Ego, Spirituality, and Free Will

Years ago I used to visit and have Satsang with a Surat Shabd Yoga Master who first introduced me to the truth that the ego is not the thing that is permanent and as we have spiritual struggles; oftentimes it is because we are hooked in to thinking that we are those ego selves and we were best served by not listening to the demands of the ego too much.    Her sister once said in conversation that many who believe in reincarnation get confused because they believe it is the personality that reincarnates when it is not.  That was decades ago, so I've had a little bit of time to think about that.

In my personal spiritual growth and amazing experiences, I've come to experience who I am underneath the personality / ego / mind stuff /brain from time to time.  It waxes and wanes with my meditative practice.  I and you are that eternal light and consciousness that propels physical form forth.

What hasn't been elaborated enough for me in my circles is the value of the ego / brain stuff in this physical explicit nature of reality.  However, Alan Watts talks of music and the strings of a harp and how if all the strings would be played at once, it is muddy but if none are played, it is silence.  We and the universe need to be a combination of sound and silence to make a song.  Even though I am understanding the illusory states that we are all engaged in, I am convinced that our ego selves and the way we live our lives in temporal existence is just as important as the intelligent consciousness of the primal stuff that bore us.  Why would this implicate order of intelligence manifest in to explicate and coarser reality that is comprised of matter and brain to produce thoughts, awareness, and choice?

Daniel Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist wrote a book entitled “Freedom Evolves” in which he addresses that free will is a human thing and required evolution in order for it happen.  It makes sense.  We see in everyday situations where some people whom we know could make things happen and don’t believe they have the ability just might not have found the way to exercise that free will.  It is true that money does unfortunately buy freedoms that those without money do not get.  I believe this is changing.  I believe people are waking up.  I believe that it is in the waking up that we are able to gain more awareness and it is in that awareness that we realize more of our free will for ourselves, others and the planet.

This morning I was half awake half asleep enjoying a hypnagogic dream.  An aspect of this hypnagogic dream was there were parallel thoughts running in comparison and relationship to each other.  I was watching a tree branch with leaves bud forth and older leaves dying out and thinking of life as shared, self-replicating, but improved as more evolved and having new intelligence.  The new life was clean and clear with unadulterated perspectives to experience life fresh and from where they had burst.   The energy from the old was moving through to the outer like sap, and generations of people and improvement upon self similar entities in evolution – and the shared spirit / consciousness behind feels like it does the same thing – grows and does more miraculous living within the implicate  “spirit” world.  It was the same shared energy source and I was feeling this sense of reincarnation in that nothing and nobody is a discrete personality or ego which moves on into a next life, but a purified blend of fresh knowledge and intelligence received from previous lives without the biases that ego would have. 

The laws of Karma, I don’t know.  Perhaps if you make some doo doo in your spiritual stream, then you have to deal with it down your own pathway.  HA! 

So the answer to my question of why have ego anyway, is I believe it is to experience life, and to beautifully be the stuff outside that moves the stuff inside along.  The explicate physicality feeds back in to the implicate spirituality (if one were to choose to look at this dualistically).  [Personally, I believe it is a continuum and that it is only our instrumentation that cuts it from physical to nonphysical.  It is within ranges of frequency that we hear sounds, and in the cosmic music of things, we experience the silence with the song.]

It is in our egos that we can find awareness and therefore free will.  We can choose to nurture, or we can choose to tear down.  I am always astounded to find seemingly “spiritual” people enjoying “good murder mysteries”, watching TV that involves crazy murders and playing games that involves violence.  Then, why are we so shocked when our young kids kill and torment violently?  We have shat down our spiritual highway so why wouldn't it be toxic?  I believe these ways do not create the spiritual ground of peace and love if we continue to let our egos and brain stuff engage in such crap.

Do you believe you have free will?  In what areas?  What can you choose to do for your environment in physical reality and the spiritual ground from which sustains us?

Prana Dance

Prana means “life force” in Sanskrit and is used in Yoga.  I've discovered something for myself that is very effective in healing quite holistically and I’m calling it Prana Dance.  I’ll describe it to you.

