In my move to WordPress, this post went missing…here it is republished.
Jack on productive [tag]waiting[/tag]:
Waiting is a fact of life. We wait in line, on hold, for people to get back to us, for traffic lights to change, for parking spaces to open up, for solutions to appear, for consensus to be built, for projects to move forward.
What is unproductive waiting … and what is productive waiting?
Two pieces, for me.
First, there is the kind of waiting when our minds are not united with the task at hand, and second there is the kind of waiting when we are fully engaged.
On the first one, the waiting in lines, on hold and so on, we can choose to be mindful about that waiting or use that waiting to do something else. I think the question then starts to come apart, for there can be no such thing as productive or unproductive waiting. Only waiting in which we are present and waiting in which we are not.
For people wanting to meditate, but who find that they don’t have enough time in the day to do so, these periods of waiting can be true gifts. They can be like mindfulness bells, ringing us into awareness. When we are asked to wait or “forced” to wait, we can simply direct our attention to being mindfully present and practice awareness.
The second kind of waiting is the one that really fascinates me. This is waiting when we are fully engaged in the present. The most powerful experience I have ever had of this was when my children were born. Being with my partner through two long labours was a very interesting kind of waiting. Time starts to do funny things – it gets shifty and stretchy, and your awareness of it detaches and solely rests on the emergent moment. A child will soon be born, and the best you can do is to be fully alive to that possiblility. Distraction serves no purpose. In fact, with our second child, my partner commented that at one point it felt as if she was living in a ghost world. As we walked around with her living through this long and low grade labour (40 hours!) she noted that none of people we were walking past had any idea of what was going on between us and within her. She felt in the world but not at all a part of it – like a ghost. But she was deeply within the moment.
This is a deep [tag]presencing[/tag]. It is waiting for something to emerge, something life changing, possibly life threatening, and yet with no way to know how it will all unfold. Radical trust into the moment, radical readiness to accept what will come.
When Otto Scharmer writes about presencing, I think this is what he is talking about. We can practice for these kinds of moments by embracing the first kind of waiting, which gives us the capacity to appreciate the second kind on those rare occasions in our life when we are gifted that experience.
[tags]birth[/tags]
Alan Watts
Listening to some wonderful podcasts from Alan Watts. In the current series, Images of God, which is made up from talks given during his lifetime, he is delivering all kinds of angles on the divine.
In the third installment of this series, he was talking about school, journeys and the dance. The point of a dance or a piece of music, is not the end, says Watts. If it was, then we would only have composers that wrote finales and audiences would only go to hear great final chords, or see people in their final positions.
No, the point of a piece of music is the way one experiences time. It’s all about the journey, the movement from here to there, the texture of moments that music or dances imparts.
From this he draws a parallel with schooling. We school in this society as if there is an end in sight, a point at which we are heading. In so doing, we teach people to sacrifice the moment for the delayed gratification of the end. And of course the end never comes. One grade finishes and the next begins. High school ends and university begins. University ends and work begins and work is simply more of the same, chasing promotions, until at some point one wakes up and realizes that one has arrived. And in fact one has always arrived and always been arriving, but we miss it constantly, and we school our children and ourselves into missing it completely as well.
Life as dance. Life as the middle phrase of the middle movement of a violin concerto, moving right on to the next one..
[tags] alan watts, unschooling[/tags]
Good old whiskey river:
Mindful
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
– Mary Oliver
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
– Mary Oliver
Yesterday my five year old son and I went for a walk in a remote and wild part of our island to a point where the waves riding the southeasterlies up the Strait of Georgia break on a basalt reef littered with driftwood. And in that place, in that moment, with rain washing our faces and wind lashing at our ears, we talked about seeing with the close-seeing eye that watches where we step and seeing with the long-seeing eye that knows where we are in the forest. So turning, we made our way back through the trees with our close-seeing eyes and long-seeing eyes both tuned. We learned that it is important to stay aware of our feet below us and the turns in the forest path ahead of us, and that getting lost is a result of losing the manner of both modalities.
Such a trove of teachings in a simple, slippery path on a rainy day.
Before I took off to the Evolutionary Salon last week I blogged about Sarvodaya.
