Sunday, June 12, 2011

Director's Message for June 2011

Greetings, Sacred Path Community,

We’re getting the June newsletter out a little late this month, partly due to the Leonard Orr events that were held last weekend. I want to highlight two future events, and our July newsletter will contain more information about them, including the registration form for the 24th Annual Fall Sacred Path Men’s Retreat, October 20-23.

We had a group of about 50 that attended Leonard Orr’s presentation on Friday night and 43 for the experiential day featuring conscious connected breathing sessions I’ve known Leonard since 1974 and he never ceases to amaze me. I introduced him Friday night, not only as an original thinker, but simply put, an original. He is one of a kind. His ideas and concepts are revolutionary and tend to push one to stretch beyond the scope of ordinary self-limiting reality to expand one’s mind and embrace the extraordinary realm of human consciousness.

We had the perfect blend of male and female seekers that came together exuding such peaceful and loving radiance throughout the weekend. You’ll find another of Leonard’s articles herewith including a review of the weekend by Rich Manners. Many thanks to all who participated and to the 15 skilled Rebirthers who assisted; you made a significant impact on the quality of the practicum. We’re looking to next June to create another event featuring Leonard.

The women who attended acknowledged the consciousness of the men who were present. So many events of this nature are packed with women and a smattering of men. Conscious women love being in the presence of heartfelt, conscious men. The Sacred Path Community is not only a community of men but is also comprised of the women who love the men and love being around them. I have a date set aside at Holy Spirit on Saturday, September 17th. I’m considering hosting another day for men and women and am contemplating the nature of the event. Stay tuned for more about this in the July newsletter.

Mark your calendar now for the 24th Annual Fall Sacred Path Men’s Retreat commencing Thursday, October 20 through Sunday, October 23rd. In addition to the community gatherings, the tribe meetings, the conscious connected breathing sessions, the Inipi sweat lodges, the Recovery Meetings and the delicious meals, to name a few of the highlights, we are bringing back by popular demand Charles Horten and his F.I.R.E. team from Texas to facilitate another firewalk, glass walk, board breaking and perhaps a couple of other breakthrough processes. And, our very special guest presenter is Tolly Burkan, the father of the firewalk. Tolly has not made a public appearance in over 3 years. You can read more about Tolly at TollyBurkan.com. From his web site, read the following:

“Knowing the secret behind firewalking can improve your life! Even if you never do it yourself, knowing how it works can bring you better health and increased personal power. Why? Because firewalking demonstrates how your thoughts impact everything else in your life. Thoughts change brain chemistry, and that results in an alteration of body chemistry as well. Firewalkers are instructed to pay close attention to their thoughts, since those very thoughts are the way in which we create our own realities. Positive thinkers literally live in a different chemical environment than negative thinkers. They impose less stress on their immune systems, and the result of that should be obvious. 
I have been researching firewalking since 1977 and am considered to be the foremost authority on the subject. Because of this work, the United States now has the largest firewalking culture in history.

Even though firewalking has been practiced since before recorded history, never before have so many common people participated in this ancient ritual that had previously been reserved for only a select few. My ideas regarding firewalking have evolved over twenty-four years of leading and learning from firewalks. My theory regarding why people are not burned when walking over red-hot coals is remarkably different from all the others, but I have found each of the other theories flawed in one way or another.”


The fee for this retreat will be $495. I’d like to recommend that you get out a piggy bank or another sacred container, and that you start making donations to yourself each week so that your fee for the retreat is handled by the time the retreat arrives. I have made this recommendation before, but I’ve not felt that people really take me seriously. It’s a really good strategy for effortlessly handling of the finances for the retreat. Consider this: there are 20 weeks between now and the retreat. If you put $25 away each week starting right now, the retreat would be paid for by the time it occurs. Please don’t let money hold you back from attending. Money is the cheapest way to pay, and your life is more valuable than the money that you will invest to participate in a potentially life-changing experience. And consider sending in your deposit in July confirming your commitment to attend and reserving your place. I’m envisioning between 80-100 in attendance. The men that attended last October are coming back with family members and friends.

