Hanami 花見 flower viewing

Ty, Tricia, and Emily

Yesterday it rained, but that doesn't stop Hanami! I went to a party under the bridge new my house.

Where to begin

"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy." Einstein

I’m starting a new series of 16 dream studies (nature studies) and..where to begin.. I've prepared the wood panels, gessoed and sanded, and now: Blank Space. Flat White Light. So Bright. "Imagery" to a painter is, shit, whatever forms from that white ground. A black line is an image. So where to begin becomes the primal question. The Pulling something from Nothing. (Is also pulling no-thing from some-thing.)
SO I pick up my brush and begin

to paint a some-thing, and a no-thing...

I can hear my teachers…in a Maude voice,
Start wild. Start by smudging. But get in there. Scribble in color fields, start big. Your object is in there, you felt it, it's just out of focus. Start from unfocused light, and “pull” the object into the clear space. begin with circles and free flowing rivers.
And something else.

The thumb sketches, tiny, fast, those are framework building. The planning process can also be a mantra, holy holy holy, and you can trust it as not only an honest form of preparation, but the true beginning of germination. I know this sounds cheesy, but thumb sketches are the scratches on the cave walls. They are also the smoke.
It’s Preparing the ground for an Art process to take place. We have to do it. Order the wood. Paint it white. Sand it. Check it twice. Use both hands. Feel everything directly. This is your baby, for Christ's sake.
Use light, shadow, clean water, and deep, dark earth and the plant will grow. And then, whatever emerges from the ground, Use it, because it is an honest creation. You can judge it, and talk to it, put it in its place. But don't disrespect it. "A negative self-image" feeds on negative, stupid imagery. It hurts you, and us, wastes a lot of our time. If you find yourself judging imagery as stupid vs. cool, it's like finding yourself in bad posture: you have given in to destructive neurosis, and are wasting everything holy.

Lust and Lucidity

Once you gain a degree of lucidity, the texts talk about all the crazy things you can do to your dreams and their characters. Test your power. Turn the dream inside out, reverse it, speed it up, slow it down, stop it completely.You can be every leaf on a tree, or every star in the sky.

Are “you” still there, inside your dream, like you usually are? No. “You” are now all the characters, and all the points in the landscape, so if you choose, you can erase the entire dream and just stand back as the Void.

The creator of the dream and all it’s dream characters are one since the beginning anyway, so this is in no way a “new” state of being. But it is a new state of consciousness.

And something has changed forever for your own dream character, your own conventional "I", because your dream character knows that it is just a dream character now, like any of the other dream characters, and thus it's not stuck solely inside the dream. Of course, you can slip out of lucidity, loose contact with the creator of the dream due to fear or lust projected from your dream self, of course. But those things (fear and lust) can also slip you into lucidity! Lust in particular will pull you right back into your dream genitals, which is why lust or sexual energy is a great dream omen. Whenever you feel lust, just think “I am dreaming,” which is true enough, and generate more lucidity into the lust. This habit will follow you into the dream.
In this way, lust is a vehicle to lucidity, not a hindrance.

Unfolding Milk

So today I was eating with some third graders, taking apart my empty milk carton in a way different than theirs, and they were saying “no no, you cant do it that way, do it this way.’ And I just kept doing it my way, and the kids at my table were laughing and saying “no, no, stop,” having a great time, and then, one of the other kids in the classroom who looked quite grumpy blurted out, “moh, iiyo. Jibun no yarikata demo ii shi.” Which means, “Enough already. Doing it your own way is ok too.”

Deep wisdom entered into the classroom. I stopped unfolding my milk carton and asked him to repeat what he just said. The boy looked to his teacher confused, but she and I were on the same page. “What you just said about letting others do it their own way..that was wonderful. Say it again, please,” she said.
So he did, and the teacher and I both said to him: “very good. Nice idea.”

I finally finished unfolding my milk, and the little girl next to me held up her empty carten, pushed her thumbs into the center of the top and magically had the thing unfolded in two seconds.
“See? This way is faster.” she said.
“Yes, I see now. Thank you. Wow, you are also a very good teacher.”
Moral of the story: respecting that there is a rainbow of ways to do things is good. But that doesn't mean that all ways are equally efficient.
All is light, and some lights are faster than others.

