus. That’s where it belongs.”

Ah, but, the bad news is that the good news is that Jesus did NOT come to us so that we could cover the world with cross graffiti. If we understood the cross, we would know very well that it is us up there with nails in our wrists and ankles. That is the true vicarious nature of Jesus’ death. Jesus doesn’t take our place, but we assume his place by living the life that is ours to live in the moment of our living, just as Jesus did. The cross, or something a lot like it, is the price we pay for being true to ourselves, and fulfilling our destiny within the context, circumstances, and relationships of our lives.

The context, circumstances, and relationships of our lives are out to get us. Understanding that and living toward the life that is ours to live—anyway, nevertheless, even so—is the Hero’s Journey, the Spiritual Journey, which winds through the heart of Gethsemane and across the face of Golgotha, and on to the Empty Tomb.

Jesus’ body, broken for us, his blood, poured out for us, are propitiatory only to the extent that they demonstrate for us how things are to be with us. His blood poured out so that we might finally understand, and see that his way is to be our way—that it comes down to our blood being poured out in serving our destiny, and living our life. We die metaphorically to our idea of something of value “out there,” and live—come fully alive—with the shocking realization that we are it! That we are the dream/treasure we seek! That we are the stone the builders (we) reject! That we are the Pearl of Great Price! That we are the Prize of Highest Value! And it takes dying—again and again—by changing our mind about what is important again and again—to know that it is so.

Putting it all on Jesus saves us from shock and consternation over the fact that anything like that should happen to us. But, that is exactly what the cross is supposed to do: Wake us up to how it is with those who align themselves with the life that is their life to live, and swim against the current of cultural expectations of how life should be lived, to be and do what needs to be and to be done within the context and circumstances and relationships of our life here and now (In each situation as it arises).

Jesus’ life and death are a visual representation of what to expect, in order to prepare us for what follows. When we drink the cup Jesus drank, and are baptized with the baptism with which he was baptized, in walking the path he walked, and taking up the spiritual task of being true to ourselves and fulfilling our destiny within the context, circumstances, and relationships of our lives, the cross then takes the form of our handing over our idea of what our life should be, in order to live the life that is truly our life to live.

If you had your wits about you, you would recognize the implications of what I’m saying, and stop reading. You would turn to something that promises smooth things about sin and repentance, and offers you heaven for the low, low price of resisting temptation, and believing what you are told to believe. Here, you are going to hear that the spiritual task is the experience, exploration, and expression of yourself within the context, circumstances, and relationships of your life. The treasure is the unfolding of yourself—the spiritual life is about the creative revelation of you in the world. Don’t think that that sounds like there is nothing to it.

The minute you take up that task, you will find yourself swept up in the biblical themes. You will live out the Bible stories. The Garden of Eden will be about you, standing before the glittery, flashy, life that you have in mind, and turning your back on the different, deeper, needs of heart, and soul, and self. The Garden of Gethsemane will be about you reversing the trend and stepping back into the truth of who you are, and what is yours to do no matter what. All the stories in the Bible are about us in this struggle to be who we are, where we are, when we are, how we are, doing what is ours to do. They come to life in our life every day.

There is no bigger adventure than the adventure of our own life, and it waits for us to live it. And waits. And waits. And waits… For us to get to the end of our rope at last, and change our mind about what is important–and take up the work that is ours to do at last.

Stay on the Beam!

The spiritual quest is the search for that which brings us to life, for that which grounds us in, and opens us to, life—connecting us with what is meaningful for us. It all comes down to getting our heart together with our life! We spend our life looking for life. Life lies all about us and we are not alive, not vibrantly alive, not enthusiastically alive, not involved in our life, not invested in our life, not engaged with our life. We are hanging out, going through the motions, looking for something to do with our time, for some entertaining pastime, without much in the way of a reason to get out of bed, and no sense of why we are here, or what to do with the day. Why isn’t our heart in our life? What will it take to get our heart together with our life?

