Saturday, 1 June 2019
Greg's Blog: SATURDAY SESSIONS
Greg's Blog: SATURDAY SESSIONS: SATURDAY SESSIONS kicks off this year with a new book about a guy who tries to cure his cancer through past life regression therap...
SATURDAY SESSIONS
SATURDAY SESSIONS kicks off this year with a new book about a guy who tries to cure his cancer through past life regression therapy. He finds himself caught up in a fascinating and exotic period of unrecorded history and emerges with startling revelations about our contemporary world.
I call it The Compromise. A decision Jordan makes in the remote past threatens his life in the present. It was inspired by my friend, the mystic and spiritual teacher, Lilla Bek.
We'll post a little chunk of it every week! 📖
I
It's all very well to talk about past lives, says Cathy, but what about the present? What are you going to do about the present, Jordan?
I'd been trying to explain to Cathy that I'd found something on the internet relating to past lives, past life regression they call it. I told her I might do some therapy, that it would help me find my way. I'd just lost my job. Cathy knows I hated the job anyway, so it was all for the best they let me go. And a week ago they told me I'd six months to live. Obviously, I had to tell Cathy about the job; but there's no way I was going to mention the death-sentence.
I'm 44. Midway in life's journey. Maria left me for another man when I was thirty. I loved her. I still do. We were in our late teens when Jason arrived. He's in Australia now, working on some beach or other. We're not on speaking terms.
But forgive me, Dear Reader! It was never my intention to offload my miserable life on your unexpectant shoulders. You have troubles of your own. So enough about me for now, me and my life. Me and my current life, that is.
The theory about past life regression is that if you become conscious of some unresolved issue in one of your past lives, you may be able to correct it in this one, simply by becoming aware of it. The same pattern emerges in every one of your lives until you recognize it and correct it in your present life. If you don't correct it, you may become ill and die. And then it's back on the merry-go-round again, where the pattern remains until you finally address it. If you ever do.
Cathy is a nurse. She would never even want to understand any of this. If I don't tell her about the illness, I don't have to tell her what I'm really up to, I can say I'm trying to find my way in life, not a way to stay alive, any other way in the wide world to stay alive except the slash, burn and poison way, our state-of-the-art, cutting-edge, twenty-first century approach to treating a symptom called cancer.
II
Not that cancer, or any disease for that matter, is a pattern. It's just a symptom. The pattern is the cause. If you can recognize the pattern, you can deal with the symptom. At least, that's the theory.
Cells mutate at random and from time to time will make a mistake. They say we can produce up to ten million cancer cells every day that are zapped by the immune system. The main response of the immune system to tumours is to destroy them, using killer T-cells, millions and millions of cells, like clouds of bees swarming around a hive and passing information back and forth in response to the intrusion. If your immune system is doing its job, none of those cancer cells will survive.
I was in good health up to last week. I hadn't seen a doctor for years and as far as I could tell, my immune system was fine. I mean, I had none of the obvious tell-tale signs, you know, weight loss, yellowy eyes, dark pee, belly-ache, nausea. But the CT scan, the MRI scan, the EUS and the awful ERC tests they did all the way down my throat ended up with a guy in a suit advising me to start getting my affairs in order.
So, if cancer is a symptom, what is the cause? Something that happened in my past. I feel it in my bones. I had a pretty normal upbringing, as far as I can remember. Of course, we never really know, do we? Until we start probing. Even birth itself is a trauma. But a feeling in my bones tells me that the cause lay somewhere in the past, the remote past, in another life. And there, too, lay the cure.
Anyway, it may be completely irrelevant, but I'd just like to fill you in on what happens while I am at the bus-stop, all set for my appointment with the past-life regression therapist. I have my storm umbrella with me because of the wind and the rain. On the other side of the street, a man is struggling in his battery-powered wheelchair. People rush past him to get out of the rain, even though he seems to be pleading for help. I raise my umbrella and try to cross the busy street. At last, I find a gap in the traffic and dash across to help him. From what I can gather, he is trying to get onto the adjoining footpath but is unable to do so because there's no dishing on the kerb. I ask him what the problem is but I can't understand a single word from the garbled sounds he is trying to articulate. He must have cerebral palsy or something, I don't know. I simply assume that he needs to get onto the path, so I fold my umbrella first, wheel him to the edge of the kerb and with all my strength, heave him in his heavy wheelchair up and onto the adjoining footpath. As I catch my breath in the rain, he thumbs the little lever on the panel of the wheelchair. It lunges forward a little and then stops. He tries the lever again but nothing happens. "The auld battery must be flat!" I say, with a forced smile, trying to lighten the situation. He's getting very wet so I raise the umbrella again over both of us and stand there with him, stuck on the footpath, the two of us motionless under the pounding rain. I ask him if there's anything else I can do. He looks up at me like a child. Then his head flops back again. A bus is approaching and about to pull in at the bus-stop across the street. I tell him it's my bus and that I have catch it and so I run, splashed by the speeding cars, dodging the beeping traffic until I reach the bus-shelter. As I board the bus to pay the driver, I manage to catch one last glimpse of him on the other side of the street through the window. He hasn't moved an inch in the pouring rain. Inside the bus, the windows are too wet and fogged up to look out, so I see a seat, the only seat free at the back of the bus and I sit, and as the tears flow down my cheeks, I'm thinking to myself that nobody will notice because of the rain on my face. You see, it was the way he looked, the man in the wheelchair, the spitting image of the Caravaggio in the National Art Gallery, Jesus in the garden being arrested in the moonlight, his face, that poignant expression of calm, unquestioning, child-like acceptance of what is, what was, and what must be.
