The peculiarities of the American public education system imprinted on me (and many of you, I suspect) the contradictory and frustrating notion that the teacher is the repository of information, and the student the empty vessel, waiting to be filled at the teacher’s discretion. The problem with this notion is that it discounts the faculties of enthusiasm and inquisitiveness that the student must bring in order for the educational process to be meaningful. It also implicitly communicates that the teacher is somehow “done” with the learning process, because he or she is in the position of the Authority. The entire philosophical approach leads to a breakdown of the process it is meant to be facilitating.

Learning is complex. Until very recently, it was believed that the brain didn’t change at all once we were past about 21 years old, and that learning after that somehow imparted new ideas into an unchanging landscape of brainstuff. Now we have come to understand that the brain itself is plastic; it constantly changes its physical structure to handle new information coming in.

Recall the old adage that “to teach is to learn.” This axiom is, to my way of thinking, even better expressed implicitly in some of the Celtic languages, which use the very same verb for both “to learn” and “to teach.” Incidentally, it was through immigrants and English-learners translating phrases from these Celtic languages that vernacular English ended up with expressions like “well, that’ll learn ya!”

Real teaching is not the installation of collections of facts, but is the facilitated development of the faculties of reasoning, understanding, and synthesizing facts into new ideas. Ideas are nebulous things. They can’t really be expressed in words, because words encode not just the idea, but the speaker’s entire belief system that surrounds the idea. Teaching is the generation of multiple expressions of the same idea, multiple ways of saying the same thing, until the student has that “a-ha!” moment. The lightbulb goes on, and the idea has been transferred.

The reason teaching and learning are equivalent, then, is that the teacher invariably learns more about the subject by explaining it in a new way to a new mind, of course. Further, if the teacher is attempting to teach the student how to learn (the only lesson of real significance, for me), then the teacher is in the fortunate situation of learning more about how the mind works, how the mind learns, and how, therefore, learning happens, every time he or she meets with a student.

The learning arises from the lesson, the student, and the teacher.

For the past few days I’ve been helping my mom unclutter her house. Throughout the years, with a husband and three kids, she’s accumulated a lot of things that she just doesn’t need. At one point during the process I thought of something that I read in The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, that is, people often believe that more money and more possessions will lead them to happiness. Research shows otherwise.

Many people with little money and few possessions tend to be happier than their wealthier counterparts. In a recent study of the world’s happiest countries by the University of Leicester and the Perspectives of Psychological Sciences, the United States, one of the world’s wealthiest countries, ranks 16th. Long term data shows the level of happiness in the U.S. is stagnant. Denmark was ranked first and, along with Bhutan, consistently ranked very highly in the happiness scale. According to the University of Leicester, Puerto Rico and Colombia were second and third this year.

According to the United States’ culture of consumerism, the more we buy, the happier we will be. Arguably, consumerism is our national religion. However, Denmark, Puerto Rico, and Colombia are poorer countries whose level of consumerism is far less voracious. Clearly, the more we buy, the more we have, does not make us happy.

Of course, we all have necessities and all do need to consume. However, the case remains in our society, that we consume far too much because we think it will make us happy to buy and to have certain objects. And, for a short time, it does. This kind of consuming is unconscious and heavily ego-induced. We are trying to find happiness in identification with an object or trying to have an object that someone else does not in order to elevate our status, to feed our ego. Then, after that short lived happiness has subsided, we must buy something else… the ego is hungry again and must maintain its illusory status. In truth, objects will fulfill basic needs of survival and comfort, but will not provide for lasting happiness. Lasting happiness can only come from and be sustained by the self.

Next time you’re out shopping, ask yourself why you want to buy a certain item. Are you going to purchase that 4,000 square foot house because you actually need that much space or are you doing so because it will be bigger, and therefore, better than everyone else’s house at work? Do you want that new Hummer H3 because you actually are going to go off road, through snow, water, and wilderness, or are you doing it because it shows a level of status as both an expensive car to buy and to fill up with gas? If everyone had a Hummer H3 would you still want one? Are you going to buy a specific brand of shirt because you actually like the look and feel of it, or is Hugo Boss telling you to buy it so you’ll be better in some way than others who can’t afford it?

Consumerism is a necessity in our country. However, we can bring consciousness to it and stop using it to perpetuate a false sense of ego and of being better than others. Not only are we harming our personal and collective sanity with it, but our entire planet is suffering due to our incessant appetite to have more.

It goes almost unquestioned in business culture that a consistent delivery of a consistent product is one of the primary hallmarks of a successful business plan. We can see how successful this model is quite clearly: McDonald’s was built on the premise of delivery the same McDonald’s experience in every store in the world. Wherever you go, it’s always the same quality of food, it tastes the same, it looks the same, it’s delivered in the same fashion. It works because of the predictability of it; you know that if you like a meal at McDonald’s, you’ll enjoy what you get at all of them, because it’s the same experience.

It’s no different within healthcare in general or chiropractic specifically; there is a strong impetus for healthcare practitioners to be able to deliver the same service to every patient or client every time. On the surface, it certainly seems like a wise decision: you can rest assured that if you’re delivering the same service every time, patients who have the condition you’re trained to treat will get better in a predictable fashion. It’s just good business sense.

As an artist as well as a healer, I have a few questions and qualms about this assumption, however. The gist of my questions comes down to this: how much do I want to ensure for myself that I get the same experience over and over again? My answer is unequivocally no. I can think of a few circumstances where I want to know exactly what kind of experience I want to have in advance and know that I’ll get it exactly, but for the most part, I recognize that desire within myself as being entirely based on my fear of the unknown.

