Tuesday, July 31, 2012

blog023 Man, Who Are You?

Layers On Soul by Emelie Dupree
If your self-image is based on what you see when you look in the mirror, your woman is on the way to being very bored.

Sure, it makes sense to think of yourself as hair, skin, meat and bones, with clothes on, a solid, visible personality. After all, there you are in the mirror. You see that reflection with every wrinkle and pimple. The feedback is undeniable. Your own father probably imagined himself to be something very similar. He is your role model.

Think about it. Either you want to be like your father, or you want to be nothing like your father.

Either way makes him your role model!

You look at yourself in the mirror and you think, I am the bread winner. Or you think, I'm failing to be the breadwinner.
Disk of Nothing by Timo Wuerz
You think, I bring security, stability and protection, or I fail to bring security, stability or protection.

You think, I know the way, I have the answers, or you think, I don't know how it goes because nobody ever cared enough about me to show me.

You think, I am a strong reliable leader, or you think, I am weak and ineffective as a husband, father, leader, I am not reliable.

We ongoingly know ourselves to be successfully fulfilling our self image, or failing to live up to our self image. And that is exactly what makes us boring to women, because we insist on seeing ourselves as someone who must be knowable.
Possibility Lab
If we can be known, then we should know who we are, right? Do you know who you are?

If we can be known, then we must exhibit predictable behavior, hold steadfast opinions, maintain old decisions, not change our tastes. Herein lies the conflict. We imagine that we should identify ourselves as the content of our lives, and as soon as we identify ourselves as content we are killable.

For example, as soon as our woman has an opinion that is different from ours we think we are supposed to defend our position stronger than she defends hers or we are not men.

As soon as our child disagrees or argues with us we are forced to prove ourselves right or win by force, or else we are not the parent.

In neither case does the idea cross our mind to change the game.

By now most men have stopped reading this article. Yet this is exactly the point where it becomes interesting.

We stop reading because we have already paid full price to join the patriarchy. We have exchanged our souls for the illusion of safety and power defined by the hierarchy of godfathers. We cannot comprehend that we could regard ourselves as anything other than what we have always been: needy, greedy, sucking little boys, chasing after mommy for the goodies, trying to one-up each other for favors, being exactly what looks out at us from the mirror each morning, with emotional justifications to match.

If you are knowable then you can be projected upon. You are a target for expectations. Expectations kill intimacy. One unfulfilled expectation is enough to generate resentment. Then whenever you touch her you trigger her resentment. She doesn't feel you; she feels her resentment. It is a mess.

I am saying that you, as a man, can have a completely different quality of self image. There are many additional options to play with. Each format opens an entirely new world of relationship with your present, with your destiny, and with your woman.

What if who you are is not what you see in the mirror? What if that thing is only a vehicle or antenna for who you are?

For most of us this seems like an absolutely insane line of inquiry. What else could there possibly be than what we see in the mirror?

What else indeed!

Emerging by Sharan Ragan
Below is a list of alternative options to the question: What else could I be?

Regarding the options on the list below as concepts or as good ideas cements you into your mind, which makes you even more boring that being flesh and bones.

The proposals listed below are not concepts. They are invitations to experimental action.

Each experimental orientation starts with the word "I". But the experiment is not about "I". The experiment is about what is there instead of the "I". So forget the "I" part. The "I" just gets in the way.

Shifting from representing yourself as a knowable, visible, solid, stable man who brings home the bacon, to being one of the spaces listed below will involve going through some initiatory processes and developing some new abilities.

For example:

You need the ability to declare what is - which only comes after the ability to accept what is, because you first need to start where you are with an accurate assessment of current reality before you can shift the details into something else, otherwise you are merely another fool in a fantasy world.

You need the ability to go nonlinear and make right-angle turns at light speed - which only comes after seven to ten deep healing and growing-up processes to change your relationship to what happened to you in your childhood and some past lives (www.nextculturetrainings.org) so that you can lighten your load and drop energetic, conceptual and emotional baggage.

You cannot change what happened to you in the past because it happened in the past. But what happened is not what determines how you show up now. You show up now according to the tricks you figured out for surviving through what happened to you in the past. However, you already survived, but you have not gone through the initiation of recapitulation, so you still function reflexively in your survival strategy. You are trapped in what was once a very good plan.

