The New Age is beautiful and vital in that it frees the soul from religion with spirituality. Without the contribution of New Age Spirituality, the relgions could not fulfill their oracles of global Redemption.
The New Age sometimes gets a bad rap for being flakey, nutty and unscientific. Every group has a Shadow. No group is safe from becoming a parody of itself.
As with the religions, New Age rhetoric can sound self-important. Reading between its lines, we can detect fear and violation. A less polarizing balance than self-importance is the clown: Christian clowns, sacred clowns, and Zen clowns. They are facets of the Tarot’s Fool, and, as such, are vessels of evolving wisdom.
Take away the fools, clowns and self-importance, and there is left an Inner-Child who is afraid, violated and without dignity. S/he needs the time and space to feel; to thaw out.
Adults approximate the Inner-Child when they clown, but they cannot impersonate the spirit of play that is the Inner-Child’s lifeblood. For him/her, all drama is play and all work is play. S/he cannot be recovered except through play, which can be the most counterintuitive thing imaginable. Play throws culture out the window. Here is an example, from my memoirs (written in the third person about my former self):
George threw some more art out the window as well as some money [about 1,500 Hungarian forints, approximately eight dollars] and his ATM card. He had a vision from outside the flat, of his hand casting away the artwork and money…[The vision came from] Georgie [George’s his Inner-Child]…outside his body, outside the flat, gliding blissfully…
This morning I was sent a link to a webpage [1] of Castanadan wisdom that seemed to remark directly on the money-jettisoning episode: “…knowledge without sobriety is useless.” Perhaps, but acts of foolishness are lessons. Lessons are more than useful. They are essential to knowledge.
The author of the webpage (which I read only in part because it is so long that anyone not raised in front of a computer would have a hard time finishing it) writes at length about warriors and petty tyrants – how petty tyrants are essential to the warrior’s training. He writes:
Nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power…The perfect ingredient for the making of a superb [warrior] is a petty tyrant with unlimited prerogatives.
I had a run-in with a petty tyrant at the bank last week – a lady who was reluctant to refund an overdraft fee that should not have been placed on my account. She was imperious and condescending, turning my gracious and friendly mood into black sludge for a few minutes. In parting I told her, “This is not my world,” implying that I am not from her planet.
The author of the Castaneda article would have said that had I less self-importance, the run-in would not have bothered me. Pride was the difference between being a fool and being a “warrior.” For the warrior, all conflict must be play.
Well, my next stop was at the Post Office. I was still inflamed from the unpleasantry at the bank. A customer at the front of the line was soothingly telling the clerk, “Just relax. Just take care of yourself. It’s OK.”
[1] Link to the webpage: The Fire from Within.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Fairy Mathematics
The night after this year’s Cyber Monday I had this dream:
My anima lives inside my coat. Some people need to speak to her, and I let them by moving my head out of the way so she can speak from the inside of my hood. She is needed to solve a crime. She says we need to stop thinking in terms of stealing. She becomes a tiny fairy and leaves on a bus, riding in a compartment accessible from the outside.
A bald man pickpockets me and runs off toward the subway. I fly after him, going down into it, but I can’t catch him because he disappears into the crowd.
Hair represents thought, that which issues from the head. Being bald, the dream’s pickpocket is as unthinking as an infant. He is commerce on Cyber Monday. On Cyber Monday, commerce is a hairless, hungry infant instinctively feeding. It fed on the numbers in my bank account and disappeared into the collective.
Money is a tool of the archetypal Thief. The Thief is an impersonal personification of how people steal from themselves. The Thief is at work when a person is stressing over money. The Thief is most powerful when a person bathes in money. Those who bathe in money build giant, edible replicas from confection at Christmastime to eat them only with their eyes.
The force the Thief exerts on people – through money, disease, accident, fate, injustice and violence – appears irresistible. Fighting it is a way of stealing back from it. This works for revolutionaries like King and Gandhi, but not for soul-seekers. Stealing back from the Thief – from racism, from colonialism – only makes the Thief subtler. The subtler the Thief, the more it falls to the soul-seeker to manage it.
To neutralize the Thief, one must not compromise what one has and has to give. This awakens the anima, the Soul of Man – the fairy from the dream. The fairy always has enough. She rides the dream’s bus for free.
She is needed to solve a crime. She says we need to stop thinking in terms of stealing.
The fairy would say that until people stop stealing from themselves, there will be thieves in the world to compensate – to dramatize their self-robbery externally, as in a waking-dream.
Learning not to steal from oneself is a process that demands attention to subtlety. The reason fairies are small is that they are subtle. The feminine spirit is subtle, and even subtler where the Thief steals its light. So long as the Thief keeps the feminine from fully living, there will be death and rebirth.
Paradise is all around, but subtly: in children, animals, plants, music, dance, art, love, self-possession, sensuality, spirituality, and Divine personages of man & woman; for example, Jesus & Sophia: Vishnu & Lakshmi; Buddha & the Dakini; the New Adam & his anima. Subtract drama from these by neutralizing the Thief with understanding and Paradise is the remainder.
Paradise + the Thief = the World.
The World + understanding = Paradise.
Atlas under stands.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
My anima lives inside my coat. Some people need to speak to her, and I let them by moving my head out of the way so she can speak from the inside of my hood. She is needed to solve a crime. She says we need to stop thinking in terms of stealing. She becomes a tiny fairy and leaves on a bus, riding in a compartment accessible from the outside.
A bald man pickpockets me and runs off toward the subway. I fly after him, going down into it, but I can’t catch him because he disappears into the crowd.
Hair represents thought, that which issues from the head. Being bald, the dream’s pickpocket is as unthinking as an infant. He is commerce on Cyber Monday. On Cyber Monday, commerce is a hairless, hungry infant instinctively feeding. It fed on the numbers in my bank account and disappeared into the collective.
Money is a tool of the archetypal Thief. The Thief is an impersonal personification of how people steal from themselves. The Thief is at work when a person is stressing over money. The Thief is most powerful when a person bathes in money. Those who bathe in money build giant, edible replicas from confection at Christmastime to eat them only with their eyes.
The force the Thief exerts on people – through money, disease, accident, fate, injustice and violence – appears irresistible. Fighting it is a way of stealing back from it. This works for revolutionaries like King and Gandhi, but not for soul-seekers. Stealing back from the Thief – from racism, from colonialism – only makes the Thief subtler. The subtler the Thief, the more it falls to the soul-seeker to manage it.
To neutralize the Thief, one must not compromise what one has and has to give. This awakens the anima, the Soul of Man – the fairy from the dream. The fairy always has enough. She rides the dream’s bus for free.
She is needed to solve a crime. She says we need to stop thinking in terms of stealing.
The fairy would say that until people stop stealing from themselves, there will be thieves in the world to compensate – to dramatize their self-robbery externally, as in a waking-dream.
Learning not to steal from oneself is a process that demands attention to subtlety. The reason fairies are small is that they are subtle. The feminine spirit is subtle, and even subtler where the Thief steals its light. So long as the Thief keeps the feminine from fully living, there will be death and rebirth.
Paradise is all around, but subtly: in children, animals, plants, music, dance, art, love, self-possession, sensuality, spirituality, and Divine personages of man & woman; for example, Jesus & Sophia: Vishnu & Lakshmi; Buddha & the Dakini; the New Adam & his anima. Subtract drama from these by neutralizing the Thief with understanding and Paradise is the remainder.
Paradise + the Thief = the World.
The World + understanding = Paradise.
Atlas under stands.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Issa's Shopping Tips
Brian George, visionary artist, Amy’s Friend (no relation): I had a dream that both of us were in. We made repeated attempts to decode the works of Kobayashi Issa, the Japanese poet, which apparently contained some key to world events, advice on travel, and a number of shopping tips.
When I got up this morning, I subscribed to the "Daily Issa" service, which sends out one new Issa haiku every day. Based on the dream, I thought that perhaps this might function as a kind of oracle. The site also provides a map of all subscribers to the service around the world. Can they be plotted on some Pythagorean graph? --In that direction madness lies! We shall see...
Amy: In general, things Japanese in dreams have to do with eternity (though perhaps this is not so for the Japanese themselves.) In terms of Anima Mundi, Japan is eternity – not only because of the aesthetic values of the Japanese, but also because they were blown to Kingdom Come.
