Toward a World that Works for Everyone
March 19, 2021 Fierce-throated beauty! Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night, Thy madly-whistled laughter… Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d, Launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes, To the free skies unpent and glad and strong. ~Walt Whitman, To a Locomotive in Winter […]
Cognitive dissonance is the pressure that builds up in a person when a much-valued truth is brought into question or complained about or attacked. Cognitive dissonance is a house divided against itself. It cannot stand. Usually we either seek resolution eventually or have a lightbulb moment that resolves it. Or we can have a nervous […]
When I think of Ascension as a journey up a mountain, I weep. Because for me, that’s how it’s seemed. I could have said pulling myself out of a swamp. Or crossing a desert. These are just images, but I feel so tired looking at the journey from this vantage point. It’s been a long […]
Our personal purification, which is our way of preparing for Ascension and service, has many sides to it. I’d like to talk about two, in a general way. One side is to let go of all the residue from objectionable memories of earlier traumatic events in our lives. I call this residue “vasanas.” Linda calls […]
In doing the book on paradigmatic breakthrough, a copy of which is attached here, I came across this article on the subject, which I’d like to repost. Last revised: Oct. 16, 2009. Enlightenment and Paradigm Shifts I said earlier that we don’t want ice on our wings when trying to take off in our plane […]
Clearly my personality survives intact in some way, shape or form. I don’t know what the road ahead holds. I can only report. What I report now arises from my practice, on the path of awareness, of maintaining awareness of myself. I detected a pattern. I was people-pleasing. I was complimenting someone on a coat […]
Everything, it seems, is a confidence game. Not just as in a swindle. Let’s leave that meaning aside and look at the role of confidence in what we do in our everyday lives. I could never drive a bus. I don’t have the confidence. I could never fly an airplane, do heart surgery, or drive […]
The way things seem to go, it’s often only after a condition has departed that we learn what it was and what it did. For example, hostility having been recognized and left, I’m now beginning to see some things about it. Hostility has many poses. One of them, I’m now seeing, is “Don’t mess with […]
I’m inspired by Linda Dillon’s recent Daybreak on breakthrough (1) and encouraged to organize my own thoughts on the subject. At the same time, I’ve just had a breakthrough from hostility to harmony and that fits into this discussion. I invite anyone interested further in the subject to read anything by or about Werner Erhard, […]
I know that, at my deepest level, I am pure and innocent. (1) But between here and there is a layer of barely-suppressed hostility – suspicion, guardedness, aggressiveness. Part of that, I believe, is past-life bleedthrough. I was a military commander a long time ago. I see the jarring events of my early life as […]
While my awareness having expanded beyond the limits of my body is a landmark event, the actual experience itself is quite neutral, almost imperceptible. It’s as if a storm has stopped and it’s the next morning. All is quiet and renewed. I feel more relaxed. I was describing my experience to a friend. I said […]
(Originally published JULY 21, 2018) John Pavlovitz, https://tinyurl.com/y5tc85rq It’s exhausting to give a damn isn’t it? To be a person of compassion in a time when compassion is in such great demand? To wake up every day in days like these, and push back against predatory politicians and toxic systems and human rights atrocities and […]
Triggers just seem to keep going off. I have to be supervigilant not to launch into extreme thoughts and behavior. And not to then swing out onto the other extreme and super-protect myself from them, until the guardian again becomes the guard. (1) How to stay in the middle and yet be strong, resolute, determined? […]
There’s so much I want to say about the process I’ve just been through so things are not missed. The ideas are tumbling out. What I did was I processed a root vasana or core issue. Processing a vasana is the (wholesome) alternative to blaming and shouting at another person. Long ago I swore I […]
So far the vasana with my Dad has manifested, as it did in 1986, as unbridled anger. But I seem to have left the anger phase now, and, even as the last fumes of father hatred dissipate, I’m beset by feelings of fear. This is a crystal-clear demonstration that anger sits on top of fear. […]
