British Columbia Water

Dear Readers,
I wrote an article that some of you may be interested to read.  It's a political piece—not my usual.  I include as much of the Big Picture as possible. Waiting to hear from rabble.ca's editor to see if they publish it. Fun!
 
With love, Sally

*  *  *

This article is about one of my favorite subjects: water.  It is about living a human life on a water-bearing planet.  It is also about being a British Columbian and pertains to all British Columbians, with very few exceptions.  

With very few exceptions here in BC, we would all consider ourselves “BC Hydro customers.”  (What percentage of us, exactly, live either in the Kootenays, New West, or off-grid?)  We all depend upon this particular service provider for the delivery of hydroelectric power from our precious river systems.  Whether you are a BC Hydro customer working for BC Hydro or not, the normal routines of your everyday living depend upon the consumption of safe and efficient water power in the form of electricity.  It brings light to our darkness, heat to our winters and cold to our food preservation endeavours.  With it we grind our coffee beans and do internet research and cook tonight’s supper.  For electricity—among the fulfillment of countless other basic needs, we all depend upon British Columbia Water.

The water isn’t ours, of course.  There is no such thing as British Columbia Water.  We partake of a mysterious and intelligent planetary biosphere, no less.  A molecular miracle with the chemical code H2O hydrates, and nourishes and grows, and feeds, and transports... life.  The fact that life as we know it can inhabit our Earth is due to an utterly mind-blowing complexity of symbiotic living relationships, all made possible by the presence of water.  What also makes this miracle molecule special is that it is forever “on the move” and sharing itself everywhere.  Because water moves, we can harness its tremendous energy to create electricity.  You are reading this article in large part due to multiple electrical processes; the downstream flow of a river is the source of each one.  

The water that makes up our bodies, too, never remains static.  All day, every day, we drink in water for hydration while simultaneously releasing it through our excretory functions.  Both ends (beginnings?) of this intimate system represent the planetary flow of water from one place to the next, in continual transformation.  We have no choice in the matter.  What creates us doesn’t belong to us.  The fact that H20 is called water when it appears in its liquid form is because of liquidity itself.  Water “runs.”  It cannot remain static.  Water cannot be owned.

The human brain is 85% water.  Our ability to think, feel, and execute day-to-day life tasks is due almost exclusively to the electrical (that’s right, electrical) wiring of our brains.  One of the main responsibilities of our brainwater is to act as the beholder of electrical potential shared between neurons.  Without a consistent supply of electrochemical signals dancing around inside its skull, a human body cannot exist.  Let alone, thought. 

Among these and a million other reasons, water is life’s own miracle on our planetary home—as far as we know the only cosmic body that is liquid water-bearing, and therefore life-bearing, within at least a few long light years of distance from us.  That makes Earth pretty special.  Naturally, however, this bigger picture within which our particular cosmic body sits makes us hardly a speck of dust floating somewhere in endless galaxies.  

So we needn’t worry or get too worked up about how special we are. 

*  *  *

Until recently, I have remained happily ignorant and aloof in the midst of a major transformation of the power grid system in our province.  Having read something of the science about our new smart meters, I felt put at ease by the fact that the amount of wireless radiation from a home meter might be comparable to 30 minutes of time spent on a cellular phone in one year.  For health as well as other concerns I choose not to use a cell phone, though having to communicate via one of these devices for just 30 minutes in the course of a year certainly would not give me cause for alarm that a health risk was present.

A drop in the bucket.  No big deal.

I rent a ground level suite in a neighbourhood of our province’s capital.  A friend owns the house and lives upstairs.  In early January, he received a letter from BC Hydro informing him that an installer would be visiting to “upgrade” the meter that has effectively measured our home’s hydroelectric energy consumption for 50 years.  Previously, my friend had contacted BC Hydro to decline our upgrade to the smart meter.  His reasoning was not on the basis of a health risk, but rather was out of some frustration that—from his perspective—there was a glaring lack of invitation for public input and engagement respecting a massive overhaul to our grid system throughout the Province.

