Involuntary Celibates… thinking about where it goes wrong.

It’s in the idea that sex is a male’s biological and social right. It’s in the idea you know what is right for females, what women want, what will get them to want get together with you. So you try to dress up in that garb: the Nice Guy. And women seem to disdain that, don’t find that sexy or interesting. They see a friend in that garb, not a lover.

And you–you have no idea how important a male friend is a woman, in this world where a woman is constantly on guard from the male biological imperative. But to you, it’s a rejection of your maleness instead of a welcoming of your friendness. The problem is, it isn’t friendship you want or offer, it’s a counterfeit, so the women are deceived until your frustration makes you drop your guise and show the truth: That it’s never been about them, but always about you and what you want, what you’ve been led to believe you deserve. 

That women don’t respond as you expect is the greatest evidence that you are mistaken at every point.

Not your fault: you’ve been poorly advised all along by guys and maybe girls as well who also had the wrong information. Since you were a child, you’ve been misled about all of it.

Girls get the wrong stuff, too, a lot of us, as we all have for generations. That doesn’t help us or you. But some of us figure it out at least well enough to make it work at least… well enough. And it always seems like a kind of adversarial thing, the thing between men and women.

So here’s the deal: To be attractive a person needs to be the best version of themselves that they can. It’s not about what you look like on the outside, it’s who you are on the inside. It’s not what you can get someone else to see or think about who you are, it’s about who you actually are.

When you’re interesting, people will be interested. Not all people, but the ones who are interested in the kind of interesting you are. You can’t predict that, you can’t control it, you can’t make it happen, so don’t waste your energy. Just–follow your interests, learn your own heart and your own mind. Explore wonder! Love the world, love yourself, the world’s and your own mysteries and unknowns! Let time do what only time does. Be patient. Trust that you don’t have to understand everything, not the world, not the other people, not yourself. 

We all walk alone until we don’t. Not all dreams come true. That’s no reason to stop dreaming.

For Better Or For Worse

I was reading some news from the UK today and it struck me how lucky that nation is to be so enriched with citizens bringing ideas and culture from so many parts of the world. It’s how the world grows, how it’s supposed to grow.

I know there are many who deplore the changes to their traditional idea of their country, who mourn for the loss of uncontested values and beliefs, and I understand their resistance. They are so deeply attached to their histories and what they see and feel as their past glories; they don’t want to accept that those things that live in their hearts belong to the past, and maybe would not be very glorious by modern understandings. Love of parents and grandparents does not have to entail love of everything they believed and fought for.

I feel that way about certain changes in language that upset me every time I’m reminded that that’s how a living language works. I believe that language is for communication and I distrust every change that, to my mind, actually limits or confuses or interferes with the easy flow of communication. Language is, in a sense, my country, my allegiance, and some of the modern shifts frustrate and even anger me.

But I don’t have the right to insist everyone use that Oxford Comma, that no one can use words that actually, originally mean their opposites. I could make a fuss about the use of ‘I’ when used as an object, but it’s a losing battle. So all I can do is say a silent “Thank you!” when a writer properly places a comma after or before the name of the person being addressed, or when a speaker uses ‘me’ where the appropriate plural would be ‘us.’ I appreciate that sweet moment of connection with another citizen of the country of Language.

It would be a wonderful, beneficial thing if all of us who cling to a past that will never come again could come to this understanding: To stress over the inevitable changes nothing while making one’s own life harder. Choosing battles comes into this of course, and the decision of what is ‘inevitable’ and what simply isn’t, and what is worth fighting for.

What’s going on in the United States at the moment is a prime example of resisting the changes desired by a small but profoundly self-interested, non-ethical, immoral cabal who have all the power money can buy. That is the only power they are considering in their hostile takeover of the US, and that, of course, is why, soon or late, they will fail.

