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Thomas Merton wrote, "There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues." 

There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.

It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.

The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. 

We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have "not gone up into the gaps." 

The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. 

The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. 

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. 

Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock -- more than a maple -- a universe. This is how you spend the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

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Spiritual Cinema

Stephen Simon is a producer ("What Dreams May Come" and other films), and director of "Indigo," written by Neale Donald Walsch, about a psychic child and her "ability to heal even the deepest of family wounds."

Magical Blend Magazine : What kind of teaching potential do you think this film has?

Stephen Simon : I hope that it doesn't teach anybody anything, because entertainment is not supposed to be for teaching.

Entertainment is supposed to be for entertaining people, and hopefully for inspiring and empowering people.

The passion of my life is Spiritual Cinema. I decided a year and half ago to leave Los Angeles, to come to a different place to help birth a new kind of entertainment where we don't have to pull back, where we don't have to homogenize, where we don't have to dumb things down. 

Where I don't have a studio saying "Well, but some people in Missouri might not understand this so you have to make it clear for everybody." We're not going to do that. 

from Indigo Insights: An Interview with Stephen Simon by Robin Rice and Susan Dobra, Magical Blend Magazine

Stephen Simon sites : 

Moving Messages Media / The Institute for Spiritual Entertainment

The Spiritual Cinema Circle

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The tasks -- like getting a part-time job at a book store or joining the chess club -- may seem like odd things for God to be concerned with. Odder still: He doesn't really order Joan to do them.

"I give suggestions, not assignments," says God, at that moment facing Joan as a sanitation worker. "Free will is one of my better innovations."

The reassuring message of the show: Divine intervention, and the answers it might lead to, can conceivably occur with any personal encounter. ...

On "Joan," there is no violence, nor are there grisly displays as in the corpse-populated "CSI" genre. 

Another big difference: While those series try to solve each mystery surrounding a death, "Joan of Arcadia" confronts the mysteries of life. 

"Those are questions people wish they could ask God in person," says series star Amber Tamblyn, explaining why, like them, she identifies with her character.

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Accordingly, Joan is often moody and self-centered.

"I'm not religious, you know," she informs God (who is now a cute guy at her school). 

"It's not about religion, Joan," God tells her. "It's about fulfilling your nature." 

"Uhhh," she stammers, "I definitely haven't done that." 

I tell mostly stories here. ... The particular point of view from which the stories are told and lived is that of a spiritual seeker and artist. However detached I may have become from the label "artist," I never lost sight of art's essential heartland, and I held a creative vision throughout my journey. 

My detachment from any particular religious affiliation did not preclude the essential spirituality of the journey. I hold true that the path lived attentively is a sacred path, and that the fundamental spirit of art is alive, well, and deeply esoteric. 

As does any spiritual path, art has the potential to deliver us into our own true becoming, which is identical to our world's becoming. Art expresses and defines the deep and collective spirit of our time.....Jerry Wennstrom

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from Foreword by Thomas Moore:   While Jerry's stories will remain with me for a long time as lessons in being open to life's paradoxes, I am also taking note of powerful phrases that conjure up ancient wisdom: "Seasoning sanctifies. Insanity, that too is God. ... Form is death. I have to leave this perfection. ... Enlightenment is surrender." 

I'm sure that many people will find comfort and inspiration in this book. Jerry is able to describe a spiritual journey outside of any ancient tradition or modern system, and I trust that originality. He avoids the many hollow words sometimes enter contemporary spiritual thought and embodies the idea that you can be fully spiritual and fully secular at the same time. 

Jerry's experience shows that simply by being receptive to deep intuition and living intelligently from the heart, you can achieve a degree of holiness....

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*video: In The Hands Of Alchemy :
................The Art and Life of Jerry Wennstrom

Psychologists Carl Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz and others consider alchemy to be a spiritual discipline that enables personal transformation toward balance and wholeness.

Artist Jerry Wennstrom in this video speaks of the kind of spiritual evolution that inspires creative excellence.

"In terms of art.. I don't think it's about knowing as much as it is about living into the love we feel for other people," Wennstrom comments. 

He concludes that what he has to offer is his own story of realization as an artist - and a human being - that shows "you can't get there by way of will, intelligence and good intention. It's always been about surrender and being present to the kind of luminous void where everything unfolds."

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This is accompanied by poet and writer David Whyte commenting about the kinds of spiritual paths and lessons shown by Wennstrom's life: "One of the great disciplines of existence, especially as we grow older, is the discipline of innocence, and of keeping the sense of wonder and enlargement and surprise alive in your own heart. 

"The moment that you stop, in a sense, living from your innocence is the moment when you start feeling besieged by existence, and the moment you need defenses and walls. 

"One of the great difficulties in life is claiming your own happiness. I think Jerry is one of the few people I know who, in a very quiet way, has claimed his happiness and existence." ... [review by Douglas Eby]

Moving inside, she then makes a ritual circumambulation of the altars she has placed around her studio, each one honoring a sacred direction. 

Dusty with the cornmeal that she sprinkles on her animal fetishes and cluttered with stones, pots, postcards from friends and photographs -- of the Black Madonna, Carl Jung, Thomas Merton, and family members -- these "living" altars reflect the rich mythlogy of Craighead's life, the creative cauldron out of which her work emerges.

They are paradigmatic of one of the most powerful statements in her book The Mother's Songs: "I am born connected. I am born remembering."

"Spiritual cinema has been around since at least the 1940s," says Simon, citing "It's a Wonderful Life" and "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" as examples. "They are movies that look at who we might be when we operate at our very best. It's important to distinguish 'spiritual' from 'religious,' because mainstream media almost always use the two words as synonyms, and they're not.

"Religion pertains to an organization that tells us a specific set of regulations, rules and rituals that we must utilize in order to experience God. Spirituality respects every individual's path to God, and every individual's definition of God. The films in the book don't deal with religious beliefs. They deal with our search for meaning in life."

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from article: It's a wonderful, meaningful life by Dinah Eng, LA Times, 2/23/03

These individuals gave me the language to understand what I was really seeing. One of the common threads in all these traditions, cutting across diverse cultures, is the idea that everything in front of us right now is merely a world of appearances. It's only a surface... the task is to understand and master sensory experience because you need the language of the senses to help decipher this surface and penetrate to the deeper connections underneath. ..Bill Viola

Give me thy grace. good Lord, to set the world at nought; To set my mind fast upon thee, and not to hang upon the blast of men's mouths; To be content to be solitary; Not to long for worldly company; Little and little utterly to cast off the world, and rid my mind of the business thereof.

*...Paul Scofield: An Actor for All Seasons by Garry O'Connor

.......The King's Good Servant but God's First : The Life and Writings of Saint Thomas More - by James Monti

However, the spiritual traditions teach that it is not these unusual experiences themselves that carry the value, but rather the expanded awareness that may accompany them. While a single experience may lead to a shift in values, it is usually more extensive exploration and practice that lets a person integrate that new awareness.

It seemed to me that the development of both physical and spiritual capacities would somehow impede the growth of my intellect. ... 

Now I have more ways of knowing. Science is one of the disciplines, like meditation or the sweat lodge, for accessing knowledge. Science gives specific details with probabilities attached; religious meditation and ceremony give broader truths, with many possible interpretations. I like to think in and to use the languages of both science and spirit.