Status update for end of 2007

On the last day of 2007 - what's happening for me?

I said back in March that I planned to do these status updates "from time to time" - I'm glad I didn't set a specific time period. This is my second update.

Writing: City of Masks is in its final stages of being (self)-published. I'm gearing up to do a big promotion with press releases and so forth.

I'm having some fun putting together a podcast of myself reading it - each small section of the book will be an episode. Because it's told in journal entries (and other documents), and the first one is dated "the sixth of the first month", I'm going to try to release all the podcasts on the correct dates as per the timeline of the book. The first one is recorded and I plan to record the second later today. I'm using incidental music from Jon Sayles, a classical guitarist and Renaissance music enthusiast who loves it so much that he gives it away for anyone to use for any purpose. I emailed him and he's just as pleased as I am that I'll be using it, which is very cool.

The Journey in Four Directions didn't go anywhere this year. It's reaching the point where I feel the need to rewrite or at least redraft it, and I'm thinking of doing that by blogging bits here, once City of Masks is less central to my attention.

I haven't done any more substantial writing this year - just the blog, and hypnotherapy scripts. Next year, more writing.

Spiritual practice: my on-again, off-again relationship with centering prayer is off again. I just don't seem to stick to it if any kind of disruption comes along - this time it was being unwell for most of December (persistent cough, which has pretty much gone now). I think I may need to do myself a hypnotherapy script on creating a disciplined practice.

Exercise: I've started using the crosstrainer we bought for Erin to help with her fitness programme, so that she doesn't need to go to the gym after work and then get stuck in traffic (and for after her gym membership finishes). She's getting fit for ankle surgery. I'm getting fit for general life improvement. I'm only doing five minutes at a time but I'm getting faster and going further in that five minutes.

Tomorrow, Julianne and Mark M. are coming round and we're going tramping in the Waitakeres, something I've wanted to get back into for a while.

Hypno NZ: I'd hoped to have my online shop up and running by now, but there aren't yet any completed recording sets to put in it. Because of the cough and general voice roughness, I haven't recorded many scripts yet, though I've written several that are waiting for recording time. One this afternoon is a possibility.

Nobody has used the online booking form to book an appointment, and only one person has used the "tell me about yourself and your issue" feature (and never replied when I contacted her). Sigh.

I've been getting about one client a week since taking out an ad in the local paper. There's another, larger ad in a different free newspaper coming out in a couple of weeks; I'm going to try to "out" myself to my new boss before it comes out because someone at work is sure to see it. (So far there's never been a good time to mention at work that I'm developing a hypnotherapy practice on the side.) I think Max will be cool with it, as long as my work isn't compromised.

The therapy room is pretty much fully set up now, except I never did get a larger rug for the floor; it has two comfortable chairs, a set of drawers, a little table for my laptop, and a plant on a stand. I have all my diplomas and so forth nicely framed in the entryway.

Study: I'm in the process of enrolling for a Certificate in Health Science from Massey, which I'll be studying extramurally. It's the first step towards a bachelor's degree in health science, which could well lead to a Master's (endorsed in psychology) - though that would be about 10 years away unless I go full-time for a while, which isn't likely.

I was looking for a course where I could study anatomy, physiology, body systems in sickness and in health, nutrition, cognitive science and so forth, so that I can fill out my hypnotherapy skills with knowledge of the human mind-body system and basically help my clients more effectively. There are several around that are for naturopaths and medical herbalists and the like, but they all include things like iridology and homeopathy which I consider pseudoscience. I finally thought of checking Massey - their course hadn't come up on any of the Google searches I did, they need to work on that. It's pretty much exactly what I was looking for, from a reputable research-based university that's part of the NZ government's education system, at about the same cost as the dodgy ones.

I will have to take a couple of compulsory courses which sound fairly uninteresting and not all that useful, but they may have redeeming features that don't come through from the course descriptions. My current planned curriculum also doesn't quite give me a major in psych for the bachelor's degree, which would mean I'd have to make a case to get into the master's programme, but - cross bridge when come to. By the time I get to that point, if I even do, they may have changed the degree regulations anyway.

So, 2007 was kind of a ramp-up year. I'm looking forward to lots going on in 2008.

What I've been reading

I haven't posted for a while, so here's an update on what I've been reading.

I have about three more letters from Meditations on the Tarot to blog about, but they take a little while, so I'm waiting until I'm finished my online shop for hypno.co.nz. (That's what I've been working on in my spare time lately.)