Sometimes, resistance to change is not so much about values and traditions of the heart. Sometimes it is just about not wanting to have to relearn how to work with the world. I spent the years of childhood learning how the world works, what to expect from my own attitudes and interactions with it. I learned how to type on the qwerty keyboard, I learned how to use the technology I grew up with. I accepted the better conveniences of so many technological innovations that came along…

But they have kept on coming way past the point where any ‘convenience’ they introduced was much outweighed by the burdens of forgetting the old and learning a whole new system–especially those dependent on muscle-memory. It is distressing when nothing anymore has permanence.

It still does not give me any right to insist that no one should be allowed to surf into the future on the oversized flat screen of their desire.

More On Being An American

It’s one of the things that Americans abroad are most recognized by and very often criticized for: striking up conversation with total strangers!

Yes, we do that. We do it abroad not realizing that what we do at home is, in fact, not done in many other societies in the world. Americans consider it a good thing, a friendly gesture, a sign that there is no threat here. We rarely if ever consider that in some other societies it is, in fact, the opposite.

Americans are used to speaking our minds, even when our minds have not done sufficient quiet, interior work. It’s a fundamental right, encoded in our founding documents: Freedom of Speech! Everyone is entitled to an opinion, whether or not that opinion is of any actual value, even when expressing it exposes ignorance, prejudice, small-mindedness. We are free to make ourselves ridiculous with few limitations.

We don’t have the right to yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire.

“Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and commercial speech such as advertising.” Wikipedia

When we address strangers in other societies there is that fundamental sense that we have the right to do so, that it should be a human right unfettered everywhere. But there are reasons why it is not so everywhere.

We have not had ingrained through our history that a careless word spoken to a stranger could be our death. We don’t care much if we’re accused of heresy because we don’t remember folk being burned at the stake for that. We don’t fear being drawn and quartered for making treasonous remarks about the head of state. We have rarely had to be that cautious about what we said to strangers. It may start with pleasantries about the weather, but when we’re itching to share an opinion about How Things Are Going, that’s dangerous territory in places where the foundation of society remembers with immediacy the reality of the absolute powers of religion and state. Someone who speaks up casually inviting you to share your thoughts and feelings beyond the weather could be a lunatic or a spy. 

It’s not as if the US doesn’t have our own history of such personal risk particularly in marginalized communities like the sexually or gender or culturally divergent communities. Such carelessness of expressiveness is one of those privileges assumed by the dominant ‘white’ culture. But even here, it isn’t that kind of safe for everyone. 

(Once again, I’ve fallen into that trap of the ‘privileged’ by using ‘we’ as if it’s really all of us. At least this time, I’ve noticed.)


On Being An American

My son-in-law, an Englishman by birth, has held a green card for several years. This week he took the test and the oath and now he is an American. 

This is a strange time for Americans, as the dominating force at the top is the most anti-American we have ever had to contend with. Even during the Gilded Age of the turn of the 19th/20th century, it was not as bad as this. It was bad for the poor and the working classes, but right now all the programs that were instituted for support and relief of general society–which were fought for and hard-won by humanists and humanitarians–are under threat. Now it is a matter of deprivation of benefits that have become how Americans with less luck than to be born to security live with less desperation and more hope.

It is not a vague threat, it is an on-going, active assault on every program that serves anyone but the oligarchy. It is reckless, it is an insane attempt to undo everything that has in fact made the United States a world power, everything that fuels this nation’s potential for greatness in the future. Insane, because it totally discounts that the penthouse at the top, the apex of the pyramid where the view is so grand, is supported by the keystones and the blocks of the foundation, and by all the storeys from the ground up. 

Gold is heavy: When it is all gathered at the top, when the foundation has been eaten away to a fragile filigree, who do they imagine will survive the collapse?

In the face of all this, why does anyone want to be an American?

I have thought about this lately quite a lot. I have considered whether it is time to walk away, to turn my back on what America has become. I’ve questioned where my sense of nationalistic pride comes from, whether it is more than the indoctrination of every school day starting with the Pledge of Allegiance–as if a child can be legally held to such a Pledge!

As a child I loved the patriotic songs, the commemorative holidays and events. I believed all the sweetened history, and believed that the US was in fact the best country in the world. 

