Offline for Now

I don’t have internet at the new place and haven’t yet decided if I want it.  For now I pop into the library twice a week or so and try to get caught up on emails.  So bear with me while I find my new balance.

Karma Repair Kit Items 1 – 4

Richard Brautigan. I was obsessed with his poetry when I was about 14 years old. I went from one used book store to another looking for his novels and poetry books. Karma Repair Kit Items 1-4, however, was one of the few poems that didn’t resonate with me at that time. This week I can’t think of any better way to express what my life is about just now.

1. 

Get enough food to eat,
    and eat it.  
    

2.
    Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
    and sleep there.

     
3.
    Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
    until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
    and listen to it.  

    
4.

Strings of Geese

I set the alarm so I could watch dawn from my balcony. Short strings of geese and ducks flew by. People launched boats and floated near shore, fishing. Gulls reeled, barely visible against the whitening sky.

View to the left is of the lighthouse (click to enlarge).

View to the right is of the treetops (click to enlarge).

Nines and Sevens

Tonight I visited my new place alone for the first time. It’s so empty, my footsteps echo. I leave the blinds open on the balcony door, wondering if anyone in the building across the way is watching the woman in the bright tweed coat unpack a box of dishes.

I’m not really doing this move in the orthodox way. I’m not boxing everything up at once and finding an unsuspecting friend with a truck to help me do it all on one day. The mattress I bought doesn’t arrive till Friday, so in the meantime I carry a few loads over in canvas shopping bags. One trip times four bags is about my limit after an 8-hour work day. Over the weekend we went to IKEA for a few odds and ends that are better purchased there than whenever I can find them at a thrift store.

Tonight I took over some food for the pantry and my spices. One or two jars had lost their  hand-printed labels, so I took off the lids and sniffed. Gol par (anjelica)! I use that when I make Persian dishes. Deep yellow turmeric, cinnamon sticks, a vanilla bean and nutmegs ready to rasp found a home in a cabinet by the stove.

I put a few quirky magnets on the fridge to help me feel at home. One of my favourite magnets is a depiction of St. Pasqual, patron saint of cooks.

====

One of the first things I thought when I viewed this unit for the first time was “good number.” It was strange to find myself having such a superstitious reaction. In spite of all Leonard Mlodinow tried to teach me about randomness and our oh-so-human tendency to see meaningful pattern where there is only random pattern, I couldn’t stop noticing more interesting patterns in my numbers. Unit number is lucky seven. Street number has way too many nines and and adds to nine. Parking space has the lucky number again and adds to nine. I just had to Google “address numerology,” suddenly certain there was such a thing.

From www.decoz.com

9 Address.
This address inspires idealism, personal growth, self-confidence, and personal style. Not particularly good for families, this address tends to work better for singles. Serious and compassionate, people tend to become involved in community work or volunteer for good causes. Also a good address for young people living in groups (dormitories). Women in particular tend to do well with a 9 address. Not good for ambitious and goal oriented people, this location is better suited for dreamers and idealists. Can be financially lucky (inheritance, lottery, or similar).

Strengthen the positive influence of this address with: Subtle colors such as light pastels, stenciled edges and other whimsical designs. Easy, comfortable and unpretentious furniture. Plants and flowers. Open windows. Light and airy.

7 Address.
The most unconventional address in all respects. Good for single adults; alone but not lonely. Inspires spiritual growth but abhors conventional organized religion. Inspires depth of thought, reading, contemplation and perhaps even meditation. Serious and often pushing one to become a bit more introvert, this address is my personal favorite. Just as only an artist knows the bliss of “breaking through” to create a truly great piece, only the seven knows the ecstasy of a truly spiritual realization. If all churches, mosques, and synagogues were located at number 7 addresses the world would be a better place. Those who like to keep things light and superficial tend to find little happiness in this location.

Strengthen the positive influence of this address with: Few colors, preferably white or shades of white. Austere, minimal furniture. Simple but high quality. Avoid clutter. Be the opposite of a pack rat – eliminate what you don’t need.

