After-Vision: The Power of Reaching into the Gap

Vision was the easy part. Maybe you starved yourself in a desert, leaped into the abyss or abandoned a cozy security palace to see it, but the vision of what you were made for is just the curtain parting. Instead of beholding a stage filled with characters and plot lines, what do you see? Nothing. Vision isn't a filling up. It's a tearing away, an emptying out. It's not the full blown story dancing in the rear view mirror. It's seeing through the old tales to the fresh, spacious, roadless road ahead. Vision's momentum propels us forward, but not through a pre-carved slot. Vision presses us onto a field of possibilities. Cultivating the potential fruits requires that we reach into unknowable soil and work with unseen forces.

When vision brings us face to faceless face with the unknown, the usual response is to run. We sprint away by burying ourselves in someone else's noble cause, distracting ourselves with all manner of important things, or by crawling under the covers and assuming the fetal position. Yet, whatever direction we race, the nagging, undefined purpose of our vision is waiting with its silent call.

At some point all excuses have been exhausted, or we're too exhausted to run anymore. Our vision seizes us again and we accept its call. What's the first step we wonder. This is our sacred mission and we don't want to blow it by making the wrong move. So we stall a little longer mediating, journaling, talking to our best friend, communing with the trees and maybe howling at the moon.

Finally, we get real and start. We pick up the pen, put down the keyboard, tap on the telephone or gather the tribe. Each move, any move, comes down to this: we start digging right where we are. After all the preparation, we are where we always are: Here, Now. Finally, the energy of the vision flow through our bones. It feels good, really good. Mind and body, soul and earth enter the pleasure of engaging life.

Soon the work produces initial results. Surprise! The image on the page, the words on the screen, the response to the phone call probably aren't precisely what you envisioned. At this point, I've found that it's helpful to notice the gap between my expectations and my outcomes. I can either get frustrated or shut down. Or, I can man-up, reach into that gap and discover hidden powers and knowledge I didn't know were there. Somehow, from that lightless space comes the strength and insight I need to take the next. If I get ahead of myself and attempt the see the distant design within the gap, I come up empty-handed. Step by step the potential of the vision unfolds. To stay true to the vision, every step of the way seems to involve reaching into the unknown. Following this process, I notice what is actually unfolding rather than what I thought would develop. Whenever I try to control the vision, it kicks me in the butt and leaves me with nowhere to turn and nothing to do. All that's left is to stare into the gap and reach into the unknown.

There's an architectural embodiment of this experience at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. The cathedral is the last stop on the 600 mile Camino thousands of pilgrims walk each year across Spain. Inside the portal of the basilica stands the marble pillar of St. James. Flanking the base of the pillar are two mythic beings with gapping mouths. Pilgrims approach the pillar and slide the fingers of one hand into the five indentations at the marble roots of the Tree of Jesse. These indentations have been worn into the stone by countless others who have repeated this ritual for nearly 1,000 years. After reaching the touchstone of their journey, each pilgrim kneels. She touches her forehead to the base of the pillar and stretches her arms into the mouths of the mythic beings. It's an energy-filled moment, reaching the end of the long trail and stretching her body into the dark void. After pausing in that humble position for a moment, the pilgrim rises to her feet, turns and walks out the door. The vision she thought would be completed by arriving at this place silently whispers: we've come so far, more has been revealed than you ever dreamed possible... and together, we will bring forth many more treasures from the depths of the soul.

Vision: Golden Eyes on the True Prize

New year time is vision time. Millions of pens hit the page scrawling goals for better things to be, do and have. Minds glow with images of what will make life happier, healthier and wealthier. Great intensions, but it's mostly a noble distraction from what the soul genuinely wants. Setting high-minded goals is the separate self's way of reasserting the belief that it occupies the driver's seat of life, steering the car of your destiny toward its cherished goal. It reminds me of the my childhood car-seat; the one with the toy steering wheel. There I would sit importantly and cleverly steering the car and its passengers through the dangerous stream of traffic. All the while, my mother, behind the big wheel to my left actually guided the car to our destination.

