pandora's box

Knowledge that leads to understanding enables a process which is like the peeling away of layers to an onion to get to the core. Each successive layer of understanding which is bequeathed to me, grants me the ability to go deeper into the forest of enlightenment. I am grateful for the process, as unravelling the puzzle seems to be my reason for incarnation. It seems that every week I say to myself: Well, for sure I have reached the end and there's not much more to learn. Then I'll have some epiphany, usually while smoking Mapacho tobacco. The analogy of the onion is fitting because the root of existence is a mystery. If I ever do peel away all the layers, I intuit the last layer will reveal the absurdity of my seeking. The joke is I already know the answer to the riddle, as I am the inventor and designer of the puzzle. The gift of eternity leads to a sense of adventure. Laughter, joy, play, friendship, connection, discovery, and love. At the heart of the great cosmic drama are these values. All stage plays, whether they may be poignant dramas or gruesome tragedies, will point towards these aspects of love.

A couple of years ago, the word Pandora kept showing up in my life and it still does. I didn't understand the connection because I hadn't peeled away enough layers of the onion to figure out why. Well, I finally reached that layer last week, helped by a recurring theme of opiate drug abuse and the helplessness and despair caused by the addiction. Derivatives of the poppy are everywhere, and it makes sense when one realizes earth is a place of suffering. Opium takes away the suffering, both physical and mental. It becomes highly addictive because of this ability and the continual use will send you to the depths of hell. A lesson of the poppy is the higher the high, the lower the low. The poppy teaches that in a world of duality, there is no escape from the reconciliation of high and low. It's a zero-sum game. If you see the connection between all life, you further see that when you are in the positive ledger, someone else is in the negative.

I see that Pandora's Box is life on earth. Pandora's Box is Maya; the weaving together of an illusion which creates the stage for biological life to do its dance. The Great Mother Goddess created the playground we desired. She enables the suffering and within this world she places the gift of the destroyer. When we see through the game and tire of the dance, we hail the destroyer and he puts an end to the drama, dancing the Rudra Tandava. Pandora's Box is once again shut up, until the next curious seeker unwittingly opens it.

Subconsciously as a species, we know this. Peering back into the sands of time, we find Mother Goddess worship. She is the creator of life buttressed by her destructive masculine offspring. The practitioners of the mesa in pre-Columbian South America seek to balance the feminine and the masculine - the energy of creator and destroyer. The balance creates healing and harmony. The attentive student sees the dualistic relationship between the two and knows they must work at maintaining the balance, against all odds, in order to curtail the suffering to come. As a species we worshipped the Great Mother and then later we buried Her. We wanted to forget about her and wipe away the memory. Our religious past as taught is patriarchal and there is no room for the Goddess. Why did we do this?

Misogyny is a good answer to begin with and may explain the situation. I don't buy it 100% though because it defies what just is. If we worship a masculine god, he is just half of the equation. Of course, there is a counterpoint that makes the worship whole. Having a divine masculine god and his son being the be all and end all is preposterous when you think about it; notwithstanding the initial preposterousness of a religion that allows you to get to that point to begin with. But this is not intended to be a polemic against religion, so I'll let that be. What I think is that we collectively stamped out goddess worship because we know she initiates our suffering.

I came by this knowledge through plant medicine use - specifically Ayahuasca. I experientially met the Great Goddess through the use of Ayahuasca and I have had multiple visions of what I am describing. My knowledge is from a subconscious origin, is not verifiable, and could be considered a tale of fancy. I'm totally down with that and don't expect anyone to take my word for it. I'm just writing about my experience.

In vision, I've seen the illusory nature of the world. I saw through the transparent curtains of the dream - a spinning realm of fortune and chance, defined by the four suits in a deck of cards. I saw the worship of the Goddess and how man stamped it out. I was harassed to no end in vision by an inherent dark warning to stay away from the Goddess and her charms. I didn't heed the warning and soldiered on. I am a student of history, and so I know about Goddess worship and what it entailed way back when.

