tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14405644055970613962024-03-13T06:01:36.696-06:00We Are The World We Walk ThroughPracticing Self-conscious living
Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.comBlogger60125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-687123849650947432016-12-06T16:15:00.001-07:002016-12-06T16:20:10.757-07:00Mind is the Triathlete <div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: arial; text-align: justify;">Suppose
you want to “do” a triathlon. Where would you begin? A triathlon is an
intense aerobic endurance contest, consisting of a 2.4-mile ocean swim, a
112-mile bicycle ride, and a 26.2-mile marathon run. Triathletes are
elite athletes, not mere experts in one sport, but expert in three. If a
triathlon is your goal, your training is guided by it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Margaret
Laird was a world-class metaphysician, acknowledged as such by other elite
metaphysicians. In her writings she presents insights into the Science of
Being which she grew for herself reading the works of Mary Baker Eddy, as well
as many, many other great thinkers. These revelations she discovered by
practicing her Mind-being for over 70 years. Her Mind’s Eye she understood
as the “discernment of the spiritual fact of whatever the material senses”
behold (S&H 585:10). Her practice was the exercising of this core
muscle. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">In her
Journal article (<i><u>Christian Science Journal</u></i> - February 1938. Vol
LV, No. 11, p. 609) Mrs. Laird states that without the understanding of
Love as Principle, human love, no matter how lovely its impression may seem,
will produce the impression of love/hate on the level of belief. She
writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Christian
Science has been appropriately called a religion of love. But the
appropriateness of such a designation has its root far deeper than the
tolerance, kindliness, forgiveness, charity and justice which characterize
those whom we usually think of as loving. A man may express all of these
attributes in their superficial meaning, which the world accepts, and yet not
actually express the Love which is Principle. In fact, considered
humanly, these attributes imply duality and give reality to evil, in assuming
that there is actually something to forgive, something undesirable of which to
be tolerant.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">In
training for a big triathlon, everyday becomes a mini-triathlon. You
don’t jump into the big one, you start with a lot of little ones. You
start with a run around the block, a dip in the pool and a bike ride to the
grocery store and back. Everyday you work out. Everyday you try to do
more. And you learn an important insight: energy begets more
energy. The more you spend, the more you have to spend. You
discover an “inexhaustible Source” and its reciprocal functioning as you
living. The unseen Reciprocal action taking place imperceptibly as you
practicing, is seen when you stop practicing. You see it by not seeing
it. A friend once said, “Perfection makes me practice.” You may
take a break; it does not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">The one
thing that all aerobic endurance contests, like triathlons and daily living
have in common is, well, “aerobics”. Aerobics means depending on air
(spirit, inspiration) and exercises that are aerobic strengthen the heart and
the lungs. We may forget that air is substance but it breathes our lungs. Try
living today and tomorrow and next week, with all the little upsets and
frustrations that offer to sink you, as if they are exercising you and your
capacities to live the divine Principle, Love depending on Spirit
substance. All the negatives are making you stronger, just as all the
positives are. They are not two things but two aspects of the same thing,
like inhaling and exhaling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">You can
learn to “expand in the negative”. But this is not beginner’s work.
Before you can learn to swim the negatives, you’ve got to learn to swim; and
before that you’ve got to learn to float. And before that you’ve got to
get into the pool. Swimming instructors tells us how hard it is to “teach
people to float.” Having trusted the ground under their feet for so long,
they cannot overcome their resistance to trusting water to buoy them up
instead. The problem of course is not the ground or the water, it’s their
sense of substance. But radical reliance on water - the streaming 4th
dimensional divine substance or underlying reality of all things- is the
beginning of swimming and every experienced metaphysical triathlete who just
dives in when others, afraid of sinking, stay in the shallows, had to learn to
float, too. Learning to float means relaxing and letting omnipresent
Substance live you consciously, even if momentarily you are unconscious of It.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Here,
another Laird insight is most important and that is the “permissiveness of all
appearances.” Science is exact knowledge and its metaphysical science
includes no vague general sense of “error” to be destroyed but a pinpoint
supposititious “cause” that disappears in the full identification of one’s self
with and as infinite divine immortal Mind. That is why the permissiveness
of all appearances principle is a practical rule. Using the principle uncovers
the hidden offender which hides in “every affective phenomena”. We learn that
they are all but “the interpretive deformation through ignorance, of
non-affective phenomena.” We learn that “all my affectivity is
interpretive delirium resulting from illusory beliefs” and we learn that “my
real Self is inaffective.” (Benoit, <i><u>Supreme Doctrine</u></i>, pg.
152 ) This ignorance is not a person, not a thing; but seems to be and this
“it” can greatly handicap the one who would be Mind as Mind’s conscious
identity self-consciously swimming the great Channel of human daily living when
the tide suddenly turns against him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">The
permissiveness of all appearances in Mrs. Laird’s writings is opposed to the
possessiveness attitude of the personal concept. This personal
possessiveness of the conceptual is nothing but the fact of individual divinity
ignored. This ignorance deforms (makes ugly) non-affective phenomena
which are just minding their own business. It makes them seem
afflictive. But the affliction is not in the phenomena appearing, since
Mind is the only Presence presenting everything. It is in the false view
and its lone viewer, in the possessiveness attitude. This attitude is the
misinterpretation and the misinterpreter of the fact of God’s allness as
individual being. My own divinity ignored bedevils me. By the
discipline of permissiveness, the personal, false self impression is uncovered
and its possessiveness attitude found to be the basic trouble-maker.
Again, permissiveness is no sissy act, it’s triathletic. It’s intensely
aerobic. It depends absolutely on air. It takes strong heart and
lungs, a strong central Core Principle consciously lived to permit the ugly
seeming in myself to appear in order to disappear.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">
Metaphysical swimming with the negative results in “Kuhnian paradigm shifts”
and the principle of “permissiveness of all appearances,” is one of the
insightful keys that sets up this scientific shift since it accesses a 4th
dimensional solution to a 3rd dimensional problem.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Thomas
Kuhn, 20th century philosopher of science, coined the term "paradigm
shift" in 1962. He used the familiar metaphor/image of the duck/rabbit to
explain revolutionary science as contrasted with normal science. As the
old normal science paradigm is breaking down under its own anomalies,
simultaneously a breakthrough is happening. This is not just a simple
personality adjustment among quirky scientists. The scale of it is
universal. The Copernican revolution is an example. A scientific
revolution causes not only a radical change in the basic assumptions within the
ruling theory of the science, but is a cataclysmic shift in the whole worldview
belonging to that science and all of the implications which came with that
view. (source: Wikipedia)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Just as
you lose sight of the duck in the seeing of the bunny, so you lose sight of the
supposititious personal concept and its possessiveness attitude in the seeing
of the spiritual fact of being. All of its suppositional characteristics go
with it, including its entire world-view and all it implies, leaving nothing
appearing but the divine idea, the perfect concept of Mind, </span><span style="font-family: arial;">which
you, including everything, are forever being. The </span><span style="font-family: arial;">finite
view disappears in the Infinite Vision, the imperfect </span><span style="font-family: arial;">seeming
in the perfect being, and the fear of death </span><span style="font-family: arial;">vanishes
in Life and its demonstration, Love, Principle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Out of
this Scientific shift from a consciousness of human </span><span style="font-family: arial;">concepts
to the consciousness of the God-idea comes </span><span style="font-family: arial;">new
creative power. Daily living becomes a great exercising </span><span style="font-family: arial;">of one's
spiritual capacities. "Depending on air" one lives </span><span style="font-family: arial;">consciously
as the divine Principle, Love, the Heart of all </span><span style="font-family: arial;">being and
finds the power to swim with the negatives. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">One
discovers that the Principle of air (self) and water (world) </span><span style="font-family: arial;">is one
Substance, Spirit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Said Mrs.
Eddy, "All true thoughts revolve in God's orbits: they come from God and
return to Him." (Mis 22:16-18) With this fact, I can imagine the whole
stream of thoughts, conscious and unconscious, as I do my heart pumping, blood
circulating, lung-breathing Life activities. My heart-lung system is
right now reciprocally supplying the demand for positive full-bodied,
red-oxygenated blood to all of my parts without my taking thought for it, and
simultaneously right now is also receiving back the negative spent purple
carbon-monoxided blood for recharging at its Source, all in one continuous
loop. Transforming its negative "old" into its positive
"new" is just simple functioning of my Life Principle. Just so
my life of spiritual awareness, my 4th dimensional divine Selfhood including
all thoughts, circulating as the Me that is Spirit, is me as inspired thought
from the "source and condition of all existence," (SH 181: 2)
bright with life-giving energy of Spirit, currenting through me AS me and all
of my parts, including all of my universe. By that one reciprocal
Cognitive action of the one egoic Being that propels my consciousness
"out" as my world, so by that one Act is my consciousness returned
instantly, reflexively back into its infinite Souce for recharging. This
is Soul in its recognitive act. Cognition and recognition are two aspects
of the same thing: Mind-functioning as conscious identity. There are not two
kinds of thoughts; all thought is divine. But humanly, here's the
hang-up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">At the
zero point of Infinity's cognitive movement, where its direction reverses
itself back into Itself, lies the negative aspect of the infinite divine
Reality, the "beginning" of the re-cognitive act of Soul. Some
of Mrs. Eddy's greatest insights into the nature of divine Mind deal with this
point of return and of the scientifically correct method of humanly
interpreting (living) it. The whole of metaphysical science practice, the
application of divine truth to human experience, hinges on "the knowledge
of error which must precede," (S & H 252:8-10) the action of
Truth which disposes of it. Disposing doesn't mean destroying, it means
putting it back in proper order. Like my heart/lung in living, my
"bad" blood is not destroyed, it is recycled! It is redeemed
and reconstituted. Hence Mrs. Laird's principle of the permissiveness of
whatever the appearance; since Mind is the only appearing, let everything be,
let everything flow.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">But right
at this point, the point where the divinity of humanity turns to return to its
Source, the whole of human thinking gets hung up and the hang-up becomes a
great handicap. Humanlly, we intuitively feel this infinitesimal zero
point (our Infinity) and misinterpret it as something. We call it
"nothing", "non-existence", no-sense, no-mind, as a gap in
our awareness, as a defect, as a great lack, etc. and by misinterpretation,
this no-mind infinitesimal point, becomes entifyied instead of understood . For
the human mind, zero is as inconceivable as Infinity. Infinity gets
conceived of as many positive ones and zero as many negative ones.
Understood scientifically it is simply the negative aspect of Infinity, Mind at
the point of its turn to return, Mind in its own Self-recognitive act
(cognition/recognition like inhale exhale- two aspects one thing). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">But human
thinking having entifyied it, given it all kinds of names, has educated itself
in attaching great fear to it, and in blaming it for everything humanly
undesirable. We try to segregate it. We try to destroy it.
And by this dualizing of nothing, the natural inaffective phenomena of the real
Self, Soul, become the seeming afflictive phenomena of human experience, by
this "interpretive delirium based on illusory beliefs."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">"Permissiveness
of all appearances" is a rule and it means letting all
"negative" thoughts flow free. Do not try to hinder them and they
will flow back into Mind, naturally, since Mind is the source and condition of
all thought- even the thoughts that humans call "negative".
Depending on air, depending on water, this discipline sets up the shift of
impressions currenting against us to energies currenting with us. It is
as if our daily swim suddenly was lifted by a super-charged energetic wave
buoying us up and moving us forward toward our goal. Living this fact of
the negative aspect of my divinity unconsciously as the old paradigmatic fable
of devil, "evil," and "error", "sin, sickness, death"
etc. et al, I am misinterpreting the very equilpollence of God, of my own
Mind. I am resisting the flow of my own Mind's streaming thought. I am
refusing to set up the radical shift, the scientific revolution, that the
evolution of consciousness requires of me and that would fulfill my Life.
