Dreaming Change

Okay, so much is political again today here on the WWW. It’s okay. Gotta have the feels and causes, right?

Last night, there came another in a string of interesting dreams that’s been visiting me lately. Lucky for me, my dreams have become so much clearer, easier to translate this last decade since awakening has come.

So it was that an old teacher showed up with this map in my dream. My eyes scanned across it’s surface and I found that it had been written in a different language. The key to understanding it was understanding the language. I had assumed that if I were given a map in, say, Lithuanian, I’d still he able to read it. But not this one. I couldn’t tell what the scale was, what any of the words meant…it was more than just names for locations (which is easy enough to guess). But then, this was no ordinary map and this was no ordinary dream.

My teacher sat across from me, beaming in excitement over her discovery which she had unfolded in front of me. As this wordless exchange happened, I opened my mouth to ask her how to read it and I instantly returned to waking (and having overslept my alarm clock, too–sorry Hannah!).

Simply put, we cannot understand the new while using the old ways of thinking. We talk about how people don’t get us, how a political party or group of some kind is clueless about an issue, or how we repeat mistakes often with tragic results over and over. We keep doing things the same way, approaching a problem the same way all with no change in outcomes.

“Um…hello? Earth to human: the way to a new way of seeing the world is by changing the part of you that will allow for better comprehension: your mind.”

All the great teachers have taught this. Buddha did and so did Jesus (his were obfuscated by way of incorrect translation from Greek to Latin—check the word “metanoia” and how both Jesus and John the Baptist used it to better understand this one to get how they advocated “changing your mind”).

In helping to bring change in life, I have found that something always has to give in order to see things in a new way. You just can’t get there using the old map. Something that you take as belief, assumption, or that immovable pillar of understanding may in fact be blocking the way. It could be ANYTHING….a belief, a desire to stay rooted in being a victim (and cleverly not taking responsibility for ones’ feelings and subsequent actions) It might be how you think men should be treated, or how women should be treated. It might be a religious belief that was promulgated thousands of years in our past in tents by Bedouin-like tribes that still governs our behavior in the world in regards to each other. All of this can be shed through a simple act of radical willingness to bridge the gap, to understand by setting aside whatever is blocking our path.

It takes humility.

It removes our savage habit of retaliation against the “ignorant infidel” for their own lack of awareness. Blocked people at war with other’s own blocks or limitations. It’s rather hilarious when you think about it. And it would be a real belly laugh if it weren’t so incredibly serious. People will deny you, unfriend you, demonize, and even kill you over this. It’s hilarious for maybe three short seconds ’till the sh*t gets real. What I’m talking about are the principles involved in the forces that drive you, me, and everyone else here on the planet. Conditioning. Belief. Dogma. Go deeper and what drives us in a negative way is fear.

Curiously, the soul knows it’s contract with the multiverse and it’s implicit divinity, and it’s compass can be read when the way has been cleared of as much bias (conditioned belief) as possible….to read the maps that lead us into those new lands. Again, openess, ready for the memory banks to be wiped, the old programming scrapped, is required. And no, I don’t at all advocate ever following what another says is the way. Inquire, seek. It’s in us to know, to discover. Our past is littered with wrong belief.

Here in the U.S. we once believed that our colonizing North America was approved of by God. As we killed and marginalized the indigenous People here our ancestors actually believed God was on their side. I could cite hundreds more of these examples, but the point here is that no matter how good you think your model is, it is constrained and limited by the thinking in the past. In the sands of Ur, where Abraham lived, the concept of woman coming from a man’s rib was dreamed up. Talk about crafty! The moment someone protests the characterization of women as lesser, or an afterthought to the primary and blessed male of God, it is explained how sweet it is that men and women were once from the same flesh, joined as one and now forever seeking that union. You get the idea; mysoginistic bullshit out the yinyang. Still, in our day, it is a thing discussed as if it were real. We all have work to do. Let’s get to it, shall we?

