Footnotes to Crossroads Dispatches

spiritual winter and "everything returns to its most essential root nature" - adyashanti

This is an excerpt from the chapter The Radiant Core in the book Emptiness Dancing by Adyashanti:

"Winter is an interesting time of year. Many of our most sacred days of the year are in the winter. It is the season of spiritual holidays such as Ramadan, Hanukkah, and Christmas, and often Buddha's enlightenment day is celebrated at this time of year. Winter is a sacred portal, an opportunity. The leaves on the tree are falling; the fruits drop to the ground; the branches become bare; and everything returns to its most essential root nature. Not only in the exterior world, but also in the interior world there is a natural stripping away.
. . .

Even with its storms, winter is the quietest time of the year. There is nothing like the quiet after a storm. If you have had the privilege of being in the mountains right after a snowfall when there's no wind, nothing is moving, the snow is sucking up every sound, and you hear a deep silence everywhere, you know how potent this silence is.

In a real sense, self-inquiry is a spiritually induced form of wintertime. It's not about looking for a right answer so much as stripping away and letting you see what is not necessary, what you can do without, what you are without your leaves. In human beings, we do not call these leaves. We call them ideas, concepts, attachments, and conditioning. All of this forms your identity. Wouldn't it be terrible if the trees outside identified themselves by their leaves? These are very flimsy things to be attached to.

. . .

[What if we] saw the trees doing this, holding all their leaves to themselves as if they were in an existential crisis? This is our tendency, to pick up the pieces of our pet beliefs and theories, and hold on for dear life.

Sometimes this falling away feels like a powerful storm stripping leaves from a tree. You may have a sacred identity and some wind blows through--usually another human being--and that identity is ripped away. You can be thinking, "I am so enlightened, I can't stand it, it's amazing." Then some wind is going to come along and rip the thought away. Some friend or fellow worker is going to come along and say, "That doesn't look too enlightened to me," and you see it was just another unnecessary identity. If you don't reach down to gather it up, this is a sacred opportunity. Then as it falls you will see that you don't need that identity. It's an illusion, just more dead weight to toss overboard.

Returning to the core, the root of your own self, and seeing through everything that you take yourself to be allows even your most sacred identities to drop away. There is such beauty in discovering what we can do without. The most beautiful gift of this wintertime is ultimately something that is unspeakable; it is only livable. The winter is actually begging you to just let go, and then let go of letting go. Let this natural and spontaneous returning tot he root of your existence happen. Return to that which is not definable.

There is a wonderful poem about a lone tree with no branches standing at the edge of a cliff in winter, which was written by someone describing his own awakening. A crack opens and runs through the bark of the tree, and then the bark peels off. Imagine cracking a tree or log open to see what is in the core. To see what is inside, you have to crack through to the core. What would you find? You find radiant emptiness, the full radiant emptiness of winter. Imagine something radiant coming out of nowhere, something just radiating out, coming out of nowhere, absolutely nowhere.

When you reach the core that comes after allowing everything to drop, you are naturally cracked open. There is a spiritual heart in that core. You uncover not only the emptiness of the radiant mind, but the radiance and warmth of the spiritual heart as well. When you're really resting, you can actually feel the radiant, empty mind--not as a thought, but as the radiant emptiness of yourself, the nothingness of yourself and of all selves. You also experience the radiant heart fullness and realize that the emptiness isn't just a bland emptiness--it is heart-full. When the emptiness awakens, you know that it is also the compassionate heart. The warmth of your own spiritual heart comes alive.

Sometimes the winter seems cold, lonely, and isolating. You might find yourself being very still and at rest and feeling very peaceful but wondering, "Where is the juice? Where is the life?" You can be very still and quiet, and even quite empty in a certain way, and still have all the bark intact, without having been cracked open at all. Then you have what could be called the emptiness of emptiness. This is the fully protected form of emptiness.

. . .

You notice that as soon as you grasp a thought and believe it, the mind closes down onto that thought. So the natural mind is an open mind, and the natural heart is open, come what may. That's the shock of our natural condition--the mind and heart are naturally open and do not know how to close under any conditions at any time. And at the same time, you are beyond even the open mind and heart. Everything is contained within what you are.