The study of the Goddess reveals a connection to the earth and her bounty. You see her in full display in ancient cultures such as Egypt, the Levant, Crete, Phrygia, and Greece. You can trace the stamping out of her influence in mythic stories of the taming of the serpentine monster of the sea or in stories of the crushing of the lunar bull such as in Phrygia where the sky father Sabazios is depicted on horseback placing a hoof on the head of the bull, which represented the crushing of Goddess worship. The Minoan snake goddess of ancient Crete is iconic in the depiction of Goddesses because of the serpents and the poppy. The poppy is the teacher. The roshi. The head of the poppy instructs, and you'll find the word for the head teacher congruent with the idea: "Siri, what does the Hebrew word 'rosh' mean?" Goddess worship involves the ingestion of narcotics and for some this would lead to addiction and a life of hell. Goddess worship would be equated to being ensnared in her world of intoxication, enchantment, and pleasure seeking. Give in to the worship and all will be fine. Try to leave and suffer. You can find polemics against pharmakeia - the plants of the Goddess, within ancient sources. We now call these substances drugs, i.e., the bad drugs. The New Testament warns of her witchcraft. In Galatians chapter 5 of the King James Bible translation, we read:

19 Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,

20 Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies,

21 Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

In verse 20, pharmakeia is translated as witchcraft. Other translations will use sorcery for the translation. The term was used a pejorative for the woman healer. In the Book of Revelation, we find the mention of pharmakeia in chapter 9, where many are killed by the wrath of God.

20 And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:

21 Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.

Those made to suffer did not repent of their sorceries, sorcery referring to the drugs of the Goddess. A last mention of drugs is in Revelation chapter 18 where the sins of the great whore of Babylon are enumerated. The whore is the Goddess, and in this setting, she is a great city of the world, namely Jerusalem, who has been soiled by the company she keeps. Here's the passages:

23 And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.

24 And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.

It is by her enchantment and seduction that all the world was deceived. The deception is taking men away from the worship of God back to Goddess. These attitudes permeated all ancient cultures. A student of the Greek play-write Homer will find plentiful comparisons in the story of the hero Odysseus. Odysseus spends seven years with the nymph Calypso in a narcotic haze, seduced by her witchcraft until he finally leaves her for home. The Greek warrior and his men are also ensnared by Circe and her magic potion. Odysseus and his men also become trapped on the island of the Lotus Eaters, another warning against the use of narcotics. Also extracted from this story is Odysseus' run in with the Sirens. Delving deeper into the tale, one realizes the Sirens are the call of the addictive properties of opiates. Odysseus' men are given beeswax by Circe to plug up their ears so they wouldn't heed the call, while Odysseus is bound by rope to the ship's mast and tells the sailors under no circumstance should he be untied. The pull of narcotics is strong and would summon Odysseus to his doom much like the fields of wasted men on the rocks of the shore of the Sirens' call. Odysseus urges his men to free him, but they sail on. The hold of the addiction and cravings is defeated. The lesson being taught is the warrior spirit of a man is crushed by the enchantment of the Goddess. Narcotics will definitely do this to you, but underlying this understanding is that love and compassion for your fellow human as taught will make you think twice about conquest, pillage, and the killing of others. I'll bet you want to re-read the story now that you have been given the understanding!

The Goddess will take away your pain with her poppies but then make you see it's not free. Opiates will take you to hell. There's a terrible lesson of reconciliation in duality within the pain reliever. Hers is the toughest course of them all. The man on his journey of conquest wants to get to the top of the mountain, not find unity at the intersection of the valley plain and the base of the mountain.

There is another way to escape the suffering and ultimately the course of the Goddess will take the studious practitioner to the doorstep of what it is we all eventually seek. The way is through the heart and the path is only discovered through the fires of transformation which involve suffering. Every course on my spiritual path is designed to lead to the heart. In hindsight, the progression is obvious. The path of the heart is laying it all bare. The Goddess is showing me all she has done and how the immense suffering is designed to lead you back to the heart. She is showing me how you can't escape the lessons. You can deny them, but all is reconciled and eventually comes together in the middle. The Tao Te Ching teaches one to go with the flow. Following the flow leads to the centre.

