Kundalini Splendor

The Beating Heart

After the texts
and the commentaries,
the explanations
and the explications,
the footnotes and
the end notes,
and the endless
interpretations and revisions,
nothing is left but this:
the beating heart
of God pounding
here,
in your own chest,
naked signal,
telling you once more
that this pulse
is your own.

Dorothy Walters
March 26, 2012

I was extremely disturbed today when I picked up a copy of the N. Y. Times and discovered that Adrienne Rich had died. She was, above all, a pioneer in getting women's voices recognized as major poetic presences. Her poetry, alive and dynamic, brought language alive on the page in a new way. I loved (and still love) what she wrote, and treasure her poems.

But Adrienne was more than a mere "female poet." She was a pioneer bravely leading the way for what was then called "women's liberation," especially attending to the needs of women in states of subjugation to patriarchal modes of relating. She began her adulthood dutifully married and mother of three. But then she broke with traditional patterns, declared herself a lesbian, wrote amazing love poetry to her lover, and in general made an invaluable contribution to lesbian identity. But she did not stop there. She also wrote of broader issues of social injustice against all groups, and, towards her later years, explored her own Jewish roots and the perversion of democratic ideals.

Many male critics were furious at her defection from the traditional roles and perspectives of women in American society. But she was not deterred. She was a fighter against all forms of oppression, and will be remembered for her fierce spirit, her inspirational presence, and her matchless poetry. Some place her among the greatest poets of all time, and I concur in this judgement. I will miss her terribly, for she was truly amazing, a constant inspiration in my life.


ADRIENNE RICH, 1929-2012
A Poet of Unswerving Vision at the Forefront of Feminism
By MARGALIT Fox

Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82.

The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, with which she had lived for most of her adult life, her family said.

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s.

Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.

She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.

For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets.

All this helped ensure Ms. Rich’s continued relevance long after she burst genteelly onto the scene as a Radcliffe senior in the early 1950s.

Her constellation of honors includes a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1994 and a National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for “Diving Into the Wreck.” That volume, published in 1973, is considered her masterwork.

In the title poem, Ms. Rich uses the metaphor of a dive into dark, unfathomable waters to plumb the depths of women’s experience:

I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently about the wreck
we dive into the hold. ...
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Ms. Rich was far too seasoned a campaigner to think that verse alone could change entrenched social institutions. “Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy,” she said in an acceptance speech to the National Book Foundation in 2006, on receiving its medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. “Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard.”

But at the same time, as she made resoundingly clear in interviews, in public lectures and in her work, Ms. Rich saw poetry as a keen-edged beacon by which women’s lives — and women’s consciousness — could be illuminated.

She was never supposed to have turned out as she did.

Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore on May 16, 1929. Her father, Arnold Rice Rich, a doctor and assimilated Jew, was an authority on tuberculosis who taught at Johns Hopkins University. Her mother, Helen Gravely Jones Rich, a Christian, was a pianist and composer who, cleaving to social norms of the day, forsook her career to marry and have children. Adrienne was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church.

Theirs was a bookish household, and Adrienne, as she said afterward, was groomed by her father to be a literary prodigy. He encouraged her to write poetry when she was still a child, and she steeped herself in the poets in his library — all men, she later ruefully observed. But those men gave her the formalist grounding that let her make her mark when she was still very young.

When Ms. Rich was in her last year at Radcliffe (she received a bachelor’s degree in English there in 1951), W. H. Auden chose her first collection, “A Change of World,” for publication in the Yale Younger Poets series, a signal honor. Released in 1951, the book, with its sober mien, dutiful meter and scrupulous rhymes, was praised by reviewers for its impeccable command of form.

She had learned the lessons of her father’s library well, or so it seemed. For even in this volume Ms. Rich had begun, with subtle subversion, to push against a time-honored thematic constraint — the proscription on making poetry out of the soul-numbing dailiness of women’s lives.

A poem in the collection, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” depicting a woman at her needlework and reprinted here in full, is concerned with precisely this:

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Once mastered, poetry’s formalist rigors gave Ms. Rich something to rebel against, and by her third collection, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” published by Harper & Row, she had pretty well exploded them. That volume appeared in 1963, a watershed moment in women’s letters: “The Feminine Mystique” was also published that year.

In the collection’s title poem, Ms. Rich chronicles the pulverizing onus of traditional married life. It opens this way:

You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time. ...
Your mind now, mouldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact.

Though the book horrified some critics, it sealed Ms. Rich’s national reputation.

She knew the strain of domestic duty firsthand. In 1953 Ms. Rich had married a Harvard economist, Alfred Haskell Conrad, and by the time she was 30 she was the mother of three small boys. When Professor Conrad took a job at the City College of New York, the family moved to New York City, where Ms. Rich became active in the civil rights and antiwar movements.

By 1970, partly because she had begun, inwardly, to acknowledge her erotic love of women, Ms. Rich and her husband had grown estranged. That autumn, he died of a gunshot wound to the head; the death was ruled a suicide. To the end of her life, Ms. Rich rarely spoke of it.

Ms. Rich effectively came out as a lesbian in 1976, with the publication of “Twenty-One Love Poems,” whose subject matter — sexual love between women — was still considered disarming and dangerous. In the years that followed her poetry and prose ranged over her increasing self-identification as a Jewish woman, the Holocaust and the struggles of black women.

Ms. Rich’s other volumes of poetry include “The Dream of a Common Language” (1978), “A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far” (1981), “The Fact of a Doorframe” (1984), “An Atlas of the Difficult World” (1991) and, most recently, “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve,” published last year.

