Ch. 1 ~ Introduction
After many years of Buddhist study and practice, and being influenced by less traditional non-duality speakers, I was inspired to develop a contemplation practice called “Knowing Gaia”. I’ve combined my experience of meditation and a Buddhist world view with a more contemporary approach which is not based on any spiritual authority. In “Knowing Gaia” a scientific world view is bent a little bit in the direction of intuition, poetry and mysticism without making up any stories which contradict our modern common sense. The text is more of an invitation than a guide, and readers are expected to make their own discoveries which may well be radically different from my own.
Gaia, from Greek mythology, can be thought of as ‘Mother Earth’. The mythology includes stories of creation, primordial conflict and shifting rulers. Here, I’m using a contemporary concept of Gaia. James Lovelock, an English scientist and inventor, started it. He was working for NASA investigating planetary atmospheres when he started thinking about how very odd Earth’s atmosphere is, how unstable and unlikely. Of course this is a result of life processes exchanging gases, impossible for a non-living planet. He realized that not only does life adapt to changing conditions, but also changes conditions itself in a dynamic, self-regulating system.
There was nothing anthropomorphic in his idea, but his friend, novelist William Golding, found it poetic and suggested calling it ‘Gaia’ rather than a more prosaic ‘Earth systems science’.
Some people have been enchanted by the poetry into thinking that our Earth will take care of us. Unfortunately, we don’t know that. Evidence so far suggests that Gaia is heartless. We are only as special as we make ourselves to be. Gaia is mother to all her children - frog and fly, Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens. Life forms thrive, or not, in an ever-changing web. Everyone needs something to eat. Animals eat plants which were thriving on the carbon dioxide exhaled by those very animals. The animals are thriving on the oxygen produced by the plants they are killing. Yet the whole complex system not only continues, but continues to develop more complexity. It almost seems alive, and so, following Lovelock, I’m calling it Gaia.
I’m setting aside the fact that traditional ideas of ‘mother’ imply the existence of ‘father’. Let’s just say the Sun is our father, and go ahead with Gaia as our subject. Think of the earth and everything on it. The oceans are home to phytoplankton cells in the billions, each separately working away at photosynthesis, releasing trace amounts of oxygen. Diatoms not only give us oxygen, but lock carbon in their miniscule shells.The shells drop down through the water when the diatom dies, taking that bit of carbon with them, cooling the planet, to the benefit of the living diatoms and everyone else who likes the temperature the way it is. Having discovered the amazing convenience of fossil fuels, we humans are about to defeat their efforts. Certain species of jellyfish think that’s a great idea! They are already showing up in unprecedented numbers. So, who is choosing the future?
At the time of the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, small mammals were living in burrows, out of danger from the huge beasts who had ruled the planet for 175 million years. These small rat-like mammals would not be our first choice of an ancestor, but hiding in their burrows they survived the fires and extreme conditions following the impact, and became our ancestors. From a combination of chance, time and natural selection in a complex, self-regulating system, we merged.
Ch. 2 ~ Taking a leap into the deeply personal
Contemplation is a way of investigating experiences which are particularly difficult to capture in symbols. “The name you can say isn’t the real name” is how Ursula LeGuin expresses it in the beginning of her version of the Tao Te Ching. But there’s no point in trying to stop thinking. Any attempt we make to stop thinking only fuels conflict resulting in either more frantic thinking, or a frozen silence, neither of which is productive of insight. And it is insight that I’m after, that’s the goal - to bring awareness into what I’ve been ignoring.
How do I do that? First, it’s important to state that how I do it is probably different from how you do it. Let’s not get religious or ideological about a process which is so essentially personal. The question is simple and pragmatic - what works? And how do we know it is working? Let’s say you’re on a boat touring Antarctica and you suddenly feel a vastness which doesn’t make you feel small, but includes you with a sudden loss of boundary. You look around at your fellow passengers and feel a surge of warmth, an appreciation for how unique and precious every single one of them is. Or let’s say I’m in the garden picking strawberries and I ease into a vivid perception of red and green which makes me feel so much more alive than usual. The tangle of leaf, flower and fruit suddenly seems miraculous, a gift. I have an urge to share this gift with everyone I know. In both cases we have unexpectedly discovered something about ourselves, and about Gaia. Something we were not noticing before. In both cases words like vastness, precious, vivid, gift, contain only the slightest hint of the experience. What caused that shift in perception? Was it something we did sometime in the past? Was it brain chemistry? Was it a stage in a quest? Was it because we listened to one of the many people giving advice or teachings? Who knows. We can only make a guess and judge for ourselves how to proceed.
Developing an appetite for a state of unabsorbed flow has been very helpful for me. Usually we experience something like ‘flow’ when absorbed in some activity. Any activity which absorbs our attention, while encouraging a flow state, is what I’m calling ‘absorbed flow’. We lose track of time, and effort becomes a simple flow of energy. What I mean by ‘unabsorbed flow’ is something quite different. You don’t lose yourself in an activity. Also, you don’t enter into any non-ordinary mind state as with a drug or other extreme or unusual experience. It feels completely like ‘plain old me’, but with a crucial difference. The ‘me’ in the unabsorbed flow state is light, often to the point of dissolution, but not because it’s been absorbed into an activity. Rather, there has been a thinning of a sense of separation. We become more available to what is actually here.
Contemplation comes naturally when we relax with uncertainty. We don’t need to manufacture any special mind states. Our conditioning, however, is well tablished. We think we like it because it is so familiar. I’m suggesting there is something more natural, more nourishing. Doing something unnatural might help us get back in touch with the basics. Using the principles of Gaia, I have some questions and statements which help me understand myself and the world better by serving as prompts for contemplation.
Here are the ten prompts I’m using. You could try making up your own. Just think of some questions or statements which will challenge your own deeply held assumptions.
Ten Prompts
P1 ~ Since living systems do not exist independently in nature, what am I? What does that feel like?
P2 ~ Integrity is a function of how well a system is integrated. Are any conflicting emotions currently creating instability in me?
P3 ~ The problem with living in a dream is that real people get hurt. What’s my most recent example of that?
P4 ~ If I’m not feeling my inner body right now, I’m not feeling anything. Take a moment to check in.
P5 ~ Since Gaia is what’s real, any gap in honesty separates us. I can only be honest with myself if I listen to my whole self. How can I do that?
P6 ~ How much power do you think you have? How much do you want? How much does the other person have? How much do you think they want?
P7 ~ What am I being touched by right now, physically, emotionally, intellectually?
P8 ~ How does ideology creep into your thinking? What does it offer you? What does it take away from knowing Gaia?
P9 ~ We’re breathing, we’re feeling the force of gravity. Paying attention to both at once places us squarely in the presence of Gaia. Try it.
P10 ~ Does Gaia have a self? What would that mean?
Now I’m going to circle through the prompts a number of times using a different lens each time. Feel free to skip around throughout the text. This is not a narrative. Rather, it’s a series of reflections. You may find some provocative, some obvious, others irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. Go with what helps you expand your own direct perception, and call it what you will.
Touching Gaia can be a bit of a shock, causing a reflexive withdrawal. That’s why I think it’s helpful to keep coming back, from different angles, with different points of contemplation, none more important than any other. I’m hoping that what I’ve written will invite you into your own language and natural pathways. Keep in mind that we are doing an investigation together. No one is telling us how it should be done, or what we will find.
For a bit of refreshment, I’ve included some youtube clips. Take a look...
Ch. 3 ~ First Impressions
P1 ~ Since living systems do not exist independently in nature, wha t am I? What does that feel like?
Contemplation begins with our ability to talk to ourselves. This ability can sometimes seem like it’s out of control, turned into an exhausting, meaningless stream of chatter. However, like Gaia, the brain is a self-regulating system. The stream of chatter is not coming from a dumb machine. It is running alongside intelligent awareness. An impulse to slow down and find meaning can arise, fed by our curiosity about ourselves. Probing questions can redirect our attention away from problems we can’t solve, to our most basic problem which is our misunderstanding about who and what we are. These days we have ample information from outside to support us in this inner work. But I have to do the work for myself, no one can do it for me.
P2 ~ Integrity is a function of how well a system is integrated. Are any conflicting emotions currently creating instability in me?
Gaia creates by chance, not by design, and then gives beings free rein to design themselves. We admire flowers without seeing the lines insects can perceive on some petals, leading the way to nectar, pollen and stigma. It’s hard for us to believe that small, random shifts in genetics favoring specific behavior has produced this intricate and highly balanced partnership between bugs and plants with no access to planning ahead. In the past, people made up fantastic stories about invisible sources of intelligence, but our human intelligence gradually asserted its integrity and demanded that explanations be based on observation rather than conjecture. Emotions run between mind and body. Observing my emotions can direct me toward what needs to be integrated.
P3 ~ The problem with living in a diream is that real people get hurt. What’s my most recent example of that?
Accurate predictions transcend our personal hopes and fears. Caught in a dream state, we are trapped in the personal. Stepping outside the dream state, we can perceive our surroundings clearly. We can see how, even with the best intentions, we hurt other people. We can see how they hurt us, in spite of their best intentions. Attempting to choose what I think are the best bits for me, I make bad predictions about the future. Our decisions affect the environment, economy, international politics, all aspects of our world. It’s bewildering. Turning to religion or political ideology for guidance, I miss the complexity of present conditions. So I have to rely on my own intuition, even as I work on refining it. Dreams can help! But only if I’m able to identify a dream as a dream, and make predictions based on what’s possible.
P4 ~ If I’m not feeling my inner body right now, I’m not feeling anything. Take a moment to check in.
We all know the body is a dynamic system of interacting organs, cells, chemical reactions, messages, fluid transport, exchange of gases and home to colonies of microbes. We take all that for granted. When something hurts, we pay attention. What happens if I pay attention to the inner workings when there is no problem? It’s like entering a forest with unexpected small creeks or sudden bursts of sunlight. It’s like noticing the sound of a breeze, call of a bird, odor of damp rotting leaves, an endless feast of sensations, direct perception of Gaia in action. The body wants to listen to itself, the subtle messages which usually go unheard as we are preoccupied with the constant narrative of the mind. A state of unabsorbed flow radiates outward from the inner body, and we can tune in to that any time.
P5 ~ Since Gaia is what’s real, any gap in honesty separates us. I can only be honest with myself if I listen to my whole self. How can I do that?
Or maybe I don’t even want to because I think it’s already automatically happening, or maybe I’m afraid of getting some bad news about myself. I can start with whatever is blocking the process, knowing what I have to work with. I don’t know where the drive toward wholeness is coming from, but it’s undeniable. It’s also intuitively obvious that separation is fed by self-deception. This is a tough one. That’s why it’s so important to have a broad focus, contemplating a few different areas which invite me to go further. Contemplation can produce unusual mind states which tempt us to make up interesting stories which are not anchored in actual experience. An unabsorbed flow state is full of gaps, open to unexpected new information.
P6 ~ How much power do you think you have? How much do you want? How much does the other person have? How much do you think they want?
Power to do what? Maybe all we want is the power to make the other person think we have more power than they do. Having the means to push other people around isn’t power, it’s force. Having enough nuclear weapons to obliterate another country in a first strike isn’t power, it’s force. We want the power to create, but that power belongs to Gaia. Our predictions tend to be faulty, so our attempts to create a better world are rife with unintended consequences. Gaia operates through probabilities rather than preconceptions, and the only real power is in what’s possible.
