Do You Know M.A.N?

Posted on June 13, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

816. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

[continued from 811, 12, 13, 14, 15]

Bali Journal Excerpt #6
At the Preventing Child Sex Tourism in Denpasar, I sat to lunch with a man named Rai. He was very educated and had a passion for the worlds religions. He was familiar with the holy writings of most major religions. He asked me about my religion. I answered that I had no religion. I told him that I had a spiritual life but had no particular attachment to a system of belief. He smiled and nodded.

We talked of tourism and its impact on Balinese culture, both positive and negative. He told me that in his village of Kuta that the people believed that the many changes in Kuta over the past few years was the result of Black Magic. He also told me that this event was predicted. He used a word for the era in which we are living but I can’t recall it – but said the English equivalent was something like ‘apocalypse.’ “In this time,” he explained, “people forget Atma.”

“What is Atma?” I asked.

He responded, “Do you Know M.A.N?” I didn’t. “M stand for Maya. All that is transitory is Maya: money, friends, status, power, and the body are all Maya. When people focus on things that are Maya, things that are transitory, they can only be unhappy. This is what is happening in Kuta. ‘A’ stands for Atma. Atma is your soul, your god-nature. You are god.” he said, touching his heart chakra. “When your mind is Atma, you are happy. Atma is eternal. Do you know Mahatma,” he asked? “Like Mahatma Gandhi? Mahatma means Atma,” he laughed. “Mahatma is the one with gleaming thoughts. When you are Atma your mind is not attached to the transitory. Detachment from all things leads to Moksa. Moksa and Nirvana are the same thing. ‘N’ is for Nirvana. Moksa is a state of being. When you are attached to nothing, living as Atma, you are said to have Moksa. M.A.N.”

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Invite The Soul

Posted on June 12, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

815. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

[continued from 811, 12, 13, 14]

Bali Journal Excerpt #5
Madeleine asked me if I would go with her to see the Balian. She wanted me to scribe for her – to take notes of her session with Jero Manchu. I’d written off my previous experience at Jero Manchu’s compound. I didn’t listen to the inner voice. I ignored the imperative to, “Ask the Balian what was missing.” Now, I sat with Madeleine before the Balian. The Balian sang, breathed incense, and was quiet for a moment or two. Then, she turned and began speaking to me. I’d not asked a question. I was there in support of Madeleine.

Jero said (through a translator): “The one in you wants to be purified at the beach. One is pulling you there; one is pulling you in another direction. This is why you feel at a crossroads. I suggest you pray to the one not committed to you. Pray at the beach before the sun is rising. Invite the soul – he is still in the water – invite him into your body. Ask him to be happy in you.”

I was stunned.

It seems, thirteen years later, my work in the world is to invite the soul. I did my ritual on the beach (it is a journal entry coming soon) and my soul eventually came out of the water and into my body. He is very happy and getting happier each year.

The lesson or action is universal to people, organizations, communities,…the internal tug of war reveals the split gate, the investment in being right. It reveals the place where we divide and pull in opposite directions. Power over or control are usually the drivers of the split. There is nothing worse than having two experts come to dinner. There’s nothing better than having two masters come to share a meal.

Heal the split by stepping into the space between. This is to invite the soul into the body. Heal the split by shifting the focus from the points to the vectors, from the fixed to the fluid, from the staid to the movement, from the particle to the wave. Invite the soul. Ask him or her to be happy in you, as you.

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Count To Three

Posted on June 11, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

814. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

[continued from 811, 12, 13]

Bali Journal Excerpt #4
There is an important number in Bali. Three. I come from a culture built upon the number two. Everything in my culture is a duality. Until coming to Bali I was not aware of the degree to which I saw the world in terms of opposites: black/white, success/failure, good/bad, /left/right, religious/secular. Between two points there can only be a line, a distinction. Judgments are the result of two – guilty/innocent. Lady Justice stands blindfolded holding her scale aloft. Which way will the scale tip? Democrats or Republicans? Make a choice! Are you for us or against us? Pro-choice or pro-life? In school I was taught that a good play, a good story, is driven by conflict, the place where two opposing forces collide. Will the major character win or lose? Will I be a winner or a loser?