Her prose includes the essay collections “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence” (1979); “Blood, Bread, and Poetry” (1986); an influential essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” published as a slender volume in 1981; and the nonfiction book “Of Woman Born” (1976), which examines the institution of motherhood as a socio-historic construct.

For Ms. Rich, the getting of literary awards was itself a political act to be reckoned with. On sharing the National Book Award for poetry in 1974 (the other recipient that year was Allen Ginsberg), she declined to accept it on her own behalf. Instead, she appeared onstage with two of that year’s finalists, the poets Audre Lorde and Alice Walker; the three of them accepted the award on behalf of all women.

In 1997, in a widely reported act, Ms. Rich declined the National Medal of Arts, the United States government’s highest award bestowed upon artists. In a letter to Jane Alexander, then chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, which administers the award, she expressed her dismay, amid the “increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice,” that the government had chosen to honor “a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

Art, Ms. Rich added, “means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”

Ms. Rich’s other laurels — and these she did accept — include the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

She taught widely, including at Columbia, Brandeis, Rutgers, Cornell and Stanford Universities.

Ms. Rich’s survivors include her partner of more than 30 years, the writer Michelle Cliff; three sons, David, Pablo and Jacob, from her marriage to Professor Conrad; a sister, Cynthia Rich; and two grandchildren.

For all her verbal prowess, for all her prolific output, Ms. Rich retained a dexterous command of the plain, pithy utterance. In a 1984 speech she summed up her reason for writing — and, by loud unspoken implication, her reason for being — in just seven words.

What she and her sisters-in-arms were fighting to achieve, she said, was simply this: “the creation of a society without domination.”

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting. “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” reprinted from “Collected Early Poems” by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1993 by Adrienne Rich. With the permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company Inc.

PHOTO: Neal Boenzi/The New York Times
Adrienne Rich in 1987.

As 2012 continues, more and more groups are gathering to become full participants in the "shift" that is clearly happening. I thought this announcement contained much wisdom as well as information about the upcoming workshop in Colorado Springs.



CELTIC MYSTIC JOURNEYS IN COLORADO SPRINGS

Call for info 877-756-8763

Workshop: Ascension, the Shift! 2012 and Beyond!

Workshop: Ascension, the Shift! 2012 and Beyond!
$125.00
SKU: WKSP/APR2012
Weekend workshop in Colorado Springs
March 31st - April 1st, 2012

Location: Center for Powerful Living

635 Southpointe Ct #220, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80906

Cost: $125, includes Essene Supper on Saturday night

Coming from out-of-town? See more information below for special hotel rates reserved at a nearby hotel. Transportation to event will be provided. Shuttle service is available from Colorado Springs Airport.

Register below or call 877-756-8763

Co Creating as we embrace the shift to Ascension.

In this period of great energetic shifts that are truly upon us, whether we choose to acknowledge them or not! They provide clear explanations of what many are experiencing spiritually, physically, emotionally and in other areas of our lives as well as the keys to walking through the next step with grace and ease.

It is important for each of us to understand that there is an essential energy inside each being of divine light, love and wisdom that propels us all along the path. While the world may be wondering what we are doing, or our families thinking we may have "lost the plot," deep within, the essential energy of light, love and wisdom keeps burning with a huge glow!

The Journey of 2012 (The Shift ) has just begun. Now it is your moment to come and join me as I offer to you perspectives and insights and extraordinary events that will define this moment in history have started to reveal themselves.

We will review the steps that brought us to this point:

2008 Transparency 2009 Compassion, 2010 Balance, 2011 Resurrection, 2012 Ascension.

The planetary rulers of these years correspond to these phases of the global transformation listed above.

2008 was Mars bringing to light all hidden conflicts
2009 was the Sun 2nd ray love/wisdom and compassion
2010 was Venus ruler of Libra the balance
2011 was Mercury the hierophant awakener
2012 is the Moon channeling energies of the invisible transcendant planets
Our next big shift comes at Spring Equinox 2013. As the seed that was planted 2000 years ago sprouts into its next phase.



Essene Silent Ritual Meal

Let Magic Happen Through The Silence

A basic belief of the Essenes was the need to harmonize the earthly and heavenly forces, as is seen in their morning and evening communions and their noon peace contemplations.

They felt that the food they ate was created by the Holy Stream of Life combining the elements of earth, air, re and water and that this food therefore represented the meeting place of the Earthly Mother and the Heavenly Father. The obvious next step from this belief is to attune oneself to these forces, thus allowing them to be assimilated into your own material being, for physical, mental/emotional and spiritual healing, guidance and growth.

Our silent ritual meal is a modern day interpretation of this harmonizing process. The ritual, before the meal is taken, is to raise our level of consciousness and concentrate our awareness, in order to better link with, and absorb these forces as we eat in silence.

The eating place will have been dedicated and consecrated before the ritual begins, lighting will be subdued and the room full of the fragrance of essential oils and the sound of gentle music. You will each be met by the celebrants who will wash and dry your hands as a mark of service, humility

and cleansing of the outer world. There is and opening and closing ritual along with a special blessing of the food. All food id uncooked, vegetables, fruit and nuts.

It is a very special inwardly looking time as you eat in silence and allow the magic to happen.





The symbol of the Aquarian Age is a chalice.

The chalice is each one of us. The empty chalice is pregnant with possibilities, alive in the now, unattached to outcomes. Our chalice can be empty or full.

