Blog

Apparently, we now live in the shining city on the hill where empathy is weakness and cruelty is both a strategy and entertainment, where the statue of liberty is waving a club as a smirking F-Off to the tired and poor. Astonishingly (as if anything can astonish us anymore) the strong and gleefully cruel ones are also super devout Christians. I don’t understand why other Christian leaders don’t state the obvious: These folks are not Christians. They are a new religion, the deformed child of a polyamorous marriage of social media, capitalism, and the Old Testament (but with all the poetry, wisdom, and social justice stripped out). I think about the prophet Amos in those same scriptures who called the wealthy “You cows of Bashan!” meaning fat, well-groomed cows. He actually aimed the insult at the wives of rich men, but I think Elon Musk uses enough hair products and plastic surgery to qualify as a cow of Bashan. In my book of Amos, all the pampered billionaires and the preening faux manly men parading around social media these days are cows of Bashan. Amos said to the cows of his time that soon they will all be taken away with meat hooks because of their lack of empathy and smug superiority. When I listen to MAGA-ites speak of God, I think of Carl Jung’s idea that humans need contact with awe-inspiring forces far larger than ourselves, or we get very small minded. we implode in on ourselves, and convince ourselves that we are the gods – that what we hate, God hates. Without true awe, which shatters us in certain ways, we shrink and collapse inward, and we spend our life amusing ourselves to death, as Neil Postman wrote in 1985. The Hebrew prophets and the psychologists are clear: arrogance can become pathological and self-destructive. When I hear the Republicans talk about God, I cannot help myself from thinking about the ancient Gnostic belief in the Demiurge : that the material world is not created by the true, supreme God, but by a lesser, imperfect being whose goal was to entrap souls and feed off their suffering and worship. A God who demands to be worshipped or he will kill you, like a leader who demands to be thanked and adored - clearly these are not worthy beings for our adoration. The Gnostics saw the God of the Bible as that Demiurge, not as the Supreme God. They saw Jesus not as a blood sacrifice to wash away sin (something the demiurge would be totally into) but as a blazing light illuminating our roadmap to free ourselves from the small, awe-less, false, hate-filled universe of the Demiurge. Not "Jesus saved me," but Jesus showed me. All of this thinking got the Gnostics banned and killed by the institutional church. Of course. Amos got killed by a politically well-connected prelist's son. I think about Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s speech (from two years ago, but floating around the internet now) where he describes cruelty as a conscious effort to stay un-evolved as a human being, and kindness as the difficult practice of moving our animal fears out of the driver’s seat so that our more evolved kindness can make the decisions for us. I like that so much. That’s as clear of an explanation as any for what’s going on right now. Maybe he will be president in a few years, after we find out what happens when you turn the government over to teenage boys. Speaking of the boys, I think about how so many bro-dudes in the billionaires’ club seem to be devoted to the “transhuman” movement whose vision is eternal life as a sort of human/cyborg creature. Apparently the wanna-be trans-humans, like Peter Thiel (PayPal founder who is the puppet master of JD Vance) believe that death is an aberration. They see a world where billionaire trans-humans rule over a “Christian” world from their own island. They imagine a king of Olympus, but its really more of a Rolex-wrapped Lord of the Flies, except everyone is chipped and hydraulic in some way. Beyond the irony of their embrace of the “trans” word, I just have a hard time understanding why anyone would want to live eternally at all, much less on the island of lost boys with the bros. I think about a Norwegian aphorism: “Death is the mother of beauty.” The bro dudes are seriously malnourished in actual beauty. They think beauty has to do with gold or with penises. But beauty has everything to do with vulnerability. This may explain why they are so afraid of death, because it is our ultimate vulnerability. I feel sad for the bro-dudes when I think about what they are missing from this precious opportunity to be a human being, and how their denial of death equates directly with their lack of empathy. They could be using their immense power so beautifully. So beautifully! But, instead, they build rockets (penises again, sigh) and spend their energy finding ways to make the poor suffer more. But when I think about their easy cruelty and their off-the-charts arrogance, I don’t feel sad for them anymore; I just find myself wondering what form the meat hooks will take and when they come. I want to be more spiritual about all of this. I want to be in neutrality and compassion. I want to see myself as conscious and compassionate and large-minded and gentle and loving and all Jesussy and Budda-y. I try every day to claw my way up to that 5D throne of light where all old shamans certainly sit. But I really enjoyed it when I stumbled on that meat hook image. It felt good, and now I really like Amos. I am not sure what my point to this entire piece is, except, I guess, this: If you are grieving and afraid, and mad and astonished, I’m with you, I’m all of those too. Let those energies live in you so they can help focus you. Grieving is important and appropriate right now because grief can ferment blind rage into right action. The time is building for right action. Let's be ready.

