pio's place

Belief and Life

2010-08-03T10:27:00.000-07:00

When logics die, the secret of the soil grows through the eye
and blood jumps in the sun. Dylan Thomas

I have learned that we see life not only through what we are, but what we believe. This is the prime filter, the colored glass that interprets the innocent white light of the sun. And I have learned that belief is, more than we most often realize, a choice. We choose to believe what we do, whether from the standpoint of familiarity, or security, or because it resonates with our repressed, traumatized being, or because of mutually shared hopes and dreams. If we want to really change our experience of life we must change our beliefs. This is the primal principle of Life, and there is no getting around it.

This is actually good news, because if a belief is ultimately a choice, we only need to choose to be happy and free and then inspect and question our beliefs that oppose it in order to turn them around, bring them into harmony with an innate sense of joy, that which gives rise to our spirit, that which harkens to us, calling us into a broader, freer place where Love is a free function, the primal reality.

Right now we can look at the world and shake with trepidation, for the shakable things are being shaken. If we believe that the economy is our hope and help, our security and well-being, then we are in a precarious position, for the world order is collapsing to allow space for a holistic, spiritually alive and harmonious new state of humanity. But if we shift our beliefs in ways that open us to the waves of Grace that are sweeping the planet, then Grace will soften us, detach us from old habitual identities, expand us as it opens us to the miracle and divine beauty of Life itself.

We have been in a collective spell and are waking up to the Universe as it actually is. No matter how expansive and beautiful our beliefs can grow, the ultimate reality of Life is forever beautiful beyond our beliefs, beckoning us to open more fully, celebrate more joyously, love more passionately, live more wisely, and thus grow big and strong and tall in heart, becoming all we are capable of being.

The Animal Us

2010-08-01T13:23:00.000-07:00

THE ANIMAL US

How do we know that we don’t have fur just underneath our smooth skin? I mean the fur of a black bear, smeared with berries and the blood of fish. Oh, the x-rays won’t spot it. It is rougher than coarse stone, finer than air: this animal body in our bodies, this connection to a miraculous creation.

Part of our brains are on a brilliant kind of autopilot… just brilliant, inventing a million ways to keep insanity going in the world. I mean the oh so familiar dysfunctional disconnection that someone soaked us in, an incessant washing of the brain with the milk of discontent. And so the familiar conditioning says, don’t look too deep into the most of you, you might find too much trouble there, while the symbol making, music loving, heart-beated, drum thumped, danced crazed and wild heart of us goes on whistling dream songs beyond the reach of us, luring us through luminous looks and moments of confusing clarity.

There are birds in our blood, the trees are kissing us with every breath. Great beings watch over us from realms where a thousand earth years are one very interesting day. Some of us are kings in these worlds, some queens, some wizards, some prophets, all adventurers, who signed up to be diminished into flesh, squeezed into this world of forgetfulness, this place where we learn the hard lessons of willfully destroying the web of light through every little discourtesy, with each lie, continually shattering the wonder-child’s trust with this twisted insecurity that drives our greed.

It is closing time now: the night has fallen and we don’t even miss the hidden sun. World makers beat the dead horse and shout, it is bound to get up any minute now. But it is over. The whole system is collapsing. Time to wake up. Time to turn it all around, get down on our knees, look into our children’s questioning eyes, refind the deep soul of us, nuzzle earth. Time to let sharp claws tear our skin open from the inside. And in the dark eyes of the animal us a smile will appear, reflected in each eye, lighting up the distant horizons, spattering golden beauty all over the world.

Climbing the Naked Tree

2010-06-02T10:46:00.001-07:00

I climbed the Naked Tree today: my favorite tree in the world. The sun is warm, the breeze cool. The fields around the great tree are bright yellow mustard. The breeze makes the mustard flowers move in swirling waves of unanimity. The Great Tree is suffused with strength: about 50 to 60 feet tall and utterly massive: its great gray truck splaying out in 10 different directions about 25 feet above the ground, then stretching outward and up, licking up sunshine, drinking wind with eager leaves.

I pressed my body against the huge trunk and felt its silent strength in stark contrast to its lithe, trembling twigs and clattering leaves all around me. Suddenly it was so clear: this Great Tree and its lessons; the wind whistling its counsel of radical forgiveness and release; the sweet burble of birds in natural song; and the silent earth beneath, resting in its massive weight, alive with glory-making fecundity.

Life… the great mystery, the supreme teacher, the Living beauty, the spontaneous happening just beyond the sphere of ideas and words. Why have we required more than this? I sensed in a moment of innocent clarity that we really can return to Paradise here in this world… that the fiery sword is not that horriid a fate to face and pass through: that it only kills bondage, that it only melts duality, that it only slays fear.

To hear poem: The Ecstasy of Trees

RECREATING THE SACREDNESS OF THE NATURAL

2010-05-26T04:32:00.000-07:00

There is a spiritual pathway that is just the opposite of our current economic/social patterns of ever increasing wealth generated by ever increasing consumption. It is a pathway into a profound simplicity of life for the sake of lightness and freedom; an increasing clarity of mind through realizations of the Real; an expanding Love of heart through a growing state of sensitivity to the beauty of all that is natural and good. This way opens to us through an astonishing discovery that we love what we love in life just because in some way it gives us a taste of the essence of what we all most truly are: through that song, or that gadget, or that place, or that person, we sense the freedom, beauty and joy that is the very pure nectar of Existence.

These times of collapse and uncertainty have thrust upon us the imperative of a massive change of perception much greater than politics or current religious paradigms can give. Let’s get with it now!

If you would like very practical help with personal transformation, see the free resources at: The Inner Healing Center

THE HIGHEST HUMAN PURPOSE

2010-05-24T08:06:00.002-07:00

The highest human purpose
is always to reinvent and celebrate
the sacred.
N. Scott Momaday

We live in a galaxy of 4 hundred billion stars which is one of a trillion galaxies. To get some idea of how many a trillion is, if you made a photograph one meter by one meter in which were a thousand galaxies densely spattering the blackness of space, put enough of these pictures to cover a 10 meter high wall a 100 meters long, that would be 1 million galaxies, (1,000 stars x 10 pictures high X 100 pictures long). To show a trillion galaxies the wall would have to be a million times as long. That’s 100 million meters long, or 100,000 kilometers. This is just over 62,000 miles. The circumference of the Earth is 40,000 kilometers, or 24,900 miles. So the 10 meter high wall would be about 2 1/2 times around the earth. Another way to envision this is you would have to have 10 of these walls going from Los Angeles to New York, 10 meters high, all densely covered with spatters of galaxies. And each of those galaxies has an average of 400 billion stars.

We have images of God basically formed in the Bronze Age by passionately tribal people of an exclusive God concerned with his own reputation. No wonder there is so much disinterest in religion on one hand and conflict between different religions on the other. Such images are not in harmony with the vast, beauty-filled Universe the sciences have been discovering. What if our image of the Divine kept being renewed by sacred artists? What if we never settled for any spiritual reality that did not make us luminously, laughingly free because it is just such good news? What if we acted on our deepest instincts to be wide open, whole beings in love with Life, with all of Life… with all the rich diversity of Life, including people, including cultures, embracing all the differences? What if we started waking up from this “dream of life” created by the competitive business community and started to embrace one created by synergistic harmony makers, beauty-makers, lovers, poets, and creative thinkers in every sphere of Life? What if? And… why not now? Time for a revolution of thinking, people.

The very, very good news is, it is happening, right now, all over the world, one soul at a time.

AWAKENING THE WILD CHILD

2010-05-01T09:40:00.004-07:00

Leap a little, do a bit of an Irish jig,
perhaps every day,
perhaps while standing in line at the Post Office.
No, because you read it from my mind,
do something different, something fresh
on your own:
like singing opera at the gym
during a "serious work out",
or walking down the isles at the supermarket
playing a harmonica, smiling at everyone.
If you are a woman, do something wild
and Lilly-like every day:
like giving a purple or golden scarf
to an old woman in a nursing home
and fashioning flowers into her hair...
or, out-crazying the children,
riding their makeshift pulley out to the stars.
If you are a man, do a prophetical act everyday:
like running out of the office
and digging your hands into the earth,
rubbing it into your face.
Then wash the dirt into the bathroom sink
as you hum sea chanteys
and spit into the waste basket,
rubbing your cheek where a beard should be,
and speaking like a pirate into the mirror,
telling all God's invisible warriors
that you would pour your blood out upon a stone
for one whiff of the fragrance
of a wild woman's spirit,
and that you would just as well grasp wind or fire
as that lady's freedom.

Blake Steele's Poetry

WALKING SERAPHIM

There are some women
—rare as blue horses—
who burn with life,
who emit sparks,
whose words ricochet around the room.
You may ask them a simple question
and their spirits quiver, then suddenly expand
far beyond the boundaries of their bodies
like tidal surges,
like thunderous waves of green water and foam,
flushing away all grayness,
washing concrete down drains.

Blake Steele's Poetry

KISS BY KISS

2010-04-07T08:49:00.012-07:00

Poem:

Kiss by kiss we explore the real Universe.
Not by telescopes or microscopes
does it open its secret beauty.
A lover has other eyes
that sees more than two worlds.

Observance:

Left brain looking; right brained luminous seeing.
Left brain logic; right brained leaps into fire.
Left brain getting along;
right brained howling laughter at poverty.
Where is that part of you that licks the face of the sun?
Where have you hidden the naked child
who dances down dingy streets
dressed only with ribbons of flame
flying in her hair?

(Click on title for more poetry.)

IN HER HEART IS A CHILD

2010-04-06T02:38:00.004-07:00

In her heart is a child
too innocent to wander wild
in this world.
She suckles innocent Love
from God’s young breasts.
She is a tender child, curious and shy
and longing to be held,
to pour out her freedom
in someone’s arms.
Tough as leather in her stand
against callous death,
she suffers to stay alive
to miracles.
Painting pictures,
colors of freedom, whimsy
and passion of dreams…
she sails her porcelain boat
upon an azure sea
and paints a duck’s eyes
ruby red,
its feet like emeralds
in a field of gold.
When she drinks
rose petal tea
her mind caresses light
and moves
with ease to open her heart,
to drop her clothes,
to embrace the sun
into her circling arms,
to hide the moon
under her hair.

Illuminating Happiness

2010-04-06T02:17:00.004-07:00

"Our minds, which are even now only just awakening after
years of materialism, are infected with the despair of unbelief,
of lack of purpose and ideal. The nightmare of materialism, which
has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game,
is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.
Only a feeble light glimmers like a tiny star in a vast gulf of
darkness. This feeble light is but a presentiment, and the soul,
when it sees it, trembles in doubt whether the light is not a
dream, and the gulf of darkness reality."
Wassily Kandinsky

We live in a time of tremendous uncertainty smeared over with thick veneers of ever whiffle-waffling confidence that science and the purveyors of technology will find the way to solve our exponentially escalating problems so that life will continue ever upward towards its peak of material prosperity and thus some semblance of peace for all. There are real lives at stake here: the hopes and dreams of countless parents for their children’s right to live out their lives in a harmonious world.

