Take a moment to watch the video above, it’s less than 2 minutes long
This video gives you a glimpse of how the Earth and its Oceans and Islands are made Indeed, how the Cosmos itself was formed And what makes up the some-body each of us think we are
And what do you see? Ripples of Light - on the surface Vibrations of Waves - on the ocean Undulations of Quanta - on the sandy bottom
It also gives you a glimpse, and a metaphor, if you will for the interplay of the Cosmos and of Life itself The manifest dynamic pattern is an unfathomable Wholeness And no part can be isolated for ease of analysis or exploitation
This is the Wisdom we need at this time — Right Now To recognize and explicitly value our dependance on this One Earth And to see our neighbor, and even our so-called enemy, as ourself Made of the same stuff, we are kith and kin; we're all in this together
There is more, of course, once you begin to see these Ripples of Light You start noticing them everywhere ... Seeing the shadow dances Feeling your subtle body sensations as they come and go, Watch them simply arise and then pass; this is the Life process itself
All of this is impermanent, is transitory, except, perhaps, the awareness that is aware of these “sense”-sations Science has yet to find the ultimate building blocks of Nature But many before us have lit candles in this darkness
The common instruction of this exploration is to look within Hold that candle of awareness, and look deeply into all that you might think “you” are, and see, that you are not that No unchanging “self” can be found; nothing fixed anywhere
It may seem unsettling at first, but actually it is such a relief To be able to drop one’s opinions and beliefs, and replace them with curiosity and awe and not-knowing — it’s so liberating to simply live Life, as it Unfolds, in this Moment, Here and Now
The common advice when one is uptight or troubled is to “just be yourself” as if that will relax you and let you breathe more easily.
But while that may be better than being anxious or fearful, is not enough. Still you have yourself — your ego — and that requires defending, stroking, placating, and the like.
So the real step to take is to Just Be! Dis-identify with that self that needs protection. That self is itself a contraction of being. You can even feel that contraction in your body if you become still, quiet, and aware.
Just Be that which is present in this moment, or as Ram Dass so wisely titled his first book, just Be Here Now.
So rather than just being yourself, try freeing yourself so that you can Just Be.
After all, what you call the self is not a solid, well-defined, static thing. If the self is anything more than just a label, it is a dynamic, ever changing, process of being. The flux and flow of Life itself.
You understand this intellectually — cells constantly dying and dividing, new experiences being processed and becoming part of your identify, even gut microbiome being changed based on the food you eat and affecting your health, etc., etc.
Absolutely everything you believe is your “self” is changing continuously. It's impermanent. That is what Life is.
Come to know that fact intellectually and experientially, and you will have unlocked a precious treasure. The ability to allow yourself to simply Be. Recognize that you already are part of Life itself, an ever unfolding part of the Cosmos. You are not looking at Nature, you Are Nature.
Nature does not worry about its past or project what might be its future. Nature simply flows, based on the deep interconnection with all that Is. Indeed, it is that Is-ness, or Such-ness that constitutes your true Being.
There is a so-called Flower Sermon, given by the Buddha to his monastics and visiting lay-people. It is captured in a famous Buddhist Sutra, and has been interpreted by Thich Nhat Hahn, in the book Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha (available for free).
In the Sutra, at the beginning of his anticipated dharma talk, the Buddha (Guatama) held up a single flower in his hand, and remained silent for a long time. One of his disciples, Mahakassapa smiled and received the direct transmission of wisdom of this teaching, as interpreted below:
“The Buddha began to speak. “Friends, this flower is a wondrous reality. As I hold the flower before you, you all have a chance to experience it. Making contact with a flower is to make contact with a wondrous reality. It is making contact with life itself.
“Mahakassapa smiled before anyone else because he was able to make contact with the flower. As long as obstacles remain in your minds, you will not be able to make contact with the flower. Some of you asked yourselves, ‘Why is Gautama holding that flower up? What is the meaning of his gesture?’ If your minds are occupied with such thoughts, you cannot truly experience the flower.
“Friends, being lost in thoughts is one of the things that prevents us from making true contact with life. If you are ruled by worry, frustration, anxiety, anger, or jealousy, you will lose the chance to make real contact with all the wonders of life.
“Friends, the lotus in my hand is only real to those of you who dwell mindfully in the present moment. If you do not return to the present moment, the flower does not truly exist. There are people who can pass through a forest of sandalwood trees without ever really seeing one tree. Life is filled with suffering, but it also contains many wonders. Be aware in order to see both the suffering and the wonders in life.
