Terry Patten
Please note the special time and join us Sunday, Halloween at 12PM for “Great Full-Ness, an Open Heart, and Cultural Change” with Brother David Steindl-Rast
Join us at 12 noon (not 11 AM as originally announced) this coming Sunday, October 31st (Halloween) for a deep, uplifting conversation with Brother David Steindl-Rast.
He’ll join us live from Vienna, Austria, for a conversation on “Great Full-Ness, an Open Heart, and Cultural Transformation”.
When Brother David speaks, he enters into your heart and mind. Something profound and true happens to you, and you know it. He consistently creates the climate in which his profound philosophical understandings and gentle but profound teachings on gratefulness can be deeply received, without fear, and then explored in the heart.
He does much more than speak about spiritual life — he transmits it with the authority of the monk who is living it. For Brother David there hardly seems to be a distinction between teaching, preaching, praying and meditating. All of these for him are one process and he has the ability to invite his listeners to become part of his own experience, and to enter with him in the places that fill him with gratitude and joy.
We will be blessed with the opportunity to engage with him on a holiday — albeit an often profane one — Halloween, All Hallow’s Eve.
With Thomas Merton, Brother David was a pioneer of the resurgence of contemplative practice in Christianity, and he was one of the first Christian mystics to seriously practice Zen meditation with many of the great Japanese Roshis, including Yasutani and Suzuki. He also held Paul Tillich’s chair at Cornell University. He is probably most widely credited as a primary pioneer of inter-religious dialog and of an Integral Panentheist Christianity. Join us for a dialog with a true practitioner, who radiates and transmits authenticity, humility, gratitude, and happiness.
HOW TO PARTICIPATE:
Sunday, October 31st @ 12:00pm Pacific
Please Note: There will be a limited number of lines available on the live conference call, so we encourage you to listen online if possible. To make sure you can get through by phone, we encourage you to dial in early.
- To listen live by phone, dial: 216-258-0785, then, enter Access Code: 272072#
- To listen live online go to: http://attendthisevent.com/?eventid=15767355
- To download the audio after the teleseminar is complete, click here.
Join the Dialogue: About one hour into the dialogue, we’ll open up the lines and you’ll have the opportunity to interact with us directly over the phone or via instant message. Here’s what to do:
- To interact live by voice, dial into the conference line number and wait until we ask for a question from someone in your region, or
- Send us your question via instant message in the teleseminar window on your computer
- Send us your questions and comments before or during the live dialogue by posting them on our Beyond Awakening Community Facebook page
We look forward to your attendance!
Sincerely,
The Beyond Awakening Team
Many or most of my friends and relatives in the Midwest fear to venture out beyond their fundamentalist perspective. Over in Montana there is even a museum replete with dinosaur skeletons attempting to prove that the earth was created 6,000 years ago and the great Flood is responsible for the layers of deposits.
Beyond the past century of inter-religious dialogue and development of the historical-critical method of scriptural study, there are other tools in our toolbox in recent decades to help awaken the mind.
One of my favorite thought experiments in the interface of quantum physics with ancient tradition, faith, and mythos comes from the Dogon tribe in Mali which is an ancient window into a priesthood that pre-dates the pharoahs. The classic work on them is ‘The Sirius Mystery’ by Robert Temple arguing they know about the 50 year orbit of the invisible Sirius B and around Sirius A.
Two orther more recent works by computer scientist Laird Scranton should be classics. ‘The Science of the Dogon’ explores nuclear physics and quantum mechanics in relation to their symbols. ‘Sacred Symbols of the Dogon: The key to Advanced Science in the Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs’ goes much farther in decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs with Dogon symbols and quatum physics.
On page 99 of ‘Sacred symbols’ taken from the foundational work on the Dogon ‘The Pale Fox’,p 185, by Griaule and Dieterlen is a diagram of the nummo fish.
Visualize a vertical fish figure. At the bottom triagular ‘tail’ is the point where divine awareness pulls a thought together. (This could be ‘First Thought’ of Apophasis Megale–the Simon Magus fragment). Up the body of the fish we have seven segments. There is a ‘backbone’ in the middle bifurcating them. This can represent the seven dimensions of string theory.
At section six is a spiked ball the Dogon refer to as Amma’s egg. Amma is God and the egg is the Big Bang in modern parlance. (The Dogon describe the Big Bang process very well.)
Segment seven is a bifurcation into two big round clavicles or ‘doors’ or wormholes. The Dogon say they are closed on the lower side meaning Amma keeps some things to himself but open to the square’head’ of the fish. This is a good representation of God ‘resting’ on the seventh day in Hebrew cosmology. The seventh segment perfectly represents also the Christian Logos cosmology of the androgenous primal adam born out of the father and in the body of the holy spirit which creates out of himself the physical world.
Across from the seventh segment on either side like fish fins are coiled squiggles which can represent the string of string theory which begins to vibrate back and forth creating those androgenous poles and all that is.
The two ‘doors’ in the seventh segment open up into two doors in the square ‘head’ of the fish. The squareness perfectly represents physical structure. Out the top of the head are four straight lines like four ‘hairs’. These can represent the four quantum forces: gravity, electromagnetic force, strong force, weak force.
John
Great blog! I like how everything is well written. I will be back to check for new posts. Thanks!!
this post is very usefull thx!