For your viewing pleasure, a collection of photos spanning the past few years.

Old School

A Love Long Gone

All-Around-Altruistic-Alex

Emily Blatson-Wagden

Indian-Style Jarret

Money Music

Meenakshi Temple, Madurai


Catching You Catching a Groove...

I am a human jungle-gym


The Rice Fields of Hampi

Giggle-Belly

Mental Training--get it? Train-ing! Heh...


Darjeeling Skyline

Returning Home

A Samurai's Game


One of many homes


Children of the Corn

Chokeberry in Bloom

Smiling Children

My Favorite Wood-Woman

Burlington Skyline

Ridiculous Reunion

A Keen Moment

Nikki's Day of Emancipation

Kalyana Mitta

So I got this really expensive piece of paper the other day; a lot of people came to see.

Its good to have this piece of paper, but what I really value are all the beings and experiences held within it. And though people have said ‘It must feel good to be done,’ really it feels good to finally begin; for I perceive the end of this work to be the beginning of a much greater work...one that involves the rest of my life and the lives of so many others, striving together for something far beyond all of us.

'DharmaFarming'

Dharma: dher--That which supports/that which is/Truth/Interconnection; Farming (agriculture): agri + cultura--cultivation/guarding/tending of acre/field/land. Growing food and tending land with a radical working understanding of Interconnection.

We meditate in self-imposed isolation in order to act more fully and joyfully in the world.
We meditate to discover the Truth, and bring this Truth into each of our acts, trivial or profound.
We meditate to remember, to chart the future by consulting the past.

I am finished with school, officially passed, my thesis substantially complete. For the first time in a long time i feel i am again at the crossroads. Yet it is not simply a north-south road meeting an east-west road, it is a dynamic intersection where truly all destinations are available.

I have little money and much enthusiasm, little idea and much hope. the only plans that have settled so far is a 2 to 3 month stint at the spiritual intentional community that i apprenticed at over the summer. The general purpose is to solidify a strong meditation practice, to refine my thesis into the story it wants to be, to arrive at a simple and healthy diet, and to share time with others in the community in gardening, maintenance, and building.

More and more i see that not only am i at a salient crossroads, but that our global tribe is also at the crossroads. Our planet is at the crossroads, and we are all taking part in this next stage of the cosmic journey.

I only wish to be present in this journey, do the work that is laid before me, and find wholeness and completion in my small but integral part.


I am not ready to give up my dreams for 'security' or relative comfort. Available to each of us is true security--freedom from bondage--if only we follow our dreams, our 'personal legends', our deep and calm inner voice to which so many of us have become deaf. I do not buy what this industrial culture is selling, for it is sick of itself. The talking heads are just as lost as i am, and they offer false salvation.

Buddha put it simply, 'abstain from that which harms any being at any level; cultivate the saintly virtues of morality, patience, generosity, loving-kindness, truth, willpower, and equanimity; and release/surrender into the infinite.' This i am buying, for this is worth my money, my time, effort, and life.

Yet this for me is not easy, in fact is is oft'times sheer war. But little by little balance restores, effort becomes less effortful, and deep satisfying happiness arises. Little by little, bit by bit.

So for now i am taking the next step, little by little, bringing me for a short time to Sirius Community. After this will come the next step, but not just yet.

I am so happy for all of you on this journey with me, so happy for your happiness, so happy for your experience of coming out of delusion into truth. May you all be happy, be well, and be liberated in your own righteousness.

-justin

Alright.
January is almost over; my thesis is almost finished; and i am just about ready to make the next move.

of course, i don't know what this next move will be, but i do know that it will be in the spirit of the DharmaFarmer.

I will post the intro to the thesis soon. If, upon reading the intro, anybody should want a spiral-bound copy, just let me know.

ok,
peace and ease to all that be.

Hello again.

yet another month has gone by.

things continue. it is good.
i threw out my back recently, but beyond this i feel healthy and strong. I have seen many good friends graduate this past week. It a salient time for most, and foreshadows my own process. January 25th is my graduation date.