The conditioned mind is always taking on God's job, wondering what people are doing and why they do it. But that is none of your business, none of your concern. You can just start walking through life with this natural openness to what is and be that way under all conditions at all times. That's what the true Self has been doing all along. When your true nature is realized, it is not as if you will have some amazing experience, and after that you say, "Okay world, I'm ready." The deepest experience is when you realize that this open, radiant, empty mind and open, radiant heart have always been open. They don't need to open; they are not going to open; openness has always been here. You no longer see two, you see the One in and as everything.

People feel so vulnerable and put up defenses. But putting up defenses is like walking out into the starry night and trying to wrap a little coat around vast infinite space. The vastness just flies out through the arms and the hood. You have this silly little coat out in the vast space and protect yourself inside it and think maybe someday you will open the buttons and be spiritually liberated. Probably not. It's more likely that someday you will stop identifying with the silly little coat. Free yourself of all limiting identities and embrace the infinite.

What allows this opening to take place at a great depth to realize we are already the openness into which we are opening. If we keep identifying with the human aspect of ourselves we think, "My God, I am opening into something too big for me." When we really let go and fall into this open silence, we can't find any end to it. It has been eternally here from before the beginning, and, in that, our humanness finds a welcoming to open itself. This is so because we are not opening ourselves into a mystery that is alien, or foreign, or different, but into what we have always been.

If you touch the sacred quality of winter inside yourself--that quality of everything returning to its most essential form--you find yourself falling off the end of the mind and into openness. You will start to experience this by not resisting the wintertime and just going with it as it opens you. It can be tremendously revealing, tremendously liberating to just return, return, return. It takes courage to do this. You want to ask, "Who will I be? Will it be okay?" But just return to the essential. When you find the courage to allow yourself to return to the essential, you are actually returning to the very root of your own self. That's the fullness that winter has to offer.

It's as if you return all the way to the seed, and only there do you see that the seed contained the whole truth."

They had no problems understanding light speed and teleportation except that they could have done it more discreetly. - Malidoma Some

One day after the dot-com bubble burst and I was no longer a CTO at an Internet start-up, I was at a wonderful bookstore and cafe in Salt Lake City, The Golden Braid. Instinctually, a particular book had a magnetic pull and I lifted out of the shelf. At that time, I very much defined myself as a left-brained, analytic, rational pseduo-intellectual that thought I knew how the whole world worked... until the rug had been pulled out from underneath me that previous year. Every part of my life went from idyllic (if you didn't look too far below the surface) to catastrophic, and I finally found myself in an unknown place where I had no pat answers.

This is a long-winded way of saying that this book I'm about to excerpt below made a huge impression on me. It changed my life. It was a voyage home, a true homecoming even if I didn't quite understand everything in it, it still rang true. It's the true tale of an African boy whisked from his village to a missionary school and his odyssey back to his own culture and shamanism. I don't really want to give too much away, but I recently checked the book out of the library to re-read my favorite passages.

In the world I reside today everything is based on left-brained intelligence (or, seeing as I'm in Vegas now, primal emotions run-amok) which culturally and systemically dismisses and buries any conversation by methods of mockery and/or fear all things not measurable and taught in schools or books. Thus, I tend to not speak of these agreed upon taboo subjects.

The passage below also explains why I'm moving more toward fiction writing to convey another view of reality.

This passage is in the Introduction by the author, he also mentions that Asian countries tend to also hold a non-Western view of reality that is foreign to Western education. Another reason that two of the main characters in a story I'm working are Asian-American.

"In the culture of my people, the Dagara, we have no word for the supernatural. The closest we come to this concept is Yielbongura, "the thing that knowledge can't eat." This word suggests that the life and power of certain things depend upon their resistance to the kind of categorizing knowledge that human being apply to everything. In Western reality, there is a clear split between the spiritual and the material, between religious life and secular life. This concept is alien to the Dagara. For us, as for many indigenous cultures, the supernatural is part of our everyday lives. To a Dagara man or woman, the material is just as the spiritual taking on form.

. . . .

