Behavior vs. Being

by DCH Park

One of the apparently more difficult things to deal with is the difference between behavior and being. We are trained to confuse these two. Often people react to hearing criticism of their beings when all that was intended was criticism of behavior or (worse) honest appraisal and reaction to behavior.

My wife once reminded me of how it is possible to love the divine in the other and to hold that love above everything else. Loving the divine in the other also makes healing possible. Embracing that divine makes many things possible that seem impossible otherwise. In many ways embracing the divine in others and yourself is the very essence of spirituality.

Perhaps that is why it is so strongly resisted. Regardless of why it is resisted though, Ego benefits when it is. What I have noticed is that in your outrage over being criticized, the tendency is to lose sight of yourself feeling outrage and to become submerged in the outrage. Other emotions work as well.

What they have in common is the tendency or expectation (some even encourage) the emotional reaction that protects Ego and is seen to come from criticism. It is remarkable that such criticism can be reacted to when it is not meant.

If I am catching something in a conversation that was not thrown by you, the other participant in the conversation, then it must have come from me, even though I may insist that it came from outside of myself. That is what I and resisting seeing and taking account of – myself.

One way to deal with this is to look for the difference between your being and your behavior. Is there something that you’re doing that assumes or restricts yourself and/or someone else? Is there some way that your actions or attitudes control those of another? How would better understanding and articulating them and/or your reasons for them lead to deeper realization of your own being or your reasons for choosing as you did and the wound(s) it (they) sprang from?

I find that pushing or trying to create behavior always boils down to control. I am trying to control myself and often trying to control others. I may be trying to control conversations or points of view, but I am trying to control.

Being is different. Being does not go away. It is in no rush. It can sit and placidly listen. It can even draw another out in the case that there is something waiting to be drawn out without losing focus or being diminished in any way.

What are you trying to control? What are you imposing Ego over? Is it strictly for Ego’s sake? How can you more clearly see and love the divine in yourself and the other?

For more information or for personal support in exploring presence, contact me at david@dchpark.com or 412-407-7401.

© 2014, David Park. All Rights Reserved.

”Behavior vs. Being” by DCH Park is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Finding Your Shape

by DCH Park

One of the things that keeps coming back to me over and over in different situations is the realization that there is a difference between deciding what you want or what you’ll dedicate yourself to and discovering what you are dedicated to.

There are a plethora of differences, each with its own subtlety or implication but in my experience, all of them devolve from a single, central one. At least that’s the way that I discovered it in my life and that’s how I try to talk about it when it comes up and that’s how I try to teach it.

I have found that it is a hard concept, often taking years or more to fully explore. Often words are lacking for specific concepts. Sometimes it is not explored at all, instead, being rejected out of hand. In this way, it is like math or history. To be sure, it has similar power to ask the hard questions and invite, almost demand, sometimes difficult explorations to find answers to those questions.

I find that asking such questions is the most natural thing in the world. It’s as natural as breathing or walking. Small children do it naturally and universally – so much so that it has led to multiple cliches. Unfortunately, as children grow into adults, it is one of the things that they learn not to do. Also, when creative types of all stripes talk about being “childlike,” they are usually talking about the wonder, curiosity, and joy that a child welcomes the universe with. These qualities are closely related to asking questions. They are so closely related that quieting one leads to quieting them all.

This is why I was surprised to find that discovering what you’re dedicated to can be so hard. In the interests of full disclosure, let me say that I am still exploring what this means in my life, too. What I find is that the more aware I am of what is important to me and who I am in the world, the more clearly I can realize myself.

This has direct and immediate consequences. For example, the current direction of my career is one that I could not have predicted less than a year ago but it is a direct consequence of my greater insight into myself. It is a direct articulation of my answer to the direct question of what excites me.

This question had hung around for a long time, but the awareness and clarity from which the answer came is new. In this life, it came out of my second stroke and the near death experience that came with it.

I do not advocate strokes or near death experiences, but what I learned is interesting and useful. I learned that it is possible to be numb to pain. I had learned to numb pain. In fact, that was part of what I was holding on to. I was holding on to it in the name of life. I was assuming that if I felt no pain, there was no pain, no damage. It sounds silly, but that was my belief. That numbness was in me was a revelation.

Of course, healing required me to accept myself as I was. In order to do that, I had to first see myself clearly and honestly. That’s the value in realizing your numbness. There’s a difference between being numb to pain and having no pain. When you’re numb to pain, you’re numb to everything. Its like the numb part is a dead weight. You know it’s there logically. It takes up space but you can’t feel it.

When you have no pain, everything is alive. If something interacts with that part, you know it’s there even if you can’t see it. The richness of what’s available is profound and the contrast is a sharp one. That not withstanding, though, that richness is something that is often diminished and ultimately ignored by the attitude that leads to numbing.

As I healed, it became apparent that I was not alone in my numbness. The prevailing attitude seems to be that numbness is always preferable to pain. This seems to be true and is in the culture even when being simply honest about the pain can lead to healing and elimination of the cause of pain in the first place. This seems to be held as true even when simply treating symptoms and numbing yourself leads to further damage and greater pain later.

