John Dorsey Wolf — On Victimhood

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Are we victims?
As a result of our illusionary separation from our physical world, events seem to happen to us.
The prevalence and apparent unfairness of pain, suffering, and evil acts, can reinforce a mind-set of life in a world gone mad, largely determined by people who are morally, ethically, and ecologically out of control. With this mind-set it is difficult to value our own consciousness, much less advance our own greater awareness and spirituality.

(From My Joint Mind:) There are many unpleasant aspects of our reality. These exist as consequential by-products of the countless choices made with free will in dualistic creation, not necessarily confined to Earth. Lives in the 20th and 21st centuries will experience cancer, automobile accidents, shootings. We will experience earthquakes, floods, tornados and hurricanes. We will bring into reality for ourselves experiences of pain and suffering.
(I believe I’ve been shot in a prison camp. I believe I’ve drowned at sea. I believe I’ve died 8 years ago in a fall in the Grand Canyon.)
We manifest these experiences to and for ourselves in order to form ourselves through our choices, to be unique, to be more and more of everything that we are inherently capable of being. We are placed into space time to make ourselves within particular time frames with their unique characteristics, both positive and negative. We manifest our selected paths to ourselves to understand and to learn how to be better creators.
In short, we experience pain and suffering because it’s part of reality on Earth in the time frame we have chosen to live in. There is no life lived without challenges.
Continue reading John Dorsey Wolf — On Victimhood

John Wolf — On Making Our Own Reality

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

This posting on making our own reality is the first of three related messages. The second will be on Victimhood, and the third on Responding to Evil Events.
One of the effects of our sense of separateness in our physical world is that we perceive ourselves independent of all objective reality surrounding us.
To borrow Jim Austin’s useful approach:
What if we KNEW that our daily physical reality, the objective world we experience with our five senses, is created for us and through us, primarily by our greater being?
What if we KNEW that almost every night in our sleep we were with our greater being, learning and planning our upcoming manifestations?
What if there are many other alternates of us that experienced events meaningful to our becoming that we chose not to experience, and there are alternates for every self that incarnates?
Continue reading John Wolf — On Making Our Own Reality

Happy Birthday, Miss Rita

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Rita Warren picture

Marguerite Queen was born January 30, 1920, in Ohio.

(Think how long ago that really was! The World War had ended only 14 months before. Woodrow Wilson still had another year of his presidency ahead of him, and another four years of life. There were no commercial radio stations yet. Freud and Jung and Adler and Reich were all in their vigorous middle years.)

And along came miss Rita, whose mother would die in just a few short years, leaving her and her sister to be raised by her father. In due time she married, had daughters of her own, earned a Bachelor’s degree, underwent analysis with Joseph Henderson, who had received his own analysis from Carl Jung, and went on to earn her doctorate. For many years, she was Rita Queen Warren, Ph.D., scholar and academic, and in those years she earned an honored place in her profession, teaching at Berkeley and at SUNY.

Then came her Gateway experience at The Monroe Institute, which transformed her life. She took early retirement, moved down to the New Land, the community built around Robert Monroe’s institute, and became the initial director of his consciousness laboratory. For four years, she and her husband Martin conducted hundreds, perhaps thousands, of altered-state sessions with volunteers. Then she re-retired, and it was only when she was 80, the much-loved and respected wise old woman on the hill, that I met her.

In The Sphere and the Hologram, Rita and I told how we began working together. And in Rita’ World I told how we unexpectedly began working together again, a full seven years after she passed over to the non-physical (in 2008, at the age of 88). She had no fear of moving over to the other side, and toward the end she had a sort of resigned impatience with the body and its limitations.

A few years ago, I remembered her birthday anniversary this way:

She and I used to raise a glass each January 30th, to toast Franklin Roosevelt, whose birthday she shared. So here’s a virtual toast, Miss Rita. “Thanks for all your help (not least, an ever-listening ear). Thanks for suggesting the sessions that eventually became The Sphere and the Hologram. And thanks, on behalf of so many friends scattered across the globe, for all that you were. Whatever you’re doing, may it be interesting and productive, and may you never lose that curiosity.”

As I found out beginning in December, 2014, that birthday wish came true, and in a big way!

The Healing Power of Truth

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I was thinking, as I got up this morning, about that YouTube clip I posted to Facebook yesterday, a two-minute excerpt from a meeting Bernie Sanders was having in Iowa, where he invited members of the audience to speak from their personal knowledge of what it is like to live on $10,000 or $12,000 a year.