The Between State

There is a extremely special moment durring the sleep cycle. It happens right at the beginning, right when you fall asleep (everytime you fall asleep, meaning you can ride this state a bunch in the morning by pushing snooze ever ten minutes). The waking mind loses hold and the self is pulled into orbit around the dream state. At this time the mind is in transit, free from both the waking and dreaming state. Recognizing this moment causes the mind to spontaneously rest as its own basic, transparent, unmoving yet radiant nature. Then the dream begins to form, which is a whole nother trip....

The dream yoga mantra is,“Recognition and liberation are simultaniouse.” So if the dream arises, see it as dream and be free. But before the dream arises, you can just be free, as yourself,as Emptiness, without going through the trouble of awakening within the dream. Let the dream awaking within you.

How many people are in your diet?

We don't eat people directly, of course. That would be cannibalism. But some of the foods we do eat (and lifestyle choices we make) co-create the killing of humans, and so looking deeply, we might be able to see that there are real people in our potatoes, babies in our burgers, kids in our coffee. It’s all interconnected, unfortunately.

Cutting back on meat has been proven to cut down the amount of people in your diet. Would you like to know more?

What brilliant mind builds the believable dream?

When really examining the process of dreaming, an incredible question rocks the boat: Who, or what, is responsible for actually building the dream? What mind does that? It's not me; my memory is not that good. My imagination is not that smart! Whatever mind makes my dream is extremely intelligent! It's some sort of super-mind, able to construct a virtual-reality filled with virtual beings, including my self, and trick even me in the process!!!!
It's me, isn't it? Is the super-mind in me, or beyond me? Both/and, I bet. But I sure as hell don't know how the fuck I/it do(es) that! It`s beyond me, and yet, it's me to the core. This is very strange.

When I`m lucid in a dream, the dream often becomes even more solid, more real, more radiant. More consciousness=more radiance. The dream-memory of the dream becomes richer too.

From the “Heart of America.”

If America has a culture, (and it can be argued that it really does’t have a culture, it’s too young. It can also be argued that the very aspect of not having a single culture is itself American culture). In any case, with the outside edges receiving informatio from abroad, the center is where we might look if we want to find an all-american culture, don't you think? (this is just for fun).

Well, I’m your man. I’m from Kansas!

And as many of you know, I do not fit the steriotype of an all-american boy.

I am a strange Kansan, but a real Kansan nonetheless. I am not the myth…I am the real thing. And it appears I have abandoned ship, now living in rural Japan. Does that say something?

Kansas is famous for beef, BBQ, the Wizard of Oz, Jazz, Basketball, Eisenhower, Truman, trying to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools, and Fred Phelps. There are no mountains in Kansas, but we do have hilly forests and rivers. Kansas was a free state, and helped many people find liberation.

Kansas means“People of the wind.”

We just flew right in. It`s complete with a great music scene, dedicated anarchists, and one of the greatest art museums in the country, The Nelson Atkins.
So, that's just a little bit more info to help you get to know me,
and my people. IT`s all part of my job as an ambassador.

A letter to Jamil

We needn’t worry. As it has been with all revolutions, this global transformation we seek is already being built in the hearts and minds of individuals, individuals who evolved to worldcentric levels of care and concern. The revolutionary worldview comes from within and is silently, secretly embedded in the world, where it grows.

These farmers, like you, create a potential for others to occupy. You live a concerned perspective, a new worldview, and this catches on, with the help of institutions and magnetic fields, this new worldview becomes the central power of organization. Why? Because it is best equipped to solve the new world’s problems.

Death practices

Some people believe that if you can develop the habit of prayer, then at death, in the midst of all the confusion and agony, you might spontaneously start praying and find yourself invoking the mind-states of angels. And then, from that nice, familiar space, you die.

