D.M. Kenyon's Blog, page 8
February 27, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Intention – Light A Prayer On Fire
Today's Exercise: Light A Prayer On Fire
Spend a few minutes thinking about the one thing you wish you could do for the world and the life in it.
On a clean piece of paper or a piece of stationery, hand-write your wish for the world and sign your name to it.
Take your prayer paper and some matches or a lighter and step OUTSIDE.
In a safe place, light your prayer on fire.
Training Note:
Clearly this must be done in safety, but even in our modern times the human relationship to fire still has places where it can be safely exercised. Make sure that you are very intentional about what you write and think it through. Sign you name to claim it as your intention. Lighting it on fire is a gesture of broadcast to the world, but it also makes it impossible to take your prayer back. This little ritual doesn't burn the paper, it burns the intention into your mind.
Karmic Benefits:
Clarity: the exercise has you think through what is really important to you and what your life stands for. When you are clear about an intention it becomes manifest around you without much effort, almost magically, because it is present in you mind to make real.
Commitment: by burning the prayer you are promising yourself that you will not and cannot take it back. We make promises like this all the time and they last five minutes. When we step out of our normal routine and swear by fire, we hold our intention with a whole new intentionality.
Causing Reality: By making an actual gesture rather than having a passing thought, you have already taken action on your intention. You have brought into the physical world. Even though it may only be a seed, it now lives in the same dimension as you do. Placing an intention the physical world is the first step to causing the benefit that are trying to create. After this exercise what there is for you to do is find every opportunity to make that seed grow.
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February 26, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Awareness – Taste Your Food
Today's Exercise: Taste Your Food
Pick a meal and sit down to eat it.
Take one full minute to think about what you are about to eat and where it comes from.
Take another minute to think about why your body needs the food and that it is about to be part of your body.
Smell what you are eating even if it is saltine cracker. Chew slowly and think about the flavors you are experiencing.
Training Note:
We almost never smell or taste our food. We allow ourselves to have a flavor rush, in other words, an emotional response, but we rarely actually think about what we are actually eating as a matter of fact. This contributes to overeating because we too often use food as an emotional pacifier instead of fuel. That is because our eating experience is usually not based on what is actually happening.
Karmic Benefits:
Health: Relating to food as a fuel and not as an emotional pacifier is a the basis for establishing a healthy relationship with your body.
Presence: eating is an important human function and yet most people are barely aware that they do it. Paying attention when you eat, to the process of eating, locates you as an organism in a food chain.
Connectedness: Food comes from your environment. Understanding your place in the natural cycle of life makes you capable of being a responsible member of the biosphere.
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February 25, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Chain Reaction Compassion – Empower A Clerk
Today's Exercise: Empower A Clerk
Go to a grocery store and check out with a real cashier.
Ask the clerk how their day is going. Be prepared for a brush-off answer. Then say, "No, really, how are you holding up? Are people treating you well today?" Be prepared for a shock. Thank them for taking care of you and for the job that they do. Let them feel that you like them.
You can substitute a customer service representative on the phone with a big company for this exercise.
Spend 1 full minute meditating on the abuse that these service people endure and how it hurts them to be treated like non-humans.
Training Note:
People abuse clerks. They think it does not matter, but it does. The harm that a clerk endures by being yelled at and abused is real harm, over what, a toaster? When a clerk has been harmed they tend to be cold or mean to the next ten people they deal with. It is a gift that keeps on giving. This exercise cuts off the chain of harm and reverses it. It also serves to make us aware of the harm we do to others when we do not pay attention.
Karmic Benefits:
Heal the harm: a tiny act of acknowledging humanity can erase a lot of harm. It gives people energy that they then share with the next 10 people in line.
Plant the seed of benefit: a simple act of kindness puts compassion on the mind of the recipient.
Give the gift that keeps on giving: they then come from that compassion instead of the nastiness that a more thoughtless person left behind. This state of mind transfers from person to person as the day progresses.
You come to know yourself as an antidote to indifference and harm. It is a real transformative power.
