After trying to research this issue in order to explain it to others, I've found myself taking an extremely unpopular position: I'm not sure that the climate is particularly changing, I'm not sure that changes are being caused by humans, and if they are, I'm not sure that they would have the devastating consequences to the planet that are being predicted. This attitude makes me a great anomaly among the environmentally-conscious.

I'm not sure where people (I mean, in our culture, generally speaking) are at with this. I don't know to what extent the people of my culture are awakening to reality.

The great irony of life is that most of us spend most of it completely missing the point. And that is the point!

Imagine for a moment that there's a god or gods or Great Spirit, or spirit-that-moves-through-all-things. By definition, this Whole Ghost is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, which means that It is everything and every time and everyone. This Oneness contains and is everything from the Universe to each particle in it. This Oneness comprises not only every planckion of physical (manifest) reality, but every non-physical process, emotion, and happening. Eternity. Presence.

Within Everything, anything and everything can and does happen, forever. There's no up that isn't canceled by a down, no bad that isn't neutralized by a good, no love that isn't destroyed by hate, no death that a new birth doesn't discount, and no great work of art that isn't winked out of existence by the relentless passage of time. There isn't even the relentless passage of time, because from the eternal perspective, it's all now anyway.

Isn't that boring? What's the point?

Something exciting and irritating and frustrating, tragic and incredible takes place as a miniscule aspect of the Oneness that makes all of Eternity worth being here for. This "something" is the Devil.

Into God's whole view comes separation, splitting up, forgetfulness. Into the closed-system of the Universe comes thermodynamics, disequilibrium, and gravity. Now we have particles - pieces of the whole - trying to reunite with one another. We have misunderstandings that can be resolved, we have ignorance that can be dispelled by the light. Glaciers take down the forest, and then the mosses crawl in to humbly begin a whole new world. Into the equilibrated universe we can now experience the joy of union following the despair of separation and isolation. What comfort is safety without first experiencing terror?

In the total big picture, these joys and tragedies all cancel each other out. All the excitement and wonder of life takes place within and especially between the parts of the whole. It's like a fabulous dance in which partners constantly change, and the music and movement shifts from ballet to square dance to stomping jungle boogie and back to ballet again.

Thank you to the Devil. Thank you for breaking the world into a googleplex of possibilities and parts. Thank you for all that work of making the lovers get old and restless and start cheating on each other the minute they finally find each other after years of tragic searching. Thank you for the catastrophe of continents crashing and creating Himalayas; thank you for destroying the Ganges by washing the mountains into the mighty river. I like mud, too.

Thank you for evolution, for succession. Thank you for our wounds that make us stronger. Thank you for killing us and for the endless battle. How else could we be warriors?

There is a reason not to become enlightened. In the enlightened state, your conflicts will likely be resolved, but they will almost certainly become irrelevant - and then what would there be to do? Your dis-eases will wane and your physical discomforts will become at best interesting but at worst also irrelevant - and then what would there be to strive for? Your relationship with your true self will become primary and sufficient (since the Oneness is sufficient unto itself) - and what would be the purpose of all that longing for true love?

Worse than that, what if everyone became enlightened? Nobody would work, there would be no purpose in having a government, the elite would cease to amass billions... in short, our whole social fabric would disintegrate and people would just be instead of doing, striving and longing. Wouldn't that be terrible? Who'd run the compactor at the garbage dump?

The most terrifying thing about enlightenment is that it's available to any one of us at any time. The slightest accidental awareness, the slightest willingness to relinquish our sufferings and - WHAMMO! the dream is all over, suckers.

Luckily, the Devil works in myriad ways. The Devil is at work in our schools, churches, shopping malls, doctor's offices and most certainly on our television screens. The Devil lives in every single one of us as an "ego". The Devil is always there to keep life interesting by giving us one experience after another.

For this I am grateful.

Ever since my enlightenment experience, I've had an interesting (I can't say upsetting) impact on my ability to write. I used to be prolific, and now I think my thought and have my insight and then let it go and at best I'll jot down the essence of it if I happen to have my journal handy. The interesting thing about this is that I have books on the go and writer's block when I sit down to work on them!

Q: So, how do you fit a billion civilized people into a space the size of Ontario (including Hudson Bay)?

A: Make everything really small and squish it together.

The average Indian citizen has an ecological footprint - the collective "resource" use translated into the common denominator of land area - of 0.8 hectares, roughly one tenth that of the average North American citizen. So, what is it that people are doing without here on the other side of the planet from the pinnacle of Empire? 

Well, India is very ... Indian!

I haven't written here for so long, and so much has happened, I don't know where to start. I began teaching ecology and that was very profound for me, because of how much I learned and because of the way the story finally got to play itself out to a much deeper conclusion than simply bits and pieces in blogs and conversations. From there we packed up our house, rented it out and moved to a private (Unitarian) camp for the summer. Situated right on the Niagara Escarpment north of Orangeville, Ontario, this 50 acre pristine pseudo-wilderness gave us an opportunity to create a calm and quiet atmosphere to help Jasper find resolution for his double-hearing conflict (newmedicine.ca). We lived for the summer in a 50 square foot trailer, hiking around to the pond, the woods, the frog areas, other lovely spots. Meanwhile, I began what I call "nature meditations," following the Kamana Wilderness Awareness course (highly recommended!). So while Jasper went deaf and then went hyper-sensitive in the auditory department, I was fox-walking and owl-eyeing around the Niagara Escarpment. It began for me (or maybe teaching ecology began for me) my "shamanic journey." I really got into the German New Medicine this summer, delving deeper and deeper into the way that the evolved body-brain interacts with psychic/cultural experiences to create who we are in any given moment. For me, panic attacks grew out of a refugee conflict ("who am I? Where do I belong?") when I was 27 years old and my mother left the country and I couldn't "take care of" her anymore. I discovered this last May when we decided to go to India and my flying phobia reared up.

How can anyone know if she has substantially changed? How can anyone know if she is affecting substantial change?

In a reductionist paradigm, the usual approach of the vast majority of scientists and economists and sociologists working on the world's serious problems, she would measure the initial conditions and measure the same parameters later on, and compare the two. I guess she would arbitrarily assign a value to quantify "substantial".

In which case, I could reasonably say that everyone is substantially changed every day of their lives. How fantastically useless a measurement.

I read Ishmael in 1996 and I sat back and said "oh my god, it's not me that's crazy, it's everyone else".  Which was a nice realization, because I was able to stop trying to find a shrink.

It took me many years to learn the things I have had to learn to start to feel like I'm actually DOING something. I don't think there's time for newer readers to take several years to learn these things. I think the tide is rising and those who read Ishmael now can rise with the tide or jump right out of the boat, and not have to spend several years proving to yourselves that, yes, the world really is quite buggered up, culturally speaking and that you don't have to be that way.

Not that I think that highly of myself (that I can begin to emulate coyote), but I at least aspire:

"Coyote teaching": made popular by Tom Brown Jr., a coyote teacher answers questions with questions, inspiring students to dig deeper and find more connections. A successful coyote teacher helps the student to learn on his own until the student no longer needs the teacher.