Fire and Fury

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Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff, is a revealing look at the Trump administration during his first year in office. It shows a lot of the infighting which has been hinted at in the news, but here revealed in all its “fury”. It gives realistic looks at the various personalities inhabiting the Trump White House. It speaks of the games being played to gain influence and power within the administration.

This book helps explain so much about what we hear snippets of in the evening news. It gives a broader perspective and background to the news.

And what it shows is a man totally unfit to occupy the office of president of the United States. It is really a frightening scenario. With so much influence and power at his disposal, the unhinged rantings and ratings of this man are truly scary.

I urge everyone, especially my American friends and family, to read this book if you really want to understand some of what is occurring today in US politics.

Fever

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Deon Meyer, the author of this stunning novel, is South African. He sets the story in South Africa. In fact, it is translated from the original Afrikaans. And it is a great read. I could hardly put the book down, once I got it out of the library.

The basic premise (and I will not give away the ending!!!) is that a disease has hit Earth, killing most of the people. Some find themselves immune, and slowly begin to put their lives back together. As they do, civilization begins to reassert itself. And all of the problems of society begin to emerge.

The story includes some incredible, hair-raising episodes of survival. It includes discussions of how to form this new society and disagreements of how to structure it. In various areas there are different attempts at doing this. And of course, as in all societies, there are dysfunctional people who want nothing more than to destroy what successful groups accomplish.

The story mostly follows the life of a boy, Nico Storm, who was about 13 years old when he and his father find themselves survivals of the original onslaught of the fever. The book follows Nico until his late teens or early twenties. There are many adventures, many threads to his story. It’s complexity includes the coming-of-age of Nico, his relationship with his father, religious conservatives, open-minded people, all of the dimensions of human society.

And it is a page-turner! I recommend this book to anyone desiring a really, really good read!

Alabama election results

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It was with vastly swinging emotions that we followed the election in Alabama of a US Senator. I was driving/working late, receiving updates from my wife about how the results were going. At the beginning Roy Moore was running ahead, by as much as 10 percentage points. I was so discouraged. “When will we learn to not keep electing scuzzy men?” It just seemed like more of what we’ve experienced in the past. People keep getting elected not for the strength of their character, but for their political connections. I was really very depressed.

As I continued to get election updates, Doug Jones began to move closer in the results. I thought, oh, perhaps there is some hope! But I didn’t want to get my hopes too high because I had been disappointed too often in the past. So it was with very guarded hopes that I hurried home after work.

By the time I arrived home, my wife had texted that they were tied at 49%. I fixed myself some food, and settled down in front of the TV. As the evening wore on, I became more and more excited!! And when Jones won by quite a large margin, over 20,000 votes, I was over-the-moon positive!!!

As I listened to news commentators, I dampened my response a bit, realizing that Moore had been a very damaged candidate, and his demise was not necessarily a sign of things to come, a sign of a significant shift in the US political scene. But still, for a Democrat to get elected in a solidly Republican state like Alabama, signalled that there are some people who still take their democratic responsibility seriously.

When Breath Becomes Air

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This book, by Paul Kalanithi, is an incredible story of dying. Paul Kalanithi was a medical student, specializing in neurosurgery. He was in his last years or months of residency, nearing the end of his training. He was good, very good, at what he was doing. He was being noticed already, even as a resident surgeon.

He got lung cancer, had never smoked, but knew the seriousness of his diagnosis. As a doctor, especially one who took very seriously helping his patients die well, he took his own diagnosis as a chance to experience this in his own life.

The book details his path through medical training, and through his own disease. Throughout he showed incredible integrity, a calmness with what was happening to him. He details going through the various stages of grief, in a somewhat backwards order from the usual.

I can’t say enough good about this book. Kalanithi details very carefully his brief life and his travel through his disease. He does so with great articulation, no preachiness, no life-changing revelations.

His wife finishes the book after he dies, carrying out Paul’s final project.