But when I was in high school, I began to see the inconsistencies between the glorious words and the hard realities. Things were no longer simple, no longer merely black and white, and the range was wide. I stood but stopped repeating the Pledge every morning. I chose not to participate in what seemed the height of hypocrisy. Then one day I took a step further in my thinking and realized that the Pledge is not a statement of what is, but of ideal, of intention. 

And that is why, today, I am raising a glass to all the new Americans who have chosen to identify themselves with this nation,and dismissing my thoughts of deserting what was only mine by chance.  I reject the current misadministration’s redefining of America, and continue in faith that the true spirit of the United States, set up by the Founding Fathers and so clearly defined by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, will outlast the wholesale tearing down of all that ever made America great. 

Mount St Helens Diary–part two

It was 24 years after the major eruption of 1980, and the mountain had been restless. My son Charles who was 19 now and I decided to drive down from Olympia WA and sit vigil for a while just in case something dramatic was about to happen. I took notes.

6PM Oct 3, 2004 —We’ve been gazing at the mountain, from one angle or another, since late afternoon. I’m sitting now on a wide, weathered stump, where I plan to stay a while. There is no better view than this, outside the danger zone, which has been officially extended to Johnston Ridge Observatory, 5.5 miles from the caldera, into which it faces directly.

The observatory is named in honor of the scientist Dave Johnston who was viewing from that location in a substantially less substantial observatory on the morning of May 18, 1980. He had time to radio to his colleagues stationed in Vancouver, WA, “Vancouver! This is it!” No one realized or imagined, apparently, even though the mountain had been visibly bulging out on that northern slope for months, that the volcano would blow sideways rather than straight up.

[edit 2025: In fact, I’ve found out that they saw the growing bulge on the north slope and did imagine it, but didn’t believe it would happen because it had never been seen to happen before. So Dave Johnston was where he was when it did.]

I know with my head that right below us, beneath our very seats, profound forces pulse and strive, but to look at this mountain that seems so still, so calm as it fades into the dusk, it is hard for my guts to believe it: I don’t feel in any danger.
If it were not for the scientists with all their gear telling us of the deep dynamics, the only outward sign of activity would be the plumes of dust we see rising from occasional rockfalls within the crater. Those little avalanches are more frequent as the imperceptible quakes and tremors shake the mountain, but from here, nine miles away, no sound of it reaches us.

Our house is 60-70 miles away, as the pyroclastic projectile flies. Due to the distance and the prevailing winds, we rarely saw ashfall in the events of 1980, and actually had to drive down under the great ash cloud on May 18th to scoop up a souvenir supply; we still have it in the same Folger’s Crystals jar. It was a light, floury-textured ash that day, unlike the very gritty stuff that came later.  The place we collected it was about 15-20 miles from the mountain, and considerable nearer the outer edges of the blast zone, with another ridge of hills in the way. We never saw any evidence of great heat or devastation that day.

We didn’t go there just to get a jar of ash. The thing is, when there’s a volcano going off in my backyard, it is unthinkable to just sit and watch it on TV.

Everywhere around us here are millions of dollars worth of record-keeping equipment, in the hands of both amateurs and professionals. We can see a cluster of news trucks at one viewpoint: they and all the sightseers were evacuated Saturday from one much nearer the Johnston Ridge Observatory, where we saw them on Thursday.

The big white vans remind me of barnacles, clinging to the rock with their feathery antennae out, grabbing at whatever they can get from the airwaves. Our spot is about a mile farther east, and at this proximity to the action we’re all waiting for, that gives us a slightly better view into the caldera: we can see a bit more of the mound in the center.

That mound is about a mile across, and the caldera itself is about three miles from side to side. We are about 9 miles northwest and a bit more than 3000 ft below the floor-level of the caldera. But it looks closer, and right at eye-level.

