Step One: Give Yourself Permission to be Passionate

Our resistance is the Refusal of the Call. Change whispers in our ear, and we attempt a high-tech tune-out: call waiting, call forwarding, on hold, voicemail. We fight change because acceding to it feels like stepping off a cliff into an abyss. Out of touch with our vital, intuitive nature, we panic and crawl safely back into the shopping center mentality. We resign ourselves to buying the leopard skin pants because we’re afraid to be the leopard.

How do we answer this call to reclaim our connection to what’s true for us? We start by giving ourselves permission to be passionate, to dream beyond our self-imposed boundaries. As we grant ourselves this grace, the still, small voice inside us grows stronger.

Step Two: Say The First Farewell

One “symptom” of transition is that the familiar starts to seem strange. You feel a need to distance yourself from the “ordinary world” of others. This leave-taking needn’t be physical; it can occur symbolically. In the year before I left my corporate post to start my marketing communications business, I made a conscious decision to mentally “let my company go.” I still completed the work to my usual high standards, and freed up enormous emotional energy I’d been pouring into job frustration, which I productively channeled into the launch of my business.

Step Three: Enter The Void

Pry those mental fingers loose! Your willingness to be in free-fall, to release one trapeze bar before the next has swung into view, is an essential step in restory-ing your life: looking again at the story you’ve created about how the world is, and seeing how this filter distorts your view of beauty-your own beauty.

The poet Rilke encourages us to “live awhile in the question.” You’re entering a corridor between the worlds; it’s okay to not know what happens next. As you allow yourself to feel safe inside the space between who you’ve been and who you’re becoming, the feeling of falling into an abyss will subside.

Step Four: Enlarge The Lens

Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Look with the eyes of wonder, like a child. When children encounter the unfamiliar, they s-l-o-w w-a-y d-o-w-n, allowing their senses to absorb new information. You can do this with personal transformation. Breathe deeply into the mystery. Ask yourself, how can I expand this experience?

Keep a journal. If you’re more kinesthetic than visual, dance your change process. What does it feel like as flowing movement? You might also paint or sculpt your journey, or make up songs describing your experiences.

Step Five: Bless The Fear

Fools rush in; the rest of us tremble. Fear is normal. It’s even valuable, because it gives us something to push up against, which helps develop our spiritual muscles. This is positive resistance. Weight training for the mind. Fear itself is only a smoke screen: false evidence appearing real. You can defuse it with “affirmative action.” Every night before bed, I used to look at my office (set up in a corner of my living room) and give it the thumbs-up sign. I did this for years. A simple, powerful, YES for success!

Step Six: Do The Work!

In the Hero’s Journey, this is the Initiation. Goethe said, “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it/Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” Once you commit to change, a confluence of forces moves to assist you.

I draw inspiration from improvisational comedy. The core concepts are: Begin with what is. Don’t manipulate the action, discover it. Never stop the action by saying “but” or “no”; instead say “yes, and” and add on to what’s come before. In this way we build a story, a calling, a life.

When I wanted to start writing for health magazines, I began by authoring a piece about a fashion designer for a business magazine (Begin with what is.) After the article was published, I asked the editor, “Do you have other needs I could fill?” (Discover the action.) I learned they were planning to drop a certain column for lack of writers with good story ideas. The topic? Personal health. I became their primary contributor, and used these articles as a springboard to generate assignments in health magazines. (Yes, and…) Step

Seven: Take The Tests

There’s no hitching a ride to self-discovery (or a new career or relationship) on someone else’s coattails! To own your power, you must be willing to scrape your psyche on the rocky road inland. It’s the only way to discover and claim your unique gift. You’ll encounter tests along the way, which can be innocuous or even pleasant, depending on our degree of resistance.

I saw a woman wearing a T-shirt that brings this principle home: “If you want to live life on your own terms/You’ve got to be willing to crash and burn.” Now that’s answering the call!

Step Eight: Humor Yourself

We can lighten up our enlightenment. A healer once told me, “One day you will hear laughter and realize it’s your own voice.” It seemed a strange prophecy. Yet as I peeled away layers of false beliefs and crusty attitudes that kept me enslaved, I felt laughter spontaneously bubble up from some subterranean source, and I understood. This is who we are. Let yourself feel the joy, the light, the love inside your being.

To encourage dormant humor, play with a young animal or a child. Make up nonsense words to popular songs and walk around singing them-in public. Enroll in an improv comedy class.

Step Nine: Be Grateful

Gratitude and forgiveness are brothers. Be grateful for all the challenging people in your life-bosses, co-workers, children, friends-because they’re your greatest teachers. These relationships are difficult precisely because of your resistance to the teaching, which might be about compassion, self-worth, generosity, or unconditional love. We’re always looking in the mirror. If we don’t like what we see, we can blame the mirror, or look within. The latter is the path of personal mastery, and peace.

Step Ten: Be The Change

Heroes know that mastering change requires daily practice. I really enjoy the signs in public gardens that say, “Stay on the path.” The key to integrating change in our lives is, have big dreams, take baby steps. Gandhi said, “You must be the change you wish to see.” It’s a lifelong process of self-actualization. And it’s our reason for being here.

Source: Ten Steps to Personal Transformation, by Amara Rose

Bellow is a short film that explores this phenomenon through interviews with five astronauts who have experienced the Overview Effect. The film also features insights from commentators and thinkers on the wider implications and importance of this understanding for society, and our relationship to the environment.

Source: vimeo.com

Being in doubt as to what constitutes truth or error, and having, on the other hand, a clear notion of its strength, a crowd is as disposed to give authoritative effect to its inspirations as it is intolerant. An individual may accept contradiction and discussion; a crowd will never do so. At public meetings the slightest contradiction on the part of an orator is immediately received with howls of fury and violent invective, soon followed by blows, and expulsion should the orator stick to his point. Without the restraining presence of the representatives of authority the contradictor, indeed, would often be done to death.

Dictatorialness and intolerance are common to all categories of crowds, but they are met with in a varying degree of intensity. Here, once more, reappears that fundamental notion of race which dominates all the feelings and all the thoughts of men. It is more especially in Latin crowds that authoritativeness and intolerance are found developed in the highest measure. In fact, their development is such in crowds of Latin origin that they have entirely destroyed that sentiment of the independence of the individual so powerful in the Anglo-Saxon. Latin crowds are only concerned with the collective independence of the sect to which they belong, and the characteristic feature of their conception of independence is the need they experience of bringing those who are in disagreement with themselves into immediate and violent subjection to their beliefs. Among the Latin races the Jacobins of every epoch, from those of the Inquisition downwards, have never been able to attain to a different conception of liberty.

Authoritativeness and intolerance are sentiments of which crowds have a very clear notion, which they easily conceive and which they entertain as readily as they put them in practice when once they are imposed upon them. Crowds exhibit a docile respect for force, and are but slightly impressed by kindness, which for them is scarcely other than a form of weakness. Their sympathies have never been bestowed on easy-going masters, but on tyrants who vigorously oppressed them. It is to these latter that they always erect the  loftiest statues. It is true that they willingly trample on the despot whom they have stripped of his power, but it is because, having lost his strength, he has resumed his place among the feeble, who are to be despised because they are not to be feared. The type of hero dear to crowds will always have the semblance of a Caesar. His insignia attracts them, his authority overawes them, and his sword instils them with fear.

A crowd is always ready to revolt against a feeble, and to bow down servilely before a strong authority. Should the strength of an authority be intermittent, the crowd, always obedient to its extreme sentiments, passes alternately from anarchy to servitude, and from servitude to anarchy.

However, to believe in the predominance among crowds of revolutionary instincts would be to entirely misconstrue their psychology. It is merely their tendency to violence that deceives us on this point. Their rebellious and destructive outbursts are always very transitory. Crowds are too much governed by unconscious considerations, and too much subject in consequence to secular hereditary influences not to be extremely conservative. Abandoned to themselves, they soon weary of disorder, and instinctively turn to servitude. It was the proudest and most untractable of the Jacobins who acclaimed Bonaparte with greatest energy when he suppressed all liberty and made his hand of iron severely felt.

It is difficult to understand history, and popular revolutions in particular, if one does not take sufficiently into account the profoundly conservative instincts of crowds. They may be desirous, it is true, of changing the names of their institutions, and to obtain these changes they accomplish at times even violent revolutions, but the essence of these institutions is too much the expression of the hereditary needs of the race for them not invariably to abide by it. Their incessant mobility only exerts its influence on quite superficial matters. In fact they possess conservative instincts as indestructible as those of all primitive beings. Their fetish like respect for all traditions is absolute; their unconscious horror of all novelty capable of changing the essential conditions of their existence is very deeply rooted. Had democracies possessed the power they wield to-day at the time of the invention of mechanical looms or of the introduction of steam-power and of railways, the realization of these inventions would have been impossible, or would have been achieved at the cost of revolutions and repeated massacres. It is fortunate for the progress of civilization that the power of crowds only began to exist when the great discoveries of science and industry had already been effected.

Source: “The Intolerance, Dictatorialness and Conservatism of Crowds,” from The Crowd, by Gustav Le Bon

‘The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.’ ~Samuel Butler

Our culture has taught us to view death as our enemy. We can, however, see the dying process differently and learn to lighten about it by looking at the teachings of religious traditions and cultures that do not view death as a taboo subject, and at those people who have come in contact with either their own death or that of others and have still been able to maintain a sense of humor.

‘When one has understanding one should laugh; one should not weep.’ ~Zen saying

In death, as in life, our attitudes are the crayons that color the world.

We can see illness as a hopeless time or as a chance to slow down and take stock of our life. We can see death as an unfair end to life or as a necessary part of it. We can see grief as inescapable or as an opportunity for us to gather our resources and move on. We can see funerals as a time to lash out at death or to celebrate life.

Both Zen and Jewish traditions see pain, suffering, and death as part of life and therefore embrace them with a laugh that at once reduces the pain and teaches us not to take anything in life seriously. Both are saying the same thing: Every situation, every experience–even death–is ripe for humor. Here is an example from the Jewish tradition

“Ladies and gentleman,: the manager announces. I am terribly sorry to have to tell you that the great actor Yankel Leib has just had a stroke, and we cannot go on with tonight’s performance.