In my case, the numbness that I induced was centered around career and money. As I felt deeper and deeper into what I was numb to and why, I was able to heal it. As I healed it, I gained greater and greater clarity into my answers to hard questions. I actually asked myself those questions deliberately in order to open that space for answers.

I found that it is true that the arc of my life came clear or clearer anyway. I still had choice within that arc. I could even choose to live outside of that arc altogether. Specifically, I saw how every choice I had ever made in life was related to this arc. Ether it was a way to further explore and express it or it was a way to avoid exploring and expressing it.

That brings me back to the original question with which I opened this essay. What I realized was that the difference between deciding and discovering can be found in how much thought or logic you apply and possibly when you apply it.

It is difficult because many of society’s messages are centered on this idea, but deciding what you will dedicate yourself to (and then possibly applying discipline to stay on “the straight and narrow”) is an intellectual exercise. It is an application of logic and as such is divorced from life and you.

Discovering what you have already devoted yourself to, on the other hand, is an exploration of life and being alive. It is an expression of what excites you. You can hear it in someone’s voice when he or she is talking about what’s exciting. It’s the answer to the question, “What do you do (would you do) even though (if) you aren’t (weren’t) paid to do it?”

We are often numb to such questions so we don’t hear our answers. Often, we are afraid of the answers because we can’t see how they might lead to living financially. An old cliche is that figuring out “how” is not our job. What I have found over and over again in this life is that not only is it not my job to answer “how,” but the universe always provides a way to live. It’s my job to trust it and get out of the way.

It is like the roadrunner in the old Warner Bros. cartoons. Stepping off the cliff edge onto thin air might require faith at first, but it is rewarded. Not only does the universe catch you, it does so gracefully and painlessly. It does so in a way that not only leads to further insight and healing, it does so in a way that is also joyful.

That is a major focus of my ongoing explorations – to understand from personal experience some of the ways that discovering yourself can lead to joy and vice versa.

For more information or for personal support in exploring presence, contact me at david@dchpark.com or 412-407-7401.

© 2014, David Park. All Rights Reserved.

”Finding Your Shape” by DCH Park is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Freedom

by DCH Park

We live in a free society, or so we tell ourselves. We want to be free, but what is truly free? What is the nature of freedom? If it matters to us that others see us as free or powerful or popular, are we really? Can we be? These questions used to bother me greatly when I was younger. “How can I know that I am free if I don’t know what freedom is?” I would ask myself.

It seems pretty obvious that we are talking about one of two possible definitions of “free.” There may be others, but two spring to mind. Any good dictionary would point out that one definition of “free” applies to the price of something. Being a free person probably doesn’t have anything to do with prices in the marketplace, although economics would probably note that there is a connection between being a free person and how much things cost – if things cost too much, is it possible to be free?

The other definition of “free,” that of being at liberty, of not being imprisoned or enslaved, of not being controlled by obligation or the will of another, is at issue here. First of all, notice that you are not “at liberty” in some sense or other as long as you are enslaved, imprisoned, or controlled.

Secondly, notice that one of the ways to be controlled is through obligation. This control could be financial but it needn’t be. It could be cultural or traditional. It could be through something as ill-defined as “peer pressure” or expectations.

For example, I may have no connection to my neighbor at all other than that I live next to him or her. Nevertheless, that neighbor can have certain expectations for behavior and spending that affect choices that I make. All I have to do is accept those expectations into my worldview for them to control me.

I may rankle at what I perceive as the source of things that control me but the only thing at controls me, the only place such things can come from, is myself. On one level, I have to accept expectations into me for me to be subject to them. If I never accept them, they wouldn’t control me.

You can cleverly phrase things so that you use whatever language is fashionable. For example, you can claim that unless your neighbor cuts his grass in a certain way or disposes of his garbage and recycling just so, that neighbor is curtailing “your freedom.”

Such claims can be found in many places. Some of them are phrased more strongly or cleverly than others but they all boil down to attempts to control things. Specifically, people try to invoke changes in how they feel inside by controlling their external environments.

This is understandable. It is how we are trained in this society. We are taught to change the inside by changing the outside. In fact, we are taught to even find our own inner truth only obliquely, by looking outside first. We are taught to metaphorically tell what’s on on our left by looking only right. Even those who move so that they can see all around them without moving their heads, assume that everything stays fixed. If something moves, they may never see it.

We are even taught that it is somehow more “holy” or “honorable” to go outside to find what is inside. Who has not heard in this culture that those who serve others are more “blessed” or “selfless?”

To be sure, since everything is connected, it is possible to go the long way around and find yourself through service to others but it is shorter and quicker to find everyone within yourself through truly healing yourself. Besides, if you are in the habit of thinking that someone or some agency beyond you will notice your devotion and reward you then you are really thinking about yourself. You are possibly fooling yourself and you are using others. It seems cleaner and it is definitely quicker to free your head to look to yourself clearly first and truly heal yourself.

