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There is a disease in our world called hoarding. It is almost at endemic levels in the spiritual world. We hear something that seems real or reinforces our current ego state and we say yeah… “I buy that.” The idea is then put into our spiritual/religious closet and usually kept there. After awhile the closet is so full we can’t open the door without becoming overwhelmed with philosophies that no longer are valid, but we hold onto them. Holding on because we are afraid that we will miss something, we will be less worthy and connected.

Our ego has allowed us to ingest junk spiritual food. Junk spiritual food are those ideas that may be Truth to a degree, but lack depth and a path that we can walk to remember who we really are. By consuming these junk spiritual ideas, our mind has become toxic to the point that we can no longer distinguished between healthy and junk ideas. We let our ego take us through one idea after another looking for something that will satisfy that internal hunger of wanting to belong of being loved and desired. The need to be loved and wanted is as much spiritual as it is physical. The spiritual needs always plays out in some physical manner.

The road to cleaning out your hoarding closet is not particularly easy or fast. And no one path of cleaning fits all of us. What I have learned in my own cleaning is that each path leads to the same place. A remembering of your true identity where you strip away all that feeds the ego. The ego keeps you emotional and spiritual locked into old ideas and language.

The tendency of the Western consciousness is to think in binary terms. This binary idea then forces us back into a puritanical place of separation of our consciousness.

It literally forces us to consume ideas that further blind us to the hoarding and lack of connection to Truth/God. For us to move past hoarding we must embrace consciousness as the progenitor, the causer, the father of all actions and reactions.

Once we can embrace consciousness as the causer we can let go of all kinds of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual junk that covers our true identity. We can embrace the idea that our identity is no more or less than consciousness aware of itself as consciousness. With this we can unload our hoarding closet and throw out all of the ideas that have fed our ego and false identity.

This act of consciousness automatically renders a state of grace where we are embraced by the cohesive force we call love. We know that our true nature is manifesting in infinite variety without the death or birth, without beginning or end ever evenly present.

© 2016-1018 Suzanne Deakins

Sexual Fluidity

http:/www.onespiritpress.com

www.theprosperos.org

“Beauty authorizes everything.”

–Pierre (Pascal Cervo) to beautiful 20-year-old Matthieu (Mathieu Chevé) who he meets outside Paris via Grindr in the movie 4 Days in France.

August 15, 2018 (theonion.com)

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Shedding further light on a long history of attempts to protect itself from accusations of criminal activity, biblical scholars at Harvard Divinity School reported Wednesday they have found evidence that the early Catholic church covered up for three wise men who molested baby Jesus. “After deciphering fragments of a previously unknown gospel, we now have textual documentation that clearly delineates abuse by three magi who arrived in Bethlehem and inappropriately touched the newborn Christ Child as He lay in the manger,” said Professor Raymond White, recounting the extensive efforts made by the church to scrub the story from early versions of the Bible and to discredit Jesus’ account of the event in His later sermons. “As described in newly discovered scraps of papyrus dating back nearly 2,000 years, these three magi were powerful men of great influence. Whatever moments of weakness or temptation they may have exhibited on that first Christmas morning, the early church must have seen fit to protect their reputations against any accusation from the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, who were, after all, very poor.” White went on to note that additional passages from the text explain how the three wise men were quietly relocated and allowed to continue their work in a remote village in Persia.

Every child has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don’ts,
Not the God who ever does anything weird,
But the God who knows only four words.
And keeps repeating them, saying:
“Come dance with Me, come dance.”

~Hafiz (1325 – 1390) was a Persian poet who “lauded the joys of love and wine but also targeted religious hypocrisy”. Wikipedia

From the Christian Science Monitor :

Ukraine’s leading fact-checking group is a project known as StopFake, started by journalists and others to counter fake news. It has nearly 200,000 followers on social media and runs programs on Ukrainian television.

With its success, it has begun to provide similar fact-checking in other countries, including Russia, that are the brunt of Kremlin propaganda. StopFake relies heavily on donations from abroad as well as local volunteers. One donor in particular stands out: the Czech Republic. Fifty years on, the events that started with the Prague Spring keep echoing into the future.

• For more on the Prague Spring, click here; for more on Alexander Dubček, click here; for more on the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, click here; for more on Vaclav Havel, click here; for more on Charter 77, click here; for more on the Maidan Revolution, click here; for more on Hans Rosling, click here; the Stopfake website can be accessed here.

Jordan Peterson in conversation with Joe Rogan (again!):

– a process that Peterson has described (elsewhere, of course!) as “like being interviewed by a vacuum cleaner”.

• Some interesting bits/highlights:

Starting around 58:00 Peterson addresses the fact that his goal was to come up with an approach or approaches that would work even under the worst of circumstances.  Highly commendable, in my book, since so many current therapies and self-help regimes leave one thinking something along the lines of: “That’s all very fine and well, but what about somebody who’s got a real problem?”

Shortly after that, from about 1:01 through 1:08, there follows one of the best discussions I’ve ever heard of the reasons/justifications for what, in the Fourth Way, we call Fly Efforts.  And who’d’ve thought such a small concept would have such a huge effect on the popular psyche?  Maybe the World is just ready for such things – they have been kind of floating around almost forever, and maybe time has come for them to move more to the foreground.  After all, although the image/term “Fly Efforts” is original to Gurdjieff, the concept is hardly unique to the Fourth Way, and is probably universal to wisdom systems, both esoteric and everyday.  For example: in mainstream US culture, they’re called “Baby Steps“; in Twelve Step Programs, participants are enjoined to “…take things one day at a time”; in Japan the related term is “kai-zen”…

Starting around 2:05 there is quite a long in depth discussion of the infamous Vice interview – with which, it turns out, Peterson is very far from pleased.  As noted in my comment on that interview (both posted below), it seemed to me that that interview went quite well, with Jay Caspian Kang asking very pointed and difficult questions, and Peterson fielding them admirably.   But Peterson seems to see things very differently.  For more of his reactions to the Vice interview, click here; for some further thoughts on the same subject – from Rogan, along with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying – click here.

• Also gleaned from this interview:

Peterson has been tapped to write the introduction to the upcoming fiftieth anniversary edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn‘s The Gulag Archipelago.

Further, included in the discussion of the Vice interview is Peterson’s admission of his problem with anger.  It was a great relief to me to hear him admit he’s at least aware of, and trying to address, this aspect of himself, which is one of several big problems I have with him; but more on all that later, if I can continue to develop and articulate a critical appreciation of this remarkable phenomenon…

AI is massively transforming our world, but there’s one thing it cannot do: love. In a visionary talk, computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee details how the US and China are driving a deep learning revolution — and shares a blueprint for how humans can thrive in the age of AI by harnessing compassion and creativity. “AI is serendipity,” Lee says. “It is here to liberate us from routine jobs, and it is here to remind us what it is that makes us human.”

This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Kai-Fu Lee · Investor, computer scientist
At Sinovation Ventures, Kai-Fu Lee invests in the next generation of Chinese high-tech companies.

“Then I went to my sister’s and my mother was crying and praying so hard.  There wasn’t room for anyone else to feel anything.”

–Peggy Olsen (played by Elisabeth Moss) describing JFK’s funeral day on Mad Men.