Preferences

The universe is always giving us something in every moment. What makes the difference between being happy and being unhappy is that we have preferences. The world offers pain and pleasure, joy and sadness. We cannot escape what we are given. We cannot change the way the world is in any given moment. Our having preferences only adds suffering on top of our experience of what is given. When we get what we prefer we suffer that we may lose it. When we get what we do not prefer we suffer over what we believe we should have gotten.

The truth is that we can experience pain without suffering and pleasure without worry that it may end. But we must be willing to live in the moment. We must be willing to fully experience what we are given without thoughts of the past or future. It is only then that we can truly experience being alive.

Living in the moment is a practice that we take on so that we can fully experience being alive. The past is gone there is no life there. There are only fleeting memories of moments that are no longer real. The future is yet to be created. What we seek to create in the future is given by how we are in the present moment. It makes no sense to live in the future. It makes no sense to live for the future.

God's Plan

I had a friend named Ernie, when I was 20, who was several years older than me. I enjoyed Ernie because he often asked philosophical questions of me that really made me think. One afternoon I had dropped over to talk and he said. “Michael, what is it you really want to do with your life? Do you have a plan for your life?” I thought for a minute and I said, “I want to be able to go anywhere, and do anything with anybody.

After a few seconds Ernie looked at me and said “It sounds like you want to be like a sailor who sails the world with a girl in every port.” His response was not a surprise because Ernie and I often talked about girls. “No Ernie”, I said, “It’s bigger than that, I meant it exactly as I said.”

There is a creation myth that tells us how before there was anything, there was only Oneness. In the myth Oneness is alone. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do and no one to do it with? So Oneness thought, I will make a plan, I will create an endless universe of infinite wonder and fill it with beings of infinite curiosity. I will endow each of those beings with the power to create unlimited possibility. I will create a game of hide and seek and hide myself in every corner of the universe and in every being in the universe. I will pretend that each of those beings is not me. I will make love and connectedness the goal of the game. And to make the game seem absolutely real I will forget where I have hidden myself. The game will play out through eternity until all the pieces, through seeking love and connectedness, have again found that they are all just me playing a game of separateness with myself. Then I will not feel alone.

Several eons passed and Oneness thought, what if I make a mistake?

Several eons passed and Oneness thought, if all is Oneness and Love there cannot be a mistake.

Several eons passed and Oneness declared, "Let there be a universe where I can go anywhere, and do anything with anybody."

Several eons passed and it was so.

 

~Michael Jenkins

Path with a Heart

I was re-reading several of my Carlos Castaneda books from the ‘70’s and I came across the passage below:

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks.

My benefactor told me about it once when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is: Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor’s question has meaning now. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it does not, it is of no use.

Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart the other does not. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path.

Become a Skeptic and Transform Your Life

I believe most people do not know or appreciate what the word “Skeptic” truly means. The common vernacular has a connotation of cynicism and predisposition toward pessimism.

Skepticism

1: an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object

2a : the doctrine that true knowledge or knowledge in a particular area is uncertain b : the method of suspended judgment, systematic doubt, or criticism characteristic of skeptics

Even the word doubt has gotten a bad wrap. I believe doubt is one of the healthiest things that one can have. If someone acts like they are insulted when you doubt what they say then I say they don’t really care about informing you, they want to impress you so that they can control or dominate you. It is subtle but it works. The result is that you stop being curious.

This shows up in your life as a kind of laziness. If someone gives you an answer and you don’t question it then you don’t need to research it out for yourself. But this leaves you open to every hoax and deception imaginable.

Intention Manifesto

Almost a year ago I was meeting someone for the first time who has now become a close friend. The day before our meeting I sat down and wrote the notes below for our meeting. I see now that our meeting was just the beginning of what has attracted a stream of remarkable people into my life. I see now that the list was channeled to me and it has become a powerful list of "Intentions" that has altered the course of my life. I have now adopted the points on this list into my life as my "Manifesto".

*I am open to connecting with people who operate from the consciousness level that we are all extensions of each other.

*Your success is my success.

*Money is a vehicle not the objective.

*I have eliminated or am in the process of eliminating all the impediments that have been operating in my life that prevent me from being committed to what I know I must fulfill during this lifetime.

*I am creating the kind of freedom that allows me to pursue my objectives.

The Eternal Return

Are you living the kind of life that you would be willing to live over again and again? This is the question Frederic Nietzsche poses for us to ask ourselves. Certainly not everything about our lives has occurs as pleasant but when we look back do we see the purpose of everything that has happened and see that life had to be that way it was in order for us to become who we have become? Do we feel grateful for having lived the lives we got?

