Here & Now Notes & Jokes

Someone sent me a golden nugget of a simple description of how the concept God works from an inner-city point of view:

“When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bike. After a couple of years, I realized that God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked Him to forgive me.” Anonymous

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You might note that either type of prayer supports the religious institutions that have grown up around the concept of "God."

©2010 subhan schenker

A friend wrote and said, "When you change nothing, nothing changes."

My response:

Nothing changes, nothing changes, nothing changes - this is the foundation of having enough of what I don't want.

So, becoming aware that nothing changes, and that our "choices" are habitual, is a blessing and the beginning of change....

©2010 subhan schenker

Miracles

A good friend of mine just had a close brush with death.
He had a heart attack. And his heart stopped beating on the way to the hospital.
The nurse riding in the ambulance defibrillated the heart and normal heartbeat was restored. My friend says that now he believes in miracles!

The whole process got me to look at what I call miracles. And certainly a heart that stops beating...and then starts again is what I would call a miracle!
I was delighted that he was still on the planet. And that miracle gave me a bounce in my step, and I could feel an appreciation in myself for my just being here too, and for a moment, I felt that all was the way it was supposed to be.

So, what is wonderful about a miracle is not only the miracle itself, but the fact that it made me appreciate what I would normally call "the ordinary"...and then I could see the miracle in the ordinary too! In fact everything became a miracle!!

And then I remembered a quote from Albert Einstein. He said:

There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.

Amen….
©2009 subhan schenker

Wall Street, Deception and Exploitation

I just noticed that justice was served today. The judge said that the case was about deception and exploitation; that it was an “exploitation of people’s emotions and money.” The scoundrels were sent to jail and were barred from profiteering on their criminal activities for the next four years!

So, at last, justice caught up with some of the Wall Street robber barons?
Well not exactly. This court decision was rendered against the Balloon Boy’s parents – 90 days for the father and 20 days for the mother – for their escapades in trying to get publicity. But the significance is there in its comparison to what has happened to the crafters of the worst financial crisis this country has seen in eighty years. Over a year has passes since the proverbial waste hit the fan. And what have they received? Time in jail? Not a minute to date. Fines or orders barring them from profiteering? Not a dollar and not a peep. But these bankers and financiers have received billions of bailout dollars from American taxpayers, plus lucrative salaries, plus extravagant bonuses.

Is there something wrong here when comparing these two situations, or am I just having a bad day? If it is “just” to put this couple in jail and to forbid them from profiting from their deception, then why is it not “just” to at least do the same with those whose deceit and exploitation were responsible for the financial disaster and destruction we now have in this country?

Is there no indignation left in our prosecutorial halls of justice to do with Wall Street what is appropriate and required under our legal system? Perhaps this is just an obvious symptom of a country - a civilization – that is now in a steep decline….
©2009 subhan schenker

Here's my take on Tiger Woods and the current zoo that has been created around his female relationships:

He spent an inordinate amount of time on the golf course or range as a young boy and young man, driven by his Dad's desire for him to be the best golfer in the world.
He was painfully shy with girls. He even needed a friend in 2002 to ask his wife for his first date, which she promptly refused!

My hit is that she may have been one of the first women that he dated and made love to. As his confidence in his prowess improved, so did his need to satisfy the raging hormones that were dripping out of his ears, which were a result of his not having had sexual exposure before. And no doubt, women were throwing themselves at him all the while. So how can we blame him from saying yes to these attractive women?

It is his public status - and the myths that we have created around him - that have fueled the stories coming out about him. And really...why should we care about his private life, except that we are acting like voyeurs?!

In a better world, we will stop locking up people in marriages that require/force monogamy on people, regardless of the circumstances. Let monogamy be a choice that comes out of awareness, not a decision forced upon us by societal norms and religions. In that better world, we will simply drop the whole ownership idea, which is just stupid, and abandon the institution of marriage. After all, who wants to live in an institution? Then we can stop making sex into something serious instead of the joy and fun that it really is!
©2009 subhan schenker

