Spiders As Totem Animals

When Wolf Woman and I still worked at the same place, she fed crows in the side yard every morning. They’d be watching the parking lot and the five of them would swoop in when they saw her truck pull up. She’d come inside and get a bag of stale bread, and outside they’d flap and caw at her feet until she tore up some slices and threw them down.

When she left for another job, Wolf Woman left the feeding of the crows to me. They call to each other when they see me come out with a bag in my hand, but they wait on top of the building or in nearby trees until I go back inside before they come down. I’ve never been able to inspire the kind of devotion they had for Wolf Woman.

Wolf Woman said that it’s because crows are her totem animal, so I suppose they recognize her. I asked  her what she thought my totem animal was, and she said she’d could give me some kind of reading to determine that. On Friday I told her I suspect mine is the spider.

Last night I dreamed I was talking with someone and gradually it got harder and harder to form words correctly. Finally I couldn’t ignore the problem any longer. “Excuse me,” I said, and fished a big daddy longlegs spider out of the corner of my mouth. I fished again just to be sure and found another one, and another one, until I had thrown five or six to the ground. I thought I was finished, but then I noticed more of them crawling up the backs of my arms and up my shoulders, presumably trying to sneak inside my mouth again. 

I dream about spiders periodically, and based on the themes in these dreams it’s hard to tell if they’re friendly or not. The dreams are rarely happy ones, but they tend to happen at times when I need a warning.

The Dilemmas of Sevens

So according to the Riso-Hudson enneagram test, my personality fits the description of sevens pretty closely. Sevens entertain many interests. They tend to be the most ADD sorts of the types, I think. Here I am at midlife, having spent way too much time in school and not enough earning real money, and I feel like I never got to learn the things I really want to do because of a shortage of time and money. Here they are:

Learn to play the banjo ukelele

Become a proficient belly-dancer

Spend 8 weeks in Peru attaining basic competence as a Spanish speaker

Write and publish a novel

Spend a month or so at a Buddhist retreat

Go abroad with the Willing Workers On Organic Farms program for six weeks or so

Learn to sew my own clothes

Build an earthbag house

Understand the five-element system in Chinese medicine

Visit Petra

Participate in a sweat lodge

Learn to kayak

Attain some level of enlightenment

Spend time in Jungian analysis

Pay off all mydebts, including mortgage

Complete the Ngondro

Integrate daily meditation and yoga/chi gong into my life in place of surfing the internet for interesting news

Plant my own garden and get a lot of our food from it

Learn to really cook

Become a master in my field

Would it be possible to do all that in say, ten years?

Mabon Ritual Results

Last night Quint and I did the Bon-style Mabon ritual I wrote about here. I made the dough for our tormas from a mixture of millet and corn flour with a little rice protein powder thrown in. After we made the tormas, I baked them for 20-30 minutes at 200 degrees to see if that would make them sturdier and less crumbly, and it did work nicely.

Once it got dark we walked down to a park and made vodka offerings to the earth, to the sky, to water, and to fire. We did this by dipping a fingertip into the vodka and flicking drops off a fingertip for each one, then we tasted the vodka ourselves.

I brushed my torma down the length of my lung meridians -  a friend recently reminded me that my usual hours of sleeplessness correspond to the lungs on the chinese body clock. She also suggested that I may have unresolved feelings of grief or an inability to let go of something, because those emotional states correspond with the lungs. I also held the torma against my lower back, which has been creaky lately. Then I threw the torma into the darkness. We had to use Quint’s compass to determine the proper directions to throw our tormas.

It says in Tenzin Wangyal’s book that if the spell works and the malefic influences in question are indeed pacified by the offering, you may dream of insects or fluid or other things like that leaving your body.

I once again couldn’t sleep between the hours of three and five a.m. last night, but during the little sleep I did get my dreams had the flavor of those H.P. Lovecraft movies, Re-Animator and From Beyond. I don’t think that’s a good sign. A former co-worker also made an appearance, a woman I considered a good friend at the time but who I learned later may not have been so kind to me behind my back.

IPod Spell

I was reading this book, which is potent magical theory and cuts out a lot of the steps people deem essential to magical practice.  I’ve undertaken the study of pagan ritual with some talented and enlightened folks, but for years I’ve underutilized my magical opportunities because all the steps involved with ritual seemed like too much trouble. Smudge, cast a circle, call in the directions in some flowery and overdone verbal fashion, invoke some dieties, state intent, enact the body of the ritual while straining to reach a meditative or otherwise altered state, raise the cone of energy, cut it loose, fall out, devoke, open the circle. I’m sure I’m leaving something out too. And when you have a number of people involved, there’s a lot of talking and bonding and so forth. It can take all day, and that doesn’t include the prior planning involved. When faced with all that, I often settle for wishing.

So one of the exercises in this book is this: Think of something you want to happen. Come up with some dance movements or steps. Decide this dance means the same thing as your statement about what you want to happen. Dance. Record your results.

I modified this by agreeing with myself that whatever song first struck me in the IPod rotation and my free-form movement to it would mean the same thing as my statement about what I want to happen.  “I will gain proficiency in _________ and will be generously supported by it materially, physically, spiritually and emotionally by December of this year.”

Then I hit the skip forward button on the IPod until I came upon this song. I did a little merengue, a little bellydance. Much fun.

The great thing about actually getting down to spellwork is it forces you to define what you want in specific terms, and also to consider the possible side effects of getting what you want. For example, I’m always nervous about doing spells for money because I’m afraid that will result in a family member croaking and leaving me an inheritance, or me winning an out of court settlement after getting hit by a city bus. It would be hard to enjoy wealth under those circumstances.

Mabon Ritual, Bon Style

I think Sunday Quint and I are going to celebrate the Mabon pagan holiday in a Bon Buddhist-flavored fashion. While this might seem like a clash of magical cultures, I still believe that if we could go back far enough, we’d see that both traditions spring from a common root.

Mabon and its predecessor on the pagan calendar of red-letter days, Lughnasadh, are both about reaping the growing season’s harvest and making an offering of part of it as a gesture of respect and gratitude toward harvest gods. I’ve got some dried herbs I grew earlier this year, so I might use those in our ceremony.

In Bon, offerings are made constantly. At the close of a Bon Buddhist meditation session, practitioners dedicate the benefits of any merit they’ve generated to the benefit of all sentient beings. In one Ngondro meditation exercise, practitioners imagine chopping and cooking themselves up as an offering to sentient beings in this and other realms. None of the Gobi Desert dwellers I met during my trip to Mongolia would consume vodka without offering some to the spirits first. But for this ritual, Quint and I plan to offer fingerprint Tormas to any spiritual entities that may be planning to make our lives hard.

Tenzin Wangyal wrote about fingerprint tormas in Healing With Form, Energy and Light.  To make them, you mix up some flour (Tibetans use barley flour) until it’s got the consistency of Play-Doh. (I might include some of my dried herbs in this mixture.) Then women squeeze a lump of dough in their left hands and men in thier right in order to make the torma. It should have the imprint of all five fingers in it. You touch this torma to areas of your body where you suffer affliction. Then you make the torma an offering by tossing it away from you, where malefic influences can feed upon it and become satisfied, hopefully becoming motivated to leave you alone.

If you want to get technical about it, you can so some research to determine the exact direction in which you should throw your torma.  Based on your birthday and your Tibetan astrological sign, one of twelve points on the compass is dedicated to you, and bad influences come from the opposite direction. That’s where you need to throw your torma.  There’s a table in the back of the book that helps you figure that out.

Still don’t know where we can go for this activity. Outside would be nice. But it’s hard to find a place outside where strangers won’t be likely to tramp through at any given time.

The Dad Principle

Dads aren’t just guys with kids. They represent a larger force in the universe. This Dad-force, archetype if you will,  has its positive side. But I don’t think I’d be writing about that today.

This subject came up on Sunday while I was hanging out with Sr. Elfman. He’s a teacher, and he was complaining about the father of one of his students. This father, who is divorced from the child’s mother, is suing to have the child removed from Sr. Elfman’s school. He wants the child to go to another school. Wants to drag himself, his ex-wife, and a number of other people into court so he can disrupt the child’s life and assert his Dadness in the largest possible pain-in-the-ass way.

“What is it about Dads?” Sr. Elfman said. “My Dad’s the same way. Can’t ever leave well enough alone. Still loves to blame my mom for everything. Can’t forget about the past. Won’t learn anything new.”

“It’s like they see something going along nicely without them and they think, ‘Hey, I must interfere with that,’” I said.

I see that kind of thinking in my father in law, and I used to see it in my Dad. Once he drove me out of the house, my Dad pretty much made it policy to leave me alone. To my face anyway. He chews my Mom’s ear off about how I’m not doing this or that right. These men, who’ve made some pretty obvious mistakes in their own lives, still think they’re smarter than everybody else and therefore obligated to opine and advise about what you should do instead of what you are doing. To them, life is one big football game. They can’t understand that the game looks different and plays differently to the people on the field than it does to spectators (Dads) on the couch. They don’t understand that the couch is not an appropriate place to make judgements from.

They believe their sole holy purpose is to evaluate and criticize.

This morning I went to Yoga class for the first time in several months. Last night I returned to my Chi Kung class after about a year off.  I’m also slowly getting back into a daily meditation practice. I feel good about all this, but not too good. Because I have an internalized Dad who’s already taking note of these activities. He’s not going to interfere for another few weeks, until I start to get comfortable in my new routine. Then he’s going to start with the evaluations. You didn’t give %100 percent today. You skipped class once this week. You aren’t getting the most out of this. Suddenly, Chi Kung, Yoga, and meditation will be transformed into chores and obligations, so I’ll start mentally checking out during these activities, simply waiting for them to be over.  And the internal Dad will criticize for that too. Hell, by that point, the internal Mom will be helping out. And I’ll get sick of all the nagging and quit classes and meditation again.

A long time ago I read a book called Dark Hearts: The Unconscious Forces That Drive Men’s Lives. Truthfully I can’t remember much about it other than being very impressed with it, so impressed with it I loaned it out to a man I thought could benefit from it and now I don’t have it any more. I hope it’s doing some good in the world. Anyway one thing I took from the book is that deep down, as a group, men are unsure of what their purpose is in the world. Women’s roles are more defined. They have babies and sustain families, and they don’t necessarily need men for that.  For boys whose fathers go to work, there’s always the question of “So what’s he doing while he’s gone all day?” If he asks about that he’ll likely get “I am a financial adviser” or “I broker ocean-going freight.” Those activities are hard for a child to visualize, so said child becomes suspicious of the real importance of what Dad does at work, and anxious about his own future as an adult.

So to make a long story short, men instinctively look for ways to make themselves appear valuable and seem important. In many cases by being big, critical blowhards. Which their children internalize and torture themselves with for the rest of their lives, in some cases long after the actual Dads are dead and buried.

All that said, I’d like to thank my Dad for taking the time to show me what hickory nuts are, and for baking bread from them. The sassafrass root tea was good too. And thanks for showing me how to identify poison ivy and Death’s Head mushrooms, and how to identify the most common types of trees. And for being generally more interesting, level-headed, and funny than any of my other family members. When he wasn’t being an enraged, surly, or simply bitchy jackass. Take some Midol, you hormonal git. You are such a baby that you must whine and bully others when your blood sugar starts to drop or you become the slightest bit uncomfortable. But thanks for not being the total psycho your dad was. Thanks for not putting the rest of the family out on the side of the road, leaving them to walk four hours home, like he did in a dumbass fit of pique.

Bodhicitta Practice

For the next 30 days I plan to focus on the Bodhicitta section of Ngondro practices and accumulations. I’m having a hard time with it. Specifically because I can’t believe I’m capable of enlightenment in this lifetime, and because I don’t believe others are either.

The Boddhicitta exercise asks you to think of someone you love, and of how if you could, you’d take on that person’s suffering in order to spare them from it. Once you get a fix on that, you imagine applying that kind of compassion to all living beings, even the people you can’t stand. Now that’s a tall order, but it’s doable. But the next step is a doozy: You commit yourself to achieving enlightenment so that you can help all beings become enlightened.

Well, now that I’ve done some meditation and been to some retreats, I’ve become a little more familiar with just how dark my heart is. Sure I’d like to achieve enlightenment, but even when I’m aware that I’m being a self-absorbed pain-in-the-ass who’s wandering in samsara, most of the I can’t stop.  Here lately I can’t even do sitting practice on a regular basis. I’d rather just feel guilty about not doing it. So, the best I was hoping for with my practice was to simply avoid being reborn into the animal realm in my next life.

With the Bodhicitta vow,  you voice your commitment to work toward enlightenment so you can help bring all sentient beings to enlightenment. That’s a great sentiment, but in the back of my mind, I’m thinking “Come on now. You really mean everybody?”

I hate to keep blaming the Jesus Cult and my background in it, but here I go again. In the mythology I grew up with, we were told there was only one sinless individual. He was also the only one who was capable of working toward the Salvation of everybody. His name was Jesus, and he lived a long time ago. We were to strive to be like him, even though we never could be, and we should always feel bad about it and ask for forgiveness constantly. Through this striving, we might be able to brownnose our way into heaven, but certainly not everybody would and those who were not were going to spend eternity in Hell.

Maybe my Bodhicitta problems stem from being unable to leave the Christian paradigm behind. I learned a lot of guilt skills in church too, which may have something to do with my reluctance to sit on a daily basis. I can’t help but evaluate my practice as I do it, and to feel guilty if I believe I’m not doing it well. And when it does go well, I just remind myself that it won’t go well later, not to get so smug and happy about it. So there’s never a positive reward for doing it, other than the benefits which are related to the practice. Those are significant but I just can’t face the incessant internal nagging that goes on when I sit.

There are plenty of practices that strain plausibility in the Ngondro, but this one is really giving me fits.

Snakebite Dream

I was living outside Austin, TX (I’ve never even been there) and was working in my yard. I noticed that toads were getting quite lively in the clover near the house. Later in the day the lively toad area had moved, and I decided to take a closer look because it might mean something. Sure enough, I watched the toads jumping around and saw that it was all happening in front of a rattlesnake. The toads were evacuating ahead of the beast. I was glad I’d noticed, because I’d have walked right over it if I hadn’t.

I went back around the corner of the house, which incidently looked like my maternal grandmother’s house. I’d been so careful about not stepping on rattlesnakes but then I went and got sloppy about handling the one draped around my neck; tried to remove it by grabbing it too far from the head, and it got pissed off and bit the back of my hand. I wasn’t surprised to find the snake there, which is surprising. It was just a low-level dangerous thing that had been there so long I’d forgotten about it or started taking it for granted.

Not sure how, but by the end of the dream I’d been fanged on the back of my other hand.

Teeth were a theme in my dreamland last night. I also dreamed that one of mine fell out while was watching TV in the living room here. I walked down the street to my friend’s parents’ house, which is really across town. They were getting ready for a formal dinner party at their house (evening gowns, tuxedos) but since they were both dentists, (not in reality) they decided to take time out to help me. I spit the tooth out and there it was root and all, longer than my palm and with some jawbone attached. Necrotic black fissures ran along its length. 

I’m not sure if they decided to fix it for free then and there because it was the result of bad work they’d done on my teeth in the past, or if they were just cool that way.

Tarot readings lately have indicated that either I’m deceiving somebody and doing them wrong out of selfishness, or somebody’s doing that to me.  The cards indicate I’m not seeing what’s going on even though it’s right there in front of me, that my blindness is somehow an unwillingness to see on my part. I am capable of some dumbass shit that way. It’s driving me crazy trying to figure this out. The snake dream makes me think of this situation because, although I was adept at doing detective work to find the snake in the grass, I was totally unable to come up with a plan for dealing with the one around my neck. Even though it was right there and had been for a long time, it took me by surprise. 

There’s so much potential for danger from so many arenas in my life right now, I guess I have become numb to it.  Business has been so bad and money’s been so tight, I haven’t been able to afford some of the things that might help mitigate unforseen events. Health insurance is the big one. For several weeks I was riding around with a broken seatbelt, and every time I drove somewhere I’d think, please no accident today. My neighbor me fixed it for free, and if he hadn’t I’d still be riding around in a death trap.

I traded services to get some dental work earlier this year, but the other party has yet to cash in her half of the deal.

Re: Scarier Turn/Lucid Dreams

Did some Google research and found references to something called Sleep Paralysis, which is I guess was happened to me in my last post.  Most people who described experiences with it reported feelings that they were pinned by something sitting on their chests. But a few mentioned feeling pressure on their foreheads.

Sleep paralysis happens when stages of sleep get mixed up and start happening at the same time. The reason you can’t move is that your body releases chemical inhibitors to keep you from flailing about in your dreams and possibly hurting yourself.  The sense of terror comes about because the brain’s fear machine, the amygdala, is being put through its paces at that time. Sometimes people in sleep paralysis still dream even though their eyes are open and they’re awake, and those are the people who report being abducted by aliens, according to another article.

People who experience sleep paralysis tend to suffer from sleep deprivation or other disturbances like narcolepsy. In my case I’ve been quite the insomniac here lately.

However, my research also indicated that some people use sleep paralysis to shoehorn themselves into lucid dreams. It looks like it may be a step in the process of being lucid dream proficient. Here I have to admit that over the past several weeks, all of my meditative routines, including those of lucid dreaming, have gone to shit. The only thing I still do on a regular basis is pray to Salgye Du Dalma to help me lucid dream. So maybe I got what I was asking for, though it scared the shit out of me.

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading a book about the history of Central Asian shamanistic practices and thier influence upon Bon Buddhism. This book, Bo And Bon, talks about how in the shamanistic worldview there’s a spirit realm that, while it’s not strictly a part of our world, it has effects in this one. For example, according to the Bo it’s a bad idea to build your house on a spirit road. All that otherdimensional traffic and coming and going will disprupt life in the house on a very subtle level and it can make people sick, and one source reports having an experience similar to sleep paralysis shortly after his parents moved the family house onto a spirit road. People might see or dream of dwarves and such if their home is on a spirit road, and they’ll have to relocate the house. So maybe yesterday’s dwarves and goblins and today’s ETs are the same thing or at least similar.

If you can learn to manage sleep paralysis without feeling terror, that’s probably good preparation for how not to panic in the Bardo.

And Yet A Scarier Turn

Fucking covered up in nightmares last night, I was.

It didn’t help that the husband was sleeping restless, up and down a lot, and snoring, so I slept on the couch. The cat food bowl was getting low, so Gin was restless too. Outside there was a lot of first responder traffic. It sounded like everything in town with a siren first went east, then west on the nearby thoroughfare.

