tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84278736443130921762024-03-05T21:31:14.127+01:00A Touch of PansophiaTaking a stab at the examined lifeTheo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.comBlogger49125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-49437917529435683322010-05-13T21:38:00.004+02:002010-05-13T21:51:15.674+02:00On this historic occasion...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLtuZOva-XNZHp9t4FukcAxCTW6uzJZhApuXJ5dMVSScRz01BjfXhiWUDSX3DElI10CmbS0vPaqnbVkad_AjUshdqNlBxQTLWjkU6i9_o4MqL9E_zyZhRM7jTJmpDnpSDERXNBT2x3abk/s1600/Parliament_Building-Budapest.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLtuZOva-XNZHp9t4FukcAxCTW6uzJZhApuXJ5dMVSScRz01BjfXhiWUDSX3DElI10CmbS0vPaqnbVkad_AjUshdqNlBxQTLWjkU6i9_o4MqL9E_zyZhRM7jTJmpDnpSDERXNBT2x3abk/s320/Parliament_Building-Budapest.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5470842037294465346" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Tomorrow is the first session of Hungary's new parliament. There's a lot of hope riding on the next prime minister's shoulders. He better not screw up.</div><div><div><br /></div><div>On this occasion, I would like to offer up an essay-disguised-as-a-story that I wrote three years ago, called <a href="http://pansophist-scribbler.blogspot.com/2007/07/parliament-opening-speech-youll-never.html">The Parliament-opening Speech You'll Never Hear a Prime Minister Give</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>Enjoy!</div></div>Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-82718810902734667072010-03-29T12:02:00.009+02:002010-03-29T14:17:54.745+02:00The Big Lie<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKcUjVuJ0k6H3370_SBgoiJp-h_A0jtiS2qYFgEq-Gf1lK-m09vAaX6bb6_IELnxym7ZnJq1QXhMvB3Y9vrbIZX0CHLK8n1KoePjjTdYY5e1diUrK6Wpvcq3PC_nNZoQGTaodf39JQ_6M/s1600/reichstagfire.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 245px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKcUjVuJ0k6H3370_SBgoiJp-h_A0jtiS2qYFgEq-Gf1lK-m09vAaX6bb6_IELnxym7ZnJq1QXhMvB3Y9vrbIZX0CHLK8n1KoePjjTdYY5e1diUrK6Wpvcq3PC_nNZoQGTaodf39JQ_6M/s320/reichstagfire.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5453996071504020818" /></a>As I was just about to leave for work this morning, my wife pointed to the computer screen to show me the headline to a breaking news story: Suspected Suicide Bombers Hit Moscow Metro Stations.<div><br /></div><div>Here we go again. I left for work, and haven't even read the news in the meantime. I know what to expect. Don't you? Oh come now! It's so predictable. All information will be controlled by the authorities, since they will seal off the stations and commit all officials to secrecy. The news media will parrot and paraphrase and rehash and over analyze the paltry tidbits of disinformation the Russian government spoon feeds them.</div><div><br /></div><div>Public opinion will be manipulated by emotional interviews with eyewitnesses and friends and relatives of the victims. </div><div><br /></div><div>The "investigation" will conclude that it was done by Chechen "terrorists". Or, if there is another Russian republic in need of suppressing, it will be Islamic terrorists from that republic, and the whole thing will justify the Russian government: 1. weeding out whatever democracy and freedom had managed to sprout in Russian society 2. sending troops to kick some provincial butts, and 3. increasing the military budget and military influence. Same old story.</div><div><br /></div><div>Coincidence that this happens days after the US and Russia announce a new arms treaty? That gives the White House cover for not shouting too loud about whatever the Russian government does in response. Wouldn't want to spoil the treaty before it's signed, would we?</div><div><br /></div><div>I used to scoff at the conspiracy theories concerning 911. Especially because some of the things people said were so absurd. One of the favorites among Hungarian anti-Semites was that no Jews showed up to work in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, because they had been warned by Israeli contacts. Sure. </div><div><br /></div><div>But then came the bombing of the London Metro. When I read that on the very morning of the bombing <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=821">a consulting firm was conducting terrorist scenario exercises in the Metro</a>, rehearsing incidents alarmingly similar to the ones that actually occurred, my suspicions were raised. And the more I read and learn, the suspicions just won't go away.</div><div><br /></div><div>Don't believe what the news media tell you! Take it all with a huge grain of salt! Also consider that the majority of conspiracy theories are a bunch of bullshit. That doesn't mean that some of them aren't true. </div><div><br /></div><div>I don't think 7 World Trade Center fell without <a href="http://www.wtc7.net/">a little well-planned help</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>What does one do with these suspicions? How does one act in this context? That's a puzzle this pansophist philosopher is still working on.</div><div><br /></div><div>Don't believe me! Think for yourself! </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-41632484340115050792009-03-28T15:43:00.013+01:002010-03-05T10:15:19.961+01:00Visualization - Personal Observations<div><a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/speakingtocrowd-1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 252px; height: 160px;" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/speakingtocrowd-1.jpg" border="0" /></a> The best way I could sum up the previous article is this: visualization is the art of creating in the outer world by creating it in the inner world first.<br /></div><div> </div><br /><div>Once you get the basic technique down, you can move on to more involved and complex techniques. You can influence your world through the creation of works of art (paintings, poems, crafts), through simple rituals, and through other means. But the basic technique remains the same. You use all of these tools to create something in the outer world by first creating it in the inner world.<br /></div><div> </div><br /><div>In this posting, I'd like to talk a bit about some of my own experiences with applying the technique; my frustrations, and my successes.<br /></div><div> </div><br /><div>I'll start with the things I haven't had much success with: money issues. I must have had some moderate success, because I know my finances are much better than they used to be. But this has always been the hardest for me. I suspect... well... no, I don't suspect, I'm fairly sure this is a karmic thing. I grew up in Appalachia, and some of the poverty consciousness stuck to me. That, and the attitude got built into my subconscious-- partially fostered by 60s hippy philosophy, partially by Christian indoctrination -- that poverty is virtuous. I'm chipping away at this, because I realize it's a long-term handicap. But, it can take time to transform the things we've been building up in the subconscious for decades.<br /><br />What I have had <span style="font-style: italic;">incredible </span>success with is using visualization to influence people's attitudes toward- and receptiveness to my plans. If it is vital that I get someone (usually someone in authority, or with particular powers) to approve of something I want to do, or to give me assistance, I visualize the conversation with them several times before I go to them, and I imagine them listening attentively, nodding in agreement. And I also visualize them actually saying that they will give the permission, or will give me the help I need. The results are astounding sometimes; reminiscent of Obi-Wan Kenobi's interaction with the Imperial Stormtrooper at the roadblock (Obi-Wan:"These aren't the droids you're looking for." Stormtrooper: "These aren't the droids we're looking for"). People I thought would be serious hard sells have fallen all over themselves to tell me how much they agree with me, or have whipped out a pen to sign a document before I was even finished telling them what I'd come to talk to them about.<br /><br />Now, you might be thinking, "If this works so well, is it ethical?" To which I have two answers. The first is that there are some things in life you definitely want to have the power to push through. Let's say you're an artist and you want to talk to a gallery owner about having a show of your paintings. That's something important. That's your life's work. You've sweat blood for the last two years creating this series. You want to have all the influence possible on making your show happen. The other answer is this: nobody is ever going to be influenced into doing something against their own morals or critical judgement. You can tip the scales if the balance is close, but you can't fight against a two-kilo weight on one side.<br /><br />The other thing I've had amazing success with is small crowds. My job requires that I occasionally give in-house presentations. Days ahead of time, I visualize the audience being attentive and enthusiastically receiving the message of my presentation (not to mention, that I use visualization to create the best presentation I can!). I see no harm in this, since my presentations are for training purposes, and it's for the attendees' own good that they pay attention and find it interesting. But on more than one occasion, I have unexpectedly received enthusiastic applause, and been told afterward that I "owned the room" while I was presenting. I attribute a great deal of this phenomenon to the visualizations I do beforehand.<br /><br />This observation has led me to wonder how many other people have discovered that they can mold the behavior of crowds with this technique. (My conclusion: more than most people suspect.) I also wonder how many people do it without realizing they're doing it. Just imagine: the enthusiastic politician is lying in bed after writing what she considers to be a brilliant speech. She pictures herself before an awestruck crowd as she delivers her carefully crafted lines. She feels the joy, the <span style="font-style: italic;">ecstasy </span>of having hundreds of people under her sway. She can hear their cheers. She can feel the energy of their voices vibrate the podium under her hands.<br /><br />All the ingredients of a successful visualization are there. Thought-provoking, isn't it?<br /><br />If you consider the last example, you might realize that we influence the world with our visualizations all the time. Whether they manifest or not depends on how vividly we visualize them, and on how consistently we visualize what we want rather than visulizing what might go wrong, or what we fear.<br /><br />One last observation. I've noticed that it's much easier to get results from a situation that's in flux than from a situation that's well-established or inert. Let's say that you really don't like your office, for whatever reasons. It's too noisy. It's too dark. It's next door to someone who shouts on the phone all day. Whatever. If you visulize getting a new office in that situation, getting that new office might take some time, and you might have to help it along with some manipulating and politics on the material plane. But if the boss has already decided to move some of the personnel around to make the seating arrangements more logical, it is my experience that you only have to visualize the exact characteristics of the office you want, and that is the office you will be given, without even having to say anything to anyone. Once things are in motion, it's much easier to make them go where you want them to.<br /><br /><br /></div>Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-52910483322798382412009-03-26T11:21:00.005+01:002009-03-27T12:43:03.463+01:00A Short Visualization Lesson<a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/sprouts2.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 221px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 157px" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/sprouts2.jpg" border="0" /></a>A friend recently asked members of an internet forum my wife frequents whether anyone could give her advice on how to practice visualization. The following is an e-mail I wrote her. It turned out so well, I decided I might as well post it. The text draws from various materials I've read over the years, among them: Shakti Gawain, <em>The Master Key</em>, and, of course, AMORC teachings. I didn't consult anything while I was writing it, so this is (as Joseph Lisiewski would put it) my own "subjective synthesis" of the topic. So, although virtually none of the material is original, this is my own unique way of putting it together and my idiosyncratic way of expressing it.<br /><br /><span style="font-family:trebuchet ms;">Dear_______<br /><br />With the passing of years, I have become wary of giving people advice. Often they misunderstand it. They make you responsible for what happens when they follow it. But most often, they don't make any use of it because it involves doing something.<br /><br />But in this case, you have actually asked for advice concerning something specific. And the specific thing you ask for is the most powerful tool available to the human mind, and the thing most likely to make a difference in your dire situation: the art of visualization.<br /><br />I am no expert, and my track record of success is far from perfect, but I use the skill fairly often, and I have convinced myself that it works. At this point, I am perfecting my understanding of this art, and how to use it in my efforts to unfold my being and, simultaneously, in my efforts to be of service to my family, my friends and my community.<br /><br />The technique of visualization is essentially fairly simple, but there are certain things one has to understand before one uses the technique. I'm sure some of this is familiar to you from Anthroposophical concepts, but it never hurts to review (repetition is the essence of education!).<br /><br />The mind consists of two "sides": the conscious or objective side, and the subconscious side. In essence they are one, but they are like the two sides of the same coin. The conscious mind chooses, analyzes and discriminates. The subconscious accepts everything that is placed into it, like seeds into fertile soil, and nurtures it, and grows it to maturity. The conscious mind's job is to filter the input into the subconscious mind, so that only those things grow there that are beneficial and in harmony with our life's plan. If we allow fear, hate and doubt into our subconscious, then we will eventually harvest a crop of even greater fears, hates and doubts.<br /><br />There is one more thing about the subconscious: at its very depths, it is in communion with the universal mind, the source of all things; God. In its task of growing things according to the demands of the conscious mind, its resources are infinite, just as God is infinite.<br /><br />So, in order to change the world our subconscious creates for us, what we have to do is change the instructions we give our subconscious.<br /><br />The subconscious speaks a language which consists of symbols. So to speak to it, we have to fashion our message in symbols.<br /><br />So much for my "nutshell" introduction.<br /><br />The technique:<br /><br />1. Decide what you want. This sounds easy, but it's actually the trickiest part. What we want has to be something that not only benefits ourselves, but others as well. It has to be fairly specific, so that we don't send the subconscious a vague, confusing or contradictory message. You need to be able to formulate what you want in one, or at most, a few sentences. It has to be positive. The subconscious doesn't understand negatives. (i.e. You shouldn't say "I don't want to be poor." The only part of that the subconscious will understand is "poor", so that's what you'll get.) Once you have an idea of what you want to have (either a thing or a situation) that will benefit you and at least one other person (the more the better!), you should think about it and test your emotions. If you detect something negative, you need to define that negative emotion and examine it. This is important. If you go into the active work of visualization and only then discover negative emotions associated with your desire, then you will waste your time, because this negative emotion will work against you, since it will enter the subconscious at the same time as your visualization.<br /><br />Let's say your desire is to get a guitar. The negative emotion that might come up is guilt. "I don't deserve a guitar." First you have to accept this feeling and acknowledge it. Love it, like a little child. Then you have to patiently explain to it why everything is OK. "Of course I deserve a guitar. I plan to use it to make myself and others happy with the joy of creating music. Music is a powerful tool for healing the mind and the body." And so forth. You need to examine this desire, and interact with and neutralize any negative emotions that might arise in contemplating it, until you feel (as you should) that it is the most natural thing in the world that you should have it. If, after this process, you still have lingering negative emotions attached to your desire, you should probably put it aside for a while. It's not really going to manifest for you under these circumstances.<br /><br />2. Assuming you have worked with your desire and have a positive attitude toward it, it is now time to formulate your "image" of your desire. What you have to do is create a full scene in your mind, complete with elements from every one of the six senses you can work into it. This scene is a vision of what it will be like when the desire has been fulfilled. Let's take the guitar as an example. You picture the guitar in your hands. You see the beautiful gleam of sunlight in the grain of the wood. You feel the smooth surface as you place your hand around its neck and the cool feeling of the metal as you place your fingers on the strings. Smell the fragrant wood scent rising from the sound box! And then you strum the strings and hear the lovely resonance of the chord singing from the entire instrument. Notice that this is not just visual sensations; it incorporates, tactile, aural, and olfactory sensations.<br /><br />3. Then comes the work of actually doing the visualization. If you are a relative beginner, you need to give yourself the best chance of concentrating by withdrawing to a silent place where you can sit or lie comfortably for several minutes without being disturbed. You need to slow your breathing to a rhythm that relaxes your body. You relax until you have fairly much forgotten about your body, and are mostly a mind floating in the semidarkness. Now you create your "image" of your fulfilled desire. You have to imagine it as already fulfilled. It has already succeeded, and you are overjoyed to have this gift from the Cosmic Mind, from the Universal Storehouse. It is also important that you don't give the subconscious instructions how to fulfill your desire. Don't tell it which store to get the guitar from, or who should bring it to you, or how much it will cost. Stick to the essence of the desire. The guitar. Let the subconscious make the arrangements.<br /><br />And now comes the SECRET! It's not really a secret, since you'll find it in any number of books, but it's the part everyone forgets, and has the most difficulty including in the visualization: emotional energy! In the visualization of the guitar, the emotional content would be the joy of having the guitar in your hands, and the joy at the knowledge that it is yours to use and to make beautiful music with. You really have to FEEL the joy, and electrify the visualization with that energy. This can be the difference between a successful and a failed visualization.<br /><br />4. Now comes the really tricky part. Take a deep breath, and as you blow it out, forget what you were just visualizing. Put it out of your mind. Go about your business. Clean the house. Cook. Go grocery shopping. Read a book. Anything. Just don't think about your visualization. If you keep holding it in your objective mind, it won't release into the subconscious, and it won't have the chance to undergo those truly mysterious and miraculous processes of the deepest levels of consciousness.