Awakened

The sleepwalker passes through life with eyes fixed firmly on his past and, walking backwards through his present into his future, he allows his path to be directed by the life situations which he bumps into. The awakened looks ahead to the future with a firm footing in the moment, each moment, a slippery stone in the stream of ever changing life.

Humility

This is not an age of humility. It is an age of celebrity and self-promotion. Youtube has enabled the ad man in everyone with a digital camera or mobile phone. "Look at me." is the underlying mantra of videos of cute cat tricks and gurgling babies. There are, of course, exceptions, but Google Ads belie a certain egocentric materialism generally.

As a humanist and atheist who admits ignorance of what I cannot see or understand in The Universe, I do experience a natural humility every day. My tenuous grip on life and consciousness allows me to appreciate the vastness of The Universe. I do not live comparatively in relation to other human beings. I understand that we are all smaller than bacteria in the great Universe around us. The famous will sicken and die no more elegantly than the man sleeping under a bridge.

Admission of the smallness of my life in the great sea of life and non-life around me is liberating. My greatest possession, perhaps my only possession, is this moment. Though it is precious to me, it is fleeting and so easy to miss. I choose to share my moments with you because I feel our greatest quality as human beings is our ability to share our internal experiences of The Universe with each other. Bringing our shared awareness to life's successive moments breeds compassion and mindfulness. Each tiny light of shared consciousness, like my own, joined with millions like itself, may eventually illuminate a world darkened by selfishness, poverty and violence. This is my idea of a great vision of a better world.

Love

It is tempting to equate love with sentiment. Who doesn't enjoy infatuation and sexual titillation, once these drugs are discovered during adolescent hormonal rushes? But, I have grown to see love as behavior, as a process, as a growing entity with its own life.

I believe sustaining love is planted and tended like a tree by those who love. The seed of love can be sex, sentiment, blood relationship. The sapling of love is the early discovery that comes with time and shared experience. The tree of love is the pruned and shaped understanding and dialogue which can withstand drought and storm. The fruit of love is the sense of belonging with another who knows and accepts your deepest truth.

Love is supported by commitment. It can be accelerated by sex. It is fed by communication. It is strengthened by ongoing affection. Learning to love one person deeply and completely opens the heart and mind to loving the world. Never experiencing deep love leads to mental illness and alienation from the world.

The greatest challenge of love for some is letting it into their lives. Money, role, material success and possessions are common barriers against loving and being loved. Loving requires vulnerability and sacrifice of some boundaries and barriers. It also requires the personal confidence and self-understanding to remain a whole individual while loving another completely.

Like a healthy forest, a full life contains loves of many varieties and levels of maturity. Love can be contained within a simple interaction on the street, a sprouted seed which does not grow but has life and value. Certain relationships may remain contained by business or other boundaries. The love in these relationships can grow like an elegant dwarfed bonsai, shaped by more formal manners and behaviors. Love in other relationships takes root and grows wildly from sexual passion into an ever-changing canopy of shared experience and understanding. These tall trees of long relationships lend shade and protection to new loves, planted in our lives.

The art of loving is practiced with the mind as well as with emotion. Loving is intentional behavior. Communication os essential to developing mindful love between human beings. The communication of words and the communication of physical affection have equal power. I believe any practice for human growth entails practicing the art of loving.

Attitude

Attitude, the outward demeanor with which we face the world, shapes our world. In Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism, a Medieval Japanese Buddhism based on the teachings of the Lotus Sutra, two precepts apply. First, the law of cause and effect. Second, man and his environment are one.

The way I approach the world is the cause. The effect is the result of that approach. In Biblical terms, I reap what I sow. My approach to the world creates a personal environment of peace, antipathy, harmony, etc.. Therefore, a person lives in an environment which he is part of and shapes with his attitude. Likewise, a person and his attitude are shaped by the environment which he creates. This is a basic concept of behavioral science.

In American gay culture, "attitude" is a commonly used word. It sometimes implies an edge, a defensiveness on the verge of reactive hostility. It can also describe the dignified pride of a gay person who has affirmed and accepted his sexuality without shame or diffidence. Different attitudes, different human experiences.

Practicing an awareness of human suffering and a commitment to alleviate human suffering when it is encountered in human interactions leads to an attitude adjustment. Acceptance of human commonality in suffering and death leads to an open attitude in social situations. Aggression gives way to humility. Selfishness gives way to generosity. Attitude reveals humanist mindfulness where it exists.

