August 2003 Archives
I am envious that I am not a California citizen eligible to vote in their
upcoming gubernatorial election. In fact, I'm envious not to be living in the
land of "hot sex". You ever wonder what the word California means? Probably not!
CALIFORNIA: From Latin 'calor', meaning "heat" (as in English 'calorie' or
Spanish 'caliente'); and 'fornia', for "sexual intercourse" or "fornication."
Hence: Tierra de California, "the land of hot sex."
~ Ed Moran, Covina, California
The media is claiming as well as those dear to the political process, the the
gubernatorial recall election has become a farce due to the unlikely candidates
who plunked down $3,500 and 65 signatures to be placed on the ballot. Hey, the
political process says anyone can run, it was not mean to be a "career"!
So, if I could vote in this election, I've narrowed it down to three people who
would most likely get my vote. In no particular order: (1)Gary Coleman. He said
he was running just to see how many votes he'd get. I like that. It's honest.
(2)Mary Carey, famous porn star. She's been screwing people for years and is
honest about it! Most politians deny it. (3)Gallagher, comedian. He made me
laugh, and certainly these days we could use more reasons to laugh, smile, and
be silly.
At the age of 10 my perception changed. I was an awakening to something outside
of myself, that there was a larger scope to the world than just my being. In
looking back at this experience, I realize that what I was sensing was the
collective consciousness of the people who comprise this planet. I have since
felt a much greater consciousness beyond the Earth, as well as more of my own
consciousness, but for now I'll focus on just that first awakening.
My awakening caused a flood of curiosity about the world and how it
works---meaning how and why people act, think, and feel the way they do. I began
questioning the way things are, wondering why about everything.
My asking why at first was a purely mental quest for information and knowledge,
but the more facts I loaded into myself, the more I was able to define that what
I was yearning for was not of a mental or physical nature. My questioning was
coming from my spirit. The answers around me in the society were not satisfying
to me. Something was missing in the Christian philosophy and practice that was
ubiquitous in my surrounding environment. Thus began my spiritual quest to find
'something' that gave me an answer, which would be equated to a sense of
satisfaction.
In my desire to find Truth, harmony, and fulfillment, I was drawn to the
emerging sense of spirituality that was entering into the mainstream. It started
off as New Age, but this is a broadly applied term just as Paganism is a broadly
defined term for any religion or spiritual philosophy that is non-Christian.
I began meditating and practicing the methods put forth by Eastern and New Age
philosophies. I really liked Zen!
As I worked on exploring Reality and my own consciousness, things started to
happen that left the realm of the mainstream. I had entered the realm of the
spiritual where the rules no longer necessarily apply.
One of my first experiences that is still with me today took place in a dream. I
was 15 yo at the time and I had a boyfriend. He was a Native American and was
very much into exploring his ancestral roots of shamanism and NA spirituality.
I awoke from this dream feeling very peculiar. It left me with a very intense
feeling that I could not rationally explain. In the dream I was riding in a
carriage, it was the 1700s, and I was in Europe, the country look liked France,
but it may have been anywhere on the European continent. In the carriage with me
was a man who sat opposite to me, and I looked at him, and I knew him, not just
in the Biblical sense, but much more complex. There was this intense feeling of
love between us, the kind of pure love that you can only feel when you aren't
weighed down by a physical body. It's pure love energy, and there is nothing
like feeling this, because it fills you all up and it's just wonderful to
experience because there is room for nothing else.
I felt guilty for feeling this love for this man, because my mind thought back
to my current boyfriend. My logic said, you shouldn't be feeling this way about
this man because he isn't your boyfriend, and you're only supposed to love one
person. Until that thought entered my mind that I had a boyfriend, I was this
other person---the person in the carriage traveling back to our home that was a
chateau.
I couldn't shake the feelings of this dream, nor the intensity of it, so I told
my boyfriend about it, wondering if he might know what had happened. His
response was that I had dreamt of a past life. I was incredulous at first. No,
that couldn't be the answer. I wasn't totally sold on the idea of reincarnation,
it was something that I entertained as a possibility, but felt that it was a bit
hoaky because the New Agers that always talked about it always claimed to be
famous people of the past. How many Cleopatras, Caesars, and other assorted
historical figures could there be?
He explained to me that a past life, especially if there was an intense feeling
or experience, will work its way into your active consciousness. The feelings
that I had for my previous husband were very intense, and in that life I was
very happy. There was a need for this past life to be remembered, which was why
it was revealing itself. He encouraged me to contemplate this previous life to
find out more, and so I did work on it. I was able to uncover that this
particular life ended unpleasantly, and unresolved issues from that life were
manifesting in this current incarnation.
How they menifested themself took a number of years to come full circle, so the
dream I had was only the begining of the journey. In my next post I will
continue with what happened next, and I will give the conclusion.
It's true when wise people say that we all take our own path to God. My own path
has been an interesting journey. I started off in life not having a religion
crammed down my throat. My mother was raised in the Holy Roller church, and her
negative experiences with that turned her off to religion, but she still
maintained her spirituality. My father---the closest he came to anything
remotely religious is when he'd shriek 'goddamnsonofabitch' like it was one
syllable.
My mother would share her spiritual outlook if asked, but the whole topic of
religion and spirituality was left up to us to decide. We weren't discouraged or
encouraged either way. This approached proved to be rather helpful in that
ultimately I found my own path to follow.