P7 ~ What am I being touched by right now, physically, emotionally, intellectually?
I know I’m out of touch with Gaia, that’s why I’m doing this practice. I know intellectually that I exist as a collection of processes, but I’m out of touch with those processes. That leaves me subject to misconceptions. So I need to take a backward step, out of thinking, out of doing, into more basic experience. When I simply rest with awareness of the chair touching me, the sunlight coming through the window, the sound of the refrigerator, the smell of mint tea, everything comes alive. Then I can even feel touched by the idea ‘everything comes alive’. Touched also by my hesitation to say something which might sound silly. No need to correct anything, because I’m simply being touched by all these things, not trapped by them.
P8 ~ How does ideology creep into your thinking? What does it offer you? What does it take away from knowing Gaia?
An ideology is simply a system of ideas. Our problem is that the mind grasps onto concepts, narrative, names, labels, symbols, and uses those unreliable mental constructs as the basis for an equally unreliable self-image. At that point ideology becomes a filter. Not only is perception reduced but the filter becomes predominantly what we experience. Ideology makes me part of a system of ideas, with a nice feeling of being right. Some other people agree with me, reenforcing my confidence. Some other people disagree with us, reenforcing our sense of solidarity. Holding on to this security makes us afraid to open up perception to the complexity all around us because it can be so confusing.
P9 ~ We’re breathing, we’re feeling the force of gravity. Paying attention to both at once places us squarely in the presence of Gaia. Try it.
We depend on oxygen. We can’t taste, touch or see it, but we have evolved to continually breathe, trusting the air. It feels very good to notice the process more consciously. Gravity is also a constant source of experience which we tend to neglect. We are surrounded by life forms with individual methods of respiration and some means of working with gravity. Tiny life forms in the ocean must adapt to the tendency of cold water to sink and warm water to rise. Huge trees must balance the weight of their limbs so they don’t pull the trunk down. We do well to take a little time to give our usual concerns a rest, and focus on what is most near and most essential to life in each moment.
P10 ~ Does Gaia have a self? What would that mean?
Self exists only in relationship with other. By naming Gaia we are giving an impersonal system an identity related to a human self. Gaia has no way to know we’re doing this, while we have a system of mental activity which is able to know what it is doing. We also have the ability to study systems outside ourselves, find boundaries, give names. If our minds became fully integrated with Gaia, as our bodies already are, perhaps we would be Gaia’s self.
Ch. 4 ~ Seeing the prompts in one word
P1 ~ Independently
Gaia is a self-regulating system in which no part exists independently. Gaia is dependent on the sun, rocks, water, air. Every part of Gaia is dependent on the whole. One part, let’s say Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep, could die off and the whole would continue, although certain other parts would be affected. Some local willows might flourish. If the whole system crashed could any bighorn sheep remain? Obviously not. We humans, however, have been led to believe that somewhere at the center of our being is a ‘me’ which stands alone. This independently existing static entity is supposed to be free and responsible, subject to reward and punishment, praise and blame, inclusion and banishment. How do you think that idea took hold? Because it is a very convenient form of social control.
P2 ~ Integrated
Gaia is strong because all parts must adapt to the whole. Each individual organism contains systems which support that organism’s ability to adapt. Sometimes the internal systems aren’t even related to that individual. Cows can eat grass because they have a special stomach where they host microbes which produce enzymes able to digest cellulose. Humans have developed language, a system available to each individual but able to survive that individual’s death. If an isolated language dies, the concept of ‘language’ lives on, and people can learn another language, making human culture an increasingly robust system.
P3 ~ Dream
Dreams add to the diversity of experience, enriching Gaia. But dreams don’t make the rules which we must follow if we are to flourish. Gaia doesn’t make the rules, either. Gaia is the action of the rules. That’s why it’s so important that we work on knowing Gaia. We can follow our dreams as much as we want, we have the freedom to do that, but we don’t have the freedom to determine the consequences. Knowing Gaia is a process of awakening, and dreams are much more useful when we’re awake.
P4 ~ Body
Knowing Gaia doesn’t happen through words, although words can play a part. The body’s way of knowing is feeling. It’s too bad we usually ignore those subtle feelings coming from deep inside until pain demands our attention. Experiencing our own physical well being is a direct experience of Gaia. The body is a complex self-regulating ecosystem just like Gaia. And just like Gaia we do not consciously experience the myriad interactions. If I let my attention wander around to different areas I may notice a tight muscle, or that my feet are tired, but I won’t be able to detect what my kidneys are doing. The dominant sensation is unitary. I think of it as ‘aliveness’. The same is true of sensing what Gaia is doing. As I become less focused on separation, I can feel that I am part of something much bigger than I am. As I become more curious about what that is, I can consciously study what other people have investigated. That conscious study can then include the details of what the body is doing.
P5 ~ Honesty
Gaia has allowed some devious creatures to come forth. A type of hawk moth caterpillar has markings which mimic a pit viper to scare off predators. People can tell each other fantastic stories to encourage cooperation, stories of punishment we experience while dead, or rewards in a next life. Gaia doesn’t listen to stories, Gaia sees behavior. If the caterpillar fools a bird, good for the caterpillar! If people fool themselves and each other, the resulting behavior might be adaptive, or it might not be. Humans are such habitual liars that we need the concept of ‘honesty’. Gaia doesn’t care about that, but we can’t know Gaia without the simplicity and directness of honesty.
P6 ~ Power
You know that Gaia owns the power because you know that ugly surprises await all of us, even the most supposedly powerful individuals. Beautiful surprises are also just around the corner, and, we suspect, beyond our control. We are driven by a strong desire for dominance. The mystique of power gets folded into the near constant struggle for dominance and status. We are complicated organisms who can make strategic decisions to play along to get along. We also invent things which carry benefits or dangers, and we have a certain amount of control over those things. We are also subject to unintended consequences. When we make accurate predictions, Gaia rewards us handsomely. Inaccurate predictions sometimes work out just fine, and sometimes not. Then we pay the price.
P7 ~ Touched
Touching is personal. If Gaia isn’t something which touches me, there’s no point in knowing about Gaia. I can know all sorts of things which are impersonal, like how to make polenta. But if no one tastes the polenta, if the knowledge remains impersonal, then it’s of no use. A theory of Gaia which describes earth systems science, however accurately, doesn’t become truly useful until it touches us personally. Human experience has expanded into mental realms so compelling that I am overwhelmed and out of touch. Paying more attention to how one particular form is touching me relaxes distortions and clears my senses, offering a window to the activity of Gaia.
P8 ~ Ideology
Ideology creates tunnel vision. Knowing Gaia requires openness. Gaia can be used as an ideology just as easily as any other set of concepts. It happens when we forget that a concept is a tool to be used. Concepts are not a direct reflection of reality, but constructed through our own mental processes. Even if we understand that a concept is just a tool, we can misuse that tool to support useless activity like wanting to feel like I know something special, therefore I must be special. When that happens I develop a need to defend my concepts instead of continuing to explore how useful they are and for what job.
P9 ~ Presence
It takes a lot of work to sit and breathe. The blood in my feet must somehow make it to my kidneys. It’s literally a matter of life and death. The cells in my lungs must accurately select some elements of the air and reject others. There’s nothing in my experience which informs me of how to consciously do that. Yet I can sense that beneath my gross perceptions of light, sound, temperature, tension and so on, is a field of existence. There is an undifferentiated experience of aliveness which reveals itself in silence.
P10 ~ Self
There is a strange and wild beauty in a system which is unintentionally self-regulating. There is no need to anthropomorphize if what we are talking about includes humans. Gaia is not a person, but I am, and totally dependent upon Gaia. Other life systems are increasingly dependent upon human activity, and our ability to limit our own destructiveness. If we want Gaia to continue to favor us, we might need to offer ourselves as Gaia’s brain. From that, we will see what kind of self naturally emerges.
Ch. 5 ~ Using words to step away from words
P1 ~ Since living systems do not exist independently in nature, what am I? What does that feel like?
What a relief it is to stop trying to do the impossible, even for a moment, to step back from trying to be a person made of words. I already know that the words in my head are not the things they represent, so how about not listening for a little while. I can take a break, turn my attention to unity rather than further division. I can allow Gaia to do the work. Just as I trust that the work of keeping me alive will continue when I fall asleep, I can turn my awake attention toward stillness and the ground of being.
P2 ~ Integrity is a function of how well a system is integrated. Are any conflicting emotions currently creating instability in me?
Emotions generate stories, and it’s easier to listen to the stories than to feel the emotions. We can approach emotions as music within the body, listen carefully to how different tensions create a range of feelings. The narrative can then start to fade into the background while the physical sensations bring us closer to the underlying motivations. Harmony brings stability and clarity. Our whole system, mind and body, seeks balance. If we dive beneath the surface waves of confusion, into the quiet depths, balance and buoyancy are simply there.
P3 ~ The problem with living in a dream is that real people get hurt. What’s my most recent example of that?
Dreams enrich our lives. I don’t want to live without dreams. Neither do I want to live in a dream. The first person to be hurt when I live in a dream is myself. Dreams are intensely personal, and make it impossible to love another person who is living in their own dream. I used to dream that I would find another person who lived in my dream. Didn’t happen. What happened instead is that I discovered, through a window of silence, how to open to what is actually here. There’s nothing better in the gap between past and future.
P4 ~ If I’m not feeling my inner body right now, I’m not feeling anything. Take a moment to check in.
The mind will continue to generate words because there is a part of me which believes it’s necessary. There’s another part of me which is able to perceive the unity underneath the division.
Habitually, we pay more attention to words. Our environment has become choked with words, because, yes, the ability to use words is absolutely crucial for humans. We hope we can find unity through words and symbols, or maybe through a prescribed set of activities such as ‘pay more attention to the inner body’. I’m only suggesting you do that because I find it relatively easy and effective. Words are objects we can grasp, and so are the sensations of the body. Yet, somehow, feeling the sensations without making up a story about them can soften and open the mind. It does take practice to not make up yet another story about the body.
P5 ~ Since Gaia is what’s real, any gap in honesty separates us. I can only be honest with myself if I listen to my whole self. How can I do that?
Recognizing my filter of hopes and fears, I have to loosen up in order to allow more information to come in. If my motivation for allowing more information in is to protect me from my fears and advance the agendas of my hopes, o.k. That’s what is happening. But we humans are smart. That’s why Gaia should be afraid of us! We have the capability to crash the system. So let’s be honest about that. We can sit around talking about ‘knowing Gaia’ while our carbon emissions are accumulating in tons. We can sit in silence while other people are fighting mega-fires in Australia. We can practice being honest with ourselves for no other reason than it’s what we feel is right, then see what happens.
P6 ~ How much power do you think you have? How much do you want? How much does the other person have? How much do you think they want?
