Emotional Terrain: Anger

This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Emotional Terrain

[Exploring Life] Anger is a strong emotional reaction in response to a perceived provocation or injustice. The emotional reaction consists of an often unintended improvisatory abyss of displeasure, irritation, resentment, outrage, and enmity. Anger is an extreme reaction that takes our body and mind to the very edge of a threshold in which rationale thinking and clear reasoning begin to break. Of course, there are times when anger is a necessary and effective response to a situation – no emotion is purely negative. Acute anger occurs in a specific moment and is a short-term response to an antagonizing situation; it may be a helpful response or not. Chronic anger is more mercurial in that it tends to shift our perception of our circumstances so that we look out into the world through the lens of heart-felt irritation. And what we tend to perceive in the world we also tend to attract.

Emotions are a natural and unavoidable part of life. All emotions reveal something about us to ourselves; they are part of our story, our narrative of being here on this wonderful yet mysterious planet. Life would be bland, dull and immensely boring in the absence of our emotional terrain. However, emotions are not neutral and they can have a dark side, especially if a reaction becomes chronic, habitual, and even addictive. Anger, when chronically out of control, has immense potential for personal destruction on physical, mental, and spiritual levels. In a way, we can literally lose ourselves and our identity to the shadow side of anger. Any emotion when pushed to extremes over a period of time becomes a form of confinement and suffering.
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Belief: Dying to Live

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Belief

[Exploring Life] How do our beliefs change when we are faced with our own mortality? Our lives are fragile and inexorably transient. Our presence will transform when we die. The nature of our transformation at death is an unknown and, in spite of our proficiency in creating fanciful stories that propose an explanation and perhaps even comfort, there is no evidence of what actually happens to us. The unknown is something that can inspire breathtaking levels of fear and anxiety within. The mystery of our own death is perhaps one of our most intense sources of fear in life. Yet it is while we are walking through the terrain of this universal mystery, this uncomfortable landscape of fear, that the essence of our beliefs becomes strikingly clear and coherent. The subtle approach of our own mortality brings tremendous clarity and transparency to our lives.

There is a kind of threshold that many of us will enter into, a landscape of experience that is defined by an overwhelming awareness that death is approaching and our time in this life is coming to an end. The amount of time we will remain in this threshold is not apparent to us, it may be hours, days , weeks, perhaps even months. What is apparent, however, is that the nature of our beliefs we have lived by in our lives are exposed in the midst of this, and we are completely immersed into the most practical and authentic philosophical moments in our lives. During this time we realize that all we have, all we have ever really had, in our lives is our beliefs. We innately wish our lives to have been meaningful and purposeful, yet sometimes we find ourselves near the end of days facing a wall of regret.
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Belief: Cultural Confinement

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Belief

[Exploring Life] Culture may be viewed as a universal tendency for people within stable geographic populations to create sets of beliefs, values and expectations that serve to create a sense of social coherence. It may be that culture is an offspring of the innate human need to belong. Perhaps culture originated as groups of people sharing the same situations and circumstances found it advantageous to solve the problems of survival. Whatever its origins, culture is built upon an integrated and extensive pattern of assumptions, beliefs, and ideas about how to live. One of the greatest problems with culture is that it tends to be static rather than dynamic, that is, cultural beliefs, traditions, and patterns of thought are resistant to change retrieving the old adage that it is easier to remain in the familiar than to change. We are immersed in culture from the moment of birth and are silently influenced by it throughout our lifetime. In our minds, culture shapes our presuppositions often in ways that lie outside of our own awareness. We are immersed in the code, programs, and language of our culture, which in turn establishes the core medium for all learning. Culture is a total surround, an immersive environment, that shapes our identity and behaviour.

The origin of the word culture lies in the Latin cultura, meaning to cultivate. We are the object of culture, and our lifestyle is cultivated, shaped, and developed by the underlying code of beliefs, knowledge, and behavior, that we are immersed in. Culture is one of the most potent yet hidden sources of influence throughout out lives. It is a compelling and invisible force that shapes our body, mind and spirit. The quality and effects of our cultural assumptions and ideas need to be critically examined through reason and consciously evolved through creative expression. However, we all too often allow culture to operate as a kind of unexamined neural code that executes programs, patterns, and routines throughout our daily lives without our awareness. An addiction to busyness is a major ally of culture in that it helps to ensure we remain distracted and subservient, while creating the illusion that our busyness is meaningful and productive.
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Belief: The Realm of Evidence

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Belief

We interpret our experiences in life through a complex and often hidden network of beliefs. The human brain is a belief engine; beliefs are the apparatus and raw materials of the mind. They lie at the core of our emotions, determine our subsequent behaviour, and shape the course of our lives. In a basic sense, a belief is any thought or idea we hold to be true. In an ironic twist, however, the human mind is capable of developing impassioned patterns of belief that have no clear evidence to support them. In other words, we can passionately believe in something, perhaps even have faith in it, and allow those beliefs to determine the course of our lives in the complete absence of clear evidence to support their validity. In this darker sense, our beliefs have the potential hijack our presence and lead us astray – often without us knowing it. What do we base our beliefs on? What is the foundation of that which we hold to be true? of our beliefs, for it is through the expression of belief that we ultimately shape our destiny.

