It is interesting how our tastes change over time. I used to love getting messy, playing in the mud, digging in the dirt. I’m sure I was like a typical toddler happy to have my hair full of hummus, or delighted to have my diaper deluged in dirt. But at some point, I’m not even clear when, something changed. I’m no longer a fan of muck.

I’m not a huge fan of swimming in lakes, at least not ones with slick slimy banks. I don’t like mucking about in the mud. That said, give me a fishing rod and a good set of waders and boots and I’ll slog through anything. I guess just keep the mud off my skin.

On my commute this week I went over a dirty stream flowing into the San Francisco bay, lined with a slimy, muddy bank. And my first thought was “Yuck!!!”. My second thought was about my 15 month old and how much he would love running his fingers through it and finger painting his face with it… Which again made me go “Yuck!”

I’m sure if I allowed my 15 month old near it, he would be in seventh heaven. A seemingly limitless supply of mud! For sliding around in and squishing between your toes. Can you image the feeling of coating your hair in its brown gushy goodness? I can, and as previously stated, my current mind set is, “Yuck!”

I have to say, at least in part, I have health concerns associated with the mud itself. Who knows what kind of bacteria or other organisms might be growing in those muddy piles. And I also have to say there is a little bit of fear involved. Maybe I had enough people correct me educate me over the years. Maybe I was told one too many times of the dangers of getting mucky. Or maybe I just got in trouble one too many times for getting dirty and making more laundry.

I remember a time when I was a teen and there was a summer rain storm. I was over at my best friend Brian’s house and there was a low spot of grass running between his house and the neighbors house. Normally you’d refer to this as a drainage ditch or water diverting area. But in the right conditions with the proper mindset, you’ve got yourself a water slide.

I don’t know how long the storm lasted or how long we played there. But we’d start at the back of the house and take a running dive, forward into the grass ditch, sliding on our bellies for 30 feet or so. Stand, laugh, run to the back of the house and repeat.

We were drenched, filthy, and grinning from ear to ear.

I simply can’t imagine doing it today. I remember the feeling of fun. But I have a hard time picturing the abandon that would be required to dive into the mud and just enjoy it. Abandoning all things I ‘know’ in favor of enjoying the moment.

If I were to make a point today, it would come from this. Knowledge is a double edged sword. Everything that we learn propels us forward to the next level in terms of knowing of how things work. But it also holds us back from the previous level of, well of, ‘Ignorance is bliss’. And it begins to break down the mystery.  The more we know the less we can escape knowing. Knowledge is both powerful and a pair of shackles, all bound into one bite sized package.

I don’t know if there is a break even point. A point between where we we know too little and we know too much. I think I must have passed it years ago. I often wonder if that is the difference between childhood and adulthood. The crossover is so exciting and such a whirlwind that we don’t consider the cost of knowing more. In many ways it harkens back to the bible story of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You can’t know the cost of the knowledge until you have the knowledge. You can’t possible understand the impact of what you will know until you know it, and then you can’t decide to go back.

Or can you?

This to me, is one of the reasons why reincarnation works philosophically. This is one of my most pressing arguments to why I think reincarnation would be a valuable tool in growing a soul. If the purpose of our experience in this world it to cultivate an enlightened soul. That enlightenment would be frequently hampered by knowledge. Scriptures often highlight that our goal should be to become childlike. And one of the major attributes of childlike is unhindered by knowledge. So in this way the universe allows for a reset button so we can experience a simpler state once more.

I have noticed something else about the progression of knowledge, an abundance of knowledge introduces subtlety. Meaning that a little knowledge can cause one to think in black and white, but a great deal of knowledge moves things back to shades of gray. As you are first learning you come to believe that your new knowledge is paramount and infallible.  But further experience shows you where it fails. And the more you learn and the more you experience you find that what you thought was truth was in fact only a facet. And in this way your knowledge softens and becomes organic.