Breathing

I have had to learn how to breathe. Breathing deeply and slowly has become a conscious practice for me. I spent the greater part of my life unconsciously focusing tension in my chest, gut and neck muscles. Tightened chest, tightened gut, poor posture, poor breathing. Poor breathing, poor oxygenation to brain and muscle, which leads to more tension and even worse breathing. The result is disease and dysfunction.

Learning to sense tension in your body is a very good health-promoting skill. Taking an inventory occasionally through the day is the key. While sitting in a task chair or walking to work or sitting on the subway, consider your own body's posture and attitude. Straighten the spine with chin up and shoulders back. Inhale deeply. Exhale deeply. Repeat. Feel the change in your body. It will relax. You may even feel a burst of alertness and increased energy, as your brain is oxygenated.

Whenever you can, follow this procedure throughout the day. Stretch your arms and legs. Remember to keep your chin elevated as you look at monitor screens, listen to lectures or carry on conversations. This helps to keep the posture erect with shoulders back.

This activity is a form of meditation. It brings you back within your consciousness of your own life, your own body, which is ultimately all you truly and temporarily possess in life. Mindfulness of your own state of well being or dysfunction is the first step to greater mindfulness. By staying well, you will have energy to practice compassion and generosity to others.

Discovery

When you move through life, do you feel whole? Does your sense of self move with you? Does your perception of yourself and your life change with each circumstance you encounter?

Discovering who you really are is perhaps the most valuable and satisfying activity of any life. It is not easy. The mind can be a trickster.

The current prejudice in American society is anti-judgment and anti-analysis. This makes serious investigation of who you really are more difficult. Peer pressure may encourage you to pretend to be whoever you wish to be in any moment. Peer pressure may encourage you to accept your unhealthy obesity or drinking problem. Peer pressure may dissuade you from asserting what you know to be true or just. In some ways, the Facebook society is an extension of high school, not a mature environment, which promotes serious self-discovery.

Knowing yourself requires the dedicated practice of truth-telling. And it starts in front of your mirror. This requires time, patience and courage. Along the way, you may learn self-forgiveness, self-acceptance and the joy of rebuilding yourself in each moment into the person you wish to become.

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.

Death

Death is our great commonality. The more a society flees from death and dying, the less it invests in the common good. The wealthy indulge themselves in delusions of immortality, aided by plastic surgeons and medical gurus. The poor slave away their lives for the rich under the delusion that they will live forever in their children, whose lives might be better.

We are born alone. We die alone. There is no reason to believe in any personal, conscious immortality.

Accepting mortality as the human condition can lead to an awakening. The awakened focuses on the quality of human experience in the moment and the means to improving that quality. The compassionate person, once awakened, strives to bring that quality of his/her experience to others by trying to awaken them.

Stunning surprises, terrible accidents or life-threatening diseases bring this awareness to most. The elderly often awaken a short time before they die. How sad it is to waste a life asleep only to awaken just before death. The wise person accepts his/her mortality and incorporates that acceptance in his/her relationship to the world.

Control

Being balanced, being healthy, being mindful ... all entail control of behavior by applying awareness. Control is a sharp and double-edged sword. It also must be moderated by the mindful brain. Letting go of control is sometimes more beneficial than attempting it. Learning to use control or release it mindfully and intentionally is a first step to liberation, which is a step to enlightenment.

Vision

Maintaining a personal practice of truth, compassion and mindfulness is aided by a vision of life as it could be without suffering, greed and violence. Formulating this vision is helped by focusing on alleviating your own suffering, monitoring your own greed and purging violence from your own thoughts and actions.

My own life is my best laboratory. By showing myself that I can effect change in my own actions and perceptions in the moment, I can instill hope into my life for the eventual liberation of all life from suffering. This requires an ongoing commitment in moment after moment.

The mind slides to its animal or habitual nature all too easily. Being fully awake entails guiding the mnd along a path to wellness against the resistance of habit and history in each moment of awareness. This takes practice. This is practice.

Christians

"What would Jesus do?" That was the central mantra of the Christianity in which I was raised. In fact, the utter failure of the representatives and officials of that Christianity to live by that standard drove me from that Christianity and the other mainstream Christian sects.