It was a breath of fresh air (to paraphrase the title!) to read this account. Anyone would be well-served reading this story.

Split Lives?

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A few weeks ago I had a very profound dream. In the dream I was an old woman; I was with my grand-daughter. We were in a house which had been destroyed by some natural disaster, like a hurricane. There was no roof; debris was everywhere. My grand-daughter was looking for something dear to her. I directed her to look behind an upright piano. This piano was standing next to a mostly intact wall, with debris, like boards, sheets of plywood and the like scattered around and leaning against the piano. We had to move some of this, my grand-daughter doing most of this moving stuff out of the way, with me mostly standing by and giving advice. As my grand-daughter was crawling down on the floor around the back side of the piano, my daughter, the mother of the little girl, arrived on the scene, and we stood observing the progress of the little one.

This was the culmination of a longer dream, but is pretty much all I remember. As I was coming out of this dream, waking up, before I was fully awake, I had the very, very distinct impression that this grandmother was my soul in another incarnation, a “split incarnation”. That is, my soul decided in its between-lives state to become two humans at the same time. This message I was receiving was very clear to me. It was not the same as awakening and wondering what the preceding dream had meant, remembering the scenes, etc, the result of analyzing. No, this was more like receiving this information prior to my being able to process the dream. This was not the result of thinking about and wondering about this dream. It was almost like it was tacked on to the end as information for me.

Then, a few moments later, entering the more usual period of lying there processing the dream, wondering and remembering certain details, I became aware that my skin in the dream was quite dark. Not as dark as Negro skin, but more like being a fairly dark-skinned middle-eastern woman, or perhaps a darker skinned south american.

This information, that my soul was incarnated into two persons at the same time, was completely startling to me. I had heard of the phenomenon; I knew of this dynamic of souls splitting into two incarnations at the same time. But I had never even remotely considered this as a possibility for myself!

When I was undergoing BLSR (Between Lives Soul Regression) training in Boulder, Colorado, under Linda Backman, she told us about the possibility of split incarnations. In fact, although I don’t remember for sure, I think she has been shown that she herself is a split incarnation. I contacted her about this dream, and the subsequent revelation that this was me in another life!! And I may yet contact her for more in-depth analysis and understanding of this phenomenon.

One thing I have wondered about, and which this dream has helped in my understanding of my current life as Dennis, is that throughout my life I have had a number of experiences of being perceived by others as very talented and able. But subsequent to initial contact, I feel I have let people down, that I did not live up to the initial expectations people (and myself) had of me. I have disappointed myself and others in not being able to fulfill hopes.

During my first contact with Linda Backman, a psychologist extremely experienced in the fields of soul regression, she told me that she perceived me as an advanced soul. I did not accept this judgement at the time, due to my own self-perception of immaturity. I could see times during my life when I had opportunities to do some seemingly positive things, even great things. But for whatever reason, these opportunities never seemed to pan out. I would end up failing, at least from an earthly perspective, and certainly from my own perception of myself.

Musing upon this dream I have wondered whether being part of a split incarnation means I did not bring quite enough soul-energy into this life I am now living. This is another aspect of soul lives I have been learning over the past decade or so. We as souls, together with our soul-guides, decide what percentage of our soul-energy we want to bring into the life we are considering entering. Typically souls will bring just over half their soul-energy into their lives. Bringing too much can lead to burn-out. Bringing too little can lead to lack of energy in the incarnation.

I know this is a dynamic is not unique to split-incarnations. Too little soul-energy can be present in a single incarnation as well as in a split incarnation, but it seems to me if I decided to split my incarnation, it would’ve been more likely to not take quite enough soul-energy into at least this incarnation of Dennis, that is, more likely than if my Dennis-life was the only life I was currently living. With the possibility of two incarnations, there would be less soul-energy available for each individual life. I, of course, will not know whether this is true, and I will not know whether this has been a similar experience of my split incarnation (the older, dark-skinned woman), until we are reunited between lives!