These many years later re-reading this entry I marvel at how little I see the world now in terms of two. If there is a two there is also a space between and that space is dynamic. It is vibrant and alive. I see shades of gray. I see the middle way. I’ve worked hard to break my pattern of two-seeing. Budhi told me this space between was god. It is energy. One-ness. Why would I live in a universe built upon the number two if it precludes the space between?

I am sitting in an airport right now and it is just after midnight. I’m going on a trip of transformation. I am journeying to touch a heart that is precious to me. I am not popular for making this journey. Today, the people in my story are seeing pairs of opposites. They want me to see in terms of two and I am consciously reaching into the space between. They are invested in my choice. One or the other? They want me to “do what is right” yet right looks like left to half of the people who are invested with the choice they think that I am making. They cannot see the choice that I am making because their number stops at two.

Heart lives in the number 3. Heart is found, not in the noun, but in the verbs, in the action, in the space between.

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Begin With A Charge

Posted on April 28, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

780. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Given my post yesterday I laughed out loud this morning when Saul-The-Chi-Lantern started talking about the cult of exhaustion that is sweeping the nation. He said, “Have you noticed how many people start their morning by saying, ‘I’m exhausted?’ Why would someone choose to start their day exhausted?”

Now, isn’t that a world-class question? The choice of exhaustion comes to those who believe they have no choice. After Megan hammered my thick noggin yesterday, I’ve been looking at my choices.

Saul led us through a section of the form before picking up the thought. “People talk of tai chi as some kind of cult but given the choice of starting your day with a vital charge or starting your day exhausted, why wouldn’t you choose to begin each day with a vital charge?” He laughed and continued, “I want to get things done when I get up in the morning. A vital charge is useful. I guess I belong to the cult of people who desire to feel good.”

A month ago I was in Holland with an international group of coaches. They were talking about their health care and the number of weeks of paid vacation they get every year. One of the participants asked me why Americans were dedicated to working so hard. Essentially her question was about why we are so dedicated to exhausting ourselves. Balance is not high on our priority list. Scratch the paint and look beneath her question and find a deeper inquiry: she wanted to know how I explained the gap between our identity as free people and our national dedication to servitude. We work for health care. We work more hours by far with less time off. We seem okay with the every increasing gap between the haves and have-nots. Sequestration is the best we can do because the other options would require us to take a look at the gap and its drivers. I had no answer. Denial didn’t seem satisfactory. I didn’t want to say, “We think we have no choice.”

And then I flew home and promptly exhausted myself. The universe has never been subtle with me when I need to pay attention to something. Saul’s question followed Megan’s admonition. Stillness, listening, and choice.

Saul returned to the practice saying, “Exhaustion makes no sense to me especially if I can avoid it.”

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Spare A Moment

Posted on April 13, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

765. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Once while in Bali I watched a rooster pick a fight with itself. The rooster saw his reflection in a big screen television and prepared for battle. I thought of that rooster today when I watched a woman screaming at her reflection in a storefront window. She was picking a fight with herself. She pointed at her reflection, shouted profanities, lunged forward and dropped back in a defensive posture when her adversary seemed to lunge at her.

It seems like a sad and lonely image unless you consider how often we wage war within ourselves. The woman at the window was simply expressing outwardly what was happening internally. If we did that, if we gave expression to the internal separations and subsequent battles, we’d be called crazy. The woman at the window lacked an editor. Her desperation was hidden no more. In a sense, she was more authentic than those of us who gave her a wide berth. Without an editor she was dangerous. None of us wanted to be mistaken for her reflection.

After help arrived for the woman I continued across town watching the many things we do for attention. Isn’t that what the woman wanted from her reflection? Wasn’t she looking for someone – internal or externally – to pay attention, to afford her a kindness? The young people raising money for the ACLU asked if I had a moment. The man carrying the large sign that read “How Do You Know Jesus” asked me if I had a moment. The woman who wanted some change started the conversation by saying, “Sir, do you have a moment?”

Everyone wants a moment. Everyone wants to be heard. In a city, with so many sounds and billboards and buses and sirens and people, people everywhere wanting, wanting, wanting change, a signature, a kindness, a bus, a convert or a clear path, it is no wonder that we have so few moments to give. I can only hope, that if I am someday staring at my reflection in a window, that I have kind words to say to myself rather than a fight to pick. I hope that I offer my reflection one of my precious few moments and ask, “What do you need to say. I’m all ears.” I’ll be okay if I’ve learned to stop and listen.