I have heard things in the media in the last ten or twenty years about “freedom from fear” or “freedom from terror.” Is this truly freedom? Maybe it is or at least leads to it. When I look within myself, I find that one way to be truly “free from fear” is to understand fear and where it comes from in an honest and courageous way. The first step toward healing what is there is to notice what is there.

If I am afraid to follow a connection that might lead me to my fear, rather than finding its root and healing it, I am controlled by it. The best that I can do is to restrict my behavior and minimize what I am afraid of, or to try to minimize it.

So it is important for healing not to become consumed by my wound, fear in this example. That way, rather than losing myself and being controlled by fear, I can find my way to its source and heal it. By healing it, I can transform it. It becomes a source of love and enlightenment. It becomes a source of power and understanding. Rather than a drain on resources as something to defend against, it is transformed into something that adds to my sense of energy and aliveness.

In other words, by fighting against it, I can never eliminate my fear. I can never heal it. I can only try to minimize it and reduce its effect on me and turning to things outside of myself too often leads to fighting. It’s like whistling in the graveyard. The whistling doesn’t eliminate what I’m afraid of nor does it eliminate my fear. At best, it distracts me or covers over what I fear.

In the meantime, I can hope that others are creating bulwarks to protect me while I’m whistling. What I don’t notice because I’m too busy being afraid is that those same bulwarks also limit me. They control me. I am not free.

Unfortunately, much of modern media seems to be geared toward engendering fear and providing a hated outsider to blame the fear on. By giving in to their fear, whole communities can come to hate other communities and individuals. They are so busy being afraid and finding things to be afraid of that they might not notice what they are doing.

Leaving aside for a moment who might benefit from such hatred, it seems clear that such benefits accrue only if hatred exists and is embraced by society. Since society is made up of the members of it, in other words, of you and I, if we each chose as individuals to heal instead of to hate, healing becomes possible on a societal level. It becomes commonplace.

This is the way in which we can all transcend fear together. This is what healing is and healing makes freedom possible. How do we heal?

One method that has been laid out very eloquently is Nonviolent Communication. Another is available through updated Ho’oponopono. What have you done lately to turn into your fear and heal it? Does it allow you to see or accept a hated other differently? Who is healed? The other person, or you, or both?

For more information or for personal support in exploring presence, contact me at david@dchpark.com or 412-407-7401.

© 2014, David Park. All Rights Reserved.

”Freedom” by DCH Park is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Difference – VI

by DCH Park

What is the value or importance of going into what hurts you? Why would you run toward metaphorical explosions? What possible reason could you have for seeking out the pain, fear, etc.? Is there a benefit to turning into the storm?

In a word, yes, there is. There is a reason that we are taught to turn into the spin while driving a car or a plane. There is a reason that we are taught to turn a boat into the storm. It is the same reason that we naturally press into the soft, spongy spot left behind by a lost tooth. Survival.

In extreme cases, like in spinning cars or planes, the choice between life and death, between truth and illusion, may seem particularly clear, but it is always there. It is present in every situation, although it may seem cloaked by other concerns in some situations. One thing that I have learned as an engineer is that principles that work on one level work on other levels. If they don’t seem to work, I find that I don’t understand the level as well as I thought I did, I don’t understand the principle as well as I thought I did, or both.

As an engineer, my job has been to understand what’s going on well enough that I can apply the right principle to generate the desired outcome. In fact, this idea has been widely enough recognized that it has given rise to a popular series of books in engineering circles that talk about “patterns” that can be applied in a variety of circumstances. In fact, about a dozen or so patterns are used to account for the majority of all needs that arise.

What’s interesting in this case is that the idea itself. It is noteworthy that you can exercise power in a situation through your understanding of it and application of the right pattern. The process itself – of recognizing patterns and applying them across situations – is powerful and what we are talking about here. It has been in fields as diverse as programming and architecture.

A mundane example is fire. Open fires that burn wood seem primitive, yet they give rise directly to closed fires and burning other things, such as coal, oil, and gas. Building devices that can contain and burn such fuels requires an understanding of fire. It requires an understanding of the combustion that goes into fire and that understanding allows a level of prediction about the behavior of fire in different circumstances, such as standing upright, large acceleration, and zero gravity.

Understanding fire has led directly to the creation of many modern technologies. They may not seem to, but modern automobiles, boats, and planes all rely on a form of fire directly to make them go. Most forms of power generation in use today have fire at their hearts. Other forms of modern technology rely on fire indirectly.

Almost everything found in the modern world relies on fire. In fact, it has been said that modern technology, as we understand it, would be impossible were it not for fire.

This principle – that what is true on one level is true on others (and possibly on all levels) – is interesting. Coming back to the question that we started this inquiry with, we are taught two different things about pain, fear, etc.. Can they both be right?

The lesson from engineering is that they can’t both be right. In one case or the other (or both), we don’t understand things as well as we believe we do and that lack of understanding leads to the apparent contradiction. However, the implication is that as we understand the issue better, the apparent contradiction will disappear and our best path forward will become clear.

One possibility that an archetypal “angry young man” might embrace is the possibility that one of these views (or both of them) is (are) wrong and we are better off in the end rejecting it (them) in favor of the truth, no matter how uncomfortable that truth may seem to be.