Our vantage point is on a hillside within the 1980 blast-zone, among the regrown greens at around 3000 ft altitude. From here, we can see high ridges north of St. Helens, still barren: grey tree trunks still lay like matchsticks, pointing away from the volcano; just over the ridge, dead wood stands just as naked, where the shape of the land protected them from the blast, but not from the intense heat and scouring ash.

Noble fir were replanted in the 1980s, and range from saplings that would make, in other circumstances, ideal living-room Christmas trees, to some 30 feet tall, or a bit more. These thick, young forests cover hillsides that were flattened in 1980, and burnt to crisps, and they dazzle, baffle and disturb the eye with their repetitive symmetry.

Nobles have an extremely neat, orderly habit of growth, and as economic of profile as they are, in large groups, they create an eye-troubling pattern hard to focus on after all the hours I’ve spent trying to un-focus, to see those 3-D pictures pop out of those computer-generated visual teasers that were a fad a few years ago. Some piece of my brain thinks these trees are meant to be part of that fun!

There are also groundcovers of grasses, small fuzzy and flowering alpine meadow plants, fungi, and berry-vines that, on a loose slope, grab at one’s feet. If one has foolishly rushed out of the house without one’s sturdy shoes, one is likely to come home with bloody red stripes across feet and ankles. (One is in the habit of sandals, in this mild autumn!)

Riding the highway through forested hills; we peered ahead through a misty autumn air, put on a little speed around each corner, eager for the mountain itself to be revealed… The last time we came this way was on a school bus for his third-grade field trip. There were distractions. We stopped along the way to visit the Buried A-Frame, the remains of someone’s summer home along the Toutle River, which is buried up to its second floor in dried mud and ash. I hardly remember where else and what else we saw, most of my attention being required for the herding of 9-year olds in fits of exhilaration. So last Thursday, it is like the first time.

Finally, suddenly, just around another bend, there it is: Framed by the forests and hills of southwestern Washington, it is a starkly ominous presence. As the road winds in and out of the coves of the hills, with every clear angle the volcano fills more and more of the field of view; the 24 year-old devastation emerges and dominates the scenery.

At one viewpoint, we turned and looked westward down the Toutle River, flowing grey with ash…

[note added 10/9: For the past several days the satellite images of the area increasingly show the river flowing more grey as loose ash enters the run-off from the glacier within the caldera, behind the old dome. The official photos from airborne cameras have shown a bubbling melt-lake where the action is getting hot between the dome and the glacier.]


8:30 PM-– The mountain is a grey ghost now, beneath a brilliant sky: Cygnus flies across the Great Rift of the Milky Way, which reaches from one horizon across the sky to the other. We don’t see this near the lights of Olympia, which are not that spectacular in themselves but quite enough to hide the splendor of stars. The Interstate-5 corridor and the cities, large and small that straddle it, create an orangey atmosphere, too, that taints the clarity of the sky night and day. That’s one reason anyone wanting to really see this volcano must come closer, even though the mountain is visible from miles away.

I didn’t intend to sit here all night, but wanted to wait until it was quiet. Really quiet. Just in case there was something to hear. For a couple of hours there was the constant ebb and flow of car traffic, about one vehicle coming into the area for every 5 or 6 going out, then one for every 3 or 4, and finally, hardly any traffic either way. From here, headlights show them coming either way for miles, and the hillsides contain and reflect the sounds. It was not until just after 8PM that I actually heard the silence of the land, broken only by a distant river.

Now, I hear one of the tiny toads we’ve seen around–huge voice for a critter an inch across! And a brief comment from a far-off coyote. There are still humans around: we hear the lacey sound of laughter from cars parked at least a mile away. Amazing, how clearly it carries! And a while ago we heard a childish voice followed by a parental imperative: “No, we aren’t playing squirt guns here. No! Put your pants back on!”

But there is no sound at all from the volcano.


11AM Oct 4– A steam eruption again this morning, around 10:40– The barnacles gathered it in hungrily, and sent it streaming out to us, back home in front of the TV. Makes me want to run out and find that nice vantage point again, but today makes other demands, so I don’t. Maybe tomorrow.

