poetry

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Birth and Spirit

When your mother was carrying you, you were hovering around, sometimes nearby, sometimes following where she went and always looking in on the baby inside her. As a spirit you thought about your many lives you have lived before and your decision to live again, this time with this mother and father and the history you would be a part of. Even before you made the plunge and joined that little body inside her womb, you felt your mother’s love for you. You felt her little pats, the hugs of her body as she carried you. You watched what she ate and enjoyed her pleasure at eating those dill pickles. As she walked through the park you went with her, flying just over the tops of the trees. You weren’t quite ready to make the plunge yet and enter that tiny body. (In Dr. Joel Whitton’s book, Life between Life, hypnotized patients recalled their experiences like these before they were born.) You watched your father too and got a good feeling for him. It was the quality of the love shared by your mother and father that sent a message into the spirit world which you applied to accept, to come here again and have another lifetime that would give you lessons you need to learn. Your mother provided so much of your early training. Her breast milk would feed you, not just with nourishment, but with oxytocin, the love neurotransmitter. You would learn love from your mother’s breast milk. But nine months before that oxytocin played a huge part in your process. When your father sent his sperm to join with your mother’s egg, oxytocin was released with his sperm! See, there is just no way, you can get away without love! = 
Then came the big day, probably somewhere around the last trimester, and you decided to join that little body in mother’s womb. There were angels around you helping you take a deep breath and jump! Your mother felt it when you landed into her! She called to your father to tell him. He ran over to your mother and placed his hand on her tummy. More oxytocin was released!!!!!! You settled down in that little body in the womb and sort of took a cat nap, aware but comfortable, like you remember a former life, being in your jammies in an old chair. Boy (or Girl!) did you get to know your mom!!!!!!!! Every thought she had. Every feeling, every hope, every joy and every fear. That’s OK as long as there was not too much fear. You had a chance to sympathize and empathize with her during that last period before the BIG DAY! BIRTH!!!!!! You had been floating so nicely, bobbing and weaving within that nice pool of amniotic fluid. But now earthquakes!!! The sides were shrinking and you were being pushed down. Your mom was getting a little scared but dad was there smiling like everything was cool! You were being pushed and shoved through a tunnel but there was a light at the end of it. There was only one way you could go, like you were being flushed!! Out you came flying like a greased pig at the fair! Then this alien in a white space suit grabs you and spanks your bum!! It hurt and you began to cry!!! But then the big alien guy layed you on your mother’s chest and you just knew those nipples were made for you! You docked on and out came the best oxytocin you have ever tasted…and the milk was great too, as sweet as cotton candy and plenty of it! That was day one of your new life on earth! Wow, back another time for another go round of tests and lessons! Another chance to learn to love yourself and others. Another lesson simply to learn to be kind to everyone. You may get 60 or 70 or 80 years to learn this so pay attention! The time will fly away.  Then you will fly away too but the love you have learned you get to take with you! 

baby3

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The Body was made as a place God could not Enter.

You who made the body made it as a little temple for illusions. Believing it a place where God could enter not, you created it to house all your illusions. Every little pain and thought of separateness you hid within its tissues. Every horrible thought of a world without love you poured into the mold of the body, and thinking each thought safe from investigation you left it there and denied it. Every thought of fear and attack found its home within this sickly little temple you made to pain. This sickly little temple to pain cannot abide Love’s Presence. It would move through each sad tissue of the body with loving touch and release those illusions that you believe in so dearly. Every memory of abuse you suffered and the image of your abuser would have to go with the entry of Love’s Presence. And so you have gone through the years, holding your illusions and their painful presence, wrapped tightly within the tissues of this little temple, almost forgetting them, except when they escape from a Loving touch, a sweet smile, a caring thought from others, the touch of a cat that loves you so much this little brother has chosen to live his life with you. At their release the body for the moment feels weakened, so accustomed to being the bearer of sadness, and so sure that it is a victim come here to this life to stagger and die. Now do you see how deeply you have been misled by illusions of pain and evil. They have lived within the sinews and muscles of this body temple, asking for release, and you denied them. Letting them go seems too much to you. You fear that the body could not live without them. And yet there is a welcome little touch that would allow them to quietly leave and make room for Truth. You have not yet felt the Truth for which you seek, that you are still as God created you. “The body was not made by love. Yet love does not condemn it and can use it lovingly, respecting what the son of God has made and using it to save him from illusions.” Touch someone today with Love, a little pat, a touch of the hand, or maybe more. God’s son is waiting for someone to touch him and begin the flood of release that will save him, and you with him.
bench into eternity
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Practical Mysticism