<br /><br />5. If you feel it's necessary, you may repeat the visualization several more times, but you should wait at least a half day in between visualizations. The ideal time to visualize is right after waking up in the morning and right before going to sleep at night. After a certain number of visualizations, one should decide to let it go for good. When to do that is a matter of feeling and experience. But for a beginner, it would be wise to let go of a visualization after a few days.<br /><br />6. Once you have visualized, you should follow up with activity in the objective world. Go to the store and find out if there are credit arrangements for buying instruments. Decide to sell something to start saving for the guitar. Whatever. Don't assume the guitar will just fall in your lap. But the interesting thing is that once you start to make the effort, you will often find that you are met halfway, or more than halfway. You save one third of the money, you get another third through some mysterious source (say, a tax refund you weren't expecting) and on the same day you notice the guitar is on sale at a 33% percent discount. Wow! And three weeks ago you thought you'd NEVER get the money together for the guitar. Sometimes it happens like a lightning flash. After visualizing, you get an unexpected phone call from someone who wants you to teach a children's folk music class, and they'll buy you a guitar so you can do it! I once visualized a car I needed because my old car had broken down. The next day I was talking to a friend who was moving to Hawaii and needed to get rid of her car. She hadn't heard I needed a car. She gave me hers, and told me to pay her whenever I had the money.<br /><br />That's about the shortest I could make this advice without leaving out the essentials. Use it! It works. It can be frustrating, because there are many elements of our own minds we need to have under control before we can get consistent results. The most frequent cause of failure is what is called "cross currents". That happens when you spend ten minutes a day visualizing something, and then five hours worrying and generating negative thoughts that counteract it (i.e. "I'll never have a nice guitar!" "Only rich people get high-quality instruments!" "With all the bills I have to pay, I'll never be able to save money for a guitar!" “I never get the things I need!”) You have to be on your guard that you don't spend time thinking thoughts that counteract your visualization. For that matter, we always need to stand sentry at the gates of our subconscious.<br /><br />And now I leave it all up to you. In diligent hands, this technique can work seeming miracles.<br /><br />Love, Theo</span>Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-83948945042496959762009-03-15T00:10:00.014+01:002009-03-19T12:58:22.428+01:00The Subversive Discourse of Fairy Tales<a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/wanderer.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 98px; HEIGHT: 130px" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/wanderer.jpg" border="0" /></a>I have a friend (more my wife's friend than mine) who has lived her life following Thoreau's "different drummer". She speaks several languages, has lived in several countries, trained as a Waldorf teacher, and did her student teaching abroad. She does not lead an oppulent life, and has sacrificed dearly for going her unique path. She works hard to provide the life she thinks her young son deserves. And despite the obvious virtues of her character, I understand that her parents have little respect for who she is or what she has done in life.<br /><br />I was reminded of her, and of people with similar burdens, when I recently read the fairy tale "The Beauty and the Horns" from <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/laughingprincebo00fill"><span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The Laughing Prince: A Book of Jugoslav Fairy Tales</span>.</a> In this tale, a rich man tells his only son that he will bequeathe his entire estate to his son as long as the son promises not to go in search of a fabled woman named "Peerless Beauty," no matter how beautiful anyone tells him she is. He should, instead, settle down with a hard-working girl from his own village, like a sensible boy. Well, some time after his father's death, the youth gets more and more curious about this Peerless Beauty, so he begins to ask around. All the older men he speaks to give him the same advice his father had. But that only makes him <em>more</em> determined. He ends up blowing his fortune and ruining his life in the pursuit of Peerless Beauty (who tricks and deceives him, mercilessly). But he persists and eventually wins her over, and in the process breaks the enchantment she is under, and wins back his fortune. He ends up happier than he ever would have been if he'd just settled for what was "sensible."<br /><br />The message of this tale (and others) is remarkable when you consider the milieu it comes from. Just image Balkan peasants and burghers telling this tale at the hearth on a cold winter's eve. Now these are the very people who would tell their own children to be "sensible," and to forgo what <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_With_a_Thousand_Faces">Joseph Campbell</a> famously called "following your bliss." Why were these people telling a story that was obviously in conflict with their conservative values? They didn't want their children running off chasing dreams when they came of age, did they? So what gives?<br /><br />My theory: this message was planted in the collective subconscious by The Hierarchy. Who is The Hierarchy? They are those human souls who have advanced beyond the level of "normal" human consciousness -- many of them no longer needing to incarnate in a physical body -- and are working in unison for the evolution of the race. The Hierarchy is constantly influencing the actions of the human race through our subconscious, suggesting ideals to be striven for, and giving us inspirations to bring to fruition. These impulses are often expressed in the works of more enlightened artists and scientists. <a href="http://pansophist-scribbler.blogspot.com/2008/02/evolving-relationship-to-fairy-tales_11.html">Rudolf Steiner </a>said that fairy tales were retellings of psychic experiences in a symbolic form. They are a form of folk art appropriate for people of all ages and from all srata of society. The perfect medium for The Hierarchy.<br /><br />This tale emphasizes the necessity of following our inner strivings to attain something we intuitively know is perfect and beautiful (Peerless Beauty). This is none other than our inner self, our soul, our divine spark (our daemon, Holy Guardian Angel, Inner Master, etc., etc). The mundane world frowns on people who pursue their inner reality rather than riches and worldly power. Don't get me wrong! I'm not talking about running off, joining a monastery, and taking vows of poverty. I'm talking about priorities. It's what is referred to in the Gospel of Mark in the rhetorical question "For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?" In the end, the young hero wins everything back: he gets the girl (his anima, if you will), and regains his fortune and power. How? By answering the inner call; by not giving in to the cowardly desire to stay comfortable and safe, and to sit on the bags of gold his father left him; by not doing what the crowd thinks is "sensible."<br /><br />I have, myself, done many things that my family, friends and colleagues thought were... well... crazy. Most times they worked out fabulously. Occasionally I fell on my face (or other parts of my anatomy). I recall when I was contemplating a particularly risky move in my life (coming to Hungary with almost no money in my pocket and only vague employment prospects), a good friend said to me, "If you don't do this now, when you have the chance, will you be able to live with yourself the rest of you life, wondering what would have happened if you'd done it?" That was enough to convince me. Living with that sort of doubt forever after sounded like hell itself. (Thanks Geoff F. !)<br /><br />And there are times I have been more "sensible." When it was the right time to be sensible, it worked out just fine. Other times, I've hated myself afterwards for being a chicken shit. Life is meant to be lived boldly.<br /><br />The message of fairy tales is often at odds with the values of the people who retold them. But then, most people are innocent enough, or jaded enough to believe they are "just stories."<br /><br />I think the friend I mention at the beginning of this essay is a brave woman.Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-51251873550707424742008-09-03T21:29:00.007+02:002008-09-03T22:52:59.783+02:00Getting Coaxed Out of Blog Sabbatical<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/cafetable.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/cafetable.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />Well, folks, I still don't feel like addressing the most immediate issues in my life, and I still don't feel comfortable blithely talking about other things either.<br /><br />But there's a voice out there in Blogdom that won't let me sink into complete silence. Bless her.<br /><br />In a recent posting, <a href="http://http//hellibrarian.blogspot.com/2008/09/38-classes-week.html">Hellibrarian </a>placed me among the ranks of people she wished to thank for various things, referring to me as her "blogger conscience." I decided to talk a little about the history of our writing relationship, but when I sat down to the computer, I quickly checked my feed reader and discovered that she'd (quite synchronistically) already alluded to our early "writing buddy" days in <a href="http://hellibrarian.blogspot.com/2008/09/theo-psychic-messaging-and-desiderata.html">her posting</a> today. And she claims to not believe in "psychic dialoging."<br /><br />Hell and I met back in the autumn of 1992, when Budapest was still "The Wild East". We were both on the founding staff of <a href="http://www.budapestsun.com/index.php">The Budapest Sun</a>, and shared one of the most amazing experiences a beginning writer could ever have. We got paid peanuts, and had more fun than most people can possibly even imagine. There was something about the times and about the mix of characters who worked at that paper that made the experience nothing less than magical: every day we wondered what would happen next.<br /><br />We both moved onto other jobs (her with <a href="http://www.wherebudapest.hu/">Where Magazine</a>, me with <a href="http://english.mti.hu/">The Hungarian Press Agency</a>) but we continued to support each others' creative endeavors, which can quickly get buried in the day-to-day spade work that makes up ninety-nine-percent of all journalism work.<br /><br />Hell and I would meet at the Astoria Hotel (pictured on her blog), which has a cafe with the most amazing Art Nouveau interior, and for the longest time had very affordable coffee and pastries. And it was the kind of place where they didn't mind if you hung around for hours. We would get comfortable, order coffee and pastries, shoot the breeze for a while, and then get out the notebooks. We'd choose a topic and <a href="http://www.nataliegoldberg.com/">(Natalie Goldberg</a> style) decide how long we'd write (anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour). And then we'd just let our pens race across the pages with no inhibitions. No talking. No pausing. Just writing. After the session was over, we'd read our essays to one another.<br /><br />Ah! Fond memories.<br /><br />In that spirit, when Hell has lagged in the maintenance of her blog, I've prodded her some, and reminded her that people with the writing bug just can't be happy unless they're doing a certain amount of writing. And now, when I'm lapsing into silence, Helen is there to remind me of the same.<br /><br />Bless you.Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-88129046781918827642008-08-27T21:40:00.003+02:002008-08-27T22:05:39.821+02:00Sorry Folks...... but there are some things I just don't want to blog about, at least not while I'm in the middle of them. I'm going through some heavy times -- my life filled with life-and-death issues -- and I don't want to write about them in a superficial overly emotional fashion. When I was younger, I knew that writing about things when they were fresh -- sometimes even with pen in hand while they were happening -- gave things serious <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">edginess</span>. But now I realize that's sensation, and not an honest way to search for a deeper kind of truth. I don't want to turn what I'm going through into sensation. And at the same time, I don't want to blithely post about other things, as if everything was hunky dory. My heart wouldn't be in it.<br /><br />I'll take a page out of <a href="http://eve3.wordpress.com/">The Third Eve's</a> book. She recently wrote an article about something very trying, very demanding, and very emotionally overwhelming that happened to her a year ago. She didn't write about it then. She waited until it settled, and she could make sense of it; until the experience had ripened. It's more meaningful that way.<br /><br />So I might wait a while to write about these things. That is, if I ever write about them.Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-1994793523311673232008-08-20T21:57:00.009+02:002008-12-11T12:40:55.889+01:00Bringing Mysticism to the Office<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/officeworker.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 83px;" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/officeworker.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">The following article will appear (in Hungarian) in A Rózsakeresztes Tükör (The Rosicrucian Mirror), the offical newsletter of the Rákóczy Pronaos, a subordinate body of The Rosicrucian Order AMORC.</span><span><br /><br /><br />Have you gotten very frustrated or angry with some situation or other at work recently? Do you have a colleague who really irritates you? Perhaps someone who has decided they are your enemy, and does dishonest or unethical things to sabotage your projects or your reputation? Do you feel you are stuck in a soul-killing job with no chance of moving on to something better? Do you sometimes feel you aren't smart enough, fast enough, young enough, or skilled enough to do your job properly? Are you afraid of losing your job? Do you have troubles communicating with people at work?<br /><br />Have you thought of applying mystical principles to any of these problems? No? Why not?<br /><br />Rosicrucianism is a mystical philosophy, but what has always distinguished this philosophy is its emphasis on the need to apply the mystical principles it teaches to everyday life. When the Rosicrucian student looks closely at the challenges his life presents him with, he can easily discover situations that can be positively influenced by employing methods he has learned from the Teachings. He can use breathing techniques to stay calm in times he knows will be stressful. Visualization can attract objects and/or circumstances he needs for his or someone else's evolution. Meditation can bring understanding to puzzles we must always solve to progress in life.<br /><br />But somehow, it seems more natural to apply these things to our personal lives, to our family relationships, to our friends, and to our home. But where we work seems to be a different matter.<br /><br />But it shouldn't be.<br /><br />Part of this attitude is a result of the nature of work ever since the Industrial Revolution. There was a time when one's work was something one inherited from one's family. If your father was a farmer, then you were a farmer. If your father had a trade (blacksmith, shoemaker, carpenter, etc.) then you learned that trade. And work wasn't separated from life the way it is today. Children played at the edge of the fields their parents where cultivating, and when they were old enough, they worked alongside them. The trademan's shop would be part of the family house, and the mother and children would come and go all day long.<br /><br />Nowadays, we often have the attitude that a job is something we do just for money. It isn't our land we are cultivating; it isn't our goods we are producing in the shop; it's not in our name we are rendering the service. We feel detached from our work. We feel it has little to do with our "real life". We feel it is unrelated to who we really are.<br /><br />Nonetheless, we spend upward from 40 hours a week at work. We spend the majority of our energy on work five days a week, and we often spend more time with our colleagues than we do with our families. And the people we spend time with at work are "real" people. They are souls; sparks from the divine fire, just like ourselves. If we pay attention to them, we will realize that every day at work presents us opportunities to serve these various people, even the ones who are hostile to us. No. Especially the ones who are hostile to us!<br /><br />Regarded in the right way, we realize that wherever we work we will find challenges that offer us the opportunity to grow as spiritual beings. If we approach work this way, it no longer seems a dreary, boring, tedious place where we feel the life draining from us every hour we spend there. The workplace is transformed, as is our relationship with everyone and everything there.<br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Techniques for transforming our work experience</span><br /></div><br />One quick way to transform work is to start the workday with an invocation. It can be a very simple invocation (or prayer, if you prefer this word). All it has to do is serve to raise your consciousness and make you aware that the time spent at work is as much a part of your mystical quest as any other part of your life. Here's an example:<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Work Invocation</span><br /></div><span style="font-style: italic;">God of my heart:</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">May the still, small voice within guide my actions as I work today.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">May it point out every opportunity to learn new lessons from the situations I encounter.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">May it show me every chance to serve that comes my way.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">May it help me to engage myself in my work with interest and enthusiasm, and may it help me guard against laxity and apathy.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">May I be inspired to do my work with dignity and honor.</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So mote it be!</span><br /><br />Saying your invocation at your desk, and then spending a minute or two in meditation will make a big difference to the way you vibrate within your work environment. Even if you don't have much privacy, you can still say it to yourself silently and close your eyes for a moment afterwards.<br /><br />Another technique addresses the problem of being overwhelmed by events at work and not being able to stay focused on the most important tasks. The modern workplace is full of distractions: ringing phones, e-mail alerts, colleagues popping in the door at any moment. It can be difficult to stay on track and do the things we planned. Sometimes we can come to the realization at the end of the day that we haven't done <span style="font-style: italic;">any </span>of the things we planned. We let ourselves get distracted.<br /><br />In this case, it can be useful to use a little time when we are away from work to project our energy into the future. During a few moments on the weekend, or in the evening, when you are calm and clear-minded, go into your sanctum and picture yourself at work calmly and efficiently performing the tasks you have decided are important and need to be completed. Naturally, you should be specific, and imagine yourself doing only those tasks you want to focus on. Of course it is important to inject emotion into the visualization: feel the joy of accomplishing important work. If you do this a few times before you go to work, you will find that it becomes easier to stay focused on the tasks you visualized, and that the tasks are accomplished more easily. This is an important mystical technique: preparing for stressful situations while we are still calm and clear-minded.