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I work as a psychotherapist with an emphasis on transformational learning - a blend of psychoanalytic and transpersonal approaches, and am the author of Self Actualization and Unselfish Love and co-author of Families Helping Families: Living with Schizophrenia, as well as Mental Illness as an Opportunity for Transformation. My interests and life have taken parallel courses, which together have woven a complex tapestry: spirituality and meditation on the one hand, and political psychology on the other. I have studied and practiced with Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Mata Amritanandamayi and Gurumayi Chidvilasanda, and continue a daily practice of meditation. My early political education began with the writings of the founding fathers. Over time this led to involvement in the anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear movements. I was interested in the powerful molding of prevailing political and economic dynamics by what C. Wright Mills called the military-industrial complex. In time I have come to the conclusion that, despite various interest groups' attempts to minimize or trivialize the concept, the deep state is a reality - decisively and covertly shaping events on both the domestic and international fronts. I am interested in an exceptionally promising alternative source of energy that has yet to see the light of day. I see the current period as a precarious form of initiation rite into the beginning of adulthood for our species, and hope to do whatever I can to help us reach this goal. Meanwhile, I seek daily to recall the reality that the same awareness (the Ever-Present-Origin) looks out through all of our eyes, and actualize this in my relationship with other beings.
(36 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 5, 2022 Jesus, Christianity and the Oppression of Women
Jean-Yves Leloup's translation and commentary on the apocryphal gospel texts reveal unique teachings that emphasize the eminence of the divine feminine and an abiding love of nature over the dualistic and ascetic interpretations of Christianity presented elsewhere. What emerges from this important text and commentary is a renewal of the sacred feminine in the Western spiritual tradition and a new vision for Christianity. Series: Gnostic Christianity (2 Articles, 4553 views)
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 16, 2022 The Untold Truth about the Martin Luther King Assassination
"...history...is an eternal reminder to a generation
depending on nuclear and atomic energy, a generation depending on physical violence, that love is the only creative,
redemptive, transforming power in the universe."
(34 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 12, 2022 Nero Would Be Proud
After hundreds of thousands of years, humanity has begun to move into a time of great transition.
While many may sense that something is afoot, most of us have not yet awakened to the reality that we have reached a time of choice, unprecedented in its urgency, severity, and scale.
We must now recognize that the Earth is a tightly interconnected system that is currently breaking down and moving toward collapse.
(86 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 26, 2021 "The Five Elephants in the Room"
Every person remembers some moment in their life where they witnessed some injustice, big or small, and looked away because the consequences of intervening seemed too intimidating. But there's a limit to the amount of incivility and inequality and inhumanity that each individual can tolerate. I crossed that line. And I'm no longer alone."
Edward Snowden
(17 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 18, 2021 Jesus of Nazareth - Psychedelic Guru - An Alternate View; Part 2
"Like all great spiritual Masters, Jesus taught one thing: presence. Ultimate reality, the luminous... is always right here, right now... The portrait of Jesus that emerges from the authentic passages of the Gospels is of a man who has emptied himself of desires, doctrines, rules - and who has been filled with the... Unnameable. Because he has let go of the merely personal, he is no one, he is everyone."
Stephen Mitchell Series: Our Collective Predicament - The Recovery of Humanity (19 Articles, 43160 views)
(33 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 2, 2021 Nobility of Soul
"Beneath the fears and needs, the aggression and the pain, whoever we encounter is a being, who, like us, has the tremendous potential for understanding and compassion, whose goodness is there to be touched."
Jack Kornfield Series: Our Collective Predicament - The Recovery of Humanity (19 Articles, 43160 views)
(11 comments) SHARE Friday, November 19, 2021 Transformation: Applied Principles of Psychosynthesis with Schizophrenic Clients and Their Families Pt. 2
"I have come to see our human life, individual and collective, as a journey of soul on earth. This soul is universal and archetypal in all cultures, though named in myriad different ways"the word 'soul' [expresses] the experience of the core consciousness in each of us that holds the potential and pattern of our full, unique, maturity."
Thomas Yeomans
(13 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 16, 2021 Mental Illness as an Opportunity for Transformation: Applied Principles of Psychosynthesis with Schizophrenic Clients
"I have come to see this soul journey as an expression of a deep need, even drive, within us to seek the fulfillment of our human wholeness and to realize the destiny we sense is ours at this core level. Many obstacles, inner and outer, always appear, and the journey is never easy, and yet something in us is compelled to take it. It is a central aspect of human experience - light and dark, high and low..."
