JAIME'S ARTICLES

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By Jaime Meyer 11 Mar, 2024
Don't sink to the bottom like a fish going to sleep.
By Jaime Meyer 29 Jan, 2024
The only effective way to change the world
By Jaime Meyer 24 Nov, 2023
In the northern hemisphere, as we step into winter, the north on the medicine wheel, we have stepped into the embrace of the Dark Feminine. What is this power, and how can we work with it? I hope this article helps you grasp what is happening in our world right now from a mythic angle, and I offer some practices that may help. The Celtic tradition has many instances of a young man encountering a repulsive, hideously ugly old hag who offers him some kind of power – often, water from a well – if only he will kiss her. Most of the men who meet her refuse in disgust, but the one who will become king embraces her deeply. The Celtic hag is the archetypal Dark Feminine, the initiator of the masculine into its mature depths. Many of the patriarchs of the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) meet their wives at a well as the woman draws water up. The motif signals that these are the men who will lead. While the women characters are not the “loathly hag,” archetype, they carry the same initiating power. It’s important to point out that, while these stories seem to focus on human men, we will get ourselves tied in patriarchal knots if we don’t remember that we all have masculine and feminine inside us – the stories are not always about gender. The Dark Feminine comes to initiate the masculine into its own darkness – refining and fermenting the light, youthful masculine into its depths. In the Celtic world, the men who refuse to kiss the hag are either left behind never to be heard from, or they are sent on a journey to suffer in their arrogance until they have a breakthrough. “Beauty and the Beast” is an example: The arrogant prince is offered initiation by the old hag at his door. She appears in a rainstorm, holding a rose, asking for his hospitality. He refuses, slams the door, and she changes him into a hideous beast. He ultimately receives the same initiation – expansion out of self-centeredness and into the power of love and compassion – he just must take the long road through suffering. This is the world we are living in. The “shift in consciousness” that so many of us are talking about is an initiation of the light masculine being facilitated by the dark feminine. She’s at the door with the rose of expanded love, asking to be let in. In a way, I’m describing here a reversal of our common ideas of light and dark, whose roots are in Plato (400 B.C.E.) and Neoplatonism (300 C.E.). In that philosophy, we transcend out of the dark (chaos) and into the salvation of the light (wisdom, unity with the divine.) Neoplatonism was a major influence on Christianity and on New Age thought, but not necessarily on shamanism. In Neoplatonism there is a not-so-subtle valuing of the direction “up” and a distaste for the direction “down.” This is why statues of Plato nearly always have him pointing up with his index finger, echoed by later images of Jesus in the same pose. In that system, up is masculine, rational, holy, God and perfect. Down is feminine, dreamy, messy, corrupted by animal instincts. The Dark and Light I’m talking about here are energies present in nature, and transcending or ascension don’t apply. The point is to work with all of the energies, banish none, integrate all. The western mind is lodged in the light masculine - the energy of the teenage boy. There is exuberance and great energy there, but, as yet, little wisdom. In its simplest expression,” light” equals “youthful, naïve, joyfully self-centered” and dark equals “refined, fermented, nuanced, with a larger vision.” Light and dark energies are not better or worse than each other, and we need a balance of them in us. Daily life for the light masculine is mostly a sustained competition for dominance. The goals are very short term. We’ve been in the grip of the light masculine for several thousand years. It’s difficult to not be angered at what the unrestrained light masculine has done to our world, and it’s tempting to hate men, hate the patriarchy and lay blame there. But we can also try this to reframe that anger: Spirit is all about curiosity and exploration. It wondered what it would be like on this planet to let the light masculine have full reign, untethered, untempered by the feminine. It's found out the results of this experiment and is now ready to initiate the masculine into its darkness, into its wisdom. This is where we are. In the ideal, the path of human life is one of continued darkening – being refined by life, expanded in our vision, fermenting from simple, sweet juice into nuanced, full-bodied wine. The process of darkening is one of learning, through experience, to marry grief with praise, gratitude with fear, joy with sorrow. In the Celtic tradition, this is all work with the cauldron in the heart center – the Coire Ernmae, the cauldron of “vocation.” It is our work in this world to cook joy and sorrow into one soup, rather than seeking to summon joy but banish sorrow, as we have so often been instructed to do in the light masculine word. Most spiritual paths have dark feminine deities and characters that are there to help us in our darkening. A few examples are Lilith and Mary Magdalene in the west, Kali and Durga in India, the Aztec goddesses Coatlicue (“Serpent Skirt”) and Coyoxauhqui (Golden Bells). In the Celtic world, the Irish Cailleach, the Welsh Cerridwen, the “Loathly Hag,” and the Russian Baba Yaga are a few Dark Feminine presences. How do we welcome the Hag in to work with us? Something to remember: we work with her consciously through spiritual practice, inner work, and wisdom work, or we work with her unconsciously through disaster and suffering. One practice is from the Buddhist world: the practice of Tonglen . Let’s say you feel resentful of the nincompoops, naysayers and prevaricators in power. Breathe in that resentment, and let it fill you, let yourself feel it. Then on the out-breath, send compassionate prayers to the people you resent, wishing that they be relieved of their suffering, that they become wise. It’s important to avoid arrogance here, assuming that I am the wise one and they are the lesser ones. A more shamanic approach might be to use the out breath to invite the Dark Feminine into the world, asking her to expand wisdom in all of us. Another good idea comes, perhaps strangely, from Jesus. Not the Jesus in the official scriptures, but the one from the gnostic “Gospel of Thomas.” His disciples ask him what they need to do to be in alignment with the divine. Fast? Give alms? Make the correct prayers? Jesus answers, “Do not tell lies and do not do what you hate.” That is the amazing, radical Jesus that people originally fell in love with. If we lived those two practices, our lives would transform. The Dark Feminine facilitates our initiation with two main powers. One is dismemberment. This is the power of deconstruction, of “releasing what no longer serves.” The second is digestion. This is running energy through a system, separating the nutrients from the waste. I look around the world now and see the Hag fully at work. A side note that I can’t resist. The digestion element is why I see my backyard compost bin as a shrine to the dark feminine. Whenever I toss the kitchen scraps in, I make it an offering to the Hag of transformation and ask her to continue to work on me. A great story to help you in all of this is Snow White. Forget about the Disney version. Read the original Grimms version because it's more visceral and disturbing. In the original, Snow White keeps refusing the advice of the dwarves not to let anyone into the house. (The dwarves are dark masculine powers – working inside the earth, mining minerals, a form of digestion.) She keeps letting the evil queen into the house because the queen offers her beautiful (but poisoned) objects. The dwarves return and move the energies through her. Finally, the queen gives her the poisoned apple. Snow White chokes on it and falls into an initiatory coma. She wakes up not because the prince kisses her, (that is the light masculine’s version of the story) but because his men carrying her coffin stumble on a root poking up and drop the coffin, dislodging the piece of apple she has been digesting in her fifth chakra, and she wakes up a queen. Here is a link to the story: https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm053.html And here is a great podcast I recommend after reading the original Snow White story: “This Jungian Life Podcast”: A podcast from three Jungian therapists, this episode unravels the story of Snow White and female initiation. https://thisjungianlife.com/episode-144-fierce-female.../ One of my teachers says that our world will be totally different by 2050. That sounds very hopeful. But it took 1,000 years after Padmasambhava “tamed the spirits and demons of Tibet” for the warlords of the time to incrementally surrender their grip on dominance, open their vision, and allow Tibet to become a peaceful culture. Whether we are in the final 30 years of this initiation, or we have centuries to go still, all each of us can do is work to be darkened, bit by bit, lifetime by lifetime, through the grace and fierceness of the Dark Feminine. Many blessings on you, and many blessings on all of us, wherever we are on the path of darkening. A personal addendum: This piece has taken me several days to write. I’ve spent time by my compost bin asking for guidance, and it has given me plenty. Late last night I went out to it with a bowl full of icky stuff from the refrigerator. It was dark out, and I was in a little bit of a hurry. I poured the stuff in, and suddenly a racoon leapt up from the inside of the bin. She raised up on her back legs and hissed at me, terrifying the living bejabbers out of me – I yelped and stumbled backward. I’ve lived in this house for 15 years and have never seen a raccoon at the compost, although it makes perfect sense. I took it all as the Dark Feminine making a dramatic appearance. Wahoo.
