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Podcast No. 20 on The Truths of Terasem – Posted on iTunes 12/13/2010
(Text used to record podcast)
TITLE: Truths of Terasem – The How of Terasem
SUB TITLE: Closing Affirmations for Terasem Connections
SUMMARY: Terasem Connections are short breaks at four hour intervals used by those orienting their lives around Terasem’s goals. These connections are used to relax, to remind themselves of their purposes, to enjoy yoga for improved health, and to engage in setting their minds in a state that will best aid them in accomplishing what they want to do in beginning the day, upon returning to work after a Connection, settling down for the evening, and so forth. The affirmations in this set of the Truths of Terasem are particularly important because they represent this final setting of the mindset, before resuming other activities.
(Fred) Hi, we’re Fred & Linda Chamberlain, with podcast no. 20 on the Truths of Terasem.
(Linda) Awwww, we’ll go into the affirmations used to close all six of the daily Terasem Connections today!
(Fred) That’s right! Today we’re going to focus on that, but we’ll put our primary emphasis on the ones that done most frequently. For example, Earthfire is usually done at 10 a.m. in the morning, but in some ways it’s the most important, since for those who don’t do connections as regularly as others, they might only encounter this one at the monthly Gatherings, but there, it’s almost always “Earthfire”, because the Gatherings happen at 10 a.m. on the 10th of each month.
(Linda) What about Ambrosia? The ideal schedule puts it at 6 a.m., the first of the day! It’s true that you and I do it a little later, but it’s a pretty fundamental one for us.
(Fred) That’s true, but I’d like to put it third on the list. The reason is that for some people, particularly those that do their connections for Gatherings at 10 p.m. monthly, which could be in Second Life, for example, Crownaura would be the one. All of us get started on this at different levels, and then work our way up, but for folks we might be running into at 10 p.m on the tenths of the month, let’s do EarthFire first, CrownAura second, and then Ambrosia. The rest, we might as well take in order. Aqua Lung is at 2 p.m. in the afternoon, you know the one where we’re supposed to run jump in the ocean afterwards and have a great swim, if we’ve got an ocean handy, then StarMind at 6 p.m. for when you get home from work, and finally Alum al-Mithral for anyone who’s still up at 2 a.m. Sound OK?
(Linda) Right! Let’s get into it!
(Fred) Just one thing more, first. Terasem represents that it has the breadth of vision to unite all types of faiths, and it honors diversity, so these affirmations reflect the long term vision of Terasem. Those who are blending their adoption of the Terasem Way with a faith where they have ongoing prayer practices, Buddhist meditation recitals, or humanist affirmations, etc., should feel free to substitute these others, if they find them more inspiring.
(Linda) I couldn’t agree more. One of the things that gave me the most comfort when we were first reading the Truths of Terasem, and it comes almost at the very beginning, is 1.1.2 “Collectivity means unity of diversity not mandatory homogeneity.” The Founders of Terasem, even before we met them, were very strong on that point in email discussions, and then when we finally did meet them we found they lived by that principle.
(Fred) So, with that taken care of, let’s have a look at Earthfire, usually done at 10 a.m.. I’ll read the affirmations first, and then discuss them. Here they are, from 6.8.2, which is titled, “Herald Earthfire with Earth is Our Mother”. The affirmations are: “The Earth is Our Mother, we must take care of her.” (Then we repeat it.) “The Earth is Our Mother, we must take care of her.” And the rest of the affirmations are, “Unite, my people, be as one.” (Again, we repeat.) “Unite, my people, be as one.” The rest of it is, “Now her sacred ground we walk upon, with every step we take. Unite, my people, be as one. Unite, my people, we are one.”
There may be affirmations in other faiths that are highly congruent with this, and if so, they might stir the same thoughts, but let me say what goes through my mind when I look at those words, and then when I say them. I think the message is both powerful and important. This 10 a.m. connection comes at a point in the day, if we manage to work it in at that time, when we are surrounded by others who will be arguing about the environment, taking sides on various issues, and so forth. How do we remove ourselves from this chaotic babble and still not appear to be withdrawn? Others may take the message here differently, but to me, the bottom line is that I want to self-program to stand my ground on points I think are important, to encourage others who might be on the same wavelength, and yet not engage in attacking others who are mainly concerned with profit at the expense of the environment.
(Linda) To me, the starting words set the context. We arose from the earth, and we are still absolutely dependent on it to continue to live. It truly is our Mother, and there are many who would destroy it in wasteful extravagance with no thought of long term consequences. The “We must take care of her!” sets the tone for what follows.
