Revolution Through Embracing Simplicity

 

 

 

In the last few years’ I’ve become more aware of how wonderful a thing it is to breathe. It’s not like I’ve recovered from a pulmonary disease or a near-drowning experience or anything, I’ve just come to appreciate the pleasant sensation that accompanies air moving in and out of my lungs. I feel it now, a slight tickle in what I imagine might be my capillaries.

It’s odd that I never really seemed to be aware of this before. God knows my lungs are not what they once were, having smoked cigarettes for decades. You’d think in my youth I would have occasionally marveled at this feeling, seeing as how all physical sensation seems heightened in youth.

Perhaps this awareness started to evolve a dozen or more years ago when I finally kicked the nicotine addiction, choosing fresh air over poisonous smoke. Sometimes getting a second chance at life makes us appreciate it more.

I’ve also noticed of late how good it feels to move. Again, I cannot move as I once did in my twenties or in childhood. But when I allow my body to move at its own speed, to exert itself with an appropriate force, I am reminded that bodies are meant to move, are happiest in motion. If I only meet it on its terms and do not try to force it to be what I want it to be, but allow it to be what it is, it will not merely respond but do so joyfully. I am not just some lump of clay but the energy that moves through it. I may be dependent upon my limited frame, but it is not all that I am.

I can feel this way in a factory, where the air is not sweet and the sounds are not that of nature. Do not get me wrong, I prefer nature, but I can transcend my surroundings. Sometimes I lie awake at night and feel my breathing, and think of how wonderful it is to be alive. And while I appreciate it that my wife is next to me and our dog is between us, if I were alone, I would still be aware of how pleasant a thing it is to breathe.

I lie in bed and breathe, thankful for the modest but comforting blanket on top of me. I enjoy the coolness of the air mixed with the blanket’s ability to moderate it. If I inhale deeply, I might get a whiff of the simple but extremely enriching meal that my wife made earlier. Such wonderful smells tend to pervade the household and hang around. There are leftovers in the refrigerator and we will have the opportunity to dine on it again tomorrow.

Life is simple. Happiness is simple. The true joys of life do not require fighting over. There is more than enough for all. I sometimes ask myself, late at night when the air is brisk but the blanket is comforting, why we must fight so bitterly for the things that do not make us happy. Why do we focus on other things when simply acknowledging the beauty of the moment has the power to bring us contentment? Sometimes I feel that we as a species are throwing everything away, everything, for things that do not matter at all, for things that do not bring joy but only distract us from it.

I think of such things, and I open myself up to an immense sadness for what we have to lose. The world is dominated by those who fear and crave and hate but who clearly do not appreciate the simple joy of breathing. Such people are leading our society, our species, our entire planet to ruin. Like others, I have tasted despair and quiet desperation in my life, and I know they still call to me, not as a solution but as a resignation.

But then I become aware of my breathing. I hear my dog’s inhalations next to me, free from all the concerns we humans have. I could lose myself to despair, but that would help nobody, least of all myself. I accept the simple comforts the universe has provided me. With gratitude. With joy. Perhaps, if I can appreciate fully such simple things, others might come to ask me what it is that makes me so at peace, so contented, so joyful. I can think of no other way to get people to cease their pursuit of useless acquisitions, to choose a path of peace rather than a path of violence and domination.

I’ve tried other ways, and they did nothing to change the world, they only made me forget how wonderful it is to breathe, how wonderful it is to be alive. I feel it now.

The Part Of Me That Writes

I am happy when I am able to write and unhappy when I cannot. Usually it is the outside world, the many obligations one accumulates through the years or the multitude of distractions that are always there that makes it impossible to write. But sometimes, I stare at a blank page or my work in progress (WIP, for you fellow writers) and I am afraid. I am afraid of not being able to write, not being able to cross that line that separates the observer from the doer. There is a certain switch that needs to be flicked before I am able to unloose words upon a page and have them convey meaning. It is like having a certain ability and being afraid that it will someday desert you.

