David's Desk 175 The Presence of Light

This is the month when, in one form or another, we celebrate Light: its presence, its return, its wonder, and its miracles in our lives. My “Desk” this month comes in the form of a prayer on all our behalf.

May we know the Light that is eternally within us.
May we be that Light to the world.
May we know the Light within all the life around us.
May we serve that Light that all may thrive.
May we know the Light that yet seeks to unfold.
May we be its unfolding that our tomorrows may be blessed.
May Light be Present in who we are, where we are, and in all that we do.
May we celebrate the Presence of Light.

However you celebrate this December, may your life be enriched with blessing and with joy. I will see you again in 2022. A Happy New Year to you!

David's Desk 174 Changing the Game

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.

When I was ten years old, I read Homer’s Odyssey (not, I assure you, in the original Greek!). I was enthralled with the whole story of the siege of Troy, the actions of heroes like Achilles, Hector, Ajax, and Ulysses, and the interventions of gods and goddesses. What a tale to fire my imagination! I immediately set about to translate it into a board game so that I could play out the story. It took me a couple of months, but eventually I had a full-fledged board game with rules that only I could understand and play, which nevertheless brought me hours of enjoyment. I was a strange kid!

This began a life-long love of board games. Not just the “family classics” like Monopoly, Clue, The Game of Life, and Careers. In the Fifties, an obscure board game publisher named Avalon Hill produce a line of historical war games in which you could play a famous battle, like Gettysburg, and, in the words of the publisher, “attempt to change history!” I was well and truly hooked.  

Avalon Hill was the first of many small, independent game publishers that made up what came to be called the “adventure game hobby.” These companies produced board games that allowed the players to be famous generals from history, run your own multinational corporation, lead an expedition to an unknown planet, or delve deep into an ancient dungeon filled with gold…and monsters. They were all a feast for the imagination.

They also tended to have long, complex rule books, which I loved. In my geeky mind, there was nothing like curling up with a sixty-page rule book! Obviously, this was a hobby for nerds, and when national board game conventions came into existence, there were thousands of us!

For years, nearly all these boardgames were competitive with winners (usually just one) and losers.

Recently, though, there has been a change in the industry. New generations of gamers (including my own children) are enjoying board games that encourage or even require cooperation rather than competition. Either everyone wins or everyone loses. These games not only present compelling challenges to be met and dealt with. They also give players the fun of discovering how to work as a team and of overcoming obstacles together.  

The cooperative mode has become so popular among many gamers that now many new board games are designed to allow for cooperative, as well as competitive, play. Many games are entirely cooperative. This is a huge change from the games of my youth.

I think about this when I think about the climate crisis and generally about the various social and economic crises that humanity is facing. For millennia, we have been playing competitive games with each other and with nature. Winning, often called “survival of the fittest,” is everything. We are seeing the consequences of this in our world today.

One of my friends from the Lindisfarne Association was the microbiologist Lynn Margulis. One of her seminal discoveries in her research with single-celled organisms was the vital role symbiosis plays in evolution. As it turns out, it is cooperation, not competition, that gives the greatest advantage in evolutionary survival and advancement.

This is a truth well-known to our indigenous ancestors who saw us as a part of nature, not as a competitor against nature. It’s a truth that the climate crisis and other environmental and ecological crises is forcing modern humanity to remember.

What we are discovering is that it never was really a competitive game. It has always been fundamentally a cooperative game. Ignoring this is now threatening us with species survival, which would make us all the biggest losers ever.

When I listen to the news and look out at the world, what is evident to my gamer’s sensibility is that many haven’t realized that rules have changed. They are still acting, still legislating, still behaving in politics and economics as if competition and winning were the way the game is played.  But many others have realized or are discovering that, living on planet Earth, we are in a different game and now need to play in cooperative mode.

It’s not and never has been the game our society taught us to play. It’s past time to learn new rules.

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An Apology

In my last David’s Desk, I quoted from an email that my friend Patrick S. Wolfe sent me. Here is what I said:

“I want to close this essay with some thoughts shared with me by another friend, Patrick S. Wolfe, a writer living in Canada.  Over the years, he has taken part in several of my online classes and forums, and he always has good, wise thoughts to contribute. After taking part in a recent online forum focusing on how we can meet the future, he sent me these comments in an email. I could not have said this better.

May all who can, open to the qualities of fiery hope, peace, joy, and love, and to the potential and energy of the new civilization unfolding around us.  May love, not fear, hope, not despair, joy, not distress, compassion, not anger or hate, enfold each of us in safety, protection, and courage.  May we have the will to do what is available to us to bring the new civilization into being.  May my strength, my calm, my courage, my joy, my love empower at least one other person to join in this enterprise and become a source of vision and new life.

Be peacefully urgent and aware, open to engage with love and power with what the world brings to your doorstep.”

As it turns out, I may not have been able to say this better, but in fact, I did say it, translating something one of my subtle colleagues had said.  The challenge is that when I receive a communication from a non-physical source in the spiritual realms, it is rarely in words. It is a direct transmission of meaning through a blend of telepathy, the sharing of thoughts, and telempathy, the sharing of feeling. I then supply the words so I can put it on paper or share it with another. After doing so, however, I often forget the actual words I’ve written, though I always can remember the actual energetic transmission itself. That, for me, is where the meaning is, not in the words themselves.

For this reason, when Patrick sent me this quote, I didn’t recognize it as something I’d written but went ahead and shared it with you as something he had said. Patrick immediately let me know, wondering humorously if I were setting him up for a charge of plagiarism, making it seem as if he were laying claim to the authorship of my words. It was an inadvertent mistake on my part, a quirk and consequence of “trans-dimensional” communication and a seventy-six year old memory, for which I take full responsibility. You’re off the hook, Patrick, my friend, and I do apologize for any inconvenience my mistake may have caused.

David's Desk 173 Climate Crisis

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this blog post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.

I decided some years ago that in David’s Desk, I would not try to “chase the headlines,” as they say. I would not comment on current events in the world. This was not due to a lack of interest or concern but from feeling that there were already many skilled and knowledgeable people writing essays, blogs, reports, and commentaries calling our collective attention, almost daily, to the problems and challenges our world is facing. I felt that my best contribution would be to focus upon and write about the inner journey, as I say in my preamble above. That is where my strengths and my knowledge lie. Given that all things are interconnected, I felt that success in our spiritual lives could not help but reverberate outwards and benefit our positive efforts to meet these challenges. 

However, our spiritual, our psychological, and our physical lives are intimately interconnected within us and to the environments in which we live and work. If we lack wholeness within ourselves, this will affect the wholeness of our environment, and vice versa. We cannot separate ourselves from the Earth. We are, in a way, one entangled, interdependent, interconnected organism, a planetary life within which every person, every plant, every animal, every stone and river, mountain and ocean, prairie and desert has value and meaning.

I talk about this all the time in my classes, but I have not done so here in this monthly essay. Now, I am. Every voice is needed to shout out, cry out, sing out, say out that it is time to change how we live upon this world and with the life that surrounds us. The world needs us, Life needs us, WE all need us to say “Stop!” to the habits of “business as usual” that are feeding the intensity of the climate crisis. The fate of our civilization—perhaps even the fate of our species—hangs in the balance. 

One of my very good friends is Vance Martin, the President of WILD. He and his organization are doing important work on behalf of the Earth and the non-human species that share this planet with us; if you would like to know more, their website is www.wild.org. Vance and I met at Findhorn back in the Seventies, and I’ve watched his work with growing admiration as the years have passed.

Vance recently began a blog, to which you can subscribe by going to WILD’s website. I was moved by what he had to say about the climate crisis—he is definitely one of the experts in this field—and I received his permission to quote a relevant passage here:

“We will not escape the consequences of human actions…the natural world that supports us has laws not feelings…but there is much we can do to avoid catastrophe. Everything helps: nothing is too small. But some things matter more than others.