Thinking we need power keeps us running in circles, generating a torrent of words. We may be free from attachment to the usual status symbols, but still thinking ‘knowledge is power’. But then how much knowledge do I need? Is it possible to just pause for a bit? When I pause with no loss of alertness, I can sense my own energy. I’m using the word ‘energy’ in the basic sense of ‘ability to do work’, not as some quality which is mysterious and unique to me, not as some ‘power’. Energy, unlike power, is not guaranteed to get me what I want. Ability to do work may advance my personal agenda, or may not, depending on the situation. In quietness I’ve discovered something more reliable than the ability to do work. My conscious connection to Gaia allows me to rest. In deep rest I get a glimmer of basic being, in which there is no need to do anything.
P7 ~ What am I being touched by right now, physically, emotionally, intellectually?
I am being touched by other people’s words all the time. Words spoken to me in the past, all the way back to my most vulnerable childhood years, reverberate in memory. Words hurled at me when I was a confused adolescent are still shaping me. There are more gentle, nurturing messages from the forces keeping me alive now which I could give some attention. The electric light I switch on at night carries a message I might focus on for a moment. It is a message of caring combined with human ingenuity, touching me directly, now. I can shift my attention to sounds, especially in a quiet place away from the roar of traffic. Gaia is active everywhere, and our physical senses evolved in harmony with our source - sun, rocks, water, air. There’s nothing supernatural about that, and it’s easy to notice. When I hold a rock in my hand and allow it to touch me, it can be seen as a tool, a weapon, a garden ornament or simply a rock. When I dig in the garden and notice what happens to rocks when acted upon by countless generations of microbes allied with plants, I realize that I am eating rocks every day. An idea like that also touches me emotionally, beyond the words, sinks into my body, reassuring my gut that life goes on.
P8 ~ How does ideology creep into your thinking? What does it offer you? What does it take away from knowling Gaia?
It takes a lot of words to construct and maintain an ideology. The word ‘Gaia’ does not convey an ideology. The narrative I’ve been developing here could easily become an ideology. That’s why it’s so important to practice shifting attention away from words. There is no method for doing that, but if for some unknown reason your motivation is strong, you will find a way. If my motivation is to advance myself through an ideology, I will never know Gaia. Knowing Gaia demands surrender. It might not make me happy. There’s a good chance it will scare me, and I have to take that chance. What I’ve seen of Gaia so far tells me that I am unique, but nothing out of the ordinary. Ideologies of all kinds, religious, political, pseudo-scientific promise an unassailable identity, an individual merger with what appears more powerful than myself as an individual. My experience has been that the sooner you unmask the desire for power, the sooner you will start noticing the incredible beauty of things as they are.
P9 ~ We’re breathing, we’re feeling the force of gravity. Paying attention to both at once places us squarely in the presence of Gaia. Try it.
Shifting attention away from our habitual pursuits takes faith. I’d like to distinguish faith from belief. Belief depends on concepts; faith comes from direct experience. Faith guides us forward into that which is beyond the small, individual self activity. I’m calling that larger activity Gaia, but that’s just a name. You might have a name for it which is more meaningful to you. I just want to encourage you to get into it to the point where it’s not threatened by silence. That takes work because faith can be blocked by boredom. Part of our mind is so addicted to mental junk food that it keeps reaching for the next symbolic chip and the next and the next. It takes work to redirect attention away from words. If the motivation isn’t strong we’re going to quickly find a reason to quit. When the motivation is limited to a desire to feel good, feel secure, feel powerful, feel confident, feel loving or any other state which is temporary by nature, we will not practice knowing Gaia. Only faith in the entire range of activity which can occur will give us the energy to do this work. This faith is ungraspable, yet so simple. I’m suggesting a technique: shift attention to breathing and gravity. If you have a better technique, of course you will do that one. If you can open to what is here now using no technique, no concepts, no practice, no help from anyone, then you don’t even need faith.
P10 ~ Does Gaia have a self? What would that mean?
As far as we know Gaia is an unintentionally self-regulating system. The larger forces driving the Earth systems don’t care what happens. Gaia as a whole is incapable of making plans. The necessary equipment simply is not there. I find a strange and wild beauty in the midst of all that unguided complexity which is why I’ve picked up on the name “Gaia”. Then, watching a cat stalking a bird, I can see that the ability to make plans came onto the scene long before human intelligence evolved. The cat and I make plans because we are capable of intention. Our little individual organisms have the equipment required. There doesn’t need to be a static entity somehow producing intentions. The activity arises out of a huge collection of other activities, large and small. We can’t even begin to imagine how dynamic the whole thing is. And I say “thing” because our language is primitive; I know full well it isn’t a “thing”. Primitive thinking comes from an earlier time when we thought the world consisted of “things”. It looked like objects were acting on objects, and maybe there was some supernatural super-object managing all the other objects. But let’s look closely. There’s nothing static about intentions. The activity comes and goes. In silence I observe no self, including no observer. Out of silence emerges self-activity. We humans, with our intelligence, organizations, tools, machines, information, continuity and focus, are now capable of influencing the whole system. For better or for worse - and who decides what is “better”, what is “worse”? We do. I think we would be smart to take a close look at that.
Ch. 6 ~ What do we want?
P1 ~ Since living systems do not exist independently in nature, what am I? What does that feel like?
A lot of the time it feels like “wanting”. I want this, I don’t want that, I want to be around people who want the same things I want. Then there’s always the next thing to want. I wonder if I’m choosing this condition, or even choosing what it is I think I want. Maybe all this wanting is a good thing, driving progress. Maybe it’s built into the evolutionary drive to survive. It certainly doesn’t make much sense to want to stop wanting.
P2 ~ Integrity is a function of how well a system is integrated. Are any conflicting emotions currently creating instability in me?
Not knowing what I want most of all creates conflicting emotions. A jumble of conflicting ideas about different possible directions can keep me stuck. Too many choices can pull me first in this direction, then in that one, here’s temporary success, here’s abject failure, off in the distance is a shining star always receding. If I reject any of the conflicting emotions, I will be constantly off balance because that emotion will remain active underground. I may become very convinced I’ve developed integrity, while ignoring parts of the system which will bite back. A good way to reveal hidden conflicting emotions is to look closely at my judgments of other people. It’s not a simple one to one correspondence, but there might be some sort of projection going on, and admitting it can be helpful in uncovering conflicting emotions in myself.
P3 ~ The problem with living in a dream is that real people get hurt. What’s my most recent example of that?
We live in Gaia and we need to know Gaia in order to make accurate predictions. Dreams are simple minded expressions of our hopes and fears. Gaia is complex. When we’re awake we’re able to listen to people who have their own dreams which sometimes clash with ours. When I’m awake I can explore the difference between desire and intention. I can consider the difference between what I want to get, and what I want to do. Whatever our intentions we need to keep in mind that Gaia is difficult for us to predict. Our preferences often do not match what is possible over the long haul. However, dreams can actually help us. After all, dreams would not even exist if they were not possible within Gaia’s many systems. I just need to be clear about what a dream is, and the difference between what I want to get, and what I want to do. Intentions can be generous, can include the dreams of other people and consider a wider range of all kinds of information. There is a gap between my dreams and the environment, including my body. Dreams often reflect our impatience with physical processes. We want to put on a cape and fly, rather than build an airplane. Dreams can help us see what we deeply want, even in our sleep. Awake, imagination can play freely, help us set intentions and experiment. Gaia will determine the outcome of the experiments. Outcomes, though, are not predetermined because Gaia includes input from our dreams.
P4 ~ If I’m not feeling my inner body right now, I’m not feeling anything. Take a moment to check in.
We talk about our feelings a lot, but often they are mainly bound up in thoughts. To experience feeling states more precisely it helps to check in with physical sensations, especially those far away from our skin. Instead of thinking about why we feel a certain way, we can pay attention to the raw data in the physical system. All through our body cells and organs are wanting something. It seems like they even want attention, because when I give attention to the signals they are sending, everything calms down. If there’s a little gas pain in my belly, it will calm down and pass through more easily if I become quiet and listen. A sense of well-being gradually replaces the habitual hunger. We are so lucky to live in a time and place that has us well-fed - why not just sit down for a few minutes and experience it? I find if I do that I can then tune into larger questions about what I want for myself and the world with far less anxiety than when I am ignoring the inner body.
P5 ~ Since Gaia is what’s real, any gap in honesty separates us. I can only be honest with myself if I listen to my whole self. How can I do that?
I can only listen to my whole self if I honestly want to. We sabotage ourselves by trying to do the impossible. If I don’t want to be honest with my whole self, I will only wear myself out pretending, or make up elaborate justifications about how I’m already doing just fine. A very valuable clue is hidden in any sense of separation I’m experiencing. If I find that clue, I know I need to do something to be more in alignment with what is happening, and what will happen.
Of course I can never actually be separate from Gaia because all these processes, including my confusion, are connected to all the other processes surrounding me. A sense of separation indicates that what I want is not possible. One thing to look at is how much we think we want something that will happen in the future. It’s much more accurate to look at what I’m experiencing right now that I want to get away from, as well as what I’m experiencing right now that I want more of. Then I can move in the direction away from or toward those experiences while remaining open to new information, and acting on the basis of what is actually happening. If I imagine I want something, but honestly don’t know what to do about it, I’m dreaming. Honesty wakes me up.
P6 ~ How much power do you think you have? How much do you want? How much does the other person have? How much do you think they want?
Power is the most elusive and undependable goal we can possibly imagine. Think about it. The fact that it’s such a common desire does not make it any more sane. It makes people crazy. It makes people corrupt. The only healthy way to work with a desire for power is to first of all be honest with myself. If I want it, I want it. I don’t have to be ashamed of that. However, it might be helpful to examine what you think power is giving you, or would give you if you had more of it. Use other people you know or hear about in the media as a mirror. What do they have that you want? In particular, do you think they have all the power they want, or do they act like they’re trying to get more, and do they know where more will come from. In contemplating what you want, keep coming back to present experience because that’s all you know for sure. Even our memories are unreliable, especially our memories of something as elusive as power. If you know you want more power, you can at least understand what it’s supposedly going to do for you. I can tell you I feel a lot better since handing power over to Gaia.
P7 ~ What am I being touched by right now, physically, emotionally, intellectually?
I, as consciousness, am always being touched by the life processes of Gaia. I want to know Gaia more because I feel limited and blocked in ways I don’t understand, somehow separated from my own life processes. Contemplation is my method. To contemplate what is touching me doesn’t take time. In a flash I can notice my contact with the person I’m talking with, how I’m being touched by that unique conversation, the flow of emotion, the hesitation, the glimmer of mystery. When I’m walking down the street and notice a current of loneliness, I can be touched by it. Of course I don’t want pain. I want pleasure. It’s confusing though, because the possibility of pain can be exciting, like when I’m meeting someone I find attractive. There is both potential pleasure and potential pain in meeting such a person. Gaia tells us there is no life without pain, and we want life. As I get more in touch with the elements of life, like the liquid touch of warm tea in my mouth, I instinctively see how to navigate pleasure and pain. Too hot - ouch! Put the cup down. Too cold - unappealing. It’s the same with everything. We don’t passively allow any and all kinds of touch. In contemplation each touch can be unique with its own flavor. We move toward what promotes life, and move away from harm. Generations of individual organisms have been doing this for millions of years. I can trust my instincts, especially as my mind becomes less clouded by memories of past hurt and helplessness, and less fixated on images of what I think I want. Fleeting connections, in all their richness, provide the nourishment I need.