<br /><br />Although our workplaces are filled with electronic communications devices, there is still a place for old-fashioned communication: no I don't mean face-to-face communication, I mean psychic communication. There are various reasons why people in professional situations might miscommunicate. They are distracted by their personal feelings for one another. They're distracted by the pressures of the office. One or more of the people in the conversation are blinded by their feelings of superiority or inferiority. The list could go on, but suffice it to say, there are many reasons why verbal communication isn't always as effective as one would like. For this reason, it is often good to send someone a psychic message before you talk to them. Using the methods taught by our order, you can telepathically tell them the essence of the message you wish to give them days or hours before you say it to them personally (or on the phone, or by e-mail). It is likely they won't consciously recall the psychic message, but when you speak to them, the message will already seem familiar to them, and they will be more likely to understand what you wish to say. And they will be more likely to be receptive to you message, especially if you visualized them as being receptive. And repeating a message psychically after you have spoken to someone helps to make the impression of what you said go deeper.<br /><br />Visualization can also help smooth out conflict in the workplace. If disharmony arises between you and another person in the workplace, it can be very useful to spend time each day visualizing love, in the form of pink light, emanating from your heart, and surrounding, nurturing and protecting that person. Naturally, it can't only be a sterile visualization: in order for it to be effective, you really have to <span style="font-style: italic;">feel </span>love for this person. That's the challenging part of the exercise. But the results can be miraculous.<br /><br />Meditation can, naturally, be used as a tool for solving problems one encounters at work. Once you have worked on a problem with your conscious objective mind as far as you can go, send the problem, in the form of a simple question, into your subconscious, and wait for your inner self to suggest the solution to you.<br /><br />As suggested in the invocation, it is important to see the workplace as a school, just like the rest of life. When difficult and puzzling situations arise, it can be rewarding to ask yourself what the lesson is that can be learned from it. The workplace is especially fertile ground for this, because we are forced by circumstances to deal with things we might isolate ourselves from in home life, and among friends and acquaintances. But at work, you can't avoid them. You just have to deal with them.<br /><br />Work can be very draining and tiring. Remember the exercise that comes in the very first monograph that every member is mailed? It's a technique for reviving yourself with psychic energy when you are tired. Have you ever used it at work? Why not? And that's not the only technique in the monographs for increasing one's available energy. Perhaps it would be better to use one of these techniques the next time you are tempted to grab another cup of coffee.<br /><br />The same goes for techniques we learn for staying calm under stress. The techniques are there. We can only blame ourselves if we don't use them.<br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">Conclusion</span><br /></div><br />The workplace is an excellent opportunity to use the techniques we acquire through AMORC's teachings. Applying the teachings counteracts the feelings of helplessness the modern workplace can often impose on employees, by letting us demonstrate that we can have a positive influence on events at work. Not only can they make professional life a bit easier and more successful for us, they also make us more effective members of the teams we belong to, and a source of health and harmony to the entire community we work in.Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-36941042043286090202008-08-13T21:19:00.005+02:002008-08-14T12:26:53.104+02:00Of Fish, Dreams and Blank Books<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/Atthewritingtable.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; WIDTH: 130px; CURSOR: pointer" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/Atthewritingtable.jpg" border="0" /></a>If you consult any number of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=dreamwork&x=17&y=18">books </a>or <a href="http://members.chello.hu/huffman.donald/Resources_for_Dreamers.html">websites </a>in the hopes of learning about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamwork">dreamwork, </a>almost everyone last one of them will tell you there is one essential practice on which all dreamwork depends. If you want to engage in the art and science of dreamwork, you <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">must </span>keep a dream journal. If you don't keep the journal, you won't develop your dream memory. If you don't remember your dreams, there's no material to work with. Pretty obvious.<br /><br />It can be a very difficult habit to cultivate. It has to be a daily thing. And you have to be consistent. Sitting down to write down your dreams (unless you actually have the time, leisure and privacy to write them down while you're still in bed in the morning) has to be one of the first things you do every morning. If you wake up to an alarm, hit the snooze button and then don't move. Stay lying exactly where you are and ask yourself what you were dreaming. Only if you are lucky do you recall an entire dream right then and there.<br /><br />Dream recall is like fishing. It all starts with a nibble on the line. There's the lingering feeling of a mood from a dream. Or the faintest memory of just one image or object. Or you only remember that "I was with Stephanie", or that there was something having to do with Sacramento. Be gentle. Be skillful. If you pull too hard, the fish won't get hooked. Just stay with whatever little bit you have. Now let your attention wander from it for a second or two (kind of like letting out a little line) and then focus your mind on the object again. You might find that something else "breaks the surface" along with what you already had: the background to the vague image; what it was that Stephanie said to you; what specific part of Sacramento you saw. Let your concentration go for another second or two, and then "pull in some line", i.e. focus on the things you remember. You will likely find that something else comes along with them. If all goes well, you feel the fish bite! A whole dream sequence comes back to you in one piece. But be careful! You still haven't reeled that beauty in. Nothing worse than "the one that got away." When the next alarm goes off, don't hit snooze again. Turn the alarm off and get out of bed, whether you remember a dream or not.<br /><br />There is a short window of opportunity after one wakes up -- I'd guess no more than fifteen or twenty minutes -- during which the portal to the sleeping consciousness hasn't quite shut tight, kind of like that little gap on a baby's skull that hasn't quite grown together (which is why, a friend tells me, babies can still talk with angels). One needs to cultivate the habit of not hurtling headlong into the day. Stay quiet, both physically and mentally, while making that first visit to the toilet for a pee. Don't turn on lots of bright lights. Don't turn on the radio or other loud electronic devices. Sit down in a quiet place with a notebook and pen and write down whatever it was you remembered. Don't be surprised if you now can't recall what you remembered while waiting for the second alarm. Close your eyes and ask yourself, "what did I dream last night?" Just relax and allow it to come to you. Most times something will. But there are those times that it won't. One of the emotionally challenging aspects of dreamwork is the moment when you realize that, despite all of your efforts, you are empty handed. You don't remember anything. Nada. Zero. Goose egg!<br /><br />It can be discouraging. It can be <em>very</em> discouraging when you are just starting out in dreamwork, and only remembering one or two dreams a week, if you're lucky. But the truth is that the dreaded "dream drought" is something that even veterans have to endure. Even people who have been faithfully recording dreams for several decades, and who have stretches in which they remember several dreams a morning for three or more mornings in a row, still hit patches as dry as the Mohave desert; no dream recall for days, or even weeks.<br /><br />What do you do then? Many writers on the subject suggest writing anything at all into the dream journal: what one was thinking after one woke up, or even making dreams up. The theory is that the subconscious mind responds to this signal from conscious behavior that says the conscious mind takes dreams seriously, and provides one with dreams on subsequent mornings. This has never worked for me. I've always felt too silly writing things that are not dreams into my dream journal.<br /><br />Recently I've come up with a new tactic. I've designated a new little blank book to be for dreamwork exercises. Never mind that this means I am now carrying no less than four hard-back blank books in my briefcase everyday. My wife can tell you that I have a hard time passing a blank book display in a shop without buying one. I have a reserve that should last me for several years. But I digress.<br /><br />I take both my journal and my new dreamwork book to the table where I write down my dreams. If, after all efforts and tricks, I can't recall any dreams, I open up my dream journal and read one of the dreams that's already in there. Then I open my dreamwork book, date it, indicate which dream I'm going to work with, and then do a little dreamwork. For an idea of what that work might entail, I recommend <a href="http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/pdffiles/dreams.pdf">this very convenient collection of exercises</a> generously published for free by Professor John Suler (warning: it's a PDF file, so the link will open Acrobat or whatever PDF reader you use).<br /><br />This has a dual purpose. Firstly, I am using the first half-hour of the day to work with dreams (either recording them or doing exercises), and secondly, I'm actually designating a time in which to do dreamwork. I think one of the pitfalls of dreamwork is that we sometimes keep collecting more and more dreams, but we keep putting off working with them, because our lives are so busy. I'm guilty of this. This way, I don't get so frustrated if I don't remember any dreams on a given morning, and I automatically get a certain amount of dreamwork done every week, without having to set aside more time in my otherwise over scheduled day.Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-71848512300241698192008-08-06T23:08:00.003+02:002008-08-06T23:10:54.804+02:00... while you're making other plans<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/detour.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 96px;" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/detour.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>Yup! That's when life is happening.<br /><br />So there we were, on vacation with another family in an area of Hungary which is about as rural as you can get, and pretty much as far away from home as you can get. It had been a grand week away from the rat race, with a family our family dearly enjoys spending time with. A week filled with common meals, cooked together and served at a long table under a shelter with a terra cotta roof. A week of afternoon coffee in comfortable chairs under tall shade trees, reading, talking and watching the children erect huge sand castles in the oversized sand box. A week of going out after the children were in bed and lying on a bench to watch the stars (which you just can't do in Budapest).<br /><br />It was Saturday night. We were partially packed, and the plan was to leave late the next morning. I'd taken Monday off, so I'd even have a day to get my head ready for the working grind that was to resume on Tuesday.<br /><br />That was the plan, anyway.<br /><br />Szilvi got me out of bed before midnight to inform me that she was bleeding. Very lightly, but there was some blood, nonetheless. And she'd been getting contractions that were too frequent, and too intense. The baby isn't due until the middle of September.<br /><br />Thank God for mobile (cellular to you Yanks) phones! Szilvi called the doctor who has attended all the home births of all our children. She said we needed to get to a hospital so they could give Szilvi a steroid shot that ripens the fetus's lungs in case there's a premature birth.<br /><br />Great! The last place I want anyone I love is in a Hungarian hospital. It's not just that they are severely underfunded and underequipped. That could be dealt with. But the truth is that Hungary's health-care system is one of the last bastions of totalitarian mentality. Please leave your civil liberties and your individuality at the door. You have just become an object. You have no input into the decisions being made regarding you, and you have no right to information beyond what they want you to know. Democracy never made it into these walls.<br /><br />But, OK, we had to do it.<br /><br />The ordeal at the hospital was tolerable. An ultrasound revealed a tiny tear in the placenta, but no continued bleeding. Szilvi got the steroid shot, and an anti-spasmodic shot to stop all contractions. Szilvi was placed on 24-hour observation, and was put on a drip IV against the contractions. I had to go back to the vacation house alone. I had to be there when our two-year-old son woke up.<br /><br />The next day I quickly took a few bags full of supplies to Szilvi (remember I said the hospitals are underfunded?) and was informed that if by midnight (i.e. 24 hours after being checked in) there was no evidence of bleeding or contractions Szilvi <i>might</i> be released. But then again, she might not be. Blood tests showed she's anemic (which we knew; she's always been anemic), and that might be reason to keep her. Whatever. The doctors were being cagey.<br /><br />Should we stay another night at the vacation house? Should we go ahead and go home and come back for Szilvi when she's released? I kept wandering around the house and half-heartedly packing (packing for a family of six is serious business!) and not figuring out what to do. Finally it hit me that I could take the children back to Budapest and leave them in Szentendre with their grandmother. A call to grandma (Did I say Thank God for cell phones?) confirmed that I could do that. Packing began in earnest. I made it clear to my older sons that my being without their mother made it imperative that they take responsibility and help me. To my delight, they responded; especially Alex, the older one. He really took responsibility for his youngest brother.<br /><br />We left after dark, and formed a two-car caravan with the other family. I made sure my sons had the phone numbers of the parents in the other car, and vice-versa. Alex was very proud to be my copilot; handing out food and drinks, looking for road signs, fielding phone calls from the other car.<br /><br />We arrived in Budapest real late. At grandma's I bedded down with my two-year old. He was confused. That morning his mother had disappeared without a trace or without an explanation. Then we left the vacation house without her, and then we went to grandma's. Poor kid's head was spinning. The next morning, he rolled over, put his hand in the hair at the back of my head (which he often does with his mother) and softly uttered the one word: "Mommy." My heart melted. This kid needed his mother.<br /><br />Szilvi was released the next day, and the father of the family we vacationed with drove me down to pick her up (he has a bigger, more comfortable car).<br /><br />On the way home (have I mentioned Thank God for cell phones?) I called my office and arranged to take the rest of this week off. Szilvi's doctor told her to spend a few days in bed, after which she would be severely limited in what kind of physical activity she could engage in. The usual cooking and housework were out of the question. So I'm doing the housework, and Szilvi's mother will be coming over every day once I start working again next week.<br /><br />Life truly is what's happening while you're making other plans.Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-29991428967561237362008-07-30T01:00:00.003+02:002008-07-30T01:00:02.232+02:00You Call THAT Summer Reading?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/woman-on-beach.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px;" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/woman-on-beach.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>Although four days ago I escaped the urban circus of Budapest for the idyllic peace of a farm house in southeastern Hungary, far, far from TV cables and internet connections and subway trains and all the other features of my harried life (which I love, but gets a bit much after a while), through the miracles of online technology this posting is being published on my appointed publishing day, thereby keeping my promise to grace the world with another dose of my prose every Wednesday. (Note to self: I should suggest to Google that they develop an application called iStiff, which sends an indistinguishable virtual image of a nine-to-five employee to the office through the internet every weekday morning, while the real employee stays home and putters around the house, blogs, meets friends at cafes, etc. Sounds like the Next Big Thing, huh?)<br /><br />As this digital missive is being released into cyberspace, its flesh-and-blood author will have already spent days breathing fresh air, taking walks in the woods, watching his kids play with farm animals, cooking meals for ten (we'll be there with another family with children), watching the stars in a clear sky free of city lights, and... READING!<br /><br />Now, being a corporate editor, reading on vacation is a bit like a busman's holiday, but as any professional reader (or college student) will tell you, there's a world of difference between reading what you have to, and reading what you want to.<br /><br />Admittedly, being on vacation with that many children doesn't really allow for that much reading time, which is why I have to make every minute of it count. So... no mental-chewing-gum potboilers for me. Why waste that quality time away from the frenetic life, while my blood pressure is down and my brain waves smoothed out to gentle curves? No, I'm going to bring along two books that are definitely not what most folks would consider light beach reading.<br /><br />The first is a novel. I don't read many novels anymore. First of all, I don't have time for them. I recall when I was younger, being very disdainful of people who say they don't have time to read. But, now I'm in that position. A full-time job, four kids and a commitment to spiritual exercises doesn't leave much time for other things. And the truth is, I <i>do</i> read. But shorter stuff I can squeeze in while commuting or eating lunch: articles on subjects I'm interested in, short stories (especially from my favorite speculative fiction site <a href="http://www.strangehorizons.com/">Strange Horizons</a>). I read chapters from e-books on subjects I'm researching. But novels, no. You have to have long stretches of time to read novels. Reading a three-hundred page novel at a rate of four pages a day is very frustrating.<br /><br />So, there's this six-hundred-page book I started,...uh,... a year ago on a bus ride to a company outing. I got one or two chapters read on the bus. Then I struggled for a few weeks at three or four pages a day and gave up. Around Christmas I took the time to plow through half of the book, and gave up when vacation was over. At this point I still have 170 pages of Gustav Meyrink's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Angel-Window-Dedalus-European-Classics/dp/0946626650/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216973285&sr=8-1">The Angel of the Western Window</a></i> left.