The Curious Case of the Curlew

Bush Stone Curlew

The Wisdom

Look! Look! he is climbing the last light 

who knows neither time nor error, 

and under Whose eye, unforgiving, 

the world, unforgiven, 

swings into shadow.

 –from "Evening Hawk" by Robert Penn Warren


Have you ever had one of those pivotal moments in which everything you had previously thought of as true and real, no longer seems so because your whole sense of reality has shifted gear and opened out into a wider dimension?

This 'new' perspective is so near and so natural we can't help wondering how we had never noticed it before.

I think most of us have experienced such moments during our lives. When they happen we feel that nothing will or can ever be the same again and 'truth' seems so very near and obvious. But alas, all too often and all too soon we lose the lofty heights of our momentary perspective and sink back into the dream...

And the 'dream' is addictive and compelling. We believe in the story of our lives and almost everything that we do or say or think feeds into the sturdy edifice of 'our story.' It is almost as though we cannot help ourselves because the story-line seems so believable.

And sadly, we almost never think to question our story or to investigate the nature and origins of our inmost sense of 'self.' As a result, our attention remains locked onto the drama of our unfolding life and we remain none the wiser right up until the time it is about to end.

Most of us are not even aware that we are fixating on a drama which is neither true nor real and we are accustomed to living almost all of our lives this way. For us, what is nearest and true, as our inmost nature, has become but a distant dream and what is dreamlike and passing is the obsessive focus of our day to day attention.

There is a nocturnal bird that lives in Australia, called a Curlew. It has a tendency, on occasion, to turn up outside windows and reflective surfaces where it appears to be mesmerized by its own image. It is not that it thinks the image is another bird, rather it knows instinctively that the image it is seeing in the glass has something to do with itself. There is an almost fatal attraction which compels the bird towards what it is perceiving in the glass.


In a similar manner, we human beings are infatuated with our sense of self-identity. We are convinced that we are what we appear to be.

We can learn so much from the natural world around us, from the wildlife, from the plants and in fact from every living thing.

Since I was very young I remember hearing stories about birds that
would appear just before or around the time of someone's death. In fact, I personally witnessed such a thing on more than one occasion in my younger years.

In New Zealand, where I grew up, these untimely or timely, visitations were considered, by the Maori, to be an omen.

Modern societies have forgotten about omens. Everything has been reduced to the small and narrow focus of what is apparently provable. As though the only reality we can identify with must be scientifically accounted for.

And yet, whenever something rattles our attention and gives us pause for thought, or better still, arrests our thought altogether, we come face to face with the 'unknown.' In such confounding moments, we entered the realm of the omens of awareness. We cannot understand them with the mind and yet on an almost subliminal level we feel deeply unsettled by them.

Getting back to the curious case of the Curlew.
Some years ago, while I was visiting Kuranda, a small settlement, in the far north of Queensland, I was surprised to see groups of birds occasionally gathered here and there around the town, usually near bushes and leafy parklands.

They were most often completely still and immobile so that one might not actually notice them until very near and then be startled by these strange, still and ghostlike creatures. They certainly made an impression on me.

I asked a friend about them and he told me they were called Bush Stone Curlews and that the Aboriginal people feared their appearance in a locality as harbingers of death.

Whether that is actually true or not remains to be seen, however, given the ancient origins of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia one might well assume that they would have cause to know.
I was particularly impressed by these birds and had the feeling of something 'other-worldly' which I always felt when I saw them or happened upon them on my way.

They are said to be primarily a nocturnal bird explaining why they move so little during the hours of daylight and have an almost dreamlike quality about them. Dream-like as in sleepwalking.

Then, quite recently I came across a story of a bird that appeared in a busy Brisbane suburb. One of this particular breed had planted itself very firmly outside an office building and was seen to be gazing at itself in the glass of the shop front for hours on end. In fact, it would come at the crack of dawn with the very first rays of the sun and leave again only at dusk when it became dark.

Of course, many people noticed it and the occurrence began to spawn much attention. So much so that a notice soon appeared on the window just above where the bird would stand in isolated and determined vigil gazing at itself in the glass.

"I'm a bush stone curlew," the sign read.
"I'm fine. I just like to stare at myself in the window."

Many people were alarmed by its behaviour.

Read on in Pieces of a Dream

Too Busy Being Busy?

People running here and there. No time to stop, no time to think, no time to even really live...

