My Bishop used to say, “Choose one path and stay with it if you want to reach the top. Switching pathways only keeps you wandering around the base of the mountain.”

The question hung in my being for two weeks. Have I just been wandering around the base of the mountain? I’ve not stuck with one path. I left the Gnostic Church after being ordained to the priesthood. I did stay with a wisdom teacher for twenty years at which point I felt I’d received all I could from him. Since then I’ve explored many different avenues, each of which could have been a life’s work: various forms of meditation, energy healing, mind/body techniques, front lines in neurological and epigenetic exploration. I’ve explored how hereditary traumas can pass down to later generations. I learned that the egg from which I was first formed was in my mother when she was just an egg in her mother. Have I just been dabbling? I certainly have no material position or platform in the world to show this is who I am and what I do.

I sat in meditation feeling the pain in my body until it called me to the bathtub. The water was not hot enough when I got in and I had to wait for the tank to heat again. I dove into my being with all the tools I’ve learned, Vipassana, Presence Process, tapping, hooponopono, accepting, watching, seeing… My immigrant maternal grandmother’s trauma revealed itself with more fullness than I’d seen up to this point. I felt its impact on my mother, witnessing her familiar characteristics as part of that pattern. I saw in turn how the patterns passed to me, and how I passed it along to my children. I saw anger, resentment, and bitterness. I saw how I carried what didn’t really belong to me but lived and had effect in me nevertheless.

I saw that the patterns and people at whom I pointed my finger were mirrors of myself, and I drew my attention from out to in. By the time the water became hot enough to stay I’d surrendered to my shadow. Metaphorically down on my knees I heard Leonard Cohen, “When they said repent I wondered what they meant.” Now I knew. I was in a state of repentance. I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you, thank you.

I felt I’d just experienced another Baptism (we can have many over the course of the years). I got out of the bath and returned to sitting. With spine erect, hands in meditative mudra, I felt a halo about my whole body. It was a mandala of wholeness made up of all the various studies and practices I’ve learned, all the pathways I’ve only partially taken. Each one was crucial to the whole, none were false starts or errors, and I’d abandoned nothing. Each avenue of exploration contributed to this moment of recognition—I am whole. I allow my life to be what it will be. I am not in error needing to be fixed. I am not sick needing to be healed. All that I’ve loved, hated, been disrupted by, resisted… all are my teachers on this one pathway to the summit of this life.

Whatever you can say about anything, the opposite is also true. We don’t just inhale we also exhale—both parts of breathing constitute the whole.

My sister shows me her Israeli Identity papers. She points to her name in Hebrew letters that fill in the form; then to our parents’ names, then her children’s names. She smiles, her heart swells to be living in a country where the state recognizes her identity as blood lineage. I say, “It gives me the creeps.” We are two of a kind from opposite sides of the whole.

I sit in silence each morning noticing my breath, noticing my thoughts. I experience this life as a mystery that cannot be defined or limited by identity. Whatever you can say about me, whatever I can think about me is only an incomplete restricted frame, a partial construct.  True science is the art of looking and our science has seen, through honest looking, into the mystery that in reality there is no there there. I’ve seen there is also no me here.

In the language of mathematics there are both integral and differential equations. The first breathes in, the second breathes out. The entire cosmos both integrates and differentiates. A star bursts into being radiating outward bright with elemental fire and eventually fades dull into black, sucking in everything around it.

One day I feel a void so empty I can see no reason for being. The next day the scent of pine, the smile of a baby swells my heart to golden light full of meaning.

One administration comes in with a confident stride of hope and a can-do enthusiasm that ignites the feeling of connection to all life. Then comes the attitude of building walls, fear of otherness, turning the equation from expansion to contraction.

I feel the entire cosmos expanding and contracting with the life force that animates this body, this life, and all being. I am that, beyond tribal identities or personal delineations.

The grandpa outside playing with his 18-month-old grandson teaches him, “up and down, up and down”

I glance at a printed article on my table entitled, “Beware of False Dichotomies.” I haven’t read it yet; don't know what it concludes; have no argument with it. I live in a world in which false and true are but two angles of vision divided by one mysterious mind.
 

For over 35 years I’ve had faith that eventually medicine would catch on to true healing. Pharmaceuticals and surgery seemed so heavy handed for such a refined and finely tuned instrument as the physical sentient body. I turned to natural remediation of my chronic ailments, but still, though they went a long way to preserve my body and keep it intact, the deeper healing eluded me.