Or a Pure Land Buddhist might pray, “namo amida butsu” all their life so that when the important time comes, that great mantra, (which is best translated as “Hello Amida Buddha!” ) will find their lips and reverberate across their consciousness. Then suddenly, Amida will arive, just as they imagined he would—a red-skinned, half naked, sexy Japanese man with blue hair. Amida will arrive to take the mind away to his heavenly realm Dewachen, where a river of Infinite Life flows into a crystal clear lake of Light, filled with lotus buds. Each bud incubats a baby bodhisattva. You curl up inside one of those warm flower buds, beneath a warm blanket of light coming in through the petals, and then from there you die.

Or, if you practice Tibetan p’howa, at the moment of death you imagine yourself as a tiny ball of consciousness floating in your heart space. Suddenly, with the final out breath, you imagine yourself soaring upwards and out the top of your head where, like a grain of salt diving into the ocean, you are released into the nondual mirror mind of All Space. And then from there you die.


Or you pray for Jesus to come. When he doesn’t you pray for you lover, and your children, and your mother. And then you think of how lonely this is, and how this is the end, and you don't want to say goodbye to music, and to mountains, and to your children and lovers and life. And why does it have to hurt so much, and oh god I wasted it, I wasted my life, and oh no, how horrible!, and then, from there, you die.

Or you forget to pray for anything at all, and instead just fall into a dream state confused and unclear, and then from there you die.

Not to say you can’t have all those kinds of deaths. I personally believe (with my Elizabeth Kubler Ross books at my side) that we will definitely all go through stages of grief. Frightened thoughts and confusion will cloud the mind at death like the coloring of leaves in fall. It’s all very natural, and can be good indicators that the brain is starting to die.

But if you are lucid enough to be free as the space or clear mind in which those thoughts and feelings and confusions arise, then you can have enough calm lucidity to also, alongside the stages of grief, experience the stages of enlightenment. This is one reason to start a dream yoga practice of some kind.

Genital Symbolism in Art

Maybe I try to make attractive pictures, ones that can act like hot people, like magnets, like genitals. It's like the idea of Georgia Okeeffe simplifying beauty down to erotic forms (although she never admitted to doing that intentionally and instead pointed to the fact that we are all perverts for thinking so). Totems are phallic before they are anything else. In an erotic beauty, buttholes, tongues, vaginas, and nipples are everywhere, winking at us. (Now I am not trying to reduce beauty down physical shapes and genitals. I'm just saying that good-looking genitals can cause us to stare. It’s in our nature. (However, non-sexual people also exist, and that is natural too.)

Stare

Many of us, if the situation is safe, will stare at erotic zones, yes? We become momentarily hypnotized by their wonder, beauty, and arousal. Why do we stare? We stare at them because they contain the power to bring us pleasure, I guess.

Art, like genitals, can make us stare. Art can point us to the beauty of the world, to the mystery and the power, to the genitals happening all around us. Art can eroticize the universe, and that kind of perversion lubricates the higher mind to easily slide into the nervous system and manifest. Art is porno for the over-mind, and his or her cum is the integral matrix splattering across the internets inside. Art history is hot, collaboration is hot, art museums are fucking hot. It’s all porno for the soul.

Color

You know how you don’t really know how complicted a song is until you try to play it?  Or you don’t know how complicated a house is until you try to build one. Color is the same. Out of all these artists's statements I’ve read, so many arrive at the same confession: Color drives them mad. They want to know how to mix the colors of nature, but looking deeply with eyes full of light, they see how complex it is, how subtle it is, and this drives them crazy. The sky’s color field is complicated and yet, a simple light blue or blue gray will work fine in communication. That’s what’s so interesting. The brain is easily fooled, but you can tell when the artist has spent hours and hours mixing and layering colors, putting as much light in the sky that they can. Glazing, manipulating. The eyes see tiny fields of shimmering light-waves, mixing. The soul sees this too, only the light waves are also oceans of mind.

Post integral

Glimmers of Post-integral are found in social action, I think. Integral becomes aware that all perspectives are right, and Post-Integral now uses whatever perspectives work best to get a job done. The "community service" line of intelegience developes,ans we all have friends who are much higher than we are—they have so much energy, and so much care. They are fighting ans working for freedom. I’m not talking about the punks and anarchists just doing it for themselves, to make themselves feel good. I’m talking about the saints that live and work at the radical libraries, community gardens, farms, construction sites, the brilliant minds actually out there doing. Habitat for Humanity. They don’t have time to read and discuss Ken Wilber. The post integral might understand and agree with everything he says, but will not agree with his actions. Of course I’d argue that he is not practicing what he preaches because he is busy being the preacher! He has to consume knowledge and tell stories. It’s like how the Dalai Lama isn’t an accomplished monk because he is so busy being a politician. He starts his teachings with the fact that he has no realization because he is not an accomplished monk, but he has leaned the teachings, so he can pass them along. He’s such a funny man.

Music is the proof

It seems to me that music is either what this is all about, or is at least mirroring what this is all about. The universe is a big play, a dance, a song. It IS a song, and follows the same rules and rhythms of music. Music, in its nonsensical shouting and drumming, as well as with its structure and intelligence, is reflecting the cosmic impulse to play, to dance, to music.

Also, music is, and always has been, spiritual. "Spiritual" here means universal and cross-cultural, and therefore it is something very true to the human spirit. From the beginning we have been dancing, drumming, and singing. Look at babies. Music connects us. We sing together and dance together and bliss love ripples through our bodies as a reward. Halleluiah!

What is aloud to be sacred?

The structure of the universe --the chaos, the order, the patterns and growing up of it all--is enough to make any sensible person stand back in awe, yes? This fill-in-the-blank universe is so awesome that it alone can be held as sacred and worth worshiping. No unseen spirit is necessary when everything seen is transparent to infinity, transparent to creativity. Infinite complexity=infinite wonder. Nature worshipers are usually very happy people, since they end up worshiping everything and everyone! Nature worshipers believe that all outer worlds permeate with Divine Nature and the Flow of Life, and they live accordingly.

But what about the inner worlds? The psyche? The dreams and delusions? What about the inner glow that is my subjectivity? Can that be included in the Dance of Divinity? Is that aloud to be sacred?

Dream Yoga

It’s time for sleep. I am lying on my back, imagining tiny dakinis, like large fairies, standing around my bed protecting me. The deakinis are androgynous, smart, strong, beautiful. It’s a great fantasy, and it comes out of a daydream-like mind: my imagination. I’m not hallucinating yet because I know I am the source of this dream. I can turn it off whenever I want and think about something else. But I don’t at the moment; I try to imagine the dakinis as clearly as I can, hovering around my bed, hovering on the screens of my mind. I tell myself that this foggy vision of imaginary beings (which is actually changing the state of my mind and body, carefree nostalgia and a feeling of safety while also being chewing gum for my mind) is coming from the same source that the virtual reality dream comes from. It’s me, and nobody else, and if I can stay awake for the show, the dream will arise and leave a trace, and I’ll follow that trace with the moon as my lantern and get to the source of the dream. Follow it out right through the center to the source.

So, I begin with fantasizing about something outside my body (dakinis) and then imagine something inside my body (a tiy full moon in my forhead, or a ruby-red crystal chakra floating in my throat.) I Imagine streams of light coming out of and going into my nostrills, and I imagine a chain of a thousand hums flowing up my spine and out into the world.

The point is to carry that light, in whatever form--the red ruby, the white moon, the blue Hums--take that bit of light, that bit of mind with me as the physical world fades away and a virtual world takes its place. Usually people just plunge into the darkness of sleep, unconciouse. I will carry with me a little bit of mind-light.

Help me help!

I almost want someone, some dictator, to force me, by gunpoint or draft number, to go help the people in Burma. Build houses, carry water, play with the children, whatever! I feel a deep desire to help, but lack, along the “emerging wisdom culture,” any form of effective power. We have become obsessed with our freedom, and freedom and power do not mix, as you know. Or I should say that when they do mix, one emerges as victor, while the other waits in hiding for its chance to reemerge and curtail the higher degree of freedom, or power, just when the one is moments away from destroying the world. They work together in this way, but do not mix well.