When we are busy most of us are not able to live consciously in the present, instead, we are caught up in thoughts and all of the activities that spring from them. If we strip these thoughts right down to their bare basics we can quickly discover that all of them are about some preconceived hopes or fears about the future or the past. This is the condition in which we normally live. It is distracted, pre-occupied, stressful and very unbalanced.

Busy-ness is a kind of modern-day insanity which is overrunning our lives.
Even in our moments of non-busyness, we often find ourselves reaching for something to engage our attention and this continues from the moment we open our eyes in the morning until we shut them again at night. We live in a kind of fever and stress has become a substratum in our day to day existence in the modern world.

Unless we consciously take the time out to pause and be still we are caught on a wheel of perpetual movement and change. We are little better than mice on a treadmill which is going around and around. We are working so hard but we are not actually getting anywhere.

There are most certainly psychological impacts when we are constantly distracted, and constantly busy.

There is nothing so useless as

doing efficiently that which

should not be done at all.

Peter. F. Drucker

One impact of this condition is the sense of acceleration, the feeling that time is speeding up. We perceive this as something which is happening to us and we feel it as a kind of pressure which manifests itself in our lives as stress.

And stress, as we all know, directly affects our health, our moods, our thoughts and the quality of our lives. It also affects the way that we interact with others and has powerful repercussions on the lives of those with whom we are close.

In actuality, of course, time and space are relative and yet when our mind is engaged in the busyness of living from day to day we become entangled in the machinations of time passing in units of hours, minutes and seconds. We get caught up in the drama of events and we lose our sense of a wider and vaster perspective.

If there is one disease that pervades modern society it is that of stress which can condition our behaviour in so many ways and adversely affect our sense of well being and health. When our anxiety levels are high we are certainly not at peace and our lives are certainly not balanced.

When our attention is constantly engaged and distracted and busy we can easily miss out on the very things that give us a sense of meaning, satisfaction and fulfilment in our day to day lives.

*****

Recently I was reading a story about two psychologists from a university. They conducted a test which was designed to indicate what kinds of triggers and conditions engender in people certain types of behaviour. In this instance, compassion and empathy.

In two separate groups, one therapist asked the students to walk to a class where they were each expected to give a short speech. The chosen theme for the day was compassion and empathy.

The other psychologist sent his group of students off to another class, ostensibly telling them the same thing, however, he led his group to understand that they were already late for their class. The first group, however, had been told that they had plenty of time until their class would begin.

Meanwhile, an actor had taken up a position on the pathway along which each group would pass. The actor made the appearance of being very unwell and in distress.

What happened next was interesting. It turned out that the theme and topic on which each person was expected to speak in their up and coming class, had little if any impact on their behaviour. (Remember, that day the theme was about empathy and compassion.)

Only 10 per cent of those who had been told they were late for class stopped to help the person in distress, whereas, 60 per cent of the group who thought that they had plenty of time stopped to help out.

Busyness is bad for empathy and compassion. Those of us who have spent time in big cities have seen many examples of this. I am sure that most of us can also attest to examples of this in our own day to day lives if not personally, then in numerous instances that we can observe happening around us.

*****

It is very extraordinary to notice how our sense of perceived 'time' can affect the way that we behave and react to different situations.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have the following, also equally thought-provoking example which took place during an excursion into the Andes.

An archaeologist hired some Inca tribesmen to lead him to an archaeological site deep in the mountains. After they had been moving for some time the tribesmen stopped and insisted they would go no further. The archaeologist grew impatient and then angry. But no matter how much he cajoled, the tribesmen would not go any further. Then all of a sudden and quite unanimously they completely changed their attitude. Inexplicably, to the archaeologist, they picked up the gear and set off once more. When the bewildered archaeologist later asked the tribesmen why they had stopped and refused to move for so long, but then suddenly appeared to have changed their minds they answered, “We had been moving too fast and had to wait for our souls to catch up.

This may sound very quaint in our digital world where everything moves at breakneck speed and yet there is a very profound truth buried within the simple tribe people's home-grown wisdom.

When we rush around continuously never giving ourselves time to be still, to be silent, to be quiet and to be present in the present we rob ourselves of something utterly fundamental to our health, wellbeing and sense of day to day fulfilment.

