Each of us has a flight data recorder housed in the deepest recesses of our being. In a commercial jetliner, the flight data recorder is a physical object capable of receiving and storing the facts of every flight. It has a part number. It has physical dimensions. It is manufactured somewhere. It can be damaged, broken or lost. It is but a crude caricature of the real thing. In a human being, the flight data […]
The question in my heart today is this: what is possible? That is actually a poor translation of what is in my heart, because this simple question is so abstract it permits responses like, what is possible… ever? And the answer then is… well… anything, I suppose… This is not the question. I am not filled with a question about what might happen in places and times so remote from where we stand today as […]
This post is part of a series on the subject of Awakening sponsored/inspired by Barbara Franken—a January Challenge that has claimed the first week of February as it’s own as well… * * * * * One of my favorite descriptions of awakening comes from the book Dialogues on Awakening by Tom Carpenter. These are Tom’s recounting of conversations he has had with his friend and brother, Jesus, that grew out of his daily practice […]
At the tail end of this last week I came down with a pretty decent sinus cold, my third in about four months. I invite you to listen to the voices with me, some inner, some outer… Taking vitamins? Getting enough rest? Gotta’ be stress-related. Your system is weak. You need more balance in your life. I take [insert the product here] and I never get sick. You should probably get more exercise. You’re not […]
In A Course of Love, Jesus notes that “the animation of form with spirit is an ongoing aspect of Creation.” He says this is not a timebound dynamic. This is every moment. It was there at the Beginning. It is there right now. It will always be there. It is what is happening… Spirit is peeking out at us right now from behind and within everything, including the stale self-concepts I jam like boulders into […]
If this world is not an accident- the fortuitous product of its own basic uncertainty, or strictly speaking the ramification of a series of serendipitous oscillations in a quantized electromagnetic field- well, then it must be on purpose. We are left with no acceptable alternatives. Well… it could have been a mistake, but that is a scenario we hardly ever entertain. That would really be a head-scratcher wouldn’t it? To have been brought into existence […]
Let us begin. The room is dark and empty, and filled with silence. Keep in mind: this is not the type of silence to which we’re accustomed, a silence that is the inverse of noise, the silence that pervades space like a Propensity For Action lying in ambush. No. This is before that type of silence. This is emptiness. It is not even a room actually. It is not even space. Space, you see, has […]
Sometimes a day arrives in which the thing to do is just see what it has in store for you. It’s a day free of obligations, a day book-ended by important affairs and thus inopportune for embarking on projects that must be finished once they’ve begun, a day on which taking stock means discovering how you really feel given the space to do so, a day for partaking of simple pleasures. I chose once, on […]
Hafiz explained to us that, given Mr. Findley’s unexpected absquatulation to Costa Rica, he would be teaching the class for a little while. Then he let go of a stack of books from about eighteen inches off the desk and when they landed the sound they made was so big it damn near blew the back wall of the room off. After the dust settled, he winked at us. “Mr. Findley,” he said, “was the […]
I love science- the way it pries open the mind, the way it reveals the marbling of connection that courses through world like a vein of sparkling ore running deep through a mountain, the way it points to a destination without ever quite arriving. When- after digging through the till, sifting, examining, illuminating, testing, and finally conceding the point- we admit our befuddlement, and we dare to ask the types of questions our previous world […]
Embracing Forever 