P.S. Lazarus is the extraordinary tale of a man who raises his son from the dead - but at a cost. It's published as an e-book by Smashwords. If you'd like a free copy, just pop me an e-mail and I'll be happy to send it to you!
Greg
www.gregoryrosenstock.com
Greg
www.gregoryrosenstock.com
Saturday, 13 January 2018
Welcome
to my weekly blog, SATURDAY SESSIONS!
In
this blog, for the perusal of all our students, past, present and future, I
include an extract from our interactive presentation Course, Ireland and its
Culture.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865 –
1939)
W.B. Yeats
is now considered to be amongst the finest poets in the English language
worldwide. He was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1923.
He
was born in Dublin into a Protestant family at a turning point in Irish
history. His childhood was shadowed by a power-shift away from the minority
Protestant privileged classes, as nationalism was growing and Catholics were
becoming more prominent.
This backdrop had a profound effect on his
poetry which includes a great interest in Irish legends and mythology but also
Irish politics, mysticism and spiritualism.
He
was in love with an Englishwoman named Maud Gonne, but the love was never
returned. Many of his early poems are
about unrequited love. Here is one of
them:
WHEN YOU ARE OLD
WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
www.bluefeather.ie
Saturday, 11 November 2017
Welcome
to my weekly blog, SATURDAY SESSIONS!
In
this blog, for the perusal of all our students, past, present and future, I
include an extract from our interactive presentation Course, Ireland and its
Culture.
If
you wish to ask me any question about the text, by the way, just send me an
e-mail at greg@bluefeather.ie
Log
Twenty-nine, GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950)
Born
in Dublin, Shaw was another household name in Britain and Ireland in the early
twentieth century. He was widely
admired for his sharpness of intellect
and his wit and he wrote some engaging plays such as PYGMALION (later filmed as
My Fair Lady).
The
prefaces to his plays are often better than the plays themselves, but
nevertheless, Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.
Like
Wilde, he played a very important role in changing society through his plays.
Victorian plays were usually sentimental and superficial. Shaw focused on the
moral, political and economic issues of the time. Like Wilde, he was a superb
essayist and a famous critic. 'My way of
joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.'
Shaw
was a committed socialist and a
vegetarian. 'Animals are my friends - and I don't eat my friends.' He described
schools as prisons, deadening to the spirit and stifling to the intellect. 'What
we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge, not the knowledge in
pursuit of the child.'
He
was a member of a BBC radio panel set up to standardise the pronunciation of
words in English - but the venture was a failure because the panellists could
never agree!
His
political views, however (a fan of Stalin and Mussolini) and his appalling
comments regarding eugenics and population control (not to mention his
distasteful sense of self-importance), diminish his stature as a Nobel
Laureate.
Some
of Shaw's quotes:
1.
Those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything.
2.
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other
is to gain it.
3.
Why should we take advice on sex from the pope?
If he knows anything about it, he
shouldn't.
4.
The liar's punishment is not that he is not believed, but that he cannot
believe anyone else.
5.
Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.
6.
'I
am enclosing two tickets to the first
night of my new play; bring a friend...if you have one.' (Shaw to Churchill) 'Cannot possibly attend first night; will
attend second...if there is one.' (Churchill to Shaw)
7.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken
place.
8.
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same
one a second time.
9.
War does not decide who is right but who is left.
10.
He knows nothing, and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a
political career.
11.
Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
12.
You don't stop laughing when you grow old; you grow old when you stop laughing.
13.
The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the
power of speech.
14.
Youth is wasted on the young.
15.
If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.
P.S. Fintan O'Toole has just published a
magnificently-produced book on Shaw; it would make a great Christmas present
for anyone who's interested!
Saturday, 4 November 2017
OSCAR WILDE, PART 3
Oscar died in poverty in Paris. He had
contracted meningitis which was related to an injury to his ear-drum during
hard labour in prison.
It is
said that his last words were (in reference to the wallpaper he hated in the
room where he stayed): “One of us had to go.”
From
a long letter he wrote while in prison:
When
first I was put into prison, some people advised me to try and forget who I
was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found
comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget
that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal.
It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of
disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody
else – the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the
music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the
leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver – would
all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of
communicating joy. To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own
development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of
one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.
from De Profundis
Here are some of Oscar Wilde's epigrams:
1.Always
forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
2.Every
portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the
sitter.
3.I
am not young enough to know everything.
4.The
only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to
oneself.
5.The
only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
6.The
true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
7.Whenever
people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong.
8.Work
is the curse of the drinking classes.
9.I
can resist anything but temptation.
10.Experience
is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
11.Only
the shallow know themselves.
12.The
truth is rarely pure and never simple.
13.All
art is useless.
14.Nothing
that is worth knowing can be taught.
15.Dull
people are always brilliant at breakfast.
16.
Punctuality is the thief of time.
Friday, 3 November 2017
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