Dear Pilgrim,

Welcome to Outrageous Truth: A Mystical Paradigm (OT/MP.)  The Mystical Paradigm (MP) is an integrated series of concepts that can empower those who understand them to be more effective in managing the important dimensions of life.  These concepts integrate the sciences of  Consciousness and General (Living) Systems Theory with the Metaphysics of Spirituality.  The MP has been under development for more than two decades in order to mature and express as the version you now read.  Apart from applying the Principles of the MP to your life, I am also offering for you to enlist yourself in the cause of social and political healing that our society urgently needs.  You will grasp the importance and validity of this need from reading the Preface and three part Introductory Dialogue.

I define each of you as I define myself for worldly purposes, as a Pilgrim, a person who is on a Spiritual journey.  Your life is that journey whether you are aware of that or not, or even if you care or not.  Of course, what you don't know about the nature of this journey cannot help you, but worse, not only can ignorance of your Spiritual journey harm you, it can sometimes destroy you.  The MP is designed to remedy that possible lack in ways that can directly benefit you and your loved ones, even before you apply yourself to using the MP to examine the ills of society.  What types of Pilgrims can most likely benefit from taking on OT/MP?

Three broad audiences:
Social and political activists:  whether you are professionally, or personally involved with politics at any level, or if you are simply concerned about the political and social health of the United States (or any nation that is yours,) the MP is designed to empower you in several ways.  First, for you to become a more effective agent in detecting dangerous problems and their sources.  You can better recognize why and how things are going wrong. You can then recognize the need for specific kinds of change worthy of investing your time, talent, and energy, and that of others.  You can be empowered to design, create, and implement the transforming conditions that promote beneficial personal and social change. You will have a model to evaluate alternative healing and correcting interventions that humanity so sorely needs.  You will find means to cut through the confusing facade of illusions that mask the complex integrated, interacting, and interdependent elements of those conditions that affect both your personal life, and the larger life of your society.

Persons on a Spiritual Path, or wanting to enter a Spiritual Path, or wanting to better understand the nature of a Spiritual Path:  if you want healing changes within your own life and those you love, MP is designed to serve you at that level as well as in more complex and abstract organizational and social levels.   Independent of worldly concerns, there are those who have already discovered, or intuitively suspect, that there are powerful information realms beyond what their senses can detect and intellect explain.  Regardless of their belief in any form of "God," they recognize at some level that they are subject to a Power higher than themselves, however they choose to relate to it.  The MP will help you articulate the nature of that Power.  It will define the crucial differences between Spiritual Power and the traps of ego power. It will suggest how you can cause yourself to intentionally become aligned with Spiritual Power and benefit accordingly.  The MP will also suggest the nature of the costs to you if you ignore it, or worst of all, oppose it, even when done in ignorance.  Understanding that relationship can shed useful insight into the Real nature of the problems and opportunity you observe or must confront today. It makes no difference whether your relationship with this Power is the result of your intentional will, or by default, i.e., by surrendering that relationship to chance.  This Power is as dispassionate as its LAW and Principles are certain.

Specialists in the technical and professional areas incorporated into the MP: if you are person who has (or is about to) invest your life in an area of specialization, you will discover the price you must pay for the benefits associated with such a focus. You will learn the costs of losing perspective of the context in which your specialization occurs, especially the larger social costs.  While this loss of perspective may be mostly inconsequential, in some cases such loss can have seriously adverse consequences for your overall well being.  As a specialist, you may be an unwitting servant of a class of persons you would avoid if you knew what they are, a class I have labeled the power mongers.  The advantage the MP can provide you is to restore or reshape that perspective so as to empower your greater effectiveness in your practice of your specialization, and avoid being an innocent agent of evil. .

Unfortunately, there is also a fourth potential audience.  This is that group of individuals who could highly benefit from understanding what has been prepared for them here.  However, the nature of their consciousness is such that they will deny themselves that opportunity. For various contrived intellectual or emotional reasons grounded in their ego, of which they are oblivious, they will quickly move on.  But if you persist in overcoming the challenges of the MP, you will come to understand the nature and dynamics of their flaw of consciousness, and the costs it places upon them. Best of all, you will discover how to detect and avoid that flaw in yourself.

Some major concepts and characteristics of the MP:

Spirituality and religion or religiosity are not the same:  Understanding the differences can contribute significantly to your gaining improved insight and decision making regarding the choices you make in life.  Even those of you who are devout atheists may be amazed to discover that the "GOD" who has created and who nourishes the MP (and your life) is not the same "God" you have had to reject in order to be an atheist.

The Builders vs the power mongers:  The path your life is following may be directing you toward one of these extremes. They are entirely incompatible with each other.  You will discover the dynamics that create each, and why and how the power mongers are now being permitted to manipulate and coerce us to the ruination of civilization. On the contrary, the active presence of a sufficient number of Builders are society's only help for healing and recovery from the damage that is already done and which is accelerating.  Which is your destiny?  By each decision you make or decline to make, you are choosing now to be a Builder, or a power monger, or a lackey to the power mongers, or to become a helpless victim of the power mongers.

