Comments about the archive
and about the teachings of
Thane of Hawaii
Over the years Thane presented several talks relating to the Independence Day holiday. This year we are featuring a talk he gave at the Servers’ Center in Santa Monica in July 1981.
The troubles of 1981 were not the same as those of the early 70s, which might seem closer to those we are facing today. Yet, this talk reminds us of the philosophical and religious roots of the American experiment and the attentiveness required by all those who would like it to endure.
We live in a word-built world, and this pandemic offers us a veritable feast of words to examine and to shift from materialistic challenges to abstract, liberating principles.
Al Haferkamp and I decided to talk about various words that come up around the COVID-19 outbreak in a brief format : each discussion less than 20 minutes. Our goal is to move from material to abstract connotations briskly, to give a sense of how our consciousness can change through the application of thought.
New Sunday Meeting presentation by Richard Hartnett, H.W., M., in the Sunday Meetings section.
December 7 is the birthday of this Sagittarian, beloved to many Prosperos students over many years.
Teaching class in July 1998
We remember Billye for her forthright and compassionate kokua - her deep caring for all of her students.
The Prosperos website is undergoing a complete redesign and will come on line early next year with a new Members section and new contributions every week from Mentors, students, and friends. Responsive design will allow easy access from any device. Check out the screenshots below - more to come in the coming weeks.
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Prosperos students may know him by a different name - little matter. The work of Elliott Zaff represents everything we need to be doing to move Thane’s instruction forward.
Visit his website for more details - worth the trip
Prosperos Dean Alfred Haferkamp will teach the Foundation class Translation® in Tulsa Oklahoma on August 10-11, 2019. I spoke with him about the class and about his life as a teacher. Runs about 28 minutes.
Summer Soltice 6/21/19. The Sun appears to stop moving in the sky as it reaches its northern- or southernmost point. After the solstice, the Sun appears to reverse course and head back in the opposite direction. The Sun is overhead at the Tropic of Cancer. Eating strawberries is the perfect way to celebrate the June solstice, since June’s full Moon is also known as the Full Strawberry Moon.
Full Strawberry Moon 6/17: This Full Moon is 25 degrees in Sagittarius and characterized by a lively energy and excitement since it is in conjunction with the expansive Jupiter. Enthusiasm and adventure may be the emotional hallmarks of the month, BUT Neptune in Pisces widely squares this alignment. Enthusiasm and idealism in relationships may be strong, and bring some blissful moodiness. Just remember to stay anchored in reality, because you are not likely to be in the most practical mindset. This Full Moon intensifies and emotionalizes 2019’s Jupiter square to Neptune, which is likely to bring mass delusion in the first place.
This cycle is based on empirical data meaning enough data was observed and recorded to make it possible to suggest attitudes and reactions. Keep in mind that we all have free will and thus results will vary from one individual to another.
The graph shows the energy high at the beginning of the cycle (not unlike any other astrological aspect) followed by a slow down before it gets strong and again this reflects years of tracking and noting feedback from our many students.
If you are making a decision during this time you might want to let it set for a day or two then check your decision again to see if it still makes sense. However, you can feel into the ebb and flow and find good times to work on self emotionally in both the low and high points. Impatience, emotion and acts without thinking are common.
With practice you can also feel when the energy is there to help bring completion to tasks, goals and projects you may be working on.
“There is only this pastless, nameless thing I am become, striving with its entire being against the inertia of its days. . . .”
-Roger Zelazny
Zelazny’s writing is gripping, intense, and full of struggle, like the music of Beethoven. I love it. In this phrase he gives us two sides of a koan : an identity boundless and unconditioned and an inertia of experience that must be struggled with.
The “pastless, nameless thing” is in fact not a thing - how could it be ? It has no limits and cannot properly be called a “thing” at all.
The one who is struggling with the past is the identity of the past. The Ontological identity IS, in all of its magnificence, without struggle. This doesn’t mean we don’t experience struggle; it just means the struggle is not who we are. We leave behind the one who is struggling, and the struggle, with the understanding and insight into our innate BEINGNESS.
“Be yourself.” Easy-peasy, right ?
Al Haferkamp, Dean of The Prosperos, takes a good look at these simple words in a one-hour lesson delivered on May 19, 2019.
Uplifting and thought provoking as always . . . . Enjoy.
“. . . For what is inside of you is what is outside of you,
and the one who fashioned you on the outside
is the one who shaped the inside of you.
And what you see outside of you, you see inside of you;
it is visible and it is your garment.”
