tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85877190795793497612024-03-05T01:32:00.719-08:00 doremishockLee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-44542376002243219272013-05-12T06:17:00.003-07:002013-05-12T06:17:39.434-07:00Page will redirect:<br />
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Doremishock content has been moved to the Zen, Yoga, Gurdjieff blog page.Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-57689545359606789252013-05-04T03:02:00.000-07:002013-05-04T03:02:03.594-07:00The world question<br />
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"We cannot know what life is unless we know what love is."</div>
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—Emmanuel Swedenborg, <i>Divine Love and Wisdom</i></div>
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"In moments like this, in front of death, and being free from the known, we can enter the unknown, the complete stillness where there is no deterioration. Perhaps such moments are the only time in which we can find out what life is and what love is.</div>
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And without that love, we will never find the truth."</div>
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—Jeanne de Salzmann</div>
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It's in the small hours of the morning, as the birds awaken, that I go deep in myself and search for this kernel of love that has formed me. It isn't separate from life; it <i>is</i> life, and, as Swedenborg says, we are <i>receivers of life</i>. This action a receiving life is already born from love; even the worst human being, at the very lowest possible level, is a receiver of this life that has been born of love. </div>
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If something goes wrong with it, that is not the fault of life or of love.</div>
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My paradox arises in trying to understand how things that appear to be unloving can come out of love. That's the world-question, isn't it? </div>
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But I can understand this vexing philosophical issue directly this through my own life and my own manifestation, where I believe I am loving — in whatever way I understand that — and then discover that it isn't true. </div>
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Even one moment of self-awareness will reveal this, and such revelations are available all day long, every day.</div>
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There is talk of loving-kindness in Buddhism, but loving-kindness must be organic; in order for me to have any understanding, I must go to the root of it and sense it within Being, before it is expressed. If there is no connection to this expression within Being before the outward expression, no love can be present.</div>
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The way that unloving things arise from love is because of a lack of awareness. If there is no relationship between the expression of love within Being, and outward life, love remains passive and inactive at the core of Being, and is unable to touch life. The capacity is only mediated by an awareness and conscious effort. But the conscious effort isn't an outwardly directed one, which seeks to manipulate or repair outward life; the conscious effort begins in sensing the seed of divinity within me. </div>
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This is why Jeanne de Salzmann phrases what she says above so exactly.</div>
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Our inner work is a call to understand that we are receivers of life, and to know that this begins with love. To sense this intimately is a sacred task; a duty we have to ourselves, to others, and to the Lord.</div>
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These are my thoughts this morning.</div>
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May your soul be filled with light.</div>
Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-13642042181510838682012-12-15T04:26:00.001-08:002012-12-15T07:25:55.491-08:00 A Majority of Cowards- on the Killings at Sandy Hook<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There is no poetry in these moments.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is in times like these, on days like these, that the objective facts of the terrifying conditions we all live in are brought home. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In 1964, when I was nine years old, my parents took me to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. I wandered through halls filled with the most awful photographs of starving, emaciated Jews, piles of corpses, in a daze of horror. I walked past the mounds covering thousands of bodies. When I left the memorial, I realized that this planet was nothing like the peaceful place it appeared to be.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> The incident was life-changing. I have never been able to see the conditions on the planet as anything other than terrifying since then. We are in a desperate place that takes desperate measures.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Earth itself could be a paradise, relatively speaking. But we have created our own hell, and we live in it, each of us. When awful events like the events of yesterday in Connecticut take place, we are stunned, aghast, horrified — one could just list adjectives paragraph after paragraph, and that is indeed what we seem to do in our efforts to rationalize the events. But these events aren't rational, and will always defy our attempts to rationalize them. They confront us with our own fears, our own inner violence, the responsibility each one of us bears for the terror that we create in human society. That terror begins in each one of us; and it's not so easy to expunge.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> I don't think we see that the guns would not be there if we were not how we are. They represent what we are; they symbolize what we are. War, torture, brutality; claiming high principles, we deny them all, yet they belong to us. My moment in Belsen was a moment, I now see, where I looked into the mirror of our inhumanity. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It reminds me of what Krishnamurti once said: <i>war begins in each of us.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Yet look at how our media, our politicians, all immediately begin to outsource the blame. Everything is a mop-up operation; and what we are always mopping up is the blood. No one ever gets there in time to keep it from being shed. There are too many men with enough courage to kill one another, and not enough men with the courage to stop the violence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> This is going on all over the planet. Today, hundreds of people will be killed in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, El Salvador, Mexico, the Congo... yes, <i>America...</i> and all the other places... everywhere... where men decide that they should destroy one another. It is always, they protest in the loudest possible voice, necessary.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Perhaps it's only when children die in a catastrophe of this kind that we begin to see the reality of it all; that it is <i>never</i> "necessary."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> And what is <i>actually</i> necessary never happens.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Leadership on this issue isn't there; we have a majority of cowards. And the killing goes on. We act as though we are horrified; but look, in America, at how comfortable we are with it. This is what we don't see. As a society, we <i>condone</i> this kind of killing. If we didn't, our gun laws would be different... our movies would be different... our politics would be different. Our television and our media would be different. But they are all of the same texture; and that texture is as coarse and appalling as the behaviors and events we, in our hubris, collectively claim to disown.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Nothing will happen after this; laws won't be changed. And I will have to write a similar column the next time, because the date is somewhere out there on the calendar already.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We just don't know what day.</span><br />
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Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-37852181814936707932012-10-06T03:36:00.002-07:002012-10-06T05:18:26.778-07:00 a wish for the good<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Last night, I went to the <a href="http://www.bluerockschool.org/">Blue Rock School</a> to see a shaman from Ecuador by the name of <a href="http://www.doremishock.com/manuscripts/donalbertotaxo.htm">Don Alberto Taxo</a>. He's quite different than what we expect from ourselves; much simpler, from a culture with a more essential approach to life. Nonetheless, an educated man, who clearly understood modern life as well as the next person. At the same time, his culture has preserved a sound connection to nature, which is something we lack.<br />
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The room was filled with well-meaning, New Age seekers, all rapt with attention as Don Alberto expounded the simple virtues of a relationship with nature, the need for things to be less tense and complicated; a personal empowerment to let go of our obsessions, fears, and pessimism, so that something new can enter.<br />
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His teaching is, in the end, probably not too far off some of the material we are more familiar with from modern Western spiritual practices; but the language is different, a heartfelt, less complicated message that extols the virtues of relationship with the planet, not in the political or sentimental terms that our intellectual society gives us, but instead a call to something more direct—more practical and organic.<br />
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Skeptics, cynics, and modern medicine will undoubtedly discount what the Don Albertos of the world say; yet have they offered us anything better? It seems not. Modernism, what one might call non-traditional culture, cultivates exploitative relationships rather than cooperative ones. We exploit nature; we exploit one another. I recall one wag who said "in capitalism, man exploits man; in socialism, it's the opposite."<br />
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We forget the emotive value of our relationship with simple things like water, the forest; a soft voice singing and a thumb beating gently on a drum. There's a numbness in us, born of sensory overload, a surfeit of data, and the compulsion to shovel everything we can into our mouths, our ears, and our eyes, for fear that we might miss something.<br />
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Don Alberto's approach is, perhaps, too simple for most "developed" folks; we don't come from the mountains in Ecuador, and we're not surrounded by nature. Most of us live in the suburbs or cities, and our contact with nature is minimal at best. But his reminders are vitally important. As <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._O._Wilson">Edward O. Wilson</a> has pointed out, our organisms originally evolved specifically for taking in impressions of the natural world. Starving ourselves of these impressions, he argues, actually creates psychological deficits which we are unaware of.<br />
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Those of us with a slightly less biological, more spiritual tilt might put it in other, more personal terms: only if we fulfill this duty to ourselves and the planet can we help grow a whole Being. Things have become unbalanced; and in our characteristic sense and manner of approaching the world, we create environmental movements, causes, grand gestures to push things back in the right direction. We forget the very small gestures that can be made within ourselves, in the places where real change actually might occur; as Don Alberto advised us, touching the petals of a flower. Or drinking a glass of water much more slowly, to appreciate its qualities. No extravagant claims; just a request that we place our attention where it belongs. Right here, right now.<br />
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Perhaps we have become too modern to believe in the apparent naïveté of a sacred quality in water itself; of the idea that a feather can be used to brush away negative thoughts. But if so, I think we've lost more than we imagine. A sense of the magical is needed in life, and once it's exterminated, what is left? Each one of these gestures and ideas touches an unknown that lies beyond the reach of our ordinary senses; each one of them inspires a part of us that has a wish for the good.<br />
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This is certainly the central message Don Alberto brought; we do have a wish for the good in ourselves, and we can cultivate it. We can exhale the things in our lives that create negativity, and make room to receive something new; something different.<br />
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In these small ways, in this search to rekindle our wish for the good, we can make a difference that begins at home, right here, right now; not on the scale of nations and governments, but on the scale of our own Being.<br />
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Thanks, Don Alberto, for reminding us of that so gently, and with so much love.<br />
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<br />Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-17166285358850466272012-10-05T12:22:00.002-07:002012-10-05T12:24:26.949-07:00Every sensation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Every sensation is a movement of energy, but I don't really understand it that way.<br />
