Thursday, December 16, 2010

The Metaphysics of the Moment

I am working on the metaphysics of the moment.  Another word for this work is "treatment."  Treatment is always self-treatment.  Reading Jan Christiaan Smut's magnificent work, Holism and Evolution in my morning reading time and Dr. John M. Dorsey's Psychology of Language in my afternoon reading time is providing interesting dymanic in the life of my ideas.  An old word for this dynamism in ideas is "chemicalization," using a non-organic metaphor for a real psychic experience.  Like dropping an alka-seltzer in a glass of water, a chemical transformation is triggered by the combining of two different chemical substances whose properties antagonize the moment, until one emerges as basic and the other disappears.  The catalytic agent or trigger is untransformed in the event and plays only a mechanical role in the transformation.  Actually it is the thing itself which is thrown into self-transformation.  As this process is in high gear in my just now, I expect to be with it a while longer and not yet haver coherent results of what is precipitating within me.  Also, I am far beyond the point of twoness and instead of an antagonism or struggle for survival of the aptest mental power, the concept of Holism and its holistic action in my individuation combining with the consciously solispsist oirentation toward my emotionality and hence all my life is more of a synthesis and integration, a harmonizing of cosmic visions into a single, unfied vision and a well-made languge. I keep promising my self to write and someday maybe soon I will do so.  But for now I share this piece from Maragret Laird's Chrisitan Science Re-explored (now called We are The World We Walk Through), which keys with a marginal reference in Science and Health, "the true healing,":

S&H 230:27
"We think that we are healed when a disease disappears, though it is liable to reappear; but we are never thoroughly healed until the liability to be ill is removed. So-called mortal mind or the mind of mortals being the remote, predisposing, and the exciting cause of all suffering, the cause of disease must be obliterated through Christ in divine Science, or the so-called physical senses will get the victory."

Margaret Laird:
There is but one way to accomplish healing. This way is the way of Science, the discernment of nothing to heal. This accords with a statement about healing in the Christian Science textbook: “We think we are healed when a disease disappears…but we are never really healed until the liability to be ill is removed.” This liability to be ill, impoverished, unhappy, lies in mistaking the material personality for man—conscious identity or Mind. In mistaking the material personality for man—conscious identity or Mind. In the material personality conscious human individuality is the personality. This fact is the cause and cure of dis-ease.


It was during my service as 2nd Reader of First Church Evanston that I became increasingly restless and began to question the validity of organized religion’s efforts to hold Truth to a stereotyped pattern. I began to see that there is no Truth for the individual but his own demonstrated understanding. As this fact broke into consciousness, I experienced a natural impatience and resistance to the habit of clinging to outworn religious concepts.

The mental gymnastics of attempting to correlate incidents or myths taken from the King James version of the Bible with passages taken from to me seemed limiting and frustrating to original thinking.

One day this contradictory passage from Science and Health appeared in the Lesson Sermon. “While we adore Jesus for what he did for mortals treading alone his loving pathway up to the throne of glory in speechless agony exploring the way for us, yet Jesus spares us not one individual experience.” Science and Health page 26 I asked myself, what did he do for mortals if he did not spare us one individual experience.” I questioned this passage and others in this Lesson Sermon on “Sacrament”. I realized that my thinking was no longer oriented to Christian theology but was taking the path of Science. I did not adore Jesus, he meant nothing to me, nor did my heart overflow with gratitude for what he did for mortals. He was not my Christ. Even at that early day I recognized that the divinity (Spirit) of each individual is his own Christ or Savior, whether named Jesus, Mary, John or James. Also,

Also I could not subscribe to the statement read each Sunday at the CS church services: “Now are we the sons of God, an it doeth not yet appear what we shall be; If now I am the son of God, now am I the appearing of that fact. The I or Ego in the now is the I or Ego appearing in the future. We know what we shall be because of what we are. The divinity of humanity is not a development. It has no future that is not now. The end is from the beginning. Reality may assume different forms, but remains Reality all the way.