- The Thunder, Perfect Mind
Nag Hammadi Library, p.302
from A Gnostic Book of Hours, by June Singer
If we understand this message, which we hear from many sources, it should be clear that any sane response to external events must begin with setting in order what we see inside of ourselves. Outrageous events that we witness in the world - and we witness them every day on the radio or television news, or on our phones - often cry out for action, and often leave us with a sense of despair because we feel we can do nothing.
That is when we should remember that what we see happening is happening in us - that is to say, in our consciousness, in our awareness - and as such can be responded to in our consciousness by the application of straight thinking in the abstract or by other meditative practices. This is fabulously good news, challenging as the times are, because it means we are not without resources nor the ability to respond meaningfully.
Responding meaningfully first will bring guidance as to further steps to be taken, letters to be written, meetings to attend, or reading to be done, if any. It can be a useful step back before clicking on that button urging you to “ACT NOW”.
Eugene Peterson, a very influential voice in defining the role of the pastor in modern America, writes in his memoir about his experience of seminary:
“Daily life at the seminary comprised common prayer in the chapel, common meals in the refectory, common play in the requisite volleyball game on the roof after lunch each day. . . . All of this took place on a quiet side street bordering the maelstrom of noisy, jostling, harried, secular, cutthroat, competitive New York City.
“I had only the vaguest notion of why I was there. . . . I didn’t know it at the time, but what I absorbed in my subconscious, which eventually surfaced years later, was a developing conviction that the most effective strategy for change, for revolution - at least on the large scale that the kingdom of God involves - comes from a minority working from the margins. . . . [T]hat a minority people working from the margins has the best chance of being a community capable of penetrating the noncommunity, the mob, the depersonalized, function-defined crowd that is the sociological norm of America.” (my emphasis).
We do not change the world; but changing ourselves and working in the community of our study groups can provide the insight that will power revolutionary change on a larger scale, that is, the unfolding of Divine consciousness in the lives of an entire planet.
An old chestnut from the sales lexicon: Positive Mental Attitude. It is a pretty important asset for a sales person, but there’s a lot more to attitude than being positive or negative. Attitude determines what we see and what we don’t see. It’s very true that a person who cannot see themselves succeeding at something will have a much more difficult time than the person who can. So a lot of motivational exercises address themselves to this problem with tools like visualization and affirmations: one develops PMA.
The Prosperos takes a different approach - a different attitude about attitudes, as it were: Put yourself to the task of unlearning attitudes that are restrictive. The thesis is that perfect competence, perfect enthusiasm, perfect energy, and perfect delight are all part and parcel of our natural being. They do not have to be inculcated or created. Your effort and your energy belong to addressing the many claims of limitation, inability, bad luck, etc., etc., etc. Each of these claims is a liar.
It’s easier to spot some of these false beliefs than others. It can help to is ask yourself, “Where do I feel or see limitation, discomfort, or unhappiness?“ Every instance of limitation or dissatisfaction is concealing an attribute of the boundless. Your true identity is boundless and, being boundless, immediately available and at hand. The Law of the Vacuum and The Law of Assumption lessons on this website go into these points in much greater detail.
One of my favorite things about the apartment which Alana and I have shared for the past 17 years, here in Silver Spring Maryland, is that it has a south facing lanai, and we enjoy being out there in the warmer months.
One of the things you notice if you’re sitting out there in the evening is all of the bright lights that are aircraft coming in to land at the National airport just across the river from Washington DC, in Virginia.
I timed these aircraft one night and found out that they made their approach exactly 2 minutes apart. Now, National airport has two runways that run parallel to each other so it’s possible for aircraft to land on one runway or the other one. Still, between 8:30 and 9:00 PM there is a steady stream of aircraft landing, one every two minutes. Each of these aircraft is independently piloted, and most of them carry over 100 passengers. There is something truly uplifting about the professionalism and excellence of the system by which so much traffic can be handled with so elegant a process.
This is what we are capable of, at our best. We are capable of impossible feats of engineering, like sending a crew of humans to the moon and bringing them back to Earth safely. Or, like sending the space shuttle up into orbit, traveling at 17,000 mph, and then having it glide back to earth without any power whatsoever to land exactly in the middle of a landing strip at Edwards Air Force Base.
It has been a perplexity for me for many years to witness the explosions that we produce with the aim of killing people and destroying cities when we have at our fingertips the power to transform lives for the better with great feats of imagination and prowess.
