The Present Participle

Crown Chain

2012-02-17T13:44:00.001-08:00

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Setting Up the Retinue

2012-02-17T13:42:00.000-08:00

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Steadfastness and Courage - Charles Wagner

2012-02-15T22:13:00.001-08:00

"Steadfastness is the indispensable quality of every man who one day does not wish to be obliged to say: "I have wasted my life."

A man should not incessantly change with every impression of the moment, but should remain steadfast when he has once determined upon what is right. Of what use are the flowers if they do not produce fruits, and of good ideas if they are not transmuted into deeds? We must encourage stability, habituate ourselves to remain constant, and when we are sure that we are right, must fortify ourselves against invasion. Do not let criticisms or attacks disturb you.

Nothing is so difficult as to remain faithful. At each step of the way outside influences are brought to bear upon us to make us deviate or retrograde. And if there were only difficulties from without, it would not matter so much; but there are those from within. Our dispositions vacillate. We promise one thing with the best intentions in the world; but when the time comes to keep it, everything is changed–the circumstances, men, ourselves; and what duty demands of us seems so different from what we had foreseen, that we hesitate. Those who will fulfill on a rainy day a promise which they have made on a sunny one, are few and far between.

And so we go on casting our hearts to the four winds, giving it and taking it back again, breaking with our past, separating ourselves from ourselves, so to speak. And when we look behind, we no longer recognize ourselves. We see ourselves in the days that are past as a stranger, or rather as several strangers.

There is nothing like a steadfast man, one in whom you can have confidence, one who is found at his post, who arrives punctually, and who can be trusted when you rely on him. He is worth his weight in gold. You can take your bearings from him, because he is sure to be where he ought to be, and nowhere else. The majority of individuals, on the contrary, are sure to be anywhere but where they ought to be. You have only to take them into your calculations to be deceived. Some of them are changeable from weakness of character; they cannot resist attacks, insinuations, and, above all, cannot remain faithful to a lost cause. A defeat in their eyes is a demonstration of the fact that their adversary was right and that they were wrong. When they see their side fail, instead of closing up the ranks, they go over to the enemy. These are the men who are always found on the winning side, and not in their hearts would be found the courageous device: Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.

A profound duplicity, a discrepancy between words and deeds, between appearance and reality, a sort of moral dilettantism which makes us according to the hour sincere or hypocritical, brave or cowardly, honest or unscrupulous–this is the disease which consumes us. What moral force can germinate and grow under these conditions? We must again become men who have only one principle, one word, one work, one love; in a word, men with a sense of duty. This is the source of power. And without this there is only the phantom of a man, the unstable sand, and hollow reed which bends beneath every breath. Be faithful; this is the changeless northern star which will guide you through the vicissitudes of life, through doubts and discouragements, and even mistakes".

Charles Wagner, from his 1894 book, Courgage. RT@ArtOFManliness

Invictus - William Ernest Henley

2012-02-15T20:24:00.000-08:00

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul

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Accolade, by Edmund Blair Leighton

2012-02-15T18:56:00.000-08:00

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Alchemical Blue

2012-02-15T16:46:00.001-08:00

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"... if some great idea takes hold of us from outside, we must understand that it takes hold of us only because something in us responds to it and goes out to meet it".

2012-02-12T22:25:00.001-08:00

"The personality is seldom, in the beginning, what it will be later on. For this reason the possibility of enlarging it exists, at least during the first half of life. The enlargement may be affected through an accretion from without, by new vital contents finding their way into the personality from outside and being assimilated. In this way a considerable increase in personality may be experienced. We therefore tend to assume that this increase comes only from without, thus justifying the prejudice that one becomes a personality by stuffing into oneself as much as possible from outside. But the more assiduously we follow this recipe, and the more stubbornly we believe that all increase has to come from without, the greater becomes our inner poverty. Therefore, if some great idea takes hold of us from outside, we must understand that it takes hold of us only because something in us responds to it and goes out to meet it. Richness of mind consists in mental receptivity, not in the accumulation of possessions. What comes to us from outside, and, for that matter, everything that rises up from within, can only be made our own if we are capable of an inner amplitude equal to that of the incoming content. Real increase of personality means consciousness of an enlargement that flows from inner sources. Without psychic depth we can never be adequately related to the magnitude of our object. It has therefore been said quite truly that a man grows with the greatness of his task. But he must have within himself the capacity to grow; otherwise even the most difficult task is of no benefit to him. More likely he will be shattered by it".

- Carl Jung

The Power Grid - Nicole Dadone

2012-02-12T15:59:00.001-08:00

"... So now, about that fact that the angel needs you as badly as you need them, which brings a tremendous sense of relief to my accounting soul... Without me, my angels float around. They need housing. In the same way it might be difficult, though not impossible, to create great and big things if you were living out of your car, an angel needs a little stability to do their whole creative process inside of. The good news is that their creative process just happens to make me really really smart, so that when I do their bidding people don't laugh and walk away. I believe that they also need a place to express the unbearable weight of their love. It's useless if it doesn't land somewhere, so it may as well be me. And then my job is to find other people willing to receive this thing, so that I too do not get all backed up. Then there is this simple, lovely, electrical line where the current can flow through all of us.

And I ask things of them. I used to think that I was a bother, but no, it is what they are there for and when I do, they get to be great and deliver. One of my angels will text me 20 times a day asking me if I need anything. Not for me, but because that is where she gets to have the voltage come through her. And then I too get to give and feel all generous and good. To receive from and then give to is the natural order of things. One side keeps us humble and the other keeps us generous, and both in a benefitting from necessity kind of way.

Isn't that a lovely system?

When I talk about turning on the power grid, this is what I mean.".

- Nicole Dadone

Lama Yeshe

2012-02-02T00:44:00.001-08:00

"We really need tantra these days because there is a tremendous explosion of delusion and distraction... and we need the atomic energy of inner fire to blast us out of our delusion".

- Lama Yeshe

Guru Rinpoche

2012-02-01T21:06:00.001-08:00

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The Gift of Renewal of Each Day - Mark Kaplan

2012-02-01T21:01:00.000-08:00

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SES Quote

2012-02-01T19:05:00.001-08:00

"We would say: the signifier "Emptiness" can only be understood in those who possess the developmental signified that is Prajna, whereupon the actual referent "Emptiness" is directly perceived as the Emptiness of all forms whatsoever, and not the privlaging of one form or concept, such as no-self, over its opposite, such as self. But the referent of the signifier "Emptiness" becomes obvious only upon the awakening of Prajna, and Prajna is not an idea or a theory but an injunction or a paradigm: it begins its practice by categorically rejecting every conceivable category of thought to embrace the Real, or Dharmata. This categorical rejection—the dialectic—creates an opening or clearing in awareness in which the primordial and unobstructed nature of the Real can shine forth non dualistically as the Suchness of all phenomena. And all of those words are nevertheless still signifiers whose actual referents are disclosed only in that "opening" or "clear in," and prior to the discovery of that opening or Emptiness, they are all equally off the mark. Even the phrase, "Emptiness is free of thought concepts" would itself be denied: that's just more words. Where is the actual referent? Where is your Original Face right now?"

—Ken Wilber, Sex Ecology Spirituality, p722

Prana Divides Itself Into Five Vayus - Swamiji

2012-01-26T13:56:00.000-08:00

When kundalini comes outward as Prana, the Prana operates in the body, it divides into five major flows called Vayus. These can be thought of as somewhat like major currents in one of the large oceans of the world, while there may be thousands of smaller currents. These five Vayus are the major currents that contain thousands of smaller currents.

Prana Vayu operates from the heart area, and is an upward flowing energy, having to do with vitalizing life forces.

Apana Vayu operates from the base of the torso, in the rectum area, is a downward flowing energy, and has to do with eliminating or throwing off what is no longer needed.

Samana Vayu operates from the navel area, deals with digestion, and allows the mental discrimination between useful and not useful thoughts.

Udana Vayu operates from the throat and drives exhalation, operating in conjunction with Prana Vayu, which deals with inhalation.

Vyana Vayu operates throughout the whole body, having no particular center, and is a coordinating energy throughout the various systems.

From - http://swamij.com/kundalini-awakening-1.htm

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Appearance Emptiness

2012-01-23T16:41:00.000-08:00

Appearance emptiness
has been the longing
blossoming in all
forevers, all along.

In The Sky, 24/1/12.

Vantage Points and Form/Emptiness Trans-Duality

2012-01-23T16:37:00.000-08:00

"... as each new vantage point is recognized along the spectrum of realization, the shallower vantage point are seen through as transparent but they do not cease to exist. That is to say, even as one shifts identity beyond thought, one moves beyond the confusion and obscuration that an exclusive identification with thought causes, but the functionality and apparent existence of thought still remains. In a similar way, from an awakened vantage point of non-dual awareness, each of the lower vantage points (witness, time/space, personality, and thought) remain open and functioning. This means that appearances of subject and object and the whole manifestation of duality in form do not vanish. In fact, the experience of realization is quite the opposite. All lower vantage points are enlivened with the magnificence of realization and seen clearly as an expression of the very nature of reality. A realization that fails to fully manifest the functionality and particular skills of a lower vantage point suffers from a state-stage pathology".

- Dustin DiPerna, in his forthcoming book, Heart of Conscious Evolution: An Advanced Guide to Integral Spiritual Development

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2012-01-21T23:23:00.001-08:00

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Sunday January 22 2012

2012-01-21T23:18:00.000-08:00

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Tilopa’s Ganges Mahamudra Oral Instructions

2012-01-21T22:40:00.000-08:00

This afternoon, after begin guided through the first three turns of the dharma wheel, we were given the grace of receiving these unspeakably beautiful instructions, 1001 years after their first oration on the mouth of the Ganges. I've never been pointed to non-dual then awakened space before, and still can't quite make appropriate constructs to convey the gravity of this simple, powerful opportunity and gift from a very skilled master. Heartfelt blessings.

Tilopa’s Ganges Mahamudra Oral Instructions

Translated by Daniel Brown, Ph.D. (c)

1. Out of respect for the lineage, who developed these instructions to counter an ocean of suffering in Samsara, Let me pour this View into your mind, my friends.

2. Although Mahamudra isn’t anything I can really explain. Just let go, and hold this vantage point of mind, without artificial meditation strategies, and freshly [without conceptualization]. Just as space has no substance to it, Likewise, the real nature of the mind, Mahamudra, has no substance that can serve as a support to focus on

3. Cling to nothing as I speak, and there is no doubt, liberation will come. Take this View as if you were looking directly into awareness-itself, like space, in such a way that you aren’t trying to see, because from this vantage point, awareness sees itself by itself. And when all attempts to conceptualize cease, you will attain perfect awakening.

4. Clouds float through space, but don’t go anywhere, or stay anywhere. In the same way conceptualization arises in the mind, but from the vantage point of the real nature of the mind, thought is like waves that become calm.

5. Just as space has no color. It has no form. It has no darkness. No light. It is changeless. Likewise, the real nature of the mind has no color, no form, Nor is it tinged by the darkness of bad, nor the light of virtuous actions.

6. For thousands of aeons, the sun that shines everyday day has never been clouded by darkness. Likewise, the real nature of the mind’s clear-light of awareness has never been clouded by the cycle of Samsara.

7. You’ll probably conceptualize about the mind in so many ways, calling it “empty space’ or ‘clear-light’ but you can’t really explain it in words. This mind is...insubstantial, and words won’t make awakening happen.

8. The real nature of the mind is always right here, beginning less, endless, like vast space that saturates everything! So my dear friends, now stop doing anything to set up your body posture, shut your mouth, be quiet, and don’t think about anything whatsoever.. Simply take this vantage point, as the teaching beyond all practices.

9. The body has no substance, like the hollow inside of a bamboo stalk. And the mind, like space itself, is beyond any intended meditation object. So let go of any artificial strategies of meditating. Let go of meditating. And when this mind reflects itself to itself, right here is Mahamudra awakening.

10. You will not see the clear-light of Mahamudra by chanting mantras, reading the wisdom texts or sutras on emptiness, or by practicing ethical precepts. When the [ordinary] mind [incessantly reacts] by moving away from practices it dislikes and moving toward practices it likes You stay obscured and will not see the clear-light of Mahamudra-awakening.

11. Having ideas about how you routinely keep your vows, trying to conceptualize how you might [awaken], just makes to stray from this truth. This truth is beyond the reactivity of the mind moving away or moving toward anything.. Don’t particularize anything, and whatever seems to arise by itself, immediately becomes calm by itself, and so the mind remains like a still pool of water.

12. Never leave Thatness, but don’t stay in it either, and don’t try to represent it. Simply vow never to leave it, and nothing will obscure the flames [of awakening!]. Beyond the reactivity of the [ordinary] mind moving toward and moving away, not trying to stay, not even trying to see it, then you will see everything there is to see!

13. Conduct an examination-meditation right now on the Truth, and you will become liberated from the prison of Samsara. Then, in you samadhi-meditation, right now, the flames of this Truth will burn up all the bad karma and obscurations. Those who are unable to appreciate this Truth are toss about in the sea of Samsara.

14. Those foolish beings who continuously get caught up in negative states of misery and sorrow. All these sorry folks who wish to be free, need only depend on the teacher’s pointing out instructions.

15. So my friends, everything that exists within Samsara is only the cause of suffering, not the cause of Truth. The essence of this teaching is: to do nothing, other than taking the vantage point of what is the essence of Truth.

16. The King of Views is: Going beyond subject/object duality The King of Meditation is: Holding this vantage point uninterruptedly. The King of Practice is: Do nothing. Do not search for anything. Be without any expectation of gain or fear of failure, and your realization will directly come to fruition.

17. So now move beyond any intended meditation object to the real nature of the mind’s awareness self-illuminating itself to itself. There is no path to walk.... and you are already facing Buddha-mind as your mind. And when you are familiar with what its like meditating in this way, without any intended meditation object, and it is perfect, now you awaken!

18. So my friends, please understand me well. Everything that seems to exist in this world is impermanent, like a mirage or a dream, And as such, mirages and dreams are not the Truth.