<br /><br />Many of you will know the name <a href="http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/gustav-meyrink/">Meyrink </a>as the author of <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem">The Golem</a></i>, but far fewer people know that Meyrink was actually an initiate of the western esoteric tradition, and that he wrote a number of esoterically significant novels. The plot of <i>Angel</i> takes place in two different time periods. One is the lifetime of Dr John Dee (1527-1608), and the other is the lifetime of the first-person narrator, a bachelor gentleman in Vienna in the early twentieth century. We slip into John Dee's time whenever the narrator reads Dee's diaries. I won't spoil the story for you (because you really <i>should</i> read it), but suffice it to say that the interaction between these two times and personalities becomes very bizarre and intricate.<br /><br />Dr Dee was the Renaissance man's Renaissance man. There's hardly an art or science this man didn't dabble in, if not excel at or pioneer, including magic. And this novel is very much about the magical side of Dee. And the sweep of the novel is incredible: England and Wales, Emperor Rudolf's Prague (including Rudolf himself), Vienna, and more.<br /><br />I've really worked myself up! I can't wait to get back to it.<br /><br />The other book I'm taking along is a very thin, but very dense volume by Dr John Dee himself: <i><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/104666/The-Hieroglyphic-Monad">The Hieroglyphic Monad</a></i>. I've been wanting to delve into this book for some time now, but just haven't felt the time was right. This is the type of book <a href="http://www.steinerbooks.org/author.html?au=399">Georg Kuhlewind</a> would designate a "contemplative book". That means that, unlike a light novel, or an instruction book, or a magazine article, it is meant to be absorbed a few sentences at a time. The prime example of such a book, according to Kuhlewind, is the Gospel of John. One should, he says, read a sentence or two, and then deeply meditate on them to see what they evoke from deeper levels of consciousness. I'm certain this is how the <i>Monad</i> is meant to be read. It is divided up into 24 short theorems, each short enough to read in a few minutes. So, in the afternoons, after lunch has been served and the children are playing in the yard, or in the barn, I plan to drag a comfortable lawn chair out under a tree in the yard, sample a theorem, and then slowly sip my tea and contemplate.<br /><br />Slowly. Patiently.Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-29514344225137622402008-07-24T00:44:00.013+02:002008-07-25T22:30:05.196+02:00Stream of Consciousness on the Yugoslav Wars<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/yugoslavia.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 143px;" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/yugoslavia.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>At the end of my last posting, I wrote a short laundry list of dramatic ideological shifts: times that looked very different when those who lived through them looked back on them. The impetus for this exploration was the way the ideological purge of post-war Japan is portrayed in Ishiguro's <i>An Artist of the Floating World</i>.<br /><br />Before I move on to the topics I planned to explore, I'd like to reflect on the Surprise that came in yesterday's news: that they'd finally arrested Radovan Karadzic. Talk about your anticlimaxes! How does this relate to my theme? Well, in an odd sort of way. Serbia is a country that hasn't really undergone the post-defeat purge. And so you have a small part of the population that feels repentant about what happened there in the 1990's, and a large part of the population that still feels defiant and justified for its ultranationalist atrocities.<br /><br />This posting is going to be a bit "stream of consciousness" because I find that the recent news is dredging up lots of memories and sentiments, and I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from them yet, but I'd like to relate my second-hand relationship to the wars Serbia waged. You may recall that last week I wrote "As in another well-known Ishiguro novel - <i>The Remains of the Day</i> - the story of an intense era with reverberations well into our own time is not told on the grand scale of historic figures and events, but on the level of less prominent people and their personal lives. One gets the sense that the grand historical and political life of the world is made up of the sum of millions of personal lives." Indeed, these wars had their effects on my little life. And now that the war-criminal architects of those conflicts are finally being brought to justice, I find myself reflecting on how my life felt the echoes from their deeds, distantly, but distinctly.<br /><br />I was planning, in the summer of 1991, to move to Europe for a while. I religiously read <a href="http://www.zeit.de/index"><span style="font-style: italic;">Die Zeit</span></a>, every week in an effort to brush up my German, and to tune into the European news and media. German media was very keen on reporting the developments in the incipient Croatian War of Independence. Germany had, after all, made the controversial move of being the first country to recognize the newly declared Republic of Croatia. I recall sitting in a greasy-spoon diner in Knights Landing, California reading an article by a Croatian woman who described how unprepared she was when the war began. She called her mother and asked her what kind of supplies to buy, and drawing on her experience from the second world war her mother rattled off the list "oil, flour, salt, candles, potatoes, bacon, sausages, pasta, rice, tea, coffee, soap." I will say more about this article in a minute.<br /><br />Part of my complicated motives for coming to Hungary sixteen years ago was to try my hand at making a living as a writer. I even imagined that once I'd established a base in Budapest, I might slip down to Croatia and do some reporting. It all seemed so interesting and "real" when I read about it in <span style="font-style: italic;">Die Zeit</span>. It was the sort of stuff that would inspire a budding Hemmingway. But once I got comfortable here, I (sanely!) decided I wasn't meant to meddle in that world, especially when I heard the tales of the people who <i>did</i> venture down there to report about it.<br /><br />I recall the young freelancer (who incidentally shares my not-all-that-common surname) who stayed in my apartment twice between jaunts down to Croatia. One evening he sat in my living room telling me how two nights before he'd spent in the cellar with a Croatian family while they endured the nightly shelling by the Serbian Army. No, I thought, not my cup of tea.<br /><br />When I was working at the <a href="http://www.budapestsun.com/index.php"><span style="font-style: italic;">Budapest Sun</span></a>, there was a freelancer named Julius Strauss who regularly did stints in the Balkans to report for the <span style="font-style: italic;">Telegraph</span>. One evening at the watering hole around the corner from the Sun offices, Julius told us about driving up a Bosnian hillside toward the war front in a rented Jeep full of reporters, and being informed by the Bosnian Serb Army that their presence wasn't appreciated by raining shells around them. I was quite certain that was not an experience I needed in my life.<br /><br />I was the book reviewer at the <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Budapest_Sun">Budapest Sun</a>,</span> and one day a local English-language bookstore sent me a book called <i>Balkan Express</i> by a Croatian journalist named <a href="http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/drakulic-slavenka">Slavenka Drakulic</a>. Among the essays in that book I found the one I'd read in the rural California diner two years before in <span style="font-style: italic;">Die Zeit</span>. I liked the book so much that I pestered some publishers to send me more of her books. I gave a glowing review to a darkly passionate novel of hers entitled <i>Marble Skin</i>. Not long after that I met her at a book festival in Budapest. I brought along copies of her books to sign. When I told her who I was, she gave me a big kiss. Her publisher had sent her a copy of my review, and she said it was one of the most flattering things she'd ever read about her writing (which is pretty amazing, considering some of the gushing reviews of her work I've read).<br /><br />The apartment I rented in those days looked out over the Danube river toward <a href="http://www.fsz.bme.hu/hungary/budapest/bptour/bpmari.htm">Margaret Island</a> (a locale I couldn't even <i>dream</i> of affording nowadays). Over time it occurred to me that the flags on the ships that passed by were always from countries north of Hungary. Due to the war, the river was unnavigable because of sunken boats and bombed bridges, for years. No boats from Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria. Perhaps a little thing to me. But once I noticed it, I thought about it every day when I watched the boats pass by my balcony window.<br /><br />There was a photographer who briefly worked for the <span style="font-style: italic;">Budapest Sun</span> in the early nineties who had fled from Vojvodina, the ethnic Hungarian region of northern Serbia. One day we were talking in a cafe. He reached over to get something out of his camera bag. I briefly caught sight of a nine millimeter automatic among his cameras. That's the only time in my sixteen years in Hungary I've seen a firearm anywhere besides on a policeman's belt. Though a dear man in most ways, he was paranoid and uptight. I could feel the war craziness in him.<br /><br />My wife had a Serbian office mate at the advertising firm she worked at many years ago. She invited us to come over for a few drinks with her and her husband. Things were going quite smoothly until the subject of Kosovo came up. They had been living in Belgrade during that war. Addressing me as the only American in the room, his eyes suddenly got wild, and he shouted, "Why on earth did you have to bomb us?" I tried to politely say a few things about atrocities, but I could tell he hadn't been convinced yet that that wasn't all just Nato propaganda. "But why did you have to bomb us?"<br /><br />It's hard to describe what it was like to live in a country at peace and in relative prosperity, knowing that barbarous butchery and cruel terror were transpiring less than a day's drive away. I think Hungarians tried to forget what was happening in the country next door. But there were always reminders.<br /><br />There was an odd incident one Saturday morning in the early nineties. I was awoken in the first hour of daylight by the sound of an explosion. Turns out it had been many miles away at the St Matthias Church on Castle Hill. People got a bit nervous when news reports said the bomb site had been marked with Serbian nationalist symbols. But people realized soon that a) Serbia had enough on its hands without involving Hungary, and b) Hungary was quickly falling within the sphere of influence of the EU and Nato. Serbia wouldn't dare.<br /><br />And so, you see, despite the fact that I didn't experience that war first hand, and that I have yet to go to the former Yugoslavia, my life was affected in many ways.<br /><br />As I said before, the grand historical and political life of the world is made up of the sum of millions of personal livesTheo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-77932622726415041622008-07-16T22:20:00.009+02:002008-07-17T10:22:48.898+02:00Reflections on Ishiguro's "Floating World"<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/Janus.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; WIDTH: 121px; CURSOR: pointer" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/Janus.jpg" border="0" /></a>It is a perennial puzzle of mankind: how do we judge the acts of individuals and societies once the times have changed? Certain ways of thinking and patterns of accepted behavior predominate for years, for decades, even several generations, but inevitably comes the sea change. Live long enough and you see it happen. Kennedy is shot and the world goes into mourning. Iranian militants take American diplomats hostage, and the world goes paranoid. The Berlin Wall falls, and the Cold War is over. In retrospect you look back and realize that things were no longer the same afterwards. And you also realize that what you think, what you believe, and what you feel is no longer the same.<br /><br />I just recently read Kazuo Ishiguro's novel <i>An Artist of the Floating World</i>, which deals with just such a situation. The first person narrator, a painter who was an influential pro-imperialist propagandist, tells the story of his life in the first few years after Japan's surrender to the allied armies. Here is a society that is coming to terms with what it thought, felt and believed only a few years prior, and how it must accommodate a new reality as an occupied land. It is a society going through an inevitable post-defeat process: the purge.<br /><br />Purging is the act of ridding a system of undesirable elements or properties. The victor does not want to be confronted with the need to fight this enemy again. But any reflection on history will yield the conclusion that purging is a tricky thing to carry out. And it might even be argued that it can never be carried out justly, or that it doesn't actually work.<br /><br />The Romans didn't fool around when they purged. When they were forced to defeat the pesky Carthagians a second time - actually having to fight them on their home soil, and nearly being defeated at one point - they killed the men, made the women and children slaves, took their capital city apart (not one stone standing on another) and sowed their fields with salt. Let that be a lesson to everyone. Don't mess with the Romans! International law frowns on such behavior nowadays. They call that genocide now. People get dragged into international court for that sort of thing.<br /><br />The Counter-Reformation (and the ever-popular Inquisition) was a purge. There's another example of methods that don't quite meet public approval anymore. And, well, it didn't really work, did it? Protestantism just kept spreading anyway.<br /><br />The treaties of Versailles and Trianon are another example of a purging. The idea was to make the enemy too resource poor to be a threat anymore. Well, we know how that worked out, right?<br /><br />Ethnic Cleansing (a term brought to prominence by the Balkan Wars) is another type of purge. Nato finally stepped in an put a stop to that.<br /><br />In Ishiguro's book, the narrator's friends and former students must deal with the Japanese world's equivalent of denazification. Through his eyes, one can see how ambiguous it all seems. One does what one feels is one's duty, and devotes one's energy and talent to a cause, then one day the tables turn, and what you and your society used to regard as a virtuous activity is now considered a crime. Although the narrator is retired and financially set, his former students and colleagues are finding it either difficult or impossible to get work in a world where everyone's political background is being screened before they can be employed in positions with any authority.<br /><br />As in another well-known Ishiguro novel - <i>The Remains of the Day</i> - the story of an intense era with reverberations well into our own time is not told on the grand scale of historic figures and events, but on the level of less prominent people and their personal lives. One gets the sense that the grand historical and political life of the world is made up of the sum of millions of personal lives. In the same sense, each of us has to deal with the big questions and the big political realities of our day as they manifest in our own lives and in our individual choices and decisions. But what we don't always consider is how the way we choose to live our lives is our own accommodation to the predominant ideas and ideologies of our times. And we certainly don't consider that we will regard our own actions differently once the tide turns.<br /><br />In the next few postings I will explore these themes further, using Ishiguro's book and particular dramatic societal shifts to find some philosophical truth underlying the phenomenon of being a human being in a constantly shifting ideological environment, with the concomitant changes in values that brings.<br /><br />Some of the big shifts I want to look at:<br /><br /><ul><li>The sixties and aftermath</li><li>The purges of the Bush II years</li><li>Post-Nazi Europe</li><li>Post-Communist Germany vs Post-Communist Hungary</li><li>What will happen once Bush II is gone?</li></ul><br />Am I getting ambitious enough?Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-73501433411466338732008-07-09T20:19:00.008+02:002008-07-10T16:05:31.537+02:00Who's to Blame?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/ring.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; WIDTH: 122px; CURSOR: pointer" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/ring.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The following article, translated into Hungarian, previously appeared in A Rozsakeresztes Tükör (The Rosicrucian Mirror), the official newsletter of the Rákóczi Pronaos, an affiliated body of the Rosicrucian Order AMORC.</span><br /><br />I'm not telling you anything you don't already know if I say that we are in a difficult situation: Budapest, Hungary, Europe, Western civilization, the world. We have some serious problems. We face some very frightening dangers.<br /><br />How did we get here? Why is this happening? Who is to blame? Let's examine those questions carefully.<br /><br />It would be easy to blame the politicians. Depending on your political loyalties, it would be easy to say that the other political parties acted against your interests, and stole the people's money and resources while they were in office. Or even to say that all politicians are corrupt and untrustworthy. That would be one way of looking at the world.<br /><br />We could blame powerful corporations. It's easy to point a finger at them and say they are destroying our culture with their mass produced products, and their aggressive, tasteless, and ubiquitous advertising. We could accuse them of abusing working people with their low wages, and of polluting our environment with all their packaging and freight transport. That's another way of looking at it.<br /><br />How about the greedy small business people who don't pay their taxes? Let's blame them! Or let's blame the schools because they aren't properly preparing children to be productive and responsible adults.<br /><br />The list of people and institutions we could blame for the problems of the world is endless: pop culture, the police, drug dealers, the EU, organized crime, the Americans, the Islamists, etc.<br /><br />But there's an aspect of the problems we are experiencing in the world today that cannot be explained by looking for evil people or institutions to blame it on. And to explain to you what I mean, I need to tell you a little story.<br /><br />Like many people, I sometimes have money problems, which weigh especially heavily on me, since I am responsible for a large family. One day I was particularly preoccupied with these problems, and specifically that I needed to come up with a certain amount of cash within a few days, and I didn't know how I was going to do it.<br /><br />I was walking along a quiet tree-lined street near my home, on my way to work, when I noticed a chubby, shabbily dressed old man with an old-fashioned metal cane coming towards me. He was still several meters away when he stopped and looked at something on the sidewalk. He leaned over, sticking one leg out behind him and using the cane to support him. I was right in front of him once he had stood up straight and had had a second or two to see what he'd found. He made eye contact with me, and held up the object for me to see. It was a simple gold-colored ring. He tried to put it on one of his fingers, but they were way too thick. Unexpectedly, he held the ring out to me. From it's sparkle in the morning sunlight, and its heft in my hand, I immediately knew this was gold. I peaked inside and found the marking: 18K. It was a very thick, woman's wedding band.