The word heal comes from the word whole. When interferences, such as pathogens or trauma, disrupt the full and free flow of wholeness within the systems of the body, true health is not achieved.

Chinese healing systems work on the basis that the energy fields, from which the physical ensues, are the true source of healing. Acupuncture has been effective for centuries. But alas not all acupuncturists are masters of their art.

Various energy-healing technologies have been with us since the early 20th Century:

In the 1930s Royal Rife, the inventor of a high intensity microscope, “also reported that a 'beam ray' device of his invention could weaken or destroy the pathogens by energetically exciting destructive resonances in their constituent chemicals. *  Sadly Rife was ahead of his time and his work was controversial.

Hulda Clark—a Canadian naturopath, whose work was popular in the second half of last century, claimed that all disease was caused by parasites. She invented a “Zapper” which delivers electrical currents at various frequencies that supposedly kill off corresponding parasites.

In the 1980s I was shown a computerized technology that reads the body’s vibrational fields and supposedly delivers improved vibrations to the faulty unhealthful ones.

Further developments in energy medicine have become more refined.
We are now at the dawn of the quantum age, beginning to effectively access information distortions in the human body field. And the world of medicine is perhaps more accepting of alternative approaches.

The most recent machine I’ve experienced is NES which is an acronym for Nutri-Energetics Systems. This modality is based on new understanding of the information and energy that make up the body field.

As I was in the process of receiving this healing modality, taking liquid drops coded by the NES technology, I had an “aha” moment—this is not frequency, this is information.

In the 1980s I practiced a form of bodywork called Trager, named for its founder, Milton Trager. Though it looked like massage, I was actually delivering information. I’d bring myself into a “lightness of being” state and then communicate that to the client. Dr. Trager said, “it’s contagious, your client will only catch it from you if you have it yourself.”

Infoceuticals work similarly. The computer program reads my body hologram and determines what aspects in my body field are struggling, because of misinformation, or a lack of flow. A certain type of water is encoded with the “lighter-freer-flowing” information my body field calls for (because the body is always reaching toward homeostasis).

The drops then imprint the body field, giving it information to correct flow, where it has been stultified or compromised. This invisible stimulus through the quantum field is more effective than trying to “fix” the physical or chemical levels, because it addresses the source of the disruption and stimulates the body’s response.

This takes medicine further conceptually, because it gets to the underlying causes of disease rather than just attempt to alleviate symptoms. It corrects the human body field so that it works according to its original blueprint.

So how is it affecting me? A digestive disturbance that for more than 35 years has fluctuated between chronic and acute is now settling and my overall digestive system feel stronger. The fallout from gut issues, Rheumatoid Arthritis, is subsiding. I have more sustained energy, a clearer mind, and most of all a desire to continue living.

Spoiler alert: Though the above statement was true after just two treatments, I had to go out of town for a month, unable to continue treatment. I experienced a little backslide (though I’m still much better than I was). For anyone wanting to go into this healing modality, I recommend making the commitment and staying the course.

You can find out more about NES Health from Luis Constantin MD, at https://heartandbiofield.com/


*Wikipedia

I’m trying to feel forgiveness father, for they know not what they do. But these minds, so far from the real, they have no vision beyond the horizon of their own stories and beliefs. They do not have eyes to see the world is not flat; they only see top or bottom, left or right. They cannot see the content of a man’s character. And I feel numb under a full moon that seems to cast more shadows than light.
 
Jesus, you said, "Perhaps people think that I have come to cast peace upon the world. They do not know that I have come to cast conflicts upon the earth: fire, sword, war. For there will be five in a house: there'll be three against two and two against three, father against son and son against father, and they will stand alone." *

I feel so alone now, for my house is as you said, no common comprehension, thrown asunder by un-common “facts” claiming blatant untruth. What can possibly be true on this babel, this globe where unseeing prevails and words are flung like pinballs, bouncing and crashing, never making real contact?

"I have cast fire upon the world, and look, I'm guarding it until it blazes."* I trust that you are guarding the world, here is the blaze you have set upon it. I feel like Joan of Arc with the flames following her “as she went riding in the dark.”†
 
Is truth draining from the world in favor of delusion, born of manipulated statistics, foreign objects hurling insults and blame. There is a hut in the forest in my heart calling me away from words. Inviting me to commune with the trees and the bears, and all that does not lie.
 
