PASSAGES: IDEAS WORTH AN HOUR
The first Saturday of every month the coffee is on and there's something good to eat and we read together. The week before, I send you a short reading, usually six to ten pages from a book that has something real to say, along with a few questions worth sitting with ahead of time. You can read it before you come and arrive with thoughts, or you can come cold and we'll find our way into it together in the room. Either way works fine. At the end of the session you'll get a list of books and resources if the topic grabbed you and you want to go further.
The conversations that happen in this class tend to go places that surprise people. Partly because the material is genuinely worth arguing about and partly because a Saturday morning with good coffee and something worth thinking hard about is one of the better ways I know to spend an hour. No background in spirituality, philosophy, or anything else required. Skeptics always welcome, especially here.
Cost: $25 (Included in all Class Passes)
And there will always be coffee and morning snacks! :-)
JUNE: The Architecture of Belief
This month we're reading excerpts from Neville Goddard's "The Law and the Promise," a book from 1961 that makes a claim so radical about the relationship between consciousness and reality that most people either dismiss it in the first ten pages or find themselves thinking about it for the next ten years. To balance it out we're also reading two pages from William James, the Harvard philosopher and father of American psychology, who was wrestling with a related question from a completely different direction around the same time and arrived somewhere surprisingly close.
The conversation is about what belief actually does. Whether it changes things outside of us or only inside of us, and whether that distinction matters as much as we think. Reading sent the week before. Bring your skepticism if you have it. There's room for it.
JULY: The Mechanics of Manifestation
Joseph Murphy's "The Power of Your Subconscious Mind" was published in 1963 and has sold over ten million copies, which tells you something, though I'm not entirely sure what. It's also the book that tends to get dismissed fastest by people who haven't read it and taken most seriously by people who have actually tried what it describes. We're reading the chapter on how the subconscious processes what you feed it, which is the part that tends to make people quietly uncomfortable in ways they find useful.
We're also reading two pages from Florence Scovel Shinn's "The Game of Life and How to Play It," written in 1925 by a woman who had absolutely no patience for hedging, and it shows in every sentence. The conversation this month is partly about whether any of this holds up and partly about the more uncomfortable question of what you'd actually have to change if you took it seriously for thirty days. Reading sent the week before.
AUGUST: What Happens Next
Michael Newton spent forty years as a hypnotherapist, started his career as a committed skeptic, and ended up documenting what thousands of clients described experiencing between lives under deep hypnosis. The cases are specific enough, and consistent enough across people who had never met each other, that his own discomfort with what he was finding comes through in the writing, which is part of why the books are worth reading. We're also looking at two pages from Raymond Moody's "Life After Life," the book that introduced the term near death experience in 1975 and started a research conversation that is still very much active.
The discussion this month is about what we actually believe happens when we die, where those beliefs came from, and what it would mean for the life you're living right now if the picture turns out to be different from what you were handed. Reading sent the week before. This session runs the same month as the Past Life Regression class, which is not an accident.