First the chapter from Your story Matters. and then Jo's Notes:
Chapter 31
Wordlessness
Fail fast, fail often, and get those failures out of the way so that idea that sets your pants on fire will come to life.
You know about brainstorming. It can be with others or by yourself. It's an opportunity to throw ideas out without judgment, ridicule, or naysayers saying they can't work.
If naysayers are nearby, don't tell them what you're doing. Just do it. But be sure to write down your ideas before they evaporate. Ideas are like clay pigeons; you must shoot them at their highest trajectory, for they are hard to hit on the way down.
Regarding those ideas, you can fine-tune them later—remember, you can't edit a blank page.
Wishes and daydreams can become a reality if we keep them constantly before us. Tap, tap, tap, like water dripping can wear through rock.
While I mention writing down ideas, I know that people tend to gloss over that suggestion, yet that's where the music starts.
Scientists keep lab notes, artists keep sketchbooks, and cooks write their recipes. Those morning pages will help explain where you've been and how you are progressing. Although you never need to reread them. It was your brain dump in the moment.
And…those morning pages are for your eyes only.
I hear they are not teaching cursive in schools anymore. I know how handy a keyboard is, but after reading that cursive increases neural activity in specific brain sections like meditation, I wonder if I should do more composing longhand. I wrote longhand long before I was able to compose on the keyboard. Now, I hear that writing longhand will improve one's creativity.
A study performed at Indiana University showed that the mere action of writing by hand unleashes creativity that is not easily accessed in any other way.
Studies have shown that students who take notes longhand remember more of the material than those who type directly into the computer.
In Finding Your North Star, Martha Beck writes about being on safari in Africa with a silent, unfriendly guide named Richard.
Suddenly, Richard spoke to the driver.
"Hold on, folks," exclaimed the driver. The vehicle veered off the road, over potholes, and through thorn bushes until it stopped before two baby leopards hidden by their mother. Questions, "How old are they?" "Will they be all right?" Cameras clicked.
Yet, nobody asked Richard how he knew leopard babies were hidden in the bush three miles off the beaten path.
His knowledge came from something other than books or classrooms. It came from watching, listening, observing, and learning from other people. It came from a place unknown to most Western people. Beck describes this style of learning as Wordlessness.
Wordlessness is a challenging concept to describe to a Western mind. Westerners are used to book learning and tests, where we give the teacher what she wants and focus on the grade instead of grasping the material.
Many Moons ago, I read a book called Of Water and Spirit by Malidoma Patrice Some'. Some', a native African, was taken from his home as a child and raised for 15 years in a Jesuit school. As an adult, he told the elders he wanted to be initiated back into the tribe. They responded, "I don't know if you can, you've learned to read."
At the time, that struck me as not only odd but disappointing. I love to read, and our society is based on it. How do we disseminate information? Old papyrus scrolls help us to understand where we've been, and their "secrets" were so important to ancient peoples that they buried them so well that not before hundreds of years had passed would we find them.
The point Some's elder was making, however, was that reading had changed his brain. Wordlessness was no longer a part of him.
He did his initiation anyway.
See—we can do it.
Many of us think we should meditate, yet we resist doing it. Meditation usually requires sitting still and going into a non-thinking mode. (It's hard. That's the reason we don't do it.) But what if we didn't have to sit still? What if Wordlessness is a mode we can carry with us?
Wordlessness exists in the "Zone" of creativity or athletic endeavors where one pushes oneself to higher standards. Either success comes or the knowledge that "I have gone the distance. I have fought a good fight. I am complete." Or success in layman's terms.
Wordlessness is when we are at one with what we are doing.
Many cultures use paradoxes to nudge their students out of their thinking mode. One is "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" That is a Jewish koan that seems nonsensical. However, it is an attempt to halt the monkey mind, which tends to loop and cycle and say absurd things.
Wordlessness is an oasis for a mind caught in its web of negative thoughts. What if, in the Wordless place, we find that we can mend both our spirit and our bodies? What if, in Wordlessness, we find that as we heal ourselves, we heal the world?
Woo, woo, alert!
What if…
Money isn’t the issue in winning the election.
What if all the money in the world wouldn’t put Trump in the White House.
What if Jean Huston is correct in saying we are standing on the precipice of stepping into our Quantum Powers? We are, she says, in the middle of a time between going on with the way things have been, or entering a new Quantum Field.
Jean explains that Quantum Power is partnering with the Universe. This isn’t the Law of Attraction; it is being a partner.
