Unless you are new to Manzanita Village and The Five Changes you know that we’ve been making some changes over the past year or two. We are rooted in the Buddhist traditions of personal transformation, but now less attached than ever to specific methods for effecting that transformation.

We have been testing and adapting other tools for personal change, social engagement, and global perspectives for some time. Some of these we have been using with clients for years.

Now we ask, “Why not teach these in a broader context? Why just help people feel comfortable with their limitations, when we can teach them to obliterate those limitations altogether?”

It may sound like a wild claim, but there are skills, which in the right hands, can do in ten minutes what meditation may not accomplish in ten years. I was shocked when I first discovered it. These skills don’t lessen the power of meditation, they enhance it. And your subsequent capacities are enhanced exponentially.

If you have attended a retreat within the past year you will know that we have begun teaching this new integrated work. The work includes several approaches to meditation, as well as an array or  other skills that we absolutely guarantee, if you are ready to use them, will change your life – or any part of your life – to allow you to become more effective, positive, flexible, creative, inherently intelligent, inherently joyful . They will, to coin a cliché, knock your socks off!

Join us November 6-8 for Get The Life You Want

Meditation instruction is considered to be something best done in person. I’ve been teaching retreats and classes for many years, and always in person.

There have always been people who are too far awayto get to a retreat, let alone a morning or  evening meditation class.

I have been working by phone with coaching and hypnotherapy clints for some time. So why not use the phone for meditation classes too? It’s not like it’s new technology exactly. We’ve been using the phone for more than a century. And you can get to the class without even leaving your house.

We begin the next class series on September 14 – Monday evenings 7:00 to 9:00 PM.

To find out more go to http://www.manzanitavillage.org/meditation/classes/

So words set us in an unavoidable tailspin of disconnection that could drive us crazy. Well, maybe we are crazy. After all, wars have been fought over words (the name of god, for example).

And how crazy is that!?

Words are the means by which we express ourselves and communicate with each other. If we are to reach any agreement at all, our words must be least one step away from the actual experiences they describe. Then as they are spoken again and repeated there’s no telling how many steps of remove and misrepresentation occurs.

There is a magic to words. What was invisible and unknown is made visible and known through them.

Words contribute magnificently to the human puzzle. It has been said that the human experience cannot even exist without them.

Over time we get used to being separated from our experience. Beginning when we first learn to speak, our world becomes entirely defined by the words we use to describe it — unless perhaps we undertake some inner discipline that can begin to change the way we represent the world internally.

Nominalizations

There are certain words that we use to turn processes into things. These words are called nominalizations. They are abstract nouns – things you can’t put into a wheelbarrow: relationship, character, faith, education, journey, buddhism, god, dharma…

What I mean by the word ‘enlightenment,’ for example, may be light years away from what you understand by it.

Even the word ”person’ is a nominalization. After all, isn’t a person a series of events, a process?

If language as a whole remove us from experience, nominalizations allow us to establish a veritable  parallel universe.

Alfred Korzybski asked his students to stop using the verb ‘to be’ and its variations – ‘is’ ‘am’ ‘was’ etc. for a whole day. He wanted to point out how we freeze and make abstract the process of living through language. He also wanted to point out the how difficult it is to stop doing so.

Buddhist teaching and praxis makes the same point. Teachings on Impermanence, Emptiness, and No-self direct us towards parallel understandings, with the intention they transform the way we experience the world.

Unfortunately, over time words like Impermanence, Emptiness, and No-self, themselves become nominalizations – pointing to principles rather than processes.

Does this mean that change is no longer possible? or that Buddhism is no longer useful?  Of course not. Perhaps it means that Alfred Korzybski was a Buddhist; or that the Buddha was an advocate of General Semantics? Probably not. Anyway such questions just open up the way for more misleading nominalizations!

Meditation does work if you’re prepared to work. The work in question does not necessarily need to be hard or painful. Who said “no pain, no gain”? Probably someone whose life wasn’t going too well!

Every kind of work, learning, and personal change, goes better when it’s fun, when you’re engaged, when you have internal congruence; rather than when you’re merely serious. Take a look at professional sportsmen, musicians, entrepreneurs. They’re thorough rather than serious, they have lots of energy, and they have fun. Think of meditation as something that can benefit from the same approach – be thorough, energetic, and have fun!

It’s sad that sometimes people dislike living in their own company so much that they come to meditation as way to get away from themselves. It’s not the best approach. It’s better to be playful. Life was given to you for free, unexpectedly, and it’s a gift. Let whatever work you do, including meditation, be playful, thorough, and fun.

Thoroughness includes being consistent, curious, focused, and having a clear intention. And playfulness is a perfect vehicle and the perfect compliment for such qualities as those.

And of course, it’s always a good idea to get instruction from a competent teacher.

And you probably imagine that these things work because you imagine they should - even when it’s apparent that they don’t; through wishful thinking, laziness, or even denial.

It’s the nature of the myths we invent, and that we surround ourselves with – like clouds of denial and misinformation.

Well, everything ‘works’ in it’s own way. Healing modalities that require you to take expensive drugs forever ‘work’ for the drug companies; and therapy that requires you to come back on a regular basis forever may work better for the therapist than it does for you. I’m not saying that all therapy and all drugs are bad – though they are often used in ways that are questionable.

The same applies to all manner of things on every level of scale that you can imagine – foreign aid, religion, relationships, career, recycling …

The point is that there are questions we sometimes don’t ask. We often ask ‘Why’ when we would be better off asking ‘How’.

• How do you best help contribute solutions to endemic poverty, famine, disease?

• How do you engender positive joyful internal mental and emotional states along with personal integrity (in yourself or others) without relying on rigid belief systems and absolutist morality?

