Chakra System and the New Seer

The Beyond

Probably one of the most difficult current trends in symbolic art and spirituality is the vast number of modern spiritualities that refer to the Chakras.  There are 7, and they relate to areas of the body which hold emotional energy, memory, trauma and of course healing and vision.  This is actually a current modern interpretation.   There are very specific descriptions of what they look like.  Go to any spiritually minded bookstore or gift shop, and you will see them hanging as individual units or as banners around the store.  Everyone knows they are rainbow structured, and sacred geometry is within each diagram and description of their forms.  If we study them, we find out the spiritual, healing, emotional and physical significance of each chakra.  There are gods and goddesses associated with each of them and if not gods, spiritual divine energies.  We are possessed by the spiritual materialism of these derivate forms and functions.

This is, for me as a Toltec artist, ripe for recapitulation.  The very fact that it is a pattern and a structure that was laid down before I ever got here, makes me demand to recapitulate the whole downloaded program.  Thus have I spent years meditating and connecting to this system of symbols, sounds and patterns.  What I found out is that like all religions, philosophies and cultural spiritual traditions, this one has been co-opted, simplified and is working very hard to distract the original intent and lineage to which the ancient seers created them to be.

Erasing Personal History

 

Recapitulate!! and when you are done, recapitulate again!… until the practice is so fluid as to be a walking meditation each moment flowing through us like a stream in the now which is infinity. When we become fluid we have no past and no future. We have no personal history, we have no expectations, life is what it is.

History is one of the most valuable studies in all of the disciplines because it gives us greater opportunities that we can recapitulate. Why? History means “to inquire,” to understand, to link back. For the warrior of freedom history is replete with stories, stories of power, if approached with the perception of our practice. We honor the past for it brought us to this moment. But we do not hold onto the past. What we learn is the past is encoded into our bones. We hold history whether we chose to look at it or not. To know history is to recapitulate it, to release it, and to live in the present. But if we work with history to search for the causes to the effects of now or search for reason and blame, we will become lost. Why? Because there are no innocents in anyone’s history.

When I say there are no innocents in anyone’s history, we know when we connect as warriors to history through the act of dreaming, shifting our assemblage points to know, not just to understand, that humans have been and always will be selfish and mean people surviving the best way they can. There are no innocents!!! Not a genetic line, culture, religion, clan or people. Go back far enough and every line has skeletons in its closet. No one is above any other, there is no innocent culture or time. This is the great gift that warriors get from history. We get a kind of compassion and strength that is tempered in the knowledge that freedom costs absolutely everything we have down to our bones. Awareness is the greatest gift… and taking sides is ultimately the necessity of the predator, which we are chosing to liberate ourselves from.

We are as we recapitulate, more and more free with our energy, our resources, our ability to choose in the moment. We erase personal history because we know that 99.9% of all the stories in all histories are self-important survival stories based on fear. Why are we so addicted to movies and the like? Because they are all the same story, the story of our self-importance as humans moving forward through time. Amazingly we can become overwhelmed by those that hold fast to stories. Stories of abuse, stories of survival, stories of ecstasis, stories of anything that is repeated for no other reason than they are repeated.

The greatest impediment to erasing personal history is our local friends and family. When we release our connections to history, we are in a state to create any history we wish about ourselves. We can tell any story. But those we surround ourselves with limit our ability to succeed. Their hold onto our history which can be debilitating and destructive to real freedom. So we must learn through compassion and we discover through study of history… “forgive them for they know not what they are doing.” We learn that they cannot see the limits of their perceptions of our selves.

If the burden of this type of recapitulation becomes too much, we must change our local group, tribe or clan. Ultimately as we progress as warriors, we recognize that only warriors of freedom and those dedicated to the practice can be our group. For this reason the old ones created warrior houses and groups and the Rule that moved them towards freedom together. These groups of warrior/seers were and are amazing dynamic groups. They have no history because no one cares what the history was. This does not mean they do not know their history, their stories… far from… it means they live in the place of erasing personal history even down to the previous day’s encounter. They live in support of pure and absolute freedom in the moment.

