I AM THE PRODUCT OF...

I AM THE PRODUCT OF...

Here are things I am profoundly grateful for in my life:

• I am the co-founder of a successful law firm in Boulder, Colorado, which fully supports a comfortable lifestyle for my family.
• I have a nourishing and vibrant marriage currently in its 12th year.
• I have two healthy and vital children.
• I have a wonderful "life/work balance." I enjoy my law and mediation practice, and have ample time for outside activities, including performing music regularly as a serious pursuit.
• My relationship with my kids is strong, and I am constantly opening up to new ways to parent them, treating them with respect and dignity while modeling a self-actualized life.
• At age 44 I am radiantly healthy, feeling better than I have ever felt. I eat clean and delicious foods. I exercise daily with a variety of running, hiking, biking, and yoga.
• I have a strong spiritual practice, meditating twice per day.

Now the important part: I think all of the above blessings are a product in some small way of my own genetic makeup and how I’ve chosen to use my natural talents and intellect, BUT I believe it is powerful for me to name and acknowledge that the above blessings are predominantly the product of the following circumstances of my life:

• My parents are white and were both born in the United States, where there is relative freedom of thought and action, where tremendous resources are located or have been gathered from around the world (perhaps often through economic/debt coercion or military coercion), and where many societal resources and avenues to wealth are available (especially to white citizens).
• I was born (and have lived almost all of my life) in the United States.
• On the foundation of the above circumstances, I grew up in a relatively safe suburban area.
• On the foundation of the above circumstances, my parents had sufficient resources and commitment to feed me the most healthful foods they knew about and had access to.
• On the foundation of the above circumstances, my parents had sufficient resources and commitment to push me to excel academically and to help me attend college and law school.
• I am white, which means I have had less barriers to entry to almost everything in the United States.
• I am what is referred to as a cis-gendered (non-trans) straight male, which means in part that many societal resources and avenues to wealth have been more easily available to me relative to females or other gender minorities.
• I am of average size, which means many things have been constructed for use by males like me.
• On the foundation of the above circumstances, I have always had sufficient resources (or access to credit) to invest in personal development, relationship development, spiritual development, and therapeutic programs supporting body, mind and spirit, and have lived in areas where such programs are easily available.
• On the foundation of the above circumstances, I have enjoyed the privilege of extensive world travel, including unique cultural experiences such as Burning Man.
• I had the ability to pursue a non-punitive avenue to correct for unfortunate or ill-advised financial choices and circumstances, via the bankruptcy laws of the United States.

I have tried to be thoughtful about what exactly to thank for my abundance in life, but please comment if you notice one or more missing elements.

The main reason behind this post is to model a thorough acceptance of the sometimes hidden factors of our station in life, and also to identify some of the fundamental things humans need to live abundantly, so that we can begin to work together to create a culture where everyone has access to these things.

Upon review of my list above, I flag these important ingredients for human abundance:

• Relative freedom of thought, action, and travel
• Sufficient monetary and non-monetary resources to build and exchange things and ideas, and to nourish the body (e.g., universal basic income)
• Communities free of coercive debt or forceful extraction of their local resources
• Communities free of unregulated criminal activity
• Tools that have been constructed for use by all kinds of different people
• Access to, and no unjustifiable barriers of entry to, good quality services, education, employment, clean and healthful food, etc.
• Laws and systems that allow for non-punitive correction of past mistakes or misfortune

There are surely more ingredients as well.

If this post resonates with you, I invite you to re-post and re-write using your own life as the basis for this exploration of what is required to produce abundance in life.

Thanks for reading.

Diversity In Unity

According to Chris Bache's description of Robert Monroe's "interlife rings," the bardo region between life and death is a place where our souls can choose to associate only with others like ourselves, or with others at a similar level of development. Bache indicates that this stands in counterpoint to the physical plane where we live, where we are forced to interact with myriad, different beings. Thus, the diversity of physical life encourages faster development at the soul-level. In this way, would such an "interlife" be a kind of heaven with a dark side, akin to gated communities where people choose to be insulated among others just like themselves? This model indicates a back and forth between resting (in unity) and growth (through diversity). But is such a one-at-a-time model the only way of thinking about how diversity and unity interact?

Perhaps a more useful conception, especially as manifested in a conscious organism, is consciousness as unity and community. The diversity of unique thoughts, the diversity of experiences and emotions -- these can be conceived of as analogous to a society. The single neurons in a human brain that can never experience what it feels like to act as a coherent body nevertheless comprise an overall system which "transcends and includes" them. Aren't these neurons a form of community? Moving beyond the concrete biochemistry of the brain, Genpo Merzel builds on the "Psychology of Selves" theory as he seeks the communal intelligence of our different conscious "Voices" to help us integrate Dual and Non-Dual reality. And even from the point of view of the unified ego-consciousness of a single individual, the diversity of experience as we age reflects the shifting of emphasis of different voices or perspectives of our minds.

