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Posted on September 29, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Getting My Inner Camera to Work

During the last week or two I have several challenges in my work about getting photos taken and then downloaded for applications and printing. One of the interesting things that is happening is that the school has a very expensive camera so that events can be recorded and used in the yearbook. Recently, when I asked to use the camera at one our important soccer tournaments out of town, I was refused permission for its use. And when I asked for the A-V technician’s time to take some photos even at local games in the school, I was also denied permission. So then one of the students volunteered to go to the soccer tournament out of town and take photos with a cheaper camera, but now every time I go looking for her to download the photos, she is nowhere to be found.

Under normal circumstances I would become angry and give the administrators a few choice words of how stupid they are acting. I did try it. It didn’t work. So now I am facing the fact that there is a part of me inwardly that is somehow not allowing the camera work to happen. In order to do this change work it is important for me ot think of photography as metaphor for my inner process. What photography does, through the use of a camera, is to record images of things. In my case the need is to record images of specific events. It can be extremely motivating for others to see action shots in a slide show or posted photos on a board or in a book that spurs them on to even greater achievement. Because I am having problems in the photographic process, I can assume that something is wrong with my own inner recording process which means that I can’t take and remember images in my brain very well.

My memory for visual content is having a difficult time working. The first issue is connected to authority. In the outer world I am not allowed to have access to the camera or staff to assist me. When I get a cheaper version of what I want, it turns out that the person taking the photos is irresponsible.

To solve the memory issue, the first thing I can do is give myself permission to have really beautiful and exquisite memories by realizing that the authority for my memory rests within myself, not outwardly from protective administration. Isn’t that an interesting revelation that I can just give myself permission to have wonderful memories. The second issue seems to fall right on the heels of the first. If I have permission to have beautiful memories, then my inner camera will record things with very high quality of color and clarity, but because I don’t give myself permission for the highest quality of memories, I tend to have cheap memories so I just become irresponsible with them and forget them.

What this means is that motivation to get to a higher level of performance in every endeavor depends upon a high level of memory recording. When I give myself permission to take excellent photos in my mind of events and actually do the mental recording, then my motivation goes sky high.

If this is true about memory and its effect on motivation, then I have to examine how it happened that my mind was allowed to have such cheap memories and then become irresponsible and unmotivated. What I realize, as I reflect on the question, is that I believed that people outside of myself were responsible for giving me great memories by telling me how wonderful my performance was. Now I understand that I can be in control of my own memory by doing the recording myself.

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Posted on September 15, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

How to Transform Your Child’s Nightmares into Amazing Capacities

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It is not surprising to me that after I wrote my last post about Godzilla and the principle of opposition that, without having read the post, someone sent me an account of their 3 year old child’s nightmare with a dinosaur. The dream is as follows.

“I dreamed that a dinosaur was chasing me – it was big with blue skin that was really bumpy. And was scared, so I went into Mummy’s room, and I could see Mummy sleeping under the covers, but when I pulled the covers back, Mummy was a pirate! And she had a knife! I was so scared that I ran away from her, but he started chasing me so I jumped out the window. Mummy the pirate followed, and then killed her. “

This is what I wrote back to the mother with her permission.

“A dinosaur represents a huge fear of negative evil, reptilian, which means that it doesn’t have a lot of positive ambition and it is very old like dinosaurs. When you have a dinosaur in your dream, it means that you have huge potential and drive to go for really big things that that are positive. Think of it as a negative sign whose solution is really positive potential.”

“As a parent you can to do 2 things that will really make facilitate the development of your child. First is to acknowledge the fear and give your child lots of comfort and assurance. ‘That was so scary. etc.. ‘, but in your mind at the same time you are beginning to think of what the solution is because reassurance is only short term and can only go so far. The solution, that she has a big bright wonderful future, is long term. So you can start planning for how she is going to have a big bright future by seeing the signs of it in her spirit and then providing the environments she needs to develop it. Both processes are important, but the second one is sooo much more difficult than the first. Many parents do not even do the first process of acknowledging the fear and the dinosaur. They do everything possible to deny the experience hoping that it won’t reoccur. This can mainly be attributed to the fact that most people do not understand that the principle of opposition. Once you understand that the negative has a positive opposite that can be brought out over time, then it is much easier to be empathetic and patient with the nightmare. Culturally speaking most people do not believe that their children have incredible potential because in the history of the world we have been mostly led by tyrannosaurus rex. T-rex doesn’t like people who may challenge his leadership.”

“When she sees you as a pirate that has a knife that kills, it is because she needs exactly the opposite from you and also eventually from herself. She needs someone as a mother who is life giving and nurturing and sees her gems and provides environments for the gems to come out and then also acknowledges the gems when they are inside and when they start coming out.”

“One more thing. The blue skin that was really bumpy means that she sees the dinosaur (the fear) with a lot of clarity. To solve the problem you can have her see who she is in a positive way very clearly as well so that she can begin to generate a positive future and become enthusiastic about going for things. The clarity is also an indicator that she has the ability to perceive the negative aspects of the culture very clearly. This means that if she is guided properly, she will readily be able recognize people who are dishonest, who are trying to take advantage of her, and are ambitious for their own greed.”

“Windows are symbols about vision because you start from inside of your true self and then look out into the world. Your house in a dream is a symbol of your self and so a window is the vision onto the world. What a child would normally do is look out a window, see possibilities of play or something like that, and then run down to do the activities, but in the dream she is so scared that she jumps right out of her vision.”

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“Vision is an essential part of the development of a person’s will because they get an idea in their mind ( a window of opportunity) and then seek to achieve it. Fear of the dinosaur drives out the positive envisioning process.”

“What you can do to help her is to ask your own self the following question. What is the part of me that is acting out of the negative culture that is fearful of envisioning great possibilities?”
“Then you can begin to change that part into positive capabilities that will support her. The negative cultural aspect of yourself is the pirate in your/her unconscious that comes through the dream.”

“What I would guess is that there is something in your own envisioning process that has been affected by the culture.”

Last notes: My experience is that people dismiss their nightmares or just try to forget them because of not knowing about the opposition principle. When you have a nightmare, it is a sign that you have a great deal of fear and very little of the capability that the dream is calling forth. My personal practice with nightmares is take as much time off the day after so that I can begin the work on the new capability because it is like an infant at that point. By doing this process you can actually become excited about a nightmare because it means that you are going to develop something brand new. If you dismiss the nightmares in the dream world, then they have a tendency to appear in the actual world.

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Posted on September 12, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Dreamwork and the Principle of Opposition

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In Chapter 11 of Dreams for Peace, (see Hastings) Godzilla comes into someone’s house causing panic and huge fear where everyone ends up fleeing for their lives. Some don’t make it. It is easy enough when you are doing the initial dream analysis to see that the dreamer is running away from a perceived fear of something that is large and evil. You have a fear and it makes you start avoiding. This is the pattern. You can find this kind of information in most books about dreams.

What you don’t find is a good theory about solving dreams. About 10 years ago when I was doing dream work with a lot of adolescents on a daily basis, I discovered a principle which I call opposition. It certainly isn’t a new principle because it can be found in great writings of every major religion. The principle, briefly stated, is that we all have a true self, which is eternal, positive, and oriented toward service to humankind, and we also have an ego, which is the animal or material self that will one day die. The ego, because of its protective and survival orientation is prone to all of the negative emotions especially fear. When the ego is not subordinate to the true self, it tends to cause all kinds of harm and mischief. Godzilla, for instance, is a symbol of a big ego that causes great evil.

The major problem with most contemporary practices in psychology is that they do not see the true self as the solution to the ego. The true self is unlimited in the number of positive capacities that it can express, while the ego is its mirror opposite in its negative destructive abilities. Dreams are either an expression of the true self or an expression of the ego. Sometimes there are dreams that express parts of both in the same dream. Godzilla is an example of dream about the ego. It could be as a result of personal experience, of family upbringing, or of cultural origins. What most people need after a dream like this is an analysis, but what is even more important is a solution. We have to ask ourselves what is the solution to Godzilla.

In the Baha’i Writings there is a famous quotation that goes like this.

So far as ye are able, ignite a candle of love in every meeting, and with tenderness rejoice and cheer ye every heart. Care for the stranger as for one of your own; show to alien souls the same loving kindness ye bestow upon your faithful friends. Should any come to blows with you, seek to be friends with him; should any stab you to the heart, be ye a healing salve unto his sores; should any taunt and mock at you, meet him with love. Should any heap his blame upon you, praise ye him; should he offer you a deadly poison, give him the choicest honey in exchange; and should he threaten your life, grant him a remedy that will heal him evermore. Should he be pain itself, be ye his medicine; should he be thorns, be ye his roses and sweet herbs. Perchance such ways and words from you will make this darksome world turn bright at last; will make this dusty earth turn heavenly, this devilish prison place become a royal palace of the Lord — so that war and strife will pass and be no more, and love and trust will pitch their tents on the summits of the world. Such is the essence of God’s admonitions; such in sum are the teachings for the Dispensation of Baha. (Abdu’l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha, p. 34)

Spiritual writings are, by their very nature, solution oriented. In the above quotation, described as the sum of all the teachings for this age, the solution to blame is praise, the solution to poison is honey, and the solution for thorns are roses. So if we look at Godzilla, based upon the above quotation, he can be described as a terribly destructive force that wreaks havoc everywhere he goes. Where psychology has come to thus far as a practice is to recognize that Godzilla is an evil force causing untold destruction, so therefore, lets kill him and everything will be just great. So we kill Godzilla, but because we haven’t done the solution of opposition as in the holy writings, sooner or later, Godzilla’s uncle pops up and starts the same thing all over again.

Being solution oriented means doing the opposite. Great destructive powers are solved by great constructive and healing powers. When the world trade center was destroyed in New York City, the immediate response was to go after Godzilla. Countries do have the right to protect themselves, and there is a benefit from killing Godzilla, but no one seems to have responded to him in a solution oriented way by going after huge positives.

Whenever I have a dream that is negative, I almost immediately begin by flipping the negative images in my mind to their positive opposites. This tells me almost immediately what kind of actions to take in my life. You can try it. If you are being attacked by a poisonous snake in a dream, you don’t really need to worry so much about what a snake means. What you need to do is to change from being poisoned to being healing. Maybe there is a lot of vicious backbiting at work. You can do healing work by finding people to praise and honor.

