Guided by aliveness

  Birgitta is one of the great woman mystics of the middle ages. She was born in 1302, a daughter of a noble family in Sweden. She married early and got 8 children, living the life of a noble lady. The story is that Birgitta had religious visions at some points during childhood, and when her husband died the visions returned, and transformed her life completely.  In an important vision, God told her that her calling was to be his bride and mouthpiece. Birgitta let go of her comfortable life and her assets, moved into a monastery and started conveying the visions and messages she received from Jesus Christ and Mother Mary. There were messages about how to live a good christian life aligned with the will of God, about international politics and what God wanted the Pope and kings of England and France to do, and about founding a new monastic order. More than 600 visions, which were written down by Birgitta and her helpers, were spread and read widely. She was also an important co...

  The classic mystical traditions of the great religions are diverse and complex, their stories about reality are very different and their perspectives on life are unique. Still, in its core, there seems to be common ground and a universal experience and perception of life. One gateway into this perception of life may be a quality of radical presence - a letting go of attachments and beliefs from the past, opening up and receiving the flow of life in its newness and wonder. Life as a continuous gift, carrying us as grace. Life as a work of art, forms constantly being created and changing. Life as a timeless eternal ground, emptiness and fullness.  In his book  The mystic heart  W. Teasdall points out that for the mystic, human identity is not something we own, but something we receive - we dont own our consciousness, we inhabit it. This implies a concept of consciousness as a community of interconnected being to which we all belong. "Reality, cosmos, life and being a...

 "In our western world, the fixation of the process of separation from our instinctual/archetypal lives has been pronounced, resulting in overly intellectualized, sublimated, and devitalized removal from ourselves and our depths", Stanton Marlan writes in his book C.G.Jung and the alchemical imagination (2021). While the separation of consciousness from instinct is necessary for development of consciousness of the kind we know, the separation may cause dangerous and unbearable alienation if there is no kind of reunion between the individual and the instinctual and archetypal layers of the psyche.   Jung and many jungian analysts have described how encounters with animals in dreams and visions may symbolically represent attempts of the psyche to reestablish a connection between the conscious mind and the unconscious. The animal is a symbol for the part of the psyche which goes down into the subhuman and yet reaches above everyday consciousness, to the animal god. In an ind...

  Alchemy is an ancient and diverse tradition,  its origins dating back to ancient Egypt and the practicing of mumification. It is mystical, complex and ambiguous. Its method of explanation is "the obscure by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown". (Jung, C. :  Psychology and alchemy  p. 227 ).  Jung has been central in the rediscovery of alchemy by showing how the alchemists spoke in symbols about the human soul, and were working as much with the imagination as with the literal materials of their art. To Jung the alchemical images and symbols became an objective basis from which to interpret dreams and other unconscious material. Jungs study of alchemy made him realize how the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche can be transformed in a positive way by the contact between the ego and the contents of the unconscious. This development process becomes visible in the dreams and images of the individual, and in the changing symbolic structures o...

Being a parent is a gift, and its hard. I like to think of this picture as showing my children meeting the vastness and possibility of life. I am so grateful for them. Here is a text I have written about parenting:  Your Family (relateful.com)

  The  Post Carbon Institute  has recently published the report  Welcome to the great unraveling. Navigating the polycrisis of environmental and social breakdown.  The concept polycrisis points to a situation where crisis in multiple global systems becomes causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanitys prospects. The different crisis interact in ways which produce more harm than each crisis would have made, had it happened in isolation. The report claims that the current global environmental and social polycrisis is evidence that humanity is entering the  Great Unraveling  - a time of consequences in which human impact are compunding to threaten the very environmental and social systems that support modern human civilization.  The report describes social challenges as poverty, inequality, racism and other forms of discrimination as consequences of environmental challenges and the following scarcity in many areas, and as related sy...

  Form is emptiness, emptiness is form Emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness All things and phenomena are marked by emptiness they are neither appearing nor disappearing, neither pure nor impure, neither increasing nor decreasing. (...) There is no ignorance and no end of ignorance, there is no aging and death and no end of aging and death, there is no suffering and there is no end of suffering.