And I have way too much freedom, and not enough responsibility, and if only some enlightened king could fore me to the slums to build houses…

The up-drift towards an integrated planetary culture, a world village, which we all feel and intuit within, pulls on our heart to go help. When our sisters and brothers in Burma are dying, we feel something, or at least the 20% of the population that is even aware of these global problems feels something, and that something is a universal compassion, a soft spot in us that goes beyond “us” and connects with the rest of the world’s population. This soft spot wants nothing else but to see everyone everywhere happy, healthy, and free.

But those of us connected to the planetary culture, (those of us aware of the global commons) and its economic/ecological problems, have vacationed far too long in our exalted states of freedom and security. Relishing our rights, we have lost responsibility, and might need to sacrifice some freedom for the sake of organizing power. We might want to reach down into our traditionalist past, grab a hold of some of that militarism, that membership, and exert some sort of authoritarian power onto our world. After all, if the founding fathers would not have done that, if it would have actually been a one-person/one-vote democracy, the fundamentalists wackos who made up the majority of the population would have taken control, and the constitution would never have been created. In some cases, elitism is best.

Is “Liberty” life or death?

Give me liberty, or give me life?


I learned from Wikipedia that the American revolutionist Patrick Henry gave his famouse “Give me liberty or give me death” speech today, 1775.
Being an America, this speech holds a speacial place in my heart.

Give me liberty or give me death! However, to many people death is liberty--the great emancipation from the torture and agony inherent to living through a human body. God death is a release.

For others, Life is the great Liberation, by itself, as is, and if one were not manifesting that Liberty though every cell in their body, that would be death. Patrick Henry’s idea put “Liberty” or a pedistal, what is Goodness, and he saw it as a Perfection humanity deserved. It was our Right, which is something inhearent to living in a human body.

Fortunately, his speech was like Kings’s…prophetic. Unfortunatly, that human right to liberty quickly turned into the right to irresponsibility, the right to consume belligerently. Responsibility was forgotten along with the witch burning. Progression and degression, spiral all the way down.

How far would you go to protect your liberty? And isn’t it time you gave some of that liberty up?

Japanese kids hate caterpillars.

If they find one, they kill it. Why? It’s soft and icky like a worm, and the hairy ones can hurt your skin. I told them that American kids, if they are lucky enough to find one, might keep a caterpillar as a pet to see it grow into a beautiful butterfly.
“No way! A pet!??!”

They don't think butterflys are that cool either. Over here kids like beetles and drogonflies. Don’t even say the word centipede though; you will cause a tiny panic.

Wind Dragon’s Tail

Sometimes I go out on my balcony, fourth floor, and look though my prayer flags, look though my prayers, into the sky behind them. I look into the Dragon's tail to see distant mountains beneath a hazy layer of cloud. They fade away. I look through the colored fabric inked with mantras into the infinite sea of soft stillness: Sky!, and I see clearly the black crows flying through me. Kaw! Kaw! Kaw! The wind picks up. I take some pictures, look at my reflection, go back inside to type letters into my own prayer flag: Life!, waving and playing and saying to the wind “May peace be in all of you!” in so many words.

The beginning

I probably started studying of dream yoga when I found the Tibetan Book of the Dead in highschool. Ram Dass, Surya Das, Ken Wilber and Sogyal Rinpoche soon informed me deeper. Finally, a weekend dream yoga retreat with Lama Surya Das in Kansas cemented it into my practice, and I have been practicing it ever since.

It’s funny; In high school my mother gave me The Art of Happiness, which I read three times and profoundly changed my views toward spirituality. And then in college my mother gave me a dream yoga retreat for my birthday, which seriously strengthened my practice. My mother has always been very supportive.


But I remember when I told her about the basic principles of dream yoga she immediately, in a kind of panicky voice, replied
“But you know that if you jump in front of a bus you will die, don’t you? This is not just a dream.”