Beyond your programmed beliefs about death penalties, life and death, homosexuality, dark or light-skinned people, or how the role of government, or ten thousand other things should be in our world, the pearl of truth will always emerge wordless but knowing. Our problem as Westerners is we havent a clue how to deal with truth neing a wordless knowing thing. We are so used to rational thought that the intuitive scares us, and when we are scared of something, we demonize it. We make jokes, we do anything to forestall actually trying to understand it. Part of reading that map is letting go of the fear that the new or different presents to us. I have known people who, awakened even, have lied and denied just as away to remain in their comfy place. Sadly, even in awakening there is the risk of becoming a comfortable place. It happened to me just months after the serpentine force rose in me, changing me. I had changed, hadn’t I? Relatively speaking, it was just a drop in the bucket. It seemed like a lot, but compared to the many summits above me, it was an important journey in the lowlands of a wild world.

To get anywhere I had to step outside of what everyone was saying in regards to the awakening experience in order for me to see it for what it is and then to make myself available to a whole new level. This changed me irrevocably, and I had an energetic force in me pushing the issue. I get it: it was easier to change with this gift by my side. But even those first six months spent in the tsunami waves did knock me apart, it was all relative. I had to keep asking questions of the world view I had in order to break on through to the other side (thank you Jim Morrison).

You don’t have to be awakened to begin changing your world view. You just begin by examining it. Just remember that to really see it, you will have to get out of your comfort zone.

Men have been quite comfortable aligning their desire to the beauty of women. This has led, along with paternalistic belief, to the objectification of women and rape culture. Now I ask you, how comfy is your desire now? How can you change how you see women so that your desire is not channeled on the way it once was? Or how about how as a woman you might view men as the stoic suck-it-up-no-nonsense kind of person, completely unaware how this map locks a man into an expectation of having no feeling, no sensitivity (because it’s being denied), resulting in male anger and rage. In both cases, these views of how we think things should be are dehumanizing to both women and men.

The way to change is to be aware they exist. Then, you observe honestly how they govern you and your outlook. Those outlooks master you. If you can be honest and listen to what others are saying, you can begin to catch the errors. Bear in mind that while you listen to others to catch where you might have gone wrong, each condition has it’s own layer of error or distortion, and you need to be able to see error and the right together at the same time. Every view will have its own distortions. An antiwar group could wind up advocating violence, for example, making them just as bad as the warring sides. A man can expect a rule to apply to everyone but himself. The same with a woman. These blocks keep us from seeing a new world. It is done with discernment and finesse. It’s probably not working if it doesn’t create a good deal of discomfort as one approaches being ready for the nuts and bolts of just letting the stuff go.

New maps for a new world await each of us. But always, we believe our old ways are the good ones until we glimpse the brutality in us that those beliefs represent. Until then, political memes, social memes, religious ones. Everyone shouting, no one wanting real dialog…I sit and continue my meditation and inner inquiry to find out what is blocking me to see that map.

~Namasté

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Mamma Love

I am not a big one for days we set aside in order to honor something. I was grumping recently about Earth Day because I felt every day should be Earth Day. But not Mother’s Day. For me, this is like a birthday, a celebration.

