I remember a specific moment in time when I was talking to my mom. I would say I was about 10 years old. Old enough to believe strongly and young enough to make bold claims. We were talking about some medical condition, she was a nurse at the time and these were common discussions. She had used some medical term I didn’t understand. After a long explanation I understood, but was resolved that the world shouldn’t be so complicated. I responded with sincerity and enthusiasm, “When I grow up, I’m going to write a dictionary that explains medical terms in words that everyone can understand.”

I assumed at the time that I would go into some medical field and then make my knowledge accessible to the layman. I never did go into medicine.

I didn’t realize then, but looking back I can see it wasn’t that I was interested in medicine. It was that I wanted the world to make sense and I wanted others to be able to see the sense of it. I also saw language as a way of segregating people. The languages we learn in each profession are an elitist tool that draws boundaries around areas of knowledge and exclude those “uninformed”. As if to say, “If you haven’t spent 10 years learning the words I know, I won’t bother talking to you”. It may reflect a need to feel superior, and language tends to be the quickest path to isolation.

I find I still both balk at and embrace the differentiators in language. As my primary profession in computer software, an industry riddled with specific terms, the segregation shows up every day. Don’t get me wrong the terminology is crucial to specificity. But it’s also a path to overburden that must be cleaned up before any effective communication can take place. Then to make matters worse, in an industry already buried with specific terms, here comes the acronym. RAM, ROM, HD, VGA, HDMI, USB… And these are just the common ones. I’ve been at companies where they produce their own new acronyms on a daily basis. If you were out of work for a month and come back to a group meeting, you can find yourself completely lost as they bandy back and forth with the latest TLA (three letter acronyms), to describe everything from cloud software to going to the bathroom.

I recently entered the world of VOIP (Voice Over IP) (IP means Internet Protocol) (VOIP means telephones). And I came across the acronym POTS. It means an old style land line, as opposed to mobile phone or VOIP. So at first I thought it must refer some hardware structure of the land line. Something that resembles a pot or a bucket. Nope. At the risk of sounding stupid in a meeting I asked what POTS means. The answer even surprised me. Plain Old Telephone Service… Really?! We can’t just say that? Or land line? Did we really need to spell it out the long way and then acronym it… Well POTS it is.

It’s endemic, It’s the nature of a metaphorical language. Even, and I should say, especially, spirituality requires it’s own language. Imagine stepping into a christian church for the first time as an uninitiated, or if you happen to be lucky enough to be unitiated, imagine the lost feeling as you walk into a yoga studio for the first time. What did he say? What’s an asana? What does Namaste mean?

Metaphors evolve and words get stale. Think of some of the words in your world that are completely buried in mire. Words that mean so much, that they now hold little meaning at all. Words like ‘Politics’, ‘Religion’, ‘God’. The word ‘God’ will conjure an image in everyone’s mind, everyone you talk to will have an impression from this word and the use of the term will impact everything in your dialog from then on… But what does it actually mean to the person you’re talking to? Do they have any impression in their mind that’s even close to the meaning you had originally intended? The more loaded with meaning a word becomes, the harder it is to communicate using it, because the translation on the part of the receiver is less predictable.

So we come up with new words, and more specificity. And then we educate those around us, that we care about communicating with, to help them understand what it is we’re trying to say. The cycle of language and metaphor grows and recedes and repeats.

This is why I use the word Namaste in my close. Partially because it has strong meaning to me. But also because it has new meaning to me. It’s an ancient word and in certain cultures it is overloaded with meaning. I’ve seen it used in presentations in India as casually as saying “hello”. I was honestly offended. It was impersonal and quite frankly too intimate for a presentation on how the Oracle database was going to help my business…

For me it’s much more precious.

When I say Namaste, it means to me: Putting aside my ego, the divine within me acknowledges the divine within you.

It means I see the spark of God within you.

It means that I have the spark of God too.