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Taste. Test.

Posted on April 10, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

762. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Many years ago I spent most of my time in the studio. I spent hours each day alone with my paintings and my thoughts. I’d go out at noon to get food. Later in the evening my friend Albert would meet me for coffee. He knew I would twist and fall into my self if I wasn’t forced to emerge and speak to other humans. He was right. The life of a painter is a lonely existence. In addition to my gypsy tendencies I used to tend toward the hermit and it was wise and loving friends like Albert that saved me from myself. Now my inner gadfly has the keys to my personality; I just can’t leave people alone.

I had occasion to go through old journals this afternoon. It is a quirk of mine that my personal and work journals are one-and-the-same. I’ve never understood the separation between working and not working, playing and not playing. I’ve tried to explain that to the IRS to no avail. Apparently one must separate oneself to be in compliance with the regulations. My life is my work. Megan told me that I am purpose driven and she is right. So sorting through old journals is a funny affair because I’ve collaged dream imagery with workshop notes with thoughts about paintings with personal insights with notes from calls. And, since I’ve never learned what the lines on the paper are used for, my notes go in multiple directions. Ask me which came first and I will squint and turn the journal upside down. I also noticed that I sometimes start an entry on the right hand page and then move to the left hand page – essentially moving one step back before taking two steps forward. I refuse to entertain this journal practice as a life metaphor. I intend to lie to the IRS if they ever ask me about my journaling. I am linear, linear, linear.

I opened a journal from 2009 and found this thought from Ana-The-Wise: For every child everything is new and unknown. They see with the eyes of the new and that is okay. For the child, it is all unknown and so it all must be tasted and tested.

We dull our palates. Last night in class a man asked me what is the point of courting chaos once you’ve made order of your world. He liked order. Arriving at order was his goal. I’d just finished telling the class that chaos is where innovation lives: if you are playing in the fields of the known you are not innovating. I edited my reply and stayed in the context of business and entrepreneurship. What I wanted to say was that, just as innovation, vitality and life are found in the unknown. Order is not a fixed state. It is fluid and flows toward chaos. Life is motion. Try and stop the movement and you will one day look up and wonder why your life has no meaning. You’ll wonder where you lost your passion.

Ana-The-Wise spoke truly: it is all unknown and so it must be tasted and tested. I’ve not yet lived tomorrow and I will miss it if I think I know what’s coming. There is so much to be tasted, so much that begs to be tested.

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Show Up

Posted on February 14, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

707. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine

“The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.” Neil Gaiman

The clichés are ubiquitous: fingerprints and snowflakes, each of us is unique in the universe. There will never be another like you and if you’ve ever looked through a telescope into the universe you will recognize how profound a recognition that is. The universe is vast and you are unique in it. You are vast.

The paradox of our uniqueness, of course, is that we want to fit in. As E.O. Wilson suggests, the strongest human impulse is to belong. The question becomes do you need to sacrifice something essential to fit into someone else’s idea or is bringing to life your unique perspective the very thing that will make you belong?

I recently heard a speech and the speaker was making a case for self-love. She spoke of the myriad of opposing opinions she’s heard and sometimes entertained about who she should be. Like most of us, she spent many years trying to conform herself to those conflicting ideas – other people’s ideas of who she should be. Aesop wrote a fable about that and the moral was clear: you will lose it all if you don’t listen to yourself. No one has the capacity to love you like yourself. When you come upon your idea of who and what you want to be, and strive for that, there is no conflict or sacrifice. You will fulfill it all when you listen to yourself. This, too, was the speaker’s conclusion.

To me, the shorthand is to orient your life according to what you bring to it and not according to what you get from it. Show up as you know yourself to be not as anyone expects you to be. Let yourself be seen as who you are: unique in all the universe.

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Sound Glorious

Posted on January 25, 2013 by davidrobinsoncreative

687. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Today as I walked north on 5th Avenue from the International District toward downtown, I went through a short tunnel or underpass. A young woman was standing in the center of the underpass, singing without inhibition. The acoustics were magnificent. Rather than singing a lyric, she was vocalizing, celebrating the range and depth of her voice. She saw me smile and stopped long enough to say, “Don’t I sound glorious!” She did.