Without Science, what is there for me then, but suffering? It is my own
divinity mistinterpreted that bedevils me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">So how
does swimming consciously this positive/negative identity of infinite Mind
start? You learn to float, then to swim, then to swim whatever the
circumstances. "Depending on Air" buoyed up by water you learn
little by little that IT, Principle, will be there for you consciously, when
you return your awareness to It as Its Self-awareness, its Self-recognitive
act. This is practice: living and learning, step by step, to live from
the standpoint of your now divinity - no matter what. Practice is your
now divinity. You have to be willing to let go of your present
vision for a greater vision. It starts with practice, its stays with practice
and only practice gains the "ear and right hand of omnipotence" (SH
15:28) the great Wave, Love as Principle. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">In her
book, <i><u>Christian Science Re-explored</u></i>, page 230, Mrs Laird
demonstrates her keen understanding of Principle, Love, the oneness of Being in
her courageous chapter 15 insightfully identifying Sex with God, the Love that
is Principle. She writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">The chief
characteristic of the unselfed-love that is Love is permissiveness. In
this Love there is no taking thought for appearances, good and bad, right
and wrong, life and death, sick and well. Hubert Benoit in The Supreme
Doctrine uses this illustration of permissiveness: "The caterpillar has to
immobilize itself as a chrysalis in order to become a butterfly." In
other words, if we should live humanly without the neurosis of a split
personality to bedevil us, we must die to ourselves as person. This we do
by living as Principle. We must become unmindful before we can become Mindful.
We must discover that we live, move, breathe humanly because we are divine.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Stephen
Levine in the introduction to his book, <i><u>Healing into Life and Death</u></i>,
writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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be used. It can be read like a book, not unlike<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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the rippling waters, or, one can go <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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participating in it as a healing process. Indeed there is <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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youth who felt he could learn everything from books. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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became an astronomer, he read about history <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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about swimming and drowned.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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wading in slowly, from the direct experience<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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directly is to participate in the <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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become fully alive.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial";">Such are the writings of Margaret Laird, world-class Mind
triathlete. Wade in. Float. Let the current of Awareness take
you where it will. Practice, practice, practice.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-13908245233325026622016-10-07T13:09:00.000-06:002016-10-07T13:09:37.032-06:00<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 20.0pt;">Wean Thyself<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Dr. John M. Dorsey, in his later writings, develops his idea
of emotional continence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In his book <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>Illness
or Allness</u></i></b>, he had not yet coined this image.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He shows awareness of the distinction between
infantile narcissism and adult self-love throughout his writings, noting that
the latter depends on an individual’s conceiving of self as comprehensively one
all-inclusive meaning (life).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Every
individual is an all.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Emotional
continence – neither over-reaction nor under-reaction – is an indicator of the
well-integrated self.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Understanding that
I am one, neither less than one nor more than one as my imagination may momentarily
tell me, is self-continence: self-contained, self aware, self-renewing
individual being. In several of his works he uses the metaphor of a little
child for the well-integrated self-conscious adult living his/her all as
his/her self within, and he uses the word “God” for such a one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He explores these themes in his 1971 book <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>Psychology
of Emotion: Self-discipline through Conscious Emotional Continence.<o:p></o:p></u></i></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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At the Laird seminar in Evanston, 1966, where Dr. Dorsey was
invited to speak, he tells of his roll-calling at the beginning of his classes
addressing each student of self, as “God,” “Mr. Jones-God”, “Ms. Smith-God,”
etc. In a quick exchange between Dr. Dorsey and Mrs. Laird, he is about to pay
verbal homage to Mrs. Laird and her pioneer spirit and asks her not to
listen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“There’s many a wonderful person
(will you close your ears for a moment please Margaret).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She has a darling sturdiness in her devotion
to the divinity of her world of self, which everyone who lives as Margaret
Laird can…” She responds with unabashed childlikeness: “…go ahead. I don’t have
to close my ears.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know I’m
divine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can God be flattered?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Now emotional continence such as the above has nothing to do
with blocking emotion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s why I like
his use of the word “continence.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
tells me not to try to hold my feelings, breath or urine indefinitely which
would be growingly painful to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
tells me that I need to learn how to express my emotions consciously through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>sublime-ating</u></i> them and outgrow
the habit of denying them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s my
word for it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“We feel the energy of Spirit
and rise into newness of Life because Spirit is what we are.” (WATW, pg. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>xx) Through Science, I can learn how to move with
the energies of my Spirit and rise myself into newness of life, if I can
understand that each emotional event is all and only about itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is always now and always new.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And this awareness of my Self-allness is
“childlike.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“I consciously am.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A little child accepts this fact
naturally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had nothing to do with being
Self-conscious and takes no thought about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Self-consciousness Is; I am.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am
I by being conscious identity and not-I as someone or something to take thought
about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Self-consciousness is Mind and
the existence of all that Is or seems to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When there is no I-taking-thought, then there is I-being-thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the meaning of the statement, “Except
ye become as a little child, ye cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(L.L. Jan./Fe. 1976, pg. 1)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
D.T. Suzuki, the renowned Zen master describes what happens
in archery when the “thought-taking” no-mind takes control:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“As soon as we reflect, deliberate,
and conceptualize, the original unconsciousness is lost and a thought
interferes…The arrow is off the string but does not fly straight to the target,
nor does the target stand where it is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Calculation, which is miscalculation, sets in…Man is a thinking reed but
his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Childlikeness” has to be restored with long
years of training in self-forgetfulness.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Newness and nowness are coordinates in Scientific
metaphysics which Descartes did not imagine. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Keeping thenness and thereness in their place,
the back and forth of human ruminating thought is left behind, as one rises in
the scale of being – the vertical veridical –<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>UP</u></i></b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dr. Dorsey in his writings states over and
over that all human defensiveness including disguising one’s feelings as not-I
(“my body is sick”) are necessary self-help for an individual who feels
overwhelmed by living and trying not to sink <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>down</u></i> in to the abyss of unhappiness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every human is treading water, trying to keep
head above water, staying afloat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
is the human condition.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In working this article up, I reminded myself of a phrase I
picked up about aging which correlates with the statement of Mrs. Eddy
(Overcoming age is not renewing our youth but is thought going into new
channels which history has not yet recorded), and the phrase I remembered was
“hardening of the categories.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A play
on the phrase “hardening of the arteries,” I like the description of it given
in Yahoo Answers describing how we remember things:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“Memory process tends to work with
generalized categories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If people do not
have an appropriate category for something, they are unlikely to perceive it,
store it in memory, or be able to retrieve it from memory later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If categories are drawn incorrectly, people
are likely to perceive and remember things inaccurately.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When information about phenomena that are
different in important respects nonetheless get stored in memory under a single
concept, errors of analysis may result.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
(<a href="http://artichoke.typepad.com/artichoke/2007/05/hardening_of_th.html">http://artichoke.typepad.com/artichoke/2007/05/hardening_of_th.html</a>)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After first drafting this article, I realized that the above
description is a good one for “point of view” or attitude.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not the altitude attitude that Science
provides, but the basic human, trying not to sink into abysmal unhappiness
manic attitude. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Mrs. Laird is quite clear on the fact that a Scientist who
is the Science will lose his/her vision of divine/human Selfhood if that one
refuses to wean him/her self from Oldness - “organization” mentality
(memory-basing) - when the signals come to do so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ignoring the signals of impaired spiritual
growth and progress “incontinence” and indicates a long-standing habit of
refusing to sublime-ate all of one’s emotions, that is identify all emotion
with Love, the awareness of perfection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also indicates a lack of spiritual
self-understanding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Mrs. Laird has much to say in her works about the false
human emotions: gratitude and humility, which represent not a fully matured
spiritually conscious self, but a leveling off at a developmental impasse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again, trying to not sink in one’s own
downerness.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In my research these past few months, I came across this
wonderful statement of Mrs. Eddy’s written to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the New York Herald</i> on May 15, 1908, following the report of her
demise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The same message was repeated in
stronger language for her followers on the next day, when this notice appeared
in the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>Christian Science Sentinel</u></i></b>:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Since Mrs. Eddy is watched, as one
watches a criminal or a sick person, she begs to say, in her own behalf, that
she is neither; therefore to be criticized or judged by either a daily drive or
a dignified stay at home, is superfluous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When accumulating work requires it, or because of a preference to remain
indoors she omits her drive, do not strain at gnats or swallow camels over it,
but try to be composed and resigned to the shocking fact that she is minding
her own business, and recommends this surprising privilege to all her dear
friends and enemies.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
(Source: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>Mary Baker Eddy</u></i></b>,
Gillian Gill, pg. 529)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sarcasm, a cousin of wit, indicates growing emotional
continence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today, I might advise my
self: “Don’t have a cow.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I find the
important point of minding my own business is to feel the energy of Spirit and
rise into NEWNESS now!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the
demand of Truth pressuring me to be Love, the energy of Spirit, the male and
female of Mind, functioning as newness and freshness of life. (WATW, pg.
204)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have not minded my business (my back and
forth thinking) into the integration of my maleness and my femaleness in my
one/allness, I lack the regenerating force of my own Soul – Self-recognition as
absolute Good-being – which acknowledgment opens the way to rise UP.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The human coordinates of now/then,
here/there, must be put in the framework of Science: omnipresence, omniscience,
omnipotence to stop the ruminating human mind and open the way for new
self-insight.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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I find my 95-year-old Margaret Laird babysitting a
five-month-old baby.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reminding her that
“the human is human because it is divine and not human for the same reason” as
she observed the baby doing itself divinely, she writes: “I saw her do all
sorts of things that she had no way of “learning” how to do, and I realized
that she knew without knowing that her original Nature is Self-responsibility
and Self-fulfillment.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(L.L. Jul/Aug.
1980, pg. 1)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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We all know that wonderful quote from <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>The Little Prince</u></i></b>
by Antoine de Saint- Exupery that what is essential is invisible to the eye and
that it is only with the heart that one sees rightly, but suppose you could
actually become invisible?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Mrs. Eddy’s comment on “being watched” reminded me of a book
by Cambridge biologist and psychic explorer Rupert Sheldrake – <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>The
Sense of Being Stared At</u></i></b> -- in which is asserted that “our minds
are not limited to our brains, but rather stretch outward to touch the beings
and objects that we perceive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Once this
extended influence of the mind is taken into consideration, many puzzling
phenomena being to make sense, including telepathy and phantom limbs.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dr. Dorsey sitting in analysis with Freud
spoke of the feeling of being watched and Dr. Freud exclaimed – “That’s the
whole of the trouble!”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Two diametrically opposed points of view of the same Mind
phenomenon, just like the “unillumined human mind <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(SH 573) versus John who “saw the human and
divine coincidence,” …”divinity embracing humanity in Life and its
demonstration – reducing to human perception and understanding the Life which
is God.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In divine revelation, material
and corporeal selfhood disappear, and the spiritual idea is understood.” (SH
561)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This spiritual continence –
self-discipline through owning one’s individual allness -- resolves all human
emotion in the understanding that is Self-Love.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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“Know thyself, live your divinity (Spirit) self-consciously
and you will be humanly what you are divinely – the male-female of Mind
continually expanding into newness of Life…It will be a great day when Sex is
given its nobility as Soul and restored to Love as the act of integration – the
bond of cohesion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In that day the human
race will possess a morality, an ethical culture so pure, so virgin, that
crime, poverty, way will be words without meaning.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(WATW pg. 207) <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“Dr. Dorsey found the confirmation
of his life work when he “grew” one or two Christian Scientists in his world
who interpreted and demonstrated that living the God-Nature Self consciously is
God “doing” the living.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(L.L.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sep./Oct. 1980, p. 4)<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
P.S.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was recently
contacted by a student of Kathryn Breese-Whiting, founder of the Phoenix
Institute<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(http://phoenixinstitute.us)
offering me 5 boxes of Dr. Dorsey’s books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Seems that Mrs. Dorsey and Mrs. Breese-Whiting were friends and Mrs.
