In the special relationship where both partners see the special self in each other, the ego sees 'a union made in heaven'. 

-- A Course in Miracles 

 

Several months ago, a dear friend urged me to sign up for an online dating site. She had recently attended a later-in-life wedding where the couple had met on that website. She even offered to pay the subscription, she was that convinced it was just what I needed!

Since then,  I have read more than 2,500 profiles submitted by men living within a radius of at most 250 miles from my current location.  This is further constrained to men who report their age as between 66 and 73.  I've looked at four different sites.

Reporting back to my friend, I'm sure I've entertained her with my reports.  Early reactions included that many of the photos I saw included baseball caps, indoors, sometimes with t-shirts, not to mention the men who wore sleeveless t-shirts.   These seemed somehow at odds with their verbal protestations of wanting to find that special woman who would somehow make their lives so much more worth living.  That seemed to be at least potentially about laundry skills.

Then there was the issue of distance.  Clearly, since I have spent about 15 years of my life living 12 of the 24 time zones away from where I was born, my view of distance is altered.  But even when the distance seemed "doable" to me, I finally realized it wasn't about distance -- it was about convenience.  Finally, all of the men with whom I interacted personally, no matter what they said in a profile, preferred a woman who was easily and quickly accessible.  Nearby.  On short notice.

It became a special kind of challenge that I assigned to myself.  Eventually I dropped the hope that I would find someone who would be attracted to my unconventional life history, and had lived in a different culture outside the coziness of being "American."  Surely, I still told myself , I could find, even in the USA, at least one potential male partner who was not totally self-absorbed.

Of course, the results will be obvious to most people reading this post.  The problem lay, not in the "stars" of match criteria, but in my own foundational assumptions and expectations of relationships.

Specialness is what ACIM calls it.  It's a trick of the ego-world.  A few other quotes from the UK website "Centre for Inner Peace" will illustrate this:

A special relationship is a device for limiting your self to a body, and for limiting your perception of others to theirs.

Every special relationship you have made has, as its fundamental purpose, the aim of
occupying your mind so completely that you will not hear the call of truth.

And my favorite:

The special relationship is an attempt to re-enact the past and change it.

So many times the profiles were by men who had experienced a lovely relationship and lost it, through death.  Loneliness is a hard condition to admit to others, when everything about American life is that we are the best, the brightest, the smartest, the most caring.  The widowers were more likely to admit it, and to say in other words that they were hoping to re-enact the past.  The "change it" part sometimes manifested as looking for a significantly younger woman, so as to not have to go through the trauma of that kind of loss again.

If you happen to be a fellow student of "The Course" you will have certainly spotted the most important flaw in my self-imposed Persephonean task:  that of projection.  There is absolutely no way that one can achieve inner peace through finding another ego/self that somehow "fits" what I seek.  Because my seeking can only be a projection of my own lack, and will only find lack. 

The way the Course puts it:

To believe that special relationship, with special love, can offer salvation is the belief that separation is salvation.

When I seek to overcome separation, all I prove is separation.  To find that "special someone" is to declare all others as not-special, and thus increase separation.

The closer you look at the special relationship, the more apparent it becomes that it must foster guilt and therefore must imprison.

The gentle message of the Course articulates that even the special relationship can, through right-mindedness, be transformed.  And become a blessing.  This happens through what it calls the "Holy instant."  As another of my favorite writers about the life of spirit, Paul Tillich, once said: "It happens, or it does not happen."  Loneliness is transformed into solitude when the ego is seen for what it is.

And then, what the world and the ego present to us as pain, is transformed into inner peace. As the Course says:

I have said repeatedly that the Holy Spirit would not deprive you of your special relationships, but would transform them.

The special relationship will remain, not as a source of pain and guilt, but as a source of joy and freedom.

