These days, I find myself wrapped round story, magic, being—in any and every order—an entangled trio so reminiscent of a quantum entanglement known as “spooky action at a distance.”
It seems entanglement is the heart of this blog.
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The story I pursue is layered in the oneness of the 10,000 things of “the Way” (the Tao) that connects the consciousness of all always and simultaneously. That is the story of the human plane, I believe.
It is a story I want to know.
I have enrolled in a sixteen month course that offers a synthesis of the ancient traditions of the last 25 centuries including Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity in its “original state,” meaning not according to St. Augustine of Hippo, a prospect much more exciting than it may seem. I may write a post on that but we are not there yet.
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Perhaps a more practical way to consider the course is this: the predominant Western belief of “you are your rational mind” is lacking in magic and story, at the very least, and at its very worst, it is unsustainable dogma.
That is how I see the course, and while it is early in my study, I am impressed with its evidence-based emphasis, specifically that hypothesis is not fact.
The irony of my beginning this study as my lupus moves into its own story is not lost on me; I suspect irony is frequent when one leads with the heart and not with the head. Yet, to live with an open heart and to discover what that truly means–for there is not agreement upon it or about it—is to dive deep into the head-heart connection.
Mark Nepo writes that “with your head beneath your heart, you must stop doing….Time and time again, the head must be brought beneath the heart or the ego swells” (The Book of Awakening).
Consider the entanglement of placing the head under the heart, thereby creating the “voice” of the gut. Nepo calls it, “a truth of being for a truth of being.” The resonance of the gut is like a messenger rushing through every system of our being proclaiming a resilient, “I get it!”
And resilience is rather magical but it is not magical thinking. To me, resilience lies in remembering the distinction between believing and knowing. While believing is akin to knowing, what we believe often lies in faith but not always in fact. For fact, experience provides us evidence of all we come to know.
“By opening fully to our own experience, we can feel and see the resilience of life around us” (Nepo).
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Being completely within the experience of our life–being fully present—we experience what every other life form knows: living fully means denying nothing. Being present in every moment is to experience all the moment offers, a pure opportunity to be.
Being is the magical story that the natural world celebrates completely and constantly every moment. It is a story that plays out moment by moment, a real page turner.
For those of you who want to follow my ROW80 progress, you may view it here.
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