Changing Places

In spite of knowing,
Yet still believing.
Though no god above,
Yet god within.

There is no god in the sense of a cosmic father or mother who will provide all things to their children. Nor is there some heavenly bureaucracy to petition. These models are not descriptions of a divine order, but are projections from archetypal templates. If we believe in the divine as cosmic family, we relegate ourselves to perpetual adolescence. If we regard the divine as supreme government, we are forever victims of unfathomable officialdom.

Yet it does not work for us to totally abandon faith. It does not follow that we can forego all belief in higher beings. We need faith, not because there are beings who will punish us or reward us, but because gods are wonderful ways of describing things that happen to us. They embody the highest aspects of human aspiration. Gods on the altars are essential metaphors for the human spiritual experience.

Faith shouldn’t be shaken because bad things happen to us or because our loved ones are killed. Good and bad fortune are not in the hands of gods, so it is useless to blame them. Neither does faith need to be confirmed by some objective occurrence. Faith is self-affirming. If we maintain faith, then we have its reward. If we become better people, then our faith has results. It is we who create faith, and it is through our efforts that faith is validated.

Deng Ming-Dao, 365 Tao

The point of faith is to become better people. Not to force your religion on others, but to better yourself. Not to strengthen your religion or return it to its traditions so you can glory in the past, but to allow yourself to face the world as it is now, and deal with life as it is now. Tao doesn’t encourage us to live in the past or long for some past glory days of Taoist rule, or go around converting everyone to Taoism, or to force our governments to meet some holy standards of justice. Tao tells us to live our own lives in harmony with natural forces. The “faith” of Tao is to know that if you follow its principles and move in harmony with the Tao, your life will naturally become better.

And it does. That’s the beauty of it. It works. Just as Christianity does if you truly follow its teachings, and don’t reinvent your own interpretations of it to suit your misogynistic tendencies. Just as Buddhism does, if you follow its logic. Just as Islam does, if you follow its true tenants and don’t use them as ways to control the women in your society, or enforce the power of the Mullahs over the people to their detriment. Just as any faith does, once you get past the “rules” you’re “supposed” to follow and understand the heart of what it is trying to tell you - to treat other people well, to better yourself before complaining about others, and to live your own life in accordance with what you believe, and not impose that on other people around you.

For the unified mind in accord with the tao all self-centered striving ceases. Doubts and irresolutions vanish and life in true faith is possible. With a single stroke we are freed from bondage; nothing clings to us and we hold to nothing. All is empty, clear, self-illuminating, with no exertion of the mind’s power. Here thought, feeling, knowledge, and imagination are of no value. In this world of suchness there is neither seer nor other-than-self.

To come directly into harmony with this reality just simply say when doubt arises, ‘Not two.’ In this ‘not two’ nothing is separate, nothing is excluded. No matter when or where, enlightenment means entering this truth. And this truth is beyond extension or diminution in time or space; in it a single thought is ten thousand years.

Emptiness here, Emptiness there, but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes. Infinitely large and infinitely small, no difference, for definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen. So too with Being and non-Being. Don’t waste time in doubts and arguments that have nothing to do with this.

One thing, all things: move among and intermingle, without distinction. To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection. To live in this faith is the road to non-duality, because the non-dual is one with the trusting mind.

Words! The tao is beyond language, for in it there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today.

–Hsin Hsin Ming (Verses on the Faith Mind)
Attributed to Chien Chih Sengtsan, ca. 600 C.E.
Translated by Robert B. Clarke

I am beginning to understand that there is much of the trickster in my personality. I’ve always identified with Loki, and often use humor to try and defuse situations (not always successfully, like any trickster…)

I’m currently reading Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift” right now, but I think his “Trickster Makes This World” will be in the reading stack soon. (It’s been on my wish list for a few weeks now).

Lewis Hyde

“An important part of any sacred activity is marking a boundary between the sacred and non-sacred. It’s important to build a container so the action is conducted inside sacred space,” he noted. “So, when you get to a character like the Trickster, you now have somebody who is the critic of the boundary, whose position is that all boundaries can be become too rigid and too impermeable, causing the life to dry up inside the container. So you need, both … some way to make the container and some function that is smart about how and where to break it. The Trickster is the sacred boundary crosser. And it’s not just that he crosses boundaries, he does it as a needed sacred function. If all you have is sacred forces who are maintaining their fiefdoms then you can end up with a fragmented heaven. Trickster gets a commerce going among the various sacred powers.”

