Even before I took up Busting Loose, I was becoming less and less interested in the things of this world. It started about a year ago when my partner and I decided to split up. The impending end of that phase of our long-term relationship scared me straight.
    Almost overnight, I lost interest in cable TV, politics -- then news in general. To put this in perspective, I was a newspaper reporter/editor for 25 years. it was the height of the presidential campaign and I was watching MSNBC political coverage and reading political blogs 6-8 hours a day. News junkie does not even begin to cover it. I wanted to know every twist in the campaign and lambaste everyone on websites who thought differently than me. Finally, last July, I decided who I was going to vote for, that nothing was going to change and I'd tune back in on Election Day. I did, said a prayer for Obama, and tuned back out.
    From a Phase 1 perspective, I had been in denial for a long time that TV, politics, sports, cruising the Internet were merely huge time sucks which took away from other things I might want to do. My judgment was that they were distractions for my unhappiness in my relationship and my life. They were a lot of things, except supportive. But I found justifications everywhere.
    After I moved out of the house, Expanded Self reinforced this by having me move in with a friend of mine who had a TV, but only got local channels.  There went the "House" re-runs, and although I could still watch "Seinfeld" every night -- something I had done for literally years -- I chose not to.  Besides, my buddy had to watch his "Stargate" DVDs about that time.
    But my lack of interest accelerated after I tuned in to Busting Loose. Then I understood that not only were these things Phase 1 time sucks, but that they fed into my illusion that the physical world was all real -- the economic crisis, global warming, hunger and Susan Boyle.
    Soon, I could not even stand to turn on NPR in the morning, because I just didn't want to listen about this crisis or that catastrophe. It grated. I tuned out radio talk shows forever. TV news -- verboten. I occasionally read the daily newspaper when I'm bored. But it's a quick read. Want me to join your cause on Facebook? That's pretty much not happening. Even sports became less and less of an interest and for the people who know me, that's almost inconceivable. (Go Bucks!) Except for an occasional online rant about the health care bill up for consideration, I mind my own business.
    It's sometimes difficult to finesse an explanation to one of my "aspects," (people who appear to be other individuals in the hologram, for those of you not into Busting Loose yet) especially those not in Phase 2, about why the "existence" of starving children in Africa doesn't move me. It sometimes reflects back to me as cold and self-absorbed. But to me, it means to me that I have a lot of beliefs to un-learn about "reality."
    Then again, I just have to smile at the futility of those aspects who are diligently trying to change the hologram from the outside, playing a game they can never win.
    Dropping out has been my path, and I don't necessarily recommend it for everyone. I can't say has been like a near-death experience, where I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, came back and began appreciating every butterfly alighting on the petal of every rose, then wrote a best-selling book about it.
    No, not quite that dramatic.
    But, it has given me the space and time to rediscover what would be really fun for me in Phase 2, to take responsibility for my fun, in a sense. For the last few months that has been writing screenplays, blogging, producing TV shows, promoting indie filmmakers and generally expressing my creativity. That's been expansive for me. I've created a bunch of new aspects who are caring, generous, fun and interesting. So something seems to be working.
    As Robert Scheinfeld always like to remind us, there's nothing "wrong" with caring about certain issues. There's nothing wrong with trying to be a healer, for example, and healing illusory bodies of illusory illnesses. It's just that you realize it's part of a fun creation in the hologram and has no meaning outside of that. If you're doing anything out of a sense of obligation, guilt, money, morals, gratification, well, I'm not going to tell you to stop. But I would suggest you do the Busting Loose process.
    I don't judge anyone who is caught up in these issues. That's part of their unique mission and purpose, and I hope they're having fun doing it. But I remain unswayed. Please don't get mad at me. I imagine over time, as I process this stuff, fewer and fewer people will be approaching me with "Save the Chinchillas" petitions as I walk through Nob Hill. I can only hope.

*****
I'd be interested to hear what you're losing interest in. Please post in the comments section.


    

