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.

 

 

Waking Life/Dream Life

A participant in one of my workshops wrote down a question about whether we repeat our daily experience in the dreaming.

Yes, I think so from my dream experiences, but there always seems to be a twist. Even though the characters of my waking life, in person and from TV, may show up in a dream because they figured in my day; there's always more to it, and it's personal.

My dreams will throw me a bone sometimes in the way of wisdom for my waking life; but they aren't that interested in the physical life I'm living; they are partial to the life of the soul.

What's sad to me is that most people automatically think, oh religion.  Christian, Muslim, Judaism or Buddhism, that's where one goes to plug into the life of the soul.  No, wrong.    That's where you go to get told what to believe and how to save something that doesn't need saving.  The Soul saves, it doesn't need saving.  Dreams are the Soul's messengers.

Some people think "spirituality" is all OM and Amen.  Spirituality is whatever you do with an open heart and selflessness.  Like dreams, that come big and small, so does spirituality.  And I don't think you can enter into true spirituality without a sense of humor, which leaves most religions out.

So, our dreams are focused on spiritual growth over winning the lottery, which often means we get even more lost than we already are into the physical.  Dreams bring us the messages that help us let go of rigid, silly or unloving ways, not just towards others, but towards ourselves.

Let's face it; if you get told from day one by your culture that some Nobadaddy was pisssed with you from the minute you hit the physical because your ancestors disobeyed, therefore, you must spend a lifetime making it up to Him.  What?  This dude even insists His one and only son die for the cause.  Jesus.  Who needs a god like that?

Dreams remind us that the Divine has many faces, and sometimes it has no face at all; just Light, just Being.  Many of you dreamers know just what I mean.  After one experience I wrote about here, I came back saying, "I'll never be able to explain this to anyone, not even myself."

Isn't it better to experience spirituality than to be told what to believe?  There is no language for the Truth that Is, you've got to experience it yourself.  Luckily, not only are we born with belly buttons, we're born with the power to dream.

So, back to how dreams mirror an experience in waking life to us, day life; yes, it can seem mundane repetition, but play with it a bit anyway.  Write it down, ponder it from time to time.  Let yourself say, huh; yes, that thing happened yesterday and that person I saw or spoke to, that was the movie I watched, the fight I had, etc. but there are some very interesting other things in the dream; it's not an instant replay.  Sometimes I have to wade through the repetition of a dream before it clicks, but life's lessons are best learned both in sleep and wake.  If both sides agree; I'm in good shape, at least spiritually.

My spirituality is like my bellybutton, mine.  It doesn't need a credo, or ask allegiance of me.  It never harms my wholeness.

Look at women's situations because of patriarchal religious dogma and tell me those misogynous edicts don't harm women, sometimes body and soul.  Eve; really?  Check out my Howling Mary dream and my posts about the Great Mother.  There was a time when these crazy religions didn't rule and we, as a human race, were just not that crazy.

Dreams are still our lifeline, though many hold that line with lots of slack.  When people ask me why they don't remember their dreams, my first question is; do you want to?  Do you set an intention to dream before you go to sleep.  Do you take the time in the morning to gather whatever you can from the dreaming?

Yes, we see lots of parallels to waking life in dreaming; it's up to us to notice the differences, the new elements our dream has added, the challenge our dream is presenting.  We don't learn from being told; we learn from experience.  There's great wisdom in how dreams handle us; it's up to us to recognize it.

Each of us is going to die.  There are few things we'll carry across that transition with us, but they are the best things we can have on either side of the divide.  Who and what we truly, selflessly love, what we do for others, and how much we learn to truly, madly, deeply love ourselves.

There are huge obstacles to self love; it's ironic that we have such supreme ultimate narcissists right now on the global stage, keeping us cowering every second possible with war threats and closed hearts. I lay that obstacle square at the feet of the patriarchal paradigm of the last 6,000 years; and I propose that once we discover who we truly are as spiritual beings having a physical existence, those mind-forged manacles will fall.

Dreams matter whether they're mundane or mind-blowing, whether we know we left our body and are in the dreaming or we don't.  Wether we have one dream a year, or a dozen a day.  They matter to each dreamer.  That's the bridge, the cord, the secret door to our souls, as Jung insisted.

So dream strong and pay attention.

Ashé!

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."