Ah, but when the words start to flow, I feel I am where I am meant to be. No, not words. I really don’t give a fig about words. I distrust writers who say how much they are in love with words. Words are merely tools used to convey ideas, it is ideas that I love. When they flow through me, I feel my body vibrate as though I were an instrument through which music is conveyed.

Yeah, I’m getting a little mystical. I tend to do that. It’s why I write. I write to get that feeling that something is flowing through me. It’s not just me who feels that way. The idea of a muse is thousands of years old, an idea that something other than the writer is writing. I do not try to justify the description, merely relate it. As a matter of fact, I kind of like leaving it unexplained. Perhaps someday science will be able to explain the creative process. When they do, I’m sure they’ll suck all of the magic out of it. Oscar Wilde said “Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.” If I may, I’d like to add that science is the process of obscuring the miraculous with explanations. Explanations do little to improve an experience. Explanations distance us from experience. It is not the musician who is thinking what notes to play but the one who plays what he feels that best conveys an experience.

So in a way, the mind that does not use the typical mode of explanation is best able to convey meaning. Feelings can be conveyed through a musical instrument in a way no description ever could. Similarly, truth can flow from a writer from some deeper channels than the conscious mind. True, words are still used, but what is conveyed goes deeper than what can literally be interpreted in the words. That is why a thousand lines can be expended explaining a single line of poetry.

And there we get a little closer to the heart of art, that it is a description of feelings and describing feelings does not need to make sense to the conscious mind, it merely has to be true to the feeling. Feelings, not the intellect, shape the sentences being recorded. I can write down a sentence and a voice deep within says, “Yes, that makes sense to me.” The voice that speaks is not one I’m often aware of but one that deeply influences my decisions and my course in life nonetheless. It is a voice I am quite able to keep from listening to when going about my day-to-day life, and yet if I do not keep its opinions in consideration I inevitably pay a steep price for ignoring them. If I am out of tune with that voice that speaks to me when I write, play piano, or have any inspired intuitive moment, be it in social interaction or “being in the zone” while competing at sports, I know I will be less productive, less successful, less happy.

I realize there is more than just my intellect or my conscious thoughts I need to listen to. I earlier referred to it as “feelings”, but there’s more to it than that, at least it feels like there is. It is a form of consciousness that is apart from the intellect. Perhaps it is some sort of synthesis of the emotional and the intellectual, perhaps it may even be spiritual. Even if it is not spiritual I believe that it is perhaps best that we treat it as though it were, give to it the same respect and reverence as those who are of a spiritual mind would. Ever and again I will say that I cannot explain it, and yet the evidence seems to be there. Man is a deeply spiritual and artistic creature. Humanity at its best expresses itself through religion and art.

Of course there are those who deny spirituality, who blame such beliefs for the irrational moments in history that run contrary to reason and progress. The narrative is that science and reason are responsible for all that is good and that with the sleep of reason there arises monsters. My contention is that it is not the sleep of reason that creates such monsters but the lack of attention paid to the subconscious, the spiritual, that which cannot be explained by the intellect. That which the intellectual, the agnostic, and the strictly materialistic mind chooses to ignore, is merely a garden which then goes bad through neglect. It is not naturally a domain of monsters, but it can become so if it is not properly tended. It exists, and like any other fact that we choose to ignore, it festers and gradually becomes an increasing problem until we are at last forced to deal with it. It is at this point that it becomes so threatening that it appears to be an evil, when in fact if we had acknowledged its existence from the beginning, we would have realized just how much it was able to give to us.

So to summarize, there is an artistic/spiritual way of observing the world that is separate from and often contradictory to the purely rational and logical way we too often believe is the correct way of processing information from the outside world. Without a doubt, a rejection of what the intellect can tell us about reality will inevitably lead to bad decisions. But so too will ignoring the artistic/spiritual way of perceiving the world and our relationship to it lead to the growth of monsters we never saw coming.