Shenpa = Complex

I was drowning in shenpa. For a few days there, I was just projecting and getting comlexed all over the place.

Karyn and I have been exploring some teachings of Bill Harris of Centrepointe Research Institute and Genpo Roshi. One thing they get into is how Eckhart Tolle will tell you all about the power of Now, but very little if anything about Shadow work.

The Jungians (I was in analysis for three and a half years) will teach you all about Shadow work, but do not really get into the power of Now.

Well, I’m not sure about all Buddhist traditions, but I do know that when Ane Pema talks about shenpa, it sounds to me like she is talking about the very same thing my analyst and I were talking about when we talked of being complexed, operating from a complexed state.

Today’s lojong slogan from Chodron’s Compassion Box is “Always meditate on whatever provokes you.” So I don’t think Buddhist teachings are entirely ignorant of the Shadow or the fact that it is Shadow stuff that is so good at taking you away from the Now. The difference as I see it is how each traditions teaches you to deal with Shadow or a complex or shenpa when it comes up.

The Buddhist teachings I’ve encountered so far offer me the three Rs: recognize, refrain and resolve. Recognize that I’m hooked, refrain from going down the habitual path, resolve to keep working on this the rest of my life. They also remind me to come back to the present moment and breathe.

Jungians get more into it. In depth work we name complexes and give them voice. We have conversations with our Shadow parts, get to know them…write them letters and so on.

In interview three of Bill Harris’ introduction to HoloSync, he and Diane Musho Hamilton talk about how people tend to delve into one tradition for a while and then they’re done with it, onto the next thing and turn completely against the earlier school rather than integrating. I haven’t done that completely with the Jungian model, but I have stopped journaling my dreams and have stopped dialoguing with my Shadows.

I think it’s time I reintroduced some of those methods of transforming consciousness into my practice.

After three days trapped in mind (small mind), I was desperate for guidance. Last night I begged for a guiding dream. I requested that I please remember the dream clearly on waking. When I awoke this morning, I realized I had dreamed (for the third night running) about an old friend.

Were I in the parlor of my former Jungian analyst, reporting this dream to her, she first would ask me, “What is her essence?”

Then I would tell her about this friend. I would say, “S is someone that I perceive as being unhappy with her life. She over analyzes everything. She ponders other people and their motives and what they might be thinking (about her) constantly. She is trapped in (small) mind, as Tolle would put it.”

S is someone who makes me want to take her by both shoulders and shake her and scream, “WAKE UP! Life is too short for you to spend it all in crazy head. Just BE! Just RELAX.”

And so that is the speech I gave myself this morning, only a bit more gently than that. Listening to my dreams is one thing that is proving helpful to me today. Another VERY helpful influence is the book I started reading this weekend: The Holographic Universe by the late Michael Talbot.

Oh, and the fact that I got the keys to my new place tonight? That is helping, too.

Confirmation Bias (cont from penultimate post)

From page 189 of The Drunkard’s Walk:

“Now that you have pondered your strategy, I can say that if you are like most people, the sequences you present will look something like 4, 6, 8 or 8, 10, 12 or 20, 24, 30. Yes, those sequences obey my rule. So what’s the rule? Most people, after presenting a handful of such test cases, will grow confident and conclude that the rule is that the sequence must consist of increasing even numbers. But actually my rule was simply that the series must consist of increasing numbers. The sequence 1, 2, 3, for example, would have fit; there was no need for the numbers to be even. Would the sequences you though of have revealed this?”

“When we are in the grasp of an illusion–or, for that matter, whenever we have a new idea–instead of searching for ways to prove our ideas wrong, we usually attempt to prove them correct. Psychologists call this the confirmation bias, and it presents a major impediment to our ability to break free form the misinterpretation of randomness. In the example above, most people immediately recognize that the sequence consists of increasing even numbers. Then, seeking to confirm their guess, they try out many more sequences of that type. But very few find the answer the fast way–through the attempt to falsify their idea by testing a sequence that includes an odd number.”