The Dream Connection and the Pope

This may be a bit David and Goliath of me, but I'd like to challenge the need for institu-tionalized religion. I'd like to propose that modern day "religions" do much more harm than good; they divide us from one another and fail to deliver on all the Good they claim for themselves.  I'd like to suggest that we each enter this world connected to our Spiritual Source and will exit this world to reunite with the same Loving Source; even as we reside in the physical body, in a physical world, we are spiritual beings living our unique purpose.  The burgeoning exploration of near death experiences, NDE's, out of body experiences, OBE's, and dreaming in general is opening the gates to direct spiritual experience for everyone, not just the chosen prophets of the status quo.

The organic spirituality dreaming offers is like having a spiritual compass through life helping to connect us on a regular basis with inner resources, as it provides us with personalized guides, teachers and angels, messengers of the wisdom beyond embodied reality that delivers us from the trials of waking life, big and small.  We can also gain freedom from judging ourselves by the standards of the physical world only, because we have other experiences to cultivate in other realities that often more than compensate for lack on this plane.  We’ve been brainwashed to believe the physical is the only solid, real reality. Despite a century of exciting developments in the fields of Physics, Consciousness Studies and Dream Studies, a great number of people ignore the dream portals to other worlds that are being offered them on a regular basis.

We've been taught, conventionally, to rely for spiritual nourishment on external reality based religions that give prescribed outlines of dimensions beyond the physical and demand consensus on the grounds of an elite, usually male, group of authorities who alone can decipher what even older all male authorities wrote about the Divine. I'm mostly talking about the big three, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Perhaps some accept constricting religions as our only spiritual option for lack of alternative. These limiting religions, especially as absorbed through the mind of a child, which is when most of us get brainwashed into them, operate on a deeply suggestive psychic level to imprint on us the dire consequences of disbelieving their dogma.  They utilize a simplistic and dualistic punishment and reward system, commonly known as hell and heaven to instill fear and obedience to their projection of the Divine. Yes, they profess that at the core of their teachings is the ultimate reality of Love, but by their deeds, as Jesus put it, you shall know them.  These patriarchal religions have a track record of deeds that belie their preaching of Love, from present warring zealotry in the Middle East to horrendous historical events like the Roman Catholic Inquisition, when claiming any direct revelation from dreams could get you barbecued.

The myths that these for-profit organizations perpetuate can be truly detrimental to the human spirit, especially if you're a woman.  The myths begin by saying that once we were loved and provided for in a wonderful place, but something happened, so we got kicked out.  Humans DISOBEYED and worse, it was HER fault, the woman’s.  The serpent, EVIL, outsmarted her cute little self and she used her wiles to get the smart one, THE MAN, to do what he otherwise would surely not have done.  The rest, most believe, is HIS-STORY.  SHE must be constricted, especially sexually, so she doesn’t again undo all HIS progress,  SHE, whether in human body or as EARTH can also be abused and used, because SHE is but MAN’S servant.  HE AND GOD are on the same level; they are the PATRIARCHS.  The GODDESS is no longer anywhere to be seen, at least not in the CIVILIZED world; yet, since the beginning of human history, archeologists have discovered, the Divine was worshipped as the GREAT MOTHER.

Surely most people can see that religion, at least as much as money, is the root of our accelerating self-destruction.  The great mystic poet, William Blake described our mental chains, our unexamined, constricting paradigms as "mind forged manacles." These patriarchal myths, with different players, are in dangerous and violent competition for supremacy around the world.  If people adhere to these limiting myths for lack of a real alternative, one that satisfies, informs and inspires beyond that old time religion, then the world is ready for the alternative - individual, direct experience of the divine.

There are many roads to these direct experiences being explored by a growing number of people, all over the world, through the contemporary Consciousness Movement   My portal of choice is dreaming because it's effortless, natural and organic.  It doesn’t require much of me; all I need is to want to dream, want to remember and to pay attention.  Sharing and playing with dreaming in family groups and community groups can nourish our need for human connection and help us build a better future together.  Through individual and group dream explorations, we arrive at our own certainty, we gain our own authority over our spiritual lives.  For me, dreaming provides access to my spiritual home long before I finally go there; death does lose its sting.  It’s taught me that in thought responsive, non-physical worlds of dreaming, it’s all up to me.  I create my inner world with my intention, desire and imagination, yet in these worlds, I meet others who share similar visions and we create together.