I continue to work on my thesis, with only one chapter left to write. Even though i am writing about past powerful experiences, the writing itself has been such a powerful experience.

The global change is coming quicker than we can image. Now is the time to do what we must do. Now is the time, let us not put off our urges and callings for some other time. Let us make good use of this time.

Light-Life-Love

An update:

Over a month has gone by,
quick and full.
Too full to be precise,
I can only report vaguely.

My final project has changed somewhat.
Not my thesis or what my central belief is,
but rather how it will take form.
It has become more narrative/journalistic,
and more limited in its scope.
An outline is below.

0- Seeds and Sprouts
• Opening Narrative: Fukuoka, Hawthorne Valley, and the Seeds of the DharmaFarmer
• Introduction to this work- purpose, layout, and limitations

1- Nascence
• Narrative: Obo, Buddhism, and the Beginning of Personal Journey

2- Death Rattles and Birth Pains
• Narrative: Wim and the Crash/The Doom of Our Time
-Environmental Timeline, Lovelock, Stern Review, Living -Planet Report (what is dying)
-Deep Ecology Narrative and Platform Principles (what is -birthing)
• Permaculture Methods
• Joanna Macy’s Great Turning/the Bigger Picture
-Refinement of consciousness as an aspect of EcoConscious l-iving

3- Reconnecting
• Narrative: Yogic Birth- the beginning of deeper Sadhana
-Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga
• Spiritual Practice: a Practical Guide
-Insight- anapana, vipassana, samatha, jhana
-Devotion and Action- Bhakti Yoga and Karma Yoga
• Methodless Methods
-Tao and Zen
-Revising Fukuoka and ‘Do-Nothing Farming’
• Realizing EcoConsciousness/Union

4- The DharmaFarm
• Sirius Community Case Study

Also, I have decided to graduate in January,
as opposed to December originally.
And I still have no idea what will happen after college,
though things may continue on as they always have.
Buddhas in the past, Buddhas in the present, Buddhas in the future,
that's what they tell me.

Does anyone feel what's coming?
We're primed,
we're at the height of some tradjectory.
Are we in that brief and intoxicating moment of weightlessness?

How will we respond?
How will I respond?

We must remember to be as children,
we must humble oursevles in the holiness of the planet,
we must remember our community and our communion,
when hardship arrives.
When, under darkened skies,
we make right and good and beautiful
all that we despoiled.

We underestimate our potential.
Let us CoCreate our shared future,
actualizing it through thought
becoming vision
becoming aspiration
becoming action
becoming fruition.
This is how you grow tasty fruit!
Let's plant tasty thoughts, eh?
Each seed counts...

Peace and ease to you

Hey
Ok
So where am I now?
Indeed.
The fall has come, and school is full tilt.
I watch the frantic faces fly by wasting no time to say hi.
Oh my.
For me, the work is much and yet such a fulfilling trust.
We each have been entrusted with a piece of the truth; our personal truths hold personal meaning but may also be shared through compassionate feeling...
for the healing of beings in need of connection and introspection.
Yes, revealing the truth, the encompassing truth that speaks of our deep union with all beings and with our highest Self. Reflection on this is the name of the game; if we all are just one then we do not need names, our path is the same.
Not a path of shame, but a shared righteous claim. What is this claim?


It is the Great Movement. This is the name given to something un-nameable, pointing a finger into the ether and say, 'there!' Where?
The Great Movement is the process of God returning to itself, through a process of 'involution'. Aurobindo put this forward; its not rightly 'evolution', because that would imply striking outward and upward into new territory. Not so; this Great Movement is a Great Return; a return to our true and essential nature, which is Tao; which is Sunyata; which is atman; which is brahman; which is ishwar; which is that very thing that escapes all attempts to name.

This Great Movement is the focus of my thesis. Though such a title may seem daunting for a simple undergraduate thesis, i have concerned myself with only one aspect of this movement: Union.