Perhaps the dream is suggestive of new perspectives on time/eternity concerning psychic travel and what to invest value/time in.
It could be that your immediate response to the dream – subscribing to the "Daily Issa" service – is the exact opposite of the implications of the dream. That is, you ignored the shopping tips.
This kind of thinking: The site also provides a map of all subscribers to the service around the world. Can they be plotted on some Pythagorean graph? is indeed madness. If it does anything, it keeps synchronicity at bay. Synchronicity is a “moment” of eternity. Every moment in eternity is synchronistic. Eventually, consciousness will become a river of synchronistic moments blending together, and then music will arise effortlessly from being to drown out death.
I would suggest never following anything too far on the Internet – and letting it reach out to you instead. It is an ocean – the world outside the land.
I have tried a million times to act directly on hints from my dreams – like you did with your subscription - and it has never once borne fruit. I think the best way to honor a dream is often through an attitude, behavior, or perspective adjustment.
Here is an excerpt from my memoir “Scabies,” covering 6/98 – 12/99:
Aboard the subway en route to the station my mind was revving, aware that it was unalterably true that at any given moment I could see the wholeness of the universe by perceiving it symbolically. In caricature, my mind was working like this: the positioning of the passengers in this subway car spells “Capricorn” (my starsign) in semaphore, which, when arranged backwards at Machu Picchu on the solstice, would produce a shadow with the shape of the teeth on a key that opened a door to a secret chamber in a Russian basilica that was named after a dancing monk of whom Jerry Garcia got a tattoo on my birthday--Beatrix’s echo kept reminding me, “So what?”
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
When I got up this morning, I subscribed to the "Daily Issa" service, which sends out one new Issa haiku every day. Based on the dream, I thought that perhaps this might function as a kind of oracle. The site also provides a map of all subscribers to the service around the world. Can they be plotted on some Pythagorean graph? --In that direction madness lies! We shall see...
Amy: In general, things Japanese in dreams have to do with eternity (though perhaps this is not so for the Japanese themselves.) In terms of Anima Mundi, Japan is eternity – not only because of the aesthetic values of the Japanese, but also because they were blown to Kingdom Come.
Perhaps the dream is suggestive of new perspectives on time/eternity concerning psychic travel and what to invest value/time in.
It could be that your immediate response to the dream – subscribing to the "Daily Issa" service – is the exact opposite of the implications of the dream. That is, you ignored the shopping tips.
This kind of thinking: The site also provides a map of all subscribers to the service around the world. Can they be plotted on some Pythagorean graph? is indeed madness. If it does anything, it keeps synchronicity at bay. Synchronicity is a “moment” of eternity. Every moment in eternity is synchronistic. Eventually, consciousness will become a river of synchronistic moments blending together, and then music will arise effortlessly from being to drown out death.
I would suggest never following anything too far on the Internet – and letting it reach out to you instead. It is an ocean – the world outside the land.
I have tried a million times to act directly on hints from my dreams – like you did with your subscription - and it has never once borne fruit. I think the best way to honor a dream is often through an attitude, behavior, or perspective adjustment.
Here is an excerpt from my memoir “Scabies,” covering 6/98 – 12/99:
Aboard the subway en route to the station my mind was revving, aware that it was unalterably true that at any given moment I could see the wholeness of the universe by perceiving it symbolically. In caricature, my mind was working like this: the positioning of the passengers in this subway car spells “Capricorn” (my starsign) in semaphore, which, when arranged backwards at Machu Picchu on the solstice, would produce a shadow with the shape of the teeth on a key that opened a door to a secret chamber in a Russian basilica that was named after a dancing monk of whom Jerry Garcia got a tattoo on my birthday--Beatrix’s echo kept reminding me, “So what?”
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Birds of Paradise 2
During a night of rites, in spring 1998 - the season of my initiation onto the spiritual path – there were about 100 birds were screeching clamorously and ominously in my parents’ backyard
A few months later I started hearing birds singing sweetly in my head. I could only hear them when my mind was relatively quiet. I wondered if they were the Birds of Paradise.
In 1999, on a few mornings at winter’s end, I was awakened from sleep by the song of mockingbirds. I was living in Hungary where mockingbirds’ song is utterly bizarre. Instead of methodically moving from one song to the next, all the songs are patched together into a crazy-sounding jumble without any repetition or sense of predictability. In the songs, I could hear what was to become of my mind, when all logic and sense flew away in the coming year.
A year later, in spring 2000, as my female soul emerged into consciousness, my male self submerged into psychosis. Processing what was happening was like deconstructing the mockingbird’s song, and assigning each piece of it to the bird to which it first belonged.
After calibrating the psychosis this way for a few weeks, I moved into ever deeper states of existential crisis, till finally one morning – when I believed the world was ending – I heard the Birds of Paradise louder than ever. These ones were not in my head, but calling from the rooftops of nearby flats.
Since then, the birds I hear singing inside me have come and gone at intervals. Generally, the closer I feel to myself, and the more lucid I am, the more I hear them.
Recently, I have received a number of lessons about the association of birds with death. [1] Most recently, last weekend my family buried an elderly matriarch. As I left home in newly fallen snow, en route to the service, a bird was calling from my rooftop.
The song of the Birds of Paradise is that of the freeing of spirit from body, of being welcomed to an eternal home. It is the song linking death back to Life.
[1] One of the lessons about birds and death was through a story on NPR’s “This American Life” about the death of Spalding Gray. Here is NPR’s preface:
Kathie Russo’s husband was Spalding Gray, who was best known for delivering monologues onstage—like "Monster in a Box," and "Swimming to Cambodia." On January 10, 2004, he went missing. Witnesses said they saw him on the Staten Island Ferry that night. Two months later, his body was pulled out of the East River. Kathie tells the story of the night he disappeared, and about how, in the weeks following, she and each of their three children were visited by a bird, who seemed to be delivering a message to them. (10 minutes)
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
A few months later I started hearing birds singing sweetly in my head. I could only hear them when my mind was relatively quiet. I wondered if they were the Birds of Paradise.
In 1999, on a few mornings at winter’s end, I was awakened from sleep by the song of mockingbirds. I was living in Hungary where mockingbirds’ song is utterly bizarre. Instead of methodically moving from one song to the next, all the songs are patched together into a crazy-sounding jumble without any repetition or sense of predictability. In the songs, I could hear what was to become of my mind, when all logic and sense flew away in the coming year.
A year later, in spring 2000, as my female soul emerged into consciousness, my male self submerged into psychosis. Processing what was happening was like deconstructing the mockingbird’s song, and assigning each piece of it to the bird to which it first belonged.
After calibrating the psychosis this way for a few weeks, I moved into ever deeper states of existential crisis, till finally one morning – when I believed the world was ending – I heard the Birds of Paradise louder than ever. These ones were not in my head, but calling from the rooftops of nearby flats.
Since then, the birds I hear singing inside me have come and gone at intervals. Generally, the closer I feel to myself, and the more lucid I am, the more I hear them.
Recently, I have received a number of lessons about the association of birds with death. [1] Most recently, last weekend my family buried an elderly matriarch. As I left home in newly fallen snow, en route to the service, a bird was calling from my rooftop.
The song of the Birds of Paradise is that of the freeing of spirit from body, of being welcomed to an eternal home. It is the song linking death back to Life.
[1] One of the lessons about birds and death was through a story on NPR’s “This American Life” about the death of Spalding Gray. Here is NPR’s preface:
Kathie Russo’s husband was Spalding Gray, who was best known for delivering monologues onstage—like "Monster in a Box," and "Swimming to Cambodia." On January 10, 2004, he went missing. Witnesses said they saw him on the Staten Island Ferry that night. Two months later, his body was pulled out of the East River. Kathie tells the story of the night he disappeared, and about how, in the weeks following, she and each of their three children were visited by a bird, who seemed to be delivering a message to them. (10 minutes)
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Birds of Paradise 1
Last September I dreamed: I float downstream till awakened to self-recognition by an animal.
The psyche symbolizes the unconscious with water. Water represents unrealized potential. In the dream I am my unrealized self, unaware that I am flowing with the River of Life. I am then awakened to myself by an animal.
In all life forms there are aspects of people; mainly feeling, but more particularly, a plant’s rootedness, an insect’s stillness, a dog’s lack of inhibition.