Is the guarantee of a predictable experience worth the loss of variety?

The subject of religion utterly fascinates me. Religion is a perhaps the most powerful and influential force throughout history that has taken us to the heights of our sublime and beautiful feats and to the depths of our most despicable and gruesome acts.

In the past three weeks several friends have asked me about my thoughts on various branches of Christianity as well as other world religions. My thoughts on any religion are basically the same: they are all good at their core, but are often filled with corruption and a lust for power which shrouds the truth of the original teachings in fear, greed, and hatred. I have been reading The Power of Now and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and he really helped me solidify my thoughts on religions when he said “All religions are equally good and equally bad. It just depends on how we use them.”

All prophets from Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, and Krishna teach the same basic message and have all realized and tried to point to the same ultimate truth. Consequently, all religions seek the same thing, the Absolute, our truest nature, the Ultimate, or God. The nouns differ, as do the methods of attaining what is sought, but in essence, it is always the same end — getting away from our pain inducing, false, ego-derived sense of self, and realizing our true nature, that is pure being. In Christianity this is the attainment of the Kingdom of Heaven or knowing God through Jesus the Christ, which is becoming free of pain and illusion of the ego self through God. In Buddhism it is the realization of Sunyata and Nirvana, which are complete dissolutions of the ego-self through the realization of emptiness and nothingness where nothing else but pure, unadulterated consciousness and bliss exist. Schools of Hinduism, such as Advaita Vedanta, speak of attaining the Absolute from the opposite end of the spectrum, that is fullness, rather than emptiness. All is full of God, all is God. The totality of reality is nothing more than the divinity. Here, the ego self is dissolved in the realization that there is no “me” or “I” but only the fullness of God.

Nowhere is the commonality between all religions so obvious as it is when reading mysticism. There are branches of mysticism in every major world religion: Dzogchen in Buddhism, Gnosticism of Christianity, Sufism of Islam, Kabbalism in Judaism, Kashmir Saivism and Advaita Vedanta of Hinduism. It is often difficult to tell just by reading passages from the world’s mystics which religion they adhere to because their words are so similar.

Why then, if the ultimate aim is the same, are there such disputes between religions of the world? When the founders of these religions were still alive, the message was still true to the founder’s experience. However, over time, religions begin to be controlled by people who have not experienced their true self. These people start to take the words of the prophets, beliefs, and dogma as absolute truth rather than signpost pointing to the Absolute. The Absolute cannot be truly grasped with language or thought. Politics and fear come into play, and religion is used as a means of inducing fear and oppression, by frightened people who are, themselves oppressed. Religion becomes a divisive tool to say that “We have the truth and no one else does”. It becomes a game of “us” versus “them”. This othering and separation then allows for violence and murder. This is evidenced most strongly in every form of religious fundamentalism today. This is clear with the inquisition, the crusades, and with Fred Phelps. The basic messages of love, acceptance, knowing God and the true self are lost to fear, hatred, and greed.

So, what are my thoughts on religion? That, intrinsically, they are all good, but most of the time they are so covered in ego that they only serve to entrench the followers further into the world of form and illusion rather than taking them to their goal of finding the true self. Branches of mysticism, which are often lacking in this thirst for power and politics, and are often marginalized as a result, are the closest and truest aspects of the incarnations of the prophet’s original message.

Recommended Reading:

The Power of Now and A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle

What if the Internet had no users? Can you picture it? Can you imagine what the Internet would be if there were no user input on it? To be sure, there is some implicit structure or form to the Internet that arises from the fact that there are these large domain name servers that figure out that when you type www.anadiholistics.com into your web browser, you should get content from some particular server at some particular physical location, and there are technical documents describing how languages that are used on the Internet (like html, php, etc) are designed to work and interact with each other and with your browser. Without the content, what are we talking about beyond the implicit, though?

It’s not until people put stuff on the Internet for you to interact with that the internet has any real meaning. And conversely, imagining the content without the context of the Internet is similarly meaningless. All of its meaning is derived, either directly or indirectly, from the fact that it has someplace to be in the first place!

When I started studying Eastern Philosophy and Religion (indirectly, through Scott, who is getting his PhD in just that!), I abruptly realized that the internet-without-content is an excellent metaphor for understanding the concept behind the Hindu God, Shiva.

Say what?

Shiva is, at least in some traditions, the God who represents the Implicit forces of the Universe. He is the Unmanifest becoming Manifest. He represents the very ground of being, from which all of our experiences of physical reality arise. He undergoes this Becoming through his Divine Union with Parvati, sometimes referred to as Shakti. Shakti is the Feminine Principle, the outsurging of Life from the Unmanifest into Form.

The concepts are peculiarly analogous to the Empty Internet, the field upon which we play, and its “divine consort” the user Input.

Understanding this led me to realize that the mythology that Joseph Campbell has claimed our society is so sorely needing to put us into accord with Nature and the world is, at last, emerging in a way that we can recognize. The way to view mythology, both according to Campbell and to some Hindu texts that he cites from as early as 900 BCE, is to see all of the Gods, Goddesses, Heroes, and Powers that move through those stories as being reflections of psychological Powers that are in you. Shiva, as a Yogi and renunciate, can be read as being meant to show the path to spiritual liberation. Identify yourself with the entire field of consciousness, and you are free. Identify with the forms of the world, and you are stuck in the cycle of life and rebirth.

The Internet has no features except in the context of its content. Mythologically, for the sake of this experiment, it can be read as the formless ground of being, the field of consciousness itself.

The next time you find yourself becoming angry or emotionally unsettled at something someone on the Internet says to you, ask yourself this simple question: How would the Internet feel about this?