Tomorrow, I finally move into my new home... the townhouse I'm renting in Ballard.  I'm so psyched.

    It's absolutely amazing to me that almost everyone who hears that I'm choosing to live in Seattle starts with, "Man, you're going to do that commute?"  As if I'm choosing to live in Long Island and work in New Jersey or something.  Sure, it gets busy on some nights, and some nights it doesn't, but Route 520 is only 13 miles long, and I won't be on all of it, and most of that will be moving fairly well.  So, yeah, some nights it'll take 45 minutes to get home... at worst, it might be an hour.  If I plan my time right, and go to the gym, and work from home sometimes, and then travel for business, I'll only have to do the commute maybe 12-15 times/month, and, of those, some will be very easy.  So, you know, that's not such an awful thing.  (Seattlites are such pussies when it comes to driving, though.)

    And, in return, I get an amazing place to live, a neighborhood I love being in, bus stops two blocks away that take me directly to downtown in ten minutes, whenever I feel like it, and all the choices of places to hang out that I could want for the next five years.  Life is good.

    In a sense, I'm sad to leave this corporate housing I've been in for over two months now.  It's, well... home.  I've grown accustomed to it.  It's the most stable thing I've had since I've been out here.  I mean, I don't want to live in Redmond, but I do find myself clinging to each little piece of stability I can find.  So, I jettison this too.  Fuck it all.

    It's certainly true that I've just been waiting to create stability on this coast, and having my own place to live will be the key piece of that.  And, yes, stability is all a fucking illusion, I know.  I'm feeling a lot braver these days about living without it, more than ever, especially for this introvert who couldn't imagine international travel just ten years ago.  I'm actually wondering how having all of my possessions back will influence me.  I might have to shed a bunch just to feel lighter.  I probably should.

    Some people just can't live without stability... same house for 50 years, born-lived-died in the same neighborhood, etc.  I get tired of sameness... I crave change.  Only up to a point, though, I guess.  I'm a little burned out on all the churn right now.  I'm just tired.  I want to rest.  But I just have to be brave for a little bit longer, get settled in Ballard, get the routine going at work, get the social life flowing a bit more, and enjoy the ride.

    Once more into the breach....

    I had a thought a few weeks ago... if I hold the position that all creation is equally filled with Spirit, and that I am, in fact, simply a manifestation of the one Spirit that exists in the unmanifest realm, and from which all creation springs, then I have to ask myself a question:

If God visited my house, what would I feed Him?  And if I'm fully Spirit... well... what would I feed Spirit?  As I reflect on the divine spark within me, I ask:  what would I feed myself as God?

    Would I invite God over to my house and offer Oreo cookies?  Or heavily processed frozen items?  Or items with lots of high-fructose corn syrup?  Or a plastic wrapped, mass-produced , preservative-laden loaf of bread?  Or Coke and Pepsi?

    Obviously, I wouldn't.

    Wouldn't I serve fresh fruits and vegetables?  Wouldn't I serve fresh, high-quality meats and all-natural cheese?  Wouldn't I serve freshly baked bread from a bakery?  Wouldn't I cook these with great delicacy and proper spices?  Wouldn't I simply offer water and tea to drink with the meal?

    So... um... what would I feed God (who happens to be manifest as me, among everything else)?  It's time to rethink deeply what food habits I have.

    Since I've had that thought, sometimes I've had the awareness of what I'm doing to ask myself that before choosing my food.  Sometimes I haven't, and just acted out of habit.  But it's a practice to think this way, and it will become more automatic, and I expect that I'll feel better once it does.

    But it's a good question to ask yourself, isn't it?

    I've been long overdue in writing this entry.  My second week out here in Seattle, I attended the Ken Wilber Meetup and met some amazing people.

    I just have to observe how fortunate I am to have landed here in a completely new city and to have found this group.  I'm absolutely humbled to see so many people who have such long time, committed practices, and to see how many new people continue to come to the group and participate.

    I already have good friendships from the group, and I look forward to deepening them as I spend more time here.

    We meet once a month in a room upstairs at a coffee shop in the University District.  (Cafe Allegro is incredibly kind to host us and allow us to reserve that room... show them some love if you're in the neighborhood.)  My three meetings now have see anywhere from 25-30 people show up.  Generally, we'll start with a short meditation to set the mood, and then listen to a recording from one of the standard Integral sources, and use that as a launching pad for a discussion.
    After we're done, some smaller group makes it way over to Ruby's on University Way for drinks / food.  (Another good place, by the way... try the Chicken Tajine if you can.)  And then we hang out as long as we feel like, chat some more, informally, and split up.

