Here's a picture of me starting my first presentations of the EE Course. That screen is our wonderful powerpoint presentation!

We are doing classes in Salmon. We are a small town, so it was quite a success to get 8 people up to the house to take the course. I was also fortunate that a group of friends up in Hamilton Montana had let me go through all the classes with them the previous weekend. So I had learned from my first experiment that I tended to make the first class too complicated.

Fortunately, I learned my lesson and kept the first class in Salmon very very simple. And it went over really well. The first class is "What is Enlightenment?" So that is a very big topic to start with. What we consider in this class is the difference between depth and perspective. We also talk about the fact that people can develop. And really try to get to the point that enlightenment is an experience, but it is more. It is really a perspective you have on all your experience.

It's quite a topic to take a group of people through. But by the end we have something really interesting to talk about.

These days people are very interested in learning to have a positive attitude on things. This is because of lots of movies circulating around, The Secret, and What the Bleep. But in these movies people are taught that they are always suppossed to have positive thoughts and positive feelings. Problem is that it is impossible to control the thoughts and feelings, because the nature of thought and feeling is constant change.

So it is quite a relief to start thinking that our spiritual development is more a result of the perspective we have on all our experience - rather than on our ability to control our experience.

We'll see what everyone comes up with in their homework!

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King day, and we'll be sharing Class One of Evolutionary Enlightenment again in our home.

I just saw an awesome speach of MLK on Meet the Press and was totally inspired by his absolute committment to change and the highest potential of any human being. MLK spoke a lot in an absolute context. He certainly did not suffer from any ambiquity caused by being afraid of using a negative term in his speach or thoughts. 

Martin Luther King Jr

(From the Acceptance Speech, The Nobel Peace Prize, 1964)

            "I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘isness' of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness' that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life unable to influence the unfolding of events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality."

            "I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of a thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final world in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger that evil triumphant."

Martin Luther King Jr was an awesome Evolutionary.

So what is Enlightenment anyway?

It is very attractive to think of enlightenment as an experience of depth. As an experience of depth that will bring us relief from fear, total bliss and a deep sense of oneness.

But enlightenment is more a perspective we have on all our experience. With this perspective, we can be in the storm of any sort of experience, and not get caught into taking it personally or in reacting to it from our conditioned self. Having an enlightened perspective on all our experience gives us a total liberation from that experience!

That's what we're talking about -- liberation from the small mind and small experience. A liberation of the Authentic Self !

We went through the class, "Context is Everything" in Salmon last night. Even though we are all people on the leading edge of thought, we could still see, through example after example, that we habitually see ourselves as separate from the world happening around us. This is most obvious in the ways we don't see our selves as part of development.

When we were looking at the models of development form ego-centric, to ethno-centric, to world-centric -- to cosmo centric, one woman commented, "The leap from world-centric to cosmo-centric takes a different kind of a leap than any of the others. The ego can be maintained in any of the lower states." What a perfect way to say it!