By Jaime Meyer 31 Oct, 2023
An interview with MysticMag
By Jaime Meyer 21 Sep, 2023
So we swing into the dark center
By Jaime Meyer 13 Jul, 2023
When you heard the Titan mini sub imploded, did you imagine being inside it at that moment? When you watch the videos of people jumping off cliffs, do you feel it? Do you like horror movies for the gasping “jump scare?” Do you dance and shout when your team scores? Do you like kissing? Have you heard that Mount Everest is littered with bodies of climbers that will never be brought down? The Eastern mystics say that everything we love, every pleasure and danger we chase - including our traumas - is for one purpose: to open a gate for the finite mind to plunge into Source momentarily. To jump out of our self-imposed, limited identity and into the infinite, into Source. You know this Source. You feel it. We are all taught, early, to place a veil over Source – by our family, our culture, our religion, our economics. And by traumas – not the trauma itself, but our reaction to it, the way we carry it, hold it, nurture it. The people you’ve been mad at for so long? Probably your veil-placers. We want more than anything to lift that veil, and let Source shine through us. And at the same time, we totally fear lifting that veil, because of how that might shatter our reality. It’s this dance that creates those suffering habits we return to again and again. We invent habits to distract us from thinking about what's beyond the veil, habits to distract us from being mad about the veil, and habits to keep us from lifting the veil. Dance, dance, dance, dear human. Okay, I understand - because the mystics and the blogs have told me repeatedly - that “I am Spirit.” Spirit is manifesting in the world as me. I am Spirit experiencing the experience of experiencing this experince. Yeh, I get it. But why does this Great Spirit - Boundless Love, Pure Awareness, Limitless Wisdom – choose to manifest in this place of unending limits, with uncountable forms of ignorance and frustration? Why does it give me that vague memory of Boundlessness to haunt my thoughts, to hint in my dreams, to hunt me from the dark? I say, quickly without thinking about it much, “We come here to learn!” “Earth School!” “University of Embodied Experience!” But learn what? What it feels like to be frustrated? To be filled with yearning and unmet desires? To have my heart crushed and to feel my body slowly degenerate? Western theologians have tied themselves in knots for millennia over the question of why God created a world in which He knew we would “fall from grace” and He would then punish us with pain of childbirth, sweat of the brow, and then death, but He went ahead with the project anyway. Why? What kind of God is that? There are a billion words written about this, half of them in German, of course, but I haven’t found any that answer the question with anything beyond “we know not the will of Mighty God.” The mystics tell us (and the shamans agree) that it is only a small part of us that is mad and frustrated at all of this. It’s a small, not very bright, totally self-addicted part of the larger “me,” but it’s loud and persistent; an internal Lauren Boebert. It is unclear about what exactly it is afraid of and mad about, but because it is so loud, I can easily come to believe that I am afraid and mad to my very core. The small self has a powerful imagination, but its imagination is very small in scope. So, it can imagine unending forms of enemies, disasters and threats but it can’t see over the fence surrounding its tiny backyard, the yard of wrongdoing and right doing. In fact, the small self is terrified of even peering over that fence to behold the boundless field of knowing and unknowing, in which the mystics and shamans cavort. It spends its time planting angry flowers and judgy-weeds in its small space. Although the small self doesn’t really know what it’s mad about, I believe I have discovered the key: Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? -Mary Oliver, from “ The Summer Day “ I worship Mary Oliver as semantic goddess and I would gleefully wash her feet if she asked, but she articulates here the core error of the western mind, and the source of several millennia of vague anger. Western religion says we only have one life. Materialst science says the same thing. We are raised with a double-whammy of one-lifeism. Nowhere in nature does anything live only one life, then vanish. Everywhere in nature, everything lives again and again and again, in different shapes. The small self believes the current shape must remain in the same shape (that tiny imagination again). Its small imagination cannot fathom actual transformation, so it makes it an enemy. This is why we imagine our soul looking just like us, but kinda glowy. - but probably younger and thinner. The most poisonous lie that the false self tells us is the “one (and only) precious life.” All of western religion is based on this. That’s why the most devout people in the western world are the angriest. But they often don’t really know what they are mad at. Spoiler alert: it’s God they are mad at, for bringing us here, tricking us to disobey Him so he can punish us, so we must suffer, and must obey his capricious and hypocritical law, and must endlessly - with forced sincerity - praise Him for His goodness, and then, after all that - we croak. They can’t admit the anger at God, so they focus on being mad at people they are afraid of - the “rule-breakers.” And of course, anyone who looks over the fence is a real problem. So, why does Spirit desire to manifest as this delusion-riddled, limited world? Why would Boundless Wonder jump into me - this tiny cooking pot poised over the butt-searing flame of life? The answer to that question is actually So. Damned. Easy. And if you sign up for my webinar, “The answer is so damned easy” for only $39 by midnight tonight, you will learn what people throughout history have been begging to learn. Screw it, I’ll, just tell you. We come here to learn, incrementally, how to take the next bigger leap into Source. With each jump you make, you can stay in the water of the infinite longer, you can smell more of the fragrance of Source. The poet Rilke said , “This is how [we] grow: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.” Sometimes that pervasive fear you feel comes from the small self holding you down in the Boebert judgy-weed yard. But sometimes your fear comes from the fact that you are leaping into the next larger or deeper gap between your small self and the infinite. This is why we need human teachers, by the way – fellow humans who have made the bigger leaps that you are about to make. They can help you prepare, and they can keep you from making a naïve leap that will end up in an imploded submersible or on some frozen Everest crag. Here are some ideas and practices to help you: The first key is to admit that the “you have