When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.
— Psalm 8:3-5
Another Fine Orbit
Our human nature is so complex and powerful that our expression of it can range from wonderful and beautiful to terrible and ugly.
As we journey through life, we have all been drawn to the Light that casts out darkness, and to the Love that overcomes fear. We have come to understand that fear is a tool that can help us avoid dangers to our physical and emotional welfare, but if it is not kept in balance its grip will make it very difficult to enjoy this journey we are on together.
With the mass media of this day so focused on the terrible and the ugly, it is inevitable that our cultural mind is suffering from the dis-ease of unbalanced fears.
How can we be a part of the blessing and healing of this deeply rooted dis-ease in ourselves, and fellow humanity?
The core of every true spiritual teaching conveyed to us reveals that fear is a product of the illusion of separateness. Overcoming this illusion takes a vigilant seeking out of experiencing our oneness with our benevolent Creator’s selfless love.
It’s our choice–accepting an illusion that seems so real–or seeking a truth that seems so illusive.
It’s not an easy path; One-der and Beauty. The messengers and guides give implausible directions: love God and love thy neighbor as thyself. Love thine enemy. Live beyond the illusion of possessions. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Give. Serve. Eat My Body. Drink My Blood. Fear not. Let go and let God. Seek and ye shall find.
Only faith in a greater Power than our own can lead us to experience and know the way.
May the power of the Sun/Son at this Solstice re-awaken our recognition of Your Wonder and Beauty, and may we take on more fully a oneness with Your image.
Navajo Path of Beauty Prayer:
Beauty before me I walk
Beauty below me I walk
Beauty all around me I walk
In Beauty is all restored
In Beauty is all made whole.
From Father Paul
Excerpts from class on Flesh Body from January, 1969
how much more is there to man and his vehicle than what we understand? Now this is what we try to reach, is to endeavor to understand the body that we are driving. And many people today are doing just that without really knowing how to do it. They are driving a vehicle which has tremendous possibilities and a tremendous and unlimited source of power, but they don’t understand it. And so they put it in high gear when it shouldn’t be in high gear and they wear it out pretty fast.
Instead of understanding and learning about their vehicle, and learning how to refuel it, not just food but otherwise learning how to take care of it, learning how to use it and its unlimited powers, they go on blindly shoving it into high gear when it should only be running in low gear and letting something else do the rest of the work.
Then there is another very strange and very interesting part of man’s body, when we look at the circulatory system, and that is the fact that every man and woman–because when we speak of man here, we mean man and woman both–a great deal, about 99 percent of the function of the entire human system, is an electro-chemical function; not just chemical–electro-chemical. For around this body–I’m not talking about auras now–around this body the electro-magnetic fields circulate, that come from the functioning of this vehicle. This was not taken out of books; I have measured these things myself. I know. This circulatory system that we see here which is the distributing system, you might call it, is the part of man that when it is not functioning properly, some organ of man within the vehicle is going to pay the penalty of working below normal.
Now, if you do not get enough air in the lungs, you are going to first of all not be able to carry in these small cells of the blood the amount of oxygen and some other qualities which are not always definable chemically but can be defined electrically, and some through other means, to the cell system of the body so that they can be recharged, so to speak. Not from what’s in the blood. But they will set up and stimulate the system so that from this other structure that holds this together–and it does–it will be recharged, the cells will be, and brought back into strength and vitality, and as we would say, the body is then rested and ready for use.
The condition of man’s body is the mirror of his mind, 80 percent, at least 80 percent; I’m being extremely conservative when I say this because I believe in staying on the conservative side of things. If I have a fact I will declare it, I will prove it. But if I do not have a fact, and this fact is unknown, what, how the percentage, how far the percentage of it works. If I were talking to my students alone I would say this is in totality that man’s body is controlled through his mind. But I know also that we live in a strange world where we live in the midst of tremendous electrical fields.
This building, for instance. It’s a rather small and insignificant place, but there are numbers of wires and cables running through the walls that are radiating electrical fields of energy that we are exposed to at this moment. Of course when you are here you are exposed to some other things too, but we won’t talk about that; we’ll talk about the things out here in this physical world. When you go down the street, you’re exposed to millions of volts of electro-magnetic force, and each one of these cells are exposed to it, so that is why we have to say that the body is [only] 80 percent reactive to the mind. Because there is another quantity here that it reacts to because of the external conditions that we are passing through. These external conditions, of course, can be controlled, but that is another story.
