Season's Greetings.
Wishing you a wonderful holiday and a happy new
year,
this is a letter about the year of the EL and me.
From a couple of books:
Now I'm slowly reading "Immortal Yearnings" （by Anna Maria Hemingway, Nov. 2012) It lights up many pieces of colorful ancient myths worldwide, like shifting glass pieces of a kaleidoscope. In this side of the mirror cylinder of the human world, contemporary near death experiences and psychologists' ideas are scattered. Ancient myths in the back and these in front sometimes compound and are consistent with each other making a symphony, and invite me deeper into the primordial realm of mysticism. The author points out that symbolic realms of myths worldwide have commonality beyond time, races and cultures, and is persuasive because of the universality of symbolic nature.
She searched nature-based primordial symbols, found Earth Language (EL), then sent me this book asking me to write a small article related to EL for her next book, "Sacred Symbols". Her symbols are more synthetic with a story and EL symbols are elemental. However we both are searching and seeking primordial universality. I'm very happy to find her. as a companion.
When reading this book, I started to recall my faint memory of more than a half century ago. On high school days, I was heavily anemic with 120 times per minute of resting pulse, and assumed my life would be short. One night, I found a secret passage that went underground from the hall of the apartment building where we lived at that time. I tried to take the dark narrow rocky tunnel, and came into a large cave with dim light. An old man with a long beard was sitting there, looking like he was waiting for me. I was given his long name and somehow he knew my name. and situation. He said he was a three thousand year old philosopher and I believed him. Since then, I commuted to see him almost every night for more than two years. Of course only my spirit went, leaving my fast pulse body leaning on my desk. I wrote down our conversation as much as I could, although now I can remember nothing even his name. To bring a subject for our conversation, I peeked at and read various old books in the school library. I now realize that many names shown in "Immortal Yearnings" woke up my buried memory through the names in the books I read at that time. I entirely filled three thick and large notebooks. But when I was twenty I shifted, steering my life into the more realistic world, and burnt all of them. The contents had to be spiritual, yearning to go beyond the boundary between life and death. When I burnt them, there was no way to imagine how much I would desire to read them in a half century.
I read another book to open up my new vision this
year: "The
Biology of Belief" (by Bruce Lipton 2005).
The author is a Cytologist observing cells with nano size view, and explains
about the relation between our body and consciousness. I will try to summarize the
book:
Human body is comprised of 50 trillion cells, and each cell lives as a miniature human, having all physical systems we have, such as respiration, digestion, excretion, motility, immunity etc., and can communicate with other cells. Nucleus only work for reproducing proteins following the DNA program, and the commander to switch on or off for the program is not nucleus but the synthesis of membranes of the cell. As human sense organs and the brain do, cell membranes sense various information from their environment and judge to perceive or to act opposite by movements of the proteins in them. Environmental influences including nutrition, stress and emotions can modify genes without changing their basic blueprint. The primary factors of contemporary diseases are stresses from chemical signals through food, water and air, and through social and psychological matters, also through hot or cold temperatures and microwaves that also can come from out of this planet. Our environment is always changing. relating to the entire universe. Emotion is especially influential to the balance of cell environment. It means we can control our health by our consciousness. Dr. Lipton expresses the details of these mechanisms even using quantum physics.
It sounds like scientific proof of "One = All" in Zen theory.
In my childhood, I always liked peering in a bowl with a fresh egg inside. The
yolk looked perfectly round holding a small organic world;.
When seeing it, I felt that this world where we were was also like this yolk
being watched by a super giant from far away over the sky. The fractal image
expanded endlessly. Perhaps that was the first experience to feel happiness
linking to eternity as far as I can remember.
One cell self is from the unification of all judgments of its membrane elements,
Our human self is from the unification of all judgments of cells of the entire
body. The Earth self must be from the unification of all creature selves, and
the universe must be .... Nature world spread inner and outer all connecting in a
fractal structure. Each "self" of all is unique and shifts by its
experiences and environment. However the beginning of nature had to have strong
will or direction to exist and to evolve, so every one of every realm is
supported with the same original will base through each environment. Our bodies are
mortal, but lives continue and evolve in the eternal environment. If we call the
founder of the system "God," you, me and all of us are smaller gods too, each
having the world of 50 trillion of cells. The image is similar to Asian idea
such as Shinto and
Tao. Some of Japanese Buddhism have told people that you can be saved into
paradise or feel
happy only by chanting a simple prayer to the Buddha. Now I think it means that
just simply focusing your consciousness to feel the huge energy of primordial
affirmation of existence of all, and appreciating it would immediately bring you
a happy feeling, by neutralizing your body cell conditions into the original
positive setting, and you can be healed and forget stresses.
