Margaret

This is the first part of my essay for the book Stricken: The 5,000 Stages of Grief. Click the title to go to it on Amazon.


Margaret

What is this resistance I have to going there again, procrastinating writing about my personal grief? What comes to mind is a scene from Beth Henley’s play Crimes of the Heart, made into a movie with Diane Keeton, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek, in which Old Granddaddy has been dying for a long time, and the three Southern sisters have just been through so much—parental abandonment, suicide, sacrifice, numbing out, lies, neglect, loneliness, scandal, attempted murder, and gallons of too-sweet lemonade—that by the time they learn that Old Granddaddy has finally died, they burst out laughing.

An evening out with girlfriends, taking turns reading favorite Rumi poems on the patio of a Mexican restaurant and laughing a lot, will also do the trick.

Now I’m back home, facing it. So here it is: I am 54 years old, and I can tell you that without a doubt, the most grievous thing that happened in my life was the murder of my younger sister Margaret when I was 11 years old.

This is a story about trauma, about experiencing a loss that is so horrifying that I thought, “If this is what life is, I don’t want to be here.” I checked out in some ways. Yet here I am, years later, and, damn, that was a high price to pay. Never again.

So here’s the story. One day, right before she was to start first grade, Margaret went outside to play after lunch. She went down the street to visit a neighbor girl, but the girl was taking a nap and her mother told Margaret to come back later.

Margaret walked down the alley back towards our house. She met a 15-year-old neighbor boy whom none of my family knew, who was also walking down the alley, and they began walking together. That was the last anyone except that boy saw of Margaret alive.

I don’t know what all happened. I suspect he raped her, and she was not cooperative. Maybe she threatened to tell, her most powerful weapon with her older siblings. Whatever. He strangled her with electrical wire. He strangled her for a long time, the paper said afterwards. Then he put her body in a cardboard box and covered it with leaves and trash and closed the box and left it in the woods. The paper said that the police found a trail of blood leading from his garage across the alley into the woods. There was a photo of a policeman standing by a box in the woods at night. The paper also said that the boy told the police that she was still breathing when he put her into the box.

Margaret and I shared a room from the time she got out of the crib until that day. She had straight brown hair and big blue eyes and sucked her two middle fingers. She still wet the bed sometimes. She was also daring. She once looked up a nun’s habit to see her artificial leg, something none of us older children would have risked. The nun just laughed and later gave her a teddy bear. And Margaret was outgoing. She was the one who told her first grade class, gathered for a group photo at orientation, to say cheese. She couldn’t say her Rs, so if you asked her what her name was, you’d hear “Maw-gwet.”

Every year I remember her on her birthday, May 7. I count how old she’d be now, and I wonder what she’d be like if she had lived. Would we be close? Would we live in the same city? What would she have done with her life? Would she have married, would she have had children? What kind of work would she be doing? Would we like each other?

Sometimes she shows up in my dreams, always as a young child. I miss having a sister. I had one for 6 years.

When my daughter turned 7, I breathed a sigh of relief. When my granddaughter turned 7, my daughter and I both breathed sighs of relief. She made it past 6. Whew.

I also remember Margaret every year on her death day, September 4. That date is seared into my memory. I feel sad, and it passes. After 43 years, my grief has been reduced to feeling what a horrible shame it was that she died like that. She just happened to run into that boy on that day, and he just happened to be so unstable that he had a psychotic break and he killed her. I so wish that she had been able to die at peace, in the presence of love. I wish that for you, for me, and for everyone.

But there’s more to my grief than that.

stricken: the 5,000 stages of grief

Last night, Wed., Jan. 28, I participated in a book reading at BookPeople. The book is Stricken: The 5,000 Stages of Grief, published by Dalton. It's a collection of essays about grief, and several of the local essayists, including me, read from our essays.

Spike Gillespie, whom I met a couple of years ago, pulled me into this with her indefatigable energy. She's one of the co-editors.

So...grief isn't exactly a happy topic. I wondered who would come, if there would be much of a turnout besides the contributors and editors and folks from Dalton. Our society doesn't exactly embrace grief, and yet each one of us will experience loss and ultimately death.

