How Big is Your World?

Posted on September 15, 2015 by admin

Habitat is a wonderful word, carrying layers of meaning and subtle implications. It includes the physical place where something lives, the environmental factors that support and contribute to its well being, as well as other species that may be key components of this ecosystem. From a physical point of view, most of the planet serves as a habitat for the modern human as we have been shown to be a very adaptable species when it comes to the outer environment. And now we have space stations orbiting the earth, with dreams of Mars and beyond.

But, from a psychological/mental perspective, most modern humans inhabit the tiniest of worlds; one limited by their own narrow minded thinking and fear based ideological beliefs. These self created prisons and personal hells shape our behavior, and are reeking havoc on the environment and ecosystems that support our existence. How did the human become the species that destroys its own habitat?

This was the driving question of Thomas Berry‘s life and it inspired many extraordinary books, including The Dream of the Earth, one of the most important books of the 20th century. One possible perspective is that the modern human has completely collapsed its collective soul. Whether through over-reliance of logic and reason, or just plain fear of the unknown, we no longer inhabit the soul. We some how live outside its domain, the way James Duffy, a character in James Joyce’s short story, “A Painful Case” “lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glasses.” In our detachment from what is real and spiritually meaningful, we have forgotten how to nurture the environment that allows the soul to thrive, and barely acknowledge its existence. Because of this, we allow others to decide how big our dreams can be. We allow others to impose limits on our spiritual freedom, never acknowledging or trusting the deep inner wisdom of our own unique soul journey. And we are devastating the planet that nurtures or existence.

Fortunately, the Soul is making a comeback. The Feminine Spirituality that nurtures soulness is returning. Spiritual liberation is upon us, if we can find the courage to plunge into the unknown. For us somanauts, our soul journey is to fully and deeply inhabit this human form we call the body, in its soul dimension, which is the whole cosmos, physical as well as psychic. In the last post there is a brief description of the triune soul, including the Celestial, Mental and Physical Souls. When we can begin to see these soul realms as inter-related habitats, with healthy and unhealthy ecologies, we can begin the process of inhabiting, healing and reconciliation, both within our own soul realms, and simultaneously within the collective soul of humanity, the planet, and the cosmos. We’ll look at the Mental Soul first, and then, for our embodied practice, dive into the Physical Soul. We’ll call upon the Celestial Soul angels to help with both!

Mental Soul

The Mental Soul is the realm of thoughts, ideas, beliefs, creativity, imagination and intelligence. It is also the home of the ego, the realm where both the pathology and the healing begin. The poor ego has become a punching bag for much of pop psychology and pop spirituality, and this misunderstanding is a major obstacle to spiritual maturity. We need a healthy ego to continue to mature. The Samkhya term ahamkara, the ‘I maker’, refers to the natural and essential psychological processes that lead to the development of a strong, wise and unique self sense.

The Mental Soul is also home to the buddhi, or intelligence, and a key role of the buddhi is to keep the ego healthy, but in check. An unhealthy ego oscillates between an over-inflated view of itself with a deflated one, runs wild with imagination and self deception, and makes decisions from these deluded perspectives. What about me me me…? Trouble begins here. A healthy ego just does its job of navigating the incarnational journey without trying to personalize anything, and leaves the key decision making to the buddhi. A strong buddhi is essential for this. To inhabit this realm in a healthy way we need to awaken and nurture this balanced relationship between ahamkara and buddhi.

Thomas Berry’s 4th principle can help us understand nature of a healthy triune soul, and the Mental Soul especially, as it is a fundamental description of Soul health. We need all three of these basic laws Thomas describes to function simultaneously. If one is missing, or dysfunctional, problems will arise.

Principle 4: “The three basic laws of the universe at all levels of reality are differentiation, subjectivity and communion. These laws identify the reality, the values and the directions in which the universe is proceeding.”

