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Three Ethics to Change the World

1) Do no unnecessary harm.
2) Do not presume.
3) Do not compare experience.

The world doesn’t need changing. We do. Read on and live the three ethics and be changed.

Do no unnecessary harm
We can’t live without harming someone or something. Though we can completely avoid doing unnecessary harm. This requires that we are intelligent and compassionately Aware in our state of being, that we embody our power while being gracious in the face of another’s. One requisite for this is being centered and grounded in our body—in the moment—here and now.

We need to be connected with and informed by the non-ordinary forces of the Mystery which guide our choosing and our decision taking—rather than making choices from our emotions and understandings. (The “how” of doing these things is another conversation.)

Do not presume
Nearly all or our difficulties are brought on by ourselves—save for being caught and injured in natural disasters, political or environmental calamities for example. Thinking we know is problematic: thinking we know more, or better, or what’s up when we are actually caught up in the folly of the fables we’ve told ourselves. This is the status quo for most of us. Everything we think we know is story—made up or adopted. Over the years my teacher, Paul Richards, passed these ethics to others and myself—without saying more than identifying them. Me passing them to you is an example of presuming—thinking I know.

Ethics are a model to guide us. The wonderful thing about a model is that we have a model. The problem with a model is that we have a model (limiting our creativity).

Do not compare experience
She’s doing better than me. I’m envious of so and so. I wish I had his job. She’s prettier. He is respected more than me. So and so has been published. I haven’t. I’m the better parent. At least I’m not a drunk. My life isn’t as difficult as his.

Blah. Blah. Blah.

• Psychological experience
Psychologists say “experience is what we do with what happens to us”. They’re correct if we limit the use of the word to mean psychological experience—thoughts and understanding—which is, by the way, a consequence of transforming direct sensory and extra-sensory experience into language and thought.

“I think I know what a strawberry tastes like…” — Jody Richard

But there is more!

• Direct sensory experience

“…until I’m tasting the one exploding in my mouth.” — Jody Rickard

We are sentient: We see, hear, feel, taste and smell things directly—before and without involving thought.

Again, there is more!

• Direct non-ordinary experience
We possess, distinct from our five senses, an array of perceptual faculties through which we experience the non-ordinary realities suffusing our lives. Generally girls and women are best at this, particularly when they keep them active—something patriarchy eschews. Too, there are sensitive boys and men in the world who perceive the non-ordinary.

“I awoke knowing I’d been selected for the promotion.”
“Out of the blue I knew something tragic had happened to so and so.”
“I saw her across the campus quadrangle for the first time and knew we would marry.”
“The phone rang and I knew it was her.”
“Suddenly I knew what I had to do…”
“The solution came to me in the shower.”

There are forces of the Mystery awaiting our detection… awaiting our collaboration… awaiting our co-creation.

Comparing experience is a thought-based-psychological undertaking. It’s predicated on values and beliefs which are themselves constructions of our own, or another’s. They are not real. In the right context they are useful. Others, not so much as they destabilize ourselves and others, impede intimacy, our connection to our creativity, to the Mystery.

1) Do no unnecessary harm.
2) Do not presume.
3) Do not compare experience.

The world doesn’t need changing. We do. Live the three ethics and be changed.

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Self First, Unselfishly: A Study in Grace

Tree of Life — Gustav Klimt

 

“Poems are rough notations for the music we are.” — Rumi (Coleman Barks translation)

 

Rumi’s acumen in perceiving people as music is not such a stretch given that science describes reality

 

in terms of frequencies—waves of matt

er, sound, light, electromagnetism and so on. So our suspicions of not being who or what we’ve thought ourselves to be may be spot on. No wonder when left to their own devices children dance—do they still hear and feel their music?

Rumi also said there is an Awareness present in everyone that existed before the Universe itself existed; and it, and ourselves, came out of that Awareness. Not the other way round. Hmm? What if this Awareness is but a single notation? and what if this single notation is an original score? and what if this original score is a love song? and what if this love song—when audible and palpable in our lives counterbalances the juggernaut of disharmony in our world?

Musing further, I love the French concept of étude. It means a study in an instrumental musical composition, which is usually short, of considerable difficulty, and the étude is designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular musical skill. Are we not composing our lives? Do we not by late mid-life appreciate life’s short duration? Do we not experience considerable difficulty in effecting our desires to help others? to be genuine in ourselves? and in our expression and movement?

So what specifically is our study?—our étude? What is the particular skill we’re here to perfect? It is to live in ways in which our thought and action reveal the luminosity and numinous beauty of the single notation of the extant Awareness within us? This Awareness, the one Rumi reminds us of—the one seemingly oblivious to us—the one that is The original score, it is—I contend, a love song.

Isn’t it odd though that such a love song—our love song—the what and who that we essentially are—is largely obscured and drowned out by our upbringing and the cacophonies of our time? I submit to you that it need not.