 

Deities and Time: Reflections about a new year

Tibetan monks build a sand mandala

A mandala, according to some interpreters of things Tibetan, is a representation of a home, palace, residence, of a deity. For some years now, Tibetan monks have traversed the USA, and surely other places too, creating mandalas built slowly by careful arrangements of grains of colored sand.
It is likely that modern sand mandalas use sand that has had color added. In Tibet, though, there are places where colored sands are found naturally. To gather the sands is part of the process. Eliot Pattison, the author of several detective novels set in Tibet, describes this in Bone Mountain.

"Nyma could not stop smiling as the inhabitants of the hermitage sat with her ten minutes later, encircling the pouch of sand she had brought from the glacier. 'The stream was frozen,' she said, explaining why she had been gone several days longer than expected. 'So I sat and waited. . . . . On the second day a warm wind came, and the ice began to melt. On the third, I watched as a hole opened, just big enough for my hand to fit through.'
. . .
"Nyma's contribution was the perfect offering for completing their work, made all the more powerful by the reverence she had shown the mountain. She had not taken the vermilion sand, but had waited for the ice to melt, had waited for the mountain to offer it to her."

As I am writing this, there is another kind of waiting, in a place called Times Square. It is a waiting for a sparkling electronic structure to move to signal the modern world's mark on time. It is noisy, mechanical, precise, and essential to all commerce, warfare, transporation systems, banking --- every system of our era. There are truncated conversations about events since the nearest previous such event. But there is something missing. It does not feed my soul.

For Tibetans, to be human is to have an inner deity, which is the most precious aspect of any part of creation. Mountains have deities, glaciers have deities, frozen streams have deities. The purpose of life is to honor one's own inner deity and allow the deities of all creation to instruct it, to guide it, to hold it in relationship.

After a sand mandala is created, it is always, with great respect and seriousness, destroyed and the sand is swept up.  This is an essential teaching about compassion often called impermanence.  It is a lesson about time, and perhaps even more, a lesson about care for the tiniest and most vulnerable.  Can there be a piece of a mountain smaller than a grain of sand?

The mandala sand is not wasted, though.  Some of it may be shared out to people as a reminder of the process, a reminder of the teaching of compassion.  The rest is returned to the earth, to a lake, a stream, to become part of the source once again.

Like the sand, the passage of time becomes part of the flow of eternity, and it is this which heals.  It is this which permits com-passion, passion with, all of creation, and one's own inner deity.

The marking of time using the lunar calendar, the rhythms of nature, and the marking of time called Losar in Tibet is more nourishing for my spirit, my inner deity.

One contemporary lama explains Losar:

During Losar, the Tibetan celebration of the new year, we did not drink champagne to celebrate. Instead, we went to the local spring to perform a ritual of gratitude. We made offerings to the nagas, the water spirits who activated the water element in the area.

. . . . Our way of relating to the elements originated in the direct experiences by our sages and common people of the sacred nature of the external and internal elements.

Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche (2002). Healing with Form, Energy, and Light. Ithaca, New York: Snow Lion Publications.

And so, this moment, as people are huddled together where the bright lights no longer provide much in the way of useful warmth, I wait for the ice to melt, as my inner deity salutes your inner deity.  And will do so again as the earth moves through space toward another solstice and the tectonic plates shift and the mountains grow and the deity of the frozen river waits to meet the deities who will honor the vermilion sand.  Namaste.

A wish for you

How Wide Is Your Stream?

A blessing: 

may your path have smooth safe stepping stones.

Lizard brain

This tiny critter sitting on a researcher's finger spoke to me. Well, not actually. But seeing it/him/her caused a message to come to whatever part of me that receives messages. I guess I'd have to say "my brain" although some sticklers would argue that "brain" and "mind" are not the same reality. Let's just say for now, my "awareness." Because the first impact of the message was about the physical structure we call "brain."