Our existence is rooted in a truth so unspeakably near to us that we fail to recognise it. In the midst of our busy-ness, there is just one thing which is utterly essential for us to do. Everything else, in the light of this truth is completely meaningless.

To find out who and what we really are is the single most important thing we can do in this life. By refocusing our attention away from being the 'doer' we can train ourselves to perform actions even while we remain quiet and at peace within our sense of 'awareness.'

Letting Go of Our Addiction to Hope and Fear

Ever notice that we spend most of our time in a distracted state somewhere between an ever-swinging pendulum of hope and fear?

If we really give it some consideration it does not take much to realise that we keep ourselves away from the happiness which is always available to us in the present moment, by being constantly distracted by the hope of 'getting something' or the fear of losing it.

If we boil it all down, this is how things are for us.

So, while we are all seeking our happiness every moment of every day we are constantly sabotaging our own best efforts. We are our own worst enemy, barking up the wrong tree and generally way off the scent to use a few well-worn cliches.

A mere shift of focus and we could transform our world simply by staying with the dynamic and ever-living present moment which is completely free, ever available and the only thing which we really can ever have. Instead, we are like mice on a treadmill, running and running after something that we can never quite catch and no matter how far we run or for how long we just can't get anywhere or achieve the happiness we so desperately long for.

Why do we do this to ourselves? In the first place, we don't actually need to go anywhere and in the second, there is nowhere to go!

 A friend recently told me something which I found very interesting. 

In certain places in India, it is not uncommon to see fortune-tellers parked out on the pavements with a pack of cards and one or two green parrots locked up in a tiny cage. Many people believe that these green parrots have clairvoyant powers and can predict a person's future or a future outcome.

In the South of India, where this belief originated, one can find the green parrot honoured among the religious pantheon as a messenger, a harbinger of news and tidings. If we scrape the surface of deeper meanings here we can uncover a very profound truth indeed and one which has nothing to do with clairvoyance.


Continue reading in Return to Forever

Are Smart Phones Making Fools of Us All?

In this age of smartphone technology, most people are distracted pretty much most of the time. Constant inattention can and will have serious implications for this and future generations.

Many people are not aware of the fact that they are almost constantly distracted. We tend to have an almost addictive need for some kind of emotional engagement and smartphones fill this need on a number of different levels, very effectively. In fact, they have been designed with just this 'need' in mind. 

Various kinds of social network messaging, digital games, news and or information feeds can keep us engaged for inordinate amounts of time and in one way we may feel more connected than ever before and yet, ironically, the levels of disconnection in our societies and among our young people are higher than ever before.

As artificial intelligence begins to penetrate our lives in various subtle and invasive ways we would do well to take into account what this can mean and how it can affect the way we live. 

There are not many of us who have not experienced the frustration of trying to sort out a problem on the phone and having to deal with a digital answering service.

Certainly, the changes now taking place are unprecedented in both the speed with which these technologies are being developed and the manner in which they will completely change our mode of living. 

I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.

These words have been attributed to Albert Einstein but regardless of whether this is, in fact, true or not, they are relevant and sound out as a clarion call. May we wake up in time and shake ourselves out of our zombie-like infatuation. It appears that a whole, vast section of humanity is sleepwalking. Will we look up from our devices long enough to actually notice that we are distracted in the first place and from what we are distracted in the second? 

It is not that this is anything particularly unique to our current civilisation. As says the Biblical injunction; 'there is nothing new under the sun.' We may think we are on the cutting edge of technologies that have never before seen the light of day and yet countless civilisations have passed through this earthly realm and the remnants of their passing are a continuing cause of wonder and mystery to many in this current day and age. 

Whatever the mind is capable of dreaming up and even what has not yet been dreamed, all these things are possible and can and will become manifest in due course of time, if the will to manifest them arises. This is the innate power of the mind.

What has not changed, however, is our perpetual state of 'distraction' in one form or another. The fact is that these emerging technologies can capitalise on this apparent human weakness to target and harvest our attention on a massive scale never before witnessed. We should all be alert to the implications of this.

What we see happening now with the rise of modern technologies which have quickly become seemingly indispensable to the vast section of humanity in just the brief space of a few decades, is at base just more of the same old, same old... There may be a new look, a new flavour, a new brand, but strip that all away and our basic human instincts continue to propel us all in the same old direction.