P8 ~ How does ideology creep into your thinking? What does it offer you? What does it take away from knowing Gaia?
Being a person is not easy. We’re definitely still in the experimental stages. The balance between competition and cooperation, for example, is really tricky. Do I want to be accepted, or do I want to win? One way to get both is to be a member of the conquering tribe, and joining a tribe can be as easy as agreeing with their ideas. Also, consider our need to know, to be certain. Ideology seems to offer a firm ground to stand on. It’s all mixed up with values and beliefs. The problem with beliefs is that fixating on a set of thoughts can blind us to the larger systems we depend on. Gaia has no beliefs and no values and we find that distasteful, even threatening. We confuse indifference with hostility. We want nature to value what we value. So we pile belief upon belief declaring our values to be eternal truths. As part of getting to know Gaia I want to let go of ideology and hold beliefs lightly. I don’t want my identity tied to any particular set of thoughts, especially not thoughts about something called “Gaia”. I want my values to be part of a living system, not depending on words set in stone.
P9 ~ We’re breathing, we’re feeling the force of gravity. Paying attention to both at once places us squarely in the presence of Gaia. Try it.
To do this practice I have to set aside any motivation for gain. Being in the presence of Gaia has nothing to do with getting what I want, or doing what I want. In order to sense that I’m not separate from the whole, I need to step away from preference for any of the parts. This is easier than it sounds at first because actually the “parts” consist of concepts created in my own mind. We are conditioned to experience division, but we don’t have to be focused on that. Concepts can stand quietly in the background while we invite Gaia to come forward. It’s helpful to set a time frame, maybe 10 minutes and be physically quiet, sitting comfortably. There might be a kind of gap in your usual experience. It might be very attractive, so now you want that gap. Then there’s a struggle, subtle or obvious, about trying to prefer no preference. That’s why it helps to have something concrete to focus on, the breath, the feeling of gravity, as an anchor. It can also be frightening, as though you’re going to lose yourself. No, you won’t, because Gaia is supporting you.
P10 ~ Does Gaia have a self? What would that mean?
As our technology becomes more sophisticated and global, we are becoming Gaia’s brain. If we want to, we can become Gaia’s self. We can provide Gaia with values, with intelligent purpose. If that’s what we want to do, we first need to adjust our own identities.
Ch. 7 ~ Investigating personal identity
P1 ~ Since living systems do not exist independently in nature, what am I? What does that feel like?
Everything in Gaia is dynamic, always doing something. That bare tree we see in the snow is not growing, but we can tell by looking at it if it is surviving. If it is surviving, it is doing something to keep itself alive. The same is true of my self-image. A dead tree can stand up for a while, but there’s no such thing as a dead self-image. If a self-image exists at all, it must be fed constantly. It must be groomed all the time. It’s changing all the time, too, but we don’t notice. We’re captivated by the image of the moment. There is visual memory connected to my self-image, and sometimes it’s a bit of a shock to see myself in the mirror. Who is that old person? Primarily, though, it’s not a visual image, but a collection of concepts. This dynamic collection of concepts is not easy to change by an act of will, but it will change itself if it is seen clearly.
P2 ~ Integrity is a function of how well a system is integrated. Are any conflicting emotions currently creating instability in me?
When I glance in a mirror and see an old person there is a slight jolt of rejection. There is a conflict between how I think of myself, based on the past, and how I look now. Integrity demands that how I see myself in my mind’s eye and what my body is doing right now are in synch. Conflicting emotions can reveal cracks in my identity. What I look like is a small part of the process. Conceptual self-image includes things I did in the past which I regret. I might not talk about those things, or even think about them, but the memories linger. Those memories are not like the husk of a dead tree, they are part of a living system, my identity. While the dead tree in the forest has been colonized by fungus and other life forms, my memories of long past actions remain my own. Allowing distasteful memories to surface into consciousness gives the self system the opportunity to work on integration. Much of the work will take place outside our experience. The narrow band of the spectrum I experience as “I am doing” doesn’t need to be involved. I don’t know how unconscious forces work, but I do know that the system self-regulates as naturally as a tree drops leaves in winter. Just the fact that I react emotionally to some memories as ‘good’ and some as ‘bad’ shows me that a selection process is at work. Although I can’t select what happened in the past, I can consider the future as open ground.
P3 ~ The problem with living in a dream is that real people get hurt. What’s my most recent example of that?
Dreams can reveal hidden dimensions of experience. The emotional significance of memories can be seen full blown in dreams. Dreams contain valuable clues about our unconscious identity. Trouble begins when I become a character in my own dream, and make other people into dream companions or adversaries. Sleep mostly keeps us safe. Being half-awake is dangerous. We’re not taking in enough information when we are half-awake. Our identity becomes very solid because it’s not being challenged. We might feel confident, stable, successful. But if we are not integrated with Gaia, our dreams will collapse sooner or later. When our identity is challenged it probably won’t be pleasant, and the deeper we were in our own dream, the more unpleasant it will be. It would be good to have some support from other people at that point, because what appears to be dysfunctional could be part of a very creative awakening. But if other people are caught in their own dreams, and Gaia is being ignored, I’m on my own.
P4 ~ If I’m not feeling my inner body right now, I’m not feeling anything. Take a moment to check in.
Identity depends on narrative, and most of what I feel is in reaction to a current narrative. In order to connect with my inner body, I need to step back from the narrative and pay attention to what we mistakenly label ‘physical sensations’. It is more accurate to label that level of feeling as ‘my basic experience’ because it can tell me much more about myself than any narrative. Those so-called ‘physical sensations’ are a direct link with Gaia. This is where identity begins, and it is where identity can change. It is when we are able to slip beneath experience that feeling becomes truly creative. How can I feel something that I’m not experiencing? By dissolving the subject/object division. When “I” am no longer feeling “my body” and yet awareness is actively sensing what is happening in the body, consciousness can expand into a sense of wholeness. Identity becomes fluid and open for business, so to speak.
P5 ~ Since Gaia is what’s real, any gap in honesty separates us. I can only be honest with myself if I listen to my whole self. How can I do that?
I can’t listen to my whole self if I am insecure about my identity. Defensiveness and dishonesty are two sides of the same coin. The way to disarm defensiveness is through compassion. Guided by my desire to open to Gaia, I can open to myself in the privacy of my own mind. I have the freedom to play whatever role I think I can handle in society, while in contemplation the mask can come off. I can admit my insecurities to myself and my friends while playing it safe with people I don’t trust. I don’t have to pretend to be honest with everyone. If I develop the ability to be honest with everyone, well great, but let’s not jump the gun. Relying on my deepening contemplation practice, I can see myself losing my own attraction to pretense, and develop more sympathy for people who still need it. I don’t think dishonesty is freely chosen. I think it is a weapon picked up out of perceived necessity. We have a deep desire to connect, and you don’t want to connect to a lie. Still, the need for self preservation drives us into strange territory we would not enter unless we thought we had to. In contemplation identity can slip, and that isn’t always a comfortable experience. Let’s be honest about that. Gaia can help. Thanks to science and technology I can watch a video describing cellular respiration. Who needs to pretend to be something they are not when we’re all sitting on cellular respiration! It’s a miracle, a totally natural miracle, happening every moment in each one of our cells. Although knowledge of cellular respiration is second hand and subject to change, it does tell me something about my whole self which inspires me to learn more.
P6 ~ How much power do you think you have? How much do you want? How much does the other person have? How much do you think they want?
The mystique of power closes identity. We can’t take any chances. The people who think I’m powerful are identifying with my story, but if those people knew the whole story, they would not be impressed. Some parts of my story might make people feel sorry for me, and although maybe I could exploit that to manipulate a few people, that’s not the self-image I want. You might think that power brings freedom to the individual, but I have to say it’s just the opposite. Since individual power depends entirely on fooling other people, you will need to keep fooling yourself. Otherwise you won’t be able to convince anyone else of your own importance. Does that sound like freedom? To me it seems like some weird game of mutual tyranny. In that game identity cannot naturally ebb and flow. The person we think is powerful is depending on weapons and tools which can be taken away. They might not even feel their own fear as fear, but some other people will be able to see it. In some species of animals there actually is an Alpha male or female. Humans are too smart for that. Although we sometimes conveniently ignore this fact, our positions of dominance are fluid. No matter how powerful an individual appears now, we know that individual will die someday. Not only that, we can think about all sorts of other ways individuals can lose power. We’ve told stories on this topic from as far back as we can remember. Some animals settle into a social hierarchy as though there’s no tomorrow. For humans there’s always tomorrow. We have the capability to imagine the unexpected. Unfortunately for those who desire power, the ability to imagine the unexpected detracts from our determination to hold onto current beliefs. Allowing current beliefs to fade, like waking up from a dream, can dissolve our game of mutual tyranny. Then we are available for opening identity in directions we haven’t even imagined.
P7 ~ What am I being touched by right now, physically, emotionally, intellectually?
Gaia is, above all else, a dynamic system. Interaction is what keeps it going. Concepts resist change. We somehow developed the belief that the feeling of ‘holding on’ represents security. In contemplation we begin to notice there is nothing to hold on to. If I think repeating the same words over and over gives me any kind of security, I’m going to miss out on the richness of life. Common sense tells me that an appropriate response to current conditions is a more reliable form of security. Before I can respond, however, I must form an accurate sense of what is touching me. If that sense is based primarily on memory, I’m stuck in the past. Intelligence demands more. Yes, memory contains valuable information, but my mind wants to stretch and grow. It may sound ironic, but in order to leave the past behind, we need to stop reaching for the future. What’s here now is touching us on so many different levels. It doesn’t take much time to stop and simply feel, we can do it with amazing swiftness. All that’s required is the bravery to experience a gap in the process of identity. The gaps are there, always, and there’s no profit in fearing them, while there is tremendous potential profit in an accurate assessment of what’s happening. Without any attempt to figure out anything in advance, we can simply stop and feel at our deepest levels. What a relief!
P8 ~ How does ideology creep into your thinking? What does it offer you? What does it take away from knowing Gaia?
No matter how hard I try I can never live up to the demands of an ideology. Values are easy because I can see them in action. Ideology exists as a set of ideals. We may think our heroes are able to enact those ideals, but talk to that hero at 3 a.m. and you may witness some cracks in the persona. Then you may turn against that person as a representation of failure, and feel better about yourself in comparison. Gaia, on the other hand, welcomes uncertainty and the creativity which goes along with it. How do I know when I’m being compassionate? I may be just making excuses. How do I measure wisdom? It always depends upon a particular situation, so we can never draw the comparisons necessary for measurement. Ideology requires group confirmation. Otherwise, the collection of ideas just seems kind of crazy. Within a group, crazy ideas can become the norm. The group doesn’t have to look like a group, as with people who idealize individualism. There just needs to be an image of a superior person which is then reflected back to me through some medium. Trying to live up to any image is a thankless task because I’m never quite there. Much easier to see what’s here, and what I value about it.
P9 ~ We’re breathing, we’re feeling the force of gravity. Paying attention to both at once places us squarely in the presence of Gaia. Try it.
