HOLDING SPACE -- ULTIMATE CARING

CREATE SPACE...HOLD SPACE

THE ULTIMATE FORM OF CARING

When our mother was dying, my sister and I gathered to be with her in her final hours. Neither of us had any prior experience of supporting someone in transition out of this life into the next, but we were pretty sure we wanted to accompany Mum for as long as she was still here.

While we supported our mother, we were, in turn, supported by a gifted palliative care nurse who came in every little while to care for her and to talk to us about what we could expect in the coming hours. She gave us only as much information as we felt we needed about what to do for her now, and later with Mum’s body after her spirit had passed.

“Take your time,” I recall her saying one time. “You don’t need to call the funeral home until you’re ready. Gather any people who will want to say their final farewells. Sit with your mum as long as you need to. When you’re ready, call and they will come to pick her up.” We knew that we were being supported by someone who knew her stuff from a long history of relevant experiences, and who at furthest, was only a phone call away.

In the years since then, I’ve often thought about those nurses and the important role they played in our lives. They were much more than what can fit in the somewhat sterile title of “palliative care nurse”. They were facilitators, companions, coaches, and guides. By offering gentle, relevant, non-judgmental support and guidance, they helped us walk one of the most difficult journeys of our lives. And they did it without any hint of them wanting to do the walking for us. They were just available, to guide and steady us if needed.

The work that they did can best be summed up by a term that’s become common in some of the counseling circles in which I work...... they were holding space for us.

What do I mean “to hold space” for someone else? I mean that we are willing to walk alongside another person in whatever journey they’re on, without judging them, without making them feel inadequate, without trying to “correct” or “fix” them, or without trying to interfere or “do things for them” or otherwise impact the outcome. When we hold space for other people, we open our hearts, offer unconditional emotional and intellectual support, and let go of judgement and any urges to protect or usurp initiative.

Holding space is a complex chain thing. It's a bit like the suits of chain mail that mediaeval knights used to wear. Interlinked loops of metal that, in concert, allowed the wearer to move freely, but provided effective protection from onslaught. In fact, the more I think about it, holding space is a seminal activity that spreads its tendrils throughout the social fabric, binding people together in a network of sharing purposes. Sometimes I find myself holding space for people close to me, while they hold space for others, some of whom I may not even know.

Holding space is inter-dependence in action. Inter-dependence is a median state of social being somewhere between the unhealthy extremes of being an untouchable hermit, and being a powerless parasite.

In our situation, for example, the nurses were holding space for us while we held space for Mum, for each other, and for family members who could not be present. And though I know nothing about the nurses' support systems, I suspect that there were others holding space for them as they did this challenging and meaningful work.

I suspect it might be virtually impossible to be a strong space holder unless we have others who will hold space for us. Even the strongest leaders, coaches, nurses, etc., need to know that there are some people with whom they can be vulnerable and weak when they need to be, without fear of being judged or disadvantaged.

In my own roles as teacher, facilitator, coach, father, and friend, etc., I do my best to hold space for other people in the same way. It’s not always easy, because I have a very human tendency to want to fix things for people, give them advice, or judge them for not being further evolved than they are. By the same token I have to keep working patiently holding space for parts of myself, too, because I know that I'm no different – and it’s important. 

Empathy and compassion begin at home.

And so do their opposites.

At the same time, there are people in my life that I trust to hold space for me. Hopefully they can do it when I need it, but it doesn't always work out that way. It isn't a question of their not caring; it's usually just a matter of timing. That's when it's handy to have more than one “best friend”.

To truly support people in their own growth, transformation, grief, etc., we can’t do it by taking their power away (ie. trying to fix their problems for them), shaming them (ie. implying that they should know more or do better than they do), or overwhelming them (ie. giving them more information than they’re ready for – something I'm very prone to do.). We have to be prepared to step to the side and create space for them to make their own choices, offer them unconditional love and support, give gentle guidance (and sometimes a push) when it’s needed, encourage them to feel safe when they make mistakes, and be there waiting for them when they've explored a pathway that turned out to be a dead end..

Holding space is not something that’s exclusive to facilitators, coaches, or palliative care nurses. It is something that ALL of us can do for each other – for our partners, children, friends, neighbours, and even strangers who strike up conversations as we’re riding the bus to work.

Here are the lessons I’ve learned from those who have held space for me.

1.    Give people permission to trust their own intuition and wisdom. When we were supporting Mum in her final hours, we had no prior death-experience to rely on, and yet, intuitively, we knew what was needed. We knew to sit and sing hymns to her, and we knew how to love her. We even knew when it was time to inject the medication that would help ease her pain. In a very gentle way, the nurses let us know that we didn’t need to do things according to some arbitrary health care protocol – we simply needed to trust our intuition and accumulated wisdom from the many years we’d loved Mum.

2.    Give people only as much information as they can handle. Do not overwhelm people with far more than they can process in the tender time they're struggling to handle. Too much information leaves people feeling overwhelmed, incompetent and unworthy. That's not what we intend for them – in fact, it's the opposite. Be like our aboriginals with their great secrets – introduce only as much as their growth will allow at a time when it's relevant -- to them, not to you.

3.    Mind your own business. Don’t take their power away. Do-gooders need to learn this one, big-time. When we take decision-making power out of people’s hands, when we “do for” them, we leave them feeling patronised, invaded, useless and incompetent. We really need to stop enabling victimhood. There may even be some times when we need to step in and dispense tough love for other people (ie. when they’re dealing with an addiction and an intervention feels like the only thing that will give them the “escape hatch” they're looking for), but in almost every other case, people need the autonomy to make their own choices (including our children).

If you're not sure whether an action on someone else's behalf is your business or not, here's a good test of where responsibility lies – Who will be the main beneficiary if this crisis works out? If it isn't you, mind your own business. If they need your advice, by all means share your experience, but leave Choosing up to them. Don't usurp their response-ability. Any choices to be made are on their side of the line.

Good-care people know that we need to feel empowered in making decisions, for ourselves and on behalf of others, and so they offer support but never try to direct or control us.

