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.

 

 

 

Tis the Season

Bear’s Dreaming

Between the shortest day of the year and the perihelion of the sun, January 3rd, there is a period of intense silence and connection that can be attained by the warrior of freedom.  This period, the dark days, mark a time when the light of day is short for the northern hemisphere.  If we sit in silence, we can hear the pulse of the earth in the subtle ways that she speaks to us.

We have to disentangle the pulse of the earth from the rolling force.  The rolling force is the force of constant change and is deeply connected to death.  Not that the warrior of freedom should ignore this, but at this time of the year for the north, the pulse lies under the rolling force.  It sleeps deep within our bones and speaks to our imagination.  We are linking to the creative generative force that sleeps in the winter.  That force can, if we are patient, guide us to ever newer possibilities for our next steps into the new year.

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….

Questions and Answers

Thought and Memory

The modern trend is towards answers. Everyone has this great need to know everything, to be anything, to be everything. The net gives us access to information, thus we all know everything because we are constantly plugged into the common (miss)perception of the dominant position of the assemblage point. We have become people of answers. We all know it all.

The result is that the universe, the world, is boring. All we believe or know is the 5 second delay between posts we read everyday in social media, news and the approved Wikipedia post. What is truly important is lost in the detritus of the overwhelming input no one can handle. Like the old renaissance English saying about politics, “a whirlwind lasts only nine days”, today it lasts only as long as we can click the “like button” and move on.

Thus the general attitude among people is to be either knowing it all or keeping silent in the background of life. All of this is the result of raising children who have constant access to the answers even if they are completely wrong.

Tradition and Traditionalists

So often when working with organizations, tribes, segments of society, they have traditions.  It takes time and a certain amount of finesse to begin working with any group or organization.  We have to be inculcated in their traditions.  Traditions are for lack of a better word, repetitive behaviors which give a sense of cohesion to the group.  They are passed along from generation to generation in large groups, religions, and tribes.  The generations will justify the reasons for a tradition often without knowing exactly where they come from or why these traditions occur within the tribe or group.  Traditions are tied to fuzzy memory lost in the programming of in our childhood.  A memory that runs deep within our being and speaks to our ultimate need, humans want to belong and feel safe.  So many traditions are there for the sake of this root value or drive.

But traditions can be the death call for fluidity and true survival.  Certain repetitive behaviors in every generation need to be carefully evaluated and changed or dropped all together.  Traditions are hidden contracts, binding alliances that can keep us from seeing what is really going on.  And many of them are unspoken, assumed and filled with hidden self-criticisms.  A warrior of freedom rejects any contract to which they were not actively part of creating.  It binds our energy and limits our discipline which kills our liberty.

We drive on a certain side of the road because of tradition.  There is certain logic to this: safety.  If a road is narrow, we look ahead and take the side that is traditional when we pass another person.  The right hand is traditionally the hand with the weapon.  When we pass each other, the right is far from the other person’s right.  We shake hands with the right hand because it traditionally represented that there is no gun in our hand, its open to receive.  All of this adds up to why we drive on the right side of the road.  Without these traditions we would in many ways be lost. But the roots, which are actually cultural, have been elevated to law and applied to other unconscious situations.  We sense the inherent logic of tradition, now law.  It just makes sense.  But travel to another culture and there are many things we will never understand because of unspoken traditions.

When one is standing before a fire in a traditional plains native ceremony, one should walk around the fire clockwise, or as they say, sun-wise.  Why?  This tradition is rooted in observations.  The sun goes from left to right when facing the south where the sun is in the northern hemisphere.  So natives at some point felt that this walking movement was a way to honor the sun.  But in reality the original reason for walking sun-wise around the fire is lost far in the past.  We keep doing it; we do so with all sorts of mythological reasons, which are often just superstition.  This is not to say that it is wrong to walk in this way, or for the tribe to share a similar action to honor the sun.  It’s all good.

Where we cross into territory that we question as warriors of freedom is when the tradition is a block to walking in freedom.  Traditionalists often beat up anyone for not doing it the right way for no other reason than that is the way they were taught.  They are fixated on the position of their traditional assemblage points.  Our fluidity is compromised when the traditionalist runs over others with the tradition, or worse judges those who do not know.

Intent is the power behind all things.  Intent has no direction or focal point until it is activated.  There is nothing wrong with right or left.  Yet at one time right, dexterous, was always associated with good while left, sinister, was associated with evil.  These traditions are sacred and held so stiffly that we may never change the words or the results.  But our goal as warriors of freedom is to discipline our lives so that we are not attached to left, right or the meanings therein.  We watch and observe.

Warriors drive on the right side of the road, at least here in America, for the simple fact that it is easy to go with the flow.  Why question it?  It would cause too much distress and warrior choses his battlefields wisely.  But many traditions are silly and filled with fallacies that are keeping us trapped.  Think about it.  Make a list.  Recapitulate!  Then walk around the fire sun-wise because it goes with the group flow.  But leave judgment far from the beauty of the ceremony.  The thing that is killing the fluid traditions is the traditionalists.  The thing killing humanity is the fixation of our assemblage points.

What Does War Got To Do With It

Center Figure, Mescalito Spirals

As a Toltec, we use the term warrior to define the path that we are on daily. The warrior’s way, the spiritual warrior, the warrior of intent, these are some of the qualifiers that are present to soften the term warrior. The term in English goes back to a time of great conflict in Europe between tribes. Warriors were active participants in the act of war, conflict, and aggression. In the east, the term for warrior actually meant to serve or attend to a leader. The term from many indigenous tribes meant to provide and is more in kind with hunter. So how does this stack up with the Toltec path?

After years of walking the path, there is just no better term for the process of becoming a Toltec. A person passes from childhood, a time of receiving the programming of our culture, to adulthood with a significant emotional event. The pain of that event ties the individual to their path, their purpose. For many traditions, this time of passage was related to a quest. The individual looks carefully at the sum total of what they have received and choses what they are going to become. So often the purpose of this passage is to diminish the self-importance typical in childhood and train the attention to commit to something greater than the self.

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.

Lucy Part II and the Selfie

Don Juan cautioned Carlos that he needed to break the mirror of self-reflection.  This obsession with me, me, me creates constant limits to our perceptual field and traps our awareness on the least common denominator, our selves.  This does not mean we should not have a self nor a point of central perception while in form.  But rather that we need to be careful that everything is not constantly being filtered through our own singularity of focus.  This trap causes everything to become personal.  The universe, as said before, is more interesting than that.

While sitting in the theater about to watch Lucy, as always we were assaulted with commercials and previews of coming movies.  Almost 2 to 1 the commercials were about either a phone or selfies.  The personal device was being pushed over and over again because it took the best selfies.  The announcer kept reiterating that of course you are the best you and you are the best person at taking pictures of you.  You are the center of the world… stay there, look pretty and smile.  How nice.  You rock, amazing… Well after 15 minutes this got very boring, as we can all imagine.