Archives

The Oracle Balloons

Doug Marman

Last month, I became a grandfather, when my son and his wife gave birth to twins. A boy and a girl.

There is an interesting story behind this.

About four months ago, a bundle of balloons were bought to our house for the baby shower. As you would expect, most of the balloons lost their lift in a few days. However, two of the balloons kept floating. They were made of Mylar, so they held their helium extremely well. How long they could they last? We kept them around to see.

After a month, I had the crazy thought that they might last long enough to see the birth of the babies. That would mean staying afloat for about three months, which seemed unlikely.

Then, about two weeks later, I was looking at the balloons with Stephanie, my daughter-in-law, when the inner image hit me: I saw the balloons dropping down off the ceiling when the babies were born! Could something like that happen?

It Is What It Is: The Personal Discourses of Rumi

New Translation and Commentary by Doug Marman

It Is What It Is: The Personal Discourses of Rumi brings you across time to sit at the feet of one of the world's greatest spiritual teachers. Jalal al-Din Rumi lived over 700 years ago, yet his voice still echoes around the world today. Rumi's discourses have long been recognized as a key to unlocking the depths of his wisdom.

This new translation, with all new commentary, brings one of the most difficult of Rumi's manuscripts to life. You can now experience the impact of listening to Rumi as he shares his universal and timeless teaching.

Rumi says: “These words are for the sake of those who need words to understand. As for those who understand without words, what use do they have for speech? The heavens and earth are words to them. . . .Whoever hears a whisper, what need do they have for shouting?”

Cultivating Our Spiritual Purpose

Doug Marman

Recently, I was invited to be the opening speaker at an Eckankar retreat for Washington State. The following comes from my notes:

I found the theme of tonight's program inspiring: Consciously Walking Your Own Path. I wondered, "Who are the best examples of people who consciously walk their own path?" I immediately thought of spiritual teachers downthrough time. What better examples do we have? So, I thought it might be interesting to hear what Shams-i-Tabriz and Jalal al-Din Rumi had to say about God Consciousness, which is the state they worked from.

The Revolution of Spirituality

Doug Marman

When spirituality turns its gaze beyond this physical world, it becomes revolutionary. This is something that can't be avoided, whether it is intended or not, which is why spirituality has brought about more changes to civilization, down through history, than any other force.

This thought struck me as I was walking through Independence Hall in Philadelphia, last week. I took the picture on the right while standing on the stairway of Independence Hall, as I thought about the amazing times of the American Revolution.

The US Declaration of Independence was first signed and read out publicly here, and it was in this building that the US Constitution was created after months of work behind closed doors and shuttered windows. These are changes that shook the world.

The Question of Inner Experience

A visitor to this web site wrote me. He wanted to see a dialogue on Inner Experience.

What leads to spiritual experiences and how important are they?

What is the difference between those who explore spirituality out of curiosity and those who continue with a spiritual path their whole lives? Is there a difference in their inner experiences?

Why are some people not gaining any conscious awareness of inner experiences?

What should our goal be, or our expectations?

How do we judge our progress?

Rather than offering my answers, I thought this would be a great topic for open discussion. Jump here to join the dialogue

Giving Up The Taste of Blood

Doug Marman

Vampire myths have swept across the U.S. again. We seem to be visited by vampires at least once a generation. This time, the new Twilight series of books and movies, by Stephenie Meyer, are sparking the imagination.

The first book came to Stephenie from a dream. She woke one morning, having just seen an incredibly handsome, sparkly vampire falling in love with a girl, while the desire to drink her blood raged within him. He was torn between love and the instinctive drives of his body.

Her books stir up interesting spiritual discussions, especially for teenagers, whose bodies are going through their own transformations. Will this new animal nature coursing through their blood take over? Will they lose who they are?

The Lost Secret of Endings

Doug Marman

With new years, it is the custom to think back over the last twelve months and to set down new goals for the future. Time for reflection and resolutions. However, there is another opportunity that is often overlooked.

Look closely at the transitions of time and you can see that with every start there is an ending. However, we tend to miss the end of things in our modern age, and in the process we overlook something more important than we realize.

