This is not going to be the usual type of Thanksgiving newsletter in which I remind everyone to be thankful for their blessings, although I might get to that. Rather, I am in a more cosmic mood this morning, so I thought I would share some thoughts that are running through my mind as I attempt, in my own way, to make sense of a world undergoing epoch-size changes at light speed. I also, of course, hope that this Thanksgiving newsletter will be something you'll be thankful to have read by the time you're done with it.

No one is untouched by these changes, and from that perspective we are being drawn together in uncharted waters. None of us can possibly anticipate what each new day will bring us. Will the stock market go up tomorrow? Crash again? Will billions of dollars move from this faltering bank to that one? Will another entire country like Iceland actually go bankrupt? When have we ever witnessed such unbridled madness right in front of our eyes?

So, how do we interpret this? Where do we begin? What calculations do we use that we can even begin to rely upon? This situation has all the "experts" scrambling - and if I'm not mistaken, it was also experts who got us into this mess. Or was it? Perhaps the greater truth - the cosmic truth, as it were, is that this period of chaos was always scheduled to happen. Seems to me deep in our intuitive gut we've always been anticipating an epochal period of change. We just had no idea how that period of change would actually manifest and perhaps, in our naiveté, we thought that the dynamic of change would somehow occur "out there" somewhere, affecting the lives of others more than us, or be a controllable force that didn't penetrate our 401K's or our subprime mortgages or our personal incomes.

I'm reminded of how many times people say this comment after a disaster, "Who would ever think that such a thing could happen here?" We all live in the illusion that bad things happen "out there" and that our particular school of myths has the power to protect us. If I'm a good person, bad things won't happen to me - but things do happen. The reason you study spiritual and mystical literature is so that you can learn to "reason like a mystic" and apply that skill precisely in times like this, so that when difficult crises arise your response is not, "What have I done wrong?" but, "Ah, so change is constant." You haven't done anything "wrong." Instead, we are witnessing the truths in motion that we have studied for years. To wit, Buddha's teaching: All is illusion. What greater proof can we have that all is illusion than to see fortresses of finance disappear in front of our eyes that just last week, or last month, we would have "bet the ranch" were as safe as, well, Fort Knox? Who was right? Fort Knox or Buddha? In the end, it is the great spiritual teachings that always, always, always remain steady, and prove to be truth.  You can read on here...