Hello Dear Reader:
Well, Sunday is upon us once again, and we have news to share! The newest member of our family, a grandson, arrived in the world early yesterday morning. He has ten fingers, ten toes, and everything else is exactly where it should be.  He’s beautiful! (but we may be slightly biased) He also has good lungs and a powerful set of vocal chords. An orator perhaps?
Having said that, we’re off to celebrate.
Hugs,
M&M
Greetings, Dear Reader!
Well, with the end of the month falling on a Sunday, we’ve all of a sudden discovered that we had one post to do yesterday, two today and one tomorrow! We might have to take a break in there somewhere just to allow the keyboards a bit of a rest!
If we look at time as the linear passing of one moment to the next, then it could be said that we have both been walking a ‘spiritual path’ for a very long time. In some circles that might be cause for veneration, but we both agree that the only question really worth asking from all of this is, “Have we found joy in our discoveries?’ Yes, for the most part we have. We get better at is as we go, or maybe it’s just that we’re getting better at discovering that it always exists within us.
Of the many books that were written by Seth, Jane Roberts and Robert Butts, the first Seth book we each read was ‘Seth Speaks‘. In that book ‘he’ wrote:
”Using the inner senses, we become conscious creators, cocreators.” ~ Seth Speaks, session 515.
The very basis of Seth’s teachings, and the teachings of many others can be formed along the lines of: ‘You form your own reality’. So, taking that in hand we thought that this week we’d turn our minds and our keyboarding fingers toward ‘Conscious Co-Creation‘.
Hugs,
M&M
Follow these links to read what He Says/She Says: Marcia’s View / Mike’s View.
Greetings, Dear Reader!
Thanks so much for stopping by!!
If you’ve read these posts before, you’ll know that every Sunday Marcia and Mike pick a common topic and write about it individually. Neither reads the other’s posts until both are finished. The title for this week’s talk, ‘The Elephant in the Room‘, comes from a post written by journalist Robert Scoble during his time at the 2010 TED Conference in Long Beach, CA. You can read his article here: The elephants in the room at TED. The ‘elephant’ in this case is money. Those having taken a vow of poverty aside, money is often among the most challenging of ideas held by many if not most people.  It doesn’t matter if you are a street person, a corporate executive or a subsistence farmer, or whether the currency is dollars, pounds, rubles, kroner, baht, pesos, rand or yen. Both Marcia and Mike have been included in this, at least at times.
The title of this week’s post came from Robert Scoble, but the inspiration for this week’s post came from our wise and wondrous friend, Samantha Standish and a series of blog posts she has written recently on her ‘I Am Pollyana‘ blog. Our thanks to her and to the many, many people who have been and continue to be our guides, our teachers and our friends.
Hugs,
M&M
Follow these links to read what He Says/She Says: Marcia’s View / Mike’s View.
Hello, dear reader!
“Beliefs are neither good nor bad – true or false.
The beliefs we explore are simply empowering or
disempowering in relation to our intending.”
Our topic this week is about beliefs – old ones and new ones. We’re talking about beliefs from the perspective of Seth, channeled by Jane Roberts and recorded by her husband Robert Butts. Seth spoke a lot about how we use our beliefs as the basis for the events and experiences of our lives; one example is here:
“Events are not things that happen to you. They are materialized experiences formed by you, according to your expectations and beliefs.â€
“If you are in poor health, you can remedy it. If your personal relationships are unsatisfactory, you can change them for the better. If you are in poverty, you can instead find yourself surrounded by abundance…â€
“This does not mean that effort is not required, and determination. It does mean that you are not powerless to change events; and that each of you, regardless of your position, status, circumstances or physical condition, is in control of your own personal experience.â€
“If you do not like your experience, then you must change the nature of your conscious thoughts and expectations.â€
“You need to learn the power of thought and emotion… Once you realize that your thoughts form reality, then you are no longer a slave to events. You simply have to learn the methods.†(from the 1/5/71 Class Session)
So, without further ado, read on to discover Marcia’s and Mike’s thoughts on “Beliefs … old and new”.
Follow these links to read what He Says/She Says: Marcia’s View / Mike’s View.
Greetings, dear reader!
We watched ‘Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone‘ again on TV last night, and although we’ve seen it (several times) before, what always intrigues us is Harry’s transformation from the world of the mundane to the world of the magical, and even more that these two worlds co-exist. Both Marcia and Mike have had many ‘magical’ experiences in their lives, and so this week we thought we’d talk about living a ‘magical life’.
Follow these links to read what He Says/She Says: Marcia’s View / Mike’s View.
Hello, dear reader!
Both of us have traveled extensively throughout our lives, and to that end eating in restaurants has at times become ‘routine’ for us. There was even a time when we co-managed a resort with a 90-guest seating capacity. Still, we both appreciate a really good restaurant. Food in all of its aspects – the preparation, the sharing, the sights, scents and tastes… (even the cleanup) is an important part of both our lives. All of that is a long way of saying that we’ve decided to add a ‘Food’ category to our blog, where we’ll feature some of our favourite restaurants and we might even sneak in a favourite shared recipe or two along the way. Neither of us is a professional food reviewer, but we know enough to know what we like and what we don’t like, so rather than having a ‘scale’ of 1-10 or whatever, we’ll just share our impressions. If we go somewhere we don’t like for whatever reason, we just won’t write about it. We want to share what we DO like instead. We have broad palates and sometimes eclectic tastes, so we’ll offer our thoughts on a wide range of places with three things in common: adequate food, adequate service and adequate value (and each must be excellent to be adequate). Look for future ‘Eating Our Way…’ posts on the last Saturday of each month.