Our most basic form of identity is “I am experiencing this”. With practice we can deliberately shrink attention from both “I am” and “this” to focus on “experiencing”. That is the unabsorbed flow state. There will still be conceptual judgments within the flow of experience, but they will be quick, easy and simple. If I’m sitting quietly in the safety of my own living room, I don’t need to make very many judgments. If I need to go to the bathroom, I get up and go to the bathroom. I find it helpful, though, not to obey every impulse, because I am doing a deliberate practice. If my mood starts to darken and I have an impulse to go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, it’s better to wait. I’m curious about that shift in mood. Generally it’s like a cloud passing. It doesn’t take much time and it doesn’t have much impact. That’s good to know. I don’t have to either run from or chase moods. On the other hand, if I’ve left something burning on the stove, immediate action is required. If something more complicated is bothering me, like needing to earn money, it will probably take over my mind and it doesn’t help to try to focus too much away from it. Since breathing is always happening, and the force of gravity doesn’t go away, I can practice just being quiet with the whole thing for awhile, and then do something to solve my problem. Gaia informs me that individual identity is not a problem as long as I’m experiencing breath and gravity, I don’t have to prove anything about myself.
P10 ~ Does Gaia have a self? What would that mean?
The Sun is sending out energy and Gaia is receiving it and using it to do work. There could not be a more perfect love, and yet neither system has had the capability to know that. Until now. We are not separate from these systems which are giving rise to our existence moment by moment. And we have somehow developed the capability to know something about what’s happening. Because we’re still in the early days of this development we don’t quite believe in it yet. We are mesmerized by our own imaginations at the cost of conscious connection with that which gives us life. We know we are going to die, we know it’s possible that all humans could die in a chain reaction to one cataclysmic event, and that knowledge is too much for us right now, with our limited identities. Yet we are smart enough to invent technology which can bring about the very death which we fear. We are smart enough to destroy our own environment. Are we smart enough to change our behavior before it’s too late? Gaia can’t do it for us, we have to grow up and do it for Gaia.
MEDIA: Do Robots Deserve Rights?
Ch. 8 ~ Being and doing
P1 ~ Since living systems do not exist independently in nature, what am I? What does that feel like?
The more firmly I am established in my sense of being, the less I have to prove by doing, or not doing. Gaia is doing the heavy lifting, always. A few billion years ago cellular metabolism and replication joined forces, and we are still riding that wave. I’m not on the wave, I’m in the wave, an integral part of it. Whatever I do is an expression of that wave of life. I can take a few minutes and deliberately not do anything, and the wave sweeps on. Taking a few minutes in a quiet place to deliberately ‘just be’ I notice that thinking goes on. There are varying degrees of experiencing thinking as something I’m doing or as something that is happening autonomously like breathing. There are other actions which are more autonomous than breathing, for example the stomach processing food. Breathing, I can decide to take a quick short breath or a long slow breath. Thinking is rather like that. I don’t depend on thinking as much as I used to, so I notice long pauses in the stream of thoughts. Those pauses help me become more aware of the feeling of being here. There’s a feedback loop from the feeling of being here which undermines watching myself be here. Watching myself be here is a form of grasping which relaxes as I notice I don’t need to make myself be here. When I get hungry, I will eat. I’m lucky to be living in a situation with food easily available. While I’m cooking or cleaning up I’m in harmony with the people in the background who produce the food and keep water flowing from the faucet. Some of those people might be having a hard time. Contemplation broadens my concerns; it’s not supposed to make me blindly happy.
P2 ~ Integrity is a function of how well a system is integrated. Are any conflicting emotions currently creating instability in me?
As being and doing become more integrated, my motivation for doing anything becomes more grounded in actual needs rather than superficial wants. If my goals are unrealistic it means I’m out of touch with being. ‘Being’ refers not only to my own basic existence, but to the nature of the systems I’m part of. The nature of these systems guide what I’m doing. Remember that Gaia is self-regulating. As I’m part of Gaia, I’m being regulated by Gaia. If I’m trying to do something difficult, the level of that difficulty has been set by Gaia, not by me. So I have to first of all pay attention to how I’m feeling. If I’m feeling good, that indicates some integrity. But that good feeling might be coming out of some fantastic story I’m telling myself. I may be integrated within my own mind, but if the story I’m believing conflicts with the facts of other systems, there is no real stability. So I have to look beyond my own mind for a wider integrity. What I see might cause some conflicting emotions. I might feel very good making myself a delicious breakfast with eggs. So far, so good. But if I happen to see pictures of how most chickens are living, I might find it revolting enough to stop buying eggs and miss my favorite breakfast. The system was stable until I was exposed to new information. Something in my being responded to the quality of life implied by the pictures of the chickens, and changed what I wanted to do. The amount of suffering in the life of all beings on a global scale is frightening. Stories of children in refugee camps, pictures of rainforests burning, can produce overwhelming feelings of helplessness. Is life on earth some crazy accident? Is it all a bad dream? When I return to my more basic experience of being alive, my breathing, any tension around the eyes, comfort in the gut, these physical sensations I usually ignore, I am led into an awareness of basic being which wordlessly answers my questions.The ability to vividly remember something from the past has been given to us by Gaia as yet another survival tool. But as with any tool, it must be used correctly. If used incorrectly, people can be injured. Unfortunately in our current culture we are not well educated in the uses and misuses of memory. Living in memories is just like living in a dream. We are not available to the immediate incoming information which is constantly changing. We live in memories when we believe that those images of the past represent who we are now. That doesn’t mean we should ignore memories. Even the most simple animals depend upon memories in order to respond in the present. I don’t know what it’s like to be a simple animal, but I do know that self-image is important to humans. Memories get tangled up in that self-image, and we believe it must survive intact. People who would exploit us know how to make use of our social instinct to preserve a self-image. We can free ourselves from their influence by realizing that our memories are there to be used as a guide to action, not to tell us who we are. When I am sitting quietly, remembering nothing, I am fully myself. Nothing is missing. When I get hungry and need to find the refrigerator, memory will serve me well. Some memories from high school are probably best forgotten. I’m still fully who I am right now.
P3 ~ The problem with living in a dream is that real people get hurt. What’s my most recent example of that?
Dreams drift around somewhere between being and doing. They remind us of how much happens in the realm of the subconscious brain. They are a creative force between the certainty of being and the uncertainty of doing. They are immaterial and yet can have unpredictable influences on what happens in the material world. Artistic expression can be seen as a manifestation of a dream state. When I watch a movie I’m joining a large group of creators in a group dream. None of those creators are likely to know what that dream means to me. They don’t know how successful they will be in persuading me to believe something is possible, when it’s not. A man singing a song, surrounded by skilled musicians who easily awaken buried emotion, have no idea how they can change my life by changing my dreams. A group of people caught in a conspiracy theory which is essentially a bad dream can change an election, casting a shadow over the rest of us.
P4 ~ If I’m not feeling my inner body right now, I’m not feeling anything. Take a moment to check in.
You touch the opposite of existential angst by not avoiding it. Our thoughts connect to the biochemistry of the nervous system. Often when we’re not thinking of anything in particular a thought pops up about a problem that needs to be solved. Our biochemistry shifts away from simply being to doing. But how many thoughts do we have about problems which we are in no position to solve? Speaking for myself, a lot. With biochemistry poised for action, and no relevant action available, we go for the irrelevant. Confusion and anxiety are the result. Rather than trying to avoid that state, it is possible to recognize it fully and then have the motivation to simply halt the train. The train will slow down as I direct attention to the inner body. I can remind myself that conscious being is an alternative to doing. If this is a deficiency in my earlier education, it’s important to learn about it through my own experience. The countless mechanisms of the interlocking systems of Gaia are keeping me alive at this moment. Not forever, but that’s in the future. I’m here now. What’s it like to just be here? You might find your experience expanding, taking in all sorts of subtle perceptions and a recognition of the deep unity in everything which is happening. There is an unexplainable happiness in the dynamic quality of being. There is nothing passive about it. You are not being subjected to anything. You are not less alive than when you are doing something. You don’t need to seize upon some problem solving activity in order to justify your existence. If you want to help people, try passing along permission to experience basic being. There are countless ways to communicate this attitude, but first of all you must know it thoroughly in your direct experience.
P5 ~ Since Gaia is what’s real, any gap in honesty separates us. I can only be honest with myself if I listen to my whole self. How can I do that?
For a few minutes stop choosing your thoughts and see what comes up. Then if a bad or crazy thought comes up you’re not responsible because you did not choose it. You didn’t do it. It just happened. And, being a self-regulating system, you won’t act on that bad thought because you know it is bad and you don’t want the consequences of acting on it. Whatever bad or crazy thoughts drift through my mind are not who I am. The being that I am is what the thoughts - good, bad, irrelevant - pass through. Being itself is not changed. All kinds of clouds gather and blow and drift through the sky. To acknowledge my own thoughts is the beginning of honesty. To experience very strong emotions while doing nothing tells me something about where my actions are coming from. A self-regulating system is not necessarily a mechanical, deterministic system. My refrigerator is a mechanical, deterministic system which does a good job of keeping my food cold. But it’s not smart enough to know if there’s any food in it needing to be kept cold. It will keep going regardless. When our human system is functioning well, we know the difference between thinking about helping or hurting someone, and taking the action necessary to do the helping or hurting. Often when we hurt someone we don’t do it deliberately, but as a result of unconscious forces. The more honest I am with myself, the more those unconscious forces will reveal themselves. Intelligent action requires information, and nothing gives me more important information than being honest with myself.
P6 ~ How much power do you think you have? How much do you want? How much does the other person have? How much do you think they want?
Insecure about our possession of power, we cling to familiar thoughts. The need for power is an old, old human thought. All our ancient thoughts about gods, angels and demons reflect our desperation to exert control. Our modern investigations based on science seem to result in more control, so more of us are following science, abandoning the old gods. Yet the confusion goes on, blocking our access to the experience of being. Power is all about doing, who is doing what, who is influencing others, how we can join with others to amplify our personal power. We might believe that power is somehow embedded in being, that some people are just naturally more powerful than others. We notice that some public figures have charisma, some magical quality which makes them attractive to large numbers of people. What are they doing to create that charm? If I’m not in touch with basic being I can easily believe that those people don’t have to do anything to hold onto power. I might even believe that about myself because I seem to lead a charmed life. That’s why it’s so important to investigate the difference between being and doing. I’m embedded in a series of systems and those systems are giving me life. I can control bits and pieces of the network of systems, but I can’t control the whole thing. I can only do so much, and then I depend on other forces. Being doesn’t need to know what it is depending on . Being doesn’t need to possess any particular form. It’s happening - period. As we get in touch with being we realize that it isn’t a ‘thing’. And neither is it an activity. Weird, huh? There’s no way to explain it, yet we are all experiencing it right now and at every moment. We prefer to ignore it, keep it way in the background, because we are fixated on our preferences and how to maintain the forms we prefer. Being is formless, potentially all forms equally. My human form doesn’t have any more or less being than your human form. The forms have different capabilities, and we are naturally concerned about that because we have to take care of our individual survival and advancement. It makes us nervous to rest in being because we know we can’t trust it. It doesn’t favor our present, temporary form. It doesn’t care about our desire for power.
P7 ~ What am I being touched by right now, physically, emotionally, intellectually?
