Tales: Are You a Donut Too?

Have you ever thought of yourself as a donut? Hmmm, not really...though there have been times when I wanted to eat enough of them to possibly become one myself. Becoming a donut, just for a little while, can be instructive, as crazy as it may sound.

Here's how it works: A donut is a mix of elements that generally takes one of a few different, but similar forms. It comes into this structural being through a difficult transformational process. In most cases, it gets fried. Constituted of fairly predictable ingredients, surrounded by The Universe, it features a small space in it's middle that contains another little piece of The Universe. A hole. Nothing (or "emptiness," the Buddhists may say), surrounded by more donut.

The ingredients can work delightfully well together, or they can become a bit unpleasant. So the effect can be at times utterly delicious, and at other times a little too much. Laboring the metaphor? Well, bear with me for a moment...maybe a visual will put it over:

If you look at the diagram above, you'll see how we're a bit like donuts ourselves. Our outsides, where the glazing is, is our physical interface to the world – our sensory selves. Sticky and delicious. Sticky and unpleasant (collecting stuff). Everything we feel and sense: hot, cold, pleasure, pain; arising unexpected waves of intense sensation, torporous states of inexplicable numbness; bitter and sweet; an erupting giggle, or a fit of uncontrollable sobbing; some coming from without, some coming from within.

Our sensory selves are our human covering. Our senses. The feelings that arise and dissolve; the physical joys of being human, and the source of our unwanted pains. It's very seductive, even addicting at times, all of it. It can also all be rather relentlessly brutal as well, on occasion. But by themselves, these sensations and reactions are not completely who we are.

The inner ingredients of our personal donut consist, in part, of thoughts, like who we think we are and how we see ourselves in relation to the surrounding Universe. What I look like. What I do. How much money I have. Whether I'm a "success" or a "failure." Whether I'm happy or not. "T'is the stuff dreams are made of," because an awful lot of it just simply isn't real. It only seems that way to us, maybe not even to anyone else.

It's hard to be objective about this part of ourselves, even though this is the Ego part that tends to make us feel so separate and unique; and every single one of us is unique, despite the truth that our donut is made from the exact same ingredients as everyone else, arranged in slightly different ways, and is always changing. Sure, we're unique – all in the very same way. Our Egos make it hard to see how alike we are.

If we identify ourselves with this "separate," ever-changing, often imaginary self-portrait, filled with inaccurate judgments and comparisons about ourselves and others, the result can be painfully over-indulgent, and lead to tremendous discomfort –"dis-ease."

Did you know that the rich, handsome, successful actor Cary Grant was really a donut? He was heard talking to someone, confessing his profound insecurities, and when the man said, "you don't have anything to worry about, you're Cary Grant!" The actor replied, "I wish I were."

"To identify consciousness with that which merely reflects consciousness – this is egoism."

Patanjali, Yoga Sutras, II. 6.

Our Ego keeps wanting us to somehow control The Universe, not to just be a part of it, and in doing so, demands the constant judgments, inventories, and evaluations that further separate and disconnect us from that truth that lies right in our very center, in that eternally grace-filled and easy space that also surrounds us – our true birthright.

In the diagram, I've made that "hole" in our middle heart-shaped because that's where The Universe, Grace, "God" lives in us, and how it is connected to us. That's who we really are.

Since that's where our Universal Consciousness, our "God Consciousness" lives, when we can unify that true space within with that unifying space that's all around us, we'll become both "hole," and whole. Our donut, and all the misperceptions of "who we really are supposed to be" begin to dissolve, and life becomes much easier and more comfortable as we become the Grace that we're truly meant to live within.

Besides, we don't really want to be a donut...maybe just the "whole" in the middle.

Thanks for the inspiration to Eric Jiaju Lee.

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 24: The Western Ridge, JayBird, and the Cuyamaca Run

It was a morning like a lot of other San Diego mornings, when I first met Jay on the canyon ridge that was the western border of my hunting territory. Sunny. A little cool. A morning dove cooing that I "allowed to live," playing God like hunters do. It wasn't hot enough to start to simmer yet, for the dust to rise, or for the grasshoppers to set into their endless buzzing.