We’re going to begin our ‘Food’ category with a local restaurant that we both appreciate: Floyd’s Diner.
Follow these links to read what He Says/She Says: Marcia’s View / Mike’s View.
P.S. You can read more of our Food posts and restaurant reviews here.
Hi Folks:
In Elizabeth Gilbert’s (wonderful) book, ‘Eat Pray Love‘ she has a conversation with her friend Giulio about why Rome is a beautiful city, but it’s not ‘her’ city. Giulio says that each city and each person has a word to describe them, and if your word and the city’s word don’t match, you’ll never be comfortable there. It’s easier to type out the conversation than to try to explain it, so we’re including that section here (pp. 102-104): Continue Reading →
Greetings:
A long time ago Marcia and Mike lived in a world where they both believed there were positive and negative forces in the Universe. In that world it was common to practice (and to teach others) than when doing any meditative or astral work one should create a bubble of white light around him or herself in order to protect the meditator from those dark forces. This idea came into focus for them one night at a talk given by a very interesting gentleman. His talk had all of the right words, but the underlying energy behind them was really not good. Mike’s response to this was to create a circle of loving energy surrounding all those present; although he had his eyes closed at the time, Marcia saw the speaker’s response to this was to step outside of the circle, remove some herbs from his bag, and with few words…well, you get the idea. When Marcia and Mike went home that night everything was fine, but the next day Mike woke up with a high fever, delerious. He couldn’t walk, could barely stand, and he spent the next few days in bed while Marcia ministered to him.
It was shortly after this event that Marcia and Mike received some teaching on a New Way of Being. Rather than surrounding themselves with a loving white light, or drawing it in from above or below as others had suggested, they were told simply to imagine a candle in the center of their bodies. They were to simply allow the light of this candle to flow out from them, gently, in all directions. They were then to allow this loving light to grow and spread until they literally ‘became’ the candle, and this loving light was flowing out from their entire being. A candle doesn’t reach out to touch others with its light, it simply is itself, and in being itself its light spreads and illuminates. In this way the light comes from within, not from without, and rather than being a bubble of protection to keep away those dark energies, it simply transforms them into that same loving light. As the saying goes, “All of the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of one small candle.”
Well, time went by, their knowledge grew and their understandings of the nature of All That Is changed, and they began to see the world and the universe in which they lived as much bigger, more open and more dynamic than they had once imagined. As a part of this process they were able both to see the role they had once played in the event above and how their own beliefs had created it. Furthermore they were able to surrender their beliefs in those negative forces. As such, the idea of ‘being the candle’ no longer held the same significance for them.
Until one day, several years later, they came up with a different idea about ‘Being the Candle’.
Follow these links to read what He Says/She Says: Marcia’s View / Mike’s View
Greetings:
Our topic for this week comes from a quote in a book that both Marcia and Mike have recently read. The book is titled, ‘The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid‘, by Bill Bryson. On page 10 of the book, he wrote:
“The two teams split the first two games, so it came down to a third, deciding game. At last the Dodgers appeared to recover their invincibility, taking a comfortable 4 to 1 lead into the ninth inning and needing just three outs to win. But the Giants scored a late run and put two more runners aboard when Bobby Thomson stepped to the plate. What Thomson did that afternoon in the gathering dusk of autumn has many times been voted the greatest moment in baseball history.
“Dodger reliever Ralph Branca threw a pitch that made history yesterday,” one of those present wrote. “Unfortunately it made history for someone else. Bobby Thomson, the ‘Flying Scotsman’ swatted Branca’s second offering over the left field wall for a game-winning home run so momentous, so startling, that it was greeted with a moment’s stunned silence.
“Then, when the realization of the miracle came, the double-decked stands of the Polo Grounds rocked on their forty-year-old foundations. The Giants had won the pennant, completing one of the unlikeliest comebacks baseball has ever seen.”
The author of those words was my father – who was abruptly, unexpectedly, present for Thomson’s moment of magesty. Goodness knows how he had talked the notoriously frugal management of the Register into sending him the 1,132 miles from Des Moines to New York for the crucial deciding game – an act of rash expenditure radically out of keeping with decades of careful precedent – or how he had managed to secure credentials and a place in the press box at such a late hour.
But then he had to be there. It was part of his fate, too. I am not exactly suggesting that Bobby Thomson hit that home run because my father was there or implying that he wouldn’t have hit it if my father had not been there. All I am saying is that my father was there and Bobby Thomson was there and the home run was hit and these things could not have been otherwise.”
So, what then guides the dictates of our lives? Is it fate? Is it a Guiding Hand or some supernatural force? Or are our lives the summaries of our choices? For this week’s ‘He Says, She Says’ post we thought we’d take on “Destiny or Choice: A Matter of Beliefs?”
Follow these links to read what He Says/She Says: Marcia’s View / Mike’s View
Greetings: Well, we’re now into our second month of having our blog site, of being ‘citizen journalists’, and this process has opened many different doors for us both. With that in mind we thought we’d tackle the idea of what this means to each of us, taking on the subject of ‘Social Networking’.
Follow these links to read what He Says/She Says: Marcia’s View / Mike’s View
