Wisdom Connections

We began the evening with several announcements which are summarized here:

1. Sundays at The Center, the Community and Celebration of our Spiritual Connectedness, has been gathering at The Center for Powerful Living since September 27. We polled the group to determine if a different time would be better for everyone. As a result the next meetings of the community will be at 11:00 am for the month of October. Please visit the website for details:  www.SundaysatTheCenter.org
2. Rosemary is leading several new events in October and November. On October 24 she is presenting “The Intuitive Entrepreneur”©. This event is being held at The Center for Powerful Living from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm. On November 1 she is hosting “Conversations with The Other Side”©, again at the Center for Powerful Living and on the web or via phone. It is scheduled from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm. And note that this is All Saints Day, a time when the veil to The Other Side is the thinnest – this should make for a very special experience! And On November 21 Rosemary is leading “Jazz Up Your Life”©, a seminar on putting fun into conscious living! This too will be held at The Center for Powerful Living from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm.  These events are described in detail on Rosemary’s website: www.rosemarybredeson.com.  Register early on the website to take advantage of early-bird discounts!
3. Tascha Yoder also presented a summary of her program: “Reawakening Your Sacred Connections – A Journey into the Teachings of the Delicate Lodge” scheduled for November 5-7, 2009. See:  Reawakening Your Sacred Connections Flier.

We then moved into discussing the topic of the evening: “Energy – what is it and how does it connect us? Where does it go when we die, and is there an energized afterlife?”

We had a lively discussion beginning with an exploration of the chakra system, those energy centers or “portals” within our bodies. We also talked about chi and the meridian system used by Asian doctors to improve the flow of chi through all parts of the body for improved health.  And we related the chakras and chi to martial arts.  Note: Balancing the Chakras diagram.

The discussion continued with anecdotes of healing touch effectiveness, the fact that everything is energy in one form or another, Near Death Experiences, and even touched on Quantum Mechanics and its relationship to Eastern Metaphysics.

Reference books mentioned during the evening included:

1. “Ordaining Reality” by Joseph E. Donlan
2. “Wheels of Light” by Rosalyn L. Bruyere
3. “The Chakra Handbook” by Shalila Sharamon and Bodo J. Baginski
4. “The Promise of Energy Psychology” by David Feinstein, Donna Eden, and Gary Craig
5. “Vibrational Medicine” by Richard Gerber, MD

Our next meeting will be held on November 2, 2009 at Little Nepal Restaurant, 6:30 pm.

The discussion topic for September was “Tools for Personal Growth, Self-Knowledge, and Understanding Others.” We created a very long list of tools many of us have tried, used, and found helpful. The list is quite extensive and the categories broad ranging from body work to meditation, from using various types of cards, such as Tarot, to journaling, from “readings” of various kinds to self-help books. The following list has not been categorized; the tools are (mostly) in the order of discussion:

Enneagram – a spiritual and personality typology approach (we discussed this tool at length during our August gathering)
Myers-Briggs – a personality typology approach
DISC (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness) – a behavioral typology approach
StrengthFinder 2.0 – an online strengths discovery tool
Astrology (and the new Sunology developed by Sharon Moore)
Numerology
Tarot (and the numerous other card approaches to divination)
Palmistry (and Toe Reading?!)
Abraham (and other numerous channeled material that has been published over the years)
Animal Guides (both physical and symbolic; e.g. what birds are showing up in your life and what do they represent?)
Coaching – external support for personal development (from physical, to business, to spiritual)
Vision Questing (and other indigenous approaches to spiritual discovery and growth, e.g. shamanic work)
Meditation (there are so many forms, from passive following the breath and mantra meditation, to active guided imagery, hypnosis, shamanic journeying)
Energy Work (from Qi Gong and Tai Chi, to Massage, Rolfing, Yoga, a myriad of body work approaches)
Self-Help Books
Journaling (e.g. the “The Artist’s Way” approach by Julia Cameron)
Dream Work and Interpretation (what are our unconscious minds trying to tell us?)
Study of Ancient/Sacred Texts (Bible, Vedas, Upanishads, Tao Te Ching – a whole separate category of “self-help books”!)
Relationships and Community (we can learn so much about ourselves in relationship with others; and so much about others from self-exploration!)