The circulatory system of man, if he is in a state of depression the pulse of the heart changes and the metabolism which is the breaking-down and rebuilding of the blood system, allowing the food energy and, oh, like your vitamins–we’ll call them vitamins–and things of this nature go into the blood stream. And due to the fact that our entire physical vehicle, as we learned last week, functions on a basic principle–that is, it’s motivated, the function of the body itself is motivated by either external or chemical shock, in reality. Come down to the fine points of function, all things function from this basic form….
Now what has this to do with our, well, let’s say our attainment, our godliness, our ability to know God, our ability to receive the light of Christ–and I mean light as it is spoken of in the Bible? It is simply this: that when a person and his body is not fully functioning, neither is his own spirit functioning normally. I’ll call it spirit. I’ll call it Self, because it is the Self. It is the you part, the part that is you. It is the part which does not die and never will.
And after all, anyone who comes to a church certainly should be seeking to know a little bit more of themselves; and the ultimate goal is to prepare yourself for that long trip later on after you’ve dropped this vehicle that we’re talking about. Because if it isn’t for that purpose, then a person is wasting their time. They actually don’t need to worry about anything else. But when …we start to worry, we start to get depressed, we start to slow down this circulatory system, then we are inviting all of these diseases which are derived from this.
Now you can call them dozens of names, such as arterial sclerosis, arthritis, old age, cell deterioration, as they might say, in a person that has got to be, oh, sixty, a real old man, and I could dig up probably ten more names in the book, but fundamentally they are only one thing: they are the lack of circulation and life in your body. They are the lack of coordination between your mind and your function of your physical being, for it does control the physical body….
Jesus said, “Thy word shall become flesh; as the Father said it and gave it unto me, so also I give it unto you.” Now this is not a parable; this is a reality. This is a strict straightforward statement in the gospels.
There’s another very interesting general statement and a very accurate statement, and that is the fact that many people talk about the Tree of Life, many people talk about how this Tree of Life looks or what it represents and all of this sort. There is also the Tree of Life here, and it can be traced in the body, and we’ll do it one of these evenings before long. But the principal thing that I want to bring to you this evening in the first half of this lecture is the fact that every single part of your physical being is adequately supplied with channels to maintain and keep it alive, keep it alive. Foolish statement, isn’t it.
Maybe some of you people have studied some physiology; I hope you have, because this will only help. In the first place, the nerve system–which we’ll see next week, along with the rest of the lecture–is constantly pulsing with life and energy. This arterial system is caused to function, not by the driving force of the heart pump alone, but also the motion that’s within the body itself. The light motion and pulse that is within the body itself, and it is there….
Life is a strange and beautiful thing, and it is as scientific as anything that you can find. Because life is; there is life and this is a force and power that comes from the Son of God. And that life-force isn’t something which runs just down, like this, through the various blood cells and the lymph and so forth that feed through these arteries. But there is a distinct electrical pulsation that moves across the trunk of this body, in where the principal organs lay, and that pulsation is just as regular as can be. And that is an electrical pulsation, and it goes about seventeen beats a minute–in the neighborhood of that.
This is a thing that throughout this body, as I spoke of, is the electrical reactions and electrical fields. Now these fields are created by the spiritual body of man and its reaction in the physical, in what we call metabolism. It is the breaking down of cell structure and the use of this energy in motivating action and heat, for light. It is through this and the cross-pulse of the physical body that we have a constant awakening and a constant rebuilding of cells. If we will let it! If we will let it; and this is the sad part, that we do not believe many of the things that have been taught us for thousands of years, or should have been taught us–at least they were there in the Bible–and therefore we suffer the lack and are unhappy because this body of ours doesn’t function properly. And of course then we have to, and it is necessary that we should, if we do not know how to take care of this body then we should go to a doctor and get emergency help.
And then the next thing we should do is go someplace and start to find out if God really provided a way for us to be healthy. And of course this brings a big question. First of all, do you believe in a supreme Power, and a supreme reality? And second, if you do, then it is time to get with it and start to study something about it, and start to learn some of the things that control it. Because your mind does control energy….
