energetic thoughts

The body perishes but where is our energy on the cycle of appearances? Is it still ascending or is it like the body where it has exhausted itself and needs to recharge in order to create a new vehicle?

Our world is a giant evolutionary simulation where through trial, error, and redesign life forms are created that are harmonious within the environment. This instructional code is then used when the species propagates itself. The body is an inseparable product of its environment. The features, shape, and modalities of extracting energy from our surroundings are all based on an evolution of the intelligent energy derived from its relationship with the sustaining earth. The body is the flowering of the energy that has come forth. The energy is not blind, nor dumb. All that we feel - love, hate, happiness, satisfaction, depression, anxiety and so on are within the hum. So is the potentiality and intelligence necessary to manifest life, universes, and more love. The energy to power the body vehicle comes from the environment in the form of foodstuff, oxygen, water, minerals and so on. These nutrients power the generator of the life force that animates the body. It's a massive transformer, much like a hydroelectric plant that converts raw force into electricity. In fact that's what we are - mini turbines. We convert the abundant energy that comprises the universe into a life force that powers the body, the body encapsulating the dimension of energy that is aware and instinctual. Through this construct the energy can build upon awareness to try and know self and formulate a conscious idea about the universe that contains it. From this, there is a realization that there is energy and a container that holds the energy and the two are inseparable. The container is black and the energy is white. The container is female and the energy is male. The container of latent energy is the Taoist yin and the coming forth of the energy is yang.

Sentient beings transform the raw materials into more energy which powers the bodies made up of the same raw energy. Everything is recycled and the energy is forever being used up, released, and recycled. The energy is also supremely intelligent and has access to omnipotence, as it is a replica of what we theorize as 'god'. The energy fluctuates, comes forth and disappears in a continuous cycle, and infinite amounts of god are the result, each with the capacity to birth more universes and create more life. 

You can call this magic.

I am a tributary off the main energetic wave. Pulsation is everything. Objects are illusions crafted by delineation and language. Nothing lasts. Project this unto the static image of you. You are energy cresting and falling repeatedly. You as you won't last and why would you want to when you can change form and renew? Are you scared of death? Why? Your energy will crest again; it always does. 

untangling the web

Everything starts to unravel once you get past the initial gnarly knots. We are told to follow the right hand masculine path which strives for reason and logic, with asceticism and purity worthy goals, all free from the siren call of the female. She will shipwreck and take you away from achieving your personal greatness. Check out the ancient Greek Homeric story of Odysseus for further elucidation on this patriarchal trope. The left hand path is the forbidden path. It’s the sensuous path of Tantra. The path of caring and cultivating relationships. The feminine path contains chaos, pleasure, and desire. Hinduism and Buddhism proscribe ideals of non-attachment. Free yourself from desire they say; but wait, love is ultimately from desire. The woman is where the erotic and exotic principle comes from and all masculine spiritual paths are either ascetic or frown on the sex thing. Even Jesus, who hung out with Mary Magdalene, eventually says to disown your family in order to walk with him.

Luke 14:26 If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

Wanting to stay pure and on the straight and narrow? To become desireless is so hard; well, actually it is impossible, so we create a straw man to blame who tempts us away from our path. He’s the adversary, the tempter Satan. All our fucked up erotic fantasies and desires for all forms of guilty pleasures and selfishness are because of Satan. He tempts us. He did it. What a crock. The real Satan is us and it is the masculine part of us who engenders the no desire, uncaring, unfeeling race to the top so we can glorify ourselves, and then fingers Eros as the devil so that the real greedy scoundrel can remain unmasked. This gives the Satan within free reign to run around the world promoting division in the name of economic progress. Satan has branched out as the world system of greed and everyone out for themselves, engendered by man, which is the direct result of a lack of love and compassion for our fellow human travellers. We enable the god of war, but we are loathe to admit it or try to change it earnestly.

dragon tales

The rise of the dragon is given its impetus by the suppression of the feminine. It is the response of a downtrodden feminine class in order to highlight the need to bring everything to centre. The dragon epitomizes destruction. Men want to build a society based on reason and logic and out of this hope to create a utopia. A dysfunctional utopia though; you see there’s a severe imbalance in this construct that does not integrate love, wisdom, and intuition but instead triumphs reason and the suppression of all others. The eventual response of the feminine is to release the dragon from the depths in order to harass man into waking up to the sad truth that all his progress will eventually destroy him unless he becomes inclusive. The dragon was always there at the behest of the feminine, chained to the world axis, to keep the masculine in check. So Apollo came and killed the Python at Delphi, the Greek designation of the Axis Mundi, and ushered in our age of reason.

