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Creating Bridges: Spirituality & Philosophy: |
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Revolutionary Innocence - We are LIMITLESS !!
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by Bill Douglas |
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In my book "The Amateur Parent - A Book on Life, Death, War & Peace, and Everything Else in the Universe" I often marveled at how with one sharp glimmer of innocent observation my children . . . sometimes shattered the most sacrosanct "grown up world" views of reality. Their innocence constantly challenged serious and highly regarded mores and beliefs that the more rigid adult world held as absolute and unquestionable. Observing my children caused me to see great issues like war, racism, tolerance, etc. in a wholly new way.
I realized their revolutionary insight was from seeing the world without the teathers and constraints of life experience, which enabled them to see the world with a new and fresh view. I once saw a bumper sticker that said, "Everything you know is wrong." It moved my consciousness to a sideview that achieved a "disconnect" from dogma, like the Zen teachers tried to give their students with questions like, "What's the sound of one hand clapping." My children were living embodiments of this. Their very being was revolutionary. Life has revolution deeply woven into it's fiber in the form of new life.
This realization led me to believe that meditation is the ultimate revolutionary act. Why? Because in meditation our goal is to "let go" of all our "past" connections, and thereby to release any pre-conceptions or prejudices about the future based on those past experience. In meditation, we seek to "un-plug," and drift, opening our consciousness to whatever flows through it without controlling, limiting, quantifying, or catagorizing experience.
This practice of meditation in the end melts away prejudice, enabling us to touch, taste, and smell the world in a new, fresh, and unprecedented way. In this process we see the world in wholly new ways and with all new possibilities.
Buddha in his meditations realized the futility of chasing a world of material gain, and Jesus saw the delusion of might makes right and the ultimate desolation of an "eye for an eye" way of dealing with other human beings. Many humans have found endlessly creative ways of dealing with life through the "un-plugging" of the mind that quiet meditation creates the space for. These people engaging in these acts are the world's ultimate revolutionaries.
However, it wasn't the insight that made them revolutionaries, but their mature adult ability to behave differently based on those insights. Here is where the consciousness movement needs to take a great leap forward. For, it was not the innocent insights of Jesus and Buddha that were revolutionary but their ability to experience the thick, hard, dark reality that was so far away from the brilliant possibility of their visions. They were able to move in a world that from every corner of it's being sought to quash the light of their insights, and yet maintain those visions, and indeed "live them."
Our world right now is at a historic juncture. We have through the information age the ability to see what is often a frightening reality on a grand scale and yet because of the technological age have the abilities for the first time in human history . . . to realize wonderful possibilities and alternatives. We all know that we are headed for environmental collapse, and yet we also know that we have the technology to create a green livable world with cheap renewable energy for our entire planet. We all realize that we may be headed to an over populated world with agonizing struggles to control food and water distribution. Yet, we also know that we have the knowledge to build up the world's production and to reduce the world's over population with the disemination of knowledge and birth control technologies. We know that our world can spiral into a state of mass terrorism as the powerless seek to exert power in the ways available to them, yet we also know that by lifting humanity's hope and living conditions we can dry up the lake of recruits that terrorism depends upon to thrive.
So, why do we not choose the healing, lifting, compassionate and actually "simple" answers to our current problems? Because of our limited ability to "un-plug" from old ways of living. Einstein once wrote, "imagination is more important than knowledge." The word "imagine" means to "image-in" a new vision that does not yet exist. Right now global dependence on fossil fuel and controlled distribution of energy exists. Right now mass consumption in the rich countries and starvation in the poor countries exists. Right now "war" as the popular global solution to inequity of resources and power and the inevitable violence that leads to when left unchanged . . . exists.
The 3 dimensional reality of this world is a heavy weight on our consciousness. The visions are lighter and brighter and less tangible. It is very difficult to lift our awareness out of the heavy vibration of what already exists in solid reality to "what is possible" in our imaginations. It reminds me of Dorothy and her compatriots in the Wizard of Oz seeing the Emerald City glittering on the hill with all the hope and promise shimmering from it . . . yet as they trudge through the poppy fields they begin to get "so sleepy," "so sleepy." This is the narcotic myopic state of human consciousness today.