Warrior’s Dance! Warriors Sing! Warrior’s Drum! Connecting to the beat of creation in the moment. Erasing personal history is the ultimate art of the warrior of freedom. It goes to the essence of life, to create something, first we must destroy… and in destroying we are responsible for the leap into the next moment.

We are One…?

Chakra Wheel, unfinished

Self, couple, family, tribe, religion, culture, state, nation, race, species, region, continent, hemisphere, earth … how we define these circles of inclusion is also how we define circles of exclusion. Until we are invaded from space by aliens, I don’t think we will ever get to the point where the collective will orient itself as earth first, but…. These circles are like that of an onion ringing around the fixation of the mold of man. Variations being slight shades of difference from each other, human pride demands we define ourselves in some manner and then construct walls to our differences.

We have evolved because of the necessities of the predatory attacks on our survival. Humans cannot live easily alone. We were weak, all alone as one, in the face of the savannah’s predators where we evolved away from our jungle source. Thus we coupled and kept within family circles and tribal connections so we could last the long night of the big animals. We shared stories which became our culture and religion to make it through those times. Today many of the stories we still hold in highest regard come from this period of uncertainty. Our gods were nature derived and our fears the vast unknown in the dark corners of the jungle we had emerged from.

It took almost a million years to conquer paradise. A paradise that was dominated by the relations we had with animals and gathering plants. This was supplanted in grounding our awareness with the control of nature, water, plants and animals. Once this idea was instilled in our deepest drives, we leapt forward with our religion and our possessiveness to guide our relations between bands of tribes. The tribes were conquered by the sword and the plow turned under by growing brains dedicated more to story than to observation. It was all about the gods, my god can beat up your god until only one survived, which really meant my stores of grain were stronger than yours. And if we wanted to leave, slowly the territory was consumed by this new predator of possession safe behind the walls with our temples growing taller.

As our circles grew larger, our aggression grew stronger. It took a mere 4 thousand years to leap into the nation/state and carve up boundaries with language and culture as our guide. Then came nationalism, the sacrifice of our root being to the greater good in the name of cultural self-preservation. But even this definition has its flaws. What about the wandering tribes within or the dispossessed, or the variations of faith. All of these were thrown onto the battlefield for supremacy. Is it any wonder that we created ethnic cleansing, cultural slavery and dominion of the few over the many? It was a logical outcome of the tribal struggle over land and mother culture’s demand that we preserve the farm.

We now have regional and continental struggles. We have north and south hemispherical differences. We have bold plans to make sure that those that have keep and those that have not never do. We must. It has become evident that there is just never enough to go around. And not-enough is what maintains the economic system chugging along charging us for the basic needs we used to, not too long ago in an evolutionary sense, gather and hunt for essentially free.

The warrior of freedom recapitulates it all. The warrior of freedom sees the illusory boundaries of these definitions and knows it is all energy. There is no difference in root energy between any of these self-defined exclusive circles within circles that we have created to define ourselves and others. Anyone can become free of these shackles. It is the new predator on the hunt for its prey in a new way that maintains this in the face of our global situation.

We are waking up as humans in this band of awareness and starting to notice something. We have run out of territory to leave, to spread, to wander off. Try to leave this system and you run into the illusions of boundaries no matter where you go. Someone owns that bit of dirt or has claim to that quadrant of meal. We are waking up as warriors and re-orienting our energy to a global awareness, awakening, and awe struck in the face of the facts that we will never leap from the earth with the form we currently possess.

We are waking up to the fact that we are one… not as replicas pressed out of the same factory mold, but one as in the energy that it takes to liberate ourselves from this self-induced game of thrones. We are waking up to species awareness and to the fact that we are trashing our back yard, oceans and water which is catching up to us. The air is tainted with carbon and chemicals forcing us to wake up to our potential self-created annihilation.

