Critics and Creativity
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
–Albert Einstein (German-born American Physicist and, in 1921, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1879-1955)
I have had the incredible privilege of knowing, working with, and sometimes sitting at the feet of more than one hundred of the greatest and most influential thinkers, scientists and spiritual leaders of the last fifty years. I have never been interested in listing them: many wish to retain their privacy, and it is much more important for you to get the message, rather than its origin.
It’s great if a Nobel Laureate or a fourteenth generation teacher transmits his or her insights and wisdom. Yet it remains our responsibility to use all our powers – emotional, intellectual and intuitive – to decide what is right for us. I have seen a T’ai Chi Ch’uan master forget the “form,” a “guru” who neglected the most fundamental part of his own teachings, and a Nobel Laureate misquote a study in which I was involved. Such things happen; it just means that we have to bring our own gifts to bear when we decide how to proceed. Some spiritual teachers deliberately throw in some misinformation to see if we are actually working with their material, and not just sitting passively and soaking it up like a sponge.
After all these years spent with these fine people and scores of complementary practitioners, athletes, musicians, opera singers and ballet dancers, all have told me the same thing: the more creative you are, the more you give the world, the stronger the negative reaction. It almost seems to be a law of nature, to stop anyone form rising too high.
Debate is great! Willful destruction never is. Gently pointing out errors or inconsistencies is one of the marvelous strengths of the Internet. Smashing things and people for fun seems singularly pointless! Think about all the people in the public eye, actors and performers, who have been built up only to be thrown down again.
I’ve always been a gossip magnet: it’s just one of those things that I’ve come to expect! Yet we recently had something totally bizarre: we received a number of odd messages from people with strange pseudonyms. One made the bizarre claim that I was going to die. Well, I guess that’s a safe prediction for anyone! But with thanks to this modern Cassandra I am not, in fact, even close! I practice what I preach. Experts who have looked at my biophysical and "energetic" profiles think that I’m going to be around for another fifty to seventy years. And I plan to use those years to do what I can for others: helping, guiding, teaching, encouraging and supporting. And as long as people find them helpful, I’m going to keep the blogs, articles, books and CDs coming!
As Mark Twain said:
“The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
And another wise person had this to say:
“Pay no attention to critics. No one ever erected a statue to a critic.”
Odd comments like those recently sent to me are a terrific gift: they help us to see how far we’ve come with one of the three great pillars of self-realization: detachment. The other two pillars are "Honesty of mind" and "Sincerity of spirit."
You must decide how far along you and I are with those!
Technorati tags: Creativity Criticism Detachment Cassandra
Cosmology and the Ageless Wisdom
“Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.”
–The Buddha (a.k.a. “The Awakened”, a.k.a. Siddhartha Gautama, Indian Religious Figure and Founder of Buddhism, c.563 B.C.E. – c. 483 B.C.E.)
I was very interested to see a paper in Science by Professors Paul Steinhardt from Princeton University and Neil Turok from Cambridge University.
Based on calculations and observations, the new theory proposes that instead of there having been one Big Bang that lead to the creation of the Universe, there are instead cycles of "Big Bangs" and "Big Crunches", meaning our Universe is merely a "child of the previous one". This proposal challenges the conventional view of the cosmos, which observations show to be 12-14 billion years old and may explain why the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. It also suggests that there’s a continuous cycle of universes, with each a repeat of the last, but not an exact replica. This whole idea is so startling that it was picked up by the BBC.
However, there is another piece to this that does not seem to have been picked up yet. Various publications of the Ageless Wisdom seem to have done a good job on predicting many findings of contemporary science. There are some interesting papers here.
One of the key postulates of the ancient teachings is that the Universe goes through cycles. In the metaphorical language of the ancients, the Universal Mind breathes out the Universe that we can see around us, and then inhales, collapsing the Universe, before once again breathing out. Precisely what the new model is also saying.
I’ve previously reported about the speculations concerning “dark matter,” and whether this has something to do with the subtle systems of the body. This new model includes a consideration of dark matter.
This represents a remarkable confluence of the Ageless Wisdom and some of the most creative scientific thinking.
“Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.”
–Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor and Philosopher, A.D. 121-180)
Technorati tags: Ageless Wisdom Cosmology Subtle energy Qi Dark matter
Happy Summer Solstice!
The Summer Solstice is supposed to the day that summer begins. Of course, from an astronomical perspective is doesn’t. Yet the day has been celebrated for millennia.
