This Present Moment: Recent Episodes
Joe
Hey folks. This is just a quickie to let you know about The Present Dimension Podcast, a series of conversations my partner Molly and I have been doing in recent months.
As previously announced here, The Present Dimension is the creative brand which runs adjacent to this magazine. While what you read here is always rooted first in the written word, The Present Dimension Podcast, conversely, is driven by the power of conversation.
Thus far Molly and I have talked to musicians, poets, therapists and more, diving into their stories and their ideas through the same filter of consciousness which has marked what you've heard here over the last year. Similar gist, but simply through the iris of others.
Having landed in North Carolina a year ago with a non-existent social network, the project of finding comparably-curious souls has proven surprisingly exciting. Making friends as an adult is its own adventure, and The Present Dimension Podcast has been part of that process.
Perhaps Life simply is the function of all the people we meet.
You can check out these conversations on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or at ThePresentDimension.com.
Finally, regarding these emails, I always invite your feedback: Is there something you'd like more of? Questions you want answered? Mysteries which demand pondering đ€ ? Let me know.
Thanks for your support and have a stellar day.
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The winter nights were dark until Christmas came to play, Then strings of squinty stars lined every window frame. All plugged in, Suburbia would electrify in glow, Illuminating diamonds sparkling in the snow. The lights, the love, the pristine pines, red bows and mistletoes, Our little world was swirled into a Hallmark snow-globe.
A candy-cane cacophony of sugar snow and gifts, This wonderland met its myth in the man who had the list: A bearded saint, we were told, knew of all our wishesâ who we were and if we were goodâwith a God-like omniscience. And unlike dusty legends now dead to time, We left cookies for Santa: He was very much alive.
I recall one Christmas Eve, amidst crisp midwest wind, My eyes saw some moving light that could haveâpossiblyâbeen him: A celebrity sighting up in the sky! Look! It's St. Nick! (The drift of distant satellites blinks like Rudolf to us kids.) Everything was possible inside our boundless minds: We Believed it when Nat King crooned that "reindeers can fly."
With such imagination I would sit beneath our tree Plucking off its ornaments to make-believe littles scenes. Kermit the Frog, some plastic kitsch, was my heroic figurine. He'd glide through all the branches to save his tree-crossed Queen. And all of it felt real, a free flow of belief. A reality we created through the one our mind's see.
The years carried on and we left that world behind, As cold rationality clogged those magic minds. Like when Pan returns for Wendy, to fly to Neverland, And she replies: "Peter, I am Old ... I can't." Those memories of guileless possibility Seem some distant miracle to a grown man like me.
Now we may not be so young, but Christmas never changed. It's still all red with gingerbread and the elves still look the same. There's this Christmas-y motif which we collectively createâ A sphere of sounds and senses centered around this date, A global covenant bigger than its Faith, Like the whole world jingles if just for a day.
I don't know much history about this holiday. We're told it's some dude's birthdayâa holy man, they say. A carpenter out of Nazareth who simply served and loved, And realized our potential to channel kindness from above. Sure, it's been commercialized and diluted into goo, But the Spirit which speaks through it is the realization of this truth.
It's that spark of meaning lit inside of Scrooge, Or how the Grinch's heart grows to make him someone new. It's that oft-forgotten Knowledge It's a Wonderful Life: That we're all angels earning wings, trying to do what's right. And as Clarence reminds us, 'No man is poor who has friends.' Perhaps real wealth is Community in the end.
And of course we all know that December bath of cheer, Where chipper songs about chestnuts steal 'n tickle our ears. How every melody and caroler's so merry it's almost weird, As if Christâwhoever he wasâis through the music somehow here. Like under every Christmas song is a divine little twirl, A smirk from his reality that sings joy to the world.
Today we gather under those old creeds, Even as we blabber and eat mindlessly And open random presents we don't really need. But we find such triviality are the binds of family, Where the tiniest dearest thing holds something sweetâ As we sit around a table enjoying my mom's toffee.
All the while a star shines atop a tree, Winking to a child who beams in full belief That his world will be lifted to magic on this night, As a song behind him whispers, "Let your heart be light." And when he becomes King he may reclaim this bliss, Which hides inside the simple phrase: Merry Christmas.
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Last month, the actor William Shatner was launched beyond the Texas skies via Blue Origin, the nascent rocket company helping pave the way for a new era of civilian space travel. At 90 years old, Shatnerâaptly famous for playing Captain Kirk on Star Trekâbecame the oldest person to ever exit Earth's atmosphere. After piercing through the stratosphere, floating above it weightlessly, and looking down at our planet, the TV icon emotionally recounted what was a transformative experience:
"To see the blue color go whoop! byâand now you're staring into blackness!" he exclaimed. "That's the thing!" He goes on:
This covering of blue ... this blanket, this comforter of blue that we have around us ... Suddenly you shoot through itâas if you whip off a sheet while you are asleepâand you're looking into blackness. You look down and there's the blue down there, and the black up there ... [Down] there is Mother Earth and comfort, and [up] there is ...
He pauses, puzzled. "Is there death?" he wonders, pondering what the black beyond our sky holds.
"Is that the way death is? Whoop and it's gone? Jesus! It was so moving to me."
Captain Kirk's whole monologue is worthy viewing, for it's a message which beams upwards towards a most inspired future: the ever nearer possibility that we and the universe become one.
In 1902 William James released the immensely influential book Varieties of Religious Experience. It was and remains a landmark synthesis of psychology and spirituality. The book investigates the various interior phenomena which accompany what is known as "the mystical experience."
The "mystical experience" is, by James' account, almost impossible to define. It is in the truest sense ineffable.
... But words are all we got right now! So, James said that the first marker of a mystical state of consciousness is that we can't articulate it. It evades language. Poetry can gesture at it, but basically ya-had-to-be-there.
As we will find, this was a mystical experience being had by Mr. Shatner. "I can't even begin to express ... " he says, struggling to lay words on the indescribable. "This experience is something unbelievable."
In fact, astronauts have their own term for this: The Overview Effectis a well-documented shift in awareness often realized by travelers who exit the reality tunnel of Earth. To witness our world from a wider perspective stirs man into "an explosion of awareness," as put by Apollo 14 pilot Edgar Mitchell. He describes:
There was suddenly a very deep gut feeling that something was different. It occurred when looking at Earth and seeing this blue-and-white planet floating there, and knowing it was orbiting the Sun, seeing that Sun ... set in the background of the very deep black and velvety cosmos, seeingârather, knowing for sureâthat there was a purposefulness of flow, of energy, of time ... in the cosmos ⊠I suddenly [saw] the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious.
This Overview Effect bears the indelible markers of the mystical, a tilting of the mind which reveals some magnificent meaning beyond the veil.
In fact, Edgar Mitchell was so changed by his experience that he ended up devoting the rest of his life to studying the science of human transcendence. He explains:
When I got back to Earth I started digging into various literatures to try to understand what had happened. I ... eventually discovered it in the Sanskrit of ancient India. The descriptions of samadhi ... were exactly what I had felt ... An overwhelming sense of oneness and connectedness ⊠accompanied by an ecstasy ⊠an epiphany.
Such experiences of unity consciousnessâwhether we call them samadhi (via Eastern philosophy) or mystical (from Western)âare the common seed out of which all religion bursts. They entail a noetic insight, as William James called it, which brings about an intense realization of meaning which reaches, it would seem, well beyond the boundaries of the brain. The function of life death and all its intermittent mania suddenly makes complete sense, as if after a lifelong sleepwalk you finally awokeinto a world more real than the one you always knew.
And then like an iris closing to the light, it's gone.