… Man’s vehicle is three-fold and there isn’t any question about this. We also have here in Romans 12:1-3, Paul says, “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as living sacrifices holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. For by grace given unto me, I bid every one among you not to think of himself more highly than that of his thoughts.” Now, this is just one tiny quotation. There are many, many quotations in the Bible regarding these things…
Now this form, therefore, this form as I pictured it here before, like this, if we were to look back and see some of the ancient hieroglyphs, we would find that … the letters of the English language, for instance, evolved from pictures of men and their action. And …, if traced through the, well, we’ll say from the Semitic through to the Chaldean, down to the Hebrew, and so forth, they actually depict what that letter represents …. A combination of letters, forms, represent–put together, mean a certain thing. We pronounce certain vowels, certain sounds, and they represent certain things, but they will stimulate certain actions too. And they will do this through the power and the spirit existing; because He said, “thy word shall become flesh.”
Now I believe this implicitly, because I know it to be a fact. I’ve experimented with it. Man has a primary purpose of lifting up his whole being toward the Son. Many people make this mistake when they say “toward God”. Yeah, toward the Son. He said only through the Son shall you find the face of the Father….
Another thing is, if you’ll notice the spine of man, which is back of this, and I don’t have a skeleton form here, but the spine of man is back of this. Also the arteries run, the main stem runs right along in this same formation. The other answer
is that man walks upright on the earth and he takes out of this and feeds up through.
We take, for instance, the sciatic nerve that runs up through here and comes back, goes through here and connects at the base of the spine just above the bone here. This is a feeder of electro-magnetic energy as well as the spleen here, that picks up the electro-magnetic forces of the earth.
And down through the head comes the force through the great chakra, as the Hindus call it- .. it comes through the head and down through the entire body. This way it feeds as it falls through, as it drops through, it feeds the whole body with the forces of life.
Now this is not an imaginary thing, get that out of your head, because this is a real thing and can be demonstrated. It can be demonstrated. And that primarily is the reason for this form. It not only is possible to feed it with life-forces, but it is also possible to feed every part of it so that man is independent in his choice and he has something to use, and stand up, climb, sit down, lay down, do any of the things that he pleases to do. And at the same time, one step further, the Master said that this body, if it is full of light, becomes eternal. And I mean it like I said it, that this flesh is everlasting.
Now it turns in its nature, that’s true. He went and ascended; he told us. ..”all these things which I do, so can you do also”–Buddha used different words, but he said the same thing–“and even greater than these”. Because he knew that two thousand years later man would have evolved to a higher state of being, with greater power and greater possibilities. And he would be living in a world where there was more force, more energy in the atmosphere that he was living in. And in the last fifty, last twenty years, last fifteen years, ours has increased tremendously, over 600 percent. Yes?
Flowers generate weak electric fields, and a new study shows that bumblebees can actually sense those electric fields using the tiny hairs on their fuzzy little bodies.
“The bumblebees can feel that hair bend and use that feeling to tell the difference between flowers,” says Gregory Sutton, a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.
People used to think that perceiving natural electric fields was something that animals only did in water. Sharks and eels can do it, for example. The platypus and spiny anteaters were the only land critters known to have electroreceptive organs, but these have to be submerged in water in order to work.
Then, a few years ago, Sutton and his colleagues showed that bumblebees could sense electric fields in the air.
“There is, all the time, a background electric field in the atmosphere,” says Sutton. “Any plant that’s connected to the ground will generate its own electric field just by interactions with the atmosphere.”…
But how were the bumblebees able to sense them? That’s what the researchers tracked in their latest study, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“We used a laser beam that could measure small motions of an antenna or a hair, and that’s how we measured how much the air and the antenna moved in response to an electric field,” says Sutton.
They also stuck a very fine electrode wire into the nerve at the socket of the bottom of a hair to record the activity of nerve cells there.
“They’ve got these really fuzzy hairs all over their body, and when they approach something with an electric field, that electric field will bend the hairs on their body,” says Sutton. And that bending generates a nerve signal.