For most of my life I have been afraid of dogs because of their excitability. It may have begun when, as a male tot, I was trampled by a dog and never recovered from it. My male self never grew up because of the doglike characteristics which people have – their pack behavior, excitability, blind loyalty. In people, these characteristics translate into mistrust of individuality, disrespectfulness, and ignorance.
My male self is a child I call Georgie. I am his mother. Dogs feel Georgie’s fear and go into attack mode, which only compounds his fear. He has been getting better though. Watching Caesar Milan’s “Dog Whisperer” has helped. Dreams help, too, as far as illuminating where Georgie’s fear comes from. In one dream he is telepathically hearing dogs think. About my male self, they think, “He does not feel OK in his body.”
True. Alienation from his body was a main reason why he wasn’t able to stay male-identified after he grew up. Being in my female body, I feel more confident with dogs, but still there is a toddler inside me who does not stay “in his body” when he sees a dog.
There is so much to learn from plants and animals in that they are humans, just without higher human capacities for thought, art, science, wastefulness, et al. They possess basic instincts humans have forgotten, but which demand to be accounted for – particularly if people are to evolve into the types of human/animal relation that typify the New Kingdom.
Here are a few examples, from my essay, Adam Clay, Lazarus Mouse & the Kingdom of Eros, that typify human/animal relation in the New Kingdom:
Nowhere in the Bible is it stated word-for-word that the lion will lie down with lamb. The verse most nearly echoing the prediction is Isaiah 11:6: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” The verse metaphorically (if not literally) describes harmony as it is in the New Kingdom.
The New Kingdom is the post-apocalyptic world. In the New Kingdom, knowledge (conceived in Eden from the Tree of Knowledge) has cleansed the Beast from human reality, hence the lion may lie down with lamb.
“The Beast” is a name for the biological legacy of evolution. Spiritual evolution overcomes the Beast. Without the Beast to contend with, humanity may focus on existence before survival. Without the Beast obscuring existence, humanity’s relation to the world comes to mirror God’s. As such, the type of extraordinary relationships between man and beast - such as those that St. Francis is remembered for - become normative.
As the Beast is subdued with spiritual knowledge, animals take on a metaphorical function, like characters in a story. The metaphorical function of animals has been central to myth since its prehistoric advent. From the earliest times, stories about animals were suggestive of the relation between them and humanity that comes into being in the New Kingdom.
In addition to myth, dreams are also rich with the metaphorical aspect of animals. In the early 90s I dreamed the whole cat family, from the lion to the housecat proceeding side-by-side in a line sweeping from the front to the back of a church. While the lion stands for God, the cat family symbolizes Catholicism – Cat-holicism, or Holy Cat-ism, if you will. As the lion is known as King of Beasts, God is King of the Beast in man. When the Lion lies down with the Lamb, God the Father is reunited with Christ the Son, on Earth.
I have dreamed of Mary as a purple panther and Jesus as “the rare spotted tiger.” The purple shows Mary possessing a post-evolutionary color, a color of beauty and royalty, rather than survival and adaptation. “Rare spotted” refers to how Jesus is rarely directly experienced (“spotted”), and also to how when he is experienced, it is in forms that are difficult to anticipate. That is, as one would not anticipate a tiger to have spots, neither can they anticipate experiencing Jesus.
Where Catholicism is uncompromised by the Beast it becomes associated with the cat and is a vehicle of the New Kingdom. As Christ can be symbolized as a cat, monks and nuns surrender themselves to him as mice so that he can torment the Beast out of them; tormenting them as cats do to mice. This is purgation, alchemical purgation.
After the torment is done, Christ consumes the monk and nun like a cat eats mice. This is a metaphor for Christ integrating the monk and nun into his body. Once they have been thus integrated, they have become saintly. Of them it can then be said, “They are in him as he is in they,” which is equivalent to Christ saying, “I am in the Father as he is in me” (John 10:38). The Lion has lied down with the Lamb.
The snake is another beast with an elaborate metaphorical side. For modern spiritualists the snake is typically associated with Kundalini, which is “serpent power” or concentrated life-force. People practice Kundalini yoga, have Kundalini awakenings, and access Kundalini in Tantric sex without understanding the Kundalini Snake’s relation to Christ Cat.
In biological evolution, the snake is more fundamental than the cat. The snake is inside the cat, as the cat’s central nervous system, its brain and spine. Likewise Kundalini Snake is within Christ Cat, being as central to Christ’s divine love as the snake is to every creature with vertebrae. Where Kundalini is deeply instinctual, Christ consciousness is supremely ethical and self-aware. The two differ greatly, but are one in the New Kingdom, in the mystical body of Christ.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
The psyche symbolizes the unconscious with water. Water represents unrealized potential. In the dream I am my unrealized self, unaware that I am flowing with the River of Life. I am then awakened to myself by an animal.
In all life forms there are aspects of people; mainly feeling, but more particularly, a plant’s rootedness, an insect’s stillness, a dog’s lack of inhibition.
For most of my life I have been afraid of dogs because of their excitability. It may have begun when, as a male tot, I was trampled by a dog and never recovered from it. My male self never grew up because of the doglike characteristics which people have – their pack behavior, excitability, blind loyalty. In people, these characteristics translate into mistrust of individuality, disrespectfulness, and ignorance.
My male self is a child I call Georgie. I am his mother. Dogs feel Georgie’s fear and go into attack mode, which only compounds his fear. He has been getting better though. Watching Caesar Milan’s “Dog Whisperer” has helped. Dreams help, too, as far as illuminating where Georgie’s fear comes from. In one dream he is telepathically hearing dogs think. About my male self, they think, “He does not feel OK in his body.”
True. Alienation from his body was a main reason why he wasn’t able to stay male-identified after he grew up. Being in my female body, I feel more confident with dogs, but still there is a toddler inside me who does not stay “in his body” when he sees a dog.
There is so much to learn from plants and animals in that they are humans, just without higher human capacities for thought, art, science, wastefulness, et al. They possess basic instincts humans have forgotten, but which demand to be accounted for – particularly if people are to evolve into the types of human/animal relation that typify the New Kingdom.
Here are a few examples, from my essay, Adam Clay, Lazarus Mouse & the Kingdom of Eros, that typify human/animal relation in the New Kingdom:
Nowhere in the Bible is it stated word-for-word that the lion will lie down with lamb. The verse most nearly echoing the prediction is Isaiah 11:6: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” The verse metaphorically (if not literally) describes harmony as it is in the New Kingdom.
The New Kingdom is the post-apocalyptic world. In the New Kingdom, knowledge (conceived in Eden from the Tree of Knowledge) has cleansed the Beast from human reality, hence the lion may lie down with lamb.
“The Beast” is a name for the biological legacy of evolution. Spiritual evolution overcomes the Beast. Without the Beast to contend with, humanity may focus on existence before survival. Without the Beast obscuring existence, humanity’s relation to the world comes to mirror God’s. As such, the type of extraordinary relationships between man and beast - such as those that St. Francis is remembered for - become normative.
As the Beast is subdued with spiritual knowledge, animals take on a metaphorical function, like characters in a story. The metaphorical function of animals has been central to myth since its prehistoric advent. From the earliest times, stories about animals were suggestive of the relation between them and humanity that comes into being in the New Kingdom.
In addition to myth, dreams are also rich with the metaphorical aspect of animals. In the early 90s I dreamed the whole cat family, from the lion to the housecat proceeding side-by-side in a line sweeping from the front to the back of a church. While the lion stands for God, the cat family symbolizes Catholicism – Cat-holicism, or Holy Cat-ism, if you will. As the lion is known as King of Beasts, God is King of the Beast in man. When the Lion lies down with the Lamb, God the Father is reunited with Christ the Son, on Earth.
I have dreamed of Mary as a purple panther and Jesus as “the rare spotted tiger.” The purple shows Mary possessing a post-evolutionary color, a color of beauty and royalty, rather than survival and adaptation. “Rare spotted” refers to how Jesus is rarely directly experienced (“spotted”), and also to how when he is experienced, it is in forms that are difficult to anticipate. That is, as one would not anticipate a tiger to have spots, neither can they anticipate experiencing Jesus.