1. Be politically active at every level—demand and create enlightened leadership.

2. Be financially active at every level – demand and create responsible business and finances.

3. Be a personal demonstration – make the changes in your own consumerism, travel and food that makes a difference.

“All of the above are important. But even more important is how you/we respond with each other to this crisis. Danger, emergency, and threats can drive us inwards, defending and isolating ourselves from others as a matter of what we perceive as self-preservation. That is not the answer and, in fact, will only worsen the negative impacts of our situation. This is the time to reach out, not in; to integrate, not polarize; to be sharing, not selfish; and wisely loving, not negatively suspicious. More than anything be hopeful, not hopeless. And don’t forget that your sense of humor is a great ally!  In short, be the best possible person you can be.”

To Vance’s list, I would add a fourth action that we can take:  Be spiritually, psychologically, and physically active to foster and maintain inner wholeness—acting as a whole person helps create wholeness in our world.  

Vance implies this, but I wish to make it explicit. The time is long passed when we can imagine a divide between being spiritually responsible for the state of one’s consciousness and being and being an activist taking responsibility for the state of one’s planet. The distinction and boundary between our inner and outer worlds simply is not there. We cannot foster a whole world if we are divided in ourselves. We cannot walk our spiritual journey divorced from the physical well-being and wholeness of each other and of our world. It is a shared path, a mutually dependent path.

From this perspective, the climate crisis can be seen as involving both the outer climate of the planet and the inner climate of our minds and hearts. As wildfires are raging in the world, so also anger and hatred are raging in our inner lives. As floods are swamping the land, so also fear swamps our inner stability. It’s not a matter of dealing with one or the other but rising to deal with both. The wholeness of the world is not divided between human and non-human, organic and inorganic, the spiritual and the material; it is one world sharing one future.

We may not know what to do to help with the outer manifestations of the climate crisis, though there are certainly many sources now available to give us that information, such as Vance has done in his blog and continues to do through WILD. One of the newest, and to my mind, one of the best, is Paul Hawken’s new book, Regeneration. It is a clear statement of practical actions anyone can take to, in the subtitle of the book, “end the climate crisis in one generation.”

But as Paul and many others, like Vance and like I am doing here, are pointing out, what we are facing is as much a crisis of consciousness as of climate. It is a crisis of who we believe we are, a crisis of changing to be the kind of humanity the planet needs us to become. In this area where we face the inner manifestations of the climate crisis, none of us is powerless. Here we can do something to learn, to grow, to change. In the process, we also discover how to act in ways that will build a new world with a new way of being human within it.

I want to close this essay with some thoughts shared with me by another friend, Patrick S. Wolfe, a writer living in Canada.  Over the years, he has taken part in several of my online classes and forums, and he always has good, wise thoughts to contribute. After taking part in a recent online forum focusing on how we can meet the future, he sent me these comments in an email. I could not have said this better.

“May all who can, open to the qualities of fiery hope, peace, joy, and love, and to the potential and energy of the new civilization unfolding around us. May love, not fear, hope, not despair, joy, not distress, compassion, not anger or hate, enfold each of us in safety, protection, and courage. May we have the will to do what is available to us to bring the new civilization into being. May my strength, my calm, my courage, my joy, my love empower at least one other person to join in this enterprise and become a source of vision and new life.

Be peacefully urgent and aware, open to engage with love and power with what the world brings to your doorstep.”

David's Desk 172 Forgiveness

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this blog post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.

This month, I feel a desire to share an exercise that I first presented in a recent online forum for people who subscribe to my journal, Views from the Borderland. The topic under discussion was forgiveness, and one of my non-physical, “subtle” colleagues suggested this exercise.

What has prompted me to share it was a news report stating that airlines had reported nearly 3500 incidents of “air-rage” and “unruly passengers” since the beginning of this year. I have certainly watched with incredulity on evening news television shows recent episodes of passengers assaulting each other and attacking flight attendants. One segment showed flight attendants receiving martial arts training for their own protection and for subduing violent passengers. The “Friendly Skies” have definitely become unfriendly.

Much of this air-rage violence has escalated since the pandemic hit and has focused around mask-wearing protocols. At the same time, on the ground, road rage incidents have increased as well. “The number of people shot and killed or wounded in road rage shootings nearly doubled…from a monthly average of 22 deaths and injuries from June 2016 through May 2020 to a monthly average of 42 deaths and injuries between June 2020 and May 2021,” according to the organization, Everytown For Gun Safety.

Obviously, we are living in angry times, which is evidenced daily on the news in many other ways than simply incidents of rage in airplanes or on the highways. It’s as if people are living with hair-trigger emotions that are easily upset, leading to one kind of confrontation or another. What is striking is that in so many cases, the cause of the angry flair-up was something relatively trivial, something that might have easily been overlooked or forgiven in pre-pandemic times. But now, forgiveness seems to be becoming a forgotten tool in our civil and social toolkit.

The following exercise may not solve the problem of a pandemic of rage moving through society, but it can remind us of what we are capable of. It can remind us of the tool of forgiveness, which can be used for ourselves, for others, and for humanity as a whole. This exercise, as well as any others we may practice, can strengthen our “forgiveness-muscles.” This helps the calming energy of forgiveness to be our first response, rather than the heat of anger.

Here it is:

–Stand in your Sovereignty, honoring your sacredness.

–Forgive yourself. For actions done or left undone; for any thoughts and feelings and the subtle energies they create, for anything that may have left wholeness less manifest in the world, forgive yourself. Forgive yourself so that you may move forward in the wholeness and freedom that allows your sacredness to manifest.

–Forgive others. For any actions done or left undone; for any thoughts, feelings, and the subtle energies they create, that has impacted you and left you feeling less whole, forgive others. Forgive others so that you and they may move forward in the wholeness and freedom that allows sacredness to manifest.

–Forgive humanity. For all actions done or left undone, and for the motivations, thoughts, feelings, and subtle energies that have impacted the world that all humans and all life share and left the world less whole, forgive humanity. Forgive humanity so that you and all human beings may move forward in the wholeness and freedom that allows sacredness and life to manifest.

–May Grace and Forgiveness open the hearts of all, that love may heal and wholeness be restored in all beings upon all the world.

–In the spirit of this forgiveness and love, stand in your Sovereignty, and then move out into your world as a presence of wholeness.

During that same Subscribers’ Forum for my journal, some of the participants offered links to websites on forgiveness that they had found helpful. I’d like to share them here as well, as they offer other exercises and practices working towards the same end. It’s good to have choices to find what works best for you.

The first is to the Midwest Institute for Forgiveness Training: https://www.forgivenesstraining.com/

The second is to the International Forgiveness Institute: https://internationalforgiveness.com/

Certainly, you can find your own sources on the Internet and elsewhere that can give good advice about forgiveness and how to achieve it. The best source always, though, is in your own heart and in the love you bring into the world.

People are hurting right now, and this hurt often turns into anger that can lash out at others for the most minor of reasons. You may be hurting, too. But it doesn’t have to be this way. However we do so, it’s time to make use of our inner tools to bring calm and healing to our world, and among these, the spirit of forgiveness is perhaps the most needed. It can keep momentary, tiny embers of irritation from flaring up into hurtful fires of rage.

David's Desk 171 Joy Mining

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this blog post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.

For many of us, August is traditionally the month of summer vacations, a time of recreation and happy activities. This makes this an ideal month to explore what I call “joy mining.”

In the realms of spirit, joy is more than just a feeling of happiness. When we hold joy in our hearts and minds, letting it permeate us, it heightens our spiritual energy, opening the door to a wider flow of spirit from us into the world around us. But can we summon joy when we want to? For many people, joy is a result of something good happening. Absent that good event, where does the joy come from?

There is a simple practice that I call "joy mining." Think of yourself as deliberately looking for "nuggets" of joy in your daily affairs and drawing their energy into yourself, depositing them in an inner "bank account." To do this, you need to realize that joy doesn't have to be a dramatic experience of ecstasy and pleasure. It can be very simple, a moment of wonder, a moment of feeling whole. What you are looking for are moments that hold the potential of heightening your felt sense of life. The trick is to make a habit of noticing and acknowledging them so that they become part of your psychological and spiritual “muscle memory.”