From page 190: “The confirmation bias has many unfortunate consequences in the real world. When a teacher initially believes that one student is smarter than another, he selectively focuses on evidence that tends to confirm the hypothesis. When an employer interviews a prospective candidate, the employer typically forms a quick first impression and spends the rest of the interview seeking information that supports it. When counselors in clinical settings are advised ahead of time that an interviewee is combative, they tend to conclude that he is even if the interviewee is no more combative than the average person. And when people interpret the behavior of someone who is a member of a minority, they interpret it in the context of preconceived stereotypes.”

When I saw the author’s sequence of numbers 2, 4, 6, I thought the rule might be increasing even numbers with no more than one number between them. And so my test sequences were: 8, 10, 16 (to test no more than one number between them); 6, 4, 2 (to test increasing); and 7, 9, 11 (to test even).

Had I presented those to the author, he would have told me that my first and third samples obeyed his rule but the second one did not. I would have then guessed that the rule was increasing numbers.

I do not conclude that I am any less liable than the next person to fall into the confirmation bias trap. I think I’m just wary of tricky test questions and know to stop and think about them carefully. But in everyday situations, I do believe I tend to form opinions and then only seek to prove them valid, never seeking to prove them fallible.

Meme from Lynn

While we’re waiting for a few more guesses on the last post, I’ll participate in this meme. I was tagged by Lynn. I’m not sure what the rules are other than to respond to some key words or phrases.

Clothes shop: Trader K’s in Ithaca, NY. Anyone for a road trip?

Furniture shop: Ikea, thrift shops, Freecycle, Kijiji, Craigslist

Sweet: Looking forward to having a kitchen, where I plan to make my own gluten-free snack bars with very little if any sweetener.

City: Eureka Spring, Arkansas

Drink: Yogi chai with rice milk and stevia. Hands down the best chai that comes in a tea bag.

Music: You’re walking through a strange neighbourhood in the late afternoon and hear someone practicing a Bach piece on the piano. You stop in the middle of the sidewalk and close your eyes.

TV Series: No TV. My favourite show of all time was Northern Exposure.

Film: Sylvain and I will start our zip.ca subscription again when the weather turns cold. One film on our to see list is “I’m Not There.” Recently saw “Burn After Reading.”

Work Out: Right now all I do is stretches in the morning and evening, plus an occasional walk on the Ganatchio Trail. I am looking forward to having an indoor salt water pool at my disposal. Swimming is one of the only ways I enjoy exercise.

Pastries: No no. Sugar triggers mood swings and allergies and all sorts of problems. Which one do I miss the most? Probably baklava.

Coffee: No coffee for me.

I tag anyone else who wants to play.

Test

From page 189 of The Drunkard’s Walk:

“Suppose I tell you that I have made up a rule for the construction of a sequence of three numbers and that the sequence 2, 4, 6 satisfies my rule. Can you guess the rule? A single set of three numbers is not a lot to go on, so let’s pretend that if you present me with other sequences of three numbers, I will tell you whether or not they satisfy my rule. Please take a moment to think up some three-number sequences to test–the advantage of reading a book over interacting in person is that in the book the author can display infinite patience.”

So that you are not all influenced by each other’s answers, rather than posting them in the comments, please email your test sequences to kikipotamus at gmail dot com.

In a day or two I will post the next paragraphs from page 189.

Two Views of Illusion

I put down Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk after we got back from vacation, but I’ve picked it up again and it’s getting juicy. Chapter nine, entitled “Illusion of Patterns and Patterns of Illusion” ties in especially well to the Lojong teachings with which I start my day each morning now. I am fascinated by the parallels between what I’m reading in this book on randomness and what I’m reading in Pema Chodron’s Start Where You Are. In the particular chapters I hit last night in each of the two books, they are saying the same thing to me with different vocabulary.