I'd gone a little farther out that way west, further than usual, but still it was turf I regarded as mine, so when I saw some strange big kid likewise carrying a rifle, it raised my hackles a little. Some poacher, no doubt. Then I guess I saw something I recognized. I knew there must've been some interior purpose weaving those oxide red trails together as we sized each other from a ways off – we were both doing the same thing in the same place together, both of us alone. I rightly guessed my west slightly overlapped his east, the ridge having been, up to that point, our natural divider.

We started walking together, about fifteen or twenty feet apart, like hunters do, through the sumac and black sage, the slender wild oat would've flecked our socks with foxtails, if we'd either of us had worn any. We traded shots, and impressed each another with the similarity of our styles; and with very little said we discovered how much alike we were.

Each of us had come from houses that were hard on the inside, and each of us were the youngest child – but that was enough of that. As kids, we sublimated that turmoil in our lives with much greater economy than we muster as adults. Our canyon stoicism balanced and calmed the subtle sense of injustice we held under—inculcated by irresponsible adults—and inspired our joint belief that there had to be a right way of doing things. In the canyon that morning we silently agreed there was, and we would bring it back with us, into the rest of our waking world.

It was in those kind of calculated approaches where we really met point for point, right down the line, planning along the same logic, or improvising with uncanny coincidence at every turn, meeting up in the same unusual places with a kind of precise tribal karma, like reunited platoon-mates on a "need-to-know" mission. The Mexican excursions, double-dates, crashing parties, a psychogenic exploration of Mount Cuyamaca – all the events unfurled as though planned in a slightly different dimension. One where we knew how to get away with everything.

By no design of our own, we ended up working together in that crazy little ski-shop across the street from one of San Diego's last neon-façade drive-ins, down on Sports Arena Boulevard. We connived, and conspired, and ate all the good jerky, and sold a lot of skiing stuff. Why, he was even dating the first girl I'd ever fought over, at age five, in the sandbox at Kindergarten – the beautiful Marylou, all grown up.

On that particular Cuyamaca day I mentioned the sun was sky-high and raging, and as we reached that state ourselves, Jay suddenly dropped everything and took off running full-speed down the side of the mountain, bounding hell-bent through the sumac, over the saltbrush, yucca, and fountain grass, boulder-to-boulder at a flat downhill dead-run. I lost my shirt following, and by the time I'd recovered it and wheeled away back down the mountain his trail was only a light luminescent whisper, a barely perceivable turbulence in the ether, but still easy for me to follow. Like in our lives, despite all the options, neither of us could have found any other path.

The trail ended in the shade of a weathered fir tree, where a young buck had lost his antlers. Jay stood there holding them, panting, his mouth open huge, twice the size of normal, his arms, much longer than they should have been. He'd truly reverted to a Paleolithic state, covered only with dense hair in place of his clothes. At that same moment, he told me later, I'd become "a reptile"– kind of a snapping desert tortoise-man. You could say psychogenic substances are funny that way. Very elemental.

Like it was always to be for the both of us, we had to go to those extremes to lose ourselves from the world of structure, and to find ourselves, our authentic selves, our true selves – even for just a few moments there in the wilderness.

...and there never seemed to be any consequences until we each ran long and hard enough to finally catch up to.

Years later, the paths would unravel, spin off, and lead us each with the same urgency in very different directions; but in that canyon dimension where our spirits met [and still inhabit], the morning sun stays low out on that western ridge. A little further out that way west, or east, than usual.

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other"

doesn't make any sense.

Rumi

Tales: The (Spiritual) Three Musketeers

Kindness, Tolerance, and Acceptance are kind of like the Three Musketeers of spiritual protection. Don't ask me which one's Porthos or Athos or Aramis, but suffice to say, you are probably D'Artagnan in that mix (as you'd like to join their crew). There is no assault by any evil Robespierre that these three can't out-maneuver and overcome. There's no army of worries or fears that together (with you joining in), they can't defeat.

