$pirituality - the conflict between money and awakening

There is a long-standing conflict in the minds of many - if not most - modern people between spirituality and money. As a working shaman and a Sheya mentor and initiator, this is an issue I have had to work with for over twenty years now - and I'm still trying to get to the bottom of it. 

There are several pieces to this puzzle. One is the way that money has come to symbolize all things material, when spirituality is so often seen as the antithesis of materialism. Another is the idea that spiritual instruction should be freely given and available to all, regardless of the sacrifices of those who offer it. 

I have come to a place in my own journey where I find these two suggestions absurd. Well grounded spirituality is about integrating the whole. As long as we keep any part of the whole outside of us and paint it with the brush of shadow, we cannot be truly liberated. It is only when we realize that WE are the ones who give money - and anything else - its perceived value, that we are set free of that projection, to use use money as a simple means of storing and directing energy. As for the belief that spiritual instruct

ion should be freely given and available to all, how are we to offer instruction is we don't set good examples. Would you take diet advice from an obese nutritionist? Marital advice from a counselor who have been divorced several times? Why would you take advice on how to live a full and happy life from someone who is neither? 

This is not to say that money is any indicator of health, happiness or fulfillment. In many cases, it has no bearing at all. However, being free of the stigmatized shadows we project onto money IS a good indicator of these things. As is the ability to meet ones responsibilities in an effective manner. 

It is my considered opinion - at least at the moment - that any system of spiritual growth that does not maintain a healthy balance of giving and receiving, is not offering its membership a viable role-model. I realize that I am a dyed in the wool non-dualist and this may have some bearing on what I consider to be effective and healthy spirituality - but there you have it.

namaste

awakening the teacher

For many years I have been rolling around the idea of "teacher" in my head - trying to figure out just what we mean by this word. 

As language is painted onto the essential concepts that we try to communicate, a veil is placed between the person who expresses the concept and the one who receives that expression. And yet, without that veil, would we even be able to communicate as well as we can? 

This particular concept has been calling my attention more lately as I've been designing a training program for Sheya mentors. Even there - in the choice of the word "mentor" instead of "teacher" - is a further attempt to communicate some essential variation on the concept, which is probably lost in the process. For me - though I still haven't quite gotten "teacher" firmly delineated - "mentor" is one who supports and assists the student through a process which they have voluntarily taken on. It is less concerned with passing on specific information than it is with helping the student through the various pitfalls and avalanches of the chosen path. 

This realization about "mentor" reminds me of the confusion arising from "teacher". There are teachers who stand at the head of a class and shove information into children's heads. There are teachers who sit in caves and spout nonsense to awaken their occasional visitors. There are teachers who have no contact at all with their students, but create patterns of words and images that continue to instruct others for generations after their own death. 

With this wide spectrum of usage, we really need to be clear what we mean when we say, "this is my teacher." It could mean anything from "I take a French class from this person" to "This person has awoken my soul." 

This leads to the question of what is my role when I accept someone as my student. If I believe that I'm being asked to help them awaken their soul and they think I'm just going to spoon-feed them some intellectual "mysteries" that will allow them to live a more interesting life - we have a problem. It is my responsibility to communicate the essential nature of the service I intend to provide to any potential student - along with any boundaries, expectations and goals pertaining to the relationship. 

Over the past 20 years or so that I have served as a teacher (with varying degrees of competence and incompetence) I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing that prepares you for the task other than actually doing it. If a person is open to learning from their students, they gradually improve their teaching. This has been my experience and it continues to awaken my capacity to teach at deeper levels. I would say that I have learned considerably more since becoming a teacher than I knew when I started. And the process continues!

namaste

random thoughts for today

It occurs to me that many of the apparently discrete things that I'm interested in all overlap in some way. Essentially, Chinese medicine/QiGong bils down to the same map as shamanism. Tone and vibration play a part in each. The whole of Sheya is rising from the same structure - integrating tools and techniques from all of them. It's all the same thing expressed in different ways. At a superficial level, it's an obvious and simplistic statement, however, at a deeper level it is also a reflection of the nature of all those pieces.