There are a lot of interesting clues that you can get in dream work if you learn to pay attention and then apply a solution. If the dream is dark, then it means that you need to bring more light into the world, maybe shedding more light. If there is a large negative, then you can go for a very large positive. If everything is going really fast, then you can work on slowing everything down.

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Posted on September 10, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

The Right Brained Dyslexic ADD Planning Tool

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If you have ever walked around with labels like very creative but extremely disorganized, dyslexic, distracted, hyper, or ADD, this little tool may help you out. You first have to realize that most people with such labels organize on the basis of space, not on time. This is a big key. All of the courses of time organization or other organizing schemes won’t work for you so don’t feel bad if you have organizers that don’t have any marks in them. Most of them are for people who organize on the basis of time.

People that lead with their right brain tend to process by seeing the whole picture and then making connections between things in the picture. Left brain processors organize themselves according to lists and sequences. They make a list and check it off one at at time. They are greatly loved by teachers because they follow directions well. Most people can do some of both, but those with a more severe right brain style really can’t do lists. They have never read a technical manual but know more about computers than anyone because they can just keep experimenting and making connections. The only time they look at the manual is when they absolutely can’t figure something out.

So when you are right brained or ADD, you need a different type of planning tool. You need something where you can see everything all at once and then just start doing things that seem most important. One way to do it is to just write things on a piece of paper as if it were a picture, not a list. You can remember a picture, but you can’t remember a list.   There is a dynamic that happens in the brain when you can see the whole picture and stay focused on it that leads to a lot of action which is not necessarily sequential but still accomplishes a great deal of work.  It doesn’t seem to be present in right brain processors when they are given a list and a calender where you have to turn pages.

Personally, I think that the less organized the paper looks from a left brained perception, the more likely you are to accomplish more.   I would suggest writing at different angles with lots of lines and shapes.   I personally find things like mind maps a little too organized and contrived.   I like to keep all of my papers on top of my desk strewn all over the place because as soon as I am done with a  project and file the papers away or stack them neatly, it is like a death notice to the project, something like a cemetery.

The best device for a telephone list for me is my cell phone because a large percentage of my ideas come to me when I am speaking to others away from my office.   By having a lot of numbers in my cell phone I can start working on a project immediately.

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Posted on September 10, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

The Killing Fields of Criticism

There used to be a popular notion in the practice of psychology that you could give criticism to a person by separating the behavior that someone is doing from who they are as a whole person. The theory evidently is that by doing this you preserve the person’s self esteem, that is, they won’t feel bad about themselves when their behavior is criticized. Someone had this wild notion that a person’s behavior is somehow separate from themselves so you can mess with the behavior all you want and the core of the person will go unaffected. Ok I am Johnny on the playground, and I want to score a goal really badly. I run up to the person with the ball and trip them so that my self interest can be served. The old notion would have us believe that I just have to change my behavior of tripping because the core of me is this perfect child that doesn’t need to change on the inside, that somehow inside I already know how to play enthusiastically and also think like a member of team and play by rules. I think that the idea is that if you stop the negative behavior, stop the tripping in this case, and give the child a new behavior, that he is somehow going to change.

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The first half hour that I ever entered school I was given a pair of scissors to cut on a line. I just remember how much of a blur the first days were and how overwhelming the new experience was. So the teacher gives me some scissors and asks me to be a choo-choo train staying on the track by cutting across the paper on a line. Well, you can imagine the outcome. Being overwhelmed with wandering attention my train derailed. So what does this brilliant teacher do? She makes sure that I know that my train went off the track.

If you have ever watched the national team from England play soccer, you will be able to see just how devastating criticism is. The English press puts constant pressure on the national team to perform better. They criticize the players and coaches constantly putting them under enormous pressure to succeed. The national teams usually react to the criticism with what science has already discovered about performance. They always usually find a way lose when they are in a pressure situation.

Criticism is the act of seeing a behavior that is negative, according to the criticizer’s point of view, and then expressing it. The way I think about it is that it is the lazy person’s way of getting attention and advancing. For a writer or journalist using criticism as his main tool means that he advances on the backs of other people’s mistakes. It is the easy road. It is how journalists kill other people’s spirits out of their own self interest of getting to the top. Politicians, social climbers, parents, and people trying to move up corporate ladders all do the same thing. Criticizing gets a lot of fast attention, it makes others look really bad, and it destroys people’s spirits. It also takes the pressure off of your own performance and puts it onto others.
The more difficult road, the road less traveled, starts and ends with the belief that people have unlimited potentialities that can be actualized. It believes that change is possible. How many of us have been called into our boss’s office to be told how we screwed up and to not let it happen again or else when what we need to hear are acknowledgments of positive observations and the belief in positive change.

And then there is the ever popular acknowledgment of an event that goes like this from the leader. “Well that was a great event. Congratulations. There is just one little small thing.” And then the leader goes on for 5 minutes about the small thing. What is it about leaders who think they have the right to criticize every little thing? Why has the research on the effects of criticism gone so unnoticed when it has been consistently shown to cause such major damage? It must be about laziness and the lack of self control and self discipline.

Here are some interesting things from the research on criticism on why constructive criticism doesn’t work. 80% of the people who are criticized go into a negative non-resourceful state when they are criticized. Of the 20% who don’t feel really bad from criticism only 10% can keep the criticism dissociated so that they can judge whether or not to use it. This means that almost everyone takes criticism personally even when the criticizer says I don’t want you to take this personally. Most people just feel bad and get more non-productive from criticism.

There is also some interesting research on work in elementary school classrooms and in marriages that found that the magic number for positive encouraging comments in ratio to correcting or more negative ones is at least 4 to one. That means four positives to one correcting. When the ratio was 2 to 1, students felt like the classrooms were very negative. Marriages where the ratio is 4 to 1 last much longer than those where the ratio is much lower.

This does not mean that there is no place for critical comments, but they don’t seem to have the intended effect unless the environment is 80% positive. So maybe, instead of losing self control and blurting out negative comments, it may be good to practice some self discipline by keeping our big negative mouths shut and opening up the positives ones.

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Posted on September 8, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Organizing Your Emotional Space to Get More Time to Play

I was very inspired when I read my daughter’s blog about sorting beans with Olee, our grandson the other day. See http://hoogliart.wordpress.com. I think Maria Montessori was one of the first educator’s to see how organization of space really gives children a great deal of freedom to play and explore. Yesterday, I had the great opportunity to work together with a number of my colleagues to apply her teachings. What happened was quite incredible!

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Being a product of the 60s you can imagine that I might have some difficulties conceptualizing how play and creativity can work together with order and control. The 60s were instrumental in bringing out the evils of leadership by control and self interest so for many people of our era, when we think of conrolling an environment, we think of people who had the wrong motives. Organization for accumulation of selfish desires still may be a huge reality in the world, but yesterday it finally clicked for me why order is so important when you are doing something for the right reasons.

The event that we planned was a swim meet for students from grades 2-5. We had four hours, two two-hour sessions to complete 110 swimming races. What was incredible to me at day’s end was that we finished each session 20 minutes early. That is two groups of 160 swimmers each. You can do the math, but however you calculate, that is a lot of play in a short period of time. When I think of about it, it was all about the organization of space. Military order paled to us yesterday.

We planned where students had to sit while they were waiting for races to be called, where they had to sit after their races were called, which lane they were to swim in, and where they were to go when they finished each race. The adults all had a program with the list of all races and lane assignments, the volunteers all had written instructions of what to do at their jobs, and well if you have ever done a swim meet or track meet, you know that it takes a lot of people and organization. Because of the organization all the athletes had to do was to focus on their play, the swimming. The heat numbers were written on their arms so all they had to do was listen for their heat, go to the marshaling area, and then jump in the pool and swim. They were absolutely wild with enthusiasm and joy.

The results: Every child in the school participated in at least one to four races and everyone received at least one ribbon. It was magical. We even had to take a 10 minute break in the 2nd session because of thunder and a small amount of rain, but still we finished 20 minutes ahead of schedule.

The planning group was extraordinary. Everyone worked together with no self interest, just the joy of doing great work. So a day later I am thinking about the excuse that I have already mentioned previously in other posts, that people say that they don’t have time to play and now after yesterday, I am certain that the issue is not about time but the fear of being in the play space.

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Unlike most children who can’t be held back from play, many adults seem to be blocked when it comes to participating in play. For them it is emotional. The underlying emotion that inhibits play the most is the fear of being criticized. Children are immune to its deadly effects for a time mainly because they are around other children who love to play, but gradually they drink in its venom especially when other expectations in their lives like academics are raised until the joy of play is sapped right out of them.

The key for me in recapturing the joy of play of childhood is the ability to organize the emotional space in my life, to bring order to my emotions so that my positive energy can shine through. Criticism is the great epidemic of our time, far more deadly than any pandemic the scientists may predict because it kills a person soul and their bodies. It is so commonplace that it is even often regarded as a virtue, but it kills nonetheless.

What is the vaccine that will get adults back in the pool and into play? It is simple. Find something positive about yourself and others and say it. This changes everything. You just let go of the negative thoughts that come in by dealing with them on your own in your meditation or with the help of others, but you don’t express them in an aggressive way outward. When you recognize positive things that are happening, you express them outwardly. This has the effect of making play very inviting. Then people can experiment and make all kinds of mistakes and the great learning and fun can happen.

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Posted on September 2, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Why God Needs to Be a Woman Again

First of all it should be clear from my recent post that God, according to the Baha’i Writings, is neither a man nor a woman but transcendent above all names and attributes.  However, I am fascinated by the idea that God was once a woman and then became a man.   Who is God as a woman?   Why do we need Her back again?

About 15 years ago I was on a trip in northern Alberta to a small city called Ft. Vermillion to do some work with some of the Cree people there.   So one afternoon we drove out to visit an elder who told us a very remarkable hunting story.   It seems that two men went out one day to hunt for some moose.  They loaded up their backpacks with some extra meat and rifles before leaving for the hunt.  Then the elder surprised us by telling us that they will never find a moose.   We were left in our western materialistic minds sitting there wondering why.   He says that they won’t find a moose because they don’t need to find one.  They already have meat.    If they needed meat, it would show up, but they don’t need it so it doesn’t.