I'm glad to say the turnout was good. The BookPeople staff had to bring down more chairs from the third floor to seat everyone.

I was in awe of some of the writers, and some of them were especially good at reading aloud.

I was just happy I got through my piece without breaking down. The loss of my sister is still emotional for me. I paused a couple of times to gather myself. I could hear the emotion in my voice and feel it on my face. It was so different reading aloud to people I mostly don't know than it was rehearsing by myself to figure out when 5 minutes was up.

Everyone who read had something to say that stuck with me. The biggest lesson is that grief is about love. Or maybe grief is love. It opens the heart, and in that sense, it is joyful and alive. What a paradox, huh? A Zen priest told a story about counseling a woman whose husband was so locked up after the death of their son that he couldn't be there for her when she had cancer. Surrendering to grief may seem fearful, but it's the only healthy way to move through it.

My friends Katie and Keith were there, and I am so grateful for their presence. I didn't go out of my way to invite people, out of fear that I might be inviting them to a bummed-out experience. They volunteered to come without any pressure on my part, and I'm glad they came.

I'm going to post separately the first part of my essay. To read the rest, buy the book! It's available for pre-order at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Stricken-5-000-Stages-Grief/dp/0981744362/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233278022&sr=1-2 It will be available in March.

There's also a social networking site for the book at http://strickenbygrief.ning.com/ where you can read and post comments.

There were funny parts to the evening, too. One was Spike, an inveterate knitter, telling us she'd just learned that stricken is the German word for knitting. Another was spying a chartreuse book cover with the title LOVE + SEX with ROBOTS and realizing it just wasn't going to be all sad.

control of attention is the ultimate individual power

Click the title of this post to read David Brooks' response to Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers, which contains the quote above. Outliers explores what makes successful people successful and concludes that it's mostly social forces.

Brooks applauds Gladwell for moving us away from the cold rational self-interest model and hopes it will influence policy-makers to focus more on policies that foster relationships, social bonds, and cultures of achievement.

He also takes issue with the book, saying Gladwell has lost sight of the point at which the influence of social forces ends and the influence of the self-initiating individual begins.

This is important. Success is not entirely determined by social forces, in Brooks' opinion.

He points out that successful people have two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so. Successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention, and people who can focus attention have the power to rewire their brains--a topic of great interest to NLPers, meditators, and others seeking to improve the quality of experience.

As Brooks puts it, control of attention allows people to choose from patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons, which leads to self-control, resilience, and creativity, something humans can certainly use more of.

This certainly got my attention! Who doesn't want more choices, self-control, resilience, and creativity????? I totally do!

Kathleen this morning told me she realized last night that in 15 years (when the moon is this close to earth again), she'll be 70, and that 15 years is the mere blink of an eye. It's time to truly focus on what's important.

I agree. What is important enough to focus your ferocious attention on?

Disclosure: I haven't read Outliers but have read Gladwell's previous book Blink.

For more on developing attention, see the posts under the label 12 states of attention on this blog.

Also, I'm reading Meditation for Dummies after meditating for a few years with minimal instruction. I'll post a review of that later. Focusing the mind is a key benefit of meditation, which in the big picture doesn't really have any downsides...

i'm being published

Stricken: The 5,000 Stages of Grief is being published in January. An essay I wrote is included.

A book reading will take place at BookPeople on Wednesday, January 28, 2009, at 7 pm. I may be one of the readers, yet since there are 14 contributors from Austin (local writer and raconteur Spike Gillespie pulled the book together), I may not. Details remain loose, but I plan to attend whether I'm reading or not. I haven't met the other contributors, and I look forward to that.

The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Stricken-5-000-Stages-Grief/dp/0981744362

You can also request it from any local bookstore, and copies will be for sale at the book reading and at BookPeople.

I wrote the essay many months ago, and actually, I forgot about it until I got an email from Spike about the opening. It'll be interesting to read what I wrote and see if what I wrote then is close to what I'd write now!

Yes, there is living in the present after grief.

book review: The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe

I recently finished reading The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe. As promised, here is my take on it. Click the title of this post to order the book from amazon.com.