These experiences are big, beautiful and usually brief. This fleetingness of feelingâor transiency, as James called itâis another marker of the mystical. Such heightened states of consciousness are rarely maintained for any long period of time, most being just a momentary glance into a wider webwork of meaning.
James examines hundreds of such occurrences. In one a doctor describes how, after a joyous night out with friends, and with his mind at pleasurable ease, he spontaneously felt an "immense fire" within himself:
There came upon me a sense of exaltation, of immense joyousness accompanied ... by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have an eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love; and that happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed.
Now Consider Mr. Shatner, who himself could have had an entry in James' catalog of rapture:
I'm so filled with emotion at what just happened. It's extraordinary! I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don't want to lose it. It's so much larger than me ... It has to do with the enormity and the quickness and the suddenness of life and death and theâOh my God! It's so moving.
You can sense him trying to hold on to this revelation as its radiance sinks beneath the mud of our Earthbound reality.
But unlike a mundane morning dream which fizzles into obscurity, the enduring meaning of the mystical experience evolves with the memory of it. In another account from James, a gentleman describes his "sudden ... indescribably intense ... sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light."
These highest experiences I have had have been rare and briefâflashes of consciousness which have compelled me to exclaim with surpriseâGod is here! ... I have severely questioned these moments ... lest I should be building my life and work on mere phantasies of the brain. But I find that, after every questioning and test, they stand out today as the most real experiences of my life, and experiences which have explained and justified and unified all past experiences and all past growth. Indeed, their reality and their far-reaching significance are ever becoming more clear and evident.
To the uninitiated the dissonance between the mystical and the ordinary seems so insurmountable that these descriptions read as vague wish-wash. But to those whose curiosity brings them to the buckling boundaries of logicâthe mystical seduces us like a siren. And if we listen to its song, we soon learnthat this mysterious mode of mind underlies our every waking moment, hidden behind our normal humdrum consciousness like a radio station yet to be turned to.
Such is one aim of the endless treadmill of spiritual practices which tune the mind and body to this frequency. Yoga, meditation, plant medicine, prayer ⊠They're all strings towards the same space, strands from which this mystical netting is sewn.
Revealed of its radiant wonder, the mystical experience is the magical experience, a dazzling reality tunnel which enfolds the smaller one you currently read from. It is out of thistranscendent dimension that every wisdom tradition draws its rendering of reality. It is the sparkling denizen of the sages and saints who've spoken to us through millennia, all offering the same message: It is within you too.
This special dimension is awakened through many means, but few are more propulsive than Awe, that soaring sense of wonder which tips the mind towards the sublime. Awecracks open our consciousness and lets new light in, arousing in us what spaceman Edgar Mitchell felt to be "the primordial energy of the universe."
As progress places this mystical experience just a rocket-ride away, technology will lay a fresh sake into the path of human enlightenment.
Honestly, I've never been one of those dudes blissed out by the idea of going to space. I had glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling as a kid, but elsewise my walls were plastered by posters of the Chicago Bulls and Batman. But now I see what all those geeks and dreamers with the Milky Way murals on their walls were getting at. It's not just about going to space ... It's about the feeling of space.
A vision of the future invited by this recent year is one in which folks will be able to pop up into space the same way we fly to New York. Captain Kirk's ten minute jaunt will eventually be a norm. These trips may right now be bound to a small band of the rich-'n-famous, but that will expand just as the automobile grew from privileged to pervasive. And as this horizon widens to eventually include the everyman, we may find ourselves at the foothills of a new religious pilgrimage.
Imagine: You pop up to space for a psycho-spiritual cleansing, your own communion with the universe ... literally. To every color and creed under the Sun, a shared history re-emerges. The Universe itself becomes Godâas it was from the beginning.
And for those dreamers of yesteryear with posters on their wall, they no longer must just look to the stars in yearning, but may now manifest their visions into otherworldly adventure.
And, fittingly, the present prophet of this good news is none other than Captain Kirk. Ageless and vibrant, our space-faring leader has returned to our screens. After guiding our ship through tube televisions half a century ago, the Captain is now zapped into our pockets. He ushers us into a real-life portal to the world he portrayed in our living rooms so long ago. "Everybody in the world needs to do this," he says. "Everybody in the world needs to see."
William Shatner is one of the last household names of an old American Empireâthe collective hearth-fire from which our older generations were warmed. This old America, with its many faults and its massive heart, held this nation together under one common flag.
Now that center has given wayâin fact recently a poll indicated that almost half the nation believes we should break in two. Perhaps this shrill is just media manufacturement, or perhaps we truly do approach a karmic crest of national reckoning.
Or perhaps itâs both: We are creating the future in the image of our attention. "What goes around comes around."
So many moments fly by us with the power to unite, but they rarely puncture the way our fears do. Our media is splayed out like a million queenless bees warring over a hive. Hissing headlines hover around our heads: Are You Scared? Are You Stung? If not, you should be!
Most Meaning is lost in this buzz, while most hope is swarmed and swallowed by the hive-mind. And when it's not, it's ground into meme and mockery by the Snark Sharks and the Fear-mongers. Whatever good faith remains is left blowing in the wind.
And yet through the twilight of this fading national spirit we hear ol' Captain Kirk. He's come to proclaim new hope! "It's extraordinary!" he declares his trip into the mystic. "What you have given me in the most profound experience I can imagine," he cries to (trigger warning) Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos (đ).
The lambasted gajillionaires at the helm of these operations have ignited both moralism ("Feed the poor before you feed your egos!")and rancor ("Super rich white dudes are building a playground in space"). Everyone's got their sanctimonious soap-boxes, but beyond this blind bashing of ambition there are genuine concerns as to the direction of our technologies. "With so much strife plaguing our world,"a friend rightfully asked me, "is flipping the focus away from Earth the right use of resources? Or are we simply jumping ship?"
In 2008 video game developer Richard Garriott snagged a ride to the International Space Station through a Russian program offering galactic tourism to non-astronauts. His pricey 12 day stay aboard the I.S.S. "changed [his] entire life."
Prior to my flight I would already have described myself as an environmentalist but looking out the window back at the Earth from space ... really changes you at a very deep level ... I think it's impossible not to come back, as I did, feeling reinvigorated and refocused on living a lifestyle that is more of an environmental example than just talking the talk, like I was prone to do.
You see, paradoxically, these distant experiences may offer us the impetus and inspiration needed to disentangle the insoluble crises we face on the ground. Just as the Earthbound traveler journeys abroad only to return in greater appreciation of home, so too may man now see his entire Kingdom from a new perspective.
Edgar Mitchell's samadhi experience of "instant global consciousness" left him with, as he put it, "an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it." If there is one commonality across all the rocketeers who've seen Earth from abroad, it is this newfound reverence towards this house in which we breathe. So said Sigmund JĂ€hn, German Cosmonaut:
Only when I saw Earth from space in all its ineffable beauty and fragility, did I realize that humankind's most urgent task is to cherish and preserve it for future generations.
"It would be so important for everybody to have that experience," agrees Mr. Shatner. "The jeopardy ... the vulnerability of everything."
Of course the planet itself isn't vulnerable. This magma-filled rock is a robust 4.5 billion years old, but our split-second cameo on it is a mere guest role, subject to the boot at any moment.
We are the ones in jeopardy.
Dim to the wisdom needed to marry technology and nature, the ecological fabric of our well being is beginning to tear. This deafening period of accelerating change summons us to rise above our little reality tunnels and inhabit a wider one. Politics, activism, fundraisingâthese may be laudable efforts towards change, but to truly tilt the paradigm towards a most flourishing future we must think bigger.
We must elevate consciousness, not cloud it.
