Bookmark 2015

Here is this year's holiday bookmark. Encouraged by exTA Collin Hughes' appreciation of last year's, I'll try to keep posting them every year I make them. I've only missed one year in over three decades of creating them for family and friends which now includes my blog readers. Print it, cut it out, put it between two pieces of clear contact paper to protect it, then cut it out again.
Enjoy having a gargoyle to watch over your reading and enjoy your reading.
If you're looking for a different kind of book, try "The Family Fang" by Kevin Wilson.
Happy Holidays!  

Anticipation 2

Open Mind

The physical brain is the repository of what’s learned about living in material existence. We are each an exquisitely complex integration of mechanisms to perceive and understand the world and because we walk around separately having different experiences there is the illusion that awareness is separate. But science has been unsuccessful at locating a place for consciousness, so the idea of awareness that flows through us bringing consciousness to our place in the world, what Sri Aurobindo calls the superconsciousness is not a far-fetched notion.

Our own experience of this is in how similar, exactly the same really, the perceiving mind in our head seems to be throughout life. I remember that phase in childhood when the idea of separateness was upon me and didn’t make sense, and I feel that same questioning mind using my personal mental equipment now. It’s what provides the outlook. Years of meditation have loosened my attachment to the personal in a shift to viewing it as a particular instrument for learning about creation.

It was interesting to read that brain scans show less over all activity and ego consciousness during time on hallucinogens. Yet the experiences reported are more elaborate and intense. This would support Huxley’s idea that the brain is a filter, screening out all that is not useful to our purposes. When the filter is disconnected the awareness ranges beyond the personal mind including sights and experiences not accounted for by brain activity. There are many reports from doctors and scientists of people having consciousness without brain activity and the testimony all mystical religions shows how stilling the mind opens it. Meditation is a way to let the brain settle. Day to day demands emphasize the personal, so it’s easy to get caught in the illusion that is all there is. As personal agendas fade, the mind expands into larger perspective. The extended mind opens the channel for inspiration, influenced by the needs of the field of mind. In this way a larger field of mind guides us to what we need and the individual contributions that grow from separate life history are what it needs. The noosphere described by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his "Activation of Energy" is the self-regulating organism of mind that encloses the planet like an atmosphere.

In a beautiful way of saying this from an essay by Bhikka Bodhi, “When the soul becomes embodied, it forgets its original nature and becomes enmeshed in material creation. This creates the self.”

We are particle and wave. When we’re identified with an isolated self, we’re particle. When identified with a higher frequency, consciousness remembers its original nature. Just like crest and trough are all part of the wave, we shouldn’t let our distinctions between figure and ground give the impression they’re separate and that only one side is important. Because we are material does not mean that’s all we are. As the wave, we are continuous with the energy spectrum.

Opening the mind to the possibility that consciousness is not confined in the body allows more access to the creative stream fueling the growth of the future. To be the wave is to resonate with the larger field of consciousness and feel the connection to all of creation.

Anticipation 1

Bernie Sanders

 Whenever I tell someone I support Bernie Sanders, the first thing they say is he can’t win. This sounds to me like people who’ve compromised, who have resigned themselves to a system that if allowed to continue its current course will stomp everyone that’s not already rich down to gravel underfoot, because the rich already have too much power. With an army of PR companies strategizing about how to keep people distracted and acquiescent, corporate messages flooding into every relevant source, the public is convinced there is no other course. Competitive aggressiveness is tearing the world apart.

