Lucidity in a dream can be like a handful of sand. You have it – you’re looking right at it, but even while you do, it’s sifting through your fingers. When your hand is empty, you don’t realize it. You’ve forgotten what you were holding. You don’t remember you were holding anything at all. You’re submerged in the drama of the dream.

Life on this plane is like a dream. Spiritual awareness is like lucidity. The handful of sand phenomenon applies.

To make matters worse, we are buffeted on all sides by a cacophony that would drown out our inner voices and by strong waves that would pull us back down into the dream.

It is challenging to hold onto that sand.

In three of the podcasts I recommended last time, Christopher Moors talks about the need to first withdraw and observe your patterns without acting on them. Start where you are, he says, quiet the mind and observe without reaction. When the drama surges, let it pass by.

I have been consciously trying to master my emotional reactions for years now with only limited success. I am a person with a whole lot of water going on. I have a big barrelful and I easily slosh over the top.

I think a big problem was that I’ve been consciously trying. You cannot consciously master unconscious processes. You need to deal with the unconscious directly – in its own language.

Listening to Moors talk about “letting it pass by,” an image came to me wherein I was sitting calmly on a bank at the edge of a wood watching a river rush by me. Somehow the image spoke to me on all levels, so I’ve adopted it as sort of a mental talisman.

This is a day-by-day, step-by-step journey. Some days are better than others. Nevertheless, with this image in my mind, I have been much less swept away by my reactions. Progress, not perfection.

A test came in a family event some weeks ago – an annual event that I always dread because of the negativity that permeates it. My family is a bit oddball, but there is a very conventional couple in my extended family. They are financially well off, politically conservative and — in my view — narrow minded in their aspiration to middle brow American culture. I have nothing in common with them except this extended family connection that forces us to socialize at least once a year.

The husband is basically good natured, but the wife is arrogant and judgmental. She sits aloof in a closed posture of arch superiority and provides negative commentary throughout the day. She doesn’t approve of me and makes it known with several put downs at each gathering. Since she is my mother’s age and this pattern goes back to when I was a child, her put downs have a powerful effect on my barrelful of water.

In recent years – mainly since I quit my managerial job – her put downs have focused on my writing – specifically on my lack of what she would call “success” as a writer. She makes it clear she thinks I should stop my silly scribbling and resign myself to the “real world” (i.e. climbing the corporate ladder, owning a big house, raising kids, voting Republican . . .).

This time my mother, my aunt and I were talking about email behavior when it struck me that “Reply to All” would be a funny name for a satirical novel about the contemporary corporate workplace. Unfortunately, I blurted the thought out, forgetting that my critic was sitting nearby. “And I have an idea for the picture on the cover . . .” I said playfully. It was all supposed to be a joke. My idea for the cover art was going to be the punch line. Maybe it would not have been funny in that setting, but that did not matter because I didn’t get a chance to finish. I had stepped out of line and my critic was already snapping back.

“But you don’t have the content for the book, now do you? There’s where your writer’s block comes in.” She was looking away with a smirk on her face – arms akimbo, one leg crossed over the other. Awkward silence fell around us.

Does this comment seem mean to you? To my ears in the moment, it was sneering and dripping with contempt. In the past, I would have taken it like a kick to the stomach. I would have felt completely humiliated and worthless.

This time I saw that wave coming, but I sat on the riverbank and watched it pass by.

Okay – truth be told, I did muse to myself about how she is going to look eating crow at my book-signing party. BUT this wee bit of a MILD reaction is a HUGE improvement for me, sloshing barrelful of water that I am.

Um, did I have something in my hand a little while ago?

I am deep in process now. It’s where I need to be. For years I was stuck at the gate, rattling it in frustration. Now I am taking my first steps in. I have a long way to go, but I see where I am going. I am in no rush, despite the hour. Step by step, the journey is the process.

Chances are you’ve heard it, too — that strange inner calling. That half-tuned in radio station playing in the next room. For me it was always there, but I didn’t know how to move in that direction. There was no direction to it in my mind. It was just a nebulous droning that over the years intensified into a distinct but still poorly understood imperative. I felt I had a purpose to fulfill in this life . . . I confess I fancied it a special purpose. But I guess it’s often experienced that way.

Years passed. I had recently graduated college. I was standing at the first major crossroads of my adult life — completely confounded and carrying this maddening impulse within me. By day I was lost and afraid. By night I was dreaming about being on an elaborate multi-stage quest that I could never fathom upon waking.

One such night I dreamt I was in a small band of travelers following a white unicorn or horse on a path through fields and forests. We were on a grand quest that would solve the riddle of everything.

I was so engaged and excited. This is what I had been waiting for my entire life. In a semi-lucid moment, I thought that the quest would make an inspiring novel and that I must remember it to write it upon awakening. All of the other dream characters continued on unaware, but an elderly couple in the party responded to me as if I had spoken the thought aloud. They were smiling and nodding emphatically.

“Tell the tale and live it,” they told me.

The quest itself did not survive the dawn, but I came away from the dream with what I felt was a directive. One that validated my lifelong love of stories and story telling with the stamp of a higher purpose.

Tell the tale and live it.

Not live the tale then tell it. Like an expert. Like a memoirist looking back on a thing done.

No, tell the tale and live it.

I felt “the tale” was the grand quest of all quests. The inner grail quest that I felt relentlessly drawn to but didn’t understand. Telling it meant writing a grand novel. At least one.

Years passed muddled in frustration. This was far too grand a tale for me to tell. I had no clue. I tried to live it, but for the most part I was circling around, endlessly searching for a way in but always stuck outside the gate.

Then weird little things started happening in my life. The more I paid attention to them, the more frequently they happened. The little things got bigger and formed chains that became undeniable. I spent some time on the web looking to see if anyone else was experiencing what I was experiencing. I found a lot of things, to be sure, but not quite what I was looking for.

A new wrinkle came in the fall of 2006 when I started getting synchronistic nudges to start a blog. The nudges came from outside me. Blogging was not something I wanted to take up. I thought it would be another jones-driven distraction keeping me from “telling the tale and living it” and was therefore avoiding the whole blogosphere. But the synchronistic message was strong. It took me a long time to get rolling, but I heeded the call.

The urge was to come out as a seeker and share my experience with fellow travelers. NOT to put myself forward as some kind of expert and dish out bullet points of wisdom. Instead, to share from one seeker to another – here is my personal experience from where I am on the path . . . can you relate?

This was a scary prospect for me. It was a side of my life – of me – that I did not often share, even with my husband and closest friends. My socialization told me it was the kind of stuff that you just don’t talk about or people will think you are wacko. Nevertheless, what I often looked for from others I would try to put out there myself.

Here I am several months and a better blogging platform later. Little did I know when I started that putting my journey out there on this blog would unlock the gate for me. Previously I was looking for something out there to let me in, when actually I needed to put something out there to turn the key.

Now I am finding things that I’ve long been looking for. Books I knew about but never felt inclined to read now call me and turn out to be revelations. Pieces of the puzzle are clicking into place in big clusters. Understanding that long eluded me now flows easily. And I am starting to connect with other travelers around me.

Tell the tale and live it.

So now I am processing. I am pausing to find balance in my new surroundings. I am learning to make that calm space within so I stop getting swept up in reactions to daily drama. I may continue to be relatively quiet for a few more weeks while I process, tend to my garden and finish setting up this blog. But I would like to say that the podcasts over at Occult of Personality have been very helpful to me. There are too many good ones to list, but I particularly recommend the following four if you relate to the rattling-the-gate syndrome: Podcast 32: On the Spiritual Path with Christopher Moors, Podcast 41: Journey to the East, Podcast 47: Exploration of the Inner Realms and Podcast 46: Fraternity of the Hidden Light’s Steward, Dr. Paul Clark.

Namaste

I dreamt I looked out my office window here at home and saw an aircraft hurtling in for a crash landing. It looked like a rocket flying on its side like a plane, low and parallel to the horizon. It screamed across the sky and then exploded some distance to the southwest.

There was a huge commotion there – a crowd of emergency vehicles, lights flashing, sirens wailing, amid great plumes of smoke and fire. But it seemed that the commotion was there before the crash, and the exploded rocket was merely adding to the chaos on the ground. I wasn’t sure.

I studied the air above the crash site. At first it appeared empty, but then my eyes refocused and just like when the other side of an optical paradox emerges, I could make out two huge dark space ships and a slew of other strange aircraft hovering above the area. They looked like shadow craft, but they were darkly lit and now that they had emerged from their camouflage, I could make out their complexities.

It crossed my mind that a new war may be breaking out. I raced to turn on the TV and radio to hear what was going on. Station after station was playing the same inane commercials and programming as if nothing was amiss in America. But I could see with my own eyes out my own window that the reality was clearly and extremely otherwise.

Lately the synchronicity stream has me awash in one-offs. I jolt awake at 4:43 and 3:44 and 4:45. My timestamps are 3:33:34 and 4:44:43. My electric toothbrush stops inexplicably at 2:21 minutes while I am still trying to brush. People inadvertently send me emails at exactly 1:10. The best was the QA test I received at work after I finished telling a friend I am always one off lately – the auto-generated title was “Sanity Test 11:10:10.”

I feel off. The perennial contradiction between my job and what I see as my true work in the world has me spiraling down. I hate that I spend most of my time and energy working for The Man. I hate the idea generally, and it only makes it worse that my job is absurd on every level.

It hurts my head to do my job. I don’t know how else to describe it. Work is an energetic river – I guess all activity is – and dipping into this particular river does violence to my mind and spirit.

It’s not that my job entails activities are in themselves difficult – far from it. But they are crude and inane – and far beyond one person in volume.

Ultimately, though, the work is fundamentally non-aligned. You could say that I work for the defenders of those who would put a spigot on air and force us to pay to breathe.

It’s painful to turn to that frequency.

To those of you in the same boat as me, I ask can we agree to stop this? Spending our days working for the wrong team in grossly mismanaged situations, banging our heads into walls, trying to accomplish nonsensical tasks given to us by bosses without a respective clue, doing the work of whole departments because they keep laying people off, driving long, harrowing commutes back to heavily mortgaged homes . . . By the time we’re home, we’re mentally and physically exhausted, but then there many household tasks that every good suburbanite must do. We’re just starting to feel human again when it’s time to go to sleep. Next thing we know, the alarm is ringing and we have to go back.

I don’t want to go back.

There is something else I long to do that I think would be a much more worthwhile contribution, but it doesn’t often pay a living. I’ve been trying to figure out a way, but the health care/health insurance issue is a stumper.

I may not have figured out an alternate route yet, but I do know we are all better than this. Our time, our will, our creative power should not be wasted and misused in this way. This is NOT who we are.

I really liked Charles Eisenstein’s post “Money: A New Beginning” on Reality Sandwich a while back. He captured the absurdity of the artificial scarcity that we are living in. He writes:

For indeed, we live in a world of fundamental abundance, a world where vast quantities of food, energy, and materials go to waste. Half the world starves while the other half wastes enough to feed the first half. In the Third World and our own ghettos, people lack food, shelter, and other basic necessities, but cannot afford to buy them. Other people would love to supply these necessities and do other meaningful work, but cannot because there is no money in it.

When paying work is meaningless at best and destructive at worst and when meaningful work doesn’t pay enough to sustain the worker, the system is obviously unsustainable.

“Contribution” image by my husband, used courtesy of a marriage license.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I attended the Omega Institute’s “Being Fearless” conference in April. I’ve been turning over the impressions and insights that I collected there. Here’s what I am learning:

1. I can be the space that I seek.

All my life I’ve felt that there is no true space in the world for me, and deep down, this has made me feel unworthy and afraid. I’ve been searching for my Right Place, and over the years, I’ve done some “wild and crazy” things on that quest. But for the most part, I’ve been living like a figure in an Emergency Exit sign – always rushing to the door. Whether rushing to meet the next external demand or to run from it, I’m always trying to be where I am not.

I’m usually earlier than I needed to be, and I’ve usually done more than I needed to do. Where has that gotten me? More demands but not more rewards. And the price is that I haven’t taken care of myself in my perpetual rush to respond. So there is no space for me.

It’s true I don’t like my job. And I don’t like where I live. Neither of these places is a good fit for me. They give me blisters. But does that mean that there is no air for me to breathe where I am? No. Yet I’ve been experiencing these places as if they are suffocating me.

I’ve been chastising myself for feeling this way, but this only feeds the cycle of bad feeling. At the conference, I attended Tara Brach’s workshop and got a glimpse of the way out of the cycle – to be my own Right Place wherever I am, not through superhuman feats of willpower or gut wrenching fortitude, but through radical acceptance.

The idea is not to repress or deny or overcome the pain you are feeling, but instead to PAUSE in it. Fully RECOGNIZE in detail what is happening and how you feel about it, and then to ALLOW it. As Brach said in the workshop, “to hold it in kindness.”

This opens a space where previously there was none.

Brach told a story about a man who in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease agreed to give a presentation to a sizeable audience. Although he had prepared thoroughly, his speech left him at the podium. He went blank — every public speaker’s nightmare, no doubt all the worse for someone who knows that a mind-robbing disease is the culprit. Instead of fumbling for words or racing for the exit, the man stood firmly where he was and proceeded to acknowledge and honor aloud every nuance of what he was feeling in the moment. Brach said he had the audience in tears – not because they pitied him but because he was demonstrating the concept of radical acceptance.

The story moved me.

2. Wholeness means accepting the gift of my shadow.

In a workshop entitled “Discovering the Gifts of Your Dark Side,” Debbie Ford talked about how we learn to repress certain aspects of our personality. She likened these repressed aspects to beach balls that we are forever trying to keep under water and out of sight, lest we appear “bad” in the eyes of others. Of course, the constant beach ball management effort is exhausting, and when a ball gets away from us, it explodes out of the water in a potentially destructive way.

I like the analogy. I’ve been smacked in the face with more than a few projectile beach balls, so I know what that’s about. The alternative to repression is to look for a constructive way to use the aspect, accept it and thereby integrate it.

3. Don’t hide my cracks.

It seemed that everyone at the conference told the story of the Golden Buddha, each with a slightly different take on its lesson. If you haven’t heard it already, this is the story of a 700-hundred-year-old solid gold Buddha statue that long ago was encased in clay to camouflage its true worth and thus protect it from invaders. When the people who did this died, knowledge of the inner gold of the Buddha died with them. So the statue was thought to be a plain clay statue of modest worth for time out of mind. In the 1950s, it was damaged as it was being moved. Someone looked into the cracks and saw a glint of gold within. They chiseled at the cracks until the golden statue was fully revealed and all were amazed. The statue is now known as a national treasure of Thailand.

It is a simple but rich story, so it’s no wonder so many speakers at the conference referenced it. We, too, have gold within us, waiting to be revealed. This is the gold of alchemy — our evolutionary potential. But the key point for me is that exploring the cracks – wounds, if you will – led to the discovery of the gold within. Far from being something shameful, the cracks were the gateway to transformation.

I’m still turning these lessons over and processing. For now, I will focus on standing in the four corners of my feet where I am . . . and breathing.

“Emergency exit →” image by OwenBlacker, used courtesy of a Creative Commons License.

When I was four years old, my older cousins – all boys – came over and my father took us to the neighborhood hobby shop. I suspect that the only reason I was included was my mother wanted me out of the house for a while. My father was taking the boys to get model rocket making materials – model rocketry was one of my father’s passions, and he was introducing the boys to it. Being only four and female, I did not fit into the plan.

At the shop, I was bored with the squares of balsa wood and tubes of glue they were poring over, but I was in rapture over a huge case of slim little phials containing beads in every color imaginable. I wanted those beads!

The boys were heading for the register. I stopped my father and begged for the beads. No, no, no. There was pleading on my part met by skepticism. But what are you going to do with them? MAKE THINGS! You won’t make anything with them. He was probably thinking I was too young, but I didn’t see it that way.

I WILL TOO MAKE THINGS! My father relented. Okay, you can have ONE color. If you make things with that, we’ll come back and you can get more.

How could I possibly pick just one out of that endless array of color? I hemmed and hawed. My father told me to hurry up while he tried to corral the boys, who were chasing each other in the aisles.

Finally I chose: orange.

I remember the car ride home so vividly. It was late afternoon, probably late summer. It was still warm but the sun had that orangey gold September angle that I love to this day. I was sitting in the back seat, holding my little orange phial before me as if it were a candle, or maybe a chalice. All around was that orangey gold light. I was so excited. This was just the beginning. Soon I would have a rainbow of beads and I’d be making all kinds of fantastic things.

It didn’t turn out that way. I’m not sure what happened. My mother probably didn’t want me to play with them out of fear they’d end up in my mouth, or maybe I just didn’t know what to do with them, I don’t know. But I didn’t have materials to make jewelry. And ultimately I wasn’t inspired by only one color of beads. What had inspired me in the store was the array color, and possibility.

So the phial of orange beads ended up at the bottom of the family junk drawer. I remember unintentionally digging them up several times in the years that followed. Always they were a symbol of guilt and shame. I didn’t make anything with them. I wasted them. I didn’t follow through.

It never dawned on me to pick them up and make something with them when I was a little older. Instead, I felt I had already failed, which made me feel bad. And feeling bad made me want to push them out of sight.

Meanwhile, my cousins – sons of a high school art teacher – were growing up with all the resources of an art supply store at their fingertips. Oils, acrylics, canvas, cameras, tripods, clay animation equipment, sculpture tools, their own darkroom . . . plus every musical instrument imaginable. I was writing stories on notebook paper and illustrating them with crayons while they were making movies, performing their own music and having one-man art shows at the county art gallery.

I was a little girl with a strong creative vision of my own, and although I didn’t make anything with the beads, I was active creatively in my own right. But I couldn’t help comparing myself to my cousins and feeling inferior. Whatever I did and whatever recognition that brought me seemed rinky-dink next to them. My art was child’s play – it might be good for grammar school but it wasn’t good enough for the real world.

Time passed and I forgot about the orange beads. When I turned forty they came up in a meditation on my creative block. For the longest time, I’ve been feeling guilty and ashamed for “not following through” on my creative vision, for “being unproductive” and basically wasting it. Not for lack of trying, of course. Just not breaking through the wall.

I realized that everything I’ve been feeling about my “failure” as a writer, I felt as a child about those damned beads.

More than that, I’ve been stuck in that hobby shop story — longing for the freedom and array of possibility with which to create grand and fantastic things but meeting only skepticism and relatively meager resources until I prove myself worthy.

I haven’t proven as an adult that I will make things. Somewhere along the line, I stopped believing that I can.

Not that I have given up. Quite the opposite. I’ve been obsessed with the dream of becoming a full-time novelist. Unwisely, imprudently, incorrigibly obsessed. But I see now that my dream is the equivalent of earning all the beads in the case so that I am finally free to express my creative vision. In the here and now, however, I am always trying to make something with the orange beads. I’ve been so caught up in trying to satisfy externally set prerequisites that I haven’t allowed myself the freedom of opening the door to inspiration, allowing fallowness and flow in kind, and expressing whatever comes in. I haven’t allowed myself to enjoy my creative work in the moment and to just BE.

No wonder I’ve been stuck at the gate.

But I can stand now and look into the shadow of shame and self-doubt. My creative expression has been blocked. What has the block given me? Well, it has driven me to look deeper than I would have looked if my expression had flowed into the world without resistance. It has driven me to look within and to seek a transformative path. Maybe I have something more valuable to say than I would have said otherwise. Maybe the block has been an alchemical flame.

I accept the gift of the flame and release the idea that I need to fulfill prerequisites to prove myself worthy of expressing my creative vision in the world.

Nevertheless, can we say that I made something with the orange beads by writing this post?

As I’ve written before, I am one of those people who has a synchronistic relationship with 11:11. 11:11 was my original wake up call, and it continues to be sort of a master number for me. But 11:11 opened the door to a whole river of synchronicities that I swim most every day. All kinds of things can be synchronous. I keep my eye out and try to follow the strings when they occur. They are breadcrumbs marking the way.

Numbers other than elevens show up synchronistically in phases. They are a subtle line of communication between me and my higher self, or so I think anyway.

For a while I had sets of consecutive twos showing up all over the place. Then it was fives. Lately it has been consecutive fours. Fours all over the place. One of the more striking examples of this is that I keep jolting awake from a deep sleep and looking at the digital clock on the other side of the room at 4:44 a.m. exactly. It occurs so often that I now wake up my husband as a witness when it happens. All I need to say is: “4:44 AGAIN!”

The other night I woke up early on with anxiety about work. In desperation, I asked the universe to help me learn from and heal my job situation. I fell back asleep and hours later woke with a start. I sat up to check the clock on the other side of the bed. Sure enough, it was 4:44. I thought that my higher self was trying to tell me something about my work. I had the thought that fours mean transfiguration. Then I fell back asleep.

I dreamt I was in a bookstore café. The guy at the next table had Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012 book in front of him. I commented on it, telling him I had read it and it was good, though actually I haven’t read it yet.

There was a young woman sitting at the table behind me. She had two books in front of her. I started a conversation with her and told her not to buy the books. I said I would check for them at home and give them to her if I had them.

The first book was Look Homeward Angel. I have never read this book. I have never intended to read this book. I haven’t even thought of it twice before now, though I’ve known of its existence.

The identity of the second book was unclear in the dream, but I left the young woman at the table thinking that I had to look at home for Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren, so perhaps the second book was All the King’s Men.

Okay, once again, I have not read All the King’s Men, nor have I read anything else by Robert Penn Warren. I have not felt the urge to. I knew of their existence – both book and author, but that’s it.

I woke up as I was leaving for home to go look for the books.

In the waking world, I went to work (ugh), where I googled the second two books and authors because their presence in the dream was odd to me. I learned that Thomas Wolfe set Look Homeward Angel in a thinly fictionalized version of his hometown — Asheville, North Carolina. I didn’t know Asheville existed until recently when it came up synchronistically in another context, so the dream connection got my attention. Then I learned that both Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren died on September 15th. I have no idea what significance this has, if any. It just makes me think I should visit Asheville, North Carolina. Perhaps on September 15th.

Have you checked out Asheville, North Carolina online? There is a website where someone makes the claim that if you’re into 2012, Asheville is the place for you.

Okay, maybe I am babbling. Then again, maybe not.

I will end this post with the following thought, which has nothing to do with anything else I’ve written . . .

I want to be able to say that I stand by what I perceive in the world.

That’s all for now.

I am reading Shakti Gawain’s Living in the Light. I was looking for a mass market paperback I could carry around in my bag (and read in public without attracting odd looks) and it fit the bill. Anyway, I am glad I picked it up because it introduced me to Ram Dass’s analogy for the process of spiritual growth and enlightenment. It is a round clock, and Gawain outlines Dass’s hours as follows:

12:00 to 3:00 – submersed in the illusion of form
3:00 to 6:00 – increasing disillusionment with worldly concerns
6:00 – feels like you are hitting rock bottom, and probably looks that way to the world as well, but it is actually the beginning of awakening
6:00 to 12:00 – increasing enlightenment

The process occurs over lifetimes and within a lifetime. There is a grand cycle as well as subcycles. According to Gawain, you are past 6:00 if you have the awareness to be thinking seriously about it.

I think I came into this life well past three o’clock. I have never been comfortable in the world of form. From the time the light of consciousness first flickered in my little head, I have felt a jarring disconnect with consensus reality. I’ve always been reaching for something beyond the veil. Always looking for transcendence instead of busying myself with conventional milestones and making my way in society.

I feel like I’ve hit 6:00 at least once in my life, but in the bigger picture, those may have been subcycle sixes. It may be that I came into this life at 6:15 or something like that (I was literally born at 6:15, FWIW). At any rate, I think I am now somewhere past 6:00 but well before 9:00. I am too angsty to be past 9:00, that’s for sure!

I imagine that 9:00 to 3:00, the upper half of the clock, are relatively angst-free because you are more clearly and comfortably aligned — with matter or with spirit, but either way, you aren’t walking around feeling a huge contradiction between where you are and where your spirit longs to be. No, 3:00 to 9:00 are the hours of angst, with 3:00 to 6:00 being the downward spiral and 6:00 to 9:00 being the upward climb – just like descending and ascending Kali Yuga. That’s how I see it, anyway – I am taking Ram Dass’s analogy and running with it.

So I am in a personal ascending Kali Yuga. My angst – the contradiction I feel with the context of my life in the third density – drives me ever forward in my climb. I feel that I have made progress in recent years, but I won’t feel that I’ve turned the corner until my external life is somehow aligned with the incessant calling I feel inside.

I think that 9:00 to 12:00 means being able to manifest your inner light in the world. You are a clear and flowing channel. I am not there yet.

I attended the Omega Institute’s “Being Fearless” conference in NYC this weekend. The event brochure fell into my hands just after I posted 2012: Two Paths. Since I was doing a lot of thinking about LOVE vs. FEAR at that time, I took it as a synchronistic nudge and decided to go.

It was an interesting experience and the speakers were amazing. But the conference was targeting a different audience from me, and I knew that would be the case going in. For example, there was a lot of “God” there (though in an inclusive, open-minded way that allowed for someone like me). On the other hand, I didn’t hear anyone talking about 2012, the precession of the equinoxes, wage slavery or homo luminous.

Mainly I doubt many of the attendees are pounding the walls of their lives with a strange version of “All Along the Watchtower” playing in their heads. They weren’t people of the fringe. Like me.

But the overall theme was one that I can wholeheartedly relate to: We live in an extraordinary time and the urgent call of the hour is to integrate our shadows, transmute our fear and help give birth to a new world.

Andrew Harvey gave one of the weekend’s most memorable speeches. It was a passionate expression of the same vision he describes on his website, where he writes:

Everyone whose eyes are open knows the world is in a terrifying crisis. As many of us as possible need to undergo a massive transformation of consciousness and to find the sacred passion to act from this consciousness in every arena and on every level of reality. It is my deepest belief that only Sacred Activism – the fusion of the deepest mystical knowledge, peace, strength, and stamina with calm focused and radical action – can possibly be of use now. A mysticism that is only private and self-absorbed leaves the evils of the world intact and does little to halt the suicidal juggernaut of history; an activism that is not purified by profound spiritual and psychological self-awareness and rooted in divine truth, wisdom, and compassion will only perpetuate the problem it is trying to solve, whatever it’s righteous intentions. When, however, the deepest and most grounded mystical vision is married to a practical and pragmatic drive to transform all existing political, economic, and social institutions, a holy force and power of wisdom in action is born, a force and power that can re-fashion all things in and under God, and bring humanity, even at this late desperate hour, into harmony with its self and original nature. This force of Sacred Activism I believe will be the source of the birthing power that humanity will need to create a new world from the smoking ashes of the one that is now passing away.

On the other hand, The New York Times recently ran a story by Alex Williams about how doomsday survivalism is going mainstream and middle class.

LOVE vs. FEAR.

These are interesting times indeed. I’d say “fasten your seatbelt” if that didn’t run flatly counter to my philosophy.

I dreamt I was in a gathering at a banquet table in a manor house. It was night and there was a blizzard raging outside, but the manor house was warm and bright. We were seated around a table engaged in some kind of philosophical discussion. The table held platters of food for us to take from as we wished.

I left the table and went out on the porch to survey the snowy night around us. The manor sat alone on a small hill top. There was a flood light on the porch that lit the entire hill. The storm seemed to have stopped. In the sphere cast by the light I could see a lawn thickly blanketed in white sloping all the way down to where the road began, then blackness. It was perfectly still.

I thought I saw a couple poles emerging from the snow near the perimeter of the light. Somehow this seemed strange and worthy of immediate investigation. I bounded down the slope. Running through the snow in a sphere of pale light enclosed by night was exhilarating. It was easier than I expected to be able to run in snow so deep. I ran through one apparent “pole” then another, finding nothing solid at all. Perhaps they were mirages.

I ran all the way down to the edge of the light and then into the night. As soon as I stepped into the night, I was hit with a blast of blizzard. I zigzagged across the line between light and night a few more times to confirm the impression. It was indeed quiet and peaceful on one side and a fierce storm on the other, with no shades of gray between.

I ran back to the manor house and told the others. No one believed me. Then there was an article in the paper about how I had made these ridiculous claims and that I was lying to stir up trouble.

Image by millicent bystander, used courtesy of a Creative Commons License.

I tend not to get worked up about conspiracies. I am glad that there are people delving into the shadows and bringing specific instances to light, but my main concern is the open conspiracy that we all live every day. How is it that a small minority has made it so most of the rest of us must sell our labor power to them in order to survive? Or turning it around, how is it that the majority lives in either wage slavery or dire poverty (or both) for the profit and enrichment of the few?

As I see it, the laundry list of what’s wrong with the world we’ve constructed is rooted directly or indirectly in that fundamental violation.

Our labor power – our ability to make and use tools to create things and modify our living conditions – is the very thing that defines our species. Having to sell it to survive alienates us from our essential humanity. Aside from genocide or chattel slavery, I can’t think of a more potent way to hold us down, sap our life energy and block our evolution.

And now the ruling class is baring its teeth as it fortifies its power and profits in a world of accelerating change. It is orchestrating an intensification of brutality, oppression, repression, exploitation around the globe – greasing it all up with FEAR.

But I sense a quickening under the surface as 2012 approaches. Some people are awakening, and in awakening, they are becoming.

In “Old Struggles on a New Earth,” Daniel Pinchbeck offers a constructive way to look at this period and the opportunity in presents:

My view is that “2012″ is useful as a meme if it helps us to catalyze a shift in global culture and consciousness. Rather than fretting about what may or may not happen on that date, we should concentrate on the work that needs to be done now, on an inner as well as outer level.

Neil Kramer also talks about our potential power (and responsibility) in his post Crossing The Rubicon: Breaking The Fake News Trance:

The very act of comprehending the nature of our creative consciousness undermines the Control System by raising the frequency of consciousness out of the manipulation field and into inspired independence. I believe, as others have for millennia, that the outer world is a direct reflection of our own private inner consciousness. When a critical mass of people understand that the game is not a good game anymore, that there is a better way of living and evolving, then the awesome synchronous power of the universe begins to paint a new world into being.

So what if a growing number of us begins to awaken to the idea that this is a game and not a good one — that there is a better way of living and evolving? What if we spread, and constellate? And what if we find ways to bring our evolving consciousness into positive manifestation in the world – to help liberate others as well as ourselves?

We will form the chrysalis of a new world in the belly of the dying beast. We will grow and when we are ready, we will shed the old outer world like a snake shedding its skin.