"Something arises which pleases the mind, which fits in with our notion of what is profitable for us - and we love it. Something arises which thwarts us, which conflicts with our wants, and we hate it. So long as we possess this individual mind, enlightenment and delusion, pain and pleasure, accepting and rejecting, good and bad toss us up and down on the waves of existence, never moving onwards, always the same restlessness and wobbling, the same fear of woe and insecurity of joy."

"Our state of mind is not to be fatalistic, saying of bad things, "It can't be helped," and of good things, "What difference does it make?" It must be to want what the universe wants, in the way it wants it, in that place, at that time. This wanting is the Way, this wanting is the suchness of things; there is no Way, no suchness apart from it.

The suchness of things is what the poet is looking for, listening to, smelling, and tasting. And in so far as he and we listen and touch and see, the suchness has an existence, a meaning, a value. Unless we taste the world, it is tasteless; it is void of suchness. But this tasting is not to be a choosing, tasting some and not tasting others."
- R. H. Blyth (via one of my favorite blogs whiskey river)

(Rarely have time to post over here, but wanted to share with Zaadzers...as crossposted at my main blog, Crossroads Dispatches:)

I want to jump in the fray around Demo this week with a pre-announcement. Since everyone's asking what I'm baking these days, here's a peek inside the oven:

Imagine walking right into a set, a living theater of sorts, a pop-up teahouse and brasserie evoking the artistic foment and intimacy of the Parisian salon.

A laidback running showcase for eclectic installations of provocative and live social art, aesthetic and green designs, Web 2.0 demos (including a boutique digital screening room, etc.)

A convivial spa of conversation catalyzing fertile verges.

A community space for people to commune with people of every stripe. (Devoted but not pushy about transforming "the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.")

Each production comes once around for less than a season, never to be repeated again, to instanteously pop up in another incarnation somewhere else in the Bay Area (initially).

This time, the swirling philosophers and literati of a Vienna coffehouse with Art Nouveau vibe

(exit stage left)

Now, the Silk Road beckons saffron and cinnabar colored plush pillows spice-laden opium den  (sans opium)

(exit stage right)

Now, what does your fantasy fancy?...

"All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players" - Shakespeare, As You Like It

I haven't seen anything quite like it I can point you to. But something about Colette's in Paris reminds. Something about New Frontier on Main at this year's Sundance Film Festival reminds: 

"New Frontier on Main is Sundance's newest venue, showcasing moving-image [video] installations, live performances, microcinema screenings, new media technology, and the Rabbit Hole, a DJ lounge cafe." (more in this great article, "Sundance's New Frontier preserves artistic integrity", Variety, January 17, 2007)

"I've always loved DEMO-style conferences (like the one going on in Palm Desert today) where entrepreneurs show off their creations for the first time to an audience of their peers, the press, and investors." - Jason Calacanis, "Taking the payola out of DEMO-ing: The TechCrunch 20 Conference (or, I'm back in the conference business baby!)

This doesn't replace any expos or conferences, but I'm yearning for gatherings more sassy than a conference, and I'm willing to bet others are too.

I applaud the launchpad that Mike and Jason are giving visionaries to demo their dreams based on merit, not who's able pony up fees:

"It is a well known secret that if you are willing to pay the $15,000+ fee, your startup will really need to suck to be turned down." - Mike Arrington, "The TechCrunch20 Conference"

I don't have my model entirely cranked out, yet. But, claro que si, it's about the artists, innovators, entrepreneurs pushing the edges.

p.s. Comment, blog, email, text, or call 408 513 7324 if you are interested in participating in anyway.

dancers? investors? musicians? VJs/DJs? sponsors? videographers? filmmakers? accountants?  real estate gurus? conceptual artists? chefs? burners? producers? set designers? experimental theater folks? etc. etc?

People often ask me to take sides. Don't you love this? Hate that? I usually maintain silence because I don't know how to answer. Even my "I'm a Visionary, Not a Revolutionary" post only lightly hinted at what I really wanted to convey and which Adyashanti says with so much more brilliance than I:

"This depth of love isn't something we fall into or out of. The love that we fall in and out of is somewhat removed from the essence of love. That type of love is also part of life experience for most human beings, but this love is just recognized to be. It is a great surprise the first time we recognize it - when we find that this love, right here, coming directly from ourselves, is in love with whatever it meets.

"How can this be so? I'm not supposed to love that person who has a different philosophy than mine."

"What is that love doing here? We are at totally opposite ends of the political spectrum."

"Why do I love you? How did that creep in? What kind of love is that?"

This is a deep love. This is a love synonymous with Truth. Where this love is present, Truth is present. Where Truth is present, this connectedness, this deep love, is present.

Many stories of Jesus describe this kind of love. People around him were constantly telling him what wasn't lovable.: "This prostitute, we'll stone her to death. God doesn't love people like that." But Jesus, totally connected, knew this love is indiscriminate. It doesn't come because someone is nice or noble. It just is. It loves everyone indiscriminately...

Make no mistake: this love doesn't have anything to do with you becomng noble, holy, or worthy. This is a love that's preexisting. It has always been here and always will be here. It's a love that simply is.

You had to discount this love to get on with the business of being a separate self, but still it existed. And this is actually our greatest fear, to find out that you love all sorts of things and people that your mind would rather not love. Possibly the only fear greater than death is love, real love. Finding out that you do love, that this is your nature, is the beginning of the end for everything in you that thinks it is separate." - Adyashanti, from "Emptiness Dancing"

I've been reading and stretching myself on Julian's ponderings on 21st century spirituality.