It means that I’m not bragging, I’m not being pretentious.

I’m being authentic and setting aside the part that will judge both you and me and determine if we are worthy of such a gift and if one of us has it to a greater extent than the other.

That voice is silenced and I sit in wonder amazed that we are even able to have a flawed conversation in language that both of us share but neither of us fully understands.

And I pause each time I write it, to consider, do you know what I mean?

Watch your language.

Namaste,

Kevin

(Click to play audio file)

I hate being late. It really grates on me.

Some days, you do what you do, you bring everything to the table, but the balance sheet tallies wrong, and you end up in debt.

There is always tomorrow. But how do I judge my today?

Today I was late, everything was out of time, I was behind from square one, and for the first time in 2 years I didn’t get my blog out before noon.

But how do I tally my day? What is my currency?

If I judge on timeliness, I lost. I didn’t make my deadlines and I didn’t fulfill all of my commitments.

If I judge on grace under pressure, I lost. I was frantic and overwhelmed and I lost it with those around me that I hold most dear.

If I judge on Cosmic Karma, I suppose tied. I shifted focus from what I wanted to do to what I had to do. I had to wait for the time to breath later in the day. The world didn’t end and my blog got written. Nobody unsubscribed when I missed my noon deadline (they waited till my email came out).

Can I judge myself on being non-judgemental? Can I go back to he beginning of the day and forgive myself for taking care of my priorities before my pleasures? I love writing this blog, but today my commitments were high and passion suffered in the face of need. But I found a time for both, at a later time.

Can you practice awareness in the moment, after the moment has passed? Can I look back at how I reacted and find a path that I would have wished I took? And is that any different than regret? Becoming a better me by criticizing the me of the past?

When it’s all said and done I am the person that I have always been. I will do what I can, and I won’t do what I cannot.

When I look out at the world and cast a light of compassion and grace to all the people struggling out there, I hope that my eyes will stumble upon a mirror. Then my eyes will meet with those of a man who can most benefit from my grace and compassion. The man who needs me to understand and accept him above all others. I will see the man who needs my unconditional love most of all. And he will weep at the acceptance when he realizes he is truly loved.

Namaste,

Kevin

One time I had a debate with a drunk man. My father always told me, “If you argue with a fool, what does that make you?”. But I still couldn’t resist, I get pulled into philosophical debate so easily.

His position was that we are all chemical engines. Our reactions are programmed responses based on our previous experiences and inherent wiring.

He argues that if you are driving down a road and someone cuts you off, you have no choice but to get angry, it’s a function of our behavior. Road rage is just a buildup of these experiences forming into action.

I argued that we all have choices to make, and whether to get angry was one of those choices.

It also seems a matter of perspective. In other words, how you interpret the situation.

In my argument I referenced a time, years ago, when had been cut off by someone. As I looked into the car I realized it was my neighbor. I knew my neighbor well and he was a good person. So from this knowledge I inferred that there must be a good reason he was in a hurry and that I should not take it personally. Anger left me and compassion entered the picture.

This lead me to the next level of thought, “What if I treat everyone as my neighbor?” What if I were to believe inherently that all people are “good people” and there is typically some good reason for their behavior. It would let both them and me off the hook. They would incur grace for their actions, and I in turn would not find myself taking actions personally, as the cause was outside of me. Ergo, I have chosen, through logical inference, not to get angry.

But this is one of the key benefits of, and why I enjoy so much, having a philosophical conversation, it gives one time to deduce the best reasoning and outcome. It’s not always simple to apply it to your day to day life. This is why awareness has become so powerful for me. Tying awareness into experiences can lead to intellectual responses instead of emotional responses. So when I am capable of applying awareness to a situation I can identify it more clearly as what is really happening and not get bogged down in a knee jerk emotional reaction.

But awareness and reasoning takes energy and now I am a parent. As a parent I find that most days tend to wear me down to the nub. When run down and exhausted there is little room for reason and you fall back on baser instincts, emotion and default reactions win the day. And the debate resumes.