One of the most important concepts in understanding the nature of belief is evidence - or the proof that provides a solid foundation for the construction of beliefs. At the core of all of our beliefs is the veiled and illusive territory of presupposition, or more simply, assumption. An assumption is something we take for granted, something we presume to be true as a necessary precondition for our beliefs. If our core assumptions are correct then we are in a position to construct beliefs from a solid foundation; if our core assumptions are incorrect or misguided we construct beliefs on a false premise. It is frightening to consider the possibility that many of our most deeply held and cherished beliefs may be unfounded and without merit. Worse, optimistic and hopeful belief systems can sometimes become tyrannical and delusional. The tenacity or extent of a belief has no bearing on its relevance, accuracy, or merit – even widely adopted belief systems can be imprudent.
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Spiritual Qualities: Presence

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Spiritual Qualities

[Exploring Life] An external presence means that we share some kind of proximity with other living force in our world. This kind of presence may be visible or invisible, readily perceptible to our senses or it may be intuited as a felt-presence that does not present itself as everyday sensation. The invisible tends to confound and confuse us. That is to say, if we cannot readily grasp a presence through our basic physical sensory apparatus, we have a tendency to conclude that it may not exist or at least in our imagination only. This is a strikingly crude and inert belief that misleads us into proceeding through life in a isolated and spiritless manner. When we invite and inhabit different forms of presence into our lives we expand our physical, mental, and spiritual horizons.

The Earth is the origin and basis for all life. Indigenous tribal cultures often maintain an intimate sense of connection with the natural world and believe that the Earth is a living presence. Modern cultures tends to use the Earth as if it can be “owned” and that whatever life is “present” on it can be manipulated and even destroyed at whim. Of course, this is an over-generalization, albeit with an unfortunate sense of accuracy about it. However, it is reasonable to generalize that the way indigenous tribal culture and modern culture perceives the presence of the Earth are remarkably different. The modern consciousness is delusional in that it tends to see the world as something that can be owned. Tribal consciousness lives close to the Earth, with the least amount of technological mediation, and tend to embrace a close affinity to their surroundings. They often believe that the Earth and everything it is alive and imbued with spirit, just as they are. Modern consciousness tends to perceive the Earth as an object of possession and commodification. To the modern consciousness, humanity is generally viewed as a superior life form.
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Spiritual Thresholds: The Alchemist

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Spiritual Thresholds

[Exploring Life] Fatalism is an insipid belief that the general order of things, including the experiences we have in life, are predetermined and that we are powerless to alter our destiny. Self-determination is an ostentatious belief that we have the power to make decisions without the interference of outside influences. There are even those that claim we have the ability to manifest any intention we desire if we truly believe in it. This of course is nothing more than new age nonsense. Both perspectives present extreme viewpoints that are hard to locate in our authentic experience of everyday life, and tend to amount to little more than fodder for philosophical meandering. Somewhere in between these two extremes it may be that our ability or “power” to influence the course of our life lies within our capacity to interact and form relationships with the world around us. The essential question is, “Does the Earth, or Universe for that matter, have a an underlying intelligence that we can communicate with.

In The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream, Paulo Coelho provides a vision of the Earth and Universe as a living and soulful entity that we learn to communicate with through a language he simply referred to as “The Language of the World.” The premise of the story originates in the idea that each of us has a specific purpose, or Personal Legend, and that by learning to interact with The Language of the World and the omens it provides we can pursue our dreams in life. There are magical qualities and moments in the story that are compelling. The story of a young boy’s quest for meaning and purpose in life is a journey toward fulfilment of bliss.
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Spiritual Qualities: Presence – 2

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Spiritual Qualities

[Exploring Life] The spiritual dimension is the space in which we journey into our most divine essence, as well as our darkest shadow. A spiritual quality is an intuitive source of inspiration we inhabit in order to orient ourselves to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The word presence embraces an essential spiritual quality and creative capacity. We are all artists within the confluence of our everyday lives. The greatest form of art is etched out of raw experience and creatively expressed through the quality of our presence in the world. Crafting our identity and the nature of our presence in the world is the most primordial and pristine art form. Exploring the nature of presence invites a journey into the realms of identity, sensibility, discernment, meaning and purpose.

