Kundalini Splendor

Note: I will be off line for a few days.


Matthew Fox––The Feminine Face of God

The feminine face of God was not altogether wiped out by patriarchy  She returned as Wisdom and as Shekinah in the Hebrew Scriptures.  And she returned as Christ-Sophia in the Christian writings.  The experience that Wisdom is Feminine is ancient and transcultural as we shall see.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, Wisdom is celebrated for her cosmic oversight.  She comes wrapped in cosmology.  She has a universal perspective, a cosmic sense.  She is “fairer than the sun, greater than every constellation… and the source of all treasure in the universe.”  There is nothing petty or sectarian about Wisdom—the universe and the entire cosmos are her dwelling place.

She undergirds all things and permeates them, bringing order from chaos while she plays with God from before the beginning of the world.  She is the object of our pursuit of truth at the same time that she is accessible as the fruit of awe and wonder.  Indeed, “awe is the beginning of wisdom.”  In her is found rest and repose, delight and joy.  She is the source of all eros, all love of life.  “Whoever loves her loves life.”  She is the way of true justice and she is a “friend of the prophets who she deploys her strength from one end of the earth to the other, ordering all things for good.”

She entices us with her fruits and attractions for “she is an inexhaustible treasure for humankind.  She blesses the world with Supreme wisdom and allows all people to realize their unity with God.”  Notice how ecumenical Wisdom is—she brings all people to unity with God.  (This same sense of ecumenism is echoed in the story of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem when the angels sing out to the shepherds: “Glory [Doxa, Radiance] to God in the highest and peace to all people of good will).”

We are told that she is “the mother of all good things,” who “age after age enters into holy souls.”  She “makes all things new” and “to love her is to love life.”  Indeed, “a desire to know her brings one to love her,” we are assured.

Banner Image: “Saint Sophia” by Eileen McGuckin

Pray

So let us pick up the stones
over which we stumble, friends,
and build altars.

Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies.
Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices,
of our own names, of our own fears.

Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug.
Let’s lick the earth from our fingers.
Let us look up and out and around.

The world is big and wide and wild
and wonderful and wicked,
and our lives are murky, magnificent,
malleable, and full of meaning.

Oremus.
Let us pray.

~ Pádraig Ó Tuama

 Free Spirit to a Wise Elder––Mirabai Starr

My hippie mother did not interfere when I left home as a teen to seek enlightenment. But she has picked the mantle of motherhood back up.

May 10, 2019


“You seem to think I have relinquished my role as your mother,” my mother wrote to me when I was 15 and living with another family in Staten Island. It was just across the river from where I had been born in Brooklyn, but 2,000 miles away from where my family had settled in the mountains of northern New Mexico.

I had to look up the word “relinquish.”

She was on to something. Growing up in the counterculture of the early 1970s, I was granted an excessive degree of autonomy by my parents and, like many of my contemporaries, I didn’t know what to do with it. While my friends went riding off on the backs of Harleys and sleeping with their drivers, I was tracking the footprints of a series of spiritual teachers, quasi-Eastern and questionably legitimate, in the hope that they would lead me to enlightenment. One such teacher lived in New York City, and I was bargaining that — in the shelter of her magical powers — I might become a guru myself by age 16. Eighteen, tops.

I waited each day for the mailman to bring me a dose of mother-love. But my mom rarely reached out, and her silence intensified my alienation. That was partly because she was busy building a small business, tending to my younger siblings and accommodating the bizarre demands of a brilliant and bipolar boyfriend.

But it was also because she believed in me. I said I wanted God and even though my mother leaned toward atheism herself, she did not interfere.

I assured her that the family I was living with was taking good care of me. She could not have known that the dad, 25 years older than me with kids my own age, was working on luring me to his bed in the name of my spiritual development. I was the eldest living child in our family, the responsible one, serious and driven. My mom did not question that I knew what I was doing.

I did not know what I was doing.

“Last night I had an anxiety dream about you,” she confessed in one of those infrequent letters, and she described a long hallway through which she was frantically searching for me because I needed her, but as soon as she got close I would slip into another room, quietly closing the door behind me, and disappear all over again.

I looked up “anxiety dream.”

