human potential

Chasing Smallwood

[A book with four interlocking themes:

• how to communicate with the dead;
• the life of a 19th-century American;
• the massive task facing us today, and
• the physical world’s place in the scheme of things.]

.18. Steamboats and slavery

By now, you are probably wondering the same thing I was wondering: What is going on here, and where is all this going? I was fascinated by Joseph’s story, and it was interesting to get a different slant on things than I had ever heard, and his opinions were not necessarily opinions that I had ever formulated consciously, which gave me a little more confidence that perhaps I was not making this all up. But what was going on? Why had it showed up just now?

Remember, my conscious intent was not to produce material from talking with Joseph, but to write a book about the use of visualization in healing. For several weeks I regarded my work with Joseph as a form of goofing off. It was pleasurable, interesting, but I thought perhaps mere self-indulgence. It took awhile for me to begin to suspect that war was going on here than I was consciously aware of. Not that that’s any change.

[Monday, December 26, 2005] [7:30 p.m.] All right, Joseph, let’s do it again.

You want to know what’s the hurry, what’s up my sleeve, as you say. We’d have said, where

where are you coming from??!!

Would you prefer “what’s your agenda”? We smile.

Very funny. Not Joseph, then. [What I meant by this is that I could “feel” a difference in the energy coming through. I was accustomed to dealing with what I call the guys upstairs, who seemed to be several individuals, never very clearly defined, that I took to be guidance of some sort. Before Joseph began coming in, I mostly dealt either with David, the journalist and psychic investigator, or “the guys” in general.]

Just slow down. You are too far “up” in your energy. Calm down, slow down, that’s it, less intent, much less pressing to get the next thing. More like it. Now –

It is a skill and I’m still only at the beginning, aren’t’ I?

Ain’t I, we would have said, speaking of correcting each other’s speech. Well, I wouldn’t say you are at the beginning, but there’s a way to go yet. And if you keep careful track you can teach.

[Interruption. Long phone call.]

[9:30] Joseph, more?

Let us talk about steamboats. You know the commerce of the river ran one way until steamboats. They’d build big rafts, float them down to the city [New Orleans, of course], break up the rafts after they sold whatever they were hauling, and then make their way upriver in small boats as passengers.

Steam changed all that. Now they were going up river and down, carrying passengers and freight just as regular as trains, and before they had many trains, especially out there.

Now how many steamboat companies do you suppose they had that were put together by southern gentlemen, and how many by northern corporations? And railroads, the same way. And factories, and every thing that had to organize people and money and materials and all the thousand details that have to be put together. The slavers couldn’t do it because they didn’t have the brains, didn’t have the training, didn’t have the liquid capital and – mainly – they couldn’t admit to themselves that it was a thing worthy of “gentlemen” doing. The long and the short of it is, the slavers ran the south. They couldn’t turn themselves into capitalists or corporations and they couldn’t let others in to do it for them. If they had, they’d have put themselves out of business.

I know it ain’t entirely true; you can’t say a thing that’s going to be entirely true, but it’s true in the main. For every Atlanta, how many Charlestons did you have? For every railroad line, how many thousand square miles of dirt roads and no rivers? For every Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, how many places did you have that could even make cartridges let alone rifles?

It was all because of slavery, and just as General Grant said in his book it was the best thing we ever did for them, making them get rid of it.

We missed a big chance at the end of the war though. I wonder if Mr. Lincoln would have missed it. What we had ought to do was confiscate the property of the slave owners and divide it among the slaves. That would have solved a lot of problems, and kept ‘em solved. It would have caused other problems, but everything causes problems; we could have dealt with them somehow.

We didn’t spend any time thinking about what to do with the slaves, like I said. So we freed ‘em, and – there they were. Put into terms you will understand better, it’s like they were all unemployed and they didn’t have any savings or income or education, and they were supposed to make their way.

We could have given them all the land they’d been working. Given them help learning the business end of farming it. Maybe set the craftsmen among them to working building the things they was all going to need. But nobody gave it much thought, and look at all the evils that followed – the carpetbaggers, the Ku Klux Klan, the rebs re-elected to their old seats in Congress, and then reconstruction again with all the chances that gave people to make fortunes (like I said, the carpetbaggers). We needed long-headed Abraham Lincoln to help us find a way, and they’d put him in the grave with so many other of our soldiers.

