To Be or Not to Be...

There is the infinite dance of cosmic being, and within it, but largely unaware of its undifferentiated participation in the totality of existence, there is the personal human mind. This mind is insensitive to life as a whole because it is filled to the brim by the particular images and ideas that determine its sense of separate existence and generate the chaotic social reality created by its necessarily conflicted social relations. 

Hidden beneath the isolated superficiality of the experience-based personal psyche —that is, at the very core of mind itself—  awareness and the wholeness of being exist without distinction. However, at the superficial level of mind conditioned by personal and tribal experience and sustained by fear and desire, distinction is all there is. Distinction is, in fact, the life and essence of the self that deems itself separate and unique. Who would any one of us be be without the all-too common distinction between “you” and “me”; between “us” and “them”; between “me” and “myself"; and, more generally, between “me” and “not-me”? 

Life, the ever shifting movement of existence as a whole, is all-inclusive and therefore not “a thing” or a container of things. But personal self in order to exist and endure in its own self-reflective eyes ,  must be something, some “one”, somebody. It must also endlessly strive to be recognized by others as such within its particular cultural enclosure. 

The personal self is all about gradually evolving identity and the defense and projection of that identity, whereas life is  innocent of separation, and therefore anonymous. Which is why the separate and self-projecting self can never feel secure and at peace, much less survive a serious inquiry into itself and the truth of its participation in life.

To Wake Up to the Anonymous Self...

No one would deny being alive, but very few are content with just that. For most of us, to be alive is to be defined by a particular story held by memory and sustained by self-centered thought. We generally see ourselves as particular entities living a relatively autonomous and enduring separate existence, even though the stream of life as a whole is nothing if not integrated movement, change, death, and regeneration. Yes, we admit that things change, that the circumstances and even the attributes of the self evolve and change, but we are generally convinced that the “I” remains fundamentally separate and unchanged through time. "I" am who I was, who I am right now, and what I will become in the future.

Regardless of how common this belief in personal identity and autonomy is, if closely observed it becomes clear that there is something deeply irrational about an on-going private life that is largely unrelated to the whole of life. In our proud personas and all-important social roles, the infinite actuality of life has been reduced to particular images and ideas, memories and desires, and that encapsulation is clearly insane. No one needs further proof of this insanity than what an unbiased look at the chaos of the world at large reveals, a world that is but the outpicturing of the egotism, fear, and conflict in the lives and relations of seven billion human beings. Defined, isolated, and ordered around as we are by the cultural imperatives of particular tribes and our own conflicting memories and desires, we generate and sustain the insecurity, ambition, and violence that we suffer and makes others suffer. 

In relinquishing full participation in life, we have condemned ourselves to the impossible enterprise of fulfilling the petty ambitions of self, clan, and tribe. Despite undeniable scientific and technical development and endless sequential attempts to reform our institutions and improve ourselves morally and intellectually, we remain incapable of freeing ourselves from the same social and psychological problems human beings have already suffered for millennia. The persistence of this cruel primitivism clearly resides in the alienated and fragmented quality of the human mind. Why should all our efforts to improve the quality of human life ultimately fail, if not because they leave untouched the deep root from which they spring? This being so, our only intelligent and caring option is to confront in ourselves the general fact of a mind conditioned and isolated by experience, and in this mind, the root of all that ails humanity. We need to see that we are made dull and insensitive by the imprint in our minds of the entire journey of the species through time, as well as by the intrinsic limitation of our biographical experience and learning.

Put differently, the insecurity and grief produced by the alienation of the whole species from life, has generated over time countless different responses seeking even a small measure of security and certainty. These responses have at every point in time splintered the species by assuming particular personal and cultural identities. Separate and equally fearful and ambitious individuals organized in different and competing societies, groups, and institutions, cannot but produce strife and sorrow, and this mode of existence cannot be significantly improved, let alone transcended -ever- through superficial modifications that leave its fundamental alienation and divisiveness intact.
The impotence of our actions in the past, in the present, and in a future conceived on the bases of previous actions and failures, clearly indicates the absolute necessity of an irreversible dissolution of the artificial boundaries of self and tribe that separate us from one another and alienates the species as a whole from life. There is no other solution. All other attempts to change are just a projection of the same nightmarish play of sectarian dogmatism and personal egotism we have been enacting over and over since we first appeared on the face of the Earth and started thinking we were original and very smart.

To wake up from the nightmare of self-centered thought is to suddenly realize that the only sane and sensitive human being is one who is not identified with any particular ideology, and lives free of association with any given group or institution. To survive, he or she may perform a given function related to the satisfaction of the fundamental needs of other individuals, but is in no way psychologically identified with this function. In a mind free of the strictures of self and tribe, the doing is not the being. The being is only life, and life is one and anonymous, it has no place or need for particular identity.