What might constitute of "nugget" of joy? It could be anything that in the moment gives you an uplifting feeling or attunes you to the spaciousness and wonder of life. It could be the pleasure of a good cup of coffee on a cold morning. It could be a smile from a friend. It could be seeing the blue of a clear sky or hearing the soothing sound of rain on the roof. It could be a song you hear, a funny remark, a bite of something delicious. Our senses are designed to connect us with pleasure in the world around us; when we acknowledge a moment of pleasure, we discover a nugget of joy. It may not be the joy of winning a lottery of thousands of dollars or the joy of getting married, but it's a nugget of joy nonetheless. The more we acknowledge and collect them, the more they shape and fill our life’s energy, becoming like a warmth we can send out into the world around us.

There are challenges. One is that we mentally establish a threshold of delight that has to be crossed before we will recognize the presence of joy. This is like saying that bits of gold dust are beneath our notice and that all we'll mine are fist-size hunks of gold. Yet as many a wealthy miner has discovered, those little bits of gold dust can add up to a fortune.

Another challenge is that we feel guilty. How can we justify being joyful when so many in the world are suffering? Denying joy, though, or refusing to acknowledge its presence in our lives, doesn’t alleviate suffering. It may only add to it. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the uplifting and empowering effect being with a truly joyous person can have on us, giving us renewed energy and strength to meet our challenges. The issue is not one of denying joy to ourselves but one of not hoarding it, feeling that it’s our right, that it’s our joy not to be shared. That attitude turns joy into lead, like a reverse Philosopher’s Stone

The heart of Joy Mining is paying attention to moments of happiness, lightness, pleasure, and all-around ok-ness when they happen to you, even if they seem like small pleasures indeed. By paying attention, you are sensitizing yourself to this heightening, expansive energy. Further, it helps you realize that for you to pass on joy into the world, you don't have to be in a crazy state of ecstatic happiness yourself, though I can say from my own experience that as you practice this, the sense of being in the midst of joy gets progressively stronger until it can truly lead to moments of bliss and ecstasy in the midst of ordinary life.

The exercise is very simple. The moment you feel pleased by something or have a sense of happiness about something you experience, pause for a moment and "collect" it. You do this by acknowledging the moment and honoring its felt sense. Feel this joy in your body, in your heart, in your mind. Feel yourself filled with it and surrounded by it. Feel it opening you to the grace and wonder of the universe. Say to yourself something like, "This is a nugget of joy. In this moment, I am touching joy. Let it become part of me that it becomes a power within me shaping my life. May this joy empower me to radiate it onward and outward to my world." Then give a silent appreciation for the moment. Gratitude and joy go hand in hand.

May your summertime this month bring you many mining opportunities, and may your accumulation of joy grow in blessing to you and to your world.

David's Desk 170 Summer Thoughts

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this blog post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.

My eye surgery this past month ran into some hiccups as the retina of the eye which was operated on has swelled. This is more bothersome than alarming as it’s a known complication of cataract surgery, and it will heal itself over time. However, while it is doing so, my vision is blurry and writing is a chore. So, I’m once again dipping back into my David Desk archives. This particular essay was written twelve years ago this week (David’s Desk 26, July 2009). I’ve edited it a bit to bring it up to date. I hope you enjoy it.

Consider a small town in which everyone has a house and a garden and all the houses are clustered into small neighborhoods separated by hedges. People are aware that they are in a town but it serves more as a backdrop to their everyday lives than as a true community. Everyone is busy attending to their own affairs, their own gardens, and their own homes, with some attention left over for their immediate neighbors.

But then one day a discovery is made. There are underground wires running between all the houses and not just the ones in a particular neighborhood cluster either. The whole town seems to be interconnected in ways no one had suspected. Furthermore, these wires are attached to a peculiar instrument that had always been in the house but which had not seemed to do anything, so folks had just been ignoring it. Searching about, they found old dusty manuals that suggested that these devices, called “telephones,” could be used to talk over a distance across the hedges to people in other houses, even people in neighborhoods on the far side of town. Suddenly the sense of being part of a whole town became that much more real.

Unfortunately, they also discovered that many of the wires had been broken by the digging and plowing that people had been doing in their own fields and around their homes. If we really want to have a whole town, the people said to each other, we need to fix these connections so we can talk to each other. And this is what they did.

However, they discovered even this was not enough. Interconnected though they might be and although they were now communicating and aware of each other in new ways, they began to realize that to truly be a town they had to build it together. Communication by itself was not sufficient for community. A level of mutual participation, caring, and co-creativity was also required. For the town was more than just a collection of houses and neighborhoods; it was a collaborative creation, a shared consciousness and identity. 

Over the past few decades, particularly as the impact of climate change has become more and more felt and acknowledged, the penny is dropping that we live in an interconnected, holistic world in which all of life is interdependent and interconnected in profound and complex ways. To continue my metaphor, we are citizens of a township called Gaia or Earth, a “township” made up of many diverse neighborhoods. The next great task is to learn how to be participants, collaborators and co-creators with the other neighborhoods that make up this world and in the process fixing the connections that our human activities, particularly in recent years, have allowed to become broken.

For make no bones about it, we live in a broken world, though one that I feel can be repaired. The connections between parts of ourselves, between ourselves and others (particularly those different racially, ethnically, politically, economically, or culturally from ourselves), between ourselves and the kingdoms of nature, and between ourselves as physical beings and the subtle or non-physical realms of life and intelligence are nowhere near as healthy, whole, or vital as they could be. Much of this “wiring” has been buried and forgotten or outright broken, leaving us struggling within a fragmented—and fragmenting—consciousness of the world.

This issue is not solved simply by accepting and believing in a holistic paradigm. It is solved by collaborative mind and action, a reaching out across our boundaries to create wholeness through, at the very least, the use of love, caring, and appreciation. It is also helped by developing an appreciation for the many ways in which we are connected and the nature of some of the invisible “subtle” wiring that we’ve overlooked for decades in our technological and materialistic culture. 

I suppose my summer thought then is that as challenging as the work has been and continues to be for many people to articulate and foster a holistic, ecological worldview, the real work, the “town-building” work, is yet ahead of us. If the holistic paradigm has asked us to revision and redefine the nature of the world around us, the next step asks us to revision and redefine ourselves in co-creative and participatory relationship to that world. It means accepting levels of both surrender and openness on the one hand and power and capacity on the other with which we may feel uncomfortable and unfamiliar. It asks us to step up as partners to the world, learning to “think like a planet.”

Thank you, everyone! May you have a wonderful, blessed, joyful, fun, and safe summer.

David’s Desk 169 These are Still Important

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this blog post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.

This month, I’m recovering from dental surgery and preparing to have cataracts removed over the next three weeks. Fun! I’m actually very thankful that medical science has progressed to where these surgeries are possible and my vision, which has been getting increasingly blurry, will be restored. But it does mean I haven’t had much energy or focus for writing a new David’s Desk.

Ironically, nine years ago, I was in a similar situation. The David’s Desk I wrote then seems perfectly fit for now, so while I recover, I’m offering the following repeat. The questions I ask are still just as important.

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THE PARTNERING QUESTIONS

This month finds me convalescing from two major surgeries and a time in the hospital. While I am recovering steadily, I am not quite back to being able to sit at the computer for very long to write, so this essay will be shorter than usual. But it’s no less heartfelt for being brief.

There are Big Questions that confront us in life. We’re all familiar with them: Who Am I? Where Did I Come From And Why? Where Am I Going? What Is My Life’s Purpose? What Is The Meaning Of It All?

It used to be that religion and spirituality were the main avenues for finding answers to these mysteries; then philosophy stepped in and added its contributions. For the past two centuries, it’s been Science’s turn to have a crack at them.

There’s no argument that these are important questions. Very smart and insightful people have dedicated their lives to answering them, and over the millennia, various answers have been proposed. Of course, once someone has come up with answers (at least to his or her satisfaction), someone else will say, “But…” and ask the questions again, prompting yet more probing and more or different answers. It may well be an endless quest.

