2a. HeartanSoulanMind /2b. Grandma /wkg.ch.1.
Ms. Havisham here. Good morning. If curious and have the time, one can look me up in Orndorff's second blog, "Encounters in Spirit." I was created from the abstract in that blog and was Orndorff's first written communication with his soul, which I personified at that time. His long-time inner writing companion was Amorella. She was angelic-like and bright and comforting for Richard from 1988 until the late Spring of 2020, when she considered her helpfulness complete. By then, I was designated and named oSoul. Amorella said her good-byes much as she originally said her hellos.
When Richard was five, he had a secret imaginary friend, a reading and talking companion. Her name was Aunt Jemima, and her picture was on a pancake box in 1948. Aunt Jemima was Richard's first imaginary friend. Amorella, in 1988, became an invisible writing companion whose first job was keeping Richard both polite and honest in what he had to say. I keep up this tradition by broadening myself to keep his heart, mind, and fingertips on the keyboard as honest as his soul. From my perspective, the human spiritual part, the heartansoulanmind, together is what one is left with after physical death. The Reader does not have to agree. Orndorff was Christian until after joining the First Presbyterian Church in Westerville, Ohio, at age twelve. Within a few years, he became an agnostic, and only recently, at age seventy-eight, did he unofficially become a Transcendentalist. To keep the religious discussion to a minimum, if someone politely asks, Richard now says he's a Unitarian Universalist, who, by the way, are kind enough to accept kind agnostics.
My point is that if you want to know more about Mr. Orndorff, read any selections of his earlier blogs. – Ms. H
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Encounters in Mind (August 15, 2009 – April 20, 2018)
This notebook blog was created on 15 August 2009. Its conclusion is today, 20 April 2018. Amorella, my inner writer, imaginary or not, is, as I see her, my spiritual essence within. I have learned much. Thank you for reading this blog, sincerely, Richard H. Orndorff. Since I still have a few readers, I'll leave the blog up. Eight plus years of my heartansoulanmind for what it's worth. Be pretend angels if you like. © 2009 orndorff
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Encounters in Spirit (October 21, 2018 – August 24, 2019)
This is a spiritually oriented learning curve blog. I intended to show through reflection what the human spirit is to me. This is as far as I could go before abandoning the project. 25 August 2019 - Experimental writing is what it is. Once I began feeling uncomfortable writing this blog, it was time to end it. However, it is online to view. Why? Transparency is important to me. © 2018 orndorff
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Old Man on a Study (August 25, 2019 – October 8, 2019)
The Old Man is real enough, but he is more fiction than most human beings than he likes to admit. This blog is written by a not so free spirit named "Amorella" through Orndorff, the Old Man's fingers on the keyboard. I am his poetically personified soul, "Ms. Havisham," who also named myself through the Old Man's fingers on the keyboard. What is the present informal thesis of this study? "The Metaphysics of Consciousness" - Ms. Havisham ©2019 orndorff
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Grandma Earth is on next.
Grandma's section of Orndorff's book revision is being toyed about with a little history and science and a dose of an ancient shaman's understanding of how the world is. I speak the words to the shaman, and the shaman utters the translation to his audience. These were practical and superstitious people, intelligent too – but their story interest purposes understand how the world is. To early people, understanding is more important than knowledge in itself. More often than not, the experience also conveys the truth. The audience wants to absorb the shaman's words because the speaker has an honest insight into his and their nature—Grandma's understanding of how the world goes beyond knowledge. Experience is more useful than knowledge itself. Experience is aligning with a moral compass. Knowledge is the facts on how and why things potentially work. Here is my latest draft of Chapter One.
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One
"I have an old story," says Grandma Earth. A man is in worldly trouble long ago. The characters in my stories could be one of your or your friends' ancestors. Without your ancestors, you would not exist. Your genetic Mother, Mitochondrial Eve, may have lived one hundred and fifty thousand years ago. That's what science suggests in the twenty-first century. Everyone alive connects to the Y-chromosomal Adam genes of someone in East Africa who lived perhaps as recently as one hundred twenty thousand years ago. These are Mother and Father genes we all share in our mix. One recent estimate states we are each 50th cousins; another says we are each 70th cousins. In any case, we are each human cousins. These stories are a selection of some of our direct ancestors, no matter who you are. That's the sense in this book, so say I, Grandma Earth.
