After reading the *PHENOMENAL* Variable Star by Robert A. Heinlein & Spider Robinson, two of the great immortals of science fiction, I started doing a bit of a Heinlein review. I admit I find some of his older works harder to wander through, not at all like his flowing and polished later works, but there were so many references and allusions in Variable Star that I wanted to check back into Heinlein before I re-read Variable Star to see what else I can catch that I missed the first time. Re-read? Yes, just think of it as multiple orgasms. I kid you not, nor do I exaggerate.
I tried a set of short stories and lost my interest a bit. I had just finished JOB: A Comedy of Justice, a later and more polished tale, and in that odd way that my life resembles the fiction I am currently reading, I met a man who calls himself a “new Christian,” having had a spiritual awakening and, in my opinion, having no other framework in which to interpret it. That, plus the fact that he had just been to see a pastor and was told to pray when his heartfelt prayer led him to a genuine spiritual experience.
Naturally, he assumed his mystical experience was Christian in nature. I do not.
Not in the sense of fundamentalist literal Bible interpretation one-way-ism. Not at all.
In the sense of Jesus as Christ, which in Greek, cristos means “light,”making Jesus one . . . of many . . . enlightened Ones who all came to a state of awareness that is as natural to any one of us as breathing, yes. It was Christic, a term often used to indicate “of Christ” as differentiated from “of the Christian church.”
Got all that?
Then yesterday I attended a tea given by the lovely Lena Phoenix, author of The Heart of a Cult.” After a quiet beginning where the author discussed, in anonymous terms, some of her experience with cults, the group got into some lively discussion.
We talked about how cults try to be the authority in our lives, denying us our inner knowing. There are checklists on the web that help one identify the characteristics of a cult. Not surprisingly, many of them apply to fundamentalist Christian churches.
For example, see: http://www.rickross.com/warningsigns.html
I admitted that I was there, both to support the author and the book, and to see what I might learn to help my own questions of where and how to teach, as well as where and how to find a community of people to live with and work with. We did not get any farther with that than to acknowledge that a lot of us were feeling that lack of community.
And of course, here I am reading about water brothers grokking in fullness one of the truest statements ever penned, “Thou Art God.”
It makes me wistful for that. At the same time, I have to admit that I have found it, over and over, it just happens that my last spiritual community kind of disbanded a couple of years ago, as they often do, and has not yet been replaced by anything else. Two years has been “a long cold lonely winter. Little darlin’.”
Of course, I spoke to Steven Sashen one day on the phone about feeling “lonely,” and his reply was “What is your proof?” In about 3 sentences I couldn’t find a lonely bone in my body! Funny stuff, truth.
Further, I had just re-read the best discussion of jealousy I’ve ever, ever seen, preserved for posterity on the net by Eric Francis at
http://www.planetwaves.net/jealousy.
Read that.
Then re-read it.
And when you’re done, read it again.
No, I’m not kidding. It’s that good, that deep, that important and that true.
So, here I am brain the size of a planet… sigh. No, I won’t quite go as far as Marvin on this, but I wonder whether all this grokking is getting me anywhere. I’m still struggling for rent and spend my days alone in a room looking for a place to be my best self that serves others … and me!
I definitely do not want to be cult-ish or church-ish, exactly, but in a sense what I really, really want is something very much like the Nest of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. I read that somewhere around 1973 when I was 13 years old. I knew it for my own. I knew I was reading something that touched a core of belonging in me. 33 years ago.
Where is that?
Since I am still asking that question, and all answers come from within, I’ll conclude with a prayer from A Course in Miracles, in the form of the final 5 lessons:
Final Lessons 361-365
“This holy instant would I give to You.
Be You in charge. For I would follow You,
Certain that Your direction gives me peace.
And if I need a word to help me, He will give it to me. If I need a thought, that will He also give. And if I need but stillness and a tranquil, open mind, these are the gifts I will receive of Him. He is in charge by my request. And He will hear and answer me, because He speaks for God my Father and His holy Son.”
Amen, Ann
Ann's Tale 