4.    Keep your own ego out of it. This is a big one. We all get caught in that trap now and then – when we begin to believe that someone else’s success is going to depend on our “help”, or when we think that their failure reflects poorly on us, or when we couldn't live with ourself if we didn't interfere (selfish guilt!). or when we’re convinced that whatever emotions they choose to unload on us are about us instead of them. It’s a trap I’ve occasionally found myself slipping into when I teach. I can become more concerned about my own success (Do the students get me? Am I succeeding with them? Do their experiences reflect on my ability to teach? etc.) than about the success of those I'm working with. I take whether they “get it” or not – personally. But that doesn’t serve anyone – not even me. To truly support their growth, I need to keep my ego out of it and create the space where they have the opportunity and retain their choice to grow and learn. They are their own therapist. I'm just there to ask questions that may point them in the direction of a possible path to explore.

5.    Inspire or empower them to feel safe enough to fail. That does not include offering paternalistic noises of sympathy – they give off the odour of you being somehow superior to them. If you cannot be with the other as a fellow traveller, better to keep your counsel and just be present and available.

When people are learning, growing, or going through grief or transition, they are bound to make some mistakes along the way. When we, as their space holders, withhold judgement and shame, we offer them the opportunity to reach inside themselves, to find the courage to take risks and the resilience to keep going even when they fail. When we let them know that failure is simply a part of the journey and not the end of the world, they’ll spend less time beating themselves up for it and more time learning from the situation.

6.    Give guidance and help with humility and thoughtfulness. A wise space holder knows when to withhold guidance (ie. when it makes a person feel foolish or inadequate, or when they're just not ready yet) and when to offer it gently (ie. when a person asks for it or is too lost to know what to ask for, except “help”). A guide does not take power or autonomy away; he/she stands ready to gently challenge us to take up possible things we can do that enable us to self-realise our power in the matter. This is a careful dance that we all must do when we hold space for other people. It takes practice and humility to recognise the areas in which others feel most vulnerable and incapable, and be able to offer the right kind of support without diminishing or shaming them.

7.    Create a simple container for complex emotions, fear, trauma, etc. When people feel that they are held in a deeper way than they are used to, they feel safe enough to allow complex emotions to surface that might normally remain hidden. Someone who is practised at holding space knows that this can happen and will be prepared to hold it in a gentle, supportive, and non-judgmental way. Some counsellors talk about “holding the rim” for people. A 3-dimensional circle becomes the space where people feel safe enough to fall apart without fearing that this will leave them permanently broken or that they will be shamed in front of others around them.

Become the kind of person that is available and present to offer strength and courage. This is not easy work, and it is work that I continue to learn about as I host increasingly more challenging conversations. We cannot do it if we are overly subjective or emotional ourselves, if we haven’t done the hard work of looking into our own shadow, or if we are not confident of the ultimate evolution of the people we are holding space for. Good guides show up with tenderness, compassion, and confidence. If we show up in a way that doesn’t offer assurance that we can handle difficult situations in a balanced way, or that we are afraid of failure, we won't deserve their trust.

8.    Encourage and allow others to make different decisions and to try different experiences than you would. At Lifeline, counsellors are constantly reminded that the only real expert in the other person's life is the other person – they just don't realise it at the time. Resist the temptation to bring to the process preconceptions of “This is how it should go”.Holding space is about respecting each person’s differences and recognising that those differences may lead to them making choices that we would not make. Sometimes, for example, they make choices based on cultural norms that we can’t understand from within our own experience. When we hold space, we release control and we honour differences. It's our challenge to be relevant to them, not the other way 'round. It's much more effective this way, too.

Holding space is not something that we can master overnight, or that can be adequately addressed in a list of tips like the ones I’ve just given. It’s a complex practice that evolves as we work at it, and it is unique to each person and each situation.

Begin by practicing on yourself. Stay open to what is actually going on with you. Create and hold open space for all facets of your Self. Give yourself space to be all that you are, without judgment. Give yourself room to make and experiment with different choices. Make space for change, it only to see what it feels like and see what happens.

Then stay open for others to connect with you. No need to go out looking. Life will deliver like-minded seekers to your door at precisely an appropriate time – for both of you. Then simply meet them evenly at their level of experience and consciousness. If you don't know what that is like, ask them What does it feel like to be you in this situation?

And pay attention to the answers that come your way.

We hold space for one another because it's an essential part of fully being. If it's done for gratitude or for any other reason or purpose, it's conditional, and you're not going to be very effective. Nor will either of you be satisfied. Along the way, you may find gratitude in the other's eyes; you may not. You may not even be there when that miraculous shift in ways of seeing happens for the other person. Completion may not even come from the people you directly deal with, but the space you create for others will come back to you a hundredfold – that is Universal Law.

WHAT'S DRIVING EVOLUTION?

CONSCIOUSNESS – THE DRIVER OF EVOLUTION

Charles Darwin got a really handy handle on Evolution but, as often frustratingly happens when we try to nail down a truth of something, there turns out to be more yet to be discovered. And to an open mind, it is these “more-yets” that prevent a truth becoming entrenched as The Truth.

There is always more. Let mystery deepen......

Dr. Deepak Chopra says, “An emerging view alternative to Darwin’s random mutations and natural selections is that consciousness may be the driver of complexity in evolution. Consciousness is the key to evolution and we will soon prove that.”

Well, fine, I’m up for change. But before we go digging deeper, let's get a clearer idea of what it is that we're looking for. Good idea?

What precisely is this no-thing we call Consciousness?

I don't have a definition – actually I have several. If I may, I'll put them out here so that you can join me in finding one or more that suit the situation you're in at the moment.

1.    Consciousness is Universal Awareness with (human) limitations. I say “human” limitations because, on the evidence of what I see in the bedroom mirror and similarities I see between my “thinkings” and “feelings” and those of human beings around me, I have my limitations and I claim to be human. (But I could be wrong about that. Time will tell).

