Changing Places

“How much of the day are you aware – just basically aware of what life is presenting – rather than being lost in waking sleep, in being identified with whatever you’re doing, almost as if you didn’t exist?

To what extent do you blindly drift from one form of comfort to another, from one daydream or fantasy to another, from one secure place to another, in order to avoid the anxious quiver of discomfort or insecurity? How much of your energy is used to fortify a particular self-image, or to simply please others in order to gain approval, instead of devoting your energy to living a genuine life?”
- Ezra Bayda
At Home in the Muddy Water: A Guide to Finding Peace within Everyday Chaos

Via WhiskeyRiver

A person does not have to join a group or be a wise leader to work things out. Life’s process unfolds naturally. Conflicts resolve themselves sooner or later, whether or not a person knows how things happen.

It is true that being aware of how things happen makes one’s words more potent and one’s behavior more effective. But even without the light of conciousness, people grow and improve. Being unconscious is not a crime; it is merely a lack of a very helpful ability.

Knowing how things work gives the leader more real power and ability than all the degrees or titles the world can offer. That is why people in every era and in every culture have honored those who know how things happen.

Tao of Leadership

“Being unconscious is not a crime; it is merely a lack of a very helpful ability” … those are words I have taken to heart. Too often in the past  I’ve been annoyed with other people for not being aware of how things happen or the consequences of their actions. I excused it a lot in my kids, knowing they were kids and learning. I had difficulty excusing it in adults, however. I wondered how people could be so stupid, quite a lot of the time, actually.

One of my former good friends, Mike, used to say I didn’t suffer fools gladly. Very true. But I think I am a bit more forgiving now than I used to be. But the everyday, ordinary lack of awareness of how life progresses around you, the out of touch way so many seem to live their lives still bothers me.

I am pretty much aware of where every living thing around me is, without even thinking about it. It amazes me when my husband asks where one of the kids are. I know where almost everything in my house is and can find it in minutes, even if the house is a mess. I know dates, places, times I have to be somewhere, what the weather is like, how people are without asking, just from their expression. My husband is never aware of these things.

Ah, well, it’s just a helpful ability. Heh. To me, awareness of life and how things work is a central part of my life. I would hate to be without that helpful ability….

Earth Knower, Manyard Dixon

“But what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism? For most of the past decade, magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle. The benign faith that dreams will come true can be hard to distinguish from the more sinister seduction of believing in lies. To counter the tyranny of fantasy entrenched on Wall Street and in Washington as well as in Hollywood, it seems possible that engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy. Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism.”

- A.O. Scott, in the article “Neo-Neo Realism“.

I think what I learn from studying the Tao is this appreciation of reality, the beauty of the everyday world. When you can enjoy your everyday life to the utmost, you don’t need the fantasy of wealth (you are already wealthy, really), the lure of working hard to achieve some unknown dream (you are already valuable, really), or the illusion of power and control (you can’t really control the universe anyway, only yourself and your reactions to everything). It doesn’t mean you don’t have plans and goals, but it means you become less attached to achieving some perfect illusory result, that those things don’t run your life, you live your life and may or may not achieve what you set out to do, and either way it is ok.

Being ok with the reality of your life is a really powerful thing. It means that other people can no longer manipulate you, that you won’t give in to those things that end up hurting you, that you and you alone are responsible for what happens to you to a very great extent. You no longer feel that what others do has to make you happy, and you lose that urge to do something, anything, to make yourself more happy. You just become happy without all the drama. And when you are unhappy, you realize it is because you are separate from the reality of the moment, pushing into future expectations or resenting past hurts or upsets. You learn to let go of that, and choose this. This moment, this place and time, this feeling, even. Then, you can deal with it, just as it is.

Escape to Reality.

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” — Albert Einstein

“Few people have the imagination for reality.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Everything you can imagine is real.” — Pablo Picasso

“There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.” — Douglas H. Everett

“In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed.”
– Henri Matisse

Since we are all about the change here… a place to connect with other people interested in changing things.