Mlodinow recounts how in 1848, two girls named Margaret and Kate Fox heard unexplained noises in their house. The entity in the presumably haunted house could rap out answers to questions. By the early 1950s table rapping and table moving or turning had become all the rage in the US and Europe. In table moving, a group of people arranged themselves around a table, resting their hands upon it. After some time, the table would begin to tilt or move about, sometimes dragging the sitters along with it.

In 1853 a group of scientists decided to look into the phenomenon. The definitive investigation was conducted by Michael Faraday. Through his experiments, he was able to show that the sitters were unconsciously pushing and pulling the table. At some point the sitters perceived in the random movements a pattern, and that pattern precipitated a self-fulfilling expectation as the subjects’ hand followed the imagined leadership of the table. (p. 170)

Mlodinow goes on to gives many other examples of our fallible senses and how the brain fills in the gaps.

Yoga for Cynics had this wonderful quote on his blog in September: “The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. Atul Gawande

From page 173 of A Drunkard’s Walk: “When we look closely, we find that many of the assumtions of modern society are based, as table moving is, on shared illusions.”

“Shared illusions” reminds me of what many Buddhists call “consensus reality.” In chapter four, entitled Let the World Speak for Itself, Chodron recounts the story “about Trungpa Rinpoche sitting in a garden with His Holiness Kilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. People were standing around at a distance close enough to hear but far enough away to give them privacy and space. It was a beautiful day. These two gentlemen had been sitting in the garden for a long time, just sitting there not saying anything. Time went on, and they just sat in the garden not saying anything and seeming to enjoy it very much. Then Trungpa Rinpoche broke the silence and began to laugh. He said to Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, pointing across the lawn, ‘They call that a tree.’ Whereupon Khyentse Rinpoche started to laugh too.”

With Tibetan Buddhism teachings, I am learning not to accept my ego’s take on the world hook line and sinker. Buddhism speaks of the emptiness nature of everything, while quantum physics reveals that if you could see inside our bodies on a small enough scale, you would find we are made up mostly of empty space. Buddhism says what is happening to us at any moment shouldn’t be taken too darned seriously, as it’s a passing memory.

Mlodinow points out that it is our human need to feel in control that interferes with the accurate perception of random events. Chodron says it’s an inherent need to “get ground” and not feel the reality of this wide open, fresh space where really, there is nothing to hang onto.

There is nothing to hang onto, but that is not bad news. That’s what my daily training is about now: learning to be okay with naked reality. Learning to stay with it: the hot, the cold, the bitter, the sweet…and learning to be okay with my inability to control what comes up next.

We’re not in control and so we reach for things that make us feel in control: prejudices, addictions, belief systems, ….

I don’t know exactly what conclusion I am trying to wander toward with all of this, except that both schools remind me not to take the events and appearances around me at face value. Not to take myself or my latest idea or belief structure too seriously, either. It’s no more reliable than the last one. It will not give me ground, only perhaps momentary escape.

Mlodinow: “Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal.”

Let the world speak for itself? Train in encountering naked reality without adding anything extra from a categorizing, judging and very fallible part of the human brain? Not easy. But worthwhile. Very worthwhile.

When you realize you are a child of illusion, you can lighten up and bring more joy to each moment. More curiosity.

I {Heart} VBA

I haven’t quite finished the procedure manual for my department, but I’ve written about 30 chapters, complete with screen captures and little arrows pointing to which button to click next. I met the deadline of getting enough of it finished to be able to use it with a new hire all this week.

On Thursday I overheard my supervisor sighing about having to prepare that day’s cheque batch. Then she and my coworker were half kiddingly tossing around the idea that coworker should learn how to do it so supervisor doesn’t have to. It’s tedious.

“Is it hard?” coworker asked.

“It’s not hard, but you have to know Excel well,” supervisor answered.