Consciousness vs the ego intellect:  What is not first held in C/consciousness cannot be processed by the intellect, no matter how great the intellect. The implications of this assertion are enormous, and developing your comprehension of that difference is a major goal of the MP.

Spiritual Wisdom vs the ego intellect: Because Wisdom can only reside in the Spiritual Consciousness, here is the difference between insight or confusion, prosperity or poverty, success or failure, happiness or despair, health or illness, peace or torment, and ultimately, life or death.

Reality and reality are not the same: the reality in which you appear to live and move (and make your decisions) is not the Reality that actually determines your well being. The MP will define and document the differences, and show how you can enlist yourself in service to Reality in order to reap the practical benefits that are attached.

Life is RAW! (RealityAlways Wins!):  The MP explains why this claim is without exception. No matter what you believe, what you desire, how certain you are of your path, no matter how determined you are, or how great your investment, no matter how innocent of your errors, unless your cause is aligned with Reality, it cannot prevail, and it must and will fail.

Unique Challenges: many benefits are possible from your grasp of the MP.  However, as is typical of any worthy cause, there are certain challenges that inevitably interfere with the positive potential. These challenges must be overcome to gain the advantages:

The "Curse of Holistic Learning, a Paradox:" in order to fully understand any part of a Holistic concept or system, you must first understand all of it. But you must first learn about it in a linear fashion, one sub concept or part at a time.  Thus, because of the still missing context of the whole, the first sub concepts encountered often produce frustration and confusion in those Pilgrims and students who aspire to Know the whole. You will have to surmount that initial period of confusion and frustration to continue engaging and assembling the parts of the MP until you begin to grasp its enormity and full relevance to you in the context of the whole. The determination to meet that challenge is an indicator of one's accessible Spiritual capacity.

The MP is not focused on one Specialty: the MP cuts across, incorporates, and integrates many areas of specialization.  This integrated and inclusive approach sometimes is off-putting to those who only want to revel in the details of their specialized area of expertise.  After all, that is their life's work.  Therefore, each Pilgrim must summon sufficient patience to encounter and embrace strange ideas and concepts outside their arena of specialization, outside their natural comfort zone. This is a prerequisite in order for them to reach that point where these ideas can be adequately understood and successfully applied to further empower their specialty.

OT/MP has not been edited.  Regrettably, the absence of funds and access to technical support has denied OT/MP that essential function.  Therefore I ask that you not allow any defects in my writing to obscure the content and concepts.  Don't allow such lapses to deter you from continuing to pursue the benefits those concepts and principles can offer you once you understand them.

Special Benefits: the following benefits can accrue to you in proportion to your grasp of the MP:

Wholeness: Understanding the nature and relationship of Spirituality to all of the dimensions of your life and in the life of humanity, in the context of both personal and social dynamics, and how to manage and benefit from that understanding

Self: Enhanced insight into yourself, how your physical and emotional health are directly related to the nature and substance of your Spiritual health, how to recover from any prior ego grounded intellectual mistakes, and how to prevent such mistakes in the future.

Others: Improved relationships among self and intimate or loved others and important acquaintances; improved capacity to serve as a mediator and facilitator of interpersonal relationships with and among others.

Organizations & Institutions:  Improved insight in the interacting economic, social and political dynamics of your nation's corporations, institutions and other organizations, and how to function more effectively as a facilitator and manger in complex social systems.

Personal Power: Insight into the dynamics of how to use or abuse personal power, and how to recognize it when it manifest in the politics and economics of organizations, institutions, and governments

Spiritual Principle: Understand how all human systems, regardless of complexity, from yourself to national and international governments should and can function in accord with Spiritual Principles.  You will therefore grow to recognize and understand the symptoms and costs when they do not.  You can apply these Principles to evaluate the claims and counter claims of competing vested power oriented interests that are rampant during political elections.

Getting Started:
You can continue to acquire additional background on OT/MP than found in this "Welcome" letter.  The first source of additional background detail will be found by going directly to the Preface.  Then still additional background detail about OT/MP will be found under the "About OT/MP" tab.

Otherwise, If you have already acquired enough background from this letter, then you can immediately go to the Introductory Dialogue and begin reading OT/MP.

The MP is presented as a dialogue between a "Mystical Protagonist" (P) who explains, demonstrates and advocates for the Principles that undergird the MP.  P engages an "InQuiring Mind. (Q)" who articulators the values and beliefs of the limited and limiting ego owned intellect. P and Q become involved in an extended Spiritually grounded odyssey across the seven major dialogues and concluding Epilogue that present the MP.  Their dialogue begins with a three part Introductory dialogue which presents a summary of the scale and scope of current problems now afflicting western societies. The case is made why these problems must soon be resolved.  These conditions define the broader social context in which the MP is intended to work.

Within their odyssey, you will discover 45 stories in the form of allegories, parables, and metaphor that, with their interpretations, help bring out the structure and processes of the MP. By using the "Allegories and Parables" tab, you can read these stories independently of the dialogues.

