Regift

A Light So Powerful

The only judgment involved is the Holy Spirit's one division into two categories; one of love, and the other the call for love.  You cannot safely make this division, for you are much too confused either to recognize love, or to believe that everything else is nothing but a call for love.  You are too bound to form, and not to content.  What you consider content is not content at all.  It is merely form, and nothing else.  For you do not respond to what a brother really offers you, but only to the particular perception of his offering by which the ego judges it. 

The ego is incapable of understanding content, and is totally unconcerned with it.  To the ego, if the form is acceptable the content must be.  Otherwise it will attack the form.  If you believe you understand something of the "dynamics" of the ego, let me assure you that you understand nothing of it.  For of yourself you could not understand it.  The study of the ego is not the study of the mind.  In fact, the ego enjoys studying itself, and thoroughly approves the undertakings of students who would "analyze" it, thus approving its importance.  Yet they but study form with meaningless content.  For their teacher is senseless, though careful to conceal this fact behind impressive sounding words, but which lack any consistent sense when they are put together. 

This is characteristic of the ego's judgments.  Separately, they seem to hold, but put them together and the system of thought that arises from joining them is incoherent and utterly chaotic.  For form is not enough for meaning, and the underlying lack of content makes a cohesive system impossible.  Separation therefore remains the ego's chosen condition.  For no one alone can judge the ego truly.  Yet when two or more join together in searching for truth, the ego can no longer defend its lack of content.  The fact of union tells them it is not true. 

It is impossible to remember God in secret and alone.  For remembering Him means you are not alone, and are willing to remember it.  Take no thought for yourself, for no thought you hold is for yourself.  If you would remember your Father, let the Holy Spirit order your thoughts and give only the answer with which He answers you.  Everyone seeks for love as you do, but knows it not unless he joins with you in seeking it.  If you undertake the search together, you bring with you a light so powerful that what you see is given meaning (emphasis added).

~ Possibly the words of Jesus from The Equality of Miracles,  A Course in Miracles 

2008 Season Opener

Auburn 34 - Louisiana Monroe 0

War Eagle!!!

Pseudologica Fantastica: Dull and Common

When we were kids we called it "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire" but Dr. Sam Vaknin, self-proclaimed narcissist and author of Malignant Self Love, calls it Pseudologica Fantastica - way too pretty a term for such ugly activity.  it is hard for basically honest folks to comprehend people of the lie (a phrase coined by M. Scott Peck in his book by the same name).  Now everyone will lie to keep from being shot in the head, but there is a condition that goes beyond self-protection.  As my Daddy used to say, "He would rather climb a tree and lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth."  And I will never forget Judy W., a girl I knew through junior high and high school.  It was one pathetic attempt after another to illicit awe or pity.  We pitied her, all right, but not for her hard luck, rather how pathetic a liar she was.  

Dr. Vaknin's description might help us understand how controlling liars are:   

 "In 'Streetcar Named Desire', Blanche Dubois, the sister in law of the character played by Marlon Brando, is accused by him of inventing a false biography, replete with exciting events and desperate wealthy suitors. She responds that it is preferable to lead an imaginary but enchanted life - than a real but dreary one.

I exaggerate everything. If a newspapers publishes my articles, I describe it as "the most widely circulated", or "the most influential". If I meet someone, I make him out to be "the most powerful", "most enigmatic", "most something". If I make a promise, I always promise the impossible or undoable.

To put it less gently, I lie. Compulsively and needlessly.

All the time.

About everything. And I often contradict myself.

Why do I need to do this?

To make myself interesting or attractive. In other words, to secure Narcissistic Supply (attention, admiration, adulation, gossip). I refuse to believe that I can be of interest to anyone as I am. My mother was interested in me only when I achieved something. Since then I flaunt my achievements - or invent ones. I feel certain that people are more interested in my fantasies than in me.

This way I also avoid the routine, the mundane, the predictable, the boring.

In my mind, I can be anywhere, do anything and I am good at convincing people to participate in my scripts. It is movie-making. I should have been a director.

Pseudologica Fantastica is the compulsive need to lie consistently and about everything, however inconsequential - even if it yields no benefits to the liar. I am not that bad. But when I want to impress - I lie."

This concept leaves me pondering how a person is a thief of reality when he or she will lie to control another's perception of reality.  It's sad for the deceived and even sad for the liar.  You have to see it for the pathology it is and laugh at it to keep from taking it too seriously.  Ultimately the shock and awe of lies may be covering only a Blanche Dubois dull commonness.

Perfumes of the Spirit

Dr. Paolo Rovesti of Milan University in Italy was an interesting man who was something of a pioneer in the study of the effect of essential oils on the mind.  In Medical Aromatherapy Kurt Schnaubelt described Dr. Rovesti  as a man "traveling around the globe, he researched the role of fragrance in past cultures, such as the many ways fragrance was integrated
into spiritual, magical, and social rituals." 

Dr. Rovesti lamented modern man's loss of olfactory sensibilities through sterile living.  He found tribes in India who had the olfactory capacity of animals who could detect visitors by their smell over 100 yards away.  In Essence and Alchemy, Mandy Aftel quotes Dr. Rovesti from In Search of Perfumes Lost, "We who are immersed in the unnaturalness of modern-day life cannot recall, without nostalgia and sadness, those gifts of nature at man's disposal, now neglected or in disuse.  Among those are paradises of natural perfumes, of the perfumes of the past and of the spirit." 