"My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness."

The Dalai Lama

Kindness is probably the most readily accessible and the easiest to summon up, since we all know we're capable of it spontaneously. As an action, it's the most actively proactive because we can always simply use it all the time. When we're as kind as we can possibly be to everyone we meet, without being at all patronizing, we energize our lives and the lives we touch with a positivity that's absolutely transformative. Kindness flows into people and situations like a calming, lubricating emollient – yet just below that smooth surface it packs a real punch - the underlying positive power to support a soul or a situation with unshakeable solidity. Just ask the Mahatma, as kindness is the proactive element of the Hindu concept of ahimsa (absolute nonviolence) that he based his revolution of human consciousness on.

Try it, apply it, give it a test-drive for at least a couple of days, and watch the way it changes your life – dramatically improving it so much that you never would have believed it could be so easy...and fun. You'll discover that there's a secret world, a conspiracy of kindly like-mindedness constantly at work in the world, right under your nose.

Next is Tolerance, and tolerance is simply identification. The destruction of separateness. Tolerance is compassion and forgiveness, neatly wrapped into one.

If you just give it a little thought, you can easily see how most of our difficulties, personally and culturally, are self created, coming about as the result of feeling that we're separate and somehow special or different from everyone else, when naturally nothing could be further from the truth. To paraphrase what I believe is the single wisest thing Ronald Reagan ever said: If the Earth were under attack by aliens from another planet, how long do you think it would take us to get over all our differences?

That's easy to answer, don't you agree? Every uncomfortable difference would disappear almost immediately, as we would unite to protect our beautiful home. When we look at the Earth and all it's inhabitants in that context, we see the foolishness in considering ourselves different from one another at all. Everyone is literally in (or on) the same blue boat, going about the exact same business of being, with the same thoughts, fears, and joys determined by our slightly different sensory identifications and experiences.

And unfortunately our planet is under attack right now by an inhuman invader called Fear – the sick army of the collective Ego that takes the form of elitism, exploitation, greed, and prejudice. As is often pointed out, it's the result of humans doing, not of humans being.

"Tolerance is giving to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself."

Robert G. Ingersoll

Lastly, Acceptance is the toughest to come by, often seeming to make the least sense in light of the basic injustices of Life. And it's true – some things just aren't fair or right, but nonetheless they still simply are. So Acceptance requires a sort of vigilance, of continuously turning it over. Simply put, it's open-heartedness, just allowing life to be as it is, as it always will be, and keeping on the lookout for what is inspired by Love, and what isn't. 

In that sense, there's never anything attacking us personally – just "Life on Life's terms," and the ongoing challenge to find the Love constantly flowing around and through us. The Love that lays just beneath the noisy surface artifice of ego and unconscious self-centeredness. Acceptance is a kind of surrender – as a strategy. Joining up with the energy and power of that underlying Love. Joining the winning side. Acceptance is essential in redefining "success" as a practical, and grace-filled state of being.

So there's Kindness,Tolerance, Acceptance, and you. And all together, there is just is no problem in Life that we can't  resolve. With all that in mind, what was the battle-cry of the Musketeers?  Oh yeah...

"All for one, and one for all!"



Read about concepts like these and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore!

What's An Animation Designer to Do?

...with very little time, very little money, and a request for a "New Yorker Magazine" look with limited color, and a nice lightly "boiling" line. First off, we needed some quick characters (a lead, and 5 or 6 others) that we could follow through history from caveman to philosopher to peacenik to conferee...

Too bad it wasn't "her"story...

........................................................................don't forget the kids!

the backgrounds

There's always a bunch of odds and ends and special shots to figure out...

...............................................to the amphitheater in ancient Greece

....................the "Peace Rally" background (here's to Peace Rallies!)

We had a request for a "limited color look," which is a gift on a tight schedule and budget...