19. So at least for now put aside everyday activities, break connection with [ordinary] sensory experience. It only generates more desire and aversion. Dwell in the forests or mountains and meditate. Yet, [above all] stay in this vantage point of non-meditation, and when you don’t try to attain it, you will attain Mahamudra-awakening.

20. The leaves and branches of a tree whither and wilt when its roots are cut. Likewise, cut the roots of the mind, and the leaves and branches of Samsara end.

21. The smallest lamp can eliminate darkness that has accumulated for thousands of eons. Likewise, a singe flame of the clear-light of the mind’s awareness self-illuminating itself to itself, in a single instant, eliminates all the ignorance, obscurations, and defilements, that have accumulated for eons.

22. So my friends, don’t conceptualize this, or you won’t see the Truth that is beyond all conceptualization. Don’t engage in any artificial meditation strategies, or you won’t see the Truth that is beyond all doing. So if you want this Truth, it is beyond all conceptualization and all artificial meditation strategies.

23. Use your sword of emptiness everywhere, and cut to the root, and hold the vantage point freshly. Purify the muddy water of conceptualizing until it becomes clear. Ease up so you let whatever arises come forth in its own right [self-contentedly]. Don’t do anything. Do not make anything happen nor prevent anything from happening.

24. Do not hold onto anything, nor let anything go, and right here, is Mahamudra-awakening, and you are freed from Samsara. All that obscures, even the subtlest propensities cease. The awakened mind, always right here, self-illuminates the storehouse of all potential experience.

25. Complete liberation from all extreme [views]. This is the Supreme View. Wide and deep and limitless. This is the Supreme Meditation. Beyond any intention or cutting anything off. This is the Supreme Practice. Beyond all expectation of outcome or fear of failure, the mind frees itself. This is the Supreme Fruition.

26. At first awakening the mind is like a fast-moving waterfall. Then, it flows gently like the vast Ganges, And finally, it is a great ocean wherein the infant of individual consciousness and the dharmakaya mother consciousness flow into one another.

27. For those less intelligent who can’t stay [continuously] in the vantage point of awakened wisdom [once you taste it] You can [once again] stay on the breath, and distill the nectar of awareness with many concentration practices, [and when your concentration is strong again] Above all learn to hold the vantage point of awareness-itself

28. If you take that vantage point as your support, Awakened Wisdom arises, its radiance, its emptiness. Through empowerment, entering samadhi, then insight, [the seeds of] this Awakened Wisdom are gently drawn into the mandala [in your heart], then manifest in various sites in your body, then saturate your entire being. When you don’t grasp for it, Awakened Wisdom arises, its radiance, its emptiness.

29. You will seem ageless and healthy like the waxing moon. You become radiant. You’ll seem to have the strength of a lion, and all the ordinary [positive states] and special powers of a Buddha will flourish.

This is my oral advice to you, my friends, on the essence of Mahamudra awakening. Let it stay uninterruptedly in your heart, and in the hearts of all sentient beings!

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2012-01-20T23:44:00.001-08:00

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16 January 2012

2012-01-20T23:38:00.000-08:00

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2012-01-20T23:32:00.000-08:00

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Dreamer Dreamed

2012-01-20T23:05:00.000-08:00

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A Walk in the Hills: A Few Thoughts on Self-Acceptance - Jonathan Young

2012-01-20T08:54:00.000-08:00

What a fine day, I thought, for a walk in the hills. The sky is pleasantly warm and clear. The breeze drifting through the trees makes the world seem fresh and new. On an outward level, this stroll is a very small adventure. I pass near some old sheds that were once used for animals, but have been neglected for years. The dark planks have texture and character that are the gifts of the seasons. Further away, some cows graze with what seems like infinite inner peace.
My love affair with the beauty of this landscape is not rare. Anyone who visits the coastal hills has to be swept up in the natural grandeur of such a place. As a native Californian, I share in the belief that this is about as close to sublime as we are going to find on this planet.

So, ok, I’m in a good mood. I am appreciating the simple experience of moving the body and how it takes me into a reflective space. There is more than a lovely day to celebrate. I am grateful to live in a part of the world where people are curious. The seekers that are numerous in these parts are kindred spirits. Being in the company of adventurous types is gratifying. Around here, I don’t feel like the only one who is forever poking at difficult questions.

The people that appeal to me are forever discovering new layers of possibility. Their larger adventures are often within. After all, our rich inner lives are what we have to show for how we have invested our energies over the years. Whatever we might accomplish in practical terms is modest, compared with the marvels within. It is as if a life is the task of building an interior castle of ideas, feelings, experiences, and dreams.

On this day as I wind my way through a glen with a small creek, most of my attention is in the private world of thoughts. Bits of conversation float through my mind.

A memory comes of a very successful friend who once asked for ideas on how to live so that, at the end, he would have no regrets. I thought long and hard, then answered that I thought regrets were inevitable. There isn’t time to do everything. There is always some grief about all the good ideas we never get around to developing. I don’t think life has to be perfect to be fulfilling. I suggested that he give some thought to how to handle regrets well, rather than putting too much energy into avoiding them.

These days, I am far more interested in self-acceptance than in further improvements. Seems to me that a good deal of pop psychology is thinly veiled self-rejection. Of course, I want to continue to discover more about life and myself. I just don’t want to miss the quiet knowing that has always been present.

The sun is starting to get low in the trees. The air is growing cooler. At moments like these, I can hear the angels sing.

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Emptiness of Self + Emptiness of Phenomena from the Mind Perspective

2012-01-20T00:27:00.000-08:00

Two monks were arguing about a flag flapping in the wind. "It's the wind that is really moving," stated the first one. "No, it is the flag that is moving," contended the second. A master, who happened to be walking by, overheard the debate and interrupted them. "Neither the flag nor the wind is moving," he said, "It is mind that moves."

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Simply Wait

2012-01-20T00:13:00.001-08:00

You do not need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at the table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait.
Do not even wait, be still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

- Franz Kafka

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Eight Extremes - Nagarjuna - "Find the Middle Way".

2012-01-20T00:02:00.000-08:00

Based on dependent origination something occurs, yet
There is no arising nor passing away.
There is no nihilism nor eternalism.
There is no coming nor going.
There are not many nor one event(s).
Whatever tends to be elaborated becomes almost calm again and again.

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Nothing Else Matters - John O'Donohue

2012-01-19T18:39:00.001-08:00

From you
I don't want anything new
no more gifts
nor the scent of landscapes
rising to fill us,
no bouquets of insight
left by my head
in the tenderness of morning,

no intoxication
of thoughts that open horizons
where rooms are low,
nor the sever of spring
under the grid of old worlds
that has set on our skin,
nor my favourite blue,
the cobalt
colour of silence.

No.
All I want
is your two hands
pulsing in mine,
the two of us
back in a circle
round our love.

Bowlby

2012-01-19T17:24:00.001-08:00

"Attachment theory regards the propensity to make intimate emotional bonds to particular individuals as a basic component of human nature, already present in germinal form in the neonate and continuing through adult life into old age."

- John Bowlby

Ocean of Love Bliss - Alex Grey

2012-01-19T07:53:00.001-08:00

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Five Stages of Prenatal Development - The Sutra Requested by Yakshendra and The Sutra of Entering the Womb.

2012-01-19T07:47:00.000-08:00

Five stages of prenatal development (Wyl. mngal gyi gnas skabs lnga) — there are two principal ways of counting the five stages of prenatal development, following lists given in two different sutras, The Sutra Requested by Yakshendra and The Sutra of Entering the Womb.

According to the The Sutra Requested by Yakshendra, the five stages are:
- ‘creamy mass’ (nur nur po),
- ‘quivering mass’ (mer mer po),
- oval mass (nar narpo),
- ‘solidifying’ (trang gyur), and
- ‘with emerging limbs’ (kanglak gyüpa).

According to the The Sutra of Entering the Womb, they are:
- ‘creamy mass’ (nur nurpo),
- ‘quivering mass’ (mer mer po),
- oval mass (nar narpo),
- rounded (gor gor po), and
- ‘with emerging limbs’ (kanglak gyüpa).

A slightly different list, beginning with mer mer po, is given in Gampopa’s Jewel Ornament of Liberation.
The Padmakara Translation Group, in their translation of Words of My Perfect Teacher, give the five as:
- round jelly,
- viscous ellipse,
- thick oblong,
- firm oval, and
- hard round lump.

From the Rigpa Wiki

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Blessings For Those At the Threshold of Manhood - John O'Donohue

2012-01-19T07:42:00.000-08:00

As you leave the blurred wood you entered while still a boy,

And light clarifies around your emerging, manly form,

May you discover gradually a natural confidence in your body.

May your new strength be graceful as you learn to carry yourself

With a dignity that is sure, bringing your gestures and expression

Into an easy harmony and rhythm.

May you never feel the need to be coarse, or force yourself;

Rather, may you receive your manhood with grace and mindful ease;

Then, at one with your own elegance, your presence will claim it’s radiance.

May you awaken confidently to the feminine within you,

and learn to integrate the beauty

Of intuition and feeling so that your sensitivity kindles and your heart is trusted.

That you may slowly grow to trust the silence of the masculine

As the home of your stillness.

Though it will be always difficult to find the words for what you feel,

May you find ease in that awkwardness, until gradually from beneath

The gravel of stuttered sounds, the pure flow of you emerges.

Be gentle with yourself, learn to integrate the negative,

Harnessing its force to cross the boundaries

That would confine you.

Love the life of your mind, furnishing it ever with new thought

So that your countenance glows with the joy of being alive.

Be vigilant and true to an inner honor that will not allow

Anger or resentment to make you captive.

Always have the courage to change,

welcoming those voices that call you beyond yourself.

Beyond your work and action, remain faithful to your heart

For you to deepen and grow

Into a man of dignity and nobility.

- John O'Donohue, from his book To Bless the Space Between Us.

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Another Padmasambhava Invocation, This Time From The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

2012-01-18T18:52:00.000-08:00

Imagine the practice unfolding in these three phases:

First, dazzling light, crystal white in color, bursts out from the forehead of the master and enters the energy center in your forehead and fills your whole body. This white light rep-resents the blessing of the body of all the buddhas: It cleanses all the negative karma you have accumulated through negative actions of the body; it purifies the subtle channels of your psycho-physical system; it gives you the blessing of the body of the buddhas; it empowers you for visualization practice; and it opens you to the realization of that compassionate energy of Rigpa, the nature of mind, that is manifesting in everything.

Second, a stream of ruby red light shines out from the throat of the master into the energy center at your throat, fill-ing your entire body. This red light represents the blessing of the speech of all the buddhas: it cleanses all the negative karma you have accumulated through harmful speech; it purifies the inner air of your psycho-physical system; it gives you the blessing of the speech of the buddhas; it empowers you for mantra practice; and it opens you to the realization of the radiance of the nature of Rigpa.

Third, a stream of shimmering blue light, the color of lapis lazuli, bursts out from the heart of the master into the energy center at your heart, and fills your whole body. This blue light represents the blessing of the mind of the buddhas: It cleanses all the negative karma you have accumulated through negative activity of your mind; it purifies the creative essence, or energy, within your psycho-physical system; it gives you the blessing of the mind of the buddhas; it empowers you for advanced yoga practices; and it opens you to the realization of the primordial purity of the essence of Rigpa.

Know and feel that you are now empowered, through the blessing, with the indestructible body, speech, and mind of Padmasambhava, of all the buddhas.

.

2012-01-18T14:03:00.001-08:00

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

My Retinue #1 - Jesus Christ

2012-01-17T23:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

A Gift from Padmasambhava via my friend Trish

2012-01-17T23:02:00.000-08:00

‎'Now when the bardo of this life is dawning upon me,
I will abandon laziness for which life has no time,
Enter, undistracted, the path of listening and hearing, reflection and contemplation and meditation.
Making perceptions and mind the path, and realise the three kayas, the enlightened mind;
Now that I have once attained a human body,
There is no time on the path for the mind to wander'.

- Padmasambhava

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

The Nine Stages of Abiding

2012-01-17T00:36:00.000-08:00

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Om Ah Hum Invocation From Padmasambhava from Awakened Dharmakaya Space

2012-01-15T23:36:00.000-08:00

On a lotus, streaming toward me for benevolent means, available at all times, resting life size in front of me, connecting white light Om out of awakened dharmakaya space from his third eye to mine, then connecting red light Ah out of awakened dharmakaya space from his throat chakra to mine, and connecting blue light Hum out of awakened dharmakaya space from his heart to mine.

Then a clear light ball comes from him, to me, down from above and resting in the heart.

An auspicious beginning.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Integral Options Cafe: Introduction to Attachment - Conference Lectures

2012-01-14T13:48:00.000-08:00

Integral Options Cafe: Introduction to Attachment - Conference Lectures: The first lecture is useful as an introduction to the basic ideas of attachment theory - too bad the whole conference was not videoed or mad...

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

The Domes

2012-01-14T12:07:00.000-08:00

“If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace”.
― Gaston Bachelard

"These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased”.
― Ranier Maria Rilke

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Sambhogakāya and The Reward Body

2012-01-13T15:58:00.000-08:00

Evidenced in meeting the road of trials with ethical action and assuming karma beyond the proximate self, the Sambhogakāya is the reward-body whereby a bodhisattva completes his vows and becomes a Buddha in this second of Trikayas. Amitabha, Vajrasattva and Manjushri are examples of Buddhas with the Sambhogakaya body. Sambhogakāya is the second mode or aspect of the Trikaya. Sambhogakaya has also been translated as the "deity dimension", "body of bliss" or "astral body". Sambhogakaya refers to the luminous form of clear light the Buddhist practitioner attains upon the reaching the highest dimensions of practice. Conversely, it is also considered one of the primary means by which the Dharmakaya is made manifest. Consequently, the Sambhogakaya encompasses "celestial" Buddhas such as Bhaisajyaguru, etc., as well as advanced bodhisattvas such as Avalokitesvara and Manjusri.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Depictions of Sahasrāra

2012-01-13T15:17:00.000-08:00

From ILoveULove

The Celestial Rose, Illustration to Dante's Paradisio.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Trans-Duality in the Mahāyāna Mahāmudrā - Daniel P Brown

2012-01-13T13:06:00.000-08:00

"Eventually, when you awaken in the Mahāyāna, you also eradicate reactivity. That is called the liberation component of awakening. It gets rid of all the reactivity and suffering. But in addition to that, which you get in the Mahāyāna, and which you don't find in the earlier Theravadan tradition, is another component which is called the omniscient component of awakening. You have this vast all-at-oneness as a direct experience, and you open up to what are called the Buddha bodies. The buddha bodies are then the basis of operation. It is no longer only within individual consciousness. Your basis of operation is now also the Dharmakāya awareness - that vast ocean of awareness which is the ground of our being. Simultaneous with that, the energy of manifesting anything in existence, across any potential kind of existence, is there at the same time. And simultaneous with that is your individual consciousness, and the content of your individuation consciousness and your personality, and the stuff of your ordinary mind. It's like quadraphonics - it's all there at once".