I dreamed I looked outside and saw about fifteen Batman figures dashing through the darkness on separate crimefighting missions. It had gotten so bad out there that we needed that many.

Since this was the kind of dream which incorporates stimuli from the real world, it became hard to tell what was dream and what not. But I at least thought I came awake because of pressure on my forehead, in the center and above my eyebrows. It felt like the end of an index finger.

Fuck, that must be cat, I thought. Hussey. That’s pretty brazen, applying a paw to my face like that. Then I opened my eyes and looked and there was no cat, just the edge of the couch and the floor beyond it. I freaked out. But I couldn’t move. So I was screaming “LEAVE ME ALONE!” inside my head over and over, until I had the power to move again and the pressure on my forehead disappeared. At that point I saw Gin the cat was asleep on the back of the couch behind me.

During my panic I was sure a ghost or other unseen, untrustworthy entity was prodding my head. Quite upsetting. At first, I resolved to get up and turn on some lights to better cope with the emotional aftermath, but I pretty much went right back to sleep and dream.

I was walking down a wooded path with my husband. It was a warm winter day after a cold snap. We crossed a small stream full of different kinds of very hungry turtles. I wanted to feed them cat food so they’d have enough calories to make it through till spring, but I’d heard that animals should hibernate on an empty stomach, so I wasn’t sure what to do.

Then we saw an old Oldsmobile on the side of the path. I knew there was a girl alone in there in the front passenger seat. Then I saw the car begin to crumple, like something invisible was crushing it with her in there. I thought, uh-uh, no, we are not having any more of this horror movie shit, and I made myself wake up.

So I guess my question is, what do I make of this? Was something really poking my third eye, and if so, what and why? Should I just write it off as a meaningless wierd dream?

Moon Balloon

In this dream there was a white, aspirin-shaped balloon the size of small house. It had a will of its own and sometimes it floated way up above the trees and other times it came down into the city streets floated not far above people’s heads, like a wandering full moon.

Sometimes it sent down banners people could grab onto and the balloon would take them for a ride. I saw an eleven-year-old girl fall onto pavement and get smashed up pretty badly that way, so I was very anti-moon balloon and told all my friends how dangerous it was, and not to go for rides with it.

Some other stuff I don’t remember happened and later in the dream I was riding from the moon balloon, sailing over the countryside, and finding that there was more to it than the ride. There was a definite buzz that went with a trip with the moon balloon. Not a dopey buzz like pot, not a metallic, frantic buzz like acid, not a goofy buzz like alcohol. Not like any buzz I’ve really experienced outside of a dream, in fact. It was like a blissful, heightened sense of awareness.

Lately I’ve been wishing there was still a recreational drug I could use that I’m not tired of. Maybe the moon balloon was a symbol of prescription drug abuse, but I as far as I can tell all of those just offer the goofy sleepy variety of buzz I am totally over.

Well this dream also reminded me of a short story I read in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine circa 19early80something called “You Can’t Go Back” by R.A. Lafferty. I googled it and found other people remembering it fondly. I deserve lauds for remembering a story, author and title from something I read in 5th grade.

Balloon Moon realizations

 

I think the 11-year old girl who got smashed up in the Moon Balloon dream was me.

 

I occurred to me after I wrote about the Moon Balloon dream that I might have been about 11 when I read that R.A. Lafferty story the dream reminded me of. And that was right about the time I started forgetting how to be happy as a default frame of mind. Gradually over the next few years I became the kind of person who needs a reason to be happy.

 

My grandfather Chambliss (on my Mom’s side) died that year, and she was not the same after that. I never saw them talk much or seem to have much of a relationship, but apparently he was some kind of linchpin holding her together. From there on out, my Mom went into full, psychotic, haze the daughter mode. You’re too fat. You’re too skinny. Your skin is terrible. Why do you get sick? I’m in a bad mood so I’m going to make fun of you until you cry, and it won’t be any better later when I’m begging for your forgiveness because you’ll just be desperate for me to leave you alone.

 

Don’t get me wrong, I love my mom and she’s done a host of wonderful things for me. But much like her dad, she’s got a Jeckyll and Hyde personality.

 

I never cried when Grandpa Chambliss died and don’t remember missing him. I just felt scared because everyone around me was so distraught and things were changing.

 

But earlier this year, right after some big grief inducing events, I dreamed about him. We were going somewhere in his truck. I looked over and saw him behind the wheel and grief hit me like backhanded slap. But I don’t think it was for him. It was for the fact that somebody who lived next door to me and who was so closely related didn’t leave more of a vacuum when he died.

 

I’m told that at my parents’ wedding, Grandfather Chambliss went up to my Grandmother Moorfield and said “Well, we were hoping our daughter would marry somebody better educated and financially well off.” Granfather Chambliss used to smack my father around. My father didn’t hit him back, and I don’t know why. I’m pretty sure my dad could have taken him, especially if the old man had been drinking, which was often enough.  Finally they had a big verbal confrontation and stopped speaking or going near each other.

 

The Chamblisses are pretty snotty, and I guess I’ve always had a solid sense that they all consider me a Moorfield and therefore inferior. Even my mom has this sense of superiority, and she too considers my father beneath her. She keeps trying to Chamblissfy me.

 

When both families are lower middle class and the head of one is an alcoholic and the other is a Klansman, I don’t see much point in arguing who’s more trashy than who. But I guess it was important to the Chamblisses. I’m sure Grandpa Chambliss was catching some shit at the time because he was spending a lot of time at the home of an African American lady friend and all the people at the Baptist Church he attended were outraged; among them was the woman he was married to. So maybe he needed somebody to bully.

 

In our town, all the black people lived in a clearly defined area. I was a slow study and it took me a long time to put that together – one of the houses on the school bus route looked just like my aunt Mary’s, and I told my friends it was, and they looked at me like they thought I was crazy. They understood this part of the bus route was in the Land Where No White People Live, and eventually I came to that understanding too.

 

Later on when the bus went through there in the afternoons, this little black kid I didn’t even know would ask me, “Isn’t that your grandaddy’s truck?” and point out the window. I’d look every time, confused and thinking, What’s he talking about? Who is he? Why does he act like he’s trying to keep a straight face? How does he know who my granddaddy is, or who I am?

 

There are strangers in my hometown who know my family story better than I do.

  

Lafferty link

I couldn’t find a link to “You Can’t Go Back,” but I did find a link to another Lafferty story I read as a kid: http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/lafferty5/lafferty51.html

Here’s another one I read just now: http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/lafferty4/lafferty41.html

That Lafferty was way out there.

Exorcism and Julius Ceasar

My husband Quint and I rented a movie to watch last week, and we found ourselves sitting through a preview for The Exorcism of Emily Rose. “Oh shit,” Quint said. He snatched up the remote, frantically pushed buttons to try to fast forward past it, but to no avail. We sat there, resigned and trapped on the couch. I tried not to look but I couldn’t help it.

Why is that image of the kid in the classroom with the blacked out eyeballs so horrifying? Why does the voice of the demon on the tape player make me want to fly to Italy and hide under the Pope’s skirts? Why did it make me have nightmares? If a movie preview gets to me this badly, I’d probably need Thorazine to get through the whole thing, not to mention counseling afterward and a five-year’s supply of demon-be-gone spray. The thing that makes it a self-perpetuating torture is this instinctive belief: That my fear of demon possession is going to open the gates of hell and create an exit ramp across the river Styx and into my body. This belief of course creates more fear, which draws worse demons. Pretty soon you’re not just attracting misdemeanor offenders from the upper levels of hell, you’re drawing the most awful felons from the dungeon levels of Hell. The ones Satan himself likes to supervise. Ugh.

I don’t know if it’s because we were raised Southern Baptist or if it’s because commercials for movies like The Exorcist and The Omen scared us to death in our early formative years, but watching content having to do with demonic possession makes both Quint and I panic.
So a couple of days later when I had a nightmare about demon possession, he didn’t really want to hear about it. When I said, “Hey, let me tell you what I just dreamed – it was about that The Exorcism of Emily Rose preview,” it was like I’d just said “Hey, I just got this bag of crunchy cat turds, want one?”

Well anyway I was sleeping and this dream was kind of abstract to begin with, so there’s not a lot of detail to report. At first in the dream I was watching The Exorcism of Emily Rose, but after a while I was in it. Maybe that’s why the details get sketchy here because I’ve haven’t actually seen the movie. In the dream I was preoccupied with not becoming a main character because I thought that would make me a target for possession. It was going pretty well, and I was watching other characters to see what they did wrong before they got themselves possessed, and I came to a realization. Now this doesn’t actually make sense, but it did in the dream:

Demons make the jump into people who resign themselves to doing something they don’t want to do because they think they have to do it because they want to think of themselves as good people.

I realize that’s kind of convoluted. Bear with me.

For example, in the dream a demon was waiting in a street person and wanted to transfer into a suit and trenchcoat wearing man who was coming down the sidewalk. The street person reached out from where he was sitting on the ground and asked for money. The trenchcoat wearing man didn’t want to give in, but he thought to himself that he was obligated to because he’s a good person. He felt guilty but he felt smug at the same time about being a good person, and it was that combination of feelings that invited the demon in.

And in the dream I had the thought that this was like what happens in Julius Caesar, a play I haven’t read since ninth grade so forgive me if I don’t have my facts straight.

Brutus is a good guy and Caesar trusts him. But Cassius manipulates Brutus by appealing to his sense of himself as a responsible, good man. Cassius says something like “Hey Brutus, we all know Caesar’s out of hand and you’re the only one who can overthrow him. You have an obligation to bring him down.” Once that thought takes root in Brutus’ mind, he becomes an assassin and then the tragedy gets rolling. The knives come out and Portia has to start swallowing coals. Ugh. Wasn’t hanging, drowning, or defenestration available in ancient Rome?
I get the feeling my subconscious was trying to tell me something important but I can’t figure out what the hell it might be.

Them’s the breaks

 

A couple of years ago, I carpooled to permaculture training in the mountains with Laslow, a Greensboro friend of mine. We learned all about Peak Oil theory and ways we could grow our own food and design yards and homes to maximize energy efficiency and take advantage of things like passive solar heat and collected rainwater. At the time, I wondered if all of the training would ever pay off for me.

 

Two years later, it looks like the collapse has arrived, but I’m still living in a condo building where I can’t so much as put up a clothesline, much less install rain barrels or solar panels. I’m living the permaculture ideal in some ways by sharing resources (a roof, walls, dumpster) with others, and save time and gas by visiting and sharing meals within the building. But I can’t just go out and dig up the yard to plant perennials and practice what I’ve learned, either.

 

I’ve also gotten married, something I’d been wanting to do for a long time because I could get out of debt if I could share bills with someone and have a regular source for sex. My husband is charming and hot, but he’s too stressed out to have sex because he got laid off nine days after we got married and he’s struggled to make money ever since. I lost my job right after he did and I’ve been bringing in even less money.

 

When I look back at my life I see a pattern of dealing with my sense of poverty by focusing on one thing and thinking, “If I can just do that” or “If I can just get that.” Like graduate from college, snag a certain boyfriend, get this or that certification. But none of these things has led to the promised land. This is the essential human problem, according to Buddhism as I understand it.

 

Cormac McCarthy is a great writer to read through a Buddhist lens. His villains are so chilling because they’re Bodhisattva-like in their insights but sociopaths at the same time.

 

Here’s a quote from Cities of the Plain. Bad guy Eduardo is speaking to Billy Parham about John Grady Cole and the woman Cole loves. Eduardo is explaining to Parham why this love story won’t have a happy ending.

 

Eduardo says: “He (Cole) has in his head a certain story. Of how things will be. In this story he will be happy. What is wrong with this story?”

 

“You tell me.”

 

“What is wrong with this story is that it is not a true story. Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of. “

 

No matter what we give up to get them, our goals become more elusive. We are part of a game, a story writing itself, and the universe hates simple stories. I guess we do, too, because the hero of the above story is not the smart guy with all the answers but the dumbass who’s risking his life for love.

 

Antichrist Identity Crisis

As a child I feared I was the antichrist. I don’t know where this fear came from but I do know the majority of my waking life was involved with reassuring myself it wasn’t true while feeling a dreadful sinking certainty it was. Fear of death and hell drained all enjoyment out of living sometimes. I told no one of my fear.

 

This period of time coincided with the onset of second grade and my beginning to have trouble in school. It was also after a bout with pneumonia and a hospital stay. I’m sure being raised Southern Baptist didn’t help. There’s also a chance I got it somehow from the family – I have some second cousins who are obsessed with the apocalypse. They’re in their forties, dress alike, live in their car, and call themselves cheerleaders for Jesus. 

 

I just realized this fact about my background explains why I can’t watch movies about demonic possession.

Nudity at Work

Standing around naked for art students breeds weird experiences. That’s why several of the more interesting stories I can tell have to do with my time as an art model.

Art modeling generally consists of two kinds of poses. Gesture poses are random – you move around and freeze at a certain point, and you hold the pose for 30 seconds or so to let students get down the basics of your form. Longer poses might require you to sit still for 20-30 minutes, take a break, and come back and get into the pose again for 20-30 minutes. You might do that for two or three hours. The art instructor might put out masking tape so you’ll remember where your feet went when you come back, because you need to recreate the pose as closely as possible. An extended pose needs to be comfortable, or you’ll fidget the whole time and make people complain.

So I’m doing an extended pose for this painting class. The room is warm, and I can see a pretty day outside through a rear window. I’m on a platform at the front of the room, stretched out and leaning back on one arm. All’s well.

The students are working intently. Then an older lady on the front row of students facing me starts whispering to get the attention of the girl next to her.

“Jeannie!” hisses Continuing Ed lady a couple of times before she gets her neighbor’s attention. The teacher has left the room.

Finally Jeannie looks at Continuing Ed lady.

“You won’t never believe what happened to me last Friday,” the lady says, pursing her lips and shaking her head.

“What?”

“Well, my car broke down on the side of the road in GOOCHLAND.”

“GOOCHLAND?” Jeannie said with a look of horror on her face.

I’d never heard of this place, but tones they used to talk about it made me think of the Lord of the Rings and how Bilbo and Frodo and all the residents of Middle Earth probably spoke of Mordor.

“I had to walk two miles down the road to a gas station and call my brother-in-law to come get me,” nodded the lady. Then she quit all her painting pretenses and put one hand on her hip as she recalled the phantasmagorical events that happened next. Here’s how she related it:

“I was in there waiting, and IN walks this MAN, in these WHITE sweat pants, with SHIT running down BOTH legs, and he comes walking up to ME, and he says, ‘Ma’am, do ya’ll have hot dogs?’ and I said ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t work here,’ and he left.”

I roll out of my pose and into a ball and quake with gut-busting laughter, interspersed with snorts and wheezing attempts to breathe. Nobody can paint me anymore. The instructor comes back in and says “Hey, what’s wrong with the model?” and I lie there with tears streaming down my face.

After a few minutes I recover and collect myself. But then I make a fatal mistake.

“What else did that guy in the sweatpants look like?” I ask.

She looks off into space. “You know, he was not an unattractive fellow,” she says, and I am wrecked again. I eventually stop laughing, but then every few minutes I think something else about this story, like, What are the chances that somebody’d happen to wear white sweat pants the day he shits himself? What would make a man who’d just shit his white sweatpants walk shamelessly into a public place and ask a casual question like that? Why would a man who’d shit himself be craving hot dogs? How could she see past the shit and notice the attractive qualities of this character? Etc., and I curl up into a laughing ball again for three more minutes.

There’s something about trying not to laugh in a situation where laughter is not appropriate that is, in itself, unbearably funny. And if you have nothing else to do besides sit still, you cannot escape how funny it is. It is devastating. If we could harness the power of that kind of funny, I can’t even get my head around how world-changing it would be.

Follow your bliss?

Joseph Campbell advised me to follow my bliss, and I found myself at the plasma donation bank with a needle in my arm.

 

For the longest time I wanted to be a writer and I thought that was my bliss, but I don’t do so well with solitude and when there’s nobody to read you that’s not very motivating.  And for most of my adult life I’ve sought to have day jobs to allow me to pay bills and write in my spare time. I found that said day jobs left me such a wrecked shell of a human being by the end of the day that I didn’t have much energy for hobbies.

 

So I said to hell with it and quit a teaching job, which paid good money, and went to work for a newspaper that didn’t pay enough to cover rent and utilities both. But I had some money in the bank I wanted to see my name in print. I worked for a couple of crummy small newspapers for a few years, but went back to teaching when it started to look like a buyout and layoff was imminent. This time, I thought, I’ll whip teaching’s ass. I’ll not let it kick mine again.

 

But I was wrong. A job you don’t like can turn you into a person you’re ashamed of. Before you grapple with it you tell yourself that you’re spiritually advanced enough and have the resources to stay centered in the midst of the drama vortex that is the work. But in my case, my wishful thinking wrote a check I couldn’t cash.

 

I quit without having another job. That’s when I decided, to hell with thinking for a living. I need to get out of my head. I’m going to massage school. Which I did.

 

I began using Permaculture principles to plan my life. Permaculture says elements of your life should reinforce each other so you won’t get strained. So I thought, I need to make a living, and I want to live more mindfully and get out of my head, so with massage I can make my job a meditative practice and get paid for it too. Since I have so much trouble with sitting meditation, this will be the best way to ensure that I do have meditation every day.

 

And I found massage work across the street from my house, so I don’t waste the money I earn on transportation.

 

The only problem is that there’s not enough massage work there. I’ve looked around for a part time job but couldn’t find anything that wouldn’t interfere with my massage career. That’s how I found myself donating plasma. I’m still paying off an MA in English and twice a week I go earn money by letting somebody drain off my blood.

 

I’m tempted to say Joseph Campbell can kiss my ass but I do have to admit I’m a lot happier than I’ve ever been making money in a large organization.

Like trying to hide from your Siamese twin

So, I pursued massage because I need to use it as a meditative practice. I use Blue Medicine Buddha and Reiki mantras and visualizations while I’m massaging. Or I try to. I get lost in woolgathering a lot.

 

Some days go better than others with the Medicine Buddha. You’re supposed to imagine that he’s sort of covering you or taking your place, that your hands become his while you’re working. You’re also supposed to visualize that he and his associates are watching you at the same time. At times it really feels like a power that is not me is moving through me, and I can feel a calm presence in the room.

 

Other times I can’t get the flow going at all.

 

I think when it’s not going well is when my ego has insinuated its way into the scene. I forget that I don’t do the healing and I get performance anxiety or vanity or whatever wrapped up in it. Or I tell myself this person doesn’t need healing as badly as other people, or might not deserve it; my judgement gets involved.

