Phyllis Edgerly Ring's Blog, page 49

Escaping the prison of our imagined past

The spiritual nature has a value system that places priceless relationships above any object or hoped-for outcome. But the human nature, if left in charge, does not.

The sign that we’re in a situation that requires a shift from the eyes of our human nature to the vision of our spiritual one is when we find ourselves focusing on the imperfections of others to such an extent that we experience an increasing intensity of negative emotions that, in turn, causes deterioration in personal relationships.

The only escape from this vicious cycle is to change what we see, to elevate our perception, and to begin looking at others with the sin (imperfection)-covering eye of the spiritual nature.

The spiritual nature doesn’t dwell on perceived imperfections but instead seeks the missing spiritual attributes that the situation is calling for and creates an act of service designed to release those latent virtues, which exist within the heart of every soul. When that happens, the destructive negative emotions and imperfections begin to dissipate. They are, after all, merely perceptions and `decisions’ of the mind or human nature, and the resulting emotion is the energy of those thoughts in motion.

However, in the survival-motivated blind imitation that is the human nature’s customary behaviour, our mind and emotions can liken our current experience to one that has registered as negative in the past. In order to truly investigate the reality of the matter, we need the spiritual nature and its vision to come into the driver’s seat, to interrupt this reflexive imitating of what happened — or what we perceive to have happened — in the past. If we are unwilling to do this, we will remain prisoners of that past, and of what, in essence, is actually an imagined past, the perspective of the mind alone.

A sign that we’re progressing away from imitation towards investigation is that negative emotions we’ve experienced are replaced by positive ones, and there is also a noticeable improvement in the way we feel, and within the tone of our relationship  with others.

Excerpted from With Thine Own Eyes: Why Imitate the Past When We Can Investigate Reality?, coming soon from George Ronald Publisher.

Creative discovery: leaps ahead of thinking

I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking …

~ Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet

This insight is one of the things I love most about creative process. The author shares it in a book that’s a longtime favorite of mine, the first of her Crosswicks Journal works.

I experienced a serendipitous example of what she describes while researching my current novel during a visit to Munich. A portrait of Eva Braun is a key element in the book’s story — a real portrait with a 1936 framer’s label on the back that says “Promenade Platz 7, Muenchen (Munich)”, together with an August date. I’d tried for some time to locate this address without success and figured that whatever building had been there on that day was long gone since the bombing damage from the war.

Spontaneously one afternoon, my ever-patient husband asked whether I’d like to go see the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, one of Munich’s historic hotels. It just so happened that a scene set there had “arrived” on the page that very week, not that I’d told him anything about that. It was still a bit of a surprise to me, as these often are. It had also somehow “connected itself” with a scene in that framer’s shop whose address I couldn’t find.

When we reached the Bayerischer Hof, I looked up and saw a street sign that said: “Promenade Platz” And there, on a stone building directly across from the hotel, was a blue address sign with the number 7 — !

But more, the setting outside it – a long, slender park between it and hotel – was exactly what I had “visualized” as I’d imagined the framer’s shop. So were the two sets of tram tracks on either side of it. Although I hadn’t yet known where Promenade Platz was, the scene that includes it had already taken shape on the page – and here it was right before me, just as my inner eye had seen it. Yet it wasn’t until that scene had been captured down that – without trying – I was led to discover exactly where that address is.

I also learned that day during a tour of the hotel that its dining salon/lounge, where my writing’s process had just sketched a new scene – a huge, elegant space with a beautiful stained-glass dome overhead — is the only part of that massive hotel to survive bombing damage in the war.

These sorts of impromptu research discoveries leave me speechless. Indeed, in creative process, as L’Engle describes, mind lags far behind, like the slowest hiker on the climb.

The age of advantage is over

    

     “Today, in an era most of whose pressing problems are global in nature, persistence in the idea that power means advantage for various segments of the human family is profoundly mistaken in theory and of no practical service to the social and economic development of the planet.

     Those who still adhere to it—and who could in earlier eras have felt confident in such adherence—now find their plans enmeshed in inexplicable frustrations and hindrances.

     In its traditional, competitive expression, power is as irrelevant to the needs of humanity’s future as would be the technologies of railway locomotion to the task of lifting space satellites into orbits around the earth.”                               

~ The Prosperity of Humankind

The entire statement is available at:

http://statements.bahai.org/95-0303.htm

Photos courtesy traveling souls Kathy Gilman and Nelson Ashberger.