First, let me introduce brookesia micra, the tiniest of 4 species of tiny chameleons discovered in Madagascar. The photo is of a juvenile, but full-grown they are not that much bigger. Because of what we share as creatures, I'm going to name this one "LizBit." Ever since Michael Dowd came to town and presented a mind-boggling [oops, there's that word again] explanation of the evolution of the brain, I've been using the phrase "lizard brain" a lot.
According to Dowd, among others, the human brain evolved through four stages. We, homo sapiens, have the functions of not merely a triune brain, but four brains zipping along through the nerve cells and spaces inside our skulls. Michael and his wife, Connie Barlow, have created presentations and teaching aids about the spiritual dimension of evolution by depicting the human brain in relationship to the brains of other creatures.

One image that has stayed with me from the show is this one depicting the evolutionary development of the human brain.
On thegreatstory.org, they explain this depiction of the human brain this way:

Our human brain contains the foundations of vertebrate brain evolution: our reptilian brain (our Lizard Legacy) and our paleo-mammal brain (our Furry L'il Mammal). Evolved later is our human rational brain, the neocortex (our Monkey Mind), and highly developed in the human are the prefrontal cortex or frontal lobes (our Higher Porpoise; higher purpose).

LizBit and I have something in common: we both have a "lizard brain."

What the lizard brain governs for us, and also for LizBit, is 5 functions: Food, Flight, Flight, Freeze, and Reproduction. (Michael has been known to call those the 5 "f"s. I'm don't think he means "family" exactly.)
All four sections of the human brain are fascinating. This post is just about the one LizBit and I share. Without my Lizard Brain, I would not survive. I don't like when the functions of my Lizard Brain get dismissed as "lower brain." That's a little like saying gravity is less important than sunlight.
At the same time if Lizard Brain is all I have, I'm vulnerable especially to messages that trigger the responses of the 5 Fs.
Consider television ads, for example. Many of them seem to be aimed straight at my "freeze" response. It's as if I'm supposed to focus like a rabbit caught in headlights on their messages. My eyeballs get stuck for 30 seconds or 90 seconds on how, for the right price, all my primal survival needs will be met. No more fear, just buy this. Loud noises trigger my freeze response. Do you suppose that's why ads, and some program intro music, seem so much louder than the actual program content?
LizBit and his/her relatives generally inhabit dark decaying leaf matter stuck between rocks. It takes the next stage of evolution to get us out the door into the sunlight, seeking sociality and the company of others. That's the gift of the mammal brain, and it's a huge evolutionary step forward. Mammal brain has a different kind of vulnerability. One of the best ways to learn about it is the Animal Planet show Orangutan Island. When our mammalian brain is wounded, we, like the traumatized primates at the rehabilitation center, exhibit 5F behaviors. Those are usually not very pretty, which is why I dislike the TV show "The Survivor."
If we can protect LizBit, and let brookesia micra live by not destroying its environment, maybe we can come to terms with our own survival needs by learning to care for each other even while surviving.

1-11-11 and the Garden [original posted January 11, 2011 – 5:13 pm]

The number 11 has energy that calls to me. It has always been so. This day, so far, is no exception. Already in email a very special letter has arrived, from my dear colleague and friend, Zinai Shi, the vice director of the Luminary Buddhist Monastery of Taiwan. Then, a phone call from one of the founders of an ecovillage which is committed to permaculture, here in New England, and which I was able to visit this past weekend.

Permaculture is not new to my Buddhist friends. One of my favorite photos of my dear departed mother is from a visit by my parents to Taiwan, when we spent a night at the rudimentary rural temple complex. Mother was very uncomfortable on the tatami mats with no mattress and only a few duvets. There was a laywoman from the area who stayed in that room, living at the temple to help with the gardening. She was very devout and prayed aloud in the sacred language with her beads, which frightened my mother. When she stopped sobbing, I learned she worried I was becoming a Buddhist. Rather than ask why this would be such a disaster, I only tried to reassure her. Although, when the huge gong immediately next to our resting place called the sisters to prayer at 4 am, her anxieties began all over again.