The “feeble light” that glimmers is the same Light that Moses knew burning in his bones, that Buddha discovered beyond all form and emotion, that Jesus proclaimed himself to wholly be. It is the Light of Life in all of our eyes, purified of the deeply immersed trauma birthed emotions and their pernicious defense mechanisms and strategies.

How shall the Light emerge and harmonize the body-mind with its own inherent nature of Freedom, peace, spacious bliss, and beauty making instincts?

I wish, wish, wish it could happen because people stretch their imaginations, open up their intuition, affirm the facts they don’t want to admit to and thus start waking up from the corporate spell woven by the super rich, the carrot dangled on the end of their enticingly extended sticks. I wish it didn’t have to come through the intensities of pain inflicted when mutual dreams collapse as the oil-based economic systems of ever increasing growth cough, and choke, sputter and sigh into exhaustion.

It is such a small shift, and yet so momentous, when people put Spirit above money, peace above material prosperity, time for leisure above acquisition, the highest good of their own children and all others above their own self interests. But it will take something powerful to enact it, like economic collapse, like total disillusionment, like the anarchy of despair.

This is just how the majority are, so this is how it will be. But there are many, many people out there, right now, who sense what is coming, who are awakening to a deeper realism, who are thinking for themselves, who are making the time to get in touch with their souls. For them the ancient words of the prophet Isaiah hold true:

“Arise and shine, for your light has come, and the glory (beauty) of the One Light, the Great Love will shine upon you. For though dense darkness covers the earth, the Light will arise upon you…”

In the original language of Hebrew this could also be translated:

Be Luminous for your illuminating happiness is come and the splendor and reality of the One who becomes in time is shining upon you. For the dark that obstructs the Light will fill up the world, but the Eternal One(ness) shall arise upon you, and his splendor shall be seen on you.

Materialism as the controlling paradigm of existence is a dense dark. We have enjoyed the bright side of it, for the material sphere is not evil, of course. So much good has come in the form of tools, knowledge, expertise… and yet, because of vested interests of powerful entities, mankind has been exploited, medicine poisened and drug warped. Massive economic ponzi schemes have been developed which are money making machines for the super rich. Do we really realize that for every corporation that flourishes there are countless small, family run business that go bankrupt and with them dreams destroyed, families stressed, marriages failed, children traumatized?

Do you know that during the recent economic crises the number of billionaires have increased in the world? Just recently the news quoted Warren Buffet as saying, “When it is raining gold it is time to get out the buckets.” His wealth has vastly increased as has most of the most wealthy people in the world. Do you realize that his opportunities for profit come at the expense of millions of poor and middle class families who are losing their homes, their business, their hopes? When are we going to wake up to how things really work in a system of ruthless competition?)

The collapse of a civilization is a major historical event. We are in the midst of one. But the future is very bright for the bright and clear souls who are awake to the true nature of the Universe and the laws of Love that govern the higher good and harmonies. This is one wild ride!

A New Way of Thinking

2010-02-08T00:12:00.002-08:00

Einstein wrote, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking. Thus we are drifting toward a catastrophe beyond comparison. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."

Can we hear Einstein with the sobriety and seriousness these words should evoke? A new way of thinking requires a recovery of the truths and values written inside us by the fingers of Nature, or Hand of God. We must let Life start thinking in us. What I mean is there is an inherent wisdom in all Creation. This wisdom does not think in human symbols — but it can! We can allow the Language of Life to harmonize our bodies and brains.

All Life is singing the glory of its existence and the wisdom of its delicate relationships. It is an unbroken field of interrelating energies. All, except for us. We must now clearly see ourselves as broken off from this web through 300 years of excessively left brained thinking and the paradigms of life we have developed that are inherently self-destructive.

It is the nature of the left brain to distinguish differences, to analyze, to break down into parts, to structure in new order. But without the inspired, insightful, creative, mystically related right brain the order it creates is too inclusive and limited. We create independent systems without regard for their relationship to the whole. We are now experiencing the catastrophic potential of such imbalanced and partial thinking. We must, must, must shift to new patterns based on universal values expressed in new ways.

Thomas Berry eloquently echoes this. "The New Prosperity requires a new language. This new language is primarily the language of the earth, a language of living relationships that extend throughout the universe."

New thinking demands a new usage of language. The two are inseparable. If I think differently I will express myself differently. If I am growing more attuned to the rhythms of the stars, the energetic shifts of seasons, the balances or imbalances of our food producing soils, the quality of water, the greater good of humanity and all wild creatures, I will speak of stars, weather, earth, fire, water, birds, deer and bear, the laughter of children.

We have journeyed away from nature for 300 years now and learned much. We are in a tremendous place where we can take the best of our insights, tools and technology and the ones that shall yet be invented in order to create a new world of harmony and peace, where people love nature in a way they never have before: seeing it as both motherly provider and source of inspiration, beauty maker, marvel and delight.

We are on the cusp of a new era. Those who cling to the dying age will resist the changes with all the strength born of their fear or greedy lust for power. Those who let go and embrace the challenges and changes are in for a very inspiring ride through the death of life based on consumption into life based on quality of relationships, simplicity, creative freedom, harmonizing with the whole, sanity and peace.

THE DREADED BUGGYWASSELS

2010-02-03T02:04:00.006-08:00

May 27, 2009

You must be careful, big people say,
of Buggywassels everyday.
Buggywassels, what can they be?
Do they look like rinosofferouses
are they smaller than a flea?
Well I have seen them, and I can tell
they’re scarry, warty, and they smell.
They often come from sewage drains,
but sometimes through aches and some times pains,
sometimes they drop out of a tree
and slip and slide through revelry.
And when they come then everything goes:
they’ll snitch your shoes and snitch your clothes,
and snitch money from your father’s banks
and take your pills and guns and tanks
and when you’re sure that’s quite enough
they’ll snitch away your other stuff.
And when they’ve snitched you night and day
and took your thinks and what you say
and snitched your gadgets, gears and goes
they’ll snitch these green things in your nose.
Oh me, oh my, what should we do?
This is prepondrous if its true.
I put the question on the net
and waited until I might get
some insight — but got only junk
that twenty thousand people thunk.
Until I got a message from
a tiny child who sucked her thumb:
her mother wrote it down for her
without a comma or a slur.
She was from an African tribal place
and sent this drawing of her face.

Buggywassels, she plainly wrote,
come like this drawing and this note.
They appeared two times last year
and stole my father’s chandelier,
and stole my momma’s credit cards
she used as wind chimes in the yard,
and stole my crying doll you see
with her controls and battery.
Then stole my TV and my games
and took my books of weights and names
and everything that they could find
except the pictures in my mind.
So that’s what’s left, but its enough,
I play with sticks and rocks and stuff
and make up worlds and draw and write
and dance in circles half the night.
So if those Buggywassels come
don’t shoo them out or make them run
just give them all your stuff and junk
that packs your mind with glop and gunk
and let them open up that place
of freedom that’s in empty space
for through it comes those songs that fly
through Earth and sea and stones and sky.
With that I took the junk I own
and piled it up outside our home
and drew a sign to show and say,
“This is a Wassel take away.
And now I write and sing and rhyme
and draw and paint most of the time,
then hug my momma and my dad
and say don’t worry or be sad
for if the Buggywassels come
having nothing much is fun.
Now they don’t get it, but when they do
they’ll have more time for me and you
and be happy to be free
to dream and write and dance like me.

CLARIFY YOUR HEART

2010-02-03T02:02:00.001-08:00

Many of us are experiencing the emergence of our most primal wounds, our deepest unconscious fears and negative beliefs. This is happening for us to see them clearly and become free of them.

It is a Law of Life that we experience Life according to our deeply held beliefs: the ones on our unconscious levels that have extensive thought patterns developed around them. We can see our unconscious beliefs mirrored in the negative patterns of our lives.

Most of our deepest fears have to do with being abandoned by those we should be able to trust, and our deepest rage of grief is feeling betrayed when we are most open, innocent, trusting and vulnerable.

Truth frees us. The Truth is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is Pure Love and Infinitely Intelligent Light. In the Light of this absolute reality how do our negative beliefs and patterns fit in? Can we both believe in our fears of betrayal and the fact of Divine Love absolutely loving and caring for us? No, something has to give. We must see that one is true and the other false and choose which we will believe.

We don’t have to understand the cause of traumatic beliefs, only to witness the reality of them in our deep soul. The cause could be primal wounds that came to us as children or even infants in the womb. Or they could come from karmic debt or agreements made with God before birth, to experience a sense of isolation and betrayal and over come it. We don’t really know. What we can do though is accept that in the Light of limitless Divine Love, Goodness and Truth all such traumatic beliefs must be errant, they can only come from some primal misinterpretation of painful experience projected on Life.

To neutralize the negative belief:
1. Write it down. Work with the wording it until it rings true to your soul.
2. Write down how this belief makes you feel.
3. Then turn the belief around: reverse it. Write that down.
4. Write down how this makes you feel.
5. Choose which one you will believe. Make a commitment to this.

If you will take time to do this, it will clarify your heart.
CLARIFY YOUR HEART

A GLIMPSE

2009-08-31T10:48:00.001-07:00

August 4, 2009
Thassos

A GLIMPSE

There are worlds within this world
where the completed ones live.
If they were to glimpse you in a field
or amongst a grove of ancient trees
you would be an ethereal breath,
a fleeting shadow,
with no more substance than wind.
And a lover would turn to their lover and whisper
“I think I saw a ghostly one.
It must have been a mortal being
in a body of shadows.
I don’t think it saw us for God’s sleep
was heavily on it
and it stared at our pure beauty
with blind eyes.”

THIS AMAZING TIME

2009-05-15T03:45:00.000-07:00

This is an incredibly exciting time. There is a huge shift going on. It is on a scale too big for us to grasp. We can just catch glimmers of it. It is bigger than the shift from the ancient world into the Christian era; it is bigger than the shift from medieval times to the awakening of the age of discovery and the renaissance; it is bigger than the industrial revolution and birth of modernism. It is the awakening of mankind’s consciousness that the seers and prophets of all religions have dreamt of and longed for. It is happening, right now, all over the world, like the first signs of spring in the sweet swelling buds. It is happening as one soul at a time wakes up to the miracle of existence, to the multi leveled reality of their being, to the supreme gift Life is. It is a quiet revolution of consciousness getting clear. It is Love on the move.

