Old blog

Until you shall return, I wish you peaceful travels Nancy. Happy India!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Watch out India! Here she comes...

Witnessing my mom losing her memory. When she no longer recognizes me, will I still exist? Will she? How fleeting life seems to be.

The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed identity. We have to be able to relax the psychic and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, vulnerable, helpless “I” that is all we know as ourselves. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p.204

.... Apply the ego as the organ of awareness rather than the organ of decision making.

... it's 4:07 UTC, that's Coordinated Universal Time -- somebody didn't put their letters in the correct "acronymal" order, did they? That translates to 20:07 Pacific. I am sitting in the control room of the Hanford LIGO detector but I can tell you, I am not in control... It's my last shift as a "Science Monitor". All LIGO scientists are asked to come to one of the two US detectors at some point and do some helping out with the real deal. I chose the WA state desert over the Louisiana swamp land where our second US detector is located -- I went for half-life Hefeweizen rather than Carnival Jambalaya. One can wash down a plutonium pizza with that Hefeweizen; the owner of the local "Atomic Brew Pub" has quite a sense of humor. Do you know about Hanford's nuclear past and present? Nagasaki's plutonium came from about 10 miles down the road from where I am sitting right now and the desert landscape these days is littered with power p...

Fasting and praying now. Fasting to purify the body and mind and praying for the spirit. Grateful for this day, even with the cold damp weather. Spring will be welcome when it comes this year. Parkinsons is a dreadful disease, I am sure it is caused by some exposure in the environment although no one seems to know for sure....

"The idea of reincarnation is a fanciful way of addressing unlived life. If we take it literally, it seems to suggest that we are reborn through time as different people or even animals. This is the ego's attachment to an identify. Literalism is always a form of idolatry, and the idol is usually our own ego. The ego can't imagine its transformation and so liberalizes it. ... Understood psychologically, reincarnation refers to the redemption of our unlived life, the necessity of addressing all our potentials before we can realize God(unity). There are thousands of potentials within, all of which are calling simultaneously be expressed and experienced. This is the meaning of reincarnation for the modern person. All of our potentials want to be incarnated, to be lived out before our journey back to wholeness is complete. All of them are vying for attention simultaneously. Reincarnation is not for another time, another place, another existence-it is now. U...