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It is the beginning of dawn, and my shoulders shiver, and the shivering is the way it is here. I hear the crickets and other small creatures around the swamp. I am inside a hole in the wall, and there is no way out. I am stuck. I cannot get out -- let me out. Let me out.
It is dawn, and my forearms shiver. Trembling is the way it is. I hear the crickets and the other small creatures. I am in a hole in the wall, and there is no way out. Holed in is the way it is. I cannot get out.
My fingers are full of ice. Again, it is dawn, and I am ice on the river. I am floating and cold. I am common ground with icy hands floating on the river.
I had a frigid dream last night, and it was a whopper. It was about these people who live way out among the stars and how they are stuck too. I will work on this floating block of ice and let you know how it is. I will tap out my message from here as we people who are caught in a cave do. As long as I have icy cold fingers, the Dead living in me, move. I have all the time in the world. That is how it is in my cold late dawn of almost eighteen thousand years ago. I am stuck frozen and flat across the vicious circle of stone surrounding our pond of stars in the heavens. I am here, and they are both at once. I am a shaman dancing on the board between mind and spirit. Where are you, listener?
The old shaman pointed to a not so bright star in the night sky and said, "We are from there," then he points to the soil beneath his feet, "to here." That is all he says. Nobody in the group slept that night.
One of the listeners tosses and turns, and suddenly unexpectedly, she thinks, 'How can we be here and there at the same time?'
If I remember right, says Grandma, she was the first human being who died and did not die at the same time. The woman asked others the same question in the morning.
Eventually, their small human band concluded how it is possible to be in two places at once. Later in life, the woman died and found herself waiting for her group members to join her once they died physically but did not die consciously. People then began respecting the Dead more and burying them with rites and passages to help accommodate both the Living and the Dead.
The Living were afraid the Dead were going to forget those Living. That is the way Grandma remembers it. The Living were made conscious of being in two places at once, and they hoped the Dead would remain mindful of those still living.
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In the story, this particular shaman is long dead, knows you are reading his thoughts, smiles Grandma, who appears black as the richest soil on the planet. Her white teeth gleam as white paper unsoiled with ink or paint. She looks out into the eyes of her young listeners. Children, she says, "You don't have a clue on what words are when they come out of the blue. I'm going to sit on this stump and hope it won't stain my pretty blue and white dress that likes to float in a gentle breeze. You look at Grandma as you look deep down into your child self. I am in your inside nature and out. The scarf on my head is nothing but the stars in the heavens. You keep that in mind. Freedom stories aren't for everyone.
Grandma glances up beyond the dark sky above her head and out to the Reader far away. The white in her old eyes shows you her dark pupils are rolling up and disappearing within her skull. Grandma Earth closes her eyes by rolling them back within. The shaman opens his eyes to see the white in hers and thinks, I now have the parchment; I need to unfreeze the black letter-forms to dance upon the white in Grandma's eyes.
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Here's a bit about shamanism. – Grandma
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Shamanism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Shamanism is a religious practice that involves a practitioner, a shaman, who is believed to interact with a spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance. The goal of this is usually to direct these spirits or spiritual energies into the physical world, for healing or some other purpose.
Academic study
Cognitive and evolutionary approaches
There are two major frameworks among cognitive and evolutionary scientists for explaining shamanism. The first, proposed by anthropologist Michael Winkelman, is known as the "neurotheological theory."[98][99] According to Winkelman, shamanism develops reliably in human societies because it provides valuable benefits to the practitioner, group, and individual clients. In particular, the trance states induced by dancing, hallucinogens, and other triggers are hypothesized to have an "integrative" effect on cognition, allowing communication among mental systems that specialize in theory of mind, social intelligence, and natural history.[100] With this cognitive integration, the shaman can better predict animals' movement, resolve group conflicts, plan migrations, and provide other useful services.
