Attunement Blog

When you’ve stepped off the cliff, not knowing yet somehow trusting how something new would unfold. It has happened a number of times in your life, and strangely, curiously, you have always been caught and held. The leaps into the unknown have been OK. You have come to trust the taking of risk, because even when the risk immediately had unexpected experiences, long-term the leaps have always offered something new and vital. In ways you couldn’t have possibly imagined at the time before the leap. Sometimes knocked around on the way down, it turned out that there wasn’t any “down,” in the way most people thought. It was more a “through” than a “down.” And there is a landing, in an initially strange land, for sure. You look around and little is familiar, perhaps other than the human condition(s). What people do, everywhere and everywhen. You go on out to meet who shows up, as you have shown up. Daring greatly.

Now that you’re here, what’s next? You have no idea, but to take each moment as it comes- thoughtfully, with hopefully as many wits as you can muster, and kindly in this new place. Who would have thought you would show up here? In what seems to be someone else’s movie, but turns out to be your show. Some of your friends, back there, got together before you stepped away, to celebrate knowing you- How many of them have chosen to face their own life-changing risks? You see some in the air, right along with you. Its hard to tell if anyone will land in a similar place.

Be patient, your new family says. Take your time, if you have that luxury, in this new place to get acclimated. Which will take a few weeks. Or months. And perhaps the most important thing is to realize that the place you left has already changed from what you knew. So if you thought to go back there, and dreamed about it, it has already changed beyond what you knew. The familiar unfamiliar. The root of familiar is family. With family, in a curious punning way, nothing is un-familiar.

Who are these people, whose group you have shown up into, from that leap off the cliff not so long ago? Maybe it takes decades to show up here- and you were only a story that people told on holiday gatherings. Here you are, inhabiting this story, realizing and materializing in this place that was previously occupied by a character.

And you can absolutely trust, that there will be yet another leap, willing or unwilling, off another cliff.

There is an old story I dimly remember, perhaps it was a story told by Alan Watts; where there was once a Zen master who loved ceramics, and tea bowls in particular. The story goes that there was a man who was studying with this Zen master, and had found what he felt was a particularly beautiful tea bowl. It was beautiful for its simplicity, uniqueness, and character. The man presented it to the Zen master with respect and ceremony- and the master picked up the bowl and smashed it on the floor. The man was so shocked he left the presence of the master without saying a word. One of the temple attendants was nearby and understood the distress of the man who had offered the bowl. The attendant gathered up the pieces, and had the bowl repaired with a Japanese technique that is called kintsugi (金継ぎ), which is the process of repairing broken pottery using lacquer mixed with gold dust for the seams. The attendant presented the repaired bowl to the master, and the master called in the man who had originally given it to him. “You were attached to the form of this bowl when you first presented it to me,” said the master. “So I had no choice other than to smash it.” The man bowed and said, “Before, it was beautiful- but now it is perfect.”

©2016 Anthony S. Wright, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved.
www.theonaut.com

There are these men in the forest. They have been called by the landlord to cut down tall trees that would fall across the road in a high wind storm after or during rain. They sing in a lilting Spanish while they work in the trees. Perhaps their songs are about women they have known or would like to know. They climb high into the branches, sometimes over a hundred feet off the ground, with a running chainsaw hanging from their belts, carefully belayed by the expensive climbing ropes, tossed over forks in the tops of the trees they are cutting. They step with great care onto long branches that are no thicker than a wrist.

These men have great awareness of the forest- and there is a kind of thoughtful approach they take, as one would approach a lovely woman for the first time. They are aware of dangers that even she herself doesn’t know. To move among the branches, defenses, and know which to take first, so that later, without conscious thought, one is not caught by what is unplanned.

Perhaps that is also what brings these men to the woods. Along with as heady and sharp a perfume as ever adorned a female human, “the talls” (Los Altos) bravely bleed stiff scent into the air as their conquerors take them, as a man takes a woman- to the surprise of both.

There are those who have long ago found trees to be phallic- yet I might suggest that these beings are as to the forest as hair is to us. Maybe that’s inaccurate also, as our human hair is not alive as it is grown from our bodies. These trees are living beings- and the men who take them know this- and are full of care, and respect, and technique- to do their work and stay as safe as they can- knowing full well, that there are those individuals who will fool them particularly when one is distracted-

Life can be lost this way- when distracted- when work with the sacred becomes routine, or mechanized. Such a slow death-life transformation we are undergoing from the willful ignorance of the corporate persons, who find their sustenance from a sole pursuit of unthinking and limited value games within the context of the whole.

Its so plain to see. The Apollo astronauts saw it- Not that our lives as human beings are a zero-sum game- yet we might just want to consider a bit more thoughtfully, not only the intrinsic nature of our being, and not only how we may be inhabiting it, but how we are perhaps literally compromising our own body- in (many times willful) ig-norance.

The ancient Greeks who declared that our world was made up of elementals were not so far wrong- yet instead of fire, air, water, and earth, we have vibrating strings and membranes. And now there is more and more confirmation of the Higgs field, that gives otherwise weightless particles mass, in concert with these vibrating energies.

Of course, we will have to continue to look more and more closely at the nature of Reality- and we will continue to find more and more to be aware of-

Yet there is a kind of orientation of awareness that we can embrace, that allows us access to this infinite unfolding. This awareness is other than finite- it must be infinite- as only the infinite can attend to the infinite- yet the good news is that each human being, each human interface is as capable of this infinite interface as was anyone through time. The recipe, the hackneyed recipe is ego-death.

