He’s Just Had Coffee

Chris Caines quoted me today and it made me smile.

This is advertising, but hopefully interesting to a lot of my readers.

Some friends and I have been scheming for a while about making some things happen in the integral scene in Australia. One of the outcomes of that scheming is that we’re bringing Diane Hamilton to Sydney to hold a retreat in September. This is the first time a senior Big Mind teacher will appear in Australasia, so I’d like to encourage you to think about attending.

Integral Meditation
A 5-Day Retreat with Zen teacher
Diane Musho Hamilton Sensei
Friday 5 – Wednesday 10 Sept 2008

This five day retreat gives you space and time to explore the depths of your Big Mind and Big Heart through an Integrally-framed range of meditative, psychodynamic and body practices.

Diane Musho Hamilton Sensei is the dharma successor of American Zen Master Genpo Roshi, and is his first successor in the Big Mind lineage. Diane’s program will lead you through Zen meditative practices, psychodynamic shadow work, and the Big Mind process. The retreat will also include bodywork and energetic practices to provide you with a rounded transformative experience that engages the full depths of your self through mind, body, spirit and shadow.

Big Mind is the name given, by Genpo Roshi, to a straightforward and effective method of self investigation designed to give you an experience of your unconditioned nature. This process is a new synthesis of methods from western psychology and the non-dual wisdom traditions which successfully navigate core aspects of your psyche to reveal the compassionate nature of your heart and to cultivate a better understanding of the limitless wisdom and presence of your mind.

Diane is a truly impressive teacher who uniquely holds status as a Zen sensei, Big Mind process facilitator andas a key teacher with Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute. She is also a professional mediator, group facilitator, and trainer in conflict resolution. With a demanding international teaching schedule, this retreat presents a rare opportunity to study and practice with Diane on her first teaching visit to Australasia.

Venue: Brahma Kumaris Centre, Wilton
Dates: Fri 5 – Wed 10 Sep
Cost: $750 - includes accomodation and food;
scholarship places available on application

Places limited – for more information or to reserve a place, email: integralcentre@gmail.com

Visit and retreat sponsored by The Integral Centre, Sydney (Australia)

To my considerable surprise, my church recently decided to nominate me to the priesthood. After a couple of days of turning this around in my head and examining it from a few angles, questioning whether I’m worthy, whether I’m ready, whether I’m the right person for the job, I accepted their decision.

Today, our Patriarch, The Most Reverend Mar +Iohannes IV announced officially that I’m to be ordained along with a bunch of my fellow seminarians. So in May, Min and I will go to San Francisco to attend the AJC Conclave (well, I’ll be attending Conclave, I’m hoping Min will be sightseeing) where my life takes an irrevocable turn.

When I return, our small Sydney group Saint Uriel the Archangel Gnostic Community will become the Parish of Saint Uriel the Archangel and start offering more public services as we begin the process of community-building in earnest.

To answer some commonly asked questions:

I’m not finished in the seminary course; there’s a lot more to learn. The AJC regards the formation of a priest to be parallel to seminary studies — the two processes proceed at their own rate.

This is not a change in career; the AJC is a small church and none of our clergy are employed by their parish. Perhaps that might change in the future, but I think there’s a lot to be said for priests who live in the world.

When I’m ordained, my Orders will be valid, apostolic orders — which means in plain language that I will be a priest in the same spiritual sense (though in a very different organisational sense) as a Roman Catholic priest (for instance). That means that I am able to provide the sacraments (baptism, confirmation, unction, eucharist, reconciliation and matrimony) and those sacraments have the same validity as those provided by a priest in a larger church.

Australian Federal law does not automatically grant me the right to perform legally valid marriages, even though my church gives me the right to provide the sacrament of matrimony. That distinction is, I think, an interesting and productive thing to explore for couple seeking to formalise their relationship — it means you could choose to seek either matrimony or marriage at separate times.