On the other side of cynicism there is an opening wherein our mind ascends into possibilityâwhere we meet the mystical Truth waiting behind our furrowed brow.
Certainly a mass transformation of consciousness is a lofty ask! But maybe it's already here. Maybe the swirling unknowns of our shifting grounds are casting new foundation.
Maybe the question marks of today tomorrow turn to play, where we'll move again with nature in a grand celestial way.
"It was unbelievable," reported Captain Kirk through tears. "Unbelievable."
Maybe it will be aweâthat timeless testimony of infinityâwhich pulls us all back to the center.
Of course for most of us, it is this Earthly ground from which we'll live out the rest of our lives. Tickets to the transcendent are, admittedly, somewhat pricey right now.
But we don't need to travel outside ourselves to catch a hint of this wonder.
Our bodies are 99.999...% empty space, a vacuous universe of electrons circling distant neutrons, the atomized mirror of the planets and moons above us. We are galaxies within galaxies, warmed by the sun as our hearts warm our bodies. In the end, the whole cosmic play is one grand flow from top âto bottom, a divine movement of energy into beauty.
Looking up, we find this great revelation canopying our world in light. Tonight the sky will give way to blackâand then that darkness back to blue, as the past spins into presentâreminding us that we are but marveled passengers launched into some unknowable future.
"Look at the beauty of that color," says Captain Kirk. "It's so thin, and you're through it in an instant."
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Modern life is tug-of-war between the digital world and the natural world. For some of us the pull is the daily news, for others it's Instagram. Perhaps for you it's your inbox or the financial markets or the metaverse or whatever turns you on. Most of us are victim to some covert digidiction (digital-addiction) which tempts our minds into a wormhole of endless satiation.
I have many of these technological hair-triggers, which rip me from the present and drop me into a digital mist of my own choosing. My favorite is certainly YouTube, which offers me mindless relief with the movement of a finger.
Bored? Anxious? Tired? Pissy? There's a remedy for it all! Just open YouTube and Boom!âan hour-long interview with Bob Dylan that I didn't know I needed! Phew!As the video begins, my digital desire is satiated and I can finally tune out of that tactile world around me.
Whether it's on our phone or the TV, this digital datascape offers solace from the real world by proffering us a fake one.
Of late I've dove body-first into Bikram yoga. I leave my phone in the car, turn down the day and enter into a space void of this digital haze permeating so many parts of my life. In Bikram yoga, one embodies 26 postures over the span of 90 minutes in a room heated to 105 degrees. It's basically a super intense stretching session in a sauna. It's as stifling as it sounds, but this roasting is designed to loosen the body and strengthen the mind. And it works!
To maintain this simmering studio, the yoga instructor places an oblong blockade underneath the door to prevent cool air from sneaking into the space. Bikram is one big heat trap.
But occasionally someone sneaks out to refill their water, and as the door swings open a brief wave of crisp air unexpectedly clutches my skin. Ahhhh. đ For just a moment I'm awash with the tender touch of this fresh wind, teasing me with the relief that will reward me beyond the studio doors.
Certainly you've felt the cooling power of an unforeseen breeze on a sweltering summer day. It soothes our senses, calms our minds and refreshes us in a manner more deeply-drawn than anything we find inside a screen.
On such sweltering summer days, I occasionally enjoy a masochistic afternoon run in the peak of the midday humidity. By the time I return home I am of course so blazingly thirsty that a cup of ice water brings bliss to my body and a break to my brain. When we really need itâwhen it is earnedâthere is nothing more nourishing than a simple gulp of water.
I recall my daily jogs up New York's East River wherein, after six sticky miles, I would be so desperate for H2O that I would cast my eyes to the river, and in its sun-gleamed waves I would envision myself becoming a boating captain. Literally, I would begin to believe that my next career move should be to pursue a life at sea. "Water! Water! Water!" I would dream.
Eventually I would arrive back home and violently fill two glasses with ice. The feeling of frosty water kissing my lips, caressing my tongue, and tracing down my throat like a glacier into my stomach is an elation unrivaled inside the air conditioned comforts of our digital day.
Of course, after quenching my thirst, my fisherman dreams would dissolve and I'd trudge back to my computer for "work."
At present I'm sitting on my porch while my dog lays in the front yard basking in the pleasant September sun. A rambunctious pooch unfit for our unfenced yard, Rooh spends most of her days indoors. But like any animalâand that includes humansâ she's most relaxed when given the time to revel in the warm embrace of the midday sun. As it beats against her fur and her body breathes against the grass, I know she is happy. And as the wind streaks against my flesh, I am happy with her.
Later I will inevitably play fetch with her. She will get thirsty and eventually seek the cool air inside, where a refreshing bowl of water awaits her.
Within these delights we find our common rootsâman and beast alikeâwhere we all mutually renew in a ray of sun, in a splash of air, in a swill of water. These simple satisfactions are the reminders of our physical body, our connection to pleasures of Planet Earth.
No matter how thick our digital haze becomes we will always be, firstly, denizens of Nature; faithful servants to those elements which constitute us: Water, Wind and Sun. They weld us, ever so briefly, to the flowing source of Gaia.
For millennia, all living things have enjoyed these sensual rewards. As my phone teases me from the desk beside, I try to hold on to that feeling of what true satiation is.
For eventually, I'll be back on YouTubeâlost in a maze of disembodied mania.
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Hey there! Forgive my hiatus, but I was stirring up something I'm very excited about.
I am thrilled to announce the launch of a new brand I've created:
In the loosest sense, THE PRESENT DIMENSION is a type of lifestyle brand. It's an adaptable agency designed to explore and expand consciousnessâin whatever form that takes.
For instance, this writing series itself is a sort of bloodline to the brand. The ideas we explore here give life and conviction to the ethos of this new company.
Because beyond being just a name, "The Present Dimension" is also a living philosophy which articulates a genuine 'dimension' of our individual and collective reality.
It's what I call a Universal Space.
The Present Dimension: A Universal Space
This Moment is the pinpoint where the past culminates And flips inside out into the future we create. In this present flippening, the world stands still And a whole new Dimension is suddenly revealed. It's that collective magnetism that joins us in breath As we gaze up at the wirewalker dancing over death.
It seeps out in the gleam of a newborn baby's eyes, Or from the pregnant pink of a new day's morning sky. It slides through every Moment, and hides in the mundane, Like the multicolored prism beams from a drop of rain. It's the waterway to Loveâand it resurrects our Inspiration, As a line drifts towards rhyme in divine collaboration.
This Dimension's all around, yet it's always freshly found. Like an inner-diamond dug from our ancient common ground. It may tease us with a twinkle, or arrest us in luster When some strange providence ignites our Sense of Wonder. Each journey finds its road is lit by glints of glory, As cosmic coincidence casts meaning onto our Story.
Put more simply, it's the Feeling of Being Awakeâ To the Beauty that flows from the folds of every day. Whatever makes us feel alive, whatever passions capture us, Whatever flutters of the heart lift us and enrapture us, Any Moment of Awe, or natural human connection Can be a Turnkey to The Present Dimension.
And if we choose to Meet each other in this Center-Place, We'll greet a grander world in a fantasia of embrace. For there's a timeless mystery within this very Moment. And when our eyes are Open, it Shines in â And we Know it. It's breathing air. Its body's there. A Kingdom comes clear: You're Alive. We're Alive. Wake Up! We are here.
This Brand is a wayfinder that gestures towards that â dimension.
Another leg of this brand is apparel. We're beginning with a line of premium tee shirts sourced from an inspiring manufacturer named Known Supply. Known Supply's all about ethical fashion production, and each of their shirts are hand-signed on the tag by whoever crafted it.