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When God was our mother, this is how we used to think.   We believed that we would be supported and cared for.  The whale hunters on the coast of British Columbia used to describe whaling as paddling out and waiting for whales to arrive rather than searching for whales.    Thinking of  God as our mother in no way negates the idea of God as our father.  God as a father gives us the qualities of self reliance and justice, but it seems to me that when God became a man, the qualities associated with mothers left religion and society.

I mean think about it.  When we think of a CEO, do we think of him with qualities of a father or of a mother?   Being a mother means being supportive and nurturing, overlooking mistakes, and giving lots of encouragement.   Do we think that our nations’ leaders should have these motherly qualities or do we persist in thinking that the  leaders are those with only qualities associated with fathers?

The mother is the first educator.  The life of every new born babe depends upon his mother’s milk.  Through a strong bonding with his mother, the child learns to trust.   So with that in mind I believe it is time to think of our communities as being more motherly, as more nurturing and more encouraging.

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Posted on September 1, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Some Early Positive Signs of the Global Shift

When I was in Canada this summer visiting my family in Vancouver including my three wonderful grandchildren, my two daughters introduced me to Facebook, which is an internet based service designed to help people from all over the world to connect with each other. Yesterday something really great happened by using Facebook. I wrote to one of my old colleagues in Brazil saying that I had lost touch with a good friend who lives in Bolivia and wondering if she had his email. Well she didn’t have the email, but she told me that my colleague’s daughter was on Facebook so I could write to her and find out her father’s email. I then wrote to her on Facebook and she gave me her father’s new email. So in the space of about an 2 hours I was reconnected with an old friend. Now that is radical global change.

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The first thing that you notice, if you get onto Facebook, is that information is not very guarded between the participants. You can see what everyone is writing to each other and what everyone is doing simultaneously all around the world. If you need confidentiality you can still have it, but the huge guarding of emotional content in people’s life that characterized most of the 20th century has suddenly been swept away. Yesterday I received messages from Australia, Japan, China, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, the US, England, and Israel.

Most of what you hear in terms of future prognosticating these days is the acceleration of the negative so I am just going to do the opposite. If I can communicate instantly all over the planet with people I know and share my thoughts and feelings openly on a blog on a daily basis for others to read, then it has to mean that we will see unprecedented acceleration of the healing of all those conditions that are caused by isolation and alienation. It will become increasing more difficult to go to war, people will begin using the term world citizen as easily as they identify with their own countries, and conflicts and oppression will be almost impossible to hide. This is all because the communication space between people from great distances will continue to decrease.

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Ok, here is the thing. If you look at the way the world is in all of its negative aspects, it will have a huge tendency to bring on paralysis. It does for me. However, if I look toward the future and see what is going to happen in positive terms, it means that I can accelerate its occurrence by acting positively now. If I just complain and whine, which I love to do, then nothing will happen. What is difficult to account for are the radical changes that are going to happen to drive us forward in a positive way in the next few years. The best strategy for a great world shift toward the positive is transformation of our lives.

Here is what it is like. My oldest grandchild is now 4 years old. Within the space of two years her brain is going to go a radical alteration so that she can move from being a captive of perception, that is, to being able to only hold one thing at a time in her mind such as size or shape or color to being able to hold all three dimensions in her mind at the same time and then use them. She will move from thinking in size or shape or color to size and shape and color. This means, for instance, that she will be able to see that a person can have very light skin and still be a human being. Right now she can only see one or the other.

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This is exactly what the world needs. We can be citizens of our countries and citizens of the world. We can be women or men and still all be human beings. Human beings don’t have to be men while women are something much less. We can have great economies and we can have a clean and protected environments. We can have security and health and we can travel limitlessly with great freedom.

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Posted on August 31, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Where is God?

I am not sure if many people have reflected on this question on where God is, so I decided to throw out a few thoughts to share some of my observations. What I have observed is that the location of God seems to move around according to the cultural context.

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In the Judeo-Christian culture that surrounded me growing up I learned that God was a man in the sky. That was in the 1950s in California. I am not sure if he is still there in California. He may have moved to the mall because people seem to do their worshiping there. However, when I first learned to pray, I learned that God was up there watching over us. I can remember pictures in the Old Testament, which is really the Jewish Torah, about seeing an older man in white beard with white hair sometimes looking pretty peeved at the world. I can understand the Jewish notion of God, because it was the purpose of Moses to unite the tribes of Israel through the application of law in a just manner. Justice means that people are not higher than the law. The law is higher which keeps people’s egos lower. Prior to this time the rulers were above the law. Many of them still are, but that is a different story.

In the 1980s I began working on a Cree Reserve in Alberta, Canada which had the effect of radically altering my view of where God is. For the Crees God is a woman who supports and nurtures all life. Her spirit manifests itself and communicates with us in all things in nature. For the Jews God created order through a set of laws and became a man, but for the Crees God is our mother living in the earth. Could God be in both places at once?

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When I read the New Testament which is really the teachings of Christ and then some elaborations, I find that what Jesus was trying to teach was love for one another. He seems to have moved God out of the sky and into the heart, but since you can’t have order without law and justice, God needed to remain in the sky, but also in the heart. Now Christians also have the third place for God which is in the spirit, the Holy Spirit. Hence, Christianity evolved into what they call the trinity. There is God in the sky keeping things in order through justice, God in the heart which brings about love and connection, and God in the spirit which brings about communication and guidance. Before I get to where the spirit is, I just have to say that I am a little bit perplexed as to why the Christians forgot to add the mother like the Crees. For that matter, the Jews abandoned God as a feminine figure as well. Maybe that is why it so hard for the equality of men and women to take root even in western liberal cultures. Could be the source of Jewish mother’s guilt as well.

God may have always been there in one form or another, but the real impetus for God being an invisible force came through Buddhism six centuries before Jesus. God practically disappears in Buddhism because of Buddha’s emphasis on people doing their own internal work rather than relying on things outside of themselves. Buddhism is about detachment. Through meditation and other practices one is forced inward so that the spirit within can communicate and be released into the world to do positive action. In Buddhism God is both invisible and internal.

So we have God being up in the sky, in the earth and nature, in the heart, and invisible and internal. What makes it even more complicated is that with atheists, God is nowhere at all and with agnostics God seems to be there on occasion or in the fog.

Islam and Christianity share the same heritage so whatever is true for Muslims is also true for Christians. The difference is that Muslims do not allow images of God or messengers which is a movement toward God being transcendent, which means that all description of God being in time or space is pure imagination. This also, is the Baha’i view of God which means that it is helpful to imagine where God is terms of virtue, but description of God is beyond all comprehension.

If true religion were ascendant, then it would be very easy for everyone to be in absolute harmony learning and integrating things from each other because virtues have no difficulties working together. Justice and love, detachment and support, and inspiration and acceptance all can live together without difficulty. The problems seem to occur when the egos take the place of God. For instance, instead of God being in the sky administering justice with the rule of law, men put themselves in the sky and do whatever they want whether they be tyrannical leaders such as Hitler, tyrannical CEOs, or tyrannical parents or teachers.

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Instead of having love for one another and treating each other with mercy, charity, and kindness, people take the place of God in the heart with lust of sex and power. And instead of going inside to deal with your own spirituality, people seek material satisfaction outside of themselves through material means.

Likewise, instead of relying on spiritual teachings for support such as sharing and generosity, people put their own superstitions in their minds to keep development from happening. Superstition is ultimately an attempt to keep God out through controlling weak minds.

What I think is that if we use the paradigm of God taking over various domains of human beings, you can analyze the weaknesses in religious structures and then change them. For instance, for God to take over the domain of the heart the religion has to place a major emphasis on artistic beauty as expressed in painting, architecture, music, and theater and it needs to look at the quality of loving relationships in the community so that there is kindness, mercy, and attraction. But God still has to be in the sky, not man, for love to take over the heart, because justice is a precondition for love to spread.

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Posted on August 28, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Further Notes on Leadership: Dealing with Frustration

In my last post I was writing about a 5 year old boy whose primary presenting negative emotion is frustration. Frustration is what you feel when you are trying to accomplish something, but you are not making the progress you were hoping. It is different than disappointment which is feeling you get after the experience is over. With frustration you are still trying, but still failing.

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The spiritual solution to frustration is always in the area of the virtues associated with patience. Patience is the ability to slow down time to a standstill so that other solutions can appear or other things can happen first. If you are frustrated as a student or an athlete, it usually means that you are not patient enough to try new strategies or solution because you are too rushed to get to the goal. To overcome frustration there is always a slowing down process so that new solutions can enter.

When frustration presents itself into a situation like my 5 year old, it usually means that there isn’t enough patience in the environment. This is sooooo interesting!!!! In the meetings I have done on dreams I usually put out cards with the names of virtues like courage, enthusiasm, honesty, compassion, etc.. I always put out 2 cards that say patience as opposed to putting out only one of every other virtue. Both patience cards are always taken.

So why is frustration such a big issue and why do we seem to need a lot more patience? It should actually come as no surprise because the more sped up the culture gets, the faster we go to keep up with it. We can’t slow down to find new solutions because we are already in the super fast lane.

I think the real key is the ability to slow down internally. So here is the epilogue of my 5 year old which is what I think leadership is all about. All of his teachers, the school counselor, one of his parents, and the nanny all got together for the purpose of discussing what we could differently. The meeting lasted for over an hour. Everyone was allowed to share openly and frankly. It was an extremely positive environment where a few decisions and a lot of suggestions were made.

So today he came to class and participated fully attending to every activity. He was quite amazing. His coordination still is not great, but he is on the right path. A little bit of patience, i.e. slowing down, seems to go along way.

The group showed how a decentralized process can work. The people closest to where the actual action is take the authority to work together to improve a problem situation. Everyone is given a voice, everyone listens to each other, and then change begins to happen.

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Posted on August 25, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

The Leaders We Are Looking For Are Inside Our Ownselves

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Last week during one of my physical education classes with my 5 year olds I witnessed and incredible act of leadership that left me with a great feeling of hope. I have a young boy in one class whose frustration tolerance on a scale from 1-10 is minus 6 or 7. He has had a melt down in each of first 5 or 6 classes, but during my last class something interesting happened. I had the students work in pairs throwing and catching balls back and forth. Now my frustration boy had had almost zero attention in other tasks, but on this day he was paired with someone who had almost no English which immediately thrust him into a helping position. He watched the task, decided he could do it, and started working with his partner. He acted extremely patient and encouraging with his partner, showing him what to do and being the perfect leader. I was shocked, but so pleased that I immediately wrote it down in my notes after class because it was the first really positive sign that he had ever shown.