It is very free form movement.  In fact, from time to time it isn't very pretty at all.  You would probably want to close and lock your door so that you are completely uninhibited.  You might want to be naked.  The purpose is to check in with your body, all of its parts regarding energy flow, lack of energy flow, strengths, weaknesses, etc.   You turn off your thinking brain and move in to a primitive child-like playful state.  Smile, breathe, and move to the music.  Use any kind of music that inspires you, but something without words.  You want to be in a very free flowing non-verbal state.

The only rules are to not hurt yourself.  You are celebrating and healing in your body and letting life force move through it.  I find that I like to do this in the mornings and my days are much healthier with more vitality.  Any movement that feels good is good.  It could be small, large, standing, sitting, lying, fast, slow, moderate.  This is not choreography, not pre-defined, not prescribed, not formulaic movement.  You might find yourself stretching parts that are tight, shaking parts that need loosening and warmth, massaging parts that need relaxation and releasing aches and pains you didn't even know you had.  In this way it is truly beautiful.

This is total body awareness and body feeling and with self-compassion and self-insight you might even find yourself moving in ways that heal past wounds and abuses that were locked in body memory or in ways that you held your body to brace against future potential wounds and abuses.  In so many ways, although to watch this dance may seem strange; it is a beautiful practice and I've come to look forward to it every day. 

This is not exercise in the typical sense.  Some days may be slow going and might require simple rotations of the ankles before getting in to it deeper.  Some days may be full of joy and bounding out of bed with arms outstretched.  The dance may involve getting up, lying down again, sitting and moving the limbs, rocking, swaying, patting, massage, stretching fingertips… anything!  It’s what suits you and what your body needs.

If you find that you simply get a bit too “heady” to feel spontaneous, close your eyes and swing your arms or just rock to the music to get yourself back in to your body and in to that sacred non-critical state of creativity.  Watching and partaking in various forms of dance and movement such as Yoga, Tai Chi, Belly Dance are all good to get yourself in touch with what your body can and cannot do and where it is stronger than not.  This time, however, is for free and non-prescribed movement.

At times, you actually might produce beautiful moves and aesthetically pleasing postures.  This is also good.  It’s all good.  No matter – it is what your body needs you to do for it. 

You may find some tension to release.  You may find pain to breathe out.  You may find tightness to stretch free.  You may find weakness to energize.  It’s all good. 

To health!  Blessed Be.

Photo of Catherine Jones at the top of this post is by permission.  Photograph taken by Jade Beall.

Dancing in Light

From 1981:

[…] I know that when I dance I feel the life-giving force.  The beat of my heart joins with the pulse of the music, and I breathe with each melodic sigh.  I can experience any emotion and express it dramatically while I draw the reflection of my soul through my body.  I feel.  I breathe.  I move.  I am alive.

[…] I want to communicate and I speak with my hands.  With my wrists slowly turning and my fingers gently following, I pull my hands to my forehead.  […] I lean back and lift my arms to the heavens; the cool melody tickles my face and arms dropping specks of light to be quickly absorbed into my flesh.  The joy of life unites me with freedom and I respond with long spins and skirts swirling wildly about me.  The compelling throb of the drum continues and I stretch my abdominal muscles in slow and hypnotic undulations.  […]  I stop abruptly [to capture the built up flow and relish the space that the temporary cessation of movement has provided with the audience.  This creates a suspended “what next” tension that beckons one in to anticipate and engage with the next movement.]   I resume the movement as I stoop into turns and curves of my hips [with my eyes downcast].

I celebrate life and all that is in it.  I want to express every emotion conceivable.  […]

From 2014 last week:

My heart rate keeps slowing to as little as 33 beats per minute as the techs and nurses in the hospital tell me.  I am short-winded and having a hard time saying a long sentence without taking a shallow breath that is afforded me.  I am scared.  For some time I’d been battling bouts of depression again and trying to get my body to cooperate with feeling vital, but had finally slowed to a grade that seemed like it needed a fully conscious choice to continue.  I needed to hear my beloved tell me that he would be better off with me in his life than without me in his life.  He told me loved me and wanted me in his life.  I needed this in order to feel a strong fight – reason to send positive messages to my vital organs.

