One session of a 10-day training I once attended was focused on the “gap.” The teacher of this session, Alia, informed us that all change and transformation occur in the gap and not as a result of reading, studying, meditating, chanting or anything else.
The gap is an elusive rascal. When you search for it directly it is difficult to find. The gap is not so much a space between not-knowing and knowing as it is a “not-space.” This not-space is a particular openness in the mind and soul that allows us to be directly informed by consciousness – the medium of knowing underlying all manifestation.
Alia worked with us in subtle ways to help us nurture a sense of the gap, so we might observe our relationship with it. Today, you can find the gap being referred to as disjuncture.
The optimal zone in which adults learn is referred to as disjuncture – when time seems to stop… when our biographical repertoire is no longer sufficient to cope automatically with our situation… where we have a tension with our environment (Adult Learning in the Social Context – Peter Jarvis) Without entering this zone, we are simply stacking up our experience on top of things to which we can relate. This action often leads to an unnecessary compromise, where we settle for what is readily available to us, rather than what is actually the best fit. With disjuncture, we are forced to build a completely new structure of learning. While in the disjuncture zone, though we usually will experience discomfort, we are ultimately able to establish a strong foundation for real learning.
In the gap, or the disjuncture zone, time stops because we are free from the linear mind and residing more in our nature that underlies the normal mind. In this “space,” our association with the past changes radically – our identity is freed from history – our knowing is not by association but through direct perception.
Exploring the gap can be challenging as it requires us to be very comfortable with the unknown, not knowing and a willingness and capacity to let go of who and what we know ourselves to be.
The question here is ultimately – Who or what knows?
I am having a very interesting experience with food and eating. I am not dieting or trying to lose weight – which is what I thought I would be doing about now. Instead, I am discovering what my relationship with food and eating is.
There is a sense of strangeness, a curiosity to this. I’ve eaten a lot of food in my life – more than my fair share! But here I am not knowing much about my relationship to it – what I like, what my preferences are, when I should eat, what I should eat.
I feel like an explorer. Every day and every meal is a discovery. I eat at Lettuce in Walnut Creek, CA almost everyday. Most times I get the Cobb Salad without bacon. It’s a wonderful blend of flavors. I enjoy it. Sometimes I wonder if I should be tired or it or bored with it. What I discover is that I don’t know. My past experiences with that salad don’t seem to be around. I look at the menu with the ingredients and think – that sounds good – and it is!
The other day, I was thinking I should have something different to eat. I did not know what I wanted. I was thinking of this and that – pulling food out of my memory banks, but nothing seemed real or enticing. I was getting hungrier, but still had some things to do before I would have time to eat.
The hunger was interesting. It wasn’t demanding, but it was there. I was observing it like a dog with it’s head cocked and one ear raised – a real organic sense of curiosity. I could not come up with an answer about what to eat. In the end, food found me as I stopped by some friends’ home to pick something up and they were just heating up the leftovers they had taken home the other day from a dinner I had served them – my world famous veggie fajitas!
There was plenty enough for three and boy did I love and relish the blend of flavors in those fajitas.
The other day, I had some terrible Mexican food. What was curious was the sense of this being a stand alone experience not tied to the past or to the future. Very interesting to have that food in my mouth. No taste buds popping, no mouth-watering yummies. Just bland, dead substances.
In all these experiences, it’s not so much the food, but the sense of newness about my knowledge of food and my relationship to it. I know, but don’t know.
It is a most curious feeling of not knowing who I am at times.
At the beginning of June I decided it was time to explore my relationship with food, dieting and diabetes. My doctor had been telling me for several years that I was at risk for type II diabetes. Not surprising since I have 32 sweet tooths and a love of bread, pasta and other wonders of refined flour.
I had been noticing for about 6 months a sense of being more at risk and I was definitely becoming more and more uncomfortable every day with my weight and a closet full of clothes I wanted to wear again. So, I did what I usually do when something interests me – I Googled and Amazoned.
