Archive for category: Consciousness/Thriving

Dictionaries specify that the word “judgment” refers to the process of forming an opinion after careful consideration. Judgments have their place in a court of law where, by social agreement, authority is granted to a judge or jury to determine whether or not someone’s behavior is or is not in accordance with the law. However, while no one has granted us the authority to play judge and jury in our personal lives, most of us make snap judgments all the time declaring our approval or disapproval of whatever and whomever we are observing or experiencing. The problem is that these snap judgments forgo careful consideration, and are typically merely the automatic expression of our personal prejudices and pet peeves. They happen so fast that we often have trouble distinguishing between our judgments and reality, and sometimes we are not even aware of the fact that we are judging ourselves or others. These little judgments, whether we say them out loud or not, are often extremely damaging to those we judge.

Typically, our point of view is built upon thousands of little snap judgments and assumptions we make about who and what we encounter in our lives. This amalgamation becomes so familiar to us that we seldom question its veracity. Here’s an experiment for you. Spend about five minutes observing your mind chatter while out in public without judging what you hear yourself thinking. Notice how often you make snap judgments. For example, “He could afford to lose a few pounds,” or “I really love the color of her hair,” or “Oh, yuck, it’s raining.” Now, you might say those aren’t judgments, they are observations. On closer inspection, notice that each of these statements probably carried with it a level of approval or disapproval, which is what makes them judgments. Observations have no emotional charge — no personal vote for or against what is being seen or experienced. For example, “It’s raining. I’ll get an umbrella,” has no charge.

Snap judgments are a form of positional thinking — right/wrong, good/bad, desirable/undesirable. Energetically, each time we make one of these judgments, we are either accepting or rejecting someone or something. When the vote is positive, there is no harm unless it occurs in a relationship where one person’s sense of self-worth is dependent upon the approval of the other. When snap judgments are negative, they are a form of emotional pollution and depending on the intensity of the judgment, they can impart psychic violence. For example, just recently, I was with a friend and her husband. She did a few things that annoyed him. While I understood why he was perturbed, I was shocked by the vehemence of his verbal reaction to her. I literally felt my body automatically contract in fear, and his remarks were not even directed at me.

Whether spoken or not, snap judgments have a powerful influence on us and the emotional environment we share. Psychologists and linguists have estimated that about 80 percent of communication is nonverbal, with one UCLA study finding that as much as 93 percent of communication is dictated by nonverbal factors.

Energetically, imagine how much damage all these judgments are doing to people. Consider the overweight man. Don’t you think he knows or feels that people are judging him? What would it be like for him if he received an overwhelming amount of compassion rather than judgment? Do you think he would notice the difference?

For many, judgment is a way of life. Did you ever meet one of those people who thinks he or she is always right? They can be very convincing and so emphatic that it can be disarming to stand in a different point of view. Even without an audience, we can be so used to our own points of view that anything or anyone who doesn’t agree with us can be immediately seen to be false and be rejected like a knee-jerk reaction, without consideration of possible merit.

Imagine what might happen if we all started to hold ourselves accountable for the impact our snap judgments have on others. What if my friend’s husband observed her behavior with more neutrality and saw the situation as a time when he needed to dig a little deeper to access his love for her rather than thoughtlessly attacking her in front of her friend? We always have kinder options available to us. The trick is having the sense to choose them. This takes practice, but just as snap judgments can become a habitual behavior, so can kindness. We just have to choose to be conscious and responsible for our behavior and practice, practice, practice kinder reactions to each other.

A negative snap judgment carries with it some kind of rejection and punishment. It may simply be the act of pulling ourselves back from the other person, creating separation. Or it can involve the spewing of a lot of negative attitude and lack of cooperation, or fists might fly. The kinder alternative is to establish the habit of reacting with greater neutrality by simply observing what is happening and calmly communicating your concerns and preferences with clarity and kindness. People aren’t wrong because they don’t agree with you. They just see things differently from their point of view. Cultivate an attitude of curiosity to better understand why others look and behave in ways other than what you prefer. You might be surprised how much compassion you feel when you choose to contribute to a safe emotional environment for everyone.

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“There is a struggle that is more interesting than pleasure or ego satisfaction… There is something far more interesting than what money can buy.” — Jacob Needleman

I find it fascinating that 92 percent of Americans claim belief in God yet current politics suggest that only 1 percent of us have it all while the other 99 percent share in experiencing not enough. If we are all equal in the eyes of God, how come we are so far from that in the eyes of man? What have we created, promoted and allowed to happen here?