This experience of knowledge growing and taking on a life of it’s own allows it to become subtle once more. And that subtlety then introduces wonder back into your life. And I believe that is the process of enlightenment.

And once you’ve learned everything there is to know. Once you’ve experienced all that can be experienced. And realized it is all part of this cosmic mystery that we both embrace and ignore every day, only then, do you really come back to the truest conclusion we can possibly hope for…

That it’s okay to just play in the mud.

Namaste,

Kevin

Over the last two weeks I’ve covered an interesting, new to me, idea about time. To begin with I introduced the idea of all time, always existing. The post introduced the concept of consciousness as a tuning needle and time being a vinyl record. The record always exists, but you are only experiencing the music where the needle is. In my next post I introduced the idea of how free will could still exist in a universe with everything being predetermined.

For this blog entry, I wanted to take it to the next logical step, reincarnation. Reincarnation has often been described as a pathway where one life follows the previous and you’re on a journey of self discovery and spiritual growth from one life to the next learning lessons and bettering yourself from life to life. But if you stop and think about this pathway model, it is based on the mindset of consciousness. The idea that our lives, like our present moment have a past and a future and we are very much in the present life. This metaphor comes out of the idea that the only thing that exists is now.

Now apply this concept of omnipresent time to your life/lives. With this new model of the universe, where everything is here all the time. Suddenly it becomes obvious that our lives are not past and present but all our our lives are happening now and all of our experiences from this life, or the ‘next’, or the ‘past’, are all happening/have happened. It gets a bit overwhelming. So let’s try an analogy.

Picture a bicycle wheel.

The black rubber tire is the universe with every possible space and time that it contains. So each inch of rubber could represent all the moments and 3d space within 100 year span of the universe. And each spoke represents a lifetime that we are connected to.

So each spoke is a life in which we have reincarnated. And each spoke leads back to the central hub of the wheel which represents our ‘higher’ self. Within each life we live, we identify with that soul, or soul fragment, through the tool of consciousness. But that ‘soul’ is only a projection of the super soul or higher self. We are projecting a fragement of our soul out to experience a discreet moment in time and the super soul exists outside of our time and connected to all time through our lives we have projected.

In this model the axel of the tire could represent the universal consciousness, the divine, God, whatever term you prefer. And the God consciousness then connects us to all other life in the universe perhaps as a universal soul. And each being in the universe experiences this same model where their lives are tied into each other through spokes up to a super soul and tying them back into the universal soul. Bringing forth the idea that we are all one, and we are all individuals.

Bringing it back down to a scale that’s a little easier to imagine again. Travel to the end of one of the spokes one more to an individual life. Picture each spoke ending in a record needle and that needle of consciousness playing that specific moment of time for the observer, embraced in the illusion that we are in the only moment that truly exists.

The wheel is a powerful model here as well because, if all time exists always, then there is really no beginning and no end. It all represents cycles and repeating patterns. With this idea the super soul at the hub represents our true self. And our experience here in this life is one of hundreds or maybe thousands of conscious lives being experienced by us. Everyone, all the time.

Remember if this freaks you out, it’s only a model. 🙂

Namaste,

Kevin

Last week I talked about a new concept of time. The idea that all time always exists. It is literally a fourth dimension in which past and present a always there in the same way that north and south are always there. Just because you are here, doesn’t mean that ‘there’ doesn’t exist.

So the next logical question that often comes up with this concept is, “What about free will?” “How do I live my life and make my decisions with any pretense of freedom, if everything has already happened?”

There are two ways to look at this. First review your perception and entitlement to free will. Why are you entitled to free will? Why do you feel you have free will? Perhaps we are not entitled to free will, instead we are entitled to perceive free will. And in that sense, with our perception locked into the current moment, the illusion of free will is complete. We do not need to have free will to embrace this learning experience we call life. We simply need to perceive we have free will. And the very fact that we can have this philosophical argument implies success on the part of the perception that free will is ours. So nothing to cry over.

