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I felt my horse, Valkyrie, start to spook beneath me.  I wasn’t surprised.  I couldn’t see or hear anything that might be frightening her, but she has always been a little unpredictable.  I smiled and looked over at Rebecca, who was next to me riding Rajah .  Rajah is a tall, powerful Shire, renowned for his cool and unshakable disposition.

“Pretty nice to be on a totally reliable horse, isn’t it?” I asked her.  And in that moment Valkyrie burst into a frenzy of bucking.  As I tried to get control of my horse, I heard the pounding of hooves behind me and a sudden cry of pain.  For whatever reason, Rajah had panicked and thrown Rebecca from the saddle.

I swung down and went to where she lay under a fence.  Calm as always, she was already doing a self-assessment, checking to see if she had sensation in her toes.  But it was obvious that she was badly injured.

We spent five days together in the hospital after the x-rays showed that she had broken her pelvis in two places.  On day six we came home, but she was restricted to a wheelchair.  It’s been thirteen days since her injury, and now she’s able to move slowly with the aid of a walker.  For a professional bellydancer who taught Zumba and dance three days a week, and did sprints and weight-lifting workouts on her days off, it’s quite a change to be unable to get out of bed without assistance.

We’re lucky in that she’ll make a full recovery– it’s just a matter of time.  But as we took her in to the hospital the day of her injury, there were a lot of unknowns.  The injuries might have been much more severe, changing her physical abilities forever.

Hidden Gifts

Now, Rebecca says that her accident was the best thing that could have happened to her.  The gifts that emerged from the event have been tremendous.  Perhaps most evident has been the community of family and friends we’re surrounded with.  From people bringing food, to people giving money to help with medical expenses, to people giving that most precious gift of all – their time and company – Rebecca has had tremendous love and energy sent her way.  But there have been other, less tangible gifts as well.

The Benefits of Tragedy

Sensibly, we all do our best to avoid serious injury.  It’s no fun to spend days or weeks in a hospital, and even less to experience injuries that give us chronic or permanent pain and disability.  Strangely, however, it’s often serious injury, illness, or death that wake us up to the fact that our lives have been caught in a rut.  It’s all too easy to gloss through life, never stopping to take stock of what you have.  For many of us, our focus is so strongly on the future that we completely neglect the present moment.

To those of you who read this site regularly, that statement might seem very basic and obvious.  But it’s one of those things we often hear and rarely understand.  Indeed, hearing it too often can dilute the powerful lesson it has to teach.

Suffering a tragedy of any kind gives us moment to pause.  The all-important things of life, such as work and deadlines and duties, are suddenly seen as minor, and the oft-neglected things of life – human relationships and attending to our present moment – come to the forefront.

Here are two ways to discover this for ourselves –

Let’s Get Injured

Sooner or later, most of us will get the chance to have this sort of experience forced upon us.  But it doesn’t take a tragedy to open us up to recognizing what we have.  It can be as simple as taking a few days off – not on vacation, but just around your own home and life.  The key?  The key is to do nothing during this period.  Avoid distraction so that you are able to pause and observe the process of Living.  Don’t watch TV or movies – just pay attention to the quiet rhythms of your life.  What you see might be quite delightful.     

Let’s Get Old

It can be especially interesting to talk to people who are near the ends of their lives.  Often, the hectic, aggressive energy has left them, and they’re content to sit on a porch and watch the birds, to talk to friends on the phone, or to experience memories.  This is why living forever (if we ever gained the technology) would be such a curse – it would probably mean that our hearts would beat interminably, but would never actually pulse with the dance of life.  It’s the gift of death that reminds us how important it is to live.

We can achieve ‘oldness’ if we simply realize that we’re all on the route to death, and that our day could be tomorrow.  Tomorrow might be the day we are diagnosed with terminal cancer, the day we get into a car accident, or the day that our heart clenches and stops.  We’d don’t like to think about this, but imagine how our lives would change if we were constantly aware of the imminence of our own death!  How we would Live!

