Saturday, October 16, 2021, 9:00 AM to 6:00 P.M., and on Sunday, October 17, 2021, 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Translation class provides the fundamental resource required for shedding limitation, disorder, and confusion from your world: Throughcogitative thinking in the abstract.
It is said that when we judge by appearances we judge amiss. “That which is essential is invisible to the eye,” as Antoine de Saint Exupéry wrote.
Learn to see through what seems to be – limitation, anxiety, oppression – to Truth which lies waiting for your discovery. Not “A, or The Truth” – there is no “the” Truth – but Truth. Within which Your Ontological identity is ever-present, awaiting recognition.
Class is live (on Zoom) with segments of Thane on tape, with music and video supplements to enhance the traditional Teacher/Student classroom format experience.
On September 20th, 2021 we have a Full Moon in Pisces.
“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”
Full Moons in Pisces always come with existential topics to ponder upon. Is it something about the last sign of the zodiac that is mysterious, intriguing, and thirsty for answers.
Pisces is the sign number 12. It has seen it all, done it all. Some say Pisces is resigned to fate, but that’s not entirely true. It’s true that Pisces understands the workings of fate better than any other sign. Pisces knows when to surrender.
But Pisces also knows that we are part of the ocean, and that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon can cause a tornado in Texas days, years, or decades later.
Pisces takes action much like any other sign – and strives not only to do things right (Virgo), but also to do the “right thing”.
Pisces takes action, and then leaves things open, giving room to the Universe to chime in and shape its creation.
If you’re in the middle of the ocean and throw a message in a bottle you don’t know where your message will end. You know it will eventually reach the shore… but which shore? Who knows? You just throw that bottle. And then leave it to the ocean.
In the midst of the “I can do this all by myself” conscientious Virgo season, the Full Moon in Pisces reminds us about the missing element of the equation.
Full Moon In Pisces – The Aspects
The Full Moon is at 28° Pisces, it is conjunct Neptune, the planet of unconditional love, and opposite Mars, the planet of action.
Like any Full Moon, the Full Moon in Pisces aims to reconcile the complementary energies of the 2 signs on the axis, the Moon/Neptune in Pisces “let’s surrender”, with the Sun in Virgo “let’s get things done”.
The Sun is conjunct Mars, adding even more fuel to the debate: “Should I go with the drift, in a sweet Piscean way, or do I focus on what I can control and get.things.done?”
The answer is never straightforward, especially when we have a Full Moon in Pisces. The Full Moon is always in the sign opposite the astrological season we are in. We are in Virgo season, so the Full Moon can only be in Pisces.
We have Order (Virgo) vs. Chaos (Pisces).
We can only get to the essence of Virgo if we also embrace its polarity, Pisces.
Full Moon In Pisces – Let Love Lead The Way
A few days ago I watched the movie “Noah”, a biblical account of Noah and the ark.
Noah decides he has been chosen by God to save the world. He starts building a giant ark, where he gathers a pair of each species of animal of that time… but, apart from his close family members, no humans. Noah witnesses people’s cruel and shameless behavior and believes that God wants to end the human race.
When the biblical flooding begins, the ark starts floating, while all the other humans perish in the waves. It’s only Noah, his wife, 2 sons and an adopted barren girl (Ila) on the boat. Noah has decided that no human will ever be born. This should be the end of the human race.
Miraculously, the barren girl gets pregnant with one of Noah’ sons. Noah decides that if the baby is a girl (who hypothetically could give birth to new children in the future) he will kill the baby.
Ila gives birth not only to one, but to two baby girls. Convinced that God wants the end of the human race, Noah goes to kill the baby girls, but he comes to his senses at the very last second. The baby girls survive. Humanity is given another chance.
Months later, when the ark reaches land, Ila asks Noah why he spared the life of her children, and he said “I couldn’t do it. The only thing that I could see was love”.
Nevertheless, Noah feels guilty that he had failed God. But then Ila tells Noah “Perhaps God wanted you to decide if the human race deserves another chance”.
Her reply is very interesting in the context of the Full Moon in Pisces energy. Knowing when to surrender and when to twist fate is something that philosophers have written full libraries about.