Alternately, you can view this with the idea that we have free will. You do get to make every decision that is impacting your life and those around you. However, the catch in this model, is that you have already made those decisions. Everything that you will do in your life has already been done and exists as discreet moments in time. But to your consciousness, the tool through which we experience time, those moments have not yet come. So what remains is for you to experience the decision making process and the results as they unfold. Knowing that you have in face made the decision.

Perhaps it is better to look at this controversy from a completely different angle. We get so hung up on our ability to make decisions and our freedom. But it’s very possible that our purpose here, in this universe as conscious beings, is not to have free will and to make decisions, but rather through the use of our consciousness to begin to understand those decisions.

In other words, our job here is not to choose. Our job here is to understand why a choice was made and direction that choice went. To understand the decision itself. For example, anyone can choose to build a weapon. Wisdom comes in understanding why you build a weapon.

So free will, in essence, may be an effort of our ego to completely avoid the purpose of our presence here. Free will may simply be a distraction from the power of comprehension.

I think that’s enough to chew on this week. Next week I want to shift gears once more and discuss reincarnation within this model of ever present time.

Namste,

Kevin

People always say “Don’t worry, your time is going to come.”

Well I have news for you. Your time is already here. All of it!

First some back story. This is an idea that was shared with me recently. It shifted my paradigm and allowed me to look at life, the universe and, well, everything, a little bit sideways. It may not be true, but then again it may.

The basic concept is this. All time exists always. The past, the future, the present all exist always. You are only observing the present moment.

According to the standard physical model we move in 3 physical dimensions. Each dimension has 2 directions it can go 1) forward and back, 2) side to side, and 3) up and down. We have a physical body as a tool. This tool can accomplish many things, but one of them it accomplishes is maintaining a physical location within 3 dimensional space. AKA You Are Here.
However ‘there’ always exists, even if you are not ‘there’. For example: Ohio is always there even though I am in California. My body is the tool that locates my presence at a 3 dimensional location, which happens to be in California. Therefore I am not in Ohio.

When I took physics classes in school the idea that time was the 4th dimension was introduced to me. It’s not controversial, it’s considered a common understanding that time is the 4th dimension. However it’s described as a more restrictive dimension in that I cannot choose to move backward, I can only move forward. Likewise I cannot speed up or slow down time, I can only move forward at the fixed rate which cannot be changed. (I know there are plenty of alternative theories to the movement of time and what is possible, but as they aren’t relevant to this discussion let’s table that for the moment) So here we are with time as a forth dimension. We’ve already established that it behaves like the other 3 dimensions, it has two directions, past and future.

Now consider my earlier idea, “Ohio exists, even when I’m not there”. So with that in mind, it’s easy to extrapolate that time being a dimension, the past and the future already exist too and they don’t cease to exist simply because I am not there.

And, in this model we are discussing consciousness is our time tool. Just as the body allows me to occupy a position in 3D space, my consciousness allows me to occupy a moment in time. Consciousness is a tool to fix my presence at a
specific locale in time.
Let’s work through an analogy.

Picture a vinyl record with a spiral groove in it starting at the center of the disk and working it’s way out all they way to the edge.

The needle plays a specific sequence of the music off the record. But while the record is playing, the whole record exists, not just the part of the record that is being played.

The universe is the vinyl record. Our consciousness is the needle. The present moment we are aware of, is the position of the needle on the record.

It’s all there, all the time, but I am only experiencing a single moment of the record.
I am the needle playing on the record, and experiencing the audio signal coming out at that moment. Put in other terms, my consciousness is a tool as the needle is a tool and
the point of that tool is to allow us to focus on and experience this single moment so we can be, observe and experience the illusion of doing…

For those of you still with me, next week I’ll jump off the wagon and describe how this model still works with free will and I’ll even throw in a little reincarnation to stir up the pot.

Until next week…

Namaste

Kevin

“Did you see that?!”

“See What?”

