“He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw.”

BY MARIA POPOVA (brainpickings.org)

“The art of seeing has to be learned,” Marguerite Duras wrote in 1984. Many legendary artists can trace their creative path to a single moment of revelation in which they were suddenly able to see the invisible dimensions of the world — for what is art, after all, if not “a dynamic contemplation” and what is the task of the artist if not to see beyond the seeming realities of the world?

For Patti Smith, that revelation was a glimpse of a swan when she was a little girl; for Virginia Woolf, a gardening epiphany; for Pablo Neruda, a hand through the fence of his childhood home; for Albert Einstein, his first encounter with a compass.

Among the creative geniuses whose paths were illuminated by such a moment of revelation was James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987).

In The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the 20th Century’s Preeminent Writers (public library) — the same magnificent 1989 Paris Review compendium that gave us Baldwin’s advice on writing — he recounts the revelation that taught him to see:

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, “Look.” I looked and all I saw was the water. And he said, “Look again,” which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.

Complement this particular fragment of the wholly fantastic Writer’s Chapbook with Annie Dillard on the two ways of looking and the art of seeing, then revisit Baldwin’s tremendous and timely conversation with Margaret Mead about race, identity, and power and forgiveness and the crucial difference between guilt and responsibility.

By Craig Hamilton (integralenlightenment.com)

Have you noticed that the number of movies and TV shows featuring beings with supernatural powers seems to be on the rise?

Why are we humans so fascinated with superheroes?

Is it because we can’t bear the overwhelming complexities of our world and find comfort in the fantasy that a group of super-ordinary beings could save us?

Or are we sensing into a fundamental truth about the human condition—that we contain within us an untapped well of powers or “supercapacities” beyond the comprehension of our “small self”?

In my work with tens of thousands of spiritual seekers over the past decade, I’ve gradually come to a somewhat controversial conclusion. I believe that all of us have access to a set of extraordinary but usually hidden “supercapacities.”

These remarkable higher capacities are not abilities we need to gradually cultivate or develop. 

They are the innate “powers” of the Awakened self. 

They arise naturally and spontaneously when our consciousness is freed from the contractions, knots and unconscious habits of our ordinary, unawakened mind.

I realize this may seem hard to believe at face value. 

In a world where personal growth and development has become a billion-dollar industry, it might seem almost heretical to proclaim that simply awakening to our own “enlightened essence” could be the key to unlocking many of the capacities we’re all striving so hard to cultivate.

Clearly, this is a radical proposition with far-reaching implications for any of us who aspire to break out of the limitations of the false self and live truly extraordinary, awakened lives.

So I think it’s important to understand that this is not a new idea.

If you survey the literature of all of the world’s great wisdom traditions, you’ll find that one thing they all seem to agree on is that when any human being takes the leap into his or her own enlightened or divine nature, that person is transformed into a kind of super-being. 

Indeed, religious traditions almost universally tended to characterize the awakened master, the realized one, as what we would describe today as a superhero. 

According to ancient religious lore, the awakened ones could read minds, fly through the air, appear in two places at once, heal at a distance, move objects with their minds, and walk through walls. 

To put this in modern-day superhero terms: enlightened masters were something like all the X-Men combined. 

However, unlike many of the superheroes in today’s movies, the enlightened ones also had a highly evolved moral center and, fortunately, boundless spiritual wisdom and compassion. They showed a limitless capacity for love and remarkable tenderness and sensitivity.

Now, I want to make it clear that I’m not asserting that spiritual awakening will make you a superhero—either in the Hollywood sense or even the traditional sense.

And I don’t know whether the people who wrote those ancient texts actually believed in the paranormal superpowers they wrote about, or whether they were being metaphorical in an attempt to convey the extraordinary transformative power of spiritual awakening.

But leaving those kinds of truly supernatural powers aside, what all the wisdom traditions strongly and consistently point to is the profound transformation that occurs when a person awakens to and embraces their true nature. 

When we discover this already awakened essence of who we are, we feel like we’re unleashed from a prison—unlocked, let out. We discover a life of boundless inner freedom and of unassailable joy. 