The world of the Dagara also does not distinguish between reality and imagination. To us, there is a close connection between thought and reality. To imagine something, to closely focus one's thoughts upon it, has the potential to bring something into being. Thus, people who take a tragic view of life and are always expecting the worst usually manifest that reality. Those who expect that things will work together for the good usually experience just that. In the realm of the sacred, this concept is taken even further, for what is magic but the ability to focus thought and energy to get results on the human plane? The Dagara view of reality is large. If one can imagine something, then it has at least the potential to exist.

I decided to do a little experiment of my own with "reality" versus "imagination" when I was home visiting my village in 1986. I brought with me a little electronic generator, a television monitor, a VCR, and a "Star Trek" tape titled The Voyage Home. I wanted to know if the Dagara elders could tell the difference between fiction and reality. The events unfolding in a science fiction film, considered futuristic or fantastic in the West, were perceived by my elders as the current affairs in the day-to-day lives of some other group of people living in the world. The elders did not understand what a starship is. They did not understand what the fussy uniforms of its crew members had to do with making magic. They recognized in Spock a Kontomble of the seventh planet, the very one that I describe later in this story, and their only objection to him was that he was too tall. They had never seen a Kontomble that big. They had no problems understanding light speed and teleportation except that they could have done it more discreetly. I could not make them understand that all this was not real. Even though stories abound in my culture, we have no word for fiction. The only way I could get across to them the Western concept of fiction was to associate fiction with telling lies.

My elders were comfortable with "Star Trek," the West's vision of its own future. Because they believe in things like magical beings (Spock), traveling at the speed of light, and teleportation, the wonders that Westerners imagine being part of their future are very much a part of my elders' present. The irony is that the West sees the indigenous world as primitive or archaic. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the West could learn to be as "archaic" as my elders are?

As in the case of "Star Trek," Westerners look to the future as a place of hope, a better world where every person has dignity and value, where wealth is not unequally distributed, where the wonders of technology make miracles possible. If people in the West could embrace some of the more positive values of the indigenous world, perhaps that might even provide them with a "shortcut" to their own future." -- Malidoma Patrice Some, Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman

...when you have learned to synchronize your life with the universe itself, you are celebrating the cosmic dance. - Deepak Chopra

"We maximize the probability that something will happen by our actions. And many of our actions are determined by our karmic conditioning--those interpretations of past experiences and relationships that form and affect our life's memories and desires. If we have had past experiences of being lucky, the probability of buying a lottery ticket increases. But a person who has never won anything feels defeated even before the ticket is purchased, and may never buy the ticket at all.

In order to change your life, therefore, you must break free of your present karmic conditioning. You've got to change your interpretation of what happens in your life. You must transform yourself into the person for whom the probability of great things happening increases. And this transformation starts at the level of the soul. The soul gives meaning to events. The soul takes actions by influencing our minds. And for every action, there is a memory, an interpretation. Meaning, experience, interpretation, memory, desire--all of these are very closely connected through the karmic cycle.

We get used to a certain way of doing things and continue this pattern out of habit, simply because it is comfortable. In order to change your life, you have to find a way to break the pattern.This is not easy, but people do it every day. The best way is to watch for signs of new probabilities--and those signs come to us in the form of coincidences.

Coincidences are messages from the nonlocal domain, invitations to break our karmic bonds. Coincidences invite us to relinquish the known and embrace the unknown. A coincidence is a creative, quantum leap in the behavior of the universe itself. Since the known is itself a habit of past conditioning, creativity and freedom exist in the unknown--anything that breaks through the probability amplitude set by karma. That is why it is important to look for coincidences, to keep a record of them. When you notice coincidences, you can discover their hidden meanings for your life.

A coincidence is, by definition, a synchronistic experience. It comes from the nonlocal domain, and affects our world in unpredictable ways. The very fact that it's a coincidence means that it is a message from God. We must take heed, and then take action. This is our opportunity for a creative response. The goal of enlightenment is to go beyond the probability pattern and experience true freedom. This is why it is important to never ignore a coincidence. Never pass up a chance to see what the universe has planned for you. And if you pay attention to coincidences, you'll find that they accelerate, creating even more opportunities.

