Brains

Developing mindfulness and compassion requires playing with your brain.

Conscious, intentional lives are the constant interplay of consciousness with brain (thought) and behavior (action). We all awake in adulthood to find we are working with a brain which is used to and preconditioned by our genetics and experience. In every moment, we are faced with the situations of life on a planet, crowded with humankind and complicated by the products of other brains. Our brains are more like racing speed boats without navigation systems than hi-tech ocean liners. The trick is to stay behind the wheel and keep on course.

Many people go through life impulsively, compulsively and reactively. Like players of a video game, they frantically push buttons in their brains to react to situations and people. Most are disappointed in the end by the choices they make. Few face their deaths with a sigh of satisfaction and completion. I know. I have been at hundreds of death beds.

Mastery of your own brain's triggers and patterns is a lifelong process, a practice.

Sobriety, honesty and reflection are necessary tools. Controlling and changing behavior is the first step to mastering the brain. This is the path to proactive living. Indulging impulses and compulsions is the road to disaster. Mindfulness and compassion emerge with understanding and acceptance of one's own mortal humanity.

Elements

I sometimes like to look at my own life's development in terms of the elements. When I was growing in the womb, I was like the amniotic fluid in which I resided. I was unconscious, flexible, fluid, malleable. After being born, my body gradually hardened and stiffened. From rubbery newborn, I became a dynamic and aggressive toddler.

Growing from baby to child to adolescent is a hardening process, a process of individuation and forming of more rigid boundaries. More like stone plow than water, as a young adult, I learned to fend off rejections and other assaults on my self image. I plowed a path into a work life. I honed the blade of my plow against the rocks of prejudice, materialism, class and ignorance.

It was familiar and easy to continue to harden as I approached middle age. A certain amount of financial stability made me less dependent on social supports and networks. I had a fixed idea of where my life would go as a plow in the secure, walled field of my life.

The AIDS epidemic represented a boulder far stronger than my plow. It shattered that hardened me. The resulting congregate person, pieced together initially from the old hardened me, fumbled along for a short while. No straight furrows through the intense, changing morass of the epidemic could be plowed. So, I dissolved into it, became part of the soil of the epidemic itself.

By working within the devouring beast, which was decimating my community and my own life, I gradually learned that being more like water than stone worked better for me. Working my way back to the fluidity of my pre-conscious, amniotic self has been a form of liberation. Rebirthing, perhaps.

My practice is leading me gradually to that end point at which I will concretely become like water, like air...simply water vapor, dust and dissipated electromagnetic energy. I believe that approaching that end point, awake and alive, without struggling with the elemental realities of being is perhaps the height of what is means to be human. I also believe that any person who does this will inevitably become a mindful and compassionate creature.

CEO-Plutocracy

I have used the term 'corporatocracy' to describe the current world government. Yes, world government. The world is being governed (badly) by corporations.

The Business Roundtable, for example, represents 160 US corporations through their CEOs, who as a group lobby and push around the US government at all levels. There are similar organizations and institutes in every industrialized nation. This amounts to a plutocratic group who govern through veiled bribery and campaign contributions.

The US sees its most blatant putsch by the CEO-Plutocracy to date in the $700 billion demand placed before Congress. Amazingly, Congress has said a temporary 'No', but this is temporary. This minimal show of resistance is spurred now by genuine fear that there will be a popular uprising in the voting booths this November, when a general election takes place.

The reality is this: Those in corporate power know that the planet is polluted, overpopulated and under-resourced. They will do whatever it takes to see that they and their offspring survive in the opulence to which they are accustomed and feel entitled. End of story. It's that simple, ladies and gentlemen.

Practice will become more essential for those who are not part of the CEO-Plutocracy. That is, for 90+% of the human species. To survive in a world controlled from the top is difficult. Look to stories from Victorian England for a primer. To evolve will become more and more challenging. To refrain from self-defensive or forced military violence will become nearly impossible. War will be used to keep the poor occupied, distracted and limited in numbers, as much as possible without alerting them to the real reasons for their systematic enslavement and destruction.

Practice living without aspirations to be part of the CEO-Plutocracy. It is a closed system and it is a corrupt, evil system. Live to be compassionate. Live to be whole in mind, body and spirit. Live without material obsessions or addictions. This practice will put your truth and your essence out of the reach of those who would dominate you or destroy your essential being.

Shill

Today Tony Snow died. Like his predecessor, Scott McClellan, Mr. Snow became the salesman for a corrupt fascist regime, which has waged illegal war, killed hundreds of thousands of helpless civilians for oil, spied on its own citizens to maintain control and lied daily about the nation's health and economy. I am sure these men see what they did as only a job. I am sure Nazi propagandists saw themselves the same way.

Every individual bears the responsibility for the jobs he/she performs, despite any rationalization he/she may make to the contrary to live with a troubled conscience. Life presents daily opportunities and demands to make right choices for the good of one's personal evolution and the evolution of the human species.

Do you throw that piece of paper or plastic out of your car window? Do you smoke that cigarette? Do you buy that sugar-infused coffee? Do you push your way through a line? Do you disturb your neighbors with loud and obnoxious behavior? Do you support a dictator? Do you hide your real beliefs to be liked?