My point is twofold. Assuming that I am human, my consciousness is Pure Awareness, distorted by my particular limitations –

a) The level and quality of human consciousness depends very much on the vibrational frequency level and resonant quality of the individual human, just as the social consciousness of a grouping of humans depends on the levels of mental, spiritual and psychological vibration of the group. You can feel this for yourself. Compare your experiences of being in the presence of one or more enlightened masters with your experiences of being in the presence of one or more members of an ultra right-wing lynch mob. All human beings, but not homogeneous.

Notice, too, the difference between your experience of driving into, say, Mullumbimby compared to your experience of driving into, say, Footscray. Compare your experience of watching someone on TV sitting with the Dalai Lama and, say, listening to someone trying to talk with Peter Dutton or Scott Morrison. Two entirely different levels of consciousness, and I am NOT saying that one is preferable to the other – I leave that to you.

b) Secondly, I apply the same definition of consciousness to all sentient life. For a scribbly gumtree, consciousness is Awareness with the limitations of being a scribbly gum tree. And so it goes for kangaroos, amoebae, lichens or rocks.

We can never get everyone to agree on what the definition of consciousness is. But here's another possible one:-

2. Consciousness is one’s perceptiveness of first person experience, as it is happening.

Right now you are having a first person experience of reading something written by me on the internet, and only you can have this experience that you're having right now. Someone else could be reading this, too, but their experience is not going to be precisely the same as yours. I guarantee that.

I could also have a third person guessing about the experience you're having by putting you in an MRI machine and then looking at which part of your brain is being activated, and if that person had enough information he/she could say, “Oh, your auditory cortex is being activated. You’re probably having a conversation with someone.” That's about as close as anyone can get to knowing, let alone having your experience.

Hardly close at all, is it? (Oh, I know how you feel! – Close, perhaps, but no cigar)

The worst thing about our Experience is the illusion that we are actually having all of it.

A being with more acutely developed awareness skills will always see things differently from a being that has its perceptions blocked in some way. And the more sensitive person will be more likely to acknowledge his/her limitations than someone who’s blocked off.

The level of your consciousness shapes what you can experience; mine shapes mine. And no being on earth can get the whole thing at once and still keep talking. Which is bad news for people who may think they're Jesus Christ. Even He wasn't the whole thing, but He had access to it. That was one purpose of His coming – to point out that we too can have direct access to divine awareness. We don’t need a middleman or mediator; we are closer to God than we think. If he’d been allowed to live longer, priests and bishops could have been put out of business.

But I digress…..

I could check the various GPS devices in the world, could even guess where you’re having your experience of reading this, and maybe actually describe a bit of what is going on for you right now. But, anything I say is going on with you right now could not possibly be your first-person consciousness experience. Anything I say would be, at best, a second person, or even third person description of what I think is going on for you.

So, we all have some grasp of what we mean by the term “first person experience”. It is as unique as your fingerprints or genes. What happens to our being when we taste a strawberry, how we feel the emotion of a story that we're reading, or how we feel when we think of somebody we love, or an image that we experience somewhere in our consciousness, or a sensation, or a thought -- that’s first person experience. So, that’s a good definition for consciousness that maybe we can agree upon sometimes. But there is more.....

3.    In Eastern wisdom traditions, which tend to dig deeper, consciousness is cast in a somewhat different mould to that. Consciousness is an answer to the question -- What is the source of this present experience?

OK, we now have three “statements-about” consciousness, which is about as close as it’s possible to get near what is essentially indefinable. We can say that experience can be perceptual, which means “I” sees an object. “I” sees a sunset. “I” sees a mountain. “I” sees another person. “I” hears a song. “I” tastes chocolate ice cream. “I” smells a rose. “I” feels a breeze on my skin. Those are perceptual experiences. In one way or another they have to do with what we call the outside world. So, we can say sound, taste, smell, texture, colour, are perceptual experiences of consciousness.

But then there are other varieties of experience, which are mental, and/or emotional, or you might say an image in consciousness, or an idea, and a bunch of feelings, in reality or in imagination. There are also our reactions to of all of those. And just to make things really interesting, you can add to the mix experiences that appear out of “nowhere”, and extra-sensory experiences.

Whew!

BUT......

What is the source of them? Where do they happen? Where do they come from?

And, here's a killer question – Is there something prior to experience? Is there something prior to the consciousness within which an experience arises?

So, given these questions, Eastern spiritual traditions go further. This is when you look at the traditions of Vedanta or Kashmir Shaivism, or the transcendentalists, or what Aldous Huxley called the perennial philosophy, In these contexts there is pure awareness that is prior to consciousness, prior to perception, prior to thought, prior to mental activity, prior to emotional feeling – in fact prior to everything including the big bang. This is the pure Awareness that is the space in which all being-ness arises.

Awareness is the ground zero of existence. Without awareness, there is no existence. Another way to say this would be “perceptions and points of view are many, mental activities are many, emotional movements are many, but that Awareness of it all is one”.

So, there’s a common ground of experience where Eastern wisdom traditions go. And that common ground is not only a common ground for you and me as human species, but also for a bird, or for a tree, or for a bacterium, or for a paramoecium, or for a plant, or for even a rock. In Eastern wisdom traditions, consciousness, or a very simple form of sentience – sentience means the ability to feel and to respond, or to be aware and to respond – that sentience pervades the cosmos from atom to galaxy and, of course, in between somewhere. Because consciousness permeates every level of all being, somehow we are integral with it.

This is not a new idea. It has existed for as long as men have contemplated possible truths or principles underlying being (philosophy). Plato spoke of it in the cave allegory; he spoke of a hidden reality, an organising programme of ruthless, inherent principles that govern our daily lives from within the observable world. Eastern wisdom traditions have spoken of the un-manifest domain of consciousness – ie. the one outside the range of what we can pick up with our five senses.

In the morning when you slowly open your eyes after a good night’s sleep, before your bio-computer has fully backed up out of “sleep” mode, before you realise you’re who you think you are and that you’re in your bedroom, or whatever, there’s a dawning-moment of awareness where there is no thought content, no emotion content, not even perceptual content or cognitive content, but there is some kind of a ground of being of contextual, unclouded awareness. And then slowly, or rapidly, you become more consciously aware of superimposing details -- “I’m thirsty.” “I’m in my bedroom. I need to go to the toilet. What time is it? OK. This is what I’ve got to do,” etcetera, etcetera.

