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.

The Predator Re-Visited

The Predator

Frank Herbert in God Emperor Dune noted that the predator, the process of consume or be consumed, started with one celled beings within the primordial ooze of the long distant past.  All of that history is captured within our cellular awareness if we chose to look.  The very act of creating something and surviving requires energy.  Energy either comes from beyond (sun) or comes from the environment (consumption).  All energy is conserved, aka not lost just moves around.  The predatory instinct was built into the survival scheme of the genetic code.  Evolution grows and develops by adapting to environmental change and threat.  As the predator becomes stronger the prey must adapt and vice versa.  They are inexorably linked to each other.

Even plants are predators.  They set up relationships and create chemicals to create optimal growth for their own kind.  They may get the lion share of their energy from photosynthesis, yet they also optimize their environment for greater growth.  Animals do this as well.  Cooperation is as critical to survival, in fact more so, than kill or be killed.  The predator/prey relationship ranges throughout the natural world and universe.

Humans evolved in relationship with predators that shaped us as we shaped ourselves with cooperation.  Hand in hand this allowed us greater access to energy which grew our capacity for storage of more energy and more awareness and perceptions.  There came a point when humans crossed the line (no date can ever be found for this) and we became alpha predator.  This predator had no visible predator.  We had evolved the means to no longer fear the constant threat of those with which we shared our environment.  For a brief time, in terms of evolution, we had it made… a golden age so to speak of energy developing awareness and leaping forward with knowledge.  Expansion was the name of the game into every environmental place on this planet.  But something turned.  A fellow warrior of freedom noted that we became so energetically active in terms of dreaming that we were like a bon fire in the universe.  Enter the predator which Carlos and many others note.

I share the following brilliant video to illuminate the current state of that predator…. The Lie We Live.

This foreign installation of programming is so imbedded in us.  Its roots are in the growth of the land controlled farms, the sky god dominion over the grain and earth, the mystery of economic terror we swallow every day.  The roots are in us right now… for the predator may have come from deep within the cosmos, it now comes from deep within ourselves for it goes hand in hand with our soldiering on for survival without real thought to the affects.

But we need the predator as Frank Herbert notes.  We birthed it in governments dedicated to the pharohonic model which combined with religious Salvationism created the perfect cool aide that we drink every day.  If it were not for this form of the predator, there would be another.  We are becoming stronger as a result of it.  We are becoming aware of something deep within our energetic matrix… that we can evolve beyond this state.  We can become….

Warrior’s of freedom are taking up the discipline of defeating this predator.  They know the conflict started in the primordial ooze is within our own beings now.  We are refining the techniques to rid ourselves of that fear based war-like being that consumes or is consumed.  We are shifting our energy towards energetic freedom so we can shift to other bands of awareness.  We are defeating the predator.  It is rising up and redoubling its forces as we do so.  It knows we are in the last throws of this matrix mind and it is scared for the loss of food we have become.

Look deep into the source within.  Warriors are planting the anti-virus of real freedom and awareness to leap into something amazing.  We are beginning to venture out and within to places no one has gone before.     We are dreaming a new dream and stalking a new position of our assemblage points.  It’s brilliant to watch as the predator realizes that it will be ejected back into the depths of the cosmos from wence it came.

That warrior I spoke of above shared an interesting story.  As we venture out, in, deeper into awareness we will discover more predators.  It is a part of being aware.  These beings of greater awareness are they themselves becoming even more aware.  The challenges are there to improve us… or as Neitzsche said, “That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.”

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…..

 

“It’s Full of Stars”

Lodge Powers

One of my favorite scenes from 2001 Space Odyssey was when David Bowman confronted by the monolith says this statement in awe and wonder. Who can’t relate to this at some level, at some point? Standing in the middle of the red desert of Canyonlands at night looking up is the quintessential awesome experience of a lifetime. A place noted for the ability to see an infinity of stars by the naked eye. One cannot but feel small. But beyond this crushing awareness of how amazing it is, we sit in the middle of vast wonder over universe whose size we can actually describe but never truly encapsulate in awareness. We are only left with awe, wonder, and amazement.

Look within ourselves as bodies; fills one with awe. One can take an imaginary journey to the microcosmic level and visit vistas within our bodies. We are colony beings with processes that are going all the time. We are harmonious colonies of bacteria, viruses and organs adapted over millions of years to process energies to maintain a structure of nerves that for some amazing reason is self-aware, knows that it knows. This colony being is moving through an awareness of time and space… Science has reached outward and inward advancing awareness, knowledge and territories discovering multitudes of universes. We are literally a multitude of universes. Again, awesome!

The older we grow on our earth walk, mature with these bodies, the more we slow to take in knowledge and information that goes beyond the petty details we used to care about years before. Some of this is due to the simple fact that our biology no longer seeks reproduction and replication in some selfish duplication of our being. Some of this is due to the more present awareness that we have little time left. As warriors of awareness, we mature beyond fear, clarity and a drive for power – vain glories all! We know the ultimate battle of old age makes us confront infinity on daily.

Silence surrounds the warrior’s practice more and more. I spend more and more hours watching nature and science shows on the social control box in the living room. With deeper and deeper recapitulation, the politics and conflicts of the average human band of awareness seems so silly. Knowing that the light hitting our planet today was created in our sun long before the current predator of politics dominated human games keeps me sunning my awareness with fresh air and good food.

It becomes more important to me that we humans wake up to the co-creative struggle we are in partnership with the earth. We are directing the evolution of everything on this planet. And this pales in comparison to who will win the next election. Rising seas, drought, fires, water purity, over population in other words the real causes of the real difficulties for the human band interest me more than anything. What inheritance are we giving the children of the planet?