The Moon and Neptune in Pisces want us to do the “God’s/Universe’s will”, but on the other side of the zodiac belt, the Sun and Mars remind us that we are part of this creation, and our actions shape the future every single day.
The course of action may not always be straightforward – but the Universe always sends us hidden messages in a bottle. Whenever confused, trust your intuition and let love lead the way.
PS: the enrollment for Astro Butterfly Wings closes in less than 24 hours. If you want to join us, select your preferred group (Beginner or Intermediate/Advanced) and enroll now – we start tomorrow!
With more than 1.5 million copies in print, A Course in Miracles is one of the most popular texts for self-actualization. A self-study course designed to help change one’¬?s perceptions, A Course in Miracles was recorded over a seven-year period by Dr. Helen Schucman, a highly respected research psychologist who heard a “voice” dictating the material to her. In JOURNEY WITHOUT DISTANCE, Robert Skutch, director of the Foundation for Inner Peace, publishers of A Course in Miracles, recounts the inspirational story of how the book came to be. What was Helen Schucman really like? Why was she chosen to receive the material? What roles did other people play in this fantastic journey? Based on firsthand accounts told to the author, JOURNEY WITHOUT DISTANCE is a suspenseful and dramatic story that will fascinate the millions of people who have read A Course in Miracles and captivate those who have not yet opened its pages.
Be Careful What You Pray For, You Might Just Get It: What We Can Do About the Unintentional Effects of Our Thoughts, Prayers and Wishes
by Larry Dossey
From the ‘New York Times’ bestselling author of ‘Healing Words’ and ‘Prayer Is Good Medicine’ comes this compelling exploration of the negative side of prayer. Larry Dossey, M.D., offers remarkable evidence that, just as prayer can be used positively …
TheVideoLover Alternate Caroline Myss will change your life! She is that rare individual who can alter our fundamental ideas about health and well-being. In her no-nonsense high-voltage style, Caroline provides insights that foster hope and inspiration, unlocking the doors to health and healing. Her motto, “Your biography becomes your biology” is based on fifteen years of research as a medical intuitive. Caroline reveals how your thoughts and feelings are recorded in every one of your cells and how this determines your emotional, spiritual and psychological well-being. She explains the cultural blocks to healing and shows how to improve your health with the revolutionary Five Steps to Healing. With humor and compassion, Caroline Myss shares a bold new vision that will electrify you. Discover the infinite possibilities for a healthy, vibrant and spiritually fulfilling life.
AWAL Digital Limited (Kobalt) (on behalf of Real Music); ARESA, Kobalt Music Publishing, AMRA, LatinAutorPerf, UNIAO BRASILEIRA DE EDITORAS DE MUSICA – UBEM, SourceAudio Holdings (music publishing), LatinAutor – UMPG, and 7 Music Rights Societies
The Oneida Community dissolved in 1881, converting itself to a joint-stock company. This eventually became the silverware company Oneida Limited.[6]
Structure
John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886) led the community
Even though the community only reached a maximum population of about 300, it had a complex bureaucracy of 27 standing committees and 48 administrative sections.[7][better source needed]
All community members were expected to work, each according to his or her abilities. Women tended to do many of the domestic duties.[8][page needed] Although more skilled jobs tended to remain with an individual member (the financial manager, for example, held his post throughout the life of the community), community members rotated through the more unskilled jobs, working in the house, the fields, or the various industries. As Oneida thrived, it began to hire outsiders to work in these positions as well. They were a major employer in the area, with approximately 200 employees by 1870.
Secondary industries included the manufacture of leather travel bags, the weaving of palm frond hats, the construction of rustic garden furniture, game traps, and tourism. The manufacturing of silverware began in 1877, relatively late in the life of the community, and still exists.[6]
Complex marriage
The Oneida community strongly believed in a system of free love – a term which Noyes is credited with coining – which was known as complex marriage,[9] where any member was free to have sex with any other who consented.[10][page needed] Possessiveness and exclusive relationships were frowned upon.[11]
Noyes developed a distinction between amative and propagative love.