I have evolved a long way since my Southern Baptist ministerial days! I began my theological life as a liberal Southern Baptist theologian! There is a contradiction for you to ponder!! I moved to a Bultmannian, Tillichian liberal Protestant theologian, and then to an adherent of the Primordial Tradition in the school of   Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, Julius Evola, Harvey Spencer Lewis, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Elémire Zolla, Alain Danielou, Jean-Louis Michon, Gottfried Leibniz, Aldous Huxley, and Plato. While Plato came the closest to satisfying me, in the end he did not! That satisfaction was reserved for the modern scripture, A Course in Miracles, when it came into my contact.  It brought together the truths of Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Perennialism and modern psychology in a unique way. It remains the most satisfying theological system I have come in contact with! Therefore, my past decade or more has been devoted to an experiment in practical application of the metaphysics of A Course in Miracles. The system is very close to Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought, yet also provides the ultimate Advaita of the Hindu Vedanta. I am an  Advaita Vedantin following the Metaphysical path of A Course in Miracles. At the practical level it has been my intention to see if I can live in the perspective and awareness of Oneness rather than the duality that is the common perception in this world. When I first approached this I spoke with my friend, Dr. Ken Wapnick, if it were possible to live a non-dualistic life in a dualistic world! He responded, “Of course! That is the purpose of A Course in Miracles. It takes a lot of hard work but it can be done.” He should know. He did it. Now that he has left his body, he has left us with an example of one who did just this in his life!

I have had some limited success in living out an awareness that is Advaita. I say “limited” because the longest I have maintained that awareness was six weeks. Yet those six weeks were the culmination to me of my theological quest. Other ACIM students have made similar attempts. The students of Tara Singh have, since his “death”, been meeting together to hold practical sessions on “Objective Thought.” That is essentially Advaita. Objective thought would not project the opposite!!! “Objective thought” would be impersonal, loving thought, shared with God! What would it be like to experience our thoughts shared with God? To me, the practical application of that would be an awareness of “not two.”  Writing about this is extremely difficult! It would take, myth, prose and poetry to approach it. I attempted to do that in a connected series of writings I called “The Beloved and I are One,” in which I used my experiences at a nearby lake to serve as an artistic attempt to convey this experience in practical mysticism. It was good enough to get me my Doctor of Theology degree, but the experiment continues, the quest goes on until I can steadily hold the thought that “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me!” Then Peace shall reign over the storm and in stillness shall the voice of God be heard!

 

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Truth, Music and Creation

When you sing serious music, you must understand that there is no intrinsic Truth in the musical form! The musical form needs something to bring it to Truth and that something is human experience. Singing is intrinsically human when it expresses deep emotions, but the musical form–even the melody–is not true, so don’t be so proud you can sing the notes to an operatic aria or a song from Lieder. If you have not brought human experience to the song, it is dead. Songs have to be sung. They cannot just be thought. So when you sing you must bring to the musical form human truth and let it be shown and felt. You must stream the truth to the music as you sing and this we call acting. All singing is also acting if truth has been brought to the music. Otherwise music is just a form that we use to create a block to the awareness of Truth. How often we see this. Some “great singer” sings a great piece of music–let’s say Schubert’s Die Winterreise–and we see him standing by the piano, his arms by his side, and as far as we can tell, there is no human truth being given to either the music or the audience, and there is always an audience for singing, even if it is just nature or God. No song is sung in obscurity!! He sings the music very well. His phrasing is good. His timbre is good. All the aspects of the musical form are good, but it is as dead as any lifeless form. The music has captured his mind and it sings through him as though on auto-pilot, as though a robot were singing. He has forgotten that his mental attention must be ahead of the musical beat so that he can present truth to the music as it comes. This takes a lot of concentration, of course, and so he contents himself with “just singing.” He tells himself a lie, that the music doesn’t need to be acted.
One of the best tools for a singer is oral interpretation of literature. One must take the text as a text and interpret it with human truth. Only then is he ready to “sing” that text with meaning in a song or aria. The “acting” will then be very easy and realistic. You won’t just stand there with your arms in one position and we will see on your face and in your body the human truth that you have brought to the music.
In the Stanislavsky Method, there are two “beats” involved in singing, the first “beat” is the awareness in the mind of a choice for how the phrase is being interpreted. The second beat is the musical beat. So, the dramatic beat must be before the musical beat or no truth is offered to the music. The music is very good at hypnotising the conscious mind into falling in line with its beat. If that happens, the singer is just a singing machine and there is no truth!! But if you know this you can also tell that the music is very good at giving the mind imagination out of which a dramatic beat can be chosen. It takes work! Creation takes work! We see little of it happening today. Singers struggle just with technique to sing the notes. They have no energy left over for human truth!!! But I also saw this in the singing of two generations ago among singers we now consider “golden age” singers. They just sang and added on some gesture here or there and called it truth, but such is as much a lie as we see today! Creation has always been difficult, and only creation can be called “art.”

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Of didactic ways I would repent.

Of didactic ways I would repent.
My school years have passed.
The time for learning is over.
In this space I would put away all time and learning.
I would come afresh to stillness.
In that stillness there sparkles all the truth my learning could not attain.
In that stillness I find you,
perfect with the innocence of creation.
You have not changed.
As wisdom-bearer in Brahman’s House, who could change you?
As natural as the flow of the Tao, who could change you?
As the silence on the Buddha’s lips, who could change you?
In this space I have come to stillness
And in this stillness I have found you as perfect.
In perfection does my mind hold the moment and share it with you.
In this space where stillness shines there is relief from time
and freedom to remember the vast ages of our knowing.
Lifetimes upon lifetimes present themselves in parade of gallant splendor
for at last we remember.
Millions of years come to us in memory of who we are and the Love that grows within us.
We have not changed.
My alchemy shows its art.
In this space I have summoned stillness and I remember.