Your perfect world

“Our Fortunes and Lives seem Chaotic when they are looked at as facts. There is order and meaning only in the great truths believed by everybody in that older and wiser time of the world when things were less well known but better understood.” — Roderick MacLeish

The psychiatrist Eric Berne (“Games People Play”) wrote in one of his books that when confronted with a troubled patient, he would ask himself what one would have to do to a person while they were a child to make them turn out the way they did, needing the help of an analyst. Answering that question was often the beginning of treatment.

Berne’s statement had a great impact on me, especially while I was working at state facility for the developmentally disabled. We could see, in many of the residents’ histories, the effects of abusive, inept and often criminal events in their “upbringing.”

When we compared our residents’ current behaviors to their case histories, we knew the answer to Berne’s question.

Unfortunately, asking Berne’s question outside the world of psychology and mental health has led us all down some bad roads. They are roads of blame and excuses. Ask anyone why his dreams for his own perfect world never materialized, and more often than not, he will have a list of people and events from his past that “created” the world he is now experiencing.

He may have, filed away inside his mind, a mental dossier complete with facts, eye witnesses and the testimony of experts that proves he would be happy/rich today, if his parents hadn’t thrown his bike in the trash when he was 15…or if his former spouse had let him finish college…or if his boss hadn’t fired him at a financially precarious moment.

We take great comfort in such blame and in the fact we are using pure reason when we gather the facts that prove we are totally innocent when it comes to the slings and arrows that comprise our current lot in life. However, these facts seem to obscure the real truths, those we’re afraid to consider.

How odd that the very truth that presumably should empower us to fix everything that we claim is broken in what could have been our perfect worlds, is the one truth left off the table. If we could walk into a courtroom and sue everyone on our list of nasty people responsible for how we ended up, a wise judge might explain to us the meaning of such terms as contributory negligence, co-conspirator, and accessory.

Hearing such explanations might show us how to fix what we don’t like. Yet, ask anyone if he played a role in the way he’s ended up. Ask if he believes he created his present reality in any way, shape or form, and he will laugh off such ideas. It’s less personally devastating that way.

It’s far past time, I think, to stop asking Eric Berne’s question. While it’s a helpful question to ask, it’s skewed our thinking away from essential truths about why things are as they are. These days, I’m more inclined to ask questions based on James Allen (“As a Man Thinketh”) approach:

The aphorism, “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he,” not only embraces the whole of a man’s being, but is so comprehensive as to reach out to every condition and circumstance of his life. A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.

That leads to a far different question: “What have I done with my life so far to end up in the place I am now?”

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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.

Disconnected

I was washing salad greens last night at twilight when the power failed. While the house gathered up the darkness, the silence was almost palpable as the news on the livingroom television faded to black, as computers powered down, as the lights went off on numerous clocks, phones, the stove, and the microwave.

Since I was in a hurry to finish making the tossed salad, it was more difficult than usual to just sit back, relax and watch the fire flies outside the breakfast nook windows.

The house was disconnected from the world, an anlogy of sorts to the disconnexion between people and the light.

When the light fails, its absence is obvious. But if one has never been connected, or only slightly connected, then the withdrawal of the light may well be hardly noticed.

Describing physical light to one who has never seen it is a challenge. What a greater challenge it is to describe spiritual light to one who has for years been disconnected.

Perhaps, describing a normally bright and noisy house as contrasted with a house where the power has gone off might be a reasonable analogy.

With power, the house has information, light, motion, music, games, and numerous appliances running. With spiritual light, our minds are synchronized with the pulse of the universe.

The All

“People, other creatures, and the rest of creation are linked together. Thinking in dimensions like these keeps us from being narrow and self-centered. Instead, it stretches and expands the mind.” –Fools Crow, in Fools Crow – Wisdom and Power by Thomas E. Mails

When we look out the window and say, “This is my yard,” we’re not considering the fact that the grass and trees growing there may see the world from another perspective. So, too, the bluejays bouncing across the grass and the hairy woodpeckers “walking” up and down the sides of the trees.