Which leads me back to writing and the joy I experience when caught up in it. It is though I am doing a bit of spring cleaning inside of me, releasing a clutter of thoughts that have too long stayed in the dark recesses of my consciousness. It is like putting into the sunlight a plant that has been kept too long in the shadows. It is like finally taking the time to explain things to a part of me that processes information differently than the conscious/logical part of me, the “me” I too often believe is all I am. But there is a whole vast pool which lies under the glittering surface that I can see, depths which are a joy to explore, containing as it does endless possibilities. At its bottom is a bubbling spring which never seems to run dry.

A Deeper Understanding

Please bear with me a moment while I attempt to explain an idea that’s been evolving within me for a while. If you are charitable in your reading of what I now write, then perhaps you yourself might rephrase it with more understanding and insight than I am able to bring to the subject at the moment. It is after all, just the beginning of an idea, one which began before I came to it and shall continue far beyond anything I have to say.

What if humans have a higher means of relating to the outside world than the intellect, the way many other species do? After all, there is no species as intelligent as us, and yet many of them accomplish feats that we cannot begin to understand. Take birds, for example, that are able to migrate thousands of miles to return year after year to precisely the same winter grounds. Or fish, who return to spawn in the streams in which they were born. There are many species capable of doing amazing things without themselves being able to understand how it is they accomplish what they do.

More importantly, many species have a swarm intelligence, or hive mind. A colony of insects are capable of working together in such a way that is far beyond the will or thought process of any of the individual members of the group.

So what if humans have similar abilities, ones that our intellect would reject should it become aware of them? Because after all, the intellect and the conscious mind are very much biased towards the intellect and the conscious mind. Individual humans are very reluctant to believe that they act according to anything other than their conscious, well-reasoned thoughts. But that is vanity and we can all site examples of people who rationalize their behavior rather than attempting to understand it. Psychiatrists and advertising executives would be more than willing to tell us that human beings often behave according to more primitive and sub-conscious motivators than we like to think. But our egos do not let us admit to such behavior.

So if we were to have senses similar to ones that animals possess, it is most likely our intellect would deny them, just as it denies myriad pieces of evidence that suggest we do not always behave in our own best interest, that we are often not even aware of why we do what we do. That we develop justifications later for the actions we perform now.

Is it not likely then that not only are we capable of operating according to senses we are unaware of, but that we have been doing so all along? After all, it was little more than a hundred years or so that the idea of the subconscious has come into our language.

Of course, while the idea of the subconscious came into common knowledge at about that time, it began somewhat earlier as a new thought in one or two people’s heads. I don’t like thinking of an idea as belonging to anyone, as if one genius created it out of thin air. I prefer to think of an idea as gestating until it is grown enough to leave the womb and make its way into the mainstream. Such ideas are never the child of a single person but the result of a sort of collective conscious that suddenly starts to break out in different minds. Freud is most closely associated with the term subconscious, but he was not the only nor even the first to use the term.

So let us for a moment imagine a concept similar and perhaps even parallel to the subconscious. Let’s give it a name, the superconscious. There, it has now entered into human thought, perhaps for the first time, perhaps not. Let us just for a moment imagine it exists and it is this idea that has been responsible for such unexplainable phenomena as the Third Reich, market bubbles, and fashions. The concept of a superconscious can perhaps then explain what we find unexplainable otherwise. It is what we sometimes call the mob mentality, the hive mind, the herd instinct.

Maybe it doesn’t exist at all, but perhaps by using it as a place filler it serves as a function to explain the world we live in. If it helps us see more clearly, it really doesn’t matter at all if it exists or not. Just as x in math is used to represent a variable, let us use the idea of the superconscious to solve a problem that might be unsolvable without it. This is not to say it doesn’t exist, it’s just to say that it need not actually exist to be useful.