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Salvador Dali - Ascension

2012-01-13T12:47:00.000-08:00

Looks conspicuously like Sahasrāra in the background...

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Longing for Recognition: Commentary on the Work of Jessica Benjamin by Judith Butler

2012-01-12T14:17:00.001-08:00

"One of the distinctive contributions of her theory is to insist that intersubjectivity is not the same as object relations, and that 'intersubjectivity' adds to object relations the notion of an external Other, one who exceeds the psychic construction of the object in complementary terms. What this means is that whatever the psychic and fantasmatic relation to the object may be, it ought to be understood in terms of the larger dynamic of recognition. the relation to the object is not the same as the relation to the Other, but the relation to the Other provides a framework for understanding the relation to the object. The subject not only forms certain psychic relations to objects, but the subject is formed by and through those psychic relations. Moreover, these various forms are implicitly structured by a struggle for recognition in which the Other does and does not become dissociable from the object which is psychically represented. This struggle is represented by a desire to enter into a communicative practice with the Other in which recognition takes place neither as an event nor a set of events, but as an onging process, one that also poses the psychic risk of destruction. Whereas Hegel refers to a 'negation' as the risk that recognition always runs, Benjamin retains this term to describe the differentiated aspect of rationality: the other is not me, and from this distinction, certain psychic consequences follow....For Benjamin, humans form psychic relations with Others on the basis of a necessary negation, but not all of those relations must be destructive. Whereas the psychic response that seeks to master and dispel that negation is destructive, that destruction is precisely what needs to be worked through in the process of recognition".
Longing for Recognition: Commentary on the Work of Jessica Benjamin by Judith Butler

Reference:
Judith Butler (2010). Longing for Recognition. In Kimberly Hutchings & Tuija Pulkkinen (eds.), Hegel's Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? Palgrave Macmillan.

RT @ Trish Nowland

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Contact

2012-01-12T12:25:00.000-08:00

‎"One of the reasons many people fundamentally get into relationships is to have someone witness your life with you...an unwitnessed life is a tragedy".

- Ken Wilber

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Chilling Out At Chrissy Field

2012-01-11T16:27:00.000-08:00

Late Night Diner Experience at Orphan Andy's

2012-01-11T11:38:00.001-08:00

My Fave Video Game from Childhood!

2012-01-11T09:44:00.001-08:00

Sourdough Clam Chowder Central! Fisherman's Wharf, San Fran

2012-01-10T21:53:00.000-08:00

Reanimating The Penny Arcade Characters of Musee Mechanique, Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco.

2012-01-10T19:08:00.000-08:00

They were all such colourful old friends, so I thought I'd catch their (line of) sight and let them strike a pose.

City Lights

2012-01-10T16:15:00.000-08:00

John Lennon - (Just Like) Starting Over

2012-01-10T02:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Interdependence

2012-01-09T17:52:00.001-08:00

"The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community".
- William James

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe".
- John Muir

"Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being. Without interrelation with society he cannot realize his oneness with the universe or suppress his egotism. His social interdependence enables him to test his faith and to prove himself on the touchstone of reality".
- Mahatma Gandhi

"...for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom".
- Martin Luther King Jr.

Dependency to Responsibility - Joseph Campbell

2012-01-09T14:12:00.001-08:00

"The human being is a very strange animal. He matures when he is about twenty years old. He has been growing for twenty years. For most animals, that is the length of a lifetime. So here is a creature who has grown for twenty years in an attitude and in a position largely of dependency: uncertain of himself, turning—particularly in the earlier years, the first twelve or so—to his parents for help, instruction, protection, approval and punishment.

This creates a psychological structure of dependency. The individual is in an attitude of dependence on parental figures. Then we ask him to become responsible, to assume responsibility, grow up. This is the crisis of the transit from infancy to adulthood, from dependency to responsibility. Something has to be done to make it happen; it won't happen automatically, as we now know from the problem of psychoanalysis.

A person who looks like an adult, but every time responsibility is thrown upon him turns around to see where Mother or Daddy is just hasn't passed that threshold. A neurotic is a person who is having responses of dependency when there ought to be responses of responsibility. That's all it is. So then he goes to a psychiatrist, who tells him, "Grow up."

That's about all the problem is. But that is not so easy, because after you have, you know, the business of a reflex stimulus response, the response takes place—the response of dependence, dependence, dependence—and now suddenly it's got to be responsibility. And so, here it's going: you say, "Oh gee, look, I'm 30 now, I've got to be over here," and the thing gets mixed up".

- Joseph Campbell

Highway 1

2012-01-08T15:48:00.000-08:00

Highway 1

2012-01-08T15:43:00.000-08:00

Pacifica Graduate Institute

2012-01-08T15:10:00.000-08:00

Pacifica

2012-01-08T14:35:00.001-08:00

...

I dive...

... into our hewn earth courageously. Celebratory. With praise.

Praise for hills above Santa Barbara, and what they would hold in store.

Praise for Clarissa telling me to face every wind to protect the flames at our core.

Praise for the soil, ploughed with our every toil, every root torn, and restored.

Praise for harvesting our dreams, and sewing their seeds for our own family tree once more.

Praise for Joe, and what he's done for you. And I. I tipped my hat at his library, and dropped your book at his door.

Praise for the these many Gods who plunder and adore, surely across the universe, but most certainly in these hallowed halls.

Praise for Carl, seeing what so many would ignore. Gifting me a bridge to explore my true nature's rhythmic and blissful score.

Praise for the rapport with men who resemble me, pouring cups of plentitude, stomping together these floors, eyes that meet where others merely war.

... and the walls, oh the redwood walls! You should see this place! Decor fit for heaven and earth's wedding, a marrying of the exalted and the abhorred.

... and praise for my soul. Once more.

Praise for my soul. Once more.

Praise for soul. Once more.

- Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara. 08/01/2012.

Ventura Sunset

2012-01-07T16:15:00.000-08:00

Malibu

2012-01-07T15:21:00.000-08:00

Here, on this ordinary day, I stand at the precipice of all things. The wintersun gentle, as though twilight, soft filtered through the ocean spray and a canopy of Los Angeles smog. We make our claim to this place, you and I. Our mark is obvious, always expressed, digested in nature's entropy, and renewed again - as our true nature.

Here on this ordinary day, I stand as the precipice of all things. My prescient blood keeps me warm with memories of your smell, and impressions of what you might be (doing) right now. We make our claims on eachother, you and I. Our mark is obvious, each breath shared, even at distance, across the entire world - true nature.

Here on this ordinary day, we stand as the precipice of all things. My sentient belly preempts our unborn, and I already love them. Just like you, I nurture life within. Held in the embrace of this motherly coast, my being is provoked by fatherly urges to steal another independence in this formless, ever renewing, pregnant moment. This divine family claims us all. It is our mark. The mark of our true nature.

I stand here, on other side of this ocean's shore and see, in us all, Blake's eternity. Our eternity. In every finitude. Fleeting. I must respond. Compelled. I walk across these sands and, at the precipice of all things, I raise my hands in praise, make dedications to each of us, and all, and then, I dive.

- Malibu, 07/01/2012

Toumani Diabate - Kaounding Cissko

2012-01-06T21:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

She In Me In You

2012-01-06T19:31:00.001-08:00

I met her, the her in I, transcendent,
mother,
- lover,
- > other.
Then it was you.
You who can nurture life within you.
Like I now can too. My own life. And ours. All of ours.

I will.
For you.

- All -

Split Enz/ENZSO - Message To My Girl

2012-01-06T17:57:00.000-08:00

I don't want to say "I love you"
That would give away too much.
It's hip to be detached and precious,
the only thing you feel is vicious.

I don't want to say "I want you"
even though I want you so much.
It's wrapped up in conversation,
it's whispered in a hush.

Though I'm frightened by the word,
think it's time I made it heard.

No more empty self possession,
visions swept under the mat.
It's no New Years resolution,
it's more than that.

Now I wake up happy
warm in lovers embrace.
No one else can touch us
while we're in this place.

So I'll sing it to the world
this simple message to my girl.

No more empty self possession,
visions swept under the mat.
It's no New Years resolution,
it's more than that.

Though I'm frightened by the word,
think it's time I made it heard.

So I'll sing it to the world
this simple message to my girl.

No more empty self possession,
visions swept under the mat.
It's no New Years resolution,
it's more than that.

Oh there's nothing quite as real
as the touch of your sweet hands.
I can't spend the rest of my life
buried in the sand.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Fleetwood Mac - Everywhere

2012-01-06T17:50:00.000-08:00

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Nick Cave - The Ship Song

2012-01-06T17:47:00.000-08:00

Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around

Come loose your dogs upon me
And let your hair hang down
You are a little mystery to me
Every time you come around

We talk about it all night long
We define our moral ground
But when I crawl into your arms
Everything comes tumbling down

Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around

Your face has fallen sad now
For you know the time is nigh
When I must remove your wings
And you, you must try to fly

Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around

Come loose your dogs upon me
And let your hair hang down
You are a little mystery to me
Every time you come around

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

New Year

2012-01-06T17:43:00.000-08:00

Hot golden light marks transition again
from dreaming to waking and walking
across another threshold, a marker
of boundary space, from year to year.
What was formerly toil, now practice.
What was formerly struggle, somewhat eased.
Where there was nothing, now there is no-thing.
This spaciousness, this self, all meeting this new year.

Winnicott on the gift of the good-enough mother

2012-01-06T04:08:00.000-08:00

"The good-enough 'mother' (not necessarily the infant's own mother) is one who makes active adaptation to the infant's needs, an active adaptation that gradually lessens, according to the infant's growing ability to account for failure of adaptation and to tolerate the results of frustration. Naturally, the infant's own mother is more likely to be good enough than some other person, since this active adaptation demands an easy and unresented preoccupation with the one infant; in fact, success in infant care depends on the fact of devotion, not on cleverness or intellectual enlightenment. The good-enough mother, as I have stated, starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant's needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant's growing ability to deal with her failure. The infant's means of dealing with this maternal failure include the following:

1. The infant's experience, often repeated, that there is a time-limit to frustration. At first, naturally, this time-limit must be short.
2. Growing sense of process.
3. The beginnings of mental activity.
4. Employment of auto-erotic satisfactions.
5. Remembering, reliving, fantasying, dreaming; the integrating of past, present, and future.

If all goes well the infant can actually come to gain from the experience of frustration, since incomplete adaptation to need makes objects real, that is to say hated as well as loved. The consequence of this is that if all goes well the infant can be disturbed by a close adaptation to need that is continued too long, not allowed its natural decrease, since exact adaptation resembles magic and the object that behaves perfectly becomes no better than a hallucination. Nevertheless, at the start adaptation needs to be almost exact, and unless this is so it is not possible for the infant to begin to develop a capacity to experience a relationship to external reality, or even to form a conception of external reality".

From his seminal, Playing and Reality

It appears quite sensible - gotta be attuned and not resentful in your devotion during infancy, then slowly provide tolerable failures of empathy which provide differentiation and self-soothing away from fused fantasy (of perfection) into reality objects, which ushers in self growth from the paranoid-schizoid position of the infant into an early ego position - from the pleasure principle into the reality principle. Nicely...

Wilber's Fulcrums 0-4 sorted! ;-p

New Year

2012-01-02T18:19:00.000-08:00

Alexander Ebert - Truth

2012-01-02T14:20:00.000-08:00

Truth
The truth is that I never shook my shadow
Every day it's trying to trick me into doing battle
Calling out "faker" only get me rattled
Want to pull me back behind the fence with the cattle
Building your lenses
Digging your trenches
Put me on the front line
Leave me with a dumb mind
With no defenses
But your defense is
If you can't stand to feel the pain then you are senseless

Since this
I've grown up some
Different kind of fighter
And when the darkness comes, let it inside you
And your darkness is shining
My darkness is shining
Have faith in myself
Truth

I've seen a million numbered doors on the horizon
Now which is the future you're choosing before you gone dyin'?
I'll tell you about a secret I've been undermining
Every little lie in this world comes from dividing
Say you're my lover, say you're my own homie,
Tilt my chin back, slit my throat, take a bath in my blood, get to know me
All out of my secrets
All my enemies are turning into my teachers.
Because, lights blinding, no way dividing what's yours or mine
When everything's shining
You darkness is shining
My darkness is shining
Have faith in ourselves
Truth

Yes I'm only loving only trying to only love.
Yes I'm only lonely loving trying to only love and feeling lonely only loving.
Yes I'm only loving only trying to only love.
Yes I'm only lonely loving trying to only love and feeling lonely only loving.
Swear to God I'm only loving, you say it ain't loving ain't loving ain't loving my loving
But I'm only loving only loving swear to God I'm only loving
Only loving only loving only loving only loving
I'm only loving only trying to only love
You say it ain't loving ain't loving ain't loving my loving
But I'm only loving only loving only loving only loving the truth.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

First Point in Mindfully-Held Anger

2012-01-02T06:25:00.001-08:00

"What we need to learn to do is to see the thought as a thought, and then feel the body tighten. The body is going to tighten if you're angry with somebody, right? So just be the tightening. Forget the thinking at this point, and just be the anger, the tension or vibration. When you do that, you're not trying to change your anger. You're just being with it, totally. Then it is able to transform itself".

–Charlotte Joko Beck

Garden, Temple.