The bottom line is, I guess, that over all, I have been quite satisfied with my life as Dennis. When I went through my initial BLSR session back in 2011 I was told by my spirit-guides that I was doing a good job of this life, that I was following the tasks I had agreed to when planning this incarnation. Also, I was told that I had everything I needed to complete this life as planned. So I really don’t have any tension that I “should” be doing more or anything! I have been very happy doing what I am doing, and am able to rest in the fact that this is okay with heaven. I know that when we plan our lives, they are not always hugely intense, highly visibly successful lives (in the eyes of other people). Sometimes we come into a life to be an impact to a very few, in very subtle ways. I am here to live a rather quiet life. And that’s okay with me!

So, all this new information is not really stressing me or anything! All it does is add another piece to the puzzle. It helps me understand this life just a little better. I view this dream, and the startling revelation at the end, as a gift from the Spirit realm. It is yet one more aspect of feeling accepted, loved, supported, aided. I am being walked along-side. I am never very far from supernatural assistance and support!!!!

More Trump

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Sorry, folks, but I’ve got to do it!! The Trump era continues to provide fodder for the mill. Just about every day there is some new and disturbing thing he does to give us all pause.

Just a couple notes, from the entertainment industry:

One: here is a quote from one of the greatest rock musicians ever, Robert Plant. In an interview about his latest album, Carry Fire, Plant mentions Trump as an inspiration for one of his songs. But, “It’s not just Trump. It’s every Trump that’s ever been. Every generation and every culture has several Trumps. It’s just some are a bit heftier than others. And you’ve got one hell of a heft over there.”

Two: I recently read an interview with the screenwriter for the Back to the Future movies of the eighties. This writer, way back in the early eighties, used Donald Trump as a model for his character, Biff. Biff was a bully in these movies. Everything he did was for his own advancement. He cared nothing for anyone else. Like Robert Plant said above, every generation has these characters. We can all recognize them in the Biffs and the Trumps of our time. That a screenwriter recognized this decades before Donald Trump ever ran for public office is very telling indeed. Trump’s character has been consistent from the beginning. He hasn’t changed his stripes. He has been a narcissistic bully from day one. He has never grown up, or grown beyond the person he was as a young man. In fact, I have heard several commentators refer to him as a “man-boy”, or even a “man-baby”. He has the demeanour, and intelligence, of an immature person.

The truly scary aspect of all this is the position he has found himself in. Here we have a truly immature narcissist in one of the most powerful positions in the world. My feeling, watching this ongoing circus called the Trump administration, is that he cares so little for anyone beyond himself and his family, and he has such abysmally little understanding of the consequences of his actions, that he could unthinkingly plunge us all into oblivion.

We do indeed have, “. . . one hell of a heft . . .” on our hands.

Friends

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A quote I keep on my monitor reads, “The most beautiful discovery friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.” (Elizabeth Foley)

This past weekend we experienced that beautiful discovery. Three friends of ours from forty years ago came to visit. From our time together in the 1970’s we have scattered quite broadly. The three couples involved live in Kansas, California and Alberta. One of these couples knew that my wife and I were celebrating fifty years of marriage next spring, and they wanted to come help us celebrate. The widower of the other couple also wanted to join us.

We visited, we went to the nearby mountains, we ate together, and just enjoyed each others company once again. Although we had occasionally met over the intervening years, we had not had a time like this since we all lived in a small town in central Kansas during the ’70’s.

Each of us had walked our disparate paths. But we were able to share these paths with each other and accept each other even over widely differing beliefs and experiences. I told them that the things I now believed and the ways in which I now experienced the Divine were the result of forty years of searching. I certainly did not ever expect that my friends would be able to fully comprehend in a few hours what it had taken me that long to arrive at! And that was okay.

In fact, I had entered this visit without any plan to share very much of my own journey at all. I made space during our time together for my wife to share hers. But knowing how far I myself had moved from Church orthodoxy, I had decided we did not have enough time to share much of that. But of course, questions arose! And I ended up sharing fairly extensively, at least with one of my friends, the essence of my journey.

