Author: Michael

Arguing Your Case

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Creative

In order to escape your prison, you will have to argue your case.  No one can argue it for you. I’ve got a hearing coming up- Docket 249 in the Court of Self Appeals- and I’m getting antsy.  I can tell you it’s no cake walk.  I’m prowling around this cage like a tiger fresh off the jungle, drowning myself in images of freedom that induce feelings of freedom, that induce tears one instant, and […]

Desert Wandering. Desert Discoveries.

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Christ / Creative

There is a desert inside of me where I wander, like a hermit, my vocabulary reduced to variations in the salinity of my tears and one Name that I give to everything.  I found myself there again last night, sheltered against the wind by a robe of old rags, walking alone amidst an endless quilt of rolling dunes beneath the stars.  I know I am not the Originator of this place, even though it is […]

The Teachings of Rubik’s Cube

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Christ

Once when I was a boy I asked my father for a Rubik’s Cube.  My wish was granted, and when I arrived home I took it out of the package and played around for a little while making small, easily recovered changes, frequently restoring the original hexi-color symmetry.  I didn’t want to lose my way back to the original, “correct” state, so I made four or five moves to “scramble” the puzzle, then put it […]

Choosing to Exist

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Course Ideas / Creative

I think we should begin with a bit of Rumi.  This is like stretching out briefly before we tear ass across a back yard still slick with a morning dew.  It’s a best practice, and it just might prevent us from ripping ligaments or pulling hamstrings in the recklessness that follows.  It’s a safe beginning. Sort of. “We tremble, thinking we’re about to dissolve into non-existence, but non-existence fears even more that it might be […]

Daring to Think Competently

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Christ / Course Ideas

When I read Bucky Fuller, I tend to laugh out loud in joy at least once per page.  I’m a geek, yes- that is surely a contributing factor to this physiognomic response- but it is the joy of recognizing Bucky’s mind that really sets into motion the cascading processes that result in air being fired from my lungs in short bursts.  His writing bristles with intelligence, connection, humility and honesty.  One reason I enjoy reading […]

The Conundrums of a Conflicted Mind

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Christ

Who is studying the Course?  And to what end?  Who hears the words?  Who is stirred to hope for a new life?  Who recognizes Love and surrenders, turning round then to confront their darkness?  Who finds it too complicated or difficult? Who knows? My little, egoic self is a Seeker.  The starting point for this little one is the deeply held belief that my unique and particular historically-derived collection of personal experiences is all that […]

A Journey of the Heart

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Creative

It began with thickets and brambles.  I was mired neck-deep in a conclave of every manner of growing thing possessive of sharp, pointed, prickly, skin-penetrating armor.  I was hacking a path to nowhere with a partly rusted machete, swearing, sweltering in the mid-day sun, growing increasingly angry at the steady rain of recently hacked-in-two, thorn-laden vines that seemed bound and determined to fall down on top of me.  I was way behind schedule.  My arms […]

God Is Brewing Tea Again

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Creative

In the Creation, God is a tea plant.  She is a tea plant and also the soil in which the tea plant grows, and the air in which the tea plant breathes, and the rains in which the tea plant drinks, and the Light in which the tea plant Knows. We were a leaf on God’s tea plant, and the Life of the tea plant lived in us and through us.  It was beautiful and […]

Setting Yourself Aside

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Creative

Strange.  Strangely familiar, I mean, this coming back.  It’s a lurching free-fall and a hot cup of tea all at once.  At first I don’t recall ever enrolling in this University of Unceasing Joys, but then my feelings and memories, even my very identity and my deepest sense of Self, snap back into their real shape, like that shape memory polymer when you heat it back up. I’m taking one of two required semesters of […]

A Rambling Exploration of Perception

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Course Ideas

Perception is the only mode of awareness available to the separated mind.  To say it another way, perception is a way of consciously viewing ourselves and the world that is based upon the a priori assumption- or belief- that separation is real.  Once we have accepted this false premise- that we are truly separate from God and from one another, that the ‘I’ within ‘me’ is an island unto itself- then perception is the primary […]