Dreamlog: House Fire
A fragment only:
I return to my house to find it's been completely burned to the ground. So have the houses next to it; in fact, they are attached units in a block of six or more, more like dorm rooms. The whole block has burned; concrete walls remain and ashes, but nothing else.
My first thought is regret that I didn't have offsite data backups.
pod bay doors open
New year, new decade, new blog name and look. Let's try starting this thing again.
Our Glorious Three Components
Simon Talbot from Kraft Foods said: "The name Vegemite iSnack2.0 was chosen based on its personal call to action, relevance to snacking and clear identification of a new and different Vegemite to the original. We believe these three components completely encapsulate the new brand."
The call to iSnack action
Resounds throughout the land
Our glorious three components
Encapsulate the brand
On darkest breakfast tables
Dank dusty Vegemite
Made snacking near-irrelevant
Until we joined the fight
To feed the millions craving
Difference and novelty
We prayed to Kraft for a miracle
And lo! Processed CREAM CHEESE!
No mortal mind conceived this snack
'Twere born in circuit's glow!
In awe we serve to you on crackers
iSnack Two - Point - Ohhhh!
(iSnack 2.0 will now be known as CheesyBite. It's cheesy... and it bites! Kraft Foods would like to remind you that it is no longer directly related to the Philip Morris tobacco empire, since a whole couple of years ago, and would all you people please just shut up about that.)
Dreamlog: Rutherford’s Game
I'm playing a scripted Live Action Roleplaying Game set over a weekend in a a Gothic Revival type building somewhere in a New Zealand town, a little reminiscient of Rutherford's Den in the Christchurch Arts Centre (though this connection doesn't come to me in the dream; for some reason I think Dunedin; possibly Knox College). The building has a history of science; several famous inventors have lived and worked there. In the game we are reliving the early 1900s and have a complex plot involving espionage, secret inventions and interpersonal rivalry.
At one point in the game I round a corner and see one of the GMs, who is holding a toy rifle. We simulate a fight and I 'win'. He hands me a clue.
Brazil
From next week I will be travelling for a month to Brazil. Since I'm not entirely convinced of the stability of this site, I'll be blogging the trip at natecull.wordpress.com.
The Colour of the Wheat Fields
"But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince.
"Yes, that is so," said the fox.
"Then it has done you no good at all!"
"It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields."
(I know I posted this a while ago, and I can't find where.)
My copy of Regina Dawn Akers' The Holy Spirit's Interpretation of the New Testament has arrived, and I am starting to read it, beginning with the commentary for Mark, the most direct section.
It is a challenging read. I am getting all sorts of emotional mixed messages: I like it, and I'm disturbed by it, and I'm not sure if I believe it, or not. It's definitely in the A Course In Miracles vein, but ACIM was much clearer to me. This one... bugs me.
And yet. Looking at Regina's Yahoo Group, I see this:
Last summer, I had a dream. I was standing and looking at a wheat field that stretched as far as the eyes could see. As I looked on the wheat field I heard a thought, "The cover of the book is to be this color." A few weeks later, I had the same dream again.
I am not an artist, so I called Phil Frisk, who is. I asked him if he would design a wheat-colored cover for NTI. He agreed. We didn't talk about it again and a couple of months passed, then I had another dream. In this dream I was talking to a young man who seemed to have some authority over the cover of the book. I was telling him that the logo for the Foundation for the Holy Spirit needed to be on the cover. He disagreed. I told him that the copyright for NTI belonged to the foundation, so the logo must be on the cover. He said that wouldn't do. I continued to insist, and he continued to say no. Then, he reached in his files and pulled out a picture of a sheaf of wheat. He said that this was
the picture that was to be on the cover.
The symbol of the wheat and the harvest is hugely important to me. And then this blog entry:
I saw the seeds, which had been planted in every mind, as they began to grow. Happiness sprouted in bushes of light that grew from the minds of everyone. And soon, although we still walked and lived in this world, we were focused on our minds. We knew that’s where our happiness was. We knew that Love was in our minds, and we recognized that our minds were one. So, we walked within the world of form, but we did not pay attention to it. It was no longer of value to us. We valued only the Love, Happiness and Oneness of our minds.
It bugs me because this Sunday I had a similar mental image during the sermon; the parable of the Mustard Seed. All these people with seeds of light growing within them; all good acts forming trees which shelter the world. How much of our society has already been shaped and sheltered by quiet trees of righteousness that we don't even recognise, without which we'd be living in a harsh, dead desert?
It bugs me because I don't want to believe a false gospel. I don't want to believe something that's too simple, too easy, feels too right to be true.
This Jesus attracts me, even as he scares me, and I am desperately afraid that I will find out that he's only an illusion. What he says is too radical. 'God is within you' 'We are all God's children' 'I am only an elder brother'. 'The world is not really there' 'Everything you have done is already forgiven' 'You are one with God'.
How many Jesuses are there? What was the message he taught, really? When we strip away all the layers of human interpretation, what's the core of it? 'Say the Sinner's Prayer or you'll die and burn forever'? Or 'God loves you'?
This Jesus teaches like an Easterner. Is he even a Christian?
If this is real, there's something very interesting happening this decade. The Harvest that was promised to the Pentecostals might be beginning. And, for now, they're missing it. (Though perhaps the rain, to mix metaphors, is falling everywhere.)
If it's not real, the implications are too horrible to contemplate, and I've not yet entirely freed myself of that fear.
A voice inside me says 'fear is not the Way'. But...
