Monday, August 31, 2009

Newsletter is ready

The September Newsletter is now available on the Divine Science Today web-site. Hope you enjoy it. Rob

Thursday, August 13, 2009

September Newsletter

Friends -- as you may know I have revamped the Divine Science website to reflect recent influx in my reading and a shift in my thinking. The Website was renamed: Divine Science Today. As I returned to reading the work of Margaret Laird, via the Laird Letters I was struck by the value to today in the Margaret Laird, John M. Dorsey collaboration. It was as if two currents of high voltage thought-energy connected and lights went on for me. Dr. Dorsey was Dean of the Department of Psychiatry, Wayne State University, Detroit. As a medical doctor and psychiatrist he evolved a conceptual view of individuality that is very refreshing. Margaret Laird was (in my opinion) the clearest articulator of Christian Science or scientific metaphysics of our day. Her paraphrase of the writings of Mary Baker Eddy is very valuable. A friend introduced Mrs. Laird to the book, Living Consciously: The Science of Self, co-authored by Dr. Dorsey and Dr. Walter Seegers, Dean of the Department of Physiology, Wayne State and on reading it Mrs. Laird felt they were voicing the same idea, each in their own language. She sent him a copy of her book, Christian Science Re-Explored and thus began a long and fruitful association between a Christian Science teacher and a medical doctor educator. You might find the words of Dr. Dorsey describing his discovery of Christian Science, which I have reprinted on the front page of the website, astonishing.
As I came to appreciate what this association means, I felt it spoke to "today." I am at work writing a newsletter for the website for September, entitled "Today." My plan is to write an October newsletter on "Science" and a November newsletter on "Divine." This will amplify the new name: Divine Science Today. I hope you will read these and share comments.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

The Circle of Life

In the Disney movie, "The Lion King", there comes the song by Elton John "The Circle of Life." One line goes: "Some say 'eat or be eaten', some say 'live and let live'.
What say you? Your view of Life (Mind) will determine your will, which in turn will determine your life. My friend Margaret Laird says, "If we knew better, we would do better." We can't do better than we know. This is a principle of any enlightened view of Life and Mindful living.
Now all of these words you are reading just now can have only the meaning you are giving them to give to yourself. If your vision expands so does your view, just like a telescope, or a zoom lens on your camera. Consciousness is such that it can and does expand and contract just like the iris of your eyeball does and just like you eyeball, consciousness is by nature flexible, adaptable, creative, original and free to the one who has it. Good news! You have it. If you KNOW how it works, it works FOR you and you do better. Doing is always in proportion to knowing. If you don't know how it works, it seems to work against you -- it doesn't really, but it seems to. When you start up self-learning (infancy? pre-natal?) it expands. Training, which socialization requires tends to contract it. Training and self-learning are not synonyms in the context of Science understanding today. When you lay aside self-learning for the "goods" of your training (conditioned thinking), these "goods" (gods) that are not the Good, are the devils of your own making which hide the Good-being you are being. If on top of this ignorance (immaturity of view) you believe that your devils are coming from outside you, from someone else, and you aren't yet prepared to be self-responsible for all of your self-creations, you set for yourself an impossible task in living. The task of trying to get rid of "them" or trying to avoid "them" is impossible because there's one of you and 3 billion of "them." "To agree with your adversary," writes Margaret Laird, using the old quotation from the Gospels, "means to not be one."
If we understand the scientific metaphysical distinction between Reality and our views of Reality, we are free to expand our Awareness infinitely. If we telescope our zoom-lens attentiveness to our personal view of Reality at this moment and try to resist its changing, this "dis-ease" will make trouble for us beyond our concept, though we are always the maker of our own experience and always free to free ourselves.
Once you are free of mistaking your view of Realitly for Reality as it is, and in Science living this comes from practicing the "discernment of the FACTS of being," there comes an ability to appreciate ALL points of view as nothing but views with no Truth in them, no matter how "gross" or "wicked" your old Sunday School teacher trained your judgment to react. "Try it out, dude!"
Do you know where the phrases "eat or be eaten," "live and let live" and "know better, do better" probably originated? These are all old views of Reality still in popular use as mottos. You can check your real view of things by your emotional reaction to suggestions offered in words. What you say your view is, may not actually be so. This is good practice, since discovering your old childish emotional training secretly influencing your thinking in work-situations or love-situations is bound to be unhappiness-making for everyone.
Let's start with the easy one, "Live and let live." Do a Google. I did and this came up as the first "hit." Which amazed me.