Dorsey gave the books to Mrs. Breese-White over 30 years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These were entrusted to the new friend who
contacted me to see if I would like them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Traveling to Nashville to see our grandkids, Laura and I stopped in
Kansas and picked up these books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, if
any of the IMS newsletter readers would like a copy of the following books of
Dr. Dorsey, shoot me an email <a href="mailto:%D0rob_craig@hotmail.com">–rob_craig@hotmail.com</a>
- and I will mail them to you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
Psychic Nature of Physiology, The Psychology of Ethics, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Psychology of Language, American Psychiatrist
in Vienna and His Sigmund Freud.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-74506750298686561832016-07-14T09:33:00.001-06:002016-10-03T21:07:07.769-06:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5icY53omqT0/V4ewivs9xEI/AAAAAAAAA3w/hodAXlpyImADxxNlrjxHyCsVXOHzakewwCLcB/s1600/0711160657.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5icY53omqT0/V4ewivs9xEI/AAAAAAAAA3w/hodAXlpyImADxxNlrjxHyCsVXOHzakewwCLcB/s320/0711160657.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-size: large;">Awake to a Perfect Day</span></i></b><br />
<br />
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Sometimes the world seems upside down and backwards. Feeling off-balance has consequences, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">ramifying effects. Part of my self-conscious living practice is paying attention to my off-balance </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">feelings and listening to them tell me what I need (usually it’s something which I don’t think I need.) “Nothing is either good or bad,” said Shakespeare,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> “but thinking makes it so.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Thinking gets us into trouble more often than feeling does, especially when we do not trouble </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">ourselves to think. We put our thinking on “auto-pilot” -- like the guy in his Tesla auto-car </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">driving the interstate in Florida, and was watching a DVD. “It” auto-piloted him right into </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">a semi-tractor trailer and he went on to his next life. Self unconscious living can only do so </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">much and then it turns upside down and backwards taking “me” with it.</span></div>
<div class="_2cuy _3dgx _2vxa" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #1d2129; direction: ltr; margin: 0px auto 28px; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 700px; word-wrap: break-word;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the Science of metaphysical awareness, the thinking that is out from the one infinite </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">divine Mind (formerly called “God”) my Mrs. Margaret Laird, writes: “When we quote, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,’ we do not mean that the definitive </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">point of view incidental to the belief of two minds (dualism) affects Reality, the Good. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The concept of Good is relative to Good and is not good in its own right. Thinking in the </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">belief of two minds creates a veil blinding us to Reality. Reality is not good-and-bad, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">true-and-false, simply because that is the point of view. It makes no difference whether </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">we think constructively or destructively, positively or negatively about the human picture. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The picture is Reality in the language of individual discernment. Forget the language and </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Reality will evolve new thought forms in which the positive and negative are reconciled. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What seems to be, seems to be because Being is its existence. As Truth comes to the conscious </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">level, it takes care of the “conscious and unconscious thoughts of mortals” -- </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span class="_5yi-" style="font-weight: bold;">the unexamined assumptions - that have conditioned our points of view</span>. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Let the divine oneness of Mind be your thinking (you) and you will walk the earth safe and </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">secure, liberated from the belief that thinking is divided into good-and-bad, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">constructive-and-destructive.”</span></div>
Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-61879986069525116922016-02-17T13:06:00.002-07:002016-02-17T13:06:39.225-07:00He's Getting Ready to FlyWhen I went into my hermitage, my poustinia to confront the Unconscious and listen to my thoughts, I had no other human presence to give me escape. No heat, no electricity, no running water, no bathroom or shower. A small log cabin at 10,000 ft elevation in the middle of a Colorado February. In April, I had a visitor. A fly. At first, typically, I annoyed myself at his appearing. Gradually, I allowed him to befriend me and we became companions. This was long before I discovered J. Allen Boone's <u><i>Kinship with All Life</i></u>, <u><i>Letters to Strongheart</i></u>, and <u><i>The Language of Silence.</i></u> He talks about his friendship with "Freddy the Fly." And of the amazing things he learned by communing with "Freddie."<br />
<br />
When I returned to my "real" life, as rooky retreatants were want to call it, and related my story of my friend the fly, my "friends" laughed at me comparing me to St. Francis of Assisi (the famous garden statue) who befriending all Nature was swarmed with birds; only I would be swarmed with flies someday if I kept it up. Sure enough I was. I was swarmed with all the little annoyances of everyday life. But the annoyances weren't coming from Nature. They come from the usual human point of view; the self-important self-opinion of the "common sense" crowd; the crowded mind. I wonder what Freddy the Fly would say about my "friends".<br />
<br />
My favorite Allen Boone book is still You Are the Adventure, in which he states his idea of the purpose of Life: "Virtually all...outstanding men and women whose lives have been recorded attributed this inner beam-voice to their God source, to that creative and governing Intelligence and Energy back of all manifestations of real being and life...this beam-voice, you will observe, if you study their lives, communicated with them in simple, understandable, soundless language, telling them just what to do about every detail of their lives and how to do it effectively; success or failure in each instance, you would also observe, depending on their individual receptivity and willingness to follow instructions.<br />
<br />
What you call your particular beam-voice is, of course, a matter for you and you alone, to decide. The wise thing, the experts say, is to call it what best helps you to grasp and to understand how it operates in all its relations with you. The great spiritual achievers usually spoke of it on such terms as The Voice of God, The Christ, Revelation, Illumination, Insight, and so on. The American Indian, with his keen sense of practicality of the Big Holy, calls it in-hearing and in-knowing. The fellow with the diploma tags it with such terms as intuition, perception, inspiration, impression, awareness, immediate knowledge, discernment, instinct, comprehension, and so on.<br />
<br />
(The common man)... may not know...or understand in the least how the hunch gets from its source to where he can recognize it and use it to do some good for himself.<br />
<br />
At which point the entire situation again reverts to you, and to your unavoidable cosmic adventure of having to find more of YOU...know more of YOU...be more of YOU...and share more of YOU. And it reverts to you in that inner self-consultation chamber of yours, where you ask yourself, or at least I hope you do, HOW, from this point on, YOU CAN BEST MAKE CONTACT WITH YOUR OWN INNER BEAM-VOICE, AND LET IT GUIDE YOU INTO LARGER AND MORE SATISFYING AREAS OF YOU. In the earsplitting clatter and din or the world's brawling and bawling, and especially with the widespread and growing effort by both seen and unseen agencies to get you off your beam, rob you of your individuality and its expression, and force you to think and act as others want you to think and act, it isn't easy. But it can be done, and sooner or later, you will come to find out, it has to be done by each one of us."<br />
<br />
Allen Boone, You Are the Adventure, pg. 219-221)<br />
<br />
<br />Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-35778054339958217792015-04-02T14:45:00.000-06:002015-04-03T19:07:20.117-06:00Teleconference Note #1<br />
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In 1976, Dr. John M. Dorsey, M.D. published his
autobiographical sketch <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An American Psychiatrist in Vienna,
1935-1937 and his Sigmund Freud</i></b>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For the previous 15 years Dr. Dorsey had occupied the chair of Wayne
State University’s first University Professor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>His professional educational experience began at the University of Iowa
from 1918 to 1928 and continued at the University of Michigan from 1928 to
1938, including two years of sabbatical study at the University of Vienna and
the Viennese Psychoanalytic Institute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>During this latter period, Dr. Dorsey kept a journal, oriented mostly
around his exciting mental growth, associated with his discovery of the rare
power of the one and only psychoanalytical rule, namely, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>free association</u></i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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While all of Dr. Dorsey’s scientific works have been
purposefully of an autobiographical nature, in this volume, formulated near the
end of his life, he provides the key to understanding his numerous books and
other writings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Using description,
narrative, and exposition he accounts for all of his meaningful living in terms
of his own psychogenesis (mental development).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The close-ups of his chosen self-analyst, Dr. Sigmund Freud, are rare
contributions detailing Dr. Dorsey’s sustained efforts to help himself by
cultivating his own self-knowledge with this “peerless scholar of the mind.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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As I read through this work I found myself reading three
different Dr. Dorsey’s. Naturally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First
there were entries from his original journal while in Vienna and including
insights, which came through his self-analysis with Freud.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Dorsey then was 35 years old and had never undertaken the discipline of free association. </span>But this work, American Psychiatrist, was compiled in the late 1970’s
almost 40 years after that life-changing experience, by the Dr. Dorsey, now 76 years old, with 35 years practice of "making the unconscious conscious".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One sees all of the Dr. Dorseys present and
working in this work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dr. Dorsey had
gone to Vienna not intending to become a psychoanalyst, but to further his
understanding of psychiatry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
personal encounter with Freud, however, had powerful and deep meaning for
Dorsey who went on to become one of the leading psychoanalysts of his day.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the preface of this book, Dr. Dorsey records:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
Living the spirit of psychoanalytic
helpfulness in Vienna saturated my self-identity with its power far beyond what
might be understood as resulting from my studying about it, and furthered my
practicing myself in free association there…By psychoanalysis here I mean
specifically loyal devotion to working with the metapsychological method and
insights first worked up by Sigmund Freud. (xiv)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And his preface ends with:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
Whoever makes this writing his own will
find later on that I learned the lesson that all help must be self-help in the
only way possible to learn it effectively, namely, by growing it as precious
painful experience of mine.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
My most difficult language lesson
teaches: My every word can be nothing but my own linguistic growth, despite the
fact that I can and do enjoy its functioning as if it is not referring to me at
all. *<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Therefore, I carefully record:
All I can mean by describing Sigmund Freud must really refer to <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>my</u></i></b>
image of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>my</u></i></b> Sigmund Freud. (* See my chapter, "Idiolect," in <i>Communication of Scientific Information</i>, ed. Stacey B. Day (Switzerland:S. Karger, Basel, 1975, pp. 12-27)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Elsewhere, Dr. Dorsey describes this awakening to his
solipsistic idiolect as his feeling thunderstruck, even humiliated, then
experiencing his living as “wide awake” and “extremely sane.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now, it has been almost 40 years since his passing, and Dr.
Dorsey is not remembered as one of the great psychoanalysts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other names such as Menninger, Szasz, Rogers,
Maslow, Erikson are bigger ---until just recently.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In 1996, Peter M. Newton, professor of psychology at the
Wright Institute, Berkeley, California and his colleague Beate Lohser, member
of the Core Faculty a the San Francisco School of Psychology, Berkeley, both
practicers of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy wrote their book,
<i><b>Unorthodox Freud: The View from the Couch</b></i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Based on existing full-length accounts by patients who were treated by
Freud in the 1920s and ‘30s, this volume reveals an unexpected Freud ---one who
is quite different from the current stereotype.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Contrary to the capricious Freud of in-house clinical lore,
the starched Freud of Strachey’s Standard Edition, and the blank screen of
traditional orthodoxy, Losher and Newton demonstrate that Freud was explicit
about defining the primary task (making the unconscious conscious), directively
instituted free association as the means to accomplish the task, and actively
monitored his patient’s compliance with it…(thus)”organizing the treatment dyad
in terms of its primary task and the division of labor between himself and his
patient.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of these only 5 book length accounts of intimacy with
Freud is Dr. Dorsey’s book, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An American Psychiatrist in Vienna,
1935-1937, and His Sigmund Freud.<o:p></o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In her September/October 1980 Laird Letter, Mrs. Laird
wrote:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
A few years ago I gave a Seminar in
Washington, D.C. with the text, “All consciousness is Mind, God, an infinite
and not a finite consciousness.” (Mary Baker Eddy, <i>Unity of Good</i>, 24:12-16) Two
incidents made the Seminar a momentous one.
I had not talked very long when I realized the three women down front
were listening with such understanding that my imagination took off beyond the
words I had prepared. The second
incident came after the morning session.
A woman in the audience said, “I see you have been reading <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>Living
Consciously: The Science of Self</u></i></b>.”
“No, I have never heard of it.”
She said it was written by two M.D.’s – a Dr. Dorsey, Dean of the
Psychiatry Department of Wayne State University, Detroit Michigan and a Dr.
Seegers, Dean of the Physiology Department.
That afternoon she brought me a copy of the book, co-authored by these
two eminent physicians, and I was thrilled to find the coincidence of the human
and divine expressed in their language.
This reading resulted in sending a copy of the first edition of <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>Christian
Science Re-explored</u></i></b> to Dr. Dorsey.
