The Bright Side

has transmuted into

Funky Zen Monkey Grin

I love you all. ... Thank you for visiting.

The New Westerns and David Allan Coe together at last...

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UPDATE: show postponed?
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David Allan Coe - "If that Ain't Country..."

-

The New Westerns and David Allan Coe
will be playing together
at Goathead Saloon... in Mesa, Arizona,
on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008.

David Allan Coe is scheduled to hit the stage at 7 p.m.
... followed by Arizona's own, radiofreedoghouse,
aka Danny Western and his gang, The New Westerns.

(below)

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note to self: ... relax and breathe
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An Observation

If you love something, set it free.
If it comes back, it was and always will be yours.
If it never returns, it was never yours to begin with.


If it just sits in your living room, messes up your stuff,
eats your food, uses your telephone, takes your money,
and never appears to know
that you actually set it free in the first place,
---
then you either married it or gave birth to it.

The Troublesome Paradox of "The Secret"

the field center
explains the paradox
of the "The Secret"

-

I've had numerous emails asking me to comment on The Secret, the latest and massively popular New Age offering (available as a best-selling book and a DVD movie) on how consciousness allegedly can be used to attract health, love, and prosperity.

First off, one has to hand it to Rhonda Byrne and the crew at Prime Time Productions, who put together this collection of New Age wisdom on the subject, for their keen sense of what would appeal to a mass audience. The packaging is unquestionably first-rate.

Even a cursory reading of the book, however, reveals that it offers no secret at all, but only a reheated collection of the same instruction that's been available in the New Age literature since the 70s on a cultural scale, and since the 1800s and early 1900s somewhat less visibly in the work of New Thought writers such as Phineas Quimby, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Ernest Holmes, Florence Scovel Shinn, Emmett Fox, and others.

The essence of this teaching, to which Field training takes exception, is that one can, through visualizing or using affirmations or prayer or otherwise embodying a consciousness of fulfillment, create corresponding conditions in the world.

Note that Field training does not deny that the outer world corresponds to the inner, but points out that one cannot use this "Law of Correspondence" by setting out to use it.

There is an element of paradox built into the principle that Field training regards as central, and which the various New Age offerings on the subject, including The Secret, miss.

This paradoxical element becomes obvious once it's stated, but it is nearly invisible until then:

If our belief creates reality, and we seek to create, say, prosperity, then it is unavoidable that we must already be believing in a lack of prosperity (else why would we set out to try to create it?) and this belief casts the vote of our faith, as it were, mobilizing the Law of Correspondence against our desire.

It should be apparent that any attempt to use consciousness to solve a problem presupposes believing in the problem. Therein lies the paradox.

The idea that we can create conditions through consciousness techniques is nearly irresistible to anyone who has suspected that our inner life and our outer life are mysteriously commingled, but those who have made the experiment have learned quickly and sometimes the hard way that desire alone is not creative, and that visualizations and affirmations fail as a rule to have any creative effect on the world, which seems to roll on indifferent to our fantasies.

We can want something with every atom of our being, we can visualize and affirm it till the cows come home, and still find the universe unresponsive.

Of course, writing a book that tells us otherwise, that fosters and perpetuates the popular misconception that we can have, say, prosperity at the same time that we're believing in its absence and consequently the need to create it—writing such a book may well fulfill the author's expectation of prosperity, because there will always be a huge market for the idea that we can have what we want simply by wanting it, that "wishing will make it so," but in such cases, the authors have made use of something like a pyramid scheme.

As long as these writers can keep "selling" the idea, prosperity follows surely enough for them, but the tab ultimately is passed to those at the bottom of the pyramid who run out of customers, and are left wondering why this seems to work for others while they can't get results.

I don't say that the authors of these books are doing this intentionally. My guess is that they got excited about an idea and mean well, but this is the effect nonetheless.

The fallback position for the New Age's mistaken approach to conscious creating has been essentially the same as the fundamentalist's, who infers from the failure of prayer that we must not have had enough faith.