.......................and of course, the viewer's site interface invitation.

And right up to the present day, it all worked out very well...and fast...and not expensive. Thanks to Will at Homebaked Films.

Congratulations on Our Rainbow Connection!

......................a rainbow in Word World must always be legible!

The singular purpose of Life is to transcend (but not abandon) our senses, and to live and think on the level of spirit; then we gain the self-awareness to recognize and remove the obstacles between ourselves and Love.

Congratulations! to all our brothers and sisters who have finally won their battles to make it legal for same-sex couples to get married. It's been a long time coming, and I suspect it's an issue of simple compassion that has been around for a much longer time than we think. We've always all had these little differences, it just depends on the consciousness we use to notice them.

Extending the rights of marriage to gays, lesbians, and transgendered people, as it has historically been to differing religions and races, is literally a real "no-brainer" – but it's always been an issue with those people whose thinking is dictated by fear. Folks who sing the praises of personal freedom, yet insist on playing God by denying the simplest of human unions to others whose little differences aren't identical to their own. In other words, what those people have always needed is less brain, more heart.

Nonetheless, this small breakthrough is still more evidence for the expansion of compassionate consciousness into the world – the spiritual growth of our earth-bound collective – that indicates the (albeit stubborn) relinquishment of that fearful minority's harsh judgement to the over-arching power of Love and shared enlightened consciousness.

It has always been those zealous dogmatists, forever seeking compensatory control and self-enhancement, who've led the way into that particular darkness – blindly following the delusional intelligence that in our past has been responsible for such ingeniously misguided evangelical inventions as thumb-screws, "The Iron Maiden," and the Rack, as well as the bans on gay and interracial marriage. God Bless Them. They're helping us identify with how difficult it can be to accept our differences. We have to show gentle tolerance, and try to be an example of how it really works.

Shall we toss out those resultant stigmas as we throw out their dogmas as well? None of our earthly brothers and sisters need bear any brand of separation – nothing that marks them as being anything other than "Children of God" and the expression of shared humanity—of Love—that we all are actually here to learn to be. That's our ticket to real freedom.

Like it or not (and I do), even with the most stubbornly prideful, egoically deluded of us, our inner and outer obstacle-walls to Love come tumbling down, and what's simply humane, just, and divinely blessed inevitably overcomes even the staunchest advocates of self-hatred. It's a spiritual evolution that we're taking part in, and evolution can't reverse itself unless a species is extinguished (which might seem like an option at this particular point), an outcome that's very unlikely in light of our growing enlightenment.

What's more likely is that we are learning to Love each other – differences and all – and are inevitably overcoming the petty greed and intolerance that threatens us, and this beautiful Earth, as we know it.

"Love thy neighbor as thyself."

Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:39

For the lucky, ever-increasing number of us for whom that Christian dictum has always been a simple function of karma (likewise a "no-brainer"), that beatitudinal expression has always worked in both of the directions that it was intended to. Outward, and inward, which is where it all really starts—with ourselves. Treating our fellow human beings well is an easy enough principle to understand, but how about loving Thyself with the same kind of unconditional compassion?

As we are all essentially the same player in on this stage, judging our brothers and sisters, and their choices and expressions in Life, is always simply a form of unnecessarily harsh self-punishment. Now it can be released at the same time as our stridently illogical and intolerant  traditional "Laws of Nature" deconstruct themselves, revealed and overturned by compassionate consciousness. Only then can intuitive intelligence and reason be freed up, and allowed to demonstrate where our boundaries really need to be. Where boundaries make sense for everyone – boundaries against needless destruction and gross inequality. Boundaries like those defining the need to save all the life of our precious Earth.

What do you say we finally let ourselves off the hook (along with all the rest of God's creatures), and instead of identifying ourselves with life's painful obstacles to happiness and fulfillment, finally accept our true potential as channels and stewards of the Divine Spirit of Love?

"Would it be possible for you to hate your brother if you were like him? Could you attack him if you realize your journey with him, to a goal that is the same?"