one life” story is false. That may actually be very difficult for your western mind. It may take many lifetimes. Our life isn't precious because it's so rare - fleeting, ephemeral, and then totally gone. That's is an absolute recipe for short term, totally ego-based living - in other words, the world that the western mind has created for us, and in which we all live now. for Our life is precious because each experience, tiny to shattering, ecstatic to debilitating, is a doorway to the infinite, if we have the courage to see it that way. The second key is to allow the Universe to be as big as it actually is, which is far bigger and weirder than any of us have ever imagined – or can. The third key is to admit that you feel the whole universe as a presence, in you and around you, in and around everyone and everything. Regardless of what your inner Boebert is currently complaining about, you are, in essence, never separated from the quantum-entangled flux of creation. Tibetan Buddhists say, "look around you - every being you lay eyes on has been your mother in some other life." The next key is to enter into the idea that the universe was never created – it has always been. There was never “nothing,” and there never will be. When you allow yourself to enter this, you can skip past all of Western theology, and just enjoy your life. Let’s say there are 100 quadrillion ways Spirit can manifest in the endless, eternal universe (that’s far too small a number, but it’s helpful to place some kind of “big” number on it.) In your endless lives and shapes - billions of lives in every shape imaginable, from nematode and virus to salamander to wandering Sapien - this world of the veil, this planet of limits, this cooking pot of “I want,” is only one tiny part of your great, limitless experience that you can never even imagine. Here is the most simple and potent exercise you can do, right now, and any time, to clear away this frustration of life. Close your eyes. It helps if you sit in some kind of meditation posture - cross your legs or cup your right hand in the left hand. Really get to meditating. Meditate the hell out of this. Say to yourself, “I am meditating.” Feel good about that. Do it for a while. I am meditating. I am meditating. Then after a while ask a simple question: “Who is meditating?” Ask that a bunch of times. And then ask yourself, “Who is watching that person meditate?” This is a practice that mystics, yogis, monks, and shamans use frequently, sometimes called “cultivating the witness.” The big, sloppy, delicious question then to ask is, “Who is the witness?” The answer we want to get to is along the lines of, “The one watching is Awareness itself.” In other words, Creation, Spirit, Boundless Wonder – it’s the witness of everything, including little you trying to meditate. To take this exercise down the shamanic path a few steps, after witnessing the "one who is meditating" for a while, turn your attention now to the “one who is afraid." Watch that person for awhile, asking, “Who is it in me that is afraid?” Watch how they act, what they do. Stalk them for a while, see where they like to go, and what they like to do. There are next, deeper steps in all of this, and you can explore some of them in our August Three Moon Ceremony if you want to. I leave you with this: How I become hyacinth How I become daffodil How I become hosta How I become sedum easily divided easily rooted How I become the two-tone whistle chirp in that far off oak How I become something you never planted How I green from brown How I heave up your mulch and crawl to you in your winter slumber How I spring from pruned branches How I become again the weeds you poisoned How I emerge out of dead vines How the longer you know me the bigger I grow How you think you can cultivate me How long it takes you to see How I become you. (© 2005 Jaime Meyer)
By Jaime Meyer 20 Jun, 2023
Opening the Four-Chambered Heart
By Jaime Meyer 06 Jun, 2023
In Buddhism - and in Shamanism as I have learned it - the first teaching is that life is “full of unsatisfactoriness.” The word “suffering” is most often used, but I think words like jacked, bollix, fubar, and GMFU (Got Me Fk*d Up) are descriptive on a day-to-day level. The Christians call it sin, which, in its original definition, was a term from archery, meaning “to miss what you’re aiming for.” “Missing the target” comes from not being centered in our power. In archery, a calm, still breath is critical. Every spiritual tradition tells us that it is “grasping” that causes all the trouble. Grasping takes over when we don’t trust Spirit. Spirit is the most expansive and elegant thing we can comprehend, and when we trust it, we, too, become expansive and elegant. When we don’t trust it, we shrink, we lose our expansive and connecting breath, we become clumsy, tight and inelegant, and our aim goes awry. And we grasp for new knowledge, for old happiness, for solid security and gleaming love, for pleasure, acceptance and worthiness. Every tradition says clearly: the more you grasp, the more you push it away. And yet, here we are, reaching all the time, with our “gimmee gimmee gimmee” hands. There is a difference between joyful growth and desperate growth; it’s the difference between how Spirit works and how our smaller self works; it’s the difference between culminating in a wondrous harvest or in cancer. It’s not the desire for growth that matters, but the grasping, which is borne of fear, which is borne from lack of trust in Spirit. A common phrase for Buddhists is, “I take refuge in the three jewels: the Buddha, the teachings, and the community.” The shamanic translation of this may be: “I take refuge in Spirit, the practices, and relationships (with everything).” Spirit, as it is seen through the shamanic lens, is always changing, exploring, creating, growing, shifting, dissolving, flowing. But with Spirit, there is no fear, anywhere. The single best practice we can do is 1) remember that each of us is that also. And 2) approach everything like Spirit does: exploring without fear. Is this easy? Fk*k no. That's why we have 10,000 lifetimes. But when it GMFU, it helps to return to that simple knowing and breathe. Try this: Imagine yourself standing on the edge of a cliff so high that you cannot see the bottom. You gaze over, look down, and see nothing but blackness. You drop a rock down, see it vanish into the dark, never hearing it hit bottom. You understand that it’s not just beyond your sight, it is, in fact, bottomless. Now, turn around so that the very tips of your heels are on the edge, in fact, the heels are over the edge, and you are only held onto the lip of the cliff by half of your feet and toes. How do you feel? Isn’t this how we all feel, inside, all the time? Now, let yourself fall backwards over the cliff, and keep falling. There is no end. Keep falling. Keep falling. Keep falling. Keep Falling. Keep Falling. See what happens.
By Jaime Meyer 15 May, 2023
For me, shamanism is all about working with the uncountable forms of fear that arise as we wander our way through life. Fear is so deceptive because it often dresses up as wisdom or common sense, as creativity, as morality, or as devout faith. It is a Herculean task to stay aware of how we are guided by fears that we don’t want to engage with, and we often fail. Failing is no actual failure, of course, because the mystics tell us we came into the body specifically to engage with fear. When we were a pre-embodied spirit, what was there to fear? As death is our teacher of beauty, love and compassion, fear is our teacher of self-awareness. Fear comes to open us to power - if we take the opportunity. I frequently receive a frantic message or call from someone who is convinced they have an “attachment” – some kind of malevolent spiritual entity that has attached itself to their energy body. The internet has made everyone an expert in the diagnosis of spiritual illnesses, so you don’t have to be online long before you can be convinced that, if you feel just about any emotional discomfort, you probably have an attachment. The attachment has come to you typically because someone with malevolent energy has sent it to you. So, the person who can’t stop feeling icky about the ex-boyfriend believes he has sent some kind of attachment. The person who had a frightening experience while taking magic mushrooms in their living room is convinced they have an attachment. A scary person lives down the hall and is sending attachments to me. This is a difficult topic because any of the above examples could be actual attachments. The shamanic tradition is clear that there are free-floating energies in the world that are looking for a home or looking for food, and they can see us as both. However, just as the Christian tradition has urged people to project their fears outward onto the devil, in neo-pagan-urban shamanism, we often do the same thing – project fears outward onto some “attachment.” A projection is an internal issue that we project outward, like a movie, onto something external. We are each other’s projection screen all the time. “That person is so arrogant” nearly always means “I am afraid I am arrogant.” Psychologists affirm that the level of passion with which I despise, fear – or admire – something is directly proportional to my fear that I am the actual owner of that energy. So, 99% of “attachments” are likely my own projections. “How dare you say that? The suffering I feel is real. This thing came to me. I don’t control it! I’ve gone to nine different healers of every modality, and no one can get rid of it!” Shamanism is a path of taking personal responsibility, of learning from the times we falter. Learning from mistakes is how we build our power. The new age obsession with attachments is rife with what the shamans call the spiritual parasite of martyrdom. It is far, far less likely that something has attached itself to me, and far more likely that it is I who am attached to the drama and the distraction of being a noble victim. Go back through the examples above of what people call attachments (the ex- boyfriend, etc.) and ask “what fear, inside me might dress up as what I want to call an attachment, in order for me to escape responsibility for my life?” Attachments can be fairly easily cleared from your field but won’t be if you are attached to the drama of having an attachment, especially if you don’t do the follow up practices required to build your power. Our world is deep in the throes of martyrdom, which, according to shamans, is one of the classic spiritual parasites that eat our life force. We are all given total permission nowadays to identify our suffering as someone else’s fault, call it evil and work to eradicate it – to force others to stop being evil. My definition of evil is “unaddressed, human unconscious fear, projected outward.” Evil only comes into this world through human beings, not through any other creature. Evil is a human act of asking someone or something else to carry my unconscious fear, and then giving myself permission to kill them for it, metaphorically or physically. I hope I can kill my fear by killing them. A year and a half ago, in one of my trainings in Peru, I was at the end of an eight-day dieta with a powerful plant in the sanango family. It’s a “master” plant that you work with after you have already worked deeply with many previous plants that build an inner matrix of power and protection. The plant was utterly cosmic, taking me on many astounding journeys into endless oceans of light I could never imagine on my own, and it showed me, day after day, how I, too, was made of pure light. But after a few days of glory, it took me to an otherworldly room to meet several beautiful, welcoming beings that I perceived as awesome cosmic teachers. As I talked with them, I began to realize that their intention was to eat me. Their radiant faces became the faces of Piranhas with red Scottish hair, eyes bulging over immense jaws lined with glistening teeth, insatiable for the taste of human flesh. I was flooded with intense fear, and became trapped in that dreamy spirit world, flailing to keep the several piranha people off me, hysterically crying out to the Spirit of Tobacco to rescue me. It took a tremendous struggle to free myself from their jaws and claws as Tobacco pulled me by my legs out of the spirit world and back into my tent in the jungle where I was dreaming. Utterly distraught, I bolted from my tent, hyperventilating, into the jungle and began smoking myself with tobacco to rid me of that death energy, to put up a hard protective wall between me and those evil beings. I spent the day in a teary haze of fear. And a deep sense of failure – that I hadn’t spotted the truth soon enough, that I had allowed myself to be seduced by their beauty. I was stupid and naïve. Later, I told my teacher about the experience. He listened with no reaction. I wanted him to give me some magic charm to say, a mantra, or a power song, or some technique to make sure this would never, ever happen again. He said quietly, “Next time let them eat you to see what happens.” I didn’t like this answer at all. I was very mad at him. I wanted him to affirm that I had been predated upon by beings from the lower astral plane - hungry ghosts - and that I had triumphed through my solid relationship with the tobacco spirit, and I did a good job getting back alive. That’s a good story that I can tell again and again, and makes me feel pretty special. Every religious tradition makes room for the “wrathful deities.” In Buddhism, the wrathful deities are manifestations, or the “other face” of the enlightened being, including the Buddha himself. Green Tara of total compassion takes some terrifying wrathful forms as well. On and on it goes across cultures. The job of the wrathful deities is to destroy the obstacles to enlightenment. They stomp and roar to cleanse the traveler of the obstacles – ignorance, pride, impatience, greed, self-deprecation, and other forms of fear that hide inside our thoughts. Those take form as our unconscious habits that limit us and hold us back. Shamanic language for this could be that fearsome visitors arrive when you are ready to actually make your bid for the next level of power. They shake you loose from old habits, or if you would rather stay attached to them, the wrathful deities protect you from stepping into power that you aren’t ready for. It's possible our world right now is staring into the bulging eyes of the wrathful deities. The “shift of consciousness” we all talk about cannot come only in beautiful form – it is always accompanied by the wrathful deities who are there to assist in the shaking off of the old structures. For over a year, I’ve wrested mightily with that experience in Peru with the Piranha people. I’ve concluded that the experience was an opportunity offered to me by the Sanango plant to shed another layer of ego. For the first few days of the dieta, it showed me its face of boundless cosmic wonder. Then, the other face. It was the ego that was terrified of the piranha folk. Maybe what they wanted to eat was my safe thinking, my habitual self-deprecation, my resistance to greater knowing. I think about the times in my training that I have let the powers eat me or kill me. Particularly, 30 years go, when I had a three-month long nightly terror ride of tormentors in various shapes come to me every night. Finally, I was grabbed from behind by a large man with flaming red hair who held me in choke hold. His arms were thicker than my legs, so there was no getting free. He whispered into my ear in a thick Scottish accent, “Let go, Laddie, just relax into it and let me kill you.” I did. I died. I woke up from the dream. The three-month terror ride ended, and I entered a new stage in my life and shamanic work. May every person be assisted in shaking off their old ignorance, fear and habits by the wrathful, protecting deities. May the world be renewed with their help.