At this, a woman in the second balcony stands and cries, “Quick, give him an enema!”

“Lady,” says the manager, “the stroke was fatal.”

“So give him an enema!” she shouts once more.

“Lady, you don’t understand. Yankel Leib is dead; an enema can’t possibly help.”

“It certainly couldn’t hurt!”

Humor cannot stop us from dying, but as the lady in the second balcony (as well as the Zen and Jewish traditions) remind us, “it certainly couldn’t hurt.” Humor may not alter the fact that we die; but it helps us live with it and deal with it.

Both Zen and Jewish traditions teach us that laughter frees us to new perspectives on our fears. Any loss therefore, even complete annihilation, as in the story below, can be turned around with a laugh:

A new flood is foretold and nothing can be done to prevent it; in three days, the waters will wipe out the world.

The leader of Buddhism appears on television and pleads with everybody to become Buddhist; that way, they will at least find salvation in heaven.

The Pope goes on television with a similar message. “It is still not too late to accept Jesus,” he says.

The chief rabbi of Israel takes a slightly different approach: “We have three days to learn how to live under water.”

Zen teaches how to lighten-up our dark times with a quite approach; it uses thought-provoking stories and koans–those nonsensical questions that have many answers and at the same time none (“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”) Judaism, on the other hand, is somewhat more down-to-earth. (“Cancer-schmancer! As long you’re healthy.”)

Jews joke about the inevitability of death by reminding us that “for dying you always have time.” The Zen teachings do likewise and lightheartedly remind us of an important lesson. Everything, they tell us in the story below, dies.

Ikkyu, a Zen master, was very clever even as a boy. His teacher had a precious teacup, a rare antique. Ikkyu happened to break this cup and was greatly perplexed. Hearing the footsteps of his teacher, he held the pieces of the cup behind him. When the master appeared, Ikkyu asked: Why do people have to die?”

“This is natural,” explained the older man. “Everything has to die and has just so long to live.”

Ikkyu, producing the shattered cup, added, “It was time for your cup to die.”

Zen and Judaism are not the only traditions that teach death-and-dying lessons through humorous tales. The devilishly clever character named Mulla Nasrudin, for example, is often used by the Sufis for the same purpose. Here is one Nasrudin tale that again reminds us of the universal fact that everything dies.

 One day Nasrudin went to his neighbor and asked to borrow a very large pot. “I am sorry,” said the neighbor, “I cannot lend you my pot. I fear that it will not be returned.”

Nasrudin assured the neighbor that in exactly three days he would bring it back. The neighbor finally agreed.

Three days later, to the minute, Nasrudin appeared with the pot. When the neighbor looked inside, to his surprised, there was another tiny pot.

“What is this?” asked the neighbor.

“While your pot was at my house,” replied Nasrudin, “it gave birth.”

A week later Nasrudin appeared again at his neighbor’s house wanting to borrow the large pot. This time the neighbor was more than pleased to lend it to him, providing Nasrudin would again bring it back in three days. Nasrudin agreed.

Three days passed and there was no sign of either Nasrudin or the pot. When he and his neighbor met at the market later that week, the neighbor inquired about his pot.

“I am sorry to tell you, but the pot died.”

“My pot died?” asked the neighbor. How can that be? Pots do not die.”

“If pots give birth,” replied Nasrudin, “pots die.”

From China comes another story to help us deal with our death fears. As told in the fairy tale below, not only must everything die, but it does for a reason. Death as part of a larger picture is a necessary part of life. Without it, life would not only be totally different than it it now, but most probably also totally unmanageable.

Once upon a time, a great kind went hunting with his closest companions. They paused at the top of a hill from which they could see for miles around. As the king surveyed his domain, with its rich fields and bustling cities, tears came to his eyes. He thought of his palaces and friends, the honor and wealth that belonged to him, and the love of his people. “To think that one day I must die, and leave all this behind!” the king lamented. The nobles with him started thinking, and soon began commiserating with their king” they, too, would lose palaces, riches, and honors when they died.

“Imagine if we could live forever!” the king said. “Aye,” his nobles agreed, their eyes bright at the thought of immortality. One lord among them laughed. “We should never have to leave this all,” the king went on, ignoring the interruption, but the noble laughed again. This happened several more times, until the king himself demanded the reason for the mirth. The the lord bowed. “I cannot keep my joke from you, Majesty,” he confessed, “although I hesitate to say it.” The lord paused and went on.

“I imagined what would be like if we all lived forever, and if there was no death,” the lord explained. “Why then, the First King would still live among us, and the Great Sage! The Immortal Emperor, and the Fearless General, too! Compared with them, I and my fellow lords, would be fit only to be rice-planters, and you, Majesty, would be a clerk! Imagining that, I could not help laughing!”