Many people in my life don’t have optimism for 2025. Instead, they see a darkness looming. I feel like this often too. The social media provocateurs on “both sides” are dedicated not to describing reality or helping you understand the world, but only to stimulating your vitriol. That is the business model. I’ve had a 2024 full of that, and I want to be free of it in 2025. I also want my life to be about much more than constant dread and outrage and finding distractions from both. I also want to help, in my tiny way, to participate in building a better world, a more loving world. I refuse to fall into the emotional trap set for me by the influencers, the talking heads, the pundits, the screamers. All of them are intent on drawing me down into their small universe, and I’m staking a 2025 claim: I freakin’ refuse to live in someone else’s small universe. For me, 2025 is about two core strategies: 1) protecting myself from being devoured by the purveyors of the small universe, and 2) calling in expanding powers, life force, the binding power of love-mystery. Here are my strategies for thriving in 2025 • A daily spiritual practice. A spiritual practice has one basic goal: to replace the power that we lose as the world drains us. There are uncountable practices, but I believe the core is doing the practice in the morning before the whirlwind of the day begins. Dedicate time for intimacy between you and creation. • Refuse to get lodged in outrage. Outrage is a useful splash of energy to kick open the door to justice. But it’s a terrible bathtub to soak in all day. Outrage is also a dopamine blast, and that’s why once we get lodged in it, we need more and more. There are two movements out of outrage. First, the (not easy) practice of acceptance. Acceptance is a savvy spiritual practice. It is not “giving up,” withdrawal, or denial. Acceptance is seeing reality for what it is, without succumbing to vitriol. Check out Pema Chodron or Tara Brach for help in this. • Pick who you want to help and focus your energies there. • Explore tonglen meditation (a Buddhist technique). See here . Or here. • Commit to taking in live arts made by, presented by, and attended by, live humans. Especially try unfamiliar art forms. This opens your curiosity which is core attribute of the creator spirit. • Rather than texting that friend, meet them. • Put strict limits on your social media intake. What you eat, you become. If there is evil in the world, its name is algorithm. Decide not to add that comment that echoes the outrage. Decide not to post that new outrage. Refuse to play the game called “add to the woe.” • Stop multi-tasking and pay attention to one thing. This is the critical skill of “concentration” taught by shamans and Buddhist masters, among others. This skill imbues you with the defense against distraction, and distraction is a tool used by the small-universe purveyors to keep you confused and powerless. • Sing. Sing praise and blessing to the trees, the wind, the birds, the earth, the sun, the moon. You don’t need words, and you don’t need to sound good. You only need to open your love and give it voice. If that love-singing is lubricated by tears, congratulations. • Make art, especially shitty art. Unhitch yourself from any desire to make it appealing, or fine, or pleasing, or valuable to the world. Focus on using it to open the feelings you are afraid to open. • Cook meals for yourself and others. If you think you’re a bad cook, just use salt and garlic powder on everything. • Read poetry out loud, and sloooow. Speak it three times more slowly than you want to. Repeat some of the lines over and over. • Memorize short spiritual poems. If poetry is new to you, a good place to start is Rumi, and here is a very good book . Leave the phone out of the bathroom, print out a poem in 20 point bold Helvetica, and tape it on the wall cross from the toilet. This gives you focused time each day to memorize. (Poetry also s great for the bowels becasue it slows you down.) • Of course, spend much more time outside, especially in open spaces or green spaces. Bless the earth and thank her for giving you the opportunity to be in a body. Bless all the other bodies you see around you. • Invite some people to a game night at your house or a suitable public space. • Enter into the Buddhist perspective that you have already lived billions, yes billions, of lifetimes, and that means that every person you meet or see has been your mother in another lifetime. • Remember that you’re going to die someday, and the great gift is that you don’t know when. You may die before you reach the end of this sentence. Or maybe next week, or in 40 years. What a gift, this uncertainty! Meditating on this reality helps to focus your decisions. • Before drinking water, bless it. • Bless your partner regularly, and your children, and your friends, and, silently, strangers, and those who you despise. To bless means to ask for expansion and intimacy with creation. (Don’t send “healing” to people without their express permission. In blessing we ask Spirit to do the work.) Be careful of becoming spiritually arrogant. Blessing doesn’t make you holy or superior, it just helps glue life together. • Remember that the purveyors of the small universe want you to feel chaotic, depressed, and powerless, and when they do, they win. Be a rebel: allow yourself to feel joy. (Harder than it seems. Ask yourself what real joy is to you, and how you tell the difference between joy and distraction.) • Be kind to strangers. When they return kindness, add it into your “the world is good” list. When they are unkind, open your heart and pray that love comes to them. • Place your attention on “My Divine Yes.” In the biblical tradition of the prophets, there is what’s called the “divine no,” and “the divine yes.” The divine yes is what glues life together. The divine no is what tears it apart. What is the highest, most noble human attribute – the core gift from Spirit that you believe is the most fundamental to promoting life? Inside that is your divine yes. We all emerge from the wavy sea of pre-creation. The deep current of that great sea is the ungraspable energy of “wanting to become” – what the philosopher Spinoza called conatus (effort or endeavor) and what the Celtic shamans call yearning. I name that core yearning: love, the love of life for life itself. It is this love that coaxes us into existence, into form, that binds all things together, and that bestows upon you that not-quite-touchable yearning you feel in your depths. All politics, culture wars, economies, empires, even planets and galaxies will pass away, but the glue of life, the yearning of life for life itself, persists through it all. Find your divine yes, and work it, bring it into the world somehow. May you be blessed by the mother of life May you remember that she is always here to cleanse you and call new life into you May you remember that darkness doesn’t last And that love is stronger than fear May you learn to be a good friend to yourself. And to others. May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness. May you be uplifted, rekindled, brightened, and warmed by Love in the coming year.

