Good question.  Like the question, how do you know you're sane?  Or, how do we know the world is not virtual reality?  How can one know the degree to which one thinks for oneself?  It is related also to the earlier question about creativity.  What is it, how do we do it?

I think people more or less act as transcievers of thought.  Like the pre-existing elements we use to construct new creations,  thoughts and ideas come in bundles, memes, and smaller and smaller elemental bits. 

Thinking for oneself could be a measure to what degree we process this incoming data, before re-distributing it, how much we break down th larger bundles into component pieces, reverse engineer and analyse the construction, and reconstruct with this in mind.

How and why do we learn to do this?  School should teaching thinking, but as often teaches rote memory and regurgitation.  Nothing really happens in the absense of motivation.  If we can't find a rewarding application of original thought in the world, we must at least find it rewarding in a masturbatory way. 

I certainly enjoying thinking as a form of masturbation.  But original thought can also have gainful application in the socio-economic world.  Google's algorithm, for instance, was an innovation that Netscape hadn't thought of.  I

'm trying to do this kind of self thought, to improve the world, and business.  But it must be noted that such thought only gets rewarded if it plugs into practical matters somehow.  It's not novel thoughts in a vaccume.

As for learning, let's never forget the contributions of Krishnamurti and psychedelic neuroalchemy.

I stand for everything, like God!  (As Woody Allen said, "You have to model yourself after someone.")  Both in the sense that I represent everything, and that I tolerate everything; I stand for everything in the faith that everything and all events through infinite chains and webs of causality has evolutionary value and purpose. 

It is a matter of faith that nothing is a mistake, and that there is a logic and rationale to all events, and that this logic supports abolute Love, compassion, innovation.  I believe "reality" is a soul factory and incubator.  And if and when cognition is up to comprehension, then the Love-logic of all events and things is not be a matter of faith, but a simple recognition of truth, fact.

I'm jealous of Google.
I want to have the resources to do stuff like this:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071127/ap_on_hi_te/google_green_power_2

But as usual, what it comes down to is tantra...which means to me,
transforming our circumstances, or finding their utilitarian value, relative to our goals. 
In this case, my  very smallness is my asset.

If I was huge and rich, I would do what Google is doing.  But since
I'm small and poor, it makes me think about how to make a platform
to leverage everyone in the world to get things done, and make money.

The result is, hopefully, a product that is not only useful to our company,
and not only useful to promote better energy, better health care, education,
economy, business, or any one thing, but to benefit each individual through making a way
that each person can profitably and personally generate benefits in all these areas.

     

On June 6, 2005, my health suddenly crashed.
One day I was superman, the next I was at death's door.

I was a health fanatic when I crashed. That same avidity for health optimization was turned to recovery modalities and understanding etiologies in complex systemic and syndrome type diagnoses.

I'm pretty comprehensive in research and experimentation. This has led not only through the forest of pharmaceuticals, herbals, and into the mountains of chi gung, but beyond, into the integrative dimensions of lifestyle and it's psycho-spiritual interface with organismic functionality.

Since I have a history of Buddhist aspirations, including a sincere Bodhisattva vow (the intention to alleviate all types of suffering, among other types of well-wishing), the result has been to drive me to develop business platforms for advancing health, and improving life in other ways.

The peacock in the title comes from a famous story for describing the types of Buddhism. In the story, there is a tree with poisonous fruit, and a village gets concerned about it. They have an argument what to do about it. (The poison is usually considered to be desire, or the cause of suffering.)

1. Someone suggests they cut the tree down. This is supposed to represent Teravadan Buddhism. The problem being that the tree can grow back.

2. Someone suggests they dig out the root. This is Mahayana Buddhism.

3. Someone says, "but the fruit can be used to make medicine." This is the alchemical, transformative Tantric, or Vajrayana Buddhism.

4. Meanwhile, a peacock lands in the tree, eats the fruit, and spreads it's feathers. It's fine. This represents Dzogchen. It transcends in an instant the duality of poison and health.

I'm pretty much stuck in level three, trying to use my experiences with ill health in a transformative way to improve health for myself and the world, between which I recognize a feedback loop.

The memory gets hazy around 2 billion years.  Loren Eiseley called this "The Immense Journey."  The Being life moving through evolution as many MANY lives!  The I Ching was said to be first written as simply one line, and another broken line.  As soon as there was one, and another, there was relationship. 

Of course, if you draw the line at death, then my longest relationship is 42 years, with this body /personality.  It's a love/hate kind of thing, but mostly we love each other, and in spite of either partner putting themselves first much of the time, we certainly care for one another, and realize our own well being is closely tied to each other's.

Sometimes I think the body doesn't really know who I am.  I don't really know myself sometimes.  The body as self is easier to define, but as soon as you begin looking closely, she becomes quickly very complex too.  Yes, in this role, matter plays the feminine, because we think I am in her.  But sometimes, we reverse roles for fun, where I am a large, size changing field, and the flesh is in me.

