Aligning and Harmonizing with “The Basics”

Even though Jim had been energizing designs of “New Songs, New Stories” and “A Completely Different Reality,” he also had other emphases in motion from earlier times—especially golf achievements and more basic understandings of Western music. Then last month (later August), after he had achieved a fairly consistent level of skillfulness on the golf course, he experienced a physical situation that involved both of us.

Rather than going into the details of what happened using cultural thought patterns, I‘m choosing to write about it from within the reality I am amidst now and my perspectives from there. What I See is that Jim‘s body—as an integrous, intelligent energy form amidst the basics of divinity overall and the basics of the natural world—brought forth a wisely chosen event in which Jim was somewhat disabled for a while. And during that time, we both often sought divine guidance in terms of how to think about what was happening, and what to do and not-do. Being together this way, we each cherished some of the richest days we have ever experienced as a dyad.

One result of Jim‘s reflections is that he decided to withdraw all his attention from golf and sports in general—as a participant, spectator, or Witness. He concluded that to go any further with increasing his golf skill level would require more than he wanted to put into the process … he thought that if he wanted to play the game sometime in the future he would be able to feel good about his abilities and performance. In other words he interpreted his body telling him, “Enough is enough.“

Since sports and athletic prowess had been huge significances throughout Jim‘s Life, starting in his growing-up home and their family‘s involvement with the community, his purposeful withdrawal from all aspects of competition shifted his whole psyche—with dramatic consequences from the start. He also removed the complexities of cultural designs he had used around being a separate individual.

All of these developments further magnified my Understandings about the uniqueness of each of us, and the various components of an individual‘s psychic structure. I could clearly See that while I had been intent on aligning all parts of my Being a steady step at a time into and within A Completely Different Reality, Jim had had a mixture of realities in motion. And his physical disablement obviously provided the motivation for him to make some big changes!

During the process I became even clearer about the part I Am playing as a wholistic, Liberated Being including an intelligent-wise body organism, with various and flexible connections to divinity and with my personal God that is a portion of overall divinity.

At one point I was guided to imaginatively take the top portion of my previous “Beyond Sticky Webs” dream/vision—where each of us is an integrated, wholistic, illuminated Self, who is now freed from all the entrapments of cultural obligations and responsibilities and from our own personal patterns—and to mentally fill the whole picture frame with it. What I experientially Understood is that “more is less,” that is, the larger Self I Am in a basic sense, the less “individual” I Am in ways I had learned for a cultural identity. Playing my part now as a spirit-being human is to encourage others to step into their own basic grandeur in Oneness terms.

Starting with my writings in early 1999, I have been describing an expanding progression of Me and my identity, where now I know myself to Be an integral part of divinity and the Earth system, like a significant dot amongst thousands of other significant dots, where there are potential flexible and moving energy connections with other individuals, both with physical bodies and without them. I know that all of my writings have been collaborations with other aspects of Oneness, where I have played my part as an Essential I/ spirit-being and body organism in this time/space reality as an individualized portion of Oneness. Along with my evolving identity, my Understanding of personal power has also evolved.

Jim has Realized that what he is really enthused about energizing for his Life in the present is to express basic divinity overall and especially musically—uncomplicated Divine Love, Divine Trust, Oneness, and Joy. From there one thing led to another, where together we went through a delightful co-creative process online of connecting with distributors of crystal bowls in the U.S. Southwest, buying a set of 12 that were harmoniously tuned with each other. At the start we decided we would both use them for healing/healthing activities; additionally, Jim would use them for some of his forthcoming musical compositions, and I would personally use them to explore and have fun. Jim also purchased an E minor wooden flute.

Crystals have been meaningful in Jim and my Lives in the past. In the early 1980s when we lived in the Sierra mountain foothills of northern CA, our delightful cat, Minute, would frequently go to the top of the back of the couch, bat the crystals that we had hung in south-facing windows there, and then jump down to chase the dancing sunbeams around the room. In our Lives today, we have the same two crystals hung in south-facing windows, and twice a year they dance on the ceiling and walls of the large expanse called “the great room.” And when I was seeking for a core symbol of my psychic structure, where I no longer needed any protections, what inwardly emerged was a beautiful, large fluid crystal to replace any of the steel core that remained, which I had given myself during difficult years with my father in my middle teens. Then recently Jim was able to achieve some healing and healthing when he immersed himself in Steven Halpern‘s “Crystal Suite” CD, which my body had also loved for many years.