Coworker didn’t seem too keen on taking over the responsibility, but when curiosity got the best of me and I started peeking over supervisor’s shoulder, coworker crowded around, too.

I watched supervisor run through the steps she goes through every day at 4:30 to validate, approve and send the claim payments to the accounting department for cheques to be cut the next day.

Export report 1 from system to Excel. Export report 2 to Excel. Compare amount A on Report 1 with amount B on Report 2 and find differences row by row, if any. Play detective. Fix claims that are out of balance.

Format final report the way accounting likes it: bold 14 point header with today’s date, footer that says “Checked and approved by:_________,” delete unneeded columns, autofit columns, landscape orientation, amount column formatted as currency with 2 decimal places. Print 1 copy to be walked over to the accountant and send the soft copy by email to her. Save the file to the shared drive in the Daily Batch folder and name it for the day’s date.

“I should write you a macro,” I said to supervisor.

Friday I asked supervisor to allow me to write down all the steps. While everyone else tore out of there at 5:00 for their 3-day Thanksgiving weekend, I stayed for an hour and wrote the macro.

At first it was depressing. I’m so rusty. I used to do this stuff 5 days a week, yet I had already forgotten about declaring my variables.

Oh, right.

Dim strFileSaveName as string. FileSaveName = “Claims Batch for ” & Format(Now(),”yyyy-mm-dd”) & “.xls”

It started to come back to me.

Option Explicit!

I used my email address instead of the accountant’s for now, for the test runs.

I tied the macro to keystrokes Ctrl-r and gave it a whirl.

Bingo.

I hit two keys and within 6 seconds the report had formatted itself, printed one copy of itself and emailed itself to me.

I don’t know what my supervisor will think. Does she care that I’m underemployed and underutilized? Does she realize that I’d jump at the chance to do more automation around the department and less claim adjudication? I’ve taken every opportunity to communicate this to her in the few months she’s been on board.

Perhaps the message will finally get through on Tuesday.

I Didn’t Kill the Neighbour’s Child

Little B from across the street lives in a house where supper is often KFC or Mickey D’s or Subway or Domino’s Pizza. One day this summer he saw me eating a spinach salad and begged me for some. I felt bad that he didn’t get much “real” food and stood by while he devoured my whole salad.

Yesterday I had picked up some trail mix to snack on, as Sylvain and I wouldn’t be heading out for our “date night” dinner until after signing papers at the condo. As soon as I turned onto our street, B was waving and running over to meet me. As I pulled up the emergency brake, his hands and face were plastered against the driver’s side window.

I reached for the bag of trail mix, and then it occurred to me: I shouldn’t open this and eat in in his proximity before I find out if he is one of those peanut-allergic children you hear so much about these days. Some of them can get sick just being near peanuts.

“Are you allergic to peanuts?” I said as I stepped from the car, wrangling my book bag and purse and keys and snack.

“DO YOU HAVE SOME? CAN I HAVE SOME?” He said.

“Are you allergic to peanuts?” I asked him again.

He assured me he was not, and so I gave him a handful of trail mix.

After a bite, he came up with, “Oh, I’m allergic to walnuts.”

There are no walnuts in the mix.

Next he was running through the yard and saying something about “what’s that on my shoe?” Oh great. He had run through a big pile of dog stuff and was scraping it onto the driveway. I walked him across to his house to tell his mum not to let him come in until he’d taken off the shoe with the dog poo. He is a child with behavioural and attention issues, so I didn’t trust him not to track the feces all through his house before his mom realized what was happening.

I went back home and around to the side of the house to unwind the garden hose to wash down the driveway before Sylvain arrived and tracked the dog mess into the garage and house.

B was back, only this time he was hacking as if he had some peanut skin stuck to his throat. He was spitting and started saying, a bit panicked, ” I AM allergic. I AM allergic.”

Unfortunately, B is one of those cry wolf sort of children who will lie or act out to get attention.

“Go tell your mom,” I said rather non-challantly as I went back to washing the driveway.