- Thomas Yeomans
(36 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 26, 2021 We Are Giving Birth to a New Level of Awareness - and Labor can be Long and Difficult
Gebser has very cogently argued that human consciousness has developed over time via mutations. In terms of what is currently happening, we can use the metaphor of birth, or alternatively that of interference patterns in physics. In either case it should not be surprising that we are experiencing turmoil and turbulence. We need not allow the difficulties to blind us to what is emerging - in the present and the coming decades.
(34 comments) SHARE Friday, October 8, 2021 Are We Learning Disabled? No Wonder our World is in Such a Mess.
Edgar Morin has been advocating a shift towards complexity thinking for many decades. In doing so he has laid down a tantalizing challenge to think more complexly about everything from self to society to planet, while suggesting a creative, dynamic view of the world. His contribution to the paradigm of complexity depends on the fusion of Western and Eastern thinking.
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(38 comments) SHARE Friday, September 24, 2021 Are we critical thinkers or "useful idiots?"
Contemporary politics provides numerous examples in which people fail to use critical-thinking. There are many obstacles to critical thinking including, overconfidence, obsession with fantasies, and disregard for truth, among others. Critical thinking opens doors to possibilities, helping us see possibilities in problems. Critical thinking helps us discover the essence of a problem, and explore viable solutions.
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(81 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 29, 2021 Death - the Final Frontier Pt.
These contemplations on death carry a particularly poignant truth today. Evolution always proceeds by way of extreme crises. These appear to be on the way. Andrew Harvey: "This allows me to accept all "horrific news... as necessary wake-up calls [dispelling] any false illusions... the darkness is indispensable to emergence, because only so biting and savage a [situation] could drive us to [the surrender of the separate ego."
(17 comments) SHARE Friday, August 13, 2021 The Birth of a New Human Species
"I believe that humankind has entered into the most critical stage of a death-rebirth mystery...It seems that we are all entering into something new, a new development, a crisis of accelerated maturation, a birth, an entrance into a profoundly different way of being in the cosmos."
--- Richard Tarnas
(29 comments) SHARE Monday, August 2, 2021 Death: The Final Frontier - Pt.1
In the modern world, many of us deny death, and are taught that death involves nothing but annihilation. Many of us live with a subliminal terror of this event, and believe that even talking frankly about it is morbid. Others look at death with a naïve, thoughtless cheerfulness, and assume that it is nothing to worry about. Yet, all the great spiritual traditions have told us clearly that death is not the end. Is it?
. Series: Death: The Final Frontier (1 Articles, 1954 views)
(54 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 4, 2021 The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
Maslow broke radically new ground concerning human possibilities. He is considered a founder of Humanistic Psychology, which gave rise to a number of approaches to therapy, guided by the assumption that people possess the inner resources for growth, healing and optimal functioning and that the point of therapy is to help remove obstacles to individuals' achieving them. He brought to light the fact known as "Peak Experiences."
(65 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 19, 2021 Enzo and our Planetary Marathon
To honour our shared humanity and in a bid to highlight our pressing concerns for the condition of mankind and our planet, Irene Fowler (Nigeria) and I (U.S.A.) collaborated on the publication of this article.
(24 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 10, 2021 The Scapegoat
The shadow refers to the dark, unlived, and repressed side of our conscious self. Elements of the shadow that we do not accept tend to function behind our back, leaking out when we least expect it.
If we have not sufficiently integrated a part of our personal shadow, the collective shadow is able to sneak in through the back door.
(29 comments) SHARE Friday, May 28, 2021 Self-Actualization for the Benefit of the World
One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
Self-actualizing people are those who have come to a high level of maturation, health and self-fulfillment. Values that self-actualizers appreciate: truth, creativity, beauty, goodness, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, justice, simplicity, and self-sufficiency.
Abraham Maslow
(42 comments) SHARE Friday, May 14, 2021 Loving Awareness
"At another level when I'm in his presence I experience ecstasy and bliss from the depth of the love that our relationship has for me. And that's a drunken kind of love where I often find myself just dissolved into tears because I've just never experienced such profound love from any being."
Ram Dass