©2011 Anthony S. Wright, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved.
www.theonaut.com

I saw an attractive young woman, trotting about the Memorial Glade on the campus of  University of California at Berkeley this afternoon, holding with what seemed to be fierce concentration,  a two and a half foot dowel protruding upward from her crotch. I watched as she departed and realized that what she was holding between her legs was actually a small child-sized straw broom. I looked around a bit more, and saw that she was part of a group of Berkeley students, all holding these child-sized brooms, attempting to play Quidditch- the ‘wizardly’ game described in some detail in the Harry Potter chronicles. One of the constraints of the game may have been that one had to have at least one hand on one’s broom at all times.

I was stunned. To see the hoops and the accoutrements of a game described in a fantasy novel attempted to be played without the resources of wizardry or sorcery is plainly courageous. Quidditch doesn’t really work without the magic of levitation of Wiccan broomsticks, and these young people were attempting this magic without the benefit of such realized belief.

Who is to say that the vision of courage is not to be supported beyond the belief of the usual Newtonian laws of cultural perception? Perhaps one of the most important things of our lives is to embrace how we may have been enthralled (in other words, hypnotized) by repetitive ideology and response that is rather other than what a truthful engagement of our own comprehensive awareness might be. In other words, to dispense with the bullshit that is offered to us, again and again, for the true intuitive feeling that we cannot deny.

They think they know what will persuade us, you see- from long experience, of working with people who are careless with their thoughts, and who have no personal ethical basis of relating in the world. Those people are, sadly, spongy- meaning malleable and uncertain.

A story I heard recently, and cannot recall at present the source, said that the most precious gift that would be offered in return for a certain kind of deep and knowledgeable awareness, was the gift of doubt.

There is no greater capability to focus upon what the truth may actually show itself to be, than doubt. And doubt, being the one of the most powerful cleansers of awareness, needs to be judiciously applied.

If doubt is applied thoughtlessly, it turns into corrosion of belief. One turn deserves another, without remorse. And rather than to say that belief is incorruptible- it is to say that the capability to believe has power beyond those who would corrupt it.

Mencius believed that people were inherently good. And Xun Zi, and Han Fei Zi were of contrary opinion. I prefer to believe in this inherent goodness of people.

Yeah, the Dao is neutral. It ‘only’ makes space for the seed to grow. It gives nourishment to all who come. And it prevails after all distinctions fail.

Whether we put the ball through the hoop, in competition that enlivens us, the question remains- how are we going to choose to find Harmony among and with our fellow human beings? And how do we, in the breaths that define our mammalian experience in the world, come to find commonality with our arboreal, mineral, and cosmic brethren?

Just because the stones and trees, and for that matter, our very bones, are less vociferous than our cognitive minds- does this mean that the value of what they have to offer us is somehow less than what we might care to learn?

©2011 Anthony S. Wright, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved.
www.theonaut.com

I heard earlier tonight a commentary about how trees have a molecule in their sap that is nearly the same as our hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is the molecule that helps us bind the oxygen out of the air to vitalize our cells. Where the flowers have bees, we have trees. The trees take the CO2 that we breathe out in as nourishment that fulfills them, and they exhale oxygen that nourishes us…

And I sense that this is true of our true friends. This is how we nourish one another, as part of our whole being.

Bravely do we carry through as we find ourselves cleansed by the fires of circumstance.

New Moon in Virgo tomorrow- and everyone is concerned for details, yet the Few of Us find the details to serve Us in the mounting wave, of shifts in consciousness-

We’ll never be the same, coming to this realization; from having been separated and alone… with the darkest places now flooded with startling awareness…

How can I help? It seems that many have been so fearful and consumed- it is such a short step to giving up who we thought we were- though one of the most difficult.

There is an enlightened evangelist who said the evangelistic movement needed to be ‘born-again!’ (Richard Cizik [interview with Terry Gross on “Fresh Air”])

This being born-again is to allow the rigidity of egoic structures to fall away in the context of the sacred. It is truly a surrender- and to trust our own lives. Which happened at one time for many, if not all, in the ‘born-again’ movement, in their initial realization that they were both less than and more than who they thought they were, but they forgot they had to continually be born again (it is an ongoing process!)- one of the embedded and presuppositional structures within the very movement itself.

It is the continual shedding of “ego.” Which process, when abandoned part-way, leads to a worse enslavement of ideology, than if there had never been a first stripping away of the ego in the first place. Those who stop part-way become stuck, rigid, in their partial cognitive comprehension of what they think had happened. Standing on the river-bank with a small cup of water in-hand (some trying to sell it!), rather than diving in to the river on whose banks they stand.

Alan Watts had it right- when he said that those who had initially had this experience and had not completely shed the allurement of the ego, found that they attempted to gain status by having been more Worthy of The Love of God by having been Greater Sinners than anyone else. Which is the ego game all over again, but in a negative sense. Mid-western Lutherans have this down to a Fine Art.

The Buddhists call this “chains of gold,” (of having ego about being “enlightened,”) versus “chains of iron,” which are from those who have not yet realized that they are other than separate.

I interviewed a guy a couple of years ago who was so proud that he had meditated an hour a day for the last 40 years. Actually, the goal of meditation is not about how many years one has meditated; it’s about quieting the mind- and the fact that he had such pride in it, was a clear indication to me, despite how much monetary wealth he had accumulated, that he was caught- by those “chains of gold.” “My mind is quieter than yours!”

The King’s son, Gautama Shakyamuni, died penniless.

I do truly seek to impart value to our human life, and that implicitly and explicitly implies that there is breakthrough to be made. That value is independent of the conveyance of value, which has been horribly manipulated.

The true value is to know how we are one being, in the most literal sense- and the time we spend discovering this is the most well-spent.

©2011 Anthony S. Wright, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved.
www.theonaut.com