Simple Pleasures

“Whatever our background, culture or race, what rewards us most powerfully and consistently are the most deceptively simple abilities of all: the ability to be kind, to live enthusiastically and creatively, to appreciate and understand experiences different from our own, and to sustain a sense of inner stability and trust even in unwelcome and difficult situations. Those are the abilities that, bit by bit, moment by moment, choice by choice, create a life of happiness.” –Stephanie Dowrick in “Choosing Happiness”

So simple in concept, but often so difficult in practice.

Syngery

“In order to be able to understand the great complexity of life and to understand what the universe is doing, the first word to learn is synergy.” –Buckminster Fuller

I think we want to understand this and to experience what it’s like to be part of a larger system or organism–a drop of water within the sea, as some call our true relationship to everything else.

Day to day, though, we habitually fight it, and go about our daily tasks seeing the world around us as “everything else.”

Oddly–or predicatbly–we are drawn to fads from the latest music to the latest clothes, but when it comes time to commit ourselves to the group on things that really matter, we tend to retreat back inside our homes and our own skins.

We yearn for more, though, while we resist it.

Failure

“Only man is placed between perfection and deficiency, with the power to earn perfection.  According to the sages, as long as we live, we have the potential to fall.” –Moshe Chaim Luzzatto

If we could not fail, much less fall, we would not be human.

More importantly, I think, our successes would be meaningless for all would be sunshine and roses and bluebirds straight out of a classic Disney cartoon.

It seems to me that if we do not make mistakes, that is to say, fail in various ways, we would be much slower to learn. Quite possibly, we would be like couch potatoes leading charmed lives so divorced from the real world that our experience and knowledge would remain sorely lacking.

With failure comes knowledge. With each fall comes the option and the opportunity for standing back up.

Going back to Pericles

Feeling lazy, I borrowed this post from my blog on MySpace…

When philosophers, historians and writers look deep into the past for examples of truly good old days, their time machines often linger in Greece between 448 BCE and 429 BCE or even 404 BCE.

Whether we consider the Age of Pericles to be the 19 year period between the end of the Persian Wars and the Athenian leader’s death in 429 BCE or whether we say it lasted until the end of the Peloponnesian War 25 years later, these were the days of splendour when history, literature, politics, architecture, sculpture, and philosophy were the brilliant, well-nourished, and widely appreciated flowers in their elected leader’s garden.

In his book Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy, Donald Kagan writes that Pericles “met the challenge of the heroic tradition by showing that democracy would bring to all the citizens of Athens the advantages heretofore reserved for the well-born few. The Athenian democracy would encourage merit in its traditional form and reward it with victory, glory and immortality.”

A quick review the discoveries and advances in all areas of art, science, and quality of life since Pericles died will convince most people that they wouldn’t want to turn the calendar back over 2,436 years even if they knew how.

Yet the Age of Pericles, within the consciousness of our world community, is a highly charged archetype that invites us to ask each other what—quite precisely—we must do to create a golden age now, living and breathing in the present tense.

It’s all too easy—and quite misses the point—to focus such a discussion on the pro and con talking points of our highly charged issues: immigration, the Iraq war, overpopulation, affordable medical care and global warming. There are larger issues afoot and they involve process more than a “fix” here and a “repair” there.

Jean Houston, in The Hero and the Goddess, aptly compares our present day mode of thinking with that of the “Homerically inspired Greek mind” as it was 2,436 years ago as linear vs. nonlinear.

Today, she writes, we “persist in looking for cause and effect and remain monotheistic (having one god or supreme principle), monophrenic (having one personality), and monocular (having one way of seeing) in our epistemology. We tend to think in a straightforward, linear fashion. All we need do is accumulate enough facts and look at them rationally and the truth—of which there is only one—will reveal itself.”

This limiting, though highly addictive approach, is rather like comfort food—fattening without a lot of nourishment. Yet, our reverence for the ways and means of science and technology brings us back to this patriarchal approach whenever we have a problem to solve and/or whenever we think solving a problem is the Holy Grail we’ve long been seeking.

Contrast this, to the mindset found during the Age of Pericles. It was, as Houston describes it, “polycentric (having many centers), polytheistic (having many gods), polyphrenic (having many selves), and polyocular (having many ways of seeing), conceiving of many causes—all of which provided a rich weave of explanation. They viewed reality as a field of unity in diversity with the One, achieving its Oneness only from the interconnecting patterns of the many.”

The unexpected bedfellows of Eastern religion, modern new age thought, Kabbalism and physics appear to be drawing similar conclusions about the nature of physical reality, leading many from diverse backgrounds to question how linear thought and hierarchal models of behaviour can possibly blend into something so foreign to us as “the way things really are.”

I especially like Houston’s “rich weave of explanation.” How boring, how shallow, and how prone to us-vs.-them thinking is anything else. We will, I believe, have to understand the merits of the rich weave over the flaws of the single thread before we find out golden age again.

Courage

“It takes courage to do what you want.” –Joseph Campbell

Sooner or later, one simply has to stop listening to the well-meaning people who think their plans for our lives are more important than our own plans for our lives.

Until then, we’re walking in everyone else’s shoes.

Just for today

When I notice the beginnings of anger, I turn to the principles of Reiki. While Reiki is a healing method with origins in Tibet, the principles have a wider application:

Just for today, do not anger.
Just for today, do not worry.
We shall count our blessings and honor our fathers and mothers, or teachers and neighbors and honor our food.
Make an honest living.
Be kind to everything that has life.

