I sometimes find myself listening to Garrison Keillor; I’ll be out driving on a Sunday, which is something I often do, and the show will come on and I’ll listen to it.

In a recent show, there was a funny skit about how we needed to not allow merging; we needed to keep our separate identities, for the strength of the American way: a country founded on the idea of independence and individualism.
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It’s interesting, isn’t it? That this whole country is founded on the idea of the right to do what we want.

And yet the reality is, that we mostly act like sheep.

We continually look for a new shepherd to follow: the celebrity, the politician, the fashion trend, the popular YouTsube, or whatever is the hot thing at the moment.

This Oneness thing; it’s not something you can fight against. It just is.

The boundaries between you and me and everyone else, are really just something we’ve made up in collective mind.As long as we think we’re separate, we are.

But there will come a time, when we don’t believe the myth of separation any more. 

One of the things that’s happened with global society, is that our design sensibilities have gotten all swirled around and mixed up with each other.

Whereas it used to be, that each region or part of the world would have a particular look and style, nowadays it’s common to have fashion or décor or design that borrows heavily from all kinds of ancient tradition, ethnic tradition. We live now in world with many influences.

You might have a Buddha statue, and Nordic pattern plates, and a basket from Africa, and a vintage sign from the American 50s, all in your living room.

It’s all mixed up together.

Or in your closet you might find an American jean jacket and Japanese slippers and fisherman pants from Thailand and boots from England and beads from Bali, all mixed in as part of your wardrobe.  

World influences, becoming part of your everyday. Ancient symbols and patterns and even color combinations, becoming part of the global consciousness.

We didn’t use to see design like this; we were really separate, regionalized before.
It’s just another way we’re merging, becoming One. 

Several days a week I go to the gym to lift weights.

After years of aerobics and group fitness and ecstatic dance, it’s finally come to this: I need to push against something.

I need to go up against the Universe in some kind of arm wrestling match, and see who wins. (Well, of course it's the Universe!)

When you lift weights, there’s the idea of going to failure: you lift a weight that’s right on the edge of being too heavy for you, and then you lift that weight until you can’t lift it any more.Maybe you lift it eight times.
And the first and fourth times are easy; but by the time you’re at the eight rep, you really can’t lift it any more.

In other words, you go to failure.

And thus weightlifting becomes an incredibly humbling experience, a kind of meditation in which you fail and fail again, every time you show up.

And in this process you learn to fail better. 

You can’t fight gravity, can you? It’s an unwinnable battle.So in this process of getting used to what it feels like to fail, over and over and over, you lose your fear of failure.

You trust that you’re going to arm wrestle the Universe with all the might of your ego and your personality and your body, and the Universe is going to win. 

You lose your fear of failure, over and over again. 

Years ago I went to a training session, and we did a lot of interesting exercises. One of them, and you may have done this yourself, was about being outside of a circle, and then stepping into the circle.

The idea was that you were outside of a possibility, and experience, a way of being, and then with full intention and commitment, you would step into the circle.

It seems really simple.

But what happened was not simple at all; it was pretty astounding to be on the outside of the perimeter, and then to step all in: in full commitment, fully engaged, into the circle.

The circle could be anything you want: a goal, a plan, an experience.

You get to choose. 

And then, when you’re ready, you get to commit, simply by moving from the place of being outside of that reality, to the place of being in that reality.

All manifestation works this way, really. We hold our intention, and then we step into it, “as if.” And over time “as if,” becomes “as.”

Maybe there’s something you want to go all in with in your life.

You can just step into now, and let that reality begin. 

For the past few months, I’ve been waking up every night around 2:30 or 3:30 or 4 am, and I’m unable to get back to sleep.

This is very unusual for me, as most of my life I’ve slept like the proverbial rock.

At first this waking in the middle of the night was very disturbing to me; I was afraid in the dark, and I would like in bed tossing and turning.

One night, I decide to simply get up, and meditate and write, and use this time in the way our ancestors did: it was common in generations past to have a first sleep, and then wake up for several hours to read, write, meditate, visit friends, and then go back to be for a second sleep.

To my amazement, I found that this time in the dark, quiet of night has become one of my favorite times of day. It is the time of the Amrit Vela, the time of the sacred veil between the worlds becoming thin, so it is easiest for us to access Divine guidance in prayer and meditation. For me, it is the perfect time for Sahadana, my personal spiritual practice, where I can write and meditate in the beautiful stillness of the night.

In this experience I have become detached from the old idea, that it is important to sleep all night, or to get a “good night’s sleep.” I understand that I get all the sleep I need, and that it doesn’t have to happen a certain way.

It’s very freeing, to get up this early. It is new to me, to experience this time of day, when much of the world is dreaming, quiet, resting.

I’m glad I’m not sleeping through it. 

I sometimes get stuck in the trap of believing what everyone believes, or thinking what everything one thinks, even though in my heart I know it’s wrong.

The other day I needed to drive my son to the airport for his flight, after a long holiday weekend.

Everyone knows the traffic is going to be terrible on a Sunday after a holiday, and parking will be difficult, and the airport security lines will be long, right?

Except, none of that was true.

The weather was perfect, and the traffic was simple; many times I found myself in those pockets of space where even on a crowded freeway like I-5, there wasn’t another car even near us for long stretches.

We found a parking space right next to the airport overpass, within seconds.

The lines were so minimal at security, we had time to wander around and look at the shops for fun.

I have the feeling, that if I had allowed myself to be in the expectation of group thought, my experience would have been very different: stressed, angry, tired.

But because we just went with the idea of being; of just showing up to the experience, whatever it was, with a sense of full involvement, it was easy.

What everyone else thinks usually leads you astray.

What you desire and hope for and want, even if it’s something as simple as an easy trip to the airport, is what almost always happens.