Dreaming has also taught me that “as there, so here.”  The mirror lessons from the dreaming that apply to physical reality are the gifts we receive to carry into our waking lives.  If I can create my dream realities, how much of my waking reality can I create?  If I can conquer my fears in the dreamworlds, can I conquer them in waking? 

Rather than disconnecting us from what’s important and turning us into “dreamers” as is sometimes said with disdain, connecting through our dreaming to our eternal, non-physical self and exploring the resources available to us in those dimensions can anchor us in our authentic lives, despite the “peer pressure” of social consensus.  In waking life, connecting through meditation, mindfulness, open-hearted living are ways to keep spiritual portals open; when we sleep, it can be effortless.

In the frilly aftermath of Saint, I mean, Pope Francis’s whirlwind visit to our land, I heard the fluttering comments about his awesome Presence here. I have nothing against him personally; he seems like a truly sincere and nice guy, but as a Pope, he’s doing the RC Church a great service by gaining so much popularity. Talk is cheap and the fact that he rides by papal Fiat is not the point, or perhaps, on a PR level, it is.  The Vatican alone is a vast empire of wealth and power with deep corruption issues; does he really wield any influence there?  Could he be, perhaps quite unwittingly, the misogynist and power hungry RC church’s best media foot forward?  This is the church of the outrageous child sexual abuse scandals that are still current in the courts and the just as outrageous cover-ups by Church authorities.  This is the church that continues, the only one out of just about all others in “Christendom,” to deny women equal access with men to clerical office, and it’s proud of it!  So, how about that papal fiat to reform all this; will he do it?  Can he do it?  I don't know; but the fact that he just canonized J. Serra, despite all the impassioned pleas for him to consider the man's brutal acts towards the indigenous peoples he savagely forced to build his missions is not a good sign. 

Here’s a wonderful article on papa’s visit by Maureen Dowd in the NYTimes; well worth reading!  In it, I learned that a San Francisco priest was just officially forbidden to say mass, for attending a women's conference on ordination.  This outrageous censure of true pastoral outreach happened under Francis's watch, NOW.  What's changed? For those who might think that women's ordination is a marginal issue, here's a view to consider.


Without the Feminine Divine to balance the Male Deity, the psyche of humanity is completely out of balance.  As Carl Jung famously put it, the fate of humanity hangs on a single thread and that thread is the Human Psyche, the soul of humanity, which is dangerously out of balance.  Restoring that inner-world balance of Feminine/Masculine Divine is the only way to restore outer balance; an internal mythic world where God is Male alone means an external world that reflects this.  But, the Feminine Divine is an energy source just as powerful; to deny Her is to bring on our own destruction.

A dream connection is more important than a pope or a religion.  Organized religions need people to close their minds to other possibilities; dreaming perpetually opens new frontiers with first-hand adventures. One time, when my husband and I attended a friend's religious themed Halloween party as Death (me) and the Devil (he), someone in clerical garb asked us about the religious connection of our costumes,   My mate promptly replied, "Without us, you'd be out of business."  It's much easier to move beyond fear in the actual practice of dreaming than it is in the tomes and regulations of sects, cults and religions.  Organized religion feeds on fear of death and projects evil outward. Our own dream encounters over a lifetime with all aspects of Spirit, helps us weave the personal connections with divinity that makes us strong and helps us not to be afraid.

Religions give us a prefab God with lots of restrictions; one of my favorite jokes is that religions are all guilt with different holidays.  Relying on my own innate ability to connect with Spirit gives me the confidence to know that whatever my strengths or frailties, my successes or failures, I'm essentially a spiritual, whole being, experiencing this physical existence willingly for a purpose.  As long as I stay connected to my own experience in waking and dreaming, I'm free of the fears which make me vulnerable to psychic manipulation.

I'll end with one of my favorite quotes from a great dream explorer, Carl G. Jung:

“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.”

The Flowering of Women

In my last post I told you about Mother Nature’s S.O.S. to all dreamers.  The real and present danger to our own survival as a species if we don’t learn to value all living things above ridiculous monetary gain should be apparent to all but the most concrete embedded citizens of this planet.  So that means that most of us must know this and most of us must act to do our part.  That means there’s hope.

And where there’s hope, there are women. 

Another dream theme that is coming increasingly clear to me is that Mother Mary is indeed howling for us to wake up, especially the women. (The link will take you to my Howling Mary dream. She’s the Feminine Divine who recruited me in a dream in 1971. When Mary howled, I listened; she led me to discover the goddess and the importance of dreams as organic spirituality.) Bye, bye patriarchy; I just can’t take you seriously, anymore.

The deep, ancient understanding that the Feminine is behind all creation, all life on the planet (and perhaps beyond), that our pre-historic ancestors saw the Divine as Mother, came to me first in dreams.  Synchronicity took care of the rest; my life played out in the most interesting and parallel ways to that big dream.  Having that dream as a road map made it much easier to sort out the paths I took; dream guidance is a powerful ally. 

At the time I heard Mary howl for help in my dream, there were very few women in religious authority; the stained glass ceiling of religion is a tough one to crack for women, to this day.  Many of the women I met as fellow students in seminary in those days were challenging the ban on women priests and ministers in Christianity; most everyone but the Catholics caved.  Many got ordained; I didn't because I learned that I didn’t want to change the system from within.  The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. 

So I turned my attention from theological studies to psychological ones, after all, the word psyche in Greek means soul.  By then, I was convinced that understanding dreams and dreaming was the road to my Divine connection and so much more. I pursued studies in transpersonal psychologies and Jungian ideas.  I also studied and continue to learn about the Goddess in her many manifestations and in her great antiquity.

This brings me to the real topic of this post.  Woman’s flowering.  Perhaps, you’ve noticed that a great divide exists in this American political race regarding issues that deeply impact women. I sincerely hope many, many Americans are disturbed about the attack on women’s autonomy and full constitutional equality afoot in Republican legislation.  What is at the root of these political attacks? Religion.  Religious thinking that says our god, the great white patriarch, knows what’s best for women.  Women should have no choice about when to conceive, let alone whether to be pregnant and give birth because it's really god who's creating; she's just the incubator.  

Already, the republican anti-woman rhetoric is beyond belief, from leering disrespect to condescending religious dribble.  Looking at the horrible situations in the world today, I feel stuck between two super patriarchy’s, Christianity and Islam, who have nothing but the worst intentions for me.  “Shut up, sit down, do as I say or I’ll make you.” Do women really want to be treated this way?  No, of course not. 

There is great danger in what’s psychically implanted, because we’re controlled by our deepest beliefs.  Notice please, that in groups where the strictest religious sanctions apply to women’s behavior, women lead invisible and often miserable lives.  Religion is the corporation that handles mind control for the big patriarchies of the world.  It’s easy to spot a patriarchy, just count the women in public and religious authority.  When you've only got a male god, watch out, especially when he's petty, unfeeling and constantly demanding.

Mary was howling about the way things are done in religion and about her relegation, the Feminine Divine, to the sidelines.   In my dream, I know I have to do something to help Her; her pain is unbearable.  I snatch the chalice from the priest’s hands and the worms he was giving as communion turned to rubber bands.  What do you use rubber bands for?  I use them to hold things together.

Just as we're being called in dreaming to honor the planet and hold it together, women, and men who love women, are being called to take charge of the clean-up and transformation of human consciousness, with our hearts open to the sacred Feminine.  I think the literal manifestation of this dream is that we'll see more women in roles of leadership, leading compassionately and cooperatively with men.  The flowering of women means that we come into our full potential as equal citizens of this planet, as leaders and saviors and healers and mothers of all.  We don’t use the same methods or employ the same mentality, because on this very real eve of self-destruction, we see clearly that those methods haven’t worked.

Consider the metaphor of women being de-flowered. In patriarchy, much is made of the deflowering of women, control of women's virginity.  I’m sort of stuck in reading "Memoirs of a Geisha"; I’m at the part where her virginity is being auctioned to sleazy old men and it makes me sad.    The sado-masochistic patriarchal paradigm of sexuality is another psychic realm where deep healing is needed.  Again, it’s about woman’s role in sexuality. Was it fun for her?  Was it joyful for them?  “The only sin that passion can commit is to be joyless.” Dorothy Sayers

What would it mean to flower a woman having sex with her – to invite her out to unfold in all her pleasure and all her glory?  What would it be like if advertising treated women and men as people instead of body parts?  Would we have more joy centered, less frenzy driven or repressive sexual cultures?  

The flowering of women means the empowering of all that is Feminine.  She’s calling to us all – be the change you want to see and see to it, with all your soul, that the change happens. 

I can't help hearing that hauntingly beautiful song of solidarity, "Bread and Roses".  Here's Judy Collins version on youtube: