November 1980
Fear And Courage
Fear is lack of information. It is ignorance. It is the belief that one has lost control of any given situation or group of situations.
Sunbeams
“I can’t believe that,” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said, in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
An Interview With Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan is head of the Sufi Order in the West and founder of Omega Institute, which sponsored Cancer Dialogue '80. A Sufi Leader since the death of his father, Haznat Inayat Khan, in 1926, he studied at the Sorbonne and Oxford, and under many spiritual teachers in the East. Now in his sixties, Pir Vilayat has in the Last two decades overseen the growth of the worldwide Sufi movement.
An Interview With Stephanie Matthews-Simonton
SUN: You said that preventive medicine will come about when we teach parents to raise their children differently. Could you elaborate on that?
Mrs. Reilly And Her Little Ignatius
Book Review
We speak of dialogue as being authentic, but we seldom know if it is. When Mark Twain claimed to have used four modified varieties of the “Pike County” dialect, or John O’Hara to have duplicated the speech patterns of eastern Pennsylvanians, or Ring Lardner to have caught the exact flavor of conversation around a ballpark, there weren’t many readers who could have checked up on them, and thirty years later nobody cared anyway. What we ask of dialogue is not that it be authentic but that it seem so, and that it be lively, colorful, and interesting. Good dialogue does not reproduce speech, but imitates it, especially its rhythms, in a kind of shorthand. When a beginning writer with a sharp memory tries to reproduce speech, it is inevitably windy, lifeless, and dull.
Mysteries And Metaphors
A New Look At Cancer
The train winds through lush countryside and crowded cities, like a finger tracing a vein, clogged with bleak tenements and abandoned factories and neighborhoods long out of control. If this land is our shared body, the cities are the vital organs, and they are largely uncared for, plagued by the waste and tension of modern life, unloved.
On The Mind And Cancer
This was one of the most important and thoughtful talks given at Cancer Dialogue ’80. Stephanie Matthews-Simonton is a psychotherapist and the director of counseling at the Cancer Counseling and Research Center in Fort Worth, Texas. What she has to say — about how we make ourselves sick, and how we can become well — applies to us all.