“Up in the clouds, just off to the right. It looked like a bright light. It was there for a moment and then darted off. That way. It was just sitting there and then moved really quickly over towards the east.”

“Come on! Are you joking with me? I didn’t see anything. Neither did you. You’re funny!”

It has happened to us all, we’ve seen something, experienced something, understood something that doesn’t mesh. Something beyond what we’re willing to talk about or share. But we know it happened. We know we saw it. Or did we?

It’s happened to me. Even as I write this I think back to my posts from a year ago. As I wrote about my body talk sessions and the insights they provided me. And now, a year distant from them my analytical mind says “You were just imagining that helped. You just like to think that worked.” But I know it did, I know it helped, but the further I get from it, the easier it is to dismiss it. The easier it is to roll it into the ball of experiences, that don’t quite mesh with the societal version of accepted reality, and tuck it in a corner.

But letting go is more sinister than losing the experience. It’s more powerful than forgetting an anomaly. It’s symbolic, and symptomatic, of our plight to see beyond this physical plane. There are experiences all around us that if we only allow ourselves to process, point us to a higher truth, something beyond what we’ve been taught and told and trained. Something mystical, something powerful, something realer (sorry, not a real word). More real?

It is symptomatic of our inability to hold onto the mystical.

The mystical has to be revealed individually. A group mystical experience doesn’t really work as well as each person, individually, being offered the opportunity to break through the veil. Each person exposed in their own personal way to a snapshot that can change their thinking, their values, their life. This cannot be done en masse.

I’m reminded of the lyrics to a Sting song, All This Time:

Men go crazy in congregations
But they only get better
One by one

Truth is revealed to us as individuals, and it is our burden and our privilege as individuals to think for ourselves, process for ourselves and believe for ourselves. It is up to us to embrace and process our mystical experiences. It is our job to treasure those experiences and nurture the new knowledge towards a growth of consciousness that can only come to you as an individual.

So I encourage you to think back to your spiritual experiences. These treasures, the gold currency of the spirit, and look again at what it may mean. Because, “Yes! You really did see that.”

Namaste,

Kevin

I remember time and again hearing this as a child. “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you do it?”

Sometimes it came from outside sources, but frequently it was from my own parents. Apparently there was an epidemic of bridge jumpings in their youth and it left a permanent scar on a generation of parents eager to reference it as the ultimate example of peer pressure.

Of course it’s a scare tactic. Of course it’s scary. The visual of jumping off a bridge, no support to grab on to, once your in the air, you are out of control. Plummeting to your doom with all your lemming friends that en mass decided to go bridge jumping that day.

And while it can be a lucrative tactic for awareness in a teenager of how peer pressure can cause us to do harmful things, it doesn’t always stick. Or in fact it has stuck in the opposite way. Bare with me for a moment as I walk through this.

We live in a generation that is afraid of jumping off bridges. We were duly warned have avoided that pitfall, while in fact missing the point of the lesson. Nobody is jumping off bridges anymore. We are all too afraid. We are all too concerned with the results of that jump that nobody does it. And now we follow peer pressure to not jump off the bridge. Everybody is doing it. (or more precisely not doing it)

We live in a culture of fear. Fear traps and enslaves. Fear makes people easy to manipulate. Fear makes people easy to herd. Fear makes people fall prey to peer pressure. The very same thing that our parents were warning us about as teens is now the cultural control mechanism that keeps us all in line. And we’re afraid to do anything different.

Please bare in mind, I’m not asking you to consider jumping off an actual bridge. I’m asking you to address your fear and see if it’s really worth holding onto. I’m asking you to consider that the very thing we were warned about avoiding, peer pressure, is now the same thing that holds you back. I’m asking you to consider no longer being afraid and no longer following the crowd and beginning to trust yourself and think for yourself. I’m asking you to learn how to jump off a metaphorical bridge and follow your instincts instead of someone else’s.

