Want to be Happy and Fulfilled Today?

Breathing in Full Awareness Is the Key

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If you wish to be fulfilled, happy and clearheaded right now, begin by Identifying your breath as an inhalation, and then acknowledging your exhalation as you breathe out.

When you focus on your in-breaths and out-breaths to the exclusion of all else, you can reconnect with your deepest nature very quickly. Become aware of your body, of your chest as it rises and falls with each inhalation and exhalation. This is a dependable way of bringing body and mind together in perfect unity. Too often, our minds and bodies occupy completely different spaces. If we want to be genuinely present for the world and for other living beings we encounter, we need to find and claim unity of body and mind.

Practicing mindfulness throughout the day, you’ll find yourself more attentive to your surroundings, ever more aware of what’s going on both within you and around you. The plants, animals and animals around you are in need of your attention, of your radical presence. When you encounter your life as an ongoing series of present-moment realizations, everything deeply healing becomes available to you. The constantly shifting sky, the birdsong, the whisper of the wind in the trees, the living beings you love -- are suddenly there -- truly there for you; you are really there for them, as well. Returning to the present moment, and reconnecting with your true identity through conscious breathing, make it all possible.

Joy, fulfillment and a sense of transcendence are all waiting for you to claim them. Focus on your breathing without giving in to distractions, and you’re there! The entire universe wants to reveal itself to you, to encourage you to be fully at ease in it. Beautiful sights, sounds, scents and sensations lie ready to be encountered in this moment, now. Your senses and mind are in good working order; you can taste and feel, intuit and dream. These are sources of deep happiness, the enduring kind; again, breathing in full awareness is the key that opens the door.

Gut Check

Have you checked your daily life against your mission statement recently? I did mine yesterday, and discovered that some adjustments were in order.

Ideally, the bulk of our time should be spent doing things related to our life’s mission, or in recreational pursuits that feed and renew our energy for the things that matter most to us. My personal statement runs as follows:

“To bring enlightenment, beauty and inspiration into the world through words and music, and to deeply care for the human and other sentient beings in my world.”

What I found upon checking my datebook was that I’d been doing quite a bit to tend to the latter part of that mission (although a bit more would be good): both my two elderly feline companions and the rest of my family have been getting a lot of quality time from me. The other side of the ledger, the writing/music-making side, didn’t get the time it deserves lately. Time to go about rebalancing!

If the things we’re most committed to are getting short shrift in our daily lives, it can be helpful to get a sense of what’s occupying our time in their stead. It turns out I’d been connecting with people in real time on social media, and having really fascinating and substantive talks about ideas with highly insightful people. So that’s a good thing! Now, I just have to allocate a little more time to writing in other fora; I can take ideas from my online dialogues and make them into pieces to inspire and inform readers.

And I’ve really got to get back into the studio and do some recording. The songs inside us don’t do anyone any good if they stay there. They have to be harvested from deep within, lovingly crafted, and skillfully sung.

So, how do things stack up in your own gut-check? If you check your datebook against your statement of purpose, will you find you’ve been spending significant time engaged in activities related to your mission, or in recreation that supports them? If not, you may want to make some changes.

Of course, sometimes things go quite the other way round. Our purposes are evolving all the time; sometimes evidence that you’re involved more and more in something else of value may prompt you to amend your mission statement. The healthiest people spiritually, I believe, are those attuned to the subtle messages received from their subconscious minds and from the phenomenal world. They are intuitive and flexible enough to make subtle changes to their lives in the light of new insights. And that's a really good thing!

Who Remembers This Erstwhile Convention?

There was once an almost-universal American "civic religion" that rode alongside people's actual faith traditions like a sidecar to a motorcycle. Citizens generally respected other citizens' religions; or, if not their faiths themselves, at least their right to practice them unmolested. Church/state separation was a given; intrusions into highly personal bioethical matters of conscience were largely -- and rightly -- considered in poor taste.