Recapitulation is systemmatic neutral transformative introspection.

Recapitulation distinguishes your survival reaction triggers from what is actually happening to you right now so you get immediate new options for behavior.

Recapitulation springs you from an ancient prison that you long ago forgot you locked yourself into.

Recapitulation starts with new thoughtmaps of feelings so you can be painfully clear about what happened to you in the past without being a victim of it anymore. Then you can freely detect what meanings you gave to what happened back then, and decide if you want to keep or change those meanings in order to reclaim your power of present attention, your inalienable authority, your unique contributory talents, and your free spirit.

This takes efforts, of course. It requires re-prioritizing the energy that you may presently be using up trying to represent yourself as being a "sane" and "successful" "man," as if you knew what those things are...

Each experiment below invites you to center yourself in a non-knowable self-image. Choose one and use it for a full week (or the rest of your life) without ever shifting back to being something knowable: (Remember, forget the "I". )

I am a distinction-framework, establishing spaces of adventure.
I am a map inventing new territories to explore.
I am stage lights illuminating high-drama.
I am a space navigator for three worlds.
I am a context of radical responsibility.

I am a place of delightfulness, clarity, and transformation.
I am a nonlinear gameworld pirate.
I am a source of unending humor and possibility.
I am a gateway to evolution.
I am a space of mystery.
I am nothing - the kind of  nothing so big that everything fits into it.
Forget the "I".
I am not here to provide you with safety, predictability, peace, calm, and comfort.

I am not an emotional garbage can. I am not a doormat. I am not a good boy. 
I am an ongoing nasty question, noticing without attaching meaning, attentively here, in a very small now, without believing my own reactive stories and incomplete emotions from my past.
I am the space through which a unique set of bright principles can do their work in the world.
Starmaking by NASA JPL Caltech Artist R. Hurt

And you might be also...
If you connect the origin of your self-image to a new source, then your woman might have something a little more interesting to play with.
She's probably been waiting a long time for you to get this...

Friday, July 27, 2012

blog022 Bringing Creation To Life

I think the Goddess suffers because after giving birth to the multiverse she saw that it was dead. As magnificent as it is, creation has no self-awareness. It just is. It does not realize that it is.

I think most of us are the same. We are zombies. Look in someones eyes. Just keep looking into their eyes and watch what they do. What do they do? They look away. They look away to stay asleep.

We are the walking dead. Why else would we eat junk food from terrorist companies who murder ecosystems for the illusion of profit? We are numb. We are sleeping.

We hold beliefs and assumptions and interpretations and conclusions unconsciously. We react unconsciously thinking that because we feel incomplete-emotions re-triggered from our childhood that it means something - something important enough to start a war over.

If we repeatedly do things the way we've always done them, the way our parents did them, we think we are justified - or we feel justified by doing the opposite. (We are as well imprisoned by what we oppose - this is why the OCCUPY# movement provides its greatest value when people implement new systems that make the presiding systems plainly irrelevant - and clearly not as much fun.)

We do what we're told and assume that we are good. We do what everybody else does and assume that we are safe. We are unaware that we are choosing unconsciously because we never considered that we have another option.

But we do have another option. The other option is to go pirate. To take responsibility for things which we were taught cannot be taken responsibility for. This is called radical responsibility.

Radical responsibility is uncommon, because if you stand in radical responsibility there is no one to blame for what happens next except yourself. On the other hand, when there is no one else to blame, who has the power? Being responsibly and consciously at source for what is, and for what happens, can be exquisitely pleasurable.

It is possible to live in a culture that is centered in radical responsibility. This culture is called next culture, the culture that comes after patriarchy. It is archearchy, a culture of initiated adult women creatively collaborating with initiated adult men. You do not get into such a culture without growing up. In modern culture there are no grownups. Not even the United Nations tells the adolescent and psychopathic personalities who have done whatever it takes to climb corporate-political hierarchies, "Stop it! No! That is not okay! No lying, no cheating, no stealing!  Don't even think about touching that! It's not yours! Clean up your room! You are grounded!" Without adults, another species was just exterminated.

We make many moment-to-moment choices. Because we are mostly sleeping, most of our choices are unconscious. One of the most important unconscious choices we make is where we place our attention, because where your attention goes your energy flows. This is why corporations pay billions a year trying to get your attention. If they get your attention they've got your wallet. The embarrassing thing is that advertising costs are more than compensated by our easily-seduced weak-willed attention.