A part of me wanted to be saved, and yet if she had tried, I would have thwarted her efforts, proclaiming that she could never understand the depth of my soul. I would have insisted that there was no place for me in the New Mexico house where she lived, a house filled with intermingled clouds of homegrown pot, menthol cigarettes and green aspen split and shoved in the wood stove. A never-quiet house where Janis Joplin took turns with Kris Kristofferson blaring from the cassette player so that a girl could not meditate if she tried. A cynical house where the only gods allowed were drunken poets.

Twenty-five years later my mother held me on the porch of the New Mexico house I shared with my boyfriend and our daughters. She was rocking me and I was screaming. The police had just come to the door, hats pressed to their chests, to inform me that my 14-year-old daughter, Jenny, had been killed in a car accident on the downslope of U.S. Hill, a favorite local sledding spot between the Mora Valley and our home in Taos.

“We were blessed to have them in our lives for the time they were with us,” my mother was murmuring. Her face, smeared with tears, was pressed against my face, smeared with tears. There was nothing to say, really. There was only this hollow amphitheater of anguish where we clung to each other. All I understood in that moment was that my mother knew this ravaged landscape and that I was safe with her.

My mother too was a bereaved mother.

My older brother, Matty, died of a brain tumor when he was 10 and I was 7, and for a time we lost our mom to the wilderness of grief. This probably accounted for the lapse in parenting that characterized that crucial span of my upbringing. But over the years, my mother absorbed her impossible loss and picked the mantle of motherhood back up. She has modeled for me what it looks like to shatter and mend, to defy social norms and find your own voice. My mother’s vulnerability gave me permission to be vulnerable, and her ferocity allowed me to be fierce.

She is in her mid-80s now, vibrant and eccentric and devoted to her family. She never shows up at our house without bearing bags or boxes or baskets of treasures she picked up at yard sales or at the local thrift store. Incomplete sets of handblown Mexican water glasses carefully wrapped (“Who needs exactly eight?”). An alpaca sweater, extra small (“Perfect for you”). A challah (“To stash in the freezer for French toast”) or chocolate chip cookies from a bake sale (“For when the kids come over,” she says, referring to her great-grandchildren, who occasionally stop by).

My mother’s overflowing love of life has shown me what true happiness looks like. She has taught me how to be open to amazement in the face of life’s small beauties: a mourning dove drinking from a hollow of rock, a child unbraiding her grandmother’s hair, a well-balanced soup.

When I watched the mailbox for word from her in my teenage years, hungry and hopeful yet also huffy and aloof, I could never have imagined how the arcs of our lives would send us back toward each other. Now I cannot imagine stepping up to the call that’s been seeping through the seams of my life without this calm, complicated, unconditionally loving being holding my hand.

Mirabai Starr is a New Mexico-based writer and the author of “Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics.”

Channeling Prince

A few months ago, I met a woman who told me that she had started having conversations with Prince,  the famous entertainer, who had recently died under mysterious circumstances.  Although part of me was skeptical, I found her story quite intriguing.  An akashic reader had assured her that they had been siblings in an earlier life, having come over together on a slave boat as brother and sister.  She herself was surprised to have this sudden connection in this life, especially since she had not been an avid follower of Prince.

Because I had heard her story, my attention was drawn to a Youtube talk I happened upon recently from a channel who was herself channeling Prince.  I listened to her presentation and found it interesting.

Among other things, Prince mentioned several changes that would take place in future on planet earth, changes similar to procedures on the place where he is now.  These changes included:

1. a shift from language to symbols as a means of  communication (within 200 years)

2. a different way of conceiving children, perhaps employing test tubes and such

3. a new way of hearing music (When I first experienced Kundalini, I heard music in a radically different way, as if it were originating inside my head.  I have met others who had the same experience.)

He also explained that Purple Rain (as the substance where he is now) is not wet, but is more like rays (of light?)

She also said that the reason he became a Seventh Day Adventist was so that he could experience all the different human experiences, not as a form of repentance for the life he had lived before.  She said that he was so "vast" perhaps he needed to be "taken out."  Because his life had included so much variety, he would not need to return to earth in a new incarnation.

Her name is Amanda Ellis, if you care to look her up.  She channels various celebrities, including Michael Jackson.

Although I am a spiritual mystic, I sometimes like to check out other "fringe" areas such as channeling, astrology, UFO's and such.  There is much we do not know.

Sudden, Slow

Sudden, slow,
three persons, one,
named deities, none,
what do these matter?