So, what if it exists? Might it not go a way towards explaining things the conscious mind has always had difficulty explaining? Might it not exist in religion, giving voice to feelings that science has never been able to assuage? Might it not exist in things we call intuition, insight, and revelation, things we cannot erase from common understanding and yet cannot explain through science or observable phenomena?

Prior to a couple of hundred or so years ago, we as a society were quite blinded by the idea of a God whose laws were not to be questioned. We did not probe such ideas as I describe then because we felt it sacrilege to do so. We had belief, but not enough to question. In short, we were ruled by a fear of God rather than a faith in him that would have allowed us to explore our spiritual selves and any connection we might have with a “superconsciousness”.

Once human beings started actively questioning reality and meaning without regard for a divinity who took care of us and who provided meaning, the idea of an abyss took hold in our collective imagination so that we feared to gaze beyond, worrying like ancient mariners worried that we would simply fall off the edge of the universe into the great void. Nietzsche said that when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you. A chilling thought. And he was not alone. Other thinkers of around his time expressed similar sentiments. As we explored the physical world, we began to truly appreciate how humanity was not the center of the universe. We began to see just how insignificant a part of the whole we are.

The scientific method of observing the universe required putting ourselves outside of the equation. Our inner yearnings, our desire to be part of the whole, did not fit into the mechanistic view of the outside world. But they do exist and we are part of the whole. We cannot deny that. We as human beings have spiritual desires. I won’t bother trying to define them, but it is time we starting exploring this aspect of our humanity that has been common to every culture and every people dating well back into prehistory. This is not to deny science, it is to admit that science does not, can never explain everything about our role in the universe. The intellect and the scientific method are immensely important tools, but a little humility regarding the limits of our intellects might be the greatest wisdom we can hope to achieve. After all, the intellect often misdiagnoses situations our sense of smell or taste might easily make clear to us. It doesn’t matter what the date on the gallon of milk says so much as what our senses relate. It is important to explore all aspects of who we are, not merely what our intellect relates to us. Spirituality, like our other senses, is unavoidably part of what we need in order to understand ourselves and the world we live in.

Perhaps for the first time in the history of humanity we are in a position to explore what spirituality can show us free from fear of offending God or our intellect. There is new territory to experience and map, facets of our being we have been fearful to delve into. It is not supernatural, just another aspect of our nature. As long as we cannot adequately explain the world we live in, as long as supposedly intelligent humans act contrary to their best interests, as long as we use technology to build ever-greater weapons of destruction, and as long as we destroy the planet that will be the only one the vast majority of us will ever know, it could prove suicidal to our species not to humbly seek to learn from it. But of course if you think we’re already on the right path…

Perceptions And Paradigms

More thoughts from a forthcoming book which I believe I shall call The Book Of Ashavan. If you have read my novel Seven Stones you will know Ashavan was forever scribbling his thoughts in a notebook as he collected a series of stones that gave him a deeper understanding. Here then are some of his thoughts:

Please know that what I ask of you is to stare into the abyss to dig the depths of understanding. You have spent your life distracted. We all spend our lives distracted. We play in the shallows, barely daring to break the surface, let alone plumb the depths. We prefer to live as animals, afraid to look at ourselves as we are,terrified of using our human capacities to explore our world and ourselves.

The illusion is that if I am not one I must be the other. If I am not a bully I shall end up being bullied. If I do not make myself strong I shall be weak. By accepting that we must be one or the other we place ourselves upon the wheel of opposites, give it the energy to spin around. We believe ourselves to be in a battle with a fierce enemy, but if we were to see it truly we would see a dog chasing its own tail.

 There is a center, a reality that is at the heart of all illusion. The problem is that we as humans, we as physical entities, cannot reach it. In reaching towards it we invariably overshoot it only to find ourselves on the opposite side of where we began.

But as we better appreciate it for what it is, we feel it pulling us like planets that ever circle around a sun but keep their distance. The truth is a campfire around which we all sit. We feel its warmth but cannot get too near it. As a society we can only gather around it.