We shape our world by the questions we ask—and by those we fail to ask. If I’m asking who I am or what my purpose is in life, then finding that kind of information is where my attention will be. I’ll be looking for explanations and reasons. I may ignore those things that don’t provide me with that knowledge.

Understanding the “why” of things can be mentally and emotionally satisfying. Self-knowledge and self-understanding can be vitally important. It seems to me, though, that many of the problems we face in our world require more than just explanations. It may be that as we move forward into our future, the truly Big Questions will become “How Might I Help?” and “What Can We Do Together?” or “How Can We Collaborate?” These are the questions that form connections and foster participation. I think of them as “partnering” questions. Answering them enables us to build community and get things done. They open the door to collaboration that can help resolve challenges with grace and skill, creativity and resilience.

These partnering questions are the ones we usually ask in times of crisis. When people are facing the destruction of their homes by fire or flood, which has been happening with distressing frequency this year, they are not going to ask “Who am I?” They are going to ask what they can do to help each other, either to save their homes or to rebuild afterward. It’s when people don’t feel some crisis looming over them that they feel they have the leisure and time to ponder the meaning of it all.

However, if we asked the partnering questions more often and especially in times when we’re not feeling threatened but rather as a normal part of life, then many crises might be averted. If “How might I help in this situation?” became one of our Big Questions, the kind of questions we ask frequently and attentively, then we would be more aware of the needs of the world around us and more attuned to how we might contribute to their resolution. A world shaped by a habitual use of the partnering questions would be a world filled with greater awareness, compassion, and cooperation. It would be a world bent upon finding solutions rather than simply upon winning and proving the other fellow wrong.

Religion, spirituality, philosophy, and science can give us important perspectives and tools to use in healing and blessing our world, but it’s the hospitality and openness of our own hearts and minds that can turn the partnering questions into Big Questions, Important Questions, Questions that focus our attention, time, and energy. They turn our attention outward to each other, creating opportunities to use our explanations, knowledge, and tools in service and collaboration.

If we want to build a better world for ourselves and our children and grandchildren, it’s the Partnering Questions that will help shape it into being.

David's Desk 168 Anger

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this blog post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.

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My father was a deeply loving man. He was not a drinker, but otherwise he was a bit like Jimmy Stewart’s character, Elwood P. Dowd, in the movie, Harvey, open and considerate with everyone he met. Forming friendships came naturally to him. But he had a secret. He had a berserker temper.

As a young man, in the heat of that temper, he had come close on a couple occasions to killing another person. This loss of control when angry so frightened him that he clamped down on this part of himself. In all the years of my childhood, I never saw him angry with another person. In fact, though never explicitly stated, the expression of anger was avoided in our household. One simply did not get angry or express that anger if one did.

For me, the consequence was that while growing up, I never learned how to deal with anger, either in myself or in another. Unlike my father, I do not have a temper, but like anyone, I can certainly become angry. My challenge was that I did not have tools with which to deal with it.  Feeling anger in another was always a bit frightening for me. Being sensitive to subtle energies, I could feel and sometimes see that anger as spikes of hurtful energy emanating from individuals, much like quills from a porcupine. Feeling anger in myself, I was concerned with what I might be radiating as subtle forces that could harm another. 

It was my sensitivity to anger as a form of subtle energy that enabled me to learn how to deal with it, but first I had to accept anger into my life as an ally. I needed to recognize the ways in which it could be constructive as well as the obvious ways it can be destructive and harmful.  I needed to learn to trust myself to be able to handle anger constructively (something, I think, my father was never fully able to do where his own anger was concerned). But I also had to learn to trust anger itself as a form of energy that was as sacred as any other form of subtle energy. Whether it was a positive or negative thing, constructive or destructive, depended on how we held and used it.

Fire has often been used as a metaphor for anger. I believe it’s a good one. We know fire out of control can destroy. We also know that fire held and channeled gives us light, warmth, cooks our food, and in fundamental ways, made civilization possible. We have built our human world on the energy of fire and what it has allowed us to do.

We are living in an angry time. As we awaken more and more to the imbalances, the injustices, the incompetence and even stupidity that are damaging our world and our societies—many of them deeply rooted in the traumas and habits of our histories—anger is a natural result. It can be frightening, especially as the suddenness and swiftness with which anger can turn into berserker and destructive rage is presented to us daily through the news.  And it is frightening in the way we now have tools through the Internet and social media to anonymously, and thus without personal consequence or accountability, let our anger loose in ways that pollute, corrode, and destroy our ability to work together. This is happening in a time when our survival depends on that very ability, when communication and cooperation are vital for human continuance and evolution.

Anger is hard to hold. If we suppress it within ourselves, it can cause harm to our bodies and our psyche. If we just let it explode, it can cause harm to the world and people around us.  Sometimes, the stress we feel makes it seem impossible to hold it. It feels good to let it explode, to rage against the world, to destroy because we have forgotten that we can also create.

I don’t have a full answer for this.  Like

David's Desk #167 Fourteen Years

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this blog post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.

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FOURTEEN YEARS

It’s amazing to me to think about, but with this David’s Desk, I’m starting my fifteenth year of writing these monthly essays. Fourteen years have gone by since I began this project. Frankly, I had no idea it would last this long! That it has done so has been due to the support and enthusiasm which you, my dear readers, have offered me and the kindness you have shown in welcoming my thoughts into your lives.

From the beginning, I set out a couple of rules for myself. The first was that I would avoid as much as possible writing about politics. The second was that I would not “chase the news,” that is, use David’s Desk to make comments about current social conditions and situations that might be making headlines in the media that month. I felt that there were already a number of very talented and skilled commentators who were writing editorials and blogs covering current events and the machinations of politicians. While I have strong political and social views and opinions, I did not feel my strengths lay in sharing them as some kind of a pundit. What I could do, as I state in the preamble to each Desk, is “share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey.” This journey is very much in my wheelhouse, so this is what I have tried to do each month.

Still, our spiritual lives are not separate from our social, economic, and political lives. They are all entwined in our wholeness and embedded in the ongoing evolution of our world and of our humanity. There is no doubt in my mind that we are all engaged in a struggle to turn a corner in how we view and treat ourselves, each other, and our world. I am a bone-deep optimist and will always be so, but my optimism doesn’t prevent me from seeing that this struggle is central to whether or not we will thrive—or even survive—as a species.

Because it has many facets, there are equally many valid ways we can define this struggle. One way is the need to rethink our relationship to the Earth in the face of climate change. Another is to deal with the many inequalities that exist in our societies whether these are economic, gender-oriented, racial, religious, or of some other nature that allow one group to have advantages denied to others.  I often think it is a struggle to move from fear—fear of others, fear of loss, fear of powerlessness, fear of the new and unfamiliar, fear of the future—to trust: trust in each other, trust in opportunity, trust in the power of cooperation and mutual service, trust in possibilities, trust in adaptability to meet the future with grace. On the whole, it is a struggle to move from division and conflict to wholeness and cooperation.

However we name this struggle, our spiritual lives are part of it. The purpose of developing spiritually is also to develop in the other parts of our lives that engage with the world. I may not focus in these essays on ways of participating in the struggle for change. This is because I trust in your ability to figure that part out for yourselves, since I don’t know the unique conditions and possibilities—or challenges—of your life. You don’t need me to give you action instructions, but I believe I can help by offering perspectives that can inspire you to act and that affirm your ability to do so with love and wisdom.

Thinking back over the past fourteen years of David’s Desk, there are many essays that I’m proud of, but there are two that stand out for me. I’d like to reproduce them here.

The first is David’s Desk #146 which came out in July of 2019:

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WHERE IT STARTS
This month’s David’s Desk is a short picture story with a moral.

I live in a suburb about twenty miles east of Seattle, Washington. The city itself is on Puget Sound, a large body of water that separates us from the Olympic Peninsula to the west and that ultimately opens out into the Pacific Ocean. Here are some pictures of what the Sound looks like:

My home is about twenty-five miles or so from Puget Sound itself. Beautiful as the Sound is, I normally don’t think about it as I go through my day at home. I can’t see it from where I live, so it’s easy to forget. It seems removed from me.