Today my dear and I
will go forth
among the trees
and the snow clad flowers,
we will smell freshness,
see the brightness
of new daisies, just born tulips,
faces scrubbed,
heads lifted,
we and they as one
in celebration.

Dorothy Walters
May 9, 2019

What is the Holy Ghost?

First of all, the choice of the word "Ghost" by the translator is unfortunate, since the word "ghost" conjures up images of spooky creatures in bed sheets, disturbing images of the departed.  "Holy Spirit" is a better translation, but even then we must ponder what this "Spirit" is.

I think the "Holy Spirit" is the essence of the God being, the vibratory expression of that which is indefinable through words.  Even if we cannot capture its reality through words, we can in fact feel its actuality through certain frequencies that enter and enliven us through a sense of undeniable love.  Most would agree that love is the basis of all religious systems, all attempts to define the divine presence in familiar language.

I of course would go even further, for to me the "Holy Spirit" is Kundalini, the invisible unnamable truth that arrives and infuses us with a love so vast we are all but overwhelmed by its forcefulness.  The Holy Spirit is that which animates the universe, the life force itself.  It is far too immense for us to experience it in its fullness.  Its frequencies must be stepped down for us to partake of its essence, stripped of its immeasurable power and brought to a reduced level that we can sustain and relate to.

This reality is beyond what we can comprehend.  We can only contemplate in awe its manifestations in our lives, our world, and the cosmos beyond.  We can only know it not by thoughts but by feeling, as we may sense the presence of an unnamed and unknown lover who indeed makes love with you, day after day, all the years of your life.

This is critical.  It has to do with human survival as a species:

UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline Unprecedented. Species Extinction Rates Accelerating.

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The most comprehensive report of its kind just released today, the “Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) summary,” describes a catastrophic and urgent environmental crisis whereby ecosystems are deteriorating more rapidly than earlier thought. This landmark UN report warns that up to 1 million species are on the verge of extinction.

Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’
Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’
Current global response insufficient;
‘Transformative changes’ needed to restore and protect nature;
Opposition from vested interests can be overcome for public good
“The overwhelming evidence of the IPBES Global Assessment, from a wide range of different fields of knowledge, presents an ominous picture,” said IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson. “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

“The Report also tells us that it is not too late to make a difference, but only if we start now at every level from local to global,” he said. “Through ‘transformative change’, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably – this is also key to meeting most other global goals. By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.”

“The member States of IPBES Plenary have now acknowledged that, by its very nature, transformative change can expect opposition from those with interests vested in the status quo, but also that such opposition can be overcome for the broader public good,” Watson said.

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 Over 1,000,000 species on the planet are facing extinction, says the UN's first comprehensive report on global biodiversity @IPBES


7:42 AM - May 6, 2019

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The report is based on thousands of scientific studies and provides the “most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization.”

NYT: Civilization Is Accelerating Extinction and Altering the Natural World at a Pace ‘Unprecedented in Human History’

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in.
As the NYT reports, the IPBES Global Assessment is not the first to sound the alarm on the existential threat the climate crisis poses, but “it goes further by detailing how closely human well-being is intertwined with the fate of other species.”

“For a long time, people just thought of biodiversity as saving nature for its own sake,” said Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services,which conducted the assessment at the request of national governments. “But this report makes clear the links between biodiversity and nature and things like food security and clean water in both rich and poor countries.“
The IPBES Global Assessment warns that piecemeal efforts are no longer sufficient. The climate crisis is so severe that it demands transformative changes.

ipbes

Despite progress to conserve nature and implement policies, the Report also finds that global goals for conserving and sustainably using nature and achieving sustainability cannot be met by current trajectories, and goals for 2030 and beyond may only be achieved through transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors. With good progress on components of only four of the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets, it is likely that most will be missed by the 2020 deadline. Current negative trends in biodiversity and ecosystems will undermine progress towards 80% (35 out of 44) of the assessed targets of the Sustainable Development Goals, related to poverty, hunger, health, water, cities, climate, oceans and land (SDGs 1, 2, 3, 6, 11, 13, 14 and 15). Loss of biodiversity is therefore shown to be not only an environmental issue, but also a developmental, economic, security, social and moral issue as well.