While we were in LA I bought several books at Brand Books, an excellent little second-hand bookshop in Glenfield. One of them was New Techniques in Behavior Therapy and Hypnosis: Including Advanced Techniques in Sex Therapy by Arreed F. Barabasz, written while he was lecturing at Canterbury University (30 years ago, so the "new" isn't applicable any more). There's some good stuff on migraine which I'll make use of (basically you teach people to warm their hands, since that shifts blood flow away from the head, and too much blood flow in the head is part of the problem). There are also some useful ideas on systematic desensitization for phobias. The sex therapy material is mostly either things I already knew or things that would require me to be a doctor to put into practice, but there's also a section on sleep disorders with one or two useful points.

I'm partway through John Crowley's LITTLE, BIG; I've kind of got bogged down in the tragic story of Auberon and Sylvie. It's one of those books that's really well written but I don't necessarily enjoy all of. I've read it before; I don't remember whether I finished it then or not. Possibly not, since all I can recall is the very early scene where Smoky and Daily Alice go off on their honeymoon walking trip. I'd forgotten how much sex it has in it, and forgotten that there were drugs in it at all (no rock-and-roll, though). I've been stalled on it for a while, reading other things, but I do intend to finish.

A book that does include rock-and-roll is Russ Haines' Digital Audio: Record | Rip | Edit | Mix | Master | Burn | Stream, which although it was published in 2001 is still a very valuable resource, because unlike so many technical books it gives underlying principles, not specifics of using rapidly outdated tools. In fact, he emphasizes that the (software) tools you use don't particularly matter; there are several of them, find one you like and learn to use it well, they're much of a muchness as far as the basics are concerned. I want to summarize this one fully from the perspective of voice recording and post the results to my hypnotherapy site (since this is why I got it from the library: to learn how to make better recordings that I can sell in my new online shop). I'm waiting for a device he recommends, an analog-to-digital converter, to reach me from Australia, and it's taking forever. (Australia Post were slow when I lived there 17 years ago, and apparently are still slow. You'd think that for $9 they'd be able to move a small package 1200km in less than two weeks.) Once I have that I'll go through the book again.

On the spiritual side, two things. I've finally got round to Sister Mary Margaret Funk's A Mind at Peace, which I must have had in the "to-read" queue for over a year. It summarizes the teaching of John Cassian, who collected a lot of sayings from the Desert Fathers in the 5th century, on meditation and dealing with the "eight thoughts": food, sex, things, anger, dejection, acedia (spiritual weariness), vainglory and pride. Andrew has been using it in his Centering Prayer workshops for a while now. The writing itself is not tremendously well organized and is quite poorly edited, but the ideas are useful. I just finished the Sex chapter this morning, and already the book is making a difference. The basic principle, as with Centering Prayer, is to be aware of the eight thoughts (thus making them mindful rather than mindless), and then "renounce" them, or as Centering Prayer more helpfully says, let them go, so that they don't carry you where you don't want to go. It has a handy appendix with a number of different practices listed and briefly explained.

And speaking of Centering Prayer, Andrew lent me his copy of Love Is Stronger Than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls by Cynthia Bourgeault last week. I didn't quite finish it before I had to pass it on to Julianne, but it's interesting. We've been reading her books in reverse order, first Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, which borders on being orthodox (albeit in a slightly unusual mode), then The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming An Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart, which is definitely esoteric, and now this, her first book, which is very unusual indeed. She believes (and may be correct in believing, I'm not in a position to say) that she still has a powerful, living connection with her late teacher, a hermit monk with whom she shared a (non-physical) love affair which surprised both of them. Together they formed a "second body" which, she claims, persisted and continues to develop after his death.

Finally, I'm currently reading, and very much enjoying, Charles Stross's Glasshouse. Damn, this thing is good. Future society, nanoassemblers, ability to upload yourself, change your body, and - this is important - change your mental "state vector", i.e. the contents and pattern of your mind. Someone infected all the assemblers with the Curious Yellow information virus, which censored everyone's memories of the past as they went through the assemblers (to change bodies, heal, de-age or whatever) and made them vectors of the virus to the next assembler. A major war was fought to destroy Curious Yellow and "clean" those affected. During this war, people did terrible things, some of which they then had memory surgery to forget about. One such is the protagonist, who along with others in a similar situation volunteers for a sociological experiment, a recreation of the long-gone society of the late 20th/early 21st century, as best it can be reconstructed from fragmentary records - which is kind of 1950s suburbia (with strongly defined gender roles) plus a mixture of technologies from various eras. All, though, is not as it seems...

