Up/Down Handle: The way you are controls whether you are pulling up or down. The secret is to always pull up. Never pull down, not when in grief, not when in anger, not for revenge, not to demonstrate. Sometimes the up handle may seem to hurt at first, but it is always worth it. Vale la pena.
Guidelines for Sanity and Safety: Up/Down Handle
Written by admin on July 2nd, 2009Guidelines for Sanity and Safety: “I Am Human….”
Written by admin on July 2nd, 2009“I am human and nothing human is alien to me.” This was said by Terence, one of the old Roman playwrights. It just means that we all have the seeds of all human emotions and actions in us. What we actually do in this world is the result of our heredity, our environment and our free will. Under different circumstances, any of us might not have been as nice.
Susan Boyle: Nun?
Written by admin on June 22nd, 2009When Susan Boyle first showed up on the scene at Britain’s Got Talent, she mentioned that she had never been kissed by a boy, and she was laughed at pretty roundly for that.
But I thought that after the performance she put on, when you see the quality of life force that her chaste life leaves her with, it makes you think that she got more power and juice out of it than the average nun.
Intelligent Design
Written by admin on June 20th, 2009It actually isn’t that easy to apprehend evolution. It’s a very large and complex subject, and it doesn’t do well to be compressed into quick sayings like “descended from monkeys” or “man from ape.”
It is necessary to expand your mind in at least three ways: One, you’ve got to expand it in the dimension of space. And to understand that the medieval church could not believe that small thing, the sun, didn’t revolve around the Earth, even after it was known the Earth was round. And now what we call the Milky Way is the galaxy that we live in, edgeways to us, and some of those big bright stars out there are other galaxies bigger than it and farther away. It’s a huge panorama to think against.
And you really need to understand why we know what we know about the dimension of time—you have to be able to understand at least the rudiments of half-life (the amount of time that it takes for a radioactive element to lose half of its mass) and decay of radioactive elements and in particular radio-carbon dating, which tells us how old every campfire we ever find can be—because that carbon can be dated by the radioactive half-life.
So, it’s not a question of somebody saying, “Well, the world’s 5000 years old, and besides who the hell really knows….” It’s not like that. With the extension of intelligence of science, one can reach back past those 5000 years and read the history in the rocks that goes back millions and billions of years.
And in time and space, things have been going on long enough that there is light traveling toward us at 186,000 miles a second that’s been traveling for hundreds and thousands and millions of years, and the star that gave up that light is dead and doesn’t put out light any more and that light isn’t even here yet and by the time that light gets here, that star will be gone, and maybe us as well.
A Revised Caravan
Written by admin on June 20th, 2009
Stephen standing by Caravan buses.
Three decades after first publication, we’ve published a revised and annotated edition of Caravan. The book follows me and the Caravan of 50 school buses flowing out of Monday Night Class, as we travel around the United States on a speaking tour arranged by preachers who wanted me to tell them what this hippy thing was all about.
This new edition adds background to the speaking engagements, by sharing the road stories, the scenes behind the scenes—cowboys and cops, birthings and poop, peyote tea and White House security guards. There are dozens of great photos.
Here’s an excerpt I hope you enjoy.
We’re pretty durable, and we need to bump up against the universe a little bit to find out where it’s at. Also we need to bump up against each other a little bit. We shouldn’t think that we’re so fragile that we can’t lean on each other a little bit and interact kind of heavy and still be friends.
Getting away from the small village idea has done a funny thing to the whole country, because in a small village, if a fellow turns up obnoxious one day he’s still going to be living there the next day, and he’s either going to have to straighten up or nobody’s going to talk to him anymore or something. He’s going to get cooled.
But here in the city you can get obnoxious and move to another neighborhood, and get obnoxious and move to another neighborhood … and people get the idea that if you’re going to have to come on heavy to somebody to make them straighten up that they might not like you anymore, and they might move, and you’d never see them again or something. But we should all think that we’re all good enough friends—we’re all kind of like cousins anyway, we’re all the same kind of monkey—that we can say, “Hey, man, how about it,” once in a while, and the other fellow isn’t necessarily going to say, “Well I’m going to go home.”
Guidelines for Sanity and Safety: Delusion
Written by admin on June 20th, 2009To understand the nature of delusion is very powerful. To know that one’s own mind can put up an illusion that can fool the mind that made it is liberating. I once believed the I Ching had been written all those hundreds of years ago just to fool me in the here and now. The next thought I had was that I must be very paranoid to believe such a foolish thing. It was good to realize that I was paranoid. It was much better than thinking that the universe was somehow against me personally.
Build a Temple around Susan Boyle?
Written by admin on June 20th, 2009The people from Britain’s Got Talent did Susan Boyle a great disservice. They treated her like she was someone who was ordinary. She is extraordinary in the fullest sense of the word.
For a long time, I have studied swamis and yogis and Indian road chiefs and a zen master, and listened to them when they came through, and I have heard scads of psychedelic divas with god knows what chemicals brewing in their bodies. And I have not in my lifetime seen any other person, spiritual teacher, or entertainer put out that power and quality of personal chi (psychic energy). If Susan Boyle had lived in India 150 years ago, they would probably have built a temple around her.
All of us must wonder what is that quality that can be picked up by a microphone and turned into digital bits, sent bouncing off a satellite around the world, beamed to scores of different countries whose people do not speak the language it’s sung in, and nonetheless it had the effect of giving listeners physical chills and thrills and a high psychic awareness and a tendency to break out crying.
Lest somebody think this is just my opinion, I will give you the testimony of Brian Williams of NBC. He said that he had listened to it and had thrills and chills and cried—and he played it five more times and it did it to him every time, at which point he started sending it to his family and friends and business acquaintances.
This effect is so powerful that even in stories about Susan Boyle, when they play a little clip in back just so you’ll know who the story’s about, it gives me chills and makes me cry. And I don’t even listen to show tunes.
She should have been recognized as an immense personal psychic force. With the huge chi of her night with the audience, she should have been guarded like a diamond merchant. And they let the British and international paparazzi, who are famed for lack of taste, rip her off of her justly earned psychic riches. If some material thing of comparable worth and money had been taken from someone in a similar fashion, it would have been called a felony and would be worth years of time in jail.
That she had the nerve to come back and try again after that bad treatment is evidence of her courage, but the evidence of her heart and soul and her sweetness is in that great voice. We owe her. I wish I could have been there to protect her.