Where Catholicism is uncompromised by the Beast it becomes associated with the cat and is a vehicle of the New Kingdom. As Christ can be symbolized as a cat, monks and nuns surrender themselves to him as mice so that he can torment the Beast out of them; tormenting them as cats do to mice. This is purgation, alchemical purgation.
After the torment is done, Christ consumes the monk and nun like a cat eats mice. This is a metaphor for Christ integrating the monk and nun into his body. Once they have been thus integrated, they have become saintly. Of them it can then be said, “They are in him as he is in they,” which is equivalent to Christ saying, “I am in the Father as he is in me” (John 10:38). The Lion has lied down with the Lamb.
The snake is another beast with an elaborate metaphorical side. For modern spiritualists the snake is typically associated with Kundalini, which is “serpent power” or concentrated life-force. People practice Kundalini yoga, have Kundalini awakenings, and access Kundalini in Tantric sex without understanding the Kundalini Snake’s relation to Christ Cat.
In biological evolution, the snake is more fundamental than the cat. The snake is inside the cat, as the cat’s central nervous system, its brain and spine. Likewise Kundalini Snake is within Christ Cat, being as central to Christ’s divine love as the snake is to every creature with vertebrae. Where Kundalini is deeply instinctual, Christ consciousness is supremely ethical and self-aware. The two differ greatly, but are one in the New Kingdom, in the mystical body of Christ.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Beyond Faith and Trust in God
When I was male I gave my life to God, and he purged me of my male self, whose name was “George.” Time after time God did this by betraying George’s expectation that God’s priorities were in George’s best interest. God’s only interest in George was destroying him so that I could emerge through him.
Two years before my emergence, when George was beginning the process of giving his life to God, “Cedar,” a best friend, acted as his guide. Cedar taught George how to relate personally to God, as if God really valued George, making God into an object of trust and devotion, into a parental figure. This was in addition to how George already saw God; as an impersonal being that informed the universe.
One of Cedar’s gifts was prophecy. He would “receive the Word,” which meant that the Spirit – the go-between entity linking God to people – communicated through Cedar. When receiving a Word, Cedar sometimes went into trancelike states. This happened in a dream I had with Cedar last Tuesday night:
I am planning to leave a city by bus, but first I need to pick up my things from an apartment. I don’t exactly remember where it is. I go so far that I realize I must have missed it, and backtrack quickly. From behind I see a guy who looks like he could be Cedar. I call out his name, just to see what happens. He turns. It’s him! I tell him I am leaving on the next bus. His trancelike reply has the authority of the Word:
NO, YOU’RE NOT. YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE DINNER WITH ME. YOU’RE STAYING RIGHT HERE. SIT DOWN RIGHT HERE.
I do as he says – sitting down – but I’m quite upset. I say, “You’re only going to leave me again.”
Here, Cedar is not Cedar per se, but represents the Word – the Spirit, which over and over comes and goes from my life with the purpose of teaching me what it is and who I am. This is done by betraying my expectations, so that the true essence of God and Self can come forth, subvert my ego, and be united as one in me over time. How long is impossible to know.
God acts like a vacuum on the ego, sucking it against instinct toward the circle of Self. The ego then may both resist and accept the vacuum’s pull. To resist more than accept is to die unfulfilled. To accept more than resist is to endure ego-death for the sake of spiritual evolution.
God rarely is concerned for a person’s immediate desires. He wants to cultivate spiritual evolution – not placate the ego. This is the sum of hardship on the spiritual path.
I do trust God has my ultimate best interest at heart – but he has proved unreliable when it comes to fulfilling my immediate desire for peace of mind and sense of control over my life. His interest is in illuminating me – dunking me into darkness and lifting me out by the scruff of my neck over and over till I am so self-aware that there is no longer anything about me that can be traumatized, so that my spirit and the Spirit have become one and the same.
Unshakeable faith gives God the opportunity to use a person’s trust in God to overcome the need for trust and faith. God resides at a frequency where there is no need for trust or faith, and wants us to manifest that frequency here. It is a frequency of non-duality, of union, of multiplicity. Being seamlessly with God, there is no piety, pining, wishing or hoping. It is a state of being in which desire and its satisfaction are simultaneous. All suffering can be traced to the irresistibility of this end.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Two years before my emergence, when George was beginning the process of giving his life to God, “Cedar,” a best friend, acted as his guide. Cedar taught George how to relate personally to God, as if God really valued George, making God into an object of trust and devotion, into a parental figure. This was in addition to how George already saw God; as an impersonal being that informed the universe.
One of Cedar’s gifts was prophecy. He would “receive the Word,” which meant that the Spirit – the go-between entity linking God to people – communicated through Cedar. When receiving a Word, Cedar sometimes went into trancelike states. This happened in a dream I had with Cedar last Tuesday night:
I am planning to leave a city by bus, but first I need to pick up my things from an apartment. I don’t exactly remember where it is. I go so far that I realize I must have missed it, and backtrack quickly. From behind I see a guy who looks like he could be Cedar. I call out his name, just to see what happens. He turns. It’s him! I tell him I am leaving on the next bus. His trancelike reply has the authority of the Word:
NO, YOU’RE NOT. YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE DINNER WITH ME. YOU’RE STAYING RIGHT HERE. SIT DOWN RIGHT HERE.
I do as he says – sitting down – but I’m quite upset. I say, “You’re only going to leave me again.”
Here, Cedar is not Cedar per se, but represents the Word – the Spirit, which over and over comes and goes from my life with the purpose of teaching me what it is and who I am. This is done by betraying my expectations, so that the true essence of God and Self can come forth, subvert my ego, and be united as one in me over time. How long is impossible to know.
God acts like a vacuum on the ego, sucking it against instinct toward the circle of Self. The ego then may both resist and accept the vacuum’s pull. To resist more than accept is to die unfulfilled. To accept more than resist is to endure ego-death for the sake of spiritual evolution.
God rarely is concerned for a person’s immediate desires. He wants to cultivate spiritual evolution – not placate the ego. This is the sum of hardship on the spiritual path.
I do trust God has my ultimate best interest at heart – but he has proved unreliable when it comes to fulfilling my immediate desire for peace of mind and sense of control over my life. His interest is in illuminating me – dunking me into darkness and lifting me out by the scruff of my neck over and over till I am so self-aware that there is no longer anything about me that can be traumatized, so that my spirit and the Spirit have become one and the same.
Unshakeable faith gives God the opportunity to use a person’s trust in God to overcome the need for trust and faith. God resides at a frequency where there is no need for trust or faith, and wants us to manifest that frequency here. It is a frequency of non-duality, of union, of multiplicity. Being seamlessly with God, there is no piety, pining, wishing or hoping. It is a state of being in which desire and its satisfaction are simultaneous. All suffering can be traced to the irresistibility of this end.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Meaning Is a Mirror
A metaphor framing meaning is the mirror. Meaning reflects the world, as a mirror does. A broken mirror therefore symbolizes a shattered sense of meaning.
Ms. X’s mirror has been shattered. Her divorce is final, and the meaning she's ascribing it is that she's fat, ugly, and destined to be abandoned, unloved, alone. She does not have to see her divorce as a measure of her worth. She has a choice. The powers-that-be orchestrated her marriage and divorce because her soul needs her to choose against letting marriage substitute for her self-worth. Her soul needs deeper meaning.
Yet, in all the broken shards Ms. X sees only trash. Sweeping them – the puzzle pieces to her own soul - into the bin, she thinks, “I am not trash! My marriage was just a fluke. Shit happens. I’ll find someone new.”
Suffering is not, ultimately, a "shit happens" sort of deal. Shitty things happen over and over until the lesson in them is integrated. Shit waits to be used as fertilizer for flowers of meaning.
When despair makes meaning appear unreachable, then meaning is found through not doing – in not thinking, fretting, knowing, talking, listening, etc. – but in just being, and just feeling, without making any judgments. Instead of the litany of stories (“I’m fat, ugly, unlovable, etc.”), sometimes it is necessary to just sit with pain in the present moment.
But suffering is not just sensation. It is part and parcel of the stories that generate it – which in turn generate meaning, eventually.
There is an evolving relationship between story and just-being and meaning. Just-being silently edifies meaning. Story explicitly edifies meaning. Story and its meaning edify just-being. The three weave around each other like a braid. Where one is missing, the braid is incomplete. Like a braid, they take time to weave. Well-woven, they are beautiful and have an implicit dignity.
