"I of my own knowledge…"

When I read Ventura in this column talking about people’s “virtual tour” of Rome, it struck me that our society is so impoverished that many in it do not realize that the energy of one place differs from that of another. True children of the enlightenment (which I have seen described as the sunset that all Europe mistook for dawn), they think one place is the same as another, and one time is the same as another. Not true, of course, as anyone who has done even the rudiments of energy work could tell them. They don’t even seem to realize that a wooded lot is different from a field and both are different from a cityscape, say, or a lake, in ways beyond the obvious.

That is such a massive impoverishment, it’s difficult to give them an idea of how stripped-down their world has become. It’s like Castaneda never wrote anything, or Thoreau, or anyone who ever wrote about power spots – let alone human history which is replete with holy spots. All arbitrary placement, apparently, to these idiots. (I mean idiots, in this case, not as a put-down but in its literal sense, though applying it to them is still a metaphor. Barely.)

MICHAEL VENTURA

LETTERS AT 3AM

SCREENWORLD

Austin Chronicle – February 27, 2009

Screens, screens, screens – everywhere, screens. Right in front of me, in arm’s reach, are three: the three computers accessible from this chair (often I work on two at once). Another screen’s across the room – the TV. My cell phone, also in arm’s reach, has a screen, even though I bought the simplest device possible — it cost 10 bucks, but it can take and transmit photos and movies. You see screens at checkout counters, restaurants, laundromats, waiting rooms, and on the dashboards of cars. Millions preen for screens on YouTube and Facebook, marketing their images like politicians or starlets.What with Blackberrys, iPhones, and my 10-buck cell, few Americans go anywhere anymore without a handy screen that connects to every other screen in some way or other, linking to any event, broadcast, or data source anywhere, including satellite photos of every address you know. The screens disconnect, as well: I work where I live, so, theoretically, I need never leave my apartment — I can order shoes, pet food, people food, parts for my car, and lingerie for my girlfriend right here on this screen, to be delivered right to my door. Now that I think of it, it seems half the people I know met their present significant others via the screen.

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A piece by my friend Robert Clarke, author of The Four Gold Keys, who lives in Stoke-on-Trent, England.

It was recently the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, who had connections with the area where I live, being married to one of the Wedgwoods.

Darwin is universally renowned of course for his theory of evolution, first propounded in his groundbreaking work, The Origin of Species. And he is not only renowned, but almost revered as a ‘wise old man’ figure, like Socrates and Plato – he even looked like them. Darwin opened up and made possible new understanding of the processes of life in matter, of how species grow and change and adapt, though others were doing pioneer work in this field even before him. But with knowledge of evolution and other great discoveries of science that were to follow, not only life on earth but man’s opinion of the whole universe, of eternal truth itself, was radically and drastically altered.

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THE TRANSFORMATIONAL PERSPECTIVE (4)

AN EMERGING WORLDVIEW

By Hank Wesselman

(continued from last time)

Values of the Transformationals

When I started leading workshops a decade ago, I perceived that members of my circles tend to express a distinct character profile that I find deeply reassuring – one that the media finds puzzling at best or unworthy of serious news coverage at worst. Our newspapers, magazines, and television news programs inundate us with negative information on a daily basis, creating the impression that violent crime and genocide, economic catastrophes and political mendacity are reaching unprecedented proportions. While this may be true to some extent, it must also be remembered that all the murder and mayhem, political corruption and corporate fiascos are being generated by only about two percent of the world’s population. Despite this, the media seems to believe that this is what makes news, a supposition reinforced by polls and surveys created by the demographers who serve the media. The same could be said of the film industry, of course. There is no question that Hollywood knows the big money is to be made by appealing to the dark side of the human psyche.

Given this understanding, I was surprised to discover that most of the participants in my seminars and workshops lack the blade-runner mentality, as well as the cynicism it tends to generate. Instead, they express a strong sense of social justice and seem to be deeply concerned about the quality of human life at all levels of society. They feel strong support for women’s issues as well as those of minorities. They are concerned for the safety and well being of both children and the elderly, and human relationships are clearly seen as more important than material gain. Social tolerance, personal individualism, and spiritual freedom are highly valued ideals. The reweaving of the social fabric through the rebuilding of families, neighborhoods, and communities are major areas of concern. This is what I mean by deeply reassuring.