After breakfast one of the nuns who speaks excellent English took us on a tour. When Mother saw their garden, completely free of pesticides and weed killers, wholly organic, her face finally lit up into a wonderful smile, and from that moment on, she was able to relax and relate to those shaved-head women. A connection had been made.

The photo here is one view inside the wonderful multi-seasonal garden at the entrance of the Rodale Institute, which is visited by many for education and enjoyment. Ancestors from my mother’s family are buried in a small, brick-walled cemetery there, because eight generations of her ancestors owned that land before the Rodale family bought it. Mother understood gardening. And that served as the bridge for her to relate to my friends, the Luminary Buddhist nuns of central Taiwan.

Only recently, I pointed a friend in Asia to the Perelandra garden website, a co-created garden I want to visit someday.
Perelandra in Virginia, USA
Machaelle Small-Wright, whose vision created Perelandra and who continues to teach about the relationship of our species and the living planet called Earth, once said a garden is not possible without human activity. Gardens don’t start themselves. Sure, you might trip over a zucchini vine while on a walk through a nature preserve, but only if a seed got transported there by a generous bird and managed to derive nourishment enough to grow. It's a garden only if humans somehow were involved.

Like permaculture, gardens do not need to be on an outdoor plot of soil. Gardens are wherever human beings decide to combine the elements provided by nature to create something new and useful, according to Machaelle. When we create a garden, or a farm, or even just grow some herbs or bulbs on a windowsill or balcony, plants will flourish more when we honor them, and consider them entities with which we are co-creating something useful to the cosmos.

When I was growing up on the farm, this time of year the seed catalogs began to arrive. Vegetables, fruits, herbs, all appeared in bright colors and many variations. These became, for me, the stuff of wonderful day dreaming. I miss those. They beckoned us to go on during gray cold winter days. Browsing them counteracted despair. They were the heralds of life as a garden.

This is a gray cold winter day in my life, as the farm that has been in the family for generations, lovingly husbanded by my parents, has been sold to another family. For some, the money mattered more than the vision or the family ties. I will do what I can with what remains to me to insure that the vision does not die. I’m still searching for a physical location in which to invest myself, but for the moment, this writing is enough.

In winter, indoors, I speak with, and listen to, my poinsettias. In the tropics they are considered a weed, a wild plant. Now, they epitomize the festive season, a superb example of what can happen when humans honor the spirit of a plant!

Iron comes from exploding stars

Iron comes from exploding stars. Not as bullets, of course, but as molecules.

The following quotation is from the Max Planck Institut in Germany:

Where does iron come from? According to astrophysicists, iron, like all other heavy elements, is created in the center of massive stars, and is expelled into space once these stars explode as supernovae at the end of their lives. The material then mixes with the interstellar matter and may form new stars and planetary systems. Our solar system was formed after several generations of stars and therefore contains enough heavy elements like iron, oxygen etc. to form Earth-like planets and to sustain life.

Cast iron. Shackles. Magnets. Cemetery fences. Cutlery. Patio furniture. And, hemoglobin. Just a few things that come to mind. Not immediately poetic imagery.

That last one, hemoglobin, gives me pause. The iron in my blood. It is once again obvious that my very being is due to stardust, intertwined in cosmic relationships.

Blood relationships. When humans amass or procreate enough units, tribes are the result. Naming, identity, is usually based on blood relationships.

Relationships also define organizations. People are attracted when there are open and welcoming relationships, or at least the promise of such. We know who we are by deciding to whom we are related. It’s what you see and sense when you enter a Sunday morning gathering of people who value relationships. Warm, expansive, non-intrusively inquisitive, multiple orbits of relationships.

What would it mean if all tribes everywhere knew, really knew, that the very stuff of life, blood, is derived from stardust? Related to stardust? Parented by stardust?

Iron as metal, forged in fire, can be formed into many items. Red blood cells are shared by all creatures with spines, except ice water fish. So, I’m pretty directly related, by blood, to all of those creatures that can bleed. And to those which use oxygen, because what hemoglobin does, carry oxygen around.