 

Eckhart Tolle says the ego loves stories, and that you can tell it’s active in you when you start telling yourself stories about what’s going on or what’s happened before or what you want or fear will happen. Well, as a writer, breaking the ego habit is a tall order because I’ve been fascinated by story and encouraging myself to editorialize about events to make myself a better writer since I was in elementary school.

 

I seek a more enlightened existence, but anything you’re interested in will also attract the attention of the ego, and once the ego gets involved you’re fucked. You’ll come up with all kinds of self improvement plans and projects, you’ll read all kinds of books and do all kinds of things, but you won’t sit down and be present.

 

I’ve had brief open moments when I was able to step out of the madness of the discursive mind, but they were followed by egoic obsession with mass production of those moments. Periods of my life that became rich and deeply textured with acceptance and well-being were followed by rebound periods of hysteria, when my ego noticed what was going on and rushed in to reassert itself.

 

Here lately I’ve come to realize that when I dream of sacred lands that I search for and find by accident, I’m really dreaming about where I find myself when I’m meditating regularly and being present and mindful in my life. I enjoy those times so much I lunge at them to capture more, because the ego is greedy, and then they disappear.

The Bitchy Lama

One time I went to a seminar given by a Tibetan Buddhist lama and a friend of mine who helped organize it encouraged me to get a private question and answer session with him. I agreed to do it, even though I really couldn’t think of anything profound to ask, and she signed me up.

 

I decided to ask about TV, because I have what I consider an addiction to it. If it’s in the room I’ll watch it even if there’s nothing on and I hate myself for it. I wanted some advice about how to handle TV in my life, because they’re great for getting the weather and school closings but I’d gotten rid of mine because I couldn’t handle it. The lama got positively bitchy with me about my dumbass question. He said something like “well either watch it or don’t.” I think because of the language and cultural barrier, he wasn’t getting the whole addiction aspect of my problem with TV. Or maybe he did and was tired and hungry and annoyed by my stupid western problem.

 

I didn’t really hold the bitchiness against him, even though it made me uncomfortable. It reminded me of how short tempered and bitchy my great-grandmother could be. I loved her and still do because she was always real and herself. You never had to wonder what was going on behind the mask. Along with the short-temperedness, she was the most spontaneously funny and fun person I’ve ever known. For some reason when she snapped at me I didn’t take it personally. Maybe that was because my hyper assed self couldn’t slow down enough to take anything the wrong way, but I think it was because I felt safe and loved around her regardless.

 

People who are polished and sweet all the time scare me. Maybe it’s wrong to, but I always assume they’re hiding something. I imagine the knives of judgment are hiding behind that person’s smile, and I put on a mask too for protection. Whenever I go to the Remote Religious Retreat Center, I love it for the first couple of days and then start craving to hear profanity and drink tequila. And I’m not sure how to address conflict with other people there because it’s not clear how to do confrontation in that culture.

 

Anyway what I wish I had done was get an audience with the Lama’s assistant instead, but I was afraid I’d offend everybody if I did that. She was an American girl about my age. I wasn’t advanced enough in my religious studies to have Lama worthy questions, and I just wanted to have an informal conversation about what Buddhist monastic life is like. You can learn a lot more from an aimless conversation than you can from a formal question and answer session. You get answers to questions you didn’t know enough to ask.

Toxic X-mas Syndrome

Well the economic downturn has hit this household pretty hard. Of course the last people you can admit hard times to are members of your family, so now it feels I’m staring down the barrel of an uncomfortable Christmas season. It’s a stretch to pay for gifts every year, but this year it’s out of the question. It’s come down to “Gee, I sure would like to be sure I can pay my taxes next year, but I’ve got to pay for a bunch of X-mas shite I’m pretty sure the receiver won’t like much. Unfortunate, but I don’t know what else to do.” And that’s starting to feel like crazy thinking.

 

I’m not a Christian and I’ve felt like the degraded whore of big box America at Christmastime for several years, a shamed and unwilling shopper like my friend Verona, but just try to interfere with the inertia of family tradition. It will flatten you like a brakeless bus. Or I fear it will anyway.

 

Last year I proposed we all do Heifer International instead of gifts. That way, I thought, we could support instead of exploit people in developing countries. With my Christmas spending, I’d rather help a woman in Indonesia get a cow so she can support her family instead of encourage companies like Nike to employ children in sweatshops. My mom advised me not to push that issue because it would never fly with the grandmothers. Well, one of them, the most potentially disagreeable, has moved on to the next world and the other one is worried about money and planning to scale back this year, according to my uncle.

 

Yesterday he asked me what I wanted for Christmas. “Nothing,” I said. I explained my feelings, and he said he’s come to feel that Christmas is too commercial too. Then he said “Well, I’m going to get you something anyway.” It made me clench my teeth and want to scream “LISTEN YOU HARDHEADED MOTHERFUCKER, I DONE TOLD YOU I WANT NOTHING, HEAR ME, NOTHING FOR CHRISTMAS. I AM TIRED OF TAKING YOUR LAMEASS GIFTS TO GOODWILL EVERY YEAR AND IF YOU GIVE ME ONE MORE I AM GOING TO SET IT ON FIRE AND USE IT TO SET YOUR HOUSE ON FIRE.”

 

But I didn’t. I can see, however, that people are going to fall all over themselves to get me shit for Christmas because I want to call the gift giving off. If you give a scrooge a present, you get to feel extra good about yourself. I will admit I’m not spiritually advanced enough to appreciate gifts given under those conditions.

 

I met a girl at the Remote Religious Retreat Center who said her family forgoes gifts and gets together to volunteer at a soup kitchen every Christmas Day. I began to hate her. She must come from a family where members are friends in addition to relatives. They must feel like they have so much abundance that they can give to strangers, and they must not fear the judgment of each other too much.

 

Then again, maybe we are the same kind of family, but just don’t know it yet. I’m going to see if I can get my brother on board for a New Tradition of Christmas. Maybe we can stage a coup.

 

Two Pages a Day

I’m just getting over a cold. My husband had it first. The nature of this particular virus involved a lot of fatigue, and one afternoon I realized Quint had been napping on the couch all day, and I thought wow, what a great little vacation. As soon as I thought it I tried to take it back, but it was too late. The virus took that thought as an invitation to come invade me.

Why do I need a vacation like that, anyway? It’s not like I’m blessed with much work. I spend all day sitting around here filled with financial worry and self loathing. I surf the Internet, check the Drudge Report 30 times a day, and flip endlessly through the channels on the TV.

I guess I just admired the concentration with which Quint was resting. He felt tired to the bone and had an excuse to do it without being filled with self loathing for not doing something more productive with his time.

I’ve noticed I keep coming up with grand visions of new daily routines to transform myself. And inevitably, instead of doing them, even though they do make me feel better, I wind up in front of the TV or the computer instead and hate myself for it. What the fuck?

So here’s one more: Write two pages a day. Not that I’m a huge Jonathan Franzen fan, but I read an interview with him right after his book The Corrections hit it big. He related the punishing work routines he experimented with as a writer. His ex-wife verified his story – when they were first married all they did was write, and she said that if social services had come by and seen what they were doing to themselves “…they would have arrested us for self abuse.” But anyway after all the self-denial and torture and so forth, all the elaborate routines he tried to stick to, he said it all boils down to the fact that you have to write two pages a day.

Two pages a day? That fat-assed, impossibly complicated book The Corrections came out of two pages a day? You’re shitting me.

My favorite bloggers post every day. Maybe I should. I tend to put it off until there’s something I feel inspired about, but unless a lot of interesting things are going on in my life I don’t feel inspired. But back when I used to journal every day sometimes I’d discover inspiration.

Ideal Routine

So the things I want to include in my everyday life include:

Waking up and recalling my dreams and noting their dreamlike nature

Alternate nostril breathing followed by fire breathing followed by more alternate nostril breathing

Exercises- sacrum rock, bridge pose, Gall Bladder 20 stretch, Chi Gong hip swing, and headstand

10-15 minutes of meditation – observing my thoughts

Chant refuge vow 7 times

Ascension meditation throughout day, watching events as if they are a dream

Practice guru yoga and medicine buddha chants and visualizations at work

Write two pages

At bedtime, recall the events of the day and their dreamlike nature

Watch hypnogogic imagery and maintain lucidity in sleep

Hmm. Looks to me like somebody with more self discipline than I needs to be responsible for this list. I guess that’s why some people join monasteries – they choose a lifestyle that supports spiritual practice because day to day life outside the monastery is too distracting. Check out this article about the Dalai Lama. In short, he’s talking about how secular attachments to lovers or spouses or children can interfere with spiritual development.

Dumbass me. When I was wrestling with the dilemma of whether or not to take a teaching job, I reassured myself that spiritual practice could make me strong enough to withstand the drama storm that I’d be walking into every day. Of course it didn’t work that way, and I got a close look at my shadow that I haven’t recovered from yet. I wanted to make a positive contribution to the world – I didn’t want to reinforce my cold-hearted, racist, hate inspired tendencies. But my work life banished all my spiritual aspirations by week three, and I’ve never felt the same way about myself since.

But if somebody as spiritually strong as the Dalai Lama rejects real life because it will fuck with him too much, why should I think I’d have any chance in it?

All the same, I won’t be joining any monasteries anytime soon. I’ve heard that when monks and nuns reincarnate into worldly existences, they show very little personal initiative and find it impossible to be anywhere on time because in their former lives they didn’t have to think for themselves and followed a schedule of bells all day long. Shit on that.

Leave Jesus Out Of It

The other day a friend was telling me about a conversation she had with her six-year-old son. She said he often comes home from weekends at his dad’s with an attitude, but this time he came back a full-blown punkass. She said he told her “You’re not my real mama. You can’t tell me what to do.” Now I don’t know if he’s adopted or the product of a surrogate mother, but I do know the woman he was mouthing off to is somebody who takes care of him when he’s sick and who bought him a goddamn pony for his birthday. Thank God I am not a parent because I don’t think I could handle a situation like that without breaking the law. A loud slap and shouting “Figments of imagination can’t knock you down!” is perhaps how I would have chosen to react.

I found her story upsetting, but then I got more upset by what she said she told him in response: “It hurts Jesus when you talk like that.”

Oh my god. How many times did my own grandmother say that to me when I was growing up? “Jesus’ heart is bleeding” was another guilt inducer I heard after I did something she didn’t like. I can’t say statements like that are solely responsible for warping me, but I can say I’ve done hard time in therapy for religious problems. I recommend Seemorg Matrix  and Results System work as a method for defusing subconcious beliefs like “I am the Antichrist.”

Why can’t we just say “It hurts me when you say things like that?” Why do we have to drag Jesus into it? That implies it’s okay to say hurtful things to individuals as long as it doesn’t offend Jesus.

Not that I’m criticizing how this woman raises her child, because I doubt I could do any better. Were I to be in a situation involving an ex-husband and shared custody of a child, it likely would have ended in murder-suicide pretty early on. Not that I’m criticizing my parents, but I recognize that one’s parenting skills are largely learned from one’s parents and I do not want to create the kind of household I grew up in or have the kinds of regrets that my parents have.

So they need to get off my ass about producing them some grandchildren. They should have gotten me a pony.

The Secret and The Law of Perversion

The Law of Perversion sounds fascinating, doesn’t it? Well get your mind out of the gutter – it’s not what you think. It’s the opposite of The Secret.

 

The Secret is a philosophy that is promoted in a book and movie of the same name, and it posits that focus upon things you want can draw those things to you.

 

The Law of Perversion is a similar theory espoused by Isaac Bonewits. It’s about the thwarting interference that comes between people and what they want.

 

Well, I know The Secret works, and I’ll tell you how. One time I had too much to drink at a Southern Culture on the Skids show, and realized I’d pass out soon if I didn’t get some food to slow down absorption of the beer I’d just slammed. I gazed around the club at the heaving multitude that surrounded me. Alas, there appeared to be no safe place to nap, but lo! The band began performing Eight Piece Box and a member of the crew started to fling pieces of fried chicken into the crowd. I saw my salvation, and though he was on the opposite side of the stage and I had no way to get his attention, I willed him to come to me. It took a while but he came over with what was in fact the last piece of chicken. When I reached for the leg and thigh he offered he took it away and made it clear he wanted to feed it to me. No problem. I was a starved cavewoman on that greasy cold chicken and my friends were horrified, but it steadied me and I was able to keep on enjoying myself for the rest of the show.

 

That’s just one example.

 

The problem with The Secret is that the Law of Perversion sometimes sneaks in. I believe it’s when your desire for what you want is superseded by fear that you won’t get what you want. Or fear that if you get what you want, it’ll create other problems.

 

Like: How I want to live someplace where I can see the stars at night and garden, but I also want to live in a place where there are cool, educated people and things to do. So far it seems that those things are mutually exclusive.

 

Another example is how if I meditate every day I can experience moments in day to day life as the promised land, but I don’t meditate every day. Especially if I’m stressed, which is when I need it most. I’m not sure why.

Headcleaning with Drugs

Recently Marie, an old friend from college, reminded me of something I said years ago about tripping. She said she overheard me telling somebody that I liked to take LSD when I was stressed out and confused. Whoever I was talking to said that didn’t make any sense. That person thought being stressed out and confused could lead to a negative LSD experience because it would increase the mess in your head and leave you even more distressed. I replied that I didn’t agree because to me, tripping was like cleaning house. When you clean house, I mean really clean house, you drag everything out of its normal place and make a huge mess in the middle of the room so you can dust and mop underneath everything. Then you can dust each individual item and put it all back, though it might occur to you to put it back in a new and better arrangement. A greater sense of cleanliness and order arises, but the mess had to come first.

 

Well drugs don’t find me now the way they used to, so I haven’t had many headcleaning opportunities over the past several years. Something happened to me in my late 20s anyway, and drugs and alcohol stopped being so much fun.  Maybe it was some kind of chemical change in my ageing brain, I don’t know. The only drug I’d consider revisiting at this point is mushrooms, and now I don’t have anybody to do mushrooms with. Marie lives five hours away and she’s in graduate school and too busy to trip with me even if she lived down the street. God knows the social millieu in which is trip can make or break the experience.

 

Sometimes you need a vacation from normal reality to refresh and adjust your perspective, and normal law-abiding life doesn’t allow for any of that.

The Silverback of Type A Personalities

This here is a link to a rant by Harlan Ellison, surely one of the most pugnacious writers ever to have lived. Nobody can spew ire like this man. The clip comes from the documentary about him, Dreams With Sharp Teeth. Saw it last night and thoroughly enjoyed it.

It’s almost better to hear/watch him carry on than it is to read one of his stories. He writes “speculative fiction,” what most of us call science fiction, but he’ll shit in his hands and sling it at you if you use that term. I could label it “Upside Your Head Fiction” because his best stories hit you with a thud.

In high school my devotion to Harlan’s writing equaled my love of The Doors. Alas, what can a teen girl do when a bitter, obnoxious author and a dead, asshole rock star are her role models? It was a difficult time.

Harlan’s not one of those introverted, quiet, geeky writer types. Oh hell no. Man’s done some hard living, though not in the drug and alcohol sense. His best stories are the true ones he’s written about his life, like “When I Was A Hired Gun” from Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled and a preface to one of his stories in Stalking The Nightmare, where he tells of a time he saw somebody murdered in a movie theater for talking during the show.

Now I’m feeling down because I just checked and both of those books appear to be out of print, though they can be purchased used.

Though he’s famous for being a dickhead, I have to say Harlan was nice to me when I met him before a reading in 1987. I can’t remember what we talked about in our brief chat as he signed my program, but it was pleasant. I was thrilled to meet him, but I remember being stunned by how short he was. Somebody that takes up that much of your respect and admiration should be bigger than you are at least. I was really pleased that we had both worn the same outfit to his reading: tan pants, cream colored shirt, black jacket. I hoped it looked like we’d gotten together on the phone beforehand to coordinate our outfits.

Well, now it’s 20 years on and Harlan has had a couple of heart attacks, stopped dyeing his hair and eaten too much sausage. But he’s still fun to watch. I’m here to testify.

Cunnilingus Graffitti Crusade

I love this piece of graffiti because it looks like the script for an exotic language – possibly from ancient history or outer space. I have no idea what it means, but it’s downright pretty.

It’s very unlike the last rash of graffiti postings I saw in the park a few years ago, which consisted of blue spray-painted letters in all caps: EAT PUSSY. That statement was on park benches, steps, and bridge walls throughout the park.

I wore my head out trying to guess at the motivations of that graffiti artist. Was it an angry female, someone frustrated with male reluctance to perform cunnilingus?

Or was it a forgetful husband, possibly the partner of a woman like I just mentioned – A jogger with poor memory who spray-painted the message all over the park as a reminder to himself about how to improve things at home?

Perhaps it was some 15-year-old kid, a sheltered, home-schooled child who hadn’t yet discovered Penthouse Forum and thought he’d discovered a new sex practice, and he was trying to promote it.

Or maybe an erotic photographer put it there. Perhaps he was working on an exhibit of sex-in-the-park photos, and he had enough fellatio, anal, doggie-style, and missionary position shots. Somebody like that would want to influence people to indulge in cunnilingus so he could round out his collection.

I guess I’ll never know the real answer. But I do want to encourage graffiti artists to produce more abstract, visually appealing work like what’s featured in this photo. You can just look at it and think, “That’s pretty,” and leave it at that. You don’t torture yourself speculating about what drove somebody to do it.

Sometimes Drugs Do People

The drugs find you. It’s far-fetched, but I can’t shake the feeling that the psychedelic Buzz is a thing unto itself. It’s made up of people high on marijuana or tripping on LSD or mushrooms. This Buzz seeks out people through which it will experience itself, and through chance and happenstance it provides its chosen with the ability to get fucked up. It likes to catch them by surprise, though. Seekers of the Buzz are often frustrated – they may drive for miles to ramshackle trailers in search of the Buzz, only to find the supplier not at home or fighting with the mother in law or otherwise unable to provide.

 

But two weeks later these same seekers may find themselves tired at a party and ready to go home when somebody pulls out a Visene bottle filled with liquid LSD. The buzz is on!

 

Once fucked up, the psychedelic buzz moves the universe at the quantum level and makes things happen that wouldn’t normally. Things take place that would make a sober judge uncomfortable, and there you are all fucked up trying to deal with it.

