CT Step 82 - Great joy is with me today. – Journal – CT Step 81

Today:  CT Step 82 - Great joy is with me today. (MP3)

 

Great joy is with me today. CT Step 82

There is great joy. It lives within you and lives in your genuine relationships with others. This joy is born of gratitude, service and recognition. It is not the kind of joy one has by having immediate sensations of delight. It is more a joy that a miracle is happening in your life, and you are bearing witness to it. For all the work that must be done along the way, there are these moments of confirmation. That is what they are.

Everything can be problematic in your life, and yet you can still have this experience of confirmation. Look at your true ally and feel grateful. Look at this study in Greater Community Spirituality and be thankful that you have it, for you could be lost without it. Be grateful that you can live today, that you have your health, and that you have the opportunity to give to someone else.

Let this be your focus for today. In your practice in stillness and in your hourly practice in awareness and discernment, be open to receive this joy. For this sense of joy is a natural by- product of the genuine work that you are doing here.

Practice 82:   One 30-minute stillness practice.

                         Contemplation practice.

                         Hourly practice.

Pictures:  Setting a goal and achieving it generally gives a sense of joy. These scenes from Arches National Park, Moab, Utah show a window feature that is an achievable goal. Beyond it is a greater landscape.

Plan B - If the MP3 doesn’t work, here’s the link to the folder: New Message - Student Spoken Steps CT Recordings - Steps to Knowledge Continuation Training - Working file

From the journal:  CT Step 81 - I will not be afraid of conflict today.

Note:  Another long entry. Here I try to sort out my perspective on the world and soul presence here. Later messages will expand the perspective.

3:53 p.m. Wednesday, November 14, 2001 – and

→ Infinite Community – in the built environment. This seems the idea that I might try to develop after the session on 9-11 – Security response AICP Fall symposium.

→ Infinite Community is local, regional, national, global. It is human community in a built environment. Settlement is beyond tribal spatial arrangement now, so we must consider the future. The world does not end, we get a new heaven and a new earth.

"Infinite Community".

4:51 p.m. Is there a future? What will it be?

5:28 p.m. Conflict, conflict, conflict. A human condition. Getting here was quite difficult – I missed the train – no exit marked on 234 – so I drove in – missing the Vienna Metro. Guidance said left, left – by cheating on HOV I made it to the conference on time.

The speakers were poor, but the day was stimulating. I talked to a few people about living towns – a new integration. Making that work is a challenge.

I could seek to go to Richmond with Mark Warner – or stay in the Valley and try to make it work here – with no resources. My ability to lead? I question that right now.

Infinite community – the mode of conflict resolution in the world of intelligent life. People seem to agree – yet I'm so far from the network, I don't connect.

– People met today –

…

Life = Community

Humanity = Community

(no single life form does it alone) 11/16/01

So… Infinite Human Community – an adaptive intelligent life form.

The history of human community.

In the beginning. The great "What if?" Caused the manifestation of matter. The big "yes!" Where Spirit wondered and its thought manifested with the visible creation. (its raw material)

Eons later, on planet earth – intelligent, upright life forms manifested. The forefathers and mothers of humanity.

Spiritual creeds have it that angelic forces were involved, bringing DNA – thought forms from other planets/environments – to earth.

Cooperative intelligence. Early humanoids had larger brains, but that size declined over time. Smaller, but more cooperative brains one out over brawn it seems.

Biology knows to survive. That is how life does life. It does that through common-unity – community.

Can humanity perpetuate itself as an infinite life form community? Though perhaps not human, matter picked up/evolved the life virus and man and woman kind emerged. They propagated.

– They spread out over the earth and adapted to climates with physiological and cultural adaptations.

Tribes lost contact as they spread, developing ancestor stories. With physiological changes – they only barely saw each other as human community.

Culture, particularly religion, dominated thinking. As hunter-gatherers, territories shrunk. Some developed farming and, with spare time from hunting food, civilization was made available; <it could be developed> and the focus shifted to governance, trade, invention, arts, religion.

Highly populated, great cultures evolved. Greeks, Romans, Aztec, Mayan, Chinese, Egyptian, Persian, Indian – governance based on spiritual creation stories.

Life manifests worship of the creator (?) (!)

In 2001 – who has made it thus far? There are many communities on the planet. Fewer ethnic communities than 500, 100, 50 years ago.