The letter we received is not a personal issue, and I know nothing about the person who wrote it except that his role at BC Hydro bears the title Chief Project Officer, Smart Metering Program.  With all due respect, it would be remiss to not point out that the language he relied on to write this letter reflects a style of leadership that is designed to deliberately exclude its recipients from a due process of collective dialogue.  Officers often work utilizing this communication style; it comes with the legacy of the job title itself.  What else could he do?  Clearly, he was simply fulfilling his duty to the crown corporation that employs him.  He was “just doing his job.”

As a British Columbian wishing to participate wholeheartedly in advancing the possibility of true health, well-being and equality for all people (and certainly not just people—we are only one miraculous species among billions inhabiting this Earth-speck-of-dust in endless galaxies), I feel it is my duty to ask some well-conceived and relevant questions.  I feel it is my duty to reinvest the deeper intelligence of life that is the source and possibility of all my thought and action in this Great Intelligence itself, on a human scale, via inclusive organizing principles by which we can live together, interact with one another, and share the preciousness of our world’s resources for the benefit of All.

In reading the January 4^th letter from BC Hydro, my bucket became filled with concerns and questions.  Many of my questions have been answered on the website (www.bchydro.com/smartmeters).  I perceive here a dedicated, comprehensive attempt to fill in the gaps for people who, like myself, wish to be better educated about how our utility provider works for us and to avoid reacting from a stance of personal opinion, fear or NIMBYism.  In a phone conversation with a Hydro representative I learned that by January 11^th approximately 93% of the upgrade was completed, which had involved installing 1.73 million meters.  While my bucket is still overflowing, at this stage of the grid upgrade it doesn’t interest me to make a fuss about the installation of our home’s smart meter.  The massive overhaul is nearing completion.  The officers have fulfilled their duty.  Almost all British Columbians have already been converted.

That’s all she wrote.

The letter presented a number of convincing arguments on behalf of the smart meters we bought from Itron Inc. for a base contract value of $270 million (www.bchydro.com/news/press_centre/press_releases/2011/itron_selected_smart_meters.html), including the statement: “The old meters are becoming obsolete and require us to manually perform services that have now been automated by smart meters.”  Any informed reader can attest to the fact that this kind of statement is being made all over the world in the name of new, “advanced and smarter” technology.  In the name of modernization.  Automation.  Wherever and in whatever context such statements are being made, it remains surprisingly rare that we humans acknowledge and give voice to the elephant in the room: our well-practiced mantra that new, advanced and smarter always means better.  Healthier.  Safer.  Happier.  (Which most of us will agree, ultimately, the word better comes down to, at the core.)  It begs the question of the degree to which our obsession with automation is currently helping us achieve these basic human ends.  It begs the question of why we so desperately avoid public conversations that allow us to unpack and freshly review our assumptions in an open, inclusive, mutually respectful way.  

What makes us resist a dialogue in which we humbly concede with our whole human intelligence that we can never know or understand the full impacts of allowing automated technology to replace our ability to “manually perform services”?  What makes us embarrassed to confess that automation cannot provide any ultimate guarantees?  What keeps us always looking elsewhere so we can consume the next shiny-modern-zippy-trendy thing instead of working creatively and collaboratively with the material legacies we have already created for ourselves, prioritizing before newer things more engaged people— their work, their natural skills and talents, their creativity, their questions?  Why do we continue to deny ourselves the (yes, often challenging, yes, sometimes frustrating, and no, probably not nearly as expedient as we would all like) learning and enrichment that such conversations would afford us?

If the biggest proponents for automating manual services succeeded in automating “manual” right out of the equation, what could we possibly agree, then, is left to bring hope of greater health, safety and happiness?  Where are we in this equation?

Which brings me back to water. 