2012-01-02T05:57:00.001-08:00

Among a watchful community
of olive trees and tomato plants
and voices feint but knowing
we touch temples and sense
transmissions of love's awareness
so much bigger than you, or I,
or us, or this watchful community
of spinach leaves and sansivera
and traces of persuasive whispers
which midwifed new clarity
where none had chosen to grow
until we all planted care, just here.

Is the Relationship Between Trait-Positive Affect and Global Physical Health Mediated by Nature Relatedness and Nature Exposure?

2012-01-02T04:36:00.000-08:00

Is the Relationship Between Trait-Positive Affect and Global Physical Health Mediated by Nature Relatedness and Nature Exposure?

Luke Fullagar
Research Project at Monash University
Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences
School of Psychology and Psychiatry

Abstract

Emotions are thought to act as a principal pathway connecting psychological stress to physical disease (Cohen & Pressman, 2006). Much research in health psychology has focussed on associations between negative emotional states and/or affective styles (traits) with negative morbidity and mortality outcomes (see meta-analysis in Pressman & Cohen, 2005). More recently, evidence from a range of experimental methodologies (Diener & Chan, 2011) has provided compelling evidence of associations between trait-positive affect (PA) and increases in a number of physical health indicators including: mortality, morbidity, disease survival, recovery, as well as for specific biological systems (e.g. cardiovascular, endocrine) (Pressman & Cohen, 2005; Cohen & Pressman, 2006).
For brevity, this study is limited to self-reported health measures in healthy populations, and therefore, a review of previous research is limited to morbidity and self-reported symptom findings. Similarly, the current study limits the research question to hedonic trait-PA defined as the enduring disposition to experience feelings that “reflect a level of pleasurable engagement with the environment” (Clark, Watson, & Leeka, 1989; Cohen & Pressman, 1995). This definition distinguishes the current study from research on state-PA, being those that measure or manipulate short-term experiences of PA (Cohen & Pressman, 1995). Similarly, generalisability of subjective wellbeing research (SWB) is limited, and therefore excluded from review, given the inclusion of both eudonic measures (e.g. optimism (Diener & Chan, 2011)) alongside hedonic PA.
Both cross-sectional and prospective studies support an association between trait-PA (herein referred to as “PA”) and lowered morbidity (Pressman & Cohen, 2005). Unsurprisingly, many cross-sectional designs on populations with serious disease demonstrate a link between lowered PA and increased disease severity, for example: fibromyalgia and arthritis (Celiker & Borman, 2001) and hypertension (Knox, Svensson, Waller & Theorell, 1988). However, these cross-sectional research designs preclude causal inferences, rendering it possible that the observed effects of PA are attributable to the chronicity of disease symptoms themselves rather than PA’s unique contribution. Prospective morbidity studies, however, do provide encouraging evidence for a causal and unique contribution of PA to physical health despite strong variation in PA measures and health constructs studied: e.g. in contracting the common cold (Cohen, Doyle, Turner, Alper & Skoner, 2003); the future occurrence of stroke (Ostir, Markides, Peek, & Goodwin, 2001), lowered risk of injury for hockey players (Smith, Stuart, Wiese-Bjornstal, & Gunnon, 1997); and incidence of general injuries (Koivumaa-Honkanen, Viinamaeki, Heikkila, Kaprio & Koskenvuo, 2000).
While exposed to affect-elicited self-report biases (Cohen & Williamson, 1991) considerable research also connects higher PA to lower self-reported pain (for example, in cancer patients (Guadagnoli & Mor, 1989) and hospital inpatients (Kvaal & Patodia, 2000)), and better perceived health and fewer self-reported symptoms in healthy populations (e.g. Takkouche, Regueira, & Gestal-Otero, 2001; Roysamb, Tambs, Reichborn-Kjennerud, Neale, & Harris, 2003). Prospective studies by Hirdes & Forbes (1993) also demonstrate that PA prospectively predicts less symptom reporting and better self-reported health. By contrast, small, or in some cases negative, associations between PA and symptom reporting were observed by Watson and Pennebaker (1989). However, it is important to note that in this study, trait NA was also associated with greater self-reported symptoms and poorer self-reported health, potentially confounding conclusions on the role of trait PA.
Indeed, this potential for confounding is highlighted by ambiguous evidence that NA and PA are both bipolar extremes and orthogonal factors (Pressman & Cohen, 2005; Deiner, Smith & Fujita, 1995). Three of abovementioned studies on morbidity either controlled for NA or assessed NA variables and found no influence on outcomes (Cohen et al., 2003; Ostir et al., 2001; Smith et al.,1997; Pressman & Cohen, 2005), suggesting a unique contribution of PA in limiting morbidity. However, the literature on NA and disease demonstrates convincing associations (e.g. meta-analyses by Krantz & McCeney (2002) and Pressman & Cohen (2005)), and it is therefore essential for PA research to control for NA to assess whether the relationship between PA and self-reported health measures is merely due to the absence of NA, or a unique contribution of an orthogonal PA factor.
Additional variables have been shown to affect both health and PA and are controlled for in this study. SES is a potential spurious factor as it has been strongly linked to health (Adler et. al., 1994), and while no study appears to explore the connection between positive affect and SES, SES has been identified as a common risk factor for emotional health (Hudson, 2005).
Existence of religious affiliation has also been shown to affect health (Ferraro & Albrecht-Jensen, 1991) and positive affect (Fredrickson, 2002; Levin & Chatters, 1998). Employment status also has been shown to affect health (Bartley & Owen, 1996; Bambra, 2011) and positive affect (Puglesi, 1995). Similarly, relationship status has also been shown to affect both health (Verbrugge, 1979; Wyke & Ford, 1992) and positive affect (Wood, Rhodes, & Whelan, 1989)
While many of these studies are atheoretical in nature, two theoretical frameworks have been proposed for the influence of PA on health outcomes. The Main Effect Model proposes that PA affects physical systems such as cardiovascular, nervous system and endocrine pathways, as well as social and behavioural influences, whereas the Stress Buffering Model suggests that PA influences health through its ability to mitigate pathogenic outcomes of environmental stressors (Pressman & Cohen, 2005).
One pathway proposed by Smith and Baum (2003) suggests that PA’s stress buffering role may be achieved through inducing a proclivity toward self-caring restorative activities such as sleep, exercise, relaxation and spending time in natural environments, which in turn reduce the physical and negative affective stress responses which lead to disease. This stress-buffering perspective echoes theoretical and empirical research in the nature exposure, affect and health literature spearheaded by Roger Ulrich (Ulrich, Dimberg & Driver, 1991, Ulrich, Simons, Losito, Fiorito, Zelson. 1991, Ulrich & Parsons, 1992, Ulrich, 1993), which suggests that exposure to natural settings (real and, to a lesser extent, virtual) potentates an affective response which replaces negative affects with positive ones, and resultantly reduces stress activation and susceptibility to stress induction via restoration of cognitive, emotional, social and, importantly, physical resources (Hartig, Book, Garvill, Olsson & Garling, 1996). Together, these lines of research may suggest a causative pathway from trait-PA to nature exposure through to state-PA and stress-reduction leading to better health outcomes.
However, while these associations are well supported, diversity in research findings renders the direction of these relations uncertain (Hartig et al., 1996; Mayer et al., 2008). That is, it remains uncertain the extent to which, nature exposure, connection or relatedness cultivates trait-PA and state-PA versus the extent to which it may assist in sustaining PA which motivates nature-focussed activity in first instance.
The relationship between nature exposure and health is supported by findings which demonstrate that those exposed to nature have reduced heart rate, muscle tension, blood pressure, and improved skin conductance (Ulrich, Simons, Losito, Fiorito & Zelson, 1991); lower frequency of stress symptoms (Moore, 1981; Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Leather, Pyrgas, Beale & Lawrence, 1998) lower digestive illnesses and headaches (Moore, 1981) and also recover from illness faster (Lewis, 1996) and with more resilience to subsequent stress (Parsons, Tassinary, Ulrich, Hebl, Grossman-Alexander, 1998).
Strong associations between PA and nature exposure have been evidenced in cross-sectional correlation designs (Mayer, Frantz, Bruehlman-Senecalm & Dolliver, 2009). Mediation of this relationship by one’s sense of nature connectedness, or affective sense of community with nature, as measured by Mayer and Frantz’s (2004) Connectedness to Nature Scale (CNS) has been observed by Mayer, Frantz, Bruehlman-Senecal & Dolliver (1999).
Nisbet, Zelenski and Murphy’s (2009) nature relatedness (NR) construct transcends but includes the domains covered by the CNS by adding physical relation with nature to the construct. Nisbet & Zelenski (2011) demonstrated strong associations between NR and PA, and this was repeated in three cross-sectional correlation designs (Nisbet, Zelenski & Murphy, 2011) where the NR construct strongly correlated with trait-PA measured on the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988). Importantly, NR was also found in these studies to be unrelated to NA prior to the control of environmental measures, suggesting a unique contribution of PA to this relationship. NR has also been shown to mediate the relationship between PA and nature exposure (Nisbet, Nealis, & Zelenski, 2011).
Accordingly, this study aims to assess whether trait-PA and self-reported global physical health are associated when controlling for NA, and demographic variables age, socio-economic status, religious affiliation, relationship status and employment status. In addition, this study aims to assess whether any relationship between trait-PA and global physical health is mediated by nature relatedness and/or exposure.
It is hypothesised that PA will be positively associated with PH, operationalised as a significant correlation between trait-PA scale scores on the PANAS and self-reported global physical health scores on the WHO-BREF (Hypothesis 1). It is further hypothesised that PA will continue to predict PH when controlling for: self-reported trait-NA (reported as a score on the PANAS NA sub-scale), age (reported in years); dichotomous SES by postcode (reported as either below or equal/above average), existence of religious affiliation, relationship status and employment status (Hypothesis 2). Thirdly, it is also hypothesised that NE will mediate the relationship between PA and PH (Hypothesis 3). Due to size limitations of this study, this mediation will employ an augmented version of the methodology for mediation analyses set out by Baron and Kenny (1986), and will be operationalised by: establishing Hypothesis 1, establishing a significant positive correlation between NE scores on the NE Questionnaire and self-reported trait-PA on the PANAS (Path 3a), establishing a significant positive correlation between NE scores on the NE Questionnaire and self-reported global health scores on the WHO-BREF (Path 3b), and then, by controlling for paths in hypotheses 3a and 3b in a hierarchical regression model, evidencing a significant diminution in the strength of the correlation between trait-PA scores on the PANAS and self-reported global health scores on the WHO-BREF. Finally, it is also hypothesised that NR will mediate the relationship between self-reported trait-PA and global physical health (Hypothesis 4), similarly operationalised by establishing Hypothesis 1, establishing a significant positive correlation between NR scores on the NR Scale and self-reported trait-PA on the PANAS (Path 4a), establishing a significant positive correlation between NR scores on the NR Scale and self-reported global health scores on the WHO-BREF (Path 4b), and then, by controlling for paths in hypotheses 4a and 4b in a hierarchical regression model, evidencing a significant diminution in the strength of the correlation between trait-PA scores on the PANAS and self-reported global health scores on the WHO-BREF.

Method
Participants
318 participants were recruited, and 297 completed the study. All were healthy adults aged between 18-79 sampled at convenience through invitation from student experimenters. 68.80% were female (n=192) and 31.20% were male (n=87). Mean age was 38.28 years (SD=11.78). Mean annual household income was between $70,001 - $105,000. 78.5% were employed. 19.3% had completed standard education and 80.7% had completed advanced education. 78.2% had a current partner, and 21.5% were currently single. 34.9% reported having a religious affiliation.

Materials
A copy of the survey used is included in Appendix 1.
Demographic Information. A demographic survey was administered using an online university website.
PANAS. The trait-scale of the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988) was used to assess participants’ trait positive and negative affect. The PANAS is a 20-item scale, divided into 2 separable 10-item positive and negative trait affect scales. Positive affect is characterized by feelings of enthusiasm, engagement, and alertness, whereas negative affect is characterized by various types of distress, including anger, contempt, disgust, guilt, fear, and nervousness. Participants rated the extent to which they had felt these mood states during the past few weeks using a modified Likert-type scale (1 = very slightly or not at all, 5 = extremely). The positive and negative affect scales both demonstrate moderately good internal consistency (NA: α=0.84 to 0.87, PA: α=0.86 to 0.90), and 8-week test-retest correlations were also good (PA: 0.47-0.68; NA 0.39-0.71) (Watson, 1988)
WHOQOL-BREF. The WHOQOL-BREF comprises of 26 items, which measure an individual’s self-reported perceptions of themselves across four broad health domains (subscales): physical health (“the PH subscale”), psychological health, social relationships, and environment. Participants rate questions (e.g. How satisfied are you with your health?) on a 5-point Likert-type scale (1 = lowest to 5 = highest). The full WHOQOL-BREF measure was administered, but only the PH subscale was used in the analysis of self-reported global physical health (PH). The test demonstrates moderately good internal consistency (α=.60-.90; PH subscale in healthy populations α=.87), and 8-week test-retest correlations were also above r=.80, PH subscale r=.86 (Murphy, Herrman, Hawthorne, Pinzone & Evert, 2000).
Nature Exposure Scale. The Nature Exposure Scale (Francis, 2011) is a four question measure testing the extent of one’s exposure to, and noticing of, natural and virtual nature settings in everyday life and on specific excursions to nature (e.g. In your everyday home, travel and work environments and activities, please rate your level of exposure to ‘natural environments’). Questions are answered on a 5-point Likert-type scale (1 = lowest to 5 = highest). The test demonstrates moderately good internal consistency (α=.707).
Nature Relatedness Scale. Nature relatedness was measured using the NR Scale (Nisbet, Zelenski & Murphy, 2009). The scale requires participants to rate 21 items on a 5-point Likert scale (1=disagree strongly to 5=agree strongly). Each item asked participants to measure the extent to which they agree with statements evoking cognitive, affective, and physical connection with nature, e.g. “My relationship to nature is an important part of who I am”, “I enjoy digging in the earth and getting dirt on my hands”, “I don’t often go out in nature” (negatively keyed item). The NR Scale has demonstrated good test-retest reliability (r=.85), internal consistency (α=.87), convergent and discriminant validity and construct validity (Nisbet, Zelenski & Murphy, 2009).

