A New Age for the New Age. It’s Time.​

Have you noticed the almost sacred ritual that happens as it gets dark outside, at dusk? It’s especially noticeable for me on a warm summer evening. The air cools and stills. The lighting becomes surreal, glowing, soft, almost like a dream. Birds of a particular feather, shift location as if cued by an internal alarm. Humans and cars bustle about leaving and returning. Mosquitoes might try and get their last bite in. Certain other critters offer a strange but steady musical chorus to welcome the night. It feels like there is a divine design to all of it, like it would be imperfect with just one of its many guests missing. Where the sum of these individual pieces, and what can seem like disorder and disparateness, comes together to truly create the experience of dusk and night falling. Can you tell its my favorite time of day?

But more than that, in a weird way, it has me thinking about the incredibly crazy, imperfect but deliberate plan that is playing out in the world right now and our roles in it. Specifically I’m thinking about the disruption and dismantling of privilege, “business as usual” in its many forms. We see this as it relates to global politics, religion, women’s rights, ethnicity and race, sexual preference and so many things really. As of late, my own experience and attention has been on what greater healing and inclusion looks like in the spirituality/wellbeing space. But I think these reflections might also resonate in other spaces as well.

The True Meaning of Wisdom

For centuries a quality has existed that is referred to as wisdom. A phrase like “wiser heads prevailed” implies that wisdom can save us from stupid or foolish actions. Elders were once considered wise, and so were philosophers. But once you bring up these references, wisdom feels antiquated and irrelevant. Who are the wiser heads in our day? Aside from a revered figure like the Dalai Lama, it’s hard to name one, and he is really a spiritual figurehead more than the classic wise man.

Whatever wisdom might be, the average person doesn’t think about it very much, if at all, and when you consider the problems that feel the most disturbing—climate change, terrorism, racism, poverty, and international tensions, for example—nobody is clamoring to call on wisdom to solve them.

But maybe only wisdom can. Let me explain what I mean.

Every problem, not just the big global ones but problems in everyday life, get solved by using a mental model. This model explains what has gone wrong, which is the first step in making things right again. Consider a common problem like feeling depressed. In our time we apply a medical model and send the depressed person to get help from a doctor, who will prescribe an antidepressant, or to a psychologist, who will apply some kind of therapy.

In the past, other models would have offered a very different explanation of why someone is depressed. Instead of calling depression a mental disorder or a psychological malady, which leads to trying to understand the person’s brain, depression would have been considered a lack of personal discipline or a moral failing. A depressed person in another model would be considered possessed by evil spirits or punished by God for some hidden sin. It’s strange to think that depression might be treated using everything from bleeding to exorcism, but such is the power of mental models.

Models fool people into believing that they are true. In modern society, the general belief that depression is an illness like catching a cold or contracting cancer feels so certain that few would disagree. But in fact, the disease model is not always workable in depression. The action of popular antidepressants on the brain isn’t certain and may be totally misunderstood. You cannot reliably predict who will get depressed, and quite often depression comes and goes on its own for no reason anyone can explain.

If your model doesn’t predict things correctly, leads to haphazard solutions, and depends on unproven assumptions (in this case, the assumption that depression is a brain problem), it’s not a model that matches reality. In modern life, we rely on a model of reality that has three components or levels.

The first level is data, which we collect and assemble into facts. Facts are supposed to match reality, but thanks to the human gift of rationality we now have so-called “alternative” facts, that are really just stubborn opinions that refuse to be rational.

The second level is information. Information consists of the conclusion that the data reveals. If your blood test comes back with an abnormal blood sugar reading (fact), your doctor might inform you that you are diabetic (conclusion). But in many cases of other disorders doctors and other experts  frequently disagree. The same information can often lead to opposite conclusions.

The third level is knowledge, which consists of understanding. You are a knowledgeable doctor if you went to medical school and acquired the knowledge of diseases and how to treat them. Knowledge is the summit of the scientific or rational model. Data gives us the facts; facts assemble into correct information; information, when absorbed as knowledge, allows any problem to be solved, any question to be answered.

“Birth and death in every breath…”
—Deva Premal and Miten

Recently, a dear friend told me that he is moving back to California, which he had left two years before for Florida, where we both live now. (This, only a few months after I moved here myself from Massachusetts.) A week later, I received news that a long-time friend in Boston had died of cancer. Hellos and goodbyes fill my life these days. Friends and family passing to and fro in my experience and my memory like vivid but ephemeral spirits. And I myself am moving with the flow of my own life’s journey, loving and letting go again and again.

Anandamayi Ma: Serving the Formless Through Forms

I’d like to share with you two bits of wisdom from one of my favorite saints, Anandamayi Ma.

For those of you who have been on our circuit together for years, you may have many pictures of her by now, because we usually hand out pictures of her. The reason I like these quotes is because they convey two different planes of consciousness, one of them in which she exists ‘in form’ and the other in which she’s ‘beyond form.’ In each of these, when she’s speaking, she’s speaking from that place at that moment, and it gives you a chance to hear, which is not so frequent, from a true ‘free’ being on different levels of consciousness.

So, when she is in the level of ‘form,’ she has millions of devotees and beings in her presence. For me, it was like being with a wild deer or fox or something like that, just an intimate, non-human connection, non-social.

My preference is for stability. But nothing remains constant. As the inevitable challenges of life confront me, at the deepest level I know I am constantly evolving into more. And yet that seismic shift can feel radically uncomfortable because paradoxically, all of the events that are unfolding are serving to shake me loose of the need for stability. Recently, nature in all her benevolence slapped me upside the head with a tangible reminder of how to release control and embrace surrender in the moments when I am most afraid.

My life has been lived in the eye of the storm literally and figuratively over the past 12 months We are approaching the one-year anniversary of our precious two-year-old, Celeste’s, catastrophic heart failure. And today marks two weeks since the most powerful storm in the history of the Atlantic, Hurricane Irma, plowed through our Southwest Florida community.

I already know the obvious question… why didn’t we get the Sam hell out of Dodge in advance of a Category 5 hurricane?

It’s very easy when you have touched great depths of love and beauty and presence and emptiness and clarity and wisdom – it’s easy to assume you’re always going to stay in that, because when you’re in it, it is so totally who you are. So, you’ve got to realize we are living in incredibly seductive times, in a seductive universe. I mean, advertising is only the beginning of the game, which is constantly saying, “Desire me. Desire me. You want me. Get into your desires. You are your desires. You are your attachments. Look at me. Want me. Enjoy me. Fear me. Hope for me. Collect me. Experience me.”