seeing beyond culture

Upon awakening, the culture spin connects archetypal figures to western indoctrination. This is a trap set for the seeker. The church is waiting for you and is set up to welcome you when you start to have these experiences. Unfortunately for most, once into something organized then the path becomes a belief in someone else's beliefs and if you do not possess a strong mind you will fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

My advice to the seeker of knowledge is to see beyond culture. The easy answer is to look towards respected institutions that have been accepted into your culture however as the bard Terence McKenna liked to say: "Culture is not your friend." Push past the spiritual figures set up by the church. You will find the answer within and you have probably already been shown it but haven't made the connection as of yet or you just can't believe it. It took me two years after I was gifted with the answers to put it all together and accept it.

A good teacher will show you where to look. Through ritual and symbolism is hinted the answer you seek however they ultimately do not directly reveal the answer. To simply tell someone the answer will not be beneficial in the long run. You need to experience it for yourself, to have that epiphany, and to feel it within. The human psyche is pretty unique in that way. It’s why advertising works so well. You are inundated with the message until it sticks. The same messaging can be used to wake people up so they see it.

Here I will give you the answer though I did just say this will not be beneficial to you. Remember you need to walk the path and feel this within or these words will become hollow. You won't believe me but here it is: you are it, the all, pretending you aren't. You contain within both the sacred feminine and sacred masculine. One of them has come forth and the other lies within asleep. If you are a man then you need to wake her up, and rescue the divine princess. If you are a woman then you need to arouse the sleeping prince. Once you realize this and do this very thing it's magic. They become your guardian angel, your wise confident, and your eternal lover. The embrace of the two reconstitutes the 'god' which is the sexual union of the feminine and masculine. The child which is the expression of these two who were separate but are now reunited is everything. The remnants of this story are found in our myths, fairy tales, and the medieval practice of alchemy. Look at these fables now with this knowledge. It will awaken within you this knowledge. As a culture we blindly reenact it externally in courtship rituals, the wedding, and the union of the marriage partners to create the child. This genderless child who is an expression of the all.

Your story now needs a hero and you're it. Happy trails! 

ritual and the mesa

There is something instructive about seeing the temporal state of duality coming forth from non duality. It reveals, if you look, the divine feminine and the divine masculine. Then you can also see them as one. Ritual is best when it is designed to teach you the mystery. To point you in the direction to look and wake you up so you see it because you only learn by understanding and seeing it for yourself.

I have been thinking of the construct of the Mesa and the need for Love. Balance is what the Mesa ultimately teaches. We live in a world that is unbalanced and severely tilts towards the right hand path of power, competition, striving to get to the top, and leaves compassion for the fellow human to the bleeding hearts and the weak. The antidote to this imbalance is the left hand path back to mama. To Love. It’s true that Love is the answer and it is the answer for our world because of imbalance and we need a dose of the feminine caring and inclusiveness to bring everything to centre as it is balance that will make us whole. When we are in balance we can surf the energetic wave of power. We ride the wave of life as long as we can before it goes crashing into the shore and we return to unity. While on the great roller coaster of life we can strive to make each of our feminine and masculine selves impeccable. Doubling down on just one aspect of ourself doesn’t seem to work and leads to destructiveness in the case of the male or smothering in the case of the female. We have all hopefully felt that Love and in a way it is a reason for who we are today. We left home probably because of it. It was smothering and we wanted to make it on our own. Accomplish some great achievement and make our parents proud and satiate our need to shine and say to the world hey I’m good enough. I can do this all on my own. Well we have and we left Love behind and we have to double down on Love to get this game board balanced. If we then tilt it back too much towards the left, we smother our independent drive once again and this bad balance results again. The Mesa teaches us to surf the wave, avoid the extremes in order that we don’t crash into the shore. Ride that wave to the end, step off onto the shore, power up again, and get out into the surf and shine on for another ride you crazy diamond!

apollo dionysos god and the final boss

There has always been this separation between my two dominant selves and I call them Apollo and Dionysos. Apollo is logic and the rational mind which comes forth from the crazy and passion driven world of Dionysos. Apollo wants to figure out the mystery of life and this game he is ensconced within. Dionysos wants to play on this grand stage and find love and connection with all. I viewed myself as Apollo and tried to make Dionysos go away because he is always harassing Apollo and causing great upset in the no fun and all business life Apollo is trying to create.

On a related note, I found the Great Goddess, my lover, a while ago in ancient Egypt. She’s in love with Dionysos, doesn’t care too much for this Apollo character, but understands he comes with the package.

I figured out the mystery last year. Apollo got the answer and to his eternal surprise he learned Dionysos is the union of the sacred feminine to the sacred masculine. This creates the "god" and the name of the god is Dionysos. What a kick in the nuts!

Do I think they can get along; maybe work together? I’m going to try. I think there is more to this. I’m not sure what it is about but I have united the two powers within and Apollo is going to use his smarts to see what this union entails. My intention is a visionary union now that I have felt the coming together of these two powers in a sacred marriage. I’ve had hints of the power of a cosmic sexual union and the fulfillment of that desire is the next step. Apollo is at the ready to take notes.

