In Darkness We Are Born
I read recently that in the early 20th century, the sum total of human knowledge would double every generation. Now it doubles every year or faster. You could say that our daily world is moving 40 times faster than our parents’ world did. Technology advances so swiftly that none of us can keep up completely. Our lives become like a ride I went on in Copenhagen a few weeks ago, called the Himmelskibet which means “Sky-Boat” (but we called it the “Shpinup-Highunpuker”). Spiritual work, at least how I see it, is our way of entering into a power that helps us slow down this whirling thing we call our life so that we can make decisions not out of shrieking, wind-blown terror as we clutch the handle of our Sky-Boat, but out of the power of beauty. This is what I hope our drumming does for you. Stanley Schachter conducted a famous experiment years ago in which young women were told they would be given electric shocks. The more anxious they were about the shocks, the more they wanted to wait w...