Why are we here? That’s the Quest for the Holy Grail, the Land of Promise. We are looking for vitality, for elan vital. We aren’t looking for our assignment, for some obligation that is laid upon us by someone else. Albert Schweitzer went to Africa because he had to—not because he was supposed to—because his life required it. We are looking for what we have to do! For what compels us to do it! We are looking for what it means to live in the service of our heart—and how to do that within the circumstances of our living.

We are looking for our life, for what brings us to life, and is life. We are here to be alive, yet, to be alive, our life has to revolve around something, has to be grounded in something. What draws us toward it, into it, and serves as the source and goal of our living? That’s the search that fuels the journey. And every journey begins where we are.

We begin with what we care about, or used to care about before we stopped caring. We can care about the wrong things, but the wrong things can lead us to the right things, if we let them, if we care about the wrong things in the right way: with our eyes open.

We have to care about what we care about, and see where that goes, what it leads to. NASCAR, baseball, fishing, photography… It doesn’t matter. The problem with what we care about is not what we care about, but that we don’t care about it deeply enough, and we don’t care about it with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. Care about what you care about! Get into it! See where it goes! What it asks of you! Calls forth in you!

It will carry you to something else to care about. Care about that! Who knows why we care about what we care about? Who cares why? It is enough to know what we care about, and to care deeply about it, and see what happens. Carl Jung suggests that we not limit our understanding of libido to sexual energy, but think of it as the energy of life, as enthusiasm for some aspect of life, and follow that energy where it leads us, and do what it asks of us, and see where it goes.

This experience with life energy, with being moved by something, to something, was called “the Holy Spirit” in previous ages. Jesus said “The Spirit is like the wind that blows where it will.” There you are. We have to become aware of the energy of life, noticing those places, ideas, people, events that are charged with energy for us, that we care about, and follow wherever it goes.

We are to move toward what moves us. We have to find those things, those people, that attract us in this way, that are charged with energy for us, spending time with them, incorporating them into our life—remembering that, as in all spiritual matters, things are not what they appear to be. We cannot take even life energy at face value. We have to always get to the heart of the matter, looking past the surface to what else is there, seeing where it goes.

The first step is to trust ourselves to what moves us. To look closer at what catches our eye. We have to decide how to recognize, read, and follow life energy. Energy for sailing may have nothing to do with buying a sailboat or taking lessons. What is the charged idea of sailing asking of us? We have to see what it is asking of us, where it is drawing us, and go where we are being led–with our eyes open, working with it imaginatively to know. Imagination, curiosity and patience are essential tools in the work of soul, of finding and doing the work that is ours to do, the life that is ours to live.

The holy obligation is to care about what we care about for as long as we care about it, and then care about something else. We will always care about some things, but not all things. People will try to talk us out of what we care about, and into what they want us to care about. We are here to care about what we care about, to follow our enthusiasm for some aspects of life throughout our lives, as it evolves, shifts, transforms and leads us a merry chase. No matter what people think and say.

What do you care about that nobody notices, knows, or cares if you care about it? What do you care about that nobody wants you to do or care about? If you have never had a life to call your own, never done a thing you wanted to do just because you wanted to do it, what are you waiting for? How much of your life do you live because other people expect it of you? How much of it do you live no matter what anyone thinks? Whose permission do you need to do the things you do, to live the life you live? Whose disapproval do you fear? Whose life are you living? Who is guiding your ship on its path on the sea? If you are not at the helm, who is?

We don’t have to worry about destinations, and outcomes, and what we are going to do with our life. We only need to know the right path when we see it, and walk it. The right path will take us where we need to be. We can trust ourselves to the rightness of the right path, knowing no more than that. We know the path is right the way we know anything is right. A cup of coffee, a walk in the woods, watching the sun rise and set… You wouldn’t trust anyone else to choose your deserts for you, why think anyone else will know the right path for you? You know what is right for you, and what is wrong, what is life for you, and what is death, and you know whether the path you are on is IT or not.

We aren’t here to get anything out of it, to gain the advantage, to have our way. We are here to find the right path, the right track, and to stay on it—to Stay On The Beam! We know the right path, the right track, the beam when we see it but. We can be led astray by 10,000 self-serving things. We have to know all that we know, and live mindful lives.