Not all teachers are appropriate for every student. I can tell if a teacher has something of value for me to learn by observing who he is and how he lives his life. If he is the sort of person that I would like to be, then I might be able to learn something from him. The person I am now - and the person I want to become - are different from who I was and wanted to be when I was twenty. Therefore, the teachers I look to now would have been invisible to me then. 

Context is everything - a warm coat is bliss to someone in a snowstorm, but on a sunny beach it is repulsive. The same can be said for much else in our world of samsara. Even though we may "realize" that it is all illusion - that there is no difference - the experience of matter and energy as "real" is remarkably persistent. Is this really just a matter of perception? Or is the very nature of our context such that, in order for us to experience, we take on this dual existence? 

Terma - there are hidden teachings everywhere. Not only in the rocks and caves of the Himalayas, but in the everyday experience of each and every human being. However, one of the keys to accessing these "hidden" teachings seems to be a process of opening doorways in certain objects - like special rocks - and exploring what we find there, with the intention of discovering such teachings. What can the nature of this key tell us about the fundamental nature of our relationship with the world around us? Is this the meta-teaching behind the terma?

seed stone sits in the palm of my hand

opening doors beyond mind

I close my eyes and contemplate

endless sky

LumensGate '08

Friday night I spent all night - and I do mean ALLLL night - around the heartfire, dancing, drumming and trancing out with the rest of the wonderful folks at LumensGate. I am still amazed, after 18 years, at how well it all comes together. The flow of the rituals, the openness of the participants, the presence of spirit (and spirits) all working together to make the transformations happen. 

I'm still too toasty (and glowing) to make as much sense as it deserves, but I definitely found new doors to walk through. They were not comfortable, and I'm still dealing with the feelings of vulnerability and loss that arose once I had made it to dawn, but I have a feeling that this was the most powerful one yet. It will be "interesting" to watch the results of the ritual cycle take shape over the next year - both in myself and in the other "gators". 

Jai Hanuman!

The Miraculous Quality of the Mundane

One of my earliest memories - I think I was seven - is of riding in a truck cab with my father, listening to the radio. Quite suddenly I was struck and overwhelmed by the vast, complex and intricate network of people, skills, interaction, cooperation and efforts that made radio possible. It wasn't just that someone had invented the radio itself but that there were people who paid for advertising products, which generated income which allow allowed other people to make music and play it over the radio so that others would listen to their music, and the advertising, and perhaps even purchase the products advertised, thus completing the cycle. I don't know how long it lasted, but I was pretty stunned by the complexity of it all. 

Quite a few years ago, when I was twenty something and was meditating for hours a day, I once went for a walk and realized I could feel the sidewalk humming. I saw that even the sidewalk, made of crushed sand and grit, was still alive - that everything was filled with Chi. This realization left me quite blissed out for hours afterwards. Since then I have always tried to keep in mind that the whole of the world is alive and conscious at some level. Not just the trees and animals but the stones and even the dixie cups. 

Yesterday, in the shower, I found myself looking at my twin bladed razor and thinking "this too is alive." It was tempting to laugh it off - seeing myself as ridiculous. But it's true - and miraculous. Consider the miracle of the razor: Not only is it an item that could not be produced by our bare hands. Not even a skilled blacksmith with a complete set of modern tools could craft this simple product. It takes the completely (apparently) unconscious and unskilled attentions of a robot factory fed on the remains of long dead monsters that once roamed the earth, to slap together a construction of plastic and steel that would not even exist if not for the current trends in human society to 1) be clean shaven, 2) compete with each other for resources, 3) constantly strive to find and meet previously unrealized needs in order to more effectively compete with other monkeys for

  increasingly scarce resources....and it occurs to me that sometimes miracles are not things emerging from puffs of green smoke but instead arising from the fog of the everyday trance - that even awakening from that trance, even for a moment. That is a miracle. We humans - building trash heaps of wasted resources on which we sacrifice the future of our unborn generations in the vague hope of another moment of unknowing - and suddenly acting out of compassion we transform everything - with a single smile we change the world. It is worthwhile - valuable - beautiful. . . and never to be encompassed by mere words. This magical, ecstatic Mystery that we are. What grand visions we mistake for mundane refuse. 

