SoundBites from the Still Point:

Stand by me

Reading time less than 90 seconds.   Contemplation for a lifetime

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More often than not, words do not reach what poetry or music touch.  Recently, one of my better friends sent a link this song, “Stand by Me”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM (Click on the link and the video will play or paste it into your browser) As I listened to the music, watched these incredible musicians and listened to the message in the song, something near miraculous moved into the deeper parts of me.  Perhaps the movement stirred places in the soul because much of the song reflects the severity and exquisite beauty of indigenous people across the world.  Perhaps it is because so much of this reflects the reality of South Africa where my daughter lives, or because the song addresses the profound longing in the heart that America for a sense of peace and meaning.  In this interview with Bill Moyers, Mark Johnson describes the ten year process of creating this album Playing for Change and his inspiration to unite the world through music.. (This link is an interview with Bill Moyers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHU0BTGHe3g&feature=related) and in and of itself deserves your time.

It is not merely the lyrics or the melody that is so transformative, but the heart and spirit Mark Johnson responded to that provides the inspiration and hope in these very hard times.   Please take the time to let this music sing in the bones, then listen again and let it dissolve what stands between you and others, and resolve with me to Stand together. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM

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The Stillpoint of Being describes the point of consciousness where, completely connected to the sacred center of life, pure awareness replaces thinking, the frenetic activity of the mind quiets, emotion ceases to dominate our inner experience, and we rest in the calm expansion inherent when the soul of the world carries us.  To live in the wholeness of the moment requires our skill to recognize when we’ve left the present in favor of living in the pain or nostalgia of the past, the fear or hope of the future, or in stories of what we think others think about us.

By David Bryen.  For more information contact: (503) 644 1027).

The Man Loves the Wine She Serves Through Her Body http://www.davidbryen.com

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David Bryen MA

www.StillPointServices.com

david@davidbryen.com

I love the Heron’s knowledge that its

momentary dance across

the water is reason enough for the lake to

calm itself into mirror.

I love the way she sits and waits until

the fish cease jumping

the breeze quiets

and gravity settles the water.

When the world has suspended all else

she unfolds her wings

and all those who have readied themselves

see the two graces flying.

I love the extravagant disrobing of the Heron,

fluid and abundant over night calmed water,

this pride in giving unobstructed

access to her delicate moon formed treasure.

It is enough to see it once

and I will gladly spend the rest of my life

here at the water’s edge

David Bryen

December 3, 2008

Curators of Consciousness:  How should we then live?

A house of cards collapsed somewhere between here and the summer of 2008.  The seeds of this collapse were evident to me during the election of Al Gore and George Bush in 2000.  Watching the incompetency of our country to properly elect the highest office in our land, it dawned on me that we had just reached the apex of our culture.  I didn’t know what to say publicly but I knew that because all things tend to cycle toward an extreme, a reaction would set in and the test of our culture would come in response to that reaction.  When the towers went down on 9/11 our nation responded with an unfortunate hardening which in turn paved a way for the disastrous war in Iraq and the subsequent loss of respect from many nations of the world.  The seeds of this demise were apparent in the incessant replay of the airplanes, the towers, the fires and the disintegration of the citadels of America’s financial institutions.  It was as if the collective could not wrap its mind around the tragic dissolution we all witnessed.

Taken from an archetypal point of view the collapse of the towers was a harbinger of the coming collapse of the financial world we once knew.  Before 9/11 who in America would have imagined that our country would experience such a dramatic shattering of our innocence and naivety.  Not only was it a physical tragedy and caused the suffering of so many, it was also an image, like a collective foretelling dream, to let us know that we were facing a precarious collapse, and our response to that warning needed the utmost wisdom to shepherd our way through the times we were to face.  Individually and collectively, the dreams of earthquakes, tidal waves, plane crashes, volcanoes etc. are indications from the deeper wisdom of the psyche that deeper processes drive conscious life.  These picturesque and intuitive warnings invite us to approach life with consciousness, care, and thoughtful considerations of the decisions we make.

It is important to know that these deeper processes demand that the ego’s hubris must soften in order to make way for the new life to emerge.  Everything cycles; every idea comes int0 fruition and then is revitalized, reshaped, and reformed.  Every year plants blossom, fruit and then go into a period of dormancy, every nation must endure the inevitable rise and fall of its supremacy.  Florida Scott Maxwell, talks about the individual psyche:

“I often say to people, you have neat tight expectations of what life ought to give you, but you won’t get it.  That isn’t what life does.  Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to and it couldn’t do it better.  Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition.”