Procedure
Participants who agreed to participate were advised by letter from senior Monash University staff that approval for the study was granted by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee. Inclusion criteria were that paricipants were over 18 years and had computer access, and exclusion criteria were that participants must not be experiencing a severe or debilitating illness. All materials were administered online and completed in one sitting at participant’s convenience. All scored surveys were collated by university staff and uploaded as a data file on SPSS Version 18 software.

Results
SPSS Results are presented in Appendix 2. Raw data was cleansed and 23 cases removed because of missing information. Three outliers with Mahalanobis distances over 25 were identified and excluded from the analysis. One additional case was eliminated due to an absent employment score. Preliminary analyses were conducted to ensure no violations in the assumptions of linearity, normality, multicollinearity, and homoscedasticity. P-P plots were inspected and confirmed normal distribution, and scatterplots confirmed a linear and homoscedastic distribution. Belsley’s (1991) limits for multicollinearity problems (Variance Inflation Factors (VIFs) above 10 and Tolerance values below 0.10) were not breached in the current regression models, with VIFs below 1.88 and Tolerance values above 0.53.
Descriptive statistics for measures used in the study are summarised in Table 1.
Table 1
Descriptive Statistics Mean (M) and Standard Deviations (SD) for Study Measures
Variable Mean SD
Physical Health 73.98 14.20
PA 34.84 6.69
NR 3.75 .63
NE 9.38 2.98
NA 18.50 6.39
Dichotomous SES from Postcode .91 .29
Existence of Religious Affiliation .35 .48
Relationship Status .78 .41
Employment Status .78 .41

PH means and standard deviations were similar to Australian normative data (M=80, SD=17.1) (Murphy, Herrman, Hawthorne, Pinzone & Evert, 2000). PA means and standard deviations were marginally higher than normative samples of Australian men (M=33.5, SD=5.9) and women (M=33.9, SD=5.1) (Watson & Clark, 1994). Similarly, NA means and standard deviations were higher than normative samples of Australian men (M=14.2, SD=4.1) and women (M=15.5, SD=5.3) (Watson & Clark, 1994). Mean NR scores were similar to the average reported by Nisbet, Zelenski and Murphy (2008) (M=3.71). NE score range was from 0-20. Dichotomous SES from postcode was coded 0 = below average, 1 = average to high. The dichotomous variables existence of religious affiliation, employment status and relationship status dichotomous were coded as (0 = No, 1= Yes).
Pearson product-moment correlations were computed and are presented in Table 2. Due to an error in scoring, the sign of the NE scale in correlation results were manually reversed.

Table 2
Correlations Between Study Variables

Measure 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
1. Physical Health .33** .11* .15** -.40** .07 .11* -.18** .11* .20**
2. Positive Affect .18** .17** -.13** -.02 .11* -.03 .05 .10
3. Nature Relatedness .66** -.14* .06 .22** -.26** .16** -.01
4. Nature Exposure -.12** .40 .15** -.17** .12* -.03
5. Negative Affect -.02 -.21** .13* -.09 -.02
6. SES .08 -.21** .10* .10**
7. Age -.18** .27** -.05
8. Religion -.10* -.05
9. Relationship Status -.02
10. Employment Status
*p<0.05 (two-tailed), **p<0.01 (two-tailed)
SES = Dichotomous Socioeconomic Status From Postcode.

Pearson product-moment correlations were computed for all study variables and are presented in Table 2. PH was significantly positively correlated with PA (r2=.11), NR (r2=.01), NE (r2=.02), as well as age (r2=.01), relationship (r2=.01) and employment status (r2=.04). PH was also significantly negatively correlated with NA (r2=.16), and existence of religious affiliation (r2=.03). PA was also significantly positively correlated with NR (r2=.03) and NE (r2=.03), and significantly negatively correlated with NA (r2=.02). NR and NE were significantly positively correlated (r2=.44), and both were significantly negatively correlated with NA: NR (r2=.02), NE (r2=.01).
Additionally, a hierarchical multiple regression analysis was performed to examine whether PA could be used to predict PH after controlling for potentially confounding and/or mediating variables: NR, NE, NA, Dichotomous SES, age, existence of religious affiliation, and relationship and employment status.
Results are presented in Table 3.

Table 3
Hierarchical Multiple Regression Predicting Global Physical Health
Criterion Variable: Global Physical Health Β SEB β
Step 1 Constant 82.77 4.91
Negative Affect -.83 .12 -.38**
Dichotomous SES from Postcode .90 2.70 .02
Age -.00 .07 -.00
Religion -3.26 1.68 -.11*
Relationship Status 2.40 1.95 .07
Employment Status 6.63 1.88 .19**
Step 2 Constant 92.95 9.73
Negative Affect -.82 .12 -.37**
Dichotomous SES from Postcode .91 2.70 .02
Age -.01 .07 -.01
Religion -3.10 1.72 -.10
Relationship Status 2.24 1.95 .07
Employment Status 6.75 1.88 .20**
Nature Relatedness -1.26 1.67 -.06
Nature Exposure -.60 .34 -.13
Step 3 Constant 75.00 10.04
Negative Affect -.77 .12 -.35**
Dichotomous SES from Postcode 1.48 2.59 .03
Age -.03 .07 -.02
Religion -3.37 1.65 -.11*
Relationship Status 2.15 1.87 .06
Employment Status 5.75 1.81 .17**
Nature Relatedness -1.86 1.61 -.08
Nature Exposure -.48 .33 -.10
Positive Affect .56 .11 .26**
** p<.01 * p<.05

Durbin-Watson tests revealed no violation of the independence of errors assumption.
The analysis revealed that the variables in Step 1: NA, dichotomous SES from postcode, age, existence of religious affiliation, relationship and employment status (“Step 1 Variables”) significantly predicted PH, F (6, 267) = 12.31, p < .01, accounting for 21.7% (adjusted R2 = .20) of the variability.
Adding NR and NE in Step 2 did not significantly improve the prediction of PH, ∆F (2, 265) = 1.63, p >.05, accounting for only 1% of the variability in PH. Thus, together, the Step 1 variables, NE and NR, significantly predicted PH, F (8, 265) = 9.69, p < .01, accounting for 22.6% (adjusted R2 = .20) of its variability.
Adding PA in Step 3 significantly improved the prediction of PH, ∆F (1, 264) = 23.83, p < .01, accounting for an additional 6.4% of the variability in PH. Thus, together, the Step 1 variables, NE, NR, and PA significantly predicted PH, F (9, 264) = 12.00, p < .01, accounting for 29% (adjusted R2 = .27) of its variability.
Table 3 shows the regression coefficients for this analysis. As can be seen in the table, when only the Step 1 variables were included in the regression model, NA, existence of religious affiliation and employment status were significant predictors of PH. When NR and NE were added to the regression model, they were not significant predictors of PH, and NA and employment status remained significant predictors of PH. When PA was additionally included in the regression model, it, together with NA, employment status, and again, existence of religious affiliation, were each significant and unique predictors of PH.
A meditational analysis was performed to test the hypothesis that NR and NE would mediate the relationship between PA and PH. An additional hierarchical multiple regression was performed to assess the whether there was a diminution in the extent to which PA predicted PH when NR and NE were removed from the regression model.
Step 1 in the analysis above is identical the first regression model. Adding PA in Step 2 of this regression did significantly improve the prediction of PH, ∆F (1, 266) = 25.12, p < .01, accounting for 6.8% of the variability in PH. When contrasted with the first regression model, NA and NE accounted for a very marginal .4% of the variability in PH, consistent with a weak mediation effect.
Discussion
The aim of this study was to assess whether trait-PA and self-reported global physical health are associated when controlling for NA, and demographic variables age, socio-economic status, religious affiliation, relationship status and employment status. In addition, this study also aimed to assess whether any relationship between trait-PA and global physical health is mediated by nature relatedness and/or exposure.
The first hypothesis that PA would be significantly and positively associated with PH was supported.
The second hypothesis that PA would continue to predict PH after controlling for NA, SES, existence of religious affiliation, relationship and employment status, was also supported. PA was a significant independent predictor of PH after controlling for each of these predictor variables in the regression model.
Taken together, these results confirm previous findings of the unique role of trait-PA in predicting self-reported health (e.g. Takkouche, 2001; Roysamb, 2003), and provide contrary evidence to equivocal findings of Watson and Pennebaker (1989) who observed small, or in some cases negative, associations between PA and self-reported health (symptom reporting). The significant and unique contribution of PA to PH after controlling for NA lends further cross-sectional support to prospective studies that suggest an independent role of PA to PH when controlling for NA (Cohen, et al., 2003; Ostir, et al., 2001; Smith, et al., 1997). However, NA was significantly negatively correlated with PA in this study, and remained the strongest unique predictor of PH in the regression model, demonstrating that previously observed PANAS sub-scale independence (e.g. Egloff, 1999; Deiner, Smith & Fujita, 1995) was not present and suggesting that PA and NA were not orthogonal factors in this study. This potentially confounds the independence of these results. Given the strong psychometric properties of the PANAS, further research should seek to replicate the current findings in further populations to assess whether the independence between PA and NA observed in other studies (Cohen, et al., 2003; Ostir, et al., 2001; Smith, et al., 1997) can be repeated.
The third and fourth hypotheses that NR and NE would each mediate the relationship between PA and PH were not strongly supported. While NR and NE both significantly correlated with PA and PH, when added to the regression model, they were not significant predictors of PH at any step. In the comparison between the first regression model and the second that excluded NR and NE, NR and NE accounted for a negligible .4% of the variability in PH. This unexpected result is in contrast to Smith and Baum (2003) and Ulrich’s (1992) suggested pathway for the stress-buffering contribution of PA to PH. Given the strong and repeated correlations between PA, trait-NR and NE (Nisbet, Nealis, & Zelenski, 2011; Nisbet & Zelenski, 2011), myriad health benefits (Nisbet, Zelenski & Murphy, 2011), and also the meditational observations of Mayer, Frantz, Bruehlman-Senecal & Dolliver (1999) and Nisbet, Nealis, & Zelenski, (2011) demonstrating a mediating relationship of NR between NE and PA, these results suggest that a different causative process may account for the relationship of nature exposure and relatedness to PA and PH. Given the strong associations between PA and PH in this study, and previous meditational results, further research should test models that posit PA as a potential mediating factor in the relationship between nature and health.
The current study only tested trait-PA, and not state-PA. Given the theoretical bases for suggesting a restorative role for nature in stimulating stress-buffering health benefits, differential testing of state and trait affect in future studies would be prudent for studies attempting to understand whether trait and state PA affect the meditational pathways between the varieties of PA, nature and health outcomes in different ways (e.g. as a motivator for vs an outcome of nature exposure and relatedness). Similarly, subscales of nature experience were bundled in this study, and future discrimination of types of nature experience and relatedness (e.g. NR-scale subscales, virtual v natural nature view, exposure vs view) should be the subject of additional research.
Because self-report measures are subject to affect-elicited self-report biases (Cohen & Williamson, 1991), future research should consider replicating these results alongside other direct observation measures of health.
Issues of affect valence may affect the current results. The PANAS scale has been repeatedly shown to privilege activated positive affect (happy, cheerful), as opposed to non-activated PA (e.g. contentment, calm) (Egloff, 1999). Ulrich (1992) and Smith and Baum (2003) both focused their research and sound theory on the basis that nature induces non-activated PA, and accordingly the observations which predicate the hypotheses of this study may be affected by issues of valence. To test potential for a differential role of valence, future research should provide for either a measure of low-arousal PA or introduce a range of affect and mood measures sensitive to differences in valence (e.g. Egloff, 1999).
These findings further implicate hedonic trait-PA in the establishment and maintenance of positive health, but do not explain the role of nature relatedness or exposure in that relationship. The unique contribution of PA to health is an important issue for public health research, and especially in the production of preventative health and disease management protocols and campaigns. Importantly, demonstrating the effect of hedonic PA on health adds another feather in the cap of the broader subjective wellbeing research canon which has demonstrated strong associations with eudaimonic measures and health. Ultimately, these results demonstrate that emotions do provide a significant pathway in the connection between psychological stress and physical disease. Future research will hopefully further elucidate the role of nature in this equation.

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The Promise of Play - PBS Series by Stuart Brown

2012-01-01T20:46:00.000-08:00

These are 12 videos back-to-back which I have placed in a playlist.

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Stan Tatkin & Diane Poole Heller - A Declaration of Interdependency

2012-01-01T15:31:00.000-08:00

I'm going to see attachment psychotherapist Stan Tatkin deliver a two-day professional development training in May on his triadic model of attachment-based couple's work which grounds orientation in affect regulation theory, attachment theory and interpersonal neurobiology - right in the same vein as Dr Allan Schore and Dr Dan Siegel's recent work (indeed, Tatkin is a veteran member of Allan Schore's study group).

It's very pleasing for me as I've been pointing to the unavoidable necessity of this view for a long time now, and have finally uncovered the throughlines in the research work done by all of these psychological heavyweights to go very deeply into this aspect of my transformation and sculpting of a healthy and happy relational and family, if not community, life. Their admonishment of the gestalt oaths of separateness and framing of them as a mere plateau in an immature 70's psychology ring like bells in my ear after years of advocating for what Judith Blackstone calls 'contact' over ego-division. The research is in, and it is pretty unequivocal that, across the lifespan, we grow and flourish in the attunement with significant others, and as adults negotiate relational space healthily only if we open to interdependency - the flow of selves-in-context securely negotiating time together and time alone within the trace of an attuned connection which pervades one's sense of having a secure base from which to venture into the world and return.

Looking forward to this deepening engagement with his work.

From the invitation:

Wired for Love: A Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy (PACT) focuses on the effect of early attachment on brain and nervous system development, as well as specific neuroendocrine issues related to interpersonal stress. Enactment of experience is emphasised over cognition or psychological interpretation. Interventions often entail therapeutically-staged moments intended to trigger arousal and implicit somatoaffective experience and memory. A PACT-trained clinician attends to each patient's moment-to-moment variations and shifts in affect and arousal as observed in the face, body, and voice. These macro and micro state changes occur rapidly in couples work. This training enables clinicians to discover and analyse psychobiological cues and other bottom-up (implicit) processes that reveal what top-down (explicit) approaches cannot.

