A Paradigm Shift: Revolution from Within

You say you want a revolution, well, you know...I agree; we need a revolution - a revolution from within, a paradigm shift.  Even though Trump is living up to the scary picture I had of him from the beginning, I propose that now is not the time to give up the ship, nor to bail on karmic duty.  The revolution that can derail the great pus pimple of world wide domination by very nasty men, (Putin, Trump, ISIL, etc.) is a revolution from within; a revolution in the human psyche.

British writer, Tobias Stone, looks at the Brexit and Trump phenomena and, based on what he believes is our innate self-destructive human behavior, predicts another huge blood bath, the trademark of patriarchal history. And who knows, Tobias muses, like at other moments of historical horrors, we resilient little devils recover and seem to do even better, (like cockroaches?).   

Stone's analysis assumes that the written "his-story" of patriarchy, a mere 6 or 7 thousand year old social structure, defines who we are as humans.  Scientific findings place humans many thousands of years earlier, based on amazing artifacts like 32,000 year old cave paintings.  "Anthropological evidence suggests that most prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies were relatively egalitarian, and that patriarchal social structures did not develop until many years after the end of the Pleistocene era, following social and technological developments such as agriculture and domestication." Wiki

The stunning fact is that humanity was not always warlike, violent and aggressive, not even the males.  Women and men shared communal power and responsibilities; most ancient ritual artifacts uncovered by archeology point to a Feminine Divine.   There was a time when hate didn't prevail or triumph, there was a time when women and men cared for each other and for young and old alike.  The patriarchal myth that human beings are naturally violent, vengeful and cold-blooded is recent. We can't look at what records remain through the lens of a false paradigm because all we'll see are our own projections, like cave men dragging cave women by the hair.  For a stunning narrative of human history and how having a bigger picture (paradigm) might help us create a better future read, Riane Eisler's book, "The Chalice and the Blade: Our Past, Our Future."

The revolutionary challenge is to think differently, quite literally outside the box, in the circle.  It's not the polemic way of thinking patriarchal paradigms teach, either this or that, yes or no, right or wrong. Patriarchal thinking is based on absolutes, on power-over models of domination, on might makes right and on righteous, extreme violence in the name of sating the Father's wrath. In Dr. Eisler's words, “In sum, the struggle for our future is . . . the struggle between those who cling to patterns of domination and those working for a more equitable partnership world." I'm not surprised that Hillary Clinton's slogan is "We are stronger together" while Trump's is "I alone can fix it?" 

We're at a human crossroads; we don't have to keep choosing a paradigm that divides and kills to conquer. A huge shift in emphasis is that women's rights are human rights, the imbalance in representation and legal protection around the world has to be corrected on every level for all humanity to thrive. It's just common Zen.  Hillary Clinton has for decades championed issues to benefit women and children around the globe; having her as our POTUS sends the absolute right message to every corner of our planet.  This is better than landing on the moon to prove how cool we are as a country.

We need a paradigm shift in which we look away from a daddy figure who can fix it (If DT saying 'who's your daddy?' doesn't scare you, I can't imagine what might.). The new approach at fixing things is to ask ourselves, what's my contribution?  Partnership, cooperation, compassion and understanding may be slower tools than shock and awe, but, truthfully, how have the blood baths been working?

A paradigm shift might take a long time to actualize, or perhaps no time at all.  I don't know.  It is, however, in process right now; each of us can have a part in growing the change we want to see happen.

In my dream of our immediate future, we come together as never before to give back in our communities and our country; we treat each other with respect, regardless of differences, and we take pride in this great rainbow nation led by our first woman president.  For those who persist in their bullying, jeering and hating, let's call them Roger:

The American Dream...again

Back in June, when Donald (Drumpf) Trump announced with  unprecedented vitriol, racist hate against Mexicans, and with his  noxious self-aggrandizement, that he would once again, run for POTUS, my favorite political satirists like Jon Stewart, believed his bid a joke.  So, it got me to wondering about the people and the ethos in this country that would happily see him succeed; I asked what is the American Dream?

