The Book of Revelation

It gets REALLY lonely sometimes, and I forget that I AM surrounded by love and support, when I can't physically see it and feel it.
I am not alone.
But oh, to be able to have daily conversations with like-minded people at a similar level!
On Thursday night I gave my 1-1/2 hour presentation on the Book of Revelation to my New testament class.
Everything that could go wrong with the technology did, despite my careful prep and redundancies, but fortunately I knew the material well enough to stand and give it old-fashioned lecture style (donkey and cart) while my laptop (Cadillac) sat and sizzled uselessly.
Most of my notes were within the sizzling, inaccessible computer program, so I had to speak from heart and memory, and perhaps that was how it should be, but I'm still frustrated as heck about it!

I had found all sorts of amazing art on the internet, like the images included here, and they added so much, combined with the text, to make a wholistic, left-brain/right-brain experience.... I had spent DAYS on that presentation. And the whole file got deleted. ALL MY WORK gone without a trace, except for one old copy, missing a huge amount of work.
Yes ..."we can rebuild it, we have the technology,"
but I need to grieve and sulk and stomp around for a few days.
I was in such a rush to finish it, I didn't save a copy to a removable disk.
Shut up.
Believe me, I've learned my lesson.

Actually, the musical slide show worked well enough to get a round of enthusiastic applause when finished. Yay!

And it felt excellent to finally express at length what I love about the concepts of the inner sense of the Bible and the divisions in creation and the Word of everything into (more or less) a "Wisdom, Intellect, Linear, analytical, scientific, left-brain, Male, truth" category; and a "Love, Intuition, circular, wholistic, mystical, right-brain, Female, kindness" category.
Everyone was nodding and with me.
I talked about basic correspondences like horses and wine and rocks and blood and water and oil....
When I gave my low-tech talk, I resorted to "So, when it describes the Son of man as having 'eyes like a flame of fire,' what would that mean?" One person piped up, "Truth?" and another, "Love?"
Hee hee!
I nodded and answered, "He looks at us with Love, intense love. And since the eyes 'see' they are about the understanding, so he looks at us with Divine understanding, and intense love...."
As near as I could tell, the whole room was one with me at that moment.
It felt really, really wonderful.

One student said, if nothing else, he had only heard terrifying messages about the meaning of Revelation, and he had lain awake afraid for his loved ones, and that now he had a whole new way to see the book that was loving and hopeful. It balances the scary, "you'd better get your act together or you're toast" messages that others preach.

I got goose-bumps repeatedly while doing the research. I saw things I had never seen before and found all sorts of amazing connections.... It is so beautiful and compassionate and hopeful and incredible --- very Kara Tennis --- though hiding within some first-glance judgmental and divisive language. When I get past a fear-blame mindset and remember that everyone and every group has both dragon and harlot tendencies and the whole point is the promise PROMISE of our gradual and inevitable release and freedom from both tendencies (from intellectual religious arrogance, and the assumption of "rightness" so deep that we feel justified in trying to control everybody),
then it is no longer about "that group over there who is so wrong, aren't-we-lucky-we're-not-them." The judgment is a loving promise of release from these nasty inclinations inside each one of us, and the consequent relative heavenly life we have once free of those things....

I was also adamant about the language Swedenborg uses. I was up front about how he talks about "The Reformed" and also the Roman Catholics as the (apparent) bad guys , and firmly declared, as I believe, that that talk is all about my (and your) inner tendency to want out thinking to save us, apart from our life, and our list of accomplishments to save us, apart from the state of our heart. It is not about those groups, per se, at all.

Everyone was nodding. They know. They know that it is the heart and life that matter, not just right thinking, or many good deeds without a good heart and effort to live according to the commandments. Despite official institutional dogmas, the new perspectives and good-heartedness is already so clearly alive among the people of the world.
Baruch bashan!