On the road to Christmas

Actions that are from our desire to receive for the self-alone connect us to the path of Darkness. Actions that are for our desire to share connect us to the path of Light. –Michael Berg

Children traditionally experience the magic of Christmas in part by speculating about the gifts beneath the tree. They wonder what will Santa bring them and can hardly sleep the night before as they toss and turn thinking about opening their presents and shaking out their stockings.

As children grow older, they slowly begin to learn that a great part of the joy of Christmas comes from giving, from finding something special that another person will like. My parents and grandparents were far more excited about my reactions to the gifts I received than their own gifts.

There are some balancing acts here. One is keeping gifts and expectations within reason so that Christmas isn’t viewed as a time to get absurd amounts of loot. Another is keeping one’s ego out of the picture so that one is giving in order to share and to make the recipient happy, not to be praised and loved for the size of the gift.

At Christmas time, people frequently say they wish the magic of the Christmas tree were a part of their lives year-around. I don’t expect they’re talking about handing out gifts 24/7 every day of the year. The magic, I think, comes from being willing to share what we know and what we have and who we are. It comes from having a “you first” philosophy.

Perhaps we start first with our family and friends simply by being more available in the multiple senses of the word, and then we take another step and expand on that. And then another step after that. We all know how we’ve felt on Christmas mornings watching children open gifts from us they hardly dared hope for. Their surprise, their smiles, their delight–we can have that feeling again of witnessing that by giving of ourselves, our experience, our knowledge, our time, and our compassion.

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NOTE: On December 11th, Shelagh Watkins, creator and editor of the recently published Forever Friends anthology will visit with us to talk about the book. I hope you’ll join us with comments and questions.

On the road to Thanksgiving

The excesively polarized political debate in recent years focused the consciousness of the nation on negatives, on what we purportedly lacked, on what we didn’t have, on what somebody somewhere was doing wrong. During this time, the country and our lives were not without value, yet the daily whining tended more than anything else to obscure what we could have been and should have been thankful for.

My belief system is quite unwielding on one point: What you resist, persists.

To our detriment, lack–even before the nasty political bickering of the last eight years–has long been a favorite topic of conversation, in barber shops, over the backyard fence, on street corners with strangers, beneath satin sheets with lovers, and one could almost laugh at it as the tragicomedy of the human experience if it weren’t making such a mess of our lives.

If one’s lumbago wasn’t acting up, if it weren’t too cold or too dry or too wet or too windy, if the President hadn’t just said something idiotic, if the promotion hadn’t gone to company clown, if the neighbor hadn’t just painted his house pink with green stripes, if if if if, then for goodness sakes, there was veritably nothing to talk about. Lack, for many, makes the world go around.

Like attracts like, the gurus tell us, and so it is that those who focus a fair amount of their waking thoughts–not to mention their dreams–on lack seem forever surprised on the constant deluge of additional lack into their lives. Many, as we have seen, have been quite willing to mortgage their souls as well as all of their temporal assets in a blind attempt to escape from lack.

When we focus on lack, what we already have is slid onto the back burner. We don’t think about it. We’re not grateful for it. We take it for granted. We even hide it on purpose because–should it be seen–it might diminish our argument that fate and other people have cast an unfair amount of lack into our lives.

As Thanksgiving approachs, a large part of our daily conversation remains focused on lack, on just how bad the Black Friday sales figures are likely to be or on how early we need to get up on that day after Thanksgiving to get to the store before anyone else does so we can beat them to the sales tables and get rid as much of our lack as possible at the lowest possible cost.

The cost, I think, is far too high regardless of the amount we spend, and the consequences of worshipping the daemons of lack are far too dear to leave the house with credit cards in hand.

I have an alternative proposal. It’s not my invention. Thousands have already said it and said it better. Stay home with what you have rather than going out in search of what you think you’re missing. It’s a difficult habit to break, I know, but it’s the only way to your heart’s desires.

Each day on the road to Thanksgiving, we have an opportunity to ponder that which we are likely to be grateful for if and when we give it a clear focus within the mind’s eye. What we have requires more of our attention than what we don’t have. Perhaps it’s a warm coat or a lover or a house filled with friends or a job or a perfect weekend or a full pantry or a pleasant disposition.

Gratefulness leads to more gratefulness and thanks leads to more thanks, do you think?