Differentiation is simple on the surface. Every form, from atoms to galaxies, are unique. The Universe never exactly repeats itself. To honor our soul, we must allow our uniqueness to awaken and flourish. Differentiation also means we can function as as independent being at all levels of reality. We do not need to be dependent upon mommy, daddy, or guru to live our lives. Ideally, parents and teachers allow us to discover our own inherent freedom. Interestingly enough, this independence is a very clear expression of ego. I am different, I am unique. The buddhi understands that independence is a cosmic law, and really ‘nothing special’, because everyone is unique. There is no need for an inflated, or deflated self sense. However, many spiritual communities, cults and fundamentalist groups cultivate the dependence of their followers as a means of maintaining power and control. We are superior, and you are inferior, but if you do what we say, you will be safe. Yikes! This is not to imply that independent beings cannot continue to learn from and evolve with others, as we will see with ‘communion’.

Subjectivity states that the soul is also the Soul. The individuated self is also the Self, Drashtuh, the Seer. This is the integration of the infinite unbounded Celestial Soul or Atman into everyday consciousness. Infants live here, but the incarnational process gradually draws them into the Physical and Mental Souls, and when these are not well integrated, the Celestial Soul is forgotten and the spiritual world collapses. A healthy buddhi also keeps the ego in check here. Grandiosity can run rampant when the ego discovers the infinite and stakes its claim. “I am a spiritually enlightened being and I can do no wrong”. Naive students can project this grandiosity onto their teacher, and if the teacher is not awake, their own egos can get sucked into believing this as well.

Communion is the reality that the Universe is a Community of Beings, inextricably intertwined within and without each other. Souls need community, and find community at every level of reality, from humans, to angels of the celestial realms, to the animal and plant spirits of the lower realms. Communion is about relationships, where we can safely dissolve egoic boundaries without losing our personal identity. The buddhi monitors and regulates this process and helps repair and restore the inevitable ruptures that take place in relationships.

We also need communities of humans that give us full support to pursue our own wholeness and not tie us down with dogma and small mindedness. We all hold a unique piece of the cosmic puzzle. It is our dharma to unfold that piece, discover how it fits in with the other pieces and share it with the world.

Studies of the attachment process, one of the great contributions of the modern west to the understanding of the developing mind, high-light the role played by emotionally mature adults in helping an infant slowly evolve the ego or “I sense” and the buddhi or intelligence, and thus continue grow to emotional adulthood, and maybe even spiritual adulthood.

The infant begins with no ego boundaries and can merge with its environment. In the idealized attachment process, the parent(s), as carrier of love in the form of nurturing and safety, merges with the infant to provide strength, security and support. The parent appears to the infant/child as all-knowing and all powerful. The mental soul of the child remains latent in the beginning. A mature parent gradually allows the baby/child/adolescent to differentiate. This involves developing its own self sense or ego, and its own ability to make decisions, awakening the mental soul level. All the while,the parents still provide the primary guidance in monitoring and modulating the emotional ups and downs of being alive. Love is constant channeled from the celestial soul, even through hard times and deep disagreements come and go.

As the physical soul matures through biology and healthy living, the intelligence of the mental soul, the buddhi, awakens, and guides the ego towards a realistic perspective on its own unique capacities. Parents own human frailties are exposed and everyone’s humanity is acknowledged. Mature parents have a strong self sense of their own and do not confuse their own needs and wants with those of the child. This leads to healthy differentiation. Healthy parenting provides clear examples of trusting surrender into relationships and freedom to be and become a unique being. This leads to healthy communion. When love is the foundation, subjectivity flourishes. Of course, the process is never as smooth as the idealized projections. Children come into the world with their own past life karma, and parents have the karma of their parents as well, so it is usually quite messy.

The Physical Soul

Inhabiting the Physical Soul requires the activation of perception, as this is the major modality through which it functions. Through perception we begin to navigate the inner world of the five elements: earth, water, fire, air, and space. In any somatic exploration, we begin with the complementary elements earth and space, also known as weight and lightness. (Please explore and inhabit these in all poses and life.)