When empty, the chalice can be filled by the divine and we receive perfect balance and harmony through the mystical marriage of the heart and mind. We embrace both our masculine and feminine selves, God - Christ, Goddess - Sophia.

Through guided meditation, personal exploration, rituals and emotional healing we accept the chalice of the Aquarian Age. We become an open vessel to awakened awareness for the benefit of ourselves, our families, our friendships and all of humanity.

In this workshop we will learn to work with the sacred chalice to be the vessel that we were meant to be.

Coming from out-of-town? We'll make it easy for you.

We've arranged for discounted hotel rates and we'll provide transportation from hotel to workshop. All you need to do is fly into the local airport and get a shuttle to your hotel.

Hotel Rate: $79.99 per studio suite (1-2 persons), normally $129.99

Staybridge Suites
7130 Commerce Center Dr., Colorado Springs, CO 80919
Phone: 1-719-590-7829
http://www.suitescolorado.com/
Ask for Daniel or Rachel and tell them you are part of the Celtic Mystical Journeys group.

Airports: Colorado Springs Airport (20 min), Denver International Airport (1 1/2 hrs)

Airport Shuttle: Colorado Springs Shuttle Services

Register Now!

Space is limited. Your early reservation will ensure your space.

Call 877-756-8763 or email us with any questions.

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Celtic Mystical Journeys Reservations and Information
US: 1-877-756-8763 or 719-641-6764
UK: 01887 829 596
Ireland: 086 1000272
Celtic Mystical Journeys
PO Box 1702
Lafayette, California 94549

(image found on Celtic Mystical Journeys website)

The Soul’s Hunger

The hunger of the soul for
God
is never sated.
We taste that one’s heart,
and cry out
for more nutriment,
more wine.

How can we assuage
such longing?
How quench
such thirst?

No matter which
tavern we visit,
what temple
we frequent,
always God is seeking
God,
whichever way we turn.

Dorothy Walters
March 26, 2012

The Seeker Attempts to Return"

I could, of course, put
a mark
on my forehead
(and don’t think
I wouldn’t like
to do this)
or I might wander
about in a robe
of saffron or maroon
(and never believe
I wouldn’t wish
to clothe myself this way.)
I could stand beneath
a tree
and recite ancient verses,
give blessings as
someone with strange eyes
fondles a flute
or a stringed instrument
nearby
(and I would do this gratefully,
indeed I would.)
I could infuse the crowd
with sweetness,
love energy from God
and watch them cry out,
and fall to the ground.
Now I have only silence,
sometimes these words,
dream passages
from that other world
that I say to myself
at night.
Shanti, shanti, shanti

(from "The Ley Lines of the Soul, Poems of Ecstasy and Ascension")

(Note: The flowers were a gift from my friend Patricia Lay-Dorsey on my recent birthday.)

Spring and all its flowers
By Hafiz
(1320 - 1389)
English version by Homayun Taba & Marguerite Theophil

Spring and all its flowers
now joyously break their vow of silence.
It is time for celebration, not for lying low;
You too -- weed out those roots of sadness from your heart.

The Sabaa wind arrives;
and in deep resonance, the flower
passionately rips open its garments,
thrusting itself from itself.

The Way of Truth, learn from the clarity of water,
Learn freedom from the spreading grass.

Pay close attention to the artistry of the Sabaa wind,
that wafts in pollen from afar,
And ripples the beautiful tresses
of the fields of hyacinth flowers.

From the privacy of the harem, the virgin bud slips out,
revealing herself under the morning star,
branding your heart and your faith
with beauty.

And frenzied bulbul flies madly out of the House of Sadness
to unite with the flowers;
its love-crazed cry like a thousand-trumpet blast.

Hafez says, and the experienced old ones concur:

All you really need
is to tell those Stories
of the Fair Ones and the Goblet of Wine.

Memories of finding you fallen in the field
where so many fell, your striped garment streaming in the breeze.
And were we allies or enemies? It is not revealed.
And was the cause you fell in good or ill?
And were you quick forgotten, or was there fame?
I do not know; I do not think I will. All I can tell
is: Such a shame, such a shame.

Birrell Walsh

Birrell Walsh is a poet/mystic/musician living in the Bay Area.

Jeff Richards--from "The Cosmos is my Significant Other"--part 4


Back to my story....as I was struggling to emerge from the depths of my existential crisis I found myself looking for guidance in the form of books. Not self-help books, but physics and biology, consciousness research, philosophy. I restarted a meditation practice as a way of training my focus and looking deep within. I restarted my art practice, which had been dormant for almost a year. I was intent on clearing the fog, more single-minded in that regard than I had ever allowed; a vision of suicide as warm and snugly will tend to have that effect on you.

I spent a lot of time in the Denver Public Library, devouring books and letting the library gods guide me wherever they saw fit. During one period of exploration concerning the mind/body problem I kept running into references to the chakras. When I thought about it I realized I knew about as much as the average college educated Westerner concerning chakras; that is, next to nothing. Something vague about energy centers, etheric bodies, chi or prana, all mostly incoherent to me. I decided I needed to know more, so I found a few books on the subject and got... something vague about energy centers, etheric bodies, chi or prana, all mostly incoherent to me. It didn't help that most of it was presented in the form of translations from esoteric and ancient Indian texts, which was only slightly easier than reading Sanskrit. Then I stumbled onto a little book written by an American who had spent time in India studying and now lived not far from me in Boulder. Her name is Layne Redmond, and she is now a world famous drummer among her other talents. The book was Chakra Meditation, and it was written in plain old American, a language I had familiarity with. This was a Saturday afternoon. I took it home and that evening sat down to read.