<br /><br />In heavily Slavic-accented Hungarian, he told me to try it on. "Kicsi uj!" (Meaning: little finger!) It slipped onto my finger easily. He made a gesture to give it back to him (it was his ring, he found it, after all), and for a moment I feared he would realize how valuable this object was. He tried to find a finger of his that it would fit on, but with no success. He smiled and handed it back to me. I was relieved, and excited. I was about to walk away when he indicated that he wanted money for cigarettes. Fair enough. I got out my wallet and handed him two 100 forint coins. He frowned and said "Keves." (Meaning: Not much. And he seriously mispronounced it.) "Nincs cigoretta!" (A very illiterate, ungrammatical way of saying he can't get cigarettes for that.) The only other thing I had in my wallet was 1,000 forint bills. I thought about the fact that gold had recently hit $1,000 an ounce; an all-time high. The ring was worth at least 50,000 forints, probably much more, considering how heavy it was. So I thought, fair enough. And handed him 1,000 forints.<br /><br />All morning long I kept thinking about the fact that my momentary crisis had been solved. All I would have to do is sell this ring, and I'd have the cash I needed. At lunch time, I went to the silver smith's shop across the street from my office and showed the ring to one of the men who work there. He looked at the ring, and asked, "Is this your ring?" I told him that I'd found it on the street. He raised an eyebrow at that answer. He got a little brown bottle off the shelf, unscrewed the top, pulled out a little glass rod and placed a drop of liquid on the ring. It immediately started to fizz and make white foam. The man looked at me and declared, "It's brass." I was very disappointed, and slightly embarrassed. Just then another man came from a back room.<br /><br />"What's going on here?" he asked.<br /><br />"This fellow thought he found a gold ring on the street. Turns out it's brass."<br /><br />"Found it on the street? You didn't walk up to someone just as they were bending over to pick something up off the sidewalk?"<br /><br />Both of them smiled at me, knowingly. Now I was really embarrassed. I don't really recall how the conversation in the shop ended. I just wanted to get out of there.<br /><br />Later sitting alone in my office, I pulled the ring out of my pocket. As I was examining a dark indentation, that should have made me suspicious, I suddenly noticed that I could smell the ring. I held the ring up to my nose and recognized the unmistakable smell of brass. And now I realized how much I had been blinded by my greed. Neither did I notice that it had a tiny dark indentation in one spot, nor did I think to use my sense of smell to test it. I wanted it to be a piece of gold, and I let that push me completely out of balance.<br /><br />And now I understood how the trick worked. The trick depends on the victim being greedy, and desiring to take advantage of someone they perceive as less intelligent than themselves. In the moment the victim believes he is about to walk away with something valuable, the con artist asks for something. The victim panics and makes a bad decision, based on the belief that whatever he gives the con man, he is getting the far better part of the bargain. The trick only works on people who have been blinded by their greed.<br /><br />Now, it would be easy to get angry about a con man tricking you that way, but I was grateful to him for teaching me a valuable lesson about myself. Even if I try hard to be a good father and husband; even though I work at being as kind and loving as possible in my interactions with other people; even though I work to use the teachings of The Order to elevate my consciousness so I can serve mankind and The Order; when I felt desperate and afraid, I was willing to take advantage of another human being. I was tested, and I failed.<br /><br />In the week that followed this incident, I went into my sanctum several times and visualized the situation. I would see the man bending over and picking up the ring. I would see him trying it on. I would see the situation just as it happened, up to the point where he offered me the ring. At that point in my visualization, I would look at the man and see him as my brother, as another soul, as another spark from the divine fire. I would look into his eyes and say, "No. You keep the ring. You found it. It is yours. You need it more than I do." And then I would imagine myself walking away happy, and full of love for the world.<br /><br />Why have I told you a story that shows me in such an unflattering light? What does this story have to do with the topic of this essay? Who is to blame? This incident, and others in my life, serve to remind me that I am to blame for the way the world is. I am. You are. We all are. I'm sure every one of you could tell us an embarrassing story about how your actual behavior fell short of your Rosicrucian ideals. Whenever we fail to live up to the ideal of living our life as an expression of the light, life and love that flows from the divine center within us, whenever we give in to fear, greed, anger, pride, laziness and other distortions of human nature, then we contribute to the problems of the world. As the American journalist Sydney J. Harris said: "If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem."<br /><br />And that sentence shows you the choice we have to make. Many people falsely believe that you are not part of the problem if you don't actively participate in the problem, and just mind your own business. But being passive and neutral isn't an option. You are either part of the problem, or part of the solution.<br /><br />Are you upset when you see the condition the neighborhood around your home is in: trash on the streets and sidewalk, paint peeling from the disrepaired buildings? Not only should you not throw more trash in the street (which nobody reading this article does, I hope), but perhaps you should occasionally pick a few things up and throw them in the nearest trash can. Perhaps you should spend a few minutes a day visualizing a beautiful neighborhood the way you would like to see it.<br /><br />Do you complain about the way Budapest is run, and the way this society behaves? Maybe it would be more productive to think of what kind of city, country, society you would like to see develop in your lifetime and in future generations. Don't complain and gossip about how bad things are, and what stupid things leaders and powerful people do. Talk to people about your vision of the future. Get involved in projects that improve the world.<br /><br />But above all, do you complain about the how people are unkind and unfair? Perhaps it's more important to be sure you yourself are always kind and fair in your dealings with other people, rather than judging the behavior of other people.<br /><br />Who is to blame for the problems of the world? We all are. But the good news is that we all hold the keys in our hands to solving those problems.Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-84056518263238339992008-07-09T17:17:00.006+02:002008-08-13T21:53:06.368+02:00Announcement: Scribbler Goes Weekly!<a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/paperboy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 135px;" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/paperboy.jpg" border="0" /></a> That's right folks! The Scribbler had a serious talk with himself and decided a change was needed.<br /><br />When I started this blog a little over a year ago, I declared that I wasn't really interested in your public diary sort of blog. Not to say that there isn't a call for that kind of blog. Lord knows I even read a few like that. It's a good way to keep up with family and friends who publish them. And just because a blog concentrates on such subject matter doesn't mean it can't be intellectually deep, or aesthetically dazzling.<br /><br />But that's just not what I was aiming for. I wanted to concentrated on good writing; the sort of thing I used to write when I wrote columns for small newspapers. And, I said this was going to be a philosophical blog, which is still my aim.<br /><br />To a certain extent, I have succeeded. I've been pleased with some of the essays I've published in this blog, and I've received good feedback. But something was missing. I couldn't put a finger on why it was so difficult for me to motivate myself to publish regularly, unlike my wife, who puts out new postings almost daily (sometimes even more than one a day!), and doesn't seem to ever run out of steam. She's <a href="http://kisember.freeblog.hu/">my alphablogger</a>. When she mentions my blog in her blog, my stats go through the roof for a day or two.<br /><br />I tend to write long. (I can hear some people out there saying, "Tell us something we didn't know!") Years of habit make me think of ideas that take about 800 words to express; columns in other words. And it's just so hard to keep that up all the time when you're a nine-to-six working stiff.<br /><br />And then it occurred to me: deadlines! I'm a deadline creature! Tell me an article is due on Tuesday at five, and you'll get it in the e-mail on Tuesday at 4:50.<br /><br />I followed a blog once that published weekly. It was good. I always looked forward to publishing day (I think it was Monday), and his pieces were always worth reading. It worked.<br /><br />So that's how it's going to work around here now. Starting today, <em>A Touch of Pansophia</em> will publish a posting -- think: column -- every week, and Wednesday will be publishing day. That doesn't mean I won't ever post in between, but Wednesday will be a deadline I commit myself to keep every week. I can already feel my creative juices responding to the deadline pressure.<br /><br />Later today I'm going to cheat by publishing something I already have in the can. It's Wednesday: time to publish!Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-73937096774298414812008-07-02T17:29:00.008+02:002008-07-03T00:06:15.531+02:00Dreams as Spiritual Practice<a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/dreamjournal.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 250px;" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/dreamjournal.jpg" border="0" /></a> <em><span style="font-size:85%;">I Just wrote this essay as a contribution to a project being conducted by an on-line dream group I belong to. I thought it was worthy of space on this blog.</span></em><br /><br />The majority of mankind's current problems can be attributed to a drastic restriction of the race's consciousness to a narrow band of phenomena that can be perceived by our physical receptor senses. This trend in human priorities is generally known as materialism. Various esoteric schools have differing explanations for how and why this veiling of the face of Isis came about (some saying that it was a necessary stage of development in order to make us more fully manifested on the physical plane), but they generally agree that cultural evidence shows there was a time mankind was, as a whole, more sensitive to vibrations from other planes of being, and communicated with these planes of being.<br /><br />Materialism as a "philosophy" (if one may grace such a narrow-minded view with such a lofty designation) is completely bankrupt: it is impossible to find one's way through life with no guide other than one's perceptions of the material world, and the conclusions of the physical brain. Actually, going about life in this manner inevitably leads to error. There is vastly more to the Universe than the material, and there is vastly more to Mind than the brain.<br /><br />For the purposes of this essay, a good definition of spirituality would be: the desire to escape the prison of materiality and to expand consciousness to an awareness of realities beyond the material.<br /><br />In this day and age of unfettered eclecticism and prolific <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">syncretism</span>, people driven by their spirituality to search for means to transcend the material world have access to a bewildering volume of resources from myriad cultures and historical eras. There are countless trail heads for paths up the mountain to the one unifying peak: meditation (comprising a plethora meditation methods), ritual, herbs and potions (including outright drugs), alchemy, sex, dance... you name it! (And any eclectic/<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">syncretic</span> combination thereof!)<br /><br />The practice of devoting oneself to dreams, and especially what evolved in the late 20<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">th</span> century under the rubric of "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">dreamwork</span>", is undoubtedly a means of expanding consciousness beyond the material. Although it would be disputed by the most intransigent of academic scientists, it does not take too many months of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">dreamwork</span> -- especially if one's work involves other people -- before one has experiences that lead one to suspect dreams are not solely dependent on the physical brain. There are things that happen in dreams that strongly suggest (some would go so far as to say PROVE) they are <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">transpersonal</span>, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">transdimensional</span>, and involve communication between the self and other beings or states of mind beyond the physical body. These experiences are characterized by an unexpected transgression of the assumed laws of nature one has absorbed from the society we live in. For instance, time is demonstrated not to be what we thought when we see an event in a dream before we experience it in physical reality. Or space gets bent when we see something happening in a dream that is taking place somewhere else in the world. Or the nature of personal reality and individuality is challenged by perceiving knowledge that someone else knows, but has not told you.<br /><br />So it is not hard to argue that increasing one's awareness of dreams is a path to breaking out of the material fetters our milieu tends to bind us with. But the bigger question is: HOW does one pursue dreams as a spiritual practice?<br /><br />One conclusion I've come to is that the discipline of keeping the dream journal is the single most important aspect of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">dreamwork</span>. It is the <span style="font-style: italic;">sine qua non</span> (Latin for: without which there is not) of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">dreamwork</span>. If you don't keep the journal, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">dreamwork</span> can't happen. It's what practicing <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">katas</span> is to karate; playing scales is to musicianship; drawing sketch studies is to painting. If you don't write them down, you don't remember them, and if you don't remember them, there's no material to work with. Keeping the journal is already an act of "spiritual anarchy" in and of itself. You are declaring that you are willing to put time and energy into something which has no physical reality, and is unrelated to the usual mania of acquiring possessions that dominates the motivations of most people in the materialist world.<br /><br />But there's another aspect to this. The act of keeping the journal is what rebuilds the bridge. This loss of awareness of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">noumena</span> outside the realm of the ordinary conscious mind (the aforementioned falling of the veil) is why we are such strangers to our unconscious minds. It takes practice to rebuild that bridge. As most people know now: we dream every night, most people just don't remember it. With practice, we learn how to coax those memories into the bright light of day. And along with that ability to remember dreams comes an ability to pay attention to the subtler things that are always going on at various levels of one's mind.<br /><br />The subconscious mind is the gate to greater reality. The word dream is a very broad catch-all term that encompasses all the experiences we have from the time we put our head on the pillow and close our eyes until we get out of bed the next morning. Once we pay attention to these experiences we realize that they are not all of the same nature. Some can be accurately described as psychic experiences, visions, astral projections, readings of the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">akashic</span> records, and other types of internal experiences that have been documented in esoteric teachings, religious texts, and other literature, as far back as our records reach.<br /><br />But paying attention to and recording dreams does not yet constitute a spiritual practice. To be able to call it that, one has to make a commitment to act on the experiences one records. You cross a line from <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">intellectualizer</span>, dabbler and dilettante to spiritual practitioner once you act with will and courage, and actually base an action you take in the physical waking world on something you experienced in a dream. And it does take courage at first. After all: this is the kind of thing the materialists call insanity! "You did it because of WHAT? Something you dreamed? Are you nuts?" There is something downright magical in allowing this knowledge, this energy from another dimension to manifest in your physical world. It's like lightning striking. And sometimes the effects can be just that dramatic, or they can be simply deeply gratifying. And that’s everything one could expect from a spiritual discipline.Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-87318164560307933562008-05-01T10:41:00.004+02:002008-05-03T10:49:43.200+02:00The Two Gates<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/forkinroad.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 93px;" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/forkinroad.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">Szilvi and I have recently gone through a life-changing experience. I wrote the following essay in order to explain it as clearly as I could to my family. </span><br /><br />Your mind turns its attention, at some point in your life, away from the portal through which souls enter this world and becomes increasingly aware of that other portal through which souls depart again. I'm not talking about the moment you first truly realize your mortality sometime in your twenties, when you understand that this life won't last forever, and that you will have to make some choices that narrow your possibilities for the rest of this life. No, I'm talking about the point at which you cannot deny that your years in this body have reached well beyond half of the statistical average lifespan for your gender, social stratum, and geographical location. It's just a fact: you are closer to the exit, than you are to the entrance. It doesn't mean you need to fret or panic, but it does mean that if you are wise, you should slowly begin to prepare for it.<br /><br />This has nothing to do with being morbid, or having a death obsession. As a matter of fact, due to my adherence to a Rosicrucian philosophy, I avoid using the words death, and dying, because they tie you to a limited, materialistic conception of human experience. The truth is, we never die, only these bodies we inhabit while in this world. I may have misgivings about the physical pain involved, and I may have some fears about what it's like to get old and weak and forgetful, but I don't really fear death itself. I know I existed before this life, and I'm certain I'll continue to exist after this particular incarnation. That's not really an issue.<br /><br />But there is the matter of gracefully living out the rest of this life. I've always been what they call a "late bloomer"; slower to mature than my peers.<br /><br />So I find it hard to understand why I, at this stage of my life, am still intimately involved with the gate that lets souls in. This was the question raised inside me when, not more than a few weeks ago, we determined that Szilvi was pregnant. As usual, it caught us by surprise. I'm not going to go into the gritty details, but it's not as if we don't use contraception. We always have. Nonetheless, none of our children were planned; none of the four of them, and soon to be five (six, counting my child from my first marriage). Their conceptions have always beat the odds, which if calculated, were always several thousand-to-one. These souls really wanted to be born into this family, into this time, into this milieu. If you accept the idea of reincarnation, it follows that souls choose the time, place and circumstances of their birth. These children chose us. The corollary is that we, unconsciously wanted all these children. I love every last one of them with all my heart. I can't imagine what my life would be like without any one of them.