So, there is Awareness prior to Consciousness. Whether there is consciousness prior to experience is a question I have gone into elsewhere, but –

• the here-and-now co-existence of consciousness and experience is the common ground of all experiences in all species. This is the definition of consciousness that I have used all my life because I have been obsessed with the questions: What is existence? What is consciousness? What is experience? What is the universe?

Today, there are two hard problems that are considered number one and number two in science. Number one is what is the universe made of?

Well, nothing. The kind of “nothing” that is everything, but suspended as potential.

To make a long story short, the universe is mostly invisible, with dark matter and dark energy combined. That’s 96 percent of the universe. Four percent is atomic, but when we look at atoms, then those atoms are particles. And when we look at particles, they’re also waves, and their waves have no units of mass or energy. People are still struggling to define what is the universe made of because our current science says it’s made of nothing. That would be no big deal, except for the fact that our minds simply cannot, and most people will not, embrace or be with nothing. In other words, we're an idea called “something” living in an incomprehensible, unreasonable, unknowable “nothing” that we can't be with. And we're made of the same incomprehensible “nothing”, insisting that we're “something”.

When you look at the sky and you see these vast, empty spaces between the stars and between you and the galaxies, these empty spaces are not really empty. Nothing there, yes; empty, no. They’re the womb of creation. Some invisible forces are manifesting out of nothing, gradually lowering their frequencies and ultimately showing up as atoms and star stuff and everything that we call “material”. I see the universe as an eternal process of “nothing 'mattering'”.

But, the vast realm of reality is sub empirical, where the usual methodologies of science -- which are measurement, observation, experimental validation – are useless. Scientists cannot go there because there’s nothing to measure. There’s nothing to observe. There’s nothing that you can do any experiment with. There's nothing to validate.

All experiment starts once a measurement is made. Type out the phrase, “interpretations of quantum physics,” or “quantum mechanics” in Wikipedia. You’ll see one big fact that stands out: quantum mechanics is a mathematical formulism.

It explains basically the statistical likelihood of observing particles. That’s it. And it’s very successful because all our technology is based on it. It’s probably the most successful science so far, but when you look at the interpretations of quantum mechanics you will see there are at least, at the moment 15 to 20 of them, which means we know certain facts around quantum mechanics, but we don’t know what it means because we are ending up with a domain that is unobservable.

That’s true of most of where science is going right now: Superstrings, a theory that can't yet be validated or falsified; or multiple universes, a theory that can't yet be falsified or verified, because science has brought us to the door of that which is beyond observation and measurement. And that’s 99.9 percent of reality. The .01 percent that we can observe is, in fact, somehow just a manifestation of the invisible realm of the universe.

Are you starting to get the possibility that people who are “certain” of something might be a wee bit shallow?

Un-answered Question #.1. How much can we really conscious of?

Truth is up for grabs. We live on a huge, huge, huge iceberg and the tip of your little finger is the tip of that iceberg. The tip of your pinkie is the size of the physical, observable world. The rest of you and the world you're standing on is way out of sight. The whole “world” is so huge that we actually have no idea how big it is, and it's expanding faster than we can run. So, that takes care of the number one unanswered question. How much are we conscious of? We do not know what we're conscious of. We can't even have an idea about that because what we have available to think with won't stretch that far or fast.

The second unanswered question I ask today is: What is the biological basis of consciousness?

And here there’s also a problem because everybody assumes that there is a biological basis of consciousness. That’s the prevailing scientific paradigm: that your thoughts, your imagination, your perceptions, your everything that you experience every day as your feelings, intentions, introspection, intuition, rational thought, imagination, and also everything that you experience as a perceptual world is a biological phenomenon.

But there’s a problem with that assumption because, first of all it’s just an assumption based on no evidence whatsoever. Nobody has ever actually proved that biology produces consciousness, or any experience for that matter. Biology may be peripherally involved in the process of picking up and conveying some signals from an experience of something, but the experience itself? What causes that? What's driving it? What's driving us? What's looking though the viewfinder of our senses? What's looking over our shoulder at us and what we're picking up? 

Nobody has the vaguest clue. When we look, there’s nothing there – but we can feel there is some “no-thing” there. In the meantime, the best we can do is agree that while “biology” may be one of many, many means of things happening, it is only part of the mechanics; it is not the cause of anything.

When you look at a beautiful rainbow, or you look at a loved one, or you look at your teenage daughter's room, or you look at an exquisite building with intricate architecture, all that’s going to your eyes is strings of photons. Those photons are colourless and have no dimensionality whatsoever. When they reach your retina or your brain, all that happens is – an electric current oscillates in some kind of mysterious code. Whether it’s any of the five sensations in your experience, all that happens in your brain is electrochemistry. You don’t experience electrochemistry or photons or electrical currents, though. You experience a rainbow or a messy room, and your reactions to those things. How that happens, I don't know, neither do you, and neither does anyone else – yet.

You experience a three dimensional world, which is evolving in time. And no one knows how that happens. It’s called the hard problem of consciousness. If I ask you to imagine a beautiful sunset, in your mind's eye you see a picture of that sunset, but there’s no picture of the sunset in your brain, or anywhere else that a surgeon can locate. There’s just a product of electrochemistry being driven by --- what??. And that's no more your experience than a graphic equaliser readout is Beethoven's Ninth!

So, where does experience happen, any experience? People will say it happens in the brain. You say, “why?” And they say, “Well, if you knock somebody on the head, then they lose consciousness,” or “If you give the man anaesthesia, he’ll lose consciousness, or, you know, if they take a drug, or have a hallucination, they experience a shift in consciousness.” OK, so experience happens in consciousness. But where's the seat of consciousness?