We can dress up our confused emotions, we can varnish over the fundamental impulses which propel us through life, but century after century, decade after decade and day after day, they remain intact and they are the motivating force behind all that is manifest in this world. This is and remains the case as much now as it was a thousand years ago.

What is troubling now is the fact that this trend is being directed by a tiny minority. If we lose our 'attention,' we lose our power. If we are not aware of or have never considered what impact the current technologies are having on our human civilisations then it is certainly time to become aware now!

As long as we remain subject to the ebb and flow of our hopes and fears we cannot know our true inner freedom and at this time and in this age we are so vulnerable en-mass to being manipulated by a minority. 

The sheer scale of what is taking place, virtually unnoticed, is indeed a cause for concern. When a minority is capable of quietly manipulating whole populations for gain and profit can we call this anything other than a negative trend?

When a whole civilisation appears to be sleepwalking towards a precipice we do indeed face grave danger.

Is it not intrinsically against the whole idea of democracy to intentionally keep the mass of humanity distracted by what is unimportant? If we create devices that are geared to monopolise our attention and keep it focused on the trivial instead of the vital we can imagine what the outcome might be.

Don't we have a moral obligation to wake up and notice what is really happening here? It is up to each one of us.

And there is a tapping at the door of our awareness. The inmost core within each and every one of us is trying to get through, trying to jolt us out of our torpor.

Do you ever get the feeling that something is missing in your life?

You should trust that feeling because it is a true one. Something is missing in your life. It's called 'attention.'

If our attention is hijacked by a mobile phone or some other kind of smart device do we not then become the plaything of that device or thinking which has created it? Where is our cherished freedom if our ability to avoid the subtle manipulation, inherent in the designs of modern technological innovations, is woefully inadequate.

There is something infinitely more dangerous about an addiction which slips into our lives unnoticed. Modern technologies exploit people's impulses thereby robbing them of the ability to choose wisely. 

Leunig

Have you ever heard of the term, 'persuasive design'? Until very recently I hadn't either. I have, however, long suspected that our very modern deficiency of attention or perhaps we could term it; partial attention syndrome is a very insidious new-age kind of illness with momentous implications. Are we not distracted most of the time?

Persuasive design is a term that describes any kind of technology that has been created with the intention of grabbing people's attention and holding it. It involves the subtle art of subversively

capturing our interest, overpowering our attention and bringing it back repeatedly to that thing, whatever that may be.

If we are beginning to recognise this trend then it is none too soon. The problem is, that even upon recognising this very recent affliction we are nowhere near addressing and or managing it.

Learning to pay attention to our attention is a very crucial piece of advice. It points to something utterly fundamental about our existence.

Do we really notice what is going on around us if we are distracted? We lose our inherent freedom the moment our attention is compromised. Smartphones are not only very efficient in creating a 'vacuum' in our lives, but they are equally efficient in seeming to fill that vacuum as well.

The moment our concentration is directed towards something or other, then, at that moment, whatever it is that we are perceiving becomes our 'world.' 

This is what is meant by the spiritual dictum that we so often hear and yet fail to truly understand. Namely; nothing has an inherent existence in and of itself. Another way of saying this is; whatever our mind is drawn to, that is our reality at that moment.

If something or someone hijacks our attention we become little better than automatons, walking zombies moving past one another in the vast ocean of time and space, scarcely even aware of each other or of the fact that we exist at all.

We don't need any evidence that this is in fact already the case, we have proof of it in every direction that we may turn our gaze in our so-called modern and technological societies. These technologies have entered our lives and are completely and utterly changing the ways we live and think and behave.

We urgently need to become aware of just how pervasive and insidious these changes really are.

In our so-called 'money economy' it is regarded as perfectly acceptable to manipulate people's attention in order to capture that attention and direct it towards a 'product.' Isn't this the very basis of capitalism?

Therefore capitalism is geared towards exploiting human vulnerabilities for monetary gain. Smartphones have already become tools of mass manipulation on a scale, the likes of which we have not seen before. This is a deeply worrying trend and deserves our thoughtful attention.

Ultimately all of this leads to nothing but a profound and insidious disconnection from who and what we really are.

If we are not in control of our attention, then something or someone else is... We can be absolutely sure that if we feel that something is missing in our lives, it most assuredly is our attention.

In days to come, we will be forced to grapple with this problem head-on. Given how pervasive our distraction has already become, this will be a mammoth undertaking.

