The Translucent View

Many years ago, when my children were still quite young, we got a visit for the weekend from my friend Peter Russell. You may know him from his book, “The Global Brain,” and more recently, “From Science to God.” He came to visit us for the weekend to get a break from his busy teaching and writing schedule. He wanted some time off. So that Saturday afternoon he organized a grand Monopoly tournament with my two sons, who were around six and nine at the time.

As the game wore on, someone had built up hotels on Park Avenue, and someone else had bought all the utility companies; you know how Monopoly goes. I was glad to get a break from looking after the kids, so I wandered in and out from time to time to see how they were getting on.

What I learned that afternoon has stayed with me ever since.

My youngest son, Shuba, who was only six at the time, got very caught up in the game, as kids often do. So at one point, when he landed on Pete’s two hotels on Park Avenue and had to pay thousands of dollars in rent, he lost it. He ran to his room crying, saying he hated all of us. It took us 15 minutes to coax him out. When the game went better for him, on the other hand, he was overjoyed, ecstatic, and wanted to play forever. Pete, on the other hand, seemed to be enjoying himself no matter what. He rolled his dice, and if his fortunes were good he laughed. He rolled the dice again, and if his fortunes were bad…he still laughed. (more…)

With record prices at the pumps, both Freddy and Fannie looking really quite punch drunk, much of California covered in smoke, and an economic forecast gloomier by the day, many people today find that their response to our world has gradually shifted from patient optimism to concern to, well, freakin’ out.

As a writer, public speaker and “awakening coach,” I travel a great deal throughout the US, working with all kinds of people, from CEOs to hairdressers, and from mystics to merchants. When things get this uncertain, we discover that there is not nearly as much difference between us all as we might have imagined. In our ambitions, our dogmas and our prejudices we find a splintered world, when our status quo is threatened we find our common humanity. During the second world war in London, people discovered the same thing. Families who had not talked to each other for decades, because of some half remembered feud, became friends again while taking refuge in the London underground from the German bombing. The external threat provoked a sobering up from small preoccupations.

I have worked with tens of thousands of people over the last decades, both individually and in groups, facilitating a simple shift in consciousness, which we can call “awakening.” Generally our attention and energy is wrapped up in trying to improve our situation: make more money, find the perfect relationship, get the right raise. Perhaps we get a little more savvy, and shift that attention from the external to our internal state: we work on ourselves to become more loving, more positive or even more “spiritual.” Awakening is in a whole different ball park. Awakening happens when you run out of options, when, at least to some degree, you surrender the struggle. Then all the effort that was wrapped up in trying to make things better is freed up, and we relax simply back into ourselves, into a peace and presence that was overlooked in our obsessive activity. And millions of people are discovering, and least in snapshots, that everything goes better as a result. (more…)