It is unconditional, expansive Love happening within and beyond all faith systems, stirring people open into the luminous awareness all religions point to, moving people’s experience beyond the mental limits of symbols and ideologies into the vast, living Substance of Life’s ultimate realities. People are finding, in a rich variety of ways, how Life freely happens in them as their spiritual centers open. They are learning to live the quiet revolution of the freely given Love that alone can open them. And as they do, the world is changing, one priceless soul at a time.

You are most certainly part of this revolutionary shift, for the providence of the Divine has led you to these words, this little rivulet of thought: one visionary stream amongst millions of living streams of truth and kindness that flow through millions of open hearted people all over this world every day.

Let me sing to you, dearly beloved, you are fantastic! The Great Love loves you endlessly. Through your simple surrender, through your upturned palms and open arms, let Love illuminate you more and more as you learn to love what the God of Life loves: stars, sun and moon, the blooming trees and singing birds, seas and fish, fields animals and mountains… your own mysterious and precious soul, and each person you know or meet.

Connect: take time to listen deeply to each other with that complete acceptance each one of us longs to know. Make time to taste the mystery of your friend, your lover, a child… and be known, just as you are awakening to know. Require a more expansive knowing in courageous honestly. Make much time to be with the children no matter what the cost: play with them, learn from them, get down to their level and let them lift you into their innate innocent wonder. They are our God-given teachers in this awakening. Their spirit is the door to the life of Love that is our rightful state.

Plant gardens as a celebration of Life: learn to love simple, basic things. Get your hands dirty. Love water. Love soil. Love seeds and bless them. Learn how blessing through words and hands actually makes things grow bigger. Love the animals. Watch your dog carefully. Learn from his awareness, his joy, his simplicity, his savoring of sunlight and sensitivity to the wind, his response to every rustle in the bush. Watch a cat: play with its free playfulness, rest into its open awareness, and move with its simple, silent grace.

And bless each other: you are designed for this. How powerful the words, “I love and accept you just as you are,” or, “Don’t worry, the Great Love loves you with limitless Love,” can be when whispered from your heart. Practice letting Love and the breath of Life move through your entire energetic systems in a rich diversity of ways — don’t confine Love to rigid, socially “approved” or ritualistic structures. Break the molds and let real Love in open honesty flow. Love is a creative happening, and creativity means freshness and freedom. So open wide in the Spirit’s freshness and freedom to be fully aware and alive in the free happening of Love.

Coming Out in God

2009-03-30T08:12:00.002-07:00

I stand in the mingling currents
of countless rivers.
I shout until the winds of every quarter
swirl together to carry my words
nowhere.
The enemy is everywhere, present
in all forms and no forms.
The time is dire
because it is not dire.
There should be a crises —
but who can define it?

There are millions of people all over the world who have had experiences of the Divine Presence, of inner Light, of pure Love in their lives whether through spiritual openings or near death experiences or religious epiphanies and if you are one you need to come out of the closet, to move beyond petty fears of what “people might think” and be very natural and open about the reality of the Divine dimension of reality. The world needs this, right now! The paradigm of materialism is over, it is a failed world view because it just plain isn’t in harmony with Life’s multi dimensional realities. It is therefore blinding, ultimately destructive — and must end now!

There are many dimensions to Life and they are discovered through expanding awareness, not through technology. We need a wide scale awakening to a whole new way of perceiving the Universe and thus our place in it. We need a radical shift in prevalent values away from more and more stuff to more and more inner lightness of being, more open receptivity to the free gifts of Life. We need to awaken our childlike wonder and joy in what is: to find happiness in just waking up in the morning, no matter what the weather or how your body feels, to be incredibly thankful for bird song, for food to eat, for the sound of a child’s voice and the presence of those who are important to our lives. We need time to open our hearts wide to all that Life is actually about: developing soul richness, deep, loving relationships, fearless honesty, creative freedom, social harmony with the Earth and compassionate care. We need to be set free from the tyranny of debt and consumerism and the only way we can be set free is by waking up from materialism, one soul at a time.

If you know that what I’m writing about is true, then naturalize your knowing. Bring the subject of the Divine dimensions up. Ask meaningful questions that shatter the status quo. Cry out for honest inquiry instead of the prevalent influences of diversion and escapism. Learn about the freedom and wisdom of spiritual Love. Give your self to what naturally opens you. Talk about what you know in your guts is true. If you don’t relate to what I’m saying I can only say, be open, look into things. The Universe is much more mysterious and wondrous than any of us can dream or imagine. Change is on us. Will you change or be a spiritual dinosaur resisting reality until this failed system crushes your hopes and possible you?

The very worst thing that can happen to us now is for the economy to recover and us to pick up where we left off: numb with over stimulation, driving big gas guzzling cars, supporting mega corporate take overs with our purchases, listening to and exporting violent rap, hiding away in tribalistic spiritual groups that refuse to look at their own limitations, ogling at soulless porn which confuses innocent sexual energy with dark, degrading attitudes and language —until the oceans inundate New York City and Copenhagen, Buenos Ares and Sydney and take us all down. We are in this together and every one of us counts. Do your part. Wake up, open up, and start thinking and taking about what is really important to human happiness. We need big change, now! Break out of the spell someone else is selling you. It is, after all, your own soul that is being sold out.

Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T15:30:00.003-08:00

In honor of this historic inauguration day I am breaking with my principle of staying out of the political arena in order to concentrate on the issues of the human heart which I believe are foundational to the establishment of a compassionate world. I rejoice with America on this hugely historic day and the renewed sense of community and Love I see cleansing the general spiritual atmosphere. It is a shame that many draw back from this opportunity to emerge into the Light of good will and make a positive contribution. As one who has been profoundly affected by the events of the last 7 years I feel a sense of relief today... but also a sadness at the dark underbelly of negativity that snares so many sincere souls around the world. I write this in response to a very negative facebook response to my jubilation.

Please, let us beware of the trap of paranoiac attitudes that attach to unsubstantial information regarding conspiracy theories. Remember, we see the world not as it is, but to a great degree, as we are. There is only one thing that forever gives us the power to prevail against tyranny and it isn't fearful negativity. It is the Love, hope and courage of common people banding together in creative innovation for the good of all. If you are concerned about this world please, become a positive influence for change. We can each do it in our own unique way.

The Mystery of Existence

2009-01-06T09:57:00.002-08:00

The Holy Grail of explorative physics right now is to discover the common ground of all existence and to discover its actual nature. Working from the known towards the unknown under the constraints of scientific tools and rules is an exciting and laborious process. The scientist can speculate, but not write a paper of discovery until theories become proven, repeatable facts. My question is, it may not be possible because the rules that limit science may rule out the only way which the ultimate answer can be found.

What is the common ground of all existence, really? Common sense can answer that easily. It is existence itself. All that exists share this together, the fact that each thing exists in existence. Can existence be limited to any aspect within it? No, existence includes all that actually exists all at once. All that exists shares this fact of existence with all else that exists. You can say existence is within all that exists and all that exists exists within existence. But what is existence? To discover that would be to discover the ground of everything.

Think about the fact of your own existence. All right, you exist. Probably you don’t have any immediate sense of wonder or surprise about this. It is a very familiar reality. The mind tends to become dulled to that which is familiar to it. One of the traditional functions of artists and mystics is to call humanity back to a fresh awareness and appreciation of that which the mind becomes dulled to through over familiarity, conditioned filters of beliefs, etc. Now, just for a moment put your attention on your body instead of your mind. Feel your presence within your body. Feel your feet. Wiggle your toes. Now move your awareness up your legs. Feel them. Feel yourself inside them. Now your torso, your sexual area, stomach, heart, lungs. Now your arms and hands. Now your face and entire head. Once you take this little tour of awareness simply feel your entire body at once. Feel yourself inside this body, experiencing it just as it now is.

You are, the one experiencing your body. You are the one experiencing the thinking of your mind. You are the one experiencing all your feelings and experiences. You are the one experiencing your beliefs about yourself, the world and your experiences, past and present. You are the one experiencing your hopes and projections about the future. You are the existent one experiencing it all.

Who is this one? Are you a “feeling of self?” Think of yourself and feel what happens in your body. Do you feel a tension? Where? Or perhaps you feel a certain quality that you say, this is me. Who is the one experiencing this sense of self? Is it the one who exists?

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to step out of all you experience as yourself and experience the essence of Existence that you are, nakedly, purely, without any coloring of emotion, thought, memory or belief? People for countless centuries, from all cultures and every religion have stated they have had this experience. They have experienced within them the naked essence of existence itself and everyone of them has said something like, it is bliss, it is Light, it is pure Being, it is harmony, it is oneness, it is Divinely perfect, it is Holy, it makes sense of everything, it is what we call Love.

If this journey of discovering for yourself what is ultimately real draws you feel free to explore The Inner Healing Center, a free on-line spiritual festival composed of many spiritual tools to inspire and guide you in your own journey of discovering what the top physicists in the world aspire to know: the actual nature of the common ground of all existence, the naked, pure nature of Existence itself that you and I and all beings are, and that, far beyond all of us, is the Pure Ground of every known and unknown aspects of an infinite, multi dimensional Universe of wonder and beauty.

WAKING UP

2008-11-18T05:25:00.002-08:00

What if the purpose of life is to become more aware and loving? What if it is just that simple, and that these two things, when carried beyond death, are worth more than all the passing riches of earth?

What if the purpose of life is to wake up every morning with a burst of gratitude for the sun in the sky, for bird song, for a rooster’s crow or a cloud passing by? What if the purpose of life is to open your heart with the same simplicity as you would open a window and pour out songs of love towards the open sky and into the earth? What if these simple acts charged the spiritual atmosphere of your home with Love and Life?

What if we are designed by powers that are utterly free to be spiritual receivers and transmitters and Love is the one message? What if our highest calling is to allow the warmth, Light and sounds of Love to spread through us into the collective mind of mankind in order to soak the spiritual matrix of the world with beauty and goodness?

What if every little act of kindness, every word of soothing Love, every expression of gratitude passed on to a child is worth 10,000,0000,0000 times a Ferrari and not only affects this child but children in Africa, South America, and Asia as well? How would that affect your priorities today?

What if we are corporately creating a matrix of thought, values and feelings that are completely out of harmony with the sublime powers of the Universe and that are like a collective hypnotic spell we all accept as true just because it becomes so familiar to our minds? What if Love and beauty really do hold everything together, right down to the molecular level and beyond? What if, as thousands of near death experiences are saying, we will realize at the moment of death, as surely as the sun shines, that the American dream of increasing material prosperity was the wrong dream, but that only Love matters, and that we need to purposefully change our priorities to make space for it if we want to discover and fulfill the real meaning of our existence?

What if ultimate reality really is utterly free and breathtakingly beautiful? What if we are all dancing blind on a sea of laughter?