Similarly, I say to Buddhist practitioners, "What would Gotama do?" I tire of those who identify themselves as Buddhists or Buddhist-friendlies and live as materialistic hedonists with little or no regard for those in need around them. I bristle at those who turn Buddhism into a lucrative career path by selling it to the wealthy as a balm for their already lapsed social consciences.

Practicing mindfulness and compassion in the moment every day is not easy. The world is immersed in suffering all around us. The awakened sees the suffering and is compelled to action, right action , to ease it in whatever incremental way possible in each life situation. Jesus and Gotama, as best as I can tell, were awakened human beings. They did not set out to be demigods, used by scoundrels for political and materialistic purposes. They tried to promote a daily practice of peace and justice for all human beings.

Addiction

I am impressed by the current trend in U.S. society to accept binge drinking and public intoxication. In the urban environment, it is matter of course to see inebriated people in public in the middle of the day. On weekends, drunk young people are commonplace during the afternoons on city streets.

Thirty years ago, this would have been unacceptable public behavior, associated with sociopaths and derelicts. Not so today. What has happened?

Well, the U.S. was led for eight years by an alcoholic, who, despite claims of longterm sobriety, managed the government like an unruly drunkard. President Obama chose to resolve a serious racial incident, involving a cop and a Harvard professor, by having a beer with them. When did drinking alcohol become a panacea?

While I believe it is useless to try to control human behavior, like drinking alcohol, by stern prescriptions of sobriety, I am concerned that all the ills associated with addiction will once again blossom with the inevitable social repercussions. Domestic and random violence are among the worst of these.

Personal and social peace is dependent on the mindfulness of individuals. Alcohol/drug use is antagonistic to mindfulness. Mindfulness requires a useful, alert brain. Managing brain function cognitively is difficult enough in itself without adding external intoxicants.

The occasional medicinal use of alcohol, cannabis or other intoxicants may have some beneficial effects for some people. However, the routine, habitual use of intoxicants has no beneficial effect for any individual or society. Learning this lesson is a necessary first step for many on their path to personal growth.

Equilibrium

I'm rebooting, clocking slowly, monitor blinking. The harsh adrenaline edge of unpacking and repositioning has softened with the gradual return of deep, healing sleep. Another Monday, more like the good old Mondays past, begins with a list of to-do's.

Moving is like running. You have to persist until your pace kicks in sync with your breath. Then it's automatic, less painful. But, when you stop, you must stretch before you can walk comfortably into the rest of your day. So, today I am stretching, reminding myself to breath deeply and proceed with mindful caution.

There is so much to be learned from daily life, if you simply pay attention.

Courage

if you're always strong

you can do no wrong

if you're always rich

you can feel no hunger

if you're always safe

you can see no threat

life wrongs the many
life starves the poor

life frightens the unsafe

the powerful can defer

the wealthy can provide

the secure can protect

if you're always mindful

you can see true need

if you're always willing

you can find compassion

if you're willing to suffer

you can find true courage

Practice

I try every day to practice mindful, intentional, purposeful behaviors and thoughts, governed by an informed ethical standard. This is what I refer to as my humanist practice.

Haiku

narrow middle way
footpath parting darkest wood
forest voice beckons

Ethics

Peter Galbraith, son of a prominent American political family, has demonstrated the etiquette and importance of ethics in true democratic culture. He has been castigated for it by corrupted men in international seats of power.



The corrupt shrug at the practicality of corruption in others. This is the way of politics and the world of materialistic men without ethics and higher vision. Keeping their secrets overrides keeping their standards of ethical behavior. When exposed, the corrupt encircle each other defensively, like a pack of attacked wolves. The truthsayer is isolated, punished, expelled.

This behavior has infected all layers of civic culture and business culture in the U.S. and in the developed world. It is symptomatic of governmental and corporate reactions to overpopulation, stressed environments and stretched natural resources. Greed is a symptom of the awareness of the wealthy classes, usually well educated, to the impending environmental disasters on this planet.

Is this behavior conscious? I doubt it is as conscious as it is pervasive and infectious. Capitalism has no consciousness. Corporations have no definable consciousness. Accumulation of wealth drives capitalist corporations in the same way hunger drives a pack of wolves. However, the hunger of corporations is unmitigated. Corporations never have full bellies. They never sleep.