And bringing this personal touch into even more immediacy, I've had the shirts embroidered across the chestâby a local artisan here in Ashevilleâwith the phrase Presence is Power.
In a world drowning in Noise, We each have the Choice To rise above the chaos And use Presence as our Voice.
From the original hand-maker to the embroiderer to The Present Dimension, each step of these shirts' creation has been infused with a human touch. And now it's your turn to carry on that spirit.
As you can see, The Present Dimension is many things: Aside from being a brand and a philosophyâthis is also an art project. It's also an experiment in language. It's also, at its most metaphysical, a participatory hologram aimed at drawing a vibrational hyper-space out of the morphic field whichâAh, I digress! More on that one some other time! đ
But at its most personal, The Present Dimension is a prism to shine Life through. What beams out the other end is the wonder within you.
The process of developing this brand has been the most enriching experience. I must thank Nick Gertonson for assisting me with the web side of it allâa more generous friend I could not ask for. And thanks to my loving partner, Molly, who's intuition and support is a well of which I would be parched without.
And as always, thank you for your continued engagement.
Now head on over to ThePresentDimension.com.
I'm so excited.
Joe
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Welcome back to a summery edition of This Present Moment
Preface: June 2021
The Year is born out of winter, and Spring brings it to bloom. Its flowering unfurls into this month of June. Now, Life is everywhere. The Year is finally grown. It's matured into Summer, its splendor fully shown.
As the Earth has opened up, so too have we. Suddenly there's crowds babbling in the streets. Live music's traveling, filling the evening air, Carrying a Normalcy back into our ears.
America's regaining her collective senses. She's stretching out her legs and kneading out the tension. Our faces feel free, our bodies touch when we meet, And the bounding Pulse of Life once again beats.
Summer's here again, and so too are we. We reunite with friends and hug our families. And we all play together, in dreams forevermore, In the sacred common ground of our Great Outdoors.
The Glow of Summer
1.
You Know that Feeling during a Perfect Day of Summer? Where everything around seems to burst with Life and Color. A glimpse out of your window strokes your heart to flutter, And you're seduced to go outside, as if glanced by a lover. This universal invitation of a Perfect Day of Summer Calls forth a world of Strangers to commune with one another. Like everyone has joined in worship of the weather. It is this clever way in which the Earth brings us together.
Sometimes those Summer Days arouse a kind of glow, A joie de vivre which follows everywhere you go. You find you're greeting passersby with genuine Hello's, And sometimes they'll reciprocate as if they too glow, Like they are vibing with you in that Summer Flow. On the specialest of Days this multiplies and grows, Like some secret's got around and everybody Knows. Because everybody senses that vivacious Summer glow.
2.
As an example I recall a certain memory: It was a Perfect Day and I was vibing on that energy. Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, was dancing with activity. I stood amidst a meadow, surrounded by the synchrony Of many little characters in their own little lives, Culture's many dots in a portrait pointillized: A Hipster tickled his Son, a Fat Man pushed through a run, Yogis moved to djembe drums, and a dog basked in the sun.
It was as if The Artist had painted a Perfect Day, Like George Seurat's "Sunday on La Grande Jatte." There's something simply Right about a World at Play, Where the whole Human Drama lifts above the fray. The meadow felt in perfect balance, like fireflies at night Who from a frenzied flurry flash together in one light. Hiding in simplicity is Beauty beyond compare. We almost always miss it, but it's always right there. â
As I took in this Moment, a disabled man came my way. "Developmentally challenged" I think is what we say. He bounced on towards me as elated as can be, Radiating out this innocent giddy. He beamed me a few words: "It's a Beautiful Day!" "Yes it is," I said. And he skipped along his way. It was the tiniest exchange, but the realest connection, To meet him in vibration in that Present Dimension.
At my worst I can get swindled into that illusion That for my wits and intellect I am somehow more "human." This man and me are given different looks by our society. I, with my "intelligence," am privileged to its niceties. He we can't make "sense" of, so we offer him our pity, As if our hard-scrubbed Vanity will keep our conscience pretty. But this charade falls away and the walls come down In that lifting of the lid of the Here and Now.
3.
We all share in this secret, yet we all forget we Know. But on the Best of Days you may feel it start to grow. Rising from the Earth it thus blossoms to bestow A reminding spark of Radiance which sets the world aglow.
There is something sacred in a Perfect Day of Summer, When Man lets luminosity and timeless Beauty govern. It takes hold of his consciousness and Life feels rediscovered, And just for that brief Moment, Paradise is uncovered.
This story took place in a meadow near the southern end of Prospect Park. I've had a number of sublime experiences in this very spot, and I believe there's a special magic there.
An hour after this story occurred I came upon a tribe of Rastamen in a densely forested hill overlooking the field. One of them told me that they protect the spiritual energy of this meadow, ensuring it remains pure. "Good vibes only," he told me.
Until next time, enjoy the magic of Summer.
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You are in a "Reality Tunnel."
Your Reality Tunnel is, most simply, the reality you experience. It's the "real world" which plays out in front of your eyes. Right now, in your Reality Tunnel, you're looking at a screen.
Your Reality Tunnel is also what's inside your head. It's how and what you think: All those beliefs about yourself, about others, and about how the world works. Right now, in your Reality Tunnel, you may be thinking "This sounds interesting!" or "Will this be long?" or "I love Joe!" đ
So in every moment you are viewing life through this "Tunnel." And since you built this Tunnel, you know it quite well. But it wasn't always that way.
When you came out of the womb, your Reality was just an animate playground of dancing shapes and enticing sounds. The world was a symphony of sensations: the patter of rain upon a window, or the ripple of light off a sun-catcher. Each moment felt alive, and this new land to which you'd recently arrived was flowing with boundless possibility. Your mind was supple, your Heart was soft, and you were in total wonder of simply being here.
But of course life began to happen, and that innocence was quickly left behind.
Whirling around you were a carousel of figuresâfamily, friends, teachers and peersâwho pulled you into their Reality Tunnels and left their imprint on yours. Year by year, brick by brick, your Tunnel was created. All your traumas and victories, romances and heartbreaks, favorite bands and fashion faux pasâthey all informed how you've come to understand yourself and your world. Every book, every commercial, every part of your sprawling history helped erect this enclosure that slowly surrounded your entire Being.
And that "new-born bliss," as Wordsworth called it, eventually hardened into an intricate meshwork of beliefs, fears and patterns which now hold you captive in this mini-universe you've created.
Of course, we're all in our own mini-universes, surrounded by a constellation of thoughts, images and memories which cast us as the distinctive individuals that we feel ourselves to be. We are all in our own personal Reality Tunnels.
Today, technology serves to substantiate our own little worlds. Our most ardent convictions are compounded by The News, our world-views are bolstered by an Internet ripe for cherry-picking, and our dogmas are digitally endorsed by an invisible hive mind. Even our entertainment is tailored to serve us exactly what we want to see when we want to see it. All these tools designed to connect us, have instead whipped us into feedback loops of our own design.
Make no mistake, this Modern Network also proffers many benefits that may balance out its dangers. But for all its merits, it is also compelling us to shout louder, harden our opinions, and dig our ballasts ever deeper.
In turn, our culture has become ensnared in a Cycle of Judgement. We think this, they think that. So we hate them, then they hate us. Then we double-down, and so on and so forth as this Vortex of Vitriol spins faster and faster and faster ...
And as the center starts to buckle, the only thing we seem to agree upon is that we can't agree upon anything.
Until we loosen the grips on our certainties, we will remain conscripted in an intractable War between Our Reality and Their's.