Unless I walk through our neighborhood….

Throughout our neighborhood, there are storm drains where rain water can run off. They look like this:

They are not beautiful. But they are very useful and necessary when it rains!

If you examine the picture of this drain, you’ll see a little sign embedded in the concrete of the curb or sidewalk above it. Here’s a closeup of what the little sign says:

This sign tells me that in terms of being connected and thus of potentially having an impact upon it, Puget Sound is not twenty-some miles away but right here at my feet. Right here where I am standing by one of these storm drains, I am connected to the large body of water that is the Sound.

In effect, this:

is also this:

Something small, utilitarian, and locked in concrete is connected to, and thus part of, something majestic, beautiful, and spacious.

Rather like the relationship we have with sacredness

Every time I take a walk around the neighborhood, I am getting a little lesson in connectedness.  Each time I see one of these drains with its accompanying sign, I’m reminded that what I do in my neighborhood (at least in terms of putting things down these drains) affects Puget Sound. Truly, the Sound starts here.

For me, this is a perfect metaphor for how we are connected with each other and with the world and the universe beyond in many unseen but nonetheless impactful ways. If there is one lesson humanity struggles to learn right now, it is this lesson of just how interconnected we all are. It is a lesson of how our actions can have an effect on people and places in ways we can’t measure by physical proximity. It’s a lesson in our interdependency.

What we generate in our lives through our thoughts, our emotions, and the ways we choose to express them can have a far-reaching influence in a world that is so much more than just its physical nature and appearances. Love and hate both connect, though with very different consequences. 

It is also a metaphor for how we in our ordinariness and individuality are also part of something vast, special, and all-encompassing. Whether I call it the World, the Universe, or God, we are each part of a source of beauty, spaciousness, and abundant life. We are each part of something larger, a Wholeness affected by all that we do.

The message of the little drain-signs in my neighborhood always remind me of the interconnected nature of creation and of the profound lesson we need to learn

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The second David’s Desk I want to remember and celebrate came out in August of 2015. It was my 100th essay, and I celebrated it by simply publishing a picture of my desk (my desk looks a bit different now; the two Gandalfs are still there flanking my monitor, along with Yoda and Dr. Strange, but all the other icons have been replaced by new ones; after all, the winds of “nerditry” bring change!):

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ONE HUNDRED
Amazingly, this is the 100th David’s Desk. Frankly, when I began writing these essays nine years ago, I had no idea they would last as long as they have. Nor do I have plans to stop. After all, in another nine years, we’ll reach 200. Maybe I’ll retire then!

I’ve been thinking what topic—what jewels of wisdom—would be suitable to celebrate reaching 100.  A number of thoughts came to mind, but none quite seemed what I wanted. Then it occurred to me. I should just show you what my actual desk looks like!

David’s desk

Here my nerdy geekness and love of movies, fantasy, superheroes, and science fiction are on full display. On the left stands my Gandalf the Grey bobblehead, followed by Sunshine Care Bear (a favorite of mine from when our children were little), Joy (from the movie Inside Out—I mean who doesn’t want a little Joy in their lives?), Chewbacca and Hans Solo from Star Wars, an Elven maiden warrior stepping out of a castle door, Yoda, Dr. Strange (Marvel Comics’ Master of the Mystic Arts—obviously a role model!), Storm (also a Marvel superhero, a woman who can control the weather—always handy in the Pacific Northwest), a Viking (a gift from my friend Søren in Denmark), a small Bear stone, and finally Gandalf the White bobblehead.

These figures are each meaningful to me in one way or another, usually by representing something important to me in the realms of myth and archetype from which inspiration often comes. But mostly I love them for their playfulness. I am basically a whimsical fellow.

On the screen is an aerial view of Issaquah, the town where I live, taken by my oldest son John-Michael one beautiful summer day when he was paragliding off one of the foothills of the Cascade Mountain range. The large lake is Lake Sammamish which is a five minute walk from our home. Oh, and yes, that is a Yoda bobblehead on top of the monitor.

Revealing the true David’s Desk may give you some insights into the strange workings of my mind, at the risk of discouraging you from wanting anything more to do with me! I hope, though, it will encourage you to stick with me for another nine years, and to appreciate the icons, the myths, the heroes, and the whimsy that are part of your lives.

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With this stroll down memory lane, I wish you a wonderful and delightfully foolish and blessed month of April. I’ll see you in May!

David's Desk #166 Stick Figures

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this blog post with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler.

I have always envied people who can draw. That a person can use pencil, pen, paper, and colors to replicate the world—or invent new ones—seems magical to me. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s a trade I’d love to make.

Not that I mind writing. I’m grateful that I can translate my thoughts into words that others can comprehend. But I often work with topics that are abstract and, frankly, hard to put into words. It is easier (and often more fun) to try to illustrate them. My drawing skills, though—or lack of them—limit me to stick figures, like these:

Over the years, my “Smiley Soul” (cloud with face) and “Mr. Stick Man” have become well known to people in my classes. I’ve even managed to insert them into some of my books: my willingness to demonstrate my lack of talent in this area knows no bounds! I have to admit, though, that I’ve become fond of them. For those willing to stretch their imaginations, they’ve even served their purpose in communicating the ideas for which they have been pressed into service.

In fact, their very simplicity holds a certain charm. It can even be an asset. No one is going to linger over my illustrations in appreciation and wonder at their artistic merit (“Note that clever turn of line, that delicate shading!”). They are going to get the point I wish to make and then move on.

In fact, as a fan of the science cartoonist Randell Monroe and his webcomic XKCD, I’m aware of just how amazingly funny and communicative stick figures can be! (Though I always feel that, even though made with the same economy of lines and lack of dimension, his stick figures are more artistic than mine; they’re certainly more successful!) If you’re not familiar with him or with XKCD, I hope my mentioning them will lead you to Google them and from that, to much joy and laughter, though you may have to be a science nerd to fully appreciate some of his humor.

Useful as stick figures can be, mine included, they still lack dimension. They represent a minimalist approach that can be appropriate and even desirable for some purposes. But they don’t represent a way to look at life. (Note the clever segue here to the point I wish to make in this essay…)

Stick figures belong on a page (especially in the skilled hands of someone like Munroe), but they create problems if they become a lens through which we look at life. They lack more than one dimension. Not that we see other people as actual stick figures populating our world, at least I hope we don’t! But we can, and do, often see people in one-dimensional ways that fail to perceive the complexity and depths in each of us.

Right now, our country and our world are suffering from an unwillingness or an inability to see each other in our fullness. We see each other as labels, as names, as stereotypes that reduce us to caricatures of who we are and deny us dimensionality. What else is this but seeing each other as stick figures?

The challenge here is that reducing a person to one dimension also reduces the possibilities of finding areas of connection. By making someone else a stick figure in our imagination, we make ourselves a stick figure, too. We close our eyes to just how many-sided and multi-dimensional we all are.

A friend of mine tells a story of being evacuated from his home during one of the recent wildfires here in the West. A progressive liberal by inclination, he lives in a rural area filled with people who are anything but: “MAGA-land,” as he puts it. Yet, when he and his family were allowed to come home, he discovered that his Trump-supporting neighbors, who had refused to evacuate, had guarded and protected his house and land, had cared for animals he’d been forced to leave behind. He was no stick-figure called a “liberal” to them; he was their neighbor.

The future is going to depend on our ability to cooperate and help each other, to discover how to be neighbors. This means being willing and capable of seeing each other past the labels which we might attach to each other. It means recognizing that none of us are stick figures.

Unlike my drawings.

David's Desk #165 Creating Reality

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2021 by David Spangler. If you no longer wish to receive these letters, please let us know at info@Lorian.org.

