Healing 3

Dear All,

In the story of blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:36-52), he literally asks that he might "look up."  He has as if forgotten how to look up, and knows this is the problem.  Hence the story's relevance to those who are not physically blind.

But what is up?

The story put me in mind of another one, Edwin Abbott's wonderful Flatland (1884).   There, a square who lives on a two-dimensional plane encounters a sphere, which intersects the plane in a circle and so appears to be a circle to the flat-land-inhabiting square.   To convince the square that it is something other than a circle, the sphere takes the square onto its periphery and soars through space.  When he drops the square back, the poor traveller has no way of telling his plane-dwelling friends about the glories of three-dimensional experience.

Blind Bartimaeus has a feeling for up, or he wouldn't ask for it.

This feeling is called faith.

We practiced the further reaches of opening upward on Tuesday, and will continue on Thursday, tomorrow, in the first evening session: 5-6pm, 5 Hillside Ave, Great Barrington, MA. 

(Remember: no meeting next Tuesday, the 22nd!  So the next two meetings are tomorrow, the 17th at 5pm and a week later, Thursday the 24th at 5pm.)


At the end of the story, it says that Bartimaeus follows Jesus "in the way."  This is the Way of Taoism and of, "I am the way, the truth and the life"  which we could explicatively over-translate as meaning: "The I AM, the essence of personal being, is the path, the truth, and the life beyond physical life that informs, as it created, this living existence of ours, the Earth, stars, laws of physics, and all and all."

What gets in the way of all this is what the story represents as the cloak that Bartimaeus throws off as he leaps up, ready for everything.

He becomes, through the practice of a specific feeling, the person who can follow in the Way.

all blessings to all,

Michael