The CSt who is Science has no “Jesus” to adore. His Jesus is defined by Mrs. Eddy, “The highest human corporeal concept of the divine idea.” The highest human corporeal concept of the divine idea.” His Christ speaks to him from within and as the self-unfolding Truth. I soon read my Bible as Science-fiction where the characters and circumstances portray the God-idea in the metaphorical language of that day and when I read, “I am the Way, the Truth, and Life,” I did not think of “Jesus,” but of my own divinity. Each one individually is his own I Am, his own Way, Truth and Life. In every name and concept, I am is the concept or name. Before Abraham was I Am. Every tree, every flower, every man, is continually crying out, I Am. This I is Mind.  (WATW-xxxviii)

Healing in Science is education. It is the elimination of disease in the sense that sin, “missing the mark,” imperfect apprehension, is the dis-ease. The “educator” that the patient or pupil grows for help in the self-discovery of his divinity does not deny the sin or sickness. They are not his dis-ease. His disease is the ego-image he has mistaken for the Ego, his true self. One of the first steps in the educational process, therefore, is acquainting the patient with his ego-image. This confrontation with habitual thought patterns, many of which the patient may not be conscious of (W-121) holding, is of great value and must precede the understanding essential for “leaving the mortal basis of belief.” A CST will not ask himself why or how he got into trouble since what confronts him as trouble is the mistaken sense of himself. The all-knowing Mind never got into trouble and does not have to get out and the ego-image can never get out since it is the trouble.


You tell me it is your experience that healings in CS are lessening, and that more CSts are finding it necessary to have medical aid. I do not think this is surprising. CSts have rested too long with the conditioned thinking that healing means the elimination of symptoms rather than the healing of disease through awakening to the truth of being. What you call no-healing of the physical body is the spiritual fact coming to view that body is metaphysical—conscious thought. Mrs. Eddy made this point clear (132) many times in the CS textbook. She says SH150 the healing power is Science (knowing) and not a phenomenal exhibition. Also on SH230 “we think we are healed when a disease disappears though it is liable to reappear, but we are never thoroughly healed until this liability is removed.” The marginal note of this paragraph is “The true healing.” The metaphysical healing of physical disease comes with the awakening or discovery that “Mind is the source and condition of all existence.” The mythology of healing is obsolete in the Science age. In the Science age, the magic of healing is the fact of no sick to heal, no sinner to save.

Love, the divinity of humanity, supplies the human need with the magic of Science: a practitioner able to recognize that in mistaking the ego-image for the I or Ego (one’s self), we have dying in our living, and living in our dying. Science (knowledge) is Spirit. It is the dynamic Life-force, the unchanging Change apparent as new concepts of Reality, new technological discoveries, new “materialism”. A comment in the LA Times of Jan4/71, by an anthropology professor at UCLA is pertinent to our point: “Man [as conceived today] is already obsolescent.”

The man of imagination, maintaining the absolutely neutral position of Principle, with no pro-this or anti-that is the one who will discover steps and techniques for communication leading to the abolishment of war.

I was once asked by a prominent physician, “How confused can you get by reading books like the CS textbook which deny the reality (W-122) of matter?” I replied, “There need be no confusion if you do not read words but let ideas unfold from your own withinness, letting your own Mind, your own being doing the reading.”
(WATW 121)