Couples often enter therapy due to intense periods of mutual dysregulation whereby attachment injuries and adaptations become reanimated. The therapist needs a knowledge of the neurobiological processes that underlie primary attachment relationships, and a coherent narrative to explain where the couple has been, where they are, and where they must go. This training integrates three domains of developmental neuroscience, attachment theory, and principles of arousal regulation in treating couples typically thought of as untreatable. Attendees are introduced to an approach to adult romantic relationships that helps illuminate how and why adult primary relationships succeed and fail. Didactic, experiential, and multimedia learning are used.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Oh Shit!

2012-01-01T05:18:00.001-08:00

"A half-read book is a half-finished love affair."

- Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

Oneness and Separateness - Judith Blackstone (from her book, An Intimate Life)

2011-12-31T00:36:00.000-08:00

Overcoming Boundary Problems

"All duality comes from the differentiation of a single ground".
THE PEARL GARDEN, DZOGCHEN TANTRA

The Boundary Problem in Relationships

One of the most common problems that people have in intimate relationships is that they feel lost or submerged in the other person, or they fear that this will happen if they allow themselves to be truly intimate. Some people cope with this fear by distancing themselves from other people, by closing themselves off to external influence, or by finding ways to push people away. Others cope in a seemingly opposite way, by attempting to merge with the identity of their partner. Most of us do some of both. These relational styles are ways of accommodating the defensive barrier that we have created, early in our lives, between ourselves and other people. They are a continuation of the delicate negotiation, which begins in infancy and can last our whole lives, between connection with ourselves and connection with other people. This quandary of choice between self-love and love for others is, at root, illusory—for we are fundamentally whole within our own being and one with other people at the same time. Love is an essential quality of the whole field.
The fear of losing one’s own identity in relationships is so central to the challenge of being intimate with another person that I could find some expression of it in all of the couples who come to work with me. To some extent, the fear of identity loss is the fear of ego loss. In an intimate relationship, our ideas about ourselves and our strategies for getting approval, maintaining oneupmanship, and so forth are always challenged. There is almost always some conflict between our partner’s intimate view of ourselves and the image that we hold of ourselves. These conflicts can be very helpful for dismantling our holding patterns. But I have found that the reason so many people are unable to surrender their defenses in relationships is that they are defending something even more precious to them than their constructed ego. They are protecting their actual connection with themselves—their self-enjoyment.
Since the experience of self-connection is difficult to define, the loss of it is often expressed as a vague but intolerable malaise. It is described as a loss of “space,” a sense of being “out of sync” with oneself. People may speak of feeling cut off from their own needs and desires or from their own thoughts and feelings. Some people feel as if they are seeing the world through their partner’s eyes, that they can no longer connect with their own perceptions and responses. The loss of self-connection is experienced as a breach of boundaries, an inability to juggle the guarding of one’s own perimeters with the openness of intimacy. The perceived threat of intrusion often gives rise to power struggles, turning the act of mutual decision-making into fight-to-the-death warfare.
The loss of self-connection is the inability to attune inward to the source of our own experience, within the internal space of our body. Our awareness of our partner overwhelms and replaces our contact with ourselves. But instead of feeling a connection with that person, we feel bound up in them.
In my last book, The Enlightenment Process, I quote R. D. Laing’s description of the loss of self-connection. He writes, “If the individual does not feel himself to be autonomous this means that he can experience neither his separateness from, nor his relatedness to, the other in the usual way. A lack of sense of autonomy implies that one feels one’s being bound up in the other, or that the other is bound up in oneself, in a sense that transgresses the actual possibilities within the structure of human relatedness. It means that a feeling that one is in a position of ontological dependency on the other (i.e., dependent on the other for one’s very being) is substituted for a sense of relatedness and attachment to him based on genuine mutuality.”1
This common difficulty in relationships can be particularly confusing and troublesome for people who are interested in spiritual transformation. Since spiritual realization is the unity of oneself and everything else, they ask, shouldn’t we surrender our connection with ourselves? And isn’t the resentment that one feels at being overwhelmed by another person’s presence simply one’s own clinging to the illusion of existing separately from that person?
In order to progress on the spiritual path, it is important to understand the difference between lack of self-contact and the dissolution of ego. In order to realize true oneness with other people, we need to recognize the difference between spiritual unity and the experience of being “bound up” in another person that R. D. Laing describes.
The Equality of Fundamental Consciousness
As I described in the last chapter, we experience the unified spiritual dimension of life as vast space pervading all of the various forms of life equally. This experience is sometimes called “nonduality” or “one taste.” This unified existence is not something outside of ourselves. It includes ourselves. Our own being is the same one taste as everything around us. This is our most relaxed state.
As we let go of our defensive holding patterns, we can relax into the unified dimension of existence. This feels as if we are dissolving in space, becoming more and more permeable or transparent. At the same time, it feels as if we are truly existing, as if we are being born. It feels as if we are coming into contact with parts of ourselves, actual places within our body, that have been numb and unavailable, as if we are becoming whole within the internal space of our body. This is an emptiness of defensive structures and a fullness of our essential being. Spiritual oneness is not an experience of submerging our own existence in the existence of another person. It is not a diffusion of our own sense of being outward into the environment. It is a deepened and simultaneous contact with ourselves and our environment.
As I touched on in the previous chapter, spiritual oneness is not a return to the predefended condition of infancy. According to the observations of developmental psychologists, we begin life with just a rudimentary ability for self-contact and connection with other people. Early childhood development is described as the increasing ability to differentiate between ourselves and our environment, to recognize and express our own needs and perceptions, and, at the same time, as an increasing ability to connect with other people. Although children are as unguarded as spiritually realized adults, they have just begun the process of inward contact and connection with others that becomes fully developed with spiritual maturity.
A Model of Human Development
In the past two decades, psychologists have emphasized that childhood development always occurs in relationship with other people.
From the beginning of our lives, we exist in a relational field with our environment. The child’s initial inward contact may come to fruition as the internal wholeness of spiritual realization. And the child’s initial connection with the environment may mature into the spiritual oneness, the absolute unity of self and other. It is a process of growing toward inward and outward contact at the same time. Thus, the realization of spiritual oneness is a continuation of the child’s budding experience of the self/other relational field.
As I described in the last chapter, letting go of our defensive structure is an important aspect of spiritual realization. But it is not the whole story. The letting go, or dissolving, of defensive structures only allows the process of human development to continue. The actual process of development is still a mystery, and it appears to be innate—a natural function. There appears to be a spontaneous movement toward increasing contact with the self and the other, or with the relational field as a whole, that drives the child’s process of development and that continues to unfold in adulthood as we let go of our defensive grip on ourselves. Just as a tree needs the appropriate environmental circumstances to grow from its seed, human beings need the appropriate circumstances for this developmental process. But just as the tree and all of its basic characteristics can be predicted from the seed, spiritual realization, having the same basic characteristics universally, is the predictable outcome of human development.
The movement of human development proceeds through deeper levels of contact with ourselves and our environment. This deepening contact bring us into increasingly subtle and unified realms of existence or increasingly subtle attunement to ourselves and the world around us. This process arrives finally at the spiritual dimension of unified, fundamental consciousness, but there is still much further to go. When we reach the experience of “one taste,” we have just begun the most advanced phase of human development. As I will explain more fully in a later chapter, we can continue to “fill out” our realization of spiritual oneness for the rest of our lives.
Suffering as a Schism in the Field of Oneness
According to developmental psychologists such as Margaret Mahler and Daniel Stern, children gradually deepen their connection with themselves as individuals, distinct from their environment. Mahler claims that we begin life in a state of merged identity with our primary caregiver and then proceed through what she calls the “separation-individuation sequence.”2 Stern says there is always some amount of self-distinction, even in infants, but that this increases over time. He also says that this deepening self-connection occurs simultaneously with the ability to connect with other people.3 But both agree that the direction of childhood development is toward the recognition of self and other.
I describe this developing recognition of self and other as “spatial,” as involving a shift in our experience of space, because it produces a deepening of perspective on life. At first, we can barely distinguish our own self from the people who hold and nurture us. Then we begin to discover our own sensations, emotions, perceptions, and needs as belonging to our own being. At the same time, we begin to recognize, respond to, and communicate with people who are other than our own being. This is a deepening of perspective, an increasing polarization of self and other.
When someone holds us, for example, we can sense that our own body is separate from their body. We begin to notice that the emotions of other people are different from our own and that we can feel sad, for example, as someone else feels happy or angry. As we continue to increase our experience of ourselves, we also begin to have an understanding of what is going on around us, and we form opinions, ideas, and beliefs around those events. Through the use of our developing verbal ability, we learn that our thoughts differ from those of other people; agreement and argument become possible. We become increasingly separate from other people, but because we are separate, we are able to touch them, to feel love and other emotions for them, and to communicate verbally with them. Inward contact gives us distance from our surroundings. At the same time, it develops our relational capacities, such as understanding, emotion, and physical sensation.
We reach our deepest perspective when we contact the subtle core of our body. This is a channel that runs vertically through the center of our body. It is our innermost connection with our own being. At the same time, it is our entranceway into fundamental consciousness, the dimension of our oneness with everything around us. In this way, our perspective—our sense of distance from our environment—develops simultaneously with our realization of oneness with our environment.
Thus, human development continues to unfold, under favorable conditions, toward spiritual maturity. But as it turns out, this process is so fraught with difficulty and obstruction that it tends to become arrested, or, at best, limited, in virtually every human life. By limited I mean that some aspects of ourselves become developed and others do not. Because the process of deepening self-contact and connection with others is not accomplished in isolation but in relationship with other people, it is greatly influenced by the capacity of those other people for self-contact and connection. In other words, it is difficult for us, as children, to become more distinct from our parents than they are from us or to be more connected with our parents than they are with us. The process of developing contact with both ourselves and others must accommodate our specific family legacy of developmental arrest and economy.
For example, in attempting to both separate from and connect with our mother, we will have to accommodate her own history of loss, abandonment, or rejection; her fear of connection or her anger at separation; her defenses that limit the depth of her sensation, love, and awareness, as well as her unconscious strategies for avoiding pain. And all of this accommodation and adjustment will occur in a complex economy in which some types of connection (emotional, physical, or mental) are available while others are obstructed.
As we navigate this relationship, we will both imitate her defenses and strategies and form our own. We will learn just how much and what kind of contact we can have with ourselves without loss of her love and just how much and what kind of connection we can have with her without loss of ourselves. We will make some compromises, trading a bit of self-contact for the sake of connection with her—or at least some semblance of connection, for true connection with others requires self-contact. We will also endure a degree of alienation from her for the sake of contact with our own sensations, feelings, and thoughts. But again, the contact we have with ourselves will be limited by our defense against connection with her, for all our defenses limit the relational field as a whole. Our defenses limit our self-contact and our connection with others equally. We cannot close our heart to someone else without closing our heart to ourselves. And this same complex navigation takes place with our father and other primary members of our child environment.
The constraints, attitudes, and strategies that we develop for both protecting our self-contact and for assuring our connection with other people harden with repeated use into habitual ways of being. In this way, our pattern of openness and defense, our degree of authenticity and distortion, our ability to trust the flow of exchange between ourselves and others or our need to manipulate it are all formed in relationship to the people we first encounter in our lives. Likewise, our ability to enjoy solitude, to notice our true desires and needs, to create, or to think for ourselves is formed within the context of these relationships.
Some of the defensive holding patterns that we form in these relationships
hips become bound in the physical tissues of our body, constricting even our physical form. Other patterns emerge in response to circumstances that remind us of difficult situations in our past. All of these formations diminish the functions and capacities of our being. For example, with our own protective grip on ourselves, we limit our capacity for love and sensation. We constrict our senses. We restrain our voice and our creativity. We pull away from the support of the ground. We grip the muscles that we need in order to reach out or embrace or to take in nourishment.
These rigidities hold us in the perspective and economy of our childhood relational field. It is this defended relational field that we bring to our present relationships. Within the limitations of this field, we continue to negotiate the boundaries of self and other, and to balance self-contact with connection to others. In each new relationship, we confront the same riddle of how open we can be with this person without loss of our own self, and to what extent we can be who we really are without loss of their love.
Merging and Distancing
Our defensive patterns both contract and fragment the relational field. They form a defensive barrier between ourselves and our environment. At the same time, they hold us in our childhood perspective on life—in our childhood sphere of self and other. They hold us in the unresolved conflicts of our childhood, in the limitations of contact and the arrested flow of unexpressed responses. The defenses that were meant to protect us from the world actually keep us bound up in it, unable to get the distance (the inward contact) that we need in order to connect with other people.
In this contracted, fragmented relational field, we feel both too close to other people and alienated from them at the same time. We feel encroached upon, yet at the same time we feel unable to truly connect. We cope with this predicament both by distancing ourselves from others and by attempting to merge with them.