Let the beauty of the love song that we are move and resound and refract through the instrumentality of our thought and action. What practice need we undertake to develop this skill? Placing the self first in our lives and do so unselfishly. Honoring the integrity and dignity of the original score and the love song that we are. Doing this by placing ourselves at the front of queue. The top of the list. Making ourselves and meeting our needs priority one without entitlement or arrogance. Without injuring or shorting others. Without cruelty or diminishment.

What blasphemy am I suggesting? Is your psyche rebelling? If so, consider the resistance a measure of the mettle of our indoctrination, the rigor and strength of pressures to conform and domesticate and diminish ourselves—even though doing so occurs at our expense.

Placing ourselves first in our life is The prerequisite to fulfilling the promises of our life. It is:
1) Recognizing the imperative to graciously live interdependently in cooperative and creative collaboration.
2) Loving, valuing, supporting and making place for the feminine and her voice, standing, methods and motion.
3) To genuinely be ourselves living in our own way—which means:
a) actually and genuinely helping others while caring for ourselves equivalently;
b) opening to and participating in the Mystery Herself, the realities suffusing us all—not through belief or contemplation—but rather, through movement in Her realms, and being changed by these experiences; and by
c) making our lives themselves—and our unique creative expression—impeccable works of art.

We will not and cannot fulfill the promise of our lives without placing ourselves first! We will not be first among equals. Remember: No one is equal to another. There are always those more powerful and those less. We can, however, be equally gracious in our differences. We can live and work interdependently. And cooperatively. And collaboratively. But can only do so by placing ourselves first in our lives and doing so unselfishly. Putting oneself first is The Study in Grace—Our étude.

Look around: independent selfish agency and agenda prevail in the world. It is increasing at an increasing rate.

Bringing our love song to the fore can counterbalance the selfishness that is imperiling us all. The more of us doing so, the sooner the tipping point. The sooner global change. Whether we do this timely enough I don’t know. It’s worth doing so nonetheless.

Lastly, remember please that the now canonized never-take-no-for-an-answer Mother Teresa did everything she did for herself. She knew the power of placing herself first. She knew the benefits to self and others of doing so.

Happy New Year!

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Grace Report

Mahatma Gandhi: “Whatever you do in life will be insignificant but it’s very important that you do it.”

A year ago this month my elderly father took his life ostensibly without letting others know what’s up. Yet, the morning my brother told me, I realized that my dad had been telling me as much for the last two months during our frequent phone calls. He told me not in words of course, but in the spaces in between. In his non-ordinary messages—those things communicated without words or para-verbals or physical analogue. He told me in energy. Women know about such communications more often than men. Nonetheless he’d been telling me and I remained oblivious.

He’d taken as much as he could stand. His death, and its cause, prompted (as soon as I hung up the phone) an immediate and involuntary response where my body dropped to the couch in loud explosive paroxysms of sobbing that were all too brief. Regrettably, my expression was interrupted and I couldn’t recapture it for six months. In the interim, my body expressed its sadness and grief and anger with four months of bronchitis. What needs moving finds its way irrespective.

The thing is, when grief rises, it all comes. All of them. The ones I’d long forgotten, and the existential ones—those I didn’t know I had. Along with these were angers and rages issuing from early childhood development breaches and ouches lying unexpressed beneath the compost of familial and cultural mores and other restrictions on my nature. This year I had the good fortune of having a good guide and workable maps to navigate the terrain of moving my emotions. To say the year has been difficult is an understatement. Though I talked about my dad with one of my brothers, and my sister and mom a day or two before the anniversary of Dad’s death, the anniversary itself passed unnoticed. I’m not yet through my many griefs and angers but this year, for the first time it seems, the gift my dad gave me in his death has enabled me to get to the bottom of things I’ve wanted to remedy for a long time. He hadn’t seen or met me in his life. He never knew me. He saw instead what he projected. A pandemic circumstance I think. One worthy of our healing efforts.

I was prompted by a dream in July to go to the Alvord Desert in Eastern Oregon. I went there by myself for four days in August. People who know me know that I’ve a mystical thing going on and have non-ordinary experiences, and use non-ordinary forces in my work. Suffice it to say that in the desert I had a significant intellectually indefensible experience culminating in an integration and a reorganization of whatever I am, for which I am wholly grateful. I’ve been utterly changed, and so too has my work.

Before leaving to work in Taiwan this fall I felt I needed to go to Kaohsiung in the south of the country, a port-of-call during the Vietnam War. Though the city’s skyline was unrecognizable, the mountain scape was. Attempting to put words to my experience this time round seems something I’m incapable of doing: all I think I know is that something moved and began finding its way back to me. Equally unexpected, the next day I had lunch with a Vietnamese woman and we talked of the war. I had no awareness that I had felt so betrayed in my involvement in that “Police action” as history euphemistically regards it. My dad had been in WW11. My grandfather in WW1. Something moved for each of us this autumn and I am grateful for the changes.

As to the healing power of illness, well, my wife’s recent foray into chemo infusions remains quite a teacher. Lesson one: don’t carry what is not mine. Two: stay centered and grounded here and now. Three: sensibly manage where I put my focus and attention. Four: Keep love in the foreground.

What sheltering Grace this life gives us. What Grace!

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