Once, Jean asked Margaret Mead, the famed anthropologist living with her and her husband, why she was so lucky.
“Because I expect to be,” she said.
New science has emerged in the last few years about consciousness, epigenetics, genes turning off and on, NDEs all that tell us that “not only do we live in the Universe, the Universe lives in us.
Aren’t we tired of dragging around our little egos while being overwhelmed by the business of day-to-day living? We are in a state of entropy—meaning falling into chaos.
So, send your mind to graduate school.
We are the people.
I grieved for a couple of days, depressed to the point of snapping at everybody. It was the Trump threat, and to top it off, Elon Musk joined the fray and gave 45 million dollars a month to the Trump campaign. I was drawn into fear. And boy, are they going to beat the drum regarding that?
What if we didn’t buy it?
Yesterday, I listened to a promotional for another course—yep, it was Jean Huston’s—but boy, she gave it to us for 90 minutes. She said that we are the ones who we came at this time for a reason, that the Universe is a microcosm that comes alive with our life, and that we are the people to usher in a new day.
You are being called. The world needs goodness and intention.
We can drop our disbelief in ourselves. We have been caught in the web of the same old feeling that there is no way out and that we are running out of time. (Hey, I’ve stuck in the Second World War.)
We have a bigger message to give to the world—and the old operating system isn’t working. When we drop that, we will feel inspired, evolve, and expand. Then we will be able to manifest our vision.
One day when Jean and Mead were walking along a path, with Mead complaining that she couldn’t find some information she needed for a talk the following day. She had searched and searched and couldn’t find it. Not a few minutes later, a student walking toward them stopped and said, “Professor Mead, you probably don’t remember me, but I was a student of yours.”
“Oh yes I remember you, class of 1991, You didn complete your paper.”
Well, the girl said that she went on to Graduate School, and I have been studying whatever right then, Mead needed.
Mead grabbed her and said, “You’re coming home with me.”
She’s lucky because she expects to be. (That core belief overrides her complaining. See, a little complaining won’t push our good away from us. We can stop feeling guilty about it. But don’t turn into a complainer.)
We can expect that Trump will not win this election. He will not be in the White House.
Jean used Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave as a model for the Nature of Reality—of which we know little. Long ago, Plato proposed that we all live in a cave behind a wall, and what we see are only shadows cast by the fire. We think the shadows are real. However, they are only illusions.
If we crawled out of the cave and looked back, we would see the real things. But at first the light is so bright it hurts our eyes, and we are tempted to turn back.
Don’t go back, no matter how bright the light is.
I am finally getting it. Evil is upping the ante because it is afraid it will fail.
It behaves the way our minds behave; in fear, our brains spill chemicals and put us in flight or fight mode. In time, too much cortisol can weaken our hippocampus, change our brain chemistry, and create a craving for the next high, the cortisol and adrenalin rush.
We can become addicted to it. Notice how we keep looking, listening, and reading about what happens daily in the political field. The ones who think Trump is stupid look for more to make us laugh at him. The others say, “That’s my boy.”
They’ve got us.
Women have been known as carriers of the light. Don’t ask me where I got that—long ago. Of course, the powers that be knew women had power; why do you think they punished or burnt women for the simple act of using their intuition or trying to heal with natural products, a placebo, or positive thoughts. Horrors.
Why do you think they kept women uneducated to the point of keeping books away from them? Why do you think they kept them from voting? Why do you think they kept them barefoot and pregnant? The men went to prostitutes for their jollies, then defamed them for being sluts. They grabbed women, molested them, and victimized them because they could. And women’s work? It used to be that a man wouldn’t touch a dish, a dish pan, or sweep the floor. Change a baby? Horrors.
Let’s follow our calling and say, “We’re mad as hell and we aren’t going to take it anymore.”
You can’t use our biology against us. We can bring forth new life, but our bodies are ours. We will share our bodies under our own terms. Controllers, Priests, and Kings have, since the beginning of recorded history, kept women subservient and interfered with their reproductive rights. They drummed women out of votes, religion, education, and realistic paying jobs.
The buck stops here.
Are we going to keep a rapist, a bully, a liar, and a cheat out of the White House?
How dare he and his cohorts treat us with contempt.
What if we don’t care how much money people or candidates have? We are the people. We can talk, we have pens to write, we have a voice, and we have a vote.
We need our sisters.
Women, we can do it!
“When you stop operating from an old operating system, you will feel inspired, evolving, and expanding, and you won’t feel overwhelmed.
‘You will be able to manifest your vision.”—Jean Huston.