Stay Mindful,
Stephen

Rich Manners: Review of Leonard Orr Event, June 3-4

This event was one of those wonderful occurrences in which the assistants received just as much benefit as the participants. 50 people attended Leonard’s lecture on Friday night, and 43 populated the rebirthing process on Saturday. Participants and assistants alike were drawn from the Los Angeles Men’s Center and the rebirthing circle, and first-time rebirthers were joined by veterans of more than 30 years’ experience. The two groups had a lot in common and easily blended into one well-connected community.

Leonard’s lecture on Friday night was centered around the 5 aspects of a complete life: spiritual, physical, social, economic, and political, and how we can best bring each of these aspects to healthy fruition. In addition, Leonard spoke of attaining spiritual purification, ridding oneself of emotional energy pollution (EEP), and overcoming the death urge. This is accomplished using air (breathing in energy as well as air), water (bathing twice a day), fire (cleansing the energy body by proximity to fire or meditation on candles), and earth (quality vegetarian diet, fasting, exercise). The group repeated affirmations dealing with retarding and reversing aging, preventing illness, and living in harmony with the universe.

Saturday’s rebirthing exercises were quite productive. A trained assistant accompanies each team of two rebirthers, and an atmosphere of safety and trust pervaded. There were two sessions, morning and afternoon, followed by a period of sharing what arose for some of the rebirthers and assistants.

Many of the participants expressed a desire to continue their rebirthing practices, and Dr. Johnson promised to look into more events for men and women in addition to the rebirthing opportunities provided by the Sacred Path men’s workshops and retreats.

The Living Earth

by Leonard Orr

Every year I like to write an article on one page or as brief as possible on the idea of physical immortality. You may not think that this has much to do with the living earth, but as you will see, it has everything to do with it.

Earth, world, universe, planet, are words that can be interchangeable or have separate meanings. This living planet is composed of earth, air, water, and fire.
This planet is as much a living intelligent Being as any human. Its intelligence functions somewhat differently than that of humans, but the earth planet has intelligence and a whole integral awareness. Just look at dirt. We may not think
that dirt has intelligence, but steel, gold, homes, cars, computers, and all our food
and our bodies are dependent upon the intelligence in earth. Night and day are dependent upon its orderly movement.

The human body is composed of the same earth, air, water, and fire intelligently interacting. In fact, if the body and the earth didn't have more intelligence than most people, we wouldn't live even 10% as long as we do. So when is the human species going to catch up with the intelligence of the earth and physical body?

Orthodox religions have not realized in thousands of years that the body takes care of the soul a lot better than the mind does. In fact, the mind is the most dangerous influence on both the soul and the body. The human mind creates all of the problems that both the body and the earth have to deal with.

When will we learn to respect our intelligent living body and our living earth –
Mother Nature?

Here is what we can think about this year. If our body is earth, air, water, and fire, and our planet is earth, water, air, and fire, and we plan on destroying our body with physical death, then why shouldn't our living earth help us destroy human bodies with natural disasters. In other words, does the unconscious death urge in humans cause natural disasters?

If in fact the unconscious death urge in humans - the mass mind – causes natural disasters, then we can prevent such disasters by healing the death urge in people. Can or could the floods and fires in Australia be prevented? Could the earthquake in Japan be prevented? Can we prevent the disasters still coming by spreading the idea of physical immortality? AND CAN WE PREDICT NATURAL DISASTERS BY MEASURING THE DEATH URGE? THE AMAZING THINGS ABOUT GOD AND MOTHER NATURE IS THEIR MERCY AND PATIENCE. IN THE 70'S, THE JAPAN EARTHQUAKE WAS PREDICTED BEFORE 2000; IT IS BEHIND SCHEDULE. EVEN BHARTRIJI PREDICTED THAT 90% OF THE POPULATION WOULD BE DESTROYED BY 2010. IT DIDN'T HAPPEN, MAYBE BECAUSE OF THE RELATIVE SUCCESS OF THE REBIRTHING MOVEMENT. DON'T GET COMPLACENT; WE STILL REQUIRE A FEW MILLION REBIRTHERS TO CREATE HEAVEN ON EARTH - THE AGE OF TRUTH. WHAT MAY BE AMAZING ABOUT THE JAPAN DISASTER IS THAT OVER 500,000 PEOPLE LOST THEIR HOMES, BUT ONLY ABOUT 1% WERE KILLED, MAYBE 2%. THE REST ARE GETTING A SPIRITUAL PURIFICATION TRAINING INVOLUNTARILY. THIS WILL LIGHTEN THE DEATH URGE FOR SOME AND MAKE OTHERS LUST FOR DEATH.