“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

Albert Einstein

And herein lies our salvation if we can, in fact, rise to the challenge.  We will have to recognise what has always been nearest and dearest.

It has become an urgent necessity to expand our vision beyond the current distraction and preoccupation with smart devices of one kind or another, towards what is fundamental to our very existence.

*****

Continue Reading in; Are Smartphones Making Fools of Us All?

Digital Dilemmas, Part 3 (How we are Affected Emotionally)

Because the modern digital technologies that we use are potentially and in actuality so pervasive in their effects, it is easier to unravel some of the strings of implications for our, and future generations, by considering their effects upon the different levels of our being.

So far we have examined, in a very cursory way, how they affect us physically.

In terms of our emotions these effects may be more subtle, more difficult to label, but nevertheless, in their way, just as pervasive and profound. As time goes by we will be able to gauge much more accurately just how these technologies are changing our way of living for better and for worse.

In a general sense, our emotional responses take us into the realm of human moods, behaviours and reactions. These can be likened to the ever-shifting sands of hope and fear that push and pull us into endless cycles of fluctuation and change. How we place ourselves within the world as functioning human beings is often reflected by the way that we connect and interact with one another and the world wide web is all about 'connections' and 'inter-connected-ness.'

No one can deny that in one sense, this has bought us all much closer together. We can connect instantaneously, we can interact easily, almost effortlessly, cheaply and from just about anywhere on the planet. Never before has our Earth appeared to be such a small place. Suddenly we find ourselves inside the solar system and less intensely focused on the small family, tribal and communal groups that were always so pivotal to our sense of place and belonging within human societies of the past. These are still very much present but now put into a context and within a much bigger 'world view.'

If anything can reveal 'inter-connectedness' clearly, it would have to be the technologies and social media tools that are available today.

At the heart of this connectedness is the incessant tug of war between hope and fear.  These underlying forces drive most of our emotional interactions and are often bound to be magnified in the cyber 'realities' that we create on-line. Our emotions may be fleeting but they are nevertheless powerful and compelling. Are we not constantly driven by them in one form or another?

Think about it. Our need to belong, our need to excel, our need to be liked, our need to feel important, etcetera. Often at the very inception of an idea, before it is put into actuality it is motivated, consciously or otherwise, by some very visceral emotion. Facebook was virtually built out of one man's desire to impress a girl. We have played into this instinctive need. Facebook and other social media networks have flourished and spread around the world fuelled by our almost obsessive need to be 'connected' with one another. To make our little splash in the vast pond of existence. To reassert our existence as independent and yet interconnected beings and all of this on a much grander scale than ordinary people like you and I may ever have dreamed possible in the past.

Continue Reading in: Are Smartphones Making Fools of Us All?

Digital Dilemmas Part 1

The Ways in which technology 
continues to improve communication

***

Those of us who have been around for more than twenty years know very well just how pervasively modern technology, particularly that of personal computing and mobile phones, gaming and electronics in general, have changed our lives. We have seen these technologies revolutionise the way we do just about everything and all of this has come about in a comparatively short amount of time.

I well remember the days when letters to my mother in New Zealand would take around two to three weeks to arrive from India and then the turn around was often the same if not longer. It would take weeks to exchange our news and by the time the letters arrived, the news was well and truly out of date.

Probably not too much has changed with postal timings except that we hardly ever send letters these days, preferring the instant messaging or email and WhatsApp. I even remember the wind-up telephone in my grandparent's house and the 'party line' that was shared with other Motueka residents. One would pick up the mouthpiece, turn the handle a few times and hear a voice saying; 'what number please?' Although mail is still very much in use other forms of communication are quickly falling into disuse and becoming the dinosaurs of recent technology.

From shopping and banking through to how we access information, how we read, how we interact, even how we work, these changes have infiltrated every level and facet of society. There are not many areas of our lives now that are not in some way touched by the innovations of the digital age.

We older folk were well acquainted with the good old days of snail mail and landlines and my generation are by no means 'old.' We knew all about waiting in queues at the library in order to borrow a certain book. The days of newspapers and telegrams and fax machines, of trudging to the bank and standing in the line waiting for a teller to transact our business, these were all very much a part of day-to-day reality. Now, there are so many ways in which computers and mobiles have changed our lives in these past few short years that it would take up too much space to mention all of them.

Continue Reading in: Are Smartphones Making Fools of Us All?