Joseph Campbell said, “We know when we are on the beam, and when we are off of it.” The rule is simple: Stay on the beam! The “force” that is “with us” is the power of the beam, the right track, the right path. In it, on it, we have all we need. Off it, we are lost and on our own. One of our problems is that we want to live the way we want to live and have the “force” be with us, paving our way, smoothing our path, toward goals that we set and ends that we declare to be valid.

Our way is not The Way, our path is not The Path. But, we don’t want to do what our life is asking us to do. We want all the things the culture tells us make life worth living, but, the catch is whether our heart is in it or if we are being talked into something that isn’t right for us. What we want, may have nothing to do with what our heart wants us to want, with what we need to want. We should know that by now.

We have to be on The Way that is the way for us, on The Path that is the path for us. The quickest way to the way that way is staying on the beam that we know is the beam for us, caring about what we care about, living with our eyes open to what is happening, and with our heart open to what is calling our name.

Right Belief

Thich Nhat Hanh believes that we should eat an orange in a certain way in order to be mindful of the experience of eating the orange.

You know by now that mindfulness is the cornerstone of my approach to life, living and being alive. “Mindfulness leads the way.” I use that phrase as much as I use “in the situation as it arises.” Being mindful of the situation as it arises is the key to being able to be who that situation needs us to be—the key to being who we need to be in the situation. We cannot be too mindful! But. We can be mindful of eating an orange in whatever way it suits us to eat the orange.

Thich Nhat Hanh recommends—that’s too light a word, insists—that we eat an orange one section at a time, because “that’s the way the orange comes,” and to eat two or three sections at a time would be to do a disservice to the orange, and miss something essential about the experience of eating it. Well…

An orange also comes with seeds and peeling. An orange comes with a tree attached. At some point, you have to draw a line. You have to say this is how I am going to eat an orange. Eat the orange the way you would eat the orange, with as much mindfulness as you are capable of administering, and stop following instructions—including this—about how you should eat oranges. We can become so caught up in doing mindfulness correctly that we forget to be mindful at all. The same principle applies to all of life. Don’t be so intent on living correctly that you forget to be alive to the moment of your living.

There is only this moment, right here, right now, and doing what needs to be done with it, about it, in response to it—and we have to be mindfully aware of the moment in order to know and to do. Too much of spirituality is about doing it the way someone in authority tells us to do and how to do it. The search for spiritual truth, too often, is the search for the latest greatest guru—the one who has been on Oprah most recently. We want to be given the authoritative road map to the spiritual realm. We don’t want to be figuring out anything for ourselves. But. Only we know what is right for us, and what is wrong. Only we know what is life for us, and what is death. No Authority who ever has been, or will be, knows that much. And, it is all we need to know.

The measure of a belief is how well it connects us with, and enables us to live, our life—the extent to which it assists us in being alive in our life in the time left for living. Believe anything you want to believe as long as it deepens, expands, enlarges the life that is truly your life, and propels you into living it! A belief that fails to bring us to life in the fullest sense of the word, within the context and circumstances, the time and place, of our living, needs to be left on the rack, while we look for one that brings us alive.

Beliefs, generally, don’t have much to do with life, with being alive. The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity, for instance, doesn’t cause us to leap out of bed each morning, filled with zest and gusto, ready to get into the day, and to do there what can be done with it. Whether God is three in one, or how God is three in one, or why God would want to be three in one, doesn’t translate smoothly into an attitude, or perspective, or way with life, which blesses us, and all those around us. Don’t believe anything that doesn’t improve the way you live—that’s my recommendation. Evaluate every applicant for belief in light of its capacity to infuse your life with life—that’s what I say. Does this belief work? Does it help us to live the life that is ours to live?

Does it help us live in the service of the good? And, who determines what good is? We do! (YOU do!) How good is the good we call good? We decide. Whose good is served by the good we call good? We decide. And, the catch is that we have to be right about it. And time will tell if that is the case. If it becomes clear in time that we are not right about it, we change our mind about what is good and live in the service of that good until it becomes clear that we need to change our mind again… Etc. all the way to living in ways which validate the goodness of the good we call good, and therefore, the value of what we believe.

