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Integrated Yawning and Stretching Technique - Videos

Revitalize your Chakra System by utilizing the dynamic energies of yawning and stretching.

A Series of Seven Video Clips

For a printable copy of the spoken text, please see the entry two blog entries down.
or click on the following address:
http://free-by-nature.blogspot.com/2009/01/integrated-yawning-and-stretching.html


Part 1 - Introduction to the "Integrated Yawning and Stretching Technique."
>

Part 2 - Introduction to the Seven Chakras.
The Crown Chakra Exercise.


Part 3 - The Brow and Throat Chakra Exercises.



Part 4 - The Heart Chakra and Solar Plexus Chakra Exercises.
Discussion on Cholesterol and the Brain.



Part 5 - Discussion about the Senses.
The Sacral and Root Chakra Exercises.



Part 6 - The Shoulder and Pelvis Exercise.



Part 7 - Putting it all together.
The Final Balance Exercise.



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Integrated Yawning and Stretching Technique

~~~

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Table of Contents

Part One (Introduction)

Integrated Yawning & Stretching Technique
Yawning & Stretching and the Lymph System
The Brain & Cholesterol
Yawning & Stretching and our Energy Centres
Our Energy Centres or Chakras
Intermezzo - Being centered in the Heart
Seven Levels of Well-Being

Part two (Exercises)

Crown Chakra
Brow Chakra
Throat Chakra
Heart Chakra
Solar Plexus Chakra
Cholesterol and the Brain
The Senses
Sacral Chakra
Root Chakra
Shoulders & Pelvis

Integrated Yawning & Stretching Technique


Revitalize your Chakra System
by utilizing the dynamic energies of
yawning & stretching

Part One

Introduction

Yawning & Stretching together probably belong to some of the most important physical movements that all of us do throughout the day - or actually... that all of us are supposed to do throughout the day. After all, if we do yawn or if we do stretch at all, doesn't it often go something like this, "Oh, I'm sorry!" while we hide a reluctant yawn behind our hands and stretch ourselves to the smallest extent possible? Don't we often just stretch ourselves in secret, hiding our stretches from most anybody, except maybe from the one we are facing in the bathroom mirror?
Of course, before we go to bed we are supposed to yawn and stretch - it is not for nothing that our body spontaneously sets us up to do it - the same as when we wake up in the morning. But we don't or hardly do it, having been made to believe that somehow it is not socially acceptable - at least not in public.
Luckily things are changing, but still, all too often we just don't have the time for it or we don't make time for it, instead we rush off to work and then, later in the day, we wonder why during the day we were so tired or sleepy. And when night comes, when we are finally ready to go to sleep, we are often so tired, too tired even to yawn & stretch, sometimes even too tired to fall asleep. (Gosh, it sounds like sex!)
Don't we often wonder why we cannot easily fall asleep, and don't we often wonder why - after we eventually fell asleep - why we could not wake up afreshed and with ease?

Yawning & Stretching and the Lymph System

Yawning and stretching may very well be one of the most important self-healing mechanisms that is built-in into our own body's dynamics. We've all seen how cats yawn and stretch, we've seen dogs do it and we may even have seen chickens do it. But we humans are probably the only type of being on earth that doesn't really fully appreciate that self-healing mechanism that yawning and stretching actually is. If it is something we do, it's the kind of thing we prefer to do away from others, not necessarily in the closet but surely mostly only in the privacy of our bedroom or maybe our living room. (Gosh, it still sounds like sex!)
We all know that yawning and stretching is catching... when someone yawns, doesn't almost everyone follow suit. It must be something we need, or why would we be doing it so automatically when we see others do it.

Although not generally known, the most important function of yawning and stretching is that their combined movements activate and mobilize our lymphatic system.

As most of us live quite a sedentary life (or should we call it a slouching life?) our lymphatic system - which is a system that doesn't have a heart to move its fluids - almost entirely relies on physical body movements to circulate them. If we don't move, those lymph liquids don't move, they just don't get circulated well enough to be effectively discharged into our circulatory system to be transported to the various filtering glands where toxins and waste products are removed to be eliminated from the body via the kidneys and the urinary system.

We know we should be quite mobile, we should move a lot, but we often don't, at least not without some resistance, some reluctance. Thus most people's lymph system or auto-immune system has gotten rather sluggish and slow. It is not for nothing that we get all kinds of sicknesses and diseases, cancer, fibromyalgia, colds, flues, chronic fatigue syndrome, hives, shingles, etc. This is not to say that yawning and stretching is a miraculous cure for any of that, but its energetic dynamic is what the body comes equipped with: to cleanse, heal and restore itself to full functioning in ease while undoing dis-ease.

The Brain & Cholesterol

The following notion is probably a new thing to most of us: the brain consists totally of brain cells - of course - but did you know that these brain cells are actually... fat cells... and did you know that these fat cells consist mostly of cholesterol!

Cholesterol!
Isn't that curious?
The same type of cholesterol that we have in our blood!

Although this cholesterol can clog the circulatory system, it is the same cholesterol that is supposed to run freely through our circulatory system to reach our brain and tissue of the nervous system. That very same cholesterol that can be so bad for us, is actually indispensable for the proper functioning of our brain and nervous system.
Shouldn't we wonder why we have cholesterol in our blood and why our brain is mostly cholesterol? Shouldn't we wonder about what the relationship is between the brain and our body's cholesterol, wherever it happens to be located?

Let's say you live a normal life, I mean a normal good life and everything is going quite fine. Nothing is really too stressful, you sleep well, you eat reasonably well, you even exercise regularly, you are in good shape and all that. Well, in that case, you do all your movements energetically, naturally and easily. In that case also, your lymphatic system is OK, your circulatory system is OK, your nervous system is OK, your muscles are OK, everything works OK. When that is the case, your brain rejuvenates itself by itself. Everyday it actually rids itself of old brain cells and everyday the lymph and the red blood system take great care to replace old brain and nerve tissue with new tissue.
Hmm, come to think of it, could it be that that cholesterol in our blood is meant for that? Could it be that cholesterol is waiting in our veins, ready to occupy our head, to occupy our mind positively so to speak, instead of worrying us?
Too many people of course don't live that kind of good life! What really happens with most of us is that at the end of the day we tend to say or think, "I should have done this...", "I should have done that...", or "I should not have done this..." and "I should not have done that..." Eventually we go to bed but we can't sleep - not right away anyway - and we find that our thoughts are going round and round in circles, circling inside our brain. Actually one could almost say that our brain's fat cells are being stirred in their container while having a hard time being replenished in due time!
People that are not generally happy - this could be you of course - people that feel too often somewhat low or depressed, people that have been traumatized, people that have been prevented or are stymied to live their life the way they'd like to live, their physical dynamic energetic state is falling short.
Let's say, this is about you. Let's say that you want to be joyful and playful but that you have almost given up. Let's say that it appears to be hard for you to simply be happy in this world, that you feel kinda' held back... if that is the case, could it be that your brain cells don't get replaced and rejuvenated often enough anymore. Could it be that why life seems to be the same old grind... the same old stuff?
Could be! Let's have a look. For starters, perhaps you hardly yawn and stretch anymore, the circulation of your whole system doesn't work too well anymore and those brain cells... well, they just sit there. Could it be that those cells have gone bad, something like cooking oil turned rancid?
Some centuries ago in Europe, when Renaissance scientists started to practice anatomy on human remains in order to find out what their internal organs looked like, they found, after dissecting the craniums of their specimens, that the brains of many (curiously enough often the remains of criminals and inmates from workhouses and asylums) did not reek too well, that they were 'kind of smelly'! Rancid perhaps?

That should make one want to think afresh.

Maybe, although it is not a happy thought, we should think of it this way: if we are not living a happy and open life, a joyful and dynamically energetic one, could it be that our brain is on it's way to 'going bad'?
Now, that - a brain going bad - that could be what makes us forget to sleep well, to think well, that could be what makes us forget and 'forget' to live well.
I suggest that, as our brain cells don't get reworked, replenished or replaced, that they turn bad, and that it is then that the thoughts that are associated with those brain cells, go round and round in circles in our mind, keeping us awake, but not freshly awake and definitely not acutely and happily aware.
Let's see what we can do about it. I suggest that we've got it in us to get it right again; that it just something that can be re-awakened or re-activated again.

Yawning & Stretching and our Energy Centres

Wouldn't it be nice if we could get rid of those old brain cells? And, while we are at it, wouldn't it be nice if we could also rid ourselves of any other waste products that have such a hard time leaving our bodies?
Well, we are going to do just that. That is what the yawning and stretching exercises dealt with here are about. What we are going to do is yawning and stretching, but in an integrated way.
Although up to now it may have sounded as though it is primarily the brain that needs our attention, but we are not going to do this yawning and stretching just for the brain, we are going to do it for the whole of us, our whole being... and also not just for the body but for the less physical aspects of us as well: our spirit, our mind, our creative faculties (the procreative system included), the systems that we use to express ourselves functionally and the faculties we use to express ourselves emotionally. We will even work on that body level where our will power is situated - not only our gut feelings but also the gut as related to our digestive system and system for elimination.

I've broken the 'Integrated Yawning & Stretching Technique' down into seven main steps according to the seven centers of energy or chakras that we find in all their various forms and formulations in the physical as well as the metaphysical build-up of our entire human reality.

You may know already that we have seven energetic centres of concentrated, enhanced feelings in our being, a complex of inner energies that in Oriental terms goes by the name of the Chakra System. The Western notion of those energy centers or chakras is generally believed to have its origins in Oriental thought, especially Hinduism, as understanding of the nature of these centres was spread widely by Yoga teachings as well as Ayurvedic healing practices. Various other terms to do with the human energy body in general (such as the aura) and the concentrations of energy within it in particular (such as Shakti, Qi and Kundalini) amongst many other Ayurvedic and Yogic terms (such as yin, yang, etc.) have found their way into current Western alternative ways of people helping each other healing themselves. Reiki, Healing Touch, Energy Medicine, Acupuncture, Reflexology, Feng Shui, etc. have greatly popularized that terminology.

It would not be totally right however to conclude that the notion of for example chakras solely originated in the East. In the West there exist similar notions although they were never fully and clearly given specific formalized names. In the West though, these notions tend to have more negative connotations about them (as will be illustrated below) whereas in the East chakras are primarily seen and experienced as positive faculties, unless they ended up as temporarily deficient or defunct and thus in need of balancing.
Let me illustrate the Western notions about these energy centres with a few examples. Each example points at a location of emotional energy in our body and is just one of many other examples that can be given for each location in particular.
I'll leave it to the reader to tag each of the following examples with the appropriate chakra label. I'm purposely listing the examples in random order, enticing the interested reader to put them in some logical sequence according to the conventional oriental descriptions of the chakras. (The chakras will be described in more detail in the section that follows the examples.)

• The chest centre: Imagine a mother seeing a child that is suddenly crossing the road. Imagine how the mother would quickly bring both her hands to her chest, holding her breath while doing this.
  
• The forehead centre: You are sitting at your desk pondering a challenge that is confusing you greatly. You are bringing your hands to your forehead massaging your face and rubbing your eyes. You only seem to see objections or impediments to any possible creative solution.
  
• The navel centre: You may once have experienced an uncomfortable empty feeling in the pit of your stomach area, a nervous anxiety felt physically just above your belly button. You may remember how you reached there with both your hands to express concern or to bring some comfort?
  
• The creative centre: Imagine that you once heard someone say, "My stomach turned when I heard how this child was sexually molested..." You may feel a certain nervous sensation in the lower belly area around the sexual glands and organs.
  
• The neck and shoulder centre: Imagine someone who lost her job a while ago and who cannot seem to come up with any reason to find herself worthy of life, let alone another job. There she sits, shoulders hunched, head pulled in and bent forward, repeatedly bringing her hands to her eck as if to massage it while attempting to breathe but just not managing it.
  
• The anal/pubic centre: You may know someone who is quite 'anal', maybe obsessive compulsive. Try to imagine vividly that you see that person acting out that way. Can you imagine how you might be contracting your own muscles in the lower pelvis and buttocks as you are visualizing it?
  
• The crown of the head centre: You may once have been throwing up your hands while looking upward in utter despair, having given up all expectations in finding peace within yourself and the world, "No hope in hell even!" so to speak, and you felt like saying, "Just forget about heaven, even God."

Our Energy Centres or Chakras

What follows is a more formal description of the chakras with some added insights that may differ from the more conventional view on this subject.

1. Starting from the bottom up, you'll first find the Root Chakra... in fact... you are sitting on it. The Root Chakra's energy actually runs from the anus to the mouth and vice versa, following the length of the alimentary tract. Interesting (and you may already have spotted it,) when one yawns a little more intensively than usual, one does a lot of work with the whole body. Notice that when one yawns, from the moment one opens one's mouth that there is at the same time a lot of stuff happening 'down there'. In general the Root Chakra has to do with one's physical well-being.

2. The second chakra from the bottom, the Sacral Chakra, has to do with sexuality, creativity, the sexual organs, their hormones and other glandular secretions: human procreativity but also, but that more in general, physical creativity. It depends on one's age how that creativity gets expressed and realized. Overall this chakra deals with the physical creative impulses and energies needed to realize (to make real) what we imagine and visualize to create. This second chakra from the bottom works in close concert with the second chakra from the top: the Brow Chakra.

3. The third chakra - the Navel Chakra - has a lot to do with our gut and... gut feelings. Come to think of it, when we address our gut feelings, we are expressing something like, "If I had a free will and if my mind were clear I would know exactly what to do!" Our physical willpower is concentrated in this energy center (also called 'hara') and it emanates from there.

4. The chakra next up is the Heart Chakra, the chakra that has to do with 'heart felt' emotions. But there is much more to this centre of emotional energy.

Intermezzo - Being centered in the Heart

The spectral colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) are often brought up when chakra energies are discussed. The colours for the three lower chakras are - in sequence - red, orange and yellow.

I haven't identified and named the top three chakras yet, the ones above the Heart Chakra, so let me mention them for now in relation to their associated colors. From the top down they are the Crown, the Brow and the Throat Chakras and their colors are - again in sequence - purple, indigo and blue.

Imagine that you take the bottom three chakra colors (red, orange yellow) and that you take the top three chakra colors (purple, indigo and blue) and that you bring them together. There where they meet - between the yellow and the blue - you get green!

Now, isn't that curious, green is the color for the Heart Chakra!

Putting it differently: visualize "Mother Earth's" energy ascending from below through the Root, the Sacral and Solar Plexus Chakras, also visualize how the forces from the universe above - "Father Sun's" energy so to speak - descend from above through the Crown, Brow and Throat Chakras. Now visualize that these two grand energetic flows join up in the Heart Chakra... Now isn’t it that how we get balanced?

Could that be why nature's flora is generally green?

The 'coming together' of these grand energies into each of us, while concentrated and centered in the Heart Chakra, is what causes the Heart Chakra - the core of our being - to be a most powerful centre. The Heart Chakra is where we create and realize balance, harmony, where we can experience life and love in its finest form.
But there is even more to the Heart Chakra....but more on that later, for now let's return to the remaining chakra descriptions.

Our Energy Centres or Chakras (continued)

5. The next chakra up is the Throat Chakra, and as noted above, its color is blue. The Throat Chakra employs energies that enable us to express ourselves functionally as well as vocationally, very often aided by powers of verbal expression, for some poetic even, for some more melodious, as through song. This chakra deals with how we function in the world as related to our fellow human beings. The word 'vocation' by the way, has to do with how we respond to our calling (an internal or external voice that may be calling us) and how we voice ourselves through our functioning in the world.

6. The next chakra up is the Brow Chakra, the color being indigo. Think of indigo as the color of the night sky and imagine being outside on a starry night, feeling inspired to ponder the deeper questions of life, the very personal ones and the more fundamental, universal ones. Imagine that you conclude that (1) intelligence, (2) aspiration, (3) inspiration and (4) imagination are involved in this. These four together form one complex continuum that represents the creative aspect of something grand that is normally only intuited as an aspect of all reality. Some special structures and glands that we carry in our head in addition to our brain are especially suited to operate in and process these levels of reality.

7. The uppermost chakra is the Crown Chakra and is represented by the color purple. Through this chakra we can realize the unconditional oneness of all reality from which a full range of energies manifest themselves into a dimension transcending presentation of varied phenomena, from the smallest to the largest, the grossest to the subtlest. It is through this chakra that we integrate the physical and metaphysical realities of our entire being. The complexity of our brain in combination with the pineal gland and structures like the five paired ventricles is well suited to not only intuit but also contact full reality - some call it divine - even with the individual physical manifestation that we now enjoy living as a human being on earth.

Seven Levels of Well-Being

There is a sequence to the functionality of the chakras, related as they are to seven levels of individual and personal well-being (notice the intended "strange" numbering):

7. spiritual well-being
6. mental well-being
5. vocational well-being
4. emotional well-being
3. will-power or volitional well-being
2. creative well-being
1. bodily well-being

One could say that the three lower chakras (1 to 3) emphasize the physical realities of our well-being and the three upper chakras (5 to 7) deal more with the metaphysical realities of our well-being, and, as indicated earlier, they join to balance each other as they get centered in the Heart Chakra: balancing our well-being as a whole.
That balance of our whole reality is expressed in and from the heart, the core of our being from which we live and love.

Let's go through the above sequence in more detail, first from the bottom up until we reach the Heart Chakra and then from the top down until we again reach the Heart Chakra:

• The Root Chakra (red) has to do with our bodily well-being and forms the physical health base (our grounding) for the next chakra up:
• The Sacral Chakra (orange) is concerned with our creative well-being as it is supported by and arises from our bodily well-being.
• The Solar Plexus chakra (yellow) follows this up while dealing with how we with a 'free will' and a 'clear mind' work out and put into action our volitional well-being by giving shape to the creative impulses that come from the Sacral Chakra.
• After that manifestation in the Solar Plexus, we reach and realize balance in the Heart Chakra (green): our emotional well-being. Once we respond to those balancing dynamics, we become empowered to use the 'divine' or 'universal' energies from the three top chakras.
• At this point we turn to the uppermost chakra, the Crown (purple) which represents and expresses our spiritual well-being and is the source inspiration for the Brow Chakra below.
• Through the Brow Chakra (indigo) we peruse and stimulate the energetic powers of intelligence, imagination, aspiration and inspiration - belonging seamlessly together - as we express it through our mental well-being.
• This is followed up by the way we express all of the above through the energetic powers of the Throat Chakra (blue) which represents our vocational and functional well-being.
• And thus we return to the Heart Chakra, from where and through which we emote all our physical as well as metaphysical realities.

There is another very interesting and important aspect about the core or centre in our being. In, from and through the Heart Centre originate three axes: a vertical axis, a horizontal one and an axis at ninety degrees to the first horizontal one:

1. Our physical well-being (from below) and our metaphysical well-being (from above) are brought together on the vertical axis.
2. On the horizontal axis, running between the left and right sides of our body, yin and yang characteristics are brought together so that they can balance into one integrated whole. Individually as man or woman we can than restore our original wholeness as it was intended for each of us from conception on.
3. On the other horizontal axis (the one between our front and back) our past and future are represented: that what is behind us and pushes us, and that what is in front of us and pulls us. After we have balanced our past and future, e.g. when not escaping into weird things, living in the past or being obsessed with the future, we live in the current moment: we are always just simply present.

At the cross point of these three axes, the point that in geometrics is called 'O' or 'Origin', we find and recognize our original authentic being: who we are when we are truly centered, when we are ourselves, authentic and original, from and in which we live and love in fullness and wholeness.

Part Two

Exercises

The text in this section parallels the spoken word on the DVD that can be special ordered, however the directions and explanations expand in more detail on a number of topics.

If you have the DVD, it is advisable to first practice the yawning and stretching exercises with the aid of the DVD, then at a later opportunity you can do the exercises again by following the directions from this text, but at your own pace.

The "Integrated Yawning & Stretching Technique" as demonstrated in this 'Exercises' section is broken down according to the seven energy centers or chakras that are distributed throughout the human body as described in the 'Introduction'.

Crown Chakra

In this first exercise we are going to concentrate on the head and the brain, that area of our body that physically processes Crown Chakra energies. The main aim of this exercise is to see if we can clear the brain from those cells that have, so to speak, served their purpose - the ones that have been 'overstaying their welcome'. These are the cells that are mostly connected to our negative thoughts, the ones that keep us awake at night, and also the ones that can almost incessantly keep our internal dialogue going.

• Move both your hands - clasped together with interwoven fingers - above your head. Hold the elbows wide while bending them slightly backwards. Hold your interwoven hand-palms above your head forming a sort of crown. Your hands may be turned up or down.
• Now close your eyes tight, real tight and breathe in. When you do this and while you inhale, you may hear some rumbling in your ears. That rumbling is important.
• Do it again, and listen for it while holding your breath... then exhale.
• Again, with your eyes tightly closed breathe in, but now, loosen your interwoven hands and stretch your arms out while you yawn again. Make sure that you make a sound with your vocal chords during this yawn. You may have noticed that the sound you made was pretty high - it should be. If not, do it again and go for a high pitch.
• While you stretch your arms, clench your hands tight like fists, really squished and yawn again. Notice, as you do that, how you are also stretching your biceps.
• Did you notice that while you closed your eyes tightly and while you were listening to the rumble inside your head that your face felt as though it looked sort of ugly?
• Do it again and see if you can feel it... yawn and inhale... hold your breath... yawn and exhale. Ugly face? Yes? But did you also find that it actually felt good?
• Try it again, and when you are done, this time also say that it felt good, "Ah, that feels good!" Did you notice that when you said "That feels good!" that your face started to feel and look rather blissful?!

It must be good for you, of course! We are talking to ourselves but in a positive way when we say that kind of words. All too often we speak in negative terms to ourselves, like "I should do this better...", "Next time I have to fix this up...", "I shouldn't have done this..." What about turning it around and say, "Ah, this feels good, I'm doing the right thing!" When you do that more often, you are going to feel more blissful and when you feel more blissful you are going to be a way nicer person to be with, and of course there will be much less stress and strife in your life.

So what happened, what actually took place inside your brain during this stretch of yawning?

In the brain we have an enormous number of tiny red blood vessels or 'capillaries'. Those capillaries reach every part of the brain. In addition to these red blood capillaries we also have as many white blood cell holding 'pre-lymphatic perivascular structures' in the brain,
(http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/julkaisut/mat/bioti/vk/jeltsch/10revie3.html section 3.6)
and what they do - when we squeeze our brain as much as we just did - they pick up waste products from our brain cells. In addition though, when we tighten our facial muscles and when we stretch our arms, when we squeeze our hands into fists AND when we yawn at the same time, the lymph vessels also absorb the waste products from the muscles that we squeeze and stretch: the lymph cells pick them up and transport them to the lymph nodes, and later, at some special locations under the clavicles and in the groin, the lymph system drains its charge into the red blood system which eventually transports the waste products to the liver and kidneys and... eventually... you go to the bathroom to get rid, so to speak, of those bad 'thoughts', 'feelings' and 'sensations' as well as other unwelcome substances or toxins that you may have picked up during the challenging moments of your daily life.
So what you just did, you concentrated on the brain and squished out many 'bad' brain cells as well as toxins and other waste products. But at this point they are still in the lymph system as they have not been transported to the filtering glands (e.g. the liver and kidneys) yet.

Brow Chakra

The next chakra that we are going to take care of is the Brow Chakra.

• This time we are going to put our hands on the level of the brow, about four inches away from the temples on both sides of the head.
  Notice that as you do this, you may already feel that you want to squeeze your hands real tight.
• Now while you are doing that, put some inside pressure behind your eyes, but this time don't tighten them, just keep them closed and start a yawn. Direct your yawning into the front of your brain, it is a bit hard to explain how to do that but just try it somehow. So yawn into your forehead and 'into your eyes'.
• Inhale... hold... exhale....and again but now with a deep yawn and... a sound with your vocal chords!
  You may already have noticed when you did this, that the pitch is a little lower that when you did the previous exercise for the Crown Chakra.
• Do this again and when done, again say to yourself that it feels good, "Mmm, my gosh, this feels so good!"
• Repeat this sequence, but now turn and twist your shoulders, your head slightly tilted back, the spine arched backwards.

Something else to be aware of! Did you notice that when you did the previous movement, that your hands and fingers were stretching and squeezing in an alternating manner?
Also, did you notice that you were bending, twisting and straightening your wrists as well? Spontaneously! Isn't it something?! Of course you had to, you've got lymph vessels and lymph nodes in the wrists, in the elbows (and of course under the armpits and in the chest area).
The thing with the lymph system is that it does not have a pumping organ like a heart to move its fluids around, so this bending, twisting, squeezing, inhaling, exhaling and yawning is really the only dynamic that keeps this system functioning effectively so that it can pick up and transport the waste products that our muscles and other organs let go off when we stretch, clench and squeeze them.
Another very important thing about yawning: there are three phases to it. The first phase is accompanied by inhalation, then there is the phase during which you hold your breath, followed by the third yawning phase when you breathe out.
Although it might not be obvious, but the middle phase is more important than one would at first suspect. Of course you have to breathe in air (first phase) to take in the oxygen that is needed for your energy metabolism. At some point later that oxygen combines with carbon in your system, much of which is a remnant from that energy metabolism process. This then produces the carbon dioxide that is usually seen as a waste product to be quickly eliminated (in the third phase). But that carbon dioxide is not immediately a waste product, because before you breathe it out it serves another purpose: as you are holding your breath in your body and especially while you are yawning (the second phase) that carbon dioxide helps dissolve much of the of crystallized waste material that you've been accumulating in your body. (Residue from sometimes inappropriate DNA methylation. See "Chemical caps called methyl groups onto our DNA."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026845.000-memories-may-be-stored-on-your-dna.html)
Without that dissolving process in which carbon dioxide serves as a catalyst, certain waste products will not be absorbed by the lymph system. Unless those waste products have been processed by carbon dioxide, they cannot be readily eliminated from your system.
So during this middle phase of yawning and stretching, for those who suffer from arthritis or rheumatism, people who suffer from fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome, those who have chronic muscle pain or frequent muscle spasms or those who have over-sensitive nerves, the crystallized waste products in their bodies that can be the cause of these type of ailments, can get more efficiently dissolved and disposed of.
So, holding your yawn, even if only for a brief moment while you are stretching, is very important. It will pay off to be very attentive of that holding phase in all of the upcoming exercises.

Throat Chakra

The next energy center we are going to pay attention to is the Throat Chakra. The Throat Chakra has to do with how we express ourselves.
Remember the Crown Chakra represents our spiritual health, the Brow Chakra represents the energies that express that spiritual health through creative imagination, inspiration, aspiration and intelligence and the Throat Chakra in turn expresses that in how we speak for ourselves, how we speak out, how we answer to our calling and how we voice ourselves in our vocation through our calling. Thus the Throat Chakra has also very much to do with how we professionally function in the world.
When we concentrate our yawning and stretching on the throat and the neck, an additional process, not well known to most of us, gets stimulated: under the clavicles the lymph vessels dump their waste into the 'sub-clavicle veins' of the circulatory system.
By the way, further down the line, when our blood reaches the liver or the kidneys, those glands can do their work only well enough if there is enough lymph in the blood - much like your washing machine: it won't work as intended if you don't add soap to the water with the clothes to be washed. Part of that lymph fluid that gets dumped into the red blood system ensures that the filtering organs do their work more efficiently so that the filtering can be done more effectively.

• We begin with putting our clenched hands on the same level as the throat with our elbows bent and wide while pushing them to the back. While we yawn into this area, the sound that our vocal chords make is going to be lower again. So yawn and inhale... hold... and exhale.
  With this exercise we are also going to pay extra attention to the shoulders, because as the Throat Chakra deals with your answer to your calling, it has also much to do with the weight on your shoulders: responsibility. And as you know, most of us take way too much on our shoulders, or if not that, we get too much put on them. But now we want to get rid of that excess.
• So start squeezing it out - squeezing those shoulder muscles -
  They squeeze out all that stress that our muscles have picked up over the years.
• Yawn and inhale... hold... and exhale...
  Notice again the sound that you make.
• While repeating this, now bend from the waist and 'tumble' left and right, while you also turn your torso. All very good for the spine.
• Repeat this and while you keep your head backwards, now stretch your arms wide and observe that when you do that, that the shoulders loosen up.

You have been ridding yourself of all that stuff that you wanted to get rid of, another reason to say again, "This feels good!"
I hope, eventually that comes by itself.

By the way, we are doing these exercises while sitting down as for some it is easier to retain their balance, but there is of course nothing against doing them standing up as well.

Heart Chakra

For the Heart Chakra we will concentrate on the chest area. But when we concentrate on this area it's not only to be aware of oxygen entering our lungs, it is also to become aware of a gland behind our breast bone or sternum. Behind the sternum is a very important gland: the 'thymus gland' and it produces the leukocytes or white blood cells that are needed in our lymphatic or auto-immune system.
Anatomists of the 17th and 18th centuries found that the bodies on which they performed their dissections (the bodies of criminals and the poor, those from the workhouses and asylums) that their thymus glands had become atrophied - had almost died off, disappeared. They thought that this atrophy had to do with aging and that it happened to everybody. They did not consider well enough though that their sample did not represent normal, well functioning humans and that atrophy of the thymus gland could very well be more prevalent amongst those who found reasons to give up hope in life and happiness, than amongst others. It stands to reason, that when you don't appreciate yourself, when you don't love yourself enough - also when you don't appreciate the existence of other people with enough love - that the internal organs that represent that appreciation and which safe-guard it on the physical level, that those glands, become sluggish, dysfunction and may eventually atrophy. If you don't love yourself and you don't love others, your auto-immune system that is supposed to take care of the stresses of life and to defend it against external invaders into one's environment, may find less and less reason to stay around.
At any rate, it has been found that the thymus gland does not have to atrophy and that it can be re-stimulated into effective functioning.
In this exercise we are going to re-stimulate the functioning of the thymus gland. If we do this every day, the thymus gland will actually increases in size and... you will also spontaneously start to appreciate yourself more. After all, it's on the level of the heart and as it is said, "Love your neighbor as you love yourself..." well, if you don't love yourself, how can you love your neighbor?!
So all this has to do with loving ourselves and others but actually in the first place... our own body. If we didn't have a body, there would be nothing to love, not self, not others.

• Hold your elbows on the same level as the heart and lungs, and while pulling them backward, bend your arms and hands toward your shoulders and yawn deeply while you focus on your inhalation, holding and exhalation.
  Again, notice the sound from the vocal chords: it is lower again than with the previous exercise.
• Now, while doing this, also push out your breast bone... inhale... and hold... expand the sternum...and exhale.
• Do this sequence again but now, while you are holding your breath, pay attention to your ribs to one side of the sternum and spine... and exhale.
• Breathe in again but now more into one side of the lungs while you expand the ribs on that side of your body... hold... and exhale.
• Repeat the previous steps for the other side of the rib case and lungs.

While you are holding your breath for an extended time, feel the muscles in between your ribs, in the front as well as the back. They hold so much stress and... many bad memories as well, probably from when you were disciplined, or from when you had to carry your weight (and maybe other people's weight as well) or from when you were not allowed or enabled to be free, when you were made to feel down. All that is all carried in those muscles, and now by stretching them, the physical deposits of those negative feelings - the depressed feelings as well as the repressed ones - you are actually going to expel them. You are going to dissolve them and later, through the urinary system, you will eliminate them.
Did you observe that as you were doing this that you were starting to twist and turn your spine? Did you already notice that some of your vertebrae were trying to slip back into place? You may already have heard some clicking and felt some spontaneous spinal vertebrae adjustments.

Solar Plexus Chakra

After all these exercises the blood contains so many waste products that we now have to get rid of them. The organs that we have in our body that can filter them out are of course the liver and the kidneys. It's too bad that these organs - in too many of us - just 'kind of hang out' there just like we used to just 'kind of hang out', maybe smoking, maybe drinking. Let's see if we can massage them back to a higher vitality. The liver was already massaged during the previous exercise when you twisted and turned your torso and concentrated on the thymus and the lungs, inflating and deflating the ribcage. In this exercise we are going to pay special attention to the kidneys.

• Place your thumbs on your back just above your hips, to the left and right of your spine. There are two soft spots there. For most people those are not just two soft spots, they are sensitive spots, they can even be quite painful. That's where your kidneys are. When that area is sensitive it means the kidneys are stressed, they must have had too much going through them that they could not treat effectively. (There was likely not enough lymph type of fluid in the blood.) They have been working overtime doing the filtering without really being able to get rid of all the waste products.
• At this point, with your thumbs still in the kidney region, your fingers around the waist, start pushing your elbows gently backward, and slowly twist and turn the torso.
• Lean forward to the left, then lean backward to the right, then lean forward to the right and twist back to left.
• Initiate a yawn and keep repeating these movements.
• Inhale... hold your breath... and exhale while you let your vocal chords make a very low sound, almost a roar.
• Do this again without the twisting, but now, when you are breathing in, lower your diaphragm and push your belly out while also arch back a bit. Inhale... hold ... exhale.
• Relax to a normal sitting position.

Cholesterol and the Brain

Let's just take a break for a few moments.
I already mentioned that our brain and much of our nerve tissue (even our spinal chord) consists mostly of cholesterol... fat that is! But the fat around our intestines, closest to the intestines also consists mostly of cholesterol. That begs the question, is there a brain/belly connection and does cholesterol have something to do with it?
Maybe it can be said - I even read something like that in a science magazine (to do with cattle) - that cholesterol around the intestines, the way it deals with the nerve tissues there, that it points to something like a 'body brain'. We could say that in our head we have our 'mind brain', while the fat and nerves down around the intestines represent some-thing that could be called the 'body brain'. I'm not saying that the excess fat that we may have in that area represents the body brain, it is only the fatty nerve tissue closest to the intestines that should be seen that way.
Could that have to do with the fact that cholesterol gets (or should be) transported from the digestive system to the brain to rejuvenate the brain's nerve cells (except that for most of us, it doesn't reach the brain but instead it ends up clogging the arteries)? Could it be that cholesterol is supposed to be picked up by the blood, move through the veins, to be sent to the brain in order to help replacing or rejuvenating those brain cells that we dealt with in our very first exercise, the Crown Chakra exercise?

"Why do we yawn?"

The answer one hears most often is that we yawn to bring oxygen to the brain. But is that actually so?
Maybe it is kind of stupid to say that, as that is only a very small detail in a larger picture. Let's find out...

Let's imagine that you are waiting at a bus stop, and while there you are wondering aloud why there are so many trailer trucks on the highway, driving into and out of town. Let's say that someone answers you with, "Well, that's obvious..." and while pointing at the large gas tanks that are suspended underneath the trucks that are racing by, that person adds, "Those trucks bring gasoline into and out of town..." ignoring the fact that the trailers that are being pulled are filled with food and building supplies, etc.
Of course you know that such an answer is silly.
It is the same with yawning: is it really to bring oxygen to the brain? No, but although oxygen drives an important part of the yawning process we are dealing with here, it is not the just oxygen that is at play here. The reason why we yawn is to ensure that the circulatory and lymph systems work well, especially in case of the lymph system so that it can carry off the waste remains from our metabolism or from its defences to keep external environmental invaders at bay. In addition, in case of the blood supply to the brain, oxygen is needed to prepare the brain but especially to help open up its doors for the materials needed to rejuvenate the brain cells: potassium, sulphur, phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, etc. Those minerals are supposed to be supplied timely and regularly, but when the supplies are not delivered in time or readily available, yawning kick-starts the tired brain's metabolism.
Too bad it is most of the time 'just in time' and at the last moment.

The Senses

Now that your brain is getting its cells spruced up, it is probably good to also pay attention to non-material input for the brain - not just physical nutrients that physically sustain it, but also fresh mental input that keeps the brain vibrant and alert.

Possibly up to quite recently you may have lived in a rut, you may have been doing the same kinds of things day after day, you may have smelled the roses once in a while, but much variation there may not have been in your day-to-day life. We all tend to become children of habit and after a while we take our sensorial input for granted. But now that our brain is getting reworked physically, it would be good to give our senses some new fresh input, mentally and sensorially.

For the sense of smell, next time when you buy flowers, smell them even more attentively. If you are interested in essential oils or aromatherapy, good for you, smell their fragrances but also smell the fragrances of nature more attentively, the fragrance of the baby's skin, the fragrance of the person you love, the fragrance of when you've just washed yourself, or after you have been for a nature walk.

For the sense of sight, colors: red orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, pink, turquoise, burgundy, and all the shades and hues in between! Every week buy yourself some flowers, not only for their fragrance but also for their color. (Don't wait till your partner gets them for you, buy them for yourself or buy them for the two of you.) Every day concentrate on a different color in your bouquet. Maybe one day red stands out, you probably need red for a fresh physical start, another day purple may stand out, maybe you need purple for finer inspiration. Another day or week you don't want flowers, you may just want to buy a plant with beautiful green leaves, maybe because you are in the phase of creating or achieving balance or you are ready to... celebrate it.
When you go to bed, what you wear, pick a different color, a color that you feel freshly attracted to (which of course might depend on your subconscious needs): red for a new beginning, orange to find creative solutions and yellow for applying them, green for the balance and blue to talk about it, to express it or even to sing about it, indigo to get new inspiration or to let your mind become alert again, and purple to become more aware of the higher, more subtle realities.

For the other senses like touch and hearing start looking more at art, go to concerts, museums, bookstores. Look at art books and think of travel to get in touch with what you saw in the books that inspired you to travel. As for touch, when dressing yourself, get yourself some garments with materials of different textures, and feel what it does to you.

And we haven't even talked about the sense of taste... surprise yourself, the past is a poor template for the future, you may now appreciate tastes you never thought you would.

By the way, although it may seem counterintuitive if you are from a more Western culture and have acquired sombre feelings about wearing black, wearing black is actually very good as it enables you to absorb less familiar energies. Black enables you to take in the unfamiliar and your mind... (after all, your mind is now more nimble with all that new sensorial input) is going to be able to reinterpret and re-evaluate things that you once may have thought were not for you.

As distinct from black, white protects you: it wards off that what is not supposed to come at you. So if you are experiencing a period during which you are in need to protect yourself, use white.
Following that, after you have regained trust and self-confidence use black but...with appropriate color accents: when you use black, make sure that there is just a touch of color, maybe some orange one day, some red the next or blue, etc., what-ever seems right. That accent color then represents the main transformative theme you want to concentrate on for that day.

Sacral Chakra

The next chakra, the Sacral Chakra is situated in the sacral region and is controlled by the sexual organs and hormones. Its function is six-fold as it deals with creativity in a wide range of modalities, presenting itself across practical, emotional, individual and social levels.
After birth a baby's creative impulses are for the first time separate from the physical connection to the mother and depending on the age of the individual, this chakra's energy takes on different roles and meanings - and all that very much under the influence of a variety of hormones and other glandular secretions:

1. When a baby turns toddler, playful creativity and creative play become prevalent in a child's life.
2. When a child reaches school age, creative learning and learning in a creative environment is of paramount importance to a child.