I'm not sure what exactly 20th century spirituality was. Mostly because I wasn't that interested in spirituality in the 1900s myself.

I really got into spirituality in earnest through a serendipitious way at the turn of the century, but that's a long story maybe for another day.

I found going to the Catholic church of my Cuban parents' upbringing rather boring. 

Follow rules, no questions please, just read this book -- this is the Word (well,  thankfully, I've met many Christians today who intimately know the Word is the dynamic, living, breathing Holy Spirit).

No heart please.

No spirit either.

So if I had to characterize 20th century spirituality, and 21st century religion, I'd guess I'd say it was rote.

I think we've delved in the Age of Enlightenment far too long.

Yet I'm not advocating checking our intellect at the door (heck, you're talking to a straight-A student and BSEE graduate and ex-chief technology officer), but I sense more of an integration of the disavowed feminine aspects of the divine occuring in the 21st century.

As I spoke once in my other blog, I see a shift from the scared feminine to the sacred feminine.

There is so much to say on this topic that I see now that's what I'm devoting this entire blog to:  the exploration of the sacred feminine and the enchantment of enlightenment.

I'll leave you with the words of Sufi master, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (of the Golden Sufi Center in Inverness, CA) from his article, Anima Mundi: Awakening the Soul of the World:

"Plato understood that “the cosmos is a single Living Creature which contains all living creatures within it.”(2) While this tradition was carried on by the Gnostics and later the alchemists, the Church fathers imaged a world that was neither divine nor sacred. A transcendent divinity was the source of all creation, and humanity lived in exile from heaven in a state of sin. This doctrine created a split between matter and spirit, causing the world to be seen as separate from its creator.

The understanding of the world as sacred resurfaced from time to time over the next centuries. In the Gothic revival of the twelfth century, and later in the Renaissance, the created world was briefly seen through the image of the World Soul. In their cathedrals the Gothic architects reflected their vision of a sacred order within creation that belongs to this feminine divine principle. The World Soul animated and formed nature according to divine proportions, which the architects, masons, sculptors, and stained glass artists imaged in their creations. (3)

Again during the Renaissance nature was briefly seen as a living spiritual essence:

If medieval theology had removed God to a wholly transcendent sphere, to the Renaissance Platonists nature was permeated by life, divinity, and numinous mystery, a vital expression of the World Soul and the living powers of creation. In the words of Richard Tarnas, “The garden of the world was again enchanted, with magical powers and transcendent meaning implicit in every part of nature.”(4)

In the Renaissance the World Soul was understood as a spiritual essence within creation, guiding the unfolding of life and the cosmos. In the words of the Renaissance philosopher Gideon Bruno, the World Soul “illumines the universe and directs nature in producing her species in the right way.”(5) The World Soul was also the creative principle that the Renaissance artists sought to channel in their work. Their art was based upon the same sacred proportions they saw in nature, and they understood the imagination as a magical power that can “lure and channel the energies of the anima mundi.”

The Renaissance left us great wonders of art and the imagination. It was a brief flowering, however. The orthodoxies of the Church re-established the split between matter and spirit, and the rise of science began to image the natural world as a machine whose disembodied workings human beings could rationally understand and master. The magical world of creative mystery infused with divine spirit became a dream belonging only to poets and the laboratories and symbolic writings of the alchemists. "

And so I am an alchemist, and so I am a poet.

image Jia Lu's Lattern Guardian

Julian asks: “again at some point the subject i would want to explore with you evelyn would be something like “what are the implications for non-dual consciousness in the real world?” or how does non-dual realization affect the manifest realm?”

Great! I actually don't want to talk about otherwordly transcendent realms and celestial abodes anyhow.

This table, this chair, this cup of tea, this lily, this war, this TV set, this concrete pillar. Yes, precisely what I want to explore. And what I consider the sacred feminine: the great mater is about matter and consciousness in form.

I had this snippet handy since I'd written about harmonization and The Middle Way, on my other blog), I thought I'd share here as a kick-off.

Perhaps many people grok from their reading or their meditation experiences that nondual consciousness or awareness is what the entire 'real world' arises from. If one accepts that as a given (and please don't -- inquire for yourself), then it doesn't appear to make sense that simply realizing nondual consciousness (or awakening) would have any real effect on the real world.  (Is this the prevalent understanding - I'm curious...)

I mean it's all happening and unfolding in a wholly flux anyhow, right? Paradoxically, yes, and not exactly so. Ah, what could Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki have meant by: "Everything is perfect, but there is a lot of room for improvement"?

Though, typically we aren't really moving about in the real word as it is though, but rather our interpretation of it (or as Adya terms it, "the perceptual overlay" we place over it). David Hawkins says there is a tiny time lag between any experience as it is and our perception because anyone that's not realized is continually adding an "I am author of"  in between.

Nondual realization, or awakening, dramatically affects the 'real world' as well as our perceptions of it. But that's too much for any one post. 

As harmonization between two aspects of Self - form and formless - deepens, it seems as if an alchemical transmutation ripples through the Universe. It's a Beauty that cannot be evaluated - it just is beautiful. It's a symbolic union of sorts, often portrayed in Vajrayana Buddhists paintings as a sexual union, of spirit (portrayed male) and his consort, matter (portrayed female).