So you conclude, consciousness must be a brain phenomenon, which is a pretty good argument, until you ask, “Then how does the brain do it?   How does the brain produce imagination, or creativity, or intention, or any volition, or a thought, or even the colour red when all that comes is colourless photons. How does the brain produce the experience of a sound, or the smell of a rose, or a taste of chocolate? Then we get stuck. We don’t know where to go. In confusing the operations of “brain” and “mind”, we fail to notice that a lot of our experiences happen in every cell of our body, not just the brain.

Now eastern traditions and many other systems of science or philosophy will say there is just consciousness, and its multitudinous varying states of excitement, just consciousness and its modulations. If that is so, then our mental and emotional experiences are an excited state of consciousness. Biology is an excited state of consciousness, and our experience of the world is an excited state of consciousness. Everything is consciousness excited at different frequencies, and the only problem arises when you just assume that the world is solely physical. That's when you run yourself into a dead-end.

If you assume that the world is consciousness, arising in consciousness, then the universe is consciousness as well. It’s during the objective experience of consciousness that biology, etcetera come into play.

So, then if this is true, if this philosophical assumption or ontology is true, then we are just a species of consciousness, as is a microbe, as is a bacterium, as is a paramoecium, as is a monkey, etcetera. Then the evolution of species is in fact the evolution of species of consciousness.

I am proposing “another” interpretation of evolution – That we are all agents or manifestations of consciousness coming from one universal domain of Awareness. I think Charles Darwin’s great contribution was that he identified from his observations and introduced to us the concept of “evolution” and the word to label it.

His main critics at that time hailed from the creationists' bandwagon. I've lived a lot of my early years as an unquestioning disciple of the Genesis' version of creation. Thanks to Darwin, however, I was prompted to look at the world around me working itself out, and I found that creationism could not be relied upon as a viable theory of it all. It looked more like an excuse for dogmatic religious (as opposed to spiritual) agendas. So, definitely, I’m not proposing a creationist theory. I’m just saying evolution in each of its forms appears to be more true than creationism, and that on closer inspection the evolution of species seems to be the evolution of species of consciousness.

When Darwin wrote his theory of origin of species, he had no knowledge of DNA or genetics. He had no idea that such a discipline as epigenetics would come, He had no idea of how genes get activated, or expressed, or regulated, or changed. So, yes, random and quantum mutations are intriguing theories when coupled to natural selection.

If you talk to some of the evolutionary biologists today (those who don't belong to the 99 Percent Club who are still wedded to the old mechanistic paradigm), but to biologists like Dr. Rudy Tanzi, or other people of his calibre, they say that the periodic mutations that created sideways leaps, breaking linear evolution, don’t seem to be random at all. They theorise that mutations follow certain probability patterns. An individual mutation can be unpredictable, but when you look at the multiple mutations, they follow a distribution pattern. But, is there a discernible probability distribution? and is there room even for purpose driven mutation (teleology)?

“Random” is sometimes a convenient word to excuse passing on further digging. If I go to Spencer Street Station in Melbourne I see people apparently at first sight to be moving about randomly. But if I come every day and pay close attention I may see that, so many people are coming from or going to Albury, so many are going to and from Geelong, so many to Bendigo, and so many are going to Adelaide In fact, I could even plot a distribution pattern and create a business plan out of it, Are evolutionary mutations like that? Can I plot a distribution pattern and say that, OK -- there’s the evolution of species going on with natural selection, but that evolution of species is also being driven in a direction of complexity and purpose?

This is dangerous ground to tread in if you’re with traditional biologists because they will immediately accuse you of creationism and teleology and all the old terms that are used to attack the most traditional model of evolution. Our view of Evolution right now needs revision.

I’m beginning to see that it is possible to get a sense of some directions that the evolution of certain things (change) may be taking, and deliberately merge myself with that flow.

Could intentionally participating in evolution like that make a difference?

Yes.

Dr. Deepak Chopra and Dr. Rudy Tanzi are doing studies where they take people through various practices of meditation and then look at their genetic expression. And it changes! It changes because of epigenetic modulation. Epigenes are factors outside the gene and the epigenetic information is all there in the sheet of proteins outside the genome. Epigenes are influenced by everything – influenced by persistent thought, by stress, by relaxation, by meditation, by diet, by sleep, by emotions. So, for the first time, we now have a very clear handle on mind, brain genome,…..

And even microbiomes. 90 percent of the genetic information in your body is in bacteria.

This includes your gut and your skin. 90 percent of your DNA is bacterial. Only 10 percent is strictly human. Even in the human cells – the 10 percent human cells that you have – the mitochondria, which are the energy producing organelles in your cells, they’re all derived from bacteria. It could be said that you are, as a human being, the awakening in consciousness of bacterial colonies that got together to produce human beings and they said, “Okay, who am I now?”

Let’s now focus on consciousness itself.

University studies can now show that the thoughts you entertain, your emotions, your mental activity, which obviously arise from and within the ambience of your consciousness, are influencing the behaviour of your genes, not only your human genes, but your microbial genes. The work is still ongoing, but so much is plain to see already.

If you look at experiments where they take mice and they have them smell something like wintergreen and follow that with electrical shocks, then the next generation of mice will be afraid of the wintergreen smell even though they haven’t experienced the electrical shock. Or if you go to a cattle farm and you see cattle that are enclosed within an electrical fence so they get mild electrical shock when they touch it, then the subsequent generations will be afraid and will not go near that wiring, even when the power has been turned off. 

How do memories get transferred like that?

We all assume that memory is in our brain, and, of course, there are neural correlates for memory there that you can look at. If I ask you to remember the face of your mother, or the location of your house, or a really memorable past experience, or what you had for dinner yesterday; when you do that there will be activity in your brain that can be seen on an MRI. But, where is the memory at a cellular level before I asked you that question? We know that every cell in our bodies, like the pieces of a shattered holographic plate, has complete memory, nobody is able to pinpoint its origin. Where is the seat of “Soul memory”? Some people point to their heart or their solar plexus, but who really knows? Maybe there is no single residence, any more than a wave on the ocean can contain properties that are not already shared with the whole ocean.

If memories were in the brain alone, how would they be transferred? Epigenetically we don’t know yet. My theory is that all memories are in universal consciousness and consciousness is not just in the brain or just in the body. Consciousness at the very fundamental level is Sentience that pervades the entire universe.