3. During puberty a child's 'private parts' are for the first time taking centre stage in the context of sexuality and procreativity.
4. When mature an adult's creativity may begin to focus more and more on the creative guidance of those under their care.
5. When older and wiser still, life as realized by an adult at full maturity may inspire others to be creative in new ways. (Sometimes even quite different from previously accepted ways.)
6. By the end of human life, creativity may take on more universal connotations - after all, the human being is then getting ready to pass on from the physical realm into a realm that may be beyond it.

But let's return to the exercises.

• For this one we are going to stand up. Make sure that you have enough room to move.
• Put your hands to the left and right of your sexual organs, in the groin area where it is soft and warm.
  The reason we place our hands there is that it is the location of some of the most important lymph nodes. We have lymph nodes under the arm pits and we have lymph nodes in our 'leg pits': the groin.
  Because most of us live such a sedentary life, the lymph nodes in this region can be more sluggish than the ones in the armpit region so they need some extra attention.
• Put your feet about a foot and a half apart, lean back a bit while you also twist your torso slightly to one side.
• Now push out that side of the groin even more (the side that is already pointing forward).
• Letting go of your hands now, push that part of the groin forward. Were you able to do it while also yawning?
• Try it again.
• Now the other side, twist your torso the other way while you push that side of the groin forward.
  It is the groin we want to stretch, the lymph nodes there need to be stimulated so that they eventually drain themselves into the circulatory system.
  The lymph nodes under the arms and in the groin but also the ones in the chest and the belly are the ones that are affected the most in the case of certain cancers. When we start draining them, the chances for cancer to develop decrease.
• While you are doing these stretches also notice the back of the knee of the leg that is forward, it is also stretched!
• Now along with the other movements stretch one arm up and one arm downward and notice the stretched inside of your elbows, notice your ankles, notice your wrists. You are stretching them all.
  So while doing this exercise you actually stretch the whole of your lymphatic system, one side at a time.
• Practice this again while yawning and again, as before, notice the holding phase of your breathing.
  In this position you may even start to feel like Marilyn Monroe... she knew she was beautiful. You know that too now... about yourself!

When doing this, you may already have felt that this is good for all the soft organs inside your body, while also, at the same time, all the lymph vessels and lymph nodes are getting vitalized. And all that while you are feeling, "I'm beautiful, I love myself!"
Of course, if I may say so, if God loves us, we have to return it by loving ourselves lest we, by not feeling that we are lovable, call God a liar!
Love and compassion... If God is compassionate, we can be compassionate too, and when we are compassionate with ourselves we will also be compassionate with the world.

Root Chakra

The last chakra we are going to take care of is the Root Chakra and as mentioned in the Introduction its energy runs from the anus to the mouth, from the bottom of our being to the top and vice versa. That's why you will find that we are going to involve our whole body with this chakra.

• While standing up, stretch your left arm upwards, your palm pointing up, your wrist bent back and your fingers stretched.
• At the same time, while standing on your left leg, stretch your right leg sideways, your foot stretched as well, your toes pointing out and away from yourself, all the while stretching your right arm down and out, your palm pointing down and bent at the wrist.
  As you do this, observe that your calves and thighs are tensioned and that the knees are straight.
• Initiate a deep yawn, with the usual inhalation, holding and exhalation, again ensuring that the vocal chords make a sound... quite a low one.
• Now change position, standing straight on the right leg and having the right arm up, the left arm down and out while the left leg is stretched sideways.
• Again initiate your yawning and again pay attention to the breathing and the sound you voice is making.
• We can do this sitting down as well: imagine that you are sitting inside a balloon, a big balloon. Imagine that while you push your left leg and foot forward that you push them against the inside wall of the balloon, then while pulling the left leg in, push out the same way with the right leg and foot... alternate these movements a few times.
• Keep doing this repeatedly while you are now also getting your arms involved, push them against the insides of the balloon in an alternating manner.
• Initiate your yawning again, and again pay attention to the breathing as you did in all the previous exercises.

At this point we have covered the seven chakras and concentrated our yawning and stretching on all their energy locations. We pretty well covered our whole body... but still, more integration is in order!

Shoulders & Pelvis

When the Heart Chakra was addressed, we discussed the relationship between it and three axes: the two horizontal ones and the vertical axis - the three directions that control the three dimensions of the world we live in: the 'three degrees of freedom'.

I'll get back to those axes when I relate them to our shoulders and hips. But first we have to acknowledge that our shoulders and hips have something in common. In the first place both are an equal distance away from the centre of our body, in the second place both carry most of our stresses: stresses in the hips, stresses in the shoulders, we get back pain, we get neck pain: pain in the butt, pain in the neck!

We are going to do some special exercise for those two parts of our body. When those areas are balanced and move easily together as if in a dance, our whole being will be more open and all our energies will move more freely.

Let's break the shoulder and pelvis exercise down into small parts.

The Pelvis

We are going to take care of the hips first. The hips can - actually, they have to be able to - move easily around the vertical and the two horizontal axes... rocking smoothly forwards and backwards, rolling up and down at the sides, while turning in a half circular fashion - altogether a gyrating kind of continuous three dimensional pretzel like movement. Yes! Much like belly dancing!
Many people have some problem with fat around their hips. But we are in luck, people that are overweight when they do the following movements, they will actually start to feel quite a bit of lightness there. It is actually unbelievable that they can feel that light!

1. The pelvic tilt

This is the first part of a complete body dance that we will attempt to perform at the very end of this exercise section.

We will start the pelvic exercises by tilting the pelvis up-and-forward and back-and-upward along the horizontal axis that runs between both sides of the hips.

This exercise is extremely important for women after they have given birth, but also for men, especially men that are over sixty or so and are likely to get urinal and prostrate problems. This is going to help control the muscles around the bladder.

• Stand with your feet about a foot apart and at the same time pull your pelvis forward and upward. Hold this position for a second, then return the pelvis to the normal relaxed position.
• Do this again... forward and up... let go... and again, three times altogether.
  Observe that as you are pulling your pelvis upwards that the buttock muscles and the muscles around the sexual organs are getting a good exercise as well. Pull those muscles in tightly, as though you are holding your water.
• Repeat three more times, then relax for a moment.

Now we are going to move the pelvis up and down the other way: instead of forward-and-up it will now be backward-and-up.

• Push the bottom of your buttocks backward and up - a totally different set of muscles are involved now, especially those around the lower spine and in the waist!
• We are now ready to combine the previous two movements: forward/up and backward/up.
• Repeat this three times. Are you starting to feel that lighter weight yet?
• And again three times, but now while you inhale and exhale with each tilt.
  And what about yawning? It might even have come by itself!

2. The hip tilt

In this portion we are going to move the hips along the axis that runs at a ninety degree horizontal angle to the hips.

• Move your left hip up while you are also lifting your heel (leaving your toes on the floor.) It is OK to bend your left knee.
• Return to a relaxed position and do it again... altogether three times.
• Now do the same with the other hip, also three times.
• After this, alternate between both sides in sequence while you also concentrate on your breathing.
• Do this again, but now allow yourself to get your arms involved. Let them sway freely with the movements while you also allow your knee and ankle movement to become more fluid.
  The dance is starting to take shape, isn't it?!
  
  3. The pelvic twist

Let's take a breather as we are getting ready for the third portion of this sequence. This time we are going to move the hips along the vertical axis of the spine, rotating them back and forth.

• Stand up straight, concentrate on the spine and move one hip forward, then let it return to the normal relaxed position.
• Repeat this three times altogether.
• Now move the other hip forward and again relax, repeat this also three times.
• Now do both sides sequentially, three times back and forth for both sides.
• Repeat this, but now with some special attention to your breathing.
  But be aware, if you are moving your shoulders with this you are cheating, so see if you can keep the shoulders still while you are just rotating the hips along the vertical lower portion of the spine.
  It is OK to rotate your head in the same or the opposite direction, but try to keep the shoulders and the chest area still.
• If that is too hard, you can put your hands against a wall to help keeping shoulders in a still position while you are rotating the hips.

Of course this whole set of movement is extremely good for the lower spine.

If you are experiencing muscle pain, don't force yourself. Go just up to the point of pain but keep it acceptable. It has to feel good! It is not about, "No pain, no gain." If you feel pain, gently stop, slow down, relax! Next time you'll go further by itself.

4. The belly dance

• Let's put the three movements together into a belly-dance like continuously rotating movement.
  So there you go, try to go clockwise first and attempt to have all three elements flowing from one into the other: the pelvic tilt, the hip tilt and the pelvic twist.
• Now the other direction: counter-clockwise. (Remember the 'Hoola Hoop' days?)
  You may notice that one side is easier than the other side. But that will improve over time.

After you have loosened up this area, you may start to hear some clicking in the lower end of the spine: your vertebrae are starting to self-adjust. You may also feel and hear this clicking in your knees and your ankles. That is of course welcome, it's all part of the self realignment that the 'Integrated Yawning and Stretching Technique' is attempting to awaken.

The Shoulders

The final set of exercises will concentrate on the shoulders, and again we are going to use the three axes or the 'three degrees of freedom'.

1. The shoulder tilt

The first part of this set of movements is going to take advantage of our ability to slouch! Slouch? Yes!
Remember that you were not supposed to slouch. Didn't your mom and dad repeatedly warn you not to do it? But you know what, slouching can be good, you just have to do it with positive intent... that makes all the difference. So let's do it right.

• Imagine a horizontal line running through your shoulders from one side to the other.
• While standing up, bending forward a bit, drop your shoulders forward and just let them hang.
  Feels depressing? Well why not? Let's get into it!
• You may even try to look depressed... imagine that the pressure of life got you down and that you finally want to drop it all. So let's do, just let it go... all that responsibility that was so unfairly put on your shoulders!
• Why not think it aloud, "They should do it themselves! Why do they let me do all the work? Why do I constantly have to be at the ready - instantly even?!"
  Of course it's OK that you do lots of work for people, but at some point it may be the right time to let go of some of it... maybe even much of it. Let's at least pretend that we can.
• Drop your shoulders even more and let your hands almost reach the floor. Shake your hands and drop all that tired energy that your hands seem to be holding on to. "Hhrr..." Let go, you don't want it anymore! You only want to do what's good for the world but... not from guilt, not under duress, not under pressure.

Now did you let it go? It's OK, give all that negative energy to the earth... the earth will turn it into manure.

• Now that we have let go of much of it, we can now stand up straight again.
• Reach your hands up to the sky while you arch backwards as though looking the sun in the eye, saying," Give me more energy! Give me the energy and the passion to live!"
  That positive energy released quite a load of negative material and you want to drop it all, so bend forward and downward again, dangle your arms and shake that heaviness loose... all that stuff that has dragged you down... "Here, earth, you can turn it into plants, beautiful flowers, things that make me happy. I want to get rid of it, it surely did not make me happy, especially the way I was forced to use that energy!"
• Now we straighten up again, we'll let the sun shine on us again, and, as though we are a flower, we open up our petals and say, "Thank you, thank you sun for all that energy, and thank you earth for taking all that stuff that we don't want but that you can turn into all kinds of goodness."

2. The shoulder twist

In this part we are going to move the shoulders back and forth around the vertical axis. While doing the following movements try to hold your head and hips still.

• Standing erect and keeping the spine in mind, pull one of you shoulders forward while you push the other one to the back.
• Hold this position for a second. You can use the elbows to accentuate the direction. (If you want to raise them, that’s good.
  Some people may not be able to raise the elbows yet as there might be a lot of pain in that area. Do whatever you can, as long as it is comfortable.)
• Now do the same with both your shoulders, but the other way around.
• Again hold this position for a second then relax.
• Now repeat these two movements three times in sequence, taking care to breathe normally.
  Feel the twisting of your spine but also, while you are rotating, feel how your lungs are moving the oxygen in your lungs.
  Put your mind in your body!
• Repeat three more times, but this time allow your arms to move freely, you can even bend and straighten them in an alternating manner.

3. The shoulder lifts

• Standing up straight, lift you left shoulder up, then gently move it back and forth a few times...
• Now rotate that shoulder around a few times... first one way... then the other way.
  You may notice some clicking of the vertebra and shoulder bones.
• Relax into your normal position and after a moment stretch your neck and bend your head
  to the left and the right...
  then back and forth...
  and eventually rotate your head first one way...
  then the other.
• Relax for a moment.
• Lift your left shoulder up again, but now, while holding it still, pull your other shoulder down.
• After holding it for moment move it gently back and forth...
  then rotate it around one way...
  then the other way.
• Relax for a moment and now reverse this set of movement for the right shoulder: lift up... back and forth... rotate one way... rotate the other way... relax.
• Again gently bend your head and neck... move it back and forth... move it sideways... rotate one way... rotate the other... relax.
• Lift the right shoulder up again and while holding it up, pull the left shoulder down... back and forth... rotate one way... rotate the other way.
• Relax and again rotate you head and neck... and again relax.
• Now while still standing erect, at the same time and in an alternating manner rotate both your shoulders, first one way and then the other way.
  It is OK to have your head moving freely with this, but also, after a few rotations allow your arms to move freely. Let them sway as freely as they can.

As you probably already felt, this it is very good for freeing up the movement of the shoulder blades.
Combine all this with some attentive breathing.

Finishing it all off, the complete dance!

All that wonderful energy that runs in such physical ways through your body has now been revitalized and rekindled in a most integrated manner. It will get even better over time, and stay that way when you attend to the self healing powers of yawning and stretching as described in this integrated technique regularly, say, for about seven minutes every day, maybe three and a half minutes in the morning and three and a half minutes in the evening. In fact, doing these movements interspersed throughout your daily routine while varying your attention from one aspect of the technique to another, is even more effective.

Here's a good way to keep yourself reminded. Get a brightly colored sheet of paper and cut it into seven strips. Go through your house to seven different areas that you often pass through during your normal daily routine, take one of the strips and place it on the floor of each of these areas - near a doorstep is best. Every time you come across one of those strips, you are reminded to practice your yawning and stretching.
Let's' say you need to do some vacuum cleaning, so you go to the closet where the vacuum cleaner is, "Ah look, there's that colored piece of paper!"... as soon as you see it - even before you take the vacuum cleaner out - do some exercises first, then proceed with your vacuuming. When you are done, and as you are about to return your vacuum cleaner, "Ah, there's that piece of paper again!" and again you do some yawning and stretching. When you go to the kitchen, when you go to the bathroom, when you go to the carport, on the seven spots where you put a strip of colored paper you will be reminded.
When your friends ask you, "Why do you have these pieces of paper lying all around?" you say, "So that I don't forget to yawn and stretch!"
Before you know it becomes natural again.

When everything is right, let's say now, after you have practiced the separate exercises as demonstrated, see if you can do all the movements together in a seamless sequence. You might be able to turn it into a complete body dance...

Why not try it now!

Before you know you are dancing - a most wonderful thing!

If at some point in your life you catch yourself dancing spontaneously, perhaps then you can stop yawning and stretching, because then your life is fully integrated and... you are celebrating it.

50 Minute demonstration DVD of the

"Integrated Yawning and Stretching Technique "

Revitalize your Chakra System

by utilizing the dynamic energies

of yawning & stretching

· rejuvenate your central nervous system
· refresh your brain cells
· activate & drain your lymph system
· stimulate your circulatory system
· dissolve & excrete toxins
· restore your glandular system
· stress relieve your muscular system
· realign your spinal column

Developed and presented by
Wim Borsboom

To order this 50 Minute DVD contact:
AuraSphere Unlimited Living

408 Goward Road Victoria, BC Canada

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250 479 0001

wim_borsboom@yahoo.ca

© 2009
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A Side Effect of Alternative Healing Approaches

"…This is the shadow side of holistic medicines:
There is a tendency to turn illness or suffering into self-condemnation."

Ivan M. Granger
http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/blog/2008/04/22/health-suffering-and-spirit/

How true, tragic and sad!

Holistic and spiritual approaches to healing do not protect the ill person from bouts of self-incrimination, self accusation, shame, guilt and additional feelings of inadequacy when:
(1) healing does not take place,
(2) when an illness worsens,
(3) when an illness repeats itself after what seems to have been a healing episode, etc.

In fact, self-incriminating tendencies may even be worse for people who chose (or were led to choose) alternative healing modalities. It is unfortunate that the 'New Age paradigm' of illness and healing seems to have come with a number of moral judgments that are not only seen as pointing at the causes of being ill, but also as pointing out the reasons for not being able to heal oneself.

One of these notions seems to be the idea of personal past life Karma, another one is the idea that any acquired illness befalls you because of the choices you made or... did not make.

There is all too often an accusing finger pointing at the ill person and that finger points even stronger when an ill person does not seem to heal.

Someone who, so to speak, 'fails' the alternative healing modalities, will often carry an additional burden of 'forced' self incrimination, self accusation, self-condemnation, personal disappointment, guilt, shame, self-blame, an almost never ending finding-fault-with-oneself, self-loathing , self-hatred , desperation, etc... all preparations for and ingredients of some sort of mental, emotional and spiritual suicide.

A very sad thing! Not a sign at all of the compassion that adherents to alternative approaches in healing also tend to hold out for each other!

Hmmm?!
Could it be that these self-incriminating, self-blaming and self-doubting tendencies, however unwarranted and unjustified they actually are, by themselves add to illness, or make any illness worse?

Come to think of it, it might well be that any kind of unwarranted self-criticism is at the root of certain afflictions and illnesses.

That may be worth investigating...

If this is so, where does (1) this tendency to accuse oneself of being the cause of one's own suffering and misfortune, and (2) the assumption of one's own inadequacy and shortcomings come from?

If we end up having these kinds of tendencies, how did we come to adopt them so easily and identify with them?

As an aside:
If blaming others for one's ills and misfortunes is not deemed to be appropriate, how did we come to think that doing the same with ourselves IS?
Shouldn't we treat ourselves equally as compassionately and understandingly as we treat others?
In a manner of speaking, if God is compassionate with me should I not be as compassionate with myself? Why should I choose to be less compassionate and wise than God, even if it concerns myself?!

Isn't this whole judgmental fault-finding phenomenon, whether self- or other-directed, the basic affliction that pretty near all of humankind is affected by, the root cause of human suffering? Wasn't there some biblical figure of yore, someone who unfortunately and mistakenly also came to be attributed with godly qualities and names, who started this thing?

Could it be that this person 't r i c k e d' his fellow human beings into situations of peril, discomfort and insecurity so that mis-steps, mis-takes and weaknesses by 'his underlings' became unavoidable?

Could it be that this personage (and later similar personages) then took advantage of those situations and created subsequent schemes in which social and religious subservience became the norm for a new order (disorder actually)?!

Is it not that what 'religion' can also mean: to be bound, to live in bondage, bonded through subservience!? (Many etymologists connect the word 'religion' with 'religare' - to bind fast.)

Could it be that these kind of manipulative strategies lie at the root of most if not all subservience and unequal dependencies?

Could it be that subsequently that very same megalomaniac personage, the one with those 'divine' allures, then blamed his tricked victims for having put themselves freely in the path of his trickeries?

Did he perhaps identify his victims so often in that manner, that they eventually came to identify themselves according to his identifications, however false they were and however concocted in the first place? (If someone often enough shouts at you that you are mad, it is pretty well unavoidable that you eventually end up mad and... that then your (?) madness will be thrown back into your face!)

Could it be, eventually, that that pseudo-godly personage was able to have his victims become convinced that they were indeed the cause of their own misery and fallibility, that they had it coming because of 'the choices they made'... thus making them forget or disregard that they were originally tricked into 'their' weaknesses and inadequacies, exactly those that are now used against them?

Ah, fault finding and blaming eh!!!

Well, it must have started at some point and somewhere... But can we stop it; can we halt its momentum?

Insight into the dynamics of how all this might have come about should help!!!

But... too much speculation perhaps, so let me try a memory closer to home.
For myself I remember from early childhood that the very first time I was made to feel "stupid" by my older brother, that there was actually no reason or motivation whatsoever for his judgment about me... except that it must have made him feel quite superior, especially when he felt that he had been successful in making me feel shitty and stupid.
Initially, I remember, I objected strongly to his ploys, but over time, after many repeats, I noted how close I came to identify myself the very way he identified me.
Over time and under more duress, it became easier and easier :)) to at first assume and later even 'admit' that it was my own (?) stupidity that got me into a deeper and deeper mess: "Problems of your own making!"

Yeah right! Were they really???

Not that I have to blame my brother, my peers or myself; there are thousands of years of pseudo-divine history behind us, pushing us to replay the 'manipulative ploys of yore' on ourselves and each other...

But... no more!

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The Buddha's Eightfold Path.

The Buddha's Eightfold Path* consists of eight admonitions which he devised to assist human beings in their endeavor to:

• restore their original authenticity of self-expression as human/divine beings,
• restore harmony and unity at all levels and in all aspects of a human being's personal, social and universal existence.

The eight points of the Eightfold Path form a series of quite radical urgings in which the Buddha prompts a way of being and living that is altogether different from the way of life that most of us have become so accustomed to.
His suggestions point to an existential and essential authenticity of being-and-living that is radically holistic from the get-go. He advocates a living authenticity for each of us that is in actuality the realization of everyone's original intent and purpose at the moment of each person's initial conception - a way of being that is uniquely primed into each human being - uniquely seeded as it were into everyone at the moment of their individual conception.
(It is indeed quite unfortunate that so many of us have been made to lose sight of it so soon after birth.)

In the Eightfold Path the Buddha recognizes eight distinct attitudinal formative aspects of human life:
(1) insight,
(2) intent,
(3) vocal expression,
(4) action,
(5) lifestyle,
(6) effort,
(7) mindfulness and
(8) concentration,
each one being an essential tool in the realization (making real) of everyone's life.

The Buddha advises us to use these tools appropriately, effectively and with integrity. The Sanskrit adjective that he uses for this effective use is samyañc†, a Sanskrit word that traditionally gets translated as "right", as in, for example, "Right View", "Right action," "Right Speech", etc.
The word "right" however is a rather incomplete translation of samyañc, as it actually means “whole” or “complete", "integrating” and “completing” as well as “healing” in the sense of “making whole."
Samyañc carries the sense of a perfect, ideal and truthful state of being. Thus, words like “integrating”, “holistic”, “positive”, “healing” and “truthful” better represent the full meaning of the Buddha's use of the word samyañc.

The application and practice of the eight promptings that make up the Eightfold Path will enable those who are intent on the reclamation and realization (making tangibly real) of their original authentic being - the originally intended full expression of the human/divine Self that each human being so uniquely represents.
These promptings are designed to undo the habits and attitudes that up to then have tended to disturb most everyone's individual life and the lives of others they were up to then in contact with. The Buddha's suggestions will assist in un-learning and letting go of arbitrarily acquired character traits. They will help us to un-train ourselves from the artificially acquired habituated behaviors that we at various points in our lives were forced or tricked to adopt and identify with - adopted behaviors and manners that come from suffering, lead to suffering and keep suffering going.
These eight urgings form a practical - 'hands on' so to speak - heart, mind and willpower driven set of motivating tools that enable us to facilitate and realize our own and our fellow human beings' enlightenment and liberation.

To better understand and thus more effectively apply the Buddha's eight admonitions, we can subdivide them under three headings as they pertain to:
(a) insight & intent,
(b) conduct & action,
(c) mind & will.

Let me list them again accordingly but now also using the above suggested more appropriate representations of the word samyañc.

Insight & Intent:

• Right or All-encompassing Insight.
  (An integrative, “whole-making” view, understanding of, and insight into life and all of existence.)
• Right or Consistent and Steadfast Intent.
  (The intent to restore wholeness and harmony as the motivation behind all our actions and interactions in human life and in all of existence.)

Conduct & Action:

• Right or Truthful Vocal Expression.
  (Positive truthful communication skills that come from and lead to support, agreement, compassion and truth.)
• Right or Constructive Action.
  (Action aimed at restoring our own and everyone else’s wholeness, so that we may repair brokenness and fragmentation in human interaction and intercourse.)
• Right or Wholesome Lifestyle.
  (Wholesome, healthy, life sustaining and healing living practices.)

Mind & Will:

• Right or Well-Measured Effort.
  (Effective appropriate effort and willpower in all activities and actions.)
• Right or Pure Mindfulness, Clear Mindedness.
  (In order to always be positively mindful - to have our mind filled with truth only - we need to identify all negative thoughts as coming from the illusive realm of deception and deceit. We need to relegate all negativity to the realm of illusion - maya - so as not to give any negativity the semblance of reality, as negative thoughts are conceptual only, based as they are in fear and dependng on threats, they carry no tangible value in reality.)
• Right or Steadfast Unwavering Concentration.
  (Positive focus, mental concentration and steadfast motivation to advance our own and everyone else’s life in love and truth - sat chit ananda.)

Notes:
* See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_path
† The Sanskrit roots SAM or SA (meaning “taken together”, "integrated" or “same”) are the basis of such Indo-European words as the German zusammen or the Dutch samen which mean “together” or "taken as a whole." The English same and similar also derive from SAM, as does the word homo in homosexual. Homo- came to English via the Greek hama and homos which (surprise?) are also based on the Sanskrit root SAM. (Etymologically speaking, the “h” often replaces the “s”.)

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Pictures from India Trip early 2008

Mumbai, Royal Bombay Yachtclub, Sasoon Docks Fishing Village, Taj Mahal Hotel






Khajuraho







Indus Valley Collection in New Delhi







Hindu Sculptures in New Delhi

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Announcing the publication of:

A 180 page booklet, containing a collection of essays, correspondence, conversations and ruminations on:

• Awareness, reality and illusion.
• Impermanence and suffering.
• Suffering and illusion.
• Identity, ego and pseudo-self.
• Entrapment, subservience and apparent loss of freedom.
• The reclamation of innate freedom.

From the back cover:

"A surprise awaits the reader who accompanies the writer on his investigation into the dynamics and language of entrapment, dependency and suffering while he endeavors to uncover the causes of apparent loss of human freedom. Witness how he digs up clue after clue on how this innate and inherent freedom came to be treated as only conditionally available.You are invited to look over his shoulders and find out with him how humankind was made to believe that dependence and suffering define life more than freedom and happiness do, and to discover that the claim on unconditional freedom and happiness is not only warranted but realizable for everyone."

The booklet comes with: "Personal Power Pack(TM)," a mini booklet containing "points to ponder," a collection of phrases drawn from the main text that can be used for meditational consideration.

$20 (USD) plus shipping. To order phone 250-479-0001 (Canada) or send an email to: wim_borsboom@yahoo.ca

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Perfection anyone?

Aristotle (1) said that God is perfect and Thomas Aquinas (2) stated:

"Hence [God] is spoken of as universally perfect."

~ Summa Theologica, Question 4, The Perfection of God

Every child – from the moment of conception – comes with an inalienable right to something that also comes with whatever is needed to bring that something to completion... batteries included, so to speak.

This something can best be described by a rather technical term: 'entelechy', a word which not only describes the power of self-completion but also expresses the presence of an inward knowledge of what that completion actually entails.
Entelechy is usually understood to mean perfection and has come to us mostly via the Greek philosopher Aristotle. It has its roots in the Greek word telos which means end, goal or finish.
Another word that Aristotle liked to use - especially when he was listing the attributes of God - was the word teleios, a word that is usually translated by the word 'perfect'.
It would be good however to find out if Aristotle, when he used the word teleios, if he actually meant it to have the same meaning of 'perfection' the way we currently understand or interpret that word.

In our investigation into this it may be worthwhile to start off quoting someone else who is generally considered to have something meaningful to say about perfection: Jesus of Nazareth. A saying attributed to him goes:

"Be you therefore perfect as the father in the heavens is perfect."

~ Jesus, Matthew 5:48

... a saying which parallels Aristotle's and Thomas' view, so it looks like we are on target!

The word that Jesus used for 'perfect' was either the Aramaic gemara (gmr, complete) or the Greek teleios (or both, as Judea was very Hellenistic or Greek-minded in those days!) The problem is that in their context either word usually gets translated and interpreted as 'perfect', but... a kind of perfect that tends to include such moral connotations as being without flaw or being without sin.
This interpretation of flawlessness though (even if only subtly suggested or alluded to) is not correct, especially when we consider that the meaning of the Aramaic gemara is 'completion'.
When, in addition, we find that the word 'perfect' itself derives from the Latin per-facere which like gemara also means 'making full' or 'completing', we can be sure that 'being without flaw' or 'being sinfully inadequate' was not assumed to be included in the meaning of perfection at all.

Thus, when we encounter words like 'perfect' or 'perfection' in the translations of texts from the sages of yore, and if we want to clearly understand their original meaning and intent, we need to exclude any suggestion of 'being without fault' or 'flawlessness'.
In addition, if we want to be close to the original meaning and intent of Aristotle's, Thomas' or Jesus' words, our understanding and interpreation of the words 'perfection' and 'perfect' must include a strong sense of dynamic process.

It follows then that the process of completing then, the process of being made full, the process of bringing to an end is much closer in meaning to the original historical intent of the word teleios or its translation: 'perfect'.

Teleios stems from telos as in teleology.
Telos means goal, mark, target, end.

Perfection then, in those classical days, was seen as a process, a cosmic (3) process of circular, perhaps spiral karmic repetitions, recurring iterations of alpha-to-omega, the idea of a continuous creation going full circle, as depicted by the symbol of the ouroboros.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

If (that is 'if'!) creation would ever be nearing its end, it would become teteleios, it would be reaching a fuller completion! – this dynamic state of affairs though is not to be understood as something final, something 'all good without fault or blemish'. It is to be seen as something perfected through a process that naturally, dynamically and organically includes 'the ways of trial and error'. (By the way, etymologically the word 'error' does not contain any suggestion of fault, this in contrast to the word 'mistake'.)
It was only in the days of 'end-of-first-century-Christian-disappointment' (when the Second Coming did not materialize) and specifically under the influence of apocalyptic biblical paradigms, that creation-completion scenarios began to include apocalyptic 'end-of-time' themes. (Contrasting with the 'in-the-beginning' or 'bereshit' themes from the book of Genesis.) It became expected that at the completion of creation a final and absolute perfection would be reached... as in: "All is good, no flaws, no failures!" and subsequently anything that did not fit in with that "All is good" assessment was deemed to be burnt up forever through hell fire, 'forever' though according to the meaning of "gotten rid of for good."
(The idea of eternal hellfire and eternal suffering only developed later in an attempt - using the technique of fear instilling imaginations - to convince prospective believers and force prospective disbelievers into joining Catholicity.)

According to current science (and in line with the meaning of 'perfection' as expresed above) it is theorized that the universe's evolution is not over... "never over" so to speak. We are not finished, we are still per-fecting...
Yahweh's "It is all good!" might have been a bit premature.
(It is interesting that in the enactment of Jesus' dying on the cross, he is reported to have said, "Tetelestai" meaning "It is done, fully done." I don't think Jesus meant, "Well, that was just perfect.")

When did the moral meaning of 'perfect' in the sense of without fault, flaw, blemish or sin, come into use?

The history of the word telos goes back to the days of the bow-and-arrow.
Telos had to do with a set of concentric-circles-around-a-dot but also with a spiral as it is zooming into its centre. A telos was the target that was used to train warriors throwing catapults or shooting arrows.
Missing that mark when shooting an arrow or manipulating a catapult was called hamartia: "not being (ha) on target" in Greek. Only in the time that the gospels were being written and reedited (after Jesus' passing) did the word hamartia begin to mean 'sin' or being morally in debt. 'Missing the mark' or hamartia (4) came to mean 'sinful' only during the formation of institutional Christianity when 'not missing the mark' or 'being perfect' began to mean 'having no flaws' and 'being all good'.

But as pointed out above, Aristotle and even Jesus did not have that understanding of the word teleios as morally good and flawless (or that someone could be a sinner or a no-good). For them life was a process of continuity that even included pain, failure and flaws... the same way the Buddha saw suffering (dukkha) and change/transience (anitya).

Aristotle's word 'perfect' in 'God is Perfect' thus has a different meaning than 'being flawless'. His 'perfect' has to do with the evolving dynamics of the universe, the movement of stars and planets in circles and spirals – the idea of creation... which even includes processes that can seem to be off-target (hamartia) but which in the larger picture may not be off target at all.

Perfection is never a solid non-dynamic state.
Perfection is never 'in stasis'.

Perfection, when seen as per-facere or completion, is a dynamic process that never ends. (This, by the way, is also according to the Buddha's notion of change or transience: anitya.)

So when thinking about perfection or Aristotle's teleios, we have to keep a target in mind. Try visualizing a circle with a dot inside or even... a circle with an X marking the spot.
These kinds of symbols may remind us of a symbol from early Christianity: the one that came to represent the 'anointed messiah'. It consists of the Greek characters CHI and RO (XR) inside a circle. (Often also accompanied with the alpha & omega symbols!)

A simpler form of this symbol, but predating it by some two thousand years, can be found in the world's oldest and still undeciphered writing: the Indus Valley script. This symbol could stand for DHA , a Sanskrit root word meaning divine. It is found in words like deus, dieu, Jupiter, Zeus, theos, all having to do with divinity or deity.

Newgrange Tomb (5)

This leads us back to Aristotle who, when he described divine, creative and cosmic aspects, always pointed to the perfection of the heavens... just like Jesus did when he said, "Be you therefore perfect as the father in heavens is perfect."

So, according to Aristotle, there is a perfect God – perfecting that is – a divine prime mover responsible for all moving objects which in turn move other objects: the spirals (6) and circles of the heavenly bodies: moving and change. (The same idea as the Buddha’s "transience" the way it is described in the doctrine of "Dependent Origination" or Pratitya-Samutpada.)

The heavens are not some abstract abode (Greek: en tois uranois) for heavenly gods!
Instead, they are the havens – earth included – of heavenly "bodies" which involve all things and entities – humans included.

But let's return to entelechy, the process of completion, that bringing-to-an-end of something. An end though, that appears to be receding forever as the process itself is unending… the goal or target always being there but finessing itself to a finer and finer resolution as the process of fulfilling and per-fecting keeps working its ways.

Aristotle’s process of perfection is a natural growth process, one in which the end condition is that in which the initial planned potentiality is forever becoming an actuality… but gradually finer - with a sharper resolve as the process goes on.

Entelechy is more than an abstract plan, as it also contains hope and confidence for the fulfillment of its expectations. It is more than a multi-dimensional blueprint, as it is also imbued with the innate generative energy (KI in Sanskrit) necessary to bring the "plan" to an end (telos) and completion.

Pinecone Fountain, The Vatican (7)

We could represent entelechy visually with the symbol of a pinecone, a kind of proto-form that pre-visions and ener-getically holds within it what a completed pine tree will be when all conditions are as they are supposed to be… when everything unfolds as it should. A pinecone even contains a myriad of seeds within it to secure the generous continuity of its own species: the pine tree that produced the pinecone.

The entelechy model also takes into consideration ways to make the best of it, even when conditions or circumstances are less conducive to 'perfect completion'.

In the human application of entelechy there is even more evidence of that than in the entelechy processes found in flora and fauna, as the human model also holds within it ways on how to restore and work back to the original plan if later development did not turn out as the planned completion intended it to be.

In principle every child has already within itself an active ongoing process of perfection, not just as a potential but as a potency (8) already at work and in progress...

We as parents, caregivers and the earth’s custodians better not adversely affect our offspring's circumstances in their ability to process themselves to 'perfection'... If we would, we'd call upon ourselves Jesus’ words:

"It were well for him if a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, rather than that he should cause one of these little ones to stumble."

~ Jesus in Luke 17:2

Notes:

(1) Aristotle, 384 - 322 BCE
(2) Thomas Aquinas, 1225 - 1274 CE
(3) ...perfect as the father in 'heavens' or 'uranois' in Greek.
(4) Matter, haMartia, mark, maya, make, manas (mind), man, manipulate, la main (French hand).
Many words that start with MA have to do with hand-ling, shaping, seizing and measuring manually… by hand. Even the Sanskrit manas or mind expresses that: the mind gets its data from hand-ling or per-ception. (Perception literally means "capture by hand.") We still find this Aryan/Sanskrit root MA in the French main, the German machen, the English manipulate, make, manufacture, measure, matter (even meter) and yes… in the Sanskrit word maya which originally meant 'the world of tangible measurable phenomena or matter'.
(5) As seen in the Newgrange Tomb Ireland. 3000 BCE.
(6) We still use words that have a history of at least 6000 years...
Just consider the following: our words THis, THat, THere (dies, das and da in German) start with a TH sound that in Greek is represented by the capital character theta... a circle with a cross, dash or dot inside, again similar to some of the oldest writing symbols from the Indus valley.
A different way of writing the Greek letter TH or theta was using a symbol that resembles the root sign √ but more fluid and rounded with a small spiral curve at the top.
Then there is the combination of a spiral and a + sign which stems from a sign that we also find in Chinese, a sign that also became one of the Reiki symbols. (Reiki or the sacred healing power of CHI.)
(7) As seen in the Pinecone Fountain, Vatican City Museum.
In the wedding ceremonies of old (especially the royal ones) based on rich pagan customs and fertility rituals, newly-weds were presented with pinecones. One can still see pinecones on the posts of nuptial beds and the balusters that led to the noble chambers. Outside on the terraces of French chateaux one still sees stone pinecones in all sizes.
(8) An inner self-healing mechanism called Kundalini is based on this potency, a restorative energy that heals on all levels of human reality: the physical, creative, volitional, emotional, vocational, intellectual and spiritual.

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Yes but...

You will very likely encounter viewpoints on this blog that you might be questioning, thoughts about topics that you are viewing from a different angle. That is to be expected, but it may be surprising to know that "bringing up the other side" is often no more than an acquired habituation, an automated habit, something like the "Yes, but..." syndrome. Even touching on this right now, may bring up that automatic response.
Here are two stories:

Jeremy about his father at a counseling session:

"The other day, I come home from a good day at school. During Phys Ed we discussed how we could train ourselves to become successful marathon runners. All enthusiastic about it, I bring it up during supper and finish up telling my dad, "From now on, everyday when I come home from school I’ll go for a run and…"
"Good son, but what about your homework!?"
He’s always saying things like that. It makes me so mad. Why does he always throw in stuff like that …, with everything I came up with?"

Lloyd and Karen:

Lloyd and Karen had decided on a new BMW. After they had visited the dealership, they agreed that they both liked the metallic purple-burgundy sedan and the iridescent teal one equally as much. They had something to celebrate, a positive change had happened in their relationship, the main reason really why they were getting this new vehicle.

"It is so much better now", Karen thought when the following morning her husband said with a look of generosity, "Honey, I’m needed at work today, so why don't you go to that BMW dealership and whatever color you decide, it is OK with me." And with a staccato in his voice he said, "You bring that beauty home, Baby!"

In her imagined anticipation, she already saw herself flipping a coin, "Whatever the outcome, that is what it will be!"

Later that day, when Lloyd came home and saw the new vehicle sparkling away in the driveway, she expected him to say, "Fantastic honey, just look at THAT beauty!" instead he said, with a look of exasperation and with that intonation that always made her feel so uneasy, "But honey, why didn't you take the other color?"
"Why dear?" she wondered, not really laughing, although it may have looked that way.
"Well, honey" he said, "I thought you liked the other color better."

She walked off to the car, turning pensive. Didn’t he say, "It’s OK with me?" And now… look at him. He still comes up with his predictable "other" option. And, darn it, he always turns things around on me. If it is this, it should’ve been that and if it is that, it should’ve been this. Will he ever stop saying, "It’s OK honey, but look at this way," or "It’s quite alright dear, but look at it from the other side…?"
But now she was happy, she got in, started the engine and drove away thinking aloud, "He just likes to disagree. He likes it the other way, no matter what the first way was!"
She pressed the accelerator hard, "I will be OUT of his way."
Karen and Lloyd brought this incident up during marriage counseling. The story started nice enough and at first it didn’t seem to be so serious as to lead to the row that eventually made them decide to get counseling.

Lloyd did get it… He began to notice what he did and at some point he burst out in laughter as he recognized how his voice and intonation, even his mannerisms, resembled his father's.
He decided that if he had picked all that up, he could also let it all be.

