image courtesy of Smath.

Like most people, my mind meanders much of the time. I find myself starting a task with great aplomb but soon I lose focus and end up daydreaming, dicking around on the internet, and otherwise wasting time. This is especially pronounced in my job-free life, where it is up to me to structure my own time and pursue my own goals. I haven’t done terribly at this, but I also haven’t done as much as I know I’m capable of, or even as much as I want to do.

I successfully changed several of my bad habits a few years ago, but, over time, I found myself retreating back into those old patterns. I learned once again that inertia is powerful, the ruts in our brains are deep, and gains, if not protected, can soon be lost. In the last few months, even my physical well-being has suffered from the lazy choices I was making. I felt low-grade fatigue and nausea many days, and dragging myself through even the bare minimum tasks required took what seemed like an inordinate amount of effort. Was I depressed? No, I don’t think so. I was just feeling lost, lacking even a compelling reason or the energy to get found.

So I signed up for a spiritual retreat in the Rocky Mountains hoping to jump those entrenched tracks, get my head straight, and make some space for something new to emerge. The annual Being and Becoming Retreat takes place in two parts: being is all about practicing what it’s like to take a liberated position to life, and becoming is about operating from that position in conjunction with others. I decided that I needed to start at the beginning, and so signed up for the Being half.

Sitting on a cushion without moving for 10 days is not as easy as it sounds, but ultimately it was incredibly rewarding. Our instructions were simple: let everything go and have no relationship to whatever arose in our consciousness, from beloved songs to brilliant ideas to back pain. Most importantly, our teacher told us, don’t give up. Keep making noble effort.

This phrase, “noble effort,” really stood out for me. Trying is one thing; making noble effort is another. It puts a higher and deeper value on our struggles, and makes continued exertion feel, in and of itself, worthwhile. As I sat hour after hour, I put everything I had into the act of meditation. Some hours were easy and some were torturous. But the fact that I kept at it, even in the face of terror and distraction and physical pain, made me feel proud and capable. It also led to beautiful moments when I was freed from the small position I usually operate from, and got to experience what it feels like to be truly liberated from the past and future, alive and awake in the present moment.

I noticed that, as I exerted my will, I felt lighter, more positive, happier. I wanted to sing and dance all the way back to Pittsburgh, and visions of what’s possible came streaking through my imagination like glittering comets. I had meditated before, and had lovely experiences of space and freedom and expansion. But what was a new realization for me was that all this good stuff comes simply from continued trying. “Noble effort is the most sacred thing in the world,” our teacher said, and I felt a wall in me crumble.

Being a member of Generation X, perhaps the most cynical crew ever to walk this good green earth, I sometimes saw my desire for a better me and a better culture as something shameful. “You talk such a good game,” I would tell myself, “about wanting to be a new kind of person creating new ways to live and relate. And yet look at you, doing the same stupid shit you’ve been doing for 20 years! You are full of it!” You can guess where this train of thought led—straight back into silliness, laziness, and despair.

But Andrew’s words flipped that around for me. Yes, I have inertia and karma and bad habits to overcome, and no, I will not always be successful in my attempts to do so. But to allow momentarily failures to become a rationale to quit trying is insanity. Noble effort is sacred. Instead of twisting my utopian impulses into a reason for self-doubt, I need to treasure them, cultivate them, and encourage them.

Since the retreat, it’s funny—my life is pretty much the same, but it feels different, too. The ideas I am working on—this blog, Bright Green Burgh, a new handmade business, a band—haven’t fundamentally changed, but my position to them has. All will require lots of work, lots of effort, but I’m not scared of that anymore. What’s important is that I keep pouring myself into what seems right.