For its handling of gender alone, this novel deserves an award (in fact, I just took a moment to nominate it for the James Tiptree, Jr Award, and I'll be surprised if I'm the first to do so). (EDIT: I wasn't.) But it's also incredibly well written and gripping, real mind-expanding "what if" science fiction. Stross is finally learning to keep his tremendous intellect and immense knowledge in the background, dialled down to a level where lesser beings can still understand - something like what Connie Willis and Neal Stephenson have learned to do - and it makes it even better than his earlier books, because for almost all of the time I know what the hell he's talking about. It has the disturbing presence and depth of Neil Gaiman, than which I have no higher praise to offer.

Intermediate Christianity

Before I return Jacob Needleman's Lost Christianity to Julianne, I want to note down the things that struck me in it, particularly "intermediate Christianity".

Intermediate Christianity isn't in the sense of "basic, intermediate, advanced" (though that works too), but more in the sense of a Christianity that's intermediate between the external, "assent to propositions + good behaviour" Christianity and the full-on mystical union with God. It has a more modest aim than the latter; it aims to bring into being the soul.

Needleman's argument (derived from his mysterious Father Sylvan) is that what we usually tend to call "soul" is actually just thought and emotion at the external, small-s-self, egoic level. Actual soul is much more; it involves a return to authentic being which reflects the original paradisal innocence (which, as someone who aspires to be the Innocent Man, is something I'm interested in). This authentic being is not the being constructed for us by our various interactions with the world; it's the "face you had before you were born" of Zen. For most people, it isn't simply hidden, Father Sylvan claims; actually, it doesn't even exist. It only comes to exist when we let go of the external thoughts and emotions that we think of as our "self". When we do so, we encounter, not different thoughts and emotions, but a new level of knowing and a new level of feeling that is quite unlike the former level.

"Intermediate Christianity" also points to the soul as the aspect of ourselves that is able to relate both to the world and to God, paying attention to both - and "attention" is a key word. Here he brings in centering prayer specifically - he was among the early discoverers of what Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington were up to (the book is originally from the 1980s).

The soul, too, is formed, is present, in the moment of self-questioning, before our genuine response to anything turns into a programmed reaction, and before we resolve the paradoxes. Retaining the energy of this moment of questioning within ourselves, rather than allowing it to disperse by being absorbed in the usual thoughts and emotions, we can come to awareness of the subtler energies within ourselves which form, eventually, the soul.

We have been carrying on all this time as if the Bible addressed itself to people at the level we are at, the external level of ordinary thoughts and emotions, and told them to be at the level of saints. No wonder we couldn't do it. No, says Father Sylvan (echoing Gurdjieff); it addresses itself to intermediate Christians, to people who have a genuine existence and a real soul, who are able to love others as they love themselves because they have an authentic self to love.

And finally, Needleman offers reflections on what it means to "love" our neighbour. Just to help them in ways that are beneficial to them? This is a weak definition of love; love is not less than this but surely it is more than this. "To love my neighbour is to assist the arising and the unfolding in him of that which can harmonize the real elements of his nature" - and we can't do this for others until we have done it for ourselves. (As the great Hasidic teacher said, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?")

I'll close with personal responses to two quotes from Father Sylvan.

"The intellect cannot be abandoned until it knows why it must be abandoned and theoretically agree to it." - p. 207

I think this has been a part of my struggle with Centering Prayer (which I still don't practice regularly and consistently). I find it difficult to let go; I need to have reasons why it's a good idea (though I now have a great many).

One of the reasons that "intermediate Christianity" appeals to me as a concept is that I don't feel ready for the higher kind, the mysticism of a Theresa of Avila or John of the Cross that gives up all for the beloved. It doesn't reflect well on me, but it's true: I just don't love God that much, not yet, anyway. Seeking to be the Innocent Man, to have a genuine existence, to form a soul? That I can aspire to.

