Writings

December 5 2019 Introduction to writing on the web

Today I’m beginning to write on this website as a precursor to extensive writing here.. I will bring to this site quite a number of texts that I already have in situ to give a sample of my thinking and my thoughts that have become texts. I should advise the readers that I am both a mystic and and independent thinker who is mindful of the immense rational underpinnings of the Christian Fath. My intellectual and spiritual interests are wide and varied. My particular brand is Christian, but I am deeply respectful of other approaches that seek to enhance our humanity at the same time as searching out the mystery of God and the mystery of humanity within that mystery if that is their focus and interest. I have published my autobiography and it is called A Stand-Alone Boy and the Utterly Profound Touch of Heaven. My work in progress at the moment is called The Abiding Genius of Jesus: The Universal Human. Jesus did not teach a new Torah, “divinine instruction”, but Halachah, “priciples of life drawn from experience”. As one of those who espouse his name, I try to teach in an halachic manner if that is an adjective! I am happy to coin it if its not!

I will post samples of The Genius of Jesus…on these pages for comment and critiques. That would be a great help in the process of writing this book.

I’m sitting here thinking what one can do to be in touch with the still small voice every day and to create a space before one responds to the leading of that same still small voice. The apostle Paul knew about the conflict that goes on in every human being between a good and bad spirit. I’m not sure whether he saw this as something supernatural or whether he thought it was a purely human intuition driven by the human spirit. Paul wrote in Greek, but his teaching about a yetser ha raq, “an evil spirit” and a yetser ha tov, :a good spirit” is very Jewish.I do not think that we are condemned to this by some sort of programmatic original sin tied to the profound depths of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis. There is some sort of eruption there, but I think it is tied rather to an original forgetfulness of who we really are, that is, beings who are human who have the image and likeness of God in us. It is when we forget that innate gift that we tend to lose our footing and our identity and get drawn into the prevarications of the ego. Eckard Tolley wrote a beautiful commentary, incisively drawn, on the core of the ego in his book A New Earth. I have never read anything so perceptive about the false presumptions of the ego. This is reinforced by the Toltec shape of human identity depicted by Dom Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements and other books. I particularly like the agreements not to take anything personally and not to make assumptions. I focus into my interior depths and search for an access. I am dropping peace and love and beauty of person through the access to what lies beneath the surface of the selem, the ‘floor’ of the Neshama. It can then drop into the unconscious and fall through into a recoverable infinity. The depths are worked over by Ruach and what happens is the replication of Creation. Creation is always replication. Paul talks about the “mind of God” and Ruach connects with the mind of God in creation. We are always imitating the Creator because we are wired by the Creator. We can do no other than imitate. We are the only ones with the instruments of creation. We replicate ourselves and we are co-creators. This is a true expression of an ontological relationship. Being replicates Being.  The unconscious records everything. Nothing is wasted. Every prayer we have ever uttered. Everything that others have said to us and we have thought and said ‘within’: our internal speeches and ravings and tyrannical episodes. The unconscious is the memory pad not only of ourselves but of God’s memory. No secret is unremembered. No detail is too miniscule to recall. Nothing is lost.