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New Currents: Maui

2010-02-06T15:10:00.000-08:00

New Currents: Maui (Nov-Dec-Jan)

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Introduction

Avatar and the Kipahulu Na'vi

Book Reviews: Echardt Tolle, Jeremy Narby, Stephen Cope, N. Nosirrah, Mark Winegardner

Bashar on 2012

Ocean Heart Ministries - Church of the Cetacean Nation

Video Interviews: Nassim Haramein, Bill Ryan

Workshops: Shamanic Healing, School of Tantra, American Buddha

Meditation Exercise: Love and Gratitude

More Maui Photos

Introduction

It is the state of your vibratory field that determines your experience of any event. In its most simple form, the cultivation of appreciation for the smallest things in your life will give you the greatest results.

-- A Hathor Planetary Message through Tom Kenyon

Since my last blog entry (November 1, Kula: A Meditation on Warmth) I have spent a month enjoying a daily routine of sunny meditations and editing work and group music and swimming and going to dance classes; and then most of two months entertaining visiting friends with various outings and adventures; and in between, bingeing on drum sessions with my fellow djembe and dunun devotees. Along the way I have also been part of a fascinating series of events, workshops and encounters, kirtans and satsangs, reinforced by books and articles and audio and video interviews on a wide range of subjects pertinent to the world today. I also saw Avatar (twice, in 3D), which rather neatly encapsulates much of that transformative vision I've been exposed to ... or maybe not so neatly after all.

Avatar and the Kipahulu Na'vi

While nearly everyone comes away awed and inspired by this film, some argue that the paradigm of the Na'vi victory is not really new at all. The battle for Pandora is a rare victory for the good guys who, in a twist on tradition, are not our nation or race; but it is fought like any other, force against force. Yet the further twist here, beyond the shift in our allegiances, is telling: it is not the alien warriors or even their human supporters who win the day, but their allies, the creatures of Ehwa (Gaia). And though the mutant dinosaurs and panther-dogs do join the battle as a decisive force, the greater message is not so much that "the good fight" is won, but that the supreme force resides with the power of nature. Those who share in that power - which is also the power of greater connection as opposed to self-serving material exploitation - will ultimately prevail.

On second viewing I come out of the theatre realizing that the link-up is progressive. Now I am even deeper in. Baba says he looked at his black skin and expected to see blue. In Kipahulu where the jungle is Pandoran, magically lush, and the air is silky, gentle, alive, the young people living in community there come to greet you with eyes shining bright and peaceful, saying, "I see you."

[For an excellent review of Avatar from a mythological perspective, see "Take Back the Planet" by John Lash. For an excellent discussion of our metamorphosis beyond a "battle" mentality, and of the power of a more "subtle activism," see David Spangler, Call to Action: Fear and Loathing in the World.]

Book Reviews

Eckhart Tolle - A New Earth

All that is required to become free of the ego is to become aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible. Awareness is the power that is connected within the present moment. This is why we may also call it presence. The ultimate purpose of human existence, which is to say, your purpose, is to bring that power into this world. And this is also why becoming free of the ego cannot be made into a goal to be attained at some point in the future. Only presence can free you of the ego, and you can only be present Now, not yesterday or tomorrow. Only presence can undo the past in you and thus transform your state of consciousness. - Eckhard Tolle, A New Earth

Oprah selected Eckhart Tolle's latest book for good reason: this is enlightenment for the masses. Tolle takes ancient and unversal wisdom, frees it of the dogma and terminology of past doctrines and religions, and distills it into clear, convincing, plain language. He outlines a path beyond the limited ego and its emotional "pain-body" to a new self, refreshed from habitual boundaries and definitions and ready to operate with a new frequency, new modalities.

Acceptance, Enjoyment, Enthusiasm. These are the hallmarks of our existence in a New Earth. The new earth is not "out there" in society, or in a time that begins in 2012, but right now, in this moment, within our potential to awake. These three modalities are somewhat sequential, however, in that acceptance of our present condition allows us to relax into enjoyment of it, and enjoyment in the context of chosen activity leads us to enthusiasm for a goal, vision, purpose in life.

This sequence at first glance might seem contradictory to The Power of Now, as it posits a future orientation. But Tolle qualifies his view of enthusiasm with two caveats. First, our purpose is not to be confused with the unawakened desires and attachments of the self-serving ego, which is limited by identification with the objects of its desire. Rather, it is characterized by our alignment with a deeper source of inspiration and service transcending the ego. Secondly, in the modality of enthusiasm we are not fixated on an end result and stressed in the meantime; rather, we find enjoyment in the journey, the moment-by-moment experience we inhabit fully along the way.

"So the new heaven, the awakened consciousness, is not a future state to be achieved. A new heaven and a new earth are arising within you at this moment" (p. 308).

Jeremy Narby - Intelligence in Nature

Narby is the author of The Cosmic Serpent, a classic work exploring the world of Amazonian shamanism and its access to plant intelligence and even the informational structure of DNA. In this newer work he takes on the paradigm of "intelligence" and frees it from its human-centered box. The result may be, as some would complain, a loss of human "superiority." On the other hand it is a revelation to understand that we are only a part of universal intelligence present in all life, perhaps in all existence.

Narby proceeds as a layman approaching scientific research for answers to his investigation of the meaning and nature of intelligence. Along the way his account is engagingly human. As Stephen Cope does in The Wisdom of Yoga, Narby inserts himself into the narrative, sharing tea or coffee with the scientists or ayahuasca with the shamans he interviews, and putting a humble human face on the inquiry.

The documented evidence assembled here is ample, fascinating, convincing. Parrots and macaws gorging on clay for breakfast to detoxify certain seeds in their diet. Research of bee brain structure and function. Studies of sponges, hydras, nematodes. Plants that adapt and respond appropriately to changes in environmental conditions. Bacteria communicating and using chemical strategies for survival. Amino acids engaging in DNA repair. Though Narby devotes most of his approach to living forms, the bridge down to the molecular level of amino acids and DNA leads us to expand the inquiry to a universal fabric - a cosmic ecosphere - of interdependent behaviors, actions and reactions and adaptations.

This book is reminiscent of When Elephants Weep, in its somewhat polemic stance against the prevailing mindset that says that only humans are intelligent or possess emotions. Yet this disentangling of our fundamentalist delusions must occur if we are to embrace greater possibilities of our kinship with all life and all of existence. I have to entertain the possibility that whales are sentient and that they are open to communication with humans, in order to fully appreciate and absorb the impact of swimming with them, playing music with them, beginning to move and think with their vibration.

Stephen Cope - The Wisdom of Yoga

At the end of the book, Cope tells the story of his own shattering disappointment when his manuscript, a scholarly treatise on the roots of Yoga in the texts of ancient India, is blasted by his editor for being inaccessible to the average reader. He responds by recasting the book as a work of creative nonfiction, in which his fellow seekers are the characters in a shared journey of discovery. This revised approach embodies the message of yoga, not merely as a system of physical postures, but as a set of daily principles and practices designed, by long experimental study, to facilitate the liberation from human suffering. That liberation allows us to enter a realm, possible in this world, of optimal functioning: "Liberation means being entirely awake, and fully alive."

Struggle and pain are a given, along the way. But there is a process of becoming free from our habitual condition of mental slavery. First, disengagment; spurred by an awareness of "Dukha: pervasive unsatisfactoriness." Next, acceptance ("Sukha: everything is already OK"). Finally, cultivating concentration, to remove everyday distractions; this is the practice of meditative absorption, most frequently characterized by attention focussed on the breath.

Further elaboration of the steps of yogic practice centers around the Eight-Limbed Path outlined by Patanjali in the source texts: "external discipline, internal discipline, posture, breath regulation, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditative absorption, and integration." These steps form a progressive path allowing entry to a final apprehension and dwelling in a state of universal oneness - the Dance of Shiva.

The bottom-line truth of this state is that "our ordinary experience of the object world is nothing more than a construct of consciousness." Such a statement may seem radically untrue by conventional standards of material, objective "reality." But as Stuart Mooney (AKA "The American Buddha") stressed in his Maui workshop in December, the truth of this counter-claim is supported by modern scientific neuroscience and quantum physics. There is no objective reality out there, because reality as we perceive it is always a subjective experience of our own sensory input and interpretations. This is not to deny the existence of objects and events as they have apparent causes and effects in the world; but to recognize that their so-called reality is provisional - like that of our own apparently separate bodies and personalities - resting on conventional agreements, even "consensus" among our various subjective experiences, rather than on any absolute and fixed material solidity. "What we call the rain," the Buddha once said, "is not really rain; it's just what we call the rain."

To operate in a new world freed from the old conventions and boundaries might seem disorienting or threatening, as indeed it is to the unconscious ego. But the point is not to live aimlessly in an undifferentiated soup of quantum vibration, even if that is the truest picture of the nature of things. Rather the task is to unwind the fetters of ordinary consciousness, then to perceive the liberating oneness of all existence, and finally to reenter our bodies and personalities and the dance of karma with an awareness of our true nature and of the divine play in which we are actors for a brief time.

N. Nosirrah - Nothing from Nothing: A Novella for None

Everything in this book, from the very title and name of the author, is playfully nihilistic, and not to be taken seriously. The author, it might be said, is carrying out the work of Shiva the destroyer, to bring down every preconception we might have about belief, art, the self, the novel, meaning, and existence itself. Yet like the wisdom of yoga, there is a redeeming wisdom here which can delight in the very spirit of playful dance, in which destruction and creation are two faces of the same art.

From the very beginning, the so-called Editor's Preface, by a Lydia Smyth, is suspect, along with the Foreword by a dubious Nebirk Yallip. Later in the text the author interjects conversation with said editor, hinting also at personal relationship issues with her (among other attractions). These digressions are par for the course in a narrative that follows no linear thread, but the sparking digressions of a brain wired to everything and nothing at once.

The approach is ironic, in the tradition of Tristam Shandy. It is Nietzchean, in its bold broad strokes of overturning every conventional assumption in favor of a revolutionary insistence on the power of truth in the momentary impulse of expression. It is post-modern, discursive, tangential, irreverent, profane, fearless. It is at once "not an easy read" and effortless.

Mark Winegardner - The Godfather's Revenge

I bought this book thinking that it was written by Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather. No matter; I was pleased with Winegardner's style and treatment of the same characters. Interestingly enough, the contents of this sequel played similar tricks with American history of the 1960s in which it is set. The Kennedys (John and Bobby) become the Sheas, and the details of the eventual assassination are altered. By means of this fictional sleight of hand, Winegardner is able to portray the likely truthful underside of that history, beginning with the failed black-op known as the Bay of Pigs invasion.

In this author's hands (as with Don DeLillo's even more historically faithful Libra, and the Oliver Stone film JFK) it becomes obvious how the agendas and the machinery of the Mafia and the secret government (CIA and FBI) overlap. What is truth and what is fiction? At its best, fiction gives us the clearest glimpse of what is true.

As with the spiritual texts discussed here, the transformational path leads us from unconsciousness (history), through revelation (understanding truth), back to our story. We read at first thinking it is fiction; we come to understand the underlying truth of how things work in the world (in the underworld); and then we can continue reading the fiction with new appreciation. History, meanwhile, which we at first take to be truth, upon closer examination we find is fiction.

Bashar on 2012
Bashar (bashar.org) says that it is in going through the darkness that we develop more impetus for a greater leap into the light, more decisive and delicious. We will inhabit the alternate world or parallel reality of whatever frequency we hold. I would add that it is happening now, in the moment we practice in that vibration. The vibration is now, and it is the operating reality for everyone tapped into it. Which is why the personal connections of people of like spirit keep happening, as if along human ley-lines.