By Jaime Meyer 11 Apr, 2023
Working Shamanically with Mushrooms
By Jaime Meyer 14 Mar, 2023
What if the major reason we come into life - into the body - is to experience fear, to learn about it? There seems to be some agreement in every spiritual system that, wherever it is that we came from before we came here, and wherever we go after here, fear doesn’t exist. It is only here. Love and wonder exist here too, but we say that love and wonder exist in the before and after realms as well. Life in the body offers us unending varieties of fear. So, it seems clear that we are offered this opportunity to learn to overcome it. Not overcome, meaning we will be totally free of fear, because we won’t be. But overcome its ownership of our life, of our decision-making. I see all spiritual paths as united in at least one thing: fear wants to own us, and it does so by remaining hidden in the unconscious, making decisions for us before we are even aware of what it is doing. Biology tells us fear is our teacher of survival, our antidote to naiveté that will get us killed. In nature, when you become fearful, you enter a tight focus – you stop, fall silent, stare at that shadowy movement or that noise lurking about in the underbrush. Or you forget everything else for a moment – your history, your opinions your dreams - and focus on sending all of your energy into your legs to run, or into your arms to fight. If we step into fear over money or love, our focus likewise tightens down; and we perseverate all day on that person or that number. In culture, fear is used to ensure obedience. Obedience thrives on urging you into that same tight perspective and focused awareness. When teachers, governments, priests, lovers, parents, or advertisers use fear as a motivator, it always involves shrinking your awareness down into some kind of tunnel vision, accompanied by some level of fight/flight/freeze energy. A searing and tragic example of this in religion is the biblical phrase, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (Proverbs 9:10) Countless people have been shrunken by the idea that fear of the creator – the most expansive thing we can imagine – is the entrance to wisdom. This is absolutely true, if your goal is to live a terribly small life of obedience to people who do not want you to live fully. The western world has several millennia of the Fear of the Lord imprinted in our energy field. When and when I look out at the battle between the two sides who call each other crazy, I see a struggle between those who want everyone to fear the Creator and people who decline to. It turns out that the $34,000 I spent on that seminary degree does have some benefit: A simple look at the original Hebrew text in Proverbs 9:10 opens the awareness of how so many people have been so sadly duped. I’ll spare you the levels of linguistic investigation and get right to a more accurate translation of that phrase from Proverbs: “The energy that flows from the belly of the creator is the beginning of intimate relationship with life and the ability to discern what is good for you and what isn’t.” ( Reference ). The Celtic shamans might put it like this: The beginning of wisdom: The eye that sees what is. The heart that feels what is. And the boldness that dares to follow them. As we are taught to shrink the ancient texts through translation, we have also been taught to pray from inside that same shrunkenness. We are afraid of something, and we cry out for some great power to take away the sensation of fear so that we don’t have to feel it anymore. We plead with the great power to kill the enemy, to withdraw its punishment (I’ll be good from now on, I promise), or to make us rich (money makes all problems go away.) We pray to the great power to make these uncomfortable feelings go away by delivering magic to us. That is prayer-making from a small and powerless place inside us – a place in which, we are taught, good and devout people live. When people think prayer is stupid, fantasy, childish, this is what they are thinking about. They reject all prayer because they been taught only about praying from shrunkenness. Here is a secret: a teacher interested in your fullness as a human being will not teach you to pray like that. A tyrant will promise to deliver on all of those kinds of prayers (but will rarely or never actually deliver). When we envision Spirit as a judging king or father (or a judging Mother Earth, for that matter) we are committing ourselves to making small prayers. Shamanism teaches us to, first of all, open our shrunkeness, to step out of it, and step into a vast universe of helping powers. One of my teachers is fond of saying that Spirit answers every single prayer we make. A second secret, which shamanism teaches: If you pray to have a fear magically removed rather than pray to learn from the fear, you are actually making an unconscious prayer for Spirt to deliver more fear to you. That is a difficult idea, but I have come to see it as true. This is how shamanism teaches you to work with fear through prayer: Begin by asking Spirit to make you open, receptive and trusting. Remember that you are not essentially made of fear, but of wonder and curiosity. That’s why you came here – to explore this strange thing called fear. (A digression: a few years ago, in one of my morning astral travels, I went to a place where everyone could fly, but most of them chose to walk. A group of people called me over to talk to them. They sheepishly, with great care, asked me: "Is it true that you come from a place where people actually fear death?” I said yes, and they all burst into gasps of sheer wonder.) So, begin by remembering that you are made of Spirit, and one definition of Spirit is “boundless wonder and unending possibility.” Ask “the flowing energy from the belly of the universe” to enter into you, in order to expand you out of any shrunkenness, so that you can learn what that current fear has to teach you – in other words to open wisdom (the intimacy with the life force that gives you the ability to discern what is really happening, and what is good for you and what isn’t). As Jesus might say, Spirit doesn’t give you a fish; it teaches you to fish. Here is a simple prayer to try when are feeling powerless and afraid. (By the way, feeling an ambient sadness is often – not always, but can be - a kind of mis-translation of the feeling of fear.) “Spirit, I know you will deliver the power to help me sink into this fear with strength and clarity, and learn from it. Deliver that power to me right now.” Imagine what “the flowing energy from the belly of the universe” looks like as it flows into you. Open, and bring it in. Let it shimmer throughout your body. Because you need this support (and you always, always have it) in order to do your best work with fear. After filling yourself with universe-belly-energy, sink into the current fear, and aggressively ask yourself what is the more daunting fear under the lid of this current fear I’m feeling? You may find yourself sinking down layer after layer, always protected and supported by the universe-belly-energy. In shamanism, the way out of fear is not to plead for the fear to be whisked away by delivering something nice, but to ask the power of the universe to support you as you learn what that fear wants to teach you about life. This kind of work is not easy. Here is a good little prayer you can make in the morning to support this process: Spirit, I am ready to work with you to dissolve my fears ownership over my life. I am ready to grow my power. Come, Spirit, and work with me right now. Pour your shimmering into me. Help me see you shimmering in every cell. Help me step into the next level of love, truth and energy. Thank you, Spirit.
By Jaime Meyer 24 Jan, 2023
Many people are yearning for a deeper connection to spirit to help guide their lives in a more meaningful way. They want to step off this cruise ship for orphans, as Martin Prechtel might say; they want a way out of the culture of economics that substitutes “more” for “the beyond,” as psychologist James Hillman said. Years ago, social scientists identified loneliness as the main illness of western culture. Maybe that has been replaced by meaningless. That deep yearning for connection with Spirit often feels like pain. Spiritual yearning has these two ingredients: the awareness of something larger and beautiful that brings meaning to life, and the frustration and grief that we can’t quite touch it or hold it for very long before it evaporates. The poet Rilke said, “So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.” It’s good to recognize that this particular form of grief has always been with humans. It's an integral part of being sentient. It’s not just you, not your personal flaw, or your weakness, or your inability to figure things out. It’s not because of your parenting. It’s not just our time period or culture. It is a fundamental energy of being a human being in a body, and it is a holy grief. This yearning/grief has inspired all religions and spiritualities, and it is fueling the transformation of consciousness that we are all now part of. Grief opens the door to every shift of consciousness. It’s also good to allow this grief some room, and not push it aside, as we often want to do. When this holy grief lives in