So, the New Age practitioner may wonder or even worry what he "did wrong" when the universe fails to deliver the goods.

It doesn't occur to him that the whole model is wrong, that the Law of Correspondence (also called Law of Assumption, Law of Attraction, Law of Creation, Law of Mental Equivalents, etc.) is elegant and unfailing but also in this sense ruthlessly thorough and efficient, and that he overlooked something essential, viz., that what we get in life corresponds not to what we want but to who we are.

The person who believes he lacks prosperity sufficiently to be trying to create prosperity uses the law perfectly, and ends up with more lack, though this was not his aim.

Here, then is the paradox:

We cannot use the Law of Creation to create anything. We can, however, assume the identity we desire for its own sake, that is, solely for the sake of the inner fulfillment.

Paradox requires that practice stop there.

Anyone who could practice this far and no further would find the Law delightfully surprising him, and at that point indeed would have discovered a great secret.

A few weeks ago, I received an angry email from someone who had visited the Field Center site, looked at our "how we're different" chart, and accused me of saying that other models "suck" as he put it.

Most of what he found upsetting, I never said and wouldn't. But even responding charitably, I don't see anything wrong with stating that one approach is better, more revealing, more thorough, or more useful if it really is. And we don't just allege this; we explain why.

Furthermore, we don't claim that Field training is the model. It's a model, certainly not for everyone. That said, nearly every student who has come to Field training came from some New Age approach that, in the end, had not "worked."

What Field training gave these students was an entirely different standard for what counts as "working" when it comes to deliberately taking on the great adventure of living consciously, complete with its creative implications.

It taught them that, as we say endlessly, "the aim of practice is alignment, not manifestation." It taught them to recognize, appreciate, enjoy, and work with the paradox of consciousness-as-cause.

And it freed them from the pervasive and obviously still very popular misunderstanding that we can have anything in the world that we haven't earned by right of identity.

Instead, through their willingness to look beyond the popular model, they saw firsthand that identity is the generative force of creation, that what we want also wants something of us, that we cannot have anything we believe we lack, and that we cannot make an end run around these living principles through pretending, visualizing, repeating affirmations, or any other strategy.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

"The Secret" - Part 2

Last week, on 25 June, the Associated Press ran this story:

The Secret: Big Sales, Loud Criticism.

Here's an excerpt: "While The Secret has become a pop culture phenomenon, it also has drawn critics who are not quiet about labeling the movement a fad, embarrassingly materialistic or the latest example of an American propensity of wanting something for nothing.

Some medical professionals suggest it could even lead to a blame-the-victim mentality and actually be dangerous to those suffering from serious illness or mental disorders.

As with many publishing hits, the 'Oprah Effect' played a role.

Winfrey devoted two shows in February to The Secret, and Larry King and Ellen DeGeneres also featured it on their shows.

It was spoofed on Saturday Night Live when a man portraying a refugee in the Darfur region of Sudan was blamed for having negative thoughts.

However, the fear that The Secret will lead to a blame-the-victim mentality is a serious claim of critics.

For example, the book dismisses conditions such as a genetic predisposition to being overweight or a slow thyroid as 'disguises for thinking "fat thoughts."' And during times in which massive number of lives were lost, the book says, the 'frequency of their thoughts matched the frequency of the event.'

So, according to The Secret, the victims of the Holocaust were responsible for their extermination, the rape victim is asking for it, and the people in Darfur are being murdered because of negative thinking.

You see, this is a prime example of the sort of oversimplifications and confusions typical of the New Age approach to consciousness-as-cause, and one that Field training regards as particularly egregious and shameless.

Our response when asked how we explain the Holocaust and other calamitous or tragic events is that we don't. We recognize that decency places a limit on how far theory can or should be willing to go, and we don't speculate about the experiences of people who are not present to take part in the conversation and present their experience firsthand.

We don't preserve our theoretical model at their expense.

It is true that many who have come through Field training who endured and survived such experiences found that they were not beyond the reach of Field practice to revise and redeem, and that the principles applied even in such severe cases, but this was their call to make, not ours, and this is perhaps why our program doesn't appear either on Oprah or Saturday Night Live.