We must act. We must look deep and see that it’s full of stars! It, the overwhelming awareness of awareness is full of stars. Everything was made in the stars. Everything was created within the vast compressions and explosions of forces which are awesome. Thus our thoughts must change, our focus must move back and forth to awe. We must return to our real selves and act. Action is the only cure. We must shed this bizarre naiveté that we can do nothing, we are powerless. We must become responsible…

There are subatomic particles and energetic forces that we can right now bend and move to truly heal ourselves and our planet. We are in the center of the greatest battle in history. We are in the battle of knowledge, which is now so vast and available that we can no longer deny… we are the creators of this band of awareness. We are starseed and wunderkinds. Why not chose something new, something different, something awesome! “It’s full of stars!”

 

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.

 

 

 

The Earth has plans

Ride the Wave – 22×30 ink on paper original, framed.

Despite every other issue under the sun that one can get all worked up about, the one issue that we seem to never directly connect to all root causes and conditions is population. This is truly the white elephant living in our midst that we refuse to acknowledge. The course of logic around the issue has mostly dealt with food and feeding an ever growing population. This is how we got GMOs in the first place, the inventive and technological success/necessity of our age to have enough food. You can blame Monsanto, but it is our need that Monsanto provided and our inability to look population growth square in the face that is the real cause. Demand and desire drive everything in this world… not supply except when we reach the ultimate limits. So too, factory farming, drought, petroleum demands… I would venture to say that if we look deeply at any/all social issues that we currently face, it is the global denial surrounding population growth that is at the deepest root of it all.

Up in Smoke, a Puff of Electrons and Art

Contemplating Circles: “To touch the abstract all we need is silence.”

Artist, especially those of us dedicated to freedom, stand strong in the wind of criticism of our creativity. We create because we are driven to create. Nothing should or can stop us from being the creators we are. Complaints are shouted into the wind of current culture and are useless and banal. Yet understanding the state of art today is essential to the commitment we have to creation and to freedom itself.

We live in a post apocalyptic world of immediate gratification. Using this term carefully, it indicates the advance of the predator into every part of our lives. Our current culture does not so much create as it barfs out entertainments and distractions. When once a work of art was created and appreciated for years, the topic of conversation and enduring ideals, works are too often created today with speed and flash that echoes off the back of our visual cortex and is gone as soon as we look at it. Sometimes we are left with a nagging urge to understand the work, but it fades into the background of the media blur that we are constantly being assaulted.

Dreams of the Apocalypse

The field where we ran to was full of people of all ages. Suddenly, everyone circled around and began to gather and hold hands. We all called to the directions, center, earth, east, south, west, and north and above…. Fingers of fire were descending from above like tongues of a great beast. The ground in every direction exploded as these tendrils annihilated the areas where they touched. As a group we linked intent and shifted to another dimension, the only tears where those of joy and wonder at sharing the beautiful planet we had been on.

Dreams are amazing places where we can explore many things. Recently, apocalypse has been a theme of my dreams. This is archetypal. Ever since we considered telling a story of creation’s beginning, we have been telling of its end. Often the weight of our decisions brings us down. Some imbalance demands a resetting of the clock. Many ancient cultures have myths associated with the cycles of time, a need for renewal. In many cultures we are currently in the 4^th world. If we look closely at these myths and cycles of transformation, we can see eternal regeneration and generation of awareness through time.

In some myths there was a time when we spoke to and with animals, or at one time there were giants, or at one time the creators, angels, or the watchers walked among us. In many cases, in fact all I can consider, there was a destruction, flood, migration, emergence from a cave etc into a new world where we begin again with a better understanding of what we need to do better.

Insane Apes!

One must have a sense of humor simply to breath in this life. Awareness, like all randomly occurring things in our universe, is diverse and varied. In fact it is its diversity and variety that makes the universe a great place to explore… or maybe this universe among the multi-verses out there… one can only wonder in awe at it all.

This band of awareness is so silly. We grew memories to assist in our survival amongst the natural predators… we can recall how to hunt, how to become animals, how to do all sorts of things. And rather than tie this into instinct, we tie it into stories which have the flexibility to change with the times and adapt to lineal changes. Aren’t we neat! Yet that very memory becomes our most tireless tyrant. It dogs our heels with flashbacks and automatic reactions to situations sometimes even before they occur.

Lodge of Freedom

Mystery of Seven

For almost 23 years, this warrior of freedom has walked a practice that is called lodge. While warriors of freedom, Toltecs if you will (though not limited to that), are people who recapitulate all ritual, religion and patterns, this practice has become an amazing key to freedom. Staying away from the topic for as long as this blog has been in existence was a conscious choice. There is nothing about lodge that can save anyone from anything. This is a critical distinction. The only practice that can and does lead to deeper understanding and freedom is recapitulation. But it is time to share the idea with warriors of freedom around the globe.

Lodge has become a beautiful obsession, a shared wonder, and an awesome practice. Lodge is a space within which silence is cultivated. Lodge is a space where recapitulation can be done with increased focus. Lodge is a space where warriors can celebrate who and what they are and the path we share together. Lodge is a space where we throw down the gauntlet at the predator and say, NO! Lodge is a space where we can heal, knowing healing comes from within our own being. Lodge is a space of creation and creativity for creators. Lodge is a space of darkness that swirls with energy and light that focuses our intention. Lodge is a space where we become INTENT.