We find ourselves becoming a conduit for an overflowing fullness and a love that seems to have no end.

When we discover this “super-conscious self,” we also find that we have access to a remarkable type of intuitive knowing that enables us to instantly—faster than the speed of thought—discern powerful truths, see into the heart of a situation, and spontaneously take effective actions, seemingly without any premeditation, and sometimes without even our own awareness. 

It is often only after the fact that we realize what we knew and what we did, leaving us wondering: “Where did that clarity and courage come from?”

When we awaken to who and what we really are, we find that we’re filled with a dynamic source of energy that is seemingly limitless—energy to do whatever needs to be done in each moment. This energy is no longer coming from our body, but from somewhere mysterious that we can’t see.

We also find we can tap into a well of creativity that feels limitless. It’s as though the creative power of the cosmos is coursing through us. Whenever we need it, it is available. 

We discover we also have access to a wellspring of inner strength that gives us steadiness and confidence in the face of life’s challenges. No matter what life throws our way, we’re not daunted. 

We have a fundamental trust that we’ll find our way, that the resources needed to meet the demand will appear. From where, we don’t know, but we trust that they will, and we find that they do. 

I’m not talking about trusting that an all powerful God or “universe” is going to take care of us, or that mystical things will happen in our life to make everything work. 

Instead, there’s a kind of trust in an inner resource that is seemingly limitless and readily available to us. That’s where the confidence comes from. It’s also where our ability to act so freely and spontaneously and with so much strength and clarity of purpose comes from. 

We also find an unprecedented ability to be present in a way that most of us have never experienced. 

One of the shocking things about meeting somebody who is highly spiritually awakened is that they are so incredibly present. They are here. 

In fact, they have so much weight and consciousness in their field, that we feel deeply held by a great and mysterious power when we’re in their presence.

With this awakening, we also find that we have become unimaginably sensitive. We’re like a finely tuned receptive instrument that can sense into the deeper needs and feelings of those around us, of groups, of situations. 

But most importantly, we become receptive to what we might call the evolutionary need or trajectory of the moment. We can feel it with our being. And this enables us spontaneously discern “the way” of positive, effective action with a precision that transcends mere cognition.

Now, I want to be clear. I’m not asserting that every single skill or capacity that we need to get through life is somehow contained in our spiritual super nature. 

I’m not saying that your super nature will make you good at math or spelling, or turn you into a perfect communicator, or any of the dozens of other things that we all need to develop in order to be functional adults. 

What I will say is this: the most remarkable capacities available to human beings are not abilities we need to cultivate piecemeal.

The game-changing revelation of authentic spiritual awakening is that there is a deeper “essential supernature” that already exists within each of us fully formed.

This “essential supernature” already contains the extraordinary capacities that most of us are striving to develop.

So, rather than spending decades trying to develop each of these abilities one at a time, if we wholeheartedly give ourselves to the process of awakening, we can tap directly into this source of truly infinite potentials and give birth to a completely different order of human life.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pronoia is a neologism coined to describe a state of mind that is the opposite of paranoia. Whereas a person suffering from paranoia feels that persons or entities are conspiring against them, a person experiencing pronoia feels that the world around them conspires to do them good. In 1993 the writer and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow defined pronoia as “the suspicion the Universe is a conspiracy on your behalf”.^[1]

The word may have first appeared in 1982, when the academic journal Social Problems published an article entitled “Pronoia” by Dr. Fred H. Goldner of Queens College in New York City, in which Goldner described a phenomenon opposite to paranoia and provided numerous examples of specific persons who displayed such characteristics.^[2][3]

Pronoia is the positive counterpart of paranoia. It is the delusion that others think well of one. Actions and the products of one’s efforts are thought to be well received and praised by others. Mere acquaintances are thought to be close friends; politeness and the exchange of pleasantries are taken as expressions of deep attachment and the promise of future support. Pronoia appears rooted in the social complexity and cultural ambiguity of our lives: we have become increasingly dependent on the opinions of others based on uncertain criteria.