I am not so sure what happened inside for him to make that kind of click, but it was clear to me that he had become a leader on that afternoon because he was practicing the virtue of helpfulness. It just made me realize that leadership is no longer a function that can be described as a top-down function. We seem to mostly make jokes about those who still are appointed to positions highest up on the hierarchical ladder because leadership can no longer be directed by one person, if it ever could. Those who try to force their wills by reason of position have found themselves isolated and unsupported. Their days are obviously numbered. The only people who are thriving are those that have turned decision making into a collective process and worked to empower members of an organization through capacity building and decentralization.

The world has turned upside down on its head because now the best leaders are not those who are decisive and willful, but those who support the development of leadership and decision making abilities in everyone in the organization. My 5-year-old melt down specialist became a leader in my class. How can I support him to be a leader all the time?

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Posted on August 22, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Having a Bright Future When All Seems Lost

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One of my little addictions is watching war documentaries on various history channels. I have seen a lot of people die on TV. I think it has to do with the fact that I am always trying to do new things that require facing the enemy of tradition. Today, I watched a show about World War 2 and the invasion of Normandy. The story featured an American soldier who won the US congressional medal of honor, which pays the highest respect for bravery under fire. Despite his heroics on the battlefront he could not prevent the death of his brother who died while fighting on Omaha Beach. He said that he has had continuing dreams of his brother for over 50 years since his brother’s death in 1944.

So I asked myself, on hearing about this story, why he would have dreams for so long about his brother. He had been a faithful soldier that had gone off to war to fight for a just cause, but nothing in his soldiering could save his brother from an untimely death on that beach. The purpose of the war, as I see it, was to make the world safe so that a person like him could have a life of peace and harmony with his brothers. When he came home from the war having received high honors but not having his brother present in his life, he must have surely had torn feelings. On the one hand he was a hero, but on the other he was without a brother. The scourge of fascism was ended in Europe and Asia in no small part by the heroics of such soldiers, but in his own family there remained a hole. The future that he had probably envisioned with his brother was suddenly finished.

So why the dream? I am sure that I have listened to over a 200 people share their experiences where loved ones has come back in the dream life who have already died to the physical world. Inevitably, their message is the same one which is that they are fine in the next world, the people in this world need not worry about them, and that they can let go of their grief and get on with their own true lives. The dream world is kind and patient and without time, so it doesn’t seem to mind sharing dreams repeatedly to the person in the physical world for as long as it takes to get the right message.

There is nothing the young soldier can do to turn back the clock and save his brother from an untimely death, but he can deal with his own grief. The people who have gone on to the next world seem to being quite fine, but it is we, the living who suffer.

In 1982 one of my great educational mentors was murdered while on a routine visit to New York City to discuss some ideas with people at the United Nations. I had envisioned my professional career being played out together with the educational model he created, but then he suddenly died, the program we were working on was curtailed, and I was suddenly left without a future. From time to time he appears in my dreams in such a way that the dream feels like real life. When I wake up, I suddenly fall back into grief as if he has died all over again. For a long time I thought he was trying to communicate to me to continue the work of the model, but as I think about the soldier and the other people who shared similar dreams of loved ones who have passed on, I am thinking that he is saying that he is perfectly fine, doing great work, and that my future can be extremely bright. The dreams have a lot more to do with my inability to have a bright future without him than needing to hang onto his model and further it.

After his death, I spent the next six years on an First Nations Reserve in Canada. Instead of the hallows of a university campus I was thrust into the field of application into the worst possible environment imaginable. No high school graduates for over 12 years, 50% attendance in the school, 80% sexual abuse, alcohol, drug, and gambling abuses in every family. You name it, we had it. And the model worked very well. Students stopped dropping out, attendance rose to 95%, teenage pregnancies decreased, and scores of people went into treatment for addictions. I didn’t need my mentor there to have a bright future or create bright futures for others.

The ideas that I learned while studying the model have worked wherever I have applied them very effectively. I still use them everyday and as long as I have a bright and enthusiastic future they will surely keep producing. The soldier on the battlefield in World War 2 woke up courage in himself to do remarkable feats during the war, and his brother’s death is a reminder to keep doing heroic events everyday with weapons of peace. Courage generalizes. Notice in the picture that boys are wearing pink and the girl blue. Now that is radical change.

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Posted on August 19, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

You Can’t Have a Great Future Without Dealing with the Negative Past

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When I first began teaching in 1975 there was a huge counter movement to what I had been studying at one of the most progressive schools of education for that time period, the University of North Dakota. The counter movement was called “Back to Basics” which capitalized on the mistakes of the progressive movements so that schools would just focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic. Sadly I have to say that the Back to Basics movement won. By the early 1980s progressive education was all but dead even when it had learned from mistakes and held much hope for the future.

The progressive movements had really sprung out of the failures of the more traditional systems because so many students were just not learning using the old methodologies. The Back to Basics movement struck back at the progressives by using an amazingly effective strategy that put fear into the hearts of the vast majority. They took the mistakes of the progressive systems and blew them way out of proportion. It wasn’t difficult to find mistakes. They were abundant for sure,so the traditionalists had huge amounts of ammunition which they used unceasingly.

They also performed another interesting strategy which also worked very effectively. You have to give them credit. They really crushed new ideas and experimentation to shreds. Their strategy was simply to glorify the past as if it were much better than any new ideas could ever be. It gave the psyche of a fearful public just what they needed so that they would not have to make significant fundamental changes in their lives. Glorifying the past while ignoring the issues was the drug of choice. It seems to me that is has been the addiction of the world’s culture for quite some time now. The strategy is driven by the fear of the unknown in the future. It has kept really meaningful innovation from entering institutions because every new idea is crushed by the traditionalists convincing people that innovation will lower the standard. Whenever you bring up innovation or change in conservative circles the quick retort is always about the standards, especially that change will lower the standards.

Now that the traditionalists have really had their way for the past 40 years, the cracks in their protective shields have really worn thin. Glorifying the past, ignoring the issues, and blaming someone else by magnifying their mistakes doesn’t work in the public’s eye as much anymore. We are finally reaching a stage where we can’t hide from the issues anymore.

Psychologically it is relatively easy to map out the old pattern. Here is how it goes. Inwardly we are all driven by our spiritual nature to grow and make changes. Since growth possibilities are always unlimited, we are always pushed inwardly to change. So if this is true what makes people stop. At the moment that our true self presents a new opportunity for growth for us, a new future, it also presents the issues that keep us from achieving the desired future. On the one hand there is a new vision, but on the other is the negative energy that keeps us from growing. So what most people do is to feel the negative energy, become uncomfortable with it, and then try to find some sort of comfort in a glorified past so that they won’t have to face the discomfort. It is usually accompanied by other forms of diversion as well. We all do it.

It is particularly difficult right now in the history of the world because the vast majority of people in leadership positions owe their positions to this strategy. They assert the past, glorifying the standards of the past, but completely ignore the current issues. When someone tries to do something new, they lay in wait for mistakes and then magnifying them making themselves seem great for pointing out the failures of others. And if all else fails they accuse others of lowering the standards.

The new strategy that is extremely effective is get a preliminary vision of a new future, address honestly and openly and determinedly the issues that are holding the new vision back by taking full responsibility for them, and then doing the internal work to solve the issues and release new energy. The key is having a great deal of honesty about our own issues without trying to put them on others. When we take the plunge of honesty, it helps us to see what was truly positive in the past and what wasn’t so positive. We keep the strengths, and change the weaknesses rather than glorifying a false image of the past and ignoring weaknesses.

Let’s see. Right now I am having an issue with the fear of being attacked by conservatives. Ok, so I want to implement more radical ideas and I have a preliminary vision of that but the fear originates when I started my education work. The fearful is like a thousand people yelling at me that I am wrong and they are right. I am feeling all alone and just want to go and hide. What is the solution? Hmmmm. I can see thousands of people accepting positive ideas about change and beginning to work on their issues more honestly. I think I will just start with people that are supportive and gradually expand outward. Ok, that’s it.

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Posted on August 16, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Sometimes It is Much Better to Be Late

Warning to North Americans and Europeans: This posting may create some negative side effects to your cultural selves.

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This morning I did something interesting. I actually listened to my own advice. I had invited a few colleagues from other schools to a planning meeting to schedule games and other sports events. The meeting was to be held at my school in my office. At 6:30 am this morning I realized that my office was the wrong venue, that it would be full of distractions and give me the rushed feeling of all the little tasks that I do each morning. So I sent text messages to all of the participates and told them to meet at the local Coffee Bean.

Shortly after I arrived at the Coffee Bean, one of the others came. The third said he would be late so it gave the first to arrive and myself time to chat about our lives. We didn’t talk at all about sport or schedules or anything like that. We talked about babies because his wife is now 3 months pregnant and it has already changed his life in very interesting ways. When the third person came, he apologized for being late and didn’t go to get any coffee because he thought that maybe we should start the meeting. We told him that we had all of the time in the world, to just go and get what he wanted.

The meeting went longer than maybe any of us planned so just for good measure I stayed longer and chatted some more with others when the meeting was over. I began to practice the process of disregarding time so that I could be in the space that I wanted to be in. It worked spectacularly because I accomplished not just one task, but also another. We scheduled the games and we became closer. Had I not disregarded time the chance to have a better relationship with my colleague would have passed.

So when I taught my classes with my 5 year olds today, I did the same thing. I decided that I could just stretch time inside myself, and get my students into a really positive space. What happens to me usually is that I tend to get worried that my students are not going to pay attention, that they are going to just goof off and do their inappropriate things. I decided that I could relax and slow myself inside and pay attention to how I wanted the class to go rather than what might go wrong. It worked amazingly like nothing I could ever do in previous years.

Slowing down time seems to help me relax and get into the right space. It may seem strange to be able to think of time as being so flexible, but we all know how long time seems to drag when we have to listen to boring speakers. The most important aspect of being able to control the space you are in so that it becomes desirable is one’s ability to disregard time, and the first step in disregarding it seems to be to slow it down by relaxing.

You don’t always need to be in a hurry and sometimes being later is much better than rushing.