Thanks to the pernicious rise of the religious right, all those pro-social civic conventions were infected, compromised. Hitchens was absolutely correct in observing that the evil Falwell and his criminal associates did would live on long after them.

We need to keep encouraging the widespread outbreak of secularism that's sweeping the country right now. It's fed largely by demographic and generational change; still, our best, unwitting allies in this effort are the ever-more-extreme, morally bankrupt, and politically-engaged right-wing Xtians themselves. Their inhumanity and empathy deficits are doing more to drive Americans into a wholesale embrace of humanist values than the best-coordinated anti-theist campaigns could possibly accomplish on their own.

The Fundamentalist Mind

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I know that full consciousness of this concept will never penetrate the fundamentalist mind, but I still wonder: 

Might it ever occur to them that, if their program were wholly spiritual, we would have no objection to their religious beliefs and practices whatsoever? I have no problem with the Amish, Pagans or Buddhist monks, because they practice their spirituality in peace and demand nothing from me.

But the fact is that fundamentalists cannot help but insert themselves into the phenomenal world -- the only one we know exists -- in a supervisory role. Faith in a god is their claim, but regaining their cultural hegemony is their actual aim. Given half a chance, they will set about contracting the civil rights of all who do not share their delusions. For this reason, free citizens in a secular, democratic republic cannot abdicate the fight against them. 

We find ourselves in a war we never wanted -- we humanists are generally the "live and let live" type. But since fundamentalist religion has declared war on the larger culture, we have no choice but to engage.

Seven Guidelines for Mindful Online Communication

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1) Promote peace and fairness.

2) Call out unacceptable behavior without attacking people personally.

3) Reserve the strongest language for times when genuine harm is being done without remorse.

4) Judge unjust or false statements themselves, rather than the people making them.

5) Highlight the positive in situations in which people are caught in negative feedback loops.

6) Be kind.

7) Do no harm, but take no shit.

Rejoice (A Proclamation)

It's nowhere near reality, this space in which you dwell.

Your make yourself quite ludicrous with all this talk of hell.

The mad beliefs to which you cling are really quite absurd,

But you insist we take you at your great god's holy word.

Thank god your god does not exist! It never could or will.

Ancient Hebrew warrior gods remain not with us still. 

The time has come for growing up, embracing what is real. 

This god is not, but people are; they live, and think, and feel.

So when you say,"you're going to hell!" it sounds quite like a threat

(Which, we both know, it's meant to be), and let us not forget

That you default to this rejoinder when all cogent thought has fled:

"Someday you'll be sorry; you'll be tortured when you're dead!"

Sinister, rebarbative, contemptible and vile.

A childish bit of petulance, an ugly bit of bile. 

We'll have to chalk it up to insecurity and fear

Of atheists and socialists, and liberals and queers. 

We pose a threat to you because we do not bend the knee

To gods of men's invention, nor embrace absurdity. 

We're having too much fun here in the kingdom of the real

To let your silly threats from us one joyful moment steal.

So we proclaim to everyone,

Wherever they may dwell:

Rejoice and be exceedingly glad;

There's no such place as hell!

A Profound Abandonment of Reason

I share a view with many cultural critics: that the profound abandonment of reason, the seething rage stewing (and overflowing) among Evangelicals in the Bible Belt, has been fueled primarily by two discrete phenomena.

First, the "election" of George W. Bush represented the zenith of the Moral Majority's stated goal of "winning the culture for Christ." This was little more than slick sloganeering, of course. The real aim was to establish cultural hegemony (and lasting cash flow) for Christians of Falwell's ilk. The problem was that, in choosing "W" as their candidate, they were very much shooting themselves in the collective foot. Everything the man touched became a clusterfuck; thoughtful conservatives were able to recognize their serious tactical error in joining forces with politically-engaged right-wing religious zealots.

Then, of course, there was the election of Barack Obama. The shock of their lives, from which they haven't yet begun to recover. And not only his election; the man had the audacity to clean up most of their guy's world-class messes and achieve historic milestones for the country, despite their best attempts at total obstruction. No wonder they're losing their minds.