I have found an awful lot of wisdom over the years in the novels of Dion Fortune. As a “for instance,” this from The Winged Bull, pages 155-157. It reminds me of an old Sufi saying, “Words are prisons; God is free.”
A chat with The Guys Upstairs
As we get toward the end of the year, I sometimes re-read my journals to see how I spend it. A major part of “how I spent it” for me is less what I was doing than what I was thinking about — or what (or who) I was communicating with. This, from last January, proved to be of interest.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
7:30 AM. So, I am very aware that I went to the Florida Keys as an indirect result of some restlessness within me saying that my accustomed way of living had become unsatisfactory. I am equally aware that I am having to avoid temptations — a crossword puzzle, a Nero Wolfe, any of a number of possibilities — rather than slow down enough to do this. Commentary?
The cracks in the system
Last August, , in a talk with Whitley Strieber, I said the mind could travel in time but the body couldn’t. In response, his wife Anne sent me an e-mail link to his description of two instances in which he apparently time-slipped to another century, and was told if he did anything he’d wind up there permanently. I thought, I’d better ask the guys. So, on Wednesday, August 31, 2011, I did.
A day
My friend Karl Boyken send me this link, saying “Frank, I do believe you’re going to love this video.” Very true. Inspirational without being sappy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXDMoiEkyuQ&feature=share
About 10 minutes.
Letting go
One night in the middle of the night I was looking through a beautiful book a friend sent me, The Blue Heron Book Of Love And Gratitude. And there, on page 39, was my spiritual autobiography, in these words from psychologist William James.
“The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal center of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.”
That’s just how it (finally) happened. I relaxed and threw the burden down. Or, I didn’t even need to throw it down; I shrugged it off. But like so many of the things we learn, it can’t be passed on to others merely by telling them about it. We have to test for ourselves whether a thing is true or not.
Greer on The Trouble with Binary Thinking
John Michael Greer is an interesting thinker, whose column The Archdruid Report appears Wednesdays at http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ My friend Rich Spees sent me an email reminder that the weekly column had been posted, saying, “Oh, you’re going to like the latest druid.” I don’t always, but this time, he was so right. The spooky thing, as I told Rich, is that decades ago, writing in my journal, I made a conscious decision to always find a third choice, never to stay at two, because (something told me) any two would be incomplete and misleading. Where did that knowing come from?
First Noosphere World Forum
A friend sent me to this website: http://www.noosphereforum.org/
It took a while for me to get beyond the artwork. Unfortunately their presentation is in reversed type (white over a background) so I took this text from this pagehttp://www.noosphereforum.org/drupal/?q=node/6 and reformatted it so I could read it. Now, I haven’t yet read the other pages, but this seems to me an important initiative. The analysis feels real. It ties in with what I have felt in my bones for most of my lifetime: We are in a once-in-a-species-lifetime transition and it’s a good and hopeful thing!