The other lords held their breaths, fearing the king’s wrath. After a tense moment, the king laughed. He raised his drinking glass and turned to the other lords.” For encouraging my foolishness, I penalize each of you to drink of wine! And as for you,” the king told the laughing lord, “whenever I bewail my death again, you are to cry out, ‘A clerk! A clerk!’ “

We may not want death at the end of life, but there is not much we can do about it except enjoy what we have while we have it. Even in our darkest moments, even when death is imminent, even if we are hanging on to life by a thread, we still, as this final Zen story teaches, can look around and find something to enjoy!

A man travelling across a field suddenly encounters a tiger. The man flees as the tiger tuns after him. Coming to a precipice, the man takes hold of the root of a large, wild vine and swings himself over the edge. The tiger sniffs at him from above. Trembling, the man looks down and discovers that another tiger below is waiting to eat him should he fall. The only thing that holds the man up is the vine, and it is now being gnawed at by two mice near the top of the cliff.

As the man looks around at his predicament, he sees a luscious strawberry on a nearby branch. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucks the strawberry with the other.

“How sweet it tastes!” he says.

Source: “To Die Laughing,” from The Healing Power of Humor, by Allen Klein

I traveled to the airport in a hotel shuttle. On the way I told the driver, a Peruvian immigrant, about the talk I had given this weekend and about my vision of a more beautiful world, and at one point, by way of illustration, I said, “Here you are driving back and forth to the airport all day — surely you must have moments when you think, ‘I was not put here on earth to do this.’”

“Yeah, that’s for sure,” he said.

I can’t help but think the same as I watch the cashier at the airport kiosk, typing in purchase items and handing out change and saying, “Thank you sir, have a nice day,” and the man going from trash can to trash can, emptying them into his cart and changing the plastic bag, silent and sullen, wooden-faced. What kind of world have we created, that a human being spends all day doing such tasks? What have we become, that we are not outraged by it?

The men and women at the ticket counters and gate counters have slightly more stimulating work, work that might take a few days or weeks to master, rather than a few hours, but still, their work falls far short of engaging the ability and creativity of a human being (although it might be satisfying for other reasons, like service to others, making people happy, meeting people, etc.). The same goes for the flight attendants. Only the pilots, air traffic controllers, and mechanics do work that might reasonably occupy the learning capacities of the human mind for more than a few months.

Strange it is to me, that the very worst, most brutal of all these jobs also receive the lowest pay. I understand the economics of it, but something in me rebels against that logic and wants the baggage handlers, drivers, and cashiers to be paid more, not less, than the pilots.

Without these menial workers, this airport and this society would not run in its current form. My travel depends on their labor, labor for which they are paid barely enough to survive.

And why do they consent to such work? Certainly not because of any aspiration to spend their lives doing it. If you can ask one of them why they do it, they will tell you, if they are not too insulted to speak, “I have to do it. I have to make a living, and this is the best work I could find.”

So my trip today is only happening because people are doing jobs they don’t want to do, for the sake of their survival. That’s what “making a living” means. A threat to survival is, essentially, a gun to the head. If I force you to labor for me under threat of death, then you are my slave. To the extent we live in a world that runs on the labor of many people doing jobs that are beneath human dignity, not just in airports of course, but in factories, sweatshops, plantations, and nearly everywhere else, we live in a slave world. Anything we obtain from the labor of slaves comes at an insupportable spiritual cost: a painful void or disintegrity deep within that makes us ashamed to look people in the eye.

Can we bear to shrug this away and resign ourselves to living in a slave world? I want to be able to look every man and woman in the eye, knowing that I do not benefit from their indignity.

Source: “A Slave World,” from Sacred Economics, by Charles Eisenstein

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter-” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We now the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here-time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.

Suppose we try to return one of the elements to its source. Suppose we return the sunshine to the sun. Do you think that this sheet of paper will be possible? No, without sunshine nothing can be. And if we return the logger to his mother, then we have no sheet of paper either. The fact is that this sheet of paper is made up only of “non-paper elements.” And if we return these non-paper elements to their sources, then there can be no paper at all. Without “non-paper elements,” like mind, logger, sunshine and so on, there will be no paper. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it.

There are many lessons we can learn during the course of our lives that can help us overcome our problems and live in contentment.

In this post I would like to share some of the greatest such lessons I have learned. For this reason I have compiled a list of 25 spiritual lessons that I find of utmost importance that anyone should try to understand and always keep in mind:

1. Never let anyone’s behavior tell you what to do. You are a free being and responsible for your actions.
2. We are all connected. If you help another being, you are helping yourself. If you hurt another being, you are bound to hurt yourself.
3. Don’t be afraid of painful experiences. Pain is neither good nor bad in itself, but we can deal with it in good and bad ways.
4. When you drop all desires and expectations about how people should be, you will never feel deceived or hurt again.
5. All fears ultimately come down to the fear of death. Unless you become familiar with the idea of death, you will never be able to truly live care-free.
6. You cannot know more about another person than you can know about yourself. And the more you get to know yourself, the better you will understand others.
7. True love can never be hurt, because it gives without asking anything in return. So even if love is unseen or rejected by those at whom it is directed, it keeps on being what it is.
8. Pleasure and pain are two aspects of the same coin. You can never have one without the other.
9. By treating the symptom you won’t cure the disease. Instead, try to get rid of the root-cause.
10. There is no God higher than Truth.
11. Don’t focus you attention on what people say or do. Rather, seek to find out their motive for speaking and acting the way they do (this also applies to yourself).
12. Speak the truth, no matter what the consequences. Being honest is the only way to be at peace with yourself and others.
13. Possessions can possess you. Let go of your attachments to your belongings.
14. We all come to this world alone and leave this world alone. Don’t be afraid to be experience aloneness, because only in this way will you be able to confront yourself as you truly are.
15. Never submit yourself to any relationship. True friendship can flower only under the sun of mutual respect.
16. When you lose a friend, don’t hurry to replace him with another one. Instead, find the space to examine your heartache.
17. Sometimes your enemies can help you more than your friends. Enemies are always willing to point out to the negative aspects of yourself.
18. Gratification does not mean contentment. Gratification comes and goes, contentment stays with you forever.
19. Don’t mistake desire for love. Desire is a passionate fire, love is calm breeze.
20. Everyone is motivated either by fear or by love. Choose to be motivated by love.
21. Seek to change yourself, not the world. Unless you embody the change you  want to see in the world, the world will remain the same for you.
22. Don’t try to escape from unpleasant experiences with others. See this as an opportunity to better understand people, instead of projecting your own images on them.
23. There is no knowledge other than self-knowledge. Unless what you get to know transforms yourself, it cannot be called true knowledge.
24. Your beliefs shape your perceptions, just like sunglasses color what you see.
25. Don’t imitate others. Create your own path and walk on it.

Many people claim that God–the ultimate Good–is outside of us and beyond ourselves.

I say God is within ourselves, and we can all experience God.

Here are three ways to do so:

Create

Myth has it that God created the world, and that the moment we create, we partake in the Creator.

So many painters, musicians, poets, and other artists claim that they experience God while they are creating. They say that when they involve themselves in the process of creation, they can experience a state of freedom and delight that transcends the normal states of consciousness–an experience that is beyond what words can express.

What is it that you love creating? Maybe you enjoy writing? Then take a paper and a pen and write down your deepest thoughts. Or perhaps you enjoy painting? Then take a brush and a canvas and paint with the colors of your heart.

Remember: What you create does not matter–what matters is the act of creation.

Share

Existence (which to me is just another name for God) has given you so much open-handendly, without asking anything in return.

Do the same to those around you–share freely, without expectations or conditions.

Is there something you have that may benefit others? Whatever that might be, share it with those that are willing to receive it.

Don’t hoard what you possess. Give, and experience the Giver.

Love

I am not a Christian, but I like a sentence that is found in the bible: ‘God is love.’ To experience love is to experience the highest feeling there is–a Godly feeling.

Love is sharing, with only one difference. When we share, we usually share objects. But to love means to share your very self.

Love allows you to expand yourself and embrace other living beings. It also allows you to perceive yourself as part of a bigger whole and realize your connectedness with all there is.

Love, and you’ll feel complete.

And the premise of this map is lack—not enough of anything, from energy to food to parking spots; not enough goods and not enough goodness. In such a world, we come to believe, it’s compete or die. The popular British writer Philip Pullman says, “we evolved to suit a way of life which is acquisitive, territorial, and combative” and that “we have to overcome millions of years of evolution” to make the changes we need to avoid global catastrophe.

If I believed that, I’d feel utterly hopeless. How can we align with the needs of the natural world if we first have to change basic human nature? Fortunately, we don’t have to. A new way of seeing that is opening up to us can form a more life-serving mental map. I call it “eco-mind”—looking at the world through the lens of ecology. This worldview recognizes that we, no less than any other organism, live in relation to everything else. As the visionary German physicist Hans-Peter Dürr puts it, “There are no parts, only participants.”

As part of this shift, breakthroughs in a range of disciplines are confirming what we already know about ourselves, if we stop and think about it: That humans are complex creatures and what we do—from raising children to caring for elders to sharing with our neighbors—exhibits at least as much natural tendency to cooperate as to compete.

The view that our species is basically brutal defies the evidence: “There is a very tiny handful of incidences of conflict and possible warfare before 10,000 years ago,” says archaeologist Jonathan Haas of the Field Museum in Chicago, “and those are very much the exception.” Our species has a vastly longer experience evolving in close-knit communities, knowing our lives depended on one another. The result is at least six inherent traits we can foster, once we learn to navigate the world with the map of eco-mind.

1. Cooperation
It turns out that cooperating and co-creating explain our evolutionary success just as much as competition does. No wonder neuroscientists using fMRI scans discovered that when human beings cooperate, our brains’ pleasure centers are as stimulated as when we eat chocolate!  And what were the evolutionary pressures that turned us into cooperators?

