Put a Smile on Your Face


This should be our theme song! It reminds me of The Humanifesto! I can’t believe I never noticed it before : P
Old song but the message has never been more true : )

LOVE!
SF Jenni

In Mind, in Body, in Space: Following up on the Sacred

A comment from Jackson on my last post, regarding creating sacred spaces in everyday life:

This is fantastic, Drake! The question I ask myself is: How big can I make my sacred space?

Can it be bigger than a room? Could it be the whole house? Could it be the whole street? Could it be the planet itself? Could I stretch out really far and contain the entirety of the Universe within my sacred space?
If I did that, I would reside within my sacred space forever.

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A reply, in three parts:
I. IMAGINATION EXPERIMENTS
You are in your backyard, an open winter’s plain, with a camera in hand, and a spindly birch stands alone before you. A sparrow flies to a far branch and begins to tweet, and you turn your head to the stimuli. The angle of vision shifts. Light and shadow form a new composition. “Snap” goes the shutter.
It’s the high summer. You are lying in bed, looking out the window to the same tree. Feeling hot, you switch on the fan above you. You look again at the cedar, now full and green. Coolness on your face brings your attention back to the fan. You look up, and follow one blade’s spin, slowing its orbit with your concentration.
That fall, standing in line at the grocery store, you are a bit bored. You need to get home, and the fluorescent lights give you a headache. Your jaw tightens. The cashier is taking too long, and the little kids up anew spots ahead are getting annoying.
Or, rather, you catch yourself growing annoyed, blink well, and exhale. You breathe down into your soles, let your arches rest, and feel the ground beneath your toes. Frustration melts into relaxation, and the environment shifts: the lights illuminate, the cashier is thorough, and the children’s whimsy delightful.
Light and shadow recompose. The blade slows.
A smile alights on the corners of your mouth.

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II. PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONFESSIONAL 
When I was a boy, I played lots of video games. I remember, in my early illiteracy, begging my sister to read to me the text of RPGs. As with many of my ilk, the screen, I think, shaped the way that I relate to myself.
I remember standing in front of the bathroom mirror, one of those places of childhood epiphany, and touching my face, thinking, “this is my body, this is the one I get.” I had, through the analogy of SEGA, thought of my body as something I was “playing,” the character given for this life.
Using myself as an example, I tend to identify with the witnessing screen of my consciousness, rather than this body, as me. And, contrarily, I tend to see others as their bodies; it takes consideration to realize that in this other collection of parts lives a consciousness, with a history of breakups and best friends and ice cream preferences. Unexamined, I harbor a frayed mind/body dualism: I am only my mind, they are only their bodies.
Descartes would suggest that this consciousness and this body are running parallel to one another, and do not intersect. This seems silly, as this mind and this body are constantly interacting. When I hit my head on something, consciousness knows it too.
Going back to childhood, the screen conditioned me into a mediated identity. There was the subject, consciousness, and the object, the body, which have a mysterious degree of separation. We often talk of “having” a body, but rarely of “being” a body. Perhaps this is a reason that so many, including myself, tend to neglect, or even harm, our bodies, which are somehow so far away. But it is in the body that the consciousness is in the world. Rather than being mutually exclusive, mind and body are mutually inclusive.
Our bodies are constantly communicating with us. “Listen to your body, listen to your body.” But what is it saying, and how do I listen? Most obvious is “HUNGRY” and “SLEEPY!” but what are the less obvious elements, the tension in the shoulders, the pull in the hamstrings, saying to us?
A teacher once told me that all body tension is emotional. And with meditation and yoga my incredulity had eroded. It seems that it is a sensitivity to these feelings that is needed to udnrstand them. It is a though my body is a class of students, and each part wants to be called on to say what happened over the weekend. That tension, or that peace, radiates in consciousness, and out into our surroundings. The mind is manifest in the body, the body manifest in the mind.

