Namaste insights fall 2013

Namaste Insights Brought to you by Namaste Publishing

Fall, 2013

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About The Fall Issue of

NAMASTE INSIGHTS In this Fall issue you’ll find a variety of articles and interviews that look at different aspects of the diversity of life, then point to how an awareness of our essential “oneness” changes everything—whether we are talking about a cessation of wars between nations, preventing the tribal and sectarian strife that is currently tearing much of the Middle East and parts of Africa apart, resolving the economic injustice that oppresses so many, or ending the battle between the sexes.

These tragic situations arise for one reason, and one reason alone: the fact that we “objectify” our fellow humans, fellow creatures, and the planet’s resources as if we were separate entities. In other words, our failure to recognize the “oneness” of everyone and everything is the root of every kind of misery.

In contrast, if males in the corporate world saw females not through the eyes of duality, which leads to objectifying them, but through what Jesus referred to as an “eye that’s single,” the feminine would instantly be viewed as a vital asset, instead of being seen as it is by so many as “less than” the masculine. Men and women would then identify the strengths of each of the sexes, maximizing these strengths and drawing on them to the fullest for the benefit of all, instead of putting down, demeaning, and ultimately oppressing.

Similarly, if management saw labor as part of themselves, they would seek to capitalize on the worth of each individual and find ways to foster their wellbeing.

Each person would be seen as a worthy expression of the divine singularity, contributing in their own special way to the whole, not exploited as if they were a mere object.

In no area of life is a sense of our oneness more vital than that of bringing up children. For this reason, not many months from now Namaste Publishing will release a book that shows, unlike any other so far published, how parents and children can move beyond duality and grow together in harmonious families.

Dr Shefali Tsabary’s forthcoming Out of Control will show the world how we can raise children in a manner that’s grounded in oneness, instead of in the widely accepted but destructive mindset of control and punishment that has dominated societies the world over for so many thousands of years, resulting in the mess our world has so long found itself in.

Welcome to this fall 2013 edition of Namaste Insights. Welcome to life lived, jobs enjoyed, and relationships enriched by the awareness of our ultimate oneness.

“Oneness, Oneness...

But How to Experience Oneness?”

by Constance Kellough

By now we know that the new science has irrefutably proven that everything is connected, forming a cosmic tapestry of Oneness. If we change one strand within the tapestry, it affects the whole.

We also know that in order to break out of our repetitive patterns of war, brutality, and inhumanity to our fellow men and women, we need to act on this awareness. Whatever we do to our neighbor, we truly do to ourselves—precisely because we are One. Jesus’ edict to “love your neighbor as yourself” is based on his awareness of Oneness —the core, unshakeable spiritual law.

Even though intellectually we can say, “I agree, all is One,” when we look out and see different forms that are apparently separate, most of us find it hard to truly accept and therefore act on this knowledge that we are one with the sky, the trees, the fish, each other, and our ancestors.

We have been seeing with dual vision—dividing the world into good and bad, me and you, ours and theirs—for so long that it’s difficult to see otherwise, even though we try so hard to do so.

Where are the spiritual glasses we can put on to help us see correctly? We need the kind of glasses that will bring us into “righteous” vision, which is that of Singularity.

Singularity is the consciousness of our Oneness with God, whatever we conceive this omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent reality to be. (To explore this in more depth, please go to our website www.namastepublishing.com. On the homepage, you will see the link to the first blog in the series entitled “God Realization.” From there you can follow the sequence of remaining blogs by going to The Compassionate Eye, which is also found on our homepage.)

Unless we experience our connection to God, our Oneness with this reality, how can we hope to experience Oneness when we look out at our world with its multi forms, each of which are different individual expressions, different extensions of the One God? This is why it’s so critical that we spend time in meditation, or what I have come to call “sacred silent sitting.”

It’s in the silence and stillness within that we “make contact.” And we can most easily do this by just sitting silently and listening actively. Listen with your whole body, your whole being. Listen expecting to hear something. By this, I mean listen with your real physical ears. Truly, try listening with your physical ears when all there is to hear is silence. It works!

When we listen in “expectant silence,” we create a vacuum that longs to be filled. This attracts spiritual awareness and the experience of God-contact. When we listen for the silence, we hear the voice of God—even though we actually hear nothing audible.

Even if we don’t literally “hear” any words from that still small voice within, we will receive an impartation that will evidence itself in our lives in one way or another. And the more we listen for that still small inner voice, the louder it will become. Increasingly, we will find our daily activities dictated by what we have come to call our “intuition.”

When we just sit still in silence, going within, allowing ourselves to feel the animating life force within the body, we open ourselves to experience contact with The Ineffable Invisible. We will know we have made contact when we experience a sense of peace, a sudden deep inhalation, or a sense that something “clicked”—a feeling that expresses, “Okay, done.”

Just recently I’ve come to realize another challenge to experiencing the truth of Oneness. I find myself saying, “It’s so obvious. How could I not have seen this before?”

We can’t experience Oneness if we are split and not whole within ourselves. As within, so without.

If we live with envy, jealousy, resentment, how can we be one with our neighbor? If we dwell on the feeling of being a victim, and at other times feel like the victor, how can we experience wholeness within our being?

We can feel this split right within ourselves. And this needs healing before we experience Oneness. Our Oneness with all that is will then be out-pictured as a gentle celestial harmony.

We cannot be ego and the Son of God made in the divine image and likeness. The two must give way to the singularity. We are only the One Son of God. When we are aware of this down to the marrow in our spiritual bones, then all we will experience is our Oneness with God. That is the road to higher consciousness we are on.

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Hope for Humanity The Deep Undercurrents Propelling our Planet’s Interfaith and Interspiritual Development

by Kurt Johnson David Robert Ord

We may be apt to think that the modern interfaith perspective and growing interest and openness among the world’s peoples to consider the religious beliefs and spiritual heritages of people from widely varying cultures is merely a byproduct of the “Information Age.” Indeed, particularly since the last world war, not only is more information available about the world’s religions, this information is much more readily shared. However, as our book The Coming Interspiritual Age emphasizes, there are stronger and deeper forces at work influencing the apparent rapid growth of world interfaith exchange, trans-traditional practice and belief, and the growing sense of a shared universal spirituality, or “interspirituality.”

Two powerful undercurrents are setting the pace of global interfaith and interspiritual development. First is the world’s inevitable movement toward globalization and multiculturalism across all arenas of human endeavor. Second is the movement of cognitive brain-mind development away from the parochialisms of the past toward deeper appreciations of unity and profound interconnectedness.

The human species has for far too long sustained a lens of fragmentation, competition, and even conflict between worldviews stuck in the traditional “boxes” of our planet’s

divergent cultures. The interfaith and interspirituality phenomena are not only timely, inherent responses to globalization, they fall in line with our species’s unfolding evolution.

Because of this, interfaith and interspiritual leaders and practitioners must be even more proactive in their pivotal role at this threshold in human history. Comprehending this, Wayne Teasdale, in his seminal work The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World’s Religions (wherein he coined the terms “interspiritual” and “interspirituality”) stated: We are at the dawn of a new consciousness, a radically fresh approach to our life as the human family in a fragile world. The necessary shifts in consciousness require a new approach to spirituality that transcends past religious cultures of fragmentation and isolation. This revolution will be the task of the Interspiritual Age. We need to understand, to really grasp at an elemental level that the definitive revolution is the spiritual awakening of humankind."2 Understanding that “interspirituality”—this more universal experience of the world’s religions, emphasizing shared experiences of heart and unity consciousness— represents religion’s inevitable response to globalization, Teasdale further realized:

The real religion of humankind can be said to be spirituality itself, because mystical spirituality is the origin of all the world religions. If this is so, and I believe it is, we might also say that interspirituality—the sharing of ultimate experiences across traditions—is the religion of the third millennium.

Interspirituality is the foundation that can prepare the way for a planet-wide enlightened culture, and a continuing community among the religions that is substantial, vital, and creative.3 Today, we’re witnessing many parallel discussions concerning globalization in all fields of human discourse: governance, economics, science, and culture, to name a few. The interfaith and interspiritual conversations are religion’s part of this evolutionary leap.

The Current Unfolding Interspirituality emerged from the growing interfaith phenomenon of the latter half of the twentieth century. According to Brother Wayne Teasdale, this new movement is the result of the world’s religious and spiritual leaders talking to each other—discussions that were both long overdue and destined to come of age in the global era.

Interspirituality represents the culmination of years of international interfaith and ecumenical exchanges centered on the recognition of a common experience within all spiritual traditions—a sense of profound interconnectedness and what this implies for how humans should behave both individually and collectively.

This recognition has occurred hand in hand with the wider universal sense of unity that underpins the world’s other currently advancing ideals of holism: true economic egalitarianism, the abandonment of militant nationalism, nuclear disarmament, and other ethical gold standards advanced by the secular voices of globalization and multiculturalism. They are ideals that propel the defining edge of human development.

When polled about these ideals, some 80% of Americans felt such ideals were both important and achievable.4 Central to globalization is the imperative that our two primary ways of knowing—the external explorations of science and the internal explorations of religion and spirituality —must converge as coherent parts of an emerging worldview or cosmology. Not only must these realms cooperate, they must forge new approaches that can successfully nurture a healthy global and multicultural age.

Teasdale’s goal, along with that of the other great historical champions of a universal spirituality—nearly fifty of whom are described in The Coming Interspiritual Age and pictured at www.thecominginterspiritualage.com and www.isdna.org—was to prepare the world’s religions for their role as an asset toward achieving this mature global civilization, not a liability as part of the worldwide problem of competing ethnocentric and nationalistic allegiances. These interspiritual pioneers believed that the primary

vector of our species’s ultimate spiritual and ethical development wasn't any one of the world’s countless spiritual paths, but the shared direction of all. For this view, Teasdale coined the words “interspirituality” and “intermysticism” and put forward the view that, in the deepest sense, the historical development of humanity’s spiritual unfolding has been a single experience on behalf of all humankind—a convergence continuing to this day, defining the leading edge of the maturation of our species.

After the publication of his books, Teasdale worked tirelessly (along with many other interspiritual pioneers) to initiate institutions and structures that could support this historic threshold in human development. Their success in inspiring so many others has, to a great degree, resulted in the upwelling of the current growing global interspiritual emergence. Diverse traditions are coming to see that at the heart of all spiritual traditions is a “mystic heart” that connects us to the very core of reality itself— one that can enable humanity to unconditionally embrace all beings with the love and compassion central to all the world’s spiritual teachings.

In other words, the world’s interspiritual pioneers see the emergence of a new axial age that can lift all of humanity to transcend the differences and disagreements that have plagued the human family, instead nurturing a spiritual alignment based on the universal elements shared by all the religious, spiritual, wisdom, and philosophical traditions of the globe.

This alignment is characterized by four points: (1) the possibility of a common unifying core to human mystic experience (2) basic teachings held in common by all the world’s religions (3) shared ethical implications of the teachings of all the great traditions, and (4) mutuality across the religions regarding commitment to social and economic justice.

Trends Toward an Emerging Global Interspirituality The Coming Interspiritual Age recounts in detail the emergent steps toward a global interspirituality. We painstakingly documented as undeniable trends the progression toward globalization, multicultural blending, the rise of a global collective, and scientific advances to support the reality of unitive consciousness, along with newly emerging self-evident truths that will characterize the twenty-first century.

Globalization of planet earth and the resulting multicultural blending is inevitable. But the question remains as to what kind of globalization it will be. Will it be devoid of any significant contribution from the Great Wisdom Traditions, or will it usher in a new spiritual axial age? If indeed multicultural globalization is inevitable, we must ask ourselves how this process will unfold. Will it be a bumpy ride full of competition and conflict—indeed possibly even outright economic and military warfare, or will a more reasoned dialogue emerge, mitigating such negative consequences?

Inevitabilities such as these elicit the question of whether this era of globalization can lead the world to a maturation like that predicted by such visionaries as Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo.

This vision also framed the “foundationalist theologians” after Vatican II, who envisaged the possibility of a global religious pluralism ultimately joined in heart and consciousness.

Further, these unifying principles characterize the best vision of philosophy and futurism as well—from the perennial

humanist goal of “a global ethical manifold,” to Ken Wilber and the integralists’ positing of a “conveyor belt” to an “Integral Age.” Creeds and dogmas, exclusive in nature on a cultural level, still characterize much of the purely religious side of the world's spiritual traditions. However, significant movements across the world’s spiritual communities are beginning to potentially alter the global equation. This spiritual emphasis on the experience of “the heart” and states of unitive higher consciousness appears to nurture universally life-altering experiences of interconnectedness, mutuality, and “oneness.”

These experiences are reflected in an increasingly expanding worldwide popular literature and media regarding the experience of the gestalt of “we.” They are also reflected in the results of scientific studies of humanity’s advancing cognitive skills, human brain-mind research indicating ongoing moral maturation, and advances in our species’ understanding of science itself—in the New Physics’ quantum realities and the vibratory understandings of string and M-theory.

Indeed, modern science continues to bring forward major discoveries concerning the unified nature of reality—both at the level of new factual discoveries and also changes in science’s methods and philosophies. Holistic visions and discoveries are arising across all the physical, biological, and cognitive sciences, affecting our understanding

of basic physics, chemistry, and technology, our anthropological origins, ultimate views of cosmology, and changes in the assumptions and methods of the philosophy of science itself. What was dreamed of or speculated about only a decade ago—about time, matter and energy, life, communication, and the cosmos—is now considered commonplace reality within the scientific community.

New self-evident truths also appear to be emerging. The merging rational and analytical mind of the Renaissance and early European enlightenment created a gestalt in which individuals began thinking strongly in terms of their own worldviews and life options, not just those of the privileged or governing elite. As such, that era witnessed the emergence of self-evident truths with regard to the rights of individuals.

Today, in step with the trend in cognitive evolution toward holism, we also see new self-evident truths arising. But this time they appear to involve the meaning of collectives and the roles of individuals and institutions within and responsibility to a collective. We’re seeing this in the emergence of a sense of inalienable rights with regard to access to resources which appears to be behind all of the worldwide “Springs”—the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and the emerging Catholic Spring.

In turn, these reflect science’s new understanding of humankind's ongoing cognitive development—out of the old paradigm of dualism and into a new paradigm of nondualism—the realm of the world’s perennial mystics.

Our Chances for Survival A new field of science has arisen: "The Cognitive Science of Religion” (CSR), formally associated in 2006, combining the studies of five major academic fields focused on the investigation of religion and spirituality by scientific methods.5 The perspectives of CSR suggest the real danger for the world's future may be that the human “monkey mind” will become entrained in ways of viewing reality, and functioning within it, that are radically non-fact-based and thus lead to public decision making that actually impedes or seriously challenges a successful future for the species.

CSR also clearly distinguishes the phenomenon of religion from that of spirituality.