Goldner’s paper received a good deal of publicity at the time, including references in Psychology Today, the New York Daily News, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

Usage

Long before the term was coined, author J.D. Salinger referred to the concept later to be called pronoia in his 1955 novella, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters. In it, the character Seymour Glass writes in his diary, “Oh, God, if I’m anything by a clinical name, I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”^[4]

The writer Philip K Dick referred to pronoia as an antidote to paranoia in his private work, Exegesis, in which it is mentioned in relation to his perceived protection by an entity he called, V.A.L.I.S., an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Published posthumously in 2011, the word “pronoia” first appeared in his Exegesis in January 1980.^[5] Dick suggested his own pronoia was based on an “intelligent analysis” of his mystical experiences, and was not “reflexive or mechanical” in its nature.^[6]

Pronoia is also a prevalent theme in the 1988 novel The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. In it, the protagonist, a young boy, is told by an older man to pursue his dreams. He tells the boy, “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”^[7] The book also deals with omens, signs that the universe wants the boy to follow a specific path, which will lead to his goal of fulfilling a dream.

In May 1994, Wired magazine published an article titled “Zippie!” The cover of the magazine featured a psychedelic image of a smiling young man with wild hair, a funny hat, and crazy eyeglasses. Written by Jules Marshall, the article announced an organized cultural response to Thatcherism in the United Kingdom. The opening paragraphs describe “a new and contagious cultural virus” and refer to pronoia as “the sneaking feeling one has that others are conspiring behind your back to help you”. The article announces a cultural and musical invasion of the United States to rival the British Invasion of 1964-1966, culminating with a “Woodstock Revival” to be staged at the Grand Canyon in August 1994. The spokesperson for the Zippies, Fraser Clark, dubs this movement the “Zippy Pronoia Tour”.^[8] An article in The New York Times published in August 1994 also described the Zippies and their efforts. It contained two references to pronoia.^[9]

In the 1997 film Fierce Creatures, Jamie Lee Curtis‘s character describes Kevin Kline‘s character as excessively pronoid: “It means that despite all the available evidence, you actually think that people like you. Your perception of life is that it is one long benefit dinner in your honor, with everyone cheering you on and wanting you to win everything. You think you’re the prince, Vince.”

The horoscope columnist Rob Brezsny proposed a philosophy based on pronoia in his 2005 book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.^[10]

Actress Susan Sarandon, describing her experience in working on the 2012 film Cloud Atlas, described pronoia as the opposite of the noted line from Joseph Heller‘s Catch-22: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you”; Sarandon said “You just assume that the universe is conspiring for you, not against you. … I think that the more you expect that, the more it actually works out.”^[11]

On July 13, 2018, in response to Donald Trump‘s claim that the British “love him”, actor John Cleese explained in a series of tweets:

My American friends are asking me about President Trump’s observation that the British ‘like him’. I regret this is quite unfounded. The explanation for this canard is that Trump is pronoid. Pronoid is the opposite of paranoid. A paranoid person thinks, without any basis in reality, that everybody is out to get them. A pronoid person is someone who thinks, without any basis in reality, that everybody likes them.^{[This quote needs a citation]}[1]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoia_(psychology)

(Contributed by Shahid Buttar.)

July 3, 2020 (TheProsperos.com)

Link to audio: https://www.theprosperos.com/podcast/2020/5/21/independence-from-what

Ecclesiastes 5:4: If you make a vow to the Self, you must do all within
your power to keep it. For it is in the Soul/Self that
one finds God.

–from “Ecclesiastes: the unauthorized version” by Mark Crawford

“Your shadow is your potential.”

–James P. Dowling (Depth Psychologist, Molecular Biologist, Founder/Director of Jung To Live By, Vice President at Logos Productions, Right-Hand Man at Universal Man)

You are invited to discuss the coronavirus and how with TRANSLATION we can open up to GIFTS!
Computer link: https://zoom.us/j/848372474

History With No Chaser Let’s start respecting who uncle Tom was, what he was about, and what he did. Change the meaning of uncle Tom… Email me at Historywithnochaser@gmail.com Fb messenger at Nico Boom Boom Jefferson

Kevin Polowy Senior Correspondent, Yahoo Entertainment Yahoo Movies July 7, 2020 (Yahoo.com)

Michael Arthur admits there are no official metrics to back up his claim that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is “the world’s fasting growing religion.”