One thing that we are taught is that when life and death are on the line, as when a car spins out, or when the stakes are relatively small and personal, as when you lose a tooth, the thing to do is to turn into the pain. We are taught that it makes sense to turn into the spin. Who hasn’t found him/her self attracted to a missing tooth and tonguing the soft spot?

In fact, it is taught by many psychologists that the core of pain, fear, etc. is healing and the only way to come to that healing is through the pain, fear, etc. Not only does that emotional reaction depend from that healing, it whispers what it needs to realize that healing.

In other words, the emotion tells you what it needs to be healed. However, the only way to hear such whispering is to sit with the pain and let it be and say what it will. The only way to hear it is to shut up and listen.

The other thing that we are taught is in less severe cases that arise on a more everyday basis, the thing to do is to turn away from the pain, fear, etc.. There are a plethora of attitudes, techniques, and habits to do this that are recommended from various corners. They range from such apparently innocuous things, such as certain attitudes and expectations to intrusive interventions, including chemical and surgical techniques.

It has amazed me in the past that a chemical intervention, like the administration of so-called “painkillers,” can lead to a reward defined by a resumption or increase of the same activity that led to the pain in the first place!

It is unlikely that both perspectives are true. Either you are benefited by turning into the pain (etc.) or you are benefited by turning away from it.

When I am faced with this kind of dilemma, I am reminded of the old investigative reporter’s razor – “follow the money.” To put it more generally, who stands to benefit from which perspective?

Leaving the definition of “benefit” aside for the moment, does one perspective lead to benefits that accrue mainly to you while the other leads to benefits that accrue mainly to others or even produce effects that lead to your own suffering? Which leads to which?

Each person must decide for him or her self.

For more information or for personal support in exploring presence, contact me at david@dchpark.com or 412-407-7401.

© 2014, David Park. All Rights Reserved.

”The Difference – VI” by DCH Park is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Difference – V

by DCH Park

There are several things that come up for me when I am aware of problems and how to deal with them. One thing that becomes apparent very quickly is that what I was taught is not necessarily true. This, in itself, is an incendiary idea. It would seem that schools, churches, indeed, social leaders of every stripe, want me to believe them and do what they tell me to. At least that’s the message that many of them are conveying.

Regardless of what they may get out of my compliance, one thing is clear – I am not choosing for myself as long as I accept what others have chosen for me.

One of the more powerful results to come out of organization theory is that one of the most powerful positions to be in in any organization is to be the one who sets up the options that someone else will choose from. All eyes are deliberately trained on the one who makes the final choice but if that choice is made from a field of options that are all acceptable to you then you are guaranteed to win.

All you have to do to be a guaranteed winner is control the options. In fact, it doesn’t matter who makes the final choice as long as that choice is one of the options that you have set up.

Arguably, this is exactly how society works. People choose from a limited range of options. They limit themselves because that range is all that they allow themselves to see. What they don’t see is that those options are carefully chosen and tailored so that they benefit a few while they claim to benefit many.

At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy hound, note that creative types of all stripes have said the same thing down through the ages. The individuals who are most directly responsible for pushing the whole race forward have said the same thing. Whether they have been in the arts or the sciences or have applied their understanding through engineering and business, the central message has always been that it is vitally important to decide for yourself and that as the decider, you owe it to yourself to be aware of what is truly going on. Only by being aware of what is truly going on can you hope to choose from the full range of possibilities, or at least, the fullest range that you can choose from.

No matter how well intentioned someone is, he or she will probably not find a way from point A to point B if certain paths are hidden or secret. In fact, points C, D, or W may be better suited for him or her but if those points are hidden, the only apparent choice is point B.

This is the power in making things invisible. If C, D, and W are all invisible, point B looks like the only logical goal. The nature of invisible things is dealt with at length elsewhere. Let it suffice here to note that you are benefited by seeing things that other people can’t or refuse to see.

Note that things that lurk unseen often engender pain, fear, being “creeped out,” etc. They can even induce feelings of numbness. We are often trained in this society to ignore these feelings and either block them chemically, additudinally, or otherwise or to emphasize things that “feel good” instead.

Regardless of this “wisdom,” however, rarely do such feelings go away on their own. They may be drowned out for a while but that doesn’t mean that they are gone or solved. They will inevitably return until they are solved.

This is one of the lessons of the parable of tying down an elephant. The elephant doesn’t even try to break the rope even though he or she could easily do so because the elephant “learned” when it was younger that it couldn’t. The elephant never sees that it could easily break the rope. Its true prison is formed out of its expectations.

In what ways are you trapping yourself because of the expectations that you have about the world? What are you “taking for granted” and never looking at? What parts of the world are you “taking for granted?” What is invisible in your world?

The fact is that the only ones who ever break out of their cages are the ones who test the bars and everything else that holds them back. The ones who sit and simply accept what they are told or the way things appear never break out of their cages.

There are a plethora of parables and stories about turning into the pain and that pain, fear, etc. are gifts. They are as common as steering into a spin if you lose control of your car and pointing the bow of your ship into an oncoming storm and as exotic as running toward the first artillery blast on a battlefield.