Wrestling With Greater Angels

What kind of person do I want to be?

Navigating a world out of control

Greeting the Father/Mother of Life

Dear Jesus, I’ve been wanting to write to you for a long time. To be honest, the reason I haven’t is that my heart breaks into uncountable shards when I think of you. I remember when you came to me on that winter night in 1973, after walking home from the Wednesday night youth for Christ soirée with Kevin. We hugged goodbye and shouted “maranatha!” to each other and I headed along my street among the thick snowflakes dancing down from infinity, each one humming like its own small crystal bell. I lay in my bed buzzing from Jesus-love and God-mystery and the lingering fragrance of strawberry that wafted from Carol Stevenson’s hair and the pink shine on her Jesus-prayer lips. And you came to me. At first as one of the ten thousand snowflakes drifting down, then growing into the shape of a white dove passing through the ceiling, down, down into my forehead where you burst like silver fireworks through my whole body. As I trembled, love for everyone coursed through me - everyone, even for Troy Ondreczeck and his weaselly little sidekick, Scottie, who tried to beat me up that one night even though we used to be friends but they had become victims of reefer madness exactly like the movie predicted. Your words “Forgive them for they know not what they do,” filled the inside of my ears and I felt bad for whatever sadness was inside them. And your words “By their fruits ye shall know them,” floated around me, and I knew that’s the only way to judge a true Christian from a false one. I somehow knew that you would always be there as a mirror for me to check my falseness in, and it would always be up to me whether or not to look in the mirror. The next day I tried to tell Kevin about you, and about how we should forgive people, and love them, and try to remember that people have a lot going on that we can’t see, and that God is too big for us to understand. And Kevin rebuked me, saying that everyone who is wrong is going to hell and we should not give them a second thought. Then he listed a whole bunch of kinds of people who are going to hell, and the one that really got me thinking was “people who live downtown.” So, Jesus, what I’m trying to say is, you’ve been with me for 54 years now and the white dove isn’t the only way you’ve come to me. But when I think of you, I can’t help but think of Kevin. And my other friend, Dirk, who went to a giant youth for Christ convention in Dallas and when he came back he asked me if I had been saved and I started to describe how you came through my ceiling and filled me with - - he cut me off, and with his beautiful blue eyes gleaming like the sheen on a freshly sharpened sword, he said, “No! You are not saved until I decide that you are.” So, Jesus, every time I think of you, my heart breaks. Because Kevin and Dirk seem to be everywhere, and I don’t understand how, but they became your spokespeople. They rolled the stone back into place and told you to stay in there and shut up. And that’s why my heart breaks, and that’s why I haven’t written to you over the years even though I have wanted to. The thing is, I don’t want to spend my relationship with you worrying about Kevin and Dirk. They have their own way, and I hope they are doing okay. But they also have those gleaming eyes and lots of guns. And that certainty. And they are incrementally, day by day, giving themselves permission to kill me in your name. I don’t think you are going to stop them with your great words and ideas, and I don’t have confidence you are going to come through their ceiling. So, this is problem I can’t ignore. So, I guess, again, what I’m saying is, my heart breaks for the opportunity you handed all of us, and we failed you. We failed you. And that’s why my heart breaks. And my heart fears for what’s coming in your name. I guess what I’m trying to say is please, please please roll the stone back. Please, Jesus. Roll the stone again. 

Don't sink to the bottom like a fish going to sleep.

