I will love you if you love me. This is not love; this is business.

Swami Muktidharma in his talk here in Cleveland last night.

One of the more radical perspectives on life is the quantum physics evidence that everything in the universe is a single, seamless, indivisible field of information and energy. Achieving world oneness is not possible; it is the state of things as they are whether we realize it or not.

The first step in this realization is noticing how language suggests and persists the illusion of our separateness.

I�ve learned from the Bhagavad Gita and other teachings of our culture to detach myself from the results of what I do, because those are not in my hands. The context is not in your control, but your commitment is yours to make, and you can make the deepest commitment with a total detachment about where it will take you. You want it to lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take full responsibility for them, but then you have detachment.

And that combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me always to take on the next challenge because I don�t cripple myself, I don�t tie myself in knots. I function like a free being. I think getting that freedom is a social duty because I think we owe it to each other not to burden each other with prescription and demands. I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.

Vandana Shiva

fingertips of yellow fragrance,
the consciousness
of this morning’s rose

Bouyancy
Rumi

Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I tried to keep quietly repeating,
No strength but yours,
but I couldn’t.

I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
but who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?

A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That’s how I hold your voice.
I am scrap wood thrown in your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.

I saw you and became empty.
This emptiness, more beautiful than existence,
it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence!

The sky is blue.
The world is a blind man squatting on the road.

But whoever sees your emptiness
sees beyond blue and beyond the blind man.

A great soul hides like Muhammad, or Jesus,
moving through a crowd in a city
where no one knows him.

To praise is to praise
how one surrenders
to the emptiness.

To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, little ship.
So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where!
Just to be held by the ocean
is the best luck we could have.

It’s a total waking up!

Why should we grieve that we’ve been sleeping?
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been unconscious.
We’re groggy, but let the guilt go.

Feel the motions of tenderness around you,
the bouyancy.

It’s good to remind ourselves that although we often equate place with geography, it often has as much if not more to do with sociography and psychography.

Road trip this weekend to Athens Ohio where for the past 20 plus years, the non-profit ACEnet has been incubating rich networks of hundreds of successful entrepreneurs. Touring the region in dozens of conversations, the expectation that start-up equals success is palpable.

Without agendas, we talk authentically and action is more likely.