It’s not a bad question to think about: What kind of explosions are there in my life? Are they outbursts of creative imagination? Or are they outbursts of anger, frustration, and so on? The message of The Prosperos, and the message of Ontology, is that we have the power to turn our frustrations, our anger, into creative acts that enrich our lives and the lives of everyone around us.
. . . She led the way,
And the man followed in the deity’s footsteps.”
-Odyssey, Book 5
This statement recurs throughout the Odyssey. Intuition can feel like a glimmering of the divine, and it can lay out a path for us to follow, leading us out of a familiar, comfortable, possibly unpleasant situation, into challenging circumstances, and finally to resolution in the making right (ho’oponopono) of all issues.
I have become much too dutiful. A spate of obligations has brought me to a place where, upon waking, my mind is filled with all of the tasks I have for the day. I will return to my practice of reading something uplifting first thing in the morning, before anything else.
A group of new and long-time students got together in mid-March - right before the Spring Equinox - to explore Thane’s method of Metonymy Translation during a two-day class.
This is the first version of this class as a full two-day event. It was given once before as a one-day event, in Los Angeles in 2007. Various lessons associated with MTR have been presented at Prosperos Assemblies as they've been developed. Over the years I have assembled a variety of related information, and when Al Haferkamp asked me to present a full version of the class I felt the time was right, and that I was ready.
Rick Thomas, with Australian students Irene and Bridget Stewart under the Banyan tree at Waikiki
Hawaii was chosen for a very practical reason : Irene Stewart and her sister Bridget were joining us from Australia, and it seemed only fair to meet them halfway. Of equal importance : MTR was developed in Hawaii during the last years of Thane’s life. It seemed appropriate that Hawaii should be the venue for unveiling the two-day class, and I felt that a small, face-to-face group would be best for working to develop the material.
Through Maureen Malanaphy we were able to arrange to use a retreat center on the Windward side of O'ahu (Ka’a’awa). Given the limited space, and limited local accommodations otherwise, it was decided that this class would be promoted almost entirely by word-of-mouth. Moreover, because we had three full days together following the class presentation it was possible to do daily check-ins about using the technique : were there difficulties? what kind of experiences did people have? and so on. This worked out as well as I could have wished for.
As expected, some Hawaiian students got wind of the event and decided to come. Canda Bloir opened the class with a very moving Hawaiian 'oli. I was happy to meet Brian Malanaphy (again) after many years, and he joined HughJohn and Maureen in the class. In fact, we had a Malanaphy micro-reunion on Wednesday night when Liam, Kevin, and Kathleen all joined us during our farewell meal ! Canda's grandson (!) Keoni also visited for awhile, and we discovered that his Maori connections were familiar to Irene and Bridget.
Alex Gambeau, a member of the audio study group where this idea was born, unfortunately was not able to make it. Also, Pam Rodolph and Ragin from Oklahoma made all the arrangements to come and then got shut down by a renegade snowstorm that closed the Denver airport. That was a big disappointment to all of us.
Wonderful Aloha welcome from Maureen Malanaphy with Canda Bloir, Kathleen Malanaphy, Carol Chappell (seated), Rick Thomas, and Hugh John Malanaphy
I am deeply grateful to Al Haferkamp, who managed many of the logistical issues around a venture of this magnitude, leaving me free to compose the final lessons and prepare myself for delivering the material. In this I feel very privileged - not many of our instructors get that kind of support these days. Alana had her hand very much in those tasks as well. Jim Renza joined Alana and me on the trip from the East Coast - which was a loooooong haul - and was wonderfully helpful with managing the food presentation and other details. HughJohn Malanaphy took responsibility for running the video camera on short notice and also engineered an alternative audio recording which will be of higher quality than what we could get from the camera. And Maureen Malanaphy, as I mentioned, provided crucial support during the run-up to class and a wonderful welcoming dinner feast on Friday night.
I'm also very appreciative of everyone who participated in this class experience. Whatever comes out of it very much belongs to them.
Canda Bloir
Carol Chappell
Alana Fennie
Al Haferkamp
Brian Malanaphy
HughJohn Malanaphy
Maureen Malanaphy
Jim Renza
Irene Stewart
Bridget Stewart
Rick Thomas
A new Moonwobble report outlines the dynamics of this cycle where the Sun in Scorpio will square the North node in Leo and South node in Aquarius. Taurus is also involved due to Uranus at the early degrees of that sign.
Long-time students Richard Hartnett and Heather Williams invite you to come to The Prosperos Annual Assembly . . . .
Long-time students Hugh John and Maureen Malanaphy invite you to come to The Prosperos Annual Assembly . . . with a special backdrop !
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