Our whole culture seems to be focused on youth, the outflow of life, and the birth of new creations in the world. We avoid death. We don't like final moments. This comes from a common misunderstanding about the flow of life. We think it is continuous, but it is not. Gaze deeply and you will see that each moment is separated from the next by an instant.

Shedding Skin

Doug Marman

“The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come,” says Joseph Campbell, the famous teacher of mythology, referring to the ancient symbol of snakes shedding their skin as a metaphor for inner growth. “If you want resurrection, you must have crucifixion…We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”¹

However, it is easy to overlook how difficult this process actually is. We must die and let go of what we are before we can enter into our next stage of growth. It is a rebirth. But, who would ever want to go through the death of everything they know? This is not something that comes because we are seeking it. It erupts upon us. We have no choice but to shed our old skin or die.

Medicine Grizzly Bear, an American Indian shaman, once described his struggles to me, about how much suffering he went through until he accepted the changes he needed to make. He felt as if he was at the brink of death, before he broke through.

Spiritual Beings Having Human Experiences

Frank De Luca, Ph.D

In one of my first doctoral classes in East-West psychology some years ago, we were asked for our definitions of spirituality. The question was met with plenty of ceiling staring and throat clearing. A few of us ventured an answer, hoping to give the impression that we knew how to approach questions such as this. I had a sense that most of us thought we were spiritual or at least knew someone who was, but to define it? Well, it’s, you know, spirituality. The most interesting answer came from a Japanese student. He said, “I don’t know what you mean by the question. There is no word for “spirituality” in Japanese. It is not a thing. It’s everything.”

It reminded me of Tibetan meditation teacher Chogyam Trungpa’s term “spiritual materialism,” the practice of “acquiring” spiritual wisdom and practices that ultimately do nothing but serve the ego. In our very acquisitive culture, we try to go out and get some spirituality as if it were a commodity to buy, something that will save us from the trials and challenges that come from living a human life. I have heard clients say to me, “I feel like I have no time to work on my spirituality. I’m just too busy.” Working on spirituality is like having to moonlight, taking on a second job. I think what these clients are saying is that they have no time for practices like meditation or prayer or yoga. Or maybe they are saying, “If I were spiritual, I would not be so stressed by what I have to do to just get through the day. Maybe I would take more time to be and not feel as compelled to do.” Whatever the meaning of their desire, the desire stems from the thinking that being spiritual is different from being human. There is the rub.

Befriending the Ego

Jo Leonard

It all started one fateful day when a nun, head of the drama department in the all girls' school I attended, told me I had a nice face. Her own face quickly flushed and her hands flew about in the air as if to bat away the words she had just spoken. "I shouldn't have said that," she stammered. "It may cause you to be vain."

Vanity. There it was, the cornerstone upon which I built, at least in part, my search for the Divine. In any new spiritual teaching I approached, I quickly sought out information on how to deal with my ego, the home of vanity. I was convinced that if I was vain, I couldn't know God. And I wanted to know God; I wanted it badly.

There's some biblical advice about cutting off your hand or plucking your eye out if they offend you. (I'm sure they were speaking metaphorically, weren't they?) Anyway, I never had the inclination to cut or poke at any of my body parts with the exception of my ego. I was willing to burn it at the stake, bore it out with a router, or smash it to smithereens with a sledgehammer—anything to escape its control and incessant needs. My ego separated me from the rest of life; it often made me needy and painfully unhappy.

The Rise of Evolutionary Spirituality

Chris Zissis

The title for this article is taken from the subtitle of the recent (2004) book by Jim Marion, Death of the Mythic God. It refers to an emerging trend in contemporary thought and practice that seeks to combine insights from traditional spirituality with the key modern insights of evolutionary theory. Key among the latter is, simply put, the notion that things change. Prior to the 19th Century the general conception was that things (animals, plants, forms, etc.) remained pretty much the same throughout the thousands of years that the world was taken to have existed. But in the course of that century and the succeeding one, science discerned both a history of changes (disclosed by a close study of the fossil record), and a far greater time span in which these changes had taken place. Thousands of years turned into millions, then billions.