How do “your” memories, stored in the universe, find “you”? I don’t know, but I’m looking at the possibility it might be by a code that is unique to you. Maybe your genetic code allows memories stored in “the cloud” to find you??? It’s called “quantum entanglement”, a sphere of work that arose from one of Einstein’s discoveries – a phenomenon he called “spooky action at a distance”. I don’t know much more than that at the moment – it’s an exploration in progress.

If you read Freeman Dyson’s book Infinite in All Directions, towards the end he addresses some very interesting questions. He says, “Every quantum experiment forces the atom to make a choice. That, in fact, atoms have some degree of sentience.” They’re hanging out with other atoms. Particles are hanging out with other particles, and they’re all in a relationship with each other. Otherwise you couldn’t get two atoms and molecules, etcetera. So, there’s some form of sentience. Obviously bacteria have sentience, too. They look for “good” food.

I take probiotics, and fibre, so I can multiply the biotics, the good bacteria in my blood. One reason I cultivate probiotics is that they don’t like toxic substances like petroleum products and insecticides. So, to counteract the grooblies that now get into our food chain, we can deliberately use to our benefit a degree of sentience that exists in bacteria. There is sentience, too, in unicellular organisms like a paramoecium. It avoids toxins, looks for food, and even has sex, all without a brain. You’ve got to go a long way further up the evolutionary scale before you get a brain, and then of course there are several levels of brain. You and I have the reptilian brain, the limbic brain. and the cortical brain.

There’s a long line of living organisms from bananas to pineapples to trees to other plants that display sentience. They look for sunlight. They bend away from salty winds. They select nutrients from the earth. They communicate with each other. They reproduce. Is this not a form of sentience? When and why did humans decide that sentience is the sole privilege of something with a brain? Why do you need a brain? [Homework for you.]

Freeman Dyson, one of the most eminent physicists of our times, said there are three riddles that have confused him all his life. The first is the unpredictable movement of atoms. The second is a universe that’s friendly to life and mind. And the third is our own consciousness. Then he goes on to say that some form of sentience seems to pervade the entire cosmos and that we are also part of that same sentience. Like waves on the ocean, we are each essentially “the ocean” – waving.

So, here’s Dr. Chopra's theory; the evolution of species is evolution of species of consciousness, that consciousness is the trigger for evolution, and that in some way the gaps in evolution – the so-called gaps – could be creative intuitive leaps of consciousness into complexity and emergence.

One direct experience of consciousness is self-awareness, because the self is a conscious being. Sentience may pervade all of the species, but I think we may be the only species that asks, “Who am I?” I could be blind to it, but I don’t yet see evidence of other species asking that question, even though they are sentient. It seems they’re all just happy to just be what they are. But we humans get to ask “What am I:” So, when we get to the consciousness of consciousness, which is a human trait, we then develop techniques for exploring consciousness.

Who can predict what the future science will bring?

What I'm very confident of is that we are getting very close to that Awareness that is conscious of our consciousness. Maybe one day I'll actually enter that pure Awareness. Maybe I've already had moments. But I'll never be able to remember them or tell you what it's like because language just isn't up to the job of even remembering, let alone telling the tale.

How does a car's glovebox describe the car's driver?

All it can do for the moment it know that there IS a driver, and go along for the ride.

I NO LONGER FEEL LIKE A FAILURE.

I NO LONGER FEEL LIKE A FAILURE

In an interview I saw earlier today, Australian author Tim Winton said “When I was growing up, I never met anyone like me.” I felt an immediate connection with that.

But I wasn’t always happy about it.

I desperately wanted to belong – to be accepted by everyone else. So, as Colin Hayes often said, I sold out and went-along to get along. It didn’t work; I still  made an easy target for bullies, and I did my own share of bullying when I found someone even less able to defend himself. I grew up not liking myself much.

------------------------

As with a lot of people of my era, I was brought up to “make something of my life.” Among the many admonitions from my parents I had drilled into me “Finish what you start.” Unfortunately that was at odds with an unacknowledged personal inclination that went something like “If at first you don’t succeed, don’t be an idiot. Try another way – try something different.” Holding those two principles in one space has proved to be one helluva challenge.

By the early 1980’s a very busy life that had involved aggressively pursuing several careers began to seriously unravel, culminating in the shock departure of my wife of 18 years, and subsequent divorce. I hadn’t seen that coming. The bottom fell out of my world. After that, there’s nothing much new you can tell me about hell. I felt life had just sucked me backwards through a sewer, and I was drowning in it.

What had I done wrong? Had I missed something? If so, what? And why hadn’t somebody warned me?

A few years before, aware that since branching out of theatre and TV into more commercial pursuits I’d lost some direction, I decided it was time to stop surfing the waves of fortune that had borne me so far, and take some deliberate control of life. I jumped headfirst into the personal development movement, lapping up breakfasts and seminars led by success gurus, and learning techniques for disciplining my wayward mind. I gobbled down and practised techniques for winning friends and influencing people. I set daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, 5- and 10-yearly goals. I affirmed myself silly. The whole mind-gymnasium….

At first, it seemed to work – things got better, except sometimes. As months turned into years, though, I realised it wasn’t working, except occasionally. Because I couldn’t find what I was doing wrong I concluded I was missing something. There was something else – a “secret ingredient X”. I had not yet learned there’s a difference between control (not possible), and Mastery (the purpose of it all).

                                                     ----------------------

Like most people of the time, I was viewing my life as a series of mostly continuous time lines, each with its own identifiable beginning, and directed towards an end that meant achieving a consciously imagined goal – an attainment that I could call “Success”. 

As a pianist and organist I aimed to make magnificent, stirring music, play  grand organs, with choirs and orchestras. As an actor I wanted to get to know the parts in me and create revelatory moments of experience for an audience. I also later wanted to be recognised, rich and famous. As a director I wanted to inspire. As a business man I wanted to create success, for others and, ergo, myself. As a father I wanted to support, inspire and create children who would be self-reliant, self responsible, and … happy. As a writer and radio presenter I wanted to inform, inspire and empower.