Regulation...deregulation...these are words that have become the battleground between the progressive/populist movement and Wall Street and its supporters. They are the two sides of the polarity that governs our approach to human behavior generally and to our economic sphere specifically: "freedom" vs. "Rule of Law." We "regulate" ourselves - either through external laws and institutions or by an internal super ego that tells us what is right and what is wrong. Freedom, therefore, can be seen in this context: The progressive sees regulation as a boundary in which the individual operates in his or her own freedom. The Wall Streeter, in this instance, finds it burdensome to accept the economic boundaries, finding them as obstacles to what they feel is their right to the freedom of creative money-making.
It is not at all surprising that boundary making is the realm of both sides of the polarity, and that each one claims its territory with a passion. While the bankers don't want boundaries in their economic sphere, they do want them when it comes to protecting their bounty. Here they insist on boundaries in the form of criminal and civil laws and regulations. And while progressives want these regulations in the economic sphere, they are opposed to them in the realm of their private lives, e.g. drug use, pornography, sexuality, abortion, etc.
There have been countless speeches, articles and discussions about this polarity. What is missing, however, is a discussion and understanding of WHAT we are attempting to regulate. Only then will we be able to determine how to effectively deal with it! Questions about what regulation is necessary, and, if yes, how can we best do this will then be taken in the context of what the true problem is.
The real roots of the economic crisis are to be found in the behavior of human beings, not how they are regulated or deregulated.
This is not to say that regulation should not be a tool, given the human behavior as it is today. It is to say that unless we know and understand how this behavior comes about and how it can be dealt with, we will not adequately deal with the issues that it presents to us.
Progressives often describe this behavior in terms of power and greed, which produces a substantial power and wealth disparity. Supporters of Wall Street see the economic world through the eyes of innovation, risk-taking and hearty individualism.
Today, we are getting a clear view of how that behavior can affect us all when it acts without restraint. What is apparent to an objective viewer is that those hearty Wall Street individuals, without regulation and when left to their own devices, have not acted in the best interest of the majority, but have in fact pursued power and the accumulation of wealth to the detriment of most others. But what we fail to look at and explore is the behavior itself - how it happens and how it can ultimately change, regardless of regulation or not.

The central hypothesis of this article is simply this: While looking at regulating the financial industry, it is essential to also look at this kind of behavior in people and what creates it. What is greed all about? And how can it be dealt with, on a person-by-person basis, so that it no longer thrives in our marketplaces. Unless we are willing to explore this behavior and the possibility of its change on the psychological/spiritual level, we will constantly be faced with a financial industry that needs to be regulated because it does not consider the general welfare of the people. And they will do everything they can to stop or bypass regulation. We will continue to have a political body and regulators that are a product of the same human behavior background, and who are in many ways beholden to the financial industry. Through its power, this industry is destined, again and again, to create problems for the rest of us.

A willingness to explore how this behavior is created is the first step to actually dealing with the problem and not its symptoms or results. If we do not explore this, then it is akin to mopping up the water in front of the refrigerator instead of pulling the fridge out and finding out where the water is coming from and how it can be dealt with. We can mop forever without resolving the root cause of the water.

©2009 Subhan Schenker

The Path of self discovery has a kind of road map.

And it depends upon what we have learned so far.

Before entering the Path of self discovery, we either

blame others…or we blame ourselves…for our misfortunes.

Once we enter the Path, we often turn that around.

And when we move deep into the Path, we stop blaming both.

We simply stop blaming….

©2008 Subhan Schenker

A man has 50-yard-line tickets for the Super Bowl. As he sits down, another
man comes down and asks if anyone is sitting in the seat next to him.

"No", he said, "the seat is empty".

"This is incredible", said the man. "Who in his right mind would have a seat like this for the Super Bowl, the biggest sporting event in the world, and not use it ?"

Somberly, the man says, "Well... the seat actually belongs to me. My wife was supposed to come here with me, but she passed away. This is the first Super Bowl we have not been to together since we got married in 1967."

"Oh I'm sorry to hear that. That's terrible. But couldn't you find someone else - a friend or relative, or even a neighbor - to take the seat?"

The man shakes his head, "No. They're all at the funeral."

Maya is the Hindi word that has been translated in the west to mean “illusion.”

It is said that life on this planet is maya – an illusion.

This translation creates a misunderstanding which goes like this:
life as we experience it doesn’t really exist if it is maya.

What is more helpful is to understand that maya really means “that which is impermanent but which gives the illusion that it is permanent."

Everything in the physical world will come and go. On an intellectual level, we have that understanding. Yet we still go about our daily lives with an unconscious expectation that the world around us has permanence.

What we don’t understand is that when a hundred billion years are dropped into eternity, they disappear in less than a nanosecond. Any number of years – in fact anything finite – will vanish without a trace when placed in the context of infinity.

And when it is deeply understood that nothing in the finite world has endurance, then the only “thing” which does endure is that which has no substance, which is pure potentiality. It can be called the unmanifest…or it can be called "no-thingness." Everything else comes and goes, but the potentiality always abides, forever…and even beyond forever!

This understanding, even if it is presently intellectual, opens the door for a deeper exploration into that which never dies – that which is not maya!

And it explains much of the pain we experience in our lives because we are always trying to do something impossible - to hold on to the impermanent….

©2008 Subhan Schenker

Opposites do attract.

So there is a good chance that as a woman, if you live in your male energy, you will attract more vulnerable/female-energy men. And if you live in your vulnerability, you will attract more male-oriented energy. The same is true of men and the women they attract.

It is when there is a balance of both energies within, that we will start to attract others with that balance….

©2008 Subhan Schenker