The only effective way to change the world

In the northern hemisphere, as we step into winter, the north on the medicine wheel, we have stepped into the embrace of the Dark Feminine. What is this power, and how can we work with it? I hope this article helps you grasp what is happening in our world right now from a mythic angle, and I offer some practices that may help. The Celtic tradition has many instances of a young man encountering a repulsive, hideously ugly old hag who offers him some kind of power – often, water from a well – if only he will kiss her. Most of the men who meet her refuse in disgust, but the one who will become king embraces her deeply. The Celtic hag is the archetypal Dark Feminine, the initiator of the masculine into its mature depths. Many of the patriarchs of the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) meet their wives at a well as the woman draws water up. The motif signals that these are the men who will lead. While the women characters are not the “loathly hag,” archetype, they carry the same initiating power. It’s important to point out that, while these stories seem to focus on human men, we will get ourselves tied in patriarchal knots if we don’t remember that we all have masculine and feminine inside us – the stories are not always about gender. The Dark Feminine comes to initiate the masculine into its own darkness – refining and fermenting the light, youthful masculine into its depths. In the Celtic world, the men who refuse to kiss the hag are either left behind never to be heard from, or they are sent on a journey to suffer in their arrogance until they have a breakthrough. “Beauty and the Beast” is an example: The arrogant prince is offered initiation by the old hag at his door. She appears in a rainstorm, holding a rose, asking for his hospitality. He refuses, slams the door, and she changes him into a hideous beast. He ultimately receives the same initiation – expansion out of self-centeredness and into the power of love and compassion – he just must take the long road through suffering. This is the world we are living in. The “shift in consciousness” that so many of us are talking about is an initiation of the light masculine being facilitated by the dark feminine. She’s at the door with the rose of expanded love, asking to be let in. In a way, I’m describing here a reversal of our common ideas of light and dark, whose roots are in Plato (400 B.C.E.) and Neoplatonism (300 C.E.). In that philosophy, we transcend out of the dark (chaos) and into the salvation of the light (wisdom, unity with the divine.) Neoplatonism was a major influence on Christianity and on New Age thought, but not necessarily on shamanism. In Neoplatonism there is a not-so-subtle valuing of the direction “up” and a distaste for the direction “down.” This is why statues of Plato nearly always have him pointing up with his index finger, echoed by later images of Jesus in the same pose. In that system, up is masculine, rational, holy, God and perfect. Down is feminine, dreamy, messy, corrupted by animal instincts. The Dark and Light I’m talking about here are energies present in nature, and transcending or ascension don’t apply. The point is to work with all of the energies, banish none, integrate all. The western mind is lodged in the light masculine - the energy of the teenage boy. There is exuberance and great energy there, but, as yet, little wisdom. In its simplest expression,” light” equals “youthful, naïve, joyfully self-centered” and dark equals “refined, fermented, nuanced, with a larger vision.” Light and dark energies are not better or worse than each other, and we need a balance of them in us. Daily life for the light masculine is mostly a sustained competition for dominance. The goals are very short term. We’ve been in the grip of the light masculine for several thousand years. It’s difficult to not be angered at what the unrestrained light masculine has done to our world, and it’s tempting to hate men, hate the patriarchy and lay blame there. But we can also try this to reframe that anger: Spirit is all about curiosity and exploration. It wondered what it would be like on this planet to let the light masculine have full reign, untethered, untempered by the feminine. It's found out the results of this experiment and is now ready to initiate the masculine into its darkness, into its wisdom. This is where we are. In the ideal, the path of human life is one of continued darkening – being refined by life, expanded in our vision, fermenting from simple, sweet juice into nuanced, full-bodied wine. The process of darkening is one of learning, through experience, to marry grief with praise, gratitude with fear, joy with sorrow. In the Celtic tradition, this is all work with the cauldron in the heart center – the Coire Ernmae, the cauldron of “vocation.” It is our work in this world to cook joy and sorrow into one soup, rather than seeking to summon joy but banish sorrow, as we have so often been instructed to do in the light masculine word. Most spiritual paths have dark feminine deities and characters that are there to help us in our darkening. A few examples are Lilith and Mary Magdalene in the west, Kali and Durga in India, the Aztec goddesses Coatlicue (“Serpent Skirt”) and Coyoxauhqui (Golden Bells). In the Celtic world, the Irish Cailleach, the Welsh Cerridwen, the “Loathly Hag,” and the Russian Baba Yaga are a few Dark Feminine presences. How do we welcome the Hag in to work with us? Something to remember: we work with her consciously through spiritual practice, inner work, and wisdom work, or we work with her unconsciously through disaster and suffering. One practice is from the Buddhist world: the practice of Tonglen . Let’s say you feel resentful of the nincompoops, naysayers and prevaricators in power. Breathe in that resentment, and let it fill you, let yourself feel it. Then on the out-breath, send compassionate prayers to the people you resent, wishing that they be relieved of their suffering, that they become wise. It’s important to avoid arrogance here, assuming that I am the wise one and they are the lesser ones. A more shamanic approach might be to use the out breath to invite the Dark Feminine into the world, asking her to expand wisdom in all of us. Another good idea comes, perhaps strangely, from Jesus. Not the Jesus in the official scriptures, but the one from the gnostic “Gospel of Thomas.” His disciples ask him what they need to do to be in alignment with the divine. Fast? Give alms? Make the correct prayers? Jesus answers, “Do not tell lies and do not do what you hate.” That is the amazing, radical Jesus that people originally fell in love with. If we lived those two practices, our lives would transform. The Dark Feminine facilitates our initiation with two main powers. One is dismemberment. This is the power of deconstruction, of “releasing what no longer serves.” The second is digestion. This is running energy through a system, separating the nutrients from the waste. I look around the world now and see the Hag fully at work. A side note that I can’t resist. The digestion element is why I see my backyard compost bin as a shrine to the dark feminine. Whenever I toss the kitchen scraps in, I make it an offering to the Hag of transformation and ask her to continue to work on me. A great story to help you in all of this is Snow White. Forget about the Disney version. Read the original Grimms version because it's more visceral and disturbing. In the original, Snow White keeps refusing the advice of the dwarves not to let anyone into the house. (The dwarves are dark masculine powers – working inside the earth, mining minerals, a form of digestion.) She keeps letting the evil queen into the house because the queen offers her beautiful (but poisoned) objects. The dwarves return and move the energies through her. Finally, the queen gives her the poisoned apple. Snow White chokes on it and falls into an initiatory coma. She wakes up not because the prince kisses her, (that is the light masculine’s version of the story) but because his men carrying her coffin stumble on a root poking up and drop the coffin, dislodging the piece of apple she has been digesting in her fifth chakra, and she wakes up a queen. Here is a link to the story: https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm053.html And here is a great podcast I recommend after reading the original Snow White story: “This Jungian Life Podcast”: A podcast from three Jungian therapists, this episode unravels the story of Snow White and female initiation. https://thisjungianlife.com/episode-144-fierce-female.../ One of my teachers says that our world will be totally different by 2050. That sounds very hopeful. But it took 1,000 years after Padmasambhava “tamed the spirits and demons of Tibet” for the warlords of the time to incrementally surrender their grip on dominance, open their vision, and allow Tibet to become a peaceful culture. Whether we are in the final 30 years of this initiation, or we have centuries to go still, all each of us can do is work to be darkened, bit by bit, lifetime by lifetime, through the grace and fierceness of the Dark Feminine. Many blessings on you, and many blessings on all of us, wherever we are on the path of darkening. A personal addendum: This piece has taken me several days to write. I’ve spent time by my compost bin asking for guidance, and it has given me plenty. Late last night I went out to it with a bowl full of icky stuff from the refrigerator. It was dark out, and I was in a little bit of a hurry. I poured the stuff in, and suddenly a racoon leapt up from the inside of the bin. She raised up on her back legs and hissed at me, terrifying the living bejabbers out of me – I yelped and stumbled backward. I’ve lived in this house for 15 years and have never seen a raccoon at the compost, although it makes perfect sense. I took it all as the Dark Feminine making a dramatic appearance. Wahoo.