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Holism and Evolution

I have a friend who has a friend who accused me of being just an "intellectual".  I accepted the compliment, remembering that around the turn of the 20th century in heated philosophical debates over Mind and Brain, in America and in Europe, with players such as the great William James at Harvard, Borden Bowen at Boston University on "our" team, deep thinkers were dismissed as "metaphysicians."  Being "too metaphysical" got you laughed out of the discussions.  I filed this "compliment" away until on reading Jan Christiaan Smut's book Holism and Evolution (which launched the holistic health movement) written in 1925 contained the thoughts recorded below about the evolution of Mind, on which the greatest whole of wholes, human Personality, is built as superstructure. Without the stuff of Mind, my friend of my friend would have no stuff to work up into the language she may so thoughtlessly take for granted. My every word is an autobiography of my magnificent Yogic Self. My Atman shines most clearly in, as and through my use, misuse and abuse of myself (mind) linguistically.  I reveal and conceal the most of myself (unconscious) in my most habitual talk.  I cannot walk my walk, unless I talk my talk.  Evolution out of the spirit of Holistic Nature will not allow it.  Naming is my most powerful game.  But whatever I call a thing, or person, or situation, that it is not.  It is I disguised by my own self-ignoration and all my language can ever mean, or signify, or point to is its very author, Me.  Whatever is, perfectly is.
  Jan Smuts, was a twice-term Prime Minister of South Africa and the only Prime Minister until Nelson Mandela to stand against Apartheid.  Reverencing individuality, he courageously wrote the theory of Wholes and as I read it I guessed he was subverting the old order.  Haunting his prose I wonder if he is silently, brilliantly asking for Reason (Intellect) to justify the enslaving of an entire African race and in 1925 on what grounds?
  I do not wish to change my friend's friend's mind only to grow consciously my own.  And so I read and read and read.  And noticed I the hiding res in the words real, reason and reading.  Res, the thing itself is the common pool out of which all of my psychic energy and my living it comes.  I read myself only in whatever I read, including my friend and my friend's friend.  When I am trying to read your mind, whose mind am I really reading but mine own and how startling to discover my lack of appreciation for my own esteemed being, by my easy, quick dismissal of any part of it as if it were "only". Here is the text:
   Without Mind, the organic and regulative process of the universe, vast and magnificent in any case, would have been best but a tame affair.  The universe would have moved forward, as it were in a dream, with unearthly regularity and majesty of movement.  Its process would have become ever more complicated and ever more frictionless, as of some sublime animated machine, great beyond all power of conception.  All elements of discord and disharmony would have passed away from its vast cosmic routine.
   But it would have gone on sublimely unconscious of itself. It would have had no soul or souls.  It would have harboured no passionate exaltations; no poignant regrets or bitter sorrows would have disturbed its profound peace.  For it neither the great lights not the deep shadows.
   Truth, Beauty, and Goodness would have been there, but unknown, unseen, unloved.  They would have been cold and passionless like the distant stars and would never have become the great ideals thrilling and inspiring men and women to deathless action.  Love would have been there, but not that immortal emotion which mortals call by that name.
   Into that great dream-garden of Eden, Mind, the Disturber has entered, and with Mind sin and sorrow, faith and love, the great vision of knowledge and the conscious effort to master all hampering conditions and to work out the great redemption.
   To the Music of the universe there has thus been added a new note, as of laughter and tears, a new undertone of the human, which transforms and enriches all the rest. It is no longer a song of the Golden Reign of the Elder Gods, but of the intertwining of the Cosmos with human Destiny, of the suffering which has become consecrated and illuminated by the great visions, of the magic power of knowledge to work out new enchantments to break the dumb routine, to set the captive spirit free, and to blaze new paths to the immortal Goal. Mind has thus added infinity of light and shade and color, of inward character and conscious content to the great process in and from which it has emerged.
   Without Mind, the universe would have been an altogether dull affair, however unimaginably grand in other respects.  Even its aberrations have been woven into the new harmonies. Its eye has beheld the greater lights. And knowledge has given it the key of power and mastery over the conditions which it previously towered like an unscalable mountain escarpment athwart its path of progress."  (pages 267-268)

Like someone said, "If you think education is expensive try ignorance".   Mind-growth is not optional. Refusing to grow my mind consciously, it grows unconsciously as all my symptom-formation including all my fault-finding displacement of my low self-estimate upon my others.  The way I treat my mind (self) is the way I treat my all.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Black Like Me

I was reminiscing today and two memories collided.  An early one was when I was in elementary school.  I tried out for the sixth grade play at Park Hill Elementary School (Denver).  It was 1963.  I was twelve.  By 1969, a senior at East High School, we were featured in a Life magazine article as the only fully integrated high school in the country.  East High was a model of integration in a battle over civil rights and my high school was closed and all students sent home when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.  I had a black girlfriend.  But back in 1963 things were still quiet, I guess, I was just twelve and trying out for  the school play. Years later as an adult I would recall this memory with amazement and horror and also some humor.  The role I was given was of the Black porter at the train station.  I had to put black-face make-up on and talk with a dialect.  The script called for it. 