Consider Melissa. She is Pro-Life. Through her childhood, a subtle feeling of loneliness permeated even her most joyful moments. When Melissa was 16, her mother revealed to her that two years before she was born, a sibling of hers was aborted. Melissa came to believe that the loneliness of her youth was this empty hole left by a sister she never met.
When she was 21, Melissa came to a spiritual understanding of the world that instilled in her the belief that Consciousness is sacred. To deny its forward flow, she now believes, is no less than the snuffing out of a Miracle. To Melissa, we stand on the shoulders of our mothers, and grandmothers and the hundreds of generations who came before us. So briefly do we get to play our part in this cosmic march. So as our bodies weaken and that distant horizon approaches, the only eternal act of Freedom is to allow NEW LIFE! to unfurl behind us.
This is Melissa's Reality Tunnel.
And now consider Cory. Just before graduating high school, Cory unexpectedly got pregnant. With no familial support system and a scholarship in hand, she made the difficult decision to have an abortion. Had it not been for this decision, she could have never afforded the time nor money to fulfill her lifelong dream of escaping a terribly rocky upbringing.
Years later, with an MBA and a successful business under her belt, Cory feels grateful that she had the option to choose. She maintains that this "choice" must be offered to all women. At the core of our humanity, believes Cory, is the Freedom to pursue the Best Life we envision for ourselves. And thus, the sovereignty to do with our bodies as we desire is a human right inextricable from Freedom itself. No one may usurp that liberty, least of all suited-up men in smoky back rooms.
This is Cory's Reality Tunnel.
Obviously Melissa and Cory hold opposite positions here, but does it make either of them less correct? Or is it that each of us constructs a coherent worldview built on the unique life we've experienced?
Whether it's a hypersensitive hot-wire, like race or gender; a contentious conundrum, like immigration of healthcare; or something as trivial as "The Beatles vs. The Stones," we each feel quite certain that we see the world as it is. And everyone else? They're just a bit mixed up.
(By the way, the correct answer is The Beatles.)
The playwright Aaron Sorkin said that when he writes his villains, he does so as if they're pleading their case to God as to why they should be let into Heaven. Perhaps even those whom we most vilifyâwhose opinions seem to us wrong, ignorant or even hatefulâhave merely had a different life. And what feels true to them doesn't feel true to us.
All of us have our personal "plea to Heaven." It's those convictions that run all the way down to the Soul. Those causes which stir your passions, and those ideas of which you are most sure of.
And yet there are undoubtedly folks who see the exact opposite, who would see you as their villain.
If we could manage to rise above our little Tunnelsâwhich is easier said than doneâwe may look down and witness a multiplicity of contradictory experiences playing out in untold combinations of Nature and Nurture, of which we are one tiny speck. From up there, there is no "right" and "wrong." There is only "different."
The Tao te Ching says: "Not knowing is True Knowledge. Presuming to Know is a Disease."
We only see the smallest slice of what the Universe has to offer. In fact, even our consciousness itselfâthe nature of our awarenessâis far more malleable than we generally realize.
Our brain is a trickster, and it rejects, rejiggers, and revises any evidence that the world is not as we think it to be. That is, if something contradicts our Reality Tunnel, we don't even allow it in.
In his influential book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman examines the many ways in which we are fooled by our mind. "We can be blind to the obvious," says Kahneman. "But we're also blind to our blindness."
At the most basic level, you may be familiar with "confirmation bias," the psychological phenomenon wherein information that validates our beliefs seems to pop out at every turn, and information which challenges what we believe quietly recedes into the background.
Imagine the couple arguing over housework:
"You don't see how much I do!" she says.
"No, you're not seeing what I do!" he says.
Imagine the politicos convinced of the other's dishonesty:
"The proof is right here!" says one.
"I see nothing there!" says the other.
Imagine yourself reading the morning news and, as always, finding exactly the world you expected to find.
"Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense," continues Kahneman, "rests on a secure foundation [of] our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.â
He, and many other psychologists, have unearthed hundreds of cognitive biases which bend the world we perceive to fit what we believe. For instance, there's the "What-You-See-Is-All-There-Is" phenomenon, in which your brain concludes that its minuscule sampling of the world is actually an accurate representation of all the world.
In a study at Stanford, subjects were exposed to different legal cases, and participants who were briefed on only one side of a caseâeven as they were told it was only one sideâwere qualitatively more confident in their Judgement than those who were briefed on both sides. We are more swayed by the coherence of a story, than the completeness of the story.
Or the "affect heuristic," as another example, shores up beliefs about the world based on our likes and dislikes. For instance, if I love red meat, I will find the benefits of eating red meat. Conversely, if red meat's not my thing, I will find the risks of eating it. We are wired endlessly with these kinds of self-fulfilling mind-warps.
There are thousands of ways in which, as Kahneman concludes, "the world makes much less sense than we think." We are embroiled in an "illusion of understanding." In fact, even our memory itself has been proven time and again to be flimsy and unreliable. What we think, how we see the world, and who we understand ourselves to be is subject to many devious distortions.
And it gets even weirder. The very fabric of our physical world appears to be strangely pliable as well.
Subjects of hypnosis, for instance, tune into alternate channels of awareness in which they see, hear, or remember things that are foreign to their ordinary Reality Tunnel. As easy it may be to write this off as "delusion" and go on our happy way, we can not just dismiss these peculiar phenomena as hypnotic fantasies. They point us towards the important fact that we are, in profound ways, highly impressionable.
In a fascinating experiment chronicled by Michael Talbot, a hypnotist placed a man into a trance and told him that when he came to, his daughterâwho was sitting three feet awayâwould be invisible to him. When this man was brought out of his trance, he was indeed unable to see his daughter right in front of him. To confirm this was not a trick, the hypnotist covertly placed a small wristwatch against the back of the daughter (who was facing her father and thus blocking the watch). Not only was this man able to identify the object "through" his daughter's body, but he also read off the time!
For some of you, this may test the boundaries of your Reality Tunnel. That's just impossible! Right now you're scanning your Rationality Database for an explanation: Maybe the hypnotist was in on it? Maybe it was a lucky guess! Maybe Joe made this up! ...
Maybe. But a foray into the field of hypnosis yields a bounty of similar experiments which support this very factâthat the world we see can be manipulated in mystifying ways.
In another famous exemplar of mind-over-matter, German doctor Bruno Klopfer was treating a man named Wright who was long into a struggle with lymphoma. His entire body was riddled with sizable tumors, and his spleen and liver were so swollen with fluids that they had to be drained daily.
But luckily for Wright, an experimental new drug called Krebiozen emerged and he was eager to get his hands on it. Dr. Klopfer secured a small sample and they excitedly began treatment. Within just three days, Wright's tumors shockingly shrunk to almost nothing. And within 10 days, he was astonishingly cancer free and left the hospital!
He lived healthily for two months, until he discovered a small study that had recently found Krebiozen to be ineffective. This confused Wright, who descended into doubt over his miraculous recovery, and almost immediately he relapsed and the tumors returned.
Dr. Klopfer then decided to run a little experiment. He convinced Wright that this study mistakenly used a tainted sampling of the drug, and that Krebiozen was perfectly effective. The doctor then re-administered a highly potent round of the drug, but this time around, the "drug" that Klopfer administered was actually a placebo of water.
Yet again Wright recovered, believing that a miracle drug was curing his cancer.
Some months later, a larger report by the American Medical Association concluded, once and for all, that Krebiozen had zero effect on lymphoma. And again, Wright sunk back into illness and with nothing left to believe in, passed away.