~~~

If we look at things one way, we are advised to look at those same things another way, but if we would have looked at those same things the other way, we would have been urged to look at them the first way.
No matter what, it often seems that we have it wrong, but… if we feel we have it right, it feels more right when we tell others they have it wrong.

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In the beginning

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Causality, interdependence, impermanence and suffering

Causality

Causality is quite a complex notion and when it comes down to it, it is hard to conclusively know exactly what causes what uniquely – it might even be impossible.

The internal and external complexities of things, entities, conditions and circumstances are so great that the best we can do is to say that everything influences everything else and that every one thing is influenced by every other thing – a kind of complex dance of mutuality and reciprocity between all things simple and complex.

In light of current scientific understanding of relativity, quantum mechanics and quantum statistics as well as current philosophical discoveries based on the above, this is probably the final wisdom we can end up with. (It is also a very ancient wisdom, as we will see later.)

The relationship between causation and suffering

We live in a world in which there is much human suffering, and in regards to that suffering we often hear the questions: "Why?" or "Why me?" Those questions invite us to look into causes, but rather than investigating causes, it may be better to first look at what causality actually is.
Currently, in the assignment of labels as to what are the causes and what are the effects in certain processes or developments, often these labels are considered interchangeable.
When we take a historical look at how causality or causation was understood, we will find that in the early history of human thinking, the interpretation of causality was quite different from how we tend to deal with it now. Early on causation was understood to be less linear.

At some point in time, time was consciously discovered, but all too soon a flawed understanding of how time operated (the assumption that time runs one way) altered the understanding of causality. It can be demonstrated how and why this flaw in understanding was being taken advantage of by certain early humans and how it became ill applied when some humans began using it for their own benefit to create inequality, dependency and subservience.
Have we arrived at the root of human suffering?

Humans began to suffer when humankind lost sight of the wisdom hinted at in the opening paragraph of this section on causality.

It can be found how the mistaken understanding of causality and the ill-intended application of the flawed concepts that were distilled from that incomplete and fallacious understanding, eventually created hierarchical structures that benefited greatly from the subservience that the installation of suffering created and maintained.

This means of course that when we discover where we failed in our understanding of causality, and when we eventually come to return to that place of aforementioned wisdom, that we should be able to break ourselves out of suffering's hold.

Or does that seem too big an expectation? Some might think so. After all, some may say that if sages like the Buddha already told us that life is suffering, how can there be a chance to overcome it? If life is suffering, don’t we have to bear the consequences of life by suffering it?

Is life suffering?

Actually, did the Buddha say that life is fundamentally suffering?
How can that be when he strongly indicated:

“All conditioned things in the world are changeable.
They are not permanent.
Work hard to regain your freedom .”

that there is a way to break out of the vicious cycle of suffering – the wheel of karma? Obviously, if that can be done, it is because suffering is not a fundamental and intrinsic characteristic of life. (Unless of course the Buddha also said that the way out of suffering is to stop living… but that is something he definitely did not say.)

What could he have said, if it was not that life is suffering?

Transience, change and interdependency

The Buddha’s most important observation was that the main characteristic of ALL things is their transience or anitya, meaning that the elemental state of all things – their aggregate state or skandha – is impermanent (consider water: it can be liquid, solid or gaseous) and that this impermanence is complexly relative as it is based on inter-dependent causes.

We do not have the Buddha’s direct words on this, they have all come down to us in commentaries on his life and teachings, but the following may well be the closest to a complete understanding of his insight:

All appearances – from the subtlest to the grossest – are mutually and reciprocally related, each appearance affecting and being affected by any other appearance, hence their changeability or impermanence: their transient nature.

Or, as said in the second paragraph of this blog section, a complex dance of mutuality and reciprocity between simple and complex entities.

Hmm...? Could it be a joyful dance?

A dance? Yes! Joyful? We shall see.

All appearances in this dance – from the finest to the coarsest – are mutually and reciprocally related, each appearance affecting and being affected by any other appearance, hence their dynamic state. As such, each unique detailed appearance with its particular characteristics carries within it – and dynamically so – all influences from all "entities at large." Each unique appearance is therefore also "inhabited" by the characteristics of anything at large, be it in sharper or less sharp resolutions depending on relative and always changing distances.

The Buddha’s insights are probably best represented in Nagarjuna's teachings of Pratitya-Samutpada, or "Dependent Origination," which poses that causality is an interdependent multi-dimensional dynamic in the nature of all existence.

It must have been something like that, what the Buddha said…, not that life was fundamentally suffering.

The distinction between pain and suffering

But what is suffering then if it is not life, and also – as this is very much related – what is suffering in distinction from pain?
There is a great difference between suffering and physical pain. Not all physical pain is accompanied by mental or emotional suffering and not all mental or emotional suffering is directly accompanied by physical pain.
Suffering is a mentally and/or emotionally charged overlay on top of physical pain that is experienced or... that can be threatened to be experienced. When the mentally or emotionally charged overlay of suffering disappears, the underlying physical pain may not disappear, but when this happens certain chemical processes that take place in the brain can make physical pain, if not disappear, then at least become more bearable.

Suffering is based on a treatment model, according to which someone’s life can be hijacked through repeated threats that can cause their life to be stymied, frozen, halted or taken away prematurely and conclusively. The initial treatment is usually followed by additional threats of prolonged physical pain if certain conditions are not followed up on.

When looked at carefully, one will always find that in the life stories of those who are undergoing such treatment (and thus suffering), that in addition to their possible experiences of pain, severe or not, that invariably there have been episodes in their lives during which ploys occurred that attempted to usurp their personal authenticity and freedom.

If pain is physical, where does suffering take place?

Life appears as suffering in the recesses of the human mind as well as in the emotional constrictions around the inner core of those who suffer suffering.

Threats as attempts to cause subservience

Someone who imperils someone else’s life with suffering (a power monger, a victimizer or a perpetrator of abuse), always uses an example – an acted out threat – as a fear instilling example, and employs additional threatened threats to consolidate the initially instilled fear as a strategy to claim power over the victim. It is a strategy that also installs or increases self-doubt in the victim in order to weaken his or her capability to consider escape and to even prevent the thought of a possible reclamation of personal freedom.

Suffering is not part of life.
Suffering is about the threat to be parted from life.

An important part of suffering is that it can be described as: the acceptance of an assumed validity of a persistent feeling, that a threat to have one's life prematurely halted or seriously stymied by someone, is not only just hanging above a victim's head, but also physically feels like it is executed continuously.

This suffering then, is brought about by external interruptive agents – fellow human beings indeed, but those who with manipulative intent strategize their threats in such a way as to create dependency and servitude.
The threats are suggestively being made to feel more real than the obviousness and evidence of reality itself, thus they lodge themselves in the minds of the perpetrator's victims as though they are already a fact or can be a fact any moment.

Illusion and suffering

It is the acceptance of this pseudo-reality as reality that the Buddha calls illusion or maya. The Buddha is not saying that life is illusion or maya, or that life is suffering or dukkha. He is saying that the threats to life's continuity are illusion and the root of suffering.

What should be clear from this is that suffering is strictly a human affair. The strategies and maneuvers that bring about human suffering do not exist in the inanimate world nor will one find them in the world of flora and fauna, except perhaps in that part of the animal world that has been dealt the same illusive manipulations that suffering humans treat each other with.
The view that I'm offering that "suffering is strictly a human affair" is not at all the view of most followers and students of the Buddha’s wisdom. The consensus view is that dukkha or suffering (or any translation that expresses stress or un-satisfactoriness) is part and parcel of existence – all existence. The consensus view is that impermanence and transience (anitya), animate or inanimate, is the basis of suffering and that therefore – as it is correctly held that in existence everything changes – suffering is characteristic of all existence.

But that is not what the Buddha said. Even in his last words he did not include a reference to suffering as related to non-permanence or transience.

“This is my last advice to you.
All conditioned things in the world are changeable. They are not permanent.
Work hard to regain your freedom (moksha).”

Transience, changeability and freedom

The quotation above certainly sounds like the Buddha means that change, impermanence or transience include the freedom and latitude to make that transience and change possible. Change is intrinsic to life and... the source of its innate freedom!
It is this changeability that enables freedom, meaning that those who were made to believe to have lost their freedom, that they can recover and reclaim it.
What if the Buddha meant, that rather than holding on to a stiff or frozen status quo, that with the unconditional acceptance of transience, impermanence, change, flexibility, etc., that the law of causality (1), guarantees unfettered freedom for all humans?
That could be reason enough for the joyful dance alluded to before!

Sentences like the following are often encountered in oriental "wisdom" writings: "The refusal to accept transitoriness as the cause of suffering brings more suffering." This line is usually read to mean that impermanence or change is the cause of suffering, but as you may now have seen, it is actually the refusal to accept change as bona fide that causes suffering.

Suffering is always characterized by the fact that it includes attempts to alleviate itself.
The operative word in that sentence though is not "alleviate" but "attempts."
The problem with attempts is that in spite of their promise, they are fruitless. If not, they would not be called attempts, would they?

It is the fruitlessness of attempts combined with a compulsive drivenness to keep attempting that is the illusive part of the emotional experience of suffering.

Attempts to resist change or impermanence are the cause of suffering.
Accepting change and impermanence halts suffering.

The reality of life with its built-in changeability caused by mutual and reciprocal interdependence cannot be avoided; one can only mentally attempt to avoid it or mentally be coerced to attempt to avoid it. This mental attempt or coercion to attempt avoidance of change is what characterizes suffering.

It is not for nothing that the attemptive "tries" lead to the trials of suffering. The reason that suffering can be called illusion is because "trying attempts" are no more than "make believe" mental efforts.

The impermanent world is seen as uninviting when:

• impermanence is wrongly explained as something ending to the point of annihilation or death,
• life is only seen as something that can come abruptly to a halt,
• one wants to hold on to the status quo by all means,
• life is mistakenly seen as lacking opportunities for change,
• the adage, "It’s all to no avail." is pessimistically uttered,
• "Everything changes and everything stays the same!" is seriously believed.

The impermanent world of transitoriness and change can again be experienced as a positive dynamic, a characteristic of freedom in a freely moving universe. The boxes, closets, cells and doors can open as there are always transformative cycles to life that help humankind to carry on where it seemingly left off when the fallacy and illusions of interrupting the world through isolation and a freezing grip on freedom became the strategy of the abusers of power.

Freedom or moksha

When the resistance to change disappears, freedom – a free will guided by a free mind – restores the world of change and interdependence and... suffering dissolves. For the person who has been experiencing suffering, it will also – and that is the miracle – halt the world of resistance, stop the stopping, and help him or her to move forward again in a world of change, mobility, progress and evolution.

Notes:

(1) The way the Buddha's follower Nagarjuna understands it in his doctrine of Pratitya-Samutpada or Interdependent Origination.

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Human conditioning and conditioning in flora and fauna

There is a striking difference between the way conditioning takes place in the world of flora and fauna, and the way conditioning takes place with humans.
For example, caterpillars/butterflies in their evolution adapted themselves to changing conditions by altering their own physical condition; humans on the other hand have been altering their own physical condition to a much lesser extent, e.g. instead of developing wings, flippers, grizzly bear nails, hooves, more protective fur, etc. they lost most of their fur, definitely did not grow hooves and invented external implements like airplanes, boats knives, forks, chopsticks, space heaters, UV protection lotions, shoes, boots, etc. This difference between how humans and other life forms responded to conditions or altered them, has "from the get go" made human existence very different from the existence of everything else, but as we shall see in upcoming sections, that may not necessarily have been a good thing, especially in regards to one particular type of conditioning.
From as much as four hundred thousand years ago the earliest representatives of homo sapiens – apparently more so than any other non humanoid creatures – were able to compare their own individual condition in fine detail with what they observed in the living and non-living environment around them. One way or another (which is not the topic of these discussions) they acquired the skill to take careful and detailed stock of what that environment contained and they learned to use a variety of the inventoried items from that environment in a rather novel way.
Unlike other creatures who alongside humans and before them, adapted themselves physically to changes of environment, early humans (and us still) did not alter themselves physically to the same degree. In their adaptation to different or changing environments, humans resorted to the invention of tools, implements and structures: they made external changes. Instead of keeping or increasing fur cover, they lost it in favor of clothing and eventually built themselves shelters; instead of increasing their muscular strength, they opted for instruments and strategy; instead of acquiring a different type of mobility by changing their body structure, they opted to make material shells of mobility: ships, automobiles, planes, etc. Eventually they their created bazaars, galleries and shops...

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Conditionality and conditionalizing

Conditioning is of course very much related to the human condition and the way humans affect each other and their environment.
The human condition is affected by two kinds of conditioning:

1. factual conditioning: conditioning in which changes are taking place,
2. hypothetical conditioning: conditioning consisting of the consideration of changes taking place.

While discussing the fundamental difference between these two forms I'll be using the term conditioning for factual conditioning and conditional conditioning or conditionalizing for the hypothetical kind.
The word condition, together with words like tradition, extradition, edition, etc. has come to us via Latin. These words are a combination of prefixes such as trans, ex, extra, con, etc. with the noun form of the Latin word dare which means "to give." Taking that into account, the meaning of the word condition is "a given", something that "comes with" life.

In the evolutionary history of life, specifically in the evolution of humankind, hypothetical or indirect conditional conditioning is a rather recent arrival, and it can clearly be distinguished from the direct conditioning that we encounter in the world of inanimate objects, flora and fauna. Of course in the world of human nature there is much factual or direct conditioning taking place, but human conditioning is very often an if thing, it is very often conditional or "weak." In the world of nature conditioning is always a when thing, it is "strong."

When a wet lump of clay gets heated up by the sun it dries up and becomes solid; the wet and pliable condition becomes a hard and dry condition... there are no doubts about it, one can count on it, it is direct and not negotiable. Human conditional conditioning on the other hand is "iffy." For example when a child gets punished in order to entice the child to be more obedient or better behaving, that child will not necessarily become more obedient or better behaving.
Conditional, negotiable and unreliable elements are often part of the conditioning procedures humans use in their attempts to control each other and the world they live in.
Another example: "If you do such and such, I accept you in my life, if you don’t, I won’t."
It is indeed possible that "such and such" gets done, but when the required action is seen as lacking the right intent, acceptance might be held back, or, even when the action gets done with the right intent, the promised acceptance might still only come grudgingly or… perhaps not at all.

As said before human conditional conditioning is a rather recent evolutionary occurrence, but already it is a skill that has been honed to a very high degree of perfection… or should we say: imperfection?
I'd like to suggest that this particular conditional conditioning procedure at an identifiable point in the course of human evolution turned into a less effective tool when its methods got mixed with the unnatural conditioning tools of punishment and reward, threat and promise in addition to a high degree of verbosity and an almost built-in unreliability in the application of its methods.
Rather than alleviating the human plight already characterized by suffering, these methods became the cause for more suffering. If conditional conditioning in this de-natured format would’ve worked and produced the expected results, we should persist using it – by all means – but there is no proof of that. In fact the continuation and wider spread of human suffering is now glaringly visible in our lives, on our TV and computer screens and in our publications. An audacious review and clean-up of the methods of human conditional conditioning seems in order.
"Human nature" is of course very much the result of the way humans condition each other, but considering that humans seem to have become the only mentally and emotionally suffering creatures in nature, it seems to me that the nature of "human nature" has now become that of the "de-natured human."

Does this mean that we have to turn the clock back on thousands of years of human development? Of course not, rather, it is the other way around. We can restart the clock where it got stopped when the application of conditional conditioning became a tool to constrict, limit and even stop life rather than promoting and expanding it.
When we at first, as early humans began to condition each other and our environment, an additional novel mode of planned constructive conditional conditioning was discovered and applied(1). It flowed naturally from nature’s direct conditioning. But just as with any invention or discovery, the application of this new kind of conditioning showed that it could also have unfavorable side effects when it got mixed with the confusing language and misguided motivation that the unnatural and hypothetical conditioning tools of punishment and reward, threat and promise brought with them.

During the transition from the hunter-gatherer and nomadic society to the agricultural and husbandry one, one particular type of constrictive conditional conditioning took over from constructive conditioning with the sole intent to thwart the transition from one phase of human evolution to the next, challenging a natural process that initially happened to be a fortunate mix of natural direct conditioning and planned positive conditional conditioning. This unfortunate constrictive intervention (as biblically recorded) jeopardized the natural evolution of humankinds' participation in the advance of evolution.

A closer look at "conditionality."

