Our left brain does such a good job of identifying things, singling out details and examining them. Without it, we would not be able to focus in on anything. We would not recognize numbers, letters, or make sense of ANY kind of symbolic language. We probably would look at art and see something wonderful, but lose what it is trying to communicate through the associations, which are themselves identifications made on a cultural as well as mass level. And yet, for as good as this lobe is, it cannot bring all the parts together into a unity, to see the larger picture or interweaving of patterns. We'd be stuck in the lines within patterns. We'd see one or two messages in the patterns, but we would not be able to take it one step further. Our brains are perfect mirrors of the energetic currents that move like lifeblood in our energy bodies, and our souls. Without the plethora of organs and tissues, we would not be able to make flow from the material universe that mirrors the energetic one. Just as our kidneys are tied into adrenaline function, which mirrors excitement and fear and caution, if we did not have that facet existing in the body, we would not have this one aspect of our soul's life living within us. Without organs excreting the hormone and neurotransmitter oxytocin, we would not know the sense of union that we feel in the soul, for oxytocin certainly does this in a myriad of ways, from bonding parents to their children to bonding to lovers and to groups. Without all of the symphonies of coordinated aspects of our physiology, missing just one of them would turn us deaf and mute and unfeeling and unknowing to what the soul seems to seek to express. The body becomes a template, a prism, of the soul. Through this very small space, this body, the universe somehow has a way to emerge in our experience.
Sitting on my porch, looking up at the stars one summer night, I felt "it" riding in the breeze. It was there with me, talking gently to me, playing off my own awareness, feeding me a stream of whatever it was I was most focused on. For me, that means understanding what is not yet known by me, doing some sort of inner somersault of a kind in order to get at the fruit just beyond my reach.
I was thinking about how some traditions speak of how kundalini rises upwards through the body, through the chakras, which are wheels or energetic organs of a sort, that have no physicality save for being energy. Shaped and formed by this energetic blueprint, surely I thought that the body had some parallel in its function that revealed some tie-in with this force that wakes up within us, or that we wake up to in us.
An image resolved in my third eye, an inner sight. My body was taken over in a sense of delight that "it" was speaking again. It revealed how important it was that our brain, actually TWO brains, did a kind of mirror flip in our bodies so that one hemisphere governed one side of the body while the other governed the other. for those who know about energy, it has long been understood that the negative and positively charged poles of our energetic selves are divided into the two "lobes" of the body; left arm is controlled by the right brain while the right is governed and controlled by the left brain. The left side of the body is the negative or feminine while the right side of the body is masculine. Taking the face you can split it down the middle and mirror it and you come up with two very different faces. The two hemispheres control the two sides of the body (face) differently. Even in men, at least in myself, when I did this little trick using photoshop, I saw how softer the left side of my face was than the right. the right side was more angular, somehow carrying an intensity that was not present in the left. the left was no less alive and unique, it was simply different. Softer somehow. Perhaps leaning into what I'd consider more feminine.
The energy swirling around me showed me how the two energies moved upwards into the head, but that the energy itself crossed each other as the feminine current went into the right brain instead of going straight into the left and the right sided energy, the masculine, jogged to one side and moved up into the left brain. It was here, in this cross, that nature had assured us of a way to merge these two currents. For all of the struggles and hurdles that the yogis had moved through over the eons in seeking to bring balance to their own inner energetic houses, nature had provided a path that was not elusive, nor even difficult. In fact, it was assured. It was assured by this crossing going on where one side becomes the other, where one energetic pole would cross through the other. They would merge in what we call the crown chakra. It is here that once awareness builds sufficiently, that we become aware of ourselves in our fullest sense while here on this plane of existence. Even as you look at each hemisphere, it is hard to miss the similarities that each have with the energetic spheres of our spiritual experience. We call them masculine and feminine, but I feel that they are in a very real way, beyond definition. they are qualities that go beyond mere sexual orientation, and will most certainly confound our efforts at pigeon holing them. So broad, so inclusive, one cannot say that any one person is JUST feminine or JUST masculine, but instead are delicately constructed currents more like a flowing poetry where aspects of each seemingly "separate" polarities flow one into the other and utterly confound our efforts at defining this new current combination as masculine or feminine. For as impersonal as it is, perhaps energetically, it is like the sine wave or the electrical poles of a battery or magnet. They do not exist separately, but are part of a unity. So a man is made more receptive by his own inner feminine traits his own personality chooses to take on in navigating this sea of being, and a woman is more decisive when her own inner masculine currents flow through her. And perhaps we have leanings in one direction or the other, certainly, and certainly our own bodies have its own biological alignment, and yet even so, we have very masculine women who seem more man than woman all within a female package. Some men can be very soft, very feminine, too. We have all kinds of mixtures, combinations, all expressions of the vast endless combinations possible in these bodies of soul.