According to CSR, spirituality refers to humans' underlying personal subjective experiences of reality (“contemplative” and “mystical” experiences, for example). These often lead experiencers to profound, life-altering understandings of the nature of reality and their place in it. Historically, however, CSR sees these naturally occurring experiences, which appear to be part of our deepest human nature, as historically changed (in some senses “hijacked”) by the eventualities of organized religious systems. The priority of organized religions is usually not so much the individualized subjective life-changing experience, but the wider sociological phenomenon of organized religions, which naturally have as their currency exclusive beliefs, dogmas, and creeds. CSR sees the arising of religion from spirituality as natural, but often with a pathological paradox, because religion actually has a different social purpose: to conform behavior to various social, cultural, and political norms (and less-to-nothing to

do with spiritual experience). It’s this pathology that the emergent interspiritual conversation addresses, offering new inspiration and hope to so many.

The coming decades will prove pivotal with regard to whether a new global gestalt, with a new cosmology common worldwide for the “person on the street,” can emerge— and what it may look like. Some startling statistics frame this emergence. In the West, some 70-75% of younger people proclaim themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”6

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Similarly, across the world’s traditional cultural spheres, 35% or less are actually participating actively in the traditional religions of that cultural sphere, while, worldwide, 86% of the global population have worldviews stemming from some kind of religious or spiritual heritage, and less than one billion hold purely atheistic or reductionist scientific views.7 This is a huge vacuum in which the cosmology or gestalt of the future will emerge. And, to make the matter even more momentous, science itself appears to be continuing through an anti-purely-reductionist, anti-purely-mechanistic shift in search of holistic paradigms that can more skillfully grasp and explain the kind of reality—from the infinitesimally large to the infinitesimally small—implied by today’s quantum and vibratory string views of the cosmos.8

In the midst of all this stands the emerging interspiritual paradigm—as a holistic paradigm certainly not alone on the world stage, and certainly part of something bigger than just an increase of available information in our modern Information Age. This realization should challenge those of us at the leading edge of this understanding to recognize we have a pivotal responsibility regarding the survival of our species. The religions have, again and again, turned to emphasizing difference, competition, and even conflict. In doing so, they have held up for derision the spiritual values they cherish and share. As Brother Wayne Teasdale said in The Mystic Heart, the historic shift away from this exclusivism and absolutism toward a universal spirituality will take great courage for members of any world religion or spiritual tradition. Nevertheless, he was convinced that this path is the destiny of all the world’s religions—and the one toward which we must journey, or be part of a colossal failure on the part of our species.

Indeed, many (up to 77% according to CNN) feel that “old time” religion is in certain decline. A similar 75% equate this shift not with the values and ideals of religion, but with what has become of religious institutions.9 This trend may well reflect the prediction made by Teasdale. If “old time” religion doesn’t change, it will certainly further feed the world’s chronic pathologies of division, competition, and conflict. If so, like astrology before it (which ruled for centuries in the Middle Ages), it might simply fade away. Yet humankind’s spiritual nature appears fundamental. Hence, could it shift toward the kind of universal spirituality—interspirituality—that Teasdale and the other great pioneers identified and, with it, the structures of religion?

The Coming Interspiritual Age envisions such a shift toward a universal spirituality that’s highly personal, highly experiential, holistic, and all-embracing. If such a spirituality came of age, it's possible its narratives would no longer be anthropomorphic —those of casts of celestial characters bringing permanent salvation or damnation. Its narratives might more likely be about how reality is structured and how it works, in both our inner and external cosmologies. Most of all, it would teach a world of the heart, where “truth” is identified with what brings everything and everyone together, and “falsehood” identified with whatever separates or parts.

The world is already full of models that reflect these kinds of visions and values. It isn't overreaching, we think, to forecast that this kind of spirituality, and religion, might—and must—characterize the twenty-first century. Interspiritualists and interreligionists call it “The Interspiritual Age." Integralists and developmentalists refer to it as “The Integral Age” or “Age of Evolutionary Consciousness.” Humanists speak of it as “The Ethical Manifold.” Through worldwide polls speaking not of beliefs but of ideals and values, The Coming Interspiritual Age reported some 90% of humanity supporting this holistic and egalitarian worldview10. If this is any indication, hope is afoot. And the deep undercurrents pushing today’s upwelling of interfaith and interspiritual activity are indeed real and working their slow but steady evolutionary magic.

The above article can also be found at www.ContemplativeJournal.com

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Killing the

BUDDHA

An Interview with

“What the BLEEP Do We Know?!”

Filmmaker

Betsy Chasse

David: You’ve talked lately about “killing the Buddha,” and have been working toward a film along those lines. I realize there’s an ancient koan that says, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” But to someone not familiar with this statement, perhaps not even familiar with koans, it seems such a cruel thing to do! Why would anyone want to kill the Buddha?

Betsy: I like to provoke, because I think we’ve become quite lazy. The point about killing the Buddha is that if you don’t kill him, you’ll follow him the rest of your life.

There’s a longer version of the koan that’s more of a teaching, in that it goes on to say that if you see the patriarch, you must kill the patriarch. Similarly, if you seen the matriarch, you have to kill the matriarch. The teaching is showing that we can’t place the authority for our lives outside of ourselves. We can’t put someone so high on a pedestal that we are constantly looking up to them. When we do so, we hand them our power.

To me the Buddha doesn’t just represent teachers. It’s anything that causes us to think, “Well, if I only had this.” It can be a cause we get involved in, a house, a larger pay check, a boyfriend or girlfriend—all those things that cause us to say, “When I have this, I’ll be happy.” What we have to understand is that everything we are looking for is within us.

David: We are living in an era when many religious leaders, gurus, and other authorities tell us that we need to listen to them, follow them. The Vatican, for instance, has been reasserting its authority in the past decade, especially where the sisters are concerned. In countries such as Pakistan, some of the Middle Eastern nations, and parts of Africa, there are Islamists who are extremely dictatorial. When so many groups are authoritarian, with the result that several billion people on the planet believe they need to toe the line, to say, “Kill the Buddha,” is to go in the opposite direction.

It’s to assert that the authority for our lives should rest solely within ourselves.

David: So my question is, what brought you to the place you are willing to trust yourself?

Because many, many people are filled with self-doubt and afraid to chart their own course.

Betsy: I was blessed with parents who taught me to trust myself. So essentially, I came into life that way. Yet along the way, I haven’t always trusted myself. Like others,

I’ve had my struggles, and to get through them I’ve created a lot of Buddhas in my life.

For me, the crucial moment—the turning point—was when I hit forty. I underwent a huge change because I got divorced, and it caused me to look back on my life. As I did so, I noticed a pattern. About every ten years, from ages twenty to thirty, then thirty to forty, I would experience a major crisis. I asked myself, “Why does this happen to me?”

I began to realize that life essentially whacked me from time to time, trying to get me to open my eyes. It happened because I had been giving my power away, constantly putting the authority for my life outside me. Finally, at forty I got it. Maybe it was because I was forty and by now had a little wisdom. In any event, I was able to look back and say, “Wait a minute. I’ve been doing this backwards for years, and I don’t want to do it backwards anymore.”

For so long I had given my power to making money, my boyfriend, my husband, my church, or some guru. Since by age forty it wasn’t working, I was kind of the only one left that I could turn to. Somehow I realized that I had to start looking within my own heart. I needed to find my own mission, follow my own destiny.

David: Do you happen to have read the book The Little Prince at some time in your life? Your story reminds me of the spiritual awakening this book describes.

Betsy: Oh, indeed. The Little Prince was one of my favorites as a child.

David: When I read The Little Prince, I was amazed to discover that it’s actually a story about how we can move from dependence on people outside of ourselves to depending on ourselves—how we can find our own center of gravity. I was so enthralled with the wisdom in this story that I wrote a book unpacking its meaning from cover to cover, which is now a Namaste Publishing audiobook. It’s about finding ourselves, and as a result being able to find each other because we are at last capable of really connecting with someone.

Betsy: Yes, very much so. You think about these things when you are older. How funny that when I was young, I loved that story. I had pictures of it in my room. I read it to my kids. I too thought it was amazing.

It’s interesting to me to be able to look back at all the times in my life when the message was there, right in front of me the whole time. It took me until forty to see it, but it was never absent. As I said, my parents even started me out on that road, and

The Little Prince is all about this journey we take in life. But like the Prince, we have to get it for ourselves, which comes about only through experience.

Today, I love my life. I love even the crises in my life. I love that I can look back and say, “Wow, what an adventure I’ve had to get where I am today.” I’m grateful for all of it.

David: I think this is a really important place for people to come to.

Betsy: In the last few years many of us have been experiencing a bit of a struggle. At a time like this, we can easily become down on ourselves. We can look back and say, “Gosh, I should have figured that out when I was about eight reading The Little Prince.”

But I look back on my life and say to myself, “Look how far I’ve come. Look at the journey I’ve taken and all the lessons I’ve learned. I can go further because of what I’ve been through.”

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David: It’s about becoming a person who’s totally happy with who you are, and who loves being who you are. You become very comfortable with being in your own company, even quite alone at times. It’s not so much that you have to be alone, but that you have to be comfortable enough to be alone. This was part of the Little Prince’s journey.

Betsy: I used to collect friends, not because they were great for me, but because I was afraid of being without them. We get stuck in patterns. We create stories we hold onto as if they were ultimate truth. I’m working on a book about that right now. Like our Buddhas, we become really attached to our stories. Then it dawns on us that we don’t have to be this way anymore.

David: Becoming comfortable with ourselves is one of the biggest keys. You never feel lonely because there’s a fullness within you that never goes away.

Betsy: One of the reasons I found comfort within myself when a lot of people who used to be in my life weren’t there anymore what’s that I was beginning to be real. I was starting to be authentic, being more willing to be open about what was going on with me in my emotions and feelings.

I had this persona of being the “Bleep” girl. Everything was supposed to be wonderful, because I was supposed have it all figured out. It wasn’t that way, but it was a persona I projected. When I started being real, a lot of people said to me, “Oh, I thought you had it all figured out, but you are just like me.” When people were okay with me being just like them, I experienced such a beautiful connection with them. They didn’t feel

alone, and I didn’t feel alone. All of my work now revolves around this kind of authenticity.

I think many of us have spent a lot of time reading the books, going to seminars, watching the movies, but we feel so disconnected. I think part of the reason for this is that we’re not being real with each other. A large part of my life now is about enjoying real connection with people, which means being authentic. Anytime I find I can’t be authentic, I ask questions like: Why am I hiding? Why is my real self staying in the shadows? What am I blocking, so that this person I’m talking to or involved with in some way feels they can’t be authentic with me?

David: In The Little Prince, the more he becomes authentic, the more he discovers what it means to connect with someone else. Authenticity is extremely important. In my own life, I came to the realization that is the key spiritual task—simply to be who we are, where we are, right now. We don’t need to worry about all the things we’re “supposed” to do. Life provides the grist for everything that needs to be teased out of us so that we grow.

Betsy: In the film Quantum Activist, Amit Goswami talks about “do, be, do, be, do.” A little bit of being, then a little bit of doing, followed by a little bit of being. It’s about finding the balance. I don’t think I’ve found that balance yet because I’m very good at doing. I’m good at digging the holes and being the mouse that runs around in circles trying to make it happen. So I’m working a little bit more on just letting it be.

David: For me, doing just flows out of being totally accepting of who I am. It's about embracing where I am at each moment, and I suppose that’s a form of killing the Buddha.

Betsy: It is! We have so many expectations that we get upset when they aren’t met— upset with ourselves, and upset with others.

When I find something frustrating, I just start asking, “Why? Why does this piss me off?”

Then I take a moment to pause instead of reacting from my usual programming.

Whenever I manage to do this, other ways of seeing the situation start to show up. I find that most often the person wasn’t trying to aggravate me; they were just communicating

the best they knew how. Now I try stop and just listen—not merely to their words, but to their intent. As I learn to objectively look at the whole picture, I inevitably find myself concluding, “Ah, I understand what this person is saying to me.”

As I became increasingly real, I began to have such great conversations with people, which opened up further authenticity within myself, as well as in the other person. It involved being open, and real, so that I was really listening to every ounce of their being. Words are just so messed up much of the time. So to me, the koan “Kill the Buddha” is all about being real.

I had a poster made in which I have something pointed at the Buddha’s head. Well, I received literally thousands of posts on Facebook and Twitter saying, “How dare you put a gun to the Buddha’s head!”

My response was, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You pointed a gun to the Buddha’s head.”

“Look at it again,” I told people. There’s no gun. There is however a camera pointed at the Buddha’s head. The camera looks like a gun, I’ll give you that. Out of hundreds and hundreds of people debating it, about ten have have come back and said, “Wow, you just nailed me on this.”

David: We really cling to our sacred cows, which is why we are so reluctant to kill the Buddhas in our lives.

Betsy: I recently had the opportunity to talk to Michael Meade, who is such an incredible storyteller. It’s interesting to listen to him and other storytellers because storytelling is an art form that’s largely been lost in terms of everyday life—though I guess you could say that I’m a modern-day storyteller because I make movies. When you listen to those old stories, there were lessons in them. We have to tell stories because they have real power in them. That’s one reason I like art in general. For instance, by looking at medieval artwork and paintings, you can see what was going on at the time.

The girl who did my poster about killing the buddha was a really great artist. There are so many dimensions to that poster. If you’re willing to look at it long enough, all the initial one-dimensional responses like the gun go away, as you begin to see a whole three-dimensional meaning. For instance, you notice the light the Bhudda is floating up into, and it becomes a whole different picture. You have to be willing to sit with it for a time and really study it. There’s a story in the picture.

David: That’s exactly what I did with the story of The Little Prince. And as I sat with it, its cryptic statements and symbols began to take on meaning. I saw that from page one to the very last page, the entire story is tightly woven in a manner that describes

the spiritual journey—the journey of becoming true to who we are, real, so that we can at last connect with one another in meaningful ways.

Betsy: The Little Prince becomes his own authority. He becomes master of his own destiny. When he returns to his own planet, he’s a very different person from the one who first came to Earth a year earlier. He’s killed the Buddha—all the expectations he had of how things “should be,” which prevented him from connecting with the love of his life, his rose.

David: I point out in my book Your Forgotten Self that in the story of Jesus, for three years his followers were essentially borrowing a sense of self from him. It was a transfusion of selfhood. At the very moment they thought he was going to exalt them as rulers over the nation by leading a revolution, he did the exact opposite: he completely dropped out of their lives, the victim of a Roman execution. He literally let himself be taken, and they were utterly devastated. Their Buddha got killed! Now they were really alone—and in the emptiness, the authentic reality that he embodied came alive in them. They found their true selves, as a result of which they created genuine community in which there was real caring.

Betsy: The koan about killing the Buddha points to the same reality. You let go of the sense of self you are borrowing from a teacher, a guru, a partner, or your station in life.

It feels terribly frightening at first. But in the dark night of the soul that envelops you, you find yourself.

David: When you look at the many of the world’s religions, there are a lot of diehards who want to be the Buddha in other people’s lives. They want to dictate how people should live. When you see how fundamentally opposed to one another such people, resulting in a great deal of violence in some parts of the world, what hope do you have that we will shift into a place where we begin to see spirituality in terms of the commonality and oneness between us, and at last drop all of the divisiveness we indulge in?

Betsy: When you pose it like that and I look at the world, I’m not sure I feel all that hopeful. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have faith. I have faith, because deep down in our humanity—everyone’s humanity—there’s a desire to feel connected to one another. I think the reason people often feel hopeless is that most of the time all we talk about are those who are the really angry ones, the fanatics. But there are way more people like me than we might imagine.

David: That’s encouraging. For us to come together doesn’t mean people have to give up their particular way of practicing their faith and ethics, only that they can allow others to be different.

Betsy: When I was a little girl of eight, my father used to take me with him when he played music at churches. So on any given Sunday I was in a Catholic church, a

Baptist church, the a Baha’I faith, a Methodist church, or an Episcopalian church. We even went to synagogue a few times. I remember asking my dad, “When all these different religions basically say the same thing, why do they have to go to different places?” Of course, they can have preferences in style. But it’s the division, the hostility, that’s the problem.

David: To see the commonality in our humanity and practice acceptance is happening one person at a time.

Betsy: I have little kids, and I see that they are just like little kids in other parts the world. I look at other moms, and I connect with him on that level, even though we might be at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of our ideology. But we see each other as moms. I do it everyday. My daughter has a lot of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian friends, and we share the commonality every day as mothers and children.

So I have faith that it can eventually happen globally.

David: It has to happen. Either we will shift, or we will die angry with one other.

Betsy: We’re in the process of change. Old systems have to die, and new systems have to come in, and it’s not very comfortable. Right now a lot of people are pointing out all the bad, whereas I tend to spend a lot of time finding the good. It’s more authentic, because in our essence we are good—and it’s what can connect us and save our world. It’s where the future lies.

Editor’s Note: Betsy has put Killing the Buddha on hold while she films the next installment of What The Bleep Do We Know?!, which is currently entitled What The Bleep?!: Now What? Her next book Tipping Sacred Cows is available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller.

“Tipping Sacred Cows is a pure delight. it will make you laugh and give you courage to face anything…it will keep you on your path to your conscious evolution. A light and enlightening read.” Barbara Marx Hubbard – Foundation for Conscious Evolution Betsy Chasse is an internationally known author, filmmaker, and speaker. She is the cocreator of the film “What The Bleep Do We Know?!” and author of two books, Metanoia – A Transformative Change of Heart and the companion book to BLEEP. She has just completed her third book, Tipping Sacred Cows, due January 2014 from Atria/Simon & Schuster. In addition to blogging and books, Betsy continues to make provocative films, with the recently completed documentary CREATIVITY and two currently in production—The follow up film to BLEEP and Zentropy, a narrative comedy about what happens when the least spiritual person on the planet gets hired to make a movie about spirituality.

Equality Versus Balance:

The Truth about

Women's Wisdom

by Johanna Maaghul

and

Men's Magnificence

In 2009, the Dalai Lama was quoted as saying, “The world will be saved by the Western woman.” Not much attention was paid to his statement; even less was it truly understood.

For me, these words when I first heard them spun in my head again and again. I think about the women in other countries like China who are diligently chipping away at finding some form of equality among thick and ancient social archetypes—while still admiring a model at least a half century behind ours here in the West. Yet they pursue this effort with a vigor and passion that goes unmatched by women in the West today.

Then there is Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, which from her corporate post she was able to rocket to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, offering a message that echoed much of the same sentiment of the model from fifty years ago delivered by another iconic female writer, Betty Friedan.

Despite both Sandberg and Friedan’s plea for equality, at the root there is still this: Women are still women and men are still. Men are not “going away,” as was so quaintly implied in Hannah Rosen’s Atlantic Monthly article entitled “The End of Men.” As much as Ms. Sandberg would like to water them down, there still remain fundamental and beautiful differences between men and women. The more we ignore them, negate them, or pretend they don’t exist in our struggle to achieve financial, domestic, and professional equality, the more we’ll continue to wage a silent war between the sexes—and thereby miss the amazing opportunities for collaboration that our era and economy now beg for.

In 2007, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Although most purveyors of western medicine would never endorse this belief, the word on the holistic medical street is that breast cancer is symbolically a disease of over-nurturing. To be blunt, it’s a disease of women who have let too many suck at the breast at the expense of their own health and wellbeing.

Coming from a lineage of women who have historically surrendered their power to the men in their lives, it took time, but I eventually came to terms with the fact that I, too, had succumb to this condition of over-nurturing at my own expense.

I hold no blame for myself or those I have over-nurtured, as I was never taught to understand this balance as a woman, a mother, a wife, or a human being. However, I was fortunate to find guidance later in my journey to help me realize this, and I would like to share with you how this came about and the difference it has made.

A guide who helped me most goes by the name of JaiKaur. I had originally connected with her to share my own book with her for an interview on her internet radio show. After the interview, we took our dialogue offline, where it became apparent that she had far more to teach me than I her.

I saw in her something so unique and brilliant in her vision of how women were being

compromised in the world, in their lives, and in their relationships with men, that my own perception was permanently altered. As she put it, “When women implode, men explode.” Given how dangerous our world has become as a result of our technology, it’s clearly time for women to reclaim their real power, lest we explode the planet itself.

When I speak of our “real” power, I’m not referring to the power that Ms. Sandberg speaks of, which involves climbing the corporate ladder and making sure we hold equal positions at the pinnacle of the company’s executive team. Neither am I referring to a “balance” of men sharing in housework and childcare more equally.

I’m talking about a power that restores the lost feminine, while it also returns men to their own magnificence.

JaiKaur www.jaikaur.com

As much as part of me wanted to resist the depth of JaiKaur’s insight, I knew I couldn’t.

When I explained that I was lucky to have escaped some of the challenging mental afflictions of many of the other women in my family, she was quick to remind me, “Yes, but you got breast cancer.”

Again, I would be hard pressed to find a western doctor who would back the breast cancer over-nurturing theory, but for me it made sense. Of course, I don’t mean to imply that this is true for all women who get breast cancer. But I knew too well my own story, and too well the amount of mindless nurturing I had dispensed without ever once questioning its consequences for my health.

JaiKaur was also quick to help me understand the toll that the breast cancer, and specifically the transformation I underwent post-breast cancer, took on my marriage.

Throughout the entire ordeal, it was my husband who had been by my side every moment. He sat with me at every chemo drip; took care of the house, the kids, the business; tucked me into bed when I would go down for days at a time. Yet, when I rose as a phoenix from the ashes and watched the hair on my head grow back like a garden, the truth is that I didn’t bring him along with me in the transformation I was undergoing.

It wasn’t until years later, when I was experiencing fractures in my marriage, that I met JaiKaur and she brought this to my attention, gently signaling to me that I needed to confront the fact that I had emotionally abandoned my husband. I needed to reconcile and reconnect with him if our marriage was to survive. Her ability to identify how I had excluded him from this part of the process, and why he was left feeling no longer connected to me, made sense—especially in light of all the caregiving and love he had shown me while I was sick.

My marriage has been unique in the roles each of us have played in the caregiving and income-earning departments, a uniqueness that we often struggled with for innate reasons—reasons that are ultimately not addressed in Sheryl Sandberg’s book, yet that have become practically epidemic among couples today. Both she and her husband rose through elite educational institutions, eventually landing in highly prestigious positions in Silicon Valley, which meant that some of the subtle yet powerful differences between men and women were absent from her story.

In her book, she talks confidently (and often naively, it seems to me) about how the world would be such a better place if men and women could share equally in the responsibilities of building successful careers and taking care of the home and children, and how sexy it is when a man does dishes.

She refers to activities such as shopping, cleaning, and cooking as “mundane,” stating that someone has to do them. Reducing homemaking to a mundane set of tasks in this way misses the mark on the important role so many women have played in caring for their families and maintaining a home— as, too, do some fathers, particularly those who are single parents.

My intent isn’t to discredit or discount Ms. Sandberg’s success; I have lived in the corporate world myself and can imagine her pride at what she has accomplished. The corporate world can be ruthless and heartless, and to get to the top as a woman is no small feat. I’m sure the fact that her husband supports her and shares an equally powerful position furnishes them with plenty to stay connected in their marriage.

In my case, through my work with JaiKaur

About JaiKaur I’ve been an architect, a mediator, an administrator of community, traveling the East and the West to learn wisdom and healing.

I learned challenge invites us to discern and decipher the divine guidance and support that surrounds us in life.

I learned conflict invites our courage for learning and for relationship.

I learned our legacy is crafted from our responses of integrity aligned with our deepest values, in response to the changes and challenges that make up a lifetime.

I learned compassion is essential for living the depth and dimension of our humanity, and for the alchemy of relationships that are true.

Together, we decipher and discern the patterns of life that are calling out to you, inviting you to bigger, to deeper, to truer.

Together, we transform what lacks integrity and throw open the doors for your spirit and soul to guide and support your living, everyday.

Do you see yourself in these words? Are you ready to stop settling for what you have been told is so, is possible? Isn’t it time for you to stop living a life that’s smaller than your radiance and your knowing?

www.jaikaur.com www.blogtalkradio.com/jaikaur

everything shifted for me. I learned that as a woman my brain and body work differently. My innate nature is to nurture, and only by paying close attention to it and not overtaxing this gift am I able to maintain my health as well as offer my gifts as service to my family and the world.

JaiKaur challenged me to look at the dynamics of my marriage and the frustrations both my husband and I carried, having to in many ways take on each other’s preferred roles for so long.

In the early years of our marriage, my husband took on the role of nurturing our three small children, while I held down a series of computer consulting jobs in Silicon Valley. Eventually we began to work together in the technology world, building an amazing company.

Then came the moment when it all crashed. It may have been the cancer that finally brought it all home to roost, or the pressure of living in one of the country’s most expensive places while raising three children and taking on the intense stress of a startup internet business. Nevertheless, the simple truth was that we had never slowed down sufficiently to ask the important questions: Who will raise the children? Who will take care of the home and shop and prepare dinner? Who will make sure we have enough money coming in to make it all work? What are our dreams both collectively and individually? How do we want to retire? What legacy do we want to leave our children?

It was my work with JaiKaur that finally got me to ask these questions. It was also my work with her that awoke in me the truth that, as a mother, I had been raised without a full-time mother myself, which meant mothering was something I had to learn. On a bad day it was an awkward task, and on a good day it was a developed skill.

While the subtle differences in how men approach life in contrast to women—what drives them, and what makes them feel afraid—may seem petty, they aren’t. It is, in fact, honoring this subtle energy that creates strong, confident, vibrant human beings—and more particularly, strong, confident, vibrant men and women who understand their capacities, limitations, and the importance of the roles they can so naturally and powerfully play to nurture these strengths in one another.

To negate the differences between men and women, however subtle, is to lose some of the most beautiful gifts that have been instilled in the human race over the course of our long journey.

Although many in western societies are uncomfortable with the mysterious nature of the differences between the sexes—especially as our world evolves in some ways at lightning speed—other cultures have been comfortable with the mysteriousness of masculinity and femininity for eons.

Sadly, religion—which for eons has influenced so many—has often perverted the mysterious differences between men and women, twisting some of our natural traits in order to gain power and subjugate. Consequently, for several thousand years much of religion has majored in controlling women. It’s therefore exciting to see women turning the established patriarchal paradigm on its head, despite the distortions and excesses that are an inevitable aspect of any venture so grand.

On this note, I want to say that while Ms. Sandberg is obviously a bright, positive, and vibrant person, I would caution her not to imagine her theory and vision is the answer for all women. Her tendency to downplay, if not completely ignore, the differences between men and women is actually an obstacle to women reclaiming more of their rightful power and the roles that such power can fulfill.

As the Dalai Lama said, it is in fact western women who will save the world. But let’s not imagine we can fulfill this responsibility by regressing to a model that’s only about women getting equal pay (and play) in the workforce, and men “leaning in “more at the kitchen table.

It would have been interesting if perhaps in both her book and in her career, Ms. Sandberg could have taken more time to reflect on the true nature of power. Much of the inequality in the world today is the result of a desire for a distorted form of power, which isn’t true power at all. It’s this obsession with power that has manifested in our world’s afflictions of violence, abuse, and inequality.

In view of the Dalai Lama’s prediction, it’s important to recognize that women do indeed need to continue to seek roles of leadership—but not roles that exercise the abusive “power” that patriarchy has spawned. Let’s remember that the founding fathers of the United States fashioned their collaborative decision-making model The Younger Children after the Native American model in which women played a significant role. (Of course, the missing component, the elephant in the room with our model in the United States, is that they were all men!)

The image of men wielding power in the corporate world has become so iconic that we just accept the abuses, forgetting how many people’s lives were destroyed

during the recent financial crisis as if this were just the natural fallout of doing business.

In contrast, Martha Stewart went to prison for simply padding her own pockets outside the law.

It would be beneficial to use other measuring sticks of power, rather than just the one of the corporate world that Ms. Sandberg refers to again and again. One of my favorite recent models of women in power is Elizabeth Warren, who in a Congressional hearing firmly yet consistently pressed the purveyors of the Wall Street crisis to concede that not one single man in a position of power had been appropriately held accountable for such crimes. Warren didn’t let such men off the hook for a minute. She exercised her power as a leader, maintaining her integrity through the entire session—a trait I believe to be innate in women.

As western women, we are allowed exceptional freedoms—not found in many other cultures—to compete with men. But we also have to ask ourselves, “Is that the end goal?” Ms. Warren is proof that women today have great opportunities to serve in powerful roles that can bring real change. It isn’t only in the corporate boardroom that women’s power needs to be felt.

Is it not time to collaborate rather than compete? And is it possible that what His Holiness was referring to is indeed correct—that it is women (and particularly western women) who must step up and create this the new collaborative model?

From my own work with her, I believe JaiKaur is here to teach us that we are still women. We are the keepers of the earth, the bearers of the children, the uplifters and supporters of our men. Women’s bodies are The Older Children also symbols of the physical body of the earth.

If we are honest with ourselves, our bodies will never lie, but will teach us what and how we can give—without overtaxing ourselves.

We have a unique set of responsibilities that we must claim and own.

If we listen to our bodies and let them guide us, then the Dalai Lama’s prediction will have a hope of coming to fruition.

You can learn more about the revolutionary yet ancient teachings of JaiKaur at her website www.jaikaur.com, where she shares what she so succinctly refers to as the art and science of contemporary life. JaiKaur will be releasing a book on her teachings in 2014.

I Used to Be

by Cheryl Blair I used to be a young mother of one—and then I became pregnant with three. No fertility pills, tonics, elixirs, or magic potions. It just happened.

Suddenly, my own life was whisked away in a whirlwind of emotions occasioned by other people’s “What ifs?" and “How will you do it?” With all these “triplet” questions, I felt like a freak. Maybe I could run away with the circus and keep it all a secret.

I used to be in shock. You see, my life became so different that I would never again be the same as I used to be. As I reflect back, I have no recollection of how the “who I used to be” did in fact do it.

Who was that woman in the body with the belly so large she could barely negotiate the hospital hallways? Who was that woman who wanted to cover her head with a veil to shield herself from eyes that gawked at her in horrific disbelief? That woman who had the maternal instinct to protect her babies from the thoughts reflected from the eyes of the gawkers in the lonely hospital corridors? Corridors that were her new home, which became her temple, where she prayed for protection from the "what ifs?", asking for the strength "to do it."

The following years became a vortex of energy that fueled the fire needed to care for four babies with the endless chores of bottles, dirty diapers, and feedings. Who was that woman who worked a full-time day shift, night shift, and overtime shift—always on call, seven days a week, every month for the next eighteen years?

The woman I used to be was hiding a secret: a feeling that she wasn’t fulfilling a role of any great importance in this male-dominated culture. Thus every time this “who I used to be” was asked what she did, she felt deeply ashamed, as though she had committed a terrible crime by staying home with her babies.

Although I was being a mother and doing the work it required, I harbored a sense of guilt because I was merely doing what came naturally to me. In other words, guilt for not playing a “meaningful” role in the outside world—the world of real importance,

where all successful people must do something “great.”

The “who I used to be” fulfilled the role of mother, nurse, chef, therapist, teacher, personal shopper, role model, laundress, housekeeper, maid, chauffeur, coach, and friend—an extensive resume of multidimensional skills, when you stop to think about it.

Although never recognized as of any great importance, since this “who I used to be” had no college degree, it was nevertheless the only role I truly wanted to play. Which is why it never felt like I was “doing” anything “great.”

When most of my responsibilities came to completion as, one by one, my children left, my little secret began to unravel, leaving me in a tangled emotional mess that took years to deal with. I found myself drowning in sadness, grieving the “who I used to be.”

It turned out that all the pain had a purpose, for it was to awaken me to the realization that I had functioned as a channel for divine feminine energy in its purest form. I had a direct line to the divine—no going through the operator here! I was given the gift of being a mother, doing the work of taking care of the children of the earth. What could be more important in life?

It was this question of what could be more important that I had to put to the “who I used to be” in order for the “who I am now” to wake up to the realization that her job was of utmost importance in this male-dominated world, since only the strength of divine feminine energy has the power to transform our world.

If only the “who I used to be” had known back then that she was indeed a channel for the divine feminine. Perhaps she would have danced her extra big goddess belly through the hospital hallways, causing the gawkers to gawk with delight!

The “who I am now” reminisces about some of the delights of the “who I used to be,” such as the familiar song of Blue Rodeos Rose Colored Glasses, always on repeat, getting me through the night feeds. Or the words “Love Could Save Us All,” taking me back to those seemingly endless small hours of bottles, burps, and diaper changes. Night after night, there was something that kept me hanging on from day to day, all eighteen years.

The “who I used to be” was seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, which is what kept her going—only she was shamed for looking at things this way and told she wasn’t allowed to dream. The “who I used to be” kept this a secret, too. Yet without the dreams, how could the “who I used to be” have stayed in that room with a baby in her arms and two more propped ready to rotate, burp, and feed?

Reflecting back to that time, it now seems like a dream, with the smell of fresh-cut lilacs in the air; dogs barking; children chattering; babies screaming, crying, laughing, giggling, sleeping—all in a single breath. Bottles to be prepared, diapers to be changed, and a triple stroller to be pushed. Splashes in the pool, walks in the park, cookies baking, bedtime stories, and school days. A mother’s love, empathy, nurturing, gentleness, kindness, tenderness, compassion, and understanding.

It seems the “who I used to be” had the right song on repeat—almost a mantra, chanting the words "Love Could Save Us All.” For truly, only the divine feminine that loves, cares, and shares has the power to transform our world.

Love vs. Fear The Transcendent Battle

by Alexandra Folz

The Sun beats down my mind exposed.

Love and Fear armor to armor frozen on this ancient battleground.

Society soldiers standoff behind their chosen force, Separation a human condition.

The Divine light intensifies.

Fear stands stiff and hollow.

Love opens to the magnificent orb their pulses in perfect synch.

My Soul gasps.

Finally I awaken…

Fear a haunting shadow.

Love afraid of itself the omnificent Sun captured in a human piece.

Knowing this, it is time.

This battle must be won.

My Soul ignites.

The battleground begins to sizzle.

Love and Fear drip with impervious metal.

To the core, Love knows its truth.

To the core, Fear knows its truth.

Who will ascend from this melting pot being fully to the bitter end?

A preparatory wind swirls through my crown sweeping beliefs and projections.

Smoke hovers above the battleground.

Soldiers stiffen.

Horses shift and stomp their hooves.

Each side in shallow breath knowing their lives are bet on loyalty.

Flames drop at Soul’s command.

Through the haze troops see Love lifting off its helmet.

Orange flames cradle the metal lowering it to the core honoring its surrender.

Fear draws a hidden dagger in response.

Now two weapons live in one anxious hand.

Love drops its only sword.

It disintegrates…

With sword and dagger in hand Fear waves its troops closer flashing slicers encroach from every angle.

Love drops its shield and motions its troops to fall back.

Fear plunges forward shoving Love with its plate of malice.

Love steadies, then passionately peels off its armor piece by piece now naked in surrender.

Soulful flames step aside and bow to the Master.

Fear effortlessly stabs Love’s heart.

Sparkling light beams from the infliction.

Fear is instantly blinded.

In a panic, Fear stabs recklessly dressing Love in iridescent sequins.

Bright truth bursts through every opening.

Fear’s illusion now coated with Love’s full reveal.

Love’s vibration serves soulful flares to Fear.

Engulfed by light Fear and its troops transform Sun and Soul burning bright.

Soul chose Love the universal ONE Divinity illuminates to and from.

Fear once a shadow now a golden mirror a Sol-ful truth Love’s reflection an inspiration…

love more love deeper love through and beyond where I AM now.

Thank you, Fear your vintage threat the transformative spark to this Love ascending end.

Love and Fear Armor to armor A moment A choice A human blessing.

Alexandra Folz is author of two forthcoming books for children, Indigo’s Bracelet and Indigo’s Crystals. You can find some of her poems at: www.elephantournal.com/ author/alexandra-folz/

Shefali Tsabary, PhD

As a planet, we are facing a variety of critical issues, each of which has the ability to derail our future. Yet there is a lynchpin that underlies how we as a species will tackle these issues. This lynchpin involves the way we raise our children, for our children are the ones who will both inherit our problems and either steer us in a constructive or a destructive direction.

It’s for this reason that parenting needs to be at the forefront of global consciousness.

The kind of humans we produce as a result of parenting is at the root of all the issues we face as a world. It is the core of what makes for a sane world, a healthy society—or will take us down the pathway of self-destruction.

Everything builds on how we parent. So I want to propose that if we achieve nothing else in our lives but the ability to be fully present and attuned to our children, we will have achieved what it takes to redirect our world along a fruitful path.

When Your Kids Have You Backed Up Against the Wall

In other words, I am proposing that global transformation begins with the parent.

The world has changed drastically since we were children. We do practically everything differently from when many of us grew up. Yet our approach to parenthood has in many ways remained stagnant.

The challenges of today are in many ways different from those of our parents. What worked for them isn’t working in the new millennium.

The statistics speak for themselves: According to the United States Surgeon General, about one in five children and adolescents have symptoms of a psychological disorder. One in five—that’s a hairraising statistic.

In the four short years between 2001 and 2005, the number of children who take antipsychotics rose 73%. I find that bone chilling.

There has been a 274% global increase in the prescribing of psychiatric drugs for youths over the decade across more than 50 countries. In other words, the increase in prescriptions worldwide has been exponential.

In 2010, the number of children in foster care rose to 662,000. To me, this is tragic.

Clearly something is amiss. I think we can safely say that huge numbers of our children are in serious psychological crisis. We could look to poverty, neurobiology, social pressures, among other factors, yet my experience as a child psychologist in clinical practice informs me that none of these have the same level of effect on our children as does the way we parent.

The challenges of the new millennium require an urgent transformation of the family system. At the heart of this transformation is a paradigm shift in parental leadership.

The hierarchical, top-down, parent-to-child model doesn’t work in the modern world.

The old paradigm perpetuates the belief that children are powerless and emotionally impoverished, requiring the rule of linear leadership. We are now seeing how terribly archaic this notion is.

When I tell parents that this model needs to be abandoned, they immediately say something like: “Oh, great. So when Johnny runs my red lipstick all across my white walls, I just let him? I allow him to lead? Well, let’s see where that takes us.”

I respond, “Permissive parenting isn’t at all what I’m talking about. That was tried by a generation of parents and was a hopeless failure. You cannot let children just raise themselves.”

We need neither an authoritarian nor a permissive model. We need a revolutionary model—the approach I call conscious parenting.

The conscious approach steers us away from the idea that the parent is the almighty authority. The parent is a parent, not an overlord. You see, whenever we are ensconced in parental righteousness, ruling from on high, we stop listening to our children. This is where everything begins to go awry.

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The conscious parenting model turns the spotlight away from the “child-as-problem-tobe-fixed” to the “parent-as-the-one-who-needs-to-be-transformed.” This model challenges parents to realize that it is they who are the wellspring from which their children evolve. But when this wellspring has either run dry or is polluted, there are implications for the child’s wellbeing.

“Easy for her to say,” parents sometimes respond, “but she hasn’t dealt with my child.”

And it’s true that many parents have a rough time. Their children are hardwired to be more difficult than others. Tough temperaments can be challenging. But as my own mother used to tell me when, as a young mom, I used to whine about a challenging moment with my daughter, “You have to look within yourself to find a way to connect to he. There is always a way. You just aren’t mature enough yet to find it.”

What she was in effect telling is that the child who is born to us, in precisely the form she or he comes—especially the “difficult” ones—is an invitation to come to terms with

the ways we ourselves as parents have yet to grow up. I can promise you, it you take up the invitation, it will stretch you like nothing else.

We are lucky there’s so much research today that we can turn to in our quest to figure out what works for our children and what doesn’t. Corporal punishment, for example, has been clearly shown not only to be ineffective but to have long-term detrimental consequences in terms of the neurobiology and emotional development of a child. You would think this practice would stop A.S.A.P. Nope. Millions, if not billions, of parents around the world still resort to corporal punishment. Feeling beaten by the child, they beat the child.

In contrast, research now shows how effective the practice of mindfulness is terms of the development of a child’s brain. Yet only a handful of schools, and even fewer homes, have adopted this practice as a means of teaching children how to selfregulate. And in the end, self-regulation is what discipline is all about, because we all know the stories of the girls beaten by nun—girls who in their teens then ran amok.

How many parents realize there is an effective way to praise a child that motivates the child, and an ineffective way that has just the opposite effect? Thanks to the work of researchers such as Carol Dweck, the insight parents need is now readily available.

We are also discovering that there are effective ways to connect to our infants— approaches that form a deep bond, so that we nurture in the child not only love and respect but also the desire to become the best she or he is capable of becoming.

It’s possible to understand adolescent conflict and address it effectively, so that our teens don’t end up running away from home, dropping out on drugs or alcohol, or worse taking their own lives—as has been happening so much lately Parenting needs to promote the it seems. joy children naturally feel Look, there is no doubt that parenting confounds our best plans for our children. We all need help to parent more therapeutically. So why don’t we admit that we don’t know how to go it alone and stop pretending we do.

When we finally admit

that our kids have us backed up against a wall, we find that we aren’t in a hopeless situation at all. On the contrary, we are primed to discover the many helpful and hopeful insights that a mountain of research, never available before our scientific era, is so clearly telling us.

When you power on your cell phone, you trust that it’s going to connect you with the person you are calling. When you download a movie, you know that pressing the remote will initiate an evening of entertainment. When you hit “send” on an email, you realize that there’s no recalling the statement you may now be wishing you had thought about a little more.

My friends, science has brought us an era of understanding that makes possible all of the technology that today powers our increasingly comfortable lives. And this same science has also been exploring how the human brain develops, how it interacts with its world, and how it either flourishes or turns rogue.

Why is it that we have no problem trusting what science tells us when it puts a rover on Mars and explores the makeup of rocks, yet we refuse to heed the incredible insights concerning our own functioning as human beings that are now available to us in bucket loads?

In our parenting, how many of us draw on the insight of science concerning how our child’s brain develops and the impact this has on how Is a child’s the child’s psyche functions? How many of us messiness really have ever sat down for a truly intelligent talk with so important? our child’s teachers, exploring how we can utilize the findings of thoroughly grounded and tested psychological studies? Do we work together both as parents and as schools to enlighten the dialogue, open the conversation, and ask the really tough questions? Or do we sweep the real issues under the rug with an authoritarian approach that only delays the consequences of ignoring what’s really going on in our children’s psyches?

I propose that it’s time to move away from the misguided kind of privacy of the home that cloaks abuse as “parental rights.” It’s time to abandon the rigidity and the defensiveness that has shrouded parenthood in secrecy. Don’t our children deserve to be raised with the best insights that our advanced era has furnished us with?

As a clinical psychologist, I have been working with people’s deepest thoughts and feelings for the past twenty years. Their thoughts and feelings are my raw data. And if I

had to distill all the problems I have encountered with kids who bully, cut themselves, starve themselves, binge, steal, overdose, or in some in one form or another of acting out scream for help, I would come down to one simple insight. When our kids are struggling or have become antisocial to some degree, it’s because they are suffering from an internal schism caused by dysfunctional early childhood attachments.

Let me cut the psychobabble and say it simply. The root of the problem is the child’s relationship with mom and dad. In other words, if it weren’t for moms and dads, we therapists wouldn’t be in business.

The match, the fit, the relational attachment between parent and child ultimately shapes the child’s sense of self. When this primal relationship flounders, it impedes the development of a solid experience of connectedness, which leaves the child flailing for a sense of self.

To the questions: Who am I? Am I okay, or is there something fundamentally wrong with me?

Do I matter?

Is my existence here of any importance? …to these crucial questions the child finds no answer.

And so begins a lifelong question. The child, parched in soul, will seek a sense of worth outside of itself. It will look everywhere for what can only be found within—for a sense of self that develops only through a balanced, supportive but not suffocating, guiding but not controlling, healthy connectedness to our initial caregivers.

It’s when this quest for a sense of identity becomes external that problems arise.

The search for a sense of self turns to an unbalanced approach to food, a craving for the Ferrari, a life defined by the boutique, or a hankering after the corporate corner office. And we could add the emerald, the bed partners, the casino, the pills, the powders, the bottle, the needle, or spouse number two, three, or four—all in search of a mirror of the self.

When there is a lack of

Children’s needs are the same the world over...

It’s the connection we form with them that really counts

connectedness in the parental relationship with the child, it not only becomes the driver of an eternal quest. It can become our undoing. It’s this desperate need for recognition, which is what needs to be established in the initial connection, that creates the addict, the bully, the victim, the lost soul, the derelict, the criminal, the abuser—and also the abused.

None of the answers to the essential questions of life—Who am I? Am I worthy? Does my life have meaning?—can be found in the external world of material possessions, romantic entanglements, or achievements in the classroom, on the playing field, or in a career.

As parents, if we ourselves are not fully developed on an internal level, we will be unable to attune ourselves to the internal essence of our children. So instead, we focus on externals: their appearance, their grades, how many trophies they win, who they associate with, where they graduate from, who they love, or their career choice. These become more important to us than who they intrinsically are.