For most of a couple of days last month Jim lay on a chaise lounge on our covered deck amidst the natural world here on Harmony Hill, using his CD player with earphones to wash his body and himself with gorgeous classical music that we have in our music collection. I think it definitely helped him!

At one point I mentally associated to 1975 when we left the accelerating world of money-making and money-spending in southern California, and we turned in another direction, taking our Lives into our own hands when we moved to the Sierra foothills in northern California. In some ways this change of direction we are making in 2011 is similar because portions of our Lives will certainly be different. We will still live in the same home and locale with this directional shift, but our experiences will be emerging from different emphases.

During this large-scale reconstruction, one day during meditation I experienced an internal energy structure collapsing, which I could both inwardly feel and See, where the energies were being freed to move on. One association with some of the collapsing structure was to the emphasis I made in my early 20s: I emphatically stated that when I got to the end of my life, I wanted to be able to look back and have no regrets. Well, after the completion of Jim and my first collaborative script together on our 40th wedding anniversary last October 30th and I looked back as a wholistic Being, I felt I had satisfactorily and successfully completed that story.

I also intuitively knew that part of the collapsing inner structure came from last October 30th on our 40th wedding anniversary, when Jim and I completed our first collaborative script with one another and started a fresh adventure the next day. At the time we dissolved all of our previous design connections. For me this meant no longer Being immersed in the River of Love, either individually or as a dyad … and so I really opened things up as I had been divinely guided to do for years. One result has been that how I would describe my Life currently is that the river of love—which I believe connects us all and is the Source of Life—is able to flow freely throughout all levels and layers of my Being. I don‘t have to go anywhere or do anything. I don‘t have to Be immersed in it as I was before—it just is, it is a basic. It can now flow freely and unencumbered.

Since starting our New Adventure last October 31st (2010), I even more clearly Saw how some of Jim and my personal designs had obviously conflicted with each other, and we had both done the best we could to be as harmonious as possible with one another. But what finally dawned on me was that with those conflicting energies, we just made it worse by trying to be harmonious because that put each of us freshly and automatically into energy connections with the other one. So what I did was to take all my energies back from those types of patterns with their connections, and instead set forth a design that if from my individual choices there was a natural connection with Jim and others with their choices, all well and good, If not, in energy terms we would miss one another. Result? It has played out beautifully for both of us!

In the present regarding the purchase of the 12 harmonized crystal bowls, I could See that there was a convergence taking place of some of Jim and my past-present personal interests—mine in primal processes, the basics of divinity and the basics of the natural world; and Jim‘s immersions into the depths of music and their harmonics. We both think that sound and vibrations are a basic of this system and primal to our body organisms. So we are clearing our round slate coffee table that sits in front of the curved couch and a comfortable distance from the fireplace, and we will be placing the bowls on it when they arrive, as a welcome addition to our living room area. It seems that finally Jim and I are both at a place individually where we can naturally harmonize even more wholistically with each other now.

More connections to the past were also emerging to my conscious awareness. Twelve plus years ago Jim experienced a crises of the spirit we wrote about in our book, God‘s River of Love. In the snapshot “Jim‘s Odyssey” he talked about not being able to correlate what he knew about himself as a spirit-being in an uncultured environment with how to translate that harmoniously into his Jim Life. And in “Caught Between the Worlds” he said things were better, but he was still caught between the worlds of the basic spirit-being dimension and the current-day cultural time/space reality.

With the purchase of the crystal bowls and his choices to remove all competition and cultural separations from his Life, Jim has felt like he has finally achieved what he had been seeking all his Jim-Life … and the other day he told me while we were making our lunches, “I can finally say I Love my Life now!” He also says he has completely stripped himself of cultural designs with which he learned to be strong, and now he needs to build his strength (and identity) afresh as the essence of himself.

For months I‘ve been in a Culmination Time, being open to what emerges from my past emphases, studies, and inputs from elsewhere. Jim has recently suggested that I complete my student role. I smiled when I heard him because I‘ve thought of myself as a student most of my Life, currently speculating that possibly I should emphasize and put even more weight into explorer and adventurer designs in this Completely Different Reality. It seems that the inner voice that stated it needed a vacation last spring has also provided energy input for our personal and dyadic choices now.