Seriously, I’m Not Really James Bond

When my friends answer their phones, I’m likely to say, “My name is Bond, James Bond.” Then, after they say, “Malcolm, I know that’s you,” we get on to the real reason I called.

In my heart of hearts, I realize I’m not James Bond. For one thing, my psychologist Dr. No Way has informed me that it’s “wrong” to pretend to be who you’re not. Years ago, Kurt Vonnegut warned that such pretense is dangerous.

What is less clear is who I really am.

Yes, I do know my name and I’m happy to tell you I remember it most of the time. But that name is merely a convenient label, perhaps like a brand such as Coke or Pepsi and General Motors or Ford. You know what’s what with such brand names, but with Malcolm Campbell you may be less sure, and I would agree.

Masha Malka begins her beautiful little book The One Minute Coach with this question: “Whose life are you living?” I’m not sure I can answer this question correctly. What about you?

The psychologist Eric Berne, widely known for his work with games and scripts, suggested that when we were young, we accepted so many of the “you should” and “you ought” admonitions from parents and other adults without question and that we still accept them today as gospel. Consciously, we might exclaim: HOW CRAZY IS THAT while subconsciously we still believe “you’ll never make anything of yourself” and “dreams like that are only for rich people.”

In a similar vein, author Nancy Whitney-Reiter says in her recent book (Unplugged: How to Disconnect from the Rat Race, Have an Existential Crisis, and Find Meaning and Fulfillment) that there are reasons most people aren’t happy even though they’ve achieved many of the goals we set out to achieve. Among them is the fact that we’re shoved into the school system and then into the world of work with goals that are programmed into us by parents, friends and society. We don’t have time to ask, “Do I really want to be a highly paid CEO of a giant company who lives in a million-dollar house and drives a $100,000 car?”

How many of us are trudging ahead from school to marriage to kids to jobs following either the expectations of others or the expectations we accepted without question?

Reiter urges us to “unplug” from the hustle and bustle of every day life, take some time for ourselves, and learn who we really are and what makes us happy. Malka urges us to spend time each day taking action steps that will lead us toward an authentic life. Why don’t we do such things?

We just don’t get to them, right? Remember all the things you told your friends you were going to do some day: learn another language, go back to school, maintain a savings account, lose weight, stop smoking? Like New Year’s resolutions, they sounded good, but they took a effort and seemed to be such endless processes that we didn’t get anywhere. So, whose life am I living? Whose life are you living?

In his e-book The Principles of Successful Manifesting, Thomas Herold observes that we’re going to make progress in those areas where we place our attention. This echoes a question that has been asked by Silva Method instructors: “If you spend 15 minutes three times a day thinking positive thoughts about yourself and your goals, but then spend the rest of the day thinking negative thoughts about your life and your job and your relationships, what kind of result will you end up with?”

Indeed. If we’re not attending to ourselves and our dreams, I don’t think we’ll find either of them.

If we had started that savings account 25 years ago, it might be worth something now even though we could only deposit a little bit of money each week. If we had started learning another language ten years ago, we might have some fluency in it by now even though we only had time for one lesson a week. Had we placed more of our attention on learning who we really are and what we truly desire, we might now be free from parental admonitions, the un-verified assumptions, and the expecations of those who embrace the consumer matrix version of “life.”

Malka asks where we’ll be next year at this time. “Will you be doing the same things, going to the same places, spending time with the same people, wishing the same things, and realizing that with each year that passes, those wishes will probably never materialize?”

Those of us who have noticed that we might not really be who we want to be are told by friends and co-workers, “that’s the breaks” and “that’s just the way it is” and “you’re stuck now, so let’s just go grab a couple of beers and watch the ball game.”

We’re hearing more and more these days from more and more people that we’re not stuck, that we do have choices, and it’s not too late. In 1902, James Allen wrote his ground-breaking and inspiring book “As a Man Thinketh.” My father had an original-edition copy on his bookshelf and I read it as a young man thinking what a wonderful dream. Problem was, I saw it as a dream rather than a reality. One of the more positive developments I see in a time many are describing as chaotic, is that thousands of people are finally catching up with the beliefs Allen stated over a century ago.

Our choices are real and viable. Unlike tasks requiring bricks and mortar, Allen’s beliefs–and those of his modern-day counterparts–do not take years and years of painful 24/7 effort that are beyond are schedules and our capabilities. Seriously, they’re relative quick and painless if there’s a lot of passion behind them and oh, so little time.