For an infant, nothing has meaning. Only with accumulated experience does a child develop a sense of meaning. Meaning is gradually edified by a variety of things: religion, sport, love, art, roles, values, memes, et al. At the same time, meaning is destabilized by violence, trauma, abuse, and inequity. In response to these, people become disillusioned with established meaning. Then they seek to establish more sound meaning, and/or they despair. Despair is definitely part of the process of finding meaning that is deeper than those who came before could grasp.
Though the richness of meaning never stops building on itself, people have a tendency to resist any more meaning than they already have because meaning does not come easy. Meaning is the harvest of suffering.
There is no suffering that is not predicated on a person’s estrangement from the Self. The panacea for suffering is self-knowledge.
The symptoms of estrangement from the Self are metaphorical down to the parasite. Taking hunger: it is a symptom that something other than Self substitutes for nourishment. Taking financial collapse: it is a symptom that something other than the Self substitutes for value. Taking the broken heart: it is a symptom that one does not love oneself.
Self-nourishment, self-valuation and self-love reconstruct the shattered Mirror. The reconstructed Mirror is self-knowledge.
Ms. X’s mirror has been shattered. Her divorce is final, and the meaning she's ascribing it is that she's fat, ugly, and destined to be abandoned, unloved, alone. She does not have to see her divorce as a measure of her worth. She has a choice. The powers-that-be orchestrated her marriage and divorce because her soul needs her to choose against letting marriage substitute for her self-worth. Her soul needs deeper meaning.
Yet, in all the broken shards Ms. X sees only trash. Sweeping them – the puzzle pieces to her own soul - into the bin, she thinks, “I am not trash! My marriage was just a fluke. Shit happens. I’ll find someone new.”
Suffering is not, ultimately, a "shit happens" sort of deal. Shitty things happen over and over until the lesson in them is integrated. Shit waits to be used as fertilizer for flowers of meaning.
When despair makes meaning appear unreachable, then meaning is found through not doing – in not thinking, fretting, knowing, talking, listening, etc. – but in just being, and just feeling, without making any judgments. Instead of the litany of stories (“I’m fat, ugly, unlovable, etc.”), sometimes it is necessary to just sit with pain in the present moment.
But suffering is not just sensation. It is part and parcel of the stories that generate it – which in turn generate meaning, eventually.
There is an evolving relationship between story and just-being and meaning. Just-being silently edifies meaning. Story explicitly edifies meaning. Story and its meaning edify just-being. The three weave around each other like a braid. Where one is missing, the braid is incomplete. Like a braid, they take time to weave. Well-woven, they are beautiful and have an implicit dignity.
For an infant, nothing has meaning. Only with accumulated experience does a child develop a sense of meaning. Meaning is gradually edified by a variety of things: religion, sport, love, art, roles, values, memes, et al. At the same time, meaning is destabilized by violence, trauma, abuse, and inequity. In response to these, people become disillusioned with established meaning. Then they seek to establish more sound meaning, and/or they despair. Despair is definitely part of the process of finding meaning that is deeper than those who came before could grasp.
Though the richness of meaning never stops building on itself, people have a tendency to resist any more meaning than they already have because meaning does not come easy. Meaning is the harvest of suffering.
There is no suffering that is not predicated on a person’s estrangement from the Self. The panacea for suffering is self-knowledge.
The symptoms of estrangement from the Self are metaphorical down to the parasite. Taking hunger: it is a symptom that something other than Self substitutes for nourishment. Taking financial collapse: it is a symptom that something other than the Self substitutes for value. Taking the broken heart: it is a symptom that one does not love oneself.
Self-nourishment, self-valuation and self-love reconstruct the shattered Mirror. The reconstructed Mirror is self-knowledge.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Dread Management
A recipe for neutralizing feelings of dread and doom:
1. Faith.
2. Self-devotion.
3. Knowing that dread passes, that doom is a mood: Dread and doom may crest ominously, but then they break. To cope with them, it helps to learn to surf; to see everything in terms of metaphor, as dreams do.
4. Vigilance over one’s thoughts: turning away from some, working with others.
5. Removing attention from the mind and relocating it to the body, to the heart, to the ground under the feet.
6. Listening.
7. Neutrality.
8. Patience: waiting for as long as it takes.
It takes three metaphorical days, the span of the crucifixion. All transformation is patterned on a 3-part template: the beginning, middle, and end. The end is a seed of new beginning.
While enduring the crucifixion of my identity in 1999, I swooned midday into unconsciousness and dreamed a terrible Beast had me captive in a sack. Escape was impossible. He kicked me deeper and deeper into the darkness of hell, until finally, at the bottom of the darkness, I fell out of hell through a circle of white light.
Just before his end, Christ called out, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” It is darkest before dawn.
Below is a poem written just prior to the last act in my male self’s crucifixion. It was transmuted to me from a vision of Rose Mary – my female soul – writing in her New York apartment. She was writing a poem I could barely make out. I hurried across my room, in Budapest, to paper-and-pen and transcribed it. Her version was longer than the one I managed to scratch out:
High in the black night of fear
Stars are born from tears.
When comes the light of day
Back to school you find your way.
Then it’s yours to wonder why
The sky so blue did not die.
What becomes and what does not
Is not the Child of a thought.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
1. Faith.
2. Self-devotion.
3. Knowing that dread passes, that doom is a mood: Dread and doom may crest ominously, but then they break. To cope with them, it helps to learn to surf; to see everything in terms of metaphor, as dreams do.
4. Vigilance over one’s thoughts: turning away from some, working with others.
5. Removing attention from the mind and relocating it to the body, to the heart, to the ground under the feet.
6. Listening.
7. Neutrality.
8. Patience: waiting for as long as it takes.
It takes three metaphorical days, the span of the crucifixion. All transformation is patterned on a 3-part template: the beginning, middle, and end. The end is a seed of new beginning.
While enduring the crucifixion of my identity in 1999, I swooned midday into unconsciousness and dreamed a terrible Beast had me captive in a sack. Escape was impossible. He kicked me deeper and deeper into the darkness of hell, until finally, at the bottom of the darkness, I fell out of hell through a circle of white light.
Just before his end, Christ called out, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” It is darkest before dawn.
Below is a poem written just prior to the last act in my male self’s crucifixion. It was transmuted to me from a vision of Rose Mary – my female soul – writing in her New York apartment. She was writing a poem I could barely make out. I hurried across my room, in Budapest, to paper-and-pen and transcribed it. Her version was longer than the one I managed to scratch out:
High in the black night of fear
Stars are born from tears.
When comes the light of day
Back to school you find your way.
Then it’s yours to wonder why
The sky so blue did not die.
What becomes and what does not
Is not the Child of a thought.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
The Secret Secret
One face of Divinity is fearsome Yahweh. Another is Kali who tells us “fear not.”
Divinity wants to destroy us because it knows our potential can only be reached through change. It is constructive to use “change” when speaking about the death-rebirth process. When I interpret a dream where the dreamer dies, I tell them, “Don’t worry – it’s just change. This in no way means you are in danger of physically dying.” In fact, the dreamer is in danger of more truly living!
“Evolution” is even nicer than “change” as a word that subsumes “death” and “destruction.” Another way to lighten “destruction” is to rename it “deconstruction.” To self-deconstruct is to actively participate in one’s own ego-death. To self-reconstruct, then, is to participate in ego rebirth. Self-deconstruction and reconstruction constitute spiritual evolution, which dissolves death into awareness.
Physical death is usually a lot less excruciating than ego-death. And once the ego has died and been reborn, one is an entirely new person – as if they have literally died and been reborn. I say this as someone whose male self was killed off by – and reborn into – a female one. (See my profile.)
In spring 1999 my male self dreamed the prints of Shiva’s footsteps are black spaces on the Earth from which flowers grow. In the year following the dream, the god of destruction crushed my male self into blackness. I was the flowers.
Dreams propagate the sublimation of physical death onto ego-death. They sublimate all manner of harm – cuts, viruses, lost limbs, divorce, random violence, falling down, age, torture, imprisonment, suicide, car accidents, rape, poverty, excess, disease, karmic entanglement, nuclear annihilation, et al – from material reality onto spiritual reality. Therefore, when one relies on dreams as a guide to cultivating who one is, the possibility of experiencing physical harm is greatly reduced. Provided one is adequately attentive to dreams and adept at understanding them, instead of karma putting one physically in harm’s way, dreams put one spiritually in harm’s way.