We all seem to be effected by how we were raised. For years I felt a deep sense of anger towards my Mother, a feeling that came from not getting what I needed in my early years of infancy. I was able to let that old hurt go by going deep into the experience and the feeling in order to really experience it. It is this one act that most often clears old long-standing blocks that will continue to cause problems going forward in life. Now, with that gone, I have been able to come to a new place in my relationship with my Mother. Being able to overcome, within ourselves, what is there that serves to separate us from ourselves serves to help us relate to the universe. This is an amazing outcome to self work. Most often, I have found, the problems we face with others are entirely self made. It goes back to what many teachers have observed about the nature of our expectation and resultant suffering when the world does not meet our own self-made expectations. All of this work has been, for me, about seeing things as they are. So on this Mother’s Day, I am all about What Is and celebrating that. And you know what? In perfect timing, along comes all this stuff showing me how I need to heal the womb of the world that is my own part, and this womb, interestingly, is felt right where it should be in the woman, except it is expressed as an etheric or energetic form within me. It has been coming up now as one of the last (it feels like) major issues to clear in my energy field. Since awakening, I have watched as center after center, chakra after chakra was cleansed of these old wounds. When the heart chakra was cleared, it was like an epiphany. Now, a similar kind of wound remains to heal, to let go. My feeling is that individually, it bears on the hurts that are connected to the creative fire of the feminine over my evolutionary spiral on this planet both as man and as woman. Healing that part helps others to heal, healing the planet, lifting our awareness, and changing the vibration here on Gaia. What could be more amazing as that?

For some of you, this might sound foreign, maybe even strange, but consider this: I have been a woman before in past lives. All of what I am in my universal essence has the experience of the feminine within me to the degree that I have taken lives to help add that to balance in physical what is in the spiritual. Awakened, I am more aware of that essential self more than ever. Far from making me bland or androgenous, it has helped me to understand more, relate better in some ways, and also to reach back into my own being for the resources I need to know the self I am “beyond” my current awareness here. The feminine has become more and more a part of this as I have overcome the hurdles that have stood in my way. As I have written over the past year or so, I have mentioned instances where I have encountered this inner feminine as an overarching archetype, a kind of feminine goddess of Parker. She is there in a number of dimensional forms or realities. It is no surprise that the problems I have had with my own Mother, birther, nurturer, have been the ones I have struggled with and am now learning to uproot, cleanse, heal, and bring to peace with. Our family can be our greatest teachers, you see. Every problem we face is a teaching opportunity in disguise.

In wondrous intelligence, nothing in our world is lost. All is transformed. I have always thought the idea of a hell was so wasteful of a deity…..until I really realized hell is just something we came up with, but as an objective reality created by some angry father god, no. So in healing, you never lose anything. Your own Mother comes right along, transfigured herself most likely in your own eyes as you learn to see her for just as she is which is, I think, the greatest honor we can pay our Mothers because what Mother does not delight in her children really truly seeing her (and perhaps in a more complete way maybe for the first time).

Tomorrow I get to have my Mother all to myself. She seems to need that these days as she ages. Life has conspired that it will be this way, and I am looking forward to it. So to all Mothers out there, to the children who have them ( smiles), here is to Mothers!

It’s Afoot….

Today is a gift.  Another day that I get to spend working on my book.  I am taking a break from writing in order to write. I just finished a section that had to do with larger effects across the Collective Consciousness that are happening currently.  And it is exciting.

I can remember those early days of awakening where I looked out through new windows, a returned sense of perception. I sensed I could feel the collective awareness, knew I was doing this now, and in sensing it, could feel, like a pulse, what was moving in the Collective Awareness.  I had never heard of anyone sensing in this way so I kept quiet about it for a while except for my closest of friends like Alison who has been experiencing this since she was young.  About six months ago while visiting my grandmother I listened to an interview with U.G. Krishnamurti when I had little to do in the house where I was staying.  Krishnamurti was describing the same thing I had experienced and said how we awaken to this state, less of just the individual and more of the Collective Consciousness. “Yes, yes!” I thought, “like shifting gears from one singular focus to a much larger focus which now makes up the whole of my experience now….”

What I experienced in those early days was a very clear awareness that something was afoot!  It was!  All these beings, people, all awakening!  I could feel them like stars shimmering against the dark coat of night….each pulsation having its effect on the whole.  A giant webwork, a network of being that was becoming conscious at this level!  What I felt within this was how the Collective felt “pregnant” with awakening, that the incident of awakening would expand.  You could just FEEL it.  It wasn’t rocket science, it wasn’t something hard to get at, at least I didn’t think so.  As I observed it seemed that more and more younger people were waking up all in a more spontaneous way, or with the barest of triggers.  What I feel now is a feeling of something rolling out, unfolding.  In some ways, I have focused much more on my own process, on me, instead of looking out into the Collective.  I think at the time this new feeling felt novel so I spent a lot of time just poking it and feeling around inside of it like some new skin.  I know, that probably sounded weird.  At least it isn’t an old bear skin or something…

Something is being birthed.

