The goddess aspect of the feminine is incredible to behold. I saw it up close and personal last night and it filled my heart with a new kind of love. Life's road is a continual plethora of surprises along the way. My path has found an enchanted forest that I never dreamed was ahead of me! I'm taking a week or two off to contemplate my future. Bless all of you out there somewhere -- especially the Goddesses. You know who you are.

Prefacing Note: The following extraordinary story, absolutely as true as my memory serves me, which is quite well, has never been documented before, and through the years only brief details of this strange encounter have been discussed among family and intimate friends – including my immediate family members, all of whom were there (as well as the family dog, who was terrified) . The story should have been told publicly long ago, but there is always the reticence – for fear of ridicule or worse – that inhibits the ego and keeps one silent about such things. – lap/alw (At right is the old dirt road as it looks today at the crossroads where the encounter occurred. The alien craft approached from the upper right of the photo while we were driving in the direction of the view. I first stopped the car near the point where I took this picture.) The incident took place shortly past midnight on a summer night in the early 1970's. We were on our way home from a drive-in movie in Riverto

"... the great materialistic progress which we have venerated for so long is on the verge of bankruptcy. We can no longer believe that we are born into this world to accumulate wealth and abandon ourselves to mortal pleasures. We see the dangers and realize that we have been exploited for centuries. We were told the twentieth century was the most progressive that the world has ever known, but unfortunately the progression was in the direction of self-destruction." - Manly Palmer Hall Today is the birthday of Manly Palmer Hall (1901–1990), a Canadian philosopher, scholar, and mystic whose prolific works included the remarkable volume The Secret Teachings of All Ages , from which I offer this quote for your contemplation: "Philosophy bestows life in that it reveals the dignity and purpose of living. Materiality bestows death in that it benumbs or clouds those faculties of the human soul, which should be responsive to the enlivening impulses of creative thought and ennoblin

Gnostics say that experience and seeing, and absorbing what you see and experience, is far more important than formal study and education. It has something to do with nature – being close to the earth – and the natural wisdom of intuition that has all but been purged from our senses. It is the musky scent of Sophia and the deep feminine, of damp soil, dark caves and wombs, and of the fertility rites of the old pagan ways when "God was a Woman." – from The Mystery of Being Alive , my essay of January 7, 2009 When I was a teenager a few of my friends and I would occasionally take the latest feminine objects of our desires to a cave system called the Tongue River cave west of Dayton, Wyoming, to seduce them, for there is something sensual – even erotic -- about penetrating deep into the dark, damp, yet pleasantly pungent, atmosphere of a cavern where even the most prissy and proper of our young ladies soon succumbed to the passion of her natural sexuality. We didn't under

As the years wear on I find myself, more and more frequently, looking back over my long life with conflicting and alternating mixtures of quiet comfort and satisfaction, unsettling regret and remorse, and nostalgic memories of all that has gone before. Though I seldom dwell on the past for long, I often pull incidents, places, people, and things through the cobwebs of my mind for use in my writing. For a writer, drawing from personal experiences is the most valuable reference library there is. From time to time I consider the influences of the roles that others have played in the shaping of my life – the significance of my father, mother, and siblings, for instance. It took me decades to realize that my mother had more influence on the character of my mind and my personality than my father did. My father was a here and now kind of person, and he was a friend and companion more than a father, for we spent years fishing, hunting, and exploring together when I was a kid – all the while i

Though I've eulogized her, made references about her, and written poems to her in this blog, I've never told anyone – not even her – exactly what makes her so overwhelmingly attractive to me that my obsession over her borders on madness or maybe holiness, or so the story goes. . . . In numerous essays I've written about my Zahir (I capitalize zahir because she is my own personal zahir), but I've never discussed the feminine wiles and attributes that attract me to her so obsessively. This, then, is all about her, and why she consumes every thought I have, every breath I take. In my time-jaded, yet discerning, eyes she is the most exquisitely attractive image on the face of the planet. Whoever agrees or doesn't doesn't matter at all to me, for I love her unconditionally. Every man's obsession is his alone, and my Zahir is mine. She is a bit taller than average, and thin: five-eight, maybe, and 120 pounds with her boots on. She has small breasts, long legs, a