It is timely and imperative to understand that life shatters precious things in the collective as well.  The whole world watched as the airplanes pierced the epicenter of the financial world igniting a fierce firestorm in the belly of financial centers of the world and they collapsed.  The airplanes popped the bubble of our military and economic might, crushing America’s sense of invulnerability as we watched them fall.  We all tried to absorb the absolute horror and devastation in this newly experienced vulnerability.  It has taken 7 years, but we are just now experiencing the collapse envisioned in that attack.  The image and the reality of those planes piercing the skin of the towers, infecting the structures with the fury of heats disease, remains as an archetypal reality that has been chasing the extravagance of our culture for some time.

Carl Jung introduced the concept of Enantiodromia as a valuable concept to help understand the movement of the psyche and the movement of a culture.  This concept helps give context to what we are currently facing in the economic disaster of our day.  Enantiodromia is a description of the equilibrium principle we observe in the natural world when any extreme is opposed by the system to restore balance. It means the superabundance of any force inevitably produces its opposite.  It is the cycle of life (birth, maturation, death) that governs every system we know about.

This concept is demonstrated in the Icarus myth.  The youthful Icarus was given wax wings fashioned by his father Daedalus to escape the island on which they were imprisoned.  Before they flew from the island, he warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, or too close to the sea. Overcome by the giddiness that flying lent him, Icarus soared through the sky, but in the process he flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax. Icarus kept flapping his wings but soon realized that he had no feathers left and that he was only flapping his bare arms and he crashed to the earth.

Our culture is unconsciously living out the enantiodromia of the Icarus myth.  The meteoric rise of our culture necessitated this corresponding cycle of diminishment.  Think of the rise and fall of a culture as a cycle and we may have reached our apex.  With an understanding of this natural cycle we can approach the current financial collapse, recession, and environmental crisis intellectually grounded in our knowing that larger processes are at work that have always shaped rise and fall of all cultures.  .

When Copernicus realized that the sun did not rotate around the earth, but the earth rotated around the sun, he forever changed the way we look at the solar system.  This same paradigm shift is upon us and it is so important to seize this opportunity to realize that we, our culture, our nation, our ideals, our earth, the way we understand evolution, development and individuation,…are not the center of creation.  This chaos that grips our current recession is painfully indicative of the ego’s fear of the unknown and until a different consciousness finds us, many will suffer. If I am correct, it is time to stand grounded in the emergence of the new consciousness that approaches our world and to become the curators of that consciousness. If we can take our eyes off the immediate fear sweeping our world we will see the immense possibilities that underlie this change.

We may for the first time collectively understand what it means to be our brothers keepers, and to realize that we are also the brothers that are kept by others.  We may finally as a world realize that what is good for one must be good for all, and that the flapping of the butterfly’s wings in Asia effects the weather across the globe.  A new age of responsibility may dawn and the interdependence of everything on everything else may just become a reality that informs every decision we make.

Armed with the reality of a deeper pattern, I want this Soundbite from the Stillpoint to have two effects on its readers.  First is to recognize that we have the opportunity and choice to recognize our role in the Copernican shift that is afoot.  We can take the role of becoming the curators of consciousness, to protect a new awareness and through our ability to observe the deeper destination, usher in the new.  In the fallow times of life, ( I will write more later about this ) it is imperative to relax, deepen, remain thoughtful and interior while the world goes through its natural cycles.  The questions:  How Should We then Live?  How do we live each day with the assault and chaos of a collapsing world?  What do we focus on?  Where do we look for hope?  What is the Source of our lives, our identity and the purpose of life?  Who is the Body we are called to care for?  How do those of us who have been called to be the curators of consciousness act, feel, and behave in a world whose identity and definition comes from our consumption habits?

Wordsworth said it best:  “A dark invisible workmanship reconciles discordant elements and makes them move in one society…”  It is time for us to yield to this dark and invisible workmanship and to respond with the wisdom of the Toa Te Ching:  “Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?”

Here are some ideas that float to the top for those who accept the invitation to become Curators of Consciousness:

• We must realize that collapse is necessary for the new form to emerge.
• This is time to develop the soul’s capacity to relate to and live with the paradoxes of life and embrace the opposites that exist in our world.
• It is a time to hold consciousness without the answer, to relate to what is, to let ourselves fully experience what it is to no longer have an identity so that something new can grow.
• Rather than constrict in fear, stop spending, and hoard our money we were to understand that now it is time to give, to open, to share. The question of how to live becomes: How should we then share?
• Perhaps the whole purpose of this point of our journey is to become co-creators who can help transform the potential ideas into new forms with richer meanings, and new cultural relationships. I have an idea that a new Divine-Human partnership is arising in this time of collapse to let us know that our depths are structured for just such a relationship, and that our capacity to be transparent to the Divine will usher in a broad new awareness of participation with Divine Life. In the times to come, we will, I believe, have the opportunity to understand that something totally more substantial constitutes what we are as human beings.
• What has been left out of the equation is what an enlightened focus might do to shape the coming new. Human beings must understand that our culture, our bodies, our lives are not the end of the world, but a stepping stone to whatever calls us forward. The ego must learn to give up its primacy, and its idea that it is the center of the world.
• There is something essential in suffering that develops the life of the soul. The soul of a nation benefits from this suffering as well.