Proponents of evolutionary spirituality argue that neither present-day evolutionary thinking nor traditional religion alone is sufficient for a complete understanding of the Big Picture that so many are seeking. Traditional spirituality has the depth which comes with including the divine in one's worldview, but too often it gets burdened with archaic thinking and old-fashioned conceptions of the deity. Conversely, most evolutionary thinking is weighted too far on the material side, not taking account of the evidence for a deeply spiritual process underlying the outward manifestation of the ongoing change and advancement of forms and consciousness.

Hearing Your Inner Voice

Ann Elizabeth Grace

The key to recognizing your calling is to pay attention to the way you feel. This means becoming acquainted with your wise inner voice. The inner voice is different from society’s voice, the media’s voice, or even from the voices of well-meaning family and friends. It knows what is best for you at any given time because it operates within the broader picture of your life in ways your rational mind cannot understand. In fact, the directives of your inner voice might not make sense to your logical mind or to other people around you. Yet it is through this internal guidance that you will receive unfailing counsel about whether to turn left, right, or go straight ahead.

To hear your inner voice consistently and trust in its direction, carve out some quiet time each day to connect with your thoughts and feelings—even if it is only for five minutes while you are cooking, exercising, driving, lying in bed, or taking a shower. Quiet time is critical in our twenties because we are bombarded with endless stimuli from the outside, ranging from the demands of our work and relationships to the vast amounts of information available through the Internet and other means of technology. If we aren’t vigilant, these outer voices can drown out our inner guidance.

Godwill

by Jo Leonard

I had known God’s love through its many manifestations: my husband with his unconditional love, the myriad of other brightly-lit Souls who came and went in my life, even my clear-eyed cats. But it was never quite enough for me. I wanted to know God directly, up close and personal.

Metaphorically-speaking, I would often shake my fists at the night sky and cry for the state of God-Realization.After one prolonged period of trying every technique I knew, I fell into bed one night with little else but God on my mind. I believe it was as a result of my one-pointed intensity that I was given the following dream as I slept.

I awoke in the dream as a woman named Cencea and found myself sitting in a tavern of huge proportions, the size being a sure sign to me that I was no longer in the physical world. Engaged in a lively philosophical debate, I huddled with three friends at the end of a long, roughly-hewn wood table.

What We Do to Ourselves

Patti Simpson

I recently wrote about the mistake we make when we compare ourselves to others and come out wanting because we haven’t used the correct yardstick. One of my favorite teachers in the world today is the man known as Ram Dass. I was fortunate, years ago, to be able to attend several weekend workshops with Ram Dass, and the more I was around him, the more impressed I was. The former Dr. Richard Alpert was a Harvard Psychology Professor and fellow researcher with Dr. Timothy Leary on the properties of LSD. What began as a clinical research project evolved interestingly. Timothy Leary came to see LSD as a recreational drug and almost single-handedly popularized it for public consumption. He took over a hundred LSD trips and in some ways, he became a caricature of himself. From my training in addictions and my experience with hospitalized addicts, he seemed to be in a category we used to call "Crispy Critters." These are people who have taken so many drugs that they have fried their brains.

Breaking Out of Karmic Patterns Through Communication

Jonathan Reams

The words just flew out of my mouth — “I think I want to be with her as well.” Although part of me recognized the insanity of telling my partner this, I was driven by some overwhelming emotional state that I was not in control of. The next six months were spent trying to understand and extract myself from that moment and recover the relationship I had.

On a trip to visit online work colleagues, I’d had a very deep and overwhelming experience of connection with one of them. Unknown to me at the time, this had activated some unresolved issues from a past relationship, and the energy of that relationship had found an opening to insinuate itself into my current relationship.

The Burden of Consciousness

Doug Marman

How often do we see people running away from awareness? They don’t want to know.

Many take up drinking for this reason, or drugs. Some get lost in religious fanaticism, becoming groupies of movie stars, or addicted to TV and entertainment. It becomes a way of escaping.