Contemplation is ‘doing’ reaching for ‘being’. It’s for people who want to be more in touch. Often we confuse grasping with touch. There’s too much doing in grasping. Allowing ourselves to be touched, we can see there’s no need to hold on to one particular touch. Contact is coming at us from every different direction on every different level. I can begin with air. Can I feel the air touching me? Is it cold or warm? Is it comfortably drawn through my nose and throat? Emotions are a different kind of experience. Is anything bothering me emotionally right now? What about intellectually - is the idea of contemplation making sense? Exactly how does an idea touch us? Isn’t touch always physical? Emotion certainly has a physical component. When I’m angry my whole body is in a state of anger. But emotions also involve the mind, which is not physical. Some ideas touch us emotionally with the excitement of disagreement or happy airgreement. But some ideas touch only the mind, and it is important to learn to see how that works. Because the mind is not physical we confuse it with being. Here’s the difference: being is unconditioned, mind is conditioned. An idea which touches the mind is part of the process of conditioning. Just as icy air stinging the nose conditions me to come inside where it’s warm, an idea like Gaia conditions me to seek certain kinds of information and see the world in a certain way. Maybe the idea of being is touching you right now. Maybe it strikes you (touch!) as vague and irrelevant to your life. Maybe it seems elusive yet something you want to dig into. This practice says to simply notice how it’s touching you. Then notice how the chair you’re sitting on is touching you. You know you don’t need to hold on to the chair. It continues to support you effortlessly, that’s just what it does. You’re invited in this contemplation to try just sitting in the chair, touched by a flow of emotions, touched by a flow of thoughts. Being is ungraspable, but it is touching you always, at the core of every form.
P8 ~ How does ideology creep into your thinking? What does it offer you? What does it take away from knowing Gaia?
Blaming people for their actions is based on an ideology of separation. It is a grandiose idea connected to our desire for praise. Unfortunately it is not possible to have praise without the possibility of blame. To blame myself for doing something stupid is to ignore the painstaking step by step method by which Gaia has formed this web of life. During photosynthesis some chloroplasts have the choice to move across the cell toward the light or, if it’s too intense, away from it. It’s easy for them to do the right thing. It’s not easy for us. And so we create ideologies to share and to guide us. Any ideology, not just an ideology of individualism, ignores the clay from which we are constantly being formed. If we are loyal to a set of ideas we can’t risk observing our own limitations which include the limitations of knowing who is right. We can’t float in the ocean of being. We have to vigilantly maintain our tunnel vision against all the evidence which says it isn’t helping us. I’ve never consciously chosen an ideology. I’ve gravitated toward certain points of view and gradually I become enmeshed in an ideology with other people. It’s never been individual. It’s possible to be attached to a unique and lonely idea, but that’s not what I need to contemplate because I haven’t done that. What I have done is join groups, partly because of shared ideas but mostly because of chance encounters and attractions. Knowing Gaia, knowing I don’t choose my limitations, frees me from attempting to escape from my limitations through ideology. This freedom, rather than the freedom to choose what to do, opens the window to the emptiness of being.
P9 ~ We’re breathing, we’re feeling the force of gravity. Paying attention to both at once places us squarely in the presence of Gaia. Try it.
In Gaia there is no separation between being and doing. Breath and gravity are not in opposition. When I’m asleep I breathe without knowing it. Gravity keeps me on the bed while I’m lost in a dream. Although we’ve never left Gaia (that would be impossible) we are distracted by evolution’s shiny new toy, the human mind and all its inventions. Returning to the breath is returning to the basics of life. Noticing gravity we are in the company of everything. When a shark locks onto the scent of a prey animal, it doesn’t have to do much in order to be successful. Sharks have been perfecting this behavior for about 450 million years. We get confused. Do I want this? Do I want that? Did I hurt my friend when I said that? Will it help to say this? Or maybe I secretly want to hurt this so-called friend who has neglected me. Our lives are complex and we need all our intelligence. We don’t want to return to the world of sharks, and we can’t. Misguided motivation can squander our energy. Acting in contact with being is straightforward action. Being is not some mysterious force we need to get hold of. It is what we share with everything. It is the potential, the empty cup which accepts tea, soup or poison with equal graciousness. Nature never agreed to present us only with food, but has given us the ability to distinguish food from poison. Even when simply sitting with breath and gravity we are enjoying the challenge of insight into our own hidden beliefs and wishful thinking. Otherwise it would be better to take a nap. Sometimes I wake up from a nap with fresh insight. Yet there is something special about going into a deeply restful state while fully conscious, and not attempting to produce something non-ordinary. If you want to see your mind in a non-ordinary state there are some very good drugs you can take. I’ve had some interesting trips myself, back in the day. Breath and gravity are the most ordinary things imaginable. Ordinary might sound dull if we confuse it with mindless habitual activity. But when I give it my heartfelt attention it is anything but dull. When being and doing are not separate, freshness and a profound richness pervade all our experience, from the most simple to the most complex.
P10 ~ Does Gaia have a self? What would that mean?
Our lives depend on photosynthesis and we can’t do it. We depend on plants, and they benefit from our ability to recycle carbon. Gaia figured this out a long time ago. To us it seems like a clever system designed by someone. But we haven’t been able to find the designer. The whole thing just seems to be purely natural, which means no division between being and doing. In our language there is nothing artificial about the elaborate process of using light to create food. If humans manage to invent a process of inorganic photosynthesis, we will call it artificial. We will say we did it. Some people would then say that the process of inorganic photosynthesis arose completely naturally from the vast potentiality of being. We would agree, on an intellectual level, but would we feel that in our bones? When I’m in a plane hurtling down the runway and then lifting off, what I feel is an amazement that we are able to do this. Grateful that once again, it worked. It doesn’t feel natural. It has a beauty which is quite different from the beauty of the bird lifting off from the tree branch outside my window. Atmospheric carbon dioxide a few days ago passed 416 parts per million. We can’t live with that on a long term basis. We have to do something unnatural. We have to consciously assume responsibility for our own ecosystem. One of the key concepts of Gaia is that organisms affect their environment. So there’s nothing new about that. What is new is the ability to say “Wait a minute. We need a plan.”
Ch. 9 ~ Natural limits
P1 ~ Since living systems do not exist independently in nature, what am I? What does that feel like?
Ch. 10When thoughts quiet down a space opens up which feels not just vast but unlimited. We don’t need to make that into something, to give it a significance it doesn’t actually have. It’s so tempting to believe that death is not real, that we go on and on in different forms. Well, maybe we do, I don’t know. I just know how important it is to acknowledge the limitations of my current experience. The simple experience of being alive, which is so wonderful, is limited to being alive. All emotions are arising from current conditions, which are always changing. When I try to hold onto any particular feeling state, I’m blocking a fuller experience of what’s here now. I will never understand myself if I refuse to be fully what I am right now. When those futile efforts to stick to what I prefer start to fade away, it’s such a relief! Yes, I do want to be happy, but there is something so much better than happiness, and that is to be appropriately aligned with what is happening. To do that, I must be as supple as a pine tree in the wind. I can’t be in the wind and out of it at the same time. I can remember what it’s like to be in a quiet, windless snowfall, that’s part of being human. But let’s not overdo the memories, the predictions, the desires. Within the limits of current conditions, I can be in contact with what exists around me, and it is enough.
P2 ~ Integrity is a function of how well a system is integrated. Are any conflicting emotions currently creating instability in me?
My desire for stability has led me into a lot of rigid thinking. Trying to find something solid and dependable has blocked me from the unabsorbed flow state which is what I really want. Being afraid of my own limitations has kept me in a soup of conflicting emotions. Wanting stability, I didn’t recognize that Gaia demands dynamic integrity. How does a system remain integrated when everything, outside and inside, is moving? How does a pine tree remain a pine tree on a windy day or through a heavy snowfall? First, it is flexible. It doesn’t argue with the wind. It sheds the snow by bending and letting gravity do the work. Ancestral pine trees were shaped by wind and snow. If a pine tree has a weak limb and it snaps off in a storm, the tree itself adjusts to the loss. Humans are obviously much more complex than pine trees, especially since so much of our integrity resides in the mind. Because so much of what happens in the mind doesn’t appear to be physical, we have gravitated toward identification with thoughts as much as with physical form. Our conscious links with what we call physical have weakened, and this has weakened the integrity of the whole system. When I relax my fixation on words, attention can be more flexible. When I’m talking with someone and deliberately open my senses to the sound of their voice, facial expressions, posture and so on, I gain a much better sense of that person’s integrity. I can see what we share and what we don’t share. If I think my compassion is unlimited, I’m treading on unreliable ground. At some point my own integrity will demand that I close the door. Gaia is composed of individual organisms related to each other. When I die, you can continue to live. I want you to! No, I’m probably not going to lay down my life for you, but it makes me feel good to know that when I go down, I’m not taking everything with me. The integrity of life around me maintains itself through constant change. At some point life on earth will end. That’s all the more reason to take care of it while we can. If I notice I have some conflicting emotions I can ask myself what might help me be more resilient, more adaptable, more in harmony with Gaia.
P3 ~ The problem with living in a dream is that real people get hurt. What’s my most recent example of that?
When imagination gets tangled up in personal hopes and fears we see other people through that lens. We are limited by imagining how this person could help me or that person is frustrating. At that point we are living in a dream world, missing the complexity of real time interactions. We did not invent this world, it was forced upon us. Remembering the dreams I had last night can help me understand the causes of the emotional haze which binds me to the past. The clear potential of basic being is limited when old hurts and memories of happiness capture our attention. Emotion is supposed to motivate us to protect ourselves and work on enhancing our lives. The problem is a lack of coordination. Dreams arise from our primordial memories which is why they can be so emotionally rich yet weirdly irrational. Emotion tied to dreams is heavy, ponderous. Awake, our emotions are light, able to dance in a world of constant change. Memories are useful, but we can see their limits when we are awake. I can savor the intensity of dreams with no need to analyze them, because they already told me what I needed to know. To get more in touch with basic being I need to expand identification by contacting what is here now. I can be liberated from my dreams without killing them. Within my natural limits I can work on coordinating past, present and future. I can be open to surprises. I can trust myself to respond creatively to a world of change, rather than dreaming of being a person who never makes mistakes. Dreams which promised me freedom from limitations only slammed me up against other people who inconveniently refused to be part of my dream. It’s much better to include all those people in who I think I am. Random encounters can take me out of my dreams and into Gaia where dreams are one more little piece of a much bigger picture.
P4 ~ If I’m not feeling my inner body right now, I’m not feeling anything. Take a moment to check in.