Most of our daily judgments and actions are usually managed by subconscious actions, and conscious thoughts takes only 3% of them. For example, when we walk usually our feet and hands move automatically without consciousness, even when you are talking with your friend on different subjects. When you walked the first time, you needed strong consciousness to do it. Like that, we've accumulated a lot of subconscious through experiences, besides instinct that automatically tries to protect your body. Your body organs, muscles and cells are always learning from your experience and environment, in a little different way from your thinking brain. The body doesn't think with a story. It often likes nice feelings and self-sabotage to be easy, and never tells a lie. So it often helps you to do things, however sometimes you need to control it by your consciousness, otherwise you can easily be sugarholic, alcoholic or a lazy person. Believing in nature's primordial affirmation system to relax yourself, and redesign yourself would be possible by your strong will and consciousness effecting the environment of your body cells. The title, "The Biology of Belief" speaks deeply.
I read these books from different motivations, and they were written from different angles. But both are similar on positively seeing spiritual lives. What is spirit? What is life? These intangible concepts were hard to set up as visual symbols. Interestingly I set the following Earth Language symbols as below more than 15 years ago.
: life, live with the verb mark (a base symbol to make overlay symbols relating to life, such as various living creatures and condition/relation/process of a life)
: heart, think (from one's heart) with the verb mark (a base symbol to make overlay symbols relating to emotions, thoughts, psychological terms etc.)
: cell (the smallest unit of organism, looking like a dot)
: spirit (the center spot of heart, connecting varied emotions and thoughts to self)
I used the traditional heart mark to represent heart or thought, and its up-side-down shape is used for "life. "Because you can't separate your heart from your life, right? If our cells are like miniature humans, each cell might have its spirit to unify its senses and reactions as cell self; and our human spirit might be the unification of all cell spirits. Can I say that? If so these are profoundly well formed: the symbols of spirit and cell have the same shape but only up-side-down, assorted by unphysical or physical. In Tao, they named human's organs and cells to call them as gods, and communicate with some of them to heal the related parts. It means that they recognized a spirit in a cell. Ancient people might have flair to feel the movement and sense of cells. In fact, I also used scent to set up symbols asking my own body feelings. These were set by that way too.
My 2012 and notes for 2013
I'm now preparing a sort of philosophic book directed by some Earth Language symbols as above. I wanted to finish the Japanese draft at the end of this year, but still only near a half, struggling with the way to express and repeating rewriting since it's so unique.. By having another big concern overseas too, I often wake up too long, forgetting how to get to sleep. I'm still trying to learn to control my own body cells. Since the cells want it, I spent much time working for our forest and garden, carrying literally hundreds of wheelbarrow loads of rocks, soil, wood-pieces and leaves. So I'm almost fascinated with seeing my limbs' muscles. Probably the forest nature likes me, and unexpectedly nature started to call me too often: frequent urination has been with me since this early spring after continuation of very heavy work. The symptom is so inconvenient. I had been innocent about the female lower tummy structure that wasn't made well for carrying heavy stuff. This situation made the sphere of my activity so narrow. I'm trying to train the particular muscles to recover from this symptom. Also I still continue to train for my vision, since I can just read without glasses. Problem is I can't recognize thin color lines, so sometimes I can't know where a comment box or scroll bar is, even if you invited me to your site. Pardon me about it. Aged body claims much care and works slower. so I feel a day becoming shorter and shorter. Maybe nature is telling me to focus more on my EL book writing.. All right, I'll do my best
# In the Facebook EL page, I introduced mainly
pictographic expressions this year. Seeing the trials, the editor of "A
Hundred Gourds" (a global Haiku web magazine) asked
me to make a feature of EL translated Haiku and these pictographs for the
September 2013 version, and I'll do it. It might be a good chance to share the
fun of using EL with others. I'll make many for this project, perhaps I'll not
be able to make updates for the EL poem section in the first half of 2013.
# Please join raising
Earth Language and polyglot dictionary
(by Mindaugas
Indriunas), putting the contents referring to
the original EL dictionary.
Doing this volunteering, you might enjoy becoming an EL user naturally.
# Jouni Kemppinen's
Earth Language related site
recently restarted at Earth
Language Users' Club.
Thank you for reading. I look forward to hearing from you.
Warm Blessings,
the winter solstice day of 2012
Yoshiko McFarland