the unconscious, it manifests in two main ways. Pointed inward, it becomes depression or ennui - directionless dispiritedness. Projected outward, it becomes blame placed on others, or it becomes a fantasy that others have some secret magic key to happiness that we don’t have. That’s a recipe for falling into all kinds of go-nowhere spiritual compulsions. In the early 20th century, for those esoteric teachers that called themselves “The New Age,” the very first rule for initiates was to shed the three human desires that manifest as evil in the world: the desire for status, possessions, and sex. Please don't mistake what I’m saying for "to be authentically spiritual is to live in celibacy and poverty." That's part of the old story. What the sages mean is, when we see those three desires as substitutes for spiritual power, we create suffering for ourselves and for the world. We are beginning to see this more clearly now than ever before. The good news is this truth: you already have a deep, profound, unbreakable, nourishing relationship with Spirit; you already live in beauty and are made of beauty. The issue is you’re a human being, so you are constructed in two parts: the eternal essence which knows this connection and has no fear, and the constructed social personality which is made of fear glued together with those three desires mentioned above. The shamans say all of us come from the otherworld but we forget in the first few months of being in a body, because we get dazzled and dazed by this physicality. This inner wrestling match is in the human structure. So, recognizing and honoring the grief as sacred energy is the first step. Then there is the question of how to create meaning. Charles Eisenstein wrote a piece called “ What is the Next Story ” that was made into a nice little video . He lays out elegantly the “old story” that we are leaving and “new story” that we are bringing into being. For example: “Old Story: I am a separate self: a bubble of psychology, a soul encased in flesh, or a biochemical machine. New Story: I am a holographic mirror of all that is, a nexus point in an infinite web of relationship.” He goes on and on elegantly. His article is about gathering meaning to yourself to help give you strength day by day. Even though we spend so much of our life energy wrapped up with status, possessions, and sex, we need a big story - something greater, non-physical and mythic to devote ourselves to, and to help pull us through the daily wrestle of life. The old stories have stopped working for many people, which has opened up a great smoking chasm of anxiety. Even many who fight frantically for the old stories don’t believe them – they just greatly fear that chasm of holy grief, and that doorway to the new story. In truth, the new story has already arrived in this world, and is now solidifying its new body. All of my indigenous teachers, from the Mayan, to the Amazonian, to the Celtic, have said the same thing: every creature in this world is made of song - of music, of vibration. Quantum physics is remembering this too. Spirit is that living song, or as a Toltec shaman says, the only living being in the universe is life itself, and it constantly sings new songs into existence. Those new songs become birds, ocean sand, black holes, tarantulas, Anjou pears, and you. That one living being, life itself, is the connecting net of everything. We aren’t searching to find anything. We are already in the net, along with everything else. I have found it helpful to remember that the yearning you feel inside you is the same ancient yearning inside the Spirit of Life. You are an aspect of the “only living being – life itself,” and it is always yearning to bring forth the next new song. That yearning that sometimes feels like pain is hard evidence that you and Spirit are in total communion. This is what the masters mean when they say, “You are perfect, right now. All is perfect, right now.” Martin Prechtel, who I was lucky to study with many years ago, says that our main task as human beings is to help mend the net of life wherever we see it torn. He calls the mending of the net the shamans’ main job, but each of us are responsible for it in our own way. Look around and ask, “Where do I see the net of life torn, and how can I help mend it?” No single person can mend the whole net And we are past the old story of a messiah coming to do the work for us. But there are so many of us awakening to this grief and yearning, that each of us attending to even the smallest rupture in the net is a great service to life, Spirit, and the future. So, “mending the net” is a good recipe for summoning daily meaning. And “solidifying the body of the new story” is also helpful. The shamans know that it is crucial to support our great story with ceremony and prayer. This is how we send energy to the shift that we want to see, to the new song. We send this energy from this world to the otherworld, and it gives the otherworld energy to send its new song to us. Ceremony transmutes grief and yearning into the threads that are woven by Spirit into next shape of the world. The simplest thing you can do is make offerings of beauty to that grief in you. Sing a prayer onto some flowers, a prayer song that acknowledges your yearning and your grief as holy energies. Sing for the release from the old story. Then ask Spirit to put its compassion, intelligence, and power toward weaving the body of that new story into this world. Put the prayers on flowers, and give the flowers to mother earth - the energetic matrix that brings all things into physical form; in whose womb all possibilities of life on this planet are stored; upon whose loom all new stories are woven. Include in your prayer song some gratitude to Mystery for making you a human being with this beautiful holy yearning and grief. Then ask Spirit, the otherworld, to send you power to help you navigate this world. This prayer can be done on your own, but it is especially good to do this kind of work in community. So, gather some people together to do it, and don’t forget to have some laughs too. May your grief reveal itself to you as a sacred power of your deep love of life. May your yearning reveal itself to you as the best evidence of your complete harmony with the Spirit of life itself. May the new song, filled with the love and wisdom that we never imagined was possible for us, flow into the world. 
By Jaime Meyer 06 Dec, 2022
“We are in a time where the fundamental myth of civilization has collapsed, and a new myth is emerging.” Joseph Campbell says words to this effect in the famous PBS series The Power of Myth, back in 1988. Bill Moyers, leaning forward, wide-eyed, like a school child about to learn a big secret, whispers, “What is the new myth emerging?” Campbell leans in, and with his cherubic cheeks glowing, and says giddily, “Well, that’s just it, Bill! No one knows yet!” In the 34 years since, I think we’ve gotten a foothold on what that new foundational myth is. The core idea of the old myth is: things are solid, different from one another and separate, and the universe operates on consistent physical rules. Theologians (the good ones, anyway) affirm that the God we imagine is a projection of our current understanding of how the universe works. In other words, any culture’s God is the representative of our fundamental cultural myth. We have an inner shared myth, we create God to run it. So, the God of western culture runs a universe where everything is in separate bits and has consistent rules. We must obey the rules. We’ve taken the bait that science and religion are enemies, but both agree on this underlying myth: the universe was once not here, and then it separated from the nothingness - the void – and continued to separate into more and more physical bits, like carbon and oxygen, and those bits combined into separate bits like stars and planets, and reindeer, octopi, the covid virus, and us. As reality progresses, it separates again and again into different physical bits, all commanded by physical laws like gravity, time, and space. For both western science and religion, the foundational myth is a consistent flow of separate bits. The laws of physics and of God are the same wherever you go. But… A hundred years ago, quantum physicists started to realize that none of the above is true, at all. A totally bizarre, ludicrous, baloney-malarky idea began to appear: electrons were both a particle and a wave – at the same time. They were simultaneously solid matter and pure energy. Electrons could be in more than one place at the same time. They changed form when they were observed by us. They communicate across vast distances faster than the speed of light. Like a child announcing to its parents that they are non-binary, electrons declared that they weren’t going to follow the rules of the universe that we had laid out for them. So, during this 100 recent years, ungodly relativism has poured forth across the world as science started to reveal a radical truth: that reality is based not on consistency, but on uncertainty, and underneath everything is not a set of unchanging, firm laws, but a field of ever-shifting energy with potential to become anything it seemed to want to become, at any time. For 100 years, science has reacted to this in the same variety of ways