This is not a political posting. You know I love what Sanders stands for and what he is attempting to spark among the people. That’s not what this is about.

A young woman came up to the microphone and spoke of her own on-going experience, and could hardly speak for crying about the shame of always being in debt while working several minimum-wage jobs and having to live with her parents. See it here: http://usuncut.com/politics/incredible-moment-bernie-sanders-rally-iowa-video/

I thought, this morning: Nobody could watch that clip unmoved.

We don’t know anything about the woman, how much of her plight is the result of bad choices, or bad luck, or whatever. But, watching, listening, we do suddenly remember, this is a human being; this is a person, not a statistic, not an abstraction.

Multiply by millions; remember that these millions live in the most productive economy on earth, and remember that it is in no way their fault that the value of every dollar they earn has been consistently chipped away by inflation, giving them invisible pay cuts every single year for their entire life, with no offsetting increase in the number of the depreciated dollars they receive.

My first job after college, I made $6,000 a year as a news reporter. My wife and I lived small, saved HALF of it, and after a year traveled to Europe for six weeks before I went on to grad school. Nobody could do that today. Today, the buying power equivalent of that nominal $6,000 would probably be $40,000. (I’m guessing, of course.) So people are being told to live on the equivalent of $1,500 in 1970. Is it any wonder that people are starving, and that the American dream is dying?

It is an achievement of Senator Sanders – perhaps not the least of his remarkable achievements this remarkable year – to suddenly put the human face back into the economic argument.

You shall know the truth, it says in an old book you may have heard of, and the truth shall make you free.

Socialism and individualism — and snow

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I was looking out my second-floor window today, looking down at the trucks with blades clearing off the parking lot, and, out the windows on the opposite side of the house, at the trucks clearing the roads.

The city or state clears the roads. If you live in a condominium or apartment complex, probably the management clears the driveways and main access lanes of your parking lot. But chance are, if your car is out in the open, you have to do your own shoveling to get your car clear. If your car is in a garage, chances are you have to shovel to clear the area between the garage and the cleared lanes. And, of course, if you have live in a detached house, nobody is going to clean your driveway but you or someone you pay.

Isn’t that a capsule summary of the division of responsibility between governments and individuals?

Individuals working as individuals couldn’t clean the roads, so what use would their cars be to them? But governments couldn’t clean off everybody’s car or shovel out everybody’s driveway, unless they expanded their workforce by about a hundredfold. (More, probably.)

As in so many seemingly intractable political disputes, the answer is that both poles are somewhat right, until they get carried away to think that their end is the only end.

No government could do everything for us, and we wouldn’t want it to. But individuals in society can’t do everything for themselves without organized civic effort (known as government). Individuals as individuals don’t fight fires, repair downed power lines, provide emergency medical treatment, etc., etc. Individuals accomplish those things by working as part of a team, be it government, for-profit corporation, public utility, or non-profit.

Probably we would do better to remember that there’s something to be said for all parts of the ideological and political spectra, rather than thinking we are holding a stick that has only one end.

Be grateful for the organized efforts that make our lives go as smoothly as they do. Continue to do for yourself what you can. Stay warm.

YouTube conversation on reincarnation

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Sofia Axelsson interviewed me the other day and put this up on YouTube today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-4sB0hrZIA&feature=youtu.be

People have lots of beliefs around reincarnation, but they don’t always realize that those beliefs are founded in assumptions, conscious and otherwise, about who and what we are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-4sB0hrZIA&feature=youtu.be

John Wolf on separation

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Turning Part and Whole Upside Down
A pointed message to me.
John: It’s a foggy rainy morning, dark outside even after sunrise, and it’s a beautiful day for sitting in my favorite chair by the fire. It’s my place to connect to the rest of me, to raise my consciousness, to expand my awareness, to gain wisdom through guidance and teaching and to open my mind.
It is so very easy to say that we are all one, so very hard to substantiate it with our five senses.
My Joint Mind: In fact, the five senses are designed to do the opposite: make you feel separate and distinct, reinforce you as captain at the helm. You KNOW (reinforcing what our physical senses tell us) that the others around you are separate from you. Yet, if there is any one principle that all the gurus seem to agree on, it’s the oneness that we strive for and will ultimately achieve.
Continue reading John Wolf on separation