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(03 - 22 Sept, 2008)
Sept 03, 2008: Do, or Do Not
Do, or Do Not. There is no 'Try'!
Yoda (Star Wars)
Sept 04, 2008: May You Awaken
May you awaken to the mystery of being here and
enter the quiet immensity of your own presence.
May you have joy and peace in the temple of your senses.
May you receive great encouragement when new frontiers beckon.
May you respond to the call of your gift and
find the courage to follow its path.
John O'Donohue "Eternal Echoes"
Sept 05, 2008: INITIATION AND PSYCHOLOGICAL MIMICRY
Because Initiations that are attempted without the spirit or a comprehension
of the sacredness of the commonplace only serve to placate an uninitiated
hunger for entertainment that hopes to fill the spiritual void of individuals
and a whole culture with talk shows, corn chips, movies, dope, fast cars,
and the like.
That hunger is an emptiness that should be wept into, grieved about, instead
of blocked and filled up.
The Spirit I'm talking about is not human spirit or a churchy God, an elevated
concept, an idea, or a metaphor but is something bigger, older, and more
dimensional than maybe some scientists could even understand.
Initiations with no spiritual root that are only engineered to make people
into better people always fail because they are horrible travesties of what
initiation really should be. Worse yet are rituals designed by psychologists
to address psychological needs through mythological metaphors with no real
encounter with the butt-kicking bigness and beauty of Deities, because then
humans, not the Spirit, are still at the centre of that kind of Universe.
Martin Prechtel "Long Life, Honey in the Heart. A story of Initiation
and Eloquence from the Shores of a Mayan Lake"
Sept 09, 2008: Attention
People usually fail when they are on the verge of success.
So give as much care to the end as the beginning;
Then there will be no failure.
Lao Tzu "Tao Te Ching"
Sept 10, 2008: SHAMANISM AND MADNESS 1
For the shaman however the vision is never the goal. He or she must
bring back from this other reality, knowledge and power to heal the body
and regenerate the social order. Without this humane and practical application,
the shaman is merely crazy at best or unworthy at worst.
Indeed we might consider that there are many natural shamans who are haunting
the corridors of asylums, inmates who, under other circumstances and with
different training, could have been ecstatics and visionaries, evokers
of the sacred in society, instead of maimed and miserable spirits.
Jean Houston "The Mind and Soul of the Shaman", in 'Shamanism'
compiled by S. Nicholson
Sept 11, 2008: SHAMANISM AND MADNESS 2
Shamans "see' and "talk" to spirits; schizophrenics and other psychotics "hear voices" of spirits and sometimes "see" or "feel" them when they "shouldn't". What's the difference?
For the past several years I have been employed as a staff clinical psychologist in a state psychiatric hospital where I have daily contact with large numbers of both chronic and acute schizophrenics....It is the place where I have been led in my apprenticeship to learn the origins and ways of the spirits of madness. From this experience I can say without any reservation whatsoever that the the transformational processes in shamans and psychotics are clearly not the same.
Volition is the clear difference; the shaman actively seeks out the spirits in deliberately induced altered states of consciousness, which is only a part-time activity, as he must maintain full social and occupational functioning. The person undergoing a psychosis is victimised by the voices, usually mercilessly criticised and mocked by them. Sometimes they tell the unfortunate person to commit suicide.
This leads to the question of whether these "voices" that plague the mentally ill are the handiwork of malevolent spirits. From the shamanic point of view they undoubtedly are.
Richard Noll "The Presence of Spirits in Magic and Madness",
in 'Shamanism' compiled by S. Nicholson
Sept 14, 2008: I'm Becoming More
I'm becoming more and more myself with time, I guess that's what grace is,
the refinement of your soul through time.
Jewel
Sept 16, 2008: The Way Things Are
We don't see things the way they are. We see things the way we are.
The Talmud
Sept 18, 2008: The Way Things Are
What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination will affect
everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you
read,
who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and
gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love and it will decide everything.
Pedro Arrupe SJ (1907-1991)
Superior General of the Jesuits (1961-1984)
Sept 22, 2008: In the Threshing-hold of Nature
In the threshing-hold of Nature, the initiate must lose his rational perception. He must go inside himself, into the blindness of intuition and instinct, where compensatory gifts await him, conferred by the goddess. As he gropes his way through this world of feeling and introspection, he learns to yield to the rhythms and forces of Nature, to watch himself through the inner eyes of self-consciousness, to navigate psychological space, to communicate with the creatures, to hearken to the in-dwelling spirit in all things, to know what lies between emotion and thought, fear and understanding, to hear the voices of his collective ancestors. The goddess teaches him by scaring him. She brushes death up close to him so that he will acquire death power. She holds up her mirrorlike shield, in which only the blind may see.
Roaring of the Sacred River
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