I wrote recently about thought systems, and then I got to thinking… There’s a prevalent concept in our still predominate worldview that goes like this, “Use it. Or Lose it.” Use the budget allocation your department has been given within the current fiscal year, or it will be taken away. Use your bicep to lift hunks of metal once or twice a week until your arm is burning like a sonuvagun, or it will atrophy. […]
If you haven’t tried everything yet, by all means keep trying. That is, if there is still something you wish to say or do that seems it might just be the thing to establish the veracity of your special amazing carefully hidden sparkling inner superhero identity- the one only you really understand, the one you feel that you and you alone must forge in the fires of your achievement and then quench in your cool […]
Jesus is, among other things, a systems thinker. Throughout A Course in Miracles he reminds us that one of his goals is to help us change our thought system, an approach to healing that he extends beautifully in A Course of Love wherein he invites us to consider that we have arrived, and left the ego behind, but may still be prone to move about in old patterns. He asks us to consider abandoning those […]
Sometimes after a period of engagement with the world- of rummaging through a serpentine forest of excessively close-packed motorists, of defusing tasks that have been thrown headlong like live grenades towards the hard wall of Deadline, of displaying all the requisite attributes of a trained specialist embroiled in the local deluge of a world economy – I take a deep breath and return to the Beginning. I stop and take a drink of the Solace that […]
There’s nothing quite like a good paradox to peel the shrink wrap off your inner life and release the beautiful flavors that you are, or to suggest the intersection of hidden dimensions with the particular version of Flatland we’ve been calling our own. Let’s try one. Consulting the book of Rumi, as translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne (The Essential Rumi), we find the following lyrical paradox poised atop the 105th page, like a […]
The laws of nature have received quite a bit of coverage over the years, and rightly so. In their silent immutability, there is no example more powerful in all the land of indomitability- of accomplishment freed from the constraint of effort, of action freed from the morass of choice, of character freed from the question of evolution and learning. Let me just say it: in my heart of hearts, I want to live as purely, […]
This week I have felt particularly troubled, and perhaps some elements of my experience are worth sharing in at least a general sense. Maybe in the sharing others can benefit. Maybe in the sharing I will better understand what has taken place. Unlearning can at times be deeply challenging, as if you are pitted in a wrestling match for your own soul. In A Course in Miracles Jesus describes the way in which the ego […]
The day to end all days begins like any other. I awaken in the same bed. I begin an awkward stumble down the hall, but… even before my synapses have warmed, I can sense it. Something is strange. Nice strange. Really nice strange. I am filled with the abiding sensation that everything is worked out. The center of my being is a field of possibility and satisfaction. Nothing hangs over me and nothing begs for […]
Jesus suggests in the Treatise of the New- (of the Treatises on A Course of Love)- that we stand poised to enter the causative formation of the new world we have so long sought. It’s right here, now, awaiting our response. I feel like I’m in it up to my neck- but neck deep isn’t enough. I can’t stand on the end of the high dive, bouncing in place, and just imagine what it would […]
As of this morning, I’ve very nearly completed reading Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84, my first encounter with his work. Early on, say two hundred pages in, I happened to mention to a friend at work that I was reading the book, and they replied with the requisite question, “What’s it about?” I knew it was going to be a good read when my immediate reaction was a blank stare and a smidge of resentment for […]
Embracing Forever 