Besides an explanation of the physical and metaphorical meanings of the chakras, Redmond had supplied a group of color prints of painted symbols for each chakra, known as yantras. In what is a typical style, each chakra was represented by a lotus flower, each with its own number of petals and its own color. A yantra is a visual devise used in some meditation practices - the practitioner gazes at the yantra, contemplating its meaning and significance, often while chanting. As a visual artist I found these chakra symbols intriguing and was drawn to their simplicity and mystery.

As I said, Chakra Meditation is a slim book - less than 100 pages - and I read through most of it that evening, leaving the final chapters on specific meditation instruction for the morning when drowsiness would not interfere with the practice. And so it was on a beautiful, sunny Sunday morning in May that I sat in my favorite reading chair to finish. The meditation instructions were highly specific, and an audio cd that came with the book included a guided-by-drum chanting session designed to facilitate a focus on the actual location of the chakras in the body. However, it was such a glorious Sunday morning I decided the outdoors were where I needed to be, so I put the book down, rose stretching and gazed out my 3rd floor balcony window, only to see a yard sale on a lawn directly across the street.

To back up a little, I had just that month finally secured an art studio I could afford, and had that week finished moving my tools and benches and supplies into the space. I bought a small coffee maker for the studio, and had decided I would, rather than bring a mug from home, let chance guide me to one appropriate to my new studio. When I saw the yard sale it dawned on me that every yard sale in the world had coffee mugs, and that special mug just might be waiting for me there. In three minutes I was browsing through the numerous mugs offered for sale. I found one, and pleased with myself I looked about for my neighbor to ask the price. My eye was immediately caught by a string of small pennants tied between two trees, waving in the light morning breeze. There were seven of them in a string, maybe 8x8 inches each, very colorful. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks - THEY WERE THE CHAKRA YANTRAS!

Now remember, until Redmond's book I had never seen, nor had any knowledge of yantras. If I had seen these pennants even the day before they would have meant nothing to me. And remember this as well - I had just put that book down 3 minutes before! Call it what you will, I knew something very odd was at play here. I found my neighbor, inquired into a price for both mug and pennants, and for $1.50 I acquired them and marched home delighted.

I must admit, my first reaction was AREN'T I SPECIAL! It didn't last long - after all, I had no self to feel special about, so that one didn't stick. But I knew there was meaning here, and that there was something to explore, and that an unforeseen and unimagined door had just cracked open. Where it would lead I had no idea, but I'm an artist, and if you're not adventurous in that pursuit you'll get nowhere. And so, in the months ahead I gently pushed open the door and stepped through......

To be continued....

(Image from Jeff Richards website at http://www.hexagonart.com/

ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT CONCEPTION DAY






A Message from Barbara about Conception Day 2012Monday, March 19, 2012 12:14 PM
From: "Stephen Dinan & Barbara Marx Hubbard" Add sender to Contacts
To: dorothywalters72@yahoo.com

Dear Dorothy,

The excitement is growing for Conception Day 2012 as we already have more than 10,800 people registered from 120 countries to participate!

We invite you to keep spreading the word to friends and allies to participate in this historic moment!

Send them to http://www.conceptionday2012.com and share on Facebook.

Or use the invitation tools (that includes email text you can send) at this link: http://conceptionday2012.com/invitation

We especially want you to use your own creative genius to create local events that link to the larger energy of the whole. You can participate in one of the 24 events now listed in 5 countries or create one of your own here: http://www.birth2012.com/conception-day.html

Also, we have a limited number of tickets for the main event, so make sure to get yours soon if you're planning on joining us live - we keep adding wonderful new elements including Santana keyboardist Freddie Ravel, conscious hip-hop band The Luminaries, dancers and cool performance art: http://www.conceptionday2012.com/event

And here is a note Barbara Marx Hubbard wanted to share with you about the significance of this day. Let's create something incredible together!


Dear friends, colleagues, cocreators,

Welcome to the beginning of nine months in which we are called together to "conceive" and activate our participation in a planetary birth experience for humanity!

We are envisioning a December 22 Birth Day in which 100 million people will feel connected with each other to cocreate and express their own gifts to each other and the world. We see a committed core of 350,000 of us connected in global heart resonance to help "gentle" the birth. With your help, this Birth Day will be an uprising of human creativity and love celebrating Day One of the next stage of human evolution.

The Conception Day gatherings this Thursday are really focus points for coming together to cocreate, engender a field of love, and cultivate the deeper impulse of evolution within each of us. We will evoke the "sacred space" where the impulse of evolution comes through us collectively.

On Conception Day, we can conceive together a way to deepen our communities of pioneering souls. We will be linked together locally and then globally so that we can seed in the Earth the quality of love and creativity for the next nine months.

By December 22, 2012, our intentions will be connected in the larger "field" of the noosphere, the thinking layer of Earth. We will be connecting heart with heart and center with center in such a way that we actually affect the field of Earth.

Perhaps the universal process of creation is waiting for enough of us to wake up and love each other to "turn on" the global brain/mind/ heart and link us as one planetary body that is now being "born" into its full potential.

Together, we can evolve a cocreative society in which all people will become free to be and give their best.

I am eager to connect with all of you via the Internet, and possibly in person during the Campaign for the Planetary Birth now initiated on March 22.

With love and blessings,
Barbara
P.S. Let's build this exciting movement for positive change together!

Spread the word to your friends and allies and invite them to participate in the Conception Day event this Thursday, March 22nd.

Send them to http://www.conceptionday2012.com and share on your Facebook page.

