Thank God for taste buds

I love food. Not just for the taste but for the smells and textures and colours. I've just been watching a local programme on television that was spotlighting 'Westcoast' restaurants in Vancouver. They interviewed the chefs and the food critics alternately. My mouth was watering and there is nothing in my fridge that holds a candle to what I was watching being whipped up on the screen. One of the chefs said he wished he had 'smellevision', as he wafted steam at the camera.

It's not that I don't like to cook - au contraire! It's precisely because I do like to cook that I like to eat out. It's inspiring. I like to get inspiration from the menu items and then I like to order the things I wouldn't make at home - just because I wouldn't make them at home. It's a hard choice to make though. Do I collect ideas for things I can cook myself or do I eat what I can't be bothered to make at home? What a delicious dilemma.

And it isn't just the food that I like. I like the ambiance, the people-watching and the whole experience - when it's done well. When it's disappointing, there's no worse waste of money. Different restaurants satisfy different needs in me. Some are for comfort food and a cozy atmosphere. Some are to inspire me creatively. Others are for the buzz.

I have a few musts: the seat must be comfortable; the staff must be knowledgeable and friendly; the food must be tasty and hot, as well as being what they say it will be; I have to be able to hear my eating companion; the food has to be good value for money, and that doesn't mean quantity; and the restaurant has to be clean and well-lit (not bright), including the bathrooms. My pet peeve is when they don't tell you that there are fresh tomatoes in the dish and it comes loaded with them. They may think it's a bonus but, as you know, it isn't to me.

If the restaurant offers wine by the glass, so much the better. I can't usually take advantage of anything more than two glasses but I do like the choice. I'm not really into pretty cocktails with umbrellas but an interesting feature drink can be a good thing - even if its a beer.

I have to say that the selection of restaurants has increased and improved immensely since I arrived here in 1990. I keep a list of ideas, just so that my mind hasn't gone blank when it's time to make a recommendation. I just have to be able to find it when I need it! A little scrap of paper on my desk isn't helpful when I'm out for the day.

Lest you think I only like to eat out; no sir-ee! Eating in is great as well. I just wish my little 'hoosie' was a tad bigger. I can work with a small kitchen - less space to cover - but I'd like a bigger spot to put the table and chairs - and hide the dishes. Other than that, cooking is a creative treat for me, even when I cook for myself, but especially when I have someone to cook for. I've got a lovely selection of cookbooks and have to cull them periodically. There are currently two new ones waiting to be cracked.

Food is such a great way to commune. When I work with clients, especially when I am 'living in', we eat something at the completion of each piece of work. Taking food and drink into the body is a way of integrating the work into our cells. It's why people have been eating at celebrations and ritual events since before we can remember. Every family can tell you of memorable family events that took place around meals - both wonderful and disasterous, leaving us replete or with indigestion.

Got any dinner dates planned?

A convergence of understanding

Dr. Richard Tarnas wrote a book in 2006 called Cosmos and Psyche. This week he was speaking about the book at the Vancouver Public Library and I went with a friend to hear him. I didn't know anything about him except that my friend's friend had thought he might be interesting. The title of the book and the blurb on the web site sounded intriguing and I had vaguely heard his name before - so we went.

I read an interview about the book on beliefnet when I got home and they quoted Richard regarding the value of astrology as it relates to our cosmology. In his talk he explained that the book is somewhat revolutionary in academic, scientific and philosophical circles because it is giving credence to astrology, a subject which has almost universally been ridiculed in those circles in the past:

The existence of correlations between the planetary cycles and human life makes it possible for both individuals and societies to understand better what archetypal energies are at work and at what time. This can help us be more skillful and aware as we engage in the activities of life. It's like knowing the weather report before going out into the ocean to sail or surf. It helps to know where the winds and waves will be coming from.

But there is also a deeper advantage: Modern civilization pays a high price for living in a universe that it believes is random and spiritually meaningless. Nature is not honored but is instead exploited for short-term benefit. And a purposeless universe creates a sense of deep spiritual emptiness inside, which people try to fill with endless consumer products, so that the industrial technology producing those products is cannibalizing the planet. But as we know, you can never get enough of what you don't really need. A new vision of nature and the universe as ensouled, as spiritually significant, would give a better ground for both moral responsibility and a sense of spiritual belonging.