All of these parables and stories point to the same wisdom and they all contradict the so-called “wisdom” that it’s best to avoid pain whenever possible and to minimize it when it’s not possible to avoid it. Pain, fear, anxiousness, etc. are good in that they have at their hearts the thing that will heal the wound. They take us to that healing if only we let them. All we have to do is learn to turn into the pain.

For more information or for personal support in exploring presence, contact me at david@dchpark.com or 412-407-7401.

© 2014, David Park. All Rights Reserved.

”The Difference – V” by DCH Park is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Difference – IV

by DCH Park

There is a further subtlety at work in choosing arbitrarily to “prove something,” including to yourself. It’s not immediately apparent. This may be due to its invisibility, which is also why so many people get drawn into it, either as an advocate or as an opponent.

For what it’s worth, my practice is to notice what is said and how I react to it. My reaction comes from me. By noticing it, I can notice myself. My practice is to notice what is said and my reaction to it to better understand my own private view into what is true and to express what is true.

I find that in that way, I am able to experience more freedom and joy within myself and hear others around me more clearly. To be sure, reacting to what I hear and say is a part of that process but my goal is to be more aware of things, not less aware of them.

I thus try not to use those things and reactions as shields or excuses. I feel them and at the same time practice being aware of myself feeling them so that they can serve as bridges into the deeper part of me rather than as blockades.

What I have also found, to my delighted surprise, is that the more I share what I find to be true with others, the more truth there is to share. This can take many forms. One of these is that the more I share, the more I have to share. Another is that the more I share, the more I give permission to others to do the same. A third is that other people see and voice pieces of the puzzle before I do but I can recognize what they say as the truth.

Another, which is always unexpected and delightful, is that someone may say something which no one had ever heard or even thought before, yet as soon as it is said, its truth is recognized. I can say it, so can others. The list goes on.

In every case the recognized truth provides a solid stepping stone to another truth and often to many truths. Such honesty also leads to freedom. In the cases when apparently solid truths have led to wounds, healing those wounds has led to even greater truths that would have remained hidden if the wound had been allowed to block the path. If I had seen the wound as a barrier, a tender spot to be avoided instead of as what it can always be – the shortest path to the other side – I would have stopped on the near side of the wound and whatever I saw it as, anger, fear, numbness, a small annoyance, or something else, would have become simply a part of the backdrop. It would possibly become invisible. In my experience, healing something always leads to something more.

What I notice is that many people have heard that one thing or another leads to wealth and that as long as you “toe the line” and follow one set of rules (their prescribed set) wealth, ease, and health are the inevitable or logical outcomes.

When I take a step back, I notice that all such systems are saying the same thing. Details differ from system to system, but the goal is usually defined in terms of wealth. That wealth may be yours or it may be someone else’s. Either way, the worldview that lies at the heart of such views is that:

1. The material world matters (as revealed by material wealth, for example); and
2. You don’t have a choice about everything in the material world.

Thus, taken together, these attitudes toward the material world have various implications. One of these is that healing is impossible. It is impossible to experience the world differently by doing nothing more than heal yourself because you are completely separate from your surroundings. Therefore what affects one cannot affect the other or if both are affected, those effects are unrelated and/or complex.

This runs counter to the observation that it is possible to experience change in the world by doing nothing more than healing yourself. The implication is, of course, that you contain the whole of existence, which only makes sense if the world is a reflection.

This means that it truly is fruitless to try to effect change in the world while holding yourself constant. At best, you can change yourself as you change the world. However my tendency has been to change myself in order to change the world.

The things I lament in the world, the disease, war, poverty, etc. are reflections of me. They must be if I can find the world in me. This means that as I find those things within myself and heal and fully release them, the world will be transformed.

On the other hand, if I accept the reality of the world and insist on the separateness of the world from me, such wounds and strife are inevitable. They are inevitable as long as I accept them as part of the world.

Thus, choosing what you want and trying to exercise Law of Attraction in this way is the same thing as trying to hold down a good-paying job, a house in the suburbs, two cars, and a family with a spouse and a couple of kids. They are both ways to emphasize the independence and reality of the material world. They are both ways to deny or reduce the power of healing yourself.

Another view would be that you are born to have a certain shape in the universe. Some people have called it your mission but that sounds like something you do rather than what you are. In the same way that you are born to have a certain color hair, a certain look in your face, etc., you are born to have a certain shape in the universe. What is your shape? What is your truth? Not what you want – which often determined or influenced by material reality – what is your being?

For more information or for personal support in exploring presence, contact me at david@dchpark.com or 412-407-7401.

© 2014, David Park. All Rights Reserved.

”The Difference – IV” by DCH Park is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Difference – III

by DCH Park

This may sound mean. In fact, in a way, I hope that it does. I also hope that you will ask the next question and seek out the deeper truth reflected in the (apparently mean) saying rather than sitting with the surface meanness and dealing only with that.