Maybe those two words are signposts to why realizing matters:

Harmony.
Beauty.

So just want to start with this:

"When spirit and matter are in harmony, it's as if a third entity is born - that's really the Buddhist "Middle Way." The Middle Way has nothing to do with the notion of being halfway between two opposites. The Middle Way is when spirit and matter are in harmony - when the inherent oneness is realized. Spirit and matter are not two different things, they are aspects of the One. This is the realization of our true nature.

As humans we become identified with matter. Matter includes every subtle and gross manifestation. Matter is anything that can be touched, seen, felt, perceived, or thought. A feeling is matter and emotion is matter, as is a body, a car, or a floor.

The essence of matter is spirit. Matter is animated by spirit, by the life force, and they cannot be separated. Although we can speak about them as if they are two things, if we take away the life force, there is no matter. It's not as if there is dead matter. There is no matter.

Part of realization is moving from identification with matter (which manifests as personality, or "me") to identification with spirit. True enlightenment is when spirit and matter are in harmony...

If we are sensitive, we can feel when environments are awakened [matter and spirit in harmony]. Human beings can be more or less awakened. So can trees or a mountain, canyon, hilltop, or a particular street corner in our neighborhood. When we are sensitive, we can feel these things. When we expose ourselves to that awakeness, to that environment where spirit and matter are harmonized, it helps us awaken. Ultimately, that's what satsang  is. That's also what meditation really is. We are exposing ourselves, and then, quite naturally, spirit and matter harmonize [within yourself too]. All of a sudden it just clicks, without you doing anything. The less you do the better.

When we relax and allow this natural harmonization, there is a deep awakening to the beauty of our environment, just as it is, and to the beauty of our own selves. That's the Middle Way, but it's not really in the middle: it's all encompassing." - Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

p.s. I do have other teachers besides Adyashanti - but he's so convenient living in Bay Area. I also love Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, David Hawkins, Ken Wilber, Karl Renz, Daniel Odier, and Pavarthi as living teachers.

Update: You know it's okay to fess up to a deep gratitude that melts into love for Adyashanti. I think everyone that is sincerely desirous ends up finding just the person that reflects back to them their own Self. And, for me, that was Adya.

Update #2: I accidentally omitted Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee from my list of relevant living teachers I like. Coincidentally, he'll be in San Francisco, March 3, 2007, discussing this very topic: Awakening the World: A Global Dimension to Spiritual Practice.

images Anthony Ulinksi's Yellow Teapots ($2350, I'm simply an art advocate, not his agent)

Placing a long comment  in response to Al and Julian over at Julian's blog here for prosperity' sake (whatever that is) because it's relevant to the discussion of how and why realization matters.

First off, I guess I wasn't clear about what I meant about global awakening. I don't see it as some singular global thunderbolt event whereupon everyone awakens to their true nature on the same minute on the same day in 2012. To me, it doesn't matter how long it takes. I do the service that is presented in front of me moment to moment coming through me (rather than by me) for as long as it takes, as many lifetimes as it takes. All while knowing only Now exists.

That said I do sense (no proof or evidence, only anecdotal, only intuition) that there is a quickening or acceleration happening. I see more and more people around me waking. Siona's post on Maitreya reminded me that Maitreya means the Friend. What I've seen in my own sphere is that something is rippling out in an organic fashion: one friend awakens, and then that person is there for another of their friends, and so forth. Mostly occuring through direct transmission in a very subtle and simple network effect.

In my experience, I think many many many people are ready because it's simply who they are.

I was feeling a bit lost after a multiday meditation retreat in 2005 because if you listen closely to most spiritual teachers they tell you this spiritual stuff is all about putting in your time. Read between the lines, and they're telling everyone that Enlightenment is a far off fantasy which few beings are worthy to attain. (Ultimately this is what they believe is true, not being done out of malevolence or anything like that.)

What a godsend to find the biography of Dipa Ma at the bookstore near my PO Box on my way home after this retreat. Short version: simple middle-aged widow in Calcutta awakens, and helps her villagers awaken through meditative practices incorporated into the everyday - nursing, ironing, whatever.

This was a turning point in my life. There and then I knew it was possible in the mundance world - I did not need to enter a monastery - and it was possible in this lifetime.

From then on I was on the direct path.

After initial awakening, one realizes that This is self-liberating and nothing needs to be done…it's doing. But often people seek living guides for that threshold into realizing that nothing needs to be done.

This discussion has sparked an understanding where people are coming from and maybe I wager I'm on a different page about the fundamentals in the fundamental principles (“in light of the fundamental principles of spiritual awakening and experience”) than Julian and Al and perhaps others based on their writings.

This is already long, but here's a nutshell:

“Do not improve yourself past that which is already whole. And return the favor. That's the saving of the world. Return the favor and see it over there. Wherever over there is - to your left, to your right, behind you, upside down, under your feet. See wholeness there. That's the transformation of everything. If you don't see wholeness in everything around you, that's the continuation of ignorance, the continuation of violence….