It is fed by our mass media, and our mass media are victims of it as well. Vision and possibility have little room to get through in a 10 second sound byte, nor can the "imagination" that Einstein pointed out was so all powerful, be expressed in the "pro-con" dynamic all modern talk shows are based on. Why? Because the vision is not a "pro" or "con" position. It is a non-dualistic approach to life, but rather a "multidimensional" view of reality and potential reality. Our media looks at "slices" of reality in a pro-con or dualistic way, and is unable to see holistice or multi-dimensional realites.
For example, let's have a look as some seemingly seperate and unrelated topics as our media would slice them up. The United States imprisons more of our children than any nation in the world. Prison costs more than tuition at Harvard University. American children are increasingly becoming latch key children with no adult supervision much of the time. American children are increasingly reliant on psychotropic drugs to control their anxiety. Stress is responsible for most health problems. Our national annual health costs are now well over $1 trillion per year. Pollution is exhasperated by the massive commutes that tie up our nations roadways during morning and evening rush hours. We are required to spend great sums of money expanding our roadways and on the fuel burned while people are stuck in traffic. CO2, or carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to warm, threatening a massive global environmental disaster that will disrupt food production, increase energy demands, and ultimately according to the Pentagon become a massive national security threat as people worldwide compete over diminishing resources in a world of chaos.
Now, let's look at the same above reality in a "holist" way, which meditations "un-plugging" quality enhances our ability to do. Imagine that we give tax breaks to companies that encourage and provide employees using computers to work at home 2, 3 or 4 days per week. This is often called "cyber-commuting." This would massively reduce the traffic on our highways saving untold amounts of fuel and significantly reducing the CO2 emmisions that threaten our environment. By parents being at home more our children would not be at home alone so much, especially during the hours between 3 and 7 pm (when most youth crime is committed), thereby reducing youth crime significantly.
The many hours of time at home rather than on choking stagnant freeways would dramatically reduce the stress, not only in the lives of those cyber-commuting from home, but also for those who can't cyber-commute who can now get to work much faster as the masses now cyber-commuting rather than driving to work are not on the roads. The $700 billion or so per year spent on health care caused by chronic stress could be significantly reduced, saving our economy hundreds of billions per year.
The lessened stress of parents will ripple out to their children and families likely resulting in less need for children to ingest stress controlling drugs. Children's rising asthma problems would be lessened by less cars on the road (rubber particles) and also by less stress as their parents who are now at home more are less stressed themselves, and the children have more at home support now as well. With the savings on health, environment, and energy costs as well as diminished child imprisonment rates, we can now spend more on Head Start programs which are proven to lessen children's likelihood of ending up in prison, thereby saving even more money on reduced expensive prison costs, and creating productive tax paying citizens instead of perpetual inmates.
Everyone is less stressed as we begin to proactively deal with environmental problems rather than feeling powerless as we watch our global environment continue to spiral out of control. In fact, beyond reducing traffic with tele-commuting we can use our savings to shift to solar and wind energy production (which can produce many times the electrical needs of the United States), and then can create jobs by exporting such green technologies over seas.
We have now created a world of hope and limitless possibility. But, there is no room on our television talk shows for this kind of vision. So, we must look at what is dysfunctional in our society as well as what is possible. Often in meditation we find blissful exciting possibility springing forth, but also discomforting memories or fears will come up as well. The best way to handle these feelings is by "breathing into" them, and "being with" them. Fully feeling and experiencing those "blocks" within our psyche or body, but at the same time realizing they are things "passing through" our reality, and not actually who we are. They are parts of us that we are now ready to let go, but we can only let them go by becoming fully aware of them, being with them, yet at the same time being willing to let them go.
So, we are all ready to let go of old stuff that doesn't work, but most of us don't like feeling the discomfort of being with them in order to allow them to be lighted, lightened, and in the end enlightened.
A few examples of what most of us don't want to feel the discomfort of realizing and "being with" so that we can "breathe it through." Our government is run by money. Our media is run by money. Corporations are here for one reason . . . to make money. Capitalism is a great tool, but it's good to keep in mind that it is a tool to be "used" for humanity. It is not God. However, our consumer society has come very near making money and the aquisition of it into a "pagan image" of God. The people we adore in today's society are most often rich and famous . . . because if you are rich and famous you must have something important about you (so the unspoken theory goes). Problem is that our government officials have to have massive money to get elected (a senator needs $6 million minimum). So, they work largely to satisfy the needs of those who have a great deal of money, rather than the needs of society as a whole.