Collectively, as a species, if we do not learn to love our water—to demand less of it and stop polluting it and clean it up and reduce our tampering with its natural flows and ensure people around the world have enough of it to meet their basic needs—we perish.  It’s that simple.  You, the reader, know this.  We don’t need statistical data or longitudinal academic research studies to “know.”  It only takes the normal circuitry of the brain in its electric dance of deductive logic and a well-functioning limbic system.  We know it because we feel it.  When we make our water sick, we are sick; the two go hand in hand.  Water makes us what we are.  Water makes us life.

As an informed reader, you may know that the intensive industrial production of information technologies is a highly water-consumptive and water-polluting endeavour.  If you are reading this article on a wireless device or some other form of computer technology, you can be quite certain you purchased a device whose production leeched toxic chemicals into a waterway somewhere.  You can be quite certain that the mining, manufacturing and assembly of the 1.73 million+ wireless smart meters we purchased has had a significant impact on water and its ecosystems.  This is something we cannot take back.  We have unleashed this impact long before measuring any of the purported environmental benefits of our upgrade to the smart metering system.  Likely, the impact was more than just a drop in the bucket.  Or, if it really was only a drop in the bucket, the drop fell in a bucket that is already bursting at the seams here on Planet Earth.  

The cracks and leaks are quite evident.   Like a dam ready to break.

I imagine that this particular issue, among many others, would have arisen in an atmosphere of public consultation and dialogue, had one been created prior to July 2011 when the grid upgrade began.  How would BC Hydro customers be served under the direction of a “Chief Project Collaborator,” or a team of Project Collaborators?  How would we, in turn, serve?  Under this style of leadership, would customers participate with more conscious responsibility for the complex and intricate systems we inhabit, making our primary role as consumers of hydroelectric power one of stewardship, precaution and care?  Would we have an opportunity to become better at not taking for granted what we are so apt to take for granted?

Having not been able to raise my hand before the deed was done, I’m hoping I’ll one day be able to take for granted that the production of two million shiny new meters was just a drop in the bucket...

*  *  *

One of the most obvious saving graces of the smart metering system is standardization.  All our meters look the same now, across the province!  Thank goodness we have officers at BC Hydro.  Thank goodness the Crown took care of that for us.  An obsolete grid system would have required far too many manually performed services to maintain... more people working creatively with old stuff.  In the case of a power outage, I would have continued to rely on my landline to make a phone call to a real person about what’s happening in real time—using my own power of observation via the hydroelectric technology that sits on top of my shoulders.  

Non-standardized analog metering is messy and unwieldy, and it requires the wielding of a whole lot of wrenches and hammers.  Best we don’t depend too heavily on those gadgets, or invest our public money in them.  Especially when the people wielding such devices have to come to my house.  I used to engage in conversation with people like that, and sometimes I would learn something.  I would get to ask questions.  But now I don’t have to worry about these inefficiencies, and my privacy is better protected.  Everything is sure to work for me much faster and better, with less effort on my part.  

In respect to the provision of this essential service, standardization is no doubt much better.  The alternative was becoming impossible to predict and control, like a bucket coming apart at the seams.  Like a dam ready to break.

Like water.  Like life. 

 

 

The Newest Phase of Things

Dear Readers,

I wish I could be writing more on the blog.  I've taken on a new project as a way of disseminating the book.  I welcome your support and participation.

Crowdfunding is such a great model of the Sharing Economy!  Enjoy the video... fasten your seat belts!

With All Love and Peace,
Sally

http://www.indiegogo.com/selfward-way/x/1837491


  

Infinite SIZE - Part One

 
From The Selfward Facing Way Chapter 2 ("Multiple Concepts, A Singular Wholeness"):
 
Something quite wonderful is occurring at this stage of our human story.  We are now developing a quantum understanding of reality, based on mathematical principles (and backed by discoveries in astronomy and molecular biology as well as other fields of natural science), to reflect and confirm what the greatest saints and sages ever known have been telling us all along.