In the present/future I‘m very interested in more explorations with the feedback loop—from Selector/Chooser, Energy Originator, Witness, Experiencer, and Evaluator positions—in relationship with others, in invisible and visible terms.

One day during this directional change process, with tears in my eyes I thought back to that afternoon in 1975 on the beach in Tobago when tears were flowing then as I told Jim I was homesick, sick about our country and what was happening to it, as I was engulfed with the realization it was the land of my birth … I loved it and its people. I said I had to go back and somehow play my part, to do what I could, whatever that meant. At the time, Jim said he too had to go back and figure out how to create a different Life. My evaluation at this time is that we have both achieved those goals—and we‘ve each had a lot to do to get here!

Then from more recent times, out of a dream event in mid 2006 I Lovingly and slowly painted a mixed media picture of a new home Jim and I bought that has complemented and coexisted as an imaginary one to the physical home we live in now. The unfurnished imaginary home was/is amidst a natural world environment where really big dreams can be realized. For five years now this picture has sat on an easel atop the dresser in our bedroom. Again I feel that multiple emphases from the past have been emerging and intermingling in the present.

One of Jim‘s visions and follow-throughs in physical terms is manifesting in our front yard today, where the fruit trees we planted have matured and we are daily eating fabulous peaches in our morning fruit compote, while more peaches are ripening on another tree … and pears, pear-apples, and apples are also ripening. Last month the Cox Orange Pippin apples Jim picked were delicious. He is frequently exclaiming, “We are going to have a lot of fruit this year!”

And so I close for now with Namasté and Unfettered Love from both of us, J.

The Land of Our Births, September 2011

Sometime last spring when I was half way through the DVD series around Frenchman Alexis de Touqueville‘s observations about the U.S. during his visit here in 1831 and 1832, from which he later wrote Democracy in America, I heard an inner voice I Trust say, “I need a vacation.” The warmer season was approaching, and so I began to methodically shut down what I had in motion, neatly stacking up materials I thought I would return to in the later fall or winter. Then one day Jim came into my personal room during this process, observing that he thought it would be good for me to get some of those piles out of my daily environment, and he would be happy to help me take them downstairs to the file cabinet he had moved there when he brought an electronic piano into his personal room. He added that he‘d be happy to bring materials back up if I wanted them later in the year. Since I agreed with his suggestions, downstairs they went.

Then I crafted and painted the clay pot of safety and peace I talked about earlier, that is now thumb-tacked on the door to my personal room—and in my imagination it‘s growing! After that I went through all my art materials to update myself on what I have, deciding (again at Jim‘s suggestion) to get a lovely wooden, portable tabletop easel. My first picture using it was of a chickadee, a tribute to an indigenous spirit-being male I greatly admire. The painting style I‘m currently using has many aspects of what I‘ve interpreted in my studies over the years of Japanese and Chinese visual expressions, which come from their Zen, other Buddhist, and Taoist belief structures.

A big emphasis for these past few months during my “vacation” has been to Go Direct, repeatedly given as divine guidance. This has meant to use my invisible inner Choice Selector from a position of Oneness and merge with what I want to Understand.

Moving to the immediate present. After I recently reread my website manuscript Within the River of Love, Translations and Applications, and then the subsequent blogs, I Realized I had already interwoven many perspectives about “The Land of Our Births.” Central to my perspectives is that We the People of the United States of America have now taken the energy designs and patterns that were set forth from the beginning of our nation and have played them out to their logical conclusions. From my point of view, that‘s what the spirit-being experiment for the past thousands of years has been all about, and what our United States of America experiment within the larger experiment has been all about. And now each of us as an individual has the opportunity to stand back in his or her Life, deciding and choosing which I, which matrix, which wavelength—and then effectively implementing their decisions. Will we choose, individually and together, to craft A New American Dream?

We the People

While immersed in The Teaching Company‘s CD series, “Touqueville and the American Experiment” about democracy in the United States, I carefully read the recent series of three articles in the New York Times by Ian Urbina about the extraction of natural gas called “hydrofracking.” Within them, there was a highlighting of that process and procedure in Pennsylvania, a state where both my daughter and granddaughter live … and my expanding awarenesses struck close to the bone. I also listened carefully to Diane Rehm‘s NPR discussion on 3/1/11 about the first New York Times‘ article on this subject, concluding that to my mind the Health of the people in Pennsylvania goes far beyond limited conversations about free enterprise and Constitutional rights.

