We do live in uncertain times, and uncertainty is gaining in momentum on a daily basis. The illusion of safety, the idea that we can continue to turn our back on the fragility of our lives is being eroded day by day (and we have to remind ourselves that living in a “Western” country is a most cushy experience to begin with compared to the rest of the world).

As artists and alchemists, our lives are about transmuting the muck, turning lead into gold: Using our personal experience and work as a platform for shared transformation, be it through our artifacts or teachings. And we do it as prototypes, so that others can do the same in their own lives. While she agreed, she said it was tough to persist sometimes, and to keep a long-term perspective. I absolutely agree with that, and I think the two are connected.

Long-Term Perspective

We will all die at some point. I know, I know, this might be fatalistic sounding from a transhumanist perspective, but with all the age research and life extension, it’s going to be a while, and maybe death isn’t such a bad thing after all. Because one thing it’s really good for is that it provides perspective.

An exercise I enjoy doing with myself, clients, and people I speak with, is to think of my funeral. Who would be there? What would my obituary say about me? What do I want my legacy to be?

It’s easy to get caught up in our daily lives: Bills, rent, partners, kids, people, work, entertainment… One way to deal with this is by setting goals, by planning our time, by executing against winner scripts. But usually life is what happens when you make other plans. While we have all been reasonably successful in setting goals for ourselves and achieving them to the best of our ability, maybe there is a better approach, one that honors uncertainty in new ways?

Purpose and Progress

Recently, I have decided to replace goals with purpose and progress indicators for my life management. I found goals not motivating enough. Too short term, too limiting – and not flexible enough in our world of instant communication, sharing, networks and clouds, and accelerated evolution. If I think of the goals I have had in my life, many have drastically changed again and again. Sometimes because I realized that it wasn’t what I wanted after all, sometimes because the times changed around me (I remember the dotcom era too clearly), sometimes because I banked on the wrong tools or people, sometimes because I had set my expectations too high or too low… And sometimes, because they felt more like “shoulds” than “wants” – and who wants to should on themselves?

Focusing on purpose creates a bigger game. Instead of looking at goals for a few years out (and who knows how long I will ultimately live  – I could get run over by a truck this afternoon), instead of analyzing the derivates of the function that is my life, I look at the integral and ask myself “what does this function cover?” With that, the ups and downs along the curve become much easier to manage, as they become part of a larger holistic picture.

As progress indicators, I look to my values. Having clear core values provides me with a wonderful framework for performance management, as I can look at any activity and see how it affects my values. All of them are intangibles, values we reach for, but as Ingeborg Bachman said, values that keep moving further out of our grasp each time we take a step toward them. Regardless, in any situation, I can measure if what I am doing has a positive or negative effect on my values. And I can ask myself at any point “Am I advancing toward any of my values with this action?”

Having a clear purpose

Thanks to a great mastermind group I have been in, I have become much clearer around my purpose. It’s “to consciously and creatively serve my soul, be visible doing it, teach others and have fun.” Simple. Even felt a bit like a cop-out at first, as I thought I needed to know what that looks like. I don’t.

Instead, I have a wonderful tool to constantly calibrate my actions in every moment. In any situation, in every minute of my life, I can look into this mirror and ask myself: “Does this conform with my true will?” “Am I doing what I can to show up?” “Is there something I have learned that I can share?” – and most of all “Am I enjoying myself?”

Dharma

In eastern thought exists the concept of Dharma. I keep using it as a great framework, not just for personal, but also for business performance measurement.

Dharma means “the natural order of things.” Birds fly in the sky, fish swim in the sea and everyone here does what they are truly here to do. It is often translated as “duty” or “personal responsibility.” Makes sense. If there is a natural order of things, doing what I am here to do would be my duty and responsibility.

There are five indicators that let you know whether or not you are in alignment with Dharma:

• Whatever you do gives you tremendous joy. You love doing it, it’s fun, you would do it for free and all day long simply because it makes you happy. There have been studies that show that people begin to lose interest in things they love doing once they get paid for it. Think about that for a moment.
• Whatever you do utilizes your strengths and neglects your weaknesses. We live in an ecology, in a world where special flowers attract specific insects and repel others, where each of us has gifts and talents and things we are not so good at, which in turn happen to be gifts and talents of other people – in business they refer to this as “focusing on core competency”
• Whatever you do benefits others. Like force in physics, you can measure your actions mostly by the effect they create in the world you are perceiving. Simply do good. If you have a business, make sure all your stakeholders benefit. Your customers first and foremost, but also your vendors, employees, the community you operate in, and even your competitors.
• Whatever you do sustains you. It provides you with what you need. Not just materially and physically, but also emotionally, mentally and energetically. Who wants to feel worn out and drained, exhausted and sucked dry just to make a buck?
• And finally, whatever you do is supported by synchronicities.