I’ve learned to love and to feel love.  I’d been getting over some dharma blues and recognizing that everyone has and is having to continue with strange life events that we cannot understand.  Why there is fortune, why there is misfortune, why some babies live just a few short months crawling forward and dying in starvation, why clueless pedestalized stars get the luxury of eccentricities to the degree of killing themselves through drugs and alcohol and endless partying.  Our stories all have such bizarre twists and turns, and yet I find that I love my friends and family more through it.  We've schlepped along the best we can sometimes and it hasn't always been that easy.  We need to forgive ourselves and we need to forgive others.  I want to go on and be happy, so I bring the words “I just wanna celebrate – another day of living” in to my mind and soul.  I tell my heart I love it. 

I get up from the bed, IV pump tagging alongside, and place a folded towel down to the side.  I’d been training with work friends for a 5k and just a couple of days previous had successfully done one of my training honor runs quite well.  My heart had helped me move forward and breathe rhythmically although I was conscious of my extra weight and how much better I’ll do without the heaviness.

So now I jogged in place to get my heart rate up – to pump vital oxygen and life force through my body – to resume health and get back to the business of living and getting out of the depression.  I was dizzy.  My heart rate would not budge.  I felt no increase in pulse.  The drug they had given me on Friday for high blood pressure which was the wrong drug for me was keeping my heart rate down and I was not experiencing the simple and forgotten joy of what it feels like to have ones heart rate pick up with physical activity to deliver breath, energy – prana.  It was not happening at this time.  I had to rest.  I had to have patience.

Today:

I recalled listening to a TED talk about depression from Andrew Solomon.  In it he says that the opposite of depression is vitality.  I recommend listening to this lecture.  The depression scale inventories ask about if we are finding less joy in the things that used to give us joy.  I’d found in my dharma battles that this had become so.  I’d done so many things, had so many adventures, but wasn't finding the same ecstasy I used to when it came to living life in physical form.  The only ecstasy I was finding was in deep meditative states.  Staying in Samadhi is not conducive to actually moving about and living in the real world.  So what was that secret ingredient that used to give me so much joy to experience life?  --The VITAL ingredient?  The answer required deep pondering that only being taken out of work and being put in the hospital to be confronted with life/death questions would provide.

I went back in time and remembered when I was just out of high school and was experiencing all that I could do and wanted to do.  It was exhilarating.  There was so much to do and I felt a deep sense of infinite human potential.  It seemed that the universe as infinite also provided potential that was infinite.  I could feel this on a visceral level.  Remembering that helped me re-experience it.

I also had to come to terms with the chemistry of our physical bodies.  It is important for me to take drugs that hadn't been important to take before.  I had to realize that my soul incarnate needs the added chemistry just as much as it needs water, nutrients, and exercise.  My body doesn't need to weigh this much and taking the weight off will hopefully make me require less of the human-made chemistry.  For now, I need to feel alive, vital, engaged with my loved ones and be able to re-recall that our souls dance in ecstatic joy in a universe of infinite potential and that love is the most powerful force of all.

As I close this, I’ll turn the music up, and

(from 1981:)  [feel the…] jolt of energy thrust through my being as I turn down into a half-stoop.  [finding brassy rhythmic patterns] I stretch and flow. [spinning and swaying, shaking and raising arms to heaven until I tire and lie down on the floor] my body becoming one with the earth, [imagining my pulse and the earth pulse melding, imagining health and new beginnings for all.]

Let’s DANCE!

Carnality

I am becoming more and more aware of the physicality of myself and the importance of movement as I also realize my life style puts me on my back side way more than it should.

I, like so many others, feel compelled to write bits of “my story.”  You see, regarding the “body” -- It was taught to me that carnality was wicked, the body was not to be trusted…  basically a fair amount of disrespect for the body along with conflicting statements that our bodies were the temples of the spirit.  This just meant that we were to deny it carnal pleasure because the spirit was superior.

Well, this attitude hasn’t served me well, and maybe you had similar teachings too that haven’t served you well.  Because of my dissociative identity disorder, and having been on antidepressants for 21 years, I didn't feel like I was really IN my body for much of my life.  Since I didn't know what it felt like to be “in” my body I didn’t understand any difference.  When I started going through therapy and had visualizations I suspected that something wasn’t right when I visualized myself as someone “out there” like on a TV screen.  I somehow knew that the visualizations I was to go through should be more physically direct to me.   I told my therapist about it and she was intrigued and told me that, “no, that wasn't how the visualization should happen.” 

