Waves of Oneness: A Journey of Remembering

by Peter Melton

 I believe that Peter, a wise friend from Oregon, meant this parable to be read aloud. There are two parts, so perhaps it’s for two people to read aloud to each other   Love, Harvey Austin, 2021

Once upon a timeless moment, before there was such a thing as time, there was a huge ocean that splashed all around on a beautiful planet.  One day, the ocean laughed as it overheard two of the splashes talking.

“Get away, quit chasing me, you’re scaring me” said a small wave to a larger wave behind it.

“Sorry, I don’t mean to scare you,” replied the bigger wave.

“But you’re so big and you keep following me,”

“It might look like I’m big and scary, but to the ocean we are all part of one big show,” said the bigger wave.

“What’s an ocean? What are you talking about?” asked the little wave

“In order to answer that, I will need to explain a few things.”

“Explain a few things?”

“Yes, you see, there is a lot more going on than you think and how you look at things is very important.”

“How I look at things?”

“Your life is happening in two different ways at the same time. Both ways are real and both true.”

“How does that work?”

“Well, there is an ‘individual’ point of view where it seems like little you is over there and big scary me is over here.  You think that we are separate waves and so that is true for you.”

“So what is this other way?”

“The other way is called the big picture or the ‘unified’ point of view. In this unified story, you are aware of yourself as both the ocean and one of the waves it has created.”

“What’s an ocean? Where is this ocean you keep speaking of?” 

“The ocean is all around us. It is a huge body of water.”

“Water, what’s water?”

“Water is what we are made of and it is what the ocean is made of too. When this water-filled ocean expresses itself, it creates all of us watery waves.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I’m not sure how I know it, it’s just something that feels true for me.”

“How come I can’t see this water or feel this ocean thing?”

“Hmm. . .That’s what I was trying to explain, you see, you are the ocean and you are a wave that the ocean created.”

“Wait a minute, if I am the ocean and I am a wave, then how come I only feel like I am the wave?”

“Well, that takes us back to how you are looking at things. If you are looking at life the individual and separate way, then it is really hard to feel the unified way.” 

“How come I don’t know any of this?”

“Sometimes we remember and sometimes we forget.”

“Well, I want to remember more!”

“Yes, we all want to, but in order to feel the joy of remembering, we had to forget something first.  It seems as though we decided to forget something really important, we forgot the bigger truth of who we really are.”

“So are you trying to tell me that I am a little wave who forgot that I am also the big ocean?”

“Yep, that’s what I think.”

“Can this really be happening?”

“I think so, does it feel true to you?”

“Yes, it does feel true to me and I think I am feeling that remembering thing right now.”

“Does it feel good?”

“Yes, I feel great and I want to feel like this all the time.”

“Well, since you love the feeling of remembering so much, you will probably choose to forget again.”

“So I can remember again?”

“Yes”

“So this remembering and forgetting thing, does it go on forever?”

“That is another great question, and once again it all depends on how you look at things. From the unified point of view, this does go on forever and you are glad it does because it is so much fun.”

“What happens to the individual way?”

“If you think you are separate, you will continue to remember and forget until your time as a wave is done.”

“What happens, when I’m not a wave anymore?”

“Well, as you crash on the shore, the wave you were blends back into the ocean that you always are and have always been.”

“Oh, I get it now.  At that time, the wave part of me will rejoin with the ocean part of me.”

“Yes, exactly.  We are all waves in the one great ocean.”

“Just splashing around, remembering and forgetting?”

“Yes, just splashing around on this journey of remembering”

“And forgetting”

“And remembering again…”

“And forgetting again I suppose.”

“Probably.”

“I Love You”

“Thank You, I Love You too.”

“But wait, since I am connected to you… then actually…I Love Us, I mean WE Love US.””

“Yes.  Yes, we do.”

“Hey look, here comes the shore…Is it my time?”

Yes, it is. Have fun!

“Have fun? I’m really scared.”

It’s OK to be scared, you’ll be fine.

“Here I go… weeeee!”

“Hey, hey little wave?

Are you there?

Little wave?”

“YES, HEY I’M HERE,

I AM STILL HERE!

THIS IS GREAT…

YOU WERE RIGHT,

I WAS A WAVE AND

NOW I AM THE OCEAN!”