Last night I was reading Gretchen Rubin’s lovely book The Happiness Project, and she takes on this concept of noble effort in a more secular way. She has to try hard to keep her resolutions, but she finds that the effort it takes is more than worth it; that the harder she tries, the more success she has, and the happier she and her family become. One thing Rubin excels at is peppering her own work with thoughtful and well-placed quotes from others, and one in particular stood out to me, from William Butler Yeats: “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this this nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”

It seems obvious to say that growth and effort are inextricably linked, that effort leads to growth and growth requires effort, but deep in my heart, I have difficulty believing it. Cynicism and distrust are so embedded in me, it’s almost like they are my default operating system. And while it’s true that many try and try and try and still fail, and I may be among them, it’s also true that failure in and of itself can lead to growth, if it’s thought of in the right way, as discovery and a step on a path rather than a dead end.

This rings true in my own little personal life; the more effort I expend, and the more I can see problems as opportunities to learn rather than wellsprings of drama, the more I am able to keep doing what needs to be done. It seems to hold true on a bigger scale, too. Can we look at our time in history as simply where we are rather than entrenched and unsolvable and the result of a fundamental flaw in who we are? Can we see ourselves with compassion AND hold ourselves to a higher standard, as we would a growing child? Can we encourage what’s good while pruning what’s bad? Can we cultivate our nobler impulses rather than shitting on them?

After 10 days of letting it all go, I’m ready to put everything I have into maintaining this position of freedom so that I can whole-heartedly participate in the development we need to do. The fact that making noble effort brings happiness, too, is just the icing on the cake.

image courtesy of mikebaird

Most of the time, for most of us, life seems pretty consistent. Work, family, and home life may vary from day to day, but for the most part, things chug along remarkable steadiness. Then something happens—a job loss, an illness, a new opportunity—and we realize how tenuous our security really is. No one ever really knows what our lives will look like in a year, but we think we do.

Since I lost my job, I’ve seen how strong this self-delusion of security can be. In reality, there’s no less certainty in my life than there was a few months ago, but it feels like there is. The challenge is the same as it always has been—to be OK with uncertainty, to connect with the possibility inherent in it and not freak out.

This idea figures prominently in Whole Earth Discipline, the new book by Whole Earth Catalog and Long Now Foundation founder Stewart Brand. In it, Brand has a ball tearing into some of environmentalism’s most sacred cows—urbanization, overpopulation, nuclear energy, and genetic engineering. The science he cites and the stories he tells are compelling to say the least, but what strikes me most in his argument is how he looks at things—from a position of not knowing, having his own ideas but being more than willing to change them as new evidence and explanations arise.

Brand addresses this viewpoint head on, and urges environmentalists to approach research and technology without prejudice or pre-conditioned responses. He wants us to stop being hedgehogs and start being foxes.

What’s the difference? Hedgehogs have one stance and they stick with it in all situations—whether they are being attacked by a predator or observed by a child, the spines come out. Foxes, on the other hand, adapt their behavior depending on what works. They experiment and evaluate and adjust. This ability to read current conditions and adapt makes them effective.

The foxy approach makes good sense—of course we should always have another look at our conclusions when we take in new information. But in practice, most of us are much more comfortable sticking with the hedgehog strategy. We make up our minds on an issue and we never reconsider it again. We look at people who change their minds or their course as weak-willed and lacking in conviction. We even mock our policy-makers—people who should frequently be changing their minds based on the data—for being flip-floppers. We say we value change and innovation, and we do, but only after it’s proven right. Though we live in a world that demands foxiness, most of us cling to our hedgehoggy ways.

The problem with this rigid approach is obvious—it stifles growth. If adherence to ideology is more important than empirical testing and iterative development, then it’s not possible for anything to change. We end up with a highly polarized debate in which nothing is actually debated; talking points are merely spoken and then shouted with increasing vehemence. When we adhere to our pre-conceived ideas, we make the mistake of assuming that what’s important is our ideological consistency rather than our effectiveness.

At this point, most of us are still hedgehogs. We like knowing what our response will be to any question. We like feeling as though our worldview is “all done.”

But the truth is that when we value ideological consistency over practicality, we stagnate. Our simple, preconfigured ideas are not equal to the challenges facing us. We need to let go of our fundamentalism, allow ourselves to be unsure of the next step, to stray from the familiar path in pursuit of our goal, which is nothing less audacious than the transformation of our our whole way of living.