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Relationship is everywhere, and everywhere we are shown ourselves. The other reveals us … The whole always throws the parts into relationship, polishing the mirrors. What we see happening in the external drama we can be sure is part of ourselves. It is said that a cow walked across the entire city of Baghdad and saw only some hay that had fallen off a wagon. Likewise, some people travel all around the world and report back that everyone tried to cheat them.
Coleman Barks’s commentary, The Essential Rumi.
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III. CONSCIOUSNESS AND ENVIRONMENT

When first laying eyes on the Himalayas, or Monet’s <em> Water Lillies </em>>, one may emit a soft “ah,” a soft vocalization of placid awe. This awe extinguishes anxiety, and the conscious mind rests on the beauty it beholds. Correspondingly, the body relaxes and releases. For a moment, the “I” and its projected barriers are gone, and consciousness is unseparated from its environment. The lover dissolves into the beloved, and this is, to me, the essence of sacred experience.
What is important to keep in mind is that consciousness does not exist somewhere else; the phenomena we experience through our senses are not behind a screen, the mind is not mediated. The state of consciousness is reflected in the body’s posture and movement, the tension of muscles and joints, in the tone of voice, in the feeling communicated by physical touch. As well, the state of consciousness frames, or perhaps even defines, what one takes away from a particular location.
Christianity and Buddhism agree that the body is a temple. The body exudes its consciousness, and if one makes safe refuge within one’s body, the way that the druid feels in Stonehenge, or the francophile in Montmartre, the sacred space of the mind expands, and the peace of that consciousness acts as a temple blessing to all those that interact with it.
Last summer in Dharamsala I received a teaching from the Dalai Lama, and walking from his throne to his car, he turned to his right and, for the briefest of moments, His Holiness connected eyes with me, and I froze in elation; all my ideas my ideas fell down, and he turned back to his path, and I cooed and clapped in a fit of Lama-induced love-hysterics.
What is the well-spring of said swoon? How is it that His Holiness radiates radical peace, through the medium of air into me? I do not know, but I sense that in that lustrous mind of his is a calm ocean, and that serenity of consciousness is manifest in the body.
In loving, we train ourselves to love more. In perceiving the beauty of the world, we make ourselves more vulnerable to seeing the beauty that is inside us. By stepping into the quiet beauty within consciousness, and gain an appreciation for this foundation of living, we in turn open our aesthetic aperture. In the calm abiding of sensing beauty in the “screen” of consciousness, one begins to appreciate the beauty of the body. This threefold sensitivity to beauty, at the seat of consciousness, as part of the body, and within space, creates a sustainable, positive, psychological ecology, transcendent of “everywhere.”
A SuperForest.
Love,
Drake

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Heather’s Journal: A Transformational Quote

This quote is helping me transform my life from the inside out:

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change” – Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

What quotes are helping you transform your lives, SuperForesters? 

Death of a Family Member, SOPA/PIPA, and my Chapstick.

Hopefully the death of those bills, anyway! Good work to all who participated in the protests, wrote in, or called representatives. We moved the number of reps needed to repeal the bill from merely 5 to 35. Thirty-five! How rocking!

And yes, I lost my chapstick. Again.

 

In more somber news, I come to you, SuperForest, to announce the world lost the best kitten in history, our family pet Willow.

She was a gorgeous black Persian, dying at only 12 months old.

Our family believed her to be the reincarnation of me and my sister’s deceased mother. It’s been a very difficult 2012 for us already, but this tops it so far.

I would greatly appreciate prayer and good energy sent to my sister about this. She is incredibly inconsolably devastated. Do what you can.

In addition to that, we can’t afford to cremate her or get proper service for her. It’s not too much, but it’s more than we can really cough up at the moment. I’m going to put a link to my Tumblr on this post. If you can, please use the PayPal button to donate towards her funeral services. This means a hell of a lot to me, and I’d love to explain but…Some other time, perhaps.

 

Thank you to anybody who does their part in my personal time of need. It’s incredibly righteous of all of you, and I hope at the very least, your 2012s are going better!

I also apologize if I bummed anybody out, I don’t mean to be so negative. Her passing was indeed peaceful, and she had a good life.

Cheers to all, SF!

Jackson’s Journal – What I Want

What I want:

I want my entire ohana happy and healthy.
I want a piece of land to build a church, a home, and raise a family.
I want to make the world a better place.
I want to build and fly around the world in an airship.
I want to inspire others to inspire others.

I want to learn to write computer code.
I want to swim with great white sharks.
I want SuperForest to be the most popular website on the net.
I want to fish.

I want to live part of the year in Japan.
I want hot springs.
I want hot water.
I want cold water.

I want to improve the soil wherever I go.
I want to leave gardens in my wake.
I want  to garden with my friends.
I want earthworms.
Thank you.

Robert Anton Wilson on Censorship and Intelligence

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Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies, etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.”

-Robert Anton Wilson

Defrag your hard drives, SuperForesters. Locate, and replace any source code stopping you from engaging your full intelligence.

Any judgment of any kind is hampering your growth and expression.

Read the RAW wiki.

via boingboing

Will Allen: The Urban Farmer

Will Allen: The Urban Farmer from Spark Project on Vimeo.

“Eating good food and bringing people together. People forget about all their differences. Food is the one thing that binds us together…”

-Will Allen

Ten OTHER Things Martin Luther King Said

Here’s some words of wisdom to brighten your day.

Happy belated MLK day!

Oh, the Places You’ll Go at Burning Man!

This video comes to us from Burning Man and Dr.Seuss.

Trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind.

- The Official Burning Man Website: http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/

I really want to go to Burning Man one day. It looks epic. And I am inspired : )

5-minute timelapse roadtrip around America

America, how wonderfully diverse in terrain you are.

CNN’s Freedom Project

We superforesters are huge advocates for the fight against modern day slavery.  We’ve written numerous posts, spoken with authors and abolitionists, attended the Freedom Awards, sponsored by our friends at Free The Slaves (if you haven’t please check out he amazing work they are doing). One of the greatest advocates in bringing awareness and progress to this movement is CNN’s freedom project, which since it’s launch in March of 2011 has inspired thousands of individuals and organizations to get proactive right now.

Recently they reported on an amazing event held in Atlanta, Georgia in which over 42,000 faith-based college students gathered to hold a candlelight vigil in whcih they raised over 2.6 million dollars to end modern slavery.  Yes you heard correct, 2.6 million!  What an incredibly hopeful and inspiring message of community gathering to raise light to the darkness and engender change.

You can read the CNN report here: http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/05/college-kids-vow-to-end-slavery/

How To Stay Cold and Flu Free Forever!

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Gooood Morning Lovely SuperForest!

Since reading the book A Course in Miracles, I’ve been paying special attention to my body. My body, which I have happily ignored and reviled for years, has recently become a friend. A companion. A nice lil’ playmate.

So when my nice lil’ friend got a cold, I was keenly interested in what exactly was happening to it while I was “having a cold.” A Course in Miracles says that sickness is impossible if you are connected with love and eternity, so when I woke up with the sniffles, feeling congested and slow, I thought to myself: Great! Here’s a chance for the book to work.

Then I had to remember that the book did nothing in itself, that I myself was in charge. According to ACIM the sole reason that I was “sick” was that my mind was attacking my body. To cure the sickness, I had to identify which idea my mind was attacking my body with, an idea that my ego was desperately trying to hide from my loving attention. To accomplish this, I had to slow down and listen to myself.

The feeling of “having a cold” I quantified thusly:

Feelings of tension and tightness in my neck area, specifically where my head and neck join. A “swollen” feeling in my sinuses. Snot coming out of my nose. A feeling of lethargy and fatigue. A feeling like if I exerted myself too much, I would prolong the sickness. My eyes felt tired.

I would note this little laundry list of feelings with a kind of disassociated interest. The attitude I cultivated was one of happy interest in the fact that my body was alive and feeling sensations, but not trying to interpret those sensations in any way. Feeling neither negative nor positive about my “cold symptoms” I lobbed them onto an imaginary desk in my mind and asked please that they be whisked away from me.

