• There is MORE for this episode like images of the illuminated manuscripts of the Lindisfarne gospels! Support the program with $1 and unlock a weekly Access Pass now, right HERE.
Consider a contribution of any-sized gift to help keep the program running.
Listen to a recent episode:
• Make it possible for Spark My Muse to thrive. Help in these two ways:
The free Patreon App gives me a chance to show you update photos and videos–on the fly.
I just uploaded the first one!Some photos and a video of our snow-pocalypse and some of my travel items.
A teaser photo for you: (Yes, it hardly shows you anything too well, so you get excited to see the real thing!) If you want to ask me questions, I’ll answer them in future update installments!
The App is available for iOS and Android. Once you download it, find Spark My Muse and become a sponsor (if you aren’t already). Then you won’t miss a thing. The updates go away after 24 hours. Eek.
($1 sponsors will get some updates, and $5 sponsors, and up, will get everything I create.)
On Sunday April 24 Spark My Muse will be 1 year old!
HOORAY!
Thank you to everyone who has helped by listening, with encouragement, and with gifts to keep the Spark My Muse show going.
To celebrate there will be some very interesting things happening in the…. #weekofSPARKle —stay tuned!
Today, I have a return guest!
My soul friend, Shane Tucker. He has a new book and you can get it free.
Today we converse about it and Irish culture
–two fire-makers are sparking things…what’s not to love?
Rolf Potts is a celebrated travel-writer and best-selling author (over a million books sold!). Besides writing best selling books, teaching writing in Paris each summer, occasionally hosting a television travel show, and inspiring the polymath, phenom Tim Ferriss to embrace the Vagabonding philosophy (as well as give Potts’ book of that same name the coveted spot of “first book in the Tim Ferriss book club”), Rolf Potts lives in rural Kansas and saves for extended world travel. And there’s also the gangsta rap project.
Scroll down to the Click to Listen Button and read the shownotes.
Listeners and friends, as you enjoy the show, will you please consider a giving a small tip to help out?
A philosophy of life, travel and seeing the world.
Vagabonding and the “time-wealth” value-adjustment from which action naturally follows.
(video by Tim Ferriss)
Time is treated as a commodity but thinking of how we will spend our days and our lives can poorly reflect a life we really want and actualize time well.
Travel is not an expensive indulgence. Freeing up the time to travel can be the greater obstacle (mind-frame) for living well.
“time-wealth”
Seeing Time as the true wealth of our lives.
5:20
The repercussions of “the selfie stick” for the modern traveler.
How technology affects how we travel.
6:30
Technology can have you living through a screen instead of traveling or living at a firsthand level.
Tourists of everyday life. Is performance engaged enough?
7:40
Counting selfie sticks in Paris.
It can advertise that you are there to harvest photos. (The least obtrusive selfie stick I could find, in case the temptation for better shot is too much.)
Comic book Wenamun the ancient Egyptian travel story.
If we get bored, lost, or lonely while traveling you are forced to be more imaginative and be more engage with the people and place where you actually are. These are gifts of travel.
10:20
Discipline and the ability to wean off technology and allow life to happen can give us richer experiences. More surprises and more vulnerability can make for a better trip.
Put the smart phone away.
12:10
Asking people where to eat who actually live there.
14:40
How he has evolved as a world traveler?
16:00
Being a Korean ex-pat for a few years and understanding how cultural is a gut-level thing that helps to learn while living there so that the abstractions change into lived experiences.
18:30
Rolf on having a provincial perspective and how it has been a benefit to him because he appreciated the smaller towns and places and not judging the place for their perceived lack of sophistication. People have more time for you in small towns. Big cities can have more arrogance toward other more rural places.
21:00
His recent travel adventure: Renting a car in France with a 100 page road atlas but no guide book. Seeing the beautiful town and eating Beef Burgundy.
Ladder of abstract in writing. We meditate the world through abstractions. Root myself in the concreteness of travel and use my 5 senses.
25:00
The crap shoot of how he choses where to travel.
Visiting friends feels less like travel than it does like reunions.
On traveling alone and winter traveling.
29:20
Places with bad reputations can be the best places to travel. Syria, though, has become too dangerous, but had been one of his favorites.
Egyptians are very accommodating except near the pyramids where it’s very tourist-heavy.
China is a giant country with many things to experience.
Russia also has a lot to experience.
32:00
Less traveled parts of the world can be more interesting and people can have more time for you.
New projects:
Comic book (Wenamun) inspired by reading about travel in the ancient world. The anti-hero is Wenamun who bumbles through his travels. Proceeds go to help Syrian Refugees, Save the Children Fund.