Complex marriage meant that everyone in the community was married to everyone else. All men and women were expected to have sexual relations and did. The basis for complex marriage was the Pauline passage about there being no marriage in heaven meant that there should be no marriage on earth, but that no marriage did not mean no sex. But sex meant children ; not only could the community not afford children in the early years, the women were not enthusiastic about a regime that would have kept them pregnant most of the time. They developed a distinction between amative and propagative love. Propagative love was sex for the purpose of having children; amative love was sex for the purpose of expressing love. The difference was what Noyes called “male continence” , in which the male partner avoided ejaculation. Noyes argued that this practice not only kept them from producing unwanted children but also taught the male considerable self-control. The system worked very well.[12]
Women over the age of 40 were to act as sexual “mentors” to adolescent boys, because these relationships had a minimal chance of conceiving. Furthermore, these women became religious role models for the young men. Likewise, older men often introduced young women to sex. Noyes often used his own judgment in determining the partnerships that would form, and he would often encourage relationships between the non-devout and the devout in the community, in the hope that the attitudes and behaviors of the devout would influence the attitudes of the non-devout.[13][page needed]
In 1993, the archives of the community were made available to scholars for the first time. Contained within the archives was the journal of Tirzah Miller,[14] Noyes’ niece, who wrote extensively about her romantic and sexual relations with other members of Oneida.[1]
Mutual criticism
Every member of the community was subject to criticism by committee or the community as a whole, during a general meeting.[15] The goal was to eliminate undesirable character traits.[16] Various contemporary sources contend that Noyes himself was the subject of criticism, although less often and of probably less severe criticism than the rest of the community. Charles Nordhoff said he had witnessed the criticism of a member he referred to as “Charles”, writing the following account of the incident:
Charles sat speechless, looking before him; but as the accusations multiplied, his face grew paler, and drops of perspiration began to stand on his forehead. The remarks I have reported took up about half an hour; and now, each one in the circle having spoken, Mr. Noyes summed up. He said that Charles had some serious faults; that he had watched him with some care; and that he thought the young man was earnestly trying to cure himself. He spoke in general praise of his ability, his good character, and of certain temptations he had resisted in the course of his life. He thought he saw signs that Charles was making a real and earnest attempt to conquer his faults; and as one evidence of this, he remarked that Charles had lately come to him to consult him upon a difficult case in which he had had a severe struggle, but had in the end succeeded in doing right. “In the course of what we call stirpiculture”, said Noyes, “Charles, as you know, is in the situation of one who is by and by to become a father. Under these circumstances, he has fallen under the too common temptation of selfish love, and a desire to wait upon and cultivate an exclusive intimacy with the woman who was to bear a child through him. This is an insidious temptation, very apt to attack people under such circumstances; but it must nevertheless be struggled against.” Charles, he went on to say, had come to him for advice in this case, and he (Noyes) had at first refused to tell him any thing, but had asked him what he thought he ought to do; that after some conversation, Charles had determined, and he agreed with him, that he ought to isolate himself entirely from the woman, and let another man take his place at her side; and this Charles had accordingly done, with a most praiseworthy spirit of selfsacrifice. Charles had indeed still further taken up his cross, as he had noticed with pleasure, by going to sleep with the smaller children, to take charge of them during the night. Taking all this in view, he thought Charles was in a fair way to become a better man, and had manifested a sincere desire to improve, and to rid himself of all selfish faults.[17]
Male continence
To control reproduction within the Oneida community, a system of male continence or coitus reservatus was enacted.[18] John Humprey Noyes decided that sexual intercourse served two distinct purposes. In Male Continence, Noyes argues that the method simply “proposes the subordination of the flesh to the spirit, teaching men to seek principally the elevated spiritual pleasures of sexual connection”.[19] The primary purpose of male continence was social satisfaction, “to allow the sexes to communicate and express affection for one another”.[20] The second purpose was procreation. Of around two hundred adults using male continence as birth control, there were twelve unplanned births within Oneida between 1848 and 1868,[20] indicating that it was a highly effective form of birth control.[21]: 18 Young men were introduced to male continence by women who were post-menopause, and young women were introduced by experienced, older males.[21]: 18–19
Noyes believed that ejaculation “drained men’s vitality and led to disease”[22] and pregnancy and childbirth “levied a heavy tax on the vitality of women”.[22] Noyes founded male continence to spare his wife, Harriet, from more difficult childbirths after five traumatizing births of which four led to the death of the child.[21]: 17 They favored this method of male continence over other methods of birth control because they found it to be natural, healthy and favorable for the development of intimate relationships.[23] Women found increased sexual satisfaction in the practice, and Oneida is regarded as highly unusual in the value they placed on women’s sexual satisfaction.[21]: 19 If a male failed he faced public disapproval or private rejection.[23]
It is unclear whether the practice of male continence led to significant problems. Sociologist Lawrence Foster sees hints in Noyes’ letters indicating that masturbation and anti-social withdrawal from community life may have been issues.[21]: 19 Oneida’s practice of male continence did not lead to impotence.[21]: 18
Stirpiculture was a proto-eugenics program of selective controlled reproduction within the Community devised by Noyes and implemented in 1869.[24][25][26] It was designed to create more spiritually and physically perfect children.[27] Community members who wished to be parents would go before a committee to be approved and matched based on their spiritual and moral qualities. 53 women and 38 men participated in this program, which necessitated the construction of a new wing of the Oneida Community Mansion House. The experiment yielded 58 children, nine of whom were fathered by Noyes.
