Short Sleeves Insights
Short Sleeves Spirit Songs
Short Sleeves A Book for Friends (2007 & 2008 collections)

Check out his website and his blog. --JGR

Janet
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THE ENERGY OF LIFE

The conventional self is composed mainly of a history consisting of selected memories, and beginning from the moment of parturition. According to convention, I am not simply what I’m doing now. I am also what I have done and my conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost the more real “me” than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems so fleeting and intangible, but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions of what I will be in the future and so it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is.

Alan Watts the British philosopher wrote that interesting statement in his book The Way of Zen, published in 1957. If I ask my self who I am, I do start putting a mental image together of what I’ve done and where I’ve been. I am a composite of yesterday waiting for tomorrow and never seem to get yesterday out of the way in the present moment. I constantly live a historic dream of my own making and continually try to wake up, but I find my self falling deeper into a waking sleep, as linear time shows tracks of my past on my physical body of now. I identify with those tracks and in a way wear them as badges of achievement and perseverance. The self that exists in the now is stuffed in a body of distorted memories that create a future with similar distortions.

As Ken Wilber mentions in his book Spectrum of Consciousness, my ego seems to be happy today if I promise it a happy tomorrow. The good news seems to be in a bright future, not a bright present. I endure pain and misery waiting for that future, but I don’t enjoy it, because it doesn’t exist now. When it does arrive my ego will only be content if I offer it another bright future. I continue to create insanity in order to be sane. I spend so much time running towards the future that I identify with running and I run right past it in the present, so I never really know who I am or enjoy that self. I find my self not enjoying the present because it has no future and if it has no future then it is dead in my belief system.

Trying to get a handle on the present and living it without associations that form from past beliefs is an enormous challenge, but it is one that I can experience. When I start to examine who I am from not only a physical and linear perspective, but from a psychological and metaphysical perspective, I open the door of awareness a little more. I still have beliefs about the past and the future, but I begin to immerse my self in the present. When I use my imagination in the present I create thoughts that are expressed as energy in some way. By following those thoughts from pure energy to manifestations, I find hidden fragments of my own consciousness waiting to be accepted and released in some form. Life in the present is about action and expansion and the awareness of different realities, so I can experience them. I tend to fear them for I have no past experiences to associate them with, but when I allow them to show themselves, I sense the incredible amount of energy that I have in every moment and that is enlightenment.

By accepting a changeable past and a probable future, I learn to live in the now. Both the past and future are creations of the present, which in psychological time happen simultaneously. Like the bark on a tree my ego is the buffer for this camouflage reality. I keep it healthy by making it aware that I am like the roots of a tree that need the energy of life now, not in the future.

"These were not idle words. I listened to her stories of the children and their troubles and successes. It was not uncommon, in later years, to be walking down the street and have some young adult come up to her and say how much her influence had helped them to be successful individuals.

One former student said she could not get married if Mrs. Thompson could not attend her wedding. Another invited us to his wedding reception. He came over to our table, and whispered into Ruth's ear: "Mrs. Thompson, I want you to know this is all paid for!" (She had always tried to help guide the youngsters into sensible spending and budgeting their future expenses so that they would not be caught short at some critical time.

"In later years she taught mentally handicapped students. One time she just knew that this student did not belong in that class. He had been out of school and was out of touch with his age group. She gave him special attention, which he thrived on. We helped him go to summer school. In the fall he was put back into the regular classroom. He graduated from high school and was working at Ford for a good wage last we heard." --Erwin A. Thompson

MY PHILOSOPHY OF TEACHING
by Ruth Evelyn Johnston Thompson

That's what teaching is all about. A teacher is a social engineer, as it were. You see, the responsibility of a teacher in learning is to guide the pupils so that satisfactory personalities are achieved. That is the most important thing that a teacher does.

Subject matter is a part of it, but subject matter is as nothing if the personality is warped. We must strive continuously for inner adjustment and self acceptance of each child so that he has a good mental hygiene. If the emotional tensions of an individual and group are not considered and it is just assignments, soon one finds that the best is not being brought out of each child. Students have to want to do, if there is to be progress.

Teachers cannot set the goals, and expect children to succeed, because the goals are not their own.

Guidance is at the heart of teaching.

First of all, children must be able to live with themselves before they cam live with others. If there is to be any degree of success in the future for them, then they must know and understand how to live with others. If this is possible, then they will be better able to cope with their problems and help solve the social problems that they will be faced with in adulthood.

I know that this is idealistic, but if it is possible to plant these seeds, it is difficult to know how big the plants will grow. I have no doubt that there will not be a hundred percent perfect achievement along this line, but when I can work for two years with a little mind (and some of those minds are outstanding) it is a challenge to attempt to help point them in the direction that I hope will lead uphill; not only for each one personally but for the world as a whole.And if not as a whole, ten in the corner in which they find themselves.

That is teaching, and the kind of immortality that I find exciting and worthwhile. I know this is not done by man alone, nor can God his miracles perform except through man.