I first heard the phrase, “you create your own reality,” in the mid-Sixties, living (where else?) in California. It came out of the nascent human potential movement, much of which was centered in the San Francisco Bay area where I was living. Coming out of a therapeutic context, it was a way of encouraging people to discover their agency and to move away from defining themselves as victims either of others or of circumstance. It encouraged one to take responsibility for how one interpreted and integrated one’s experiences. It was a way of reclaiming a sense of empowerment.

It was not long before this idea escaped the environment of a psychologist’s office or of an encounter group and became a staple of the burgeoning New Age movement. In this new context, however, it morphed from being therapeutic advice and became a statement of personal power. “I” was in the driver seat because reality could and would conform to the dictates of my will.

The idea that our inner state—the way we think and the way we feel—can affect and shape our outer life is an ancient one. Some variant of it can be found in most metaphysical, esoteric, and magical traditions. It recognizes and honors that we are generative, creative sources. But in these traditions, it is also recognized that we express our creativity and generativity within a larger spiritual context of connectedness to (and, importantly, responsibility for) a larger whole. Reality emerges as the expression of that larger participatory, co-creative wholeness and not simply as the whim of a single individual.

All too often in the New Age movement, I witnessed this idea being stripped from its larger context and reduced to a kind of mantra of individual apotheosis: “I can create my reality irrespective of anyone or anything else; life is subject to my will and my belief.”

A kind of giddiness took over from having the locus of godhood shifted from some old, bearded man in the sky to our own minds; like adolescents arriving at college and feeling themselves free for the first time from parental supervision, there was a new sense of freedom. Anything seemed possible.

It was not a huge leap from this, from feeling that a strongly held belief would shape reality and become true, to feeling that a strongly held belief simply was true. Belief was reality. I knew many people back in the day who knew that what they believed was true simply because they believed it. I discovered that no amount of logic or evidence would persuade them otherwise. This was because their belief had become deeply entwined with their sense of agency and power; to challenge one was to challenge the other.

Thinking that we create our own reality can be liberating and empowering, in part because the capacity to be a source of creative energy and inspiration is present in each of us. But it can also lead to problems. For instance, it was unfortunately common in New Age circles (and elsewhere, I’m sure) to assume someone is responsible for misfortunes or illnesses they suffered, saying that they had created the situation for themselves, totally ignoring that life can be messy and unpredictable for any of us, regardless of the state of our mind or our beliefs. I saw people feel ashamed when bad things happened to them, because they must have created it. I also witnessed many instances of painful disillusionment and even despair when a belief that was supposed to become real foundered upon the hard rocks of reality itself.

Perhaps the greatest problem, though, is how an uncritical acceptance of this idea of creating our own reality distorts our understanding of the world and thus our relationship to it. For one thing, it puts us into a power relationship with the world rather than one of partnership. The world—and reality—becomes malleable to our will and our thinking, like a ball of clay or a blank sheet of paper waiting for us to write our wishes. We fail to see the world as a generative and creative source in its own right, one with its own will and intents, but also as a potential co-creative partner. The consequences of this perception are all too evident in the climate crisis that is upon us.

The other problem is that it can blind me to what is happening in the world around me, blind me to evidence, to reality itself. If all I need is my own belief, to which reality will conform itself, then what need do I have for evidence from the world itself? I am caught in a solipsistic state in which only what comes from myself is true.

If I say, “Reality is a co-created state. We, you and I and the world around us, create our reality,” then I am open to connection, to partnership, to participation in the world as a whole so urgently needed these days. On the other hand, if I say, “I (and by implication, only I) create my reality,” then I disconnect from the larger world around me.

These days, I don’t know how many people are still using the mantra of “I create my own reality,” but it’s obvious from the news that a great many people are saying that what they believe must be real simply because they believe it or wish it to be true, no matter if there is evidence to the contrary. The mindset is the same.

The entanglement of belief with agency and one’s sense of power and purpose is the same, as well. We are in a time when so much in the world is challenging and disempowering, and so much is changing around us, that we all feel a need for purpose, agency, and empowerment. It makes us vulnerable to anything or anyone who promises us these things, even if the promise is based on illusion. If a person invests in such illusion, it may be that helping them recognize and discover other inner sources of power and agency that are not dependent on that belief system can be liberating. This process begins not with accusation or attempts to prove them wrong but with listening, with respect, and with a love that can open their hearts to a larger vision of themselves, their capacities, and their world than their belief system can offer. That’s when connection can occur, co-creativity becomes possible, and the world as it is, reality as it is, can become our partner.

DAVID'S DESK #138 - ZOMBIES

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2018 by David Spangler. If you no longer wish to receive these letters, please let us know at info@Lorian.org.

I want to write about zombies. Why zombies, of all things? A couple of reasons. First, I thought you might like to read about something different from all the social and political upheaval and conflict going on this month here in the United States. And second, I’d like to celebrate Halloween, one of my favorite times of the year. In an election season that seems filled with nothing but tricks, it’s nice to think of giving away treats!

I realize that Halloween is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I have always loved the spookiness of it, the dressing up in costumes, the groups of children trick or treating, the decorations that can turn an ordinary house into a borderland between the realm of the living and the subtle regions beyond the physical world.

Since our children have grown up and gone on to homes of their own, we don’t decorate as lavishly as we used to. A few ghosts and skeletons strategically placed in windows here and there, and that’s about it. Nothing as elaborate as the zombies I once had clawing their way out of graves we’d created on our front lawn.

Ah, zombies. They’re very popular these days. “Zombie apocalypse” has become part of our cultural lexicon. The Walking Dead is one of the most popular shows on television. One can make, and many have, all kinds of analyses about what this means in our collective psychology and the metaphorical significance of the surge in zombie-ness as it relates to popular sensibilities. Simon Pegg, the British actor, has produced a classic zombie satire, Shawn of the Dead. In one brilliant scene in the movie, you see dozens of commuters going mindlessly to their jobs, and in the next scene, the zombie apocalypse having struck overnight, you see dozens of zombies moving mindlessly about—and there’s no difference between the two groups! The same blank stares, the same aimless motions, the same lack of vitality and life characterize both.

Modern zombies, though, are not the same as the ones I encountered in classic ghost stories when I was growing up. In those stories, part of the horror lay in the fact that you didn’t know what was animating the dead. What mysterious force brought corpses back to life? It was supernatural, through and through. Further, zombies didn’t arise in mindless hordes, seeking human brains as a late-night snack. The zombies I read about were solitary for the most part and, like a heat-seeking missile, were aimed at a specific person or group. They rose for retribution or to right a wrong. They were payback for someone who had violated justice in the universe. They were instruments of karma, rebalancing something that had gone out of whack due to someone’s actions. The laws of life and death were overturned because someone had done something to overturn the moral laws governing creation. (A classic, and wonderfully understated, example of this is "The Monkey’s Paw", a short story by W.W. Jacobs, first published in 1902.)

Modern zombies, though, are a disease. A supernatural or moral reason for the dead to rise doesn’t fit well into modern sensibilities. We want a rational cause, a technological explanation. We’ve banished the supernatural as a cause for fear and substituted science and technology in its place. Therefore, the zombie apocalypse is a pandemic.

It used to be the zombie was a force of nature, left unexplained. When a child on Halloween dressed up as a zombie, he or she became a supernatural creature. Now, they’re just a plague victim. The modern zombie is someone infected with a virus. Further, unlike the classic zombie who returns to the grave once justice has been meted out, the modern zombie can be cured or at least stopped, if only the right antiviral medicine can be discovered. The misuse of science visits horror upon us, but the right use of science can restore order and normalcy. All very rational.

This makes zombies a medical phenomenon, strange and horrible, yes, but ultimately explainable. Science and technology may have gone wrong, but they are familiar, part of the world we know. The modern zombie is frightening and dangerous; it can kill you. But so can cancer, or ebola, or the flu. It’s a danger that can be met and understood and potentially overcome with the right knowledge. We may be threatened but our worldview is not. The classic zombie, however, was a force of mystery from another world altogether, one beyond reason and science. This made it far more unsettling, for it demanded a revision of our worldview. It proclaimed the existence of the irrational and the unexplainable. Society doesn’t think in these terms much anymore, which is why our modern zombies are, well, pedestrian and ordinary, products of moral relativism even while being decaying and horrific.