An interview with MysticMag

So we swing into the dark center

When you heard the Titan mini sub imploded, did you imagine being inside it at that moment? When you watch the videos of people jumping off cliffs, do you feel it? Do you like horror movies for the gasping “jump scare?” Do you dance and shout when your team scores? Do you like kissing? Have you heard that Mount Everest is littered with bodies of climbers that will never be brought down? The Eastern mystics say that everything we love, every pleasure and danger we chase - including our traumas - is for one purpose: to open a gate for the finite mind to plunge into Source momentarily. To jump out of our self-imposed, limited identity and into the infinite, into Source. You know this Source. You feel it. We are all taught, early, to place a veil over Source – by our family, our culture, our religion, our economics. And by traumas – not the trauma itself, but our reaction to it, the way we carry it, hold it, nurture it. The people you’ve been mad at for so long? Probably your veil-placers. We want more than anything to lift that veil, and let Source shine through us. And at the same time, we totally fear lifting that veil, because of how that might shatter our reality. It’s this dance that creates those suffering habits we return to again and again. We invent habits to distract us from thinking about what's beyond the veil, habits to distract us from being mad about the veil, and habits to keep us from lifting the veil. Dance, dance, dance, dear human. Okay, I understand - because the mystics and the blogs have told me repeatedly - that “I am Spirit.” Spirit is manifesting in the world as me. I am Spirit experiencing the experience of experiencing this experince. Yeh, I get it. But why does this Great Spirit - Boundless Love, Pure Awareness, Limitless Wisdom – choose to manifest in this place of unending limits, with uncountable forms of ignorance and frustration? Why does it give me that vague memory of Boundlessness to haunt my thoughts, to hint in my dreams, to hunt me from the dark? I say, quickly without thinking about it much, “We come here to learn!” “Earth School!” “University of Embodied Experience!” But learn what? What it feels like to be frustrated? To be filled with yearning and unmet desires? To have my heart crushed and to feel my body slowly degenerate? Western theologians have tied themselves in knots for millennia over the question of why God created a world in which He knew we would “fall from grace” and He would then punish us with pain of childbirth, sweat of the brow, and then death, but He went ahead with the project anyway. Why? What kind of God is that? There are a billion words written about this, half of them in German, of course, but I haven’t found any that answer the question with anything beyond “we know not the will of Mighty God.” The mystics tell us (and the shamans agree) that it is only a small part of us that is mad and frustrated at all of this. It’s a small, not very bright, totally self-addicted part of the larger “me,” but it’s loud and persistent; an internal Lauren Boebert. It is unclear about what exactly it is afraid of and mad about, but because it is so loud, I can easily come to believe that I am afraid and mad to my very core. The small self has a powerful imagination, but its imagination is very small in scope. So, it can imagine unending forms of enemies, disasters and threats but it can’t see over the fence surrounding its tiny backyard, the yard of wrongdoing and right doing. In fact, the small self is terrified of even peering over that fence to behold the boundless field of knowing and unknowing, in which the mystics and shamans cavort. It spends its time planting angry flowers and judgy-weeds in its small space. Although the small self doesn’t really know what it’s mad about, I believe I have discovered the key: Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? -Mary Oliver, from “ The Summer Day “ I worship Mary Oliver as semantic goddess and I would gleefully wash her feet if she asked, but she articulates here the core error of the western mind, and the source of several millennia of vague anger. Western religion says we only have one life. Materialst science says the same thing. We are raised with a double-whammy of one-lifeism. Nowhere in nature does anything live only one life, then vanish. Everywhere in nature, everything lives again and again and again, in different shapes. The small self believes the current shape must remain in the same shape (that tiny imagination again). Its small imagination cannot fathom actual transformation, so it makes it an enemy. This is why we imagine our soul looking just like us, but kinda glowy. - but probably younger and thinner. The most poisonous lie that the false self tells us is the “one (and only) precious life.” All of western religion is based on this. That’s why the most devout people in the western world are the angriest. But they often don’t really know what they are mad at. Spoiler alert: it’s God they are mad at, for bringing us here, tricking us to disobey Him so he can punish us, so we must suffer, and must obey his capricious and hypocritical law, and must endlessly - with forced sincerity - praise Him for His goodness, and then, after all that - we croak. They can’t admit the anger at God, so they focus on being