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February 24, 2012
The Word: Living In Language
A couple of weeks ago, my good friend Terri Long, author of In Leah's Wake invited me to participate in a short essay extravaganza on her blog site entitled For the Love of Love. Forty authors were asked to write short essays of various types on the topic of love including passionate love, the love of family. the love of animals and the love of language. I chose to write on the subject of the love of language. Below you will find my short essay The Word that was featured on Terri's site on February 20, 2012. You can see the essays submitted by the other writers that participated in the event at Terri's site.
The Word
by D. M. Kenyon
At the beginning of things, there is the word. At the beginning of a house there is a humble prayer for shelter, be it whispered, sung or shouted, an idea, a design. Without the word, there is no home, no hearth, no comfy chair.
At the beginning of life, there is the word. When disentangled and laid flat, the word that makes all life on Earth is two yards long, spoken in parallel sentences, couplets of verse, billions of characters in length though separated by a space that is a mere ten atoms wide. In the beginning of life, nature speaks in double helixes, a tongue that is understood by all species, plant or animal.
At the beginning of love, there is the word. There is the idea of her, a beauty indescribable, that must be spoken of, if only to myself, so that I may grant her being in my world. And I so earnestly want her being in my world that I would speak of her in a thousand sonnets before God so that this love so well known to me might inspire the transformation of mortal clay into divine creation, and hence, grant me the pleasure of her touch.
At the end of everything, there is no word. Its disappearance is the end of luminosity. A darkness not even known by the absence of what can no longer be seen. A silence that knows not even empty space, for there is no word to grant dimension. There is only a nothing so profound that it cannot be known, for there is no vessel to carry any knowledge of it. For if we form a single word to describe it, we defile its true emptiness with talk of angels dancing on the head of a pin.
So sing your love into our ears. Sing loudly so that we may know it and rise up in a chorus of beautiful things that are first whispered of in our dreaming and then carried upon our breath so that we may come to know them in all intimacy.
DMK, February, 2012
[Post Graphic: The Tibetan script for "Om Mani Pema Hung", one of the most commonly used mantras chanted to bring benefit into the world.]
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Solitude – Breathe Air In Peace
Today's Exercise: Practice Breathing In Peace
This will take 5 minutes and you need to be alone and in a quiet place.
Turn off your electrical devices. Do not cheat and set your phone to vibrate. The world can do with out you for 5 minutes.
Sit up straight and draw in a long breath. Exhale taking the same amount of time as your inhale.
Think only of the sound of your own breath and the smell of the air. It is okay if you mind wanders a bit but bring it back to the sound of breathing and the smell of the air.
Training Note:
Most people breath like dogs. The do not fully inhale and exhale, they pant. When you do this exercise, breath in through your nose and out through your mouth. You nose is a filter and it cleans the air. Listen to the sound. You breath all day and do not notice this sound. Smell the air around you. You rarely pay attention to smell, but every where you are always has one. If you take a full inhale and exhale you will be breathing in substantially more air than normal. You blood will finally have all the oxygen it really needs.
Karmic Benefits:
Breathing fully, is one of the best things you can do for your body and yet we rarely do it. Being fully aerated helps us fight disease, gives us stamina and creates alertness.
Tuning in has many benefits as well. I makes you aware of details that you often miss. It shows you how completely unconscious you are throughout most of your day. Most of us are barely present during our day.
A calmer, more energized you is much more pleasant to be around and cuts off the karmic feedback that we generate for ourselves when we put stress into our living space, especially around others.
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February 23, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Contribution – Let Traffic Cut In Front Of You
Today's Exercise:
Let Traffic Cut In Front Of You (Or hold doors for others if you do not drive)
Take a minute to think about making life a little easier for others – even if they don't know you did it and especially if they don't deserve it.
Meditate for 1 minute on giving at least 5 small gifts of service to others today.
Let at least 5 people cut in front of you in traffic or let 5 people go first at an intersection. If you do not drive, hold doors open for others or get them coffee.