These two relational styles are not just sets of behaviors; they involve the placement of our attention in the relational field. People who mainly distance themselves from other people have trained their attention on themselves and attempted to ignore, or at least filter, the vivid presence of others. Because their defenses prevent them from actual contact with their own being, they seem to reside mostly in their thinking minds or their imagination, which sometimes gives them an air of abstraction or preoccupation. These people actually seem distant, as if they have a moat around them. But they are not really distant. They usually feel that life impinges on them with devastating force and that they must defend against it at all cost. To the best of their abilities, they are protecting their precious contact with themselves.
People who abandon their self-contact for the sake of connection place their attention more on other people than on themselves. When we relate with a person who is merging, we feel that they are too close to us, that they are in our “space.” People who merge with others usually think of themselves as being very loving, very concerned for other people. And they have made a great sacrifice in order to feel connected with people. But because their inward contact is diminished, they cannot truly make the connection that they seek.
So both of these strategies for coping with the defended boundary between ourselves and other people are ineffective and unsatisfying. The self that we defend in isolation is just a shadow of our true self. And the connection that we make by attempting to merge with other people is just a fraction of our capacity for intimacy. It is through inward contact with our own organism that we become capable of true contact with other people. We grow toward our true distance from other people and our true oneness with them at the same time.
I first noticed this about thirty years ago, while I was living at a Zen monastery in upstate New York. It is an old joke that the hardest thing about being a monk is other monks, and although I was not technically a monk, this was particularly true for me. I arrived at the monastery at a very low point in my life. I had suffered some losses, of both my physical health and people close to me, several years before and had been living in near isolation ever since. I found the communal situations of monastic life almost unbearable, the boisterous presence of other souls bruising and disruptive. We were expected to eat all our meals together, to work together cleaning the monastery, and to socialize together on the two days each week when the formal schedule was suspended. We also meditated together twice a day, sitting in silence and absolute stillness, attending to our breath or to the compelling phrase of a Zen koan.
It was in this stillness that I first noticed the movement inward, how each breath brought me infinitesimally closer to the core of my body. As the year went by and this inward movement progressed, I began to notice that I felt further away from the people around me. I could look across the distance and connect with them. I could feel their presence while still feeling my own. I could also feel the stillness that was the same in all of us, that was continuous between us, and that was unchanged by even the most intense movement of thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
It is very interesting that when we inhabit the internal space of our body, the barrier between ourselves and other people dissolves. We experience oneness of our internal and external experience, a mutual transparency of self and other. But when we live on the surface of ourselves, as most people do, we live in divided space; we feel separate from everything around us. We can say that the world of the severely defended person is (almost) flat, whereas, at the other end of the spectrum, the world of the advanced spiritual master is (almost) round. This is a deepening of perspective, a deepening of contact with oneself and others.
How Two Hands Touch in Oneness
When we relate with another person in the dimension of spiritual oneness, we do not lose our essential identity. We experience that other people and ourselves are made of the same one essence without losing our own individual embodiment of essence. When we shake hands with another person in this dimension, we experience that our own hand is continuous with the hand of the other person. As fundamental consciousness, there is no separation between our own hand and the other person’s hand. But at the same time, we know our own being in our own hand and the other person’s being in the hand that we shake. The recognition of self and other is reflected in the clear, unified space of fundamental consciousness.
Whatever communication occurs between our own hand and the other person’s hand is also clearly reflected in this space, in this unified relational field of consciousness within the two hands. One person may communicate love, for example, while the other communicates respect. The subtle currents of this communication move freely in the unobstructed space, producing a dance of intermingled currents, an excitement of interference patterns, that is transmitted throughout the energy systems of both people. And at the same time, as fundamental consciousness, we can each distinguish our own communication from the communication of the other person. This is the paradox of spiritual oneness: we are each whole within ourselves and unified with everything else at the same time.

Self-Other

2011-12-28T13:48:00.001-08:00

"It is one and the same Self that shines as one's own self as well as the selves of others".

- VIJNANABHAIRAVA

Heart as Furnace

2011-12-28T02:14:00.001-08:00

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Six Happiness Habits Worth Cultivating

2011-12-27T23:19:00.001-08:00

I got this from Bioneers Nonprofit. Six happiness habits worth cultivating. (http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/pdfs/happycircle-ggsc.pdf )

These all stimulate the creation of positive affect, which is consistently being shown not to be a cognitive event (the reflection on one's life), but rather, an experience of the nervous system's regulation. A peaceful nervous system itself affects the view through which we then reflect on the degree of fulfilment and other forms of happiness. (per Alan Schore).

I'm finding this to be a crucial point - that it is in the reallignment of the felt-sense and feeling functions (analytical psych), that we see the nervous system's self-regulation, and therefore, affect regulation, grow and stabilise into an aware embodied consciousness. All the reflections I have on my life are coloured by this, and all my ability to relate to others is also coloured by this. As e.e. cummings so deftly puts it, "since feeling is first".

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

.

2011-12-27T23:11:00.000-08:00

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Purifying Motive

2011-12-27T22:20:00.001-08:00

I read this at the start of a short story by Tim Winton called Family, and it nailed the sense of 'singing-to-myself' which I've been doing in my recent transformation and in preparation for my stint at the Daniel P Brown retreat at the Mount Madonna Centre in Santa Cruz on the 15th of January.

When an archer is shooting for nothing he has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle he is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold
he goes blind
or sees two targets
- he is out of his mind!

His skill has not changed. But the prize
divides him. He cares.
He thinks more of winning than of shooting
and the need to win
drains him of power.

- Chuang Tzu.

Container-Contained

2011-12-27T21:07:00.000-08:00

I find myself, these days, a peculiar force.
Where life was but word, thought and wonder,
now lays space, possibility, and a realm
of throughlines who interact and morph
and know eachother, between eachother,
like brothers and sisters I'd never had,
they'd never had, we'd never had, and
all playing, shapeshifting, under a potent
omninscient gaze, a witnessing gaze,
big enough to feel into all of this timeless space,
and possibility, and the realm of throughlines,
who move across time, through time, as time,
under a potent omninscient gaze, a witnessing gaze,
which holds together this family of I, like
a father, I am, I am becoming, through the
furnace of my heart, and the belly, throat,
eyes, ears, mind, crown, education, love,
friendship and affection, through the throughlines
which are none other than the fabric of I,
which swaddle my baby self, seed my future babies
our future babies, in throughlines which start
here timelessly, and flow forward into futures
already remembered, as the fabric of I,
which is none other than the sails which
steer this ship back home, on and off course,
always returning, under a potent omninscient gaze,
a witnessing gaze, which is none other than
the mother of this family of I, this mother
who would shed her maidenhood to nurture us all,
and I am her, and as her I can see her outside,
relative, beyond mere divine eternities, into
the far more vast alterities which themselves
invent and produce a We between He and She
in a container-contained, containing the furnace
of the heart and the belly, the sex and the soul,
the mind and the flows between them all, which
are none other than the throughlines of I, you and I,
in time, as we intertwine, in realms beyond our flesh
and back to it again, across time, where I remember
every message you left on my phone,
every glance, every time we left eachother alone,
in memory and alive, in the spaces only ever
between you and I, I find myself, these days, a peculiar force,
ready to dive, into what is never negotiated,
only ever alive, in ways a boy never could feel,
in ways only a man can know, and a secure base
of this family, here and now, which is none other
than the throughlines of I, being qua being,
and in actions as well, across realms I can handle
and so rightfully contain, to withstand the tests
of the ages, and stand firmly on this ground again,
under a potent omninscient gaze, a witnessing gaze,
God of this family, this family of I,
who stands above feeding, a shining sun,
a testing present, a gifting father, a loving mother,
transforming its son in a container-contained,
who can see his own divine horizon, and yours as well,
in this flesh, enlivened, permitted, anointed,
the spirit infusing metamorphosis, this time,
self-aware, birthed again, in intimacy with
the great one, the potent omninscient gaze,
the witnessing gaze, which contains each flow,
and returns me again to a movement between others,
wherever we might tread, in the throughlines
between us all, those throughlines which
were once an enigma, then erotic fixation, an obsession
to know each line as I'd know a story, itself now
loosened, individuated into space, itself
yet another throughline morphing and intertwining
with Others as a family under the gaze,
a peculiar force, where I find us, myself, these days.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Done - Hazzy Bee

2011-12-27T20:14:00.000-08:00

Done by Hazzy Bee

Playing the Gaelic Club on 14 January 2012 at 8pm.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

The Fool

2011-12-26T18:20:00.000-08:00

"There's a time when a man needs to fight, and a time when he needs to accept that his destiny is lost... the ship has sailed and only a fool would continue. Truth is... I've always been a fool."

- Young Edward Bloom, character in the movie Big Fish.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Heart-Anger, Robert Augustus Masters

2011-12-26T14:17:00.000-08:00

"Where anger-in and mindfully held anger approaches seek to contain anger, and where anger-out seeks to empty the “container” (usually equated with the body), heart-anger seeks, at least at some point, to radically deconstruct the “container” (including the very intention to contain), engaging in a deeply embodied consideration of anger in which the very notions of “container” and “contained” are permitted sufficient transparency so as to all but shed their outlines (or definitional certitude). Expression here is not necessarily repressed, rethought, kept to oneself, nor evacuated, but rather is infused with wakeful attention, without any requisite dilution or muting of its passion. If heart-anger could be said to have a “container,” it would be love, open-eyed, passion-embracing, unconditioned love, love that remains intimate with awareness. Heart-anger connects. Like all anger, it is “against” something, but its “against” is in the service of a deeper, more inclusive “for” (and “with”). Ultimately -- as in the case of realizers of the nondual -- it is anger devoted to the liberation of all beings, anger free of any sort of self-serving agenda.

Heart-anger is not necessarily devoid of ego, but in its expression, ego mostly assumes a peripheral position to Being -- heart-anger could be said to be the soul’s shout, wrathful compassion in the raw. Though it is far from egoically centered, it is still usually individuated, indicative of the presence of strongly held, distinct preferences. At its most sublime, it is, so to speak, but Sacred Fire, the Heat/Light of Divine Caring (or self-transcending Love), untainted by any trace whatsoever of personal investment. Here blooms a radically different kind of flame, exemplified by the awe-inspiring presence of Tibetan Buddhism’s Wrathful Deities, Hinduism’s Kali at Her fiercest, the Old Testament’s blazingly raging Lord, all burning, burning, burning with a hyperbole-transcending enormity and luminosity in the service of a context that, though always already beyond the grasp of the rational, self-possessed mind, is intuitively known by the awakening heart.

Such “anger” -- or Holy Wrath -- only serves to awaken, and to awaken in the most radical sense; it is pure compassion in action. Heart-anger, however, does not have to be this pure to be deservedly called heart-anger. So long as caring for the other and mindfulness are significantly present during and after the expression of anger, the label “heart-anger” can be applied without qualification.

Heart-anger incorporates the best of anger-in, anger-out, and mindfully held anger. However, if we do not have sufficient “hands-on” familiarity with each of these, we will generally not be capable of heart-anger -- we may still have moments when we are angry and yet still heart-centered, but such a practice will be far from stably established in us. Anger-in must be learned -- healthy, efficacious emotional regulation is essential, so that we are capable of stepping back from arising anger when circumstances dictate that its amplification and/or expression would only do harm. So too must anger-out be learned -- not to have the capacity to directly and strongly express anger all too easily disempowers us. Practicing mindfully held anger is also essential -- not only with regard to learning to investigate closely (and patiently) in the moment whatever characterizes one’s anger, but also with regard to developing compassion for one’s anger and angry “I’s.”

To practice heart-anger is to simultaneously honor mind, body, and spirit. Such practice, like that of mindfully held anger, means to no longer resort to blame, to take responsibility for keeping one’s heart open in hell -- an admittedly far from easy undertaking, but an immensely rewarding one. In heart-anger, we can find not only a moral and fittingly expressive fieriness almost seamlessly aligned with a deep caring for the other, but also our grief, our joy, our interconnectedness (and ultimate identity) with all that is. Our heart-anger announces not that we are detached, but that we care, and care deeply, so deeply that we will not sit back and passively watch desecration and abuse occur. In such caring, we contact not only our personal grief, but also our collective grief, finding in it not defeat, nor impotent sadness, nor powerlessness, but rather a fathomless sense of communion with both the pain and the joy (and all-pervading Mystery) of what is.

Heart-anger seeks not dissociation from the world, but engagement, wherein love, rather than negotiation, shines at the hub of relatedness. As such, heart-anger uses separation to create connection. It is the swordplay of healthy criticism, unconditioned love’s warcry, the firm yet receptive release of needed forcefulness. It honors differences, even as it cultivates intimacy with that depth of wisdom in which it is tacitly obvious that differences don’t really make a difference -- seeing that the Many are One does not stop it from also seeing that the One is Many. Heart-anger does not let its embrace of the Universal separate it from the Particular -- it does not seek transcendence of the personal, the particular, the crystallized, but rather illumination. Heart-anger is a warrior, yes, but it is a warrior who, in nakedly facing suffering, must sometimes also weep.

The fiery intensity at the heart of anger does not ask for smothering, spiritual rehabilitation, nor psychological marginalization, but rather for a mindful embrace that does not necessarily require any dilution of passion, any lowering of the flames, nor any muting of the essential voice in the flames. If such fire destroys, it is only in order to create. And heal. In its flames, the Phoenix is more than a myth. In its fiery heart, love burns brilliantly, ever replenished, illuminating more than we can imagine.

Bringing our anger into our heart is not only an act of love for ourselves, but for all beings, since such a practice greatly increases the odds that we will not let our anger mutate into aggressiveness, hostility, and hatred, but rather into compassion-centered activity. In no longer abandoning nor destructively harnessing our anger, we move a little closer to being the very love that we most desire from others.

Anger can be love - may we permit it to be so".

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Love Not Negotiation

2011-12-26T14:12:00.003-08:00

"Heart-anger seeks not dissociation from the world, but engagement, wherein love, rather than negotiation, shines at the hub of relatedness".

- Robert Augustus Masters

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

"Conditions can be unconditional, and that's confusing us to conflation".

2011-12-26T14:11:00.000-08:00

"Boundaries create clarity, in a 'swording' of reality. It takes at least 30-40 years to get that double-edge to become unified. Under the best conditions. Only recently have we become aware conditions can be unconditional, and that's confusing us to conflation. Buy the ticket, realize you're on the ride".

- Ollie

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters

2011-12-26T03:08:00.001-08:00

"It is precisely the lovers' leap out of objectivity and into subjectivity that signals the liberation of love. If it is true that the greatest breach in nature is between two minds (as William James suggested), then we must acknowledge the magnitude of the emotion that allows us to bridge such a chasm. Once we lose the psychological sense of oneness with mother, which prevails (if ever) only during infancy, we become increasingly isolated beings. Sometimes that isolation is so profound as to be painful, raising the awful spectre that one may exist as a consciousness all alone in the universe. Only by sharing in each other's subjective realities can we mitigate that isolation. While empathy, intuition, and identification all help, romantic love goes much further: it denies the barriers separating us, offering hope for a concordance of two souls; or at least for a free flow between them—what has been called "emotional telepathy."

