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.  

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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.  

 

  

 

 

 

About Time

 It’s been a while since I’ve felt I had something I wanted to say, about dreams, about healing the wounded feminine, about smashing patriarchy. I firmly believe the patriarchy can be dismantled because it’s just a state of mind projected by the collective waking dream.  Unfortunately, judging by the current 85 percent of the global population following patriarchal religions under male dominion, god the Father, God the Son, we’re not waking up anytime soon. 

What can I possibly say I ask myself? 

 

What I’ve always said.

 

L.I.T.A. 

 

Love is the answer.

 

Love is the only cosmic force there is that can get our collective ass out of the monolithic sling that is six thousand years of Father Knows Best.

 

Despite the everyday shootings, despite the despicable men in leadership around the world, with their stone cold hearts, allowing, encouraging and perpetrating atrocities on humanity daily, there is a growing recognition in people worldwide that love is the only force that can save humanity from itself.

 

What love has over patriarchal power is that love endures beyond the moment of death and accompanies us through our journeys in the afterlife, hooking us up with people we love and who love us that have already crossed death.

 

As long as love accompanies me, fear can be overcome.  

 

Can hate be overcome?  I don’t know. I don’t know if the toxic level of male driven, father god condoned misbehavior on the part of so many can be righted.  Will the patriarchs give up their power willingly?  

 

I once had some wonderful dreams I titled Galactic Journey #1 and # 2.

 

In them I concede to uniformed guards questioning me that I am visiting here, actually, and will be glad to return from whence I’ve come.  

 

I see the dream worlds as gateways and windows to “from whence I come” and to "where I shall return.”  For that reason, I’m deeply committed to teaching about dreaming as organic spirituality.  Organic because it’s innate in each of us.  We all dream, despite the dismissal of the importance of dreaming in the prevalent paradigm of western culture.

 

I’m fond of saying that patriarchal religion is to spirituality what patriarchal pornography is to sexuality.  Spirituality and sexuality are the two libido drives Jung identified as the psychic motivational forces that propel human actions.  Patriarchal religions discourage or forbid, depending on how stringent the particular culture, individual spirituality based on one’s own lived experience or independent sexuality based on how good it feels when not demonized psychologically.

 

We can come to real truths by paying attention to our dreaming at the same time that we are paying attention, “being mindful” in our waking lives. The best thing about dreams is that you can answer many questions of importance to your waking and spiritual life for yourself.  You find friends, teachers and guides in dreams.  You are assured by the ones who love you and have died before you, that you are never, ever alone or separated when love is the bond.

 

Since hate, anger and fear are also potent energies, I think they might live on, too, but not for those who love.  Like attracts like; the rules of the non-physical aren’t rules, they’re energy.  If our energy is malevolent, we will continue in malevolence. Malevolence is not a happy place to spend eternity, especially if you get a taste of your own medicine, which is likely.

 

How do I know?  I’ve been respecting my dreams for some 50 years.  I’ve been learning what other dream explorers teach for all that time.  Dreaming is an art form like any other, it takes effort and practice, but it pays off big and quickly becomes a delight.

 

So, in the face of everything that must be done, in the face of all the ugliness in the physical environment we share, there is a reason we each are in it at present, that we are each alive.  It’s not one reason and one reason alone; it’s up to each person to open their hearts and discover it.

 

I ask myself, what have I learned in my life that I will take with me past death, and what can I do, now, while I’m still here?  When I’m dead, I know from dreaming that I can create my exit. I know from dreaming that the laws of the non-physical are all about intent, awareness and will.  Above all, they are all about love. And I know from dreaming the experience of true bliss, the wisdom of the soul, the pure light of love, that there's not much to fear of death.

 

I want to do what I can to activate love in myself and in anyone else who graces my path in life.  I want you to do what you can in the same way.  Talk about an epidemic.  What has hate become?  Why are so many people dying violently at the hands of angry guys with guns blazing?  Why is there so much self-righteous anger? Because the collective dream we’re living is deeply unbalanced; it threatens all that is good and natural.