I’m writing in generalities here, and I’m hardly an expert on zombie literature and films. But these are my impressions. I bring them up not simply because I’m getting into a Halloween spirit, but because I think this shift tells us something important.

The zombies I read about growing up were agents of a living universe. They could exist because in some manner the world itself was magical and alive in ways humans didn’t fully understand. The modern zombie, though, truly is the walking dead because we see the world itself as dead: unliving matter to be used however we see fit and never mind the consequences. Now, with climate change and other environmental challenges, we see this “dead” world rising up to confront us.

Our image of apocalypse, whether caused by zombies or something else, is one of destruction and collapse. The familiar world is torn down, and yet, fundamentally, it remains the familiar world, though with a new element—the walking dead—within it. These zombies are a disease, and we can think of them in those terms.

But the word “apocalypse” originally meant “revelation,” the gaining of new knowledge that changed how we thought and saw the world. An old order based on different conceptions might come to an end as a result of this new knowledge but not necessarily in destructive ways.

We face challenges in the world—poverty, corruption, a dehumanizing greed, terrorism, disease, climate change, to name a few—that are more horrible than anything that will knock on my door today and yell “Trick or Treat!” Meeting these challenges calls for a true apocalypse in the form of new ideas, new vision, new knowledge, a different way of understanding ourselves and our role in the context of a living world. This would be less a “zombie apocalypse” than an “awakening to life” apocalypse, as the argument could be made that we are the zombies now, shuffling towards the end of a civilization and eating our own brains as we go.

DAVID'S DESK #137 - EM-POWER

There is a power that each of us has which can make possible a positive and abundant future for all of us and for the world as a whole. There’s nothing magical or esoteric about it. It is available to us every day, and many people do make a point of using it. But it can be overlooked because it operates on a different scale and in a different way from how we usually think about power.

I think most of us would understand power as the ability to accomplish something, a force to make something happen or to get something done. This might be muscular power to physically implement one’s will, or intellectual power to persuade and compel. It might be the power that wealth brings or political or social status. It might be power granted by an organization such as the government or the military.

Whatever its source, power is seen as a capacity to impose, to compel someone or something else to do what I want. Power becomes a commodity that is not equally shared in a zero-sum game where there are winners and losers. Some people have it and some people don’t, and in most human societies, the latter are far more numerous than the former, which, of course, leads to abuses and imbalances in human relationships.

Because of the consequences that can follow when one is on the receiving end of power in the service of dominance, we seek after it so that we won’t be subject to those consequences. This quest for power can itself become fraught with destructive and hurtful results. We can descend into a social-Darwinian mindset in which only the most powerful can survive, much less prosper. We favor competition over cooperation.

The power to impose is inherently insecure because the foundation on which that power rests can change or disappear. As a commodity, power can be won or lost. I can amass a fortune and then lose it. I can be elected to a political office and then be defeated in the next election. I can work out in a gym and develop a powerful physique and lose it to an accident or illness. I can occupy a favored demographic position and then lose it to changing population dynamics or social norms.

The power that I’m referring to, though, is different. For one thing, it can never be lost; we always possess it. We may choose not to use it, but we cannot lose it. For another, we all possess it equally. Some do not have more of it while others have less. It is not based on wealth, social status, organizational membership, race, religion, gender, or any of the many other means by which we usually measure the presence of power. It is not a commodity, and its use is not part of a zero-sum game. It does not produce winners and losers, only winners.

Broadly speaking, this is our power to choose how we relate and connect to others. The results of such choices always affect someone else or the world around us. The scale of the effect may seem small, but it is never inconsequential; in fact, the consequences can ripple out widely, often beyond our ability to foresee or to know.

We are constantly affecting each other through our thoughts and feelings and the behavior towards one another that they inspire. I don’t have to have a dollar in my pocket to give you a compliment that may brighten your day, for instance. I don’t have to have any special social status to treat you with kindness.

While a competitive society bids us struggle to be “in power,” a holistic society that can bring wholeness and healing into the world bids us to develop the skill to “empower.” This means using the power of my presence to enhance your experience of the power of your own presence.

I like the word “empower” to describe this capacity we all have to engage with one another in mutually supportive and beneficial ways, ways that make each of us a winner. However, when we think of being empowering, I would like us to think of it as more than just giving something—our own power, perhaps—to someone else or of doing something beneficial for them. These things can certainly be helpful, but there’s a deeper potential at work here.

To describe this deeper power we each have, let me introduce a hyphen to “empower” and turn it into “em-power.” This could be seen as short for “emergent power.” This is the power—the capacities—that emerge when two or more people connect through mutual respect, sharing, and cooperation. This power doesn’t belong to anyone but arises within everyone. It is the power of synergy, a power of wholeness. It draws out the best in all who participate.

This is not an abstraction by any means. Anyone who has been part of a successful team knows what this is like. Being part of a group whose members mindfully and deliberately work to support each other and draw out the best in each other is a joyful and profoundly empowering experience. Now imagine if the team was humanity itself, all of us learning to both stand in our individual sovereignty and power and be empowering with each other, allowing a power of wholeness to emerge from our connectedness.

The ability to em-power is always part of us. We exercise it when we choose to honor another and deal with him or her respectfully and with a desire to discover the power we can unfold through our cooperation and kindness. We lose it when we seek to dominate, to go from being empowering to being in power.

The shift from struggling for power as a commodity to enjoying and nourishing emergent power in which everyone is benefitted is the shift that I feel humanity is struggling with at this time in our history. Empowerment—or em-powerment—goes beyond how we relate to each other and defines how we relate to and empower our world. It is what I call a holopoietic power, the power to create wholeness. Nothing, it seems to me, is more needed on our planet today. The important thing—the hopeful thing—is that we don’t have to seek for this power; it is not available only to a few. It is always present in the heart of each of us.

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole.

DAVID’S DESK #130 - HEARTLAND SECURITY

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2018 by David Spangler. If you no longer wish to receive these letters, please let us know at info@Lorian.org.

DAVID’S DESK #130 - HEARTLAND SECURITY

Four years ago, one of my “subtle” (i.e. non-physical) colleagues said to me, “You are at war, but you don’t fully realize it yet.” His comment has been borne out by recent events detailing the extent to which Russian hackers and “bots” are utilizing social media in the United States to exacerbate existing tensions and divisions through the spread of misinformation. Nor is it just the Russians. ISIL has been using websites and Internet propaganda to radicalize individuals towards participating in their brutal form of violent jihad. Not to be left out, various hate groups in the United States and other Western democracies have been doing the same, all using the instant availability and openness of social media networks to advance their agendas. These are just the organized groups. We are also beset by uncounted numbers of individual “trolls” who take advantage of digital anonymity to spread negativity and conflict.  

If invading enemy tanks were rumbling up the streets of New York or San Francisco—or London, or Paris— the threat would be obvious. We would know what to do and how to respond. We’ve done it before, as when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Physical combat we understand.

But this war is different. It is a war being waged in the imagination, in the mind, and in the emotions. It is an “info-war” that is harder to spot, harder to define, harder to know just when we are being invaded, particularly because it enlists our own prejudices, our own fears, against us. Weaponized misinformation is challenging to defend against because it touches us in our beliefs: it invites us to accept and believe what we want to believe, whether it’s true our not. It uses confirmation bias as its ammunition. We feel affirmed in our worldview (whatever its limits), which makes us willing colluders with the very forces that wish to tear us apart.

What is even more subtle and dangerous, though, is how this war masquerades itself. Different as it may be from past physical conflicts, we still see it through a familiar lens as one human group versus another  It is the Russians against the United States, ISIL against the non-Islamic world, hate groups against people of races, ethnicities, and religions different from their own. The methods of attack and defense may be new but the adversarial narrative is not.

This war, though, is really an attack upon the human heart and its ability, in each of us, to craft a positive, planetary future. It is an attack upon our ability to walk beyond fear and to connect with each other.  It is an attack upon our ability to love and to see ourselves in the other. It is an attack upon our ability to grow and expand and give expression to what President Abraham Lincoln so aptly called the “better angels of our nature.”