The mean, unexpected thing is that you make no progress toward your true self by choosing something arbitrarily. The idea is usually that by choosing arbitrarily, you choose unpredictably and that if your arbitrary choice is fulfilled, that must mean that you are powerful.

However, one lesson that can be extracted from modern shamanism is that no choice is arbitrary or unpredictable. If you gravitate toward something or even imagine something, the question to ask might be, “Why did you gravitate toward that thing or why did you imagine that thing?”

If you imagine meeting a dolphin or gravitate toward holding $1 Million, why did you imagine that? You could have easily imagined a completely different animal but you imagined dolphin. You could have gravitated toward a new house or a car or boat. Why did you gravitate toward your imagined goal?

We choose the things we choose because they have some significance for us. That significance is unique – even if someone else makes the same choices, that person will have different associations with those choices and even the same choices will thus have different meanings.

Therefore, each choice provides an insight into the chooser – you. By being aware of your choice (and perhaps the other choices available) and knowing why you made the choice you did, you come that much closer to healing yourself because you come that much closer to realizing you apart from your actions and the choices you make.

There is a difference between who you are and the choices you make, between your being and your actions or doing. Realizing that difference is critical and powerful. Healing comes in between them. It becomes possible to embrace your being without getting distracted by your doing.

Conversely, Ego sees itself as benefiting from confusion between being and doing. Ego sees itself as benefiting whenever doing is confounded with being. It sees itself as benefiting when doing disappears into being. When it becomes invisible.

Healing only becomes visible as a choice when being is separated from doing. That’s why Ego loses healing. Ego tries hard to confound the two.

My teenaged son was surprised to learn that you are just as controlled by something when you fight against it as when you accede to it. This leads me to suspect that this idea, though a reflection of a deep truth, is not part of current culture. Part of me notices that I am controlled by something to the extent that it is invisible to me.

To what extent can this be found in culture? To what extent is everyday life controlled by invisible things? How can invisible things be seen?

The answer is simple and also maddening. Look.

Contrary to popular belief, the human visual system is an amazingly subtle and accurate one. It can also be trained (or the human brain can be trained) to “see” things that aren’t there and to ignore things that are. Look. Dare to see what is truly present. Amazingly, the simple act of actually seeing what is there can be a subversive act. It is subversive only in that it gives the lie and the lie is only effective as long as it seems like the truth. It is effective only as long as it is invisible.

As a child, you saw things more simply but you also saw them more clearly. You saw more directly what was right in front of you. You had to literally spend years learning to see what trusted adults said you should see. Dare to see like a child again.

###

There is a further subtlety at work in choosing arbitrarily to “prove something,” including to yourself. It’s not immediately apparent. This may be due to its invisibility, which is also why so many people get drawn into it, either as an advocate or as an opponent.

For what it’s worth, my practice is to notice what is said and how I react to it. My reaction comes from me. By noticing it, I can notice myself. My practice is to notice what is said and my reaction to it to better understand my own private view into what is true and to express what is true.

I find that in that way, I am able to experience more freedom and joy within myself and hear others around me more clearly. To be sure, reacting to what I hear and say is a part of that process but my goal is to be more aware of things, not less aware of them.

I thus try not to use those things and reactions as shields or excuses. I feel them and at the same time practice being aware of myself feeling them so that they can serve as bridges into the deeper part of me rather than as blockades.

What I have also found, to my delighted surprise, is that the more I share what I find to be true with others, the more truth there is to share. This can take many forms. One of these is that the more I share, the more I have to share. Another is that the more I share, the more I give permission to others to do the same. A third is that other people see and voice pieces of the puzzle before I do but I can recognize what they say as the truth.

Another, which is always unexpected and delightful, is that someone may say something which no one had ever heard or even thought before, yet as soon as it is said, its truth is recognized. I can say it, so can others. The list goes on.

In every case the recognized truth provides a solid stepping stone to another truth and often to many truths. Such honesty also leads to freedom. In the cases when apparently solid truths have led to wounds, healing those wounds has led to even greater truths that would have remained hidden if the wound had been allowed to block the path. If I had seen the wound as a barrier, a tender spot to be avoided instead of as what it can always be – the shortest path to the other side – I would have stopped on the near side of the wound and whatever I saw it as, anger, fear, numbness, a small annoyance, or something else, would have become simply a part of the backdrop. It would possibly become invisible. In my experience, healing something always leads to something more.

What I notice is that many people have heard that one thing or another leads to wealth and that as long as you “toe the line” and follow one set of rules (their prescribed set) wealth, ease, and health are the inevitable or logical outcomes.

When I take a step back, I notice that all such systems are saying the same thing. Details differ from system to system, but the goal is usually defined in terms of wealth. That wealth may be yours or it may be someone else’s. Either way, the worldview that lies at the heart of such views is that:

1. The material world matters (as revealed by material wealth, for example); and
2. You don’t have a choice about everything in the material world.

Thus, taken together, these attitudes toward the material world have various implications. One of these is that healing is impossible. It is impossible to experience the world differently by doing nothing more than heal yourself because you are completely separate from your surroundings. Therefore what affects one cannot affect the other or if both are affected, those effects are unrelated and/or complex.

