The Wise Turtle Speaks

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guidance system for shopping carts

Published July 23rd, 2008 in activism, bicycles, philosophy and science. 0 Comments

my bike trailer follows me to all kinds of bright and shiny places

One of the secrets to using your power to affect the world in the most effective way possible is to understand how forces work on independent objects.

Repelling forces that push things away from you and/or you from them are mostly directionless because after a very brief period of time they become weaker than other forces, including the power of the independent object itself. Once you’ve pushed the shopping cart, with your best friend sitting precariously inside, enthusiastically away from you in an effort to liven up the grocery store atmosphere, the cart’s path is no longer in your control, and it wobbles across the isle with a mind of it’s own, stopping only once it crashes into some hapless shopper or an unsuspecting stack of soup cans, leaving your best friend shaken, and maybe a bit stirred, as well. You may have started your food shopping adventure out feeling all powerful and in control, but as soon as you let go of that cart, and your friend, your control rapidly diminished into a brief memory, while giving you a more lasting memory of your less-than-happy and slightly discombobulated friend, who at least is still friendly enough to help you return the poor unsuspecting soup cans to their upright positions.

Attracting forces, on the other hand, where you pull things toward you, are directed almost entirely by you, because you control where you go, and objects follow you around with the understanding that you know where you’re going and wherever that is must be a most wonderful place, full of delights and delectables. Once your friend forgives you from your previous shopping adventure gone wrong, they might be willing to let you tie a rope between their shopping cart full of snacks and your bicycle, driven carefully and responsibly by you, while you take them on a little trip down to the park for a picnic in the grass on a sunny summer afternoon, where you both learn that you can repel those hungry ants away from your picnic blanket far better by attracting them towards a small bit of food that you offer them on the other side of the fence, where they can enjoy the greenerness of the grass over there, while you eat your snacks in peace on this side of the fence, and enjoy the equally green grass, along with the genuinely friendly company of your much happier and more combobulated companion, right where you are.

smoke and mirrors

Published July 22nd, 2008 in happiness, philosophy, reality and science. 0 Comments

ghost in the machine?

If it’s all an illusion, then what you get to see, hear, and feel is up to you.

And even if it’s only partly an illusion, you still get to choose how to interpret what you see, hear, and feel in whatever way is most useful and healthy for you and your goals. When your senses present you with some information, like two different objects in space - for example a penguin and an airplane - you get to choose how to perceive the relationship between those two objects. You could choose to perceive the penguin as belonging with the airplane (Penguin Airlines, keeping the skies cool and well dressed!) or as being antagonized by the airplane (Antarctica’s answer to The Crocodile Hunter, perhaps), or the penguin and the plane as having nothing to do with each other (a random effect of the Heart of Gold’s infinite improbability drive being used top propel Zaphod Beeblebrox to the end of the Galaxy for a good stiff drink, maybe).

And, because we are only human, and our senses only pick up one small sliver of reality at a time, you’re guaranteed to be at least partially right and partially wrong about whatever you choose to perceive.

So, instead of being woefully obsessed with figuring out what is “right” all the time, why not spend your efforts being delightfully impressed with what you find?

catalyst

Published July 21st, 2008 in activism, healing, love, needs and purpose. 0 Comments

working with gravity and surface tension to build something new

What’s your strategy for creating change?

How well does your strategy reflect your values and the kind of problem solving process that you’d like to see be adopted by society?

the real world versus the artificial world

Published July 20th, 2008 in living economy, needs, philosophy and reality. 0 Comments

sand is real

We always live in the real world, but some people can’t see the reality of it all behind the facade of the artificial world. The artificial world is the illusion that is created when we assign value to something that isn’t inherently valuable. The artificial world is what we get when we try to work against the laws of nature, instead of with them. The artificial world is the unsustainable structure that we’ve cobbled together out of fake materials which is always threatening to collapse in a heap of painfully broken cruft and which we waste time and energy desperately trying to keep going even though we know it’s not what we really want or need.

