Dancing Snowflakes

Posted by David on November 24, 2010

If you imagine for a moment a still, cold winter’s night. A few clouds are in the sky, the frost is just starting to form and there is no breeze. Then, as if by magic, tiny flakes of snow start to float gently in the dark night’s air. Dancing down to the earth.

There is an effortless beauty about them.

Herein lies a perfect metaphor for timeless meditation. There is an effortless beauty about it.

A letting go of technique, a letting go of effort and expectation, an acceptance of all that is arising in our mind, body and whole being.

A letting go of letting go.

Resting in the eternal embrace of our creator, dancing in the ground of our being.

© David R. Durham

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Circumstances

Posted by David on November 12, 2010

We are all more, in many ways much, much more, than our circumstances.

This problem, of being constrained and over-identified with our circumstances is often seen most clearly in a therapeutic context. People with chronic health conditions can become labelled and defined by their condition. “Hi, I’m Mary and I was abused as a child.”, “Hi, I’m Mike and I have a weak heart.” OK, people don’t literally say these things (well not that often), but it is the sub-plot to how they live their daily lives.

A similar thing can happen with our whole identity: I’m Russian, therefore I think in a certain way. I come from an affluent LA suburb, hence I am this LA life-style. I am a spiritual being, so I’m a vegan.

The labels we can identify with are almost endless, yet all are limiting in some ways, all are derived in some way from our transient historical circumstances, which has helped us to define our selves, our relationship to other people and our world view.

The labels we can identify with are not, in and of themselves, a problem. To function in our human context requires them, it requires these mental constructs which we develop during our early years. It is our failure to recognise the limitations of these identities, to get stuck in them and hence fail to grow beyond them, that can create problems for us. Problems which can be hard to define: it may be a general unease or feeling of emptiness with our current life, or maybe we cannot see the point in it anymore. Unfortunately, these are problems for which our society driven solutions are not always the most healthy or appropriate (e.g. alcohol abuse, drug addition, obesity and other excesses.)

Practices such as Soto Zen meditation and Centering Prayer aim to remind us of, and re-introduce us to, the nothingness of our core being. This ‘no-thing-ness’ is impossible to stick a label on, hence it is ‘unlimited’ by mental concepts, it is the vast potential of life to be all things. It is the as yet unborn, unbecome, unformed, unmanifest.

It is deeply liberating to be reminded of the fact the we are not this label, or that label, or this other label. It gives us space to breathe, space for our being to flow and to grow.

We are all potentially so much more than any of our temporary life-style labels allow us to be.

© David R. Durham

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Eternal Union

Posted by David on November 5, 2010

There is something a little frustrating about The Buddha’s teaching. In a way, he didn’t seem to say very much. There is suffering and the cause of it are our ceaseless desires.

On a gross level, we can observe these ceaseless desires in ourselves and others from time to time. That glass of wine too many, or a wardrobe stuffed with so many clothes we cannot get the new ones we simply ‘had’ to buy into it.

However, our ceaseless desires run very deep in our psyche. The need for emotional comfort in a relationship, that extra book or course we simply must have for our knowledge to be complete, and the ‘awakened’ state of consciousness we have got to experience to be considered ‘holy’ or ‘spiritual’ enough.

What a challenge it is, first of all to notice and then to let go of our ceaseless desires. How liberating it is when we repeat this letting go process again, and again, and again, through all the levels of our complex being.

Yet, this letting go process is at the heart of all contemplative meditation traditions, this is the unfolding core of a spiritual life.

And the result, ironically, is what we have craved for all along: an end to our illusion of separateness and a peace that passeth intellectual understanding, in an eternal union with an unconditionally loving God.

© David R. Durham

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Mental Models

Posted by David on November 3, 2010

On a recent flight from Lima to Cusco, I sat next to an American lady who was visiting Peru to do some charity work.