Union is the state of being in wholeness or oneness and the process of coming into oneness or integration. I have chosen this word and definition purposefully because it implies both the state and the process- the state and the process are one and the same.

Union is a thesis that i am drawing through my final project in the attempt to articulate the importance of having personal and meaningful experiences of Union in regards to the Human chapter of the Great Movement. I am also concerned with how to bring these experiences about; the methods that precipitate Union.

Ultimately there are many if not countless methods of Union practice. What is important, i feel, is that these experiences are had on a personal and intimate level: the Here-And-Now Experience. The Here-And-Now Experience is this process and state of Union and the Great Movement is the arbitrary name i give to this divine play.

Below is the basic layout of my final project. Currently, i have completed in draft form everything up to chapter 2 and all of part 2.

The Path of the DharmaFarmer- Unity and the Great Movement

Title Page

Dedication

Declaration of Intention

Introduction: Concerning this Work

Table of Contents

Part 1: Unity and the Great Movement

Chapter 1: Orientation

Chapter 2: Aim

Chapter 3: The Doom of Our Time- Global Crisis

Chapter 3: Western Yoga

Chapter 4: The New-Old Vision

Chapter 5: Do Nothing


Part 2: Communal Unity

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Love Made Visible

Chapter 2: Aspects of an EcoVillage

Chapter 3: Co-Creating a Community

Chapter 4: Higher Education

Chapter 5: A Higher Purpose

Chapter 6: Sirius Community- Spiritual Permaculture

Chapter 7: A Personal Look- Member Interviews

Appendices

A: Other Methods for Unification

B: Book List

C: Crafting a Spiritual Div III

The Community Bell in its finished form.

Hi all.
Another transition has occured; my final semester is under way and a solid 7 months of travelling radical experiential education is come to a close.

Now is the time of production, of cultivation, of crafting and polishing to a smooth shine this DharmaFarmer.

But what is the path of the DharmaFarmer?

The influential progenitors of the waning generation have played their part in the Great Movement, and now the waxing generation will do its own part. What will fill the space left by Aurobindo, Masanobu Fukuoka, Arne Naess, Robert Hart, etc?

For my part, I would like to focus my iteration of this Great Movement on the raising or refining of consciousness, and further articulating the use of spiritual practice or 'self-realization' as an agent or facilitator of the Great Movement.

The Movement is called 'Great' because it is 'wide and deep', to borrow a Naess phrase. It is wide in that it has myriad descriptions and myriad functions; it is deep in that it addresses and satisfies superficial as well as subaqueous levels of the experiential being.

Saying 'the Great Movement' is a bit troublesome. Saying this over and over, such a thing can quickly become an misguided maxim or empty decree. As consciousness for me is an essential aspect of my experience of the Great Movement, a desire to lessen consciousness or a lack of desire to further establish and refine consciousness would be counter-productive.

Part of the human experience, or at least my human experience, comes from discovering meaning and value in the world around us. For me, a deepening or refining of meaning comes easily or immediately when i am in an undisturbed, natural environment, such as a mature bamboo grove, or a silent pine stand in the snow, or a black-sand lagoon. Equally in certain human cultivated environments do I feel easily inspired, such as in temples and dojos, around community fires, and especially in permaculture gardens or forest gardens.

For me these settings hold the value of humility or 'proper perspective', and the experience of interconnection. Interconnection as a working hypothesis is taken up quite readily in the east (Buddha: Dependent Co-arising, Veda (Sanatana Dharma): Indra's Net, Bhagavad Gita: Krsna, Ramana Maharshi: Brahma/Self/World, Yogananda: Divine Mother, etc); and more and more the west is understanding these teachers and teachings to be of a highly refined scientific tradition. Yet what are the western equivalents, what does western science have to say?

Some disciplines at the evolving edge of science include agro-ecology, astronomy, quantum physics, molecular biology, neuroscience, and conservation biology. It is incredibly difficult to make any sweeping statements about the hard sciences, but still i will venture a few. First, these disciplines always further illuminate, more than anything else, the scope of our ignorance about ourselves and the world around us. Second, these disciplines exemplify a basic connection of 'things' or a basic non-existence of 'things'. Not that a cup of tea has no existence, it just has no autonomous or intrinsic existence. It's existence is based on the causal existance of the cup, the tea leaves, and the hot water. In this way each phenomenon occuring in space-time is causally related to all other phenomena that have occured, are occuring, and will occur.

This type of connection is immediate and intimate. In analysis of these two terms, I find that one thing immediate and intimate to me is this body, and another this mind, and another these emotions. These three things are so immediate and intimate, in fact, that I call them my own or my self. Thus connection of phenomena becomes interconnection or, further, unification. With the term unification, it is not any more multiple things being or coming together, it is one thing, unified in itself, without a second.

One last statement is that these disciplines are beginning to find active relavence through ethical valuation. This is exemplified in agro-ecology, molecular biology, neurology, and conservation biology. What is meaningful, what is good, what is desired? The pure sciences cannot answer these questions, only science applied through an ethical or philosophical matrix can inspire action.

The OED has this definition for conservation biology: "the branch of biological science concerned with the conservation, management, and protection of vulnerable species, populations, and ecosystems." I wish to draw attention to the phrase 'concerned with'. This implies that this science is not a pure science, but one that draws also from a system of value or meaning. Hard science or categorizations of facts informs action in the case of conservation biology.

The path of the DharmaFarmer is the process of becoming wise individuals and wise communities, acting from a place of solid scientific information married with meaningful philosophical and ethical systems that we each hold on some level of our total being. The sciences of ecology, biology, physics, psychology, etc. are now merging with the timeless teachings of countless saints, charting out the cosmic truths of intimate and immediate connection between all beings and indeed all objects that exist in space-time.

This is my deepest theme for the DharmaFarmer: Unity. Going by many names and explained through many images and analogies, unity can be understood as a basic oneness, singleness, or wholeness of truth or experience.

Here is a small thought experiment. Objects A and B observed. Are A and B the same, different, both, or neither? It is not that A and B are all 'the same' or 'equal', or anything othewise. It could be said that A and B are both qualities or expressions of '!', where '!' is incapturable with words or concepts. As the first line of Tao Te Ching reads, 'Tao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Tao.' In fact (relative in space-time), A and B are not 'the same' or 'equal'. The diversity on the relative level cannot be overlooked, nor should it be. Abundant, ever-evolving diversity, i feel, is a virtue of this Unity or Oneness.

This is equatable to the 'chit' in sat-chit-ananda. It is sometimes translated as 'active consciousness' or 'creative consciousness'. Sat-chit-ananda is said to be the trifold expression of Godhead, advanced by the ancient Vedas as well as contemporary yogis and yoginis. 'Truth-consciousness-bliss' it reads. Truth is that which truly exists; consciousness is the active or creative expression of truth; and bliss is the experience of truth. 'Tat tvam asi' read the Upanishads. 'That thou art'. Brahman is Atman. The trifold quality of Godhead is also the trifold quality of each diversified piece of Godhead. Each of us and the totality of us is the pure expression of Sat-chit-ananda, or so say certain saints.

Now is a time where we begin to see scientists turning toward saints, and saints turning toward scientists. In truth, Siddhartha Guatama, Patanjali, and others were very strict scientists, taking nothing for granted in their experiments of yoga. It is also true that many of the renowned scientists of our time held a special space for the super-mundane in their own personal lives.

Unity, if it is to be purely understood, must be illuminated as objectively as possible, as a theory, AND it must also be experienced consciously as a quality of existence. If unity is not brought to the level of personal experience, how can we expect this movement to be anything but intellectual masturbation? The Great Movement comes from inside each of us, originating in our own personal experience of truth. It must catalyse individual as well as communal growth. The experience of unity must occur on the level of conscious experience.

Now, given the working hypothesis of Unity, what are some scientific/human systems that acknowledge this and set out principles in line with this hypothesis?

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