Jennifer, Thanks for posting and welcome to the Zen Forum.
The account you gave of your husbands life was very interesting. Id be much more interested, however, in an account of YOUR life, the lessons YOU'VE learned and most of all - like your husband - if you have had or now have any 'intentions' for your life. I look forward to your next post. ...Bill! From: Zen_Forum@yahoogroups.com [mailto:zen_fo...@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of S. Jennifer Gray Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2010 2:43 AM To: Zen_Forum@yahoogroups.com Subject: [Zen] sitting and science I haven't written here previously, but there is a struggle going on here I hope to assist with, maybe a little bit anyway. My husband, Zeera (Zee), is almost 75, and he has spent most of his life attempting to unite scientific truth and spiritual truth. Science and spirituality are explorations. There have been some gains and some detours in both. There is some truth in each exploration, he has not chosen one over the other. There are extremes, carefully delineated and defined camps, with an insistence upon the invariant use of language, and thought, but in between there are all kinds of gradients and alloys. Zee finished highschool at 13, lived in the back of a car, for 2 1/2 years, parked across from his school, and became an architect at 16. In architecture, he lived in a very visual world, without much talking. At 18, he went into seminary, became a minister in the restoration movement. Memorized the New Testament in Greek, taught Greek, did the whole church thing. He went back to school, majoring in psychology, English. He also managed to get a Ph.D. in physics, in magnetics (which was classified because of military interests, but I won't go there). He found elders in the church to be quite unpleasant, and he also found that restoration had a much deeper and deeper meaning. He was finally excommunicated from church for asking too many questions, and most of his parishoners came to his home, every Sunday, for two years. Someone said he was a teacher because he couldn't make it in business. So he started a company, dedicated to 'solving problems everyone else had given up on. And the company ended up sharing in the responsibility for getting Apollo 13 back to earth safely, and working on high performance for astronauts, as well as a variety of other research and development. On and on, a very interesting and amazing life (at least to me). But also like climbing a cliff, hand over hand. He was rigorous and diligent, that's what it took. One might even say his life was scripted. One could say he has been a tramp (that's what he says): learning what he wanted, when he wanted, where he wanted, if he wanted. What I'm getting at is that he was willing to make a lot of explorations, without deciding ahead of time, what he was going to discover. He made a lot of mistakes. He also learned from his mistakes. And what he discovered is most interesting: No matter what profession / career he excelled at, he was never hired to create excellence. People always wanted 'the cheap and the familiar'. Even when they had a lot of money, and could provide him everything in terms of state-of-the-art equipment, available at that time, that he needed to function, they still wanted 'the cheap and the familiar'. And part of the familiar, to them, was: because they had the money, they called the shots. And if they had money enough, they would use some his most intricate and helpful discoveries for destruction, domination and control (which was also part of the 'familiar') (yet another story). In addition to insisting on 'the cheap and the familiar', they also insisted upon 'certainty'. Because they usually had little to no ability to evaluate the value of something, one had to overwhelmingly convince them of something's value so that they could be certain. And just to be certain of their certainty, everything needed to be overly secured. Somewhere, in Zee's busy family and work life, in 1966, he was provided a learning experience that provided a greater context for who we all are and what we can create with the opportunity of life. He was hospitalized with one of his numerous bouts of pneumonia. His doctor told his wife he was not going to make it this time. He was in quarantine, he waved goodbye to his 4 children at the window. He clincally died. Lungs and heart stopped. I think he was gone for about 20 minutes before they revived him. During that time, 'he' went 'out of his body', saw the name tags of the 'Code Blue team', saw the precise settings of the dials on the crash cart, set for the paddles, which he later reported, to the astonishment of the medical personnel involved. Of course, lots of people have written about near-death experiences now, but in 1966, this was not discussed or acknowledged very much at all. A tunnel opened gradually for him, through the west window of his room. 