God is Freedom

2008-09-30T11:00:00.002-07:00

I do a lot of questioning, and asking questions. Sometimes, it is really good to exercise what you most deeply know is true by just simply saying it. Others do not have to agree. That is not the point. What is realized through consciousness cannot be reasoned or argued for with others, because it is not about mind and logic, but about waking up in Light and awareness. My point here is just to air out what I know is true in a world of countless opinions about everything. I differ between an opinion and a gut level knowing that emerges out of your most luminous experiences, your most wakeful states. Here is some of my knowing that brings great joy to every cell of my body and synapse of my mind.

God is complete and perfect freedom. And God is Love. God’s will is Love. Love is the meaning and guiding principle of Life. Love always gives freedom. There is no real Love without freedom and no real freedom without Love.

This is very good news.

God is free and has given us freedom. We are free to pursue Love, Light, lightness of being, joy, harmony, wholeness, blessings, healing, release. We are free to share all this beauty with others, to see them open and find release and freedom in Love. We are free because God is free.

This is very good news.

God is free and gives all his creation freedom. All the angels of God are free in Light and Love. All glorified humans who are now in higher worlds are free in God’s Light and Love. We don’t understand God because we don’t understand the relationship of unconditional Love and spiritual freedom. God is free. God is freedom. God is Love.

God will not make decisions for us. God is not that way. God has given each of us free will and it is required of us to exercise free will in every aspect of our lives. God allows us to make our own choices and God is totally for us doing this. We get in bondage when we are afraid to do this, afraid of punishment for “making the wrong choice,” for “missing the will of God.” Fear is missing the will of God for the will, or purpose of God is Love and freedom. Fear is constriction. Love is expansion. Fear is regulation. Love is spontaneity and creativity. If we understood this difference clearly we would began to understand God and God’s ways.

God is free and gives us freedom to create heaven or hell, joy or misery, compassion or vengeance. It is always our choice. We are here to experience this.

Religion is a constriction of God’s free nature into forms in an effort to preserve them. You cannot preserve Love and freedom: you can only point to it, surrender into it and become it. To the degree that religion substitutes security for freedom, to that degree it misses God. Jesus taught we must transcend religion as he did, we must renew and transform, it, expand it into greater Love and Light. Only in this way can religion be a living communal form for human liberation. Only in this way can the beauty of God continually flood through it in freshness and freedom.

The only security in a mortal life is openness to the Divine Nature in the center of our being. All other security is an illusion for everything changes and all things will be lost to us in the end… except what we are in our core. This pure Light of Life will emerge into the freedom of God.

The caterpillar that seeks security is deluded. It is meant to die, melt down and emerge as a new creature. There is no security in being a caterpillar except in following the Life instinct within it to die and be reborn as a butterfly. All clinging to the caterpillar stage that moves against this free flow of the purpose of Life within it is born of fearful delusion.

Look at the birds. See how they function in spontaneity and freedom. Observe the free movement of wind, of fish, of animals. All elements move freely; all living things function in complete, spontaneous confidence. In everything is a natural peace, everything knows its true nature and ways, except for mankind. Our journey home is into a natural peace, a fully confident rest in the heart of our hearts, the essence of Life within which is the Light of consciousness. This Light is a free radiance. It is higher than all bodily densities, all pain, all pressures, all stress. It is what it is, Light, lightness of being, silent, observant, free. This is our foundation. To rediscover our essence is to get our foundation right.

Freedom is our foundational essence and right. Love is our way, for Love is the great harmony of free creatures.

God is Love. God is the Great Harmony of all. God is the essence of all. God is utterly and completely free. Those who resonate with God express Love and freedom. We can undo all our constrictions and grow in resonance with God. This is very good news.

CATS

2008-09-16T06:40:00.003-07:00

CATS

How do we know that cats are not in a state of constant contemplation, graceful, purring Buddhas, St. Francis with paws, always aware of the present moment, being all awareness itself aware? How do we know that every shimmy of grass, each turn of a leaf, every errant bird call doesn’t splash into their naked awareness like a stone into a unruffled pool, and that the ripples of sound and sight do not gurgle through them like laughing bubbles in a stream?

How do we know that when a cat lopes in lightness or meditatively meanders it doesn’t caress each tiny variation in the ground with tender soft paws, and listen to them, as a man should listen to wind with his skin, cherishing their touch with earth?

How do we know that when a cat stretches it doesn’t feel a slow rise of yoga-sweet pleasure as each muscle yields, elongates, swells open and breathes?

How do we know that when a cat purrs it doesn’t feel silver shivers of ecstasy humming through every red cell of its body, melting it into a life-renewing relaxation in the naked presence of Life —and isn’t it possible that it sometimes slips in a sweet euphoria of peace into God’s bliss heaven to play with the eternal in dreams?

How do we know that when a cat hunts it isn’t in a state of constant prayer, a keen and constant anticipation that at any moment the object of its longing may appear? And how do we know that when it crunches the skull of a mouse and tastes brain juice and blood it doesn’t feel the same thrills we feel when enchanted by the succulent creations of some three star chef?

How do we know that when a mother cat licks its baby’s ears it doesn’t feel love’s holy warmth flooding every cell of its maternal body; and how do we know that when a kitten licks itself clean it doesn’t feel the freedom of the sky moving in its naked skin?

How do we know that when kittens play they are not exultant as God’s pure whimsy and that every pounce, twist and twirl is not a divine form of cat laughter?

How do we who have hidden our most sensitive, dreaming hearts in shells of abstract knowledge and numbed our most awake awareness in fear of further pain know anything at all?

THE OPENING

2008-08-19T05:13:00.004-07:00

The Great Love, flowing smoothly,
opens the heart.
Words from sweet lips
convey the nature of Heaven.
Gently the Spirit soaks through.
The veils soften and grow thin.
The opening comes
from the Holy side.

For many resources to inspire and guide your unfolding growth please explore these sites:
Blake Steele Web Sites Index
One Fresh Minute: stress relief at office and home
The Wild Christ: the mysticism of the Aramaic Jesus
Inner Healing Exercises and Resources
Being Loved: audio recordings, galleries, writings and more

HEART DANCE

2008-08-10T03:33:00.002-07:00

I listen to your eyes
with my whole body
until your eyes open
as my whole body sings
with the beauty of your eyes
seeing my beauty in wonder.

THE SECRET LIFE OF BIRDS

2008-07-20T00:12:00.008-07:00

How do we know that birds aren’t singing with bubbling gurgles of joy warbling and trembling inside their bodies? How do we know that their little energetic systems aren’t alive and luminous with the ripples and cadence of song? How do we know that when they can’t contain it any more—because the ecstasy is so great—that they don’t dive and dip out of the trees or off of wires to soar?

How do we know they are not blithe and happy as they eat seeds by the road? How do we know that the robin isn’t perpetually cheerful because it savors the sensation of a worm wiggling down its throat into its belly? How do we know birds are not savoring the warmth of soft nests amongst twigs as snow falls on feathers? We who filter out Life with our bodies and left lob limited brains: how do we know anything?

How does a bird feel when it makes love: when feathers part and soft tissues touch? Is the ecstasy so filled with Light that their body feels like it flies with its wings folded? And does a bird know pain that drains its brain and flutters its body out to the edge of extinction as its orifice stretches thin, budging open to expel an egg?

And how do we know that birds do not grieve in song when they see their brothers or sisters in peril: when the cat pounces or shots ring? How do we know that when a bird friend falls and its eyes darken a black stone doesn’t weigh their hearts down so heavily that it strains their wing bones and feathers?

We who filter out oceans of brimming Life with our biological brains, we who dumb down and dampen our senses so we can darken and immure ourselves in abstract thought symbols, the supposed and seditious security of familiar emotions and endless chatter of words — how do we know anything real at all?

The NoMind Festival

2008-07-14T11:06:00.003-07:00

I have just experienced another Angsbacka NoMind Festival in Sweden. It is a week in Paradise with a flow of blessing upon blessing as so many hearts open to reveal the secret beauty of the world. Workshop leaders come from all over Europe and the world. There are around 50 workshops a day with lots of music, dance, incredible organic food, and best of all, countless loving encounters with a rich variety of beautiful souls who shine with the Divine glow of Love, and hold in their sparkling eyes the mystery that is revealed in awe and creates a deeper awe.

I know in my body and bones that one day the world will be like this, for what is happening here is just Life in us, unbound, realized, revered, and surrendered to: the Light we are, the way we are designed to be and know. In this is wonder, achingly tender Love: opening, opening, deeper into the warm receptivity, the bestowal, the flush and flow, the flowering.

God is Love in action: blessing upon blessing... this silent shock of beauty, this silver shiver, always so far beyond words, yet somehow pouring through our Love-infused, child-like attempts to paint the wind with words.

The festival is called NoMind because in all its rich diversity the secured intention is to move beyond concepts and all mental facsimiles into the immediacy of Life as awareness, Life as the awakened urge towards Loving harmony, Life as a free flowing creative happening in the eternal Now. As mental veils part and old, primal fears melt away the naked Spirit shines in the bright Ocean of Love. We are inwardly embraced and sensitized to the rich flavors of the sky, the green earth, healthy food, each human word and glance as Life becomes what Love makes it, a wedding feast of awareness, a celebration of breath, a huge, wild and kind awakening.

A NOTE FROM THE FESTIVAL:
So many opening hearts. And, the shining of the mystery. Bright, open eyes revealing the unutterable beauty, the hint, the glimpse, the shine of Divine Beauty, the call in. I longed to dive into so many eyes. If I could only be more receptive, emptier of all need, even the slightest stir of insecure ego, then, I think I could slip into these eyes and pass beyond the silver stream, the golden flow, the opening curtains into the ultimate freedom, our home.

The Ecstasy of Trees

2008-06-23T06:47:00.003-07:00

(On the incredibly innocent beauty of Being…)

A TREE BRIGHT BROAD AND SHIMMERING

A tree bright broad and shimmering,
pudged wide with thoughts tree slothly slow,
gnarled feet of brown, specked head of blue,
splash what’s quickly quaint and true
that shakes to mold a meek man free,
who drinks with mouthing cell the milk
of Life that squirts like windy silk.

How do we know that trees are not aware of the wind shimmering them, shaking and shivering their delicate twigs, their laughing leaves?
How do we know that they are not ecstatic and happy when the lightest breeze caresses them, or a bird sings in their limbs?

Trees are, like all things, made entirely of energy. And trees are aware. There is a self-regulating communication existent within every living organism. Trees are composed of energy fields existent within living awareness. Isn’t it wholly possible then that the wind-roused trembling of tree leaves and twigs, the spontaneous shaking of branches is an ecstatic thing in the same way that the human body, when fully alive and delicately caressed, trembles in ecstasy?