A Course in Miracles, 24.I.6

Read about this and much more in the new book: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor is due out early 2018, from Llewellyn Worldwide can be pre-ordered online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available everywhere – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!

Tales: Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! Finding Your "Right" Brain.

......................................you see, meditation is not boring!

It's easy to see how someone might think that sitting in meditation would be a terribly boring thing to do, sitting there, doing nothing. Trying to think of nothing. Trying to think of not thinking. Of course, that thought (like most of them) couldn't be farther from the truth.

When we just sit at first and try not to think, we naturally fail, and so we start thinking of all sorts of things. Everything comes up. Everything. Like: What your father said to you twenty-five years ago. The money your Ex still owes you. That guy who was on Oprah. When will the landlord finally fix that leak upstairs? Things in the Mid East will never get better. Is there an asteroid heading directly for Earth? What are we having for breakfast?
 

That's one of the really great things about just sitting in meditation, thinking about nothing is an endlessly interesting and entertaining thought show, and we have the best seat in the house.

All these different crazy kinds of thoughts occur in a serial fashion, that is, one after the other after the other. One leads haphazardly to the next, sometimes connected by the barest thread that only makes sense right at the moment it connects. A few more turns of the wheel down that road, and you can't even remember how you got there, or why. Because there is no why.

How you got there is simply caused by the incessantly demanding nature of your "thinking organ," your brain, which like some kind of wild, prehistoric shark, insists on relentless movement, the continuous exercise of thought, that overlying process that we often confuse for ourselves. Descartes was a little off on that one, "I think, therefore I am." We are, whether we think – or not.

Thought requires consciousness; Consciousness does not require thought.

"Serial" thought, the kind most of us often find ourselves and our identities tied to, is an apparent function of our Left Brain, the left hemisphere of our thinking organ, which is our serial processor. It's job is to process, process, process in that con-tinuous shark-like motion, joining one thing to the next, relating each significant fact (or not so significant lie) to another. Often, the best we can manage is to discipline our mind to think things that we want to think about. Like to focus our thinking on problems that need solving, say building a bridge, creating a Unified Theory of Everything, or figuring out how to get the TV remote to work. As long as it's something we want to think about – hopefully something productive, or creative, or at least painless.

The simplest form of this discipline is the common self-request, I don't even want to think about it.

When we sit, all we're really trying to do at first is to witness this serial inner monologue, try to wear it down a bit, until it gives in. Or best of all, to side-step it completely. That's the best way to put it, because it describes what the (very appropriately named) Right Side of our brains are doing while all that exhausting thinking is going on. It's functioning concurrently as a parallel processor, connecting everything to everything, simultaneously. Processing our entire sensory experience holistically, with a kind of quantum perception, which for the most part appreciates Life. It's the part of our brain power that gets short shrift because of the sequentially demanding nature of contemporary life, but you're using it every time you find love, beauty, melody, serenity, and joy.

As we sit longer, we try to engage our Right Brain experience, and to live in it for as long as possible. When, in this state, we're collecting beauty, creative energy, and Love in our hearts, suddenly, your serial thoughts no longer have all that urgency. Life can be experienced in a more realistic way when we are in this way less realistic, because we recognize that the moment is always fine, as it is, not full of demanding or threatening "realities." Nothing really needs to happen right at the moment, unless the doorbell rings, your butt is getting wet, or the kitchen is on fire.

This escape from serial thinking, to the Right Side of our brain is a much more pleasant state of affairs, when we can experience a presence for life that's only possible when we give the crazy person in our heads the day off.

In the popular myths of religion, this is the same experience that was reached by Buddha, when Mara the Tempter assaulted him with all the allures and fears of the world (see illust. above); or by Jesus, when he was in the wilderness, and Satan offered to make him the King of Everything.

Neither of them even wanted to think about it.

"What have you gained from meditation?"

"Nothing at all."

"Then what good is it?"

"Let me tell you what I lost through meditation: sickness, anger, depression, insecurity, the burden of old age, the fear of death. That is the good of meditation, which leads to nirvana."