Once children were weaned (usually at around the age of one) they were raised communally in the Children’s Wing, or South Wing.[28] Their parents were allowed to visit, but the children’s department held jurisdiction over raising the offspring. If the department suspected a parent and child were bonding too closely, the community would enforce a period of separation because the group wanted to stop the affection between parents and children.[29][30] The Children’s department had a male and female supervisor to look after children between ages two and twelve. The supervisors made sure children followed the routine. Dressing, prayers, breakfast, work, school, lunch, work, playtime, supper, prayers, and study, which were “adjusted according to ‘age and ability’.”[13][page needed]
Stirpiculture was the first positive eugenics experiment in the United States, although it was not recognized as such because of the religious framework from which it emerged.[31]
Role of women
Oneida embodied one of the most radical and institutional efforts to change women’s role and improve female status in 19th-century America.[32] Women gained some freedoms in the commune that they could not get on the outside. Some of these privileges included not having to care for their own children as Oneida had a communal child care system, as well as freedom from unwanted pregnancies with Oneida’s male continence practice. In addition, they were able to wear functional, Bloomer-style clothing and maintain short haircuts. Women were able to participate in practically all types of community work.[32] While domestic duties remained a primarily female responsibility, women were free to explore positions in business and sales, or as artisans or craftsmen, and many did so, particularly in the late 1860s and early 1870s.[33] Last, women had an active role in shaping commune policy, participating in the daily religious and business meetings.[32]
The complex marriage and free love systems practiced at Oneida further acknowledged female status. Through the complex marriage arrangement, women and men had equal freedom in sexual expression and commitment.[32] Indeed, sexual practices at Oneida accepted female sexuality. A woman’s right to satisfying sexual experiences was recognized, and women were encouraged to have orgasms.[34] However, a woman’s right of refusing a sexual overture was limited depending on the status of the man who made the advance.[35]
Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of “The Status and Self-Perception of Women in the Oneida Community”, said that men and women had roughly equal status in the community. She points out that while both sexes were ultimately subject to Noyes’ vision and will, women did not suffer any undue oppression.[36]
The headlines are filled with the politics of Islam, but there is another side to the world’s fastest-growing religion. Sufism is the poetry and mysticism of Islam. This mystical movement from the early ninth century rejects worship motivated by the desire for heavenly reward or the fear of punishment, insisting rather on the love of God as the only valid form of adoration. Sufism has made significant contributions to Islamic civilization in music and philosophy, dance and literature. The Sufi poet Rumi is the bestselling poet in America. But in recent centuries Sufism has been a target for some extremist Islamic movements as well as many modernists. The Garden of Truth presents the beliefs and vision of the mystical heart of Islam, along with a history of Sufi saints and schools of thought.
In a world threatened by religious wars, depleting natural resources, a crumbling ecosystem, and alienation and isolation, what has happened to our humanity? Who are we and what are we doing here? The Sufi path offers a journey toward truth, to a knowledge that transcends our mundane concerns, selfish desires, and fears. In Sufism we find a wisdom that brings peace and a relationship with God that nurtures the best in us and in others.