We have perceived life through the veils of our own desensitized sensitivities, afraid to be too wide open, to be fully sensitive and aware, afraid of “too much pleasure” that might embarrass us, or worse, make us vulnerable to the cynical, pain-sourced scorn of others. How strange to be embarrassed about being too happy, too pleasure-filled.

Is it actually more accurate to perceive life through abstract mental thought ruminations than directly through our capacity for fully alive and awakened sensitivities? That we are capable of perceiving Life through super alive and purified sense conveyance is fantastically true. But most of us are not experiencing Life this wide open and joyous way: rather we gaze through dense sensory filters meant to restrict bodily (and soul) pleasure as we listen to the chatter of habitual mental recollections about the little we perceive and call this an accurate experience of what is real. Are we sure? Are we willing to bet our blooming lives that this is an accurate perception of reality?

Why do most people have a sense that something big and important is missing from their lives? The marketers take advantage of this and convince our mind through repetition (until it seems familiar and thus true) that what is missing is this product or that. But what if what our deep soul longs for is a primal state of being super alive, open, sensitive, clean, clear, whole, harmonious, full of wonder, inspired by Love? What if we are instinctively longing to be ecstatically joyful, creatively imaginative, and peacefully attuned to the beauty and mystery of what we thought we understood but have not ever really known?

Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy … at the coming of the Lord.
(from Psalms)

This Universe is stranger than we can conceive. Quantum physics has been pointing to it, but the ramifications have yet to pierce through our mental veils of social conditioning. The facts of Life point to this: that the Universe is reflecting our own state of mind back to us, and that if our perception radically changed, Life would respond in kind. For example, if we began to perceive trees as unique beings, who (though their rate of perception is on a vastly different frequency than ours), are capable of a range of fluctuating energy qualities — everything from what we, in human terms, would call sadness to ecstatic joy — trees would come alive to us in new ways. It would be as if they (and we) were awakened from a deep drowse, a solemn sleep. Not that trees would become cartoon caricatures of themselves, popping open their newly found eyes and suddenly smiling, but rather we would sense the poignant mood of the trees and how the silent conveyance of energy qualities has always been the primal language of God’s countless creatures.

A DOO DAH DAY

Today, the trees seem ecstatically happy.
Perhaps it is as the psalmist foretold —
they are clapping, they are swaying,
they shimmy and clang!
They feel God…
If they could pull up their roots
they’d dance on them — I’m sure of it!
because when I feel God —
all fresh and lissome,
frolicking in green —
my spirit shimmies, like those trees,
in an inspirational breath,
and I want to dance from the essential urge
bursting from my core!
To throw back my head and howl,
like those trees surge back:
clattering and trembling,
ecstatic and shimmering,
rattling with sky in the wind!

It is a shocking and stunning, fun and far reaching reality that if our perception changes, Life responds. What a mind-blow to discover and become! Even now, right as we are, the wisdom that is inherent in each tree’s way of being can be conveyed to us through a kind of inherent intuition we might call telepathic knowing. And this open-hearted knowing is a true communion. Simply stand before a tree and breathe slowly, deeply, with the intention to move from mind veil to pure, open sensation. See the tree as if you have never seen a tree before. Pretend you have just been dropped on this planet from a place where there are no trees. Caress it with your eyes. See this astonishment emergent from earth: feel through the air with your skin until a state of wonder comes upon you. At some point, if you are ready, you will shift from mind filter to pure energy awareness and experience the tree itself, unfiltered, fresh, alive and real.

THE OOZE OF TREES

The trees draw Life from the earth
up their patient centers,
slowly up their majestic wooden bodies,
from earth, from dark roots, from the wet
and fecund, from the dampness and rottenness
of sweet mother earth, slowly rising,
each tree, slowly ecstatic in the rise of Life,
slowly drawing upward their juice,
their wet ooze into air,
into wind, and freshness, into Light,
into bird song and freedom,
into God.

See what just one tree has to teach you about patience, perseverance, generous self-giving, gentleness — and maybe even ecstasy. We can perceive their symbolic meaning and messages as well, even as we more deeply enjoy their energetic presence and company, And why not thank them for their long history of partnership with mankind: turning the poisons we exhale into life-giving oxygen, meeting so many of our shelter, food, heating and art-making needs.

We can wake up right now, if we want to enough to act on the potential these words convey, and experience for ourselves the language of trees, sense their vital energy and even current moods. Just be very quiet, and feel. Don’t be afraid to sense life directly, to move beyond the conditioned filters of your mind. You can do it because you are human and have wired right inside of you God-given sensitivities and capacities to be fully alive. So alive that you just must overflow with the blessing to others, and inspire as you are being inspired.

Why not be inspired and thus be an inspiration? Why not be blessed and thus be a blessing? Why not bless those you love with your celebration of awakening? And why not bless the trees with your hands and heart even as they bless you with their branches and leaves?

What if on the next windy day you felt a subtle thrill pass through your soul, body and bones because you were happy and child-like enough to accept the freely wild and waving ecstasy of trees? What if you were fully and freely alive?

THE MINISTRY OF TREES

Trees gift a shimmering voice
to the free blow of wind.
From rough roots dark water oozes,
flooding thickened trunks
branches, twigs and stems,
bleeding flat to brighten
translucent leaves.
And as wind-blown twigs tremble
leaves shimmy and clatter
spewing oxygen bursting
mist into free air
freshening sky-birthed breath
to soak into bodily cells,
until your brain dimples and dazzles
with laughing bright Light of Life.

SPIRIT IN OUR NAKED CENTER

2008-06-12T05:51:00.007-07:00

A new time is upon us:
a time of spirit in our naked center,
land in our circumference:
feet deep in earth, heart in open sky.

In this time of extreme urbanization, when the dream time of merchants which so forms our collective consciousness draws us to the edge of a precipice—will it take the rising roar of waves beating down city streets, filling gutted department stores with foam to wake us up from a truncated vision of what is real, this materialistic spell? Will it take the extinction of the polar bear, or the walrus, or the robin or the bee before we awake to realize the supreme peace and Life-presence inherent in the quick of every cell in our bodies?

Our economies are driven by the myth that mankind’s most natural state is an ache of constant need; that the true nature of man is a ravenous consumer. Is it possible that this belief acutely enhances perpetual, restless, human unhappiness? Could it be that this perception, expressed through the artistry and endless repetition of the advertiser’s barrage spills over into bleak, grieving pain passing itself on: the blind longing for an unknown, missed cohesion in Light, grinding out more pain, inflicting our children through dangerous, degrading words, the harsh slap, the snapped and sapped issuance of loving awareness, plunging adolescents into needless alienation and densities of soul?

I am convinced that what is essential to creating a more just and beautiful world is staring us right in the face, reflected in the Light of our eyes, but our minds are mesmerized by a illusionary worldview propagated by merchants. We are so used to a consummeristic way of beholding life we assume it is “normal”. You need a better this. Life will be better with a better that. What you now have is just not good enough. More and more is obviously better and better. Of course, don’t we all know that this is just how civilization must advance: new inventions driven by human nature’s inherent thirst for something more? But is it? Can we safely assume that we need more and more and more to be happy, that we, by nature, are bereft and bored and need lots and lots of things to stimulate us into happiness?

As long as we believe the lie that who we essentially are in our most naked essence is not enough, that our inherently natural, unbent nature is not relaxed and open, fluid, creative and harmonious, but rather wounded, tense, constricted and in constant need, we will continue in our mutually created and increasingly dangerous dream. We will continue to act out a cultural conditioning foreign to the actual nature of our essential existence at the expense of the Earth and future generations. And we will never discover the profuse and free nature of Life itself as it can be, unburdened from mental illusions, pouring as Love and liberty through our open energetic beings.

Click here to read the rest of this article. Scroll down to Spirit in Our Center in index on left.

Our Secret Inner Call

2008-05-14T05:51:00.004-07:00

Our secret inner call to new beginnings is super intelligent and already knows much about our destiny and journey to it. This call echoes down from what seems to be dark places: a radiant river streaming out of shadows. A new beginning is change. A new beginning is growth, and we often fear it. But Life happening in us must be newness; it must be growth. Look at each living thing in their upsurge, in their movement towards the fulfillment of their potential, and you see a flow of change happening. You behold the inexplicable wonder of transformation. A lowly worm dies into a free flying moth; a hard shelled seed dissolves to let the fragrant flower hidden in its potential arch up and splay open.

Life is Light—you can see this Light in any eye, animal or human—for the miracle of Life issues as gleaming streams from the Ocean of Light. And it is this radiance of Life that calls us, forever beckons us to grow, to risk what we are to become what we shall be. But more authentically, to unfold into what we forever are, the eternal pattern of our actual being, the luminous children of Life.

Did we come here merely to contribute to the gross national product of our particular country? Have we blindly pushed through our mother’s thighs in order to be programmed by the business community to consume, dispose of and die? Are we here with instincts to strive, to overcome suffering, to grow by learning, to develop character through it all and then be extinguished? It is possible, but not probable. I say not probable because it is humanity’s brightest spirits, most loving hearts, those with the greatest passion to know truth and be true that have said not so, there is so much more. It is these awakened ones who have expressed in countless ways worlds of higher awareness within our world and the mysterious paths of consciousness that follow Life’s river to its pure source. It is the true Lovers of Life who have said and sung that Life’s deepest mysteries only open by Love and for Love for they issue out of Love. If these Love-filled and luminous souls have lied then who can we possibly trust?

It is the opened ones who have sung, shouted and sighed we are here for more than a materialistic worldview can ever envision because we are more. Beyond the consciousness spells of human conditioning, beyond the limits of our waking and our dreaming is the Universe as it is, forever more glorious than our mental facsimiles, our theories, our mathematical patterns, projections and paradigms, for the Universe issues out of the infinite. It is a many-storied building made of consciousness and our sciences of technology and tools can explore only a limited number of floors. But the open heart can sense more, for the heart is the portal to a shining pool, a radiant river, and the ocean that is our living water’s home. And it is this radiance that forever calls us to grow from darkness to Light, from cultural limitations towards the mysterious and beautiful.

To love Life as it is we must love the ever new. I do not mean to imply an unsettled, uprooted existence. No, one can grow, unfold and stretch out no matter where they live, no matter in what circumstances, for no one or no circumstance can hinder our freedom to form new intentions and make new commitments. Even if our body is in a prison we can still inwardly unfold and grow. Whether in bad jobs, bad marriages, bad political systems, we are free to make this choice, I will open my heart right down to the core of me, that pure Light of Life I am; I will face the emotional pain that feeds the defense patterns of my inner programming that has limited me and thus become free of my fear of what lies in my own deep heart. I will know the harmonious nature that holds together quarks, molecules and star fields. I will learn how to relax wide open to Life in the moment Life is happening. I will allow Life to happen in me, to freely pour out of me in all its beauty and ceaseless Being.

Many changes are happening in the world. The Earth is calling us and will continue to call us to wake up from social conditioning and every other form of mental spell, in order to fall into the primal Life-force, into the mystery and miracle of Existence and learn its highest, wisest ways. And through the Earth it is God Who is calling. I mean God beyond religious story, custom and divisive limitations in our own minds. God as the Great Universal Love that encompasses the 100 million galaxies; God as the Great Wisdom who has so finely tuned all elements so as to create and sustain biological life ; God as the Great free flowing freedom within which all free creatures function for their good or harm; God as Universal Source: not tribal, but limitless, not exclusive but wrapping luminous arms of Life around all living creatures; God as the super alive Ocean of Existence itself and its ultimate fulfillment and meaning.

For many resources to inspire and guide your unfolding growths please explore these sites:
Blake Steele Web Sites Index
One Fresh Minute: stress relief at office and home
The Wild Christ: the mysticism of the Aramaic Jesus
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A Passionate Call for Revolutionary Change

2008-05-11T07:47:00.016-07:00

"We need a new economic system - one that is embedded in the care of all people and also in the care of the Earth and all of life upon it."
Presentation Sustainable Living Group, Ireland

I passionately agree with this statement, and also recognize that due to the inbuilt inertia of the familiar and fear of radical change a new economic system can only come from a tremendous shift of perception. Humans must "wake up" and embrace realities that will inevitably cause huge personal and social shifts. Our addiction to the familiar and fear of the new must be recognized and rejected out of a sense of deep moral necessity. I believe that once it dawns on us that we really are in a rapidly accelerating world-wide crisis, once the spell of denial is broken, needful human changes will accelerate. But will it be too late to prevent wide scale suffering and irreplaceable loss? That we will see.

The business community is the servant (or should I say slave) of profit. If the average person is unthinking and allowing the business community to manipulate social thought and feelings through clever advertising then the business community will not initiate radical change. But when enough people stand up and say, "No more!" no more repression of Earth friendly technology, no more social manipulation by powerful international corporations for the sake of their own profit no matter what the cost to mankind, no more false dreams of ever increasing material abundance for all through mindless consumerism, NO MORE! We demand non polluting, renewable, inexpensive energy production; we demand and require to restructure our laws so we are free to build the super inexpensive, energy efficient homes now possible out of natural materials that are freely available so everyone can have their own warm, human nest. We require access to the earth, to have our hands in the soil, that each of us can have our own garden full of singing birds and honey bees and grow our own organic food. And we demand this because we have woken up and recovered our passionate love of Life. We are now awake and recognize we are part of a miraculous, interdependent web of Creation.

We require more leisure time to study the wise ways of Life inherent in Nature and recover our sense of the miracle of existence. We require time to express the natural creative instincts that arise from Light-filled, Life inspired, Love bloomed hearts. We require freedom and peace of mind to deepen our meaningful relationships to the Divine Oneness of Life, to each other, to our own eternal, pilgrim souls, and to create beauty for ourselves, our communities and our children who trust us with their future.

It is time for change, for waking up, for shifts regarding where we place our attention and what we value. The transformation of the planet can only comes through the transformation of each one of us.

These are dangerous and exciting times. Will we continue to sleep in the mental/emotional spells created by the business world to drive its unsustainable economic systems, or will we return to that which is deepest, highest and most real within us, the Light of Life, the Love of Life, the reverence for the miracle of all existence?

We do not “have Life” in us. We are Life. We are the Light we see in our own eyes. This is our essence. And Life is, by its own nature creative, harmonious, playful, peaceful, joyful, and nourishing of more Life. Life is a miracle beyond comprehension because it is limitless in spiritual dimensions waiting for our discovery.

Everyday over 350,000 souls die and arise through the sky into higher dimensions of consciousness. Everyday around 400,000 souls come down to this earth to be born. All this movement of Life goes on in realms that our mortal body/mind systems cannot perceive, test or prove. But those who have left their bodies and entered super alive states of consciousness are telling us this over and over again. Read any of the Near Death Experiences sites. NDE, NDE Research Foundation. Read the spiritual mystics of the ages, the awakened ones. Read the awakened poets and writers. Get your attention off dangerous, status quo ways and put your attention on waking up to the larger picture and truer perspective. We must each embrace our own responsibility to do so and our changing lives and the crises of our times will inspire others to enact the same.

Imagine This

2008-05-02T06:00:00.002-07:00

Imagine a world where: all religions realized their founders and visionaries were ultimately pointing beyond tribal concerns to a greater reality, a Oneness of all humanity in Love and freedom as the supreme goal of their visions and dreams.

Imagine a world where the Universe is understood as an open, multidimensional system, and that the Spiritual world is as alive and real to our minds as the realms we perceive with our bodily senses.

Imagine a world where our miraculous human body is seen as the physical expression of higher and more refined levels of energy and awareness that open into realms of inexpressible beauty, harmony, health and Light.

Imagine a world where the dominant paradigm is of service in Love and growth through mutual support for the greater good of all.

Imagine a world where being forgiving and kind to yourself and others is the first rule of healthy existence.

Imagine a world where happiness is understood as the natural results of seeking to contribute to a beautiful environment and the happiness of others in all that we do.

Imagine a world of self -governing local communities that lovingly support all members and trade with other communities in a win/win situation for the greater happiness and welfare of all.

Imagine a world of clean, free energy that is usable on small, local scales, therefore disbanding huge, polluting industries and dysfunctional urbane living isolated from the harmony and beauty of the natural world.

Imagine a world where skilled craftsmanship is highly valued because of the human spirit that is held in it through prolonged attention.

Imagine a world where living simply is widely loved because it frees the mind and heart of non-essential clutter to be available to develop and enjoy deep, meaningful relationships.

Imagine a world where family is a unit of lasting love, mutual support and joyful celebration linked through mutual love and respect to other family units.

Imagine a world where giving loving attention to children and playing with them is a top priority for all.

Imagine a world where effective education and joyful play is one and the same thing.

Imagine a world where the gift of sexual ecstasy is seen as a pure mirror of a deeper tenderness and ecstasy of spirit and is never repressed in fear nor exploited for profit.

Imagine a world where when young people sexually awaken they are never shamed or isolated but rather celebrated by family and friends and given wisdom about how physical ecstasy can unite with a deeper, instinctual opening to God as the pure bliss of Light, Love and endless beauty.

Imagine a world where the making of beauty for the joy of others is as natural a part of daily life as eating or breathing.

Imagine a world where developing artistic expressions of Love and wisdom for the good of all are highly respected and sought after trades.

Imagine a world of community wisdom gathering circles, where every perspective is carefully represented, from the creative, playful artists, to the women and children, to those concerned with economy and communal integrity—and mutual decisions are made as all perspectives are honored and a sense of wisdom and balance illuminates every heart.

Imagine such a harmonious world of beauty and joy. If you can, then simply desire such a world, right here, right now and hold this ideal in your heart as a sign of personal health and you will naturally find yourself part of the immergence of a new world of human happiness and beauty as the old order crumbles and passes away. Never underestimate the power of vision, desire and imagination, nor of the human will united to the wisdom of the Great Love that has conceived this bountiful and beautiful Universe and is for us all in every way.

Bringing Sex and Everything Home

2008-04-28T03:58:00.005-07:00

Everybody is looking for God’s Love and doesn’t know it. This was the first revelation of my spiritual awakening: Everyone is looking for God’s Love in the wrong ways, turning everything upside down.

And everyone is looking for pure energy, for the pure essence of everything, for a clean flow of experiecing Life as it really is because this is happiness. Many people are looking for it in sex, because the flow of ecstasy is a pure state of being. It is inherently innocent and joyous and the body’s energetic system knows this is true. The tragedy is they surround that pure flow with darkness. In truth, the darkness feeds on the pure, ecstatic energy; it draws sustenance from the pure Life flow in sex through the delusions of the soul, the twisting influences. So the innocent purity of the ecstatic flow cannot carry over into experiencing the innocent purity, or sacredness of all existence.

To bring sexual energy home to its pure Source is to melt away the attachments, the soulless lust, guilt, shame, shamelessness, and all the rest. To rediscover pure Being at the core of our Being is to be cleansed, to allow the twisted things to become untwisted, all our reversed energies turned back straight. Then our own inner world gets turned right side up, and the world appears as it really is, upside down, with its priorities and most of its beliefs just the opposite of how things really are. This is why Jesus’ first call was “Turn things around, heaven is here.” Turn things around. The way up is down. The way down is up.

Let’s get our heads clear, our hearts open, our innocent energies restored. The realms of pure happiness are right here, in the sky, in the beautiful earth, in the wind, in the trees, in the grass and flowers, in the innocent animals and free-flying birds, in the pure energies of our bodies, in the eyes of our lovers, friends and all the mysterious souls we shall meet.

A Blessing

2008-04-06T12:31:00.003-07:00

Words can move us, bore us, bounce us, be us; words can uplift, cast down, spangle, sparkle, twirl us round. Words can color or drain, bring laughter, tears, dagger with pain. Words can conceal, confuse, color or confess. May these words open and bless...

A BLESSING:

May you be sparkling with inspiration, creative, playful, laughing, insightful and above all, flowing with the Love that makes stars burn and flowers unfold, birds sing and fish swirl. May your life grow more open, aware and filled with the wonder and beauty of Life in the great adventure of Love.

So may it be, from the center of all Being to the center of your Being. Yes!

Christ is Risen

2008-03-23T00:02:00.002-07:00

Christ is risen. The Light of Existence has triumphed over all illusions, all deception, all ill will, all maliciousness. The Light of Love has pierced through all energies of fear, all holding back. The Light of joy has overcome all grief, all habits of bondage, all self created patterns of misery. Christ has triumphed, and Christ is in us, in us all. In every human who exists, for God is the Light of Existence. In every animal, every insect, every leaf, every flower. The Light of Existence is Love, and this Love has broken through, risen up, overcome, able to transform us all.

Be riddled with Light. Let a trillion little beams of Light pierce all that resists Light within you. Let all karmic darkness be riddled with Light. Let all attached negative energies be riddled with Light. Let all your hopes and desires be riddled with Light. Let all emotional energies be riddled with Light.

Sing out, shout, "Christ has risen in my being." Let it flow through you. Let your natural inner confidence arise. It is there. It will awaken. You can do it. Christ is innocent, pure Existence, flowing with Love, radiant with beauty, alive forever… forever free. Christ is in you. In the highest heights and lowest depths, in your center and circumference. Christ is you. Your truest true, your absolute Being. Be riddled with Light.

Happy Easter everyone, everyday, through all your journey, all the way home.

The Two Trees

2008-03-10T02:29:00.006-07:00

There is a tree of Life inside of us. It is our body/mind energetic system. When our body/mind system is freeflowing with the Breath of Life, the Life-giving Spirit radiating out of the Ultimate Oneness of Existence, then we experience inner harmony, unity, wholeness, inspiration, natural creativity, and that supreme
goodness we call Holy Love.

There is also a tree of knowing good and evil. This is our dualistically developed mind. Our miraculous mind is meant to be such a fantastic tool, a beautiful servant of the unifying spiritual energies of Life. But when our consciousness becomes ignorantly fixated on mental workings and lost in its symbolic facimilies and sense-limited reasoning, it becomes a tyrannical master, denying and repressing our deeper Being of pure consciousness, pure essence of Existence, pure Life.

We are born with a natural sense of the Unity of existence, but are soon schooled in the ways of dualistic thinking and trained to fixate on the workings of our minds. Of course, energetic dualism is an inherent reality of Life. We are taught to not touch a hot stove because we will be burned. We feel ice and know that if it is on our skin too long it too can burn us. Dualistic perception is necessary to deal with Life as it is. It is only a problem if it becomes all we know, our dominant way of perception. Our mind is perfectly able to simultaneously perceive both the dualistic and unified nature of Life. And if our mind/body system was trained in harmony with reality, we would hold both ways of perception in a marvous creative relationship and be bursting with Life.

All energy, at its Source, is utterly Pure before it is influenced by mental/emotional interpretations or suffers energetic reversals in our body/mind system. What I mean is, for example, if we come to believe that feeling sexual energy is dangerous or wrong the pure, innocent flow of sexual energy that the body instinctively knows is beautiful, healthy and good is then resisted and repressed in our body/mind system. This repression strengthens our ability to deny and deaden it even as it sends a very confusing signal through our entire energetic system. Every cell in the body knows that feeling purely good is a sign of health and feeling bad a sign of sickness. But now the energetic message is given that feeling good is not good. So perhaps feeling bad is now good. To confuse our energetic system is to create inner sickness and stress. And sickness and stress are what deadens and kills our body.

Life itself is a constant creative happening. I have learned that the way to work with all energies is lovingly and creatively. Energy is meant to flow positively and freely. Every point of frozen energy is a point of negativity and inner sickness. Health is free flowing positive energy. But, and this is critical to understand, energy can only flow freely in a healthy way when it is guided by Unconditional Love. Unconditional Love is the high Law of existence. Only this Love can guide free flowing energy into harmonious expressions that give Life, peace and freedom for all beings. When Unconditional Love guides all body/mind energies in the ways of caring for yourself and others, inspiring yourself and others, honoring yourself and others, giving everyone freedom to grow at their own rate, then all energies become pure servants of the highest principle of Life, all energies become straight, clear, free flowing and harmonious. All energies find their balance and natural creative instinct to express the beauty and goodness of Life. This is the Feast of Life, the Wedding Feast of opposites, the return home to the Eternal Tree of Life within and all its Life-giving fruits of beauty and peace.

Waiting for God's Children

2008-03-02T09:20:00.002-08:00

The whole Creation eagerly waits for God’s children to be born…
St. Paul

If this is true, why would Creation long for God’s children? Is a child of God a member of a certain religion? Does a child of God have just the right dogma or ritual, tradition or moral attitude to make Creation itself long for their presence in the world? What is so special about a child of God that would make the stars, the sun and moon, every bird and fish, dog and bear, even the rocks and rivulets, trees and toads long in every fiber of their instinctive beings for God’s children to be born? Scripture says, “God is Light…” Is it Light then? Are God’s children full of a primal Light and lightness of Being all Creation sighs for?

We are part of Creation. Our “human nature” is simply nature in a human form. As part of Creation are we longing for God’s child in us to emerge out of the shadows of our hearts? Do we sigh for a natural freedom of being along with the innocent animals and the chemically burdened sky? If so, why don’t we arise and shine? Why can’t we radiate Life like happy people we admire? What holds us back? Is it because even as we long for Light we also fear its radiance?

Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light? Maurice Freehill

Our best songs celebrate joy, Love, beauty… those qualities we have long ascribed to the Light. Our joyous, jump up and down Gospel music celebrates the freedom of Light manifested into the world as Love. Why would we sing of Light, work for Light, long for Light and yet secretly fear it? Perhaps because this kind of Light, the Light of what is whole and real, exposes all that makes us conflicted and phony. What if those whom the crickets are nightly calling, are souls who for the love of Light have faced their repressed traumatic pain, their secret fear of guilt and embarrassment so that they too might sing songs of Love in the dark?

I believe that to free the Divine child within us is to bubble with Life’s joy… to laugh so hard at times our whole body aches. I believe it means that instead of repressing our energies we recover the innocence nature of our being and guide our energies in the ways of fearless Love. This is the way we come to passionately love being fully here, sensual, alive, vibrant with God’s Life-force flowing as freely through us as wind through the trees.

This is the way to be a blessing, when God's own energetic Love streams through our open energetic system to bless animals, plants, the patient trees. We are the ones we are waiting for, just on the other side of pain's shadows and the projections we make on others. Just behind the passing clouds of culturally "normalized" misinterpretations lies a reality longing for our Love filled embrace, our awakening, our coming home to the unbroken fabric of all that is real.

Poems

2008-03-01T05:46:00.003-08:00

WHO IS TEACHING THIS THING WRONGLY?

"And they shall return to God
with everlasting joy upon their heads..."
Where is the artesian laughter,
the dancing feet,
the flashing light of freedom
in the eyes?
There is no joy
in a boring God.
Where is the God
that all little children
would spontaneously love?
Let's return
to that One.

THIS POETRY IS NOT YOU

This poetry is not You,
nor any image.
The Bible is not You,
nor any holy book.
The saints are not You,
nor any compassionate deed.
This longing is not You,
nor any answer.
The light in a lover's eyes
is not You,
nor is this body You,
or any truth--
yet You clothe Yourself
with all these
at Your pleasure,
then laughingly
divest Yourself
of all things
to run naked
into garments of sunlight
through invisible snow.

REGARDING THE LAST AND BEST
REFUGE FROM GOD

Should Church be a place
to hide from the naked Heavens,
a place of refuge
from encounters with the world of Spirit?
Why don't church goers meet angels?
If a profound spiritual awakening
should happen to a certain church member:
an opening of the eyes of the soul
to see spiritual halos, departed saints,
angels and devils, and the glory of God
hovering like fire above the altar--
would the congregation be a safe place to share it?
Or would there be murmurs of fear,
anxiety about delusions, hallucinations,
gastric distress, nervous breakdowns?
then castigation or an unspoken distancing.
I think God is too creative and free
for almost all religion:
that is why the seed shell must crack,
the old wine skin burst!
*
One day, the poetry of God
and religion will be one...
The fields will be singing;
the sky, angel packed.

In Memorium

2008-02-03T10:35:00.001-08:00

John O'Donahue has died, taking sudden flight in his sleep, slipping over the thresholds, through the horizens, giddy, shocked, light as air, a poet found in Poetry, wild eyes full of Light, heart stunned by beauty. He drank whiskey. He loved women. There is a special place for poets at God's table amidst the riotess uproar of heaven's laughter.

John Moriarty died last May, that Beethoven of intellect, that hermit wielding his pencil amidst a pile of books, that gargantuan face, that heart tender as an infant's lips.

Two of Ireland's vast voices, two dancers of thought, two warriors of delectible words, forging hope through that imperceptible shift of perspective that lets trees rattle reinterpretations in the sound of their leaves, that makes bird song mystery, that seduces the Universe to burst with sudden meaning.

With their passing their work shall expand and gain new impetus. It will seem richer, more urgent and real. This is the work of those angels that stir the deep waters of the heart. Are we made poorer or richer by their passing? How would they have us interpret that? Lyrically I suppose.

Update

2008-01-14T07:18:00.000-08:00

I am on an old farm in Sweden. My computer has crashed, so I will not be updating my sites for a while, but there is so much already posted to explore that it seems ok.

I am currently doing workshops on how to heal and bless with your hands and will be going to Ireland in May to do workshops there and see about settling in the Green Isle for a while and sinking into its poetic heritage of Life-filled beauty.

So much Love to you in your journey. May we each find in our own unique way how Love is the answer to every vital question, the healing balm for every wound.

Lost in Mental Facsimiles

2007-09-16T12:56:00.000-07:00

What is Existence? I would like to say from my heart that God is Existence. Think about this: we are never separate from Existence. What if God is ultimately the Great Harmony and goodness of Existence? We are not and have never been separate from the Great Harmony and goodness of Existence. That means, whether we realize it or not, we are in God and God is really in us.

Here, in this world, we naturally become enmeshed in the illusionary senses of our ideas and emotions. We have created in our own mental/emotional nature a sense of separation, a sense of insecurity, a sense of grief. We have grieved for the highest, purest things we instinctively love and think we have lost and this pain of grief has perpetuated its own illusions.

The Light of Existence is Pure Love, loving us for our uniqueness; loving us for our unity with the One Light—this Great Light of Being. We exist, therefore we are Loved in the same way that the Earth exists therefore the sun shines on it. If the Earth did not exist, the sun would still be shinning. First things first. First the sun, then the green earth; first infinitely wise Love creating, then us, the created observing, feeling, seeking, learning.

It is our return to this expanded perspective, this looking out from a higher place in the multistoried house of our Being that frees us. We gaze out from the penthouse of Spiritual awareness on the true nature of Life instead of being blind in the basement. But, contrary to the hierarchical systems we have created, this perspective can never create a sense of superiority, for that is not its essential nature. There is no superiority or inferiority in Love, only unity in the tender-kindness and pure nurturing of its life-giving nature. To arise in the building is actually to sink into it through a loss of insecure egoism as the whole soul relaxes into the supportive nature of Love. Here is where all spatial examples fail: where the opposites of up and down, in and out, Light and dark unite in a greater reality of the unitive nature of consciousness itself.

It is important to realize that this transformative perspective cannot be gained through reading about it. On the mental level it can only be pointed to. All mental images are only symbols of something greater than the magical mirror of our brain. It is gained only through facing and transforming our primal fears into Love. This transformational process of the soul is the movement from mental facsimiles and fear into the courageous confidence of Spiritual reality. It is a total Being growth process, not an intellectual attainment. It is the miracle of consciousness, the essence of Existence in us discovering its true nature which streams out of the One, the Whole, the Holy, the Highest beauty, the supreme Good we call God. This ultimate Living Reality is God beyond all concepts or names of God. May God save us from the echoes of God in our brains that can only point to the ultimate reality of the Universe, to the Oneness beyond all divisions, to the Love beyond all customs, cultures or traditions, to the radiance that transcends even the peace of understanding.

Love and Playfulness

2007-08-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

Once You Learn Your Life Lessons, The Reasons You Have Come Here, Then You Are Free To Play...