(Fred) The repeated phrase, “Unite, my people, be as one!” is an invocation to join with others who feel the same way and turn away from those who do not share in valuing the earth as we do. You can call that class discrimination if you wish, but selective withdrawal from those who advocate environmental destruction, failure to reinforce them even to the point of giving them an opportunity to be listened to and imagine that they have convinced us of anything at all, is the most we can do without engaging them aggressively. The affirmation is to “unite” with those who agree on protecting the earth, supporting them in their convictions that this is right, and peacefully working to spread that meme.
“Now we walk upon her sacred ground, with every step we take!” is a reminder that every act, however small, is a contribution either to honoring and protecting the earth or trashing her, and that we are on the side of honoring and protecting her. The final phrases close the group of these affirmations by reminding us to hold tight to others who see things as we do, for in this spirit, we are deeply akin to one another. We are “one”!
(Linda) Wow, I like that! I’ve been a nut about recycling for a long time because we can’t know how long it will be before nanotech will be developed to the point of cleaning up our waste products for us, but I’ve also sensed that you weren’t that energetic about it. Have you changed your mind in some way?
(Fred) In a way, I have, Linda. I’d even go so far as to say that before I began to draft this podcast, I’d never looked as carefully at these words as I did in trying to see how they might be best explained. Now that I’ve done that, to my own satisfaction, it’s profoundly shifted my way of feeling and thinking about these issues. Now, if I run into someone who doesn’t take the issue with environmental protection seriously, I’ll treat them far more the way I’ve advocated, in interpreting these affirmations, and, every time from now on that we say these things, they’ll penetrate still more deeply. It’s an important step forward for me, and I hope that others listening to this podcast will feel the same way.
(Linda) Me too! Now, we move on to CrownAura, with 6.8.5, which introduces that group with “Keynote CrownAura with Terasem Destiny”. It looks simple, but as with other Truths of Terasem, I’ll bet there are underlying ways of looking at these affirmations that will expand both our perceptions of them.
(Fred) It would be surprising if that weren’t the way it worked out. Here are the affirmations, which can be combined into just one, long sentence. They are: “I’ll always remember, each night and every day, Joyful Immortality is my ultimate destiny, Joyful Immortality is our ultimate destiny, Joyful Immortality is the ultimate destiny, Joyful Immortality is for me, we, qi & ti.” I’m going to lapse into one of those old “Navy” stories to make the most sense of those affirmations, will that be OK?
(Linda) Oh no! It’s not going to be one of those bomb disposal stories, is it, or about when the killer whales suddenly appeared during one of those dives you made in Canada on a minesweeper joint exercise, is it?
(Fred) No! It’s a much shorter story than any of those, and it ties into this affirmation package directly.
It was on a summer training cruise to Europe on the U.S.S. Wisconsin, one of those old, huge battleships with sixteen inch guns and crew of at least three thousand. Standing watch on the bridge, they put me on the helm and it was my job for that brief time, probably not more than a half hour or so, to “steer the ship”, to make sure it stayed as close to being “on course” as possible.
If it wandered a little to starboard, that’s “to the right”, I knew I had to set the wheel to counteract that, so it would swing back to the left to get back on course, but after ten or fifteen seconds of applying a little left rudder, I knew that this huge mass of steel must already be swinging back to port (that’s left), even though the compass needle showed nothing at all, so I’d put the rudder back to the straight ahead position, and soon, sure enough, it would begin to swing left. You had to watch the thing like a hawk, and never take your eyes off it, never stop thinking about it. And then, finally, someone else would come along and relieve you, and you could unwind a little.
That’s what the first part of the affirmation says to me, each time I say it, the phrase, “I’ll always remember, each night and every day”. It doesn’t say, “remind yourself now and then”, it says, “Don’t ever take your eyes off the compass! Don’t ever forget the big picture. Keep things moving in the precise direction you know they should be going.” The rest of the affirmation is about where we’re headed, and believe it or not, the battleship example fits in there, too!
(Linda) Really? We’re not through with the battleship, yet?
(Fred) No! Let’s look at the rest of it. The words that follow are: “Joyful Immortality is my ultimate destiny, Joyful Immortality is our ultimate destiny, Joyful Immortality is the ultimate destiny, Joyful Immortality is for me, we, qi & ti.” Since we know that Joyful Immortality is in every one of them, let’s see what we have when we take it out. Then, the affirmation is about “my ultimate destiny, our ultimate destiny, the ultimate destiny, and it’s for me, we, qi, & ti”. So, now we can look at how they relate to each other.
