The Rainbow Bridge Between Now and Forever

This is the perfect time of year to speak of death and of the departed.  Yet we dare not speak of death and of the departed, at least not directly, honestly and unafraid.

 

Growing up, I can count on the fingers of one hand the very few times I was physically disciplined by either of my parents. Once, when I was a very little girl, perhaps five, a neighborhood child fell off his bike and broke his arm.  When the doctor left his house, my mom and I went to check up on him and his folks.  Walking back home I was thinking of how I’d seen the boy lying sedated in his bed.  I turned to my mom and said quietly, I thought he was dead.  SLAP! across the mouth; I was too stunned to cry.  My mom had never hit me, but with the slap came the clear message, we do not speak of death.

 

What is your personal myth about death?

 

We’ll go to heaven?  Whose heaven?  There are three patriarchal, militant religions in our reality right now that will fight to the death for the right to claim their heaven is the only heaven, their Father God is the only God.  Which are you cheering for?  

 

I don’t think we need religion.  In fact, I think, especially for women, these religions are a detriment.  It is mind bending to think that a Justice of the US Supreme court would, in private, by the code of her “faith” have to ask her husband permission for anything.   Justice Amy Coney Barrett is not just a Catholic, she belongs to a fringe group of the Catholic church, “People of Praise” that requires this of women based on St. Paul’s chestnut, man is head of woman as Christ is head of the church. Go figure; I doubt, based on his teachings, that the real Jesus would have much to do with many so-called Christian churches.  The Roman Catholics still won’t let women be priests, their official representatives of the “Lord” to the people. Incredibly, it’s because women don’t have a penis and Jesus did, though they swear he didn’t use it for anything except peeing.  In contrast, in the Gospels, Jesus was constantly breaking patriarchal laws in favor of women’s equality. He is my favorite Feminist.

 

The Orthodox branch of Judaism has a long history of controlling women; these soul numbing mores are poignantly depicted in movies like “A Price Above Rubies” or the current Netflix special, Unorthodox. Some Hasidic women shave their heads, part of a code of modesty that requires them to cover up, so as not to tempt the men.  Although this story has gotten old in some religions, the chastity of women paradigm is very much alive and well in all three patriarchal superpower religions.  In radical Islam, men who martyr themselves in their battle against the infidels will have access to 72 willing nubile virgins in the afterlife.  Apparently, in their macho heaven, virgins are currency, as above, so below. 

 

Yes, these are extreme examples of the intractability of patriarchal religious rule, but THEY EXIST!  They exist NOW! And they are one of the forces that is destroying humanity. Tell me, what is climate change denial based on?  Why are so many wanna be Christian soldiers so itchy for a righteous civil war in our beloved America?  Can’t wait for Armageddon and the rapture; certain of their just reward? Abortion is murder but god doesn’t mind you trying out those excellent lethal weapons on non-believers.

 

Patriarchal religions deal out death and destruction, when they’re strong, they're aligned with the state.  People adhere to them because they don’t have an alternative that will fulfill their spiritual needs. Any form of internal reflection, meditating, self-reflection and especially dreaming, can connect anyone to their spiritual core, their inner reality. It’s important because that inner reality is the one we experience at death and after. As Jesus put it, the kingdom of god is within.

 

At this time of year, many ancient indigenous peoples celebrated the turning of the Wheel of LIFE to the cycle of DEATH, because death is equally part of our experience.  We come into the physical through birth and we exit the physical through death, still the same SPIRITUAL BEING ready to move on.

 

I’ve written this message in different ways often in my posts, but now is the time to say it again.  Religion is not your friend.  The more you give your autonomous will over to someone else’s restrictions, without first consulting your own experiences and your own intuition, the more you lose your organic connection to your own spirituality.

 

Religion is a vast patriarchal mind fuck that has had us in it’s grip for millennia; but before religion was spirituality, innate, organic and a birth right.  Religion is the driving rational of war and cruelty.  Look where we are now! I marvel that people don’t more readily see behind the OZ to the manipulators of this Father God image religions have created.  Of course, without some deep personal connection to the spiritual realms, it is hard to free ourselves from this psychic tyranny. But that connection is innate in each of us, a snooze, a dream away.

 

Each of us knows that LOVE is the supreme force in the universe.  Religions talk God is Love, but rarely do they walk that talk.  I’m saying Love is God. Love is the physics that drives all creation.The simplest way to connect to spirit is to think, feel and act from Love. It helps to focus on your heart, to open your heart to your mental, emotional and spiritual truths. There are revolutionary discoveries happening about our experience of death and the afterlife in the field of Medicine, in the study of Physics and in the exploration of Dreaming.  Why not tune in; explore for yourself?  You can start tonight when you go to sleep.

 

Have you never had a dream about a loved one who died? It’s the number one subject of the many dreams I hear from students, friends and family.  What you believe about these dreams can make a huge difference in your attitude towards death and the dead.  To simply dismiss them as weird or spooky but unreal can shut a door that opens to your own soul.  

 

Our culture has taught us to fear and caricature death and to cling to external codes fashioned to sell us safeguards against our fears that at best are useless and at worst, inflame our fears and fuel our misconceptions.  Why is Halloween always about ghouls and blood and fear?  That’s not how it was for our pre-patriarchal Pagan ancestors, who without TV or internet to distract them, may have lived more connected to their inner realities.  Honoring the dead was an act of loving remembering.

 

Our ancestors valued dreaming far more than we do.  Dreaming is our built in rainbow bridge to the dimensions we may travel after death, to the places our beloved departed travel now.   Our dear departed visit us and we go visit them.  They show us how they’re doing, ask us for what they may need and give us comfort and advice.  Our relationship to those we love who cross over does not die; it transforms into a long distance, dream-facilitated bond that continues to grow and change. Of course it’s heart wrenching to be physically without the person who has crossed and it’s not the same, but it is something. 

 

Dreaming with our departed allows us to stay connected to those we still love; I know from my own experience, that the communication is valuable to me on many different levels.  The beauty of it is that you can test this knowledge out for yourself. There’s nothing to believe.  There are wonderful teachers available that with their books or classes can help you understand your dreams, but only you live in your dreaming mind.  The rainbow bridge is a connection only you can make for yourself.

 

 

Fly Free; You Are Forever

In the aftermath of the waking dream that has many of us stunned, saddened and fearful, it's hard to find that silver lining.  Many of us in the consciousness/spirituality movement feel it's very important to stay positive, because despair leads to emotional catatonia, which literally gets us nowhere.

In my last post, I mentioned how one of the things that seems apparent is that we won't have a leader to turn to, so we'll need to do it ourselves, for each other and with each other.  Do what?  Make sure Love trumps hate.

Obviously that won't be easy, but the hard things seldom are.  For myself, I'm choosing the areas I most want to champion and commit my energy there, while supporting others in their endeavors to move human consciousness beyond the stagnant mental swamp of this dying patriarchal system and its death generating values.

For me, the women's movement has received a huge wake up call; too many women, white women it seems, voted for a misogynist and put their own civil liberties, their daughters' and their grand daughters in jeopardy.  Why?  Brainwashed, that's why.

That's the title song by George Harrison on his posthumously released album:

Brainwashed in our childhood
Brainwashed by the school
Brainwashed by our teachers
And brainwashed by all their rules
Brainwashed by our leaders
By our Kings and Queens
Brainwashed in the open
And brainwashed behind the scenes

God God God
A voice cries in the wilderness
God God God
It was on the longest night
God God God
An eternity of darkness
God God God
Someone turned out the spiritual light

Patriarchy is a 5-6 thousand year old paradigm that has forced humanity into this perilous period of self-destruction.  It takes many forms on the planet, physically, monarchies that are inherited or hierarchical legislative structures that are to various degrees elected, but psychologically it takes one common form.  God is male, so the male is the only suitable representative of his rule in the physical. This belief is manifest to varying degrees of severity, depending on where in the world we find ourselves.  But very few societies extant give equal voice to the Feminine Divine.  This denial of half of who we are, within and without, has created the dark paradigm, the collective dream, we're living on this physical plane.  I spoke about this in my Mother's Day Homily a few years ago in more detail.

The good news, as I've mentioned before, is that we humans have been here much longer than the patriarchal age and have experienced peaceful coexistence and egalitarian organization of societies. The myth of it's always been like this is part of the patriarchal, apocalyptic narrative.  Are the myths of Eden hinted at in this bleak story echoes of the paradise we indeed lost when god was not the war tyrant father and all that was life was the Mother? 

The challenge of the times we're in is doable; it depends on one person at a time learning to free herself/himself from the mind-forged manacles that make us conform to values that are religious rather than spiritual, exclusive rather than holistic.  The choice isn't religion or atheism; it's dogma versus experience. The realm of God/goddess is within and the path is always open to us, especially through our dreaming.  Paying attention to our dreams, our organic spirituality, can free us from the religious strictures and lies that cloud our judgments and harden our hearts with fear.

We are forever because we're spiritual beings in this present physical existence.  We've been here before and we've been elsewhere in the multi-universe, as well.  We don't have to earn our way into heaven because heaven is inside us - as is hell, if we choose it.

The question for each of us is, why am I here now?  What do I need to learn and what am I here to contribute?

A world out of whack is a world of imbalance; many teachers in the consciousness/spirituality movements of today believe that the Feminine Divine must be returned to equal status with the Male Deity that's been Ramboing us to perdition these past several millennia. The influence of the Feminine is key to achieving balance; the goddesses that all our earth centered ancestors revered informed our moral codes very differently.  Goddess respecting cultures embodied a very different paradigm, a very different consensus reality. 

We need to melt down this hateful paradigm that's imprisoned the human imagination for so long and fly free.  Patriarchal religions control through fear and coercion, just like patriarchal governments or patriarchal family structures.  But no one can control our inner freedom.

The spiritual movement of this dark patriarchal age is brighter than it has ever been, thanks to so much passionate research and writing in the last century.  Material science and metaphysical science are partners in the current conversation on what constitutes "reality."  We can take heart in that.

There is no doubt in my mind that as Jesus put it, you can't put new wine into old skins; the new skin we need to grow, to rebirth, regenerate and renew our existence on this planet is a psychic one.  We need to act as if our spiritual being is just as important as the ego being of our waking reality. It's not either/or, it's both/and, especially when the shit hits the fan.  We need to examine our beliefs, where and how we got them and whether they serve our deepest values.  We need to tune into our dream lives because that's where we find the help we need, custom tailored to our own soul, not mass produced, mass distributed and controlled by patriarchs for their own profit.

As Robert Moss teaches; "We are born to fly, and in dreams we discover that the soul has wings."