mad at people they are afraid of - the “rule-breakers.” And of course, anyone who looks over the fence is a real problem. So, why does Spirit desire to manifest as this delusion-riddled, limited world? Why would Boundless Wonder jump into me - this tiny cooking pot poised over the butt-searing flame of life? The answer to that question is actually So. Damned. Easy. And if you sign up for my webinar, “The answer is so damned easy” for only $39 by midnight tonight, you will learn what people throughout history have been begging to learn. Screw it, I’ll, just tell you. We come here to learn, incrementally, how to take the next bigger leap into Source. With each jump you make, you can stay in the water of the infinite longer, you can smell more of the fragrance of Source. The poet Rilke said , “This is how [we] grow: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.” Sometimes that pervasive fear you feel comes from the small self holding you down in the Boebert judgy-weed yard. But sometimes your fear comes from the fact that you are leaping into the next larger or deeper gap between your small self and the infinite. This is why we need human teachers, by the way – fellow humans who have made the bigger leaps that you are about to make. They can help you prepare, and they can keep you from making a naïve leap that will end up in an imploded submersible or on some frozen Everest crag. Here are some ideas and practices to help you: The first key is to admit that the “you have one life” story is false. That may actually be very difficult for your western mind. It may take many lifetimes. Our life isn't precious because it's so rare - fleeting, ephemeral, and then totally gone. That's is an absolute recipe for short term, totally ego-based living - in other words, the world that the western mind has created for us, and in which we all live now. for Our life is precious because each experience, tiny to shattering, ecstatic to debilitating, is a doorway to the infinite, if we have the courage to see it that way. The second key is to allow the Universe to be as big as it actually is, which is far bigger and weirder than any of us have ever imagined – or can. The third key is to admit that you feel the whole universe as a presence, in you and around you, in and around everyone and everything. Regardless of what your inner Boebert is currently complaining about, you are, in essence, never separated from the quantum-entangled flux of creation. Tibetan Buddhists say, "look around you - every being you lay eyes on has been your mother in some other life." The next key is to enter into the idea that the universe was never created – it has always been. There was never “nothing,” and there never will be. When you allow yourself to enter this, you can skip past all of Western theology, and just enjoy your life. Let’s say there are 100 quadrillion ways Spirit can manifest in the endless, eternal universe (that’s far too small a number, but it’s helpful to place some kind of “big” number on it.) In your endless lives and shapes - billions of lives in every shape imaginable, from nematode and virus to salamander to wandering Sapien - this world of the veil, this planet of limits, this cooking pot of “I want,” is only one tiny part of your great, limitless experience that you can never even imagine. Here is the most simple and potent exercise you can do, right now, and any time, to clear away this frustration of life. Close your eyes. It helps if you sit in some kind of meditation posture - cross your legs or cup your right hand in the left hand. Really get to meditating. Meditate the hell out of this. Say to yourself, “I am meditating.” Feel good about that. Do it for a while. I am meditating. I am meditating. Then after a while ask a simple question: “Who is meditating?” Ask that a bunch of times. And then ask yourself, “Who is watching that person meditate?” This is a practice that mystics, yogis, monks, and shamans use frequently, sometimes called “cultivating the witness.” The big, sloppy, delicious question then to ask is, “Who is the witness?” The answer we want to get to is along the lines of, “The one watching is Awareness itself.” In other words, Creation, Spirit, Boundless Wonder – it’s the witness of everything, including little you trying to meditate. To take this exercise down the shamanic path a few steps, after witnessing the "one who is meditating" for a while, turn your attention now to the “one who is afraid." Watch that person for awhile, asking, “Who is it in me that is afraid?” Watch how they act, what they do. Stalk them for a while, see where they like to go, and what they like to do. There are next, deeper steps in all of this, and you can explore some of them in our August Three Moon Ceremony if you want to. I leave you with this: How I become hyacinth How I become daffodil How I become hosta How I become sedum easily divided easily rooted How I become the two-tone whistle chirp in that far off oak How I become something you never planted How I green from brown How I heave up your mulch and crawl to you in your winter slumber How I spring from pruned branches How I become again the weeds you poisoned How I emerge out of dead vines How the longer you know me the bigger I grow How you think you can cultivate me How long it takes you to see How I become you. (© 2005 Jaime Meyer)