I guarantee you that one being who sees the Buddha in you is worth more than reading ten thousand books about the Buddha. One being who actually knows that there is only the Buddha and that nothing else is going on has a more powerful effect than anything else.” - Adyashanti, from ”Emptiness Dancing “

I was far from any mentally stable place in 2001 myself. I was so depressed and numb that 9/11 didn't even register a blip for me: “Like what else can go wrong?” When therapists and coaches would ask, ”Where do you feel that?” I didn't know what they meant by where in the body. I lived totally in my head, and that mind was spinning out of control. By mid-2002 I realized the questions I had no traditional therapist could me help me with.

I think if I had to categorize myself on the SD spiral I was making a transition from orange to green in 2001. Yes, I agree that there is some  time needed to prepare the body/brain, but not so much as everyone thinks either…I've written [to a mathematically inclined friend]:

"Psychology is helpful in terms of developing strong healthy sense of self so we don't have a nervous breakdown or experience psychosis when our sense of self bursts into free, luminous, open space.

There is a like a circle or mathematical set that we enclose around our concept of ourself and label let's say for instance “Evelyn.” That Evelyn circle can be pretty small, constrained and limited if our self-esteem is shot through trauma, etc. So Western psychology is useful towards expanding that circle wider and wider and wider so that it's not so constrained. But as big as it gets it will always hit a limit to where the finite brain can go. There is still a circle/set, albeit very large.

There comes a point where what I'm talking about has no divisions, no seams, no lines for circles, no sets. It's Setless.”

As Mahatma Gandhi once said, ”Even one person who is awake can change the world.”

p.s. I've heard it been said that the direct path is risky and fraught with danger. But in my experience staying in illusion, or delusion, is far far riskier. This ain't about 'helping' any deluded misguided souls out there to attain something better but rather simply seeing through and through who they are which means really truly seeing through and through who you are and what everyone is simultaneously all at once .

image  "The Spirt Within Me" by Oleg Zhivetin: "I show in my paintings what people cannot see in real life. I show individuality, the intelligence, dreams and emotions, that every human being is different and because of that, they are beautiful"...Oleg Zhivetin

Update: I received an email that got me pondering. Here's my response:

It may be later, or tomorrow, before I can address all the points in this exchange. Thanks for pointing out and reminding me that what I'm writing is not necessarily meant for everyone to apply, but rather those that know that there is no self experentially, not philosophically.

“”The expanding of the circle of self is not the extinguishment of ego-self identity, the identity of the seperate ego-being. Thus, expanding the circle of self is not the same as non-dual realisation.”

I didn't say it was. I  meant to say that this is what most of the aim of self-improvement, self-help, and much of therapy is about - widening the diameter of an imaginary circle. But rare is it to find someone that asks you to consider if that so-called line drawn in shape of a circle was a mental abstract concept imposed on something totally without boundaries…and that in fact, perhaps, there is no circle or seam whatsoever.

Those that have that felt sense, they do have capacity to see the Buddha-nature or the Christ consciousness in Other because they know there is no Other.  We often falter since yes there is still imaginary smudges remaining faintly in shape of circle, but it's definitely definitely  possible. I have witnessed this myself in small groups that's prime purpose was awakening.

“As an extreme example, imagine a new-ager telling the mother of a child which is starving to death due to the greed and selfishness of others: “this is all an illusion, your child chose this”. ”

Hmmm, I've never said anything about choice. Illusion, yes.

Seeing through and through isn't done through words or preaching or explaining dharma even. It is direct transmission. Of course, I am violating that ideal right now ;-)

So I think I hear you. You are saying people that aren't ready will read my words in this blog and misinterpret and misuse them somehow?

(I have another much more popular blog intended for general public at http://evelynrodriguez.typepad.com where I try and avoid nonduality language as it's meaningless to nearly everyone….)

I guess I tend to agree with you that this philosophizing and trying to describe the ineffable isn't really helpful. I thought it may be for those on the cusp, or those already familiar with satori. But my gut tells me that there is another way.

Thank you & namaste, e

p.s.  How I keep forgetting that tantrikas don't philosophize, they write poetry. (Show, don't tell.)

I have grown weary in the attempt to try hard to save the world (operative word: try).

I'm taking a break away from keyboard (too into my head, too far from the breath of people and grasses and bark and coyotes and clinking forks) for a day or so to recall that all's right with the world and reconnect to Self.

And to heed Byron Katies's sage advice: "I don't let go of concepts. I question them. Then they let go of me."

So as I take this little break, I'd like to share what feels naturally my style of writing-being with you from an entry on my other blog from this past winter solstice 2006:

I am not afraid of the dark.

This late spring, I could smell the Mediterranean breeze and Tuscan vineyards in the orange trees and in the bend of the olive trees in this sun drenched valley.

Late summer, I gave myself the nom de plume, Evelyne, because inexplicably the petite patisseries and boutique lingerie shops of Paris - the City of Light - were in my bones as I strolled through the promenades of Palo Alto, Los Gatos or Los Altos.

Late fall, the Celts weave their harps and faeries and thick mossy stones into my sinews and midnight black hair. I am dark Morrigan incarnate.

"Few forms of Christianity have offered an ideal of Christian perfection so pure as the Celtic Church of the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries," wrote Ernest Renan. The Catholic monk Thomas Merton agreed: "I am reading about Celtic monasticism, the hermits, the lyric poets, the pilgrims," he wrote. "A whole new world that has waited until now to open up for me." - Steve and Lois Rabey, Celtic Journeys: A Traveler's Guide to Ireland's Spiritual Legacy

Wednesday the new moon, invisible pure potentiality. Friday the winter solstice, seventeen minutes of pure light filters into the innermost tomb, the centermost womb. Today the eve of Christmas.