I also didn’t move “spontaneously” throughout the course of my earlier life as even basic movements were pre-meditated.  Other than sneezes and coughs, motions were pre-thought.  Even bringing my hands to my mouth to hold a cough were.  I belly-danced and even those were pre-thought before they became dance form.  At a medicine woman retreat when I was in my early 30’s, I finally found what it was like to move my body without thought.  It was beautiful, liberating, and empowering.  I finally found spontaneity. 

As the antidepressants moved their way out of my body I became more solid with what I felt in my body and it was at times over-whelming to the point of experiencing dizziness.  I remember walking on the campus of the University of Arizona with my sweetheart and I felt like I was actually inside of my body.  It was a glorious experience.  The mindfulness of moving within my body is sacred and holy.

My personal spiritual development has taught me that although we are souls living physical experience, we are also souls incarnate and that our physical manifestations are our stewardship.  Our bodies are not only our temples, but our tools with which to experience the glorious existence of our physical universe.  We should celebrate them, play in them, move, rejoice, dance, enjoy physical pleasures responsibly, and care for them health wise.

I've spent a lot of time struggling with my body.  Telling it rotten things about its inferiority, its lack of beauty and all it has done in return is continue to serve me and get me around.  Going to the gym to get it in to shape, I bullied my body by overworking it.  I love my body.  It has been so forgiving and loving to its host.  No, I’m not a dualist, I just recognize that the life force is a continuum through energy patterns from the deep levels of consciousness on up through coarser physicality.  Like buds on trees, our life force sap from light flows through and likes movement and gets ill with blockages.

True, Samadhi is an ecstatic state, but we are physical and can’t stay in Samadhi all the time while still alive.  I believe that Satori (awakening) needs to happen as we manifest our light from source through the body and the world and back again in healing circular flow.

To do this, we need to not only meditate; we need to take care of our bodies.  My physical health is my top priority this year.  I have been too heavy for too long and the results of that are that I don’t have the energy I want, I have more headaches than I should, and I border on blood sugar issues and hypertension.

If you have issues like this, let’s do it together!  Let’s get physically healthy.  I am so honored to know so many people making positive changes in their lives and I get inspired by such good and encouraging friends who are compassionate at the same time.  It isn't easy, but it is necessary if we want the full and joyful lives we so deserve together.

Remembering and forgetting

This post is mostly a questioning one because I’m trying to find what works regarding what to remember and what to forget.  I suppose the universe in everyone’s earthly mind needs to find its most productive space in what to remember and what to forget.

Since being off of 21 years of antidepressants since 2009 I have been remembering a lot of stuff that I didn’t have access to before.  Some of it has been pretty icky, but most of it has been pretty nice.  The largest benefit is that I feel more integrated as a person now than when I was living in a superficial brain state with lots of extra serotonin and norepinephrine floating around.  I’ve also been learning how my brain decided to forget things by association.  If something was a trigger, I would lock that event away too because of any closeness of association.  I have forgotten things that I want to treasure.  I have no memories of my mother reading to me, no memories of some parties I had in my youth, and very few memories of tender touching moments between my parents and myself as a young girl. I want those memories back.  I had forgotten them because of association.   At my age I want to have a more solid and effective brain with better learning powers.  It is important to me to not throw away new information just because of a negative association it may elicit.  I want to resolve and put to peace the negativity by understanding it and loving it, and continue to learn.

This last week a friend delivered a trigger and a complication arose in which I wanted to completely have nothing to do with that friend.  For many reasons he needed to not be a house guest any more.  However, I needed him out of my space and I know that my hyper strong reaction had a lot to do with the trigger.  I still needed relapse time and time to recover from the delivered trigger.

A good friend of mine reminds me that with brains, that which “fires together wires together.”  She is right.  She says that this is the reason why it is important to forget traumatic events.  It is not good to relive them over and over again.  She is right.  However, I want to know just how much I need to know.  As I write this, it occurs to me that this is where the power of the subconscious just might help.  It’s going to work anyway especially as we sleep.  We might as well give it good direction.

I am blessed with a loving partner who has such a deep capacity for love.  It seems sometimes that his love falls to the lowest of us – those who need the most compassion.  His powers of forgetting are staggering and have served him well.  He doesn’t know resentment.  It doesn’t work for him.   If it arises, he finds ways to shuttle it away because it is just not an effective state of mind.  He is a good example for me.