Seems like a pretty good guideline for living your purpose. Somehow thousands of years of empirical study have brought forth some good ideas… Thank you writers of the Vedas. Great legacy!

Legacy

My friend asked me what the legacy I would like to leave behind would look like. I told her that I want to do what I can every day to leave a world behind where people get up every day, do what they love, do what they are good at, that uses their unique perspective, gifts and talents  and that fully supports them with all the physical and spiritual sustenance they need. And it all felt like a magical carpet ride along the way…

I know I can’t do it by myself. But I know I can act on my purpose and focus on my dharma in every moment. Writing this blog was part of it. Now you know.

What do you want your legacy to be?

When I started this project last year, I had no idea I would actually get such lovely responses from people and hence have plenty of reason to keep it up and running. Thank you for watching monkday, for recommending it, for tweeting it, for your encouragement and support!

Here are some of my favorite episodes over the last year:

• Cha-cha-change – Episode 14
• Silly Songs – Episode 22
• Kids – Episode 20
• Get drunk! Episode 23
• 4-fold Paradox – Episode 40
• Worry be gone! Episode 43
• Tooltime – Episode 46

Thank you for the inspiration and the opportunity to not take myself too seriously

Smiles

philip a.k.a. joy(monk)ey

Thank you Alfonso for filming, Barry for recoding audio and Vanese for editing the video! All of you are wonderful gifts to my existence…

Copper is one of the few metals to occur naturally as an un-compounded mineral. Copper was known to some of the oldest civilizations on record, and has a history of use that is at least 10,000 years old. It is probable that gold and meteoritic iron were the only metals used by humans before copper.

Copper was associated with the goddess Aphrodite/Venus in mythology and alchemy, owing to its lustrous beauty, its ancient use in producing mirrors, and its association with Cyprus, which was sacred to the goddess. In astrology, alchemy the seven heavenly bodies known to the ancients were associated with seven metals also known in antiquity, and Venus was assigned to copper.

Crucial in the metallurgical and technological worlds, copper has also played an important cultural role, particularly in currency. Romans in the 6th through 3rd centuries BC used copper lumps as money.

The gates of the Temple of Jerusalem used Corinthian bronze made by depletion gilding. Corinthian bronze was most prevalent in Alexandria, where alchemy is thought to have begun. In ancient India (before 1000 BC), copper was used in the holistic medical science Ayurveda for surgical instruments and other medical equipment. Ancient Egyptians (~2400 BC) used copper for sterilizing wounds and drinking water, and as time passed, (~1500 BC) for headaches, burns, and itching. Hippocrates (~400 BC) used copper to treat leg ulcers associated with varicose veins. Ancient Aztecs fought sore throats by gargling with copper mixtures.

Richard Wagner’s themes in his 1849 essay “Art and Revolution” are in many ways as applicable today as they have ever been. Drawing from perennial wisdom as much as from future technologies, this talk will draw an arch from the beginning of art, the Greek drama, the Camerata Society’s first Opera commission, Wagner’s impact on arts and media, to today’s possibilities and tomorrow’s responsibilities.

From a reflection on the nature of creativity as described by Wagner and other artists and philosophers to the function of arts and media in society, this talk will reflect on how artists and media makers hold up a mirror and serve as a public conscience, and how they can also inspire long term visions of the future, ever more realistically shared via ever more realistic immersive media.

This free talk will be given in the context of the Brewery ArtWalk and the Los Angeles Opera Ring Festival.

Brewery ArtWalk is a bi-annual event at the Los Angeles Brewery Arts Complex, one of the largest artist enclaves in the world. ArtWalk occurs from 11am-6pm. Soup will be served after 6pm. The talk is scheduled from 7pm-8:00pm. A reception follows.

The event is free.

Am working on preparing a talk on this topic. Been thinking a lot about community lately, and how the technology we have created for ourselves allows an unprecedented melding of minds, but how we should ensure that we have proper ways of relating in place before Singularity occurs. We have to step up so that the evolution of the machine is paralleled by the evolution of our consciousness.

Been thinking lots about relating lately. There seems to be a lot of confusion around distinctions of the universal principles of duality and gender, of the emotional “Like – Not Like”, dialectics, of the ever new experience of “I and Other”. Been looking at a quadropolar model as a means to transmute dualism creatively. Some of that in the video below. Enjoy!

