The Other World

[Don posted this as a comment to another post, but I thought it deserved a wider audience than that was likely to get.]

When I was still pre-puberty, anything that smelled like normal Western religion turned me away and still does, yet I was attracted to Rosicrucian, Theosophy, and Buddhist wisps that were floating around without having a clue to enlighten me why so. Then, in the later sixties a dark, little bookstore on a side street invaded my world with stacks of East Asian publications that promised enlightenment. The ones that attracted me, especially those by Zen roshis, Krishnamurti, and Shri Ramana, never mentioned God, sin, salvation, required beliefs, or pleading prayers, but practices prefaced by, in essence, “try it, you’ll like it.” I did try, but knew no one else who was interested and supportive, so often my focus was lost in making do. Only in the last couple of years am I starting to get hints of what it is all about thanks to heavy duty help streaming down from elsewhere. While I’ve always somehow treasured those teachings, truthfully I didn’t really consider them practical until just a few months ago.
Continue reading Don Sanderson on enlightenment

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!

Rita’s World, volume one, scarcely 10 months from the beginning of our latest set of conversations.

From http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/news/Absence-carol-singers-evidence-spiritual-malaise/article-586899-detail/article.html

My old friend Robert Clarke, author of five books investigating modern culture in light of Jung’s discoveries, wrote this letter to his local newspaper and sent me a copy. I came across it just now, and i want to share it. Robert was a lovely man, who died that same year.

Absence of carol singers is evidence of spiritual malaise
Tuesday, January 06, 2009, 09:20
Comment on this story

NO carol singers came to my door before or at Christmas, though children wearing monster masks knocked all night at Halloween. Last year, I had two sets of children come at Christmas, first a group of young boys then a group of girls who were a little older. All both groups could sing was We Wish You A Merry Christmas, and when I asked them to sing a carol they replied they didn’t know any.
I could only shake my head in sadness; this was yet another sign of the soul-sickness of our modern so-called culture. Children singing carols at Christmas go together like milk and honey – we certainly loved singing them at school back in the 1940s and ’50s. Watch a street scene at Christmas in any old movie and you will see a group of children carrying a lantern singing carols from door to door.
The absence of religion in many schools today fits in with the prejudice felt against religion generally, which means children do their learning in the street about drugs, drink and sexual perversions their grandparents never dreamt existed.
Yet as the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung discovered, the human psyche does not consist merely of ego-consciousness. The psyche is actually attached to what the East calls the Self, the Atman, what certain early Christians called the Logos, borrowing the term from the Greek Mysteries. This is the higher immortal to which we are all attached, which disperses itself into mankind and perhaps all of nature, and which ultimately is part of God. An example of the Logos is Christ, with the man Jesus representing the human side. Logos means Word, and Christ is the Word in the Gospel of John.
Jung said myths and religious teachings are not fiction, but rather express archetypal processes of the spirit coming through the collective unconscious to mankind, which is why the symbolism in the world’s myths is often very similar. For example, the Star of Bethlehem appears with Christ, but a star appearing in the heavens heralding the birth of a saviour is actually known worldwide. Horus in ancient Egypt has his star, as does the Chinese Kwan Shai Yin, while at the birth of the Persian Zarathustra a magical star shines over the village for three days and nights. In Polynesia, the god Vatea has his special star, and the Wichita Indians of North America tell of a star that falls to earth to become a human saviour. As I say, the symbolism is known worldwide, connected with the descent of the Self as saviour through the collective unconscious into the soul of a human individual – thus the divine birth.

There are many such comparative symbols to be found in mythology and religion because experience of the birth of the Self is a universal phenomenon.
Jung tells us that, because the birth of the divine child expresses a definite sacred occurrence, albeit through the unconscious, when consciousness accepts it as an outer event in a religion it still works, because consciousness is coming into harmony with the workings of the unconscious/spirit. When it is entirely rejected, however, then consciousness is going the opposite way to the unconscious/spirit, and this, Jung stresses, means psychic/spiritual dissociation, which in the end causes neurosis.
The Christian version of the birth of the divine child is a particularly beautiful one, and children singing carols to express this means they are in harmony with the sacred workings through the unconscious.
This is not merely the best way to bring up children but really the only true way to bring harmony to the psyches of adults. Christianity is not just a matter of a faith and a creed, it is a healing system, because it heals the split in our psyches. This applies to all genuine religions.
It seems, however, that modern educators see fit to deny children the benefit of religion, and more specifically of Christmas carols, so that not only does neurosis then become a powerful danger to the growing child, but also all the things of chaos rush in to fill the gap in the psyche.
To quote Jung: “Does (man) know that he is on the point of losing the life-preserving myth of the Inner Man that Christianity has treasured up for him? Does he realise what lies in store should this catastrophe ever befall him? Is he even capable of realising that this would in fact be a catastrophe?”
ROBERT CLARKE
Burslem

The current issue of Fate magazine has an article by my friend Michael Langevin, titled, “Is There a Real World Hogwarts?” As you may imagine, it’s about the magical possibilities of a certain institute in central Virginia. I must admit, I read only one Harry Potter book, and didn’t like it, so the comparison has no charm for me, but it’s nice to see The Monroe Institute get some favorable ink. I don’t know the demographics about Fate readers, but i would think that at least some of them ought to be interested.

http://www.fatemag.com/current-issue/

For nearly two dozen years, TMI has been a major factor in my life, and it, and the community I tapped into there, have done more to make me whatever it is that i am than anything else i can name.

If you don’t know about the place, take a look at their website. Poke around, see if intuition prods you in that direction. You never know.

www.monroeinstitute.org