Everyone wants something exciting and spectacular so much, the news-folk want so hard to be the first to holler, “This is it!” They back up their “not yet…” monologues with enthusiasm, and then finally accept and acknowledge this was just another little burp, and the next Big Show is yet to come… Maybe hours, maybe years from now.

Last Thursday, when we were up at Johnston Ridge, Geraldo Rivera was up there, too: a reporter who has been known, if not respected, for years in the US, for his chasing after the spectacular: his was one of the first of the chair-swinging daytime talk shows; he committed a Prime Time Special to the opening of Al Capone’s underground vault, which turned out to be a repository of dust and the odd paper clip, as I recall.

Charlie heard him asking his cameraman, “How do you stake out a volcano?” The cameraman replied, “Well, at least you know where it’s going to be!

My thought, when I saw him, was, “Heck, we might as well go home.”


10 am Oct 5– There has been another steam and ash eruption on-going since about 9 this morning. Sadly, I am watching it on TV at home, but, happily, the views they are showing are from one of the helicopters, so we are getting spectacular views of the billowing clouds that we could not have gotten even if we made the drive. The weather is again clear, though change is expected today as the high pressure zone weakens and clouds move in from the Pacific.

The fascinating thing about a volcanic cloud is that it is so obviously not a water-vapor cloud: It has quite a different aspect, rising visibly, rapidly, and though the steam is white, the ash is grey, from light to very dark, and the cloud has not the translucence of even the darkest rain clouds. And while the steam and ejected material climbs the sky, on the outer edges, the heavy material is, at the same time, falling back to earth: It is much busier than a typical everyday storm cloud.

This event has quieted now, there is no evident ash, only steam filling the caldera, and overflowing gently into the sky, drifting off to the northeast. They showed a satellite view: the steam plume is quite visible from space.


1:30 PM Oct 12– The official word now is that magma has reached the surface of the new area of uplift, and can now be called an actual new lava dome. A large slab or fin of rock has thrust up through the surface of the dome and heat sensors are indicating rock is around 600 C (1000 F) and it has a pinkish color. How nice: It’s a girl!

The old dome built over several years following the 1980 eruption, mostly with slow effusions and upwellings, a few steam and ash eruptions, but nothing sudden or dramatic by a human perception of time. One reason for this is that the composition of the magma is mostly a mineral called dacite, which produces slow, sludgy and chunky lava. The lavas that flow in dramatic red rivers are basalt lavas.

I am hoping to drive down again this evening and see if I can catch on film the glow reflecting against the inner wall of the caldera.

(later edit: I made the drive, but at the safe distance, 10 miles away, any glow was too subtle for my eyes or camera.)


December 29, 2007
Nothing much of a publically dramatic nature happened at Mt St Helens in October, 2004. The mountain quieted, and after a time the news trucks, the photographers amateur and professional wandered off to other more exciting photo-ops, still envious of those who have been at the right place at the right time with the right equipment to capture that elusive and spectacular image that rewards patience, expertise, and sometimes just plain luck.

I still drive the 70 miles to the mountain from time to time, just to see what’s shakin’.

Mount St Helens Diary–part one

We’re approaching the 45th anniversary of the May 18th, 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State in the US.

I was there that day.

I lived in Olympia, about 60 miles from the volcano. For months we’d been hearing news of the rumbling earth, increasing intimations that St Helens was restless. At the time, I didn’t know much about the mountain, had seen it on the horizon when driving south along I-5, but never much noticed it.

That day, May 18th, standing around at a swap meet in Tacoma, there was a great cloud in the sky down that way… Looking at it, it was clear that it was not a water vapor cloud. Within half an hour, I was driving down the highway, passed through Olympia, and stopped at a viewpoint in Chehalis where a crowd was gathered, looking in the direction of the mountain, but there was nothing but cloud. Not good enough! I drove on south and turned east on Hwy 12, drove until I was under that cloud, and then in it.