The neurotheological theory contrasts with the "by-product" or "subjective" model of shamanism developed by Harvard anthropologist Manvir Singh. According to Singh, shamanism is a cultural technology that adapts to (or hacks) our psychological biases to convince us that a specialist can influence important but uncontrollable outcomes.[103] Citing work on the psychology of magic and superstition, Singh argues that humans search for influencing uncertain events, such as healing illness, controlling rain, or attracting animals. As specialists compete to help their clients control these outcomes, they drive the evolution of psychologically compelling magic, producing traditions adapted to people's cognitive biases.
Shamanism, Singh argues, is the culmination of this cultural evolutionary process—a psychologically appealing method for controlling uncertainty. For example, some shamanic practices exploit our intuitions about humanness: Practitioners use trance and dramatic initiations to seemingly become entities distinct from normal humans and thus more apparently capable of interacting with the invisible forces believed to oversee important outcomes. Influential cognitive and anthropological scientists such as Pascal Boyer and Nicholas Humphrey have endorsed Singh's approach, although other researchers have criticized Singh's dismissal of an individual - and group-level benefits.[106]
David Lewis-Williams explains the origins of shamanic practice, and some of its precise forms, through aspects of human consciousness evinced in cave art and LSD experiments alike.[107]
Ecological approaches and systems theory
Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff relates these concepts to developments in how modern science (systems theory, ecology, new approaches in anthropology and archeology) treats causality less linearly.[57] He also suggests a cooperation of modern science and indigenous lore.[108]
Historical origins
Shamanic practices may originate as early as the Paleolithic, predating all organized religions,[109][110] and certainly as early as the Neolithic period.[110] The earliest known undisputed burial of a shaman (and by extension, the earliest undisputed evidence of shamans and shamanic practices) dates back to the early Upper Paleolithic era (c. 30,000 BP) in what is now the Czech Republic.[111]
Sanskrit scholar and comparative mythologist Michael Witzel proposes that all of the world's mythologies, and also the concepts and practices of shamans, can be traced to the migrations of two prehistoric populations: the "Gondwana" type (of circa 65,000 years ago) and the "Laurasian" type (of circa 40,000 years ago).[112]
In November 2008, researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced a 12,000-year-old site in Israel that is perceived as one of the earliest-known shaman burials. The elderly woman had been arranged on her side, with her legs apart and folded inward at the knee. Ten large stones were placed on the head, pelvis, and arms. Among her unusual grave goods were 50 complete tortoise shells, a human foot, and certain body parts from animals such as a cow tail and eagle wings. Other animal remains came from a boar, leopard, and two martens. "It seems that the woman … was perceived as being in a close relationship with these animal spirits", researchers noted. The grave was one of at least 28 graves at the site, located in a cave in lower Galilee and belonging to the Natufian culture, but is said to be unlike any other among the Epipaleolithic Natufians or in the Paleolithic period . . ..
Semiotic and hermeneutic approaches
A debated etymology of the word "shaman" is "one who knows," [13][114] implying, among other things, that the shaman is an expert in keeping together the multiple codes of the society, and that to be effective, shamans must maintain a comprehensive view in their mind which gives them the certainty of knowledge.[12] According to this view, the shaman uses (and the audience understands) multiple codes, expressing meanings in many ways: verbally, musically, artistically, and in dance . . ..
Analogously to how grammar arranges words to express meanings and convey a world, this formed a cognitive map).[12][122] Shaman's lore is rooted in the community's folklore, which provides a "mythological mental map." Juha Pentikäinen uses the concept of "grammar of mind."
Armin Geertz coined and introduced the hermeneutics,[126] or "ethnohermeneutics," [122] interpretation. Hoppál extended the term to include not only the interpretation of oral and written texts, but that of "visual texts as well (including motions, gestures and more complex rituals, and ceremonies performed, for instance, by shamans)."[127] Revealing the animistic views in shamanism and their relevance to the contemporary world, ecological problems have validated paradigms of balance and protection.[124]
Selected and edited from Wikipedia
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There you have it, the working revision of chapter one of Orndorff's untitled book, and a shortened article on shamanism. If you want more on this subject or any other, look it up yourself. Forty-six more such chapters to go for a start. Have a good evening. – Ms. Havisham
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