A Special Lesson on the Lord's Prayer

Over the years Thane presented several lessons on this prayer so essential to the Christian faith. In doing so he was re-interpreting traditional - perhaps a little tired with age - lines in a way that creates an invocation of the timeless and immortal: not in a far-away heaven but right here, right now.

The online listening and dialogue group - a group of veteran students meeting in a group dynamics setting to review archive materials - took the lesson on as a project and found it very compelling.  After a lot of tender loving care spiffing up the audio it is now published on the website and available for listening.

Check it out, and leave comments below if you'd like. We're curious to know what you think about its relevance to our current age.

New Directions

We are again in the situation where we haven't seen a lot of growth in the archive. The process of preparing the materials is not particularly difficult, but it is exacting and takes thoughtful attention in order that the result be a product of quality.

We have been able to use this platform, however, for a very unexpected purpose: presenting monitor classes as an asynchronous experience. Our Dean, Al Haferkamp, has been experimenting with this aspect of the archive to work with some new students, and we are in the process of evaluating possibilities - from the perspective both of student experience and of Mentor development opportunities.

The archive remains an excellent resource for interested seekers to hear Thane's public presentations from the 1970s and to review his students' efforts in recent Sunday Meeting episodes.

I find that Thane's open meeting lessons convey the timeless message of the Ontological instruction remarkably well - despite being almost 50 years old - while the newer ones demonstrate a lively community continuing to explore the Ontological message and its implications for our times, which are sorely in need of a sane perspective.

In fact, these times are very much like those. We see social upheaval in our own country and around the world which looks very familiar to one who lived through the 60s and 70s. "Déjà vu all over again," as Yogi Berra put it. The Ontological message reads these social uncertainties as a call for attention to timeless, eternal realities in order to allow the birth of something new which cannot come to be within the existing structures of our societies. What is it ?

The Prosperos has always focused on "unpredictable good". While the results cannot be predicted with specificity we know that our job is to clarify the collective consciousness by clarifying the disturbing evidence around us in the light of a boundless and irrepressible wholeness which is forever pressing forth. The "how to" can be found in the lessons contained in this archive.

 

Down to business

We haven't been doing much to grow the collection for several months. We've managed to add Thane's stand-alone Greater Freedom lessons - the Law of the Vacuum and the Law of Assumption - which are one of the best introductions to The Prosperos instruction ever developed. These have been transitioned from a purchase model to a by-contribution model.

We have about half of the Transcendentalism series posted, and we plan to add the Ours for Discovery and The Greater Freedom (not to be confused with the stand-alone lessons mentioned above) series in the next year.

All of these are open-meeting-format lessons for which a contribution was always the only expected fee. Collectively they provide a window not only into the philosophy of Ontology which is the root of our instruction but into the work of an accomplished Teacher in the midst of his mission at a time of formidable social change - the late 60s and early 70s of the last century.

One thing we have accomplished in the meantime is to support several online courses and open up new inventory and payment options that make accounting easier and assist students by offering the kind of payment options they are used to online.
If you have suggestions, or questions, please send us a note.

Transcendentalism #12

Presentation date : January 17, 1971

This lesson is given the day after the first presentation of what would come to be called “Cosmic Intention Therapy” - “the new space-phase of religion” as one student put it.

Mary Ritley’s introduction is mentioned several times as being more relevant to the material that was given during the class than what will be delivered during this talk.

Her introduction is missing - how did that happen ?

Thane also introduces a woman who, as a child of 9, sat through the original Zion lessons in the late 1930s.

The woman’s mother was named was Virginia Stilton, and Thane remarks that she was an unusual voice, especially for that time and that place.

This lesson is about re-interpreting the Lord’s Prayer.

Finding a voice; finding a way

 

Ben Thompson notes that blogging as a means for individual self-expression is far from dead, although the shape is changing and a lot depends on what you’re after :

A big problem with this entire discussion is that there really isn’t a widely agreed-upon definition of what a blog is, thanks in part to the rise of sites like TechCrunch that ran on WordPress and presented posts in reverse-chronological order and so, at least in the beginning, were called “blogs”; add to that the thinly-disguised PR-channels known as “company blogs” and it’s easy to get confused.

And so, to be clear, when I speak of the “blog” I am referring to a regularly-updated site that is owned-and-operated by an individual (there is, of course, the “group blog,” but it too has a clearly-defined set of authors). And there, in that definition, is the reason why, despite the great unbundling, the blog has not and will not die: it is the only communications tool, in contrast to every other social service, that is owned by the author; to say someone follows a blog is to say someone follows a person (This applies both for amateur and professional bloggers; most of the rest of this post is concerned with the latter).

There’s a lot to digest here for those of us who wish to share what we’ve learned from Thane and other teachers.

Thane's Transcendentalism Audio Lessons

I'm in the process of editing and posting 40 lessons given in 1970 and 1971 to The Prosperos website and to the Internet Archive. So far, I've completed 10 lessons. Lessons available can be found in the Open Meetings section of this website.

It's a lot of work because I trim the greeter's remarks from each copy, leaving only a brief introduction of the speaker and Thane's presentation. The opening meditation and closing music have been removed to avoid copyright hassles.

So, it's a matter of loading the existing audio file into an audio editor along with the introduction and closing tags, trimming where necessary, and saving to mp3.

For assistance with this website, or for more information, contact the webmaster.