The ambulance had probably been parked in the street a good three minutes before I put two and two together.

B is allergic to tree nuts. My mix had cashews in it.

Fortunately his mom used the epi-pen while the ambulance was called.

Fast forward one day…past the mortification and apologies and forgiving and hugs all around. B is okay. His mom doesn’t hate us. He still runs up to me for a hug when he sees me drive up.

Lesson learned? Don’t feed the neighbour’s children without first discussing it with the parents.

Whew.

Room with a View

Sylvain has blogged about my moving out and how he feels about it.

Tonight we went over so the condo owner and I could each sign on the appropriate dotted lines. I gave G a cheque for first and last months’ rent and filled out the form for residents that goes to the condo corporation.

Each time I am inside the condo, I look around and can’t believe it’s soon going to be my abode. It’s just so beautiful.

It’s not terribly big, but it’s clean and fresh with white walls and pine-coloured laminate flooring. When you walk in, your eye is drawn immediately to the view. There is a large sliding balcony door framing a breathtaking view of the marina.

When we were looking at other units in this building, we noted that the higher you go, the more rent you pay…merely for the better view of the confluence of Lake St. Clair–studded with forested islands–and the Detroit River. Indeed, the view from the 13th floor is amazing. Nonetheless, I think I like this 7th storey view even better. You’re high enough not to see the parking lot, but low enough that the sailboats seem to be floating right past the balcony.

Mindful Consumption

Throughout my life I have fantasized about an ascetic life. I have wondered if I would be happiest living in a radically minimalist way. As early as age 5 I was answering the “what do you want to be when you grow up” question with “beachcomber” and “hermit.” We had friends who owned a place near the Pacific Ocean. They had a tiny shack even closer to the water, which they rented out to two young and in love hippie kids. I don’t remember how or why I got to see the inside of this minuscule dwelling. I just remember being captivated by the simplicity of their one-room life. An Indian bedspread screened off the toilet in one corner. A sweet potato vine wound its way around the perimeter of the ceiling, beginning in a Mason jar full of water atop a window ledge.

I did my first material purge when I was 20, shortly after my mystical experience and just before taking off for Europe on my own with a rucksack stuffed with clothes, passport, some saved up babysitting money, a copy of Krishnamurti’s On Love and a dog-eared copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe.

When I got back from Japan in the mid-eighties, I volunteered for one year at Wheatberry, a non-profit vegetarian restaurant in Little Rock run by Shailesh, who was raised a Jain in Gujarat and had been a Zen Buddhist Monk in Japan. Working side by side with Shailesh, I was exposed for the first time to the idea of doing one thing at a time. In the restaurant, diners were given a pamphlet on the philosophy. When we eat, we just eat. When we listen to music, we just listen to music. This is why there was no art on the white walls at Wheatberry.

Shailesh and his partner Judith rented a small house in a neighbourhood where burglaries were not uncommon. That wasn’t such a problem for them; they didn’t have anything to steal. They dined while sitting on zabuton around a low table and slept on mats on the floor. He owned about three changes of clothes: cotton tunics, drawstring pants and dhoti he had sewn. In stature, wardrobe and mannerisms, he reminded me a little bit of Gandhi.

While my lifestyle didn’t change very much while I was donating time to the organization Shailesh founded, observed a lot and absorbed.

In almost equal proportion to my yearning for a propety-free life is an overactive nesting instinct that wires itself into the allure of materialism in cycles that alternate predictably with my purge phases. I have also often yielded to a tendency–found in many with OCD–to collect things. I’m told by those into astrology that I am a typical Cancerian with my love of all that is domestic: cooking, baking, sewing and caring for others. I can spend hours curled up in a club chair at Barnes & Noble drooling over the glossy photos of home interiors. When I indulge in the purchase of home decorating magazines, I cut out the best pictures and glue them into inspiration scrap books.