The great mistake of The Secret and the many models, some of them far more rigorous and thoughtful, is the failure to recognize and incorporate paradox and what we call the "dialectic" into its principles and practices.

As stated in Part 1 of this piece, believing in a problem sufficiently to set about "consciously creating" its solution already places one in a position of checkmate. The game is over, because belief, not willful intent, not visualizing, not prayer, not affirmations, not wishing or hoping or knowing "the secret" is what creates.

This has a far-reaching implication, namely that we cannot use our creative consciousness to create conditions.

We can, however, believe in the desired conditions for their own sake, or as we say, for the sake of alignment rather than manifestation.

This is where practice must stop.

This is the oasis in a desert of contradiction to which we banish our practice the moment we allow it to be strategic.

And this indeed appears to be something of a secret.

At least the New Age doesn't seem to know about it.

This essential element of paradox—this is one of the first things we give our students, and it changes their view of who they are, of what it means to be conscious and creative, and as a result, their lives in many ways, all for the better.

There is no "secret" that will bring us to anything that we do not earn through the willingness to live up to the version of self to which that thing corresponds, and moreover, to live up to it for its own sake.

Conscious creating, it turns out, is an act of love, an act of giving the self to the ideal rather than trying to get things from the world.

We cannot escape the assumptions of our own consciousness.

When the creative moment is entered into lovingly rather than for some desired effect, then and only then are we operating at the level of cause. This means that it isn't enough for us to visualize and such.

We have to become the thing we want, until all experience of lack has vanished in the joy of our having come home to our ideal.

Then, as far as we're concerned, the world can come along or not.

And the one who practices this way will discover a great secret indeed.


-
--
---

the field center

Secrets of the Occult:

Part 1 ... The Magicians

(video)

Thanks, Alice.

Holding the Right Thought

Multitudes of people are attracting the wrong things because they do not know the law. They have never learned that the great secret of health, happiness, and success lies in holding the mental attitude which builds, which constructs, the mental attitude which draws to us the good things we desire.

They have never learned the difference between building and tearing down thoughts; the difference between success and failure thoughts; in fact, they do not know that whatever comes to us in life, in our undertakings, great or small, is largely a question of the kind of thoughts we hold in the mind.

We can attract the thing we desire as easily as we can attract the thing we hate and despise and long to get rid of. It is simply a matter of holding the image of the thing in the mind. That is the model which the life processes will build into our environment and which we will objectify.


Like attracts like, failure more failure, poverty more poverty. Hatred attracts more hatred, envy more envy, jealousy more jealousy, and malice more malice. Everything has power to attract its kind.

The feeling of jealousy or hatred is a seed sown in the great cosmic soil all about us, and the eternal laws return to us a harvest the same in kind. What we sow we reap, just as the soil will return to us exactly what we put into it.

Nothing has the power to reproduce anything but itself. There is no exception to this law.

The law cannot pity or help you if you break a bone, or are injured, any more than the law of electricity can help you when you abuse it. It will kill you if you break the law.

To think about and worry about the things we do not want, or to fear that they will come to us, is but to invite them; because every impression becomes an expression, or tends to become so unless the impression is neutralized by its opposite.

If we think too much about our losses, too much about our possible failure, all these things will tend to bring to us the very thing we are trying to get away from.


On every hand we see this law of like attracting like exemplified in the lives of the poverty-stricken multitudes, who, through ignorance of the law, keep themselves in their unfortunate condition by saturating their minds with the poverty idea; thinking and acting and talking poverty; living in the belief in its permanency; fearing, dreading, and worrying about it.

They do not realize, no one has ever told them, that as long as people mentally see the hunger wolf at the door and the poorhouse ahead of them; as long as they expect nothing but lack and poverty and hard conditions, they are headed toward these things; they are making it impossible for prosperity to come in their direction.

