The Integrated Self

What happens when we live for the collective, not just for oneself? Modernity's guiding question is: "How can I make MY life better?" I believe a different question leads to a much richer and more fulfilling life: "What does life need now?" Holding this guiding orientation to life creates a radically different paradigm than the hyperindividualism currently leading to planetary and societal collapse, that carries an entirely different energy in the actions taken, and leads to vastly different results. Using the metaphors of making music and conversation, this episode explores how we can attune to reality to discern what's wanted to enhance the whole experience for everyone involved. Not "What can I get out of this," or "What will enhance my own status," but "What does this moment need?"

In this episode:

• Are we live?
• Musical soloing vs whole band responsiveness
• ATTUNEMENT
• The silence between the notes
• The Celestine Prophecy and group conversation
• Listening for hidden purposes in encounters
• Socializing to enhance one's own status or to enhance the social event
• Group travel through the needs of the whole

Forgiveness is not something we do to let someone else off the hook, it's something we do for ourselves to allow more love into our lives. We can still maintain boundaries and discernment of what we're not okay with while we forgive, while we stop continuing to poison ourselves with the stuck energy of a grudge.

In this episode:

• Preambles before we get to the point
• A Course in Miracles
• Forgiveness is a tool that transform poison into Light
• A personal example I felt regret for and the need for forgiveness
• Necessary and unnecessary suffering
• Grudges create walls between ourself and life / love
• Forgiveness as grace
• The paradox of unconditional love and things that aren't okay
• Resisting and accepting life
• A guided practice to actualize and experience forgiveness
• - Feel the effect in you of the thing you don't like
• - The mind opens to a wider understanding
• - Our pain around it sequences, digests, and releases
• - Love comes in and through us
• How a long, developmental view of life supports forgiveness 

Providing an encore to the last two episodes, we round out our deep dive into the spirituality of Phish by focusing on the profundity of playing with humor.

In this episode:

• The lineage of humility, humor, and light-heartedness of Phish and the sometimes heaviness of The Grateful Dead
• The cosmic joke of seriously mattering and simultaneously not mattering
• Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig on music critics' valuing serious art more than lighthearted art
• Grown ups standing still talking at each other
• Everything Everywhere All At Once

The living spiritual path I'm most connected to, present in and transcending many different traditions, is the path of leaning into life, leaning into the body, the challenges, the relationships, the experiences, the boring and mundane, and awakening the transcendent miracle of life in all things. The band Phish embodies this praxis through the ways they listen humbly to each other and the energy in the room of their concerts; through saying "yes, and" to whatever arises; and through playing with form and freedom to create a cohesive third force of engagement, a relational field in which all who listen to and participate in their music can connect with the paradoxical fullness of life. Their art also expresses a consciousness to these qualities, acknowledging the seriousness of life and the cosmic joke of it all simultaneously. At the core, Phish create a symbolic language I resonate with to connect to higher frequencies of life.

After last episode's introduction to the band, this episode uses the band as a springboard to focus more on these spiritual qualities. The episode goes a little "type 2" (Phish speak for when a jam completely leaves the song structure and starts making up new spontaneous compositions) and rambley exploratory, not unlike an exciting Phish jam. I hope you enjoy it, and use it to connect to the higher potential in yourself and your life.

• a preramble on interpreting life symbolically, finding the high teachings in any phenomena.
• connecting with a conversation you resonate with. I resonate with the conversation and sense of humor of Phish.
• how "yes, and" and improvising with life is a spiritual practice
• the animism of humble listening
• listening as respecting transpersonal experience and personal feelings, needs, and under the surface realities
• humility dissolves the ego
• grief rituals hold relational humility in recognition of a larger whole
• form and freedom, songs and jams, duality and non-duality, and the third creation behind the binaries
• honoring the transcendence of the mundane life experiences
• a quick encore to focus on safely leaning into the body to access the depth of your spirituality

Why 43 years of friendship, humor, intelligence, and creativity is so meaningful to so many. In this episode, I describe how being present (i.e. surrendering to the flow) is a key ingredient to spiritual experiences. The band Phish offers A LOT to be present with, in caring, inclusive, and endlessly playful ways. Among many insights and experiences, three of the core teachings I've learned from Phish are:

1. Listening humbly and responding powerfully,

2. Balancing form and freedom,

3. Saying "Yes, And" to whatever's happening.

This is the Spirituality of Phish.

In this episode:

• What is and isn't "spiritual"?
• Sustained Presence is a key aspect of spirituality and ceremony
• Containers you need to fit into, and containers that naturally fit all of you
• Phish is 4 friends - humble, kind, genuine, and inviting
• How dancing can widen and support listening and understanding what you're hearing
• The blended unity of difference
• Phish are master teachers of listening
• Music as presentation and music as participatory journey
• Humility in listening, and sharing the lead
• Balancing form and freedom, earth and sky
• The multi-meaninged abstract nature of Phish's lyrics
• Bringing your personal process into the music listening experience
• Phish's expertise at "Yes, And"
• Jamming awkward and any mood (I referenced them playing a song and mistakenly said it was Cannonball, meant to say it was Catapult)
• Tension and release
• Phish's career-long and ongoing evolution, musically and personally
• Ghosts of the Forest and Phish fans' widely varying opinions and criticisms of the band
• The full freedom of the open channel Phish creates
• Phish's psychically attuned light show
• The art of listening and responding simultaneously
• Listening to each band member and widening your awareness - teaching owl eyes practice to relax mental fixations
• Specific Phish listening recommendations
• "Hose" and channeling spiritual experience through music
• Letting the surreal lyrics and music work on you from the inside over time
• Growing presence and spiritual awareness by surrendering to the flow of whatever is happening
• Find and play your notes in the already present music of life