"...in order to attain to the immediate you must begin by setting aside the language of the Christian religion." - p. 208

I've been trying to read some of the writings of the theosophers, Jacob Boehme and co., and my problem is that although (I'm reliably informed) what they're expressing is not just the same old-time religion that I strove so earnestly in when I was young and foolish, their language is the language of that religion, and it's a barrier for me; I keep being emotionally ejected into the assumption that the language is empty, which for them it wasn't, but for me, now, it is. So approaching things a bit differently - whether via Buddhist language, or Meditations on the Tarot, or Kabbalah, or however - is helping me to, paradoxically, get back to Christianity in a way that things phrased as Christianity don't. Again, I'm not claiming that I don't have issues here; clearly I do. But given that I do, the fact that I can find a way of working around them is, I think, the important fact.

Wisdom's Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition

I'm reading Wisdom's Children by Arthur Versluis at the moment. It traces the obscure history of "theosophy" - not Madam Blavatsky's theosophy, but the Protestant mystical tradition of that name - starting from Jacob Boehme, though acknowledging the older tradition of which he was a part. I'm up to Part 2, which is about the foundational doctrines of theosophy, and here's my summary of Chapters 8-11 (with some of my own insights and speculations added).

There are three worlds, corresponding to the three persons of the Trinity. There is the "wrath world", the world of dark fire, or Hell. There is the elemental world, the one we see around us. And there is the world of love and light, or Paradise.

Initially these three worlds were in balance. The wrath world, which is a world of separation and finitude, was necessary to bring creation into being (basically the Kabbalistic idea of tzimtzum). It arose from God's desire to have an other. Out of the separation of the darkness (the wrath world) from the light (the love world) came the creation of the elemental world. Unlike the early Gnostics, the theosophers did not see the elemental world as an evil creation of a demiurge but the good creation of God.

But Lucifer fell from the love world into the wrath world through his pride and self-will, and through the temptation of Adam and Eve brought wrath and darkness, separation and death, up into the elemental world. (All of this is seen as "spiritual symbolism for events with real consequences, not history".)

Christ's incarnation into the elemental world, however, brought love into that world just as the Fall had brought wrath, and by his death and resurrection he showed the way to Paradise: the transformation of wrath into love, darkness into light, separation into union, death into eternal life. Eventually, the separation of the three worlds will again be complete, redeeming the whole universe, and shutting away wrath, death and darkness forever from the elemental world.

We, however, participate in this process all the time; we are a microcosm of this macrocosm. If we are actively transforming wrath into love, and passively receiving the grace of God for this purpose and aligning ourselves with God's will (which are different ways of phrasing the same thing), we are fitting ourselves for the light world of union, Paradise. On the other hand, if we are abiding in wrath, or worse still transforming love into wrath, we are fitting ourselves for the dark world of separation.

Salvation, then, is not the acceptance of an historical atonement at one point in the past, but the enacting of an eternal atonement in the continuous present - a view which drew much wrath on the theosophers from the conventional religious authorities.

Versluis is casting out fascinating hints on how this works in practice, which are sounding like centering prayer. I'm looking forward to reading more.

Meditations on the Tarot: The Emperor

The Emperor, says the Unknown Friend, is a symbol of authority - which he distinguishes from force or power. The Emperor doesn't bear a sword, but a sceptre; he has renounced compulsion and violence. In fact, his authority is shown by what he has actively renounced. "He has renounced ease, being not seated. He has renounced walking, being in a leaning position and having his legs crossed. He may neither advance in order to take the offensive, nor move back in order to retreat... he is a guardian bound to his post." He has renounced movement and action, by the position of his legs and arms. His belt restrains his instinctive nature, and his heavy crown painfully restrains his thought and arbitrary imagination, for it is a crown of thorns, the sign not only of his legitimacy but of a mission from above. It is not a personal mission; it is a mission symbolized by the throne, against which the shield rests.

These four renunciations establish a fourfold emptiness, into which the fourfold divine name YHWH, source of authority, can enter. His personal intellectual initiative is renounced in favour of divine initiative; his action and movement are renounced and replaced by the action of divine revelation and the movement of divine magic; his personal mission, his name, is renounced and replaced with authority, law and order. This leads the UF to a long digression on free will and divine power which I won't go into as there's nothing that strikes me as particularly new about it, until he gets to the idea of tzimtzum, the withdrawal of God, taught by Lurianic Kabbala.