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THE TRANSFORMATIONAL PERSPECTIVE (3)

AN EMERGING WORLDVIEW

By Hank Wesselman

(continued from last time)

The New Spiritual Complex

It is not surprising that the ‘new spirituality’ is integral in nature, drawing on all the world’s wisdom traditions, from the East to the West, from Animism to Zen. What is surprising is that right at its core can be found a cluster of principles that were embraced at one time by all the world’s indigenous peoples. (It must be acknowledged here that the religions of the traditional peoples were as diverse and varied as they themselves once were, with each region of the world encompassing hundreds of cultural groups and subgroups, some large, some small, each devoted to their own unique spiritual ways that could differ markedly from those of their neighbors.)

In approaching the idea that principles of indigenous wisdom are involved in the genesis of a new spiritual complex in the West, it is not necessary to compile yet one more academic stockpile of esoteric minutia of interest only to scholars and theologians. Rather, I am broadly concerned with the general mystical insights that were once held in common by virtually all of the traditionals and are thus the birthright of all people everywhere. I should add that modern spiritual seekers do not seem to be retreating into archaic belief systems, nor, with rare exceptions, are they interested in ‘playing Indian’ or becoming born-again Aboriginals. To the contrary, members of the Transformational Community are beginning to reconsider the core beliefs and values once held by the traditionals, and in the process, something entirely new is taking form.

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THE TRANSFORMATIONAL PERSPECTIVE (2)

AN EMERGING WORLDVIEW

By Hank Wesselman

(continued from last time)

The Foundation

It is no news to anyone that a widespread spiritual reawakening is currently taking place—one that has two distinct aspects. On one side, we find a resurgence of religious fundamentalism that embraces an historic view derived from the Middle Ages—a literalist belief system that proclaims this world to be the kingdom of a remote, transcendent authoritarian father-God, alternately wrathful or beneficent—a narrow perspective that has been embraced in our time by misguided religious zealots who have the capacity to ensure that this world will be their God’s kingdom… or nothing. On the other side and in opposition to this view, we have the spiritually awakened and expanded perspective of the secular humanists who perceive an omnipresent, immanent Divine Presence or Creative Force existing within all of creation, one that is benevolent, life enhancing and life sustaining (2).

It is significant that this latter view is quietly, yet definitively, being embraced by increasing numbers of well-educated, well-informed, and well-connected individuals, many of who are in professional and social positions from which they may influence the larger society’s ideas and trends. Their secular yet spiritual perspective is intensely democratic, cutting across socio-economic levels of achievement and status, transcending cultural, political, and ethnic boundaries as well. In response, a broad social movement is taking form, one made up of people who hold a set of beliefs and values that differ considerably from those of the fundamentalists as well as those of the public at large. The number of people who hold the new view is not known with certainty, but fourteen years of sociological research conducted in the United States by demographer Paul H. Ray and his wife Sherry Ruth Anderson, has revealed that more than fifty million Americans fell into this group as of the year 2000, representing more than twenty-six percent of the adult population. This is not a small number, and it appears to be growing (3).

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 THE TRANSFORMATIONAL PERSPECTIVE (1)

AN EMERGING WORLDVIEW

By Hank Wesselman

 The Invitation

On a bright autumn day in New Mexico, in October of 2002, I crossed trails with Dr. John Mack at an international conference on altered states of consciousness at which both he and I were offering keynote presentations. John had read several of my unusual books and over dinner one evening, he asked me if I would consider contributing an essay to the Primacy of Consciousness Project that he was co-chairing with Trish Pfeiffer. When I responded with interest, John began to talk about the project’s epicenter – how the world might be transfigured as the public at large becomes increasingly aware that consciousness, not matter, is the ultimate reality and thus the ground of all being. 

As I listened, my thoughts turned toward those parts of my life spent working as an anthropologist among the tribal peoples of Africa, for it was out there, among the indigenous traditionals, that I had first stumbled upon this perspective more than thirty-five years before. It was expressed differently, of course, but it was always there, right at the core of their worldview—the perception that the multi-leveled field of the dream is the real world; that we human beings are actually dreaming twenty-fours hours a day; and that the everyday physical world came into being in response to the dream, not visa-versa. These assertions were always accompanied by a conviction, strongly-held, that the dream world is minded, that it is consciousness itself, alive, intelligent, and power-filled, infusing everything that emanates from it with awareness, vitality, and life force. 