Does what we believe help us deal with the disappointments, failures, defeats, and losses that we incur along the way? Does it help us envision what needs to be done, and live toward it through all the events and circumstances of our life? Does it enlarge our perspective, and enable us to laugh? The laughter test may be the key. If a belief doesn’t encourage laughter, don’t have anything to do with it.

In light of what do we live? What beliefs do we need to believe in order to live well in light of them? What are the organizing, directing, principles of our life? How do we want to have lived at the end of our days? What will it take for us to be proud of the way we dealt with what came our way? Maybe we didn’t get the breaks. Maybe things didn’t go as we wanted. Maybe we missed out on the caring parents, the devoted partners, the well-paying jobs, the successful careers, and the loving, nurturing, friends and neighbors. How did we handle that? How did we work with it? What did we do about it? What response did we make? What response would we wish we had made? What beliefs would have enabled us to make that response? What beliefs would have enabled us to live the life we would want to have lived?

In order for our beliefs to guide us into lives worth living, they need to be affirmed and sustained by the right kind of community. We do not do well without the right kind of relationships. We cannot be healed, and whole—we cannot be at peace with ourselves—we cannot be good company, or any fun to be around without the right kind of community to welcome us, receive us, make a place for us, and love us into to life.

Living takes the life out of us, and the right kind of community loves it back into us. The right beliefs can help us survive between loving experiences with the right kind of community. But, they cannot replace, or serve as substitutes for, a secure place in the lives of the right kind of others. Think of the craziest people you know. My bet is that they don’t have a secure place in the lives of the right kind of others.

Healthy beliefs help us find healthy relationships. And healthy relationships help us find healthy beliefs. The right beliefs help us see one another in the right ways. The right beliefs are essential in creating the environment, the atmosphere, that is necessary for living well upon the earth. They guide us through the mess of life, direct us toward the best we can imagine, and enable us to live rightly, in light of that which we believe.

We can’t be the right kind of community without believing the right things, and living lives that are aligned with them. It’s a circle: right believing, right relationships, right living. It’s one thing. How we think and believe is how we live. It’s a unit. It’s a whole.

Sitting still. Being quiet. And reflecting on these things as a part of our regular, routine, on-going spiritual practice opens the way to The Way, and therefore is The Way opening up before us, calling to us.

The importance of the right kind of emptiness, stillness and silence cannot be overstated. Everything leads to and flows from that grounding/centering/guiding/directing experience. It is the place of listening/looking. Of hearing/seeing. Of knowing/doing.

Sit still. Be empty. Be quiet. And let mindfulness lead the way to believing what we need to believe to do what needs to be done, when, where and how it needs to be done in each situation as it arises, no matter what, throughout the time left for living. And allow time to tell how right we are about what we believe to be right–and make adjustments as necessary, all the way.

The Freedom to Be Here Now

We have been hearing from quantum physics over the recent past about the fluid nature of apparent reality, and how we invest facts and experience with meaning which colors the facts and the experience, becomes inseparable from them, and makes them into something more than they were by themselves, before we became involved with them. We cannot experience a purely meaningless experience, an experience which means nothing to us. It doesn’t register. It won’t compute. Which is to say that we experience all experience in light of previous experience—which is how we assign meaning.

There is no experience apart from interpretation and evaluation, which is biased by virtue of previous experience. Our perception is skewed by past encounters with something similar. Prior experience positions us to receive the world—to perceive the world—as we do. Our expectations color our reality. Whatever we think about the present moment has more to do with previous moments than with this one, has more to do with where we have been than where we are. So, Mark Twain can observe that “a cat once burned will never again sit on a hot stove—or a cold one.”

This means that the work is to stand aside. The work is to get ourselves out of the way, to the extent that can be done, in order to see what is happening now, with as few filters—with as few memories and associations—as possible coming between us and the action. The work is to become increasingly aware of where we have been, and how that has impacted us, and how that is influencing where we are, and our response to it. The work is to pay attention, and to make an emotional and physical response to our environment that might be quite different from the way we have been accustomed to respond.