Now, you’re happy enough to be receiving all this but I can hear you clear enough asking what it’s all about. You’re not fixing to write a history of Joseph Smallwood, so what is going on?

What is going on is an education. But maybe that’s all we can do for the moment. It is 10 p.m. and you are tired.

Does that mean I’ll lose the ability to focus and so won’t get it?

It means your life is more than scribbling.

https://rudolfsteinerquotes.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/there-is-a-hundred-times-more-hatred-than-love-among-human-beings-3/

I put this one on FB with the comment that whoever picks these quotations is sure picking good ones. And this is appropriate to what Nathaniel is bringing through, as well.

What could I (or anybody) add?

Double egoism

The following is the Introduction to Awakening from the 3D World. This, in a few words, is my attempt to tell you how the book came about, why it is worth reading, and what’s in it for you. As I point out, this book can change your life.

Introduction

Anyone who does any serious exploring into the question of “what is real and what is not” is soon presented with difficulties. It is difficult to envision life on “the other side.” How do beings there spend their time? What is it they do, and why do they do it? What if anything is their relationship to us? For that matter, what is our 3D life all about?

The world’s scriptures have been addressing these questions for centuries. That’s what scripture deals with: models of interaction between the physical and the non-physical aspects of the world. The problems, the techniques, the models are, after all, just so many varieties of packaging. The reality remains the same. But in our time, neither science nor religion — neither believers nor materialists – give us a credible picture of the meaning and nature of life, nor a picture of the afterlife that we can relate to. So where can we find one?

Well, the closest to first-hand information that we can get, at least until we ourselves drop the body and cross over, is direct communication with someone in the non-physical.

Of course I am aware that common sense would argue that we and the deceased cannot communicate. The trouble is, “common sense” depends upon two unstated assumptions. The first says the past is gone and the future is not yet created and the present is all that exists. The second says the dead either cease to exist or exist beyond our range.

Understandable assumptions, but neither one is true. Centuries of recorded experience testifies to people seeing the future and communicating with the dead. Souls live on after life in the 3D universe, as alive as when they were here, but outside of time and space. Being outside of time and space, all times and all spaces are available to them, which is why we can communicate with them about things in our life that happened long after they were gone.

That doesn’t mean that we can know for sure that we aren’t just making it up, nor that we know just who we are interacting with, nor that the information we receive is true. But those are the wrong questions. The only thing we can know, and the only thing we need to know, moment by moment, is—does the material resonate? In other words, does it feel true? Is it useful to think that way? From that point, what you do with what you have found is up to you.

Explorers by definition move into poorly mapped or unmapped territory, intending to help fill in the map for those who follow. It cannot be required of them that they always know what they are doing, or where they are going. If you were to stick to “respectable” or “common sense” explanations and pathways, what kind of exploring would that be? Sometimes you have to just keep on going and trust that eventually things will sort out. Exploring is the only alternative to either taking things on faith, or refusing to think about them at all. All that can be required of explorers is that they be resolute, honest, and a bit skeptical even of the maps they themselves help to draw.

 

This is the third volume of a series of conversations I had with my old friend Rita Warren, who died (or passed over, or changed state, or dropped the body – however you want to put it) in March, 2008, at the age of 88.

Rita had been the first director of the consciousness laboratory at The Monroe Institute (TMI), and she and I were was very familiar with the use of Monroe’s technology to assist people to enter into altered states of consciousness. In the autumn of 2000, I did a series of ten sessions in TMI’s isolation booth, or black box, and posted the transcripts to a group of email friends, naturally including Rita.

In 3D life, Rita was 26 years my senior, and our backgrounds were different in many ways. But we shared an intense interest in the hidden nature of things. So, in the summer of 2001, she and I set out to see if we could get the answers to a few simple questions. Instead, what we got was a new picture of interaction between the physical and the non-physical aspects of the world. We sat down once a week for several months, she asking questions about the hidden side of life and I, doing my best to stay in a mildly altered state, relaying whatever answers came to me. She and I both knew that information obtained this way is subject to error, but we also knew that it could provide valuable insights.

Session by session, “the guys,” as we called our interlocutors, introduced and built upon certain themes, and as we absorbed the picture they were painting, our lives changed. We decided that the material had importance for others besides ourselves, and I started to edit the sessions for publication, and got Rita to write an introduction.