I have yet to change the world, pondering these. But I often change myself. And that’s always the first step.

Connecting with the earth right now

This exercise will help you begin to reattune yourself with the natural world of the heropath, clarifying and magnifying the outer landscape through which you walk and the inner landscape through which you create.

Exercise Goals: (a) Observe in detail, with all of your senses, the natural world around you; (b) Focus your mind on the here and now of yourself in communion with the trees, grasses, flowers, birds, animals, insects, clouds, sky and wind.

(1) Find a quiet natural setting—-your back yard, a park, a favorite trail or beach.

(2) Take off your shoes, if weather permits, and don’t forget sunscreen and a hat.

(3) Look around you. As David Abram suggests in “The Spell of the Sensuous,” during this exercise, the present is everything from your vantage point out to the visible horizon, the past is everything beneath the surface of the ground, and the future is everything over the horizon.

(4) Use your favorite relaxation technique and become at ease. If you don’t already have a relaxation or meditative technique, here’s one you can try:

(a) Sit or lie down in a comfortable position with the soles of your feet flat against the grass, beach sand, or forest floor and focus on something interesting in the environment—a shadow on a rock, a flower, a tree branch, a blade of grass.

(b) Take three deep breaths, slowly exhaling each time and visualize the tension draining out of you into the earth through the soles of your feet.

(c) Then, slowly repeat (or think) the following: “I will now count from 10 to 1 and with each descending number, I will become more and more relaxed and rooted to the earth. Ten, nine, I feel myself relaxing and absorbing rich energy through my feet. Eight, seven, six…more and more relaxed. Five, four three…deeper and deeper into relaxation now. Two, one…I am now at a deeper level of relaxation, a level I can use to observe and communicate with the natural world.”

(5) Casually observe everything that interests you for as long as you can remain grounded in the present—10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour. That is, when your mind wanders to yesterday’s joys and regrets or tomorrow’s challenges and excitements, pull your attention back to the environment—how the wind moves the tall grass or the waves, the shadows dancing in the tree tops, a line of ants moving across a flat rock, a bird looking for seeds or insects in the forest floor. What do you see? What do you hear? What does the air taste like? What do the things around you feel like to your bare feet, the caress of your hands? What smells can you detect? Move toward anything that draws you. Consider the possibility that everything you see can see (or sense) you and that everything that makes a sound can hear the sounds that you make; that when you touch a rock a woody shrub it is also touching you. Imagine that you are deeply engaged in a conversation with the plants, animals, rocks and earth, water, clouds and the wind and—like any other conversation—it would be rude, in a sense, if you allowed your mind to wander off in the middle of it to think about something you read in a book or something you need to pick up at the store.

(6) Over time, this exercise will help sensitize you to the environment and the lives and the information around you. Try different places, different times of day, different focuses for your attention, imagining with each visit that as you come to know and feel more comfortable at the places were you go, they too are coming to know you and trust you as well.

(7) After you have been going to one or more places for a while, also visualize going to them while you are relaxed in a comfortable chair or bed at home. Use a relaxation technique such as the one given in step four, close your eyes and then imagine yourself driving or walking to the selected place, sitting or lying down in your favorite spot, and looking around with all of your senses at the environment you already know so well. Pick a time when distracting household noises that will pull you away from the visualization are at a minimum and when your mind wanders off to other things, gently pull it back to your mental trip to your mental images of the natural world and what it is telling you.

(8) Experiment with both your on-site observations and your mental “trips” and discover what works best for you and what pulls you and seems important. If you wish, jot down a few notes and record your impressions over time. (Do this long after the exercise—while doing the exercise, try not to plan what you are going to say in your notes.) Like any good friend, repeated conversations with the natural world will impact your life, changing it and making it richer and deeper just as it always has done for seekers on the path and heroes on a quest.

(At some point, you may discover you’re not where you think you are. You may believe you have been meditating outdoors only to find yourself in a chair in your livingroom. Or you may believe you have been meditating in that chair, only to find yourself outside. Do not become alarmed.)

Memories

“Don’t let yesterday use up too much of today.” –Cherokee proverb

What would we do without our memories? For practical and sentimental reasons, most of us don’t like to contemplate this scenario.

Trouble is, we don’t notice the addictive quality of our memories, so we get out of balance in a sense by spending more time recalling the past than living in the moment. Sometimes, we’re actually trying to rewrite the past by using our imagination to visualize what might have been if we had said something or done something differently.

When we dwell upon the past at the expense of the here and now, we’re using mental drugs to make us feel good about ourselves or to avoid making new commitments. Even the bad memories are the “devil we know.”

How hard it is to seize the day when we’re living in yesterday.

Humility

The I Ching often suggests one image of balance or another to help those using the book to synchonize their goals with the ever-present flow of the world.

Humility, which might be symbolized as a field bounded by mountains, is balance. Balance comes from taking from that which is too great or too large while adding to that which is too small so that balance is restored. The field, where yin and yang create together is limited by the mountains guarding against the excess that could take the work out of balance.

When one has a goal in mind, a goal that has perhaps been stalled, one is humbled by the reminder: seek balance, not power. In some ways, humble and unassuming action or nonaction may equal the ”most successful” route.