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My relationship to my sensation seems personal so much of the time. It belongs to me; it's mine. I take it for granted; my body, my life are so obvious they don't need or perhaps, in my mind, even deserve my consideration. I just use them as I wish.<br />
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I don't stop to consider that every expression of energy is a sacred force. All manifestation emanates from the divine; while I ought to perpetually honor that, instead, I forget everything. I want food. Is there enough money? That woman looks good. And so on. I suppose that these crudely formulated approaches are, in themselves, some low form of honor, but they don't have much respect in them.<br />
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When I see something like this daisy, which I took a picture of on the Outer Banks about a week ago, I have a bit more respect. This is a remarkably ordinary flower— they grow all over the place— and yet something is going on there, there is an expression of perfection in this particular plant that strikes me. A vibrancy, a quality of energy — yes, energy, form, color, manifestation — that makes a deeper impression.<br />
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Even now, that impression is in me as I relive the experience, and I see how the impression is a kind of food that supports me. It's not bread, or meat, or air; it is some other kind of food, something I generally don't think of as food. Yet it is food; spiritual food. And despite the tendency of spiritual food to be presented to us in magnificent yet overblown venues such as the Sistine Chapel, it's these very small impressions that somehow sink the deepest into me and say the most to me about where I am, and what needs to be respected.<br />
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I see that I'm not present enough to my life. That's the bottom line. And yet I can't change that myself; only an energy from a higher level can effect any real change, and that begins from within. Not from a place where I exercise my own will, but from a place where help arrives.<br />
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That's a mystery. It will probably remain forever unexplained; it is where I meet the cloud of unknowing.<br />
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Then these sensations, these movements of energy, touch me.<br />
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And only then do I know that I am not alone.Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-46750248614660202922012-10-02T04:18:00.001-07:002012-10-02T04:27:02.947-07:00A Good Reminder<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It's close to a year since my sister died. This past weekend, I found myself in North Carolina, working to organize my elderly parent's house in the wake of an accident where my father sprained his ankle. He's now in a wheelchair, and in no shape to keep the grounds for the garage up. It falls to me, as the only remaining child, to do a good deal of work the parents in their 80s can't do anymore.<br />
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I spent most of my life imagining things. I imagined, for the majority of my adult life, a shared responsibility between my sister and myself for my parents; I imagined us organizing things, discussing the past together, attending to the many basic needs our aging parents would have.<br />
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Yet none of that can happen now; in the end, despite my fantasies, imagination has no power over the real world.<br />
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Every single thing I went through this weekend was a subtle reminder of my sister, and the fact that she's gone. There is no single stunning grief to be found here; instead, there is the overwhelming but subtle sense that everything is lost: lost within time, lost within a series of events that can't be predicted and that no one really understands. I live, as we all do, in a world that churns out an endless series of interpretive mechanisms, all of which ultimately fail.<br />
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Why do our interpretations fail? Well, Ibn al 'Arabi would probably tell us that all things are lost in the Lord; he believed that there was an insurmountable separation between man and the <i>Essence</i> of God, which can never be known. It can only be described by negation — we can only know what God is not, and God is always not anything we can think of. Not anything we can imagine.<br />
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The Names of God — one of al Arabi's major points of discourse — are a very different question; all of manifested reality, including ourselves and all our thoughts, <i>can</i> be known. (or, at least, some parts of it can —al 'Arabi is rightly cautious in warning us that no man can know but a tiny portion of it.) We can only know God indirectly through these Names, however. Anything that can be named in any way; this is what al 'Arabi refers to as the <i>Divinity</i>, that is, our understanding of God, which is always insufficient, and merely an isthmus that will forever stand between the Essence of God and ourselves.<br />
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This insufficient understanding is in me in regards to death. It is here in regard to the progress of daily life. It is everywhere, in fact; although I'm a reasonably intelligent man, and can understand many things, in the face of death, I am forced to recognize my own insufficiency. And I don't think I will ever approach life, or other people, with enough humility if I don't recognize this very deeply, very deeply indeed. So deeply, in fact, that it becomes a force in me that penetrates the bones and emanates from their very marrow.<br />
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The sorrow I feel as I confront these circumstances doesn't seem personal. I sense a question that lies at the root of my existence itself here, yet it can't be described in words. It is mapped in the sensation of the body and the arousal of feeling; in other words, the majority of it is tactile and organic, rather than intellectual. And, really, if I admit it to myself, so much of life is like this. I'm called to invest myself in these tactile and organic qualities, and yet instead, I <i>think</i> about them.<br />
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Good, strong thinking is necessary; but if that's all I rely on, it's not enough.<br />
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As I grow older, I am increasingly struck with the impression that we are all lost in the wilderness; but not lost in a lonely wilderness, no. There is a lonely wilderness in me, and I am lost in it, but I am lost in the Lord, because the Lord owns even the wilderness I fear.<br />
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Sometimes, along this path, I discover trust. But I need to discover it over and over again, because so much in me rebels.<br />
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Death is a good reminder. It never goes away.<br />
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<br />Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-85720330092094843342012-09-25T09:16:00.001-07:002012-09-25T09:16:27.905-07:00To Live Inwardly<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"For truly, insofar as it is something external that prompts you to act, to that extent your works are dead, and even if it is God who prompts you to act from outside, then such works too are dead. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">If your works are to be living works, then God must spur you to action from within, from your innermost part, if they are really to be alive. For that is where your own life is, and that is the sole place where you are truly alive."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">—Meister Eckhart, Sermon 10</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Esau was hairy — and Jacob was smooth skinned, like the beautiful Egyptian woman pictured above. Esau lived according to external characteristics and principles; he acted from outside, was a man of personality. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Jacob, on the other hand, was devoted to inner qualities, a man in touch with his essence. Thus he deserved and earned the birthright that should have been his older brother's. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The inner is the higher principle, always.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Our innermost part is much higher than any other part of us. It's difficult, actually, to speak of this with words, and to discuss it publicly, because in fact our innermost part is so much higher that no words can encompass or convey its qualities. Truly, it has an uncorrupted, intact, and eternal nature; it is nothing like we are as we are. Yet there is a thread that can connect us to it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Action in life can come from this innermost part, but only if the thread is functional. And that in itself is a big change. Even if I've heard of the thread, to have actual contact with it for anything more than a moment is a big thing; and to truly have this contact turn into a source of information, something inwardly formed that is directed outwardly, is very much different than how I usually am, which is to be outwardly formed and attempt through that to live inwardly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> I think very carefully about this, because I begin to see my entire life is formed through this being outwardly, and attempting through that to live inwardly. The parts of me that are in need of good food for the soul thus go unfed; because they cannot derive their sustenance from the objects, events, circumstances and conditions of outward life, try though I may to arrange it this way.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> This is truly a mystery, because I don't know any other way of being. What else could there be? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Things are just the way they are, <i>this</i> way, and that's it. Right?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Only by opening to a new inward quality of a very different kind can I begin to understand this in another way. It's true; there are times when something outward which was created from an inward influence may suddenly touch me; I may see how something was actually inspired by a force from a higher level, or understand how an idea comes from a place much more powerful than my usual intellectual wiseacrering. Yet this isn't quite enough, because to be exposed to things which arose because of such influences is different than coming under the influence itself. And I need to become open, to come under, such influences from within myself in order for any real action to take place.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is why Meister Eckhart says that <i>God must spur me to action from within</i>. There is a place within the soul, within the living and organic tissue and structure of a man's Being, that can receive material from God; that can receive an energy that will catalyze a transformation of the inner state. Even a very small amount of this can make a big difference in life; and yet it's so rare to encounter even a little of it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> The old masters knew that constant prayer was necessary. Not just prayer on my knees; prayer in supermarkets, prayer on highways, prayer in the gardens and prayer in the banks. And prayer cannot just be a repetition of prayer in me. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I need to begin to understand prayer as a living action that arises within each moment of life.</span><br />
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Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-57962730424159987782012-09-24T03:47:00.000-07:002012-09-24T03:52:13.734-07:00What is will?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Something comes in the darkness and opens.<br />
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It doesn't have a name; I've never seen it before – I will never see it, it can only be sensed and felt and touched. It isn't me; it isn't mine. Yet it is of inestimable glory, and it speaks — in its own voice — without any words, about the fundamental nature of things.<br />
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I wake up very early this morning. This question, this experience, on my mind and in my body, as it always is when these things happen.<br />
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What is Will? Why should we develop it? Whose will are we concerned with? These are the questions that concern me this morning.<br />
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Yogis talk about developing Will — The whole practice of Hatha yoga is, in fact, about this. In this question, there is a presumption of power — that somehow, if I have real Will, I will have power.<br />
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But what kind of power? And power for what?<br />
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Is it power to get to God, to attain the gates of Heaven? Do I have that power? Could I have such power at all?<br />
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Every conception I have of Will is my own conception. If I imagine myself having Will, it is my own Will. It belongs to me. I imagine I will do something with it — attain that enlightenment I want, or some such thing.<br />
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Yet everything in me that is attached to this is part of the problem. All of my will comes from this level; all of it belongs to this level. And if there is any Will at all that needs to be expressed or obtained, it is the influence of a Will from a higher level. Nothing could be more explicit than Christ's words: "<i>Thy will be done</i>." And yet this is exactly what I don't actually want, and don't understand. Do I see how everything I do is driven by my own will? I don't understand this. Even my wish to surrender to a higher influence comes from my own will.<br />