But by the time the book of transcripts (titled The Sphere and the Hologram) came out, Rita had already made her transition. She died March 19, 2008, and came to me in a dream to assure me that she was fine, and I assumed our work together was over.

Six and a half years later, in December, 2014, I dreamed of her saying she was ready for us to work together again. I was surprised, but pleased. The next morning, I sat down with my journal and announced myself ready. I was prepared for anything or nothing, as usual in this business of communicating.

(When working alone, I write down a question, or even just state my readiness, then I move into a receptive state and take down whatever comes, alternating between questioner and receiver as the material dictates. Sometimes it comes fluently and I can write it down word for word without thinking. Sometimes I have the sense of it, but need to do the phrasing. Occasionally we wind up arguing over meanings, or over the sense of the material.)

That was the first of six months of sessions, usually every day, with the exception of one two-week hiatus. Throughout that time, Rita set out to answer the same questions she had been pursuing in 3D life, with the benefit of her new vantage point. That seemed to be about as direct a communication with the non-physical side I was likely to get.

In mid-May, we seemed to reach a natural place to pause, in and that was all right with me: We had accumulated quite enough material to change anybody’s life. Bob Friedman, my former business partner at Hampton Roads, now heading up Rainbow Ridge Books, offered to publish the new transcripts, and I was delighted to accept. He broke the transcript into two three-month segments, and Rita’s World, Volume I was published in September, 2015 – a remarkably quick turn-around. Volume II was slated for publication the following September, and again I thought perhaps Rita and I had completed our task.

Then, in February, 2016, I was lying down in bed when a sudden thought came to me, like the sun cutting through fog, and I knew that Rita was ready for me to get back to work. So I got some coffee and sat down at my desk, and we were off to the races once again.

In reading the material that follows, it will help if you keep these concepts in mind.

• “Sometimes, to understand A, you have to understand B, but to understand B, you have to understand A.” One of the most enlightening concepts I have come across, which Rita gave me while she was still in the 3D world, this explains why some things can’t be said directly, but must be hinted at until other changes in your viewpoint allow you to see it more clearly.
• “The 3D world and the non-3D world are not two things, but one.” Divisions in the universe are never absolute, only relative. The implications of this one just keep expanding as you mull it.
• “We are not so much individual units, as committees learning to function as individuals.” This very important concept explains a lot about life and relationships. We are more like bundles of threads, connected in all directions to others, than we are like the images that the word “individual” summons.
• “As above, so below.” As said from ancient times, different levels of the world are scaled differently, but structured similarly.

In earlier volumes I was careful to preserve the flavor of the interaction — to preserve the sense of play between equals; to emphasize how natural such communication can be; to remind the reader that such communication takes place among the incidents of ordinary life. This time, I have edited myself out somewhat, in the same way that I have silently eliminated many false starts and rephrasings, in order to make a more compact statement. I trust I have not edited the humanness out of the resulting document. In any case this material can change your life, if you let it.

A third volume of conversations with the person who was Rita Warren, centering on what the great transition from the 3D world to the non-3D world — as it appears to the soul as it is leaving the and as it is arriving. (The first two volumes were Rita’s World, vol. I and II. A related fourth volume is The Sphere and the Hologram, which comprises transcripts of sessions Rita and I did when she was still alive in the 3D world.

Available for order now. https://www.amazon.com/Awakening-3D-World-Enter-Next/dp/1937907538/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505157533&sr=8-1&keywords=awakening+from+the+3d+world

 

John Tettemer was born in Missouri in 1876 of devout Catholic parents, and as a boy was a good athlete and a good student – well-rounded, it sounds like. Early in his teens he decided he wanted to be a monk in the Passionist order, which he chose because it was strict and laid stress both on contemplation and on communal prayer. He intended to be a lay brother, rather than a priest, but when his superiors chose him for the priesthood, he obeyed willingly. In September, 1901, after the usual years of study, at age 25, he became Father Ildefonso.

In his posthumously published book I Was a Monk, he writes lovingly and with knowledge and wisdom of various aspects of his years in the monastic order. He must have had a winning personality, as well as an incisive intellect and leadership ability, for he rose extremely rapidly in the order, despite his own doubts as to his ability to perform the tasks he was assigned. At age 30, he was named director of the International College in Rome. By age 38, he was named to the order’s second-highest position. He lived in Rome, was on almost filial terms with the Pope, was considered to be the obvious choice to succeed the head of his order, was offered (but declined) the position of Bishop of Bulgaria, and was made to understand that he could look forward to being made a Cardinal. In all, a success story. A man happy and fulfilled in his chosen profession, recognized and apparently cherished by his superiors, colleagues and charges alike, a man with an assured future.