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Posted on August 13, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

When You Plan, Space Comes First, NOT Time

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There were a lot of workshops in the 1970s when I was first introduced to much of the self help literacy about the importance of time management because it was the thinking in those days that how you manage your time has a lot to do with accomplishing what you want in your life. Time is money so the saying goes. It was a logical way to approach the accomplishment of a task. Nowadays people aren’t so naive as back then because most people with any common sense now believe that time is a lot more flexible, that it is much more internal than external, and that you usually accomplish the most and love life the most, when you ignore time. We realize, for instance, that we can actually slow time to a virtual standstill so that we can eat a long relaxed meal with our families or take a walk with our friends. I don’t think anyone believes time is money anymore, do they? Anyway, it is a pretty foolish idea that I once believed.

What I have only recently begun to explore that is proving to be extremely valuable is how much more flexible space is. I mean I really get the time thing. If I slow way down internally, I accomplish much more because I can stretch time so that I seem to have much more of it. What I didn’t realize was that I can also change space. I am only really at the very beginning stages of learning this quality. I am sure most people are way beyond me.

Here is an example of why it is becoming more apparent to me. When my wife and I were flying from Vancouver to Los Angeles recently, we thought we had arrived at the airport early enough to get on our flight, but because of the long lines, we only made the flight by a couple of minutes. Then the steward said that 12 other people were not let on. Imagine that! The plane couldn’t wait another 10 minutes to get the other passengers on. It actually shocked me so I began naming countries in my mind where they would have waited. The steward said and this is not a joke, that they had waited during the last flight to the same destination, but because their on-time record would be published in a journal or something like that, that their reputation depended not on whom they left behind , but only on being on time. So here is an airline whose purpose is to carry people from one destination to another, but being on time is more important to them than accomplishing their purpose. People lost their space because the airline management was only thinking of time.

So I am thinking to myself that the people that are controlling my space are mostly just concerned about making everything happen much faster. Ok then, so most of us believe that “time is money” is ludicrous. Right? We have common sense, but it also appears as if the people managing an awful lot of major corporations don’t really care too much about the space you are in because they still believe that time is the important thing, and that the faster things go, the more money they will make. It is just hard for me to believe that so many really stupid people are running large corporations and governments.

So, the fact that we know that slowing down time is possible means that we are ahead of the game, but the fact that they control my space unnerves me. My first task is to gain control over my space. What to do? I’ve got it. I will just think about the space I want to be, focus and meditate on it, and then just not care how much time it takes to get there. I will just slow down time, and walk right into the space. Now that is pretty simple.

Hmm. I am thinking of a hot cup of coffee.

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Posted on August 8, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Radical Change and Space: Good Morning Vietnam!

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Last April my wife and traveled to Vietnam.  So here I am in the middle of Hanoi about 9 am in the morning faced with the challenge of crossing a busy street with 2 million motorcycles and no traffic lights.   This could possibly be a North American’s worst nightmare because in the U.S. pedestrians have all of the rights even when they are wrong.  Not so in Hanoi.   So I do the illogical thing and it works.  I just start walking slowly across the street without stopping.  No one hits me because they seem to know how to make space for what is happening around them.   For some reason my intuitive mind already knows this before I take my first steps.

This exercise in walking across the street fascinates my mind so I begin to think about how they are able to give me the space to cross the street.   In their minds they are trying to get from one space where they began their journey to another space where they will end it, but before they start they seem to already understand that there are many other people in the space who are also doing the same thing.  It is as if a whole culture has built itself around the idea that you can move from one space to another and respect others who are doing the same thing.

In the western materialistic world the space thing seems to be about how much space you can take up and then protecting the space that you call yours. Your worth is calculated by how much space you have in the most highly valued areas.   Financial worth is not calculated by how much space you are able to share or how well you live in the same space with others, but how much space you own.

What seems ironic to me is that 90% of pop music and a large percentage of the movie industry focuses its time and energy on the value of closeness, i.e. love. which is the ability to be in the same space at the same time harmoniously with no concern whatsoever about ownership.   So, on the one hand, a part of us  values being in the same space at the same time, but the material world values separation.  If you have a lot of material space, you are worth a lot of money, but being able to share a space is not valued financially at all.  What if, instead of the amount of space being worth lots of money, the ability to share space was what determined your wealth.  Now that would be radical change.   Let’s face it people who share space well are the happiest and lead the best lives.

Have you ever noticed that dance clubs where there are so many people that you can hardly breathe and the music is so loud that you cannot have a conversation are the ones that are most valued?  What is that about?  Not too many people like to dance on a big dance floor where there are not many dancing.   There seems to be too much space which is quite discomforting.

I am just wondering why one of the world’s largest real estate moguls who has had several divorces is seen as so successful.  There are so many of his books in practically every bookstore in the world lauding his value.  So he has a lot of material space, but he doesn’t know how to share space very well.  Is that what we call successful?   I guess you may have surmised that I won’t be reading any of his books.

I am not all that against having a space I can call my own, but I really love sharing my space with others.   I have lived in the same room with my wife for the last 33 years.  Now that ought to be worth something.  Don’t you agree?   It’s certainly better than owning half of city,  but not being able to live closely with others.

Let’s see, the wealthiest man in the world is trying to give away most of his wealth to solve the world’s problem.  You gotta love that, but will he share the space of who decides what to do with the money?  I think maybe sharing space and the wealthiest man in the world is an oxymoron in today’s world, but you gotta love that he wants to give it away to help others.   Hmmm. Another radical change, sharing the space of decision making.   How many CEOs want to do that?

I wonder what other kinds of space we can share.

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Posted on August 6, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Interpreting Your Own Dreams 7: You Don’t Have to Be Dreaming to be Dreaming

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Isn’t it interesting that we use the word dream both for when we dream of doing something in the future and also for the stories that we receive while we are sleeping? They are not all that different. Many people love the waking dream of flying off to many different countries. When I am flying in a dream, I have a feeling of freedom and lightness that often seems so real that when I awaken if feels like I know how to do it when I am under the laws of gravity. I have flown all over South East Asia in the last two years and I can tell you that I am closest to the flying dreams that I have in sleep time during my travels.

So I am wondering, as I am writing this post, if the two realities, waking and sleeping dreams, actually originate from the same place. I have had, on occasion, running dreams, where I have felt completely relaxed, been able to run for very long distances, and finished in times way beyond my expectations, which when I approximate those feelings in my actual running life, give me my best results. The two realities seem to become one at that point.

I have been known to say that all dreams come true. It is a very frightening thought, because on the one hand, I have my share of positive dreams like the flying dreams that I love to live out in real life through travel and my daily life, and then, on the other hand, I have numerous ego related dreams such as the one shared in the last posting about not being able to choose a film to view. What is even more worrisome is the fact that the negative dreams seem more likely to come true than the positive ones because the ego seems to run on its own desire and own controls. I am not behind the wheel with the ego; someone else is.

Today, for instance, I have a huge desire to go up to someone and just tell them that they are way out to lunch. I have a great deal of anger that this person has such a huge voice and is giving out ideas that people are compelled to listen to and obey. Last night I didn’t have a dream about this situation because I already knew that if I lived out my ego desire to tell what was what, that the consequences would be disastrous. I already have a long history of bad dreams about this subject and have watched myself suffer consequences for trying to make a big ego listen to my ideas. I don’t need a dream, in this case, to know that my ego desire will not work. My waking life experience, and my former process work lets me know not tell the person that he is headed down the wrong path, but I feel a strong urge to so, nonetheless.

The dream in my true self, which is the opposite one of my ego is to have more relationships based upon mutual sharing and appreciation for each other, but the anger in my ego used to become so intense, that I used to just unleash a flurry of negative expressions that ended in disaster. Generally speaking I am known as a fairly calm and gentle person, but I also do know how to tell the truth. I really want to let the person know how wrong he is.

In the Baha’i Writings it is put this way.

“Not everything that a man knoweth can be disclosed, nor can everything that he can disclose be regarded as timely, nor can every timely utterance be considered as suited to the capacity of those who hear it.”

This is another way of saying that, in this case, being right and saying it, is wrong. Sometimes it is just better to keep my big mouth shut. My ego is dreaming of telling someone the truth even though that person is not capable of hearing it. My true self is dreaming of setting up environments where mutual sharing and appreciation are present. Unfortunately, the ego dreams are always, at first, much more compelling.

If in my night dream, I am being attacked by a poisonous snake, my ego will have me do everything possible to avoid or try to kill the snake. This is survival. In real life, a poisonous snake is a poisonous behavior such as gossip and backbiting. I can remember that there was a time when I was having to deal with people that were just very charming and excellent public speakers with progressive ideas, but behind my back they were doing all kinds of dirty dealings and spreading lies about me. One night I had a dream with huge numbers of poisonous snakes all around me which made me want to avoid everything about the place I was in and at the same time really kill the behavior by confronting it. Eventually the snakes in real life did get rid of me by firing me. The dream came true.

I was not powerful enough in my life to realize that my true self’s dream which is to create environments where mutual sharing and appreciation, can thrive wherever the dream is strong. The venom was just too strong. Fortunately I was fired, but my true self’s dream still lives on, and because I already have the experience of knowing that trying to confront the wrong ideas doesn’t work very well, I can calm my anger, keep my mouth shut, and then seek positive ways to build supportive environments.

This is all to say that waking or sleeping our true dreams continue on, but they always come with the price of dealing with the ego’s desire first, learning from it, letting it go, and then pursuing fully what is in our hearts. The ego’s dreams do not have to come true in real life. You can deal with them in your meditative and therapeutic life so that your true dreams can flourish.

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Posted on August 5, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Interpreting Your Own Dreams 6: The Symbols

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Last night I dreamt that I was downtown at a movie theatre with my wife.  While I was trying to choose what to watch, I got separated from her because she went to the washroom.   The longer the dream went on, the more it became apparent that the choices were really bad, mostly horror type movies about some rampaging homicidal maniacs.   I  then started to feel panicked about not being able to find a  film and then I woke up.

So what does it all mean?  There are 3 aspects to deal with, the feelings, the syntax, and the symbols.  The theme of this post is about the symbols, but it is often nice to end with the symbols rather than begin with them.