When we are focused on externals, we constantly project a “doing-mania” onto them.

They can no longer simply have a hobby: they must master it. They cannot just play: they must achieve. They cannot just learn: they must excel. They cannot just dream, but must dream big and or there’s no point in dreaming at all.

On the bright side. Whew, there is a bright side?

When the first primal attachment between parent and child is one in which the child is allowed to engage in a meaningful dialogue with its inner self and is taught to foster a respectful and loving relationship with others, the child’s need to belong, to feel safe, to feel worthy, to have a sense of internal cohesion, to enjoy a degree of emotional literacy, to trust, to feel empowered, to divine a sense of purpose, and to experience connection begin to be met.

Again, let’s drop the psychobabble. Simply put, mom and dad need to have their act together. That’s a whole lot to ask from mom and pop, I agree.

The simple fact is that if we parents already knew what it takes to create emotional abundance in our children, we would be living in an entirely different world. The reason we are unable to do this for our children is because we are ourselves have been subject to conditioning from our own childhood that has left us emotionally starving and empty.

For parents to provide the kind of foundation that results in children growing up into well put together adults means the parents themselves need to be relatively whole.

This requires that they become conscious of their psychological baggage, their internal voices, their emotional inheritance—and conscious of how they inflict this heritage on their children.

Let me share with you a few slides to illustrate what I’m saying: November 2011: Judge Adams viciously whips his 16-year old daughter with a strap in the name of discipline August 2011: Woman convicted of child abuse after she disciplined her adopted son with hot sauce and cold showers September 2011: Marion County schools consider paddling again September 2011: Texas mother arrested for gluing child’s hand to wall June 2012: Video showing a man whipping his stepson with a belt goes viral.

Stepfather allegedly beats young boy because the boy dropped a ball in a game of catch October 2012: Drugging our kids. ADHD or not, kids prescribed medications to boost school grades October 2012: Couple pays broker $2 million to help get kid into Harvard These are extreme examples. But nuanced versions of this kind of abuse are taking place in households all over the world. A belt in one household, two slaps in another, an emotional insult in the house across the street.

Just as damaging is all of the subtle parent-child abuse that’s a daily occurrence in America’s homes. I’m referring to the mother who threatens to take away their daughter’s favorite teddy bear if she doesn’t learn to sleep in her own bed, or the father who thinks it’s somehow going to straighten an eight-year-old out to leave her in a dark basement as a consequence of forgetting her backpack at school.

Not to mention the parent who tears up his son’s exam because it has a C grade on it, or the mom who in exasperation declares to her son, “None of this would happen if you weren’t such a bad kid!” And think of the parents who yell at their sons for kissing a boy on a play date because they are terrified he might turn out to be gay. Or those parents who call their teenager stupid because she got a low SAT score.

Let’s get real here. Who hasn’t yelled at their child? Sometimes, we feel like we are yelling at them all day. And haven’t all of us have been exasperated by our children and called them a choice name or two? All of us have been triggered to the point of unleashing an unholy tantrum. Our children have experienced our worst side, our fangs bared. They have heard us threaten them, lie to them, bribe them, and insult them. With all that we’ve said and done in the heat of the moment, it’s guaranteed they’ll be talking about us in therapy for years to come.

You may be surprised to hear me say that all of this is quite normal. It’s par for the course if you are going to bring up children.

Where it stops being normal is the point at which we refuse to be awakened by our behavior. I’m talking about picking ourselves up the day after we have lost it with child number three for the umpteenth time, then hauling ourselves to a therapist’s office to get the help we so desperately need.

Let me be clear that I’m not talking about dropping Johnny off to the shrink to get medicated while we get our In all cultures, children come mani-pedi and a into our lives to grow us up Starbucks. It as adults isn’t Johnny who has the problem. It’s us.

We are the ones who need the help.

We have to be willing to see that the problems we have with our children arise not because they are inadequate, but because we are ill prepared to handle them. It’s we who are immature, reactive, emotionally illiterate, moody, narcissistic, perfectionistic, controlling, obsessive, anxious, and insecure—and this is what we transmit to our child’s psyche every time we fail to face this about ourselves.

We all have weaknesses, but it isn’t our weaknesses that kill our children’s spirit. Our children are amazingly resilient. Believe it or not, they can handle our weakness. It’s when we don’t own our weaknesses, but instead project them onto our children, causing them to believe they are somehow lacking, that problems arise.

It’s our lack of awareness of who really has the problem that’s the problem.

This is what the parenting manuals don’t tell us. They teach us how to fix our children, but not how to address the root of the problem that lies with ourselves. They teach us how to end our children’s bad behavior, but not that the bad behavior has been perpetuated for so long because of us.

The spotlight needs to shift the child as the problem to parental unconsciousness as the problem.

I hear many stories on the proverbial therapist’s couch in my office. In voices that are awash with unmet needs, ablaze with yearning, I hear story after story of difficult, emotionally painful, neglectful childhoods.

“My mother told me I was too much for her to deal with; I was too much of a burden,” said one client. Another commented, “My parents were never around, so I kind of grew myself up.” Still another opined, “I guess I am just never going to be who they want me to be. My parents think I am a loser.”

One mother, picking on her skin, said to me, “This”—referring to the scars on her body–“began the day after my mom said I was the reason for the divorce.”

“Help me,” these parents silently shout. “Am I really this unworthy? Don’t I matter? Am I this bad?”

And no amount of words I repeat to them—You are worthy, You matter, You are good—seep in. For they have internalized how their parents saw them. Try erasing that first blueprint. It takes a whole lot of work.

This is why we parents have such an immense power—and with it the greatest responsibility.

Now before we as parents begin to feel inordinate guilt, we need to know that we are not entirely to blame here.

In a way, we have all been misguided when it comes to this venture we can “parenthood.” We were told that all we needed as a parent was to love our kids. If we loved our kids, we would be good to go.

Well, there isn’t a parent in this world who doesn’t love their child. And I’m including that parent on the tenth dope charge, locked in jail. That parent who gifted her seventeen-yearold with a boob job to help her fit in.

The delight we feel at the beginning needs to guide the way we respond to our children throughout their lives

Every parent, at a deep primal level, naturally loves their child.

No, parental love isn’t in question here. We all feel love for our children. But love alone simply doesn’t cut it.

Love doesn’t get us far with our tantrum-ing four-year-old who refuses to be potty trained, or with our eleven-year-old who regularly steals from his friends to buy video games. As so many parents have discovered, loving a child is hopelessly inadequate in the case of an anxiously underweight eighteen-year-old who thinks she isn’t good enough unless she weighs 80 pounds, or a troubled eight-year-old who was just suspended for spray painting obscenities in the school bathroom.

Love, while a wondrous thing indeed, doesn’t really equip us with the skills we need to raise our children. We need a whole tool chest of skills that include mindfulness, emotional self-regulation, connection to our breath, detachment from getting our way, inner connectivity, and emotional literacy. But few of us went to school to learn these kinds of skills, and neither did we have parents who taught us such skills, let alone modeled them. Sadly, by the time we gain this wisdom, our children are often already knee-deep in social, emotional, and behavioral problems.

How are we to put into practice what the 20th century poet Kahlil Gibran was pointing to when he penned the words, “Our children come through us but they do not belong to us?”

To love someone who comes from you, but not possess them? To treat fully as “ours,” but then detach from who they are and what they choose to become? To teach, but not to condition? To give them everything we have, but not our mind nor our madness?

This has got to be the biggest hoax, a huge set up designed to induce parental insanity.

Parenting is a minefield of split-moment decisions between heart and head. How do we meet these demands that change constantly, from moment to moment, child to child? How can we parent mindfully?

How do we negotiate the will of our children with that of our own? Balance their needs with ours? Give them age-appropriate freedom, yet set boundaries? Love them and simultaneously discipline them? Encourage them to follow their own spirit, yet also equip them with the ability to conform when necessary? Honor and validate, yet require accountability?

We are asked to be a friend, while also being a parent. We are require to always be there, yet not create dependency. We want them to learn to fly, while also being realistic. We need to push them to meet life’s challenges, yet do so in a manner that isn’t demanding or harsh. We need to somehow teach them to love the process, while also detaching themselves from the outcome. We have to expose them to the risks of

Coming Soon from Namaste Publishing

life, yet not overwhelmingly. We are required to honor their intrinsic being, even when they are achieving little. We must encourage them to speak their mind, and at the same time know when to defer to ours. We need them to respect elders, yet not fear them. We have to give them advice, but not preach. We have to know when to speak, and when to shut up—and teach them the same.

The truth is that there is no perfect way to parent. We are all going to mess up.

Parenthood is by its very nature messy, chaotic, unpredictable. The point is to understand how to mess up mindfully. How to use the mess-ups as a means of our own awakening.

The parenting journey has little to do with the raising of our children, but everything to do with the raising of us, the parents. The extent to which we are willing to grow ourselves up, so that we are truly grown-ups, is the extent to which we will raise our children well.

To the extent we know who we are, we will dare to allow our children to know themselves. To the extent to which we can dance in the rain without worrying about getting wet, we will allow our children to be joyful and free. To the extent to which we are emotionally literate, we will honor our children’s feelings, which will facilitate in them the kind of inner connectivity that will allow them to relate to their world both realistically and productively. To the extent to which we have learned to love deeply, laugh loudly, risk freely, dream boldly, and lose bravely, we teach our children about life. And to the extent to which we have detached from external accoutrements of beauty, wealth, success, diplomas, and gadgets, we will teach our children to rely on who it is they are, not on what they possess.

I ask parents to inquire of themselves, “What is the original destiny of my child, separate from my projections? Am I encouraging them to move toward this, or away from it?”

All of us would benefit to ask ourselves, “Am I meeting my child’s needs, or imposing my own? Am I able to see—truly see—my child today, separate from my own ego’s needs? Did I listen today? Did I connect? Did I empower? Did I trust? Did I see abundance? Did I inspire? Did I learn? Was I present with my child?”

Most importantly, I suggest to all parents, “Take the time to find who you are. Pause, reflect, meditate, connect, love yourself, create worth, find purpose, and live in a state of gratitude.” the more you do these things for yourself, the more the grace of wholeness will descend upon your household. Through your wholeness, the river will flow vibrant and resilient within your child.

Our wholeness defines our child’s. To become increasingly whole is our sacred obligation to our children. To enter our own state of awakened living, so that we are truly living in the present, is the essence of conscious parenting.

The Economy of

Appreciation

by Michael Brown There’s a new way for individuals and communities on planet earth to raise funds for worthy creative projects. It’s called “Crowd Funding.” Michael Brown, author of The Presence Process, now available in nine languages, as well as Alchemy of the Heart, discusses how Crowd Funding is creating a spark of hope in the forgotten Eastern Cape communities of Aberdeen, Thembalesizwe, and Lotusville.

In the latter pages of The Presence Process, I discussed the wonders of the word ‘appreciation’. Appreciation mean both ‘to admire’, as in appreciating a piece of art, and ‘to increase’, as in ‘having stocks and shares appreciate’ Therefore, when we appreciate something, we increase it through our admiring attention. I tenderly call this, The Infectious Law of Affection. Now, 8 years after having written that book, I am enthusiastically participating in the economy of appreciation – Crowd Funding – as a means to assist our local community to facilitate itself. Hopefully, this will both inspire and encourage others to explore this relatively new economic starter tool.

Crowd Funding it is an internet platform that enables you to let others know about something you feel needs financial appreciation. You state your intended financial goal [usually through a 3 minute video], declare how long you are raising funds for, and what rewards people receive for assisting you. Then you let your own personal internet platform know – through Twitter, Face book, etc. – then you watch and see what sort of response you generate. Some Crowd Funding sites have flexi plans that enable you to keep all the funds you raise even if you don’t reach your declared goal, whereas others require you reach your goal to receive any funding at all. Millions of dollars have already been raised and channelled into independent creative projects all over the planet through this facility. I first heard about this funding possibility when I had friends travel from The United States to South Africa in 2009 to make a documentary – all sponsored by Crowd Funding. However, my journey into it began a year before that.

In 2008, when I returned from touring and teaching in the US and Canada to settle in Aberdeen in The Karroo, my intent was to start gathering equipment to construct a very basic recording facility. In 2011 I released my first attempts at recording my own music on an album called Freedom. A copy of this recording found its way into the Aberdeen townships of Thembalesizwe and Lotusville, and through this I was told about a reggae artist that I should meet called Moses Lesco Levi. Apparently, he was also told about me and my recording facilities around the same time period, but it was still six months before he, and his lifetime friend, Masterboy, showed up at my house.

We instantly connected and started collaborating musically, and our recordings together can now be seen and heard on You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/user/ MGFBrown2013?feature=watch.

What readers who know me through The Presence Process may not be aware of is that I spent ten years in the South African Music Industry before I departed on my journey to The United States in 1993. During that time I was a roadie, stage manager, stage lighting designer and operator, script writer for Toyota Top 20 Television, Editor of Top 40 Music Magazine and Flipside SA Music Magazine.

Through this ear of past experience I immediately recognized the raw, unique talent of Moses Lesco Levi. When he first picked up his guitar and randomly made up a reggae song for me [also captured on my You Tube site], it was obvious that as an artist he was both hungry and gifted. I have personally met many of the South African greats, and it didn’t take me long to realize I have now met another. When he started playing

me the variety of material he has ready to record, I also realized his uniqueness as an artist. Reggae music is ‘the people’s music’ because of its many origins. Moses revealed to me that he is not only a reggae artist, but that he also honours all his musical origins – the Afrikaans, Xhosa, and Zulu music played to him when he was a child and heard throughout his youth. And as we began exploring this music together, I also became acquainted with the depth of Moses and Masterboy’s ongoing community vision and efforts. This wasn’t just an individual wanting fame and fortune – this was a reggae artist with lineage and roots, combined with the example of daily community activism. “Do good and good will follow you,” is one of Moses’ personal creeds.

It turns out that both Moses and Masterboy are Elders in The Universal Movement of The Rastafari Royal Family. Masterboy is both their National Vice Chairman, and Chairman of Elders Council. Moses is also the founder of the local Aberdeen soccer team. They are Elders here in this community of Aberdeen and in Graaff-Reinett, where they spread their message of: “More sport, more music, more indigenous activities, less crime.”

To this end they started UMANYANO [Unity] in 1997 – a three day event held annually on 2nd Nov, catering mainly for the youth, in which sports, indigenous dancing, indigenous games, a prize giving, a live performance by local artists, and free food for the day are staged. This they accomplish annually without any government or local economic support. Their intent in initiating UMANYANO was in response to the growing disease of racism they experienced throughout their community. Also, Masterboy believes that, ‘building all these RDP houses without any facilities for developing the children in our community is community suicide’. [See in-depth interviews with Masterboy at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj3ICWb7ZHM&feature=c4overview&list=UUZAF0VT2ePzoAj-IEtr_gRg ] UMANYANO is therefore a hand reaching out from the Elders to the youth, a hand of upliftment in an environment where there is no foreseeable economic or political hope.