The way to attract prosperity and drive poverty out of the life is to work in harmony with the law instead of against it. To expect prosperity, to believe with all your heart, no matter how present conditions may seem to contradict, that you are going to become prosperous, that you are already so, is the very first condition of the law of attaining what you desire. You cannot get it by doubting or fearing. Whatever we visualize and work for we will get.

What we most frequently visualize, what we think most about, is constantly weaving itself into the fabric of our lives, becoming a part of ourselves, increasing the power of our mental magnet to attract those things to us. It doesn't matter whether they are things we fear and try to avoid or things that are good for us, that we long to get. Keeping them in mind increases our affinity for them and inevitably tends to bring them into our lives.


It is a curious fact that many people seem to think that one must spend years as an apprentice to become an expert in any line of endeavor, in business or in a profession, but that in regard to prosperity it is largely a matter of chance, of fate, something which cannot be affected very much by anything they may be able to do.

They say, "Well, I was not built that way. I am not a natural money-maker, and never can be." Or they excuse themselves on the ground that their parents and those before them were never money-makers, and never did anything more than make a bare living.

There is nothing at all peculiar about prosperity any more than there is about legal efficiency or expertness in law or medicine. Its realization is purely a matter of concentration and of preparation; a matter of focusing all our powers upon the prosperity law in order to attract prosperity and to make ourselves expert in attaining it.

The law of prosperity, of opulence, is just as definite as the law of gravitation, and it works just as unerringly. Its first principle is mental. Wealth is created mentally first; it is thought out before it becomes a reality.

If you would attract success, keep your mind saturated with the success, idea. Develop an attitude of mind that will attract success. When you think success, when you act it, when you live it, when you talk it, when it is in your bearing, then you are attracting it.


When we once get this law of attraction thoroughly fixed in our minds we will be careful about attracting our enemies, contacting with them through our mind, thinking about them, worrying about them, fearing, and dreading them. We will hold the sort of thoughts that will attract the things we long for and are seeking, not the things we dread, and despise, and are trying to avoid.

It is just as easy to attract what you want as to attract what you don't want. It is just a question of holding the right thought, and making the right effort. There is no exception to the law of attraction, any more than there is to the law of gravitation, or the laws of mathematics.

-
--
---

(Orison Swett Marden)

Your Fate

Everything you long for,
Whether good or ill,
Shall at length be given
If you have the will--
If you have the patience
And are very still.

All is in the silence
Waiting to be brought
Forth to form and substance
By the Builder, Thought.
That is how God fashioned
Everything He wrought.

Yet I often wonder,
Looking at the earth
With its weight of worries,
If God finds it worth
All the force projected
Thinking it to birth.

Worlds and universes
In the silence wait;
Yours the power to shape them,
Either soon or late.
But be very careful
How you form your fate.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Sunday Lessons at Unity of Tucson

-



Teachings of Abraham
...are Unity
...are New Thought


Q and A on Abraham w/ Reverend Swartz (audio)

Functional Art and Found Wood

... Hand-carved and assembled rustic benches,
---
using only salvaged, reclaimed or found wood.





"The wood has a mind of its own", explains Dave.



-
"Everything I make is the product of the struggle
between my expectations and the wood's will.
---
It's a messy, sometimes angry process."
-

Dave Sage is a rustic woodcarver living and working in Portland Oregon.

What is Dudeism?

The beauty of Dudeism is its simplicity.

Once a religion gets
too complex,
everything can go wrong.

That’s why the
“To What/From What/By What Means” method of identifying a religion is a great way to summarize the Dudeist ethos for your un-Dude friends.

For example, if you apply this method to Buddhism
(a compeer of Dudeism),
you can easily answer what the point of it is.

From what is Buddhism trying to liberate us? ...Suffering

To what state of being is Buddhism trying to bring us? ...Nirvana

By what means does Buddhism attempt do this?
...The Noble Eightfold Path.


Isn’t that fucking interesting, man?

Now let’s apply it to Dudeism:

From what is Dudeism trying to liberate us? ... Thinking that’s too uptight.

To what state of being is Dudeism trying to bring us: ...Just taking it easy, man.