The feeling that I have is panic or anxiety that I can’t find a movie to watch.  If the feeling were positive, then the symbol of the movie theater would be something that I would want to pursue, but as the feeling is negative, it means that the symbol needs to be transformed.  This is because negative emotions come from the ego, while positive ones are from the true self in dreams.    Anxiety is an emotion that denotes lack of confidence and its solution is almost always to remember positives about yourself and then act from them.   When you are overwhelmed, it is often helpful to do something like washing the dishes or cleaning up because simple activities often ground you into remember positive abilities.  But panic about not being able to find a movie means that I have  lack of confidence about something.    Panic, structurally, is a combination of internal speed and a large negative imagined picture.    When it takes over, it can be pretty crippling.

So the feeling tells me that I am going to need to some confidence by slowing down inwardly and remembering positives in a large way.

As regard to syntax,  the one thing of many that I can see is that the emotional content starts with the hope of doing something together with my wife, things soon get more separated, I end up in panic, and then I wake up.    So the dream goes from the hope of closeness, to separation and panic.    This means that if I solve the dream that I am going to have a great deal of closeness and feel really slowed down inside as opposed to panic.

Ok so this brings us to the symbols.   Metaphor is the language of dreams just as it is in myth, mystical writing, and art such as poetry.   The best way I have found to deal with symbols is first get your mind to slow down so that you can take your time to figure out a meaning.  It doesn’t need to be done in a hurry so if you write your dreams down, then you can go back to them often to enrich the meaning.  What is most important when you are at the beginning stage is to avoid jumping into believing that the dream is literal even if it seems literal.   A literal dream such as a future dream that comes true also has symbolic meaning because it is trying to communicate inner abilities.
The key symbol in the above dream is the movie theatre.  The way to start understanding the symbol is to ask yourself what a movie theatre is and then make a correlation with non-material reality.   What is a movie theatre?  A movie theatre in a positive sense is a place that you go to view a made-up story that communicates  something related to life.   When you leave the theatre, you feel enriched and have more understanding about life.   So a movie theatre is a symbol of a made up reality that attempts to communicate a message.  You can have your own positive inner movie theater by making up pictures of the life that you want to live and then going for them.

The problem I have in my dream is that when I go to my own inner movie theater trying to pick the movie that I want to live by,  I only find negative choices and then I panic.   In the dream I was having to pick from other people’s choices which means that my negative inner movie theater was being run by others.    To transform the theater I simply can start choosing the inner movies that I want to view and one of the best ways to do this is by seeing the great positive movies of the past about my life which then can be used to create new movies about the kind of future that my true self wants to live.

When I am panicked, my ego throws me into a materialistic way of viewing the world that is controlled by others which causes me to be separated from others, but when I view the dream symbolically and then transform it to a positive, I can create positive pictures of being closer to others by remembering how I was able to do it in the past, and then projecting a new positive film about the future.

Once again, the key to understanding symbols is to not rush into thinking about them literally, to remember that they are trying to communicate deeper spiritual conditions both positive and negative.

Next post:  Symbols related to elements

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Posted on July 29, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Interpreting Your Own Dreams 5: Defying Time

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My mother turned 86 this year.  By all accounts you would think that her life would be on the downswing.  Not so.  After having painted in oils for a number of years, followed by the less forgiving medium of watercolors, she recently began the most difficult of them all, Chinese brush painting.  It requires a very steady hand and great mental preparation before the brush hits the fragility of the rice paper.   If you know my mother, you know that she often complains out loud about the arthritis she has in her hand and all the aches and pains in the rest of her body.   She still walks more than a hour each day, cooks, cleans, and does a series of strength and flexibility exercises.   Teenagers would be envious of her energy levels.   20 years ago when she had back surgery to fuse a couple of vertebrae the doctor told her she would have about 10 years before she would be in a wheel chair.

Janet, my sister-in-law, put it this way.  She rules over her body.  She is a major anomaly.
If you know anything about my mother, you know she has high expectations for herself.  She could never hire a maid or extra help because she can out work them even approaching 90 and the quality of her work is just too high.   I feel sorry for the gardeners.  If you have read the last posting about the two worlds of time,  you can see that despite the fact that my mother lives in the world of clock time,  her spirit soars in the other dimensions of time.   Her body aches, her ego grows impatient with the lack of will in others, and she complains that she isn’t as good as she used to be, but her spirit just keeps marching forward, learning and developing as if she were 20.   You can’t have a better role model than my mom.   She demonstrates a basic principle of spiritual growth, which is the recognition that the ego is present (the arthritis is there), but she doesn’t let it rule her.  She allows her true self, the self that lives beyond time and space, that produces great art and prepares huge feasts, to be the sovereign of her life.   I am sure that my mother feels a lot of pain from the arthritis, but it is only because the dreams of her true self are still so high and way beyond the reach of most people.   Most people would have given up the brush long ago, but she continues to defy time with great dreams.

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Posted on July 28, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Interpreting Your Own Dreams 4: The Two Worlds of Time

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One of the great aspects of the dream world is its interesting way of dealing with time.  You can be asleep in your bed and within a very short span of time travel to several different countries.  While we are wake, we are governed by the clock that is determined by the earth’s journey around the sun.  It is sequential, one moment following another.   In the dream world time seems to be more flexible.   In the physical world things have a definite beginning and ending.   In the dream world the laws of time are stretched so that they can have the options of communicating whatever we need.     It teaches us much about the way the mind can work.

For instance, it often happens that people dream about something one night and then some days or months or years later the dream comes true in the material world.    This is the same process that an architect uses when a building is construction.   The building is constructed in the mind of the architect long before the building ever is finished in the material world.     This is why so many self help programs emphasize the importance of seeing the end in the beginning.

People often communicate the phenomenon of time by saying that they were in one location and then suddenly they were somewhere else.   This shows that time can just jump without having to take years and years of living or multiple flights to various locations.   It teaches us that we can use our minds to connect one experience to another so that it sees their relationship.    If you are dreaming a dream that shifts from one place to another,  it can be assumed that the two locations are closely related and usually is there to prove that though you move jobs or houses or families, it is still the same you with the same problems that is moving around.  You can’t solve a personal issue by moving.  It is much better to solve the issue first and then move rather than the other way around.  If you have a  problem with finishing what you start, you can’t change it by changing locations.  You have to change your spiritual space, i.e., more determination and then the new options appear that you never thought possible before.

The primary issue of all human beings is inclusion and family is the first priority of inclusion.   If in your dreams, you are having an intimate physical relation with someone else, and it isn’t your spouse,  it doesn’t mean that you should go out and immediately have a sexual relation with that person.    It means that the person you are relating to in the dream has a spiritual quality that you are needing, which, when it is actualized, will bring your life into harmony with everyone around you.  Dreams always are merciful.  They warn you ahead of time what you ought to be working on to make life work and therefore, is much more efficient.  However, if you don’t pay attention to the dreams, life will present you with the same issue until it is solved.  If you are a womanizer, it just means that you are trying to solve spiritual issues that will bring your life into harmony with others through sex.  It doesn’t work.  Purity works because it allows you to deal with the fact that you have virtues that are as yet to be unleashed in your life.   It is pretty simple and pretty basic and dreams are the most merciful way to handle it because they act before your life is ruined outwardly.   It is a great predictive device because it always gives you information beforehand.   It is like knowing who is going to win the race before it begins.  Understanding time in a dream is what makes it such a powerful tool.

Hmm.  I wish I had access to some CEOs and presidents’ dreams.  I think I will hire myself out.

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Posted on July 25, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Interpreting Your Own Dreams 3: Playing with Time

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One of the activities I often do when I do a dream meeting is to place out a number of virtue cards on a table where each person chooses the one that is most needed in their life right now such as courage, honesty, determination, love, joy, or patience to name a few. I always have 2 patience cards and it is very rare that both of them are not taken and others in the group having thought that they wanted to pick patience as well.

Why is patience so necessary and why is so non-prevalent in places where the western materialism has taken root?

The other day I crossed over the border from Canada into the United States in the state of Washington and immediately the pressure on time became magnified. I never thought that time was much more pronounced in the US than in Canada, but the great symbol in the northwest of the US is the number of drive thru coffee stands ready to give you a double shot of espresso while you rush to where you are going. As I allowed myself to partake in this cultural phenomenon because of the love of coffee I thought to myself that I better slow myself down inside that there is no real difference between getting to a destination 5 to 10 minutes earlier, but everywhere I went that weekend the rationale for not doing things for everyone I met had some relationship with time. Americans are in a hurry and get upset if they have to wait in line.

This made me start to play with time in a new way. Here are a few thoughts. The reason I am writing them is because dream time is much different that clock time as I will explain later such as when you dream of something before it actually happens in the physical world. I thought that Americans, who are supposed to be the most advanced culture in the world because of their economic might have really gone crazy over the clock.

I guess it is no surprise to me that the first culture that I landed in when I left the US in 1983 was the aboriginal culture of Canada who have a whole different way of viewing time than industrialized consumer based cultures. I was really forced to question my issues around time when I landed in Brazil some 15 years later. Now that I am in Malaysia my clock has been altered once again.

Since patience is the virtue most people want to have more of, it seems like a great place to begin the exploration of time. Patience is the virtue of being able slow down time or stop time so that something else can happen first. Impatience is the inability to allow other things to happen first before our greedy needs are met. It is how we have, as a world culture, managed to destroy the environment and why development projects in the third world don’t work.

The way I hear impatience being said to me, since I work in the area of physical education, is that of not having time to play or exercise. People most often say that they don’t have time to play because they have too much work to do which they rush through and then throw themselves on their couches in exhaustion.

When you lack patience, it means that you are rushing through a task so that you can get to an end that will give you something positive. Managers want you to work really quickly so that you can get a product out which will give them more money that will make them happier. It is all pretty simple. To discover impatience you just have to follow the money trail especially the greedy money trail. When we are impatient, we are trying to get to an end faster so that we will get some kind of reward.

If you have patience, it means that you can slow down time to a standstill so that the spiritual energy can be placed right in the midst of all of your activity. The American energy is very telling. You rush to work, buy coffee in a drive-thru to get you to rush more, so that at the end of the day you can have more things that will allow to enjoy life more, the pursuit of material happiness. Rush, rush, rush. Only at the end of the day everyone is too tired from rushing all day to enjoy their things.

If you can play with time, that is to realize that it can speed up or slow down or even not exist, then the joy and happiness can be placed right in the midst of what you are doing. Patience is the ability to slow down the material life so that positive energy can be placed in the midst of what you are doing. The illusion of the clock is that people think it is ticking, when in reality the space between the ticks is diminished for them. Slowing down time means increasing the space between the ticks.