Or use the invitation tools (that includes email text you can send) at this link: http://conceptionday2012.com/invitation

Thank you!

# posted by Dorothy : 3/20/2012 06:32:00 PM

This morning, I ran across an article on Sufism, describing it as "The Path of Love." As I read, I realized once again that the "Path of Love' is also the way of Kundalini, for it opens the heart to union with the divine not through creed or formulas, not through rituals and law, but through connection with the divine in the deepest possible sense. One becomes single--both Lover and Beloved, Witness and Subject. Kundalini, in its highest form, tells us that we too are divine, part of the divine flow, God embodied as self.

The article itself is titled "On the 'Path of Love' Towards the Divine: A Journey with Muslim Mystics." The author is Omid Safi of Colgate University. It was published in "The Journal of Scriptural Reasoning," No. 3.2, August 2003. I found it by "accident" when I googled Sufi.

Here are some excerpts from the article, including poems from various authors. I will not try to identify these--they are listed in footnotes to the article:


"Hazrat Inayat Khan's heartfelt poem in many ways stands in a thousand-year-old line of what has been referred to as the madhhab-i 'ishq, or "Path of Love" in Islam. What holds this thousand-year old "path" together is neither creedal statements nor particular initiatory rituals, but rather an aesthetic, a "mood", a rasa: the intuitive experience of love, which must be tasted personally. This is what the Sufis of this path referred to as the "taste" (dhauq) of love:

Of love one can only speak with lovers. Only a lover knows the true value of love. One who has not experienced it considers it all a legend. For such a person, even the claim of love, even the name of love, are forbidden![2]

******************

You!
always traversing the world
searching...
tell me:
what benefit has come of it?

That
which you are seeking
is with you;
and you seek
elsewhere[7]
('Ayn al-Qozat)

****************

I will incinerate this creed and religion, and burn it.
Then I will put your love in its place.
How long must I hide
this love in my heart?
What the traveler seeks
is not the religion
and not the creed:
Only You.[12]

***************

And this, from Rumi, speaking to the travelers to Mecca in sacred pilgrimage:

O you who have left for Hajj,
where are you?
where are you?
The beloved is here!
Come, come!

The Beloved is your neighbor
what are you doing,
lost in the wilderness?

If you could see the formless face
of the Beloved
you'd know that you are the lord,
the house, and the Ka'ba![19]

So many times you set out on that road to that house;
Just once...
come to the roof of this house.[20]

Yes, that house [Ka'ba] is subtle,
you've told me about it.
But show me something
about the Lord of that house!

If you saw that garden,
where are the flowers?
If you dove in God's ocean,
where is a single soul-jewel?[21]

(Image found on google)

Hexagon Art - The Art and Musings of Jeff Richards
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14, 2012
My Significant Other is the Kosmos Part 3: Is Evolution the New Metaphysics?
Marching onward into the fog - sounds a bit daunting, even a little terrifying. We think of phrases like "a foggy mind", or "the fog of war"; we think of being lost without bearings, no visible landmarks to guide us. But fog can be a teacher; let me relate to you an anecdote concerning fog.

I grew up in Northern California, land of the giant Redwoods and - you guessed it- fog. From June until October thick ocean fog presses the shoreline from San Diego to Eureka, tumbling over hills and rushing inland through openings like the Golden Gate at San Francisco Bay. Anyone who has visited San Francisco for summer vacation probably remembers that rude awakening when, dressed in shorts and tank top and sandals on a trek to the sunny California beaches, they encountered the icy grip of wet, clinging fog that never quite burns off, but at best recedes to a pale grey haze. Another peculiarity of weather in California is the dry summer - from June until October it's likely not a drop of rain will fall on the state west of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Because of this much of California is, for all intents and purposes, a desert.

And yet, there are those vast forests of giant redwood trees, the largest trees in the world - hardly a desert inhabitant, one would think. How do they survive four to six months a year, year after year, with no rain? This question had never risen in my mind until one thick foggy morning I took a stroll in a redwood grove just east of Oakland. As the trail meandered through a particularly thick stand of trees I suddenly found myself pelted with a steady, persistent stream of large globs of water. I stopped, and all around me I could hear what sounded like a light but steady rainfall. When I looked up I discovered the source - somehow, the peculiar shape of the redwood needles managed to capture moisture from the fog and condense enough of it to create a small stream of water that ran down to the tips of the branches, light drops falling from each branch in a steady drip, drip, drip. The ground under my feet was wet and soggy. Then it hit me - the redwood trees had found a way to water themselves!

They adapted. A neo-Darwinian would say it came about by the process of random mutation and natural selection over thousands, even tens or hundreds of thousands of years. But if you stand back, way back, and just look at the process and results, you'll be struck by how astonishingly CREATIVE this solution is. One might say, in this light, that the process of evolutionary adaptation seems to be saturated in a kind of creative desire - in the case of redwoods, some elemental desire for water resulting in a novel, creative solution to overcoming environmental obstacles toward satisfying that desire. And think of this - how persistent were they? Thousands and thousands of years working at the problem trying this, trying that, morphing slowly but always, always in the direction desire dictated, until finally.... no rain? No problem, we'll make our own rain. It's as if this small expression of the Cosmos just shrugged and said, "if ya gotta lemon, make lemonade".

