Publisher's Synopsis
CEDAR BUG BOARDS: In Search of the Truly TrivialI was Catholic until in 1967, when a supposedly homeless man came to the door, asked for, and was refused, a bed for the night. The event might have seemed trivial, its consequences less so. In the resulting soul-searching I became agnostic, even atheist, though still during this period I was at times aware of some force beyond the material that spoke to me.In 1971, in the fallout from the failure of a cherished enterprise, I attempted to return to my Catholic roots, but found I couldn't. After a period of anguish, I discovered first Buddhism, then Quakerism, each in ways arguably more trivial than the one that had led me from Rome. Trivial in the sense that I stumbled upon each by different strokes of chance.I was also taking my dreams, more seriously than most do these days. Analysis of significant dreams (not all dreams are significant) plays a major role in Cedar Bug Boards, along with a range of other phenomena that sceptics dismiss as unworthy of human attention.I continued to develop interests in new age ideas, and in varieties of Mahayana Buddhism, until in May of 2004 I experienced another event which, again, could be dismissed by others as trivial, but for me was earthshaking. It led directly to this quest over the last seven/eight years to understand and to write about it, its consequences, and its spiritual significance.All these "trivial" yet for me highly significant happenings presuppose the existence of a real spiritual power that does not interfere in our lives unless we ask it to. This is not to say that it may not put signs, and even wonders, in our way. The power is well known to Quakers, but for most of them it seems not to manifest in any particularly paranormal or overtly supernatural way. Yet I was finding that the power I was becoming aware of could, and did. Thus this first volume of three (update in 2018, it will finally be four) deliberately attaches the earlier account from The Quaking Buddha to these later very personal revelations of how this change was experienced. The second volume, View from the Playpen explores these in much greater detail. Phenomena such as mediumship, prophecy, consulting of oracles, near death experiences and miracle became central to my understanding of the world, along with the actual experience (though it curiously only lasted for three and a half months) of direct communication, as I felt it to be, with such higher powers. I painstakingly recorded their seemingly trivial workings in my life, which mostly took the form of what Carl Jung famously patented as "synchronicities", as well as other supposedly chance events.