• How do you relate to other people while staying free from your own projections?

• How can you earn a living by pursuing your passions and skills?

• How can you minimize your own consumption and live simplywithout feeling that you are depriving yourself?

Perhaps you can add: How can you be an example to others?

The best questions often begin with “How?”

Not “Why am I in this situation?” but “How can I change it?”

The Buddha told the story of a man who was wounded by an arrow. Before he would accept medical treatment he wanted to know who shot the arrow, whether it was deliberate or an accident; and if it was deliberate then he wanted to know why that person had shot him.

Clearly, asking ‘why’ is not the best way towards effecting healing and change.

To learn the why of things may be interesting, informative and even have long-term value.

But  for immediate effective change, for practicality, the question is “How?”

First:

Second:
Eat real food – like Camembert made with un-pasteurized milk. You can find it at the back counter of the Italian Deli on Lincoln Boulevard. It will feed your dreams

Third:
Love your life with a passion, and
Trust Yourself!

• Walk around in the mountains in the dark
  and know that you are safe,
• Listen to everything you hear,
• Let your life bleed and know that blood
  is plentiful,
• Leave behind all that you have known,
• Hitch-hike to somewhere mysterious far away,
• Meet someone and fall in love. Touch their body with your breath,
  your fingers. Never stop.

Fourth:
Take all you have done, (from the list above)
wrap it in a parcel, mail it to yourself,
forget that you sent it .
Until the parcel arrives,
then open it right away, watch
the green bird emerge from the wrapping paper and
fly out into the distance and disappear.

Fifth:
Open your eyes. Look for the bird.
Keep searching.
Always.



In other words it’s you yourself who reinforce, or change, habits of thought, emotion, perception, and action.

Personal transformation, or spiritual practice, whatever you call it, is a way of uncovering your internal patterns, and learning a new way of processing information.

A lot of what you think you know to be true is reinforced by your habitual emotional states. Emotions can be changed, resolved, transformed. That’s something you can learn to do.  You can change your world entirely with new emotional states (if you want). When you release negative emotions, everything else then changes too – the world as you perceive it, your life as live it!

You might ask, what about the circumstances of life, the circumstances of history, the mishaps that occur -  like someone’s car going out of control and running you off the road. Whose karma is that?

If you want to interprets the situation as being mysteriously your own responsibility you can choose do that if you want. Or if you want it to be entirely the fault of the other person, you can do that.

Perhaps, in the process, you have already learned  that it would be better to drive with greater sensory awareness. Perhaps you could have avoided the accident after all. Perhaps not. And you may never know for certain.

Or you can simply decide that there’s something to learn in every situation regardless; beyond individual responsibility

You can never know the entirety of the meaning of something. Nothing has a singular cause. Karma as it is typically understood is a way to give the illusion of control by giving events a fixed and final meaning. To say something is “my karma,”  seems like a resignation of your responsibility, and an obfuscation of what’s actually happening.

What if you decide instead to accept that you are accountable for everything that happens to you, what would then change? I don’t mean that it’s necessarily true in any absolute sense, but what happens to the notion of karma as something separate from yourself if you simply accept that everything in your life is based on choices that you have made?

What would change? For eample: your point of view, your emotional states, your interpretation, and the meanings you give to things? And wouldn’t those changes be beneficial regardless of what may have happened, regardless of your ancestors, past lives, past mishaps, self-pity, ideological predispositions, physical predispositions?

Wouldn’t it mean that your were now the keeper of your karma, to hold onto or release, based on choices that you can now make?

Communities are divided by it, lives shortened by it, divisiveness supported by it, the perpetuation of ideas of other – them and us, are fed by it. The climate of ongoing, largely unconscious, anxiety, uncertainty, and fear.

The fact is that most of it is made up, manufactured by the media, and by the habits of society. It’s a relic of a past we no longer live.

Are there things that can harm us? Of course. Yet fear has not one iota of power to prevent that harm.

Awareness, gratitude, listening for meanings hidden in what is spoken, generosity – there are any number of antidotes – not only to fear, but also to the things we imagine may be a danger to us.

Thus have I heard … the Blessed One was traveling by foot along the roads of Northern India, speaking to the crowds who gathered at the places where he, and his growing community of monks and nuns, stopped to rest. They were excited and delighted to hear him speak. Word spread ahead of him, and people would say to each other, “He’s coming, he’s coming. The Blessed one, the Awakened one is coming!” They would wait by the road with gifts of food and and water anticipating the arrival of the Buddha and his community.

People were hungry for truth, for understanding, for inner peace, and just as the traveling monastic community that grew up around the Buddha was increasing in numbers, so the community of people who continued to follow their everyday lives, while at the same time practicing the Dharma, grew year by year. And the monks and nuns came to depend on the generosity of the people for support, food and shelter, just as the lay people came to celebrate and practice the profound teachings that were made available to them.

These benefactors included people from all walks of life; kings and princes, peasant farms and rich merchants…

I’m curious about the distinction implicit in the last paragraph. What is ’spiritual’ anyway. Isn’t paying attention to your life enough? . . . I mean really paying attention, so that you’re also paying attention to the consequences of all you do. You do the best you can. Isn’t that enough?

There’s always more. You can learn to stretch yourself too. Meditation can help with that too.

My teacher once said, “Meditation is just an intelligent way to enjoy your life.” Maybe that’s enough. And all we call ’spiritual’ is just guff. I mean what isn’t spiritual – if you really love and respect the world, and yourself as part of it?

So meditation is no more ’spiritual’ than cleaning out the septic system. It’s learning to pay attention, that’s all.

“You pay attention, or you pay with pain,” another teacher said that.

We’ve got a meditation class in Los Angeles coming up, and Meditation retreats at Manzanita Village all the time too.