“What’s an Ocean?” the big wave replied, playing.

The ocean laughed again,

a new wave was created

and a new timeless moment began…

924 words

---

 [HA1]

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What Do We Tell The Kids?

March 6, 2021

My Vision —To have mastered the art of playing the game of life with commitment, joy, compassion and enthusiasm, regardless of circumstances… including chaos.  This vision is a self-created choice.

The question, “What Do We Tell the Kids?” is one of the most powerful questions of our time.  Not easy to answer.  Fortunately, there a fable, “Waves of Oneness” by Peter Melton, that provides a useful first step.   My plan is to send it to each child and to each grandchild.  Read by the author on: https://petermelton.com/2007/09/26/waves-of-oneness/  If you want printed copies, drop me an email at HarveyWAustin@Yahoo.com.

After reading it aloud a time or two, each of the readers … especially if one is a child … might be open to a larger set of questions — “What did you come here for?  Why did you come at this time? Why did you choose us as your parents? What is your purpose here?” 

These are not questions to be answered but rather to be “dwelled in”. 

If the child is willing, able to remember, or sufficiently insightful, this fable may be able to set the stage for their answers, often surprising.

There are two more steps I am considering.  The first is to create a limited edition of a collection of my memoir-writings, a hundred or more, and send a copy to each of my children and to each grandchild. These are short vignettes of my life, none more than a page and a half.

As part of that book, Gail Gulino, my sister, has agreed to write a genealogical section, placing each reader clearly in a lineage of both ancestors and descendants.

The last step is intended for the older reader, providing them with an up-to-date powerful article that thoroughly and clearly delineates our world’s predicament, deals with the futility of solutions, and suggests how each of us cam live lives of joy and compassion in the face of this predicament.  “Facing Extinction” by Catherine Ingram.    https://livingresilience.net/facing-extinction-catherine-ingram/

These are my personal answers to the question, “What Do We Tell the Kids?”

What will you tell your own children?

Arno T. Rant

Arno T. Rant is also known as Our Now Tyrant:  the tyrant of our times.

 

 

Imagine our era of wild consumerism to be a person.   And imagine his name to be Arno.

Arno is a petty tyrant.  He is clever, a master of sly propaganda.  He rules, smirking and invisible, below our level of conscious discovery.

He has installed in us an overall rule: “Who gets the Most Stuff Fastest, Wins.”

Arno has divided us into two groups.  And he has brain-dirtied each group differently.

The Stuff Group worships Stuff. We are the “getters”. We in the Stuff Group are most comfortable when focused on accumulating stuff. We are shoppers for goods, shoppers for money, shoppers for power.  Our slogan is, “Get a great deal.” We are housewives and executives and politicians; the titles don’t matter, most have none.

The Time Group worships Time.  We are the “doers”.  We in the Time Group are most comfortable when focused on doing.  Our slogan is, “Accomplish the most in the least time.”  Our watchwords are effectiveness and efficiency.  We have huge to-do Lists.

When we in either group fail to meet Arno’s installed standards he has trained us to self-punish — with frustration, anxiety, self-anger.  Insomnia.

 

Is this a useful way of looking at our era of runaway consumerism?  Perhaps.   After all, notice our own emotional condition so much of the time — frustrated, upset and uncertain.  Perhaps waking in the middle of the night, afraid but not knowing why. It could be Arno whispering.

Watch Arno at work.  By our noticing alone, Arno’s power diminishes.

Thoughts on Bonding

Thoughts on BONDING

 

 

Bonding is what we have sorely missed in our raising, that loss embedded in the distancing of father and son, and son again down through the generations.  Instead, most of us were raised and lived our lives inside the world of separation, as in — “Let’s hear it for The American Dream.  Let’s hear it for the patriarchy, separating man from woman and smiling man from smiling man, fearful but smiling ever.”

 

Bonding … so important that it deserves a capital B.   Bonding – that closeness, that trust, that allows us to call each other brother … and live it. 

 

Yet, can it be a goal, searched for directly?   And, by powerful intention, have  as a result?

 

Or is Bonding a paradox?