His evidence is as much anecdotal as it is statistical, with the filmmaker pointing to the explosion of social media groups devoted to the movement.

“It’s everywhere,” Arthur, the director of the new documentary I, Pastafari: A Flying Spaghetti Monster Story, tells Yahoo Entertainment. “It’s kind of a play on words, but not really. Because 15 years ago there were [no members]. And now there are millions. You can go on Facebook and look at Flying Spaghetti Monster pages [all over the world] and they have 100,000 members. Poland… Italy, Spain, every country has these groups.” (Wikipedia estimates the movement more in the thousands than millions, and a Pew study from 2017 indicates that Islam is the world’s fastest growing religion.)

Of course, that’s if the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Pastafarianism, can even be considered a religion — and exploring the question of what constitutes a religion in the first place? “And who decides that?” Arthur asks. “Because if the state decided that, then that’s a violation of the separation of church and state. A state can’t say your religion is [valid].”

Those themes are at the heart of I, Pastafari, a fascinating and more earnest examination at a subject rooted in satire than you might expect. While other filmmakers may have been tempted to approach Pastafarianism through a quirkier lens, Arthur offers a more serious look.

General beliefs or tenets of the religion — or cultural movement, depending on how you look at it — include that a literal Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe (“His Noodly Appendage” is often referenced by followers with straight faces, speaking of quirk restraint) and that heaven includes a beer volcano and stripper factory.

“Really what it comes down to is science, empathy and not taking your beliefs too seriously, not taking your religion too seriously,” the filmmaker says. “So really it’s science, empathy and humor, having a good sense of humor. That’s really the trait that I see in all Pastafarians.”

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster also includes a heavy climate change activism element, with pirates (as in Pirates of the Caribbean) being considered “absolute divine beings” and a widely circulated graph meant to prove the global average temperature has risen as the number of pirates in the world has decreased.

“Really, it’s just a bunch of groups of like-minded people that are kind of exhausted of seeing science and religion being presented as two different belief systems,” says Arthur, an Oregon native who was inspired to make the documentary after moving to Amsterdam and discovering there was a religious rights legal battle between a Flying Spaghetti Monster member and the Dutch government that stemmed from the plaintiff’s desire to wear customary headwear — a pasta colander, natch — in his passport photo. “That’s kind of the whole premise of the movement is that science isn’t religion and religion isn’t science. And when you combine the two, they both suffer. That’s kind of how it started.”

In the Netherlands, Pastafarianism was ruled a life choice, not a religion — and the movement is often viewed by other international bodies as farcical, not genuinely spiritual.

The entire Pastafarianism movement was in fact born out of satire. In response to debates being held in Kansas over the teaching of intelligent design in biology classes, then-24-year-old Oregon State student Bobby Henderson composed a letter to the Kansas State Board of Education. It claimed that if creationism was being taught side-by-side with evolution in schools, so should his beliefs in Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, which Henderson argued was just as legitimate and provable as intelligent design. (Arthur was unable to convince Henderson to appear in the film, which he says was his greatest failure.)

Henderson later made the letter public, and it became a viral internet phenomenon — and as I, Pastafari proves — much, much more.

While the movement has a strong foothold in the U.S., the documentary focuses primarily on European members in Holland, Germany and Austria whose defenses of Pastafarianism often feel more like critiques of Christianity and other organized religions than devoutness in their own.

If so many millions of people believe that Jesus Christ walked on water or Moses crossed a parted Red Sea, Pastafarians will tell you — and those convictions are part of a faith and belief system afforded specific rights and benefits by the state — why shouldn’t their own beliefs, no matter how outlandish, be recognized?

“The question isn’t whether it’s wacky or not, or whether it’s real or not, the question is whether these people actually believe this,” admits Arthur. “So I thought if I could get people to be curious in that, like whether these people really believe that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe, I thought if I could hook him with that, I could slowly pivot towards the purpose of all this. And the purpose of it is really that all religions are made up. They all have their Genesis story. They all have similar characteristics. So I feel like it’s impossible to distinguish what a real religion is versus a fake religion or a satirical religion. Satire really is just a matter of perspective, you know?”

