The following is a transcript message from Lady Evelyn Cornelia to fans, supporters, and friends of the podcast and of her majesty.
Dear Subjects,
I am well.
You may have noticed the rather menacing photo of me circulating. It is featured here to help you understand.
It is not a flattering image particularly, but I am pleased that it is circulating if it produces the proper attention in the general public and gives pause to friends of the show who, unlike you–my dear favorite listeners, have been a bit stingy with their monies toward our efforts.
The podcast needs more support, and now it’s purrsonal.
We all feel the financial pinch occasionally. It wasn’t that long ago that I had to switch to more chicken in my diet and fewer trips to my catnip resource person, just to do my part. But, we do what we can.
Because I went down to six trips purr week, there was a significant lull in my enthusiasm toward humans at the beginning of this month. I took it out on the corner of the blue lounge chair. First, I acted as though I was stretching and then…whoops… I just got my claws stuck.
Then, I pulled them in and out a few times. But after this point, I simply got lost in my work and forgot to be sly about any of it. I did some shredding, because, of course, my catnip dose was off, as I mentioned earlier.
I have a few things I’d like to leave you with to reflect on as you enjoy the coming weeks and until you hear from me again, which I know you very much look forward to.
Never assume that cats have short memories. We don’t. We remember and the pee on the rug is no accident. It could be from a real or imagined slight 3 years ago. And, why it happened is really none of your business. Try to do better next time and it won’t happen at all.
Remember that wet counters or floors are gross and no one, least of all us like to touch them. Simply wipe up and no harm will come to you.
Grabby children are demons. The should be banished from earth. Keep them in a pen outdoors where they belong and throw them food if you have to nourish them.
If you’d like advice on life, love, or catnip, please send in your queries. I’d be delighted to help.
For Bonus Features and material related to the episode are available FREE to the public in 10 days, or FREE IMMEDIATELY to regular supporters of the show,CLICK HERE for ACCESS or more info.
Dear, lovely listeners,
Please help in these two ways:
DETAILS:
• Each FRIDAY, guests join me in a conversation.
• Come back each Wednesday
(on “Hump Day” aka Midweek) for a brief Soul School “lesson”–something for your interior world and common life.
HOW FUNDING WORKS: Even though listening twice a week is free, Spark My Muse costs hundreds of dollars out of my own pocket each month to create, produce, and host online–and takes 25-30 hours of work per week too–which keeps me from making income to pay my own normal bills like food, electricity, and water. The good news is that Listeners, like you,give so kindly (at over 3 times the average!!) to support the show. LISTENERS make the BIG difference – Thank you for helping too!
Today’s guest is lucid dream expert, Robert Waggoner. We discuss remembering dreams, overcoming nightmares, PTSD, trauma, grief, and how to lucid dream (gain consciousness and control of your actions and dreams themselves while you are dreaming).
MIN 2
Scientific proof for lucid dreaming (discovered in sleep lab studies)
REM sleep (the brain state where dreams happen)
MIN 3:30
Robert’s dream life from childhood onward
Precognitive dreams – Dreaming something before it happens.
Robert feeling that dreaming maybe tapping into God in a timeless realm.
6:30
Half of people don’t seem to recall their dreams at all.
Keeping a dream journal
9:30
3 Reasons you don’t remember your dreams
12:30
Important reasons why we might delve into working with our dream life at all?
17:00
Using dreams for healing.
26:30
Mutual lucid dreaming
30:00
Dreams for healing phobias, anxiety, emotional healing, to aid in mediation, bad habits, obsessions, etc.
AND Thanks for supporting the project of Spark My Muse through listening, reading the show notes, reviewing the show in iTunes, and sharing it with friends, too! You are awesome.
xo
~Lisa
NEW!
Join in for weekly LIVE interactive discussions each Tuesday about that week’s podcast topic! VIEW UPCOMING topics and subscribe to join in HERE.
INTRO TO THE EPS 26:
Melissa Wilson didn’t just survive mistreatment as a child, she worked to heal from it, redeem it, and establish a platform to help sufferers and advocate for those who are suffering now or wounded from the past.
Melissa converses with me about how she found healing and the joy of transforming her pain into a thriving website and podcast that shares stories of victory, triumph, and overcoming great odds.
Don’t let your past define you. Here are some ways you can move forward and even find a valuable mission in life.
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.
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