Author Lynne McTaggart is an investigative journalist. Her mission here was to examine the cutting edge of science, quantum physics specifically, by reading studies, interviewing scientists, and translating scientific findings into a layperson's language while maintaining as much accuracy as possible.

She got interested in this topic when she kept bumping into hard scientific evidence about methods of healing that went against the prevailing ideas about human biology, including studies validating homeopathy, acupuncture, and spiritual healing.

Now some of you may think, what's the big deal? Everybody knows they work, even if science doesn't know how. Well, the answer to that is that science is a prevailing paradigm in Western culture,and science is on the verge of a revolution that goes far beyond alternative medicine. McTaggart says that scientific stories create our perception of the universe and how it operates, and from this we shape our social structures.

What McTaggart discovered is that a small number of scientists have been working on the fringe of science (although their work is slowly becoming more and more acceptable to the mainstream), using the scientific method to prove things that fly in the face of the scientific belief system. These scientists were often at risk of ostracism from the main scientific community, yet they kept at their research because like true explorers, they knew they were on to something new, and that's what is exciting about science--discovery of the new. These men and women are the revolutionaries of the scientific community.

McTaggart interviewed scientists from around the world, adding personal information about their appearance, background, and so forth to humanize them. She stuck with scientists with solid credentials--some at prestigious universities like Princeton and Stanford--and limited her reporting to studies using rigorous scientific criteria, such as the double blind study design with a control group. The bulk of the book is about their studies.

She interviewed 22 scientists, some up to 20 times, basically translating their findings into metaphors that you and I can understand, in the process receiving an education in quantum physics, statistics, brain neuroscience, and other hard sciences.

Very few of these scientists would discuss the metaphysical implications of their work. McTaggart herself says that although her sympathies lie with alternative medicine, she still demands scientific proof. "There is little of the woo-woo about me," she writes.

The prevailing scientific paradigm is based on Isaac Newton's work in the 1600s. Remember the apple falling on Newton's head and his "discovery" of gravity? Newton basically saw the universe as a machine that follows laws and behaves predictably, independent of human observation.

Then came quantum physics in the early part of the 20th century. The smallest bits of matter were not set things. They were mutable, often many possible things all at the same time, and had no meaning in isolation but only in relationship to everything else. Subatomic particles existed in all possible states until disturbed by us--our observation influenced them to settle down. Time and space did not exist except as arbitrary constructs.

Most scientists assumed the strange quantum world only existed in the world of dead matter, or that one set of laws (Newtonian) applied to the visible world and another to subatomic particles (quantum). It was all so counter-intuitive to their belief system.

Reading her stories about the studies was a good experience. Some were pretty amazing. I especially liked the studies where scientists worked with psychics--who could see inside machinery (influencing it at the same time) and also describe remote locations they'd never been to and only had geographic coordinates for. Even in Russia. (Hint: The NSA gets involved.)

In a nutshell, some of the findings are:
--Human beings and all living things are a coalescence of energy in a field of energy connected to every other thing in the world. There is no duality to our bodies in relation to the universe. There is one field that underlies everything, us included.

--"Nothing" does not exist. Even in absolute zero degrees (the closest we can get to a vacuum), things are happening. There is a field of energy, called the Zero Point Field.

--The field is a recording medium for everything, the means by which everything communicates with everything else. It holds the memories of everything that ever happened. The brain is a receiver.
[define coherence and resonance]

--Perfect coherence is an optimum state just between chaos and order.

--Health is a state of perfect subatomic communication.

--Each molecule in the universe has a unique frequency, and the language it uses to communicate is a resonating wave. Molecules "speak" to each other, regardless of distance, virtually instantaneously.

--We perceive objects by resonating with them--perception occurs by tuning in to the field.

--Consciousness is a global phenomenon that occurs everywhere in the body, not just in the brain. (Perhaps it occurs everywhere, not just in the body. Perhaps consciousness IS the field.)

--Observation puts a halt to randomness and creates order.

--Intent can change the physical world, even the past.

--Pairs of people of the opposite sex have more power to influence outcomes, and bonded couples have even more power, than individuals.