You can check out the web site if you'd like to read more. It was affirming for me to listen to what he had to say this evening. At the end, I said so to my friend and he said that he would have thought that there wasn't too much in what he said that I didn't already know. Overall, I think he's right about that - at least about the conclusions, not the details specific to his areas of academic expertise. What was affirming was that it was coming out of his mouth and not mine.

When I named this blog 'Is there anybody out there?', I wasn't expecting the answer to my question to come so fast nor so graphically. Not only is 'someone out there', but one of those someones is publishing his thoughts in a well-researched and clear fashion.

At the end of his talk Dr. Tarnas concluded that he thinks that humankind is involved in a giant experiment. It is as well, in his opinion, that we disregarded the value of astrology when we did, at least in mainstream society, because it allowed human beings to discard the restrictive ideas of predestiny and consider ourselves masters of our own destinies. Now that we've had a go at that perception, and seen the pitfalls (hopefully), we can come back to the overarching, mythical aspects of astrology again, in order to appreciate what being individuated means within the context of an intelligent, caring cosmology that gives meaning to our choices.

He explained how he sees our western culture as being without intentional initiatory experiences for our young. I'll quote him again from another article on the same site:

If all our youth are uninitiated, then of course all our adults are uninitiated too. When one turns on the television, virtually everything one sees is designed for the adolescent mind, of all ages: Pow! Zap! Boom!, explosions, aggression, superficial sex, incessant change, shiny surfaces, ceaseless growth, the new, the fast, the ever youthful, the momentarily exciting. There is no sense of the deeper meanings, the profundity of life, and that our actions today have enduring consequences.

The reason our culture does not provide such an initiation, however, may not just be that it has somehow simply been forgotten, or foolishly abandoned its traditional wisdom, and myopically asserted a mechanistic material world with no deeper spiritual purpose or significance. While true as far as it goes, this explanation does not do justice to a possibly deeper process that seems to be unfolding. For the very absence of initiatory rites of passage in our culture appears to have effectively created a kind of closed container, a psychic pressure cooker, an alchemical vessel that is intensifying the archetypal energies into a collective morphic field of explosive power. Perhaps the fact that our culture does not provide rituals of initiation is not simply a massive cultural error, but rather reflects and even impels the immersion of the entire culture in its own massive collective initiation.

I believe that humankind has entered into the most critical stages of a death-rebirth mystery. In retrospect it seems that the entire path of Western civilization has taken humankind and the planet on a trajectory of initiatory transformation, into a state of spiritual alienation, into an encounter with mortality on a global scale—from world wars and holocausts to the nuclear crisis and now the planetary ecological crisis—an encounter with mortality that is no longer individual and personal but rather transpersonal, collective, planetary. It is a collective dark night of the soul, a deep separation from the community of being, from the cosmos itself. We are undergoing this rite of passage with virtually no guidance from wise elders because the wise elders are caught up in the same crisis. This initiation is too epochal for such confident guidance, too global, too unprecedented, too all-encompassing; it is larger than all of us. It seems that we are all entering into something new, a new development, a crisis of accelerated maturation, a birth, an entrance into a profoundly different way of being in the cosmos.

I hadn't looked at it as a transpersonal experience before and it was worth going to hear him for that thought alone. I have been casting about for a long time now trying to figure out what is going on with a great number of the the people with whom I have contact. IThey seem not to be interested in engaging the process of introspection. It has felt to me as though this is not specific to any individual but rather generally true of the mainstream of our society.

Dr. Tarnas' talk gives me hope again because if people are uninitiated, I think they are unlikely to be interested in introspection. The uninitiated psyche might be so busy sorting out how to enter the adult world and determining who they are in it - initiatory issues - that they are too busy to have time for introspection. Perhaps the desire for introspection comes with having enough maturity to see a reason to reflect.

I don't think we can be so categorical as to say that everyone is uninitiated. Conscious initiatory rites are somewhat rare but there are some people who have been initiated by crisis, although I wouldn't wish it on anyone. Of these, some get stuck in crisis without any redeeming initiation as the by-product. They are the walking wounded and therapists deal with them daily. Crisis-as-initiation seems to me to be a fairly hit-and-miss approach to what should be one of the building blocks for creating mature adults. Far from using our elders as the guides for initiating our young men and women, we have been marginalizing them and making everyone in society afraid of their impending elder years of wisdom.