A particularly charming olfactive story told by Dr. Rovesti was that of a colleague who kept a sample of the perfume of each of the great loves of his life - eight by the end of his life - labeled by name, years of love and places to which the scent and women were associated.  According to Dr. Rovesti "he told me with half-closed eyes, 'I relive in a film of memories the delicious romances of my life, when the whole world rotated around one woman, her name and her face, under the spell of her perfume, which now erases time and brings back in all its beauty what by now, as far as reality is concerned, has turned to ashes.'" 

I have heard that the fragrance Jicky was created by Aime Guerlain to honor a lost, unrequited love for a girl he met while studying in England.  The story is lovely, and the fragrance may be as well, but Dr. Rovesti's scent collecting colleague likely would find such an experiment futile despite its creativity.  Memory is what it is and cannot be created anew.  To déjà vu the ghost of lost love some unextractable molecule of the past must be brought forward embedded in the heart and brain.  Such is the nature of smell.  Such is the nature of love.

Robin's Gift

When I served as a curator for ECVA's Visual Preludes 2006 I selected this powerful image entitled "Gift" for the day when the theme was Gracious Spirit.  I did not know the artist; I only knew that the colors and composition had a tremendous sway on my emotions.  The turquoise in all of its energetic strokes made me want to go back and look at it over and over again.  It turned out to be one of my favorite pieces in all of the Preludes. 

At the time I actually thought that the artist who produced this work was a man.  You can imagine my surprise when I learned that C. Robin Janning is a woman - an incredibly talented one - and fellow Saggitarian at that.  Robin has since become a valued friend of mine and ECVA's Director of Communications.  Like her painting that exudes energy, she gives so many of her gifts to the ministry of ECVA, and she graciously allowed me to use her work here.

To see more of Robin's work, go to Gramery Digital Diary. 

"Gifts" by C. Robin Janning, all rights reserved   

Full Feathers

Feathers

Feathers are a Native American symbol of the Great Spirit and the sun.  There's some kind of magic in a feather, that instrument of delicate strength that allows a bird to travel the sky while I remain bound to the Earth watching in awe.  My arms and legs are strong and brave, but they do not lift me from the Earth to soar in the face of the sun.   

Yesterday I found a bird in my bungalow.  The poor thing must have been accidentally shut in there when the cats were put up for the night.  Here I was dressed for court, letting out Cats Boomer and Randy, when I found this rather large bird who had bled out on the tiles.  He was still soft, and as I lifted him with the empty cat bowls, his head rolled over gently.  I was overtaken by the sadness of what the bird endured overnight as the cats ganged up on him and brought him down.  I'm sure he went higher and higher in an effort to avoid them, and I'll bet they were expert trapeze artists swinging off whatever they could to reach the terror stricken creature.  Alas, there was nothing I could do now to help him, and Boomer and Randy bounded out of the bungalow like children being let out to play.  Little monsters. 

If that bird could have freed himself from the barrier of the roof, he could have flown off into the silvery moon filled air, perched in the limbs of the magnolia and laughed at his tormenters.  But his feathers could not accomplish that for him. 

I can identify with that bird.  People get caught in bungalows, too, with accusers psychologically clawing at them to bring them down.  It has happened since the beginning of time, and it will continue to happen until the end of time.  Usually we do become soft dead things by morning, our heads rolling over gently in defeat.  But that isn't required because humans have an advantage in psychological battle that is better than feathers.  To keep from being a soft dead thing when morning comes a soul has to break out of the barriers of fear and disbelief that keep it in prison.  And that can be done through right thinking with the heart.  Only from the safe limbs of the magnolia tree can the soul choose to laugh or love again. 

As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is.  ~ Proverbs 23:7  

...behold, the kingdom of God is within you.  ~ Jesus (Luke 17:21)

"Learn to think with your heart, and feel with your head."  ~ Native American saying

You Might Be Southern

There's a joke down South.....You might be Southern if  you schedule your life around SEC football.  Since I am, here is my Fall calendar (it isn't enough that I have shortcuts to the Auburn schedule on the desktops of my computer at home and work).  War Eagle!: 

08/30/08	vs. Louisiana-Monroe	Auburn, Ala.	6:00 p.m. CT
09/06/08	vs. Southern Miss	Auburn, Ala.	11:30 a.m. CT
09/13/08	at Mississippi State	Starkville, Miss.	6:00 p.m. CT
09/20/08	vs. LSU	Auburn, Ala.	TBA
09/27/08	vs. Tennessee #	Auburn, Ala.	TBA
10/04/08	at Vanderbilt	Nashville, Tenn.	TBA
10/11/08	vs. Arkansas	Auburn, Ala.	TBA
10/23/08	at West Virginia	Morgantown, W.V.	6:30 p.m. CT
11/01/08	at Mississippi	Oxford, Miss.	TBA
11/08/08	vs. Tennessee-Martin (HC)	Auburn, Ala.	1:30 p.m. CT
11/15/08	vs. Georgia	Auburn, Ala.	TBA
11/29/08	at Alabama #	Tuscaloosa, Ala.	TBA

Country Roads

Somnolent Summer scenes on any Southern road are drenched in color and haze, providing a sense of fantasy and blessing...how could any place be so naturally rich?  How could I have been so blessed to be born and to live my life in such a God given painting?