The book brought enthusiastic letters from both men, with the comment:
“Your phrase, ‘conscious of’ implies a dualism the rest of your book
rejects. How could consciousness be
conscious <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>OF</u></i></b> something ‘other’ if consciousness is all there
is? The exchange of these books brought
a close association with Dr. Dorsey, resulting in his writing the Introduction
to the second edition of <i><b><u>Christian Science Re-explored</u></b></i>. (There follows in this Laird Letter notes from Dr.
Dorsey’s last Adult Education Class which Mrs. Laird says indicates the common
ground the Psychology of Self-divinity has with Christian Science.)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
When you cannot see what is happening
in a group, do not stare harder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
Relax
and look gently with your inner eye.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
When you do not understand what a
person is saying, do not grasp for every word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
Give up your efforts. Become silent inside and listen with your deepest
self.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
When you are puzzled by what you see or
hear, do not strive to figure things out.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
Stand back for a moment and become
calm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
When a person is calm, complex
events appear simple.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
To know what is happening, push less,
open out, and be aware.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
See without
staring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Listen quietly rather than
listening hard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
Use intuition and
reflection rather than trying to figure things out.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
The more you can let go of trying, and
the more open and receptive you become, </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
the more easily you will know what is
happening.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
Also, stay in the present.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
The present is more available than either
memories of the past or fantasies of the future.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0.2in 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
So attend to what is happening now.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
(John Heider - <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tao of Leadership – </i></b>pg.
27)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .2in; margin-right: .2in; margin-top: 0in;">
<br /></div>
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My Self-consciousness always transcends
my “other” reasoning. (A Dorsey insight)<o:p></o:p></div>
Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-10665801095601619432015-03-20T12:34:00.005-06:002015-03-20T12:34:54.139-06:00It's Never Too Late to Change Your MindBeginning Tuesday, April 7th and continuing on Tuesdays in April, May and June (21, 5th and 19th, 2nd) I will be facilitating a teleconference sponsored by the Institute of Metaphysical Science, La Jolla, CA (formerly the Margaret Laird Foundation). The title for this discussion is <i style="font-weight: bold;">Mind is the Bodybuilder. </i>Anyone interested is invited to participate. Information on registering is available online: <a href="http://www.scientificmetaphysics.org/">www.scientificmetaphysics.org</a>.<br />
<br />
The discussion will center on the insights of Dr. John M. Dorsey, M.D. who met Mrs. Laird in 1966 following an exchange of letters and books. One of the products of their meeting is a CD recording of an seminar featuring Dr. Dorsey speaking the the Laird students meeting in Evanston, Illinois, as a part of their opening session of a 3 day seminar. (also available from the IMS)<br />
<br />
I plan to use this space to present materials to the teleconference participants, as well as using email to send homework, or exercises for self-observation. If you don't want to participate in the teleconference but would like the materials I generate for it, send me a note with your email address and I'll add you to the group-mail list. My email address is <a href="mailto:rob_craig@hotmail.com">rob_craig@hotmail.com</a>.<br />
<br />
Below is a sample.<br />
<br />
In 1966 Mrs. Laird, a Christian Science teacher, presented "her" Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science insights to Dr. Dorsey, the head of Psychiatry at Wayne State University, Detroit, who presented Mrs. Laird and her students with "his" Freud and Psychoanalysis insights. Mrs. Laird had evolved quite beyond the sunday school version of Christian Science, after forcing herself to resign her official status therein, and pursuing independent research into scientific metaphysics.<br />
<br />
Dr. Dorsey, in 1966 was looking at retirement, and emeritus status after leading the tremendously successful MacGregor Center, a small 33 bed hospital for training medical professionals in humane "psychological medicine." Dr. Dorsey was in analysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna for one year of his sabbatical (1935-1937) and for one year with other key psychoanalytic leaders. His two sons were in school during that time with Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud, who developed the early theories of childhood development for Psychoanalysis. Dorsey is one of only five writers who authored a book length account of his time with Freud, which recently has come into the spotlight in a book called <b><i>Unorthodox Freud</i></b>. This book challenges the American psychoanalytic "orthodoxy" and shows how far off from Freud's original insights this movement went.<br />
<br />
I have been researching into these two sets of insights for many years now and have found that just looking at the ideas presented creates a dynamic within me that generates new insights into my life and its events. Not all of these ideas, which I try to consider with open mind, are easy and pleasant. One of Mrs. Laird's insights which she shares comes from the chapter <i>Crime and Punishment, The Prophet </i>by Kahlil Gibran. <br />
<br />
Even like the sun is your god-self;<br />
It knows not the ways of the mole nor seeks it the holes of the serpent.<br />
But your god-self does not dwell alone in your being.<br />
Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man,<br />
But a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.<br />
And of the man in you would I now speak.<br />
For it is he and not your god-self nor the pigmy in the mist, that knows crime and the punishment of crime.<br />
Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.<br />
...<br />
the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.<br />
Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self.<br />
You are the way and the wayfarers.<br />
And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone.<br />
Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.<br />
And this also, though the word lie heavy upon your hearts:<br />
<b><i>The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder, </i></b><br />
<b><i> And the robbed is not blameless in being robbed</i></b>.<br />
<br />
The word, indeed, "lies heavy upon our hearts." It is the grief of the whole world over against the "pygmy in the mist, searching for its own awakening" -- searching for bigness of Self to see justice where we now see injury.<br />
<br />
And so -- a question: What kind of strength of Self must we cultivate or grow or evolve from within ourselves in order to lift the whole weight of humanity UP and not be those who "though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone." What "bodybuilding" does Mind make us do, consciously or unconsciously? What are the signs that we are growing stronger in Self? Peace, peace, when there is no peace? Or a fire in the belly? What is the "Wisdom of Passion"?<br />
<br />
A question: what is the difference in your spiritual experience and discipline between depression and tranquility? Does genuine peace of Mind produce lethargy of living? Dr. Dorsey titles one of his essays: "Self-consciousness or self-hypnosis." What are the vital signs of my truly growing and extending and expanding my self-conscious allness, my wide awake living to include my whole world in and as my whole self instead of contracting, narrowing and withdrawing my wonderful self into an ever smaller and smaller interior space which I create for my retreat from my increasingly hostile and unfriendly world? Dr. Dorsey's opus <i><b>Illness or Allness </b></i>puts the demand on every individual to see clearly the true meaning of individuality and in that light to be able to "call my soul my own and my all my soul." Only self-love can save our own lost soul.<br />
<br />
Question: What Mind muscles do I need to exercise, use 'em or lose 'em, and what are these Mind muscles? Insight, inspiration, intuition and instinct all expressions of the awesomeness of being ONE including all - the one divine human being, which both Mrs. Laird and Dr. Dorsey discovered was the deep self living in the depths of their own powerful individuality and hidden by their own inconsistent personality. How we engage the deep self is unimportant. That we do and keep doing that with increasing self-conscious honesty and clear-eyed inner vision is the task of the scientific spiritual psychologist (metaphysician).<br />
<br />
In 1996, Bill Phillips, president of EAS nutritional supplement company, and a former bodybuilder launched the first "Body for Life" competition to the general public. It challenged overweight, out of shape men and women to transform their physiques following a strict exercise and nutrition regimen. It has been popularized by a book by the same name. Phillip's slogan? <i>"Change your mind, change your body."</i><br />
<br />
In 2009, Dr. Pamela Peake, M.D. published the book <i><b>Body for Life for Women</b></i>, using the successful approach of Bill Phillips' original program.<br />
<br />
The only reason I present these two authors and their books here, both of which I've used successfully for my own reference and with my personal training clients, is to tell you that in the Pamela Peake book, is the story and the before and after pictures, of a 76-year old woman. She started the new exercise program in her wheelchair. She finished it 12 weeks later running!<br />
<br />
It's never too late to change your mind.<br />
<br />Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-64165453955256671242014-12-09T15:00:00.001-07:002014-12-09T15:00:32.799-07:00For those of you who still follow the grand ideas of Soul, I wanted to let you know that I've reworked my website: http://thedivinescienceway.homestead.com and after a hiatus of several months have just republished it. The Institute of Metaphysical Science, formerly the Margaret Laird Foundation, in La Jolla, Ca, for whom I have written many articles over several years, has invited me to give a teleconference in April, May and June on Dr. Dorsey. As you may know, they also asked me to draft a biography of Margaret Laird for publication in Wikipedia. After 3 attempts to have it published, and 3 rejections because Mrs. Laird didn't meet their "notability" standards for biographies, I gave up and published it on my website.<br />
<br />
In a recent article (which you can find on my website soon) I told my readers that cartoon characters are "notable" by Wikipedia standards, but not someone who attains to a fuller conscious identity as Mind (God). This would be no surprise to Mrs. Laird. Indeed, I could hear her roaring with laughter, reminding me that in the appearance, Reality is the appearance. Let it go.<br />
<br />
So, dear followers, borrowing an old statement from my childhood days, "We'll see you in the funny papers."Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-49240537966073846652014-05-23T15:36:00.000-06:002014-05-23T16:34:54.356-06:00Unless you see yourself treated contrary to the way you think you should be treated, your best efforts to "help" "another" repudiated, and are hurt and unhappy, how would you know that your are not being individual God-Mind-Self --the conscious identity of only Good is being -- manifested? How would you know you are deluding yourself? <br />
If you were living Life as Principle -- minding your own business, attending to the business at hand of being -- you would recognize the right of each absolute self/individual to act from her/his own standpoint of experience and not from yours. You would have no opinion of how s/he should treat you. When you see yourself rejected, criticized, condemned, even persecuted, frustrated and disappointed with your daily life - its people, events, circumstances, what you see is your own failure to be Mindful Man, self-consciously alive to your wholeness, divinity, perfection now. Your own <u><i>unlived</i></u> Life is rising up and demanding that it be lived as impersonal unguided thinking, that is, as Principle instead of person.<br />
It goes pretty hard for the one who lives Life personally - ignorant of Life-Principle. That one has mistaken a concept of self for the Self. But the one who lives impersonally, without emotional attachments to a self-image, self-concept fabricated by society, family, religious group, etc., one who has understood that by basing living on the personal concept, one depersonalizes the Self and that this self-deprecation must show up in the mirror of relationships, sooner or later, that one understands the absolute necessity to give her/himself the freedom to be self-determining. Giving others the right to self-realization in their own time and their own way, I am giving it to myself. I am freeing myself. Life is a joy to such a one.<br />
Living Life as the acknowledgment that only Good is being, <u style="font-style: italic;">in all ways, </u> means no emotional attachment to any concept, in the understanding that every concept of Reality is Reality coming to view and that all trouble is self-trouble coming from one's own point of view: either the personal (depersonalizing) view of being or the impersonal view.<br />
For the one whose religion is Science, enlightenment - the conscious experience of God from within and <i><u>AS</u></i> oneself - with no outside God, no outside authority, outside his/her own demonstrated being of Good, God, s/he demonstrates the science (religion) of human behavior -- the government of Principle instead of person. In the understanding, that "God" is Truth- Principle - the law of self, the law of sanity, one becomes a law unto him/herself and the world of that one mirrors back the facts of being Spirit in human terms: health, wealth and happiness. Self-government, self-control, self-discipline, self-direction, self-determining being, self-realized, that one lives his/her own <u><i>lived</i></u> Life, finds the cure for social ills and the problems of human relationships. Loss turns itself into gain, hate turns itself into Love, Truth - the all consuming fire turns itself into the all-preserving Presence.<br />
When Life brings you face to face with what you are doing to yourself by identifying with the personal point of view - instead of being the conscious identity of Good -- do not add to you troubles by turning away from the mirror or condemning the false self-belief. Self-pity, self-justification, remorse, indignation belong to the personal concept and by trying to get rid of the false self concept/image you reinforce it, build it up, deepen it.<br />
Face it! You may discover all kinds of things about the belief of self - you've taken as your Self -that you do not like - believing these are about your self - not the least of which that you are afraid of being alone, afraid to be yourself, afraid to think originally out from Mind, afraid to be the Perfection of being you are - afraid to be..." alone with one self, and the reality of things."<br />
<br />
Margaret Laird paraphrased.Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-36495164057031720302014-05-19T14:52:00.000-06:002014-05-19T14:52:39.123-06:00My father died two years ago. It has been fascinating, when my psychic anchor gave way with his passing, to watch all that started coming up for re-processing. It has been a challenging two years. My father is no longer a frequent personal appearance in my consciousness, and yet all of the joys and pains I associated to him still live, and breathe and have their being in me. Of course, "they" are me. The horizontal, temporal experience of myself and my other named my Dad stopped, but the vertical still exists in me as me. It's like a psychic elevator which goes up and down depending on my faithfulness to my living self-consciously. <br />
<br />
The word 'veridical' is interesting. It means coinciding with reality. In my science of self-living consciously, my scientific metaphysics or spiritual rational/transactional analysis, which I have been growing for myself deliberately for 38 years, this coinciding with reality is a synonymous phrase for "the human and divine coincidence" my Margaret Laird taught. Her synonymous phrases for this event in and as individual conscious being one Mind unfolding infinite Good was "conscious identity, the infinite divine reflection, and one reciprocal being.<br />