All major religious and spiritual traditions urge us to live our lives from the inside out, expressing outward into the world instead of in reaction to externals. We are urged to ground our consciousness in the core of our being where we find a oneness with others that allows us to be together in a loving, caring and cooperative manner. Whether one believes that this core of our being is God or love or something else, when we touch into this place an urge to unite is aroused. Some fear that this urge to unite is diametrically opposed to personal material wealth and comfort. Others suggest that as in the two parables of the loaves and the fishes where Jesus is said to have fed a multitude with just a few small barley loaves and fish, compassion creates possibilities that are invisible to those driven by self-interest.

Since we are social beings, we are individually and collectively faced with an existential challenge regarding our level of concern for the welfare of others. Each collective, whether a family, a country or our entire global community, contributes to the state of our consciousness through the creation of a particular set of social systems and culture. Each collective encourages us towards certain beliefs, desires and behaviors, and discourages us from others. Each inclines its members towards competition or cooperation in relationships with others.

Unfortunately, in contemporary American society the two major relationship models are co-dependency and competition. Neither fosters a strong sense of self-worth, equality or caring for one another. As a result, most individuals end up as losers in these models.

Money and material wealth have become the language and measurement of human value. Our economic system, which necessitates growth to survive, serves as the bedrock of society. The structures and norms of our society are designed to ensure the survival of our economy and have cast us in the roles of producers and consumers, ceaselessly barraged by commercial enticements to stimulate and indulge our desires. This entraps us in a system that serves too few at the expense of too many and leaves us with little time or energy to explore other dimensions of our selves. For too many of us, our material success has brought with it a poverty of spirit.

Distracted by the external world, we lose sight of the intimate dance of the relativity of our mental, emotional and spiritual selves with one another. Yet, it is the social dimension of our lives that gives moral meaning to our individual and collective choices. Perhaps this is why the fundamental teachings of all the major world religions contain a version of the Golden Rule to guide us in our social interactions.

When we look outward instead of inward, it is easy to become disconnected from a deep sense of the relevance of our being and our connection to one another. Too many of us are caught up in the illusion that our personal happiness and success in life will be achieved through the acquisition and accumulation of monetary wealth and possessions. Yet, ultimately, we come to realize that financial and material riches are empty and unsatisfying in the absence of a state of consciousness that deeply connects us to others. Indeed, a diamond ring or a Hummer is of little comfort on your deathbed.

Ultimately each of us is responsible for the priorities we set in our lives, the choices we make and the effects they have on ourselves and others. We come to realize that financial and material riches are empty and unsatisfying in the absence of a state of consciousness that deeply connects us to others.

Many of us, disillusioned by the empty promises of the gravy train, are instead boarding the generosity train, delighting in its riches of loving, caring and sharing and are finding ourselves humbled and surprised by the abundance that is achievable when we first ground ourselves in a consciousness that is concerned about the highest good of all concerned. As the signs and wonders of this powerful shift in consciousness take hold, it manifests in new attitudes, beliefs and actions and a commitment to reach for something higher and nobler within and among ourselves.

In Buddhist teachings, greed, hate and ignorance are considered three poisons in human consciousness that lead to the evil we create in the world that is the ultimate source of our suffering. The practice of generosity is the first stage of the Buddhist spiritual path and an opportunity for any of us to reverse a greed-based view of life. Giving with a kind, loving heart opens the human spirit to fulfillment through nonattachment and loving kindness. It lightens our mind, makes us more available to insight and sets us free from our greed.

Perhaps I sound like a Pollyanna socialist to some. I assure you, I am neither. I am simply someone who thinks we have taken a devastatingly expensive wrong turn in our search for happiness. My goal is to raise consciousness about this so we can do something constructive that has the potential to bring us a whole lot more happiness in our lives.

I have a request — please watch the following two videos about generosity.

• Nipun Mehta — “Designing For Generosity”
• Sasha Dichter — “The Generosity Experiment”

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

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Sometimes, I walk through this world and just marvel at the fact that we are all souls with individualized karmic agendas. Our lives and stories are woven together in a perfect complexity of clearing our individual and collective karmic accruals. It is as though we have a kind of karmic DNA built into our physical, mental and emotional makeup, as well as our identity as male or female, our socioeconomic circumstances, relationship patterns, membership in a particular family, race and religious tradition. I have come to believe that before we incarnate each lifetime, we, as souls, choose the role we will play on the world stage that offers us the best possibility of clearing our karmic accruals.