God, according to this idea, had to withdraw in order to make a void within himself where creation - and hence freedom - could come into existence, and the Emperor imitates this action. In doing so, he enables the complete divine name to manifest through him, the complete authority of God, the post of the Emperor, "the state of consciousness of the complete synthesis of mysticism, gnosis and sacred magic", initiation. That is, the state of consciousness in which the temporal and eternal are one and are simultaneously visible. This sanctification of the Divine Name in humanity is the deeper meaning of the first petition of the Lord's Prayer, "hallowed be thy name".

Another digression, this time on Hermetic philosophy, concludes: "its teaching... consists of spiritual exercises and all its arcana (including the Arcana of the Tarot) are practical spiritual exercises, whose aim is to awaken from sleep ever-deeper layers of consciousness." The Gospels are also spiritual exercises, for participation, not just scrutiny. "The aim of spiritual exercises is depth. It is necessary to become deep in order to be able to attain experience and knowledge of profound things. And it is symbolism which is the language of depth - thus arcana, expressed by symbols, are both the means and the aim of the spiritual exercises of which the living tradition of Hermetic philosophy is composed." After a digression on reincarnation - which he sees as God giving multiple opportunities to begin again - he states, "An arcanum practised as a spiritual exercise for a sufficient length of time becomes an aptitude. It does not give the pupil knowledge of new facts, but makes him suited to acquire such knowledge when he has need of it... The initiate is one who knows how to attain knowledge, i.e. who knows how to ask, seek and put into practice the appropriate means in order to succeed... Spiritual exercises alone have taught him." He calls this the arcanum of the three united endeavours (ask, seek, knock), which lead to receiving, finding and gaining access.

The Emperor is thus the one who has authority because he represents humanity before God. He is not superhuman, but more human than anyone else and so is worthy to guard the Throne of David. In becoming fully human, he is also being transformed into the image and likeness of God; in renouncing the four arbitrary liberties of humanity, he is crucified, wounded with four wounds.

This is a complicated and digression-filled letter with multiple points which, ironically, don't appear fully integrated (given that the Emperor is the fully integrated man). The most immediately valuable to me are the side points about spiritual exercises as preparation for knowledge, making you the kind of person who can know. A spiritual exercise in which we renounce intellectual initiative, movement, action and personal missions - in which we sit silent and still and listen - is therefore preparation for us to be filled with knowledge of God, to become truly ourselves, truly human and in the image of God. This, then, is the purpose of Centering Prayer.

Nice bit of serendipity

You can't tell, of course, but I'm blogging this across our brand-new wireless network, which I spent most of yesterday morning setting up. I hit a few issues initially, but now it works really well.

We were sitting in the lounge taking it for a test-drive, and Erin went to the NZ Herald site to see if it's possible to subscribe just to the Weekend Herald (it isn't). While there, we spotted a random Google ad for The Labyrinth Company, and clicked on it, since we're interested in labyrinths. (I talked about putting in a garden labyrinth at our other place. There isn't really room for one here.)

On their About Labyrinths page they say:

Research conducted by Dr. Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School’s Mind/Body Medical Institute has found focused walking meditations are highly efficient at reducing anxiety and eliciting what Dr. Benson calls the ‘relaxation response’. This effect has significant long term health benefits, including lower blood pressure and breathing rates, reduced incidents of chronic pain, reduction of insomnia, improved fertility, and many other benefits. Regular meditative practice leads to greater powers of concentration and a sense of control and efficiency in one's life. Labyrinth walking is among the simplest forms of focused walking meditation, and the demonstrated health benefits have led hundreds of hospitals, health care facilities, and spas to install labyrinths in recent years.

We thought that was pretty interesting, so we Googled for Dr Benson and his Institute and found one of the best descriptions of Centering Prayer we've seen that doesn't call it that - he calls it "Elicitation of the Relaxation Response". It's all there: choose a focus word from your belief system, sit quietly, close your eyes, progressively relax your muscles, breathe slowly and naturally, when you find yourself drifting into thoughts gently return to your word, practice for 10 to 20 minutes twice daily for optimum effect.

It sounds, on rereading, as if he is more on the lines of John Main's Christian Meditation, where you keep repeating the word, rather than Centering Prayer as such, where you only use the word to return to when needed. But basically it's all the same stuff.

I'll have to look out for his book. And a link to his research is definitely going on the Hypno NZ website.

orthodox, catholic AND protestant, with small letters

I've had it in mind to do this blog post for a while now.