As we were walking out of the library at the end, my friend's friend who had suggested the talk shook her head and said to us that Rudolph Steiner had been saying many of the same things at the beginning of the last century. I'm sure he isn't the only one and we could all add to the list. I'm choosing to see the glass as half-full though and I think that perhaps there is a convergence of understanding coming from many different disciplines. When a perspective's time has come it seems to sprout up everywhere, and many people claim ownership. I'm just relieved to see that the time has come.

I shall come back with more comments when I've found the time to read the book and not just respond to what he talked about tonight which is, after all, a brief review of a much deeper topic.

Spiritual bungee jumping

I had an idea many years ago for a t-shirt design. It was to picture a black line drawing of a scared, skinny guy standing on the edge of a cliff with a huge elastic tied around his ankles and his hands together, as if in prayer but standing out at right angles from his solar plexus. His hair is in disarray, his knees knobby, his feet without shoes, and his eyes are bugged out. Under his picture it was to say, "spiritual bungee jumping". I had this idea in 1988 when I did my first degree of Reiki. I guess you could say I've been sitting on it for a while.

I never drew it because I didn't have the artistic skill to make the picture look exactly the way I could see it in my head. So it has stayed in my head even though I have described it to people many times. We so often talk about the physical, intellectual or emotional 'jumps' in life but we rarely talk about the spiritual ones. They're important though. I could argue that they are the most important. They are, after all, the ones that the sciptures of all the major faiths of the world are concerned with.

Perhaps 'spiritual bungee jumping' encompasses all of the others by using them as a metaphor for the great leaps of faith that spiritual exploration requires. Take an initiation rite as an example. It involves a physical, emotional and sometimes intellectual task where an individual comes face to face with themselves and their limiting beliefs, and meet the challenge. Anything can be a 'spiritual bungee jump' if we choose to frame it that way.

One thing is for sure and that's that the jump takes courage. Life is full of challenges, great and small but it isn't just the great ones that require courage. That's because the definitions of great and small are in the eyes of the beholder.

Here's a thought to sit with and ponder: What great 'spiritual bungee jumps' have you taken in your life? Or is there one that you've been sidling up to, flirting with? Are you ready to jump yet? What do you believe it would do for you if you jumped? What's holding you back?

But never mind the ones you haven't taken yet. Let's see the glass as half full ... have you celebrated the ones you have taken?

Would you live your life differently?

What makes a choice we've made, a mistake? I watched a film the other night about life choices as viewed by a woman on her death bed. She was lamenting past 'mistakes' and came to the conclusion that you can't make mistakes and so you shouldn't live in fear of making them.

I've been saying for a long time, to anyone who will listen, and especially to myself, that 'everything is perfect', which I think is just another way of saying that we don't make 'mistakes'. It goes along with my saying that 'there is no such thing as a coincidence'. But that's for another day.

What I took away from the film is not only that we can't make mistakes, but that if we had chosen the 'other road' it would have been 'right' as well. What we choose is what is for us. It is our reality from that moment on. If we lament it, then we're not really living it. Doesn't that put us in some sort of Never-land? You're not living the life you didn't choose and you're not really committed to the one you did.

To lament a choice is to open wide the door of your life to doubt. It's to constantly ask, 'Did I do the right thing?' It drags us back to the point of choice, where we are suspended until such time as we come to terms with what we did choose. Watching the character on her death bed, grappling with her fears, I wondered whether we have to wait until we die to find peace, or if we can consciously resolve these doubts at an earlier point, leaving ourselves free to enjoy life.

And we could consider what happens if we don't choose. What if life seems to happen to us and we feel we have no choice? I'm pretty sure that if I don't make a choice, that is also a choice. I think you can be so afraid to choose that you let life choose for you - but it's no less of a choice for all that.

We get the tool of free will on this planet and it is our greatest opportunity and our greatest responsibility. To choose is to exercise our prerogative as human beings to participate in the experience of duality; this way or... that way. Which will it be?

And here's a mind-bender! What if every time there is a choice to be made, one part of our being makes one choice and another part makes the other choice, branching off endlessly to infinity? What if we can split as often as we make decisions and we're not as finite as we think we are? We have no proof that we can do this but we have no proof that we can't either.

Wouldn't that be the ultimate waste, if you lamented not taking one of the options when all the time another part of you did make the other choice and lived out the consequence of that choice? You would literally be ruing something that didn't happen! It would be such a waste of time and energy. If we knew this were so, we could make our choices without being afraid that we had missed an opportunity. I ask myself, would I live my life differently if I were to see it this way?

Me in the Napoli

Someone anonymously asked if the photo here is of me in the Napoli and indeed it is.