The morning after the first democratic debate I tuned into NPR to see how they were playing it. The point that stood out for me was that it was the highest rated Democratic debate in many years. This had to be because of Bernie Sanders. Everyone else was a politician and politicians are the reason people have become cynical and uninvolved. His message came from the heart. He sees the big picture and what most needs to be changed about America. Control of the country is being bought up by the few. In a documentary almost entirely made of uploaded individual footage of the Occupy Wall Street movement as it spread, the range of people marching together is the most diverse of any march I’ve seen.  The courage and creativity felt more true of America than the glitzy soul-killing media version. These are people with principles who care about other people. The title “Rise Like Lions” was drawn from a Percy Blythe Shelley poem quoted at the beginning encouraging people to stand against oppressors. The power of this movement is behind Bernie Sanders because he’s getting at the roots of the problem. It’s not a fluke that he’s getting such big crowds. The Seattle demonstrations against the WTO drew over 40,000, which then fueled the Occupy movement. When the mainstream media mocked the movement saying, “Occupy What?”the answer  seemed obvious. People want to occupy their country again. Our police are no longer the smiling Andy of Mayberry sheriff protecting the people of the town, they are the guns that protect the new polluting factory FROM the people of the town. That capitalism has become pathological is shown by the soaring wealth of some while a growing number struggle and do without, a gigantic shiny tumor hanging off the side of the shriveling body politic.

Young people today are beyond being swayed by labels. The media may think enough shouting the word “Socialist” will make a difference but the generation coming up is smarter than they think, multisensory. While the elders are yelling, they may have the earbuds in listening to DemocracyNow and scanning world wide articles on reddit. If the mainstream media can’t see what’s happening it’s because they are too close to the 1% themselves.

There is still time to have a just and humane world that respects everything in it. Having a mission to make it happen can unite across surface differences and stop reacting to what the media wants us to be upset about. They say he can’t win because of their own fear, not knowing what a just America would mean to those now on the winning end. Taking the incentive out of greed might be a relief for everybody. If anything over a certain amount goes in a 90% bracket the competition to have the most might be defanged. Without so much extra money, the extremists might not get funded. The best in people could be allowed to flourish without self-interested parties telling them who to hate.

Bernie Sanders is visible because of the lions. Let’s join the pride.

Behaviorism

Variety and Enrichment

What made talking about the art from my “Imaging the Idea” class such a pleasure was partly due to the wonderful variety of approaches this semester’s class represents. It was stimulating to go from paintings and constructions to photography, animation and video collage, stuffed objects and reconstructed prints offering a thorough exploration of expressive iconography. That combined with the interesting and perceptive responses from the group got my own ideas moving into brand new territory. This is serious enrichment. I can revisit any one of the works mentally and get to know the mind that created it, feel their humor and priorities, the particular gifts each brings to the things they need to show us. Perspective is enlarged by the accumulation of many ways of seeing. This was the reason I created this class and the “Imaging from Current Events”, as a way of spreading a variety of visual and verbal ideas on the table so everyone gets a sense of the range of the ways others come at a topic without dispute. No idea has any more claim to being truth than another. Building the skill of moving through and pooling ideas rather than using mental resources to defend and prevail offers a more interesting, open journey through the field of ideas, the extended mental space of collective perception.

Variety is enrichment at every level of biology. When people are threatened by difference it can often be because they aren’t attuned to essence. The idea that everyone has to come around to one way of
thinking is an archaic remnant of colonialism. The availability of multiple points of view needs a more open-ended orientation toward belief that allows for growth and change. Understanding underlying relationships, how things function and the patterns of behavior formed in early development provide a platform for understanding all that is shared. Every human being has the experience of being a helpless baby that then begins to sit, to crawl, to begin the struggle to stand and
walk, and these shared early experiences are an important component of how we respond to gravity, position, obstruction, imbalance and their analogue in the composition of art. Art communicates through the human response to space. The metaphors based on functioning in the world are universal.

Understanding this essential responsiveness should enable us to transcend superficial physical descriptions and appreciate the ways in which human beings are varied as valuable. A restricted gene pool and monoculture weaken a species and make it more vulnerable, whereas interbreeding takes advantage of the best genes on both sides to makea more vigorous next generation. When Picasso saw African masks it opened a new creative direction for him. Whatever is new and different stimulates dopamine in the brain, which is represented in behavior as curiosity and focused attention. This is not something to be suppressed.  One way to make use of the untapped potential of the mind
is to expose it to more difference and find the novelty that most inspires creative thought. If as so many are now saying, we are moving into a post-knowledge era our tools for depth understanding and creative thinking will be essential to the future.