Presence is everywhere: it weaves itself deep within the fabric of our essence and resonates in landscapes beyond the realm of awareness. There is immense flexibility in presence. It can refer us to something quite simple as attendance, that a person is physical present without making reference to the qualities of presence that are companion. This is a banal and unimaginative use of the word. In its most compelling sense, presence invites us to explore a landscape of vibrant attributes such as beauty, gratitude, and light, as well as the darker attributes of suffering, ignorance, and want. Presence easily travels across the sanctuaries of the soul as well as the hostile terrain of suffering; it is everywhere around us; it is everywhere within us.
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Ecopsychology: Release from Spiritual Confinement

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Ecopsychology

[Exploring Life] Ecopsychology embraces three vital concepts, relationship, interaction, and belonging. Psychology has had an incestuous history, one in which it constantly looked for solutions to the problems it was responsible for creating in the first place. In this sense, psychology created its own market by infecting people with false assumptions about behaviour, emotions, and feelings. In viewing the mind as both solution and problem, as a self-contained concept unto itself, it has degraded the human experience to mere claustrophobic ramblings hidden behind the pleasant disguise of intellectual insight. It is a nauseating form of rampant self-proclaimed expertism. The failure of psychology lies directly in its inability as a form of expertise to understand and embrace context.

Ecology is a biological science that focuses on exploring and understanding complex interactions and relationships between organisms and their environment, including how living organisms relate to each other. Unlike psychology, ecology is focused on context. Adding the modifier “eco” to psychology is an attempt to rescue psychology from its own demise. More specifically, the mind cannot be properly understood in isolation and the context, the total surround, that the mind functions within embraces ideas about relationship, interaction and belonging. These three qualities also have a vibrant and essential spiritual dimension. To explore the mind in the absence of the spiritual qualities of relationship, interaction and belonging is a harsh form of confinement, a concentration camp of the mind, that only serves to intensify mental degradation.
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On the Loss of My Parents – 12

This entry is part 12 of 12 in the series On the Loss of My Parents

[Exploring Life] Closure means to find a resolution to a significant event in a person’s life. With respect to the loss of a loved one, closure ultimately means to find contentment and gratitude as the final and most significant outcome of death. This is the twelfth and final entry I will dedicate to the series On the Loss of My Parents. This is not to say that I have brought full closure to the grieving process, nor is it to say that I will no longer reflect on both the presence and absence of my parents in my life. It is to say, however, that this is the last entry I will dedicate expressly to the loss of my parents and as such it represents a form of partial closure. The meaning of their lives will remain a constant companion within me; death destroys physical presence and replaces it with spiritual presence. Grief does not want us to become lost and mired in a bog of suffering and pain over that which is now gone: it encourages us to emerge from the trembling and begin to inhabit gratitude. Ultimately grief is a direct extension of love, therefore grief is fundamentally an essential source of healing. The feelings and memories that surround the loss of my parents remains an impassioned interplay of absence and presence. They have died and are physically gone, but their presence remains. Through death, grief inspires emergence.

We know without doubt that our departed loved ones would not want us to become entrenched in mourning their death. The loss of a loved one invokes suffering because all grief originates in love. Mourning, the offspring of grief, only wishes to pay us a short visit in order to give us permission to express the intense emotional turmoil invoked by death. The death of my mother and father is an expression of the impermanence we all inexorably belong to. My father lived life according to a simple yet profoundly effective outlook, and that was to influence what he was able to, and not worry about things he had no control over. My mother lived life by actively seeking out enjoyment in life and sharing that enjoyment with others as much as possible. They experienced the unexpected onslaught of life as we all do, but were able to steady themselves through the rough weather with these perspectives.

As I embrace the union of both of those perspectives in the midst of their absence, I literally feel the touch of the spirits within. The inevitable veil of tears continues to fall within the privacy of my heart, yet I also sense the approach of a new landscape that lies beyond the vanishing point. Grief does not wish us to take up residence within it – we are meant to pass through it as if it were a portal to a new land. My parents would encourage this movement through grief, to find contentment in the midst of their absence, to inspire memory with their presence, and to inhabit a landscape of gratitude.
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Spiritual Thresholds: The Artistry of Trust

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Spiritual Thresholds

[Exploring Life] We are immersed in a culture that confuses education with learning. More precisely, we ritually submit ourselves to courses that have been prepared by someone else and trust that the instructional delivery these courses will inspire learning. In a bizarre twist, we sometimes incorrectly think of education as being synonymous with learning. Learning is a phenomenon; education is a technology. This is one example of how we tend to denigrate human capacities and qualities to that of machine metaphors. Education is not a program for learning, it is in fact an assembly-line in which the design of the prerequisite prevails over our own individual and unique experiences in life. In the spiritual realm authentic learning, not education, is essential.

One of the addictions that emerges from our obsession with education is dependence. That is to say, we lose our self-reliance with respect to learning and instead broker it out to curricula, instructional design, degrees, courses, teachers, and inept forms of assessment and evaluation. We falsely believe that greater expertise lies beyond ourselves. More simply, we come to believe that the location of learning is exterior, or outside ourselves, and in the process lose our connection to the interior world. We desperately look to the exterior for solace and are constantly disappointed; we avoid the messy untamed interior world of our our mind and emotions where true discovery resides. This bias toward the exterior is a significant problem for those interested in expanding and deepening their spiritual presence on Earth. There is no form of education that can assist us in this journey; to embrace spirituality in life means to be absolutely self-reliant in learning.
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