 

When I was in high school my best friend and I smoked a roach together at her house one afternoon when her parents weren’t home. She wanted to call somebody so we went into her parents’ bedroom where the upstairs phone was. She sat on the edge of the bed to have this conversation while I laid back and marveled at how she could do that because I was too high to talk at all. For a while I listened to her end of the conversation, but then I couldn’t hear it any more and forgot where I was. I lost myself in the texture of  the bumpy ceiling and smooth dome light fixture, trying to remember where I was in space and time. Well, of course, I’m in my grandparents’ bedroom, I thought. I felt smug and pleased with myself for figuring it out. But nagging doubt came up and I realized I was a child the last time I’d followed up Sunday lunch by going through my grandmother’s jewelry and stretching out on her bed to gaze at the ceiling and daydream. Get a hold of yourself, I thought. A gradual sense of realization washed over me – of course, I’m in my bedroom at home, I decided. I felt safe and secure in that knowledge until I realized that that room I thought I was in had belonged to my brother for several years. Then I decided I was in my own bedroom.

 

Gradually I became aware of the sound of Geraldine’s voice again, and that helped clue me in to my actual location. Finally Geraldine hung up the phone. “Let’s go to the store,” she said. “I’m too high to leave,” I said. “How come you’re not this high?”

 

“We decided we were going to the store to buy that magazine,” she said. “Don’t you remember?”

 

Oh, right. That.

 

We’d been having a conversation about Penthouse Forum. A boy I worked with after school talked about it all the time, and being curious virgins, we wanted to check it out too. Geraldine assured me she was straight enough to drive, so I reluctantly left the house with her. I sat shotgun in her ancient station wagon and felt too high to deal with the stimulus of traffic, light, and passing scenery.

 

So: Next we found ourselves at the counter of a convenience store, the kind with a glass case containing shelves of friend chicken, potato wedges, and donuts. The Penthouse Forums were on a rack behind the clerk at the main counter. There they are, I thought. Geraldine will ask for it and I’ll pay for it and we can leave.

 

But no. The woman stocking the glass case raised loud objection to two young girls buying Penthouse Forum. Then the woman getting it down for us argued loudly for our right to have it. Neither Geraldine nor I said anything. Finally I realized, hey, I’m not just watching this – this incredibly embarrassing thing is happening to me, and I just don’t want to know if there’s anybody else in this store.

 

After a lengthy exchange between the two employees, the clerk put the magazine down and rang it up defiantly as if she’d scored a human rights victory. We paid, said thank you, and left.

 

“It’s like the universe helps you be fucked up,” Geraldine said once we were back in the car.

 

Right Arm Only Girl

Friday I went to sell plasma and was dismayed to notice I made $35 instead of the usual $40 for my trip. I guess they’ve had so many new people signing up lately because of the economy they feel safe enough to start screwing us. When I first signed up I made $20 on Tuesdays and $40 on Fridays. They like to reward you for coming back twice in a week, I guess. Over the course of a month you can earth $260 – a nice chunk of bill money – but I don’t know if it’s worth it for less.

 

Part of my problem is that I’m a right arm only girl. I get stuck with the bigass IV needle in the same spot in the crook of my right elbow every time because the veins in my left arm aren’t big enough. I have to wear a Band Aids on the wound to cover the tiny scab and bruise because I don’t want people to think I’m a junkie. If I could alternate arms I’d be much happier.

 

I recognize a few of the same people every time I go, but I haven’t really made friends there yet. There’s one guy who sometimes comes in his mailman uniform, and another guy who I think might be a boxer because he always wears gym clothes and boxing shoes. His stuff isn’t raggedy but it’s got a worn quality to it that indicates he’s not just cultivating a look. Today he was reading Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, a book I read during my plasma sessions a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to ask him what he thought about it but the lounges we stretch out on while getting bled are too far apart for private conversation. Usually when people talk to each other in there it’s loud and about Jesus.

 

It’s interesting to see what other people bring to read, to see what they wear from day to day. You get your students in slouchy sweats and your moms in jeans and your office types in golf shirts and loafers. Lot of Tom Clancy similar popular fiction.

 

Friday a guy on the lounge next to me wanted to photograph his experience, but they wouldn’t let him. What the fuck was he going to do, e-mail the photos to his mom? My mom would shit if she knew I was selling plasma. I’m afraid she’s going to ask about the Band Aid.

 

The Power of Voodoo

One time I was helping an El Salvadoran kid write a paper for his English class, and we got off topic and started talking about religion. I told him about a Unitarian service I’d been to which had some elements of Buddhism worked in.  At first he asked me what Buddhism was, then he said “Oh wait I know what that is. There’s a lot of Buddhists in Cuba.”

 

“What? Really? I don’t think so,” I said.

 

“Yes there are. They kill chickens and take the blood -”

 

“No no no. You’re thinking of voodoo.”

 

I don’t know if I was successful in making him understand the difference, but then he told me a Salvadoran folk tale that was really creepy.

 

“In El Salvador there’s these little black and white monkeys. They try to get in your house and if they do they tear it up. Well, people say some of these monkeys used to be people.”

 

“How’d that happen?”

 

“They tell this story about a man going through the woods. He heard a baby crying and it sounded like it was coming from a bush. He got off his horse and went over there. It was kind of dark and he couldn’t see really too well, but he could still hear the baby, and it took him a while but he finally found this shape like a baby. He picked it up and said ‘There you are little baby, I’ll take care of you’, and it jumped up and started clawing at his eyes. It had red eyes and fangs.”

 

So here I don’t remember the connection but I think this devil baby turned people into monkeys. The lesson is, don’t try to rescue any crying babies in the woods at night in El Salvador.

 

Several weeks later I met up with some friends in the coffee shop. My friend Liz brought her friend Ben, who I’d never met before, but he seemed pretty cool. At one point in our muffin eating and coffee drinking I related the above story. About four or five sentences in, Ben started to twitch. Big involuntary twitches, like with Tourette’s syndrome. The longer I talked, the bigger the twitches, until he was about to turn his chair or the table over. I kept talking and pretended not to notice what was happening because I didn’t know what else to do.

 

After I told the story the twitching subsided. Ben mopped spilled coffee from the table top with a napkin and we talked about something else for a few minutes, but then he explained about the twitching.

 

“I’m schizophrenic and have OCD,” he said. “I get really paranoid about demon possession, and that story you told really got to me.”

 

I felt like a total asshole. But it was as if voodoo had insinuated itself into an innocent conversation in the first place through misunderstanding and then set off a bomb in another one several miles and days later.

Plasma Blues

Bad mood here today. Cold rain, damp in my bones, and I tried to buy X-mas presents online with my plasma debit card and it was declined. We get paid on a debit card. I got a temporary one initially and apparently it’s expired and I don’t have another one yet. It’s been long enough that there must be some kind of problem, a problem that might be a pain in the ass to solve, and if that’s the case the plasma folks can kiss my ass. I was over there for two hours this a.m. trying to make $20. Most times I get there at 6 am and leave around 7:00 or 7:30, but today I didn’t leave til after 8. I’d forgotten to make an appointment so I had to do that first, go over to a goddamn computer and make an appointment for fifteen minutes later. What shit. I’m here. I’m in line. Why make me do that? I’d rather have a quick scolding and get on with it.

 

Then it took forever to get IV’d  because the employee who was going around sticking people and hooking them up to the machine couldn’t get blood out of the lady sitting on the lounge across from mine. The employee spent a long time trying and stuck both arms but that lady just wouldn’t bleed. A supervisor came out and scolded her for not eating breakfast before she came.

 

When I left this morning I couldn’t find anything to read while getting bled, so I took a Graham Greene book off Quint’s shelf. And so of course it was about pathetic losers banging around in a dingy English setting where everything’s got a stilted name and you’ve got to do Algebra to figure out what it is. Fifteen pages in and some poor bastard was murdered already. It pissed me off.

 

I woke up this morning crabby and wanting to barf for some reason, but I ate some oatmeal anyway because I’ve already been warned about the connection between no breakfast and falling out or retching at the plasma center. Uh-uh. Not me. That place is full of people and there’s nothing more humiliating than fainting or dry heaving in front of others. On top of the humiliation of having to sell plasma for money in the first place.

 

I sound kind of down on plasma donation today but mostly it’s okay. As long as those in charge of debit card operations come across with a new and working card here soon I’ll keep on with it. It puts a new spin on spending. For example: Hey, I like those pants, but they cost almost a week’s worth of plasma. Maybe I’ll wait.

Fringe Girl Dream

 In this dream I was the Fringe girl, which is odd because I don’t much like her or the show. There was an alien invasion going on which of course I was passionately against, and work was full of intense meetings in this place that was like a cross between a mall and an old marble-halled college building.

 

The nature of this invasion was that people were getting taken over by the aliens. Hosting an alien makes one really strange, according to this dream. Strange, bossy, and as one guy said, prone to grope others. So everyone was preoccupied with how to recognize and stop alien infiltrators. All of the alien-free FBI folks were at this series of meetings trying to come up with a plan for resistance.

 

So I walked into a lecture hall and sat next to an elegantly dressed black man with glasses. He was similar to the Fringe Girl’s boss on the real show, only not as skinny and better looking. Maybe he was more like Morpheus from The Matrix, only not as beefy. He was the top hat and cane type, only instead he wore an intricately engraved thimble on one finger and a phone thing in his ear.

 

So we exchanged pleasantries, then I looked toward the stage, then this Morpheus man touched the stem of my glasses with his thimble and I could hear the thoughts of other people in the room. I thought “Holy Fuck, this guy’s an alien!” and there was a tremendous explosion. I mean the stage turned into a ball of white fire and there was a deafening noise and shockwave. I felt some teeth get jarred loose.

 

Next thing I know, I’m getting evacuated. Don’t know how I escaped the explosion without getting seriously hurt, but I was running down a hall and somebody was telling me and others to leave the building and get on the back of a truck. He also warned us not to get groped.

 

My survival instincts guided me to stroll past the truck and head into the woods on my own. I’d stuck with a safe crowd earlier and wound up sitting next to an alien. Maybe I’d be able to escape alien notice on my own. At one point I was walking down a rural road and there was a huge pair of disembodied feet, about three or four feet long x two or three feet wide and dressed in boots, fighting each other. Stomping, kicking, etc. I thought with disgust, that’s the kind of crazy shit you see all the time since these aliens showed up.

 

Then I was trying to hide out in an old horse barn. It harbored the other kind of alien – they were like illegal Latino workers hustling from the scene of an INS raid, but we didn’t have much to do with each other. At one point I thought the space aliens were chasing me and I ran into a room and was cornered – there were no windows or doors. Then this wizened little old Latino man ran in and stepped up against the wall, angled his knees into something like a fruit crate lying on its side on a ledge, and got flipped outside. He smiled at me before he left, and then I followed him and escaped the same way.

 

More running around in the barn. Finally I was on an upper floor and the space aliens were about to get me. I decided to jump out a third story window to escape. Very scary, rocky ground rushing up, then I started to float. I looked back at aliens on the ground and felt very smug. I thought gloating thoughts like “Fuck you aliens! You won’t get me!” then I realized I was floating back through the pine trees toward them. They were making me float and they had control. It sucked. What sucks more is that’s all I remember so this story has no resolution.

Perils Of Breast Implants

They didn’t warn us in massage school about breast implants. I’ve had a couple of bad experiences with them lately. The problem is, they don’t feel like real boobs, and unless you understand that you may grab one thinking it’s something else.

 

First I was doing a hot stone massage. I always put the chest and belly stones on over the sheet and under the blanket. I was getting ready to turn the client over, so I was fishing around trying to get the stones out one day and found a boob instead – quite an awkward situation, but the client was understanding.

 

Another time I was doing a Thai massage, so I was kneeling behind a client who was sitting, and I reached for the front of her upper arm. I thought “Wow, this arm’s pretty hard, she’s got great muscle tone,” but it wasn’t her arm, it was her boob. She was pretty understanding too and hopefully at this point I’ve learned my lesson.

Guardian Angels Part I

My friend JJ is at a crossroads in her professional life, and she mentioned she’s sought guidance from her guardian angel about what to do. So I asked her how she made the acquaintance of this angel, and she told me an interesting story:

 

A friend of JJ’s, we’ll call her Mabel, was happily married for many years but then one day her husband died. It was all very sad but Mabel appeared to handle it okay. Then one day JJ was visiting Mabel and they were catching up on things, when Mabel casually mentioned that she’d been talking to her husband the day before and that he’d given her some good advice.  JJ, concerned about possible dementia in her friend, questioned Mabel about her conversations with the dead husband. Mabel told her she’d been having such conversations with him ever since he died.

 

JJ was skeptical at first but she needed some advice and Mabel was not the jealous type. She encouraged JJ to go sit in the garden and talk things over with the dead husband. And JJ’s been talking to Mabel’s dead husband regularly ever since. She calls him her guardian angel.

 

Well I have to say this story gave me some hope. I’ve got post-Xmas shit to do now so I’ll write about how and why later.

Guardian Angels Part II

Earlier this year my grandmother died and a few weeks later my 16-year-old cat did. Not long after all that I went to the Remote Retreat Center for some professional training, and was blessed to meet others who were dealing with loss. I’m thankful for the conversations I had with those people.

 

But a conversation I had with Reyna made the biggest impression on me. She said when her father died about eight years ago, “I didn’t want to lose him, so I didn’t.” Conversations with him were such an important part of her life that she kept having them with him after he died. She said she has her outer day-to-day life that’s very grounded in the practical and sensible, but she also has an inner life that includes communion with her dead father, which has enriched her existence immeasurably. Reyna did not come off like a flaky person at all, so I took her story seriously.

 

This conversation made such an impression on me for two reasons: a) I was fascinated by the prospect that such a thing could be possible, and b) I felt something akin to jealousy that someone could have such a relationship with a deceased family member. I still miss my great-grandmother, for instance.

 

And I thought, well, such a thing is possible for Reyna because she comes from a different culture with a stronger religious background.  But now JJ’s story has given me hope, because she’s a bland white girl too and her angel is not even related to her. This bears further investigation.

 

Once I went to a Spiritualist meeting and afterwards the group leader told me my spirit guide was an Indian Yogi, who he saw sitting on the same chair I was sitting on and at the same time. He said he could see the Yogi’s outlines juxtaposed over mine. For a long time in my mid -20s I had recurring dreams about a Native American man, and I thought maybe he might be my spirit guide.

 

So far I’ve dreamed twice about a wizened little older man who strikes me as a migrant worker or something like it. He made his first appearance in that Fringe Girl dream and showed me how to escape from being cornered in a barn, and a few nights later I dreamed about him again but all I can remember is that he made sort of a cameo appearance. Maybe he’s a guardian too.

 

Happy New Year!

‘09 Goals

Goals for ‘09

 

Procure a comfortable and flattering wardrobe. Now that I’m getting my age on and in a different line of work I don’t know how to dress anymore. I need to rediscover how to be hot.

 

Do a three-day Acupressure workshop. I continue to be fascinated by this topic and love studying it.

 

Participate in rituals for all the pagan holidays. They happen about every six weeks or so and they’re a great way to mark your passage through time. You feel more complete at the end of a year if you observe them.

 

Spend eight weeks or so in Peru. While I’m there I’d like to do a Spanish Immersion program and participate in an Ayahuasca ceremony. A friend mentioned the other day that she’s looking into doing an Ayahuasca retreat in Peru sometime around midyear.

 

Find some enjoyable and lucrative employment. Right now I think it’d be nice to have a part time job doing 7-11 am hours and do massage/acupressure appointments after that.

 

Become consistently healthy. I have some nagging health complaints I think I can manage through diet and exercise, but I’ve yet to accomplish that. I also need health insurance so I can go to the doctor if I need to.

 

Become consistent in my daily meditation and exercise routine. That’s about all there is to say about that. People like me find routine painful and difficult, but they really need it for balance.

 

 

Some of this is not terribly realistic at this point, seeing as how I have no money, but I like to write down ideal goals anyway. What I probably need to do is stop trying to master Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs from the top down.

Dream and Umwelt

That Fringe Girl dream made me think of two books: Viriconium, which I read recently, and Okla Hannali, which I read several years ago. The first is a fantasy story about the far future and the last is a tale about how the Native American influence was erased from the US. The one concept they present in common is Umwelt. Here’s what one of Viriconium’s characters says about it:

 

The material universe, it would appear, has little absolute substance. It hardly exists. It is a rag of matter, a wisp of gas, a memory of some former state. Each sentient species perceives the thin evidence of this state in a different way, generating out of this perception its physical and metaphysical Umwelt: its little bubble or envelope of ‘reality.’ These perceptual systems are hermetic and admit of no alternative. They are the product of a particular set of sense organs, evolutionary beginnings, and planetary origins. If the cat were to define the world, he would exclude the world of the housefly in his mouth. Each species has its fiction, and that fiction is to all intents and purposes real; and the actual thin substance of the universe becomes more and more debatable, oneiric, hard to achieve, like the white figures that will not focus at the edge of vision.

 

In other words, to us the world is how we are able, or how we are taught, or how we choose to see it. Language is the way we name and understand things in the world, so it’s the holder of Umwelt. If we run across something we don’t have a label for, we tend to mislabel it or not see it at all. So: in Viriconium, there is an insectoid alien species that wants to convert the Earth to its own use. They build a settlement on a remote island and start trying to turn the earth into their ideal environment. Hundreds of miles away from the alien settlement, people dream of idealized insects and race purification. But nobody really sees the insects, or understands what they see if they do, so they don’t understand there’s an invasion taking place even though they feel its effects and respond by going crazy.

 

The insects, in turn, are affected by the human Umwelt and become mad through their own loss of identity.

 

The situation’s dire. Everybody’s miserable. I’m not going to say how it ends.

 

Okay. Okla Hannali. This book about Choctaw history starts out reading like a great myth, but then as the story unfolds and begins to include historical events and white people, it turns into something else. We meet the main characters in a time before natives lost hold on this continent. They’re grand, larger than life individuals in a limitless landscape. Then come Europeans and their encroaching Umwelt, and the Native American characters get smaller and smaller and more fallible. Near the end, one of them makes a statement with a particular syntax and phrasing – and this is where the author indicates that the old Choctaw worldview (Umwelt) died, because it meant the last person who still truly thought like Choctaw started thinking like a white person.

 

All through the story Native Americans do pretty well until a large number of them start subscribing to the European Umwelt and decide that slavery is okay, then they all get their asses whipped due to Civil War era politics, and Native American influence in American society is diminished forever. People who subscribe to dominator values because they’re on the bottom and they want to be on the top never get what they expect in the deal, it seems.

 

So – in my Fringe dream of alien invasion, it felt like we were fighting to hang onto our culture and identity in response to the weird, unsettling things going on the world and our loss of sense of control. We were clinging to our Umwelt and violently rejecting the new one the aliens were bringing in.

 

Of course I don’t know what that might mean as far as interpreting this dream.