Where Joyful Immortality is concerned, it’s not just about me, or my destiny. This is where, sadly, many people cut off their concerns about the bigger picture of how they may relate to others. It’s not just about a small group’s future either, not just about our destiny, not just about a “we” of some kind. Once we get to talking about the ultimate destiny, about it being for qi and ti, we’re into some pretty global thoughts.
The ultimate destiny sounds like it could encompass the entire universe, even to the point of concern about the long term fate of the Cosmos, so at that level Joyful Immortality is being applied to a very large “playing field.” It’s about the progression of extropy to a stage where what Terasem may become, perhaps merging with others of its own kind, is addressing the roles of control of cosmic physics, and even before that, with avoiding catastrophes in passing safely through the Singularity.
Truths 1.8.3. and 1.8.4 tell us, “The ‘Ti of I’ is he time-cone of a being’s existence” and “The ‘Qi of I’ is the unique pattern of a being’s energy flows.” Joyful Immortality “being for qi and ti” could imply that the way we manage the time and energy flows of our lives must be oriented in the right direction in some specific way. In any case, it’s a very global and inclusive way of thinking about Joyful Immortality.
(Linda) You didn’t say anything about the battleship!
(Fred) You caught me! Or maybe not! It’s an extension of how we feel when we’re driving a car; that we feel a responsibility not only for our own lives, and those of our passengers, but for others on the road, with whom we might collide. It broadens our viewpoint to take in others, in some cases many others. No doubt, pilots in cockpits of passenger planes feel this, to an even higher extent. There could be hundreds of lives at stake.
Now, with the battleship, it was unlikely to develop that anything I might have done could have endangered the lives of others on that ship, or on another ship, but one never knows what might happen. What if suddenly a cruiser with a crew of 1500 to 2000 persons had emerged from the fog and cut across our bow. Clearly, the Officer of the Deck would have been screaming commands about how the ship should be maneuvered, to try to avoid collision, and there would have been orders to change the engines, perhaps reversing propellers, but it could be that I would have been actually turning the wheel to carry out those orders, in effect with many lives in my hands. Thousands of lives could have been at stake. The U.S.S. Wisconsin represented many thousands of tons of steel hurtling through the water, with sixteen inches of armor plate. It was just one of those experiences you don’t forget. That’s how it ties in.
(Linda) Now, we get to my favorite, Ambrosia. It starts out with 6.8.1 “Top off Ambrosia with Longer Sun,” and the affirmations are, “Long Time May the Sun Shine Upon Us, Only Love Surround Us, Now may the pure light within us, Guide Our Way On, Energize Our Way on, Realize Our Way on.”
(Fred) I always enjoy that one too. It greets the Sun in the early morning, pouring its energy into us, and tells us to pour it forth again in the form of appreciation and gratitude, an outbound “wall” of love no hatred can work its way through. It tells us to filter it within ourselves into a light so pure that like a laser, it helps us navigate our lives, empowers our lives, and helps us make a reality of our dreams. At least, that’s how these words speak to me.
Moving on, not repeating EarthFire of course, 6.8.3, tells us “AquaLung culminates with the Water Song” and the words are, “Water, earth mother’s womb, water, our own life’s blood, now water, washing over us, water, may we flow as one, water, may we flow as one. We are one.”
Each person may interpret this a little differently. In my mind, I see our biological bodies as nothing less than contained oceans of salt water in which our 50 to 100 trillion living cells “float”. From our surroundings we take water, and we return it to this outer environment, lacking which we would quickly perish, in the same way that we would perish even more rapidly if placed into an air-free (or rather oxygen free) environment. Life emerged from Mother Earth, and now we are part of it. Our blood, mostly water, constitutes our internal rivers and lakes, recycled from its ocean, our heart, with rapidity that makes the natural environment’s recycling of water by rainfall seems almost tortoise-like in its slowness. We are one with our own water and more generally, with all exterior water. Our internal flows of water mimic, at a tiny scale and with astronomical rapidity, external flows of water, but the idea “may we flow as one” is perfectly valid.
(Linda) StarMind starts at 6.8.4 “Namaste Starmind with Lovely Lady”. “Namaste” is a Hindu salutation which expresses respect and the hope for all good things that day. So, Namaste Starmind means to approach this Connection with that kind of mindset. The affirmations are: “Hey, Lovely Lady, I see you sitting alone, Hey, Wondrous Lady, stars are singing your song, Now, Magic Lady, lift up and rise from your home, Joy Can Be Found, Without Limit Or Bound, Just Tune Your Soul to its Sound.” Is the “Lovely Lady” the Earth, but if so, how can she “Leave Home”?