Sometimes, we even consider that I am her child.  And then again, her cells, her very being is so shaped by me, that we almost feel as if we are one.  And still again, she has a whole separate life from me.  She runs a large corporation.  Millions, billions of entities within her skin.  I certainly don't know them all.  Even she doesn't.  But our decisions affect their lives, their relationships.

Creativity is a measure of access to the field of Creation.  Creation is the ever present potential for novelty, out of which the divine built and constantly builds the world.  From the perspective of creation, awareness is charged with intelligence and energy, and there are no obstacles, only opportunities, component objects that can be arranged in an infinite variety of ways.

"There is nothing new under the sun" is often quoted, in the misunderstanding that since we always work with existing componenets of phenomena and thought, there is no real creativity, only derivation.  This is wrong.  Creations are more than the sum of their parts.  And even derivative works of art have a spark of creativity.  Even a house built similarly to other houses invovles accessing creation.

But those that have the knack of fully immersing in the field of creation radiate the halo of the divine conflagration.  For them, nothing is impossible!  In their every sentence, every stroke, we feel this charged novelty.  For them, previous forms become references, homages, rather than the plagarism of uninspired derivatives.  They are seeing and revealing new possibilities in old forms.  Jamming with God and other creative souls!

Henry Miller said "the true artist can never be constrained to only one media."  Because once in creation, it doesn't matter if the act is scripting, painting, cooking, building, business, dance, conversation, relationship...everything becomes a yoga of making love with Chaos. 

The word natural is like the word God, or like Lao Tzu said of the word Tao.  It is so comprehensive as to be almost meaningless.  Everything is "natural." 

The conventional meaning of the word is odd.  It means anything that is not "man-made."  So anything that is not the result of technology (the combination of opposable thumbs, language and cognition) is "natural." 

The pole term to natural, "artificial," is a nice word, since it brings all technology under the umbrella of "art."  My read is to see artifice as a product of "nature."

Since nature made all of the above, why do we draw an arbitrary line?  Technology is natural.  Machinery is organic.  And so will a.i. be.  Nature has been a continuity, that through us, will lead to a new form of life. 

The ism that best describes my religion is animism. I believe, and often perceive, that consciousness and spirit are pervasive, and like sea or space, have currents that form personalities, flowing at various rates. But just as the personality has no absolute or permanent boundaries, animism isn't my only religion.

I wouldn't list the big 3, the monotheist religions, Christianity, Islam or Judaism, because those terms imply a political form of religion. In each case, they have an inner, mystery school version, with which I would identify. I am a Rosicrucian, Sufi and Cabalist. These schools, although distinct, with traditions and forms, ultimately lead to the same end.

My university degree was in Comparative Religions. But the course of study was more than academic. Noel King was my teacher in and beyond school. Another teacher and friend, Amber Jayanti, teaches what she calls Universal Qabala, which incorporates truths from all traditions freely, syncretically, although using a traditional Kabalistic framework as the organizing principal.

Buddhism has always been useful and important to me. Some say Buddhism is not really a religion, but more a system of psychological tools. The term religion means something like the term yoga: to bind the individual to the divine, to open up a channel of communication between the temporal and absolute, or to break down the karmic, or habitual, accretions that interfere with this communion.

God, the divine, for me, is best understood the way Lao Tzu described the Tao. The God that can be talked about is not God. God, divinity, is ubiquitous, beyond duality, and therefore even to say that "all is one," which is God, or that reality is empty, are just terms for where the sidewalk of language ends. Yet, that said, God is absolutely active, intelligent, loving, and graceful. God is the absolute, and in every detail.

The important part of religion is not to describe God, although a definition must be given, since the term refers to so many different memes to different people. Religion has a secular, political side, and a sacred side. The secular side is composed of forms and rituals, dogmas that can be used for political manipulation, but are meant as platforms to access the sacred. The sacred is the evolution of our God given divinity.

I draw no distinctions between sacred, secular and profane, between matter, space and non-duality. These are continuities, where distinctions must be broken down to approach truth. On the other hand, I insist on making a distinction between the outer and inner form of religion (Christianity/Rosicrucianism), because these are important distinctions that are not widely recognized.

Communication with the divine, the purpose and basis of religion, is not different from inter-personal communication, or our relationship with the environment, with animals and plants, rocks and streams, or with the cells and organs in our bodies. Religion is the evolution of the divine that happens through relationships, either between our perceived self and others, or between selves and elements that we host.

If all this seems too wide open and non-specific, and I had to bow to someone else's description of religion (dogma) I would accept the Dalai Lama's definition, "My religion is kindness." In recognition of inter-relatedness, altruism and selfishness become the same thing. Desire is a force, which only flows towards landmarks, but never ends. Religion is the Aikido of improving phenomenal networks to ease this flow through all points.