I could become legally licensed as a marriage celebrant and therefore be able to provide both, but until I am able to marry my beloved in my own country, I do not intend to do that. My church provides its sacraments to “all humanity without discrimination on the basis of gender, race, social status or sexual orientation” (one of the many reasons I’m here) and I would be thrilled to offer matrimony to gay or lesbian couple who wish to celebrate their eternal bond before the Divine.

Each of those points could probably bear expanding and there’s more I’d like to say, which leads me to my next point:

To celebrate my happy news, I’ve started another blog. This one is focussed on spirituality, specifically the modern, gnostic, post-dualistic spirituality I’m pursuing in association with the AJC. It will have reports from my own journey, comments on stuff I’m reading both in my studies and on the web, perhaps occasional references to the news… stuff like that.

Please come visit and put my new site’s feed in your feed reader.

“He’s Just Had Coffee” continues, but it’s mostly going to be focussed on personal stuff and silly pop culture.

(This post is cross-posted to both “He’s Just Had Coffee” and “… as upon a straight road”)

“The primary goal of a social network is to connect people, to simplify their communication, and to help them stay in touch.”
Alex Iskold on Read/Write Web

This view is widely held by people who have failed to understand Granovetter’s idea of “weak ties” – contacts you can maintain with minimal maintenance. Social networks are not just your friends and your friends’ friends and so on. Social networks are a powerful notion (and “networking” such a powerful activity) because they include people who you can’t really call friends but with whom you have a positive, yet weak, relationship.

People in business don’t network to make friends. You don’t go to a conference, collect business cards and then try to “stay in touch” with everyone afterwards. That’s psychologically impossible except for very remarkable people. You can however maintain weak ties with vastly more people than you can maintain an intimate or even friendly relationship with.

“At the center of Facebook today is the news feed - a dynamic listing of the collective activity of all your friends. The news feed shows updates from your friends, prompting you to explore their profiles and the site. When someone adds an application or befriends someone new or posts a video or a picture, the news feed directs you to their profile page to check it out.”

Iskold’s argument seems to be that Facebook is a bad mix of ideas: more intimate and less professional than LinkedIn, less about communication than MySpace, hence (possibly) doomed to fail. MySpace, he argues, puts communication right at the top of their priorities, whereas Facebook puts mere notifications of all the things your friends are doing at the top of profiles and The Wall, on which friends can write notes, right at the bottom.

If you assume that social networks are about communication, this is disastrous. In my experience though, Facebook hits a real sweet spot. I hated MySpace because it requires almost constant attention to the various messages people sent me, I couldn’t simply respond via email, I had to go read their comments on my profile, go to their profile, read the comment book and add my comment.

Too intense. Too personal. Too much time.

On Facebook, by contrast, I don’t do a lot of communicating and neither do most of my contacts. I have nearly 100 contacts, yet I feel closer to them because I note little things about them in their movie reviews, status updates and new befriendings. Contacts I do talk to a bit to reveal things they might not bother mentioning (getting their citizenship sorted out, having a small bout of seizures) that help me understand and empathize with them better. But contacts from decades ago are finding me and tracing the lines of their lives gives us both a way to become reacquainted from far away without the mandatory two days camping and drinking beer to catch up.

This gentle layer of developing intimacy makes me feel much less awkward about contacting people to ask for help in finding work, getting answers to questions and introducing people. My cold, dead office at LinkedIn on the other hand is characterized by a stony silence.

And all this takes me less than 10 minutes a day, or 20-30 once a week.

The primary goal of a social network is to connect people and help them maintain weak ties, not to simplify communication or help them stay in touch. We have email and IM. Staying in touch with everyone constantly is too much work.

Technorati Tags: community, entrepreneur, knowledgemanagement, socialsoftware

I seem to have a job. I started on Monday at NICTA working on the Braccetto project with my old friends Markus and Gregor.

The job’s part-time and on a six month contract. We’re building table-top collaborative applications for people trying to get crucial things done. The project’s a collaboration between clever people at CSIRO and DSTO. More details as I get my brain around the project, but so far it seems cool. We have our own big-ass tables.

For anyone wondering what’s got my attention right now, I’ve been collaborating with some local folk to set up a Gnostic community in Sydney as a local branch of the AJC. I’m doing this partly as a component of my Formation work with the church, because if/when I finally become a priest, I’m going to need a parish!