that parents and ministers have to the children, or to anyone who steps outside the foundational myth. Some shouted angrily, “You’re either an electron or you’re not! You’re either matter or a wave. You’re either here or you’re over there! You’re either dead or alive.” But it didn’t matter what they shouted because it wasn’t true. If you want to know why conservative religious people are so upset nowadays, and polishing their guns for the coming holy war, it’s because what they say is true: “God’s” universal order is being threatened by these ideas. And it goes even further. Not only does the word “either” not exist in the quantum universe, neither does the word “thing.” Quantum physics is telling us – through hundreds of repeated experiments – that, at the fundamental level of reality, there is no thing separate from another thing. Every shape that the field of quantum energy takes only has reality based on its relationship with the whole. Nothing exists separately from anything else. This is an absolute affront to western individualism. For the past few hundred years, we totally fell in line with Isaac Newton telling us that the universe is made of individual particles governed by gravity, and we totally got on board with philosopher Rene Descartes (standing on the book of Genesis) telling us that the human mind makes us separate from an otherwise lifeless storm of matter. This foundational cultural myth “ripped us from the fabric of the universe,” as writer Danah Zohar said. So, if you’re feeling confused, frightened, at odds with your fellow humans, filled with rage (which is the last desperate attempt to restore by force the previous universe) just remember: it’s not you. It’s not (only) because of your flaws and your traumas and your inability to cope. The whole bleachers at the game have collapsed, and we are, together, falling into the great sea of transformation. (This is why you might want to be careful with the spiritual marketplace promising you “TRANSFORMATION!”) And when, as you work your spiritual path, when you plunge into the cold waters of self doubt, where you wonder if you’re being stupid, or if you’re making it all up, when voices, the quiet ones inside, and the eviscerating ones in social media, try to convince you that you are a fool, all ego, just another “(fill in the category) idiot” pretending to be what you aren’t, remember give a chance to the idea that, when the bleachers collapse into the sea, everyone flails, and just do your best to make your flailing as graceful as possible. And as full of love as you can muster. The future of humanity is the marriage between quantum physics and shamanism. Why? Because they see the same universe. One studies it, the other works with it directly. One is grounded in the logical, analytical, rational mind; the other uses the larger, freer, more fun-oriented, poetic mind. We need both in this marriage. So what does all of this have to do with kissing under the mistletoe? Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp, (d. 2018) spent the 20 th century making groundbreaking discoveries in the quantum mechanics of biophotons – how cells take in the smallest known particle of light, the photon, how they store light, and radiate it. He came to a conclusion that every living thing is communicating with every other thing, through light. Remember that in this emerging myth, nothing exists on its own. We are “light beings,” yes, but only because we exchange light with the rest of the universe. We are not beings because we “SHINE!” as so many workshops want to teach, which is the western model dressed in new age clothing. We are light beings because we all drink each other’s light. The old joke about heaven and hell comes to mind. Everyone sits around an extravagant banquet table loaded with food. But the forks are five feet long. Hell is where I try and fail to find a way to feed myself with that too-long of a fork. Heaven is where we learn to feed each other. A fascinating element of Popp’s work is that heathy cells actually radiated less light than unhealthy cells – less, but more coherent light. He found that stress increased cells’ emission and incoherence of light. I know I’m stretching the analogy, but I certainly feel that when I’m stressed – which really means that I’ve fallen into some ego-hole, I’m emitting more energy, but with less coherence. He found that cancerous cells emit vast and incoherent light. He knew that cells communicated through the exchange of light. In 1923, the Russian scientist Alexander Gurwitsch discovered that plants’ roots could stimulate a neighboring plant's roots through the transfer of UV light if filtered through a crystal glass. So, Popp experimented with many plant extracts to see if the light in the cells of plants could coax the cancerous cell into a normal, healthy radiance. The single success was mistletoe, which was used on a woman volunteer, and within a year her terminal cancer was reversed. So, when you are standing under that mistletoe, innocently hoping for that kiss, you can expand your inner universe by considering that what you may be asking for is that you and someone else can drink light together, and regulate your own cell’s light, guided by the mistletoe light-spirit, and as full of love as you can muster. Blessings of light be yours at this solstice time.  For more on Fritz Albert Popp: “ Are humans really beings of light? – Esalq” Two accessible books on quantum physics: The Holographic Universe, Michael Talbot The Field, Lynne McTaggart
By Jaime Meyer 05 Oct, 2022
In Scotland, at one of my favorite places on earth: the Standing Stones of Callanish. It is a stone circle older than Stonehenge; a massive, wondrous site, vibrating with immense energy, but rather lightly visited by tourists because it’s so far away from anything. I love this place. In the arial image, I’ve photoshopped out the roads around the site to get a hint at what it may have looked like to ancient people. Most of the stones are about six-foot tall. The ones in the center are much taller. You can see the double lines of standing stones that point to the north. It is along this path that ancient worshippers processed toward the center, actually beginning the ceremonial trek miles away to the north. Parts of the site line up with celestial events. For example, every 18.6 years, the moon barely rises at all, but passes low over the hills far in the distance - hills that look like a woman’s body reclining or sleeping. Certain stones in the circle line up with the moon’s hours-long caressing of the woman’s body. The entire site is oriented, in many ways, to a goddess called the Cailleach Na Mointeach : The old woman of the moors.
By Jaime Meyer 16 Sep, 2022
Scotland, Day 5
i Imagination
02 Aug, 2022
No one knows the future, so I suppose it’s presumptuous for me to proclaim that we are living in a declining empire. Not one of us, not even that super-smart podcaster or well-coifed talking head, truly knows how the world will be in ten years, much less 100 or 500 years. However, the empire in which I grew up is unravelling, no doubt. So, how do I thrive in this? If you operate by the empire’s old rules, “thriving” during the decline involves seeing enemies and threats everywhere, and seeking the protection that money and weapons promise. When I’m in my fear, I’m tempted by that. When I get tired of fear, I think “anger is holy,” and I fantasize about training to become a ninja assassin of oil company CEOs and neo-Nazi leaders. But I don’t think an old dude who gently carries spiders out of the house really has that in him. When empires decline, they begin to “amuse themselves to death,” as Neil Postman wrote of our culture in 1985. Amusing yourself to death takes on the structure of any addiction. At first, it’s fun and feels great. The spirit of addiction dresses up seductively to woo us at first, but after it has us, it doesn’t even bother to put on deodorant, and one day we find ourselves shocked at how we ended up toothless in this rusted out trailer. Perhaps the most widespread, destructive spirit of addiction operating nowadays is “the algorithm.” This is the technology that social media uses to send us ads and posts relating to the same kind of stuff we’ve already clicked on. Every single one of us lives in a world shaped by this invisible spirit. Not only shaped, but shrunken. The algorithm spirals our reality down into an ever-tighter circle. This is how we get sucked down holes. If you really want to work on a huge, world-changing political level, start working to make the algorithm illegal in social media. Can I choose not to amuse myself to death? How do I do it? It begins with knowing the difference between beauty and pleasure. This has been a huge topic in philosophy, theology, and ethics for 5,000 years. Neuroscience tells us that the same brain centers are activated when experiencing profound spiritual beauty, eating a taco, and having sex. So, is beauty pleasure, and pleasure beauty? No – and conflating them or confusing them is the pathway to amusing ourselves to death. Pleasure connects you to the immediately physical, what Aristotle called hedonia, (where the word hedonism comes from). Pleasure feels good. One of my very wise teachers is fond of saying that our best spiritual life can be simply