Paradoxes Don't Scare Me Anymore:!

A good friend and wise woman sent me this article, I wanted to share a bit of it with you,enjoy..........
oh! and by the way " Happy New Year Everyone".

I often spend the season of Lent in a hermitage, where I live alone for the whole 40 days. The more I am alone with the Alone, the more I surrender to ambivalence, to happy contradictions and seeming inconsistencies in myself and almost everything else, including God.
Paradoxes don't scare me anymore.

When I was young, I couldn't tolerate such ambiguity. My education had trained me to have a lust for answers and explanations.
Now, at age 63, it's all quite different. I no longer believe this is a quid pro quo universe -- I've counseled too many prisoners, worked with too many failed marriages, faced my own dilemmas too many times and been loved gratuitously after too many failures.

Whenever I think there's a perfect pattern, further reading and study reveal an exception. Whenever I want to say "only" or "always," someone or something proves me wrong.
My scientist friends have come up with things like "principles of uncertainty" and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories.
But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of "faith"!

How strange that the very word "faith" has come to mean its exact opposite.
People who have really met the Holy are always humble. It's the people who don't know who usually pretend that they do.
People who've had any genuine spiritual experience always know they don't know. They are utterly humbled before mystery.

They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.
It is a litmus test for authentic God experience, and is -- quite sadly -- absent from much of our religious conversation today.
My belief and comfort is in the depths of Mystery, which should be the very task of religion.

by Richard Rohr

Oasis for the Soul: all traditions honored

Walking a spiritual path is a process of self-liberation, and that is a process that frightens established authority. I think one of the reasons our society fears altered states of awareness is because those realizations may inspire or engender a loss of control.

Long before the bearded patriarchal male gods, there was the goddess- feminine spirit of birth and fertility, the earth mother. In all ancient societies, beer was a gift to women from a goddess, never a male god, and women remained bonded in complex spiritual relationships with feminine deities who blessed the brew vessels, and the rise in consciousness that the brew supported.

The following recipe is adapted from the Canadian Pharmaceutical Journal of 1876.
Wild sarsaparilla was used extensively in “root” beers of that time, and is very delicious and highly medicinal herb. www.concentricrings.org This blend was also known as “New Orleans Mead”.

Wild Sarsaparilla Ale

8 ounces fresh sarsaparilla root- Aralia nudicaulis/ a member of the ginseng family
8 ounces fresh licorice root
8 ounces fresh cassia root
8 ounces fresh gingerroot
2 ounces cloves
3 ounces coriander seed
12 pints corn sugar syrup
4 pints honey
8 gallons water
yeast

Take the roots, seeds and cloves - contuse them ( bruise with a mallet).
Boil for 15 min. in 8 gallons of water, let stand until cold.
Strain though cheese cloth
Add corn sugar syrup and honey, stir until dissolved, heat liquid again if necessary.
Cool to 70 degrees F and pour into fermenter.
Add yeast
Ferment until complete, about I week.
Prime bottles, fill and cap
Ready to drink in 7 to 10 days

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Background:

This Blog was set up after John and Kelly had a reunion with Bethany and Fumiyo who was staying at Esalin in Big Sur CA. Four crazy truth-seekers/adventurer/consciousness explorers back together to recall the time spent in Brazil participating in an Ayahuasca ceremony.

We all wished our friend from Australian, Justin, was with us as well. Bethany and John stayed up late into the night talking about our experiences and our journey in answering the big four questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? What should we be doing while we are here? Where are we going.

There seems to be a third consciousness present when two or more people get together to exchange ideas as it is written. Or one could simply say that one ends up with more than the knowledge/experiences of each added together.

John remembered reading conversations such as this by various authors such as Krishna Murti and David Bohm that happened at Esalin. John could remember similar conversations with Justin in Brazil and now with Bethany. John said he wished that they had recorded the conversaton.

Bethany and John agreed to continue this tradition by starting an open ended conversation recorded in a Blog format and to invite that bloke from Australia to join in. There seems to be an energy calling us to do this and we hope this work will reveal more truth as we go along and to share the knowledge we have been given with others that are seeking that answers to the same questions.