Reflections of a Sometime Thinker

By Donald Michael Craig

Enter a world where spiritual Truth abounds, where a lyrical turn of phrase so delicately and precisely illumines this Truth that grasping it is suddenly effortless and miraculously empowering. This is the world created by Donald Michael Craig in his beautiful collection “Reflections of a Sometime Thinker”. Here we experience first-hand what mystics and spiritual thinkers the world over have invited us to ponder: the balance between what we access through our five senses, and what we are capable of accessing through the innate power of Love within us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9780984457830

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Copyright © 2014. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-9844578-3-0

A New Epoch, LLC

PO Box 474

Black Eagle, MT 59414

[e-mail]

Website: www.a-new-epoch.com

Cover design by Brenda Croghan

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For Crystal

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Dedication

The Reflections are dedicated to you—whoever you are, whatever you are, wherever you are. Know that I embrace you and hold you in my heart.

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Acknowledgements

I have so much to be grateful for and so many people to be thankful to—William, Jim, and Larry who serve the world not with promises but with their thoughts, words, and deeds.

And the women—God bless them!—who serve unsung like heaven's angels. Thank you, Brenda and Carol.

I am grateful, too, for surviving a war that claimed so many comrades. Their songs were silenced, but I hear them still.

I want to tell all of you—including Connie, Joyce, Todd, Kristen, Bill, Brian, Dixie, Erin, Mary, Vickie, Nancy, Lyle, Mitchell, and Jeff—that I love you. And though you may not recognize the face tomorrow, we will meet again.

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Introduction

In my '40s it struck me that what I called thinking was but the constant rehashing of concepts formulated by others and crystallized by habit. I was not thinking—I was remembering. The time had come, I resolved, to base my thought life on first-hand experience. But how?

First, I had to break the habit of slipping into grooves of thought etched by repetition. Next, I had to free the mental energy held captive by old concepts so it could be used to fashion new concepts.

And so in the summer of 1972, I began my quest for the wellspring of wisdom. I spent 30 minutes each morning pondering a selected subject. The first subject I chose was not only the most difficult, but one of the most rewarding. It was a treatise on the philosophy of numbers—The Theoretic Arithmetic of the Pythagoreans—by the Platonist Thomas Taylor.

With only a high school education I was ill-equipped to fathom the meaning of numeric symbols. That proved to be a plus—it ruled out falling back on memory. I spent months brooding over the same questions: What is the meaning of 1? What form does it take? What is its quality, purpose, and cause? And how does 2 differ from 1, or does it?

As I continued to ponder various subjects through the years, I discovered that, unlike the complex world revealed by our five senses, reflection reduces complexity to simplicity. At its highest level, reflection opens the door to what Patanjali, in the Yoga Sutras, called the raincloud of knowable things. This is where the creative process begins—where the Soul works Its magic.

It is in the Light of the Soul, reflecting on the mirror of experience, that we perceive both the soundness of our character and its flaws. Thus, reflection enables us to assess our state of being at any given moment and to make the adjustments needed to align the Soul, mind, and brain with the source of inspiration.

I am now nearing 90, and what have I learned? I have learned that love is the key to wisdom—not love as emotion or sentiment, but love as an expanding spiral of Consciousness that embraces all.

The more loving we are, the more we comprehend. The more we comprehend, the wiser we become. Rather than viewing life as a jumble of disjointed parts—an accident—love reveals a pattern in which the parts form one interdependent