When people turn to religion, they often want God to take care of them, or they want to believe in some absolute truth so that they won't have to think about the questions of life.

One of the most unfortunate things that can happen with a spiritual search is when it deteriorates into asceticism, when seekers believe that suffering is needed to be saved. It is a desperate attempt at freeing themselves from the bondage of materialism, but they are going about it the wrong way. It is just another form of running away from awareness.

Probing the Great Equalizer

Don Elefante

“The greatest good for the greatest number.” That maxim plays a major role in shaping the social landscape. First, some group decides what is “good” for us. Then the group employs emotional, cultural, hypnotic, legal, military, economic, or political means to impose its brand of good on others until it starts to “seem right.” I believe that’s the “social consciousness” at work, or at least one leg of it. How many legs are there?

I had been thinking about that question at a spiritual retreat earlier this year when I overheard a conversation addressing how hard it is to pin down the meaning of social consciousness. Aha! I wasn’t the only one wondering about it — and that bothered me. As spiritual adventurers, what might we be missing by not having a way to pin it down? How deeply does the social consciousness embed its hooks into its hosts? What might be the spiritual impacts of overlooking its subtle influences?

Busting Out of the Anthole

An Introduction to Presence-Centered Healing and Transformation
Rhonda Mattern

After decades of intensive spiritual disciplines, I learned to leave my physical body, work with inner guides, and consciously wake up in dreams. These experiences brought deep insights and fulfillment, but they didn’t change the things I most longed to change in my life: abusive and unfulfilling relationships, work I disliked, and a judge and jury screaming “bad girl” 24/7 inside my head.

Six years of therapy with two different psychologists left me with countless insights—and the same list of challenges. My therapists said my dysfunctional parents had caused my suffering, but eventually I realized that another couple was also involved. They’ve been around a long time, so you probably know them well.

The names of these on-again off-again lovers are spirituality and psychology. Many of us think they’re just perfect for each other, but they’ve been dragging their feet to the altar for decades. Like all couples, they get triggered into unconscious patterns. Sometimes they can’t see each other’s beauty, and other times they outright badmouth or ignore each another. Here’s how this couple’s rocky history manifested in my own life.

The Big Question in the Living Room

Patti Simpson

In the mid 60s, I had a dream one early morning in which I was listening to a voice reading a book, a mystery which was so deliciously interesting it was like dining on the finest food. I listened in rapt fascination as the delightful words poured over me. Then my awareness took a click and I was no longer simply listening and enjoying the way the words were put together. I was observing myself listening. Then another click. I was talking to myself about what I was hearing. I was saying, "If I can just remember this, I can write these words down and have a wonderful book." Another click: I'm awake. I remember listening to it, but not one word had come through, except my last statement, "If I can just remember."

However, I had something more important to learn. When I mulled it over, I knew, that is to say, I had a knowing at the molecular level, with every fiber of my being, that I would write a book. I had never thought about writing; I had no idea what it would be about. I simply knew I would do it. I wasn't even very curious--most unlike me. I knew whatever this book was to be about had not yet happened to me, but it would and then I would write. Ordinarily, I'd be scouting around trying to explore this idea, but there was no need. I did not have to make it happen, it would happen, it was already mine. I peacefully let it go.

My Native American Teachers

Doug Marman

Inéz Hernández-Ávila, an associate professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, wrote:

Many, if not most, non-Native Americans seem to feel an entitlement regarding Native American ceremonial and cultural traditions, artifacts, and gravesites, including ancestral bones, that can only be understood in the context of the original entitlement the first colonizers felt toward this land by “right of conquest” and soon after, “Manifest Destiny.” This entitlement assumes the right to take what is indigenous, with complete disregard for Native peoples, in a manner in which the perpetrators would not think of doing so easily with other traditions… Imagine people wanting to find out what it “feels like” to take part in the Catholic ceremony of the Eucharist, or to wear a priest’s garments, or the dress and hairstyle of the Orthodox Jews, because it seems “cool.”

This raised an unexpected reaction for me.