The world is perfect. With all the environmental destruction how can I say that? I didn't say it was ideal! It's progress. We are making our lives easier on earth and accumulating more and more stuff and the corollary to this is the destruction of our habitat. This is how perfect duality works. The lessons stare you in the face and you can't escape it. Eventually, we will destroy ourselves. I look at this with ambivalence. What we have been gifted by Pachamama, we will destroy. What we have been bequeathed, we turned into hell. We will destroy hell and close Pandora's Box. Maybe we should put a sign on it warning against ever opening up this gift of the Goddess? The illusion will lay its trap once again and it will take another monumental nuclear blast to destroy it. On and on it goes. What a vision of existence I hold!

It's what we wanted so we opened the Box. Leave it alone! Our desires and curiosity will once again lead us to her magic and sorcery. She will conjure another world of our dreams into existence so we can play out our eternal recurring fantasies of conquest. We will ask her once again and being love, she will give her children what they want. Within her creation is placed the destroyer so that when we have had enough, we can blow the whole thing up. In our eternal universal travels, we will pass by the big blue marble jail cell and shudder at the memory of what the siren call of desire can do to us. Will we pay heed?

My experience with drugs is not with opiates. I have an addictive streak within, and so I know enough to stay away from the highly addictive substances. I am curious about the juice of the poppy in its unrefined form and if given the chance at the right time, I would smoke opium or drink opium tea, preferably in a group ceremony. I picture a scene from Eleusis in ancient Greece and a crowd of ecstatic adherents welcoming the Goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone in a shared vision; feeling the connection between the group and the divine feminine. My history with pharmakeia is with the psychedelics. I have enough experience with them to know they are definitely not addictive, but they do offer a doorway into the occult, if that is your intention. Magic, sorcery, mystery, and knowledge are at your fingertips if you do want to see for yourself. From these trips, I came to know the Goddess intimately. No one can take that away from me or convince me it was a flight of fancy. She showed me love and taught me the answer to all I seek is love. It's that simple.

So, what's to make of the lessons of the Goddess and her opiates? To me, it is as it should be. I make the statement from the standpoint of duality. Within my masculine self, I see the light and I see the darkness. I hold them both in equal esteem and I make no exultation of one over the other. On the contrary, my discovery of the divine nature of the darkness strengthened my love of the gifts of the Goddess. I posed a question to the ether a while back in which I acknowledged I have no idea of what a woman grapples with. I saw in myself God and I saw Satan, but I knew a woman does not see the same. Externally, I see love in the woman and exuded by the Goddess. I see maternal instincts and I pedestalize these aspects of the divine feminine. True to the unfolding of understanding in due time, I have been shown the opposite spectrum of the feminine. I see the enchantment and possession and how the pursuit of her charms can lead you to destruction. As with my own darkness, I know that not only is this the way it has to be, but I see how the enchantress who sends you to your doom is just as divine as the maternal feminine who is full of love. The tension between the opposites in this mysterious world we inhabit is what keeps the world spinning.

I am grateful for the remaining layers of the onion, as I head towards the core of the mystery.

beyond mind

The reality I wake into daily is a world of mind. The mind is the great separator and conjures this universe into existence. The mind creates the exhilarating rushes we seek and sends us cratering into the abyss. The mind is God. The mind is Satan. One who does not know the other side of righteousness is cruelty knows not that the dark side of the face of God is the face of Satan. Let that sink in, deny it all you want, condemn me, and cast my prose into the virtual trash if you wish. I don't care. I'll just continue to call it as I see it.

What does it mean to be "awake" from a spiritual point of view? There's no world standard and of course humans will argue anything spiritual to its pointlessness. We will divide up experiences into cultural tribalisms and claim we hold the truth and all else is heresy, promulgated by infidels who must be eliminated. So, yeah, to define being "awake" is problematic.

But what's to stop myself from defining this state of being? Well, nothing really. I'm a spiritual free agent. I don't buy into anyone's system. The great thing about my beliefs is I can see the core of people's beliefs and though they have laid a cultural blanket over these spiritual realizations, I do see so much truth in their objects of worship. The big one for me is Jesus. I see him everywhere. I know him. I'd never worship him in the mainstream Christian sense, but I personally love the guy and my heart is filled with love for Jesus and Mary. I physically feel it, and I have this pull towards the divine pair.

Let me illustrate the love I have for Jesus and Mary in my heart which comes from a deep understanding of what was taught by spiritual masters of a long-ago age. Their teachings are now a curiosity, though the civilization of ancient Egypt is exhaustively studied.