Speaking of “heaven” - Hyde related in his book the story of C.G.Jung when he was a twelve-year-old schoolboy in Basel, Switzerland, admiring the glorious cathedral in the town square.

Said Jung, “I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the sight, and thought: ‘The world is beautiful and the church is beautiful and God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and … Here came a great hole in my thoughts, and a choking sensation. I felt numbed, and knew only: ‘Don’t go on thinking now! Something terrible is coming …’”

For several days Jung struggled with the thought of whether or not God, who controls all things, could allow him to think a thought he shouldn’t think. Finally, having worked himself around to believing that God wanted him to have the forbidden thought, he relented: “I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above the world - and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder … I felt an enormous, an indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me. I wept for happiness and gratitude.”

Hyde said he was indebted to C.G. Jung, particularly one of his students, Marie-Louise von Franz, and their work with the idea of Mercurius. To the medieval alchemists, Mercury was the metal symbolizing duality - metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery. Mercury was the metal uniting all the opposites. This Trickster energy was known to the Greeks by way of Hermes, the messenger god; in the Roman pantheon, Hermes becomes Mercury.

“C.G. Jung was a fabulously smart guide,” Hyde continued. “The Jungian insight is that the psyche is a community of forces and you need that whole community of forces working together. The pathology is when one member of the community begins to dominate in an individual, so some other part - your Warrior, say, or your sense of justice - gets muted. Or if we’re speaking of a group rather than one psyche, it’s when somebody begins to take over through display of one singular force. In a healthy community, every force will have a counter force. For example, Hermes steals the cattle from Apollo, but at the end of the story, Hermes and Apollo are friends. They find a way to relate. They need each other. You can’t have a boundary crosser unless you have someone who cares about the boundary. Hermes needs Apollo to be able to play with the rules and Apollo needs Hermes to keep things lively.”

To help people come back to a place where they’ve been trapped or lost requires them to become a ‘Hermeneut’ of their own life. They have to be helped to understand that there is an active learnable role to play in relating to the story you tell about your own life, the story you’ve inherited, the story you’re going to create as you live your life. Most Americans are passive recipients of the story that the media wants them to live by and only when you realize it is a story are you able to make different choices. You can interpret the story and be converted - from a passive object of commercial pitchmen into an actor living a life that you yourself create.”

Hyde said he believed a lot of Americans were “numb.” I liked the quote he used from child psychologist Donald Winnicott: “It is a joy to be hidden, but disaster not to be found.”

To explore within ourselves all the limiting behavior we’ve been taught takes a kind of “imaginative amorality,” the author said. It’s not an immorality, but an archetypal motivation in our own psyche to “play with the rules rather than observe them.”

On a day when I am not at peace with myself or my surroundings, Ascender comes along and kicks my cage door wide open. I was going to write something about how I am feeling today, but I think I’ll just link to her good wishes instead. Please click on her link below to visit all the bloggers she lists; I don’t have the time to fix all the linky love at the moment here.

Namaste, to all.

Studio Lolo tagged me with this ‘peace and love’ meme; to spread the word to send loving energy and thoughts to the places and people that need it. Rather then tagging others I hope to pass on some urls of my virtual pals who could use some of your loving energy and thoughts. Please leave some virtual peace and love to some people who could really use it right now.

Red Moon at the loss of her daughter

The Daily Warrior successfully fighting ALS for 16 years

Studio Friday is closing down. Stop by and show her some love for her dedication all these years.

Check out these bloggers who address peace and love almost everyday: 3191, a poetic justice, another poster for peace, anti-war us, Art For A Change, Art of Mark Byran, Artists Helping Children, Blog Like You Give A Damn, Blood For Oil, bricalu, Buddha Project, Change Me, Changing Places, Crafty Green Poet, No Blood For War and Profit, Inhabitat, kamurawayan, Light a Candle, Military Families Speak Out, Miniature Gigantic, Paris Parfait, Peaceful Societies, Pinwheels for Peace, Poets Against the War, rambling taoist, smile, smile, Take it Personally, The Peace Train, Treehugger, Visual Resistance, We Are What We Do, Betmo, Bloggers For Peace

Hope you all get to enjoy this - our weather is rainy and overcast and it doesn’t look like it will clear by tonight. Grumble.