The three (current) major organizational groupings of Christianity are Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant. Some time before the Reformation and before the rise of Islam, the third great grouping was the Nestorians, who spread from the Mediterranean to China, but there are only 200,000 of them left now. There are other small groups that don't fit into the three large groups - the Mormons spring to mind - but for most purposes, "three major groups" is close enough for jazz.

As it happens I'm part of the Protestant grouping, which gives me more flexibility in cherrypicking bits from the various traditions. I like to say that tradition funds my exploration rather than restricting it. There is a danger in cherrypicking - you can leave out important aspects because you don't happen to like them. I'm aware of this risk. The counter-risk of taking the whole package on is that you take on some really stupid stuff uncritically because it's historically part of the whole, even if it doesn't apply well any more (or even if it was a bad idea from the start). This is the essence of being protestant-with-a-small-p: To take a critical stance towards your tradition (including, in my case, the Protestant Reformation itself and some of its historically and culturally rooted assumptions). Protestants with a capital P haven't always been good at this.

I'm also orthodox-with-a-small-o. I've talked about this before in "Orthodox, open-minded, skeptical and happy". And I'm catholic-with-a-small-c, that is, I consider myself a part of the whole Church-with-a-capital-C, which exists across time and space and merely organizational boundaries (and doctrinal boundaries, which aren't necessarily the same thing any more). I suppose - I just realized this - that the "open-minded" bit = "catholic", and the "skeptical" bit = "protestant", kind of.

I'm not sure what my point is. Perhaps it's that these labels are more useful when we think about their original intents than when we use them as the names of tribes. And that all the bits are important; nobody has everything right and nobody has nothing right.

It's also part of my continuing attempt to find a way to describe myself. I really like the Gospel of Thomas, a very likely early although non-canonical gospel text which may preserve genuine sayings of Jesus. (I treat it as a Scroedinger's cat in this regard, neither affirming nor denying.) At one point in it, Jesus asks his disciples, "What do you say I am like? Or to what will you compare me?". John says, "You are like a philosopher of the age." Peter says, "You are like a holy angel." But it's Thomas who "wins". He says: "My mouth is unable to say what you are like." I sometimes think that not only is my mouth unable to say what Jesus is like, it's unable to say what I'm like either. Apparently this is part of the point of centering prayer: you sit wordless and eventually you realize who God is and who you are beyond all the words.

I'm rambling. I'll shut up now.

Portraying myself

First, another quote from City of Masks (Tamas's sermon, given while, ironically, disguised as someone else):

...A mask is made, not only by the craftsman whose hands have formed its physical being – as parents form our bodies – but by the wearer and by those the wearer encounters – as we, and those we befriend and oppose and learn from, form ourselves as human beings, form our souls.

The soul is a flame, we are taught, like and yet unlike to this flame which burns beside me; it is a flame which feels, reasons, speaks, forms relationships of love – and also of hatred. And like this flame beside me, it can be seen, and when we make it manifest, we call this a mask. For the mask which hides is not the true mask, it is not the light but the darkness; it is the mask which reveals that is the true mask. This is why, when we honour some man or woman by naming him or her a Character, the mask that is given to him or her is the mask of his or her own face. We are saying: This man has portrayed himself, this woman has portrayed herself. Only his face, or her face, can represent who and what this person is, for he or she has been himself or herself.

And so I say to you, brothers and sisters, children of the Lord Sun, put on the Sunmask each day in your lives. Take upon yourself the light, not as something merely external to yourself, but as something that rises up from within you, that is the truth of who you are. Each day arise, each year renew yourselves, in the struggle against evil, in the struggle against ignorance, in the struggle to bring truth out where it may be seen. Wear the true mask. Do not have one appearance in your words and another in your actions; be whole. Do not wear the mask of darkness; wear the mask of light. Wear the mask of your own face and let that be the face of the Lord Sun. And if you do so, you too, in your daily lives, in your daily business, in your daily rising and your daily shining, in small ways and in large ways, you will be heroes of the Sun.

Now, personal context.

I realized during Centering Prayer on Easter Sunday that the next thing I need to work on in myself is the way I was "devoiced" by my family - which includes the critical voices they implanted so I keep second-guessing and editing myself. I read a chapter in Psycho-Cybernetics on exactly that on Monday night, "as it happens". Part of what Maxwell Maltz recommends there is to just talk, without constant vigilance and self-censorship and self-criticism. He answers the inevitable "But it's important to think about what you say!" with: Yes, but not for people who already do it too much. Body temperature is important; if you don't have it, you're dead. But if you have too much of it, despite the fact that it's important to have some, a doctor will try to reduce it. Same principle.