When you engage the heart, you birth a King. The prodigy is the result of the marriage between the divine feminine heart and the divine masculine quickener. The process was called by the ancients, Hieros Gamos - the sacred wedding. The union of Goddess and God creates the child. Christianity is a patriarchal religion and thus proper due is not accorded to Mary, mother of Jesus. The elements of the myth are all present; however, the story is modified to fit the patriarchal narrative. If we go back further in time to the land of the Pharaohs, we can see the same story come forth in unadulterated splendor. Our king is the great god Amun-Re, and all Pharaohs of the 18th dynasty of ancient Egypt maintained a connection to the light of Amun-Re. In the palace of Karnak at Luxor, we find the great precinct of Amun-Re which is dedicated to the god, his wife Mut, and their son Khonsu - the great healer. The goddess Mut is the great mother Goddess, as the hieroglyphic for Mut is the vulture and the symbolic nature is one of motherhood. Mut is mother, and very interesting is the phonetic connection to world languages and the pronunciation of mother. The sacred coupling of the King and his Queen give birth to the healer; the healer is the coming forth of the love of the divine pair. The story becomes even more intriguing when we look into an epithet of Amun-Re. He is the kamutef. Kamutef is the bull of his mother. I have written about this subject previously if you wish to learn more about it as I won't go into detail here. Kamutef points towards an incestuous relationship between Amun-Re and his mother in order to produce the child, who is the coming forth into this world of the god. Cultural prohibitions make us squeamish of the taboo but to the ancient seeker of wisdom, they were more interested in spiritual truths and not distracted by Netflix, so they produced many wonderful contributions towards an understanding of what this mortal experience is all about. Let's go back to the mother goddess as a vulture. Lost in the sands of time is parthenogenesis. The female vulture was thought to give birth to the world without the need of the masculine. Aha! The concepts of maya and of the virgin birth are laid bare. The Parthenon of Athena in Athens of ancient Greece reveals its mystery. The connection by Plato of Athena to the primordial vulture of this parthenogenesis in ancient Egypt, the goddess Neith, is unveiled. I wrote a long blog post about this called, "weaving the rich tapestry." It's some of my finest work, though without an understanding of the ancient Egyptians, it comes across as a difficult read! Anyway, within the post I wrote this about Neith:

"Neith weaves the rich tapestry, this garment the all. The shuttle she wears is symbolic of not only the weaving of the universe but also has associations to the linen bandages that encase the mummified. In addition, she had warlike attributes as she could be represented with the bow and arrows. This aspect contributed to her masculine aspects with the act of releasing the arrow carrying allusions to the masculine sexual act. Curiously, the writing of her name in hieroglyphs contained within it the determinative of an ejaculating phallus giving rise to the aspect of her that contains not only the mother but the power to enliven the seed within her."

Yes, the goddess Neith who is said to be the Great mother goddess, gives birth to the light as Amun-Re. Amun-Re impregnates his mother and gives birth to the son. This is how the concept works. Khonsu is the coming forth of the love between Mut and Amun-Re. The great healer is love and thus all demi-god Saviours of religions who owe their heritage to ancient spiritual masters, teach love as the way and the light towards healing and salvation.

So, what does it mean to be awake? I'd call it lifting the veil. You see through the game and start to clue into why you are here. Being awake doesn't mean you have all the answers; however, when you see your predicament with a newfound clarity, the answers to life's riddles start to unravel. Being awake lets you see the immense suffering and understand why there is suffering. The atheists cry, "If there is a just God, why is there so much suffering? Why does a small and innocent child get stricken with cancer? Why would He let that happen?" Suffering is the denominator of desire and the impetus for change. Without suffering, our seeking of pleasure would bring us into a utopian bliss of stasis and thus pleasure must have the elasticity of pain. A world of duality bakes the suffering into the cards. The chance fulfillment of desire in a biological form came with its inherent risks but we all wanted a roll of the dice. I'll take the hit of the drug and put off the reckoning, with interest, until later. This is how the earth game works.

Being awake allows you to understand all suffering is grace. It doesn't mean you don't do what you can to help relieve suffering. You see, the earth is a place for people to suffer and there will always be suffering. Suffering will never be stamped out. If you are awake, you see that the death of the biological form will allow you to escape your imprisonment in a land of suffering. If you are selfish, then you would seek death because you see through the game and are going to check out.

