Starry Heavens

Dear All,

It can seem at times that you are the star in the movie of your life.  Other people come and go, but you are in every scene, so you must be the lead. 

Still, we know that this is not quite right.  The other people are each as central as ourselves.  We have disastrously over-learned a lesson we had to learn in early childhood: to care for this particular mind, body and biography. 

Yesterday, as part of our group exercise, we practiced toggling back and forth between a sense of being this one, in this body, in this mind (at one pole of the toggle)  and according full centrality to the other one, our interlocutor (at the opposite pole).  I exist/ you exist; I exist/you exist -- back and forth.  In this way, we were learning one of the moves necessary to bestow reality on the other person -- that precious grain by which the people of the Middle Ages nourished the unicorn.

Next week, we'll go on to a consideration of what it is to be a human among humans.  This certainly means being on earth in our physical, vegetative, and animal aspects, but it also requires a sense of our vast sidereal heritage. 

A political maxim goes:

  Think globally; act locally.

We'll reverse and extend this to:
 

Act locally; think globally; feel into the stars.

  What would it be like to walk the earth while simultaneously aware of our source in the stars?  We would become ourselves the light that returns at the solstice.  We would know each other not only as beings of earth, but as beings all together -- as the stars in the moving picture of this life. 

all blessings to all,

Michael