Each of those line-journeys was all about attaining that “Success”. Anything that fell short of success was, by definition, Failure. Thanks to some of the 70’s rah-rah-rah training, I wasn’t too fearful of failure – God knows I had experienced it often enough and lived to fight another day! I chose to regard failures as learning-stones to Success.

But…. when I moved to Thailand I looked back along my timelines and saw that, in none of these endeavours along the line, had I finished what I started. Each had come to an end, un-completed, with goals un-attained. I felt a failure. I stopped writing my life story – it seemed pointless. Although I could see and feel how I was becoming wiser and more effective, and changing my life styles and habits was propelling me to evolve as a human being, I was still quietly carrying this failure-feeling in my back pocket for more than a decade longer.

Then came a changing moment, so small and yet so deep that it resonates still, every day…….

I travelled to Maidenhead earlier this year to intervene in my son’s life at a time when his world, like mine years before, had come crashing down. Having learned so much from the aftermath of losing my marriage and the journey that disaster had launched me onto, I had acquired knowing and understandings of real value to offer the lad, ready and waiting on the backburner for years for the appropriate time to put them to him.

This was the time.

I was walking through a local garden on the Thames riverbank when the thought struck – “My whole life has led to this moment.” It was a goosebumps revelation. My pulse quickened with a sense of immediacy (not to be confused with urgency) Then, soon after – “Yes, but now the past no longer matters. The power is Now. And this moment here/now is complete in itself. There’s no failure here; no success. Starting from this quiet Here, all there is, is Possibility. And whatever I decide now to do next.”

I sat watching the river, with its traffic of work barges, pleasure yachts, cruise launches and white swans. Looking much, much closer at any lines with the aid of a magnifying glass, they lose their solidity and appear as a series of dashes and dots, with space in between them. And in those spaces in my timeline I heard Your life has been a series of dots, each complete in itself. Each perfect. No failures. Look at it. Life is also a dance of dot-moments of “A-hah!

The spaces opened up.

Memories fell into those bits of nothing, memories of fabulously full and complete instances when I had momentarily experienced what I’d longed for. I recalled the freedom of dancing down the steps of the Perth Concert Hall like Gene Kelly, the repleteness of standing in the empty studio after the hugely successful opening night of Channel 4 in Albury, the ethereal wonder of waking up at 3am to a moondrenched view over Paris, the moment I first held my newborn son, the awe of watching him chillingly burn the house down as an actor in “The Browning Version”, the sheer pride of watching my daughter stage manage a concert I’d produced, the connectedness with choirs I’d conducted, and the sense of power playing the awesome organ at the Sydney Town Hall, celebrating life-changing moments with my daughter in Inward Adventure, shopping and coffee in Windsor, as my youngest granddaughter opened bits of her life to the light, walking my youngest grandson to and from school, listening to another wise old man in a young boy’s body …. (memories of his Dad)

I got it. I had failed many times along the way, but I wasn’t A Failure.

So much evidence I’d let slip by un-noticed.

And in this moment…… nothing…. Just suchness.

Why had I hung onto this feeling “I’m a failure”? What was the payoff supposed to be? An answer wasn’t long in coming – to goad myself to succeed. I was using a prospect of failure to get success.

Insane!

---------------------------

Changing my view of seeing a life story as a series of complete moments of “now”, instead of an uncompleted historical line en-route to some distant Awards Night, has had a big effect on me since.

I started walking a few months ago to "get into training" for a cruise I’m booked on next year. Unfit as I was and ageing as I am, the walking was hard and painful work (huff-puff). "If the cruise doesn’t happen, this will be all for nothing" thought me. Then one day I decided to take along a camera I’d recently bought  -- to get acquainted with it, ready for cruise next year (another goal). Having the camera around my neck prompted me to notice minor miracles of life along the way each day and capture an image of the moment. Something happened. I got interested in the process of walking itself, as well as its objectives. I downloaded the images, played around with them in a photoshopping programme, then started to share some of my moments of “now” on Facebook. The daily walks developed a parallel purpose of their own. Walking became less suffering and more "Wow, look at that!" I realised a change this week -- If I don't get to go on the cruise, this won't have been "all for nothing" I’m already feeling better.

The difference between the dynamics of Linear and Dot approaches to life can be more simply explained if I use the example of travelling from here to London. If I were doing this linearly I could fly there direct; and come home again. Job done. There is an aspect of living linearly that allows us to postpone experience (“job done”) to a future time. 

But this time I want an experience in which arriving at my destination (London) is a possible bonus, while the real juice is inherent in all the rich moments of the journey itself – and I won’t know what a lot of those are likely to be until I’m actually in them. That’s my idea of surfing an Adventure!

Of course, I get to sleep in the same cabin most nights, and a lot of pre-planning is going into the trip, but because I’m navigating new territory on the internet, with embassies and health providers, even this is a challenging adventure in itself.

The map is not the journey, any more than a restaurant menu is the meal.

--------------------------

Experience has taught me –

·       A Linear (Kinetic) life is always incomplete until the goal is reached. Then there’s a lot of doubt about whether the attainment of the goal brings the desired satisfaction anyway, but that’s a discussion for another time.

·       A Dot (Energerial) life is complete in every moment you’re aware of. Each now-experience itself is a “goal-attained”.

While I was walking in order to make the most out of a future event, I was thinking linearly. But once I made each walk a complete event in itself, I began walking energerially. Each walk is a series of now-wows, and here/now is the ONLY place we can be alive. It’s our choice whether to fill now with Wows, or with bits of a dead past or scraps of a future nightmare. All there ever is, though, is Now. 

Are you living en route to somewhere/sometime else, or here and now?

It’s your choice. Always.

I think it was Socrates who said, “Without a purpose, life has no meaning.”. At the other extreme, Sartre and Adler both said, “Don’t stress yourself, life is meaningless.” By holding these two opposites side-by-side in my heart, I get “Here now just IS – any meaning is the meaning that you give it” Your life just IS; its meaning is up to you. And whatever you decide this moment means to you, you get to be right about it, opportunities come to your door for you to explore and express that meaning, and you get to experience the results of your choices.