<br />
A quote in my dictionary elucidating 'veridical' is <i style="background-color: white; color: green; font-family: arial;"><span id="easel_exs__0">"Perceptual error...has a surprising resemblance to veridical perception- F.A.Olafson" (1924-2012)<span style="line-height: 16px;"> </span></span></i>professor of philosophy, UC, San Diego. I agree. Doesn't it? Haven't you found this observation to be fascinating? That the perception of reality and the perception of unreality have a surprising resemblance.<br />
<br />
I see my business as thinking. I see my thinking as one Infinite Mind/Being itself. Mind in order to be, at all, must DO something. A mind that didn't do anything would be a non-entity. Such a do nothing mind, my Mrs. Eddy called "mortal" and my Margaret Laird called "conditioned thinking." Conditioned thinking is not-thinking pretending to be thinking. This is the root of all the trouble we see, within ourselves subjectively, outside ourselves objectively, since when I am my perceptual error, when I am not busy Minding my business of being the thinking that is out from Mind, I am busy growing my "reptiles of the mind." (William Blake - Marriage of Heaven and Hell).<br />
<br />
Now the experience of "delusional thinking" is one of the oldest recorded experiences of mankind, being on record in the Vedanta texts and familiar to those who study consciousness with me under various metaphors like "the ghost and the post." The oldest "theory of perceptual error" comes from Vedanta, but it found its way into all the world's religious literature in a variety of forms which means that as my human being, I excel in the ways I deceive myself.<br />
<br />
My mystic Joel Goldsmith, in a pamphlet entitled, "Call No Man on Earth your Father" - quoting the Jesus texts, was not my first experience of this idea that the father within me, or my subjective father-stuff must be kept clearly distinguished from my personification of it and projection onto my personal fathers- dad, boss, doctor, professor, etc. My Jung studies came before that, teaching me to look at my father-complex and teach myself to live it consciously, so that the father archetype does not hide my access to the Self - the Archetype of archetypes - the God behind the gods - the Mind that is the "source and condition of all existence." (Eddy) If I fall into an identification of a lesser archetype (god) - woe unto me, until I discover what I've done.<br />
<br />
All of this is to say, dear reader, that in the last 6 months, having come through yet another cycle of re-working my father-stuff, I have put my website <span style="color: #0b5394;">thedivinescienceway.homestead.com</span> on hold having a growing dissatisfaction with my work there. I have transferred my energy to this blog, which I've just renamed: <span style="color: #0b5394;">wearetheworldwewalkthrough.blogspot.com</span> and if you are interested, you will find me processing my stuff there.<br />
<br />Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-81741262015677457792013-02-21T20:56:00.000-07:002013-02-21T20:56:39.527-07:00"Now this is something very serious that I am suggesting. It is easy to meet pleasure with your total being. It does not need any effort on your part. When you are happy, you are totally happy for that moment. But what I am suggesting is, meeting pain, sorrow, suffering as it comes, without any reservation, without trying to escape from it. Why should life always be pleasant? Why shouldn't there be suffering? Why shouldn't there be sorrow? Why should we always run after sunshine? Why not enjoy the shadow and the shade as much as the sunlight? The moment I am not afraid of pain and suffering, the sting of pain melts away. It disappears. The sting of pain and sorrow consists of my fear of sorrow. If I am not afraid of death, then death loses its sting. It becomes as natural as birth. Because I am trying to avoid pain, because I am trying to escape from it, this fear is exploited by many people in our society. Organized religion would not have such a tremendous hold on the human mind if the human mind were not afraid of pain. Why should I be afraid of separation? Why should I try to run away from loneliness? Why should I be frightened of emptiness? If it is within, why not face it and try to understand it? No one can avoid pain in life. Life is a series of challenges and responses. No one can control the environments and atmospheres; they cannot be cast into a mold by one's likes and dislikes. So pain and pleasure, this duality, is going to be there for as long as you are living on the mental level. So I think it is urgently necessary to see this beauty of life - that I do not try to avoid pain when pain comes; the response of the system is there. If there is a physical pain, I consult a doctor; I do what is necessary. I respond to it. If there is a death in my family, I know that I am facing separation. I am now lonely, left behind. Instead of grumbling and grudging the loneliness let me receive this loneliness with open arms and let me find out what is the essence of loneliness; what is the meaning of separation; why separation is becoming painful to me. Let me meet it. Let me understand.<br />
The real beauty of life will be manifested if we do not turn away from any experience. Then anxiety cannot touch you. Then the thought of the morrow does not pollute the enjoyment of today. And the rumination over the past does not spoil the happiness of today."<br />
<br />
--Vimala Thakar, <i><u>Heart to Heart</u></i><br />
Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-49324725597987290632013-02-05T13:12:00.001-07:002013-02-05T13:12:33.290-07:00<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Failure to Thrive</span><span style="color: black; font: 12.0px Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> - part 3</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My human life prior to enlightenment might be described thus: I was always one, always whole, always complete but didn’t know it. With enlightenment (assent to oneness), I am enabled to say I am always one, whole, complete, but now I </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>know</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> it, therefore the perfection of being demonstrates itself. Experience of a fact is its own evidence. My individual perfection is a self-evident fact, the opposite of which is impossible to conceive. What I call imperfection is my attempt to conceive the impossible. Being, of necessity, must be perfect in order to be. Imperfect being, being that lacks all it needs to be, cannot be. Everything needed to being is in being; what is essential to anything is in the essence of that thing. Being is all-inclusive. Certain knowledge of perfection can only be my self-knowledge of </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>my</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> perfection. I can only know my being; I can only do what I am.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The acknowledgment of self-oneness must precede the demonstration of self-oneness. Demonstration is a state of awareness in which there is no doubt, a state of certain knowing. Acknowledgment is the only human access to the divinity of humanity, the state of perfection, and if acknowledgment of what I already am is not used as my starting point, any so-called demonstration is baseless. I can call an event appearing humanly the demonstration of perfection or oneness, but if there is fear for self, doubt of self, self-guilt, etc. the baselessness of this so-called verbal demonstration will be felt within me as hollow sound only.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The fact is, “I am complete” now. But it is my knowing of the fact, the conscious living of it, that makes it operative in my experience. Truth needs to be tested. It is by the testing of the truth of my oneness, allness that I am exercised by it and always some measure of proof results. Proof is not-yet demonstration, but is a necessary step to it. Proof is a measure of demonstration; demonstration is full proof (and fool-proof). Only what we have in the clear understanding is reliable and can be trusted. Testing, proving and demonstrating, assenting, consenting and intending go hand in hand and this is the intuitive will or instinctive intuition that is the divinity of humanity living consciously.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The more clearly conscious I am that “I am complete,” the more spontaneous the demonstration of that fact. In other words, when a test of truth appears (and I am ready for it always whether I recognize it or not, since it would not appear if I wasn’t ready for it), the measure of my understanding, or conscious divinity, which lives me is signalled precisely to me by how spontaneously fear, anxiousness, doubt in myself, disappear and clear understanding stands forth. Only understanding exists and understanding demonstrates itself. Spontaneity and demonstration are synonymous. I know that I know. The mystics were close. They say, “I will know as I am known.” But no such knowledge exists. I am never the known or the knower, but always the knowing which includes both, subjective and objective as one -- the knowing. The divine fact of complete oneness lives itself as my experience, whether I am conscious of it or not. But </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>when consciously assented to</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">, I am the divinity of humanity and not a human wondering what to do.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Acknowledgment is one aspect of assent to the fact. Recognition is another. Nearly synonymous, these two terms have the meaning of “ownership”, as well as giving place to the prior rights of something. Before enlightenment, I do not consciously own my allness, but live as if I am owned by an unknown alien force. The work of enlightenment is effortless, unwilled, spontaneous living of one’s self as one’s all, self-responsibly, self-authentically, self-accountably lived as the one self that one is. My heart’s deepest desire is to be myself living consciously the true nature of my living whole.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What has been said so far can be illustrated by a common example. Suppose I have suffered the loss of all of my property and money. Here is the test of truth. What do I do? Do I immediately start running my thinking around my thinking, thinking of all the things I should do to recover my fortune? No. Thinking about thinking tightens itself all up. If human steps to my recovery are necessary, they will appear spontaneously as I live myself consciously, divinely. But if I jump in and immediately begin strategizing, the human steps appearing out of my divinity cannot appear. Again, this is backwards reasoning and it inhibits my awareness. Backwards reasoning is like putting the brakes on. It seems to slow everything down.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Instead I acknowledge the fact, the absolute fact, no matter what the appearances: “I am complete.” I am one, whole, all-inclusive total self-being. My perfection is guaranteed, since nothing can exist that does not perfectly exist. Paradoxically, when I realize that my wholeness is intact without regard to the looks of my money or property, I then find my money and property quickly restoring themselves and sometimes in quite “unorthodox” ways. Supply is not money and things, it is the substance of my being which I am. So the test of truth is not how do I get more money. The test is a self-demand to be the self-supply of my every need. The need is always for more conscious self-discovery of allness now.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In all of our experiences, troubles and pleasures, we never let go of the absolute fact: “I am one, whole, complete.” I may momentarily forget it, but since it is the fact, and every dynamic fact is operative whether I am conscious of it or not, very soon I am conscious of it again. It is as if I am endowed with a divine memory that makes me remember the fact and I find that even in the densest, blackest self-forgetfulness, something occurs that jogs my memory. The something is the dynamic fact. I am whole, one, all, complete.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Speaking to the attendees of the 1965 New York seminar, metaphysical scientist Margaret Laird said:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What is there to be afraid of? I see fear as my own unself-conscious living, because when I am living the I that is Mind consciously there is no fear and there can be no fear in that conscious living. Fear indicates I must be living in the realm of unself-conscious living, denying myself, denying my own self respect, self-love, self-worth. If I am not conscious of my oneness which is allness, then of course, I am going to be insecure, afraid. It is only as I am living my all, right here, subjectively as my one Mind that I can lose all fear of what anyone, anything or any circumstance can do to me.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Events are going on in Mind before they appear to my conscious mind. There is not anything that is not going on right now. I believe absolutely in this existential NOW. The events which appear are going on right now and there are some who have the gift of of seeing these events and can conceptualize them before they happen. All the steps necessary to identifying the fact of perfection are present now because the fact is present now.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This impersonal seeing, we call insight, is Love, Principle, the discernment of spiritual facts and always the discernment is that no need is present at anytime, in anyway. With insight or awareness functioning consciously for one’s outsight there is no such thing as human need, since the divinity of humanity is ever-present supplying the needs of humanity to see its divinity and that that’s all that is going on.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now in Science, in this discernment, awareness or insightful living of myself, I have a way of consciously and deliberately awakening to the fact. Because it is the basic fact of all my facticity: all my being, knowing, doing, I learn soon that when a fact known and consciously assented to demonstrates itself through a trial, what is being demonstrated through the trial is the irrepressible</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i> law of oneness</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">. Since the fact of me is being me and this fact is my divinity living humanly as me, I learn with every lesson it creates how to relax into the presence of my present being and let it do its own thing. Paradoxically, when I relax, I awaken; but when I tense up, staying tense, then I don’t. My access to my omnipotent divinity is not through will-power, but is insight-power.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With this for my point of view, in very practical terms, the labels “sick and poor” can be understood as me habitually saying “no” to my life and naturally failing to thrive. The labels “healthy and wealthy,” which label me as my own thriving one/all, apply to the degree in which I have learned to always say “yes!” to my life. Consciously saying yes to all of my life is, in a very real way, my awakening from the dead (unconsciousness), my resurrection and my ascendance is my assent to what is always going on as the whole me - the conscious infinitude of the One/All -- here and now that I already am.</span></div>
Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-6933512804493800542013-01-31T15:25:00.003-07:002013-02-05T16:50:32.794-07:00<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue; font-size: large;">Failure to thrive</span> - part two</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One of my specimens of “failure to thrive” metaphysically speaking comes from a one sentence conversation with a former friend of mine. Have you ever noticed that some of the most important things we say are those we say as we open the door to leave? Parting shots, sometimes, or a loving comment offered, when we’re afraid of possible rejection. Truth, as you well know, has a way of coming in strange, disguised, unobvious ways. It has been shown that the truth of individual infinity comes to the conceptual level of thought as paradox.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The friend was the leader of the metaphysical church which ordained me a minister, teacher and practitioner of Divine Science. I had learned earlier that he was dying of a rare, incurable disease. He had devoted his life to creative mysticism as he called it. He lived himself as enlightened by a traditional way, combining metaphysical science and Eastern philosophy. He had had the experience of “shaktipat.” </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When we met alone, in the hallway of the old church, just the two of us, he confessed to me, “I didn’t think it would end this way.” That self-description struck me as very odd from one who had devoted his entire life to enlightenment, spiritual growth, and the practical living of mysticism. How did he think it would end? What is the end of Life?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Old Christianity has an axiom that “the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” So says its Q & A or catechism. The end of an acorn is an oak tree and not a bigger better acorn.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If we, by nature, have within us a truth-hunger that impels our search for wholeness, completeness, allness, the universal One called “God,” “Tao,” “Buddha-mind,” “Yahweh,” “Allah,” “true Self,” or whatever, then by scientific definition that instinct includes within itself the recognition of the object which fulfills its hunger. So we say, in metaphysics, the end is from the beginning. Life moves itself in a circle and not in a straight line. The circle everywhere is the symbol of totality, but the spiral up is the symbol of maturity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Consciously assenting to the fact that “I am one” -- one absolute one -- opens my awareness to the ever-present fact that “I am whole,” - complete in every way. I am self-contained and self-containing life. If I am not perfect now, then I will never be perfect - someday. As I begin to pursue the fact of my allness, disturbances quiet down, conflicts resolve themselves, broken things seem to be mended and destruction appears as construction. The law of oneness reversed by unconsciousness of it, reverts seemingly by consciousness of it. Actually it never deviates. Unawareness of the facts has no effect on the facts, but it does affect our experience of them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Observation shows that we usually think backwards. We have an experience. We think backwards from effect to cause. In order for this backwards reasoning to go on, descriptions become definitions and definitions, descriptions assume images, symbols, names, labels combining with emotional energy to form complexes of associations. Before language is verbal language it is the language of unconscious associations we construct within us. We think that <b><i>if </i></b>we had lots of money or possessions <b><i>then</i></b> we would be conscious of wholeness; we think that <b><i>if </i></b>we had amiable relationships <b><i>then </i></b>we would be conscious of completeness; we think that <b><i>if</i></b> we had a peaceful universe <b><i>then</i></b> we would be conscious of oneness, unity. When we suffer from our own <b><i>what-if </i></b>thinking, it is none other than this backwards reasoning churning in high gear. Anthony DeMello, a favorite author of mine, once said that the essence of insanity is thinking that if someone else would change then I would be happy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Imagine being tied to a chair in a movie theater with nothing to watch but disaster movies, one after another in endless succession. Do you think you would get bored and look for something else to watch? But you can’t. Even your head is locked in a forward direction. You could close your eyes, stop up your ears, and try to not feel as if this was a way to escaping such miserable living. This suicidal approach to living has been tried since antiquity. We don’t have much follow-up information if it worked or not and the person finally succeeded in feeling whole. Some spiritual systems teach a kind of quasi-suicidal living, where only parts of oneself are shut-off, thinking that other parts will be thereby enhanced. But spirit (wind, breathing) and asphyxia (not breathing) -- are they paradox or absurdity?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You could try that approach to living or - you could assent consciously to the spiritual facts of being, the science of metaphysics, and know that all the goodies in the pictures you see are not the result of outer, external, objective conditions of oneness, wholeness, and completeness -- which if met will be given to you. All the goodies of life are simply the growing consciousness which you are, awakening to its own inherent perfection: oneness, wholeness, completeness. Healing, which originally meant ‘making whole,’ is always nothing more than becoming conscious of what we already are and therefore already have. And the basic fact of inviolable oneness - the absolute integrity of individual being -- means that there is in reality nothing to heal. The discernment of that fact appears as that experience appearing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Conscious assent is the starting place in scientific metaphysics. Every spiritual teaching in the world talks about the problem of will and desire. Right use of the will is a discipline or practical necessity in each of them. Suppose that there are 3 functions of the will - assent, consent and intent. Intentionality, of course, is the will as action and is the practical discipline of living truth. Consent is affective will, we consent to a proposal of marriage, whatever our intentions are. Assent is an act of the intellectual will to a statement of truth. A statement is a definition. It can be simple or it can be a model, a map, a metaphor or a myth. “‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is a statement of truth found in a slightly modified form in every religion of the world. <b><i>If</i></b> everyone in the world practiced this truth intentionally, <b><i>then</i></b> we would have a better, nicer world,” is another example of backwards reasoning. Without the affective-will backing up the practical-will it isn’t going to happen humanly. But who would have guessed that everything hangs and hangs up on the assent.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My mysticism teacher, who is considered by many to be the most articulate Western model of contemplative living or mystical way of life, taught that the most human act of the will is to form through spiritual practice the intention to consent to the divine presence and action within the soul. In all of our sessions, I don’t recall him ever talking about assent. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In my reading, my I Ching author tells me, “Enlightenment is the passage from an intellectual belief in an abstract, conceptual “universal” truth, to existentially </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>being</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> that truth.” The gears of the will won’t move until one assents to the facts confronting them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We’ve got to stay with the spiritual facts -- absolute one and its absolute oneness - in all attempts to ‘heal’ - ourselves, each other, the world. Those facts are the Principle and law of oneness-wholeness-completeness, the facts of absoluteness. We start by assenting to individual absoluteness -- each conscious human individual is a law of perfection unto </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>one self</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">. This seems like a highly abstract truth, but actually is highly practical. Minding my own living necessitates that I grow my intentionality to conduct all of my living on a factual basis. I cannot be Principle to you nor can you be Principle to me. The concrete living of this truth makes me a fact-finder instead of a fault-finder.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Question: In the face of such compelling evidence of human difficulties how can I obtain this consciousness of absolute individual Good, or individual perfection; how can I willingly assent to the hidden oneness when appearances seem so opposite. It seems like a bare-faced lie.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Answer: To you. It seems like a bare-faced lie --<i><u> to you</u></i>. And no one is saying that the </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>appearances</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> are good. The looks of things may be very, very bad at the moment - according to the usual human scale of values. In actual practice, we abandon the good-bad conceptual dichotomy as of no value in our work, since we understand that --nothing is as constant as change. Paradox, remember. We start with basic oneness as the law, as the basic Principle of being -- of<b><i> my being</i></b>.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Again, we experience first, then we reason next or we may just react emotionally. We may not be aware that reasoning can shut out awareness, can close down perception, just like emotion can. Reason can offer a larger circle to go round in than emotion does, but the net effect is about the same. Metaphysics, in older days, was defined as the science of first principles. The search for first principles requires of one the disciplines and uses of the whole mind: reason and will, as well as sense and intuition, and in definite ways. That’s why we call it practice, or work. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As we observe and continue to observe an experience that repeats itself and we begin to see patterns emerging in our imagination, if we jump to judgment, again, we shut down perception. Close observation of a repetitious experience gradually yields more and more facts and factors involved. But we are not at the point of knowing, the power of intentional doing, until we start at the beginning -- the first principle. Being, knowing, doing is the order and being is the first principle.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So we start with conscious assent to the proposition of oneness, allness of individual being individually lived. We observe. And we keep observing, opening up perception by the power of assent to metaphysical truths that have been time tested. We don’t analyze, picture or try to guide the outcome of the experience. This attempt will obstruct the consciousness of the law of oneness, the law of freedom, from being experienced.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You may not be sure that this law of oneness, of allness, when invoked by conscious assent is on the job. Our conviction of a truth develops through observable stages: testing it, proving it and demonstrating it. Proof and demonstration are not identical, just like testing and proving aren’t. The demonstration of a truth is never an external event, but is always an internal conviction that nothing else is true. If the something is true, it is true. Whatever is, is. Period. Doubt disappears in demonstration as a truth becomes self-evident. Then it lives us, consciously and unconsciously. Then we are existentially <b><i>being</i></b> truth. This is mental soundness, it is certainty, it is permanence.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The positive acknowledgment of the allness, oneness of each absolute individual will develop into the demonstration of that truth and the side effect will be that we see the universe in its consciously positive aspect instead of its unconscious (negative) aspect.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">To acknowledge the absolute oneness, allness, wholeness, completeness of every individual in every experience is not submission to evil, it is not giving consent; it is not license but liberty. Assent is the necessary step from the unconsciousness of allness to the conscious state of wholeness. Remember, evil is not something to be destroyed or even resisted, it is an unconscious state from which to be awakened. In that awakened state (consciousness of oneness), the “otherness” (evil) disappears into wholeness.</span></div>
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Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-59743546755679506452013-01-30T15:53:00.003-07:002013-01-30T21:35:03.759-07:00<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: blue; font-size: large;">Failure to thrive</span></i></b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> I have a kind of collection of stories about people who devoted their lives to spirituality, or truth, or science, or metaphysics, mysticism, psychology and at the end of their lives made statements to the effect that they had missed the point of their life. The meaning of life generally is a fascinating study and it can keep me very busy and distracted from discovering the truth that I haven’t discovered the meaning of </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>my</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> life.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Failure to thrive is a phrase which the medical community applies to infants and old folks. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said that most problems in the second half of life stem from the lack of a profound spiritual vision. The science of metaphysical thinking is based on a single fact: that the basis of life is oneness, wholeness, and completeness. Regardless of the looks of things, existence of any kind would be impossible upon any other basis. The law of oneness upholds and sustains all life, including the life of mind and the minding of life. One absolute and its absolute oneness are the spiritual facts upon which everything must be considered.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I was a young man, just starting out as an “adult”, within a short time, my world fell apart. I was utterly lost. My body was healthy, and so was my bank account. I was successful in my work and ready to go at the world. But doors began closing before me and the prospect of great failure stood immovably before me and I stood stunned and immobilized. Through an amazing to me turn of events, everything changed. My body was the same, my finances and my career were intact and all of the relationships I lived remained. Only one thing had changed: my fundamental point of view.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One new relationship began to grow in my experience. I became a student of spiritual psychology and my teacher was a charismatic Presbyterian minister with the spiritual gift of “counseling”, who had studied with Dr. Karl Menninger, the famous psychiatrist.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This earth-shattering event, which left the earth unshattered, and me externally unchanged had done a “mighty work of God” in my interior. From then to much later, something within me guided me along a trail, had me searching for something, and only years later could I name it adequately, correctly and truthfully for myself. Today, I understand that this something is my own divinity, my own divine nature, the life that is mind, always mine, whose basis is oneness, wholeness, and completeness and whose law is absolute oneness.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Experiences always come before the language which describes them and only later does this language become definitions defining the experience. You and I experience the “mystical oneness with the divine” long before we discover a language or a community for the shaping of our living of it. Many of my mystic friends do not seem to know that a student of mysticism is not a mystic. A mystic has had an experience that so separates two states of life within them as to make the preceding one leading up to the mystic experience, fade into oblivion. The name is not the thing. And it is very sad when one comes to the end of their life and discovers they have deceived themselves by the very devotion, study and practices of spirituality, mysticism, or whatever the pursuit of knowledge is called.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Suppose that we have built within us a ‘knowledge or truth instinct.’ Like hunger it has a source, an impetus, an object and an aim. Suppose like hunger, this truth-hunger nags at us, even hurts us, until we give it the attention it demands. Have you ever noticed that when you take something to eat, an apple say, your hunger begins immediately to diminish? During World War II, children whose parents were killed had been gathered into an orphanage. The children were well cared for in a safe place full of caring people, but many of them could not go to sleep. Inspiration, came to one of the nurses and she gave each troubled child a piece of bread to take to bed with them. They just held it --- just in case --- and went to sleep.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If the hunger for truth or knowledge shows up initially as afraidness - anxiety, even panic, is dis-ease a punishment for ignorance of truth or is it a symptom of a specific lack?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There are never two states of life -- good and bad -- if life is one absolute and its nature is absolute oneness. However, it seems that there is generally an unconsciousness of the basic holistic nature of life, basic completeness, as opposed to the consciousness of it. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that the same law obeyed and disobeyed brings opposite results. It is the awareness of oneness, wholeness, completeness, perfection that we call “good”. The experience always comes before the language about it. The absence of the consciousness of perfection, or law of oneness, we call “evil.” Again, we experience the consequences within ourselves that give these names their force, meaning or value.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But, is there “good” and “evil”, or is there consciousness and unconsciousness of oneness?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Suppose that every human problem, every trouble and all suffering occurs when we are acutely </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px; text-decoration: underline;"><i>unconscious</i></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> of oneness. When faced with conflict, lack and destruction the common belief is that there are two powers, two presences, two qualities happening and the appearances of things can be very compelling. It was not until fairly recently that spiritual researchers discovered the fact that the absence of conscious oneness-wholeness-completeness results in the negative appearance of innate oneness, perfection, and in this negative consciousness, the law of oneness seems to operate in reverse.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But what seems to be and what actually is, has long been an interest for spiritual and psychological researchers. There is no lack of oneness (duality). There cannot be two absolutes. There is no lack of wholeness (inadequacy). Insufficiency of basic substance would mean an inherent self-destructive tendency in the absolute and the absolute would have long ago destroyed itself. Hence, there is no lack of completeness (destruction). It is the lack of the consciousness of completeness, wholeness and oneness that makes the universe appear potentially harmful, hostile and negative. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But another fact needs inserting here. There is no such thing as “consciousness”. Consciousness is just a name, just a word - unless and until it is seen and understood that consciousness must of necessity be the consciousness of an individual self. All consciousness is self-consciousness -- one, only, all.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The lack of conscious assent to the fact of absolute individual oneness appears as opposition; the lack of assent to the fact of absolute individual wholeness appears as inadequate substance, inadequate supply; the lack of conscious assent to the fact of absolute individual completeness appears as destruction and loss.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is in the conscious assent to these spiritual qualities, to acknowledge them as basic, that opens the way to the perception of oneness, wholeness and completeness in the lived or “human” level called experience.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The negations, apparent violations of the law of oneness, that seem so evident in human experience, the apparent violations of this one divine Principle and its law of oneness is nothing but the absence of the consciousness of that ever-present, ever-operative fact.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Remember, there is no “good and evil”, there is conscious or unconsciousness of oneness.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Remember, when faced with an experience of human conflict, lack and destruction, this is the negative appearing (unconsciousness) of oneness, wholeness and completeness.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Unaware that “<b><i><u>I am one</u></i></b>” sets me in apparent opposition to myself and makes my universe appear potentially hostile, harmful and negative to me.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Since the absence of conscious oneness-completeness-wholeness results in the negative appearing of the inherent oneness the problem before us, then, is not the obliteration of evil and the preservation of good. The problem is how to rise to the conscious appreciation of the formerly hidden and unconscious oneness-wholeness-completeness - the perfection of being we already are (have).</span></div>
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Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-57316629984121290822013-01-23T15:46:00.001-07:002013-01-23T15:46:33.529-07:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Announcement: I have been wrapped up in a writing project requested by the Institute of Metaphysical Science in La Jolla, CA for the past year or so. This work required intense research on my part into the life and works of Margaret Laird a Christian Science teacher and it brought me much light, but also kept me away from my website and blog.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;"><br /></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Having brought this project to a final stage I plan to turn my attention now to my own writing. I plan to work up the research I've done into written pieces for my blog and website. Perhaps you may be interested.</span>Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-91549768728530307682012-09-24T13:13:00.000-06:002012-09-24T13:13:51.521-06:00IllusionsI have been out of the blog business, as you can see by the date of my last post. Every once and awhile I reach a plateau and have to swill around in it for as long as it takes. For the past year I have been 'going within' and working deeply with what was being uncovered. Dreams, symbols, coincidences, life events are the elements of my language of spiritual discernment and sometimes these meanings get murky and very obscure until the light comes and they become transparent.<br />
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When I was in theater in undergraduate and studying set design, I learned of a device which creates the illusion of a wall. It's called a scrim. An open-weave fabric is hung, sometimes with a scene painted on one side. Then by using lighting in front of it the look is of an opaque and solid wall. But if the light in front is dimmed and the light behind this veil is illuminated, the 'wall' fades into a hazy transparency and what is behind the wall appears. The illusion is determined by the position of the light. It is the attitude of the light, which plays the trick.<br />
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Now, humanly, we are the light of the divine, since it is the omnipresence, the only stuff out of which everything is made. But if we keep our attention on the human point of view -- the wall, the pictures on the wall, clinging to our point of view as absolute, this clinging creates the seeming. The seeming is reality as it seems to us. And it seems to us, generally, that there are two powers -- good and evil locked in conflict with each other and that we must free ourselves by fighting. This we attempt to do by gaining a power of good, God. We think we know what spiritual power is.<br />
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This negativity which comes to live within us is an ancient problem which has troubled human thinkers for thousands of years. Every spiritual teaching addresses it and every spiritual discipline or way of life takes very seriously the deadly nature of self-deception. It has been called the problem of evil in theology and in Eastern philosophy. This negativity lives within us as the conscious and unconscious fears of losing life. Fear is a powerful emotion and has been targeted by many teachings as the root cause of illness, misfortune and death. It has been proven for centuries that a removal of fear can heal physical disease.<br />
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One of my teachers, Joel S. Goldsmith, spoke regularly of "ignorance, superstition and <b><i><u>fear</u></i></b>" as incidental to one's mental attitude -- one's erroneous point of view. He speaks of mental error, of false belief giving rise to illusions which trick us into trouble and of our acting out this inner trouble getting ourselves into more trouble. Joel in his journey moved from "metaphysics" to "mysticism." My journey has taken me the opposite way from "mysticism" to "metaphysics." Maybe these two 'paths' are equally necessary to the whole comprehension of Spirit needed for one to be free of illusion-living.<br />
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In metaphysical science, we go behind the scenes, but as detectives. We seek the light behind the veil of the seeming, but not directly -- we look for clues. And when the light of Truth comes, the illusory effect is destroyed and we are free of the suffering which mental error or disorder entails. Joel understood this very well. And he used to affectionately tell his students about those who on hearing that illness, joblessness, family troubles, etc. are illusion, would ask him, "How do you get rid of an illusion?"<br />
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If you have worked with these ideas awhile, you will know that the harder you try to get rid of an illusion, the more of it you have. If you are a student of Joel, have you read his account of losing his luggage in Africa, lately?<br />
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What is not well understood, as I have learned, traveling around the spiritual healing programs and groups of today is why illusion returns. If illusion is conquered by knowing Truth, and it is, then why do we find ourselves awakening again and again out of an illusion by some painful disillusionment? Is Truth an illusion? Recently, mystic teacher Wayne Dyer, discovered he had a rare form of leukemia; then went to a spiritual healer in South America and was healed and now is back in full force on his dog-and-pony show of spirituality. Is he wiser? Don't know. Am I? Hoping so, won't make it so. And where there is hidden doubt, there is hidden fear. And this is what spiritual teaching means by 'disease.' "Mysticism" is a word for secret knowledge - gnosis. "Science" is a word for ascertained knowledge.<br />
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I just finished reading a great book, which includes my friend Dr. John M. Dorsey, psychiatrist. <u><i>Unorthodox Freud: The View from the Couch</i></u>, uses the only five extant full-book accounts of how Freud did psychoanalysis from first hand experiences. Dorsey was in analysis with Freud. The authors Losher and Newton make this statement: "Everyone knows! But they don't know that they know and so they don't think they know." This is the illusion of ignorance. Knowledge is power. But how does one 'get rid of' the illusion of one's separation from God -- the belief in two powers good and evil?<br />
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Here is what my metaphysical scientist friend Margaret Laird might say about it. "In all illusion, Truth is the illusion." "In every sickness, Health is the sickness."<br />
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If you have studied Zen, you will recognize such a statements as koan. It is a paradoxical saying that can trigger an awakening. Like the scrim, words and concepts veil the true meaning which lives within us. Our busy living keeps the light of our attention, our point of view, glued to the pictures on the seemingly solid walls of this box of a universe we seem to live, and move and have our being in.<br />
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The basic metaphysical idea we begin our spirituality growing with is that this universe is IN us and that we are not IN it. That idea itself is a koan. A koan is a symbolic form of enlightenment -- a kind of package of spiritual power, left like a time-bomb set to go off, which when the time is ripe, reverses the light from "out there" to "in here." One's point of view changes radically -- forever. And by these inevitable, indispensable steps leading to perfection, by these successive changes in one's root point of view, one comes to dwell in the Light behind the scenes, seeing everything from the God's-eye view.<br />
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Where chaos reigned, order rules. It's like that old platitude about the two sides of a weaving or tapestry. One side look like a bunch of disconnected threads; the other looks like a beautiful picture. But thinking in platitudes is not the thinking which is profound enough to 'marry' the powerful feelings which come from within us.<br />
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Margaret Laird's teacher, metaphysical scientist Bicknell Young said, "we get out of trouble by knowing we were never in it." And in a seminar Mrs. Laird discusses the 'generic' disease. She admits that spiritual healers seem to be able to heal this or that case of cancer, but not the generic disease, the whole genre one might say, called "cancer."<br />
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This is impossible she says, until the spiritually conscious individual understands the fact that "there is nothing to heal." Not until this fact comes to light in the understanding, is the real healing experienced and then sense of separation from God removed.<br />
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Until one understands the absolute oneness of Being, and identifies him or herself with the fact that we are already wholly God-consciousness, perfect in every aspect, one's point of view will show up automatically just like the theatrical scrim, with all of the light on the human side, with us glued to the picture on the wall hoping magically it will somehow change from bad to good. Even if we experience or endure the loss of specific illusions, and we toughen up so we can endure greater and greater disillusionments, we have not touched the generic illusion which keeps us liable to all the troubles -- sickness, lack and fear -- which living on the illusion side "creates."<br />
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Until the light of our own individualized divinity comes on behind the illusions caused by our own ignorance of it, and until it stays on, we will continue to fight demons, never understanding that these "demons" are the angels which our own divine Love-nature provides to meet the human need for enlightenment.Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-38763565783433593762011-04-25T09:36:00.000-06:002011-04-25T09:36:12.456-06:00NormalForeword to <em><strong>Supreme Doctrine</strong></em> (Benoit) written by Aldus Huxley<br />
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Philosophy in the Orient is never pure speculation, but always some form of transcendental pragmatism. Its truths, like those of modern physics, are to be tested operationally. Consider, for example, the basic doctrine of Vedanta, of Mahayana Buddhism, of Taoism, of Zen. “Tat twam asi – thou art That.” Tao is the root to which we may return, and so become again That which, in fact, we have always been. ‘Samsara and Nirvana, Mind and individual minds, sentient beings and the Buddha, are one.’<br />
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Nothing could be more enormously metaphysical than such affirmations; but at the same time nothing could be less theoretical, idealistic and Pickwickian. They are known to be true because, in a super-Jamesian way, they work, because there is something that can be done with them. The doing of this something modifies the doer’s relations with reality as a whole. But knowledge is in the knower according to the mode of the knower. When transcendental pragmatists apply the operational test to their metaphysical hypotheses, the mode of their existence changes, and they know everything, including the proposition, ‘thou art That’, in an entirely new and illuminating way.<br />
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The author of this book is a psychiatrist and his thoughts about the Philosophia Perennis in general and about Zen in particular are those of a man professionally concerned with the treatment of troubled minds. The difference between Eastern philosophy, in its therapeutic aspects, and most of the systems of psychotherapy current in the modern West may be summarized in a few sentences.<br />
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The aim of Western psychiatry is to help the troubled individual to adjust himself to the society of less troubled individuals – individuals who are observed to be well adjusted to one another and the local institutions, but about whose adjustment to the fundamental Order of Things no enquiry is made. Counselling, analysis, and other methods of therapy are used to bring these troubled and maladjusted persons back to a normality, which is defined, for lack of any better criterion, in statistical terms. To be normal is to be a member of the majority party --- or in totalitarian societies, such as Calvinist Geneva, Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, of the party which happens to be in power. For the exponents of the transcendental pragmatists of the Orient, statistical normality is of little or no interest. History and anthropology make it abundantly clear that societies composed of individuals who think, feel, believe and act according to the most preposterous conventions can survive for long periods of time. Statistical normality is perfectly compatible with a high degree of folly and wickedness.<br />