Next we move into water and fire, another pair of complementary elements. B.K.S. Iyengar, writing in Light on Pranayama, equates ‘prana’, or our life energy, with the balance of fire and water. Fire warms the water and gets it moving. Water cools the fire and prevents overheating and burnout. Water is yin, fire is yang. In balance you have the whole spectrum of possibilities. The circulatory system is the best place to play with fire and water, so we will now move into the vyana vayu and see what appears.

My favorite pose of exploration these days is supported bridge, where weight and lightness prepare for a deeper experience of fire and water. Near the block, find the bifurcation of the aorta and inferior vena cava and open up the flow in both directions, toward the head, and toward the tail. (Blockages in my neck/throat lead to the excess redness of the face.) Trace the blood vessels as a flow up into the legs and back down as well. Next slide up under the heart and carefully lift the heart/liver so the aorta and vena cava stay long and free. No hinging of the spine! Track out to arms and hands and back to heart. Open soft palate and adjust skull on C-1 to help release neck pressure. Extra height under the shoulders may help here, as in sarvangasana. Now begin to lubricate the mesentery by lifting it up away from the blood vessels and imagining a thin layer of fluid sliding around. This begins the differentiation of the median plane of connective tissue in the body to help liberate front from back, flexion from extension, and the anterior nerve roots from the posterior.

Now, from the space surrounding the heart, feel the mediastinum, especially the posterior, and begin to imagine a linking of the mediastinum with the mesentery. To do this you have to pass through the diaphragm and liver, spreading them laterally to fill the space across the whole torso. Lubricate the ligaments and tendons so the tissue is more pliable and the organs feel more freedom of movement. When the mediastinum, posterior liver tissues and the mesentery meet, knit them together elastically, so in backbends, the whole net stretches evenly. Most students by pass the liver region, giving the table top look to backbends. B.K.S. Iyengar was a master of exploring the inner world through the elements. This is a backbend from the median plane, where fire, water and the connective tissues are in perfect harmony.

Similar action of the median plane is needed in forward flexion poses such as bakasana and uttanasana. No wrinkles in the median plane, but there is an elastic elongation of the core tissues. This keeps the organs toned and the fluids reaching into every nook and cranny of the body. Feel free to take this exploration into any of your favorite poses or sequences.

This is ‘inhabiting’ the body, and prepares us for allowing the awakened body to be a gateway to the shamanic realms, where the hidden dimensions of the soul can be liberated and healed. Next week we will look at rotations and how these poses help expand our perception of the fluids into the discs and spinal canal and how when we can inhabit the inner spine, the cosmic realms begin to appear more spontaneously.

I’m a Soul Man!

Posted on September 8, 2015 by admin

Although the word ‘soul’ is used in many fascinating, confusing, and contradictory ways, soul always seems to imply some form of integration or relationship between the sacred and the profane, the mystical and the sensuous, or to use the advaita terminology, between the formless and the world of forms. My first ‘felt sense’ of soul came from the Soul music that arose in the 1950’s and 60’s, combining elements of Gospel and its spiritual aspirations with the more sexual/sensual Blues. Nothing better than feeling the presence of Jesus through all the chakras! Thank you Sam and Dave! This made a whole lot more sense to me than the Catholic image of soul as an ‘untainted purity’ that was continually being stained by unending chain of sins, and had to be constantly cleansed by some priestly dry cleaner. My soul wanted heaven and earth to dance together as one. But what exactly is the soul?

The outer, objective world of the senses is relatively easy to describe. We can see and feel oak trees, ocean waves and fire. Finding words to articulate the inner subjective world, the domain of the mystic, the shaman, the poet and the somanaut, is much more difficult, but soul is a word seemingly used by everyone. Soul has recently returned to my vocabulary as three very different perspectives on soul have been offered to me and I am digesting, integrating and hoping to incorporate them into my teaching on the spiritual unfolding currently underway.

Adyashanti uses soul in a very Buddhist/Mystical Christian way. John O’Donohue has a Celtic/Druidic view on the soul, and Hank Wesselman and Jill Kuykendall speak of soul from the Shamanic point of view in general, and the Hawaiian Kahuna tradition specifically.

