As a Child

There are some articles on brain development that suggest there are good reasons why memories of childhood, before the age of four, are foggy.

It seems to me that one of the reasons we don't remember has to do with how much more observant a child that age is. In order to learn, we take everything in. As preschoolers we are easily distracted, and as a parent and now a grandparent I say thank goodness for that, but preschoolers process everything. Because we don't try to understand as much as we accept, I believe that is the time in life when we are as connected to the unseen world of the spirit as we ever can be. We need love as much or more than any other nourishment.

In the New Testament, it is recorded that Jesus taught that we must become like little children. This was likely included in the collected scripture because the passage suggests that children take a low position and accept authority, and so, therefore, should we. I believe there was much more in that teaching to be child-like.

The world is filled with so many distractions for us all - distractions that keep us from noticing or believing that there is any real magic around us. We are convinced that becoming "grown up" is our most important task in childhood. We are taught to label and classify. Our appearance and behaviour are monitored and criticized in such a way that we are loath to stand out in a crowd - a crowd that has been similarly cowed into accepting that there is no such thing as magic.

It is no wonder that a guide or teacher who sincerely desires that we should remember and connect with that hidden spirit would encourage us to be childlike. In adult terms, they would encourage and teach us to meditate, allowing the distractions of the world to fall away. Sadly, because we seem hardwired to look for community, the ultimate intervention happens. We find a church, mosque, or the like, to become part of a community of faith. The spirit that came to us easily and naturally in our own calm place, is given a name. We are educated in the finer points of what it means to be part of that religion. The ego is satisfied and what follows is a loss of the very openness and child-like innocence that allowed the spirit to find us.

I do not know how one can teach such a thing to another, but I do know that, for me, adopting an attitude of indifference to the opinions of others was essential to finding self-love and acceptance. These things were a bi-product of my search for wholeness. I knew my life could not long continue as it had. Breaking from the norm was my only option.

As though I had somehow hit the psychic jackpot, I was changed, and a child, locked away for decades, came forward to run the show. Not labelling and classifying the world - most times not even fully comprehending what goes on, I am able to accept, nonetheless.  A belief long held, but pushed away, has become a centre-point to my personal faith. Maybe it is a cliché, but if you think that bothers me, you need to read the paragraph above more carefully.

Love Is

Mystical Connections

In the light of brain studies and sensible theories on the evolution of thinking and feeling creatures, it has become hard to justify expressing a feeling and saying it comes from the heart. What seems to be from that muscular pump must instead be originating in the brain. But that collection of cells can't travel through time, can it?

I was pre-school age, much too young to have any idea of history, when I dreamed of being a monk in a monastery. I remember that "I" had never learned enough to perform the duties I was given. Unlike most dreams, the feeling of dread being that man wouldn't leave me. I never dreamed of that monk and his stress-filled existence again, yet memories of that past life taught me that I never wanted to have a job I wasn't thoroughly qualified to do.

Such musings might be in the same category as "Where do dreams come from?" or "What did that dream mean?" And I know that the brain that I'm carrying about now couldn't have been alive hundreds of years ago. The only rational explanation is a very active imagination; or is it?

Take Care of You

Here is a letter to my younger self; one who couldn't know better. 

Fear of abandonment haunted you. Your need to control relationships made you push away people you cared about, especially if they cared about you. You feared that someone that close, whom you care for so much, might uncover a great secret that you were sure nobody could possibly understand. More than anything you feared that ultimate rejection. Ironically, loss and fear of loss made it impossible for you to trust your own feelings. They were a source of so many of your problems. Soon, you learned not to ever rock the boat; taking a perverse pride in being a "goer-alonger". 

You have to understand and care for yourself. When you have a strong feeling that there is something that you need to act upon, even or especially when, that something is only for you and not for the good of others, resist the urge to push that feeling down. 

When you hear someone say something like "Do you have any idea how that (action you are contemplating) will affect me?", carefully consider the motive behind that question. 

Know yourself. Understand that what you think is self-control is a lack of self-esteem. Realize how others have learned to manipulate you, then turn those questions around and ask them of yourself. 

Do you have any idea how ignoring your own needs will affect you?

If I could go back

This is the first time someone else's words have appeared here, but if I could go back to 1988, I would take this and read it to my children, and then we would talk about it. 

Perhaps my granddaughter might need this someday. 

I definitely could have used it when I was 11 or 12. 

You know what breaks me, when someone is visibly excited about a feeling or an idea or a hope or a risk taken, and they tell you about it but preface it with: 

"Sorry, this is dumb but-".

Don't do that.

I don't know who came here before me, or who conditioned you to think you had to apologize or feel obtuse. But not here. 

Dream so big it's silly. 

Laugh so hard it's obnoxious. 

Love so much it's impossible.

And don't you ever feel unintelligent. And don't you ever apologize. And don't you ever shrink so you can squeeze yourself into small places and small minds.

Grow. 

It's a big world. 

You fit. 

I promise.

Owen Lindley

A Manifesto

Created on a computer and printed on a dot matrix printer, this final note from the late 1980s was folded up and tucked into the back of the little binder. On the outside was written: 
"Contains one manifesto. Open in times of confusion or pain."

God is. And ever has been.

We are. And ever have been. 

We live in the Universe that is God's Thought.

There is no evil. There is only love. That which we call evil is an absence of understanding.

There is no death.

We choose our lives as one chooses a television program to watch. Sometimes we want to be entertained. Sometimes we need to learn. Mostly we do a bit of both. Not all programs are happy. Sometimes we watch horror stories or soap operas where people are cruel to one another. There is nothing wrong with anything we do, when we are doing what we want.

There is no need to be nice, or kind to others. They are free to leave us or remove us as they wish. If we live, free in the knowledge that the thing we call death is only a change of the channel, a change of focus, then love will come easily, and respect for others will follow as we respect ourselves. There will be no need to judge others or to judge ourselves. 

We have the power to live and love as we choose.

We can change the script of the program at any time.

What a miracle we are

This post is the beginning of new content. Those writings from over twenty years ago having been transcribed in their entirety. What I will add here are thoughts that are sustaining me now, or intriguing me now, or anything else that I fancy because it is my blog after all. 

What does one do with a life regained? I have been given the most wonderful gift of rebirth. As a child I spent hours wondering about the darnedest things (my Grandfather's words at the time) and now I feel inclined to explore those darnedest things with the help of the most marvellous technology for exploration ever created.

Have you ever wondered about how the brain of any creature on the planet manages to do everything we think of as normal? We have biological receivers and processors for the five senses, and they do their job flawlessly. Nerve ends in our inner ear are stimulated, messages are sent to the brain by a relay system, and we think "that is a car; oh no, it is a truck and a heavy one, with a load in it".

What is sound anyway, but the compression and release of air molecules that is detected by our eardrum; a mechanical device sensitive enough to let us tell the difference between the roar of a truck on the road and the gentle sigh of contentment of a loved one nearby, and all sounds in-between.

Hearing is something we learn to interpret so early in life that it is hardly fair to call it learning at all. One day at the swimming pool, standing by the side and watching the waves lap up on the deck, it occurred to me that those waves carried enough information, that with training, I should be able to tell how many people are in the pool, whether anyone jumped in and how many are doing the front crawl, and so forth, just by carefully observing those wave patterns; that is what our ears do after all.

Today in an article in the New York Times Magazine online, I found out that humans do indeed have the ability if trained properly to use the same techniques for very practical purposes. It is called wave-piloting:

"Swells generated by distant storms near Alaska, Antarctica, California and Indonesia travel thousands of miles to these low-lying spits of sand (in the Marshall Islands). When they hit, part of their energy is reflected back out to sea in arcs, like sound waves emanating from a speaker; another part curls around the atoll or island and creates a confused chop in its lee. Wave-piloting is the art of reading — by feel and by sight — these and other patterns. Detecting the minute differences in what, to an untutored eye, looks no more meaningful than a washing-machine cycle allows a ri-meto, a person of the sea in Marshallese, to determine where the nearest solid ground is — and how far off it lies — long before it is visible."*

Perhaps our preoccupations with the mundane are somehow useful, too, but there are times I wonder how much more we could do if we applied our amazing brains to learn and do more.

*The Secrets of the Wave Pilots: Kim Tingley, New York Times Magazine, March 17, 2016

Personal Growth and Relationships

How beautiful is the support that we give each other when there is no competitive element. 

Maybe this is, in its opposite, the explanation for the seeming lack of support between married couples. As they see the growth or change of the other as a threat to security, they withdraw support for it. 

Alternately, when we court another, we see growth in terms of movement closer, so we are supportive in a way that we seem to lose as we establish some permanence in the relationship. 

This is the last of the documents written in the late 1980s and early 1990s that will be transcribed here. In the future I will add posts in the same vein as these posts, but written in the present, as they come to mind.