Apollo killing Python. A 1581 engraving by Virgil Solis for Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book I.

But did he kill the dragon or did he mistakenly unchain it through killing it at Delphi? Apollo was to rid man of his psyche and celebrate reason and logic; the Spock within all true unemotional and unattached men! Unbeknownst to the great Apollo, the dragon is also an indestructible part of the psyche and came back, this time unchained. It’s a gambit introduced by the feminine to reclaim what is lost; to scream at the masculine to realize he can’t go on this way. You will destroy all. There is a need to cage the dragon once again now that we and our progress have chartered many courses - environmental, economic, and nuclear war that will usher in the end of civilization and well how do we do that? By bringing balance back into the equation. To get back to centre. The best and the brightest resources we have go towards finding more clever ways to destroy ourselves. Killing the dragon will not solve the problem but inclusiveness will and that goes for the dragon as well. Welcome him back into society and use his awesome power to protect the weak and downtrodden among us. The sages of the east figured out a way to use the impressive yang power of the dragon long ago.

This external metaphor is mirroring my own inner world. I have met this dragon within. It terrified me and I ran from it. I have tried to suppress it but eventually I will have to deal with it. I need to integrate all parts of my psyche. I can’t suppress this shadow part of me forever. Use the template as described above to find the centre. Find inner peace and include the dragon in this wholeness.

I went on a bit of a long journey and confronted the dragon along the way, about half way through my sojourn. You want to find ‘yourself’, well guess what? The dragon is a part of that self you are on a journey to discover. I didn’t like that part so I ran from it, ran all the way home and he chased me home, sinisterly calling me Apollo. Back on home ice I was able to regroup and recover from the severe beatdown the dragon gave me. And then he came at me again and I had to summon my allies to help me subdue the bastard so he wouldn’t bother me again in order to finish my spiritual climb. He has left me alone and I completed the climb up the mountain last year.

Two of the plant medicines that helped me on this journey are Ayahuasca and Huachuma. Ayahuasca put me in touch with all the disparate parts of my psyche that are a reflection of the corpus we call self. It’s like a prism that refracted the white light of the unified mind into different light vibrations and from this I saw desire, I saw love, I saw reason, I saw destruction, I saw chaos, I saw intuition, and I saw madness. If I couldn’t have handled it I don’t think I would have been drawn to it, in fact I sure wouldn’t have gone back for a round 2 after the dragon stomped on me. Huachuma on the other hand did the opposite. It showed me the white light and the glory of self. It took all those disparate parts revealed by Ayahuasca and combined them into a harmonious one. Huachuma taught me to be aware and observe. The psyche will take that awareness and assign context, feelings, and give rise to action as we act on the desire lighting us up. When this becomes madness I know I can always return to the white light and find the way out. I see this clearly now. I felt very disillusioned when I completed the climb up the mountain last year; in a way you expect more. Don’t I get to be exalted now? But I already had everything; I just had to go on a journey to remember that forgotten part.

So why all of this and why the journey? Because I want to learn about all my parts that are diffracted through the prism of separation as well as the whole. I am the all as the white light, so I break it all down so I can examine it. I am Eros. I am the Goddess. I am Apollo. I am the dragon. I am the Moon, I am crazy. I am the joker.

I stood at the top of the mountain and realized I can’t stay there. I needed to come down the mountain and I knew on my way down I could be of service and teach love and togetherness. While coming down the mountain I have also learned the journey isn’t over. I was able to get up the mountain because I could get to a state of primal awareness and leave the mess behind. I never quite reconciled all my constituent parts. I embraced most of them but buried the dragon, but he is still there and will need to be integrated into the whole. I left that one out. I’m heading back into the world of feeling with Love amped up and it’s time to be inclusive of all parts of my psyche including the ones I ran from. That’s the impetus behind this game to begin with. Discovery. The last great discovery is the mythical dragon. Why is it a part of me and why is it included in the all?

I think I answered this at the beginning of this post. The dragon is necessary because the divine masculine is stronger than the divine feminine. When the masculine subjugates the feminine then the dragon is loosed from its chains and destroys the edifice the man of supreme reason has created and the game starts again anew. Another go round learning about unity while in a state of separation. 

axis mundi

The initial inclination upon study of the spiritual conception of the Axis Mundi is to look externally for the answer. Eventually, you circle back around and will see the answer is within; curiously, you then see internally is everything that occurs externally, and with the help of a few good friends, you can find all that you need within yourself. There's no getting away free though as the dragon is also within and we can carelessly project that wrath and greed upon the world.