This desire, this creative eros, seems to penetrate not only the evolution of life on this planet, but in fact the entire cosmic evolutionary stream. If we, for the moment, accept the notion of the Big Bang 14 billion years ago as the initiator of this grand evolutionary process, what do we see? From pure, matterless energy to the first hydrogen atoms, to helium, and on through the periodic table, slowly but inexorably coming into being from nothing. Then the clouds of gas composed of those early elements forming into stars, solar systems, galaxies. Then somehow, against all odds, here on Earth (and probably elsewhere) life appears - single cells to multi cells to organisms arising out of the primordial soup. Eventually those organisms migrate to land, culminating in 100 milliion years of domination by the dinosaurs, then a meteor crashes into the Gulf of Mexico and nothing bigger than a chicken survives, allowing the rise of the mammals, then primates, then...us, beings apparently for the first time capable of self-reflection. All of this a long, long series of absolutely novel creative leaps.

Could it be that, even in us today, when we find within us that urge to create - be it in the arts or sciences, in building or inventing, in making babies or making lasagna, in doodling or dancing - we are tapping into that same creative eros that has driven the entire evolutionary impulse of the Cosmos from the beginning? And if that's true, could it be that we are right now the leading edge of something much, much bigger and grander than our petty personal experiences? So it seemed to me on that dark night when my self disappeared and something else arose in the fog.

Jeff Richards, My Significant Other is the Cosmos, part 3

Image from Jeff's website at http://hexagonart.com

Dear Friend
Turbulent, challenging times, whether in our personal lives or in our families, groups, or society, require greater commitment to acting more fully out of love, generosity and wisdom. Dharma, living from our highest nature, our deepest wisdom, is known in all traditions and provides the refuge we need for transforming the mind in difficult times.

It is so easy for the mind to be hijacked by fear. Research on the brain makes this clear. Fear overwhelms the higher cortical functions and puts them in the service of subcortical fear circuits in the brain. These are very powerful motivators. It's why groups of all kinds, religious and political, use fear to motivate people to go in the direction the group leaders want them to go.

People who are struggling in any number of ways are most vulnerable. It's not a matter of material wealth, but perceived threat, that drives the fear-based behaviors.

Taking refuge in dharma, in the highest ideals and visions of our spiritual traditions is the way through the fear and allows us to serve by holding to the truth and vision of who we all are as embodiments of Christ, or Buddha, Krishna, Allah, Kali, Shekinah, or Light, or however we want to label the Ineffable Source.
In these times we need everyone from every tradition doing all they can to hold to the ideals of love, compassion, generosity, and truth.

Perhaps the biggest untruth, the root of untruth, is that we are not the Infinite One who fears nothing and gives to all inexhaustibly. We can banish this ignorance, this root cause from our mind.

When we take refuge in the truth, in dharma, we bring that into the present, into our everyday interactions, as an antidote to the poisons of fear and ignorance.

Take refuge in dharma and steadfastly, unswervingly assert the truth with your state of being, of being at ease, of being wise, of being free.




Ryokan
Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf

Sporting and sporting,
As I pass through this floating world:
Finding myself here,
Is it not good
To dispel the bad dreams of others?

translated by John Stevens, p. 49







Kali's Bazaar
Penned by Kalidas

You may laugh out loud, be moved to tears or pulled into deep contemplation by what you encounter in Kali's Bazaar. Readers will return often to this accessible collection of poems to draw from its wellspring of devotion, revelation and celebration of the Divine present in every moment, every being and all of creation. Bring inspiration, clarity and practical instruction to your spiritual path or meditative practice through insightful and often ecstatic poetry from a devoted master meditation teacher who has more that 40 years of experience teaching and practicing the arts of meditation.

Click on the book for more information and book reviews by leading authors. Visit The Soul's Journey Store to order this book and view many other resources to support your practices.

(Note: Lawrence Edwards makes a very important point here: "dharma," a term used often in Buddhist practice, actually refers to the wisdom teachings of all the spiritual traditions, whichever you may choose. It comprises the distilled wisdom of the ages, and often may be found even in secular writers (such as Plato or Sophocles and other great thinkers of the past.) Poets also are treasured when they offer us great wisdom, couched in (we hope) beautiful language.)

The Bright Field
By R. S. Thomas
(1913 - 2000)

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

(I like this poem because it captures one of those unexpected moments when life itself seems a miracle reflected in some aspect of nature--here a field, but it could be anything--a tree, a flower, a distant mountain, a net of leaves on the ground in autumn. Recently I woke from a dream and realized that in the dream the bark of a great tree was shining with great luminescence. It was a transcendent moment, and I marveled that the memory had survived the dream perception (and thought it a rather odd dream).
Then, a few days later, I came across just such a tree--not far from my house. I stood there in awe at the beauty and incredible arrangement of the tree before me. I can't swear it was the same one as that of my dream, but it certainly was the identical experience.
I think such moments are reminders of the sacred quality of our universe--we cannot make such experiences happen, but we can be open to them when they come.)

(photo found on poetrychaikhana)

Whose Blood?

One speaks and says,
“Speak as though your mouth
were filled
with the blood of God.”

Another says,
“Dance in your own blood.”

I ask,
whose blood is it
that is flowing?
Is it mine,
is it yours,
the animals,
ox and field mouse,
deer and salmon fish,
the little ones who
inhabit our houses,
sleep beside our pillows
at night?

Whose blood is cascading
like waterfalls
down the sides of the mountains,
falling like rainstorms
from the clouds hovering above?
Whose blood is streaming?
Is it ours?

Dorothy Walters
March 13, 2010

At this moment of world crisis, it is, I believe, important to be mindful of both the shadow and the light, to have the courage to face the terrible reality that confronts us in terms of planetary survival, yet not lose sight of the wondrous light that is also available to us at those times when we are in total sync with the divine flow. This poem addresses the possibility of total apocalypse--it is intended simply to remind us that we cannot afford to ignore the serious nature of the issues that confront us.
At the same time, joy and even ecstasy are available as well--in a paradoxical union.