Was in Chicago for a whirlwind visit last weekend. Got to have the tremendous pleasure of officiating my friends’ wedding. Was the largest one I had done so far. Great fun all around, lovely people, and from the reviews I got, they enjoyed the ceremony (checked with grandmas, too)… One of the sweetest things was that the bride and groom gave away personalized bobbleheads to the wedding party. So, I got my first philip action figure…

In general, the Chicago visit was a tremendous experience. Got to see at least some of my wonderful friends there and revisit my life and the last six years since I had last been there. Recorded a monkday on the topic.

I am a big fan of religion. In Latin, religio means anything from “Religion” (in the sense it’s typically used), to superstition, all the way to – neutrally – belief system (BS). It is related to re-ligare and re-ligens.

Now what are those words about?

Religare – Connecting with the world around us

As soon as we say “I”, we separate ourselves (sin being related to sinte, meaning separation in old German – as a side-note for those who like the concept of “original sin”). Erich Fromm in “The Art of Loving” talks about how the worst human fear is that we are completely alone. Funny enough, as soon as we say “I”, we separate ourselves from everything else, which is now “Other”, and end up completely alone. Usual ways to respond to this fear according to Fromm are conformism, orgasmic union and intoxication. All of which are dependent on external aspects to be fulfilled. He suggests that only by actively loving, by reaching out and connecting can we sustain the experience of being connected to the world around us.
In the sense of re-ligare, re-connecting (also compare yoke and yoga = union), any act that connects us to the world around us becomes a religious act. Any act that allows us to transcend fear of other by realizing our underlying oneness, experiencing ourselves in other through empathy and proper reflection, and integrating that other into our idea of self, is an act of love. In this sense love and religion become synonymous.

Religens – Paying careful attention

Religens does not translate into the English language, the antonym does: negligence -
“failure to act with the prudence that a reasonable person would exercise under the same circumstances” – according to a definition I found online.
Religens denotes the idea of paying careful attention to the archetypal experience around us. What does that mean?
Everything around us is informed by patterns. Our patterns. Sometimes they are referred to as karma. I like propensities, personally. Think about your relationships or jobs. You keep encountering the same situations, the same stories with different names and faces, not until you have solved these challenges, but until you have outgrown them. With every breakup in which you truly transform, your relationships change, your patterns change, and you suddenly meet different kinds of partners – with new challenges. Similarly with jobs, money, any other aspect in your life. Underlying each of these situations are patterns you can identify and “clean out” through awareness, forgiveness, and love.
But you have to pay attention. That is what religens is about. Listen to the world around you. Everything in your universe talks to you. You have your own myths your own archetypes, be they victim, child, saboteur, prostitute, or artist, hero, healer, teacher, knight, princess, helper, wizard (think about characters in stories that you relate to and you will know what I mean – Carolyn Myss wrote about this in “Sacred Contracts” – highly recommend it). With these you constantly create stories. Religens is taking responsibility for your stories, and realizing that you are the storyteller of your own mythology. You create your meaning. Nothing around you has inherent meaning, but for the meaning you give it. Religens is about constantly being in conversation with your reflection. As inside so outside.

Aye, there’s the rub

In our societies, driven by fear and conformism as a means to belong, we fight over whose imaginary gods are the right ones as we try so hard to find a common mythology – an impossible task. While we have common patterns in our archetypes, each one of us builds our own mythology around them. Take any two members of any religion and interview them about it and you will quickly find that each have their own opinion as to what it actually means and will bend their interpretations to fit their own personal belief system (BS).
So, why try? Why not accept that we can share stories with each other that help us see our archetypal reflections without having to feel that there has to be one right one. Delight in our differences. Only that which we don’t know yet is really information.
Maybe people misunderstood Plato’s concept of the “ideal”, the something that is behind all the appearances to mean that there is one “Truth” out there. While some things might ring true, first and foremost we each hold our own “truths”. Each of us has our own BS. Hence, the idea of organized religion is in a way an oxymoron. It is the attempt to come to one common story that denies progress and evolution and must by default have a teleological component.
By each of us taking responsibility for our own religion, we take responsibility for evolution, for forwarding growth that does not accept a predetermined end. Be the star that knows no day and night.

Taking responsibility

All this said, when I think about my “religion“, I find myself left with these components:

• Everything in this universe is my responsibility and creation
• My religion is my interpretation of my universe and my responsibility
• I assemble my mythology and create stories to produce meaning
• I rely on myself to produce faith = trust and joy in my existence
• Through loving that which I fear and experience as other, I connect to universe and evolve my identity
• Constant evolution is the aim, science the method, stories the dust I leave behind
• Attention, attention, attention

Tell me about your religion…