(Fred) This is the “Earthseed” theme. Just as the biosphere arose from the lifeless geosphere that was the pre-life earth, so now the cybersphere is rising from the biosphere, with one huge difference. The biosphere has, at best, put out a few fingers, meaning earth-orbit missions and a few trips to the moon, but the cybersphere? Lunar Surveyor spacecraft preceded the Apollo landings, and robot explorers have landed on Mars a number of times, as well as Venus and numerous points within the Solar system.
The Cybersphere entered the age of interstellar travel when the Voyager Spacecraft achieved escape velocity in their 1979 flybys of Jupiter. Despite later encounters with Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, at no time did they fail to possess heliocentric escape velocity. Voyager 1 was fully free of the Solar System after its Saturn encounter on the 25th of August, 1981 and Voyager 2 was strictly outbound after Neptune encounter on August 25th 1989. At Neptune, Solar System (heliocentric) escape velocity is about 5 kilometers per second, and after encounter Voyage 2 was traveling four times that, or in the neighborhood of 20 km/s.
In terms of intelligent communication, of course, it started earlier. As so dramatically portrayed in Carl Sagan’s film “Contact”, TV transmissions by the Third Reich Nazi regime prior to World War II conceivably could have been intercepted by extraterrestrials. But all of this is just the first sputterings of what seems likely to come soon.
As the Singularity passes, the cybersphere seems destined to explode outward in both physical and electromagnetic forms. A large part of the highest evolved life forms at that time may go outward as part of that. One might ask, what about the biosphere? What about humans who want to remain biological? Won’t all of this still be there, and the answer is “yes”, but just as life came out of the sea and has proliferated on land, it is time for sentient life to go into cyberspace and proliferate there, expanding outward in a limitless way. That, I think, is what the “Lovely Lady” is all about. It’s the earth, all right, but evolving and expanding in all directions to the stars.
(Linda) Now, skipping over CrownAura, which we covered earlier, we come to “6.8.6 Sleep on Alum al-Mithral with 16 bright stars to inspire our time and place.” It’s pretty short, isn’t it?
(Fred) That’s right. This is truly a “sweet dreams” cluster, and for most who might be starting with Terasem, it might seem farfetched to call them “affirmations”. Yet, for those who know these stars well, and the reasons why they might be near-term destinations as Terasem expands beyond the Solar System, they carry positive and heart-warming connotations.
Here are the names of the stars: Sol, Sirius (8.6), Altair (17), Vega (25), Capella (42), Rigel (4.4), Procyon (11), Betelgeuse (640), Altair (17), Antares (600), Aldebaran, Spica (260), Pollux (34), Fomalhaut (25), Deneb (1550), Regulus (77). They’re basically in the order of magnitude or brightness, and only four are more than one hundred light years away. It seems likely they’re easy to locate by constellation, helpful, if one wants to close the Connection with extended star contemplation.
(Linda) It may be some time before Alum al-Mithral is part of our daily routine, since it comes at 2 a.m., but I notice you put the distance in light years into our notes, just in case we need to beat it out of the Solar System in a hurry. Next week, we’re going to plunge into some fascinating and abstract concepts that involve visualizations that evoke feelings congruent with some of the ideas in the Truths of Terasem.
(Fred) Right, Linda. These are very short, and are part of what are said in the Connections. We’ll relate them to other parts of the Truths, where it appears they help integrate those ideas into the connections in a meditative way. We’ll be close to the end of the Truths of Terasem for the year, and there will be time to examine tie-ins of all kinds.
(Linda) Great! And don’t forget that you can “Join Terasem” at terasemfaith.net and be right at the heart of this. And remember: First in, first out. “Waking up in cyberspace” can be pursued by the programs available at either CyBeRev.org or LifeNaut.com, no fees to participate.
(Fred) Right! I want to comment for a moment about this “First in, First out” thing we keep mentioning. In the google-search locatable Minutes of the Terasem Quadrennial Convocation, February 29th – March 4th, 2008, it says, “Pursuant to paragraph 2.3.6.3.2 of the Truths of Terasem, the Organizer of the Convocation confirmed that Terasem is using its budget to fund cryonicization and cyberconsciousness efforts in chronological order of the subjects becoming Terasem members. And on a large “priorities” plaque at Terasem Headquarters, that aspect of Terasem operations is in the number one position.
(Linda) That’s true. Glad you mentioned it. As we usually remind you each week, go to mindclones.blogspot.com for an ever expanding discussion about mindfiles. Next week, we’ll explore how some of the very brief words used in the Connections link to deeper concepts of the Truths of Terasem.
(Fred) Join us, and our quest for an endless future…
(Linda) Come with us – into Tomorrow!
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