However you want to conceive of our discrete inner-selves or voices, one can imagine our inner landscape to function like the shifting currents of cultural views (and vice versa). Like a peaceful transition of political power, perhaps each coherent individual repeatedly transitions as different inner voices align and become prominent, thus transforming our "singular" identity. "I" and "We" at the same time. Diversity and Unity, together.

In the outside world as we typically think of it, diversity is something that must be actively sought out, and embraced as the vehicle for growth that it is. But coherence must also be sought. Homogeneity, or hegemony, is not an evil, unless it is blind. If we are to evolve into a loving, unified culture, certain coherence of principles must be attained. Homogeneity with openness is a strong, evolving coherence. I believe this to be our destiny: Diverse but Unified.

The Nexus Age

Increasingly, there is a desire among those interested in human evolution to distance current visionary philosophies from the perceived airiness of what has been called "New Age" thinking. "New Age" has become a pejorative moniker for all that may be deficient about hippy culture.

The replacement label for this Era of Transformation is "Next Age," a concept that maintains a focus on becoming.

Neither is distasteful to me. However, as an even more evocative label for the current period I propose yet a different concept: "Nexus Age."

Nexus means "core" or "center." As Wilber and Gebser put forth, we are living in an Age of Integration. We are in the process of melding ancient and modern wisdom, matter and spirit. The irony is that attainment of enlightenment involves the reconciliation of Above and Below, of Now and Later. We are becoming increasingly aware that the future is not "better" than the present, that life Above is not "better" than life Below. Reality, and life, is a moving process. All stages of the process are in harmony, and this point of evolution is about an awareness of this harmony and process. This facet of truth is becoming transparent to our conscious minds, right now.

In the Nexus Age, humans exist fully in the present moment, aware that we are neither matter or spirit, but the nexus of both. We are neither becoming something different, nor are we only one particular form; we are at the nexus of both. Our conscious minds see through the process, and realize that Now, our future, our destiny, our potential is manifest and manifesting.

In the Nexus Age, we embrace that we are the meeting point of all dualities. Let's meet there now.


Image credit: "Disorientation" by heiwa4126, used under Creative Commons license.

Giftvesting

"Whenever you feel ‘short' or in ‘need' of something, give what you want first and it will come back in buckets. That is true for money, a smile, love, friendship."
~ Robert Kiyosaki



I like the maxim that the more you give, the more you will receive.

Thus, I tend to believe that by giving more to our children -- giving them better care as young individuals, giving more of them better education, giving them more love -- we will all reap more than we can imagine from this investment.

My only problem with the above is that, conceptually, the idea of "investment" is not equivalent to the idea of "giving." Investment is self-centered, and giving is other-centered. In this age of social-entrepreneurship, do we really not have a word that encompasses both the altruism of giving and the self-interest of investing? Doesn't our future as a collective entity require such a harmonious mixture of cooperation for OUR sake and for MY sake?

Perhaps we need a new word. Perhaps we don't have a word because we're not even thinking like this. Or maybe we're not thinking like this because we have no word.

While clever linguists can begin the work of co-creating/discovering a snazzier word, I'm planning to figure out how to start "giftvesting" in my fellow man, in whatever way I can, everyday.

Care to join me?




Image by Mr. Kris, used under a Creative Commons license.

Life Design

If life is a work of art, does it not make sense to study the principles of design? To apply or hold the intention of using these principles in the creation of my reality?

It seems possible to broadly interpret, for life, the fundamentals of art:

Composition (how to organize, within parameters)

Format (creating with the available planes, surfaces, materials in mind)

Balance (assymmetry tends to be more interesting!)

Repetition (the beauty of plural experience)

Anomaly (celebrating some particular distinction)

Concentration (focusing on an area)

Economy (using only what’s necessary to achieve what’s desired)

Simultaneous Contrast (emphasizing difference by relation)

Scale (the beauty of the small and the large)

Negative Space (attention to what surrounds)

Metamorphosis (gradual change from one thing to another)

Gradation (the beauty in experience of spectrum or degree)

Emphasis (focus on a theme or pattern)

Focal Point (directing or compelling the observer’s attention somewhere)

Rhythm (the beauty in a repeating pattern, element or principle)

Variety (the beauty in difference)

Unity (wholeness or coherence)

While no single work of art will exemplify all principles, life need not necessarily be singular.

All of this is merely to offer a toast to Aesthetics -- a higher ordering of spirit I have finally caught glimpses of beyond the horizon of my usual vista of Utility.

Vegetable Garden and the City

In a small triangle of sunny dirt, in early February of this leap year, I began for the first time to grow sustenance.

There’s a tomato vine, spinach, broccoli, arugula, cabbage, onions, and butter lettuce. I water every few days as I come and go. Now, for two weeks I have been harvesting for salads and sandwiches.

I can’t quit paying the grocer just yet. But everything starts somewhere.

I don’t own the land, I rent it. Like all of us.

I didn’t make the plants, so I can’t take credit for the food. All I did was help. Just like we do with everything, or not.

Studying political theory, I encounter men telling us how we should all live. I don’t know of any philosopher that said each individual should learn to grow his own sustenance.

I’m not so sure about shoulds.

But I’m not sure we shouldn’t.