It is an attack upon a larger, wider, deeper knowledge of who we are as human beings. It is an attack upon our ability to cooperate, collaborate, and co-create a positive future for all of us and for the world as well, upon which our lives depend.

Success in this attack depends on us not seeing that in this conflict, Russian hackers, ISIL jihadists, members of hate groups, and individual trolls are targets as well. Their hearts are being crushed, too, their humanity limited. But if they are not the deeper perpetrators of this war, who or what is?

In one sense, we are all under attack from old habits; ways of thinking and feeling that are outmoded in a planetary, digital Age; the pain of old wounds that have festered in the collective unconscious but are now finding release; suppressed animosities given new opportunities to express themselves; the karma of humanity’s suffering. In this context, perhaps the cartoonist Walt Kelly said it best on Earth Day, 1971, when he had his character Pogo say, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”

There is another force at work, though, which I choose to characterize as fear of the unknown. Few people like change. This is true even when it's obviously beneficial; it’s even more true when the consequences of change cannot be wholly foreseen and may involve loss of some kind. Change isn’t safe.  It’s scary.

There is no question in my mind that right now we all stand as human beings at a tipping point. There are too many things happening in the world and to the world for life to stay the same as it’s always been. The choice we face is not whether or not to change but whether we will fear and resist or whether we will rise to the occasion and bring something new into being.

The war raging around us is a war over this choice.

Never before in human history have we had so many tools and so much power to bring us together as a planetary species in harmony with the world. We have access to modes of travel, communication, and cooperation that would have seemed godlike and magical only a couple of centuries ago.

At the same time, never have we been so faced with the tools and power to cripple, perhaps even to end, life as we know it. This need not be through physical destruction and annihilation. It can be through a retreat into ever-shrinking armed camps, buttressed by having only the information we wish to have, true or not, and defended by walls of thought, feeling, and action that keep away anything that is different, anything that might challenge our tiny status quo. We don’t have to kill ourselves to kill off the largeness and promise of our spirit.

This is the real war that surrounds us, whatever conflicts appear on the nightly news. It is fear of expansiveness, fear of change, fear of openness, fear of love, fear of difference, fear of cooperation aligning itself against the promise of the human spirit.

It is an attack upon the spiritual heart—the human heart—of who we are.  

It calls for us to rise to participate in “heartland” security, to protect the largeness of heart that is potential in all of us and to give it opportunity to grow, expand, and express.

Ironically, this is the easiest of all wars to fight. We do not have to bear arms, we do not have to dress in uniforms, we do not have to accumulate around us the armaments of war. What we do need to do is refuse to let our hearts and minds be shrunk. We must refuse to collude with fear and hate. If someone unknown on the Internet tells me to fear another American, I can respond by saying, “All Americans are my sisters and brothers. We may have different beliefs, but we are united as Americans.” If someone unknown on the Internet tells me to fear another race, another nationality, another religion, I can respond with a loving heart and say, “No!  All humans are my sisters and brothers. The future rises or falls on our ability to stand together in mutual respect that can see beyond our differences.”

In other words, we can imagine ourselves as being larger than our prejudices, larger than our fears, larger than the ideas that would limit and bind us in ever-smaller communities of bias. This is a war of imagination. Imagination powered by love is our greatest means of winning it.

When we stand in our Heartland and the love it can hold, then all the world becomes our Homeland, and all life our fellow citizens.

This is a war we must win. This is a war we can win. It just takes knowing who we can be, who we all can be together, and letting that truth dispel the misinformation that would tell us otherwise.

From March 1-28, join David Spangler for Subtle Energies I: Standing Whole. In this four-week class, David will guide participants as they explore the subtle sides of their natures. Understanding this aspect of yourself and learning to integrate its capacities in daily life is a key to being whole. Class will be held on our online educational website, Lorian Education, where materials can be accessed 24/7. Additionally, David will host five live webinars that participants can also download for their personal use. For more information and to register, click here.

David Spangler is a guest contributor to Earth Rising: Our  Sacred Destiny To Heal Ourselves and Uplift Our World, Together with David Nicol, beginning March 1.  For more information, click here. 

DAVID’S DESK #129 - LIFE EXPECTANCY

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters are my personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however, the material is ©2018 by David Spangler. If you no longer wish to receive these letters, please let us know at info@Lorian.org.

February, 2018 - LIFE EXPECTANCY

My friend and Lorian colleague, Rue Hass, an exceptional counselor and teacher, sent me an interesting email the other day in response to some writing that I’m doing.  Here is what she said:

I’ve been hearing on the news that for the first time in a long time the life expectancy rate is going down in the US, especially for men, as the opioid crisis continues to ravage the nation.

When I hear this news, I am captured by the phrase “life expectancy.” Of course, in common usage it means how long people can expect to live, on average. But the poignant deeper sense cries out to me of our diminishing expectations of what a life can hold.  I think we as humans are losing our vision of possibility for our lives, for life itself. A diminishing life expectancy.  

I was struck by this because I’ve been having similar thoughts about how we think of ourselves in relationship to the future. In the early Seventies, one of the first professional futurists, Frederick Polak, wrote an important book called The Image of the Future. It was a historical study of various images of the future and of the cultures that held them. He demonstrated that when a society or a culture lost its image of the future, it went into decline and eventually collapsed. He warned that this was the situation in which our culture was finding itself. We were losing—or had lost—our image of the future.

What Polak meant by an “image of the future” was not simply expectations about what tomorrow might bring or anticipation of new technologies. He was careful to draw a distinction between a “true” image of the future and an image of progress. The latter, more often than not, was really an image of the past projected into the future; life would go on as we know it, but it would get better and better. An example would be the television show Star Trek. It certainly presented a picture of a future civilization—and an optimistic picture, at that—but everything in that show was simply a projection of what we already knew. Yes, the technology was advanced, but the people weren’t. The world of Star Trek was a familiar world (necessary, of course, if television audiences in the Sixties were going to relate to it).

Polak defined an “image of the future” not as a prophecy or expectation of any form the future might take but rather as an exuberant embrace of the future itself as a horizon of possibility calling out the creative, exploratory, confident spirit of the society. The form of the future didn’t have to be familiar; it didn’t have to be simply a continuation of what was already known or being done. The power of the image of the future was that it opened doors of potential; it confronted the society with the unknown but in a welcome and anticipatory way. The future would be better not necessarily because it would be filled with improvements over the present but because it was the product of the society’s creativity and spirit of discovery. Who knew what wonders might unfold? Who knew what people might create? How exciting to look forward to finding out!

Polak was confirming through his historical study what common sense would tell us: a society grows when people are filled with a spirit of possibility and potential, when they have, as my friend Rue pointed out, “life expectancy.”

We are plagued in our time by a sense of diminishing possibilities. Climate change, political dysfunction, economic disparities, dwindling resources, the sense that our children and grandchildren will not inherit a better world than the one we were born into: all these things drain away our image of the future, in Polak’s terms. They reduce our expectations of what life can bring and of what can be accomplished.

The key behind what Polak observed through his studies is that possibility does not lie in the realm of events alone but in ourselves. A powerful image of the future that inspires and excites is not about what we can expect in the world but about what we can expect of ourselves. Hope is not wishful thinking of what we would like to happen; it’s about opening the doors of imagination and creativity to bring new ideas and new behaviors into being. It’s recognizing that we can embrace the future because we can embody and bring forth possibilities.

Whatever our physical life expectancy, we can expand our expectancy of life and of ourselves and in the process transform our world with a new image of the future.

From March 1-28, join David Spangler for Subtle Energies I: Standing Whole. In this four-week class, David will guide participants as they explore the subtle sides of their natures. Understanding this aspect of yourself and learning to integrate its capacities in daily life is a key to being whole. Class will be held on our online educational website, Lorian Education, where materials can be accessed 24/7. Additionally, David will host five live webinars that participants can also download for their personal use. For more information and to register, click here.