In a whoosh, the icons of sickness I had created in my mind were whisked away, leaving the table clean. In that moment of imaginary clarity, I found myself exhaling fully, taking a deep breath, noting that I was thrusting my head forward at an angle. Breathing in, I felt my body soften, and resettle into a place of comfort and ease.

The cold symptoms I thus self treated for a few days. I would feel “coldy,” and I would instantly remind myself that my body did not have a cold, that it was my mind attacking my body with angry thoughts that was the cause of my unease. Much like a fencer will skillfully parry a thrust of the blade in his direction, the mind training taught by ACIM has given me the inner remove necessary for fending off what in the past would have effected me in a far different way. I could use my imagination to fight back the hateful effects of my ego as it thrashed around inside me, hiding from my thoughts, keeping my body distracted with “sickness.”

On day three I was lying down on our bed at the farm. Melissa was beside me. I had my face smushed into her back, between her shoulder blades. For days I had been moving at what felt like half speed, though we were still being as active as we normally are, more so even because we are about to move and there are many plates spinning. I had been asking myself over and over, what is the root cause of this feeling inside me? Thus far, I had received no answer.

Suddenly, like a Spanish galleon rising from the muddy bottom of a lake and rushing to the surface in a spume of white water, the idea that had been plaguing me surfaced and could be seen: I was mad at everyone.

Deep inside, there was a place in me that was really pissed at the human race. Our destructiveness, our needless enslavement of each other, our hundred million thousand daily cruelties. Why had we treated the planet and each other with such reckless abandon? Why had we destroyed so much and so many?

I was smiling as I thought this. Ahhhhhh, there you are my beauty, I thought. Like a splinter in my mind, the “everyone else is a shithead” idea had sat in there and pumped out toxic waste into my very central nervous system for nearly thirty years. This rotten creme puff of an idea had infected and inflected every decision I had ever made, every interaction I had ever had with anyone, ever. Until now, moth—–er, thought I.

This splinter I believe was the root of the separation idea within my mind. The final vestige of an Us Vs. Them idea that was firmly lodged in my operating system until I took the mental equivalent of a long, hot bath, and let that little sucker squeeze its way out of my ego, up into the bright attention of my will. Where I promptly flushed that lil’ nasty into nothingness.

There sits the wooden table, or the marble mantle, the surface upon which I place the things I wish to be whisked out of my mind, dealt with forever by something much more capable than myself. Upon the table I place the shabby little muddy model of the ship, now looking old, rotten, soaked, and tired. Please, oh Universe, take from me this rotten idea that there is a them to be angry at.

Whoosh!

And there I am left, clean and innocent in the present. The past has been forgiven. All sickness and symptoms and thoughts of unease have vanished. It took three days of focused breathing, soft attention, and compassionate self awareness to root out the cause of my cold, and when it came out, I felt immediately well. It’s funny to think that the common cold remedy is a form of amphetamine, meant to wind you up and keep you going. That’s funny because in my experience, if you want to deal with the root of the symptoms and not just treat the symptoms alone, you must slow down, breath deeply, and wait patiently for the Big Nasty to surface.

Sweating helps. The ocean helps. Tea helps. Lots of water and fluids help. Loving attention from others and a TOTAL denial of your “sickness” helps a great deal as well. Slow down and the funk will work its way out. You may feel a bit funky while it does, but once the idea is clear in your mind, you’ll be able to deal with it immediately and effortlessly. Well, effortlessly over time, with practice :)

Western style medicine pays no attention to the link between the mind and the body, specifically the link between our emotional state and the way we feel physically. That the two are linked is beyond question. Our culture has conditioned us to assume that when we are sick our bodies are fighting germs or infection, but if we shift the idea of sickness in our minds to one where the mind is trying to fight itself, then the power for our healing rests once more in our own capable hands.

There is no sickness. There is simply the mind trying to fight itself and attacking the body. Find the root idea behind the attack and you negate the idea of sickness. Eliminate the idea of sickness from your mind and you will never be sick.

I love you!

-Jackson

One Million Gardens Can Save the World!

Yay! Check out onemilliongardens!