From The Other Side

There has persisted in us an interest and curiosity in communion with those who have gone on before us, those who have died.  It is interesting to me that the church so often places a kind of taboo on communicating with our departed loved ones save for only specifically sanctioned ones, as though speaking through the telephone is better than by writing letters or standing on the next hillside and yelling, sending smoke signals, or by special courier. It seems to me that there are those who do not wish the medium to get in the way of our communicating with those who have gone on through death as though they themselves would seek t control the ways and means that we carry on in our lives and discover the wonder that even though bodies die, the soul does not.  If you are tied to a dogma, you may be tied to the rules that this dogma presents, and in so doing, feel guilt or shame if you should connect with your relatives and loved ones by any other means that what the dogma seems to determine is "kosher" or acceptable. 

The history on this is one of cutting out the competition, and turning away from the rich reality that exists in the universe.  I think that the early church did not like this competition, did not like those who could speak to the world of the spirit and were thus deemed heretics, witches, and consorts with the devil.  Natural gifts, many lifetimes in the making were silenced by branding in this way.  Fear has been the modus operandi, and this works quit well to quell what is a natural propensity and curiosity. 

So mediums are often looked down upon, frowned upon.  they have to be, fi the dogma is to remain in operation.  There is a curios inflexibility with dogma.  It cannot admit that it could be wrong, or that somehow, by speaking with the universe, this means we are somehow being immoral or somehow misguided or evil.  This is silly to me, because we all have within us the means to feel our loved ones to greater and lesser degrees.  Some of us are better at it than others.  Some of us have cultivated abilities that can help to bring a person to their own sense of wonder and awe, which are the very things that help us connect to the universe.  It isn't so much that we need someone to give us messages from Aunt Mathilda as it is that doing this helps us to sense the wonder that is creation.  By bringing the message, we do sense the medium within the message, which is the source of all life, that we do not die, that there is more to us and to our lives if we but open our eyes. So often the mssage of he medim is not to simply connect ith the deceased, but to experience the inneffable in the moment, that elusive sense that exists within us all, and this it is this sense that can reconnect us with a lost line of communion within ourselves that we all thrive upon because it is what we are.  In bringing us Aunt Mathilda, the medium is delivering us the lost kingdom of ourselves.  So if MAthilda can tell you thinkgs that the medium does not know, could not possibly know, perhaps then we will listen as she leans forward and explains that life is far richer and greater than we could ever have guessed, that there is not some god there waiting to punish us, but a vast energy that sends many messengers to us, that much of what we have here is merely the result of misguided intention and some powerplays set to create and stir fear.  Many of the mediums of the last thirty years have been saying that we are on the cusp of great change.  I was told that I would be involved in helping to bring a new energy to the earth.  the same message seems to crop up in similar messages through these same sources.  We know something is up, the world is changing, a fire is spreading through the hearts of humankind.  But just what?  It is what we are, the wonder of US.  This seems to be a return to something, a turning of a great wheel, a shift away from one mode of being and thinking into one that is more inclusive, humane, and open-minded.

I think that by connecting within ourselves, the channels that ARE us can be felt.  In awakening, this has certainly become incredibly apparent.  I sense in the wings all sorts of energetic presences looking in on us, smiling, excited, wondering how we are going to go collectively.  Will humankind lash out in fear as the more controlling aspects of the collective begin to feel threatened by the great mystery welling up within us, or will those parts of us choose to drift back out of focus as humanity surrenders to the great change that is coming, has been coming, will continue to come?  Will this seeming battle between these polarities swing out of control or will be allow our sense of inclusiveness to rule the day and find a middle path where all parts of ourselves are brought into unity and greater healing? Will we forgive and forget the past so we can have a much more vibrant future?  Will  cease believing the authority lies outside of us and instead seek the kingdom within? As I was thinking about this, I looked up artistic mediums online after reading an old book I have had for years about a man who would go into trance and paint in the style of Renoir, Degas, Picasso, and Monet.  This man is able to paint four paintings at time using his feet and hands, most often in dim light, total darkness, or with his eyes closed.  It might be easy enough for someone to learn and thus copy the style of an artist, but in the case I read about, the way in which the medium works makes this argument a little hard to follow.  From that  thought I would take a look at what else is out there and I found the work of Carol Polge, which I am going to share with you in a moment.