The-years-later-recollection-as-an-adult had me realizing that I stood before an integrated audience of blacks and whites, children and adults in black face.  What amazed me was - I wasn't stoned.  Either by the audience or by being on drugs.  I never was aware of any reverberations, no riots.  It amazed me that in 1963 my teachers had a play with a black porter at the train station and a white kid in black face. I still can't quite "get my mind around it."

Black Like Me the non-fiction book by journalist John Howard Griffin was first published in 1961. Griffin was a white native of Mansfield, Texas and the book describes his six-week experience travelling on Greyhound buses (occasionally hitchhiking) throughout the racially segregated states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia passing as a black man. Sepia Magazine financed the project in exchange for the right to print the account first as a series of articles. Griffin kept a journal of his experiences; the 188-page diary was the genesis of the book. In 1959, at the time of the book's writing, race relations were particularly strained in America; Griffin's aim was to explain the difficulties facing black people in certain areas. Under the care of a doctor, Griffin artificially darkened his skin to pass as a black man.  And a little white kid at Park Hill Elementary School (Denver) put black face on for the 6th grade play.

The other recollection that came back recently was from my 10 day intensive Centering Prayer retreat at St. Benedict's Monastery, Snowmass, Colorado. It was 1989.  I was a Presbyterian minister working for the Archdiocese of Denver and my boss was a Catholic nun.  One morning at 2 a.m. I was hiking up the dirt road from the farmhouse to the Monastery for Vigils.  Walking beside me was a new friend, a black City-Councilwoman from Rochester, New York.  As we walked along she suddenly blurted out, "My God, man, you've got rhythm!" Somehow it was a great validation for me.  It was as if she said, "My God, man you've got SOUL!" 
Dr. Laura Schlessinger got in big trouble for using the 'N" word recently.  I have some suggestions for her.
And you?
Got Soul?

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Understanding yourself

"Meditation is the freedom from thought, and a movement in the ecstacy of truth."


"Belief is so unnecessary, as are ideals. Both dissipate energy which is needed to follow the unfolding of the fact, the "what is." Beliefs and ideals are escapes from the fact and in escape there is no end to sorrow. The ending of sorrow is the understanding of the fact from moment to moment. There is no system or method which will give understanding; only a choiceless awareness of a fact will do that. Meditation according to a system is the avoidance of the fact of what you are; it is far more important to understand yourself, the constant changing of the facts about yourself, than to meditate in order to find god or have visions, sensations and other forms of entertainment. - J. Krishnamurti

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

People! Who needs People?

I office at McDonald's, some of you know; two hours twice a day everyday, for 22 years now.  I read.   I also journal what I read.  Sometimes I read one paragraph in two hours.  I am also reading, very slowly, Metaphysics by Borden Bowne (1884), and Powers of Mind Adam Smith (1975) when I am at home.  I have on my next to read shelf The Syllogistic Philosophy by Frances E. Abbott (1906).  Consciousness is the theme of all my reading.

  When I journal, I draw pictures to myself of what my ideas look like, so I need highlighters.  At Mcdonald's I spread my highlighers and markers over a big table with my many notebooks since right now I am collating the ideas of two different scientists of consciousness.  People walk by on the way to the restrooms and most ignore me.  Sporadically, some one stops and makes a snide comment, a put-down.  I realized it is almost always old white American males.

  This morning I overheard an old lady sitting in eyeshot from me telling an old white American male that it's "time we take our country back from the 'negroes'."  Not much stops me, I learned to absorb my concentration and lose sense of my surroundings about 20 years of the 22 years ago.  But I stopped.  Since the afternoon before she had a conversation with a young employee and they slapped each other on the back because they love Jesus and are "good Christians". I have had some experiences with these "good Christians".  Some I even told it was obvious to me that they had never read the New Testament and didn't catch the ethics of Jesus.  They're the ones who write books like "What Would Jesus Do?"  and have bumper sticker likes "What would Jesus think, say, eat," etc?

   If we take our country back from the "negroes" do we send them back to Africa?  Or do we reclaim them as our slaves?  Did Jesus have slaves?  And if he was Middle-Eastern and not American didn't he probably have dark skin and not the light-colored Roman-like complexion of the old lady "good Christian?"