During the 1970’s we had all been part of an intense church experience, including living communally for periods of time. We had helped each other through the births of our first children. We had learned, prayed, studied together, growing spiritually. For me and my wife this was an intensely formative period of time. We grew to know ourselves and each other in ways we would never have thought possible.

But this church experience was centered around a fairly conservative, fundamentalist view of scripture, God and Church. My wife and I had grown considerably beyond the teachings of our earlier years. We had moved into areas of spiritual understanding and experience which would have been considered heretical in these earlier years.

And yet, even though some of our friends had pretty much remained in that earlier conservative mindset, we were all able to visit and share where we each were with God and each other. It was purely refreshing to be able to do this. I did not sense judgement from my friends. I sensed attempts at understanding, rather than attempts at correcting.

We parted as good friends still. Even though we acknowledged fairly vast differences of beliefs, we still accept each other. And that is the beautiful thing about friendship. We have grown separately, but we discovered we had not grown apart.

Templar Sanctuaries in North America: Sacred Bloodlines and Secret Treasures

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This book, by William F. Mann, is a fascinating look at the possibility that the Templar treasure, so long sought by kings and others, was brought to North America in pre-Columbian days.

First of all, the author is himself a high degree Mason, and descended from Templars. On his mother’s side he is also related to the Mik’maq aboriginals. He spends a fair amount of time outlining his genealogy, to the point it gets quite confusing to a reader, such as myself, new to all these theories. Along the way he deals with the Merovingian ideas, Cathar beliefs, etc. I think that Mann ends up convincing himself that he is one of the carriers of the blood of Jesus and Mary Magdalene!

What I found most fascinating in this book is Mann’s dealing with the pre-Columbian history of the Americas. There is, of course, wide-spread acceptance today of visitors to North America centuries before Christopher Columbus. Mann expands this to a fairly regular going back and forth from North America to the Old World. These early visitors went to much more than only the east coast line. He shows that Europeans visited most of the continent at various times, and indeed settled and lived in many places. Relics like the Kensington Rune Stone in Minnesota are some of the evidence of this. Apparently there are similar finds all through central North America.

Mann’s theory then, is that the Templars received a lot of information including maps of the North American continent. He posits that they ended up travelling to the headwaters of the Missouri River (so-called in today’s language) in the present state of Montana and depositing their treasure in a cave in the mountains.

Along the way the author deals with many fascinating aspects of these theories, including the Oak Island mystery in Nova Scotia. For myself, since I heard of Oak Island a few years ago, I have read a couple books on the subject. The most convincing argument for the existence of the Oak Island booby-trapped well, was that it was built by Templars. The engineering required to build an elaborate system of levels, and channels to the ocean tripped by digging into the well, could only have come from an advanced group such as the Templars.

Overall, I found the book a bit overwhelming as to the amount of new (to me) information I was trying to absorb. I wondered if this could have been helped somewhat by a reading of some of the author’s earlier books; this is the third in a trilogy on this subject. He goes off in such detail on trails that seem irrelevant to the main subject that I found myself slogging through some chapters of the book.

But the book left me wondering! Could there be some measure of truth behind all this research and surmising? Fascinating to consider!!!

Collateral Beauty

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We watched this movie the other night. Profound, positive, a real joy to experience. But be prepared! Bring Kleenex!!!!

Billed as a modern fable, the movie stars Will Smith as a father who has lost his six-year old daughter. The loss sends him into a tail spin. He ceases functioning in his job as co-owner and creative genius of a media company. His business partner, played by Edward Norton, and a couple other partners and fellow-workers conspire to get him out of his lethargy, at least long enough to sign a deal to sell the company before it totally collapses.

Howard (Will Smith) writes letters to “Love”, “Time”, and “Death” as part of his attempts to deal with his grief. His co-workers, and friends, hire three actors to play the parts of these concepts and confront him.