I have always held a respect and reverance for Nature. I got this from my mother
would point out the beauty of Nature, and remind us we had to respect Her. There
would be many times that my mother would sudden pause us at the end of the day,
saying "Stop a moment," in a very serious tone, as if something were amiss. Then
she'd continue, "Do you smell that?" and she'd take in a long breath. "That's
the smell of spring," she'd say. For a moment our minds would turn away from
whatever thoughts we had, and we'd breathe in that smell that is truly spring.
All of the seasons have a smell, and so does the time of day. Through her
influence she taught me to notice the little details about Nature.
Every year I love watching the seasons cycle, and I try to stay attune to the
phase of the Moon. When my sister and I were close, we'd often go outside in the
summer, late at night, and just watch the sky. Seeing all of those stars is like
being in a time machine. All of that light takes so long to reach us, we only
see what once was and not how it is. One special night we saw the northern
lights.
For me, God was not a pleasant concept or word. While my family didn't promote a
religion, the community around me knew of only one religion,
Christianity---fundamentalist at that. Catholics were scarce creatures, and
there was only one family of Jews, and they kept to themselves. I could not warm
up to the concept of God being presented to me by the Christians around me
because it had no room for Nature, for tolerance, for spirituality, for
intellect, for Love, Peace, and Acceptance. Their God was the spiteful, killing,
and angry masculine God. It annoyed me that they wouldn't practice what they
preached, and condescended toward you if you weren't part of their church.
Mother Nature was real to me, She sustained all Life, was not judgmental. She is
accused of having wrath and fury against people (whenever a hurrican hits its
the wrath of Nature), but She does not have 'right' or 'wrong'. At the higher
spiritual levels the concepts of 'right' and 'wrong' no longer apply. It just
becomes either action or thought.
The Eastern philosophies agreed with my inner voice, and when I stumbled upon
the loosely used term 'Pagan' to describe the Goddess-based religions that
existed before Christianity, I felt like I was connecting to a religion that
echoed what I felt within me. Yet, I still did not uphold a belief in a God,
Goddess, singular Diety or creative power.
The word "agnostic" best applied to me. I simply did not know. Nothing in my
life had happened to me that made me feel like there was a God, but nothing had
happened either to make me feel like there wasn't a God, either. While I respect
and admire the Wicca/Pagan concept of the Triple Goddess (Virgin/Mother/Crone),
it just didn't mesh with my inner being. Neither did a strictly masculine god.
Then something happened that changed it all for me. I was reading Mary Summer
Rain---it had been years since I had picked up one of her books and I was
catching up on all that she had written. The way that she wrote about God, and
her relationship with God and the Universe and with Nature, got my soul
stirring. Maybe what I needed to do was simply stop doubting about their being a
God, but that didn't seem right either. It couldn't be forced, it had to be
felt.
My mind began to think about Nature, and how when I look at something so
beautiful like Mt. Rainier, I feel like I belong, that I am part of something
more than just my own being, and that feeling extends beyond the limitations of
the Earth or physical realm. This thought suddenly flashed in my mind: When I
look at the mountain, I am looking on the reflection of God.
Everything opened up inside of me, and I felt this presence like none other, and
it was within me and without me, it extended forever. It knew no time, it just
was and always has been. It is the All of Everything, the Essence of Nothing. In
that brief moment I had a glimpse of the Divine, the Creatrix of all that we
know. It is a feeling more than it being a faith, and from the feeling comes a
certain knowlegde and understanding.
Thus, for me Nature is God, and God is Nature. The creative force that gave us
life/existence also created the Reality in which we live. This physical state of
being resonates with the beauty and love of the Divine. To more accurately
describe how I see the physical realm is that we are a reflection of the
Creatrix. The trees, the mountains, the oceans, rivers, flowers, plants,
creatures, stars, and outer space are but a glimpse---an echo---of what God is.
I've had some 'spiritual' experiences in my life that the typical person may
proclaim as 'crazy'. Even I have questioned my sanity, because when I compare my
experiences to what society deems as 'normal' and 'sane', my experiences do not
fit within the acceptable parameter. Society has so narrowly defined what is
Reality, it reminds me of the parable of the three blind men who are each
holding a different body part of an elephant trying to describe the entire
animal based upon the one portion that they are immediately experiencing.
Due to society's lack of acceptance for anything deemed 'paranormal', 'psychic',
or 'spiritual', those of us who do experience something out of the ordinary, we
are reluctant to share it because we face ridicule, persecution, and are labeled
'crazy'. The experience is usually dismissed as being 'all in your mind'. I
don't find this to be an untruth, because what I have experienced has taken
place in my mind, but that does not make it any less 'real' or any less a part
of Reality.
There is this prejudice that the only Real experiences are those that are
physical experiences, the kind that are 'solid', have 3 dimensions, and can be
replicated on demand so that a group of scientists can make a graph of the data
and a mathematician can create a new formula to describe the event. Yet, just
how 'solid' is our world? Quantum physics has revealed that what we so fondly
think is a 'solid' world is really 'illusionary'. (Ancient mystics have been
proclaiming the world is an illusion for centuries and now finally science is
giving them credibility after debunking them.)
I read once in a physics book that the volume of an atom is on occupied by
99.99999999% nothing! In other words, less than 1% of an atom contains a solid
substance, and if you look at how much each subatomic particle weighs, it's
very, very, little.
Aside from all of this, those scientists who conduct research on consciousness
have yet to come to a definitive conclusion about just what consciousness is!
From the various sources I have read, researchers are like the three blind men
describing portions of the elephant. Aspects of consciousness can be described,
but what it truly is as an entirety is still not yet cohesive.
Now that my long preamble is over, I shall start sharing some of my experiences.
Most of my experiences have come through in my dreams. I have had a few 'waking'
experiences.