This trade-off of physical harm for spiritual harm is a path to knowing Everlasting Life. The reward of spiritual death and rebirth is Shiva’s foot crushing karmic physical death and rebirth into oblivion. Praise Allah.
Either one can kill oneself off with complacency and ignorance, or participate in self-deconstruction via Divine knowledge gained through dreams and by accepting suffering exhaustively, like Christ, to eventually be resurrected with Christ living in mind and body.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Divinity wants to destroy us because it knows our potential can only be reached through change. It is constructive to use “change” when speaking about the death-rebirth process. When I interpret a dream where the dreamer dies, I tell them, “Don’t worry – it’s just change. This in no way means you are in danger of physically dying.” In fact, the dreamer is in danger of more truly living!
“Evolution” is even nicer than “change” as a word that subsumes “death” and “destruction.” Another way to lighten “destruction” is to rename it “deconstruction.” To self-deconstruct is to actively participate in one’s own ego-death. To self-reconstruct, then, is to participate in ego rebirth. Self-deconstruction and reconstruction constitute spiritual evolution, which dissolves death into awareness.
Physical death is usually a lot less excruciating than ego-death. And once the ego has died and been reborn, one is an entirely new person – as if they have literally died and been reborn. I say this as someone whose male self was killed off by – and reborn into – a female one. (See my profile.)
In spring 1999 my male self dreamed the prints of Shiva’s footsteps are black spaces on the Earth from which flowers grow. In the year following the dream, the god of destruction crushed my male self into blackness. I was the flowers.
Dreams propagate the sublimation of physical death onto ego-death. They sublimate all manner of harm – cuts, viruses, lost limbs, divorce, random violence, falling down, age, torture, imprisonment, suicide, car accidents, rape, poverty, excess, disease, karmic entanglement, nuclear annihilation, et al – from material reality onto spiritual reality. Therefore, when one relies on dreams as a guide to cultivating who one is, the possibility of experiencing physical harm is greatly reduced. Provided one is adequately attentive to dreams and adept at understanding them, instead of karma putting one physically in harm’s way, dreams put one spiritually in harm’s way.
This trade-off of physical harm for spiritual harm is a path to knowing Everlasting Life. The reward of spiritual death and rebirth is Shiva’s foot crushing karmic physical death and rebirth into oblivion. Praise Allah.
Either one can kill oneself off with complacency and ignorance, or participate in self-deconstruction via Divine knowledge gained through dreams and by accepting suffering exhaustively, like Christ, to eventually be resurrected with Christ living in mind and body.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
To Bishop Carlton Pearson
A letter I snail-mailed yesterday:
Dear Bishop Pearson,
I recently had the opportunity to hear the rebroadcast of your remarkable story on This American Life. It moved and inspired me. You have a spirit I intuitively trust, like I would my own parents in matters of survival.
In the part of the program where you recounted your realization that hell doesn’t supernaturally exist, it seemed to me so ironic that people then regarded you as arrogant – “Who does he think he is?” being their sentiment – when their own arrogance kept them from listening to you, and keeps them from listening still.
Surely, their arrogance masked their ignorance; and the insecurity of not-knowing, and not truly knowing God. Meanwhile, you had the fortitude, integrity and courage to really listen to what God was saying to you. May God exalt you.
“Judge and be judged” is a principle that seems very difficult for any group to hold itself accountable to. I am not a fan of groups in that they allow people to be less responsible for themselves. Needing to be self-responsible is one reason why I have lived in solitude for the last 11 years, with hardly any social contact except for with a relative I have been chatting with monthly since 2002. He is 60. I am 40. Though I would say he has a Christian heart, just hearing the word “Christian” fills him with loathing. The disrespectful way of knowing-your-business-better-than-you-do that religious people sometimes have severely chafes my relative’s ferocious independence and individualism. He is wont to believe that all Christians are equally disrespectful.
I love all religions. Each informs me. Though I have no need to put them in a hierarchy, Jesus Christ Superstar is in a special class for me.
Before Christ came into my life 10 years ago, I shared my relative’s anti-Christian sentiment. To me evangelizers were brazen and repugnant. Today I still see them as arrogant and disrespectful, though I accept them and have compassion for them since ultimately they disrespect themselves most of all.
I would never witness to anyone unless I was explicitly invited to. My studied opinion is that God would prefer no one witness in environments where it may not be welcomed – though surely there are times and places for everything.
My anti-Christian relative would certainly not invite me to witness to him. Instead of doing this, I offer him bits of philosophy and wisdom in the course of conversation, trying to help him see around his indignation. Also, I sent him the link to the episode of “This American Life” featuring your story.
My relative burns with indignation when he casts judgments on groups of people – minorities, the politically correct, lawyers, anti-gun people, and the word “alleged,” to name a few. (However, he is very much a supporter of diversity in gender and sexual identification.) I reflexively try to dilute his vitriol with alternate and gentler perspectives. I think over these years a smidge of my compassion and relativistic awareness has rubbed off on him…
Lastly, in 1998 I was escorted to Christ by a best friend who was a Christian. He promptly abandoned me once my experience of communion exceeded my friend’s expectations by too much. This reminds me of your experience of being cast out as heretic, essentially because your relationship with God was too authentic for the group to be comfortable with.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Dear Bishop Pearson,
I recently had the opportunity to hear the rebroadcast of your remarkable story on This American Life. It moved and inspired me. You have a spirit I intuitively trust, like I would my own parents in matters of survival.
In the part of the program where you recounted your realization that hell doesn’t supernaturally exist, it seemed to me so ironic that people then regarded you as arrogant – “Who does he think he is?” being their sentiment – when their own arrogance kept them from listening to you, and keeps them from listening still.
Surely, their arrogance masked their ignorance; and the insecurity of not-knowing, and not truly knowing God. Meanwhile, you had the fortitude, integrity and courage to really listen to what God was saying to you. May God exalt you.
“Judge and be judged” is a principle that seems very difficult for any group to hold itself accountable to. I am not a fan of groups in that they allow people to be less responsible for themselves. Needing to be self-responsible is one reason why I have lived in solitude for the last 11 years, with hardly any social contact except for with a relative I have been chatting with monthly since 2002. He is 60. I am 40. Though I would say he has a Christian heart, just hearing the word “Christian” fills him with loathing. The disrespectful way of knowing-your-business-better-than-you-do that religious people sometimes have severely chafes my relative’s ferocious independence and individualism. He is wont to believe that all Christians are equally disrespectful.
I love all religions. Each informs me. Though I have no need to put them in a hierarchy, Jesus Christ Superstar is in a special class for me.
Before Christ came into my life 10 years ago, I shared my relative’s anti-Christian sentiment. To me evangelizers were brazen and repugnant. Today I still see them as arrogant and disrespectful, though I accept them and have compassion for them since ultimately they disrespect themselves most of all.
I would never witness to anyone unless I was explicitly invited to. My studied opinion is that God would prefer no one witness in environments where it may not be welcomed – though surely there are times and places for everything.
My anti-Christian relative would certainly not invite me to witness to him. Instead of doing this, I offer him bits of philosophy and wisdom in the course of conversation, trying to help him see around his indignation. Also, I sent him the link to the episode of “This American Life” featuring your story.
My relative burns with indignation when he casts judgments on groups of people – minorities, the politically correct, lawyers, anti-gun people, and the word “alleged,” to name a few. (However, he is very much a supporter of diversity in gender and sexual identification.) I reflexively try to dilute his vitriol with alternate and gentler perspectives. I think over these years a smidge of my compassion and relativistic awareness has rubbed off on him…
Lastly, in 1998 I was escorted to Christ by a best friend who was a Christian. He promptly abandoned me once my experience of communion exceeded my friend’s expectations by too much. This reminds me of your experience of being cast out as heretic, essentially because your relationship with God was too authentic for the group to be comfortable with.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Nesting Dolls, Autoimmunity and Ouroboros
The connection between spiritual sickness and physical illness is self-evident. As science pursues physical health, the art of spirituality cultivates psychic wholeness as a cure for self-rejection.