By what means does Dudeism attempt to do this? ...Abiding.

(...from the "Take It Easy Manifesto")

Gratitude Game: The Movie

Scenius, Innovation and Epicenters

Alex Steffen
June 26, 2008 10:55 AM


Ally Kevin Kelly has a terrific piece up about Brian Eno's concept of scenius:

Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or "scenes" can occasionally generate.


His actual definition is:

"Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius."

Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.



-

The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:

• Mutual appreciation -- Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.

• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques -- As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.

• Network effects of success -- When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.

• Local tolerance for the novelties -- The local "outside" does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

-


Scenius can erupt almost anywhere, and at different scales: in a corner of a company, in a neighborhood, or in an entire region.


I've been lucky enough to be involved (at least peripherally) in a few really vibrant scenes of communal innovation, and in my experience, the one thing they all have in common is what I've called an epicenter:


[E]very community needs the space where people who do innovative, creative, risky, noble, worldchanging things get together and fuel each other's ardor. Meeting your allies -- shaking hands, sitting down and eating together, talking, laughing, getting to look one another in the eye, getting to know someone in all the rich, primate non-verbal ways which can only happen in actual physical proximity -- is powerful. Epicenters are tools.


Kevin quite rightly points out that scenius is difficult, if not impossible, to create on demand, and the same is true of its epicenters. You can't just open a bar and expect collective genius to erupt.

Artists can tell you that the same thing is true of any form of human creativity -- it just doesn't turn on like a tap. But artists can also tell you that while you can't command creativity and innovation, you can create a welcoming space for it and increase the likelihood that it will show up. It can't be commanded, but it can be courted.

The art of courting genius is one that people hoping to solve the world's big problems would do well to learn, because truly worldchanging solutions don't arrive steadily or predictably on schedules as deliverables for rational investment.


No, truly worldchanging solutions tend to arrive in unruly clumps, in great non-linear spills of changed thinking.

This reality vexes today's philanthropists and social investors.

For the past two decades, the trend in the practice of giving money intelligently in an effort to do good has been all about measurable outcomes and predictable returns on giving.

This approach has had some benefit, driving social enterprises to leaner operations; but mostly it's been an abject failure.

Indeed, as I wrote last summer, many social investors are finding that in trying to bring predictability to their work, they've become incredibly averse to risk, and that this fear of risky giving has left them almost completely incapable of finding and funding efforts that would create the conditions for the emergence of the kinds of innovation we most need.


(Worse yet is the trend towards half-assed citizen media and social networking approaches, projects based on the insane assumption that all that's needed to court collaborative creativity is a website and a good advertising campaign.

This tendency to think that innovative collaboration comes free of cost, bubbling up out the Internet like spring water, betrays a poor understanding of the actual workings of either online collaboration or quality thinking.

Most often, when these open/ citizen-media/ online-collaborative approaches work, it's because a core group in the project provides most of the important input, and usually curates most of the other participants' input into useful forms.

So, frequently, funders' hopes that they can create transformation on the cheap actually just create a system that appears cheap because it externalizes the cost of expert participation onto the shoulders of others... and when their enthusiasm lags (or they need to get day jobs), the project falters or dies.

The examples of failed peer-based social innovation efforts outnumber the successful cases by orders of magnitude.)


I suspect what we need is an exploding number of epicenters, independent and creative people and groups, and well-designed networks to support them -- things that set the conditions for a planetary explosion of new thinking. We need to prepare lots of welcoming spaces where genius can take roost.

That's going to take some risk-oblivious, keenly perceptive, imaginative money.

But even more, I suspect it's going to take worldchangers understanding how valuable networked scenius is, and joining efforts to welcome it into their own lives and communities.

(...from World Changing)

Teachers Who Influenced Eckhart Tolle

...from an interview with John Parker


Question: You mentioned that after a profound realization had occurred you read spiritual texts and spent time with various teachers.

Can you share what writings and teachers had the greatest effect on you in further realizing what had been revealed to you?

Tolle: Yes. The texts I came in contact with—first I picked up a copy of the New Testament almost by accident, maybe half a year, a year after it happened, and reading the words of Jesus and feeling the essence and power behind those words. And I immediately understood at a deeper level the meaning of those words. I knew intuitively with absolute certainty that certain statements attributed to Jesus were added later, because they did not "emanate" from that place, that state of consciousness, because I knew that place, I know that place.

But when a statement emanates from that place, there is recognition. And when it does not, no matter how clever or intelligent it may sound it lacks that essence and it does not have that power. In other words, it does not emanate from the stillness.


So that was an incredible realization, just reading and understanding "beyond mind" the deeper meaning of those words.












Then came the Bhagavad Gita, I also had an immediate, deep understanding of and an incredible love for such a divine work. The Tao Te Ching; also an immediate understanding. And often knowing, "Oh, that's not a correct translation.” I knew the translator had misunderstood, and knew what the real meaning was although I do not know any Chinese. So I immediately had access to the essence of those texts.

Then I also started reading on Buddhism and immediately understood the essence of Buddhism. I saw the simplicity of the original teaching of the Buddha compared to the complexity of subsequent additions, philosophy, all the baggage that over the centuries accumulated around Buddhism, and saw the essence of the original teaching.

I have a great love for the teaching of the Buddha, a teaching of such power and sublime simplicity. I even spent time in Buddhist monasteries. During my time in England there were already several Buddhist monasteries.



I met and listened to some teachers that helped me understand my own state.

In the beginning there was a Buddhist monk, Achan Sumedo, abbot of two or three monasteries in England. He's a Western-born Buddhist.



And in London I spent some time with Barry Long.

I also understood things more deeply, simply through listening and having some conversations with him. And there were other teachers who were just as meaningful whom I never met in person that I feel a very strong connection to.

One is [J.] Krishnamurti, and another is Ramana Maharshi. I feel a deep link. And I feel actually that the work I do is a coming together of the teaching "stream," if you want to call it that, of Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi. They seem very, very dissimilar, but I feel that in my teaching the two merge into one.

It is the heart of Ramana Maharshi, and Krishnamurti's ability to see the false, as such and point out how it works. So Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi, I love them deeply. I feel completely at One with them.



And it is a continuation of the teaching.

13 Principles of Spiritual Activism

1. Transformation of motivation from anger/fear/despair to compassion/love/purpose. This is a vital challenge for today's social change movement. This is not to deny the noble emotion of appropriate anger or outrage in the face of social injustice.

Rather, this entails a crucial shift from fighting against evil to working for love, and the long-term results are very different, even if the outer activities appear virtually identical. Action follows Being, as the Sufi saying goes. Thus "a positive future cannot emerge from the mind of anger and despair." (Dalai Lama)

2. Non-attachment to outcome. This is difficult to put into practice, yet to the extent that we are attached to the results of our work, we rise and fall with our successes and failures—a sure path to burnout. Hold a clear intention, and let go of the outcome—recognizing that a larger wisdom is always operating. As Gandhi said, "the victory is in the doing," not the results. Also, remain flexible in the face of changing circumstances: "Planning is invaluable, but plans are useless." (Churchill)

3. Integrity is your protection. If your work has integrity, this will tend to protect you from negative energy and circumstances. You can often sidestep negative energy from others by becoming "transparent" to it, allowing it to pass through you with no adverse effect upon you. This is a consciousness practice that might be called "psychic aikido."

4. Integrity in means and ends. Integrity in means cultivates integrity in the fruit of one's work. A noble goal cannot be achieved utilizing ignoble means.

5. Don't demonize your adversaries. It makes them more defensive and less receptive to your views. People respond to arrogance with their own arrogance, creating rigid polarization. Be a perpetual learner, and constantly challenge your own views.