Ocean Heart Ministries - Church of the Cetacean Nation < link >

I am vibrating now with whale frequency. I felt it ever since their darshan Thursday - their frequency of breathing, surfacing, moving out and back in through the water, their moans and grunts and cries. I rock in my sleep in bed, or in the grocery store aisles. My thoughts pass with the present time, no longer latching onto yesterday or what might come tomorrow.

In the traffic to Kihei, I am swimming with the pod. All are united in a plastic elastic harmony of movement and energetic balance, smoothly flowing and aligned. Even as we change positions, we feel the dynamic pull of change, of challenge, of connection between us all as free and independent entities, yet moving through the fabric of the whole.

That fabric continues here now as I write, you in your node on the other side of this time. Time weaves its thread through the fabric too, and we come to the same conclusions again. The truth circles like the humpbacks around the sailboat, reminding us through our synchronistic connections of its presence, all-embracing. We continue on our way. We walk in the light. We shine that frequency forward, lightworkers and soundworkers and life coaches and energy healers, dancers and artists in service to the light of understanding and appreciation and empowerment and joy in belonging to a oneness of life, a luminous vibration. All knowingness comes to the flow of this present time, this and this forever which is wider and wider inclusive of all who tap into this awareness and all who are the object of this awareness, until all subsumes all and there is no more significant division, except what makes for the play of circumstance in dynamic relation.

Video Interviews

Nassim Haramein interview on Conscious Media Network

Nassim Haramein offers an inspiring synthesis of groundbreaking modern physics (beyond Einstein) and transformative vision.

From theoretical physics he posits a "black hole" at the center of each being (atom, person, planet, star, galaxy) which has profound implications not only for energy and technology applications but also for personal manifestation.

This approach goes beyond "The Secret" to examine the universal power of "Focussed Persistent Desire." Tapping into this "vacuum" field at our core, we resonate with a frequency field connecting us with the entire fabric of space-time. In such a state of connection and resonance, synchronicity and spontaneous manifestation occur naturally, are to be expected.

The idea is to focus inward, to stillness, to the singularity of infinite potential, gaining access to our personal core connecting seamlessly to the wider universal "information network" for creative manifestation.

It is in fact that very interior and resonant space which produces the material world: Haramein calls it "vacuum engineering." Feed the vacuum, he says, and the vacuum will feed you. The primary tool in tapping into our "focussed persistent desire" is clarity, Going Deeper, via meditation.

Bill Ryan of Project Camelot interviewed by Freedom Central

As co-head of the whistleblower site currently drawing 30,000 unique visitors per day, Ryan is in a unique position to comment with an overview of the perspectives of the dozens of high-level sources who have come forward to share (in many cases confess) the hidden history of our times, what the official government and media and education outlets are forbidden to know or reveal.

What is commonly discounted in those mainstream, establishment-controlled venues as "conspiracy theory" has now mushroomed to the point where the majority of people (as reflected for example in polls concerning belief in UFOs or government complicity in 9/11) knows that conspiracy, in the strict meaning of the word, is a fact of life when it comes to policy and programming. Most people get it now, with the economics of the "Great Society" crumbling all around them, that their government is evidently not operating in their best interest, but for the interests of a few in whose hands the bulk of resources, money and power is concentrated. The shine has even worn thin on the polished veneer of the supposed savior, Obama - with the economic situation ever worsening along with the bottomless pit of foreign wars for oil.

Meanwhile the Vatican has joined the movement to disclose the presence of ETs ... joined by other nations such as France and the UK, where the secret government files have finally been opened to public view. The President of Venezuela has accused the US of triggering the earthquake in Haiti with a high-tech weapon using a low-frequency pulse. The movie Avatar makes clear to millions not only the reality of the agenda for resource domination of this planet and beyond, but also the lesser known role of private mercenary armies (Blackwater) to carry out this work that democratic legislatures will not support (except through the coercive measures of false-flag "terror" attacks such as 9/11, The Gulf of Tonkin, Pearl Harbor, the Lusitania, the burning of the Reichstag, the sinking of the Maine...)

Yet even as we are being educated (if we wish, while the Internet is still freely available) to the dire agendas of the controlling Illuminati, most of those blowing the whistle on the evildoers are counseling a perspective not of fear, reaction, revolution - but of spiritual acceptance, integration, transcendance, transformation.

Workshops

Hank Wesselman - Shamanic Healing

I attended a day-long workshop led by author, anthropologist and neo-shaman, Hank Wesselman. Noted for his work with the team that recently discovered the "missing link" to our primate ancestry in East Africa, he also brings a personal familiarity with Hawaiian and Polynesian traditional healing modalities.

There are three basic principles of Polynesian spirituality:

1. Love all you see with humility.

2. Live all you feel with reverence and respect.

3. Know all you possess with discipline.

We can call for assistance from helping spirits of nature, and spirit teachers and guides from higher worlds. These helpers offer power, protection and support.

The primary causes of illness are:

1. Disharmony - from emotion not worked through

2. Fear - lacking a sense of well-being, directly linked to immunity

3. Soul-loss - most serious, involves damage to personal life

The soul can fragment under trauma, leading to memory loss, apathy, chronic negativity, addiction, depression, even suicide.

What shamans treat is actually the ill-health of the soul (which leads to physical disease); because gaps in the soul fabric get filled by negative energetic entities, hostile forces.

The stages of shamanic healing entail:

1. Empowerment

2. Diagnosis of problem and intrusive elements; with help of spirits

3. Extraction of intrusive spirit, with helping spirit doing the work

4. Soul retrieval - of missing fragments, to repair soul fabric

Healing involves first clearing, via a ritual for unconditional forgiveness - forgiveness of others, then oneself.

School of Tantra - Sasha and Janet Kira Lessin

Through this course I have revamped my opinion of psychology and psychotherapy, replacing my rather outdated preconception of "analysis" which I developed as a stereotype in my youth. I felt that delving into such matters was overindulgent, that it fed the very neuroses it was purported to cure; that I was better, healthier, more intelligent than that, and could figure out for myself what were healthy ways of living and pursuing personal growth and development. I was in denial about my own dysfunctions, in thinking rather in black-and-white terms of psychological sickness/health, rather than in universal human terms concerning unhealthy patterns that all of us are prone to.

Yes, I was prone to excesses of the ego, as all of us are; I saw the ego as a necessary price to pay for being human and needing to negotiate worldly and social demands. Again the picture was either/or: at any given moment I could transcend the ego and worldly personal concerns, into a state of blissful all-acceptance; or I could descend back into the body/mind/ego in order to engage in my personal quest for a life of choices dictated by my desires and aversions.

The new model is more complex: replacing the unitary, limited and self-serving ego with a constellation of inner characters, sub-selves, personalities, agendas. Here the transcendance is achieved by awareness, detachment and balance - not a retreat from the outer or from the inner world, but a position of choice, where the "CEO" or witness can evaluate the needs and behaviors of the subselves and choose preferentially depending on what is most appropriate in the present situation.

American Buddha - Stuart Mooney

There are no fixed things or boundaries; just the appearance of them. It's all in your head! There's nothing else! It's only a dream that you create in your head! There's only energy! We are here right now! The past and the future are illusions! So get over it! You are who you are! And that is nothing other than all that is, which is also just what it is. So get on with it! Or not! It's just the dance of neurochemicals, which themselves are just vibrating molecules exchanging energy, and those molecules are composed of smaller bits which are also, all the way down the line, just composed of smaller bits exchanging energy, until you get down to the primoridial first event of pure energy deciding to split into two vibrating bits in resonant relation to each other ... forever! And the bits themselves aren't actually bits for real, they just seem to be bits when we choose to see them that way, out of the waves of energy they disappear into and appear from again.

It's just like what the old Buddha said (in the Diamond Sutra, or the Sutra of Hui-Neng) that the rain is not really rain, it's just what we call the rain. Which is a bit like Plato but simpler. It's interesting to reflect that these Buddha characters (to continue to be irrevent about it) are basically homespun philosophers. They have climbed down from the ivory tower of esoteric knowledge to share their findings with the masses, in plain language which sometimes comes out as a riddle. Which is the limitation of language, as the Buddha implied.

Buddhism on Maui is a dangerous thing ... where the intellect already tends to turn to mushy sand, lapped by surf-foam. Language dissolving into a quantum soup of subjectivity certainly doesn't help that situation. It's easy to drop it all and go to the beach, without books and at best, with a drum or flute. All the rest, the reading, writing, editing, book reviews, intellectual discussions - sometimes I sense it's all just arbitrary words, definitions, stories, memories, speculation. What's the point?

Not necessarily pointless, on the other hand. Just another dance of particles and waves, firesparks and shooting stars.

Meditation Exercise: Love and Gratitude

More Maui Photos

Kula: A Meditation on Warmth

2009-11-01T01:36:00.000-07:00

Kula: now I know why they call it that - it's Kula than anywhere else. It's the Canada of Maui. With nothing but the wild north of 10,000-foot Haleakala rising above it, and those hardy souls who don't mind cold at night and clouds all day to settle its backwoods, it puts me in fleece and felt slippers as I snack on passion fruit, lemon and plum, mango, coconut, yogurt. When I drive up to that summit above the clouds and hike into the barren crater under the hot sun, I'm greeted by the tame birds called Nene, a long-lost tribe of Canada geese.

At least I'm within 30 minutes of the real thing, the West African dance class with full traditional drum ensemble. After Oahu's tame FireTribe over the weekend, I was ready to taste this magic again and still it caught me by surprise. Now, I thought, I'm home. New friends opened up, the road home became mellower, and I savored the warm evening air of upper Haiku. On the one hand, I could live here. On the other, what I keep hearing is that people come and go. Kind of a lifestyle thing, in tune with wide ocean breezes, always new. In the heart of the ocean, beating with its pulse ...

Maui is a Mother, like the plant medicines many grow and use here - a nuturing, forgiving spirit. "Come and be healed," she says, with soothing breezes, heartstrong sun, wholly waves. I suppose it's no accident that I'm drawn to nest here and take warmth from the slopes of a volcano, the very body of Pele.

In mid-October here in what's called the "cloud forest," I turn to hot baths in the evening, retreating to my cave of a bedroom with the propane heater, and contemplate cutting more wood in the mornings for the living room fireplace, and those rainy cold winter days everyone's warning me about.

On the other hand, I can do cold. I lived in the arctic for three years, even; doing as the Inuit do, and just dressing warm (except of course for those teens who liked to run around in jeans and T-shirts at thirty below). I got in eight cords of wood for winter in the drafty old Beguin house in Argenta, BC, then lived in a tipi three winters while building my house. Am I just getting old and soft now, bending to the tropic persuasion so lazily, that at times I'm even swinging to the extreme of "never wanting to be cold again"?

Maybe's it's the infantile urge to get back to Mommy - no, earlier: to inside Mommy's womb, fully enclosed by body temperature 24/7. Safety, security ... the ease to breathe, as through an invisible umbilical cord, and to move without effort, languidly through water, over soft sand and among swaying palms. It's a persuasive advertising message, at that. Witness the resort component of Maui's demographic triad, resort-rural-wild. The rural and the wild have the root effect fueling the resort set, for that matter, for these are the real thing: living in Maui time. They also provide the source of marketed concepts, like the aloha spirit.

The English writers (Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, even BCer Malcolm Lowry) observed it, and succumbed to it, when in the garb of the colonialist. The lassitude of the easy life. Not that the colonial era has passed, mind you. Here I am in my hill station as in the India of the Raj, playing my civilized games of music and literature while the native masses seethe below ...

So is it indulgent to press on with this quest for eternal warmth? It's only natural, I might say, as I'm joined by that punctual pair of orange cats each morning in the hot rising sunshine. Or are the tabbies not natural at all, but just more accessories in the colonial trappings; like all the invasive species here? Maybe human beings, of whatever race or origin, are an invasive species ...