I wound up ordering 4 books – 2 on diabetes and insulin control dieting (these were not much help other than reminding me of the underlying issues and knowledge), The Gabriel Method and I Can Make You Thin. The latter two books, were a major break-through, a fundamental shift, an awakening – a moment of truth.
These two books pointed out a few fundamental truths that I had been overlooking. It was phenomenal to experience the radical shift that happened with me as the truth of this knowledge hit me.
Diets Don’t Work
Our Bodies Keep Us Fat to Keep Us Safe
Both books have 4 simple guidelines for eating like a thin person. What’s really interesting to me is how things changed over night for me. Reducing my intake of refined flour and sugars was hardly even a choice – it’s more like I lost interest in them, they no longer seemed to drag me toward them. So, this was a big plus for helping my system stop the insulin swing that has been problematic.
About the time I made this shift, I started frequenting Lettuce, a great Salad & Soup restaurant in Walnut Creek, that opened in March. I eat at Lettuce almost every day. The food is just awesome, Laura & Bahman, the owners, are wonderful and their staff is friendly beyond measure.
This whole process is opening up several interesting inquiries for me. Yesterday, I took the belt in another notch for the second time since all this began – whoohooo!
The weirdest thing about all of this is the lack of effort. As I was reflecting on this the other day, I realized that the knowledge gained is acting as a huge support, but more importantly – the shift has led to a huge sense of openness and freedom.
It’s another one of those experiences where I find myself wondering who I am – the familiar self and long-standing habits have taken a significant hit.
A friend of mine recently commented that her ego hated a recent video someone had taken of her. An hour later, in a book I am reading the author addressed self-abuse – “We would never let people treat others the way we treat ourselves.”
The author went on to say that this chronic internal negative self-talk is probably the number one factor in personal misery. And this internal criticism is what keeps our lives locked in their current form.
No big surprises for me, but I appreciate the synchronicity of the reminders. My friend is pleasant on the eyes and a joy to be around, but things are different for her. Inside her head a totally different reality exists.
As it happens, I was discussing this friend with common friend earlier in the day and we both see her similarly. It’s amazing how we could get the whole country to say – wow, you’re fabulous – and our inner critic’s opinion would out-weigh 250 million people.
Here’s the $64 million dollar question – who’s voice is that in our heads? We weren’t born with it. It wasn’t pre-installed. It came from outside to find a cozy little home inside where it can endlessly rattle around making our lives miserable – robbing us of the simple treasures in life – peace, joy, innocence…
I was wondering what to write. I’ve been giving more and more attention to Twitter these days, so I thought maybe I would write something about twitter. My first thought was, “What are people tweeting this morning?”
So, I went over to TweetCloud to get a visual of this morning’s twitter consciousness. As you can see from the tweet cloud, what’s on tweeter minds is Project Natal (gaming not babies), Good Sex (always a hot topic), the lost Air France flight (tragedy) and Google Wave (techvolution).
Toys, sex, tragedy and technology. As I was pondering this collective consciousness and what to say about it, I noticed a spectacular sunrise happening outside (Walnut Creek California). Glorious pink clouds moving through the sky with the sun just starting to break over the mountains.
By the time I was able to get to the car and grab the cameras, the sunrise was further along than I would have liked, but here it is.
And now, I must take my leave as I have to drive to Pleasanton CA for a 7:45am appointment. But, let me just say – the sunrise will have more influence over my day than the twitter collective.
But let’s begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation – but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.
This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food – but all that is changing.
There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.
When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.
You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.
There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.
Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers.This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown – Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood – and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit.. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.
The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.
The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe – exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”
So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.
This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it is doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.
Change & Transformation Happen in the Gap
Everyday is an Adventure with Food & Eating
15 Pounds in a Month with NO Dieting!
Self-Torture is a Big Love Affair
I was wondering what to write. I’ve been giving more and more attention to Twitter these days, so I thought maybe I would write something about twitter. My first thought was, “What are people tweeting this morning?”
You are brilliant, and the earth is hiring