This is a pretty exhaustive list, and yet there are many more approaches. There are whole “categories of systems” all of which can lead to Conscious Living.  And, at the end of the day, isn’t that why we do all this work to learn about ourselves, human behavior; to live consciously and contribute to the Evolution of Consciousness?

We spent all of this evening’s time studying the Enneagram. Rosemary introduced the subject by reading a children’s book which addresses all of the nine types through characters in the book. The book, Finding the Birthday Cake, is by Elizabeth Wagele.

We then did a quick tour of the types by briefly describing each one. I, as an Enneagram One, described some of the characteristics of my type. Rosemary, a Type Two, gave a good description of the basics of a two; and we both went around the Ennegram wheel describing each of the other types. (Go to this link for a summary of each type:   E-gram Intro).

And, for fun, we took a look at the types from the perspective of nine guests at a dinner party. (See this link for the cartoon:  E-gram Dinner).

At this point we passed out a five-page document to help everyone focus in on their type. The document consists of nine paragraphs in random order. By reading each paragraph and highlighting the sentences most applicable to one’s self, it is possible to hone in on type. One of the three paragraphs with the most highlighting likely points to the main type of an individual.  Reading detailed descriptions of each of these three types often results in the narrowing down to one type as the dominant one. These paragraphs are taken from the essential enneagram by David Daniels, M.D. and Virgina Price, PH.D. (This link contains the nine paragraphs:  E-gram Typing Paragraphs). You can use these paragraphs to help identify your type. We also offer the essential enneagram for sale to further refine the typing process.

Another of the Enneagram authors we have studied is Stephen Hatch, who has explored the spiritual dimensions of the Enneagram and the Sacred Ideas deeply embedded in its structure.  We presented a diagram as an introduction to these sacred ideas. (Find it here:  E-gram Sacred Ideas).

A final handout provided during the evening is an extensive list of resources for further study. (Here is that list:  E-gram Resources).

We concluded the evening with a discussion of next steps. Several members of the group wanted to dive deeper into the Enneagram. Others were more interested in moving on. Since our group is more about discussion than teaching we will move away from the Enneagram specifics and broaden our discussion in September to include other tools for better understanding self and others. Stay tuned for more specifics.

On a personal note, before we leave the Enneagram, I would add that this model for human behavior and human understanding is one of the most complete that I have encountered and studied. It is very complex (it has to be to model human behavior), it is dynamic (taking into account all of the myriad possibilities we encounter) and it is evolving, just as human consciousness evolves and grows in the process of becoming. I believe it is well worth further study; I intend to be a “life-long” student of the tool.

And please note that in order for all of us to enjoy the long Labor Day weekend, which includes the 1st Monday, we are postponing our September meeting until the 14th.  We hope to see you there!

Blessings during this end-of-summer time!

My notes are pretty brief from the fourth meeting of our Spiritual Exploration Group. We all shared stories of our experiences of Serendipity, Synchronicity and Grace from the previous month and this led into our discussion of Conscious Living.  As we become more aware of our experiences and how they relate to each other and the greater scheme of things we naturally become more conscious.  As we continue to practice we continue to grow.