Tonight Leonard, my pen turns to fog under the silver moon. I can’t find it in me to say a little more and I feel to go with you where love goes on and on.

*Gospel of Thomas
†Leonard Cohen

The Universe provided me with this great house. I’ll trust the Universe to help me decide. I’m looking for signs from the Universe to let me know which job I should take.
It seems our current vernacular has substituted Universe for God, since God has become persona-non-grate for all the damage he’s done to our fragile psyches – condemning us to hell and damnation, commanding us to do this that and the other, and generally offering only conditional love. The Universe is much more benign than that judging old white guy who sits oh so high above us.

According to B. Alan Wallace*, science is now comprehending that there is not a single uni-verse which we can map and within which we all fit – no matter how unfit we may seem to that other old bearded man in the sky. The math is showing that without the observer, “I”, there is no time. One might say that before “I” there is only Tao – the still unbornness that is before the beginning. From the primordial timeless no-thing we each come into being, a universe unto ourselves, joining other universes and entangling with them.

I’ve been leaning into this idea that we can ask, pray, intend, and even command the great mystery to oblige our will. I come across many quotes pointing to this. From Goethe’s, “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” To Joe Dispenza, “… when you as a personality embrace new thoughts, actions, and feelings, you will inevitably create a new personal reality in your future.” From prosperity pundits like Napoleon Hill in his 1937 book, Think and Grow Rich, “You are the master of your destiny. You can influence, direct and control your own environment. You can make your life what you want it to be.” To St. Matthew, “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”

So how does that actually work? Am I appealing to a benevolent entity who will grant my wish if I’m faithful enough or true enough or focused enough? I have an image from a science exhibit I once saw attempting to explain Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. There was a large circular fabric printed with a grid and stretched tight like a drum. The docent placed a weighted metal ball on the fabric which pressed down on it, modulating the grid, demonstrating how Earth bends the universe toward its gravitational pull.

So if each of us is a universe then each of us has that capacity to pull the tapestry of our universe toward our gravitational weight. And what is that weight? Well, in the beginning is the word, the logos, the thought. Ah, there’s the rub. Have you ever noticed your thoughts? They go all over the place.

So if the mystery readily bends to the weight of our thoughts, and our thoughts are randomly bouncing this way and that, like a pinball affected by anything it happens to bump up against – a surly comment from a passerby, a triggered reactionary emotion, and myriad other obstacles that the mind runs into – what’s the mystery to do? Like that fabric at the science exhibit, it is pliable and responds to the weight, the gravitational pull of thought. You get it? The universes, which are made up of each of our beings respond to every one of those pinball collisions accordingly, ding, ding, ding.

Here is another quote from Goethe: “We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”

Here is the real reason to become mindful, focused and equanimous. To bring our mind to the center of that fabric where there is only one metal ball, bearing down and bending the grid to its weight. So that the mystery formerly known as God can manifest us as a true and singular glorious expression of life.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyA6zTc6W5I

With all the intense oppositional conviction in the media about who's right and what's wrong this really resonated for me.

From a new translation of Tao Te Ching by Victor H. Mair based on the recently discovered Ma-Wang-Tui manuscripts. 

 64(20)
Between "yes sir" and "certainly not!"
how much difference is there?
Between beauty and ugliness,
how great is the distinction?

He whom others fear,
likewise cannot but fear others.

How confusing,
there is no end to it all!

Joyful are the masses,
as though feasting after the great sacrifice of oxen,
or mounting a terrace in spring.

Motionless am I
without any sign,
as a baby that has yet to gurgle
How dejected
as though having nowhere to return.

The masses all have more than enough;
I alone am bereft.

I have the heart of a fool.
How muddled!

The ordinary man is luminously clear,
I alone seem confused.
The ordinary man is searchingly exact,
I alone am vague and uncertain.

How nebulous!
as the ocean;
How blurred!
as though without boundary.

The masses all have a purpose,
I alone am stubborn and uncouth.

I desire to be uniquely different from others
by honoring the mother who nourishes.