This orientation to life feels unsteady at first, but it is possible to get your sea legs with practice. My first day of unemployment felt like staring into the gaping maw of the void itself, but I’m getting more fluent in the unknown every day. My old way of maintaining security by having a lucrative though passionless job worked for a long time, but it’s not cutting it anymore. Neither is our typical picture of what it means to be an environmentalist. We need a new strategy, a foxier one, based less on what we think environmentalism is about and more on what actually works.

image courtesy of petter palander

When you walk into a room, how do you position yourself?

I tend to evaluate who’s there and take one of two stances: superior or inferior. Either I’m better/smarter/cooler or I’m dumber/lamer/less experienced. And once I assume one of these positions, it’s damn near impossible to snap out of it.

If I perceive myself as better, then it becomes all about making sure everyone knows that I’m better—that my point of view is more comprehensive and impressive than theirs. If I put myself in a position of being less than, then I clam up like a shy little kid, barely even giving myself permission to speak for fear of looking like a nimrod.

I can see that this behavior is arrogant and immature, that it reflects an inaccurate understanding of reality. Is it true, or at all important, that I am smart or dumb, more than or less than? Isn’t it far more important that I show up in every situation ready to contribute something positive no matter who else is around?

This superiority/inferiority complex also limits my ability to participate and lead and create with other people. How can I be fully part of something big and awesome and world-changing when I insist on setting myself apart from every situation in which I find myself?

I am not going to be able to create the bright green future I envision on my own. I need to work in close and free-flowing collaboration with the many other brilliant people who believe in these possibilities. I can’t be overbearing, nor can I limit what I have to offer by shying away from those who are more accomplished than me. I have to learn how to not have it be about me at all.

Why do I evaluate every situation according to how I fit into it? Some mundane combination of childhood habits and murky psychological power plays, no doubt. But at this point, I don’t even think the “why” matters. What matters is the fact that I really want to change it.

It’s tricky, because, although I can see this pattern in myself after the fact, in the moment it doesn’t feel like something I’m actively doing. It’s pre-cognitive, a habit so deeply ingrained that I have a hard time noticing that it’s happening. So I think my first step must be to pay attention to what I am thinking, to look for that moment when I make a movement away from the group, and to resist that urge.

I doubt that I’m the only person who does this—in fact I see other people do it every day. We are hesitant to trust each other, afraid we might look stupid or be misunderstood or lumped in with a crowd that doesn’t reflect how we think about ourselves at all.

So we set ourselves apart by judging instead of coming together. Millions of us walk around positioning ourselves in relationship to each other without actually being in relationship with each other. What a colossal waste of time and potential!!

What might be possible if we each made the commitment to prioritize connection over looking good? If we decided to lay aside our ideas about who we are individually and instead discover what we can do together?

image courtesy of sektordua

Have you ever had an epiphany, decided to make a change, and then forgot about it within a matter of days? We’ve all gone through this process, and it makes sense because it’s largely how development happens. You make a breakthrough, and suddenly you’re in a new world. Or, more accurately, you have developed the ability to see things anew.

But the old way of seeing is still what you are used to, and gradually or suddenly your eyes lose their newfangled focus, and the world is old again, and you wonder whether your epiphany meant anything at all.

What happened is this: something new did emerge in you, but it wasn’t stable. This is how development occurs—in fits and starts, a messy progression of two steps forward and one step back. We go through 4 major stages in the learning process:

• Unconscious incompetence, where we don’t even know what we don’t know.
• Conscious incompetence, where we are starting to see the extent of what we don’t know. This part can be very painful!
• Conscious competence, where we’re starting to get it but it requires a lot of effort.
• Unconscious competence, where we’re so good at our new skill that we can sink into performing it, without having to think about it.

It’s like when you learned to swim, you paddled once or twice then screamed for your dad to hold you. Gradually, with help, you gained confidence in your ability to swim in new waters. But you couldn’t have expected to just jump in and do it perfectly the first time. You needed time and effort and help to stabilize it, to get over the painful hump of conscious incompetence to conscious competence.