It turned out she was a Physiotherapist, and when our conversation moved onto Cranio-Sacral therapy, she advised me that in the US it is not considered a ‘proper’ therapy. One reason being that someone carried out an ‘experiment’ whereby two therapists tuned into the cranial rhythm of a subject, and they came up with a different rate for the subject’s rhythm. Hence, logic (?) dictates it must be quackery.

Duh!

The cranial rhythm, is just one of tens, and maybe hundreds on rhythms in our bodies. And like most of them, its just an indicator. If two therapists did come up with a different count of a subject’s cranial rhythm, then isn’t this a cause to explore this observation further. I.e. there is a cranial rhythm, why does it appear differently?

The lady went further and said, since therapeutic outcomes of Cranio-Sacral therapy could not be measured and quantified in a consistent way, it was clearly a dubious activity, and not scientifically proven.

Could it simply be that therapists, such as Cranio-Sacral therapists, work with humans and not with chemical machines.

However, what is more disturbing to me, was the mind-set which first of all sets up childish experiments and then uses them to try and prove the falseness of something. This all sounds a bit like the witch trials of the middle-ages. The medical insurance and drug corporations must be getting desperate.

And, further, applying quantitative testing to a non-quantitative situation, and then pretending that this approach is somehow ‘scientific’, is highly misleading. If you were testing for the effectiveness of a drug on patients suffering from a discrete virus, then quantitative testing is highly appropriate and desirable. But, that is not what therapists, such as Cranio-Sacral therapists, are working with. These therapists are working with people’s life experiences, which are often totally unique to them. Hence it is inherently not a situation where quantitative testing has anything to add.

© David R. Durham

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Branding

Posted by David on October 14, 2010

Rummaging through the internet the other day, like a tin of old buttons, I came across a rather fascinating presentation on branding. No, not the sort of branding you inflict on cattle, but the sort of branding which clean-cut marketing chaps promise to their eager clients. “Yes sir, you will be the new Louis Vuitton of the up-and-coming stripped braces market.”

It contains several very telling comments, as the most savvy of marketers are keen observers of the human condition. Here are a couple of quotes:

Most of us feel an occasional growing emptiness somewhere in the space between the heart, mind and groin. Luxury items provide us with some short term relief to this emptiness….much like Tylenol does to our headaches and Viagra to ED. © Idris Mootee 2004

And later …

The world of plenty: Materialism vs. Spiritualism. We use all kinds of tools everyday. We are tool users and tools are not the end but he means. So materialism does not crowd out spiritualism; spiritualism is more likely a substitute when objects are scarce. When we have fewer things, we make the next world luxurious. When we have plenty, we enchant those objects around us. © Idris Mootee 2004

These are certainly interesting insights. Why does someone living an otherwise modest life-style decide to spend $250 on a pair of sneakers? Why do we choose to buy the coffee which costs three times the supermarket brand?

Enchanting objects, giving talismans magic powers and assigning mythic stories to random events or nature’s patterns, are very ancient human practices. The totems of our age may be the badges of luxury brands. How similar are they to the amulets of the ancient Romans, or mythical story telling in the aborigines’ magical ceremony?

If you’d like to see all of Idris Mootee’s fascinating presentation, then Click Here!

© David R. Durham

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Global Warming?

Posted by David on October 12, 2010

US physics professor: ‘Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life’

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Here is his letter of resignation to Curtis G. Callan Jr, Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society.

Dear Curt: 
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists.

As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends. Hal.

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defence Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

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Kali

Posted by David on October 9, 2010

To celebrate the first year of my blog, I have been searching for something appropriate. What I’ve found for you is way, way in excess!

It is a quote from the passionate and intimate expressions of the yogini Shambhavi:

“Kali is the sensational in the deeper sense of the term because her powers of manifestation are incomparable.

“She is the time that consumes our lives, and the eternity that consumes time.

“She is the death ceasing to die, the being in us that is never born, and the life in us that never dies.