abufares said...the world according to a tartoussi
"A man walking alone on a deserted beach, brandishing a lantern in his outstretched hand might be a fool. But, for a ship that went astray on a stormy night, the same man is a savior."
Saturday, March 07, 2009

Live and Let Live
In response to the latest bigoted outcry on the Syrian Blogsphere against Homosexuality.
Next - "If we knew better, we would do better" goes back to Socrates and Aristotle, Greek philosophers in the 3rd century B.C. Socrates, a most brilliant self-learner, in fact the first in Western thought to declare himself so, did not know Aristotle. Aristotle hadn't been born when Socrates died. Please notice the operative words "know" and "would". Aristotle did know Socrates from reading Plato and others and being a most brilliant self-learner himself, Aristotle decided that Socrates theory of will-weakness ("When I say "no" I feel guilty) indicated a lack of knowledge or enlightenment. Agnosia or mental blindness as cause, is will-weakness (vice -lack of skill in one's living) as the effect. But Aristotle rejected Socrate's view of Self-reality and emphasized instead "weakness of will" as the cause and ignorance or stupidity as the effect. This debate goes on today. When a metaphysical scientist says: "Know better, do better," they are advocating enlightement, or self-discovery, self-learning in the tradition of Socrates, the first "non-Aristotelian" thought-systemer.
And now for the fun one. "Eat or be eaten." This did not start with business strategists. Accoring to the book, "Ideas That Changed The World, " by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, the very fist recorded IDEA THAT CHANGED THE WORLD WAS -- drum-roll --"We can eat each other!" The idea of cannibalism indicates the first "thinking" animals -- homo sapiens. He says: "Some of the earliest evidence of human thought lies among the detrius (feces) of a cannibal feast eaten nearly half a million years ago. (Isn't science fun?)..."We have trained ourselves to recoil from cannibalism and to see it as treason against our species: a form of sub-human savagery. The evidence, however, suggests the opposite: cannibalism is typically -- you might almost say peculiarly -- human and cultural." No other mammals snap in two the bones of their prey, he says, and dig out the marrow to eat. All others tend to avoid any practice of cannibalism except in extreme circumstances and feasts and rituals are not extreme circumstances. "Which suggests that it did not come "naturally" to our ancestors, they had to THINK about it." (italics mine).
Now to complete the thought if you are a student of modern metaphysical science, it did not come "naturally" "humanly" it came "divinely." Human nature is human, because it is divinely Natural and not human for the same reason. Inspiration! Love meeting the human need for -- food and food for thinking. What an interesting view of the "two roads diverged in a wood, and I..." and how it does shoot to hell the two old creation stories of Genesis of how man becomes man in the eyes of himself and God. Science has a different view of everything (the universe).
If there was no divinity of HUMANITY, there would be no feasts, no rituals, animals would be animals. But the time came because the IDEA came, the inspiration came to be divine, to be immortal -- which 500,000 years ago meant living to tomorrow, maybe next week, depending on the food supply -- Hey! I've got a great idea! Let's eat people! And the human race was born, born in inspiration and a new idea. Fortunately for you and me, the unfolding God-idea pushing itself out from the depths within us, pressuring us to identify it more clearly and correctly had more than that one old 500,000 year old idea up its sleeve.
Reality is demanding us to give up the old concepts of the God-idea as fast as we can. Or -- we might just have to eat you.