The video I am including helps to underscore these issues I think very well by showing the life of a psychic artist who uses her gift to help people reconnect with this seemingly lost part of themselves. As is so often the case, her message is the same as others who have experience with the spirit realm; we are here to create our lives, we are not to be punished but given every opportunity to thrive and succeed.  Life is a wonder, and wonder is what will guide us if we are brave enough to just let it. 

Coral Polge is a spirit medium who does portraits of the people who come to her to let their loved ones know that they exist.  It is an interesting story about how psychic gifts can take many forms...

A Sensible Approach

When I was young, I thought how we fear death, and how fear of death was like a yoke hanging around our necks.  Even those who followed a religion were not always soothed by their faith when death came.  I think the reason for this is that often, while a religion may speak of a life in the hereafter, it really doesn't do much in the way of helping us to prepare.  For me, all of twelve years of age, it seemed like we needed some body of experience that could somehow help us to lose our fear of death and learn to live free from such shackles.  It was then that I came across a book by Raymond Moody Jr., entitled Life After Death.  Moody was a doctor who had patients describe their experiences in the wake of clinical death, and after these stories began to pile up, he asked his colleagues if they had heard any stories of what happened to clinical death survivors. They replied that yes, they had heard the same stories, but they made no conclusion or ever went anywhere with these stories.  Moody wondered why this was so and wrote a book on the subject, which was nothing short of groundbreaking for the time.  In it, he chronicled the experiences of a wide array of individuals from all walks of life who had all experienced either clinical death or a spontaneous out of body experience that led to being aware of deceased relatives and a warm and peaceful presence of light that was so wonderful, most did not wish to return from.  Reading this book as a youngster seemed to hit on this sense that here in the West, while we speak of a hereafter, we really do little to prepare people for death as a natural transition. 

If you look at our culture and institutions what you see is an almost dogged denial of death as we seek to do everything possible to forestall death, using technology and medicine to do everything possible to deny death an entry into our experience.  On the one hand, when we can keep those living from dying while having a good chance of recovery from an illness, we should certainly do so.  IN other cases, we leave people hooked up to machines little more than physically alive, but with either no hope of recovery or no real quality of life.  this is a touchy subject, because I think the minute we begin to discuss this subject in anything other than doing every possible thing to forestall death, it seems we are somehow suggesting that we should simply do nothing so death can have its way.  Certainly not. our will to live is powerful, and many people have held on to life for a very long time when they had a reason to remain here.  My own father, dying from terminal cancer, held on for weeks because my mother was scared to death to lose him.  It was only when she realized she was forestalling the inevitable, that she let him know that he could let go and die; she and his children would all be okay.  In very short order, within a day in fact, he was gone. 

Some forty years later, as my grandfather, who had lived a much longer life than my father lay nearly an invalid from a series of strokes and illnesses, lay in bed, exclaiming that he was tired of being here and just wanted to go home, he was greeted with a smile and assurance that all would be well and that he had the love and support of his family for whatever he chose to do.  Ten days after he had said his goodbyes, my grandfather departed quietly while his family was out picking beans in the garden.  His was a long life, and he went out the way he wanted.  Not everyone was of the same mind; one of his daughters did NOT want him dying and wanted every option on the table to keep him alive.  Luckily for him, there were family members who explained that he wanted to go, that he did not want to be kept alive.  He was choosing to leave.  As his own mother-in-law used to say whenever we were saying our goodbyes, "Do not wait upon the going."  In one case, a man was in his prime and really did not WANT to have to leave, but his body was not offering him many options and he held on long past what may have been best for him.  In another case, after a long life, another man died peacefully in his own bed at home.  We can all draw a lesson from this. 

It isn't that we need a hard and fast rule about death.  I rather think that we need a more compassionate way that does not preclude death as a road to peace and rebirth.  Instead, we often see it as a blotting out of our own consciousness, a very uncertain end.  It is uncertain perhaps because of the blind eye we turn, the distrustful sense we have in our own body of experience made possible by those who returned perhaps as a result of the advancements in medical technology, at once a blessing, and perhaps in some cases, a curse for those who might otherwise be ready to go were it not for an almost animal fear of what lies or does not lie on the other side of a heart that has been stilled.

So I say lets have all the advancements in technology that bring us quality of life, and longer life, yes!  But let us not forget the quality of that life, too!  And when the time comes, if we feel we have to hold on for dear life, well perhaps that is what we must do.  In other cases, we might well be ready to go. But how many of us hold on way past our own expiration date merely out of fear?

In other cultures, there are books, teachings, bodies of knowledge about what lies on the other side of death.  In dream, children are encouraged to meet their fears and to entertain the possibility that when they dream of those who have left this earth that they may in fact be making contact with that other world, that only seems "other" because of our own perspective or need to divide one from the other.  There is the Tibetan Book of The Dead that helps to explain the many levels or realms to the world we find ourselves in once we die.  It is a kind of preparatory text, most often for monks who belong to the Buddhist tradition.  I wonder what would happen if we were to realize or consider that lacking devices that allow us to see into the next world, the only thing we have are our own awareness to log and report experience and that perhaps it pays to consider what those people are saying when they manage to return. 

I seem to have had a long standing interest in life after death, perhaps partly due to having lost a father very young, but also because I often would find myself in an out of body state looking out over what I knew was something akin to the "rim of the world" where the new spirits entered this world from the realm of spirit.  I saw these spirits like dandelion seeds or white fibrous umbrellas of a sort that lilted down over this rim beyond which I never saw over, but returned to without any thought of or yearning for.  I would simply feel myself expand and become "impossibly big" as I felt my own physical body grow incredibly dense and my own awareness take on a lighter than air feel, and I would be there.  Later in life, during my late teens and early adulthood, I often had dreams of being involved in helping people move from this life into the next.  One was an old man who had lived in an upstairs bedroom of a house in the South (as best as I could tell) who, while lying in bed, spoke to me saying that he was afraid to die.  I remember speaking to him inside his mind explaining that all death really was was a big energy surge.  THAT was what death was.  It wasn't a crushing of his being, a blotting out of something.  He would remain, he would endure.  In one case, I found msyelf "on the other side" helping a gentleman settle into his new apartment, his new "house" in the spirit.  I was with another person who was doing this work with me and as we surveyed the rooms to make sure all was clear, a golden light streamed in through the windows of the living room.  All of this was itself some kind of construction, almost like a movie set, created in order to help people to settle into this new world.  I sometimes wonder what our snese of death would be like if more of us had experiences like this.  I wonder if perhaps we do many other things in dream that reveal our larger natures, the other work that we have been engaged in.  I wonder, too, if when the time comes for me, if this experience through my early life into adulthood will help me to not shrink back from death but embrace it, to die aware instead of falling into sleep and forgetting. 

It is often thought that those who do not know or wish to die, or who are in denial of death may well not even realize that they have died.  After my own fathers' death, my mother spoke of how she had these worrisome dreams where she was aware of the presence of my father calling to her from a thick fog as though he felt lost, stuck neither here nor there.  After she attended some meeting of her local A.R.E., the foundation created by Edgar Cayce, she was told that she should pray to him and explain that everything was alright, that he had died and that he needed to move on to the other side.  Not long after she had done this that her dreams subsided and she felt like he had gotten the message.  Now I know; in our Western world, we have such a heavy leaning on the rational mind.  For as powerful as this part of ourselves can be, it does a poor job of handling these issues fo life beyond the physical.  If we can't measure it or somehow prove it with some piece of physical evidence, then surely it cannot exist.  This, I think, is about as silly as expecting to measure light with a device that measures gamma rays!  We may never be able to measure the nonphysical realm in any normal way that we are used to measuring the physical world.  We may not be able to use the things of this world to glimpse something that is not of this world.  But it may be that our own awareness, our own consciousness, that is the very thing that will help us to do just that.  And it may be that this is all observable phenomenon in the same way that someone can stand and observe an apple falling.  No one can prove that you saw the apple fall.  Sure, you could take photos of it, or film.  Still, the experience exists in the moment, and it is from that experience in that moment, which may now be past, that is the key to all of this.  It may just come down to a little thing called faith.  This faith may also be bolstered by experience.  Perhaps what we need is a little of the science of GOOD observation with GOOD faith (which is not blind). 

In the Gnostic texts dug up in Egypt in 1945,  Jesus explains that if you want to know the ending, look to the beginning.  If you want to know the beginning, look to the ending.  And surely, I think, or feel, that we go out very often the way we have come in.  We often wind up helpless in old age, needing help to get around, to dress, and to be fed.  When we are babies, we see this helplesness as natural, but perhaps because of our fear of death, we do not see how the end is like the beginning, and we fear the evidence of our advancing age and perhaps even loath it in some way as a bakcwards method for coping with a very natural process where the beginning is like the end.  And in the same way that we enter this world, ending an old life in order to begin a new one, we leave this world just as we left the spirit world to come here and wake up in death to find ourselves like babies in a new realm, learning how to use our newly returned senses in a world where the sunlight streaming in through the living room windows resolves golden and full of some new life. 

I feel that we can do better.  We have certainly done well in making advancements in helping our lives remain in this world, but we have been lacking in how to cope with our transitions from this world into the next.  As I think about my grandmother who clung to life fearing that his would be her end despite being a staunch Southern Baptist, I have to wonder what our institutions are proving for us in the way of really being prepared.  Is preparing making sure your affairs are in order and the casket ordered and the plot purchased?  What of the self and the heart and the mind which grinds on this innevitable day when we shift from life into this shadow we call death, a being we have personified not as an angel of light, but one which bears a sythe and whose cloak hides a being which appears as nothing.  It is clear that deep down, we fear death is a nothingness and that we will be like wheat harvested by this being despite our own wishes.  It is less that we have made advancements in prolonging life; this is merely staving off the innevitable.  What about simply coming to peace with this thing called death.  Couldn't we choose to see death as the next great adventure?  Why not?  two weeks after the death of my grandmother, she paid me a visit, and as I scanned her memory, I saw how she had been taken on a tour of the solar system.  I felt myself reel as I saw how she had shot past Jupiter and Saturn, two imppossibly large planets, at a speed that made my head spin.  She had been given a kind of grand tour of things, she had seen deceased loved ones, and she was amazed.  She was pinching herself the whole time it seemed; she had somehow survived death!  She was alive!  Not just alive but ALIVE!  Free from an old tired body that had grown sick and was holding her back.  Her soul was like a giant steam locomotive that was chugging at light speed through the universe.  She was like her old self in her core, but somehow loosened of her old bindings, her old tethers.  She was without anchor, full of sail, and utterly FREE!  Reading many years later, today as a matter of fact, I learned that this visit, which took place soon after her death was a period of time described by the Tibetan Book Of The Dead as "Transference." 

So why can't we see it THAT way instead of some shadow in the corner waiting for us?  I ask you, why?  As long as we tell ourselves that death is a great unknown, we will continue to see it as a shadow only, and miss that tucked within the leaves of our life's book, there is another story that is full of something truly grand.  Somewhere deep within us, I think we know.  Perhaps we think that part of us is simply wishful thinking.  I think it is time to take this out of wish and into knowing.  We need only go.  We need only do.  Perhaps one good way to stat is to do as Raymond Moody Jr did back in the early 70's:  write a book.  Or tell a story.  Or speak of our own experiences, no matter how outlandish.  Certainly I cannot offer you proof of my own experience in terms of strands of DNA or pieces of cloth or artifacts returned from such a journey.  Perhaps what we bring back from such journeys is far more enduring than any artifact from this world could ever be.  Perhaps we begin by realizing that if we have a soul, then that soul may well survive death and may well be able to move beyond the body.  Even here, though, we want to relegate things like Out of Body Experiences as some kind of New Age hipsterism or silliness, or at worst, the working of the devil somehow.  All of this are merely the same conceptualizations that we offer up when we speak of death as this grim reaper.  All this seems to be made of is fear, and if fear can have such an enduring grip on us, it seems equally possible that joy and an adventurous spirit could have an equal kind of hold.  It may ust be a matter of what we choose to do or how we choose to be.  Certainly to someone stuck in depression that the world seems shadowed and dim while another without such a condition sees light and joy.  What is the difference?  I suspect it is a choice we each make.  A focus. So I ask; what would happen if we each learned to go beyond the body at will?  What if in dream we spring board beyond the body and find ourselves doing something on the other side of the planet where we observe an event that we would read about the next week in the papers?  Would that help us along with the sense that there IS something more to what we are?  What if we had scores of people all doing this, trainees in the science of the soul?  What if instead of cowering from this shadow of death, we embraced it only to find that it was not a shadow, but a light?  Perhaps a golden light that showers in through ever nook and crevice of this world seemingly "beyond."

Eventually, we will each die.  We will.  But we can conquer death while we live.  We conquer it by losing our fear so that when we do die, we do not close our eyes to it, but open them and accept it with awareness instead of slumber.  If we are all going to die to be reborn, it makes sense that we make the very best of it.  Otherwise, it simply remains the worst, an uncertainty lurking that will find us at some point, something we will put off and shove deep down instead of facing it and find that in releasing that fear, we release the very thing that robs us of life even as we live.  In living more fully, what worlds will we glimpse?  Death for us is fear.  Conquer that fear.  Be realistic; it seems everyone is doing this death thing, so there MUST be something worthwhile about it!  While here, squeeze every ounce of your life out of it that you can and leave nothing behind, but when you are done, why not embrace this life ending as the beginning of something that could well be one of the great adventures we will ever know, like being born. 

Dr. Raymond Moody Jr's Website

Saved By The Light (and other books) by Dannion Brinkley 

The Tibetan Book Of The Dead Online Version


Out of Body Experiences

Journeys Out of the Body by Robert Monroe

Preparing for Death

On Death And Dying by Elisabeth Kübler Ross

Finally, I'd like to say that the works of the Gnostics, while ranging all over the place, do contain evidence of an understanding of a process of rebirth that involved awakening, what the Hindus called kundalini.  It was this process that did not cease death from approaching, but allowed a person to enter into the light of the eternal soul where the death of ignorance or fear did not enter in.  It was this rebirth, this resurrection, as they called it, that a person was awakened into a new life.  It was in such a place that the self was unified, healed, more whole.  The way to death was in ignorance since all death, to their way of writing, was less a physical experience but an enduring trait of the self that sought not to know what was true within. 

There are many very good sources on the web and living in our information age makes it very easy for you to find many sources online that cover this topic.  You will of course have to run them through your own self to see how they sit for you. 

The Body As Soul

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.....

Rumi

Rumi gave birth to such wonderful words, thoughts conveyed with such a simplicity, deftness, and power that had nothing at all to do with how so many often think of the word.  For a long time I have wanted to plant some Rumi here, a man who puts my own efforts to shame.  But I love him for it....


I think I love Rumi so because his turn of words feel like my own, his effort, his passion, some twinkling of grace, his subject matter, his grey matter, his red matter, his matter....all matter to me.  And so for you, Rumi:

The minute I heard my first love story,

I started looking for you, not knowing

how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere,

they're in each other all along.

From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Barks

With the Beloved's water of life, no illness remains

In the Beloved's rose garden of union, no thorn remains.

They say there is a window from one heart to another

How can there be a window where no wall remains?

From Thief of Sleep

by Shahram Shiva

 When your chest is free of your limiting ego,

Then you will see the ageless Beloved.

You can not see yourself without a mirror;

Look at the Beloved, He is the brightest mirror.

From Thief of Sleep

by Shahram Shiva

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,

absentminded. Someone sober

will worry about things going badly.

Let the lover be.

From Essential Rumi

The Freshness

When it's cold and raining,

you are more beautiful.

And the snow brings me

even closer to your lips.

The inner secret, that which was never born,

you are that freshness, and I am with you now.

I can't explain the goings,

or the comings. You enter suddenly,

and I am nowhere again.

Inside the majesty.

From Soul of Rumi

by Coleman Barks

The Self We Share 

Thirst is angry with water. Hunger bitter 

with bread.The cave wants nothing to do

 with the sun. This is dumb, the self- 

defeating way we've been. A gold mine is

calling us into its temple. Instead, we

bend and keep picking up rocks from the

ground. Every thing has a shine like gold,

but we should turn to the source! The

origin is what we truly are. I add a little

vinegar to the honey I give. The bite of

scolding makes ecstasy more familiar. But

look, fish, you're already in the ocean:

just swimming there makes you friends with

glory. What are these grudges about? You

are Benjamin. Joseph has put a gold cup

in your grain sack and accused you of being

a thief. Now he draws you aside and says,

"You are my brother. I am a prayer. You're 

the amen." We move in eternal regions, yet

worry about property here. This is the

prayer of each: You are the source of my

life. You separate essence from mud. You

honor my soul. You bring rivers from the 

mountain springs. You brighten my eyes. The

wine you offer takes me out of myself into

the self we share. Doing that is religion.

From The Glance

by Coleman Barks

The Dream That Must Be Interpreted

This place is a dream.

Only a sleeper considers it real.

Then death comes like dawn,

and you wake up laughing

at what you thought was your grief.

But there's a difference with this dream.

Everything cruel and unconscious

done in the illusion of the present world,

all that does not fade away at the death-waking.

It stays,

and it must be interpreted.

All the mean laughing,

all the quick, sexual wanting,

those torn coats of Joseph,

they change into powerful wolves

that you must face.

The retaliation that sometimes comes now,

the swift, payback hit,

is just a boy's game

to what the other will be.

You know about circumcision here.

It's full castration there!

And this groggy time we live,

this is what it's like:

                               A man goes to sleep in the town

where he has always lived, and he dreams he's living

in another town.

                            In the dream, he doesn't remember

the town he's sleeping in his bed in.  He believes

the reality of the dream town.

The world is that kind of sleep.

The dust of many crumbled cities

settles over us like a forgetful doze,

but we are older than those cities.

                                                    We began

as a mineral.  We emerged into plant life

and into the animal state, and then into being human,

and always we have forgotten our former states,

except in early spring when we slightly recall

being green again.

                             That's how a young person turns

toward a teacher.  That's how a baby leans

toward the breast, without knowing the secret

of its desire, yet turning instinctively.

Humankind is being led along an evolving course,

through this migration of intelligences,

and though we seem to be sleeping,

there is an inner wakefulness

that directs the dream,

and that will eventually startle us back

to the truth of who we are.

From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Barks

The Seed Market

Can you find another market like this?

Where,

with your one rose

you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?

Where,

for one seed

get a whole wilderness?

For one weak breath,

a divine wind?

You've been fearful

of being absorbed in the ground,

or drawn up by the air.

Now, your waterbead lets go

and drops into the ocean,

where it came from.

It no longer has the form it had,

but it's still water

The essence is the same.

This giving up is not a repenting.

It's a deep honoring of yourself.

When the ocean comes to you as a lover,

marry at once, quickly,

for God's sake!

Don't postpone it!

Existence has no better gift. 

No amount of searching 

will find this. 

A perfect falcon, for no reason 

has landed on your shoulder,

and become yours.

From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Barks

     The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

As an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

From Essential Rumi

by Coleman Bark