“To the ordinary mind she is paradoxical, yet hidden in her paradox is the key to nirvana, the peaceful respite of all eternity.”

From the book “Yogic Secrets of the Dark Goddess” (p. 238), by Shambhavi L. Chopra. (Quoted with permission)

WebLink: Shambhavi’s Website.

With Love.

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Just Sitting

Posted by David on September 29, 2010

Just sitting in meditation is a liberating experience.

Its being naked, honest, stripped of any pretension of being anyone special.

Liberated from the false perfections of yoga, or the mind-numbing repetition of mantra, or the hopes and fears of prayer.

Just sitting, observing, feeling, being our breath as it rolls in and out, like the waves on a sea’s shore. Diving joyously into the infinite pause between breaths.

Very unhuman, if you’re caught doing this in the park the authorities will probably cart you away and put you on medication. You must be somebody, you must be doing something and for God sake keep on talking (if not out loud, then in your head).

Just sitting, just sitting, just being.

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FRA Obs

Posted by David on September 26, 2010

Observations From Frankfurt.

The Germans here is Frankfurt are a very warm and generous people.

They live in high-quality 2.2 lander** environment, located at a major European financial centre and all the jobs and wealth which that creates, they live in a moderate European climate, have modern housing, transport and work-spaces, beautiful countryside just outside their small city for living and recreation, an international airport on their doorstep and so on.

Of course there are one or two anomalies which I observe whilst I sit in one of the many cafes, sipping my frischer minz tee.

The first observation is the high proportion of young Germans who smoke cigarettes. This wicked destroyer of health from within seems to be somehow at odds with their radiant complexions, fit lean bodies, exquisite dentistry, intelligent demeanour and designer clothes. And runs against all the effort and resources dedicated to their healthy upbringing.

The second group who appear slightly out of sync. amongst these affluent modern European professionals, are harder to place. I imagine them to be intellectuals, with probably 2 or 3 PhDs, a collection of early edition Goeth writings and are able to play the violin to concert standards. They have longish, un-styled hair, have a slightly quirky dress sense, and go about by bicycle.

As the season changes into Autumn, I shall see how their plumage changes.

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** By 2.2 lander I mean the average family size, which is allegedly 2.2 children.

Gateways

Posted by David on September 18, 2010

In the core nature of our being, as living consciousness, there is no space and time as we understand it. For time and space are attributes of this world, and as such, they only exist for us while we are in this physical universe.

This is why, when people talk about experiencing some future heaven or enlightenment or nirvana or whatever label their culture attaches to this state of bliss, it is only true in the limited context of the human experience. And then only during the energy release, when the illusion of separateness is penetrated.

It is also as incorrect to suggest that there is some other place where we are whole, or happy, or one. For ‘where’ is a concept of space, which again, is limited to this world.

And, perhaps more importantly, imagined future ideal states or another place where we are happy are avoiding who, what and where we are right now. An acceptance of our current conditions is the first pause, the first gateway.

When we try to use our minds to understand this, or to work it out, we end up getting confused. This is simply because our mind is another one of our creations as we project into this physical existence. And as such, it is designed to help us to function in this world. It is not designed to comprehend the whole potential of our vast eternal being.

And whilst we can play endlessly in this universe, making brilliant discoveries, inventing cool toys and enjoying all the pleasures and drama of being human. When it comes to our eternal consciousness, stop trying to work it out, there’s nothing for our human mind to work out. We may get glimpses of other dimensions of consciousness and our human minds can be informed by insights from our wider consciousness; not the other way round.

Since these words are creations of this mind, in this culture and location in space and time, they are perfect for describing this world, but hopelessly inadequate in describing the fuller nature of our being. These words only serve to create a pause in your thinking process. And, in that pause, the potential for awakening to other dimensions of your vast being exists. This is the same pause which repeated meditation aims to bring you to.

The gateway to wider consciousness is in the pause.

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