Opening the Four-Chambered Heart

In Buddhism - and in Shamanism as I have learned it - the first teaching is that life is “full of unsatisfactoriness.” The word “suffering” is most often used, but I think words like jacked, bollix, fubar, and GMFU (Got Me Fk*d Up) are descriptive on a day-to-day level. The Christians call it sin, which, in its original definition, was a term from archery, meaning “to miss what you’re aiming for.” “Missing the target” comes from not being centered in our power. In archery, a calm, still breath is critical. Every spiritual tradition tells us that it is “grasping” that causes all the trouble. Grasping takes over when we don’t trust Spirit. Spirit is the most expansive and elegant thing we can comprehend, and when we trust it, we, too, become expansive and elegant. When we don’t trust it, we shrink, we lose our expansive and connecting breath, we become clumsy, tight and inelegant, and our aim goes awry. And we grasp for new knowledge, for old happiness, for solid security and gleaming love, for pleasure, acceptance and worthiness. Every tradition says clearly: the more you grasp, the more you push it away. And yet, here we are, reaching all the time, with our “gimmee gimmee gimmee” hands. There is a difference between joyful growth and desperate growth; it’s the difference between how Spirit works and how our smaller self works; it’s the difference between culminating in a wondrous harvest or in cancer. It’s not the desire for growth that matters, but the grasping, which is borne of fear, which is borne from lack of trust in Spirit. A common phrase for Buddhists is, “I take refuge in the three jewels: the Buddha, the teachings, and the community.” The shamanic translation of this may be: “I take refuge in Spirit, the practices, and relationships (with everything).” Spirit, as it is seen through the shamanic lens, is always changing, exploring, creating, growing, shifting, dissolving, flowing. But with Spirit, there is no fear, anywhere. The single best practice we can do is 1) remember that each of us is that also. And 2) approach everything like Spirit does: exploring without fear. Is this easy? Fk*k no. That's why we have 10,000 lifetimes. But when it GMFU, it helps to return to that simple knowing and breathe. Try this: Imagine yourself standing on the edge of a cliff so high that you cannot see the bottom. You gaze over, look down, and see nothing but blackness. You drop a rock down, see it vanish into the dark, never hearing it hit bottom. You understand that it’s not just beyond your sight, it is, in fact, bottomless. Now, turn around so that the very tips of your heels are on the edge, in fact, the heels are over the edge, and you are only held onto the lip of the cliff by half of your feet and toes. How do you feel? Isn’t this how we all feel, inside, all the time? Now, let yourself fall backwards over the cliff, and keep falling. There is no end. Keep falling. Keep falling. Keep falling. Keep Falling. Keep Falling. See what happens.