The evolution of physical health and psychic wholeness is destined to unite science and spirituality in a marriage. Historically, they have been like a boy and a girl; like schoolchildren too self-involved in gender-typed pursuits to acknowledge each other. Now perhaps they are hitting puberty and feel an irresistible attraction. Marriage produces babies. Theirs will engender Everlasting Life in the body.
Of special relevance to physical health and psychic wholeness is the current increase in the incidence of autoimmune disorders. Autoimmunity is when the immune system attacks the organism to which it belongs. Examples of autoimmune disorders include: Crohn's disease, ankylosing spondylitis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, celiac disease, Addison's disease, type 1 diabetes, Grave's disease, endometriosis, some hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia. [1]
Autoimmune diseases are a metaphor for the body accelerating toward self-acceptance without the participation of the mind. The acceleration would manifest as health were the mind aware of its self-rejecting attitudes, and able to put them aside. As it is, when the body acts on its own, in autoimmunity, self-acceptance becomes self-consumption. The body eats itself in an act of hyper-individualization, balancing self-rejection.
Curing self-rejection with self-acceptance was far less possible before the computer cast the light of knowledge across the globe. Curing self-rejection globally is a process, plotted across history, across time. The attitudes and behaviors that masquerade as self-acceptance - but are really self-rejection - are not limitless. Their birth, life and death are plotted across time.
Autoimmune disease has the appearance of ouroboros – the snake eating its own tail. Unlike autoimmune disease, ouroboros does not consume itself. It remains frozen in time as a symbol of eternal self-sustenance - an attribute of God destined to be incorporated into the body. Ouroboros is an image of Kundalini eternally self-recycling.
Aside from the symptom of suffering, the collective has no sound measure of how fractured its attitudes and behaviors are, except for primordial wholeness. Were imbalanced attitudes and behaviors absorbed into the wholeness of the psyche, life as we know it would halt. Were there no more distraction from wholeness, only our essential selves would survive. At the base of this essential wholeness is the body – the inert body, without a thought in its head, just a ball of perception, like an infant. This infant self is the fulcrum on which self-acceptance and self-rejection teeter. A perfect balance between them admits self-union, a state of awareness of the sacredness of the flesh. In this state, the flesh becomes self-sustained, and cell division plateaus at a rate that nullifies age, admitting eternity, Everlasting Life. Finding and accepting the inner-child, and the baby within the inner-child, and the fetus within the baby is the beginning of Everlasting Life. We are nesting dolls eternally beholden to the tiniest doll within. She sucks us back into oblivion life-in and life-out until we are reconciled to her.
[1] Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health by Charles Eisenstein
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
The evolution of physical health and psychic wholeness is destined to unite science and spirituality in a marriage. Historically, they have been like a boy and a girl; like schoolchildren too self-involved in gender-typed pursuits to acknowledge each other. Now perhaps they are hitting puberty and feel an irresistible attraction. Marriage produces babies. Theirs will engender Everlasting Life in the body.
Of special relevance to physical health and psychic wholeness is the current increase in the incidence of autoimmune disorders. Autoimmunity is when the immune system attacks the organism to which it belongs. Examples of autoimmune disorders include: Crohn's disease, ankylosing spondylitis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, celiac disease, Addison's disease, type 1 diabetes, Grave's disease, endometriosis, some hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, and fibromyalgia. [1]
Autoimmune diseases are a metaphor for the body accelerating toward self-acceptance without the participation of the mind. The acceleration would manifest as health were the mind aware of its self-rejecting attitudes, and able to put them aside. As it is, when the body acts on its own, in autoimmunity, self-acceptance becomes self-consumption. The body eats itself in an act of hyper-individualization, balancing self-rejection.
Curing self-rejection with self-acceptance was far less possible before the computer cast the light of knowledge across the globe. Curing self-rejection globally is a process, plotted across history, across time. The attitudes and behaviors that masquerade as self-acceptance - but are really self-rejection - are not limitless. Their birth, life and death are plotted across time.
Autoimmune disease has the appearance of ouroboros – the snake eating its own tail. Unlike autoimmune disease, ouroboros does not consume itself. It remains frozen in time as a symbol of eternal self-sustenance - an attribute of God destined to be incorporated into the body. Ouroboros is an image of Kundalini eternally self-recycling.
Aside from the symptom of suffering, the collective has no sound measure of how fractured its attitudes and behaviors are, except for primordial wholeness. Were imbalanced attitudes and behaviors absorbed into the wholeness of the psyche, life as we know it would halt. Were there no more distraction from wholeness, only our essential selves would survive. At the base of this essential wholeness is the body – the inert body, without a thought in its head, just a ball of perception, like an infant. This infant self is the fulcrum on which self-acceptance and self-rejection teeter. A perfect balance between them admits self-union, a state of awareness of the sacredness of the flesh. In this state, the flesh becomes self-sustained, and cell division plateaus at a rate that nullifies age, admitting eternity, Everlasting Life. Finding and accepting the inner-child, and the baby within the inner-child, and the fetus within the baby is the beginning of Everlasting Life. We are nesting dolls eternally beholden to the tiniest doll within. She sucks us back into oblivion life-in and life-out until we are reconciled to her.
[1] Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health by Charles Eisenstein
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Answer to Pessimism
a dialogue begins - November 4, 2008
Amy’s friend: If it could go wrong, I assume it will. I have historically not known how to handle positive things occurring in my life. I have tended to try to edit them out as outliers. I'm trying to more specifically incorporate the positive, seeing it as not just a fluke. I have a huge pessimistic streak in general.
I think there could be major election fraud, and this could be ultra ultra ugly. And a lot of white people could have lied and really voted for McCain. And the electronic machines are ultra easy to manipulate with nary a trail. Power likes to hold on at all costs, and I don't see darkness going down easy on this one. I hope hope hope I'm wrong on this one! Please Jesus let me be wrong!
Amy: As long as there is not too much voter fraud we will win. The last two we lost 51 to 49%, and with the deluge of new voters – particularly the youth, how can we lose? The long lines couldn't be for McCain.
November 5
Amy: Had McCain won, today would seem much darker. My male self would have laughed in a carefree way had our candidate lost – laughed instead of cried. My male self laughs into the black hole of that which makes people pessimistic. He laughs off darkness to lighten it. It’s a technique I learned from my dad. Meanwhile, Rose Mary weeps.
Does pain you are unwilling to feel contribute to your pessimism?
Amy’s friend: I've become pretty adept at allowing myself to feel pain. Not allowing myself to feel fear, well, that might contribute.
Amy: Fear and pessimism and numbness are partners. Each has a respective antidote: faith, positivism and feeling.
Fear exists in the absence of love, which is unattainable without faith. Numbness is to death as feeling is to Life. Pessimism leads to stagnation, positivism to opportunity.
By “positivism” I don’t mean something Oprah-like, like the power of positive thinking producing desired results. Positivism doesn’t help you to get things. It puts you in a position to receive without desire interfering.
An endpoint of spiritual evolution is where desire and its fulfillment are simultaneous. In a world where this simultaneity is the norm, there is no unfulfilled desire. And there is no reason for positive thinking – or negative thinking. Such a world is not the result of positive thinking or optimism – but positivism. Positivism is a way of perceiving in a way that is the least harmful to the perceiver – all things considered.
Pessimism by nature is harmful to the perceiver. Whenever I hear someone being pessimistic, I respond positivistically – just like I do toward my own pessimism when I am dialoging with myself.
The psyche is not pessimistic, nor is the Self, nor Jesus, nor Buddha, nor any other entity of wholeness. God is incapable of pessimism.
There is an imperative to see the world as God sees it. This is the only way to undermine how ignorance – and its spawn, pessimism - see it. Seeing the way out of pessimism takes devoted, positivistic and faithful looking. Positivism looks for meaning in darkness and in light. We must look for meaning in this positivistic way to be free of pessimism.
Pessimism is like wincing with pain before the needle touches the skin. Positivism sacrifices short-term pain for long-term feeling. Pessimism trades long-term feeling for short-term numbness,
If pain is perceived as bad and pleasure good, then pain is eschewed at all costs. The greatest cost is to feeling. At any moment an infinite range of feeling is possible – yet the infinity of feeling is narrowly channeled into viewpoints, co-dependencies, defenses, habits, obsessions, doing-for-its-own-sake, etc. Behind all of these is the fear of pain.