“Being in touch with suffering does not mean to become lost in it. Being in touch with the wonders of life does not mean to lose ourselves in them either. Being in touch is to truly encounter life, to see it deeply. If we directly encounter life, we will understand its interdependent and impermanent nature. Thanks to that, we will no longer lose ourselves in desire, anger, and craving. We will dwell in freedom and liberation."
Excerpt From: Thich Nhat Hanh. “Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha.”
And that is the intended purpose of the flower photo above. Open your eyes and try to see all of Nature just as it is, part of the "wondrous reality" that is Life itself. And Just Be a part of that wondrous reality! No words are needed; no words can really describe it.
Well, as my daughter Alli informed me, today is World Manta Ray Day. You can click on that picture to be taken to the Instagram page if so desired.
I thought you might also be interested to hear (and see) why that is noteworthy for us.
We recently completed a project to tile our lanai. As we were picking out the tile, and thinking of the large area that would be tiled, we thought the addition of some sea life would be a cool addition.
Back in 2015, when we tiled the inside of our foyer, we found an artist who made sea turtle mosaics, and we bought a set and had our tile installers set them into the tile. Quite an intricate job cutting the tile to fit all the turtle flippers. He did the whole job with an angle grinder, and it was perfect.
So, we reached out to that artist again, and based on a suggestion by my wife, and some research by my daughter and me, asked if he wanted to create a manta ray for our lanai. Well, he thought that would be "epic". So after two months of design, material selection, mock-ups and feedback, we agreed on the final design and had our same tile installer set it into the new tile for our lanai.
Here's a picture of the end result, with my wife sitting in the hammock over the manta ray:
Lounging over the Manta Ray
Well I'd say she is a real beauty! And I think the Manta Ray turned out pretty nice too! 😂
Remember that scene from Taxi Driver, where Robert DeNiro asks the mirror, "Are you talkin' to me?".
OK good, but this is nothing like that. 😬
Instead, this is more of a inter-species intervention, when we notice a White-Rumped Shama on a nearby branch, and knowing they had once been caged song birds that had gotten into the wild, try to get this one to "talk" to us.
So you will hear at times, my wife or I whistling to prompt this bird to sing, and sure enough, he does quite a few times.
They really are quite sociable birds, and great singers. Anyways, we thought you might enjoy this as your moment of Zen today (or just a nice diversion from current events, etc.):
May all of your conversations today be as melodic and peaceful as this one was for us.
Do you ever check those warranties you get on products? Some are only good for 90 days, some for 1 year. But the great ones are lifetime warranties, good as long as the original owner is still alive.
Well, here's some good news. We also come with a lifetime warranty. On our Life. The only requirement is we have to be alive to claim it.
Want more good news? There's no paperwork required, no receipts you need to save. Whenever Our Life is not working as it should be, we can swap it for a new one. Really. It's True!
So what's the catch, you may ask? Who gets to determine if my life is working "as it should be"? That's the best part -- We're the ones who get to make the call. In fact we have to make the call, to claim the warranty.
So maybe an example would better explain how this warranty works. Imagine you have a nice home in a nice neighborhood, outfitted with a nice security system to keep you safe. But then your security system keeps sending you alerts of intruders in your driveway. And it turns out to be neighborhood kids running amok, unable to stay on the public sidewalk. Annoying, right? They're not allowed on your property without your permission, right? What are you going to do -- how will you handle the situation? Well here's how one man dealt with it:
See how it works? Once we decide we don't like what is happening in Our Life, we get to decide how to respond. We could react with frustration, anger, bitterness, revenge -- all perfectly natural, automatic, ego-centric responses. Then once we recognize how we are reacting, and if we don't like how that makes us feel, time to turn in our Old Life for a New Life. Right Now. In each new Moment.
That's right, we get to choose our response to everything that Life throws at us. Both the "good" and the "bad", except those are really only defined by how we choose to respond to Life. Really, it is that simple.
And this is not limited to precocious kids in your driveway. This is about any situation that causes us to suffer. Take for example, being incarcerated, locked up in prison, or worse. Indeed, having survived 3 years in Nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz, Victor Frankl famously wrote:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
That is our Lifetime Warranty. And we get to use it over and over, each time we get trapped by our reaction to a situation. We get to choose another path. And over time, we will be able to sense that space that Frankl speaks of, and make a conscious choice of what our response will be to Life's stimulus.
