Archive for April, 2010

Do we live in a sufficient Universe?

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

What if there is more than enough for everyone? And you not only believed it, you lived it?

In an earlier article I talked about our societal enmeshment in the scarcity principle. We are so caught up in the model of scarcity without even knowing that we are caught.

Fear of our own security and protection, and of having ‘enough’ drive most of our thinking, acting and being. The tragedy is that this fear is so ‘normal’ we do not even know we are in it.

In my life so far as I have worked to release myself from the grip of the illusion of scarcity, I have had good days and bad days.

Good days are days when I am connected to source. I feel positive, optimistic, and I see abundance.

Bad days are when I have fear running. There is not enough…money, time, love, years, sleep, time, money…did I mention those?

Last week I thought about this question…

What if there was more than enough for everyone? More than enough food, air, water, time, love, money, sleep, safety, comfort….?

This then raised the next question…is it true that there is enough?

Well, lets look at that.

Is there enough time? Yes…we get to choose how we spend our time doing what matters. The illusion of not enough time is simply an illusion. If you have 15 minutes to get ready in the morning it will take you 15 minutes. If you have an hour, it will take you an hour.

Is there enough energy? Yes…despite the propagation of fear around our energy supplies, we have more than enough energy from the sun and other renewable resources to give every person on the planet more than they will need. The gap between our technology efficiency is diminishing every day.

Is there enough money? Yes..this is a really interesting question, and in my unequivocal answer of yes I have to give a bit more detail to a quite complex issue. At one level, if you think of money as the stuff (mostly electronic) that circulates the globe every day, is there enough for every human on the planet to live well? Certainly. Some hundreds of trillions of dollars, which is so much that no one really can grasp it.  Problem is that the money gets pooled in a few places, and doesn’t really circulate. When we sit on our foot for a while and then stand up, our foot doesn’t function because the circulation has been cut off. Similarly, pooling money in a few places on the earth body doesn’t allow healthy function. We get stagnation, decay and breakdown in certain areas.

Money also gets directed to other places with questionable value, like the money spent on weapons of killingry. If this money was directed towards livingry, as Bucky would say, hunger would be solved world wide in a matter of weeks.

And if we took responsibility for out health, as I mentioned in an article last week, that would also free up huge amounts of money to be directed to other areas that are in need.

So there is no shortage of this stuff called money.

To get just a little more below the surface of this issue, if we look at what we do on a day to day basis that adds value to the world, is there enough value to be added that warrants an exchange of value? In other words, do you do work that adds real value? (Moving derivatives around the world on a computer does not add real value.) If you are working at something that adds value to others, then there is always the place for exchange.

How about food? Is there enough food? Certainly for some people in the world there is not enough food. However, that is not because there is not enough food globally, but that there is not enough food locally. Again, the system is stagnated. In parts of the world we are dying of obesity, in other parts we are dying of starvation. We criticize the Wall Street bankers for greed while the middle and lower class suffer, but are we any better? We stuff our faces with too much food while our cousins in other parts of the world die of hunger. Is this not also greed? As is stuffing our faces with food that has little to no nutritional value and becoming unhealthy. Just another form of greed.

And water, is there enough? Again, in some places water is a scarce resource. But when we finally learn to manage our resources in a respectful and healthy way, we have enough water. Bucky created homes in the 1940’s that managed on several liters of water every day for all house hold chores. Its not the lack of water that is the issue, its our carelessness in its use.

What I began to realise as I thought about this question was that there is enough. The key  is to stop thinking locally only, and to start to consider our global actions.

At a global level there is enough money, food, water, energy….we do live in a sufficient Universe. Sure we need a game change, but there is enough.

The scarcity principle is a myth of seeing ourselves as isolated, as individuals competing for. When we step back and look at the whole, starting with Universe first, we see that there is enough. That if we work together, collaborate, share, care for each other, there is more than enough.

Does this collaborative and comprehensively considerate action allow for creativity, individualism, personal success, entrepreneurialism? Is there a space for this? Yes…there is so much to learn, and explore and discover about how we inhabit our earth in a way that is sustainable for all. There are so many wonderful things we have yet to create that will enrich lives everywhere. It is time for the biggest hit of creativity innovation ever. But this doesn’t mean that I get to create and you get to go hungry.

And before you jump to conclusions, I am not talking about socialism here. I am talking about something that allows creativity, entrepreneurialism and such, but without the gluttony, and certainly without it costing others their health, money, environment and livelihood. Truly, how many cars, or houses, or TV’s , or ?? is enough for one person?

Scarcity is based on win/lose. I win, you lose. I eat, you go hungry.

Sufficiency is based on win win win. I win, you win, the family, the nation, the environment..wins.

Having considered all of these questions I decided that I do indeed live in a sufficient and abundant Universe. There is enough, more than enough.

Now the question gets down to the next level, below the scarcity and into my worthiness.  Do I allow myself to experience enoughness? No just intellectually, but in an embodied way? Am I worthy of enough?

I will keep you posted on this one. Let me just say its a big one.

In the mean time, I ask you to really consider that we do….you do…I do…live in a sufficient Universe. If this is true, and you really do believe it is true, how will you show up differently?