Back to the subject: neither hot nor cold. Actually I don't mind hot: I prefer it. But I think that it's just a compensation for cold. If I were always warm, I don't think I'd need to seek more heat. As it is, there's this oscillation effect, so that for every hour I spend dealing with temperatures, say, of 15/59 degrees, I need to compensate with an hour at 25/77 degrees, to balance out as a room-temperature average warmth of 20/68 degrees. When I lived in Quebec, the summer/winter temperatures in Montreal and Quebec City ranged from plus 40 to minus 40. But the midpoint of 0 (freezing) is not my idea of moderation.

For me it probably goes back to that time of birth, when I came out of the womb a month premature: maybe I'm still trying to recapture that lost month of comfort. So while we're at it, let's adjust the thermostat. Because actually my preferred midrange might be 25, with a comfortable range of 20 to 30 degrees centigrade. That would fit my definition, at least, of "never being cold."

It was the root motivation behind that item on my previous "5-Year Plan" that called for "Living in the tropics (or equivalent) for a full year." I did kind of do that two years ago when I traveled in South Asia and the Pacific for six months, next to a "summer" in Victoria, BC. Trouble is, that was quite a hedge considering that true summer (temperatures consistently above 20, and warm-water lake and selected ocean swimming) in Victoria typically lasts only two months at best; sometimes just one. Last summer was exceptional and, after a full winter spent through the gray, cool, misty days, I swam in my favorite ocean spot, almost comfortably, from the end of May through the end of August.

Now I'm already starting to hesitate when I enter the ocean here. "I think Thailand was warmer than this. I'm sure it was warmer than this in southern India, and the ocean off Guinea as well ..."

But here at least they speak English. They even speak, in a rather watered-down polyglot way, American. You still hear New Jersey or Boston, Atlanta or Dallas, but also a lot of generic California and Colorado, Oregon and Arizona. The roads are mostly smooth highways, the ATMs work, and there's shopping and fast food and drink aplenty. Infrastructure and finance all familiar, the empire intact in one of its more benign outposts ... But now I'm drifting off topic again.

I'm getting drowsy already, and it's only 10:40. Was it the hot bath, or is it the oxygen in this room with the windows closed being burned up by the propane stove and replaced by carbon dioxide or worse, which by the way also adds to my carbon debt along with all the gas I burn in that American national pet the automobile to carry me to my sweaty drum-dance workouts and my yuppiistic sunbathing on the distant beaches.

Experiment: open the window ...

Ah, a little warmer than I expected - yet still cool ... like a summer evening in BC. Funny, on those warmest of summer evenings in Victoria, I always remark, "... just like Hawaii." Somewhere in the middle of the two, is that elusive ideal.

The middle way: between hot and cold. Too hot all the time wouldn't work either: sweltering, shut down, debilitating. You at least have to find shade. Or as I did in Baltimore as a kid in the summer, retreat to the basement.

Earth-sheltered house I built in Argenta: to moderate the extremes of hot and cold. Passive solar heating of rock walls and floors, to save excess heat from the sun and release it later in the cooler night. Rock hot tub next to the wood stove, to hold its heat and save it for a melting soak on a winter's day, and ease it back into the room constantly. Sunbathing is like that: storing in the skin the warming rays, to feel later as a slow burn, nightglow ...

I had a conversation with Larry tonight about my church of Bembe experience on Tuesday at Zephyr's place, wavering back and forth in my feeling of the short bell part, and in general that knife-edge between 6/8 and 3/4, where the ideal is neutral in between, so the listener can have the subjective magical experience of hearing it one way or the other, instead of handing it to them my way but continually changing my mind, or like driving a car, Larry says, weaving back and forth from one side of the road to the other, or just letting that playful spirit carry me away with it instead of remaining firm and straight and consistent on the part, keeping it in the middle, remaining neutral.

Like my conversation with Eugene before that, about sharing life's vicissitudes, the good and the bad, equally, among friends. We can accept whatever it is, from our friend.

And the book by Cope, The Wisdom of Yoga, going deeper into that same universal question, of the nature of the mind, the brain, to respond and evaluate and react according to the simplistic label "attraction" or "aversion," on a continual basis processing input of senses and thoughts. Instead, the process can be subject to a witnessing awareness, so that at least the chain of reaction can be broken, and subtler still, the chain of habitual evaluation.

So, true, I can choose not to bemoan my state if I am cold, adding suffering to the experience of cold itself. Or I can choose to do something about it: like, taking a bath, lighting the propane stove, keeping the windows shut, wearing a long-sleeved shirt, going to bed soon, staying in bed till the sun comes up, carrying and cutting firewood by hand to get warmed up before it even burns, and, whenever possible, going to the beach. I did, after all, move to Maui, so it's all here somewhere, 24/7, if I want it.

Check that:
See, even if I had that vision - that moving to Kihei, say, or even more radically, ditching Hawaii for Thailand or India or Africa, would solve the problem of ever being cold again - there are a couple of big problems. First of all, that restrictive vision is kind of anti-warm, which is to say stressful if there's pressure to maintain it. Suppose I live down near the beach in Kihei, for instance. Then what do I do, how do I feel, if I get invited to a jam at Mick Fleetwood's right here on Alae Road in Kula, some rainy January night? Even in Danya's jungle in Huelo on my last visit in January, I compared it to June in Victoria: or as we call it there, "Junuary." Coldest winter in 12 years, they told me, but it happened just the same. What do I do, cry, flee, complain, write a manifesto?

The middle way isn't just a range on the thermometer. Even if I achieved perfect temperature control in my environment, what about all the other aspects of that environment that I also evaluate as important but variable, with certain strong preferences and needs to consider? There are a multitude of manifestoes that end up having to compete in the personal boardroom for decision-making clout. Who's the CEO around here anyway? Oh, he couldn't make it this time. He's taking an extended vacation on Maui ...

Then there's the quantum connection: the middle way between particle and wave. The experiment says that if you're looking for a particle, that's what you see. If you're looking for a wave, that's what you see. Elemental reality is both, at the same time; but we can't see both at the same time, only one or the other. So my quest, on this more elemental level, is to neutralize the swings between hot and cold, between desire and aversion, and find the equanimity of the warmth between.

There is a further twist, though. The above ideal is just that: a perfectionist's ideal. Real life, living in the world in human form, puts us on the see-saw, the roller coaster of the this grand amusement park. Fitted with the instrumentation at hand, we see first particle, then wave; the bliss and conflict of relationship; the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat in the realm of competitive sports (or business); the arctic and tropic realms of earthly experience. Heaven and Hell lie within the range of daily human experience.

Is even the impulse to moderate the extremes, then, well-meaning as it is in the interest of healthy balance, at odds with the nature of life? Maybe; but it's all open to choice. The wilder the swings, the greater the ecstasies of desire and the sufferings of disappointment. Get high if you want, but be ready for the hangover.

The true middle path of constant equanimity is another choice: the life of the yogi, the celibate, the monk or saint. And this doesn't necessarily mean renunciation of the world. It can mean bringing a neutralizing influence of attention to bear during every step, every breath, in the midst of whatever our engagement with the world is. We can choose the range we live in, which is not dependent on our economic status or even our personal conditioning, but on our inner freedom in responding to impulses, desires, aversions, and judgments. We can take on the degree of involvement, in the worldly see-saw of emotion, that makes sense for us; and this degree itself can change, in a larger wave of our path of growth and experience. At one time, celibacy; at another, delving into relationship again. From Arctic, to Tropic, and back to the Temperate zone again, for another while.

At the top of Haleakala, realm of the fire-goddess, Pele, I'm challenged by the altitude, recalling Nepal; and by the exertion of a full-day hike, recalling my expedition to the top of Mt. Cooper. That pointed cone of ice presents the opposite image of my destination here, a so-called "bottomless pit" (Kawilinau) where lava once spewed forth, now closed off at a depth of 65 feet. This mountain is a breast of the goddess rising out of the sea - or a mere nipple on the wide oceanic bosom - from which, from time to time, her milky fire flows.

Wild Ride, Tame Music, Last Resort: FireTribe, Fall Equinox 2009

2009-10-10T13:48:00.000-07:00

On the plane to Honolulu I sat next to a guy who had just sold his top-100 dot-com business, and so I wound up picking his brain on keys to success: the right domain name, key paying partnerships, reverse engineering Google from competing sites. All this I knew already; the difference was, he actually followed through and did the grunt work to make it happen.

On our approach to land we had a brief scare . . . to add to my list of "28 brushes with death." Actually I didn't realize until a woman told me later, that the wing almost dipped into the water. All I noticed was a rough rock-and-roll on the approach to Honolulu, as the small jet, with every seat filled, was buffeted by strong winds. She said she was shaken awake and looked out the window to see the water shockingly close.

I had noticed the funky young woman in the gate lounge; in fact I boarded the plane just behind her. A ukulele stuck out of a rip in a small backpack. She had one other small bag, and wore orange clogs or whatever you call those new plastic versions of the old Dutch wooden shoes. I thought she looked maybe the FireTribe type, but the packing list posted on the website specified non-melodic instruments. She sang a few notes softly just before entering the plane. Hours later in camp - it took a full hour and half just to pick up my pre-reserved, prepaid rental car from the zoo of an Alamo office - I recognized her and we became acquainted. Sure enough, the ukulele got some airplay at various times in the circle.

That rental fiasco began when I paid online as an add-on to my flight, via priceline.com. 40% off! the banner blared, but then it got tacked on again as hidden fees after I paid (not to mention the extra airline baggage fee when checking in my drum). Another $24 was tacked on for liability insurance at the time of pickup. And on top of it all, Alamo put the full charge on my credit card even though I'd paid already through Priceline; so I had to sort it out with a call to customer service a week later when I saw my credit card bill. Honolulu: what did I expect? While waiting I tried to buy a bottle of plain water from the machine, but it didn't deliver, so I punched the next choice - some high-performance mineral supplement concoction in blue, of which the first ingredient was sugar, topping a chemical stew.

There was a small gathering at the camp site, a Christian-run place where I'd been once before, at Winter Solstice 2002. Partly as a result of the low numbers, and partly as an ongoing intention of these gatherings to de-emphasize the heavy drums and open more space for light percussion, frame drums, singing and chanting, the energy of this circle on the first night was low-key. A few more people showed up on the second night so there was more dance energy, and one drummer in particular just wanted to keep pounding it out ... until he was told quietly to give it a rest. Ukulele, harmonium came in to fill the gap. Coffee with coconut milk was delivered to musicians in the wee hours. Still, on the first night I didn't make it all the way through, but only till around 4.

I dreamed I was in love with another man's woman. This is the reminder of what Eckhart Tolle calls "the pain body." I awoke from the drama to a sleepy camp, dull stirrings for breakfast at mid-morning. I wanted a break from the camp and a refresher for my dusty body and foggy mind. So I headed back down to the highway and the Ko'olina Resort, which could be seen off in the distance from the camp up on the mountainside. On the way I missed the turn and wound up headed back toward Honolulu. Everywhere on the highway there were construction lanes, last-minute signs for turnoffs, speeding traffic four to six lanes in each direction. I thought I would try Ewa beach as a second choice, but when I finally got to the area it was run down, not a good choice for parking a rental car or leaving backpack on beach while swimming. So I backtracked and finally made it to resort land - the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Here the shoreline was sculpted into a series of four artificial "lagoons," each with large rocks piled to break the incoming waves. The grass around the impeccable crescent beachs was cropped like a putting green, and sprouted palm trees laden not with coconuts, but security lights and cameras. The water was all very lovely, the sand squeaky white and clean, but it was all a bit creepy.

Along the way, images:

- In a big black pickup truck, a young Hawaiian woman rides on the passenger side, with a bright flower (plastic?) in her hair over her ear.