A Heart-Felt Wish

The only reason this site is here is because of you.  It’s about you, and written for you.  My hope is that it might open the door to help you really relish the process of Living, to fully immerse yourself in the beauty, pain, joys, and sorrows which are Life.  There is something so beautiful in Living, and it’s all too easy to get distracted and let life slip by unnoticed.  My wish is that these words might urge you to dive into life with your eyes wide open.

I need to express a special thanks to Rebecca for her amazing spirit in the last thirteen days.  To have gone through such a radical shift and dance with it so gracefully has taught me much about the beauty of life and the human spirit.  I also want to thank the many people who have given of their love and support in so many ways.  Finally, I’d like to thank all of my dear readers, who waited so patiently during this period of inactivity on this site. 

P.S.  Rebecca says to give a special thanks to Rajah for changing her heart forever.

Ready to learn a big secret?  Humans use tools.  Yup.  Cars and cell phones and computers and shoes and pencils. 

What?  You knew that already?  But did you know the rest of the secret?  Here it is: 

Every tool we use changes us.

This is simple enough to understand, but its implications run very deep.  The secret is that we are following a doctrine of tool-use that we’ve never examined.  We’ve been taught that tools make our lives easier and better, but no one ever told us that whenever we adopt a tool, the tool changes us – often in fundamental ways.  In other words, each tool we adopt comes with both a benefit and a price.  We’re told about the benefits, but the price is usually ‘under our radar’.  The end effect is that we become products of our tool-using habits.  Like clay shaped by a potter’s hands, our tools shape our minds, bodies, and hearts.

Tools Using Us

Most of us wear shoes (can’t stand them, myself).  Not only is it culturally expected that we wear shoes, but we’re told that shoes protect our feet.  Of course, once we start wearing them, the soles of our feet become soft and weak, and the skin of our feet, always enclosed in a hot, moist environment, becomes prone to fungus and infection.  In fact, shoes affect our entire musculoskeletal system, since they alter the way in which our feet meet the ground and hence the way we walk and stand.  Did anyone tell us this before we started our shoe-wearing habit?  Of course not.  We were just told to wear shoes.

Consider the internet.  Today, if I have a question such as ‘When was the Great Wall of China built?’, I can have my answer in eight seconds by typing a few words into Google.  But not too long ago, I would have had to go to my bookshelf and take down an encyclopedia to find my answer.  If I didn’t have an encyclopedia, it would have meant a visit to the library or a phone call to a university.  This required much more effort on my part, but it also meant that I might meet more people (in the case of visiting the library or calling the university) or hone my reading skills (if I searched through an encyclopedia for the answer).

Do you drive a car?  How would your life be different if you walked or biked everywhere you went?

Every tool we use brings with it profound changes.  Consider how your cell phone has changed you.  Your use of a computer.  The clothing you wear.  Do you live in a house?  Use electricity?  How do these things alter ‘you’?

It becomes a remarkable educational experience if you stop in your day and notice what tools you are using in that very moment.  Then consider how those tools change your body or mind.  If you observe clearly enough, you may be shocked – it becomes obvious that we are not so much individuals as we are products of the tools we’ve adopted in our lives.  Consider how your body and mind would change if you were dumped, naked, on an abandoned tropical island.  Go ahead and imagine it for a moment.  A week after your arrival, would you be the ‘same person’ you are today?  Or would your body and mind go through some profound changes?

Language

Many tools are obvious.  But other tools seem so fundamental to us that we don’t even notice they are there.  Language is a great example.  For most of us, language-use is almost thoughtless – we just open our mouths and words flow out.  It seems necessary and natural to use language.  But do we know what affect it has on our minds?