Ready
Life wants to be fashioned through us. If we are made in the image of God—that which is essentially creative—we are also creative. We need to be prepared for when the force of becoming has something to become. A writer must have her pen and paper, her laptop or tablet, always available. A painter needs a blank canvas, paints, charcoal, and brushes. A musician needs to have at the ready a keyboard, a guitar, a recording device. An accountant needs his calculator. A mother needs her wits, humor, and patience. These are the possessions your soul requires for your work here in the body. This is a material world, manifesting through materiality.

Fire
An idea comes like a struck match, a spark—an inkling, a color, a note, a title. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.                         Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!
                                                              Goethe
Let the fire burn through you and your instruments, the possessions of your soul. Let it brighten your life and the lives around you.
         Keep walking though there is no place to get to.
         Move within but don’t move the way fear makes you move.
                                                                       Rumi

Aim
Now there is light and you can see where you are going. The voice has begun to speak, keep listening; The rhythm is in motion and taking hold of your feet, keep dancing; The palette emerges on the canvas, push those colors. They speak to you of their desire to be. They show you where you are going, keep following. A genius, an idea has taken aim and you are the fire it’s shooting through. Let the creative force use you.

What of free will? What of Good and evil (what if the idea that wants to come into being is destructive)? What of personal character—what about me? You can choose to allow the good, the beautiful to move through you. You can choose to snuff the bad, the harmful, and the ugly. Don’t move the way fear makes you move.

There was a grandfather teaching his grandson. “There are two wolves who live within me,” he told the boy, “and they are at war with each other. A white wolf moves toward helpfulness, beauty, lovingkindness and light. A dark wolf snarls with sharp teeth, impatience, cruelty, meanness, and death.”

“Which one wins the war,” the grandson asks. “The one that I feed,” says the grandfather.

P.S. Two days after I originally posted this I found out there are a few books of this same title. I wasn't just remembering a dream. There's a marketing book by Michael Masterson, a novel about Skinheads by Kevin Trigg, The Bill Cook Story: Ready, Fire, Aim by Bob Hammel and Ready, Fire, Aim: the Mainfreight Story by Keith Davies. I guess it's an idea shared by several.

I wasn’t Jesus today, but I may have put a couple stitches into the hem of the sleeve of St. Francis.

When I was a little child I had a vision. My family had returned to the States from Israel where I’d been born. We were seemingly a regular Jewish American family. Yet that afternoon, as I walked alone on the sidewalk by our tract house in the San Fernando Valley I asked myself, “how should I live this life?”

The answer came, try to live as much like Jesus as you can. It seemed a normal interior dialog to me. Only when I was much older did I realize it might have been a bit unusual. I mean, comparatively speaking. I’ve remembered and forgotten throughout my life that sage advice from who knows who, about how to live.

Today I went to the bank to consult with their loan counselor about consolidating my rapidly overwhelming debt. Due to family circumstances and my own lack of savvy with money I began to feel that I was getting into dangerous territory vis-à-vis credit cards.

I had a pleasant exchange with the loan counselor who was sympathetic personally but only had a slim piece of temporary help. I told her I’d have to sleep on it. That was always my father’s solution when confronted with something that was baffling and needed a right decision.  

I left the bank and decided to walk next door to see a friend who works in the doctor's office of Family Practice. We chatted about our problems in her quiet cubicle—I would not want to exchange mine for hers—and then a patient came to her desk with a red plastic card that indicated something she needed to do on the computer for him. So I said goodbye and gave her a hug.

When I turned around, the gentleman, a stranger to me, humorously had his arms out waiting for his hug. We all three chuckled. For a brief instant I felt the instinct to give him a hug. And then the thought rushed in, he’s at the doctor, maybe he has something contagious, I don’t want his problems either. That all came in the flash of a smile, and I departed.

Later, as I drove home I realized that refraining from extending a universal loving hug to that man was not what Jesus would have done. He would have hugged the man even if he had been a leper with open puss dripping wounds. I didn’t reprimand myself. Only witnessed where I’m falling short of my original mandate.