Rosemary supported our discussion by quoting from a book germane to the discussion: Spiritual Development for Beginners, A Simple Guide to Leading a Purpose-Filled Life, by Richard & Jan Potter. Here is the passage she read:

“Spirituality may be seen as the purposeful changing of consciousness to provide more access to varying mental perspectives, subtler levels of experience, deeper awareness of self, the opening and awakening of the heart, a wider array of emotional experiences, and states of consciousness that connect with subtle realms of being.  Spirituality shatters our set convictions about the nature of life on the rock of Truth.  Spirituality is all about experiences.  It expands the range of acceptable experience by opening consciousness to more of life.  Indeed, most of us walk around in a bubble of highly constricted experience, cut off from the vast, amazing, and beautiful life around us.  Spirituality awakens us to life — usually gradually, but occasionally quickly.

“Spirituality is also about the interpretation of what we experience.  Some interpretations of experience lead to constricting our worlds, and some lead to further expansion and exploration of life.  Interpretation of experience comes in many forms. Some of these forms are religious, some are scientific, some are mystical, and many lie in the myriad of spaces among these perspectives.  Opportunity for authentic spirituality may be found in all of these interpretations, as long as they serve as doorways into further exploration and are not literalized door-closers attempting to stamp out continued searching for deeper experience and meaning.”

Our next meeting will be held on the first Monday of August, the 3rd, at Little Nepal Restaurant. The topic of this meeting is “The Enneagram: Nine Approaches to Spirituality.” According to Helen Palmer, one of Rosemary and my teachers, and a leading developer of the Enneagram:  “The Enneagram is a highly sophisticated system of nine personality profiles that are meant to help us know ourselves and to better understand the people in our lives, ‘as they are to themselves’.” Understanding ourselves and others is certainly a major component of Conscious Living.  Understanding others “as they are to themselves” is the basis for compassion. Moving beyond the personality and psychological applications of the Enneagram, Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson wrote The Wisdom of the Enneagram. This book is the first definitive guide to using the wisdom of the enneagram for spiritual and psychological growth.

Personally I have found the Enneagram as one of the most fully developed and useful tools in modeling the human condition. It helps me understand my own actions and responses and, thereby, helps me improve on those. And it helps me understand others, and their actions and reactions, especially those with whom I associate in relationships.

Please plan to attend this introduction to a tool for Conscious Living and the Evolution of Consciousness.

This was our third, 1st Monday for 2009, and we had a great discussion on Grace, Synchronicity and Serendipity.

Richard began the discussion by reviewing the “Three Faces of God” as explored by Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber during their webinar which Richard attended on May 9. This was an excellent follow-up to our discussion in April when we explored the many ways to refer to a “superior force” in the Universe, the ineffable “Something Greater.”  Briefly the three faces, as defined by Wilber, are:

1) Non-duality, the Ground of all Being, the Great Oneness.

2) Absolute Other/Being/the Thou, which we are probably most familiar with.

3) The Great Process of Becoming/The Creative, Evolutionary Force of the Universe.

These Three Faces are also explored on three separate webcasts of EnlightenNext; these can be downloaded and heard at: http://www.enlightennext.org/webcast/index.php?ecp=wc-052809&q=audio-us

Rosemary then read an excerpt from the Sunday “NY Times” Magazine interview with Robert Wright, author of “The Evolution of God” – a history of religion. The first provocative question the interviewer, Deborah Solomon, asks is: “The Evolution of God,” your new book on the history of religion, strikes me as a welcome antidote to the stream of books by atheists that have become best sellers in recent years. Doesn’t it seem as if atheism has become its own form of fundamentalism?” The full interview can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/magazine/31wwln-q4-t.html?scp=1&sq=Evolution+of+God&st=nyt.

We then moved into our discussion of the three areas of exploration for the evening. Eileen observed that Grace is something we get as a gift; it is not something we earn. All we need to do is “allow grace to happen.” We also explored the dictionary definitions of Grace, Synchronicity and Serendipity. The time went very quickly as we all shared stories of these phenomena from our experiences. Rosemary also shared a story from Martín Prechtel, one of Richard’s teachers; the story was taken from Martín’s book: “The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun.”