In your life, you get to be god, just as I do in mine

.

You give your meaning to your life; I give my meaning to mine.

We experiment – just to see how it turns out.

And then we can get together over a drink and compare notes.

Some of my experiments have turned out to be other than I expected – well most of them, actually. But somewhere along the line I realised in that moment in that garden by the Thames, that in all the things I had set out to achieve – I had my moments! Wow! And now I was slap bang in the middle of more moments where, sooner or later, I’d get what I wanted, or something better than I could imagine (there have been LOTS of those!)

And I’m still here and a smorgasbord of moments awaits. All that is required of me is to be present and available to as many of them as possible. To give them meaning that is meaningful to me, I look for opportunities to connect and share them with others. 

But that’s just me.

The bottom line of it all is interpersonal connection – Love -- and our challenge is to summon the courage to drop our defences and ideas of separation, and be that vulnerable.

------------------------

It was about this time that I noticed that the pall of “failure” had lifted. From my soul.

------------------------

Now, the only Love I can be certain of is mine. It took a long time to get confident in my own love and trusting enough to be my own guiding star, but – hey – better late than never.

Love. This is enough.

Looking to be recognised in return is a treadmill going nowhere. Just love, for its own sake opens the vaults of joy and happiness.

If someone or something else decides to love me back….

That's a bonus.

That’s a bonus.

IN PRAISE OF UN-COMMON SENSE

UN-COMMON SENSE

Is there is such a thing as common sense?

My parents ap-parently thought so; they chose to remind me often that I was severely deficient in it. They were mistaken. I had picked up from them the gist of “common sense”; it just didn’t appeal to me.

And it’s taken me all this while to articulate why. Ah well, better late than never.

It seems to me that “common sense” – something that I was allegedly “born with” and had since discarded -- is what parents evoke to secure compliance with their dictates on everything from going to the toilet before going out, to dissuading us from jumping off the roof holding an open umbrella.

But “common sense” can be a dangerous concept when applied to more complex matters, as the journalist and writer Chris Wallace noted in a recent article.......

“Common sense is such a lazy, bogus concept,” she wrote, referring to current politics. “When someone dishes common sense at you (“everyone knows”) it typically camouflages an emotionally charged, unexamined, partisan position on something important that the Common Sense propagator wants to dismiss as beyond debate…”

Interestingly, politician Cory Bernardi’s blog is named “Common Sense Lives Here”. And he means it – he really assumes that everything he believes is just "common sense", and anyone who doesn't think like him is, ergo, not sensible. Perhaps that's because he has attracted unto himself a bunch of people who will, for whatever personal proclivities and preferences, give him agreement.

Their views do not make them wrong, but the religious zeal with which they identify their selves with views and attitudes they claim to be universal to the exclusion of any other possibilities, does make them narrow-minded.

Neither common sense, nor wishful assuming, nor faith, nor redneck dogma is a reliable guide to intellectually and emotionally mature decision-making. For that, you need a focused mix of openly heartful enthusiasm, real verifiable evidence that gives equal weight to views from all differing perspectives, wide-angle awareness, disciplined intention to get at a core truth of the matter, analytical intelligence, compassion and mercy, widely-shared moral values and an awareness of their hierarchy in your personal ethic.

An effective mix of these requisites could hardly be considered to be “common”. On the contrary, I'd describe it as being almost rare.

Politicians and their acolytes seem to be the most prone to glibly strewing phrases like “it's just common sense” and “everyone knows” and “it's obvious” every time they refer to the feedback they get from the limited cache of people who have a vested interest in telling them what they want to hear. The implication is that, “if you don't agree with what I claim is common sense, there is something seriously wrong with you”, and you instantly become one of their lesser-thans”.

From my observations, it seems that those who are loudest and most pedantic about “common sense” are those who are secretly the least sure that it actually exists. 

Pontifical cantors like Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison, Michaelia Cash, Eric Abetz, Corey Bernardi, Julia Gillard, and Kevin Rudd all betray an underlying ground being of desperation and doubt. And I suspect that the volume and vehemence of their blustering is somewhere in direct proportion to the breadth and depth of their uncertainties. In their insistence upon playing the Right/Wrong game for keeps, they betray set-jaw, shut-down, steel-trap states of mind. They will be right, at all costs. They'd even rather be right than effective. They'd rather be right than happy. And they'll take you down with them if they can.

At every level I'm aware of, feudalistic intellectual and moral superiority is the polar opposite of Evolution. But the possibility of growth and transformation is unlikely to cut through while these people refuse to question their conviction that they alone know what is best for all of us.

And I could be wrong about that so please don't believe me. Look for yourself. Look at what they say they stand for and measure that against what they leave behind them in their wake. Make up your own mind – after you've examined evidence from more than one position.

Common-Sense apologists may end up like Tony Abbott trying to hand out “Vote for me” cards to shoppers who go out of their way to ignore him. He'll still go home to Margie (if she's still listening to him, that is) comforting himself with the mantra “But I'm right”.

It might not make sense, but that is their “common sense”.

Sadly, the delusions that one class of intelligent people have a privileged ownership of common sense, are far too common amongst the ruling elite. And right now these people ain't doing too well. In fact, they're making a mess, and the “common people” are showing signs of getting pissed off, but with no idea of what to do with their disillusionment.

Stories of the world actually working are more often populated by individuals and small groups who don't cite “common sense” as the basis for their actions. Such people tend to act solo, or gather together in smallish groups, with a clear mission to meet a perceived humanitarian need in ways that sometimes defy “common sense”. They tend to heed inner voices inspired by community-directed states of being like compassion, consideration, contribution, mercy, forgivingness, and harmonising interdependence.

If only those qualities were the Common Sense!

Well, maybe not on a massive scale yet, but the evidence of big shifts is revealing itself – the instances of people actually thinking for themselves and pulling random acts of selfless kindness are on the rise.

And looking at upcoming generations of young people, like my grandchildren and those of my friends, the signs are hopeful.