Change: the Inside Out of It

I've written about my monumental dream, Howling Mary many times, but I return to Her again and again. Why was Mary howling?  That was the question I asked myself as a bright, young 21 year old woman woken from this vivid, puzzling dream.   But, as a mature woman, yes, I think now I know.

Still, that dream is my ballast.  I promised Her in that dream that I would do whatever I could to help, and here I am, still with that promise in mind. It's about changing our deepest most ingrained beliefs, not an easy thing to do.  But those beliefs have us in a world of pain.  That's why She's howling.

As a human race, for the last six thousand years or so, we have been gripped by a psychic paradigm that disrupts the fundamental balance of opposites in life to a degree that it's killing us.  What we have called evolution is devolution.  Look at the dictates we march to; who are the authors?  Who dictates by majority?  Is there balance in a male dominated world?  As a woman, I'm appalled at the number of unhinged patriarchal, misogynist monster leaders around the world today holding sway, Russia, China, N.Korea, USA.  These lunatics have our very lives in balance, and yet, they can.

Why?  Because we have core beliefs that make us vulnerable to Big Daddy dictators; God the Father paradigms that have us by the short hairs.  Psychically, we are programmed from birth to believe that we're unworthy little wretches saved from our original sin, our ancestor's faux pas, only by the ultimate sacrifice of God crucifying his only Son.  I say that's why Mary's howling; it was her son that false god crucified.

I know that our connection to spirit is the only thing that can save us from the hottest hells on earth; but that connection has been hijacked by patriarchal religions.  We are born tethered to Spirit, to Goodness, to Love.  We revisit Home often in our dreams; we are not here without support.  We came from Home and Home we'll return, but we can go Home anytime we want, when we learn to use the natural access to our spirit realms that dreams grant us.

Of course, if you never pay attention to your dreams they're gibberish, especially if you've been told all your life, like most of us have, that they are illusory, immaterial, and irrelevant.  It's just a dream.  But, when you start noticing, you start taking yourself to another level of existence.  The waking world is just one aspect of each person's reality; the dream world is just as real.  Dream realities do require certain awareness; if you go to a foreign culture, it's best to learn the language and customs in advance of your travels so you know how to navigate the experiences you'll have.

Dreaming has it's own physics that differs from material reality; that's what's so great about it.  What you can't do waking, you can do dreaming.  And sometimes, the accomplishments in the dream world undergird new accomplishments in the waking world.  It is a balance, a wholistic way of going from one day/night to the next.

The Good News is that we can change things, one of us at a time, from the inside out.  In an avalanche, no one snowflake feels responsible.  As each of us takes responsibility for connecting directly to soul, through the indigenous inside track of dreaming, we take responsibility, one by one, then in groups, until we turn this around.  And even if we don't manage it; we'll cross over on the side of things we choose.

Sea change.

The Most Important Thing

Many people shrink in dismay at having to spend family time at a funeral or wedding; I've mentioned before that I'm lucky.  As diverse a bunch as Chirino's are, we tend to stick together. Our glue is love.

I just returned from a memorial for my friend and sis-in-law's brother in my high school home town.  What I experienced is that, despite our sometimes day and night view points, we have each other's backs.  Love does that. You can believe that I am immensely grateful and appreciative of that reality in my life.

Still, these differences I mention can be like day and night; like living only in the waking world and never in the dreaming worlds, living as if only waking experiences matter.  Why has the art of dreaming been so diminished in our culture?

 A short while ago I was at the wake of a friend's mother. The preacher was a lovely young man who suggested in his eulogy, with existential Christian honesty, that he didn't know what happens after death, nobody knows. He goes on to offer the promise that faith in the death and resurrection of that amazing man, Jesus Christ, whom we must worship according to a rigorous set of precepts, depending on religious denomination, is the only road to a happy eternity.

And Jesus knows, I say this with no irony intended. Jesus is amazing, especially as a divine son, derived of this colossal six millennia long patriarchal cultural myth we've been living on this beautiful, endangered planet earth.  Thank goddess for the example he set while he was with us.  Too bad the patriarchy that killed him found ways to use his legacy to their own gain.  Following Jesus is pretty simple; Love Is The Answer.  Following patriarchal religious 'biceps' leads nowhere good.

The joke Jim and I share about that particular memorial is that when the preacher proclaimed that nobody knows about life after death, (think Monty Python, "The Life of Brian")  I could barely contain myself from raising my hand and saying,  "I do".

Anybody who pays attention to her/his dreaming life, and brings the same attention to her/his waking life, can tell you the same thing; consciousness is much greater than the brain.  Anyone who has had an NDE, OBE or lucid dream encounter with the numinous knows that there is more to heaven and earth, Horatio, than has been admitted in patriarchal theocracies.

The most important thing each of us has is our own spirit; we are connected to our spirit home through our dreams on a daily basis.  It's another perspective.  It helps me live twice as long because I live my dreams as well as my waking experiences.  The best symbol to embody this wisdom I know is the Yin/Yang, the great Balance.  That is who we are: Spirit/Physical.   It's not opposites that are either/or; it is compliments that are best in equilibrium, in a constant dance of balance.  The relationship between Yin and Yang is the dance of Life.  Living aware of our waking and dream experiences is a reflection of this equilibrium.

The most important thing is to stop putting mommy/daddy responsibility on whatever Mystery it is that makes us tick and take responsibility for using the tools we are each born with to solve the problems that confront us here in the physical.  In other words, as Ecclesssiastes aptly stated, "Naked I'm born into this world, and naked I will depart."  You take nothing from the physical, but you can develop so much understanding to take with you!  There is always help available in a dream practice.

