In New York City, where I’ve lived all my adult life, f-bombs are practically a form of punctuation, which may be a good thing, since studies have shown that people who cuss may have better emotional health than those who don’t. Still, I will try not to cuss too much here. I won’t censor anyone else.
Sufi orthodoxy is a contradiction in terms, and once when I was complaining about one Sufi companion on the path to another, she offered that in her opinion, the order we all belonged to had two rays, a dervishy ray and an angelic ray, and that the people in the angelic ray tended to think of the people in the dervishy ray as being unbearably crude, while the people in the dervishy ray tended to think of the people in the angelic ray as having simply failed to incarnate. Similar distinctions may exist in other groups. It has been said that comfort is the enemy of the dervish. I wouldn’t guess that it’s such a great friend of the angelic ones, either.
So, okay, trigger warning: this whole handbook could be one great big trigger, if you wanted to look at it that way, propelling us forward to a better life. Maya Angelou said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” This work is designed to help us get better, so that doing better can just come naturally, the way it would have been doing all along if systemic racism were not so … systemic. At this stage of our evolution, there’s a certain amount of urgency to getting better—getting over ourselves—if we don’t really want to mass-extinction ourselves right off the planet. It’s all grist for the mill, or as the wise people of Al-Anon say, an AFGO—Another Fucking Growth Opportunity—and all are invited!
After all, like the Blues Brothers, we’re on a mission from God.
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