whispers of ancient light in the dark myths….

Stories of heroes and heroines, god and goddesses, dragons and witches, and other mythic creatures and themes are really our own stories. Reading them or watching them come alive in a play or a movie, broadens our perspective and links us to a universal story that gives meaning to our suffering, our worries, our mistakes, and our victories. They tell us that we too must enter a dark forest or cross a barren desert or sit alone in confusion and pain if we want to be the hero of our own life. The most useful myths describe a person whose life has lost its inner fire and who can no longer bear to live a half-life. That person must then endure a descent into the underworld- a time of often painful and destructive change. Through the descent process the person gains an inner awakening, a transformation of body and mind, and then reemerges with his or her whole self in tow. The use of myth does not mean looking only to the old stories for direction. It also is about turning our daily experiences into living myths. ‘We dull our lives by the way we conceive them,’ James Hillman says. ‘We have stopped imagining them with any sort of romance, any fictional flair.’ If we tell the whole story of what came before, during, and after, on the inside and the outside, we’ll create personal myths that can help us make difficult decisions and move gracefully through transition…..Elizabeth Lesser

the imagery of this dark night of the soul reaches up from the gut to claim a visceral understanding of the Tao, a natural rhythm of the universe….to balance our individuation with a collective unconscious….we are called from our ancestral roots to live life fully, to reach for our potential like the forbidden wine….

An important dimension of the vast spectrum of consciousness into which we may evolve is revealed through mystical experiences. These expanded states of awareness appear to constitute the highest common denominator of human experience. This is a profoundly hopeful discovery in that, before the people of the world can cope with the problems of our global village, there must be some degree of shared agreement as to the nature of ‘reality’ within which we collectively exist. Mystical experiences may provide an important element of that common agreement at a level that transcends cultural differences. Aurobindo states: ‘Man occupies the crest of the evolutionary wave. With him occurs the passage from an unconscious to a conscious evolution.’ And Simone de Beauvoir has written, ‘Life is occupied both in perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.’…..Duane Elgin

finding the discordant vein of equilibrium….

Western philosophers usually assume that intellectual training and analysis alone paved the royal road to understanding. However, transpersonal philosophers think differently. They claim the mind must also be given a multidimensional contemplative training that refines ethics, emotions, motivations, and attention. This training is designed to develop ‘the eye of contemplation’ by inducing specific states of consciousness in which one has ‘the keenness, subtlety and quickness of cognitive responses’ that are required for penetrating insights into the nature of mind and reality. Indeed, the perennial philosophy and the world’s traditional philosophies and psychologies were derived just this way. Moreover, unless this wisdom is directly experienced in succeeding generations, traditions easily ossify into mere dogma…..Roger Walsh