This is the secret of synchrodestiny. All the ideas presented here are the ruling principles of the universe. If you make them the guideposts of your own life, you live the life of your dreams. Understanding that these principles are not just abstractions, that actually they are operating in everything we do, is really more than just awareness: It's really a kind of celebration. When you have mastered sychrodestiny, when you have learned to synchronize your life with the universe itself, you are celebrating the cosmic dance." -- from page 244 in Deepak Chopra's book, "The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence":

Note: This is a companion blog to collect longer excerpts from books that are cited in my main blog, Crossroads Dispatches, by Evelyn Rodriguez.

This is Burning Man, by Brian Doherty

Some notes taken from a book about that experiment in a self-organizing culture and ephemeral city-springing, This is Burning Man, by Brian Doherty. And the subtitle is:

page 272
What I'm picking up from Larry's new dispensation [more anti-consumerist and political activism... BM used to be apolitical event] struck me as antithetical to what I originally found interesting about Burning Man--that it offered a seeking and celebration of creative expression and liberated experience as a key to brain change and a means to search for what one might call the sacred. There are times, though, when Larry and I are feeling the same things. "We are beings, created things," Larry tells me. "We're the products of genetic mutation, and we're infinitely variable. The world presents itself to us as an artifact with slots to fill. But everyone's gifts are unique and not necessarily apparent to the [people themselves] unless some circumstance calls them forth. The whole story of my progress," he surmises, "might seem blind and hapless. But there was from the beginning a sense of something real in me and the idea that it had to have a home out there somewhere. Intuitively, blindly, as chance allowed, I moved in that direction even if it didn't make any sense by the world's standards. The human world is like a flowery meadow, and the individual is like a weed--each one different. A wed is simply an unwanted plant. It's a human category. There's no such plant as a weed. But the human world is more and more a monoculture. Farmer Jones wants corn and everything else is a weed, and if you can't get with the corn program, Buster, then get your thistle ass out of here! That's the problem everyone faces."

As he looks around at Burning Man, Larry sees lots of weeds essaying things with no apparent practical purpose. "It's weeds, but it's their weeds. Who knows what that leads to? Maybe nothing. But unless people are given that opportunity they will never find out. If their judgments are always governed by the world's standards, they might never find that one thing they are brilliant at, that they were born to do, and that's the greatest tragedy of all--the quiet desperation Thoreau wrote of. That just means that they never discovered what they were meant to do with the transcendent faith that they were meant to do that something. And that's been the moral of my life."

There's a lot I could argue with Larry about, but not that.

page 273
[What is it?] This book, I hope, provides some answers to that question. It's a place for human beings to live vividly free lives and have--as Larry used to recognize--experiences that are fundamental, unconditional, marvelous, and worth a thousand lectures on why one ought not to shop at Wal-Mart. [Kind of giving Larry a jab on that last bit.]

page 274
Interactive is the buzzword for Burning Man-style art, defined by BRAF's Jessica Bobier as "art that blurs the line between artists and audience, with collaboration in the creation or the experience of the piece. Art that requires the action of a participant to complete the piece. It represents the opportunity for people to come together and incites them to interact with one another, whether directly because they are needed to make something happen, or just something so exciting it makes people gather, brings them together." It fits in smoothly with the old Burning Man dispensation: art that creates community, art that gives you an opportunity to have an experience other than spectating.

page 282
It didn't start out as an art festival. It didn't really start as anything but an act and an excuse to gather. "What is art, you know?" muses Michael Michael on the meaning of this train he's riding. "Why art at Burning Man? What is this art thing? There's something much larger here. Art is a vehicle, a symptom of something bigger occurring. It's spreading beyond the desert, beyond the playa. It's a way of being, of thinking, to change a person: That's the real story, the real thing that's happening."

The change--that knowledge within that you no longer have to be and think and act as you previously been and thought and acted if you don't wish to--is a mystery, and Burning Man has no monopoly on the technology of generating it. It can come in an instant like a thief in the night, like Christ, or after years of difficult discipline, like those spent with a yogi master, but what's important is that it can happen and that the technologies of change exist and Burning Man is very, very good at reminding people of that.

page 280
Chris Radcliffe: "You don't need to go to Puerto Vallarta and lay on the beach and eat fish and drink frozen daiquiris and read Jacqueline Susann novels. You can have a primary experience of existence instead of something processed and fed back to you. Someone once said to me, if you're being entertained, you're not having any fun. And that's perfectly right. What we were doing was a very primary thing."