Heart’s harvest — one writer’s grateful season

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As autumn arrives, I get a bit “nesty”, as well as reflective about where the year has brought me thus far. As my awareness turns toward this personal spiritual harvest, I feel closer than ever to the neighborly small town I’m blessed to live in.

When I lived in China’s second largest city for just four short months, I experienced some of the most exciting days of my life, but I also developed a spiritual homesickness I thought I might never get over.

True, my hometown’s no longer the kind where I’d leave my car running when I stop into a store. But it’s still the sort of place where you can dial a wrong number and wind up having an awfully nice chat with whoever’s on the other end. The bonds you form in a place like this are true friendships that have absolutely nothing to do with life’s outer appearances and everything to do with that inner light that glimmers in each life. They are soul connections, as important to genuine life and survival as clean air and water.

This year, my first novel, whose story is embedded in small-town New England life, is finding response from growing numbers of generous readers. I love hearing from you. It’s a rich harvest for my heart when a reader finds that the book’s story, “describes a place in the heart we all want to visit and eventually live in. Where wounded souls can heal and find love again.”

Reader Laurel Sabera wrote, “I finished this book at least a month ago, and I am still fantasizing about taking a trip up to visit Tess and Evan. They have become family to me in my mind.”

Every writer knows what it means when those people you will never meet, but who you live with, often for years, as they unveil their story to you, become as real to readers as they’ve always been to you.

This small-town writer feels a wonderful sense of full-circle gratitude as a visit to my wonderful local bookstore looms on the horizon.

I’ll be at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter with Snow Fence Road Thursday evening, Oct. 3. Do come by and say hello, if you’re in the neighborhood.

Find more information about my author visit at: http://www.waterstreetbooks.com/event/local-author-phyllis-edgerly-ring

More information about the book can be found here: http://phyllisedgerlyring.wordpress.com/make-a-beginning-and-all-will-come-right/

Unhumiliating truth

 You have  to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.
What you’ll discover will be wonderful.
What you’ll discover will be yourself. ”

~ Alan Alda

 

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.   ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Photos courtesy Kathy Gilman.

A shade quite opposite of gray …

My big thanks to blogger and all-around angel Angie Kinsey for giving me and Snow Fence Road such a nice interview feature in her Motivational Blog for Writers and Artists:

AK: You’ve called your book “the exact opposite of 50 Shades”. Did you set out to write a book that was the opposite of “Shades” or do you base most of your stories on emotional romance rather than graphic sexual encounters?

PER: No matter what sort of writing I do, my goal’s always to highlight the beauty and meaning that can exalt the human condition. A lot of current writing focuses on aspects of “dis-ease” we can all recognize in the human struggle, then bogs down in the mess of its symptoms.  It does the same thing conventional medicine does – focuses on pain and imbalance, giving center stage to the horror and fear these generate. This serves mostly to entrap and preoccupy the instinctual side of us, I think.

But what about the wider options in the liberating power of the healing process itself? That greater part of us it’s calling forth? I love the potential power and purpose story can convey about our highest possibilities. That story must come full-circle and be authentic enough to satisfy those who make time to read it, of course. I’m also always wondering: How are we raising our vision toward something greater, rather than simply settling for the imbalance we see around us, or devolving into the negativity it creates? How effectively are we exercising our power of choice? What do we invest in – i.e. “pay” attention and give time to? And why? How is that making us feel, and how could honesty about our feelings (something nearly absent in Western culture as I’ve known it) lead to the true intimacy that is also absent in so much human experience?

Find the interview with Angie at:

http://angiekinsey.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/fresh-story-from-phyllis-edgerly-ring/

The freedom in forgiveness

Happy to have some thoughts up at BoomerCaf é this week.

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This stage of life brings a continual sorting through others’ belongings – and an invitation to forgiveness I never expected.

I put off this task after my parents’ death, as many of us do, simply stashed the boxes out of sight. Then I woke one day with the urge to unpack one.

I was plunged into stirred-up memories and stored-up feelings, not all of them easy or pleasant. As if whispered into my thoughts, an idea I’d encountered years ago in the work of psychologist Erik Blumenthal echoed: The person who comes to understand his parents can forgive the world.

Read the rest: http://lnkd.in/bCEqhVe

L’attitudes of eternity

A few gems to take with us into the week:

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity.

Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.   

~ Paulo Coelho

Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong.

