Hopeful Thinking

I had a conversation with a good friend recently. He’s not a religious person, by any stretch. He has been to my church a couple of times and has expressed an interest in the way I approach things. But that’s about as close to organized religion as he’s ever been comfortable with. I have no issue with this, of course. It’s not my job to convert people to any particular religion. I prefer to help people assess what religion they already are. Because I truly believe everybody has a religion. Of one fashion or another. Sometimes it’s hard to recognize what religion we profess. And by use of the word ‘religion’ here, I mean to say that we all place our faith in something. It’s good to have an idea of what it is. But most of us subscribe to faith systems which we don’t even realize are in progress. We may go to church, we may profess a certain type of faith regarding the nature of God, or lack of It. But the philosophies and principles of those religions may not be what you, deep d...

Never look down. Don’t look at it. It only grows with your attention. That is your prayer. Look up. I’m surprised at the amount of times I have to remind myself of that. Keep looking up. All is not as it appears to be. There is greater love at work than we can imagine. Let It do Its job. We take too much at face value when we’d be far more comforted to take a step back and look at the wider picture of how humanity is working to unify itself against all odds. The reason things are so scary right now is because humanity is actually winning. Try to find a space in your heart where you can believe that to be true. When we’re too close to drama we perpetuate it by our presence. Simply by witnessing it we are empowering it. Even in the most practical terms, our neighbor pays attention to what we notice. If you’re standing next to someone and they suddenly turn their head, what do you do? You instinctively turn your head just after them. It’s natural pack mentality. Biological. We can’t hel...

I was recently watching the television show Mad Men for the first time. It’s about the advertising industry in the 1960’s. I’m not sure what part about it I found the most surprising. The blatant sexism, The constant smoking, the drinking during working hours, or the rampant belittling of the smaller by the larger. For a split second, I felt like a prude. A voice in my head told me, “Boys will be boys. Don’t be a killjoy.” Where did a thought like that come from? Especially when I disagree with it completely? Strange as it sounds, before I caught it, I was actually belittling myself for taking a critical view of the destructive behavior being depicted on that program. How it happens that we second-guess our own judgment of what’s right and wrong at any given moment is dependent upon our personal experiences. My inner criticism of their behavior came from being bullied as a child. I let my childhood bullies’  dialogue about me become my own without realizing it. Even as...

Recently in the city of Boston, a small group of dissatisfied people held a “straight pride” parade. It was a reaction to feeling marginalized by the social progress we’ve made with regard to LGBTQ rights in this country. It was very upsetting to many people, both straight and gay alike. The anti-parade argument being, no one has ever tried to take pride away from straight people for being who they are. They have no need to publicly assert their pride of being “normal.” And, in truth, straight pride wasn’t really the point the parade organizers were trying to make. It was that everyone else should be ashamed. There are two types of actions one can take toward situations such as these. We can either react or we can respond. To clarify, reacting is ego-driven and emotional. Reacting is often hostile. It is a satisfying burst of immediate justice toward something which has deeply upset us. Reacting is knee-jerk and passionate, often involving saying or doing something we eventually ...

What emphasis do you give pleasure in your life? Do you feel guilty about pleasure? A distrust of pleasure is deeply ingrained in our human culture, thanks in large part to the exercise of religion. You’ll note, I am not pointing a finger at the religion itself but the exercise of it. What I’m commenting on here are the actions a religious person takes as a result of their interpretation of what their religion insists of them in thought or deed. It’s not the faith, it’s the follower. Be extremely cautious of those who cannot, or will not, practice what they preach when it comes to their faith. They make unfortunate ambassadors. Though many people are not a part of any religion at all, it doesn’t matter. The distrust of pleasure is so entangled with our wider secular human culture it affects us all. We are all subject to the societal meme that pleasure is somehow evil, or intrinsically sinful, or at best, a distraction from “real life.” The same could be said for junk food. ...

What do you really think about who you are? Do you think there is more “who” to you than what you see in the mirror? Do you believe you have a soul? Do you believe you have an electromagnetic field around you? Do you believe in auras? Think about these for a moment. Take an inventory of what you believe about the full nature of your reality. Go ahead. I’ll wait. So what do you believe? There is no wrong answer. Mostly because it’s not possible to know the answer—at least with any real assurance. But your answer does have implications. Some believe that we have a soul but that it is limited in volume to the shape and size of our physical bodies. Meaning that there is no more of us than what is contained in this little vessel until the time of our passing at which point, it leaves. Some believe that we are infinite, and that if we were to measure it in linear terms, only a small portion of the totality of ourselves is “contained” in our physical body. There is more to us than...

Let it go. You’re holding on too tightly. Life is a riddle for which the answer is so obvious it seems like bad advice. The hardest principle of all spiritual practice is non-resistance. It’s the one which seems the most counterintuitive. We maintain a belief that if we stop resisting, all the bad stuff will happen. If we stop holding back these waters, they will destroy us. Try turning your umbrella the right side up. You’re trapping too much water with it the other way around. The irony is, the only successfully provable societal model we’ve ever had is nonresistance. That’s the only model for which we have any evidence in favor of the argument. When we let go, things work out better. Always. Of course there are examples toward which people can point and say, “See? If people hadn’t fought back against tyranny (or whatever) that good thing wouldn’t have happened. The bad would have won.“ But it makes me wonder if resistance was really the component which brought about the ...