<br /><br />But the news was overwhelming. When we discovered that we would be having a third child (Abigail) and a fourth (Timothy), I somehow managed to get over the shock rather quickly and adopt a positive, accepting attitude to the new situation. But this time I felt overwhelmed. No! It can't be! We can't have a fifth child! Out of the question! It didn't take much discussion after the line turned blue on the home pregnancy test. There's no place in our lives for a fifth child. We would just have to abort it.<br /><br />A grey gloom subtly and immediately engulfed Szilvi's and my lives. We tried (or at least I tried) to be cheerful and matter-of-fact about the situation. Szilvi accepted the reasoning I had stated that first evening. It goes like this:<br /><br />It's one thing to be an irresponsible young person who thinks abortion is just an unpleasant way to fix the consequences of your reckless behavior, but it is quite another for a responsible married couple who are already bearing more than their share of society's burden by conscientiously raising several young children as well as they can. We are nothing if not responsible parents. We should not feel we have to justify ourselves. That was the reasoning I was going by.<br /><br />Despite the fact that my job provides my family with wonderful medical insurance, naturally such a procedure isn't covered, so Szilvi began the laborious process of dealing with the state health-care bureaucracy. First she had to go to a doctor to confirm she was pregnant, which had to be verified with an ultrasound. The radiologist, unaware of our intentions, cheerfully announced she saw a nice healthy baby. Great. With those papers in handSzilvi had to go a counselling agency, which -- once they heard we had four children -- didn't do the hard-sell to try to make her change her mind. There was a three-day waiting period, after which you can go back and get a "permit" to schedule the procedure at a hospital. WhenSzilvi got the papers, the soonest she could get an appointment at the hospital was eight days after that. It would be a Friday. It would be an ambulatory procedure: go in in the morning, come home in the evening.<br /><br />All this time, it played on our minds. It was agony waiting.<br /><br />And now we had a week and a half to wait. How do you just go on living your life with an event like that pending?<br /><br />At one point, I took a day off from work to go with Szilvi and Abigail to the Obuda Waldorf Kindergarten for the annual Mardi Gras party. Szilvi was helping out with food and decorating, and she couldn't do that while she was taking care of Timothy. In Hungary, Waldorf families tend to be bigger than average. I'm not sure why that is, perhaps it has to do with the fact that they tend to be above the median income level. There are several families in our children's classes with four or more children. So as I made small talk and ate at the party, I kept watching the kids, and the parents, and I found myself entertaining the thought: what's the difference between four and five children? Can it be that much harder? They say the big jump is between two and three. We could do it, couldn't we? Of course, I didn't share any of these thoughts withSzilvi.<br /><br />When we got home, Szilvi and I got into an argument. I accused her of making me feel guilty by making long faces and moping around the house. It came out in the conversation that she thought we'd made our decision too hastily. She thought we should at least talk about it and consider all the possibilities. I didn't want to consider! I'd decided. I was pissed off. We discussed the rightness/wrongness of abortion. I said I didn't have the same scruples that Christians do, since I was convinced of the truth of certain mystical doctrines that say the soul does not inhabit the body until the body takes its first breath. Until then, it's the power of the mother's soul that animates the body.Szilvi was not so convinced of that.<br /><br />At some point in the conversation Szilvi mentioned a dream she'd had before she knew she was pregnant. In the dream Abigail had been saved from drowning, and when an ambulance arrived, they wanted to take her away for observation, butSzilvi vehemently resisted them taking Abigail away from her. Szilvi felt/suspected this dream had been a warning not to let "them" take away her daughter; her unborn daughter. After we'd both calmed down I proposed that we use our inner resources to help us get clarity. We would incubate dreams to address our problem, and see what they told us. We gave ourselves five days to make the "final" decision.<br /><br />The dreams obviously addressed our question, but the answers were riddles. We did dreamwork together several times that week, and came to the conclusion (well, I guess I came to the conclusion) that there was nothing in the dreams screaming out not to go through with this. At this point we still had several days to go before the Friday morning appointment. The mood got darker, despite my efforts to take it matter-of-factly. I began spending lots of time during the day staring out my window at the office, and often closed my eyes in silent prayer, asking The Master Within to bring me peace and balance.Szilvi got more silent and brooding with each day. The fact that we weren't telling the children what was going on made things even worse. How do you explain something like this to a child? Especially your own children! You can just imagine them having nightmares about what would have happened had you decided to abort them. No. We weren't telling the children.<br /><br />For the day of the procedure, I arranged to to take vacation time so I could take Abigail to and from kindergarten and spend the day with Timothy. I don't even recall what we were going to tell the children. Something vague about having to see the doctor. I took the Thursday off as well, to be emotionally supportive ofSzilvi.<br /><br />I have to explain that in Hungary there is a particular means of paying money that goes into public funds. It's called a cheque, but it doesn't work like a check in Western countries. You pay it in the post office, and you get a stub that shows you've paid that amount to a certain beneficiary. With this, you can prove to an authority that you've paid. This was how the fee for the procedure had to be paid, which meant someone had to pay the fee at the post office at least the day before, which meant Thursday, soSzilvi could present the stub on Friday.<br /><br />Thursday was a black day, no matter how cheerful I tried to be. Szilvi was listless. I told her she had to maintain her routines if she didn't want to go crazy. She did, reluctantly. Finally, it came time for me to take a walk to the post office. I was getting ready to leave whenSzilvi made the remark, "Could you arrange for a small tornado to rip that cheque out of your hands, and take it off to Utah." I was stunned. What did that remark mean? I thought we'd made up our minds. Well,Szilvi said, she still wasn't quite sure. She knew I was sure. I started getting really agitated. I guess I was even beginning to yell. What the hell kind of thing was that to say just as I'm going out the door! You don't decide one thing and feel inside you should do something else! Get it together! What are we doing here? I thought we had this decided days ago!<br /><br />And then I yelled: Go get your dream journal! Let's get this matter clear! She looked at me incredulously. What good would that do, she asked. We've been over it all already, haven't we?<br /><br />"Go get your dream journal! I'm not going to do something just because we're drifting into it. I want to be sure."<br /><br />So we went over the dreams, hers and mine, one by one. I was pacing up and down the kitchen floor like a cat in a zoo cage, talking my thoughts out loud, going over every image, event and configuration in those dreams; drawing associations, speculating on the messages. Somehow, I saw those dreams differently in that moment than I'd seen them all along. I was becoming convinced the message was: we were capable of raising another child.<br /><br />I confessed to Szilvi what had been going through my head all those days I'd stared out the window of my office. It had to do with faith. Faith in myself. Faith in providence. Faith in the powers I claim to know all human beings possess. When we found out thatSzilvi was pregnant with Timothy, it took a huge leap of faith to go through with it. But we did. We moved heaven and earth to find the resources and make the arrangements to get a bigger apartment suitable for our family. But we did it. It wasn't easy, but through the power of visualization, creative effort, and shear will power, we moved into a new apartment weeks before Timothy was born. BothSzilvi and I were somewhat amazed at what we were capable of doing when we had to do it.<br /><br />And now we had learned there was another baby coming.<br /><br />As we went over the dreams, there were a few that disturbed me. One in particular seemed to have a message for me. In this dream,Szilvi and I are visiting a museum that's been made out of the home of an Israeli man killed in a suicide bombing. The house has been preserved the way it was when he was alive. The upstairs of the house was reminiscent of the attic study I had during my last year as an undergraduate. There were all kinds of projects lying around, and things he collected: evidence of an intellectually active and curious human being. There was a low bed on the floor (as there had been in my study) consisting of a just a mattress or perhaps box springs as well, but certainly no frame. On the bed was a strange wooden tray, about the length of my torso, roughly carved by hand. It was like a giant trencher or meat serving dish. I knew this was there because the man had suffered from a bad back. There was a blanket on the bed, carelessly tossed aside, making it look like someone had just been taking a nap. I decided to try the tray out, and lay down on it. I could tell that it must have been comfortable for the man, but it was just too small and confining for me.<br /><br />It struck me that this man was my former self: a man with the time and leisure for numerous intellectual pursuits. And he had a bad back. He didn't have a strong enough spine! And now, the comfortable way he compensated for his weak spine was too small and confining for me!<br /><br />This and other dreams convinced me that I'd been trying to dodge my responsibility. I had no excuse thinking I didn't have the power to handle the situation.<br /><br />I got the cheque, and held it in my hand. I told Szilvi that I'd never accuse her of saddling me with too many children if she promised never to complain that they were too much of a burden. She readily agreed. I took a dinner plate off the shelf, and a box of matches.<br /><br />"Are you certain this is what you want to do?"<br /><br />Szilvi, looking at me in wide-eyed disbelief, nodded. I struck a match and touched the flame to the corner of the thick paper of the cheque, and the dry material caught quickly. Very soon, it was a tiny black object on the plate.<br /><br />I knew we'd done the right thing, because for the first time in weeks, Szilvi and I were happy that afternoon. We smiled and laughed, and started talking about having a baby. God knows we'd been through this often enough already. We have lots of practice. I recall that when Timothy was born, the very next daySzilvi and I were in the familiar routine of feeding, changing, naps, and carrying him around. It becomes second nature. And as for the material and financial matters involved in having one more child; we just have to believe in our power to make our way in the world.<br /><br />Indeed, I am closer to the door from which souls leave this world than to the one where they enter, but that's no reason for me not to look back and watch as the miracle of birth continues to happen, as it always has, and always will.Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-75859960368645569082008-04-24T15:31:00.005+02:002008-04-24T17:23:24.791+02:00The V-word<a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/veganpunk.jpg"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 130px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/veganpunk.jpg" border="0" /></a> I never told anyone about this until I confessed it to Szilvi last week.<br /><br />I've always disliked the word "vegan". Dislike is too mild: I detest it, revile it, can barely get myself to form it on my lips.<br /><br />This is going to take a lot of explaining. Where should I start?<br /><br />What’s forced the issue is that our youngest child, Timothy, developed eczema. It was just sort of rash-y, and vaguely reddish and irritated for months, but something kicked it into overdrive a few weeks back and he started getting these angry, dry red patches on his arms and legs. And he’d scratch himself to bleeding when his clothes were off. Doctor’s recommendation: stop feeding him dairy products (and nuts and several other things, while we’re at it). Since he’s not even two yet, and we eat our meals as a family, that meant that we ALL were going to stop eating dairy products, since Timothy would throw a shit fit if he saw someone eating yoghurt or putting sour cream on their food when he can’t have any.<br /><br />Now, our family is already vegetarian to begin with (another V-word). This is a step in a more severe direction.<br /><br />Szilvi and I have been vegetarians for twelve years, and I still haven’t warmed up to that word. I’m never comfortable with telling someone, "I’m a vegetarian." How ridiculous to define someone by what they don’t eat. I don’t eat meat. Does that make me “something”? Is there a word for people who don’t drink tomato juice? How about a word for people who don’t sleep late on weekends? (OK, they're called parents.)<br /><br />The vegetarian thing was slow in developing. Back in the 80s, when I lived in northern California, I developed some digestion problems. Severe digestion problems. I began thinking I should write a will. That was when, under the guidance of my herbalist/acupuncturist, I began conscientiously deciding what to eat, instead of just stuffing my face with whatever came to hand. I began eating more brown rice, and more raw and steamed vegetables. Among the things I began eating less of was meat. I didn’t stop eating meat, or really consider it, because my favorite cuisine was Chinese. And the Chinese <em>do</em> love their pork. So I wasn’t eating slabs of beef steak, just slivers of pork to go with the asparagus in Cheng Tu sauce (for instance). All-in-all, my meat consumption fell drastically.<br /><br />Fast forward to being a young married couple in Hungary. Szilvi was never a real meat lover, so she and I didn’t eat much meat to begin with, and she even encouraged me to try making my favorite Chinese dishes without the meat. But when we went to visit relatives – even the ones who knew we tried to eat a light diet – they would put heaps of meat on the table, and we’d feel obliged to eat it. And then I’d feel sick afterwards. I’d complain to Szilvi. One day she informed me that the solution to this problem was simple. “We just tell everyone we’re vegetarians!”<br /><br />Wow! That sounded drastic. But I saw her point: it really was the only solution. And, well, it wasn’t hard at all. I can honestly say that I haven’t missed eating meat at all. Now, you should observe that we didn’t stop eating meat on moral grounds. It was actually a choice based on health concerns. Granted, after you live for years without eating flesh you do look at meat very differently, and do begin to see the taking of life for the sake of pleasure to be, well, wasteful and selfish. But that’s not how it started with us.<br /><br />Oddly, I actually even experimented with cutting dairy foods out of my diet when I was in my twenties as a way to cut calories. And that was before I became a veg-… veg-… you, know, one of those people who don’t eat meat. I’ve actually even thought of going that route for years, but it just seemed too difficult in a family with four children.<br /><br />So back to our immediate situation. If you’re already a lacto-ovo vegetarian (another really silly term pigeon-holing people by what they do/don’t eat), and you stop eating dairy products and eggs, well that makes you a… a… Oh my God! I just can’t say it!<br /><br />On her blog, Szilvi remarked that she was surprised (shocked! alarmed! is more like it) to hear me say that when, after a few months, we begin reintroducing some of the sensitizing foods into Timothy’s (and the family’s) diet, I might like to – in her words – “stay on a vegan diet.”<br /><br />Egad! She said it! About me! Somebody called me a vegan! OH NO! I’ve become one of THEM!<br /><br />OK. Let’s talk about why I hate this word.<br /><br />Where did this word come from anyway? It first started becoming commonly used in the mid nineties, and usually in reports about the animal rights movement. There’s something weird about how its spelling and pronunciation defy all rules of English orthography and phonics. Why the long e (veeegun) and not a short e as in all other words that come from the same Latin root. Why a hard g and not a soft g. It’s a downright dumb sounding word. It makes me feel illiterate to say it. This incongruence with authentic English words gives it the stink of a neologism, and a clumsy one at that. And the kind of neologism that makes my skin crawl at the suspicion it was coined by someone with little reverence for the English language and a big fat agenda. When I went to search for <a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=vegan">an etymology</a>, my suspicions were confirmed. It is, indeed a coined word. Somebody foisted this monster on us.<br /><br />And now by simply choosing not to eat dairy products, this foul locution has been used in connection with my name. Theo the vegan. That stings.<br /><br />Earlier I mentioned how the v-word made it's way into common usage with the rise of the animal rights movement. Whether or not one sympathizes with their aims (for the most part I do, especially when it comes to their stance on laboratory animals), or with some of their tactics (letting domesticated animals free is actually pretty stupid), I can't help recalling being seriously repelled by self-righteous twenty-somethings being interviewed at animal rights demonstrations declaring their superiority over the rest of humanity because they were (gulp, here goes!) vegans. What put me off was their revolutionary fervor that showed not one bit of sympathy for the fact that our society has century-old customs and practices that make meat eating an integral part of the culture. It takes serious introspection and afterwards personal strength (to withstand the constant, if most of the time subtle, criticism one has to endure) in order to make the decision to change one's diet that drastically. You can't just bully people into understanding the politics and ethics of our eating habits. It takes time to understand it. You can't expect people to accept such big changes overnight.<br /><br />And, again, my choice isn't really political. It's a practical choice regarding my health. I have lots of children I want to see grow up. I have lots of things I still want to get done in this life. I just can't afford to get sick and feeble. That's the main reason why I made these choices.<br /><br />There are spiritual reasons, too. But I take that up in a later posting.<br /><br />I guess I better get used to the fact that, like it or not, the way I eat now fits the definition of ... of... (just say it!) vegan. I'll just have to get used to it.Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-41086287952030106702008-03-23T19:58:00.003+01:002008-03-23T20:10:50.993+01:00Scribbler Does Yang Cheng FuOK Folks. I promised it. So here it is: me doing the first third of the Yang tai chi set. The initiated will be able to see the weaknesses and mistakes (which I myself can see), but my form has "stabilized" into the state it will be in for a while. This is what I do every morning (three times) after I warm up with twenty minutes of Chi Kung exercises.<br /><br />The outfit I'm wearing is my Easter Sunday outfit. I had my son take this video while we were there for family dinner. There's a strong tradition among some Chinese wu shu masters that they never wear uniforms, and only train in everyday clothes. I've worn theses clothes to the office, so that's fairly everyday.