So, too, the atoms within us, those within the walls of the house, those within the water from the faucet and the hose, those within the air and the clouds who share with us the experience of our manifestation.

Our Illusions Are Costly, Our Eternity is Free

“There is no such thing as either birth or death. They both are temporary markings having to deal with the illusion that we are each a body. We can mark our bodies as having a birth and a death, but the ‘I’ has never been born and will never die.” –Fred Alan Wolf in Dr. Quantum’s Little Book of Big Ideas

Average cost of being born: $8,000-$10,000.

Average cost of being buried: $6,000-8,000.

Eternity: Priceless.

Tell me true: What has “The Secret” done for you?

Did you see the film? Did you read Rhonda Byrne’s book?

If so, I want to learn more.

• Before you saw the film or read the book, did you consider yourself a student of ancient wisdom or what is now often called “new age” philosophy?
• If so, did you find The Secret to be new, a mix of new ideas AND things you had read or seen elsewhere, a handy summary of “the literature,” or old stuff in a new package?
• Bottom line, has The Secret changed your life? 

I haven’t seen the film or read the book. However, the book is on order, so before it shows up, I’m curious about your reactions as well as its impact.

Has the information made you feel generally happier and more empowered?

Can you point to any changes in your life that you can attribute to your use of the information in the book or the film? That is, have you proven to yourself that the philosophy works?

Tell me your story.

Conformity

“The surprising reason why many people fail to find fulfilment in their lives is because they are plagiarists. They adopt pre-packaged images that surround them–on TV, in the movies and in print. So prolifically are these images generated that they offer the illusionn of a wealth of options. In the end the mind becomes addicted to the ready-made patterns with which society presents it, and gives up on the possibility of truly evolving.” Mike George in Discover Inner Peace: A Guide to Spiritual Well-Being

Perhaps we shouldn’t just think outside the box, we should destroy the box (or at least hide it).

Landscape

“Understand that thou art a second little world and that the sun and moon are within the, and also the stars.” –Origen

We spend our lives asking why the sky is blue and who spins worlds through the heavens. The answer, I think, flows through our veins.

“Good” thought, “bad” thought

Jesse Kornbluth, writing on his Head Butler review site, recently discussed the popularity of “The Secret” and it’s message.

He finds real wisdom in “The Secret,” while wondering why great thinkers who are said to have known the secret many years ago were not more overt in sharing it.

There is nothing new about the concept that thoughts are things or that the world we find ourselves in is the world we’re creating by thinking “good” thoughts or “bad” thoughts.

Kornbluth notes such events as the Holocaust, the Iraq war, and Katrina and wonders if the victims brought evil and disaster upon themselves.

Many of those who say “good thoughts attract good things into our lives” and “bad thoughts attract chaos and strife into our lives” put the brakes on their beliefs when it comes to horrific events. While they can see that a single person might sabotage his or her life by a sequence of negative thoughts that lead to suicide or “accident,” they are not willing to consider that many people thinking many sequences of negative thoughts can possibly bring about large disasters.

This one-sided view of “how things work,” while compassionate, represents a spiritual hedging of one’s views and, I think, creates doubt amongst those who have the secret in their hands but fail to see it’s scope.

Removing Doubt

Natural High recently posted an entry about the concept of appreciative listening, showing that we’re more likely to meet challenges by asking “what’s right here” than listing everything that’s wrong with the situation.

By listing negatives, that’s where we place our focus; then we miss potential solutions. Appreciative listening reminds me of the Kabbalistic practice of seeking out the areas in one’s life that are running smoothly and strengthening those rather that focusing all of one’s attention on things that are not going well.

Obsession with answers in areas of doubt only strengthens our doubt. We make progress through certainty, not by adding energy to our problem areas.  By reinforcing what’s good in our lives, we bring more light into our lives and clear our minds and find solutions where we previously saw none.