Our media makes its money from large sponsors, usually corporate sponsors. So, the airwaves are filled with information that's not necessarily what is needed to create a livable world that feeds and nurtures our souls, but rather with what will increase corporate profits. Unfortunately this is a problem. Our health care system does not profit most by "wellness" but rather by "illness." Our military industries do not profit from "peace" but from "war." Our penal system does not profit by human uplift, but rather from human degredation. One corporate prison system actually gages its future profit projections upon illiteracy rates in public schools. When children are more illiterate, they will have more customers as inmates in coming years.
We have created a system whereby "illness," "war," and "imprisonment" are the best places to put your money. It does not have to be this way, if we can lift our minds and "un-plug" from this dysfunctional reality. However, as in meditation, it is not all light and hope that will lead us to the promised land, although that is the well from which we will draw our future of light and hope by "imaging" it "in" to reality. But, we must let the dysfunction rise up into our consciousness and learn to breathe with it, to be with it, so that it can begin to be dissembled in our lighted consciousness.
I've noticed that meditation does two things simultaneously. It opens our mind and heart to experience our dysfunction, or darkenss within if you will, while giving us stress management skills to be able to breathe with it, to be with it, and ultimately release it into the burning fires of our expanding enlightened awareness. Ultimately the thick, dark, blocks within us become the fuel that the fires of enlightenment and expansion and limitless possibility will burn on. There can be no light without dark. It is a false and constipated glimmer if we try to move into light without digging and mining within for the dark (personally or as a society).
Our current global state is based on illusion. It is hard to look at illusion, but it must happen so that it can be a fuel for the light of our possible future. Today, we are terrorized by our own government which wants us to see an increasingly dangerous world that will make huge future profits for a military industrial complex that profits all sides in global conflicts (while the majority of ordinary people suffer). Our global economy seeks to lower wages and living standards worldwide in an insatiable quest to reduce production costs and maximize profits. Fossil fuel production has peaked. We will have less and less, and there will be more and more wars in efforts to control this dwindling resource. Terrorism will rise as more and more impoverished and militarily dominated peoples become angered enough to throw their lot in with the terrorists who need their recruitment to thrive and grow. . . . or not.
By cutting global military spending we could end world hunger. Only $20 billion is needed per year to end global hunger. Green technology developement could spur employment worldwide and lessen tensions as countries need less and less to compete for energy. As the richer northern world begins to shift resources away from military spending to spending that stimulates global development and uplift in a clean energy way global income rises. Less competition creates less stress. People are more invested in society, less alienated, and less likely to be recruited by terrorist organizations. Without the well of alienated dis-invested people to draw upon, terrorist organizations, although they may exist on in some form lose any real power and support worldwide.
This is not pie in the sky. Pie in the sky is thinking you can create a safer world by draining your national and natural resources to build obscene military machines that do not create, heal, or produce anything . . . accept misery and death, resentment and hatred.
Jesus, Buddha, Einstein, etc. gave us a window of what is possible. We are living in the age where we can realize the reality they opened us to. The potential is hanging on the vine like a ripe fruit, heavy with sweetness and health, pregnant with nourishment.
I can taste it . . . can you?
Bill Douglas >>
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Bill Douglas,
Tai Chi & Qigong Author |
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Bill Douglas is the author of the #1 most popular T'ai Chi book in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.
He can be reached at smartaichi.com His work, called "visionary" by the world's top T'ai Chi experts, is entitled, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong."
Bill is also the presenter in Britain's #1 best selling T'ai Chi DVD, Anthology of T'ai Chi & Qigong: The Prescription for the Future, and author of the acclaimed inspiration book, The Amateur Parent - A Book on Life, Death, War & Peace, and Everything Else in the Universe. It is available at www.smartaichi.com, and at amazon.com.
Bill is also the Founder of World T'ai Chi & Qigong Day:
worldtaichiday.org
and World Healing Day:
worldhealingday.org
now celebrated annually in 80 countries and recognized by the United Nations World Health Organization for it's healing work.
He is a media source on a host of natural health, social, & environmental issues and has been interviewed and/or published by media worldwide, including The New York Times and The South China Morning Post.
smartaichi.com
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