I have thought of this, though. Maybe we’re already subscribing to an alien Umwelt. We’re doing so much to make the planet unlivable for ourselves, it’s almost like we’re remodeling the planet for new tenants.

Ritual Trance #1

I was lying on my back in a grassy clearing at twilight. There were still a few leaves on the trees around the clearing but it was chilly enough to silence all but one or two crickets, so it was most likely mid-autumn. There was one star in the purple sky and a dark bird flew right to left over me.

 

I got up and started walking down a short path that dead-ended at the base of a weathered granite cliff. There was a sharp cleft in the rock. Behind it was a crack big enough to slide through, but still narrow enough that I had to contort to get by as the walls changed shape. There was a powdery dry dirt floor to this passage.

 

I noticed a freakishly tall, shirtless man with long black hair ahead and realized he was leading me. We walked uphill, then down.  The passage widened as we walked and soon I found myself in a big subterranean amphitheater, complete with rows of seats like an auditorium. It was lit with orange light but I couldn’t see where the illumination came from.

 

My guide and I sat in some seats to the right of the stage and several rows back. I spent some anxious time trying to decide what to do next. My guide simply sat and stared straight ahead. I was pretty sure he knew I was there, but I never had any indication he could see me.

 

Finally I got up and went down to the stage. There was a long white table there with bones on it. Some rib and humerus bones were arranged around a skull without a jaw bone. They were glowing or maybe just lit with golden light. Still anxious because I didn’t know what to do next, I started to pick the bones up and put them on. They went through my skin and over top of my bones.

 

Then I found myself hanging by a rope from my C-7 vertebra, the one at the base of your neck. My guide was lowering me into a soupy darkness under a cliff, which was in the wings of stage left. The thick soupy stuff was cold and it got darker as I descended. I saw something like criss-crossed girders go by, like the structure of an oil derrick or bridge. Down, down, down, slowly and for a long time.

 

I stood on black ground. I walked around some but it appeared to be nothing but a cold, boring, dark and heavy kind of place. Finally after peering around for a while I saw headstones. Then I found myself in front of one. I couldn’t make out what was written on it. It looked like a series of these [  ] in three or four lines flashed on and off in a sequence.

 

Then I found myself in sort of a child’s pose with my arms hanging into the ground.  My heart and chest were draining stuff like molasses down my arms and into the ground. This went on and on. I had no idea whose grave I was on.

 

Next I was hanging by my ankles in candlestick pose, and the back of my neck, head, and shoulders were draining molasses stuff. At one point I somehow got to look down into myself through the soles of my feet and I saw light rings in the kind of shape configuration that you see on creek bottoms when the feet of water sliders make those circular shadows – kind of like two overlapping circles in a an 8 shape and two flanking circles, one each for my head, torso, and hands.

 

It got brighter and brighter as I was reeled up by my ankles. In fact, it was brighter than it had been on the way down. I was brought out of the pit and released onto the floor. I felt relieved and lighter and hugged my guide, which he didn’t seem to like.

 

I said thank you to the guide, and heard a crow call outside the window as the ritual ended.

Anybody who might have a clue how this could be interpreted, please comment.

Mud Shadow Experience Part 1

 This week a business associate of mine told me of a dilemma in her personal life: Orlandine said she lost touch with her stepfather, Johnny Rakehell, when he and her mom split up about fifteen years ago. He came back to her attention last year because he was on the six o’clock news one night, having been arrested and charged with a number of serious things. Most of that blew over and it looked like he was going to be able to stay out of prison. “I was so relieved to hear that,” Orlandine said, noting that he is a friendly man without a mean bone in his body. “He is just not prison material.”  Johnny Rakehell dropped off her radar again, but over the past couple of weeks he resumed turning up in her thoughts. She wondered if that might mean she should contact him. He was and is a party-mad womanizer of the first order, but he always took good care of Orlandine and she has fond memories of him.

 

A good excuse for visiting Johnny Rakehell came up on Tuesday when Orlandine noticed her brakes weren’t working as well as they should. Johnny Rakehell can fix the hell out of some breaks, so this appeared to be a good way to kill two birds with one stone. But: Orlandine harbors some bad memories and feelings about his house and felt reluctant to go back there. She uses kinesiology self-testing to verify the soundness of big decisions, and such testing indicated she was not safe to return to Johnny Rakehell’s property. She did more testing to clarify why not. The danger, it indicated, was not in Rakehell himself, or anybody around him, but in an energetic entity living in the house. Specifically, in the room where she used to sleep. 

Here’s where bells started to ring for me. Prepare for a long digression from the saga of Rakehell so I can explain why. TO BE CONTINUED…

Mud Shadow Experience Part II

Orlandine’s description of the wild, erratic living that took place in Johnny Rakehell’s house, and of some of her experiences in there, reminded me of a place I once lived. When I got back from some time abroad in my early 20s, I rented an apartment in an old house. I had good friends in the building, which was located in the coolest neighborhood in town. I could climb out my bathroom window and drink 40s on the roof with my friends. I loved that place. But:

 

I noticed that if I had a get together with more than three or four people, Category 5 wigouts would erupt out of nowhere. Normally sensible folks would fly off the deep end for reasons unclear to everybody else, and on at least two occasions guns came out. While I lived there I dated another building resident, and it was the most bizarre and violent relationship I’ve ever been a party to, other than those I had with my family growing up. One night I confronted this person (who lived in the downstairs unit) about late night noise – he’d invited some people over for band practice at 2 am on a work night (My kitchen floor was vibrating like a drum head) and he tried to pick me up and throw me out his door. We struggled and I pushed him, then some people separated us, then he was in my face saying something obnoxious. Then I remember thinking, why is his lip bleeding? Why do my knuckles hurt? I have no memory at all of drawing back and landing a solid punch.

 

That is not normally how I handle conflict.

 

A good longtime friend, Alphonse, lived in the apartment next door to me. He also had a roller coaster of a time while he lived in this house. He told me this story about his apartment:

 

Alphonse was sitting on his bed. It was a warm summer day, so the windows were open and he could hear children at the preschool next door playing outside. He was about to put his book down and go get a glass of water when everything went silent and he lost the ability to move. Suddenly it got very cold, and a sound like crickets at high volume made a deafening roar in his ears. He sat frozen in a cross-legged position. The only thing he could move were his eyes, and he saw something in his peripheral vision that almost made him almost twist them out of their sockets. It was a black, undulating shape rolling itself under his door and into the room, kind of like an ectoplasmic beanbag. This thing rolled around the room in front of Alphonse and went behind him. Naturally he was terrified, but right after it rolled out of his range of vision he gasped and suddenly the roar and the cold were gone and he could move again.

 

I thought this was a pretty fucking scary story, especially since it came from a teetotaler who wouldn’t even take aspirin. But LSD, shrooms, and lots of alcohol were all the rage with other residents in the building. And romantic trauma. My apartment’s previous tenant had attempted suicide after a breakup. So there was lots of weird energy going on in that house. The environment was perhaps similar to that of Johnny Rakehell’s household. Orlandine told me she often woke up in her bedroom there, unable to move, with the sense that a damp, oppressive something had her pinned and was trying to suffocate her.

 

Years later, I read Carlos Castaneda’s The Active Side of Infinity and my blood ran cold when I got to the part where he first saw the mud shadows, parasites which feed on human ego. These descriptions sounded pretty close to what Alphonse saw in his room, and I suspected that’s what Orlandine had dealt with in her room all those years ago. TO BE CONTINUED…

Mud Shadow Experience Part III

Okay so now I want to bring in some excerpts from Carlos Castaneda’s The Active Side of Infinity which describe mud shadows and explain what they are. These descriptions illuminate some of the things that happened to Alphonse and Orlandine, who I mentioned in previous installments.

In the book, shaman/sorcerer Don Juan is teaching Carlos to see things beyond this physical realm. In this particular exercise, he’s teaching him to see mud shadows, at one point turning lights off so Carlos can see them in the room. “Not only did I catch a glimpse of those fleeting images, I heard them buzzing in my ears,” he writes, adding that the encounter made him scream.  This mention of the noise they made reminded me of the sound  Alphonse described when he saw that ectoplasmic beanbag in his room.

Don Juan describes the mud shadows as “really heavy,” and that’s what I thought of when Orlandine described waking up pinned by an oppressive, invisible something. Later he says, ”It is a big shadow, impenatrably dark, a black shadow that jumps through the air.”

So, why are they a problem? Because they feed on the energy of egoic obsession and human drama. And just like humanity breeds cows and chickens to be tasty on the plate, the mud shadows manipulate humanity to constantly involve itself in trauma and heartache. According to Don Juan, they do it by becoming parasites. They attach themselves to us and then their minds become impossibly mixed up with ours:

“…by playing on our self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the predators create flares of awareness that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion. They give us inane problems that force those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us alive in order for them to be fed with the energetic flare of our psuedoconcerns.”

Hmm. Mud shadows must love locations where there’s lots of substance abuse and emotional turmoil. Perhaps those places become a buffet where they can frolic and really work people over. That house I used to live in definitely seemed to have “OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK” sign on, and I guess Orlandine’s house did too.

Don Juan goes on to explain that human culture, which is really designed by the mud shadows, is the farm where we’re held captive. The only way humans can resist this parasite, he says, is by discipline in the mind. But those with enough discipline to find themselves parasite free also find themselves alone and without a road map for the life ahead because the rest of humanity is so dependent upon the mud shadows for meaning. There’s no culture to support life without the mud shadows. TO BE CONTINUED…

Mud Shadow Experience Part IV

Getting back to Orlandine’s dilemma about whether or not to visit Johnny Rakehell and get him to fix her brakes: She asked if I’d loan her some protective stones or go with her to drop off her car. I found this situation interesting, so I did both. On the way there she told me about the wild sex and coke parties her mom and Johnny Rakehell had all the time, and about how there was always a surplus of cash in the household because he sold drugs in addition to his day job. She talked about their illegal gambling barn, where they had roulette and blackjack tables.

 

So this is what happened to Johnny Rakehell to get him in such trouble: A female friend of his he was partying with wanted to include a friend. So Johnny Rakehell drove out to get the girl, whose name he forgot as soon as he was told it. He noticed the nameless girl had trouble staying awake, but didn’t think anything of it. Once back at the house, he had some chores to take care of, which he did for a couple of hours. Then he went back inside and his lady friend was mad at nameless girl because she’d been asleep in front of the TV the whole time. They put nameless girl in one of the bedrooms in the house for some peace and quiet, but later when the lady friend went to check on her, she wasn’t breathing.

 

I’m wondering if they put nameless girl in Orlandine’s old room, the one where she used to feel the smothering presence mash her immobile at night.

 

The following fact convinced me that Johnny Rakehell is not a totally irresponsible asshole. He called 911. He stood there on the phone trying to get instructions for how to do CPR until the public safety folks pulled up in the yard. The whole time, he was probably thinking, damn I should have hidden the still first, shit they’re going to find those four gallons of moonshine, oh fuck they’re going to locate the coke and marijuana. EMS was not able to revive nameless girl, and after they searched the house, the cops threatened to charge Johnny Rakehell with murder and various drug offenses.

 

All that stuff was bad enough, but the cops went and checked out all his homemade video porn too. They determined that some of the girls on the tapes might not have been of legal age, so they threw in some statutory rape charges for good measure.

 

This house could be the equivalent of the state fair for mud shadows. It probably smells like funnel cakes and sausage dogs to them.

 

Well it was cold and windy when we got out of Orlandine’s car at the Rakehell house. I found him to be a pleasant fellow, and they talked a little before he gave her the keys to his car to drive home. I didn’t get any bad vibes from the experience but I was glad we didn’t get invited inside. I haven’t seen Orlandine since then, but I know she had to go back to get her car, so we’ll see. TO BE CONTINUED…

Mud Shadow Experience Part V

Earlier this year I read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. It seems to me that what he calls ego and pain body are synonymous with Castaneda’s mud shadows. “You want peace,” Tolle writes. “There is no one who doesn’t want peace. Yet there is something in you that wants the drama, wants the conflict.” These dramas and conflicts get preserved in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves in the process of creating and maintaining our identities. We can never let go of old hurts.

 

Tolle says individual pain bodies take a life of their own, and when they start feeling weak they look for other pain bodies to provoke. Then there’s interpersonal conflict and the painbodies involved get replenished. The Cycle of Violence could easily be thought of as the feeding cycle for mud shadows or painbodies. “The pain body is an addiction to unhappiness,” Tolle says.

 

            “It may be shocking when you realize for the first time that there is something in you that periodically seeks emotional negativity, seeks unhappiness. You need even more awareness to see it in yourself than to recognize it in another person. Once the unhappiness has taken you over, not only do you not want an end to it, but you want to make others just as miserable as you are in order to feed on their negative emotional reactions.”

 

It’s fairly easy to recognize the influence of a hungry painbody, Tolle goes on to say.

 

            “The voice in your head will be telling sad, anxious, or angry stories about yourself or your life, about other people, about past, future, or imaginary events. The voice will be blaming, accusing, complaining, imagining. And you are totally identified with whatever the voice says, believe all its distorted thoughts. At that point, addiction to unhappiness has set in.”

 

The only thing that’s an effective deterrent against these shadows is awareness cultivated through discipline. As somebody who’s devoid of discipline, that’s pretty scary. I’ve been writing a lot lately, which seems like a good thing, but deep down I know my diligence with writing is simply an excuse not to do my morning meditation. This writing is, perhaps, reinforcing my ego and feeding the mud shadows.

 

Mud Shadow Experience Part VI

The other day Orlandine said she went to pick up her car from Johnny Rakehell, and while she was there he invited her out to breakfast, and they talked about the past. They put some things to rest. She felt lost pieces of her soul fall back into place because of this closure. I was relieved for her.

 

My head’s been a spin cycle of thoughts about like: “If you get panicked and fearful about mud shadows it feeds them” and “If you get complacent about them it’s because they talked you into it.” But last night I remembered that I have all the resources I need to deal with mud shadows. I just can’t stick with any of these methods consistently. In theory, A New Earth or Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep or Old Path White Clouds should be all I’d need to guide me to a life of spiritual wholeness. But once I’m done with a book I tend to be done with it. It stretches my brain and maybe even my habits for a while, but then my brain goes back to the shape of its old frantic self.

 

I guess the devil is in your habits, and habits are bastards to beat. Establishing a regular morning meditation habit is actually more difficult for me than it was to stop smoking. The key was, I had a lot of social support to stop smoking. And I got pneumonia from it, which was a big motivator too. Not that I want a similar physical emergency to help me in my quest for mindfulness.

 

I wish there were a church experience that would meet my needs here. But there’s not enough density of people with my spiritual needs here to support one. There are meditation groups around but they’re a 30 to 90 minute drive away, and I don’t stick with activities that require that much of a drive. Hmm. I guess that’s something I need to work on…

Imbolc ‘09 planning

Imbolc is coming up, and for the first time in years I’ve decided to get together with some other folks to formally observe it.

 

I’ve belonged to a few different pagan groups in the past, and find that observing the pagan holidays in a ritual with a bunch of other people adds a valuable something to my life. My favorite brand of paganism is Reclaiming, and I’ve been to a couple of Witchcamps. I wish I could do more. I’ve driven a lot of miles to get my pagan jollies. I’ve always thought it would be nice to have access to Reclaiming-style pagan activities without having to travel so far. Briefly I belonged to a group here in town but that imploded in a big old mess of hurt feelings and thwarted expectations. We were all in that group for different reasons, conflicting reasons as it turned out.

 

I’ve wanted try spells to improve community life for a long time, having first heard about that at Witchcamp. So this year I decided to research ways to plan such a thing. I found some good stuff in Machelle Wright’s Perelandra books about working with Devas, or spirits of place. She subscribes to the idea that locations have a spirit with a personality and the ability to communicate, and they can tell you what to do to have a healthy garden.

 

What I want to do is on a much larger scale, being a city-wide thing. And I want to incorporate some trance work with a Shaman I know.

 

So I met with three other people to talk about doing a spell to purify the city of whatever bad mojo might be left over from strife related to the European incursion, Revolutionary War, Civil War, and Civil Rights era. But one person said she wanted to the spell to heal her. She’s feeling wounds related to the dissolution of the intentional community house she was a part of. Then the other two people talked about how they feel isolated these days too, and how they miss a time in the past when this town was a hub of opportunity for people like us, people on the edge. I realized they were voicing my feelings too.

 

So we’re going to draft a ritual to acknowledge our grief for the sense of belonging here we’ve lost, and we’re also going to attempt to contact the deva of the town to see what it wants for itself and if it has any suggestions for us, then do the purification of the city with a map and some flower essences. We still have some time to plan the specifics.

More later.

Imbolc Ritual ‘09 Draft

Imbolc is next Monday, but we’re going to observe the day before. We’ll use Jyothi’s back yard, provided it’s not raining. Our purpose is to process and heal our sense of isolation, and to contact the Deva of our city and see if it has any messages for us. I wrote about the sources I used for this planning in my last entry.

Chi Gong excercises to get our energy going, smudge to purify.

 

Cast circle – call in directions

 

Walk a reverse pentacle (marked out in sawdust) for banishing resentments/disappointments related to our feelings of isolation and loss of community. Have fire in the middle where we can burn letters we’ve written about these feelings. Possibly rice paper and water if we have to have this inside.

 

Coning – call in our higher selves, the Deva of Greensboro, and the White Brotherhood.

 

Spirit Boat trance/meditation for guidance about what we can do to find the community feeling we need. J. will drum for this.

 

Space clearing/battle clearing on map of city. We’ll visualize a healing/purifying purple vortex to include everything in the circle as well as the map, so it gets us too. J. will pendulum dowse to determine if areas on the map need Rescue Remedy flower essences for further balancing.

 

Ground

 

Open circle

 

Eat, discuss

 

I’m thinking we can get Jyothi’s daugher to light candles for the directions. She’s 10 and we need to have something for her to do. Of course we may think of changes or things we need to leave out or add while we’re doing it.

Heart Hazards

I got into the massage/Reiki field because, I reasoned, it would allow me to make a living and practice mindful meditation at the same time. I also wanted to have a usefull skill that would allow me to help other people.

But I’ve come to realize I’ve got a tyrannically stingy nature that gets in the way. I find myself  judging clients and I have to push my goodwill through the judgment, if that makes any sense. It’s ironic but I resent them because they’ve got enough disposable income to come to a day spa.

I do Blue Medicine Budda meditation while I’m doing massage or Reiki, which involves visualizing the Medicine Buddha in front of you watching what you’re doing. At the same time you imagine he’s becoming you and sending healing blue energy into the person you’re working on. I do the Medicine Buddha chant in my head and think “For the greatest and highest good of the universe, may this person have happiness and the causes of happiness.”

