Considering Pathways to Kindness, Love, and Peace
As Thanksgiving 2022 approached, and US politics were like a pot boiling over, I found I had to find a way to remember that life is beautiful, joyful, and peaceful if we can see it. I came across some beloved friends and their art. I share a few now to help you reflect and engage with hope, heart, and meaning that you can share with others. I hope you will take the time to read and enjoy it,
AUTUMN SKYE: Autumn Skye’s visionary artwork reveals hidden spiritual forces and embodies the noble beauty of transformative inspiration. The clarity of line and form in her work is drawn from the depths of a mystic heart that sees the potential of humanity in a sacred world.” –Alex Grey, visionary artist, cosm
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I learned my understanding of mysticism primarily from Henri Corbin’s classic book, Alone with the Alone. Corbin was a French mystic and Sufi practitioner. Sufism is a form of the Islamic religion. What I found especially fascinating was that Corbin used the classic Islamic teaching technique of teaching you what you are going to learn before he teaches. In the first section, there is a clear explanation of mysticism versus intercessory prayer or religion in which a priest or someone interprets who and what God is in a bible, whereas a mystic feels no separation and has a direct experience of Divinity ideally. I have found over years of practice, this fits many of my practices.
On to Autumn’s art and HER interpretations of two beautiful people, usually called Jesus and Mary. I see now Autumn quotes the bible.
Of Divine Humanity, Autumn writes descriptions for these pieces, and these are direct quotes that are not changed or edited, although I emphasize some I especially like and feel relevant today:
“We are the children of God, facets of the universe and sparks of the divine fire of creation.
May we remember our own divinity. May we be empowered and heart-centered and cultivate a new era of healing and wholeness for humanity.
May our hearts be our guide and burn passionately with love and compassion.
“The Kingdom of God is within you.” Luke 17:21
I find this lovely and indicative of Jesus as a teacher of great mysteries WE can learn. God is within. I like that a lot as we get to choose how we will live and behave.
Here Autumn speaks of The Holy Grail or Mary as usually named. This is a Mary Magdelene you may never have met:
“Mary Magdalene was said to be the beloved of Yeshua, his equal, and his greatest supporter in his mission of teaching the Way of Love. She was the feminine embodiment of presence, pleasure, purity, and power.
As an Essene priestess and initiate into the lineage of Isis and the Way of the Rose, she was highly trained in the Egyptian mysteries of healing, alchemy, and Tantra. Over the centuries, her name and holiness were distorted and slandered, and she was labeled a whore and sinner. With her descent from honour, so did womankind fall under heavy-handed persecution and oppression.
After Jesus’s death and resurrection, Mary was said to have fled Palestine for Egypt before settling in the south of France, then perhaps also traveling into the Isles of Scotland. Mary was pregnant and birthed a child, Sarah Tamar, who carried the bloodline of the Christ forward into the present day. Some say this bloodline is what the true Holy Grail refers to. Her womb, the chalice, literally holds the blood of Christ.
Within Christianity, Mary Magdalene was known as the “Apostle of the Apostles,” and in 2016, the Vatican issued a formal apology for demeaning and slandering her for centuries, intentionally omitting her words and perspective from the gospel. July 22nd was dedicated in her honor as her holy Feast Day.
In recent years we have witnessed her consciousness growing stronger and, with it, the rising of the divine feminine.
As the sacred mother and divine lover, she urges us to reclaim our sovereignty, embrace our sensual nature, remember our erotic innocence, and to pave a new path of embodied leadership. We are remembering a way of living in alignment with nature, reawakening our intuition, and returning into a heart centred way of being. We are coming back into balance with ourselves, each other, the earth, and all beings.
Through this we will find the union of divine masculine and feminine within us, and embody ourselves as whole and holy.” ~Lila & Autumn Skye
Autumn Skye’s work and explanations are beautiful, informative, meditative, inspiring, visionary, and uplifting. I feel hope again. I hope you do, too, for women and men at this important time on our planet.
JORGE N. FERRER: Author, Relationships Counselor, Educator, Public Speaker
Next, I will introduce you to a beautiful sensual Spaniard who will definitely help you know life as sacred and sensual. I am blessed to call Jorge a long-time mentor and friend. He lives in Spain though he has worked at my college, where I connected with him in San Francisco. We are both also long-time friends of John Heron, whose work changed my life. I would call him a leading-edge facilitator, spiritualist, and transpersonal, participatory reality practitioner. That tells me we are not separate, and in one of his psychology books, he has a lovely exercise on how we see ourselves as separate and united.
As I was learning with John, I discovered Jorge’s Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision Of Human Spirituality, and again my heart and mind opened. His book also went beyond the norm and proposed that we are all connected. I was hearing the language of my grad school day: transpersonal and participatory, and I deeply believe in these concepts. Today in many of my communities, we talk about a collective consciousness (a bit like transpersonal) and the importance of communities (I.e., participation) all based on mutual respect.