In her 2009 book Mothers and Others, University of California, Davis, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy challenged the accepted belief that our penchant for cooperation emerged through bonding to fight our neighbors. No, she says. Over most of the 200,000 years we’ve been around, there were simply too few of us to warrant fighting over territory. Instead, our capacity for cooperation evolved in response to our unique breeding culture. While other primates generally don’t trust others to care for their infants, humans have long turned to aunties, grandmas, and friends to help care for their babies from birth. With these “helpers,” children have the “luxury of growing up slowly, building stronger bodies, better immune systems, and in some cases bigger brains,” Hrdy surmises. It is this capacity for cooperation, honed through shared child rearing, that most distinguishes Homo sapiens, claims Hrdy.

2. Empathy 
Cooperation is made possible by empathy, and it, too, seems to be a capacity deeply carved into us. We see a hint of early empathy in the finding that babies cry at the sound of other babies crying but rarely at a recording of their own cries.

In the 1990s, Italian scientists first discovered what many now see as a cellular foundation of empathy: “mirror neurons” in our brains. When we are only observing another’s actions, it turns out, these neurons fire as if we were actually performing the observed actions ourselves. Evidence grows that mirror neurons respond to emotional states as well as actions.

A study in Science in 2008 reported that we actually get greater pleasure from giving than receiving. Given what we are learning about our cooperative, empathetic capacities, it should be no surprise that psychologists estimate that, on average, more than 80% of happiness comes from relationships, health, spiritual life, friends, and work fulfillment. Only 7% is about money.

3. Fairness 
Fairness lives within most of us, for we learned long ago that injustice destroys community—the bonds of trust on which our individual survival depends. Plus, fairness seems to make us feel good, even when at our own expense, Naturereported in 2010. In a simple experiment, pairs of young men were given $30 apiece, while one in each pair got a $50 bonus. The brain’s reward center responded in those who got the bonus. No surprise. The surprise came when those lucky men were asked to imagine how they would feel if they got another bonus, or if the next bonus went to their partners. The second scenario, the one reducing inequality, was the one that lit up the brain’s pleasure center.

4. Efficacy 
Could our species have made it this far if we were essentially couch potatoes, shoppers, and whiners? I don’t think so. We are doers. Our need to “make a dent” in the wider world is so great, argued social philosopher Erich Fromm, that we should toss out René Descartes’ theorem, “I think, therefore I am,” and replace it with: “I am, because I effect.”

The trait seems to show up even in tiny babies. Three-month-olds respond with pleasure to a moving mobile. But a study shows that they “prefer to look at [a] … mobile they can influence themselves,” writes Professor Alison Gopnik in The Philosophical Baby. Plus, “they smile and coo at it more too.” For Gopnik, the finding suggests that even the youngest among us enjoy making things happen and seeing the consequences.

In a widely known experiment carried out in the 1970s, Harvard psychologists Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin divided nursing home residents into two groups. In one, residents had choices as to where to receive visitors and when to watch movies; they were also given houseplants to care for. Residents in the second group did not have these choices.

After a year and a half, the Harvard investigators found that fewer than half as many residents in the more engaged group had died. Langer attributes the stunning difference to the enhanced “mindfulness” of those making more choices. I see the outcome differently. For me, the longer lives of those responsible for themselves and their plants affirm that we thrive when we feel we have power.

5. Meaning 
Human beings are creatures of meaning, seeking ways to give our days value beyond ensuring our own survival. The prominence of religion certainly attests to this need. But even the private act of voting may express this need, it dawned on me recently. Rationally, I can easily see that my single vote isn’t likely to decide anything. But entering the voting booth, I feel a quiet sense of pride welling up because I know I’m playing my part in a larger human drama—protecting a democratic ideal by my act.

6. Imagination, Creativity, and Attraction to Change
In The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik writes: “More than any other creature, human beings are able to change. … What neuroscientists call plasticity—the ability to change in light of experience—is the key to human nature at every level from brains to minds to societies.” The great evolutionary advantage of human beings is our ability to escape the constraints of instinct, Gopnik reminds us. Both “using tools and making plans … depend on anticipating future possibilities,” and we can see these “abilities emerging even in babies who can’t talk yet.”

Human beings’ unique capacity for imagination ends this list because—coupled with our plasticity—it is what enables us to envision and make the changes we must in order to draw forth the other five essential qualities. And it is this imaginative self that takes pleasure in the challenge.
But if we’re so great . . .

If humans are all the above, then why in the world do we mindlessly participate every day in a social ecology that generates so much destruction and misery for so many? For me, answering that question starts with acknowledging that the six magnificent traits above are only part of being human. But history, as well as laboratory experiments in which we are the guinea pigs, reveals that most of us have every bit as much ability to be competitive, selfish, and even horribly cruel.

So, given those potentials, why are we choosing the traits that are getting us, and the rest of life on the planet, in such trouble? And what will it take to bring out those six strong traits and use them to change where we’re headed? Here’s where the eco-mind comes to the rescue. Seeing with an eco-mind means fully appreciating the power of context—including conditions we ourselves create—to determine the qualities we express. So the question for humanity seems relatively straightforward. Which social rules and norms have proven to bring out the worst in humans, and which bring forth the best while protecting us from the worst? Here’s my take. At least three conditions have been shown over our long history to elicit the worst in us:

1. Extreme power inequalities. From historical oppression to today’s unprecedented economic disparity.

2. Secrecy, which allows us to evade accountability—as occurred when the financial industry, operating without transparency and public oversight, brought the global economy to its knees.