This runs counter to the observation that it is possible to experience change in the world by doing nothing more than healing yourself. The implication is, of course, that you contain the whole of existence, which only makes sense if the world is a reflection.

This means that it truly is fruitless to try to effect change in the world while holding yourself constant. At best, you can change yourself as you change the world. However my tendency has been to change myself in order to change the world.

The things I lament in the world, the disease, war, poverty, etc. are reflections of me. They must be if I can find the world in me. This means that as I find those things within myself and heal and fully release them, the world will be transformed.

On the other hand, if I accept the reality of the world and insist on the separateness of the world from me, such wounds and strife are inevitable. They are inevitable as long as I accept them as part of the world.

Thus, choosing what you want and trying to exercise Law of Attraction in this way is the same thing as trying to hold down a good-paying job, a house in the suburbs, two cars, and a family with a spouse and a couple of kids. They are both ways to emphasize the independence and reality of the material world. They are both ways to deny or reduce the power of healing yourself.

Another view would be that you are born to have a certain shape in the universe. Some people have called it your mission but that sounds like something you do rather than what you are. In the same way that you are born to have a certain color hair, a certain look in your face, etc., you are born to have a certain shape in the universe. What is your shape? What is your truth? Not what you want – which is often determined or influenced by material reality – what is your being?

For more information or for personal support in exploring presence, contact me at david@dchpark.com or 412-407-7401.

© 2013, David Park. All Rights Reserved.

”The Difference – III” by DCH Park is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Difference – II

by DCH Park

The world is a reflection. No doubt, this is something that can be widely recognized. Perhaps you have heard it before in your life. It is a saying that I knew immediately. I can’t put my finger on the first time I heard this. Perhaps it’s part of the culture. Perhaps it’s something that I always knew. Perhaps it’s something that everyone knows. Nonetheless, I know that the first time I can consciously recall hearing it, my reactions were (1) of course, (2) everybody has heard that (or everybody knows that), and possibly (3) so what?

Taking the last thing first, I notice that there is an expectation that noticing the world is a reflection is universal and useless. There is also a voice that says that this is wrong, the world is not a reflection. No doubt, it is the same voice or it is connected to the one that maintains the saying is useless. The weight of history seems to be that the world is not a reflection. We don’t see in the world what we wish to see in ourselves. The lesson of history seems to be that we have to work hard in the world to make even a small change in it and that our characters are implicit only through our actions.

We even seek to discover our own characters through our actions.

But note that this is not what the adage says. It does not connect what we see in the world with what we want to see in ourselves. It connects what we find in the world with who we are.

The word “reflection” implies a mirror. If we see in the mirror an image of ourselves and notice that the image we see is dirtied with mud, we do not reach into the mirror to groom ourselves. Yet reaching into the mirror is tantamount to reaching into the world.

What is perhaps not as widely known is that we don’t immediately recognize ourselves in the image in the mirror. We have to learn to see ourselves. In fact, showing creatures their own reflections is often used as a test or indication of intelligence. Perhaps the universe or God or the quantum field is similarly showing us our reflection in the world and waiting for us to see ourselves.

Extending this idea for a moment, if you see mud in the mirror, you do not reach into the mirror to remove it. You groom yourself and the reflection changes effortlessly. Could the same be true in the world? Is it possible to change the world by changing yourself? Is it possible to change the world by changing only yourself? How do you change yourself? How do you know what to change in yourself?

The last question is a good one. For that, the same adage comes to the rescue again. Many people hear about the importance of happiness, joy, peace, silence, etc. and they strive to achieve those things. I have often heard as a result the recommendation that you should choose to focus on (or only focus on) those things that make you happy, peaceful, etc.

The idea is that by focusing only on things that you like or want only those things will grow. The expectation (voiced or unvoiced) is that what you don’t like in your experience or about yourself will drop away. At very least, it is expected that it will stop growing due to lack of attention.

However, in my experience, the things we would rather not look at rarely go away. They rarely even stop growing. In my experience, as we become more successful, as we get bigger in the world, so too do our issues. The things we don’t like about ourselves are nonetheless ourselves. We take them with us wherever we go and whomever we become.

This is why a common cliche is to annoy an “enlightened being” until he or she “cracks.” At that point the claim is often made that the “enlightenment” is nothing more than a facade and the true person beneath is as troubled as any other.

However, the idea that the “world is a reflection” offers another path into this. Notice that another quality of the reflection in the mirror is that it tells you what is wrong and where it is. You don’t clean your shoes by attempting to brush your shirt or embracing your hair. It would be silly to even try. Yet we do exactly that with our reflections in the world.

By the same token, we treat a smudge or greasy stain differently from the way we deal with caked-on, dried mud. We are likely to benefit even more greatly from individual attention to things that come up within ourselves.

I have found that once I genuinely heal myself and release what irritates me, I never have to revisit it. The things that once annoyed me no longer annoy me. The tricks are to not get lost in the annoyance, pain, fear, etc. and to find that pain. That’s where reflections in the world can be handy. Once I find the pain, I can heal it.