Then – and it must have come to the church hierarchy as a clap of thunder out of a cloudless sky – he asked to be relieved of his monastic and priestly vows, because he had lost his faith. In the rest of his life – that is, the years from mid-World War I to his death in 1949 – he married, fathered children, and made his way in an economic and social world that he had to learn from scratch at an age when most men have already found their niche and perhaps have already worn it into a rut.

The reason why he left is particularly relevant to today’s consciousness pioneers. He states clearly that he had no quarrel with the Church or with any individual within the Church, nor was the decision to leave motivated by the lure of another way of life. Indeed, “I had everything to lose and nothing temporal to gain in leaving my order and, in natural consequence, the church.” Nor was it anything he consciously intended. Nonetheless, something had happened that made it impossible for him to continue in the path that he had thought would last him his lifetime.

Tettemer – Father Ildefonso – had been a diligent student and teacher, and was well versed in philosophy and theology and such subjects. But, as he says:

“It was a fact that, up to the age of forty, I was never once to bring any question nakedly before my native mind, asking myself what I really thought about it. I accepted unquestioningly the traditions of the past, the beliefs of my forefathers and my teachers, and the philosophy best suited to ready-made, accepted traditions. Naturally I imagined I was thinking profoundly, going to the very foundations of human knowledge. Actually I was interpreting life and my experience, not in my own idiom, but in the terms of the thought and belief of others.”

This is not unusual, in any walk of life, in any branch of study, but it had consequences.

“I have often found wisdom in the unlearned, often missed it in the scholar. It is a thing of the soul, not of the mind. With it a man is alive and grows; without it he is still in the womb of nature waiting to be born. Like the fruit of the tree, I think it comes from the abundant flow of life through us. Opening ourselves fully to the life and the joy and the sorrows of today brings that unfolding which makes it possible for God to reveal himself the more, day by day. Closing our minds and hearts to life, to truth, beauty, and love, cuts off the sunshine and the growth and fruition of our being.”

Apparently, as long as he was leading a busy life, he did not suspect that his beliefs – shall we call them surface beliefs? – were the reflections of what he had been taught, rather than truths welling up from within. But unbeknown to him, his years of teaching – contending with students as well as with books – were sowing “seeds of doubt in the power of our minds to know ultimate truth, and doubt in the validity of all known systems of philosophy.”

Specifically, it was the doctrinal and philosophical clash between monism and dualism, a conflict of views as old as Aristotle and Plato, and probably a good deal older. The Church’s position is based in Aristotle, yet Father Ildefonso found himself drawn more toward the Platonist position. I am not going to try to reproduce his summary of the conflict: Such questions raise in me only a sort of impatience. Tettemer himself ultimately said:

“I came to look with insistent suspicion on cleverly fabricated systems of philosophy so neatly explaining the universe. The feeling grew in me that Aristotle, that giant of pure reason, and all his followers among the Scholastics, were building up their beautiful and intricate systems on the imperfect and insufficient basis of native human experience and much vaunted `common sense.’ Was not some other dimensional factor that eluded common sense being left out?”

The specific issue that led him, for the first time, to make up his own mind on a subject rather than accept the official Church position, had to do with what we would call psychic phenomena. The Church admitted the phenomena as genuine, but (in accord with its dualistic thinking) maintained that they had to be produced by supernatural agency; that is, they were either of God or of the Devil. Father Ildefonso, though, studied the evidence closely, and concluded “that diabolical agencies had nothing to do with them and that, on the contrary, they were the result of natural laws of which we knew little or nothing.” (As an example of his reasoning, he cited the fact that people placing their hands lightly on a table’s surface were able to lift a wooden table, even a heavy one, but never an iron table, however light.) This was important in that he here formed his own conclusions even though they were at variance with the judgment of the Church. This initial step led to others, for the authority of the Church depended upon “the supernatural character of the visions, the prophecies, and the miracles of the saints and even of Jesus himself,” and if that went –.

