Today I would like to share with you an excerpt from the Introduction of my book Connecting the Dots Ancient Wisdom Modern Science.
The Earth is Flat
Hi. I’m here to tell you the world is flat. Oops — wrong paradigm! Paradigms are accepted ways of looking at and understanding our world. Put another way, paradigms form frameworks of accepted thought that govern a society’s view of anything, from physics to geography, even the concepts of good and bad. I find paradigms fascinating because they reveal so much about where a culture stands.
People can be comforted by paradigms because they give the illusion that the corners of our world are tacked down, safe, predictable. They can also give us a sense of belonging; if we believe in the same paradigm, we seem connected. Maybe you even feel “safe” to me, or like you are a “good” person, just because you believe the same things I do. Conversely, people with beliefs outside our paradigm can seem foreign, even scary.
The problem with belief systemsis that we often stop “seeing” things that exist outside those systems, even if they are right in front of our faces. They can also lead to complacency, especially if they encourage people not to thinkfor themselves, exactly what our current paradigm teaches.
If you would like to learn more, my book is available onAmazon.
Can I make a suggestion? Never write a book that is 450 pages long! Also, while you are paying attention, let me add, never write a book that has centuries of footnotes! Yep, writing this book has been a trip!
Not really being in charge of what needed to be written, at least not on a conscious level, I just kept writing what came to mind, like pouring milk out of a pail that just kept refilling. It was a messy process just trying to keep ahead of expanding content.
When I started working with editors, I found that they preferred Word to work on my manuscript. I had started the book in a program called Scrivener which was really helpful for a piece with so much research behind it. But switching back and forth between the documents my editors produced in Word, with mine in Scrivener proved too much for me. So about 4 years ago, I pulled the document out of Scrivener placed it in Word, and discovered (not for the first time) that I really should have taken a tutorial on how to create footnotes in scrivener before using that feature.
This penchant I have for jumping into projects full throttle, knowing nothing about the product (but trusting that I will be able to figure it out along the way, has bitten me in the arse before (but somehow, I keep doing it …). Did I mention that the book has over 250 footnotes? Or that I am dyslexic, and that tiny letters and numbers are VERY hard to copy without reversing or scrambling the order? (Yes, lots of fun!) Not to mention that I hadn’t created a footnote in 40 years. Speaking of which did you know that there are different requirements for footnoting different media? OMG!
So, I migrate my book out of Scrivener only to discover that I had not entered the footnotes correctly in Scrivener, and now none of them are embedded in the document. Meaning, none of them transfer with it! I had to reenter all the footnotes, some of them being four years old at that point and some I couldn’t find, (not surprising given both my lack of experience with footnotes and my dyslexia!). This meant that after all my hard work, I found that now I had to rewrite parts of the book.
Check Back Next Tuesday for more in this series …
Copyright 2022 Lia Russ
If Connecting The Dots Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science sounds like something you’d be interested in, check it out on Amazon…
So there I was, lying in bed, wondering if it was ever going to stop. Wondering if I was ever going to be able to sleep again. I get out of bed, it’s 1:28 am, thinking I guess I might as well work if I’m not sleeping… I go to my computer and open up the manuscript for my book Winging It, which after 7 years and at 346 pgs is now done!
Only I can’t direct my thoughts to the editing of this memoir of my journey to Asia at nineteen with $500.00 and a round trip ticket from LA to Tokyo. Instead, I am having revelations regarding molecular structure, light, healing, and the secrets of the universe… and I MUST write them down, or I feel like my mind will explode!
Night after night this happens until I consent to put Winging It completely aside and dedicate time to … what? Writing down a mass of information that was apparently reproducing in my brain at an alarming rate?
There was no form, no plan, no concept of what this information was to become. Just revelation after revelation. All the dots of fascinating information that I had collected over 40 plus years, were crystalizing in my mind’s eye like a supersaturated solution cooled to the point of falling out. Everything was making sense.
My heightened awareness of energy, my fascination with the natural world, natural healing, crystals, animals, plants, all the old teachings I had taken on… my travels, even the constant pain of isolation that repeated itself throughout my life… it all came together.
I still had no inkling of what was taking shape on paper, there were so many divergent yet tangentially related subjects. But there I was day after day, researching each of my theories to see if they were supported in modern science. Confirming old bits of knowledge that had been shared with me in my journey towards wholeness and healing in my life. Struggling to learn new skill sets.
At some point, I realized I was putting this information together in ways that I wasn’t hearing others talk about! More wonderful was that when I shared these dots I had connected with others, it was helping them. People started asking me when they could get a copy of my book… which I had started calling “How It Is”, and later, “Finding Our Way”.
The books’ journey to completion took eight years – there was no procrastination involved – just massive amounts of work (like over 250 footnotes to back up each of my theories). Somewhere along this journey, (as happens so often with people who are unable to follow society’s dictates and shut out the energetic world), I realized that what I was doing, was only possible because of my gift(s). Gifts that I had never really taken seriously before. I think this is a fairly common experience for folks who have not been able to shut off the awareness of their gifts.
It is hard to explain how having a gift, which no one else around you use or talks about, ends up fading into the background. You still see things or hear things, but you write them off, instead of exploring them. They can become an annoyance, something to be gotten over or compensated for, in the everyday grind of trying to fit in and succeed in the modern world. They are not seen as the gift they truly are for helping you get through life.
One of the gifts I employed in creating this book is my ability to see into the darkness (could be referred to as “owl medicine” – see my chapter titled “Mouse Medicine & More”). But it’s not that I see in physical darkness, instead, I see inside of people and processes and information. As a matter of fact, I can shift my point of perception until I am looking at all of the information I have ever learned and see it spread out above my head like constellations … it’s almost as if these points of light begin to glow and reveal connections that are not apparent normally, making them take on new significance.
They begin to create a pattern that has meaning. This ability allows me to hold and view a huge amount of information. Information that I can sift through to find correlations that most do not see until I point it out to them! And thus the true name of the book was revealed, Connecting The Dots: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science.
Copyright 2022 Lia Russ
If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, check it out on Amazon…
Connecting The Dots 