The community is small but growing and we held our first public event this week to celebrate Saint Uriel the Archangel’s day because we take St U as our patron saint.

If you’re interested, there’s a bit more about Saint Uriel the Archangel’s Gnostic Community here.

So, yeah… « Order of Santa Ignora:

Everyone’s praying for the victims and their families, and you know, that’s a good thing. Prayer good. I’m firmly on the side of prayer. News shows and blogs are all beatifying the people who were on the wrong end of the gun, and demonizing the person who held the gun.

In 1992, a kid in my middle school pulled out a gun in first period science and opened fire.

[…] Over the weeks that followed, the truth came out. The boy with the gun had targeted two specific students, who had tormented him with verbal and physical abuse, until the only course of action he saw was to shoot them.

[…] When the released the names of the two kids shot, though, well, in such a small community as a school, it’s certain I’d know these bullies. But, I knew them. The week before the shooting, they’d pushed and shoved and taunted me in the cafeteria line, calling me a ‘fat cow’.

[…] So when one of these events splash across the collective conciousness, I do the only thing I can. I pray for those who mourn, for those who will never understand why, for the family and friends who didn’t, maybe couldn’t, stop it from happening no matter what the news anchors say, and whose mourning is just as real as anyone else’s. But there will be no cameras at that funeral, no visits from the President.

And I pray for the people who lie in bed tonight, wondering if they’ll be then next to reach for a gun.

I’ve told this a few times, but never written it down. Here goes.

HP Lovecraft and August Derleth are sitting at an al fresco cafe on the abominable plateau of Leng. Sipping absinthe, as you do. It’d be a nice place if it wasn’t for the maddening cyclopean architecture with the obviously alien non-Euclidean geometry, but it’s the only spot for unthinkably vast distances and it’s got a lovely view, so you make do.

As they sit there, the ground before becomes disturbed by the passing of a great Dhole, burrowing beneath the earth, space rippling around it as it goes.

They sip their absinthe as the Dhole is followed by a Mi-Go, flapping and screeching - the noise driving several nearby patrons mad.

A shoggoth comes after, shambling along. It takes some time to pass, so they order another round of absinthe.

Then a long train of the spawn of Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods, ooze, crawl and tilt their way past - the locomotive systems reminiscent of slime running down a rock… but sideways… unthinkably sideways.

Then for a moment, there’s quiet and the plateau is empty… and Derleth turns to Lovecraft and says…

“Good Lord, Howard. Today it’s just one damned thing after another.”

Technorati Tags: lovecraft

Bartholomew saith unto him: Declare unto us, Lord what sin is heavier than all sins? Jesus saith unto him: Verily I say unto thee that hypocrisy and backbiting is heavier than all sins: for because of them, the prophet said in the psalm, that ‘the ungodly shall not rise in the judgement, neither sinners in the council of the righteous’, neither the ungodly in the judgement of my Father. Verily, verily, I say unto you, that every sin shall be forgiven unto every man, but the sin against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven. And Bartholomew saith unto him: What is the sin against the Holy Ghost? Jesus saith unto him: Whosoever shall decree against any man that hath served my holy Father hath blasphemed against the Holy Ghost: For every man that serveth God worshipfully is worthy of the Holy Ghost, and he that speaketh anything evil against him shall not be forgiven. — Gospel of St Bartholomew VI:1-4

When we started this project, Donald warned me that “the facts that we have on some of them amount to about a paragraph. Some of them have even less than that!” Saint Bart is a glowing example of the Who the hell were these guys!? problem.

Bartholomew is the Greek version of the Aramaic bar-Tôlmay (תולמי‎‎‎‎‎-בר‎‎) — an ancient Hebrew name. He’s only named in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke), in John the name Nathanael appears in the same position in the list. Convention is to assume (in the face of basically no information about either guy) that the two names refer to one apostle whose name may have been “Nathanel bar Tolomai”. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke tell us that he’s an old friend of the apostle Phillip.