Now, after ten months of freak show, I have to ask it again. What is the American dream - to you?  It's a question I think each American has to answer.  The consensus answer will create our future and impact the entire planet for generations to come. But before we answer, let's remember that what brought the Pilgrims here was a search for sanctuary from religious tyranny in England.  Unfortunately, they themselves projected that huge shadow of theocratic cruelty on the indigenous peoples they met in this "sanctuary," claimed for the white-skins of Europe by the  explorer, Christopher you know who.

By way of historical correction, I thought about calling Christopher a son of a bitch, because as his historians say, he was a cruel man, but it's misogynist, as the bitch here is to blame. Then I thought to use the word, bastard, but same thing.  Bastard is an illegitimate child under many patriarchal laws around the world.  Any woman who dares have a child on her own, give it her name, dooms not only herself to social disgrace, but also her child, to varying degree, depending on the strictness of the patriarchy.  So, why should I perpetuate this subtle, psychic brainwashing by using the language that these laws have coined? I'll come up with something new: let's see; what fits?  Ah, yes.  Devil; one who worships evil, i.e., himself, and perpetuates unspeakable, unbearable and unnecessary cruelty on everything that thwarts him. 

Back to my American Dream.  You see, America, today, is a place where one is free to grow; rich is only one avenue, a rather temporal, though popular one.  However,  we live in the Age of Consciousness, the age of inner-space exploration and new quantum paradigms.  Why dream the same old dream?  

We also live in a time of great crisis and great opportunity as the wise ones have said.  We will create the reality we give our energy to, our inward and outward allegiance.  "The world is as we dream it", is at once ancient shamanic knowledge and the title of a great book by John Perkins about shamanic wisdom.

As a woman, who is also an American citizen, I'm appalled that the rights our grandmothers fought for, a fight in which they sacrificed a great deal, (as did the brave men who fought with them) should be again jeopardized by religious extremists seeking to rule. Women fought a literal war with men who denied them, who governed them, in order to win the right to vote. TO VOTE for holiness sake!  (As historical review, I recommend two recent films, "Suffragette" and "Iron Winged Angels.")  It was no tea party for our women ancestors; they had no acknowledged voice or choice in government or in society. 

Voting was just one battle; they also had to fight for reproductive freedom, for rights and protection against laws that prevent her from exercising stewardship over her own body. The battle continues to this day, in this election and around the world. Patriarchal theocracies are still seeking to control her.
How can the grand daughters and sons, the great grand daughters and sons, of those brave freedom fighting forebears, (quite literally) allow this country to once again be ruled publicly and personally by authoritarian and patriarchal theocracy and corporatacracies?

Here's my dream.  In this difficult election season that has people in conflict and on edge, we take a moment to breathe, to center and realize that Never will there be as important a time as NOW.  (Just ask one of my favorite contemporary teachers in the Consciousness Movement, Eckhart Tolle.)

After that wonderful, centering deep breath, we each connect with the heart, with what your heart truly loves.  If it's money, okay, but there's so much more!  Whatever you learn and how ever greatly you love, that goes with you; the money, property and power stays.  I dream that we dare to dream a new dream, one where losing our fear of death, we see life with new eyes and find meaning through inner as well as outer riches.  I dare to dream that amassing riches will never again be literal, ugly and world destructive, just the opposite.  We'll dream ourselves into a future we want instead of waking up in one we fear.

The story we tell ourselves is supremely important.  There's the communal patriarchal story we've been immersed in for so long which promotes fear and separation, and there's the deeper story, one that promotes hope.  I AM immortal NOW.  I'm an immortal having this experience.  I've volunteered for this stint on earth, this physical reality.  (I love how when I say say, "Sheesh, what a world, my life partner, Jim responds; "It's not the world, it's the people in it.  The world is a beautiful place.") 

The world is as we dream it; life is as we dream it.  What is our dream, collectively as Americans?  What is our vision for "the future?" Perhaps, we've all got a mission to accomplish and a lesson to learn in this present reality that we can take Home with us when we die. How should that color our collective dream?

Fear of death, of what we believe about death is another hot topic in the New Consciousness movement.  For the sake of brevity, we live in a time of exploring that final frontier. It behooves a person to come out from the fug of patriarchal paradigms, especially as they envelop spirituality, and smell the coffee; we have delicious opportunities for personal and collective growth.  Dreams are our organic spirituality and our passkey to where we came from an where we're going; both sleep dreams and waking dreams.  We can learn to use them to heal ourselves, each other and our relationship to this beautiful planet.

To dream awake is to imagine from the heart; to come from the heart is very different than to come from the wallet.  To come from fear and hate is very different than to come from love and trust.  Depending on where you come from, you'll do different things, make different choices.  Each choice matters.  If you know that you'll live after death, just the way you're living now and beyond, then it colors your choices. 

As a woman on this physical plane, I don't know about you, but I don't want to go through the shit great-grand mama did, or that generations of suffering, confined, mistreated and beleaguered women before her did, ever again.  NEVER AGAIN!  I also count on other men and women, sisters and brothers, lovers and parents, not to allow fear and mistrust to obscure the dream we create for ourselves.  For me, that dream includes freedoms that go way beyond the nearsighted grab for money that doesn't see beyond these borders, these mind forged manacles, as Blake put it. 

I dream freedom to grow as my heart tells me to grow.  It's freedom to do the job I was sent here to do in the most loving, creative way I can.  If I'm a woman, in a temporal paradigm, I want to make sure ridiculous, confining and sadistic laws don't keep me from being free.

Women, some women, have only recently enjoyed, in the patriarchal 6 thousand year global paradigm we've endured, the freedom from the legal, social and moral restraints that theocratic male rule has inflicted on them.  Case in point, I think of how one of my favorite mystery authors recently wrote  about witch burning in such a way that I know she never would have done of the more well known Jewish genocide of the mid-twentieth century: jokingly.  "Witch" was an accusation in Medieval patriarchy; it was and often, it still is. Back then, it meant death to be called a witch; you remember Salem.  What made all this unnecessary cruelty to women possible?  Religious patriarchal theocracies.

It doesn't matter if that theocracy is Christian, Muslim or Judaic, the Big Three Traditions.  If a woman is not legally, socially and personally free to do, say and be as she pleases, she is a slave.  Our great-grandmas fought bitterly to give us the right JUST TO VOTE!

My American Dream is of a land where most people are waking up to the great New Reality that includes immortality NOW.  The violence that is so prevalent, and has always been in patriarchies, will give way to kindness and creativity. We'll collectively dream ways to live that aren't the way we're living now.  We'll continue to support the basic rights of sisters and brothers to not be like us; respecting each other, we'll create new communities.  We'll open our doors to what it's possible to achieve through fearless love and wisdom; we'll support each other in our best efforts and in living our best dreams.

So dream big and vote carefully! Abigail Adams once requested of her loving, Father of Independence, husband, "Remember the ladies" when you draft your legislation.  Though her request fell on mostly deaf and mocking ears among the ruling elite, let her voice ring clearly in our vote, NOW. And let's dream a world without end, forever and ever.  Amen and Awomen. 

The American Dream

Most of us have grown up hearing about and dreaming the American Dream, a phrase that I find worth pondering.   Just this week, Donald Trump’s racist and derisive speech, made as his bid for the POTUS spot on the Republican ticket, brought the American Dream mythos front and center to my mind.

My favorite comedians and news pundits think it’s too funny for words.  Jon Stewart thanked DT for making the last 6 wks of his Daily Show career the best.  So ludicrous do many find his remarks, that they are just making jokes. Though I love laughing at the absurdity of these extremist thoughts, I find Trump's remarks chilling to the bone.

The question I have to ask myself is, how many people think that being rich means you’re successful, smart and worth listening to?  Blaming is a knee-jerk, primitive impulse that we lose when we live valuing Love above all, including more than money.  Losing this perspective about living from the heart can cost us dearly; that's the example of Hitler and the German people who put him in power.  

In his ludicrous speech, Trump devoted as much time to bragging about his many financial assets as he did to spreading hateful lies about an entire ethnic population.  What's worse is that he's appealing to our collective projections of what it is to achieve the American Dream!  Blaming an entire people for our ills, projecting our Shadow and Devils on a group we perceive as a less deserving group, where have we seen that before and what was the outcome? We each have a choice to make about whether we'll own our shadow or cruelly project it on to others.

Trumps sneering, balls-out, slanderous attack on Mexicans is not fact; it's his own bigoted, hateful and extremely not what Jesus would do, manipulative distortion of our neighbors and fellow human beings.  What if he said those things about Canadians?  Mexicans, by the way, enjoyed their culture and didn't have a lawless society until US drug prohibition created a criminal class that in Mexico and across South America, turned into a hideous Vampire economy, the Cartels.  The drug war is draining the blood, literally, from their culture and America bears a great responsibility in this.  I recommend a wonderful book, "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs."  We need to look for mutual and respectful solutions to our shared modern ills; blaming, hating and that old chestnut, brutal force,  are very dangerous roads to follow.

Listening to Trump, he seems soul-less; someone who, counting his gold, has forgotten to count his days.  Has he ever heard that quaint old saying; “you can’t take it with you?”  Is this the reason for this outrageous megalomaniacal bid for world power; because he sees nothing beyond the grave he might need to figure in to his accounts?  Does this man have any spiritual awareness?  Even if he goes to a church and is a big contributor, religion and spirituality are not the same.  

A soul-less person is dangerous and should never be entrusted with the power of office, with our national well-being, physical and spiritual. Trump’s saber rattling is not entirely funny to me.  If as a collective, we sink to his level, if we value money more than what we have that can't be bought with money, if we don’t know that we’re spiritual beings, hence non-physical beings, ultimately, having a physical experience, we may throw our lot in with those who weave a false dream, and elect a hateful bigot.  There are others who share the ambition and soap box with Trump who also have unsettling agendas cloaked in virtue and religiosity. They're candidates who unabashedly claim authority in religion, but our first leaders, who created the foundation of our democratic republic, did all they could to draft a governing model that safeguards against the very real dangers of theocratic government.

What is the American dream?  What should it be?  I dream of a culture who knows the value of Spiritual Love and Mutual Respect and allows each of us to live our soul purpose, to receive and contribute our best dreams in our own time and place.  A culture that knows there is something like a web that unites us all, a web of what ultimately Is, regardless of our own misguided efforts to Name it. That web unites every being on this planet, animal (which includes us) vegetable and mineral.

Anyone who wants to lead me into maligning the Other, making me into a negative, bullying, blaming and hating person is anathema to me, to my soul.  It’s easy to recognize a person who only values money and who has very little heart/soul.  What would Jesus do?  Hate?  Not likely.

So, if America makes this man, or anyone projecting our problems and evils on any group, president, what does it say about us?  The Good News is that there’s time to make sure that doesn’t happen.  I dream of a post election 2016 where Americans chose leaders who can help them, the citizenry, the body politic, to create a tolerant, heart-centered, creative, imaginative, laughing and dreaming culture, a culture of joy and possibility.  This will be the American Dream; we will pioneer uniting the worlds of Dreaming.  We will be leaders in this New Spiritual Age, the Consciousness revolution. We’ll abandon hatred and embrace love.  We'll once again walk on the Moon.

The world is as we dream it.