Wednesday, September 26, 2007

I just read a short little book about the skill of healing. It was written by a guy who stumbled into this knowledge accidentally. In healing from a parasitic infection he had come home with after a trip to Brazil, he would go outside and lie on the ground every day. He began to sense the energy emanating from the ground and trees and other natural objects, then later discovered he could read peoples’ energy fields. He realized that by pulling energy from the earth (or aligning your vibration with the earth’s vibration, as I would put it) you can access healing energy. He said that the healing techniques he discovered are identical to techniques used in a number of indigenous tribes throughout the world, but that these are not indigenous techniques, rather universal human ones.
 
It’s so wonderful to find examples of other people who have stumbled into the same kind of knowledge as I have. And how did he get to that knowledge? Through the “emptiness” created by his illness. I’m convinced that emptiness of some sort is a prerequisite for beginning to explore our full human potential, whether it be through simplicity, solitude, meditation, celibacy, fasting, or even the down-time when recuperating from an illness. Being still in some way, creating a void, is absolutely necessary--creating space for Spirit to enter and for human potential to unfold.
 
In a number of the books I’ve read lately, they’ve talked about Native American prophecies that have told of the coming time when indigenous knowledge would be vital in order to save the world, and how many of the elders believe that the time is now at hand. I certainly believe so. Once the world oil fields are depleted, indigenous ways of knowing the world will become crucial. The wonderful thing is that the native way of knowing is the fully human way of knowing, and all of us have the ability to tap into that knowledge. If modern culture crashes with the end of oil, the pace of life will slow down and returned to the basics and people will have the time to cultivate emptiness. I feel hopeful. I know there’s likely to be anarchy, maybe hundreds of years of anarchy, but I feel certain there will be substantial pockets of humanity throughout the world who returned to a right relationship with the earth, with Spirit, and with their own Divine potential.
 
The Western mind, for the past 500 years or so, has veered far away from a direct way of knowing. We’ve created this abstract, symbolic, representational world view. Inserting symbols between ourselves and immediate experience. Even machines seem to be just symbols of our human ability to act in the world. They act in our place, merely representing our own potential. When we do things ourselves, even if we use tools, but are actively engaged in the process, we are changed by the act of doing. Energies intersect and we are vibrationally impacted. When a machine fully takes over a task, leaving the operator unengaged, human potential stagnates. Direct experience is what profoundly shapes humans. Insert something between the human and the real and you diminish the human.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The task of writing a book is becoming very real to me. It’s not so frightening or intimidating anymore. I know I have at least a book’s worth of information inside of me to express, and probably several book’s worth. I’ve been outlining and then further breaking things down to specific essays and it’s all began to feel very doable. I haven’t perfected the outline yet. It doesn’t quite flow the way I want it to, but I’m getting closer, and I know it will all eventually fall into place.
 
But it’s more than just having the ideas and form of this project gelling in my mind that has me feeling very upbeat. More and more I find myself overwhelmed with awe and I realize I’ve been preparing and practicing for this project my whole life. Finally, it’s my turn to begin contributing! I’ve been apprenticing for so long.
 
Research, for instance, is something I naturally love--digging through books, distilling the key information, integrating information across subjects and making new associations. As I take notes and copy down quotes in my notebooks, I’m transported back to my high school days, when I was reading Jung and would copy down quotes extensively from his work. Somehow the act of copying, in longhand, key quotations from these books, is nourishing. It’s so natural, so innate, and it helps to further imprint the ideas in my mind. And there’s more to it but I can’t quite put my finger on it. The feeling of coming home. The sense of coming around to my destiny, and of recognizing how my life to this point has been an apprenticeship. I’ve been in training all along. Slowly bit by bit the knowledge has been accruing, as well as the discipline and maturity to work with it, to find a way to express it and share it.
 
Journal writing for twenty-four years has kept me writing, even though it never feels like “real” writing. Despite the fact that my worst vice in this life is a lack of self-discipline, I am able to be a fairly disciplined writer, just because it’s such a habit.
 
And I can see the form my days need to take in order to accomplish the task of writing a book. The first few hours of the day are my hours of clarity and insight, so that is when I mostly work. The middle hours of the day are often a little muddy and sluggish as far as thinking and creativity go. Sometimes, though, the evenings also are fruitful times to work. I don’t feel as though I need to be working on this eight hours a day. It feels right to devote a few hours in the mornings, concertedly, and then the rest of the day be mulling over ideas more casually, jotting down notes and ideas here and there as they occur, reading snatches of books as I can. It feels like a wonderfully natural process.
 
On the days I’m in Boulder county, I spend most of my time at the library, so those days are really gifts to me. The library out here is really pathetic. I’m really dependent on having access to good quality libraries. Much as I dislike this back-and-forth life, I need things from the Front Range.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

I’ve been exploring this urge to write that’s had me in its grip since March. I’ve gone around and around trying to figure out what it is that I’m being called to write and finally the ideas are starting to feel a little more solid. I think the general concept is “where simplicity leads”. The majority of the books out there on simplicity simply cover the how-to’s of simplicity. When they mention benefits they’re usually simplified ones like happiness, saving money, saving the environment, having more time with loved ones. All of those are good things, of course. But simplicity is much more. I want to explore voluntary simplicity as a spiritual path and as a means to becoming fully human. It is a process, not so much an achievement. And more than that it allows a radical paradigm shift that tosses out our mindless cultural programming and we become free. Reality expands and our human potential becomes truly staggering. Simplicity allows you to break out of the box created by the modern world view. How extremely limiting that box turns out to have been.
 
The mindlessness of modern life disturbs me. So many cookie-cutter lives being lived, and lived so superficially. If we lived in constant awareness that we are divine beings we would not be frittering away our lives with mindless distractions, as so many people do. To honor the divine is to set aside the childish distractions and set out on a path to becoming fully actualized. To explore potential, and to step outside of the ordinary.
 
There is so much wasted potential in my generation. We’ve stagnated. We’ve fallen asleep somehow.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

I moved the cats, Little, Angelina, Dusty, and Spot, to John’s over Labor Day weekend. I camped out with them the first three nights to help them adjust, then packed up the tent on the fourth night and went home. When I woke up the next morning and opened the door, Little was sitting there like she’d done countless mornings in the past. She had hiked two miles through tall grass right back here. And I thought she liked her new home! She seemed happy enough.

It made me start thinking of the power that place holds again. Energetically, this is home for Little, this is the energy she vibrates with, not the energy two miles up the road. This is the only place that feels right to her. This is where she belongs.

And what exactly is this homing instinct? She knew exactly how to get back here, although she’d never been away from home before. I feel the pull inside of me to get back home too, only I’m not able to act on it. How vital it seems to me to be in your own element. To resonate and be one with the environment around you.

What fascinates me is that no one else seems to sense the importance of this. It’s only in Native American writing that I see mention of the importance of place. In becoming such a mobile society I think we’ve lost so much more than just our connections to family and community, as significant as those things are. There is something of our human potential lost as well. Changes have come so rapidly in the past two-hundred years that few have paused to consider the consequences. Being rootless has dumbed us down, spiritually. We’ve gone superficial, just skimming the surface of life.
 
I sense that the land has a lot to teach us. Nuance has become the word of the year for me. Delving into the power of place we discover nuance. Reality has a depth that is unimaginable, so richly nuanced, so full of unexplored potential.
 
Indigenous people have so often been dismissed for their magical thinking and irrational beliefs. But maybe if we lived fully nuanced lives we would understand indigenous reality. Perhaps there is far more truth there than we could imagine.