Awake in This Life

Stephen Dinan writes of The Spiritual Importance of Twitter:

Although I was a Twitter naysayer at first, I’m now convinced that Twitter is part of the spiritual evolution of our species. Its growth corresponds to the accelerating spread of a global consciousness, one in which our sense of boundaries no longer end at national boundaries and we are increasingly in touch with our sense of “oneness” with others.

Bows, @KosmicTom

Over at Shambhala SunSpace, Karen Maezen Miller writes of the struggle she’s had with the little girl initiation of Disney-inspired princesshood and Barbie marketing. This subject is near and dear to my heart as my wife and I are troubled with the bombardment our daughter receives from her peers.

Does the princess myth serve our daughter’s evolution as a healthy, well-adjusted being? Is Barbie an appropriate ideal for her? Are we foisting judgment onto something fairly innocuous; making a big deal over what should prove to be a temporary stage? How might we meet the influences we find harmful in a constructive manner?

Ms. Miller writes of her daughter’s Disney experience:

It is captivating to see a tiny child fall into pure and uncomplicated love. My daughter Georgia’s first major heartthrob was Snow White, who was just one in a color-coded sequence of princesses to be cherished, outgrown, and discarded, but we didn’t know that then. We didn’t know and we didn’t delay. When we took our daughter on her first trip to Disneyland, we strode right up to the real-life Snow White and watched our two-year-old flirt. Then, we bee-lined to the souvenir racks and forked over the bucks for a Snow White doll.

Several people close to our family find that my wife and I have over-thought this issue. Maybe they’re right. Certainly, the entire Disney experience was a source of enjoyment when I was young. The idea that fantasy could come partially alive, even in a corporate way, mystified me. I can remember the first time I went into the Haunted House, holding my father’s hand tightly with thrill and fear simultaneously coursing through my body. That same night, I remember getting on a boat that was to take us to meet the Pirates of the Carribean. I was entranced and  wanted reminders of the escape into the partial reality offered by Disney. I, too, wanted souveniers.

But something happened along the way that started to feel strange. I remember revisiting the Enchanted Kingdom in high school and recognizing that the entire Disney experience was designed to separate me from my money. Realizing this, I made sure that they succeeded only partially. But I noticed that Disney made a killing by using children as agents against their hardworking parents.

“Please, daddy, please,” they’d say. “Can I get a Mickey Mouse hat.” Or, after a visit with the marvelously made up girl, “I want to be just like Snow White.”

A short distance from the Snow White meeting, daddy is directed by his entranced daughter into a store that, in fact, sells Snow White regalia. Partial reality sells partial fantasy. Dad feels appreciated. Daughter is euphoric. All of it, temporary.

Barbie doesn’t seem much different. I’m concerned that, left unchecked, my daughter may let the psychological schema that Barbie fills assume a place in her own mind that it shouldn’t. I don’t want hypersexualized Barbie to breed adolescent self-loathing within my daughter or anyone else, for that matter. Nor do I want Disney’s partial reality to inspire commercial craving within anyone. But how do we, as parents, do this effectively?

In the process of recognizing these beliefs, I know that I must hold them loosely. less they become a hindrance for my daughter as well as my wife and me. Neither Disney nor Barbie will destroy my daughter. But walking this path is already starting to be a challenge. And she’s not quite two.

The Washington Post ran an interesting Deepak Chopra article on the evolution of “evil.”

…the Devil is the embodiment of absolute evil, the kind that admits no other explanation. His fortunes decline when valid explanations are at hand.

It seems to make most sense to me that evil is a blunt and inaccurate expression of what unconsciousness would best describe.

There is a brief piece over at Tricycle talking about Martin Seligman’s test for Authentic Happiness at UPenn.

I think this is all well and good, except for the fact that happiness is a state that ebbs and flows in time and because of this it is by nature temporary. So an “authentic” state, be it happiness or something else, appears to be merely a feeling to which the mind attaches.

Instead of looking to be perpetually and “authentically” happy, wouldn’t it make more sense for us to focus attention on our ability to stay present with whatever our state is, thus increasing an authentic awareness of what we might be experiencing at any given moment? This way we evolve and grow in ways that go beyond states. Additionally, our increased awareness can also include any state we might be in as our awareness becomes more acute, thus generating an ever-deepening presence. Presence isn’t a state, and therefore can’t be bound by time. Put simply, this means that the more aware we become, the more present we can be. The more present we can be, the more that freedom can spontaneously inform whatever state we might find ourselves to be in. From this presence practitioners can see that the most basic and ordinary of all states isn’t the temporary state of happiness, but the the timeless spaciousness of complete joy.

And there is a test for this that doesn’t require a registration of your email: simply look for resistance in your experience. If you’re feeling any kind of resistance, the mind is inhibiting joy.

Over at the elephant journal, Henry Schliff offers an interesting post looking at pop culture’s treatment of crazy wisdom:

Deconstruct the Joker, take away his violence and you have al-Khidr or any crazy mystic in comic style, the wrench thrower, the coyote, you can even keep the violence and he is Bhairava (sans-matted hair). The Joker character is another incarnation of Tyler Durden brought out of the split-psyche of humanity, the side ruled by chaos and destruction, a veritable force of nature whose only impetus is to derail the constructive impulse. I would say the Joker could almost be a budding Milarepa cutting away the constructs of religion to attain the heart of knowledge, except he falls short accepting the tried/true societal conditioning of evil, wreaking mayhem with violence and destruction, the expected norm of evil and fear.

The following point perfectly illustrates the danger that lurks within and without any teaching that readily reveals itself through a teacher like the Joker:

In the final analysis, this character inspires awe, fear, and confusion because he exhibits disinterest towards the trite and over simplistic concepts of good and evil we so often cling to and scoffs at attempted heroisms defined by chivalry and martyrdom. He embodies incorruptible chaos without logic, law, or code.

While great teaching helps us push through the boundaries of time and mind, if it isn’t met with some type of ethical code that supports “nonharming”, crazy wisdom can easily bring out the shadow elements in any of us; a shadow, by the way, that thinks it is Divine Light.

In the latest issue of Buddhadharma, a forum is hosted in which the future of Buddhism in America is discussed. An excerpt:

Forty or fifty years after the big influx of dharma to the West, we have a small but active and growing population of young practitioners. But what of the future, when the baby boomers are gone? What will become of the dharma with a relatively small number of young people waiting in the wings? To increase the numbers of young students, does the dharma need to become more relevant to younger people? If so, what will that look like?

Interesting conversation. Especially since it raised the hackles of arunlikhati at Dharma Folk.

While I can curse this article to no end, the Buddhadharma discussion finally opened my eyes to the way that white Buddhists see the Buddhist community. Dharma centers, sitting groups, meditation retreats, lay teachers, Free Tibet mailing lists and Buddhism-themed magazines are all part and parcel of white Buddhist culture. And white Buddhists want to preserve this. They want to build on this. But I can see that working with Asian Americans isn’t part of the plan.

Interesting points abound in this post, and I’m sure that fans of Integral Theory will notice the strong Green sentiments expressed.

I also enjoyed the post over at The Worst Horse:

The controversy is best boiled down to and centered around Dharma Folk’s contention that we can’t “discuss the future of the Buddhist community in America without talking about Asian Americans.” For my part, I think that’s true, but would like to reiterate that, indeed, the piece was intentionally conceived to talk about “dharma’s integration into the American culture,” (Winston’s phrasing) with an eye towards so-called “convert Buddhists.”

Fascinating. Egoic arguments over who deserves credit and blame; issues of race and identity. All of it interesting from the perspective of the ego. Not like the hurt feelings don’t matter, but until we can uncover the root of the pain, we’re just spinning the Karmic wheel of attachment, wondering why we’re suffering. If, on the other hand, an embodied realization that goes beyond this personal attachment is allowed to unfold any and every dialog has served to awaken all things.

In a previous post, I wrote of the dangers of “small self esteem”. Now Shambala Sun Space’s Andrea Miller blogs about her upcoming article:

Gen Me as a whole is caught in what she calls the self-esteem trap and it’s the way we’ve been raised that made us so.

The March issue of Shambhala Sun will feature the conversation I just had with Young-Eisendrath about how we can cultivate true self-confidence in ourselves and how we can best raise the next generation. For now, see this Globe and Mail article for taste of some of of Young-Eisendrath’s advice.

Over at Salon, Steve Paulson writes about biologist Stuart Kauffman’s new approach to God in his recent book, “Reinventing the Sacred”.

[Kauffman] seeks to formulate a new scientific worldview and, in the process, reclaim God for nonbelievers. Kauffman argues that our modern scientific paradigm — reductionism — breaks down once we try to explain biology and human culture. And this has left us flailing in a sea of meaninglessness. So how do we steer clear of this empty void? By embracing the “ceaseless creativity” of nature itself, which in Kauffman’s view is the real meaning of God. It’s God without any supernatural tricks.

He goes on to poke holes in the reductionist, or flatland approach, as Ken Wilber has spent so many pages doing.

It’s comforting in that the entire universe is seen to be lawful; we can understand everything, from societies to quarks. Yet a number of physicists, including Nobel laureates Philip Anderson and Robert Laughlin, feel that reductionism is not adequate to understand the real world. In its place, they talk about “emergence.” I think they’re right.

Here’s where it gets a little sticky for me. With all due respect for Dr. Kauffman and his attempts to realign spirituality into something more relevant, I worry that he’s confusing the Universe’s creativity with creativity’s source. That source, or Source, literally has “no thing” to it, and yet it gives birth to “some thing” in every moment. The agentic value of all somethings isn’t deniable, nor is agency separate from the Source. But agency isn’t God. The Source of agency, on the other hand, gets us closer to the substrate of all things that spontaneously bridges Itself with and into all things as a divine and messy creativity… in each moment.

Bows to Andrew Sullivan for the heads up.

Bows to Jonathan Doherty for this one.

Fascinating piece on the Utah and BYU rivalry from today’s New York Times:

As B.Y.U. players navigate the narrow alley onto the field, Utah fans on both sides hurl down insults that are as personal as they are profane. It feels less like an entrance than a perp walk.

Of course, some of those fans are themselves Mormon. They just happen to root for Utah.

“They know there are two things that are really personal — one is religion, two is family,” said Olsen, a former defensive tackle who finished his college career in 2000 and is now a sports talk radio host here. “So they’d throw out something like, ‘How many wives did you have to ask before you could play in this game?’ It’s all the typical stereotypes about Mormons. To hear that — and it would be the same for Catholics, Buddhists, Jews — it feels like they’re attacking God.”

Isn’t tribal-centric behavior interesting? Ah, rivalries: mind created orientations that so easily lead to internal violence.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed over the years is how there often seems to be more civility than cruelty in my own Cal v. Stanford experience. Yet I still find that there are those on both sides that generate amazing identification with their sense of belonging.

What’s not to belong to? Better yet, we all are members of all sides at the deepest levels of the Dharma.