I’m trying to find new ways to participate in the world, ways that dissolve the dishonest and amplify the Beauty. Since beginning work with Beauty, which I mentioned in my last “Great Mystery” post, I’ve been rewarded with a greater sense of connection with the world and with what I can only describe as Divine Presence.

But that remains vague when I need it to start evolving into greater specificity, sharper edges, clearer resolution. Enough with the mystical poetic terms, how ’bout something hard-nosed and practical to anchor it to?

I was actually inspired by something a bit random. I was doing a little reading about the magical practice of evocation. Invocation and evocation are both means of contacting spirits, but the difference is that invocation means to draw a spirit or force into one’s own being, whereas evocation involves attracting that spirit or force to a separate location, having no connection to yourself, in order to interact with it.

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I found a really fascinating and powerful story about the nonviolent path of transforming enemies into friends, in Walter Wink’s book The Powers That Be.

On a Sunday morning in June 1991, Cantor Michael Weisser and his wife, June, were unpacking boxes in their new home, when the phone rang. “You will be sorry you ever moved into 5810 Randolph St., Jew boy,” the voice said, and hung up. Two days later, the Weissers received a manila packet in the mail. “The KKK is watching you, scum,” read the note. Inside were pictures of Adolf Hitler, caricatures of Jews with hooked noses, blacks with gorilla heads, and graphic depictions of dead blacks and Jews. “The Holohoax was nothing compared to what’s going to happen to you,” read one note.

The Weissers called the police, who said it looked like the work of Larry Trapp, the state leader, or “grand dragon,” of the Ku Klux Klan. A Nazi sympathizer, he led a cadre of skinheads and klansmen responsible for terrorizing black, Asian, and Jewish families in Nebraska and nearby Iowa. “He’s dangerous,” the police warned. “We know he makes explosives.” Although confined to a wheelchair because of late-stage diabetes, Trapp, forty-four, was a suspect in firebombings of several African Americans’ homes around Lincoln and was responsible for what he called “Operation Gooks,” the March 1991 bombing of the Indochinese Refugee Assistance Center in Omaha. (He later admitted to these crimes.) And Trapp was planning to blow up the synagogue where Weisser was the spiritual leader.

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To open the new year, here’s a discussion of Divine Love and karma from Rawn Clark’s essay, Dimensions of the Divine.

Divine Providence provides us with exactly what we need, exactly when we need it. It never places before us something we don’t need. Even the vilest of circumstances are, from the Divine perspective, necessary. Furthermore, they are presented according to the Universal Legality, which means that the form in which they are presented is the only form in which they could, in that moment, be presented to us.

The consequences of this astound the mind if one contemplates them deeply enough …

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Sometimes I wish I were Christian. No, I don’t regret the direction that my spiritual path has taken me; but I see that if I were a Christian — or a Buddhist, or a Shriner — then I would have access to a community. It’s community that I sometimes desire.

A shaman of a northern European tradition, Raven Kaldera, wrote a funny and thoughtful little article called “Why My Aunt Judy Isn’t A Pagan (Or, How Far We Still Have To Go)”:

I remembered how hard I’d had to work the last time I tried to get a bunch of pagans to do a service project, First of all, just agreeing on something politically correct enough for all the members took months, and then, when we actually went to do the work at a local soup kitchen, half the people didn’t show up. I was almost ashamed of us. Leading pagans is like herding cats, they say.

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I was pondering this idea of human space recently when I picked up a book in my personal library, a textbook on Ericksonian hypnotherapy titled Therapeutic Trances, by Stephen Gilligan. I came upon a fascinating little section on “minimal cues,” which are

subtle but informative changes — “differences that make a difference.” For example, the therapist might notice that, upon introducing a particular topic, the client manifests restricted breathing, or increased muscle tension, or increased pupillary eye dilation, and so forth.

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Speaking of “human space,” I had an interesting experience yesterday while out walking in the neighborhood. My wife and I ran into a neighbor and stopped to chat with him, and he started talking about the Middle East and how our actions are bringing the “eternal war” that’s there over here.

I don’t know this neighbor very well, so all that was guiding me was my intuition. It’s hard to explain, but almost without thinking about it, I sensed the boundaries of the metaphorical “space” he occupied with his words and thinking, and I consciously stepped into it and began using his language. Not repeating words he said, but saying things that I intuitively felt would resonate with his worldspace.

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I’m becoming aware of a certain kind of energetic space that I think of as human space.

When I sit and talk with a patient in the clinic, much of what I’m trying to do is extend my senses and mind to a clear perception their being, in order to discern what they need and to determine how best I can meet those needs with what I have to offer. I suppose it could be thought of as a cold information-gathering process. Part of our training is to investigate and interrogate as thoroughly as we can, because the more information we have, the more clearly we can know someone.

But, there’s a more important process underlying this procedure, something deeper and more basic: creating a space for authenticity. Asking questions about a person’s health automatically induces a degree of self-reflection, and brings some self-awareness. The standard questions of Chinese medical diagnosis, regarding one’s digestion or urination or palpitations, do not go far enough in this regard, though. I feel that the work of a truly great physician involves the opening of a space in which people can experience themselves with greater awareness, depth, and acceptance. In other words, a human space.

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I’ve just begun my fifth semester of acupuncture school. In the sixth semester, beginning in May, I will start treating patients.

It’s an exciting time. After just over a year of accumulating and synthesizing bare bits of information, I will finally begin to apply it in a meaningful way. In terms of knowledge and experience, I feel ready to treat patients. Not, of course, that I feel that I’ve mastered the skills or theories I’ve learned; but I feel fairly confident in the basics, and I’m at the point where I need to actually practice in order to learn more and to consolidate what I’ve learned. And I feel well-prepared to do that.

There’s one major hitch: Recruiting patients.

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In many ways, what I’m looking for could be called “a sense of place.” In the past few days, on a few separate occasions (including a comment on my last post), that phrase has popped up, and I find it very evocative.

Here is what I want.

I want a sense of place. I want to feel connected, deep down to my bones, to a people: a family, a circle of friends and acquaintances, a community. I want to feel connected to the land, to the plants and animals and birds, to the geography. I want to know the stories of these people and places, not just the cold facts. I want to know and be part of the history, and have it actually be relevant, and see why it matters to me personally. I want to belong.

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What does it mean that someone tried to steal my moped?

Is the world dangerous? Or do I create the danger that I experience?

It’s interesting to explore how I may have contributed to this incident. A big clue was that when it happened, though I felt afraid and angry, one of my major emotions was relief.

The moped I bought was by a company called E-max. It was a cutting-edge, experimental, electric vehicle — it ran on batteries, which appealed to my vague “green” ideals.

The problem from the very beginning was that my objectives were completely unclear. Though the main thing was that it would be more convenient to have another vehicle (we are a one-car household), I confess that the idea of riding a cutting-edge technology zero-emission no-gas vehicle seduced me into buying without thinking it through rationally. Not until after I impulsively put down two grand for it did I begin to question it; and by then it was too late.

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