Spirit of Now

“Waiting Is”—a phrase immortalized in Robert Heinlein’s celebrated sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

For most of us waiting is not easy, often a bore. Waiting for a bus or train, we look for something to do to pass the time. Sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, we idle away the minutes thumbing through magazines of no particular interest.

We want the waiting to be over with, so that we can get on with whatever is the next task at hand. Yet in treating waiting this way, we deny ourselves a most valuable opportunity.

Pure waiting, not waiting for any event to happen, just waiting without wanting, can be a profound spiritual practice.

When you simply wait, not waiting for anything in particular, not wishing things were different than than they are, the mind relaxes. And, as you let go of wanting, you will probably find your awareness of the present moment expanding.

Many, from Buddha to Ram Dass and Eckart Tolle, have encouraged us to be more aware of the present, to “be here, now”. And numerous practices aim to help us become more aware of the present. Most, however, lead to focussing of the attention on some aspect of the present—the breath, a visual object, a mantra. The focus may be effortless, nevertheless it is there, a very faint directing of the attention.

With pure waiting, on the other hand, there is no attempt to be aware of any particular aspect of the present. Instead, with nothing to do, no particular thing to wait for, there is space for more of the present to reveal itself. We begin to notice aspects of our world we were not aware of before—the sound of a clock, or a distant conversation; a tree gently waving in the breeze; the touch of clothes against the skin. It does not matter what. It will probably be different every time, simply because the present is different from one moment to the next.

As you get the hang of simply waiting, you will find yourself being present in a relaxed, innocent, undirected way.

So the next time you have to wait for something, use the time as an opportunity to become more awake. Instead of waiting for that something, simply wait. No expectations. Simply stopping, and waiting, with an open mind.

Nor do we need to wait for a late bus or be sitting in a “waiting room” before we can practice waiting. Any moment of the day we can choose to pause for a while and simply wait.

Waiting without expectation for whatever is next. Maybe a bird flies past the window. Perhaps the refrigerator starts up. Or we find we have wandered off on some thought. It doesn’t matter. Waiting is.

You can start right now. Pause. Take a breath. Relax… And wait…

We have heard plenty about the dangers of peak oil, global warming, banking meltdowns, and global pandemics, but the most critical crisis of all, that of food, looms largely unnoticed.

When we have thought about a food crisis it has usually been in terms of there not being enough food. But in recent times a new specter has raised its head. The food is there, but the price of food is rising so fast that the world’s poor can no longer afford it. They can no longer afford the most basic commodity of life.

In the last three years, the global food prices have doubled. The fastest rises have been in the staple cereals. In the last year (2007), the price of corn went up by 30%, rice by 74%, soya by 87%, and wheat by 130%. The people most hit by such increases are the world’s poor. Some have to spend 80% of their income on food. What happens when they have to pay even more? The answer is beginning to hit the news—food riots in Haiti, strikes and protests in Egypt, 30 million in Bangladesh at risk of starvation.

There are several reasons for the rise in food prices. The most basic is supply and demand. Increasing numbers to feed without similar increases in supply, pushes up prices. Higher oil prices mean higher food production costs—farm equipment, fertilizers, and transport. Droughts in major wheat producing areas such as Australia and Kazakhstan have had major impact on supply. As growing numbers in India and China rise out of poverty, diets change. Hundreds of millions of people are wanting to eat more meat and dairy products; yet producing one pound of beef takes ten times that amount of grain, forcing the price of staple foods even higher.

Added to these, there is the crazy idea of alleviating global warning by growing biofuels. Leaving aside the question of whether this does or does not result in a net reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide, every hectare of farmland given over to growing biofuels, is a hectare not growing food. To think that growing food for cars should take precedent over growing food for people shows just how crazy some people have become. Those governments, such as the USA and UK,  who have jumped on the biofuel bandwagon are about to have a very rude awakening as the food crisis begins to take center stage.

What can be done? The factors pushing food prices higher are here to stay (for a good while at least). The impact on the world’s poor (and soon, the not so poor) will increase. More and more people will not be able to afford to eat, or not afford much else. Instead of rising out of poverty they will sink back in. Increasingly, the problem will be seen as economic; the food is there, it just costs too much.

We are heading inexorably towards a time when the nations of the developed countries will have to subsidize the food of the world’s poor. Right wing conservatives in the US baulk at the idea of social welfare in their own country, and without large numbers dying of starvation in the USA they can get away with that, but when the world’s media shows food price riots across the world, and people starving by the millions. attitudes will begin to shift. The laissez-faire free market ideology that lies beneath rising food prices will have to be overridden. In its place—as far as food goes at least—we will have to move towards a form of global social welfare. Anathema as that may be to some.