But it’s hard for me to feel true generosity doing this on clients who I know spend a lot of regular money on manicures and pedicures. I know that’s pointlessly judgemental. I just hope it doesn’t stop the blue mojo from moving through me.

I used to do regular energy work trade with an acquaintance, and after each time she worked on me she’d say she’d gotten the sense that my heart chakra was in a sad state of affairs. While she was working on my heart area I’d see an image of a black octagon. I don’t know what that means, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a good sign.

From time to time I get a vague sense that I’m not living a full emotional life, but I’m not sure how to remedy this situation or if I want to. It might mean venting a lot of old emotional anguish, painful sinuses and swollen eyes and headache from crying. Followed by a propensity to cry for no little to no reason all the time afterward. It might be like drowning.

What I think would help me is if I could find a group to practice Tonglen meditation with. In this meditation you imagine inhaling the suffering of others into your heart, where it becomes neutralized. Doing Tonglen meditation in a group  helps me a lot, I think, but I’m afraid to do it on my own. I can’t say why I’m afraid it will contaminate me, but I am, and once I got a respiratory infection after I’d been practicing on my own.

The resistance I feel during Tonglen meditation is similar to the resistance I sometimes feel while doing Medicine Buddha work on my clients.

Imbolc ‘09 Report: City Deva

We couldn’t have had better conditions for our outdoor Imbolc ritual. We started around 4:30 pm under clear skies and finished just as the sinking sun let the cold encroach. Our mission was to release some emotional baggage about the loss of some social ties we’ve all had but now miss in this city, and to contact the Deva of the city to see if it had any guidance for us. I guess mainly I just wanted to see if there is such a thing and see what it was like.

 

I dried a huge bundle of rosemary branches for this occasion, and we used some of them to mark out a big pentacle in Jyothi’s back yard. After we called in the directions, made our invocations, and cast the circle, we walked it in meditative silence. We cast our regrets and individual grief into the center as we walked. I really enjoyed this. The tiny leaves fell off the rosemary branches as we walked, so it was like the pentacle was dissolving beneath us. Three was the perfect the number to walk it all at once – we moved around the pentacle in a kind of synchrony.

 

We made a pile of rosemary branches in the middle of the pentacle, wrote letters the city Deva, and put them in the pile.

 

Next came the Spirit Boat part of the ceremony. It’s sort of an active imagination exercise. We all sat on a blanket – Jyothi and I shoulder to shoulder, with Wolf Woman’s back against ours. She beat a steady rhythm on a drum, and told us to imagine being in a favorite place outside, and then to find an opening into the underworld, where we would row our imaginary canoe in a journey to find the Deva.

 

I accessed the underworld in a manner similar to that of Freydis in William Vollman’s The Ice Shirt. I went through a rotten hole in a tree and squeezed down through damp and slimy decay. I was really beginning to wonder why I’d made this so unpleasant for myself, then I felt open space ahead, and came out into a dark underground tunnel. Cold air pressed down from overhead.

 

I got into the canoe and started rowing. It was a long time before I saw anything, and that was just flashes of light here and there on the shore as we passed. Then up ahead on the left I saw golden light shining on a sort of Hellenistic Greek figure draped over a chair, apparently in some kind of passed out stupor. Picture the statue of Liberty after way too much to drink. My instincts made me want to get the hell on by that because it gave me a bad feeling, so I kept rowing.

 

What seemed like a long time later I saw a dim magenta light shining on the left shore again. This felt right, so I got out and sat on the ground in the light. For a long time nothing happened, then I could see glints and glimmers like something almost invisible was in front of me, perhaps another figure in a chair. Then I got the sense that it sneaked around behind me and started speaking softly behind my right ear in a language I couldn’t understand. I wondered if I’ve expected too much of the city over the years, and got the feeling the Deva agreed, and perhaps she said something like “Seek and ye shall find.” The top of my head grew warm, and the soft voice continued in an unknown language. Then the light abruptly went out. I waited a few more minutes, but she was done, had taken off without ceremony. I sat wondering what to make of all this until Janet started drumming faster in a signal for us to get back in the boat and start rowing back.

 

I didn’t get the sense that the Deva was impressed with our visit. I assumed she would at least consider it a novelty. I can’t imagine she gets company often, but then again what do I know. The sense I got from her was one of overwhelming indifference. Maybe a little downright contrariness.

 

Wolf Woman said the Deva appeared to her as a homeless lady pushing a grocery cart. Wolf Woman followed her for a while but the lady never acknowledged her.

 

Jyothi encountered the Deva in the form of her grandmother. She didn’t say much more about it, but later I want to ask her what her grandmother was like.

 

Next we took out a map of the city. We planned to purify it of any energy left over from battles fought in wars and episodes of social unrest here. Jyothi noticed the zip codes on it were all wrong, and said maybe we shouldn’t use it, but I wanted to since I’d remembered to bring it and it was part of the plan. At the same time, I got the sense that the Deva wouldn’t consider this as doing her any kind of favor. But anyway we visualized a purple vortex over the map pulling up and neutralizing strife energy in the city.

 

The rosemary made almost too much of a fire. It burns like crazy and smokes like mad. It smoked up the neighborhood and Jyothi was afraid fire trucks would arrive soon.

 

Then we de-invoked and ate some chocolate, leaving an offering for our ancestors.

 

I didn’t leave this ritual with any sense of closure at all, and I told Wolf Woman on the way back to my car that I’m thinking maybe the Deva isn’t quite done with us. I also get the feeling she might have a wicked sense of humor and that any communicating she does in the form of symbols or synchronistic events might not be as warm and fuzzy as we’d prefer.

Dream Within Dream

I was inside a dark single-wide mobile home, standing in the doorway to the living room and looking through a window over the kitchen sink. There was streetlight coming through the blinds there, then there was a bright flash. At the same time a strong wind started up. It rocked the mobile home on its foundations and I braced myself. The structure tipped and I began reciting the Medicine Buddha chant in my head to keep calm. The mobile home started rolling, and falling apart as it did so, objects on the inside tumbling like clothes in a dryer. I rolled with it and remained unhurt. Finally the structure was too wrecked to roll anymore, and I began crawling out of the wreckage. It was raining.

 

I was startled when I put my hand on what felt like somebody’s leg in the wet darkness. I was even more startled a second later when I found myself in a dry, well-lit room the size of a gym. About fifty or sixty people were lying in ordered rows on yoga mats. Except for me. I was off my mat and holding my neighbor’s leg. I hissed desperate whispers at her, questions about where I was and what was going on. Instructors were circling the room inspecting everybody and I didn’t want to be seen.

 

Then I woke up here, in my home. This was definitely a dream within a dream. The shift from the wrecked mobile home to the gym felt like waking up.

Goddess Trance Part 1

Don’t know why but the imagery in my trances tends to be scary and dark.

 

The goddess, about nine feet tall and muscled like an athlete, met me at the sandy circle in the woods. She pointed to something on the perimeter of the circle. Maybe it was an illusion, maybe it was solid. It looked like an old fashioned safe door. She didn’t say anything but her expression let me know this was important.

 

There’s not a combination dial I can see. Exasperation, confusion, what do I do next?

 

Say you came in at 12 o’clock on the circle. The safe door is at 1 or 2 o’clock. It’s twilight. The goddess smiles and goes to work unlocking the safe. Bright light, noon or moon, glitters on the dial. When the door swings open she goes in on her hands and knees, not all the way, and starts pulling out two thick cables. She sits and leans forward, her head and face now covered by a black helmet. The top of her torso is now covered in black. I think this change now restricts her and her breathing. She’s turning into a machine.

 

It’s very seductive, this idea of feeling protected by a machine shell, languishing protected in cool darkness and mysterious. Somehow it sees itself as lovable because it’s helpless and immobilized. This reminds me of my grandmother, of the darkness that infected her and spread to my mother and me.

 

Now I’ve taken the goddess’ place and she’s gone. My left arm and my torso from the bottom of my rib cage and angling up to below my right armpit, and my head, it’s all sacrificed, given up to the pathetic dark machine monster. I’m struggling to sit upright. My left side is heavier than the right. It’s sad I have no feeling and it’s hard to breathe. I want people to feel sorry for me because I have no feelings, because I was willing to be altered like this. I salve my wounds with self-pity because no one cares and I knew they wouldn’t. I feel like a bug on its back.

 

Would the world be different if I could go back to being human? Can I? I can see the sky and branches and leaves through the dark tint on my helmet’s visor. I know there’s a mixture of fine sand and clayey dirt underneath me, because I can feel it with my right hand. It’s dried into a crust on top and it’s damp and cool underneath. I am at war. This is so uncomfortable. Maybe I should ask for help, though I don’t want to.

 

My voice is small and feeble and I don’t think it gets past the mask. I wanted to be strong and inviolable. It’s hard to think of losing my dead arm, my machine arm.

 

I feel sand under my feet, too. The sun is shining. I am sad that I am stuck this way, a tragic figure. But I don’t want to be a tragic figure. When they say that we should strive to be like Jesus, that wasn’t supposed mean we should gracefully suffer fatal misfortune as if suffering itself makes one holy.

 

I reject the idea that exclusion is noble

That self-pity is the noblest form of comfort

 

Help will come from the bottom of the circle, where even now a cool damp breeze stirs, the first breath of a thunderstorm. It’s obvious when it rains, the water flows out that way too.  I am in a holy place. I have asked for help. I want to be free like the goddess, alive.

 

To my grandmother: I mourn the free girl caged within you and that I never knew her. I give back your ideals of self-pity and exclusion. These things do not make me or you superior to everyone else. These things are not what made Jesus powerful either.

I am sitting up, feeling stronger. I feel that my spine connects to the earth like a root. It is dark and cloudy. I am tense and waiting. Is it possible to get my old self back? Is it possible to give up my dead parts?

Life As An ENTP

At certain points in the past I’ve gotten the notion that there was no real place for me in the conventional world, realized that I’d never be able to successfully pass as a mainstream person. And I muscle tested to ask whether or not I should accept that and get a job in a bookstore or new age store and quit trying to pass. The response was no. And now more than a decade later that doesn’t make sense to me. I was right – I was never able to fit in and truly succeed in mainstream work settings. It was painful and difficult and not terribly rewarding in any sense, and now I’m middle aged and still paying off school loans for a degree I don’t use, and not making enough money, because I’m starting over AGAIN in a new career.

 

In my mid-20s I took a career change seminar and we did some personality tests as part of it. Mine predicted, with chilling accuracy, how my work life would unfold. It said I’d burn out quickly in jobs without a high novelty factor and where routine and ability to dot Is and cross Ts was highly valued. I thought, “Where the hell can you find a job that doesn’t require high tolerance for tedium? I’m smart enough to learn any system so I can get a paycheck.” But I wasn’t. I was like Pepe Le Pew - charming and average enough to pass on the surface in most cases, but soon people usually began to suspect I was not what I appeared. One thing I’ve learned about work: When you don’t fit in to a defined social group, you eventually will make a handy target for somebody, and you will have no allies. Especially when you are female and you work with a bunch of other females.

 

I can’t really pass in total freak settings either. Though I’m definitely too unconventional to pass in mainstream society, I’m too square to be a true hippie, not flaky enough to be a true pagan, swear too much and get too cranky to fit in with the Buddhists or Yoga teachers. That really just pisses everybody off when you can’t conform to any social group or stereotype.

 

I don’t want to get lumped in with a stereotypical bunch of freaks. Deep down I am a snob. When I’m in a pissy mood I feel superior to those who conform to stereotypes. But now I realize I am a freak, and here’s why: Back when I was single I did a tour of duty on Match.com. I signed up for the personality matching service. Week after week, based on my personality profile, I was sent photos and bios of some of the biggest, most pretentious freaks I’ve ever seen – one or two I was already acquainted with. I noted that a certain indivdual neglected to mention his criminal record. At first I thought, these guys all suck. They think they’re so cool, but they’re obviously total pains in the ass. Finally I realized: This Is Who I Am. I belong on this page with these people.

 

I guess if I were more mature or spiritually advanced I wouldn’t be disappointed in the world I’ve found myself in; I wouldn’t feel cheated that I worked hard in school only to find that there are no jobs and no places in this culture where I can feel I belong. I assumed the isolation I felt growing up would end once I was able to leave home, and while things certainly improved, I still feel like I haven’t found home.

Mud Shadow Research?

Saw this the other day and it made me think of mud shadows/painbodies and wonder if they could be examples of the kind of life it’s talking about.

Sophia Realization

Have been reading John Lamb Lash’s Not In His Image, and it’s reminded me of a dream I had when I was 18 or 19.

 

In the book Lash talks about the Gnostic, Pagan traditions which he says pre-dated Christianity. These traditions celebrated physical existence and taught that the Earth was holy, and through communion with nature and transpersonal experience people could experience personal and spiritual growth. He compares this with the “off-planet landlord” paradigm of the monotheist religions, which preached that we’re all a total bunch of assholes who need to be “saved,” and we’d better start brown nosing now. This monotheist favor-currying usually consists of suffering, which is holy in that system, or of cruelty to non-believers because they don’t count as worthy of existence.

 

I was raised Southern Baptist, and though I always chafed within the narrow confines of that concept of spirituality, it was all I knew.  So I made assumptions about the earth being a nice place and home and all, but still the unholy container of hell. To experience one’s higher destiny one needed to connect with lofty regions of the sky, where angels and residents of Heaven dwell.

 

So one afternoon my freshman year of college I was napping in my dorm room. Normally in dreams I just see visual settings in my head and there’s a story line. It’s just something I watch, even though I might at the time think it’s really happening to me. But this was one of those dreams where you feel like your entire body is really somewhere else. I was standing in a ruin, like a Greek or Roman amphitheater. It was dark like just before a thunderstorm hits, and everything was deadly still and silent, like a movie on freeze-frame. At the same time, I felt the setting was primed and full of energy waiting to burst loose. From my right a huge piece of broken statuary rose up from outside the ruin and levitated in front of me. It was the chin and mouth from a face that must have been the size of a two-story house.

 

It spoke to me. The voice was big and masculine but calm, soothing and it almost had a velvety texture. It was also like I heard the voice inside my head and not in the air around me.

 

I guess we had an exchange, but this was many years ago and I can’t remember exactly what was said. Somehow it became understood that I was seeking spiritual knowledge. Next I found myself pulling Gs as I rocketed up through the sky. It was thrilling; I felt my spiritual quest was about to be fulfilled. But once in space what I saw was very unimpressive. The sun was a bare lightbulb and there was absolutely nothing of interest going on up there.

 

The voice said, “I’d like to show you a new way to get to Heaven,” and I was looking down at the brilliant blue and white surface of the earth. I began  to descend and panicked. Partly it was because I could hear the sound of my descent, like the noise of Wile E. Coyote falling in the Road Runner cartoons. Descent is inherently more scary than ascent because it’s essentially falling. But in this case I was mostly just afraid I was next going to be shown Hell, that I’d be trapped there, that it was all a cruel joke engineered by minions of Satan.

 

I struggled against the Gs in total panic and willed myself to wake up. I did, with a start. I had to look around the room and get up and walk around to reassure myself it was over. This dream bothered me for a long time.

 

So in Lash’s book, he says the Gnostic Pagans took spiritual instruction directly from the Earth itself, an energy they called Sophia. The monotheists destroyed forests of Pagan writings so there’s not much detail about how they achieved the states where they communed with the soul of the Earth, other than it appeared to them as a special kind of white light. I think I may have seen this white light in other dreams.

 

Now when I remember this dream it occurs to me that it might not have been about Satan trying to get me involved in a Hell tourism package. It might have been a communiqué from the world of Sophia religion.

How do you do Gnosticism?

I’ve read some books in the past few weeks that have blown my head apart, and I’m having trouble processing this new information to the point where I can write about it. It’s given me mental constipation. Sure I have pages of partially synthesized material about what I’ve learned, but it’s hard to piece it together into the whole I’m looking for. So here comes a big mess.

 

I’ve always been interested in religion and mythology. At first this interest came about because I feared that God was going to kill me and send me hell, or that I would discover myself to be the offspring of the devil and somehow responsible for countless others winding up in Hell.  Then after I encountered Classical mythology in third or fourth grade I got interested in that. I could not get my head around what it would be like to participate in religion like the pagan Greeks and Romans did. Up until recently I wondered why there’s not more information about how pagan worship was conducted.

 

And I had questions about my own religious tradition, like: How do you pray? But I never asked that one because it might tip somebody off that I was evil. To this day I can’t believe people spend so much time in church being exhorted to pray, but there’s no instruction about how to do it.

 

I guess that’s why I took to Buddhism so, because it’s specific. Chant these syllables, visualize this, sit this way and breathe like so. Gotcha.

 

And I really liked Paganism a lot because it’s about participation in religious rite, not just passively sitting, listening, and following rules.

 

But last week I discovered that maybe I can have it all. Hell yeah! Gnostic Christian tradition is very Pagan-flavored! I can still do Buddhist practices! And it addresses the issue of Castaneda’s Mud Shadows and Tolle’s Painbody! It makes sense! And certain schools of Gnostic thought support ecstatic experience! Hmmm, but there’s still not much information about how to it, or much in the way of Gnostic churches to join around here.

 

More later.

Why Does Christianity Need So Much PR?

I hadn’t been to church in a long time when my grandfather died. I hadn’t been to a funeral in a long time either. I was surprised to see it was pretty much like a church service, one where the preacher takes advantage of the dead body in the room to scare everybody with the reminder that unless they’ve been saved, they’re going to hell when death arrives for them.

 

During the funeral, I glanced around the sanctuary. It looked like at least two-thirds of the audience was upwards of 60 years old. In fact, most of them were members of the church we were sitting in, and had probably been hearing all their lives about the dangers of not getting saved. Why don’t initiates in the Jesus cult ever get past the point of having to be cajoled with such heavy-handed tactics?  Does a room full of saved old folks still have to be threatened? Supposedly you only have to get saved once, so I wondered who this message was for. I entertained the idea the whole sermon might be targeting me and my Dad, who is also not saved, but decided that was just paranoid. I believe preachers do think they have to haul out the “damned for all eternity” stuff at every opportunity in order to keep the flock in line.

 

I’ve got a client who’s been a believer all his life. Carries on talking about The Lord for almost the whole time when he gets a massage. And it’s really offensive stuff, too, from my perspective. All about how it’s so clear that a totally literal interpretation of the Bible is the only reasonable way to read it. He’s always complaining about how he can’t meet any women, too, so I told him to go to a yoga class. He said he can’t do that because Yoga is associated with Hinduism, a heathen faith. I told him there’s not any Hindu stuff in the average yoga class, and he says he still takes offense to it because it is based in Hinduism. He’s got high standards, that one.