Noted scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr helps you learn the secret wisdom tradition of Islam and enter what the ancient mystics call the “garden of truth.” Here, liberate your mind, experience peace, discover your purpose, fall in love with the Divine, and find your true, best self.
Several decades ago, two psychologists stumbled upon a phenomenon that revolutionised their field and changed the way we think about adversity. They called it ‘learned helplessness’ – when faced with a difficult situation that feels uncontrollable, people tend to act helpless and depressed.
In the wake of a pandemic that has upended life for millions, this idea feels more relevant than ever. But just as the concept of learned helplessness helps to explain many of the emotions we’ve been going through, it has also inspired work that offers positive insights into how people can remain resilient, even in the face of uncontrollable adversities. The key is having hope.
Martin Seligman and Steven Maier discovered learned helplessness in the 1960s, as graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, under the supervision of the experimental psychologist Richard Solomon. Solomon was studying how dogs learned and responded to fear. His team restrained each dog in a cage with two compartments, and gave it multiple mild but unpleasant electric shocks, each time paired with an audible tone. Later, the dogs were untied and the tone was played – having learned to associate the sound with pain, Solomon predicted the dogs would jump across to the safe compartment to avoid the pain. But when the dogs heard the noise, they remained passive, and did not do anything to try to escape the pain.
As a test of Pavlovian-style learning, the experiment was judged a failure. But Seligman and Maier reached a different conclusion: the dogs’ passivity was the crucial finding. During the earlier part of the experiment, when they had been bound and exposed to a shock, the dogs whimpered, barked and tried to get away, but it was all in vain because of the restraints. So, Seligman and Maier believed, the dogs learned that, when they tried to escape a shock, it did not work. As a result, they acted helpless the next time they encountered a similar situation, even though the circumstances had changed and they could jump free if they wanted.
Seligman and Maier tested out their theory. They arranged three groups of dogs for the initial learning phase: some were restrained as before while they endured the initial round of shocks paired with tones, but another group could press a lever to escape to the safe compartment, and a third group received no shocks at all. Next, all the dogs were free to move, and the tones were played again. The dogs who had control in the earlier part of the experiment immediately escaped from the shocks by jumping across the barrier to the safe side of their cage. The dogs in the control condition also learned to escape the shocks. But as for the dogs who had earlier been restrained and made to feel helpless, they did not try to escape. Seligman and Maier’s seminal findings about learned helplessness were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1967.
How people interpreted the experience – the story they weaved – was the critical missing ingredient
Over the next decade, Seligman and his colleagues replicated the learned helplessness findings first in rodents and, later, in human beings. Moreover, when it came to provoking feelings of helplessness in human volunteers, Seligman noticed something important – after exposing people to non-controllable events, such as unpleasant loud noises or impossible anagrams, they would often begin to exhibit some of the classic symptoms of depression, such as feelings of worthlessness, sadness, loss of interest, poor concentration and fatigue. Ultimately, he concluded that learned helplessness is a subtype of depression.
But there was a crucial caveat – whenever the researchers ran these studies, there was always a proportion of the subjects who were exposed to uncontrollable, aversive events, but did not give up trying to exert control. Even though they learned that nothing they did mattered to stopping an aversive event, they kept trying to make their situation better. Also, some of the subjects who did give up, becoming helpless for a time, bounced back immediately and began to act with agency in later parts of the experiments. The question was – why? Why did uncontrollable adversities render some people helpless while others remained resilient?
Two researchers became increasingly preoccupied with that question – one was Seligman’s graduate student Lyn Abramson, the other was the Oxford psychiatrist John Teasdale. Teasdale and Abramson pointed out that being made to feel helpless is not enough to produce depression. What also matters is how people make sense of their helplessness – the attributions they make. Do they blame themselves or do they blame the experimenter? Do they generalise their helplessness to life in general, or just to the specific situation in the lab? How people interpreted the experience – the story they weaved – was the critical missing ingredient of the theory.