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Only when something other than my own Will arrives do I begin to understand how inadequate I am.<br />
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The expression of a different Will from a higher level comes in the darkness and opens. It doesn't have a name; yet, when I encounter it, I am of this level, and I name it. I am a man with a charcoal pencil drawing a tiny sketch of something enormous, equipped with rudimentary tools that can say very little. But I do try, and so I name it.<br />
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It is Authority; and it does not belong to me.<br />
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It has nothing to do with me. It arrives as a gift and forms something new in me; yet even that still isn't mine. It is precious, and it seems eternal; at any rate, it does to me, with what little I know of eternity, just a concept I have formed in my mind. It comes from everywhere; it touches everything. It has a comprehension, and a quieting stillness, which exceeds anything I can ever know.<br />
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This Authority is original. It arrives clothed in Grace; it has qualities I strive for, but never seem to reach, because they cannot belong to me. Again, the dilemma of Will; everything I presume to have or be able to have, I think I can get for myself.<br />
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Yet the only truly precious thing is this Authority, not my own authority; and I can't invoke it. Either it comes, or it doesn't; either way, it moves according to its own Will, not mine.<br />
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Moments like this leave me with the impression that I don't understand much of anything about this question. I use the word Will as though I understand what it is, what I am asking for, what I can get or what I can do with it.<br />
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Yet when anything that touches this question of real Will arrives, I see that my own meanings are empty.<br />
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Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-61489870540055143902012-09-22T11:14:00.000-07:002012-09-24T02:38:11.518-07:00Tantric Practice <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We hear a good deal, in the West today, about Tantric practice from people involved in Buddhist or Yoga disciplines. The word itself, like the word <i>kundalini</i>, has interesting implications.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">While Sanskrit words frequently have multiple meanings, the following meetings are germane to the question of practice:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="line-height: 20px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><i>Kunda</i> (</span></span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px; text-align: -webkit-left;">कुण्ड) means vessel. <i>Kundalini</i> means circular, or coiled. The relationship is clear enough; before the invention of the potter's wheel, <a href="http://www.doremishock.com/documents/handbuiltjar.htm">most pottery was coil built</a>. (click on the link to see a fine example.) Ancient craftsmen could make very nearly perfectly round vessels using this "primitive" method.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><i>Tantra</i> <span style="background-color: white;">(<span style="line-height: 20px; text-align: -webkit-left;">तन्त्र) means <i>loom</i> in sanskrit. Weaving is one of mankind's most ancient crafts; we now know that it appears to been practiced even, perhaps, in the neolithic. (The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom">Jacquard loom</a>, incidentally, was the world's first automated computing device, and originally introduced the use of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punchcards">punchcards</a>, a technology that drove computing from its inception in the middle of the 20th century.)</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px; text-align: -webkit-left;"> Together, these simple words inform us regarding the nature of practice. Both relate to ancient crafts, some of the earliest creative actions in man's universe. They are not only creative; they are practical. We need vessels to hold water; we need clothes to cover us. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px; text-align: -webkit-left;">So the idea of practice that is related to vessels and fabrics indicates a basic need, something that is fundamental to the enterprise of living. These are painstaking acts of assembly, with many stages, that take a great attention to detail and an understanding of the materials. If that sounds familiar, it should be. All religious practice displays these features. Some call religious practice an art; others claim it's a science. In the end, though, it combines both features. It is above all a creative craft, essential to life.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px; text-align: -webkit-left;"> In both ceramic coil building and loom weaving, separate elements are "spun" (figuratively, in the case of clay, which is actually rolled, and literally, in the case of fibers) into strands which are then interlaced together to produce a whole entity. So the idea of practice is the crafting and interlacing of many different related elements to create a whole vessel, or whole piece of fabric. The pieces used to assemble the pot or the piece of cloth only make sense in relationship to one another, and it is only through their interaction and cooperation that anything useful arises.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px; text-align: -webkit-left;">We are vessels into which the world flows; all of our impressions flow into us and gradually fill us over the course of a lifetime. So the idea of understanding ourselves as vessels is perhaps even more fundamental to the idea of kundalini yoga than the more colorful ideas about serpents or snakes. In yoga, man is seen as a <i>receiver </i> of sacred energies; we need to be intact, untouched, and whole in order to receive our lives. A vessel with a crack in it is unusable; and the potter needs to craft a symmetrical, harmonious, appropriate vessel of the right size, then fire it—an alchemical action that fuses the inner elements together. The analogy to inner work is apparent.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; text-align: -webkit-left;"><span style="line-height: 20px;"> The idea of weaving is an equally compelling analogy. The transmission of the robe, or </span></span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasaya_(clothing)" style="line-height: 20px;">Kasaya</a><span style="line-height: 20px;">, is a long-standing symbol of passing the authority from generation to generation in Zen. (Interested readers should refer to Dogen's </span><i style="line-height: 20px;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shobogenzo">Shobogenzo</a></i><span style="line-height: 20px;">, Chapter 13, Den-e, for a detailed account of this tradition.) And we find the tradition of specific vestments common to almost every religious practice, because practice is, above all, something we inhabit; a life discipline we craft and wear. Fabric is, in fact, more commonly used than any other material product in signifying value: flags, banners, and clothing itself are all used to express meaning within religious, cultural, and social contexts. Human beings, in other words, instinctively understand fabric as a signifier of identity.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px; text-align: -webkit-left;"> Tantric practice, in its current form, is understood to mean adherence to doctrine of the tantras, that is to say, conforming to that which has been woven together.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px; text-align: -webkit-left;"> We take vessels such as glasses, pots and pans, etc, and the clothes we wear, for granted these days, because it's very easy to get them. We forget that in ancient times, the practices connected with manufacturing these things were intimate and personal, just as the practice of inner work is intimate and personal. They were also intensely demanding; no one who has spun yarn, woven cloth, or made pottery will underestimate the sheer intensity of effort required to reach any result in these crafts.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px; text-align: -webkit-left;"> So <i>tantra </i>and <i>kundalini</i>, words we have heard many times, ultimately reveal a long-standing connection between craftsmanship and religious practice that reaches back into the dawn of time. They are not just part of a heritage of religious practice; they are part of a heritage and tradition of craftsmanship, of attention, of effort. They represent the roots of our humanity itself.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px; text-align: -webkit-left;"> Our ancestors were craftsmen. They were worshipers. And they were human beings. They understood all three of these aspects of their Being.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 20px; text-align: -webkit-left;">It's worth thinking about, the next time we pull on our jeans, or drink a glass of water.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px; text-align: -webkit-left;"><br /></span></span>Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-752247714666212162012-09-20T15:19:00.003-07:002012-09-20T15:29:57.596-07:00Accepting all things through Christ<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This morning, as I was sitting and engaging in my morning meditation and prayer, the phrase <i>accept all things through Christ</i> came to me spontaneously... emerging within me unexpectedly, as though it were a breeze that had blown up out of nowhere, and touched the tops of the reeds in the salt marsh on the river.<br />
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It brushed me; it touched me. I'm not quite sure what it meant; then again, these days, I'm not quite sure what anything means, and I'm inclined to take things as they come, without asking as many questions as I used to.<br />
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Or, perhaps, what I mean is, not assigning as many interpretations as I used to. The questions may still be there; after all, I don't know anything about what happens. But maybe there is less of an urgency in me about that now; even the act of questioning does not seem as important as being present to what comes. It could be that what comes will be a question; I'm a curious type, after all, constantly inquisitive. But maybe it won't be a question. Maybe it will just be a state of receptivity, where there is a certain kind of clarity that penetrates through the fog of my daily abstractions.<br />
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Accept all things through Christ.<br />
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What does that mean? Something is trying to reach me. A force I don't know about or understand is attempting to inform me; and I resist. The resistance is my own; it's what I am. I am as I am, and that is what resists. Yet there is this possibility of understanding life through a force other than myself. And perhaps this idea of accepting all things through Christ is of that order.<br />
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Yet it's not an act of psychology or a theory; to me, today, it is an intimate touch that reaches down into the depths of the organism, a gentle reminder of the fact that I am alive, and at the same time a definite sensation of how absolutely vital that aliveness is. Such a sensation, perhaps, as I have never had; and maybe every sensation is like that, new, completely different. Maybe that's what being touched by Christ is like; having Him with me.<br />
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I don't know.<br />
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One thing seems certain to me today. Christ is not about something that took place 2000 years ago; it is about something that takes place now. It is today. I have the opportunity to live the day through a different quality of attention and a different kind of energy than I usually do. I could make that the center of my day; I could put aside my objections, my quibbles, my petty arguments about how things should be this or that or the other way. I could just encounter and accept. Even now, that's a possibility. If I walk away from it, it's my own fault, and no one else's, because the intimacy of life calls to me from here, and from now.<br />
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As I said — I'm not sure what this means.<br />
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I just thought I'd pass it on to you; because I feel so distinctly that the return of Christ is not far away. Every white cloud in the blue sky seems to announce this; every bird sings it; every bee carries it on its wings, and it rests in spiderwebs, busy picking out concentric rings of daylight.<br />
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<br />Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-14904213703584956942012-09-17T12:04:00.000-07:002012-09-17T16:07:52.903-07:00All Things are Blessed in the Lord<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
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<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All things are Blessed in the Lord. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A man can sense this through Grace. But there is no other way to
sense it, try though he may, under his own agency.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For the blessing of the Lord is a living thing, and not
something that stands still and waits for us. It is always in movement, and it
only moves into us to the extent that we move into it with open arms. If we try
to stay where we are and wait for Grace to come to us, it will never find us.