Who are you? You are the whole universe expressing itself from the standpoint of you being in the centre of it all. And you are doing just that at this very moment. In a spherical shaped construct every point is the centre; so, every position becomes the Axis Mundi on this particular blue rock twirling and whirling through space. Ritually, you can create and celebrate this centre and many ancient cultures founded their national identity upon this concept.

In pre-Columbian South America at Chavin de Huantar, the confluence of the Huachesca and Mosna Rivers was seen as a naturally occurring power centre and cultures converged upon this Axis Mundi from the coast, highlands, and jungle to give rise to a great period of peace and sharing. On the temple grounds, the stone idol called by archaeologists the "lanzon", is within the subterranean labyrinth and ritually represents this centre of the world.

replica from SpiritQuest of the Chavin lanzon

The chthonic aspects of the idol within the temple esoterically demonstrates for the initiate that within you can find the god as well. The Hindu Mount Kailash in Tibet is an Axis Mundi also where the holy family of Shiva and Parvati cradling Ganesha is pictured here.

The pillar was another way in ancient civilizations to represent the world axis. The worship of the regenerative phallus in the Ancient Greek mystery cult of Dionysos is representing this central pillar and this is also seen as the raising of the djed pillar in Ancient Egypt with Osiris.

Pharaoh Seti I raising the djed pillar at his temple in Abydos

The remembering of the god and enlivening him with life force power, represented here as being ithyphallic, is also re-establishing the Axis Mundi.

Regenerative Osiris/the eternal return

Other depictions of the symbolic centre in world mythology are the world tree which unites the sky, earth, and underworld; a vine or stalk reaching up to the heavens (think Jack and the Beanstalk); a ladder such as the one visualized by Jacob in Genesis; the omphalos at the temple of Delphi used by the oracle; Jerusalem -  the city of gold, along with Mount Zion, and various rods of healing such as the the serpent entwined rod of Asclepius with the snake acting as the guide to wisdom and knowledge contained within the iconic representation of the Axis Mundi. This cosmic axis is the link between heaven and earth and is often where the four directions of the earth emanate from, such as the four rivers that flow out of the Garden of Eden in the opening of Genesis.

Many civilizations thought of themselves as embodying this centre. China means "middle kingdom" and the venerable Mount Fuji in Japan was a symbol for the world axis. Of such importance to cultures is the Axis Mundi that civilizations erected mountains of stone such as the pyramids in Egypt and Teotihuacán in Mexico plus the Mesopotamian ziggurats, all designed to capture this motif.

Ancient Egyptian pyramids on the Gizah plateau

It was not just imposing objects in nature that could represent the Axis Mundi but also within the human form can be found this centre. The Hindu chakra system, powered by the rising of the Kundalini serpent, is an expression of this belief.

The Axis Mundi contains the fount of knowledge at the heart of the journey of all those invested in the hero's journey. As all seekers eventually learn, what you had to invest great time and effort in externally to find your treasure is paradoxically found within. The knowledge of self is guarded by a dragon and there's a good chance you'll get crucified on that world axis if you are none too careful. In the ancient story of the "Hymn of the Pearl" in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, the pearl is the knowledge you seek - grab it and don't linger or the dragon will get you!

Throughout life we establish and recognize these axes in others and society, with the capacity to become a dominant Axis Mundi ourselves. In a way, being the centre is an expression of the fullness of ego in that there is a choice in whether to use this power to be of service and to help the collective consciousness of society or to use it in a selfish manner for your own personal gain. With most, unless you were born a saint, there is a need to experience the selfish aspect of acquiring this third chakra power and hopefully you will have the good fortune to have teachers and role models in your life to steer you towards a wise and benevolent use of your influence and power. Being a node or a pillar that others feed off of is a great responsibility and as provider I have an unique opportunity to be as such. I know from my journeys with plant medicines that the world system is made up of these power nodes and they are symbols of greed and avarice however there is a choice in how you use power and when you make yourself a shining example of how to use it then it influences others within your circle to do similar. If we ever do defeat the inner adversary then it is through directly choosing to love our fellow travellers on this glorious spaceship.

Remember every point In the universe is the centre. So, ritually create the Axis Mundi and embrace the all. Live in the eternal now as the centre of all existence. Embrace the greatness, as you are it.