What I would say currently if I was on the TED Global stage or similar places though it is a little more than 18 minutes. Love to all. Peace

(This is a reprint of a reprint first made as a typed out text that I recorded as a guided meditation. Enjoy the message.)

Hi Everyone, I recorded this as a proper audio guided meditation but the file is too large to house on my website currently so I am sharing the script I wrote for it here to simply get it out there/here into the world so to speak because that is important to me in the work that I do.  It is to act as a textual document of the living spirit that was delivered in that recording and also that I hope to somehow deliver live via Zoom or in person or both at some point unless by that time I have written new things and so forth.  I might be able to get this on my website as a text as well.  For now it lives here.  All the best  To give you a brief summary this writing which was originally delivered as a spoken meditation covers how art as life is a helpful way of understanding the world for ourselves and each other.  It was written almost as a download from the universe so there are not always proper paragraph breaks as the inspiration came to me in that fashion.  Peace.  As always if you are doing any formal meditation make sure you are in a safe, comfortable place not driving or operating machinery.  Also, I am not a licensed therapist, physician or wellness professional.  Please seek any necessary assistance elsewhere for proper diagnoses and treatments.  Thank you.  

Find yourself in a comfortable position.  Sitting in a chair with your hands in your lap is fine to do.  Just make sure that you keep your back straight but still relaxed. 

Take a couple of deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth. 

In through your nose and out through your mouth.

Make sure that you will not be disturbed.  

On the next out breath go ahead and close your eyes.

We are first going to do a body scan, scanning the body head to toe starting at the top of the head and moving down slowly through the entire body.  If you have not already, return your breathing to breathing normally in and out of your nose.

Begin now at the top of the head.  Place your awareness there and keep that awareness scanning gently down through the entire body.  Scan now for the next minute or so.

Now gently and slowly become aware of your breathing.  Begin to place your awareness on the breathe as it moves in and out of your body.  You can place your attention on the nostrils as the air moves in and out there.  Or the chest as it rises and falls.  Or the belly as it expands and contracts.  Whatever works best for you.  Focus on the breath itself.  Being aware of it.  Noticing the presence of it, the realness of it, the evidenced nature of it.  Becoming aware of the breath is a mindfulness meditation technique to focus your attention and become more present in the moment, in the now.  Becoming more aware of and awake with what simply is in this way is how we come to know our true essence and the nature of our mind together as one whole.  

You can begin to count the breaths up until a count of 10 beginning again back at one once there or you can simply be aware of each breath as it passes in and out of you, aware of the inhale and aware of the exhale.  Continue focusing your attention on your breathing in this way for the next several minutes.  Allow space for this.  Alllow your being to be aware of your breath.

Continue breathing in and out of your nose, noticing your breath as we go along.  Concentrating your attention on the breath, training your mind to be attentive to the present moment as Jon Kabat -Zinn says being present, nonjudgmentally, on purpose, with attention.  This practice is a part of the practice that I have been doing now for some time where a method, approach and attitude are cultivated that aid in the realization of something circling around the known practices of creative mindfulness and reality creation.  This can also shares something with prayer, visualization, manifestation and affirmation.  It is a way of cultivating a sense of personhood, giving each of us a greater sense of being and doing in the world equipping our essence with a set of crafting tools to manifest the life that you want and also to become more yourself with every passing day by removing mental blocks and other negativity.  

Continue breathing in and out of your nose gently and with attention.  Relax.  

This work has been the culmination of a pursuit to get at what the very most current and recent art of the times is and as it turns out art history has shown that life and art have been trying to merge for a very long time and that right now in this movement of the zeitgeist with mindfulness becoming so mainstream  it is truly a pivotal moment in which to see and feel the benefits of merging art and life.  This is happening in my estimation whether we practice it or not but having a practice like a life art meditation or manifesting or reality creation or creative mindfulness gives us a framework by which to move through the daily experience of our lives.  It gives us an opportunity to synchronize our own subjective personalized experience with the objective presence of the world at large tuning in as it were to the present and most up to date state of technologies, science, philosophy and so on.  We get to know ourselves better in this way through a meditation practice and tuning in through books, documentaries, podcasts and the news about what is happening as far as we all can tell in the world right now as we live and breathe.  

Continue breathing in and out of your nose.  Relax your body.  

