Its there. And here, too.

Funny how the heralding of the miracles is often the uttering of the word "shit." Shit! As in, "Shit! I can't believe that match.com has been charging my account these past five months! Damn it! Fuckers!"

That is what I said last week, when I discovered exactly that. I could have sworn that I indicated to them not to re-bill. So I contacted them, and they offered me one month's refund. I made a little more noise, and they graciously refunded the past five months, a total of $200.

Now you have to know that at the time I was incensed. How dare they, right?

But what was quickly revealed to me was the miracle that situation turned out to be. Getting laid off only a few days later, I realized that match.com had been a godsend; I needed that $200 now more than ever; obviously if I didn't notice it being removed from my account, it hadn't hurt me much. It was like money in the bank. Thank you, match.com, and thank you, God, for the funny way you do things. Or, like they say, "God works in mysterious ways." I've heard that 27,000 times in my life, but never has it been more clear.

That is one of the reasons for this blog. My life is such an epic adventure; the bad stuff makes room for the good, the good is awesome, and woven together it is a rich tapestry of a well loved and very blessed life. Even if I did lose my job and don't have any money, somehow it always works, and usually in ways I never could have predicted. I think its important to not only document the miracles and serendipitous adventures, but to bear witness to the infallibility of the Creator when we step back and let life unfold. Don't get it twisted; I do not have a Judeo Christian sort of Creator/ Higher Power in mind; for me, the God of my understanding is, well, one that I don't understand. If I understood God, then I wouldn't be in complete awe when watching The Mystery manifest in the physical realm. But also understand that I do not deny anyone's religious beliefs, because I know that there are many ways to skin a cat.

This blog will allow me to bear witness to the wonders, miracles, challenges, solutions of my life. To the process of ongoing recovery and growth, of spiritual rambunctiousness and outrageous compassion, of discovering even deeper levels of joy and delight. If its there for me, its there for you. Its THERE. And here. Its right where you are standing; any ground that is beneath your feet is holy ground, by virtue of your standing on it.

"The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." B. Russell

There is also the ongoing theme of the Good Wolf and the Bad Wolf, which I intend to explore further. If you think about it, this motif, the good and the bad and the struggle between the two for dominance is THE MAIN THEME in almost all mythology, movies, stories, world religions, songs, conversations, and is at the root of all our decision making and choices. The Good Wolf/ Bad Wolf story encapsulates the whole story of being human in one short, elegant paragraph. And I will continue to investigate and report from the front lines of my life.

Sufi-ism and the re-awakening of the child consciousness

One of the most basic ideas of the Sufis is that man is asleep in this world. He experiences only illusion instead of reality, because is caught up in a vast waking dream. His whole life is a dream.

In order to approach the Sufi Way, the Seeker must realize that he is a bundle of what are nowadays called conditionings,- associative thinking, which is a completely automative process fed by outside stimuli. This realization can be arrived at by the use of those disciplines which have been tradtionally used in the West, and which are called Introspection and Retrospection. If these disciplines are followed long enough one reaches the point where one has strengthened the retrospective memory sufficiently that one can be aware of and follow the inner stream of thought. One can then arrive at a realization of the completely automatic process at its basis. For example, you are riding along on a bus and think of someone you have not thought of for years. You trace the stream of your thought backwards and see that you passed a billboard which had something on it that started the stream of thought which eventually led you to think of that particular person.

Let me give an example so this will be clearer. Some years ago I was driving home from where I worked in Washington, D.C. I was listening to the radio as I drove. Every few minutes the music would be interrupted to give an advertisement for a sports supply store near Baltimore. In this advertisement the phrase "Backrack Raissonne on the Beltway" was frequently repeated.

I drove home, and when I got there I sit down to read a book. After I read for awhile I got up to get a glass of milk. Just as I reached in the refrigerator to get the carton of milk the phrase "Backrack Raissonne on the Beltway" flashed into my mind. I didn't give it any thought. I poured my milk and sit down to read again. After awhile I decided I wanted another glass of milk. I went to the refrigerator, and reached in again for the carton of milk. The phrase "Backrack Raisonne on the Beltway" flashed into my mind again. That this had happened twice just as I reached into the refrigerator for the milk carton was too curious to ignore. I stopped to analyze the situation, and I saw immediately what had happened.

The carton of milk was sitting on the BACK of the RACK in the refrigerator. The mechanical associative functioning of the conscious mind, plus its pre-programming by the repeated hearing of the phrase on the radio advertisement, added to the act of seeing the carton of milk on the back of the rack in the refrigerator had been sufficient to trigger the phrase twice almost as if it had been a post hypnotic suggestion. The automatic, associative functioning of our mind works in this fashion all the time. We are machines, although normally the light of our consciousness is so dim we are not aware of this automatic associative process which takes place hundreds of times each day.

The letters on this page are another example. Try to look at them and see merely the characters without being aware of the associated letters and the words. From years of reading, the automatic associative process has been programmed into your mind. It is now extremely difficult for you to penetrate behind this screen of conditioning to the state of pure perception. Your mind during all of your daily life is trapped in an analogous associative thinking web like a fly caught in flypaper. This prevents your mind from operating in what should be its natural state, the state of pure perception. The mind of children normally operate in the state of pure perceptions until they are six or seven. At this point a number of pernicious factors kick in (the main one being our education system) which operate to degrade the consciousness into the travesty found in adults.

from the website - http://www.sirbacon.org/mshrew.htm, about the use of Sufi-ism and the layers of awakening in the play, The Taming Of The Shrew by Sir Francis Bacon

I couldn't have said it better myself....

You gotta have soul
By Tom Robbins

Mental Bungee-jumping may not be your sport of choice, but there’s a cerebral ledge that sooner or later each of us has to leap off. One day, ready or not, we glance in a mirror, cuddle an infant, attend a funeral, walk in the woods, partake of a substance Nancy Reagan warned us to eschew, chance a liaison, wake in the night with a napalm lobster in our chest, read a message from the pope or the Dalai Lama, get lost in Verdi or lost in the stars – and wind up thinking about our soul.

Yes, the soul. You know what I mean.

Popular culture to the contrary, the soul is not an overweight nightclub singer having an unhappy love affair in Detroit. Nor, on the other hand, is it some pale vapor wafting off a bucket of metaphysical dry ice. Suffering, low-down and funky, seasons the soul, it’s true, but bliss is the yeast that makes it rise. And yet, because the soul is linked to the earth (as opposed to spirit, which is linked to the sky), it steadfastly contradicts those who imagine it a billow of sacred flatulence or a shimmer of personal swamp gas.

Soul is not even that Cracker Jack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That’s why, when we ponder – as, sooner or later, each of us must – what exactly we ought to be doing about our souls, religion is the wrong, if conventional place to turn.

Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort (the old “give it up in order to save it” routine). Religions lead us to believe the soul is the ultimate family jewel, and, in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They are mistaken.

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.

Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.

But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.

More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.

By Tom Robbins Esquire, October, 1993=