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.

Power

Birth – Ink on paper

We are nothing as warriors of freedom if we are not in our power. But what is power? What does this mean? Where does it come from/go?

Power is not control. This is a common misperception of power. Power cannot make things happen, we do not gather up power and then use it. Power is not like a battery where we are charged up and then release at some later date. That is control. When we gather up and try to save our power, we are actually shutting it down and losing all control. We are stopping up the river, so to speak and thus have no access to power. A dam is a great analogy for power. But real dams do not stop the flow, they direct the flow and in directing it they intensify the power that can be drawn from the dam. And if that power is not used, not moving along the lines and consumed as intended, then it moves on and away. There is no past to power, there is no future to power, power just is.

One of our favorite saying is, power is as power moves. Motion, movement, constant flow is the only way power works (even from a scientific point of view!)… so when we say power is as power moves it means we are the conduit through which power moves. But where does power come from? It comes from all around us, mostly the sun. The sun is an intense field of energy which changes all the time. Through that change power moves out from that position of the sun’s assemblage point and blasts through our solar system granting the earth power. The earth has power too. It has a charged core and mantle that is heated by the sun which pulses (yes actually pulses like a heartbeat) energy through its systems. Also the moon through rotation around the earth pulses and thus the earth-moon creates power in the oceans and tides and weather. Power is thus distributed throughout our system as pure energy all the time.

The earth is efficient. Where there is no motion, there is death. Where there is death, there are other life forms that live off of that death and transform death back into life, power which is in constant motion. Just like silence is not quiet, power is not static nor stable. So we must learn as warriors of freedom to recognize where power is not moving through us and energize those areas to motion to get them back into the flow with power.

As we grow, we pile up layer upon layer of static repetitions. This in some ways allows us to use less power/energy to do things. You would not want to relearn how to walk every time you attempted it, so the pattern their becomes efficient and simplified so you can walk with less energy. But this is not where the trouble begins. The trouble begins when we create dams where there is no flow. A real dam always flows, a bad dam does not. For us dams are created in areas within our being that we have not recapitulated. These cause disease, both mental and physical. We can actually hold onto these dammed up energies for a lifetime. But eventually they are broken down and must flow into new life.

There was a man who held onto the fears and angers of his childhood with reckless abandon. He dammed the flow of energy and could not love (love is the flow of power)…. In the end his heart was clogged and he became racked with disease. His heart died, and thus the damn was broken and the release of energy was immediate and quick. This is exactly what the predator wants from us. To become damned up, fearful and bound energy.

When a normal person (warrior) dies who has been in the flow of energy, all damns completely recapitulated, their energy flows in a unique way. The power that had been flowing through the system, opens gently and a great subtle light is released. This light is full of power because it can ride on the same power that it had been throughout life. The body has nothing left to it and it is returned to the earth from whence form arose. But it returns as a gentle leaf blowing in the breeze. The predator cannot see this kind of death. The old ones called this burning with the fire within. But it is not a raging fire, not a random pulsation. It is a subtle maneuver. We release the inventory and stories and shadow of life to the earth where the predator has no power.

For the average person, who has done nothing but hold onto the patterns, is a loaded dam energy and there is a different kind of death. This death is vibrant and chaotic. This death has multiple colors to the seer. And this kind of death is racked with a flame that attracts the predator. The predator has only a brief period of time to consume this energy. First it becomes aware of that energy and speeds in faster than ordinary death. It does so to increase the fear and folly of our lives. People who die this way claim that they see their lives pass before their eyes. Of course, nothing is recapitulated, thus the recapitulation is done all at once in the moment of death… and thus the energy is consumed as it is recapitulated by….the predator. The earth cannot help in situations like this because the earth pulsates at a different vibration and has systems for breaking down normal death into its component parts. The earth moves slowly and steadily to return the components to their right place. And in working this way boosts those that die in freedom to another level of awareness. But lacking flow with real power, she can do nothing for those trapped by the predator.

It is a hard thing to watch someone die. They move to the pulse of their own patterns and if the work has not included an understanding of real power, then they are lost in the mire of death rather than the freedom death brings. Power is as power moves. We all have a chance to move within power, to align with it, to be a conduit. We all have a chance to build dams and increase our power resources if we remain in the flow. And we all have a chance to release the dams so we can return to the natural flow that is there.

As a warrior of freedom, we are in our power when we are in the flow. We see the movement of power and the resources we have to move power throughout our bodies, beings and lives. There is no disease but a loss of human form – a building up of dams, or the formulations we have created which are too dammed up. We have many resources to release and destroy those bad dams and create better functioning systems. But the key is to remain in the flow… to be constantly moving and allowing power to move through us always returning to the source, the universe where it circles around again and re-energizes our dance.

Power is as power moves…

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.

 

 

 

Nagual Man, Nagual Woman… self important readings

The Nagual Man

In correlation with the previous post on the nagual and tonal, one of my favorite quotes comes from the Heart Sutra. “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” Emptiness does not mean nothing, it means absence of structure and solidity. We need this to create that (form)… And vice versa. There is no actual duality in the totality of the universe. It is a constantly changing, constant pattern making system. Order emerges (form) and it becomes self-regulating through a constant link with the nagual. This is probably one of my favorite ways to speak of the relationship between the nagual and the tonal.