We must rather go out into the world, taking every chance, and risking
everything, in the hopes that we will encounter it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It falls into us like the shadows of fences on sidewalks; green leaves,
and the sun on an old building. It is, in other words, what we already know,
what we have always known — and yet it is also the unknown, because the parts
of us that know it are the parts of ourselves that we don’t know. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And what part of ourselves is it, which we don't know? It’s the
part that is God. We all have that part — because we cannot be separated from
God in reality, although we live in our imagination, where we are always
separate from God. We think that by imagining — by creating an image that we
believe in — that we are with God, but God is beyond images, and only insofar
as we are beyond images are we with God.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Lord’s wish for goodness is inside every action, even if the
action itself does not appear to have goodness in it. This is a mystery; and it
is only manifest in accordance with the energy a man receives from Grace, whether or not
he can understand this. For surely terrible things will happen; and only
through Grace can any of it be understood.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The irony of it is that if Grace were in action in man, no
terrible things would happen, except the terrible things that happen by
themselves, of nature, and not in man. And even those would be tolerable under
such circumstances. But most men know nothing of Grace and don't believe in Grace,
in fact, Grace has never touched them directly. So one lacks trust; and without
trust, how can Grace enter anything? It’s like expecting a man to be able to
enter a woman, if the woman does not trust him. We are all women; and God can’t
enter us if we do not trust God. Not because God is unable; God can do all
things. He could enter us as He wished, if He were that way, if He used his Wrath
or Force rather than His Mercy to be in relationship with us. But He will not
do that; and so a man or woman must become the bride, waiting for the bridegroom.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Yet one doesn't want to wait for anyone, even God, because one is selfish
and in a hurry.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So one rushes past God and all the good things God gives. And
what good does that do one? One has worldly things, and all the things that
belong to the earth, but one does not have God, and so everything that belongs
to the earth is worthless. Found in God and through God, the earth is the
greatest of treasures; without God, it is hell. And mankind has proved this
over and over again throughout history, because he goes on creating hell over
and over again.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hell is a complicated place, and full of many problems. Heaven
is unutterably simple, and it finds its rest in every ray of light. It's in the
call of small birds, and the crispness of leaves on the ground; it is in worn
stones and the sharp breath of tired dogs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">All of this is given to man, if he wants it. And these things
could come in any moment, and do come in every moment; and they could be with
us always—but not only in one way; in a thousand different ways that change as often
as the moment changes. For such is Grace. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And we must open our hearts to feel it in every moment, for such
is God, that He wants to be with us in every moment. And if we want to be with Him
in any moment or every moment, He will allow it, but only as much as we allow
it ourselves.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #1a1a1a;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So one ought not look for Grace where one expects to find it, or
expect Grace to find one as one expects it to be. It comes as a strange thing
filled with Love, which one has never known before. It holds nothing back; one expects
things to have a beginning and an end, but Grace has no beginning and has no
end, and so it is nothing like one is, or what one expects.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-78292927311763967882012-09-11T04:18:00.004-07:002012-09-12T03:40:28.212-07:00Chinese Medicine <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjYeI4Jro5oSMV3n-mXTsp9vxeCmXOdYCHJcnufmWLcUCv9TEehItVnNooq88BH384Myo1JJF9sdrJ0yGcF806inceP8Gc3QIjgbKnX4VEfAEGZ4jfkt2Urv-vfWHPJmYiFVP-xl3hr5y5/s1600/CIMG0502.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjYeI4Jro5oSMV3n-mXTsp9vxeCmXOdYCHJcnufmWLcUCv9TEehItVnNooq88BH384Myo1JJF9sdrJ0yGcF806inceP8Gc3QIjgbKnX4VEfAEGZ4jfkt2Urv-vfWHPJmYiFVP-xl3hr5y5/s400/CIMG0502.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
Some of the people I know are interested in Chinese medicine. They thrive on alternative medicine practices, and traditional Chinese medicine—with its thousands of years of history—holds a great attraction. The belief, I think, begins with the idea that anything herbal has to be more “natural” and hence better for you. The fact that many herbs are poisonous or even deadly is edited out of this picture up front.<br />
<br />
I spend a lot of time in China, and I happen to know that the average Chinese person would definitely rather have Western medicine than Chinese medicine. They consider it more effective. They commonly express concern that because traditional Chinese medicine isn't that effective, the Chinese medicine industry illegally spikes many different herbal concoctions with antibiotics and other Western medicines, so that they will work better. My Chinese friends claim that it's a shooting gallery taking the stuff; in many cases you don't know exactly what you're getting. I've actually even been warned by some of them <i>not</i> to use it. "Better go see a regular western-style doctor," they say to me when I need medical care in Shanghai, gently amused by American interest in what they consider to be outdated folk practices.<br />
<br />
Furthermore, as you can see from the picture above (taken in a major Shanghai hospital in the herbal department) Chinese medicine is a mass-market business. The herbs are not gathered by stooped-over little old men and women in pastoral environments; they are grown in huge amounts on large commercial farms, and shipped to hospitals just like any other factory-farmed product.<br />
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It's very possible, knowing China, that pesticides are used on these herbs while they are being grown. The country has been wracked by one contaminated-food scandal after another over the last 2 years, and pesticide use is definitely under less control than in Western agriculture... which ought to frighten just about everyone.<br />
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No one tells Americans who take Chinese medicine about that.<br />
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That's not to knock Chinese medicine. For people who want to take it, it seems fine to me, presuming you're okay with the risks. Furthermore, some of my very best friends are adept practitioners of <a href="http://integratedmedphiladelphia.blogspot.com/">alternative medicine</a>, and I fully support them. We have room for both practices, I think, and the emotive value alone of such therapies is not to be dismissed, under any circumstances.<br />
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What interests me about all of this is that to many Americans, the other's tradition often seems better than our own; yet we rarely pause to think that it might work the other way around as well.<br />
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To the Chinese, Western science is not just a tradition; it's a cultural practice they would like to adopt, and are doing so to great effect. Chinese people are eager to educate themselves and avail themselves of modern technology. They are producing some of the most advanced science—including medical science—in the world. They don't have inhibitions about it produced by religious fundamentalists, as a significant portion of America does. This is one of the reasons Asian cultures represent the future of scientific and medical innovation. They believe in evolution—and in science.<br />
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In the meantime, westerners enthusiastically embrace their medical folk traditions, all of which date from an era where the average lifespan was— objectively—less than half of what it is today. No one has been able to explain to me why modern Western medicine, which is what achieved the doubling of the human lifespan, gets a bad reputation in some alternative communities, any more than they have been able to explain why all the food we are eating is so terrible, while we live twice as long as people did several hundred years ago, when everything was indisputably organic, and all the medicines were herbal.<br />
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Why are we so attracted to traditions different than our own, and so determined to see them as more valid? And why is the old always better than the new, when it comes to these things?<br />
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Worldwide, there's a longstanding cultural myth—yes, a tradition—in which human societies engage in conspiracy theories, firmly believing that their own culture is scamming them in one way or another. Our own governments, political systems, corporations, churches, priests, lawyers, doctors, and so on, are all secretly out to get us. "They" are hiding the truth. I've heard this so often over the years I'm tired of it. One would think, in America, that the majority of the population is engaged in evil, nefarious plots to take us down. In such minds, even the horrific events of 9/11 morph into a U.S. government plot.<br />
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Among some people I know, common Christianity takes a bad rap, and is treated with thinly veiled contempt; yet popular Buddhism somehow comes off with a clean bill of health, ignoring the fact that the deeply Buddhist culture of Japan produced individuals who committed some of the most awful atrocities of the Second World War. (Ask the Chinese about that sometime.) It doesn't quite add up, does it?<br />
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We have a rejecting attitude towards ourselves. This isn't just a part of our culture; it comes from our own inner lives. Rejection begins at home.<br />
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A view of our own culture, our own medicine, or our own science as deficient and out to deceive us exhibits a kind of paranoia, I think, that doesn't serve us well. It's certainly possible for us to more actively acknowledge the value in our own traditions, as well as those of others.<br />
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One of my friends got Lyme disease last year. An ardent naturalist, they tried to treat it homeopathically, right up until severe neurological symptoms began to turn up. At last, they agreed to take an aggressive course of antibiotics—which stopped the disease. Another course of action could've ended up ruining their life, and perhaps even taking it.<br />