--Women produce better results at influencing outcomes when multitasking; men when concentrating on the task at hand.

--Consciousness results when individual quantum particles lose their individuality and begin acting as a single unit.

--Coherence of consciousness is the greatest form of order known to nature.

--Wishing or intending makes our own coherence infectious.

--People can influence their body functions by directing their attention.

--Other people can have almost the same mind-body effect on you that you can have on yourself.

--Influence increases depending on how much it matters to the influencer or how much he/she can relate to the influencee.

--The greatest effect is when influencees really needed influence. Needing something such as calming down or focusing attention makes people more receptive to influence.

--Humans have a latent ability to see anywhere across any distance. Even those skeptical of this idea can be primed and do this after a little practice.

--The important ingredient in remote viewing is being in a relaxed, even playful, atmosphere that avoids causing anxiety or nervous anticipation in the viewer.

--The information often comes across as if in a dream state. Interpreting or analyzing it colors impressions as the information is still coming through and makes it less accurate.

--People can remotely view the past and the future. It's as if the field is just NOW and all points in space and time exist in a single instant.

--People can influence the future. Using a random click generator, they could influence the output of the machine before it generated clicks. Present or future intentions act on initial probabilities and determine what events actually come into being.

--It is important for the influencer to be the first observer. Others observing first make the machine less susceptible to later influence. So focused attention freezes the system.

--Theoretically everything in the future exists in the ralm of pure potential, and in seeing into the future or past, we help shape it and bring it into being.

--Theretically, the bottom level of the Zero Point Field is not electromagnetic. The secondary fields (scalar waves) travel far faster than the speed of light and provide the ultimate holographic blueprint of the world for all time.

--To remove time, remove separateness. Pure energy at the quantum levelexissts as a vast continuum of fluctuating charge. We create time and space, and therefore we create our own separateness.

--On a subconscious physiological level, we have an inkling when we are about to receive bad news or when bad things are going to happen to us.

--People communicate and respond to remote attention, although unaware of it.

--When the left brain is quiet and the right brain predominates, ordinary people have access to telepathy.

--You can block or prevent influences you don't want by visualizing a protective shield.

--The more organized a sender's consciousness, the more ordering influence on a less-organized recipient. The most ordered brain pattern always prevails.

--The capacity of our brains to receive information from the field is limited in ordinary consciousness; states of altered consciousness such as meditation and relaxation loosen this constraint.

--Children under five permanently function in the alpha state.

--Gentle wishing works better rather than intense willing when using intentions to achieve certain outcomes.

--Plants have empathy for each other. They respond when a neighboring plant is injured or dies.

--Death is a disturbance in the field.

--Human intention can be used as an extraordinarily potent healing force. We can establish greater 'order' in another person.

--Distant healing works. All kinds of healing were tested. Conventionally religious Christians, evangelicals, kabbalists, Buddhists, and healers from the Barbara Brennan School of Healing Light, those changing colors/vibrations in patients' auras, using contemplative healing and visualizations, working with tones and singing or bells, a Lakota Sioux pipe ceremony with drumming and chanting, a qi gong master.

---The main commonality of successful distant healing was healers being able to put out their intention for the patients' health and then surrender to some kind of healing force.

--Asking for help was more effective than not. Whether it was Jesus, Spider Woman, or a healing energy was irrelevant. Help came in the form of energy.

--Experienced healers have abnormally high electric field patterns during healing sessions. This may be a sign of greater coherence.

--Intention on its own heals, and healing is a collective force. There may be a collective memory of healing spirit.

--Illness may be isolation, from oneself, community, and spirituality, rather than physical conditions.

--Experiments suggested individual consciousness doesn't die. Death may be a decoupling of our frequency from the matter of our cells. It may be simply returning to the field.

And there's more. I'm getting tired of summarizing; maybe you are getting tired of reading this very long post too.

One more point sticks out. McTaggart actually says, on page 159, "the left brain is the enemy of The Field."

NLPers, does this ring a lot of bells for you, about congruence, rapport, maps/territories?

Hypnotists, are you inspired to bring the implications of quantum physics into your trances?