“To better understand and, more importantly, to address the main causes of damage to biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people, we need to understand the history and global interconnection of complex demographic and economic indirect drivers of change, as well as the social values that underpin them,” said Prof. Brondízio. “Key indirect drivers include increased population and per capita consumption; technological innovation, which in some cases has lowered and in other cases increased the damage to nature; and, critically, issues of governance and accountability. A pattern that emerges is one of global interconnectivity and ‘telecoupling’ – with resource extraction and production often occurring in one part of the world to satisfy the needs of distant consumers in other regions.”
If we are to survive and meet the greatest challenges of our time we must ignore those who deride the idea of transformative change.

We find ourselves today in much the same place, confronted by an array of emergencies—seemingly disparate, but in fact closely connected—­that threatens to destroy us. Braced against them is a set of ideas put forward in a congressional resolution by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (the notorious AOC), a twenty-nine-year-old freshman congresswoman, and her young, ad hoc brain trust. They have put into words the growing convictions of many over the years that we cannot go on the way we have been if we are to survive and continue to keep our liberties. It is altogether fitting and proper that this effort has been named the Green New Deal, for it seeks to draw what worked best from the original New Deal and to learn from its mistakes. How well we do in putting its ideas, goals, and promises into effect will determine what our world will be like for a very long time to come.

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 "#Climatechange is different because we have an expiration date... My concern is that we are going to be the frog in the pot of boiling water, and we are going to debate and debate and debate... and our kids are doomed." #ActOnClimate #GreenNewDeal #cdnpoli @AOC

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 Climate change is here + we’ve got a deadline: 12 years left to cut emissions in half.

A #GreenNewDeal is our plan for a world and a future worth fighting for.

How did we get here?
What is at stake?
And where are we going?

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Monday, May 6, 2019 · 4:58:36 PM MDT · igualdad
Trump’s Secretary of State, Pompeo, who has ties to big oil and gas, declared today that the climate crisis offers a business opportunity for multinational oil and gas corporations:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Today, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo celebrated the climate crisis during the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting, stating, “Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for trade.” Last week, the Trump administration tried to remove any mention of climate change from the Arctic Council’s declaration, and when asked on Sunday about how he would rank the climate crisis among national security threats, Pompeo reportedly said, “I can’t rank it.”



After Pompeo’s confirmation as Secretary of State last year, it was revealed that his ties to multinational oil and gas companies was even more pervasive than initially reported.

Pompeo’s comments follow on a slew of reports on the dangers of the climate crisis, including the release of a new UN report this morning that found that human activity is putting one million species at risk of extinction within decades; the U.S. Department of Defense warning that the climate crisis is a national security issue and, if it continues unchecked, threatens both coastal and inland military bases; and Trump’s own EPA findingthat the climate crisis will cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year by the end of the century.
“Mike Pompeo’s willfully ignorant and dangerous remarks on the climate crisis are just the latest example of Donald Trump and his administration burying their heads in the sand and needlessly putting American lives at risk."

(image from internet)

Kundalini and the Near Death Experience

I am currently preparing a new book of prose reflections on Kundalini to be called "Kundalini Splendor: The god/goddess in the Body."  These reflections were originally published on my blog and Facebook over many years.  What follows is one such entry.

More on Kundalini and Near-Death Experiences

Last night I attended a fascinating panel by persons who had gone through a "near-death" experience. Once more, I was struck by the resemblance between NDE's and Kundalini awakening. Here are some of their common features (often noted by other writers as well):

1. Each is a life-changing event. It is what Katherine Anne Porter called (in another context) "the moment that changes everything." Once such profound encounters occur, one is charged forever and there is no going back to the earlier stage.

2. Both result in states of overwhelming love. Those who travel to "the other side" are so enraptured by their new sense of indescribable bliss that they feel that they are embraced by the vast and loving forces of the universe, even God itself. Likewise, Kundalini, when it is in proper alignment, may result in absolute ecstasy, akin to that of St. Teresa of Avila or St. John of the Cross. This condition of utter bliss is not a thought but a somatic experience at the cellular level.

3. Both find in this new state that feelings of depression or self-rejection simply disappear, for surely one cannot be sad in the face of such overwhelming love. Atheists become believers, doubters are convinced. The "divine" is real and courses through the body as the Beloved Within.