The work is to appreciate the close connection, the identification, between thinking and feeling—between a thought about our environment or an experience, and an emotional response or reaction to our environment or experience. Think of thoughts as feelings put into words; verbalized feelings; articulated feelings; feelings all dressed up so as to be socially acceptable, perhaps—or, hidden away, buried, beneath layers of rational discourse. At the base, our thoughts about something are inseparable from the feelings we feel about the thing—a thought/feeling, or a feeling/thought.

We can think up a feeling. We can feel our way into thoughts which feed the feeling and spin us out into crazy land. You can whisper a sweet nothing in my ear and arouse me sexually (Well, some of you can), and I can imagine you whispering a sweet nothing in my ear and arouse myself sexually. My brain can’t tell the difference between the actual whisper and the imagined whisper. It’s all the same to my brain. It doesn’t matter to my brain. My brain signals the same response to either stimulus.

We can trick our brain. Our brain can trick itself. What’s real? Our brain can’t tell. Doesn’t care. That being the case, we might pay attention to what we spend our time telling ourselves. What do we spend our time imagining? What scenarios are always being played out in our heads? What emotional responses, reactions, are we always triggering in our brains? How are we setting ourselves up to respond to our environment based on the steady internal conversation that we are always having with ourselves, with our brain? What are we saying to ourselves? What would happen if we said something else instead? What would happen if we simply tuned in and became steadily aware of the things we are telling ourselves and the feelings we are generating thereby?

These questions/this exercise become especially important in light of the work that goes into “gaslighting” into propaganda, into verbal manipulation/repudiation /replacement of facts, suggesting, for instance, that there is another side to truth that is also truth, when in actuality, the other side of truth is a lie–and the only way we can maintain our connection with reality as opposed to an alternate reality is to distance ourselves physically and emotionally from the steady input of “spin jobs” and “information with an agenda attached,” and spending quiet time away from the steady barrage of opinions colored by interests, greed and desire, in which to connect with our own ground and center, and orient ourselves according to our own sense of “the good, the true and the beautiful.”

Closely related to the question of what are we always saying to ourselves is the one about what train of associations are we always riding. Things like “this” always remind us of what? Our present experience is always taking us back to what? To when? To where? What is the prior experience that colors all other experience? What is the past experience (or the experiences) that had such an emotional impact on us that all other experience is experienced in light of that experience? The present moment is always reminding us of what moment? We make decisions today in light of what in our past? What are we trying to escape? What can’t we get away from? What are we constantly playing out? What are we dutifully obeying, carefully observing, eternally fulfilling with our lives? Who are we living to please? What experience is the Rosetta Stone by which we interpret all other experience? What experience is the Prime Integer by which all other experience is calculated, figured, understood? To what are we bound? How shall we set ourselves free?

The freedom we seek is the freedom to be here now. It is the freedom to respond to this moment based upon the needs of this moment and our ability to meet those needs with the gifts that came with us from the womb (Our original nature, “the face that was ours before we were born,” the innate virtues packed into our DNA). What is the moment asking of us? How free are we to meet the moment on the moment’s terms, without the interference of all (or any) of the other moments crashing in upon this one? To be free, we have to be emotionally neutral, No expectations, no agenda, no plans, no opinions. To see we can’t be blinded by fear, desire or duty. And this gets us into the matter of motive.

What are we up to? What are we about? What are we after? What do we want? Toward what are we living? What are we serving with our lives? If we are living to get something we don’t have, or to get away from something we do have, or to keep away from something we had once (or once had us) and barely escaped, well, you can see how that’s going to impact things. What is guiding our boat on its path through the sea?

It all comes down to “What’s important?” It all comes down to “Who are we? What are we about? What do we think is worth our life?” If we were to live to be true to ourselves, to be aligned with that which is deepest, best, and truest about us, while serving that which is truly important, what would we be doing that we are not doing? How would we be living? What’s keeping us from doing that? What’s keeping us from doing that, at least, on the weekends? Once a month? Twice a year? What are we afraid of? What are we bound to? What is so important that it prevents us from doing what is truly important? Do you see how the wonderful old Biblical themes of Bondage and Freedom, Guilt and Forgiveness, Sacrifice and Redemption, Paradise Lost and Regained, Death and Resurrection, and the like, play themselves out in our lives?

