The world’s invisible Internet (3)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

In March 1993, three months after doing Gateway,  I did another TMI residential course called Guidelines, designed to get participants into closer touch with guidance. Although I didn’t realize it until later, I entered the program not only expanded, but wildly ungrounded. This must have been hard on the other participants, but it made it easy for me to take another giant step. Doubt inhibits. Trying to define in advance of experience inhibits. Worrying too much about fooling yourself, or about making a fool of yourself in front of others, inhibits. Being ungrounded is not generally helpful, but in this instance it did allow me to move, as I was not in the mood to inhibit anything!

Guidelines has a chapter in Muddy Tracks too; all I want to say here about the program is that on the final day, I got to have a session in the isolation chamber that I call the black box, and for the first time I was able to allow the guys to come through using my voice rather than my pen. Just as in automatic writing, the words welled up within me, only this time instead of writing the words, I spoke them. All sessions in the black box are taped, and the participant is given a copy of the tape, so I was able to walk away with an hour or so of conversation from the other side, lest I should later doubt that I had done it.

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The world’s invisible Internet (2)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

When the breakthrough came, it didn’t take place out of thin air. I had been preparing myself for it – unknowingly – for a decade and a half. We need to talk about automatic writing as I experienced it.

I began just by beginning, not knowing what I was doing. I sat down with pen and paper and sort of waited for something to happen. It’s easier to do this than to explain it. I placed myself in a state of openness, in the way that you would if you were waiting for a friend to talk to you. Usually I asked a question to start things off.

At first I was trying too hard. It can be difficult, remaining receptive when you want something to happen! I didn’t know what I was waiting for, you see. I thought, “well, start.” So if I pushed the pen across the page a line, forming letters as I was moved to, sometimes I’d get words that didn’t make sense together, sometimes nonsense words – letters that didn’t even make real words – and sometimes just blankness. But sometimes things worked, and before too long I recognized what attitude worked, and then I had the secret. It is a matter of imagination as much as receptivity. I often tell people, “if you can’t get started, just pretend for a while. Make it up deliberately, knowing you are doing so. Persist, and at some point when the real thing kicks in, you will know it.” It should go without saying that as important as anything is: Never deceive others or yourself. The former is merely a matter of integrity; the latter, though, involves discernment.

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The world’s invisible Internet (1)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

 

 

So here I am, more than 60 years old, and I am talking to people who are not in bodies. Some have been dead a few years, some for decades, or centuries. It doesn’t seem to make any difference how long they have been gone or how famous they were or weren’t. Apparently I may talk to nearly anyone I wish to, provided that I have a reason to do so. I seem to have tapped into the invisible world’s Internet.

If this were merely my own experience or my own delusion, it wouldn’t be very important to anyone but me. But since it appears to be a skill that anyone can develop, I propose to tell you how to do the same thing I’m doing. To do so, I need to sketch out how I got to this point, but you don’t need to follow my path. In fact, you couldn’t if you wished to. You have your own path, whatever it is, and it’s the only one for you.

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Russia and the US — which is the superpower?

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

When you read Ventura, you always learn something, even if it’s something you would rather wasn’t true. I’ve never seen anyone who could get more out of a newspaper than he does routinely. In a sense, he’s using the newspaper as a huge reminder sheet, so we remember what happened the day before yesterday.

MICHAEL VENTURA

LETTERS AT 3AM –

ISSUES ’08: RUSSIA

Austin Chronicle – August 29, 2008

Once upon a time there was a Russian named Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Was he a gangster? Some say no, some say yes, and some say, “Sometimes.” Was he a democratic visionary? “Yes!” chants America’s press; others are not so sure. But all agree that by 2003 he was Russia’s richest person, the 16th richest man in the world according to Wikipedia, owner of that great and powerful Russian enterprise, Yukos Oil Co. Then came October 25, 2003 – a day sad for some, joyful for others, but an historical turning point for all: Vladimir Putin, president (now prime minister) of Russia, whose soul George W. Bush claims not only to have seen but to have approved, ordered the arrest of Khodorkovsky.

The West was shocked, shocked, do you hear?! Arrest the 16th richest man in the world?! That could never happen in a free country! The charges must be false! Well, we’ll likely never know whether the charges were false, half-false, or one-sixteenth false. We’ll likely never know whether the trial was even one-sixteenth fair. But off to jail went Khodorkovsky, and in jail Khodorkovsky remains. The Western press, as with one voice, declaimed that Putin is but a czar in blue-jeans (true, he often wears blue-jeans); as for Khodorkovsky, they say he was framed for his love of free markets, truth, democracy, and, you know, that stuff.

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Dreams of a better world

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

This very interesting think-piece from the arch-druid came via a friend. If our age is characterized by any one trait, I’d say it’s mythic illiteracy.

 

Dreams of a better world

By John Michael Greer

Created Jul 17 2008 – 07:12

http://www.energybulletin.net/print/45939

As it launched the modern worldview on its trajectory, the intellectual revolution of the 18th century – the Enlightenment, as it’s usually called – passed on a legacy with profoundly mixed consequences for the future. Central to the Enlightenment ethos was the claim that myths were simply inaccurate claims about fact, and should be replaced by more accurate claims founded on reason and experiment. This seems like common sense to most people nowadays, but like most things labeled “common sense,” it begs more questions and conceals richer ironies than a casual glance is likely to reveal.

One of those ironies became central to a discussion sparked by last week’s Archdruid Report post, when a reader took issue with my characterization of progress as a myth. Like most people nowadays, he assumed that “myth” meant a story that isn’t true, and drew the usual distinction between myth and science – that is, between the cosmological narratives of other cultures, which don’t usually make experimentally testable claims about the natural world, and the cosmological narratives of ours, which does. It took, as it usually does, several exchanges before he realized that the popular definition of myth he was using is not the only game in town.

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Clarification

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

A friend tried to download the free book of poetry and couldn’t make the link work. I should have explained that this was another in my list of coming attractions, available only when the website is completed. Sorry for any confusion/frustration this may have caused. Hang on, we’re getting there.

Something free

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

 

Poetry – The Marsh                               FREE DOWNLOAD

Ten years we spent-my wife, our two children, our cats, and I-in a suburban house that backed onto a marsh. Although fifty miles from the Atlantic, it was a tidal marsh, and so it felt the influence of the sea.

It was a delight to me to be able to walk to the edge of my own property and venture out in a small canoe. The house was in a subdivision; the marsh was my escape. And regardless the state of the distant tides, there were the herons and the egrets ….

The form of this poetry is the cinquain, an American form of haiku verse comprising five lines of two, four, six, eight and two syllables respectively.

The Marsh comprises 90 cinquains arranged in sections designed to print out as 17 standard 8.5″ x 11″ pages.

This download is free with my best wishes. You are welcome to share it with others, provided that you do so in unaltered form, including copyright and URL found on the title page.

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