At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.

~ Pema Chödrön

 

An attitude of gratitude comes from an understanding that we may all have problems, but we don’t have all the problems.    ~ Yehuda Berg

 

Artwork courtesy of authors Lauren Chuslo Shur and Jane E. Harper.

What are the fruits of our living and giving?

It can be a rich world out there in the blogosphere.

Some gleanings here and there:

Trust truth. It claimed us long ago. It uses us and aspects of life to push, pull, confirm and challenge us to a deeper realization. ~ Gangaji

How does truth make use of us, in the fruits of our living and giving?

In a week that included the anniversary of Sept. 11, blogger and Strategic Monk Greg Richardson notes: “When we talk about someone giving their life for someone or something, we are usually talking about how their life ended. … It is often not the way a life ends that best describes it. …The lives that are given include much more than how they end, each moment of each day. They give all their experiences and emotions, their thoughts and secrets, their passions and wisdom, their abilities and desires.

Read the rest of Greg’s “Focused on Giving Our Lives” at http://wp.me/p2kVKj-1Jq.

And while we’re talking about living and giving, writer Kathy Custren makes me smile with her admission, “Personally, I can only multi-task if I concentrate on one thing.”

Find her singular thoughts on the subject of being universal and individual and the part concentration and focus play in that at “Clarity of Singularity” at http://omtimes.co/17yV8HW.

Artwork courtesy Saffron Moser and Nelson Ashberger.

Facets of light and mercy

Thank you for this guest post, Ron Tomanio:

             My calamity is My providence, outwardly it is fire and vengeance, but inwardly it is light and mercy. Hasten thereunto that thou mayest become an eternal light and an immortal spirit. This is My command unto thee, do thou observe it.  ~ The Hidden Words of Baha’u’llah

     How can a painful or tragic event be “light and mercy”?

     I suggest seeing the attributes of God more like diamonds with infinite facets as opposed to a one-dimensional mirror. Some facets are developed in times of “calamity” or times of “fire and vengeance”. Some facets are developed in happy times, some are developed in sad times, times of tragedy involving great pain.

     It is possible to survive painful events, but not meaningless, painful, tragic events. Although a full understanding of why these events happen may not be possible in the present moment, it might be that in some future world of God we will come to such an understanding.

     Yet why allow current veils to rob us of the precious moments that await us? Instead, we can take what we don’t understand and place it in the hands of God and concentrate our efforts in seeing every moment of our life as a priceless, irreplaceable opportunity to discover the boundless love and compassion that live in our heart.

     The last part of the Hidden Word above describes our true destiny: an “eternal light and an immortal spirit”.

     The incredible irony of learning to develop facets of our inner diamonds during painful events instead of shouting “why me?” is that the choice to develop those gems is the best chance we have of escaping the prison of the painful moment and actually answering the “why me?” question — effectively.

     It seems that this process of learning and acquiring the attributes of God, whatever the type of experience it is that offers us the opportunity, has relevance to the next stage of our journey, which entails traversing purely spiritual worlds.

     Here is my “why me?” answer, but I emphasize that it’s strictly the answer I received when I personally asked the inner question. What if in this world I could only see one color of the spectrum, such as the color blue? I would not see a complete vision of the world in which I live, and that would have a severe impact on the quality of my life.

     In the next world the equivalent of our spiritual senses are the attributes of God. If we only developed the facets of these attributes in happy times, we would be unable to fully discern the world beyond because we would not have fully developed our spiritual senses to be aware of all that our surroundings include. In the next world, the attributes of God become our spiritual senses. Love, justice, mercy become our eyes and ears.

     One of those attributes, a name of God, is the Creator. Names of God are also names of the attributes of God that we have been asked to “acquire”. These qualities have facets of both giving and receiving. Thus, a wide variety of experience – including the painful and difficult — that offers the contrast that helps us build our capacities for both giving and receiving is indispensable if we are to fully develop any attribute, particularly the attribute of creativity.

     Adopt an unlimited belief in your ability to create or you will never know what you are capable of creating. Cultivate an unlimited faith in the rightness of every one of your experiences to bring exactly what’s needed for the very highest possibilities in your development and that of other souls.

Co-authors Ron Tomanio, Diane Iverson, and Phyllis Ring explore these and related themes in the soon-to-be-released With Thine Own Eyes: Why Imitate the Past When We Can Investigate Reality? coming soon from George Ronald Publisher.