Offset your driving by becoming a vegetarian!

A study by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, Japan, showed that producing a kilogram of beef leads to the emission of greenhouse gases with a warming potential equivalent to 36.4 kilograms of carbon dioxide. That is about the same as driving the average European car for 250 kilometres. The production also consumes enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

Over two-thirds of the energy goes towards producing and transporting the animals’ feed. The calculations did not include the impact of managing farm infrastructure and transporting the meat, so the total environmental load is higher than the study suggests.

(Animal Science Journal, DOI: 10.1111/j.1740-0929.2007.00457.x).

“Just let go” we are often told, yet letting go never seems easy. This is often because we treat it as something we need to do; but letting go is an “undoing”, a releasing of the “holding on.”

The first CD explores: The nature of attachment and non-attachment. Inner freedom as the freedom to choose how we see the world. The nature of the real Self, essential being. The natural wisdom of the Self, and how to use it for guidance. it takes listeners through an exercise designed to help them let go of a fixed way of seeing a situation, allowing new perspectives to reveal themselves. By letting go of resistance, we can find relief and compassion.

The second CD contains instruction in a basic meditation practice that allows us to become fully aware of the present moment.. The emphasis is on complete effortlessness.

This is followed by a second meditation using the guidance of our inner knowing to deepen meditation and open to an even greater ease in being present.

See Link on Home Page - www.peterussell.com

Charging interest on a loan is so intrinsic to our economic system that few of us ever question it. Yet usury—as the practice is called—has been banned, at one time or another, by just about every religion. Not only does make the rich richer, and the poor poorer—with all the social tensions that engenders. It exacerbates some of the most critical problems of our time, and is fueling the global crisis.

Full article on site: http://www.peterussell.com/SP/Usury.php

Love your self. It’s a common refrain.

One way to interpret this is loving who you are—accepting yourself just as you are, warts and all; having compassion for your shortfalls, while rejoicing in your gifts. Loving ourselves in this way relieves us of much self-judgment and self-criticism.

We can also love ourselves at a deeper emotional level. We can take that feeling of love, which dwells in our hearts, the feeling that we often connect with loving someone else, and allow it to flow towards ourselves. In this case we are not loving our manifest selves, with all their various qualities, we are simply experiencing love for our self. Culturing such feelings of self-love brings deep ease and relief.

Beneath this individual self there is what some traditions call the “true self.” Others call it the pure self, the unconditioned self, the universal self, no-self, essence, pure being, or true nature. It is that which is always there whatever our experience. It is the essence of what we call “I”—something so familiar and personal, and yet on deeper inspection totally impersonal, without any qualities or character. It is the pure am-ness that we know when the thinking mind becomes still, and we rest in primordial awareness.

The taste of this essential self is delicious. Mystics have written volumes of poetry about its blissful nature. Enlightened ones have urged us to discover it, and to soak in the calm and joy it brings. Knowing this true self is so delightful we do need to develop or culture love for it. We cannot help but be in love it with it.

Much of our thinking takes the form of self-talk—conversations we have with ourselves, inside our minds.

Clearly, the original root of this verbal thinking is speech. Speech gave humans the ability to communicate with each other, share experiences, learn from each other, and amass a collective body of knowledge. Using verbal language within our own minds brought many new abilities, including the abilities to rehearse what we might say to another, to recall past conversations, and to plan future actions.

This gave us a whole new way of meeting our needs. We can understand the world around us, how it works, and take steps to improve our circumstances. This is the present root of so much of our thinking.

Needs and Wants

If you look at your own thinking, you will find that a good proportion of it is concerned with meeting a need of some kind or another—the needs for security, approval, love, companionship, status, respect, control, stimulus, comfort, etc..

For many of us, such thinking is going on nearly all the time. Sometimes, it may just be in the background, but it is there, occupying our mental resources. Most of it is a complete waste of time and energy. As Mark Twain famously remarked, “My life has been full of disasters, most of which never happened”.

Looking more closely, you will find that many of these thoughts concern imagined needs—things we imagine we need in order to be happy. We imagine we need someone to regard us in a good light, or we need some new clothes, or we need to eat some gourmet food. These are not true needs; they are “wants” or desires, or in some cases simply preferences. But still they occupy our thoughts.