     I'm sitting here on a beautiful Sunday morning thinking about war and violence. Goes well with the oatmeal. Actually, I saw the movie "The Hurt Locker" last night and it took a good night's sleep to come down from the adrenaline rush.
    As a movie, it's quite a creation -- a hellaciously intense and harrowing immersion into the war in Iraq, punctuated with moments of levity and pure heartbreak. But as you've probably figured out by now, I'm not here for a movie review.
    The movie focuses on three men who comprise a bomb defusion squad in Baghdad. After the group's lead bomb expert is killed when an IED he is trying to disarm is detonated, into the void steps Staff Sgt. William James.
    In military terms, and Busting Loose terms, James knows his unique mission and purpose. He is here to defuse bombs. We find out after one particularly nerve-wracking sequence that he has, in fact, defused 873 bombs during his time in Iraq.
    There is not a lot of psychological exploration about why someone would find enjoyment in such an obviously dangerous job. The filmmaker portrays him as sort of a maverick, a "wild man" as one superior puts it, who loves the thrill. In fact, he is so absorbed he puts his fellow soldiers, like Sgt. J.T. Sanborne, at risk along with himself, a point that Sanborne makes with a quick punch to James' face.
    But "The Hurt Locker" is not about a devil-may-care macho soldier. Been there, blown that one up. There is no doubt James accepts the fact that a single mistake is fatal. He chooses to embrace that, not avoid it, to ride the edge.  And as Roger Ebert noted, "(1) bombs need to be defused; (2) nobody does it better than James; (3) he knows exactly how good he is, and (4) when he’s at work, an intensity of focus and exhilaration consumes him, and he’s in that heedless zone when an artist loses track of self and time."
    In Busting Loose terms, that last part sounds a lot like joy. Go figure.
    Still, it's a movie and would anyone of us ever really choose that vocation? Which brings me to my point. The movie brought me back to one of the delicious paradoxes that Robert touches on, about each of us living in our own holograms, yet seemingly interacting with others in their holograms.
    Without going into an explanation of that conundrum, because I have none, it becomes more obvious to me every day that we can never fully understand why someone else in our hologram does whatever they are going to do. There are lots of things "we" wouldn't do, but others choose to do.
    It doesn't take a character as off-the-wall as James to understand that point. We come across it every day. Why did my husband leave me? Why does my teenager behave this way? Why is my boss such an a-hole? At some point, after we've wrung the drama out of the situation and done the process, we can only suspend judgment, derive our lessons from it and realize as my friend Jane like to say, "all paths are sacred."
    Jane knows. She has had a life that should be made into a book or movie some day. But it was her experience with her middle daughter that brought the point home to her. Her daughter had what most of us would call a tough time as a teenager. She was raped. By age 14, she was living on the street, drug and alcohol-addicted. She became a single mother at age 17.
    Jane simply had to let go after it became apparent no amount of mothering, intervention, scolding or attention was going to derail her daughter from her path. Jane said she accepted the reality that her daughter might die at a young age.
    I'm happy to say that in this "movie," Jane's daughter emerged from this phase of her journey. She's earned a college degree, teaches middle school, raises her two children with a partner, and has been sober for 19 months.
    At the end of "The Hurt Locker," Sanborne finally accepts James for who he is. James ends his deployment, goes home to his wife and baby and does his best to be a good father and husband. But the lure of his mission and purpose is too much. He returns to Iraq for another tour of defusing bombs. He is at peace.
    We can't judge Sgt. William James and we can't judge Jane's daughter. We can only marvel at the amazing stories they created, the unique missions and purposes they were on. And love them.


    
    


 

     Back in my journalism days I wrote a weekly relationship column for the local newspaper called Fun City. It wasn't really billed as a relationship column at that point. The editors just thought it was a fun way to highlight entertainment and dining choices for the weekend, basically, a here's-what-to-do-on-a-date column
    Little did they know it was a way for me to disseminate my spiritual take on various aspects of dating and relationships, from Mother Teresa to Lorena Bobbitt. They probably didn't notice because I couched it in self-deprecating humor. Or more likely because they never read it.
    But I developed a small cult following among the locals and my immediate editor once told me that a psychiatrist she met at a party desperately wanted to get the anonymous writer (me) on his  couch to analyze me. I think he really meant analyze, for those of my creations with dirty minds.
    Those were fun times, and the writing was a marvelous outlet for me, then living my post-divorce life with nary a clue as to what I was doing in the relationship game.
    I continued playing the relationship game at full tilt through the 90s and into the 00s, getting involved with many wonderful women, experiencing short but sweet romances, then usually being dumped. I took something important from each experience, but mostly, I repeated a lot of self-defeating patterns and wore the victim role like a cheap suit. I spent a lot of time obsessing about relationships. I wrote volumes in my journal. I could not figure out what I was doing "wrong."
    It was uncomfortable sometimes, but it was a role I knew how to play. Then I met a woman, who my friends know, but shall remain anonymous for the purposes of this column. We'll call her Liz.
    Liz and I met in church, the last time either of us has been. We fell in love, slowly, but steadily. We connected immediately on a spiritual level in a way that I had never done, at least with a romantic partner. A year later, she asked me to move in to her house. I did, after we agreed on some ground rules that we thought would help it work, based on our myriad experiences.
    The details of the arc of our relationship are not important. About a year ago things had gone stale, but it was Liz who first realized it was time to shake up our lives, and she who had the courage to suggest we take a break and I move out of the house.
    Oh, the horror.
    The stories, the guilt, the terrible visions of relationships past flooded my mind.
    Fast forward to the new year. Liz calls and says she has a belated Christmas gift to give me. I'm not so hot on this idea, but I meet her for coffee. It's Robert Scheinfeld's "Busting Loose From the Money Game." You can read about this experience on the home page.
    Now, I understand the break up was all about me and my unique journey through life. Liz was just the actress chosen to play this out with me and give me the lines I was supposed to hear. She has played the role to the hilt. I've played it for her in her hologram.
    Once, when someone asked what our relationship was, I responded by saying that Liz was in my hologram to cause me discomfort, thus allowing me the chance to reclaim my power. I was only half joking, but she got it. We still have no definition of what our relationship is, but it's different, that I can assure you. Something like friends, but different.
    It has been a challenging, but rewarding experience reclaiming my power with Liz. Instead of just feeling sorry for myself, holing up for a few months, then venturing wildly back into the dating game, I have worked the Busting Loose process with her for the last several months, and while there is still plenty to reclaim, I feel as if I've come light years in my understanding of what relationships are not. What they are is the key question I'm asking.
    So starting from the premise that "relationships" are yet another Phase 1 game we can't win, what does "romantic" relationship look like when we are fully playing in Phase 2?
    What is relationship when all the beliefs, obligations and b.s. we have created around relationship disappear? What is relationship if we are living in reactive mode and being supported in our joyfulness? What happens when we remove the limitations of "future" and form from our relationships? I'm pretty sure the only thing we know is that when we are expanded in Phase 2, we are happy whether we are in a "relationship" or not. We do it only for the enjoyment.  We can choose to play the relationship game, but it's not necessary, like everything else in Phase 2.
    I'll be writing more, but I'd like to hear what you have to say. Is anybody out there living a true Phase 2 relationship?