That is the gist of the story. I will refrain from telling more; you need to see this movie!!!

The movie stars some big-name actors. In addition to the above, Helen Mirren, Keira Knightley, Kate Winslet also star. The movie is done very well; it is a well-told tale. Check it out.

DJTrump

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Recently I’ve been wondering whether we’ve been getting this all wrong. Perhaps it was the media who colluded with the Russians to put Trump into the White House!!! After all, what would they have to report on if boring old Clinton had won!!

I am being tongue-in-cheek of course! But part of what I am saying is true. Myself, for one, has been thoroughly obsessed with the continuing nose-dive of the Trump presidency. His total lack of competency has been mind-blowing.

Those of you who know me personally know that I have never been a Trump supporter. In fact, during all of my adult life I have tended toward liberal and progressive politics, not conservative.

In Canada I have voted Liberal, New Democratic Party, and even occasionally Green Party. I feel pride in Alberta choosing NDP in our last election. For our “red-neck” province to vote in the most left-leaning party was freakish. And wonderful. The Conservatives had been in power so long (over forty years, I think) they had become complacent at best, corrupt at worst.

I have never been attracted to conservative political ideas. It has never made sense to me that any working class person could support parties who legislate against their own best interests. To cut benefits for the working class while cutting taxes for the richest in society is not only unproductive overall, it is immoral in my books.

But there is more to the Trump presidency than his being demonstrably unsuitable for the office. I can actually see some benefits resulting from his election to the highest office in the land. Trump has exposed an underbelly of hatred and racism heretofore being kept largely under wraps. His own language of hate has unleashed attitudes against pretty much anyone who is “different”. I think that, in the long run, bringing such ugliness to light will assist in eradicating it. Yes, it unchains violence. But it also forces us to face the reality of who we are.

Another thing, look at the active resistance he has fomented. It has been wonderful to see thousands and millions of people getting out to voice their opposition to the Trump presidency. From day one of his administration people have gathered to express their views. This is nothing less than democracy in action.

Trump’s ignoring the Constitution of the US has also forced more of us to increase our own knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. Apparently lying to his own people (something he does almost every time he opens his mouth) is not a crime. But soliciting campaign aid from a foreign power is. And it is becoming eminently clear that that is just what he has done.

If the results weren’t so frighteningly serious, it would be almost comical how absolutely everything Donald Trump has accused his political opponents of doing is exactly what he himself is guilty of. “Lying Ted.” Trump is a proven pathological liar. “Lock her up.” Now Trump’s own son and son-in-law are possibly facing criminal charges for their actions during the campaign. His creed of helping the working class find employment and better living conditions is now so laughable as to be pathetic. His, and the Republican Party’s, policies are designed to directly affect the lives of the poorest in society in negative ways. These policies will make for extremely desperate times for millions if they come to pass; and they will make the richest among us even richer, widening the gap between rich and poor. Such a widening gap has always, throughout history, created instability in societies.

Usually, in my lifetime at least, conservative policies have been attempted on the sly. Republicans have been adept at covering up their true agenda. They know how to make their insidious policies sound as if they will benefit the average Joe. The blatancy of Trump has brought these devious schemes right out into the open. There no longer seems to be any attempt to hide what they really are trying to do.

And what it looks like they are trying to accomplish is oligarchy and hegemony. The democratic freedom experiment of the United States of America seems to be on its last leg. The forces that be seem absolutely determined to end this experiment.

One of Trump’s latest diatribes that “France is no longer France”, or “Paris is no longer Paris”, seems to be coming full circle. The US of A is no longer the United States of America I grew up in and love. It is slowly and surely being destroyed from within.

It is sad to see this happening. Many people I know, both family and friends, live there still. We visit there regularly. I do not want to see this death happen before my eyes. I still have hope that the American people will have the courage to face what is evident and stand up and take a stand, no matter what the cost.