In normal day-to-day language, conditional sentences occur quite frequently and they can appear in varying formats most of which can be brought down to two specific forms, e.g. "When this or that happens, then this or that will be the result," or "If this or that happens, then this or that will be the result." Usually the words "if" or "when" can be exchanged without altering the meaning of a conditional sentence very much, but in principle the difference in meaning between the two words is quite large.
"When" of course means that the predicted result will happen sooner or later, while "if" means that it could possibly happen but… not necessarily. It is this smallish looking but, as far as impact goes, large difference in possible effect, supplemented by a confusing and ill-intended use of conditionalizing language, that lies at the root of human deception and failure, and it culminated in the widespread manipulative use of authority in the games of power and thus became the cause of all human suffering.

Let me show some examples of the confusing use of conditional sentences. Although at this point the examples might not strike you as very consequential, you will hopefully see how the confusion that they exemplify can affect the clarity of human expression dramatically. Confusion can project far into the future of someone's life, very far indeed from the first instance of confusion when it was at first seriously and purposely applied.
When we consider a sentence like, "If you drop your glass of milk, the milk will be spilled," there is no doubt about a spill resulting from the dropping. The law of cause and effect is conclusive and dependable. That’s why a more correct version of this strong direct conditionality sentence would be, "When you drop your glass of milk, the milk will be spilled."
Now compare this with, "If you drop your glass of milk again, you will be punished."
Although it sounds just as conclusive, it actually is not. What if you dropped the glass of milk but nobody was around and it did not get noticed? You won't be punished! And even if it did get noticed and you were deemed punishable, it is quite possible that you found a way to get away with it unscathed, or it could be that the person who was supposed to do the punishing had a change of heart.
Although the initial threat of punishment sounds unavoidable in this type of hypothetical or weak conditionality, it is not dependable or reliable at all. In fact children pick up on this at an early age and learn how to organize their life around the lack of finality in the application of weak conditional conditioning.
This, together with the sometimes unfulfilled promises of reward that are also part of weak hypothetical conditionalizing, makes for a child that is bound to become skeptical, lacking in trust and quite likely itself also not to be trusted. In all likelihood such a child will use the same tactics down-line as well as up-line, eventually also manipulating the ones who applied these ways of conditioning to him or her in the first place. Doesn't this go to the root of much, if not all negative and ineffective intervention and interference in human behavior?

Notes:

(1) As told in: "The valley" see elswhere on this blog.

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The Freedom Pledge

The conception of every human being comes with a pledge that is silently present in the creative dynamics of all life.
All human beings can authentically, happily and with their sense-of-self intact, participate freely in all human endeavor.
Each individual’s birthright to an original, free and harmonious state of being with and amongst others can be realized, retained and maintained.
This pledge includes that if it appears that one has lost one's state of freedom and integrity, that it can be reclaimed and restored.

Apparent loss of freedom, authenticity and happiness shows up as mental suffering, a suffering that implies that one is held under a spell of illuding and deluding strategies, a spell that is part of the game of pseudo-life. Conditional conditioning is the major weapon used in the strategies of this game as it tricks and subsequently traps its players inside it.
Reclaiming one's original freedom involves reversing the effects of this conditional conditioning so that life will be restored to its original state of being human and humane.
The human predicament – the suffering in which we seem to have lost our freedom and authentic selves – can be overcome. The state of unconditional freedom, happiness and love can be ours again while we live on this, our wondrous Earth (1).

Notes:
(1) This is not to say, that when we deal with suffering, illusion and delusion with greater or lesser success, that this will stop the physical pain, woundedness and death that come with life, natural disasters, calamities and accidents. What is to be hoped though, is, that with a deeper and more widespread individual insight into the conditional conditioning that superimposes layers of suffering and agony on top of physical pain and woundedness, that human suffering will be reduced and that the occurrence of any ill intended conditioning will diminish and thus improve the lives of more and more of us.

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Birth

Birth, more often than not, takes place in a hospital, often on an appointed day that may not be the day that a baby would have been ready to be born naturally. If baby and mother are lucky, it is taking place in a birthing environment that is somewhat adapted to the occasion. But still, a hospital is not a home and the mother is invariably surrounded by a team of non-family members, kind professionals for sure but strangers nonetheless who the mother and child just encounter on that day and hardly ever after. If the child is lucky, the father is also happily and not too nervously present. He and the mother may even have taken some special pre-natal classes: for the mother to learn how to breathe in a special way, and for the father to coach her and to surround her with confidence and warmth.
However well prepared though, it is nevertheless expected that giving birth is by nature a painful process. It is not assumed that contractions can be a painless dynamic – although powerful – to help the baby advance through the birth canal and to enter into the outside world in which the mother and father live.
But no matter how well prepared, in the end the mother is still pressured by the attending helpers’ verbal and not uncommon loud commands (even from the father) to "push" – to push in such a way that the natural rhythm of the contractions and the rests in between, are interfered with. In addition to that, the mother is usually in a supine position where the baby has to work against gravity to transfer itself from its mother’s womb of relative weightlessness, symbiotic harmony and natural timing into the world of disturbing gravity, nervous disharmony, cool efficiency, haste and often a lack of patience.

There are alternatives nowadays to the way the "modern" woman gives birth. The oldest perhaps, and simplest, closest to the way so-called primitive and possibly still pristine people give birth, is the squatting position; a position with which the father can be cooperatively involved, an approach that at first may seem "nonsense," but which eventually makes total physical sense. The muscular pressure of the squatting body, the pressure of the oxygen filled chest and lungs on the diaphragm, its rhythmical pushes helped by natural breathing that is regulated by the birthing process itself, it all helps the contractions not to be painful at all. Aided along by the earth’s accepting power of gravitation, all of this appears to have an almost cosmic power as the baby slides into the world, into the warm and expecting hands of a helpful and loving father – not a helpless and nervous one who is (often) disdainfully held in the background as though an outsider to his own child’s wondrous birth. (And we are not even talking about the drugs that can turn the mother into an almost non-participant, nor are we even talking about a cesarean delivery.)

The next described unfortunate procedure luckily does not happen too often any more, but up to quite recently, a child was immediately after being extracted from the womb, taken by the feet, lifted up and held upside down by the ankles and given a brisk slap on the buttocks. The pain from the slap is probably not as serious as the discomfort from the suddenly recoiling spine under the full impact of gravity, caused by the upside-down and stretched dangling position of the newborn, the baby's spine being forced into a curvature it had not experienced during all the months the child spent in the safety of the mother's womb.
As muscles and nerves have a long memory, the sudden unnatural curvature sets the stage for extra sensitivity to all kinds of physical and nervous problems that might be experienced later in life: (1) lower back pain, (2) urinary and sexual organ symptoms, (3) scoliosis, (4) imbalanced personality traits, (5) subluxation or misalignment of the lower lumbar vertebrae, (6) gastro-intestinal disorders, (7) will-power or motivational problems, (8) upper lumbar vertebrae misalignment that can contribute to heart, lung, lymphatic and emotional distress, (9) cervical bone and neck muscle stress that can contribute to thyroid pro-blems as well as chronic headaches and migraines.
If not held upside down and receiving the bum rap, instead of that or additionally, the baby gets pricked and prodded and its throat and nostrils inserted with a suction instrument to remove phlegm that might constrict its air passages. Could it be that this sets up the many nasal, allergy and food dislike problems that parents experience so often with their children? (And I did not even mention circumcision!)

To prevent a 1 in-10,000 chance of a mishap at birth, every child now gets to receive with 100 percent certainty a variety of interfering treatments before it even gets a chance to bond with the mother and father in love, trust and confidence...

The baby though can be delivered into the warm arms of the mother who can hold the baby and embrace it, while the father feels the umbilical chord and notices in wonderment how the pulsations through the chord slow down while he confidently waits for them to stop so that he in full confidence can sever the chord, without severing or separating the baby from the mother.
Instead of that, birth attendants, however well intentioned, do their job in the cool and efficient manner of the professional, even cleaning the child of its protective skin coating, while not really paying heed to the loving needs of the baby and its parents. The baby is even taken away from its parents for some time to do routine check-ups and fulfill administrative tasks such as recording the baby’s weight and length.
Sure the baby will be returned to the mother, but often not for long as the anonymous baby ward, cribs lined up, is waiting for the labeled baby to be put to rest in shared loneliness with other babies away from their respective mothers – something most mothers did not naturally expect to happen for all the nine months of expecting their baby into their arms and on their breasts, and the babies expecting the breasts of their mothers and their mother's warm embrace.
No wonder breast-feeding does not follow naturally.

Good thing is that things are changing, but unfortunately we have a world (the rest of the world) still in the process of wanting to catch up to the interventive methods of the West, even while the Western ways are changing... albeit rather slowly…
And then of course there is… sound, especially the sound that comes from the lips: voice, words... language. Upon opening its eyes, the baby’s first visual urge is to look at close range for movement, especially movement from the mother's mouth. Maybe it expects a kissing mouth or a licking tongue as happens in the animal world. The baby's ears are geared to match the sounds it hears to the movement of the lips, it is looking for synchronicity and correspondence between sound and movement. A baby is into coordinating, it does not expect mixed messages, it is not ready for second-guessing… although… that might come all too soon as it quickly picks up any incongruence between sound and lips. When it hears sounds that are not accompanied by simultaneous lip movements, it looks for the next feature in sight: the eyes, and in those eyes it expects nothing else but recognition and a warm welcome.
When the baby finds that welcome and recognition, it will smile: a happy human just making its first human connection outside the womb.
But that is not what usually happens: while births took place, jets have been heard taking off over hospitals, there's the sirens of ambulances, the hubbub of the delivery room, air conditioners humming and many an electronic apparatus… none of it conducive to a peaceful birth at all! Instead of that the baby may find no happy confirmation of its arrival, no immediate recognition. There might even be discord.
All too often a baby cannot respond with a smile when it hears, "Can you give us a smile?" and when it hears, "How are you doing?", "Are you OK?", "Are you cold?", "Are you hungry?" the upturn at the end of those kind of questions is disconcerting.
The lack of unconditional acceptance and trust is unexpected and the child closes its eyes. It will try looking for it again a little later as expectation is an ingredient of birth... or it will just cry.
Instead of ending up in a world of warm welcome, safety, security and confidence, something it naturally expects more of after its unquestioned living and unconditional giving and taking in the womb, many babies receive the opposite. No wonder many are shocked, no wonder many will cry.
Just as a butterfly, after its metamorphosis, expects more mobility than it had as a caterpillar, or just as a flower expects more space to bloom in than the space around its original seed shape, a baby expects a similar expansion after its stay in the womb… not a contraction, not fearful questioning, not medical intervention, nor unsatisfactory knowledge on how to be treated.
Something that might be dumbfounding to an infant just born, could be the experience that although it physically knows it was expected, that at the moment of its own arrival in the world, the discovery of its gender is not what the parents expected or hoped it to be. (Of course nowadays there is ultra sound.) As the child is the answer to expectation, it expects to be welcomed with the happy surprise of words like, "Ah, there you are, what a dear little boy!" or "Oh, what a lovely girl!" Instead, it might hear the doctor's question, "Let’s see, what have we got here? A girl, isn't it?" Or it sees the unsure face of the mother who questions dubiously without even voicing any words. And if not that insecurity, it might see worry on the mother's face regarding the baby's health, as the baby hears the mother ask, "Is she all right doctor?"

Questions, questions!

It may not seem all that relevant or important, but have you ever noticed that in nature there are no questions. You might say, "Well of course not, we are humans, this is human nature, we are farther advanced!" But are we? What with our wars and feuds, our inability to share and be cooperative?
I would suggest we would be more advanced if our compulsive questioning had never begun.
Questioning is not the same as wondering and being curious; questioning with a skeptical judgmental twist is not really helping any advancement.
It seems to me that we can do without the artifice of questioning, but we can count on wondering and curiosity… they are part of nature. They remain naturally, whereas questioning persists unnaturally. Even a plant's roots looking for water uses its sensing curiosity to find it. Curiosity? Yes! But a plant will not do the equivalent of the question, "I'm thirsty, can I get some water please?" Or when it is searching for warmth, it will not ask, "How are you sun? Could you give me a warm smile, and... uh… if you don’t, I don’t like you anymore!"

Although we as grown-ups may be used to questions, questions were not something a baby was having on its mind while being in its mother's womb, nor does it expect questions at the moment of birth or soon after. It expects a welcome after birth, it was after all "expected." It cannot conceive of anything else but an unconditional "Yes, you are welcome!" expressed with the same unconditional exchange as it experienced it while living in the womb.
Instead of that, much too soon different expressions will start to stand out, expressions like, "Don’t!" and "No, no!" It will see many faces, but the faces' voices will be voiced over with the "don’ts" of concern such as, "Don’t breath on the baby!" and "No no, don’t hold baby like that," etc.
Now a baby will more likely bond with the inhibitions, obstructions and resistances in its environment, rather than with balanced acceptance. It is the opposite of what naturally flows from life...
No wonder the presence of tears.

And, gosh what happens if the baby is a boy and the parents, through the pressure of cultural and religious customs have been forced or elected to have the boy circumcised? The so sensitive foreskin will be prematurely and abruptly loosened and cut from that what it otherwise would not loosen itself from naturally. While undergoing circumcision the constrained little baby boy will experience sharp cutting pains leaving him in severe shock, some say even to the point of coma1. The sensitive area usually takes a week to heal, and there is hardly any reprieve during that time due to the burning sensations whenever the little one urinates.
The resistant survival reactions of the little boy, so prematurely and needlessly awakened, might very well change his behavior-to-come: from a naturally peace loving gentle male (a gentle-man) to a bitter, possibly aggressive and vengeful one, always on the ready to never be caught off-guard again, too often being in a state of tension and stress, expecting that he could be duped again, any time.
Sure, circumcision may not be a deciding factor in what makes the difference between boys and girls emotionally, but the tendency of aggression, violence and belligerence in males is quite distinct from that in females and if not attributable to this first assault on innocent life, it may still have much to do with it.

And what about female circumcision(2)?
It is still happening in some Arabic and African cultures! Could it be that this unconscionable mutilation during early childhood of women also creates a staunch belligerence – although likely more femininely expressed – in addition to other psychological and physical problems, as well as of course, the cultural and social ones?

Notes:

(1) An obstetrician was overheard saying, "How can a baby experience anything negative from that procedure, it is likely in a state of shock and unconscious anyway."

(2) http://www.noharmm.org/HGMstats.htm
http://www.quran.org/CIRCUMCISION.HTM#Male%20and%20Female

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A Quest from the Start?

The chance that we remember it ourselves might be zero, but the likelihood that we (and our ancestors and our children) came into this world in a rather shocking manner is very high – an entering into the world which differs very much from the natural process of birthing that can still be observed in the world of nature that has not yet been adulterated by domestication or other human intervention and interference.

Let's just focus for now on one aspect of what takes place around the birth of a baby and during the first months after its arrival: the verbal and auditory input that a child receives and the possible effects of that verbal auditory input on a child's early development and even… later adulthood.
The things being said by parents, doctors, midwifes and bystanders during the birth of a child and within the following few months, often do sound well meaning and well intended. Whatever is expressed then, even if not positive, is often uttered benevolently and innocently. But it is unfortunate that most of us do not realize that any negative verbal expressions during that time can have quite a long lasting impact on a person's life… often more adverse than we might expect or suspect. Even if it is not noticeable immediately or soon after birth, the impact can become quite evident much later in life.

When I brought this up with a friend, she agreed, but she also objected a little, saying, "OK, but what for instance about my doctor who said as he was delivering my baby – this was before ultra sound – "Let me see, hmm? What have we got here? A boy or a girl, hmm?"
"Is that so bad?" my friend asked me." How can, what he said possibly have much of a negative effect?"
The doctor's words were of course expressed gently, intended to relax and pleasantly surprise the mother, the still expecting parent, expecting that is, to finally hear about her child's gender.

What is to be noticed in this little scene?
With the doctor's words it immediately became a "recorded" situation around an expressed "verbal question." At the same time his words mixed themselves into an atmosphere that was, as my friend admitted, filled with questions that were perhaps not verbally expressed, but showing up on the faces and in the actions of the parents. These were questions and uncertainties that stemmed from their own pre-existing hopes and fears, doubts and expectations, emotional expressions that were quite possibly carry-overs from their parents' and ancestors' age-old expectations, hopes and fears about their own gender, health and future, expressed when they came into this world…
And now – again – they became carried forward onto their newly born child.
An atmosphere of expectations, hope and fears, love expressed and love perhaps held back, questions and questioning, wonder and doubt, all mixed in with an environment of voices and a clattering of sounds, in a traditional clinical setting with the usual obstetric tools of the trade!
What a difference from the environment that that baby had just left: the womb where everything was unquestionably and unconditionally available, the warmth, the almost zero-gravity, the muted sounds, the womb in which the embryo did not have to behave well to be fed, where it did not have to express gratitude for receiving a healthy oxygen and nutrient carrying blood supply.
Instead, immediately at birth it got confronted with a rather harsh reality, gravity, unmuted sounds, questioning faces, conditional expectations, a need to respond to unexpected stimuli and to have its responses judged and graded and evaluated for approval or not.
Not that it is or has to be that way anymore. Luckily nowadays the birthing environment is gentler, more human and humane. Rather than expecting responses from the child and the parents to fit or suit delivery room requirements, that environment is now more responsive to the needs of the child and its parents
But for most of us, the way we were born, and for many who, when they are born, will still be delivered in a less welcoming environment, it stands to reason to find out what the impact is of the first questioning impressions on the natural unfolding of life from birth on.

Birth not being a disease or illness, the unquestioned need for the presence of medical operators, medications, medical interventions or interferences at birth needs to be re-evaluated. Rather than expressing trust, the almost unquestioned medical requisites express too much doubt about the dependability of life's natural processes as well as the natural strength of the mother and the baby. Rather than trusting, prolonging trust or creating trust, the primary dependence on medical presence and assistance underlines an unwarranted and almost unquestioned belief in the weakness of the mother, the child and the birthing process. Expecting and delivering a baby from loving unity is still not fully realizable, birthing still contains too many expectations of complications, interventions and interferences, however well intended the interventions may be.

This is of course not to say, that there may never be valid and strong reasons for medical assistance, but it should never start out as an obligatory sine qua non!
We cannot underestimate the power of bonding to the first external impressions and stimuli while the birthing process takes place. Whatever happens goes deep and stays long.

Let's at this point investigate what that general atmosphere of questioning, hope, expectation and doubt at the beginning of pretty well everyone's life can bring about.
Could it be that such an atmosphere can easily be the breeding ground of that almost all-too-human obsession with the search for answers: the quest, finding the answer, that mysterious answer which, even when it is "found," still remains elusive or fleeting?

Something like the bonding of a child to that artifice of the question, one will never find in non-human nature. In nature, conditions are never to be looked for, never to be searched for or quested, they are evidently present, they naturally bring forth what they are set out to bring forth. Conditions have a natural unavoidable place in life, con-ditions(1) come with it, they are the conditions or "givens" of and for life. They are as wonderfully inescapable as they are a necessary and welcome given!
But then, at some point in the early history of humankind questionability, conditional acceptance and the artifice of conditional conditioning were introduced. Life became filled with questions, but also questions about whether conditions should be different from how they are or whether certain conditions should be there at all, or… whether certain conditions or answers were to be searched for: the invention of the quest.

In non-human nature there is never an if-then relationship between conditions and what they bring forth, there is always a when-then relationship, inescapable, unavoidable, predictable and dependable. Nature's conditions are clear-cut and work without fail, effect follows cause, they cannot be argued away or made to look as though they don't exist. No mental interference will make them appear different from what they actually are. In human nature, or actually in the de-natured human, conditional conditions cannot be depended upon, they might be argued away, they can be made to look different from what they are. In nature directions do not go like, "... and if you see the third road on your right, turn into it!" In nature the third road on the right is seen and will be turned into, nature cannot be erratic, there is no built-in dubiousness, it cannot use excuses like, "Well, eh, sorry, I had my mind on other things, I was elsewhere."

Conditional conditions were introduced at the same time questioning and doubting were introduced. It was thus that humankind lost its way and forever since was on a quest, querying and questioning itself. That's how the mythologized quest for answers developed, answers that can actually not be found as "questionability" itself is naturally unfounded…
Except... except maybe for the unfortunate fact that its seeming necessity is an habituated projection of the questioning that caregivers themselves received when they were born and which they now pass on habituatedly and carelessly to their offspring, their children who instead of receiving warm welcomes, get set up to pass the same habituations on to their offspring.
To keep passing down questions regarding their baby's arrival, gender, character or quality of presence, by parents to their children, who will pass those questions down again to their children… doesn't that resemble that same "inheritedness" that so typifies the notion of biblical "original" or "inherited" sin?

(picture)
Michelangelo, 1475 – 1574CE

Notes:

(1) Con from cum (Latin) with, -ditions from dare (Latin) to give.

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Mirror Neurons

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Discarding doubt radically

When doubt, compulsive questioning, skepticism, judg-ment, etc. are radically discarded one realizes that reality is "as is."

Reality is:

• everything-as-it-is-already – which means anything but unclouded or obfuscated by doubt or judgment.
  Sanskrit: Om tat sat(1).
• everyone-as-he-or-she-is-already – which means anyone but without any dubiousness or judgment as to their presence or quality of presence.
  Sanskrit: Tat tuam asi(2).

To recover and reclaim the reality of life or one's own reality in life, the use of questioning, doubt, skepticism and judgment in any shape or form is counter-effective. In fact, if one would use any of them for self-recovery, they would only increase one's self doubt and insecurity. Doubt, questioning, skepticism and judgment in themselves are a throwback to and a replay of the first unfair and unreasonable efforts that attempted to make someone believe that his or her existence was questionable and in need to be judged.
The installation of doubt or passing judgment always takes place under duress and is invariably accompanied by stress, which is why and how it makes the receiver believe its validity. The way doubt is installed in its recipient also aims at preventing any future reclamation of that person's authenticity and integrity of being.
Doubt and its partners need to be dispelled radically and... without a doubt. The good news is, they can be dispelled, they can be discarded, as they operate by mental illusion only… having no substance in reality at all.
One's world won't collapse when doubt is subtracted from it. Of course not, dubiousness has by definition only a hypothetical value... which means no reality value at all!
Doubt (and its partners) can only be conceptually present in the mind of its beholder. It can only be present in a mentally sentenced verbal format, only after it was unreasonably and undeservedly installed in the recipient while he or she was put under the spell of someone's doubt or judgment, only while he or she became seemingly and illusively made to feel estranged from the reality of their own authentic presence and integrity.

The installation of doubt or the passing of judgments can only be attempts, even while those attempts aim to make their sentences of doubts or judgments stick…
In principle the installation of doubt or the passing of judgments can never be successful. They can only appear to be successful while their sentences and sentencings parade as truth and as long as the receivers of those sentences and sentencings are under the impression that the dubiousness of their presence has to be treated as more real and true than the truth and reality of their own authentic being and existence.

Notes:

(1) All that is, Is… innately sacred or divine. (Hindu mantra)

(2) Thou art That… innately sacred or divine. (Upanishads)

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Karma & the Power of Entrapment

As long as you find a need to believe in and to defend the idea of karma (especially when it is claimed to be your own and... "bad") you cannot not fully appreciate that you are able and allowed to take the freedom to release yourself from the notion of karma.
Could it be because you believe that the negative judgments and remarks concerning your presence and/or quality of your presence in the world, were somehow warranted and cannot be not accepted?

The early negative judgments that you incurred in your life having to do with your presence and quality of your presence, must have tricked you into believing their validity. But you must realize that they can – against all appearances – only have been unfair and unjustified. Any subsequent judgments only appeared more fair because of their repetitiveness.
You must have been entrapped often enough to make those judgments look warranted, and eventually you became conned into believing that you yourself were the cause of anything negative that befell you, that you deserved "all of it" because of your presumed inadequacies. As this most likely took place repeatedly, you began to identify with the justifications that were directed your way by those who entrapped, tricked, accused and judged you.
Eventually, imaginarily, their judgments and justifications became part of your view of yourself, your "inner self-image" and verbally they became part of your "inner dialogs." These inside or internal dialogs however are not just absurd mental dialogs between "you and yourself," they are actually the arguments between yourself and… your entrappers, accusers and judges, arguments about whether you deserved their judgments and treatments or not.
Too bad they turned into internal dialogs as the chances to have those dialogs externally with those who duped you, were taken away.
As long as their justifications still have momentum and power over you and as long as you believe them to be valid, you will have a hard time remembering and recognizing your original innate freedom and authentic presence.
It thus behoves you to stop these inner arguments so that you can reposition yourself in that original moment of coming into being, that moment just before your existence became so unduly and unfairly questioned and judged.
You might still remember instances when you were convinced that you were without fault and guilt, instances that you remember in which you were unfairly and unjustly treated. You might still remember that you got trapped and tricked to act in certain ways that would compromise you, acts that would set you up to receive the judgments and sentences that were designed and intended to come your way… as though you deserved that "You had it coming."
It is the power and momentum of the repeated entrapments followed by their inevitable judgments that made you accept your so-called incompetence and inadequacies; that made you deny or even forget that you had actually been trapped and cajoled into believing that your existence and presence was somehow "justly" deemed to be unwelcome, problematic and inadequate.
You eventually got so used to the stress and duress of those entrapments that those negative dynamics came to appear as "realistic" qualities of your life, and made you believe that your assumed redundancy and shortcomings (the ones that you were talked into believing) were part of your reality.
It wasn't your karma that made you the way you think you are, it was the entrappers' work(1) that made you appear that way.

Notes:
(1) Karma means act, action or work in Sanskrit.

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Doubt about your existence?

If, at some point early in your life, you would not have been led to believe by others than yourself, that your presence or the quality of your presence was questionable, you would not have ended up having any doubt about yourself, your existence or the quality of your existence.
Ergo, you would not have felt the need to find out 'who you are', as there would not have been a need for that question to arise.

gnothi seauton(1)
know thyself

You would not have had to get to 'know yourself, as your presence and the way you present yourself would not have been called into question in the first place.

Thus, if you feel prompted to 'find out who you are', you and your way of being were at some point seriously called into question... for reasons though that may have had very little to do with you but very much with others: people for instance who expressed, deflected and/or projected their own acquired self-doubt onto you while they made you believe it was about you.

There are many ways to recover from this, to rediscover who you are.
Many paths can help you overcome this estrangement from yourself and the natural world. But no matter which path, at some point you will get to a place where you will be confronted with the full circumstances in which you initially were made to 'lose yourself'.

Therefore it stands to reason that it could be very effective and expeditious to find out – right off the bat – who may have doubted your right to exist and your way of existing in the first place.

The problem is though that those circumstances of seeming fundamental self-loss and self-doubt tend to include strong taboos on finding out who were responsible for making you feel the way you do in the first place… The real culprits have a tendency to make themselves appear scot-free, while they at the same time charge their victims with additional sentences that tell their victims that they should resist and object to any possibility of discovering the real circumstances around their apparent loss of self. (In fact, victimizers deflect their own victimization by passing it down to others.)
One might eventually discover that this sad dynamic has something to do with what goes under the biblical name of 'inherited' or 'original sin'(2).
In any case, at some point you will undoubtedly find out that your victimizer's existence and character was at some point in his or her life also fundamentally questioned...

Once you fully and clearly understand the dynamics of this manipulation, the intent of which is to create subordination and subservience, you will be free from any self-doubt, assumed shortcomings and artificially acquired dependencies that you at some point were made to believe to be true...


Notes:
(1) Rome, Terme Museum, first century CE.
(2) The word "sin" etymologically derives from ancient language roots meaning debt, shortcoming, falling short or being without. Attributing shortcomings to someone was a tactical maneuver intended to increase the power of the one who attributed the shortcoming, over the one who was made to feel falling short or indebted.

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Making Sense of Sentences and Sentencing

It is interesting to note that the words "sentence" and "sentencing" are closely related.
When someone gets verbally and judgmentally sentenced, the receiver of the sentence sensorially absorbs the implications of that sentence into his/her being and retains them… even after the sentencer has moved out of sight and out of mind.
Thus these kinds of sentences and sentencings have a far and wide range of remote control.

As to sentencing: even when the original passers of judgmental sentences have passed away, the transferred sentences remain in effect, they linger long… Sentences like this have the same characteristics and consequences as curses or spells.

Could it be that curses and spells work on the same principle as the verbal sentencing just described?

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Sentencing

In spite of appearances to the contrary, there can never be a reasonable justification for anybody to cast a valid cloud of doubt over someone else's original integrity, authenticity and innate freedom.
If such a cloud of doubt appears to be powerfully present around someone and if such a cloud seems – on first sight – to hold some validity, it can only be so because a "sentence" of doubt has been passed about that person's integrity. Its presence can only be there because of the lingering charge, curse or spell that that sentence came with. It cannot be there for any other justifiable reason.
Such a sentence is invariably a sentence that does not come from that person's own core being. In spite of appearances it cannot have been invited, instigated or caused by the recipient other than for the single reason that his or her appearance in life was untimely and inconvenient in the eyes and estimation of others.
It is invariably an external sentence (charge, judgment, curse, spell), implications of which were artificially made to bear "justifiably" on the one receiving it.
This usually occurs while the recipient of such a sentence is trapped in or tricked into a state of duress or stress brought about by those with an investment in making the recipient feel invalidated, unwholesome, unappreciated and inadequate, and therefore dependent.

Examples of sentencings:
"You'll never amount to anything."
"You shouldn't have been born."
"You are always dropping things."
"You are just like your father/mother."
"Go to hell!"
"Give it up."
"He/she is stuck."
"You are ugly,"
"You are a failure,"
"You aren't worth living,"
etc.

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On the "nested paradox" of matter and mind

Ted: It appears to me that the initial and original paradox of existence is the one of the apparent opposition of material reality to consciousness. In addition though, the way I see it, it is not just a simple opposition as I believe that consciousness is nested within matter even as it is the opposite of it.

Wim: You say "apparent opposition" and, indeed, that opposition is in appearance only, meaning that that is how it may appear to the person who has reasons to interpret it that way!
Seeming appearances are always produced by incomplete sensorial data gathering and incomplete data appreciation, thus bringing about incomplete and often erroneous descriptions of reality.
As far as trying to understand the relationship between consciousness and materiality while starting out from the assumption that they are opposites, I am all for a different approach. What if we consider "consciousness" and "material reality" in the same manner as science considers particles and waves? True, at some point in the history of science particles and waves were considered paradoxical but now they are not seen as a paradox anymore, let alone a "nested paradox". If they are anything, they might very well be side-by-side aspects of a 'something' that is greater than the amalgamation of any aspects that may have been observed of that greater wholeness.
(Etymologically "aspect" is derived from the Latin 'aspicere' - 'to look at'; from 'ad' - 'at' and 'specare' - 'to look'.)
Too bad that most 'aspects' are often no more than fragments of relative information - relative as any information depends on how, when, with what and who (!) gets sensorially informed.
(Of course we need to remind ourselves that scientific measuring tools are an extension of our sensorial information gathering faculties.)
My point is that when we look at just these two aspects: materiality and consciousness, (matter and psyche ?) that we may want to consider that - just like particles and waves - that they are neither paradoxical nor opposites of each other. That we tend to do treat them as paradoxical or opposites may just be due to a long and unfortunate habituation that was acquired over the ages by most of humankind. Wasn't it after all mostly religious and/or moral coercion that dis-empowered most humans to do full-hearted justice to either material or mental healthy living or both? Didn't it depend on which religious or philosophical bent one adhered to, that either matter or psyche (or both) were considered to be corrupted or corrupting?
In Apuleius' novel "The Golden Ass" the story of Eros and Psyche deals with this mythologically.

Ted: Stuff or vibrations, matter or psyche, I don't think we can understand how we are aware of the basic particulars of the world.
One possible answer to this is that we are not aware of the world at all but only of our mind and that this mind creates the appearance of the material world while it concludes that that material world therefore is maya, illusion. This has the advantage that a nondual or monistic view can be achieved by stating that everything takes place inside one's own head. Other minds can then be seen as a function of one's own mind. Pfff... scary!!!
Luckily the initial fascination of such a theory fades before a deluge of counter intuitive implications.
Hmm... How do we deal with the difficulty of accepting something other than the material? If we take the brain as an item of reality, how can it and how does it 'secrete' consciousness?

Wim: Again, what if we would consider "consciousness" and "material reality" in the same manner as science looks at particles and waves? I don't see a need to think that brain matter "secretes" consciousness or, as it is sometimes also stated the other way around, that consciousness one way or another produces apparent materiality.
Just as particles do not 'secrete' waves or waves do not produce particles, we can similarly recognize that matter does not 'secrete' consciousness nor that consciousness gives rise to apparent matter!

Ted: Well, no matter what, so far I still see matter and mind as a sortof nested paradox. The one producing or, if not that, at least holding within itself the opposite of itself!

Wim: About that nesting. Could it be that your "nesting" idea - at least the way you use it here - that it could be a remnant of a previous adherence to dualism? A bit of 'closet dualism' perhaps?
To guide you away from that, maybe taking a look at a poem I posted here recently will help. "When Identities are Identical"
http://free-by-nature.blogspot.com/2007/05/comprehension.html
Although in this poem I use a language filled with dualistic notions, I am pointing at a creative non-dualistic process in which one aspect in the creation of a clay vessel - form - does not subsequently produce its seeming opposite - void. *
Instead, I'm attempting to show how form-void are arising simultaneously and contiguously, and similarly the seeming dualities of 'I-You', 'tranquility-action', 'sound-silence', etc.
What I'm clarifying in the poem is that there is a certain simultaneity happening with the arising of form-emptiness during the creative process of molding a clay vessel. And although time is a necessary dynamic in this creative process (as it is in any creative process) the linear sequentiality of time is NOT involved at all in the simultaneous arising of form-void!
What I am suggesting is that by the same token one can recognize that matter and consciousness also arise simultaneously and contiguously in 'whatever-all-this-is', this Pratītyasamutpāda, a Buddhist term describing the world consisting intirely of "Interdependent Arisings."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da .

Could it be that the human compulsion to mentally reflect and introspect (the way we mentally bend into ourselves to see if we can make sense of ourselves) that that prevents us from recognizing and realizing the greater whole of which each and everything are simultaneous aspects, aspects that only seem to be spattered out on a 3D grid that we are trained to scan though as a flat canvas with two flatland dimensions and one dimension of one-directional time?
Could it be that our limited understanding of time (our assumption that time is linear and one-directional) that that makes us conclude that causality is therefore also one-directional?
I am convinced that the way we usually understand cause & effect: that it is temporally sequential and topically linear, that that is not the understanding of an Avalokiteshvara, a Buddha or a Nagarjuna.

Ted: Be that as it may, and I will look deeper into this as I feel that I'm starting to grasp that contiguous simultaneity that you are talking about. Hmm... I do understand how you use the particle-wave example as a possible model. But anyway, so far I'm still seeing matter and mind having a causal connection to each other, it could be matter over mind or mind over matter, I don't know. However it may be, I don't think we can know how it can be so. Maybe it is just so! But then, what does that say about the nature of matter?

Wim: It might not be the nature of matter nor for that matter the nature of consciousness that makes them appear to you the way you see them. They might just appear that way to a humankind whose original human nature has become so dis-empowered that it eventually became de-natured and lost its ability to accept the simple self-evidence of it all!

Ted: Does this have anything to do with the topic of the Self.

Wim: Yes, of course: the simultaneity of self-Self!
"All is one, and each in all... uniquely so!"

Ted: Huh?... OK, OK I get it... but the following thought still carries weight for me: all my knowledge, my awareness, my experience is mine without my having to look for indications that it is mine by way of evidence.

Wim: self-Self... mine-Mine !

* It is not for nothing that the Heart Sutra's mantra is, "Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form" For a discussion on this see "The Story of the Bowl.
http://free-by-nature.blogspot.com/2007/05/form-is-emptiness-emptiness-is-form.html Read more!

The Realm of Reality

When you recognize that opposites complement each other in unity,
when you see how diversity reaches for and comes from union,
when you experience that your inner and outer are integrated into one identity,
when the higher and the lower are realized in one and the same self,
when you integrate your feminine and masculine into one wholeness,
when you have vision in addition to looking,
when you have comprehension in addition to holding,
when you know where you are going, having no problem being where you are,
when you know your becoming, having no problem being who you are,
when you live in reality rather than holding on to any concepts about it,
you then recognize that you are in the realm of divinity.

~ After Jesus
The Gospel of Thomas 1:22,
The Nag Hammadi Library

Please access http://www.geocities.com/Athens/9068/splith.htm
and click on saying 22 Read more!

When identities are identical

The potter knows the bowl inside out,
having formed it in the void,
having shaped it around nothing
so that it may contain something.

When we comprehend with our hands again,
our minds have no difficulty comprehending.

Space and form,
form and void,
form and emptiness...
they meet each other in one common locale,
encompassing each other's shared nature.

The dancer knows her dance inside out,
forming it in space,
shaping it throughout her body,
so that space may carry its turns.

When we comprehend with our body again
our minds have no difficulty comprehending.

Tranquility and action,
movement and stillness,
silence and voice...
they meet each other in one shared moment,
listening to each other's identical sound.

The poet knows the poem inside out,
having formed it in quiet inspiration,
having voiced it around silence
so that silence may carry its words.

When we comprehend with our ears again,
our minds have no difficulty comprehending.

You and I,
male and female,
yin and yang...
touching each other in one shared embrace,
celebrating each other's identical being.

Lovers knows their loved ones inside out,
forever discovering each other in their cosmic search,
always finding each other while looking for no one,
each bringing forth the other.

When we comprehend with our hearts again,
our minds have no difficulty comprehending.

Space and form,
form and void,
form and emptiness...
they meet each other in one common locale,

encompassing each other's shared nature.

The potter knows the bowl inside out,
having formed it in the void,
having shaped it around nothing
so that it may contain something.

When we comprehend with our hands again,
our minds have no difficulty comprehending.

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Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form

The Story of the Bowl


Lord Avalokiteshvara (1) who millennia later also came to be known as the bodhisattva (2) Quan Yin, was not only a wise, very astute and courageous leader of his people, he was also a philosopher, discoverer and inventor. When he, some thirteen thousand years ago, moulded his first clay vessel from a lump of clay, he became the inventor of pottery, thus single-handedly setting the stage for many early technological advances, the products of which are still benefiting humankind.

One of the oldest written documents that mention his name is the 'Heart Sutra', an ancient Sanskrit text that goes right to the heart of the nature of existence, the nature of consciousness, the question of matter and non-matter, the elements, the faculties of perception and the functionality of those sense faculties.

When we read this document now, we find ourselves confronted with a text that at first sight - and even after many readings - does not appear to be very clear. But that is to be expected when we realize that manuscripts from the days of yore, when textual transmission was replacing oral transmission, were the result of renditions and translations that had taken place over many centuries.
The text we have now went through a process that was similar to the way in which, say, Christ's life history was at first orally and later scripturally transmitted to his followers and their descendants. The biblical account of Christ's life and teachings ended up as an amalgamation of recorded oral transmission, a variety of memories (often differing) from disciples and followers, inserted historical records as well as commentaries added at later dates.
The same way (although earlier on in time and concerning a much smaller document) the Heart Sutra has come to us, also a scripture showing a variety of stylistic and linguistic formats, also a text that is a mix of recorded oral transmission (Avalokiteshvara's original words), commentary notes from various copyists and editors as well as insertions into the main text of remarks that initially appeared only in the margins of the repeatedly copied manuscripts. We also have to keep in mind that in the writing and editing practices of the time, scribes did not separate distinct words with spacings, paragraphs were not indicated, capitalization was not used and punctuation symbols were not known. Together with inevitable spelling and copying errors, it should be clear by now why the Heart Sutra became the complex document that it ended up being.

The Heart Sutra is a small scripture - the English translation from either Sanskrit or Tibetan, Pali or Chinese versions contains no more than about 500 words - but this sutra is, in spite of its brevity, still a rich compilation of mantra like oral segments, commentary texts from sometimes misunderstanding followers, fragments of highbrow discussions, pieces of sometimes confused dialog and expressions of veneration.

A different approach

Instead of adding another commentary to the thousands of already available commentaries, I have come up with a very different and rather unique approach, an approach that might lead to quite a different but novel understanding of the Heart Sutra, a less philosophical one to be sure and also a less (and that might even be more sure) spiritual one.
A new aspect - at first glance seemingly rather far fetched, maybe even absurd - will become clear in the story that I'll be telling here about the origin of Avalokiteshvara's account in the Heart Sutra. This aspect is actually quite a soteriological one, although soteriologic in a very practical and utilitarian sense.
(Soteriology - the doctrine of deliverance and salvation; from the Greek 'soterion', 'deliverance'; from soter, savior; from the Sanskrit/Aryan root SAR /SAL, to keep whole, to save, to keep safe.)

I'll tell the story of how Avalokiteshvara made a discovery that eventually delivered his people - and humankind - from the thirst and starvation that had been caused by the repeated periods of drought that were characteristic of the climate in the populated tropical zones of the planet throughout the end of the last ice age.

What follows is a reconstructive fantasy of a sequence of historical events that took place some 13 thousand years ago when Avalokiteshvara, a tribal leader, had to find ways to help his people overcome a severe shortage of potable water.
I have also attempted to reconstruct the moment, the environment and the mindset of those who were present when one of the first dualistic abstractions - form and emptiness - was being made and explained but… almost immediately integrated back into the non-dualist reality of the concrete sensorially observable world.
The story then that follows here is about how, why and when these two words: "form" and "emptiness," were first uttered and how far reaching the consequences were. Note in the reaction of the tribal audience to Avalokiteshvara’s words, how their understanding was very practical and utilitarian, while Avalokiteshvara’s understanding shows us the first beginnings of an abstract understanding concerning concrete observations that lies at the birth of philosophy as well as technology.

The Story

One day, a very long time ago, close to the dawn of humankind, the tribal leader Avalokiteshvara had finally figured it out. For days he had been sitting by the dried-out riverbed, a former stream that was now only the smallest of a trickle compared to what it used to be when the rains had been more abundant. The frown on his forehead had become deeper and deeper, his mind more and more preoccupied with trying to find a way to deal with the drought. For a long time he had been trying to find a new source of drinking water, but although a new source he had not found... what he had found though was a solution.
But it hadn’t come easily. As he had been sitting there, looking for ways of how and where to lead his people to water, he knew that in order to find a solution, that he first had to clear his mind from the worries he had about feeding the tribe. And as he succeeded, now with a mind less disturbed, all the while concentrating on a peculiar rock in that now virtually dry riverbed, he suddenly realized how in the past the force of the once wild stream must have hollowed out that rock. Then he remembered how water tended to puddle in those kind of hollowed out rocks and boulders.

He suddenly cupped the palms of his hands to mimic the hollow shape that he saw in that rock and he wondered why he had never considered that hollow shapes could hold stuff, contain something... water for instance.
Suddenly he became aware of the sound that the few drops of water made that still trickled down the rocks at the edge of the dry riverbed.
And all of a sudden he knew it:
"Aha!" he exclaimed, and although he could hardly find the right words to express what he had just discovered, he somehow blurted out:
"Form is Emptiness!"
And while he rushed to his people, he kept shouting, "Form is Emptiness..., Form is Emptiness!"
But just as he was doing that, he became acutely aware that what he was saying, that it could be taken the wrong way, something like… that form had no substance, that stuff could be thought of as no more than an illusion. So he quickly added:
"and Emptiness is Form!"

"Huh?" the tribal members exclaimed as they watched him running madly down the hill towards them, "He must be as delirious as all of us are!"
By this time extreme dehydration had pretty well affected everybody and it resulted in rather erratic and unpredictable behavior.
"… and Emptiness is Form!" Avalokiteshvara shouted once more and he muttered to himself, "Good thing I added that, if stuff was just empty by nature, they could easily conclude that they would not have to take any responsibility for anything anymore." As it was, he had concluded, they had already become too apathetic.
The reaction of his people to the discovery he had just made was quite lacklustre though, he noted, but he could understand why his own exhilaration did not make any sense to them. Thus he returned to the river bed and pondered deeply about how he could make this "Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form" business clearer to them.

Eventually, as though mesmerized by his memories of how the stream's water had once played so wildly with the rocks, sand, mud and clay and had created so many hollows and water filled puddles in the rocks, he thought of a way to demonstrate his discovery. He would show them how his discovery of form and emptiness could also deliver them from thirst and starvation...

He looked for a still moist part of the riverbed to see if he could find some clay that was still wet enough so that he could shape it with his hands. After he found some, he gathered his people around him and he took a large lump and carefully kneaded it into a round shape.
"Form!" he shouted, proudly showing the round object to the crowd.
"Ball!" they exclaimed, expressing that there was nothing very special about such a shape: there were after all plenty such round stones and boulders to be found. But... they became amazed though when they realized that their leader had been able to make that shape by himself, with his own hands, that he had formed it from a heap of clay.
Then he surprised them even more, with his fist Avalokiteshvara punched a deep dimple into that ball of clay and showed them the just formed hollow shape.
"Emptiness!" he said elatedly.
"Hollow!" they answered, obviously not as elated as he was.
But then, in order to make his point very clear, Avalokiteshvara reached with this hollow lump of clay to the trickle of water that was dripping from the rock behind him, letting the hollow ball fill itself to its rim with water.
"Drink!" he said, while he offered them the water that it now contained, "Drink from this eh... bowl! This hollow ball of clay is now... eh... a bowl!"
"A bowl?" the crowd wondered.
But surprise and admiration followed soon after they saw him proceed to drink water from it himself; water from the ball of clay that now, astonishingly, was holding water.

Avalokiteshvara was not sure if the gathering really fully appreciated the importance and the extent of his demonstration as no one came forward yet to drink. So he urged them, and now… reluctantly - something like this had never ever happened before - they came and drank.

When they emptied the bowl, Avalokiteshvara demonstrated it again, filling the empty bowl from the trickle again after they, one after the other, kept emptying it.
Eventually the bowl lost its shape so Avalokiteshvara moulded it back into a ball shape and again he punched a deep dimple into it and again he turned it into a bowl.
He then picked up another lump of clay and while he put the previously made bowl aside, he repeated the process.

A little while later he got the idea that if he would let the bowls sit to dry and harden, that the bowls would keep their shape, and so he proceeded to make more bowls, even some larger ones.
Eventually some tribal members began to copy him and over time they realized that they had found a way to collect large quantities of water from small sources of water. In the past they would have run out of water altogether but now they could keep large quantities of water fresh as they could store it for later use.

Avalokiteshvara did not stop with his keen observations, he figured out how rock, clay, water, clouds and even fire formed. He discovered the principle of what he called skandhas (3) and what we now now call aggregates or phase states, and he would explain this to his people: he discerned how there are five distinct gradations between the very hard and concrete such as the earth and the very subtle such as the skies and its clouds. Form can turn into emptiness through five stages: from earth to water to fire to air to ether: from the gross to the subtle through a sequence of five in-between steps or, the way we say it nowadays: from solid to liquid to plasma to vapor to spaciousness.
He also discovered the correlation between these five elemental or aggregate states and the five senses: human touch had mostly to do with solids, taste with liquids, sight had to do with light and fire, smell concerned vapors and gas, and hearing involved space and vibrations (such as drumbeats) through it.

Although he must have been aware that much of what he said went over the heads of the ones he tried to explain it to, he knew that the practical applications of his insights would keep everyone healthier, happier and freer. They would drink fresher water, collected from cleaner sources rather than murky pools. They would be able to store food in lidded vessels and keep it from going bad and save it for times when supplies would not be plenty. They would be able to use their fires to turn the clay vessels into reusable pots. There was no end to this.
With his insight into the five elements and the five senses he would teach everyone how to use them to a better advantage.
He helped his people to use their sense faculties more sensibly in order to let them separate reality from illusion, especially the illusions that were instilled into them in the past, illusions that had kept them trapped into slavery through trickery of fear and misinformation.
Thus Avalokiteshvara, helped them to reclaim their original free nature and retain it rather than falling back into subservience.

The Heart Sutra (8)

Please note for yourself in the following translated version of the Heart Sutra, were some of the notions, touched upon in the above story, fit. See if you can find breaks in the text, were the text does not follow seamlessly. You might be able to find out for yourself which parts could likely be later inclusions. You might be able to identify which words could have been margin notes that became copied into the text. You might even find some places were the commentary and the original core text do not match or even contradict each other due to misunderstanding and or mistranslation by later commentators.

The Text

"The venerable Shariputra asked the noble Avalokiteshvara, (1) the bodhisattva mahasattva, "How should a son or daughter of noble family train, who wishes to practice the profound prajnaparamita?"

Addressed in this way, noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, said to venerable Shariputra,
"O Shariputra, a son or daughter of noble family who wishes to practice the profound prajnaparamita should see in this way: seeing the five skandhas (3) to be empty of nature.

Form is emptiness; (4)
Emptiness also is form.
Emptiness is no other than form;
Form is no other than emptiness.

In the same way, feeling, perception, formation, and consciousness are emptiness. (5)
Thus, Shariputra, all dharmas are emptiness.
There are no characteristics.
There is no birth and no cessation.
There is no impurity and no purity.
There is no decrease and no increase.
Therefore, (6) Shariputra, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no appearance, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no dharmas, no eye dhatu up to no mind dhatu, no dhatu of dharmas, no mind consciousness dhatu; no ignorance, no end of ignorance up to no old age and death, no end of old age and death; no suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path, no wisdom, no attainment, and no non-attainment.
Therefore, Shariputra, since the bodhisattvas have no attainment, they abide by means of prajnaparamita.
Since there is no obscuration of mind, there is no fear. They transcend falsity and attain complete nirvana.
All the buddhas of the three times, by means of prajnaparamita, fully awaken to unsurpassable, true, complete enlightenment.
Therefore, the great mantra of prajnaparamita, the mantra of great insight, the unsurpassed mantra, the unequaled mantra, the mantra that calms all suffering, should be known as truth, since there is no deception.
The prajnaparamita mantra is said in this way:
OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE (7) BODHI SVAHA"

Notes

(1) It is interesting to note that the Sanskrit name Avalokiteshvara literally means "World-ward looking Lord", definitely a lord who did ‘dig’ this world and observed it with a keen eye, consciously and compassionately looking with understanding.

(2) 'Bodhisattvah' (Sanskrit), a human being whose essence is enlightenment. From 'bodhih' (knowledge, wisdom) and 'sattva', essence, being ('sat' is existance).

(3) The five skandhas:

five elements (earth, water, fire, air, space),

five aggregates (solid, liquid, plasmic, vapor, sound),

five senses (touching, tasting, seeing, smelling, hearing),

five organs of perception. (hands, mouth, eyes, nose, ear)

five attributes (rupa, samskara, sanjna, vedana, vijnana, (five from a range of twelve nidanas).

Notice the vertical and horizontal order in the five series of skandhas listed above.
These five series can be divided into two groups, the top two series represent form and are thus the material skandhas that we use to perceive, while the bottom three are the psycho-physical skandhas that represent emptiness and thus are the skandhas we use to perceive with.

(4) The principle of non-duality is introduced.

(5) Inserted commentary.

(6) The following major insertion clouds the understanding of the first part of this Sutra, illustrating how ancient scripts in their subsequent transmission, oral as well as written, did not pass through history unscathed to stay true to their original wisdom.

(7) There are many versions of the Heart Sutra, here is another one:
http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/Clubs/buddhism/sutras_main.html

(8) Gone, gone, gone... gone all the way. Read more!

Is reality what we think?

Or can our thinking distort our perception of reality?

Clint: What do you think is real and what do you think reality is?

Wim: I don't see how in principle reality can have anything to do with thinking. It seems to me that what we think reality is – what we think to be real – has more to do with the mental difficulties we have acquired over time in acknowledging and accepting reality, difficulties in accepting the way reality presents itself as we register reality with our sense faculties. What we think reality is, is all too often influenced by how we have been made to think about what or how reality should or should not be.
Social, cultural, spiritual, moral, ethical, etc. filters and models about what should or should not be acknowledged, accepted, seen, reported on, acted upon, etc., stymie the unhampered acknowledgment of what our senses actually do perceive in reality.
A quick example: in a society where it is not acceptable to talk about genitalia, the physical presence of genitalia either get under- (tabooed) or over-acknowledged (fixated upon).

Clint: OK, I get that. So let me then change my question. Instead of what I asked you before, "What do you think reality is?" I'm asking you now, "What is reality, what is real?"

Wim: What is real is all that which sooner or later gives rise to impressions that our sense faculties (and their observational extensions in the form of instrumentation such as telescopes, microscopes, etc.) register, lay down as data in the recesses of our brain and subsequently present to our awareness and also to our mind for possible further digestion and possibly more detailed or nuanced investigation.
Problem is, and that is unfortunate, that this further mental digestion can move the original sense impressions away from the sensorial realm of the objective towards and into the mental realm of the subjective – a mental state that is much too easily influenced by spiritual, moral, ethical, cultural and social filters or models of propriety and acceptability, a sort of editorial filtering and modeling that attempts to affect the scope of what should or should not be allowed to be accepted or treated as reality.
Chances are that with every iteration of this kind of mental processing, rather than receiving deeper and more nuanced mental understanding and appreciation, that our initial sense impressions get painted (or is it tainted?) by interpretations, descriptions and meanings that they originally did not carry and convey.

Clint: Does, what you are saying, also mean that reality is to be devoid of what we have been made to think – conditioned to think – about what and how reality should be... what reality should contain?

Wim: Yes, we tend to confuse objectively sensed reality (all that which reality unconditionally presents to our senses) with a so to speak ideal or wished for reality (a better word would be "ideality")... a conditional ideality that is based on the afore-mentioned spiritual, ethical, moral, cultural and social considerations that all too often attempt to prescribe what reality should or should not be... how reality should or should not be... in other words, what should or should not be allowed to exist as reality.

Clint: Of course! I get it. What is real should have nothing to do with whether we think it is acceptable or not... You are saying that we inappropriately confuse the conditions of reality with the conditional judgments about the acceptability of eh... elements of reality .

Wim: Yes, right on! Although the world of reality is entirely a world of conditions, reality is not conditional. As such, it has nothing to do with what we think reality should or shouldn't be or what reality is or isn't. Actually, your original question about what we might think reality is, reminds me of a poster I saw displayed on a walk-in clinic window a few years ago. It said:

"Schizophrenia, It's Not What You Think!"

National Schizophrenia Foundation, 2005

I'm not sure if that phrase was designed with a double entendre in mind, but I very much noted and appreciated the two meanings of that phrase:

• In the first place, of course, it points out that schizophrenia is not what many people may think schizophrenia is. So the slogan urges the readers to give up their preconceived ideas about what they assume schizophrenia to be.
• Secondly, the phrase astutely describes what schizophrenia is by defining that "It" or that-what-the-schizophrenic-person-sensorially-experiences is not identical with what their thoughts offers them to believe about what is actually real or not.

Clint: In other words, what their thoughts offer them does not reflect or represent reality. So, reality is not that what a schizophrenic person's thoughts prescribe reality to be or not to be. Reality is not what their thoughts force them to see as reality. Ergo: reality is not what they think!

Wim: Right!
But isn't that also true for anyone... anyone who does NOT suffer from schizophrenia...?
Isn't it so, that the actual reality that anybody experiences is not necessarily all the time matched by what their minds offer them in terms of thoughts and interpretations about how and what that reality is or isn't?

Clint: Yes, I have to admit, that is often the case.
So, if I understand you well, what the poster slogan says about schizophrenia, we can actually extend that to reality itself and... also to ourselves.

Wim: Yes! We can extend it to reality as a whole and to reality for all of us...

Clint: Ok then… Reality: It's not what we think!

Wim: Right! Reality is not what we "t h i n k."
That reminds me of a notion that is quite fashionable nowadays: someone's assumed individual or personal reality. According to that notion everyone can have their own individual version of reality and call it "my reality." How often don't we hear people say, "Well, it's his (or her) reality! It's what he (or she) believes to be real?"

Clint: But isn't that actually a misguided use of the words real and reality? If something is real, it can only be so because it is objectively so.

Wim: Yes, of course. If some notion or observation is not objectively real, it should really be called illusive... perhaps illusion... or if not illusion then maybe imagination or a figment of someone's mind.
In any case, if some notion is not objectively real, then it is at best a conditional supposition.
Of course, treating illusions, imaginations or suppositions as though they are real does not make them real… regardless even of whether they are acted upon or result in subsequent action.

Clint: But aren't illusions, imaginations, assumptions or suppositions real phenomena – after all they can be objectively observed!

Wim: Of course they are, but...

Clint: Oh, wait Wim, I see what you mean, the mental phenomena are real, but the contents of them aren't. The contents are not in the realm of reality...

Wim: Yes, they are in the realm of the mind's thought processes...
You mentioned correctly that illusions etc. are real phenomena; by the same token the illusion-creating character traits of people who treat their illusiveness as though it represents reality are also real. But like you say, the contents of their assumptions, imaginations, suppositions or illusions are not – however much the person who holds them, claims them to be "their reality."

Clint: Are you suggesting that when people say that it is their reality, that they should really be saying that it is their illusion?

Wim: I'm not sure that we can get anybody to say that... unless they have a surprise sudden breakthrough and a quick sense of humor...
But, yes, I'm sure that it is possible for people to discover that their "so-called-reality" lies outside the realm of the real.

Clint: What I find so sadly unfortunate though is that people who believe "their reality" to be real, that they seem to treat it as something that is... hmm... that even surpasses the reality of reality itself.

Wim: Yes, that is sad, and you are right, by attaching an out-of-this-world mythical quality to it, they treat it as more real than the wondrous miracle of reality itself.

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"Putting an end to the alter ego" instead of "Killing the ego"

Steve: How come, in certain spiritual circles, that many consider the ego to be "a good for nothing?" Some even say, that in order to be who one really is, or to become who one actually should be, one has to kill one's ego. But what is "ego?" What is it actually?
Is it who I am not, or is it who I actually am?
If I have an ego, should I really be killing it if it possibly identifies who I am?
Or, suppose I have to kill it, where can I find it, so that I can kill it?
I'm sure we are not meant to put an end to our physical existence, so what is it then what we are supposed to kill?

Wim: There's nothing wrong with ego per se, so killing one's ego is not really what has to happen! Let me explain...

Steve: Hold on Wim, you were saying, "ego per se," what does that mean?

Wim: Per se literally means "in itself", "an sich", "by itself," and that self is...: you – the authentic real and unadulterated you, the unconditioned being who you were from your moment of conception and who you still are!

What you are not – actually never were – is how you over time came to be identified and characterized by people other than yourself... of course quite likely with good intentions or... perhaps... maybe not!
Perhaps others identified you the way they did for their own reasons, with their own personal agendas, for their own benefit.
Could it be that others than yourself have been attempting to shape you to their liking, maybe even to their own likeness?
Could it be that thus an alter ego(1) was created around you – but an ill fitting one at that, however much it was made to stick?
Could it be that you subsequently became so solely identified as that alter ego that you in the end learned to identify yourself according to how you were identified by others?
Isn't it so that eventually the repeated adulterations and identifications by those who wanted you to "change yourself" according to their wishes, caused you to give up and give in, so that you eventually surrendered yourself to such an extent that you in the end also came to identify your "self" as that with which you were so repeatedly identified?
Hence the feeling that this alter ego feels so jarringly out of place!

Steve: That sounds surprisingly right, although... I never thought of it that way.
Maybe that explains the negative feelings I experience when I feel so deeply hurt by certain judgments and personal remarks directed at me by others.
Although… when I express those feelings, I've often been told that it is my pride or my need for self-victimization that is showing... or that my "ego is acting up"... and then I'm usually made to understand strongly that that is the very ego I'm supposed to kill.

Wim: Whereas in fact those negative feelings and sensations that you are talking of, might have less to do with undue pride, unwarranted hurt and playing the victim, than with you fighting this "ill fitting alter ego" I was talking about, that pseudo-identity, that illusive entity that for a long time had been projected onto you by others and which you over time – under plenty of stress and duress – were made to adopt as your "self" while it actually was no more than a "pseudo-self."

Steve: So, these negative feelings and sensations of resistance that I have when I feel I'm not being seen for who I am, when I am not being accepted as I am, when I am not being treated as an authentic and unique human being, they are OK then? You are saying that they come from a natural and to be expected resistance to the – how did you put it? – adulteration that I was subjected to for such a long time… probably from the beginning of my life?!

Wim: Yes.
Let's look at it in more detail.
Those people who have trouble with your ego, actually see two layers in you that they object too, but they've piled those layers up into one heap and call it your ego.
One layer is the unique being that you are, the one they wanted to alter to their liking and likeness, while the second layer is your resistance to that adulteration.
So your subsequent natural resistance to their initial attempt to adulterate you, gets treated as an additional inadequacy on your part. Your natural objection to their original mis-characterizations and mis-identifications gets judged as an additional inappropriate unwillingness or inability on your part to be shaped and molded by them.

Steve: In other words, in addition to the attempts to identify me as what I am not and what I should be, I now also get identified with my objection and resistance to their initial adulteration. Instead of my natural objection being recognized as a necessary urge to remain myself, an unavoidable reflex that I couldn't even not display, my natural resistance is now treated as further unappreciated behavior.

Wim: Right.
I believe that everyone has that initial natural resistance, and rightly so. Even those who appear to have submitted themselves unresistingly to social and societal pressures not to be who they authentically are, have hidden within them and waiting to be released, underneath the appearance of submission, a nigh unsuspected layer of appropriate resistance that may for the time being remain unnoticed or unrecognized.
But to get back to the question of who you are per se. Who you are is not that complex mix of feelings that you have been made to feel yourself to be, it is who you are minus that artificial structure of non-authenticity.
The advice to "kill the ego" must be seen as an advice to put an end to that structure, that alter ego, the one who you so unfortunately, unduly and unwarrantedly were made out to be, that surrogate self that you could never truly and authentically be.

Steve: So it is not that I have to "kill my ego." I have to eventually convince myself not to treat that acquired pseudo-self as "that" who I am.
So I can actually stop breathing life into that empty balloon of my… eh… not my… pseudo-self, that alter ego. I can see it now, it is no more than a figment about me in other people's heads, no matter how much that figment seems to have been fixed on me, no matter how much I have identified with it in the past.

Notes:

(1) I don't mean Freud's interpretation of alter ego.

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The language of wonder

"There is a language of wonder..."
~Robert O'Hearn

Although we have heard that language many times, we may not remember exactly when and how often. It seems so much easier to remember the language of discontent and skepticism. It seems much easier to keep count of the slights and harps that come our way, than to count ON and keep count OF our wonders and blessings... Perhaps we prefer to keep count of those slights, barbs and digs so that we can at some point counter them.

The language of wonder...Yes, I have heard it, and actually - come to think of it - maybe I'm hearing it all the time. Perhaps the language of discontent is never able to fully drown out the language of wonder.

The wonder of wonder is that it lingers, it must have wide open recesses in our physic/psychic being, although - darn it :) – the language of discontent hangs around too, but maybe more in the agoraphobic recesses of our troubled or troubling minds.

Maybe we cannot hold on to the language of wonder as much as we tend to be able to hold on to the language of its opposite. Could it be because there is not as much anecdotal or gossip value in wonder as there is in skepticism and questioning?
Perhaps a certain jadedness has filtered away our readiness-to-see-wonder and our enthusiasm-to-spread- it. We don't seem to be able to easily acknowledge beauty and poetry in the miracle of life without first questioning it.