 

Bonding is our natural state.  Upon birth, we bond with mother first and, in the absence of barriers, bond with daddy, relatives and playmates.  But barriers are never absent, not in this culture of separation, competition and perceived shortages.  We were young and the barriers were effective. Most of us grew up non-bonded with our peers, careful, watchful, competitive … and untrusting

 

And, in this culture, perhaps Bonding is a Result, not a thing in itself.    Might it be what occurs naturally… the result … when men speak their truths, trusting each other?  We know Bonding results from our inner work at our Elders Lodge.  It results from our sharing our deepest inner experiences.  That sharing re-habilitates our natural inherent bonding.

 

Yet there is something else that results in bonding.  Ask any Marine.  The outer shared experience of basic training, the comradery of battle.   The set of shared inner experiences that begin by facing a threatening outer experience.

 

Each of these common shared experiences, whether of the outer kind or only of the inner sort, requires a willingness to see things as they truly are and not as we wish or hope they were.  And each requires a sharing of our deepest views and emotions with another.

 

We have, in our Elders Lodge, been working on ourselves powerfully and vulnerably, speaking our inner truths to each other.

 

We three leaders  believe it is time for us to take the strength, trust and confidence we have gained doing that inner work and set it within a larger arena.

 

 We live in the world of others. We live in the world of outer circumstances. We live in a world that is profoundly threatened.   We face a threat…and we believe that deeply inquiring into the situation as it is and sharing our views, attitudes, assumptions and emotions about it… will result in a bonding in our individual psyches. And this will serve the world of others.

 

We are Elders and Elders are in Service.  We are not merely a group of adults who are in competitive service to our own egos and our shadow.   We are in Service with a capital S.  We believe it is appropriate to ask ourselves, as Wise Elders — What and whom do we serve?

 

We believe that we must observe the signs that point to our world as it threatens to be.  And soon might be.   

 

What is Holy? And how does Cosmetic Surgery play into it?

 

Ah, good question, my friend.  And you began by wondering what the Grateful Dead meant by ‘Holy’.

First I shall have to speak of GOD.   However, to avoid all the baggage of that term, let’s shift a bit… to G.O.D… or Grand Organizing Design.   To start with, I have always felt that I was part of something much bigger than myself and, like most, I felt awe looking at the stars at night, amazed at the occasional glimpse of the aurora borealis when a boy in my small town in Masssachusetts.   And awe looking over the roaring… or even the placid ocean through the fog in Cape Cod.   And once, when I was perhaps four years old, I saw God’s Face in the sky but it was gone when I was able to get my mother out of the house to see it.  “Clouds?” she asked.  No.  I knew.  And I never forgot.

Religion per se, with its absurd ‘Us, not Them’ view has had no appeal.  Only since having become an Elder has my view become deeper.

 

I am impressed with what I once read that every one of our billions, perhaps even trillions, of cells in our body had the cell wall as its brain and that there were, in that wall, ten thousand chemical interactions … per second.  It was a Holy Shit! Moment.  And then when I realized that almost regardless of where one placed the electrodes on the body, we can still get an EKG reading.   How did the current get to the skin… all over?  Straight shot. Passing through every single cell on its way.  That means to me that every single cell in the body gets a message from the heart.   Perhaps the same thing from the weaker EEG… And then the question came up,  And what of the gut-gram?  And what of the myograms?

I live inside the conclusion that every single cell, even the cells of the matrix of the nail of my little toe, knows what every cell in the body is doing.  Wow! Another ‘Holy Shit!”

 

Another piece of obscure science completed the link for me… if you Google, ‘How fast is ‘non-locality’… a physicist speaks of his work whereby he concludes that non-locality is faster than ten thousand times the speed of light,  “… perhaps 125,000 times faster.”   Holy Shit, once more.

Sure, that’s at the micro level.  But, as the wise men across the centuries knew… “As above, so below.”  Or, to put it crudely, if it’s true for the electron, it’s true for the elephant… and for man… and it just gotta be true for the whole f….g cosmos.    Now that’s a real Holy Shit!