The greater communities of Aberdeen, Lotusville and Thembalesizwe currently experiences up to 80% unemployment and alcoholism – and all the ills that go with such circumstances. This is a typical Karroo town predicament that is only ever addressed by politicians as political leverage for votes.

Of course, when I realized the depth of this commitment, intent and vision, which keeps unfolding annually regardless of reward or publicity, I sat back in awe. But only for a moment, until it dawned on me that these special human beings are the exact circumstance that Crowd Funding manifested for. Accordingly, on 7th Aug 2013 we launched our UMANYANO campaign, and just as I expect, the appreciation flowed in for this group of magnificent individuals. http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ umanyano-3-days-of-community-celebration/x/4202205 Because Moses and Masterboy are dedicated Rastafarians, they know what it is like to continually experience discrimination because of their appearance, even after our socalled political liberation. In the words of Bob Marley, they are showing the Aberdeen community that despite the common negative public impression of Rastafarianism, “the stone that the builder refused will always be the head corner stone”. The reality is The Rastafarian Community of Aberdeen are the only ones who hold and work towards a vision for all their community and youth regardless of political assistance or party alliances. They believe that the upliftment of their community does not come from government or social grants, but from feeding a community the nutrition of its own arts, culture, and recreational activities – specifically focussing on the development of the youth. They believe this ought to be a community’s responsibility and not something left to outside authorities to facilitate and legislate.

Our musical intent is to release three CD’s on 2 November – reggae, a contemporary Zulu/Xhosa/Afrikaans/English, and a Bingy Fire album of Rastafarian spiritual songs.

We are now half way complete. We are also greatly appreciative and inspired. Within 24 hours of launching UMANYANO on www.indiegogo.com, we have been able to afford to purchase Moses spectacles, and this has enabled him to complete his drivers licence. Within the next few weeks he will be equipped with all the musical instruments

he requires to explore his musical talents and to prepare for his performance. Our intent is that on 2 November 2013, at the UMANYANO 2013, Moses will launch his three albums during a live performance in front of his own community. Through Crowd Funding we intend to afford a stage, PA, lighting, and to feed people nourishing food for one day. The four corners of this campaign are: launching an artist, staging a celebration, uplifting a community, realizing a vision.

It is also our hope that other communities in South Africa discover the tool of Crowd Funding as a means to bypass the non-existent economy and completely inept political system. If you have something others will appreciate, they will fund it.

If you only read this article after our funding deadline closes on 9 Sept 2013, you are still welcome to participate in UMANYANO 2013 through PayPal at: thepresenceprocess@gmail.com. Everyone who contributes receives a special MP3 from us – and when our fund raising concludes, a percentage of what we have raised will go to contributing to another worthy Crowd Funding project out there in cyber space. In this way we appreciate the economy of appreciation.

All books, CDs, and DVDs by Michael Brown are available at

www.namastepublishing.com

What “Timing” Is

Really About by Alex Laws

When I tell you that one of the great keys to fulfilling your purpose in life is timing, I’m telling you nothing you don’t already know. “It’s all about timing” has become a cliche— whether you’re asking for a raise, asking someone out on a date, or starting or expanding your own business.

You can have a great idea, but if you forge ahead at the wrong moment it will likely either flop or explode in your face. Stories of entrepreneurs who got their timing wrong abound—as do stories of how many of them learned, painfully, and went on to make a success of their enterprise.

How can you know when to move forward with an idea and when to hold back? This is the crucial piece of the puzzle that many of us miss. There are two aspects to sprouting a seed at the optimum moment. The first is internal, and the second external.

A voluminous quantity has been written about the power of thought to change your life.

But what’s often not taken into account is that few of us ever have an original thought.

Mostly, our thoughts consist of regurgitation of content that’s already a part of our brain. This content ranges from memories from our own experiences, to what we’ve heard other people say, concepts we’ve been taught, and observations about events taking place around us. This content that we run through our minds ad nauseam is mostly uselessly. When, occasionally, the content forms a fresh pattern that makes a measure of sense, we believe we’ve come up with an original idea.

You overhear someone talking about a topic and this sets off a train of thought that leads to a novel concept; or perhaps you read something that sparks an idea. Your brain is assembling existing information in a different pattern, which causes you to exclaim, “Wow. Wouldn’t it be something if…” Dollar bills are already floating in your mind’s eye.

Countless ventures have failed precisely because people thought they had a great idea, figured out how to make it happen, then not long after were scratching their head to understand why they went bust. You see, the problem with getting a great idea is that it isn’t yet yours. It’s just a regurgitation of old material, mostly gleaned from other people, that sets your thoughts racing along a particular track.

There’s nothing wrong with the The Natural World Knows All About fact an idea is Timing born of mental concepts we acquired from the external world. Great ideas come to fruition all the time because someone built on external input they received.

But it rarely happens successfully at the level of thought. Even if it does, it’s unlikely to be something that renders a true service to humanity, our fellow creatures, and the planet. We may make money, but it will be at the expense of other people and the environment.

All truly creative ideas must arise from a much deeper level than merely thinking something through. A seed has to be planted in the heart, then allowed to germinate in its own time and way. What’s required for this to happen is the opposite of thinking about the idea. We have to shelve it and allow it to incubate in our soul.

Many people fail in a venture not because their idea wasn’t a good one, but because it never truly became theirs—never entered their heart and was allowed to take its own unique shape. Because of a rush to fulfillment based on thought, often with little more than money or fame as the motivators, the idea flopped. Or if it blazed like a fire for a while, it scorched the earth and burned innocent people who were engulfed by it—as was the case with Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme, which was a head trip, not heart.

What’s Your Motivation?

When something happens at the level of thought instead of flowing from the heart, the motivation is all wrong. In contrast, if something comes from the heart, then your soul is in it. Consequently it has an entirely different “feel.” It’s naturally going to benefit your fellow humans and the planet because soul is part of the “all,” the “oneness,” that science today tells us is the nature of reality.

I’m sure you’ve heard the term “quantum soup.” In its popular usage, it refers to the oneness of all the matter and energy in the universe. For the first 300,000 years of the universe’s existence, this energy was a plasma—sort of like a pea soup in which everything is blended together and you can’t distinguish any of the components. Now that billions of years have passed, what we refer to as the “quantum soup” is today more like a vegetable broth. There are peas, chunks of carrot, pieces of corn, all of which collectively make up the soup. Similarly, galaxies with their billions of suns are all expressions of a oneness, with what we mistakenly think of as “empty space” acting as the broth in which the vegetables are held together.

This is a fundamentally different understanding of reality than that of our grandparents.

Space used to be seen as empty, and all the objects in space were considered individual and separate, not part of a seamless garment. This is known as the Newtonian worldview, and it was how people thought the universe worked for about four centuries following the discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton. Because everything appeared to be separate, it was a highly individualistic way of viewing reality—a characteristic reflected in how the industrial and commercial worlds do business.

Returning to the analogy of vegetable soup, carrots, peas, and corn were believed to exist independently, not as part of a soup.

Until, that is, the early 20th century, when our worldview underwent a paradigm shift as a result of the discoveries of scientists such as Einstein. Today we know that we are all intimately connected in a single reality that expresses itself in countless unique forms.

This means that none of us is a world unto ourselves. What we do has an impact on the entire system—and we, in turn, are affected by the system.

Soul is a manifestation of this oneness from which all unique expressions of the oneness spring. So when an enterprise is birthed in the soul, it automatically has the potential to enrich the entire system. Soul never does anything for purely selfish ends,

but always acts in the interests of the whole because it originates in the whole.

When an idea strikes you—whether it comes directly from your external world, or from the cumulative input of years—you need to know two things. The first is whether the idea truly resonates with your heart. Is the “fit” right? Does it awaken your soul? Is it an authentic expression of the person you find yourself to be in your deepest recesses?

The second thing you want to know is whether the idea is for you alone to proceed with or whether it needs to be a shared venture.

How Great Ideas Unfold Once you know what life is asking of you in terms of a particular contribution, timing becomes crucial. This is the moment to drop the seed into the fertile ground of the heart to see if it will germinate of its own accord. I can promise you from my own experience that if you don’t do this, but run with your thoughts and try to make something happen, the result won’t be a happy one. But if you shelve an idea and simply sit with it, you begin to get the “feel” of it—a sense of what it wants to become, and how it wants this to unfold, whether under your own steam or as part of something collective.

I use the word “unfold” advisedly. When you plant a seed in the ground, it sits there for a time. If it’s going to prove fruitful, a lot will be going on unseen before it pokes its head above ground. Everything the seed has the potential to become is encoded within it and must unfold in just the right sequence. All of this takes place in the dark stillness of the earth, even though it appears as if nothing is happening. In other words, the first aspect of timing is to allow your idea to find its own path. Never hurry this stage. Don’t go digging around in the soil to see if anything is happening. If you’ve ever gardened, you know you can wait seemingly interminably, with nothing at all to show— and you walk out to your garden the next morning to find shoots everywhere.

The second aspect of timing has to do with the world around you—your environment.

You’ve heard the cliche, “Location, location, location.” It’s crucial to be in the right place at the right time. But it isn’t just physical location that matters. Far from it. “Location” is just a metaphor for getting all the externals right.

In our automobile dealership, we had a prime location in downtown Portland. From that standpoint, we had everything going for us. Yet this didn’t save us from other external factors, such as the broken economy and the shortsighted decisions of our government and corporations.

No matter how bright or privileged we may be, or how good our ideas, we all have to take into consideration the world around us. When an idea has been birthed in our soul, we need the wisdom to know when and how to take it viral. A seed planted in

earth that’s too cold, or when the winter frosts and snow aren’t yet over, may be a healthy seed with huge potential, but it won’t get far without the warmth, sunshine, and gentle rain that are essential if it’s to thrive.

While on the one hand we have to wait until both our inner being and our external circumstances say, “Go,” on the other hand the world cares not a fig whether we sit on our ideas for the rest of our life. It isn’t going to make us act on them—it will only invite. However, the good news is that the world invites a whole lot more from us than most of us ever become aware of.

Alex Getting His Timing Right in a Crucial Environment

Given what we’ve said about timing, which is all part of moving forward and not at all the same as sitting passively waiting for the world to “discover” us, the problem many of us have is that we really aren’t open to the opportunities life places before us. This is why I’ve come to the conclusion that no one ever holds us back except ourselves.

There’s never a time not to be proactive. “Waiting” for the seed to germinate isn’t passive, but highly proactive. There’s no sense of, “I wish we could get on with this.

Why is it taking so long?” Quite the opposite, there’s an aliveness, an awareness, an openness. In fact, I would almost say an “expectancy,” though I want to be careful how I use that word because it can so easily become tied to specific expectations.

The Importance of Detachment—and What It Really Means I have learned not to have rigid expectations, but instead to have a certain detachment from my ideas. You’ve probably heard of the Buddhist teaching concerning “detachment,” otherwise known as “non-attachment.” Let me first be clear what detachment doesn’t mean. It isn’t about holding people or things at arm’s length. It isn’t about separating yourself, being distant, not getting involved. On the contrary, it’s the opposite. Detachment means you become profoundly, actively involved; but you do so without clinging to your concept of what the outcome of your involvement ought to be.

Detachment is what allows a person to become intimate with people, projects, experiences. Because they don’t have to have it all work out their way, they can afford to invest themselves instead of holding back lest they get their feelings hurt or are disappointed. In other words, detachment is about bringing our whole self to a situation and having the faith to trust that we will be okay no matter what the outcome.

Non-attachment is what faith thrives on. The reason faith can thrive in such an atmosphere is that it invites openness and freedom, since it’s free of fixed ideas of what an outcome should be. This allows life to flow, which is tremendously important if we are going to experience fulfillment in what we do.

I want to co-create with my world, not impose “my way or the highway.” This requires flexibility and a willingness to entertain even the opposite of what we imagine ought to happen, which requires thinking outside the box—actually, living outside the box.

If you set your mind on something, then try to make it happen, you may take yourself in a different direction from where life is inviting you to go. I can tell you, the last thing I ever imagined for my life is what I’m doing now. I had a clear idea of where my life was going, when all hell broke loose and there was absolutely nothing I could do to prevent my intentions from spattering on the rocks.

Let me be clear that I’m not saying you should let your life move forward at the pace and in the direction the world chooses. That’s what the vast majority are doing. They have simply resigned themselves to mediocrity. This isn’t about floating downstream like a leaf. If you do that, you’ll be subject to all the whims and vagaries of the corporations and the government, and it’s likely to be a rough ride.

What I’m talking about is a highly interactive process. You allow the flow within you to define your direction, but you also raise your sail. You want to be, as the expression goes, “three sheets to the wind.” It requires a great deal of attentiveness each and every moment, constantly adjusting your direction and your speed. When you put out to sea in this way, the universe hears and responds. You start to really live—not a

Knowing When to Be Comfortable Resting Is a Vital Aspect of Timing

concept of living, but a life lived from the heart. This is what it means to allow life to unfold.

Life Works Differently Than We Imagine I want to illustrate what I’m saying from the movie The Duchess. We frequently fail to realize to what extent our individuality and independence as human beings rest upon our dependence on each other as members of a particular human society living in a specific era of history. In any era, and in any society, there can be no “me” without “you.” If we are going to make a difference, we can’t disconnect ourselves from the rest of our society. Neither can we evolve without rubbing shoulders with each other. We all have a role to play in helping each other define ourselves—a role that’s sometimes supportive, and sometimes oppositional. Both serve to bring out who we truly are in our essence—much as we might not care for the oppositional aspect, though it happens to be crucial because it teaches us to believe in ourselves against all odds, as well as drawing out our capacity for resilience.

Though we like to talk about freewill and individuality, the reality is that our ability to be free and express our individuality is both enhanced by and limited by the degree of freedom and individuality tolerated by those members of our society among whom we live our life. The movie The Duchess, in which Kiera Knightley and Ralph Fiennes are superbly cast, and which is in part filmed in the gorgeous setting of Princess Diana's ancestral home, is about the collective aspect of our humanity and its impact on our private life. It's also about the impact we as individuals have upon the collective.

The movie chronicles the marriage of Georgianna, Duchess of Devonshire, a direct ancestor of Princess Diana. The parallels between their lives are striking throughout the movie. One almost wonders whether Diana was a reincarnation! But what made the difference in the lives of Georgianna and Diana is the era in which they each lived.

In Georgianna's day, the power of the ego and the collective state of that society simply prevented her from becoming the unique individual she longed to be. Princess Di, in contrast, lived at a time of social transition that allowed her to expand the boundaries and increasingly express her individuality.

It may not be obvious at first, but Georgianna’s husband the Duke of Devonshire is also a victim in this drama, just like the duchess. His entire reputation is staked on maintaining the façade of ego that was so essential in those times. The duke grew up to know nothing other than the role he was expected to play as duke, so that his ability to feel his own heart, let alone that of another, was severely restricted. Consequently, he carries a huge ego and pain-body, which Georgianna comes into conflict with. But as the movie progresses, we see him begin to feel—largely in response to his wife's impact, together with that of another woman who comes to play a crucial role in this ancestral home.