Jumping off a bridge is not easy. Especially when nobody else is doing it. But pause for a minute and ask why we’re so afraid of bridges. The answers might surprise you.

Namaste,

Kevin

I am a saint.

I am an jerk.

I am God’s gift to mankind.
I am a menace to society.

I am the cause of pain and suffering.

I am a salve to the wounds of the world.

I am the full spectrum of life on this planet.

I am human.
I am Kevin.

I am all that.

The challenge of being all that, is accepting, what all that is. We will have good days, and bad days. We will be good to people, we will be bad to people. We will be idolized, we will be demonized. We will be all that.

To look at only the good things we do and say that defines our character is sugarcoating and a falsehood.

To look at only the bad things we do and say that defines our character is defeatist and a falsehood.

To say that we are simply the sum of our actions is to deny the power of a single act.

To say that we are defined by a single act is to deny the sum of our actions.

There is a sanskrit word, Maya, simply defined it means illusion, or more accurately delusion. Maya refers to the mental state in which most of us live, accepting the input that meshes with our world view and denying the input that clashes.  We have a very easy time bringing in the like, the similar, those things that agree with us. And we have a very difficult time accepting those things that we have not programmed ourselves to accept. Maya is this illusion created by our filtering. The illusion is created by our accepting of things and rejecting other things to make up a reality our mind can believe. But maya is not the truth.

Accept that you will have be good and you will be bad. You will be saintly and you will be a sinner. You will have good days and you will have bad days.

Or, as stated in the immortal words of U2
Some days are dry, some days are leaky
Some days come clean, other days are sneaky
Some days take less, but most days take more
Some slip through your fingers and onto the floor

Some days are better than others

You are all that, and that is exactly what you are intended to be. Embrace the experience and open your process to accept the things that don’t always mesh. A full experience of life is happening all around you, your job is to stop denying it. Be All That.

Namaste,

Kevin

If it hasn’t happened recently, I’m sure you have a memory of it, “Okay everybody count off by 1 and 2 and break into 2 groups. 1’s over here and 2’s over here.”

“1”.”2″.”1″.”2″….(kids counting off (or adults))

And everybody splits into two teams. two sides. Suddenly from ‘We’, there is now ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. They become the competition, they become the enemy, they are different, because they are not Us.

Whether you’re divided by the white lines of a touch ball court, the gray lines of the vaccine debate, or the red lines of pro life or pro choice, the reaction always seems to be the same. ‘They’ are out to get us! They stand for everything we stand against. They must be stopped, they must be corrected, they must be educated or put down.

The touch ball game ends when the bell rings and recess is over. But dividing into categories never does. It is human nature to seek differences. We train our minds at it, we revel in it, our brains are good at it.

It’s a game we play as children, “Can you spot the difference in these two pictures?” And our brains revel in it, it’s what they were made for.

But there is such a thing as “Too much of a good thing”.

We tend to subdivide, to accidentally insult, we assume those around us are the same and deride those that are different. When we are lucky our friend points out that they feel differently, when we are not we have begun to distance ourselves from our friend.

It’s not that we have to be guarded in everything we say. But we need to be compassionate. If you find yourself starting to make a statement such as “I can’t believe that he would…” or “I heard that she believes…”, stop and consider your impetus. What are your goals in saying it? Are you really concerned with that the other person believes? Or hoping to find an ally that will back you up in what you believe? Is the other person really completely wrong? Or are you just hoping to find someone else that will reinforce what you believe as right?

It has happened time and time again in my life, I will make a statement to a friend like “Did you know Andy thinks <this> is true?” And the friend that I am talking to will have more information than I do, and explain why Andy came to that conclusion and in some cases what lead him down that path. And I am blessed for it, because my world opens up. I see things with a new prospective and realize that my way of thinking, the way I learned things, is not the only way to look at it.

And when I’m having my more enlightened moments, I can change the question. It’s no longer gossip, it’s now inquiry. “Do you know why Andy thinks <this> is true? I’ve not heard of that before.”