Mind is the Master power that moulds and makes,

And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes

The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills,

Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills:—

He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass:

Environment is but his looking-glass.

                                         –James Allen

Copyright (c) 2008 by Malcolm R. Campbell who takes this philosophy neither shaken nor stirred.

Join me on December 11th for a discussion with author and publisher Shelagh Watkins. She’ll be here to talk about Forever Friends, a new poetry and short story anthology released by Mandinam Press in October.

Do you agree that perception is reality?

“Most all of the current brain research is leading to one conclusion. Most of what we consider to be happening ‘out there’ is really occurring ‘in here’ within the confines of our own head. Perhaps this is why mystics refer to the external world as maya, or an illusion. It’s interesting to note the word ‘illusion’ is derived from the Latin root ‘illusere,’ which means ‘innerplay.’” –MaAnna Stephenson in The Sage Age, Blending Science with Intuitive Wisdom

What do you make of this quotation from MaAnna Stephenson’s new book?

Do you view perception is reality as figurative? That is, psychological in tone, warped or clarified by our attitudes, preconceptions, philosophies, likes and dislikes.

Or, do you view perception is reality as actual? That is, literally concrete, dynamic, and totally synchonistic with your intentions (conscious or otherwise) and mission here on the planet.

Or, do you view the notion as merely interesting and/or absurd?

We can step into a labyrinth here, suggesting that if you believe perception is reality, then it is, but that if you believe perception is not reality, then it isn’t.

Perhaps your perception of perception has a great impact on your view of how things work in the world, whether it’s a jungle or an oasis, whether it’s filled with hate or love, whether goals and intentions create the “future” or whether fate and the purported stronger wills of others bring tomorrow into actuality, whether there’s more room in our lives for fear or for hope.

As the Christmas song asks: Do you see what I see? I’m suggesting that you may or may not see what I see and vice versa, and that problems between people often occur because they presume their perceptions of reality, while necessarily synchronous in many basic respects, are hand-in-glove matches. To know, better yet to understand, another person or another group requires, I think, really seeing what they’re seeing, that is to say, knowing quite literally where they’re coming from and where the “live.”

Does this make sense? How do you perceive such ideas? Are they foreign or are they an integral part of your reality? Either way, I’m suggesting that the universe is responding to your opinions and your imagination. Or, it may be better to say, I perceive that it is within my reality.

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Copyright (c) 2008 by Malcolm R. Campbell

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Embark on the Journey, Follow the Fantasy, Create the Reality

The Sun Singer, new age literary fiction by Malcolm R. Campbell

Buy the e-book for only $5.33 at Powell’s Books

Sun Singer Interview

Yesterday, I enjoyed stopping by Yvonne Perry’s Writers in the Sky weblog to talk about my fantasy novel The Sun Singer. The interview was fun and it was nice to see a couple of folks from the long-gone WritingUp blog community stop by an say “hello.”

A New Age Fantasy

The day before, writer/reviewer Geri Ahearn posted a very positive review on her site, Amazon and B&N. Here’s my favorite part:

Malcolm R. Campbell takes the reader on a magnificent, magic carpet ride to the past, the present, and the future. The story is enlightening, and tugs at the reader’s heart as the adventure becomes a journey that strikes a chord in every reader, while looking back into the years of growing up. This novel is packed with riveting intensity, and is hauntingly powerful. As each page in “The Sun Singer” fits another piece to the mysterious puzzle that Robert is determined to put together, the story becomes more entertaining, and touching. The author created a brilliant, must-read fantasy that makes you crave for a sequel. –Geraldine Ahearn

Last month, I took part in a 24-hour read-a-thon to help celebrate the 25th anniversary of a book store in nearby Gainesville, Georgia. Our profits were donated to the county’s literary alliance. It was fun talking about the novel again in a reading/signing environment. We had a good group of people even though it was a rainy night.

As an author, I see such things as gifts, for when a book has been out for a while (four years) one isn’t involved in the heady hoopla of promotion attendant to launch dates. It means a lot when, for example, a person comments on a weblog and says they lent the book to a friend who liked it and lent it to another friend or family member.

Writing is a rather solitary profession, and those of us who don’t get out much and who don’t know how to act when we do get out, relish the moments when somebody rings the door bell or shows up at a book signing or leaves a review on B&N or Amazon or stops by a Facebook or a Myspace profile and says, “hey clown, I hope you’re having a good weekend.”

