"I of my own knowledge…"

Perhaps it’s always this way. The players in 3D get tired, so the other side sends in new troops, full of intelligence, optimism and joy.

Happy New Year, friends.

Revolution? Well, why not? The end of the year is as good a time as any to turn around and around, looking at your life. Is your life going the way you want it to? Is it going toward something? Is it going away from something? Is it satisfying?

If your life is anything like mine, probably parts of your life are satisfying, parts not. New Year’s is a good time to consider: What things (specifically) are stopping me from having a more satisfying life?

If the answers seem to be external (need more money, need a better job, etc.) then I suggest you try again, looking a little deeper. What traits within you, what robots dictating your behavior, get in the way of your having the life you want? Suppose that nothing external in your life could possibly change for the better – how could you change yourself, your mind and spirit, to have a better life within those circumstances?

This is a good season for a little quiet time, preparing your mind and spirit so that you may enjoy a turn for the better, a New Year’s revolution.

Happy New Year, one and all.

Shaping Ourselves

This post may be one of the better Christmas presents you’ve ever received. At least, I hope so, because here we enter more closely into the question of how we should live; what the possibilities are. The easiest way to convey this is just to pass along the contents of this session with the guys upstairs. As usual, paragraphs in italics represent me speaking (or, in this case, writing), while the words the guys provide me are given in Roman text.

They begin:

(more…)

Received this heartening email from a friend, and thought I’d pass the encouragement along.

Hi, Frank,

I wanted to report an experience made possible by the idea in Sphere that there is no “there.”

Happy holidays.

(more…)

For the past several weeks, we have been looking at a new way of seeing who we are. A couple of loose ends today, and then next week we’ll start looking at what the implications are for the way we lead our lives. Subsequently, we’ll look at society and the individual, and then what the guys call the challenge of our time.

(more…)

It is always a pleasure to find kindred minds — and sometimes more of a pleasure to find minds that are sort of kindred than ones which exactly mirror our own way of thinking. So I was pleased to find, via an article in Schwartzreport, Search Magazine.  (This particular link: http://www.searchmagazine.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/2009%20March-April/full-ongodgopnik.html)

Adam Gopnik “On God”: Don’t Stop Believing

A lot of atheists don’t believe in atheism right now. That is, they view with a certain embarrassment the louder arguments that have lately filled the best-seller lists. The feeling comes less from disagreement with those arguments than from the fear of a kind of Gradgrindism of the heart. Just as the dumber anti-scientism writers treat science as mere product rather than as spiritual adventure, the louder atheists often treat spiritual yearning as mere product, too, reducible to nice buildings or fine music.

(more…)

This is an excerpt from Robert Clarke’s book The Royal Line of Christ the Logos, forthcoming from Hologram Books.

Many years ago I had fallen into a very deep and prolonged state of depression. I had lost all belief in religion, in there being any deeper spiritual meaning to reality, and what loomed threateningly large to me was nature with its savagery and largely unconscious cruelty, the devouring of life by other life etc. Nature, I knew, has its beautiful and delightful side, but the stark brutality and immense suffering that forms so large a part of it had become devastating to me. (As Jung says, dig up a square foot of earth and it will contain thousands of minute creatures devouring one another.)

(more…)

In response to my post titled When Science and Religious Beliefs Conflict, my friend Jim Price proposed a way of reconciling opposites.

Fundamentalisms and alchemy

Jim Price

I feel I have something important to say about scientism. Of course, scientific authority needs to be questioned. Religious authority needs to be questioned. De-mythologize, label the imprints of the human condition, and then elevate the conversation.

I agree there is a thing we might label as scientism. There is bias in every human endeavor. But if it is really true that 40% of Americans believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old (and I find that hard to believe), then this nation is in a bit of trouble. An unsophisticated public is easily manipulated by various authorities. Blind faith leads to Fundamentalisms.

Fundamentalisms are probably the biggest problem in the world today, be they religious, scientific, left, right, or center. Pointing fingers may be traditional. But what is needed is some good old-fashioned alchemy. This science/religion split is another opportunity to distill from the tension of opposites.

(more…)

I don’t usually insert anything even vaguely political in this blog, though I have plenty of comments in my newsnet email list that I send around to long-suffering friends. But  President Obama’s speech to the Nobel Peace Prize committee transcends politics and statecraft, and makes points that too many people prefer to forget.

Peace, after all, is not merely the absence of war, and it doesn’t come about merely by people wishing for it. Peace is necessarily borne on the back of soldiers, for otherwise it would be at the mercy of the first person taking control of a country and insisting on it being either his (or her) way or else. One would think that Hitler and Stalin would have taught the world that lesson, or good old revered Comrade Chairman Mao, who taught that “power comes from the barrel of a gun.” But it’s hard for some people to give up their dreams of living in a perfect world among perfect people.

(more…)

Our connections and what they can accomplish

Outside time-space, neither separation nor delayed consequences apply. Since we exist part in and part out of separation, it is helpful to realize that a vital part of our nature exists on the other side. It will save you from the superstition of thinking you are an orphan of the universe, marooned without connections on a pointless and mysterious ride from nowhere to nowhere. It will also make clear to you the nature of guidance as it may be experienced.

(more…)