I have also read many of Jorge’s papers, especially on academia dot edu. And he has been kind enough to help me refine some of my understanding, most recently the word metaphysical, which can be used in many ways. I now use it as an all-embracing reality that the metaphysics of life and synchronicity may be based on the big picture of a universe where we are One and Unique. We know through relationships and diversity. See especially the classic Martin Buber I and Thou, in which he shows us that life becomes sacred as we see every meeting with any part of life and nature. When we see too objectively, we distance and often destroy. I call I and Thou a great anti-depressant. I will use this description from Jorge’s author’s page to get to know him:
”In his striking debut, Jorge N. Ferrer deconstructs and reconstructs the entire transpersonal project, articulating a more sophisticated, pluralistic, and spiritually grounded transpersonal theory. He brings recent ideas in epistemology and the philosophy of science to bear upon core issues in the psychology and philosophy of religion.
The book's first half (Deconstruction) describes the nature and origins of the prevailing vision that has guided transpersonal scholarship so far and identifies some of its main conceptual and practical limitations: subtle Cartesianism, spiritual narcissism, intrasubjective empiricism, and reductionistic universalism.In the second half of the book (Reconstruction), Ferrer suggests a way of reconceiving transpersonal ideas without these limitations—a participatory vision of human spirituality, one which not only places transpersonal studies in greater alignment with the values of the spiritual quest, but also discloses a rich variety of spiritual liberations, spiritual worlds, and even ultimate realities.”
Jorge has become a core teacher at INFIJOY, an online platform for accessing many kinds of teaching, even narcissism and philosophies like stoicism which I often have people ask. Jorge is currently teaching Love and Freedom: The Art of Sensual Spirituality. I wish I could have downloaded his video. Click the title to see it. I highly recommend any of Jorge’s work. What a privilege to know him! Next, we will meet a unique Earth and Heart-centered author and teacher, Tom Cheetham.
TOM CHEETHAM: I’m an author, teacher, biologist, and poet exploring creative imagination in human life and culture.
I somehow shared a storage drive with Tom Cheetham. Mystical; magical. I fell in love with his work.
“My work is to help people wake up. Most of us live, most of the time, in a world invented by others or in cages we make for ourselves. We have more control than we think we do over our experience, our thoughts, feelings and emotions, and even our sensations. There is an open field of reality accessible to us through the imagination, but precious few know how to use it. I'm not a Master myself, but I know where some of the doors are.”
I have watched Tom grow his online presence after, I believe, he retired from Amherst College in MA, a location I love and dreamed of attending at one time. I think we “met,” as this was all coming together in one format. I LOVE his newsletter Pyrotechnics which announces upcoming classes. His writing on imagination I find deeply important to me.
These events in January look wonderful. All on Zoom:
COMING IN JANUARY from Tom Cheetham:
Two 8-week Seminars, Topics To Be Announced in December, and A Life in Sympathy with Beings: Cosmology & Kinship, Saturday, January 28, 2023, an online lecture for THE JUNG SOCIETY OF VANCOUVER
“Henry Corbin argued that modern technological society suffered a catastrophic loss of soul with the abandonment of active, creative Imagination as a source of knowledge. We see the results of this all around us. In Corbin's theological psycho-cosmology, the supreme and archetypal act of creative imagination is the event of theophanic prayer. The dynamic he discovers there between the two poles established by the terrestrial soul and its celestial twin applies universally to every real encounter between and among all beings. I suggest that although Corbin, Jung, Hillman and others are not wrong to assign this cognitive function to "imagination" we tend to be led astray by a tendency to associate imagination with human agency. Better is to follow Corbin in centering on the "cognitive function of sympathy." In order to make this clear, concrete and immediate I will give a brief overview of the analogical cosmologies of Lou Andreas-Salomé and her brilliant contemporary interpreter Kaja Silverman. The implications of their development of a cosmology of kinship are breath-taking.”
REGISTRATION DETAILS COMING SOON HERE AND IN THE NEWSLETTER (I highly recommend signing up for the newsletter.)
Tom’s work can also be found on Medium and academia dot edu. I follow him on Twitter. Here is a link to some of his books to lure you:
In Closing, A Reflection Considering Pathways to Kindness, Love, and Peace NOW
When I began writing this, I did not know what would come. My inner pot has simmered down, and I have enjoyed composing this to share. I send you much gratitude for reading. Kindness really is our nature.
As I have shared these amazing sources of inspiration for me, I have remembered that ONE OF MY DEAREST GIFTS IN LIFE has been friends I can learn with and share with others. I will now return here or visit other friends when the pot overboils, and the world becomes too much. I hope YOU have met some new friends here and in your own world that inspire you in good and bad times throughout our lives on Earth.
Contact: Nancy Peden, D.D. I also offer counseling sessions and am very good with depression and PTSD, and dream manifestation. Text 831-236-6904, and please tell me your interests and the best time to call. I am on Mountain Time.