Adya uses soul as a synonym for what in beginning meditation is known as the witness, or witnessing consciousness. For pre-meditation consciousness, awareness and what arises in awareness are confused, or undifferentiated. Entangled in this confusion is also the self identity. I am my psychological content. All the chatter that goes on in the mind is me and this is a highly unpleasant place to be for very long. In level 1 meditation, or mindfulness, we are taught to just notice or be a witness to what is arising in the mind, without getting involved in the story. This begins the teasing apart of Purusha (soul) and Prakriti, creation, that is the foundation of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

Mindfulness is not so easy in the beginning as the mental habit is to react to almost everything that shows up and to totally forget about just witnessing. Restraining the urge to react, what Patanjali calls citta vrtti nirodhah, takes discipline, tapas or abhyasa, and patience. We teach self discipline and restraint to children, so it is a basic human practice in the beginning. Also, beginners on the yoga/meditation path recognize that ‘mind’ is addicted to having ‘some thing’ to grasp as an anchor, or place to stabilize itself. Therefore, a second aspect of beginning meditation is added.

Concentration practice, also known as dharana – dhyana – samadhi and samyama in the yoga tradition, helps root the nervous system in the world of form so it can relax, feel safe, and begin to trust in ‘letting go’ into stillness. The biological instinct for survival does not necessarily trust letting go. If you are a bunny rabbit grazing peacefully in a field, letting go into your bunny bliss may lead to becoming someone else’s dinner. An edge of anxiety and fear, just in case, keep the bunny genes alive. We have to learn to override that instinct to find the depths of our soul.

With time, we eventually begin to recognize that witnessing, or awareness is actually different from what is arising in awareness. We open to a deep, vibrant stillness, unbounded in space or time. We discover eternity as being ever-present. This is what Adyashanti calls ‘soul’ level consciousness. This level can also be called the masculine, transcendent, or formless consciousness and its discovery is the beginning of spiritual awakening. The ‘sacred emerges into conscious awareness not as another form, but as limitless eternity.

John O’Donahue uses the word ‘soul’ to describe the deep urge of our embodied self to merge with the infinite and links it with the heart. Soul is “a presence from the divine world where intimacy has no limit or barrier.” And as it is linked to the infinite, it can never be truly captured or held. “All you can ever achieve is a sense of your soul. You gain little glimpses of its light, colors, contours. You feel the inspiration of its possibilities and the wonder of its mysteries.”

In this sense, the soul is not an aspect of the physical world, the world we see, feel and directly contact, but it is in the realm of form, as it can change, mutate, grow and evolve. It inhabits the subtle realm, underground, hidden away. Poet David Whyte defines soul as “the indefinable essence of a person’s spirit and being. It can never be touched and yet the merest hint of its absence causes immediate distress.” Depth-psychologist James Hillman adds “the search for the soul always leads into the ‘depths’.” John O’Donohue’s book “Beauty” was written to help nurture the soul. “The human soul hungers for beauty.” And “we feel most alive in the presence of the Beautiful for it meets the need of the soul.” This use of soul is a lot juicier than Adya’s, but Adya uses the word ‘spirit’ to integrate the feminine as a realization of the soul. Same inner experience, slightly different wording.

As yoga students and somanauts, we can dive into the depths of our own souls through the water element, the metaphor for emotions, the inner world and the unconscious mind. Poseidon, or Neptune to the Romans has his trident, the symbol of the trifurcated muladhara/earth element, as he prepares to plunge in the depths of the oceans. The unconscious hold our fears and anxieties, as well as our unrealized higher potentials. If we want to wake up, we must take the plunge and liberate the soul from the habit and conditioning of feeling separate and lost. Mindfulness, or the awakening of “soul”, provides swimming lessons so we do not drown during our dives into the inner ocean. Beauty, awe and delight steer the soul safely through the turbulance of our life experiences. Start in the shallow end of the pool, and work your way into the deeper waters. A mindful and juicy asana practice is even better as it will help you become a very proficient navigator of the water element.