In recent years, there's been mountains of growing research into this "placebo effect," and it is becoming evident that what we believe has outsized influence upon the world we're inhabiting. Throughout the fields of parapsychology, neurology, and even medicine, it increasingly appears that consciousnessâor how we experience the worldâreflexively modifies itself based on our preconceived notions. Or more simply: We may be creating our very Reality as we go.
It seems that the further we investigate our own Tunnels, the greater our questions become.
As Socrates said, "the more we know, the more we realize we know nothing."
Given more time, we could unpack these mysteries further, and proceed into the subatomic realm of quantum physics, wherein we may find some explanations for these "spooky" phenomena. As is now understood at the frontier of this field, the concrete world that provides the bedrock to our Realityâthe very ground we walk uponâreveals itself to be little more than an illusion.
It is here, at the nexus point of all our various philosophies, religions, sciences and mathematics, that we arrive a simple Truth, articulated 17 centuries ago by the Chinese philosopher Chuang-tzu:
"Things are the way they are, because we think they're that way. Good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, they conform to the way we see them. ... Let go of all your assumptions and the world will make perfect sense."
As we zoom out higher and higher above our little Reality Tunnel, the only fact that seems certain is that we can't be certain of anything.
So then where does this all leave us?
None of this suggests that our opinions, our beliefs and our emotions are invalid. For all its imperfections, our mind guides us through life. And our Heartâin its silent wisdomâpoints us towards happiness. To grasp the limits of your own Reality Tunnel is not to abandon what you think and who you are, but to expand it. To awaken to what is possible. To widen what this life can be.
Whether it's a piece of art, an illuminating conversation, or an unbidden act of kindness, the Human Experiment is to connect across Reality Tunnelsânot to coerce others into ours.
For we are but leaves on a tree, each of us different in size and hue. And it is only in our connection to this Tree, to the distant branches, to the unseen roots, and to the ever-nourishing Sun above, that we are actually all alive as one.
And as the wind blows across us, the only thing we can know for certain is that we are here.
Only here, in This Present Moment, may we catch a glimpse of Real Realityâwhere our mind is suddenly innocent again, like it was so long ago, when the world was new and anything was possible. Back when all we could do was wonder: What is all this?
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Welcome back to This Present Moment. It's been wonderful connecting with many of you through the first issueâand as always, feel free to shoot me any thoughts.
Now, today's piece rhymes. And it's about a time When Beyoncé's world and mine became oddly intertwined. And I became confined to the clamors of my mind.
And now that you're primed ...
I.
There lies a Wilderness of Noise, overgrown and tangled. The daily din of cracks and drones which interweave and mangle. It hollers from our TV sets and grips us from the Web. It rips from us our silence, and rings out through our heads. It's the blare of The Biggest Story! from the glare of The Newest Screen. This racket deafens us to Wisdom and stirs us from our Dreams.
The Noise, you see, it seizes us. We're cast under its spell, Luring us against our will into the woods in which it dwells, Eventually we call it Homeâthe Noise becomes the norm. Around then the thunder starts. We're battered by this Storm! This Noise scrambles our compass, and we lose all direction, Rambling evermore into this dense dimension.
Bewitched by our desires and how we must be seenâ More money! More Things! More Likes! More Me!âWe reach for some prestige! Our Thoughts battle our Hearts, and we're stuck in between. This Wilderness turns dizzying, the Noise twists into screams. Don't! Don't! Don't! the culture wars. Do that and you'll sink! Don't! Don't! Don't! your ego scorns. What will they all think?!
The babbling of our brains, here, protests every whim, As a mad world howls at usâfrom outside our minds and in. Crippled by this mania, we wrestle every choice. Which way now? we ask confused, searching for that Voice. Muted under all this Noise, we feel its gentle cry, The "quiet desperation" as life is slipping by.
I've lived inside this Wilderness. Perhaps you may have been? Reality there's a prickly place. The game is, above all: Win! You choose a role, and learn it well, and then you run a race. A Contest for Status, or Who Has The Prettiest Face, Or Attention, or Wealth, or Wit. Just focus on your chase! Keep sprinting towards the future. When you get there you'll be safe.
Now this is all just nonsense. You know that's not the plot. Your story is much more than this, you feel that in your gut. That just beyond this WildernessâThere are Open Seas. Of Clarity. Of Mystery. Of Possibilities. At times we may dispel that hex, and clear the noxious Noise, To surf those effervescent waves some call our "inner-voice."
I'll tell you how I've been helped in finding Open Sea, In navigating through the Noise and learning to be free. But I am just one Average Joe. "Learning" here is key. I'm purely aiming to explore and see where that takes me. And, yes, that Land does jerk me back, too often and too fast. The Noise is always ticking, ticking, ticking from my past.
But in This Present Moment, I write you earnestly From a space of opennessâthat space we truly meet. My stories are a-plenty and we haven't time to share All the minute little tales that bring this Truth to bear. So one short bit will have to do, and I hope that it shines through That if we Listen to our Truth, our world is made anew.
II.
Years ago, as a scrappy kid, I somehow landed in this gig Working for Beyoncé.
I was pretty unqualified, But I was bright and down to grind. So I got to stay with Beyoncé.
My life got turnt before my eyes, And a slick, new phrase came to reprise: "I work for Beyoncé."
Around the world I went and back, As this vogue lifestyle came to pass. My identity became "Beyoncé."
Artists were all around within her vast Creative Teamâ An ecosystem of geniuses driven just like she. It was tirelessly demanding, but the work was so unique. Its reach was outstanding, and it honed my technique. I got to watch her Manifest, saw her flesh out instinct. And saw the stunning power that forges her mystique.
Plus, girls thought it was dope that I was with Bey. And that badge means you're cool in NYC. And I thought it was dope that I knew Jay-Z. That st means I'm cool to me!
It was an era which emerged so unexpectedly, Into this fertile stretch of dazzling opportunity.
I can't complain, I know. But in time something shifted. And I became unsettled by this job I had been gifted. Maybe it was the endless hours, staring at screens for days? Maybe the Actor In Me sought a different kind of stage? I just don't think I cared enough to sacrifice my Beingâ Even for a visionary, even for the Queen.
So the thrill began to fray. I gotta get out. Beneath my breath this mantra played: I gotta get out. It looped throughout my every day. I gotta get out. And loomed behind the digital haze. I gotta get out.
But I got paid. And so I stayed. I stayed for the cool stuff I made. Such as, I worked on Lemonade. I stayed for all the accolades. I stayed because who wouldn't stay? But really I stayed because I was afraid.
You see, giving up salary at the "coolest job around," To almost everyone looked insurmountably unsound. By any normal standard, I was winning at the game. I'd always wanted stardom, and now I was six feet from fame. More Money! More Likes! More Me! There was no bigger place to be Than in Beyoncé's crew at the age of 23.
It was an addiction, impossible to drop. The Noise roared BeyoncĂ©âand I couldn't get it to stop. Sucked into a vortex of my own desires, The Ego was loving it, but I felt like a liar. Drawn into that Wilderness, cast under its spell, Nothing mattered anymore. And that seemed just as well.
The weeks became mechanical, and nothing felt real. Years were sliding by, as I ignored my Heart's appeals. I knew it in my gut: I gotta get out. But that there threatened The Ego, so he muzzled all those doubts. And as is wont to happen when we muffle our Flow, The pilot light began to dim and living lost its glow.
A friend back then said "I'm so happy." In some misplaced zeal I retorted: "I don't think that happiness is real." I recall another talk with my Mom and Dad: "I feel dead inside," I vented. Why was I so mad? Of course this wretchedness went deeper than a job. I had nothing under me. No meaning, no god.