If you feel rushed in your life, realize that time is a construct and is flexible and realize that the end you are rushing for is in the middle somewhere, not at the end.   Instead of rushing to finish the dishes so that you can relax,  start relaxing and enjoying the dishes or even leaving them for awhile.

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Posted on July 21, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Interpreting Your Own Dreams 2: Syntax

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Whenever I do a dream meeting some people inevitable want to call me very intuitive, but most of my work has very little to do with intuition.  Intuition is the feeling I get when I know I should proceed in a certain direction, but I don’t have the conscious knowledge of why yet.  This is because the conscious mind seems to be a bit slower than other communication.

The key that unlocked lots of doors for me about dream work was actually a lot of self discipline and focused attention for long periods of time on the dream in front of me. One of the things I discovered that not many people talk about in dream books is the structure or syntax of the dream.  Most people focus on the content.  There are shelves and shelves of books about content but not much about the structure of dreams.

For instance,  a lot of people end the explanation of a dream by saying, “and then I woke up.”   So I asked myself why people wake up from a dream when they do because I hadn’t seen it in any of the books on dreams that I had read. Then I realized that the expression “and then I woke up” could mean that that was when they woke up in their life.

If you had a dream where you were being attacked by a poisonous snake and then you woke up,  the waking up is just as important as the attack by the poisonous snake because the snake caused you to wake up and pay attention.   Being attacked by poisonous snake means that you are fearful of being attacked by someone whose actions are like poisonous venom in your life, like backbiting or spreading false rumours or vicious criticism.   The structure of the dream is that you are being attacked and then you wake up.   You only wake up when something bad is happening.

The big thing about syntax in a dream has to do with time and sequence.  In the world of clocks and physical space time always goes from beginning to middle to end; first, second, third, etc….  In dream time the clock doesn’t have rules because it is timeless.  In a negative dream I can look at time exactly opposite to the clock, that is the end is in the beginning, and beginning of the work is at the end.  What the spiritual end, the goal or object of the dream is  can come at the beginning.  The end isn’t at the end, it is at the beginning and where you start your work can be at the end, not the beginning.   It is the last issue in the dream that can mark where you begin your work.

Here is the dream I had on the blog a few days ago.

Last night I dreamt that my son-in-laws and I were behind the lines in pre-World War 2 Germany doing undercover work against the Nazis.  At every turn we were nearly brutally murdered, but somehow we managed to escape only to find more threats more numerously as the dream progressed.

Structure:  a group/  a place in the  negative past /working  against/ hiding/  running away/ more challenges/threats

So the structure says that if I work with a group in a place in the negative past then I am going to end being against people, hiding out, running away and things will just be more threatening.   The important information is that the structure says that things will just get worse in the end if I put myself in the negative past in the beginning.

This makes the solution so easy.  All I have to do is put myself in the positive future instead of the negative past and then my life works.

Here is another example. Suppose you had a dream where you were flying and everything was going fine and then you ran out of gas.

The structure is your were doing something where you were feeling really positive and then something really negative happened.      First you have a positive and then you get a negative.   This means that you just have to change how you do the negative and then everything will be positive.

Mapping the structure is a bit like how we used to diagram sentences in the past to analyze grammar in English classes.  We have largely thrown grammar out of English in North America because we tended not to go for meaning, but when you map the structure of the dream,  there are some very interesting things that appear.

Next post:  Origin of the issue clues: how to read time clues

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Posted on July 20, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Interpreting Your Own Dreams 1: The Feelings

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There are 3 things that I look for when I am listening to a dream especially my own, the actual story or content of the dream, the structure of the dream which is like the syntax, and the feelings that accompany dreams.

In almost every dream meeting that I have done in various parts of the world the most common question I hear is, “Why can’t I remember my dreams?” or “How can I remember my dreams better?” The simplest answer I can give to people is to start paying greater attention. In the great majority of cases people remember their dream the very next night after the meeting. It is sort of like the greatest 2 labels or our time, ADD and ADHD, which are just fancy ways of saying that it is difficult for people to slow down and listen to what is happening inside of themselves. What I can see is that the western influence on the world culture has made cultures with attention deficits. Most people have stopped paying attention to what is going on in the inner worlds because they are busy trying to compete in the outer material world.

If you are “ADD” about your dreams meaning you don’t remember them, the best place to start to recover your memory in the dreaming process is to begin mapping or journaling about the feelings that have when you wake up in the morning. Every dream, like every experience leaves an emotional marker, whether it be negative like anxiety, grief, fear, anger, guilt or embarrassment or positive like joy, excitement, love, determination, confidence, calm or patience in positive ones.

It is much easier to remember your emotions than your thoughts because your thoughts are a combination of pictures, sounds, and words in your mind, whereas feelings lodge themselves into various parts of body that have sensations attached to them. However, the biggest problem most people have is that when they wake up in the morning, they are already brushing their teeth or onto the day without having had any reflection time.

Dreams are like the code for what the best direction your life ought to go right now. If I am not paying attention to what is happening in my dreams, which is a before time experience, then I will probably be experiencing the consequences of my life in real time. Dreams are designed to give you information ahead of time so if you can solve them, they save a great deal of suffering in real life.

Of the three elements, content, structure, and emotions the easiest to process are the emotions because when you feel the feelings you are experiencing rather than avoiding them with loud music or alcohol or rushing around being overly busy, they trigger the thoughts that help you unravel the mystery of your own life.

If you have not done very much process work or worked on your issues and negative emotions, you can be absolutely certain of one thing. The first negative emotions that appear will be aimed at solving the problems of having grown up in your own family. Family is always the first issue to arise which is probably why everyone races out of the door in the morning. They don’t want to have to face their families. The simple reason for these emotions to appear first is that the family is the core unit of every society and culture. I have never met anyone who survived childhood without a wheelbarrow full of family issues.

If you are going to process workshops to make more money or improve your relationships or get better grades or better scores on your golf game, you are always going to be taken back first to your family of origin when the negative emotions arose. It is a universal guarantee because the first priority of everyone’s life, whether they want to do it or not is family. If you have been ripped off by your family, then your job is to not rip off the next generation. When you stop being ADD which rushes you off to work, you are going to be asked to improve your family life. This is always where the most pain is.

The simplest way to start is to just recognize the feeling. What am I feeling? Negative emotions are first in line because they are the markers for where to start the growth and solve the problems of the former generation. When you remember the feelings, then the content memories of the dreams begin reappearing.

The next post: Mapping the Syntax

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Posted on July 19, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Fighting the War on Terror Internally

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Last night I dreamt that my son-in-laws and I were behind the lines in pre-World War 2 Germany doing undercover work against the Nazis.  At every turn we were nearly brutally murdered, but somehow we managed to escape only to find more threats more numerously as the dream progressed.

When I awoke from the dream, I realized that I am still living my life as if the Nazis are in power when in reality they lost.  The key for understanding the dream for me is the realization that despite the fact that we still have Nazi-like CEOs and leaders who have no qualms about getting rid of people by the truckloads, in the end, they always lose.  This means that they have already lost in the future even while they are in power in the present.

I can be confident that the power mongers of the present are going to be gone in the future because they always lose.  Napoleon lost.  I think that says it all, but what I tend to imagine is the possibility of another Napoleon or another Hitler terrorizing the world.  I forget that Napoleon lost because, in the end, he had become too arrogant with power and had created too many enemies.

Whoever I am terrorized by is going to lose because they will create too many enemies that will eventually bring them down.   What this means is that I can be very enthusiastic about going after positive strategies like cooperation and unity because I am now certain that the present-day Nazis are going to lose.  The reason that they are going to lose is that they are going to create too many enemies.

What the world seems to have plenty of is the number of “soldiers” it takes to bring down a tyrant, but what it seems to be lacking are people who have the positive strategies that replace the tyrannical one.  The despots just keep reappearing and keep re-losing.   We know how to get rid of tyrants, but we don’t know how to build a world based upon positive values.   It was relatively easy to overcome Saddam Hussein, but there are not enough positive models or strategies that replace sectarian violence and division.   It was easy to get rid of the Taliban, but it has proven not so easy to build a just society.

Here is one strategy that we all might find interesting.  My 2 son-in-laws and I share it together.  It is sort of like a modern day version of the three musketeers.  I think that this is why they appeared in the dream.  It goes like this.  When you get invited to do something positive, you say yes.  Take yesterday for instance.  It is late Wednesday afternoon pouring rain in Vancouver in the summer.  Well, normally we play soccer together on Wednesday evenings, but I am looking out the window and thinking that there is no way I am going to play soccer tonight. I am part Malaysian now. This is against my culture to play in the cold rain.  I just want to sit on the couch and relax.   Shortly thereafter Chris calls and says the fateful words, “So are you going to play soccer with us in the rain tonight?”  I am thinking he is crazy, but I say yes anyway.   When we are walking to the court, it is still raining, there are large puddles of water on the court when we are warming up, and a steady rainfall during the first 45 minutes.   After awhile the rain stops, the puddles diminish, and we have a great time.  On the way home I feel great.  We sit and reminisce about how great the night was.

Then I remember the day before and how my daughters worked their magic on Debby, my wife.  It was raining on that day as well, but my daughters joyfully announce that they are going hiking to Lynn Canyon.  Debby replies by saying that she is not going because she is fearful of a getting a cold.  Everyone else keeps moving forward with no fear of the rain whatsoever.  Finally Debby gives in and starts talking about what kinds of clothing she could bring to stay warm.  She goes and has a great time.

I guess it has a lot to do with finding people that you are really close to and then just doing things together that are positive for everyone.   Sounds pretty simple.

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Posted on July 18, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Enjoying the Ride

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Yesterday while our family was hiking in Lynn Canyon with our three grandchildren, I received some really great lessons about life. It was obvious to Chris, my son-in-law, and I that the purpose of the trip was to get to Lynn Canyon as fast as possible in our cars and get to the end of the trail on foot as fast as possible as well. On the way back we started talking about the way that all of the children had a much different way of approaching the hike.

Maria Montessori would have been proud of Erika, my daughter, because her daughter, Isa, was interested in going off the trail when she spotted something interesting. She wasn’t interested in the speed of getting to the end of the trail; she was enjoying everything that the trail had to offer. Erika just allowed her to lead rather than rushing her to the end.