There are a number of insights in the challenge Nietzsche puts out for us. One is to realize that we are creating our lives and we are not victims. If we aren’t living the kind of life that is sufficiently rewarding and exciting that we would want to live it again it is up to us to address that.

We can rise to Nietzsche’s challenge either by finding the courage to change something in our lives or coming to understand that our life is perfect just the way it is because there is something valuable in every experience we have. Either way our experience is that our life is worth living and even living over again.

But Nietzsche’s Eternal Return is not simply a philosophy to live by it is also an affirmation of the souls desire to have every experience that is possible to have. This explains all the joy and all the pain that being a human being affords. Thereby the soul will move “Beyond Good and Evil”, the tile of a book by Nietzsche, to return to an experience over and over until it has experienced it fully before it will move on to another experience.

Nietzsche invites us to embrace all that is available, every opportunity that is provided, expressing “the eternal Yes to all things”, to jump “Into every abyss…” This is how the soul strives for victory over limitation. This is how the universe is created. Without this striving the universe could not have been created. The soul seeks to make every possibility actual.

Nietzsche’s challenge to us then is to be ever willing to examine our lives and embrace both the experiences that our soul needs to become complete but also to be willing to recognize when our soul needs to move on to experience something new.

~Michael Jenkins

You Owe a Trillion

The other day I heard someone explain what a Trillion is. What he said was imagine that someone borrowed one hundred dollars ($100.00) and said I will pay you back in 10,000 seconds they would be talking about just less than 3 hours. If they said they would pay you back in a million seconds that would be about 12 days. So we are talking about a short-term loan in both cases.

Now here is where it gets interesting. If they said they would pay you back in one billion seconds that would be about 32 years, about the time you might expect to be required to pay off a home mortgage. However, if they said they would pay you back in one trillion seconds you are going to have to wait around 32,000 years!

So if someone says that you owe them a trillion dollars what they are really telling you is that you and your children and your children’s children are their slaves forever! You see, this is their way of showing us that it’s really not about the money. It is about the power they have over you if you believe you really do owe this debt.

Now the questions we all need to ask ourselves are who are these people that are telling us we owe trillions. Are these people our “friends” that we borrowed money from? But most importantly, do we believe we really owe them?

~Michael Jenkins

Researching and Analyzing the Japan Nuclear Crisis

I have been researching and analyzing the challenge we currently face with the situation in Japan.  Here are some of the things I discovered, questions I sought to answer, and conclusions I have reached.

1) What I have concluded is that individual safety from radioactive fallout is really a matter of chance [in other words, a crapshoot].

2) I don't believe the average person understands the nature of the danger from fallout [hot particles].

3) I don't believe the average person understands how the Japan disaster has and will affect the rest of the world.

4) I don't believe the average person understands the differences in half-life of various isotopes.

5) I don't believe the average person understands the danger to the people in Japan.

A Friend is Someone Who

A friend is someone who looks into your eyes and sees the universe there. A friend is someone who listens to what is important to you because it is important to him or her to discover who you are. A friend is someone who doesn’t make you “wrong” even when you make yourself wrong. A friend is someone who is not afraid to always tell you how you occur for them and hear how they occur for you. A friend is someone who will always intend the best for you. A friend is someone who will always share his/her food with you. A friend is someone who will see himself/herself as an extension of you. A friend is someone who respects and encourages your autonomy and sovereignty as a human being. A friend is someone who loves you even when he/she doesn’t love what you do. A friend is someone who will never compromise his/her values nor ask or expect you to do so. A friend is someone who you can always say “no” to without feeling guilty. A friend is someone who sees and accepts you just as you are and as you are not as well as allowing you space to continually become. A friend is someone who will be at his/her best for you when you are at your worst. A friend is someone who reaches for your hand but touches your heart.

~Michael Jenkins

An End in Itself

One of the most important things I got from reading Immanuel Kant was the notion of the end-in-itself. Actually I already knew about this concept, we all do, we just forget. In his Metaphysics of Morals Kant tells us that to be moral we must treat all human beings, including ourselves, not merely as a means to an end but an end-in-ourselves.

This got me thinking about the interactions I have with people in my life. So often I walk into a store and forget that I am dealing with a human being not a vending machine. Certainly my intent is to buy something in the store but Kant is pointing out it is just not “right” to see the clerk as merely a means to my getting something I want to purchase any more than it is "right" for the clerk to see me merely as a means to make money. Kant grants that we need to use ourselves and others as means to ends, but he points out it is "wrong" to not at the same, time treat each other as an end.