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To support the development of this site and the work of soul friendship you are invited to express your appreciation through the spiritual practice of Dana
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The Mystical Heart As a storyteller I sing, listen too and contemplate songs for the mystical heart. This often makes me dance with joy and weep for the sorrow of the world and this experience of separateness from Love called Tony Cuckson tramping the world of Boogie Street.
Dark Night of the Soul "You cannot find the Light unless you enter the darkness. " Dark night of the soul, spiritual crisis, spiritual madness, spiritual emergency, divine madness, holy madness... these are various phrases that have been used to describe a unique experience - a profound test of faith and spiritual endurance - that seems to be a necessary part of walking the path home to God.
Tony's New Ebook Irish storyteller Tony Cuckson invites you to claim your Irish Heritage through stories and songs and blessings.
There is no requirement that you be Irish. There is a requirement that you still wish to feel a sense of beauty at the heart of who you are.
This ebook "An Irish Heritage" includes songs such as Danny Boy, Raglan Road (as sang by the great Luke Kelly of the Dubliners) and My Lagan Love. These are songs of inspiration and connectedness a land steeped in the timeless.
I am so enjoying your beautiful writing and presence on the web. You offer us such a glorious invitation each time you write. You have a true gift... Blessings all around Jan Lundy - Retreat Leader, Public Speaker and Author -Your Truest Self: Embracing the Woman You Are Meant to Be." --------------
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Crying for an American Dream - I
Freedom - Walter Crane "Teach only Love for that is what you are." A Course in Miracles When I wrote the ezine edition of Ready to Radiate entitled Spiritual Warriorship about what it is to feel the loss of an ideal, I wept. I was reminded of a time long gone, but not forgotten, when I was a much younger man and went to the USA. I was
nineteen years old and I spent two months in that vast country.
Much of the time was spent in Atlantic City, New Jersey where
my twin brother and I ran out of money and existed on plums and milk
for a week. I had a
hard time but it was also a great time. I grew up a little. I
was one of a group of students from Northern Ireland who came to the
USA that summer (1969) on student visa with promises of work that
did not exist. Except
to enter the USA we had to have an address of a resident and enough
money to allow us to stay a certain period of time.
We had a one-week induction period at a college campus in
Hartford, Connecticut. I
remember the strangeness of the poverty that one never saw portrayed
in the media. There were Vietnam vets who were homeless and there
was the other side of the tracks where the black people lived. My
sharpest memory is of the man who spoke to us on the last day in
Hartford and initiated us into the American Way.
At the end he cried. For a young Ulsterman this was quite
unseemly behavior and I wondered at someone so willing to wear his
heart on his sleeve. He
asked that we not judge his country too harshly because he said that
the dream of America had not yet been fully realized. I’ve
thought about that man on many occasions since.
He was one of the few people who I ever met who shed tears
for an ideal. These
were not tears due to the experience of violence but tears from a
heart separate from what he loved.
As I write this a tear trickles down my cheek. What
he called the American Dream I would call The Heart’s Dream.
Such a dream can become a nightmare when cloaked in the idea
of the nation state or clouded by religious or political
affiliation. You can be
persuaded to do many crazy things when you bind yourself in the
identity of the patriot. You
can become sentimental rather than compassionate.
As the psychologist Carl Jung said (quite rightly), “
Scratch a sentimentalist and underneath you get anger.” Such anger
often explodes in self-righteousness. The
dream of the nation state allows you to say, “God Bless
America.” It can allow you to announce, “God is Great!”
when you defeat your enemy or burn their flag.
It allows political powers
to manipulate one’s emotional attachment to homeland and justify
going to war. Thus the dram becomes a nightmare, in particular for those
young people who fight the limited vision of their elders who have
vested interests in maintaining the status quo. Martin
Luther King had a dream. He had been to the mountaintop.
He could look down from a place of vision and see sacred
unity. His God was not
a God that blessed America or any other nation state.
That is still the kindergarten idea of separateness.
God never refuses to bless.
God does not see nation states. God is sacred unity. We as
individuals, and also as a collective called humanity shut ourselves
off from the power of Love (which is not an never will be a dream
but the only reality) when we identify ourselves with something we
are not. Gandhi
did not fight for India. It broke his heart to have her divide Herself into different
nation states with all the pursuant violence. I am not Irish. Irish
is a label I use to identify the place where I was born and now
live. If I were Irish
then I could be persuaded that Ireland is just a piece of land that
belongs to a people. She, like America, is sold short if that is all
we dream her to be. America
is a state of being represented by the symbols that live and are
alive in the heart of the individual within that nation and not in
ideas of separateness promoted by religious or political
affiliation. For this Irish mystic storyteller the primary symbol of that state of mind for the USA is the woman standing in New York harbor. A harbor is a great symbol of homecoming. She holds a beacon of light. She is a woman representing the power of the feminine that the power of the masculine is intended to serve. This is not because she is better but because she is a paradox. In
Ireland we stand to sing the national anthem. The only anthem I
really can rise for is
the one used for the European Union – Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.
For this writer national anthems keep us locked into a
position of self-interest, which ultimately plays out in the
experience of war. There
are vested interests that keep this going. Study many national
anthems and they are full of sentimentality and violence. The
primary war we have is with our individual heart.
Are we prepared to do real ‘jihad’ and not the distortion
of that word that it has come to symbolize. Are we prepared to
do the heart work which is really the hard work of true individualization. There
are universal symbols that connect all peoples across all nations
and across all times. One such symbol is the circle.
To serve those symbols connects you to the reality of your
unique universal self. To
use a beautiful term by Ralph Waldo Trine, you get to be In Tune with the Infinite. This
attunement is not a nightmare.
It makes the ego uncomfortable because the ego has to
surrender. This is not
something it does willingly. This
is why only direct experience of the ground of being is the
foundation of real change and real peace.
Otherwise it is a tinkering at the edges. All
true men and women of peace and good will ask you the same question.
It is this. Are
you willing to die – in a psychological sense –for the sake of
Love? This does not
mean you have to die physically, but it might mean that.
Many are willing to die for an ideal such as love of country
but they are not willing to see that the idea of country is a
boundary that keeps them out of the country that is beyond
boundaries and which frees them in ways unimaginable. Then such
freedom is what you want for all peoples. This ezine does not invite you to be a nationalist or even an internationalist. It invites you into the experience of the integral – the experience of Oneness. Then you will know beyond a doubt what it is to feel real and to let go into the surrender of Love. Then you come home to the harbor of Light where Lady Liberty stands. But Lady Liberty is not American. She is a state of being that is paradoxical. You are not separate from her. She is your hearts deepest longing to come home. There are those forces within you called attachment to ‘little me’ that keeps you out on the sea of separateness. You have to choose to steer in a different direction towards the Light of Love in the harbor of heart.
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