Please do this now!
1. Work on your insides. Ask, "Who am I?" Know yourself. Be compassionate with yourself. Forgive yourself. Turn on your mind sometimes. Off at others. Meditate. Meditate. Meditate! Contemplate. See where it all goes.
2. Stay involved and connected with family, friends, communities, like-minded people and movements. Strengthen genuine relationships with community (real or virtual).
3. See that you make—yeah, "make," since it has to be forced in yourself sometimes—people and nature and the universe all matter as much to you as you do (or more), not because it's the "right" thing or "spiritual" thing to do, but because it just *is* what you do. No other reason.
4. Your environment is your life. Everything you perceive—see, hear, touch, smell, taste—is a physical interaction with the outside world. Example: when you see, light energy absorbed by your eyes excites electrons in your eyes' pigment molecules to a higher energy level, and in the subsequent relaxation of that energy, it triggers the nervous impulse to your brain's visual centers; the light literally becomes you, physically and as part of a mental map. Likewise, everything you are is constantly given back up to the physical environment. Now think of how much more that may be when you factor in the beyond-knowable! Call it the unknowable, that which the mind—even with a hypothetical, perfect body of scientific knowledge—could never penetrate (and, as a scientist, I can tell you *that* is the case), the Absolute, Self, the Uncaused Cause or God; it doesn't matter what you call it.
5. Minimize your participation in the consumer economy. Live as off-the-grid as possible. Buy as little as possible. Stay away from debt. Cut out extraneous crap. Reuse things. DIY. Be resourceful. Be materially independent.
6. Cultivate cognitive dissonance in yourself and others. It sounds weird to work for calm and peace and then mess with it, but a side of you must be a bit "on edge" to keep you progressing, so you can achieve deeper calm and peace. It's not just all about feel-good stuff. Get out of the comfort zone. Push your own consciousness into viewing things in a different way, and then resolving the resulting inner tension as best you can, going back to the questions raised in your mind over time. Try to promote—even provoke in a good-hearted way—cognitive dissonance in others. Mess a bit with their way of looking at things, assumptions, etc. Try to get them to ask questions about their own life and their relationship to people and things around them. Make them, in a sense, uncomfortable with how they think and act, so their frames of reference may shift as yours' do, and they may come to realize a deeper nature of connectedness and reality.
7. Don't be evil. Be good. Peace and be well!
— Gabriel Fenteany, February 10, 2016
Open your eyes and see!