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But there is another kind of normality --- a normality of perfect functioning, a normality of actualized potentialities, a normality of nature in fullest flower. This normality has nothing to do with the observed behavior of the greatest number --- for the greatest number live, and have always lived, with their potentialities unrealized, their nature denied its full development. In so far as he is a psychotherapist, the Oriental philosopher tries to help statistically normal individuals to become normal in the other, more fundamental sense of the word. He begins by pointing to those who think they are sane that, in fact, they are mad, but that they do not have to remain so if they don’t want to. Even a man who is perfectly adjusted to a deranged society can prepare himself, if he so desires, to become adjusted to the Nature of Things, as it manifests in the universe at large and in his own mind-body. This preparation must be carried out on two levels simultaneously. On the psycho-physical level, there must be a letting go of the ego’s frantic clutch on the mind-body, a breaking of its bad habits of interfering with the otherwise infallible workings of the entelechy, of the obstructing the flow of life and grace and inspiration. At the same time, on the intellectual level, there must be a constant self-reminder that our all too human likes and dislikes are not absolutes, that yin and yang, negative and positive, are reconciled in the Tao, that ‘One is the denial of all denials’, that ‘the eye with which we see God (if and when we see Him) is the same as the eye with which God sees us’, and that it is the eye to which, in Matthew Arnold’s words<br />
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Each moment in its race,<br />
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Crowd as we will its neutral space,<br />
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Whence, equally, the seas of life and death are fed.<br />
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This process of intellectual and psycho-physical adjustment to the Nature of Things is necessary; but it cannot, of itself, result in the normalization (in the non-statistical sense) of the deranged individual. It will, however, prepare the way for that revolutionary event. That, when it comes, is the work not of the personal self, but of the great Not-Self, of which our personality is a partial and distorted manifestation. “God and God’s will,’ says Eckhart, ‘are one; I and my will are two.’ However, I can always use my will to will myself out of my own light, to prevent my ego from interfering with God’s will and eclipsing the Godhead manifested by that will. In theological language, we are helpless without grace, but grace cannot help us unless we choose to co-operate with it.<br />
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In the pages which follow, Dr. Benoit has discussed the ‘supreme doctrine’ of Zen Buddhism in the light of Western psychological theory and Western psychiatric practice – and in the process he offered a searching criticism of Western psychology and Western psychotherapy as they appear in the light of Zen. This is a book that should be read by everyone who aspires to know who he is and what he can do to acquire such self-knowledge.Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-78732514177429021972011-04-06T09:22:00.001-06:002011-04-06T09:23:21.150-06:00The Totality of Love"Freedom from your trial does not consist in destroying what appears to you as an evil condition (or even an evil belief). Your freedom consists in the exercise of your realization of the totality of Love and your acceptance of that is your resurrection and ascension. In the effort to overcome evil, as if there could be a false substance, the mind is kept in constant confusion and turmoil. Our problems and their solutions rest in ourselves. Certain it is that evil will remain with us just as long as we entertain the belief that there is evil." -- Bicknell YoungRob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-32618229291932084102011-01-26T13:40:00.000-07:002011-01-26T13:40:54.419-07:00The Tree of Failure???An acquaintance of mine, whom I visit on Facebook had an editorial from the New York Times, entitled The Tree of Failure (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/opinion/14brooks.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=general">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/opinion/14brooks.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=general</a>) following President Obama's speech in Tuscon soon after the shootings by a young man. <br />
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In the article, author David Brooks, an editor of the NYTimes, says, "Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance." <br />
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He later says, "So this is where civility comes from — from a sense of personal modesty and from the ensuing gratitude for the political process. Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation." <br />
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And later, "The problem is that over the past 40 years or so we have gone from a culture that reminds people of their own limitations to a culture that encourages people to think highly of themselves." <br />
And, "So, of course, you get narcissists...." <br />
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And, "Beneath all the other things that have contributed to polarization and the loss of civility, the most important is this: The roots of modesty have been carved away." <br />
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I felt as though I were back in church, confused by all the mixing of metaphors, but so all pumped up by the preacher's passionate spew that I had to write a letter to the editor. It wasn't published. So I'm publishing it here.<br />
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Dear Editor -- I would like to comment on David Brook's "Tree of Failure", January 13, 2011. Mr. Brooks, I found your opinion most exhilarating! I wonder if civility is a tree or an emotion, a feeling. Does it involve respect and maybe kindness? If it is a tree, and its roots are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance, no tree I know would grow in such a situation. If the root is no good, neither is the tree. But if civility is a feeling and intelligence, warmth, confidence and responsible cooperation might be its roots then I can see my civility in President Obama and his quiet, firm human display of composure as well as in your passionate outcry. Perhaps, the tree of civility has its roots in the idea Reinhold Niebuhr suggested: love, hope and tolerance, or, as he believed, rooted in the human spirit itself. May I invite you to try an experiment in self-civility? Re-read your opinion piece and put the word "my" in front of every noun. Notice how the naming power of words takes on new force when we take self-responsibility for them. Emotional continence, in my belief, begins in self awareness, self-sovereignty, and self-responsibility, which are its roots. All government is self-government. I like these words and their power in my mind. <br />
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“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so must we think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.” - Abraham Lincoln<br />
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“But I wish to be distinctly understood on one point. Americanism is a question of spirit, convictions and purpose, not of creed or birthplace. – Theodore Roosevelt<br />
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“A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society. - Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father and third U.S. president<br />
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Best to you, <em>Rob Craig</em>Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-48172951127363063002011-01-10T10:38:00.000-07:002011-01-10T10:38:13.479-07:00What's Working On You Today?The Arizona shootings which killed six including a nine year old girl, and a federal Judge, with 13 others seriously injured one of whom is a Congresswoman are on my mind today as well as a conversation I had by phone two days ago with my friend Nena Spencer. Nena is metaphysical scientist (though any label, I am finding, does no justice to her) Nena introduced Dr. Dorsey to Margaret Laird. She told me that Dr. Dorsey said he was "standing on Freud's shoulders." I read in one of Mrs. Laird's later Letters that she saw herself standing on Mrs. Eddy's shoulders. <br />
<br />
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), America's first feminist author and a member of Emerson's Transcendentalist circle, said: "If men knew how to look around them, they need not look above."<br />
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Looking around I found this wonderful article Nena submitted to the IMS newsletter in 2000 and am sharing it here. I find it very clear.<br />
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<h1 class="c-title"><span>Practice</span></h1>by Nena Spencer<br />
January 2000<br />
I have heard that "practice makes perfect," but do I remember that "Perfect makes the practice?"<br />
Spirit is always perfect in all ways. Good is the only thing going on, even when it doesn't feel like it is.<br />
When a person calls for support in a difficult experience, the best thing a practitioner can do is voice what he/she is living all the time--the spiritual fact that only Good is going on.<br />
There are many ways that Good can look, many views and languages for this Good to appear in any given human situation. I have learned to release all concepts of how a situation should look or turn out because I have no idea. To venture an opinion is to impede the perfect solution always unfolding.<br />
Sometimes it looks like our friends and clients have to experience very difficult and painful experiences and the temptation is to want to take the pain away from them. This cannot be done because actually there is no pain and what they go through is still a view, still just language for the identity of perfection present and operating.<br />
When the problem is dropped, immediately divine help looks like it is on the way. The Truth is there is no lapse from or return to divine perfection present and operating. While we are speaking, the problem is being turned around into no problem. To concern myself at any time about anyone or thing is a waste of happiness and satisfaction.Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-65704493462795569572010-12-16T14:33:00.000-07:002010-12-16T14:33:56.299-07:00The Metaphysics of the MomentI 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, <em><strong>Holism and Evolution</strong></em> in my morning reading time and Dr. John M. Dorsey's <em><strong>Psychology of Language</strong></em> 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 <em><strong>Chrisitan Science Re-explored</strong></em> (now called <strong><em>We are The World We Walk Through</em></strong>), which keys with a marginal reference in Science and Health, "the true healing,":<br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><strong>S&H 230:27</strong></span> <br />
"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."<br />
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Margaret Laird:<br />
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.<br />
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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. <br />
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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.<br />
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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, <br />
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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.<br />
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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)<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.”<br />
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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.<br />
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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.” <br />
(WATW 121)Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-5046446215090483712010-11-11T12:09:00.000-07:002010-11-11T12:09:06.643-07:00Holism and EvolutionI 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.<br />
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?<br />
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 <em><strong>res</strong></em> 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:<br />
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.<br />
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.<br />
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.<br />
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.<br />
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.<br />
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)<br />
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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.Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-82549658509891132882010-08-26T17:39:00.000-06:002010-08-26T17:39:32.742-06:00Black Like MeI 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. <br />
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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."<br />
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<strong><em>Black Like Me</em></strong> 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.<br />
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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 <em>rhythm</em>!" Somehow it was a great validation for me. It was as if she said, "My God, man you've got <em>SOUL</em>!" <br />
Dr. Laura Schlessinger got in big trouble for using the 'N" word recently. I have some suggestions for her.<br />
And you?<br />
Got Soul?Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-61863253665382903182010-07-01T12:56:00.000-06:002010-07-01T12:56:31.896-06:00Understanding yourself"Meditation is the freedom from thought, and a movement in the ecstacy of truth." <br />
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"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. KrishnamurtiRob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-8451694906874315522010-06-08T13:52:00.000-06:002010-06-08T13:52:23.389-06:00People! 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, <strong><em>Metaphysics</em></strong> by Borden Bowne (1884), and <em><strong>Powers of Mind </strong></em>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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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?<br />
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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?"<br />
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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<br />
"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.<br />
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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, <em><strong>Metaphysics</strong></em>, 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.<br />
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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:<br />
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<blockquote>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. </blockquote>He was removed from his ministry. <br />
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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<br />
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<blockquote>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.</blockquote>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?<br />
<br />
Check it out: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFdjBjBfPfc">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFdjBjBfPfc</a>Rob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1440564405597061396.post-88016499003424456042010-05-19T20:53:00.000-06:002010-05-19T20:53:58.563-06:00Traveling Bible Teachers<strong>A friends writes:</strong><br />
with the bible folks that travel door to door.<br />
<br />
A wonderful way to see/feel my growth/understanding since the last visit.<br />
Always interesting to remain steady with that which I no longer believe with honor and respect for my visitors and their present understanding.<br />
I remained longer than usual to see how they fielded my questions and/or responses were received.<br />
I recommend it.<br />
Do you all have these visitors where you now reside?<br />
<br />
<strong>So I responded:</strong><br />
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. RobRob Craighttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14451082762555546960noreply@blogger.com0