Essentially, we are coming to understand that the only thing here is infinity in all directions.  

Looking into a telescope, you know that “the universe” spreads out before you without any identifiable end point.  Your looking may reveal all sorts of mind-blowing phenomena: planets and stars, sunspots, nebulas, comets, meteor showers, black holes and galaxies.  As you look, and in each moment, the Earth is hurtling through space in its orbit of our Sun at about 67,000 miles per hour.  This figure does not even take into account the speed of the Earth’s rotation or the speed with which our solar system is rotating in the Milky Way (490,000 mph or something crazy like that).  Yet because of gravity, we and everything else here are held “in place”!  These forces and the unfathomable power be-hind them are almost unspeakable.  Countless trillions of light years are in operation, simultaneously in this very instant, engendering a perpetual multiplicity of cosmic events.  

Being aware of these unbelievable forces, it becomes evident that this activity of the universe extends forever.  Whatever you cannot see is here, too, the immensity of which exceeds far beyond what can be observed, detected or measured.  

This is a pretty huge realization!

Looking through a microscope to the inside of your body or that of any other sentient life form, you can perceive an equally mind-blowing universe.  Bearing witness to the intricate diversity and complexities of the living organism bestows an awe that is unsurpassed.  And we also know that the stronger the capability of the micro-scope, the more we can see of what’s really going on in there.  Increasing our magnification of what we are able to view on the inside reveals there is also no end to life going in this direction, in the very same way there is no end when a telescope is pointed “outwards.”  Inside and outside, there is only infinite space.  

The big question is: “What is ‘the looker’ in all of this?”  

Where is he/she?  Who is the one looking through the telescope or the microscope?  Is not the very possibility of our beginning to observe and confirm this huge mind-blowing reality—through advances in technology and scientific understanding—a function of infinity itself?  Can something other than infinity be looking at infinity?  What is the delineation between “inside” and “outside”?  Is infinity not discovering the vastness, the limitlessness, the immensity, the beauty and wonder of its own nature?  

If this is true, where does infinity begin and end in you?  Can there be somewhere in which you are not in this discovery?

Can you yourself be other than infinity?  Other than wholeness? 

Is this not simply reality as it is?

*     *     *

Infinity literally means “never-ending.”  Therefore, infinity has constant never-endingness as its nature.  So in this moment, it is seamless.  It has no demarcations or limits.  Our adopted definitions and beliefs—our concepts—are responsible for imposing an apparent limit on infinity.  But apparent limits are fundamentally untrue.  In mathematical terms, this means that no matter what number you think of infinity as being, it is always at least one more.  No matter what size you perceive it to be, it is always bigger.

Since infinity already exists as never-endingness, it is only our continual discovery of observable aspects of it that can make us think of it as expanding.  The collective learning and knowledge of humankind deepens through our evolutionary development.  But knowledge is the same as infinity in the sense that all there is to know already exists; we are simply uncovering more and more of this fact, through the passage of time.  What expands is just our apprehension of it—our confirmation.  This process does not actually change anything, however.  The knowledge of everything everywhere is already complete.

Whenever something “new” gets added to the knowledge bank in which we store our cumulative evaluation of infinity’s immensity, we can fall into the trap of imagining this new concept is somehow better at capturing what is inherently uncontainable.  Infinity is too immediate, too free and too all-encompassing to be grasped in any description or process of categorization. 

Within infinity, every concept that has ever been and will ever be conceived of arises and disintegrates.  Infinity is that by which all concepts can appear, without exception, and it remains here unaffected when they disappear again—as they inevitably do.  Infinity is already everything.  It is already one never-ending wholeness.  Reality is simply, exactly this truth.  And it is permanent. 

Can there be anything else here but this?

The Grand Finale, Blessed Beginnings...