I, Pastafari is available on-demand starting Tuesday, July 7.

Watch the trailer:

(Contributed by Janet Cornwell, H.W., m.)

By Emily Crockett  Updated Jan 16, 2017 (Vox.com)

Without Mahalia Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech might never have happened.

Jackson, known as the Queen of Gospel, was a musical legend who helped bring gospel from church to mass audiences. She mentored Aretha Franklin and Della Reese, and in 1961 was the first gospel singer to win a Grammy. She was also instrumental to the civil rights movement, especially as a good friend of King’s.

Shortly after meeting King at the National Baptist Convention in 1956, Jackson agreed to sing at a fundraising rally for the Montgomery bus boycott. After that, she frequently accompanied King to perform at rallies and events. Her voice became “the soundtrack of the civil rights movement,” as NPR’s Sonari Glinton put it.

Jackson was devoted to King, and accompanied him into the most hostile parts of the segregated South for rallies and demonstrations. Even in moments when King felt discouraged, he would call Jackson on the phone just to hear her sing.

This bond of mutual inspiration and respect between King and Jackson came at a pivotal moment during the 1963 March on Washington.“TELL THEM ABOUT THE DREAM, MARTIN! TELL THEM ABOUT THE DREAM!”

King had struggled with his speech, which was supposed to be kept to five minutes. His advisers argued over which themes he should include. King himself was torn between two metaphors he liked, figuring he only had time for one.

There was the image of a “bad check,” representing America’s failure to deliver on her promises of freedom to her black citizens. And then there was the idea of King’s “dream” for a nation undivided by racial tensions, which he had used in speeches throughout the previous year in cities like Detroit and Birmingham, Alabama. Check out the Detroit version of the speech here — it has a lot in common with the much more famous March on Washington version, but the rhetoric is a bit less soaring and the grievances a bit more specific.

King originally thought the speech should be lower-key, since he was speaking to a broad audience about controversial themes. So the “bad check” image won out — at least in the original printed version of the speech, which doesn’t even mention the word “dream.” (Can you imagine generations of schoolchildren being taught about MLK’s “Insufficient Funds” speech?)

But during delivery, King started improvising a bit when he reached a sentence that felt clunky. Instead of calling on the crowd to “go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction,” he went with: “Go back to Mississippi; go back to Alabama; go back to South Carolina; go back to Georgia; go back to Louisiana; go back to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.”

It was at that moment, says King’s adviser Clarence Jones, that Mahalia Jackson cried out: “Tell them about the dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!”

It was, Jones said, “one of the world’s greatest gospel singers shouting out to one of the world’s greatest Baptist preachers.” Jones, who was standing about 50 feet away from King during the speech, recalled that King looked over at Jackson briefly after she shouted. “Then he takes the text of the written speech that’s been prepared, and he slides it to the left side of the lectern, grabs the lectern, looks out on more than 250,000 people there assembled.” Jones remembers turning to the person next to him and saying, “These people out there, they don’t know it, but they’re about ready to go to church.”

Then King started speaking completely off the cuff. That ad-lib became “I Have a Dream.”

Jones isn’t sure, but he thinks Jackson must have heard one of King’s earlier versions of the “dream” speech, and that she knew the moment called for it. Jones said when Jackson called out to King it was like a “mandate to respond,” and King’s body language transformed from lecturer to preacher. “I have never seen him speak the way I saw him on that day,” Jones said. “It was as if some cosmic transcendental force came down and occupied his body. It was the same body, the same voice, but the voice had something I had never heard before.”

It’s no wonder Jackson was King’s favorite gospel singer, and that he would be so inspired by her at just the right time. Here’s Jackson singing “I Been ‘Buked and I Been Scorned” at the March on Washington right before King spoke. She would have had her place in civil rights history with this performance even without what came next.

For more on other amazing women entertainers and activists who shaped the March on Washington and the civil rights movement, check out this great slideshow from the Root.