    But that's just the mechanics of it all.  What really matters is the level of sincerity with which this whole thing is approached.

    If you're out there reading this, feeling like you're the only person you know who understands Integral and AQAL... you're not.  And if it's really important enough to you, and you want to be somewhere with a group of people to help you fill out the LL and LR quadrants of Integral with you, then think about moving here and joining us.  Or move to Boston and join my other amazing Integral group (I miss them so much).

    No, don't move to Boston, Boston sucks.  Move to Seattle.  :-)

    I was just reading this article from the New York Times about the strange affinity people have for their Googlegängers.

    I don't have one, though.  As far as I know, I'm the only Scott Arbeit in the United States, and I think I'm the only Scott Arbeit in the world.

    That makes the selection of user id's on web sites really easy for me... no one has ever taken mine before me, and if I find that mine is already taken, I know for a fact that it's because I must have done it already and forgotten about it.  In that regard, it would be really annoying to be Amy Smith or John Brooks or something like that.

    But when I search for my name on Google, all I get is me.  It would be kind of interesting if there were at least one more Scott Arbeit, kind of like an alternate universe view of what that's like.  But, it's not to be.  Oh well.

    It's kind of like wondering what it would be like to have a twin... but all I can do is wonder.  I wonder if he'd be more confident or less confident than me?  Would he be as smart?  Would he be a better athlete?  I know... this is silly, but compelling in a strange way.

    The Dalai Lama has arrived here, and today begun a multi-day event called "Seeds of Compassion," which will include speaking events and panels at several large venues, and even a Dave Matthews concert tonight.

    The University of Washington is one of the venues that is hosting His Holiness, and they televised the first event live, which consisted of a panel discussion about raising children with more compassion and emotional alignment.  I personally felt compassion for His Holiness, having to put up with an awful lot of Green perspectives, and what seemed like very little understanding of the nature of emptiness.  Nothing he's not used to, I'm sure.

    One particularly interesting note from an article about the trip in The New York Times had this line:

Yet Mr. Pettis, of the monastery, estimated that more than 100,000 people now practiced Tibetan Buddhism here, by most accounts a huge increase in the last two decades, even if the noninstitutional nature of Buddhism makes clean counts elusive.

People move to the Northwest “to separate, to differentiate themselves from their families and their traditions,” said James K. Wellman Jr., an associate professor in the comparative religion department at the University of Washington. “And then they get here, and there’s not many people, so there’s this sense of isolation. There’s an ambivalence about it. They both love it and they wonder, ‘Well, how can I connect?’ ”

    That's fascinating for two reasons.  First of all... 100,000 Tibetan Buddhists around here?  That's a hell of a number.  Even if he's wrong by 100%, 50,000 is an amazing number.  As a percentage of the population, that would have to put Seattle at the top of the list of Most Buddhist Cities in the United States.

    Second of all, his notion that there's a sense of isolation about it.  And I think that's probably true, but not particular to this place, or to this flavor of religion.  Many of us are on an alternative path, outside of the mainstream, and there are costs and challenges that come with that.  Nothing onerous or too difficult to deal with, but they're there.  I'd ask, though: if there's that much of a sense of isolation, why does the Seattle Buddhism Meetup group have so few members?  Is everyone else just satisfying themselves by shopping for organic goods at PCC and driving hybrids and leaving it at that?

    The demand for tickets for his events has been amazing, and the constant asking "Does anyone have an extra that they want to sell?" that I've seen has been heartwarming.  Before you ask, no, I don't have tickets, and I'm not attending... the teachings at these events won't be particularly esoteric, and I'll catch the video.

    But the point stands... there's something special about Seattle, and I don't know where everyone is who is also on the path, but I sure hope to find them.  I've already found many.

    In news that The-World-Is-Not-Going-To-Hell, it seems that there are a significantly higher number of undergraduates who are majoring in Philosophy across this great nation.

    This is exciting news for someone like me, who, although not taking a major in philosophy (my love for computers has always come first), has spent a lot of time and effort reading philosophy and feeling incredibly lucky to be able to learn from the work and thinking that has come before me.

    There are several pieces of Ayn Rand's wisdom that have survived in me, although I've long since discarded Objectivism as my worldview (although it is a particularly well-developed point-of-view at Orange).  She always said that "Everyone has a philosophy, whether they know it or not."  And I've thought that was true since the first time I read it... maybe I even thought that before I read it.