Romantic love, subjectively experienced, is an emotion of extraor-dinary intensity. The experience of love can make time stop, therefore giving one the rare opportunity to live in the present and to escape momentarily the nagging abstractions of past and future. Love may confer a sense of inner rightness, peace, and richness; or it may be a mode of transforming the self. Beyond enlarging and changing the self, love may also enable the lovers to break through the stifling limits of self. Hence, it is a mode of transcendence, frequently designated as a reli-gion of two. While it is true that love can be an agent for personal growth and change, it can also be a loose cannon on the deck of human affairs. Because of its intensity, love has the capacity to disrupt social norms and conventions, giving lovers both cause and sanction to escape the established order. In this sense romantic passion is the expression of individuality (or of two individualities joined), sometimes played out against the restraints of convention. Romantic love is the celebration of the individual and the pair, not of larger social units, and so it is that romantic love may come in direct conflict with ordered society. No wonder, then, that it is regarded with awe and suspicion by those not in its thrall".

Ethel S. Person

Not Two - Root-Tree and Canal-Rhizome

2011-12-25T13:08:00.001-08:00

I'm slowly reading A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari. A couple of pages here, a couple of pages there. I like having these meditations going on in the background of my life. This was my favourite line so far - demonstrating the way we can't avoid making models of a chaotic and potently renewing kosmos, and how a matured orientation brings us out of the rigidity of seeing only objects and into the process and flow of reflective and liberating aperspectivalism.

‎"The important point is that the root-tree and canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the first operates as a transcendent model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process that overturns the model and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel. It is not a question of this or that place on earth, or of a given moment in history, still less of this or that category of thought. It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again".

- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

"Pluralism infected with narcissism"

2011-12-25T06:19:00.000-08:00

Andrew Cohen: As you make clear in Boomeritis, this pluralistic-postmodern level of development you've been describing, which in the system of Spiral Dynamics is also called the "green meme," is a position that tends to be inherently anti-evolutionary and anti-transformational.

Ken Wilber: It does tend to be that way. But it gets tricky, because what the green meme, or the pluralistic-postmodern wave of development, likes to talk about is transformation. And there's a grain of truth to the fact that the green meme really does want to transform, even if it badly fumbles the ball on occasion. But remember that this particular pluralistic wave really is a very high level of development. That needs to be kept in mind, even though we're talking about the pathological version. This wave didn't become really widespread until the sixties, and the boomers were the first generation in history where a significant percentage was in fact at this fairly high pluralistic level of development. The previous level or wave, which is still prevalent, the universal rational wave, became widespread with the Western Enlightenment and is itself only around three hundred years old. But the green meme, the pluralistic wave, came into widespread existence only about thirty years ago. So, all of the great positive aspects of the sixties, including environmental protection, feminism, health care reforms, and, most importantly, the civil rights movement, were products of healthy pluralism and healthy postmodernism. Those were the positive gains of the cultural creatives, the green meme, the pluralistic wave. So in that sense, it was a transformative event because transformation means any vertical move in the developmental scale. And the boomers, the cultural creatives, were a transformation from modern to postmodern, or from rational to pluralistic, from orange to green—whatever terms one prefers.

But once they settled in there, boy, they settled in! And you're not going to get them to move now because the downside is that once you're there, you are not allowed to make judgments, because "Everybody's expressive truth is the same." So you can't challenge somebody and say, "Look, you have to grow. You're being self-contracted. There's a higher spiritual reality." They'll say, "How do you know it's higher? How dare you judge me!"

So when boomers engage in a spiritual path, their fundamental desire is not to transcend the ego but to confirm it, to express it, to be told that "What I'm doing is wonderful and divine, just like I am." They are there to celebrate the self-contraction, to embrace the self-contraction and to feel it really hard and call that god or goddess or spirit. And you can't talk them out of it because then you're being judgmental.

Under the guise of pluralism—which holds that no truth is better than another—not just higher realities but also all of my petty, shallow, narcissistic tendencies can find a happy home. The higher significance of pluralism gets swamped with lower impulses, contracted tendencies, and egocentric expression—all now parading under the banner of pluralism.

To put it simply: boomeritis is pluralism infected with narcissism. It's the very high truths of pluralism completely corrupted and derailed by an ego that uses them to entrench itself firmly in a place where it can never be challenged because there is no objective truth that can get rid of it.

Read and read and read. And read.

2011-12-25T05:22:00.000-08:00

“Sit in a room and read – and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time".

- Joseph Campbell

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Remembering Andrew...

2011-12-25T04:21:00.000-08:00

This is for one of my best friends from primary school who was found dead a couple of days ago, leaving behind a beautiful young family. I played this tune for him about a year ago when I was talking about how inspiring it was watching him rest in gratitude for the simple joys of being a father, and I remember him being moved. I played it again tonight as I lit a flame and cried for the life which isn't to be anymore. Love you, Andrew.

When he reached the gates of heaven
He didn’t understand
He knew that folks were coming over
Or was it all a dream?
Was it all a crazy dream?

He saw them playing there before him
What were they doing there?
It felt like home, It must be alright
Or is it just a dream?
Is it just a crazy dream?

Memories replay before him
All the tiny moments of his life
Laying round in bed on a Saturday morning
Two daughters and a wife
Two daughters and a beautiful wife

Meanwhile on Earth his friends came over
Shocked and horrified
Dolls and flowers at the storefront
Everybody cried
Everybody cried and cried

Is there vengeance up in heaven?
Are those things left behind?
Maybe everyday is Saturday morning
Two daughters and a wife
Two daughters and a beautiful wife
Two daughters and a beautiful wife

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Blind Compassion

2011-12-24T20:14:00.001-08:00

"As we shed our blinders and clearly see our pain—our anger and hurt and frustration and moral outrage—we reenter a realm of love that had been closed off but from which we can now freely give and receive. We express a genuine compassion with spine and heart, and with an especially keen and caring eye for those who are still under the spell of blind compassion".

- Robert Masters in Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us From What Really Matters.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Dad Passages

2011-12-24T15:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Freud and the Brain ;-)

2011-12-23T23:35:00.001-08:00

.

2011-12-21T21:00:00.001-08:00

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Giving Birth To Your Images

2011-12-20T15:19:00.001-08:00

You must give birth to your images.
They are the future waiting to be born.
Fear not the strangeness you feel.
The future must enter you long before it happens.
Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Finding the Father - Robert Bly

2011-12-20T14:07:00.000-08:00

This poem used to provoke all kinds of emotions for me about my own relationship with fatherspace - my historically internalised father, my then current father, and my idealised father-object (both real father and the archetypal great father). Nowadays, as I've approached the door to the dark house, and brought fire to the lamp, as the heavy brows have lifted - I find another relationship with it. A relationship with my own path into fatherhood. To move through motherspace and into fatherspace and then through it - to "leave home" stably, and lovingly - I'm opening into the view of what I can be and offer as father. The capacity to know how to skillfully bring self-generated meaning to the potential for quiet desperations in fatherspace has been right at the door step of this house. A door which stood right at the end of that extraordinarily long path. I could have never truly guessed that the father I was to find in finding, naming, facing and communing with all of my fathers, would be the father living in me.

Finding the Father - Robert Bly

My friend, this body offers to carry us for nothing - as the ocean carries logs.
So on some days the body wails with its great energy;
it smashes up the boulders,
lifting small crabs, that flow around the sides.

Someone knocks on the door.
We do not have time to dress.
He wants us to go with him through the blowing and rainy streets,
to the dark house.

We will go there, the body says,
and there find the father whom we have never met,
who wandered out in a snowstorm the night we were born,
and who then lost his memory,
and has lived since longing for his child,
whom he saw only once...
while he worked as a shoemaker,
as a cattle herder in Australia,
as a restaurant cook who painted at night.

When you light the lamp you will see him.
he sits there behind the door....
the eyebrows so heavy,
the forehead so light....
lonely in his whole body,
waiting for you.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Leif Podhajsky

2011-12-20T05:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Fluid Form - Svadhisthana and Synchronicity

2011-12-20T03:02:00.000-08:00

OK - this is out of control.

I posted about fluid form earlier today, and made the point that "activating fluid in the body has become a constant theme in my awareness and dreamspace the last couple of weeks" and that I've carried "a sense of the watery elements in my flesh". I said that I "Don't know what it's about yet" and "If you have any thoughts or recommendations about this drop me a line".

After watching videos about Judith Blackstone, the non-dual and intersubjectivity psychotherapist/spiritual teacher, I came across a link to a random guy's video called "Cultivating the Hara Part 1". I've linked to it below. Having done some Hara meditation about a year ago to try and activate that deadened area in my bodymind, I thought it worth taking a look at.

About halfway thorough, I'd started to tire of his delivery and clicked through to another page while listening to him. Then, as is so often the case, I was immediately humbled. He said: "... really grounding our spirit down into the emotional body, and down into the *watery levels* of our humanness. I say watery levels because we are talking about second chakra. The emotional body. In any form of martial arts or in zen meditation the hara is cultivated. The lower body, the abdominal area is cultivated. No matter how wide open and beautiful our hearts are, if we haven't cultivated and stabilised the emotional body in the hara, we are going to destabilise the entire system. The whole system will be unstable if it doesn't have a foundation - and in qigong teachings and chinese medicine, the hara is known as the foundation - it is known as the basement. The entire structure is built on the foundation - our cultivation of groundedness. Of being rooted to the earth".

Seriously, What the Fuck!?!?! *Watery elements*. The second chakra. The sacral chakra. Svadhisthana. My most troubled chakra. The one Dustin pointed out as key. The one my rolfer Colin talked about. The place in my physiology where I recently opened my body - the entire sacral region connected to the occipital areas - a kind of cranio-sacral work I did with him. I'd talked about the fluid forms to him which I felt in my spine when he'd done that work. When he'd activated spinal fluid.

Fuck!

Moreover, I've been containing my emotional foundations recently in a significant shift of ground in psychotherapy. The theme of self-containment was hard won, and I've managed to win that battle and find myself in newfound freedom of passage in and around my grounded sense of emotional security and tantric lessons in containing-in-emotion, rather than containing-via-supression.

And moreover again, I've been walking 10kms almost every day and in that time I've felt my torso move itself up into a new articulation with my legs - the result being constantly activated deep flexors and psoas muscles - the guys who surround and hold together this whole region!

Seriously - what the fuck?!

I'd done spine twists two days ago and felt inordinate relief when I'd rearticulated the lower vertebrae around Svadhisthana. Again - a moment of fluid form came over me.

So, as always, I did some internet research, and surely enough Svadhisthana is well known as the watery one.

From: http://members.tripod.com/kira_lis/chakra2.html

"What a watery chakra! It's element is water. The inner state is tears. Some of the malfunctions include bladder or kidney trouble. The food associated with this is liquids. The gemstone is coral. The animals are fish and sea creatures. And the location of this chakra is in the area of the genitals and womb. Some of the functions and qualities associated with the second chakra are emotions, sexuality, desire, pleasure, creation and procreation. Socialization is also a function of the 2nd chakra. The verb that best fits this chakra is "I feel". This energy is both emotional and sensual. The color of this chakra is generally orange. For chanting, the syllable is "vam". In Tarot, this chakra corresponds to the suit of cups and the cards with the number 2....High Priestess"

What the fuck?! I've just been on a journey with the dark feminine for a couple of months, I've been reading loads about father complexes in High Priestess archetypal stories, I've taken the medicine for the dark feminine which is facing it with courage and in doing so encountering my own anima, and through that transformative process, I've been open to resonant and appreciative *contained* emotional relations with the feminine in women. The high priestess had come up for me all year - starting with a reference to the Jungian Tarot book (see pictures above) my partner gave me on a flight back from Buenos Aires earlier in the year, continuing with my encounters with her in literature, psychoanalysis and then in seeking to make sense of a dream I'd had about her as a devouring father-bound creature of the underworld which appeared to be Lilith. After months of working that dream, I recently opened through and met my path again on the road of obstacles, returning internally triumphant against my own maternal complexes. In that time, I felt a deep release in my groin which travelled up the psoas and... wait for it... into the sacral chakra.

Yes - what the fuck?!?

I've been using orange texta pens constantly for two months - and I have never used them before. I've actively sought out the colour when drawing.

I posted this about the sacral chakra which was speaking the most to me at the moment a few weeks ago: http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/2011/11/blog-post.html
Indeed I'd said on that page: "Sacral Chakra (for me the currently most significant)".

I'd also posted this about "sacral perspectives", which were images which were signifying my passage through this point:
http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/2011/11/sacral-perspectives.html

Indeed, around that same time, I was leaving markers on the road in my relation with the dark feminine: e.g.
http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/2011/11/black-princess-as-other-and-anima.html
http://thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com/2011/11/jung-and-dark-angel.html

Moreover, when I was in the US earlier this year, my friend Dustin had gone to great lengths to discuss the Svadhisthana with me and we'd talked about how it had felt blocked in me. I'd written in my diary that releasing it was my destiny for the next six months.

"Creation", and "the location of this chakra is in the area of the genitals and womb" - I've also been preparing everything for the creation of children and family. To do that I needed to open and move through my blocked emotion in this area, and it is this which I have finally contained.

"Socialisation" - I have been posting about socialisation and asking questions about it to my trusted friends, colleagues and therapist for the last couple of weeks. I have been reading all kinds of books on play and how teen socialisation takes place. I've been recovering and mourning the lost moments on that aspect of the path of life, and in the mourning, freeing myself from it.

"Emotional and sensual" - I've been speaking to friends about how my emotional heart-centre has been transforming from an open container to something capable of burning as a centre of a broader central channel, and how in that I've been feeling far more sensual in my life. I've been feeling the sheets of my bed, warming to all kinds of mundane joys like walking and the simple pleasure of a cup of tea.

I just can't believe how much this thing has coalesced in such a short time. I know this is a very impressionistic post, but these through-lines, and at this point of embodiment, have just been too non-linear to contain in that framework. It all feels very much like the non-mechanistic constructions Deleuze and Guttarri speak of in A Thousand Plateaus (which I was reading on the weekend).

Here's to putting things out to an (apparently) intentional universe!

"Earth Might Be Fair" - William Blake.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com