Emotions are brewing in the inner body all the time. I might think I’m happy because I’m looking at someone I love, and that’s true to some extent, but I’m probably ignoring the physical pathways which are doing the work of producing the feelings. Because we believe the body to be the source of limitations, we don’t want to hear what it is attempting to communicate throughout our entire field of experience. There’s good reason to make a deliberate practice aimed at turning this attitude around. Going back to the example of looking at someone I love, when I am more fully in tune with the inner body, it’s like hearing a beautiful piece of music. The complexity of messages coming from the region around the heart, and the relaxation deep in the gut, is of a very different quality from the complexities of thought. Each strand of emotion running through the body is simple and pure, even though the various strands may differ in tone. A strand of disappointment can run right alongside a strand of gratification. In my thoughts, all this complexity can easily become a muddle. I want to know which feeling is truly ‘how I feel’ about this person. The more adept I become at tuning into the inner body, the more compassion I find arising naturally along with the rest of the complexity. The way to practice is to choose a moment which is relatively simple, and listen to the messages coming from the body with affection and trust. I’m not trying to reform myself as I do this, and I most certainly am not trying to get past any perceived limitations. When I’m in pain, it’s like my body is screaming at all the natural limitations of life. So I need to practice while I am not in any unusual pain. There is always some pain in the body from past hurts, some constriction. As I notice that, I do not try to relax. Trying to relax is not the same as listening, and this is primarily a listening practice. Trying to heal is also a barrier to more deeply experiencing whatever it is we think needs to heal. There are other methods for healing, and of course we will make use of whatever we think will help us. This practice is for those times when we can afford to be quiet.
P5 ~ Since Gaia is what’s real, any gap in honesty separates us. I can only be honest with myself if I listen to my whole self. How can I do that?
Trying to be honest is severely limited if it includes an unfriendly accusation of dishonesty. This brings up a natural defensiveness, including self-deception. That’s why I need to keep coming back to contemplation with an attitude of friendly acceptance and no particular goal. Instead of holding a predetermined goal, we practice in the openness of potential. There is room for both acceptance and preference. Yes, it is tricky. It demands practice. Above all, contemplation requires interest. That’s how I can listen to my whole self; I’m extremely interested. I’m lucky to be living in a time and place which allows me to do this. I can imagine doing contemplation practice in a refugee camp, but I can’t say I would be able to. Maybe? I don’t know. This statement, “I don’t know” comes up a lot as I learn to be more honest with myself. If it feels like “I don’t know and I don’t care” I’m suspicious of the motivation. Probably I don’t want the pain of caring. I value caring, so I prefer the kind of “I don’t know” which does care, but acknowledges my limitations. I don’t know what it would be like to be in a refugee camp, but the pictures of children in the ads soliciting donations make me shudder. The ads don’t, however, make me send money. Can I be honest about why I don’t send money? When I begin to explain myself, I have to stop because it’s so obvious I don’t know why I don’t send money and I don’t know what other people should be doing about the problem. And I really enjoyed my dinner tonight.
P6 ~ How much power do you think you have? How much do you want? How much power does the other person have? How much do you think they want?
Power and meaning depend upon each other. A person without power is a person without meaning. Gaia refuses to give me any meaning and I’m learning to appreciate that freedom. My search for meaning now looks to me like a futile attempt to explain all the contradictory impulses I find within myself, and then to feel good about the whole mess. With that accomplished my naked desire for control could become something mystical and admirable, almost worthy of worship. After all, this desire for control, for dominance, includes the impulse to protect what I love. When I have a strong sense that something is deeply meaningful, that sense is coming from the unlikely joining together of opposing forces like love and hate. The energy is explosive. You become convinced that the energy is yours. If you’re suddenly able to accomplish something, or show some leadership, the excitement can be addictive, and it will attract other people, which is even more addictive. Remember though, that the energy is coming from the harnessing together of contradictory impulses. The horses pulling the chariot at any given moment might be praise and blame. They might be fear of blame and hope for praise. They might be love and the fear of losing love. Or the desire to prove yourself worthy of love, and confusion about how to do that. The system of concepts employed to make ourselves seem sometimes heroic, sometimes a victim, is necessarily based on beliefs and interpretations driven by overheated emotion. It’s a rickety system. Gaia is not a rickety system.
P7 ~ What am I being touched by right now, physically, emotionally, intellectually?
Every relationship we encounter, moment by moment, opens up into the network we call Gaia. As I pick up a spoon, I’m being touched by minerals which were mined somewhere on Earth. I don’t know where. I can feel the weight of the spoon, the smoothness. This is a piece of the natural world. Someone designed this particular spoon, in line with a long history of spoons. It’s useful, it’s pleasant to see and to handle. There is artifice here, as well as natural material. Human design and manufacture is as closely woven into the network of life as is the metal which formed in the Earth. The people who worked in the mine and the factory needed to eat. That food was another part of a long chain of relationships. All along the chain there are natural limits. I’m using this spoon to eat some oatmeal. A limited amount of oats can be grown, and I’m lucky to have some of them. I’m tasting the oatmeal, feeling the texture in my mouth, how the oatmeal settles easily into my stomach. The way Gaia works is that countless small relationships radiate outward, touching in all directions. Each component, everything that touches me, is limited. The number of possible relationships is practically unlimited. Recently I was looking at some pictures from Mars. There had been an upgrade in the resolution of images beamed from a rover, so the pictures were more vivid than any I had seen before. The pictures touched me strongly. Yes, we have barren, rocky places on Earth, but I knew, or believed, that these pictures showed what it is like on Mars. Through our machinery, Gaia has jumped to Mars! Of course the machinery has gone far beyond Mars, flying beyond our solar system, but the Mars rover is actually touching the substance of Mars, driving itself around and beaming pictures back to us. It struck me as momentus that Gaia could touch the stuff of Mars, and I could see pictures of it. I felt so proud to be human, to be part of this system which has taken Gaia beyond Earth. This spoon, the oatmeal, the bowl, these familiar objects don’t seem as momentus, yet they do touch me, and they are part of this same system. As our human touch reaches out into space it’s good to remember that oats depend on specific conditions to grow here on Earth, and those of us who like our oatmeal had better guard those conditions, even as we are moved by pictures of the stark beauty of rocks on Mars.
P8 ~ How does ideology creep into your thinking? What does it offer you? What does it take away from knowing Gaia?
No emotion, anger, joy, pride, wants to hang out with uncertainty. The emotions are fine mixing it up with each other, like colors in a painter’s box, or chords on a piano. In fact, it takes an artist to express all the shades of hot or cold anger, longing which is playful and somewhat joyful, or extremely sad. What all these emotions have in common is a need for a cause. Ideology provides us with a ‘cause’ in every sense of the word. Ideology can tell me exactly why I’m angry and if I’m justified or guilty to feel the way I do. Ideology can provide me with a program to change the way I feel, or promote it by joining a ‘cause’ with others who feel similarly. Emotion loves an agenda because it now has a future. Having the reassurance of a future, emotion can soften, lose the sharp edge of present naked feeling. Gaia is full of surprises. It’s never quite clear what is causing what. The future is not assured. If I can recognize the natural limits of ideology then I’m not trapped in it. Seeing for myself how emotion tends to get itself trapped in a tangle of ideas can help my system find what it really needs, by being more in alignment with the larger system, with Gaia. Gaia apparently has no objection to the people I hate, because there they are, alive and well. Unlike certain other gods, Gaia has no plans to send anyone to hell. Not the people I hate, not me for hating them. I like my ideas, those people like their ideas. Our disagreement need not blow up our world. Time will tell which ideas flourish and which fade. Maybe the people I don’t like are right now in the process of inheriting the earth. Oh, well. I might want to loosen up my preferences. I might want to be less sure about who is causing what, and focus more on the effects as they are happening right now. There’s nothing wrong with looking for patterns and probabilities, nothing wrong with caring about the future, but it does not help to over simplify or indulge in wishful thinking. My emotions are getting used to hanging out in uncertainty, and they are all the more lively for doing so.
P9 ~ We’re breathing, we’re feeling the force of gravity. Paying attention to both at once places us squarely in the presence of Gaia. Try it.
Sometimes when I do this practice I feel like I could easily lose my motivation for doing any sort of work. I can see that so much of my effort comes from trying to be something I’m not. Just sitting, not listening to all the propaganda of culture and self, breathing, feeling gravity, I wonder why I would want to do anything else. That’s dangerous, right? Well, I’ve done it enough now to know that it’s much less dangerous than a lot of the things I do which are considered normal and perfectly safe, but just happen to be destroying our environment. I’ve done this practice enough to learn how restful it is, and to experience how rest has natural limits. Life is a flow of energy. Humans, unfortunately, have become addicted to unhealthy amounts of stimulation. We also exploit each other as workers, and become dependent on other people working too much, or in unhealthy ways. If we look to the pre-human world we can observe how other life forms have been shaped by sustainable energy flows. Sparrows would destroy the earth through their greed just as surely as we would, but they are a more simple form of life, and more easily kept within limits. To be in the presence of Gaia is to learn who we naturally are. We are not naturally lazy, far from it! We can afford to take some time in silence. For just a few minutes, as an experiment, drop all the stimulation which is supposed to be so entertaining, informative, relaxing or whatever, and come home to breath, gravity and the vast potential of basic being. Most likely you will not decide to starve, even if you do quit your present job in order to better enjoy the only life you will ever have.
P10 ~ Does Gaia have a self? What would that mean?
Self is a system in a world of other self-systems. If Gaia were all there is, there would be no need for Gaia to have a self. In the history of life, as soon as there were organisms with boundaries, metabolism and replication, there was competition for resources. The organisms that got the food were the organisms which reproduced. It all took place within the natural limits of the non-living environment, but you wouldn’t say that the non-living environment of rocks, water, air, sunlight was in any way competing with Gaia as the web of life grew. Now, thanks to humans, Gaia does have non-living competition in the form of machines. Machines which gobble up fossil fuels can’t destroy Gaia, but they can seriously upset the balance of nature. Machines producing nuclear energy can make water, air and rocks poisonous to most living organisms. Our common understanding of ‘nature’ means life and the physical substrate supporting it. When we want to go for a walk in nature, we might walk along a river. But we probably don’t stand on a bridge over an interstate highway admiring the traffic. As organic systems ourselves, we need to be on the side of Gaia. Yet we depend on our machines. How many people do you know who never use a car, or a bus, never buy food trucked in from the farm? Some of us are conscientious enough to buy cars which use less fuel, but our current choices are limited. If we were to consciously become a self for Gaia, rather than a slave to our machines, we could create a symbiosis. Our machines could support us as we created a symbiosis which promoted life systems and technology at the same time. There would still be competition for resources because the earth is limited. Maybe we can consciously control our own greed and aggression in support of Gaia.
Ch. 10 ~ Self-regulating systems and individual choice
P1 ~ Since living systems do not exist independently in nature, what am I? What does that feel like?
Our bodies need to be able to regulate their own water content. How do they do that? As you would expect, it’s very complicated. Physiologists can describe a lot of what is happening, but you need to know more about the properties of the water molecule than I do to even begin to talk about it. So let’s just agree that organisms for millions of years have successfully regulated their water content without thinking about it. At a certain point, I, as an individual, experience thirst. Then what. Do I have beer in the fridge? Do I reach for one? Do I have sparkling water imported from Italy? Do I want to drink some? Do I start the water kettle to make myself some herbal tea? Or do I just pick up a glass and turn on the tap. Consider how these conditions have developed. These days when I’m in the supermarket I don’t even look at the shelves of soft drinks. Or the potato chips which go so beautifully with the sodas. (I do remember!) Obviously lots of other people are buying the stuff or there wouldn’t be so much of it. When I think of my friends and what they drink, I can’t think of a single person who stocks up on soda at the grocery store. Therefore, when they’re thirsty, soda is not an option. This tells me that my choice to drink soda, or not, is related to who I am socially. This is all leading up to the question of how I experience individual choice. I know that who I think I am has a lot to do with making choices. I know I never choose to be thirsty. I am or I’m not. So how, precisely, does choice happen? How individual is it, really.