It took many lasting experiences of pure subjectivity to finally realize its total relevance in the here and now.  The initial experiences were a combination of possession, revelation, and seeing in which there was no one to be possessed, nothing for it to be revealed to, and the seeing was only a seeing of itself... I was mistaken to think of [the experience] as a passing infusion, because it turned out that what had initially been so awesome and unbelievable, gradually became a continuous clear reality.  Somehow, it seemed necessary to see again and again how pure subjectivity was, itself, the now-moment, the continuous wakefulness, the concentrated wholeness, the intensity, and the great abiding certitude, all of which adds up to an experiential understanding of how pure subjectivity works.

~ Bernadette Roberts, The Experience of No-Self, 1982

*       *       *

The mind can only conceive of "experience" as an event, thought or feeling that happens to a localized individual "I."

This "I" is the subject of experience, the Experiencer.

When experiences are recognized to be fleeting and impermanent, eventually one wants to uncover and confirm the real nature of the Experiencer Itself... or more aptly stated: "This which experiences."

All experiences fall upon and move through you.  They come and go and are forever taking on new shapes and forms, new sensations, new colours and sounds.  The undeniable quality of experience is CHANGE.  It is very easy to realize for yourself (and you have likely done so many times before) that any attempt to either grasp at or resist an experience causes suffering.  Not only are experiences inevitably and perpetually transforming themselves, they are also coming and going spontaneously, effortlessly and gracefully in the here and now.

Experience, therefore, never has to be a problem.  The only problem is caused by our lack of inquiry into the real nature of "I," the experiencer, while our consciousness is diverted in its game of dancing anxiously back and forth on a continuum of attraction and repulsion.

Self-Inquiry is the only way to put a final end to this anxious dance that is the plague of the human thinking mind.

The "experience" Bernadette Roberts speaks of is not one that comes and goes, nor can it be perceived, sensed, thought about, remembered or forgotten.  By engaging in Self-Inquiry in an earnest way, which generally involves taking some time each day to Sit Quietly with yourself—as yourself, without striving or manipulating or fixing or trying to experience anything at all—you naturally become familiar with the fact that the now-moment both wholly includes and is wholly free of every experience.

You recognize yourself as simultaneously wholly inclusive and wholly free of EVERY-THING...  As both localized and non-localized.  Immovable.  All-Pervasive.  Transcendent.

This is the unbroken experience of the infinite here-and-now as what/who/where you are.  In this unbroken experience, all what's, who's and where's fall away (though of course still serving a practical function in everyday communication) to reveal your nature as boundless, wondrous, imperishable stillness and peace.

Your true Self is "No-Self," because you no longer recognize "I" as an entity separate from something else.  There is no "else/other."  In you, Reality sees Itself as an undifferentiated, indivisible Whole.

Discovering yourself as This, you come to, as Bernadette has attempted to describe, "an experiential understanding of how pure subjectivity works."  Such is authentic Self-Inquiry.  And there is no end to this discovery.  Each moment becomes a blessed beginning.  Eternal, empirical, ever-deepening Self-Discovery is the grand and precious possibility of a lifetime.

All experiences—which are experienced
as objects of perception within Me—
can be none other
than Myself.

I, which has often been called "I-I"
(what is already established prior to the arising or any idea or concept of "I"),
am Pure Subjectivity.

Therefore, this Me
that I see, feel and experience
both Is and Is Not.
  
Beyond this, nothing more can be spoken...

(... which is what makes Truth so utterly immense, majestic... magical.)

If you learn to Sit Quietly,
without concepts,
saying nothing,
with great curiosity and humility,
all of This
will become clear
in Its Own Perfect Way
in "your" life.

Trust.  Be Still.  Remain as You Are.

*       *       *
  

Truth is what remains

when there are no experiences left.

~ B.R.