6. You are unique. Find and fulfill your true calling. "It is better to tread your own path, however humbly, than that of another, however successfully." (Bhagavad Gita)

7. Love thy enemy. Or at least, have compassion for them. This is a vital challenge for our times. This does not mean indulging falsehood or corruption. It means moving from "us/them" thinking to "we" consciousness, from separation to cooperation, recognizing that we human beings are ultimately far more alike than we are different. This is challenging in situations with people whose views are radically opposed to yours. Be hard on the issues, soft on the people.

8. Your work is for the world, not for you. In doing service work, you are working for others. The full harvest of your work may not take place in your lifetime, yet your efforts now are making possible a better life for future generations. Let your fulfillment come in gratitude for being called to do this work, and from doing it with as much compassion, authenticity, fortitude, and forgiveness as you can muster.

9. Selfless service is a myth. In serving others, we serve our true selves. "It is in giving that we receive." We are sustained by those we serve, just as we are blessed when we forgive others. As Gandhi says, the practice of satyagraha ("clinging to truth") confers a "matchless and universal power" upon those who practice it. Service work is enlightened self-interest, because it cultivates an expanded sense of self that includes all others.

10. Do not insulate yourself from the pain of the world. Shielding yourself from heartbreak prevents transformation. Let your heart break open, and learn to move in the world with a broken heart. As Gibran says, "Your pain is the medicine by which the physician within heals thyself." When we open ourselves to the pain of the world, we become the medicine that heals the world. This is what Gandhi understood so deeply in his principles of ahimsa and satyagraha. A broken heart becomes an open heart, and genuine transformation begins.

11. What you attend to, you become. Your essence is pliable, and ultimately you become that which you most deeply focus your attention upon. You reap what you sow, so choose your actions carefully. If you constantly engage in battles, you become embattled yourself. If you constantly give love, you become love itself.

12. Rely on faith, and let go of having to figure it all out. There are larger 'divine' forces at work that we can trust completely without knowing their precise workings or agendas. Faith means trusting the unknown, and offering yourself as a vehicle for the intrinsic benevolence of the cosmos. "The first step to wisdom is silence. The second is listening." If you genuinely ask inwardly and listen for guidance, and then follow it carefully—you are working in accord with these larger forces, and you become the instrument for their music.



13. Love creates the form. Not the other way around. The heart crosses the abyss that the mind creates, and operates at depths unknown to the mind. Don't get trapped by "pessimism concerning human nature that is not balanced by an optimism concerning divine nature, or you will overlook the cure of grace." (Martin Luther King) Let your heart's love infuse your work and you cannot fail, though your dreams may manifest in ways different from what you imagine.

-

(...from the Satyana Institute)

A Game of Boomerangs

-

Many people are in ignorance of the fact
that gifts and things are investments,
and that hoarding and saving invariably lead to loss.

"There is that scattereth and yet increaseth;
and there is that withholdeth more than is meet,
but it tendeth to poverty."

For example: I knew a man who wanted
to buy a fur-lined overcoat.

He and his wife went to various shops,
but there was none he wanted.

He said they were all too cheap-looking.

At last, he was shown one, the salesman said
was valued at a thousand dollars,
but which the manager would sell him for five-hundred dollars,
as it was late in the season.

His financial possessions amounted to
about seven hundred dollars.

The reasoning mind would have said,
"You can't afford to spend nearly all you have on a coat,"
but he was very intuitive and never reasoned.

He turned to his wife and said,
"If I get this coat, I'll make a ton of money!"
So his wife consented, weakly.

About a month later, he received
a ten-thousand-dollar commission.

The coat made him feel so rich,
it linked him with success and prosperity;
without the coat he would not have received the commission.

It was an investment paying large dividends!

If man ignores these leadings to spend or to give,
the same amount of money will go
in an uninteresting or unhappy way.


For example: A woman told me, on Thanksgiving Day,
she informed her family
that they could not afford a Thanksgiving dinner.

She had the money, but decided to save it.

A few days later, someone entered her room
and took from the bureau drawer
the exact amount the dinner would have cost.

The law always stands back of the man
who spends fearlessly, with wisdom.

-

...from the book, "The Game of Life and How to Play It,"
by Florence Scovell Shinn