When I’m feeling harried, one way I can soothe myself is to pull out one of those scrap books and turn the pages slowly while fantasizing about my “one day” home.

No sooner have I built my new nest and surrounded myself with things to dust regularly than I again begin to dream of more simple living. I remember during the years that I worshipped with the Religious Society of Friends visiting the home of two Friends and marvelling at how relaxing their very sparsely furnished home was.

A few weeks ago I was reading The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Naht Hanh. The chapter on mindful consumption called to me especially loudly. All of that week I became acutely aware of every choice I made. Do I turn on the radio or leave it off? Do I buy this? Do I put this in my mouth or would my body be happier without it?

I know without a doubt that I am happier since eliminating a television set from my household than I was with TV (in spite of the fact that tonight–thanks to Sarah Palin–we WILL be viewing SNL).

Over the past several months, I’ve been experiencing a strong yearning for more simplicity. Even though my belongings have been reduced to very few, I have been feeling that much of what is left is too much. It is contributing to a feeling of stress and burden. I want to let go of even more.

This week Sylvain and I finally found a rental unit that meets enough of my criteria (such as within my budget and not gross) and enough of his criteria (such as wheelchair accessible and not too far from where he lives). We told the owners of the condo that I want to rent it and it looks like the deal will go through.

Now I am faced with so many choices and decisions; it’s exciting.

As soon as I had this new space to call home as of November first, I started indulging in fantasies, window and web shopping. I visited antique stores today and spent a few hours in the library with decor books.

I have allowed myself to entertain both options: going simple or going wild. I have enough money in savings that if I chose to, I could furnish my new apartment any way I want. I could make it look like any of the pages I’ve clipped out of Canadian House & Home or Country Living.

If I want, I can have the sofa from West Elm and the rug from Sundance. This is the first time in my life that my bank account would permit me to turn any of those magazine pages into reality.

It wasn’t until I’d spent a solid three days fantasizing about such a splurge that I realized: of the two options, it isn’t the one I want.

Where is God’s Corpus Callosum?

The night before last I had a powerful dream. I was looking over at my Self coming to the end of a long journey (end of life?), only my Self was two disks hovering in the air vertically. The front one was the one that had received all the praise and blame and attention through my whole life. But behind it was another disk I’d never noticed. This second disk was quiet and pure and innocent and the true Life Source. It had carried me through everything, yet I’d never been aware of it.

As I awoke and tried to hold onto as much of the dream as I could, a poem came to mind that I haven’t thought about in years: How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix by Robert Browning.

I padded off to the bathroom and began to ponder the two disks. They looked like the model of parallel universes from Neil Turok’s TED talk. Only his figures have corners and mine were rounded.

I began thinking about Jill Bolte-Taylor’s stroke.

Next I was thinking about chaos theory and how symmetry can be found along various dimensions. Maybe our two brain hemispheres mirror reality on a much larger scale. Watch the Eames’ Powers of Ten. Notice how the universe uses the same patterns over and over. The planets move around a sun. Gallaxies spin around an axis. Molecular structure, cellular structure, atomic structure. Brownian motion. Whoa, it’s mind boggling all the different ways you can find repeats of iterations and ways that the micro mirrors the macro.

If WE have brains split into a half where ego lives and a half where “whoa, this is so cool, I’m having a stroke!” lives, then who is to say this isn’t an iteration of a pattern that exists also on a universal scale? Maybe God’s brain is similarly divided, so to speak.

Last night I was reading to Sylvain from Pema Chodron’s Start Where You Are. “We already have everything we need,” I began.

“There is no need for self improvement. All these trips that we lay on ourselves–the heavy-duty fearing that we’re bad and hoping that we’re good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds–never touch our basic wealth. They are like clouds that temporarily block the sun. But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are. We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake.”

That last sentence shook me. I was back again with Neil Turok and his two universe slices that hover so close to one another. Should they slip too close and touch, what might you have? A bang, perhaps. A Big Bang.