The Shamanic world has a complex view of ‘soul’. Although there are subtle variations on soul among various indigenous cultures across the planet, almost all agree that the human has three souls, or three aspects or levels of soul, that are involved in the reincarnation process and our life journeys. The following is from the Hawaiian Kahuna tradition as taught by Hank Wesselman and Jill Kuykendall in The Spiritwalker Teachings. (Kate and I will be diving more deeply into these waters when we study with them in person next month at Esalen. I find their teachings very similar to my own experiences with yoga and lots of fun to play with.

In the Kahuna tradition, the three souls, the Soul Cluster, are the Celestial, The Body and the Mental, and health and well being occur when all three are aligned and working together harmoniously.

The Celestial Soul, also known as the Spiritual Soul, Oversoul, or Angelic Soul are all names for the Immortal Soul known as Paramatman in the Vedic tradition. It’s essence is infinite light and at incarnation the Oversoul sends a holographic seed of light to awaken and enliven the other two mortal souls. This energy is transferred to the other two souls in the form of breath, or spiritus. Although everpresent, the Celestial Soul remains hidden from the other two until they attain a level of harmonious integration on the mortal plane. Then, seeds of further growth and development can be planted in the mortal souls to bring out higher and higher dimensions of consciousness into the world.

This seed first awakens and engages with the Physical, Earth or Body Soul as breath or prana. The Body Soul comes from two sources, mother and father. Not only do the sperm and egg come together on the physical plane, but also a psychic/energetic field from each of the parents combine to receive the seed from the Oversoul. The Body Soul carries the evolutionary intelligence at a cellular and organic level and handles all physiological functioning, including the urge for continuous growth, healing and development. Memories as well as all of our learned behaviors are stored here. The Body Soul is analagous to a combination of the anamaya, pranamaya and manomaya koshas in the Vedic tradition.

The Body Soul also is involved with all forms of perception, including the inner world as well as the outer. It is always honest, as it perceives without editing, interpreting or assigning meaning. And most importantly for our future explorations, the Body Soul contains the gateways to the inner world of the shaman. Because it is the perceiver, it is the giver and receiver of all shamanic experiences. (This image is from Michael Williams’ web site on prehistoric shamanism.)

Very much like computer hardware, the Body Soul follows directions and can be further programmed and this becomes a possible source of problems, as it operates in concert with the Mental Soul, which has access to ideas, imagination and creativity.

The Mental Soul or Ego Soul tends to remain in the background in young children as they are very much body centered in the early years, but begins to emerge as the child begins to question the world. The Mental Soul is the source of thoughts, creativity and imagination, assigns meaning to experiences, makes decisions and acts to guide the Soul Complex on the life journey. These choices are directed by the beliefs and the self sense that arises in the Mental Soul from our life experiences. This self sense, or ego, (constructed by the ahamkara), responds to both positive and negative experiences. Positive ones build self confidence and a strong sense of personal power, and our life choices flow from wisdom, compassion and creativity. Negative experiences such as various types of trauma can lead to a damaged self sense, emotional pathology, and life choices based on fear, aggression or self loathing. These traumatized belief structures also interfere with the Body Soul’s capacity to sustain health by sending it bad software leading to a debilitation of energy and illness.

The Body Soul can give feed back to the Mental Soul about these imbalances, as it is always honest. But the Mental Soul, in its creativity, can lie to itself. It can distort the direct information the Body Soul to sustain its own belief patterns. The question for healing becomes how do we begin the allow these two Souls to work in synchrony? The Mental Soul has to learn how to listen objectively to the Body Soul, to trust it’s information, and to discover the inherent power in the physiological wisdom that is at the heart of the Body Soul. A key aspect to the wisdom of the Body Soul is the Shamanic Gateway, and we will go into this in more detail in a further posting. When the Body Soul and Mental Soul are in synch, the Oversoul can be seen and heard, and the next level of spiritual growth can proceed.

