Thinking About Thinking

I Googled Synthetic Thinking and found this site.  (click on Title)  I love it.  It's intended for IT people, and I am not one.  The language sort of starts my engines though.  Thinking about Thinking is my favorite thing.  It almost always winds up with a wink and a nod from God but I don't necessarily start out to prove anything.  I just get overtaken with a question and follow it.

11,000 views all time. wow

If you've come to this site more than once please leave me a comment and tell me why.  It's gone a lot more slowly than I'd imagined when I started posting but I'm still enthused.  I wonder what it looks like to others.

11000 is a big number.  It would be lovely to find that I'd amused someone for a moment at some point.

Shalom

The Universe is Conspiring To Do Me Good

Pronoia

We must eradicate from the soul
All fear and terror of what comes towards Man
Out of the future
And we must acquire serenity
In all feelings and sensations about the future
We must look forward
With absolute equanimity to everything that may come
And we must think only that whatever comes
Is given to us by a world directive full of wisdom
It is part of what we must learn in this age, 
Namely to live out of pure trust
Without any security in existence.
Trust in the ever present help of the spiritual world.
Truly, nothing else will do
If our courage is not to fail us.
And we must seek this awakening within Ourselves
Every morning and every evening 

~Rudolf Steiner

One of my hesitations about writing has been the acknowledgement of how 'new-age' ish my thinking can seem.  I come by it naturally and have definitely not worked to acquire the appearance.  I just love the positive, the healing and the hopeful.  I love to learn from the truths behind these things and I love to recognize them in the minds and work of other people.   As time goes on that focus only gets more pronounced although I'm not always happy and seeing happy things.  I'm drawn to the work of people who are better at accepting only the eternal.  This verse from Steiner used to make me laugh, though. because when you read it you think, 'Holy Cow!  what the heck is coming to us out of the future?  What will be so very difficult to face with calm?'  And where can I go to avoid it?  Now I emphasize the return to an acceptance of help from the spiritual rather than the implied variety of nightmarish scenarios that may confront a person on earth.  It's the uniform irrelevance of any earthly horror, whether prophesied by Nostrodamus or not, next to the Reality we've turned away from which interests me.

The first time I ever went to the Catholic parish I'm still associated with the deacon giving the homily was talking about how nobody strives to be a good sheep.  There are no seminars on how to be a good follower, he said.  This is partly because sheep are seen as passive and any sort of receiving, even from mighty spiritual beings or God Himself, is really not seen as a good thing at all.  I need to work on that myself.  I want to get back to the frame of mind I was in when I confessed happily to the pessimist who later became the father of my daughter, "The Universe is conspiring to do me good."

Tanis Helliwell's newsletter

Tanis Helliwell's Newsletter


This nice lady wrote Summer With The Leprechauns and Pilgrimage with the Leprechauns.  I enjoyed both works.  My Dad and his wife sent the first one to me as a gift.  They work best as fictional stories since that way you can enjoy them without asking yourself whether you believe in Leprechauns.  I do believe in elementals and the Loch Ness Monster, thank you very much.
If this grants them greater reality I am happy to share it.  If the same principle works in reverse then I don't believe in people who undermine programs helping children thrive and learn.

Withholding belief: a story.

A college roomate returned from a break with this tale involving withholding belief.  She'd been at a casino with a friend.  They'd both read the same self-help book about choosing your own reality.  A man in a seat which backed up to theirs was berating his wife.  The two young women were increasingly horrified on her behalf.  My friend, Ellen, turned around to address the man bullying his wife.  She said pointedly to him, "You are Not a part of my reality!"Tanis Helliwell's Newsletter

my pinterest page - a little self-revelation

So since

• I really haven't succeeded in writing with any regularity (not that I'm giving up) 
• and since the point of the title of the blog isn't to hide identity but rather to broaden it
• and since I just gave advise to my friend Ann, who kindly linked her art page to this endeavor, to tell a little about herself as part of her professional identity as a way of acknowledging that we are all looking for a little divertisement with our advertisement

 I'm sharing a link for my own Pinterest Page.  I love Pinterest.  I can sit and look at my own Pins and feel a sort of uplift.  These are things my predilection has revealed to me.  I feel reconnected to my predilection itself which is sort the mystery behind all my activities and interests.

I don't feel spiritual as in ascetic or characterized by renunciation.  I feel spiritual as in dedicated to something which has no one form in the physical world or the soul world, and which by the process of elimination, I think is probably arising in Spirit.  This guidance in the form of response to people, places and things, mostly in the areas of art and theology is the backbone of my personal identity.  Everything I have tried to say in the past four years of fitful blogging relates to the gifts of this personal phenomenon and the effort to stay aligned to it.  (Which I think is the meaning of the word Religion - re linking).  The effort has always been present in my thinking from my earliest memory.