We are one. We are many. We are the earth in its entirety with all the plants, animals, bugs, viruses and bacterial necessary to keep us going. The web is proving that everything is necessary in balance. We are one. We are out of balance with the one, the earth our source. We are the ones responsible to and for exactly where we are at. We are one waking up… from the long sleep of consumption.   We are one in respecting our differences and laughing at the silly circles we impose on ourselves.

Warriors of freedom are leading the way throughout the world. Recapitulating all the ones out there and in there that demand separateness combining our unique energy field for an amazing maneuver towards freedom. We are creating every moment new and fresh from within. The egg has been laid, the creature is stirring within. The birth has begun…..

 

Mandalas

Jera – Year – 12×12 ink on paper original, unframed.

“ Mandala (Sanskrit Maṇḍala, ‘circle’) is a spiritual and ritual symbol in Indian religions, representing the universe.^[1] The basic form of most mandalas is a square with four gates containing a circle with a center point. Each gate is in the general shape of a T.^[2][3] Mandalas often exhibit radial balance.^[4]

“In various spiritual traditions, mandalas may be employed for focusing attention of practitioners and adepts, as a spiritual guidance tool, for establishing a sacred space, and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. 

“In common use, mandala has become a generic term for any diagram, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically; a microcosm of the universe.” Wikipedia

Space and place… we orient our selves to spaces and places. Within the territory of our awareness, we travel through our world and create maps, guideposts on the road of our lives. These abstractions of reality help us in maintaining a sense of order, logic and purpose. From this mapping the mind grows in complexity and dynamic understanding of the world, the universe. What exists in our world is manifested within our being. What is within our being is manifested in the world. An ecstatic dance occurs ‘tween in and out of creator, creating, creation. One can point to this or that, in or out, and say it is the source of intent… but in reality both are, and they work together as awareness rolls forward.

Triple Mandala, Ink on hand made paper

Diagrams of this dynamic process, mapping awareness have intrigued me for over 40 years. It started by mapping my world, grew into mapping and diagraming what I was learning. I am a visual person and the act of diagraming information made it easier to know and understand, the links often more interesting to me than the individual facts. Finally I fell in love with geometry and its ability to draw relationships between things. The mandala was introduced to me and I started to map my own mind, information, thoughts and feelings on paper. I was literally hacking my own brain.

The Ladder, sideways

The warrior’s path of freedom, dreaming and stalking, became a discipline of unwriting and writing the story of my own awareness. To that end, mandalas reflected the journey, the pathway, the walk of a thousand steps. They began to map the energy of shifting perceptions, a shift of the assemblage point. In creating these maps, pictures and diagrams… circles emerged, a great love for their representation of integrity and impeccability. There are no perfect circles in the universe of form. They do not naturally occur. But they universe is surely attempting to intend them all the time, thus we hold within our awareness the circle as abstract form and function. When we create a circle we are creating our own integrity, we are integrating our selves and defining our awareness.

Birth – Ink on paper

As I studied at the traditional mandala and grew to draw them over and over, it became evident that something was missing. The missing piece in the whole tradition of the mandala is that of surprise, the random, the breaking of the circle… the place between integration and disintegration. Thus I began to break the circle, break the universe encapsulated in the map to search for what lies beneath, beyond and before. Searching for this energy we can all tap into, the diagrams began to become fractured, half triangles, squares and broken circles began to add up to something more universal to me than the static diagram of the classical mandala. Here we can enter not through the gateways of the cardinal directions but rather any point. And any point is in relation to any other point. We journey through the work as we do in life – the best way we can.

Being in Power

The eye darts from here to there in search of an order which is implicit in our own making. We are pattern generators. As we recapitulate the patterns, we reveal a greater mystery, which lies beneath, before, beyond. The patterns are growing old. While they are certainly beautiful and they help us to integrate and to know our selves and our world, there is always more to be explored. We can step beyond mastery into becoming artists dancing in the random pulse of a universe that is seeking continual renewal.

Birth of an Idea

For this reason, I propose the mandalas that have been emerging from my drawing board. They speak to the path of freedom beyond the patterns, into the primordial ocean of being and non-being. They breath life into a universe of surprises.