'He' went into the tunnel and was greeted, first by his foster grandfather, who had helped raise him, and 'liquid love' flowed between them. Eventually he met 'a' being of light, who he has never identified specifically. The non-judgemental being communicated one thought, 'Did you do what you intended to do?' And the way Zee's mind worked, he immediately thought, 'When did I do this intending?' At that moment of asking the question, he remembered existing before birth. He realized he was nowhere near finished, and back he came. He has taught 'thus-ness' and 'such-ness' ever since. He has taught that there is no proof, there is only truth. You can only have proof in closed systems and there are no completely closed systems. There is no certainty. There is no objective reality. There are no particles. There are only choices and there are consequences. There is knowing-by-connection. We have the opportunity and challenge to learn, to change, no matter what choices we make. There are more or less graceful experiences. And each experience allows us to open more or to close more, depending on our orientation. We can choose to navigate and learn to navigate the 'middle' way (remember my mentioning gradients and alloys, above), or we can know the boundaries of reality(ies), by banging off the guardrails. To become morally self governed, to make better choices, we need to take more into account. Taking more into account may include asking others what they are taking into account. (We ask with all of our allowed senses, we receive feedback through all of our allowed senses.) In seeking bigger answers, we need to ask bigger questions. etc. Zee founded Frontiers of Science fellowship, in '67 and founded a commune to house the fellowship, spending everything he had, in selling his scientific company, to house and feed 120+ people. His artwork and poetry flourished. His aptitude for inventing, designing flourished. His speaking and meditation flourished. His ability to evaluate, navigate, clearly choose, flourished. His inventiveness became more in terms of life, and how life works: ecosystemic life essential processes, products and services. How to provide optimals for all life, for living, for growing, for evolving. He was even funded by the National Council of Churches, for a while, because some of their administration saw that he was getting youth off of drugs by introducing them to meditation and effective meditational techniques. (He taught that drugs are like a vaccine - they give you a glimpse, a taste, but you never get the real thing, and even the glimpse is harder to achieve, while meditation is the leg work that allows access.) So I'm saying, there is science, of certain kinds, practiced and explored by some very closed minds, fearful because they are closed, who believe that the frontier of life is science, as they understand and practice it. In some ways, for some people, such limited ways of thinking are evolving, but for many, science involves an absurd paradigm allowing the absurd, and the increasingly absurd, to be studied, and even foisted upon the public. There are scientists who can advocate and produce some very graceless experiences, producing some very graceless consequences. The same can be said for spirituality, of certain kinds, practiced and explored by some very closed minds, fearful because they are closed, who believe that the frontier of life is spirituality, as they understand and practice it. There are more sustainable, evolving ways of thinking that can incorporate left brain and right brain functions, that allow for mind, body and spirit, that more understand the relationships and the possibilities between kinds and levels of consciousness, that attempt to open the system, taking more and more into account, with the realization that there is no certainty and no repeatability. I'm not advocating that we all need near-death experiences, which can be very hard and graceless experiences. Personally, I'm not wanting to be that hard to help. Indeed, we may each gracefully work on taking many small steps, forwards, backwards, sideways, in circles, perhaps even for lifetimes, before we gain a moment of 'instant enlightenment', followed by another moment of 'instant enlightenment' followed by another and another . . . (which I kind of regard as a catch-up with the Tao). We may leap, in our synthesizing and building upon explorations and our sensing, our observations of explorations (and the explorations and observations of others). Or we may stall out, enforcing our ever smaller and smaller sense of reality with our beliefs, with our thoughts, words and with our practices. We are all unique, with our own sets of unique experiences. Where we may not need the same paths, to follow or to create, we need graceful paths. We have so much to learn from each other and there's no sense in duplicating each other's mistakes, but we can if we want to. Trying to be useful, writing this helped my consciousness anyway, thank you kindly, Jennifer __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 5565 (20101026) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 5565 (20101026) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 5565 (20101026) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 5565 (20101026) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com ------------------------------------ Current Book Discussion: any Zen book that you recently have read or are reading! Talk about it today!Yahoo! 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