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It is clear enough that America is broke.

It is equally clear that our country desperately needs public investment in so many neglected areas — housing, infrastructure, health care, you name it.

Is equally clear that government has grown to be an all-encompassing monster, threatening our rights and devouring our substance.

Most depressingly clear is that no one in public life is willing to mention
the elephant in the living room. Why are we broke? Why are so many crucial needs going unaddressed? Why has government grown to such threatening, overwhelming proportions?

The answer is simple and obvious, but politically unpalatable. War, and the preparation for war. In a word, the costs of empire.

Our so-called defense budget is nearly as large as that of the entire rest of the world combined! There is no conceivable national interest that could require 5% of the world to equal the armaments of the other 95%. Those costs become necessary only when you attempt to police the world, when, in short, you consider yourself a hyperpower, and bankrupt yourself in the process of trying to live up to your own paranoid fantasies.

War, it has been said, is the health of the state. The state, it has been
said, is the enemy of the citizen. I accept both those propositions. So when you are broke and when you are deprived of your rights in the name of security, put the responsibility where it belongs — on military commitments disproportionate to our strength, and on imperial ambitions inconsistent with free republican government. Ultimately, either the empire will win or the Republic will win, but we can’t have both.

Think about this, the next time you hear politicians dancing around the
question of why we are broke and insecure.

I had a dispute once with an Episcopalian woman, who told me in some disdain that Protestants don’t have saints. Eventually I thought to ask her why so many Episcopalian and Anglican churches were named St. John’s, or St. Paul’s, or St. Mark’s, etc., but I never got a straight answer to that question. I think she considered the apostles to be in a class by themselves, so that although they were called saints, it was an honorific, something like calling someone a Kentucky colonel. In this I may not be doing her justice, but in any case, it is clear that she was acting from the not uncommon Protestant assumption that Catholics, as Catholics, are superstitious idiots.

(I don’t know why it is, but I continually find myself defending aspects of the Catholic Church in conversation with people who don’t have any experience of what they’re talking about. My own Catholic boyhood has always served as a useful window into a world that I could not otherwise understand emotionally. Maybe this is why I came in to a Catholic family.)

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I have been dismayed to watch the progressive assault on Abraham Lincolns life, morals, policies, and legacy. More than dismayed, I have been angered, because I have felt a deep connection to this amazing man since I first read of him so many decades ago. The more I learn, the more admirable he seems. As Carl Sandburg said, as soft as velvet, as hard as steel. And we owe to him, as much as to any other single individual, the preservation not only of a political entity called the United States, but the principle that ordinary individuals are capable of governing themselves, which would have been seriously challenged, had the United States broken up in the 1860s. Add to that legacy the final solution to the problem of how to remove slavery from the national conscience and the national economy, and you have a lifes work that ought to be, and until relatively recently was, beyond the reach of slander and detraction.

But slander apparently is an irresistible impulse in people. Being of themselves reproached by the existence of so much excellence, perhaps they feel compelled to pull it down, to say that the excellence really didnt exist, that it was all public relations and hero worship. Perhaps it never occurs to them that hero worship proceeds from the perception that some people transcend themselves and their limitations to become heroes. If the tide is again turning, and people again are beginning to see how much we owe Mr. Lincoln, I will be glad.

Why Lincoln Still Matters

By Matthew Carey
CNN

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) – Two hundred years after his birth in a log cabin in Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln continues to fascinate.

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Jung’s Individuation Process

by Robert Clarke

The individuation process involves the expansion of the human personality with archetypal material flowing through from the collective unconscious in dreams. In other words, we may grow as personalities with whatever we experience of the outer world, but true individuation requires the assimilation also of material from the “Otherworld”, as the ancient Egyptians called it. If the individuation process goes to the highest spiritual levels, the Sacred Marriage of God and the World Soul may occur, while from the human angle the initiate may become a prophet of God, or a true priest. He may come to speak to the outer world on behalf of the inner or Otherworld, which is why Moses is the “mouthpiece” of God, and Jesus the “mediator” between Man and God.

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