UPDATE:

The clouds cleared enough for us to catch a glimpse of the moon after it was coming out of the total eclipse. So at least we got to see a part of it!!

Lunar eclipse to occur Wednesday night - Yahoo! News

The last total lunar eclipse until 2010 occurs Wednesday night, with cameo appearances by Saturn and the bright star Regulus on either side of the veiled full moon.

Skywatchers viewing through a telescope will have the added treat of seeing Saturn’s handsome rings.

Weather permitting, the total eclipse can be seen from North and South America. People in Europe and Africa will be able to see it high in the sky before dawn on Thursday.

As the moonlight dims — it won’t go totally dark — Saturn and Regulus will pop out and sandwich the moon. Regulus is the brightest star in the constellation Leo.

Jack Horkheimer, host of the PBS show “Star Gazer,” called the event “the moon, the lord of the rings and heart of the lion eclipse.”

Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Journey into the Heart of an Insurgency

“The wise ones of olden times say that the hearts of men and women are in the shape of a caracol, and that those who have good in their hearts and thoughts walk from one place to the other, awakening gods and men for them to check that the world remains right. They say that they say that they said that the caracol represents entering into the heart, that this is what the very first ones called knowledge. They say that they say that they said that the caracol also represents exiting from the heart to walk the world…. The caracoles will be like doors to enter into the communities and for the communities to come out; like windows to see us inside and also for us to see outside; like loudspeakers in order to send far and wide our word and also to hear the words from the one who is far away.”

The United States and Mexico both have eagles as their emblems, predators which attack from above. The Zapatistas have chosen a snail in a spiral shell, a small creature, easy to overlook. It speaks of modesty, humility, closeness to the earth, and of the recognition that a revolution may start like lightning but is realized slowly, patiently, steadily. The old idea of revolution was that we would trade one government for another and somehow this new government would set us free and change everything. More and more of us now understand that change is a discipline lived every day, as those women standing before us testified; that revolution only secures the territory in which life can change. Launching a revolution is not easy, as the decade of planning before the 1994 Zapatista uprising demonstrated, and living one is hard too, a faith and discipline that must not falter until the threats and old habits are gone — if then. True revolution is slow.

Lewis Hyde - Home

Clever at deceit, tricksters are equally clever at seeing through deceit, and therefore at revealing things hidden beneath the surface. In Chinese legend, for example, only the trickster Monkey can see through the disguises of evil monsters who hope to eat him and his friends. With his “fiery eyes and diamond pupils,” Monkey is “the one who has perception.”

In many traditions this kind of deep sight belongs to the prophet, for prophets are those who can perceive the spiritual world beneath the veil of the mundane. Tricksters have similar powers, Lewis Hyde argues, and thus they too have a prophetic role to play, though theirs is prophecy with a difference: no traditional prophet lies and steals to deliver his message.

Traditional prophets disrupt the mundane to point toward eternal truths, but the prophetic trickster disrupts the “eternals” themselves, and in so doing points toward the plenitude of this world, the fullness it has when not obscured by all our ideas, structures, and rules for living. Traditional prophets point toward things that time cannot touch, but the prophetic trickster points toward time itself, toward the changing noise of this world, not the constant harmony of distant spheres.

The Hindu god Krishna makes a good example. As soon as Krishna has grown up, he stops stealing butter and starts stealing love. On moonlit nights he plays his flute, letting its charming melody drift over the garden walls until the faithful women of the town abandon their marriage beds and come dance with him in the forest. Krishna is a thief of hearts, but not because hearts are scarce. Dancing in the woods, he multiplies himself a thousand times so as to appear fully to each of the women, and gratify each one’s desire to be his lover.

But if there is no scarcity, why be a thief in the first place? Because the abundance that Krishna wants (and symbolizes) is available only when ordinary moral structure has been removed. In the Hindu culture from which this story comes, marriage does not express private desire so much as the social setting of family alliances, property, land and inheritance. In some parts of India, in fact, they say that love should never be the basis of marriage, since to introduce desire into the realm of structure would confuse and weaken it.