And if it so happens - if we happen to touch upon wonder in some rare coffee table conversation - the marvelous and wonderful so quickly turns us into focusing on the wonderlessness of what we tend to call the "realities of life." Even when such coffee talk or tea time started with admiration and the hope for the continuation of it, we so quickly come up with expressions like, "Who said life has to be fair?" or "We get the leaders we deserve!"

It seems that gossip and tabloid like stories are utterly satisfying in our hunger for fast talk and easy reads. They are also much more readily available from the media's fast-food pickup windows while we 'drive through' life following the blacktop arrows and curbs to line ourselves up for our daily fix of quick dinner and conversation topics.

Funny isn't it, that fast-food for our shortened attention spans is in some strange way easier to gobble up than slow-food good news, even if it gives us similar digestion problems as the edible fasts food varieties - albethey mental and emotional.

Do we love hurt more - even if it hurts us or others - because of a contorted feeling of satisfaction that comes with the joy of jibing and jarring other people's fortune or misfortune?

Notice that even now, as I am writing this, the urge to deviate from the path that leads to 'the world of wonder' came too quickly... :) Read more!

The Arising of Suffering

The absence or presence of suffering depends on whether relationships are mentally accepted as-they-are or not accepted as-they-are, unconditionally or with resistance and reservations.

• The mental process of acceptance of any relationship or relating is felt as harmony and happiness and is supported by a physical experience of pleasure in varying degrees of intensity, usually accompanied or followed by playfulness in many different formats and in an atmosphere of joy and celebration... clearly homo ludens!
• When there is a mental difficulty with relating or when there is no acceptance of a nevertheless factually occurring relationship (when simple relating is jeopardized by resistance or objection to it) conflict instead of harmony, agony instead happiness are experienced accompanied by feelings of displeasure and anger. This displeasure and anger is subsequently carried by physical -emotional feelings which can be twofold:

1. Physical non-pleasurable feelings of pain, the source of which can be threefold:
   i) A memory of real physical pain from the time when a relationship became physically abusive,
   ii) A memory of a model of pain held up as a threat of pain or punishment when a relationship became abusive,
   iii) An additional new infliction of pain or punishment which can be of two kinds:
   (a) New pain physically brought about by someone setting up a negative and dependent conditional relationship,
   (b) New pain that is graphically alluded to by someone setting up a negative and dependent conditional relationship.
2. Physical pleasurable feelings, feelings that are – and this may be surprising – curiously similar to those that come with an harmonious acceptance of relating… but now these feelings are of a gleeful nature producing a dubious sort of gratification, an enjoyment of the pain that may be happening to those to whom an easy acceptance of relating is denied.
   But instead of happy playfulness there is now the play of conflict, possibly physical conflict. Instead of an atmosphere of celebration there is now one of destruction and attempts to obliterate chances for happiness to occur or reoccur. No celebration, but suffering. Instead of homo ludens… now deluded humans.

When factual relating and factual relationships are mentally resisted, denied or objected to, that resistance is experienced as conflict, anguish, agony or suffering – a mental separateness – that can indeed be called "illusion", as physical relating is actually and functionally taking place, albeit not supported by a clear and accepting mental recognition. This places the mind in a separate non-actual/non-factual pseudo-locale: it is not "with it" ("it" being reality)... hence the illusiveness that is part of suffering.

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Knowing who you are?! Why?

"gnothi seauton" or "know thyself"

Knowing Yourself Again

If - at some point early in your life - you would not have been led to believe by others than yourself that your presence or the quality of your presence was questionable, you would not have ended up having any doubt about yourself and/or your existence.

Ergo, you would not have felt the need to find out "who you are," as there would not even have been a need for that question to arise.

You would not have had to get to "know yourself" as your presence and the way you present yourself would not have been called into question in the first place.

Thus, if you feel prompted to "find out who you are," you and your way of being were at some point seriously called into question, for reasons however that had nothing to do with you, but rather for reasons that had to do with the one who expressed, deflected and/or projected their own acquired self-doubts onto you.

Rather than having to find out who you are, it might be more effective and expeditious to find out who doubted your right to exist and your way of existing in the first place.

At some point you will undoubtedly find out that that person's being and character was also at some point questioned...

You might eventually discover that this has something to do with what goes under the biblical name of "inherited" or "original sin*."

Once you fully and clearly understand the dynamics of this manipulation, the intent of which is to create subordination and subservience, you are free from any self-doubt, assumed shortcomings and artificially acquired dependencies that you at some point were made to believe to be true...

* What is important to know in this context, is that the word "sin" etymologically derives from ancient language roots meaning "debt", "shortcoming" or "falling short" and that the act of attributing "shortcomings" to someone was a tactical maneuver intended to increase the power of the one who attributed the shortcoming, over the one who was made to feel indebted or falling short.

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How we were made to think, "We are who we think we are."

I'm always amazed that the contents of "our personal thoughts" – the ones we assume to be so self-generated, the ones that to us feel so authentically ours – that they are actually loaded to the top with sentences that over time have been picked up by us from outside of ourselves, sentences that we have heard other people utter around us and presumably about us, sentences that we were made to believe were to specifically help us to discover ourselves, to find out who and what we were, what our identity was, how we were to see and identify ourselves, how we were to conduct ourselves and how we were supposed to behave and be…

Too bad that we at the same time got dis-abled to discover that such external pseudo-identity shaping machinations pretty well invariably produced our assumed internal non-authentic pseudo-identities, the ones most of us so seem to suffer from, and which have caused most of us to lose sight of the fact that a simple unconditional and direct self-recognition of each of us in each of us is possible.

Who we are, is not what we think!
Who we are, is not who we think we are!
Who we think we are, is who we have been caused to think we are!
Who we think we are, is not who we are!

Who we think we are is merely a tenuous identity that we have gotten used to being identified as.
It is also an identity that we subsequently have been cajoled into believing that we are that identity... however made up that identity actually was.
Over time we have been talked into identifying ourselves with that extraneous identity, an identity which (when we look closely) is really no more than an amalgamation of other people's evaluations about us – evaluations, some of which were directed our way in an attempt to judgmentally "s-u-b-t-r-a-c-t" from us… from "who we are," and some of which were sent our way in an attempt to unduly "a-d-d" to us... to "who we already were."
Too bad that we – often belatedly – find out that both these subtracting and adding maneuverings are merely based on the mistaken belief that we are not what we were supposed to be in the eyes of our "beholders," that we were not acknowledged to be already who we actually were.

As this unwarranted attributive identification process was being applied to us externally – very often under duress or in situations accompanied by stress – it created an inadvertent and adverse recoiling mental response within us, a mental reflex that turned "self-reflective-in-a-self-conscious-kind-of-way!"
This type of self-reflecting mental reflex comes in principle from an attempt to procure, maintain or restore one's original wholeness and integrity.

The kind of thinking about ourselves that resulted from these undue and unwarranted acquisitions of attributive identifications is really no more than a reflexive mental recoil that tends to follow a series of inadvertent messages of mis-recognition that came our way from judgmental sources insisting that "who we were" (and also "when, what and how") was not the way we were supposed to be.

When a series of these recoiling mental reflexes occur, a self-conscious state tends to develop that goes under the euphemism of "reflection." This kind of self-conscious reflection tends to become a mental state that is usually (and unfortunately) called "consciousness"... which it however is not, as it is not at all the same as that genuine authentic consciousness that results from unconditional mutual recognition and reciprocal acceptance of one's own and each other's being.

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Can it be better put than this?!

"When the mind was thus concentrated, purified, bright, unblemished, rid of defilement, pliant, malleable, steady, & attained to imperturbability, I directed it to the knowledge of the ending of the mental fermentations."
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The Natural Unfolding Of Reality

Letting reality naturally unfold itself without that all too human de-naturing interference

Instead of trusting a natural unfolding of events that would unconditionally (without if... thens...) arise from all contributive factors and conditions that come into play in the unfolding of a situation, what the de-natured human tends to do to control, maintain, change or initiate a certain situation, is the very doing that prevents that situation from naturally occurring, seamlessly carrying on, unfolding by itself or naturally arising from all its prior and current contributive conditions, without the additional layers of undue and ineffective mentalized activities which so unfortunately and all too often accompany the dynamic processes of stabilization, change, renewal and innovation.
This compulsive doing is an interruptive interfering activity that appears ignorant of its own unwarrantedness, as well as ignorant of the fact that any needed change will occur naturally, timely and of its own.

This interferential doing brings about a certain artifice, an additional overlaying result that is:

• at best a tenuous semblance of "right action" that overshadows and possibly even hides what is actually naturally occurring, unfolding or unconditionally arising,
• at worst a done result that strongly – but still illusively – shows up as an attemptive overlay that makes an already unfolding situation appear as something that it actually, functionally and in reality is not.

Underneath this overlay though of disingenuous doing, a doing that merely consists of harmony breaking mental activity(1), is still a genuine and seamless natural reality that can be witnessed, interacted with and enjoyed unconditionally by the well-natured human.
But apart from that it seems that:

the nature
of human nature
has become that of
the de-natured human.

Genuine and seamless natural reality can be experienced by the natural and pristine human in its fullest, unaffected – although possibly overshadowed – by the attemptive doings of illuding, illusive and spoiling overlays… a reality that in reality was and is and can only be unaffected by any attemptive interferential doings, doings that might stage themselves as reality but are really nothing more than pseudo-formations illusively superimposed on reality.

Notes:

(1) This is by the way how "illusion" shows up as pseudo-reality in the mentalized effects that have merely been brought about by mentally conceptualized and mentally presumed causes.

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Reality: It's Not What You Think!

Reality: it's not what you think!
Reality: it's not what you think! Read more!

Perpetrating Harm

Perpetrators of harm and suffering & their mistaken belief that they have the right to inflict it.

Those intent on inflicting suffering on others are themselves suffering from the very infliction they are attempting to cause in others.

• Rather than halting or resolving their own suffering (a suffering that initially was unduly, unfortunately and unfairly passed on to them in the first place, and also a suffering they have been "dis-enabled" to alleviate within themselves) they mistakenly expect that to cause suffering in others by meting out punishment or revenge, will make their own suffering go away or lessen.
• Instead they pass down to others what was unfortunately, unduly and unfairly passed down to them. They have even been "dis-enabled" to become aware that causing others to suffer will not only not alleviate their own suffering but will instead prolong it.
• In addition, those who inflict punishment and suffering on others have also been made "to be unaware" that their own suffering was actually unfairly, unfortunately and unduly acquired as well by themselves as it was initially also meted out to them by those prior to them who were in turn led to believe that the perpetuation of punishment, suffering and revenge would alleviate the cause and effects of their own suffering.

The satisfaction that accompanies the malice, revenge, malevolence, infliction of hurt and Schadenfreude(1) that is doled out by perpetrators of harm, is characterized by an emotional replica of "feeling good" that strongly resembles and almost duplicates the feeling that comes naturally and authentically with benevolence, right action and compassion. It is this replica of "feeling good" and "satisfaction" that makes it nigh impossible for them to realize that they are actually suffering themselves from a great inner pain.
One of the characteristics in the dynamics of this self-perpetuating and escalating chain of suffering and hurt is a strategy by perpetrators of harm that hides
the complex causative and guilt factors that they feel within themselves. They talk themselves into a conviction that emphasizes and justifies that they have the right to punish others with the suffering and harm that they are meting out. At the same time they also attempt to make it believable that they themselves are actually not the ones who inflict the suffering but that instead, the subjects of the suffering are the cause and creators of it themselves. Thus victimizing acts are usually accompanied by sentences such as, "She had it coming!", "Suffering is his just reward, it's his own fault.", "She was asking for it.", "Your problems are of your own making."
Inflictors and perpetrators of suffering and harm invariably attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of their victims, presumptuously assuming that they can make it believable to their victims and bystanders that they (the victimizers) are themselves free of guilt and therefore go "scot-free."

Notes:

Schadenfreude (German) - The ill gotten satisfaction that comes from the enjoyment of misfortune and suffering befalling others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude

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The Valley

A reconstructed autobiographical story of what took place some 12,000 years ago

I had just made my way up into the desert on the arid hills to the east of the delta where my partner and I live. I can still see the wide valley below, an expanse with wide rivers and streams, a fertile delta, warm and humid, the sky over it always hazy, a liquid sun barely visible.

We live and work in the valley. We tend our gardens and orchard and keep animals; we are homesteaders, a new kind of thing these days, something we are pioneering.

I am climbing up the hillside, but as I'm ascending into some misty clouds quite suddenly the sun breaks through and the clouds quickly evaporate. It is getting hot, very hot, blazing hot.

Originally, some years ago, before we and a small group of friends settled in the valley, we lived in the mountains on the other side of the delta. The wooded hills there were shady and cool and were densely populated by many tribes - all hunters and gatherers - who lately had turned into warriors always seeming to fight each other.

Many years ago those western hillsides had been a tropical jungle full of cedars and fruit laden trees, figs, nuts, berries. It used to be good hunting, we could easily catch plenty of fowl, and the fishing in the streams used to be very good. The food supply had always been abundant, everything ready for the taking, but… things had changed.

I am climbing my way up this hot, parched hillside and I'm burning my feet on the hot hard packed orange soil and I'm approaching a part were the hill is studded with many leafless prickly bushes about two or three feet apart from each other. As I’m making my way through the bushes, a strange sensation overcomes me, I feel some kind of worry coming up in me - some kind of fear is trying to raise its head. But although I don’t want to give into it, I do want to find out why I so suddenly feel this fear.

I walk carefully through the bushes and suddenly about ten feet in front of me I see a small snake, a kind of viper, about twelve inches long, crawling from underneath one of the bushes slithering towards me. It makes me stop in my tracks and as I stand there I'm starting to shake, my fear increasing, almost overtaking me and I find myself standing there trembling, pretty near stunned…

Back in the forested hills, in the tribe where I grew up, we had been taught to fear snakes. Also, we had been made to be afraid of the wide, often flooded river valley at the foot of our hills, the same valley in which I now live with my partner. We had also been made very fearful of the desert beyond the valley, the deserted, lifeless hills on other side of the valley, hills we could see only during some rare bright days when the air was very dry and clear.
Actually, we had been made to be fearful of pretty well anything that was not in our own tribe’s hillside territory.

There were two very important people in our tribe, two men to whom we were made to look up. One was our tribal leader who demanded respect, the other was our ‘man of knowledge’, we sometimes called him the ‘snake man’. Of these two men, I liked the snake man the best, he explained life to us and the nature of things and he helped us understand ourselves. He wanted us to figure out the natural order of things, but not for him, for ourselves.

The other man, the tribal chief, wielded his power in a rather threatening way, he did things we couldn't figure out or understand. He tried to control us by instilling fear, using punishment and rewards to get us to do his bidding. He was often angry and it was hard to anticipate his moods. He used to say, “Don't ever leave the tribe, I warn you! If you ever will, you will surely meet with death. Here you can count on my protection. At least you know what you can expect from me. Out there,” he said as he pointed to the valley below and the hills beyond, “Out there the unknown is very frightening and I warn you, if you ever meet with the unknown, it is going to make you wish you were dead. Out there also there is no food, the water is bad, there’s nowhere to hide, there’s nothing out there but poisonous vipers and only death awaits you.”
That was his way of holding us in his grip, keeping us tightly bound to and within our tribe. That’s how the chief worked his powers, how he attempted to exercise control over us. How he dealt with anybody always included some form of threat or punishment, sometimes mild, sometimes severe… and he often threatened with death.

Of course his way of dealing with us got copied by many of us and his manoeuvres were in turn exercised in a similar manner amongst all of us…
Now fear and lack of freedom pretty well fully permeated our way of life and our dealings with each other.
But, come to think of it, we were hardly ever dealt with immediate death and punishment, his threats were actually only sporadically executed - although… when they were, they seemed well timed and dramatically performed. It surely kept us living in a state of constant fear and uncertainty.

It took me a while to understand why the wise man - the snake man - said that we lived in a state of suffering and illusion. He wanted us to understand that our ‘way of life’, the way we normally lived under fear, was actually illusive. It took me quite a while to realize that we had only been made to believe that the illusion of what could befall us only seemed more real than the freedom that we had been made to believe not to have anymore. The illusive power of fear seemed more real than our freedom which was actually only seemingly taken away by the threatening manipulations of our tribal chief.
Of course in reality the illuded and alluded threats that came from the chief could never all happen. Imagine, if every threat was actually executed by the chief (and the others who copied his strategies), he would never have any underlings, he would not have anybody to rule over.
He must have been well aware of how he used the illusion of pain, death and punishment cleverly to make us fully confused and make us accept that we would never have any freedom apart from that conditional semblance of freedom that he promised if we subjected ourselves to his rules.

One single example of death or punishment, timely performed and shown as a dramatic example, would make all of us forever live in fear, as if it could and would befall each of us every moment.

That must have been what the wise man meant by that we lived in illusion, that our life - our way of living - was illusion, that the constant illusion of fear had made us lose sight of direct reality and unconditional freedom.

I could now identify that fear, it was the same fear I felt coming up in me as I was walking up this hill… I felt it even before I saw the viper.

As I'm seeing this viper winding its way towards me, I’m thinking - thinking quickly - “Sure there is something to be careful with, but… fearful…? I have no reason to be fearful. Really, why should I be? This creature has never seen me; it might never even have seen another living being like me. How can it possibly imagine that I might endanger it? Maybe it doesn't even see me. What do I know about this viper? I certainly have no reason to harm or kill it, the only reason I would have to hurt it is because someone made me fearful of it. It seems that I’m scared only because I was taught that I should be.”

At that moment, a warm feeling welled up in my chest, a love actually for that small creature, a care not to scare it. What I feel for this animal is so very different from the fear that I had been taught to have for it. I suddenly became very happy discovering this, ecstatic even, I love that little snake.

Before I go on with this part of my story, let me explain a bit more about my tribe.
The wise man, our man of knowledge, was a very different man than most of us. He loved people: instead of working with threats, he worked with imparting love, knowledge, understanding and insight. To us younger ones he was our friend and we trusted him. The chief though, we were afraid of him because of the power he had over us, because of the advantage he took of the fear that he had purposely created in us. The wise man on the other hand wanted us to know more about who we were, what we actually are - what it is to be human - that there is more to our being than what we were told. He taught us about mind and spirit and he even taught us about our physical body, something he called our anatomy.
He would say, “You can learn to know and understand yourself, but also you can also learn to know your body and the energies that keep your body living. You've all seen people die and you have seen that after people die how their bodies fall apart. You have seen that we eventually end up as bones. Now, of all those bony parts that we consist of, some of the most important ones are your backbones in the your spine.”
He did not often use the word ‘spine’ though when he pointed to the vertebrae that the spine is composed of, he more often called them ‘serpent bones’ .

We knew of course that we were different from snakes, but we could learn something from them, especially the fact that snakes shed their skin. The wise man used that shedding as an example to help us understand how life renewed itself… again and again. Although we humans don’t change our skin, through this symbol we came to believe that we humans somehow change lives through time… that we go on from body to body.
It was not symbolic though what the wise man taught us about our own ‘serpent bones’. He wanted us to understand how a mysterious energy flows through the backbones of our spine, and that that energy circulates between the top of our our head and our tailbone and that it via the various backbones flows to all the other parts of our body.

I remember collecting small back bones from bird and fowl skeletons, stringing fibres through the small holes in them and wearing them as a necklace. I loved to suck the soft stuff from inside those bones. I remember how I concluded that that gooey stuff formed a kind of worm shape inside those bones, something that seemed to hold itself together, and that that mysterious energy that the wise man spoke about somehow flowed through that soft stuff. I concluded that it was probably the same with us as in other animals, also with fishes and snakes.
The wise man would ask, “Don’t those serpent bones look the same as the bones of our own spine? Doesn't our body contain the same kind of bones? Well, living energy runs through those bones - life energy - and it goes from the bottom of the serpent bones upwards to where your head is, and it is there - inside your head - that it finds out what you need to do, and it is from there that it tells your body how to do it, it is there where it helps you doing it.”
“In fact,” he said, “the most important part of our body are those serpent bones that not only keep us erect but also keep all the parts of ourselves connected. Through our spine runs this beautiful power, from the bottom up - from the earth up actually - and from the top down - from the sun on down - and we humans take that energy into us and it is that energy that is the origin of life which keeps us alive, which keeps everything alive actually.”
He taught us about the fibres through which that energy runs to all parts of our body. He explained how our intestinal system operates, what lungs are and why we have them and he demonstrated how to breathe properly. He showed us how to handle our body effectively and efficiently.
All that was a pretty new stuff for us, I don't think that anybody in our tribe or any of the other tribes had ever really looked at ourselves that way.

Ah, our wise man! He was the one who had figured it all out.
He taught us that understanding creates freedom, and that freedom enables one to find solutions that are appropriate to any problem that may arise.

We very much needed solutions, especially now that we mountain people who until recently were so used to having nature provide plentiful in the wild, had run into challenges that were caused by overpopulation: too many tribes in the first place and in addition the tribes were getting too large to sustain themselves without encroaching on each other’s territory. There was now a shortage of food and game, there was a lack of good drinking water and especially - because of all those shortages - there were the recent and frequent feuds between us and our neighboring tribes. A few disastrous things had happened lately and the various tribal chiefs had not been able to solve them. In fact whatever they did in terms of raids and hunts in an attempt to deal with the shortages, only caused the problems to become even larger.

But let me return to the story of the viper.
While the snake was still slithering towards me, I suddenly discovered - surprising myself - “Wow, I don’t have to be afraid. This animal is like our own serpent bones that keep us together and upright. That little snake and myself actually have something very important in common!” And as I’m concluding this, I am getting quite ecstatic, the hair in my neck is standing on end and it feels like I am starting to float in the air; it feels like I am rising up from the red soil upon which I am standing.
At that point, I'm becoming aware of something that I had never felt before; there seems to be something like a large egg shape bubble around me. And I know what it is! It has to do with that energy that the wise man always talked about, it is inside us but it also surrounds us. It is something that I up to now had never really fully understood. And I felt myself floating even more.
And the little snake…? It just slithered away easily between my feet and nothing of what I was at first worried about that could happen, did actually happen.
I was totally amazed at what I just discovered. I now know for sure that our chief instilled us with fear: rather than giving us freedom - he enslaved us so that we became useful for his purposes. This man, our tribal chief talked about badness in the world, that there is good and evil, that the fights we are having with the other mountain tribes are actually about the fight between good and evil. He even assured us that those on our side were good and those who were not with us were evil.

That cannot be so, I just know it. It is clear to me now.
That is the story we are being told to make us fearful… so that we do the chief’s bidding, so that we would fight his wars. It just cannot be so! There is no evil except for something very illusive that is cleverly and craftily put in our heads, something which we are tricked into believing to be real but is not really. Our minds have been filled with fear so that we cannot see anymore what’s really real… I just met this snake that didn't do anything to me at all although it was supposed to be harmful to me and I was supposed to be fearful that it would hurt me, that it would even kill me.
We were made to believe that there are evil powers in the world outside our tribal confines and that only ours chief was able to protect us from those who and used evil powers.
I now realize there is no evil as opposed to good. That distinction you won’t find anywhere in nature, only perhaps in human nature… in the denatured human really.



Those assumed opposites don't exist as such; they only exist as notions in someone’s confused mind. First that fallacious notion took a hold in the mind of him who intended to use it to instill fear, and subsequently it overtook the minds of those in the grip of his spells, their unsuspecting minds now filled with fear and false notions of opposing and conflicting forces - the flawed idea of good versus evil as though those opposites exist in reality and are so to speak needed to balance each other out, as though they depended on each other in some strange devious way!

As I was realizing this with great clarity and insight, it was as though my body started to rise even higher and I felt an enormously powerful energy coming up from below me… from the earth itself. The earth actually felt like an enormous globe beneath me! I never realized that the earth was like that, and I suddenly knew that we live on a beautiful, large living entity, that the earth itself is a living being.
It then felt as though my spine became like the trunk of an enormous tree, erect and massive, its roots growing from me deeply into the earth, spreading ever so widely throughout the whole earth, the very soil from which we have grown, from which we originally came forth.
I then became aware that my arms grew into branches that were expanding wider and wider into the heavens and as I was spreading out, the glorious sun was glowing ardently down into my whole being.
All-this-right-here, energized by the widest expanse of the earth and the universe and us humans - each of us actually being a channel through which the earth and the heavens communicate.


It was as though the sun, which first stood straight above me, was now coming down into me, surging its energies throughout my whole being, my branches and leaves invitingly embracing the sun’s rays that were suddenly forming an energetic crystalline star hovering about a foot above my head. As I looked up into it I immediately knew that it was somehow also a part of my whole being. As it descended into me, my earth-like energy also ascended into it, and the energies all merged into each other. I then could look into the shape and I distinguished a huge crystal-clear gem. Inside the gem I saw vibrationary patterns that were taking on the form of a multi-faceted star, its bright lines joining the many connecting points into a complex multishaped figure that at once held many geometric shapes inside each other, a cube, a tetrahedron and a few more multifaceted shapes. The points and edges themselves were of a deep scintillating blue, but the whole formation showed itself at once while gyrating seemingly in all directions and sparkling in a myriad of vivid but pastel-like colors.

As the crystal came down into me, merging with me, my chest inside opened up so widely that it was as though my core received this divine energy as the greatest gift in the highest state of glorious bliss.

Then I suddenly felt as though I was exploding into the whole universe, being at once the whole universe as well as all its constituting parts and I realized the divinity of it all.

All and everything divine and each individual part uniquely so!

I eventually found myself squatting, my hands holding my face, elbows resting on my knees.
Having come down from this intense state, I then caught myself gazing far down into the distant valley below, ruminating my thoughts, thoughtfully focusing on the work my partner and myself were doing down in the valley.

A little later in the day, after my return to the valley, I met my partner and told her of my experience. She - this being of life - was not at all surprised, my story so much backed up and supported her own awareness and experiences.

The wise man always pressed upon us to “Know yourself” but also to “Find out for yourself!” Now I realize that he meant not just to believe someone based on their authority, but to find out and experience for yourself, “You can at some point know directly and personally what I now can only point at for you.”
Maybe my partner because she is a woman always already experienced more directly. Did she not carry life already, bringing forth life?! Maybe women have an innate trust in the way nature works, the way life goes. Maybe over time men have been compromised too much by fear - and anger too - perhaps to get motivated for their hunting escapades… or now, more recently, in their wars against the neighboring tribes.

This belief about good and evil - that whole notion is actually flawed - I get it!

Evil is a ‘thinking thing’, one does not actually see evil, one may be seeing accidents or inadvertent things that do happen (by all appearances catastrophes are an inescapable part of nature), but in addition, under undue pressure, one has been forced to develop a certain kind of imaginative thinking, caused and enhanced by fear that also increases fear and creates subsequent suspicion, scepticism and habitual questioning - in all a total lack of unconditional trust. This in turn creates a certain kind of imagery: 'illusion', which characterizes suffering. This way an added layer of suffering is created mentally, something that envelops the natural occurrences of pain and natural discomforts. This ‘manmade’ suffering causes one to see, experience and interpret things that naturally happen differently, different from the way they were seen and witnessed before the illusive fearful imagery came into play.
It is quite arbitrary really, anything that may look good to one, may look evil in the eyes of someone else. Flawed thinking overall makes you see things differently, it makes you interpret everything differently from when you just simply observe. Thinking can be good, of course it can be when it is pure and unadulterated, but it can also make that what you normally know as right and straightforward, look strange, crooked, bad or even evil, and… it might get you to make other people think and experience poorly and falsely as well and thus they subsequently also might get into situations of abusive strategizing, manoeuvring and manipulating.

Many years ago now, before we - then still a couple of youngsters - descended into the valley, the wise man had been talking a great deal about cause and effect, ‘causality’ - how in nature everything is causally related to everything else in a “mutual and reciprocal way” - how causality (when we humans do not interfere with the natural flow of things) affects other things in a complex but dependable manner. However, we humans somehow learned to interfere with the natural course of things and we have been able to cause changes that without us would not have happened. The wise man pointed out how it was sometimes hard to figure out if the changes were actually what we wanted or not.

"Years ago," he told us, "I discovered that it is possible to glean something very simple and useful from this the complexity of cause and effect. It can be used to our advantage when the results are clearly foreseen and planned to be advantageous to the furthering of life. I discovered that it was possible to intervene in the natural processes of cause and effect and that - providing it is used for the good of life in general - that no adverse side effects would accompany the results."

(Whoever reads this now, thousands of years after these thoughts, should realize that the sages and smart people of this current age are not any wiser or more intelligent than the sages of yore. The insight and engineering skills needed to conceive of, for example, making fire, cutting flint stones, forging arrow heads and adzes, the invention of pottery and the wheel, were as involved as we now are figuring things out with the ‘tiniest entities conceivable’ that are being experimented on in the ‘greatest machines possible’. In fact in the olden days it wasn’t like Isaac Newton who could stand on the shoulders of giants before him who helped him to see farther, the original sages had to pretty well start from scratch, from square one.)

The wise man’s main discovery was how in the natural order of things ‘cause and effect’ was also two- directional and not necessarily linear as far as time goes. His discovery was not at all the ‘action/reaction’ or the ‘eye for an eye’ strategy that it eventually became for the tribes who remained on the hillsides and who from there ventured into other lands taking their own misguided ways with them. Unfortunately they had learned to resist causes by replacing their natural effects with counter actions. Human nature had become a false nature, different from non-human nature.

Let me describe how life was before we young ones, moved down into the river valley from the hillsides.
The population of the tribes on the forested hillsides had been expanding rapidly over the last generations and the supply of food from the hunts and from what was available from foraging had been dwindling fast. We now had to compete with our neighbors for larger hunting grounds as we had pretty well run out of game in our own territory. All of the tribes experienced the same problem and as we couldn’t figure out how to get more food in a peaceful manner other than by raiding the neighboring tribes. We resorted to ugly but well tested tribal warfare. That is what the tribal chiefs wanted us to do and keep doing. The wise man though, our man of knowledge, who had become a mentor to some of us, especially to the tribe's younger members, started to teach us that there was a way out of this.
As I said already, he had discovered some predictable regularity in the way things follow up on each other - cause and effect - he had drawn his initial conclusions mostly from the way seeds fall from plants and trees and then, after, turn into new plants or trees. He also saw that most seeds did not turn into new plants and he wondered how and why that did not happen. He eventually saw that when you set the conditions right with moisture and sunlit spacing that they would turn into new plants. He was always looking, observing and drawing conclusions. He predicted things, not because he could look into the future but because he understood the past. He had figured out how things happen, that there are natural laws or rules that nature follows, and knowing those rules one could predict what would happen. But also, and that was his greatest discovery, following the rules and applying them with things such as seed and animals, he could change the future and… he could foresee how it would change.
Nobody had ever thought that way; there was security in his ways, not the fear of never knowing what would happen. "Things that happen are not a matter of blind chance," he said, "nor luck, neither do they depend on boons, prayers and mysterious ceremonies."


That was the kind of thinking behind everything he did, but recently that thinking was also behind his experiments with the seeds he collected and planted and with the tame animals he bred from the wild mountain goats and mountain sheep.
He got those of us who were interested to start collecting seeds, gathering up certain animals and he suggested that we eventually move down into the river valley, planting the seeds in an ordered and planned manner. He suggested how we could take care of the animals we had set aside to stay with us for herding. Maybe we could do that even better with some especially prepared animals that would take more easily to the humid environment of the valley. The wild boar could probably be transferred too, but surely the newer breed of sheep and young goats. He predicted that if we did this according to his prescribed ways we would always have plenty of food.
He did other interesting things with seeds. He ‘calculated’ with dried beans and nuts that he laid out in front of him in neat patterns. He could tell from the patterns in which the beans were laid out how large the next crop - that’s how he called it - would be or how the herd of cattle would grow in numbers.
We could now make use of land that we had thought to be taboo or waste…
Before our new experiments the muddy valley did not grow much that was of any use to us, but now, he said, that land was waiting for us to be cultivated.

