Dodona Update

Zip Dobyns

It has been a traveling year for me so far, and I hope to stay home more this summer! I do enjoy the travel but I also miss my daily swim and have to arrange for someone to water the orchard if I am gone for more than a week. I’ll be back with Shirley Leitch in Laguna Beach for the last weekend in July and speaking for the New Age Bible Church in Santa Monica and another new age church in North Hollywood on the last Sunday in August. Otherwise, I’ll be catching up on some neglected reading and working on some of the numerous projects which are always waiting for more time.

Mark and I spoke for a conference in Paris in late March, thanks to an invitation by Francoise Gauquelin who also generously provided us with a place to stay. Our talks were translated into French for those attending the conference, but unfortunately no one translated the French for us so I learned very little. I did have a chance to visit with a former student who had returned to her native country, and obtained some very interesting data from her. Some of it will undoubtedly appear in The Mutable Dilemma in time, but we have so much new data on people in the news, I am having a hard time choosing among them.

I was delighted to find out about some west coast biofeedback which is getting similar results to the work reported at the annual Council Grove Conference in Kansas. Most of the News Notes in this issue are devoted to this work by Ayers. The ARC conference has its own section in this issue of The Mutable Dilemma, with brief comments on some of the talks. I also decided to include a couple of relatively short hand-outs I had done for classes which explore some philosophical ideas.

For any readers who share my fascination with anthropology, I would like to recommend a new book on the calendar in Mesoamerican civilization called Cycles of the Sun, Mysteries of the Moon by Vincent Malmstrom. The author is a professor of geography at Dartmouth College and a beautiful example of the statement by Maslow that new knowledge rarely arises inside of academic disciplines. Maslow described the latter as like cement blocks and said that new knowledge could only come up between the cracks, in interdisciplinary studies. Archaeoastronomy is such an interdisciplinary area, but Malmstrom’s entry into the field from Geography brought a new and, I think, valuable perspective to the field. I was quite impressed with the book, except for the last few pages where I think he came to an erroneous conclusion due to lack of information.

We have had two new ministers ordained at Dodona since the last issue of The Mutable Dilemma, so our ranks are growing. We hope that our readers share the excitement of this period as knowledge continues to expand exponentially. As I always say when someone asks me what our church believes, “We believe that we do not have final truth and we are looking for more.”

Copyright © 1997 Los Angeles Community Church of Religious Science, Inc.

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