Bernie Sanders at the Vatican conference
April 15, 2016
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is speaking at the Vatican Friday, praising Pope Francis and denouncing income inequality.
The Democratic presidential candidate, who is Jewish, announced last week that he would attend a conference on income inequality at the Vatican just days before the high-stakes New York primary.
Here is a transcript of his prepared remarks.
Continue reading Bernie Sanders at the Vatican conference
Coast to Coast AM — about Rita’s World
George Noory is having me on Coast to Coast AM again, this time to discuss Rita’s World.
Air time is 10 p.m. to midnight Sunday Pacific time, which — unfortunately! — translates to 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. Monday, Eastern time.
Hopefully Rita will be feeding me information during the show. Otherwise, I’ll have to pretend to be awake!
Speaking of communication ….
I just checked the website for The Monroe Institute and to my delight they have listed the weekend program that Bob Holbrook and I are going to teach in April and again in August.
I’m really looking forward to this. We’re all born with access to guidance, and we use it all our lives, often without knowing it. A few tips and the right kind of practice and feedback should make a big difference for people.
Here is the course description TMI put up:
Accessing Inner Guidance April 22-24, 2016
Join guest trainer Frank DeMarco and TMI certified trainer Bob Holbrook for this new Guidance weekend workshop. This program is designed to help you access your inner guidance and use it more surely, naturally, and easily, in all areas of your life.
Learn to access, trust and apply your inner guidance
Using The Monroe Institute’s Spatial Angle Modulation™ (SAM) technology to facilitate expanded states of consciousness, participants can more easily develop a trusted flow of information that they can apply in their everyday life.
Explore various concepts and practices of how to access and use guidance in your life. Practice ways to bring the mind and body into coherent alignment to support a practical and reliable connection to the vast potential of our infinite consciousness.
Explore Expanded States of Consciousness
Access Positive and Useful Guidance
Accessing Inner Guidance uses three kinds of exercises: individual, done in the CHEC units; in pairs and within a group setting. Repeating and alternating these exercises gives participants a firm feel for the skills, perceptions, limitations and problems involved. The goals and practice of each exercise will change as participants’ skills and familiarity with technique improves.
Learn methods to access positive and useful guidance within as a way of being
Don Sanderson on enlightenment
[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
Happy Birthday, Miss Rita
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
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
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.