The Buddha

Visit other postings about meditation. And check this talk by Jill Bolte Taylor!


Read about concepts like these and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore! 

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 23: The Saturday Matineé

A full-on hellacious meleé is what you could call it, and you'd be right.

That would be a very fair description. There would be about a thousand screaming kids, 98% of them boys from the ages of six to twelve, packed into the indescribable moderneity of the old State Theater on El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego, somewhere back around 1962. It was like that every Saturday, at the weekly triple-feature matineé. All the kids' moms dropped them off, like mine did, watched for us to purchase our tickets – thirty-five cents back then – waited for us to go in, and then rumbled off in their classic Chevys, Fords, and Plymouths, that weren't even classics back then. Every mom had one, and apparently, some place to go in it.

I would stop at the snack bar and get a red-striped tagboard box of popcorn for fifteen cents, and a Nesbitt's orange for a quarter. For seventy-five cents, my mom could drop me at the theater for almost six hours. A teenaged "usher" (often with a challenged complexion), wearing a very official dark blue, gold-trimmed uniform would push the lobby doors open into the main theater, and reveal the utter insanity within. In those days, they took you to the seat they chose for you, pointing it out with their flashlight, but once they chased some other kid back up the aisle, you got up and moved to where you really wanted to sit. I liked to sit slightly up from the middle, down the right-hand aisle.

If you looked past the teeming kid mass – the flailing arms, kids standing on the seats, kids crying for their moms, kids running full speed down the aisles pursued by the harried teen ushers – you'd behold the intense decorative splendor of the stately State Theater interior, whose tropical Botticellian paisley flourishes fluoresced slightly when the lights went down.

They were the strangest mass baby-sitting spectacles ever, those Saturday matineés, made possible by Warner Brothers cartoons and Italian sword and sandal spectaculars, stacked up in technicolor trinities like: The Thief of Baghdad, with Steve Reeves; Duel of the Titans, with Reeves and Gordon Scott; and Mole Men Versus The Son of Hercules, with Mark Forest. Or: Son of Spartacus, with Steve Reeves; Son of Hercules, with Ed Fury; and the classic Hercules Unchained, with Steve Reeves and the beautiful Sylva Koscina.

The show started up with an animated snack bar bumper, and a card offering the "smoking and crying baby booth in the rear," just before the golden Warner Brothers frame bounced the screen into life, and the kid-mob, at least for a little while, calmed down to watch the cartoons. About half way through the muscleman marathon, the kids would get restless and started taking the place apart at the seams, starting with the inevitable winging of the flattened popcorn boxes with their wickedly unpredictable trajectories, and ending up in an all-out pandemonium that necessitated the turning on of the house lights and the theater manager walking up on the stage to sternly announce: Any unruly or destructive children would be ejected from the theater. The kids could care less, but everyone quieted down so the lights could go back off, the movies could start back up, and the insanity could build again to another fine state of perfectly frenzied hellaciousness, launching the whole cycle all over again.

The last two or three hours were always ragged like that, the over-taxed theater staff shouldering the Herculean task of containing a thousand agitated boy-children, all ready to break their slave's chains, and slay the Minotaur. I didn't take part in the antics much, I was too deeply immersed in the incongruously lip-synched world of quasi-myth, rife with nascent formative sexual stereotypes, and the enhanced and simplified life onscreen, complete with it's clear and predictable moral resolutions. Why wasn't my life more like that? It confused me, I'm sure (like everything did), and I just wanted to be Steve Reeves in my jaunty dress-toga, there by the statuary-lined reflecting pool, saying my sad, heroic goodbye to the beautiful Sylva Koscina. Why would I ever leave her? Oh yes...slaying the minotaur always took priority – in place of any real, committed relationship...it's not easy being a hero.