- On the boulevards enroute to Ewa beach, people are walking under umbrellas against the midday sun.

- On an actual putting green of the resort golf course, a guy is doing pushups.

- At the resort, electronic speed monitors appear every 100 feet, flashing my crimes at me and scolding me to do as I'm told.

- Back at the FireTribe camp, above the fire pit where we engage in our pagan rites, a trail leads to another fire pit surrounded by benches like a little amphitheatre, topped by a large wooden cross.

On the second night I stuck it out to the end, feeling that the discipline of the practice demanded it. It wasn't about the jam or the party or the dance, as I am used to; but about setting aside whatever it is that I identify with, and opening space for the collective spirit and other individual spirits to unfold. Within this setting aside, though, the other challenge is to still allow and express what is genuine to flow forth through each of us to feed the fire and the dance and the song of the long night. So I was there at the end with Tara and Michael and a few others, with a long samba jam into dawn, where we had found that sweet sustained meeting ground of volume and tempo and groove and spice and holding it down and going off and coming back, listening and speaking in turn, organically, honestly, humbly; graciously and gratefully.

View slide show with more photos from Oahu and Maui

Editing Life: from Dzogchen View

2009-09-14T04:03:00.000-07:00

Funny how the professional life and the personal life overlap. Now back working steadily as a copy editor - with music performance season passing into more of a lull, and my former nightly avocation of music editing also on hold - I'm seeing how life itself can be a kind of perpetual editing project. Forever tweaking, doing major retuning (as in this 7-month move to Maui) or minor fine-tuning (carrying the laptop around the house and to "hotspots" outside to catch the rays).

During this time of transition I've found some quality reading time, finally checking out Eckhardt Tolle's A New Earth, and Stephen Cope's The Wisdom of Yoga: A Seeker's Guide to Extraordinary Living, along with Jeremy Narby's Intelligence in Nature (thanks, Paul, for these selections!). It's fascinating how these different writings overlap ... which is no surprise, as each would acknowledge the universal essence of life in its holographic flowering from form to form, and each would stress the underlying unity of consciousness.

Back on the ranch of the mundane ... I have been mostly preoccupied over the last three weeks with getting set up in my new household, with the help of my host Marianna, who was still here for two weeks of that time busily preparing for her own winter journeys. She's an artist of some renown who paints Tibetan deities, sometimes as wall-sized murals, such as the one in Maui's own stupa at the Dharma center, where we recently attended a talk by the visiting Oracle of Tibet.

I won't bore you here with the extensive details of buying a car to use during my stay here (or, read further below if you must); of reorganizing the kitchen to my own taste (all right: stashing away unwieldy large pots and pans, sharpening a motley collection of knives buried in a drawer, rearranging items on counters and in cupboards); of various attempts to find shortcut routes down the mountain to the beach (it's so tantalizing to see sunny Kihei laid out directly below, but frustrating to have to drive the roundabout highway to get there; sadly, the Google Earth aerial views don't anticipate gates and "No Trespassing" signs on the back roads that do run straight down the mountain through the cane fields and ranch country); or of the trivia of electronic tasks such as setting up printer, router, and phone options (all systems go). Suffice it to say that now the basics are in place, I'm comfortable here in this mountainside nest, and I'm finally able to breathe a little, take stock, and deepen my vision of the life I came here to live.

The core motive of my move here, of course - as well as my skinny guy's daily quest - is heat. Sunrays. Warm ocean swimming. Endless summer. That's the theory, anyway. I mean, Victoria's as good as it gets, in Canada that is. But that's Canada. So, when the offer to move here came up last April after a long dreary March, I instinctively sprang for it. I knew from the description I had, however, that living 3600 feet up the side of the Haleakala volcano would be a compromise of the tropical ideal.

The fact is, there's beautiful warm sun here for a couple of hours first thing in the morning. Then clouds form from the ocean breezes on the mountain and hang over it like a sombrero for the rest of the day. Around mid-afternoon the sun clears the canopy and shines back in from the west, ending in a glorious unique sunset each day. The nights and mornings are chilly, the days moderate. "Winter," I hear, is somewhat more challenging, but it's all relative. This is Hawaii, after all.

The flip side of this rural mountain location, as I came to know so well at my homestead in interior BC, is space, solitude, and the beauty of peaceful nature. And of course the key difference here is that in 30 minutes I can drive to that tropical beach, any time of year. The choicest beaches are an hour away ... still no big deal, considering that in Victoria in summertime I do just that, driving 30 to 60 minutes every chance I get to go swimming in a favorite natural location.

The other throwback to my days in rural BC is a garden - my first in 15 years. This one has been just too easy. Three raised beds behind the house were nicely rototilled in advance of my arrival. I bought a flat of starter seedlings and plunked them in the ground in less than an hour. The trick now is to wait. In the meantime, groceries. The tree crops here have been a disappointment. I heard macadamias, avocados, various fruits ... in reality the only things bearing now are plums and some tiny dry tangerines. So, once again the ideal needs modification: the grail of rural self-sufficiency, as I learned once long before, remains elusive.

On the music front, things are progressing more as expected, with opportunities sprouting up frequently. For starters, I hooked up with a longtime West African drumming class I'd played with on both my previous visits, and fit right in. Same with the epic Sunday afternoon jams at Little Beach, where again the djembes and dununs set the pace. Here the added spice is that it's a semi-performance, since the beach is crowded, always produces eager dancers, and is ... oh didn't I mention? ... clothing-optional. I've also been invited to sit in and play at the dance classes happening down the road in Haiku. Then there's the FireTribe Equinox celebration next weekend on Oahu ... and after that, a class workshop and performance near the "seven sacred pools" on Maui ...

In case I get bored with too much time on my hands, there's always the full slate of yoga and dance classes going on at the Studio in Haiku ... but something tells me I'll have enough going on soon enough, and that I'll be content to take spare moments of peace and solitude to enjoy here at home in Kula, at the place Marianna calls "Dzogchen View."

A Tantra of Dzogchen

As a bee seeks nectar

from all kinds of flowers,

seek teachings everywhere;

like a deer that finds

a quiet place to graze,

seek seclusion to digest

all you have gathered.

Like a madman,

beyond all limits,

go wherever you please;

and live like a lion,

completely free of all fear.

-a tantra of Zogqen

The Unedited Life

1 September 2009

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

--Wordsworth

The car business was something I anticipated with some trepidation, not knowing exactly how I would manage payment between various options that weren't obvious; researching the best options for sale; contacting and getting around to see the cars I wanted; deciding among innumerable choices of make and model, year, mileage, gas consumption, repair history, and so on; getting ones checked by a mechanic; and arranging transportation involving various parts of the island if it did come to a sale.

It all came down to Saturday when, on very little sleep following intensive Internet research and spreadsheet comparisons of local ads, I set out to make the rounds of my top candidates. First on the list was a '96 Mazda Protege with only 97,000 miles and an asking price of $1500 obo. It happened that the car sat off a little road in Huelo, Ulalena, that I recognized as the road to Danya's where I stayed a year and a half ago on my last visit to Maui. On arriving I called the owner, Tony, on my cell, as he was working on a construction site nearby. No answer. After leaving a message and waiting awhile, I got vague and uncertain directions from a housemate of his. Another person along the road directed me further. But the house I came to did not match the earlier description, and no one was there anyway, so I proceeded further down the road for a visit to Danya and to get directions from her.

On the way I met Kevin driving up the road - a fellow I'd met when staying at Danya's. He actually wasn't staying there but at the neighboring land - which Danya didn't even know, when I mentioned it to her. On the way out again I encountered another person from my previous stay, Arianna. It all seemed so karmic. The house I was directed to was indeed the one I had found earlier, but there was no sign of Tony, so I returned to his house where the Mazda sat, to wait and ponder next steps.

After a while Tony called me on my cell, and said he would be there shortly. The car was in decent shape, except for a banged-up front turn light. I took a test drive. It drove and handled reasonably well, though a little rough on acceleration. I said I liked it and wanted a nearby mechanic, a friend of Marianna's, to have a look. Peter the mechanic actually owned a similar Mazda and so was familiar with the engine; he took another test drive with me and noted the same hitch in the acceleration; and on inspecting the engine, decided the probable cause was worn spark plug wires. He contradicted Tony's reference to another mechanic saying this car didn't have a timing belt. He also mentioned the need for a CVR boot ($75), and an immediate need for a front brake job ($100). In addition would be the probable replacement of spark plug wires, another $60. I paid him $40 for his time and drove away ... though on doing so, it seemed so much rougher than before, that I more than once turned around to go back for another evaluation, before deciding I was just not used to the car and anyway the new plug wires would probably do the trick.

Back at Tony's ranch, I sat in my rental car for a few moments and tried to figure out what to do next. Should I buy the car and then take it immediately back to the mechanic to deal with now, hoping to get a ride back here from Marianna when it was ready? But if I did that, would I have to ask the mechanic to bring me back to my rental car at Tony's? Or ask Tony to follow me to the mechanic's and then bring me back? I was too tired, hot, hungry and confused to think straight. Okay, I finally decided, first things first; I'll buy the car and then worry about the mechanical issues later.

I phoned Tony who had returned to work with his cell phone on, told him what my extra costs would be and offered him $1300 - to which he responded cooly, "Okay, whatever." On detailing what the mechanic said, I heard from Tony that he'd already recently replaced the spark plug wires, and had also bought new spark plugs which he hadn't yet installed because he didn't have the proper tool; he thought the new plugs would solve the problem of rough acceleration.

"Hmm," I said, "that's interesting, because the mechanic checked the plugs and they were okay; he thought it was the wires that needed replacing. Here, look at what he showed me ..."

But as I opened the hood, Tony with the papers in his hand said, "Look, do you want the car or not? I don't know what you expect for $1300."

"I'm just trying to understand what I need to do to get it running properly, and it doesn't make sense ..."

"Well I don't have time to dick around like this. I have to get back to work."

My hand was in my pocket ready to hand him the cash and get it over with. But I couldn't quite bring myself to do it, and with that extra moment's hesitation, Tony lost what little patience he had left. "Fuck it, man, I don't have time for this shit."

I stood there at a loss for words as he shut the car door, got back into his truck and drove off.

[happy ending: "Old Paint" Toyota Corolla to the rescue:]

The jam at Little Beach was another test. No so stressful on the surface ... in fact that part was mostly blissful. The magical blue-green waves, shimmering olive and silver when the sun went behind clouds. The soft golden sand, the beautiful naked bodies, the all-forgiving vibe of the drumming. The usual smattering of jammers were there, with one black-skinned dreadhead more or less leading and soloing, but with a drum that wasn't overpowering. Some duns showed up to add some foundation to the rhythms; otherwise it was mostly the steady pitta-patta of beginning drummers, spiced with the odd percussion, didge or flute. Some people were friendly and easygoing; others more standoffish or uptight. No big deal. At one point a dancer asked for "Yankadi," and I took over the duns, but the djembe support was not there and then someone alerted me that the woman I'd taken over from wanted her duns back. Okay, sorry, whatever. There was room to solo, to play my flute, to play a little didge and wooden frog clave. The dancers increased from two or three to a dozen, as the sun went down and the rhythms built in intensity. Then the dark came, and it was time to pack up and get to the parking lot before the tow trucks arrived.

I stopped in Kihei for a fish sandwich which I ate by moonlight on the lava rocks by the water at Kamaole Park. Here was the other side of bliss: ordinary life, alone, in the dark. I drove back home the hour by highway and sank into bed with exhaustion from the 4-hour marathon of drumming and swimming, on top of everything else, still processing the reality of the event. It was phantasmagorical in its own way, and yet mundane as reality always is, in comparison to the conception of it that has been built up in the mind of expectations.