Being awake allows you to see beyond the mind and when you do the clarity of your heart is undeniable. You see the Garden of Mary and all she has created. And then you see her son and eternal flame Jesus and know that he is the essence of who she is. Jesus is love who has come forth. El Corazón de Jesús! The eternal pair is within and comes forth when you are awake and enter into the heart space. The heart space sees the suffering and propels you into service. One who becomes of service to Mary and Jesus in Buddhism would be called a Bodhisattva. A definition of such a being, pulled off the internet, is such: "A Bodhisattva is one who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings."

The definition still puts a Western concept of salvation onto such a being. I'm not sure of the idea of "saving" anyone. There's no eternal damnation but there is desire. If I wanted to help someone full of wants to be "saved" I might point them towards Tantra and have them burn through all their desires in order that they may turn the page on suffering. Carrying desires with you into the afterlife will indeed attract you once again to the carnival called earth. And the suffering will be repeated. For sure, this is a form of cyclical damnation, though hardly eternal. Eventually, all tire of the amusement park! To be eternally damned would be a result of your own damn self being a glutton for punishment. Even the soundest sleeper will eventually wake up.

I am aware I'm casting a shadow upon the playground of Pachamama. I'm equating what she has bequeathed her children to the Christian hell. We have collectively made it hell. I said it before, and I'll reiterate - you're in hell. A hell of our collective making. Take a sober look around you, watch the news, read the papers, and try to tell me it's not so. Once you see it, you'll never un-see it. Better to remain ignorant of your predicament and pretend this earthly existence is a rung above hell. If you see it, then comes the question: What did I do to deserve to go to hell? Desire is the answer you are looking for.

Luckily, the questioning will eventually lead you back to the machinations of the mind and the inherent duality conjured by the great magician. You see with clarity the hell world of suffering brought forth is buttressed by its opposite, which we call heaven. The enlightened being does what they can to relieve the suffering and the degradation of our home in order to lead us to heaven. A further questioning of this strategy reveals it is not heaven we seek, as heaven is another dualistic construct. Through suffering and struggle we find the heart, our mother. We see the heart path to the central axis mundi of our spiritual family, and in tears of joy return home.

being famous

When I see someone going on about how successful they are, or how famous they are: "My name is known throughout the world," I laugh out loud. You either will get the joke when you see it, or after you die.

I became famous while in hell.

How embarrassing!

My sojourns with psychedelic compounds have retained a darkness to the cumulative experiences. The trips into the darkness have been primarily with Ayahuasca and Huachuma plus recently the use of Magic Mushrooms. Initially, I was scared and horrified by the constant repetition of the darkness and the constant unpleasantness of these explorations into the psyche. I wanted the love and light trips. I wanted the exhilaration of bliss which I can sometimes grasp with a good roll of the dice. For the most part, I'd get the low and not the high. Why I never gave up on psychedelics is a mystery. The advice of the maestro rings true, "You get what you need, not what you want."

I was intent on solving the mystery of this strange existence and subconsciously the result of my consciousness exploration was leading to the answers I sought. Even though I tired of the darkness, it is what I needed in order to find what it is I was looking for.

It's quite a shock to realize you are in hell and additionally the prison sentence is a product of your own making. The first thoughts post-realization are, "What did I do to deserve being sent to hell?" and "How do I get out of here?" I've previously answered these questions in blog posts so I'll make short work of the questions. You are in hell because you desire. The chance of desire fulfillment sent you to hell. To get out of hell is to go through life head up and heart forward. Make love your primary go to before all other filters of the mind. The mind becomes the servant and life is experienced through love. The way out of your prison cell while alive is through the heart.

When you die, you don't have the chance of going to hell. Instead, you are leaving hell. Following the natural flow of life will fulfill all the reasons why you came here to serve your time. When you are ready to leave, then you will leave. The thought of death is horrifying to most; yet I'm quite sure once you get to the other side you will have a good laugh, followed by a realization of what you just went through. You will be stunned at how you wanted to stay in hell when this awaits you. Then bewilderment will turn to compassion as you see your sisters and brothers on earth still struggling to find what it is they are looking for. They are still attached to the game and chasing fulfillment before the clock runs out on them. If only they knew.