Gangster rap was about the crack-era urban decline of certain areas.
Gangster rap in the 1980s and 1990s was the first black music form in the 20th Century that wasn’t appropriated and sold “with a white face”. Authenticity was so important in the art form is was done differently.
40:40
First exploring the 5th Ward in 1995 and going on a police patrol ride-along and seeing the crime from that vantage point and coming back in 2015. People ride horses in parts of the 5th Ward. The inner city in often a troupe. In Houston, the ghetto is place-specific and Rolf enjoyed writing about the history of it too.
Investigation of place.
44:30
Where to find Rolf, his writings, his books, and travel photos: rolfpotts.com
visit roofpotts.com to view more
May you see world travel in a different way. It is accessible.
Sorry, this is only a partial recording! The LIVE viewers got a great Q & A with Rolf. Don’t it out on the next one. Show up on TUESDAYS at 8pm EST / GMT -4 for the guest of the week.
Here’s a resource for you that is sure to give you a boost. AND Your purchase will help me continue the show.
(Have you already read it or might you be feeling a bit more generous? Please use the donate button (in the left sidebar) to contribute to the the work here. Help me make awesome things for you each week. Thank you!)
Shownotes
Doug Jackson, Returning Guest and All-Star, Explains the 3 Stages of Spiritual Development and Dispels the Biggest Myths.
Do you know St John of the Cross?
What you don’t know could hurt you…but good news, you are now in for a treat!
Listen and get a fascinating perspective of the darkest places on the spiritual journey with your guide Professor Doug Jackson. See the show notes below!
3:00
Historic context of 16th Century Catholic Revival-Era Spanish Mystic, St John of the Cross
4:30
3 stages of spiritual development
How do we know if we are making progress and what can we expect?
St John (1542-1591) provides a roadmap for night travel.
The Beginner Stage
(The beginner loves God for the self’s sake. The beginners thinks, “What’s good for me.”)
Doug explains the Dark Night of the Soul, the important next stage of spiritual development, in keen and helpful detail.
7:00
God starts at the first stage (in a place of joy and thrill in God) and allows us delight in spiritual things and feed on “mother’s milk” spiritually.
Next, God helps us get used to our baby teeth by moving us to love God for God’s sake.
John of the Cross takes the 7 deadly sins and show how they can happen to us in a spiritual sense.
8:10
God is weening us away from nursing and from spiritual milk. Like a baby, we may misunderstand and feel unloved or unnoticed, at first.
9:00
Commodified is the Dark Night of the Soul in Amercian Evangelicalism. The phrase itself is often used inexactly.
It’s not feeling sad or a string of bad things have happened for which we feel upset and confused.
BUT—It is that without cause we feel God has abandon us.
It is not a loss of faith, nor not depression, nor a felt distance because of sin.
It was also an analysis of depression 400 years before Freud!
11:00
God withdraws sensible (sensory, felt) affects. The dark night of the senses. (first phase).
12:30
Maybe it feels like prayers are bouncing off the ceiling. Maybe it feels that songs or sermons that had made an affect no longer do. This sense of loss will be different for each person.
13:30
Essentially, the delight in God disappears.
13:00
Mistakenly, we often may try to shock people back into spiritual infancy with a method, tactic, or suggestion that seems like it might cause feeling once again. (like a book, a conference, a service, etc)
14:10
The spiritual advice from John is to not abandon your spiritual practices (like prayer, fellowship, meditation, service, etc) continue to obey God and carry on until you pass through the night. They won’t be fun, but you continue for God’s sake, not your own.
Then you can come out on the other side to the stage of the Proficient. (Though the stages are actually more porous.)
15:00
The 2nd stage is where John says most of us get and hardly proceed from.
2nd dark night, is rare, and is horrible and includes a bewilderment and even a loss of faith in God and one comes out with a much richer deeper faith and far more settled and fuller understanding of God.
John Coe using 1 John 2:12-14 explains the stages as well.
18:00
John of the Cross found this understanding through terrible suffering and imprisonment and he saw the spiritual connection.
19:30
In the Dark Night of the Soul, spiritual answers are obscured and things are hidden from view.
Walking by faith and not sight.
22:00
If you can’t find the answers it doesn’t mean that something went wrong, it’s just that you can see right now. There will be a lack of certainty.
22:30
Stick with the basics in the dark night.
23:30
In the dark night we aren’t doubting our Faith, or God, but but we are doubting our understanding of God and our Faith.
The call is to obey God and persist in our ways as before. Eventually a dawn will come.
23:00
In this stage, we jettison things that are not core, central and true and come to understand God in a better way.
BE WARNED: Others may feel anxious to get you back in to where you were.