My creative writing tends toward the mythic, the symbolic, a finger pointing to the moon.

Except light is always light, no less.

Both Stonehenge and Newgrange's ancient engineers ensured that both monuments came alive with the sun's rays on the darkest day of the year, and among the thinnest, gossamer veiled days of winter. Even the snow carpets cannot  obscure if you but open your eyes.

Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?
Morpheus: You've never used them before. - from the film, The Matrix

Poet William Bulter Yeats, not to mention the Celts, whisper of thin places - like holy wells and sacred stone circles - open portals where drifting mercurial between worlds and dimensions is seamless.

"The world is holy. Nature is holy. The body is holy. Sexuality is holy. The mind is holy. The imagination is holy. You are holy... Divinity is immanent in all Nature. It is as much within you as without." - Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon

 

No, I am not afraid of hidden crevasses, evergreen forest shadows at 3 a.m., the depths of the well waters, the grey girth of the round Celtic crosses strewn in the cemetery. I am not afraid of the mere absence of light. No thing.

a match is struck

against the box of your body

ochre flames dance

crimson twirls spritely

on the torso

of the willow yule log

a slow burn on a long night

Yielding

into consummation

"Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day has come." - Rabindranath Tagore

Last September I was blessed to be in the presence of Daniel Odier and Pavarthi for a yoga workshop in Manhattan. (Highly, highly recommend.) Daniel was telling the story of meeting a Ch'an master (Ch'an was predecessor to Zen) in China.

"What is the task of the master?"  the Ch'an master asks Daniel (whom is a master himself these days.)

Daniel said he had a hunch he knew, but wanted to defer to the old Chinese sage, so he answered: "I don't know."

"To kill the disciple as soon as possible," he replied.

This might not make a lot of sense, or it may make superb sense. And I'd like not to interpret too much for you. Consider when Tita hesitates in her attempt at wringing a chicken for the family supper in the novel Like Water for Chocolate that the hesitation yields a chicken running and squawking about in pain with its head half wrung. Tita learns then and there that sometimes the direct immediate approach is the kindest. (This is a merely a metaphor, so comments on vegetarianism and animal cruelty are out of scope here.)

So it may not be an accident that dark Morrigan (the triple goddess of Ireland, more another day, or check out Grave's White Goddess yourself) is my icon. And it may not be an accident that my main blog's title is Crossroads Dispatches (Hekate is goddess of the crossroads).

The triple goddess of death and rebirth claimed me before I was cognizant myself of the deep connection I have with their symbols and signs and, mostly, their significance.

Hekate, Inanna, Kali, Maman Brigitte (a voodoo goddess), Morrigan, and that's just for starters. The so-called dark goddesses of the new moon are truly the goddesses of illumination, rather than the light and airy goddesses of beauty and love.

I have nothing against lovefests - whether they are soul-gazing tantric workshops or full moon trancedances - but often we crash from the "light and uplifting" spiritual high to find ourselves right back in the 'real' world of parking tickets, babies who don't sleep through the night, spouses that say the most exasperating things, the 6 o'clock news, and the nagging boss - and, we feel that short-lived joy and peace scattered to the four winds.

So here I'm after something lasting, rather waiting and chasing after the next peak experience.

"When you've understood this scripture, throw it away," says Jack Kerouac in The Scripture of the Golden Eternity. "I insist on your freedom."

I just started reading the wonderfully insightful A Short History of Myth (and at less than 150 pages it really is concise), by Karen Armstrong. Evoking Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, Armstrong writes of the (perhaps the most ancient triple goddess) Inanna myth:

"This Mother Goddess is not a redeemer, but the cause of death and sorrow [well, I'd say death and rebirth]. Her journey is an invitation, a rite of transformation that is required of us all. Inanna goes down into the word of death, to meet her sister, a buried and unsuspected aspect of her being. Ereshkigal represents the ultimate reality. In many myths, dating orginally from this period, a meeting with the Mother Goddess represents the ultimate adventure of the hero, the supreme illumination. Mistress of life and death, Ereshkigal too is a Mother Goddess, depicted as constantly giving birth. In order to approach her, and gain true insight, Inanna has to lay aside the clothes [defenses] that protect her vulnerability, dismantle her egotism, die to her old self, assimilate what seems opposed and inimical to her, and accept the intolerable namely, that there can be no life without death, darkness and deprivation."

In A Short History of Myth, Armstrong says that myth wasn't a story to be read (would you read lyrics to an opera and say you've been to the opera?), but rather myth used to be a direct, living experience whereby we confronted our deepest fears. That it was inextricably  tied to initiation, direct experience, the Mysteries, prayer, liturgy, ritual, contemplation.

Myth was "an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, helping us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and glimpse the core of reality."

And so that is why I am into art lately, and particularly the creative mind (spontaneous, aware, original versus reactive mind which is re-acting, repetitive, contrived). 

And why I agree with Michael Beckwith that spiritual growth is "allowing that which is unconscious to become conscious."

As to myth as art and art as myth, this exchange resonates the deepest for me:

Bill Moyers: "Who interprets the divinity inherent in nature for us today? Who are our shamans? Who interprets unseen things for us?"

Joseph Campbell: "It is the function of the artist to do this. The artist is the one who communicates myth for today."

image Picasso's Woman with a Crow reminds of the raven goddesses, such as Morrigan, as the raven's one symbol of transformation

I was flipping through WeAr magazine (adore it, if you're into global fashion/retail/art you might get a kick out of this large-format Berlin mag) when I came across a layout of Richard Kidd store in Vancouver.

Under glass skylights and the criss-cross steel beams of chic industrial bohemia, a wall mural reads:

I CAN NEVER BE IN LOVE

BECAUSE I AM LOVE

Profound poetry appears in the most unexpected places. Love letters to an unspeakable God ditto.

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." - Sir Winston Churchill

p.s. I love that tagline in the image: "It was the end of believing..."

(and, the beginning of being)

"Someday, after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energy of love; and for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."  - Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

"When the role called "I'm a human being" ends, we call it death. It's a lot easier if you let that role die before the body dies, and let it be put to rest now... you can awaken to being what you eternally are and have true life." - Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

"The night sea journey takes you back to your primordial self, not the heroic self that burns out and falls to judgment, but to your original self, yourself as a sea of possibility, your greater and deeper being." - Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul (excerpt, thanks for the reminder, Julian)

I'm juggling several books including The Path of the Priestess, Not in His Image, A Short History of Myth, White Goddess, among others in my weaving dream of bringing the ancient Mysteries to immersive life in a modern day mythos, as I wrote the other day.

The truth of it is I don't really know how this will unfold. The truth of it is I'm pretty sure I'm playing with fire, and I suppose it sounds romantic to imagine being a moth consumed by the flame. Yeah, that's the melodrama the ego spins although I sense that what animates the moth, animates the flame. But like one of my teachers says it might not be the cruise ship voyage we imagined we'd signed up for, "The mind starts to think it's being handed candy when it's not. It's being handed a sword."

"I live in the flame
of a still desire
I flicker there
a not-lived love
Shadowing these likenesses
living beyond the ear of my own speech
      - A Still Desire, from Like A Woman Falling, by Stephanie Pope
(poem in essay, Descent's Alchemy: The Imaginal Process of Falling Apart)

My explorations are around the themes of the dark night of the soul, perpetual beginner's mind, and (seeming) death and rebirth into the primordial self -- through the medium of art -- and, not forcing any of it.

Why? Seems like a good question. But I don't really have any grand answers to Why? It just feels like it's calling. And these days I'm trying to listen to, rather than second-guess, these calls as they come.

"'From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below.' In Sumerian, the word for ear and wisdom are the same." - from Interpretation of Inanna's Descent Myth

Last night, I felt like reading some Campbell, and re-read his incredibly lucid essay, Zen, which now makes more sense than ever before. Something in there spoke to that me deeper than me, and I think it said something about suchness, life and art too that's relevant to the night sea journey (like I like to say, Explaining Kills Art):

"A number of schools of Occidental psychological therapy hold that what we all most need and are seeking is a meaning for our lives. For some, this may be a help; but all it helps is the intellect, and when the intellect sets to work on life with its names and categories, recognitions of relationship and definitions of meaning, what is inwardmost is readily lost. Zen, on the contrary, holds to the realization that life and the sense of life are antecedent to meaning; the idea being to let life come and not name it. It will then push you right back to where you live - where you are, and not where you are named.

...The Buddha is known as the one "Thus Come," Tathagata. He has no more "meaning" than a flower, than a tree; no more than the universe; no more than either you or I. And whenever anything is experienced that way, simply in and for and as itself, without reference to any concepts, relevancies, or practical relationships, such a moment of sheer aesthetic arrest throws the viewer back for an instant upon his own existence without meaning; for he too simply is - "thus come" - a vehicle of consciousness, like a spark flung out from a fire."  - Joseph Campbell, Zen, 1969 essay, reprinted in Myths to Live By

p.s. Of all the myths, the biblical Jonah's story of the whale (featured in this excerpt of Dark Nights of the Soul), Inanna's descent into the Underworld, and Percival's quest for the Holy Grail ring loudest for me personally.

image Marc Chagall's "So I came forth of the Sea..."

"Those who cannot translate adequately, with a fair amount of integrity and accuracy, fall quickly into severe neurosis or even psychosis: the world ceases to make sense—the boundaries between the self and the world are not transcended but instead begin to crumble. This is not breakthrough but breakdown; not transcendence, but disaster.”  - Ken Wilber (via ~C4Chaos)

The world has ceased to make sense.

Today, heck maybe it's an everyday occurence now, I'm not in a mood to be pandered to, or to pander. Maybe it's just me and maybe it's just the people that come into my sphere, but they are quite intelligent.

Almost too intelligent. They've seen the world's paradoxes. I think of Enid in Ghost World. You aren't pulling the wool over her eyes. She'd puke on The Secret.

I met my friend Wyatt on the streets of Palo Alto. Sitting there with his Washburn, he asked me for change. I was curious because he didn't quite meld with my label for street musician: "Are you from around here?"

He'd been touring in the Pacific Northwest when Katrina hit. He had lived in the Ninth Ward. He'd spent most of that time he says squarely in denial living with a fellow band member's family in Eureka, CA.

I suppose it might be called a breakdown under the giant canopy of the redwoods. One of my parting words that first day (we were destined to became good friends) were from Nietzsche only because he said he was "testing himself" via the journey back to Nola. (And yes, very Campbellian.)

me: "Well, I suppose, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
he: "I like Sartre better myself. Life sucks - make the best of it."

These people are too wise for The Secret. My buddy Wyatt definitely falls prey to victim thinking, as do we all.  But he's also in that dark night of the soul spot which ain't about positive thinking your way out of. The Secret  simply won't meet his integrity head on. The Work, or some variation, yeah, that hits closer to home.

His last email to me ended  with this p.s. sentence after a brief-and-hardly-uplifting accounting of what's been happening since he arrived back Christmas Day:

it's a long way to go when you don't know where your going....

I told him he was way ahead of the game. He's genuinely honest - everyone else fools themselves thinking they know precisely where they're going and why.

What most people need is not a false reframing, but a deframing. Byron Katie tweaks Wyatt's statement (and she doesn't spout philosophy as much as try to illustrate, demonstrate, the movement of the Tao): "When you have no destination in view, you can go anywhere."

These people are onto something, it's just that that something defies everything they'd ever been taught about winning in the world. Not only self, but collective belief systems crumble.

not to know
is ultimate knowledge
thinking you know
is delusion - tao te ching

We continuously underestimate people's resiliency and intelligence. We give them cookies and milk to feed and negotiate with monsters rather than accompany them on an investigation under the bed to check for themselves whether there actually is a ferocious monster. I loved how Darshan explained the power of a film like Pan's Labyrinth:

"Pan's Labyrinth is an old story framed in a new language, and done so with the responsibility of a New Era Artist.  Instead of creating a fairy tale which helps the viewer escape from the darkness of the world outside, Del Toro is like the storytelling father who says “Yes, the world is a dark and scary place, but together we can look at the world and no longer be afraid.”"

After surviving the tsunami, I picked up Jon Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living. No, I didn't think lightning strikes twice (that was probably my natural disaster for this lifetime), but I realized it's akin to facing catastrophe when you realize the unknown is in your face every instant and it doesn't care that you already leapt off a hundred-foot pole last instant.

"It is the philosophy of the Tao that we are all falling off a tree, at every moment of our lives. As a matter of fact, the moment we were born we were kicked off a precipice and we are falling, and there is nothing that can stop it. So instead of living in a state of chronic tension, and clinging to all sorts of things that are actually falling with us because the whole world is impermanent, be like a cat." -  Alan Watts, What is Tao?,

I entertained the thought of going to New Orleans last year at Mardi Gras. But I was  exhausted from living in my thoughts (living in interpretation and expectations) for nine weeks in Thailand and Sri Lanka while visiting tsunami survivors and tsunami relief workers and I'd need to head immediately to New Orleans from Colombo to make it. 

Actually I wasn't even close to being ready for post-Katrina Nola. Yet.

I mean to go this year, and it'll be Fat Tuesday this Tuesday round the bend. I may take video and launch recklessly into a video project shooting whatever grabs me.

After the hot and sour soup and pot of tea are cleared away, the other day, my fortune cookie reads: "Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain." I pay the bill and head next door to Cafe Adria. As I cross the threshold, the radio program announces their special programming for Fat Tuesday.

Meanwhile I observe myself get into a nihilist funk as the most cherished and most "given" of my beliefs crumble around me. The fort is coming down, yet there's nostaglia for that old fort.

We try so hard to avert disaster, and yet what you resist persists. I have noticed that we're aren't all alone in this. When and if the boundaries crumble, the teachers appear unfailingly. They might not be in clothing you immediately recognize or dialects you'd expect though.

Today I write this email to a friend, a kalyana mitta,  across the country. (I've left out some identifying comments and questions). We were talking about the coincidence of this 'namaste' post with the fact that a student in his leadership class had just explained 'namaste' that day to the rest of the students:

I really adored what Bryon Katie said because she's so living it. To see not one mistake - in other, in anything is the complete namaste  - is to really see that there is only one (indivisible) thing going on.

One constantly meets only the sacred, only the divine over and over and over.

There's this poet that said: "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

I'm not allowing that total namaste myself, there are times I vacillate  to nihilism as a defense against sinking in deeper to this Self that can hardly clutch at any belief (even if I call these beliefs something nobler like, meaning) in an obscuration of simply being.

Nonetheless, everything has deepened anyway through grace even as the path meanders. Mostly I watch my thoughts, and question if they are true.

I will be in Nola when I get there I suppose and no sooner ;-). Somehow everything is not falling into place to go quite yet. Yet it's one of those things that is more a matter of when not if.

I hope to see Wyatt when I get there. I think he's going through a true nihilist stage. (Me, I'm merely play-acting.) I think going  back hasn't been the easiest thing for him. He recently wrote: it's a long way to go when you don't know where your going....

Actually I wrote back to him and told him if he didn't know where he was going, he was ahead of the game. Most people aren't that honest, they pretend they know exactly. So I get
the sense that maybe a lot of folks may be in the dark night of the soul post-Katrina, and maybe they feel it shouldn't be that way and they'd like their "old" life back.

Hmmmm, well, we'll see where I fit in all this.

namaste, e

p.s. wrote this yesterday, rough/raw....

walking home from cafe adria
meaning tumbles into ether
i want to chase after them like dragonflies
capture them down and frame
rather i am stilled

circus tent clouds cradle flamingo sunset
playdoh-blue port-a-potty
tender white plum blossoms sprinkle into
below, china-blue dumpster

once,
small of god things,
now,
god of small things,
mine
yours

all this feels strange and untrue...

In the Snow Patrol video for "Open Your Eyes" below,

...the viewer’s P.O.V. is that of a driver racing through Paris at dawn, recklessly running red lights and generally cruising through the streets (sometimes the wrong way down one-ways) without  ever once stopping — except at the very end. Legend has it that director Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman), who licensed the film to Snow Patrol, shot it in one take without getting a permit, and was arrested after its first screening.

Set to Snow Patrol’s pensive, anthemic music, it’s exhilarating, eerie, dreamlike. - via Fred, from Very Short List

I adore Paris. I adore dawn. This time of year feels like the dawn of the year, the advent of spring. The New Orleans Mardi Gras was adopted from the festival in Paris.

Yes, it's Mardi Gras today.

No, I'm not in New Orleans.

I witness that thought, "I should be in New Orleans" (it appears to have an annoying perky voice) squeaking.

"All this feels strange and untrue." ("When you argue with reality you lose - but only 100 percent of the time," I hear Katie purr.) So no I should not be in New Orleans evidenced by the simple fact that I am not in New Orleans. Rather I am in San Jose. The geisha like purple magnolias, white and pink plum blossoms, dripping branches of cherry blossoms and lavender are blooming. And I'm here writing this.

New Orleans isn't a matter of if. Simply when. Possibly it's the next full moon. The video project inspiration is gelling with a working title, "Rhyme and No Reason." Rather than a quick trip to Nola, it appears I will be languidly getting to know this voodoo mistress of a city and its peopling while entertaining with tea at my parlour in a shotgun in Marigny (Law of Attraction at work here ;-)).

Tom Piazza, a New Orleans music writer, says that in New Orleans they "participate in life as it unfolds." Life is "lived to the hilt."

"The French Quarter is the last quarter of Bohemia - a place in love with life," wrote Tom Williams, later changing his name to Tennessee after a bus deposited yet another soul passionate for the literary. Historian Louis Powell says Nola became the literary capital of the South because it was "where you could expatriate without going to Paris."

I can feel it's time to be utterly reckless this Dawn. I have a stationary box  collaged with postcards of Paris scribbled:  "Paris... en flanant ." In French, flanant means to roam aimlessly, to hang out deeply, to sashay, to slowly lounge, to wander like a pilgrim, like a lover that is.

"The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too be lovers in disguise." - George Santayana, The Life of Reason

So I will be in New Orleans...en flanant, shortly, and not a moment too soon or a moment too late. I mentioned that my fortune cookie the other day after the hot and sour soup and tea were cleared away read: ”Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”   At the same neighborhood dumpling nook, yesterday's cookie reads: "Do what you can with what you have, where you are." Eternal fortune cookie advice for life, eh?

Still I can feel it's time to be utterly reckless this Dawn. And not only in my imagination. I have a whimsical way of living in the imaginal and arriving at the same lessons, yet sometimes you know it's a go in the real world. I wrote this piece, 'What is Your Genius?'  (below, very end) in mid-December based on a desire to accompany Wyatt across the country on his way to Nola. It was looking like he could not make it in one shot, and he was kicking the idea of heading to San Diego and cutting across the country from there.

The whole thing intrigued me as a soul, as a writer, and I mentioned I wanted to tag along. On Dec 6th, he writes from the Palo Alto library:

 Have you ever traversed this fine country of ours without reservations?

What a fine question. Without reservations? Have I done anything without reservations? A cruise through this world without stopping, without reservation and gleefully greeting the rising sun in its full glory. Yes, it's high time to live life to the depths.

And open my eyes.

Private heart, my genius is polka-dotted napkins that pulse. I see awake trees, tables, chairs, almond-honey soap dishes, fishes, children with two pink bows in their hair while their mother on the bus nods 'si, una muchachita' glances. I see souls not the scraggly torn black t-shirt hanging from Wyatt's arm as he picks himself and his tin cup up from University Avenue gathering his guitar. My genius is seeing time as a single point of light, merging into the black man playing harmonica at Lytton Plaza and purple, gold, green Mardi Gras beads hanging from his tin can.

My genius is seeing the invisible tendrils that connect us like the way I-10 ribbons across the bottom of the United States through Tucson, then El Paso, then Austin, Houston until we reach Nola and finally arrive at the once-flooded Ninth Ward. My genius is that I made that journey with Wyatt in ten days and learnt how to write poetry and songs on the street for our keep, and never had to leave my imagination for a single step, a single hitchhiked ride, a single trucker who stopped to listen to the tale. I have done it in my vision, and the lessons, the epiphanies, the stories are ingested, are kneaded into the bread of life. The staff of life.

I can picture the people in Texas looking forlorn as they walk down main street with their Christmas packages past the light poles decorated with silver tinsel until they pass by our placard and stop to chat:

"What's Your Dream -
We'll Tell You Ours"

And so they stop to talk heart-to-heart and they too won't notice that the edges of the grey jacket are frayed. They'll see Wyatt's peacock blue eyes, peacock blue skies.

And I have never left my home, I have never travelled after all across the country with Wyatt.

This pilgrimage in the end is a vertical one. And that vertical plunge is a free fall into grace.

My genius is I hold a mirror to your genius by glimpsing your untarnished unfrayed untorn soul.