Today I have been scouring recent postings at the Sarvodaya blog and I find this, from Deepak Chopra’s comments to a Sarvodaya Peace dialogue:
Today we are shifting from the industrial age to the information age. Today wealth and power come from Information Technology. And Information Technology has become very powerful today. In a few years it will become even more powerful. It will be possible for anyone to have this kind of computer in their pocket and interfere with air traffic. It will be possible through handheld implements to make nuclear stations leak and cut off electricity. And when that happens we will make ourselves extinct because we have powerful technology combined with ancient habits.But Dr. Ariyaratne and Sarvodaya are giving us a new model and this is saying that we have to move from the age of information to the age of knowledge. And we have to move from the age of knowledge to the age of wisdom. When you saw those slides on the screen, you saw a model that was based on the wisdom of civilization. And this wisdom and this civilization say one thing and one thing only: that the future does not belong to the survival of the fittest, but that it belong to the survival of the wisest. Survival of the wisest will become the new criteria for evolution. It is a new civilization based on wisdom-based consciousness, a wisdom-based economy, and a wisdom-based power structure and leadership, the three pillars that you saw in the slide from Sarvodaya, which are economy, consciousness, and power. This wisdom therefore is the most important thing that we seek in our lives today. Two thousand five hundred years ago, the Lord Buddha said that the world is about interdependence; the environment, the forces of nature, and human consciousness are all part of one single reality. And today many scientists are talking about interdependent co-arising. But this interdependent co-arising gives birth to a field of consciousness that should make this change.
What can we do to nurture the evolution of the wisdom-based age? I am most interested in ways of being together in groups, communities, families and other aggregations, but also in what wisdom looks like in the structures that support those groups, structures like money, power, the natural world and information. Those of you that have read along with me for a while will know of my ongoing inquiry into philanthropy, decentralized governance, learning from the natural world and our stories about the natural world, and peer to peer ways of connecting. Where is your edge of inquiry around this question?
Jeff Aitken left me a comment with a useful framework for inquiry form Apela Colorado. These are principles of indigenous science:
1. The indigenous scientist is an integral part of the research process and there is a defined process for insuring this integrity.
2. All of nature is considered to be intelligent and alive, thus an active research partner.
3. The purpose of indigenous science is to maintain balance.
4. Compared to Western time/space notions, indigenous science collapses time and space with the result that our fields of inquiry and participation extend into the overlap of past and present.
5. Indigenous science is holistic, drawing on all the senses including spiritual and psychic.
6. Indigenous science is concerned with relationships, we try to understand and complete our relationships with all living things.
7. The end point of an indigenous scientific process is a known and recognized place. This point of balance, referred to by my own tribe as the Great peace, is both peaceful and electrifyingly alive. In the joy of exact balance, creativity occurs, which is why we think of our way of knowing as a life science.
8. When we reach the moment/place of balance we do not believe we have transcended — we say that we are normal! Always we remain embodied in the natural world.
9. Humor is a critical ingredient of all truth seeking, even in the most powerful rituals. This is true because humor balances gravity. (1994)
2. All of nature is considered to be intelligent and alive, thus an active research partner.
3. The purpose of indigenous science is to maintain balance.
4. Compared to Western time/space notions, indigenous science collapses time and space with the result that our fields of inquiry and participation extend into the overlap of past and present.
5. Indigenous science is holistic, drawing on all the senses including spiritual and psychic.
6. Indigenous science is concerned with relationships, we try to understand and complete our relationships with all living things.
7. The end point of an indigenous scientific process is a known and recognized place. This point of balance, referred to by my own tribe as the Great peace, is both peaceful and electrifyingly alive. In the joy of exact balance, creativity occurs, which is why we think of our way of knowing as a life science.
8. When we reach the moment/place of balance we do not believe we have transcended — we say that we are normal! Always we remain embodied in the natural world.
9. Humor is a critical ingredient of all truth seeking, even in the most powerful rituals. This is true because humor balances gravity. (1994)
I’d like to suggest this as a framework for thinking about inquiry within a bodhisanga that takes its cue from the relationships between humans and the cosmos and the divine.