We concluded the evening with a “homework” assignment: we all thought it would be good to observe and remember all the incidents of Grace, Synchronicity and Serendipity we experience through June. And we can share these during our gathering in July.

For our July meeting, scheduled for July 6, 2009, 6:30 pm at Little Nepal Restaurant, we will explore our stories from June and also move into our next topic: Conscious Living.

Also, note that Rosemary’s new and revised website is now online: please explore www.rosemarybredeson.com and, while there, sign up for her weekly Ezine – “Wisdom Connections.”

May you be blessed with Grace, Synchronistic events and Serendipitous experiences!

Rosemary opened with a brief outline of what our Spiritual Exploration Group is all about: mainly we gather for discussion; dogma has no place in what we are exploring. While we may be seeking the Truth, we know that the truths of our experiences are only that, true for what we observe and feel, true in the moment for ourselves; and they may have little or no relevance to  another’s truth.

We then moved to forming a list (a short one) of the names or how we refer to and talk about “something Bigger.” I have included the list here as information. I have also added a few for the sake of completion, mostly as the feminine counterpart to the masculine names listed:

God
Wakan-tanka
The Nameless
The Universe
Spirit
Source
Jehovah
Wisdom
Love
Light
Freedom
Allah
Infinity
The Way (Tao)
All That Is
Energy
Goddess
The Divine
Gaia
Siva/Parvathi/Shakthi/Kali/Durga
Ganesha
Brahma/Saraswathi
Vishnu/Lakshmi
The Enlightened One
Mary
Divine Mother
The I AM
The Force
God the Father
Jesus
Sophia
Krishna (an emanation of Vishnu)
Yahweh
Ram (another emanation of Vishnu)
Quan Yin
Tara
Zeus
Jupiter
Apollo
Creator

We concluded from this exercise that it is really not all that important to give a name to this experience which we have all had. For that is truly what this is and it is an individual thing…we could come up with billions of names for each human has her own experiences of the divine. I am reminded of the first chapter of the Taoteching: “The way that become a way is not the Immortal Way, The name that becomes a name is not the Immortal Name…” As soon as we try to name something we limit it; to name the Divine is to limit the limitless!

We also had a good discussion about “judgement” and “discernment.” And this led to an exploration of “love” as the opposite of “fear”…

I have to admit that my notes are very brief; I think I was too engaged in the discussion to record it very well. So, if anyone wants to fill in here please feel free! Let’s keep the discussion going until we meet again…

Notes from the first “First Monday Spiritual Exploration Group” – Discussion, not Dogma, held April 6, 2009 at the Little Nepal Restaurant.

Introductions:

Rosemary introduced the concepts we are choosing to follow for this group. She referenced a Bill Moyer’s interview with Karen Armstrong. This interview can be seen at: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/03132009/watch.html and is well worth watching.

Some of the main points brought out:

· At the base of all religions is the Golden Rule

· Compassion is not feeling sorry for someone but putting one’s self in the other’s shoes to truly understand the other’s position and situation. This is how she wrote about Muhammad, putting herself in “the hell of 7th century Saudi Arabia.” (ref: Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet)

· In this interview Bill Moyer’s quoted Elaine Pagels; paraphrasing: there is practically no religion on earth which affirms the choices made by someone of another religion

· St. Augustine: The Bible only speaks of charity. If you find a passage that is violent or warlike or seems to preach hatred, then study and meditate on that passage until its message of charity is clear. Armstrong noted that it is only since the 17th century and the dawning of the scientific age that anyone took the Bible stories literally.

· One of Armstrong’s projects is to put together a “Charter for Compassion” – see: http://charterforcompassion.com/

We then talked about what we thought “spirituality” means. While beliefs are of the mind, spirituality is of the heart. It just “is.” It is like energy or gravity: it’s not something to believe in but is something that we know is there. We may have a difficult time explaining it well (it’s not of the mind) but we can sense it, feel it, and know (in our hearts) that it is real.