The show let out late in the still heat of the afternoon, and all the moms idled up in their massive Impala or Fairlane or Country Squire wagons to collect their kids as they poured out onto the too-hot, too-bright sidewalk. I walked myself the five or six blocks over to Adams Avenue, to my Grandma Minnie's apartment, the little place of her own my Dad had set her up in. She was worried there, waiting for me to show up, questioning her daughter's judgement – a poor little boy walking all that ways alone.

She made me "supper," usually some canned corn beef hash, or succotash and fried baloney, a piece of white bread warmed in the bacon grease she kept in a coffee can by the stove. I pretended to eat, or hid it when she wasn't looking, waiting for the reward at the end of the sad little pioneer-style meal, and she never failed me. After I'd pushed the meager little meal around my plate long enough, she'd make me a piece of bread with her famous peach and pear jam on it — still the best jam I've ever eaten.

Mom always showed up a little later than she was supposed to (I never knew from where), picked me up and asked how the movie was. We drove home, mostly quiet, and I just wondered, where is my chariot...and where, oh where is my Sylva Koscina right now?

Tales: of Passion, Light & Dark

....................................................................................Rafael

You'll often hear it said that you must have passion for the important things in your life, and this is true of course, but it depends on what kind of passion. Passion energizes a state of action that can lift us to a higher plane of conscious being, or one that can raise our lowest expressions to a level of destructive dominance. It's a kind of moving emotional fulcrum that can make great things possible, but, when shifted, can also create a terrible self-serving momentum. This second state of passion is re-sponsible for what Christians call "sin," what Buddhists call "selfish cravings," what a 12-Stepper calls "instincts run amok," and what is often in a court of law referred to as "crimes of passion."

On the personal and world stages, this kind of passion drives so much of all the craziness around us that you could almost call it "life," or "history." It's the kind of passion that's often driving the goal of "doing what's right for the common good,"  but for whose common good? If there are winners and losers, it's probably not the kind of passion that invokes the interests of love and reason, but a passion that's fueled by ego-inspired ambition and fear. There are easy ways to tell the difference: How do others really honestly feel about it? And, what remains in the aftermath?

There is Love, and there is Hate. There's day and night, and "good" and "bad" - each burns as hot, each is equivalent to the other. Each is part of what is, so it needs to find a balance. The evidence of a passion that entails com-passion (as in com-municate, com-munity, or .com), shows the rewards that Love brings: equality, tolerance, abundance, responsibility, balance. The evidence of passion driven by ambition and fear is all around us, justified by the dictum "as long as you have passion for what you're doing." No one is surprised that madmen are quite passionate, and at the heighth of passion, any one of us is capable of throwing their life, and the lives of others, horribly out of balance. Collectively, it has happened to the world.

It's at that very personal level, when we're really honest about our motivations, that we can experience the real potential and effects of our passions. Is it just about what I want? How will it effect others? If the answer supports and encourages others, and celebrates a shared accomplishment of sorts, then it's a passion that's com-passion. If not, the momentum may take you into some dangerous ego territory, and make it difficult to get back.

Not to pick on Picasso, but...he was a very passionate guy, full of passion for his art and the women in his life. You could call that a good thing, if it's only the production of his art that matters, but a spirtually growing person knows that it often isn't what one is most famous for that's really most important in their lives. So what did he leave in his aftermath? Thousands of ephemeric artworks, many truly beautiful, many that are contested, and absurdly over-valued; a memorable chain of painfully destructive relationships, created by passionate self-centeredness; a history of emotional distance from his children; an obsessive need to project his virility and machismo.

I only invoke Picasso as an example of the "success" of passion as a justification for "passionate inspiration." I love a lot of his work (Moulin de la Galette, Portrait of Stravinsky), but truthfully (in my opinion) much of it is a redundant effort to capture an aesthetic that can be seen in more successful forms everyday, on the walls of any pre-school.

Now that's a higher plane of passion!

"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

Picasso

..................anonymous pre-schooler

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Codename: Kids Next Door, From the Sooper Obscure Files: Rainbow Monkeys!