Pain is not good or bad in and of itself. Compared to numbness, pain is very good. If a person is numb, pain is a gateway to feeling.
People are a blend of five “actions”:
1) being
2) doing
3) feeling
4) knowing
5) belonging
When one of these is underrepresented, so are the rest,
Amy’s friend: What if a person is too afraid to feel?
Amy: That is what faith and positivism are for. It is what the Cross is for.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Amy’s friend: If it could go wrong, I assume it will. I have historically not known how to handle positive things occurring in my life. I have tended to try to edit them out as outliers. I'm trying to more specifically incorporate the positive, seeing it as not just a fluke. I have a huge pessimistic streak in general.
I think there could be major election fraud, and this could be ultra ultra ugly. And a lot of white people could have lied and really voted for McCain. And the electronic machines are ultra easy to manipulate with nary a trail. Power likes to hold on at all costs, and I don't see darkness going down easy on this one. I hope hope hope I'm wrong on this one! Please Jesus let me be wrong!
Amy: As long as there is not too much voter fraud we will win. The last two we lost 51 to 49%, and with the deluge of new voters – particularly the youth, how can we lose? The long lines couldn't be for McCain.
November 5
Amy: Had McCain won, today would seem much darker. My male self would have laughed in a carefree way had our candidate lost – laughed instead of cried. My male self laughs into the black hole of that which makes people pessimistic. He laughs off darkness to lighten it. It’s a technique I learned from my dad. Meanwhile, Rose Mary weeps.
Does pain you are unwilling to feel contribute to your pessimism?
Amy’s friend: I've become pretty adept at allowing myself to feel pain. Not allowing myself to feel fear, well, that might contribute.
Amy: Fear and pessimism and numbness are partners. Each has a respective antidote: faith, positivism and feeling.
Fear exists in the absence of love, which is unattainable without faith. Numbness is to death as feeling is to Life. Pessimism leads to stagnation, positivism to opportunity.
By “positivism” I don’t mean something Oprah-like, like the power of positive thinking producing desired results. Positivism doesn’t help you to get things. It puts you in a position to receive without desire interfering.
An endpoint of spiritual evolution is where desire and its fulfillment are simultaneous. In a world where this simultaneity is the norm, there is no unfulfilled desire. And there is no reason for positive thinking – or negative thinking. Such a world is not the result of positive thinking or optimism – but positivism. Positivism is a way of perceiving in a way that is the least harmful to the perceiver – all things considered.
Pessimism by nature is harmful to the perceiver. Whenever I hear someone being pessimistic, I respond positivistically – just like I do toward my own pessimism when I am dialoging with myself.
The psyche is not pessimistic, nor is the Self, nor Jesus, nor Buddha, nor any other entity of wholeness. God is incapable of pessimism.
There is an imperative to see the world as God sees it. This is the only way to undermine how ignorance – and its spawn, pessimism - see it. Seeing the way out of pessimism takes devoted, positivistic and faithful looking. Positivism looks for meaning in darkness and in light. We must look for meaning in this positivistic way to be free of pessimism.
Pessimism is like wincing with pain before the needle touches the skin. Positivism sacrifices short-term pain for long-term feeling. Pessimism trades long-term feeling for short-term numbness,
If pain is perceived as bad and pleasure good, then pain is eschewed at all costs. The greatest cost is to feeling. At any moment an infinite range of feeling is possible – yet the infinity of feeling is narrowly channeled into viewpoints, co-dependencies, defenses, habits, obsessions, doing-for-its-own-sake, etc. Behind all of these is the fear of pain.
Pain is not good or bad in and of itself. Compared to numbness, pain is very good. If a person is numb, pain is a gateway to feeling.
People are a blend of five “actions”:
1) being
2) doing
3) feeling
4) knowing
5) belonging
When one of these is underrepresented, so are the rest,
Amy’s friend: What if a person is too afraid to feel?
Amy: That is what faith and positivism are for. It is what the Cross is for.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Gratitude and PTSD
The night before Thanksgiving I had this dream:
I have a vision of the great indignity suffered by Native Americans who were unjustly driven from the land. I wake in the dream to some of them in my parents’ guest bedroom.
If the native people had spoken perhaps they would have said, “We were driven from America’s table so we have nothing to be thankful for.” Their sentiment echoes my own, but in a different context. In Sunday’s post to “4 a New World,” I quoted myself, from 2000: “Pieces of me are in the tears of my lovers. I want to be held as a baby & feel a lover’s tears touching my face, cleansing me of thankfulness.”
The lovers I wanted to be held by were my own self. In wanting to be “cleansed of thankfulness,” what I really wanted was the safety to feel the part of myself that stopped feeling because of the trauma I suffered in psychosis. For months every day I felt I was at the brink of death. When it finally subsided I spent four years lying down under the weight of ongoing psychosis and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).
After a person has been traumatized it goes against instinct to be thankful. The places that were traumatized have to relearn feeling in order to be thankful. Perhaps relearning feeling, and becoming thankful, are essential to assuaging PTSD.
When I think of the thankfulness and feeling I lost to PTSD, I feel my heart swell with sorrow, and my head says, “Not sure if I can go there, right now. We (mind & heart) need to get more synched up first.”
I am afraid to feel the places in my heart that were traumatized. I am instinctually afraid that gratitude will make me vulnerable to psychic implosion, again. And God doesn’t reassure me. He says, “Amy, anything goes to make you into Rose Mary Pillowwater (my unconscious feminine self). You’ll have to play it by ear.”
In 2000, just before the most harrowing episodes of psychosis began, I had a vision of Rose Mary Pillowwater in her New York apartment. She was writing a poem I could barely make out. I hurried across my room to get paper and pen and transcribed it. I was certain the first four lines and the last two were exactly what she had written. They echoed the imperative to keep playing it all by ear - to keep listening. Her version was longer than the one I managed to scratch out. I referred to my version as “The Atomic Boy Poem”:
High in the black night of fear
Stars are born from tears.
When comes the light of day
Back to school you find your way.
Then it’s yours to wonder why
The sky did not die.
What becomes and what does not
Is not the child of a thought.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
I have a vision of the great indignity suffered by Native Americans who were unjustly driven from the land. I wake in the dream to some of them in my parents’ guest bedroom.
If the native people had spoken perhaps they would have said, “We were driven from America’s table so we have nothing to be thankful for.” Their sentiment echoes my own, but in a different context. In Sunday’s post to “4 a New World,” I quoted myself, from 2000: “Pieces of me are in the tears of my lovers. I want to be held as a baby & feel a lover’s tears touching my face, cleansing me of thankfulness.”
The lovers I wanted to be held by were my own self. In wanting to be “cleansed of thankfulness,” what I really wanted was the safety to feel the part of myself that stopped feeling because of the trauma I suffered in psychosis. For months every day I felt I was at the brink of death. When it finally subsided I spent four years lying down under the weight of ongoing psychosis and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).
After a person has been traumatized it goes against instinct to be thankful. The places that were traumatized have to relearn feeling in order to be thankful. Perhaps relearning feeling, and becoming thankful, are essential to assuaging PTSD.
When I think of the thankfulness and feeling I lost to PTSD, I feel my heart swell with sorrow, and my head says, “Not sure if I can go there, right now. We (mind & heart) need to get more synched up first.”
I am afraid to feel the places in my heart that were traumatized. I am instinctually afraid that gratitude will make me vulnerable to psychic implosion, again. And God doesn’t reassure me. He says, “Amy, anything goes to make you into Rose Mary Pillowwater (my unconscious feminine self). You’ll have to play it by ear.”
In 2000, just before the most harrowing episodes of psychosis began, I had a vision of Rose Mary Pillowwater in her New York apartment. She was writing a poem I could barely make out. I hurried across my room to get paper and pen and transcribed it. I was certain the first four lines and the last two were exactly what she had written. They echoed the imperative to keep playing it all by ear - to keep listening. Her version was longer than the one I managed to scratch out. I referred to my version as “The Atomic Boy Poem”:
High in the black night of fear
Stars are born from tears.
When comes the light of day
Back to school you find your way.
Then it’s yours to wonder why
The sky did not die.
What becomes and what does not
Is not the child of a thought.
“4 a New Earth” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.
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