I know, mom! The point of dream yoga isn’t to imagine this world as wonderland, but to awaken. Emptiness is one with all states; it's the common ground that connects the waking, dreaming, and sleeping states. It's the only thing that’s constant, and being awake for the state changes inside your mind will help reflect to you that ever-present witness who never changes-- the Timeless One that is Whole and Empty. It’s integral post-metaphysics, not delusional fantasies.

The Mahayana U-turn

The shift from Hinayana to Mahayana is no small deal. I imagine the monks and nuns two thousand years ago transforming into these new beings after years of insight meditation, and discovering that the goal is not to reach nirvana, but to embrace samsara! With the shift into Mahayana comes a u-turn in the seat of consciousness. The entire story changes. Whereas before you were rooted in the world and heading towards heaven, now you are rooted in heaven diving head first into the world! Eros flips into Agape, and “the eyes through which I see God are the same eyes through which God sees me.” Nietzsche’s, "If you look long enough into the void the void begins to look back through you, " has a bizarrely psychoactive meaning in this regard.

But all of that takes place in the spaciousness of already accomplished Emptiness, where nothing is “happening” or “not happening” at all. It is repeatedly mentioned that “enlightenment” is simultaneously an evolving process of liberation, a gradual unfolding of integration, and an always already Now condition of reality: Sheer Emptiness/Luminous Form. It’s paradoxical.

Radiance permeates every corner of the cosmos--the interior cosmos, exterior cosmos, individual cosmos, and collective cosmos. In a sense, every face of reality is a mirror reflecting the source, which in Buddhism is called Infinite Light and Infinite Life. These two symbols of Reality, Light and Life, are depicted in Buddhist art as two beings completely naked in mad, sexual embrace. Light and Life appear to the mind as wisdom and compassion, (freedom and fullness, eros and agape), and to the body as ecstasy and pain. With the Mahayana turn, souls delight in the opportunity to dive deeply into the center of life, incarnate a body, embody a mind, and touch the infinite amount of beings interpenetrating one’s multidimensional matrix existence. Experiencing actual wisdom and compassion, by experiencing actual pain and suffering, effortlessly generates an impulse to be a bodhisattva: to be born, to live, and to stay alive and in love for as long as space endures. The bodhisattva vow reverberates as the desire and drive of the universe, and is also seen as already fully fulfilled because you already took human form! You already decided to stay on earth! Here you are! Now enter and love in lucidity.

Buddha: “Your job is to discover your world, and then give yourself to it.”

Dance

If music is for the ears, and paintings are for the eyes, what is for the body? Dance.

Dancing is like making music in that it is done in the moment with the body and may not be recorded. It is live/It is alive; a living expression of passionate appreciation for music and emotion, and I guess because it is “appreciation” it is registered as “artistic.” I put “artistic” in quotes because we don’t know what that word means unless we attach some kind of thrilling excitement and appreciation to it. In the case of making music or dance, the experience of rapture happening in the body during is itself more inspiration to keep on expressing. The appreciation fuels the continuation of the manifestation of more music, or more dance, which is art. “Art for art’s sake.”

Moreover, the viewer of the musician or dancer receives, thanks to empathy and mirror neurons, a similar state of excitement and appreciation.

Moreover, dance and music tell stories! It’s not just expressing an emotion but also a story, which grips the audience and invokes emotional responses. Emotion emoting, mind transmitting, visual poetry, audible panting, moving sculpture, fleeting music, take a picture? It will last longer.

The power of vision (“putting on the mind of Christ”)

When I draw a picture of the Mother Goddess, fleshy, long hair, with her embracing glance and her giving hands, she comes into existence a little bit fuller as a shared dimension, a dream, and a potential. The Mother, her image, is a powerful force indeed. And with the miracle of mutual understanding, we can then talk about her image and what it represents, and in doing so, project wisdom and compassion into that image, building more of those structures into our own minds, lives, and actions. Art can be stucture changing/conversation starting. The Constructivists sure thought so.

Our own minds co-create our worldview, and thus our world. That is the postmodern insight.

We also intuit potentials (the good, the true, and the beautiful) and deep structures/connections within our being-in-the-world, then project those dreamy qualities onto forms, weather that is a best friend, or visualized deities and archetypes. And by, for example, visualizing the Mind of Christ—(human consciousness infinitely one with God, infinitely one with all of us, infinitely wise and compassionate)—our own minds grow, and grow into that visualized state. Our own minds begin to take on those characteristics. Those cognitive or spiritual structures of consciousness begin to be built, and we begin to inhabit those new structures like a house or garden. As Ken Wilber might put it, the visualized state of mind eventually becomes a realized trait of mind.

Or, it could also be said that the imagined image of Jesus and his state of consciousness pulls us like a magnet into our own deeper potentials and most filling futures. It’s magnets and mirrors and smoke.

Perspective Collecting

Perspective collecting isn't just listeneing to people talk at parties, but actively imagining what it is like to see the world through their eyes.

In the higher levels of Buddhist practice, one is supposed to also imainge the perspectve of a deity. It’s like “Put yourself in Christ's shoes,” use your imagination, and see how suddenly there is a bit more light inside than before.

With more perspectives comes a wider view. More perspectives=more truth. Perspectives act like stones that build a mountain upon which you stand to see the world. The more you have, the more informed you are. This also means the more in-formed you are, or involved in form god is. The more people you can understand, “I know where you are coming from,” the more people you can manifest. What?

The power of art museums

I have read that psychological development, or “cognitive development,” involves an increased capacity to take other perspectives. Essentially, it's our ability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. The more shoes you can put yourself in, the greater your cognitive development. As infants develop into adulthood, they grow into higher and higher capacities to take on other perspectives, to incorporate other worldviews into their own. This increases their circle of care, concern, identity, and awareness.

Art museums present us with countless worldviews. The tour guide might say “This artist is commenting on the destruction of his native rainforests.” Or “this artist is expressing her love for Jesus.” Or “This painter is demonstrating visually the fracturing of post-modernism.” Etc, etc etc. Almost all political, philosophical, and religious view is expressed at an art museum, and in that sense, just going there and bringing attention to the art forces the mind to grow. It forces new ideas, new images, new perspectives (all imaginary, but all new nonetheless) to make their way into the psyche. Sometimes art museums are exhausting. It’s too much love, too much romanticism. Too much depression. Too much religious adoration. Its too many new perspectives, insights, worldviews. It’s a mental work out.

Religious Intelligence

When religious intelligence moves into a more mature stage, the adolescent disinterest becomes exciting fascination. Religions become not only stories and myths, but anthropological wonders of a collective consciousness. They are super stories, deep art, and cross-cultural dreams. “Dream” here has two meanings. One is a hallucination, nonsensical and meaningless. The other is a vision, like Martin Luther King’s. Religions can be visions, our minds peaking into higher human potential, more perfect unions, more compassionate hearts. Art uses the symbols of religion but not necessarily promoting the beliefs. It uses these symbols because they are deeply understood on many levels by many people. “If it works, use it.” The pieta, Mary holding the dead Jesus, can have nothing to do with Christianity, and everything to do with grief and loss. Our bodies empathize with the mother holding her dead child. Who is that? Oh, its Mary and Jesus. Who are they?

Etching

You know how our actions ripple out and effect people? A dancer knows this well. An actor performing on a stage can pull emotions out of people. An alcoholic knows this well too. Our actions ripple out and to some degree are copied down. They are echoed through time into new actions. What I am getting at is that you don’t need to literally teach or write down your worldview in order for it to be copied and spread. You don’t need to write a book in order for your vision to be etched into the field of creative potential. All you have to do is be yourself and live your dream. This will naturally ripple out and effect people.

I have a dream

Every Revolution begins with a dream. One individual has it, and then spreads it. (And sometimes, in order to keep spreading that individual’s dream, their sermons must be institutionalized, and we get religion in some form or another.)

Vision is another word for dream, right?, and revolutionaries have very good visions. They are Idealists. Visionaries. "A dream is a wish your heart makes," and they are not just hallucinations. When Dr. King said, “I have a dream” he was talking about an actual world he saw: A vision. He contacted an actual state of being (or state of mind) existing in a worldspace we might call today pluralistic or multicultural. In a way, he saw into the future. Not any details, but his dream revealed the overall mood or social attitude where people aren’t judged by the color of their skin. This vision he had eventually grew into the common norm or pattern of thought. Visionary.

When you envision a perfect worldview, filled with wisdom and compassion…feeling love for all beings and acting altruistically for the benefit of all beings, your vision actually helps build that future, (within you and without). You know that altruism (or at least it’s potential) is possible because you know it is inside yourself. It exists, and has been expressed by countless saints and sages and ordinary people throughout human history. The philosophers are thinking about it, the sages are talking about it, the artists are painting picture of it, and the musicians are playing its music. The New world first appears in the stories and dreams as the Announcement.

Dr. Manhattan’s penis and the Media

As you know, repression leads to obsession, which leads to distraction, and in this case that’s distraction from the rest of the film, from other characters in a scene, or from any meaningful criticism, for that matter.

But this rather predictable response from the media is not shallow, but is actually the tip of very deep iceberg, one that reaches down into the dark depths of our shared homophobia, erotiphobia, genitalphobia, and the power-politics that go with them. (John Ince is the man)

Our culture’s general repression of the penis is evident in the lack of them in movies, on alians, but also in the social norm to not look down in a group shower, or not compare size at the urinal.

A 15-year-old student was standing next to me in the bathroom staring down at my peen and I said, “What are you doing?” He looked up and said “What, Is looking at other penises rude in America?”
“Yes, it is.’ I said, and laughed.

It shouldn't be, though. After all, we compare other body parts, other muscles, why not the penises? It’s because we have eroticized the penis. Therefore looking at one is considered “gay” or “peeping” or whatever. If it wasn't erotic, then it wouldn't be a big deal, and heterosexuals could give each other head like they can give each other massage. This is not the case in our culture. Not yet, anyway. Although some ramantics claime that times used to be like that…

Farming

Deep down I’m a farmer, a gardener. But I live in the city and don't have a plot of land to use at the moment. So I’ve been planting and harvesting in a few mind-fields of friends. These fields are very healthy, fresh, and rich with nutrients; their soil is ancient and fruitful. I plant my friendship into them and they all respond with much fruit, giving me back kindness and care, or insight into why they don’t. I am rich with fruit and experiential knowledge from all the mind-fields around me, and so I plant in the often, and spend many hours lying on their colored earth. Every one of them is a different color, texture, and shape, but they all equally glow in the setting sunlight. In the moonlight, all the fields are the same colors—shades of silver blue gray, and they all dissolves into black during the darkest hours of the night. At night, all the fields become one color. Then the sun comes up, Light returns, life returns, and with it, infinity, actually shimmering as diversity changing so fast across the fields, and humming like the dragonflies.

lighting-rod for spirit

Ken Wilber, from The Ways We Are In This Together, says this:

"In Excerpt A (“An Integral Age at the Leading Edge”), we summarized the evidence suggesting that a cultural elite, representing less that 2% of the adult population, was entering psychosocial waves of development that could best be described as integral, and that this 2% might very well be the harbinger of integral waves of consciousness to follow in the culture at large. It is a paradoxical situation, in a sense, in that this “elite” is the first to actually embrace a radical inclusiveness, an inclusive not shared by the other 98% of the population at this time (although they, too, might develop into this inclusive and integral orientation). But the integral waves of consciousness, however conceived, have at least one thing in common: an understanding that “Everybody is right.”

"This means that the chief activity of integral cognition is not looking at all of the available theories—whether premodern, modern, or postmodern—and then asking, “Which one of those is the most accurate or acceptable?,” but rather consists in asking, “How can all of those be right?” The fact is, all of the various theories, practices, and established paradigms—in the sciences, arts, and humanities—are already being practiced: they are already arising in a Kosmos that clearly allows them to arise, and the question is not, which of those is the correct one, but what is the structure of the Kosmos such that it allows all of those to arise in the first place? What is the architecture of a universe that includes so many wonderful rooms?"