I have always puzzled over the idea that we are all equal when our capabilities and opportunities vary so greatly. Prior to comprehending that we are divine beings, I thought equality was a nice idea destroyed by human greed. In fact, our equality exists regardless of human greed because it is as individual expressions of the divine that we are truly equal. Spiritual energy flows to us and through us as an equal-opportunity employer — like the sun. However, given our unique karmic accruals, we vary in our awareness of ourselves as spiritual beings and in our capacity to open ourselves up to the wisdom, guidance and upliftment of the divine. It is, therefore, for the highest good of our respective souls’ progressions to select unequal status in human form in order to work through our unique karmic agendas. So, on a spiritual level, a drunken bum is equal to a wise king, yet in physical and social status, he is not. Our equality is spiritual and manifests itself in physical form as an equal opportunity to fulfill our personal karmic agenda.

Our families usually provide fertile ground for encountering some of our heaviest karma. I was in my 50s when I started to see some of the actual karmic patterns and lessons presented to me through my family and woven into our lives together. Things that never made sense about our relationships suddenly made sense, and the childhood emotional wounds I had carried until then melted away in the light of this spiritual perspective. A resonance of truth and inner peace replaced all the years of anger, fear and frustration I had built up, especially in relationship to my father. I came to appreciate that we needed to be exactly as dysfunctional as we were in order to be presented with the opportunity to heal the karma involved. When I finally looked at my family relationships karmically, I saw them in an entirely different light which shattered many of my previously held beliefs, illusions and judgments about myself and my family members.

Here’s a specific example. Early on, I learned to give my father a wide berth. It was as though we had a personality allergy to each other. I could never get his approval, and spent a lot of time seeking it. He was a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy, and I was one who needed to walk to the beat of her own drum. It was a strained relationship at best and I never felt loved by my father. Then, in my 50s, several years after his death, I had a spiritual experience where I encountered him in the theater of my mind. I was blasting him for never having shown me any love, and I watched as a tear formed and fell out of his eye and rolled down his face. This disarmed me, as I had never seen him cry in real life. He looked me straight in the eye and told me that his assignment as a soul in relationship to me was to be my father and to never show me any signs of love or affection. This was intended to serve me in learning to turn inward and upward to find my truth rather than seeking it out in the world. My anger fell away, and something let go within me that had restrained me all my life. Somehow, I knew that what he was saying was true. I also knew that for the first time in my life, I was seeing my father as a soul. We were communicating soul to soul, and that changed me forever after.

The reality of our essential identities as souls came through in that moment in a way that redefined me and my history with my father. I no longer saw him as the heartless, self-centered ogre who could not and would not love me. Rather, he was a fellow soul, who in the most extraordinary act of love, took on this awful role in my life, knowing that I would hate him, and that he could never demonstrate his love for me or receive love from me. A deep root of anger, tension and self-rejection was pulled out of me as I rose into my soul and knew us both as innocent and pure souls rather than as damaged people. We were right on course with God’s perfect wisdom, timing and plan, balancing our karma and learning our lessons.

Where or when I incurred this spiritual debt, I do not know or need to know. What is clear is that it was an enormous blessing and I had to walk through the karma to prepare me to recognize the truth when it was finally revealed to me. So, when I looked into my father’s crying eyes in that momentary eternity, I was looking into his soul from mine and seeing a truth far more real than all our battles as father and daughter over the years.

I don’t obsess about karma, but it has completely changed my way of understanding our lives. There’s karma, karma everywhere and I’m beginning to see it as the compost of our learning, growth and spiritual upliftment.

Australian Aborigines are reputed to go on a six-month walkabout as a rite of passage when they are 13 years old. Spiritually, I now see us as a bunch of souls on a great, karmic walkabout on planet earth, where we are given the opportunity to learn important spiritual lessons as balancing actions to our karmic debts. We are so many souls traveling side by side, passing each other by, perhaps connecting with one another and reaching into that oneness that is so familiar — for a moment or a lifetime — yet elusive somehow. Each of us marches to the beat of our own mysteriously unique drum. As fellow travelers in a giant cosmic labyrinth, we take the same journey into the heart of it all and out again, ebbing and flowing, alone, yet one. Day moves into night and night to day. We are born. We live and learn. We die. We are recycled.