It was like being in fog, but dry. I got out and walked around along a side road. The forest all around was muffled the way it would be in a snowfall, but grey and not cold. I gathered up a jarful of the floury ash, which I have still.

A thought occurred to me: ages from now–actual earth ages–when this surface of the world is buried deep, a thin grey layer of rock, some future geologist could uncover it, and there will be my footprints in the geologic record of May 18, 1980.

April 24, 2025 CL Redding

The School of Becoming

Here we are, living on this fairly special planet; as Terry Pratchett described it and us, “…where the falling angel meets the rising ape.”

That’s us, indeed: a spiritual entity living in a body evolved over time from ape ancestors. Spirit vibrates at a high frequency while the body vibrates at quite a slower frequency, and somehow in some grand cosmic experiment perhaps, the two are brought together to live, to experience, to learn. 

I’ve addressed this before, the idea of this world of spirit and body being a kind of school, that we are here to learn about… What exactly? This is about what I believe about that. 

To learn about making choices, about how to choose, and what and why.

To learn to recognize the divine in and around ourselves, to recognize the divine in others around us, to recognize it in all around us.

To learn love.

We face lessons every day, and as we grow through experience and testings, we evolve as spirit. The lessons and the tests we face as individuals are scaled to how much we already know and the information we have whether or not we’ve put it all together yet. In fact, those pop quizzes that drop in front of us are often the tools for joining the bits into understandings. We fail a lot of tests, or get low marks because the information that we believed to be true and so applied to the problem was in some degree just wrong. 

It’s no problem, failing a test: It will come back again in one shape or another until we get it right or right enough and can move on. To make it easier, each time it will be presented more pointedly, louder, more intense until we get it. No matter how many times we fail, evade, postone, or ignore the problem, it will come back to us until we pass it.

Lessons also scale up.

We teach little kids about fire being hot and dangerous, and not to play with matches. By the time they are in high school hopefully they have learned enough more to respect fire but not to fear matches. An adult who won’t use a match because of being so well-taught in kindergarten is crippled in a world where control of fire is one of the most important tools.

An aside here:  When I say ‘we’ I am not talking of all humans, but mostly as the people descended from the ethnic Western Europeans who sought to dominate and define the world by their own paradigms, who considered themselves the most evolved, therefore wisest and rightest of all peoples of the Earth. ‘We’ need to study a little anthropology, to get it that all human beings have faced the same basic challenges in living on Earth, living as bodies, comprehending our place in the Big Picture…  And every community of humans has answered the challenges according to its own experience lived over time. Solutions are rarely universal, but they are logical and correct within their own context. And they are wrong and mistaken, too, every one of them in some regard because no one has the full picture. 

This world is built around dichotomies: up and down, night and day, hot and cold, right and wrong, life and death, male and female…  When we are young, we only have to choose one or the other. Then, as we get older and more experienced, we discover that there are many shades in the spectrum between black and white. We realize that everything is on its own spectrum and that the extreme opposites are not as simple as we once found comfortable and easy. 

The more we learn, the more our minds and hearts mature, the more dichotomies reveal complexities that require us to fine-tune our decision-making. Nothing, it turns out is either/or. Everything is and. It’s all part of the lesson plan. Most lately we are confronted by a lesson in which gender is not as simple or as comfortable as we have believed, and just as the way that many were troubled or even outraged (and some still are) at the notion that skin color does not define or diminish a human being, or that divorce was a legitimate course for a dysfunctional marriage, these lessons are learned and moved on from by more and more people in any given community until we are ready for the next challenge to our cherished but mistaken beliefs.


With every changing of the tide there is resistance, but there is also inevitability.  The forces that make tides are immense compared to the force of that which refuses change. A storm may create a surge for a time that inundates the land, but that surge is not the tide. Tsunamis are overwhelming and devastating, but they are temporary and limited in scope. 

In times of discovery of the complexities of dichotomies like gender where it once was so simple, ‘we’ can look to the many other ethnicities that have found solutions that allow and accept and move on. They have a flexibility in what might be called humility in the face of a Reality beyond their understanding. 