 

Every time, he comes in telling me another story about how he’s argued another non-believer into a logic-based corner about how their religion doesn’t make sense. It’s amazing some Muslim hasn’t kicked his ass yet. Or that he hasn’t been fired for that kind of shit.

 

Amazingly enough I still like this guy. He’s fun to talk to despite the zealotry, so I charge him the discount rate even though he doesn’t really qualify for it. I find it hard to believe he can’t find anybody to date.

 

But the last time I worked on him he was talking all that stuff and suddenly I had an epiphany: This motherfucker is whistling in the dark. He’s carrying on about the Bible so much because, deep down, he has doubts and those doubts terrify him. He preaches because he’s insecure in his faith. All this talk is really to convince himself.

Buzz Starved

I do some automatic writing from time to time, and frequently the scrawled messages tell me I need to open my head or open my heart. These messages never give me guidance about how to do that. But the other day I was reading Terrence McKenna’s Food of the Gods and in writing about ayahuasca or something like it, he said the natives who employ the drug report that you have to take a big dose the first time to “open the head,” and thereafter you can trip on a small dose.

 

Could that be what they mean? In fact, a friend of mine has said she wants to go to South America to do an 11-day ayahuasca tour this summer, and sure, I’d go if I had the money.

 

It’s probably been 15 years or more since I’ve done mushrooms, but they’re my drug of choice. In fact, they’re the only drug I’m not sure I’m sick of, if you exclude coffee and chocolate.  Over the course of my partying career, beginning in my late teens and ending sometime roughly in my early 30s, something changed metabolically in me and I can’t get enjoyably high anymore. Alcohol doesn’t give me the sense of invincibility and well-being it used to, and the brutal hangover that sets in before the buzz has even worn off is not worth it. Pot makes me grumpy, tired, and paranoid. I don’t run across LSD anymore and it’s too risky anyway because there’s no way to assess the quality of what you’re getting until it’s too late.

 

There’s also a necessary social component to getting high, and that’s gone. All my partying buddies are far-flung and I’m not sure we’d still have the same fun, giggly chemistry.

 

It’d be nice to do heavy hallucinogens in a reverent religious ceremony outside somewhere, and not in a dingy apartment with a lot of silliness or at a public gathering with a lot of potential for uncomfortable situations.

 

McKenna’s point in this book is that the world population is buzz-starved, sick of living in a universe with the ego at the center, and the only legal ways to get a buzz tend to make people assholes by inflating the ego (alcohol). Maybe he’s right.

Ostara Ritual Planning/Gnostic Research

I’d like to observe Ostara on the 22nd of this month.  Jyothi wants to make the observance part of a house blessing for her new place, provided she and her fellah close on it by then. That sounds reasonable to me. We did that for our friend Rajneesh at Mabon one time. (Interestingly enough, Mabon is Ostara’s counterpart in the dark half of the year. Day and night are equal at these points on the calendar). I made a person-shaped cake out of stacked graham crackers and frosting made from confectioner’s sugar and lots of REAL BUTTER. The idea at Mabon is to create a symbol of something you’ve sown during the year that that you can reap. Lots of times at Mabon rituals there will be a John Barleycorn cake made of cornbread that’s kind of like a big gingerbread man, and the participants cannibalize it. I guess back in the days of original pagans they used grain they’d grown in their fields to bake the John Barley Corn effigy, and eating it was part of a ritual of rewarding themselves for their hard work.

 

My John Graham CrackerMan was mighty tasty. I went back by Rajneesh’s place the next day to help him move boxes, and I looked in the fridge while I was there. There were deep finger gouge marks in what remained of the John Graham CrackerMan because Rajneesh had gotten hungry again after we left and couldn’t find where he’d packed away the silverware, so he’d gotten down like a caveman on the leftovers.

 

Back to Ostara. This holiday follows Imbolc, which is about planting the seeds of new projects, ideas, or goals. So the theme of Eostar is about sprouting, birthing, and breakthroughs. I sure as Hell need some breakthrough action right about now. I’m just about sick with envy about Jyothi’s breakthrough of buying this house with its sweetass yard in one of the coolest neighborhoods in town. But since I’m not exactly sure I’m supposed to stay in this city, I won’t be too bitter.

 

I’ve been doing some research about Gnostic ritual, too.  I’ve not found much out there on it, but here are three things I’ve located that I want to try.

 

Here’s a link to info about Gnostic services.

 

Here’s a link to a good ritual opening exercise.

 

And here’s a link to a good self-analysis exercise.

 

Of course since Gnosticism was oppressed, it’s probably impossible to know exactly how it was done back in the day, and how it was done probably varied a lot from sect to sect. On the other hand I don’t think it was as prescriptive as conventional Christianity today. Regardless, since we don’t know the right way to do it, we can do it the way that works best for us. Discovering, swiping useful methods from various traditions and making it up as I go along is fine with me.

 

I’ve read a lot about entheogens (buzz-producing substances) and how they figured prominently in Gnostic religious experience, so I’ve also ordered some stuff called Blue Lotus that’s supposed to offer a legal high. I’m skeptical – if it’s legal then surely it doesn’t work. But I’m too old to have real drug connections any more and don’t want to risk the legal hassles. Blue Lotus will have to do.

 

I guess I’ll primarily be experimenting with this by myself, but I’m scouting around for other people to involve.

Experiments In Dreaming

I recently purchased a mixture of herbs designed to heighten one’s dreaming ability. This mixture is brewed into a bitter, nasty-ass tea, which I let steep for four hours, and you’re supposed to roll a cigarette out of the same mixture. Then at bedtime you drink and smoke it.

 

The first time I tried this I didn’t do the smoking part because I didn’t think I had any rolling papers. The next morning I had some vague impressions of dreams and a sense I’d slept hard, but not much else. A couple of days later I was trying to get some tax stuff together and found an old, yellowed pack of 1.25 rolling papers in the bottom of a filing cabinet. The glue on the edge didn’t work anymore, and I’m way out of practice, but with the help of a lot of spit I managed to roll a functional cigarette of the dreaming herb mixture. I tried again last night after smoking about half of it.

 

In the wee hours I came to with a snap, awakened by a panicked sense of falling. Once again, I had the impression I’d been doing some heavy duty dreaming but couldn’t remember anything.

 

Wolf woman said that sense of falling happens when you come back into your body after journeying out of it.

 

Lucid dreams make me feel good for days. They renew you by putting you in a place where you feel like everything around you is alive, and that you’re humming with delicious energy. I’ve never been able to maintain the lucidity for more than a few moments, though. Even though I’ve worked on it in fits and starts, I haven’t been able to do it reliably. This may be because I’m afraid to. I hate that feeling I get right after I realized I’m lucid. I can’t think of what to do next, and get anxious about it, and the anxiety starts banishing the lucidity, and I feel like a loser.

Holy Atheism

Sometimes atheists are a real pain in the ass. These pain in the ass ones are generally the kind who profess atheism because they’re bitter. I’ve noticed there are a lot of sour former Catholic atheists, who aren’t really atheists because they’re just trying to get back at the god they used to worship. I went through a spell like that in middle school, but I was Baptist. It sucks when you don’t realize you have other options, when you think your only choices are to believe in a capricious bully God or no God at all.

 

One time I met a truly inspirational atheist. Colin’s atheism inspired a profound sense of wonder and gratitude in him because he felt really lucky to exist in the first place, given the random and meaningless nature of the universe as he saw it. He believed the fact that he not only existed, but did so at the top of the food chain, was the result of some unbelievably fortunate accidents.

 

Colin was telling me about a friend of his who’d recently come to the conclusion that there was no God. This friend became depressed because it seemed very unglamorous to him that human beings were essentially walking mud in a universe without meaning.

 

“You’re fucking kidding me,” Colin said to him. “Sure you’re just mud, but for fuck’s sake, you’re mud that got to sit up and look around. You should appreciate that.”

 

Think about that. And, if you’re reading this, you’re not only special in that you have a nervous system and are conscious. Your circumstances were kind enough to allow you to gain enough education to learn to read. In fact, you can read one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, so there’s plenty for you to read and plenty of people who can understand you if you speak or write.

 

And if you live in this day and age, you’ve never known smallpox or the black plague. And most likely, nobody owns you as property in the classical sense. If you believe in God, all of this might seem to natural because it must be God’s plan for you. But if you don’t, the mind struggles in vain to process how lucky you are. Wonder is everywhere. Savor every moment!

Ostara Windhorse Ritual

Had planned to get together with a few other folks yesterday to do an Ostara observance outside, maybe a continuation of what we did last time, but what with work/childcare conflicts nobody but me was able to make it.

So I planted some Kale and Dianthus plants to celebrate, then did the Four Directions ritual from Sarangarel’s Riding Windhorses in my dining room. Generally I don’t like to do scripted, read-from-a-book rituals, but I’ve been pressed for time myself lately and it really came in handy.

During the ritual I set an intention to lucid dream, and I sat and looked at the backs of my hands. This Castaneda method has worked for me before.

A few days ago I realized I’ve come to some conclusions about the issues I wanted help with in the the Imbolc ritual, so maybe it has born fruit. I have been thinking and writing a lot in longhand, but my husband’s laptop died and he’s been using this one, which means I haven’t been. So more analysis and postings will have to wait until his laptop gets back from the shop.

Realization

I’ve had some realizations lately about the Deva of this city, who was the focus of our Imbolc ritual. So I guess that ritual has borne some fruit. Here goes:

I’ve driven a lot of miles and spend a lot of money in pursuit of religious study and experience. Over the years I’ve come back from these experiences and thought, Hey, I can start something like that here at home. But those attempts have crashed and burned due to lack of social support. Now I’m discouraged. I’m taking it personally. Deep down, I feel like my town is holding out on me. Or trying to drive me away.

 

Yesterday I was talking with a client about how this town is right on the cusp of coolness, has flirted with it for years, but can’t seem to make it over the edge. He agreed. And this morning I related the same sentiment to a co-worker, who explained why that is. “This town can’t make up its mind what it wants to be,” he said. “It can’t decide if it wants to be Asheville or Atlanta.” 

Well that makes total sense. The hippie-dippy holistic tendencies are here, but there’s too much redneck populism in this town for it to make a transition to an Asheville, NC or a Floyd, VA type community. But there’s enough alternative identity here to keep us from embracing the path of total Southern big-dollar conventionality. Although Asheville is now too expensive for most folks, and I hear it has become a transplanting ground for former Atlantites looking to get more bang for their real estate buck.

 

When I think about it, I have to admit that this city’s inability to get off the fence pretty much mirrors my inability to commit to either world. I’ve always wanted to be a freak who can pass in the mainstream, and I’m suspicious and distrustful of others in the fringe class. At the same time, I get frustrated with people who have no freaky leanings at all. There seems to be no place for hybrids like myself. 

I guess people live in the cities they deserve.

 

 

 

Anger Sound Healing

Found the guy who wrote Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep on YouTube. Though there’s nothing of his on YouTube about dream work, there is some stuff about sound healing that looks to be pretty good. There are sounds you make that go with specific chakras, and they’re designed to assist with helping one keep one’s head out of one’s ass. Here’s the intro:

I tried this first exercise this morning and I think it helps. It’s about working with anger, which is the primary negative emotion I dance with. I probably need to work with this one for a while before I move on to the others.

Not much doing on the dream front here. Although I’ve been annoyed with an old friend for a while because she doesn’t return e-mails or facebook prods, and one night earlier this week I dreamed about her. She sent me a message on facebook the next day (though not out of the blue – I’d sent her one a few days before).

Parking Spot Guardian Angel

A client told me this story a couple of weeks ago:

 

She recently talked to her brother, who lives in town, and the brother mentioned that he believes their dead father assists him with finding good parking spots. She thought that was weird, but then a week and a half later she talked to her daughter, who lives several hours away and who told her exactly the same thing. The brother and the daughter have no idea the dead father/grandfather is performing this parking spot saving service for anybody else – they came up with this theory independently of each other. And they’ve been getting parking help from the dead man for many years now, but only recently mentioned it to my client. Now that is really weird.

 

So this client of mine sprained her ankle not long after these conversations, and she started thinking of her father when she needed to find favorable parking spaces to save her a long walk. At first it didn’t seem to help, but after a few tries she began to notice a difference.

I keep thinking I need to cultivate a relationship with a guardian angel but somehow I never get around to it. One thing that keeps coming up for me in tarot card/rune readings and sessions with psychics is that I fail to listen to my intuition. One time somebody did Results System on me and said I’m cut off from connection with God. Well that sucks and I don’t know what to do about it. As an ENTP, I have a fairly well developed sense of intuition but I guess my head keeps getting in the way.

Hmm I bet the fonts in this entry are going to be screwed up too, like so many others are, but alas once again I’m feeling too lazy to figure out why and try to fix it.

Synchronicity And The Rapture Sisters

I guess I come from a family of religious fanatics/freaks. My first cousin has quit her job and is “running a ministry out of my house,” as she put it. Having bailed out of the Jesus cult in my childhood, I’m not familiar enough with the lingo to know exactly what that means, so I had to ask. Based on what she said I think it means she’s preaching Christian services in her living room and has a small congregation. I want to go to one but haven’t had the time yet.

My sister-in-law is a Presbyterian assistant minister or preacher or whatever they call their church leaders. My brother was president of the Baptist student union where he went to college. They’re pretty normal.

My uncle is mad at God and not attending church now, but when he did he went to the kind where people fall out and speak in tongues. In 1972 the Spirit moved him to burn his LP record collection, which included everything the Supremes had recorded up to that point. He bought it all back later. (I think record burnings were orchestrated by the record industry. Churches just fronted the operation and got kickbacks, and record companies made countless millions from the folks who burned their records and bought them back later). This uncle also idolized Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker, and had many good times with church buddies at Heritage USA. I used to give him a lot of shit about that – before the scandal hit. I was really smug about being right afterwards too. 

Okay now I’m meandering to the point. My Mom’s two first cousins are homeless street preachers who can’t wait for the Rapture to arrive. Now they wear identical outfits and call themselves “Cheerleaders for Jesus.” But when I was a child, they were teenagers and I thought they epitomized cool: They had lip gloss and Queen’s News Of The World record, and one of them worked at an ice cream stand on the beach. They lived with their mom, and I’m not sure what made them go round the bend and become their own three-woman cult, but I’m sure something did. My Dad assures me the potential for it was always there because their mom had always entertained extremist religious notions, but I have the feeling something happened to drive them all to the land of zealotry. After their mom died it got worse. They got kicked out of their apartment for non-payment of rent. In court they explained to the judge God told them they don’t have to pay rent, and they only follow God’s laws. They are hungry for the Rapture; can’t wait for it to get here.

I could tell all kinds of stories about how unusual things became with them, but I’ll just finish telling this one. One day I was reading Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. It was really giving me the creeps, partly because it’s about different people’s ideas of how and when the world will end (soon). At the same time, I was sitting in Intensive Care waiting for hospital staff to wheel my sick grandmother back down from the X-Ray department. It was looking like she might die soon. This is the grandmother I’m pretty sure contributed to my childhood paranoia that I might be the Antichrist, or at least bound for eternity in Hell. Anyway I was getting creeped out thinking about 2012 issues. A chill went down my spine, and I reacted by turning on some cynicism about how it’s probably all bullshit. Before I could finish the thought a phone started ringing. I jumped, looked around the room. No phone. The ringing kept on and I kept looking, finally located the phone jack and followed the cord, then found the phone inside a drawer. The cord was wrapped around it many times so the receiver was bound to it. I frantically unwrapped the cord, sure the whole time whoever was calling would give up before I’d make it. But when I got the receiver free and said hello, I was speaking to one of the Rapture sisters, and I hadn’t spoken with either of them in about 20 years. The feeling of “Oh shit, synchronicity!” made another big chill go down my spine.

So today I had another “Oh shit, synchronicity!” moment involving them. Every now and then they send me cards or small gifts in the mail. It makes me feel awful because I never do that for them, and they’re the ones who are living in a car. But I’m afraid of what would happen if they knew I don’t belong to the Jesus cult. They’ll sic the Saviour on my ass and I’ll wind up tractor-beamed into the land of the Born Again by the force of their prayers. Anyway: I’ve done Buddhism along with Paganism for years. I struggle to maintain a daily meditation practice, but lately I’ve been doing better with it. A couple of weeks ago, the Rapture Sisters sent me a piece of bright yellow soap with a pink flowery bow on it. Kind of tacky, really. It sat on my desk with a bunch of other junk since then, but earlier I was on the phone with my brother and looking for something to fidget with, and chose that. I found that under the tacky pink bow, an Endless Knot is stamped into the surface of the soap. This is one of the Eight Auspicious Symbols of Tibetan Buddhism. I’m sure they’re not hip to what the symbol represents, and I’m pretty sure they never saw it in the first place thanks to that bow, but I still appreciate it.

I’ve signed up for a Buddhist retreat to take place soon, but have had some reservations about it for a number of reasons. But I feel better about it now.

More Synchronicity

So, I went to the Buddhist retreat I mentioned in my last post, the one which I felt the universe had sanctioned because some Jesus-obsessed cousins of mine sent me a bar of decorative soap with a Buddhist symbol on it.

I’m still reeling from the trip, and I’ve already noticed some subtle glimmers of improvement in my state of mindfulness.

Rainbows figure prominently in the symbolism of this religious group. On the final day of the retreat, I skipped a morning exercise class to pack up my camp site and sit outside the dining hall with a cup of coffee. The view faced east, and a sundog gleamed on a cloud some distance from the bright sun.  It looked like a section of rainbow. Woah, I thought. That’s a pretty big example of synchronicity.

Prior to the retreat I got involved in a lengthy e-mail bitch session about how I can’t stand other women. Ironically the other party in this dialog was a female friend from high school. Anyway, I’ve always been wary of women, who I’ve often experienced as shifty and untrustworthy and dangerous and unpredictable and crazy and downright mean. I believe these feelings may stem from my relationship with my mother, who also had a difficult relationship with her mother.

OK so at this retreat it came to my attention that my Mojo (as I’ll call it for back of a better term) is based in the element of water. Water represents femininity, comfort, intuitive processes. Yet water makes me uneasy – I’ll always prefer the mountains over the beach, and I never learned to swim well. I shun comfort, as it is for sissies. I have nightmares about tidal waves and flash floods. On some fundamental level, I am repelled by the element that is supposed to sustain me.