Spirituality is something “bigger.” It is “love” as in Brian Swimme’s The Universe is a Green Dragon: A Cosmic Creation Story, in which the Universe is loved into existence.

Spirituality is ambiguous and complex. And the “new physics” or quantum physics is beginning to bump into the mysteries, the mystical aspects of the Universe. A reference which explores this and begins to integrate western science and eastern mysticism is Joseph E. Donlan’s Ordaining Reality; The Science Behind the Power of Positive Thinking. See: http://www.ordainingreality.com/

Spirituality is about “connection.” We are all looking for connection; and love is the attracting force in the Universe; it is both the creative and motivating power behind “everything.”

Two other references were brought up in this introductory discussion:

· Power vs. Force by David Hawkins

· Hidden Truth Forbidden Knowledge by Steven M. Greer, an American physician, ufologist, and conspiracy theorist

At this point we introduced ourselves by providing a bit of background and focusing on our reasons for being part of this formative stage of the group.

We then did a round-table, all providing thoughts and ideas on good discussion topics. These include:

· An exploration of Extra-terrestrial Intelligence and UFOlogy

· How do we speak about “God” – several people expressed difficulty with the word, and other ways of speaking about “divinity” or “higher power.” What is this concept and how do we react to it? Is this a being outside of ourselves?

· Energy – what is it and where does it go when we die? How does energy connect us? Is there an energized afterlife?

· Culture and Society – what are the origins, how are they created and how are they destroyed. A related topic is the study and preservation of indigenous cultures, especially their spirituality. Is the destruction of a culture part of the evolutionary process? – out of chaos comes new creation? Is all evolution good?

· How do we determine right from wrong – especially in the turmoil of an evolving and relative value system? Ethics.

· Compassion vs. Tolerance – tolerance is of the ego, compassion of the heart

· Grace – what is it? How can we get it? Where does it come from, where to look for it? “Let go of control and let grace appear.”

· Judgment – how does our language, the words we use, further a judgmental attitude? “Try to talk without judgment.”

· Native American traditions and spirituality. Other indigenous cultures.

· Celebrations and ceremonies; rituals; earth-based spirituality and celebration of the seasons, sun-cycles, moon-cycles, and their connection to religious holidays

· Reincarnation, karma, past-life regression.

This can be an on-going and ever expanding list, but it is a good beginning.

We also discussed some basic group definitions and dynamics. The following is a list of thoughts for the group as we continue to form and move forward:

· We are a group of explorers coming to a variety of subjects with no judgment or preconceived notion of the “Truth”

· We come together to discuss, not dictate. We hold each other with respect and mutual caring, in loving kindness and compassion

· We will be guided by compassion and the Golden Rule. The following excerpt from the Charter for Compassion Project illuminates compassion’s role as a spiritual tool and its relation to belief:

The religious traditions all make it clear that compassion is the test of true spirituality; it takes precedence over belief and doctrinal orthodoxy. You can have faith that moves mountains, but if you lack charity it is worthless. Compassion is the path that brings us to the sacred. In our fellow human beings we see what has been called the human face divine. It is also the practice that brings us to Nirvana, God, Brahman, or Dao.

· We will meet monthly on the first Monday of the month; and for now we will meet at the Little Nepal Restaurant from 6:30 to 8:30 (or so).

· We may add a second monthly meeting to experience spiritual practices and ritual

· “Notes” of a general nature appropriate for sharing with the whole group will be recorded and disseminated along with discussion topic(s) for the next meeting. These will form a newsletter, “Wisdom Connections”, and be available in blog form for further online comment and discussion.

The next meeting will be held on May 4, 2009, 6:30 pm, at the Little Nepal restaurant.
Please feel free to invite guests of like mind and spirit. And do let Rosemary and Richard know who is coming no later than noon Monday so we can make arrangements with the restaurant.

The discussion topic for the next meeting is: “How do we talk about ‘God’?”