But there is a distinct confusion that arises in the works of Casteneda with respect to the Nagual. In this instance, Don Juan uses the term for an individual who, having connected totally with more than just the tonal and can shift their assemblage points, they reach a point where they can shift other assemblage points as well. They are in essence constantly connected to the nagual. Therefore the term, Nagual in honor of a person thus evolved.

Swimming in the Nagual

String Theory, or the essential structure

The deep sea of awareness, the boundless, that which surrounds, the space between, these and more are attributed to this Nahuatl word about the world that is not tonal. Its origins are deeply connected to the practice of shape shifting in a shamanic sense where ones nagual was the animal one became in the dream time. The ancients were masters of projecting their awareness into the “other world” and flying, hunting, or seeking the necessities for the tribe. If the tonal is the bright vibrational energies of all we know, the nagual is that which surrounds the tonal and more.

Where the tonal is easy to define, because it is the essence of the defined, the nagual has become in this tradition a most elusive word. At times it is used to denote a place beyond. At times it is used to denote a person. At times it is used to denote energy. At times it is used to denote the indefineable. In all cases it has an air of mystery. Its elusiveness seems beyond grasp, quicksand in the dreaming of our nighttime places.

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….

The Most Sacred Thing

The Road Man

Humans have become obsessed with objects. For good reason, their ancestors migrated suddenly away from this plane of existence. Thus leaving those that were behind distressed beyond their imaginings. Those humans had become so good at shifting to other worlds that this world was no longer necessary to stabilize their perceptions. Thus those left behind began to create objects and items to fixate the assemblage points here.

At first these focal points allowed the trained eye to see beyond and within. This benefited their abilities to maintain connection through dreaming to what their forefathers had taught and learned. These channels also maintained connections to history and to each other across vast distances. One could think of it as a spiritual/mental Internet. But with time, and continued power struggles from the predator, the object became more important than the energy it held.

Dreaming took on a morbid obsession with creating. What we saw within the dream, we demanded to create in reality. Great cities and structures to say nothing of alters and focal points were created. We elevated the past stories to the level of gods. Where the ancients understood the mystery and the unknown without words honoring the mother as the creator of life, these twisted seers became obsessed with technologies of spirit and specific manifestations of the unknown, not the unknown.

Prophecy and the Shadowy Eye

It is very easy to look around and participate in the prophesies of doom. Why not? The earth is a disaster, which was brought on by human machinations, global warming, constant drilling, fracking… the list goes on. Almost every faith, religion, system, mythology all has stories of the end times.   Why such obsessions in the human band? Simple, we have experienced it before. It’s in our bones. It’s in our memories. We are born, live and die, so too must the whole shebang. And yet, humans survived some pretty nasty stuff.

If we take a closer look, what we feed is what we get. If we keep feeding doom, we get gloom and doom. Amazingly brain scientists have proven that when we constantly repeat these patterns, our neuro-plasticity becomes stable and we can no longer help but see the world through shit colored glasses. Depression feeds itself in a downward spiral.

The Myth of Perfection

Marine Buddha

“Warriors have no life of their own. From the moment they understand the nature of awareness, they cease to be persons and the human condition is no longer part of their view. You have your duty as a warrior and nothing else is important. So do your best. ….. The challenge of a warrior is to arrive at a very subtle balance of positive and negative forces. This challenge does not mean that a warrior should strive to have everything under control, but that a warrior should strive to meet any conceivable situation, the expected and the unexpected, with equal efficiency. To be perfect under perfect circumstances is to be a paper warrior.” (The Eagle’s Gift)

God is all powerful, all knowing, and perfect. Ah the agony of the all, to be placed on such a low pedestal of manipulation of the masses! But then again, if our perception of perfection is not beyond our grasp, then what are gods for? To encourage us to grow, become more, better… Whatever….

The Modern Seer and the Challenge of the Infiite

The last century brought the human race in direct conflict with its own existence. Through trial and tribulation humans found ways to create death and destruction in more vast and convoluted ways than they ever had in their brief existence. Culminating in an obsession with the atom, humans now wake up every day knowing that they could blast themselves out of physical existence. Add to that the advancements in all areas of science, our spirituality and religions can barely keep up with our need for a moral compass which is shifting rapidly.

Modern seers have been confronted with the fact that secret societies and lineages no longer work to preserve knowledge and disciplines. The secrets are all out in some form or another. Whether blasted into the daylight by authors like Carlos Casteneda, or revealed in the diaspora of Tibetan Buddhism, or the migration of all spiritual paths around the world through the internet and travel. The world is a smaller place. We have a hodge-podge of delicacies to try on and try out. The individual can blend anything, or with discipline find the inherent links and connections in all pathways, know the behind of the behind. The modern seer is responding right now to this rapid acceleration towards reproducing human awareness in the silicon chip.