Seligman teamed up with Abramson and Teasdale and together they found there are three ways people can interpret what happens to them: they can form attributions that are either permanent (eg, I will always be helpless and nothing I do will ever matter) vs temporary (eg, I was helpless in that specific circumstance, but what I do at other times still matters); specific (eg, related only to anagrams) vs universal (eg, all problems); and internal (eg, it’s my fault) vs external (eg, it’s the fault of the world or someone else).
As Seligman would later put it, different people have different ‘explanatory styles’. Some people have a ‘pessimistic explanatory style’, and make negative attributions about aversive events (ie, internal, universal, permanent), and they are more vulnerable to depression. Other people have ‘optimistic explanatory styles’ – when bad things happen, they don’t blame themselves but the world, and they see the adversity as temporary, local and specific. Their story about the world and their place in it is much more hopeful, and they are more resilient.
In later work, Abramson and her colleagues reformulated the learned helplessness theory of depression as the ‘hopelessness theory of depression’. Hopelessness depression emerges when people experience a negative life event, such as losing a job, and draw pessimistic conclusions about the causes and consequences of the event, and what the event says about who they are as a person. They might believe they are helpless to change their circumstances and will never find employment, for instance, and that they’re worthless as a result – thoughts that depress and demoralise them.
Over the years, research has confirmed the connection between hopelessness and mental illness. Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive behavioural therapy, found that a sense of hopelessness is a key driver of suicide. Conversely, having a sense of hope contributes to better overall mental and physical health. For example, people high in hope are able to tolerate pain for longer periods; they report higher levels of wellbeing after someone they love dies; when confronted with a stressful situation, they are able to think more creatively and flexibly about how to overcome it; and, as they move through a difficult period of their life, they’re more likely to identify silver linings. People high in hope also perform better academically, are less prone to loneliness, and – above all – are less likely to succumb to helplessness and despair when adversity strikes.
Hopeful people are not like Pollyanna – they feel in control of their lives and exhibit a sense of agency
All of this points to a powerful insight – that instilling or restoring a sense of hope in people might help them build resilience and alleviate their emotional suffering. The next question is how? How can people build a sense of hope, especially during hard times?
The work of Seligman and Abramson suggests that changing the stories we tell ourselves about adversity can help instil hope. Rather than blaming yourself for losing a job or feeling sluggish, you can blame the COVID-19 pandemic; rather than focusing on the areas where life feels out of control, such as new strains of the virus, and concluding that life is unpredictable and chaotic, you can focus on those things that you can control, such as your routines, habits and the way you treat other people. You can remind yourself that this adversity, like all adversities, is temporary and will end at some point.
Another way to build hope requires rethinking its ordinary meaning. You might consider hope a form of wishful thinking, a positive and perhaps naive expectation that everything will turn out OK in the end. But according to ‘hope theory’, developed by the late American psychologist Charles Snyder, hope is not blind optimism. It’s about having goals for one’s future, agency or ‘goal-directed energy’ (believing the goals are attainable) and specific ‘pathways’ or plans for how to reach those goals. In other words, hopeful people are not like Pollyanna, rather they feel in control of their lives and exhibit a sense of agency in their pursuits – the opposite of feeling helpless.
Drawing on Snyder’s work, psychologists have developed interventions to instil hope. For example, therapists who practise ‘hope therapy’ help their clients conceptualise clear goals for their future, map out routes to pursue those goals, and reframe obstacles as challenges to be overcome. Rather than focusing on the client’s past failures, the therapist focuses on their successes, which can serve as models for future goal pursuits. In one study testing an eight-session group-therapy hope intervention, participants who were taught hope-building skills subsequently reported a greater sense of meaning, agentic thinking and self-esteem, and lower levels of anxiety and depression, as compared with a waitlist control group. They also reported lower levels of anxiety and depression post-treatment.
Even in the bleakest of times, hope – of the kind articulated by Snyder – can make a positive difference. Consider the work of the physician and ethicist Chris Feudtner at the Justin Michael Ingerman Center for Palliative Care at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Working with parents whose children have life-threatening illnesses, Feudtner has found that, while they all of course wish desperately that their children could be cured, it is those parents high in hope who tend to adjust better to the reality of the situation. In one of his studies, it was actually the more hopeful parents who were more likely to decide to limit medical interventions as their child’s condition worsened, suggesting that having hope allowed them to relinquish a goal that was no longer attainable, and to adopt another focused on alleviating suffering.