Sort of a “facebook” for change.

Change.org

Our Vision

Today as citizens of the world, we face a daunting array of social and environmental problems ranging from health care and education to global warming and economic inequality. For each of these issues, whether local or global in scope, there are millions of people who care passionately about working for change but lack the information and opportunities necessary to translate their interest into effective action.

Change.org aims to address this need by serving as the central platform informing and empowering movements for social change around the most important issues of our time.

History

Change.org is a social entrepreneurship venture based in San Francisco, CA. The company was founded by Ben Rattray in the summer of 2005, and with the support of a friend from Stanford, Mark Dimas, and a founding team of Darren Haas, Rajiv Gupta, and Adam Cheyer, Change.org launched the first version of its site in 2007.

You could labor ten years under a master
Trying to discern whether the teachings are true.
But all you must learn is this;
One must live one’s own life.

When one starts out learning a spiritual system, there are many absolute assertions that the masters make. They must be accepted with a provisional faith; each must be tested and proved to yourself before you can believe in them. You will be exposed to all types of esoteric knowledge, but you need only be concerned with whether or not you can make them work for yourself.

There will come an intermediate, joyous point where you find that certain techniques work even better than the scriptures claim. In the wake of these discoveries, you will also find that life continues to be just as thorny and problematic as ever. Does this mean that the study of Tao is useless? No. It only means that you have been laboring to equip yourself with skill. You must still go out and live your life to the end.

When you look back and realize that you have been absorbed the teachings so thoroughly that they have become routine, it is not the time to reject the system you have learned. It is time to utilize what you have learned. You must express yourself, take action in the world, create new circumstances for yourself and others. Only then does the long acquisition of skill become worthwhile.

Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao

“Any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question…Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use.”
– Carlos Castaneda

I grew up in the Presbyterian church, and that was a church and faith that had a lot of heart. I’ve attended the Community Church near my home, which is a Unitarian church.
But I’ve studied a lot of other faiths as well – Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam – and eventually came to realize the message is always basically very much the same, what differs are which gods and which prophets the religion tells you to accept. And I got to the point where I realized that each of these various faiths posits itself as The One True Religion, and began to ask why they couldn’t *all* be equally “true”. Then I read Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth and Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Karen Armstrong’s A History of God (all highly recommended), and realized that all the hero’s journeys of the various religions (Buddha, Christ, Mohammed) were very much the same.

Then I remembered what Jesus said about there being many paths. And thought about how many cultures have never heard of Jesus, or how many people lived well before that period in time. Christianity is so tied to western thought, so dismissive of eastern thought, even though the Jesus mythology is based on Egyptian mythology and other mythos. And I guess it kind of crystallized for me that this must simply be a way of filling the basic spiritual needs people have, and all the ways religion has been used as a tool for power and control.

What originally attracted me to Taoism is that Jesus referred to himself as “The Way, the truth, and the light”. Tao is translated as the way. I think of it as the process, the way things work, rather than an actual pathway. There is a process to finding one’s spirituality. The problem with religion is that it shortcuts the process, gives you an easy answer rather than making you think about things for yourself.

Taoism doesn’t do that. Taoism says, here’s an idea, think about it, go look for yourself in the world and see how this works. And that is how I think spirituality should operate. There are reasons all the religions come back to the same points over and over. They are operating manuals for life. And taken in this way, they work. But trying to force others to operate in the world exactly the way you do is ridiculous. We are all different, and what works for one won’t work for all. If you use religion as a tool to run society, you can apply one rule to everyone — but you will still have rebellion, you will still have individuality and the special case, and eventually the society becomes corrupt. If you offer a spirituality that allows everyone to be spiritual in their own way, you give people a choice.

Of course, there are many who just want to be told what to do, and for them, religion is the answer. But for those who seek and need a choice to learn how the world really works, Taoism is a belief system that can work.