The corruption of humanity occurs in small doses with minor daily decisions to do what is not the righteous thing to do. Sentimentality, peer pressure, religion, prejudice, all these factors are constant inhibitions to doing the right thing. Overcoming these habits is called practice. Practice also begins small and grows large with daily persistence.

Summer

In the 'developed' world, millions and millions of dollars are spent every Spring and Summer in attempt to prey on the insecurity of people, whom corporations view simplistically and cynically as customers. Advertising is focused on bodies and sex. Bathing suits and underwear adorn the buffed and flawless bodies of twenty-somethings everywhere you look.

This corporate self-hate industry, including diets, bogus exercise gadgets and unattainable goals for most people, makes many millions every year by inducing insecurity and offering magical solutions. Perhaps the best evidence to show the failure of capitalism as a model for human evolution is the massive number of obese and depressed people who sit and watch these advertisements over and over. Yet, obesity is rampant. Depression is rampant.

It is essential for individual human evolution to accept one's own being, including one's own body with its flaws and also its benefits. This acceptance is a first step to treating yourself with the respect and nourishment you deserve and need to advance in your life.

By embracing and accepting who you really are, you can then look to who you wish to be. This is just the beginning of a lifetime journey.

Birthright

The evolution of human consciousness has brought a new view to the relationship between parent and child. For thousands of years, children were seen as beholding to their parents (especially fathers) for being brought into human life. Children were seen as and treated as free labor and pawns of their parents to carry on their blood line, surname, and so forth. Many societies condoned infanticide and other forms of murder/brutality by parents upon their offspring.

The new consciousness, which has been fostered by the secular segments of society, against angry protest from the religiously deluded, is based on the concept that parents are responsible for their children's wellbeing and development into independent, evolving adults. More educated parents take this responsibility more seriously. They strive to provide their children with a life which will surpass their own in positive growth and experience.

Practice for those raised in the old model, the model of child as slave, entails in part declaring a birthright to respect and independence. This practice is difficult, especially if one's parents live into old age.

Claiming one's birthright to own one's own life and to be responsible for it is a major and necessary step to personal evolution.

Superstition

Religions use superstition to control their followers. A morality based on superstition is not genuine. A morality based on compassion and social responsibility is both genuine and intelligent. The lack of justice, kindness and political advancement in societies dominated by religion speaks for itself. Look, read, study and assess any religion on its merits, and I am sure you will think twice before become a devotee.

Instead, look to your heart, your conscience and your natural instincts to be open to other human beings and their experiences. Practice kindness, control of anger, and responsible behavior in social situations. Soon you will see that this way... not the way of superstition, conformity and guilt... is the way to personal evolution.

Corruption

The word, corruption, usually evokes images of a fat politician with a cigar in one hand and the other hand held out for a bribe. But corruption is much more subtle and pervasive than that image conveys. All things, on a basic physical level, are prey to corruption, due to oxidation, entropy and other phenomena. The process of evolution is a process directly opposed to corruption. Civilization is a human method of dealing with corruption on many levels. Our individual lives become corrupted physically by disease and mentally by greed, laziness and/or unhealthy dependency on people or objects. The shared lie corrupts and often leads to behaviors which hasten physical corruption as well.

Daily practices of exercise, nutrition, meditation, truthfulness, cooperation and sharing affection can aid in our attempt to ward off corruption of our lives.

Destroyers

I am not at all proud to be a human being, despite the ancient Buddhist passages which encourage believers to be thankful for being born into human existence, as some pinnacle of the Earth's biologic pyramid. Human beings have been destroying the planet like a virus since they developed the capacity to outwit prey. Long before the Nazi and Soviet thugs, human beings have followed one maniac after another who have proclaimed human superiority or human ownership of the planet. Then, of course, they go on to claim the superiority of their particular favorite kind of human. Other species have been trampled, massacred and made extinct with great abandon and a sense of majestic entitlement. In this media-dominated age, we see anthropomorphized animals in cartoons, now full length movies to indoctrinate the young. Penguins, lions, fish....they all deliver the same message. Humans are basically good and the trials of Nature are intrinsically bad. Even 'green' types are suckers for this crap.

In my world view, homo sapiens is one predatory species with no moral superiority to any other predatory species. Men kill each other. Some humans kill their young. We overpopulate when we have enough food to eat. We thrive selfishly at the expense of other species. We eat other species. The major religions contribute to this insane assertion of the superiority of humans. They go out of their way to absolve humans for being ruthless exploiters of the planet in the name of their deities, otherwise known as Imaginary Friends.

Personal human evolution entails understanding the place of the human species in planetary ecology. And, yes, that means study and intellectual discipline. If a person really studies biological and physical science to the point of comprehension, then half the road to personal enlightenment has been travelled. The philosopher or theologian who has no clue about science is simply a con man.

Deception

What is the inevitable consequence of trying to project a person you are not? Human beings are fascinated by chameleons and con men. Where is the line between putting a good face on things and downright lying? I see so much deception encouraged on television in this celebrity culture. Everything seems geared to the end, despite the unethical or immoral means. Human evolution depends on effort to improve one's reality physically, psychologically, socially. But, how can you improve your reality if your life is based on self-deception? Becoming centered, patient and based in reality is my first step to personal evolution.