Blumhardt on the Kingdom
As a precursor to a post I want to write about Sarah Palin, the Latter Rain, Dominionism, and the New Apostolic Revival: here's a take on the 'Kingdom of God' from the Blumhardts (probably Christoph, the son), one of the earliest healing revivals and precursors/parallels of the Pentecostal movement. The Blumhardts had experience of literal exorcisms and healings, and yet see how their theology differs from what is often touted today as straight-down-the-line Pentecostal values. Christoph was politically active but leaned significantly leftwards; and he took this political stance from his religion, not despite of it.
The work of the kingdom of God must stand under two laws. First, you dare never again be angry at anyone, for the kingdom of God is love for all men. Therefore, you may not belittle anyone, even the least. Indeed, you are a miserable fool if you vex or annoy one of these little ones, demean him, or treat him as nothing. Thus, we must always look with God’s evaluation upon what I like to call “the pennies of God’s capital investment.” They belong to God, of course, although the value lies in the persons themselves. As man, you are of value to God; yet, your value is not a hair greater than that of some little guy of no status, e.g., a day laborer. We always must bear in mind the worth God attributes to a small, low-ranked, despised human being; such people we must guard and protect.
The second law is that we remain slaves. Slaves we want to be; lords we want never to become. We would be slaves under God’s hand—yet, that I not be misunderstood: slaves of men we will never be!...If I serve God, then God will stand by me and men must give way to me. I shall not yield as much as a fingernail to any man. And if empires and kingdoms of men multiply until the very heavens and earth itself fall, yet shall I stand like a rock in the sea. I hold fast to God, I am his slave; and all must break itself to pieces upon me, because I serve God.
We should be priests, i.e., we who have become firm in grace should stand firm for others, praying for them and the world so that the whole might be filled with the glory and power and grace of God. If we are steadfast in this priestly sense, then we bear a kingly power. We can cooperate in overcoming the dark powers of this world...You are not to be priests for yourselves but for the world in which you live.
That world should move your heart; and if you see something of its misery and death, then you should protest against it, saying, “That cannot be; indeed, it must cease, because Jesus lives.”
Life Review
While dreamhunting, I've been flicking back through my last three years on Livejournal, and it's depressing. I wrote a lot more back then and now I seem to have dried to a trickle. Also, setting up a Wordpress site was possibly a mistake, as was interrupting my main blog with my Dataspace notes. Most of my main writing has been there, but I seem to be grinding to a halt and my very first Dataspace posts seem to be much in the same territory as I'm in now. I've done a lot of comp.sci reading but not managed to pull anything much together clearly enough to get a functioning model (other than a few sketchy notes on a Lisp syntax). The whole thing might be an illusion; probably not entirely, but I'm just tired of going over the same ground. I don't have such a system, I'm losing faith that I have the ability to describe it, much less build it, and time goes on.
(Ie, my very first Dataspace post on June 11th 2007 pretty much outlines the fundamental vision I'm still looking at. The rest is fussy semantics about storage and processing details, yet without those, nothing is buildable. It's like I've got half of a brilliant idea but no idea of where to find the other half. And after sixteen months I can't fill in those missing bits on my own. So maybe I just need to let it go.)
I wish I had what I want Dataspace to be, right now: a kind of distributed filing system where I could simply copy weblog posts from one system to another, and make new categories at will. I want a Social Web that works. But I don't have one, and now I'm scattered between Wordpress and Livejournal. And the new version of Wordpress doesn't seem to allow backdating of posts, which means I can't cleanly port bits of my online life from one place to another.
Bleh. It might be time to move back to Livejournal.
Meanwhile, my life in the local church and neighbourhood is taking more and more of my energy, which is probably a good thing, but means I'm somehow finding less and less energy to think about what I'm doing.
There are heavy things I need to work through about spirituality, religion, sustainability, and politics, and instead all I'm posting are dream logs and meta rants.
Bandwidth
Something is suddenly eating all my 2GB monthly bandwidth limit and it's probably spam bots. If I go offline, this is why.
Edit: Oops, I think it's fallout from my previous worm. Not happy. Hopefully it's contained now, but I can't be sure.
A Path to Mystery
I'm trying again to gather together a core set of materials that I think most clearly lay out a single coherent mystical Christian theology, or at least seem to converge for me:
* Mary Baker Eddy's 'Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures', 1875-1910
* Frances Bird's 'The New Dispensation', circa 1915
* Agnes Sanford's 'The Healing Light', 1947
* Thomas Merton's 'New Seeds of Contemplation', 1949-1961
* Helen Schucman's 'A Course in Miracles', 1965-1972
* Rick Joyner's 'The Harvest', 1989
* Regina Dawn Akers' The Holy Spirit's Interpretation of the New Testament, 2006
ACIM and NTI are very closely linked, and Science & Health predates both. The Harvest and The New Dispensation, though nearly over seventy years apart, also are linked by language and metaphor. Science & Health, ACIM and The Healing Light all deal directly with healing miracles.
To which I might add:
* The writings of Julian of Norwich, late 14th century
* The writings of St Teresa of Avila, 1515-1582 and St John of the Cross, 1542-1591
* The Zodiac messages (1921-1957)
* The Stephen experience (1973-1980)
* The Medjugorje messages
* The Quaker and Anabaptist movements
* The 'Emerging Church' movement
There's a common thread here, through Christian Science, Christian Spiritualism, Roman Catholic (Trappist/Cistercian/Benedictine and Carmelite) monasticism, Latter Rain Pentecostalism, Charismatic Anglicanism, and no formal religious alignment at all (ACIM, which paradoxically is the writing which most strongly asserts itself as being the actual voice of Jesus), and it intrigues me the more because it crosses such steep denominational boundaries.
It also challenges me deeply because there's a very high standard of life, thought and conduct set which I'm not sure how to live up to.