<br /><br /><embed width="430" height="389" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" src="http://s90.photobucket.com/flash/player.swf?file=http://vid90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/DSCN0116.flv"></embed>Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-19029370923811190182008-03-12T17:36:00.006+01:002008-03-15T08:54:07.610+01:00Developing a relationship to fairy tales - closing remarks (part 2)<a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/hanselandgretel.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 225px;" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/hanselandgretel.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:85%;">(To interpret, or not to interpret?)</span></div><br />Why is it important that these stories are a mixed bag, and don't neatly fit the categories scholarship has created for them? Because seen in this way, one can appreciate that all of the approaches I've mentioned so far in this essay, as well as many others I haven't mentioned, are legitimate in their own rite.<br /><br />But precisely because there are many different kinds of narratives lumped together under the rubric of "fairy tales," one has to be careful which methods one applies to which fairy tales.<br /><br />Again, there's an apt comparison to dreams and dreamwork. When working with a dream, it is essential that the dreamer feels deeply within his intuition to determine what kind of dream is in question (I credit <a href="http://www.mossdreams.com/">Robert Moss</a> and his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Dreaming-Spiritual-Path-Everyday/dp/051788710X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205563676&sr=8-1"><i>Conscious Dreaming</i></a> for making this clear to me).<br /><br />Let's say that you dream your uncle Charlie comes to you and tells you that your boss has a sharp sword in his office and he plans to cut off your head the next time you go there. In order to begin working with this dream, the dreamer has to decide whether it is a) transpersonal, b) prescient, or c) psychological (or another type of dream, but this covers the big categories). The dreamer has to ask himself: do I really feel that uncle Charlie came to me? Or does the image of Charlie represent something? If he feels it really was Charlie (i.e. a transpersonal dream), then it would be foolish to try interpreting Charlie as a symbol. One would miss the entire point! If one feels Charlie is a symbol, or represents a principle or "archetype" (i.e. it's a psychological dream) then one would apply other tools. The dreamer would also have to ask himself "do I feel this dream is speaking of the future?" If yes (i.e. it's a prescient dream), then the manner of treating this dream would, again, be different.<br /><br />Using the wrong tools on a given dream yields dubious results. The same applies to fairy tales, especially considering the types of fairy tales that <a href="http://pansophist-scribbler.blogspot.com/2008/02/evolving-relationship-to-fairy-tales_11.html">Rudolf Steiner</a> and <a href="http://pansophist-scribbler.blogspot.com/2008/02/evolving-relationship-to-fairy-tales_13.html">Werner Zurfluh</a> are talking about. If the narrative speaks of a hero who must cross a threshold into another world, and the terms of the story indicate that what follows is the hero's psychic experience, it does very little good to get out all the tools of literary analysis and try to interpret this passage or the subsequent passage (dealing with the hero's adventure beyond the threshold) with post-modern, post-colonial, feminist, queer, hermeneutic, Jungian, Freudian, structuralist or any other type of criticism. It just misses the point.<br /><br />And another parallel between dreamwork and "fairy tale work": It's very important that you base your own understanding of a fairy tale on your own experience. There is great danger in abdicating to so-called experts one's own right to decide the significance and meaning of aesthetic artifacts. Just because someone has degrees from respected institutions doesn't automatically give them insight into matters as deep as the ancient stories told by our race, nor into the meaning of creative inspirations from sources deep within our beings. The modern world regards the word inspiration, which means "to breathe in the spirit", as a quaint, colorful, but ultimately antiquated metaphor. Creativity is believed to arise in the physical brain. The average educated person believes that all the meanings of artistic creations can be found by means of various intellectual, analytical processes. And this is patently untrue. There are some things the objective mind cannot penetrate. Let's look again at that remark Rudolf Steiner made about symbols:<br /><br />"Explanation and interpretation of symbols is really nonsense; so too is all theorising about symbols. The true attitude to symbols is to make them and actually experience them. It is the same as with fables and legends and fairy tales. — These should never be received merely abstractly, one must identify oneself with them. There is always something in man whereby he can enter into all the figures of the fairy tale, whereby he can make himself one with the fairy tale. And so it is with these true symbols of olden times, which come originally from spiritual knowledge..."<br /><br />Many people are confused when you tell them that you should not focus your efforts on <i>interpreting</i> fairy tales, just as they have troubles understanding how you deal with dreams without immediately jumping to the interpretation. That's what the intellectual culture we've been brought up in tells us to do. Everyone has seen films in which there is someone lying on a couch and telling their dream to a shrink, and the shrink tells that person what the dream means, right? Your English teacher in high school (or English professor in college) gives you a poem or a story, and you're supposed to analyse it and interpret it, right? So, naturally, when you get something as highly symbolic as a fairy tale, which anyone with a couple of live nerve endings and a remnant of the natural in-born sense of awe knows is just pregnant with significance and meaning, what do you think you're supposed to do with it? Interpret it, of course! Wrong.<br /><br />What can you do instead of interpret? If you have graphic skills, you can take a page out of the Waldorf school book and draw or paint the motifs of a fairy tale. You can act them out with friends and family playing different roles (OK, I admit I've never tried this with fairy tales. But I have tried acting out dreams with friends. Powerful stuff!) You could simply review the dream in your mind and then journal about the episodes in your life it reminds you of. You can use a tale, a part of a tale, or even just an image in the tale as the subject of a meditation. The possibilities are up to your own creativity. But the most important thing is to read them repeatedly. If you have children the right age to tell fairy tales, you are blessed. You don't have to contrive a reason for reading them, nor to justify the time you spend reading them. And there is also something special about reading them out loud. You get to experience the tales as a fringe benefit of doing service for your children. And never doubt for a moment: reading fairy tales to your children is a great service.<br /><br />One last remark. I apologize to anyone who takes umbrage at my sometime somewhat dismissive attitude to the discipline of psychology. As the old joke goes: some of my best friends as psycholgists (I just wouldn't want my daughter to marry one!). The reason for this is that, despite an increasing number of enlightened individuals among their ranks, there is still a frightening number of them who fail to be human when examining the human mind, and who feel it is their duty to destroy and discredit anything that supports a viewpoint based on the divine nature of man's essence (the soul), mistakenly believing they are fighting superstition and ignorance, when indeed they are only showing their intolerance and ignorance of things beyond the ken of their particular sub specialty.<br /><br />The blinders that give many psychologists tunnel vision is a combination of materialism and the limits imposed on them by the scientific method. Materialism is a state of mind that refuses to acknowledge anything beyond the physical senses (or the measurement instruments that represent an extension of our senses). Unfortunately, dealing with the products of the subconscious and the imagination does not always yield easily repeatable results. Instinct, emotion and intuition are equally as important as reason and logic. And although many psychologists would like to stake out the territory of fairy tales and dreams as their own, in which non-shrink dilettantes dabble at their peril, they forget that dealing with these worlds is much more an art than a science. And these realms are <span style="font-style: italic;">everyone's</span> birhtright.Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-78219172047814869312008-03-04T11:44:00.005+01:002008-03-04T13:06:16.851+01:00Of heptads, rebirth, solar energy, tai chi and everything<a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/Weekday_heptagram.png"><img style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/Weekday_heptagram.png" border="0" /></a>It's a special day today. I'm buzzing with enthusiasm. Now lots of people <a name="OLE_LINK1">–</a> especially in our youth-oriented culture <a name="OLE_LINK1">–</a> would say I'm completely nuts about being happy it's my 49th birthday today. But I am. I've been looking forward to this day for weeks.<br /><br />It all has to do with cycles of seven. Rosicrucian teachings say that human life unfolds in <a href="http://www.rosicrucian.org/members/memberfeatures/cycle_life/index.html">cycles of seven</a>. First of all, there are seven days in the week. Then the years can be divided into seven periods of 52 days each, and then there are cycles in our lives consisting of seven years each. Anthroposophists and Waldorf teachers and parents will be familiar with the latter. Well... I have now finished the last year of a seventh cycle of seven. Something very "complete" about that. And what makes this year, and especially this day, so special?<br /><br />Look at the star illustrating this posting. That star can be found in the <em>Occult Philosophy</em> of the Renaissance mystic/philosopher/magician <a href="http://www.geocities.com/athens/agora/7850/">Cornelius Agrippa</a>, along with explanations of how to use it to calculate the planetary influences of a given day and hour. Every week starts with the day of the sun (Sunday), followed by the day of the moon (Monday) and so forth, following the lines of the star. The first hour of Sunday is the hour of the sun, followed by the hour of venus, following the points of the star clockwise. There are 24 cycles of seven hours per week, bringing you back to the hour of the sun in the first hour of the week. So, obviously the first year of each cycle is a solar year, and the first cycle of seven years is the solar cycle. So... I have gone through seven cycles, meaning this new cycle of seven is a solar cycle. This is the first year of that cycle, so this is the solar year, And this is the first 52 days of that year, so this the solar section of that year. And it's the very first day!<br /><br />I am reborn today!!!<br /><br />The wind is in my sails! And I know I had better take advantage of this, and use all this energy wisely, because times of such positive momentum are precious. Honestly. I feel an electric buzz all through my body and mind.<br /><br />It was thinking a few days ago that I needed to do something special to mark this occasion, when I got a serious brain wave. And here's what occurred to me.<br /><br /><br />As my loyal readers know, I started <a href="http://pansophist-scribbler.blogspot.com/2008/01/different-strokes.html">relearning the Yang tai chi form </a>about five weeks ago. I say "relearning" since I learned a short version of the Yang form in an Experimental College class at UC Davis, back when I lived in northern California. First of all, that was twenty years ago, and I didn't really remember much of it anymore. And I don't recall – if I ever knew – what particular style of Yang tai chi my teacher taught, but it wasn't as rigorous, nuanced, or detailed as the form taught on the videos of <a href="http://www.practical-martial-arts.co.uk/practical_martial_arts/erle_montaigue/em_erle_profile.html">Erle Montaigue</a>. Essentially, I had to learn it over from scratch.<br /><br />Well, two days ago it occurred to me that I was only two moves away from finishing the first third of the Yang Cheng set, which is considered to be a short set in an of itself. I realized that if I busted my butt and learned the last two moves, I could do the whole set. That represents an accomplishment to me. Five weeks of daily work to not only regain something I could do in my late twenties, but to even learn it at a higher level than I could do it back then.<br /><br />For the first time, this morning, the first day of the first 52-day cycle of this first year of the second solar seven-year cycle of my life (hope you could follow that), I performed my new Yang Cheng Fu tai chi set. It was still dark outside, and my family was still asleep, but I felt vibrant. What a wonderful birthday present to myself!<br /><br />In a few weeks, once I've ironed some of the nastier wrinkles out of the form, I'll have my son make a video of me doing the routine, and I'll upload it to the blog. <br />I'll have a big party next year to celebrate my 50th, but that'll be for everyone else. This year's the important milestone to me.Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-39912497471376880202008-03-03T12:52:00.008+01:002008-03-03T22:04:05.472+01:00Developing a relationship to fairy tales - closing remarks<div align="center"><a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/Red-Riding-Hood.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 160px;" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/Red-Riding-Hood.jpg" border="0" /></a> <span style="font-size:85%;">(Some observations about the arbitrariness of genre)</span> </div><br />Although it's obvious that I think certain modes of dealing with fairy tales completely miss the boat at times, upon reflection, I can't truly assert that those approaches are either without value, or that they have not contributed something important to my understanding of fairy tales or to the understanding of fairy tales in general.To begin with, let's posit that there's something akin to dreamwork that applies to fairy tales; let's call it "fairy tale work." One of the central tenets of dreamwork is that one shouldn't rush jump straight to interpretation. One needs to absorb the tale, play with the tale, live the tale. Only when one has finally experienced the tale on several different levels should one venture to say what it "means." One thing that has to be kept in mind when talking about fairy tales (and when talking about <i>all</i> literature for that matter) is that all categorization of literature into genre and sub genres is arbitrary. To get a sense of just how arbitrary, indulge me in considering the following potted history of literature.<br /><br />Story telling began around the campfire 150,000 years ago. After the tribe had sated itself on whatever beast they had roasted that night, Ogg, Igg and Oog would perform a dramatic re-enactment of catching a particularly worthy antelope: the world's first narrative. The story would have everything. There would be the foreshadowing of the place and time they found the magical creature through omens along the trail. There would be the enchanted moment when they beheld the beautiful animal, and it looked back at them, and consciousness beheld consciousness. There would be the tests of strength, endurance and courage the hunters underwent, as they chased the wounded prey across the landscape and almost got hopelessly lost (or they actually <i>did</i> get lost but magical beings and powers aided them in returning to the tribe).But was that the only kind of tale told around the fire? Well, no.<br /><br />In succeeding generations Org, appointed by the elders to remember everything that happens to the tribe, as well as all the stories he was told by elders before they croak of, would give recitals of certain stories of particular importance to the tribe, including Ogg's famous story of stalking the enchanted antelope. Org's stories tended to be what we would call history, or legend nowadays.<br /><br />Big Mama, Ogg's main woman (monogamy hadn't quite caught on just yet), would sometimes be called on to tell about the visits she got during the night from the Sky Mother, whose tits are the stars and whose womb is the waxing and waning moon. Sky mother would tell her which plants to use to cure various illnesses tribe members suffered from. Sky mother tended to talk in riddles, so the tribe would have to play around with Big Mama's dreams to figure out which plant Sky Mother meant and how they were supposed to prepare it. Very often the solution was a horrible pun that made the whole tribe groan and then giggle. Sky Mother has a strange sense of humor.<br /><br />Then again, there were the tales told by Jackal, the tribe's shaman. These tales were always fantastic, and involve travelling to other worlds; some of them are like the world the tribe knew, and some were very different than their world, inhabited by gods, people and beings unlike anything they knew.In his tales there were heroes who leave their tribes to find women and treasures they have seen in their dreams. To triumph in his quest, the hero (or heroine) must bravely fight battles with creatures unlike any beasts the tribe knew from it's world, and the hero must perform tasks requiring great skill and cunning.Once Jackal told about visiting a world of people with white skin who live in square boxes and travel inside things that look like shiny turtles with clear ice on the sides they can see through. There were so many things in this story that no one could understand, like the giant seed pods these people hold to their ears to talk to other people who are far away. Jackal said he didn't understand this world either, but he went there and watched how people do things if he needed ideas for how to make better tools. He said he couldn't go there very often because it drained his spirit; although the people in this world are god-like, it was clear to him that most of them are lonely, and afraid of each other.<br /><br />Oops. Got carried away there. But my point is this: although it's the shaman's tales that would most easily be classified as fairy tales, the historian's tales as "legend", Big Mama's tales as some sort of "religious" text, and the hunter's tales as something else, all of them would cross lines into one another. The hunter's tales have elements of the religious tales, the historian might relate an important ancestor's encounter with with a supernatural being, or his voyage to another world, which are more fairy tale-like.<br /><br />The same goes for the collections of folk tales created in the 19th century. When some philologist doing field work found a peasant who was willing to offer up some of the yarns common people told each other around the hearth (a modernized form of the campfire, mind you!), there was no telling what she/he might tell the scholar. It might be a ghost story. It might be a local myth. It might be a legend connected to a local landmark. It might be a fable. And many times it was some mixture of these "genres." Many times it's not exactly clear what category a narrative fits into, but it has to be put into some pigeonhole or other.<br /><br />And the picture is further muddled by the fact that various collectors attempted to edit and rewrite some tales. It is evident when reading some collections that editors made attempts to "prettify" some tales, and to make the language, plotting and other elements more consistent with the standards of the current literary (read: high culture) texts of the time.<br /><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:85%;">(Next: to interpret or not to interpret)</span></div>Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-60264936327914918662008-02-13T13:07:00.011+01:002008-02-16T09:20:41.328+01:00Evolving a Relationship to Fairy Tales (Part VI)<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/projection1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 216px;" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/projection1.