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I think it underscores the fact that there are limits to our ideals which we need to recognize, in any practical world, and deal with.<br />
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<br />Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-81205405862522009602012-09-09T04:41:00.003-07:002012-09-09T09:26:35.906-07:00 Many People, Many Dogs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLSQriFK26wtBko-UrxUKLNJ2Ubw-HakSWPRIHa4coUsq9s5RL7YYu8OpNnH8SyTcDBautTUBVlTfuOeAqaYDFXo4ucdsAxcQlchdWO12Ztp8F_tYM04WOeppSr4_IgpIJLDXyhNLQix_e/s1600/GZ4C7602.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLSQriFK26wtBko-UrxUKLNJ2Ubw-HakSWPRIHa4coUsq9s5RL7YYu8OpNnH8SyTcDBautTUBVlTfuOeAqaYDFXo4ucdsAxcQlchdWO12Ztp8F_tYM04WOeppSr4_IgpIJLDXyhNLQix_e/s320/GZ4C7602.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
This is a picture taken from the banks of the <a href="http://www.hudsonriverdiaries.com/">Hudson River</a> early one morning in August of this year.<br />
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I walk my dog <a href="http://www.nefersweetie.com/isabel.html">Isabel</a> along this section of the river every day. I've been doing this for years; it's a routine. Lately Isabel has been getting older, and the walk—over 2 miles, and up a very steep hill to the top of the Palisades—is more difficult for her. It reminds me that no situation is permanent, despite the tradition and ritual that accompanies it. I believe in this person, and this dog—but there are many people, and many dogs. We won't last, but the dogs and the people will.<br />
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A good deal of the best poetry I've produced over the last three years materializes on these walks. Perhaps it seems a bit ridiculous to believe that doing the same thing over and over can bring anything new... but it can, can't it? Doing the same thing over and over isn't doing the same thing over and over; everything is constantly new.<br />
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This isn't to say that repetitious behavior is of necessity creative. Yet the age-old adage that insanity is the definition of expecting to do the same old thing and expecting new results is obviously false. It's not doing the same old thing that is a problem; it's my idea that what I am doing is the same old thing.<br />
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So it isn't the action, but the attitude; the action isn't one person and one dog. It's the attitude that's one person and one dog. In reality, every moment, there's a new person and a new dog; I ought to have some respect for that. But instead my attitude is nonchalant, dismissive: here I am. It's the same old me. And the same old dog.<br />
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Somehow, the creative energy that flows in this (for me) ritualistic tradition of the walk along the river transcends the same old me and the same old dog. There are moments when I see that nothing is the same, and nothing is old. The idea that things are the same is just an idea; the idea that things are old is just an idea.<br />
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Nothing is the same, and nothing is old.<br />
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Everything is right now, and it's just exactly where it is.<br />
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Moments like this go into the body like an electric shock. Not a violent one, that produces anguish and dismay; rather, an enlivening vibration, an unexpected sensitivity.<br />
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I see that there are rivers, and there are dogs. I'm here to see that. And there is something extraordinary about that moment, because rivers are not rivers, and dogs are not dogs. Even I myself am not myself. Something much bigger than all of this is going on.<br />
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What is it?<br />
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There's an emptiness in that question. There's a search going on; and when a poem arrives, it's only real if it <i>doesn't</i> contain what it alludes to—that's the essence, after all, of allusion. It can't mention, allegorically speaking, a dog and a person—but it has to leave plenty of room for many people and many dogs to walk around in it. This, I think, is the danger realized in a great deal of poetry; I put things into it, whereas what I ought to be doing is taking things <i>out</i> of it.<br />
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There is always something new on my walks; but it's only when I take myself out of it, when I am no longer myself, that there is something new there. So when I stick this thing called me into life, I can't see life. I only see me, seeing life. I don't see the dog: I see me seeing the dog. It's a koan; every walk is exactly the same unanswerable question.<br />
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I remember living on the banks of the Elbe River in Hamburg, Germany when I was a child. The Elbe and the Hudson are remarkably alike; the side of the river I lived on (near <a href="http://www.thecitytraveler.com/2010/02/hamburg-scaling-the-heights-in-blankenese/">Blankenese</a>) had a high embankment, like the Hudson, and the river was broad and wide at that point.<br />
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We'd drive along the river almost every day on our way somewhere or other my mother, my <a href="http://www.nefersweetie.com/sarahhansen.htm">sister Sarah</a> and I; and my mother would often remark to us in wonder that the river never looked the same way twice in a row.<br />
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There was something absolutely magical about its ability to transform itself, even in the midst of the mundane.<br />
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Rivers do that.<br />
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Maybe people can do that, too.<br />
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<br />Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-44544046472062659392012-09-08T06:48:00.000-07:002012-09-09T06:53:38.569-07:00Water<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I don't always think of it this way, but clouds are water, too.<br />
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A great deal of what I encounter is water. All of biological life is organized around it; trees, plants, animals, people—everything is mostly water.<br />
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I got to thinking about this after <a href="http://doremishock.blogspot.com/2012/09/wall-wharf.html">my last somewhat grim post</a>, and then running into this <a href="http://www.doremishock.com/articles/drought.pdf">article on the shortage of water around the planet</a>. An irony on a planet whose surface is rich in water, and where more and more ice is melting.<br />
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I don't really understand water. I depend on it, utterly, and yet it's more or less taken for granted. People in societies where you can get water don't spend a lot of time worrying about it. The idea that there are places and even whole populations in drought conditions who are desperate for it, or poisoned by it because of pollution or contamination, is remote. And water is a chemical, a substance: something clinical, a matter for public utilities, engineers, and scientists to manage. Who wants to think about it? I just want to turn on my faucet and have it.<br />
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...But I don't always think about it this way, either.<br />
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This morning, I stand in the shower under a stream of clean, warm water, because I'm one of those individuals—there are few of us, measured in percentages—fortunate enough to live in a place where this is possible. There is no stall, no modern sliding doors; our bathtub is charmingly outdated. It's a claw-footed, enameled iron dinosaur dating from the early part of the 20th century, with a rounded bottom that makes it increasingly difficult for me to keep my balance as I grow older.<br />
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Less charming, that. We are not completely at peace with one another, I admit, but I <a href="http://doremishock.blogspot.com/2012/09/veneration.html">venerate</a> it because of its retro nature. And in the oblong cocoon of the shower curtains, every morning, the whole world shrinks down to a single moment.<br />
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The situation is mundane and ordinary enough. Yet suddenly I see where I am; I spontaneously assume a position of prayer, hands one on top of another, held out under the water, my head tilted slightly upward.<br />
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I'm receiving a special form of grace. My body welcomes the water, and there is nothing but gratitude in me for being in relationship with it. <br />
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This could be the best moment of the day. Of any day.<br />
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This is life. I am in it.<br />
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This simple moment, taken in as a deeper kind of impression, is a sacred event. Every encounter I have with water is, ultimately, a sacred event. Yet it's hard to remember that if what I'm doing is washing the dishes, spraying the car down with the hose, or getting that horrid skunk smell off the <a href="http://www.nefersweetie.com/isabel.html">famous dog Isabel</a>.<br />
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Yet I remember countless moments when water is glorious, and there are many of them.<br />
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Every thunderstorm I've ever seen.<br />
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A moment when I was 14 years old, watching waves rolling in off the coast of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algarve">Algarve</a>, the sun gleaming off them like it held the secret of life— and in that moment, for me, I think it did.<br />
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<a href="http://www.doremishock.com/enneagrams/rainbow.htm">Rainbows soaring up over the George Washington Bridge</a> like all the hope in the world was pouring down onto Manhattan at once. <br />
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The moment of the full moon in September when <a href="http://www.doremishock.com/enneagrams/snappingturtle.htm">baby snapping turtles</a>, sensing the rain, break through the shell of their eggs with their egg tooth and dash madly towards the <a href="http://www.doremishock.com/enneagrams/sparkill.htm">Sparkill creek</a>.<br />
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When I look back, the majority of my life has been spent in a deep, yet largely unrecognized, relationship with water in its countless iterations.<br />
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Thinking of water in technical terms is necessary, because I have to be practical about conserving it and using it. Or at least, I ought to be. The fact is that my failure to remember this substance is sacred, a precious thing, causes me to be cavalier about it.<br />