How has humanity survived and increased its number to over 6 billion? Community & family – Family is the building block of community, not the individual.

The individual comes into being through family – conception, cooperative or not – bodies managed to nurture a created life – fertilized egg – to the birth of a child → then family/community raised the child.

Bloodline/genetic lines go forward through – conception – and nurture of the young.

Humanity is one basic biology. It has been perpetuated by community. A family bloodline needed to be mixed to prevent genetic dead ends.

Global dispersion and population growth/diversity of culture

With or without E.T. intervention we still are at today.

1. Humanity – Africa

2. Families → tribes civilizations

3. One planet tribe > infinite?

→ do the permutations? How many

→ population@what rate?

4. The new integration for infinite community – Amen & Amen *Biology alone isn't enough.

The page from which the text above comes.

→ Conflict – lesser visions.

Culture seek to dominate. Individuality okay – core humanity important to infinite community

→ What degree of evolution will be required or take place without are observing it?

→ Cultures/religions must ask? Which beliefs limit us/community? Which ones free us?

→ Long live humanity. Let the dead bury the dead.

→ Genetics are only enough for survival, culture decides the range of life.

Technology affects culture in the manifestation of the life force.

Alone I can do nothing. Though our doing is imperfect, it has gotten a population increase in humans, but a decline in the variety of life forms.

We are not alone. Other intelligent life forms are here.

Can we now establish – or become aware of our self directed need to avoid extinction and add to our vision the need for human sustainability. Will we be the canaries? Snuffed out by gases of danger.

S2K says ET's don't want us, they want our environment.

I am Ozymandias, King of Kings, look on my works in wonder! [As I recalled and wrote then. The full poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley follows.]  

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Humanity, the human community – has an implied vision of eternal life beyond the body. Shall there ever be a time bodies in the physical are not needed?

Life could become cerebral and not physical. The primordial soup never goes away?

Matter need not change. It can randomly self combine.

Quickened matter – that with life – in the context of life.

Are we @ the beginning, middle or end? Based on the biological experience of time we've barely begun to create the built environment.

Is humanity here for the convenience of souls? Like so many car rentals – go to earth, rent a body, live in the physical. Fun huh? So existential.

Conflict comes from individuation. Production comes from cooperation – family – community – as below, so above. Who is my brother? I do not know the true extent of family or community – biologically and spiritually.

It is all conveniently separated, yet we are one – an infinite community in the Creator.

Amen & Amen

Nasi Novare Coram

T-om Su-ne

6:46 p.m.

11:42 p.m. On the way back from D.C. I stopped to call Mom.

Last night when I called, she was already in bed. Dad will be home tomorrow. She's not happy with what is being required of her, but Diane L… will ultimately help her.

My mother – Helen Marie Johnson Christoffel is a great inspiration to me. I should be so strong and righteous. She is important in the world and that's why she's here. I'll do the GC work from study – but some people are born knowing – or at least act that way and convince everyone else.

Lots of ink used this day in my attempt to put together my cosmic view, now having the benefit of the Greater Community perspective. Later works will add detail and perspective, as I seek to understand that which may not be totally understandable from where I stand and what information I’ve received. Still, it is human to try to do so. We continue.

NNC

Note: If you’ve some interest, but this is the first time you’ve seen Steps, you should go to the beginning blog post. From here you will learn about Steps to Knowledge and can begin it on the day that makes sense; then progress as needed. Begin at the beginning.

If you do know about Steps, but have not done Steps twice completely, read the related materials, and have a sense of the direction of this study, you won’t get the experience. The Introduction begins:

“This is the Steps to Knowledge Continuation Training. It is designed to build upon the Steps that were learned in Steps to Knowledge to enable you to experience the grace, the power and the direction of Knowledge in your life and to become an expression of Knowledge in everything that you do. If you have completed the book, Steps to Knowledge, twice through and have followed the instructions as they were given without altering the curriculum in any way, then you are now ready to begin this more advanced study”.

If you are an independent student, that is certainly an option. Posts here provide a trail that may let you have a virtual companion when and if you want one. One may have to study alone, as I did in the beginning. There are other Steps students blogging their experience and you might find a person more like you as a companion, or use a number of such Steps journeys. There are options as well through the Free School of the New Message.