So this is why I came to Maui ... very good ... but then what, now what, right now, today?

Bird song outside my window, sun in the garden.

Eco-Culture

2009-05-15T12:52:00.000-07:00

Normally we think of culture as human culture, the artifacts and interactions of human society and creativity. It is easy in the civilized world to forget the basis of human culture in nature. That denial is now being put to the test, as environmental issues dovetail with an untenable financial system to present a crisis of millennial proportions. Will we all be thrown back abruptly to a more fundamental relationship with ever-present but rapidly degrading nature? While the question hovers, many are exploring again or anew how to begin making constructive moves in that direction.

What does a sustainable lifestyle look like in the 21st century? We have plenty of models from the past to go on - the Inuit, Bushmen, or Aborigines offering examples to recent times of roughly sustainable ways of life that demonstrate success without modern technology. To examine other aspects of culture besides the central requirements of food gathering and shelter, supplies and transportation, is perhaps beside the point; as those secondary needs might be considered frills, optional variations. On the other hand, maybe the whole of a culture must be considered when evaluating "what works." Maybe the music of the Mande peoples of West Africa really is necessary to maintain cultural success in their geographic context. The same might be said of the Inuit shaman and the associated set of taboos; or - who knows? - even of the custom of circumcision (though I would like to think this practice could be left behind in any sustainable culture of the future).

In the moment, I am satisfied with my cheese-and-beet sandwich, brought to this lakeside in a handy plastic container, with a jar of green tea, computer to write with, flutes to play, cell phone to talk with a friend. The ducks are my company now, as I have brought other food products to tide me over in this place. Take away the grocery store cheese and bakery bread, and I am left with the beets and a lust for protein that those poor ducks will have to fend off. More likely, they laugh at the poor human who gazes at them longingly from the shore, lacking ammo or arrows, nets or help from the opposite shore. This survival business is no simple enterprise, and hardly a matter for one man to attempt to vision and dream his way through. It is a collective enterprise, to which the visions and dreams of each have relevance. Collectively we will face again as we once did consciously, the question of how to provide. Today the veils of complacency and denial are wearing thin, as the systems we have built or allowed to be built to stand between us and our daily bread, are tottering.

Thetis Lake

2009-02-14T18:58:00.000-08:00

Thetis Lake - Vancouver Island, BC

If video doesn't appear, click
here for latest Flash player

Heartsongs: flute improvisations

Mystic Beach - audio-visual | Nepali Pass - audio-visual

Daily Prayer
| Danya's Pools | Going Deeper: bamboo grove

Heartsongs: flute improvisations | Flutes Jam - Learn to improvise on flute or pennywhistle

Mystic Beach

2009-02-05T13:04:00.000-08:00

Mystic Beach - Vancouver Island, BC

If video doesn't appear, click
here for latest Flash player

Heartsongs: flute improvisations

Thetis Lake - slides and
audio | Danya's
Pools - video | Nepali Pass

Daily Prayer | Going
Deeper: bamboo grove

Flutes Jam - Learn to improvise on flute or pennywhistle

Of Prophets and Swindled Trees

2008-12-30T22:42:00.000-08:00

re. what the gypsy said ...

sometimes right, sometimes just

another path, another lesson:

the moss-laced branches, twisting

gently, pointing here and there

to this or that connection:

their information is valid, like this

communication from plants, from

nature through molecular media:

telling and showing a greater connection

of all, even the parts not visible

in this or that scene, remember:

now, when even the ice-wracked

scrubby trees are bowed down and bound

into the snow-heavy ground:

with a stark still beauty in the clear

passing light and sky-rippling black

pools of water, knowing:

that all paths turn back to the one

round wholeness, all scattered and wound

again into a whirling wonder

New Year's Mantra

2008-12-21T13:15:00.000-08:00

It's all practice
It's all performance
Every moment

Bass Nectar Review

2008-12-03T00:25:00.001-08:00

Raw power replaced finesse at times, but it wasn't all jump 'n pump. The audience cheered as loud when the beats were sick and twisted. The opening chords, if you could call them that, shook the floorboards and the air itself, never mind all the cells of the seven chakras at least …

Towards the end the drunk young guys outnumbered the gyrating young girlies by about 2 to 1, and you contacted sticky flesh from every direction. The intimacies grew in fervor while the layers peeled away. We were almost throbbing as one.

You said hello to the few hard-core celebrants you'd met on Friday at the Sunset Room, but there wasn't room for many words in that space of mega-vibrations, rippling whatever parts of your clothing weren't by now stuck to your own flesh or someone else's, or lying in a heap in a forgotten corner of the room, over by where you set the last third of your grapefruit juice before the staff removed it in a likely ploy to get you to buy another.

They say the ticket prices are so high there ($27) because everyone's on E and not buying alcohol. What do you expect from the T-generation? Sex, drugs, r&r. Just like yer own yout'. Walking past the high school last week just after the bell, your faithful snitch overheard two snatches of conversation: "… the muscles of her vagina …" and "… sixty hits of acid." The third would-be conversation was replaced by a guy (or was it a girl?) with earphones plugged in, supplying the rock.

Where was I? Oh, right: think Rock n' Roll on Steroids … Big Beat, Sick and Twisted … Way Below the Baseline.

Tabla and Sarod

2008-11-23T22:22:00.000-08:00

This ecstasy just won’t go away. In fact it’s building, building on itself and everything that has gone before. It is the coming of synchronicity as the norm, where you can’t get away from the interconnectedness of everyone and everything, no matter what you do or don’t do; yet in responding to the currents around you and within you naturally, like the 95% improvised classical Indian music concert tonight with tabla and sarod, you find that all choices are right, and the flow has carried you over 24 hours and more to your friend on the boat to give him the final push of recognition and acknowledgement of his own true genius, and in being there you recognize also the beauty of the bubble of the boat and its presence in the real world, i.e., the ocean ... and not only that but realizing that better than a swim in an artificial pool back in the city is a detour on the way home, to the summer swimming church where even today in late November the parking lot above the trail is full, and down by the water the sunny bluffs are taken with people sitting in homage, and there you find your spot before the shimmering silvery wavelets, and the luminous green moss, and the living rocks, and find your peace and stillness and knowing and oneness in presence of all this, and still it continues back up the trail on an ankle now suddenly free and healed, winged at heel ... on to town just in time for group practice, where again the immersion in music and waves has given you that frequency to hold, and it’s so big and so deep that everything is allowed, accepted into it, yet it’s also tight and focussed and dedicated enough to dance with clear measure in concert with the others, and of course now without effort, but simply attention and more knowing, and with that - but not too much - your eyes can close again for a moment and you can drift with it where it wants to go, and it drifts you where you want to go, which is everything in that ongoing flow ... so to the university where you zone out and refresh for ten minutes and then go to greet your friends there waiting, not only the two you were expecting but a handful more, and all saying midway between sets that we should have known to bring our other friends there, to share in that moment of joined creation.

Nothing New Under the Sun: A Musical Mystery Tour

Relationship, Emotion, and Spiritual Practice

2008-11-22T00:51:00.000-08:00

In the moment, this is spiritual practice. That is, it can be if I let it, if I intend so. It can be also relationship if you let it, if you receive this intention. In the moment there is no emotion but the moment of breathing.

Are you at war with feeling? No, if you listen to the body. The body tells you what it needs. Really what it needs is relaxed breathing - fast, for exercise, or slow, for meditation. In relationship, there is also a matching of breath, a harmonizing of intention, a lifting of awareness from the single body to the dual body, to the all-body of love still greater than one or two.

Still, your focus begins with one. One love, inside, from inside, healing first the wholeness of self, freeing the feelings of past hurt and success to flow into and out of present time through the breathing body, the very form of time.

Did I say “healing success”? Yes, if success is the wound that takes a toll through stress and imbalance, compromising health for one-dimensional rewards. Pride used to be called a sin. Was that just church propaganda? It’s really just logic when the body’s inevitable demise is accounted for. The fall of pride is simply inescapable reality. Therefore to remain within the boundary of pride is to hide in denial. On the other hand a balance of pride and humility is only natural: a reflection of life’s urgency for full potential while the time is ripe.

You come back to present feeling. Are you feeling lonely, unwanted, weak, depressed? These are all conditional, and can be breathed away into the past from which they originated, or the future which is so feared or misunderstood. Are you feeling gladness and joy, anticipation and relief? Fine, while realizing also that these things if dependent on temporary causes, will pass away with the changing winds of time. If rather independent, or arising from life itself - gladness for the fresh breeze off the ocean, joy at seeing friends in a few minutes, anticipation over the promise tomorrow holds, relief in the overcoming of obstacles - these feelings are not yours because of personal circumstances, but rather scents of life itself, lent to you for the savoring.

The practice is the remembering, or the means of remembering, that there is more to life than your present feelings and preoccupations. Beyond your current emotional state is communion with others, sharing and harmonizing feelings you all have; and beyond and below this ground of relationship is the ground of being itself, which connects each of you not only to each other, but also to your more central self, the body breathing free, the soul liberated to larger life and the emotion of such liberation.

Personal and Transpersonal Emotions

2008-11-21T14:25:00.001-08:00

Just after midnight. This journalist's deadline is extended, as you have come to expect from someone riding other waves and journeys. In this installment the issue of feelings arises. And I am here not just to do the usual tapdance around the subject with fine-sounding phrases.

Actually as I write I must say the urge to accomplish too fat birds with one stone - the expression of feelings and wider publication - forms a dual purpose with power: as I rise to the occasion with strength and inspiration. But then in the next breath I relax into the winter sleep, forgetting your presence on my doorstep. Have I not yet invited you in? When you say How are you, how am I (feeling, that is ...)?

At the moment I can identify ...

neutral ... but that's a cop-out.

sad ... but that's really just tired.

inspired ... by pipe dreams.

empowered ... but that's an illusion of egocentric politics.

content ... but that was earlier this evening.

happy ... depends how you define it.

I come back as I once did long ago to a kind of Buddhist understanding that most human emotions (start with the powerful ones like fear, greed, love, and joy) are usually attached to our desires and aversions; these distract us from truer, more lasting states of tranquility, which are available to us through spiritual practice and awareness.

On the other hand, Pema Chodron (When Things Fall Apart) came along when I needed her most, after a sudden marriage breakup, teaching me to make the best use of those emotions that were arising in that situation.

Back to present time: I'm skirting again - after even contradicting those emotions I so briefly affirmed. But here I am at least expressing. And if the flow of words is heady and ungrounded, so be the nature of my feeling, as it grows in power again at the very pace of thought and the music of the words playing their way on to the page.

It's kind of like blues vs. jazz -- with blues representing the more raw and direct expression of those human feelings most arising from attachment, and the jazz evolution finding, as it were, new kinds of emotion in the sheer possibilities allowed by freedom and transcendent form. Think B. B. King compared to John Coltrane or Miles Davis.

Besides, it's not me that is the subject of your interest; it's sharing concern about those things that move me. Politics? Well, there's your rage (my rage, actually). If I express that . . . ranting doesn't carry anyone very far. So I have to transform it, into research and networking, to the extent I can act on it all all. Otherwise there is denial; and distraction by myriad masks; yet I still give Buddhism top marks for putting it all in larger, all-embracing perspective.

Personal emotion has again to do with attachment, yet it is very real. For me to express such with you, however, when we have no intimate personal connection, would be inappropriate: it would be the one-sided rant, or like reading over the shoulder someone else's gushing report from summer camp. Or I could portray it (channel it, you might say, from my own experience as well as others') in the form of fiction, drama, or lest I forget, poetry (the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility --Wordsworth).

I guess I'll have to leave it at that for now, to catch some of the latter.

[later ...]