It all comes down to working room. How are we going to put enough distance between ourselves and our emotional bondage to the experience of our lives in order to free ourselves to respond to what is happening now solely on the basis of what is happening now? How do we think ourselves into feeling differently about our lives? Into responding differently to our lives? How do we feel our way into thinking differently?

We cannot be free from what we will not face. Remember the four requirements for the spiritual journey: Wake up! Grow up! Square up to how things are and how things also are and how we wish they were and how they truly need to be! Get up and do what needs to be done! All four requirements place upon us the burden of facing up to the truth of our lives and bearing the pain of realization. We have to experience our experience to be free of the emotional impact of that experience.

Experience and the emotional response to experience, which colors experience, and propels us into the downward, or upward–depending on our point of view–spiral of emotional experience creating more emotional experience based on the prior, or primary, emotional experience, are the foundational factors of life. We will never separate them into neat little categories of “experience” and “emotional response to experience.” They are one thing. And, they make our lives what they are.

If our lives are going to be different, that difference is going to be the result of our paying attention to—of our being aware of—our experience and of our emotional response to our experience. We have only awareness to work with—awareness of our perspective and perception. Awareness moderates emotional response. Awareness frees us—forces us—to think about what we are feeling, to explore the connection between thought and feeling, to wonder about motive and intention and the part they play in our emotional reaction to experience, and offers the possibility of deciding to respond to our experience in a way that is different from our normal, natural, tendency and inclination.

We can be as free as we are able to be in living the life that is waiting to be lived. The price of that freedom is taking the time to pay attention to–to become mindfully aware of–the life that is being lived. We stand on the threshold between two worlds—the one that has been and the one that will be—and decide how one will impact the other, and what we will do, here and now, in each moment that comes along.

The Bible as Mirror, Map and Metaphor

The last time the world ended, only a few thousand of us survived. That’s probably the way it will be the next time the world ends. The world has ended at least five times (Near extinctions, the experts call it) since it evolved to the point where we would recognize a beginning and an end. Life as we know it has practically ceased to exist at least five times since life as we know it came into existence. Who knows how many more times it will come and go. The same thing goes for the universe.

We have no reason to think that this particular configuration that we call the universe is the only configuration ever. This universe just happens to be the one we are living in now. But why think that this is the only one that ever has been or ever will be? As far as we know, universes have always been coming and going, and always will be.

The Bible thinks this is the only world that ever was, and this is the only universe that ever was. The Bible thinks this world that we live in right now had a beginning, and it will have an end, and the universe that this world is a part of had one beginning, and will have one end. Of course, we can’t fault the Bible for thinking of things in this way. That’s the way things were thought when the Bible was written. We can’t think that way ourselves just because the Bible does.

The world did not begin the way the Bible says the world began, and it will not end the way the Bible says the world will end. The Great Beast that the Book of Revelation describes as being destroyed in the Final Battle was the Roman Empire. There was no Final Battle. The Great Beast had some internal problems, and disappeared without much of a fight. The barbarians were enough to put an end to it.

Then, there is the idea of the Apocalypse, and Agamemnon, and the War for Complete Domination and Absolute Eternal Control between the forces of the Christ and the forces of the Anti-Christ. How does the Prince of Peace wind up commanding the heavenly legions? Does anyone see a fundamental incompatibility at work here? Doesn’t the Anti-Christ win if he forces the Christ, of all people, into a War of Last Resort? But, it is a popular view, even if it does completely discount the probability that the next time the world ends it will be when the Yellowstone caldera, which is the world’s largest active super-volcano, erupts again–unless the environment collapses first!

But you might as well know that the Yellowstone eruptions have been calculated to take place every 600,000 years. And it has been 630,000 years since the last one. Yellowstone Lake is tilting to the south. Under the lake there is a huge magma bubble waiting to blow any millennia now. Just saying…

The Bible’s depictions of the physical and spiritual realm, with God sitting on a royal throne in a different dimension, plotting the course of time, and planning the events of history, down to the number of hairs on our heads, and the deaths of the robins and the sparrows, are limited to the world-view of the people who wrote the Bible. They did what they could with what they had to work with, but they didn’t have much to work with. They thought the world was flat. They thought the sun moved around the earth. We cannot live in this world shackled to the way they thought about that world.