A funeral becomes a true celebration of life. Bodily death gets you out of jail. Rest in Peace and hopefully you saw through the illusion while ensconced in a body. Re-offending and heading back for another prison term doesn't sound appealing.

After you see beyond the mystery, the pursuits of the flesh might be an embarrassing stain upon your record of life once completed; however, it is dwarfed by the fact you took an incarnation. No matter how much you sink into the pig shit while on earth, the fact that you had the courage to do this is not lost on those who will welcome you home. There is wisdom found in the New Testament story of the Prodigal Son which speaks to this very idea. The Gospel of Luke, chapter 15 from the King James Version of the Bible:

11 And he said, A certain man had two sons:

12 And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living.

13 And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.

14 And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want.

15 And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine.

16 And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.

17 And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!

18 I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee,

19 And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.

20 And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

21 And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.

22 But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:

23 And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry:

24 For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

25 Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard musick and dancing.

26 And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant.

27 And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound.

28 And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him.

29 And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends:

30 But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf.

31 And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.

32 It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.

It is a story of celebration of the son who took on an incarnation and faced adversities. The adventure transformed the son from desirous lech into a man of knowledge and compassion and upon his return from his sojourn in hell, he was greeted with the greatest of fanfare.

Such a celebration awaits your return.

seeing the face of god

Living in a civilized society will eventually make you prone to the cyclical outbreak of madness that is triggered by an unrelated event. In the second decade of the 21st Century, a respiratory pathogen is the impetus for the mass psychosis presently infecting those who do not think for themselves. The cues for groupthink are passed on down from the arbiters of the mind parasite and the puppets dutifully follow along and repeat their marching orders. When you point out the cognitive dissonance of what they are saying, the result is a blank stare followed by an attempt to spin the facts as presented.

My greatest teachers have been found in the darkness of self. My teachers have many faces; each iteration manifesting as part of the lesson plan that lays ahead. The way I look at it is I now see the face of God in my teacher regardless of the disguise he has currently chosen to impart the knowledge. The face is the clue that will help me understand the lesson. Dare I say the darkness is a fantastical beast with many heads.

If I see the face of God in the archetypical dragon, I know he is teaching me destruction. The destroyer has a bad rap; with some merit to the assertion. I mean if you spend a lifetime building something up you may want to preserve what it is you built. Take for instance my identity which is a half-century construction project. The foundation for my ego is the shifting sands of culture and upon that flimsy base I built for myself an avatar that can successfully navigate the vagaries of culture and be moderately successful at it. Even though a voice within is telling me different, I can fit into society and get my piece of the pie. I get a warm place to sleep at night and I can fill my belly. I’m a domesticated dog with a few other privileges thrown in to keep me tame. God as the dragon reveals to me the stark truth, teaches me how to destroy my domestication, and break free from the chains of culture. He is relentless because the life of a sheep for such an awesome power as myself is no life at all.

When we live in society, we suppress a great deal of urges and passions. Failure to suppress our innate self will get you thrown out of polite society and possibly locked up in a cage. So, instead we create a virtual cage for ourselves. Psychological maladies are hard to self-diagnose and thus imagine a situation where in a culture everyone is subject to the same pathology and therefore can’t see it in others. Instead, they see confirmation that everything is as it should be and mind doctors in our culture perpetuate the madness by designating the problem being the disease of the mind that really is a result of the sickness. Anxiety and depression are the physical manifestation of a lifetime of consuming large doses of cultural sugar. The sickness is culture; however, that is not addressed. Our pills treat the symptomatic disease and numb us to the reason we feel the way we do.

We moderns are not unique. Culture has always been subject to the cyclical return of madness. The ancients Greeks had this god they called Dionysos. He’s the mad god that cyclically returns from a faraway land and wreaks havoc upon their tight civilization. Dionysos is associated with liberation and madness. I see the face of God in him so much I laugh. I laugh because I look at my society and see he’s here! Culture is splintering into absurdities. Conservative factors decry the destruction of what once was, while the more permissive within culture accelerate the decline. Dionysos encourages the use of mind-altering substances to remove the filters and see culture for what it truly is. Dionysos is the original gender-bender. The idea of identity is taken to its pathological extremes. Pretty funny, right? You can see now that I pointed it out! Have a good laugh and watch it burn.