In some Slavic countries it is known as St. John’s Night, and all over Northern Europe there have been traditional holidays to mark the day. I well remember the old times when Druid priests celebrated the day at Stonehenge on Salisbury plain: it was a sight to behold. That was in the days before English Heritage and the National Trust had to try and control the site to prevent damage by thousands of Midsummer’s Eve visitors, some of whom did not respect the ancient stone circle. Within the last couple of months I have seen reports of a site in Northern Brazil called Calcoene, which is being called the Amazon Stonehenge, for it too seems to be a solar observatory.
From a purely objective scientific perspective, the day is just like any other except that it is usually the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
So is all this discussion about a Summer Solstice just magical thinking? No more than some kind of recapitulation of the Purple Meme of psychosocial development? Not necessarily. I often spoken of my admiration for the evolving work of the writer and philosopher Ken Wilber. Nobody agrees with everything that he says, and neither would he want us to: he is creating a map and a story to help us find our place in the world. But there is one thing about which I am certain he is correct: A complete understanding of our world and of our place in it means acknowledging the subjective and mythical aspects of our lives. Is it wise to dismiss ancient ceremonies that move millions of people? Can we afford to ignore the deep cycles, currents and rhythms that propel us and the whole of our society and planet? If we do, it means ignoring a fundamentally important part of all of us.
If you have just one single minute today, sit quietly and see if you can feel anything in the atmosphere around you. Then carry on with your day. But promise yourself that you will do the same thing again, in seven days from now, and I would be surprised if you fail to notice a difference. Try it and seefor yourself: many have been amazed by the difference. Most of the time we just do not notice such things.
“It has been said that a complete understanding of the Law of Cycles would bring man to a high degree of initiation. This Law of Periodicity underlies all the processes of nature and its study would lead a man out of the world of objective effects into that of subjective causes.”
–Alice A. Bailey (English Writer, Spiritual Teacher and Founder of the Arcane School, 1880-1949)
Technorati tags: Summer Solstice Stonehenge Spiral dynamics Magical thinking Ken Wilber Alice A Bailey Cycles
Testing for Telepathy
“By means of thought, we are able to obtain all the elements we need from the universe and to reach all the beings we want to contact. Yes, through the law of affinity, thought takes charge of seeking out these elements or these beings. Even if the person you have in mind is on the other side of the world, out of the six billion people on earth, your thought will go directly to him or her and to no one else, as if it had been magnetized to make contact with precisely this person. So from now on, when you want to acquire an element from the universe or to contact someone, think about this element or this person without concern for their whereabouts. Provided your thought is intense, it will go straight to its target.”
–Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (Bulgarian Spiritual Master, 1900-1986)
Of all the subjects that I’ve discussed, one of the most difficult is telepathy. It is difficult not because of a lack of empirical data, but because it is such a polarizing topic. Some people believe in it, and others claim it is impossible, that any research that says otherwise must be wrong and if you believe in it, you will believe in anything. Yet it is an important subject, and the research data keep on coming.
The English biologist and writer Rupert Sheldrake has just published a study in a well known and peer reviewed journal. Perceptual and Motor Skills is a journal with a reputation to protect, so you can be sure that this study was scrutinized particularly carefully. This study investigated possible telepathic communication in connection with emails. In the study there were four potential email senders, and for each trial one of them was selected at random, and there were 50 email receivers, who had to guess who was going to send them an email one minute before it was sent. Further experiments were done with a small number of people who were videotaped continuously. All the experiments generated results that were significantly above chance.
What this means is that we have another piece of evidence to add to the overall body of knowledge about telepathic interactions between people and animals.
Part of the difficulty about telepathy is in understanding how it could happen. When people are in close physical proximity they can pick up on subtle physical cues like body language and dilation of the pupils. I am also persuaded by the data from the HeartMath Institute, indicating that the electrical field generated by the heart can be detected by other people at a range of several feet, and that it can lead to entrainment of the electrical rhythms two people’s brains. But the email experiment is important because none of these factors come into play. My own take on this is that we are all constantly and inextricably interlinked with one another. Most of the time we don’t notice it because of the constant chatter of the mind and the efforts of the ego to protect our individuality. But under certain circumstances – shock, meditation, deep relaxation, sex, and near-death experiences – the walls come tumbling down and we experience our connection for what it truly is. And then we see the non-dual reality of the world.
The other point is this: I have made the point that the Laws of Healing have been gradually changing and evolving over the last century, and our individual and cultural consciousness is evolving and adapting. Because of that, more and more people are having first-hand experience of the interconnected web of life.
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together . . .” {All’s Well that Ends Well, Act IV, Sc. Iii} –William Shakespeare English Poet and Dramatist, 1564-1616
Technorati tags: Intuition, Rupert Sheldrake, Telepathy Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