    With that in mind, I've always tried to make explicit that which was implicit in my own thinking.  I always felt that if I had a thought, but I couldn't articulate how I got there, that it was a matter of working within to discover the unconscious patterns that caused it to arise, and which therefore must sit within my own philosophy.  How could a thought arise that was not completely explainable by one's own philosophy?  And if such a thought arose, it was a signal that my philosophy needed to expand or be modified to take it into account. (A sudden flashback to long phone conversations with a beautiful girl when I was 16 or 17... isn't that exactly why hyper-intellectuals like me fall in love?)

    Similarly, I've always seen philosophy as the underpinning to all of the various means that people use to understand the world and human nature.  Perhaps your preferred lens into human nature is visual art, perhaps it's music or fashion, perhaps it's history, or business, or psychology.  No matter what it is, philosophy sits underneath it, explaining in precise detail what patterns of thought come to exist to be able to set the worldview that would allow your interpretations to exist at all.  And so I work personally to make explicit in philosophy that which is implicit in so many other things.

    So... welcome all you crazy young people studying philosophy.  How impractical of you... but, allow me-at-38 to assure you-at-20:  You'll be fine.  You'll be better than fine.  You'll be ahead of most everyone you know in understanding aspects of the world.  Some of your peers will "get ahead" and make more money... but that's not why we're born here.

    And once you get through it... please do spend a little bit of time on Integral Philosophy.  You won't come across it on your campus yet, but it's there, and it's real, and it's going to blow your mind if you haven't seen it yet.

    And besides, chicks dig the long ball....

Jenna Schaal-O’Connor, a 20-year-old sophomore who is majoring in cognitive science and linguistics, said philosophy had other perks. She said she found many male philosophy majors interesting and sensitive.

“That whole deep existential torment,” she said. “It’s good for getting girlfriends.”

    Here's another brilliant column from Thomas P.M. Barnett.  There are many, many points to consider in the piece, but the one I'll highlight relates to my own recent experience.

Expecting China to suddenly turn loose Tibet or Xinjiang is far-fetched. We may not care for its policy of settling Han Chinese out west, but I can find you plenty of Lakota and Mexicans who still feel the same way about past American actions.

Don't hold your breath on the U.S. returning Texas or the two Dakotas anytime soon.

With Beijing, better to shine spotlights on religious freedom and environmental degradation, two issues where we'd find plenty of ordinary Chinese in our corner.

China's becoming a lot more religious, common when a country experiences a lot of positive economic change, and its grass-roots environmental movement is growing by leaps and bounds. By tapping into those growing popular sentiments, we give Beijing more palatable choices than dismembering the country.

    The Dalai Lama was here in Seattle last week, and so the Tibet issue is everywhere amongst my friends, and the demonization of China is in full swing.

    Now, I don't deny that the Chinese are doing some very unpleasant things in terms of Tibet, and in terms of manipulating the media around that.  I don't like it, I don't condone it, I think it's reprehensible.

    With that said, looking at China today only through the lens of Tibet is like looking at the United States only through the lens of New Orleans.  There's a lot more going on, mostly good, some bad, and we're talking about countries that each span a continent.  The economic connectivity that we drive, and the connections we make with the growing middle class in China, will, over time, get us many of the improvements in governmental transparency, human rights, and political freedoms that we seek.

    But it won't happen overnight, and it won't happen if the only issue we seem to care about is how they took over a neighboring territory 49 years ago (before many of you were born, I suspect), even if it's a territory that is the home of one of the most peaceful and spiritually advanced traditions in the history of the world.  I mean, sure, Absolut set off a little controversy showing how big Mexico would be if the United States hadn't invaded Texas, but at some point we all have to see a larger context for all of this, and take the good with the bad, and be realistic about the unbelievable good we can do for 1.3 billion people if we act as partners in China's inevitable rise this century, rather than a competitor or enemy.

    What do you think the United States looked like to the more developed nations in Europe at the turn of the 20th Century?  How did we behave?  How well were our laws enforced?  How much power did oligarchs have?  We so quickly forget our own history.

    On the subject of forgetting history, a friend yesterday told me that he had seen a very funny picture of a protester at a rally against China hosting the Olympics (taken from Andrew Sullivan's blog):



    Stuff like this doesn't make us look any smarter, now, does it?