Perception is Reality

“What are dreams, Grandfather?” They were walking to the store for a newspaper when Robert asked him.

Grandfather smiled. “Scientists have been searching for the answer to that question for years.”

“But what do you think?” Gotcha, thought Robert, elated that he said But what do you think? first.

Grandfather stopped in the shade of a large oak. “Like this old tree,” he said, “some dreams are infinitely wise. Others are like the children playing on those swings, young and carefree.”

“When I wake up, my dreams seem weird,” said Robert. “I always wonder why I believed the situations were normal while they were happening. How do I make sense of it?”

“First you remember them, then you control them,” he said as he watched the children pretending the swings were airplanes.

“Control them?”

“It’s your dream. Change it. If you see an old rock, change it into a sock. If you don’t need a hose, turn it into a rose. When monsters appear, never fear, just ask for a spear. So you don’t like sour milk, transform it into cream, and then you’ll know you’re having a dream.”

“Sounds like fun,” said Robert.

“Once the fun begins, you’re ready for the next step.” He picked up a penny from the sidewalk and closed his hand around it. “Next, you learn dreamspinning—how to control your waking life in the same way.” He opened his hand—what sleight of hand was this?—and there was a crisp twenty-dollar bill.

“Grandfather, how?”

“Oh my goodness,” he exclaimed, “I guess I’m a counterfeiter!” He crumpled up the bill and tossed it high into the air where it flew, or seemed to fly, past the oak tree, past the two girls on the swings, and crossed the street toward the red flowers in the hanging baskets in front of Binah’s Bakery.

“Hmm, that appeared to be a female ruby-throated hummingbird that was very interested in those fuchsias,” Grandfather said, scratching his head as though he was puzzling out the thing himself.

“Grandfather, I’m not sure I want to know whether that really happened or you tricked me with some slick razzle dazzle.”

“But, Robert, what would be the difference?”

–Copyright (c) 2004 by Malcolm R. Campbell in The Sun Singer

According to police, eye witness testimony is the worst possible kind. Bring in ten witesses to an auto accident, and they will give you ten different stories. Reasons for this vary. One is that each witness may view the incident from a different vantage point. Others may have heard it, then looked at the positions of the cars after it was over and assumed they had actually seen it. And yet others, because their line of site was blocked or something made them look away, will fill in the gaps in the sequence of events with a assumptions about what happened. Put them on lie detectors and each one will pass with flying colors without a clue that any of his memory is incorrect.

How different is life itself? We see our lives differently from day to day and while our perception of what we’re doing and how it meshes with the world around us–while iron-clad reality to us–isn’t going to synchronize 100% with how our family and friends see it.

We come from different frames of reference with varying amounts of childhood “programming” from authority figures and this creates a positive or negative spin to some of what we encounter. We’ve had a variety of experiences over the years that impact out attitudes even to the point where mistaken perceptions can’t be alterered in our minds by clearly presented facts

It’s no wonder we have trouble finding our hearts’ desires, achieving our highest goals, or agreeing with anyone when it comes to national issues. Our perceptions don’t match. Worse yet, what we see is what we wanted to see even though we may complain that we don’t like it.

Illusions are often stronger than what our eyes and ears and brains are trying to show us.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Malcolm R. Campbell

Negatively Bound

“Revolution doesn’t have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.” —Joseph Campbell
in “Man and Myth”

How easy it is to become bound to that which we do not want. The more we argue, the more we worry, and the more we focus on negative conditions as we perceive them to be, the longer those conditions will remain.

We create through our thoughts, either more of the “bad” we are focusing on, or changes for the “good” as we dream and imagine them.

Malcolm

Discovering fire for the second time

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of Love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered Fire.” –Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Will it make the news?

Down at the bottom of the half-hour local report, after sports and weather, just before the anchors look at each other and say something mildly lame that’s supposed to be funny, just before fading to black, “this just in, a man and woman standing at the summit of Going to the Sun Mountain discovered fire for the second time.”

“Gee, Bob, I hope they weren’t just playing with matches.”

Perhaps it won’t make the news.

Perhaps it’s an individual event and has already happened, and the rest of us are wandering on wondering what it will be like and whether or not we’ll get burned in the process.