Consider that the language we are using here is one of division.  The effect of any single word is to point out differences.  A word ‘defines’ not by creating unity, but by dividing the thing it references from the rest of the world.  The result?  Whenever we utter a word, we are conditioning our minds into a philosophy of division.  Consider how many times a day you talk (or read or write).  Did you know that every time you use language, you are actively conditioning your mind to focus on the divisions of the world?

This mind-set is called dualism, and though it gives us many wondrous benefits, it brings with it heaps of trouble.  The world, arguably, has no real divisions.  When we divide it up with our language, we get into the trouble of trying to make all these divisions fit back together.  When these divisions are conceptual instead of actual, it means that we begin living in a fantasy-world in our heads.

Noticing Living

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately . . .” said Thoreau.  How miraculous a deliberate life is!  When we are actively engaged in the process of living, life takes on a lucid simplicity that always amazes us with its beauty.  But when we fail to notice how the tools we adopt create constant changes within us, we become products of our own blindness and delusion.

The point here is not that tools are bad, nor that we should stop using them.  The point is simply that we benefit from using tools consciously — with an awareness of the way that any given tool affects our life as a whole.

All it takes is a commitment to slowing down and noticing.  Usually we are running on an ever-faster hamster-wheel, without any real knowledge of why we’re running.  What happens when we stop and look at our lives, and notice what’s going on? 

The results are enlightening.

One of the amazing parts about this world is that it is filled with innumerable things – and each of these ‘things’ is a direct path to enlightenment.  Indeed, we are surrounded by teachers, both inanimate and animate, each of which will be happy to show us ultimate reality.  They show us because when we look at any one ‘thing’, we are actually looking at our own delusion, and taking a really good look at the nature of our delusion will cause the delusion to dissolve.

So let’s look at the delusion head-on.  Let’s do it by observing one of these things around us.  Let’s look at our pinkie finger.

Lucid Wonder

If you’re one of the majority of people who have a pinkie finger, take a look at it.  Wiggle it around a little.  Notice its lines and curves.  Looks pretty normal, doesn’t it?  But keep looking for a while, maybe a minute or so.  If you do, you’ll begin to notice something odd.  The pinkie isn’t so normal.  In fact, it’s kind of weird.  It has little hairs growing out of it, and this thing called a ‘fingernail’ sort of stuck on the end, and it moves around in the most amazing way.  The longer you look, the odder your pinkie will begin to seem.  You might soon find yourself struck with a strange perception that your pinkie is just about the most peculiar thing you’ve ever seen in your life.

I call this feeling ‘lucid wonder’, because it is a sense of wonder that derives from a new and budding awareness of how the world really is.  You can experience this same strange sense if you stare at a word for a while – the letters begin to dissolve into bizarre squiggles and shapes.  The more you delve into this, the more you can begin to feel this sense of wonder hidden within all the ordinary things around you – the way clouds hang in the sky, the way that one human can  make sounds with its mouth and another human can get a meaningful message from those sounds, they way a seed can turn into a plant, or the way your eyes can skim across this page and turn these black marks into ideas and concepts.  Here is a post that deals with lucid wonder, though I wasn’t calling it that when I wrote it.

This lucid wonder is our first clue that maybe the world isn’t as ordinary as we thought.  Maybe there is something missing from our everyday idea of ‘how things are’.  Let’s ask our pinkie for a few more clues. 

Something’s Suspicious

Do you know what a pinkie is?  Of course you do!  Even a kindergarten student knows what a pinkie is!  But wait a minute.  Do we really?  If we take a look at our pinkie, we can see that it is attached to the rest of our body and that there isn’t a clear dividing line between ‘hand’ and ‘pinkie’.  Indeed, if we opened up our skin, things would only get more confusing.  Tendons, blood, and nerve endings all cross the boundary that we lay between ‘hand’ and ‘pinkie’, and our supposedly individual thing – the pinkie – couldn’t function without its intimate connection with the hand.  The more carefully we look, the more it becomes apparent that the idea of  ‘pinkie’ is only a convention.  Indeed, wherever we draw lines in the world, we are drawing these lines via language and idea – there is no actual line in nature that designates pinkie from hand.