He invented new words for things he had understood and helped us to acquire the same understanding and learn the new words. In front of him he always had a clean flat spot of hard dirt and with a stick he would scratch shapes in it and he would apply sounds to those scrapes. He even made a string on which he first strung little bones or small shells with a hole through them. He organized them in certain sequences that he gave special sounds to, “numbers” he called them and he would have us repeat the words after him as he uttered them. Later, with a similar string but now with knots he would make shapes that we had never seen before: straights, triangles, rectangles, squares. He could also make the most perfect circles and other round shapes with his strings.

We kids loved him… we would lay out shapes like he did, using small pebbles, twigs and strings and he would get it right for us if it did not work out well at first.
Years later in the valley we would use his methods to lay out plots of land and build buildings from sun baked bricks of clay. The shapes of those bricks were made with strings that were divided into twelve parts; when you folded the strings just right the bricks were always straight and all had the same size. The strings we used were always divided into twelve small sections and the wise man always had us count them in two ways, either in sequence or he had us divide them up in groupings of three, four and five. That was especially handy as we kids also wanted to make his ‘magic’ shapes, triangles, squares, circles and snake forms.

In the past before the overpopulation problems in the hills, when there was still enough roaming area available on the hills, the tribes lived an ambulant life moving through the forests between the hills from dale to dale. If we would move down into the river valley we would still have to live a more or less nomadic life to deal with the unpredictable flooding each year. That’s why many of us thought that taking up life in the wet river valley with its many floods was unwise. The wise man though had been studying the floods and discovered a certain regularity to them. The larger floods always came from the mountain rivers once every so many ‘moons’, as we called it. The smaller floods always came from the sea and somehow also had to do with the moon, but those smaller floods tended to happen twice a day and could be very well predicted. He suggested that we could organize our movements in the river valley around the predictable flooding.
What if we would go down into the wider flatter areas whenever it was possible and safe, we could always return to ‘higher ground’ closer to the hills when it was not as safe and accessible.
In addition, there would always be potable water in the river valley, while on the hills during a certain period we would always run out. Also in the valley sunshine was always filtered by low clouds of humid air, it would be warm but not as blazingly hot as certain times of the year in the hills and hopefully there would not be as many thunderstorms and wild fires down in the valley.
The wise man foresaw that if we built the right environment in the valley, we could grow shrubs and trees that would produce the fleshy fruits like the figs that we liked so much, as well as those that could provide us with the nuts we so fondly collected in the hills. We could even grow large areas of those grassy weeds of which the kernels were so tasty.

To most of us eager youngsters it made sense, it had never been done before, we felt that anything would be better than the wars, bloodshed, strife and hatred. My girl-companion and I decided to take it on. We decided to go into the valley; we actually started planting saplings from some fruit trees that we thought would grow fast and tall enough to deal with the shallow flooding on the edges of the valley. We also started to grow grasses of which we were able to get the grains grow larger than in their wild form. We planted a kind of tree of which the fruit was more edible than the quince fruits that we had learned to chop up and cook and press for their juice and jelly. The young mountain sheep and young goats took very well to the valley's expanse. We started collecting more animals and settled down for longer stretches of time - we called it 'husbandry' - although we had to keep to some form of nomadic life as well.

It was good that we had left for the wider valley, the tribal wars kept increasing and many tribal members were killed, but our chief, instead of following the advice of the wise man, was fearful that he would lose his power. He foresaw that, instead of the women collecting foodstuff, that many of the youngsters - young women as well as young men - would start to grow their own food, fruit, nuts, roots. And instead of men hunting, these same youngsters would have their own animals for meat and milk! They would become independent! What would happen to the traditional role of men and women? Men not hunting, not being ready for tribal defence and raiding others tribes? That was not to happen, he decided. Young people who would be free?! No, that should not be! That way the old way of life would have no use anymore; he wouldn't be able to pressure anybody to follow his orders.

He eventually sent fighters into he valley.

In the meantime we had increased in number and the mountain people who came down into the valley to fight us, could not prevail over us as they were lacking food and as they tired out quickly on the treks they had to make to reach us. Also as the terrain was flat, there was no way for them to gain an advantage... there was nowhere to hide. In addition we knew about the timing of floods and found many ways to escape them or instead: have them landlocked. They eventually withdrew and we were able to attend to our farming practices uninterrupted and in peace.

After an especially good growing season we decided to send a group of us back to the hills and visit not only our own tribe but various others as well. As we had inflicted no harm while we defended our independence, we intended to convince our tribal brothers and sisters who still lived in the hills, that the way of going about living our new way - being free and self-sufficient, being able in the ways of animal husbandry and agriculture to produce food in a steady dependable way - that it was a better way of life in these new times. We showed them that one could live peacefully again, that one could trust again without fear of manipulation and wars. Gradually we gathered more followers.

The chief became immensely upset and got the visiting groups rounded up and banned from ever returning to the hills, also he placed guards so that no one from the hills could move down into the valley below.

We now knew that we would take up living in the valley permanently and in increasingly large numbers.

Of course in the eyes of the old chief, the snake man, our man of knowledge, was to be blamed for our misguided and “evil” way of life.

There was an interesting encounter once when the old chief came for a secret visit to one of the gardens in the valley. Initially he spied on us... or was it perhaps voyeurism? Eventually, as he was found out, he cursed us forever as he lost his patience...

But that story is already known in a biblical way, although I’m sure that as that story got passed on and was told and retold again, that it became a story that was the opposite of what actually took place.

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Modes, tools, elements & characteristics of abstract perceptions & concrete conceptions

Even in some current spiritual literature one is often warned about the use of the senses, one is often advised to withdraw from them or to transcend them, hence certain meditational or spiritual practices aimed at reducing sensorial involvement. This advice is based on remarks made by certain early commentators on ancient oriental wisdom texts. However, their commentaries, many of them initially appearing in marginal notes that over time came to be copied into the main texts, show that they did not fully comprehend the initial and original meaning of the ancient teachings.

In spite of what those later teachers suggest, the use of the senses does not go against nature ... neither physical nor spiritual nature.

That they "might," is a sentiment one still sees expressed and professed too often in ill-formed understandings of (especially) Buddhist scriptures, but also, I might add, very often in Christian and Hindu spiritual literature and teachings.

In ancient Hindu and Buddhist key scriptures, the notion of sense faculties is part of an integrated understanding of the world and the way humans perceive (abstractly) and conceive (concretely). This understanding is expressed by the Sanskrit word skandhas. This ancient wisdom tradition was initially transmitted orally and later came to be transcribed manually and copied many times over. (Hence the occurrence of errors, omissions and many ill informed marginal additions).
Many of the early texts recognize five skandhas, and they comprise of the following five sets of distinctions (notice the concordance in the vertical as well as horizontal order):

1. Elements: earth, water, fire, air, space,
2. Aggregates: solid, liquid, plasmic, vapor, sound,
3. Conceptual descriptors: shape, formation,appearance, sentiment, sense consciousness.(1)
4. Senses: touch, taste, sight, scent, hearing,
5. Sense Organs: hands, mouth, eyes, nose, ear.

Notice also that the above five series of skandhas can be divided into two groups: numbers 1, 2 and 3 are the material and conceptual skandhas that are perceived, and 4 and 5 are the facultative skandhas that are used to perceive with.

When the Heart Sutra (a most important Buddhist source text, littered though with later external intrusions) refers to the skandhas and claims that they are "empty just as form is empty," it refers at first to the faculties of perception. They are indeed empty in the sense that, as they are instruments to measure(2) with, they are initially without data and thus "empty." Whatever data they register, subsequently goes to the "sixth sense," the faculty of mentally gathering together the fragmented information that was supplied by the sense organs. (The Buddha identified the sixth sense as such.)
The Heart Sutra claims correctly that "what-we-measure-with" is empty and "that-what-is-measured" is form. The synthesis of this culminates in the "Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form" mantra, which, by the way, is not to be seen as a "magic" mantra, but as a clear statement expressing the deep understanding of how humans abstractly perceive and concretely conceive in this world.

Notes:

(1) According to the Buddhist Pali Code: the five attributes or Pañca khandha: rūpā, sankhāra, sañña, vedanā, viññāna.

(2) Etymologically the Sanskrit word maya means measurable matter, not illusion as it is currently often misinterpreted.

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A Day Out Of Time (according to the Mayan Calendar)

The Year of "The Red Magnetic Moon"

What follows is the slightly altered but complete speech that I had prepared to be delivered at the ‘a day out of time’ event (a Mayan Calendar celebration) on July 25, 2006 at CorUnum (The Yurt).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar

http://emr.cs.iit.edu/home/reingold/calendar-book/images/

I probably underestimated the time that this speech would take so as I ran out of time (which is a good thing to happen on a day out of time) I did not get to the final part of what I had planned to say… Which was actually also a good thing!!!
Over the last few days I had been trying to come to grips with the fact that the Mayan Calendar ‘runs out’ by the year 2012. Now, you will notice at the end of this speech that I make mention of the expanding/contracting universe theory…
As I was preparing this talk I felt more and more driven to bring this theory up, that we (and the universe :) are likely at the transition point of that dynamic: the expanding universe going into its contracting phase. Even while speaking, I could not fathom (some may have noticed me trying to form the words… but I just could not pronounce them…) why I was not able to bring this contracting universe topic up at the event. It was only a few hours after - at twelve PM to be precise - after I had delivered the shortened version of the speech that I realized why. It suddenly dawned on me that I could not bring this up until the Red Magnetic Moon Year had started, which is… today (July the 26th) as I’m writing this.
During a phone conversation that I had today with the lady who organized this gathering, she used the word ‘unification’ and then I had another insight: over the last generation we have found ‘unification’ to become a more and more important notion to us. Why does ‘unification’ feel better to us than say ‘diversification’ or ‘fragmentation’? It must be because we are preparing for the contracting phase of the universe to take place!
But why mention it today on the first day of the ‘red magnetic moon’ year?
Probably because during this moon year unity and unification is what we shall be working at more intensively…