 

The way I see it, I somehow volunteered to staff, for however long, the Love squad on this planet now, when it seems quite on the edge of implosion. I came because the answers are simple, even if the odds against enough people opening to this simplicity seem insurmountable. I came because I will, at some point be going back, when I die, and then I can apply what I’ve learned here working with the Love squads on other dimensions.

 

It’s a work in progress, as it is for you.  Maybe the 100^thmonkey is a real thing; if enough of us speak out for a liberty that transcends those tired old paradigms, maybe we can make it the new normal.  Homo sapiens have been around, conservatively for over 200,000 thousand years; what’s a mere 6,000? We can do this; we can dream a new dream; one we want to see come true.

 

And if our efforts seem futile in this life, there’s more life to come after death.   We’ll be able to use the heart we’ve gained from our physical experiences to live the life we love where physical roadblocks to living our best selves do not exist.  

Meanwhile, dreaming the ordinary little dream and the prophetic, lucid or OBE get us beyond our ego driven physical obsessions, to seeing the bigger picture, the spiritual beings we are and always will be.

 

May we all do whatever we can to strengthen our hearts and follow through with our spiritual goals so that we leave this physical dimension better by whatever scale we can, little or big.  Making a difference, or even just making the effort, in the service of Love brings us to a much better place after death.  

May we all follow Love and may Love follow each of us.

 

The Autumn Equinox: A Time to Honor our Daughters for their Courage

 

As the ancient Greeks first told it, Persephone volunteered to go shepherd the dead in the underworld out of her deep compassion for the suffering of those lost souls.  A young woman with a passion and a mission is an unstoppable force. 

 

So Demeter, mother of all living beings and of Persephone, herself, relented and said yes, she may go, but only 6 months at a time because she would miss her beloved daughter too much to let her go full time. Persephone promised to take a break from Queen of Death duties for half the year and return, along with Spring and Summer, because Mamma Earth is so happy to have her back that she blooms and flowers and perpetuates all sorts of joy in life.  

 

On the Autumn Equinox though, Persephone, also known as Kore, goes back down and Mamma Demeter loses her vibrant energy and goes inward, to her dreams, where she can keep in touch with Persephone in that other realm.

 

You may have heard that Persephone was raped and abducted by Hades, the Unseen, the underworld god of Death, also called Pluto, giver of wealth, who forced her to be his sex slave and queen and would have kept her there unhappily forever.  In this later myth, Zeus, his older brother and king, is alarmed by the power of Demeter’s wrath over Hades' violation of her daughter. Knowing Mother Earth could destroy all living things with just her basic elements, Wind, Fire, Water and Earth, he bargains with his hairy underworld twin to release Persephone.  Hades relented to his brother’s nagging, but tricks Persephone with pomegranate seeds so she has to come back, year after year, for half the year, in the season of death and decay. This  version is the patriarchal retelling of the original Greek myth of the seasons; can you spot the patriarchal alterations?

 

September is a bittersweet turning inward time of year in the northern hemisphere; starting with the Fall Equinox the light of day dims, moon through moon, to All Hallow’s Eve until the Winter Solstice.  I like to think of it as the Season of the Witch.

 

The Witch is an archetypal symbol of woman’s power. Patriarchy has created a charicariture of this ancient archetype, regularly trotted out at Halloween and in fairy tales. She’s ugly, old, scary and evil.  

 

Yet witch burning was a real thing in patriarchal European history for centuries! Somehow, that is one patriarchal genocide that we never learned about in school books.  In the history of patriarchal regimes, religious or secular, perhaps millions of women and a smaller percentage of men, were tortured and brutally, cruelly murdered for having their own beliefs. The crime was called heresy; failure to believe what must be believed by law.  So, if as a woman, you were raised with wise understanding of herbal healing, passed down through your family, and now some priests, cum doctors, are telling you what you may or may not believe, what you may or may not practice, you might be inclined to tell them to go fornicate themselves. Sanctioned by church and state law, church henchmen retaliated with such cruel devices for torture and murder that it must make Jesus weep, still.

 

If you took a survey today, in most places around the world, among most populations, few people have any awareness that there was so much death, pain and destruction, wreaked by the church and state, in order to vanquish women’s place and authority in culture.  The European witch burnings of the Middle Ages and Renaissance never invoke the horror that the German Holocaust or American Slavery rightly invoke; yet, the male created and male executed persecution of women in all walks of life, based on spurious religious justifications and totalitarian rule, is just as historical, just as monumentally widespread and just as deeply tragic.  Why don’t we know about it?  

 

Let’s remember that the young Persephone of the compassionate heart acted of her own accord when she chose to lighten the struggle of the lost dead and help them find the light. It took courage, self-sacrifice and vision to do what she did, and in gratitude the dead called her their Queen.

 

It took courage for Demeter, her doting mother, to let her go.  Her gift to her daughter was to continue to love her, even as she let her go.  No guilt, obligation or pressure on her daughter to live out a script she herself might have chosen for her. Instead she grieves her own loss, but support’s her daughter’s mission.

 

The death of our beloved Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg reminds me that now is the time to support young women, older women, women of color, all women who want to make a difference and help us end this dry, dusty, deadly era of patriarchy.

 

We are spiritual beings having a physical experience on a tremendously challenging physical plane of existence.  As spiritual beings, we live beyond the expiration date of our physical expressions of consciousness.  Gender doesn’t matter.  Skin color doesn’t matter, neither does ethnicity.  Spirit isn’t physical and doesn’t just express itself that way, so why limit ourselves so drastically while we’re in these earth suits?

 

In my dream of Persephone’s descent, she is the warrior princess who refuses to allow injustice to exist on her watch.  Persephone is the patron saint of real women; she doesn’t give a fig or a pomegranate about anything others think.  She does what she feels in her heart is right.  When she returns from her mission, she reunites with Demeter, her loving and supportive mother.  They share the secrets of above and below, life and death.  They’re a team.

 

I see so many strong, wise and brave young women coming into their own in the social justice movement happening now.  I see so many mature women taking the challenge to offer better service and better leadership to the American people, from VP to federal and state legislatures. I see so many older women claiming their power, owning the role of Crone and continuing the good fight for women’s rights.  Despite all we’ve been through or will go through, women are stronger now than ever. 

 

Think of how much Persephone can teach us.

 

Shout out to all the incredible young women, moms, sisters and crones who are standing up to power, 

 

In Gratitude to the Storm

The Calm After the Storm, August 4, 2020    AC

When a force of nature happens to us, there's no question who is boss, who is calling the shots.  Try as we might, the force of nature is mightier than man.  That's the bad news; the good news is the same, but seen from a different perspective.  To know that nature is boss is ancient wisdom; to think we are superior beings to all other aspects of life on earth is a hallmark of patriarchal madness.

Respect for nature is respect for something grander than ourselves; if we forget that, nature has ways of correcting our mistakes.  There's no arguing with the storm.  Isaias swept through the northeast this week hitting many states unaccustomed to tropical storm fury.  This storm was a wind event for many communities in CT and Wow; they call the wind Mariah!  The force and the howling were top notch thrilling, but the number of trees toppled, the power lines they snapped and the subsequent widespread power outage experienced by people throughout the state makes me take special notice of how delicate our way of life is.  

Our infrastructure is fragile; there are things that could strengthen our infrastructure and cultural practices, if we had the collective, global will, to make them happen.  Ask the great climate activist, Greta Thunberg; we could turn things around to sustainable co-existence with our planet and fellow beings if there were those in leadership who would make those changes happen and if all of us acted individually to change our life styles.  Since patriarchy has taught us that the earth is for the taking, subdue and conquer it; we're in this very real pickle with nature.

How do we grow a global will to cease and desist the abuse of natural resources? I can start by cleaning up my personal beliefs and extending the change in my perspective to the collective beliefs I hold.  How is this nightmare, this contemporary madness which is held up by the projected beliefs of so many people, brought to a good conclusion, not dystopia?   Jung predicted that the survival of human kind was in the healing of the human psyche, personally and collectively.  We must banish the ancient demons created by patriarchs to cower the soul's independence and claim our own connections to a divinity far greater and kinder than ourselves.

We can learn from our ancient ancestors to see ourselves as part of nature.  The more we respect our physical existence and our spiritual existence, the two halves that make us whole, the more we can respect nature and turn our horrible habits that are unsustainable, to good habits that enhance individual wellbeing and collective wellbeing - humans, animals, Earth.  

But that's not patriarchal mentality, which is a tycoon mentality, a cigar chomping, mucho, macho mentality.  Look at world leaders; who stands out to you as self-important and cruel?  Before we can get back to a relationship with our surroundings that isn't greedy and self-serving, and worst of all, lacking in human compassion, we need to rid ourselves personally of the notions that blind us to our part in it all.  As a joke I remember from my childhood says: "Remember, in an avalanche, no one snowflake feels responsible".

But everyone is responsible to the degree that they are able, to connect with the spiritual truths we're here to learn: We are all One and Love Is The Answer.  Patriarchal religions and patriarchal regimes are not very loving,  Patriarchies promote the brutality of might makes right, so systems of physical and psychological control exist under the auspices of legitimate  "government" and "religious" institutions through which we are all governed and educated and brainwashed. 

The good news is that, as spiritual beings connected to our true spiritual guidance through dreaming, we are our own spiritual authorities.  I say that thinking of Jesus telling the pharisees off, the religious leaders of his day.  By whose authority the patriarchs ask him, do you say these things about God?  Jesus answers, by my own.  To be connected to our spiritual existence that is co-existing with us in the physical is to have no need of organized religion of any stripe.

Especially any religion governed solely by old patriarchs, mostly old white patriarchs, like the Vatican, the Catholic Church, for example.  In the 21st century, in America, women are still denied ordination to Roman Catholic priesthood; and it's not like we haven't been asking for ordination for centuries.  Even today, with all our technology and science, our collective psyche around the world allows for this prohibition to exist and persist.  A vast percentage of "Christendom" around the globe is Roman Catholic. People continue to support this avenue of patriarchal rule, to allow that teaching to fill the pathways to our soul with obstacles.  Religion is guilt with different holidays, is another joke I enjoy sharing.  

The beliefs promulgated by "churches" have long continued to inculcate self-hating beliefs in our psyches. For instance, the doctrine of original sin: Fancy believing that the Divine makes arbitrary lines in the sand that require brutality and banishment to enforce and are more important than love and forgiveness!  Imagine believing that of the two genders, the one that actually gives birth to us, is seen as lesser, inferior and to blame for all our moral problems! She who must be controlled.  Patriarchies promote this misogynist mythology; we get taught it so young that many adhere to it blindly. Who is Eve or Pandora to you?

What does religion give us?  A certainty of safety after death? A reason to love ourselves, others and the Divine?  Dreaming gives us that without demanding that we march to another's rules.  Some of the rules Catholicism teaches are down right awful, as are those in the other two big patriarchal religions, Islam and Judaism.  I remember when it was a mortal sin to eat meat on Fridays?  Not a mortal sin to eat meat, that might have done us all more good, but a mortal sin to eat meat on Fridays.  One would go to Hell if one did that and didn't confess to a priest and do the proper penance.  Then, the Vatican decided that the mortal sin of eating meat on Friday was to be treated as a venial sin now.  My question was, what happens to everybody already in Hell for eating meat on Friday?  Do they make an announcement in Hell; "Ok, everybody here for eating meat on Friday line up on the left, you're getting out."

Ridiculous.  Look to the way religion treats women, look to how we see God as the Father or Son only; no women allowed in the divine boys club.  No Mother Goddess; how is that possible?  Patriarchal religions justify all kinds of control over women and peoples not wielding the patriarchal power at the moment.  Slavery, a tool of patriarchy, is experienced both by women and men of races subjugated by the ruling patriarchs.  Witness the contemporary global "sex trade" or women's lack of rights in regimes like Saudi Arabia, where, even today, women are imprisoned and tortured for demanding autonomy.  

White patriarchal supremacist racial hatred fuels intolerance, injustice and violence in countries like the USA where Americans are being called to choose how to treat each other and to decide what kind of a society we are to be.  In the 21st century, we must demand justice for citizens regardless of their pigmentation or cultural background. Racism is a disease of the soul, as well as a disease of the society, a weapon promulgated for thousands of years of patriarchy. The brutality that past white patriarchal societies inflicted on black and brown peoples is beyond belief, but more unbelievable is it's persistence in power today.   We have a  government that wants to roll back the rights that Blacks, Latinos, and Women have earned these past decades with our blood, sweat and tears. First degree patriarchs are installed in our highest offices trying to suppress the growth of the last fifty years in gender and race relations.  

Americans have a small window of opportunity, this upcoming presedential election, to restore this train wreck of a collective reality to a track where we can build the good and dissolve the evil. Personally, culturally and collectively, we are responsible for the reality our existence is on this planet.   We need a very different way of doing things; we need saner beliefs about ourselves, each other and the "afterlife."  I put afterlife in quotes because it's more accurate, if you're connected to the spiritual aspect of your life through dreaming, meditation or other positive avenues, to say that you experience it now, parallel to your own life. It's the AlsoLife, the Right Beside Me Life. if I choose to develop my inner life, the one I find in dreaming, meditation and mindfulness, and see it as important to me as anything in my waking life.  The inner life is the one I'm going to inhabit when I die.  Here is important, but not to the exclusion of there. It's not either or; it's Both And.

I'm very grateful that the hardships I endured during Isaiah were both relatively brief and easily remedied this time.  I'm also grateful for the lessons the storm brought about what's really important.  Sometimes the lessons aren't available due to the devastation of a storm or other natural event; sometimes they are fatal.  Not this time, but how can we learn to be more responsible citizens of this planet?  

Gratitude to the spirit behind nature for what she gives and using her gifts responsibly would go a long way to changing some of the things we so desperately need to change.  Also, electing leaders we can be grateful for instead of subject to; ones who lead not by coercion and deceit but with heart and soul.  Leaders of both genders and all cultures and backgrounds that represent we the diverse people, and who govern in collective and responsible ways.  

We are born spiritual as well as physical beings; we are all body and soul.  Each of us can go within through our dreaming, with gratitude to the organic spirituality we're born with, to find the connections we always have to the divine.  May your dreams comfort you and help you grow.  May we learn to be co-habitants with all life on earth.  May we save our own day, individually and collectively.  May we find joy in living every dimension of our existence on earth.  May patriarchy fall from the weight of it's own falsehood.  May love rule in collaboration and never by force.  May we dream a better reality for ourselves and our future generations.  May we have hope and practice kindness.  May we dream strong.

 

Peace or Patriarchal Dicks?

I heard Robin Roberts interview George Floyd’s brother, Terrence, on GMA yesterday, along with Rev. Kevin McCall, the moral support of the Floyd family in this personal tragedy and national maelstrom.   In the midst of all the rage, sadness and fear that the death of George Floyd has inspired among citizens of all races and creeds in this country, he spoke about the person who died, who George Floyd was and what he stood for.  Kudos to these amazing men, Terrence Floyd and Kevin McCall, for their courage in asking us to recognize the values of the man who was murdered.  George Floyd, we learn from his grieving brother, is about Peace. What would he want? What they all in the family want, a peaceful call for justice, for unity, for love and for change.

In that interview, I also heard George Floyd described as a motivator; a life-long friend says he was always there for him, to inspire him, to keep going.  All the good people whose lives have been marred by police brutality deserve the justice this country is supposed to stand for! If the system fails one of us, it will eventually fail us all.  It needs to be clearly illegal for anyone in domestic law enforcement to harass, harm or kill a civilian without checks and balances on such actions.  The public is not the enemy. We are citizens, not consumers; we are people, and together we are the community that government and law enforcement serves because we elected them to serve us.

I want to emphasize, that the really bad people in the police departments of this country give the many, many good people who are cops a bad name and a hard time doing their true job. When my partner and I produced “We the Children” a documentary about violence in the lives of inner city children in 1994, we interviewed many Bridgeport police officers, including the chief at the time.  They were brilliant champions of their community where many of them were born and raised. We have deep respect for police officers who understand their role as peace makers, as well as peace keepers.  We worked with people at every spoke of the community wheel and always came away inspired by the caring and capable work being done in community for the sake of community.

The question is will the “system” continue to protect the guilty and guilt the innocent?  At the moment, it look like things could change, especially if we each speak out as the Floyd family requests, powerfully, but with love in our hearts and seeking a creative, peaceful means to the justice we want to see in the end.  Because, as they said, we’ve been down this road before, the road of violent rioting and hate, the road of destruction and war; it never helps. 

Many of us, of all skin tones, are fed up with the irresponsible deployment of bullies into police work.  Remember the Stanley Kubrick movie, Clockwork Orange?  As much as I hated the film, it seemed prophetic at the time.  Is the irony of the horrible murderous teenage protagonists in the end  “reformed” into cops totally lost to our cultural psyche?  We can’t allow cops to be bullies, they must be wise and discenrning public servants.  More importantly, our presidents can’t be bullies, either.  As I heard the Floyd family urge today on the news, please vote and get these bullies and misogynist racists fired from our public offices.  The misogynist label is one I added; as Abigail Adams unsuccessfully urged her husband hundreds of years ago, let’s not forget the women.  Elect people who really care about people and community, not the lying bags of shit waving bibles, guns and dicks and proclaiming themselves the real Americans.

I want to emphasize that all this tragedy is out of control patriarchy around the globe.  We need to pull the plug on our habits of mind that put so much power into the hands of such evil men. The world is full of despicable male dictators wagging their inflated penis at each other and threatening us all with war, famine, assault and destruction.  Not a cheery picture; but there is a cheery note to be struck; we are at a crossroads.  What every single one of us chooses to do matters.  We are creating the energy to either build a new dream for America, one that truly values both genders and all races equally, or return to the old, dead dream of the greedy rich, whose lust for money and power leaves no room in their hearts for love and compassion.  America has had her share of tycoons and robber barons; they are often accorded more respect and given more power than is wise for the public good.  We’re in one of those bad news moments now.  What we can do about that is work to change it before it gets worse. I know it seems like it can't get much worse, but it can.  Look around the globe, it can.

Jung said that the psyche, the soul of humanity, is the thread on which our survival as a species hangs. A universal by-product of the patriarchal paradigm is rage, especially among men, but it seems that anger is the go to emotion across the land, from mild annoyance to murderous rage. Our leaders stoke that emotion, along with fear, to play us the way they want, to divide us.  Worse, there's an element of out of control rage and wild west gun lust on all sides of the racial divides. We live in an age where the wrong people, and they are all mostly males, rule the roost, whether in government, religion or the many underground cultures, like the vast criminal shadow empires patriarchy supports.  In patriarchal think mode, violence is the go to solution to any problem.  Those who adhere to that paradigm as a justification for their violent actions are patriarchal dicks.  If majority rule is in the hands of patriarchal dicks, how do we, the peace loving people, like the grieving individuals in Floyd’s family, get the change we want? We want it now and we want it peacefully. 

I’d love to see real change.  We can’t get rid of patriarchal violent, hating mentalities in leadership if we don’t start at the top and get rid of patriarchal religion.  The majority of people around the world believe in One All Powerful, All Demanding, All Male God.  They gladly go to war and sacrifice whatever to their tyrannical god, and the stronger their allegiance to Him, the worse the lot of women under their rule.  As Christians, we’re encouraged to believe in a Father/Son/Holy Ghost, a Divinity Trinity, an all Male and One Bird power triumvirate.  However, before this sorry ass patriarchal mucho macho order became the pattern of society, all peoples revered Goddesses and our Earth was the focus of our spirituality.  All life is sacred not in the way male governments claim, in order to have legal control of women’s wombs, but all life is sacred because that's how the sacred expresses itself, from the smallest insect to the largest star.  I’d like to see us topple the mind forged manacles we call religion and live a spirituality based on love, respect and mutual acceptance.  I’d like to see our governments fully diversified in race and gender and our priorities focused on compassionate rehabilitation of faulty systems.  

What is peaceful justice? For me it’s writing what I think and sharing it.  For me it’s also daring to dream, along with the Floyd family, that if everyone leans in on this one, and in the name of all black lives so unjustly marred by racial hatred, we all, in our own way, our own space, work to build a bond of peace that speaks truth to power.  So far, we do have the right to organize and the right to vote; there’s a big election coming up where we can shake the governmental pyramid and prove that our democracy can work peacefully.

I dare to dream that we can get these dry hearted old men out of office.  When I hear the president of this land champion violence like he’s at a WWE match, it makes me angry and sad.  Can we unseat this man from his throne?  I don’t know; how did he get in there in the first place?  Can we please elect wise leaders and also, can we please do the best each of us can to eradicate hate, accept our mutual humanity and act human to each other?  Can we let our hearts be schooled in community sharing and caring?

Who do I want to lead us? Who has a right to set the tone for this confrontation with institutionalized racial injustice?  Not the mucho macho set of any color.  How does tearing down your neighborhood help anybody?  It lets off steam and gets you free stuff, but are you caring about George Floyd?  I don’t know what each person should do with their anger; but I’m tired of spiritless men going in with guns blazing, blighting innocent lives in the name of justice.

I want people like those who think as George Floyd thought to lead our culture.  Let’s motivate each other to be way better human beings, to give a fuck about each other based on our common humanity, not our color or our sex. To ask ourselves how skin color or genitals can possibly determine anything important?   To ask ourselves how a supreme being who created us in sexual compliments be really only one of those sexes?  Doesn’t that hint of some heavy duty tamporing with the facts of life? Spiritual laws are written in our DNA not in patriarchal propaganda tomes written and decimated by violent woman hating conquerors thousands of years ago.

So, when I think of divinity, I think of the unquestionably powerful energy of Love. In Love as compassion and in any true manifestation of that Energy, there is God/Goddess. Patriarchy loves to portray that Love is weak, just like they portray that Woman is weak and definitely not God, but there’s hope, Jesus was a feminist.  He was also a rebel; definitely not a patriarch.  I wouldn’t call Jesus god, but I’ve always thought he was a stellar example of manhood and humanity.  

For a divine example of femalehood, I had to peek behind Mother Mary’s skirts to find the true ancient Mother, in all her fecund sexuality.  Religion is guilt with different holidays; spirituality is organic to us and most easily connected to through our dreaming.  Of course God is Mother Energy as well as Father Energy, but isn’t it much easier to skip the complexities of other dimensional understanding and just say God is always Love; if it’s not Love, it’s not God.

Let’s dream big. Let’s dream about being a people in America who know ourselves to be a patchwork of everything and who benefit equally by our differences and our commitment to fixing things together. Our country has a golden opportunity to be a community of diversity united by the universal Law of Love, as un-patriarchal as you can get.  

And please, let’s keep this one date with destiny this Fall and get the fascist, racist, misogynist leaders that have infested public office like unfettered cockroaches out and replace them with kind-hearted and wise leaders.  Don’t underestimate the damage these hypocrites holding up bibles and praising the Lord they don’t really worship, since their god is Money, can do to our spiritual psyches. How can any real follower of Jesus,  which is the whole point of Christianity, support these hateful clowns?   Let’s dream of a voting public who watches and sees what is done, not what is said, and who will get our country back on the Peace train and out from the clutches of so many patriarchal dicks,