I was talking about this with Andrew at spiritual direction last week (hence the realization on Sunday), and also last night, and we were looking at strategies I could use. One I came up with was to start another blog, a pseudonymous one, one that didn't have my real name and my photo and links to my professional website, where I could behave badly - cuss people out, be sarcastic, rant, vent - without feeling the need to self-censor.

I thought about it on the way home and thought, "No. There's already too much of that on the Internet. That's like deliberately dissociating that part of myself and saying it isn't me. It's putting on a false mask."

So here's what I'm going to do instead.

When I'm blogging away and I think of something sarcastic, negative or critical to say, I'm going to say it. I'm not going to censor it out so that I can look like a nice guy. BUT, I will go back before I post and put an advisory at the start of the entry. Something like:

Advisory: Sarcastic and critical comments about a named group (theological liberals).

That way, I can be more spontaneous, but at the same time I can demonstrate that I'm aware of the fact that I'm acting badly.

I don't know whether that's a good solution or not. The more I look at it the more stupid it sounds. I'm going to assume that's my critical voice, and post it anyway.

Current Status

I think I'll do this from time to time, as much to give myself a record as anything. What's taking up mind-space or life-space or just in progress for me at the moment?

Writing:

• City of Masks is with Macmillans for consideration.
  
• The Journey in Four Directions I've just signed up with an agent who will represent it at some book fairs in Europe.
  
• I'm thinking about sending 'Gu' to a magazine, maybe today.
  
• Restarting the Alphabet is drafted up to the first third ('Maiden'), and sitting at the Glyphpress forum.
• Topia has been stalled for a while. I've finally realized what one of the main themes is: Letting, or not letting, your disabilities define you. I need to rewrite pretty much from scratch, I think, which doesn't sound like fun.

Games:

• City of Masks has had one playtest and I've included it in the MS I sent to Macmillans. It needs more playtesting.
• Errantry needs playtesting too.
• The unnamed third game is stuck while I try to figure out the mechanics.
  
• I'm signed up for Fred's Amber play-by-wiki game, starting at the beginning of April.
  

Spiritual Practice:

• I'm doing my Transforming Practice every morning, usually in the shower. Erin used it yesterday (when she got to work but before she left the car) and said it helped with her crappy day.
• I'm doing the rosary on my commute. It's good.
• Centering prayer about 5 days out of 7 (in the evenings). Mostly I get the kind of good where you call yourself back to attending, more than the kind of good where you are attending.
• Tai Chi with a bit of Qi Gong - I count this as spiritual practice, partly in order to defy Descartes. I'm probably doing that 4 or 5 nights out of 7.
• I've given up buying books for Lent, which I've been on the verge of regretting a few times but have managed to stick to.
  

Websites/Programming:

• I'm working on getting my online booking system set up on hypno.co.nz. I'm now at the boring testing and perfecting bit, so progress has slowed.
  
• After that I'll turn my attention to finishing Unfolding Forms.

Hypnotherapy:

• I'm waiting for Roger to come back to me with a date for my interview. I strongly suspect, from what others have said, that I'll end up getting the diploma because I pass the Association exam.
• The Association exam is at the end of April.
• I'm reading Maxwell Maltz's Psycho-Cybernetics.
  
• On the business side, I've set up a bank account and got business cards and my room is pretty much set up. I'd like to get a better chair for myself, and a rug for the winter, and I want to get a standalone drive case so I can use the CD writer with the laptop to give people CDs of the suggestions to take with them at the end of the session. After the start of the financial year on 1 April I'll start spending money again on this stuff. Also a wireless network setup.
  

Reading:

• I find I'm tired in the evenings, so I'm mostly reading light stuff (and finding good light stuff hard to come by - I read too fast and the best authors write too slowly).
• Psycho-Cybernetics is interesting; "Man is not a machine, but he has a machine", namely the subconscious, which is a goal-seeking mechanism according to Maltz. It's programmed by the various messages we receive but we can take conscious control of the process and reprogram it. I'm not sure I totally buy it, but it's interesting.
• The Tribe of Tiger is the other non-fiction I'm reading at the moment.

Forums:

• I'm chiming in a bit on both "I would knife-fight a man" and Story-Games. Racism is one of the current hot topics at both.