Personal Retreat

It has been a while since my last post. The topic of the past few posts, coupled with a long absence, may have drawn some concern. I’ve been OK. The past few months has seen some transitions and a move in consciousness towards stillness (e.g., less activity). In fact, this post is made in reaction to a comment by a close friend that I will be traveling with later this summer in the US who reminded me that it has been over a month since my last posting.

I am excited to be on a personal retreat that started today. My wife and kids are traveling in China to visit a school that we helped to establish. Our maids are on holiday. I am home alone for the next four days. The situation has provided me with a great opportunity for reflection, introspection, and meditation. I am headed out to Europe next week for the Towards a Science of Consciousness Conference in Budapest (http://www.tsc2007.org/). I will be presenting a poster there. We are also scheduled to host the Conference in Hong Kong in 2009.

The "agenda" for my personal retreat is to deepen my understanding of action. What is it that moves me to do what I do – what are the impulses and their source. Watching so many people, myself included, life seems to be about working hard (busy, busy, busy), and relaxing (time with family, watching a movie, etc.). In life and with time, things seem to come up (s**t happens!). Some seem coincidental and syncrhonistic while others can seem distracting. With media and information technology, more and more things come up seemingly round the clock. We react and call that living. Even when we don’t have stuff to do, we make stuff up like watching a movie, talking to friends, going to the gym, etc. Seeing something or hearing a story in passing may trigger desires (e.g., good advertising) either consciously or sub-consciously which perpetuates further action and activity. If we fill all the hours and minutes up with activity, we call it an active life.

It is easy to react to everything and, given the things that are coming at you, make sense of them all and combine them in what seem to be the best possible ways. Its kind of like seeing the world as sockets and plugs. You hook connected things together and make bigger sense and projects from the things that “just show up.” Feeling your way, things emerge that you work towards developing further. Some pieces fit what you seem to be working towards, while others don’t. For those that fit, you try to incorporate. For those that don’t, you try to match them with other initiatives that you know about. With openness and awareness, life becomes very easy and effortless, but can very easily consume you with so many opportunities and things to do.

The other route is to bring one idea deep within and devote your full resource towards that. This requires either the discipline to say “no” to other things which emerge, or a deeper understanding and appreciation of how and why things happen exactly when they do. While it's good to let yourself just be yourself, every action has an intention and every intention has a source. What are the sources influencing your life? Needs? Desires? Joy?