(The first quote is from Jean Houston, according to my source. The second is, as I recall, from Rumi.)

Whatever You Offer

Whatever you offer me,
I will take it.

I don’t need bribes
to swallow
the bread and honey of your love.

This wine needs no water
to wash it down.

Even if we must perform
the many labors,
or huddle in
the darkened corners
of the caves
for eons
as the silence thickens
and the glaciers
gather.

This is what we have
hungered for
for so many days
for so many years.

(from The Ley Lines of the Soul"

Birthing a New Era: Join Us for Conception Day 2012
From: "Stephen Dinan - The Shift Network"
To: dorothywalters72@yahoo.com

Dear Dorothy,

March 22nd will be THE biggest moment yet for the whole Shift Network to activate our shared vision of hope for humanity, helping to make the highly anticipated year of 2012 a breakthrough time of positive change!

We're putting out a global call for visionaries, healers, change agents, artists, pioneers and lovers of humanity (like you!) to join us for our free Conception Day 2012.

Join me and visionary Barbara Marx Hubbard, plus Neale Donald Walsch, Jean Houston, Michael Beckwith, Jack Canfield, Lynne McTaggart and other top transformational leaders - all sharing their insights on how we can make best use of 2012, empowering you to envision and conceive a new story for humanity.

Get all the details and register for free here: http://conceptionday2012.com

Conception Day 2012 is the launch of our nine-month campaign that builds towards a planetary Birth Day, in which we're envisioning 100 million converging worldwide to celebrate and activate the birth of a new era.

This historic campaign has already attracted top leaders, dozens of organizations and the buzz of 65,000 participants in past events, who want to help our world turn the corner in time.

And now we take it to the next level on Thursday, March 22nd - cocreating a field of love and resonance that spans the world!

Don't miss this historic live global event - broadcasting many leaders and collaborators live from Los Angeles while weaving together inspiring messages and events worldwide! Use this moment to activate your own cocreative circles and fun, celebratory parties. Find your allies and share your gifts!

Together, we can activate an evolutionary movement that can help accelerate the shift to a new world, one based on the principles of health, sustainability, peace and prosperity for all.


(This) movement that can help accelerate the shift to a new world, one based on the principles of health, sustainability, peace and prosperity for all.

Conception Day will also launch Barbara Marx Hubbard's highly anticipated Birth 2012 and Beyond book, a Birth 2012 TV Channel, and more.

Join us here: http://conceptionday2012.com

Imagine the power and energy unleashed when millions of us come together--on the same day and at the same time--to make a commitment to create a new world.

We can begin this journey on March 22nd and work together to build to a truly planetary scale through nine months of collaboration, reaching the tipping point together for the years ahead.

2012 is not a year to succumb to doom and gloom. It's the perfect time to build on the heightened anticipation and to conceive powerful collaborations for the dawning of new era for the world. Let's make it truly special!

You can join Barbara and other top leaders online March 22nd, or in person in Los Angeles for our exciting celebration at "The Dome."

This is your opportunity to link with the hearts and minds of other change agents and help give birth to a shift for yourself and our world!

Join us now for the free global broadcast and you'll also receive information about the event, book and campaign.

RSVP here: http://conceptionday2012.com

In spirit,
Stephen Dinan

# posted by Dorothy : 3/09/2012 11:20:00 AM

Rise early at dawn, when our storytelling begins

By Abu-Said Abil-Kheir
(967 - 1049)
English version by Vraje Abramian

Rise early at dawn, when our storytelling begins.
In the dead of the night, when all other doors are
locked,
the door for the Lovers to enter opens.
Be wide awake in the dark when Lovers
begin fluttering around the Beloved's window,
like homing pigeons arriving with flaming bodies.

from Jeff Richards' blog for TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2012

My Significant Other is the Kosmos Part 2 - Gratitude for Fog

(if you missed Part 1 of this series, you can find it at Kundalinisplendor for February 28, and also at Jeff's Website (see below).

It's my intention in this blog series to follow two parallel paths - one, my ideas and speculations on the creative process and its place in our time; the other a personal story of an unusual series of events that were catalytic to a transformation in my own consciousness development. Ultimately the paths converge, for creative expression in all of its forms is, in my experience, both an expression and a vehicle of transformation guided by the evolutionary impulse; it is where evolution is happening right here, right now. Darwin had it only partially right.


To introduce the personal story, I spoke of a Sunday in May, and indeed that was a catalytic moment; but there is an important background context that I'll lay out first. This was a time of the second, most extreme existential crisis I have experienced. What I mean by existential crisis is this - every value, every belief, every constant that I had relied upon to define my sense of self, of my place in the world, of my very being had been stripped bare and viscerated, reduced to heaps of absurdity and chaos. The details are unimportant. Just know that I was staring out over an abyss and there was...nothing. All meaning gone, all purpose gone, not even a glimmer of light or life. The only experience left was that of pain and terror, and even these were ephemeral phantoms that dissolved as soon as I tried to grasp them. This was a massive ripping away of egoic identity that left me utterly abandoned.


Lest you think I was feeling sorry for myself....well, ok, I was. But this was deeper and darker than self-pity alone; it was terrifying. Ironically, the real source of that terror was the absolute transparent awareness that this hell was of my own creation. There was no angry God, no government, no institution, no social structure, not a single individual on the face of the planet I could pin it on. I was radically, irrevocably responsible for all of it, and even as I had a pretty clear idea how I got there, I had no idea how to get out. I was Dante at the Gates of Hell standing alone, not a Virgil in sight to take my hand and guide me through the depths.