Funny, how this speech makes much more sense now, than when I put it together.

~~~~~~
Here we are,
right now…
A celebration of
“a day out of time”
and… in what a beautiful place…
“a place out of space” perhaps?

But of course we cannot really step out of time or step out of space…

as it always here where we are all the time!

But we can step away from:
calculated time, exploited time,
… away from exploited space …

and it is that what we are celebrating here now in a fuller awareness…

We were just shown in the yurt the slideshow of the amazing discoveries by Dr Emoto depicting those miraculous water crystals: conscious moments of water as if frozen in time, we have just participated in that wonderful Mayan Calendar Ceremony by the pond, and we have thanked ‘the water’ for staying so closely connected and integrated with ‘the earth’, and later on we will be doing a fire ceremony.
It looks like we are covering water and fire well... and rightly so, but I feel that it would not be out of place to spend some moments out of time devoted to earth… and maybe we can even cover the remaining elements… atmosphere and space.

I’d like to donate some of the fifteen minutes that I’ll be speaking here, to the Earth but… in silence with you. While in silence for the next few seconds, could you in your mind’s eye imagine how you see our beloved Earth, how you feel your concerns about her, consider her past, consider her future, how you extend your best wishes to her?

… … …

Probably some of you may have considered our earth to be in some pain?

Ah, what have we done to her?

Some of you, after having seen “An Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore may have decided to step up your effort in helping her heal herself.
Ah the Earth… this place where we are… in this time…

There is something that we, especially those in, let me call it alternative or new age circles have worked very hard on over the last two generations, something we can actually be proud of: we have really come to appreciate being here on Earth.
That was not always so. Could you imagine some 75 years ago that your great-grandmother would be saying to your grandmother, “You have to ground yourself!” or “Be Here Now!” ?
In those days it seems that in religion and culture that it was overall more important to get out of this place… to get elsewhere: Heaven or Nirvana… and if that did not work out, oh well Hell or Hades. In bible based religions they talk about heaven, in Hinduism they talk about escaping the wheel of Karma during our sojourn here on Earth, in Buddhism there is Nirvana that cannot wait except for the odd Bodhisattva.

It seems that over the ages Earth was not appreciated too much ‘overall’!
How good that we now embrace her, she needs our love, she loves our love.

But still, the other day while I was leafing through some New Age style magazines on the magazine shelves at Chapters, I was struck that there still were some sentiments expressed that found it good to ‘kinda’ escape from here… (Maybe to end up with an ascended master? :)
And then I saw this journal that had Stephen Hawking proposing that humankind should eventually survive on an alien planet… (Can we really? After he noted that we can hardly survive here?!)

Hmm…, maybe it behooves us to check out if we ourselves are really not still some ‘closet escapist’…

The Earth wants us here… fully, with all our heart, one Heart one Earth.

Let’s give ourselves fully to her as she so unconditionally gives herself to us… even if it pains her and as we are we doing her harm.

When Louise, a few weeks ago, urged me to attend this gathering, she said, “Wim you have helped me see that this IS the garden!” - NOT ‘Eden Lost’.

Maybe we have not been excommunicated from Eden, perhaps we have just been made not to see it.

Let’s help each other to see Eden here and live it.

This brings me to another point, a subtle one, but so important, possibly containing a gentle warning.
When I was still receiving clients for counseling (I’m retired now) I would look out from my window down into the garden and I would see clients coming through the garden gate, and I would observe their energy in wonderful colors, and sometimes I would exclaim, "Oh my, look what a beautiful person!" and I couldn't wait embracing them.Then after they sat down, I was always amazed they would - almost invariably - spend their first ten minutes trying to convince me of "in how bad a state" they were, trying to talk me out my first observation. I understand of course. They had become accustomed to see themselves through the eyes of those who identified them as "not good enough" and over time they must have gotten so convinced that those external evaluations and judgments were valid that they started to identify themselves that way and... eventually they would 'be' that way.Being in the function I was given by them when they decided that I could possibly help them, I felt it to be my task to help them to convince themselves 'o u t o f' those initially unwarranted evaluations and identifications, especially those that tended to come in the form of accusations and judgments - the ones that over time had become the clients 'own' self-accusations and self-incriminations. Eventually a client would discover how innately beautiful and unharmed he or she actually still was when they rediscovered themselves from underneath the acquired veneer and layers of paint.
For most people trying to 'better themselves' is most often no more than picking at their inflicted wounds while they expect that the picking helps the scabs to come off, while in fact the wounds get even more inflamed.
One heals oneself from within as one recovers one's 'pre-adulterated' being. Sooner or later veneer and paint will always crack and peel away, especially after one sees that the external 'doings' one used to do to 'better oneself' - one's usual ways of dealing with assumed and acquired problems - that those 'doings' actually prolong the problems and causes them to persevere.

Let’s for a moment do ‘a no-no’ and take ourselves out of this place, away from time here, and imagine that we are (all of us here together)… that we are a heavenly counselor perched somewhere in the universe.
Let’s imagine that we see Mother Earth - our first client - approaching us through some heavenly gate, “Ah, look at her energy” we say, “and those wonderful atmospheric colors like an aura encircling her, that blue watery veil partially covering her fertile body…” Ah there she is Sister Earth! And we want to listen to her.

But… but, lo and behold, we hear only complaints coming from her!

For minutes we hear voices attempting to convince us that she is not as beautiful as we just saw her, that she is in pain, that she is ill, at the point of feeling like… blowing herself up…

Imagine that we are now helping her to convince herself that she is actually how we saw her to be when we first saw her approaching us: so beautiful and whole, energetic, showing her pride in glorious colours... and slowly we see her discover that she is not how she was made to be seen…!
And as a client would wipe away a tear when discovering that she was actually never really as bad or inadequate as she was made out to be, Sister Earth is now also showing a glimmer of a tear, having rediscovered herself…, recovering her real being… not being at all what she was made out to appear to be…

The following is subtle and might not immediately make sense…

What if our lovely beautiful Earth is actually in good shape - really! - as beautiful as we saw her as she approached us just a few minutes ago?
What if our usual human concerns about her are actually our self-judgments and self-incriminations projected onto her?
What if we, in a way, force her to identify herself with how we constantly identify her, by means of our acquired and mistaken self-identities?
If that is so, aren’t we then contributing to her lack of self-confidence and thereby actually hampering her self healing?
Are we aware enough that Earth can heal herself and that even our most well-meant strategies might not be the right ones, that they might actually prolong her pain?
What if our worries about her and the way we usually try to solve those worries, are actually part of the pain we are contributing to the Earth and… that we actually make her pain last longer?

Could it be that our fixes, however well intended, are also picking at her wounds?

I know, that’s a novel way of looking at this…, we are so much ‘the doer’, our work ethic is doing, but does our doing actually help Gaia (as Dr. Lovelock called the earth)? Really?

Is Earth getting better as we think her to be so ill?

Is part of our thinking not actually part of her acquired illness, something we are pushing onto her?

The first thing we as humans did in historical times to “better” Gaia for us was perhaps that we made her feel bad and inadequate in the first place…

What good do we actually do to Earth even when we think we ‘do good’? Ah Mother Dear!

The things we do, eh?!

One cannot gain genuine peace by fighting a war…

Can we heal the earth, when we actually fight those whom we see as hurting her, while we are thus engaged in a futile game of mutual pain?
We do that sometimes, don’t we?! We can be so unaware, hating those who do the hating.
Gandhi’s approach might still be the right one; he dealt with Mother India’s liberation by increasing her self-confidence by improving that of her inhabitants.

The point is subtle and complex and has a twist to it: The human survival syndrome has nothing much to do with the survival of Mother Earth, in fact we are surviving, we can let go of our syndrome. If we can do that with confidence - when we are aware that we ‘made it’, that we are surviving, then the remnants of our habitual survival machinations, maneuvers and manipulations can disappear…

But each of us may still be harbouring too much of that human survival syndrome…

There is theory that says that currently in our expanding universe, everything expands… that means ‘us to’. That theory also states that the universe will at some point start contracting.

Could it be that the universe is starting that contracting phase right about now, and that survival starts meaning something else than what it used to mean, instead of more of me, more for me it will be less of me, less for me ; instead of more of us and more for us, it will be… …

I have a feeling that Gaia is responding to a Universe that is on the edge of contracting… and we are invited to respond to it in kind... Invited? Actually, I don't think we have a choice, we are part of Gaia, we are one organism... just as we are part of this universe... we are one organism...

In a contracting universe there will be less time, less space… maybe that is why this particular ‘day out of time’ in this ‘place out of space’ is so significant!

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Grand SpaceTime

Time squared and a cube with nine dimensions

Wim: Really knowing what time is, is of utmost importance.
Lynette: Hey, yeah, I can agree with that!
Wim: Just like it is important to know more deeply and extensively what space actually is.
Lynette: Hmm... now space is a wee bit trickier... or perhaps not... maybe I don't know, maybe time is trickier!
Wim: We humans maintain some peculiar concepts about time and space, concepts that are often very abstract: geometrical or mathematical. Most of us have to learn to calculate to deal well with time, and space... Just telling time is not enough and negotiating space is even more tricky with our tendency to attempt that in leaps, tumbles and bounds.
Time, more so than space, becomes abstract very quickly, especially when one attempts to think about it. Too quickly people who care to think about time come consider it even non-existent. Of course time is quite intangible but if it perchance - through hurry and speed - becomes almost tangible, time quickly appears to be fleeting and seems to be able to escape our grasp.
In human history, time was initially a conceptual discovery, but we quickly found that we could use time to our advantage if we could mix its abstract concept with tangible implements, thus tricking people and animals (unfriendly tribes and wildlife) with our speedy javelines, rocks and bows and arrows.
Lynette: Yes, I get it and also hmmm... when humans discovered the temporal rhythms of the tides by observing the rising and receding of the sea, they also started to look at the skies, the moon, the sun. Who knows if even words like period or menstruation are time related. The word tides and time surely are - you showed me on Internet yesterday that both come from ancient roots that denote time.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tide
Wim: Menstruation of course comes from 'month' and month is related to the periodic cycles of the moon.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=menstrual
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=menses
Not only that, also the seasonal rhythms of flooding rivers became noted and early agrarian and husbanding farmers took advantage of their understanding of that cyclicity.
At some point humans even invented ways to play with time, we could almost manipulate it, at least we thought so... fertility rituals and timing were intricately interwoven.
Lynnette: So true and instead of letting time be and run its course, we found ways to seemingly speed it up or slow it down...: we invented haste and tardiness, we learned to extend durations but we also invented shortcuts.
Wim: Yes, and in our habit-forming ways, we eventually developed a sense of time that I think is not fully representative of what time actually is. That's why I like to find a fuller sense of time and space:
- a more experiential sense
- something closer to what time actually is
- not some abstract conceptuality of it
- but a more participatory functional and sensorial cooperative involvement with time
- not something abstract or philosophical
- nor something that still has the limiting remnants of prehistoric use and assumptions.
Incidentally, I have some very early poems of mine in Dutch in which I'm trying to come to grips with that.
Lynette: Cooll... could you translate one for me?
Wim: One of them goes something like:
"Time does not exist
except that
time is nothing
but going
from here to there..."
That is the quick gist
Lynette: :)
Wim: I see it differently now. Now I would say that time does exist but (as I also must have grasped when I wrote those ambiguous lines above as a teenager) I see time now as intricately interwoven with space...
Lynette: Space-time?!
Wim: Yes indeed! In fact I see space-time as resulting from the reciprocal process of Energy turning into Matter and vice versa: a space-time dynamic that happens so to speak inside the equal sign of Einstein's formula E=Mc.c.
The way we humans usually describe and deal with what we sense time to be, is that we see only a watered down version of it:
a. in the first place we see time as linearly one-dimensional and
b. secondly we deal with time as though it is running in one direction only.
To express this limiting and limited view of time in a novel way let me say it as follows: intellectually we deal only with the square root of time while factually and functionally we deal with time as a whole, even as we are not aware of how and that we do it.
Lynette: The "square root of time"? How on earth did you come up with that idea... square root of time? So far that means nothing to me.
Wim: Let's look at Einstein's formula again and notice that it says "c.c", which means speed of light squared.
I don't think it is hard to see that the speed of light includes the notion of time: a certain distance traveled at a certain speed definitely includes the notion of time.
From that 'c.c' I intuited a few years ago that time in a grander sense than usually considered must be two dimensional or square... otherwise that formula doesn't work. Square or rectangular... something with two directions, one direction linearly and the other one also linearly but... orthogonal to it... like at a 90 degree angle so to speak - although I must admit that that is clumsy way of saying it.
Lynette: I can imagine it well though, I'm thinking of a flatlander. Flatlanders (however imagined they must be) are not aware of the third dimension... the one up and down, although we-non flatlanders know that it does exist. Similarly I can imagine that time might also have an extra dimension, that it has an extended structure, something that is... hmm... planar (?) is that a good word.
Wim: Yes, right enough to spark our intuition.
Although we shouldn't mix up scientific topics, but String Theory (particularly M theory) uses terms like 'world-line' and 'world-sheet', and their depictions (a visualization trick that represents some wonderful mathematical tightrope dancing) do come in handy to help visualize the two-dimensionality of time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line
But let's not go there yet, as what I'm suggesting is only meant to be analogous.
Lynette: But it is still OK then to visualize the two dimensionality of time as a surface-like something? Square or rectangular?
Wim: Yes, but rather than horizontal, see if you can picture it vertical.
You see I feel that evolution has something to do with it that extra dimension, some kind of vertical kind of evolvement.
If time were only one-dimensional, there would simply be more of the same, a simple quantitative repetitiveness, an increase in numbers (quantity) but not in complexity (quality?). It's in the complex forms of matter and life that the second temporal dimension appears to come in in a special manner.
Too bad that at this point we can only be led by intuition and imagination, I hope it works reliably enough though.
Lynnette: Could it be that crystals tend to follow the one-dimensional route and that more complex structures - living things maybe - include the second time dimension?
Wim: I think you are right, but it seems to me that crystalline structures use the one dimension of time in a bi-directional way. An English mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger
has observed something like that in what unfortunately are called quasi crystals. These are crystals that are built up according to a rare symmetry: a five-fold one. They start out in a certain pattern that can only work towards a crystalline form if the final outcome is known beforehand, it also involves aperiodic patterns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_tiling
It seems to me that some two-directional information exchange must be taking place time-wise between result and origin, while the atoms are on their way to form the crystals... (I believe it is called teleo-dynamics) ...if not, the first steps could not be taken as they are. Although these crystals (certain aluminum alloys) develop atom by atom, it may very well be that a phenomenon which occurs at scales much smaller than the atomic plays a role here... and... luckily it has been discovered that at subatomic scales time indeed is bi-directional. (Feynman diagrams attest to that)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram

Note how the anti-particle moves backwards in time (green arrow)
Lynnette: Wim, can we get back to the square of time?
Wim: OK, but it will still be strange though, as strange as time running backwards...
Let's say that for some strange reason grand time (let me call it that way) could be represented by a number, say "nine".
Lynette: OK, let me just follow you, but I won't pretend I understand if I don't!
Wim: Fair enough. OK... Do you remember that a few minutes ago I stated that "we usually deal with the square root of time (grand time I meant of course)"? Well, the square root of nine is th...
Lynette: Three!!! Actually it is positive and negative 3!
Wim: Right, three... well that's a whole lot less than nine... Oh, and the algebraic fact that you mention, that it is a negative number as well as a positive one could be used to show how time can go hither and thither!!!
By the way that number 'nine' is not supposed to be significant here, but then... hmm... come to think of it, maybe it is, we shall see.
For now though with that example I just wanted to give you a sense of how we (by taking the square root) analytically formed a concept about grand time in which the analysis by itself made us lose sight of quite some other dimensional aspect.
Lynette: Well, I can't say I fully get it, but I have to admit that I feel pretty good that I now can see - darn it, I may have proved it to myself! - that time flows backwards as well.
But Wim, can we retrace our steps to E=Mc.c
Wim: Yes, let's make sure that we understand that M stands for mass and that the c.c part in this formula somehow... (remember c stands for the speed of light) ...points to the two dimensionality of time. Einsteins's formula could very well represent a process, rather than just an equation, although it is not necessarily meant to be understood that way.
Lynette: Energy (E) equals (=) some three dimensional quantity (M) multiplied by something involving the square of something with a specific speed (c)... the speed of light, right?
I'm OK enough with time square :) for now, but what about M or mass? I always had great difficulty understanding mass, I always get it mixed up with weight, force or size.
Now size, that is clear to me, that has to do with space and that is three dimensional, but, hey..., did you not let me read this book: "Superstrings: A Theory of Everything" by Davies and Brown?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/052143775X/sr=8-1/qid=1153379355/ref=sr_1_1/104-5359282-4594309?ie=UTF8
It explained that according to String Theory space-time could contain four, five even ten dimensions.
Wim: They are up to eleven dimensions now. But that reminds me, I promised that I would explain those extra dimensions... one extra for time (which I did) and an additional six for space. Lynette: Oh yes! :)
Wim: Alright, think of the three dimensions in a cube, see if you can visualize them...
Lynette: OK,
up and down,
left and right and
back and forth...
Wim: Can you for now just imagine those three directions as simple lines? Actually, just for now see those directions as represented by the ribs of the cube, its edges...!
OK?
Now focus on just one horizontal rib and the adjacent vertical rib and the adjacent rib running away from you...
Lynette: Shall I draw it?
Does it look something like this, is that what you mean?

Wim: Yes, right... In fact that is excellent!
Now take one line, say the diagonal one, and imagine that line to be a square rod...
Lynette: OK...
I can imagine that...
Wim: You know the length of that rod... it is as long as the depth of the cube, but because it is a rod...
Lynette: Yes, a square rod... and the length of the rod is one side of the cube...
Wim: Yes, but from a distance that rod would look like a line... right?
It seems to have only one dimension... length!
Lynette: OK, from very far away it would just appear as a line...
Wim: Closer by though you see that it is a tube with height and width, two more dimensions, right?
Lynette: Yes, it has a thickness, it has volume...
Wim: Similarly with the cube that I show here...
but it is... ... it is the same cube as this one:
except that the seemingly tiny cube is further away.
The thinness of the lines of that tiny picture makes them appear as... well... just lines. When we take a closer look though, they show their shrunk dimensions as not being shrunk at all...; the thickness of the seemingly one dimensional lines is now represented by an additional two dimensions: height and width...
When you are close by, or better yet, when you look at things under a magnifying glass, or better yet... under an an electron microscope, or even better... when you observe


subnuclear sized phenomena through one of the largest microscopes in the world, the Tevatron, which is really a particle accellerator and collider

then suddenly those extra dimensions show up.
But we have to be careful, we shou...
Lynnette: I guess, Wim, that I shouldn't take those pictures of cubes and square rods too literally, you are talking about dimensions, not really about horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines... or actually orthogonal ones...
But yes, I can imagine that in normal day-to-day life, that we are not aware of those subtleties... we don't see those hidden dimensions, but I feel that you are going to suggest that we are nevertheless very much affected by them...
Wim: True, that's why String Theorist call those dimensions 'rolled up' or 'hidden' and as I said they have now theorized up to six extra ones.
Lynnette: Yes, I see that: six extra altogether, that is two extra ones for each of the three ordinary spatial dimensions... for a total of a grand nine!
Wim: Grand indeed! So let us call it grand space: three as we see them in our ordinary world and another six that play quite a role when operating on sub-nuclear scales: the world of quarks, bosons and fermions... actually the world of particles, strings and branes.

Lynette: So nine spatial dimension plus those two temporal ones that you mentioned before...! That comes to a total of 11 dimensions for 'grand space time'.
OK, got it...
Now what about the notion that sometimes when you are "in the zone" that you don't experience time, or that sometimes time seems to go faster or slower or doesn't move at all? Can you account of that...?
Wim: Of course... for that we will have to return to E=M.cc

To be continued...

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Causality and Time

Patterns, the way bricks are laid and... t-time.

Pete:
.... Seriously now, forget about the brain, and think of a brick house, each brick laid dictates the position of the next one, but it's the bricklayer who places the bricks. So, in the case of the brain, it's the practice who plays the role of bricklayer.

E.J.:
Yeah but it seems to me that there has to have been a brick or two already laid that made a particular practice available. I mean I worked with bricklayers and there's always a layout guy that goes ahead and sets up the pattern. Not to mention bricks already made and abundant enuff and in the same area.
So, I'm saying that if practice makes patterns then there must be a pattern already made to start a practice. To me, in the end, what you're sorta saying is that neurons are what forms these or any ideas.

Pete:
Look at it this other way (groan! another metaphor) although, things arise co-dependently, they also happen sequentially.

Wim:
Ah, Pete, just what I was waiting for... :)
Now..., is what you just said the cause of how and what I'll respond, or was I in some causal way anticipating what you came up with so that I could answer it with considerations that I had already concocted?

What if it was both simultaneously?!

The issue of cause-and-effect... (the way we nowadays tend to see how an enfoldment of action is brought about by something prior to that action; the way we tend to see action as a re-action or follow-through-action to a previous action) ... was not known to early non dualist thinkers like the Buddha or Nagarjuna... at least not the same way we currently explain 'causation' or 'causality'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratitya-samutpada
When they spoke of causality they spoke of co-dependent arisings or interdependent origination (that's how pratitya-samutpada usually gets translated). They did not speak about 'cause and subsequent effect' or 'action and subsequent reaction' in a time wise unidirectional linear sort of sense. Their notion of co-dependent or interdependent arisings also always included more than two linked dependencies. Pratitya-samutpada was seen as a complex web of interferences... the way my mother said it once, "Everything has got everything to do with everything else, but the way we see time messes it up in such a way that we don't see anything anymore the way it actually occurs." (In Dutch, "Alles heeft met elkaar te maken, maar hoe we met tijd omspringen is hoe we er geen touw meer aan vast kunnen knopen.")
Our way of looking at 'happenings' linearly and one-directionally time wise, is also steeped in a rather recent materialistic way of looking at what is, a paradigm that excludes 'anything considered to be opposite to the materialist definition' as non-existent or not-extant and thus deniable, dubious or at least negligible.
The dualist paradigm made us divide the world into materialistic and non-materialistic 'notions'... a dualism that over time easily invited either one monism (materialism) or the other (spiritualism) to be deemed the only reality - either one judged by some kind of socio-moral acceptance, resistance, skepticism or denial.
This is not to say that before those divergent paradigms developed so contrastingly, that the world was seen more whole... obviously not... otherwise Buddha or Nagarjuna types would not have come up expounding their insights.
One thing though, in their days - before the 'age of the clock' - time was experienced differently. That is... if time was experienced at all !!!
To us - who are so bonded to the clock from birth on (birth all too often scheduled by appointment, our feeding patterns, breast or bottle, so timely regulated) - when we look back into history (something that we clearly make up as we go) we all too much project our description of time onto whatever we may see as experienced in our stories of the past.
That means that if we want to understand "co-dependant arisings", etc., we have to clear our understanding of the insights of Buddha incarnations from our 'time' interpretations.
When we do that, when we take our understanding of time out of their causality/causation equation, then, as a consequence, we also subtract our assumed one-directional temporal linearity from it. Thus we will end up seeing and understanding their 'pratitya-samutpada' more clearly. When we also, in order to even better understand, include that in those days less materialistic 'drivers-and-drivens' were not denied, it might become evident that even non-material elements (so to speak) were part of the web of mutual reciprocal simultaneous interferences...

A few weeks ago, to illustrate the multi-directionality of time in structures operating in dimensions less tiny than the sub-nuclear, I mentioned autopoiesis and teleodynamics, creative dynamics in which future patterns influence past arrangements or arrangements still to take place. (Geometrically Penrose (1989) identified such teleo-patterning in the way certain aperiodic crystals foresee their final non-periodic quasi-crystalline formation and set up beforehand to reach that shape.)

At any rate, I suggest it behooves us to wake up or re-awaken some intuitions, notions or ideas that we may very well harbor, conceptions perhaps that could be in line with a reality that differs radically from the assumptions that we held for real while they adulterated our observations of and in reality.
As well, we should hone our non-dual paradigm and ensure that, as we profess our nondualism, that we exclude dualist remnants that might still stick to us by force of habit, which only by way of habitual thinking seem to make sense - in spite of them being mental residue, being no more than non-sensorial nonsense.

Pete:
Well Wim, let's keep this simple and let me stick to the point I was trying to make. As far as sequentiality and cause and effect goes, watching a ballet, it seems that the beginning of a certain melodic theme causes the entrance of a certain dancer, and that a dimming of the lights causes the exit of another, etc.

Wim:
As we play life, that might indeed seem so... artistically, artificially in an artsy sense.

Pete:
Well, no, I don't think so. Although this is still a metaphor, in the biological ballet that takes place in our head, neuronal connections always precede mental acts, and mental acts call for more neuron connections. No ticket, no laundry; no brain, no consciousness.

Wim:
It looks to me that in what you just said that you include a certain 'webbedness' as well as some very welcome physical/mental integrative considerations.
This view though seems to be in a one dimensional temporal way, albeit... bi-directional and that is great!
You may remember that I once suggested time to be two dimensional I mentioned that time - the square of time actually - is part of that 11 dimensions space-time String Theory, the extra dimension being an additional temporal dimension - orthogonal to our usual description of time. I said something like, "Heck, there might even be some kind of multidimensionality to time. The collapse of the wave function always involves a squaring of space/time vectors. We have to square with time... square off with time, really!
In Quantum Mechanics with certain complex representations of probability functions 'upon collapse', time also gets squared and... that's the crux of the matter... time's linearity and sequentiality disappear... and it is that what allows for that coincidental simultaneity of what is usually seen as dichotomous, dual, linear and sequential."

What we as humans tend to do in an attempt to gain a simple grasp of seemingly complex reality is to do something that is akin to taking the 'square root of it'...: something comparable to how we find it easier to visualize the size of a 225 square mile forest fire when we take the root of 225 and visualize the size of the forest fire to be 15 miles long by 15 miles wide.
The way we attempt to understand the dynamic 'a m b i e n c e' of life (the totality of surrounding conditions and circumstances affecting growth or development: atmosphere, climate, environment, medium, milieu, mise en scène, surroundings, world ~ Houghton Mifflin) is something similar: we take the square root of it: the nine dimensions of 11 D space-time (M theory) become three dimensions (the remaining six becoming hidden) and t (time) to the power of two become just t (time).
That 'root taking' produces a modicum of simplicity: we can follow it, there is sequence and linearity, order is simpler in lower orders of magnitude, we can 'geometrically' oversee it... forgetting though that this calculated simplicity only represents the square root of totality... and thus we, analyzing and simplifying, we live now in and according to a derivation of reality... Read more!

Is life suffering or illusion?

It is often said that the Buddha held that life is suffering or illusion.

Surely, many of us have been made so dependent that they cannot seem to do anything else anymore but respond to the expectations of competitiveness, survival syndromes as well as the demands and obligations of consumerism and commercialism with all its illusive conditioning and conditionalizing. Many of us have been tricked and/or coerced into a life of giving in to manufactured desires and manipulated fears.
But should that be called life, shouldn't it rather be called a surrogate of life... pseudo-life?

This pseudo-life is by no means a recent development in the history of humankind. The Buddha discovered already some 2700 years ago how adverse degenerating dynamics had been used by some who employed illusive and deluding – foremostly mental – manipulations in their attempts to alter and modify the way humans relate with each other. They were able to pit humans against humans in such a manner as to create dependency and servitude fueled by desire and greed, fear and anxiety.
The Buddha saw this dynamic as a modifying, manipulative and manipulated overlay on life and identified it as the exploitation and affliction of suffering or dukkha (Sanskrit).
The Buddha himself did not consider life per se to be suffering, rather it were his subsequent not fully understanding followers and commentators who came to that unfortunate conclusion, they even came to read suffering into every form of existence... even going so far as talking about cosmic versions of suffering.

This is not how the Buddha and some of his equally enlightened followers saw it (Avalokiteshvara-Quan Yin and Nagarjuna). To them life was sacrosanct per se.

The negative attempts to undo that sacrosanctness do not touch life itself. The attempts do not even touch the inner living being of any human who has been made to suffer, in spite of how religious or social manipulators of power insist that it does. The attempts though do form an illuding appearance, a sort of envelop around life that hampers individuals to remain in a state self-awareness or to stay in touch with their authentic self (1).
It is true though that to most of us this pseudo-life feels more real than the reality of life in itself...
For most that illusiveness has taken on the appearance of reality although it is no more than a make-belief replica of it!
For as long as someone is seemingly disabled to see that distinction, suffering will persist for that person.


Notes:
(1) That may be why people who have come to an acknowledgement that they acted inappropriately and against their best instincts can say, "I was not being myself when I did such and such..."

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Understanding and Knowing Each Other

Unconditionality and Reciprocity

Darren: I think one of the reasons miscommunication happens is that different people have different fixed meanings for abstract words. Much of the time we're just arguing over the meaning of words: "understanding" is one of those words. If you're asking me in a deeper sense what understanding means to me, I'd say it's knowing who you are.

Wim: And with that "knowing who you are," comes:

knowing who everyone is,
knowing what everything is,
as well as knowing that everything is...
…just as it is.

About understanding and knowing, to paraphrase one of my mother's sayings freely(1), only unconditional understanding leads to knowledge…
That means that only unconditional knowledge can mentally represent reality. In other words, what is can only be known fully as to what it is, and who is can only be fully known as to who he or she is when such knowing and acknowledgement does not depend on preconditional rules of acceptance – be they moral, social, philosophical or functional rules.
People, things, flora, fauna, contraptions, things, I, you, he, she, it, we, you, they… even ideas can be known directly as they essentially, existentially, intrinsically and self-evidently are when one doesn't set oneself up with prior conditions that could lead to subsequent denial or provisional acceptance. Only an unconditional "recognition that everything is" can lead to an unconditional knowledge of what everything is...

Unconditionality, reciprocity & mutuality

When dealing with understanding anything, animate as well as inanimate, something that is absolutely important for full understanding is the discovery and recognition of a pervasive presence of reciprocity and mutuality. When reciprocity and mutuality are not a priori acknowledged and realized, one cannot expect that all available information is communicated to get to comprehensive understanding.
To ensure the acknowledgment of reciprocity and mutuality, unconditional mutual acceptance is needed, in other words: mutual trust – which is really no more than the absence of fear!
Unconditionality has to have this simultaneous two-way, mutual aspect to be unconditional. When such two-way reciprocity is present, non-duality is an automatic given and any dualist view that may cause difficulties with "I-you" and "me-other" relationships disappears.
When looking for a deeper understanding of other than inanimate subjects, they also have to be given ample opportunity to find out who the one is who is attempting to come to understanding.

When reciprocal mutuality in understanding is lacking, re-cognitive and cognitive understanding will not take place.
Conditional and thus incomplete and/or flawed understanding always denies some aspect of anything that can be known. It can therefore not lead to the acceptance, recognition, equanimity and mutual surrender needed to fall into (or actually to return to) unconditional love.

Notes:

(1) "Prejudice stands in the way of understanding and knowledge."

In Dutch, "Vooroordel staat begrip en kennis in de weg."

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Understanding

Do we actually understand each other?

When I saw my mother last, about a year before she passed on at 86, she repeated what she had said to me once before when I was about 18 years old, "I always hoped that you would understand what I meant - that you not too quickly assumed that how you understood my words, that that was actually what I was saying." Read more!

About what is and what is not...

"There is no air" said the flounder to the salmon.

Pete: There are no minds, Wim, and you know it.
Wim: That may or may not be, who knows?! But let me tell you a story.

A salmon was talking to a flounder about something mysterious that he had just leapt through, something that was quite beyond him - above him actually - and the salmon described it enthusiastically as something spacious, something he called 'air'.

"There is no... eh... 'air'!" retorted the flounder, "it just cannot exist. You just claim it does, but as far as I'm concerned you only talk about it after you seem to have lost your grounding and have become eh... rather eh... 'airy fairy'!"

"Well it DOES exist, there IS air," said the salmon, "I felt it through my gills. However, let me tell YOU something: that... eh... 'sand' that you keep talking about, that you seem to hide yourself under, THAT does not exist, there just is no sand. As far as I'm concerned, whatever it seems to you, it is just an illusion that you seem to stick your head under whenever you rush off in fear!"

At that point a dolphin came along. She had just been communicating with a two-legged something she called 'human'.

"Talk about reality, guys," the dolphin told the salmon and the flounder, "I just met this two-tailed being who claimed to live at the edge of where we are. He was telling me that he 'walks' on 'sand', moves through 'air' and, he said, he can swim just like us, "Swim in water." that's how he called it!

"That's preposterous," the flounder said, "there is no - what did he call it? - 'water', and... 'swimming'? What's that supposed to mean? The only thing I know for sure is sand and I know it because I can hide underneath it whenever I need to. Oh, and besides, are you sure that that 'human' you are talking about, that such a thing exists? As far as I'm concerned, I think that is just a figment of your mind - it must be, you're such a big-brainer, you got to keep that brain busy with something!"

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Perception and the Capture of Reality

The human mind's ability to "abstract" (a much over-trained aspect of the mind) is a mental compunction that can eventually lead to its own dysfunction. Before one realizes it, the mind can make "whatever is" so rarefied that it can lead the beholder of the mind to believe that all is – at its plausible best – the mind's creation or – at its worst – its illusion.

Ah, perception eh! And... meaning!

In our reclamation of reality (mind you, not that abstract pseudo-reality that is really no more than a mentalized perception of it) it is good practice to review the language we use that apparently accompanies our participation in reality with our vocal representations of things and notions.
In our day-to-day language we still use words which (or parts of which) initially were early humankind's vocal exclamations that accompanied the discovery of tangible phenomena.
Using etymology and language we can retrieve humankind's earliest usage and meanings of words, finding their original meaning before their exclamations as "words" started to mean less and less than what they were originally meant to represent.
Let's take as an example the word "perception," a word often used in our deliberations about reality. Initially it was a term that represented as concretely as possible the mindful discovery that one physically grasped, captured and held something in the hand.
Etymologically the root for the "cep" part of the word per-cep-tion is the Sanskrit KAP which meant hold or grasp, but KAP derives from the even older roots KA and AK(1) both denoting cutting and sharpness. They onomatopoeically mimicked the sound pebbles made when they were manipulated by hand to break or cut each other in the manufacture of stone tools.
KA led to words like capture, concept, perception, etc., even the word key; AK led to words like cut, axe, acute, hack and eventually even acupuncture and academy.
Derived from those roots, the word perception came to us via the Latin per capere (per as in "peruse.") Thus it can be seen that originally perception expressed the "holding and handling of sticks and stones" rather than the "holding of personal ideas about reality!"
Originally then, perception meant that one held something concretely in hand, but now, thousands of years later, perception has come to stand for something much more relative: at present perception is understood as a very individual mental faculty rather than a tactile sensorial one.
Nowadays we use the word perception for individual interpretations about reality, interpretations that can differ from person to person depending on their personally acquired values, judgments, fears, expectations, etc.

Could it be that our sensitivity about perception is based on a feeling of loss of its original simple and self-evident straight-forwardness?
Don't we actually wish to contact reality directly, rather than being obliquely confronted with something that is altered by the arbitrary descriptions of externally acquired pseudo-realities of which elements have been processed by mental regurgitations forced upon us by others than ourselves?
Aren't those regurgitations aimed at deforming the description of what is authentically perceived or captured, so that reality gets interpreted differently from what it simply happens to be?

What could the reasoning be for such alterations? Why would anyone want to prescribe how and what things should be, should have been or shouldn't have been or… whether they should have been at all?
For what purpose were authentic and reliable perceptions robbed of their reliability and in-authenticated?
What investment in what games do those people have, who force their adulterated interpretations of reality on those who ended up so dependently influencible and manipulatable?
In the previous chapters we undertook finding the answers to the above questions while we investigated the dynamics behind them, as we aimed to rediscover, reclaim or maintain our natural human integrity and freedom so that we may forever authentically capture and perceive what is… as is.

Notes:

(1) KA is the first consonant in the Sanskrit alphabet and A its first vowel.

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This idea of past lives! Is there such a thing?

Kathleen: I had connected some challenging issues of my current life with past lives karma - and I still do - but an explanation about passed lives by you would help me considerably in finding out if I am on the right track resolving my issues.

Wim: That I can get you on the right track resolving your issues, I'm not so sure about that, but let me see if I can get you on "the right track" interpreting the idea of past lives. But be prepared it might be a totally different approach than what you are used to. It has to do with multiple universes, parallel worlds and parallel existence and our world really consisting of more than the usually observed three dimensions. Oh... and then there is this man Rene Descartes.

The following is close to how Emmy (my wife) and I got into it last summer... over coffee, strawberries, whipped cream and a sweet desert wine.

Of course I will tell it slightly different here as I am directing this story to you now. And if what I bring up doesn't make sense to you, then at least enjoy the image of a sun-spirited tête-à-tête on the patio with some good coffee, desert, whipped cream and... a bottle of Liebfraumilch wine ready to be opened.

It may at some point be a bit technical, but I hope that the whipped cream introduces some lightness into the heavy nature of this topic.

---

Remember Kathleen, when you were very young, during your arithmetic days, how you so loved to count?
From 1 to 2
to 3 to 4
then 5 and 6 and 7
then on and on
and on and on and on?
Remember how you learned to count backwards and how you "so loved it"?
And remember, a little later, how you learned about subtraction and negative numbers?
But, that was a bit harder to like... but remember how good you got at it nevertheless?
Remember how you were shown somewhat later in school that those numbers fitted so orderly on a straight line... the number line:
- - - - 4 -3 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4 + + + +, etc...
and that after that came... infinity!!!!?

(And then, much later - too late really - you learned about your 'line of credit' ... ad infinitum and ad nauseam ... and you found that it should really have been called your 'line of debt'!)

You were taught a very one-dimensional and linear world during those early days of school! But luckily it was not too problematic... yet.

But then you grew up (how come only you knew and nobody else noticed) and you went to higher schools and your world became filled with problems... I'm referring only to the math problems here though.
Remember how you started out with simple ones, the ones with only one solution, and you learned to call those problems 'equations'.

Didn't you love that word 'equation'? It was not supposed to be a problem anymore, it was all about being one and equal... unity between both sides of the equation.

Anyway, you were to take an equation like "3 times X = 12" and you were to find that there was only one solution...: X=4. Eureka!

But then, my oh my...
Then you got into your geometrical days.
You found out that there were problems with more than one solution. If only your parents saw that. Those were the problems of life of course, but what about the problems at school...?
You were made to discover that certain math problems had also more than one solution, and you learned to call 'them kinda' mathematical formulas 'functions'.
(You also learned that you had to function in life as well... Ouch!!! But back to school...)
You found that the solutions to those equations could be turned into graphs. The solutions could be marked on graph paper and when you connected the dots you got straight or curved lines, depending... Remember that?
In the more simple graphs you used just two coordinates - the X and Y axes - and on that simple coordinate system you laid out your straight lines, curved lines, parabolas, wavy lines... and maybe, but that much later, even 'wave functions'. (...Ouch...!)

Complicated, yes, but still it was very much a two-dimensional world... But you wanted to be free, fly off into other dimensions.

By that time, your mind, if not your body, felt like dropping out, forced as you were to discover that there were more dimensions to life... (Hey, YOU knew that and YOU lived them fully, but that is not how THEY meant it.)
Anyway, the Z axis was introduced, and some of your peers, and maybe you as well, dropped out from math class in order not to have to get into complex numbers, life already being complex enough.
Too bad actually - in retrospect - that dropping out! One would eventually have understood the mathematical basis and need for chaos. "Chaos theory" I mean of course.

But let me just stay with the complexity of math.
The more complex functions used three axes X, Y, and Z - just like our three dimensional world - and while your instructor got into vectors and told you that one coordinate could also be used to plot the result from another function, those vectors got you truly vexed...

Remember all that... or most of that?

All this because of a guy called Descartes... he actually made you do that at school. All that because he, instead of chanting of "Om Mani Padme Um," he used "Cogito Ergo Sum" as his mantra and therefore thought that he was because he thought he was.
Anyway, he figured out this system of coordinates: the X, Y, Z axes, etc.

Three dimensions! Now, you may have heard that there are compelling reasons to believe that there are more than 3 dimensions to our world, that there always were... up to ten or eleven so far... including time... (That is actually not too hard to explain and I'll have fun doing that at some point.)
But back to math. Imagine a very complicated math equation, the biggest one you can imagine, lots of a, b, cees and dees, etc., an enormous number of x, y and zees, etc. but also x', y' and z'ees and so on and in addition to that plenty of exponents. All this packaged in baskets of nested brackets and ellipses, each one containing underlined numerators appropriately denominated... a formula so complex that you would even run out of alphabetic symbols (Greek to you) and numbers to represent what it stood for.
Now imagine that the old Rene Descartes gave you this equation and told you that this equation is the THING that represents the whole universe with all and everything in it.
Now imagine that Descartes told you that the number of solutions that solve this function that represents the 'whole shebang' are infinite and that it is now your task to plot or graph those solutions out on some kind of medium.
Let's say that Descartes got you into devising a scheme to accomplish that...

"Hmm... A flat sheet of paper won't do," you told him, "I need something with more than two dimensions... uh, something with more than three dimensions would be even better as using perspective tricks and overlays won't get me far and fast enough where I need to be."
You eventually ask Rene if you may use your special 'magic marker' and also that you want to plot or "draw" all the solutions out in... space.

He tells you - and you are surprised - "That is very clever of you!" and as you are about to get started he warns you that it may take you some 20 billion years to finish... ... ...

And you know what, he could be right right!
Anyhow, you already envisioned that what you would draw out on your cosmic canvas, that the result would be exactly what ALL THIS HERE NOW is already... !!!!
This, what we live IN and ON and AS. This and whatever is seemingly in the past and whatever is seemingly now and whatever is seemingly in the future, and also... whatever is here, there and everywhere!
And you realize that each solution is at once already fully available.
Solution number 3,584,675,006,758,843 (this is who you are) does not have to wait for the other ones to be calculated first... It is already true this very moment...
It just takes time and space to work the solutions through while you are connecting the dots... realizing them... plotting them... becoming aware of them... becoming aware that you are also them even if you don't seem to be... you seemingly being other than them, having come before them or after.

It's just that humans seem to get so bothered by this 'space' and 'time' thing. Space and time seem to be our challenge to negotiate and navigate through ALL THIS with our temporal and spatial perceptions.
Could it be that that is what makes us feel that one thing comes before or after the other and that one thing is here and the other thing there... but that in REALITY that is not so?

Should we not consider that past lives, current lives, upcoming lives... past things, current things, future things are already available in this moment... that there is in fact no temporal and spatial challenge, that it is all a concurrent play, a play that is only seemingly expressed sequentially in time and present next to each other?
Could it be that the seemingly problematic equation is already solved and that we - all of us and all of it - are it!

Aren't we all equal and one... and that UNIQUELY so?!

Fact is that every individual element that exists in reality - from the smallest infinitesimal to the largest infinitesimal and everything in between - that everything is a solution to that, what I call "divine function" that ALL THIS IS.

We "have" not just a few past lives... we are actually everything... living or not alive.
Although.., we may realize it only one at a time while we forget that we were - seemingly - before and while we not yet know that we will be - seemingly - later.
And all the while we may not realize that each one of us is also simultaneously the other one of us... which we will eventually discover when we simply and indiscriminately love.

If we could just enjoy the glory of this momentous moment...

Well, that is actually not too hard, just have some Liebfraumilch...

Here's to you! Read more!

The Full Spectrum Child

The Yin-Yang Principle & The Mother-Father-Child Triad

Outline of a seven chapter course containing instructional and transformational readings and exercises for prospective parents and perinatal practitioners.

1. Introduction to 'The Full Spectrum Child'

. An introduction to the possibility and feasibility that from conception on each child can be a wholly integrated, balanced child - physical & metaphysical, body & soul - in whom all levels of reality can fully develop, and - if not so at first - can be restored and well maintained.
. This section discusses how this course explores the above and introduces how and why it is possible that it can be realized by parents and their children.
. This section also outlines how this course concentrates on the period that starts just prior to conception and proceeds via pregnancy (the female and male experience of it) to the first six months after the child is born.
. Pre- and post-conception issues.
. A new view at the play of sperm and ovum.

2. The baby in the womb (I)
Its sense of the vibrations of the body, sound, movement and emotion:

. The mother's sound, her voice, her music, her movements (motions) and emotions,
. The father's sound, his voice, his music, his touch, his emotions.

3. The baby in the womb (II).
Its sense of the vibrations of the soul:

. The mother and father's aura & chakras as well as the baby's while in the mother's womb.
. This section will guide the participant to experience the finer senses, to feel and touch and positively affect the subtle forces and energies of the human aura as well as physical energy concentrations in what are usually called the chakras.

4. Peri-conception issues

. Preconception, conception and perinatal issues that might negatively impact on maintaining that integrity and balance.
. Pre-conception, conception and perinatal solutions to safeguard the baby's integrity and the parental relationship.

5. Scenarios for birthing

. From hospital to home, from conventional to caesarean, from supine to squatting to water birth, doctor and/or midwife attendance and assistance.
. The father's natural role to receive the child as the mother delivers.
. Discussion on the question of whether contractions should equate to pain. If so... how come? If not... how not? Lamaze, etc.
. Nutrition: enzymes, vitamins and minerals.
. Allergies? Why and how they are avoidable!

6. Bonding

. Bonding with mother and father or being bonded to technology that might be too over-abundantly present at birth.
. The first six months. Is the baby learning? What & how does it learn?
. How to take positive advantage of the recently published scientific discovery of mirror neurons in the human brain - biological cellular CNS structures that are concrete evidence of the physical and biological dynamics that enable bonding and learning.
. How to safeguard against inadvertent and possibly negative side effects of this inborn physical learning system, its possible negative impact on the child's and the parents' nervous, muscular and emotional systems.
. How to get it right if it went wrong... awareness, consciousness and conscience, trust and/or moral dependence.

7. The Full Spectrum Child

. A concluding review of the wholly integrated, physical/metaphysical child and its fully integrated seven levels of joyful reality: physical, creative, volitional, emotional, vocational, intellectual and inspirational.

.....................................................................................

Some key phrases and paragraphs from the course

"What is a father to do during those 9 months?"

"Whereas the mother takes loving care of the baby during that miraculous physical gestation period of pregnancy - the physical presence of the child in her womb under her heart - the father can be considered and expected to take loving care of a mysterious and almost unknown metaphysical gestation period: the metaphysical presence of the child in his heart - the father's emotional womb. Of course and naturally, when mother and father are in harmonious balance with each other during this most wonderful period of the real beginnings of their child's life, their experiences are mutually exchanged and enjoyed so as to acknowledge and maintain the union of body & soul of the child to be born and the child when... being born."

"How can we help return fathers to their original and integral function in the whole gestation process of the child, physical and metaphysical - body, soul and spirit?"

Read more!

Notions

Is it all in the mind?

The word 'Notion' in the Online Etymology Dictionary:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=notion
"Notion: 1533 (implied in 'notional'), from L. notionem (nom. notio) "concept," from notus, pp. of noscere "come to know." Coined by Cicero as a loan-translation of Gk. ennoia "act of thinking, notion, conception," or prolepsis "previous notion, previous conception." "

Cliff: Hey Wim, you occasionally use the term 'notion'. I have a question about that word. By 'notion', do you mean an idea, as in a purely abstract concept, or do you mean a feeling, as in a vague impression?

Wim: In principle a notion points to something that is simply 'noted' and tends to have a feeling of simple unquestionability. A notion points to 'something that one just simply came to cognize or note. (See the definition above, especially the Latin 'noscere'). The contents (or the object) of one or more notions - when looked deeper into to find out what it (they) might entail - often lead to conceptualization and thus... concepts.
Notions actually occur prior to conceptualization... hence 'prolepsis' (see above) from 'pro' and 'lemma' (premise). A simple notion can lead to a simple premise (or lemma) and is usually used as such in conceptualization and logic. When multiple notions are used as starting-off points (lemmas) for conceptualization they can often lead to dilemmas or trilemmas especially when the notions appear (seem) to be conflicting.

Cliff: My point is Wim, what are "notions" composed of? Not simply the idea itself, but from where does the position of the idea come from?

Wim: You are using the word 'idea' in relation to 'notion' and that is actually very 'right on' as notions are not ideas in the mental thinking sense but ideas ('eidos' - Greek) in the viewing/seeing sense... which is demonstrated by the fact that the word 'idea' is based on the Greek 'eidos' which derives from the Aryan/Sanskrit root WID which translates as 'to see', to 'observe'... ... ergo 'cognizing'. The words cognition and notion both come from the Latin 'nosco' - coming to know. (WID incidentally is also the root for words like 'video' and 'vision' and even... 'idol.)

Cliff: OK, thanks. But Wim, what I notice with notions is that many notions are easily shown to be inaccurate.

Wim: That is possible, but that inaccuracy happens when original simple notions get compromised by a mind that... (let's not look for the reasons why at this point, although that is tempting)... attempts to change the notions - the simply observed perceptions - to make them fit judge-mental or mind based ideas, not senses based ideas. ("You shouldn't have seen it.", "What you saw should be interpreted different from what you thought you saw.")
When they get 'mentally treated', simple notions get mixed in with assumptions and concepts and indeed can easily turn inaccurate... At that point the word 'notion' is actually not applicable anymore, at least not in its proper and original sense.

Cliff: Taking that into account, yet, people act from them as though they were completely accurate. How is it that this happens, specifically what underlying reasonings support the position within any particular mind?

Wim: OK, we should get into the 'reasons why' then. By now you may already know how I see that, I have often enough talked about that, so this time just quickly:
Observations and perceptions (the contents of notions) are apparently (seemingly) altered (interpreted or reinterpreted) for reasons that come from ulterior motivations, having to do with manipulative maneuverings caused by abuse of power aimed at dis-enfranchisement - the seeming loss of freedom. ('Moksha' in Sanskrit)

But to get back to the meaning of 'notion', as you might know I always start from original meanings of words, using etymology to get there. Surely the word 'notions' over time took on confusing con-notations... (Note 'CON-notations'... that is meanings in addition to 'con', the original meaning). So originally 'notions' were just simply noted observations, sensed data, observations without prejudice so to say.

Cliff: Yeah, that conflict that there can be between judgments, thoughts and observations...
Can we trust that what we see is what is actually seen?
Actually, is there something out there?
What do we see when we look at something?
What do we feel when we feel something.
Who feels?
What is it that is felt?
Do we actually see or feel something external to us?
Or is it all taking place in the mind?
I think that eventually by understanding this, it is possible to cut many years of working at oneself. There is the old Zen practice of sitting in front of a blank wall for twenty years...

Wim: Gotto laugh Cliff! So, twenty years of sitting in front of a blank wall cuts many years of work?!

Cliff: Yes!

Wim: Hardly a gain... Hey, I mean this humorously!

Cliff: Everything one sees, and just as importantly everything one "feels" and imagines is only one thing. That one thing is one's own mind, eventually one recognizes even the "wall" itself is one's own mind.

Wim: Huh???!!! Eventually, I mean in the end, one realizes that what one sees is only what one sensorially perceives without any mental interferences, interpretations or mental overlays, and... one FEELS what one has run into (the wall!) or what one has banged one's head against (the wall!).
Eventually one simply sees that every wall has... a gate and that every gate can serve as an exit as well as an entrance...

Cliff: Don't you get it Wim? Eventually one recognizes that even the wall is one's own mind.

Wim: Nope, Cliff... The wall is the wall, was so and remains so, at least until its mortar ages and the wall eventually crumbles. And although the mind may use a wall symbolically as a projection screen, it is still a wall... A clear mind perceives no walls and creates no projections.



Eventually one simply sees walls and gates of distinctions and relationships and one discovers that one can easily navigate with and through them.
So there is nothing really so deep or so mentally mysterious as what you are proposing Cliff. The mind eventually just stills and stops, while the wall might or might not be there (no mental fabrications can make it appear or disappear) and one simply stands up and exits or enters - whatever it happens to be.

And while one suddenly smells the rose blossoms, one notices that the wall's stucco has blistered and that there are wilted rose leaves and stucco fragments on the pavement...

No need to sit for twenty years, just smell the roses... Read more!

About innate freedom, soul, awareness, consciousness and conscience

and is the soul a changing type of organism?

Wim: Could you consider that you are actually as free and authentic as you were before you were made to feel that you were not?

Mario: I don't much agree with that... or... maybe... eh... I just like to consider the possibility that I don't fully understand what you mean.

Wim: It is not for nothing that I'm suggesting to consider seriously what you seem to have a difficulty with.
Of course I understand the usual objections to innate freedom, the ones that might support your reluctance to agree.
I have heard those objections before, they are quite predictable and are... widely supported by many. But my view is quite distinct from the view that produces the objections to innate freedom.

It is easily resisted or objected to, but that very resistance could also mean that it there might be a good reason to at least consider the notion...

Mario: I feel that innate freedom for the individual has to do with the development of that individual's soul. I feel that in that respect that in the evolution-development of the soul, in the soul's manifestation there is inadequacy. Being is being is being, pure untouched, but the soul is an organism that grows through experiences and through the manifestation of some of its infinite potential.

Wim: In the first place, that last sentence of yours, "Being is being is being, etc." and especially your "but" could easily lead to a flawed dualistic view and treatment of reality. There simply is no "being" possible that is separate from - fully abstract from - manifestation. Just like any type of manifestation has to be, any type of being is manifested. Being and manifesation can only conceptually - in the mind - be separated out in whatever all this is. If the manifest would be separate of being, it would collapse, just like being would just not be if not manifest.
The idea that 'be