Sufi Influences

I haven’t blogged much about the sufi influence on my Work. Over the course of several years Mushtaq posted a lot of interesting things about Sufism on the sufi-studies Yahoo user group. These always prompted a wide variety of discussions and live demonstrations of various types, and levels, of human behavior, and I learned a lot.

Mushtaq's The Hidden Conversation remains my favorite sufi-studies discussion, and he pulled most of that material together and posted it all as a single blog entry, sort of a 7 course meal served all at once. I just want to nibble a little appetizer out of that corpus for right now.

My personal objective for the remaining years of my life center around integrating three things: the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

One component of the Hidden Conversation that helps with the “How?” of doing it employs Attention, Intention, and Presence.

I see the tasks ahead of me somewhat like this:

Finding the True through Attention

Developing the Good through Intention

Experiencing the Beautiful through Presence

All right! (pardon the drool) I see Mushtaq has started gearing up for some good stuff on his Traceless Warrior blog.

Cognitive Development

Of the many lines of development that Ken Wilber examines, I initially spent a good deal of time looking at his cognitive line elaborations before moving on to some of the others.

Wilber sometimes receives credit for marrying Freud and the Buddah. He basically makes a case that where modern science stops (vision-logic,) the wisdom traditions (i.e. Buddhism, Sufism) continue.

And as the methodology of science demand, the wisdom traditions have repeatable injunctions that one can follow to either prove or disprove the claims. What more can one who has an orangish center of gravity ask for?

Getting Things Done

Well, I ended up with a kewl electronic to-do list of hundreds of items on my PDA. But I just never seemed to get much done.

So, I started reading various “Time Management” books. I ended up trying to implement David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” approach.

I do get more done, although as with many things, I frequently wander off the path.

I would credit Getting Things Done with helping reduce my stress level by 15%-20%.

Belief Systems (aka B.S.)

This story helped me see that we orange scientists, and blue religious fundamentalists, in many important areas, have the same problem.

Orange

After looking at the various Spiral Dynamics v-meme descriptions, I concluded that my own center of gravity, for most of my adult life, has existed in and around the orange v-meme.

- Strive for autonomy and independence
- Seek out 'the good life' and material abundance
- Progress through searching out the best solutions
- Enhance living for many through science and technology
- Play to win and enjoy competition
- Learn through tried-and-true experience
- Change, not permanence, is how nature works
- Authority lies with experience, experiments, and one’s own right-thinking mind
- People are meant to succeed and become winners
- Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes


However, having intellectually concluded that humans can, and do, evolve through stages, I of course wanted to try and make it happen.

So, I figured next stop…. the green v-meme.

Constant Consciousness

Zataod had a recent blog entry on Tibetan Dream Yoga. That practice has yet to materialize for me, although it does rank quite high on the list of things I feel I must integrate into my Work.

My first lucid dream marked a transformational point in my life. For a number of months after that first one I managed to achieve a good 3-5 lucid dreams per week. But they have really dwindled over the past 5-6 years to only a couple a month, and sometimes not even that.

In the beginning, as I read more about lucid dreaming and other things, I realized that some Buddhists used it as a stepping stone to continuous awareness.

“Huh?”, I thought, “Is that really possible?”

Since I had nothing else urgent going on, besides the normal hectic, sometimes frantic, morning to night activities (and 2012 seemed years away), I figured I’d just give it a shot and see for myself if I could do it.

And so my journey started.

The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep seemed to provide a nice fit because it involves practice through the three states of: waking, sleeping, and dreaming. So you have the whole 24 hour day covered.

I figured, “Good. Let’s get started! Could it be any easier?”

Flowing Body

So now take the filling a glass with water process Enneagram and substitute some other things for the water faucet, the glass, the mechanical part, the intentional part, starting the water to flow, adjusting the rate, turning it off and you can see how simple body movements from position A to position B seem to fit nicely around an Enneagram.

That little part in the middle offers a lot of opportunities for exploration.

NOTE: Check out Mushtaq’s recent Scott Sonnon blog entry. I tend to focus on Scott’s joint mobility, breath work, and body flow instruction from a general “physical fitness that also helps the waking up process” perspective. But wow… watch that man walk his talk.

Flowing Water

Since I had some pictures of glasses filled with water, I thought I’d go ahead and create a picture/diagram/word sequence to show the simplified process Enneagram A.G.E. Blake describes in The Intelligent Enneagram for filling a glass with water. I find that I can apply this to many other processes.

A description of filling a glass with water:

• Turn on the tap.
• Water flows into the glass.
• Monitor the level of the water until you judge there is enough . . .
• and then turn off the tap.
  

A.G.E. Blake observes:

The enneagram teaches us that there is a mechanical side and an
intentional side to every complete action: a side to do with the movement of things in space and time and a side to do with purpose and perception.

Unlearning

One of the stories I have seen regarding learning as it relates to personal transformation in the various wisdom traditions depicts the teacher showing the student a glass filled to the brim:

The teacher implies that the student must empty the glass (unlearn) a little before progress can occur.

As an aging mammal I find myself having a lot of trouble in that area. I have some very deeply engrained behavior patterns.

So as a potential alternative, or at least a way to get a little more room to grow, what about trying to make the glass a little bigger?


It seems like even with a full glass I can accomplish horizontal learning (i.e. new technologies, facts and figures) but vertical learning (transformative shifts in perspective) requires much more attention, intention, and presence. i.e. a bigger glass?

Global Village

I’ve always liked a little report I see from time to time that takes the world’s population and proportions it to 100 people, calls it the “Global Village of 100 people”, and then presents statements like this:

The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific

51 would be male, 49 would be female

82 would be non-white; 18 white

67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian

80 would live in substandard housing

67 would be unable to read

50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation

33 would be without access to a safe water supply

39 would lack access to improved sanitation

24 would not have any electricity (And of the 76 that do have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.)

7 people would have access to the Internet

1 would have a college education

1 would have HIV2 would be near birth; 1 near death

5 would control 32% of the entire world’s wealth; all 5 would be US citizens

33 would be receiving --and attempting to live on-- only 3% of the income of “the village”

After doing a little Google research, I started to wonder how much “urban legend” had crept into the 100 people Global Village? After looking at this excel spreadsheet of information sources, I started to see how easily someone can create a 100 people global village statistic. But, I still like the memetic perspective it provides.