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Existential maturity (is) a kind of peaceful acceptance of mortality
and of the relationship between generations of life
that mitigates the pain of our transience
by allowing an understanding of how we can die
without entirely ceasing to exist.
— Linda Emmanuel

I must admit that I have fallen in love with this new term — existential maturity. While no measurement scale yet exists, I think it is safe to say that our culture would receive a very low score. An all-encompassing fear and avoidance of death permeates our culture and misdirects much of our energy into:

• seeking the fountain of youth through “age management,” rather than fully embracing all phases of life;
• being silenced rather than speaking up about our beliefs, thoughts, fears and concerns around dying and death; and
• postponing and avoiding end-of-life planning rather than seeing the opportunity to influence the quality of life’s end and to minimize confusion, stress, and suffering for loved ones.

The fear of death is at once culturally pervasive yet deeply private. The process of developing existential maturity involves recognizing and diminishing what Pema Chodron and her root teacher Chongpa Rinpoche refer to as “ubiquitous anxiety” — the underlying fear of uncertainty and not knowing what is happening or what is going to happen. It is a desire to feel safe, secure, and comfortable having all the answers in a world. Yet, our existential situation does not provide us with any certainty. Developing existential maturity requires moving our fears and anxiety to the background while enabling our love, courage, compassion, and authenticity to come to the foreground. It is what Pema Chodron calls “cultivating bravery,” so that we can be OK and not shut down in the face of our fears. When we choose to develop our own existential maturity, we also make a personal contribution to the collective process of transforming the culture of death from one of death-denial to one where we encounter death in a way that lovingly supports us as individuals, families, and as a society.

The origin of the term “existential maturity” can be traced to two individuals — Paul Wong and Rivca Gordon. In 2004, Wong posited an expanded vision of existential psychology in which “ethical, political and social considerations are inseparable from individual human existence.” On an individual basis, he urges us to find our true identity and to fulfill our most cherished dreams. “On a socio-cultural level,” Wong asks, “what could be done to change the conditions that perpetuate injustice and how can we facilitate community development?” And from the religio-moral perspective, he asks that we consider “what it means to treat others with respect and how we are to understand the meaning of suffering, pain and death.”

In Existential Thinking: Blessings and Pitfalls, written in 2007, Rivca Gordon discusses the idea of existential maturity within the context of the writings of Berdyaev. Existential maturity is said to occur “when a person undertakes the commitment to constantly choose to be a free human being” rather than being enslaved by external authorities. It “obliges a person to courageously and passionately strive to realize the utmost of his or her being, and to live the fullness of human existence.” The person acts “from the deepest core of his or her existential centre.” This act is an attempt to realize one’s human dignity as an end worthy in itself.

Combining the perspectives of Paul Wong, Rivca Gordon, and Linda Emmanuel, suggests that we enhance our existential maturity by living with conscious and compassionate commitment to evolving a fully developed way of dealing with our individual and shared existence. It is about living authentically — sourcing our thoughts and actions from the central, unbiased core of our being. It has to do with choosing an action not just because it is deemed to be the moral or socially “right” or “appropriate” thing to do, but because it reflects the truth as one knows it in the core of their being, and they choose to be a person who behaves in this way. It is a personal commitment to engage in the entirety of one’s life rooted in a sense of personal responsibility, accountability and integrity that is in alignment with what one perceives as truth. It is about personal authenticity and collective caring and compassion.

For so many of us, our lives pass by in an uninterrupted race against time with more things that we feel we simply must do than hours in the day, weeks, or years at hand. Life consumes us with very little opportunity to explore how we are living our life. Who among us records periodic appointments on our calendar to assess our existential maturity? Where is there a space in our lives to ask questions like:

• How’s my integrity?
• What really matters to me deep in the core of my being?
• What do I really believe about human life and death?
• Am I living my life from a place of personal authenticity, or am I being driven by external forces in an effort to live up to someone else’s idea of how I should live my life?
• Am I proud of myself as a human being?
• Am I paying attention to the lessons that are being presented to me in my life?
• Am I living with deep purpose according to the truth as I know it?
• Am I gaining wisdom?
• Am I maturing existentially?

I like to imagine what our lives and society would be like if we lived in a world that encouraged and valued existential maturity. What would it be like if we were taught and motivated to connect to a deep sense of self and to live our lives from that place? What if we actually talked to each other in a curious and inquisitive way about such existential matters as the meaning of life and death? What if there were no external pressure to conform to a particular point of view, but rather we were encouraged to deeply think about and voice our deepest beliefs so that a collective response could truly reflect the individuals involved? What if we did not silence certain members of our society and give megaphones to others? What if everyone’s voice and well-being really mattered?

