I was sitting at work doing my thing focused on the job at hand when the Jefferson Airplane tune “Go Ask Alice” popped into my head.  I’ve probably heard it recently and forgotten but it seemed very out of place.  It was just there.   It was a bit startling but now I’m humming it and definitely can’t get it out of my head.

I looked up the words on the internet.

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all

Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you’re going to fall
Tell them a hookah smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call

Call Alice
When she was just small

When the men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low

Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s “off with her head!”

Remember what the dormouse said:
“Feed your head, feed your head, feed your head”

I read through the comments which seemed to be written by young males who were probably not conceived until 20 years after the song was on “underground” radio.  It was funny to me to read the anti-drug debate that erupted in this comments section.  They liked the song, “It rocks”, but felt compelled to say “don’t do drugs” or else felt compelled to dis each other for lack of experience in that area.  My favorite, “Lol, I said no to drugs, but they didn’t listen.”

But I digress.  In the spirit of anything can find connection to anything else, I will make some non-drug related connections of my own.

To me the most relevant connection is in the lines

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s “off with her head!”

When I began thinking about writing a blog entry after several months lapse, the quote that I was working with was Dickens’ best of times/worst of times, the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The first line is very familiar and its almost cliché that any time can be considered both best and worst and certainly many have made the claim about our current time.  It all depends on one’s circumstance, or does it?  Does it depend more on how one reacts to circumstances, the state of being, the focus one chooses.  It is my belief that the latter is the case.

In the worst of times it is not easy to maintain a mental attitude of hopefulness, peace, loving-kindness toward others; in the best of times we often forget the discipline that makes it possible to develop these positive attitudes.     In reality we can only start where we are.

It seems that dark clouds continue to gather.  No one seems optimistic about the economy, the euphoria that followed Obama’s election has left us, the political bickering that  has made most lose faith in our government is getting worse, and on the individual level more people are living in dire straits than since my mother’s time during the depression.  I have been reading news articles about how people are losing hope.

I am more and more convinced that what we are seeing is the transition time before a radically new way of being comes about.   Of course I am highly influenced by a lot of “New age” sources.  Since 2012 is so widely known now it is easier to speak of this transition time.

I have also been studying astrology for some time and from an astrological perspective the future also looks a little bleak.  This has been written about by many others so I will not go into the technical complexities here.  Suffice it to say that 2010 is a pivotal year where slow-moving planets cross into new astrological signs and make precise alignments with each other that may only happen in a generation.  Astrologer Theodore White outlines these transits and may be summarized:  One explanation of the current and coming transits “The Astrological Year of 2009 will undoubtedly be the first full year of the beginning of the transition from the legacy world of the 20th century, into the new era of the 21st century.”   His analysis of the transits of 2010 can b found here.

Of course one does not have to be an astrologer to read the signs, they are popping up everywhere .  Whether we believe that an asteroid or nuclear war will take us out, that the sun or the caldera in Yellowstone will explode, that Jesus or the madhi will return or that we will degenerate in  civil war, famine and survival of those that build underground bunkers, the negative scenarios abound.  And the positive scenarios are just as plentiful but possibly not as well known.

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small

We may be consciously choosing our pill with adherence to a belief or a fear.  If not we unconsciously choose it with the things that we put out attention on.

And who is Alice?  Alice could be anyone.  I submit that we each have the ability to choose those that we will ask for help or to motivate us.  We can gain insight from those that have survived hard times or found strength in tragedy.  There are many everyday wounded healers among us, in our literature, history and traditions.   These strong ones are not of any particular religion or philosophy or belief system, they are in all of them.

When one falls down the rabbit hole of hard times there may not be many options but despair is not an automatic consequence.  The path may not be easy but it need not be hopeless.

Feed your head does not have to be about psychedelics but can be about the thoughts and attitudes we choose to put there.

Go ask Alice.

I have just returned from a spiritual retreat which I will write more about very soon. While I was in the beautiful North Carolina location, my new iphone did not get telephone service. The top of the screen read “No Connection”.