Genuine vision is something else entirely. It's a picture of the possibilities life is offering you. It's the call of life not to be a greater you, but to be the greatness that can be facilitated through you. Vision is the soul's gold glowing beneath the surface of the mind's programed thoughts and desires. It's the long forgotten dream that stirred your consciousness awake, the spark that was then hidden by the shoulds and coulds of your parents, teachers and employers. Vision is not an object to be possessed; it is the stream of energy and wisdom carrying you through possibilities beyond the mind's self-imposed limits.

Vision isn't a pleasant choice made on a breezy day. It's the force of life dragging you out of your bed in the darkness of a rainy night. It's a wake up call that won't let you go back to sleep; a call that comes when you least expect it, at the most inconvenient time, in the messiest place. Vision is often delivered by a slimy character with glowing eyes and a greasy grin. You may slam the door shut, but it's too late. Vision has already pierced your belly. Its gnawing hunger can't be satisfied by the empty calories of money, status, and personal power.

Accepting vision takes trust beyond anything the mind can accept. The belief grid that defines a place for everything and defines everything by its place doesn't accommodate the unknown, unexpected, indefinable and unmeasurable. The worldview that worships the song of "I did it my way" doesn't joyously embrace a cosmic chorus chanting a strange magnetic hum. To trust the pull of this hum is allowing the pull of your vision is to go wherever it leads, emphasis on WHEREVER. Only then can your vision lead you passed the fool's gold of ego gain to the soul's gold of vitality and wisdom. Though you may feel alone on your vision's quest, you are interconnected with all of life. It is life that is having and living the vision. It is life appearing to be a separate "you" and it is life playing all the characters and settings of the vision. Vision after all, is life being life.

The adventure and benefit of entering your vision was described beautifully by Joseph Campbell: "We have not to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world."

Let 2010 be the year you receive life's vision and let it have its way with you.

Crossing a Line in Air: The Emergence of Global Mind

Today, we celebrate crossing a line in air. This doesn't diminish the importance of marking the new year and new decade. It imbues it with creative magic. It reminds me that each gesture taken and each object shaped is made of formlessness playing hide-and-seek as form. Ten years ago, I might have described dwelling on Earth using the same words, but deep in my bones and deeper in my mind I only had a faint idea of what they meant.

The core change I've traveled in the last ten years is the passage from experiencing the world and myself as solid, measurable objects to experiencing them as spacious flowing consciousness. This shift happened abruptly before Y2K, but its taken this decade to integrate the mysterious, weird, delightful wisdom and humor of this reality into daily life.

When the solid ground beneath my feet dissolved, I was plunged into watery darkness. My studies of mythic journeys through the underworld hadn't prepared me for I encountered. My hands found nothing to grasp, my feet nowhere to stand. Worst of all, my mind, after a lifetime of spiritual practice and learning, couldn't make sense of what was happening. None of the old tricks I had used for navigating the solid world worked in this realm of bottomless, ever-shifting liquid.

It was either sink or swim, breakdown or breakthrough. To navigate this watery world I had to abandon my beliefs about right versus wrong, friend versus foe, spiritual versus material. Every idea that divided the world was useless in this ocean of unmoving currents and wordless wisdom. While everyone around me enacted their lives in the same old ways of self and other, spirit and matter, I moved about as a wave of energy wearing the disguise of a human being doing what a human being does to get by. Words had meaning while pointing beyond meaning. Faces had character while revealing what was beyond character. Places had design while framing what was beyond design.

It would take a decade to recount all the wise guides and miraculous synchronicities that nurtured and challenged the way to today. In essence, life shattered the illusion that I was a separate self and opened my mind to what lives beyond the personal viewpoint. It revealed that through me, you and the rest of us a new networked global mind is emerging. This global mind is transforming the old solid world of divisions through an information world into a consciousness world. The line in air that we are crossing is the threshold to the mind re-membering its original oneness as an "unbounded ocean of consciousness in motion." The implications of this are immeasurable and we will see them unfolding in the years to come.