For me, shamanism is all about working with the uncountable forms of fear that arise as we wander our way through life. Fear is so deceptive because it often dresses up as wisdom or common sense, as creativity, as morality, or as devout faith. It is a Herculean task to stay aware of how we are guided by fears that we don’t want to engage with, and we often fail. Failing is no actual failure, of course, because the mystics tell us we came into the body specifically to engage with fear. When we were a pre-embodied spirit, what was there to fear? As death is our teacher of beauty, love and compassion, fear is our teacher of self-awareness. Fear comes to open us to power - if we take the opportunity. I frequently receive a frantic message or call from someone who is convinced they have an “attachment” – some kind of malevolent spiritual entity that has attached itself to their energy body. The internet has made everyone an expert in the diagnosis of spiritual illnesses, so you don’t have to be online long before you can be convinced that, if you feel just about any emotional discomfort, you probably have an attachment. The attachment has come to you typically because someone with malevolent energy has sent it to you. So, the person who can’t stop feeling icky about the ex-boyfriend believes he has sent some kind of attachment. The person who had a frightening experience while taking magic mushrooms in their living room is convinced they have an attachment. A scary person lives down the hall and is sending attachments to me. This is a difficult topic because any of the above examples could be actual attachments. The shamanic tradition is clear that there are free-floating energies in the world that are looking for a home or looking for food, and they can see us as both. However, just as the Christian tradition has urged people to project their fears outward onto the devil, in neo-pagan-urban shamanism, we often do the same thing – project fears outward onto some “attachment.” A projection is an internal issue that we project outward, like a movie, onto something external. We are each other’s projection screen all the time. “That person is so arrogant” nearly always means “I am afraid I am arrogant.” Psychologists affirm that the level of passion with which I despise, fear – or admire – something is directly proportional to my fear that I am the actual owner of that energy. So, 99% of “attachments” are likely my own projections. “How dare you say that? The suffering I feel is real. This thing came to me. I don’t control it! I’ve gone to nine different healers of every modality, and no one can get rid of it!” Shamanism is a path of taking personal responsibility, of learning from the times we falter. Learning from mistakes is how we build our power. The new age obsession with attachments is rife with what the shamans call the spiritual parasite of martyrdom. It is far, far less likely that something has attached itself to me, and far more likely that it is I who am attached to the drama and the distraction of being a noble victim. Go back through the examples above of what people call attachments (the ex- boyfriend, etc.) and ask “what fear, inside me might dress up as what I want to call an attachment, in order for me to escape responsibility for my life?” Attachments can be fairly easily cleared from your field but won’t be if you are attached to the drama of having an attachment, especially if you don’t do the follow up practices required to build your power. Our world is deep in the throes of martyrdom, which, according to shamans, is one of the classic spiritual parasites that eat our life force. We are all given total permission nowadays to identify our suffering as someone else’s fault, call it evil and work to eradicate it – to force others to stop being evil. My definition of evil is “unaddressed, human unconscious fear, projected outward.” Evil only comes into this world through human beings, not through any other creature. Evil is a human act of asking someone or something else to carry my unconscious fear, and then giving myself permission to kill them for it, metaphorically or physically. I hope I can kill my fear by killing them. A year and a half ago, in one of my trainings in Peru, I was at the end of an eight-day dieta with a powerful plant in the sanango family. It’s a “master” plant that you work with after you have already worked deeply with many previous plants that build an inner matrix of power and protection. The plant was utterly cosmic, taking me on many astounding journeys into endless oceans of light I could never imagine on my own, and it showed me, day after day, how I, too, was made of pure light. But after a few days of glory, it took me to an otherworldly room to meet several beautiful, welcoming beings that I perceived as awesome cosmic teachers. As I talked with them, I began to realize that their intention was to eat me. Their radiant faces became the faces of Piranhas with red Scottish hair, eyes bulging over immense jaws lined with glistening teeth, insatiable for the taste of human flesh. I was flooded with intense fear, and became trapped in that dreamy spirit world, flailing to keep the several piranha people off me, hysterically crying out to the Spirit of Tobacco to rescue me. It took a tremendous struggle to free myself from their jaws and claws as Tobacco pulled me by my legs out of the spirit world and back into my tent in the jungle where I was dreaming. Utterly distraught, I bolted from my tent, hyperventilating, into the jungle and began smoking myself with tobacco to rid me of that death energy, to put up a hard protective wall between me and those evil beings. I spent the day in a teary haze of fear. And a deep sense of failure – that I hadn’t spotted the truth soon enough, that I had allowed myself to be seduced by their beauty. I was stupid and naïve. Later, I told my teacher about the experience. He listened with no reaction. I wanted him to give me some magic charm to say, a mantra, or a power song, or some technique to make sure this would never, ever happen again. He said quietly, “Next time let them eat you to see what happens.” I didn’t like this answer at all. I was very mad at him. I wanted him to affirm that I had been predated upon by beings from the lower astral plane - hungry ghosts - and that I had triumphed through my solid relationship with the tobacco spirit, and I did a good job getting back alive. That’s a good story that I can tell again and again, and makes me feel pretty special. Every religious tradition makes room for the “wrathful deities.” In Buddhism, the wrathful deities are manifestations, or the “other face” of the enlightened being, including the Buddha himself. Green Tara of total compassion takes some terrifying wrathful forms as well. On and on it goes across cultures. The job of the wrathful deities is to destroy the obstacles to enlightenment. They stomp and roar to cleanse the traveler of the obstacles – ignorance, pride, impatience, greed, self-deprecation, and other forms of fear that hide inside our thoughts. Those take form as our unconscious habits that limit us and hold us back. Shamanic language for this could be that fearsome visitors arrive when you are ready to actually make your bid for the next level of power. They shake you loose from old habits, or if you would rather stay attached to them, the wrathful deities protect you from stepping into power that you aren’t ready for. It's possible our world right now is staring into the bulging eyes of the wrathful deities. The “shift of consciousness” we all talk about cannot come only in beautiful form – it is always accompanied by the wrathful deities who are there to assist in the shaking off of the old structures. For over a year, I’ve wrested mightily with that experience in Peru with the Piranha people. I’ve concluded that the experience was an opportunity offered to me by the Sanango plant to shed another layer of ego. For the first few days of the dieta, it showed me its face of boundless cosmic wonder. Then, the other face. It was the ego that was terrified of the piranha folk. Maybe what they wanted to eat was my safe thinking, my habitual self-deprecation, my resistance to greater knowing. I think about the times in my training that I have let the powers eat me or kill me. Particularly, 30 years go, when I had a three-month long nightly terror ride of tormentors in various shapes come to me every night. Finally, I was grabbed from behind by a large man with flaming red hair who held me in choke hold. His arms were thicker than my legs, so there was no getting free. He whispered into my ear in a thick Scottish accent, “Let go, Laddie, just relax into it and let me kill you.” I did. I died. I woke up from the dream. The three-month terror ride ended, and I entered a new stage in my life and shamanic work. May every person be assisted in shaking off their old ignorance, fear and habits by the wrathful, protecting deities. May the world be renewed with their help.

Working Shamanically with Mushrooms