What Wordsworth expressed in his poetry were the kind of feelings I would call transpersonal: those feelings of communion with nature and with people who live as integral parts of the natural fabric. And in music, again (which is a form of natural energy) it is possible to access states of feeling that are beyond the realm of simply personal experience. In fact I would say that it is only when we are free from the grip of personal emotions such as lust and affection or anger and jealously, that we can be open enough to receive the transpersonal emotions such as compassion or righteous indignation (think Jesus vs. the moneylenders, or Martin Luther King, Jr., or more recently, Congressman Dennis Kucinich with his fiery speech to the 2008 Democratic Convention, "Wake up America"

You could say that a great blues artist such as B. B. King also is able to transcend the personal and tap into universal human emotions. In such a case it might be true that the impulse for a song comes from or is enriched by the depth of personal experience, yet in the performance of art that personal feeling is raised to a higher power by the power of music itself, by the invocation of a spirit of communion between artist and audience and also between nature and art. The joy we feel in the presence of a waterfall or crystal stream, or even red-leaf maple dewed with sun-jewels along a city sidewalk, surely transcends whatever issues and emotions we are facing in our personal lives. Such a transpersonal emotion is not an abstraction, however; it is the very essence of our feeling to be alive.

Second Person Singular

2008-11-18T22:59:00.000-08:00

Three Personal Readings seeded by the Mayan Oracle

Polarity: the fullness of ideas, plans, projects and projections, under natural influence; vs. the simple emptiness of reality, unclouded ... unecstatic except by a finer more subtle clarity, and moved deeper not by karmic fear but by opening to the way it is.

On the side of the Dreamer and the Dreamed, you come to the knowing that this is a horizontal evolution, the single phase gathering charge to a series of sparks to come, a dreaming into play by dreaming your way full of your way, and yet empty. When this polarity is complete, and the fullness and the emptiness dance in clear union, within as without, the union is whole and thus ready for re-union with another such whole. Otherwise the imbalanced fullness/emptiness, whether too vain or too humble, too busy or too lazy, too pushy or too laid-back, presents a flawed match to another except by complementary co-dependence - where each seeks the primary union still and tries to fit the other into it. In the balanced re-union of two whole, internally balanced unions, is a higher order of duality dancing together.

The above model might be criticized, however, as idealistically androgenous. A person with yin and yang 50/50 is perhaps not likely going to be as sexy as one who is “all man” or “all woman.” Yet maybe gender attraction doesn’t depend on a balance of fullness/emptiness, which has more to do with the spiritual side of yang/yin than the erotic side. What we might idealize is a partnership of two spiritually balanced, ego-neutral individuals who nevertheless are attracted to complementary physical and personality traits in one another.

-----------------

While you grow and balance and gather charge in this phase of singlehood, you recollect that you also received gifts and lessons along the way of previous phases of relationship, and in each case came to an end of the positive learning environment. Maybe it goes back to the problems above, regarding imperfect unions, the flawed attempt to complete with another what is not yet complete in oneself. In any case the experimental union finally dissolved or fractured, or you might say became transformed, in a kind of quantum leap to the next level of learning, in the next relationship or phase of singlehood.

How is it assumed that the “jump” to the next classroom is vertical and not just through the garden gate, so to speak? And what is to say that we are moving at all? Maybe it is simply a succession of experiences and people coming to us, to cohabit the world we call ours.

Again, in either case, I believe the learning is cumulative. We do repeat mistakes, and develop strange habits of bouncing between the same kinds of obstacles or kinds of mismatch, if we are slow learners who do not reflect and choose otherwise. Eventually we get what it is we need to survive each step, each test, each challenge and opportunity. Or we don’t survive, and that brings us to a whole new territory.

Again, you might say this life has been just another larger phase, and after a time of grieving, and taking stock, and then paying dues or taking a vacation, you might try your luck again. Maybe as the other gender this time . . .

--------------------------

Between the polarity and the dreaming, when the stillness has cleared and the dreamer and the dream are one, shines the nurturing grace of Imix, the divine chalice and holy grail, the all-embracing Source. She doesn’t require these conditions of balance and equilibrium to offer her love and forgiveness. She gave life and she will receive it back again, without prejudice.

So let polarity flash through the night; let the dreamers have their dream awhile. You will find your way home one day, dead or alive. Or she will come to you . . . if you are not too vain, busy, or pushy; too humble, lazy, or laid-back to receive her.

--more second person singular--

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Bank

2008-11-11T01:34:00.000-08:00

... I fell into the trap set for me by the baby-boom sharks. They didn't really want me and My Generation to gobble up all that fat money in our growing pensions. No, sir. Better to prevent that sort of wealth-sharing before it gets really expensive. Blame it on the folks who couldn't pay their mortgages. Nip it in the bud, with a coy devaluation scheme called, "The Big Bank Bailout."...

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." - Thomas Jefferson, 1802

From Savior to Same-Old

2008-11-09T11:04:00.000-08:00

That didn’t last long . . .

It is a cruel irony that Obama’s first act, after the most uplifting progressive victory in America’s history, was to appoint as Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a former Israeli citizen and currently “a super-Likudnik hawk, whose father was in the fascist Irgun in the late Forties, responsible for cold-blooded massacres of Palestinians....He favored the war in Iraq, and when he was chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 he made great efforts to knock out antiwar Democratic candidates” (source). "A further contemptuous message is widely rumored to be forthcoming -- the naming as 'Special Envoy for Middle East Peace' of Dennis Ross, the notorious Israel-Firster who, throughout the 12 years of the Bush the First and Clinton administrations, ensured that American policy toward the Palestinians did not deviate one millimeter from Israeli policy" (source).

Of course it has been tempting to overlook or pretend we didn't hear Obama repeatedly pledge unconditional support of Israel, increased war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and a hard line towards Iran. Yes, the election was a massive victory for hope. But now it appears we were all being played to support an ongoing imperial agenda that persists in lionizing Israel and demonizing independent interests in the Middle East, all for the greater cause of controlling oil in the region.

... not to mention the even bigger picture of conflict with Russia and China - watch "The Men Behind Obama."

Metapolitical

2008-11-06T22:14:00.000-08:00

Love means going slower
not just doing it for fun

or profit but for something
deeper

and then, not getting stuck in
that well either

but being in earth, of earth,
for earth

and her people. I would tell
the officer of death, “Breathe.”

Because not breathing
we all forget and get lost

in the shuffle of deck chairs
the stuff of conventional politics

and if rescued by pirates,
forgetting to breathe again

even after the rape,
even when there is nothing

left but slavery
we hope that in 144 years

we can be president

Empire and Democracy

2008-11-05T00:22:00.000-08:00

Now the challenge is to become the real democracy in the world that US leaders have been crowing about for decades while overthrowing democracies as a matter of policy, if they didn’t like their stance on business. At home the US government has developed the Orwellian face, offering one-way communication to its congress with threats and to its citizens through corporate media monopoly; squandering lives by the thousands and the treasury wholesale while calling war “liberation” and occupation “freedom”; and orchestrating the rape of the natural and monetary wealth of other nations around the world.

How strange it will be now to suddenly broadcast to the world hope instead of fear, good sense instead of subtrefuge, brave intelligence instead of willful ignorance. This “Barack Revolution” will surely give other global powers pause. Will this emperor effectively turn his country from a rapacious bogeyman to a humane republic? That might be too much to ask of a country founded and weaned on conquest, genocide, and slavery. Yet the magnitude of today’s leap from slavery conveys at least an awakening of a people to outward embrace, beyond narrow bounds of race, color, creed or even, we might imagine, nationality. Is America, so quickly united, so quickly ready also to open its arms to the diversity watching with cautious optimism from beyond its borders?

What message does this triumph of democracy and equality convey? Can it still be converted into a slick slogan for continued imperial expansion? Unlikely now, since the medium is the message, and the medium of this election victory proved something new in recent American politics: that the people sufficiently aroused to care will amount to a greater force than all the president’s men and henchmen - even those with two stolen elections already in their pocket who were gamely banking on just one more.

That glum force of resistant conservatism, of course, is the first and ultimate obstacle to true global friendship in democracy, because they want no part of it still. In fact they’re probably more scared and distrustful than ever. And I can hardly blame them. Because after all, now the other “bad guys” out there (there must be some, perhaps not even trained or labeled that way by BushCo) will be wondering, “Okay, if America now goes, like, truly democratic, what kind of message does that send to the people that we want to keep down in our own situation?” I’m no foreign policy expert (think Sarah Palin) but Saudi Arabia and China come to mind.

Of course this whole ironic reversal of roles in the world vis a vis authoritarian rule vs. true democracy presupposes one important thing: a disengagement from the interlocking corporate interests which have all but taken over government to this point, at least in America and its client states. Even the supposedly independent states like Thailand or Nigeria have their own versions of this corruption of power by the heavily vested wealth of business interests. In America it has reached an extreme marriage of convenience and of contrivance, to the point that only a massive electoral mandate as we have just witnessed might rise to the occasion to start undoing these undemocratic bonds.

For America the addict of power and wealth, illusion and denial, it is a long road to recovery. Let us rejoice in the first step.

Alternative News - sources, articles, reviews, recommended links

The Coup Has Taken Place in America

2008-10-07T23:13:00.000-07:00

Breaking News, October 2008:
The Coup Has Taken Place in America
video interview with Naomi Wolf

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier - just so long as I'm the dictator." -- George W. Bush

more...

US Martial Law threatened, declared in Congress

The Battle Plan II: Sarah 'Evita' Palin, the Muse of the Coming Police State
--by Naomi Wolf

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - No Free Press, No Free Elections

The Bush Doctrine & The 9/11 Commission Report:
Both Authored by Philip Zelikow - by David Ray Griffin

Comic Relief: The VP Debate Goes Saturday Night Live

Surviving Democracy: Reviewing Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine
- by Stephen Lendman

Why Has John McCain Blocked Info on MIAs?
- by Sydney H. Schanberg, The Nation

Zeitgeist: Addendum - released October 2, 2008

Bringing it Home

2008-05-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

Miksang and More ...

When I have returned back home from winter travels to exotic lands, usually the camera goes back in the closet, and my journalistic streak goes into a prolonged funk. Without fresh inspiration from the outer world, what can the inner creative spirit latch onto?

In past years I solved the journal dilemma by simply putting in the time as a daily discipline. Filling the space with words ... which afterwards I could edit and prune, hoping to glean a rose (or tulip) among the briars. A more direct approach is to be sparse from the point of intention, as with haiku.

In this enterprise I begin - as it is said in the Buddhist art of Miksang photography - to create more space between and among the forms, thus breathing into and from the emptiness ... letting the fullness of life flow like water and air among the earth and fire of daily effort.

Taking pictures in Beacon Hill Park, during an outdoor photography workshop in the Miksang (“good eye”) approach to “Dharma art” (as taught by Chogyam Trungpa, and in this case by Charles Blackhall) I felt as if on holiday here in the natural heart of my own city, “wandering aimlessly” through the park, along the beach, around Cook St. Village.

Following that amble through the passing paradise of the “backyard” moment on a classic spring day, my camera is back in the closet and I sit with a somewhat dutiful comportment at my keyboard to share this not-really-traveling slice of life to a travel-habituated audience. Yet the depth of my single experience here - putting on fresh eyes in a familiar land - lingers, pausing my breath.

Now, yes, with the onus of taxes behind me and equally undeniable yet patient death asleep on the far horizon, I breathe free and clear in the present time, awaiting nothing more than the continued slow progress of spring. A winter solstice orange dries imperceptibly on my desktop, studded with cloves and turned cinnamon-brown: awaiting the solstice fire. In the meantime, slow birdsong, misty sky, a further slowing of breath to live stillness.

view more at

Miksang Photo Gallery

Video: Zen Dawn Meditation

The Long Way Home

2008-04-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

The long departure has begun. This trip will, if all goes well, end with me arriving home some 70 hours after leaving a guesthouse in Pokhara around 7:00 yesterday morning. That trip by bus to Kathmandu was supposed to take 6 hours but took 12, and it could have been more had my daughter and I stayed on the bus through the traffic jam in the outskirts of the capital beyond the final 3 hours, when we jumped ship in the company of a young Nepali man and his Spanish companion.