Cosmic Yoga

Posted on September 2, 2015 by admin

I decided to call my Ojai classes “Cosmic Yoga”. I’d rather call them just ‘yoga’, but there are so many variations of yoga out there, some truly horrifying, that the term ‘yoga’ can be very misleading. And I figured I might get the right people’s attention with the word ‘Cosmic’. We’ll see how it goes!

What is Cosmic Yoga ? My cosmic origins go back 13.7 billion years or so, but my cosmic teaching actually began when I met Thomas Berry and his protégé Brian Swimme back in the early 1980’s. They provided a context for my life and teaching that was unlike anything I had ever experienced or even imagined.

Bea Briggs, a yoga teacher from Chicago, told me about Brian, an astro-physicist by training, who lived in the Bay Area and suggested I contact him. I did and he mentioned he was just about to begin teaching a course at Holy Names College in Oakland, a few miles from my home, and suggested I take the course. The material covered the core of Thomas Berry’s work and became the basis for Brian’s ‘Canticle to the Cosmos’ video/cd set, which I highly recommend for anyone with cosmic aspirations. Through Brian I met Thomas and my life changed dramatically. (Brian, also featured in the Science section of this site with the “Powers of the Universe’ also has played a huge role in my own unfolding.)

Thomas became a major mentor to me also, and I was blessed to spend time with him on many occasions over the years, the highlight being the week Bea Briggs, Thomas and I spent at Feathered Pipe Ranch in Montana, somewhere back in the mid 1980’s, co-teaching “Yoga and the Cosmic Creation Story”. We were a little ahead of our time, but it was a fascinating week.

Thomas was a Catholic priest, amazingly enough, but primarily a scholar of human culture. Widely read in European history, Thomas also was deeply impressed with the East and wrote books on Buddhism and the Religions of India. And most of all, Thomas was an awakened Visionary. I am still in awe at how clearly and succinctly he assessed the modern era, saw how as a species we arrived at our historical moment, and chartered a very detailed path to restore harmony and balance to the planet. He fully embodied ‘the awakening process’ in a totally unique and profound way. He was a Taoist, a cosmologist and a spiritual teacher, but he always referred to himself as a ‘geologian’, a student of the earth.

The core of the cosmic teaching revolves around what Thomas called the ‘Twelve Principles for Understanding the Universe and the Role of the Human in the Universe Process’. What follows are the 12 principles, and then my own commentary and translation for yoga people.

‘Twelve Principles for Understanding the Universe and the Role of the Human in the Universe Process’, by Thomas Berry.

1. The Universe, the solar system, and the planet earth, in themselves, and in their evolutionary emergence, constitute for the human community the primary revelation of that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being.

2. The universe is a unity, an interacting and genetically related community of beings bound together in an inseparable relationship in space and time. The unity of planet earth is especially clear; each being of the planet is profoundly implicated in the existence and functioning of every other being of the planet.

3. From its beginning, the universe is a psychic as well as a physical reality.

4. The three basic laws of the universe at all levels of reality are differentiation, subjectivity and communion. These laws identify the reality, the values and the directions in which the universe is proceeding.

5. The universe has a violent as well as a harmonious aspect, but is consistently creative in the larger arc of its development.

6. The human is that being in whom the universe activates, reflects upon and celebrates itself in conscious self awareness.

7. The earth, within the solar system, is a self-emergent, self-propagating, self-nourishing, self-governing, self-healing , self-fulfilling community. All particular life systems, in their being, their sexuality, their nourishment, their education, their governing, their healing and their fulfillment, must integrate their functioning within this larger complex of mutually dependent earth systems.

8. The genetic coding process is the process through which the world of the living articulates itself in its being and its activities. The great wonder is the creative interaction of the multiple codings among themselves.

9. At the human level genetic coding mandates a trans-genetic cultural coding by which specifically human qualities find self expression. Cultural coding is carried on by educational processes.

10. The emergent process of the universe is irreversible and non-repeatable in the existing world order. The movement from non-life to life on the planet earth is a one time event. So to the movement from life to the human from of consciousness. So also the transition from the earlier to the later forms of human culture.