I've found my way to so many soul answers in dreaming, very few in listening unquestioningly to others.  I've also found so much in books, or film, or art or dance. I see my task to live from the heart and do as much as I can for myself and others, in balance.  But one very important thing is to pay attention to my dreams and to respect that the dreams of others can only truly be interpreted by the dreamer, her or himself.

So, while maybe some of my tribe wants to fine dine, I want to hear about people's dreams.  Does that mean I don't enjoy fine dining with them?  Of course I do; it's awesome food shared in love.  But I also enjoy how we talk about things more intimately in person and how my topics never fail to come up, eventually.

"My dreams are weird; I don't dream except sometimes."  So are everyone's dreams weird from the perspective of waking paradigms. When you look through the lens of dreaming as an experience, however, you recognize that the laws of the physical may not apply in many dream scenarios.    And as I love to say when someone tells me they can't remember their dreams, "Well, do you want to?"

It's the new year.  We're in a shit-load of confusion.  As former president, Barack Obama, suggests, what are you going to do about it?  We feel small, powerless to alter the big picture, but if the big picture includes our own journeys through this life and on into others, in other dimensions, then perhaps we can brave up and do whatever we can, however insignificant we deem it to be, to help make it better for others, as well as for ourselves, before we inevitably move on.

The art of dreaming always involves a correlation to the art of living a waking life; it's up to each of us to create the lives on both sides, the spiritual and the physical, that we truly want.  I say the spiritual first because without a spiritual anchor, we tend to seriously drift on the oceans of existence.

However, if we let ourselves be tethered with fear and inhibitions, hate and hopelessness, we'll miss our opportunity this time around to contribute something useful to the expansion of the spirit in the physical and the salvation of this planet.  Religions barter in salvation, but when I say salvation, I mean in the physical sense, as in survival rather than extinction on this beautiful planet Earth.  Otherwise, I don't have much to fear, and I devote a lot of my time to understanding my spiritual existence, because my dreams are a window to my soul.

The most important thing is that we are eternal beings, because we are, not because we have to earn it.  We also have nothing to fear but for the damage we can do to ourselves in self-hate.  A social/psychological paradigm that includes original despicableness (sin) is not a good place, psychically, from which to live.

You will die.  I will die.  What we believe about death will color everything we do in life.  Dreaming is our spiritual companion all of our lives long.  We're not born into ignorance, abandoned by our inner resources and beholding to some mercurial male deity.  We're born eternal; we probably asked to be here.  We are responsible for everything we do; we have a connection to spirit, that which we are, that cannot be broken.

Baby, It's Old Outside

Old Man Winter - Wikimedia Commons

Lately,  I’m hearing the song, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” all the time, everywhere.  It’s America’s favorite Christmas carol right now.  Why?  Controversy. What’s the controversy? Whose is the controversy?

Should the song be banned because the wolfish guy is cajoling the ingénue to stay the night? We’d be doing a shitload of banning if predatory and deprecatory language towards women in entertainment were at issue.  

For me, it rings back to the burning of the bra media era; some women, for street theater, burned bras and the media chose to emphasize that about the upswell (no pun intended but noted) of Feminism in the 60s and 70s.  It’s a media old boys network trick; focus on the ridiculous and soon the threatening will go away.  Real change is threatening; trivializing that which threatens real change is a good way to make it go away again.  

The MeToo movement has apparently unnerved too many nerves and here we go again; let’s focus on the ridiculous.   A song from the 40’s is the height of controversy over whether the movement has gone too far?  Oh, please, grow up and let’s talk about what matters.

Why, in the 21^stcentury, in which space travel will become an ordinary possibility, are so many women beaten, raped and denigrated on a daily basis all over the world? Why do so many of us have horror stories about men behaving badly, injuring us on physical and psychological levels?  

Patriarchal religious laws around the world constrain women and inflict unnecessary hardships or even cruelties on women.  They can’t drive or they have to be invisible in the society.  They are the cause of men’s misdeeds.  Can you believe that shit!

I’ve been incredibly lucky in the men department.  My dad, brother and husband are examples of men who are kind people, so are many of my male friends.  I, as a woman, also endeavor to be first and foremost, a kind person. But, I too have my “MeToo” stories, experiences with men I could have done without.  Multitudes of women have stories of lewd verbal or physical attacks from men; some of us have escaped with a sober sense of how much worse it could have been, some of us are not that lucky and know the worst.

This song would not have ruffled the air waves without producers deciding it’s a good story, a kind of push-back to the extremes of not allowing boys to be boys anymore. Just like, burning your bra, how ridiculous these women are, you see.

What are the real issues? Relationships between men and women need to be balanced by mutual respect, always.  It’s the same as the golden rule; "do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  Not rocket science.  If you don’t want to be grabbed by your private parts by a total stranger, or worse, by someone you trusted, then don’t condone in anyway, someone else being so assaulted, either in real life or in entertainment fiction. If you don’t want to be intimidated by a bully into doing or being something that you’re not, then don’t intimidate and bully anyone, in any relationship, ever.

Attitudes have to change and then the songs we like will reflect who we are.  

I understand that it’s scary to see powerful men in high positions fall under the scrutiny of how they treat women.  Look at the morning news shows, so interesting how close to the media’s heart this issue has hit.  That’s real change.  What’s the message; no matter how rich, how bossy or how big your man parts are, you do not ever have permission to grab me by the pussy.  

Perhaps, even individual #1 will someday get that message.