Training Note:
Notice when you are tempted to take care of yourself first. Notice when you pretend not to see someone so that you do not have to be considerate. Do not beat up on yourself about meeting your inner sleazebag. Just notice him/her and have a chuckle. Awareness, by itself changes behavior and attitudes. All there is for you to do is let someone cut in front of you or hold the door.
Karmic Benefits:
Chain Reaction Compassion: Every time you make the slightest contribution to others, you remove a small amount of tension or stress from their world. Some may even notice your kindness, but most will not. When the person you helped moves on down the karmic stream, they are engaging others with less negativity which means you are helping the people they meet later in the day.
Adding Joy to Existence: People will enjoy your presence because you are a kind to them.
Accumulating Merit: You are providing an antidote to tension and stress, if only in a small dose. It adds up over time.
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February 22, 2012
The New Literary Democracy: Differentiating The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
They say that 82% of Americans would like to write a book. Tens of thousands of them do. The vast majority of the books that are flooding into the muddled market space of independent publishing are read only by the author and the author's mother. This is the Gutenberg revolution on steroids. Anyone with the will to write can upload their books on Amazon, Smashwords and Createspace, to name only a few, for free and have instant global distribution. Of course, like all mass processes, no one is going to notice that you book is even there without some intervening process.
The question on the minds of most in the literary world is – is this massive flow of written words competing for attention a good thing?
There can be no doubt that the former literary establishment that used to dominate the publication of the written word like haughty aristocrats denied all too many worthy voices the right to be heard and be considered by society at large. The best book ever written in Twentieth Century may very well be rotting in a three-ring binder in a landfill having been discarded by its frustrated author many years ago. In the bourgeois era of literature, it was not good enough to be an excellent author, you had to be connected, or by some miracle be noticed by an industry insider, if you ever hoped to find an audience. There was simply no other way to get distribution. One has to wonder how many voices of sheer genius were shut out in the cold never to be heard.
The internet has punched a hole in the literary establishment and it is bleeding profusely. It will not fade away entirely just like the recording industry has not faded away entirely. But it will never again possess the glamour of exclusivity that it once enjoyed. Like the damage done to theatre by movies in the early Twentieth Century, the literati will continue to control what is left of the most influential sources of newspaper and other mass media resources for book promotion and review. The New York Times best sellers lists will remain as the principle vehicle into sales hyperspace. Oprah will still have the power to make a best seller by merely whispering a title to her following. All the while, indie writers will struggle to sell a hundred copies a book through the enormous effort of ten thousand tweets or more.
This is what market space reorganization looks like after a major technological innovation. The old guard dies or declines while many fortune hunters rush in to try to compete for the low hanging fruit that is usually gone after the first few prospectors arrive. This ignites competition and innovation as the fortune hunters scramble to get to the gold buried deeper and deeper in the ground. Eventually, a new guard emerges from the cloud of confusion and chaos that will ultimately stratify the market space and become the latest version of the new world order. A decade from now there will be a new aristocracy and a new market dogma creating an all too familiar system of market domination and exclusivity that identifies and promotes some quality products, but also creates barriers to entry for everything else. This is natural evolution of an emerging market resulting in inevitable market domination. Of course, it is also the process by which old guards are slain by new technologies.
We are witnessing the literary version of the 1848 California Gold Rush. In the middle of the Nineteenth Century, thousands upon thousands of speculators and prospectors flocked to California to try to seize upon an unexploited opportunity. Very, very few reaped any benefit at all while many, in fact the majority, were ruined by it. Some of the most successful beneficiaries were not prospectors, but people who provided goods and services to the horde. 1848 was a great year to be in the covered wagon business or to own an iron forge that made pickaxes. Unlike the California Gold Rush, the global literary boom will not leave people frozen and starving to death in the Rocky Mountains. But it will waste millions and millions of man-hours of time that could have been redirected at more certain forms of prosperity.
Opportunities attract dreamers. Like the 1848 Gold Rush, the Oklahoma Land Boom and the Tech Boom of the 1990s, millions will be inspired to seek their fortune in independent literature only to become lost in the crowd. This market space is already filled to an absurd level of overcrowding and is only just getting started. At the ground floor of market organization are the providers of the essential tools required for entry into the market space. Amazon, Smashwords and others providing free publishing services for any and all literary prospectors rushing to stake claim are already the true success stories in the independent literature market.
On the heels of the primary suppliers of the essential tools of the industry, comes a wave of secondary services that help literary prospectors compete in the market space. There are blog theme designers, cover designers, editorial services and proof readers racing to the scene of the rush, not to write the next Moby Dick, but to make money off of the thousands of writers, most of whom who will never make it. These secondary industry service providers actually have a higher chance of business success than their customers in that they feed off of the hopeful much like saloon owners in the old West.
The third wave are the market organizers. Already there is a short list of very influential blogs that can boost readership by thousands of readers with a single post. While this submarket is still very ill-defined as of yet, but it will eventually contain only a handful of truly influential review sources that the market comes to trust. That credibility is being earned right now as these review blogs tear through the volume of material to identify the diamonds in the muck that have the potential to gather large audiences.
In time, larger media outlets will eventually become the gatekeepers acting as a quality filter for the market. It takes time to build a reputation for reliability in product evaluation. The New York Times Book Review is a branded service that had to be developed over decades of careful attention to quality of service and reliability of product. The heart of the matter is that the New York Times cannot afford to recommend books that will not appeal to a broad audience so it simply does not do high lob reviews for bad books regardless of financial backing or social influence.
The truth of emerging markets is that in the beginning getting there first, or getting there with some homemade advantage will benefit the first arrivals. The success of Amanda Hawkings and John Locke will become increasingly rare over time as competition forces quality to become an issue. Even successful indie writers are already protecting their turf by hiring professional editors and proof-readers as soon as they have the resources to afford it. They have already raised the bar for what will and will not be successful in the long term in the independent literature market.
The cover of William Lee's "Junkie"
As happened in the great eras of "Penny Dreadfuls" and pulp fiction, millions of dollars is already being spent ninety-nine cents at a time on trashy e-books. Few of these books wills sell in volume, but as a whole they have already become big business. The traditional genres of pulp fiction ,like erotica romance novels, will reap the biggest rewards in this digital pulp market place. There will be trends like vampire and zombies stories that will only yield a very few success stories. If you are writing a vampire novel these days, you are in all likelihood wasting your time if you are writing to make money. That ship has sailed and there is already a market rebellion against vampire stories underway as many readers recoil from the over-saturation of the market by that particular theme. But new and similar themes will arise. They will bring forth greater and greater level of originality that what will be quickly inundated by a wave of cheap imitations.
Only certain types of themes, like erotica, romance, mystery and action lend themselves to the digital pulp audience. The pulp fiction audience, by definition, consumes large quantities of cheap stories for the thrill of it and not the thoughtfulness of it. The pulp fiction industry, however, is not a trifling matter. It has been big business, historically speaking . It has also given birth to a wide variety of literature that has had substantial longevity. In the Nineteenth Century, for example, following the invention of cheap typesetting and high-pulp newsprint, a literary boom occurred as industrial printing houses published thousands and thousands of cheap stories for the mass market. Called "Penny Dreadfuls", these often poorly written and usually serialized stories cost little to buy and very little to produce. The ever-increasing literacy of Victorian England and the United States, especially among boys, created an enormous market for these often scandalous stories. This gave way to the "dime novel" in the United States that often sensationalized the news form the Western frontier. In the early Twentieth Century, dime novels evolved into comic books. As more and more women become socially independent, the romance novel became popular having been considered unladylike in previous generations.
The new era of digital pulp has arrived. The ninety-cent e-book is the new Penny Dreadful. It is interesting to note that, historically speaking, very few authors have ever prospered from pulp fiction. The same cannot be said for the publishers of that material. Because the e-book can be made and distributed for free, you can count on the big winner in the digital pulp fiction market will be companies like Amazon. This is simply history repeating itself.
But what is to become of the writers of serious literary fiction? The truth is that those aspiring to reach a large audience with a serious piece of literature must fight the fight that has always been fought. For serious writers that struggle is for recognition and acknowledgement of talent, artistry and message. This has always required the attention of a very few influential market makers. At the present time, hiring literary agents to get the attention of these market makers is still the quickest route to success. It is not, however, the only way.
In the near future, expect the emergence of a market organizing service, possibly something like Kirkus Reviews, that will be capable of reviewing massive volumes of literature with an objective grading system that informs the market of readers what is and is not worth buying. Amazon and Smashwords have attempted to develop this process by a system of reader reviews that it is available for any and all of its books. Readers, however, are becoming savvy to lack of reliability of consumer-driven evaluations. Everyone writer knows how to start out with a five-star review on Amazon. (Isn't that right, Mom?) This review process is particularly vulnerable to market mischief. Recently, an author that I know of who has written a controversial book fictionalizing Christian history, came under attack by fake reviewers assaulting her book on theological grounds. It is a very dangerous proposition to allow fanatics to trash a book because it offends their theology. This is the digital version of book burning.
Like all evaluations left in the hands of large masses of people, the intellectual merit will find its lowest common denominator. This explains why something like Jersey Shore is still on national television. When evaluated by a mass audience, it passes muster even though no one with a IQ over "completely retarded" would watch it.
At the risk of overexposing my erudition, I could care less about what the masses think about a book. I want to locate the books that my great grandchildren will consider classics. Because the market space is currently in a chaotic mess, I rely heavily on reviews and recommendations from people I trust. A review process that includes most, if not all books, and helps the reader accurately identify his or her own tastes and interests while giving some idea of the quality of writing and structure to be found in a book is the next great innovation waiting to be invented. Like every emerging market, eventually there will be market miners that can find the gems in the trash heap and bring them to the surface so that we all may benefit.
It remains to be seen as to whether or not big players like Amazon will eventually start throwing up barriers to market entry that force a select few books to the surface based on selection criteria that is d more market control than it is quality identification. This kind of development is usually the sign that a market has matured and is ready for a new democratic revolution. We will have to wait to see how this plays out. In the meantime, indie writers will have to keep tweeting in the darkness hoping to find a reader who is listening.
So is the new democracy of digital literature a good thing? It is only if it increases the possibility that true talent will be found regardless of the wealth and social connection of the author. The world is and has always been in need of the best ideas of the human race regardless of where they come from. The democratization of literature requires us to sift through the mass rabble of writing that will make no difference to humanity. We should rightfully remain indifferent to bad writing. But at the same time, we have great need of a system that offers the possibility that somewhere in this sea of seven billion shivering monkeys, writing unnoticed in darkest corners of our collective consciousness, we might find the one or two who have the next best ideas on how to survive, prosper and be happy. Such a system or process could only help us become a better species.
February 21, 2012
Karma Builder: Today's Karmic Workout: Gratitude – Thank A Teacher
Today's Exercise: Thank A Teacher
Identify a person who as taught you something that is valuable
Meditate on the value and benefit you have received from this knowledge
Contact the person and thank them for the knowledge being specific as to exactly what it is you learned and how it helped you
Training Note:
You sometimes learn things from people and they were not aware that they taught you anything. Make sure that you tell them exactly what you learned from them. The point is to let them see the good that they have done by seeing what they done whether it was on purpose or not. The lesson you learned must be positive and truly beneficial. Do not thank your ex-husband to teaching you how to avoid jerks. Cynicism creates bad karma.
Karmic Benefits:
You become of aware of the contributions that people have made to you and experience gratitude and love. Over time, this makes you create gratitude in your life at will and opens your eyes to the beauty of that gets contributed to you every day.
You awaken others to the fact that they contribute, are heroes and make a difference. This empowers others and brings the consciousness of contribution to mind for them making it all the more likely that they will keep contributing.
You provide an antidote to the sense that people of have that they are alone, cut off and do not matter.
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February 20, 2012
Christian Kindness On The Road To Nirvana
February 19, 2012
The Oldest Living Things