How would you act, think, believe and behave differently knowing that there is enough?

And what area do you feel the most lack? Love, money, time, sex, security, friends, intimacy….?

Do ask yourself of this is true…really true that there is lack in this part of your life?

Let me know your thoughts, opinions, questions, experiences..


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What Lies Beneath?

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Over the Easter weekend my beautiful little dog of 13 years, Muffin, went missing.

She had just had a bath and so was without any from of ID. Her normal collar has her name and our phone number on it. How she got out, I have no idea. She has never escaped before.

Muffin is mostly blind and deaf, and suffers dementia. She has good days and bad days. Working with her wonderful Vet, we have chosen to allow her to let us know when she is ready to leave us. I trust myself enough to know that I will know when she says in her own way that it is time.

When I went to check on her, which I do regularly, and found she was gone, I searched everywhere. I was not sure if I could trust my sense of sight and hearing…was she really gone. I found myself looking in the same places multiple times in case I had not seen her the first time.

I called my daughter to come home and help me search. We looked everywhere. We both looked in the same places …again…not trusting our senses. Did we possibly miss something?

Maybe she had run away to lie down and die? I was not sure if I was looking for her alive or dead.

We called the dog pound, which took perseverance. Ninety minutes of waiting on hold to get through. Apparently their busiest time of the year. One staff member. I found out later that this is a paid position of the local council, and that they do not accept volunteers to man the phones for missing or lost dogs. (I would have volunteered…unfortunately our society these days makes volunteering complex…will it take away from someone’s paid position…or do we need expensive insurance…so tragic and outright wrong!)

We walked the streets and talked to neighbours. At some point we didn’t know what else to do. After a time, we went out and looked again…did we miss her the first time?

And we cried. And cried.

For me it was as if someone had turned on a tap of grief and a bunch of years of held back tears came flooding out. Almost as if I needed some external event to allow a flood of suppressed emotion to explode.

I could reconcile with her dying. The difficulty I was having was that I didn’t know where she was. I didn’t know if she was suffering, lost, dazed, confused, distressed. Mostly I didn’t want to think of her dying alone.

And this is the key for me. My deeply buried sense of aloneness. I rarely get lonely. I like being on my own, like my own company… but the feeling of being alone…this has been with me most of my life.

At the same time it has been the core of my inner work. If I were a God and designing my life, and part of that life was to learn that ‘aloneness’ is my own illusion, then I would probably write a script that looks like my life.

ChristineIndependent, capable, resourceful. One early marriage that lasted 3 years. One child, not by conscious design. No major male support figure in the equation. Needs to develop self reliance and the ability to create. Struggles with trusting that Universe will provide if she stays in her truth. Underline. Struggles with trusting that Universe will provide if she stays in her truth. Life lesson (at least the biggest one so far). To learn that she is not alone. She has many people to support her. Her family, her daughter, precious friends, amazing strangers, teachers alive and dead, the metaphysical, nature, beauty… And of course God (Universe, Great Spirit, the divine, the creative impulse…call it what you will.) This, above all else. Because in this script, the main character, Christine, seeks a  union with the divine above any other union. And so of course as part of this play, we would make the achievement of this union to be the ultimate struggle. And in the embodied realisation of this union, the aloneness would no longer be present. Instead, she would be in the same place as her beloved Hafiz, dancing in ecstasy with the all knowing sense of at-one-ment.

In the mean time, Christine’s archetype plays out the Bambi story. Abandoned. Alone. Even though this emotion is so well held in check. Years of practice in projecting independence and resilience. “I can manage on my own just fine, thank you very much!”

And, most of the time she can. Most of the time….”

So there were tears. And an awareness to keep moving, for sitting surely would allow more grief to overcome me. I made a cake. I cleaned. I watched ‘The Godfather’ movie. I spent hours going over in my mind the morning’s events. What happened? When did I last see Muffin? Touch her? Register her presence? I realised that I was not very present most of the morning. I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember when I last saw her.

I was aware that this must be what it feels like to have a child go missing. In truth, for us animal lovers, our pets are our children. We love them as much. Maybe we have a little more detachment because we always knew that their lives would be far shorter than a human. Yet the pain is the same.

Missing sleep, functioning on auto pilot, moving one foot in front of the next, I moved into Sunday. Then we got a phone call from the pound. She had been found. Someone had found her in the street outside our house. They had just dropped her off. Natalie and I were in our car and off to collect her.

We cried again when we saw her. She was distressed, dazed. But she knew it was us. It took about 6 hours to get her to calm down. 24 hours before she started eating. She is back now to her normal self. And while her days are numbered, we have made a pact that when her time is up, she will die with us present. Not alone. I will be ready for that.

As to me, the journey continues to end my separation from the divine.

Tripping over Joy

What is the difference

Between your experience of Existence

And that of a saint?

The saint knows

That the spiritual path

Is a sublime chess game with God

And that the Beloved

Has just made such a Fantastic Move

That the saint is now continually

Tripping over Joy

And bursting out in Laughter

And saying, “I surrender!”

Whereas, my dear,

I am afraid you still think

You have a thousand serious moves.

Hafiz, Translated by Daniel Ladinsky

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