The same thing goes with the world to come—the one that is waiting for us on the other side of death. It’s all speculation, what happens when we die, but it’s such a stretch to think in terms of pearly gates, and streets of gold, and angelic choruses without end in the heavenly court. Any description of life after death must be by its very nature short on the details. It’s more than we can say. But we can say at least two things.

The first is that we have no reason to think that life actually ever ends. Oh, sure, bodies cease to live, decay, and dissolve back into the basic elements from which they came. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Bodies certainly die, but that doesn’t mean life dies, that life ceases to exist. We don’t have a clue about life, what it is, where it comes from, where it goes.

Life is like the wind. We see the effects of the wind, but we don’t see the wind. We can tell it’s there by what it does. We don’t see life, we only see the effects of life. When we take “vital signs,” we know life is in there somewhere because the “signs” say so. If we have brain activity, we have life. If we have a flag flapping, we have wind. But, what is life apart from the activity we associate with life? We don’t know.

The bodies we walk around in are made up of atoms—hydrogen atoms, oxygen atoms (We’re mostly water, you know, H2O), carbon atoms, and nitrogen atoms. It’s like we stepped right off some periodic chart. Well, not one of those atoms that make us up is alive. Not one. You could pull all the atoms that make us up off some periodic chart and stack them in a corner and they would never be us. They would just be a pile of cosmic dust. Where does life come from?

Isn’t that the question, though? We’re always wondering how life began as though its beginning is a greater mystery than its continuing, than its being. How do we get the atoms that compose us, and the life that is us, together? How is it that the life that is in my body and yours isn’t in a rock or a marble? And, what makes us think that when that life is no longer in my body and yours, it dies?

Why not think that life continues? Flowing, we might imagine, from the Source to here, and back to the Source, picking up experience, becoming conscious and aware, one might say “personal,” along the way. We might also imagine that living well brings the Source to life here and now. Jesus was an epiphany of the Source of Life and Being on earth. Eternity broke into the Temporal plane through Jesus of Nazareth—and does so through all of those who do it like Jesus, and the Buddha, and all the Bodhisattvas would do it, by doing it as only they–individually–could do it. We make the Source real, we bring the Source to life, the Source becomes a tangible aspect of life in this world, when we live in ways that fulfill our destiny, serve the good, and exhibit the truth of life and being in the world.

All the Biblical depictions of heaven attempt to convey the deep truth that heaven is—beyond all imagery and flights of fantasy—an experience with the good. The catch seems to be that the goodness is wasted upon those who do not develop a capacity for goodness—for appreciating, creating, and expressing goodness—for being good—in this life in this world. “A tree is known by its fruit,” says Jesus. What goes around, comes around. If you “sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.” We prepare for the goodness of the world to come by being sources of goodness in the world of here and now.

This leads to the legitimate place of the Bible in our lives, which is that of a mirror reflecting who we are to us, a map pointing the way, and a metaphor (like an inkblot that everyone sees a bit differently) revealing the heart of how things are to those who have eyes to see. “Isn’t that just the way it is, though?” is the question the Bible brings to life as it shows life to us.

The Bible is the story of our life. In the beginning, we are one with ourselves. We were at one with our core. Every baby starts out like this. Then, we begin to get ideas. We begin to have notions. We begin to think that life would be better if we had more, did more, went more, were more. We hatch the idea of success, and tie it up with achievement, and acquisition. Life then is about the external stuff, the bigger barns, the money in the bank, the lifetime memberships in the right clubs, and we are always only one more major purchase away from complete happiness ever after. We are sure of it. And, all of the commercials declare it to be so.