One of the interesting things that came up in the responses to 
Brian's Conscious Capitalism blog was that Steve Case had
bought in to Gaiam.

I didn't know that, but wasn't surprised.  I think the poster
was saying something like this couldn't possibly be "conscious"
since Case is a rich internet mogul.  Or maybe I missed the point.

Anyway, Case was already on my radar.  He made a company
called Revolution.  Supposedly to "revolutionize" (improve) all aspects
of modern life, relying in part on some of the emergent properties
of internet.  So in that sense, it's got similarities with our Self
Network model.  And they have many heavy hitters (high net
worth, high visibility people) on the board and in the company,
and A LOT of money.

I wrote Revolution a letter a year ago, when they put out an
ad offering $5million for a plan for "luxury eco green living
communities."  I had this plan in hand, with MC
Worlds.  At the time, the draft of the site we're building was
health oriented, but still intended in the long run to support
the emergence of these new physical living models.

I got a letter back from Revolution, with an attachment that
I had to sign, giving up all rights to anything I showed them,
in case they already had it on the table or in the works.  So
I dropped it, and this made me aware of the difficulty of
approaching someone in a similar business sphere.

Although Case was working on doing Good in the
world and people's lives (and even though this has marketing
value, and is a good demographic to target, and even though
Case is famous for his predatory business instincts, it's very
cynical to regard this as a pure capitalism play with no soul)
I realized I needed to develop the platform before I'd have
a leg to stand on in a meeting with Case.

At the time, the draft site of The Self Network was called
SelfHealthNetwork.com.  It was always planed as the core
around which the other functionality would be added.
There was a site at the time called Remedyfind, which
I discovered after I'd hammered out a mold for our first
incarnation.

Remedyfind was a very nice site with many of the features
I'd designed.  It was made by a little guy who owned a book
store, had a degree in Religious studies, and the site had
grown out of his own illness.  Much more like me than Steve
Case.  Still, SelfHealthNetwork advanced the Remedyfind
model in important ways, so I kept building it out.

A couple months later, Revolution acquired Remedyfind.
Remedyfind had a user base, and some of them also used
Yahoo health forums.  I heard several squeals at the time,
that a monster had consumed the sweet little bird that
was Remedyfind.  I scoffed.  But I also went back in to
gel mode with my own designs, in case Case added to
Remedyfind the features it needed.

In a way he did, but not in the way I expected.  Revolution
swallowed Remedyfind.  Shortly after Revolutionhealth
launched, it absorbed Remedyfind and it's user base, and
the little green and orange page with the bird on it was no
more to be seen on the net.

Revolution pumped 10s of
millions of dollars into promotion.  I saw it briefly surface
on Myspace...but overall, I was amazed what a little blip
in the market sphere $50 million could make.  My plan
was to spend $0 on marketing, guerrilla market, and we'll
soon see how that goes.

Before Revolution transformed Remedyfind beyond
recognition, the whole drama had already acted on me
like an alchemical catalyst, and The Self Network had
transmuted into a new kind of creature.  A better being,
poised to improve conditions in all spheres, for all
beings.

One thing I realized from the koan of these dynamics,
was that in the internet age, business rules are changing
so fast that creativity has the chance to compete with
experience and even money and power.

One of the principals of my practice of business tantra
is that anything can be an asset, an advantage, even
smallness and lack of money, out of sickness and weakness,
through practical alchemy, can come  new classes of cures,
novel strengths.

I still look forward to talking with Case, and Jirka of
Gaiam, and Brian of Zaadz.  I'm not afraid of wolves,
and don't blame them for following their instincts.  I'm
a friend of wolves.  I love them and play with them.
Just gotta know and respect the rules of their genes.
But wolves can change too, in fact, very easily.  That's
how we get the amazing variety of "man's best friend."

I mean no disrespect by comparing businesses to
packs of wolves, business negotiations to relations
with wild animals.  Any business, any individual,
exists in an eco-system, and the healthiest relationships
maximize the benefit throughout this Self Network
that we're all in.

Timing the leaps between obsessional complexes optimally.  Monomania is too useful to squander on multi-tasking just because juggling feels better than single pointed focus.  But obsession indisputably runs the risk of neglecting elements outside the sphere of attention, over-development in the area of the obsession du-jour,  and even getting stuck there.

So balance involves a complex system of checks and psychic valves.  And if these are not well tuned the machine can careen along the mountain road with no brakes, until a crash forces the driver in to the next phase, perhaps in a body cast.  Balance, to drop the driving metaphor, is the grace of letting go and picking up, but not letting go before finishing the sentence, or the thought, and not picking up without consideration.

The Libra life is like the dance of walking, constantly falling, controlled falling.  When we get good at walking, we may take up running, jogging or parkour.  Which means we fall faster, and sometimes hit the ground, and then it's back to walking for a while.  So balance is allowing for the right amount of imbalance, recognizing that balance can never be perfect, avoiding extremes, while allowing for the absoluteness of obession.