Lehrer

I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!
-- Tom Lehrer

Leap the movie

Gary Renard is featured in the new movie Leap.

It's a bit unclear from the over-dramatic trailer whether this one, unlike The Secret, actually goes beyond the Dream, or whether it's another effort at Making A Better Illusion.

If the former, it'll be a hard sell, because there's nothing dramatic about heaven, and you can't sell to humans without drama.

Emerson

A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

"Do not seek yourself outside yourself."

For unity

[I posted this on my regular blog yesterday, but it might fit better here.]

I give my congratulations to American president-elect Obama, may god be with him in a very tough job.

My wish for the coming four years, the coming twenty years, the coming one hundred years, is that each American as well as each inhabitant of planet Earth will take the opportunity to strive always to correct his vision towards that of unity rather than that of partisanship.

That's not an easy thing. The devil in this universe is obviously a little man in the heart of each of us, telling us that "evil" is out there. It's in the other person, it's in the other group, it's in the other nation. Lord forbid we should ever look into our own heart for the origin of evil and suffering, for this would be too fearful.

Still it can be done and it is being done, and in unity is salvation.

Unexpected

I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it.
-- Jack Handey

Spirit doesn't make anything happen

I think the below (particularly the first half) is one of the things which depart most radically from other spiritual traditions, even the most modern ones:

"The ego, or wrong mind, makes everything that appears to happen on the level of form. Spirit makes nothing happen on the level of form, which is why you shouldn't spiritualize events or objects in the universe. The right mind gives the Holy Spirit's interpretation of the level of form, leading you -- and by you we mean that observatory part of the mind that has identified with and thus bound itself to the ego -- back home. Home is unchangeable spirit."
-- The Disappearance Of The Universe, page 223


This is also one more explanation why it's fruitless to try and change the world: if spirit makes nothing happen in The World, what force is there to make this a "good world"?