      Just finished watching the documentary "Leap." I found it quite inspiring, and it's good to know that there are a growing number of people out there that are being exposed to this meme. For those of you who haven't seen the movie, it poses the question, what if our "reality" was really just an illusion, as philosophers and metaphysicians -- and now some quantum physicists -- have propounded? What if everything we sense, think or experience in this "real" world is simply a manifestation of "our" consciousness and no more real than a hologram? In other words, "There is no out there out there." (Sorry for all the quotation marks, but when you question reality this much, you pretty much are living in a state of perpetual quotation marks.)
      For some, me included, this may not seem all that radical a concept. At least not after having been exposed to folks like Robert Scheinfeld (who's in the movie), A Course in Miracles, Adyashanti, Zen and a bit of HIndu philosophy from my friend Pravin. Yet, the movie satisfies because filmmakers Chad Cameron and Isaac Allen don't just stop with the basic premise. They take it to its logical conclusion and really challenge the interviewees ("guides," as the filmmakers call them) to explain what's in front of our lyin'  eyes if it ain't "reality."
      What is perhaps most uplifting is the general sentiment among the guides, that whether our reality is an illusion or not, life is always worth living. In fact, understanding the miracle of this existence can make our lives that much richer, our experiences that much more profound and enjoyable.
      To paraphrase the filmmakers, by the time you finish watching this, you're gonna think the premise is sheer lunacy, somewhat intriguing or absolutely right on. As is true with about everything, your reaction will tell more about you than it does about the movie, and I'm sure the usual army of naysayers will come out to attack it on scientific grounds. Whatever. Tell them to go study the writings of David Bohm and get back to you. That'll shut 'em up for a while.
      For more information, visit their website.
      To order a copy of "Leap," click here.
          

   Welcome to  my new blog, Another Way. This blog and the accompanying website were inspired by a major life change last year. I finally came to realize, that after 51 years on earth, there had to be another way.  I imagine you're here because you feel the same way.
     I've been fortunate over the years to be able to explore, or at least dabble in, a number of spiritual paths, from A Course in Miracles to Zen Buddhism. I've read countless books on spiritual discovery, personal transformation, quantum physics and metaphysics and other esoteric subjects.  I've made films about subjects like UFO believers and the connections between quantum physics and the Native American cosmology. I don't pretend to be an expert in any of them, and frankly, I don't really pretend to know any more than the average man or woman. But as a lifelong human being, I'm as qualified as anyone to relate my experiences. My hope is that perhaps some of my experience will resonate with you.
     Much of the focus will be on Robert Scheinfeld's "Busting Loose" program, since that has been an integral part of my most recent evolution. But there are plenty of spokes on the wheel, and I hope to talk about more than a few of them.
I believe that everything originates from consciousness, and I don't have much use for affirmations, the Law of Attraction,
traditional religion, or anything that places power outside of us. If you take part in these practices, and are finding fulfillment in doing so, great. It's just not my thing. Needless to say, neither is crystal healing.
     I also hope to hear from you, especially my Phase 2 friends around the world, about what's going on in your lives, what you're creating and how you're having fun.
Namaste,
Anthony