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The forecast is for rain tonight. From the moment when the first drop falls, to the moment when the last drop falls, all of it might be a reminder that I'm not in control of things—<br />
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Just in relationship with them.<br />
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It's a thought to carry forward with me.<br />
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<br />Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-9006986040718621762012-09-07T03:39:00.003-07:002012-09-07T06:46:50.973-07:00Wall Wharf<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQnXGz_X0l79Ub4cLx4kQ-UItd9nTjVQlySYROyBe9rORN64C9sgzoYRmm0AhnM8sfJRZT2vfuQk6tIssKodIU6vScgor0FSTG3u7zorNgbvjDZDSIb5EZ69G8dfQ0xSxGzIsjfufoSnqA/s1600/IMG_8229.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQnXGz_X0l79Ub4cLx4kQ-UItd9nTjVQlySYROyBe9rORN64C9sgzoYRmm0AhnM8sfJRZT2vfuQk6tIssKodIU6vScgor0FSTG3u7zorNgbvjDZDSIb5EZ69G8dfQ0xSxGzIsjfufoSnqA/s400/IMG_8229.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">We ignore science at our peril.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Somewhere on the order of 30 years ago, as I recall, a study of ocean floor cores and the glacial till from icebergs in the northern Atlantic revealed that glaciers can melt very, very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that some researchers involved in the project felt the pulses of melting that produced the debris on the ocean floor must have taken place in a matter of decades, where huge ice sheets simply disappeared. At the time, some researchers who heard about their hypothesis were incredulous.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Less so now.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">It's not unreasonable to presume that <a href="http://www.doremishock.com/articles/icemelt.pdf">a tipping point of the kind we are at</a> could produce a situation where the oceans don't rise a few feet per century, but a few feet per year. The total amount of additional solar energy being absorbed by the water in the northern part of the planet as a result of ice loss—something that is now actually taking place, regardless of what one wants to argue the reason is— is simply enormous, so large that it probably can't be calculated with any ease. One thing is certain: the more ice that melts, the more ice can melt. Perhaps we should call it the un-snowball effect.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Anyone who presumes that we are going to be looking at business as usual in weather and ocean levels going forward is simply naïve. Things are already changing in a very big way, and much faster than anyone- even the worst pessimists- thought they would or could. And no one can deny that <a href="http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/Courses/6140/ency/Chapter10/Ency_Oceans/Sea_Level_Variations.pdf">ocean levels</a> have, at times in the geologic past, been much, much higher than they are today. The evidence is incontrovertible. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">It's highly unlikely, in my opinion, that any change in human carbon emissions will have an affect on this trend. Such a change, first of all, seems basically unimaginable at present, and in the second place, the current warming trend is already well-established, and will probably take some centuries to reverse.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The question is what mankind is going to do about large portions of its current coastlines disappearing under 10, 20, or even 50 or 100 feet of water. This coastline currently contains a great deal of the most valuable real estate on earth, and represents a net loss of hundreds of trillions of dollars to economies and nations.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Every problem this change creates will be a huge economic problem, as well as a social and political problem. Yet not a single world leader talks seriously about it.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">I guess we will get to see what Wall Street thinks of it once the water starts lapping at the feet of the buildings in lower Manhattan. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Maybe we'll rename it Wall Wharf.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span>Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-31485135689169012602012-09-02T00:00:00.000-07:002012-09-02T00:00:05.112-07:00Veneration<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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To <a href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/venerate">venerate</a> is to regard with great respect; to adore, to revere.<br />
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Humanity collectively venerates its great traditions. This is the reasoning of tradition: it has inherent value, it transmits important ideas from one generation to the next. This is what makes it worth venerating. Mankind has any number of spiritual traditions; over the course of thousands of years, many have sprouted, flowered, withered, and died. Many have set seed. It's easy to forget this, unless one is standing in the ruins of an ancient temple somewhere, which might be a temple from a completely forgotten religion, such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe">Göbekli Tepe</a> in Turkey—a temple so old we know absolutely nothing of the people who built it, or how they worshipped. Yet it's certain that in the end, they were people much like us, with the same loves and fears; and some tangible vestige of their practice undoubtedly resides in today's religions.<br />
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Aside from what are ultimately a handful of obscure shamanistic practices still in the hands of what remains of tribal peoples around the world—an objectively dwindling population—there are only a few Great Traditions extant on the planet right now, yet almost all of them undoubtedly spring from these much earlier, and to some extent unknown, roots, which reach all the way back into the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic">Paleolithic</a>: Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and their satellite practices.<br />
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All of these traditions are venerated; all of them come into relationship together in our time, beginning in individual men, and then in cultures. They've been the cause of great wars; they have also been the cause of some of the greatest human achievements in philosophy, art, and music. Like all human things on the planet, their influences are polarized, and they create friction as well as harmony. Yet our traditions are venerated by everyone except atheists—and the atheists are few, no matter how shrill their tiny voices may seem in modern Western societies.<br />
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Strangely, it's veneration itself that creates the friction. For some unexplained reason, men who venerate one thing will sometimes hate the other; they are often unable to see that the other is exactly like they are. Hence the fear and loathing many fundamentalist Jews, Christians, and Muslims have for one another. They all belong to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions">Abrahamic religions</a>; their root traditions are identical (all originally derive from the Old Testament); and each one shares a deeply conservative view of society, with remarkably similar values, which they intensely insist are radically different from one another.<br />
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All of this contradictory behavior springs from an inherent wish for the good. So it's the veneration—the deep respect, the adoration—of these valued traditions that are transmitted that actually causes conflicts the traditions advise should not take place.<br />
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This does not make veneration bad. Veneration in itself is a right thing. But in venerating the past, venerating the tradition, perhaps men forget that their traditions must be alive <i>today</i>. They must not just be alive today; they must be alive immediately, that is, <i>right now</i>.<br />
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If my religious practice, my tradition, says that I must not harm my fellow man, and I wish to venerate it, I can't make up exceptions to that rule. <i>Right now</i>, I must not harm my fellow man. <i>Right now</i>, I must have the most compassionate attitude I can. <i>Right now</i>, I must show mercy to my enemies. And I forget that.<br />
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For some strange reason, the idea that tradition takes place <i>right now</i> doesn't seem to quite make sense to us. Tradition is in the past, somehow—it's what already took place, not what is taking place. Isn't that what the word <i>means</i>? But tradition is actually forming itself in this instant, and it is always forming itself. It's not some dead thing that already took place—and it can't be frozen into ice cubes and dispensed in cocktails later, when we finally decide that it's a good thing and should be used.<br />
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So spiritual traditions have to meet <i>now</i>, in the hearts and minds of men and women. Men and women can only venerate and honor their traditions by affirming them <i>now</i>.<br />
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It seems to me that all of the Great Traditions share a number of Great Principles, which are supposedly inviolable: Love. Compassion. Mercy. These principles are supposed to overshadow, to stand above, and to inform every other action. No matter what exception a man wants to graft on to them, they are supposedly superior to it.<br />
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To be sure, the complexities of the world make it difficult to remember this. But every Great Tradition, is, in the end, an <i>inner tradition</i> practiced by a man or a woman. So veneration begins with an inner action.<br />
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And every Great Tradition meets in any instance when men and women, even two of them, meet together. You may be reminded of what Christ said:<br />
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<i>For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them. (</i>Matthew 18:20.)<br />
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The words may come from Jesus, but they belong to every tradition.Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-69504989609170930192012-08-31T07:30:00.001-07:002012-08-31T09:11:53.592-07:00The Known<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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...You knew I was going to follow up the last post with this one, didn't you?<br />
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There is a general belief that I know things. I know this, I know that. I know what I am doing today, I know how people ought to behave, I know what ought to be done to fix the mess this country is in, and so on.<br />
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The difficulty with the known is that it all relies on associations. Knowing is a subjective assignment of relativity. Given the astronomically high number of associations even a single human being can generate (after all, our neural network creates trillions of electrical signals in relationship to one another every second) I have to confess that things in me could be quite different. I can know things one way, or I can know them another way. Knowing changes. It changes, in fact, according to the moment that is known.<br />