This made me reflect upon my professional past, which I can compare to trying to canoe down a rocky river during a drought. While I have had some moments of brilliant luck, I have had to get out and drag the boat most of the time. On  many occasions I have wondered at my lack of ability to be in the right place at the right time.

About a year ago somebody did a Results System assessment on me. The protocol led her to find a verse in the Bible that most applied to me and my situation. She picked the one in Genesis about “And on the second day God separated the waters of the heavens from the waters of the earth.” I never figured out exactly what to take from that, but those first few verses in Genesis are the only parts of the Bible I like.

So I guess in the short term I’ll work on my relationship with my mojo element, and I’ll be doing these new meditation practices. I’m excited about having my practice rejuvenated.

Good News, Bad News

Well, that retreat really provided a shot in the arm to my meditation practice. I’ve been more dilligent than I have in years, and I feel a lot better. Unfortunately, I fit the meditation into my day where I used to put the blogging. Don’t know exactly what I’m going to do about that.

Dream Ritual

Have had some interesting experiences with Dream Yoga, but it hasn’t unfolded like I expected. I’ve spent a couple of nights in a weird, jacked up state where I dreamed I was lying awake and then I woke up tired. A couple of nights I had more dreams of being chased by aliens. One of those qualified as a true nightmare. Metal cylons were hot on my trail and I was so scared I had no bricks to shit. Then it was like an unseen somebody prompted me to examine my fear, sense it like an internal structure. Suddenly I was outside the panic, studying its coral-like shape within my body, and the fear became a totally different experience. An interesting one, like studying a painting in a gallery. Now that was damn cool. I’ve tried to repeat the experience in waking life while watching stressful television.

Some nights when I think of Salge Du Dalma, the Dakini of Dream, I feel so enveloped by the nurturing prescence that it somehow evokes grief. Other nights it feels as if she’s pissed at and ignoring me.

And here lately I’ve lost my sense of rapport with Blue Medicine Buddha, which is frustrating.

Well I found this link to a ritual about the Dakini of Dream. I’m pretty sure it was generated outside Tibetan Buddhist orthodoxy but I plan to try it anyway. There’re a lot of other cool things on that site.

Heart Space

This morning I did a meditation ritual for the elemental energy of space. According to Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche in Healing with Light, Energy, and Sound, the elemental goddess of space is one of five – the others are earth, water, air, and fire. This morning’s exercise, which I took from his book, is supposed to help me retrieve any space energies I’ve lost over my lifetime. The reason I chose to work with Space first is because I’m feeling encroached upon. Here’s why:

My meditation area and shrine are in the corner of our living room, which is pretty much an extension of the dining room and kitchen. It’s hard to meditate when somebody’s making breakfast or otherwise rattling around in the front part of our house. Since my husband’s work/school schedule has changed, he’s home more often and my available times for meditation practice have shrunk. When he’s home, during meditation I find myself on guard and trying to hurry before the next distraction. This is what destroys me most: The sound of his spoon ringing on the inside of his coffee cup after he pours cream in it. I know coffee’s available at our house, I know I can have some whenever I want, but that sound yanks my attention around and incites immediate coffee lust that can’t be denied. I love having him around when I’m not meditating though, so I guess I can’t complain.

Also, major renovations are going on in the unit upstairs and workers arrive early in the morning to yuck it up and stomp in the stairwell and run sanders and saws right above my head.

I’ve managed to accept the EMS traffic going to and from the fire station and hospital down the street, which is outside the window by my shrine.

So there we go. I want to feel more spacious and free in my life, and since I can’t change my external circumstances I have to work with my internal ones. The element of space is based in the heart, so I’m interested to see how work with this element will change my emotional life.

Shrooms, vomit, and tripping meditation

Over the next few days after I did the Space Elemental Goddess meditation I mentioned last time, I sporadically noticed things I thought might be related to it, like warmth in a circle on my back behind my heart. (The space element is based in the heart). After that I did meditation for the Earth Elemental Goddess, and that just led to a greater general sense of happy.

I’ve been meaning to do a meditation for water, but I haven’t yet. As I’ve noted in the past, I have issues with water. Recently I dreamed of an incredibly deep stone-lined well will just a little water at the bottom, and I think it’s a reminder of my water issues.

One thing I did do recently was eat some psilocybin mushrooms and lie out in the rain with one foot dangling in a swimming pool. I thought this might be a more fundamental and less regimented method for calling in the element of water. It was warm enough so that the sprinkling rain wasn’t uncomfortable, and the outline of the sun showed behind the thin gray rain clouds. I wallowed in a flood of gratitute for having the opportunity to trip at all, and to be able to do it under such pleasant circumstances. I surfed waves of thankfulness, and I realized that gratitude is fun. I felt looooooved by the universe.

The backs of my eyelids were screens for a light show of moving fields of orange, red, yellow, and white with cephalapod-like outlines surging against them. I tried some yoga poses.  In plow pose, the imagery turned blue-black. In a headstand, my awareness shifted away from the colors and to the feel of the inside of my body. In child’s pose and on my back, the reds, oranges, and yellows were incredibly vivid.

At one point I got up because I heard my friend Clarice inside the house saying she felt sick. I went in and offered to work on foot reflex points to reduce nausea. She declined, but my husband said he’d appreciate some work. I said could only muster the focus if it was an emergency. She went into the bathroom and gagged for a while but got no payoff, and I went back into the yard.  Not long after that, the dog got up and barfed on Clarice’s husband, who was relaxing in a lounge chair.

Parasite Dream

While I was away at a recent Buddhist retreat I had really disgusting dream. I had it the first night I was there.

In the dream I looked down and my right forearm was a big glass cylinder. Heavy like that too. I had no idea what was going on, so I just looked at it. Inside the cylinder were rows of rectangular cells containing gray sprouts with eyes at the end – they looked like a single tiny goat eye, with a split pupil going sideways. They were looking at me. Aside from the eyes on the ends, they looked like the grayish sprouted seeds of an overripe tomato when you cut it open. Yuck. On top of each cell was a chamber holding a small while sphere.

A male somebody standing next to me, who I didn’t look up to see, said parasites must have moved into the blisters on my arm when I burned it. I have no idea what that was about.

This dream may have presaged the trouble I was getting ready to have with bugs in general on this trip. Later during the retreat I was told that dreams of bugs leaving your body are a good sign and it means the meditation is working, but I noted that the bugs in my dream were incubating in my arm and didn’t leave. Shivers.

I got schooled in some meditation routines that will now be taking up a larger chunk of my day, so I won’t have as much time to write. Sometimes I wonder if writing’s a such a good habit anyway, and maybe I should give it up for more productive pursuits. But I guess as far as habits go it’s better than many. Cheap, non-addicitive, and it’s mostly safe to drive after doing it.

Ngondro Works

I recently took up Ngondro meditation practice, and I think it’s working.  Ngondro is a set of meditation exercises designed to help you begin removing your head from your ass and become a more compassionate person. I was pretty discouraged early on, because I found out you have to do each of the 9 practices 100,000 times to complete a cycle. The way I see it, if I’m done in 10 years I’ll have worked at the limits of my capability for dilligence.

But now I’m encouraged. Here’s why: Last night I had a dream about a former arch-nemesis. We worked together several years ago, and as is the case with most of the people you come to hate vehemently, we started out as friends. She’s the kind of person who likes to play complicated games with people, and she eventually got around to doing it with me, and the aversion began.

Eventually she got a diagnosis that meant she might die soon, and she missed a lot of work. I was surprised to notice a complete lack of concern on my part. In fact, I started taking candy from the jar on her desk, knowing it would piss her off if she knew. Finally I realized that if this woman died, I would not care at all, that I would just finish all her candy and not have to worry about the repercussions. That bothered me.

Then she had surgery and her doctors discovered they’d made a mistake. Her health problem was not serious as it turned out. Soon she was back at work, and mad about her missing candy. Damn.

The day she returned, that bitch asked me if I’d been concerned about her welfare. When I said yes, we both knew I was lying, and I hated myself for being too scared to tell the truth. That ho had gotten the better of me again.

I knew enough about her to understand why she was such a mean, narcissistic freak. Intellectually, I did have compassion for her because it was so clear why she’d turned out the way she did. But I felt none in my heart. All I felt was fear that events might convene in such a way as to make me turn out the same way she did.

Anyway, last night I had a dream that the two of us were on a road trip together. I was pissed off and guarded about having to sit in a confined space with this person, but I found that her personality had softened and expanded somewhat. Though she didn’t apologize and I didn’t totally let my guard down, I did forgive her without saying so. I was stunned by what a relief it was to finally let that go.

So now I’m not as focused on the goal of doing 100,000 of each of nine meditation exercises, and I’m more excited about what might happen on the way.

Litha/Midsummer Ritual

We got up in the wee hours this morning to drive out to the boonies for this ritual. Since we live in the city, we have few options for nature spots where we can burn a fire in relative privacy. There’s a spot in woods on private property a while south of here, and it’s locally claimed to be haunted. I’ve tested the area by dowsing with L-rods and I believe it’s simply the location of a female vortex.

Earlier in the day I did Tsa Lung meditation to support the ritual. It seemed like an auspicious time – Midsummer lining up closely with the new moon. And on Sunday night, when we might be less likely to run into other visitors.

Like I said, this place is locally well-known. It’s said to be where the Devil goes to pace on sleepless nights. So one of the drawbacks when you go there is that you run a big risk of encountering drunken teens who go there for the thrill of getting scared. It’s happened to us before. When we got there this time, we found the remains of a recent fire – it smelled like somebody’d been there just a few hours before. There were many beer cans.

I chanted part of a Windhorse ritual in Tibetan, Quint did the same in English, and we burned a big pile of Rosemary and Thyme. I threw some old ritual masks I haven’t used in a long time onto the pile. It’s hard to get into a ritual when you’re worried about people sneaking up on you from the woods ( there are well-worn paths all around this place) or cops shining their headlights on you from the road. I wanted to include some chants to appease local nature spirits. God knows this place probably needs it because it sees some abuse from the partying teens. But I was in a rush to get it all over with and get the fire out and leave before any other people showed up, so the fire had to do as an offering. We splashed a cold Corona beer on it as it burned. Nature spirits might like that kind of thing.

Sure enough, the fire wasn’t quite out before a loud bunch of youngsters pulled up in a Mustang, got out, and started coming up the hill. The masks hadn’t burned all the way down yet and they looked really creepy with orange light shining through the eyeholes. It could make for an uncomfortable situation when they get here and see this, I thought, so I stamped the fire out before the strangers arrived. They were friendly enough when we passed them on our way out. But we’d been enjoying the sounds of whipporwhills, and when they got there a lot of loud talk and the occasional screech started going on.

Litha’s a time to work on prosperity. It’s the time of year when you celebrate all the hard work you’ve done and pause to look forward to all your work paying off.  It’s a tad depressing because it’s the longest day of the year and as someone who loves the sun and hates to see the day’s length go into decline, that doesn’t seem like a reason to celebrate. In just six months, it’ll be the winter solstice. That’s hard to believe.

Lessons In Impermanence/Ngondro Update

I get angry during sections of my Ngondro practice. There are nine different sections to it with about as many different chants to learn in English and Tibetan. The chanting’s supposed to go on at the same time as some vastly detailed visualizations and sometimes complicated mudras are involved. I am ashamed to admit it but sometimes I swear from frustration during my practice. One of the first three activities is kind of a confessional called “Admitting Misdeeds” where you work with a recent transgression, such as an angry outburst, and experience sincere remorse and desire not to do it again. Before I’ve finished the entire Ngondro I have inevitably racked up some more misdeeds.

Meditation practice does so much for me, but at the same time I resent and resist doing it.  A vat of  internal cranky stays on the boil while I’m engaged in or thinking about meditation, and the fumes pervade my internal atmosphere in a very distracting fashion. I stumble upon truly aware moments almost by accident, and then I get so excited about them I lose them in the excitement.

I’m happy I’ve stuck with my weekly practice of the entire Ngondro so far, but I want to experience it more deeply. I’m in such a hurry to get it over with, I don’t pause and abide after each section, which is causing me to miss a lot of the benefit. Because I fear I’m going to get fed up and quit before it’s over, I rush through.

Even though I’m not doing it well, it still feels like it’s working. Though I’m still quite short-fused, more of my emotional states are starting to feel separate from me and not as energetic. I’m having moments that feel like lucid dreaming. Here’s an example:

My friend’s daughter died last week. It’s been a long time coming, but it still caught me by surprise because I thought she at least had a few more weeks. I got home from work Friday and got the message. Immediately, my mind started to fidget. What do I do now? How do I feel?  For seconds at a time over the next few hours, I truly felt and understood the immediacy and truth of this loss as something raw and in real time, not confined to intellectual understanding and internal dialog.  I’ve also had brief windows where I truly get it that I’m going to die, that I’m already dead at some point in the future.

Last night I went out to eat with some old friends. In our 20s we took our lives together for granted, as well as the wild and exciting times we had. That stuff was so memorable and dramatic we never dreamed we’d forget it. Then they got married and left town, and we all lost touch. Recently we all made contact again and they got babysitters for the evening last night. We went out to eat.

They are still the same funny, enjoyable people, and seeing them again reminded me of how much I miss them. And it took all of us to piece together details from events in the past, and there were still gaping holes in those stories. We’ve forgotten so much. It made me sad. How could I have forgotten the times when we all used to stare at J.G.’s ass at work, and editorialize on its magical qualities? How could I have forgotten who FatHand Carl was? I was the one who almost dated him, but they were the ones who remembered him.

In a way I wish I’d been more aware at the time how valuable those days were, but at the same time if I had known I’d have already been sad about how they would one day end. Part of the fun was in being so casual about everything, and so sure that the good times would keep rolling. I guess at some level we knew that and tried not to get too hung up on it. Or we were just too distracted by thinking about things we didn’t have and how we were going to get those things.

Hitting The Ngondro Wall

I always hit a wall in my meditation practice. Resentment about doing it, internal pouting and resistance while doing it. Then feeling guilty and bad about not doing it or not doing it well. The next thing I know, it’s been months since I’ve practiced.

So this weekend I’ve taken a break from my weekly habit of doing the entire Ngondro on Sunday, and yesterday I didn’t do my daily practice of admitting misdeeds and accumulating Hundred Syllable Mantra recitations. Instead I did Tsa Lung yesterday and Sound healing today. These are both about clearing chakras and changing negative states of mind, and right now they’re easier than the Ngondro practices. Hopefully they will ease some of the negativity I feel about Ngondro.

Tsa Lung and Sound Healing are the meditative exercises I started with this time around. To begin with, they seemed like a tedious pain in the ass, but now they seem like a birthday party compared to the Ngondro. I feel more immeidate benefits after doing them, too.

One of the Ngondro practices has helped me at work, however. I use an abbreviated Blue Medicine Buddha meditation while doing massage, but at times I’ve struggled to come up with enough compassion  to make it work. In the Boddhichitta section of the Ngondro, you think of someone you love. Then you think about how, in other lives, you’ve had the same kind of loving relationship with everybody else on the planet, even the folks you can’t stand. But bringing to mind that person you love helps you envision goodness and enlightenment coming to everybody alive now.

So when I’ve got somebody on the table, I imagine they’re a person I know and want to help. That makes it so much easier.

School/Work Dream Themes

Stressful dreams lately. On Monday night, the setting and situation for the  dream was much like  scene from a couple of days before, when I had a job interview for a chair massage gig. The person interviewing me demonstrated some deep tissue moves while I sat in the massage chair.  First, I sat backwards on the massage chair, and she said “Let’s flip your cancer over,” indicating that I should turn around.  Then she pressed my bladder 20 points, those meaty bumps above the base of the neck, and while I was saying “I hope that doesn’t mean I’m –” I was going to say “going to get cancer” but she cut me off and said “Did so and so like school?” The question mark stands for a word that starts with C, which I don’t remember now. At this moment I realized that the dream was being used to get me to confront or look at something about myself. I was afraid of this and at the same time the question elicited profound, blowout rage. I shouted and wind blew like an explosion and the scene disappeard. I thought, I’m so pissed off I can’t hear anymore, and I believed it. Though I noticed that I actually could hear her saying “You can hear me, you can hear me.” The force of the emotional drama woke me up. I’ve dreamed about Bladder 20 points before, but I was working on someone else’s in that one. Come to think of it, that dream was about insecurity at work too.

Tuesday night, I had the recurring dream that I’m in school trying to earn enough credits to graduate. It feels like I’m serving a prison sentence, a very long one. Sometimes I’m in high school with these, sometimes college, sometimes graduate school. In this one I was in graduate school, but I don’t remember much else. Toward the end of these dreams it dawns on me that I’ve already got more degrees I could possibly ever need, and I start thinking about how maybe I can just walk out of the class and never come back.  I never make it to the point where I actually leave, though.

Last night I dreamed I was a shorter, dark-haired girl on her first day at her new job with the FBI. Why do I keep dreaming about the FBI? Generally I think of them as bad guys, but I guess TV characters like Special Agent Cooper and Mulder and Scully have made a big impression on me.

Anyway I was feeling very insecure at my new job. I was paralyzed by the dread that maybe I wasn’t capable enough to do it, so that made me less than a go-getter. To make things worse, my supervisors wouldn’t tell me where my desk was or what to do or how to do the job, because it was workplace policy to use sink or swim tactics to wash out the ones who weren’t good enough. 

The aftertaste these dreams have left in my head has made me anxious and gloomy all week. Rinpoche said that recurring dreams are very important, that they are trying to tell you something. In this case, what? I spent too much time in school? I get stressed out when I start new jobs? That hardly seems like news.

Dream Themes Take Scary Turn

Okay so the last time I wrote I’d had successive nights dreaming of life as a prisoner in school. Right after that, I had three successive nights dreaming of moving.

In the first two I was in that stage of moving where all the big furniture is gone, but drawers full of socks and other small items still have to be packed up and taken out.  In the first of these dreams, my whole neighborhood was also having to move, businesses and householders alike. In fact my friend’s Star Trek fan club was having to abandon its life-size replica of the latest movie’s Enterprise bridge, which was incredibly cool and I thought it was a shame. In these moving dreams all my stuff was going into storage, and there was no indication of where I would be living next.

But last night, oh horrors. I dreamed I was moving into my parent’s house. The one I left at 17 because it was such a nightmare being there. The one I still get tense about having to visit. I do not like the turn my subconscious life has taken.

In hypnogogic imagery just before sleep over the past two or three nights, I’ve seen the same white-faced and hollow-socketed ghoul with jet black hair. Though it didn’t look at me I had the sense that it has to do with my family’s generational karma somehow.