Saturday, March 4, 2023

For God's Sake

 

Remember when we were all horrified at how the Iranian "Morality" police treated women?  Mahsa Amini was killed last September in Tehran for not wearing the proper attire the proper way.  Well, how about the white supremacist Christian police we're dealing with in the USA?  They are fucking bent on putting American women in equal position to the Iranian women. controlled, body and soul.  First, a stupid misogynist Mississippi law with God quoted as the source and authority, topples the hard-won protection of Roe v Wade. Now, an oral medication, mifepristone, that has been safely used by countless women for twenty years, FDA approved, with a better safety track record than Viagra, is being challenged inTexas, to be tried before a self-declared patriarchal judge. The ruling is a slam dunk, then it will be sent to the Supreme Court.  The morality police super judgies will again do what they were hired to do; subjugate women to patriarchal rule.

How dare these contemptuous men and the proverbial token woman of patriarchy  put American women in chains again?  Based on what?  What they say God the Father wants of us, to protect fetuses and treat women like cattle?  Breeding cows who have no moral or legal agency if they get pregnant and don't want to breed?  We need the calves, so the cows are expendable.  As long as we have enough calves, the cows outgrow their usefulness and can be fed on.  

 

Where do we see this?  In every religious autocracy around the globe.  Women have no agency under law, are considered spiritually inferior and culpable and some men get to decide, usually ugly, mean old ones masquerading as authority with not a spiritual bone in their bodies.

 

We need to stop this!  My dream of Mary Howling at the corruption of religion comes to me front and center.  This is stuff to howl about.  People and pundits are discussing a threat to our democracy.  Let's be clear, whether you call it white supremacy, which it is, or the ugliest misogyny, woman hating, which it is, it is totalitarian patriarchy.  It isn't the way it's always been, but it's been this way for far too long.  We, men, women and self-identifying persons, have the opportunity to change things up for good.

 

We can stand up to the brainwashing forces of these religious patriarchs who are trying to turn back women's freedom and fight for every American person's right, regardless of class or culture, to govern her/their own body.  It is corrupt beyond belief to use people's vulnerable need for a faith in what lies beyond death as a weapon of control and oppression over women.

 

Patriarchy is a corrupt nightmare; it has built male power over women around the world for about 6,000 years.  It has justified a hierarchical power system of class and privilege that destroys community; it breeds misogyny, racism and cruelty.  Do we realize what a brief respite women attained in the US from the moral and legal restrictions of patriarchal religions? Roe v Wade liberated us in 1973 from male intervention in choices we make about our bodies. Women have been legally independent of American state and church intervention in their reproductive lives for FIFTY YEARS!  And now, we're back; Christian patriarchal men and their women allies are gloating.  Eve is back under Adam's thumb, so God, who was pissed at both of them, is mollified.  


Thank goddess for Jesus, he's the strongest ancient Feminist I know; remember do as my momma says?  The macho code, then or now, doesn't allow for the obvious respect women so deserve and Jesus gave them.

 

Please don't think getting to where we got (which now we're not) was a matter of committees and meetings.  It was a tooth and nail struggle against the smug bastards who think God is swinging their dicks for them.    And guess who we're dealing with still?  Patriarchal men and women using religion to bind and burn women, once again.  

 

Yet, I am so grateful for the amazing women all over the world and in the US  today, leading the Feminist clarion call to get off our asses and refuse to let religion enslave us again.  


The incredible miracle of birth is all on women; we were asked to do this  humanitarian service through our physical bodies by Love, and apparently, we said yes.  There came a time that some men filled with jealousy and greed decided to topple women's power and subject them through cruelty and religion to their own wills and advantages.   That's when the shit began to go seriously downhill. Patriarchy was and is a failed experiment from the get go because of the utter imbalance in the natural order of things that it defies.  

 

Patriarchy is a cracking antique social paradigm that always polarizes and then raises one opposite against the other, male/female, white/colored, rich/poor.  Patriarchy is always a pyramid and He's on top, in the hereafter and in the here and now.  As much as patriarchy has succeeded in ruling the globe, it is desperately failing millions and millions of earthlings everywhere.  Wars and insatiable greed for material gains that will evaporate the minute death knocks, what absurdity; yet, here we are doing this insanity again and again. These war-god, woman-hating and slave making religions have brought us six thousand years of  unnecessary human misery, yet we want to cling to beliefs that don't serve us. The definition of insanity, don't we all know, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

 

Why don't we change god up a little?  Does divinity really have to be your daddy? Why not let divinity be bigger than that?  Why don't we examine our own being; are we our bodies?  Or do we exist, after death and in our dreams in spirit form?  Render unto the physical what belongs in the physical; divinity is an open book which we each get to read about in our own hearts, minds and dreams; and in Love.  Love is god; there's no room for all this ugliness.  It's purely patriarchal and we can change that because patriarchy is a system that abuses the majority of us, using young men as cannon fodder for insane wars or dehumanizing young women as sex toys and baby machines 24/7.  But it's about the way we think, which rules the way that we behave.

 

You don't have to leave anything good about your religion behind; just don't commit hate, misogyny and racism in the name of your god.  I am positive that divinity doesn't want women to suffer because of the gift they have; a woman is a whole autonomous spirit, just like a man, just like any person, regardless of how they identify in the physical.  Reproductive justice is for everyone.  It's easy to tell true Christians, Jesus lovers, from the bullshit ones.  Jesus loved, trusted and respected women and would never deny a woman her own authority.  He probably died for standing up for them in the bleak patriarchy in which he lived.  It's not about detaching from the core of your beliefs; it is about detaching from the money-making false prophets of patriarchy who want to control women and peoples of color or gender difference.  Men can be feminists, the way white people can not be racists, by continuously realizing what we've inherited from so much institutionalized indoctrination over the years and figuring out together how we fix this.

 

For one, we can change our own hearts, look within ourselves for what we truly know, from our own waking and dreaming lives, Love Is The Answer.  We are the channel for this universal truth to manifest.  We are all spiritual beings having a physical existence, which is temporary and material.  We are eternal, anyone who has experienced a lucid dream, an Out of Body Experience or a Near Death Experience knows what it is to be out of the physical and conscious of our existence still.  

 

Divinity does not demand that women suffer or allow man to "lord" it over her.  That was clearly some assholes' idea of how to have power over women. We don't need to return to any external worship of our own human projections; we can turn within to the divinity that dwells in our hearts and speaks to us in dreams.  






 

 

 

Wednesday, June 15, 2022

What Will It Take?


 A dear friend, in the midst of a political discussion recently, opined that he thought civil war might be a reality in the not distant future.  This chilled me to the bone for it’s potential to materialize. Unless?

Of course we were numb at the news of yet another flipped out male youth with the power of guns way bigger than any bit of consciousness he possesses, murdering little children in cold blood, like it was a video game.

 

Now comes the avalanche of opining by our “men” in charge about whether or not we should at last take responsibility as a society for our attitudes towards guns and the perpetual harm they do to us as a collective, a society.  In patriarchy, a gun is a symbol of manhood, no?  What would Freud say?

 

I have many times here tried to put in perspective an understanding of patriarchy that underscores its basic structure as a thinking model, not a gender model. Not all men are patriarchal and not all women aren’t patriarchal.  We live in a 6 thousand year old repressive and abusive paradigm that is psychically fueled by religion.  Six thousand years may sound like a long time; it’s a small fraction of the time civilizations have existed on this planet.

 

When you believe in a male god, you call Him/He all the time, it gels an image in your mind that will guide your beliefs,  perceptions and your choices as a person. The patriarchal god is extremely controlling of his “children” the human race; his superiority warrants all sorts of cruelty and misogyny.  The stories told about this sky god in the patriarchal religious texts spin myriad tales of inflicting pain and suffering on humanity in the name of this god.  In the OT, Abraham barely misses having to slice his son’s throat to prove to this insane god his loyalty; in the NT, this insane god does it himself, sacrifices his only son to justify and meliorate his own petty peeve with humanity.

 

These are beliefs; there are ways to know that God/Goddess/Spirit is Love in your own daily/nightly experience.  Our world is desperate for a paradigm that isn’t greedy and unkind, like the patriarchal paradigms that are always demanding blood and sacrifice and elevating one gender and race above all others.  Because they are beliefs, however ingrained in us since baptism, they are not real.  When our hearts crack open and we love, not Hollywood or gender specific love, but the Love that is the real deity in our universe, the Love we can touch in each other and in our dreams, the Love that when we open to it, is our ultimate destiny, our ultimate bliss.  You don’t have to believe me or anyone else about this; it’s in you and you can experience it yourself, especially if you pay attention to your dreams.

 

I look to dreaming as a possible avenue to reshaping our paradigm enough for us to act, to save, our home, this beautiful planet, and ourselves here in the physical.  We have a sacred responsibility to pass on the most love and the most beauty we can to our children.  Instead, our patriarchal paradigms flay our souls from our bodies and demand we place the most precious aspect of our human existence in the hands of greedy, misogynist men who enforce what we shalt and shalt not do.

 

We need to be having a different human experience on the planet.  One that indigenous American teachers, like Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, speak of today.  Spirit is one energy we all experience, including animals and all that is life on this planet.  Patriarchal authoritarian pyramid models of “governance” are classic all over the world.  At the bottom of those global patriarchal pyramids are children, women and non-dominant patriarchal races.  At the moment, white males seem to be in charge, followed closely by other despotic male autocrats around the globe.

 

I have also many times described these rules as enforced by a frame of mind and a blind allegiance to shit that doesn’t make sense.  The most toxic enforcer of this patriarchal thinking is our so-called “religions” that propose to all and sundry that the supreme ultimate invisible deity is some old fart with a beard.  To him all men bow and in return, this super daddy bestows on men the right to do whatever they want to women, like deny them full personhood or health care under the law, the same as men.

 

I have many times said that this shit isn’t as old as you might think, given the scale of time that humanity has managed amazing civilizations on this planet that weren’t patriarchal.  We have been taught a very skewed history; we can’t see before the 6 thousand years of this patriarchal paradigm.  Our written history is not the whole story of humanity on this beautiful planet. Things are not, as many think, “always was and always will be”.

 

I have many times pointed to the facts taught to us by modern physics and metaphysics that reality isn’t matter, it’s energy, and that the “observer” (any conscious person) can influence the outcome of how this energy takes shape.  I think of “The Secret” and manifesting your ego driven needs as the McDonalds’ version of this universal law.  The version that counts, that you take with you beyond your physical death, is the evolution of your awareness.  Our divinity is part of who we are; we are not born defective and in need of patriarchal daddy intervention in order to qualify for social acceptability.  

 

Under the patriarchal paradigms we are asked to uphold, there is no room for trust in our own spiritual awareness.  It's simple.  We are spiritual beings having a physical existence.  We don’t need to believe in anything in particular, we need to be who we came here to be.  We have a spiritual connection to soul, self or however you name your connection to your eternal existence.  We live in two realities at once, the temporal physical and the eternal spiritual. We know this when we track our dreams frequently with respect and curiosity. Dreams are a bridge between our waking and spiritual selves.

 

Our “after” life depends on our choices now. Christianity, Islam and Judaism espouse choices that warp our organic spirituality into twisted shame, penitence and servitude and can be especially lethal for women. By the way, as I’ve said so many times, Jesus, did not put up with patriarchal bullshit and it got him killed.  The fact that patriarchs decided to take his story and run with the Messiah angle is a continuing source of irritation to him, I’ll bet.

 

A paradigm like the toxic one we are seeing disintegrate before us is not invincible; at least not in the ways that matter.  Each person that calls bullshit and starts to educate themselves in ways to be more loving to others and to themselves tears a thread from this malicious web that has frozen us in such discord.

 

No one person, of any gender, will turn this tide of destruction, but each person that refuses to participate in it, each person who opens to new, unimagined possibilities for our survival, each person who learns how to love, each person who participates in any way towards a collective solution, is saving not only themselves, but others, too.

 

On a time line of human reality, “you are here”.  The expansion of our experience can draw on what was before this disaster of a paradigm, but it is up to each of us, however we identify sexually, to help create a paradigm that is fueled by the energy of the universe, Love, which, to materialize, we ourselves must embody.

 

This means daring to embody the energy of divinity, of Love, in any way you can.  Sing, dance, play music, laugh a lot, be kind, patient, giving; all those great things and do them in a way that brings joy to your life.

 

I don’t know what will happen.  What will it take to turn this tide of hate and division that so many patriarchal zombies are manifesting around the world, including, in the USA.  I do know that however grisly it gets, we still survive this consciousness beyond the physical body, as proven by dream research, to name one avenue you can explore.

 

Taking this into consideration, it’s important for each of us to ask ourselves what we are here to learn and what we are here to do.  Anything each of the 7 billion of us does in Love for others and for ourselves will help tip these crazy scales.  Also, if we are to give up the psychic poison of patriarchal religions, we need an alternative.  Any time we make a connection to spirit dreaming or meditating or walking in nature with heart open, we are experiencing our soul selves. There are so many ways to experience the reality of Love. We can let go of the fear-based paradigm and embrace the one that is with us always, our organic spiritual connection so evident in life.  We have nothing to prove and plenty to do.  Each person’s contribution is important.  

 

May it be so.

 

 

Monday, January 24, 2022

King Kong and Soul Recovery




I recently wrote here about my encounter with King Kong in my dreaming. I was talking about how amazing dream symbols are, how they morph and dance in our dreams, sometimes thrilling, sometimes terrorizing us into attention.

When we trust our dreams to be out for our own good, we know that even the most unwelcome dreams might hold healing for our battered souls.  Why are our souls battered; soul's run on pure love energy and in our might-makes-right patriarchal world, some souls find love energy too scarce for their survival.  Psychiatry calls it dissociation, when overwhelming trauma causes some aspect of ourselves to split from our awareness; many ancient and indigenous cultures call it soul loss.  As we are often unconscious of this happening, perhaps because it was in our childhood, we don't realize that actions we take from the habit of protecting ourselves the only way we could in the trauma moment, are now not so effective in serving us well.

When my partner was hit by a car many years ago, in the moments before impact, he saw it coming and told me he heard a voice in his head say, "I don't want to be here for this"; that caused him to rise up on the balls of his feet, as if to jump. That movement probably saved his life; he was thrown and battered instead of crushed under the heavy car.  He's worse for wear, but mostly fine now.  That story illustrates for me what is common in crisis and trauma, we seek any escape we can, if not in a physical realm, then in a psychic one.

Dreams have the power to give us healing symbols.  A friend of mine asked me after my last King Kong post what this symbol teaches me?  I told her I'd let her know when I found out.  Using a dream symbol begins with recording the dream so you can return to it to refresh the story in your mind.  Dream Re-entry, as Robert Moss teaches it or Active Imagination, as Jung conceived it, are valuable ways to fathom a dream.

Dreams are the right brain's domain; imagination is the engine of our creativity.  When we approach dreams with creativity and imagination instead of logic and analysis, ("what does it mean?) we get results that benefit our healing.  

Re-entry is often incredibly healing; it's also greatly entertaining. (I like to re-enter a dream I choose before I go to sleep or when I wake up in the middle of the night; for me it's a great way to fall asleep already dreaming.) I let my imagination spin the story my dream began into one where I am able to feel safe and capable of using the myriad options dreams allow to save myself in the dream story and gain the gifts this dream offers.  I can fly to safety, talk to any character or object and bring into the story whomever, whatever I choose to assist me, to help me feel safe or keep me good company.

My quest to understand Kong's part in my dreams begins with me re-entering the dream with the help of new characters I create to support me. My plan is to get Kong to a huge wild life sanctuary and the freedom he deserves and to begin developing our friendship. Over many re-entries over many days, I befriend Kong and find him a willing guardian and protector of not just me, but of the little kid me who suffered trauma and could now use some love and understanding from her big sister, me.

In dreams time is literally immaterial so I can readily get back to that little sad, confused girl and help her gain a sense of safety, support and guidance that my sincerely loving parents didn't know how to provide.  How?  By creating a story with her in it where she feels safe and she gets to do things that make her wildly happy, which in turn reminds me of what makes me happy now.  It's a win-win.  Whatever confidence and self-love she gains in the process is a transfusion of soul for me now.

Robert Moss developed the practice of soul recovery in Active Dreaming; it differs from the shamanic tradition of soul retrieval in that it doesn't necessitate a shaman's help; the dreamer has the power of being both the healer and the healed, as Robert puts it, to be their own shaman. It also doesn't presume a cultural cosmology; it uses a dream as a gateway to where, when and what must be done for the good of the dreamer. 

I've found this practice to work at a profound level, not just for my soul healing, but for many dreamers with whom I've shared these wonderfully creative ways of doing dream play.  I suggest that a person who has suffered severe trauma and is experiencing terrifying nightmares not attempt to go it alone; I hope they can find a compassionate professional  counselor to hold the physical space with them and guide them while they bravely work to heal. Many others of us have been knocked around in ways that damage but don't cripple us.  Unfortunately, we sometimes push the wounds out of consciousness and don't face the pain in our day to day, busy waking ego lives. Dreams seem to know when we need a particular aspect of our personal unconscious to heal if we're to live our best lives.  They are not above using monsters to get our attention, but if we pay attention, they can become gentler and often, extremely funny. If we take the time to get to know our dreams through the stories and symbols they offer us, we develop ways to heal spiritually, at our soul level.  

My initial way of honoring this dream was to look up the story of the making of King Kong with all its subsequent cinematic iterations.  The original story is so obviously a white male's fantasy, where women exist with a defined sexualized role in the margins of the action, usually as victims to be saved, and people of different race and culture can be caricatured and equally marginalized.  Of course, Nature can also be conquered by man, and Kong must die to prove the white male hero's power. The height of irony is delivered at the end: Kong has been catapulted off the Empire State Building by military planes and lies dead in the street.  The big shot producer whose hubris is responsible for the mayhem, destruction and unnecessary death of Kong, intones sadly,  "Beauty killed the Beast."

Yeah, and Eve ate the apple.

So it behooves Beauty, the archetypal feminine, to also free herself from whatever chains this bullshit patriarchal paradigm has inflicted on her psyche and rescue Beast from the insanity that motivates patriarchal thinkers and leads them to bring us all to the brink of physical extinction.  We will all continue existence in other forms, of course, but I sure hope the misogynist racist folk in the world don't get any more beautiful planets to fuck up.

As for me, I see great promise for us in embracing our dream experiences and wisdom.  Once we discover that some things can be addressed on the inside, in our inner worlds, and that our inner worlds that we travel in dreams are as real as are our waking physical worlds, perhaps we'll gain the resource, the magic key, that tips the scales back into balance. If we must die trying, then at least we can live somewhere, after this physical life, away from ignorant racist misogynists. We get to choose. 

The more of us can use our dreams to heal ourselves and help others to heal, the more the scales tip on the side of hope.  When we know that spirituality doesn't have to be earned because it's organic to us and that we are connected to soul/spirit through dreaming, we are free to explore both waking and dreaming realities with more awareness, compassion and courage. 

May it be so.


Photo 4887362 / King © Han Cheng Tan | Dreamstime.com

Monday, January 17, 2022

A Perspective on Time That Dreaming and Age Has Taught Me


My mom had the best Cuban sayings that she would pepper in the wisdom she gave us. One of my all time favorites is, “Mas sabe el diablo por viejo que por ser diablo.” The devil knows more because he’s old than because he’s the devil. 

I was talking with a dear friend about young people contemplating suicide in our country and how it is epidemic.  It’s so distressing to witness, let alone to live that sad reality as a parent or guardian. When we’re very young, perhaps we don’t see time as changing all things as easily as we do when we’re older.  Our passion for whatever we deem to be our sorrows is overwhelming.  We can’t speak it and it seems it will never go away or get better.

 

What is causing our youth to suffer so poignantly?  We need to listen to them and then do something to alleviate that suffering. How can we better open our hearts to the young?  How can we open our ears and hearts and help?

 

Listening is a tremendous skill to develop.  One way to develop your listening skills is to listen to your dreams.   You would think something so simple and so beneficial would be taught in every home and school to our children, that we’d be telling them, here’s a simple way to connect with your inner life, your organic spirituality. Here’s what you do to understand what you’re doing in your dreams and what indeed, you can do.  Your wildest dreams, your most passionate desires can come true in dreams and perhaps, as they do, so they will in your waking reality. Fear is power in your dreams; you can learn to do much to create what you want in dreaming, despite the obstacles.

 

However, we aren’t “in control” in dreaming, we are hyper aware spirit beings with super powers, but those powers come from powers greater than ourselves.  Above all, dreaming has taught me that Love is the greatest power in the dream worlds.  That it should also reign in our hearts here on this beautiful struggling planet, I can only dream.

 

Why don’t we teach our children to dream well now?  Dreaming can help them rely on themselves as eternal spiritual beings, living for a purpose unique to each of them.  Since it wasn’t taught to us, we adults need to learn how to dream first and how to live our best dreams, as Robert Moss puts it.  Doing so can help us get our creativity back and change the things that need to be changed so that our kids don’t have to feel so overwhelmed. 

 

Only Love guides without asking for anything but love back.  God is not a man or a woman; that’s how we may manifest in the physical, but we are energy connected in every way to the source, Love.   All the confusion and constraints are man-made, literally.  Patriarchy has truly set a barrier to people feeling good about themselves and their sexual expression, an iron curtain in the psyche.   Sexuality belongs to the physical; spirituality is formless.  There are no genitals in the afterlife unless you want them, of course. It’s not God the Father or God the Mother.  It’s Love. Simple.  Love.

 

Living a spiritual life has nothing to do with joining some denomination of patriarchal religion and goose-stepping to whatever they tell you to do.  Living a spiritual life is paying attention to your constant connection to spirit, to Love.  Participating in your dream life is a way of participating in your spiritual life while living your physical one, as best you can.

 

What is the perspective on time that dreaming has taught me?  There is no “time” in my dreaming experience; dreams can take me back, spotlight the present or fly me forward to what’s coming on the river of temporal events in the physical.  

 

"Old" is another construct of the physical world.  Living a long life of dream exploration and waking experience can lend much needed perspective to any life; especially, the perspective that the end is a new beginning, one in which we can be intentional about creating.  Once I die, I will continue my work in the service of expanding dream awareness, in myself and in others.  Perhaps, I'll volunteer for dream bringer duties, part time.

 

I also plan to surf the tunnel of an amazing ocean wave unafraid and many other things, as well.  I once had a beautiful dream that presented itself as a gateway through death’s transition, if I should want it.  Yes, I want it and am gifted to have it. If I can, I will enter that landscape and be guided as I was in my dream.   


Once we really listen to the way dreams speak to us and what they consider important (it’s rarely our egos), we can let go of the self torture we’ve been taught or terrorized into making our belief system. We can begin to experience our spirituality organically, not on a merit system.  As William Buhlman, master teacher of the OBE experience says, the first thing we need to let go of in order to experience our authentic dream/energy bodies is to examine our conscious and unconscious learned beliefs and let go of them in favor of direct, experiential exploration of our uber-real inner worlds.


May we listen and learn from our dreams so that we can help our wonderful young people survive the fake world and find strength in their spirits to do what they were called to do in the physical.



Thursday, September 16, 2021

The Power of a Dream Symbol

 


In a previous post, I told you about a delightful gorilla dream as an example of how fun and funny animal dreams can be.  I didn’t fear that gorilla, but when he came back as King Kong, well then; it’s time to take stock.

When we have a dream practice, which means we pay attention to our dreams, record them, at least some of the time, and ponder them often, we recognize the power of a dream symbol. 

 

If my dream symbol grows from personal dream energy to the archetypal size of King Kong, it is an important story my dream is telling me.  This means I go on the trail of this symbol, what Robert Moss refers to as "dream archeology." First I search through my own dream recollections and written records.  In King Kong's case, this is the third instance of this energy in my dreams in the past decade.  I print out each dream and add it to my journal now because whatever this dream is signaling with this symbol, it holds healing energy available to me now.  

 

The challenge is to ponder the symbol a dream has presented for quite a while and in many ways until I have a felt sense of what the dream is saying, if not an intellectual explanation of its meaning. It’s not that dreams are never obvious. I’ve had many dreams that were decidedly unsubtle and quite verbally direct, but that’s not the way of dreams generally.  Understanding them can be like playing charades or Pictionary. 

 

Given the fact that many of the great Aesclepian temples of ancient Greece had amphitheaters for performance of plays and that the temples were places where people seeking healing came to petition the god, Aesclapius, for a healing dream, perhaps those ancient actors in Greece performed people’s dreams.  Was dream theater the catalyst for modern theater?

 

Dream language is definitely the language of pictures not of words. According to an early pioneer of modern dream studies, Dr. Ann Faraday, it’s no coincidence that our earliest ancestors communicated through drawings, some of which are magically still extant on cave walls like those of Lascaux, in France.  She also points out how most all of us, as children, loved to draw and tell stories from our drawings.  Pictorial, symbolic language is inborn in us; perhaps because it’s the language of our dreams and we are never apart from our dreaming selves.

 

To honor this dream symbol that has so forcefully called on my attention, I begin by asking various questions. What is the context of each dream adventure?  Is the location familiar, unfamiliar? What is my dream self doing and feeling; am I happy about where she’s at?  Who else is in my dream? What is my relationship to each character in the dream, and in waking life, if I know them?  

 

Another step to open the gift a dream is offering me is sharing my dream with other trusted dreamers.  A dream friend is one who honors the dream as yours but can also put her/himself in your dream shoes and give you their associations and feeling responses.  In Active Dreaming's Lightning Dreaming process, that feedback is always offered without personal projection onto the dreamer by using the preface, "If this were my dream..." 

 

Whether I share my dream in that way or not, I’m going to have fun exploring what I can find on the internet.  I’m not looking for the “meaning” of gorilla or King Kong in my searches.  I’m letting serendipity lead and just checking out various references like the King Kong movies and movie reviews for starters.

 

Wow, what an archetypal patriarchal white man shadow King Kong turns out to be!  Far out! My dreams are not playing; they are posing an important challenge for me and I am excited to give it my best effort.

 

In another post, I’ll share what this symbol teaches me, but for now, I want to share with you this understanding of the vitality of dream symbols for personal and spiritual growth, as well as for good fun.  May your dreams shine a path through the darkness. May we become strong enough dreamers to bring about a healing future for all and for our Earth.

 

May it be so.

Friday, August 6, 2021

A New Heaven For A New Earth

 


I’ve been thinking about toxic masculinity, with questions like, what exactly are the proud boys proud of?  Then I researched them and came away sickened and soul-chilled.  Basically they are proud of being white supremacists, incredibly racist but equally, decidedly misogynist.  

 

This is what bothers me so greatly about our public discourse, or lack thereof, at the moment.  What is destroying us is a psychic paradigm at its core.  As people believe, so they do.  As they do, our shared physical reality is manifested by the consensus will of the many. But it’s a paradigm!  Another way to say it is it’s a set of beliefs made into law, not natural law, like gravity, decreed by men in charge.   


Patriarchy is big and scary in its manifestation here on earth. At least three quarters of our beautiful earth is plagued by patriarchal rule exercising various degrees of repression of women, minorities, animals and the planet itself.  Around the world, women suffer untold indignities and cruelty based on the patriarchal laws that rule them and the men who so gladly enforce them.  In our own country, we are close to losing our reproductive rights as women, therefore, our equality and autonomy as citizens of this particular patriarchy.

 

Patriarchy is based on the supremacy of one gender over the other. It is about 6 thousand years old, not coincidently, as old as Creationists say the earth is old.  Religion is the psychic enforcement of the patriarchal paradigm for society.  Patriarchal religions are all based on tomes declared sacred texts and absolute law by the patriarchs who wrote them.

 

Once patriarchy succeeded in subjugating women, it was natural for the toxic credos of might and cruelty, empowered by divine justification, to turn to the next conquest, men and women of lesser power and might around the world. Slavery is based on the patriarchal paradigm that power deserves rewards; what’s yours is mine if I can take it. 

 

The other day I was at a party hosted by dear friends.  I was talking to their lovely young college graduate son about this and that.  Something came up in our conversing that put me at a crossroads quite familiar to me; do I go there or not?  Going there means using the P word to describe how I view our social situation; the P word is patriarchy.  See, I know that word is going to be met with some form of dismissal; sure enough he repeated it, and smirked.  He felt that summed up his opinion of the topic.  He isn’t a wise-ass guy or disrespectful.  He’s a lovely young man; it’s just knee-jerk conditioning we have all endured.

 

Patriarchy’s credos are chilling; its history is one horrific blood bath after another.  We’re indoctrinated to think this is the only way that people have ever existed on this planet, which is complete bullshit.  Archeological and other scientific investigations have dispelled the blinkered views that patriarchs prefer.  Is it a coincidence that proud boys and their fraternities like to be called patriots? They’re patriarchal patriots who don’t want to see the good old days of racism and misogyny vanish and themselves out of power.

 

There are multitudes of armed to the teeth last defenders of a dying paradigm in our country.  It is the most painful reality I must acknowledge daily; an army of disgruntled white men with dangerous weapons is seething in righteous rage, ready to protect these collapsing paradigms, male supremacy and white supremacy.  

 

Yet, it is each individual that cements this ludicrous paradigm into reality by accepting the absurd imbalance between sexes, races and classes as god ordained and by having anything to do with a divinity who would ordain such a thing.  Love is the manifestation of divinity; all else is a false god and a lie.

 

There are also multitudes of people deeply committed to Love as the ultimate spirituality. I hold on to the knowledge that spirituality has a much longer shelf life than violent man-made paradigms like patriarchy.  I chose to be born into this time, this place, in a physical lifetime to learn what I need to learn and to do what I can do.  I will be exiting at some point back to the spiritual path I have followed for eons.  I know my life after this life will be pleasant and interesting because my ability to create my reality will, as it is in dreams, be much easier than it is in the physical. 

 

We create our realities, individually and collectively.  Modern dream studies have left us with little doubt. Anyone, who like myself, has pursued a dream practice for years has learned this certainty from experience.   So it would seem that a person who has created for his or herself a reality of hate, division and fear is likely to continue that path after death. No thanks.  With the bigger picture in mind, I choose Love.

 

Most of the men I know have no conscious interest in subjugating the women in their lives; most women I know respect women and love their men and children.  What is less apparent to all of us, because it’s like the air that we breathe, is that we live in an old patriarchal paradigm.  When we continue to diagnose our problems in isms and separate them one from another, we don’t see that it’s all one piece.  Nature, that’s us, cannot be divided and conquered because nobody wins. The extreme psychic imbalance that patriarchy has caused is at the heart of every crisis we face.  

 

Our unconscious devotion to the paradigm into which we have been indoctrinated hampers our metamorphosis into the most awesome human beings we can be. The paradigm we adhere to because God the Father says to is one of divisiveness; he alone is the one true it; my way or hell is patriarchal religions’ bottom line.  

 

If you’ve read the gospels you might ask yourself what would Jesus think of today’s proud boys?  Based on where and to whom he was born, he certainly was not Caucasian, European or “white” and he championed women while living in an utterly archaic patriarchy. I wonder if breaking all those taboos about menstruating women and women hearing teachings about the Torah contributed to his enemies, Jewish and Roman patriarchs, conspiring to crucify him?   

 

Jesus’ teachings do not fit in with the rigid patriarchal constructs that were built into the world’s major religions, including Christianity.  Jesus was about finding spirituality within; religion is about relying on external authorities and their dictates to tell us what our spirituality is or should be, all the while, relieving us of the responsibility of finding out ourselves. Remember the money lenders Jesus kicked out of the temple?  What would he think of these rich ass pastors with their super churches, TV shows and constant hustle?

 

We are plagued world wide, not only by a physical coronavirus, but ironically, also by a mental virus.  The vitriol and threats that are building from militant terrorists like the proud boys around the country is a sign of how desperately patriarchs want to hang on to their power.

 

But the counter weapon isn’t a bigger machine gun; it’s a change of heart and a change of mind.  It’s opening to a new possibility for a world that is wonderful in it’s magnificence and deserves to be respected.  It’s recognizing that the trappings of genitals and skin color are a thing of the physical world we’re living in together.  They don’t mean anything outside of the experience that spirit is having in that body.  Why would I choose to judge another spirit’s journey; that only diverts and stunts my own.

 

The difficulty people have in making that change, however, is that we aren’t offered much in the way of an alternative to God the Father religions. The numerous stories of goddess cultures before patriarchy were repressed and silenced; history is the story told by the conqueror, not what actually happened. 

 

But our spirituality, our soul’s longing, is a natural flow in our psyches; we long for a vessel to express it.  Embracing and including the Feminine Divine as God equal to the Masculine Divine is a good way to bring some balance to the modern psyche that has been drenched in penis worship for so long; but god/goddess is just a metaphor for what we intuit is beyond our physical senses, what lies in dimensions beyond this one.

 

Dreams can open our inner organic god/goddess given paths to all the divine knowledge we need to get by on this beautiful earth.  The First peoples of the world knew and practiced this inner searching, but our modern awareness is focused externally almost perpetually, except when we sleep.  When we stop ignoring our dreams, we begin the inner journey Home.  When we live our best dreams, we bring to the world the healing all of us here so desperately need.  

 

  

 

 

 

Thursday, July 22, 2021

 Big Dreams Can Carry You a Lifetime

 


Today I was unpacking and storing groceries in my kitchen when I came across a rubber band, a small one, the size maybe of a communion wafer.  I didn’t want to keep it, but lately it seems insane that we just throw things in garbage cans and expect them to go away and cause no harm.  Most things we throw away on a daily basis cause the overload of waste we’re seeing around the world and a dire threat to ecological life on the planet.

 

I’ve also been listening to the spectacularly beautiful audio book by Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants”.  If you’re not mindful of the planet before her book, you can’t help but fall a little bit more in love with nature after reading it. 

 

Now, I’m standing there with this rubber band thinking I can’t toss it, as is, because what if an animal suffers harm from it? I’ll cut it I think. When I cut the rubber band, a powerful image from a Big Dream swims into consciousness.  I titled the dream “Howling Mary” ( I’ve written about it many times on this blog; here’s a link to the original.)

 

The last scene in that amazingly prophetic dream from my Senior year in college is of me having, in desperation at Mary’s distress, snatched the consecrated chalice from a priest who was about to give communion and began to serve each worshiper myself.  When I had first snatched the chalice and looked in, I was horrified to see writhing worms, but as I steadfastly began to hand them out to each outstretched hand, they were rubber bands.  

 

In an earlier post I described how poignant the dream still was for me, how I hear Mary howling and understand now, decades later, why she howls. I was writing about what happened to CBS 60 Minutes correspondent, Lara Logan while covering the Arab Spring demonstrations in Egypt, in February of 2011.  If you don’t know, here’s the full story, so now you know.

 

I wrote:

 

Why is Mary Howling?  The huge imbalance, injustice and under- championed status of women in patriarchies all over this current world, the one that is imploding of its own greed and wrong-heartedness, is causing more and more suffering.  She's mad as hell and won't take it any more.

 

Now, looking at this rubber band I cut in two, trying to figure out how best responsibly to dispose of it, the gestalt hits me; yes, Mary is howling about how women are treated AND She is howling about how the Earth, Her Body, is treated under world-wide patriarchal rule.  Of course She is! 

 

The Feminine Divine was banished along with a long list of human attributes deemed “feminine”.  Inner-knowing or intuition, compassion, forgiveness, sexuality, the spirit in the physical in favor of an other worldly cerebral spiritual and of course, women themselves were banned from full equality in the eyes of religion and the law.  


From this first enslavement of half of humanity to the will of the penis gender, it flowed  that enslaving whole peoples the ruling male class deemed lesser was also justified by their toxic paradigm.


The first peoples of North America were one group viewed by the uber-patriarchal colonizing settlers as weak and stupid because they respected the earth and saw Spirit in all things.  Patriarchies operate under a might makes right paradigm that allows for ever more horrific displays of cruelty and brutality. Patriarchal thinking also places great emphasis on knowledge as power but undervalues wisdom and understanding. 

 

The Feminine Divine Archetype is the repository for banished wisdom, understanding and psychic experience. Direct personal access to an individual’s inner world was dammed and diverted by patriarchal religions which forced us to look at all divinity as Male and in command. The Good News is that you can't stop humanity from dreaming and you can't stop dreams from revealing our personal and collective truths.  No wonder we've been taught to ignore rather than how to understand dreams. 

 

Mary is truly pissed and fed up with this needless suffering! All it takes is each one of us to let go.  Let go of the tons of bullshit that we’ve been taught. Let go of any idea that undervalues all human beings as one and the same. We’re all eternal beings having a human existence for a purpose known only to each.

 

Let go of the absurd anthropomorphizing of divinity. Recognize that the grand Mystery behind this amazing existence is much bigger than our puny projections. Recognize also that the prevalent projection of one sex on divinity is a power play that gained purchase in humanity and has lasted some 6 thousand years; a comparatively small fraction of our history on this planet. Unfortunately, the result is a dying planet and endless grief for all beings on it.

 

Dreams are calling many souls to a new awareness that is desperately needed in order to heal from the psychic trance patriarchy, especially its religions, induce. What is amazing to me once again is the power of a dream that is so very old; for an image in that dream to come alive to me in meaning so many years later is awe inspiring.  And for that image to teach me a lesson, for that dream to keep on schooling and sustaining me so many years later is deeply comforting.  My dreams are my best teachers.