Maybe it’s time to let the artifice collapse. Maybe it’s time to salvage whatever real materials are involved, get everyone out of the way, and let the awkwardly fictitious thing just fall to pieces, so we can start all over again working with the forces of nature, and building something truly real that is sustainable and beautiful and good.

What artificial worlds have you been building that you might want to offer up to entropy, and turn your focus instead to the real world, where you can find truly valuable resources to work with to create a better place for you and those you care about? Look around you and see what you’ve brought into your life and what you spend your time doing. Are these things inherently valuable to you? Do they bring real health and happiness and lasting quality of life? Or are they disposable representations of something else, merely serving as temporary substitutions for what you really want and need? If there is no inherent goodness, truth, or beauty to them, why not send them off elsewhere, to be recycled into something more useful, while you seek out resources that are more lasting and whole and meaningful to you and your life?

A good test for whether or not something is part of the real world or is a part of the artificial world is to consider whether it is something that you’d want to be one of those three infamous “things that you’d want to have with you if you were stranded on a deserted island…”

What are you more likely to want with you, lots of cash, People Magazine, and some potato chips? Or a utility knife, Wikipedia, and a good friend?

fortitude

Published July 17th, 2008 in activism, development and learning. 0 Comments

stubbornness pays off

Overheard in a homeless shelter “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!”

The more difficult your challenges are, the more developed your skills will become as you learn to deal with things and begin to understand what works well and what doesn’t work well, and what creative ways you can use your limited resources.

Obviously, when you consciously choose to engage in difficult challenges, it’s more fun than when you are forced to take on those challenges, but whether you choose to play the game of life at the advanced level or you just happen make it to one of the higher levels in the game by pure luck, you’re definitely gaining some highly valuable skills through your fortitude and perseverance.

take a vacation in the future, now

Published July 13th, 2008 in happiness and reality. 0 Comments

go to the future and come back to now with pictures of your trip

Because one can imagine the future, and because one can imagine good things happening, and because the future will some day become the past, one has the ability to imagine good things happening in the future as if it were in the past already.

Consider going into the future in your imagination, to a time when you’ve just accomplished something extraordinarily good. Once you’re imagining this accomplishment, you can linger there for a bit, in your imagination, so that you have plenty of time to experience all the brilliant stuff you’ll experience, the things you’ll see, hear, feel, etc. After you’ve really enjoyed this experience in your imagination for a while, then you can turn around to look back at your present as if it was the past. While looking back at the present, you can see at all the events that lay between the very real experiences you’re having in this future, and where you were in the present. Because you can imagine looking back at the present from this extraordinary future, you can clearly see what kinds of things you did to get to that extraordinary experience. While you’re looking at those things you did to get to that wonderful future, what do you see yourself doing that led you there? Look back at those steps you took, and then go ahead and follow them back into the past from that future, now. Take as much time as you need to follow that path, looking at the details as well as the whole route you’re following back to the present.

Once you’ve imagined walking your path from this future accomplishment that you’ve imagined, all the way back to the the present… Once you’ve seen the way to get from the extraordinary future to your current situation, and you’re back here, fully in the present, now you can turn around again to face that extraordinary future, and you can easily see the path you used to get there. Of course, because you’ve already been there and experienced that extraordinary thing, and because you’ve been able to imagine the future as if it was both the present and the past, and because you’ve already seen the path you took to get to that great experience, it will be a piece of cake to do it again, won’t it?

You can do this anytime you want to, because with your imagination you can always practice being perfect so that when it comes time to do it for real, as you are interacting with the real world here and now, you’ll already be perfect.

I wish you luck in failing!

Published July 12th, 2008 in bicycles, development, learning and reality. 0 Comments

you have to fail to ride a bike before you can learn to ride a bike

One needs to fail before one can properly learn how to succeed, because success without failure is just beginner’s luck. Which is nice, but your luck might run out. On the other hand, wisdom, gained from perseverance and tenacity, stays with you pretty much as long as your brain has still got electricity zipping through it.