We come to know ourselves better than the algorithms do in this way which is what author Yuval Noah Harari warns that we must do in order to keep ourselves relevant and autonomous, to keep in effect our humanity intact.  This is a major purpose of the life art of which I speak.  All of these names for this attitude can come and go.  It can be called meditation, mindfulness, reality creation or creative mindfulness though creative mindfulness itself many times refers to doing conventional artistic practices like drawing or painting in a more mindful way.  That is of course lovely, but this further expanded sense of creative mindfulness, what might be simply called “expanded creative mindfulness” applies to the act of living itself.  This is why attention to our breath is so important as it anchors us into the corporeal reality of our bodies and minds becoming attentive to that living presence, that one true life as Eckhart Tolle calls it that is always flowing through us, as us.

I find it helpful to incorporate verbal reminders such as this to the practice of meditation from time to time to remind ourselves of the nature and importance of the work at hand.  It helps to connect our formal practice such as we are doing here, and our everyday lives which after all as teachers like Mingyur Rinpoche have intimated is just one long extended meditation.  We connect the connection as it were that we find within ourselves, with ourselves and the world in which we are placed and the nature of the phenomena that arise there.  This sort of environment of things and circumstances is what Tolle calls your life situation.  You begin to see the more that you focus in on your breath and become aware of thoughts as they pass through your mind that you are not the mental activity that so prominently presents itself.  You are vastly more than that.  You have a wise mind that can kick in at any time and is that witnessing mind that is not wrapped up in the world as it were but rather a deeper and vaster presence, the you that is timeless and eternal.  In a way space-time as Albert Einstein related it is like the life situation of the world.  Space-time and quantum mechanics, the wave function is at the very most fundamental levels of all extant material reality in our universe.  As physicist Sean Carroll has stated if you want to know the fundamental aspect or element of the universe think of a field.  It is all just fields.  So many wonderous relationships may yet be discovered between human beings and this world-life situation of space-time and quantum mechanics such as been imagined by author and physicist Michio Kaku in his book The Future of Humanity which unpacks a tiered system of exploration and discovery of human beings in the cosmos over the next centuries starting with inhabiting the moon and planets like Mars and then slowly billowing outwards into the cosmos eventually possibly uploading our consciousness into robotic avatars in distant galaxies.  He also talks about spreading nanobots like tiny seed-satellites into the cosmos.  It is precisely this kind of artistic involvement with reality itself that I believe is a forefront opportunity within the realm of human enterprise.  Galleries and museum are wonderful places.  I hope to have some objects represent me in those domains somehow as I live and after I pass on if possible.  But the game of life is far, far out beyond those domains both in physical reality and in our conception of the world, our self and world consciousness.  We have a chance now to be life artists, all of us, in the project of humanity to tackle problems like climate change and world hunger, clean water and artificial intelligence.  It is important to remember like Harari has stated that imagination, the power and application of imagination is what has allowed us so far to organize our actions across societies and the globe.  We in this way are the art that we seek or put another way we are the crafters and co-crafters of life meant as author and physicist David Deutsch has said to engage with the cosmos, hopefully in a humble way but also with a powerful efficacy.  Deutsch’s definition of “knowledge as information with causal power” hints at the unique ability of human being to acquire knowledge.  This coupled with Harari’s sense of imagination which echoes the claims of Einstein gives us a glimpse of what we have the opportunity to do with our lives for the foreseeable and even beyond the foreseeable future.  Life art is a gift I feel drawn, pun intended from the depths of how we have known art to be so far on this planet.  It reminds me of the movie Arrival where and this is a spoiler alert, the gift from the alien lifeforms is a language that helps humanity to reestablish a meaningful relationship with time.  Who knows, there may yet prove to be other prominent types of time other than the arrow of time that has been active since the big bang some 13.7 billion years ago here in this universe.  The multiverse and possible dimensions of this place as we know it are far out beyond what we can know and yet our imagination can travel there.  This is the art of which I speak.  Art that will propel us into these new worlds.  Art that will give us a psychology for peace here on earth and for future travels in space.  This is something that I have termed the artistic attitude.  It is the gift of art I feel and is a way of taking art to many more levels of magnitude than what we had previously realized it could do.  Some of this limitation is with what seems to be foundational supports in the fabric of art like the concept and practice of exhibitions as seeming to be essential to how art is done but they are not.  The same goes for galleries and museums or for God’s sake walls, be they a cave wall or a gallery or museum or dwelling wall.  To riff on the Back to the Future movies I say, walls…where we’re going, we don’t need walls.  Granted I think reverence for where we have come from is important and of course walls will remain in a sense as they rightly should but dream with me here in this lecture, in this reading, in this confluence of energy whether I am giving it live or am reciting it via a recording.  It is all just energy after all, down to the electrons and the quarks and the wave function.  We are a realm of possibilities.  