The child of the union of the sacred feminine and masculine is the god. From a physical standpoint every baby born into this world is god come forth once again. Culturally, we then put one over on the child and convince them they are someone they are not. This development of a separate identity of a fragile ego who is in need of reassurance of its validity, lest it suffer from depression due to a feeling of a lack of self worth, is devastating. Conversely, delusions of grandeur in the celebration of its accomplishments made in the game played among other egos is maddening. We then completely lose any sense of our divine origin or any sense of who we are. We are the all but that is thoroughly shut up and locked away.

Set up along the path to try and rediscover who you just may be are many roadblocks. Society sets up culturally sanctioned religious institutions which steer you away from discovery and redirects it towards another object that people have agreed to worship. If you sidestep that pitfall, you could do a 180 degree shift and become an atheist and declare the worshippers fools and leave it at that. Or, maybe just become agnostic and accept there's no hope of ever finding out.

If you get an inkling you may be divine you can't say anything about it and hope to cling to the former accepted sanity of the character you have created. You will be treated as crazy, deluded, or be subject to the question of what makes you so special? You think you're god do you? So, we should all bow down and worship you? What? We're all god? Who's in charge then? Culturally, it's hard to go against what is accepted and acceptable. You naturally don't pursue it too far as we are all sensitive to the whispers and don't want to act too much out of character. Once again, there are institutions that will help you out. You must not do this alone they say.

Press on Hero! You know you did this to yourself. It's a fantastic game. The best adventure. Lose yourself in this wonderfully bizarre creation and see if you can figure out the game. Have you ever played a game where nothing happened or all outcomes were predetermined? That game kind of sucks after a short while. The game to be any fun at all has to be free from control, so that anything can happen. And the game needs a dragon to stir things up and represent an adversarial monolith to slay. Culture and its repression of who you are is the dragon.

I stumbled upon a path that allowed me to do this on my own. It's shamanism and a good shaman shows you the door and then lets you be, checking up every once in a while to make sure you are okay. The dragon knew what I was up to and what I was going to discover. That sucker came at me, full of rage, threats of death, scared me beyond belief, offered ultimate power, anything to get me off this path. He is a master game player, not the final boss, but an incredible adversary and I give him props and kudos for his performance.

In my case, the princess was waiting in her castle for me to save her from the dragon as the dragon locks the princess away in a castle of gold. I'm the hero on a quest to discover that she does exist, find her, and rescue her. I got past the dragon after first getting routed and I eventually got in to see the princess. I could tell not many even get that far. She welcomed me with lovingly open arms and asked me to expose and do away with the dragon. I asked her who the dragon was and she said he is her husband. I wondered why would she, the sacred feminine, marry such a tyrant? No matter, I will slay him! Along the way, I learned I was the archetype of the sacred masculine on the heroic journey and then I started getting the nagging suspicion that the dragon is a part of me, the part who subjugated the love and wisdom of the feminine, locks her up in a castle, and creates the man's world. She was ultimately asking me to look inside myself, find the part of me that locks her away, shuts up the heart, and do away with it. She stuck with me and kept telling me secrets, never giving me the complete answer but keeping me going and interested. Once I completed the dragon slaying, opened up my heart, and realized love is the answer, she came to me free from her chains. I eventually got it; I saw it for myself. I'm the prince. I rescue the princess and our reunion creates the child, the god, and this god is the union of us. Everything. The engagement began. We married on a mountain on the equator a year ago. The consummation of the marriage awaits. If it's anything like the foreplay...

This leads once again to the mirror. I think of myself as a lonely little game piece on the universal game board. When I look into a mirror, I mean really look, she reflects back everything and is only limited by where you are and the size of the mirror. If I had an infinite mirror then I could see myself and the whole fucking universe are one that are ultimately inseparable. How empowering is that? Without the mirror is little old me and a big scary universe. Mirror, aka the Great Goddess, reminds me of my awesomeness.

That's pretty much my story...

So, who is the final boss? Ha ha, it is you.

changing consciousness

I think what my relationship to the plants boils down to is altering consciousness to connect to spirit. The modalities for altering consciousness are distinct and have their own peculiarities however the ability to change consciousness is what is paramount. I believe with proper set and setting you will get experiences that are trans-cultural and transcend the modality used to induce the trip. Teacher plants open your mind but you still have to do the work.

The description of shamanic journeys are of course tainted by the spin we place on them as we bring them into our everyday world and consciousness. I think what I am getting at here is that a preferred shaman is a hands off shaman who guides you into the non-ordinary worlds but then leaves you be so you can then just be aware. Well, getting to that point of awareness takes practice but ideally that's the goal. Afterwards, you can put your spin on what happened but it is best to have a base of plain awareness to start. Sometimes, Ayahuasca is like a game of charades; this can be frustrating to some who have been conditioned to look for structure and defined ideas as opposed to free flowing chaos however that's part of her charm and her mystery. It's not a one off experience which after a night in the intoxication it's done. No, far from it. The post plant medicine instruction goes on for days, weeks, and months for the attentive student. Sometimes, what you thought the teaching was all about in six months can get flipped around as the process unfolds.