So, do you want to count on luck, or would you rather learn to be wise?

If you are the sort of person who’s a fan of wisdom, I suggest trying, and failing, to achieve smaller goals. Invest just a little in failure, so that when it comes time to succeed, you’ve still got a lot of resources left.

it’s easy being green, but harder to be chartuse

Published July 11th, 2008 in activism, development, love and purpose. 0 Comments

going around in circles gets pretty boring, but jumping off can be lots of fun!

Everything valuable takes effort. The higher the value, the more effort it takes.

Good things that are easy to do quickly become boring, and will start to seem less valuable to you. Tying your shoelaces gets boring after it gets easy. Watching television gets boring after it gets easy. Knitting your own socks gets boring after it gets easy. Playing tag gets boring after it gets easy. Even rocket science gets boring after it gets easy.

On the other hand, good things that are difficult to do quickly become a challenge, and suddenly become far more valuable to you.

Of course, sometimes being bored is highly valued, for example when you’ve been overwhelmed and need some quiet time with minimal stimulation, in which case, it ironically becomes more of a challenge to do the boring things, and thus the boring things become more valuable. We all know that it not always easy to find the time to do calming and meditative things like knitting your own socks, which is why a whole pair of handmade socks is so damn valuable!

So, when something good starts to become difficult, you now know that’s the signal that tells you that you’ve got an exciting challenge staring you in the face, and that it will be well worth the effort you’re investing into making it work when you finally do attain it.

Of course, you can always give up, stick your tail between your legs, and slink away embarrassingly when things get difficult, and wander off somewhere else to look for something easier to do, if you’d rather have a boring life.

Or, you can redouble your efforts when things get difficult, and put in an extraordinary amount of energy into achieving the most challenging things that you’re seeking, and thus be rewarded with prizes of extraordinary value.

It’s your choice…

binocular vision

Published July 11th, 2008 in happiness, living economy, needs and purpose. 0 Comments

he seeks wildlife in his city, and bounces when he finds it!

What are you looking for?

And how will you know when you’ve found it?

let them eat cake, if that’s what they want

Published July 10th, 2008 in activism, happiness, living economy and needs. 0 Comments

I can guarantee that your audience wants some fun!

The individuals in your audience, be it the general public, a board of directors, an anonymous donor, a classroom full of students, or your cat, have things they’re looking for from you, and things they’re offering you.

You can try to read their minds and psychically intuit what they want and what they have to offer (and if you’re successful, let me know how you do it!), or you can do some deep research into human motivations and needs and figure out what levels they are at, or you can find out the more straightforward way by just asking them. Or, you can do all three, if you want to be super thorough.

Understanding what people want and what they are offering is a basic strategy of mediation and negotiation. (If you’ve never studied mediation and/or negotiation, I highly recommend it to anyone who has a use for being a more effective communicator and a being seen as a good leader.) Identifying what people are looking for and what they are offering is like plotting the start point and end point of a trip on a map, so that you at least have an idea of where everyone is coming from and where everyone wants to go.

Once you have a pretty good idea of what your audience wants, and what they want to offer you, you can make good decisions about the best route to take to lead them from where they are now to where they’d like to be.

the real possibilities map

Published July 8th, 2008 in learning, nonduality and reality. 0 Comments

what lurks through these castle doorways?

For some folks, being able to easily see the wide variety of possibilities available to them comes completely naturally, with the unconscious mind just laying the possibilities out like a well made map.

If you want to involve your conscious mind in the potentiality-map making process, you can play a little game:

Close your eyes and imagine yourself in a situation in which you’d like to see more possibilities. Then, looking out at the situation, ask yourself the following questions, and actually move your eyes in the direction indicated as you consider the answers:

What do I see when I look straight in front of me?
What happens if I turn right?
What happens if I turn left?
And which direction looks more fun?