The main blog is at Crossroads Dispatches; this is accompaniment blog for longer excerpts cited there.

I've come to the realization that we have to discover the shaman within. - Alberto Villoldo

Another excerpt from Alberto Villoldo's book imparting the knowledge he gained through Inka shamans and his own direct experiences in Shaman, Healer, Sage. This one about the transpersonal awakening (typically comes from a collapse of the conceptual separate identity, and can be facilitated through mental queries like, Who am I?, What am I?, Am I?, et all) and its potential "personal' consequences.

He explains a pretty common ego trick which has us worshippinng the exoticism of the Other as the self-realized--the whole "not me, I'm not worthy" routine--and plan elaborate excursions to South America or to drool over an African shaman dressed in his native garb in your local cellphone shop--and I cite two examples from folks I know, and totally be oblivious to the ordinariness of It, and its innate in-dwelling in yourself. Seeing it only out there (and in specific steoreotypical disguises) keeps you from knowing and being It yourself and seeing It everywhere anytime. Anyhow, without further ado, Alberto's words:

"I've come to the realization that we have to discover the shaman within. I teach my students that no amount of traveling with the Indians will bring you to your own wisdom and power. I've found that it frequently achieves exactly the opposite, distracting us from a true encounter with Spirit. The shaman is a self-realized person. She discovers the ways of Spirit through her inner awakening. Antonio would remind me that the Buddha was not a Buddhist, and that Christ was not a Christian. One sat under the banyan tree until he gained illumination. The other went to the desert for forty days. In the sixth chakra [pineal gland, third eye] we experience our own awakening. We shed the ponchos, the robes, the rattles and feathers, and all other exterior markings.

An awakened third eye allows the shaman to know who he is. It gives him knowledge of the past and the future and allows him to envision alternative destinies. Some legends report that those who awaken this chakra can even attain physical immortality. They no longer age or succumb to disease, but rather are able to maintain their youthful vitality and strength. All the desires of one with an awakened third eye come true, and if a number of healers hold the same vision, it comes true for the planet. Native religions have long practiced this tradition. Elders of the Hopi and a similar council of Inka medicine men and women sit in meditation envisioning the kind of world that hey want their great-grandchildren to inherit." - pages 98-99, Shaman, Healer, Sage by Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D.

Is there a difference between reality and imagination? - Doña Laura via Alberto Villoldo

I loved this excerpt about the fiery shamaness Doña Laura in Alberto Villoldo's book, Shaman, Healer, Sage. I know it seems a tad violent, yet its also a humbling lesson in being cautious when demanding tangible proof of a sage or the Universe itself. Go find out for yourself rather than cast aspersions of doubt on those with first-hand knowledge. The book details Villoldo's training with the highly-trained Inka healers whom work well beyond the physical plane at the level of Infinity and the luminous energy field.

"Whereas most shamans could travel in the shape of a spirit eagle or jaguar in dreams, Laura could do it while awake, in broad daylight. She could merge with a condor and fly the giant bird according to her will, diving into ravines and flying miles above the ground, contemplating the landscape below. Once, at the base of Mt. Ausangate, she was challenged by one of her students, a short, pudgy Indian fellow named Mariano who had a great sense of huor and a knack for gathering medicinal plants but who managed to do most everything else wrong. "How do I know you are really inside the body of the condor and not imagining it?"he asked. I was a dozen feet away, at our camp with Don Antonio. The air suddenly became electric, and I saw a faint smile cross Antonio's face. We all knew better than to challenge the old woman, and all of us were waiting intently for her response.

"Is there a difference between reality and imagination?" she answered in a gentle tone. We looked disappointedly at each other.

It was getting close to dusk, and a half dozen of us set out to collect brush and masto, the dried llama droppings that are used for fuel so high in the mountains. Half an hour later we were all back at camp except Mariano. Most of Laura's students were women, and they had given the two male apprentices women's names, which they used when they were not around. "Where is Maria?" they taunted playfully. "Maybe she has gotten lost," one snickered.