   I read a book on the history of NewThought once that talked about the violent conflict between the theologies of John Calvin and Michael Servetus.  Calvin, who had the backing of the prince in Geneva,  had Servetus burned at the stake for "heresy."  That was before the concept of separation of church and state.  But I wondered, "Who did Jesus burn?"  When Jesus said in Matthew and Luke
"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple."  (Luke 14:26), do these Bible literalists take that literally?  Everything Jesus said is open to interpretation.

   Borden P. Bowne was professor of philosophy at Boston University and a Methodist minister. He categorized his views as Kantianized Berkeleyanism, transcendental empiricism and, finally, Personalism, a philosophical branch of liberal theology, of which Bowne is the dominant figure. His masterpiece, Metaphysics, appeared in 1882 (which I think is wonderful!) and he was contemporary with the writings of Mary Baker Eddy which I use in my study of consciousness. Bowne towards the end of his life was tried for heresy by the Methodist Church, but acquitted.

   Frances Abbot was was an American philosopher and Unitarian theologian who sought to reconstruct theology in accord with scientific method. He was a contemporary of Bowne and Mrs. Eddy.  His ministry proved controversial, and in 1868 New Hampshire's highest court ruled that the Dover, New Hampshire, First Unitarian Society of Christians' chosen minister was insufficiently "Christian" to serve his congregation. Abbott is was said, once preached that:


Whoever has been so fired in his own spirit by the overwhelming thought of the Divine Being as to kindle the flames of faith in the hearts of his fellow men, whether Confucius, or Zoroaster, or Moses, or Jesus, or Mohammed, has thereby proved himself to be a prophet of the living God; and thus every great historic religion dates from a genuine inspiration by the Eternal Spirit.
He was removed from his ministry. 

And then there's Anthony DeMello.  a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist who died in 1987. At the end of this post is a link to a you-tube presentation of his that I recommend to you.  I found it when a Facebook question from a young friend showed up and I wanted to respond. Her question was

Wondering why it has to be sooooo hard sometimes to let certain people go in our lives, even when it's the "right thing to do..." - and this includes friEnds that have moved on in their lives, for whatever reason, and leave us behind.
DeMello's books and materials were banned by the Catholic church and his teachings called "dangerous."  I guess beliefs are also so-o-o-o-o hard to let go, too.  Who did Jesus ban?

Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFdjBjBfPfc

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Traveling Bible Teachers

A friends writes:
with the bible folks that travel door to door.

A wonderful way to see/feel my growth/understanding since the last visit.
Always interesting to remain steady with that which I no longer believe with honor and respect for my visitors and their present understanding.
I remained longer than usual to see how they fielded my questions and/or responses were received.
I recommend it.
Do you all have these visitors where you now reside?

So I responded:
Friend - We have the Jehovah's Witness here and they are quite active. Also seen a few Mormon boys on bicycles. I've had several extended conversations with one or two Jehovah's. Not good. Helpful to my learning curve. Reading Dorsey helps more. Today for example - "I have grown increasing understanding of any so-called common tongue as necessitating a systematic unconscious self-belittlement in its linguist, thereby necessitating (in protest) an augmenting, systematic unconscious symptom formation in its linguist. By habitually overlooking myself in my wording I become increasingly anaesthetic to the sensation of selfness in my language." This I think is the purpose of institutional, dogmatic religious non-thinking, which Dorsey calls "self-helpfulness." I see all educational organizations, with memberships (common tongue) as self-help groups having limited value to those who join them and severly restricted value to one seeking enlightenment (self-discovery). Margaret encouraged folks to "go back to church" in the 70's as a helpful way to discover no value in the church. peace. Rob

Thursday, May 13, 2010

The Trouble with Religion

The Undiscovered Self


by Anthony de Mello, SJ

Somebody came up to me once during a conference and asked, "What about 'Our Lady of Fatima'?" What do you think of her? When I am asked questions like that, I am reminded of the story of the time they were taking the statue of Our Lady of Fatima on an airplane to a pilgrimage for worship, and as they were flying over the South of France the plane began to wobble and to shake and it looked like it was going to come apart. And the miraculous statue cried out, "Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us!" And all was well. Wasn't it wonderful, one "Our Lady" helping another "Our Lady"?



There was also a group of a thousand people who went on a pilgrimage to Mexico City to venerate the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe and sat down before the statue in protest because the Bishop of the Diocese had declared "Our Lady of Lourdes" patroness of the diocese! They were sure that Our Lady of Guadalupe felt this very much, so they were doing the protest in REPARATION for the offense. That's the trouble with religion, if you don't watch out.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

WORDS

From TALES OF POWER: "I told Don Juan that his explanation did not satisfy my senses, although I was in complete intellectual agreement with it." "That's the flaw with words," he said in a reassuring tone, "They always force us to feel enlightened, and we end up facing the world as we always have, without enlightenment...Whenever the dialogue stops...extraordinary facets of ourselves surface as though they had been heavily guarded b our words."

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

"Inscribed on The Believing Mind."

"The Perfect Way knows no difficulties
Except that It refuses all preference.

If you would see the Perfect Way manifest
Take no thought either for or against It.
To oppose what you like and what you dislike,
That is the malady of the mind.

Do not try to find the truth,
Merely cease to cherish opinions,
Tarry not in dualism.

As soon as you have good and evil
Confusion follows and the mind is lost.

When the unique mind is undisturbed
The ten thousand things cannot offend it.

When no discrimination is made between this and that
How can a biased and prejudiced vision arise?

Let go, leave things as they may be.

If you wish to follow the path of the One Vehicle
Have no prejudiced against the six senses.

Whereas in the Dharma itself there is no individuation
The ignorant attach themselves to particular objects.

The enlightened have no likes and dislikes.

Gain and loss, right and wrong,
Away with them once and for all!

Everything is void, lucid, and self-illuminating
There is no strain, no effort, no wastage of energy.
To this region thought never attains.

In not being two all is the same.
All that exists is comprehended therein.

It matters not how thing are conditioned,
Whether by 'being' or by 'not being.'

That which is is the same as that which is not.
That which is not is the same as that which is.

If only this is realized,
You need not worry about not being perfect.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

The Divine Oneness

My physiology is not opposed to my mentality but rather is integral to it. It is able-bodied identity to be studied, trained, controlled, and made helpful in my subjective wholeness, a mental condition rather than an objective locality.  This life orientation exalted and held steadily in mind invigorates my wholeness, continuing its ideality into the subsoil of my visceral subjectivity.  Thus the wording of my idea does not stop at poetic imagery but unites it with the scientific discovery that all identity must be self-identity.  It is vivifying to see the modern scientist finding his long sought self-sameness at last in mathematics, or in another less obscure form of metaphysics.  The scientific idealist can make manifest the psychic in every discipline or interest, the idenity in thought and thew, the divine oneness in pain and pleasure, harm and help, or bad and good.
(The Psychic Nature of Physiology, Dr. John M. Dorsey, M.D., page 22-23)

Friday, April 2, 2010

March-April Newsletter is ready

Friends - once again the Institute of Scientific Metaphysics printed an article of mine, entitled, "You Should Live to See This."  I have published it on my website.  Rob

Thursday, February 25, 2010

My Sense of Wonderful Wholeness

"Only my growing clearly conscious self-helpfulness can ever aid me to appreciate my wholeness-allness-oneness identity (divinity).  My practice of this self-insight is the well-spring of my ideology idealizing my solipsistic or mystic nature.  It is true of my solipsism as it is true of my selfishness itself: my problem cannot be that I am "too selfish", only that I am not sufficiently selfish about all of me (including my 'you'). " -- Dr. John M. Dorsey, University Professor, page 10

Friday, February 12, 2010

Earthquakes

The "God-idea" (Infinity) as it evolves in consciousness, is described in Matthew 24 and Luke 21. "What shall be the sign of the Christ...ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that ye be not troubled;...nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there shall be famines and pestlilences, and great earthquakes in divers places (airplanes colliding, innumerable murders, terrorist groups, and starvation)...When ye see these things come to pass, look up, and lift up your heads, and know that the Kingdom of God is nigh at hand.' This is the view of Infinity as it unfolds in the langauge of paradox: loss is gain, nothing is something, destruction is construction - 'He who would gain his life must lose it.'

   The ancient prophets were masters of Science-fiction.  They had vivid imaginations and told the story of the God-idea in languge that could not fail to startle and shock.  Their interpretations of the mighty power of Truth, to overthrow the "establishment" - conditioned or static thinking -- is expressed in myth that has made the Bible a best-seller.  Infinity, Truth functioning in/as individual/universal consciousness to bring the Unknown into the known, the Invisible into the visible, the Unconscious into the conscious, does this so incredibly that it can only be interpreted through a remarkable story of this mighty force. 'And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison wer shaken, and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone's hands were loosed."  Today, Truth and Love are still seen as earthquakes, famine, and pestilience, acts of violence,-- the dying of the old in the birthing of the new order.  This is the paradox of Infinity.

   'Our false views of life hide the eternal harmony and produce the ills of which we complain.'  All happenings whatever the name - inform me that I consciously am, and because of this fact, my Mind, Infinity, is my own Selfconscious divinity, the source of my health, wealth and happiness.

   Science is the understanding or capacity to see that the breaking up of material belief (conditioned thinking or personal sense) seen in the language of famine, pestilence, want and woe, is literally the action of Truth.  As long as matter is mistaken for the energy of Spirit, Infinity cannot be conceived except as destruction and construction, birth and death, good and evil, right and wrong.  However, what is breaking up is not a material world, but the supersititious belief that there is a world outside of Mind created by 'other' than one's own Self-divinity.

   Admitting the error of identifying the I with person instead of Principle, we cannot complain or do anything about the suffering incidental to that point of view.  Therefore, it is most important to let the suffering alone and live the Science, the discernment that 'whatever Is, perfectly Is.'  This discernment is the conscious thought, completely satisfied and satisfying, and is the Word made flesh, - the divine body."
Margaret Laird, Laird Letters 1975, Jan/Feb.)

Saturday, January 16, 2010

The little fox


It was then that the fox appeared.
"Good morning," said the fox.
"Good morning," the little prince responded politely, although when he turned around
he saw nothing.
"I am right here," the voice said, "under the apple tree."
"Who are you?" asked the little prince, and added
"I am so unhappy."
"I cannot play with you," the fox said, "I am not tamed."
"Ah! Please excuse me, said the little prince.
But after some thought, he added
"What does that mean---'tamed'?"
"You do not live here," said the fox.  "What is it that you are looking for?"
"I am looking for men," said the little prince. "What does that mean---'tame'?"
"Men," said the fox, "They have guns, and they hunt. It is very disturbing. They
also raise chickens.  These are their only interests.  Are you looking for chickens?"
"No," said the little prince, "I am looking for friends.  What does that mean---
'tame'?"
It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. It means to establish ties.
"To establish ties?"
"Just that," said the fox, "To me, you are still nothing more than
a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And
I have no need of you.  And you, on your part have no need of me. 
To you, I am nothing more than a hundred thousand other foxes.
But if you tame me, then we shall need each other.
To me, you will be unique in all the world.  To you,
I shall be unique in all the world..."
"I am beginning to understand," said the little prince.  "There is a flower...
I think she has tamed me...
:It is possible," said the fox.  On the Earth one sees all sorts of things."

Friday, January 15, 2010

Thought is the "whole dignity of man," according to Pascal.  We must be free to doubt, to search, to prove all things.  Abstract reason is not enough.  Art escapes -- from the sterility of mere intellect.  Through imagination and passion, Art enhances our consciousness of Life.  But individual Soul seeks it own substance (Spirit) beyond the pageantry of Art. Both intellect and Art point to the necessity of faith, yet the myths, dogmas and rituals of the organized religions hinder thought and warp action.  All systems, religious as well as economic or aesthetic, are intricate devices for arresting the flow of thought and dimming the splendor of Love.   (paraphrased from "Bottle in the Sea" by Albert Guerard)

Monday, January 4, 2010

The DSW Newsletter

I keep promising a new Newsletter but haven't gotten to it yet.  I was invited to submit an article for the Jan.-Mar. Newsletter for the Institute of Metaphysical Science and did so.  It is to be published now and will be exerpted in the print version, with the full version on their web-site.  I did a kind of "story of my life" retrospective/introspective which you may find interesting.  You can find the full article on my website, under Newsletter.  Have a happy January.  Rob.