To make sense of the movie, we have to keep in mind how crucial the issue of a male heir was to family power and prestige in that patriarchal world. Love for his wife wasn’t the reason the duke married her, but sheer practicality in terms of needing an heir— which was the way it often was in that society. It was an aspect of the collective ego and pain-body of those times, and it wasn't possible to break out of it completely.

It's in the acceptance Georgianna was finally able to surrender to that we see the real lesson of this story. The Duke's mistress came to live with them as part of their family.

Clearly, what began as just another fling of the sort dukes had in those days led to a growing and genuine love for her, and she became his wife and duchess after Georgianna's death. But it was initially a terribly painful blow for Georgianna, who had trusted this woman as her close friend.

In an amazing way, after her initial reactivity, Georgianna reached out to this woman and befriended her in a much more meaningful way. Now there was no possessiveness involved in her friendship. She had surrendered her emotional attachment, which enabled her to encounter the real individual for who she was quite apart from her intrusion as a mistress.

It's only when we let go of our emotional attachment that we finally discover what it is to love a person for who they truly are. Now, at last, we can really connect, and the movie shows this connection in a deeply moving way.

Georgianna could take such a gallant step because she finally saw in her husband’s mistress not someone who had betrayed her, but simply a wonderful soul trying to find her way in a very difficult set of circumstances. She saw the heart instead of the appearance.

Because Georgianna didn’t impose her attachments on the situation, in the end a deep respect developed between the duke and duchess. One would even say a love. Not the romantic kind of love—not passion for each other—but a compassion and caring born of seeing each other's essential being.

The collective development of humanity at any particular time in history restricts just how far we can go in being true to ourselves. When we reach the limits of what a particular society and era permits, the only possible way to experience love, joy, and peace is through acceptance. But acceptance isn’t merely resigning ourselves to our situation, all the while resenting it. Rather, it involves embracing life as it is and finding joy in it—in the manner Georgianna models so well in The Duchess. www.AlexLaws.com

A Conscious Approach to MANAGEMENT During 2012, Namaste Publishing’s Editorial Director visited Jinan, China and stayed at a large and prestigious hotel that’s part of an international chain. It was a time of major construction in the hotel.

Nevertheless, the service was the finest he had ever experience. In August 2013, he returned to Jinan to see the progress on the new extension. This is his interview with the General Manager, German-born Florian Heiner, whom he found to be practicing a conscious approach to hotel management. We present the interview as an example of how awareness of the value of people can transform the world of commerce and make the workplace a truly fulfilling experience.

David: From the moment I arrived, I found myself treated in a manner that made me feel as though everyone on your staff is here to make my stay the best possible experience. From the moment of check-in until my departure, it was evident your staff were happy in their jobs—a happiness that’s infectious, greatly enhancing the quality of my stay. Since the service and atmosphere in this hotel is far above any I have stayed in around the world, I wanted to ask you why you your people go out of their way to be so helpful, at a time when your hotel is undergoing construction with a huge expansion and globally the economy is in trouble and companies have been tightening their belts.

Florian: In the hotel business today, you can’t be pretentious in the way hotel personnel have often tended to be, because this has become a highly competitive market and these days the customer has many options.

To stand out, there has to be a genuine spirit of service that touches the customer’s life at every level of their stay. So many hotels— and this is true of many other kinds of business—offer much the same product.

What sets us apart is the personalized nature of our service.

David: People can feel when something is genuine and not just a front. How do you accomplish this with such a large staff?

Florian: To carry off truly personalized service, it’s imperative that each member of the team—from the person who mops the floors to the servers in the restaurant—feels like a valued person. Someone who doesn’t know their own worth as an individual simply can’t convey the spirit that’s needed in such an enterprise. Helping our staff know their value and find the place they can best contribute, so that they are truly happy in their work, is vital.

David: This hotel is thriving even in a tight market. You are undergoing a huge expansion. And with all the building going on, it’s not easy to keep guests happy.

Florian: A product is outstanding as a result of how staff are treated. In other words, in response to the difficult economy and our particular construction situation, the management has to inspire staff to greater heights by showing them how important they each are and ensuring they are happy in their work. This empowers them to go above and beyond. As a result, this hotel is expanding in these difficult times, adding a huge tower, additional fine restaurants, and a luxury shopping plaza. For a few months during the transition, we have been closed recently. I am delighted to say that we have kept

every member of our staff onboard, despite being closed for business. They are all involved in preparing for the exciting new phase of our service to the local and international community.

To have faith in your staff is treat them as important, educating them in how to be heartdriven in their profession—an approach that pays dividends whatever the economic climate because clientele feel the difference in your company. This goes equally for the person who has the lowliest job and is therefore the most easily replaced.

David: Many companies don’t pay attention to their lowliest workers because such staff are a dime a dozen. Why do you care about such individuals?

Florian: Because everyone in your company, together with your customers, will judge your product as genuine when they see how you treat those who fulfill the most menial of tasks. Remember, from the top down to the very bottom, you are creating a culture.

This culture is either one of excellence, which is built on faith in your employees, or one on fear, which will drag not only individual employees down but ultimately the whole company.

Happy workers coupled with a worthwhile product are the keys to success in any venture. Good management recognizes the importance of making the entire workday a happy experience. People need to look forward to coming to work. Management needs to recognize that when people love their work, they are also healthier and hence rarely absent. One of the keys to achieving such an atmosphere is that you don’t stretch your staff to the point they become resentful, which then reverberates in less robust health and a sullen attitude toward the public. You have to be conscious of their needs—not just at work, but in their whole life.

David: Financially, it’s in your best interests to have a happy workforce? So many in top management don’t see it this way. They want to cut, cut, cut, squeezing the most out of people for as little as possible. You don’t get a good product that way.

Florian: People who have faith in themselves and believe in what they are doing further the company’s success. Because they have an interest in what they are doing, they take an interest in both the product and the customer. Such employees are your best asset, since they are in touch with either production or the public, and hence see firsthand what works and what doesn’t. They know what brings the people in, which is why they need to also be a vital part of planning and marketing.

David: What would you say is the key aspect of running a successful team?

Florian: The difference between mere management and being a leader. In any organization, leaders set the tone, creating a culture. Managers execute by the book, following the process. Some people make very good managers, and they are needed.

But a leader is different. A leader inspires. If you only have management, without leadership, it will tend to infuse your business with a rote feeling.

David: I’m aware that leadership is the real basis of success, and that it can turn a failing business around and make it stellar. Steve Jobs at Apple is an example. But what makes a good leader?

Florian: An outstanding leader today is really a coach. Their task is to be a facilitator of other people’s potential. Excellent companies survive with excellent leadership. There are countless people in management who know nothing of the kind of humanizing leadership style I’m talking about. A major reason some of the big-name companies go down the drain is that they are driven into the ground by a management technician who knows nothing at all about real leadership, only about cutting people they consider less important than themselves to improve the bottom line. Yes, we need managers who can implement at different levels, but a leader can’t be a technician in this way.

David: In a sense, instead of working “for” someone, people who work with you are all part of a family. There’s a sense of “oneness” among you all—a feeling that carries over to your guests.

Florian: A good leader knows how to bring people together as a team because such a person is an integral part of the team. The leader must be an individual who loves people, loves the work, and believes in the product. When staff see this in their leader, it inspires trust, and trust is fundamental to bringing out the best in people. If you don’t like people, don’t like being around

them, and act like you are above them, you have no business in leadership.

When I start my day at work, I make sure I’m very happy. This sets the tone, fueling the workplace with a feeling of confidence from the top down. Those who are around me feel my confidence, and this enlivens their confidence in themselves. As the leader of the organization, it’s my job to unlock my team’s confidence, which in turn unlocks their talent. People have abilities they have no clue they possess. Good leadership means getting to know them, familiarizing yourself with their strengths and their weaknesses, as well as their needs. By taking time to be alongside them, joining in activities with them, you discover how you can best empower them. This is what makes for people who are happy in their work.

David: How do you go about hiring people who are right for your team?

Florian: I’m not looking for short-term employees, but for long-term personnel who can be further developed—individuals who are on a career path within our organization.

A vital aspect of developing people long-term is to give them room to be themselves. If you don’t give them room to be true to themselves, they won’t be happy, and then they won’t grow. Their potential remains locked within them. But if you unlock your people’s potential, this builds positive energy in the company.

David: You must have to let people go at times.

Florian: Let’s say that someone is failing in their job, whether because of lack of knowledge, lack of time to adjust, or simply because they are in the wrong job. In such a situation, using the coaching model, we try not to push; rather, we want to pull, to draw out the best in the individual.

We talk with them in a pleasant, non-threatening environment, such as sitting over coffee. We want them to be completely comfortable so that they can share with us what’s really going on in their life. Sometimes we learn it’s something we are doing wrong as leaders—perhaps not enough training, inconsistency in how we manage, too great a complexity to the job for a single person, or any number of things. We listen, truly seeking to understand. In fact, we learn more from those who wish to resign than from almost anything else. They alert us to where we need to make changes.

David: And if you’ve done all you can to coach an individual in a particular role, yet they aren’t working out?

Florian: We see if we can transfer them to another function within the company. In this way we don’t lose the asset we spotted when we initially hired them, and neither do we lose all that we’ve invested in them. If your company is large, such as this hotel, there many be a role that’s far more suitable for the individual.

If the person isn’t suited for what they are doing—isn’t happy and fulfilled in their work—

a hotel is a great environment because it’s like many industries rolled up into one. There are so many departments in a hotel. Someone may have the right culture in their heart, which is why we hired them, but they perhaps aren’t suited to selling—a fact they only learned by trying it. However, as we talk with them, we learn they would fit perfectly into administration. Or someone in administration turns out to be a person who has the kind of personality that thrives on interfacing directly with the customer. We try to give such individuals another platform—a move we find to be successful most of the time. All we are doing is drawing out what we saw in them when we hired them by giving them a place where they can grow.

I understand the importance of raising the individual’s awareness. Pushing people to get things done accomplishes nothing in the long run. What you want to do is ask the kind of questions that get people to think about themselves in new ways, then give them time to reflect. Allow them to come up with the answer for themselves. What we find is that, suddenly, the person sees where they can really make a contribution. It works because it has come from within them, not for us pushing them.

The most important element is that the person must enjoy what they are doing, because then they are going to have passion, which in turn energizes those around them. In my own case, my success has come from my passion for my work, which enables me to infect other people with the same passion. My goal is always for my team to come to work happy and leave happy. I want them to take that happy feeling back to their families. In this way we create something good—not just for our company, but for everybody.

When we lead in a conscious way, everyone imbibes this spirit from the top down, which is what creates the nice atmosphere you feel when you stay in our hotel, despite the construction! This is how we differentiate ourselves.

David: In conclusion, for those who would like to stay in a conscious atmosphere, say a word or two about the expansion you are about to open.

Florian: Located in the city center, our award-wining five-star hotel is now interconnected to an extended luxury fashion branded shopping experience. It’s also just walking distance from the UNESCO world heritage site, Baotu Spring Park. The hotel features a fine collection of stylish guest rooms, with 57 sqm average. We also provide luxury suites with floor to ceiling full sized windows, overlooking the City Spring Square and the Thousand Buddha Mountain scenery. The only outdoor rooftop garden terrace in the city center features a stunning panoramic view of the city skyline.

With 2500 sqm of event space, equipped with state of the art technology, we offer not only the largest but also the most advanced and luxurious banquet and meeting venue in Jinan.

David: I look forward to being back with you in the future, Florian. It makes a huge difference to stay among conscious people. Thank you for talking with me today.

The New Metaphysics

by Lynn Woodland

The year 2012 has come and gone, along with it the buildup to the “end of the world as we know it.” So what happened? Did we “shift?” And what happens now?

If you’re thinking nothing seems so different, just look around. Humanity has changed dramatically over the last decade, and this change has everything to do with a heightened connectivity and discovering power in that connectivity. This has been the decade of smart mobs, flash mobs, crowd-funding sites, Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, text messaging, Skype, Wikipedia, and so on.

Careers are being made as people bypass the once essential intermediaries of established industries, meeting the public directly, one by one, through social media channels. Resource sharing, where people share instead of own, has become a hot new business model. Time Magazine jumped on the power-of-the-collective bandwagon, naming “the Protestor” their person of the year, citing the 2011 phenomenon of grassroots movements rising up all over the world—some overturning governments—surprisingly, without any top-down instigation.

Technology has evolved to a place where it now seems to be evolving us. The internet is enabling the emergence of a sort of human hive mind that’s more intelligent than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever been before. MIT in recent years has opened a Center for Collective Intelligence to study this phenomenon and to perhaps find ways to harness this new form of intelligence for the common good.

Not only are we starting to act as a collective, the collective is becoming increasingly personal. At the same time that world population is growing, giving us more and more reason to feel invisible and alienated, we now have an extremely personal technology enabling us to reach beyond the chasm of our distance and numbers to touch individuals we’ll never meet. Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, etc. are putting a personal face to the vast abstraction of “humanity.”

Look at what happened with the viral video “Kony 2012,” the documentary portraying atrocities being committed by Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. It’s not that mainstream

media didn’t cover this story. It did. It just wasn’t able to get people to care. It took the more personal, one-by-one dissemination of You Tube for people to pay attention in the tens of millions and to experience something heartfelt.

Our technology has primed us for global caring. As human beings, perhaps we’re learning how to love in whole a new way, reaching beyond the tribe mentality of local community to break faceless “humanity” down into people, and care deeply.

For those of us committed to personal growth and spiritual seeking, this shift can’t help but change how we go about it. I foresee the emergence of a new metaphysics that takes technology out of the mix and replaces the connectivity we have via the internet with connection through intention and pure consciousness alone.

This new metaphysics holds at its core the tenants that we are exponentially more powerful together than separately and that love is the most potent change agent there is. It gives practical applications to what science is showing to be the extraordinary power of consciousness to affect physical reality, even including the transcendence of time and space as we think of them.

This opens vast new possibilities for tapping the power of “mind over matter,” which science has already shown to be significant. In the same way people are gathering in grassroots movements, we can also come together through conscious intention alone.

Because consciousness can bypass the presumed boundaries of time (boundaries that science is showing to be far more permeable than they seem) we can even join with people from the past and future simply by all holding the intention to do so. Imagine a crowd-funding site fueled by focused intention alone.

The real difference in this emerging metaphysics, however, is how it ends the duality of giving and receiving. The old axiom, “It’s better to give than receive” always lies in polarity, and consequently in close relationship, to “There’s not enough to go around so I’d better grab mine first.” In this duality, where we can either attend to our own needs or care for others, being a “good” person involves sacrifice and forces our energy to be divided between self and others.

A Course in Miracles beautifully evolves this duality of giving and receiving into the singular “giving and receiving are the same,” but this abstraction can feel so removed from the day to day experience. The New Metaphysics is all about the practical applications so we see, through the immediate demonstrations of our own results, that we can have more for ourselves as we give to one another. We understand through practice that giving is the most efficient path to receiving.

