Dennis Lewis

Blaming assumes that people and things and situations should be different from what they actually are. You can argue with reality all you want, but you can never win. What you can do is stop wasting your time and energy and attention imagining that things should have been different, and, instead, if that is what you truly wish, do what you can right now to make them so.

So many people whine and whimper and defend themselves and their failures, blaming them on others and the situation instead of using their so-called failures to grow in understanding and being. Such people seldom find themselves in the right place at the right time. And they never will.

The ability to respond, to adapt, intelligently and effectively to often seemingly impossible conditions and odds, is part of the power and beauty of the human brain and nervous system, part of the mystery of the human spirit. This response-ability, however, has to be exercised if it is to be a vivifying factor in our lives. And if one doesn’t exercise it in small ways as often as possible it probably won’t manifest when we really need it in more important situations.

Here’s an example of what I mean by exercising it in small ways. The next time something small goes wrong in your life, instead of allowing yourself to be seduced by the first thought that arises (it must be someone else’s fault), see that thought for what it probably is–defensiveness, laziness, and habit–and look and question more deeply. Is my judgment actually true? Perhaps if I had left home on time and hadn’t had to rush I wouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had that car back into me when I was driving by (this actually happened to me). It doesn’t mean that the person who backed into me isn’t also responsible. What it does mean is that the situation most likely wouldn’t have happened had I been taking care of my own business.

So much of what goes wrong in our lives happens because we aren’t looking and listening and sensing, we aren’t paying attention–we aren’t present. No blame here; just a simple reality for which each of us is ultimately responsible.

Copyright 2011-2017 by Dennis Lewis 

I never much liked the Arizona desert during my first visits as a young adult visiting my family. I liked the ocean, mountains, and redwoods of Northern California where I spent so many of my adult years, and I loved the lake and woods and corn fields where I spent my teenage years in Wisconsin.

But I’ve learned to love the desert, where it takes open, relaxed attention to notice the tiny flora and fauna hidden in huge expanses of landscape punctuated by the larger saguaros, cactuses, Palo Verde trees, and other desert life. In California I hugged trees and felt their energy directly; in Arizona I’ve learned to expand my perception–to look, listen, and sense from both close and afar.

For me, the desert, like the ocean, echoes and amplifies the big questions of life and death that arise in all of us. The profound desert stillness and silence, made especially poignant by the expansive ever-changing sky, the nearby mountains, and the intermittent sounds of wind and birdsong and dogs barking and coyotes howling in the distance, resonate with and help awaken the silent stillness that dwells deep within.

Copyright 2016-17 by Dennis Lewis

Ah, nostalgia. All through history people have looked back to the good old days. I myself spent my teenage days and nights on a lake surrounded by woods and wandered freely with my dog, a boxer. I hunted, fished, swam, played ice hockey, put my tent up in the woods, and used to climb a beautiful old tree across the street from our lake house and hang out there for hours on end sometimes reading and listening to music. Computers and smart phones had no place in my life, not even in my imagination.

Life changes, though, and technological innovation has been occurring at an ever-accelerating rate since those days. The enormous IBM 360/370 computers that I used to program using punch cards have given way to tiny, powerful computers that fit in our pockets and purses and allow us to communicate worldwide through the Internet. It won’t be long before we no longer carry computers and phones outside our bodies but rather within our very flesh, including our brains. Eventually these computers will be as small as our red blood cells and transmitting over whatever kind of invisible network we have then. We will be able, perhaps, to converse with people around the world, without speaking out loud or touching virtual keys, just through our intention and attention.

It’s not a matter of whether we want that future or not. Short of a great disaster, it, or something like it, is no doubt on its way. Those who are alive then will, of course, still be faced with the sacred work of searching, accepting, and welcoming, the work of awakening to the truth of who and what we are. And a tiny aspect of truth is that our technologies are a natural extension and development of our brains. The great chess champions can no longer beat the most powerful computers at chess, and computers are becoming exponentially smarter every year. You can be sure that their integration into our lives and the affairs of the world will become even more ubiquitous and intimate.

We humans are wondrous creatures, capable of great intelligence and great ignorance. How we engage our brain power and awareness does and will depend in large part, of course, on what’s in our hearts, but it will also depend on our level of ‘being,’ a word not referenced much in today’s world. Yet how important the reality that this tiny word evokes is and will continue to be to our integrity and potential!

Karlfried Graf Durckheim wrote, “Being is the animating force in everything that lives, and it provides a three-fold impetus; every living thing seeks to live; every living thing seeks not merely to live, but to become fully and uniquely itself; and every living thing seeks to fulfill itself in transcendent totality.” The question we must ask here, though, is whether we will indeed remember the great potential of our being and do what’s necessary to create healthy conditions for its “three-fold impetus.”

Copyright 2015-16 by Dennis Lewis