Let us establish a practice that codifies and supports and nourishes this art within us all.  So many cultures, all cultures most probably have art in them.  Let us awaken to the true power of art in our lives and utilize it as a concept and a living essence, an unextinguishable art flame as it were that will light the way for millennia to come and evolve as it goes into ways of being and those ways of seeing as John Berger related that will tap into a through-spirit in the Hegelian sense and give us ready and attuned access to Kairos time, that eternal present, that now and always already formulated hereness that pervades in our very breath and that will be with us wherever we go.  As Kabat-Zinn speaking of mindfulness has said wherever you go there you are.  Let us remember this in relation to Kaku and see that whoever we are here can be who we are in some sense in the deep future.  We are the ancestors of those future generations after all.  We may not be able to travel ourselves into the cosmos just yet in our current technologies but one day we likely will.  For now though, we can travel there in our imaginations and to do that is one in the same I feel in some way as the actual trip.  If we go there in our spirit, the word spirit as derived from the Greek spiritus which means to breathe then we will see so to speak with our sense of attention itself what it is we are carrying just now, knowledge and if we are lucky, love that will pervade our every waking moments now and forever.  The cosmos is here with us, inside us as spiritual teach Michelle Zarrin has stated.  As we tune into the visualizations of these possibilities in the here and now, we in a way live them.  Knowing of Kaku’s book and its many imaginative efforts of unpacking how and in what way we will travel out into the cosmos gives us a framework for how to conduct ourselves now here on the earth in this day and age for the seeds of those distant generations are upon us now, within us now.  In a sense we are all together in the realm of imagination, that pure imagination that the beloved character Willy Wonka of the chocolate factory spoke of, that timeless tale by Roald Dahl.  We must find a way to invest in our own imaginations regardless of our age and join in the celebration that is ripe in our species for what we are rightly capable of, endowed by nature itself by way of creation into our bodies and minds and hearts and souls.  It is not a matter of doing any more than what we came here to do, and just what that is is going to be different for everyone.  It reminds me of Tiny from the movie City Slickers and also my mother saying how it is all about that one thing while holding up an index finger.  Just that one thing.  But as the movie relates that one thing is different for all of us.  It is diversity that will see us through.  I do know in my heart that cultures bring us richness and integrity and character.  To be global citizens if only in spirit is a special concept to hold in your heart.  We can be one people and still have vast diversity, we already are that.  And we all breathe after all.  We all breathe. There is a unifying life force in us all that is something tangible that we can hold onto in our structuring and organizing of ourselves as we become closer and closer here on earth and for one day out in space as well.  You see later is now in a way, the seeds of hundreds of thousands of years are within our dreams and visions as individuals and as a collective species.  We do not know where things will go exactly in the short term or in the long term.  What after all will we evolve into?  Will there be a merging of biological life with so-called artificial life?  We do not know.  There are many guesses, thank God, there are many guesses.  People are thinking about these things.  You can learn about such things and much, much more through podcasts like the one put on by author Rob Reid who looks at society and culture through the lens of cutting edge technologies and ways of thinking about the world.  The conversations are going on now for what we might become and at the same time they are creating or co-creating of what we deem ourselves right now to be, what we are.  What are we after all?  And of course, what comes forth is the question of why are we at all and why are we here? But that second question can be altered given how we constitute and qualify our conception of the term “here.”  Even the “why” of us without space-time can be thought of as well and is important to consider.  We each must go within and ask such a question if we want to know ourselves rightly.  What is our ultimate purpose?  What is the future that we know is within us already, that future that comes to us as if in a dream or a story from our childhood.  It comes to us easily.  It appears naturally.  It has always been there with us, inside us.  It was never not with us.  And it is not what is thought about only but the process of thinking and deeper yet the process of presence or presencing.  We are everywhere somehow.  We are this omnipresence in an omniverse where the furthest reaches relate to the deepest withins.  There is a union in this way as we understand the connection between these two limitless states.  Have you ever traveled to the furthest reaches of the cosmos in your mind?  What do you think is out there?  Have you ever thought that the vastness within you may be infinite as well?  What is in there?  These are the connections that art has the power to unite.  This is the conception and what I mean by artist now, for the 22nd century and beyond.  Have faith, trust, believe and never give up on yourself, for you are this universe.  Remember The Never Ending Story where all is lost at some point but an eternal imagination of the child within us all imagines it all back to life to rise again as it must, pure, true and bright.  Take refuge in this knowing as it manifests in your life and know that beyond all else you are here, wherever that is for you and that you matter.  You truly matter, both literally and figuratively.  We all matter.  And now is literally the time to create the future.  Go now.  There is always more.  Be, do, go, now.  Go!

Thank you to my father, Joe, my mother Kathy and my aunt Molly for their love and support and very appreciated wisdom.