As individuals, ah, the reality is reachable because it exists within us always. We have only to be silent to hear it.

 Do not waste your time in trying to overthrow the dark towers of evil. Instead build up the lighthouses that can steer others to safety. Fighting evil is evil, because fighting is evil. 

People bow to the highest power they’re aware of, pray to the greatest god. Small minds worship primitive gods, devote themselves to small ideas. Corporations and companies benefit from the commitment of people not open enough to see their connectedness to the whole. Countries use people who cannot connect to a higher power as cannon fodder.

Embracing the path means always leaving all idols behind, always letting go. You never have it; it is always leaving. We cannot have, we can only be, cannot know we can only see.

See it as it is, not how it fits into your life story. As you grow towards adulthood and begin to have an understanding of life, the pieces that do not fit the narrative you have written tend to fall to the wayside. So much we perceived in childhood is forgotten because it is inconvenient.

10,000 years of custom and practice bring about a wisdom even if it is not understood. Customs demand respect even as they demand questioning.

Build on questions, do not build on answers. Answers are the death of thought.

Dawn comes, it always comes. As does spring, although not quite as predictably. So it is with culture. There is little doubt our culture is in the dark and cold night now, regardless of our technological achievements. But the farmer is busy even in the winter, preparing for the inevitable thaw. So too do we who mourn the death of what was prepare for the season of rebirth that is to come. We must now be planting the seeds from which great things will someday blossom. We must shine our light as if it were the first rays of a new sun.

The Eternal Now

Here's a short little bit of a book I'm slowly accumulating as I write other books. I have different names for it, including "The Laws Of Perception":

Patience

The journey shall no doubt test your patience from time to time. We have become accustomed to the ticking of the clock, the whistle that summons us to work and tells us when it is time to go. We are constantly reminded of the passing of time, of the value of time and the evils of spending it frivolously. But in the marking out of our lives in grids and blocks of months, days, hours, and minutes, we lose track of the actual flow. We atomize time until the actual living, the actual essence of the flow is chopped up. And as we chop up time into smaller and smaller pieces we begin to feel like none of these little instants are big enough to accomplish anything at all. In all of the pieces, the seconds and the minute and the hours and the days we lose track of the now, which is where everything happens. So take the opportunity to experience the now. Do you feel it? You are alive, and life is a miracle. Can you feel it? Allow yourself to do so, because that is why you are here. This is the now, you are experiencing the now. You are alive now. You feel good in the now.

And in the time you have taken to read that last paragraph, you experienced many nows. It is a different “now” as you read this than the “now” I first mentioned. At least that is the way it appears to one who is concerned with the clock or the calendar. In fact, the now is ever constant and never changing. The now that you experience is the same now as you have always experienced. It is a place outside of time, a destination to which you can always return. It is where the aged you can discover the youthful you. While all the world changes, the now does not. It is a place within you of peace, faith, security, truth. It is a oneness. It is a spring that never runs dry.

You have time, my friend, it does not have you. You have time for all of the things you want to do, despite all the things you feel you need to do. It is a matter of perception, it is the difference between pursuing what you desire and fleeing from what you fear. The energy required for both is the same but the motivation makes the world of difference.

So please come with me on this journey inward. Together we will find the things that truly matter to us, beauty and truth and joy and purpose and a sense of being where we are meant to be. The path will not always be straight, direct, but no journey is. Sometimes it will feel as if you were lost or going in the wrong direction. Sometimes it will feel that the destination is not worth the journey. But more often you will find yourself distracted from the course. You will occasionally waken to the reality that you have somehow veered far from the path and wondered how you had forgotten about it. And finding it again you will realize the feeling it gives you is no different than the feeling it gave you forty years ago. The now is no different now than it was then. And finding it, you will realize you have returned home. When you are in the now, you are where you are meant to be. And despite what it may sometimes seem, you are always in the now.