The Transformation of Consciousness

Learning to Support the Movement of our Evolution

Writing can be a very powerful way of doing inquiry, for the purpose of awakening and transforming our lives. All that it requires is a basic ground of willingness and commitment. Willingness to look at things as they are, not as they should be or could be—to face directly into the way it actually is, right now.

We can use writing for this kind of inquiry, asking ourselves basic and powerful questions like these: “What do I really want? What is my major obstacle? What happens to me when I don’t get what I want? What do I care about more than anything else? What is my strongest resource? Do I know how to ask for and receive support?”

We may think we know the answers to these questions, but we are not looking for a mental response when we inquire like this. We are learning to drop the question into our heart, into our body, into a place of deep listening. In this place, we are ready for whatever comes forth in response to the question. And this kind of response is not something old, something we’ve heard hundreds of times before. It’s new and alive and we feel it; we feel the impact of what we have discovered. That’s what makes the difference.

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Words to a friend who is organizing ‘the black ribbon’ campaign, in response to Canada’s black marks in Copenhagen: visit Rik Logtenberg, on Facebook and Twitter

We need to be very clear and hard--headed in the whole approach we take. I noticed when I listened to Michelle Mungal, our MLA, the other night, whom I love a lot, that she came across to me as enthusiastic, optimistic and naive..She kept saying things like “All Canadians care about the climate change, “ and I thought, “Well, Michelle, clearly that is not true, because I have friends that don’t even know what Copenhagen is..”

I don’t know if you are familiar with the work of Joanna Macy..it would be good to read some of her work, because she has been working for the last 15 years on helping to awaken people and mobilize their resources for skillful action in taking care of our environment.

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Reflections after being at our 350 candlelight vigil at City Hall

Standing in the cold last night, listening to how Canada has been obstructing the agenda in Copenhagen day after day, I struggled with a sense that this little blue-- green planet is pretty stuck, that most people are operating on a level of consciousness that is about survival, and being comfortable or distracted from difficulty and pain..

It was powerful for me to realize that Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who is now supporting this 350 movement, is someone who has been a part of enormous social change in his lifetime: the fall of the Berlin Wall, and of course, of apartheid..He was speaking this weekend about how demonstrations and petitions actually work, in the long run, as soon as there are enough people behind them.

That helped me a lot, because I find the general apathy and passivity of so many people can feel like a huge challenge. I was remembering when the Chinese invaded Tibet, and the Dalai Lama sent so many telegrams to the United Nations, asking for help, that they filled up a whole huge room. And nobody did anything. They left Tibet to its fate.

I actually had a good friend of mind on the weekend ask me, ‘What is Copenhagen?” That was a difficult moment for me--a shock to the heart.  I’ve been understanding that a more evolved level of consciousness allows us to keep persevering, the way Bill McKibben has, for the last 20 years, without getting overwhelmed, or angry at those whose capacity to participate is less developed.

Waking up from the emotional numbness, so that we can actually feel the enormity of what we are facing, is so crucial at this point. And then finding that place of freedom and balance, from which we can engage without being dominated by either fear or desire, is the other piece. I pray that more and more of us find our way to this level of consciousness, before things reach a point where they cannot be reversed.

I am looking right now at ways we can remain open to our interconnection and our collective destiny, realize that everything we do impacts everything else, without putting the kind of pressure on ourselves that overwhelms us.

I have discovered a lot about this recently, and will be addressing it in my writing, courses and workshops.. Letting ourselves really care, really engage, without losing our equanimity---what a fine balance this is..For me it is connected to our level of development, or evolution, and also to our capacity to rest as awareness, or the witness.

love
Shayla

This, for me, is a wonderful display of embodied spirituality:

“I am a man among men, dedicated to a life of meditative awareness. I am a man of Argentine tango, a man of organic wine, a man who makes his own biodiesel, a man in love with a beautiful woman, a man of intense passion, a man who harvests and eats wild mushrooms, digs clams and collects seaweed at the ocean, a man who feels and loves deeply, a man devoted to the idea of Zorba the Buddha, a man mending relationships, a man with a lot of opinions, a man growing and learning. A man whose heart aches and soars...an ordinary man, like you.”

Jun Po Dennis Kelly, Zen master, in an interview for the Mankind Project

I had forgotten that term Adya uses ‘affectionate awareness.” It is beautiful..

I often use the term awareness/presence for the very same reason--awareness so often has a feeling of being cool, detached and uninvolved. Which it is, but it’s so much more than that..It is intimate with everything, because it doesn’t stand back and watch--it watches from the inside, from the heart, from the core. That’s how it transforms everything it touches--because of the non-separation.

Dear friends
I’m just sending this out to those of you who might have known of the work and teachings of John Daido Loori, the Zen teacher, who passed away very recently.

It’s amazing to me how much we can receive from someone without ever having met them in person.

John Daido was a great lover of nature, and of creativity, and he taught me much, especially about listening to the invisible transmission of rivers and mountains. He asked us all to love the earth, to care for this beautiful earth, with a sense of indivisibility.

In Buddhist scriptures they speak of prajna paramita, the perfection of wisdom, as crossing the river: “Go, go, hurry, cross over to the other side.”

John Daido invited us to understand that crossing over in many ways: “We can understand the other shore as being none other than this shore. We can also understand that the other shore crosses over to us...”

In our work in Radiant Mind and The NDTT, it feels like the crossing over has happened, and that it continues to happen, and that the other shore crosses over to us in each moment....all of the above!

with love
Shayla

This is a favourite poem of mine...it demonstrates the innate capacity of our authentic being to completely open to a moment, or a few moments, and allow those moments to carry us into the mystery of life itself.

Arrivals

Imagine the confines of a long grey corridor
just before immigration at Washington Dulles
airport. Imagine two Ethiopian women amid
a sea of familiar international plastic blandness,
entering America for the first time. Think of
their undulating multi-colored turbans raised
atop graceful heads, transforming us,
a grey line of travelers behind them, into followers
and mendicants, mere drab, impatient, moneyed
and perplexed attendants to their bright,
excited, chattered arrival.
Imagine a sharp plexi-gass turn left and suddenly
before them, in biblical astonishment, like a vertical
red sea churning, like the waters barring Moses from
The Promised Land, like Jacob standing before the ladder,
a moving escalator, a mode of rising, a form of ascension,
a way to go up they’d never seen before, its steel grey
interlocking invitation on and up to who knows what,
bringing them and everyone behind them, to a bemused,
complete, and utter standstill.
So that you saw it for the first time as they saw it
and for what it was, a grated river of lifting steel,
and involuntary, moving ascension into who knows what.
An incredible surprise. And you knew, even through
your tiredness, why it made them raise their hands
to their mouths, why it made them give low breathy
screams of surprise and delighted terror. You saw it
as they saw it, a staircase of invisible interlocking
beckoning hands asking them to rise up
independent of their history, their legs or their wills.
And we stopped as we knew we had to now
and watched the first delighted be-turbaned
woman put a sandaled foot on the flat grey
plain at the foot of the moving stair and sure
enough quickly withdraw it with a strangled scream,
leaving her sandal to ascend strangely without her
into heaven, into America, into her new life.

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