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The Stillpoint of Being describes the point of consciousness where, completely connected to the sacred center of life, pure awareness replaces thinking, the frenetic activity of the mind quiets, emotion ceases to dominate our inner experience, and we rest in the calm expansion inherent when the soul of the world carries us.  To live in the wholeness of the moment requires our skill to recognize when we’ve left the present in favor of living in the pain or nostalgia of the past, the fear or hope of the future, or in stories of what we think others think about us.

NEW READERS WANTED: If you find this information valuable, pass it along. To add your name to the subscriber list, or provide feedback, email: stillpoint@davidbryen.com

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© David Bryen, all rights reserved.  Please use material from Sound Bites from the Still Point in whole or in part, as long as you include complete attribution, including email link.  Please also notify me where the material will appear. The attribution should read:
By David Bryen.  For more information contact: (503) 644 1027).

The Man Loves the Wine She Serves Through Her Body http://www.davidbryen.com

-          – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
David Bryen

-          14060 SW Maverick Ct

-          Beaverton, OR 97008

-          503 644 1027

David Bryen MA

www.StillPointServices.com

david@davidbryen.com

The Stillpoint at Cape Point

The Stillpoint at Cape Point:

Africa is old.  The animals seem almost prehistoric, worn, elegant as if from another time, irresistible to native and visitor, large teeth, thick skin, amber-brown eyes, cavernous mouths, dangerously wild, undomesticated.  I watched as my adult children stood eye to eye with the elephants, wrapped by their trunks, face to face with ostrich, baboon, and the Great White Shark. I saw the joy erupt on their faces when the ancient animal met the ancient in their soul: that feeling, old and refreshing, connected to the irreplaceable fascination for the animal.

The land is old.  This land transformed itself though us.  Like a candle dipped in another layer of hot wax, I thought of how our lives are shaped by the accumulated bruises, scars and joys of our inner lining, how we are all layers born from each experience, forming in each of us a complete and unique universe of reactions.

If “experience” is the word to describe it, one such experience still reverberates through all my layers.  Cape Town South Africa is located 50 km. (30 miles) from Cape Point.  This needlepoint peninsula of land lies at the bottom of Africa, the bottom of the world, the rounding point where the frigid waters of the Atlantic Ocean meet the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.  Below us, south of here, there is nothing but Antarctica, and turning to the north, nothing but the whole world.  We are perched on a 10 ft. wide razor edge ridge 1000 feet straight down on either side that divides east and west: The Cape of Good Hope.  Something magical happened when I stood at the very bottom of this old and deep land as the spirits of the ancient mariners, (some who drowned and some who sailed by this point,) my spiritual ancestors, the animals, and the spirit of place flooded my being.

Much of my being remains caught in the crosshairs of north and south, east and west, new and old, future and past, inner and outer. My heart, is still, agape. I stand there with my family, wave after wave of immensity rolls through my inner parts: This is the Stillpoint at Cape Point, and I stand still in its complexity.

Experiences of life shape us.  Don’t be afraid of them. There is no reason to think that life can be otherwise.  Have the courage to come into your experience, to see it, sink into it, participate in it. Let the soul be moved by things under the surface of life, so the psyche’s sensitive photographic plates can give texture and fascination to the glory of being here and being alive.
The Stillpoint of Being describes the point of consciousness where, completely connected to the sacred center of life, pure awareness replaces thinking, the frenetic activity of the mind quiets, emotion ceases to dominate our inner experience, and we rest in the calm expansion inherent when the soul of the world carries us.  To live in the wholeness of the moment requires our skill to recognize when we’ve left the present in favor of living in the pain or nostalgia of the past, the fear or hope of the future, or in stories of what we think others think about us.