McTaggart's next book is about Intent, inspired by what she learned in writing this book. I intend to get it!

2012

my daughter told me that about once a year, she has a dream about the end of the world. this month she dreamed about 2012, that portentous year in which the aztecs predicted a momentous shift of some sort would occur. it's interpreted as a major change in world order, an apocalypse, an asteroid crashing into earth, aliens taking earthlings aboard their spaceship, a great shift in consciousness, spirituality, psychic connection. (from wikipedia)

lela dreamed that it was winter solstice, 2012, and the earth changed the direction of her rotation. it took a couple of hours. some people were not affected, some got dizzy, some passed out.

the earth's axis also changed, resulting in a shift in seasons. winter became summer, summer became winter. this wreaked havoc on agriculture. people in developed countries managed to survive with processed food. people in poor countries were devastated. it took about a year to adjust, in lela's dream.

whatever it is, i believe it could be metaphoric for a shift in consciousness.

i've been reading The Field. one of the key points is that in western culture, we still believe and behave for the most part with the principles of newtonian physics. yet quantum physics has gone way beyond. everything is connected to everything, intent can influence outcomes and even the past, group energy is powerful, distant healing works, the more coherent influences the less coherent to become more coherent, et cetera.

when i finish reading this book, i intend to post its key points here. look for it!

i joined facebook a few days ago, and the connectivity is pretty amazing. you can see what your friends have posted, who became their friends, their posts and their friends' posts, etc. it's a big network, and every interactive.

maybe this is the paradigm shift occurring now, and the peak will occur in 2012. maybe it's a critical mass of people understanding that we are all connected that will really change the world. 2012 will be an election year; obama will be finishing his first term as president.

2012 could also be the year the earth reaches her "tipping point" and responds violently to the changes humans have wrought. air-water-soil pollution, mining and drilling, managing the oceans badly, chemical and fossil-fuel based agriculture, chemical and fossil-fuel based lifestyles, deforestation...

and maybe 2012 will bring both a shift in consciousness and the earth "talking back".

we shall see.

odds and ends

new month. hope you enjoyed halloween/samhain/all souls/day of the dead.

weekend highlights: meeting a friend for dinner on friday, gorgeous sunset from mount bonnell on saturday, setting up a gypsy camp in the backyard and attending the austin celtic festival with my granddaughter on sunday. she loved the viking camp, the dogs and horses, and getting her hair braided.

i just finished the third book in the "his dark materials" trilogy, which starts with "the golden compass," moves to "the subtle knife," and ends with "the amber spyglass." the author is philip pullman.

i enjoyed these books a lot. although considered children's books, they contain plenty for adults to enjoy--speculation about good versus evil, freedom versus security, what dark matter (the 96% of the universe that scientists currently can't identify) consists of, and how to live a good life. the main characters are well drawn and vivid.

i liked them better than the harry potter books. the author cites major influences as milton's paradise lost and the poetry of william blake. damn fine work for an english major!

welcome back from maui, katie and keith!

reading update

books recently finished:
emptiness dancing by adyashanti (a master zen teacher talks about awakening)
enneagram for the spirit by mary horsley (combines enneagram, meridians, yoga, and chakras)
your liver your lifeline by jack tips, ph.d. (just finished the liver/gallbladder cleanse in an appendix)

books in progress:
seven arrows by hymeyohsts storm (a beautiful book of native american stories)
the spiritual dimension of the enneagram by sandra maitri (amazing insights into the particular essences of each type and how to recover them)
the sacred power of huma: spirituality and shamanism in hawaii by rima a morell, ph.d. (an experience of huna by an anthropologist)

books waiting to be read:
the structure of magic ii by john grinder and richard bandler (NLP)
middlesex by jeffrey eugenides (a pulitzer-winning novel)
six months in the sandwich islands by isabella i bird (an account by an intrepid 19th century woman traveler when hawaii was independent)
goodbye to a river: a narrative by john graves (about a canoe trip on the soon-to-be-dammed brazos river)

walker's island review

Here's my review of K. J. Radebaugh's astonishing first novel, Walker's Island. Click the title of this post to see this review on Amazon and order the book.