As we make the cross-less crossing into the timeless New Year, the news reports describe the old divided mind that is savagely clinging to its delusions of isolation, control, dear, numbness and death. It's thrashing about, crying to be heard as it sinks into the waters of consciousness. It has forgotten its true identity as a wave in the ocean of energy and wisdom, rising and falling, emerging and submerging like all the other waves. Rather than despairing at this, I'm celebrating the dissolving of the old and the emergence of the new. This is Earth's natural way of rebirthing itself, including us. On the other hand, I'm thrilled by the tides of connection, communication and creation flowing in every direction. New insights about re-integrating life on Earth and ways of sharing them are shimmering every second. The currents of change are surging. SURF'S UP is the planetary call and billions are riding the waves of transformation. What appears through this watery mystery will be amazing to see. I'm glad we are swimming these waters together. Enjoy where life is taking "you" and "us" in the coming year.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Healing the Living Earth

At the COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen they're getting it wrong. World leaders are talking up the science of climate change. They're preaching fire and brimstone about carbon, greenhouse gases, ravaged rain forests and humanity cooking the earth into poison stew. They're looking at the earth as a mathematical formula that can be rebalanced by pushing the broken pieces of the global ecosystem back into place... News flash: seeing the earth as a machine is what wounded it in the first place. Continuing to treat Gaia's living body as an engine that can be fixed by replacing parts and retuning it will only wound it more.

The intentions are right, the mindset is wrong.

It will take two things to heal the earth: 1) interact with the planet as a living being and 2) design and dwell with cities, buildings, products and other human creations as organs in the body of Gaia. Climate change is nature's response to our attempts to halt her changes. Straining to freeze frame living processes into measurable and controllable quantities, we have blocked the veins and lungs of the earth. If we don't want Gaia's heart to stop beating, we have to stop attacking her with our mechanical mindset.

The moment we relate to Earth as You instead of It the world of fragmented parts becomes a living being. When we respond to Nature as a living being we can see what we share with all living beings: hope and fear, youth and aging, health and sickness, abundance and scarcity, and so much that is elusive and indescribable. We can see that we are interconnected with all beings, that our wellness is intimately related to the wellness of our neighbors. We can see that we share these life processes with earth and she shares them with us.

Certainly we need to reduce our carbon footprints and handprints. We need to recycle, build green, farm organic, power with solar and wind. But the tasks will be easier and the ways will be clearer when we dwell as living beings interacting with the living being of the earth. Then, instead of making futile attempts to heal a lifeless machine, we can heal the vital systems of a living being. Live for an hour seeing your home, your neighborhood and your city as living beings within the living body of the earth and see if that opens some pathways to your role healing the world.

Twitter as Sacred Space

I've been noticing the connections between Twitter and sacred space. To some, this may seem absurd; to others, outrageous. I'm not talking about those hushed, rarified places where a whisper shatters the holy apple cart. The sacred spaces to which I relate Twitter are often pilgrimage sites teeming with a cacophony of seekers, music, rituals, storytelling, offerings, hawkers, con artists, recitations of scriptures and countless other activities. Places such as Varanasi, Bodhgaya, Lourdes, Mecca and countless others are gathering places for the multitudes looking for connection, inspiration, guidance, information and wisdom.

More specifically, the architecture of Twitter reflects the archetypal design of sacred space. Similar to sacred space, Twitter offers a spacious container (think the overarching dome of St. Peter's or the Pantheon). This spacious container of Twitter invites the full spectrum of characters to enter and express themselves (imagine the thousands of carvings covering Notre Dame Cathedral or a Hindu Temple, or Borobudor...) and the crowd of faithful inside. Within the spacious container flows a stream of energy responding to questions, needs, and intentions as they arise moment by moment. Places for making offerings (altars) are also there. Like the prayers wedged between the stones of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the candles lit in the chapels of Chartres Cathedral, flowers placed on the Ganges' current, each tweet is placed in the mysterious digital river, sparking unexpected realizations and pointing toward an indescribable spirit that connects us all.

Nature's Elusive Totality

I'm noticing how Nature does things. She crafts every detail from a galaxy to an insect with care. Each form, color, texture and sound is exquisitely suited to its function. Each gesture of an ocean wave or a bird's flight is living poetry. Each thing is so entwined with every other thing that it is impossible to tell where the life of a frog ends and the life of the pond where it lives and the flies it eats begins. Yet, with all the care and craft, Nature doesn't seem to be attached to a single thing she creates. Whatever she forms, she reforms. Whatever she plants she uproots. Whatever she spawns she dissolves.

I'm noticing that all the change, the gain and loss, doesn't diminish or expand nature one bit. All this becoming and unbecoming, this shattering and flowing unfolds within Nature's completeness. Her sandbox has no limits. She's not confined in the extent of her expansiveness. She's also not confined to the layers and details of the boundaries she creates within the sandbox. Wherever Nature goes, she's definitely there, in her elusive totality.