For more information or for personal support in exploring presence, contact me at david@dchpark.com or 412-407-7401.

© 2013, David Park. All Rights Reserved.

”The Difference – II” by DCH Park is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Difference – I

by DCH Park

When I was younger (I’m showing my age), it as popular to quote, “A difference that makes no difference is no difference.” If you research it, you will find that it is attributed to James Blish and the novel Spock Must Die!. With that novel, I believe that Blish helped to create what became novel serializations or novelizations of series. He (and probably other, unnamed innovators) was (were) critical in the creation of modern merchandising.

I don’t remember much of the book and I wouldn’t be surprised if the book turned out to be mediocre at best. However, I do remember that quote. It speaks to the nature of difference and similarity. What is it that distinguishes one thing from another? At what point are similar things so similar that they are the same thing? Can those differences and similarities exist on one dimension and not another? Are some dimensions important for some things while other dimensions come into play for other things? How can you tell? How do you tell? Is this what is meant by “no difference”?

For whatever it may be worth, I invite and encourage you to experience that difference – what it is and how you find it – for yourselves. Along those lines, I notice how tricky assumptions can be. They’re all around us in the world we experience. We can, for example, assume or expect things to be a certain way just because they have been before. We can cease to see these assumptions and expectations because they seem so ubiquitous. We take them as parts of the background, take them for granted, even though they aren’t either and we can become annoyed, even blaming and angry, when those assumptions are challenged. In short, we can come to consider them to be invisible (we can certainly practice not seeing them) and become annoyed or angry when that invisibility is pointed out.

What are you protecting? Why are you protecting it? Would you be less yourself if you stopped protecting it?

I have found, admitted to myself really, that what I was protecting was an idea or collection of ideas about myself that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with who I actually am. Some of them might have represented who I thought I wanted to be or how I wanted to be seen. Others were adopted from outside. They often represented how others expected me to behave.

At any rate, what I finally admitted to myself is that regardless of where they came from or how they originated, the only power they had in my life came from me. I had to accept it into my worldview in order for it to have any power over me. – Ironically, I was free to see myself as small and I would be small if I saw myself that way but only because I was big.

An objection to this that I’ve heard over and over is the idea that there are some things that you simply can’t control. There are some things in your life that you might wish were otherwise or might wish to go away, but they don’t. I’m talking about the idea that you don’t have choice, at least not with everything.

The idea is that there are some things that are done to you and not by you. It’s the idea that you don’t have choice.

One of the things that I observe is that those individuals who freely celebrate their lives tend to grow from their experiences. They don’t resist them. They welcome them. They deepen their experiences of themselves through their trials and tribulations not in spite of them.

Even diseases and accidents can be seen in this way as stemming from wounds that can be healed. In this way, healing the original wound is freeing. Accidents and diseases can cease to be real. Healing yourself can bring you that much closer to realizing and articulating what shape you have in the Universe. It can bring you that much closer to expressing who you are.

For more information or for personal support in exploring presence, contact me at david@dchpark.com or 412-407-7401.

© 2013, David Park. All Rights Reserved.

”The Difference – I” by DCH Park is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Healing – VI

by DCH Park

There is something that comes up for me in the context of healing. It is something that I have heard before but didn’t fully appreciate before. It is similar to other things in that my practice of Huna has aided me considerably in my ability to understand this and apply it in my life.

The thing that I recognize is the idea, the truism, that wherever you go, there is only one of you there. No matter how many might be present in a given situation, there is only one person there.

This idea has many guises. Another of the more popular ones is that the “world is a reflection.” Whatever difficulty or turmoil you may find around you, it somehow reflects you and comes from you.

As we looked at in a previous essay, if you notice that your collar is mused up in your reflection, you are not served by trying to reach into the mirror, directly for your collar. You are better served to reach in the other direction, away from the mirror to reach your collar.

It may sound silly to try to reach into the mirror but in principle that is exactly what many of us try to do. This is not surprising or it shouldn’t be. We are very carefully taught over a period of many years to reach in the wrong direction. What’s amazing is that healing is close at hand, but not in the directions that most of us are reaching in.

Nevertheless, such healing is possible and available. It is easier than we ever imagined it could be.

Thus, it is possible to change the world around you by changing only yourself. Such change is only possible because the whole universe – all of existence – can be found within you.

It’s been said that a model of the universe is a bottle that contains itself. Such a model gains power by directly containing everything. This is the same power that you or I and/or everyone has. This is why you can experience change in your life by doing nothing more than healing yourself.

Huna provides philosophies and techniques for thinking about and handling these concepts. Leaving deeper realities aside for the moment, there is a simplified version of updated Ho’oponopono available for free on the internet.

The deeper practice of Ho’oponopono makes it clear that all things are connected and that healing yourself alone leads inevitably to changes in your life, but even with the free version of Ho’oponopono that is available online it is possible to clean yourself up and thus to experience change in your life.

For more information or for personal support in exploring presence, contact me at david@dchpark.com or 412-407-7401.

© 2013, David Park. All Rights Reserved.

”The Healing – VI” by DCH Park is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.