The following are my cullings from the three New York Times “hydrofracking” articles and what I heard on Diane Rehm‘s NPR program:

Setting the stage to start with. Some environmentalists say using natural gas will help slow climate change because it burns more cleanly than coal or oil; lawmakers hail the gas as a source of jobs; and it‘s said to be a way to wean the U.S. from its dependency on other countries for oil.

Now to the processes of the relatively new drilling method called “hydrofracking.” Huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and potent chemicals, are injected at high pressures underground to break up rock formations and release the gas. I read that one well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene, and naturally occurring radioactive elements like radium from underground—which combine with the original elements in the hydrofracking process itself.

From thousands of internal documents—many of which were never reported—a picture emerges that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood. It‘s a complex story of wastewater from the hydrofracking process sometimes being hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it, and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water. Radioactivity is said to be at levels higher than previously known. Federal and state regulators are allowing most sewage treatment plants that accept drilling waste to not test for radioactivity.

I read further that many E.P.A. scientists are alarmed, warning that drilling waste is a threat to drinking water in PA. And I add, this situation appears to be statewide.

Currently, there are said to be roughly 71,000 active gas wells in PA and thousands more are planned, while regulations have not kept pace with the natural gas industry‘s expansion of production and drilling. Since federal and state regulations are complex, I urge people to read the three articles themselves for more clarity. As I understand it, the natural gas industry overall has exemptions from federal environmental laws that regulate most other heavy industries, laws that were written to protect air and drinking water from radioactive and hazardous chemicals. (Adding another piece to the picture, in terms of what state and federal regulations there are and may be, with governments needing to trim budgets, it doesn‘t seem there will be many inspectors or regulators to do the job.)

In PA, some well operators are selling their wastes to communities that spread it on roads for de-icing in winter and dust suppression in summer. Then when ice melts or rain falls, the waste can run off roads and end up in the drinking supply.

Gas has seeped into underground drinking water supplies in at least five states, including PA; and air pollution caused by natural gas is said to be a growing threat, too.

Some dangers of this toxic wastewater are its potential to contaminate drinking water and/or enter the food chain through fish or farming. As I understand it, once radium enters a person‘s body by eating, drinking, or breathing, it can cause cancer and other health problems. Adding to that, what about the mix of toxic chemicals people are also being exposed to and possibly ingesting?

More of my background. In the early 1960s, while reading books by Henry David Thoreau and many other writers, I extensively studied “freedom” and its various applications, concluding at the time that the way freedom is used by some people gets into license (freedom to do as one wishes in excessive ways); and that an individual‘s American Constitutional rights need to be limited when their use harmfully affects another person. That way of thinking still makes sense to me.

So, even though cash-strapped property owners in today‘s reality have the lawful right to sell or lease their underground mineral resources, if their personal actions adversely affect the Health of others, have these landowners abused their Constitutional personal rights? I think they have. In addition to U.S. Constitutional laws, there seems to me to be Common Sense perspectives that go beyond more narrow definitions of “rights.”

And what about businesses and business people who are primarily focused upon the security of their jobs and company profits, in an era where some people are energizing, “Greed is good”? As I‘ve been digesting the recent New York Times articles, I think there has been and is a lot of narrow self-interests, including distortion of the facts, threats, and in some cases downright lying taking place.

In my blog posting of “Enough is Enough” on 11/6/10, I gave myself room to personally expand without being held back by ongoing round-robin cultural events. And now, even though I Am in A Completely Different Reality, I Am also a mother, grandmother—and U.S. citizen. Somehow an internal tipping point took place for me as a wholistic Being, when amidst the context of all the dynamic global events that are happening, I read the three New York Times hydrofracking articles. I was alarmed! … and decided to productively use my emotional energies to write this essay, post it as a blog, and let it all go.

In addition to Seeing my daughter and granddaughter as spirit-being humans with their own agendas, I passionately care about the well-being and health of my family, including my American family! And from my point of view, many spirit-being humans in today‘s matrixes, who I believe are also basically part of a dimension of divine Oneness, are energizing limited and selfish-centered patterns that are harmful to others. Yes, as I stated earlier, this current-day hydrofracking reality—called this century‘s Gold Rush by some—is close to the bone.