namaste

Initiation

Shamanism is one of those things you can read about in every book in the world and still not really grasp. This is because words live in one world and the roots and reach of the shaman lie in others. Access to these other worlds is not defined by intellectual understanding, but by direct experience - experiences that we call initiation. An initiation is a doorway opening into these other worlds. It might take many forms in this world, but if it is an effective initiation, it will have the impact of opening your awareness to the worlds of the shaman. 

It could be something as simple as a life threatening illness that shoves you out of your body and into an "hallucinatory" state in which you encounter beings or information that change your life. I could be something more specific, like a ceremony in which your physical body is ritually dismembered and your organs replaced with glowing gems. 

Initiations generally take one of two paths. Either they occur naturally - illness, car accident, lightning strike - or they are planned and orchestrated by those who have already encountered these doorways and know how to acquaint you with them in a safe and relatively non-traumatic way. If you have the choice, I encourage you to seek the later. They are much easier. Still terrifying and overwhelming, but much easier than the initiations that spirits provide you with if they feel you are not responding to their calls.

Those initiations that are encountered haphazardly in life seem to be sent by spirits that have decided they have a use for you. It would help if we lived in a culture that recognized such encounters for what they are and responded appropriately. Instead, what often happens is that the spirits get frustrated when we don't respond and so they knock louder. Eventually we either wake up or we don't survive. 

I don't mean to say that every car wreck, epileptic seizure or coma is a call from the spirits. This is another way in which words to not begin to express the nature of what it. There is a unique quality to an experience that is an attempt by spirit to wake you up. You may experience this quality in the disorientation of your consciousness and the sudden awareness of things that you didn't know before, but suddenly realize to be true. It can all be quite confusing - and there is little difference between someone called to be a shaman and a madman.

Of course, as indicated by another meaning of the word, initiation is only the beginning. 

Keeping the Ancestors Happy

It's not often in this culture that we stop to consider the ones on whose shoulders we stand - that long line of ancestors, without which we would not be here today. Shamanic teachings talk about the three souls humans have, and one of those souls comes from - and returns to - the ancestors. So we owe them our gratitude and our continued appreciation. We've lost this - most of us anyway. Grandparents and those before them might get a photo or two, a place in the family album, but they rarely have a real presence in our lives. 

When I think about how ancestors are respected and honored in tribal culture, it occurs to me that this might be one reason why we've lost so many other good parts of that culture as well. For instance, there is a sense of ingrained generosity in tribal people that I just don't see in moderns. Not that the people I know in our culture aren't generous, but that there is a difference. (And if there's someone who grew up in a tribal culture who would care to speak to this - please feel free.) There seems to me an unconscious sense of obligation to and openness of spirit and heart to fellow members of your tribe that we have lost. And this sense of generosity extends to the ancestors as well. Often there are rituals around the feeding and care of the ancestors - holding a place for them at meals - passing a plate for them. 

I try to rediscover this myself by having an altar for my ancestors and giving them daily offerings - speaking to them - asking for their continued blessings - asking for their guidance and support. All of us like to be listened to and to be of use - apparently this applies to the ancestors as well. The occasional offering of Irish whisky seems to make some of them particularly happy. 

As much as we might have lost of our tribal ways, it's important to realize that we can only reclaim these pieces from where we are now - not by taking on the trappings of a tribal culture; not by wearing another tribe's tradition like a costume. We must rediscover what has meaning for us and for our ancestors. When we do this; when we stand with our ancestors and remember we are not alone on this earth, we begin to remember what it is to be more fully human.

namaste