MOTHER EARTH IS SO PATIENT AND MERCIFUL, AND SHE IS MAKING HER MESSAGE VERY CLEAR.

An economist told me that the average life of a Fortune 500 company is 40 years. It seems that even huge corporations with hundreds of millions of dollars in income every year get destroyed by the death urge of the founders, the managers, the employees, and the stockholders. PHYSICAL IMMORTALITY PHILOSOPHY HAS TREMENDOUS COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL AND
RELEVANCE. IT IS BASIC FOR PERSONAL HEALTH, HAPPINESS, AND SUCCESS IN EVERY AREA OF LIFE.

And yet people usually put their P I affirmations down after they read them every day in my 9 Day Training and never look at them again, let alone make 100 copies to give to friends. So it looks to me like I am the only one who really cares about your body and our earth!!!

Maybe the idea of physical immortality is central to business success as well as our health and happiness and the well-being of our planet.

If this is true, then the life urge of the leaders of all ecological organizations is the main point and without this, the organizations are all doomed to fail. If this is true, we should never elect old men or women who have a death urge to political office. OBAMA IS MADE STIFF BY EEP AND MICHELE IS GETTING FAT from EEP and lack of spiritual purification.

If this is true, common sense leads us to the conclusion that healing the death urge is the first order of business for each of us everyday. AND THIS IS DONE BY ENTERING THE TRANSCENDENTAL STATE, WHICH MEANS
PRACTICING THE PRESENCE OF GOD, WHICH MEANS THE SPACE BETWEEN OUR THOUGHTS. We have to keep healing it every day because we keep getting re-injected by our deathist friends, relatives and strangers we meet every day.

What is the death urge?

The death urge is any anti-life thought. It is the belief that death is inevitable and beyond our control. It is the idea that the cause of death is outside of ourselves. Why not realize that we all are responsible for our own deaths? WE MAY NOT BE ABLE TO CONTROL EVERYTHING BUT WE CAN MOSTLY CONTROL DEATH. IT MAY BE THE EASIEST THING TO CONTROL. IT SEEMS THAT EVERYONE CONTROLS HIS/HER OWN DEATH.

The death urge is a complex of thoughts and habits that are transmitted by family traditions. All life insurance companies are based on this truth and are betting that you will die at approximately the same age and symptoms as your parent of the same sex. But there are exceptions. How do we become exceptions?

Through 50 years of research, I have noticed that it takes more than changing our beliefs and philosophies to become immortal. I noticed that even people who write books about physical immortality usually die before 100 years.

So what is the secret of physical immortality? AND TO PERSONAL EXTINCTION?

The 3 basic causes of death are ignoring our natural divinity, EEP, the negative
emotional mind, including the death urge, and poor diet. Eating dead animals kills
more people than alcohol, drugs, and smoking combined. It doesn't take much
intelligence to figure this out. Even medical researchers have done it.

I went to India to study actual immortal yogis who have to be at least 300 years
in the same body to qualify for my research.

What I found surprised me. I discovered the there are 6 basic secrets of the immortals and that they are all simple and pleasurable and easy to do. I
LEARNED THAT TO BECOME AN IMMORTAL IS EASIER THAN
RUNNING A BUSINESS OR RAISING CHILDREN THROUGH COLLEGE,
BUT IT TAKES THE SAME KIND OF FOCUS AND DISCIPLINE.

