"What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: Our life is the creation of our mind."

- Budha 

This was something I was asked several days ago...  

Let's see:

• Do saving children lives from death at a Nursery Intensive Care or Emergency Room count?.
• Do receiving a drowned child at my office, performing the resuscitation and taking her to an Emergency Room; and saving her life without any brain damage count?.
• Do working against all expectations to be where I am as a martial artist count?.
• Do opening a dojo with almost all beginners and developing and teaching them how to...from scratch counts?.
  

Sensei Myriam 

"Whatever we put our attention on grows." 

-Wendy Palmer 

What it will be?...

Sensei Myriam 

"... The world is sacred.

It can't be improved.

If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.

If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it..."

- Chapter 29, Tao Te Ching

The opposite of debasing will step forward when we stand from a different point of view. No more I/You. Separated by artificial instruments of categorization and differentiation. It is more a We/Us the standpoint where everything is understood and viewed with an adequate - and healthier - perspective. It is like everything else in our lives a matter of choice. And choice is a matter of freedom. Yet, what kind of freedom. Let me share some words,

" From one point of view, freedom and responsibility are intertwined.... [what is between the portion I've shared from the book, The Practice Of Freedom, I invite you to buy the book to enjoy it]... From the point of view of community, the two - self and other - can't be separated: what one person does affects other people."

True freedom is not lacking what will make it accountable to the rest of the world. Because in the end, as the poet said, "no man is an island".  We may think and feel ourselves as individuals  - and in a sense, very limited sense, as individuals we proclaim to be - we are. 

When we stand at the rock of the I/You our vision is limited to our differences and categorizations. It is limited to our own possibilities and capabilities. We'll see things, places and individuals as utensils to be used and managed according to what I want, desire and need. This is a very limited view indeed. Even if I feel 'responsible' for what I do to you it is a very limited type of responsibility.

What about a different viewpoint?. Instead of the rock of my own individuality, wouldn't it be  better the Everest-like mountaintop of the We/Us point of view?. What a view from there...!

Sensei Myriam 

How do we do this?. To debase is to "lower in character, quality, or value; to degrade."  Every time we take things or persons for granted, just for the service they give or the utility we may obtain from this service. By doing so we disconnect, disengage or detach from anything or everything else. We loose connection and extricate ourselves from what is the true nature of things. This separation makes us use without taking into consideration the broader nature of everything that surrounds us and establishes the artificial separation that exists only in our minds.  Classical science promoted this kind of lack of relationship in the world we live in. And a century later quantum science rescued us from this error. In just one sentence we can sum the insight of all our inter-relations, the observer affects the observed. There's no way to separate them, one and the other are part of the whole. And by separating ourselves the door is opened to debase and to degrade, to devalue by categorizing some things higher and more worthy than others. 

The final result is the paradoxical and unknowingly  result that by separating , categorizing and classifying we are devaluing and debasing none other than ourselves in the process. Because when we see one bigger than others. Been that one ourselves...somebody else is also measuring us in the same way.

Sensei Myriam 

What is this?. I came to the phrase while turning the pages from the book, Leadership and the New Science by Margaret J. Wheatley. She was explaining how science in the pursue of scientific truth and knowledge had disengaged itself from the object it wanted to understand and comprehend. And by doing this had lost all connection with it with negative consequences. There was no communication or better yet, no communion with nature, the object of  science  attention  and inquiry.

And I thought, "Don't we do the same every time we relate with nature as a mere object from which we derive and obtain whatever it can provide us?. Is not our relation with plants, animals, the Earth a disengaged one when we consider them as just things to be used?.  The phrase was taken from this paragraph I want to share from the book:

"The removal of human experience from the scientific world view had one other surprising consequence. Though scientist had engaged  in  a successful dialogue with nature, as Prigogine and Stengers describe it, an unexpected outcome of their work "was the discovery of a silent world. This is the paradox of classical science. It revealed a dead, passive nature, a nature that behaves as an automaton which, once programmed, continues to follow the rules inscribed  in the program. In this sense, the dialogue with nature isolated humans from nature instead of bringing them closer to it...It seemed that science debased everything it touched." 

But as an individual trained in scientific matters I can say as so many others had, that this view of nature came from the particular perspective or view point classical science chose to stand from to observe the whole of nature. Western culture took this perspective, but it was not a universal one. Oriental culture knew another type of relating to nature. They had a different point of view. But, that could be conversation theme for another day. Let's return to this debasing theme....

Sensei Myriam