When we believe we need such things or situations in order to be happy, we become fixated upon getting them, and this leads to no end of thinking about how to get the world to be the way we believe it ought to be.

The Roots of Discontent

This, as so many spiritual teachers have pointed out, is the root of our much of our suffering. By telling ourselves that things need to be different, we create a sense of discontent, a dis-ease.

This is the sad joke about human beings. We all want to find greater contentment, but many of us are so busy worrying about whether or not we will be content sometime in the future, we never allow ourselves to be at ease in the present. Instead, our minds become preoccupied with planning and scheming, worry and anxiety, hopes and fantasies. And when things don’t turn out the way we think they should, we easily fall into anger, grievance, judgment, or depression.

When we do manage to get whatever it is we think we want, we may indeed feel better. But we feel better, not because that particular thing has made us feel better, but because we have, for the moment, stopped creating a sense of discontent. We are no longer disturbing ourselves. But before too long we find something else that is missing, and again fall into discontent. And again start thinking about what we might do to make things the way we want.

Return to Natural Mind

Careful observation of the mind reveals that focusing on a particular thought limits our perception. We become lost in thought, unaware of much is what going on around us. And also what is going on within us; a mind caught up in self-talk is less likely to notice how it is feeling, or how the body feels. Moreover, all this thinking results in a background mental tension. There is a sense of tightness in the mind, a constriction in our consciousness.

The world’s mystical traditions repeatedly affirm that the mind in its natural state—that is, before it is filled with thoughts, worries, plans, and regrets—is a mind that is at ease. In one way or another, through meditation, prayer, dance, ritual, or service, they seek to undo the damaging consequences or over-thinking and return us to the state of ease that is our spiritual birthright.

It is a windy day. Across the street is a seven-storey office block with a flat roof. Two pigeons fly across the rooftop and over the edge. The gusting wind catches the pair, throwing them around in the air, tumbling them down towards the ground.

Nearing the ground, they fly out of the wind. Then around the building and back up on to the roof. They again fly across the roof, and out into the wind, and once again tumble towards the ground.

Then they fly around again. And tumble down again.

And on, and on, time after time, all afternoon.

Who said birds don’t play?

Psychologists run laboratory rats through mazes and to test their learning abilities. But this example in the wild beats any laboratory experiment.

Rats had nested in a rockery outside my kitchen door. Wanting to move them away to a more comfortable location in the forest, I set up one of those humane rat traps with a trap door, that allows one to catch the rat in a cage and then transport it somewhere.

I baited the cage with muesli (all I had on hand, but I thought it would do the job), and waited.

After a while a baby rat ventured by. It found the entrance to the cage, scrambled in eagerly after the food. It crossed the trap door, and was trapped. Good, I thought, I’ll just finish what I am doing, then take it away somewhere more rat-friendly.

The baby rat meanwhile scrambled around, looking for a way out. After a while it hooked a claw under the trap door, pulled it down and ran out, and back into the rockery.

Damn. I won’t leave it alone in the cage next time, I thought.

Five minutes later the baby rat returned. This time it ran straight up to the trap. In through the entrance. Over the trap door. Picked up some food. Turned around. Hooked a claw under the trap door, pulled it down, and ran out.

That baby rat had learned in just one experience. No experimenters running it through tests time and again. A natural intelligence as good as any human in a similar situation.

(The third time I was ready, and grabbed the cage before it had a chance to escape.)

It was recently shown that elephants passed the mirror test for self-consciousness. Along with chimps, orangutans, and dolphins, they recognized that they are seeing themselves in the mirror. However, other animals that may not pass the mirror test in its hard form, i.e. a positive recognizing themselves, do pass a softer form of the test in that they do not interpret their reflection as that of another.

Many times I have watched pet dogs and cats walk past a mirror. Occasionally they give their reflection a glance, but mostly they take no notice. In so doing they demonstrate that, although they may not recognise themselves in the reflection, they do know that they are not seeing another dog or cat.

I suspect this more rudimentary “not-other” awareness (as opposed to true self-awareness) is to be found in any animal that drinks from water. As an animal leans forward to drink, it is likely to see its own reflection face to face. if it interpreted this as another animal looming close, it would probably back off (and, if continually repeated, die of thirst). For such creatures, there is a clear evolutionary advantage in the inhibition of the “other” response when seeing their own reflection in water.

This more prevalent “not-other” awareness is probably an important step in the emergence of true self-awareness.