==

K. J. Radebaugh is a born story teller. I started reading Walker's Island several months ago and finally finished it last week. Completing the book felt like saying goodbye to a dear friend, complete with tears spilt on the last page.

This story, which rambles through the period from 1865 to 1898, is set in a fictional county in south central Florida. The main characters are cowboys. Now, I am not someone who seeks out stories about cowboys in Florida, set two centuries ago. I just want a good reading experience, something that opens me up and moves me somewhere.

I got that from this book. Like life, the story moves sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, enjoying the telling. It makes life bigger and richer. Let me share a few sentences from the book.

Raymond "fell into a waking sleep that rode the current of his breath until it joined the creek and flowed away, past the cold ground beneath him, past Beely's farm, past the raiders and Lieutenant Fitz and the war, all the way back to the beginning."

"The church, the hotel and cafe, the railroad track, and the road itself were Jessie's world, bounded by a sash and frame and separated from her by a piece of real glass with a watery ripple in one corner."

Red's hair "was the hot, brilliant red of a pitch pine fire, shot through with gleaming copper lights and piled on top of her head in a heap of curls and tendrils and waves that were barely contained by three large tortoiseshell combs. Its weight seemed to bear down on the woman beneath it, who supported herself with an elbow on a rough cypress table, head in hand."

"Jack was different. It wasn't his odor, which was grassy and sweet like cured hay, or his hair, which was fine and thin and floated on his head like dandelion silk. It wasn't even his peckish appetite or small, skinny, fragile-looking frame. The problem, at least in the beginning, was Jack's speech. He made odd sounds. Jack trilled, hooted, squeaked, and twittered. He hiccupped, snorted, sneezed, coughed, and popped his lips like a feeding bream. He twitched, too, tapping and fluttering fingers as thin as chicken bones. And he watched things as he tweeted and twitched - bugs and dust motes, sunlight reflecting off a pot, Jessie's hands on the biscuit dough - with an absorption that went beyond concentration."

That kind of writing made reading Walker's Island immensely enjoyable through all the ins and outs of 33 years in the lives of some people who now seem realer than real.

I'm happy to know this is the first novel in a trilogy, so I have more of K. J. Radebaugh's writing to look forward to!

must-see video: author of my stroke of insight

The author of the book I reviewed earlier this month, called My Stroke of Insight, gave a presentation at a conference. An 18-minute video of her presentation is available on the New York Times, along with a brief article.

You can click the title of this post to view the video. If you watch it, please watch it all. It's very compelling. She's a remarkable woman.

Also, I learned in the article that the author has a website. Go to http://www.drjilltaylor.com/index.html if you're interested.

book review: my stroke of insight

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, is a remarkable book. One day Jill Bolte Taylor, a Ph.D. research scientist in brain anatomy at Harvard, woke up with a terrible headache. Over the next 4 hours, she watched her mind lose its many of its abilities. She had an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) in the left hemisphere of her brain, and when a blood vessel blew out, the spreading leak of blood gradually shut down her abilities to create and understand speech, to move and sense the world, and to perceive physical boundaries, time, and space.

What was left was her right brain.

Somehow she managed to orchestrate her own rescue.

Taylor takes the reader through her experience with the skill of an anatomist teaching college freshmen and the zest of a natural storyteller. Taylor was profoundly changed by her experience, and her description of what it is like to perceive "in one's right mind" is worth the price of the book alone.

I learned that mental chatter (aka "monkey mind") is completely a left brain function. A sense of boundaries, of being solid and separate, also comes from the left brain, as do our perceptions of time and space. What remained, in Taylor's experience, without this left brain operating was deep inner peace, a feeling of bliss, silence, open-ended moments following one another, a sense of being enormous and expansive, and at the same time, of being composed of liquid cells.

I'll have what she's having.

Taylor no longer experienced herself as the personality she knew, and not surprisingly, in eight years of recovery, she repeatedly made conscious choices to leave behind emotional patterns from her pre-stroke personality that she didn't like, such as hostility and unhappiness. She learned that emotions are physical, that joy and peace are feelings in the body, that the chemicals of emotions surge through us and are flushed out of our systems in 90 second or less, and that she could choose to prolong a feeling's presence in her body or let it go after that.

In her "right mind," she processed information as images of the present moment, rather than in words. Later she learned to use her left brain's language abilities to talk to her brain as a whole and tell it what she wanted and didn't want.

It's like a scientist is telling us what the mystics and meditators have been saying all along. She's telling us that these experiences are accessible to all, if only we can allow our right brains to experience existence without so many left brain intrusions. (And in fact, she cites research on nuns and monks that says that's what happens in deep prayer and meditation.)

Taylor believes our brain hemispheres have two different characters, and that our inner conflicts are usually splits between our left and right brains. With very little guidance, she says, people can distinguish these characters in those they are close to and even in themselves.

She does not slam the left brain, however. It allows each of us to communicate in the external world, organizes information, multitasks, thinks sequentially, identifies patterns, processes information quickly, sees sharp boundaries between objects, and tunes into higher frequencies. It is a master storyteller, filling in the blanks where there are gaps. It can imagine alternative scenarios.

Taylor firmly believes that the more time we spend running our inner peace and compassion circuits, the more of those we will project into the world and the more peace and compassion we will have on the planet.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in the brain and anyone interested in experiencing more joy and peace in their lives and in the world, and who doesn't want that?

(click title to purchase on lulu.com)

mutant message downunder controversy

i feel it's necessary to share this on my blog after posting a two-part book review of mutant message downunder by marlo morgan.

i read a 1991 version of the book, which was self-published. i loved the story and wanted to publish a post to be called "lessons from the real people."

in googling the author's name to learn more about her, i learned that mutant message downunder is a work of fiction and not a true account. marlo morgan was confronted by many inconsistencies and errors after she published her book, especially by australians.

her book sold like hotcakes in the u.s., however, and a major u.s. publisher wanted to republish it under its imprint.

eight aboriginal elders flew to the u.s. to discuss the matter with the publisher. morgan was forced to admit that the work was a product of her imagination and therefore fiction. the 1994 edition was sold as a piece of fiction.

i felt very disappointed to learn this. it's similar to the controversy surrounding carlos castaneda's books. there's no external verification that don juan matus even existed--although i must say that castaneda's writing, if fiction, was much more sophisticated than morgan's.

i believe marlo morgan FELT this book was true, even if it never happened. it taps into an archetype, a human need to believe that somewhere there are people who are innocent, pure, wise, and holy. noble savages, perhaps. why do we need to believe this? to lessen our guilt? to give us hope? i don't know. but it's powerful. i mentioned i was reading the book to nearly a dozen people, and not one of them responded with any knowledge of the controversy.

what tripped her up were things like writing that australians don't have screens on their windows and that they use quarters in pay phones. much of what she wrote about aboriginal culture, such as their naming practices and using dreamcatchers, is actually closer to native american practices than aboriginal.

if you want to learn more, google marlo morgan and read some of the links.

book review: mutant message downunder part 2

you might call the real people "primitive". except that...marlo observed that they could communicate nonverbally, sometimes at a distance. at one point she is called on to lead the group. they find no food or water for two days. desperate, dying, on the third day, she receives a mental message to suck on a rock. she does, and her saliva flows again. she mentally asks how to find water and receives the message "be water." puzzled, she finally gives up left-brain thinking and begins to imagine herself as water. within half a hour, she rests on a rock and as she leans back, her hand touches a pool of fresh, clean water.

she witnessed the healing of a young man's broken leg. the compound fracture was bad, the bone sticking out of the skin. marlo, a healer herself, observed the real people's healers at work, moving their hands up and down the injured leg an inch from the skin to connect the injured leg with its former healthy pattern, eliminating swelling. two healers and the injured man together chant the bone pieces back into place. then a tar-like ointment made from aged clots of menstrual blood collected from the women was applied to the torn skin. the healing was so complete, he walked on it without a limp the next day.