I could tell that Antonio was getting worried. It was wintertime on the second highest mountain in South America. In a half hour the temperature would fall below freezing. He motioned to me and another man to go search for him. As we were setting out we noticed Mariano staggering toward camp. His face was bloodied, and he was barely able to stand. I carried a first-aid kit, which I kept stowed at the bottom of my bag, for situations like these. My mentor [Don Antonio] did not life to use Western medicines, but at that altitude no medicinal plants grew. We were so far about the tree line that no plants of any kind were to be seen. We were surround by barren, icy landscape punctuated by patches of bare rock. We brought Mariano into our tent and saw that the back of his jacket had been slashed; the white filler was stained red with blood. The gash had gone through his clothing and torn his skin, leaving three deep gouges on his back, like those made by the talons of an animal. We asked Mariano to tell us what happened, but all he would do was shake his head and say that he had fallenn and cut his face on the ice. Later that night we overheard him apologizing to Doña Laura. It seemed a giant condor had swooped down from the sky and tried to carry him away. Condors have been know[n] to abduct a fully grown sheep, fly several hundred feet into the air with the animal in their clutches, and drop it to its death on the rocks.

Over the years Dona Laura and I became friends. One day she told me that the secret of shape-shifting was to realize that you were no different from anything else in the universe, no better and no worse. Once you understood in your cells that you were exactly the same as everything else, no more important than an insect, no less important than the Sun, you could change into any shape you wanted, whether a condor or a tree. You could even become invisible to others. She explained that the shaman had to master the art of invisibility in order not to call attention to herself. Antonio had mastered this. He was invisible to the Catholic Church [unbelievably still has an office of Inquisition in Peru]. No one knew who he was, so he was free to change the world. "You can accomplish anything," she once told me, "as long as you are willing to let others take credit for it." -- pages 36-37, Alberto Villoldo, Shaman, Healer, Sage

This blog is an accompaniment to the main blog at Crossroads Dispatches by Evelyn Rodriguez.

The real reality is behind the curtain. - Rumi

I adore this example of the unfolding nature of "destiny" and chance by Deepak Chopra taken from his own life story:

"When I was finishing my medical training, I knew that my interest was in neuro-endocrinology, the study of how brain chemicals work. Even then, I could see that this was a place where science and consciousness met, and I wanted to explore it. I applied for a fellowship to train with one of the world's most prominent endocrinologists. This highly respected scientist was doing Nobel Prize-worthy work, and I was eager for the opportunity to learn from him. Out of thousands of applicants, I was one of the six selected to work with him that year. Shortly after I started, I realized that his laboratory was more about ego gratification than about real science. We technicians were treated like machines, expected to mass-produce publishable research papers. It was tedious and unsatisfying. And it was terribly disillusioning to work with someone so famous, so respected and still mange to feel as unhappy as I did. I had taken the position with such idealism and I found myself doing nothing but injecting rats with chemicals all day long.

Every morning I scanned the Boston Globe newspaper want ads, aware of my disappointment, but thinking that this path I was on was the only way to go. I remember reading a little advertisement for a position in a local hospital emergency room. In fact, every day when I opened the newspaper, I would see that little ad. Even if I was only flipping through the paper quickly, it would fall open to that same page with that same ad. I would look at it and then push it out of my mind. Deep inside, I could imagine myself working in the emergency room and actually helping people, instead of injecting chemicals into rats, but my dream had been to land this fellowship with the renowned endocrinologist.

One day that endocrinologist addressed me in a cruel and demeaning manner. We argued, and I walked away to the lounge to calm myself down. On the table was the the Boston Globe newspaper opened to the page with the little want ad--that same ad that I had ignored for weeks. The coincidence was too powerful to ignore. Everything finally clicked into place. I knew I was in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. I was fed up with the routine, with the ego of that endocrinologist, with the rats, with the feeling that I was not doing what was in my heart to do. I walked back into his office and quit. He followed me out into the parking lot, screaming at the top of his lungs that my career was ruined, that he would see to it that no one would ever hire me.