We can choose a response that lifts our heart and soul, perhaps at the same time it lifts the other person's heart and soul as well, and helps heal ourself and the other.
Please don't be shy. This is powerful stuff. We get to use our Lifetime Warranty over and over again, as many times as we need it, until we can live in that space, and make more heartfelt, compassionate, choices.
Oh, and how does that picture at the top of this page relate to any of this? Well, Wedelia can be considered an invasive weed. But it is also a very effective ground cover, holding on to the topsoil, providing beautiful flowers, supporting local honey bees and various other insects, as you can see. Did you notice that little fella there, looking you right in the eye? Is that a pest? Or another sentient being?
Sometimes, Life is really all about how We choose to see things. And whether we judge, label, and call something good or bad. Just realize it is Us, and not Life, that assigns those labels. With some practice, we really can find Reflections of Beauty everywhere we go.
Or you might call it a way of questioning. Of contemplating. Of looking more deeply.
I've been doing that recently, having reinvigorated my spiritual inquiries. And I must say it's all pretty fascinating. Those who know me have heard me say "I'm spiritual, but not religious." Indeed, I have called myself a-religious, and have some issues with a personified God. I was not entirely sure why that issue was so visceral for me, but I guess that's just my karma (no, that's not irony, just some humor ;-)
During my recent investigations, I came upon a physicist named David Bohm. I had heard the name before (as a wannabe physicist myself), but really knew nothing about him. And then I stumbled upon this movie, Infinite Potential. I think it's well done, and ties together some complex physics topics, with the drama of the A-bomb development, McCarthyism, and a scientist looking deeply for the fundamental underlying mechanisms of the cosmos. Which ultimately brings him in touch spiritual insights from past millennia that help guide his thinking. Here's the movie trailer (and by all means, if any of those topics sound interesting to you, you may want to purchase the movie, like I did, even having watched it twice before):
So anyways, "What If?"
What if our scientific world view, with its remarkable progress using experimentation to prove out theories, is still not the whole story?
What if underlying all that we can detect and classify, still lies something that would be able to explain some remaining conundrums, like entanglement (non-local effects), like wave-particle duality, like Schrödinger's cat (paradox), like dark matter/energy that is vastly greater than observable matter/energy throughout the universe?
What if consciousness, which remains poorly understood, has some role in this, and/or applies beyond one's physical body?
What if it's not only possible, but repeatable, and trainable, for individuals to gain control of their own mind-bodies, and realize the truths of impermanence, not-self or egolessness, and equanimity or non-reactivity, and then enter states of non-duality.
I think the biggest take-aways from the movie and from these sample what-if questions are that we really need to keep our minds open, alert, and inquisitive. While it might temporarily "feel good" to think we have an answer, opinion, belief, or even an orthodox interpretation on these or other important questions, we should never close our minds to the possibility of new information or direct experience that might tell us otherwise.
And in the end, a recurring question we can ask is:
Look what I stumbled on today, while coming back from my morning beach walk. Waiting to cross the street, I glimpsed something in my peripheral vision. Light flickering in the breeze. And then I was hooked.
The interlaced palm fronds, weaving together with the sunlight, blue sky, and white puffy clouds. The shadows dancing, playing peekaboo with the dazzling morning star. And the breeze, don't forget the breeze. Sometimes strong, sometimes calm, and sometimes dangerous -- always changing day to day, hour to hour, really moment by moment.
All of it, plus what you don't see. The soil in which the Acacia Palms are planted. All the insects and microbes that keep the earth alive. The periodic rain showers and occasional tropical deluges that water them all. The landscaper (or homeowner) that planted them, and who prunes off dead or dying fronds to make room for the new growth that just magically appears.
And what about the Nursery owner who's livelihood comes from raising and selling these palms. With only some land and a little business acumen (and capital) to raise them. Possibly, the land where these were raised has been in their family for quite some time. Perhaps the son or grand-daughter is now the proprietor. So much owed to the family, the upbringing, the hard work plus good fortune.
And where did that breeze come from? Heating of the air from the rising sun, trade winds that brought missionaries and Polynesian ancestors, or the chaotic flap of a butterfly's wings? No matter. Nature does not keep score.
It moves only in the present moment. And in this moment, it has woven you a basket of earthly delights. May you lighten your load into this basket, and skip more easily as you go about your day. With love and Namaste.