Various traditions have him preaching around typical places — Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, Armenia, Lycaonia, Phrygia, and on the shores of the Black Sea. There’s a tradition that has him teaching in India. Eusebius in Ecclesiastical Histories mentions that Pantaenus, Origen’s teacher encountered converts of St Bart in India who had been given a copy of St Matthew’s Gospel.

The most popular version of his death has him flayed alive by the brother of the King of Armenia as punishment for converting the King. As a gruesome consequence, he is usually represented skinless, holding a large knife and often holding his own skin. He is the patron of tanners, butchers, cobblers and bookbinders.

shudder…

His day in the Roman calendar, August 24, was the day Romanian nationalist Vlad Ţepeş allegedly put 30,000 people to death by impalement and the day in 1572 the massacre of thousands of Huguenots in mob violence in Paris.

Nathanael in John’s Gospel is portrayed as a bit of a bigot, when told about this teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, he notoriously replied “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?“. Jesus had the good grace to praise him for being straightforward.

A bunch of his relics including a large piece of his skin (shudder…) wound up in Lipari, Italy in a cathedral dedicated to his memory. The people of Lipari have a list of miracles attributed to the saint, most of them to do with weight.

When St. Bartholomew’s body was found off the shore, the Bishop of St. Christopher’s Church of Lipari ordered many men to get the body. When this failed due to its extreme weight, the Bishop then sent out the children. The children easily brought the body ashore even though the older men couldn’t. (Wikipedia)

And there’s an Apocryphal Gospel attributed to Bartholomew. He chats with the Virgin Mary about the Annunciation, subdues Beliar at Jesus’ instruction and demands to be told various secrets and receives secret instructions from Jesus. Almost enough to associate him as at least an Hermetic Saint, if not a Gnostic one. Sure it’s probably got nothing to do with him literally, but polysemy is important in Gnostic exegesis …

When we come to glimpse the Divine, the bliss can be unbearable, but the horrible weight of ordinary consciousness, the heaviness of the gross body, the unendurable mundanity of everyday life can seem a prison by comparison — we feel like escaping our very skin and getting out. All of our flaws, our smallnesses, our contraction and weakness and bigotry becomes exposed and we start to see ourselves truly and that sight can be horrible.

As Awakening progresses and the Flame continues to illuminate the whole of life, not merely the saintly parts, we notice how the whole Self fits, how necessary the parts are to the whole. To bring compassion to others , it is also necessary to bring compassion to your self. As we learn that, a miracle can occur: what has been so heavy that it’s impossible to carry becomes light — filled with Light.

every man that serveth God worshipfully is worthy of the Holy Ghost, and he that speaketh anything evil against him shall not be forgiven.

… even if that person is the man himself.

Be kind to yourself.

(Part of the Twelve Apostles series)

Technorati Tags: apostles, gnostic

A few of my friends and family heeded my request to let me know what they think of me. Here’s an early version. You can see a more up-to-date version by clicking the link at the bottom. That page also has links to explain where this kind of psychograph came from.

If you think you know me well enough to have an opinion, go right ahead and contribute.

And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men [ἁλιείς ἀνθρώπων] — Matthew 4:18-19

“Andrew” (Ανδρέας) means “strong” or “manly” from the Greek “ανδρεία”. He was born in Bethsaida and, at the time of Jesus’ teaching lived with Simon in Capernaum on the shores of the sea of Galilee where they worked as fishermen. Palestine had been under Greek rule (of one kind or another) since Alexander and remained part of Hellenistic culture through the Maccabean revolution and Roman domination, so Greek names were very common.

He is known in the Eastern tradition as “Protokletos” or “first-called”. He and John the Evangelist are the first followers of John the Baptist to follow the teaching of Jesus (possibly after the Baptist is jailed). He is counted among the “first four” (Peter, Andrew, James and John) who have seniority among the twelve apostles. GoJohn tells us that after hearing Jesus’ teaching Andrew immediately found his brother Peter and told him “We have found the Messias”.