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When one states this in such a way, it seems so obvious as to eclipse the fact that I more or less insist that my knowing is a static thing. Like everyone else I know, I believe that my knowing is fixed, intelligent, and applicable under a wide range of circumstances. It isn't. No matter how much knowing I do, it applies to a very narrow range of experience within a very brief lifetime. Every human being is stuck in the middle of this dilemma, believing that their own knowing is somehow universal; that it applies to everything, when in fact the opposite is true. We are all, in the end, idiots, in the sense of the original Greek root <i>idios</i>, meaning, private—that is, something belonging only to that particular individual, and no one else... ahem... you suspected that already anyway, didn't you?<br />
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Knowing, in other words, as I know it, is the collapse of an infinite number of probabilities and actualities into a tiny black hole (me) where they circle around, trying to draw more material into their gravity pool. The ego is what forms this black hole—light goes in, but it doesn't come out, and the ego is constantly spinning at a very rapid rate, attempting to suck everything of the world it can into itself so that it can grow.<br />
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The analogy may be colorful, but our hunger for knowledge is legion. Yesterday, while perusing material in preparation for the upcoming issue of <a href="http://www.parabola.org/">Parabola</a> on Science and Spirit, I (inevitably) came across <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/779">Christopher Marlowe's <i>Faustus</i></a>, a classic story where a man's (idiot's) lust for knowledge leads to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_in_Christian_beliefs">perdition</a>.<br />
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The story seems to be about someone else, but in a certain sense, it's about all of us. It may well be that the story's excessive reliance on images of hell and heaven, consequent to the fact that it is firmly placed in a Christian universe, are wholly inadequate to the present day, but the message is universal. I want to know everything; and primarily, I want this because I want power—I want to feed my ego. It's a matter of wanting to be superior not only to others, but to the world itself... ah, yes, and then comes the noble wish for repentance. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_shirt">Cilices</a> don't necessarily rid people of this impulse, although I hear they certainly create a lot of itching.<br />
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There are any number of religious practices and cosmologies which see man as a miniature model of the cosmos. Assuming we sign on to this idea, it's not surprising to find that there is a black hole at the center of us driving the galaxy we live in... it's absolutely consistent. And perhaps it's not surprising to see that it feeds on what we think we know— on information. (That, in point of fact, is exactly what black holes subsist on—information, in the form of organized matter.) Earth's surface, poor thing, is covered with 6 or more billion tiny little human vortexes, each one of which is sucking in all of the impressions it can of life, all of whom believe they know what is best. If one wrote up a plan on how to produce chaos, this one would work exceedingly well. And it does.<br />
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Nature has produced some societies that don't work in this way. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee">Beehives</a> are a great example. I'm a beekeeper, and I'm always amazed at the dedication of every individual bee to cooperation and the health of the community. How unlike us they are! No wonder they have been admired by philosophers, friars, and farmers alike for so many generations. (Funny how we never hear politicians mention them, isn't it?)<br />
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Bees know few things, but they put them to exceedingly intelligent use.<br />
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It's fair to say that human beings, with our much more complicated brains, are doomed, whether we like it or not, to know far more than bees. It suggests that I ought to put what I know to even better use than bees do, but I'm nowhere near as cooperative or a social as they are.<br />
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Why? If I know so much, how come mere insects do so much a better job of this than I do?<br />
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I wish I knew.<br />
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<br />Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-21788300597910791992012-08-30T12:01:00.001-07:002012-08-30T12:22:06.980-07:00The Unknown<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I was born in an age when calculations had to be done laboriously, with slide rules (which I enthusiastically hated); telephones had cords connected to them, and television was something special.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I will die in an age where calculations are almost all done by computers, and telephones and televisions fit into a wristwatch. Television is no longer special; now, it's utterly banal.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Yet everything in <i>nature</i> is essentially the same, except that there is less of it; more and more of the earth is paved over with cement and asphalt, and more and more species are disappearing. Nature does not know or care that this is happening; to nature, mankind's activity is the unknown, since the birds, plants, animals, and so on have little or no comprehension of what is being done to them, short of knowing that there are less meals, less mates, and less offspring. What is known to one side is unknown to another; and even unknowable, because we are the only species on the planet capable of understanding what we do.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This has not ever prevented us, so far as I can see, from doing anything, when mankind is taken as a whole. If the definition of vanity is doing whatsoever one wishes, without regard for the consequences, then we are certainly vain.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> In an outward lust for conquest—of nature and each other—the inward search gets left behind; yet this is where the deepest unknown lies. <i>Know thyself</i>, the adage says, and yet one pays no heed. The art of dropping off assumptions and arrogance is, to the worldly, a conceit. <i>Don't worry about such things</i>, they say; <i>simply acquire power, and exercise it</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This is how the world functions today. Not that we have any monopoly on it, mind you; a reading of <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html">Plato's <i>Apology</i>,</a> for example, will underscore the fact that it's been this way for a very long time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> But what <i>is</i> inside us? Our scientists want to re-create life in a laboratory, but life is not just a machine. Life is a process, a richness of experience, not just cellular mechanisms that can be reproduced by gluing strands of DNA together. The unknown emerges not within the context of the mechanical, but within the context of <i>Being</i>. And Being cannot be explained just by knowing how the machine works, or which switch to flip in order to turn it on or off.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> So, to me, <i>Being</i> is the unknown. Every philosophy and religion since ancient times has struggled with the effort to understand Being, because the existence of Being—the ability of consciousness to exist and comprehend anything—is the fundamental question of the universe. Why a universe should produce such a quality, a quality which seems, on the face of it, not only entirely unnecessary, but quite simply impossible—is unknown.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> Those deft with words can wrap us up in conundrums about the nature of Being—it's a bit of a sport for a certain class of inquisitive intellectuals, and I engage in it myself from time to time—but what really interests us, I think, is <i>how</i> to be. That is, how to be in this moment, how to be real. And that always involves an understanding about how to meet the unknown—because not only is our Being unknown, the moment itself, which encompasses Being and flows into it, is also unknown. As <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Kauffman">Stuart Kauffman</a> pointed out in his excellent book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reinventing-Sacred-Science-Reason-Religion/dp/0465018882/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346352509&sr=8-1&keywords=Reinventing+the+sacred">Reinventing the Sacred</a></i>, it doesn't matter whether we call ourselves scientists, Christians, Muslims, or philosophers—we all live our lives forward into mystery. And the point of intersection between all of these concepts, lifestyles, and disciplines lies at this unknown point of Being.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> To begin to investigate what it means to <i>Be</i>, to enter the unknown which Being emerges from, I have to be willing to surrender what I have. It sounds pretty easy; maybe I can shrug my shoulders, throw it away in a carefree manner, and just move forward joyfully into the present moment without any baggage. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heigh-Ho">Heigh ho, heigh ho</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But, hey, this baggage is very comforting... no one wants to trade a suitcase with warm slippers and an overcoat in it for the uncertainty of the elements! The bottom line is that I don't trust this idea of Being. The unknown is frightening; and to become <i>intimate</i> with it, which is what is necessary—that's even more frightening.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> It's odd, because the unknown embraces us as a lover in every moment, even if we reject its advances. We don't have a choice, really; we may not know the unknown, but it knows us intimately, and holds all of us—all of creation—in its hands.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> This isn't something to be figured out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It's a question to be experienced.</span><br />
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Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-64827331475451392912012-08-23T07:47:00.000-07:002012-08-23T10:26:27.945-07:00The Great UnravelingMeditating on the political landscape, I can't help but feel that we are witnessing a great unraveling of American society.<br />
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Reason has gone by the wayside. There is no moderation; every lie is attacked with a greater lie, and every liar adamantly refuses to admit they are lying. There is no middle ground; those who wish to occupy it are reviled by both the left and the right.<br />