They are:
Mind. We have to upgrade the quality of our thoughts and feelings, using a mantra, which is simply a high quality thought that is clearly identified and used to
improve the quality of the 50,000 thoughts which we have every day. Happiness is just having pleasant thoughts most of the time. Using a high quality mantra 25,000 times a day is a good use of our time and can be an instant source of eternal pleasure. By definition, it has to be a high quality thought which is a continuous source of pleasure, creativity and freedom. A high quality life is created by a high quality mind. Our feelings and our habits are created by the quality of our thoughts. This is basic.

Earth. This is the quality of our diet and lifestyle. Eating dead animals kills more people through heart disease, cancer, kidney disease, etc., than drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol combined. And what is the point of having a physical body if we don't use it enough - exercise - to stay alive? Music, sound, massage, dance, and other activities that enrich our lives fit into the earth category of self-improvement. Fasting one day per week is the most difficult, but if we do it, eating the other six days is at least twice as pleasurable.

Air. Learning to breathe energy as well as air is the secret of the immortal yogis. It is the easiest and most powerful way to breathe.

Water. Bathing twice per day is the way that these immortals keep their energy body clean and balanced. Perhaps indoor plumbing and warm water are the greatest gifts of our civilization, but this gift is useless if we don't use it for our spiritual purification.

Fire. I noticed that these immortals use fire every day. Through experimenting, I discovered that fire cleans and balances my energy body the way water bathing does, only it cleans different things than water does and is necessary to compliment water purification.

Love. Immortals have harmonious relationships. It is not possible to love responsibly in a democracy without participation in politics.

We can see that the disciplines that keep us alive, happy, healthy, and productive are all pleasurable things to do. They are the disciplines of pleasure. It is interesting that the things that produce eternal life are all pleasurable, and the neglect of these things make us miserable zombies who love death. Life breeds life, and misery breeds death.

So the secrets of the immortal yogis turned out to be simple and obvious.

The practices not only tend to dissolve the death urge that we learn from our family traditions, but also what we can get re-injected with in the process of daily participation in the world of other people who haven't healed their death urge. IN
OTHER WORDS, HEALING THE DEATH URGE FROM OUR FAMILY
TRADITIONS CAN BE DONE BY CHANGING OUR MINDS AND EMOTIONS, BUT WE STILL MUST DO ENOUGH DAILY SPIRITUAL
PURIFICATION TO HEAL THE INPUT FROM PARTICIPATING IN A DEATHIST SOCIETY.

Participating in politics is ridiculously easy. We only need a relationship with 4
people: our elected reps in the city, the county, the state level, and at the national
level. YOU CAN BEGIN BY SENDING THEM THIS MESSAGE EVERY
MONTH UNTIL YOU GET AN INTELLIGENT AND SATISFYING
RESPONSE. Make your note with it personal. And if you don't get a good enough response, go by their local offices and get acquainted with their staff. Their staff determines what gets their attention. When you have this relationship, trust your personal connection to infinite intelligence to know what to teach them next to make them worthy to be your elected representative or throw them out of office.

We only have to ask ourselves one question: is our mind and our body worth saving? This is the big one.

When we come out of the space between our thoughts 50,000 times per day, we determine the quality of our lives and contribute for good or bad to the quality of everyone around us. Are we an eternal fountain of aliveness and prosperity or what?

This information is very urgent. Ramtha predicts that both Japan as well as
California will go under water by June 15 of 2011. We have been hearing these
prophesies since the 70's. Sometimes they motivate people to change themselves
and sometimes not. The biggest disaster is still ordinary death, which kills about
2% of the world's population every year. Each person has to be responsible for himself. By the end of June we will see if this prophet has any value. If not, we still have to keep listening to our Source. Here is a powerful message of common sense about death and the death urge from the Bible.

So we have a contest going on. We can call it Ramtha versus the mercy of God. Or the personal life urge versus the death urge. Or the mass unconscious mind of humans versus Mother Nature. The question is, will the mercy of God save us from the predictions or will it be the mercy of God and Mother Nature that takes people out of their misery? The answers to these questions are up to us.

A rebirther from Japan wrote me after the last disaster and said that she has been a rebirther for 8 years and hasn't shared it with anyone, because as we know, Japanese are not aggressive. She was waiting for people to be open and seek spiritual help. Now she says people are seeking God more. She asked me to help.
I had to tell her that it is up to her, and I put her is touch with other rebirthers near her that I have trained. The question is how many disasters will it take to get people interested in their Divine Nature and to take responsibility for the content and quality of their minds?

The Wisdom of Solomon, chapter I, verses 12‐16 (In the Catholic and Jewish Bible)

God did not Create Death

12 Do not bring on your own death by sinful actions. 13 God did not invent death, and when living creatures die, it gives him no pleasure. 14 He created everything so that it might continue to exist, and everything he created is wholesome and good. There is no deadly poison in them. No, death does not rule this world, 15 for God’s justice does not die.

16 Ungodly people have brought death on themselves by the things they have said and done. They yearn for death as if it were a lover. They have gone into partnership with death, and it is just what they deserve.

What you do with information today may determine your well-being on every level of your civilization. Is it up to you or God?

We are immortal until we kill ourselves. Most people kill themselves with food. But we get some of our appetite from EEP, and EEP is the most basic source of unconsciousness. Mental noise is the basic source of sinful actions - of the things that we say and do that bring death upon people. It is emotional energy pollution that drains our life energy and causes our yearning for death.

When we are living in the eternal consciousness of the eternal Spirit, we are no longer driven by conditioning, and we have to choose what to do with our eternal
Energy. Life is no longer driving us; we can live in artistic self-expression. We then have the responsibility to make up our own lives. We have an abundance of energy from the spiritual purification practices with earth, air, water, and fire. We enjoy all of our relationships. We constantly choose higher and higher quality thoughts. Our 50,000 thoughts are the source of happiness, bliss, and many kinds
of accomplishments.

When we are living in the freedom of spiritual liberation, we can choose our
quality of life. We have the awesome responsibility to control our lives; life no
longer controls us. We create our karma; karma no longer controls us.

I have a friend named Stan Brown who desired to prevent San Diego from going into the ocean in the late 1980's. He went there from the East Coast and did fire ceremonies full time for over a year to prevent the disaster. It evidently worked, but I don't know how long his work is good for. There is a very powerful passage in the Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East by Baird Spalding, which enables us to prevent prophesies. I recommend that we all study it. We used to hand it out to all quests at the training center in Sierraville, Californis. We can do this again now. It probably should be a part of all trainings until we move into the age of truth.

The big question is this: is humanity willing to go for Life, or are too many people dedicated to ignorance? Or is it in the best interest of everyone in the mercy of God and Mother Nature to put miserable people out of their misery? I am glad that I don't have to answer this question. We will see in the coming months and years what the answer will be. I am the eternal optimist. I believe that if there were enough people teaching and practicing spiritual purification, God would bet on our work and extend mercy to the limit. Can He bet on you?

Even if the Maha Kranti (great destruction or great revolution) did happen, we still have to create an educational system for adults as well as children that will actually enlighten us in a way of life that includes spiritual purification and democracy in a way that actually works. Why not do it now? If we don't prevent the prophesies, we will get a head start on our civilization after them.

To be liberated means to live in the mind of God. The qualities of our Divine
Nature are love, joy, patience, gentleness, goodness, trustworthiness, self control, beauty, wisdom, truth, simplicity, bliss, power, mercy, energy, harmony, all knowledge, purity, good judgment, order, beyond the mind, creator of all things, infinite, eternal, all present, materialized and non-materialized, limited and unlimited, dependable, and everyone.

Need Therapy? A good man is hard to find!

By Benedict Carey

Between unresolved family conflicts, relationship struggles and his mixed-race identity, James Puckett had enough on his mind in college that he sought professional help. But after bouncing from one therapist to another, he still felt stuck.
“They were all female, and they did give me some comfort,” said Mr. Puckett, 30, who works for a domestic-abuse program in Wisconsin. “But I was getting the same rhetoric about changing my behavior without any challenge to see the bigger picture of what was behind these very male coping reactions, like putting your hand through a wall.”
He decided to seek out a male therapist instead, and found that there were few of them. “I’m just glad I ended up with the person I did,” said Mr. Puckett, who is no longer in therapy, “because for me it made all the difference.”
Researchers began tracking the “feminization” of mental health care more than a generation ago, when women started to outnumber men in fields like psychology and counseling. Today the takeover is almost complete.
Men earn only one in five of all master’s degrees awarded in psychology, down from half in the 1970s. They account for less than 10 percent of social workers under the age of 34, according to a recent survey. And their numbers have dwindled among professional counselors — to 10 percent of the American Counseling Association’s membership today from 30 percent in 1982 — and appear to be declining among marriage and family therapists.
Some college psychology programs cannot even attract male applicants, much less students. And at many therapists’ conferences, attendees with salt-and-pepper beards wander the hallways as lonely as peaceniks at a gun fair.
The result, many therapists argue, is that the profession is at risk of losing its appeal for a large group of sufferers — most of them men — who would like to receive therapy but prefer to start with a male therapist.
“There’s a way in which a guy grows up that he knows some things that women don’t know, and vice versa,” said David Moultrup, a psychotherapist in Belmont, Mass. “But that male viewpoint has been so devalued in the course of empowering little girls for the past 40 or 50 years that it is now all but lost in talk therapy. Society needs to have the choice, and the choice is being taken away.”
The reasons for the shift are economic as well as cultural, most people in these professions agree. Managed care took a bite out of therapists’ incomes in the 1990s. Psychiatry, the most male-dominated corner of therapy, increasingly turned to drug treatments. And as women entered the work force in greater numbers, they proved to be more drawn to the talking cure than men — in giving the treatment as well as in receiving it.
“Usually women get blamed when a profession loses status, but in this case the trend started first, and men just evacuated,” said Dorothy Cantor, a former president of American Psychological Association who conducted a landmark study of gender and psychology in 1995. “Women moved up into the field and took their place.”
The impact of this gender switch on the value of therapy is negligible, studies suggest. A good therapist is a good therapist, male or female, and a mediocre one is a mediocre one. Shared experience may even be an impediment, in some cases: therapists often caution students against assuming that they have special insight into person’s problems just because they have something in common.
Still, perception is all-important when it comes to seeking help for the very first time. In a recent study among 266 college men, Ronald F. Levant, a psychologist at the University of Akron, found that a man’s willingness to seek therapy was directly related to how strongly he agreed with traditionally male assumptions, like “I can usually handle whatever comes my way.” Such a man on the fence about seeking treatment could be discouraged by the prospect of talking to a woman.
“Many men like this believe that only another man can help them, and it doesn’t matter whether that’s true or not,” Dr. Levant said. “What’s important is what the client believes.”
Both male therapists and men who have been in treatment agree that there are certain topics that — at least initially, all things being equal — are best discussed within gender. Sex is one, they say. And some men are far less ashamed about affairs when speaking to another man.
Aggression is another. Many men grow up in a world of hostile body language and real physical violence that is almost entirely invisible to women. A bar fight that sounds traumatic to a female therapist may be no more than a good night out for a man. Likewise, a stare-down in the sandbox that looks vanishingly trivial from a distance may lie like a poisoned well in the stream of the unconscious.
In some men’s groups he used to run, Dr. Levant passed out index cards and had each participant write down the one thing he was most ashamed of, that he was reluctant to admit to himself, much less to anyone else. “I would get things like, ‘I backed down from a fight in junior high school,’ ” he said, “and these were mostly middle-aged, married guys.”
In just the past few years, psychologists have identified a number of issues that are, in effect, male versions of the gender-identity issues that so many mothers face in the work force: the self-doubt of being a stay-at-home father, the tension between being a provider and being a father, even male post-partum depression.
“In the same way that there is something very personal about being a mother, something very important to female identity, the experience of fathering is also very powerful,” said Aaron Rochlen, a psychologist at the University of Texas, Austin. “And some men, I think, prefer to talk about that — the joy of being a father, the stress, how it’s impacting them — with a therapist who’s had the same experience,” from the same point of view.
If they can find one, that is. “I remember when I started training, I looked around and realized that for the first time in my life, I was an endangered minority,” said Ryan McKelley, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. “Now I tell my male students, if you’re interested in clinical care, you can write your own ticket. You’ll be hired immediately.”