Dust to dust, and nothing more. Just running that race. It drained me of my courage to take a leap of faith. That mortality within us fears all Unknowns. Yet that's the only place where we genuinely grow. So I could not move forward, because I became weak. As I was now a prisoner of my own ennui.
Now, I get this was no Tragedy! It's not like someone died. I wasn't under some duress, or working in the mines! (Charge me with my "Privilege!"âand that may well be true. I'm grateful for what I was offered. That I assure you.) But sometimes suffering slithers from behind; It slinks in quietly and hides within the grind.
At some point it bites everyone. No matter who or why. Pain can not be measured, though it seems we try. It's reduced into metrics, and split down party lines. I have it worse than you! squawks our tribal whines. We weaponize our agony and obscure our Design: Love is to Realize we're all One Big Mind.
III.
We were doing a show in Vegas, and I was burnt out to the max. It was 18 hour days for months, and I was desperate to relax. I lurched to my hotel room, and got pinged to come back to work. It was midnight. On a Friday. And I legitimately went berserk. Fk this st. I'm so tired. Fk it all to Hell. I looked at myself in the mirror and erupted with this yell:
A PRIMAL SCREAM OF ANGER FROM THAT WILDERNESS. A VOLCANIC CRY OF DANGER FROM DEEP IN THAT ABYSS, WHERE SOULS HAVE LOST THEIR NATURE AND ARE BURNING TO A CRISP.
And in the mirrorâin crimson faceâI think I saw a stranger. This rupture snaked around my mind and left it with a hiss ...
The fever of this breakdown kept me in a shiver. When I got back to New York, I walked to the East River. The moon refracted off the waves in that sparkling way Where every burst of glitter is some secret kept at bay. I was not a man of Spirit then. An atheist, in fact. But that night I asked for a Sign, and I made a pact:
"I'll change my life. I will. But I just feel so trapped. I'm in this hard reality and don't know my way back. The Self Who Stands Above Me knows this is not my Path But Little Me can't take the Risk. I need more faith to Act. I don't know what's Beyond me, but it seems I have to Ask: Send a Sign that says: "Go forth. This fear shall pass.""Ask and it shall be given. Seek and ye shall find." The next morning I awoke to a text cosmically timed: "Hey Joe! It's John" (A college friend.) "You just popped to mind. I work for Bravo! now doing video and design. We've got months of overflowing work: Do you have any time?" *Whoa! An open door ... I asked and here's the sign ...
Bravo, indeed! I thought. A wondrous magic trick!* Well, now I had no choice. I had to act on it. I stayed in that vibration and rode it to the office. Holding that conviction, I gathered up my bosses. "Thank you for it all," I said. "And sorry I've been grumpy. I think I need to leave. I don't like who I'm becoming."
And that was that. So simple. It felt like almost nothing. It almost turned this melodrama into something funny!
I headed home at rush hour, and I just started running Through packed Manhattan sidewalks. My Spirit was buzzing. I must have seemed a lunatic, weaving through the passersby. It was that unbridled vigor of finally feeling Alive. For 30 blocks I ran. I'd rarely felt so free. I had escaped my Wilderness and was setting out to Sea.
I know this seems theatrical. I was just quitting a job. But looking back on it, this is what it wrought. I played victim to my limiting beliefs That I was powerless against the plague of my own grief. And in that extra push from past The Great Divide I began to Realize the universe is on our side.
IV.
Life unfolded afterwards in many glimmering ways. Reality rewards us after diving into change. Curveballs, decisions, and hard times never cease. But there are these messages that shepherd us to peace. They're whispering beneath the Noise, guiding our way out: That electric spark of joy or a knowing sense of doubt.
In the years to come, I've Listened for these signs. Sometimes it's just a dash of bliss which teases more to find. Or perhaps it's stranger, like a call perfectly timed. The webwork of reality seems weirdly intertwined ... Call them odd coincidences or call them divine, There are White Rabbits everywhere, even in this rhyme.
Maybe that's the real game: We simply have to Listen. Easier said than done, I knowâsensing intuition. In hindsight, though, we tend to say "I sensed something was off." So it follows that right now it's possibleâsomewhereâwe're lost ... Perhaps we're always being Signaled to that Open Sea. But we can't hear beneath that Noise that's hexed us devilishly.
We get trapped in Wildernessâthat scraping in our head, Those painful thoughts that we avoid, that sprout up into dread. And the world becomes that prickly place where everything is sharp, Shrieking in anxiety and splitting us apart. And the things that scare us most are what we most lack. For as Jung said: "Where your fear isâthere's your task."
Our Task is never easy. But we each have the choice To Listenâbeyond the Wilderness of Noiseâ To that song that plays outside of time and space. A melody that carries us beyond this mortal chase. It sings through the Universe in quiet chimes of grace. That mysterious compass that we may as well call Faith.
The feeling that Something knows who you're supposed to be. Even before you know it. Before even you can see. That Voice that tracks ahead of us, singing "Wake Up! We are free." It surfs the open waters laughing playfully. Life glistens when you listenâso tune yourself to thee, Which know which way the wind blows and directs you out to Sea.
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Welcome to This Present Moment.
What follows is the first in a series of semimonthly writings. In the coming weeks I will share emails on life, philosophy, consciousness and whatever else electrifies me. What this will blossom into, I do not know. It is an experiment in connection, and I invite you to meet me here. If you'd like to be kept abreast, subscribe below for new volumes at least twice a month.
To move into This Present Moment, let's first look backward.
It's almost cute how we compartmentalize our life into eras. We see our history as little chapters that comprise the Story of Our Life.It's portioned out into sub-narratives, like "My Summer Abroad," or "Middle School: The Weird Years,"or "Grandma's Final Days."
We also have collective eras, culturally agreed upon and enshrined in history books. "The Victorian Era." "Pre-9/11." And now, "COVID."
In the centuries to come, those early months of 2020 will be the pivot in which the 21st century turns. And as with many of us, it is also a fulcrum in which my life turned.
In February 2020 I snuffed out the last remnants of my bachelor life and said goodbye to the East Village. I whittled down my belongings to three boxes, moved into my girlfriend's uptown apartment, and she immediately got me hooked on La Croix. I am now a convert.
But moments after I moved in, the world moved away.
New York drifted into silence
The nation held its breath.
And we all became friendly with the unknown.
The Observer In Me found this curiously engrossing. Tragic, absolutely, but it was also a time bursting with novelty. If you recall, this domestic drama premiered in New York City. It was quite the production. There was the now-mired press briefings by Andrew Cuomo, the banging of pots for healthcare workers, and, of course, a deus-ex-machina: The USNS Comfort. That Navy darling sat emptily one block from my apartment, greeting me during mornings runs. "May you live in interesting times." Well, what's more interesting than jogging through a totally empty Times Square like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky?
And as if reality wasn't shifting fast enough, we decided to get a puppy. Rooh surged into our life with boundless vigor. At once a firecracker and a love-bug, she's tested me where I'm weak and softened me where I'm hard. And in turn, she has become one of my greatest teachers. As rascalous as she is, I marvel at how I've come to love her.
Animals are bizarre beings. On one hand, they're in some foreign world that shirks any resemblance to the mind of man. And yet, we draw our eyes to theirs and we connect. In that instant we know each other, and we see them as if they were us. That collective spaceâthe union of mindâis what this present moment is really about. Somewhere behind the clatter of our daily thoughts we have a deeper seat of awareness, a point of stillness.
Our minds have been affected by this virus more than our bodies. In the fog of lockdown, one was left with an inescapably close-up look at their life. It slowed our motion, held up a mirror, and asked Do you like what you see?
