“Wisdom is knowing you are nothing; Love is knowing you are everything; you live your life in-between.”

~Dr. Wayne Dyer, from a teacher he knew in Bombai

Not the Virgin Mary or Little Jesus, originally uploaded by Chrissy Mc.

There is something disturbing to me about this outdoor mosaic that I pass everyday on the way to work. It used to be the Virgin Mary & Jesus, but obviously the new owners moved in with new ideas.

Where I’m from, people wear masks or cover their faces if: (1) They have a case of hives, (2) it’s Halloween, or (3) they’re going to rob a liquor store. I have trouble picturing this scene as a display of tradition or modesty. To me it just looks a little ominous.

While intriguing, it feels to me almost as disturbing as a cartoon of Mohammad would to a Muslim (and I’m not even Catholic!). Weird.

I had some thoughts today on the soul, reincarnation, and heaven while in the shower and eating at McDonald’s (not at the same time, of course)!

I’ve been able to follow Yogic philosophy (largely inspired by Hindu beliefs & Indian sages) up until the talks of karma and reincarnation. The idea that every person has a unique soul just doesn’t sit well with me. That would imply that every manifestation of life has its own soul…each clump of grass, each rock, each animal…unless, of course, you buy into the philosophy that humans are somehow special and only we got the souls in all of creation (not likely given the scale of US on the scale of CREATION).

The fact that we each have a feeling of knowing who we are after peeling back all physical and memory associations simply implies that we are expressions of ONE soul. In fact, you DON’T feel drastically different & unique if you take everything you know about yourself away.

“And now, because the soul acts at a distance by some power that belongs to it, are we authorized to conclude that it exists as something real, and that it is not the result of functions of the brain?

“Does light really exist?

“Does heat exist?

“Does sound exist?

“No.

“They are only manifestations produced by movement.

“What we call light is a sensation produced upon our optic nerve by the vibrations of ether, comprising between 400 and 756 trillions per second, undulations that are themselves very obscure.

“What we call heat is a sensation produced by vibrations between 350 and and{sic} 600 trillions.

“The sun lights up space, as much at midnight as at midday. Its temperature is nearly 270 degrees below zero.

“What we call sound is a sensation produced upon our auditory nerve by silent vibrations of the air, themselves comprising between 32,000 and 36,000 a second.

From “The Unknown.” Published by Harper & Brothers Copyright, 1900, by Camille Flammarion. (French Astronomer)

Apparently my website host had 2 servers crash, and they lost all my data, and didn’t have the nerve to tell me! So…my website has been down in the past week while I switched hosting service to godaddy.com.

Hopefully the website will be mostly functional…please let me know if you find any glitches. I just got it back up and running today.

Stay tuned!

I was convicted by the words of Swami Satchidananda in The Living Gita: The Complete Bhavagad Gita-A Commentary for Modern Readers, for my journey forward as a student:

“When you go to a teacher saying, “I know a little bit, can you add a little more?” or, “I know, but can you verify it?” you are just going there to check your capabilities, not to learn anything new. If you want to learn, go empty and open. “I’m an empty cup; please pour in all you can.” If you go with a cup already full, even if the teacher pours something good, where will it go? It’s not that he or she is miserly; the teacher would like to pour, but it will overflow and go to waste. So empty your cup.”

~Swami Satchidananda, The Living Gita: The Complete Bhavagad Gita-A Commentary for Modern Readers

I soaked in knowledge quickly as a child, and did well on tests, and I became very proud of my knowledge. But as the years passed, I found myself often head-to-head, particularly with athletic coaches, who found me very frustrating to try to coach. I would never do exactly what they asked of me unless it passed through all my filters first and made perfect sense. This would require lots of questions and logic before I felt convinced about the action. But I realize now that it was really just my weakness in wanting to feel that I accomplished something on my own. You see, if you already have most of the knowledge, and someone else adds a little bit, you can still feel most of the pride for the end result, wheras if you let someone direct you, you forfeit your egotistical pride.

I know this is probably something I will always struggle with, but I am grateful for Gurudev having shed some light on the path to becoming a better student and truth-seeker.

“We’ve seen that when people are healthy and educated, they prosper.”

~Laura Bush, in a speech to the National Press Club today, about her recent visit to Western Africa

It’s interesting how these little truths will slip out of your mouth, and cause you stop and reflect inward. Though we do not have the dire healthcare and education needs of West Africa, these two basic keys to prosperity are steadily on decline in OUR great country. It’s interesting, that given the opportunities and freedoms in this country to acquire wealth, that Americans have chosen to hoarde their wealth rather than share it. (This is not a put-down for wealthy people, it is just numerically accurate that the rich are getting richer while the poor get poorer).

The recent documentary, “Sicko,” by Michael Moore, left me in an outrage. I actually kicked and punched things on the way out of the theater (not hard enough to do any damage, of course!), I was so angry at the system America has chosen for itself. Ridiculous costs of medical treatment for the uninsured, ridiculous premiums for insurance, and ridiculous treatment of patients by the money-hungry insurance companies.

Why do we allow a system like healthcare to be run for-profit? A for-profit system must show gains in profit year-after-year-after-year. We don’t want to keep people sick, or charge people higher rates for health care, or sell them drugs they don’t need, or reject valid insurance claims just to save insurance companies money. But what other ways can the healthcare system continue to make profits? It makes me furious that people consider not seeing a doctor, dentist, etc. when they need to, simply because they can’t afford to do so. Why are we making insurance companies rich instead of making people healthy?