NEW READERS WANTED:  If you find this information valuable, pass it along. To add your name to the subscriber list, or provide feedback, email: stillpoint@davidbryen.com

PRIVACY POLICY: I will never rent, trade or sell my email list to anyone for any reasons whatsoever.
© David Bryen, all rights reserved.  Please use material from Sound Bites from the Still Point in whole or in part, as long as you include complete attribution, including email link.  Please also notify me where the material will appear. The attribution should read:
By David Bryen.  For more information contact: (503) 644 1027).
StillPoint Services, www.StillPointServices.com
The Man Loves the Wine She Serves Through Her Body http://www.davidbryen.com
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David Bryen
- 14060 SW Maverick Ct
- Beaverton, OR 97008
- 503 644 1027

SoundBites from the Still Point

November 5, 2008

The Heart of the Matter

My daughter Karis lives in South Africa, where she is often reluctant to let South Africans know she is an American because of the judgment she feels for Americans. I woke up this morning to an E-mail from her:

“HURRAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GOOD JOB AMERICA! Dad, I remember when you came to SA (in 2006) the first time you mentioned this guy Obama and said you thought he could be president and I laughed saying that America wouldn’t elect a black man. I’m so glad I was wrong, the whole of South Africa is cheering for America, which is a first. . I heard a British journalist saying that this election is a ‘test to see how many stupid people there still are in America’ and at least we passed…”

I responded to Karis saying that rather than trying to find out how many stupid people there are in America, I explained that it was a test of how many people were swayed to vote by responding to the reptilian, fear based world view of conservative America, or by responding to the heart based perspective that Barack Obama maintained through his whole campaign. Let me give you the four levels of consciousness that describe what part of the brain is activated by any response to the world:

The survival/reptilian: eat or be eaten, kill or be killed;

The tribal/Mammalian: black/white, good/bad, belong to the tribe, for us or against us,

The intellectual: pragmatic, efficient, logical derived decisions

The connective Heart: the compassion, connection, connected to all things,

When we use this delineation to describe different ways we process information an interesting interpretation of the election emerges. This understanding that our thinking can arise from either or all of these brain functions, has become a seminal way for me to understand all human emotion, behavior, relational difficulties and spiritual practices. Congratulations to Barack, to an awakening America, and to all of us who have held to the need to learn the language of the heart. It is the heart that won this election, not race, not organization, but a tectonic shift in consciousness in which the fear, possessiveness, domination, superiority perspective was dropped in favor of a larger consciousness. We responded to an appeal from the heart of the world.

We observed the most dramatic shift in John McCain in his concession speech when he dropped away from his “fight and kill” rhetoric and we felt something in our heart as his eyes softened, he lost that peering frightened look, his gestures warmed, his body relaxed, he stopped baring his teeth with that forced grimace that was supposed to be a smile, stopped trying to scare us into voting for him, and he spoke of cooperation, connection, and finding a way to set differences aside for the larger good of the whole world. I have never observed such a dramatic shift from reptilian to heart consciousness in my life! If there is a lesson for me in this election it has something to do with observing this shift, not only in his concession speech, but in the bright eyes of all those caught by cameras across the nation. Gloria and I commented on what a difference this campaign would have been had he been able to communicate from that very fresh and enlivening space.

The lesson I want to point us toward is the difference that happens when one is able to find their way to heart consciousness and communicate from there. This is the center where one is not only in touch with the Source of life, but becomes one with it. This is the Stillpoint I have been trying to articulate for years. This place is the divine feminine, the holy place where we know we are part of everything. This place knows of our interdependence on everything. It is a place where soul language becomes eloquent and far reaching. It unites the world. It is this place that lets us know that the goal of human consciousness is to participate in what arises in the moment. Here, divisions create opportunities to bridge and expand, the knowledge of foibles allows compassion to reign, truth is welcomed because the fear of judgment is gone, and we become the portals for love to flow into the world.

The reason to hope is not primarily because of Barack’s bi-racial heritage, it is because he is the first national leader for many years who is able to speak from the heart of compassion, inclusion, and the dignity of all humanity. What a privilege to watch for a few minutes the possibilities for radical transformation when a national leader speaks from the potency of the heart.

My heart is filled today from the resonant note he sounded in my soul last night.

________________________

The Stillpoint of Being describes the point of consciousness where, completely connected to the sacred center of life, pure awareness replaces thinking, the frenetic activity of the mind quiets, emotion ceases to dominate our inner experience, and we rest in the calm expansion inherent when the soul of the world carries us. To live in the wholeness of the moment requires our skill to recognize when we’ve left the present in favor of living in the pain or nostalgia of the past, the fear or hope of the future, or in stories of what we think others think about us.

NEW READERS WANTED: If you find this information valuable, pass it along. To add your name to the subscriber list, or provide feedback, email: stillpoint@davidbryen.com

PRIVACY POLICY: I will never rent, trade or sell my email list to anyone for any reasons whatsoever.

© David Bryen, all rights reserved.  Please use material from Sound Bites from the Still Point in whole or in part, as long as you include complete attribution, including email link.  Please also notify me where the material will appear. The attribution should read:
By David Bryen.  For more information contact: (503) 644 1027).

The Man Loves the Wine She Serves Through Her Body http://www.davidbryen.com

-          – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
David Bryen

-          14060 SW Maverick Ct

-          Beaverton, OR 97008

-          503 644 1027