Last weekend, I conducted a little experiment. I made a little bet with myself that in a three-hour period, I could help a small roomful of people to come into contact with their internal guidance. For some, it would be contact for the first time. For others, it would be a stronger, more definite connection. I hoped and expected that in this — as in so many similar areas involving access to nonphysical parts of ourselves – it would prove to be easier done than said.
An experiment in guidance
Saturday, July 25, 2009, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., I am going to host a workshop in which I will attempt to teach people how to get into touch with their own guidance — their own Guys Upstairs. I’m pretty confident that it can be done, but it’s sort of an experiment, so I already decided to give people their money back if they’re dissatisfied with the results. (At that, I’m going to lose money on this unless we get more at-the-door registrations than I expect.)
Continue reading An experiment in guidance
Beware premature clarity, and yet —
[Sunday, January 15, 2006]
6:45 a.m. So. Here we are again. I shied away from that discussion about TGU versus any one of you. Why? It is as if I wasn’t ready to hear it – or as if I hadn’t finished making up the answer! But in fact I don’t know why. So I guess I’m ready for you at least to tell me why I’m gun-shy, and then the rest if you can get it through the pipeline.
This is a bigger subject than you consciously know. You recognize that you almost wish the question had not been raised, but you don’t know why. It is because you know, too, that “here comes another hit on my belief system.” But that is a danger of exploration – that at some point you will find something that reevaluates – or forces you to do the re-evaluating, rather! – everything you think you sort of know from experience.
When you first go exploring, that is the easy part, at least for a certain temperament. You start, knowing that what you think you know is probably wrong and certainly inadequate. For the first long phase, it is all gain. Each discovery is an item, one more useful trophy. If it doesn’t seem to fit very well into anything, that’s all right, maybe it will fit better later; maybe further discoveries will demonstrate where and how it fits; maybe it will be the key to fitting in other things. And in fact this is your assumption, your reliance, and your experience.
A Trip to Iona — Friday, June 13, 2003
Friday, June 13
Eight dreams to transcribe.
1) I start to go outside, and a man steps aside for me, and lets me go first, and I go, and he stabs me! In the back. He’s going to do something but instead, I annihilate him with this blast of anger, an amazing thing. He’s literally not there on the field. There’s nothing left. It was a blast of anger, it just flashed. I’m lying there wondering, what was that all about? I think I had just finished naming to myself the seven deadly sins, of which anger is one. Susan had said I had all sorts of anger that I wasn’t aware of, that I was not wanting to have, because I was trying to be too “nice,” as she put it.
2) Nancy __’s brother and I and somebody else come back from something or other and we’re going to leave something at her place. There’s a sign on the door that says “don’t knock.” Then we’re listening to her answering machine tape and for some reason we decide something happened to her when we were gone. We knock on the door and she opens it looking very sleepy and exasperated. Her brother says, “Well Nancy, we were worried about you because” [I forget why] and she explains that she had left a note saying not to wake her up, which of course we had – but we had somehow turned it all around. The common denominator there is the strength of my emotion, because I was really concerned, I was sure something had happened. I seem to remember an unacknowledged sense of almost over-theatricality about the emotion of concern.
A Trip to Iona — June 7, 2003
Saturday, June 7
Another breakfast at the hotel, then a cab to the train station at Crewe, a train to the Manchester airport, and a flight to Aberdeen. Traveling is easier alone. Although one might think that another person would help find things, and avoid mistakes, and share the load, in practice, it isn’t so. I watch myself traveling very efficiently, very smoothly, except for moments of confusion that a moment sorts out without much difficulty. I watch myself glide smoothly from the train through the maze to the right place to check in for the flight, and even my movements are smooth and sure, usually. Far more so than if I were with someone, my attention half on the companion. This of course has nothing to do with the companion and everything to do with the way I operate.
I like the British ways so much more than commercial-American. At Dulles airport, every 15 minutes came a strident warning that “for security reasons” you mustn’t leave your baggage unattended; unattended baggage would be seized for inspection and might be damaged or destroyed. Here in Manchester, a pleasant voice merely asked passengers “to reduce the number of security alerts by keeping your luggage with you at all times.” No threats, no stridency. Same message underneath, but all the difference in the world how it was delivered. Continue reading A Trip to Iona — June 7, 2003
A Trip to Iona (1)
The first of several descriptions of a trip to Scotland and England that was in some ways a restless spiritual pilgrimage, more so than my trip to Glastonbury and other places last year.
Iona
On Monday April 12, 2003, I realize that I want to go to Iona. I look for people to come with me, but no one can. I decide to go anyway, and within days I have the trip planned. I will fly to Glasgow, spend a day and a half with Robert Clarke in England, fly to Aberdeen to spend a couple of days with Michael Ross, then go to Iona for four days and five nights, then visit Ronald and Jill Russell for a couple of days. It seems a lot of moving around, but manageable.
On Friday, May 23rd, I write in my journal: “Dion Fortune read a passage referring to the Brotherhood, and her whole being responded. For ten days she could think of nothing else but her desire to serve. Then came a vision, and her whole life was changed. May I not strive for something like that on Iona? May I not earnestly pray to be of service? Have I anything else in life I desire? I have not.”
The following Friday, the 30th, I pick up a few hundred English pounds from my bank, borrow a backpack, and that night I pack everything except for last-minute things. (What’s the weather going to be like? Should I bring a winter coat? Surely not, in June, even in Scotland! I settle for packing in layers. Besides my short coat, a sweater and sweatshirt, a warm woolen jacket-like thing, a flannel shirt and two dress shirts, a pair of blue jeans, a pair of good pants and – in an unwarranted burst of optimism – a pair of shorts.) I spend the weekend wondering if four days on Iona will bore me. For reading material, I choose, after some hesitation, The Lives of the Saints (Brendan, Cuthbert and Wilfred), and The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counseling. Both books are small, lightweight, and likely to match my mood.
Wednesday morning, June 4, a Greyhound bus to Dulles airport. I begin snoozing as soon as the bus starts at 9 a.m., figuring it will be long hours before I get to sleep in a bed again.
And then I am at Dulles airport at 11:20 a.m., with my flight to Newark scheduled to leave at 5 p.m. (Greyhound only has one bus to Dulles from C’ville.) I have a piece of pizza and go up to the check-in desk. The woman there advises me to get onto their 1 p.m. to Newark, saying that they are experiencing weather delays all up and down the east coast, and it would be better for me to be in Newark waiting than in Dulles.
Good thinking. As it is, the 1 p.m. doesn’t get off the runway until 2 p.m.. Then up out of the grey clouds into the bright blue sky, and 35 minutes later back down into the same grey overcast we’d left, one short hop closer to my scheduled 8:35 departure for Scotland. Continue reading A Trip to Iona (1)
A New Model Of Consciousness In Space And Time
Last April I posted, in ten installments, some great stuff I had gotten from my friends upstairs in January, 2006 over the course of a few days. I recently pulled up the ten posts, removed headers and continuation lines, and concatenated it into one long file. (It’s easier to read one file, I think, than one after the other in the archives of several months ago.)
I will be glad to send the file in response to a request via email to muddytracks@earthlink.net.