Finely, by clicking on the "Site Map/Index" tab, you will find a complete Table of Contents. This allows you to see all parts of this site at once,  and the relationships of the parts with each other.  Some of you may want to bookmark this page as an easy access point to continue reading OT/MP over an extended period of time.

SUMMARY OF OPTIONS: At this point you can:

Jump right in:  begin with the Preface that provides additional context and background on the nature and purpose of OT/MP.  Or if you have had enough background from this letter, you can even skip the Preface and begin immediately with Part 1 of the three part introductory Dialogue, Meet P and Q, i.e., Meet the Mystical Protagonist and the InQuiring Mind.

     Begin now with the Preface: or skip the Preface and go directly to begin the Dialogues
     Meet P & Q:  or

Get Additional Background: In order to discover more about the scope and depth of OT/MP, you can first engage some of the Descriptive and Resource Material that supports OT/MP~
DESCRIPTIVE, ABOUT OT/MP:

Welcome Letter to you from the Author: (You are reading it now.)
Questions & Answers About OT/MP: these focus on background aspects of OT/MP, its characteristics, and why it has taken the form that it has.
How to Read OT/MP: This suggests ways that you can engage OT/MP to help you focus your interests, and to provide special guidance in using the special communication codes for selected metaphysical terms.
What is Outrageous? This provides some of the conclusions that follow from an understanding of the MP, conclusions and their implications that an uninformed public may initially experience as "Outrageous."
How you can help! This page provides an opportunity for you to help nurture the ongoing presence, growth and impact of the MP in terms other than only financial support.  Several creative ways that might be unique for you are suggested.
About the Author: a brief personal statement that inspired me to create OT/MP, followed by a more formal Curriculum Vita (Resume) for those who need it.
Disclaimers:  These are a series of statements to clarify OT/MP's positions on highly controversial issues taken up by the MP so that MP's position on these matters do not get lost in the discussion.
Privacy-Legal Notice:

  SUPPORTING RESOURCE ELEMENTS:

MASTER SITE MAP: presents all the elements of OT/MP on one page in order for you to go directly to any element or sub element.  You can bookmark this page for ease of returning to that part of OT/MP where you were last working, or to revisit a particular subsection after you have read it.
Bibliography:  this resource includes over 1,700 partially annotated references to the works that have supported the numerous content and specialty areas brought together to create the MP
Glossary: this includes definitions of 94 of the major scientific, Metaphysical, and "coined" technical terms used throughout OT/MP.
ESSAY: why the liberals and Democrates lost the 2004 election to right wing religious idiologies
    based upon an application of the principles MP
Notes: this presents footnotes containing special developmental material, references, asides, and commentary.
Scriptures: contains quotations from selected Scriptures of different faith groups and other Spiritual writing.
Guideposts:  the guideposts are summary paragraphs placed at key points across the development of the MP.   Provision is made for you to read these in sequence, independently of their context, to gain an outline of the entirety of OT/MP.  From each Guidepost, there is a link to take you directly to that part of the MP where that Guidepost is located.
MEDIATION PAGE: this a prototype application in conflict resolution through the use of a Spiritually grounded mediation model based on the concepts that define the MP.
Table of Mystical Succession: a partial listing of the succession of Mystical persons who have shaped the evolution of humanity's growing C/consciousness of itself and its cosmos.
Ecumenical Prayers:  these are a representative selection of Scripture from six major worldwide faith traditions to show some commonality in their relationship to the Universal GOD.
Resource Links: this is a collection of selected Metaphysical and Scientific links of major import for OT/MP.  There are also numerous links scattered across the MP where they are directly relevant to the topic under discussion.
Download/Print Options: this permits you to download selected portions of OT/MP to be printed or stored, retrieved and read by an html editor, or later versions of MS Word, or WordPerfect.
Research Proposal (First Draft):  this is for credentialed researchers interested in a Consciousness paradigm for investigating intercessory prayer in a health care population.
Applications: A draft of planned Phase II developments in applying the Mystical Paradigm in ways that many might find outrageous (before the encounter and understand the Mystical Paradigm.)
FORUM:  [Phase II] a discussion arena for selected topics in OT/MP for you to purse your own dialogue with others who are interested in certain of the diverse aspects of OT/MP.
Donation Page:  without support, this resource will soon have to come down.  I have exhausted all financial resources to bring it to the point of release. This page provides an opportunity for you to help nurture the ongoing growth and potential impact of the MP in terms of providing some financial support consistent with you means.

OT/MP is now released to the public for review, but it is not finished, not static. It is a work in progress.  It will continue to evolve even as you engage its many elements, hopefully with some feedback and guidance from you.   Within the MP, you will eventually discover why and how, you have not been brought to OT/MP by chance.  Some of you will find a role to play as a Builder in service to saving our nation and our humanity from our present downward course. Accordingly, my wish and prayer for each of you who have been led to this resource is that, by engaging its challenges, you experience for yourself many of those Spiritual and practical Blessings that the MP has brought to me in creating it.

May Love and Peace rest with you,
and their Blessings become yours,
 

Thomas E. Harries