In the mornings I would sit on a thin, grassy parkway on the Hudson River. This slice of "nature" became my center of gravity, my tether to the natural world. Lying in Shavasana, I would listen to the birds sing. They didn't seem worried about anythingâjust another day in the steady spin of time. The dawn sun would bathe my body, and I felt clean. What nourishment even the briefest ray of light offers us in otherwise dark times. "So shines a good deed in a weary world."
My years in New York were buoyed by these daily trips to the park. Mini-eras marked by mini-plots of grass. Astoria Park. Central Park. Washington Square. With every new apartment came a new spot to commune with the Sun. Tompkins. East River. Riverside. Prospect. They were lifelines carrying me through the different islands of my 20's.
But through the looking-glass of lockdown, these meager patches of Earth suddenly seemed insufficient. Where was there room for growth?
And thus the closing words were written for "The Most Exciting Decade of My Life." Nothing will match the youthful jubilance of those New York yearsâa kinetic voyage of self-discovery that will forever be lodged in my heart. What a gift it was to come of age in the Greatest City in the World, to ride its waves to the shores of who I am.
But it was time to traverse new lands. Molly and I condensed our few belongings into storage, bought a car, and with little Rooh took to America to find a home.
The first stop was Molly's hometown of Carlisle, Ohio, a bastion of middle America, and a counterpoint to the high pitch of New York. Molly's folks inhabit an old haunted house where I spent my free time writing what amounted to a garage-philosophy theory of everything. Our month-long stopover was a gentle respite of relaxation, contemplation, and, as always, work.
For the prior two years I had been a filmmaker at Google's Creative Lab. Gripes abound at Big Tech these days, and I could levy plenty of grievances over the perils of modern technologyâcorporate and otherwise. But my experience there was fantastic, and the Creative Lab is good people trying to do good things with a good company. Plus, the work was stimulatingâcrescendoing, for instance, in a Super Bowl spot of which I am proud.
I was at the end of my contractâand at the end of my willpower to gaze into a Macbook all day. I bid Google adieu and, for the first time in my life, began turning down work. I was simply going to live.
Thus began one of the most glorious chapters of my life.
First we dropped by Chicago to see my folks, and then sojourned at Molly's sister's in Oklahoma City (a surprisingly hip place). Then we drove west to Colorado and nabbed an AirBNB in the mountains, nestled between Boulder and a crusty, hippie town named Nederland. The mammoth beauty of it all lifted me up, and I was Rocky Mountain High. The vastness of the mountains. The totemic serenity of the trees. The notes of pine in the morning air. It felt magical, and my spirit was ignited.
We descended Colorado by way of a small mountain town named Crestone, population 86. Crestone is a bracingly unique spot in the San Luis Valley, flanked by dozens of Zen retreat centers, the Sand Dunes National Park, and my favorite: a UFO watchtower. (My visit offered no sightings ... But aliens are real. More on that some other time.đ )
We drove down through Taos and Santa Fe, catching their vibes, going on hikes, and learning the rhythms of this more transient lifestyle. I finally began to free of the workaday constraints which plagued those deeper intuitionsâsome of which gave birth to this very essay you read.
Navajo Nation. Flagstaff. The Grand Canyon.
I read. I wrote. I ran.
It was era, after era, after era. Each location unfurled into its own riveting narrative. Each week felt like a mini-lifetime of mysteries and discoveries. I was captured one particular week by the mystique of a border town named Bisbee, a quirky and colorful jewel hidden in the deserts of Arizona.
Thereafter, Molly, Rooh and myself tracked north. Palm Springs. Joshua Tree. Los Angeles. And San Francisco, where my sister was to be wed.
Against the backdrop of a sprawling Sonoma vineyard, I had the privilege of officiating what was, against all odds, the perfect ceremony. After postponing her wedding and then thinning it down to only immediate family, Jenny and Brian translated what was originally a bombastic jubilee into an intimate, gorgeous weekend shared between two families. To be with parents and siblings during these times, in celebration of Love, eclipsed the if-onlys of whatever that wedding was "supposed" to be.
In October we started heading back East and spent an amazing week in Park City. Like Colorado, I just was taken by the magnificence. "America the Beautiful." Whether it be those autumnal mosaics that blanketed Utah, the roving cliffs of Big Sur, or the humble cornfields of Ohio, I was constantly under the spell of Mother Earth. Our nation spent much of last year inflaming its other side. But outside the radioactive reaches of that noise, this land was silently shining its glory upon us.
As the days turned colder, we pit-stopped back in Oklahoma City. Our Subaru had clocked 10,000 miles. Rooh was now full grown (and still in training). Molly and I were closer than ever (and also still in training). I played guitar. Molly did yoga. Life was just, kinda, normal for a second. And then shortly before Christmas we embarked upon what was the most peculiar adventure of it all.
In most cities, we stayed at either a friend's or an AirBNB. However, on a whim I found a work-trade program at a farm in Virginia (via WOOF, the Worldwide Organization of Organic Farmers). It was an herbal tea farm run by a swami, or a Hindu priest. And it was unusual.
Upon arrival, the mood was thick. The old farm was in grave disrepair. The fields had long been barren. And the priest was a mantra-chanting ascetic whoâdespite plotting his life by the strictest doctrines of Hinduismâchain-smoked cigarettes and was seeking an open-carry permit. A priest with a handgun. Paradoxes galore!
There was a darkness there. Strange devotees would eat up the "guru"'s words, even as his mutterings distorted into negativity and fear. This was a white Hindu in the heart of Trumpland helming a defunct spiritual center teetering on the edge of foreclosure. But of course, these curiosities tantalized The Observer In Me. What a ripe scene.
It would be easy to just write it all off, but this was not a bad man. He was earnestly trying to figure out his way just like the rest of us. And he was kind. The intersection of spirituality and ego is a murky crossroads, out of which the direction is not always visible.
I also learned a lot there. I swung an axe all day. I came to love spicy food (the Swami was also an Ayurvedic chef, and his cooking was fantastic). And I met an 18 year-old girl from Philadelphiaâalso staying at the farmâwhose self-awareness and maturity gave me hope for future generations.
By necessity we cast off that farm andâseeking a nearby substituteâfound a different place just outside of Asheville, North Carolina. This new spot, a farm at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was the mirror image of where we had just come. Eerily similar in layout, but totally opposite in energy. Run by two hearty lesbians, this majestic property was pulsing with love. Horses and chickens and goats rambled around the premises. The evening we arrived we were welcomed by a bonfire, and as the night unfolded, the aura just felt perfect. It was as if I was touched by the Hidden Hand: This is where you are supposed to be.
Upon arriving back at our cabin, Molly and I shared a joyous hug. My journal from that evening read:
"I just had the most beautiful experience.
I found home.
What riches, what joy."
There it was! So unexpected and yet so organic. Such is the trickery of life.
The farm sat at the bottom of Mount Mitchell, and daily I would walk its trails. The roving rivers, the mushy moss, and the pink-brushed sunsets were out of a Taoist dream. I was enchanted. At night the moon would shine down like a floodlight from the heavens, and I'd look up and think I just spent a decade where I couldn't see the stars.
We also got to know the city of Asheville itself, which resonated with the same allure as the outskirts in which we were living. Three weeks ago we rented our own place in the city, furnished it, and are now laying the roots for a new life.
Which brings us to This Present Moment.
It is through the unknown in which life unfolds. "The only way to make sense out of change," as Alan Watts said, "is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance." I feel such wonder towards that unknown, and such excitement for wherever it carries me next. After the many mini-eras of this last year, I now stand at the frontier of another. The future is always an era waiting to be writtenâand what a joy it is that we get to dance in the cosmic mystery of it all.
What a time to be alive.
Joe
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