The results suggest that bumblebees can sense an electric field produced by a flower that’s up to 55 centimeters (nearly 22 inches) away. But that’s under ideal conditions in the lab — Sutton says 10 centimeters or so (about 4 inches) is more likely in the real world.
“I’m very excited by this because these little mechanically sensitive hairs are common all over the insect world,” says Sutton. “I think this might be something we see in more insects than just bumblebees.”
“Basically this just adds to the long list of incredible things that bees can do,” says Robert Gegear, who studies pollinating insects at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass.
He says it’s unclear if bees really use electric fields in the real world, where flowers have a ton of other compelling features, like color and smell.
“And so the one question I have is: ‘What is the functional relevance?’ — not just from the bee side but from the plant side as well,” says Gegear.
For all we know, Gegear says, bumblebees may detect electric fields for something that has nothing to do with flowers, like navigation or communication. NPR All Things Considered
Beekeeping Inside a small bedroom of a palatial home in Orinda, California, a suburb of the San Francisco Bay Area, Khaled Almaghafi climbs a ladder and draws a rectangle on the ceiling where it meets the wall. His assistant takes a saw to a chunk of plaster, a flap of ceiling drops and thousands of honeybees escape — flying through the room, clinging to the curtains in clumps. H doesn’t look like your typical beekeeper. No mask, big white suit, or gloves. This 52-year-old father of four looks like he’s heading to an office job, wearing pleated pants and a button-down shirt. “If they attack me badly in the face, I will wear a suit. I don’t mind getting stung once or twice, it gives me the energy!” he says.
That’s one way of looking at it. But also consider that Almaghafi has worked with bees since he was a kid, growing up in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. “Most of my childhood was with my dad, watching him raising the bees,” he says. In Yemen, beekeeping is respected and often family-run work. Almaghafi’s relatives raised bees the traditional way, in hollow trees and with hives made from bamboo. “But my dad, he was the first one to bring the modern style hive from Egypt to Yemen with the tin frame box. The American style hive,” he says
. “If you go to the honey shop in Yemen, it’s just like you’re going to the museum,” he says. “The floor, the walls, everything, like you are inside a beehive. Imagine you go there and you smell the honey from all over the country.”
But there’s one special Yemeni honey that’s coveted worldwide. It comes from Yemen’s Do’an Valley, in the country’s south, where the beekeeping tradition dates back thousands of years. There, the jujube or sidr tree flowers once a year. When it does, beekeepers from all over Yemen move their bees to that region.
“You can smell the honey from a distance,” Almaghafi says. “It tastes different, smells different.” Like perfume, he explains. People add herbs to it and use it as an aphrodisiac and a cure for various illnesses.
Honey shops in Yemen are also abundant. “Every corner has a honey shop, like here every corner has a liquor store. A lot of competition,” Almaghafi says.
He thinks about this in California, as he puts buzzing bees into a bucket, like coaxing a genie back into the bottle. He also thinks about faith.
Almaghafi’s work is spiritual. He’s Muslim and the Quran says God told bees how to make honey. For Almaghafi, they’re proof of a higher being. “You see how they dance, how they collect the honey, how they work,” says Almaghafi. “You feel deep inside there is a creator, created all those things and created us and the whole globe.” It troubles him that some can see bees, like Islam, as dangerous. “They benefit us for pollination, for medicine, for the environment. If it wasn’t for them, we’d be stuck,” he says. “They do all this for nothing!” And when he thinks about the war in Yemen, he remembers his father and how he took an old box from his military days, once filled with bullets, and converted it into a beehive. Almaghafi hopes that, soon, more people in Yemen will do that too. –From PRI’s The World
From Mother Ruth
Jesus does not personally leave all his other work to appear to one person. No one knows how the Lord can appear to numbers of people all over the world, and many at the same time, but he is not contained in a body. He is a Spirit and is not confined within any form or place. Spirit is everywhere and can flare up here or there, without moving or diminishing the central Source. In other words, all of him does not come, but he sends some bit of himself.
Everyone who seeks long enough will eventually find, all in different ways, some in visions, some with a change of heart, some will be divinely inspired speakers or healers. Some may have found him in a previous life and only need a bit of cleansing to renew that state. Others may be preparing now to enter the Path in a life to come. Somehow Spirit knows best what the soul needs, and how and when.