Postcard from the future

 “When man solves the mystery of imagining, he will have discovered the secret of causation, and that is: Imagining creates reality. Therefore, the man who is aware of what he is imagining knows what he is creating; realizes more and more that the drama of life is imaginal — not physical. All activity is at bottom imaginal. An awakened Imagination works with a purpose. It creates and conserves the desirable, and transforms or destroys the undesirable.” –Neville Goddard in The Law and the Promise

Dear Family,

      I’m writing you from a time zone you call “the future.” I’m doing fine and want to assure you I haven’t gone nuts. You remember, don’t you, that when I was in junior high school, my favorite book was H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine published “back” in a time zone you call “the past.”

      The good news for time travellers is this: you don’t need the machine. All you need is your imagination. And, when you “get here,” you won’t be greeted by those horrible Worlocks Wells put in his story.

      I know you’re not going to believe this, at least not until your time zone catches up with mine, but I was greeted by Oprah Winfrey. Really. (Yes, her TV show is still going strong.) You remember, don’t you, how those of us that hung out on writing forums always used to pretend “we’d gotten the call” and were sitting on that couch in front of a live audience talking about our novels.

      Turns out, if you pretend this is happening, it happens. During the spring and summer of 2008 when I began sending the manuscript of my novel Garden of Heaven out to prospective publishers, I began imagining what it would be like to talk to Oprah about my book. At first, I worried about what I would say when she asked, “Where do you get your ideas.”

      There wasn’t any reason to worry. I just said, “I keep my eyes open,” and she seemed to like that because she said—and I’m not making this up—“I have dreamt for years an author would come on my show and tell me that. I imagined it would have sooner than I expected.”

     I hope you guys are doing well and will enjoy the novel as soon as it comes out “back in” your universe. Until then, just imagine what it will be like to read a book that fractures time with a mystery that might even give Sherlock Holmes a fair bit of a challenge.

 

 TTFN,

 Malcolm

Hollow Bone – The Healer

“Her eyelids twitched slightly, yes, she heard “forgive” and “bear puke” and she was fractious enough to anger up over such things even now.  Heal, Cinnabar. He repeated the words inside his head, but he knew, was coming to know, that brute force would never bring the sun.

“He was just thinking, just reasoning, looking for pinpoint control through a proper sequence of words when, truth be told, he needed to be nothing, hollow, what was it Grandfather’s old friend said, yes, a hollow bone, free of logic and self.”     –Malcolm Campbell in “The Sun Singer”

 

Robert Adams, the main character in my novel “The Sun Singer” faces the same problems many of us do when the first attempt to use various healing methods such as Reiki and other contact methods or absent (at a distance) such as Rosicrucian and Silva techniques. He’s trying brute force, supposing that if he could think or speak loud enough and with passion enough, he’ll save Cinnabar, a woung woman just injured in a mountain battle.

Brute force doesn’t work whether one is “using” the power of God, as understood by organised religion, or “the cosmic” or “the Universe” with or without the assistance of angels or spirirtual guides.  Reiki practitioners usually do not concentrate on the specific organ, bone, system, or condition that may be causing a person’s illness. We are told that the energy the energy knows where it needs to go. This idea is a good beginning for many healing methods.

In the novel, Robert fortunately remembers his avatar grandfather’s words. He remembers that ”directing” the energy usually is ineffective. Instead,  “he needed to be nothing, hollow, what was it Grandfather’s old friend said, yes, a hollow bone, free of logic and self.”

Since hollow bone was a term used by the famous Sioux holy man Fools Crow, Grandfather Elliott traveled in good company! In relation to healing, Fools Crow used the term hollow bone in the same sense that others use the term channel or tube to indicate that while healing, a higher power flows through them to the person being healed. In his book Fools Crow Wisdom and Power, author Thomas E. Mails writes that prior to healing, Fools Crow first went through a ritual to remove all the stumbling blocks within himself that might impede the flow of energy.

“I saw myself as a hollow bone that is all shiny on the inside and empty,” said Fools Crow. “I looked around inside me to see if any obstacles or junk were left, and there were none. I knew then that I was ready to serve Wakan-Tanka well, and I held up my hands to offer my thanksgiving and to tell him how happy I was. Immediately, I could feel the power come into me.”

This necessary stepping back to allow the flow of energy was what Robert had to do to successfully call the Sun on Cinnabar’s behalf. This “stepping back” works well, for me, with Kabbalistic, Rosicrucian, and Silva Method approaches to healing as well as with Reiki.

Ego, logical thought, and passion only clog up the channel of one’s self being offered to the one in need.