Which is not to join forces with those who attack the Catholic Church as superstitious or fraudulent or (of all charges!) intellectually shallow. I know that is a common assessment here, but America, which was colonized and founded as a Protestant outpost during the era of Europe’s religious wars, has rarely been able to see Catholicism clearly. Tettemer says: “If the human mind must accept some form of doctrinal belief or creed concerning Jesus Christ and his message to humanity, I think I should prefer the Catholic tradition as the most logical and consistent.” I agree, but the most important word in that sentence is the word “if.”

.2.

Sometime during the war, Father Ildefonso was overtaken by illness and the effects of overwork. He was ordered to go to a Swiss sanitarium to recuperate. Specifically, his doctor ordered him to give himself rest from brainwork. “Obeying his rules, I put aside practically all reading and study, spending most of the daylight hours in a chrysalis-like state in a sheepskin sleeping bag on the balcony couch.”

His monastic life had been filled with activity and responsibilities, “impeding the realization in my consciousness of that real and eternal world which I saw as my true home. In my hours of prayer I glimpsed that world sufficiently to attest to its beautiful reality, but it seemed always just out of my reach. I must devote myself to the duties of the nearer, active world….” But now he was free to follow his inclination to live his day in contemplation. There followed a period of perhaps six months in which he let his mind wander where it would.

“I no longer directed my thoughts as before, to prepare lectures or prove theses. I was wholly relaxed, and my mind in a dreamlike state between thought and contemplation. I am not able to give a clear and orderly account of the ideas that passed to and fro through my mind, any more than we are able to recapture the dreams that pass through the mind if we lie looking up into the skies during an afternoon of relaxation in the country.

“My own native mind had had little opportunity to assert itself in the preceding years, as it had been too occupied with studying and teaching the ideas of others. One may inquire whether this is not one characteristic of our conception and method of education. We call thinking the passing of other men’s thoughts through our mind, thus rarely presenting to the growing mind the matchless opportunity to be found in sensing the nature of the problem itself, and in tracking down the answer with our own native powers.

“During my `quiet time,’ realizing this, I allowed my mind total freedom to open to the riddle of the mystery of existence, which had marked the birth of my philosophic mind at the age of twenty or thereabouts and always had held a fascination for me in the years between. This opening of the mind did not entail an effort to solve the riddle, but rather to let it find its foothold in my soul, to the end that I might the more fully realize it. It is a process similar to the stage of contemplation in prayer, where the faculties of intellect, sense, and imagination are quieted, and one contemplates, without mental movement or flexing, the object under consideration.”

Father Ildefonso had studied and taught philosophy for years; for nearly 25 years, he had spent at least two hours a day in prayer. As he says, this had given him “a facility in quieting the life of the senses of the discursive mind, and a capacity for fixing my attention with a quiet, steady regard on the subject of consideration.” So now, in the quiet of the Swiss mountains, he spent hours brooding over the mystery of life, “not trying to solve it, but striving to lose myself in its depths, allowing its inexplicableness to flow over me.” Being interested in all of biology, “I tried deliberately to focus my consciousness in the life principle of growing things, in order to know it directly from within, not simply from without, as is our usual form of knowing.”

And in this period of contemplation came the great change.

“Such contemplation in time stretches one’s consciousness to the utmost, bringing in its train a sense of perspective that makes us see not so much the smallness or unimportance of man as the smallness and inadequacy of man’s conception of the universe.

“This was the effect of my contemplation upon me. A new faculty of knowing seemed to be born in me, in the quiet stillness yet intense activity of consciousness within me. I seemed to touch the heart of reality, the very essence of existence, with a directness, an immediacy, rendering all my former knowledge false and illusory. As it were, I seemed to sense another dimension; or perhaps I should express it better were I to say that all dimensions seemed to go, leaving me conscious of a presence, a reality having no form that the senses could comprehend, yet not abstract and lifeless, as were the ideas of the mind, but concrete, vital, palpitating with realness.”