One more piece… we descended from some teeny creature, not even yet a creature, in some prehistoric time…thence to complicated molecules, to single cell organisms, to multi-celled things … and on and on… to you and me.  And don’t forget the evolution of our inner organs.   Smart ones, full of cooperation… full of knowledge… full of timing… real intelligence.And the most amazing part is that the pancreas never makes war on the spleen.   Holy shit, Jesus Jumpin H. Christ all fucking Mighty!   And Moses too!

So, for me, the whole thing is all of a piece.   Everything connected.  Across all space. Across all time, probably.  And somehow it’s all connected.   And that’s more than our minds can hold… at least it is more than our individual mind can hold.   Except, to my way of thinking there is no such thing as an individual mind… that’s merely a human construct… a distinction of limited value. There is only Mind, with a capital.  And it is the same thing across the cosmos.  It is a Field, if you like that term better.

So… back to Holy.  What’s Holy?  Everything… from electrons to blades of grass to the night sky.  To You.  To Me.    And where is this G.O.D. to be seen?  Everywhere!  Every fucking where!

 

And not just outside and ‘up there’ but also inside and just everywhere.  And why don’t we know this?  Because, though we might have been born with that profound inner understanding, our juvenile culture whacks it out us.  As fast as possible.

Now  was what the Dead were thinking when they spoke of ‘holy’?    I don’t know… but seems reasonable.

Cosmetic surgery….how does that fit?  Ah, for me, it too is a holy task for it empowers people.  It has them feel better about themselves, more resistant to our culture which disempowers them with words like ‘compare’, ugly, too….(fill in the blank with old, stupid, slow, homely, awkward,   etc.  You know that shit.   And you know what people tell you after cosmetic surgery.  That’s why I do it. That’s why you do it.

Holy… yes, indeed.  It is an honorable and even holy gift we make.   And sometimes we, can with pride and good conscience, even name it as ….Holy

 

I am also enclosing a piece I wrote… or maybe it was Holy-writ through me …  called The Elders Prayer.   Those prayers suck that we have for the age of youth – “Now I lay me down to sleep”…. And the” Lord’s Prayer” for adults.… well, do I dare say that it also sucks?  Well, yeah…   But this one, the Elder’s Prayer… well, I think it’s got a lot going for it.   Try it out.

 

With love,

Harvey

 

 

 

My Amazon Review of Dean Walker’s book, The Impossible Conversation: Choosing Reconnection and Resilience At the End of Business as Usual

Disclaimer:  I have purchased and read the book.  I am a friend of the author and he acknowledged me upfront for a modest financial contribution to its professional editing.

That being said, he has asked me to review The Impossible Conversation.  I have agreed to review it with integrity and honor.

I did not want to read this book.  You will not want to read it either.  And, yet, you must, we must.  It is not a book to be overlooked, to be ignored.  Nor is its messages to be, as Walker puts it, ‘overridden’ even as we are ignoring (overriding) the warnings of our scientists and visionaries. Our future generations, if any, will read  it and they will be aghast at its accuracy and its insight and will be outraged that their ancestors did not wake up.

I am in agreement with the author’s assertion that we are at the end of our western culture of business-as-usual.

We are at the inevitable end of our culture’s assumption thatwe can have infinite progress in a finite world.  We have ongoingly and foolishly damaged our nest too much. We, as the author points out with clarity, backing up his multiple assertions with deadly accuracy, no longer have a series of problems to be solved. Rather we have a set of predicaments.  And predicaments, by their very nature, are insoluble.

He, as I, believe that our culture has spun its course and that our very near future will be an abyss.  While his main thrust is the damage done by corporations and his main concern is that of man-created climate change, there are other possible scenarios that could trigger our downward plunge. He could have said more about these but chose not to extend the length of the book by doing so.

The main thrust of his book, however, is not upon our demise.  Rather it is upon the question, How shall we live in the face of these predicaments? It is a book that speaks to joy and to personal responsibility. It powerfully speaks to reconnection with our Deeper Self … with Others … and with Earth itself.

This is a transformative book.  And transformation is difficult work… work we would rather not do. Be bold, be daring, do it anyway. The Impossible Conversation will support your work.   Our future, your future requires it.

I suggest you read the book in pieces, perhaps a chapter at a time.   It will be well worth your while.  And your descendants will be glad you did.

A Most Dangerous Assumption

 “… it was amazing how many people thought money could buy them exception from the laws of nature.”  S. M. Stirling, Dies the Fire, 2004, p. 5.