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My own life is an example. Raised by staunchly Republican parents, I grew up with the understanding that you don't spend money you don't have; that you don't poke your noses into other people's private lives; and that you compassionately support others as best you are able. My parents—let me stress it again, firmly Republican and conservative—have insisted lifelong on the utmost respect and compassion for women, homosexuals, and minorities. Generally speaking, their conception of life is to see other people as human beings—not enemies.<br />
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Does that sound anything like the Republicans we know today? Probably not. Essentially, I still espouse these values. I'm not in favor of big government—I work in <i>two</i> industries (importation and medical products) which are consistently hampered by onerous regulations our Federal bureaucracy forces on them.<br />
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On the other hand, I'm a child of the 60s and 70s. (cue the Elvis Costello song, <i>What's</i> <i>so funny about peace, love, and understanding?) </i>I think we should help poor people.<i> </i>I think very rich people should pay, on<i> all</i> their income, at least as much in taxes, percentage-wise, as I do—not less than half my payroll tax rate. I think government-sponsored entitlement programs are reasonable, as long as they are competently managed. (Our political class seems pathologically incapable of competent management of anything, although all of them are elected to do just that.)<br />
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In essence, it turns out I am a moderate. I have a blended set of views that espouse both conservative and liberal principles. Yet when I point inconsistencies in their positions out to my conservative friends, they angrily accuse me of being a liberal—usually accompanying these accusations with personally denigrating remarks, indicating that I am some lower form of life. They routinely send me crude e-mails—which they think are funny—arrogantly asserting blatant untruths, announcing patently absurd conspiracy theories, and aggressively advocating non-Christian thinking and non-Christian principles. They claim that global warming is a scam, but not one of them has ever read any actual articles by scientists about the subject. (The fact that most Americans appear to think they can understand science without actually <i>studying</i> science is a bizarre, yet objective, fact. If we did the same thing with electricity, most of us would die while doing routine household repairs.)<br />
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My liberal friends are a little better, but not much. They, too, look at me sadly as though I was some kind of dirt-sucking slug when I point out that not every liberal position makes sense. They are universally opposed, for example, to every kind of practical energy production, even though all of them drive cars, use computers, and have air conditioning. When I try to explain to them how incredibly complex and expensive it is to put in and manage energy infrastructure, they insist on pretending that an imaginary world of solar and wind power is just around the corner for all of us—and, of course, that there is a <i>conspiracy</i> afoot in the energy industry to prevent this (yes, Liberals have their very own lunatic conspiracy theories, just like Conservatives.) They all want to eat boutique foods grown organically on local farms, as though everyone in the world had such luxuries available to them if they only wanted to do it that way. They oppose every genetically modified organism that comes along, even if, as in the case of cotton, the modification allows a drastic reduction in the use of pesticides—obviously a significant benefit.<br />
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All of the problems we have in front of us will take decades to correct, but we have equipped ourselves with a media—and a social attitude—that insists everything should be fixed right now, or, if not, in no more than five minutes. Five minutes or less, by my estimation, because that constitutes the attention span of the average American.<br />
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The collapse of a civil dialogue about these issues, and the collapse of any real effort to educate ourselves to understand how complex our problems are, signal the collapse of American society in general. Extremists on both sides are leading us towards a schism that will result in violence. It won't be a little bit of violence—there will be a lot of violence. One can't ratchet tension up to the levels we are seeing now—thanks to a national media that specializes in inducing either coma or inflammation, but nothing in between—without something breaking.<br />
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Our society, which was founded on ideas of tolerance and reason (that, at least, was was what the founding fathers professed belief in, although few Americans—including some of the founding fathers themselves—actually embraced those ideas, beginning with slavery and the extermination of Native Americans) can't survive this wave of intolerance and unreason. It's a tsunami sweeping through our social systems, our government, and our economy, and it will ultimately destroy everything in its path if we don't bring both the dialogue and the system of government back to middle ground.<br />
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Vast sums of money are being spent to elect government officials, but no one is spending money to elect people educated enough to understand the value of compromise.<br />
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One can be smart in every other area, and stupid in this one place, and cause all things to fail.<br />
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Looking around us in this election year, one might easily be excused from concluding that, if this is the best we have, we will fail. We don't have leadership—we have chaos and accusation. <br />
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These are not desirable qualities in a nation whose population is armed to the teeth with guns, and breeding an underclass of radicals who are already convinced they will have to use them.<br />
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When will we see a national movement to take back not the right, or the left, but the middle?<br />
<br />Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587719079579349761.post-67513749934183693782012-08-16T01:03:00.000-07:002012-08-17T03:56:21.586-07:00My father's shoes<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The earliest memory I have, dating back to when I was 2 years old, is of my father taking me to the beach in the summer time.</span><br />
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It was on the shores of Long Island sound in Connecticut. He pulled a horseshoe crab out of the water and showed it to me; I was astonished that water could hold such strange and miraculous creatures, it seemed almost impossible to me. I couldn't understand how the ordinary-looking water might produce such an amazing thing. He explained to me that they were common, and that they came in close to the shore in the summer time to lay their eggs.</div>
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Later that day, I wanted to show my parents what a big boy I was, and I carried my father's shoes back to the car. They were proud of me; none of us suspected that in doing so, I had forgotten my own shoes on the beach. My parents were very, very poor at that time, and losing my shoes represented a huge blow. There was a big uproar about it at home that night; I remember that too.</div>
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All of this came back to me this morning while I was meditating in my hotel room in Shanghai. I realized that my impulse to serve–perhaps all of our collective impulses to serve— something higher in our lives is a bit like this. We aspire to something greater than ourselves; we want to show this greater thing, whatever it is, that we are worthy, and that we are able to care for it. Somehow, in the process, we don't see that this greater force—we could call it God, or we could call it the Dharma—has given us our own shoes to wear, which we need to attend to. We forget our own shoes in our rush to carry the shoes of our Father.</div>
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It never occurs to us that our Father gave us our own shoes because we need them, and that He needs us to be responsible for those shoes; that, in fact, it may cost Him a great deal if we don't carry our own shoes, and attend to our own life. We are off trying to take care of Him—a task that is really much too great for us—and not taking care of ourselves, which is what we ought to have done in the first place.</div>
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Of course none of this is obvious to us. That's because we are children; children have a limited understanding, and, although they have a grand idea of themselves, a rightful pride—after all, every life has a right to some self-respect—they lose sight of the task. In their eagerness to please the parent, they miss the mark.</div>
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It's very important for us to see that we need to serve our Fathers—and our Mothers. We can take that allegorically or literally, it is true in both cases. There are times, however, when this service consists of attending to ourselves, and understanding that setting our sights above us may be misleading. Being distracted by the nobility of our cause can lead to a downfall. We must begin with the basics.</div>
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It's a question of balance, to honor both this impulse to serve a higher force and the need to do a much more mundane and perhaps even uninteresting kind of service in our immediate lives. The fact that we can't balance these two impulses well probably has a great deal to do with the way men and women can go to church on Sunday and kneel down in apparently honest humility, and then later go off to break every vow they took while they were kneeling.</div>
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Higher forces show us miracles. They are real miracles, not things in religious textbooks; extraordinary creatures that emerge from the water whole, unexpected, revealing aspects of life that seem impossible to understand. And they are; our Fathers and our Mothers, both on earth and in heaven, have this ability to reveal higher truth to us, whether we understand that as the children of men and women or the children of God. In respecting this, and remembering that we are children, perhaps able to do tasks bigger than ourselves, and yet not suited to them, we may gain a perspective of some kind.</div>
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There's no doubt that I want to carry my Father's shoes to the car, to honor Him. Yet this morning I see that it's important for me to remember that my Father has given me my own shoes, and by honoring those shoes, already, I honor my Father, before I even get to where His shoes are.</div>
Lee van Laerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15532580468317808353noreply@blogger.com0