This process applies to everything from financial skills to nutrition to spiritual development. We need courage to take our first steps, and then we need help to get through the awkward stage.

I know for me this external support is crucial. Without the exercise group I’m a part of, I would never have developed the habit of working out 5 hours a week. If not for community with other practitioners of Evolutionary Enlightenment, I would not be able to keep at it. Even simple education works much better in a group—I can read a book on my own, but I understand it much more deeply when I get a chance to talk about it with others.

It’s gotten to the point that when I’m struggling with something, I look for a way to bring other people into it. For instance, I have been seriously slacking on my meditation practice, and when I slack on that, everything suffers. So recently I joined together with some friends who are also working on their daily practice, and we made the commitment to each other to check in and care about what we are all doing.

At some point I will be strong enough to meditate daily without relying on anyone else’s support. But, for now, knowing that other people are part of what I’m trying to do has gotten me through more than a week with no missed sessions.

What are you working on? Can you see a way to bring your community into it so that you all benefit?

image courtesy of Mi Gi

If you’re reading this site, it’s probably because you care about the state of the world. You also recognize that the problems we have to solve are fairly intractable from the level we are at right now, and so you want to push yourself to be smarter, more comprehensive in your thinking, and more powerful in your actions.

If you’re anything like me, though, sometimes this cognitive recognition that we need to keep developing slips away a bit. After a long tiring day at work, the couch sings its siren song, and the laziness to which our culture says we are entitled takes over more hours than we’d like to admit. In the midst of everything most of us have to get done in a day, how can we stay motivated to make choices that keep us growing?

Put another way, if we are basically wired to do what we feel like doing, how can we make ourselves feel like doing the right thing?

We don’t have to be pushed around by emotions

It’s not a simple question. There are so many different factors that come into play: our low-level, precognitive reptilian brain that perceives danger everywhere ... the conditioned responses we’ve learned from long experience with defying and meeting expectations ... our inborn desire to connect with and please other people. All of these inputs and more feed into our emotions, and our emotions largely determine what kind of decisions we make.

But we don’t have to be pushed around by all the different systems that influence how we feel. I’ve found that it is possible—at least sometimes!—to point my emotional state in a positive direction. My higher selves—my moral and cognitive impulses—can get together and decide where to go, and then I can get all those other selves on board, too.

Paying attention to something bigger

How? It’s a matter of attention. When the couch and the television are calling my name, and I choose to put my attention on how run-down I feel, it’s very easy to give in. After all, what does it really matter what I do? I am such a small and insignificant part of the bigger picture. So I may as well do whatever sounds like it will feel good.

But when I actually put my attention on that bigger picture and what it really is, I can see very clearly that my actions DO matter in the most desperate way. If I don’t pick up the ball, if I don’t develop my capacities to their fullest expression and push the boundaries of what it means to be human, then who will?

Top-down perspective

When I connect with the big picture, I can see life from the top-down perspective. I can see that my decisions moment-to-moment determine how far forward we push as a species. I can see that I am far more responsible for how this experiment turns out than I could ever have imagined from my smaller me-oriented vantage point. And rather than feeling run down or bored or apathetic, I start to feel excited to explore and create.

Emotions are incredibly complex phenomena. They seem to arise mysteriously, and we sometimes feel powerless to make choices when we are bathed in a powerful feeling. But we don’t have to just push through our experience with grim determination. We can learn to conduct our internal states, to create conditions favorable for making good decisions, and to use our emotional energy to continue to evolve. It’s all a matter of finding something bigger to be interested in and remembering to connect with it on a daily basis. More on the daily basis part on Wednesday ...

What I love about this is how it breaks up normal expected everyday reality. Stuff like this puts a grin on our faces and interrupts our regularly scheduled programs. It causes, as author Jonathan Fields said in a recent post, “a momentary awakening to the utter lunacy of the patterns we’ve adopted. And, though it’s taken years to wear those patterns into existence, in a heartbeat, we become unusually open to the notion that we can choose to respond differently. To create a new pattern.”