Over the six seasons of Codename: Kids Next Door, I designed a lot of Rainbow Monkeys, almost enough to create a real toy line...but it would be a real strange toy line! Many of the variations called for old, odd, or esoteric RBMs. So, here's a collection of elderly RBMS for the true KND fans out there!

Finding Your Comfortable Middle – and Not Losing It

Doing a lot of juggling?

    In just about every spiritual practice ever known, there comes a time when one needs to develop a kind of ideal focus or contact with a guiding Higher Power; whether it's Love, or Nature, The Universe, or The Divine Feminine – our personal understanding of God, simply put. It's generally a quiet time, a meditative time...but wouldn't it be nice if it were available to us anytime, as an easy tool for day-to-day life on-the-go? Here are some ways we might make it work without any sage-burning "spiritual" hub-bub—not that there's anything wrong with that, just that there isn't always the time...or the sage.

Focus implies a center – a place of concentration right in the middle of our daily agitations; a safe place for our thoughts to return to in those moments of temporary turmoil, especially when life is messing with our sense of well-being. Having that place, that grounding center available can free us from those stressful conditions of judgement, comparison, and pressure that make us feel trapped sometimes. That discomfort can get us stuck in ourselves, having a device that easily centers us in our higher self can instantly free us up.

In Buddhism it's called "The Middle Path," and re-tooled for the demands of our culture it's an approach to life that lives inbetween a self-judgmental path to "perfection"– whose harshness makes real humility impossible, and an over-justified "self-worship" of sorts – whose entitled materialism is too elevated for our own good. In other words, either we are too hard on ourselves and everyone else; or we're self-centeredly "always right," know more than the other guy, and deserve better. Both ends of that scale: "I never get it right" and "I'm the only one who got it right," are outposts of the Ego, and each home to their own kinds of self-centeredness. Neither are actually where most of us live, most of the time.

There's a good way to play those ends against each other, and find a livable center to focus on where we're not constantly seeking redemption, or searching for some unobtainable ideal. A focus that's in a more comfortable, convenient location for most of us because it just requires us to look at one of our favorite central topics, ourselves:

We've all got our flaws, our little defects, and as we move along through life, like it or not, they become more and more obvious. They're not all that harmful, unless they harm others or prevent us from being all that we can really be. I can be stingy. I like to be right all the time. Those are a couple of mine, I'm afraid – but at least I'm aware of them, and that's where this trick has to start, there's the point where you can pick up this handy "centering tool:"

When we find ourselves in a situation where we want to react – which means we're likely to act out on one of our personality flaws like "I'm not going to pay that much" or "This guy doesn't know what he's talking about" – listen to the bell ring! See the red flag! Here's your chance to practice restraint, and find your center ground. You have a choice right at that moment to "act out" or not – but don't do it. Instead, do the old "count to three," and say: Thanks very much, I'm not going there right now. 

 That takes care of the low end, now for the high side – create an ideal goal, like what would the ideal Dad do right now? Or how would Mahatma Gandhi treat this guy? Set the bar high enough so that just reaching for it will pull you out of your funky tendencies (The Funky Tendencies - I loved their first album).

If you're anything like me, you'll find yourself focused in the moment, where you inevitably have a chance to stumble across a little Compassion...and bingo! – there's your center. Then if you set your goal high up around unconditional Love, forgiveness, and service to others – you know, really high – then even when you don't quite reach it, you and everyone around you will be much better off anyways. Right in there you can find an easy grounded center that you can make your new default.

Good Karma isn't the result of a single moment, it's the accumulation of a lot of balanced, easy moments, like you get each time you default yourself to restraint and Compassion. Just like that, you'll see that "ideal place" is found gracefully and gratefully right in the middle of your self – right around the area of your heart. 

 You may never have thought that Good Karma was really a centering song by The Funky Tendencies...

"As long as I am this or that, or have this or that, I am not all things and I have not all things...[when you] neither are nor have either this or that; then you are omnipresent and, being neither this nor that, are all things."

Meister Eckhart

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!