Moreover, Feudtner found that a simple question could help kindle hope in parents. After presenting them with the horrible news that their child’s condition was worsening, incurable or terminal, he asked them: ‘Given what you are now up against, what are you hoping for?’ Parents tended to respond unrealistically at first, such as wishing for a miracle cure or to awaken from a bad dream. But then, when Feudtner gently asked them ‘what else’ they might be hoping for, their responses became more grounded and attainable. ‘The subsequent answers,’ he writes in ‘The Breadth of Hopes’ (2009), ‘tend to be qualitatively different from the initial hopes: they are more oriented to pain or suffering and the hope of relief, to the longing for home and the hope of homecoming, or to surviving not in a physical but in a spiritual sense and the hope of finding meaning and connection.’ It’s a most powerful example of how identifying goals that are attainable, and seeing pathways to them, can restore a healing sense of control, in this case bringing a measure of comfort to parents facing the most terrible adversity.
From that initial research on helplessness in the 1960s have sprung decades of findings with a more uplifting message. Circumstances, no matter how bad, do not have to defeat us. You have the capacity to adopt more hopeful patterns of thinking in the face of adversity, and to adjust and pursue your goals, even amid hardship. If you can maintain hope in these ways, it will help you find the courage, strength and resilience to ride out the inevitable storms that life brings.
Forget Broadway’s Reopening—The Nation’s Artistic Heartbeat Is at Its Center
Production of Oklahoma! at Discoveryland, near Tulsa, Oklahoma. Dave Thomas/Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0
by JAKE JOHNSON | SEPTEMBER 13, 2021 (zocalopublicsquare.org)
If there’s a more rambunctious and promiscuous genre than musical theater, I haven’t met it yet.
Musicals are an everywhere phenomenon. They touch an enormously broad swath of American lives, unapologetically building worlds that don’t yet exist. I see this commitment to the not-yet as an aspiration for the rest of us stuck living in the here-and-now.
I recently wrote a book about musicals, and visited communities in the heartland that were using musical theater to help understand their place in this country. I watched an original musical about Samson and Delilah in Branson, Missouri; took note of the prestigious musical theater training centers in Cincinnati, Ohio and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and discovered traces of musical theater cultures in remote corners of Oklahoma, Arizona, and beyond. I chose to focus on the middle of the country because that’s where so many of America’s favorite stories about itself take place, the characters here extreme in either their moral winnings or their moral failures. It’s no surprise that this is where so many of America’s iconic musicals like Oklahoma!,The Wizard of Oz, or The Music Man spin their clever fantasies, the Professor Harold Hills hopping off trains and stealing their way into our hearts again and again. But ya gotta know the territory.
In musicals as in real life, the middle is a powerful idea in this country. Caught between reality and fiction, truth and fantasy, and the amateur and professional, musical theater in the middle of America captures the heart of what this place can be on its best-dressed days. Musicals break through class and political strata in America better than any other style of entertainment; and because these productions often involve whole communities, audiences and performers in the heartland reflect a more dynamic mix of race, class, gender, and religion than any Times Square theater has been able to manage. It may be that musical theater in the middle of America, with school performances of The Little Mermaid and church sermons expounding the traditional family values of Fiddler on the Roof, captures wide-eyed American possibility better than Broadway ever could.Caught between reality and fiction, truth and fantasy, and the amateur and professional, musical theater in the middle of America captures the heart of what this place can be on its best-dressed days.
I grew up in rural Oklahoma, and always knew first-hand that musical theater mattered here. Middle school and high school productions were frequent even in my small town, and the several churches in the area put on musicals regularly, to say nothing of the ease with which Broadway tunes like Carousel’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and Godspell’s “Day by Day” made their way into weddings, funerals, parades, and revival meetings. It wasn’t until I scanned wider that I discovered how it mattered in these overlooked, under-examined spaces. Musicals spread across the geography of this place in ways that illuminate how we believe and imagine. In place after place, musicals matter because they help us practice belonging to America and continue believing in it.