marlo eventually learned that she and the tribal elder had been born in the same year on the same day at the same time, half the world apart. in a sense, they were soul mates and, she was told, had a soul agreement made before birth to seek each other out after 50 years had passed. it was her destiny to find the Real People, go on walkabout with them, get to know and appreciate them and their culture, and take a message back to the rest of the world.

the message was this: the Real People had made a decision to leave the earth. they elected to be celibate. when the last one of them dies, that will be the end of them.

they asked marlo, the mutant, to share their message, asking the civilized world to pay attention to what the modern way of life is doing to the water, the animals, the air, and the human race. they pray we find a solution to our problems without destroying the world. they said that some mutants were on the edge of regaining their individual spirit of true beingness,and that there is time to reverse the destruction.

but, they said, the rain pattern has already changed. the heat has increased. plant and animal reproduction have lessened. the real people cannot support themselves without food and water in the desert. they cannot help. they can only warn.

so they, along with other endangered species, are the canaries in the coal mine for planet earth. it's an incredible loss to lose the real people. the youngest member was 13 at the time of the book; he'd be 31 now, so a good many real people remain.

i hope they share more of their wisdom with us mutants. to that end, i'm creating a new blog entry, distilled from this book, to be called "lessons from the real people."

book review: mutant message downunder part 1

i just finished reading a remarkable book, mutant message downunder. this is not a new book. the copyright is 1991, but it was new to me, and i was assured by alec nicholls, who sold it to me at the january NLP meetup, that it was an excellent read. alec was right.

first, an aside. as a book editor, i wish the author had used an editor. the book is self-published. in some ways, that helps her message come across as personal and heartfelt. what distracting are typos, missing words, inconsistencies, and odd spacing between sentences. nevertheless, the story is so remarkable, i have to recommend it. do not try this at home! hire an editor!

marlo morgan was an american woman in australia, 50 years old, divorced, with grown children. her work was in the line of social work and public health. she had been honored for her work with young half-breeds in an urban area, and when she received an invitation to receive an award from an aboriginal tribe, she assumed it would be more of the same--a banquet, a plaque, recognition.

litle did she know that what lay ahead of her would profoundly change her life. she had been summoned by an undocumented nomadic group of 62 aborigines to join them on a walkabout for three months in the outback. during that time, she adapted to their lifestyle, a necessity for her survival, but not without difficulty. she took these people into her heart, and they took her into their hearts.

in this book, she documents her transformation to the way of life of a very remarkable group of people, who it turns out summoned her to walk with them and then commissioned her to take a message back to civilization.

note: i've read of one other instance of someone in a shamanic, preliterate culture summoning someone from the first world. martin prechtel in his books "secrets of a talking jaguar" and "long life, honey in the heart" relates how in his young adult life in new mexico he had a series of dreams, following which he began a slow and sometimes arduous journey south, through mexico and into guatemala. he recognized a village near lake atitlan from his dreams and then met a man who appeared in those dreams, chiv, whose first words to young martin were "what took you so long?" chiv was a shaman who apprenticed martin into the ways of the tzutijil mayans, and when civil war and americanization disrupted centuries-old village traditions, prechtel--by now a full-fledged tzutijil shaman himself--fled back to the u.s., with a lot of stories to share.

back to mutant message downunder. to this group, anyone who is not part of their tribe, or at least living in the traditional aborigine way, is alien. they are so tuned into emotion and intent, so close to nature, and so in touch with what they call divine oneness, that people who aren't like them seem to be aliens, or mutated humans. their name for marlo morgan was mutant. their name for themselves was the Real People.

in a harsh climate, they survive without modern tools, of choice. they make fire by rubbing sticks together. they cook on hot rocks. they sleep on the ground. they don't bathe. they eat worms and insects and raw meat. they don't need much water in a climate often 100-plus degrees. they are well adapted to the australian outback.

marlo's translator is named ooota. he had been taken from his mother at birth and raised in urban australia. at 16 he had run away to find his roots. now about 30 and the only member of the real people who spoke english, his task was to fetch marlo, convince her to stay, and help her assimilate.

early on, marlo felt a special connection with a man who was the tribal elder, or chief. she describes looking into his black velvet eyes and feeling complete peace and security. later, she discovers an incredible connection.

to be continued...