Most of Modern Western culture abhors, shuns, and deeply fears Death. But what if Death is holding the key to the full unblemished experience of Life, and by turning away from Death, we are limiting our ability to live as the full, complete, perfect beings we deep down know ourselves to be? Continuing the contemplation started in Episode 14: Death is Safe, this episode ventures, safely in our breathing bodies, to the doorway that honoring Death can lead us through. When we allow Death to sit at our table... or rather, when we recognize that Death is the one who prepared and is in fact the table, we can relax into more of the fullness and grandeur of life, here and now, than we may have ever thought possible when we tried to live without Death.

In this episode:

• Embracing and honoring death to fully embrace and honor life.
• A story of a compassionate chicken slaughter.
• The natural necessity of death in life.
• Death's portal into ahierarchical freedom.
• Duality, Binaries, and Masculine / Feminine Energies.
• Death as a feminine force.
• The purpose of life is to fully participate in life.
• The Western approach to hiding death and a more participatory approach to celebrating it.
• On loving through grief, and grieving as the most appropriate response to life.
• We're already living and loving through a field cleared and made by death.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King's teachings on death.
• Embracing the great battle of your time.
• Beyond binaries, good / bad, into pure engagement with the dance of life and death.

The essence of The Gene Keys path of wisdom, discussed in the last episode, is the art of Contemplation. This episode dives deeper into this central practice.

Contemplation is a spiritual practice that can easily integrate into modern lifestyles. It can help busy homemakers, parents, workers, and anyone access a deep wellspring of wisdom and dynamic truth by entering into relationship with the now in an open, curious, and playful way.

Contemplation is not just a new technique to try. You might hear about it listening with your left brain, listening for something to do. But contemplation is not something to do, it's a completely different way of experiencing, a way of engaging with reality that is fundamentally unlike our usual left brain way of living. It's living into a right brain, relational process of unfolding.

In this episode:

- Meditation as a monastic practice, and modern lifestyles collapsing meditation time

- Living spirituality that evolves with life and you

- Contemplation is not a technique but a way of being and becoming

- The three phases of contemplation:

- Pausing - dropping into the eternal essence of existence and Allowing life to be what it is

- Pivoting - engaging with what's arising in your life and Accepting the effect it has on you

- Merging - Embracing the unity and dance of yourself and your experiences

- Contemplation is a playful and dynamic living relationship with life that includes and transcends protocol

- How contemplation allows wisdom and insights to emerge over time

- Create your own contemplative practice

- Containers to hold your practices 

This episode provides an introduction, an overview, and key take ways from two systems of self awareness I've been connecting with: Human Design (the first 13 minutes) and The Gene Keys. These systems provide practical knowledge for your optimal functioning as a unique individual, and a path of inner awakening for your personal evolution.

Discussed in the episode:

• Human Design's mapping of the 64 archetypes of the I Ching along the Zodiac
• The reality of astrology (we are porous and affected by external realities)
• Key Human Design Takeaway: Every person's optimal functioning is unique and different, specific to each person's design
• Different decision making styles (Human Design "Authority")
• Similarities between Human Design and neurodivergent awareness
• How The Gene Keys branched off of Human Design
• Human Design as a more left brain path of knowledge, Gene Keys as a more right brain path of wisdom
• Working with the Gene Keys if you don't know your birth date, time, and location
• Key Gene Keys Takeaway: "Every shadow contains a Gift." - Softening into the gold of the stuck and suffering places
• How the Gene Keys relate to genetics
• Three frequencies of each Gene Key: the shadow, gift, and siddhi
• The Golden Path's three areas of focus: Purpose, Emotions, and Prosperity
• The technology and art of Contemplation as distinct from meditation and concentration
• Conversing with Living Teachings, and entering into Spiritual Paths like entering into different relationships
• Focusing on one spiritual tradition or synthesizing many
• Know Thy Self
• My biggest Gene Keys Takeaway: Trust in myself, life, in slowing down, and being.

Continuing the discussion on differing circumstances from the last episode, today we go deeper into our Kabbalistic contemplation of the common life force present in all people, things, and circumstances.

• Review of the 4 levels of reality through the metaphor of the Torah scroll
• The true nature of esoteric teachings and why they're secretive
• How perceiving and relating with the shared life force (the ink) makes it impossible to hate
• The difference between electric light and starlight
• What is natural?
• Seeing the same ink in both a tyrant and their victim(s)
• What we're doing here: Awareness becoming aware of itself
• Integrating dual and non-dual
• Chinese landscape paintings, and exercising restraint with the expressions of our ink

Coming in in a very weird mood, this episode is a real time process of living in a world of inequality and astronomically different situations. I also share an unplanned Kabbalistic teaching on 4 levels of interpreting the Torah Scroll and reality, which I learned from my teacher Zvi Ish-Shalom. It's not about finding a neat answer to inequality and living with differences, but about feeling our way through the complexity and multidimensionality at play in all our circumstances.

In this episode:

- The weirdness of all of us living together, all with different circumstances

- The 4 Layers of the Torah: Words, Letters, Ink, and Parchment

- The heartbreaking gift of Life in all circumstances