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">(Werner Zurfluh, Part II)</span><br /></div><br />There are two ways in which Zurfluh's work relates to fairy tales.<br /><br /><br />Zurfluh claims that collections of traditional fairy tales contain numerous examples of slightly coded instructions regarding the virtues of maintaining awareness in the "realms of the night". And, indeed, if you examine the vast treasure of recorded fairy tales, you'll find that a great many of them hinge on things which occur around the time a character in the tale falls asleep. An inordinate amount – one might even say a suspicious amount – of sleeping goes on in fairy tales. But you never notice until your attention is drawn to this fact.<br /><br /><br />A case in point: last night I read my children <a href="http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/meft/meft39.htm">"Habetrot and Scantlie Mab"</a> (from More English Fairy Tales, ed. Joseph Jacobs, 1894). Wouldn't you know that the main character "falls asleep" by a knoll while despairing over how to perform a task her mother has set her? She "wakes up" to the voices of some people in a cave she can see through a hole in a rock. These people are performing the task <i>for</i> her. This motif -- a task being performed for someone while they sleep -- occurs again and again in traditional fairy tales.<br /><br /><br />Zurfluh argues that the tales teach the technique of maintaining awareness, and not going "unconscious," as one slips into "the realms of the night". He draws attention to the <i>Grimm’s</i> tale "The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes", in which a soldier takes on the challenge of finding out where seven princesses are slipping away to at night, despite being under lock and key. The princesses have foiled previous attempts by giving their chaperon a glass of drugged wine before bed. By means of a trick (a sponge tied under his chin) he only pretends to drink the wine and fall asleep, but stays awake, and fakes snoring. In this way he is able to follow the princesses into the fantastic world reached by a ladder under one of their beds. Zufluh says this is an admonishment to maintain continuity of ego while falling asleep. There are many more tales in which the characters achieve amazing feats when they fall asleep, or <span style="font-style: italic;">deliberately don't</span> fall asleep.<br /><br /><br />Another thing he tells us to pay attention to is passages in tales in which the hero arrives at a gate, a wall, a border or any other symbolic threshold. This, he says, is the transition into the other world, at which one must maintain awareness, or risk falling into an ordinary, non-lucid dream state. The hero is usually armed with a magic word, a power object or some other means of passing through the barrier. On the day I read those remarks in Zurfluh, that evening I read my children <a href="http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/eft/eft44.htm">"The Three Heads of the Well”</a> (English Fairy Tales, Ed. Joseph Jacobs, 1890). In this story, after the heroine proves that she has a good heart by sharing her meager travel provisions with a hungry old man, the man tells her, "There is a thick thorny hedge before you, which you cannot get through, but take this wand in your hand, strike it three times, and say, 'Pray, hedge, let me come through,' and it will open immediately." (I suspect this could be adapted as a visualization for breaking through into the other world with awareness intact. I'll let you know if it works!)<br /><br /><br />These practices were known in ancient times because, he says, ancient societies always had a certain class of people, mostly known as shamans and priests, who were privy to this knowledge. It later became necessary to code this information because of the persecution of the church, which regarded such practices as witchcraft and sorcery. But once one knows what one is looking for, he says, the message in fairy tales about lucid dreaming is fairly obvious. And I agree.<br /><br />The other connection between Zurfluh and fairy tales is his perspective on the source of fairy tale content. He is very much in agreement with Steiner that they are retellings of psychic experiences. In his essay "<i><a href="http://www.oobe.ch/9205UdM.htm">Über den Ursprung der Märchen</a></i>" ("On the Origins of Fairy Tales"), Zurfluh says that it’s a mistake to look for the origins of fairy tales in historical or folkloristic terms. He regards all arguments over the comparisons of various versions of tales, most of which have only been committed to writing during the last few centuries, to be very academic. He asserts that fairy tales originate in the experiences of those individuals who manage, through hard effort and training (meditation, dream recording, cultivating proper sleep conditions) to penetrate into the realms of the night with their awareness intact, which consequently means they return from such experiences with memory of them intact.<br /><br /><a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/drunkensatyr.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 260px;" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/drunkensatyr.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>In this essay, he presents a passage from his journal which records his experience of visiting the "Land of the Fauns." He is of the view that the beings he encountered were the actual fauns of classical myth, and that this land (this "plane") exists apart from the material plane. Anyone who develops the proper skills and discipline can visit this world, or any of the other worlds depicted in myths and tales, because <span style="font-style: italic;">they really exist</span>.<br /><br /><br />And so I've brought you to the point I've reached at this point in my relationship with fairy tales. I'm very pleased that my youthful suspicions concerning their importance to spiritual growth have panned out. Since, besides the other three children who still live under my roof, I still have a 1 1/2-year-old boy, I look forward to reading fairy tales nightly for many years to come. And now that I have been given so many keys from the researches of others, I fully expect that relationship to continue growing and changing.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;">(Next: conclusions and finals words)</span><br /></div>Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-82213819273191472592008-02-13T12:23:00.024+01:002008-02-15T08:43:20.836+01:00Evolving a Relationship to Fairy Tales (Part V)<div><a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/projection2.gif"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; width: 360px; text-align: center;" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/projection2.gif" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:130%;">(Werner Zurfluh, Part I)</span></div><br />My research into the more mystical aspects of fairy tales led me to the work of Werner Zurfluh, an intriguing explorer of consciousness. The majority of his previously-published German-language works are <a href="http://www.oobe.ch/Index.htm">available on the internet in html format </a>(unfortunately little of it translated into English, and the translations are of substandard quality). Though he is very well-versed in the literature of mysticism, meditation and eastern philosophy, and despite the fact that his works are heavily annotated, the power of what he says in his writings comes from the fact that it is based on his own inner experiences, and does not rely on anyone else’s authority. A large portion of the text consists of extracts from his journals.<br /><br /><br />Zurfluh, as a child, was prone to Out of Body Experiences (OBEs), or what is also called astral projections, and he had many of them until he was a young adult. During his student years, he noted that due to the stress of intellectual work these experiences stopped and his internal experience became confined to "conventional" dreams. He resigned himself to the situation and later began occupying himself with Jungian interpretation of his dreams. With time, however, he came to the conclusion that this was the wrong way to go about things.<br /><br /><br />Zurfluh's main theme, in almost all of his published writing, emphasizes the importance of striving for personal experience of those states of mind called dreams (especially lucid dreams), astral projection, and OBEs. Because of his own background as a biology teacher and due to several years of study at the <span style="font-style: italic;">Carl Jung Institut</span> in Switzerland, he spends a lot of his time arguing against the tenets of mainstream materialistic science and psychology, including depth psychology. He is critical of today's science because of its inability to work with, acknowledge, or even entertain the possibility of anything that cannot be measured with state-of-the-art instruments (in spite of the fact that "science" acknowledges all sorts of things now that could not be measured as recently as a decade ago), and he faults depth psychology for still falling into the Aristotelian trap of analysing and categorizing internal experiences in ways that kills them and makes them empty shells like so many mounted butterflies.<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/projection3.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 200px;" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/projection3.jpg" border="0" /></a>In his works he sites hundreds of pages of dream-, lucid dream- and OBE experiences that show a progression over time (many years, in fact). At first he utilized the standard sort of Jungian analysis on his dreams, and the symbols and sequences yielded exactly the type of results a Jungian analyst would expect. But with time, and by applying the lessons these experiences were teaching him, he began to understand that these "internal" experiences are, to a surprising extent, subject to the "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect">observer effect</a>". When he was expecting content that lent itself to Jungian analysis, that is exactly what he got.<br /><br />But once he had spent more time simply observing, and putting his efforts into being as aware as possible in whatever state of consciousness he happened to be, the nature of his experiences changed dramatically, and he began to understand that these states are not just subjective (i.e. just going on in your head), nor purely objective (i.e. something you are perceiving which exists outside of you), but a subtle interaction of the two. Fact is, he says, sometimes the things one encounters in these experiences are astral beings. They might be other people journeying in those worlds, or other kinds of beings which have been called spirits, elementals, genies, djinn, demons, angels, fairies and many other things throughout the ages. It's not appropriate to treat these like some aspect of yourself, as many depth psychologists might advise, because then you will not really find out what they wish to communicate to you.<br /><br />So, rather than torture the symbols of dreams for hidden meanings -- using the logic of the material world to analyze and interpret otherworldly experience -- he determined that it was more important to make every effort possible to maintain the continuity of ego (<span style="font-style: italic;">Kontinuierlichkeit des Ichs</span>) while entering the "realms of the night," as he calls them. One must, as much as possible, maintain an awareness of one's own identity, as well as an awareness of the otherworldly nature of one's state of consciousness when one leaves the ordinary waking state. This seems paradoxical to those who have not had this experience: being "awake" while one is asleep. His techniques encompass both what is known as astral projection, and what dreamworkers refer to as working with <a href="http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/keithhearne/States.htm">hypnagogic imagery</a>.<br /></div><br /><div align="center"><span style="font-size:78%;">(Next: Werner Zurfluh on fairy tales)</span><br /><br /><br /></div>Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8427873644313092176.post-64725310223767988862008-02-11T17:33:00.000+01:002008-02-12T21:27:30.483+01:00Evolving a Relationship to Fairy Tales (Part IV)<a href="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/rudolfsteiner.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left; width: 180px;" alt="" src="http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k258/zealot_04/rudolfsteiner.jpg" border="0" /></a>It wasn't only Bettelheim who influenced me to read traditional fairy tales to my children. Once my children started going to <a href="http://www.waldorffamilynetwork.com/waldorf101.html">Waldorf kindergarten and Waldorf school</a>, I was made even more aware of the importance of fairy tale narratives in children's lives. Fairy tales are actually a major element of the Waldorf curriculum for the first several years. The teachers tell the children fairy tales -- by heart, so as to make it an oral/aural experience again. The children make drawings of scenes and characters from the tales. Sometimes they act the tales out in class. I knew that, being a "Waldorf parent", I was in contact with a state of mind much closer to what I'd longed for since my youth: a mystical and spiritual mode of relating to the tales. Waldorf pedagogy is based on a spiritual concept of the human race (in German: <i>das Menschenbild</i>). This conception involves not only who we are now, in this physical body, in the early 21st century, but also who we are in other dimensions of being (with our various other energy bodies), where we came from, what we are evolving into, and our relationship to other visible and invisible beings. What is taught in Waldorf schools never loses sight of this big picture, and it endeavours to nurture the entire human being, not just the rational intellect.<br /><br /><br />References to the nature of fairy tales and myths, and how to put them to use, are scattered throughout the voluminous works of Rudolf Steiner. You will notice that the ways the Waldorf schools use them in their curriculum avoid outright interpretation of meaning, or moralizing. The emphasis on <i>using</i> them instead of <i>interpreting</i> them is the same attitude advocates of dreamwork take toward dreams. The efficacy of the tales (as in Bettelheim's practice) is in experiencing them as deeply as possible.<br /><br /><br /><br />In an essay on the methods of Rosicrucian initiation, Steiner speaks of the need to experience the symbols of esoteric teachings rather than intellectualize about them. He says:<br /><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 102);font-size:85%;" >"But now the pupils of this Master went further still; they learned to feel the <i>inside</i>, the inner nature, of the bones. Therewith they were able to experience a last example of what was practised in manifold ways in the ancient Mystery Schools, they learned to experience symbols by making their own organism into these symbols; for only so can symbols be really and truly experienced. Explanation and interpretation of symbols is really nonsense; so too is all theorising about symbols. The true attitude to symbols is to make them and actually <i>experience</i> them. It is the same as with fables and legends and fairy tales. — These should never be received merely abstractly, one must identify oneself with them. There is always something in man whereby he can enter into all the figures of the fairy tale, whereby he can make himself one with the fairy tale. And so it is with these true symbols of olden times, which come originally from spiritual knowledge..."</span><br /><br /><br />Steiner dismisses the notion that fairy tales are merely products of the imagination or the "folk fantasy" as the folklorists would call it. Like Jung, Steiner relates fairy tales to dreams, or more specifically to that more refined variety of "dream" called the psychic experience. According to Steiner, before the human race became what we are today -- that is, oriented toward a brain-centered awareness that focuses on a logical conception of the objective world through the five physical senses -- people experienced life with a natural clairvoyance that left them open to impressions coming from their other senses.* They experienced things that Jung would have called "archetypal." These experiences involved matters and themes that are more universal than the particular and specific experiences of the material world, which are tied to the conditions of time and space.<br /><br /><br />Steiner compares the conscious experience of hearing and experiencing a fairy tale (as opposed to the long-term process it effects on our deeper, subconscious level) to the pleasant tastes and sensations of eating nutritious food. Although they are a very important part of the process of properly feeding our bodies, they are only the obvious and superficial characteristics of food. It is only once the food is broken down, transformed and assimilated that we enjoy the full value of it. And all these things happen without our conscious awareness. Likewise, he says, it is only as we live with the tales and assimilate them into our beings on subconscious levels that we enjoy their full value.<br /><br /><br />Steiner points out a motif that can be found, in one form or another, in many, if not in the majority of fairy tales: the bewitched realm, person or object. The world is turned upside down. The prince appears to be a beast. The palace appears to be a humble cottage. This he says, reflects the illusory appearance of things in our waking state, where we are dominated by the veils of the material world. If we can view the same beings, objects and phenomena from another level of consciousness (i.e. while dreaming, or in a state of <a href="http://www.astralresearch.org/enter-index.html">"astral" projection</a>), then we will see that what we observe with our physical senses is not a clear or true perception. Bewitchment, then, is confinement to, or entrapment in, the material world. If the protagonist persists in doing what is right, which is achieved through following the dictates of the heart, then the spell is broken, and he/she gains the ability to see things as they really are, that is: to pierce the veil.<br /><br /><br />Another motif he points out is the "soul shepherd"; the old man, old woman, or other conspicuous stranger the protagonist meets who sends him/her on the quest. This contact, he says, awakens the deeper forces within the protagonist and makes the world take on its strange appearance.<br /><br /><br />Steiner's assertions present further arguments for why fairy tales can't be replaced by either fluffy-light children's literature or by the conspicuously and often ham-handedly didactic materials parents, schools and popular media present to children (often with the best of intentions, I acknowledge). Fairy tales embody truth. Truth, in this case, means an accurate reflection of the nature of being on the visible and invisible planes. They are appropriate for children, and for people of all ages, he says, because "they are able to combine the richest spiritual wisdom with the simplest manner of expression." This simple expression, clothed in the images of a simpler, pre-industrial life, interacting with our sublime inner realities, "brings the roots of human life together with those of cosmic life."<br /><br /><br /><em><span style="font-size:85%;">(*I am aware that some readers might find Steiner's claim that the human race once had clairvoyant abilities which have been lost to be an example of what Ken Wilber calls the "pre/trans fallacy." But I don't really think this applies here. He is not idealizing a previous state of the race, but acknowledging that certain developments in human consciousness came at the expense of other aspects of our beings. These abilities are merely suppressed and latent in the average person at this stage of our development, but will have to be recovered and integrated with our newly-won rational abilities before the race can advance to its next stage.)<br /></span></em>Theo Huffmanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11832438171790956528noreply@blogger.com6