Midway through the return trek back Chris and I stopped, looked up a hill, and started talking about how Shane, my other son-in-law would approach a hill versus how we would do it. Shane would take a long time to look at the hill, see all of the interesting rocks to climb over and things to do, and then systematically go after each one enjoying fully how to make his way over each rock. Chris and I admitted that we would just take the fastest path and rush up there as fast as we could. Shane enjoys the whole experience. We just rush to the end. We tend to miss the middle. We started talking about being too goal oriented rather than more process oriented.

Chris and I thought that the end of the trail was the goal, but the children taught us that the real goal was experiencing fully all of the things along the way because that is where the real growing and learning is. No one taught them how to enjoy the trail. They just did what comes naturally to them.

So I started thinking about how the world is dealing with global warming and terrorism and poverty and inequity and it made me realize that the feeling I get from the discussions and concerns is the need to rush to the end so that the problems will be finished. I am not enjoying the ride because just like the world, I am trying to end a negative, the pain of going up the hill, rather than enjoying all of the learning and growth from facing the challenges so that new positives will emerge.

Slow down and enjoy the ride. That is my new mantra for today.

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Posted on July 11, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

More Friend to me than I am to myself: Isa

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There is a prayer in the Baha’i writings that many Baha’is use often. The last line says, “Thou are more friend to me than I am to myself.” This prayer deals with the anxiety of an uncertain future and the ability to embrace it. When I read the prayer and meditate on its implications, it seems to me that when I am facing uncertainty, the quality that I need the most is friendship.

After I was fired from my job in Brazil, my wife and I spent the following year in Vancouver with our children and our granddaughter, Isabela. Isa (the name we call her by) was only 11 months old when we arrived late in the summer of 2004. She would prove to be a great friend to Debby and I. Debby loves gardens so the way she spent many hours was to soothe her soul in the many beautiful gardens in Vancouver. Isa was usually at her side. For myself, I came to know every park in Vancouver and when the winter came I joined Science World so that we could have a place to walk in the winter. Isa and I took our picture together for the membership card and spent many hours there.

Debby and I had an uncertain future because we were unemployed for the whole year. In fact everyone in the house became unemployed that year, but we always had someone who never judged us and who was always willing to go on whatever outing we had in mind, Isa.

Now in summer of 2007 I am employed, my future is a bit stabler or so it seems, and I am in Vancouver with Isa again. Yesterday we had a great walk together to the store looking for some corn on the cob. Isa is almost 4 years old, and now, besides being willing to go with me to all kinds of places, she is a great conversationalist, a true companion. There is nothing shallow about her. Her questions are all why questions. She doesn’t talk about trivial things. Why is the flower blue, grandpa? Why is the starfish painted on that sign? Nothing I can answer, just questions to ponder.

When we get to the store, we buy some fresh strawberries along with the corn. On the way home, we stop by an outdoor wading pool in a local park, she throws off all of her clothes and dances through the water. I follow her (keeping my clothes on).

As we eat one more strawberry, I tell her how happy I am to be with her. She says that she is really happy too.

I know now what to do when I am anxious about the future. Find Isabela and have an outing because she is more friend to me than I am to myself.

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Posted on July 10, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

How God is Preparing Me for Life with My Grandson

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Olee was born in November, 2005. He is my second grandson. About 2 weeks after he was born I started teaching 5 and 6 years olds wall climbing at my school for the very first time. I was learning just as much as they were especially about how to use all 4 limbs on the wall. Call it coincidence if you don’t believe in spiritual things, but the other day I was at one of Vancouver’s beaches and I noticed that Olee, at 20 months was climbing over a set of logs using all 4 limbs and figuring his way over them just the way wall climbers do. Then, yesterday when my son-in-laws and I were doing an 8 hour hike up Crown Mountain, we came to a place where we had to use all 4 limbs to scale rocks. It dawned on me at that point that maybe the reason I was fired from my other job and given this one teaching 5-6 years, which I had never done before, was to not only assist them, but also to prepare me to relate and be with my grandson.

The two years that I have been teaching 5 years olds have really helped me to combine playfulness, structure, and creativity which have made life with grandchildren very enjoyable.

Today as I reflect it really makes me realize that God is much more in charge of my life that I can possibly even imagine. You have to love the way God works. What a sweet and gentle hand He has.

What else is He preparing me for?

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Posted on July 7, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Cruisin’ with Diego: One of 3 role models

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Diego is my youngest grandson, 18 months. He is my inspiration in every way by the way he lives his life. Whatever Diego does, that is what I am going to start doing. I have begun training for another marathon and realize that his training regime is much better than any I have read in any magazine. This is Diego’s method. As soon as his bedroom door opens in the morning he flies down the hall running as fast as he can. When the gate is opened in the backyard, he immediately starts running. He doesn’t look back to see if anyone is watching. He just goes full speed ahead. When we are at the park, he finds a green spot and just runs.

Last night we were all sitting around after dinner with some of my daughters’ friend’s children watching the kids play on the swing set. I brought out a couple of plates of fresh strawberries and raspberries. Diego came back to the plate for more at least 15 times long after the strawberries disappeared. Then he went after the strawberry bushes that only had green ones on them. His appetite was relentless and unending. He barely had time to chew what was in his mouth before he came after the next one.

So I thought to myself, if only I could live life a little more like Diego. Get up, role out of bed, and start running and then have such a great appetite for life that it can’t be filled. What a life! Thanks for being my teacher, Diego.

3 Comments

Posted on July 6, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

The Mother of All My Fears: Exclusion

This year I am celebrating the 10 anniversary of the first time that I was ever fired from a job. I was a small child in the 1950s when loyalty was still a value in society. I still tend to believe too much in the leadership and stay too long in organizations because I still believe that the leaders want to do something good in society and are not in it for themselves. Call me naive and leave it at that. The second time I got fired was 3 years ago. It is still much fresher in my psyche than the first. Call me a slow learner. Both times I was under the illusion that I was doing my best work ever when I got fired.

Up until 10 years ago being fired had never entered my mind as a possibility so when it happened I felt devastated and betrayed like nothing I had ever experienced before. My firing, along with some of my other colleagues, was couched in the language of today. “We are not renewing your contract because we are changing the direction in the organization.” It would have been much nicer to hear the words, “you’re fired”.

I had a year off after my first firing and another year off after the second one, so both times I took that time to reconnect to my self by running marathons. In 1997 I trained for one marathon, but 3 years ago I felt so betrayed that I had to do two to get myself together. terryfox1.jpg On the 10th anniversary of my big separation I have decided that I would do some preventive medicine by training for another marathon. When I get up in the morning and have a run, I get reconnected with myself. It is a bit like taking a magical pill. Everything seems right with the world. When I am not running is when I feel the worst about myself.

I have no illusions about leadership anymore, but I still have a fear of being fired. I am not sure that it will ever fully leave or whether it is supposed to leave because being disconnected from people is a painful thing. Thank God for facebook and thank you Generation and X and X/Y for turning this baby boomer onto it.

Hope to see you all on the road. Did I say that I am going to run the marathon in Kuala Lumpur? See you at the twin towers.

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Posted on July 5, 2007 by dreamsforpeace

Say Goodbye to Guilt #2

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The big problem with guilt is that it makes you loyal for too long to something you should have left a long time ago.  While I am a baby boomer by birth, in recent years I have come to admire more and more how generation X operates because the “boomers” keep looking for good leaders to solve their problems while generation X realizes that given the current system, good leaders is an oxymoron, e.g. most leaders are morons.   Unfortunately, besides being a boomer, I was also born under the sign of taurus so I am extremely stubborn about moving.

It is pretty easy to identify a tyrant.  Lots of people die or get kicked around.  Still people feel guilty about leaving a tyrant because they are so fearful of being excluded altogether and being left out there all alone with nothing.  The advantage tyrants have is that they have long realized that people are fearful of being excluded and they use this fact to their full advantage.     This is why so many women hang onto an otherwise worthless relationship for years and years allowing themselves to experience all kinds of trauma.   The fear of being alone is extremely forceful.

Besides having to leave tyrants there is a second group of leaders and organizations that can be equally damaging and hard to leave.   They are “conservatives with a creative flare”.   They do things exactly like the really traditional ultra conservative groups except that they have some positive creativity and some moral principles that make them look like they are really out for changing the world.   You know that a tyrant is a tyrant, and a racist is a racist, but conservatives with a flare lead you on to believe that they are doing something really revolutionary and exciting when, at their core, they are just like all the other traditionalists hanging onto to their closely guarded space and structures.

People tend to hang on with a conservative with a flare because they see the creativity and the ethics and think that something is wrong with themselves when things just don’t live up to all of the hype, but really the core of the organization is very conservative and guards against change very strongly.    A few people see right through it, get really angry, and then are thrown out because this kind of traditionalist is like the tyrant in the end.  They don’t mind eliminating people to protect their turf and recognition addictions.    Conservatives with a flare have about a 5 year run before the walls start to crumble which is about the time they leave to do the same thing somewhere else.

What is really difficult with the flare-types is that they invite you in and allow you to be creative to a degree in the first stages.   This is what keeps people loyal and makes them feel guilty in the latter stages, but what happens when you practice creativity is that you always make mistakes which are seen as liabilities.  As soon as you start making mistakes, which give you the necessary feedback to refine and change the initial attempts, you are seen as a negative because you take away from the leader’s ultimate goal which is recognition.

You know you are working with a conservative with a flare when you start a new project, it runs into the natural difficulties of all new projects, and then you are called into the office, criticized, and eventually asked to stop the project.   A leader who is truly interested in change sees the difficulties, listens to the problems and then then encourages you to go much further.

A conservative with a flare leader can always justify getting rid of you in the end because he has been counting how many times you have made a mistake and then holds that against you.  He doesn’t want real change.  He wants a little flare to make him look good, but can’t stand to do the work of real change.  He will get rid of you in the end almost as fast as the tyrant.   You can tell who a conservative with a flare leader is by how many people they have fired.

Someone who is really interested in change is extremely slow to fire people because they are so good at the transformation work.  People actually change in their organizations.   So you needn’t feel guilty about leaving a conservative with a  flare.   They are really tyrants that have a creative front.

Be radical. Go for change.    Find a group of people who give you encouragement and stay with them.  Leave the tyrants and flares.

Richard Hastings
richard Richard Hastings is an expert in change work and dream work and author of Dreams for Peace. He is a Baha'i and currently lives in Vancouver, BC. Read more...
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