I came across this potent quote in the last week. “Reality is that, that when which you stop believing it in, refuses to go away.” -Philip K. Dick (Renowned science fiction author)

If you stop and consider all the things you believe in, a great deal of them will go away if you stop believing in them. Even better when you stop holding up a false belief, the reality of a situation, or experience, can present itself instead of the false representation that you’ve made up.

The human mind is excellent at spotting differences. But this is a very base function. We are capable and encouraged by our higher minds to spot the difference and learn from it, as opposed to dividing into teams as a result of it. We are always encouraged to “Be not quick to anger.” I would also encourage you to “Be not quick to split up into small groups.”

With that in mind, everybody count off by 1, and then break into one large group. There is only Us.

Namaste,

Kevin

Today is a simple message. It’s a reminder to have fun. Life can get WAAAAY too serious if you let it. In fact, it’s not always a matter of giving life permission to get serious, it just sort of creeps up on you when you’re not paying attention. The next thing you know, you haven’t laughed in way too long.

Have you ever noticed it’s hard to give a high five and not enjoy it? Well maybe it’s just me. But when you give a high five, and I mean really give a high five, not just hold your hand up, you have to smile and get excited.

Take some time today and tell a joke. Congratulate someone with a high five. Give someone you care about a random hug and tickle. This last one works great on 4 year olds, but can be effective with spouses and other people too. Just make sure you know them well enough. 🙂

Here are a few bad jokes to get you started.

What’s green, very small, and goes up and down?

.

.

.

.

A pea in an elevator.

My personal favorite (and I do apologize for telling this one.)

What’s brown and sounds like a bell?

.

.

.

DUNG!

And to all my readers, that are comfortable with it, big internet hug from me. 🙂

Namaste,

Kevin

Cast your mind back to the late 1980’s, when Star Trek: The Next Generation began. An actor named Wil Wheaton played a character on the show named Wesley Crusher. It’s an interesting phenomenon to me that I usually begin to like an actor by the characters they play on TV, and then I begin to dislike them as I learn more about the person they are. It’s not always the case, but sadly it has happened. With Wil Wheaton I had the exact opposite experience. I wasn’t always a fan of Wesley Crusher, probably cause I was jealous and wanted to be him (The guy flying around on the enterprise, not the actor). But in the late 90’s I came across his blog and the more I learned about his real life, the more I appreciated him. He even introduced me to one of my favorite bands, Soul Coughing.

This week he’s reached out to me once more through a viral video. What I really appreciate is that he was the right person, in the right place at the right time to help the person that asked the question. And that we live in a world that can appreciate these moments.

Take a few minutes and watch this video if you can. link.

The summary is that he highlights that the girl being called nerd is going to be okay. I have a hard time summarizing what he says to her because he makes so many good points, and it’s still a painful topic.

Nerd is an interesting title.

In childhood, it was a label of oppression. A label of difference. A mark of shame.

I’ve heard it said that “Sticks and Stones will break my bones, but words hurt more than anything.” I have had many physical injuries over the year. But bruises and scratches heal. Sometimes they leave a scar, but I can press on it and it doesn’t hurt. However when I think back to some moments in my childhood involving teasing, I can still find myself wincing in pain.

But as time went on, quite a bit of time, and I came to realize that the title ‘nerd’ was applied to me for all the things I loved about myself, it shifted. It has taken years of healing, and I’m still working on it, but I now proudly wear the title nerd. It’s even highlighted on one of my favorite t-shirts.

The very things that make me stand out and called attention in my youth, make me outstanding and call attention in my adulthood. I’ve just had to find the right people who appreciate them, and me.

We have not been brought here to be everything to everyone. We are simply tasked with being the best us that we can be. Or put into less plurality, I am tasked with being the best Me I can be. And being the best I can be involves accepting me and loving me as I am.

In the words of Wil Wheaton, “It does get easier”.

Namaste,

Kevin