This is the grave mistake we make as a western culture, particularly as an American culture. We assume, because we have so much money and have been privileged for so long, we can get away with being predators of our own home.

Nature has a way of dealing with parasites who overstep their bounds.  Since the beginning of time she has countered threats to her balance. All-powerful, she is poised to reduce the threat from our brilliant but rapacious species. We, in our arrogant adolescence, have placed our species in grave danger of becoming a failed experiment.

The Elder’s Prayer

The Elder’s Prayer

All is Change

I Don’t Mind Whatever Happens

This Too Shall Pass

 

All is Connected

What Seems Separate is but Distinction

All is God – Consciousness, Energy, Love

 

I am Whole and Complete

I am All

All is Well

Re-Thinking Your Mission Statement

“Stop it!   You are not here to speak of whether to give to the begging children. You are here to end hunger on the planet. Shift your thinking!”

In that small room in Chennai with other activists from all over the world, and from those words by The Hunger Project president of India, Lalita Banavali, my view of life altered forever. Think globally.

I brought this thinking as I was initiated into the Elders group of The Mankind Project of southern Oregon. And I brought this thinking to the planning session the following Sunday as Michael moderated the creation of our new Mission and Vision Statement.

I believe in the “Think Globally  Act Locally” bumper sticker. And that the Mission Statement of every group of concerned citizens should contain a “Think Globally” statement at its core.

If such a statement is not at the core of a group, I believe that no matter the good it accomplishes, that will have little  impact other than to have the members feel better about themselves. This is good of course, but not impactful.

Such a result might have been sufficient in a different world, one where our population was small and our ecosystems thrived. Useful in a world when we had a series of problems to be solved. Then small groups might have had an impact. Now a local group with merely local thinking can only have a local impact

We no longer have that good and simple world. Now we have a world that is out of control, one that has been described as having run off the cliff in the same way Wile E. Coyote runs off the cartoon cliff and pumps his legs in mid-air for a bit before looking down. And then crashes.

We no longer have a world with problems-to-be-solved, as every activist group assumes, wants and hopes … and often deludes itself that such is true. It is not true. Our worldwide issues are so large and so intertwined that they are like a house of cards. Remove one base card and it all falls. So too our world. Instead of a problem-solution world, we live in a predicament. And predicaments, by their very nature, cannot be solved. They just are.

Two of the simplest ways we can speak this predicament:  If every person in the world were to continue to live their present lifestyle, unchanged, it would take 1.5 earths to sustain those lifestyles. We have one earth. This one is even more informative:   If everyone in the world lived a lifestyle like you and me, average Americans, it would take five earths to sustain itself. We have one earth.

Humanity cannot live this way much longer. We have crossed the point of no return.

We delude ourselves daily and interminably with these two bottom-line beliefs, both wrong. “Business-as-usual”.“Progress at All Costs.”  With these driving us, mostly unconsciously, we are killing the planet. We are tearing up our very nest with our hubris. We assume that we can devastate our beautiful blue and green planet without repercussions. Worse, these are not just something we believe, these are our contexts for life. These are where we ‘come from’… in our day-to-day lives.

We simply assume next Monday will be like last Monday. One week it will not be so. Next Monday will be a horror of unimaginable events.

We humans are facing a future of unimaginable death, famine and suffering. We are facing a future whereby our lives-as-we- have-known-them will be altered forever, most of us dying long before we hoped and dreamed. There are terms for this scenario, this most-probably unavoidable scenario  ̶  “The Long Emergency”, “The Crunch”  and “The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI)”

Put another way, we are in a crisis, long aborning and soon to climax. Perhaps in ten years:  perhaps this year. It matters not what the trigger is – EMP, terrorist attack, economic breakdown, global warming … there are so many possible. The result will be economic disintegration and a resultant loss of electrical power for decades. With that loss of electrical power comes the loss of transportation, communication, and with those will come loss of food supply and water supply. This crisis is likely to have the outcome of the loss of perhaps 95% of our population, perhaps all of us who are not family farmers or  not indigenous tribal members. With neither drinking water nor food coming transported the cities and suburbs means their inhabitants will most likely die in place. Water and food refugees will flood the countryside in desparate survival-search. And find nothing but early death.

