(It’s almost exactly a year since my last post.
It’s good to be back.
Being Clerk of TCFM is done, and it went well, despite significant challenges.
I couldn’t have done it without Anne S.
Now, on to the current state of my adventures as a Gaia Troubadour.)

I’m giving a presentation at the Adult Education hour on 11/8/09.

I want to do some of my preparation work here.
On the day itself I’ll try to let the Invisible World guide me to what I actually say.

NOTES ON WHAT I HOPE TO COVER
The occasion for the presentation is reporting on the Amy and Arnold Mindell workshop,

GAIA’s PROCESS:
WorldWork for People and Planet

The workshop is part of the general areas of Process Oriented Psychology and of
Worldwork. (I particularly recommend the Worldwork in Photos section of this website, to get a feel of what goes on.)

Betsy and our friend Celia were there with me, and we all had quite different reactions to the four-day event. I was thrilled and empowered.
My experiences there combined with two experiences I’ve had within the world of Quakers. The first is the meditation technique, Experiment with Light; the second, reading the book Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood: The Power of Contemplation in an Evolving Universe, by Quaker author Mary Conrow Coelho.

I was raised in the Religion of Materialist Science.

I found it lacking. It said:

If you can’t see it, touch it, measure it, it’s not real. There are fantasy worlds, like fiction, religion and daydreams, which may be quite pleasurable, but to make life-choices based on them is to fall prey to superstition. Stick to the facts.

This upbringing created deep prejudices in me, which have been difficult to overcome. I have struggled since childhood with the limitations of the Religion of Science. My wonderful, deeply-moral, parents stammered when I asked,

What does it mean when Jiminy Cricket says,

Let your conscience be your guide

?

Mainstream Christianity offered much I found helpful, but ultimately I could not “go there.”
And yet the Christians, Buddhists, Sufis and Taoists are clearly onto something, an invisible world, preceding, underlying and giving rise to the world we experience.

And in my own life, I have been guided by my intuition in ways I did not trust but turned out to be clearly superior to the other guidance I was receiving.

AND …
…

I am plagued by a sense of wrongness in my life. A sense that, while I am a moral person, I could be doing better. Not in a super-ego sense with a big should,  but in the sense that there is a … truth(?!)… striving to flow through me, trying to find in me a unique avenue for its ever-exfoliating expression, and I am partly blocking the flow.

Under these circumstances I was much relieved to discover, experientially, George Fox’s method of minding the Light, as discovered and explained by Rex Ambler.
Here is a way of engaging with the invisible world, and being guided by it.
And then, at the Mindell workshop, Amy and Arnold were talking about “going into your process mind,” and it was the same thing, at its root, as Experiment with Light!

Given how phobic I am about this stuff, it was immensely reassuring to find a group using non-religious language to teach me to tap into the same kinds of experiences as I was having with the Experiment with Light.

Can I bear the wonder?!
As a boy trained to be a “brain,” to rely on the intellect, can I bear to accept these life-giving inputs from an invisible world I do not understand?
That’s where Mary Coelho’s book, Awakening Universe… is profoundly helpful to me. My intellect is stunned and reassured by the breadth of her investigation, and her conclusions.
We are not some trivial accident, orbiting a medium-sized star. The universe is dynamic/alive and we are living expressions of that dynamism. Our minds need not be cut off from that resonant wholeness, but can be sustained by contact with it. And this “New Story” is entirely consistent with a science transformed by its understanding of quantum physics.

I am not lost. I may have tough work to do, on a life-assignment that stays hard through to my physical end, but what I do counts. There are better and less-good choices that I can make, and there is an invisible world I can turn to for guidance as I co-create my life
within the circumstances of Gaia,
and her galaxy,
and the larger all.

Love,
Richard