But before I realized I had not lived up to being like Jesus today I had another moment of Witness. I’d been steeped in the thought of less- than-enough all morning—debt and how to pay it off when all my current income will cover is food, rent, and just barely Yoga class. Perhaps you, dear reader, have also experienced times like this. But for a moment—like clouds clearing and letting the sun shine through—walking into the hardware store to buy a new flapper for my toilet (OK there is a tiny bit of expendable income), I felt I have plenty. I’d scanned my mind to see if I needed to stop at the market and realized I had enough food at home and all I needed money for was to fix the toilet. Truly, like you beloved St. Francis, I have all I need. The shiny new patio chairs were not something I needed to wrap my consciousness around, nor did I have a desire for new clothes, or shoes, or any other sort of material goodies which only really serve to distract my attention from focusing on that which is sacred and holy to my soul’s purpose here on Earth in this life—to try to live as much like Jesus as I can.

Those punch cards never seemed to pose a problem in the past, before radically moneyed lobbyists, super delegates, and the judiciary started messing with the process.

I’ve never been very politicized, nor do I consider myself very well educated in American history. But I do know that people lost their lives and fought for my right to live in a free democracy and the least I can do in remembrance of their sacrifices is to vote.

When voting was sacred, your polling place was well publicized and on election day liquor stores were closed, workers got extra time for lunch break, or let out early. Polling places would stay open late to give everyone a chance to have their say in the democratic process. And when you completed voting they’d give you a sticker on your way out – I Voted – in red, white, and blue. You’d walk around town seeing many people proudly wearing their sticker on lapel, or hat, or sleeve.

Today I went to vote. I noticed that on the list of voters only three or four names per page had been highlighted as having voted. That was after it took me several hours to figure out where to go. My registration card said such and such building. I recalled that several years ago I’d voted at that location and it had taken me quite some time to figure out where it was. Today I went straight to it only to find no flag flying and no activity. I had already gone online, been directed to a Facebook page on which this same building was indicated as my polling place but also had no address. Under comments someone asked, “What is the address of this building?” There was no answer to his comment. I finally found a phone number online and called. I’d expected to have to wait, for certainly a lot of people would be calling, this being election day. But my call was taken immediately, not even a menu to have to get through. The very nice woman said, Oh that’s been changed, it’s now at the Armory – where voting used to take place.

As I drove away from inking in my ballot, on which only one vote mattered to me, the one that will cancel out my friend’s vote, I felt a kind of emptiness. We laughed that our votes would cancel each other out; that was not the cause of my emptiness. The hollowness that struck me was more about the “rite” of voting having become as empty as most church services in which candles are lit, and communion is taken but no true communion with something greater has taken place.

Leaving, walking back to my car I ran into a friend. She had just come from the liquor store where she’d mentioned remembering when liquor stores were closed on election day. The older man at the cash register said, that was to make sure that no one got you drunk and convinced you to vote as they wanted you to. The younger man stocking the candy bars said, why bother voting anyway; it’s all just decided by the super candidates. He seemed to feel that no communion between the voter and the outcome was really possible.

But what if every young person did vote? What if it is still possible to restore the tattered threads of the democracy that our forebears so fiercely believed in, a freedom for which they were willing to die? Are our souls so completely lost to the Wormtongues* of our age? I don’t know the answer. But as is said in the current vernacular, “Just saying…”

* Grima Wormtongue, "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”

“You don’t have $5 to loan me.” He said this more like a statement than a question. He was dragging his legs toward me and looked as beaten a human being as I had been feeling. I heard a funny squeak before his words came out as if he’d been priming the pump to use his vocal cords.

My instant reply was, “No, I’m sorry I don’t.” I had arrived at my old Honda in the parking lot and got in. He stood outside my door, a respectful distance, and just stared. I wondered if he judged that I looked better off than he, so why didn’t I give him $5. I also had the fleeting feeling that he might just be the Christ himself disguised as a beggar.

The truth is my pockets are empty right now and I’m pinching my pennies. His assumed request was easy for me to deny—“you don’t have $5 to loan me.” I could just as easily have replied, yes that is true.

I drove off thinking about how we really do tell the universe what it is we want, and the universe responds accordingly.  I wondered about the beggar’s psyche. Does he believe he is so undeserving, so filled with poverty that he would declare that I would not give him $5, when mostly likely he was hoping I would?

But on further reflection, he didn’t say I would not give it to him (or loan it though I wouldn’t have expected it to be returned). He said, “You don’t have $5 to loan me.”  I think he really was a messenger showing me like a clear mirror, my current situation. If I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror with my hair all tussled, my response would be to reach for a hairbrush.

So here I sit, applying myself toward remedying the predicament of being unable to assist a beggar in need.