To my way of thinking, it‘s a matter of power, personal power. I think a major significance of Facebook and the uprisings in the Middle East, North Africa, and protests here in the United States, is an emerging declaration of I Am Important, and I Am demanding to have a voice in my Life!

But currently here in the U.S., large amounts of money are being used by individuals and groups for the purpose of capturing people‘s minds and votes. So how free are people really when they are being deluged with sophisticated advertising techniques and propaganda? Who can one trust in this increasingly busy world?

Of course we need sources for the energy we use here in the United States for our industrial system and Lives. Yes, we are dependent on Middle East and other countries for large portions of our needed energy supplies. But does this also mean that hydrofracking for natural gas here in the U.S. is the answer ? I don‘t think so. From my point of view that‘s a manipulative, short-sighted solution to some very complex global and national situations.

I believe We the People of the United States now need to have quite basic, intelligent, and comprehensive conversations, that include both Constitutional rights and our individual responsibilities for others too.

Even though I certainly respect each of us spirit-being humans in terms of freedom of choice and playing our parts as individual portions of Oneness, I‘m also obviously dismayed about how some are currently using their personal points of power. Instead, I think each of us has wondrous individual potentials we can now choose to use, when We the People individually and collectively say, “Enough is enough of playing a part and parts in our trouble-making spirit-being experiment”—and instead choose to become what we are individually and collectively capable of Being.

Here‘s to widespread Liberation! J.

Cultural Contexts

Jim and I have now completed all the film-watching we had planned of the Rodgers and Hammerstein‘s Broadway stage musicals that were later made into Hollywood movies. And even though the movies were primarily produced in the 1950s, for me they have represented many of the predominant cultural patterns from the 1940s and 1950s in the United States, before the large-scale cultural upheavals began here in the 1960s and 1970s. (Until 1968 there had been censorship guidelines for the film industry called the Hays Code, that spelled out what was acceptable content for motion pictures produced for a public audience in the United States … and I think the Hays Code directly represented some of the cultural limitation agreements at the time. Then after 1968, a film rating system was introduced.)

During our recent movie-watching process, Jim and I also added a made-for-television Rodgers and Hammerstein production from March 31, 1957—Cinderella, with Julie Andrews in the title role. It was reported to have been seen by over 100 million people in the U.S., fully 60% of the country‘s population at the time. Watching the fairy tale in February 2011 provided a fresh picture of some of the underlying patterns that are part of our Western world and mutual European backgrounds for gender relationships.

In Cinderella, she is a poor but beautiful young woman, while he is a handsome and rich prince—a story line that played out with different versions over and over again in movies I saw on Friday nights with my parents in the later 1930s and most of the 1940s. At a minimum the male needed to be able to support them both because the female had limited options to make much money in those days; and besides, it was her gender role to take care of the home and family. In many of the films, before marriage she was a secretary, store clerk, or struggling actress, and he was a successful businessman.

Jim and I have also completed hearing/seeing two of the three proposed CD/DVD series from The Teaching Company about our American past—America‘s religious history, and its philosophical/intellectual history. Furthermore, we ordered and watched a two-hour film—A More Perfect Union: America Becomes a Nation—based upon the 1787 convention of delegates in Philadelphia, convened to modify or streamline the Articles of Confederation, out of which the Constitution of the United States then emerged. (The film had been officially recognized by the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution as of “exceptional merit.”)

To all of those perspectives I mentally integrated some of what I read in the Prince of Wales‘ recent book, Harmony, A New Way of Looking at Our World. He wrote that from the seventeenth century onward, science was able to view Nature as inanimate, unconscious, and mechanistic. He says the British worldview had become “a mechanistic mindset,” wherein humans were separate and separated from the natural world.

So watching film representations of the men who crafted our country‘s foundation in A More Perfect Union as people amidst their time and context too—inheritors of British traditions, laws, agreements, and worldviews—was illuminating. There was a mutual background of individual rights and the rule of law. I think the combinations of who those individual men were, their industriousness, their educations (including their ongoing self-educations), their mutual beliefs, the economic opportunities available in “the New World,” and numerous other factors combined into a potent mix that has grown and been developed to become what the United States of America is today.