After about two years of experiencing kundalini, I had this feeling like there was something more, and that some of the ideas that people were saying about soul connections, twin souls, just didn’t make sense to me anymore.  The idea that kundalini yoga being the only way to wake up was obviously proven incorrect since I had done so without it or without any discernible practice.  I mean, yes, I had my own form of meditation which I had used for years, but I never read up on it, I never followed anyone’s method or technique.  I was a do-it-yourselfer;  DIY kundalini!   And then kundalini shifted into a whole new gear, ripping me to shreds pretty much (or so it felt—I was actually just resisting it…that happens when you resist the waves instead of surf them!).  Tsunami waves broke apart the old me and left the core of me on the beach to decide what was next.  As I struggled through this portion of the process I was visited by someone I call “my zen guy” and who wound up looking like an actual zen master named Taishen Deshimuru.  I mention it because of just how similar he appeared, although the living Taishen died about two decades ago….This was what I was writing about in my book just a few moments ago….

But anyway…..zen guy.  I was feeling this hard spot inside of me and it caused me sadness and upset.  He came to me and sat down to my side asked me “Why do you struggle?  Don’t you know that all of this is happening just as it should?  Don’t you realize that all of the monks and followers and aspirants all through the ages have each unwittingly had their effect by helping to create what is here now?  Each devotional prayer has helped to shape this template and now it is ready for you and all of your kind to simply step into it.  This is not a crevass to jump.  It is like stepping outside.  It is one small step.  You only need to step into it to inhabit it, to be it. ”  After he said that, it seemed such a simple thing; like all of this was about stepping out of an old suit of clothes into one that fit  better.  Thus began my thinking in terms of the Collective not just as something I felt but that was now a tangible part of life experience.  On the one hand, it all seemed so big and formidable, but on the other, it seemed to simple.  We get to choose whether we want it easy or hard, since we are creating it.   We can, in the words of someone I recently read — we can “unfuck the world.”  I know perhaps it sounds  bit indelicate, but this is what is happening.  We are loosening the threads that bind us and freeing ourselves…..person by person.  Can you feel the sweet air of freedom?

Now, back to writing!

The Dance of Tantra

I will admit that I used the title to grab your attention.  When we think of the word tantra, it sound exotic, a spiritual way to feel sexy, or maybe a sensual form of spirituality.  Unfortunately, tantra I think is being utilized in a way that helps sell workshops on how to be a better lover, but maybe not always a better person.

I will keep this short and sweet.

Beneath what you feel is what has been overlooked.  What is overlooked is what it yet to be resolved.  What is not resolved turns in you and is your master.  Most people simply do not have the awareness of what lies deeply lodged in them.  Sometimes they need the awareness in others to point it out.  Sometimes we have seen it but ignore it or do not see it for what it is.  But as you do the work to surrender all of your junk, to die to what you were to be born to what you can be, your experience of energy will absolutely change.

It will be like layers of old clothes are taken from your body as you return naked but intensely alive.  What was removed was what you thought defined you.  And for a time, it did.  Your hates, your dislikes, your fears, your worries, your concerns, your hopes and dreams (often driven partly by some fears and worries!!) all come off of you and what remains?

You do.

So your experience of what you think tantra is will change dramatically.