Every one of the lessons about such things are about learning to make choices, learning to perceive the richness and depth of divinity in and around us, and learning finally what love means. 

Stopping Shopping

The sun is shining, the temperature is over 60F and I’m off Facebook.

This is the day that’s been set aside by a few million Americans, perhaps, to pull back our credit cards and our wallets and withhold our coin from the profit-driven commercial segment of America. One day, 24 hours… to deliver the message that the pyramid’s top is supported by the foundation: Those with their heads up in the rarified airs of the apex stone need to be reminded who put them there, who keeps them there. That there are more of us than there are of them. 

I didn’t realize that staying off Meta’s platform, ie, Facebook, was part of it as much as not shopping with Amazon, until seeing a post from Robert Reich that came up this morning, 11 hours after it was posted. Thing about FB is that so often I receive notifications hours or days after an announcement or event. Anyway… here we are exploring all the ways we are not, in fact,  incommunicado from everyone just because we’ve silenced our FB voices. In fact, that’s what we, below the rarified airs, have needed to be reminded of.

So, today is an at-home day, getting done some house-cleaning which is, seems to me, entirely in the spirit of the day. 

Death and Past Lives

January 2, 2005
[January 15 2025]

These are two things that appear quite differently to Body and Spirit. 

 An eastern teacher taught one day, ‘Death is an Illusion.’  The next day, he taught, ‘Death is Real.’  His students tried to pin him down:  ‘Today you tell us Death is Real, yesterday you told us it is Illusion.  So which one is it?’  He said, ‘Death is a Real Illusion.’ That teacher understood about the difference and the entwinement of Body and Spirit. As human beings, we experience the awareness of death as a real thing, suffer death of loved ones as real loss, real and final separation–though as spirit we may know just as plainly that there is no final loss, and that death is not an end but a passage.

 I experienced the difference between Body and Spirit consciousness when I was listening to something about past-lives, and though in certain circumstances I had no trouble accepting the notion as totally rational and reasonable and real, this time it seemed absurd.  I considered why that might be: How could I so easily believe it one day, and so simply disbelieve it the next?  I ran the concept by myself again, and found it absurd.  Then I made a conscious shift from ‘I am  body’ to ‘I am  spirit’ and all of a sudden the reality of past-lives was simply obvious.

It isn’t hard to make that shift, it only takes accepting the premise that we are comprised of both, and can identify self with either point of view.  Everything in western culture makes it easy to identify Self with the physical.  Yet, it is not so hard to identify Self as Spirit, because we experience Self apart from Body every time we sleep and dream, or wander in our thoughts away from whatever thing our body is doing.  Once it makes sense to us that we are not just one or the other, that shift is a matter of choice. 

[A fuller view of the Great Picture suggests that it’s more a matter of multiple-lives based on the idea that only where we live our lives–here, where physical things are real and physical laws are the rule–does time run in one direction from past through now to future: For spirit, it is all NOW, and all points equally accessible.]

Having and Being

Dec 31, 2004
[2025 edits]

A model of human-being: I don’t have a soul: I am a soul; I have a body.

     A simple reframe and all at once, many things that didn’t quite fit, fall into place.  Body and soul each has its own protocols: its own needs and problems, and its own solutions, too.  When we try to solve the one’s problems with the solutions for the other, we just have confusion and frustration.

     It’s like parents and children: when either one runs the family according to its own imperatives, the other suffers. When the parent expects a child to behave and think and feel like an adult, or when the child, through noise and persistence, controls everyone’s energy and opportunities, the family flounders about in a chaos of pain and confusion.

     Then there is the Grandparent in that family, that represents the higher consciousness, or the connection with the Divine: can give good advice, but doesn’t make policy.  That is the Parent’s job, to make policy for the family, influenced by the Child and Grandparent.  If only it really was done that way… Usually, it seems that the noisiest gets their way most often. [That might be the rambunctious child or the bullying parent or the parent who needs the spotlight all the time…]