And now, many people in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere, within their historical and current-day contexts, are expressing their desires for more freedom and economic opportunities. At the same time, they don‘t have a whole continent of resources such as the colonists had in the New World. They also don‘t have the backgrounds the American colonists had from the previous European Age of Reason, the European Scientific Revolution, the European Christian religious past, the English Magna Carta of 1215, and subsequent English laws. What people elsewhere do have are their own backgrounds and belief structures—which I think are very wise to be aware of as patterned energies in motion from their past into their present.

One of the things I‘m saying is I believe there is an overall cultural cohesiveness within each era in each geographic location that includes its past … and to my mind they all have had and have value in their own ways. By not using any filters of superiority/inferiority, dualistic opposition, or competition, I can use a lens that Sees the value of us all amidst the contexts we live in today, along with those contexts within which earlier people lived.

In terms of Going Beyond into A Completely Different Reality, I still come back to a perspective I expressed in the essay “Freedom” I blog-posted on 9/23/10—that for me a wholer, fuller freedom is liberation from one‘s culturally conditioned mind. Hence, clearly Understanding one‘s cultural past and present can be used as stepping stones during the process of Liberation. Then, no matter what culture one is amidst, being free and liberated from embedded cultural patterns can open up new and fresh ways of thinking, everywhere. That is, it really can be a more even playing field as each individual spirit-being person who chooses to access a dimension of basic Oneness, achieves her or his vaster and more wholistic potential > > and then keeps on expanding.

With Respect for Each of Us, J.

More Than One Experiment?

While Being amidst a large-scale culmination time this winter, a few weeks ago I began freshly exploring “The Land of Our Births”—the United States of America, starting with its originations—from a perspective of Understanding the various background threads that have made up our nation‘s overall and complex story. Along the way I have been placing that picture in a global context—our country‘s relationship or lack of same with other countries. And beyond that, I have been Seeing the whole thing within what I‘ve called a spirit-being experiment for the past thousands of years, where trouble-causing patterns were energized by spirit-being humans and played out as experiences in individual, group, and national Lives. All together, it has become a dynamic tapestry.

One conclusion that has emerged so far is that not only is it quite likely there has been a vaster spirit-being experiment taking place globally for thousands of years, the United States of America may also be an experiment—that is, its origination and development has been and is an experiment within a bigger experiment, (which is a probability I am currently delving into).

Yes, almost a year ago I did successfully dissolve plans I had for any more studies such as going back into the U.S. historical past and threading out the earlier patterns which have evolved and grown to the present—which was wonderfully freeing at the time! Then as “I” personally evolved and expanded, a few weeks ago inner urgings directed me to get into the two small baskets of materials I had collected about “The Land of Our Births.” They were still cozily stored under my desk upstairs (which I had not taken downstairs yet).

Within the baskets, in addition to many other materials, I discovered one DVD and two CD courses from The Teaching Company that I had previously purchased during their sales, before removing that study from my future plans … all of which I had not seen or heard yet. They included America‘s religious history, its philosophy and intellectual history, and Frenchman Alexis de Touqueville‘s observations about the U.S. during his visit here in 1831 and 1832, from which he later wrote Democracy in America, a two-volume study of the American people and their institutions. When I asked Jim if he was interested in joining me while I watched and heard the DVD and CD courses, he was positive—seeing it as a great finale to many of the studies we had done in earlier years.

At the time when I asked Jim if he was interested in joining me with my U.S. historical focuses, along with still and video photography, he was immersed in his musical interests and studies, focusing on composer Richard Rodgers‘ accomplishments with his two main collaborators, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. He was also bringing in other composers from that era—primarily the first half of the 20th century—like Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin. (Jim is entranced with beautiful melodies and harmonies, and thinks he may eventually like to do his own composing.)

The above people were all connected to stage productions in New York City, from which many Hollywood movies were later made. Therefore, Jim‘s New York stage interests have correlated with my earlier Life in southern California from the later 1930s through most of the 1940s. I have laughingly said that while other families went to church together on Sunday, in those years my family‘s weekly activity was a Friday night double feature at a local movie theater … all of which fed us participants at church and the movie theaters weekly doses of certain cultural patterns at the time. (In those years my parents believed in a remote God “up there” to whom they prayed nightly, and I was free to attend numerous Protestant Sunday schools and churches with various friends.)