Wouldn’t it be interesting, every time someone wants to sing or preach about the redeeming blood of Jesus, for instance, if the singers or preachers were first reminded that blood is blood because of hemoglobin, which is found in red blood cells, which consists of iron that attracts oxygen, and which came from stars that burned so hot they exploded iron all over the universe?

Membership organizations focus on blood relationships and sometimes to the exclusion of others. All too often the exclusion is intensified into violence. Families, tribes, churches, ethnic groups, nations. The fault is not the blood relationships. If only we will remember to thank the stardust.

Some ancient poetry. . . I commanded your ancestors when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, from the iron-smelter (Jeremiah 11.4)

Originally posted Jan 1, 2011, slightly edited with new photo of supernova.

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Why the internet works: a parable for pre-digital humans

The photo is a tweenbot, a cardboard smiley-face on wheels with a little motor that can only move straight ahead. As you will see in the video below, it also has a little flag that explains where it wants to go. The tweenbot is one way to understand how the internet works. The world of internet communication rests on unknown and unseen people performing random acts of kindness.

The whole story is in the videos linked below. I discovered this story because I was complaining about how difficult it is to explain the internet. Members of generations who are older than credit cards seem to shy away from, or distrust, the internet. Telephones I can explain, because phone lines are easy to see, up on poles along every country road. Cell phones have towers, and most of us understand radio waves. But how does that email and file attachment get from my computer in Hong Kong to a computer on a desk in Yangon, or in a café in Caracas, or on a farmer’s laptop in a dairy barn in Wisconsin? Or even all those places at once? How does it travel, and who owns the highway? And people really send money that way? That’s pretty scary.

A friend sent me the link to this talk about the internet. I broke it into two parts to make it easier to put into this post. I’ve put a few phrases on each section as markers about the content.

The Internet as Acts of Kindness – Part One

topics include: why bumblebees can’t fly; 3 old dudes who created the web; who runs the internet and where do they live; the ‘net and human rights, political and personal

The Internet as Acts of Kindness – Part Two

topics include: hitchhiking; mosh pits; tweenbots; ride-sharing; couch-surfing, and why the worldwide web works

43 people, complete strangers, helped the bot travel this path

Sometimes we who are in a later phase of life tend to look backward through our experiences and feel that social conditions, like our joints and hairlines and various other life mechanisms, have deteriorated. Is it true that people have changed for the worse?  This video presents evidence that cheered me up immensely.  I can’t go back to the cozy telephone party-line world of my childhood. But then, it wasn’t always comfortable either.  There’s something positive to the secular anonymity that Harvey Cox wrote about in the early 1960s. Party-lines can be a little restricting! When your village knows everything that goes on, it’s hard to blaze a new trail. It can be difficult to welcome those who are not "PLU", People-Like-Us.

Manhattan is a secular, anonymous environment in most ways. People who live there seem to have perfected the art of avoiding eye contact with anyone else on the sidewalk. But the little straight-line-only cardboard robot with the smiley face traveled all the way across the park. Forty-three random strangers along its path helped it. The tweenbot is how the internet works.  And it reminds me that maybe being human has not changed that much, and a little cardboard traveler has showed us the way of the future.
—————

Links for those who want to know more about Jonathan Zittrain’s perception of the internet and Kacie Kinzer’s tweenbot experiment

Jonathan Zittrain’s personal blog: The Future of the Internet

Talks and blogs on TED by or about Jonathan Zittrain

Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbot Page

Final note: this post is based on talks given by Prof Zittrain in 2008. The tweenbot experiment took place in 2009. We don't know whether or how the Occupy Wall St encampments, especially in Manhattan, may relate to this insight. But it doesn't matter. It's a way to talk about the internet. It remains to be seen if Congressional legislation in late 2011 will succeed in destroying "random acts of kindness" as a stream of communication around the world.