Sitting there on that quiet warm night with the moon out of sight and the winds blowing in the trees above, I felt this silent voice or presence abiding with me, almost smiling and encouraging me as if to say "It's not meant to be some kind of struggle; it was all made very simple to achieve. The path was in your souls and the path is mirrored in your bodies. The two cross and merge in the crown. You simply have to know that they are doing this. The divine marriage happens all through you, but is assured at the very least, before you exit the crown vibration and out into the cosmos."
For years, decades, even, I have remained certain that the brain when brought into a unity, will bring us to creative heights. Being an artist, I have been a careful observer of my own experience. Awakening has certainly helped to seal the deal in my mind and heart that we aren't JUST creative in the right brain, but are most alive when we are balanced in both. Watching carefully, I have become a student of my own experiences in art. There was something of the answer in all of this. there was a reason why I could not escape the orbit of art. I could certainly no longer be a part of the religions of earth, I had had enough of those. I once wrote in my application to the art program at a college I attended the quote from Jean Cocteau which reads "Art is not a pastime but a priesthood." For me, if there was to be a path or discipline, art would encompass it in a sense. It HAD no rules, and even though some would try to apply them, we all knew they were there to be broken. To move forward, the old cognition had to be broken and refashioned in a new way of seeing. this new way of seeing was a parallel of how the self comes to greater levels of awareness spiritually. In a sense, I was grasping onto the spirit a discipline that was entirely nonsectarian, nondogmatic, but gave enough room for belief, for trying on ideas, but not needing to take them so seriously. Somewhere in art lay some answers. Oh, not The answers, for I rather think that THE answers, if the exist, exist more in a sigh, a smile, a moment, a turn this way or that, or the urge to become, and this has no path and is big enough to encompass all of them. All of them. It wasn't that I was ambivalent, it was that I was on a search, a mission, and none of the other paradigms like religion or science could give me what I needed. I needed something that would not require me to buy into any authority save my own experience. I was not interested in being a guru or teacher but a reporter and inquirer into my own experience.
In some ways, no words can contain these thoughts, and art itself sometimes feels like a tight fit, and yet in other times, it is perfect. I can work alone, I can worship at the feet of nature, the great mirror of what we are here to realize without anyone or anything clouding the discourse, the experience. The rule, which we each accept, we are free to take on, but the rule is what fits our own hearts, our own measures. The authority exists within instead of without. The wonder that is the world is free to unfold before us as we ourselves bloom in our awareness and know the wonder and glory that is this creation, which is the world. There is nothing higher, this direct communion with nature, with my own energy, with the world around me, a subtle as well as overt communion with all of these aspects and my own eager inquiry into what is next, wht leads us into the mystery of all of this. Here, true religion is realized. It is without bowing down before some temple or altar, but the simple realization of what we are in this moment. Anything can become religions I suppose; the glance, the touch, the swaying of the flower buds in the breeze. It is in living and being in this state of wonder that returns us to some more clarified and true state. With all the rules and ways and books and words clouding and crowding the way, it can be hard to keep the focus on ones own self. Certainly some traditions seek to downgrade this inner sensing, but it is we who make ourselves available in the moment and the movement of the Divine is not one predicated on anything except the meeting place within ourselves. As such, there is no path required, save for this simple realization that it is within us and is ours to find. So if it be by way of making houses, healing bodies, building institutions, or leading or following or by art or by craft, or by a million other things, whatever it is, the singular point of awareness that is our own soul's purpose and presence always enters in despite the trappings surrounding it. Not one person is better than another, each is endowed by the creator with this and need only reflect enough to know its point of entry, its means of expression in the individual, to know that we are each sons and daughters of the great All. And for me, it is by way of art that I commune with this, a mirror of sorts, a means or vehicle that works as any other can work, none more suited than any other save for what the self seeks in fulfillment. To understand how the body mirrors the truth of the soul has been a path, a trail of light I have sought to trace, to know, to become. Within us are all the means that we need. Dress them up in all sorts of methods and techniques if you wish, they are like a form that has many faces or points of understanding yet remains consistent regardless of the discipline wrapped around them. Two seemingly separate currents merge and dance within us, a mirrors of the universe creating itself constantly through these two opposites
All of its keys are here for us to turn in the great lock, the great womb of the creative both within us and in the world in a collective way. It has also been a way to collaborate, to work in any way necessary for the moment. It has been flexible and impossible to define or pigeon-hole. Its own structure allows it to grow organically, something that other traditions seemed to lack. Sure, people had their own ideas about what is worthwhile in art, and yet, no one was going on crusades against another. There were pitfalls, too, like worshiping instead at the feet of ego, or keeping old notions firmly in place. Somewhere, though, there was always this voice, this yearning, no matter how faltering at times, that drew me along, always curious, always mystified, always wanting to know more, a nub of something that was the nub of everything. It is kind of hilarious, really, since this nub, the seed of All, I have been carrying around all along. By ceasing thought and rambling mind, I simply abide and KNOW without word, without a need to even express it. In some ways, there really IS no way to explain it or express it. And sometimes, for the first time in a long while, I really do grow weary of even trying. Something is pulling me along, out of this life and into another, yes for a time I thought what lay ahead of me was what I was seeking, some destination, some great discovery that was yet to be uncovered. And certainly, this did happen, and continues to happen, but now it is as though I realize more and more that this same seed will remain with me even as I ask "What is it going to turn into? What will it become?" which is silly because in a trillion years in earth time, I will still be carrying that seed and it will have burst into a billion different lives and experiences and yet will have also remained a seed swelling past its shell, almost, the very force of newness which draws me forward. There is no end in sight, nothing but the infinite spreading out like some vast undulating blanket lain beneath a shade tree with stars and oceans mixing in with it. The cosmic picnic has commenced.
My journey through art has itself been one facet for giving voice or form to the formless. It is an institution, a creation made up in the moment, and it has showed me what I already knew but had not realized before; our bodies are mirrors of our souls. Our bodies ARE our soul flesh made manifest. There IS no division, for with each step into awareness, the gap tightens and there is this growing bud of a sense that they never were separate. Fish and ocean were always together, expressions of each other and utterly dependent on the other for their own expression. Within that frame this body is like a prism for the soul just as the soul is a prism for the body. This is itself a sacred marriage, a manifestation of what we are. In turns we have seen this body as a cage, a prison, a dirty low realm of existence as well as a boundless heaven. It was never one or the either, but canvas through which our own creations emerged.
The union is assured, it is no mystery as long as you pretend you think it is some kind of mystery. In each moment, its majesty is here, and we are here, just trying to comprehend it, kicking ourselves for having made it so complicated. Step by step, we unwind that great wheel of karma, that giant spring of pent up energy so that all is but loose ends fluttering in the breeze as everything becomes easier and assured. "The union was always assured" the presence said. So here, this one tidbit of my own observation; take it for however you need or do not need. See it or not see it; it does not matter. I am merely trying to realize what it all means as this seed is bursting in my hands as I try to remember what the next step is.....
Sitting on my porch, looking up at the stars one summer night, I felt "it" riding in the breeze. It was there with me, talking gently to me, playing off my own awareness, feeding me a stream of whatever it was I was most focused on. For me, that means understanding what is not yet known by me, doing some sort of inner somersault of a kind in order to get at the fruit just beyond my reach.
I was thinking about how some traditions speak of how kundalini rises upwards through the body, through the chakras, which are wheels or energetic organs of a sort, that have no physicality save for being energy. Shaped and formed by this energetic blueprint, surely I thought that the body had some parallel in its function that revealed some tie-in with this force that wakes up within us, or that we wake up to in us.
An image resolved in my third eye, an inner sight. My body was taken over in a sense of delight that "it" was speaking again. It revealed how important it was that our brain, actually TWO brains, did a kind of mirror flip in our bodies so that one hemisphere governed one side of the body while the other governed the other. for those who know about energy, it has long been understood that the negative and positively charged poles of our energetic selves are divided into the two "lobes" of the body; left arm is controlled by the right brain while the right is governed and controlled by the left brain. The left side of the body is the negative or feminine while the right side of the body is masculine. Taking the face you can split it down the middle and mirror it and you come up with two very different faces. The two hemispheres control the two sides of the body (face) differently. Even in men, at least in myself, when I did this little trick using photoshop, I saw how softer the left side of my face was than the right. the right side was more angular, somehow carrying an intensity that was not present in the left. the left was no less alive and unique, it was simply different. Softer somehow. Perhaps leaning into what I'd consider more feminine.
The energy swirling around me showed me how the two energies moved upwards into the head, but that the energy itself crossed each other as the feminine current went into the right brain instead of going straight into the left and the right sided energy, the masculine, jogged to one side and moved up into the left brain. It was here, in this cross, that nature had assured us of a way to merge these two currents. For all of the struggles and hurdles that the yogis had moved through over the eons in seeking to bring balance to their own inner energetic houses, nature had provided a path that was not elusive, nor even difficult. In fact, it was assured. It was assured by this crossing going on where one side becomes the other, where one energetic pole would cross through the other. They would merge in what we call the crown chakra. It is here that once awareness builds sufficiently, that we become aware of ourselves in our fullest sense while here on this plane of existence. Even as you look at each hemisphere, it is hard to miss the similarities that each have with the energetic spheres of our spiritual experience. We call them masculine and feminine, but I feel that they are in a very real way, beyond definition. they are qualities that go beyond mere sexual orientation, and will most certainly confound our efforts at pigeon holing them. So broad, so inclusive, one cannot say that any one person is JUST feminine or JUST masculine, but instead are delicately constructed currents more like a flowing poetry where aspects of each seemingly "separate" polarities flow one into the other and utterly confound our efforts at defining this new current combination as masculine or feminine. For as impersonal as it is, perhaps energetically, it is like the sine wave or the electrical poles of a battery or magnet. They do not exist separately, but are part of a unity. So a man is made more receptive by his own inner feminine traits his own personality chooses to take on in navigating this sea of being, and a woman is more decisive when her own inner masculine currents flow through her. And perhaps we have leanings in one direction or the other, certainly, and certainly our own bodies have its own biological alignment, and yet even so, we have very masculine women who seem more man than woman all within a female package. Some men can be very soft, very feminine, too. We have all kinds of mixtures, combinations, all expressions of the vast endless combinations possible in these bodies of soul.
Sitting there on that quiet warm night with the moon out of sight and the winds blowing in the trees above, I felt this silent voice or presence abiding with me, almost smiling and encouraging me as if to say "It's not meant to be some kind of struggle; it was all made very simple to achieve. The path was in your souls and the path is mirrored in your bodies. The two cross and merge in the crown. You simply have to know that they are doing this. The divine marriage happens all through you, but is assured at the very least, before you exit the crown vibration and out into the cosmos."
For years, decades, even, I have remained certain that the brain when brought into a unity, will bring us to creative heights. Being an artist, I have been a careful observer of my own experience. Awakening has certainly helped to seal the deal in my mind and heart that we aren't JUST creative in the right brain, but are most alive when we are balanced in both. Watching carefully, I have become a student of my own experiences in art. There was something of the answer in all of this. there was a reason why I could not escape the orbit of art. I could certainly no longer be a part of the religions of earth, I had had enough of those. I once wrote in my application to the art program at a college I attended the quote from Jean Cocteau which reads "Art is not a pastime but a priesthood." For me, if there was to be a path or discipline, art would encompass it in a sense. It HAD no rules, and even though some would try to apply them, we all knew they were there to be broken. To move forward, the old cognition had to be broken and refashioned in a new way of seeing. this new way of seeing was a parallel of how the self comes to greater levels of awareness spiritually. In a sense, I was grasping onto the spirit a discipline that was entirely nonsectarian, nondogmatic, but gave enough room for belief, for trying on ideas, but not needing to take them so seriously. Somewhere in art lay some answers. Oh, not The answers, for I rather think that THE answers, if the exist, exist more in a sigh, a smile, a moment, a turn this way or that, or the urge to become, and this has no path and is big enough to encompass all of them. All of them. It wasn't that I was ambivalent, it was that I was on a search, a mission, and none of the other paradigms like religion or science could give me what I needed. I needed something that would not require me to buy into any authority save my own experience. I was not interested in being a guru or teacher but a reporter and inquirer into my own experience.
In some ways, no words can contain these thoughts, and art itself sometimes feels like a tight fit, and yet in other times, it is perfect. I can work alone, I can worship at the feet of nature, the great mirror of what we are here to realize without anyone or anything clouding the discourse, the experience. The rule, which we each accept, we are free to take on, but the rule is what fits our own hearts, our own measures. The authority exists within instead of without. The wonder that is the world is free to unfold before us as we ourselves bloom in our awareness and know the wonder and glory that is this creation, which is the world. There is nothing higher, this direct communion with nature, with my own energy, with the world around me, a subtle as well as overt communion with all of these aspects and my own eager inquiry into what is next, wht leads us into the mystery of all of this. Here, true religion is realized. It is without bowing down before some temple or altar, but the simple realization of what we are in this moment. Anything can become religions I suppose; the glance, the touch, the swaying of the flower buds in the breeze. It is in living and being in this state of wonder that returns us to some more clarified and true state. With all the rules and ways and books and words clouding and crowding the way, it can be hard to keep the focus on ones own self. Certainly some traditions seek to downgrade this inner sensing, but it is we who make ourselves available in the moment and the movement of the Divine is not one predicated on anything except the meeting place within ourselves. As such, there is no path required, save for this simple realization that it is within us and is ours to find. So if it be by way of making houses, healing bodies, building institutions, or leading or following or by art or by craft, or by a million other things, whatever it is, the singular point of awareness that is our own soul's purpose and presence always enters in despite the trappings surrounding it. Not one person is better than another, each is endowed by the creator with this and need only reflect enough to know its point of entry, its means of expression in the individual, to know that we are each sons and daughters of the great All. And for me, it is by way of art that I commune with this, a mirror of sorts, a means or vehicle that works as any other can work, none more suited than any other save for what the self seeks in fulfillment. To understand how the body mirrors the truth of the soul has been a path, a trail of light I have sought to trace, to know, to become. Within us are all the means that we need. Dress them up in all sorts of methods and techniques if you wish, they are like a form that has many faces or points of understanding yet remains consistent regardless of the discipline wrapped around them. Two seemingly separate currents merge and dance within us, a mirrors of the universe creating itself constantly through these two opposites
All of its keys are here for us to turn in the great lock, the great womb of the creative both within us and in the world in a collective way. It has also been a way to collaborate, to work in any way necessary for the moment. It has been flexible and impossible to define or pigeon-hole. Its own structure allows it to grow organically, something that other traditions seemed to lack. Sure, people had their own ideas about what is worthwhile in art, and yet, no one was going on crusades against another. There were pitfalls, too, like worshiping instead at the feet of ego, or keeping old notions firmly in place. Somewhere, though, there was always this voice, this yearning, no matter how faltering at times, that drew me along, always curious, always mystified, always wanting to know more, a nub of something that was the nub of everything. It is kind of hilarious, really, since this nub, the seed of All, I have been carrying around all along. By ceasing thought and rambling mind, I simply abide and KNOW without word, without a need to even express it. In some ways, there really IS no way to explain it or express it. And sometimes, for the first time in a long while, I really do grow weary of even trying. Something is pulling me along, out of this life and into another, yes for a time I thought what lay ahead of me was what I was seeking, some destination, some great discovery that was yet to be uncovered. And certainly, this did happen, and continues to happen, but now it is as though I realize more and more that this same seed will remain with me even as I ask "What is it going to turn into? What will it become?" which is silly because in a trillion years in earth time, I will still be carrying that seed and it will have burst into a billion different lives and experiences and yet will have also remained a seed swelling past its shell, almost, the very force of newness which draws me forward. There is no end in sight, nothing but the infinite spreading out like some vast undulating blanket lain beneath a shade tree with stars and oceans mixing in with it. The cosmic picnic has commenced.
My journey through art has itself been one facet for giving voice or form to the formless. It is an institution, a creation made up in the moment, and it has showed me what I already knew but had not realized before; our bodies are mirrors of our souls. Our bodies ARE our soul flesh made manifest. There IS no division, for with each step into awareness, the gap tightens and there is this growing bud of a sense that they never were separate. Fish and ocean were always together, expressions of each other and utterly dependent on the other for their own expression. Within that frame this body is like a prism for the soul just as the soul is a prism for the body. This is itself a sacred marriage, a manifestation of what we are. In turns we have seen this body as a cage, a prison, a dirty low realm of existence as well as a boundless heaven. It was never one or the either, but canvas through which our own creations emerged.
The union is assured, it is no mystery as long as you pretend you think it is some kind of mystery. In each moment, its majesty is here, and we are here, just trying to comprehend it, kicking ourselves for having made it so complicated. Step by step, we unwind that great wheel of karma, that giant spring of pent up energy so that all is but loose ends fluttering in the breeze as everything becomes easier and assured. "The union was always assured" the presence said. So here, this one tidbit of my own observation; take it for however you need or do not need. See it or not see it; it does not matter. I am merely trying to realize what it all means as this seed is bursting in my hands as I try to remember what the next step is.....
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