Look around and play this game a little.  Where are the lines in the world?  We can pluck a leaf off a tree and say ‘this is a leaf and this is a tree’, but wait!  Is the stem a part of the leaf, or can we pluck that off too?  What about the veins?  What can we remove and still have a ‘leaf’?  We can do this with anything – a car is another great example.  Try it with a person.  It soon becomes clear that the lines we draw in the world are lines of convention – not lines of reality.

So far, the pinkie has introduced us to the strange sense of lucid wonder, and has showed us that the divisions we make in the world are not as clear as we once supposed.  But the pinkie has more to teach us.

Pinkie Dissolves the Self

Wiggle that pinkie around a little more.  Stop the  motion, then start it again.  Now consider – what initiated the pinkie motion?  At first we might think the answer is simple – we decided to move it, and it moved.  We can repeat the experiment.  We ask our pinkie to move, and it moves.  But now ask yourself how that decision was made.  Did you decide to decide to move your pinkie?  Or was the decision to move your pinkie initiated by nothing or nobody?  If you decided to decide, then who decided to decide to decide?  At some point, it appears that nothing or nobody made the initial decision.

But wait.  Maybe I decided for you.  After all, you wouldn’t have performed this experiment if you hadn’t been reading this.  So did I make the decision for you?  You read this, and then decided to try the experiment.  Which would mean that your ‘free will’ is really not so free – it is intimately connected with my actions.  If you insist that you really do have free will, and that you could have made the decision to move the pinkie or not to move the pinkie, then you’re stuck with the first problem — the problem of a never-ending series of decisions.

As you can see, things become a tangled mess.  Indeed, the whole idea of free will, which is one of the foundation blocks of our idea of ‘Self’, is called into question if we examine it too carefully.  Much easier to collapse into the feeling we’ve all been taught – that we know we can make free will decisions just as easily as we can decide to move our pinkie.  If we simply close our minds at that point, we’ll be safely encased in a comfortable, if unexamined, sense of Self.

On the other hand, if we look carefully at free will and at what makes our pinkie move, our ideas of free will, cause and effect, and linear time will start to tumble apart.  We’ll become true inquirers, instead of blind followers.

Watching Our Minds

If we observe carefully, we’ll see that in each of the pinkie’s lessons, our mind at first comes up with a pat and ready answer.  We know a pinkie is an ordinary thing, we know exactly what it is, and we know that we’re capable of moving it around however we wish.  After that, we begin to see that our pat and ready answers are not, perhaps, as rock-solid as we thought.  After that, we begin to ask questions, and we’ll soon discover that the questions don’t have answers that can be put into words.  This is when a true understanding begins to unfold.

Our pinkie, and all the other objects around us, work in concert to create Maya – a mesmerizing illusion that we all take for reality.  As long as we continue to cultivate our mind’s tendency to settle for pat and ready answers, Maya will continue to dazzle us, and we will weep and laugh and stress and live and die, all in her hypnotic embrace.  There is nothing wrong with this – it is the beautiful and terrible dance we are all dancing, and it is pure in and of itself.  However, there is way to dance without being lost in the delusion.  We don’t lose the ability to dance – we just gain the ability to recognize that we are dancing.  In this way we come full circle, and discover that the convention and delusion that we were working so hard to overcome is just as much a part of ‘reality’ as anything else.  This is our final awakening – coming to see that all of our ideas about enlightenment were only ideas, and that waking up was never about ‘losing the ego’ or ‘discovering the Now’ or any of the other ideas with which we try to frame true experience.  Words won’t work here – just experience.  It’s waiting for all of us if we take the time to fully examine even one single object in this world.  Let your mind settle on no idea – look with your clear perception until there is nowhere left for your mind to rest.  Your answers are waiting there.