Are we chemical engines? Or are we mystical avatars?

Is everything that we do really the result of chemicals interacting with each other through a set of logic paths that are preprogrammed? While the pathways are complex and not always obvious, are they actually predictable and consistent? Could you, if you studied someone long enough, predict their every action and response to stimulus?

Or are we something more?

Are we actually the puppet master pulling the strings from the outside? Knowing that the puppet is likely to behave in a certain way, but capable of making decisions against default action? Can we choose to be other than we have previously been?

Is it all a matter of perspective? Is this debate really meaningless but the outcome crucial? Is the most effective means of being better, simply believing we are better?

Does establishing in your mind the belief that the world is not out to get, empower you to not be gotten by the world?

If this were the case, this would make awareness the most powerful tool mankind has ever discovered. This would mean that when we are aware of our reactions we can respond as we would choose, instead of taking the path of least resistance, we are actually empowered as the avatar instead of mindless as the machine. So awareness give us the power of decision making.

Who will you be today? The machine? Or the avatar?

Namaste,

Kevin

That’s a cross I’ll have to bare.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

There is wisdom in old wisdom, and there can be deception, but the person being deceived is often yourself. Don’t be fooled by the ease of access and availability of old sayings. In a way, they are like invoking a spell, but the primary impact is on the caster (aka, the person speaking). They summarize a mental state that you are either in, or one you shift to with the incantation of the phrase.

Never judge a book by its cover.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

In a way, sayings are dismissive, they allow us to fall back on old thought patterns instead of establishing new ideas. In a way they are a crutch of how we used to think, or worse yet, how someone else taught us to think.

Life is what happens while you are preparing for it.

He has been skimming a little of the top for years.

Sayings become analogies in our minds. We know what they mean and how to apply them. But we may not understand the full impact or original meaning of the sayings. I’ve been making a lot of chicken broth soups recently. And in my last batch, I was scooping out ladles full of good wholesome broth, I noticed that all the fat was on the top. That is when I had an “aha” moment. Skimming off the top doesn’t just mean you’re stealing a bit. It means your taking from the richest part of the soup, where all the fat is. Skimming off the top means that you’re keeping the best out for yourself.

No good deed goes unpunished.

He is an indian giver.

What you could be doing, when reciting a catch phrase, is bringing to the surface a subconscious bias or even prejudice that you have accepted so thoroughly that you no longer think about what your saying. There are saying like ‘indian giver’ that fell into disdain because popular culture had identified it as racist and an incorrect stereotype. But if we rely upon popular culture to help us identify when we are out of balance, then we are severely out of balance, much like popular culture.

The next time your brain falls into autopilot, and you find yourself about to spit out ancient wisdom, stop, and consider:

Do I believe what I’m saying?

What does what I’m saying actually mean?

Where does this saying come from?

Context is powerful, knowing where your saying comes from can help you identify if you truly want to identify with what you’re really saying.

Awareness is powerful, and understanding what your saying before you say it can help you as a communicator.

Namaste,

Kevin

Bonus Material:

What Namaste means to me:

Putting Aside my ego, the Devine within me acknowledges the Devine within you.

When I was a child my parents had a series of metal trivets that they had mounted on the wall above the cabinets in our kitchen. I grew up reading these and to this day I can recite them and even visualize the image that was on each. For your consideration, I share some of my base programming.

“Good, Better, Best. Never let it rest. Till your Good, is your Better. And your Better is your Best” – (can’t remember the picture)

“Yard by Yard, life is hard. Inch by Inch, it’s a cinch.” – (Picture of an inch worm crawling)

“If your wife doesn’t treat you as you deserve, be grateful.” – (Picture of a man running with a frying pan chasing him, assumedly thrown by his angry wife)

“A house is made of brick and stone, but a home is made of love alone.” – (Picture of a brick house)