Have a wonderful weekend! And if you decide to burst into song at the farmers’ market, let us know what happens ...

image courtesy of Cara_VSAngel

On his blog about American philosophy and evolution, Jeff Carreira recently wrote about humanity’s evolutionary crisis—our inability to adapt to the rate of change we have created—and the two primary shifts we have to make to adjust our ideas about reality to reality.

The first shift concerns unity, so that we go from seeing the universe as a bunch of different things interacting with each other to understanding it as a single whole comprised of many parts. The second involves recognizing the ever-changing nature of reality. Things are not as stable and static as we think they are. In fact, every part of this whole is constantly moving around, bumping up against other parts, and both changing and being changed by the friction generated.

Understanding these ideas cognitively is one thing—and it is a big thing. And yet there is much more to it than that. What does it mean to live as part of one comprehensive, ever-evolving process?

We have all had the experience of standing in a beautiful landscape and feeling awed and humbled in the presence of something unspeakably good. The first environmentalists saw humankind as separate from this immensity, and therefore as a danger to it. But we aren’t separate—we’re part of the same whole. The same processes gave birth to every object, creature, and system in existence. The glory of an unfathomable landscape is in us, too.

The difference is that a mountain doesn’t have a choice in where it emerges, or when or how. But we do. We also have egos and self-identities and ideas about being separate from one another and nature. All of those are constructs of our consciousness, and they have served us well through the centuries—how could we learn to see and understand the different parts of reality without seeing ourselves as another independent part of it? But at this point, those constructs are obviously breaking down. As Jeff says it in his post, “I often feel like I am still working on yesterday’s problems only to realize that today’s are already upon me.” We need to do something else.

The shift Jeff is talking about is a big one—maybe the biggest ever. And though it depends upon individuals making a personal decision to develop, it’s much bigger than what is typically called personal development. All the reaching that we do—to think bigger, become stronger, get smarter, and inquire more deeply—this is what it’s really getting at. It’s not merely about getting really good at life as we know it. It’s about changing our understanding of what life is.

Can we take the leap into recognizing our contiguity with all of nature? Can we let go of our historical baggage and lean into the future like the goddess on the bow of a ship? Can we learn to steer?

I think we can, and that the more we look into our own personal willingness to do this—to courageously develop past everything we know right now—the more the bright green mirage on the horizon will shimmer into clearer and clearer focus.

image courtesy of Caveman 92223

Holding a bright green perspective in a largely cynical world is difficult for me. I’m not used to thinking positively about the future or seeing my own decisions as an integral part of what is being created. It’s not what I was raised or trained to do.

Rather, I tend to see myself as separate from everything else, and I’m used to feeling bad about where “the world” is heading. Sometimes I feel like a kook when I try to reach for a more positive and participatory of view. Sometimes it even feels fraudulent. How can I talk about becoming new people and bearing new gifts when so much what I do and feel is old and dingy and dark?

My spiritual path helps me accept all that I am, from snarky to infinitely creative, and to develop my ability to choose which stream to go with in every moment. Seeing the grand unfolding of the universe on a very very big scale gives me perspective on my smallness and also makes it clear how responsible I am for how this experiment goes. It requires me to expand my own awareness to brand new places, and grounds me in a community so that I don’t fly away in the process.

Living with the tension between who I usually am—small, separated, responsibility-shirking—and who I want to be—powerful, inspiring, constantly-developing—is freakin’ hard. It’s shameful and illuminating and challenging and thrilling. It is also the only way I know of to grow into a person who can envision and describe and create new paths into the future. For me, evolutionary spirituality—connecting with the spirit inherent in evolution itself—provides a framework for pushing the edge of these possibilities, and a reason to keep at it.

What about you? Does spirituality play a role in your desire to change the world? If so, how? If not, what motivates you? How do you keep going? I’m really curious about this ...