Take the fundamentalist Mormon community in rural Arizona who adapted The Sound of Music into a polygamous propaganda piece where songs and dances swapped from other musicals made sure the governess Maria fell not for a grieving captain with seven children but rather for a multi-wived captain happily seeking yet another. The production was shocking and also touching. Its creators crafted an idea of America in their own image by crafting a musical where they belonged. Their example shows how musicals help communities of all kinds rehearse living in better versions of America. How can you belong in America, they ask, if you don’t first find yourself in an American musical?
It’s no surprise, really, that you find musical theater mattering in profound ways within religious settings, in those American communities where faith matters most. A performance of the musical Samson in Branson, Missouri, used the magic of the stage to make Samson and Delilah’s distant (if not mythical) past align with values of today’s evangelical Christianity—the musical providing the enchanted spackling to cover gaps and cracks in a modern religious façade troubled by secular reasoning. Through strange rituals and performative customs, musicals, like many religions, look beyond this world with bleary-eyed anticipation. All things will work out in the end, they celebrate. And in the end, we can live in a world that has been fully remade, with villains banished and problems resolved.
In her 1966 book, Purity and Danger, the anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that communities decide what makes dirt dirty, that describing something as “dirty” has little to do with impurity; rather, dirt is, as she put it, “matter out of place.” I’ve come to think of musicals in similar ways. Musicals lie about the world—they smooth over our reality with their alternate one, where people burst into song and dance and strangers know one another’s choreography. They rush to simplified and tidy endings, and unlikely reconciliations. I saw this in a homemade production by the Oklahoma Senior Follies in which senior citizens portrayed youthful scenes of lust, danced suggestively, and good-humoredly essentialized the older years as the best time of their lives. Americans often conflate increased aging with decreased value. But through the musical stage, aging performers created a not-yet world where this was not the case. Our here-and-now world doesn’t work that way.
Musicals are clever lies—and we need more of their deceptions. Lies have a bad reputation. With truth a fluid concept these days, it sometimes feels as if we are stuck pitting one set of truths against another and battling it out indefinitely. Lies offer a way out. They open space for stories about worlds that don’t yet exist. They give us a chance to invent the kind of idylls we want to live in, places more committed to justice, community, and healing. Don’t get me wrong, truth does matter. But there are times when telling a lie is more righteous than being honest: when doctors recommend a harmless placebo for an anxious patient, for instance, or when one flatters a friend with exaggerated feedback they want to hear. Lies are exercises in imagination, hotbeds of creativity, projections of promise. Lies, like musicals, to borrow Douglas’s phrase, are stories out of place.
This lesson gets lost if we crease musical theater’s map to only one city—New York—and chart performances only as some escapade of selling silliness. The pandemic has given America an opportunity to rethink where, how, and why musicals happen. Broadway may be returning with ticker tape but my experiences in the middle of America suggest that musical theater ought to be re-placed—reimagined as powerful, multi-sited performances of an America that might be.
I am happy for the return to normalcy Broadway’s reopening signals. I am glad for my friends and former students whose livelihoods depend on the theater industry. And I’m glad for the laughs, tears, and thrills audiences can once again come to expect night after night. But I also keep it in perspective. Musical theater is bigger than Times Square. Its hopes and dreams and fantasies and deceptions spill the banks of New York, flowing through the hills and cities of America’s middle lands and into the hearts and minds of people most would never think to associate with musical theater. Musicals are as big and wide as America, and America can only be as big and wide as our musicals help us to imagine.
When Zen Flesh, Zen Bones was published in 1957 it became an instant sensation with an entire generation of readers who were just beginning to experiment with Zen. Over the years it has inspired leading American Zen teachers, students, and practitioners. Its popularity is as high today as ever.
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones is a book that offers a collection of accessible, primary Zen sources so that readers can struggle over the meaning of Zen for themselves. It includes 101 Zen Stories, a collection of tales that recount actual experiences of Chinese and Japanese Zen teachers over a period of more than five centuries; The Gateless Gate, the famous thirteenth-century collection of Zen koans; Ten Bulls, a twelfth century commentary on the stages of awareness leading to enlightenment; and Centering, a 4,000 year-old teaching from India that some consider to be the roots of Zen.
(Goodreads.com)
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