Much of basic psychology today instructs us to beat down our negative emotions by " getting out of our minds and into our lives ." It is called acceptance and commitment therapy. Certainly such advice can be valuable to those of us who are living lives full of what psychologists call the "negative self-scripts", or influence emotions, that we generate from feelings of low self-esteem, guilt, self-consciousness, and feelings of inferiority. To overcome these negative self-scripts we are instructed to develop "self core skills" with mindful self-scripts based on affirmation, assertion, focusing, humanizing, and tension-sensing to rationalize and diminish the debilitating negative emotions we all live with. We are to use the polarity of our two basic kinds of emotions -- innate emotions and influence emotions -- to wage a war between our soul and our mind to keep us on the straight and narrow. There is something of "wild gnosis " in this kind of psy

Long ago, when I was a parent of three grade-school aged children, IBM introduced an elementary level science textbook and workbook to our school district that included a section on the Big Bang Theory , and the outrage began from angry Christian parents who wanted the books removed from the science curriculum and banned from the library shelves because they flew in the face of the biblical version of creation by arguing that time, and not eternity, was the cosmological reality. The Roman Catholics had a theory of their own, developed, in part by a Roman Catholic priest, called the steady state theory . Our little gym was packed for a final hearing with the PTA and school board, I remember, and it seemed to me that the majority of those who were there were dead-set against the science course. Tempers flared and voices were raised. I spoke for those parents in favor of retaining the program, arguing that the theory was developed from Albert Einstein's basic Theory of Relativity, and

In this house-of-cards world that seems to be collapsing inward upon us from every conceivable angle, everyday-people seem to lie supinely in apathy watching it all come down around them. We are an indolent, intellectually lazy, bunch who collectively respond to any form of oppression or trouble with an attitude of there ain't nothin' I can do about it . I can't tell you how many times I've heard those who I love and care about the most in all the world say those words. The situation is close to dire enough to bring me storming to the battle-front from my reclusive world. Why are we allowing this to happen? Our very existence as we've known it is being systematically swept right out from beneath our supine bodies as slick as a cloth from a table, leaving us exposed, unprotected and naked, to the nefarious winds of oppressive change. For 30 years and more, some of us have seen this coming and yet, knowing it in our hearts, feeling it intuitively in our guts, we'

Melancholy, coming in paroxysmal storms of depression and self-pity, casts its dismal gray shadow over me from time to time. I am appalled by this weakness in myself, and ashamed, too, but nevertheless every so often dark clouds of it settle into my psyche, controlling my thoughts, making them as black and foreboding as the dank recesses of a medieval dungeon. When melancholy comes, it tries to destroy me – to drive me into madness over my Zahir. It takes all of my emotional strength to stand before these gale-like fits of melancholy until they pass. They seem to be swooping down on me, like an eagle over a coot, more and more frequently, and so I have decided to write about them in an effort to face them now – head on at a time when my spirits are solid – with the hope that confronting the next one before it arrives will allow me to ward it off with a shield of awareness, understanding, and rejection. It is the longing for her that drives me down, lays my heart bare, allowing the mela

Paulo Coelho, in his most recent Warrior of the Light issue, listed an Inventory of Normality , which includes 47 items about what society considers to be normal behavior in everyday life these days. As he points out, all of these situations are absurd, but two in particular caught my eye, for they profoundly illustrate how utterly lacking we are in our search for knowledge about 1) who we really are and why – a search that should be the primary goal in life of each and every one of us – and how we are conditioned (actually brainwashed) by the patriarchy to 2) believe that our own personal religion is the unconditional, inalienable, Truth – and that you are dead wrong about yours. The first item that struck me this way was this one: 9] Comparing objects like cars, houses and clothes, and defining life according to these comparisons instead of really trying to find out the true reason for being alive. In my essay Looking for Felicity on this blog, Paulo explains that this same situa

Someone once said they won't enjoy old age because there's no future in it. More profound words were never uttered if we cannot see beyond our own lifetimes. Could it be that we live just a few decades on the face of this earth, struggling as best we can to make the most of this short time, only to fade away to nothing but whatever legacy we've left behind when we die? Do any of us really believe in our heart of hearts that that's all there is? Could it be that there is no further purpose for our existence – not so much as even some mysterious purpose beyond our human perceptions or understandings? To believe in your heart and mind that this life is all there is seems incomprehensible to me. If you are in touch with your own soul, you intuitively know there is more. In previous essays I've discussed the pleroma, hierosgamos, the union of opposites, the bridal chamber, the esoteric knowledge of the Gnostics, pagan myths and their relationship to modern day religious