My daughter Nashira, thanks to her recent 8-month stint in India, had understood some of the man’s conversation in Hindi with another passenger who had got on nearer the beginning of the jam with some dozen other refugees from another bus that had caught fire from overheating. The gist of the situation was that we were likely to be stuck for an unspecified number of further hours before reaching our destination. The alternative was walking for twenty minutes or so, joining the steady stream of pedestrians who were bypassing the columns of stalled trucks and busses, to a point beyond the jam where we could take a taxi for the final half-hour of our journey. We set out like trekkers with our backpacks over the rubbly dirt trail - no matter that the dust and mud and trash composed the sidewalk and street of a major city.

Earlier in the trip the trouble began when, halfway from Pokhara on a mountain curve, the front of the bus clipped the rear wheel of a motorcycle going the other way, passing too close. We heard a sickening bump and the bus came to a stop. As it happened the helmeted motorcyclist came out of it unhurt except for a scratch over his eye. But a lengthy harangue ensued, whereby blame was cast back and forth between the drivers of bus and motorbike, adjudicated by a growing crowd of motorists who had been stopped by the accident. Eventually police arrived on the scene, and taking the cyclist on board the bus, we proceeded to a nearby farm with a canopied table where the principals could hold their conclave at greater length, attended by the usual circle of interested onlookers.

These proceedings eventually drew to some unknown conclusion, and the bus was able to continue down the highway ... not without some further delays, however, here and there as traffic was stalled by parades of trucks and busses packed to the rooftops with crowds of red-clad youth supporting one of the two Communist parties (one Maoist and one more moderate) currently vying for power in the country’s first democratic election scheduled in a week’s time. At times our bus merged into the parade itself, and we felt visible as supporters as if by osmosis; at other times the marching youth pounded on the sides of the bus as we passed - it was uncertain whether out of exuberance or mounting defiance.

Earlier on our trek among the Himalayan peaks, we had met a couple of UN officials stationed in country to help defuse the violence surrounding this historic occasion. The New Zealand delegate was here following stints in previous hotspots Afghanistan and Sierra Leone. Here in Nepal there had been, in addition to the simmering Maoist insurgency in parts of the country, daily attacks on competing parties, threats of revolution if victory was not won at the polls, and a host of assorted other conflicts set to break out after the election. It was a good time, we were assured, to be leaving the country. When I asked the New Zealander where his next posting would be, he smiled wearily and said hopefully, “New York.”

But could we leave? The streets and alleys of Kathmandu, like the mountain highways between cities, were roughly one-lane affairs even when paved. These single lanes had to accommodate not only two-way traffic of cars, buses, and trucks, but motorcycles weaving through them in even greater numbers, as well as bicycle-rickshaws, ordinary bicycles, and pedestrian traffic. People seemed to prefer walking on both sides of the pavement, or right in the middle, and blindly crossing at will, as if oblivious to the motorized madness that swirled past on all sides. Add to this human free-for-all the odd lazy water buffalo, frisky goats, black dogs in the night, random chickens, and everywhere a peasant of town or country bearing a great load on their back with a Sherpa-style head strap, bent to the task of centuries.

Our taxi driver for the final leg to the hotel that evening - like his brave comrade the following morning for the trip to the airport - was indeed able to navigate us somehow with sustained momentum through this chaos of streets. But after the accident with the motorcyclist, our innocence was no longer sustainable, and every near-miss (with a fresh challenge every foot of the way) was a real injury waiting to happen. Meanwhile at 10 A.M. the riot police, wielding long batons and clad in padded Ninja armor, were assembling on the street corners of the capital, awaiting street demonstrations that were already planned in reaction to some knifing incidents at election rallies the night before.

At the airport things were tamer, and more secure from our point of view, yet still strangely uncertain. There were no boarding announcements, no identifiable departure gates or flight numbers; just a generalized massing of people in exodus, eerily familiar to the previous evening’s populist migration on foot past the stalled dinosaurs of a passing age. It seemed that all departing passengers, several hundred in number, were to await our deliverance in a single holding room looking out onto the tarmac. At the appearance and unintelligible utterance of a blue-clad woman near the front, half of those in the room leaped to their feet and rushed at a side door. I got up, hugged my daughter good-bye, and joined them. Asserting my way bodily toward the door with my boarding pass, I was informed by the woman in blue that this flight was not mine; I would have to wait in a smaller room in front of the holding area. There a mere hundred of us waited another twenty minutes in palpable anxiety - the anxiety of simply not knowing by any familiar or visible sign how or when our fate - actual departure - would be accomplished. Finally when a transit bus next appeared outside our room, people rose and headed for the door: the simple action of departure serving to signify itself.

Nepal: People Watching

Standing by the side of the road

watching the world go by

shopkeepers, an old man cross-legged

a group of five teen boys

a woman in sari and shawl

what are they waiting for -

why are they looking at me -

passing in the tourist bus -

also doing nothing

but watching people

not working, not in meditation

not really waiting for anything

just watching the world go by

Trekking: flashback

(guest blogger: Nashira Birch)

I know that everyone "absolutely loves" Nepal, so I feel unoriginal in saying it, but Nepal truly is an incredible place. The landscape, I think it goes without saying, is as stunning as it is diverse. The culture and people are also incredibly diverse and stunning, as well as calm and welcoming.

Sometimes I forget that I'm not in India because Nepal is so similar in so many ways, and India has become such a big part of my reality.... But Nepal is kind of like an India in which someone has turned down the intensity meter. Clearly, in the mountains and villages where most of my Nepal experience has taken place, the contrast to Jaipur's chaotic intensity would stand out, but I feel even in the most intense parts of Kathmandu people generally seem laid-back, relaxed, and happy. Luckily for me, Nepali is very similar to Hindi, which has helped in meeting people (having them laugh that I speak Hindi, which most people here learn from television) and finding our way. It is an interesting time to be in Nepal, however, and there is a lot more going on than the postcards tell you.

After a few postponed election dates due to political instabilities, a historically significant election is fast approaching (countdown: 8 days). Even far into the hills, communist party sickles and hammers adorn rocks, walls, and small flags and marches. Now, in the small city of Pokhara, every political party is "politicking" (in my dad's words), with slow-moving vehicles blaring music, loudspeaker announcements and slogans, flags, banners, and even a lively motorcycle brigade. UN vehicles meander the streets, trying to ensure everything goes smoothly over the next month or so (apparently it will take more than three weeks for the results to be released).

Anyway, the hiking: My dad and I "headed for the hills," as he put it, pretty much as soon as we could, and our lungs were thankful for the move from Kathmandu (Delhi may be one of the most polluted cities in the world, but they have gone strides beyond Kathmandu in terms of their use of clean energy and control of vehicle pollution). We did half of the Annapurna circuit trek, climbing through the most stunning and diverse landscapes (and moonscapes), I have ever been witness to. Every day held new surprises, new ecosystems, new views, new stunning peaks suddenly appearing above the clouds. We started our hike though steep hills terraced by rice, barley, and maize fields and scattered with small villages of stone houses. We climbed at least 3000 stone steps up over 2 days, and at least that many down again the next day. I thought I was young and healthy enough to overcome my lack of exercise over the past year ... my knees, however, having not seen so much as a hill in the past year of living in the desert, had different ideas.... Luckily, we landed in a village built around hot springs on the river.

As we made our way along this river up the valley over the coming week, we hiked through the deepest valley in the world, and meandered along the narrow alleyways and prayer wheels of windswept medieval villages huddled into the hillside and topped by Buddhist monasteries and Buddhist-Hindu-fusion temples. The 6000, 7000, and 8000-meter peaks that appeared during the clear morning hours towered above us as we made our way toward Tibet through what was now a moonscape of bald hills and river beds and driving winds. It turns out the upper part of this valley (the Upper Mustang), which nestles its way into Tibet, costs $700 US just to enter for 10 days. We turned around here, and made our way back down the valley.

We are now resting in Pokhara in between espressos and Tibetan soup and thunderstorms, waiting for our journey back to Kathmandu, and re-entering the deja vu that, it would seem, is the traveler’s bubble everywhere in the backpacker world (not to say the trail was completely devoid of this: I definitely - guiltily - had a Mexican enchilada about 5 days in!). You have your German bakeries, your banana pancakes, your Israeli salads, your endless strips of shops selling the same souvenirs, the same travelling pants (if you've been anywhere in Asia, you know the ones I’m talking about ... the MC Hammer ones), and the same Buddha miniatures. In Nepal, you also have endless shops chock full of North Face rip-offs. In India, the travelers go from place to place, almost never leaving this bubble. In a sense, sometimes I feel like people have only left home for the travelling culture, not for the Indian culture.

photo gallery: Nepal Himalaya Trek (Annapurna Circuit)

Black Moon Culture

2008-03-08T18:01:00.000-08:00

Children of the Machine

A hundred devotees sat motionless on the sand watching, as if on reality-TV, the spectacle of young Thai men playing skiprope with fire, a 15-foot length of flaming sisal. Thump-thump-a-thump-thump went the pounding "music" in the dark; the dayglo constructions overhead offering the only variety from the relentless beat of the machine. Most of the crowd were men, young travelers from Western lands who shared buckets of Red Bull and local whiskey with their shadow-eyed Thai escorts of the night, or with me in exchange for a few eager taps on my djembe.

It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, with the group of us who started out in the Be-Bob bar. Be-Bob was not the usual kind of casual misspelling; it was an intentionally clever description of its proprietor, a Thai in his mid-twenties who in his own gentle and gracious way, offered to this corner of the world a kind of personal altar to Bob Marley. Day and night the old standards played, "Redemption Song" and "No Woman No Cry," sometimes accompanied by Mang and friends on guitar or drum, but never out of the looping playlist for long. It was a haven artfully constructed from local rocks and tree limbs, festooned with vines and strings of coral and featuring the burbling sounds of a recreated forest spring. A few feet out the door lay the swath of new road construction, daily heaving with its trucks and bulldozers and graders as the access is prepared for the 200-million-baht, 50-bungalow resort going up on the nearby end of the beach.

A couple of days earlier I had wondered about attending the Black Moon dance party at Ban Tai, just to get a taste of the phenomenon -- at least its new moon variant -- that attracted so many partygoers to that opposite end of the island. But it seemed a bit far to go, with a pricey taxi ride and no certain return in the late night; and techno music was not really my thing. Meanwhile after a casual jam at the Be-Bob, Mang had the inspiration to throw a party on this same night, which seemed a good, rootsy alternative to the Ban Tai beach scene. He printed up some flyers with the additionally clever come-on, "Be There - Be Bob." His friends would show up with a piece of metal roofing to fold into a makeshift barbecue, and the usual fare of drinks and smokeables would be on hand to ease guests into cozy conviviality.

So it went ... me arriving with djembe in hand fresh from kirtan, already uplifted into seventh-chakra bliss by the vibrations of the beehive-kiva sound temple at the yoga center up the hill. I joined a party of somewhat familiar fellow travelers, seven of us from seven countries. Scattered tales of Jamaica and Amsterdam, Laos and India ... but soon the idea arose: who's up for a trip to Ban Tai? Some waffled. Sandrine flipped a coin: heads, she'll go. Tempted by the opportunity and a group taxi fare, I yet demurred. The complimentary barbecue food, tasty fish and plates heaped with salad, was just starting to arrive at our table, and the intended jam session was yet to begin. Mang sat pensive and alone -- perhaps a trifle discombobulated -- behind the bar, watching his only party guests consider an early exit. "Don't worry," we half-sang to one another; "Everything's gonna be all right ..." At that moment disembodied Bob joined us for the chorus.