With his voice still ringing in my ears,I drove directly to that little emergency room, applied for the position, and started work that very day. For the first time, I got to treat and help people who were really suffering. For the first time in a long time, I was happy. The Boston Globe ad had been beckoning me for weeks, but I had ignored it. Finally I noticed the coincidence and I was able to change my destiny. Even though the laboratory work seemed to be the very thing I had been striving for all my life, paying attention to this coincidence allowed me to break my habitual patterns. It was a message just for me, my life's personal road flare. Everything I had done up to that point was simply preparation for that change. Some people thought the endocrinology fellowship itself was a mistake. But if I hadn't gotten the fellowship, I might not have been in Boston. And if I wasn't working in the endocrinologist's lab, I might not have seen the ad and I might never have felt my heart's true calling. Endless details had to fall into place in order for this part of my life to play out the way it has.

According to a poem by Rumi, one of my favorite poets and philosophers, "This is not the real reality. The real reality is behind the curtain. In truth, we are not here. This is our shadow." What we experience as everyday reality is merely a shadow play. Behind the curtain there is a soul, living and dynamic and immortal, beyond the reach of space and time. By acting from that level, we can consciously influence our destiny. This happens through the synchronization of seemingly acausal relationships to mold a destiny--hence, synchrodestiny. In synchrodestiny, we consciously participate in the creation of our lives by understanding the world that is beyond our senses, the world of the soul." -- pages 126-129 Deepak Chopra, The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire

This blog is accompaniment (mostly excerpts from books) to the main blog, Crossroads Dispatches, by Evelyn Rodriguez.

the universal nonlocal part of the soul in not touched by our actions - deepak chopra

This excerpt, and Deepak Chopra's book on synchronicity and destiny in general, resonated as I often struggle to explain the unseen "virtual domain" (as Deepak calls it) that is universal, nonlocal Mind.

"The universal nonlocal part of the soul is not touched by our actions, but is connected to a spirit that is pure and unchanging. In fact, the definition of enlightenment is "the recognition that I am an infinite being seeing and seen from, observing and observed from, a particular and localized point of view." Whatever else we are, no matter how much of a mess we may have made of our lives, it is always possible to tap into the part of the soul that is universal, the infinite field of pure potential, and change the course of our destiny. That is synchrodestiny. . . .

When I decide to wiggle my toes, or buy a birthday present for my wife, or drink a cup of coffee, or write this book, it all starts with intention. This intention always arises in the nonlocal or universal mind, but it localizes through the individual mind. And having localized, it becomes physical reality.

In fact, physical reality would not exist were it not for intent. Intent activates nonlocal, synchronized correlation in the brain. Whenever there is cognition or perception of physical reality, the brain's disparate regions show a "phase and frequency locking in" of the firing patterns of individual neurons in different parts of the brain. This is nonlocal synchronization around a frequency of forty hertz (forty cycles per second). This synchronization, also called binding, is a requirement for cognition. Without it you would not see a person as a person, a house as a house, a tree as a tree, or a face in a photograph as a face. You might just observe dots of black and white, scattered lines, patches of light and dark. In fact, the objects of your perception register only as on-off electromagnetic signals in your brain. Synchronization organized by intent converts dots and spots, scattered lines, electrical discharges, patterns of light and darkness, into a wholeness, a gestalt that creates a picture of the world as a subjective experience. The world does not exist as pictures, but only as these patches of on-off impulses, these dots and spots, these digital codes of seemingly random electrical firings. Synchronization through intent organizes them into an experience in the brain--a sound, a texture, a form, a taste, and a smell. You as nonlocal intelligence "label" that experience and suddenly there is the creation of a material object in subjective consciousness.

The world is like a Rorschach blot that we convert into a world of material objects through synchronization orchestrated by intent. The world before it is observed and the nervous system before the desire or intent to observe something both exists as a dynamic (constantly changing), nonlinear chaotic field of activities in a state of non-equilibrium (unstable activity). Intent synchronistically organizes these highly variable, seemingly chaotic and unrelated activities in a nonlocal universe into a highly ordering, self-organizing, dynamic system that manifests simultaneously as an observed world and a nervous system through which that world is being observed. The intent itself does not arise in the nervous system, although it is orchestrated through the nervous system. However, intent is responsible for more than cognition and perception. All learning, remembering, reasoning, drawing of inferences, and motor activity are preceded by intent. Intent is the very basis of [physical] creation." -- page 79, pages 94-95, Deepak Chopra, The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence