Socrates In Love

"You know, I think the forms of love in my book are just five ways of approaching excellence as the Greeks conceived of it. This allows us to come to the epiphany that these five forms of love are all facets of the same thing." Christopher Phillips

Recently I've been dipping into Christopher Phillips' book, Socrates in Love, which a friend gave me last year. I met Chris Phillips in Bowie, Maryland some years ago when he came to the Borders Store near where I lived for a Socrates Cafe Intro. I was excited about his project, and the fact that this man would do such a "thing." Launch such a project. When I think about this now, and follow Chris's trail of books, talks, groups, and the ripple of energy effects these have, I appreciate how beautiful creative energy can be when one person follows his passionate heart and mind to create. Examples of this abound in my life.

This past weekend I attended Kathy Oddenino's seminar on Disease Versus Eternal Health in Chapel Hill. This seminar fits, too, because I am thinking about what it means to truly "know my own mind." Some of the questions we explored are: What do we do when are suddenly told that we have a fatal disease? How can we prevent disease along the journey of life?

I recognize how I've hoped for the best, ignored, or denied certain levels of thinking, because I was afraid of being wrong, of just not knowing enough, or...was just too busy, or too lazy to think differently. It is amazing to me to recognize the infinite patterns, like tunnels, of thoughts I have created and lived without knowing what this reality is, except in intermittent glimpses. These glimpses were inspiring, sometimes confusing.

I've had some Neural Depolarization lately, and this attention to an imbalance I've created has made me more conscious of my cellular sensing. I feel my cellular stories come alive when asked to "speak" - memories of what I've ingested, built up, and the thought patterns as the waves in constant motion, until blocked. I also feel the compassion, love, when I have the NDP - this person, practitioner, is consciously using their spirit energy to communicate with me, with mine, with a healing focus, and the love feels great. Love always feels great, doesn't it!(There is no fear in our Divine Nature!)Love is part of our Intelligent Design as our healing energy. When I've been discouraged, or felt a "lack of love," I felt "bad." Thinking on "eternal health" urges me to communicate more, both internally (listening!) and with others, and I feel my energy lift to a new motion of change. How do I feel being totally in control of my own life, health, being? Better and better, with a little help from my friends (family) of all kinds! So this is what my cells have been saying to me on my internal satellite radio...

Be the Clean Air You Want to Breathe

Disturbances In The Atmosphere - Storms
How is the weather where you are? Is it clear and sunny? Perhaps it is cloudy. Or is today a stormy day where you live? How can we tell if it is a stormy day? What conditions or clues can we look for? What is a storm?

A storm is a temporary disturbance in the atmosphere. Storms are transient, meaning that they generally do not stay in one location for very long. They move with the flow of air
KidsGeo

I read a NY Times review of a new, first novel by a “young M.D. turned M.F.A.” – Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, and somewhere in the review is this line, “No, this is not chick lit.” Hmm. The novel’s interweaving themes of this fussy 51-year-old psychiatrist whose Argentine wife, he believes, has been taken and replaced by an exact replica, seem to me one more wonderful example of how we are, collectively, creating new images of ourselves as human beings not so fixed as characters of flesh and blood (only the matter of us), with only a certain barometer of feelings, emotions, and actions or reactions in the dynamic interplay of life as we have known it. I haven’t read this novel, but I sure do love these twists of turns of our ways of creating these images of ourselves.

What do these twists and turns really mean to us as an “evolving mind,” and thinking human beings? Thinking and speaking are the two senses that primarily distinguish us from other life forms on Earth, aren’t they? Reading this review gave me one more clue as to how I have lived this belief in separation – i.e., competing mostly with my own old thoughts that jump up and use my thinking energy in ways that don’t feel as productive as they might if I changed them. This belief shows up everywhere in the world as I observe it. This is the classic “conflict of interest” model, which begins within my own mind! Still, at times, living this belief that I am a spectator of life, i.e., that if I show up, do what I’m told, encourage, support, all will “fall into place.” What an amazing revelation. Lately I have been thinking a lot about “atmospherical disturbances,” so when I came upon this review, I laughed out loud. Mine have been certain disturbances in my energy fields that have gotten my attention, if not seriously disturbed my function and overall feelings. I’ve been getting irritated easily, and finding myself impatient with explanations at times, wanting to hurry people up, to move on. I laugh at this mostly, because I have learned enough Spiritual Philosophy to recognize the “game” in this, the charades of myself that I am making myself aware of. I’ve been thinking of what I am creating as my life – as I listen to others’ joys and sorrows, as I feel the pull and tug and recession of energies I interact with, and as I am more conscious of my own constantly changing frequencies of communication. What call-to-action am I hearing? Simply to love, to think with love always and forever, as I do anything? As I’ve been reading Spirit Consciousness again, I have been dwelling on a few paragraphs in which Kathy describes the growth of the thinking mind into the loving emotions:

“The growth of the thinking mind into the loving emotions becomes a dance, two steps forward and one step back as the loving emotional self dances to and fro to capture the thinking mind’s attention and the thinking mind flows right along the stream of fear thinking as it barters for attention and fame as the “power of love” by using old thought patterns of manipulation and seduction that it refuses to release.” (pp. 69-70)

When we use an external focus of manipulation and seduction to live as an energy human being in a physical world, we do not recognize that we are an Intelligent Design of Spirit Consciousness! Kathy and I were talking about responses people have shared from their doctors or health care providers – their sometimes lack of interest or dismissal when a patient actually begins to heal using some way other than what they deem is the “right” (only) way. I thought about this and realized, again, when medical providers get irritated when someone brings up something they think is ridiculous, this is the same pattern I live when I feel impatient and want to “hurry someone up.” I’m closing my mind to more “fresh air,” to the breathing that feels so good as if on a mountain (though not too thin!), and sticking to the tunnel with the grind and blast and whine of machines and slow going that accompanies such a project.

I am no replica of myself, as the fussy psychiatrist in the debut novel tries to figure out through his scientific means. He is trying to use the available science to validate his feelings. I am no replica, yet as I live I create images of myself with each thought and action, and as I create memories, these memories haunt the corridors of my mind, or they drift easily, making their way in their unique chemical stream, adding their own combinations to the Me I am as I create. As I become the cloud of disturbance (the Pigpen in the neighborhood), I’m feeding on what wants to become old baggage, debris, decomposition (compost), rather than seeking fresh nourishment, building productively on what was, and is as I feed it. This doesn’t affect just Me! This dance Kathy Oddenino describes in the above quote suddenly comes home to my thinking mind in a new way. The love in me agrees to do this dance, to help this impatient mind laugh and trust that it is indeed the vehicle through which I create daily. The guide that has the deepest trust, the maestro of the music is the Spirit within, always loving, saying, Just love, feel the music!

What a beautiful gift it is to begin to appreciate all that makes up a mind, and a Trinity of Consciousness. I remember that the energy of all knows itself, and patiently urges me, as a mind, to acknowledge this truth – there is no impatience within the spirit, only love, and the Ethical Value of integrity of Intelligent Design, which always supports love, change, and the vistas that open to insight, whether microcosm or macrocosm. The dance goes on. Just pump up the volume, and invite others to dance with you!

Window-Boxes

Ever heard of Joseph Cornell? He was an American artist and sculptor, also filmmaker, born in December (1903) and died in December (1972). Joseph Cornell and I have a few things in common: he loved assembling bits and pieces of things into sometimes surprising collections. He liked the “evocation of nostalgia,” and though he admired the work of Surrealists like Max Ernst and Rene Magritte (as I do, in a certain way), he said he only wished to make “white magic” with his art and not “black magic.” Cornell loved birds, starlets, and certain great dancers of 19th century ballet. He was shy and sensitive to the poetic quality of dreams. His brother was born with cerebral palsy, and Cornell took care of his brother until his brother died in 1965. Towards the end of his career his art was widely recognized, and some admirers sought him out. One of them contacted his sister and their efforts kept his work from being lost.

I thought of Joseph Cornell again when I came across The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin’s blog site, and read about her love of book-making and her current project of making a book, inspired by J.M. Barrie’s Boy Castaways. This led to a link to Sloane Crosley’s blog site about her book, I Was Told There’d Be Cake. She’s an uncommon personality too, funny, quirky (as “they” say), and loves to “assemblage” too. What great fun it is to follow these streams of interest in a mind. Anyone coming across mine may visit theirs in the same way I’ve followed this trail of crumbs, or lit-up stars to make a constellation. This is another way I appreciate what memory means to a mind. When I wrote my book, Sensing Infinity: Finding the Love of My Life, it was a collection of sorts to me, a compilation of experiences, thoughts, images that had to be assembled together in juxtaposition that reflected the balancing of my own sensory exploration over and through time. I’m not so good with glue. These are my little window-boxes made of words, window-views, rooms with views, plexi-glass, sculpture, aerial flights, deep dives complete with heavy metal, shiny brass locks and chains, seaweed, and the sparkle of salt and sand on skin, seashells half-buried and sneaking a peek as the tides turn them. As Magritte wrote, Without inspiration thought becomes mechanical, and Spiritual Philosophy was and is my invitation to turn what was my "dark matter," or "black magic" into "white magic." There is nothing to fear - even that little flutter of surprise that can come from an adrenalin rush when you almost run your car off of the road and gravel sprays from your wheels is a cellular revival that invites so much more.

SHARE A BITE-SIZED MORSEL OF CAKE
“Nuptials. Sounds like something you get a case of. See: I felt a case of the nuptials coming on so I had a full-body fiancé.”
“In third grade I had to make a diorama about the Inuit. I showed up to school with a Plexiglas case that housed an igloo made from nail-filed sugar cubes and a battery-powered fan that created dry ice. It was difficult to claim I had created a functioning arctic biosphere on my own, given that long division was a struggle.” Sloane C

Rene Magritte, from Secret Affinities, Institute for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, 1976.