I felt in a sense obligated to honor the personal invitation that had been extended to me, along with the promise of semi-public performance; but on the other hand the party was, so far at least, nearly empty but for the group of tourists about to walk out the door. At the last instant I changed my mind, grabbed my drum, and joined them, promising Mang to come back and jam again another night. As I walked through the door Bob, always on cue, sang a serenade: "You're running, you're running, you're running away ..."

Sandrine confided that she always had trouble making decisions. Sometimes she would call a friend for advice; usually she would resort to the coin-flip method. That often entailed more than one result: two out of three, or even up to ten tries, to "increase the probabilities." I shared that during my recent Vipassana retreat (at a monastery just up the hill from the town of Ban Tai) I had put this very question of nagging doubt and indecision to the teacher. He had a couple of ready answers. "When in doubt, don't do. Then the task is to ask a friend. If still in doubt, flip a coin." Evidently Sandrine was already tapped into this timeless spiritual wisdom. I recalled the past year's deep dark film based on the Cormac McCarthy novel, No Country for Old Men, with the coin flip a device used by the psychopathic killer to doom his victims by their own choice. This resonance was further enriched by the fact that our Irish friend for the night's road trip was named Cormac.

By the time we reached the taxi stand there were four of us still committed to the journey. But now the taxi driver, taking his ease with friends between the shops in the calm night air, changed his mind, shaking his head as he looked at us as if in dour judgment of our collective cultural (or was it anti-cultural?) folly. No matter; we found another taxi stand, and waited there sipping what was advertised in red block letters on the wall as "Sexy Beer."

Once deposited under the broad banner of "Black Moon Culture," we were confronted with a 300-baht entrance fee, unanticipated but unavoidable now that we'd arrived. The scene past the gate was uninspiring: vendors with rainbow wands beside large boards filled with dayglo figures they would paint on body parts. Long booths selling incongruous drinks such as red plastic beach buckets brimming with Jack Daniels. Herds of aimless, faceless people visible only as a pattern of black and white, punctuated by flashing wands of rainbow light. The ever-insistent, never-uplifting deadbeat pulse of the beat, beat, beat.

Where and when had I felt something like this malaise before? Ah, yes ... the Hinsdale, Illinois Youth Center, when I was seventeen and looking for something to do on a Friday night.

Eventually people danced. Cormac wandered for two hours looking for his girlfriend who had disappeared in the company of another friend. Sandrine sipped whiskey and coke and talked wistfully of her bungalow and book, Krishnamurti. Even so she was content enough with her decision to go for "the adventure," and so was I. You never know unless you try. "Better to act," my teacher had said, "than sit on the fence." I drank a second beer, sat in the sand astride my drum and tried to play along with the bassy airwaves, refusing an offer of Ecstasy. But the beer didn't quite do it. The drumming couldn't really be heard. We joined the dancers. With a little effort and time you could kind of get sucked into the tsunami of sound. After a while that too was boring; we decided it was enough and we should look for a taxi ride home. Cormac gave up on trying to find his girlfriend.

The taxis were doing a brisk business at 3:30 A.M., and we quickly found a ride back to Haad Salad, packed in the back of a pickup with five or six others headed to assorted destinations. The tipsy Swedish blonde sitting across from me could hardly keep her flying fingers off my djembe; but whenever she paused for a moment, the French woman next to me immediately urged me to keep playing. Perhaps after all the spirit of Bob was still with us: "jammin till the break of day ..."

It was 4:30 by the time I reached my bungalow. The decision to turn off the 6:00 meditation bell-alarm was a no-brainer. Sleep when it came was not steady or deep, as the leftover pulse of the beat machine refused to go away ... having entered the very structure of my cells, reprogramming my DNA. Joining the others, in the inexorable drift toward black moon culture, now I, too, had become a child of the machine.

Fast-forward: 9:30 A.M.

"I woke up this morning, and wrote down this song ..."

blackmoon.mp3

more percussion compositions by Nowick Gray

digital/live mix also featuring E. Neptune and A. Foebus

Achievement and Practice

2008-03-02T18:32:00.000-08:00

Ten days after a ten-day silent meditation retreat which focussed on the practice of Vipassana -- insight, mindfulness -- the lessons are still sinking in. At first on re-entering the "real world," the shock to the senses was overwhelming. With resumed action and echoing speech vying for airtime with frogs, crickets, sprinklers, motorbikes, trucks, heavy equipment, hammers, neighbor's voices, roosters, wild birds, boat engines ... it has been difficult to keep the mind calm in sitting meditation. But I have kept my resolution to keep sitting every morning, and the overall calmness of my mental state is now increasing.

I was afraid that I would slip all too quickly back into long habits of chosen activity: writing, computer networking, music engagements, restless wanderings ... and indeed I have been inspired to delve into detailed schedules and outlines for all of my old unfinished and ongoing projects. I have made similar resolutions with new inspiration at various times in the past. Always within a week or two the inspiration fades; unpredictable life crowds in like jungle growth; and in despair I give up all my discipline to "the flow."

This time I feel it is going to be different; my resolution is firmer, more grounded in the practice established in the "Buddhist boot camp." The emphasis on mindful meditation practice in all the primary postures and motions of life -- sitting, standing, walking, eating, breathing -- has taught me to view all of life as "practice," a view that is fundamentally different than my former view of the importance of achievement.

Music practice is a prime example. Previously I have found it extremely difficult to maintain any disciplined regularity to my music practice. It always seemed like "work"; and work it was, designed and engaged in so as to achieve better proficiency. Renting a studio space with set hours helped a lot, because I was forced by "efficiency" to make full use of the allotted rental time. But at home -- finally moving into a place where I can practice freely -- the time I could be practicing inevitably dwindles into distraction: Do I have new email? How long is the sun going to be shining outside? I'm hungry right now and better eat ...

The same is true of my eternal backlog of tasks -- lists upon archived lists -- in the area of writing, editing, publishing, networking, promotion. Always I have been inspired by the breadth of work I could do, but debilitated by the lack of focus and determination to choose and see projects through to conclusion. I think that underlying both the verbal and musical fields of activity, I have been chronically hampered by a gnawing, existential doubt: what is it all for?

That, of course, is the problem with all worldly achievement, in the light of our eventual death. A practice of deep and repeated insight and mindfulness cuts through the veil of denial to confront us squarely with the meaninglessness of our ego-driven priorities. But that does not mean we are left with nothing, dangling helplessly, hopelessly in the void. We are left with the tool that got us to this state of realization: the practice.

In the week's company of a slow-walking friend, I had to keep practicing my slow, measured steps, with time left over to watch the breath. No time lost, no time gained: no time. Establishing a comfortable habit with the sitting practice, I extend the form to musical scales and rhythm exercises. Am I improving? Will I be a polished performer? These are secondary questions, not immediately relevant to the importance of the task. The task is to trust the practice. In itself it has value as a tool for engaging in the artful and mindful practice of living. And if continued, it will, like the sitting practice that inspires it, have secondary benefits in the form of a more successful life -- even in worldly terms.

That is the irony of spiritual practice. To be effective it entails giving up all worldly concerns and priorities. Then, being effective, it results in clearer, stronger, more effective functioning in the world, indeed in more worldly success. That success in turn cannot be gloated upon as a stolen, secret reward. Death still claims the last word. But in the meantime we can add, moment by moment, a subtle reward to our efforts, our spiritual work: the happiness of knowing what is simply true, step by step, day by day, note by note, word by word, breath by breath.

The practice continues.

Vipassana

2008-02-21T23:57:00.000-08:00

Notes from a 10-day silent meditation retreat

Haiku Smuggled out of Silent Retreat

swaying in the breeze:

bamboo and coconut palm

me, watching the breath

Daily
Schedule

4:00 wakeup

4:45 sitting

5:30 yoga

6:35 sitting

7:05 breakfast

8:15 working

9:00 walking

9:30 talk

10:15 sit/stand

10:30 walking

11:00 lunch

1:00 walking

1:45 stand/sit

2:45 walking

3:30 sitting

4:15 sit/stand

4:30 walking

5:15 dinner

6:15 sitting

6:45 stand/walk

7:15 talk

8:15 sit/sleep

Vipassana is like . . .

heavy-duty brainwashing for a mind set on permanent press
going to the mother ship for a true human implant
workshop for tools to hack the dominant paradigm
mental asylum for normal people
reformat and install new operating system
training for human puppies: Sit. Stay.
being reborn, learning to breathe, sit, stand, walk
discovering timelessness within the structure of time
boot camp for the revolution that starts within
downloading code for an upgraded language of intelligence

Back to Reality

The assault to the senses is immediate as I walk from the monastery road onto the main road through Ban Tai. Taxi trucks, motorbikes, SUVs rumbling by. Signs and shops, drying fish, burning coconuts, the bustle of everyday activity ... it’s all perfectly normal, if you live there everyday; but I’ve just spent 10 days on the hill in silent seclusion with thirty other meditators and resident Thail monks. Our days have been punctuated by the slow resonant sound of the bells ringing time to awake or work or sit. The view of the island is from a high rock, where everything appears in minature, sounds and sights by distance into a peaceful blur.

The next morning, I awake in my bungalow back at Hat Salad, having slept in - three hours longer than usual - until 7:45. I resolve to keep my practice going by doing some yoga; but by the time I settle into a sitting posture for the first meditation “on my own,” the sensory assault of “the real world” has resumed full force. It’s still muted light inside with my door and shutters closed, but the sounds I cannot block out: hammers at work on the concrete road construction site; the humming groans of heavy machinery; and now a loud sprinkler beginning just behind the bungalow. Still I manage to sit peacefully for half an hour, with the aid of earplugs that still permit me to hear the programmed end of session rung from my BlackBerry with the “Qi Gong” tone.

I go to breakfast at my favorite beachside restaurant, but again the silence I have grown so fond of at the retreat is bombarded by the sounds of hammering on renovations just behind me; pounding of waves from an unusually active surf during this day of the full moon; and constant conversation from a couple sitting at the neighboring table. It is easy to shut one’s eyes from a rush of detail and color; to avoid taste and even to minimize touch. But to shut out the press of sounds or invasive odors is nearly impossible, as our human brains are wired like the minds of dogs to become immersed in these sensations.

An apology:

In a recent blog I made a “crude and unapologetic” characterization of Americans as “obnoxious” in their role as modern conquistadors. One American friend responded with honest feelings of hurt from my overgeneralized remarks, and during my meditation retreat I had further opportunity to reflect on the unbeneficial effects of such speech. In painting with such a broad brush, it seems I put my foot in the bucket and lost my balance; and the result, instead of eloquence, was simply a smear.

A more accurate and objective statement might read as follows: Relishing their success with a reckless pursuit of materialism, some Americans take a shameless (one might say, crude and unapologetic) pride in their accomplishments and status as dominators.

Still the question arises: what is the benefit of sketching such a characterization? If the statement is true, how can it help someone to hear it?

It always helps to know the truth, however painful or uncomfortable it may be at first. Another principle is also important, however: to blend understanding with compassion. All humans are fallible; and all have also redeeming qualities and potential. Even if some actions - whether imperial militarism or careless speech - are hurtful to others, there is benefit in looking deeper to see the causes and remedies of such actions.

The problem of modern technological media is the same as the problem of modern technological warfare: we are removed and insulated from the results of our actions. I thank my readers for giving me any feedback as to the effects of my words. And I wish that any in positions of power and influence - a factor that could apply in general to citizens of affluent North America - will be open to understanding how our choices have actual impacts on the lives of others.