Of course, as we drift off in this direction, we lose connection with the core, forget what is truly important, can’t find our way back to where we came in—or to who we were when we came in—and try to compensate ourselves for the emptiness within with more of the external stuff. That’s the story of the Bible, and it is our story—the story of every single one of us. You will hear this from me again: All of the wonderful old themes of the Bible have a place in our life: Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Guilt and Redemption, Bondage and Freedom, Death and Resurrection, Lost and Found… It’s all there. We can’t read the Bible without meeting ourselves on every page. The stories deal with Adam and Eve, Jesus of Nazareth, John of Patmos, and all the others but they are about each of us.

The thread running through the Bible is the same thread that runs through our life. It’s about finding our way back home, back to the core, back to the heart, back to who we are, back to the “face that was ours before we were born.” That’s the Hero’s Journey, the Spiritual Journey, the Quest for the Holy Grail, the search for the Kingdom of God and the Land of Promise, Vitality, Integrity, Sincerity, Spontaneity. It’s the journey to ourselves, to who we are, to the experience and expression of what is undeniably, irrefutably, us in the world.

The journey is about the sacred old values like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, generosity, compassion, hospitality, justice, and the like. The journey is about creativity, about oneness, about reconciliation, about being true to ourselves within the context and circumstances of our lives. It is about drawing lines, and taking chances, and exploring new worlds, and making where we are a good place to be. If we spend our lives taking care of this world in these ways, the next world will take care of itself.

Blurbs

This is a collection of my book blurbs publicizing the titles available in my Kindle Collection on Amazon. They sell for $2.99 apiece. If you don’t want to spring for the purchase price, all of these books are available for free on this site, and I hope you enjoy exploring the options here.

This is a collection of 100 photographs with accompanying reflections. There is a problem with the formatting of landscape images, which prevents the photo from being aligned with the typeset. The typeset can do vertical and horizontal, the images cannot. If you can live with that, you have it made. If you would have a hard time living with that, do not purchase this book, or either of the two like it described below. Your balance and harmony are the most important things, and the world is wobbly enough as it is. Our place is to reduce the noise and complexity in our life to a manageable level and maintain it, like the quality gyroscope we are, throughout the length of the roller-coaster ride that is our life.

Available at this link: On Kindle

This is a companion volume with the first One Hundred Days, with the same formatting issue.

Available at this link: On Kindle

–0–

This is my foray into the world of poetry, which is one of the ways available to us for saying That Which Cannot Be Said (Music, dancing, sculpting, drawing…etc., are others). We must become well practiced in the art of such language in order to do our part in maintaining our balance and harmony in a world as wobbly as this one is.

Available at this link: On Kindle

–0–

This is a collection of photographs with the same formatting issue as described above, and my observations about the process and art of photography.

Available at this link: On Kindle

–0–

This is the first volume of my take on the worlds of religion and spirituality (The second volume is below).

Available at this link: On Kindle

–0–

This is the second volume of my work with the worlds of religion and spirituality. Our place is unique in the cosmos, so far as we know, standing as we do between the invisible world of Psyche and the visible world of Soma, and working to balance and bring harmony to the spiritual and physical aspects of our life. We bring Mythos and Logos together, integrating instinct/intuition/imagination/creativity with intellect/reason/logic/analytics in order to see and say what’s what and what is to be done about it when, where, how and why. How well we do that tells the tale.

Availiable at this link: On Kindle

Our alignment with the here, now–the time and place of our living–is contingent upon our inner alignment of our conscious, willing/wanting self with our unconscious (so-called because we are not conscious of it most of the time) knowing/feeling/sensing self. When Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Thy will, not mine, be done,” he is addressing his inner, intuitive, self, and aligning himself with his original nature, his innate virtues (The things he was equipped from birth to do best and enjoy doing most), his inherent imagination along with his intrinsic intuition). When Lao Tzu said, “Do your work and step back, let nature take its course,” he was saying, “Get out of your own way and allow your intuition and inborn gifts lead your way to the Way!” Thus, “The Tao of Jesus,” is automatic, spontaneous, natural in our work to be who Jesus was simply by being who we are. Of course, to do that, we have to get out of the way with our willing/wanting self and live in relationship with That Which Knows within as the moved in relationship with The Mover.

Available at this link: On Kindle