Cosmic Being

Home Green Home

Here is a picture of the installation that we did at Home Green Home, in Ithaca, on Gallery Night.  The little pieces of paper have environmental quotes on them.  I've listed them for you below. 

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.                                                            
          Kurt Vonnegut


A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.
                                    Beverly Sills

A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.
                                            E. O. Wilson


For 200 years we’ve been conquering Nature.  Now we’re beating it to death. 

                   Tom McMillan


There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed. 
                     Gandhi


Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow. 
                         Edwin Way Teale


Soon silence will have passed into legend.  Man has turned his back on silence.  Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.  His anxiety subsides.  His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.                                                                     Jean Arp


How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life? 
                                                       Charles A. Lindbergh


It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature.                            
 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854 

     
We’re finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age.  If the projections are right, it’s going to be a big one:  the ecological collapse of the planet.
                                                                    Jeremy Rifkin


Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given.  But up to now he hasn’t been a creator, only a destroyer.  Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life’s become extinct, the climate’s ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day. 
                                                 Anton Chekhov


A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest 
- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in its beauty. 
                                       Albert Eintein


Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo:  not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences. 
                                   Lewis Mumford


It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. 
                              Ansel Adams


To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief.  Or stupid.  A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today.  Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.
 
                               Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams


All in favor of conserving gasoline, please raise your right foot.             
                                                      Author Unknown


As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us:  “With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas,” or, “They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.”
                                             U Thant


We must not be forced to explore the universe in search of a new home because we have made the Earth inhospitable, even uninhabitable.  For if we do not solve the environmental and related social problems that beset us on Earth - pollution, toxic contamination, resource depletion, prejudice, poverty, hunger - those problems will surely accompany us to other worlds. 

    Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz, Biosphere 2000

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain’s majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
                                                                         George Carlin


There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. 
     
             Marshall McLuhan


At every turn, when humanity is asked the question, 'Do you want temporary economic gain or long-term environmental loss, which one do you prefer,' we invariably choose the money.
                                Ethan Hawke



The old Lakota was wise.  He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. 
                              Chief Luther Standing Bear

Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature.  We’re not the brain, we are a cancer on nature. 
                                       Dave Foreman


I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn. 
                 Author Unknown


Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.                                                        John Clapham

 

The Face of the Mystery

There Is No Separation...

Knowledge and belief describe the boundaries and constitute the contents and projections of the self. And the groups and institutions from which the self derives much of its identity and sense of destiny, also depend for their own on particular bodies of knowledge and belief. None of this fragmentary psychological and cultural content is related to the truth which is one, total, actual, and therefore not reducible to the knowledge of one presuming to stand outside of it. In other words, the very presence and outreach of the tribal and personal self is the negation of truth.

For one who is only interested in the possibility of finding the truth, there is then only one question then: Can individual instances of a general phenomenon of mental conditioning by previous experience and knowledge (personal memory and cultural tradition), revert to the source, the original truth? Can the human being give way to life itself?

It is of utmost importance to realize that this possible transit from the mental reality created by experience and preinformed desire to what is largely independent from such reality, cannot possibly occur in time. So “transit” is not an adequate term for what we are trying to convey here. We are not asking whether the self can move from one state of consciousness to a presumably better one guided by its own or somebody else's prescription. We are asking rather whether the ongoing accumulation and projection of experience that constitutes the self can come to an end.

No one can “know” the truth because it is unrelated to the trappings of the personal self: experience, knowledge, and desire. But complete and direct perception of the actual nature of the self and of the suffering it creates with its fragmentary, conflictive, and enduring mental content, is already on the threshold of truth because such insight cannot but obliterate the self. 

Drawing by Kim Schrag

Who Are We?

If put to the test kindly, who would be able to prove that she or he is perfectly unique and, therefore, existing independently from everything else? Who could prove that personal existence is not an integral part of the restless movement of existence as a whole? And who would dare argue that personal consciousness is conceivable outside of its peculiar cultural moorings, or the unquiet particular brain something apart from the interpenetrating and rather impersonal material reality of the Universe?
Are we just multiple sets of insubstantial personal and tribal memories driven by the same foolish desire for exclusive self-realization and, therefore, ultimately condemned to destroy ourselves? Or is it the case that, being nothing in ourselves personally, together we constitute the point of awareness (or one of the points of awareness) of the unthinkably complex mental and material reality of the cosmos and, beyond even that, the very timeless and formless ground from which all form comes into being and into which all form goes to die? 