Feel free to actually get a piece of paper and pen and draw a real metaphorical map with all the various attractions that you can see as you look in the three possible directions, or just leave your map inside your head, if you prefer.

And, of course, if you want to get really creative, use plenty of bright colors and arrows and stars and maybe some tiny, tiny turtles to mark the especially interesting and amusing routes, so you can find them again later whenever you want to revisit them.

wanna know what’s up there?

Published July 8th, 2008 in development, get out of your own way and purpose. 0 Comments

flimsy little thing, easily moved aside

What’s the difference between being ordinary and being extraordinary?

Would you really like to know?

Well, the difference between being ordinary and being extraordinary is curiosity.

Average folks are happy with the life they’ve already got. They are where they are and they are planning on staying there, and that’s just swell. Average people see a road block at the bottom of a mountain and say to themselves “That’s fine, I didn’t want to go up to the top anyway. I like it down here at the bottom.”

Extraordinary folks seek something more. They want to go somewhere else sometimes. Here is nice, but there looks interesting too! Extraordinary people see a road block at the bottom of a mountain and say to themselves, “I wonder what’s beyond that. Even if the road is out, I bet I could climb to the top some other way and see what’s up there on that mountain. And that road block looks pretty flimsy, I could just move it out of my way and keep going until I find something interesting…”

And because cats have nine lives, when someone average mutters the phrase “curiosity killed the cat” the extraordinary folks immediately reply “but the cat came back the very next day.” Extraordinary people know that because that cat is so very curious, it just keeps coming back - smarter, more worldly, and more extraordinary.

what does the world look like when you’ve succeeded?

Published July 7th, 2008 in activism, happiness and living economy. 0 Comments

I see the sky laughing when I've succeeded!

As we begin to understand that becoming popular with a mainstream audience and making lots of money is only one way to measure success, we notice all the other ways to measure success, such as happiness, influence, a better world, chocolate, etc.

For example, if you are a blogger, having 20 loyal subscribers/readers of your blog can be seen as a smashing success if those 20 people are the best in their fields, because that means that you have access to powerful, intelligent, interested people who can make the world a better place from the top down. Getting an extra hundred thousand readers is nice, too, if you want to make the world a better place from the bottom up, or from the middle out.

So the audience you aim for, and what success looks like to you, is going to vary depending on what kinds of changes you’d like to see in the world and what types of skills you have to offer.

If you’re a master magician who does a lot of intimate performances, you’ll want only a few individuals in your audience, so that they can really enjoy the experience. In this case, success for you would NOT be the quantity of audience members, but the level of surprise, awe, and amusement in your audience. Wide eyes and slack jaws might be your visual cue that you’ve done your job really well.

If you’re a neuroscientist, success might look like a breakthrough in understanding how the human mind can work better, in which case the audience could be anyone from other neuroscientists to teachers to doctors to the general public, depending on what the discovery was (whoever discovered that Omega-3 oils were crucial for healthy brain activity made a hell of a lot of people healthier, and gets my eternal gratitude!).

If you are a musician, success might be moving your audience to tears, laughter, or joy, and then getting a standing ovation.

And if you are a Buddhist teacher, success might be getting enough donations to start a brick-and-mortar Buddhist center for your community.

And if you are a human being, success might feel like a smile on your very own face when you see that you’ve done something really wonderful that you didn’t realize you could do before now.

there’s a point up there at the top

Published July 6th, 2008 in activism, development, happiness and purpose. 0 Comments

you're definitely heading towards the top, but the top of what?

“Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other. And thus makes him necessary to society.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Guinness Book of World Records proves that even average folks can become the best at something.

Of course, some things that people choose to be the best at are more useful than others. Being the best at lightsaber limbo could be what makes you happy, though I imagine if you are reading this blog you might be planning on being the best at something more meaningful and valuable, like designing the best playgrounds or running the best science bookstore or growing the best heirloom tomatoes. You’re probably not going to be happy unless you’re the best at something really big, and important, and extra sparkly, right? Though lightsabers are indeed sparkly! How about being the first to invent a real lightsaber? One which can cut through political red tape! Or that can slash through the invisible barriers of gender inequality! Or weld sand together into a solid, structural material for building instant housing in the desert! Maybe you have the skills and resources and interest in being the best at one of these things, but I imagine that it’s something else entirely that you are going to be most excellent at…

So, as you and I consider all the unusual and life-changing things that have happened to you up to now, we can look forward to discovering what point of excellence all your experiences and resources and wisdom are converging towards. And we can maybe get a brief glimpse of the peak of your metaphorical mountain, and see how your particular excellence will make a real difference in the world.

the telephone game

Published July 5th, 2008 in Integral, activism, healing, love and philosophy. 0 Comments

telephone lines along the train tracks

One can find joy in exploring other people’s worlds and finding a way to bring one’s own world into others’ worlds.

One of the women sharing the room in the shelter I’ve been staying in is Christian and spends a fair bit of time thinking and singing about Jesus. She also spends a lot of time reading the encyclopedia, for balance, I imagine. I like her. We had a sweet discussion about “God” and my brain found a way to agree with what she was saying about her beliefs as well as a way to introduce some of my own beliefs in a way that she agreed with me. Can you imagine that? An atheist, Naturalist, intellectual, scientist finding a way to agree with a devout Christian about God.

While I was talking to her, I realized (and kindly shared my realization with her) that what we all believe, deep down inside, is the same. We all just babble on and on with the grand hope that the messy jumble of myriad words and metaphors that we’ve assembled together from our limited selection of realatively crude monkey-speak can begin to approach those most profound thoughts and feelings we have about who we believe we are and why we believe we are here.

One word that seems to cross all of the imaginary and real boundaries of human kind, and manages to most clearly define some of those most core of beliefs about our universe is love. Love, sometimes even just the word itself (which utterly pales in comparison to the idea it presumes to represent), can indeed heal all wounds, including the chasm that sometimes develops between individuals who seem so far apart with their usual words. Love is a magical word that works on anyone seeking healing - physical, emotional, or intellectual. Love is like a glue that reconnects parts that were previously disconnected. Love makes things more whole.

Love may look and sound different on the surface. It might look like a crayon drawing of stick-figured family drawn by a 4 year old. It might sound like the word “god”. It might feel like the pounding drums of a sacred ritual drum circle. And it might appear to be a spiral galaxy spinning at millions of miles per hour around a black hole. Underneath all of these things is that sense of awe and wonder and beauty and truth and wholeness. We all understand that. And because we are a diverse and creative species, we’ve come up with a seemingly infinite combination of words and stories to explain it all.

Every story every person tells in this world shares something that is utterly powerful. On the surface these stories may seem different. But underneath they all are attempts to describe that sense of wonder, awe, truth, beauty, and wholeness that make up love. And, when you begin to think about how your stories might be the same as everyone else’s stories you start to find that you can speak to others with an understanding that heals, and creates a connection that builds communities and heals worlds.

When you speak of what you, personally, find good, true, and beautiful in your world, and you share what you love about your self and your universe, you will find that others will be happy to listen to you. And when you listen to others speak of what they find good, true, and beautiful in their world, and share what they love about their self and their universe, you will find what they are happy to have you listen.

And as a sweet reminder of how diverse our language is, and how spread out the words for our shared ideas have become on this planet Earth, and how very similar all our stories are at the roots, the two people sitting on the grass in front of me as I write this are engaged in a bilingual discussion, with one of the participants learning to speak English and the other learning to speak Portuguese, and both of them stumbling through the other’s native language, while generously seeking a common understanding.

And what is especially delightful about their conversation is that they phrase they are trying to translate for each other is:

“I am writing a book about my life and my love…”

“Amor.”

It is at the heart of the stories we always tell, the books we always write, and the plays we always put on, no matter who we are or where we live or what language we speak.