I worked hard to put aside the feeling of annoyance. I had internet access through the retreat center’s wi-fi network so I was not totally cut off. Also, I had chosen to leave the world for a few days in order to focus on spiritual matters. I really did not need to be connected.

Since my phone did not work in this location last year I was semi-prepared to be out of reach. Despite this, on the first day I did struggle to stay positive. As I got caught up in the retreat experience this feeling subsided.

Today, I was scheduled to participate in a two-part teleconference from New York. This morning’s session was totally unavailable to the teleconference participants. After listening to silence for awhile I had to find something else to place my attention on. The afternoon session was fine for the first hour-and-a-half then cut out for about half an hour. Again, no connection.

On the email list where some of us on the teleconference were reporting the outages, someone suggested that we take the attitude that we would know what we needed to know when we needed to know it.

Good advice.

It occurs to me that I have been exposed to a wealth of new ways of looking at things and encouraged to assimilate them into my life during the past week. No connection could on the physical level signal a technical problem but on a deeper metaphysical level signal that no new input is necessary.

Today was a day to experiment. The result is my first webcam video.

I have spent the past few hours listening to the audiobook edition of “Racing Toward Armageddon: The Three Great Religions and the Plot to End the World” by Michael Baigent. This is a just-released book. I heard the author in a radio interview Saturday night. The thesis is quite scary but I am afraid may be true. Baigent contends that there are factions in all three major religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism that are actively working to bring about the apocalypse. He develops this argument with many examples through much of the book.

I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian setting and learned (and read) Revelations at a fairly young age. I was taught that this was something that would happen, not something that should be helped along by the efforts of men. In the thirty-plus years I have been away from the church it seems that this may have changed, at least in some circles. There are also counterparts to this development in the other two religions of the book.

Baigent’s conclusion is that there must be a shift in our thinking about God, from an outer understanding to an inner understanding. This is something that I am very familiar with. The inner way has been my chosen path for many years. For the fundamentalist of all three religions, God is the external, punishing, exterior being. All three religions have an interior component which has been overlooked or considered heresy by fundamentalists. There are the Christian mystics, Kabbalists of Judaism and the Sufi’s of Islam, all of which have a great deal in common.

I, like many, subscribe to the theory that all paths lead to God which is in reality the life force that infuses everything. I also have a desire to respect all religions and as a result feel uncomfortable placing one above the other. For me respect for my neighbor’s path allows me to advance on my own. Dogma is not necessary and can easily get in the way of spiritual growth.

I do not think there can be an apocalypse willed by the divine. I believe that what is perceived as apocalypse is really transformation. The end of Revelation speaks of “A New Heaven and a New Earth.” Given all of the contradictory forces at work in the world it is easy to believe that destruction must precede this New Heave and New Earth. But, do we know that is the only way it can be? Can we imagine a different way?

I work in the IT field and have for 20+ years. I am used to things going wrong and taking the position that if it breaks then I will find a way to fix it. I deal with custom written software and have a great trust in my ability to fix whatever may go wrong there. I can not say the same for hardware and purchased software.

Despite frustration with when things go wrong I love new toys and this weekend had the experience of setting up and playing with my new iPhone. I am going from no internet access on a phone to the Cadillac version. There were only a few snarls, such as setting up my email which I hacked away at for a great part of the weekend and finally, after deleting and starting over, got it to work last night.

I tell people that one of my greatest strengths is that I am stubborn and do not let something go until I have solved it. This is a strength but also a weakness in that it induces stress when things are not working. Its not uncommon for me and my friends to say “I hate computers” when in fact we obviously love them.
When the technology is working everything is right with the world. When it is not, the sense of frustration can become almost overpowering. I realize that a lot of people have learned to walk away but for me, I hang in there until there is a solution and so bring on a lot more frustration that is probably unnecessary.