P2 ~ Integrity is a function of how well a system is integrated. Are any conflicting emotions currently creating instability in me?
Integrity is activity. Think of a Roman Arch, and it seems like one of the most static structures we can imagine, just standing there century after century. However, that arch which seems so static is doing something, moment by moment. Gravity never stops acting on the stones. The activity of compression holds the stones in place. The shape of the arch makes that possible. If you remove one block you know intuitively the whole arch will suddenly collapse. That’s because you’ve disrupted the compression, and the integrity of the structure is destroyed. We’re made of pieces of things just like the Roman arch, and these pieces of things are held together by constant activity. It sounds simple minded, but this view of being a person is not as simple minded, and much more believable than the theory based on a static self-concept. A static self-concept makes a person rigid, not resilient. There’s supposedly some mysterious thing called an ‘agent’ which makes choices all by itself. The easiest way to start to dismantle that theory is to get used to the idea that we are each a collection of activities tied to the outside world. It’s obvious once you start observing yourself closely. Doubt becomes your friend, conflicting emotions are not a problem, and disruption becomes creative. Unlike the Roman arches, life has the ability to reconstruct itself. Life has intelligence and the ability to make choices.
P3 ~ The problem with living in a dream is that real people get hurt. What’s my most recent example of that?
The self system is active night and day. The biological systems are pumping along, obviously. The emotional systems also have work to do. When I’m asleep it’s pretty simple. All my dream characters do what I want them to do without me even trying. Even this activity is not totally simple because there are always conflicting emotions, and sometimes I wake up from a dream feeling just awful. When I’m awake and trying to function in the world, my dream characters can be exceedingly troublesome. They will not do what I want them to! Suddenly they have their own wants and needs, and maybe I don’t do what they expect me to do. It can be truly a mess. The only possible solution is to choose to see a dream as a dream. Even the most rational narrative about my own life is essentially a dream. There are individual dreams and collective dreams. Even the most thoroughly researched scientific theory is essentially a dream - because it is put together and maintained by the human mind manipulating concepts. Lucky for the rest of us, scientists know this and are always working to debunk each others’ dreams. Therefore they can put together theories that are actually sort of useful in making stuff that works. I say ‘sort of’ because so often there are unintended consequences which turn around and bite us. How accurate is my theory of who and what you are? Is that going to have unintended consequences which turn around and bite us? It happens all the time. Especially with people who are way off the mark with their theories of who and what they are. It’s been very helpful for me to make a project of noticing when I’m making a real person into a dream character, or when someone is doing it to me. I know it’s been helpful because these days I like people so much better than I used to, and I’m getting very positive responses from them. Sometimes the negative responses are the most helpful in straightening me out, so I refer to them as ‘positive’ too. Bad dreams are good dreams if they wake you up.
P4 ~ If I’m not feeling my inner body right now, I’m not feeling anything. Take a moment to check in.
In order to direct compassionate attention to the inner body I need to choose to refrain from evaluation, manipulation and interpretation. I need to trust self-regulation at the deepest levels. These biological processes which I am sensing were running millions of years before humans started thinking about them. When we ignore them, when we lose ourselves in words and images, we’re ignoring the foundations of Gaia. Ignoring Gaia, there’s no way I can reconnect with basic being. Physical sensations themselves are not expressing basic being any more than my most random, irrelevant thought expresses basic being. It’s a question of how to rest the mind enough for it to be able to notice the subtlety of basic being as potential, not looking for it as something which exists. Going into the body, oddly enough, is like going into space. It can feel liberating. It can be a relaxation into primordial love.
P5 ~ Since Gaia is what’s real, any gap in honesty separates us. I can only be honest with myself if I listen to my whole self. How can I do that?
Setting the intention to be honest with myself is a form of self-regulation. But so is self-deception. Self-deception is a psychological survival strategy, and we better not go to war with it. There are subconscious forces at work which don’t want to be monkeyed with. Since we depend on social support to be less defensive, listening to my whole self includes listening to other people. Seeing how certain people in politics and the media are blatantly dishonest can help me to be more honest if I know I don’t want to be like them. I can seek out supportive environments. If I am in a social situation which is dangerous, I can protect myself through judicious dishonesty. Being honest with myself gives me a lot of flexibility. I can choose my friends carefully. I can resist manipulation. I can balance attachment and autonomy. This is all very rewarding which motivates me to keep going further into the jungle of my mind. I notice how honesty is much more strongly connected to direct experience than it is to explanation, so I learn to waste less energy on fruitless or fanciful explanations. I don’t judge other people’s explanations harshly because I understand how strongly they believe they need to justify and promote themselves, even as my own needs diminish. Being more honest with myself, I can see why people resort to dishonesty. The ability to deceive oneself and others arose for a reason, and continues for good reasons. That’s how Gaia works. As I set my intention to be honest with myself, or any other intention, I acknowledge that Gaia controls the outcome. It’s just how the cookie crumbles.
P6 ~ How much power do you think you have? How much do you want? How much power does the other person have? How much do you think they want?
Machines make us feel powerful. From the point of view of Gaia, however, we’re kids playing with fire. Since machines can do so much work for us, we have more time to play. Since machines can make things cheaply, we have more things, more entertainment based on having lots of things. Making choices, as in shopping, gives us a sense of power. Gaia has no reason to prefer living things over machines. Gaia knows that our resources are limited and that our love for machines, which has a way of quickly becoming our dependence on machines, can squander those resources. Some people are using a lot more resources than others, which makes those others mad. When those others stop playing the game, the game changes for everyone. When playing with fire changes the climate, the climate changes for everyone. The system is self-regulating, and we can only push it so far before it pushes back. No matter how powerful we think we are, we are smaller systems running within larger systems, and all these systems are bound by laws. Our machines are bound by laws. Now we have machines which can help us study those laws, so let’s do that.
P7 ~ What am I being touched by right now, physically, emotionally, intellectually?
When I’m walking outside in a strong wind, it’s obvious how the wind is touching me. It’s less obvious how my reaction to the wind is also touching me. I know I can’t turn the wind off, and yet I react almost as if I could choose to do that. Can I choose to drop my resistance to the wind? I can try. Then I need to check carefully to see if I’m setting up a struggle, and how that’s affecting me overall. Maybe I can decide to go indoors, if that’s a possibility. It may be possible, but not desirable in a larger context. Being human is complicated! I think we can assume that for a frog, if it feels good it is good. Ah, that sun feels good….until it’s too much, and then plop! Back into the water. Sometimes my life is like that. But unlike the frog, I can read the news. I can be touched by thoughts of the future. I can be touched by the working conditions of the people who make my shoes. I can be touched by a panoply of images with no idea what I can do about any of it. In our world in recent years there has been an explosion of information. I believe that for a self-regulating system, the more information, the better. Including the information that I’m making myself crazy with too much information. Does a frog need to know there might be a drought coming? No, a frog can only deal with the fact that there is a drought starting now. Gaia has given the frog the ability to do that. Gaia has also given the frog the ability to deal with the uncertainty of the movements of a fly. But probably not the ability to worry about it when the fly is not present. Or the ability to endlessly discuss their speculations about a drought which might be coming. That’s not what all that croaking is about! Humans can be touched by images of what might happen, our own worries about that, what other people are saying about it, and our desire to make the future better for ourselves and everyone else. This level of complexity is still new in terms of evolutionary history. We’ll get used to it. Meanwhile, paying attention to what is touching me in fact now, and what is touching me as a ‘maybe’, seems like an exercise in sanity.
P8 ~ How does ideology creep into your thinking? What does it offer you? What does it take away from knowing Gaia?
If I say “I don’t think there’s any such thing as free will” I’m stating an opinion. By itself, an opinion doesn’t behave like an ideology. An opinion which is part of an ideology is tied to a web of other opinions. This web of ideas doesn’t have to sound rational to everyone, but to become part of a full blown ideology it helps to have some other people who are ‘like minded’. At that point the ideas have become a self-regulating system. If I’m choosing to ‘know Gaia’ I can’t be tied up in any web of ideas. I can’t be a person who loves nature. I can’t be a person who is defending the forest. I can’t be a person who opposes nuclear energy and supports wind farms. I begin to know Gaia when I begin to know that I am not a person based on identifying with any particular set of ideas, opinions, feelings, or appearances. What makes me a person is the same thing which makes Gaia Gaia, and I can know that directly only if I’m not caught in the past. I need to be able to use ideas which are based on past experience without being trapped by them. Gaia is not tied to any particular form of life. At the same time, it’s not true that anything is possible. What are the limits of what’s possible? I find out every time I make a wrong decision. So far, my decision to avoid ideology is proving to be possible.
P9 ~ We’re breathing, we’re feeling the force of gravity. Paying attention to both at once places us squarely in the presence of Gaia. Try it.
I want to review why I’m choosing to do this exercise. It’s not in order to get a good night’s sleep, even though getting a good night’s sleep is important. To be in the presence of Gaia is to experience basic being as potential. It is to experience the energy of our own system. The countless chemical reactions taking place to keep me alive moment by moment do not explain themselves to me. Elaborate research must be done by specially trained people to explain all that activity. We experience it as a simple, unitary feeling of aliveness. If we study the science behind that feeling, we can appreciate it all the more. But this exercise of paying attention to breath, paying attention to gravity, pulls us into a part of our mind which isn’t concerned with details. Bringing awareness to this part of the mind releases us from past ideas and beliefs, and brings the possibility of a great reformation. Emotion which was fixated on past hurts or past triumphs is suddenly available to propel us into a new motion in a new direction not premeditated. The potential of being is available to be pulled into a shape needed by the larger system, by Gaia. As we experience basic being our identity eagerly drops the old forms and rushes into the formless. If this brings up fears of losing my place in the world, the anchors of breath and gravity reassure me that no, this is absolutely natural and ordinary. This is not death, this is life.
P10 ~ Does Gaia have a self? What would that mean?
A self-regulating system must have some sort of self or we wouldn’t call it a self-regulating system. Consider the tropical cyclone, one of the forms of nature which will benefit from a warming climate. A cyclone requires an ocean water surface temperature of at least 79 degrees Fahrenheit. Once Cyclone A gets up and running, it churns up cooler water making life difficult for Cyclone B which is in its wake. We could make a cartoon showing the competition of cyclones as they regulate the water temperature to their own advantage. If Cyclone B had any sense it would steer clear of that cooler water caused by its older sibling. If humans have any sense we will regulate our own use of energy and resources to avoid creating a world which is more suitable for cyclones than for humans.
Ch. 11 ~ Contemplation
Contemplation is a way of knowing.
It is a way of processing information.
It is a way of seeing from inside the fire of not knowing.
It is a way of standing in the field of formless potential.
Contemplation tied to belief might be comforting or it might lead to doubt.
It is unpredictable.
Contemplation is playful.
We don’t know where the thoughts come from.
There’s no need to be consistent.
Knowing Gaia is not a goal, it is always new.
Contemplation is not a debate, nor a way of finding what’s true.
Knowing Gaia is an attitude.
I must always reconsider.
I can go back to silence.
I can start over.
You will find your own words and your own silence.
You will find your own way of knowing Gaia.