It just so happens that my favorite people to massage are nurses and teachers. Why? Because I feel they are both overworked and undervalued in this country. Because healthcare and education really ARE the keys to prosperity, and though we keep telling the rest of the world this, we still haven’t figured out how to do it right in this country. Hundreds of thousands of high-potential high school graduates won’t go to college this fall–because they can’t take the risk of the debt incurred by the education!

I personally graduated college with the highest-earning bachelor’s degree possible for that time (Chemical Engineering), so that I could at least pay off my college debt in a few years after graduating, even if I didn’t like the job. But guess what? Now I’m going back to school again because after making the money, and feeling financially secure, I did not love what I was doing. And even my teachers told me to “study something smart, don’t become a teacher.” And even my beloved college English professor scoffed at my choice to change majors to English because “you can’t make any money with that degree.”

Well, folks, money isn’t the answer. We have money, we have freedom, yet more and more Americans are NOT prospering. I wonder why. We are a young country, and we will take a while to get it right, but we must take action on our failing healthcare and education systems.

“We’ve seen that when people are healthy and educated, they prosper.”

“The evolution is coming…a revolution has begun.” ~R-Evolve, 30 Seconds to Mars

“So it was that sex drove me to the Bible. The new emerging sexual consciousness and the passing of ancient stereotypes challenged the authority of Scripture, raised profound questions about the authenticity of biblical insights, and created for me and for many others a crisis of faith.”

~Bishop John Shelby Spong, in his book Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture

He cites the bad and antiquated treatment of women and homosexuals, when the Bible is taken literally:

Women:

• “For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man.” 1 Cor. 11:7-9
• “the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law ssays. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” 1 Cor. 14:34, 35

Homosexuals:

• Fundamentalists often use the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and other condemnations of homosexuals in the New Testament to justify their political and moral stances on homosexuality.
• The bishop notes the emerging science that homosexuality has genetic components, and that the idea of male/female as black/white is challenged by the variety observed from effeminate men to women with baritone voices and athletic skills to rival men.
• I add hermaphrodites and trans-gender folks to that sexual continuum. Are they committing a sin when one organ is removed, and they choose to copulate with someone of the same sex? Most fundamentalists will show some leniency and mercy in these cases, but if you were born looking and feeling like a man, then you better have sex with women, or you’ll go to hell.

“A person born with both ovary and testicular tissue, this could be 2 seperate gonads ( one of each) or a combination of both in one (an ovotestes). The genitalia can vary from completely male or female, to a combination of both or even ambiguous looking. The chromosome (karotype) compliment can be XX (female), XY (male), XX/XY (mosiac) or even XO (extremely rare). Those XX with female genitalia are raised female ( some have even given birth). Those XY with male genitalia are raised male ( a few have fathered children). The children born XX/XY or XO (with genitalia male or female are raised in the sex they look most like) ,Those born with ambiguous genitalia have many medical tests for the doctors to determine which sex they should be assigned. Doctors then recommend early surgery to make the child look physically like the sex assigned to them.”

~The Hermaphrodite Education and Listening Post

Bishop Spong also cites how fundamentalists justified slavery using passages taken literally from Genesis. I can identify with his response to this:

“It did not occur to those quoting this Scripture to raise questions about what kind of God was assumed in this verse, or whether or not they could worship such a God. Since they could not identify themselves with those who were the victims of this cruelty, the God to whom they ascribed this victimizing power did not appear to them to be seriously compromised.”

What yoga has taught me is about coming back to God. Because I felt the God of the fundamentalist Bible was not a God I wanted to worship, I abandoned God completely. Bishop Spong says what I am beginning to feel:

“I write as a Christian who loves the church. I am not a hostile critic who stands outside religion desiring to make fun of it. I am not a Marxist who believes that religion is the opiate of the people. I am not a Madalyn Murray O’Hair who believes that God should be expunged from public life. I am a bishop in the Anglican (Episcopal) church who was raised as a biblical fundamentalist and who, when I left that fundamentalism, did not leave my love of the Bible or my desire to serve God through the church.”

And he makes a convocation at the end of the book for those that feel the same:

“It is rather the recognition that we have no more than one generation left, in my opinion, before the dying embers of the values that were based on Bible reading and biblical view of life will be cold. There is still time for those embers to be fanned into bright, contagious flames once more. If we do not succeed in this last opportunity, the ignorance of mainline Christians will increase and the absurdity of fundamentalist Christians will reach a new crescendo. The result will be a revulsion that will accelerate the total secularization of the life of this society, putting an end completely to the religious traditions of our past. That process will move us beyond the reach of a revival. One can revive that which is dormant. One cannot revive that which has ceased to be. That requires a new creation.”

And he urges us not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

“We fear our highest possibilities (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities…”

Abraham H. Maslow, psychologist extraordinaire

It’s a gorgeous evening in the city. The clouds are rolling in from the ocean, passing over me here in Dolores Park. It’s just after yoga and I happened upon this group of people waiting to watch some films on a screen set up in the park. Looking around at all the groups of people gathered on this beautiful, breezy evening, everyone is happy and smiling. It’s almost eerie how happy everyone is. Balls are being tossed to dog companions, frisbees are being thrown back and forth, and soccer balls kicked between friends, as the sun sinks in the sky and the breeze picks up.

Today’s thought is about doing something small well. I heard an interview with a famous Egyptologist & Archaeologist (sp?) on the radio, and he shared that when he first announced his profession to a woman he was dating, that she laughed at him. At that time, archaeology was not a reputable profession. But he ended up being one of the most respected professionals in the world, and his advice was, whatever you are doing, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant, do it well, and success will come to you. On his journey, he first thought he wanted to be a lawyer, because they were considered successful, but found that he hated studying law. He eventually found his love, and poured his heart into it.