I have discovered how sexual energy can actually be sublimated fear and rage.  Really?  Yes, really.  But its not easy to get to, but its always there if you look at it.  Look at HOW you feel with your sexual energy.  really be honest with yourself.  Do you ever feel an edge of fear?  DO you ever feel an edge of rage for some reason?  Do you tell yourself “Oh, that’s just my animal nature coming out,” or “It’s only natural to want to pull hair or rip off clothes….”  Look more deeply into this.  FEEL into it.  Do you feel yourself expanding or do you feel some part of you contracting?  Do you feel sexual energy as sexual tension that has to be released?  There is something deeper down.  We can get so drawn in by the draw, the yearning that this energy drives in us.  But the energy is not like some perfectly sacred thing that is perfect.  it is only as good as our insides.  We are like a lampshade that has any number of smudges and darkened regions that when cleared allow the light to shine through without any struggle to see or know it.  The sad thing to me is that tantra is so often sold as a sexual experience when in truth it is a path of liberation that only comes about when you are willing to remove all of the old lenses that have made it seem so raw and even hard sometimes.  At first tantra might lure us through lust, but it wins us through bliss.  Not just yearning, but a yearning that is like a river that flows into larger and larger tributaries and then opens out into a sea and then vast ocean.  It is hard to know sometimes where all of this will lead, but if you want to know where you are, observe your yearning and how it makes you feel.

It was once explained that tantric temples were themselves entirely empty and plain.  They might have had incredible depictions of sexual love on their outsides.  They might even have sensual sculptures as one enters.  The central areas, though, were plain and remarkably empty.  Perhaps that might serve as a clue to what lies ahead in this journey.

Part of the answer lies in death.  Death, you see, is the soul of surrender.  Implied in it is a form of surrender that is ultimate.  In dying, we give up all investment in what has come before in order to know what lies ahead.  By conquering our fear by simply allowing ourselves to allow what is inevitable to be, we die.  We die to what we conceived of or were.  And the truth is, we can die many many deaths in any day or week or year.  Most often, we cling to life over our fear of death.  When we embrace death, not actual physical death, but the soul of what death is, we are transformed.

In releasing the fear we have of our ultimate death you can also begin to free yourself from the fear of other forms of death, the ones that actually make the biggest difference in your life.  By learning to be fearless and to live in the present, you overcome death.  You do. It isn’t that you become immortal, it isn’t that you will continue to live in your body.  No.  Your body is designed to live a certain time and then return to the earth.  It serves you in the same way that a petal serves a flowering tree.  The petal will soon fall and become the earth even as the tree continues to live and grow ever larger.  Your soul is like this tree.  It lives on forever.  Countless lives, realities, worlds.  You may not see it or know it.  You may not have to, either.  That isn’t the answer.  Knowing about a past life isn’t as important as being able to surrender all that hung you up in that past life and that also hangs you up in this one.  As you remove these barriers to becoming, you also open new doors to perception, memory and awareness.  It is just that simple.  Your higher self knows the many lives you have lived, yes, for THAT is important to it.  What is important to you is that you get this one right.  In so doing, you do a service to all the selves that you are….that you have been and shall be, for even as you release fear of death, you also open up new possibilities in living.  You begin to realize that you are just one of many bodies, lives, experiences.  Suddenly the picture broadens because your perception also broadens.  Here, fear of death begins to wane.  We each cease the grasping to the material that held us and which kept us powerless through fear.

it is the same with tantra.  It is the same with a smile.  It is the same with food.  The same with music and a billion other things.  They all change.  You change.  It is marvelously simple and direct.  And the way to making this road smooth is to know that you are more than just this one self, or life.  As ego slips away, something more slips in. Your larger or expanded self has more and more room to simply be.  Before, it had been crowded out.  Now there is more room for it to express itself.

Then the old sexual draw becomes something lighter and more wondrous than ever before.  We are each here, knitting heaven and earth together.  When you can face death head-on, those countless deaths to what you thought were ideas and investments that were so important but now no longer matter, you touch the essence of this path.  It is not for the feint of heart, but we were all born with radiant hearts and souls.  So how about we let in that light?