Charter for Compassion

Today, Karen Armstrong unveiled the Charter for Compassion, http://charterforcompassion.org/ Go to the link and listen. Hearing the words was like hearing the voice of my soul speaking its longing for what is so simple yet so ignored. At the essence of all our endeavors is a point of view. Do we see ourselves as isolated and alone or interconnected wave in the ocean of being?The isolated viewpoint generates desperate acts intended to protect and defend islands of fear and numbness. The interconnected viewpoint invites engagement in the mystery currents of becoming. Ignoring entry into those mystery currents induces fear and violence. The tides of living are too strong for an isolated individual to resist. Compassion is the act of that mysterious essence within us touching that mysterious essence that appears to be around us. It is finding that our illusions of disconnection are hallucinations. It is finding that the one true thing we are not alone, that the countless diverse waves of personality, action, belief, institutions, and every other form are shimmering glints of light within one ocean of being. We overcome suffering and recall unity in the simplest of acts: opening a door for a stranger; smiling at a passerby; listening to a friend. We enter it also by courageously acting with compassion in the harsh arenas of business, politics, art, spirituality and every other system that tends to suppress love and wisdom. Appreciate the compassion you encounter today and respond in kind. This IS changing the world.

Ask Nature

Check out AskNature.org. This project of The Biomimicry Institute opens the door to nature's research lab. Down at NATURE they've been exploring design applications for hundreds of millions of years. The results are all around you from the architecture of galaxies to the interior design of your brain. Want ideas for waterproofing and paint colors? Don't go to the local lumber yard. Ask Nature and discover what birds, plants and other living things have learned about living on Earth.

Biomimcry means imitating life. What better way to learn about truly sustainable design. Is there a more functional, versatile and beautiful solar collector than a leaf? Why not study a bird's feathers to learn how to design roofing shingles? Nature is ready and willing to share her secrets. Talk to her at AskNature.org.

Visionary Encounters with Trees

Yesterday I collected images of trees as seen by various artists from different times and different places. Looking at these images I don't see trees. I see the minds of the artists. How can Giotto's tree be so different from Cezanne's tree which is different from Georgia O'Keefe's tree and Van Gogh's tree? I think its two things: 1) they each had a direct encounter with a tree (vision of it) that broke through their preconceived (cultural) ideas about the tree, and 2) each artist expressed that vision through the unique viewpoint of their individuality. In other words, they broke through the essential being, the universal tree-ness, of what they saw and then had the courage to express that vision honestly.

This is the power and gift of art. It's a call from one one human being to others that says, "Hey, your life isn't as limited as you think. Just open your eyes, really open them, and see what's in front of you. See through your fears, through your been there done that boredom, through your I'm too busy confusion, through your I'm too important self righteousness and behold the miracle of energy and matter shimmering right here, right now. Then tell someone what you actually saw; not what your supposed to have seen, nor what you would have like to see, nor the meaning of what you saw. Just put into what cannot fit into words, put into brush strokes what cannot fit into brush strokes, put into music what cannot fit into music. Then maybe one day, your work will hang in a museum. More importantly, you will live and spark the creative light in others.

Seeing Through the Fiction of Our Lives

For a moment, the clouds of thought parted and revealed what is always behind the scenes. What broke through was not a light or a sound. It wasn't another insight masquerading as truth. It wasn't love or not love. It wasn't bliss or not bliss. It wasn't unity or duality. It wasn't a glowing state of consciousness to be grasped or a dark depression to be pushed away. Naming what it was would be absurd. Denying its reality would be more ridiculous.

In that moment, the entire fiction of my life became clear. The comedy of striving to become what I already am crashed. All the worry and work to do the right thing, make meaningful art, offer genuine love, realize true wisdom, dwell well on the planet appeared as mist illuminated by morning sunlight.

In that moment, papers strewn across the table, clothes flung on the chair, the music pouring through the speaks, birds chirping on the other side of the wall, fingers tapping on the keyboard, golden autumn leaves shimmering through the blinds... anything and everything became a miraculous dream dreaming itself. The dream spun and spun within the emptiness that is full of no-thingness.