4. Both have great difficulty in "returning" to the world where materialistic values and petty concerns are the norm. They are now "walking in the two worlds," for they have been granted a vision of a reality that others do not know exists.

5. Both are often reluctant to share this mysterious and intimate adventure with others, for it seems like a betrayal of that which is profoundly sacred. Ultimately, they may come forth and speak, as a gift to the world to understand this still unfamiliar experience.

6. Both now often have a sense of mission or purpose, and seek a means of "giving back" the gift in whatever way is best suited to their capacities. They may go into healing professions, or turn to artistic expressions, or writing. Service, rather than personal gain, is now their motivating factor.

7. Both experience great love for and a sense of oneness with all others. They literally feel "I am you" and if I look in the mirror, it might be your face that I see. The world itself may appear in radiant beauty, transformed into a garden of mystic delight. Everything, even the trash in the street, may be luminous. They may know at the deepest levels that everything and every being in the universe is connected as part of the one great whole, as part of the single fabric of the cosmos with love at the center of all.

8. They may be quite lonely in their journey, for others may be disbelieving or openly disapproving when they attempt to describe their encounters. Family and friends may think they are mentally disturbed and need psychological help. Mates may feel betrayed and see this new element as a disrupting element in their relationship. Indeed, they may have no one to confide in, no one to support them as they struggle to integrate this new dimension of awareness into their lives.

8. Both NDE’ers and Kundalini awakened ones may now be filled with the deep realization that each of us is a "fiction," a story that we ourselves have created, for we do not exist except as tiny particle in the great glory of the divine source.

9. Each experience is unique to the person. Each one undergoes a pattern of responses relevant to their particular nature and life experiences. Yet there are common threads among all of these.

10. Universal awareness of both the NDE and Kundalini processes is becoming more widespread, in part because of media access and also because (I think) more such events are actually happening as the field expands, especially those involving spontaneous Kundalini awakenings.

11. Both phenomena are (I believe) parts of the ongoing process of evolution of consciousness now going on worldwide. Both propel us forward as humanity transforms into a new kind of being, indeed perhaps a new species.

12. One of the dominant features of the NDE is the immersion into a sea of love at the other side. Kundalini itself often produces a similar feeling of ecstatic joy. Some authorities state that at the moment of death, the Kundalini energies are released and thus one may exit in a state of pure rapture. Thus Kundalini is in fact an integral part of the death process itself.

The folks on the panel were each one a loving being, transformed into a messenger of the heart to help the planet move forward in our process of universal awakening to a new reality.

Another Wisdom Child

A few years ago when my friend was putting her young daughter to bed, the child remarked, "God is love."  The following dialogue then took place:

Mother, surprised, since she had not taught her daughter to think this way: "Where did you learn this?"

Child: "At school."

Mother: again surprised, since child attended a secular school that did not deal in religious topics: "I did not know they taught things like this at your school."

Child: "Oh, not that school.  My other school."

Mother: "What other school?"

Child: "When I am going to sleep I go to my other school and they teach me things like that."

Last night I went to a concert by Dema Premal, one of our most acclaimed singers of mantra and other forms of sacred music. I enjoyed the recital very much, but did not experience rapture (too many people for me). But I remembered this poem I wrote a while back, when Dema's voice put me into ecstasy, as I listened in the solitude and safety of my own home.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

As many have noted, children are appearing on earth these days who come into the world with astonishing talents and impressive wisdom.  Once such child named Sophia made such amazing observations from the ages of 2-8 that her mother made a record of them and turned them into a book ("Song of the Wildchild.")   Here are a few examples of her comments and questions:

How do you know who to kill in a war?

Did God make us to love each other?

(at the funeral of her great grandfather) If this is about grand dad, why are they talking so much
about Jesus?

Mama, I can't know something forever.  I can only know it when I need it.

God sewed you up when you were born,
me when I was born.
We are god's art project
and he is playing wth us.

I'm thinking about a song.
It's about when all the people are dead.
The trees are dust.  The playground is still the playground...
and god is playing there.

Love is something you can go into and through
not like a wall, but like air or water.

(These sayings were recorded and edited by Sophia's mother, Jeannie Zandi, herself a poet and wisdom teacher to many.  To order copies, go to  jeanniezandi.com)

Mirabai Starr says:'Wild Child is like the first sunrise on a new planet - perfectly natural, yet utterly astonishing."