You wonder why you are burned out? You wonder why your relationship is weak? You wonder why you're exhausted? Do you know where your attention is going? Where your energy is flowing?

It is easy to prove that you have the ability to consciously choose where you place your attention. (To do this experiment, stop reading for a second, look at your finger. Look at it until you feel your attention on your finger, then look back here and continue reading.) You can consciously choose where to place your attention, but for the most part we place our attention unconsciously.

You could change your mind about leaving your attention open for others to use. You could go pirate. The kind of pirate I mean is when you break with custom and takeover choosing where and why you place your attention. You can develop your attention muscles until you can walk through a train station and not even once give your attention to the half-naked women splayed across advertising posters. (That photoshopped image, by the way, is not the Goddess...)

After you can consciously place or not place your attention somewhere for as long as you choose, you can start learning to split your attention.

Human beings have the designed-in capacity to split attention. We split our attention unconsciously every day. For example, we ride down the street on our bicycle chewing gum, listening to our  MP3 player, thinking about our plans and checking out the babes all at the same time. Splitting our attention five ways is normal for us, unconsciously. We can also split our attention on purpose.

There are many exercises for strengthening your capacity for consciously splitting your attention. Look at any object, for example, a lamp. Then in your mind, while remembering that it is a lamp, call it by a different name, such as cranberry sauce, frying pan, anaconda, or ski pole. Then look at another object and keep going. You can think up and practice a completely new attention-splitting exercise each day.

Just remembering the idea to practice attention-splitting exercises requires that you keep your attention from getting knocked unconscious by your daily squirrel-cage routine. A warning: Developing your attention-splitting muscles takes you beyond the grip and thoughtlimits of modern culture.

Bringing creation to life involves one more experiment. Split your attention, then place part of your attention on where you are placing your attention. Notice what you are noticing with. See how you are seeing. Watch yourself watching. Become aware of what you are aware of right now. Say to yourself, "What I am aware of right now is..." Do this for awhile and the space will shift. You will find yourself in the waking state. How long can you stay in the waking state? In the time that you are being conscious of what you are conscious of you have brought the bit of creation that you are to life. By bringing a part of creation to life you alleviate the suffering of the Goddess.

She does not let such efforts go uncompensated...


Dear Andrew Gains, Bill McKibben and anyone else reading this blog (which reading is not accidental, by the way...),

Please see Bill McKibben's pull-no-punches article in Rolling Stone here:

...and Andrew Gains request for going further here:

...and now my engagement of this consideration:

Yes, my friends, I, (and perhaps we all), deeply resonate with the idea of shifting wholesale to a good-willed, sustainable, next culture... and...

I want to remind us what Morpheus told Neo in Matrix: There's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

I say: Whole systems change starts at home.

I am tired of preaching to the choir.

I am finished with standing around in the choir being preached to.

I will do whatever it takes to awaken the sleeping pirate in each of us - the one with enough daring to uproot our lives wholesale from the suicidal systems of modern culture even when we don't know how. The secret to successful pirating is recognizing that we won't know how until we have already committed ourselves.

I think the universe conserves "know-how." The universe only provides know-how to those who already commit to the next outcome by pulling up their own stakes from the capitalist patriarchal empire and heading out.

I put my water-pistol to your nose and demand to know from you point blank: What can YOU personally do NOW to jump ship and leave the rats behind on the rapidly sinking wreckage of modern civilization?

How will you personally shift to sustainable culture? By when will you do this?

I, for one, with a small group of pirate friends, have closed all debts, ended all insurances, cashed in all investments, ended all rents, stashed our things, and with a backpack and a netbook will head out mid-September 2012 for an indefinite period of time to empower whoever the universe puts in our path with next culture pirate skills. Harbigaar!

I think there are more pirates in action than most of us realize: over one million ecovillages initiatives and projects online as of July 2012! www.ecovillage.org.

Daily I connect with more next culture pirates, and I am glad of it! Something better than civilization is waiting for us. (Daniel Quinn)

One Little Hint: for ongoing inspiration it helps to subscribe to John Robb's Resilient Community blog : http://www.resilientcommunities.com