11. The historical sequence of cultural periods can be defined as the tribal-shamanic period, the neolithic settlement period, the classical civilization period, the scientific-technological period and the emerging ecological period.

12. The main task of the human in the immediate future is to assist in activating the inter-communion of all the living and non-living components of the earth community in what can be considered the emerging ecological period of earth development.

My notes: (watch the ‘Canticle to the Cosmos’ series if you really want to go more deeply into this.)

1.Revelation: Thomas was deeply immersed in the religious practices of India, as well as those of the Native Americans, and both were very clear that creation was sacred. This has been lost in the Judeo-Christian-Scientific West where spirit and matter were somehow cleaved apart. Heaven, and God, were ‘out there’ somewhere, and the degradation of the Earth was the result of this belief. Thomas wanted the return of the feminine perspective that creation is Divine and the primary source for Revelation, not the Bible, or written scripture.

2. Oneness: Thomas was an advaita Vedantan. That the infinite and the finite were one, not two, was implicitly obvious to him. That every aspect of creation was intertwined is also seen in the image of Indra’s Net, or Web, the Indian metaphor for wholeness.

3. A recapitulation that Creation is not ‘just material’, but has layers of reality not easily seen. This ‘esoteric’ aspect in known in Shamanic cultures as well as those who hold Creation as Divine.

4. That these are the fundamental driving forces in the universe is one of Thomas’ fascinating insights. Amazingly enough, remove any one of these three and the Universe collapses. Brian unfolds this quite beautifully in lesson 4 of the Canticle. For yoga students and yoga teachers, the question becomes “are you allowing all three of these to manifest as deeply as possible?”

Differentiation refers to uniqueness. Every iota of creation is unique, never before existing, never to appear again in the exact same way. Like snow flakes, we all have total cosmic permission to be totally unique. Your body/mind, your life, is yours alone, unique and special. We all imitate in the beginning to get started. That is why we have mirror neurons. But ultimately, trust your own individuality. As teachers, this is even more important. Can you give permission for each student to be unique while still honoring the integrity of the pose? Fundamentalist communities have serious problems with this because they control people by limiting/stifling their individuality.

Subjectivity states that every iota of creation has Cosmic depth. Each of us, from atoms to galaxies, and all beings, speak from the Infinite Depths of Mystery. Atman is Brahman. Tat vam asi. In any posture, in any and every moment, feel the infinite presence, drashtuh svarupe. Nurture this!

Communion reflects wholeness and the inextricable intertwining of all forms across space and time. Wholeness, or Oneness is not just a good idea! To dive into this one is mind boggling. Awakening allows you to draw upon many traditions and teachers where awakening is emerging. The Whole Universe is Awakening. You just have to wake up and pay attention. Cosmic clues are everywhere!

5. The explosion of a star gave birth to our solar system. The churning and shattering of volcanoes, earthquakes and typhoons actually helps replenish and refresh the life conditions, even as destruction is also needed. Kali serves this purpose on many levels.

6. Awe is the primary expression of awakening, and then celebration. To Quote Mary Oliver: “Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be Astonished. Tell about it.”

7. This begins Thomas’ instructions of how societies and cultures self organize and begins to lay out a blueprint for large scale social changes.

8. Biology is a major means for the Cosmos to carry forth learning and experience in time. Humans can see because 2 billion years ago, a cell learned how to convert solar energy to food. The chlorophyll molecule begat the retinol molecule and vision was born.

9. Culture is another means to carry forth wisdom and experience through time. Story telling, drawing, music, dance and writing are all means to convey information to future generations. And now we have ‘the cloud’.

10. The arrow of time travels in one direction in our world. For many generations humans believed that life unfolded in ever repeating cycles. Not so in the cosmos. Cycles may repeat, but they are never the same. This puts a lot more urgency in dealing with the present conditions.

11. Thomas was a cultural historian who saw history in geological terms. He described our historical moment as the termination of the Cenozoic era and the beginning of something new. The direction we go as a planet is being determined by choices humans make today.

12: What is the destiny of the human? To be determined.