And sometimes it is the littlest things that I can not let go of. When I ordered my iPhone I ordered a clear protective cover which I put on as soon as I receive t. It fits perfectly, so perfectly that I can not get it off. So, I began to notice that there were blotches under the cover, either condensation or some kind of smear on the back of the cover or the phone itself. This was bothering me, and all I wanted to do was get the cover off so I could clean it. But, the cover wouldn’t come off. So I tried to ignore it and turn on the phone and try all of the wonderful things it would do.

So, I have been setting up my phone for two days and all I have left is to finish my contact list and I love it except for these horrible blotches. I’m sitting at my computer updating my address book when three fire trucks come roaring up my street and I jump up to see what is going on and drop the phone on the floor, pulling the USB cable out with it.

So, now I’m a little concerned about my new phone but somehow the blotches are gone.

Technology is after all a tool that is meant to be used; however, I find that I am often annoyed by relatively simple technological problems. My annoyance seems to come from the feeling that my personal experience is being disrupted by these incidents. I want my experience to be simpler, cleaner, crisper and do not have a good way of handling the disruptions without annoyance.

I believe this is a reflection of what is going on on a larger level. There is a lot of static in our experience. We have a lot of wonderful gadgets that make life interesting and fun but when they break down we somehow feel diminished.

Technology represents the best and the worst of times.

And, Technology also seems to be somehow related to our concept of time because it can be a time saver, a time waster or something that consumes much more time than anyone ever anticipated.

I have to write this. I am feeling more and more that I must say what I believe politically.

Yesterday, as I watched the tributes to Sen. Ted Kennedy I wondered why it had fallen out of fashion to be political or patriotic, especially for those of us on the left. Why has the word liberal become a curse? As I listened to the tributes to Sen. Kennedy it strengthened my resolve to say what I believe and to do what I can.

Today Arianna Huffington wrote about the spirit that died with Kennedy, the spirit to help the less fortunate and the least among us:

Ted Kennedy and the Missing National Conversation

Being a liberal is not about spending other people’s money, it’s about taking care of other people. Here’s another quote from Ted Kennedy:

During my service in the United States Senate, I have often been called a Liberal, and it usually was not meant as a compliment. But I remember what my brother said about liberalism shortly before he was elected president. He said: “If by a Liberal, they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind… Someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions… Someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties…Someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and the suspicion that grips us… If that is what they mean by a Liberal… Then I am proud to say I am a Liberal.”

Finally, in a day of tributes, this is the one I heard on the radio as I was falling asleep from one of my favorite Air America hosts, Nichole Sandler.

click here

Rest in Peace, Senator Kennedy, may we, as a country have the courage to continue the work that you have just begun.

Today I did something that I have thought about for some time. I started my own website with a domain name that is my own name. My sister Sarah has given me pointers on where to host and what software to use along with other advice on building my website. However, the final step was up to me. I had to click that final time to create the site.

And so, I am off and running.

I have a new blank slate, for what?

I have told friends that I want to set up a spiritual blog. My idea for a spiritual blog is that it will explore spiritual topics. It will reflect my own explorations and chronicle my ideas. It will be a journal that is open to anyone who wants to read it.

What do I mean by spiritual? This is a broad term because it encompasses all of life. It is recognition of higher forces at work in our world. I am not religious. I have learned from multiple religions. My core beliefs have come from what I have synthesized from various teachings: to practice love of God and neighbor, to forgive, to be thankful. Spirituality is a constant practice: to choose to forgive rather than hold a grudge or to pray for one that is in need. These are just two examples.

I am a spiritual seeker because I do not believe that there is one answer. The truth of one’s being may be expressed in various ways at various times.

My goals for this new blog can be expressed as follows:

• Express myself with authenticity as best I can.
• Provide a place for a conversation and see where that leads.
• Stay present and write about my current world from a spiritual point of view.
• Set a tone that is positive.

In the past I have often written from a voice that was not positive. I find that I can be most motivated to write by anger or some other negative emotion. That is not what I wish to do here. I want to explore what is positive. Sometimes taking what we are given and finding the positive within it is not an easy thing.  My intention for this blog is not to write about what is easy. This will be a learning process for me and I hope will benefit you as well.