The chaos that Dionysos brings into society will have its opposite extreme. The authoritarians among us will make their play for more power. We must understand we hold the power in our hands. We could retreat to the safety of being a sheep because the wolf of freedom stares us down. We can give up the best of what we offer to our master until he has no use for us anymore and sacrifices us. Such is the life of a sheep. The problem is you think you are a sheep are thus the wolf is waiting to devour you. You are not a sheep. Dig deep and you will see it. You will see the face of God within, and that face is a jaguar. The wolf will retreat in deference when you re-awaken to your power. The kingdom is yours to reclaim.

garden of the heart

We have a religion that declares the good go to heaven and the wicked go to hell. Christianity is a religion of the righteous mind. The mind creates polar extremes. The mind delineates and creates the objectification which makes the world come alive.

The name for the sacred cactus of the Andes, Huachuma, means no head. The idea is that with no head, you have no mind. The ideal state to be in with Huachuma is to turn off the mind, relax, and float downstream. When I have done such a thing, I have felt a cosmic love like no other. A state of bliss with a recognition to live within the heart with love for all is the only way to live. The experience is profound to the core, and I have wondered why when I am no longer in the medicine I can't return to this exquisite Garden of the divine feminine? I am being led in the direction of the path of the heart; to live my life in the way that Huachuma has shown me.

When you fully engage the mind with Huachuma, he takes you to heaven and then drops you into hell. It's quite the roller coaster ride, and hey, I always liked the amusement park, especially the newest ride ever summer which was undoubtedly another iteration of the roller coaster. Man, I fully rode the Huachuma ride. Sometimes I can be thick, and it's fortunate plant medicines have patience if there's a glimmer of hope in the patient. The course will be re-run until you get it. I started seeing what grandfather was showing me and then the last few times I have drank the medicine I understood. I still engage the mind, but I know when to shut it down and I see what the medicine is teaching me. I called the blog post about the understanding "Heaven or Hell." I figured it out.

Ayahuasca had a similar progression of showing me the darkness within which I kept stubbornly objectifying. She sent me on quests to slay the dragon, only to get an inkling I was that dragon. The repetition of darkness taught me courage and the warrior spirit has served me well. It was when I spent a few evenings with Magic Mushrooms that it became laughingly clear I was the very darkness I spent years in conflict with.

Early in the Book of Genesis, God tosses Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and places a cherubim with a flaming sword at the eastern entrance to the Garden. The two ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This tree activates the mind and creates a world of duality. The sword of the cherubim now guarding a return to Eden twirls in all directions, preventing access to the forbidden Tree of Life. It's quite the interesting puzzle. How do you get back into the Garden? Remember, the entrance is the eastern gate. The Israelites head east in search of returning to paradise. They find Jerusalem upon earth, but ultimately, the holy city causes more suffering. Though Jerusalem manifests the Garden, it becomes clear the location is not physical. What's the answer to the riddle? It's simple! You can't head east to return to an eastern gate. You have to go west. West is the left-hand path. It's the path of the heart. Walking westward to the eastern gate with no mind will allow full access back into the Garden. We build into our cultural language structures words that steer us towards the right-hand path, right? Are you righteous? The left-hand is sinister! Being a contrarian to the prevailing culture will help you immensely upon your journey.

I've created this world as the ultimate challenge. I have placed many obstacles in the path which will take me away from the heart. I clearly see the path of the heart and I know it is the way towards what it is I'm seeking. I intuit the number of souls who find the path are very few though it's really not all too difficult. We are wired to physically look for answers and thus we think the Garden of Eden, the Kingdom of Heaven, Nirvana, or whatever moniker you wish to give this place is a location of a reward you will be given if you are a good person in this lifetime. Instead, I discovered it's all here and now. The Garden is accessible through the heart. The path of the heart is obscured by the mind. Heading east to return home to a metaphorical Jerusalem will still trap you. The return will be futile via the glory of the right-hand path of the sun. The cherub with the twirling and flaming sword who guards the return to the Garden is sidestepped by entering the heart space, bypassing the cherubim mind, and taking the left-hand path back home.