The 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 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/opinion/14brooks.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=general) following President Obama's speech in Tuscon soon after the shootings by a young man. 

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."   

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." 

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." 
And, "So, of course, you get narcissists...." 

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." 

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.


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.


“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

“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

“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

Best to you, Rob Craig

What'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. 

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."

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.

Practice

by Nena Spencer
January 2000
I have heard that "practice makes perfect," but do I remember that "Perfect makes the practice?"
Spirit is always perfect in all ways. Good is the only thing going on, even when it doesn't feel like it is.
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.
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.
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.
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.

The Metaphysics of the Moment

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Holism and Evolution

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

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

Black Like Me

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

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

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

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

Understanding yourself

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


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

People! Who needs People?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was removed from his ministry. 

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

Wondering why it has to be sooooo hard sometimes to let certain people go in our lives, even when it's the "right thing to do..." - and this includes friEnds that have moved on in their lives, for whatever reason, and leave us behind.

DeMello's books and materials were banned by the Catholic church and his teachings called "dangerous."  I guess beliefs are also so-o-o-o-o hard to let go, too.  Who did Jesus ban?

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