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

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I always thought that babies should come with operating instructions and that parents-to-be should be required to pass a parenting test. After all, a license is required to drive a car. Surely a course in the basics of taking care of a baby’s physical and emotional needs would help. Beyond these basics, I dream of a world that acknowledges and nurtures the spiritual dimension of our being and teaches us how to be awesome human beings. It’s really very simple. It’s just not very easy. It takes a lot of focus, willingness and practice, practice, practice.

Being an awesome human being requires mastering the fine art of being a human being. The “man” part of being human has been carefully defined to distinguish us from “other primates.” Man/woman comes equipped with opposable thumbs, an erect posture, a highly developed brain, the capacity for abstract reasoning, and the ability to communicate and organize information based on a symbolic system of language. The “hu” part is best understood when we realize that it is a Sanskrit name for God that predates the anthropomorphic image of God as a fatherly, human figure. So, to be “human” means to be both divine and earthly at the same time. What a balancing act — to be a soul or spiritual being having an earthly embodiment.

To be an awesome human being requires three things:

1. To know that you are both spiritual and earthly.
2. To live consciously from the inside out, deeply connected to the truth as you know it.
3. To love yourself and others regardless of any considerations.

That’s it — just three things!

First, let’s look at what it means to be simultaneously aware of our spiritual and earthly existence. Wrapping our brains around this means grasping that we are at once limitless yet limited, of God yet earthly, finite yet eternal. We have the freedom to explore the vast complexity of our being as much or as little as we choose. Unfortunately, for many people there is no structure or stimulation in their lives to motivate such an exploration.

The world’s great religious teachings are filled with passages about what it means to be fully human. In The Wisdom Jesus, for example, Cynthia Bourgeault suggests that the incarnation of Jesus served the purpose of showing humanity how to fulfill “our only truly essential human task here … to grow beyond the survival instincts of the animal brain and egoic operating system into the kenotic joy and generosity of full human personhood.” Bourgeault notes how this claim of Jesus as the Christian role model for the human challenge of synthesizing physical and spiritual existence is affirmed in the gospels. Jesus frequently uses the term “I am,” as in “‘I am the shepherd,’ ‘I am the door,’ ‘I am the vine,’ ‘I am at your heart’s door knocking,’ ‘I am in you and you in me’ … In so doing, Jesus has identified himself with being itself.”

Whether looking through the lens of Christianity or some other theistic perspective, the challenge to know ourselves as both divine and earthly is there to be reconciled, and as Bourgeault suggests, it is our only essential human task. To know and to welcome God’s presence in ourselves is a worthy and essential vocation for us all.

The second requirement of being an awesome human being activates our conscious intention and choice. To live consciously requires the willingness to hold oneself responsible and accountable for one’s thoughts and behaviors. This eliminates such excuses as “I wasn’t thinking” or “I wasn’t paying attention.” To live consciously means to hold the intention of keeping your awareness present in the moment and building the ability to notice when your attention wanders to the past or future and then bringing it home to the present. It takes practice.

To live consciously from the inside out, deeply connected to the truth as you know it, means connecting the observations of your conscious awareness in the moment to the wisdom and truth that has been activated in your consciousness. A far richer life can be led from this deeper place of truth rather than the egoic external orientation of personal preferences and approval-seeking. When we reach outside for gratification, we are telling ourselves we are not enough and thus reside in a consciousness of lack. When we express outwardly from that deep inner place of truth, we have the ability to recognize what is true for us in the world because it resonates with the truth within us.

Finally, to love ourselves and others without conditions is the crowning achievement. This is not a matter of romantic love, but rather the feeling and expression of devotion to the well-being of ourselves and one another. It is a recognition of our kinship and underlying oneness. When we love in this way, we make nothing more important than loving one another. This kind of love is the most powerful force in the universe. It unites us as one through the trials and triumphs of life. Without it, we are separated by our judgments and personal, positional preferences. With it, we are magnificent. This kind of love is achieved through compassionate and caring choices made repeatedly day after day until it becomes who and how we are.

To be an awesome human being is not a matter of being perfect, for perfection does not exist in human form. We can only strive to do our best, humbled by the knowledge that we do in fact stumble and fall, and that those seeming “failures” are usually our most wonderful life lessons. To be awesome is to recognize and accept the challenge of being the very best “you” that you can be. Those who live this way serve as an inspiration to others to do and be the very best they can.

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

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