My mother especially loved musicals and musical comedies, so over the years I probably saw more than a hundred of them. Anyway, this winter Jim and I have been and are watching many DVDs of earlier movies, such as Kern and Hammerstein‘s Showboat; Rodger‘s and Hart‘s Pal Joey; and films based on some of Rodgers and Hammerstein‘s Broadway productions: Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of Music. Last week we saw State Fair, the only musical Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote directly for film. We both have greatly appreciated Oscar Hammerstein‘s lyrics, starting with Showboat. Oscar described himself as 1/3 realist and 2/3 mystic, and I certainly agree. To my mind, his lyrics often went far beyond poetry and spirituality.

After Jim decided to join with me and my American history DVD/CD studies, he and I began to correlate our evening film-watching with my materials, and it has really worked out well as many elements of our American past have become vibrantly alive nightly. Also, it‘s been very enlightening to See those movie “models-for-life” from my current-day perspectives and who/what I Am today.

A major difference between the plan I had envisioned almost a year ago about studying the multiple patterns that are embedded in our United States‘ past and what I have been doing recently, is its scope and purpose. Even though I‘ve been going through a lot of materials, both during the day and with Jim in the evening, I‘ve been doing it primarily as a personal process, instead of doing it as a pattern study to then write about.

Concurrently, with considerable Compassion and interest I‘ve been following recent events as they have unfolded in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Connecting those events with my American history studies, the original United States of America as we know it today was founded by people with desires for more personal freedom from their previous restrictions along with enhanced economic opportunities. And in the present I have been witnessing people in other parts of the world also seeking more freedom from their previous restrictions along with more economic opportunities too.

What will happen now? Obviously this is a very different world today than the one out of which the United States of America came into existence. As I Understand it, the combined human species within our global industrial matrixes has been using up many of the world‘s natural resources, including clean water and fertile soils. The human population is currently a little over seven billion. And today, we‘re all living on an Earth where there are dramatic climate-change effects manifesting—floods, drought, severe weather, and people who are hungry and homeless. (Nonetheless, I think that trying to feed people and animals with genetically modified food is an unwise choice.)

So how can young people, and people of all ages around the world attain their goals of better Lives in an environment of increasing pollution and diminished/diminishing natural resources? What is a better Life? It seems to me the answers need to come from multitudes of individuals effectively using her or his own point of divine power amidst an expanded dimension of Oneness. And I think that standing back as a liberated spirit-being human amidst any culture in today‘s world can be both an identity and a position anyone anywhere on the globe can choose to use.

With Unlimited Best Wishes To Us All, J.

Growing A Pot of Safety and Peace

During my recent culmination time, when as-a-composite-Being, I Am both liberated and open daily to multiple connections from the past, future, and elsewhere, I‘ve been experiencing Understandings from amidst a completely different reality. At present, a large portion of my emphases is to encourage and be available to what emerges, both invisibly and visibly.

One event that has taken place is that the pot of peace I imaginatively planted and described in my last blog posting—that is, peace that goes far beyond wars and battles—grew in expanded and invisible dimensions before I even got the painting of it started. As I now See people and events, I believe that without feeling safe, there can be no real peace. In Jim and My Lives in the past, so many of our confrontational actions and counteractions took place amidst an environment where neither one of us felt safe-enough within our individual matrixes, so we brought in our protections! That is, when either one of us felt threatened, in various ways we each used defense/offense cultural tactics we had learned.

And now in the present, I Am a Being who is comfortably energizing divine safety along with peace for myself and others, as part of my contributions to the overall current-day spirit-human events. I‘ve Realized that I can truly create a personal core that is both integrous and untouchable, without needing protections, while also horizontally Appreciating others for their positions and perspectives. Of course, if someone‘s sense of safety is built upon dominating and controlling others, and/or feeling superior or inferior, more than likely we won‘t even connect. And more than likely there will also be non-connections with those who are choosing to maintain (and defend) their current sense of identity, their worldviews, and the status quo.

For his part, Jim is even more experientially Realizing there are other ways to experience one‘s strength and personal power than the ways he learned to be a cultural male. And one of Jim and My current focuses is on even more skillful and easier mental/emotional communication processes.

With Best Wishes from A Winter Wonderland of Snow, J