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One of the best movies ever made: 1980's "Resurrection" with Ellen Burstyn, Sam Shepard, Richard Farnsworth and Eva Le Gallienne.  I saw it when it was first released, and it is just as beautiful and inspiring, and the ensemble acting performances are just as extraordinary, today.  After many years not being able to find it at all, you can now finally purchase it on DVD and download it on the Internet.  (But for best picture and sound quality, I recommend the DVD released in 2010 by Universal Pictures' Vault Series.)     http://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Ellen-Burstyn/dp/B0033PSHDG/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1396846309&sr=1-1&keywords=ellen+burstyn+resurrection

Annika Mongan makes a wonderful point in her blog post of March 28, 2014 - namely, that public scandals in Christian communities have a particularly demoralizing impact on their members, because Conversion promised them that Faith and the Holy Spirit would make them spiritually healthier than the rest of the world.  I agree, but I don't think that Christians have a corner on those feelings.  The same expectations, just expressed in different words, have applied to every spiritual community I have ever joined.  

In high school, I was an acolyte and president of my church's Methodist Youth Fellowship.  It was hard for me to understand why my father, who was active on the Board of Trustees, suddenly decided after 8 loyal years to take our family out of the church due to social friction with other Board members and political disagreements with the new Ministerial staff.  I had been taught that we were all members of the Body of Christ, and that we prized agape - divine brotherly love - above all else.  Why was my Dad so out of touch with what our Youth Ministers had been teaching me every week?  Could there be other realities, separate from the rosy picture that had been painted for me in Sunday School? 

The subject of memory has become something of a bugbear with me.  I remember a lot of things from my childhood which are now impossible to confirm…and this makes me wonder whether my memories are real.  I believe they are, but I have no proof.  The few people still alive who were around then have their own recollections, which deal with different events from my own. 

The reason it's become important for me to verify memories is that, five years into our marriage, my wife spontaneously retrieved a wonderful memory that had been suppressed till then  - something that happened, she said, when we had been married for only one month. 

Many of the world's greatest songs, poems and novels were penned by people under 30.  Back then we were already empathetic, educated, full of restless energy and oh-so-intelligent. 

Every single day we wanted things to HAPPEN!  But there were aspects of life that we hadn't experienced, about which we could only speculate.  Years later, even in those cases where our speculations had been fairly accurate, living through the actual reality was far more traumatic than we had ever imagined.

The following practice was developed through my experimentation as a Yogi and meditator.  Most mature practitioners, I think, will identify with my experience of working in prescribed ways for many years until I had gained enough "life creds" to begin adapting the techniques to suit my own inner promptings.  Those who insist on slavish adherence to rock-ribbed, inflexible traditions may complain that our altering the old ways makes us apostates; but it seems to me that every famous spiritual teacher we can think of was exactly that sort of innovator.  If the great religious, philosophical and scientific lights of our civilization had ceaselessly followed the old paradigms without adding some breakthrough insights of their own, we wouldn't be honoring their names today!   

Another way of expressing this is, "Make it your own."  For example, in order to convincingly portray a character such as Hamlet, whose story everyone knows and whom thousands of great actors have played in the past, today's actor must "make it his own."  He must find the core truths about the part which resonate for him.  If he is successful, his fresh insight will stimulate thought in others and make it worthwhile for audiences to buy tickets. 

When I taught Yoga and Meditation at Glendale Community College, I was friendly with the Chair of the Religions Department. We often discussed how the purpose of the Comparative World Religions class was not to convert students who already had a faith (as some paranoid individuals feared), but to facilitate tolerance between the citizens of a shrinking world through a better understanding of each others' beliefs. In that same spirit of education, I propose an open exchange of views - not to argue among ourselves as to who is right, but to share our mutual human inspirations and yearnings.

It has been many years since I felt compelled to convince others of my position; I simply put it out there, now, as a point of information. In my view of the universe, each mind has its own little piece of the Truth. For reasons we can only guess at, some of us were destined to appreciate Creation in terms of many Gods, while others were meant to see it in terms of only One - yet other brothers and sisters of ours were meant to believe in no God at all! Yet we are all children of a common Source, seeing reality as best we can from different points of view. If we combine all of our perceptions, this vast multi-dimensional hologram may begin to come into focus. 

Dancing by the perfumed stream, singing flower airs

Down she wound her merry way unto the island’s lairs.