The practice of truthfulness in all things is a bad business model in a capitalist world. This is a crucial conflict for any person who wishes to practice mindfulness, truthfulness and compassion in his/her daily life. It is a moment-by-moment choice. Making the right choice and taking the right action in each moment over time builds practice. In my experience, living in this practice, while never easy or monetarily enriching, builds the strength and skills which also ensure living well within the realities of the world.

Practice?

What is practice? My answer to that question is this: Practice is moment-by-moment, mindful, intentional and purposeful thought and behavior, guided by an informed, personal, ethical standard, based in love, compassion and peace.

Practice is awakened living. Practice is attempting to live every moment as a whole, human, conscious, peaceful being. I could go on, but I think I have made myself clear on my ideal concept of practice.

Practice goes beyond thought or belief or intention. Believing in ethics, believing in peace, believing in truth and justice is not enough. Practice is behavior, joined with these ideals. Right action with right thought in every situation from awakening to going to sleep.

I strongly believe that Christian practice, Buddhist practice, Jewish practice and Muslim practice, if motivated by compassion and peace, supersede their religious ideologies. In other words, practice supersedes dogma as a form of human growth and the promotion of general human well-being.

Secular humanist, or ethical humanist, practice is entirely harmonious with religious practice, when motivated by compassion and peace. Dogma is often the enemy, for dogma seeks to control human behavior and thought through ritualized and codified prescriptions.

The practitioner of peace and compassion needs no dogma. There are no magical ceremonies which can truly enhance the practice of mindfulness, truthfulness, compassion and nonviolence. Dogma divides. Compassion and nonviolence bring together. Practice is that simple, but it is also that difficult.

Alcohol

I recently heard a broadcast on NPR about the rising incidence of alcoholism in young American female population. There is also a statistical rise in alcohol abuse in both sexes.

It is my opinion that one cannot effectively practice a life of mindfulness, truthfulness and compassion while also using alcohol on a daily basis. I have come to this opinion after many years of studying the issue and working with people in my nursing practice.

Alcohol alters hormonal and brain chemistry when used regularly in even moderate volumes. The human brain, while marvelous, is limited in its intoxicant-free state. The nature of a mindful, truthful and compassionate daily practice while living in the real world is arduous and unrelentlingy demanding, if one commits to practicing during all one's waking hours.

Many people function in the world while using alcohol in moderate and even large amounts of alcohol. But, practice is not about functioning. Practice is about being the best human being one can be at any given moment, no matter how stressful or demanding, with every ounce of one's potential. Any substance use or abuse, which leeches energy or capacity from the human body, is an antagonist to practice.

Politicians

The recent death of Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts gave the awake observer some tremendous insights into politics, government as we know it, and politicians. The mindful and truthful have been testifying against politics, government and politicians since these phenomena were invented. And King Solomon would again shake his head and shrug if he were alive today. Nothing new under the Sun.

At a time when politicians in the majority are taking bribes (they call these 'campaign contributions') from the private health insurance industry to keep the American people slaves to premiums which support a Byzantine insurance bureaucracy, we have heard somber, solemn and totally hypocritical eulogies about the one Senator in Congress who has consistently supported universal health care with no buts or ifs.

'That's the way our system works, ' I have heard them say in defense of their hypocrisy and corruption. They speak of the interests of corporations as though they were of equal moral and ethical merit as the interests of the population, The People. This is not only lying. It is unconstitutional. We are supposed to be a democracy of the people, by the people and for the people. Corporations are not people. CEOs and lobbyists are people, but they are an infinitesimal minority of the people. Why are their interests being held above those of all the people?

Most troubling to me is the lack of counterpoint coming from the Kennedys themselves. In order to provide themselves the glory of a state funeral, it appeared, they have allowed the most despicable celebrities of the political class to jump on the funeral publicity train. The very people who have plotted to defeat the central pillar of Edward Kennedy's career, universal health care, rushed to fill well positioned church pews in Boston.

Death is not negotiable. It has no nuance. It is not debatable. It has no Right or Left. And neither does Truth.

If Americans could grasp and internalize their mortality, stripped of all the opiates of religion, plastic surgery, hormone enhancement, and television, perhaps they would demand Truth from their politicians. Perhaps they would demand that a Truthful legacy be granted to honor a man of the caliber of Senator Kennedy. Perhaps they would demand basic human rights, like health care, for all Americans and all the people in the world.