(As an aside, during this time I had a conversation with a young friend who was in the midst of her own existential crisis - very different in content, very similar in quality. At one point in our talk she made the comment "Suddenly, suicide starts to look all kinda warm and fuzzy". I knew exactly was she was talking about.)


So there I was, standing between terrifying nothingness and soft and fuzzy, literally paralyzed. However, eventually something happened as I took on that radical responsibility for everthing in my predicament. That realization, when I finally and completly accepted it, opened a tiny window for me to slip through. There was a nagging voice whispering in my ear constantly, saying "get over yourself, get over yourself, get over yourself". Finally in frustration I retorted " But I don't have a self anymore!!!". And that, my friends, was the moment I realized that it was all paradoxically, stupidly, sublimely hilarious... and that it was time to cowboy-up and march onward into the fog. Straight toward a Sunday in May.

(To be continued)

(If you want to read the first installment of this series and also to see more of Jeff's artwork, go to:
http://hexagonart.blogspot.com
(Image by Jeff Richards--found on his website)

Today, I attended a "Oneness Blessing," something that many of you may have heard of or even experienced. The session lasted about one and one half hours. There was meditation, music, and eye transmission by Doug Bentley, the leader for the afternoon. (Doug is a monk from India.) Doug entered while our eyes were closed, sat upon his elevated chair at the front, and proceeded to give the "diksha" (initiation) silently. Sometimes he smiled and moved a bit in his chair. At times he was still.

When Doug smiled and moved about he was, I thought, simply experiencing deep rapture or even ecstasy, which can produce delightful sensations within. Many in the audience began to laugh uproariously during these periods, or even to shout and scream, as if some dramatic process were occurring within. I wondered whether or not they were not simply releasing the intense inner energies within, aroused by Doug's apparent joy.

As for me, I had no particularly dramatic experiences. I remained calm throughout and wondered what the lasting effects of the afternoon might be.

I had had this "diksha blessing" once before several years ago, but that was a very different experience. It was a one to one transmission and I did feel a slight bit of bliss during the session. This time I felt nothing of the kind, but did have quite a bit of internal imagery during the chakra meditation, all relating to experiences in India, that seemed to be from past lives. Once I was a male dancer (dressed in a skirt, such as is depicted in some ancient portrayals of males), once a boy riding an elephant during a majestic procession (and how glad I was to be this boy, rather than the potentate honored by the event), once someone (again male) carried aloft on a palanquin, and once someone (also male) being carried on a litter to the burial grounds.

Frankly, I'm not sure what I think of any of this, but the audience seemed to enjoy it immensely, and I met some lovely people there.

The warbler knows

by Ivan Granger

The warbler knows
only dawn's shaft
of light
on her breast.

Forgetting false future
suns, she sings

in no voice
but her own.

(Ivan Granger is the founder and continuing presenter of the Poetry Chaikhana, a valuable repository of sacred poetry from around the world.)

(PIcture of Ivan found on the Poetry Chaikhana website)

The Visitant

For what is an angel,
after all?
Is it oneself,
cast into its
larger dimensions,
swelling with joy
and attentiveness?

Or is it truly
presence from
some other nameless realm,
region of
that place where
Mystery dwells?

And if it should come before us,
massive, bright,
how might we greet it,
bear its gaze,
its knowingness
of who we are,
each particle of secret longing,
each hidden scar?

Dorothy Walters

(from "The Ley Lines of the Soul")

(image of Raphael found on google)

I am very pleased to announce that "The Ley LInes of the Soul, Poems of Ecstasy and Ascension" is now available through Amazon. However, to find it, you must type in the title of the book, not just my name. I am trying to get this book included on the "author's page," but so far no luck.

This book marks a milestone for me. It contains most of the spiritual poems I have written in recent years. It is literally filled with "poems of ecstasy and ascension." Personally, I believe that no matter how bleak the world scene becomes, it is important to maintain our sense of joy and exaltation, to "acknowledge the shadow but stand in the light." Such an attitude will help us survive the current crisis, rather than giving in to despair. As I have often noted, the world seems to be falling apart and rebuilding itself in new ways all at the same time.

And, of course, Kundalini plays a major role in the transition to a new state of consciousness.


How to See An Angel

Stand very still.
Don't breathe,
or if you do,
do it silently.

Be in a familiar place,
or else a new place
which feels familiar.

Under a tree by
running water.
Or else in a church
or temple,
where vibrations of
the holy still linger
in the air.

Incense and candles are
fine,
but not required.

If you know a prayer
or a mantra,
this is the time.

Music will help.
Especially kirtans
or hymns.

Look around
for bits of color,
small flashes of light.


Close your eyes
for one brief moment,
then open and turn very slowly.

Listen for something that
sounds like a wooden flute
playing in the distance.

You will feel a
quiet breeze pass over you.
Your cells will brighten,
and you will give a little sigh.

That is when it will happen.
There will be a soft rush of wings.
a blur of shining movement. . .
Everything will light up
as if you are standing
in a cloud of sweet feeling.

Now look straight ahead:
an image will appear
at the corner of your eye,
white wings hovering against
a field of blue and gold. . .

Your heart will open
and you will become
as if two lovers kissing.

When you awaken,
you will find
a single feather
in your hand.

Dorothy Walters
from "The Ley Lines of the Soul"