One of the members of the coaching class I co-teach is a reverend. In class this week she offered us a biblical image for standing full and alive in personal truth: standing naked and unashamed before god. She asked, “What must it feel like to stand naked and unashamed before the world?” I thought of her question the moment I heard the young woman singing unashamed and fully exposed in the underpass.

Question: How do you know you are standing in your truth? Answer: you will find yourself singing your song at the top of your voice in a place that amplifies the sound and say with joy to a total stranger, “Don’t I sound glorious!”

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Think “I Can!”

Posted on December 26, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

657. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I am in the last few days of living in the apartment I have occupied for nearly a decade. And, because I see the move coming, I am aware of my patterns and rituals, the unconscious actions that have come to define my normal, my everyday. For instance, while unloading the dishwasher this afternoon, I was amused by my automatic movement, spoons, forks and knives into the drawer, pivot, dishes up above, cups one at a time to the hooks above the counter, straighten the rug. I have repeated these actions so many times that they are worn into me, paths through the woods of my life. I appreciate them today because I will soon be without them; I will soon be awkward in the creation of new patterns and intentional in creating new rituals of definition.

I realize that thoughts are like these rituals. Thoughts are patterns that define us. If you think, “I can,” then you certainly will. If you think, “I can’t” then you will wear that pattern, too. I see my impending step out of my patterns as an opportunity to create new patterns, especially new thought patterns. There are rituals of thinking that I am ready to release. A new friend recently told me of her solstice ritual: friends meet around a bonfire and write on slips of paper what they are ready to let go. Then, they commit the slips to the fire. My move is like a bonfire. My patterns are now written on a slip of paper and in a few days I will commit them to the fire on not-knowing. I will then be free to create new patterns of thinking, new rituals of belief.

It is the time of year for resolutions and, like most well intended resolutions they fall prey to the groove of old patterns. Everything begins with a thought; repetitive thought is a pattern, investment in the pattern is a ritual that defines the life you choose to live. If you are not living the life that you desire, if your patterns are thought-prisons or somehow keeping you small, join me in creating new rituals of definition. You need not leave your apartment or your mate; you need not lock the door and walk away from your life. You need only, one day at a time, one step at a time, create a new pattern. My bonfire friend is now saying to herself, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can,….” And, one small step at a time, one small thought at a time, she will. And, so will I.

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Check Your Mask

Posted on December 14, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

645. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

It’s an early morning at the airport. The line through security snakes slowly forward. There is nothing to do but look at the faces and wonder at the lives that have sculpted these amazing masks. No one arrives at their face without living a big story. Some are distinct for their laugh lines; some are worn and tired. I see angry fearful masks and faces excited to step into the adventure. There are children, young faces like a new canvas, wide-eyed at this odd place, staring like me at the people shuffling along. The children dance or melt down. That, too, is part of the mask making process as their parents shush them or encourage them or simply sigh and take another step forward. Learn to express, learn to withhold, learn to ignore, learn to hide, learn to receive or reject…it all eventually shows in the face we assume.

I look at all of these faces, these distinct masks, and wonder if they recognize their story as unique, huge. Very few of us realize the enormity of our lives. Emily Dickinson lived much of her life confined to small garden and yet lived an extraordinary life; she paid attention. She looked and felt and shared. She feared and hid and failed. She loved mightily. The adventure of living, of vivid, rich experience is available in every moment.

I wonder what others see when they look at my mask. I make up stories for everyone as the line moves toward the man standing behind the desk stamping boarding passes, scrutinizing driver’s licenses, checking faces as proof of identity. I love that moment when the TSA agent lifts my license comparing the picture to my face. Sometimes I cross my eyes to get a rise out of them; most TSA agents have great humor when you treat them as humans instead of threshold guardians. They wear masks, too; masks of authority, masks trained not to show their humanity. Imagine how that imperative is sculpting their future face!

I wonder what masks we would wear if we gave ourselves full permission to share, to express, to feel… I wonder if there would be need for this slow line to face-checking if we actually allowed our humanness to show.

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