Tettemer wisely makes no attempt to classify or justify what he experienced. Anybody who has fallen into the temptation to justify or explain knows what happens: The person on the other end assumes the right to judge what s/he has not experienced, and often enough concludes that the experience was “nothing but” something familiar. What is at least equally important, he did not permit himself to conclude that he was now in the direct presence of God, as he would have done (and in fact did do) as a novice. Instead, he thought of it in a way that is of great usefulness to consciousness pioneers:

“But whether in truth it represented a direct union of the soul with God, or the merging of the soul in the consciousness of a being larger than oneself, or the attainment of a higher participation in the consciousness of one’s own larger nature, it came, it seemed to me, to the same thing, an overbelief that was in the right direction. I had the definite impression of the loss of my own personality in that of a larger consciousness, to be called either God or at the least on the way to God. Nothing can be gained for the cause of religion by jumping to conclusions beyond those warranted by the facts. If a cell in my body could merge its tiny consciousness with mine, it would be an overbelief to call it anything but a belief in the right direction toward union with God. The point is, if, as I am inclined to believe, all consciousness is ultimately one, that losing one’s own personality in that of a larger consciousness, which we may call God, or on the way to God, is in the right direction.”

I like that very much: He experienced, and did not insist upon any one interpretation of what he had experienced. He had come to see his experience as natural, whereas Catholicism is a supernatural religion. It is, as much as anything, a matter of definition, or a matter of how you choose to interpret the world. His long contemplative experience had changed his definitions. (He admits that if he had experienced this change in the context of church life, he would have taken it for the presence of God. But as it happened in a natural setting, it seemed to him a purely natural, rather than supernatural, phenomenon.)

“It was a growing state, becoming more distinct as time went on, and, gradually, my normal habitation.”

And the point for us is that Catholic theology was not the only thing he had lost faith in.

.3.

And, speaking of faith, I have no faith that I can adequately summarize his lucid explanation, so, with apologies, these scans of pages 227-242. I think they will be quite readable, printed out, and I think that it is only when you print them out that you will be able to resist the temptation to skim:

.4.

In what he calls the darkest time of his life, he was beset by doubt. “Doubt whether faith might not, as the Church taught, be a gift of God. Doubt whether I had not lost it by infidelity to my duties as a monk, losing the spirit of my calling in the distractions of study and eternal work in the last few years. Doubt if my doubting were an evil or a good thing. And yet, strange to say, the days did not bring me unhappiness along with the darkness.”

Time passed. His body recovered its health; his mind deferred making a decision as to whether he could continue the life he had been leading. His religious order sent representatives to reason with him. “They were sad at my state and pleaded with me to forget my silly ideas and return home to the monastery…. But it was not in my power to change the course of life within my own soul. How small and weak are our little philosophies in the presence of real life itself!”

He found that he could not explain himself, as he and they no longer spoke the same language. “I tried to explain to them that for me the mental world in which they lived had now become unreal, had lost its meaning; but I could not rightly expect them to understand, for they still lived unquestioningly in a world of Aristotle and abstract thought; and the new world of reality that I thought I glimpsed could have no meaning for them.”

He and they did try to find common ground, but when he said he had lost his faith even in philosophy, he saw that this seemed like madness to them. Sadly they left him, and sadly he watched them leave. “Dear brothers! How I loved them, for the men they were, and for their efforts to understand me, who only repaid them with pain, however unwillingly! I watched them leave, feeling a twinge of homesickness as I visualized their return to their safe haven, their beautiful and lasting monastic home.” He requested release from his vows, and received it.

.5.

So what does this have to do with us, we who are not monks? Why have I been prodded into making the effort to bring one small part of this remarkable book to the consciousness of those who stumble upon this blog entry? Here is what I think:

• His life gives us a window into a way of thinking and believing that few of us will have encountered today. The monastic world today may not much resemble the world John Tettemer knew. Novices entering a monastery today were shaped in a world unrecognizably different from the peaceful prewar years of the 1880s and 1890s. Different raw material must result in different finished products, surely.
• He possessed the gift of leaving behind, without needing to condemn, his life as a monk, and his thought as a religious, and his acquired philosophical learning. He didn’t feel a need to burn the scaffolding he had transcended.
• His lucid description of his thought processes, beliefs, and awakening should go far to reassure some whose journey is similar to his. It disrupted his life; it was accompanied by doubt; it caused him, unwillingly, to give great pain to those he loved, and who loved him.
• Perhaps most relevant to us is his way of thinking about the meaning of his insights: rather than certainty, a belief that his experience was “in the right direction.”

May our own explorations be as daring and clear-sighted as those of Father Ildefonso. May we live as well and as honestly as fearlessly as John Tettemer.