After Andrew had stayed with Jesus and had learned much from him, he did not keep this treasure to himself, but hastened to share it with his brother Peter. Notice what Andrew said to him: “We have found the Messiah, that is to say, the Christ.” Notice how his words reveal what he has learned in so short a time. They show the power of the master who has convinced them of this truth. Andrew’s words reveal a soul waiting with the utmost longing for the coming of the Messiah, looking forward to his appearing from heaven, rejoicing when he does appear, and hastening to announce so great an event to others. To support one another in the things of the spirit is the true sign of good will between brothers, loving kinship and sincere affection. — from Homily 19 on the Gospel of John by Saint John Chrysostom

The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles say next to nothing about Andrew. Tradition, especially in the Eastern Orthodox churches, maintain that Andrew’s apostolic activity ranged across Asia Minor, Greece and especially Constantinople. He is remembered as an eloquent and gifted evangelist, setting up churches in “Pontos, Bithynia, Thrace, Macedonia, Greece, Scythia (Russia, where he is still regarded as patron saint) and in the capital city of Byzantium. It was in Byzantium that St. Andrew ordained Stachys as first bishop of Byzantium (later Constantinople), thereby establishing an unbroken line of 270 patriarchs down to the present day Patriarch Bartholomeos 1st.” [1].

His prowess as an evangelist was to prove his undoing. He eventually (tradition tells us) wound up, at the age of 80 during the reign of Nero, in Patras in Greece where he successfully founded a church and converted a woman called Maximilla (not the noted Montanist prophet). Her husband Ægeates, the provincial ruler, took exception to his wife’s conversion had Andrew arrested and sentenced to death. Their argument is retold in the apocryphal “Acts and Martyrdom of Andrew”.

Andrew was crucified on a “saltire” or “decussate” cross (now usually referred to as a St Andrew’s cross), possibly upside down, possibly by being tied, rather than nailed to it, though tradition varies on the details. He is said to have lasted three days before expiring, legend has it that he kept teaching for the first two.

That’s pretty manly.

His relics were moved about from Constantinople to Rome to Scotland, where the home of golf is named after him. He’s the patron of various places (including Scotland and the diocese of Grand Rapids, Michigan), fishermen, gout, sore throats, singers and spinsters. He is remembered on November 30. His major shrine is at St Andreas in Patras.

His various adventures and miracles are recounted in a variety of non-canonical books — The Acts of Andrew, The Acts and Martyrdom of Andrew, The Acts of Andrew and Matthew, The Acts of Peter and Andrew full of roaring tales of cannibals and magic tricks.

Andrew is the prototypical teacher; as John Chrysostom observes, no sooner has he come to know Jesus and his teaching than he wants to pass on his knowledge. He carries that passion to teach from the place of his birth to the far lands where he dies. He is the great adventurer-sage of the Christian tradition — a kind of Indiana Jones of the Gospel.

What does he say to Gnostics in the 21^st century? Note that Andrew’s story starts on the sea of Galilee, as a fisherman. He faces those great depths daily, living from its grace and never straying far from its shores. When he become inspired by the teaching of Jesus, he is moved to share it and that mission to teach takes him far away from his home.

We all have our natural home in the Bythos — the profound depth that is the primal ground of our being. When we first come to γνώσις of the Hidden Mother-Father, it is tempting to rest there, in bliss, living purely in harmony, in silence. But, while pleasant, that is not what the Logos asks of us. Xristos Soter asks, demands, that we move onward beyond γνώσις, not merely resting, but teaching, healing, baptising — sharing our bliss with others, helping them find it for themselves.

When Andrew comes to understand Christ’s demand, he was the first of the apostles to turn completely from his simple life and dedicate himself to this demanding life lived for others.

1. “St Andrew the Apostle, the First-Called” Greek Orthodox Archidiocese of Australia)

Part of the Twelve Apostles series.

Technorati Tags: apostles, gnostic, priesthood

My dear brother Shawn has started Big Hearts: Creative by Donation – which is intended to coordinate pro bono work by designers for charities and non-profits. Go take a look and think about whether you could offer your skills to some good organisation who might need it.

Technorati Tags: design