How does it work? Try this: bring to mind your highest heart’s desire just like The Secret teaches us to do. Imagine it until you feel all warm and fuzzy inside—and then let it go. This is where popular practices end and new metaphysics begins.

Now, imagine yourself able to reach out, beyond time and space to every other person who has, is, and will read these words (you don’t have to believe this to be possible,

just imagine what it would feel like if you did). Imagine that we’re all joining minds, bringing only our highest and best to the party, forming a pool of consciousness (biochemist Rupert Sheldrake might call this a morphic field).

To activate this field of consciousness, for a moment, let yourself love all of these unseen, unknown, fellow readers. Not for any reason, just because you can. Love them with all your heart as you would your nearest and dearest. Let their hearts’ desires matter to you as much as your own and, with the biggest wave of love you can muster, send (in your imagination) the heartfelt wish that miracles now happen for each and every one of them. Imagine you’re a parent delivering the most beautifully wrapped birthday gift to your beloved child (times many), with your heart overflowing from the sheer joy of giving the perfect gift. You don’t need to believe this is really doing anything. Just imagine how it would feel if you did believe that your loving intention is quietly making life better for people you’ll never know.

There. You’ve done it. And now countless people you’ll never meet have just done the same for you, like massively focused prayer offered on your behalf. Studies have shown the power of anonymous prayer, and you’ve just received it in a big way. Didn’t it feel pretty good to want the best for all those unknown people?

And doesn’t it feel good knowing they’re all on board, making miracles happen in your life?

If given full attention, that exercise could be an effective practice for calling forth your heart’s desire—yet most of it is spent being in service to countless others, people you’ll never meet.

When unconditional love and service is what generates the energy that takes each of us where we want to go, giving and receiving have truly merged.

I call this exercise a miracle experiment and I put forth a lot of them in my book Making Miracles to see what might happen. Many readers have shared stories of miraculous healings and manifestations related to reading the book. But what I find even more significant is how many speak of feeling less alone, more loved, more compassionate and more “connected.” What can’t be gauged is the effect that coming together in this way is having on the world. It may be greater than we’ll ever know. Perhaps this is how we’ll bring an end to the world as we’ve known it.

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About Lynn Lynn Woodland is an author, international teacher, and human potential expert who, since 1972, has worked in fields of transpersonal psychology, human motivation, spiritual healing and mind-body psychology. Her particular expertise is in what gives rise to miracles and in teaching ordinary people to live extraordinary lives so that miracles become, not just possible, but natural.

Lynn’s background includes twelve years as a chemical dependency and mental health counselor and decades of work with energetic and spiritual healing. In 1983 she founded and directed the Baltimore Center for Attitudinal Healing, a free, health-crisis resource center for people dealing with life-challenging illnesses. She is the creator of The Miracles Course, a year-long program of online spiritual education leading to ordination, and author of Making Miracles—Create New Realities for Your Life and Our World, from Namaste Publishing. www.lynnwoodland.com

CALLED BY LOVE TELE SUMMIT November 15 – December 18

Living, Loving, Legacy A Worldwide Campus of Consciousness

by Marj Britt

Two years ago I stepped back from Senior Minister, to Senior Minister Emeritus, of Unity of Tustin and founded Called By Love. The ‘download’, the guidance, was so clear. It is still an amazing journey.

It’s been a steep learning curve with some of the best teachers and coaches who know the worldwide web as platform. Sometimes it feels like a maze! It has been like entering a ‘strange new world’. And we teach and learn from each other in the new order of Collaboration rather than competition which is part of the old.

The Universe continues, for me, to provide the guidance and the support that is needed. That is the most incredible thing…it feels almost like miracles, people, gifts of genius, openings into the realms beyond what I’ve experienced and beyond what my

human mind knows. Interestingly, the Universe is using the web as one of my most significant teachers!

I’m now immersed in working on the launch of a tele summit that will bring together some of the amazing Master Teachers who came to Unity of Tustin and were a part of the creation of the Campus of Consciousness that evolved over the 19 years that I was Senior Minister.

So many times people have told me how unusual it was, and that they had never found anything like it anywhere else…even though they had looked.

The process of inviting presenters for the first series is nearly complete. It took longer than I had anticipated! I made a ‘short list’ of twelve names from the 190+ outstanding people who were on the long list from going back through my calendars and pictures!

Some of the teachers who will be involved are: Jean Houston Adyashanti Roger Walsh Don Beck Russ Hudson James Twyman Andrew Harvey Constance Kellough Having been an educator most of my life, I am steeped in what works and what doesn’t work in integrating learning. I know how to develop experiential learning. So…here is what I am seeing: 12 Master Teachers, three a week, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Each segment will be 90 minutes. First the one hour interview and dialogue, with 30 minutes after for Q & A and how to apply it in personal life situations.

My vision is that there will be additional series after that. There were 190+ names on the long list and many more who have not even been to Unity of Tustin! This could reflect a ‘campus’ calendar, a fall series, winter series, spring and summer.

I think that you can see the educator in me! And probably also the minister and spiritual teacher…that knows that the consciousness that emerged at Unity of Tustin over the 19 years was not part of a short-term happening. I want to include the experiential components, allowing time to integrate heart, soul, body, and mind. And I want it to be collaborative. It will be a worldwide campus of consciousness, the ‘next stage’ beyond the visible platform from which so many taught at Unity of Tustin. www.CalledByLove.com

AreYou Plagued by

ANTIBLISS?

by David Robert Ord Religion used to be very down on people, telling them how awful they were and how bad they should feel about themselves. Then, beginning in the later part of the 20th century, there was a trend in the pulpit toward positive thinking. The “God’s going to get you” and damn you to hell preaching yielded to a message of “God loves you and wants you to prosper.”

On one level, it’s a step forward. You feel better leaving church in an “up” mood than you do when you’ve been beaten up. Yet, despite the more upbeat message, there’s a fundamental sense in much of religion —not just Christianity, but religion the world over—that, as human beings, we simply “aren’t good enough.”

At the heart of Christianity is a ritual, performed weekly in some churches and once a month in others, that—in the way almost everyone observes it— flies in the face of the attempt on the part of religious institutions to make us feel better. It’s variously referred to as “Mass,” “Communion,” “Eucharist,” and “the Lord’s Supper.” Its symbols are bread and wine.

What’s the correlation between blood and wine? Well, unless you get drunk and end up punching some so that their nose bleeds—or worse, stabbing or shooting them—there is no connection. Even the color is different,

blood being bright red and wine a deep burgundy.

For that matter, what’s the correlation between a human body and bread? Here, we can’t even offer color as a possible answer—certainly not for the white bread or wafers served at the communion or mass if you are of Latin, African, Asian, or Red Skin heritage.

Yet for the best part of 2,000 years now people have equated wine with the shed blood of Jesus and bread or a wafer with his mutilated body. This is a travesty, a monstrous distortion of what Jesus was saying when he drank wine and ate bread with his friends.

All ancient religions believed in the kind of gods whose favor had to be curried with a human sacrifice. As tribes gradually became a little more civilized, they substituted animals for actual humans—if we can call that “civilized,” and not equally barbaric. The Jewish religion centered in the Jerusalem temple was no exception, consisting of a bloodbath of animals and birds that stank to high heaven and drew flies in swarms. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

We have to totally get away from the idea that God is pleased by sacrifice, or that Jesus’ death was somehow needed to appease God. What pleased God about Jesus’ sacrifice was the fact that it exposed all sacrifice as murder, and thereby brings into the light of day once and for all that God is nothing like the gods, or God, we conjure up in our minds and who have to be placated.

The value of Jesus’ sacrifice is that it totally changes our understanding of God. The genius of Jesus, missed entirely by the utter stupidity of what Eckhart Tolle calls our “pain-body,” was to repudiate entirely the whole notion of either human or animal sacrifice. “God is nothing like this,” he insisted.

To make his point, he took two central elements of a Jewish festive dinner—wine and bread—and said essentially, “This is what God is like.” God is the universe’s Number One Party Animal, setting the example for humans to join in loving celebration around the table whenever they are together.

Paul of Tarsus made this abundantly clear when he wrote to the people of Corinth, “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”

These words of Paul are a call to authenticity. He’s asking is to “get real,” be true to who we really are. This is what “sincerity and truth” mean. When we get in touch with who we are in our essence, we no longer see ourselves as inadequate, let alone as bad people—and consequently we quit being false with one another, fake around each other, hiding our true self behind a pretense. Malice and wickedness are no longer our

trademark—as they sadly are for humanity in general, which has lost sight of our essential magnificence.

When you no longer feel bad about yourself, you don’t take the bread and wine in a “what an awful person I am” frame of mind. On the contrary, you feast!

This is obvious from the church in the city of Corinth, where people were going over the top in their celebration of the Lord’s Supper, to the point that some with means were drunk and gorged while others who were poor went thirsty and hungry. Paul had to explain that they were failing to “discern the Lord’s body.” That is, they didn’t see that the poor among them were equally part of the “one” body of Christ. Not seeing their oneness, they broke into cliques according to class. They were supposed to come together in a potluck that ensured everyone had a glass or two of wine and plenty to eat, which would have honored their essential oneness.

While the Corinthians went to excess, which was a hangover from their past in that culture, they had the basic idea right. Where God is concerned, celebration is the name of the game. If you don’t believe it, just look at the vast diversity of nature. The countless life forms, with their many different ways of expressing themselves, are a celebration of abundance on a grand scale. No prudishness, no false humility, no holding back here.

Now, take a peek inside your average church, as people receive the cup and the bread —or, the more paltry and less celebratory versions, less we be imagined to be having a good time as God does, grape juice and a wafer. What do you see on people’s faces and in their demeanor? A party spirit? Conviviality? Nothing of the sort.

What you see is a ritualizing of the pain-body. People who feel bad about themselves, apologetic, unworthy. Just the opposite of Jesus and how he wanted people to feel.

Religion the world over has from time immemorial wallowed in the pain-body. Then, as it’s other face, seeks to comfort this pain-body—which is why so many go to church, temple, mosque, and so forth because they find it comforting. You would, if your religion all but drowned you in misery, then finally pulled your head out if it to let you gasp for a breath so that you don’t actually die in your misery, just live in.

There’s a monk in England in his mid 90s now, Sebastian Moore, who has for a dozen years drunk deeply of Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now. He has even written extensively about Eckhart’s work in his own more recent books. He coined his own term for the pain-body: he calls it antibliss.

This “antibliss” has the characteristic of a force within us that insistently drags us toward the negative, the restrictive, the apologetic, the hateful, the miserable. It takes the shape of a huge resistance to the enjoyment of life.

Not just a resistance to our own enjoyment of life, mind you, but a “busybodying” antipathy to anyone else enjoying life in a way we deem “immoral.” It’s what drives the so-called Moral Majority—all the people who want to impose their standards on others, and do so with the force of law if they can possibly swing it.

It’s uncanny how, in the parable Jesus told of the prodigal son, the father never attempted to prevent his son from plunging into a life of degradation. He not only let him, but blessed him on his way by giving him his inheritance. When the son returned, bruised and broken, not a word of “I told you so” was heard.

Yet what is much of religion characterized as by those who aren’t religious? A single word sums it up, “against.” That’s the hallmark of the pain-body, antibliss, or what Michael Brown in The Presence Process refers to as our unresolved “emotional charge.”

It’s what drives us to be so negative about ourselves, and hence to have created a world that for billions is pure hell instead of a heaven on earth.

Sebastian Moore writes in one of his earliest books, “O yes, we’ve heard of the folly of the cross, but this has generally been taken simply as a rather dramatic statement that ‘God’s ways are not our ways’. But God’s ways, in that statement, remain God’s ways: to appreciate that they are not our ways we have only to draw on the great blank cheque of God’s mysteriousness. We have not learned from the cross of an earthly, human way that is ‘not our way’. We have not felt the contradiction in the flesh.”

Sebastian is talking about our religious ways, our moral ways, our supposedly upstanding ways as “good” people, church people, attendees at synagogue or temple, those who meditate, and so on. The very things we think are God’s ways aren’t.

Hence he goes on to say, “Sin is horrified by the crucifixion. And this is not to be understood in terms of a jovial medieval mystery plan in which sin, personified, horned and tailed, cringes before the crucified. It means

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that it is the sin in us, the oldness in us, the respectability of us, the moral tidiness of us, that is shocked by God’s statement, God’s tearing down of all that we erect to honour him and keep ourselves in order.”

I said earlier that the stupidity of the pain-body causes us to miss the whole point of the bread and wine—to get it dead wrong. As Sebastian clarifies, “Thus the whole point is missed: that the crucifixion of God’s Son, the abolition of the sacral, nay its sending-up, the tearing away of all that makes us good, puts rudely before our eyes, and not in some remote divine abyss, a world beyond good and evil.”

Before the eyes of countless millions, if not a billion or more, week after week the bread and wine are hijacked by the pain-body, rendered no longer a symbol of celebrating life in joyous community but a means of feeling bad about ourselves. Whereas the cross— the broken body and shed blood—is a symbol of the pain we inflict on ourselves and each other every day in our sad world as a result of our antibliss, we worship the downin-the-mouth, critical, guilty sense of ourselves that the pain-body inflicts on us, as if this were what God wants from us.

Again, Sebastian hits the nail on the head: “What does the cross show us? It shows us life. Life at an intensity and of an abundance that we cannot bear. It reveals our best efforts to be sin…: He adds, “Look, it’s terribly simple and clear really. God tore off all the wrappings when his Son was nailed up for us, all the wrappings, all the fuss, all the things we aren’t supposed to touch, all the rigmarole worked out by priests and people.”

So it is that much of religion ends up “making of our muddled guilt feelings a courtetiquette for God’s service. The growing child is busy building the great wall of partition between being good and being alive, and the priests consecrate it for him.” (Excerpted from No Exit, which is unfortunately no longer in print.)

In other words, in the Lord’s Supper, Communion, Eucharist, the Mass—whatever you prefer to call it—the pain-body gets ritualized, made to look sacred; a “humble, even “godly” way to feel about yourself. Antibliss reigns, and the exuberance with which Jesus lived life goes out the window.

Indeed, so complete has the hijacking of the bread and wine been that the world over, Jesus is seen as the precisely opposite of who he really was—a person we have conjured up out of our own self-hating antibliss.

A London newspaper once said, “If Christians feel so much joy, they should tell their faces about it.” But the truth is, few live a life of bliss; they wallow in antibliss, evidence of which is the fact they are always pleading for God to intervene, help them, change them. They simply aren’t happy with who they are—with the person God made them to be.

If you want to shed your antibliss, several Namaste Publishing books are designed to

help you do just that. There’s Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now and A New Earth. And there’s my Your Forgotten Self Mirrored in Jesus the Christ.

I would couple these with my audibook Lessons in Loving—A Journey into the Heart. It’s all about learning to accept yourself, love yourself, be in bliss with yourself—which spills over into all your relationships, totally transforming your life. It’s a powerful antidote to antibliss!

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Namaste Publishing, Inc. PO Box 62084 Vancouver, British Columbia Canada V6J 4A3 www.namastepublishing.com