Dear Readers,

An excerpt of the book now up at:

http://www.advaita-vision.org/book-extract-the-selfward-facing-way/

With love,
Sal

Different Stories, Same Pointing: SELF-INQUIRY

 
Dear Readers,

Hello.  I write to you in late September.  We have had such beautiful September weather here on the West Coast of Canada!  It seems that with shifting climate patterns August-September is becoming the new official "summer" in this part of the world.

Distributing my first book is becoming a fascinating adventure.  Thus far I have had some very encouraging feedback, including: "Those who are led to this little book will be lifted to their own recognition of what is inherently at peace inside them."

This is great news for the writing!

A number of people have asked me: "What was the most challenging aspect of the writing process?"

After reflecting on it the first time I was posed with this question, an answer came naturally.  The trick has been to present the same idea over and over and over again, but with enough diversified vocabulary and richness of literary style to give flow to the repetitiveness of the message, creating an enjoyable and relevant experience for the reader.

This little book is fundamentally about Self-Inquiry.  Self-Inquiry is the practice of returning to yourself, over and over and over again, until getting caught in believing temporal concepts of mind gives way to abidance in your eternal, ever-present, boundless True Nature.   Looking directly at This—becoming familiar with It by just being It—takes practice in the face of our busy, conditioned mental and emotional constructs.

Sounds simple, right?  It is simple, but not always easy.  This is why the message that What you actually ARE is Infinity Itself must be driven home again and again and again until we recognize it without a shadow of doubt.  Until we surrender ourselves to it.  Until we stop contracting around the hallucination that "I" am a separate, individual ME limited by my body, my thoughts and feelings.

One of the few texts that Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, the great sage of India, ever explicitly endorsed as an aid to Seekers of Truth was the Ribhu Gita, otherwise known as The Song of Ribhu.  It presents itself in a similar way to that which the Maharshi's teaching was so compassionately delivered over the span of his entire life—never wavering from one single, uncompromising message.  It is a great blessing that this book is now widely available to Western Seekers, having been translated from the original Sanskrit to Tamil, then to English.

The beauty and the challenge of this particular scripture is that it fills 765 pages repeating THE SAME THING!

Here are a couple of stanzas to give you an idea:

17:29
Oneself is, indeed, the Light that shines as itself.
Oneself is, indeed, the joy that is established as itself.
Oneself is, indeed, the Truth of being oneself.
Oneself is, indeed, That which is the complete, the perfectly full.
Oneself is, indeed, the Peace that has no equal to itself.
Oneself is, indeed, the thing that has nothing apart from itself.
Oneself is, indeed, the Absolute Supreme Being.
By such steadfast Knowledge, you, yourself, become the Absolute Supreme Being, which is oneself.

26:36
That which is verily of the nature of the pure Absolute,
Which verily is of the nature of the mass of Bliss,
Which verily is of the nature of the subtle Supreme,
Which verily is of the nature of the self-luminous,
Which verily is of the nature of the nondual,
And which verily is of the nature of the meaning of the undifferentiated—
That, indeed, am I.
By such conviction, be in the Bliss of ever being That itself.

(For any readers who may be interested out there, you can take solace in the fact that, at 73 pages, The Selfward Facing Way is a major time saver.  Plus I never use the word "verily.")

The following quote from B.V. Narasimha Swami on The Song of Ribhu's back cover sums it up perfectly: "Page after page, nay line after line, of Ribhu Gita merely goes on rubbing into one the Reality of the Self."

This "rubbing into" is what eventually opens the mind's capacity to stop believing in something other than what is truly real.

This is the sole purpose of my writing and my work.

I extend many warm wishes on your path of blissful Self-Discovery,
Sal

Book Just For You

Dear Readers,

The book The Selfward Facing Way is now available in print!  It is a little handbook to help simplify your spiritual practice, very readable and sure to resonate with your deepest inner knowing.  I will be distributing the book "by donation" and am able to mail the book to you wherever you are.

Details at www.faceselfward.net.