The Gateway to All Understanding...

The Simple Mind...

"That which is eternal cannot be sought after; the mind cannot acquire it. It comes into being when the mind is quiet, and the mind can be quiet only when it is simple, when it is no longer storing up, condemning, judging, weighing. It is only the simple mind that can understand the real, not the mind that is full of words, knowledge, information. The mind that analyses, calculates, is not a simple mind..."       Jiddhu Krishnamurti

THE TORRENT OF COSMIC LIFE...

Everything changes with the realization that one belongs primarily to life and only secondarily to culture and society. Life is all there, and so it is incorrect to think that one has a life, or that life is in one. Cultural formulations, societal structures and personal identities are trenches and parapets separating us from life and from each other in exchange for a false sense of security in particular identity and social status.

All our mental and social problems are the result of this psychological and tribal alienation, so it is naïve to expect their resolution from new or revamped forms of personal change and institutional reform that leave intact our collective separation from life. It is the very experience and aspirations of different social groups and individuals, that blind humanity as a whole to the fact of its seamless integration with the whole movement of life. 
We generally refuse to see the extent to which our organismic reality is deeply enmeshed in the boundless torrent of cosmic life, and are frightened to death by the loss of personal identity implied in yielding to the undifferentiated embrace of the totality. This wrongheaded denial of our fundamental nature preserves the conflicted segmentation of human society, not just through tradition and habit, but by cruelly burdening every newborn child with the same illusory sense of physical and mental separation. Thus conditioned, we take life to be a battle in which everyone is compelled to defend and fulfill his personal identity by following the dictates of particular desires and fears. To simply realize the falseness of this sense of life, does change everything. Nothing else does.

Inside Itself

Self-Centered

Endlessly revolving,

appropriating everything

that comes into its sphere

as identity.

Caught in its own cage,

enough openings to relate,

not enough to escape

solitary confinement.

Accumulation

The psychological self is made of images,

ideas, and memories of:

past relationships 

wife, mother, daughter, friend, enemy,

lover, boss, teacher, pets 

places

countries, states, towns, neighborhoods

possessions

houses, mortgages, clothing, cars

titles and degrees

Professor, Doctor, BFA, MFA

professions

teacher, architect, accountant

ideology

religious and political 

accomplishments and failures,

desires and plans,

addictions and pleasures. 

Each new layer of attachment adds to the sense that I exist, I have continuity,

I am related, I am important in relation to what I associate with and disassociate from.

Falling Away


We have all seen this phenomenon,
a pile of papers, 
books or blocks, 
stacked so high
that the structure is no longer balanced and the whole pile starts to fall down.


Imagine if these layers were
assumptions and expectations,
world views,
accumulated stories of who,
what, when and where.


If the layers are light,
they might just float away. 
No chasing,
no picking up,
no worrying about where they might go, 
just an unexpected opportunity  
to dismantle and be free
of the accumulation.

Inside Itself I


A sacred liveliness animates the parts within the whole.
There is no division between what is perceived to be the interior and the exterior form.
Inside Itself expresses the love and interconnectedness of the totality.

Inside Itself II

An element existing within something else, while separate and particular,
is still dependent for its existence on the larger form.


The organs of the body can be seen separately with specific and highly specialized functions, 
but it would be absurd to say that they exist independently from the body. 


A flock of birds, a school of fish, and a swarm of bees all move together
as if they were a single organism guided by the same mind, and yet the individuals
in each group are vitally connected to the environment in which they live.  


If you imagine the earth, do you just see the rocky sphere of the planet, 
or do you include the sky and clouds, the oceans, rivers and glaciers, 
the soil, the animals and plants? Does Earth end at the biosphere?
Could we exist without the sun, the moon, the stars, the universe?


As a human being, do we exist separately from the natural environment or the social connections
which sustain us?  Physically and psychologically, where do we begin and end?







































                              

Who's Looking?


Who is the one who is looking?
Can I keep stepping back while asking the question until it is apparent 
that there is no individual apart from Life? 

Is it not Life that is the observer all of the time,
even when the conditioning of thought creates a lens of distortion?

Imagine what would happen if that lens could be taken off completely. 
What would Life see?  

Would there be a new clarity, a new intensity, 
an awareness of relationship that we are currently missing?

The Great Unfolding

We are product,
and part, 
and one with
the continuously generating source.  


Our understanding of life continues 
to unfold, with a greater awareness 
of the unity of the whole.


This unity denies our individuality, our isolation,
our separation.