3. Scapegoating, where we create “the other” to blame, whether it’s kids crying “he did it” on a playground or citizens at a town meeting shouting down a congressperson.

All three negatives seem to arise with ferocity in cultures premised on lack, where continuous rivalry is presumed. Sadly, each has been on the rise in the United States for at least three decades. And within our culture’s mental map, it all feels inevitable. Our empathy and enjoyment in cooperation, our deep sensitivity to fairness, and our need for meaning, efficacy, and creativity—all are stifled in societies where power is tightly held and opportunities shut off for so many.

For me, it’s no surprise, then, that scholars uncover a “strong relationship” between the extent of economic inequality and mental illness across countries. This mismatch between the things we know bring out the best in us and the cultures we live in helps me understand why depression has become a global pandemic.

With an eco-mind we stay focused on the social ecology we ourselves are creating that denies us the best in our species’ own nature. Knowing all this about ourselves, our challenge seems clear: We need to reverse those three dangerous trends and, instead, disperse power, enhance transparency, and foster mutual accountability. In the process, we will create a culture of alignment with nature in which human needs are met in ways that dissolve the presumption of lack.

The key is what I call “Living Democracy,” which consists not only of accountable forms of governance but also of a daily practice: a set of values—among them inclusion, fairness, and mutual accountability—that infuse everything we do in daily life. It is living what Oxford physiologist Denis Noble observes about biological systems in his book The Music of Life: “There are not privileged components telling the rest what to do. There is rather a form of democracy [involving] every element at all levels.” The interaction of those components, Noble says, creates the shape of life.

With this understanding, opportunities to be effective appear everywhere: We can build citizen movements, replacing “privately held government” with elections and governance accountable to citizens. And we can rebuild our own mental maps by doing the hard work of actively nurturing our own positive proclivities rather than taking them for granted. Just one specific example: When students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, decided to launch a student-organized sustainability course, collaborating with the administration in order to green their campus, they realized their success would depend in large measure on how well they practiced what I call the “arts of democracy”—such people skills as active listening, mediation, negotiation, and creative conflict. They got training, stuck with it, and their course has spread to other University of California campuses, touching the lives of thousands.

With an eco-mind, we know that if we’re all connected, we’re all implicated. We look bravely at our nature and realize we don’t have to cajole others to be “better.” Instead, we can get on with creating social rules and norms proven to elicit the best in us—which is plenty. We then have a chance of making this century’s planetary turnaround an epic struggle for life so vivid and compelling that it satisfies our deep needs for connection, fairness, and meaning.

Source: “Free the (Eco) Mind,” from Yes! Magazine, by Frances Moore Lappé

Zazen means sitting in silence, a state of being in non-judgmental awareness.

The Japanese word Zazen is not easy to translate. Terms like “concentration” or “meditation” are somehow not suitable, because they imply that the mind centers itself around an object. Even the common term “meditation” originally describes a process of contemplating about an object. But what is Zazen?

One day seeing Yakusan sitting in Zazen, Sekito asked him: “What are you doing?”
Yakusan answered: “I’m not doing anything at all.”
Sekito said: “In that case, you are sitting idly.”
Yakusan replied: “If I were sitting idly, the I would be doing something.”
Sekito asked: “You say you are not doing anything. What is this ‘not doing’?”
Yakusan replied: “Not even the ten thousand sages know.”

Zazen is doing nothing. We are however used to constantly doing something. “To do” something without goal or purpose seems an unnecessary waste of time to us. Activity gives us the feeling of continuity regardless of the actual sense or nonsense of our actions. Therefore we prefer to engage in thousands of other things rather than starting with Zazen. Most of our problems are rooted in the inability to sit silently. Particularly western people are very restless. We waste our live in endless activities. Our mind never quietens. We are carried away in an never ending cycle of events. Unaware of the deeper motives of our actions, we remain involved in an endless chain of cause and reaction.

Zazen is stopping. But usually we are ready to do this only if we find that our motives and actions do not lead to the desired success. We rather tend to project our thoughts and we do things to make impressions on others. We want to be seen in certain ways by others. But in this way we are constantly looking on others, loosing ourselves. As long as one does not know oneself, one wants to become something or is imagining to be something and is disappointed if one is not loved.

Zazen is not goal-oriented, it is without purpose and without supportive devices. Zazen is observation and let go. Zazen is to be here and now. However, we experience the present moment only once our consciousness is free from the processes of thought and identification. It is not the achieving of a goal, but the state of being awake, which then has it’s own meaning.

Zazen is direct seeing into the nature of one’s own being. There is no conception, no object, over which one meditates. Our brain forms and stores emotional, conceptual and graphical samples and interprets them. Zazen is awareness without anticipation. All interpretations are the attempt to derive the future from the past. This way we miss the direct perception of the world. To let go of accumulated knowledge seems dangerous to us, because it means the end of routine and security.

Zazen is silence, stability and openness. The body is like a mountain, the spirit is like the sky. If too many thoughts are clouding the perception, we not only loose contact with ourselves, we also loose compassion and humanity. But even when it is cloudy, the sun is shining behind the clouds. If thoughts and emotions are calming down, we start remembering the nature of ourselves. Like undisturbed water, our consciousness returns to it’s natural state.

Zazen is not an auto-hypnotic technique and has nothing to do with any kind of visualizations. The awareness is wide and open and not focused in any way. It is not pondering and wandering around terms or phantasies. Zazen means to become aware of the film which is playing on the screen of our mind, seeing thoughts come and go without judgment or fixation.

Zazen is not concerned with metaphysical speculation or spectacular experiences; it has nothing to do with mystification, esotericism or new age.

Zazen is not asceticism. Zazen is not a dry and serious affair. Zazen is a play, the highest play you can play, alone or with others.

Zazen is returning to the source, becoming intimate with oneself.

The Practice of Zazen

Zazen can be practiced alone or in a group.

In a calm room, one chooses a place where one feels comfortable and can stay silent throughout the sitting. Zazen is not an escape from the world. One must not create a separation between oneself and the world and it is not necessary to look for a perfect outer situation.

Before one begins to sit, it is good to relax by shaking, stretching or other body exercises. One’s clothes should be loose, in order to breathe freely. As a beginner, one should not struggle to sit for an uncomfortably long time. It is good to start off with half an hour and to gradually extend the time of sitting intuitively.

Usually one sits in the half lotus position on a cushion facing a neutral wall or looking ahead into an open space. A Zafu cushion filled with Kopak or buckwheat has the right hardness, so that one neither sinks nor sits unpleasantly hard. As a substitute, one can also use a folded blanket to sit on. A blanket or a soft carpet on the floor provides added comfort as well as protection against the cold. It is necessary to sit straight up with the knees touching the ground so that the spinal column stands comfortably in a vertical position. One sits on the front section of the cushion and crosses one’s legs.

In the full lotus position the left foot is placed on the right thigh and the right foot on the left thigh. Since however in the west we are not accustomed to sitting like this, the half lotus position is recommended as an easier alternative. This posture requires that only the right foot be placed on the left thigh.

If one sits properly upright, both knees should touch the ground. It is important to realize that it is not necessary to torture oneself in any way! The form just serves to enable one to sit freely. Asceticism or other ideals have nothing to do with Zen. If the half lotus position is impossible, one can cross one’s legs without putting one foot on the high of the other one. If even that is impossible, other alternatives are to sit on a meditation bench or to sit on a cushion in a kneeling position. Those who are unable to sit on the ground can sit in a chair while meditating.

Ultimately the search for the right way to sit should be guided by trusting our own senses. If the body is balanced it carries itself and one is able to sit quietly, and there is no reason to do anything, outwardly or inwardly. It is important not to lean upon anything and to find a relaxed and strain free attitude. The back is held naturally and the shoulders are relaxed. The arms fall easily and freely, a little away from the body. The head is held upright and the chin sits is relaxed and a little back. The hands rest underneath the navel,whereby the left hand rests in the right hand, so that the middle joints of the fingers lie on top of each other. The thumbs touch and the view is soft and directed about a meter before one towards the ground. One’s half-closed eyes do not look at anything in particular, even if one sees everything intuitively! The view goes inward. One’s mouth is closed.

The Breath

While sitting the breath is not manipulated. If one sits correctly, breathing occurs in a natural way by itself. After a short time a natural rhythm arises, the body’s center of gravity is shifted downward and the breath flows gently on it’s own. After exhaling deeply the inhalation follows completely naturally. Zazen means to see the reality of one’s existence,without interpreting it. The observer is not identified with the observed. The perception is direct. The mind is like a mirror. The internal processes are observed without judgment. Thoughts come and go like clouds. Neither does one try to hold thoughts, nor does one suppress them. They are guests, coming and going. Although they are present, one is free of them.

The Spirit

The spirit flows freely without holding on to anything. The journey is completely open. Eased and open one enters with the whole being, without spending energy. Our memory constantly projects new movies onto the internal canvas. If you find yourself lost in thoughts, just let go. As if before a mirror, everything passes by. Here there is no work to do, no right or wrong, no confusion. The awareness is total, without judgment. The heart and the mind are quiet. Without conceptions of space and time one is here now. Simply sitting, and that’s it. One is free and at the same time conditioned by everything.

The first step is to remember one’s own nature and get rooted therein. If one becomes capable of observing thoughts and feelings in one’s everyday life, one becomes independent of the form of sitting. Without hunting for things, one plays an active part in day to day life. Out of the polarity between silence and action contrasts and contradictions appear in a new light. From this arises an insight into the mutual interdependence of all appearances, compassion, an intelligence of the heart, and a great liberty.

Truth is a land without highways and there are no absolute claims. No organization, no believes, no dogmas, no priests, no philosophical knowledge and no psychological techniques can help us to know ourselves and to be ourselves. We have to realize truth through the mirror of our relationships and by watching the content of our mind. The uniqueness of mans life lies not in second hand knowledge which books, traditions or symbols supply, but in the total freedom of all of this.

Source: “Zazen,” from artedojo.com