 

 

 

“Everything is medicine….”

Healing Bear

My benefactor, elder of his tradition, said this to me on numerous occasions.   The record of his lineage was passed from generation to generation through groups of individuals that passed knowledge by word of mouth. Only in the last hundred years did this knowledge become corrupted by the influence of writing and the incursion of foreign takers. He maintained that if the people, any people, could understand this simple statement, much could be healed… between people, between us and the earth, but mostly within our own beings.

He noted that when we define anything with a negative connotation we then set ourselves up to be toxified and brought down. This did not mean that everything is in harmony with our highest good, far from that. There are medicines that are downright nasty for us and should be avoided, but they have their purpose in the grand scheme of the earth.  He feared that we might have released too many of those medicines for the long term survival of our species. And he was always reminding me of the earth’s place in the center of all medicine because she is the source of all life and energy which creates medicine and hosts our spiritual journey with her.

Death is the Only Adviser

Carlos Casteneda was asked if there was a quick way/practice to freedom. His answer was that a warrior struggles every day and endures, but if he could sum up everything that Don Juan said in one practice, it would be saying every day of every hour to ourselves, “I take responsibility for my death.” Even just a brief period of meditation practice can loosen up energies that can be better used for anything.

We are creative beings of pure energy, but life is expensive. Everything, and I do mean everything, costs in energy. We don’t get out alive. But so often we play a shell game with death. We enjoy and escape into all sorts of things, never knowing nor acknowledging the simple aspects of that cost. When we take responsibility for our death, we are facing forward into whatever is is.

Celebrate the Tonal

Flower of Life

“Tonal” as a word is amazingly beautiful. The root of the word in Nauhatl language comes from “tonalli” which means daylight or bright energy. Yet the synchronicity of the word’s alignment with music is just as amazing.

Tonal music is ancient music where composers created lines of rising and falling, (arsis and thesis) which intersect each other. When you have four voices or lines, occasionally they align and harmonize. This creates a resonance, which sings in the body and space in which the work is being performed. But between those moments of alignment are progressions, disharmonies, which “push” the work towards resolution or harmonic convergences. Thus tonal music is always falling forward or has a sense of moving forward towards….

And the Takers have it

The Bear Spiral

If I were to boil down all of the issues I see in the world today it would come down to the taker mentality. This is a pervasive and total infection in the human band of awareness. Though I have written about this before, it bears repeating.

Initially introduced to this in a work by Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, along with My Ishmael and The Story of B… Daniel managed to nail down an historical theme which underlays the whole of civilization.   The taker mentality is the mentality of ownership. It is the, “this is mine and not yours” energy which sits within our being. While initially human bands gave up their roaming ways and chose to farm in a single area because it produced more garneted food, the problem became one of environmental adjustments and imbedded mythologies around control of the seeds of production.

Scarcity is the key to all economic systems. You can’t charge for air, cause you can’t control it. Initially we could not charge for water, but now we can because it must be cleansed and transported. But the first scarce thing we could charge for was food. The seeds of production created farming. Hunting was given up for animal husbandry, or control of the animals. As we learned and grew our mythology we completely forgot any other way to live. Lost in the mire of imagination along the lineages of the mad the hunter-gatherers were cursed for their lack of culture and civilization.

What Does Love Got to Do With It?

The Assemblage Point

Warning:  this post will most likely anger, annoy and bug the snot out of people who proclaim to walk a path with heart, a warrior’s path, if they have not shifted their assemblage points beyond the human band of awareness towards silence and seeing. 

Everything, yes, everything is perception.  This is because it is funneled through the assemblage point, which organizes the knowable world into the known.  For the seer, we see the assemblage point as a bright band of luminescent fibers, which sits on an infinite sea of fibers within what is known as the shell of our being.  These fibers vibrate and glow.  Throughout life as we become more aware of our perceptions and aspects of the universe we clamp down on this vibrating force.  This stabilizes the assemblage point and our conscious awareness of the world we think we know.

Finding Silence

Meditation Manual