24:00
Backsliding is not the same thing as a Dark Night experience. The Dark Night is progression.
24:30
Prophets in the OT go through the dark night times.
25:00
Using a different lens to see what is already there.
26:00
Examples:
Elijah after Mt Carmel
Apostle Paul
Job
Jesus (wilderness and Gethsemane)
Jesus “learned obedience” and the the will of God was not pleasant
We all go through these types of dark nights
28:00
John of the Cross’s work was (and is) written for [spiritual] guides (leaders) so they can recognize what is happening and to know what not to do.
30:00
Some mystical-style theologians have been hijacked and grafted into a different (sometimes New Age) model of how the reality is ( i.e. “divided self”.)
30:30
The Devil – So what about the Devil which is a prominent feature in the writings?
A CAUTION:
John takes the readers’ Christian theology for already granted. The basic Christian theology was assumed because that was the background and beliefs of his audience.
32:00
Doug answers…Devil with a Big “D” questions. How do we come to understand John and what he is saying, if it is different than our understanding of The Devil and the spiritual world?
Don’t rehabilitate [John], or superimpose our ideas on his work.
Don’t judge or put parts on trial for the embarrassing and difficult sections of St John of the Cross.
34:30
Approach the text thus: “Eat the meat of the fish not the bones”
35:00
If the language bothers you, then let it lie fallow and see what is going on in your own heart as you read.
The promise is (found in Scripture and from those who’ve gone ahead of us in the Faith) that we come out (into dawn) and see the value of what we went through.
God says to Job: I’m God and you are not.
Job says, “Now I have seen you. I spoke out of turn.”
42:00
A word of hope for those in the dark night.
1. Those in the dark night bless those around them and their pride does not effect this because of the Night itself. We are spiritual protected.
43:00
In the Dark Night we don’t get to be proud of our humility.
Be faithful know that God is using you and wait it out.
43:30
Modern example Mother Teresa. She lived most of her life with a sense of abandonment by God.
“If I ever become a Saint I will be a Saint of Darkness, facing the dark to guide souls to the light.”
44:00
People were drawn to her service and work for God even though she felt God’s silence.
45:00
On her critics who say she stopped believing in God.
Christopher Hitchens wrote slanderously about her and others in his book “The Missionary Position”. He said she did have the courage to admit publicly that she didn’t believe in God and never had.
46:00
Mother Teresa–her fruit shows otherwise (it’s sow belief and faithfulness).
Apostasy is a deliberate walking away from God which is a danger of misunderstanding the Dark Night. This is why trained and wise spiritual guides are essential.
47:00
C.S. Lewis character Screwtape urges: “Use the word “phase” to tell him he had it all wrong”
In a genuine Dark Night, we may think we have abandon God or want to and then find ourselves incapable of it.
48:00
Doubt in God is like holding a volleyball underwater with just one hand and senses all the force and then thinking there is no volleyball because it cannot be seen.
“We aren’t working without a net and we won’t fall out of the arms of God.”
49:00
If you are in the Dark Night…(it helps) remembering “it’s a thing, a documented thing”.
49:30
Walking in the footsteps of those who’ve gone before.
51:00
What to do if you are in the throes of it all. best advice.
Richard Foster’s advice in the Celebration of Discipline. The chapter on solitude.
Don’t try to explain this to people when you are in it.
(It’s like Fight Club) “The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about fight club”
Most people will not get it. It can hurt our spiritual reputation. God is drawing us into obedience and faith in the absence of feeling. We carry on
“The Spiritual Journey: Crucial Thinking and Stages of Adult Spiritual Genesis”
Henri Nouwen “The Way of the Heart”
55:00
Protestantism running thin in certain areas.
Psychology tainted some spiritual experience as pathology and than co-opted with modern Christianity.
57:00
Baptists were not systematic theologians early on because of the persecution from the Mother Church (in Rome).
58:00
Puritan writers like Jonathan Edwards take God as Physician of the Soul very seriously.
59:00
The one sermon that did in Jonathan Edwards in our time.
“The Religious Affections” To teach that the Great Awakening was just an emotional experience or demonic experience. He writes on how to understand what is of God.
60:02
On taking your time understanding the Dark Night. God is trying to bring us into greater maturity and Christ likeness.
Have you ever gone through a Dark Night of the Soul?
If you’ve reached the dawn, what was strengthen or changed in you?
Blessings in your night travels. If you aren’t in a Dark Night, it’s coming. Stay Calm and Carry on.
If you have any questions or you would like to drop me a line about what you are going through, please use the contact page. A helpful (worldwide) listing to find qualified guides is here.