Yet, in the face of this horror, never before experienced by humans, there is a bright spot… if we can stand far enough above.

Humanity… as a species will survive. We humans are almost infinitely adaptable and can survive in the coldest and the hottest temperature and can eat almost anything. And this statistic is also good news, at least from that dispassionate view:  if only one in a million of us survive, that still leaves 750 individuals. If many are young girls, young women, that means a few hundred Eves to re-establish human beings as a species. This may be sufficient.

Let us step even further and look at a cosmic law that also is in play:  “Transformation is Preceded by Crisis.”  I believe in this law as inexorable. Barbara Marx Hubbard has extensively written how this law applies at all levels, from atoms to molecules, to simple organisms and, ultimately to all levels of life,  perhaps to the entire cosmos. Certainly it applies to the human species and to all our endeavors. Another way to say it is, “Things have to get worse before they can get better.”

In our instance, we live inside a worldview of You OR Me, an immature worldview   based on the twin assumptions that there are shortages and that we are not connected.  We have evolved (some would say devolved) from the natural world of You AND Me so far that we are at the end of this era of You OR Me. The pendulum of change is at its extreme  ̶  discord, strife, war, exploitation of other humans and of the planet itself. Coupled with denial, we are smashing against the wall of self-destruction.

What will be on the other side of this abyss?   What will be transformed?  It is my fondest hope (ah, may it not be mere hopium) that humanity will be wiser. With that worldwide holocaust in our immediate history, perhaps we will have learned. Perhaps we will create a world that works for everyone with no one left out… that  mature world of You AND Me that we now refer to as  Heaven or Nirvana or Utopia.

So, if all that be true… or at least is a possible story with significant usefulness, then what must be the Mission, what must be the Vision of an organization on this side of the abyss that takes this all into account?

It seems to me, and possibly to others, that any mission statement must, firstly, take such a crisis-future and a transformed-distant-future into account. Secondly, it musttake actions now, right now, whose results might be available to those generations “on the other side”  who, looking back, can find the seeds to  plant in their midst, seeds which provide the basic precepts of a You AND Me worldview, seeds of a great life for all, seeds for a sustainable life on our planet.

What, then, are the roles of such benevolent organizations?  (I like to call them Seymour Conspiracies… organizations who are co-conspirators to do the world good, named after Seymour Glass, a character in a short story written in 1948 by J.D. Salinger, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” who is shell-shocked and firmly believes that the world is conspiring to do him good.)

I believe this is, at its core, an issue in the realm of beingness. It is not so much a question of doing, though doingness flows from the first.  Thisglobal issue raises both a personal and an organizational set of questions  ̶   “How do I be in the face of chaos?”  “How do WE be with each other and those outside the organization?”   It is, at its heart, a question of service, for a Seymour Conspiracy is in service to the greater good. And that greater good, no matter the horrendous circumstances, is for the world on the other side of the abyss, perhaps that transformed world of You AND me.

So what group of us is most valuable to serve?   Who of us is most necessary for humanity’s future? Who must survive?

I wonder if that group we must endeavor to serve, that group that needs the greatest protection, that group which offers the most promise for transformation … is the young girls. For these will be the originators of our new world, our most precious and necessary members. They will be our Eves.

And perhaps our present groups must also consider offering great protection to those who protect and teach the young girls. These would appear to be the strong young men, our warriors of protection. And also offer great protection to that group of wise older women, once revered as Crones, who both teach the young and who carry profound spiritual and survival teachings from this side of the abyss to that distant place.

So let us consider creating Mission Statements and Vision Statements that are larger than our day-to-day world, that are larger than our You OR Me worldview. Let us have Mission and Vision Statements that are worthy of our greatest honor, of our greatest aspirations for ourselves and for our species itself.

And let us co-create vision statements that are worthy of God, the God that is without and the God that is within.

Relationship as a Laboratory

 

 

“When two people get together, they bring all their incompletions from previous relationships. They also bring all that is incomplete within themselves.

The new relationship is a laboratory. Knowing this will make no difference unless you work with what you brought that does not work. This is what it takes to grow as a couple.”

 

Elder Alex Ferranti