We are able to move beyond both the despair of self-centered withdrawal 
and the desire for personal success.                                                              

 





































There Is No Separation


As I walk the path from the house to the garden, I can see the bright yellow 
Rudbeckia blossoms moving with the wind. The birdhouse that protected a chickadee
and her young this spring, is now empty, except for a spider that is busy making its own
webbed nest. As I pass through the gate and into the garden, I stop to look at the squirrels
chasing each other in spirals down the trunk of one of the many Black Walnut trees surrounding 
this small garden. The air is full of the sounds of crows, woodpeckers, small song birds,
crickets and cicadas. The sun comes and goes under the clouds. I move through the garden 
in an almost trance-like state, not in any hurry, nor with any real purpose, except to see what
is there. It occurs to me that nothing in this garden is aware of its own beauty. The flowers
don't know their power of attraction, they just attract. Each flower comes from a seed in 
the ground, unfolds its beauty, petal by petal, attracts and is pollinated by bees and wasps, 
and eventually drops the seed that it has created so that the next part of the plant cycle will 
continue. Are we, as human beings any different from this cycle of life? While we may get
caught up in our own vanity and drive for individual identity, are we not carried through
each stage of life, our body growing, changing, transforming, without our control or initiative.
Isn't it true that just like the plants, we must have the sun, water, minerals from the earth, air,
warmth, and the interaction between us and other beings, in order to fully develop and survive? 
Where are the boundaries between the body and nature? Where are the boundaries between
the human being and Life?
There is no separation.

This exhibit is currently showing at the Community Arts Partnership, ArtSpace, in Center Ithaca, on the Ithaca Commons, until December 22.  Books with the images and texts are for sale ($35) and will help us in covering some of the costs of the exhibit. E-mail schragk@gmail if you are interested.

Update:  I have added a link at the bottom of the blog page, so that you can order the Inside Itself catalog directly from Lulu books.  If you would still rather order the book from us, send us an email. schragk@gmail.com

News from the world not created by thought...

Let it Be Here and Now

There is No Separation

As I walk the path from the house to the garden, I can see the bright yellow Rudbeckia blossoms moving with the wind. The birdhouse that protected a chickadee and her young this spring, is now empty, except for a spider that is busy making its own webbed nest. As I pass through the gate and into the garden, I stop to look at the squirrels chasing each other in spirals down the trunk of one of the many Black Walnut trees surrounding this small garden. The air is full of the sounds of crows, woodpeckers, small song birds, crickets and cicadas. The sun comes and goes under the clouds. I move through the garden in an almost trance-like state, not in any hurry, nor with any real purpose, except to see what is there. It occurs to me that nothing in this garden is aware of its own beauty. The flowers don't know their power of attraction, they just attract. Each flower comes from a seed in the ground, unfolds its beauty, petal by petal, attracts and is pollinated by bees and wasps, and eventually drops the seed that it has created so that the next part of the plant cycle will continue. Are we, as human beings any different from this cycle of life? While we may get caught up in our own vanity and drive for individual identity, are we not carried through each stage of life, our body growing, changing, transforming, without our control or initiative. Isn't it true that just like the plants, we must have the sun, water, minerals from the earth, air, warmth, and the interaction between us and other beings, in order to fully develop and survive? Where are the boundaries between the body and nature? Where are the boundaries between the human being and Life? There is no separation.

My existence or yours...

There is Thought...

Life Itself

To Be or Not to Be...

There is the infinite dance of cosmic being, and within it, but largely unaware of its undifferentiated participation in the totality of existence, there is the personal human mind. This mind is insensitive to life as a whole because it is filled to the brim by the particular images and ideas that determine its sense of separate existence and generate the chaotic social reality created by its necessarily conflicted social relations. 

Hidden beneath the isolated superficiality of the experience-based personal psyche —that is, at the very core of mind itself—  awareness and the wholeness of being exist without distinction. However, at the superficial level of mind conditioned by personal and tribal experience and sustained by fear and desire, distinction is all there is. Distinction is, in fact, the life and essence of the self that deems itself separate and unique. Who would any one of us be be without the all-too common distinction between “you” and “me”; between “us” and “them”; between “me” and “myself"; and, more generally, between “me” and “not-me”? 

Life, the ever shifting movement of existence as a whole, is all-inclusive and therefore not “a thing” or a container of things. But personal self in order to exist and endure in its own self-reflective eyes ,  must be something, some “one”, somebody. It must also endlessly strive to be recognized by others as such within its particular cultural enclosure. 

The personal self is all about gradually evolving identity and the defense and projection of that identity, whereas life is  innocent of separation, and therefore anonymous. Which is why the separate and self-projecting self can never feel secure and at peace, much less survive a serious inquiry into itself and the truth of its participation in life.












Welcome to the new blog by Fernando Llosa and Kim Schrag.