guided by feeling good. If it feels good, it means you’re on the right track with Spirit. I bristle when he says that, and I wonder if that’s just my old Protestant imprinting: “Work! Work! Only work, not fun, makes you right with God.” So, I’m hoping that my wise teacher is actually talking about beauty, not pleasure, as being the marker of being on the “right path.” Beauty does two things. First, it holds together the grief of life and the praise of life. Pleasure tries to wipe out the grief of life momentarily and only receive the praise of life. When we seek that all the time, it becomes the addiction. We begin to amuse ourselves to death. So, we need to work with the grief of life – the uncomfortable and scary – which our addictive culture constantly tells us to ignore. All spiritual bypassing involves a refusal to honestly grieve. But the grief of life must be held together with the praise of life. And our hip, cynical culture tells us that the praise of life makes us shallow. Cynicism and nihilism are a refusal to praise life. This holding together of grief and praise is what Aristotle called Eudaimonia, or “good spirit.” Many of us are stuck in a place where we are afraid that if we grieve, the floodgates will open, and we will be overwhelmed and die. And we have not been taught how to fully praise life, but we’ve been well-trained in how to analyze our lifelong fear of praising life. So, we float in this liminal space: lost, anxious, depressed, visionless, weak, tired. So: Netflix, wine, and another $29 webinar on how to “manifest.” The other important thing beauty does is connect us to the larger story of our existence than just the physical level. Declining cultures sink down into a small and ugly cosmic story that shrinks life’s meaning – for example, imagining a Creator of the entire universe as just a bigger version of ourselves, with the same hates and desires we have. Or insisting that the entire universe is a mere chance-cocktail of dead chemicals, as our scientific model often proclaims. Beauty takes us far past those small Creators, those puny gods. Beauty takes us into our “unknowing” as a place of wonder. Again, neuroscience: it turns out that, when we experience beauty, another area of the brain is activated along with the pleasure center – so beauty is pleasurable, but not merely pleasure. What’s happening in this other brain center? Mystics and wisdom carriers throughout time have said that our power only comes from the now – the present moment. All addictions sap the energy out of the now and make the now small. Beauty expands the Now. It connects us to a far larger, more spacious present moment. Thriving in the declining empire has to involve coming fully into the most expansive present moment possible. For me, the way we do that is by opening our huge, sacred imaginations. Everything I’ve mentioned above- addictions, the algorithm, the spiraled-down, compacted, ugly comic stories – all of them rely on shrinking the imagination. Shamanic practice is a spiritual path of expansive imagination; imagination as the sacred meeting place between the mundane world and the ineffable; imagination as medicine for body and soul, and imagination as the energy field that opens one’s connection to higher purpose. Not that long ago, humans spent a lot of time telling stories to each other where each person had to imagine the details of each story. As movies, TV, CGI, and super realistic digital animation evolved, we no longer need to imagine anything. Nowadays, when we are asked to imagine, it is by politicians and marketers, which chiefly urge us to imagine fear and greed. Not really that long ago, the main way the Bible was interpreted was as metaphor. Only in the last few centuries – a fearful reaction to the rise of fact-based science – has the literalistic interpretation become so widespread. Literalism kills imagination, and people with dead imaginations have an easier time bringing literal death into the world. It is not a mistake or surprise that our declining culture devalues the imagination. (Bad) science says imagination is useless fantasy and logic is the only true, reliable filter for reality. (Bad) religion warns us to only imagine certain, pre-approved images and stories; all others are evil. (Noxious) religion seduces us with a God of love, but we find ourselves shooting up daily with the god of judgment, guilt, and shame. (Thin) spiritual paths placate us with confidence that we are the better ones, smarter ones, the saved, the older souls, the more loving, than those other people. (Bad) education slices the arts from the curriculum. (Bad) amusement feeds us all the images and ideas so we don’t have to summon any of them for ourselves. Amusing ourselves to death happens when we stop imagining life into our life, when we refuse to grieve and when we refuse to praise equally. So, my recipe for thriving is very simple: find ways to open your imagination and use it. Be aware that the empire’s voice will always try to stop you (“What a waste of time and money,” “Maybe you’re crazy,” “You are courting the devil…”). The empire has always sought to shrink, smash or twist the sacred imagination, and to try to make you live in a small and false universe. Commit yourself to spending time each day imagining just how huge creation is. There are billions of galaxies spinning all around you, right now. What does it feel like to be here, now in this immense creation? Feed the spirit of beauty at least as much as you feed your pleasure, and try to not confuse them as the same exact thing.  Keep playing your drum Calling, calling. For now, you have been kissed by the Holy - the touch of Spirit on the body. The lily opens and the wild darling appears. Each wave crest dissolves with a sigh into the sea. The great song rises in the throat To sing, through you, the terrible and lovely melody of life. All is now. All. Is now.
21 Jun, 2022
People have a wide variety of diagnoses for our ill culture. I see two root illnesses at work. One is shame, and the other is shame’s true source, conditional love. We are in a culture that emphasizes conditional love – you are loved IF you act in a certain way, look a certain way, believe a certain way. Religious hypocrisy is always tied to preaching the tenets of unconditional love, but enforcing conditional love. Shame is the weapon of conditional love. In the Amazon jungle, sorcerers are hired to shoot invisible poison darts at people that lodge in them, fester, and make them sick. The darts are called virotes (vee-RO-tayz). They are typically a form of envidia, which translates as "envy" but it’s a catch-all term for "wishing ill on someone," or wanting to "bring them down." One of the most common healings is for the shaman to remove virotes. Shame is our version of virotes. Shame becomes the high, cement wall built around the small garden of conditional love. Racism, consumerism, willful ignorance – these take place in this self-created garden. Shame is designed to shrink our inner life, douse our inner fire, and shrink people’s love of life. When it is successful, people become less connected to the Great Spirit, less powerful in their personal life, and are more easily manipulated. I tell you: The creator of everything from black holes to the black puma, from the petunia to the possum, is not interested in you living in that small garden. As we approach the summer solstice, we are in the center of the south on the Celtic medicine wheel. One power of the south is ebullient, delightful, unconditional love, for everything – life, the body, others, and ourselves. That love-power can help remove virotes. Here’s a self-healing you can do: Stand under the bright sun, muse on its unconditional love for everything on earth. Then ask the sun to remove the virotes in you. (Virotes are a source of energetic "cold," so the sun is a good healer for this.) Don’t forget to turn around and ask the sun to work on your back, pulling out and burning away these cold intrusions. I find many virotes in people’s backs. Then choose someone you are angry with, or that you despise, and ask Spirit to remove any virotes in them that It will. Or a more general prayer you can make on their behalf: "Spirit, help them find their way out of any small garden of shame." (Give this job over to Spirit as a prayer and a blessing, please don’t try removing people’s virotes yourself without solid training.) Unconditional love takes practice, it’s not just a belief or catchphrase. The more you practice it, the more natural it becomes for you. Here is a good short phrase you can use as a prayer or mantra. Look out at the world – the whole world – and say: "All is holy, as am I; All is blessed, as am I; All is loved by God/Spirit/Creator, as am I." (Reference: Paul Selig). This simple phrase can carry a lot of power. During these solstice days, may you stroll with sunny ebullience in the garden of unconditional love.
How To be an April Fool Under A New Moon
By John Dorner 01 Apr, 2022
Do you feel like we are living in a never-ending April Fool's day, powered by hoaxes, lies, fake news, insults and pranks? Maybe it's not the intellectual or moral collapse that it seems to be. Maybe we're experiencing a global shift in the "assemblage point."
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