I, on the other hand, have had a tendency to give things a negative skew.  I have had to learn to remember so that I could understand why I have done this.  Now that I am learning why and how I have been doing this, I want to delete the icky stuff.

It occurs to me that when we were babies crawling around and learning how to walk, we stumbled along and fell down a lot.  We probably had temper tantrums and cried a lot about the “failures,” but then apparently we did get up again and go forth.  I think about consciousness in the context of a continuum from personal mind to universal mind and think sometimes as we echo forth we need to prune away the non-essential – much as our brains prune away in learning and plasticity.  Since the microcosm is found in the macrocosm, and I believe we are of a fractal nature in physicality and energy.   I believe that once the task is accomplished, we can forget the pain and agony of the learning experience.

Sometimes I suppose I wish I’d be able to just get up and walk on!  Arrgh.  What are your thoughts?

 

Going through the dark to get to the light

 

“There must needs be opposition in all things…” was a scripture from the Book of Mormon quoted to me as a child.  As I got older a spiritual leader of mine Judith Lamb-Lion a master of Surat Shabd Yoga, described it as the earthly plane of existence having polarity that the spiritual planes did not.  She drew a pyramid illustrating that as “word became flesh” or as spirit becomes flesh, we have this opposition.  We need darkness as we need light.  We need darkness in order to find light.

This weekend is the solstice in which the sun is at its lowest point in the south before it starts to move northward and we begin to have longer days.  It is the darkest day for many of us.  Pagans and others celebrate the winter solstice  as it signified a turn in the seasons to hope, a new cycle of life, and light.

Every night we need to return to the dark to cleanse our brain of dangerous toxins that can even lead to Alzheimer’s.  It is important to make our bedrooms as dark as possible for healthy pineal glands and melatonin production for our energy and sleep cycles so this healthy brain cleansing and other important brain activity can happen.

Carl Jung says, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”  I’ve found that on my personal spiritual path it was important for me to get in to the dark recesses of my psyche to bring things to the light.  The path hasn’t always been an easy one and I’m still on it and find dark times.  However, the understanding and self-awareness that past traumas have done to a conditioned earthly “self” have taught me so much about who I’m not and who I am beyond the conditioned self.  The “I” that is taking me on this journey is what others might refer to as the “higher self.”  I don’t refer to it as “God,” because to me “God” is that which is transcends us and includes our combined higher selves in an infinite bubbling life of pure energy consciousness and light.

So on this particular solstice, it is my silent prayer that we quiet ourselves and our minds.  We stop and as said in church today by our wonderful Reverend Diane Dowgiert, the sun pauses as it heads back north, and we too might consider taking a pause to feel our “callings” for what is next in our lives.  It is in silence and rest that we can bring ourselves in to presence of experience.  It is in the presence of experience that we can calm our brains and find transcendence in who we really are and begin the much needed healing of humanity.

At Christmastime we sing songs of Joy to the World and Peace On Earth.  Since I’ve been watching a bunch of Star Trek lately, I’d like to add, “Make it so.”

Blessed be and Amen.

Light stuff.

 

Stuff:  Physical stuff, body stuff, mental stuff.   It’s interesting how many of us are noticing this black Friday craziness and violence to get stuff the day after we celebrated gratitude for already having stuff.

When my mother started getting older I would observe her reactions when people gave her things.  It disturbed me back then that she was less than enthused but tried to express appreciation.  She simply felt that she had too much “stuff.” 

Personally, I feel choked when I have to move around in my house or any physical space with so much stuff.  I feel like I should be able to move better with less weight on my body.  I feel like I could think more clearly if I didn’t have so much clutter in my brain.

I understand and try to achieve the balance of having enough stuff to make life comfortable and beautiful and ending up with too much stuff that just gets in the way.  Now that it is the holidays, it seems like we are so compelled to “buy” each other more stuff whether we really need it or not, and whether or not our budgets can afford it.  What meaningful gifts can we really give each other instead of useless clutter?  How do we keep our body weights at a healthy level?  How do we keep our thoughts uncluttered?

The American culture is well-represented in a documentary I saw a long time ago entitled “Affluenza”.  The striking image is the pig face over America overeating, overdoing, over consuming…  There is also some footage in Ron Fricke’s Samsara that shows our tendency to overdo.

I used to joke about my fat being compiled memories of eating, drinking, and being merry, and while it is true that I have enjoyed “the good life.”  I really didn’t need to eat to such over-indulgence.  I remember sitting down to a few dozen chicken wings.  I’m not vegetarian, but now I feel a little weak in the knees when I think of all the chickens killed for me to sit down to that one binge.  The little life forms being taken for me to eat their wings.  18 little birds in one sitting.  Wow.  The healthful thing in nature is to only take what we truly need and I have been addicted to NOT doing just that.

I think of all the bankers and other people hoarding up their wealth in the Cayman Islands of which they will never be able to physically spend and the money that they do NOT deserve but which some weird lack of regulation and “greed is good” mentality has created a society so sick that they are getting away with it. 

I see in my own house redundant items and I wonder if I should get rid of them.  We’re trying to organize and simplify as we go along, but it is a process and it takes energy.  Not only that, but some things that have sentimental value are just hard to let go.  This is when I want someone else to come in and throw some things away or at least ask me, “Do you really need to keep this?”  “Can’t you remember this person another way instead of having this (fill-in-item-here) having to trip over?”

Also, there are local economies that it is good to support.  I recently bought a pair of earrings in New Mexico for personal symbolic reasons as well as an acknowledgement that it was good to support that Zuni economy.  It is a balance and while I’m trying to get out of this unreasonable debt, I still want to treasure life where some adventures cost money and money should go for local economies.  I like David Korten’s book on Agenda for a New Economy where he talks about a move away from Wall Street to Main Street.  I am craving more community and public places and beauty instead of parking lots with litter and the threat of being robbed or hurt.

Then I think of the desperate people – someone just robbed a local head shop and a comment was that someone else went to high school with the guy and she was shocked.  It seemed so out of character for him.   Desperate situations I believe are making people do atypical desperate things.  None of us like this.  How can there be so much “stuff?” while so many are struggling with trying to have homes, good food, health, education, artistic endeavor, and even …  water?  We all have to pay for water.  Everything that even sustains us is a commodity.  I suppose that beats having to kill and eat our own food, but it seems we have overdone it all yet again.

We inundate ourselves with information and mental busyness.  There is so much out there that is interesting, but when can we let our minds rest?  I know of so many people including myself who are seeking ways to get more restful sleep.  The day of information and technology leaves our houses with hums, buzzes, and light-emitting diodes.  The streets are full of bass boosting cars, noisy neighbors, and emergency vehicles attending to crimes and medical crises.

Why do we overdo?  Are we lacking something else?  Are we lacking passion and joy for simplicity and every day delights?  Do we feel that we need to go outside of ourselves to fulfill?  Is it because we feel we might not have enough in the future?  Are we concerned that someone has something or is experiencing something we’re not? 

How do we lighten up?  This is what I’m starting to do in these three dimensions of my life:

Physical stuff:  Before I buy, I ask: do I really need this or do I have something already that does the job to serve me?  I ask, just how much/many of this do I need?  Will I use it all?  Am I trying to satisfy some emotional need by this?  Is there a different way to satisfy that emotional need?  Is it something that I can buy an electronic copy of so as to not create more clutter?  Is there some way I can produce this myself and if I need to buy, is there some local place that has it?  Shifting to local businesses needs to be done gradually so as to not cause mass layoffs with the big guys.

Body stuff:  Checking back in with my body.  I’ve been working on listening to my body and one thing it said was, “you’re not listening if you expect to hear the same thing.”  What does my body really NEED?  Does it need rest?  Does it need exercise but not to be bullied at the gym?  Does it need light stretching?  Also, not just listening, but talking to my body.  Giving it loving encouragement as it is the soul’s vehicle.  Re-reading Zen-Body-Being by Peter Ralston.

Mind stuff:  Learning new things, but letting a nap happen to consolidate the new information.  Not beating myself up for not knowing something in the first place or having wasted my younger school years not learning or remembering.  Understanding that the fabulous brain is also faulty and responsive.  Feeding the brain high quality content.  Lovingly shifting my attention to old constricted negative recursions in to a focus of what creates joy, peace, and love.

I’m thinking these plans will make me feel a little more “light.”  Blessed be.