But in the trickster myth, desire becomes prophetic precisely because it can reveal the fullness that lies beyond the walls of convention. Stolen love opens windows onto that larger world. Society needs its designs if it is to endure, but trickster’s mischief regularly shows that no design can encompass creation’s great abundance. Trickster is the prophet whose actions reveal the uncontainable plenitude of this world.

My Christmas present from my son - he knows me so well!

My Associates Store - Lio: Happiness Is a Squishy Cephalopod

Drawn in the age-old style of pantomime strips, LIÓ offers a decidedly new and edgy twist to the wordless comic format. That’s right, LIÓ is so crafty it doesn’t need word balloons, dialogue boxes, or clever captions. Mark Tatulli’s cartoon also employs a unique drawing style influenced by cartooning greats Gahan Wilson, Charles Addams, and 19th-century satirist A. J. Volck.

In describing his strip, Tatulli explains he was eager “to bring something truly different to the comics pages . . . something to appeal to all ages, drawn in pictures only. To tell a story without text, while updating the pantomime concept with a modern audience in mind.”

The result is a mind-bendingly humorous and astute journey into the darkly detailed world of young Lió—where a spit wad can put a school bus out of commission faster than a spider can hamper the efforts of the U.S. Postal Service.

More of the haul:

Hope Santa leaves you everything you wanted!

Got your pole and grievances ready?

Happy Solstice…

May you find peace in quiet reflection today… (hint: avoid the malls)

Hecate has a beautiful post on the yule season here.

Via slumberinglungfish

Axial tilt indeed.

There’s even a shirt!

Golden Compass trailer here. Looks amazing. Box set of the trilogy here. These books were one of the things that brought me through the long dark night of my soul. Lyra’s strength and courage would be inspirational to any young girl.

The sum of all fears: organized religion

With any luck, and if “The Golden Compass” turns out to be even half as wondrous as the book, it will hopefully fuel a surge in sales of the “HDM” trilogy in America and, perhaps, inspire a new literary awakening among young readers, darker and more complex and even (gasp) slightly sexual, far beyond the clever but innocuous magic of Harry Potter - which, by the way, had its share of religious bonk-jobs calling for its destruction, as wizardry is clearly the dominion of the devil. We all know what a huge drop in sales that protest caused.

But there is another note of good news from this tale of fear and whining and outcry, and it takes the form of another delightful rule upon which your soul can happily rely, as well as a heartfelt lesson for trembling ultraconservative sects everywhere.

It’s this: If your ancient, authoritarian, immutable belief system is threatened by a handful of popular novels, if your ostensibly all-powerful, unyielding creed is rendered meek and defenseless when faced with the story of a fiery, rebellious young girl who effortlessly rejects your stiff misogynistic religiosity in favor of adventure, love, sex, the ability to discover and define her soul on her own terms, well, it might be time for you to roll it all up and shut it all down and crawl back home, and let the divine breathe and move and dance as she sees fit.

And the Pullman books are wondrous — I loved reading them. Perfect for that young adult reader looking to have the courage to follow her soul.

And I have a tiger daemon

Pharyngula: The whole book summarized in 29 words

What kind of atheist are you?

What kind of atheist are you?

You scored as a Spiritual Atheist

Ah! Some of the coolest people in the world are Spiritual Atheists. Most of them weren’t brought up in an organized religion and have very little baggage. They concentrate on making the world a better place and know that death is just another part of life. What comes after, comes after.

Spiritual Atheist 67%

Scientific Atheist 67%

Apathetic Atheist 58%

Agnostic 50%

Angry Atheist 42%

Theist 42%

Militant Atheist 25%

Via Pharyngula.

This song had me LOL-ing….

Jonathan Coulton celebrates May 1st (NSFW)

woke up this morning
I had a scone and a large house blend
And then a little conversation with my squirrel and chipmunk friends
I said I’m sick and tired of winter
And I wish that it was spring
And then a little fellow named Robin Redbreast
Began to sing

And he sang
Ooh ooh child, what’d you think the cold winter’s gonna last forever?
Ooh ooh child, now’s the time for all the people to get together
Outside…

Wow, who knew angels were trademarked? Guess the Mormons are getting as bad as the Scientologists.

No religion is not a joke, but any religion worth believing in ought to be able to take a joke. If your faith isn’t strong enough to overcome a little fun, what’s the point of it?

Salt Lake Tribune - Angel Moroni gone, but new coffeehouse T-shirt still resolutely ‘irreverent’

Coffee makers here have turned potential trademark infringement into grounds for inspiration.
    In March, the LDS Church asked Just Add Coffee to stop selling a popular T-shirt that featured coffee being funneled into Angel Moroni’s iconic trumpet. (The angel tops most LDS temples and figures prominently in the religion’s scriptures.)
    The Taylorsville store owners complied, but the spat spurred a new design, with the angel removed, that might prove even more marketable.
    It shows a giant hand from the sky pouring the java - which the LDS Church urges its members to abstain from drinking - into a disembodied trumpet.
    The caption: “The Lord giveth, and a church taketh away.”

Via Boing Boing.

My neighbor is having his big Italian stone pine removed from his yard today - this tree is huge, over 70 feet tall.

I hate my neighbor right now. I told him they should have just taken down the house, instead. I suppose I’ll get over it, eventually, but not today.

I have watched the moon rise through this tree, watched the stars and planets above its branches, and often sat in my front yard admiring its beauty, watching the hawks settle into its branches.

Oh well. Goodbye to a beautiful tree friend of mine for over 20 years. Sigh. Tears…

No real surprises for me to be Orpheus. I’ve done the whole logic and Plato thing before, been the Oracle for a while, too. Time to play, now.

Take the test here.

Via Watermark.

OKCupid! The Greek Mythology Personality Test

Orpheus

33% Extroversion, 66% Intuition, 100% Emotiveness, 76% Perceptiveness
You are an artist, an aesthete, a sensitive, and someone who has never really let go of that childlike innocence. To you, all of life has a sense of wonder in it, and the story of Orpheus was written about someone just like you.

When the Argo passed the island of the Sirens, Orpheus played a song more beautiful than the Sirens to prevent the crew from becoming enticed. When his wife died, he ventured into the underworld to charm Hades but, in his naivete, he looked back becoming trapped there.

You can capture your unique world view and relate it to others with the skill of a master storyteller. Your sensitivity and creativity make you a treasure to the human race, but your thin-skinned nature and innocence can cause you a lot of disenchantment and pain. What’s doubly unfortunate is that, if you try to lose those traits, you never will, and everyone will be able to tell that you’re putting up an artificial shell to prevent yourself from being hurt.

Famous people like you: Hemingway, Shakespeare, Mr. Rogers, Melville, Nick Tosches
Stay clear of: Icarus, Hermes, Atlas

How wonderful that something this great can come from the massive liberal funfest that is Burning Man.

Let’s see the rich religious righties ever do something this cool.

THE BURNING MAN FESTIVAL / Hot spots at the burn
– Best camp: Camp Katrina

Katrina victims who were at Burning Man when the hurricane hit last summer and the burners who helped them recover built a museum-style display of their relief mission to the Gulf Coast.

Through pictures, words, video and artifacts — water-logged bedposts, chipped picture frames and other items collected in Katrina’s wake — burners learned the story of how artists responded to the devastation.

Using $40,000 and 7 tons of food collected at Burning Man 2005, a crew from Burners Without Borders and Burning Man Temple Builders flew to Biloxi, Miss., and rebuilt a Vietnamese Buddhist temple with donated construction equipment. In Pearlington, Miss., they rebuilt a home for a 71-year-old man who was left with nothing but the Harley-Davidson motorcycle he’d used to escape the rising waters.

By the end of their six-month stint, burners had provided $1 million worth of free demolition to homeowners, knocked down 60 homes, recycled tons of lumber into new homes, and fetched an untold number of runaway boats and sheds.

“It was a life-altering experience,” said Scott Stephenson of Jackson Hole, Wyo. “We shared gumbo with shrimpers whose homes we put back on their foundations.”

The work inspired Camp Katrina to try something new this year at Burning Man. They asked burners to skip the tradition of burning the wood from their camps and structures at the end of the event, and instead bring it to their camp so they could recycle it into low-income housing in Reno.