Imagine an illuminated couple watching their beloved little child play. The father sits in silence, with his full attention on the child, bathing the child in awareness, detached and free. The mother’s full attention is also on the child, but her instinct is to interact fully with the child, to play with it and enhance its exploration and development through loving companionship. I suggest that these are two modes of spiritual conception about the nature of God.

From a purely detached observation of life it would seem there is a lot of validity to the more Buddhistic belief systems that perceive the Divine as pure detachment, complete in the bliss of limitless freedom, silently observing all from the highest heavens to the lowest hell with the same degree of full awareness. On the other hand, I believe our call and challenge as divine and human creatures is to create this interactive expression of God. I would say the mother figures Christ, or the ongoing development of the Divine as liberating, engaged compassion.

Mental detachment from the negative aspects of ego (selfish concerns) is crucial in both spiritual systems. But it is the element of heart that brings the full human/divine warmth into play. And play is a good word for it. Perhaps the highest expression of the union of mental freedom and compassionate heart is joyful, loving playfulness. It certainly is the healthiest atmosphere for a child’s development. Couldn’t the healthiest atmosphere for children’s growth also be the healthiest dynamic for adult societies?

I do not mean to imply that there is not compassionate playfulness in Buddhism. I’m sure there are many Buddhist who wondrously express this. God knows, it is certainly lacking here in the West with our dysfunctional anti-body, anti-life spiritual foundations. It is a challenge to spiritualities of both East and West to open so fully to Life, to grace and Love, to the Divine freedom and to each other that joyful, celebrative playfulness is the natural result.

Unless you become as children, how shall you enter the realms of the heavens? Jesus

Primal Innocence

2007-08-05T22:31:00.000-07:00

There is a primal purity or innocence of being to life. The sun is purely what it is; the moon is quietly innocent, being pure moon; the stars stream light in utter purity and innocence; the mountains arise in primal purity; the sea is innocent, the rivers; the fields; and every animal, bird, fish or insect is utterly and purely what it is and what it is meant to be. All is pure and natural except mankind. Only we have the capacity to forget our real nature. Only we have the capacity to reverse and twist things into what they are not meant to be.

Every human being deeply values peace, harmony, beauty, freedom, and every other expression of human happiness. Please slow down and read this list again. Do you really value these qualities? Why? Because they are spontaneous expressions of our true nature when it is unblocked and freely expressed. They come from deep inside us. Then why don’t we just get busy happily living our real natures? This is the big question thinkers of all ages have wrestled with.

My view on it is that in our development we have recurrently reversed things in our psyche, like a magnetic field when you switch the poles. What is pure, open, curious and joyous in us becomes injured, and thus mistrusted. Often, at this early stage of development a sense of “self consciousness” born of insecurity and anxiety takes control because it “feels safer” then developing wisdom about how to live open, curious, and spontaneously “innocent” without being abused and hurt by others.

We need to reverse things back within our minds, nervous and chemical systems to be as they are meant to be and truly are in their essential nature. Then alone will our deepest, luminous nature of pure consciousness arise as peace, harmony and joyous good will and melt away the dark core of grief that feeds our destructive natures. This is the resurrection of Christ within us, the enlightenment of Buddha. This is our true liberation.

For many powerful tools to do this reversal work, please see the free InterHealing web site. It has been created to help. And may your reversal into peace spread more peace and joyous freedom of spirit in the world!

New Web Resources

2007-07-20T18:24:00.000-07:00

One Fresh Minute
The Wild Christ
The Power of Blessing
Glicee Prints
Blake Steele Index

I've created lots of new stuff, being on a web site working roll. It includes two new web sites: One Fresh Minute with free one minute audio meditations on Divine Love and beauty as well as meditations of soothing sounds of nature. So many people experience stress during their work days, so I hope this will help them take a one minute mental vacation that will inspire and renew them and thus spread more peace in the world. The other is: The Wild Christ: poetic meditations on the Aramaic Jesus as the Universal Christ—including some very liberating translations of His Aramaic words. I hope this contributes to the rising interest in the expansiveness and mystical aspects of Christ glimpsed through the poetically free language he spoke.

I've also created a new IHC on-line workshop called the Power of Blessing It shows you how to flow in Divine blessing as well as pass it on to others. Really beautiful stuff. Spiritual blessing carries you right into a sense of heaven.

For art lovers I have new Glicee prints available on my Being Loved Art Gallery along with many new audio recordings of poetry and healing meditations.

Also, because I have so much on-line now, spanning several web sites and domains I've created an index: at blakesteele.com

I hope you'll take a look at these resources and if you like them, pass the word on to others. May we all become part of the answer by doing what we can to spread more Love and joy in the world! Remember, many snowflakes in time make an avalance. The little things count!

Sex Is A Wild-Eyed Thing

2007-07-14T17:36:00.000-07:00

I’ve been doing a lot of recording, both of poems and meditations. I just finished one called, Sex is a wild-eyed thing. I’ve been hesitant for some time to make public creative expressions of sexual energy because in America, land of perpetual adolescence, it pushes too many people’s fear buttons. But that is the very reason that our relationship to sex should be creatively brought forward through art to a place of health. Sexual energy is the biological Life-force itself. God didn’t have to make it quite so beautiful or powerful to insure the propagation of our species. It is a wild, pure and beautiful energy—and that’s what I’m specifically referring to as sex, the raw, primal essence of what sex is in our bodies, not what we do with it in our expression. That’s another subject.

Sexual energy in our bodies is fresh and vitalizing. Contrary to much teaching coming out of male-dominated, ascetic spiritual systems, sexual orgasm is meant to vitalize our entire system, releasing stress and leaving our bodies and souls peaceful and harmonious. It only drains a man if he has energy reversals, linking sexual release to guilt, shame, or other non-loving, negative attitudes. If a man manipulates and uses a woman for his own pleasure instead of honoring and loving her he should have his vital forces drained. It’s only fair. But if he loves her and she him, then all the energies of Love and sex can combine to enhance every level of both of their beings.

As our body/soul relationship gets straightened out, it becomes obvious that sex is a physical expression of the very same yielding, opening instincts and actions of our deepest spiritual self in its relationship to the Highest expression of the Life—the Divine. Click Here to listen to Sex is a Wild-Eyed Thing

EFT

2007-06-08T12:52:00.000-07:00

EFT

“IN ALL GOD'S WORKS the laws of beauty are wrought out in vanishing portrayals, in birth and death. In these there is no hoarding, but an ever fresh creating, and eternal flow of life from the heart of God.” George MacDonald

Life and beauty are constantly being created and dying, then replaced by fresh expressions. There is no hording, no clinging onto, no grasping: just a free flow of constant newness. We, on the contrary, have learned to grasp, to cling, to be afraid of losing, of letting “loss” plunge us into grief with its anger and pain.

Before the end of this month I will attend the memorial of my father's passing and my youngest daughters wedding. The coming and the going. The freshness and that which is worn out. This is life. This is just how it is.

To allow Life to be our teacher is to come to the “Ways of Life.” These ways are natural. They are real. To return to Life is to become progressively more natural and real. It is natural to be harmonious and happy. It really is. It is natural to be whole, not conflicted—to allow each part of us to love and nurture every other part. It is natural to be healthy and happy. It really is, in spite of the constant changes of Life, even in spite of the losses of people, places or things we value and love.

I am currently working with EFT as a way to reprogram our unconscious, meaning the vast intelligence of our nerve/chemical/mental systems we are not consciously aware of, to accept the pleasure and joy of being “super-naturally natural”. I like EFT because it is simple, accessible, direct, quick and effective. I will soon have an EFT workshop available on line on my InterHealing Community web site.. To reprogram our energetic systems allows new dynamics in our lives, dynamics of joy and real success. We can stop self-sabotage. We can live in harmony with our deepest values and feel fully awake and alive. We really can!

The Power of Language

2007-06-03T12:25:00.000-07:00

With all the healing modalities that are being discovered these days, I feel that one of the most powerful of all is being overlooked: the power of language. We all know how words can hurt. How many times have people said things that have keyed into deep hurts within us; and how many times have we said things in frustration or defensiveness that we know have hurt others. If words can hurt, how much can they heal?

When people appreciate something we have done, how powerful are words of gratitude to our self-esteem? How powerful the words of affirmation, acceptance, and admiration? Words convey feelings, or more basically, energy. And energy is the substance of Life itself.

After all, it is not the words themselves that hurt or heal, but the energy that is conveyed, or invoked within us. We long for positive, joyous, liberating energy, and this energy can be expressed to our inner being through language. When the language dances and sings with a joyous, free energy so does the heart. When the harmony, beauty and welcoming of Love is conveyed in words, the soul relaxes and opens into its native element.

I hope you will visit my web site and take a therapeutic dip in the language of joy, insight and beauty. www.beingloved.net

Much good to you in your journey into the ultimate energy of Love, harmony and peace.

Wild Sanity poetry by Blake Steele

2007-05-28T23:16:00.000-07:00

I've been recording and engineering a lot of my poems of which samples are now available to listen to on-line. And even better, three CDs with music, sounds of nature and sound effects are now available to purchase. If you love life, Love, beauty, mystery, wonder and joy, this unique and accessible poetry expresses all this and much more. I hope you will step outside the box and take a drink of all this Life. This kind of poetry lets you directly experience all the joy religion, philosophy and spirituality talk about.
Wild Sanity Samples
Wild Words Sample
Wild Sanity and Wild Words CD Order Page

Ashes and Snow: Finding our Song

2007-05-12T15:34:00.000-07:00

I’ve been meditating on the mystical and beautiful images on the Ashes and Snow web site. They remind me of a novel I spent 13 years writing, Pio and Lilly. It is the story of a young woman raised from birth with the animals, and a Franciscan Monk who finds her and falls in love with her innocence, wildness and beauty. Within these astonishing Ashes and Snow images as well as in the Pio and Lilly story, what strikes me is the harmonic resonance that occurs in a more wide awake state of being, when one wakes up to the Divine dimensions of life governed by harmonic sound, by the original voice that brings one into the Light of the original face——both our own and God’s. This dimension is real, more real than real. Those who touch it know they have been kissed awake by a Great Love that is the primal source of existence.

This is God beyond all concepts of God, beyond all “ownership” by religions, beyond all traditions and cultures. This is the primal harmony that makes galaxies revolve. I believe it is this awareness of a sacredness, wonder and unity inherent in the structure of reality that alone can lead us forward into a new era of peace where wisdom and Love at last rule the heart of mankind.

But how can we come to this beautiful awareness on a widespread level? Is it through faith, prayer and meditation, art, social activism, science or church? That is the question we each must wrestle with for each of us must find an answer deeply relevant to our own soul. I believe this individual questioning has far more value to our growth than someone offering their opinion of the answer to us on a platter. As it says on the Ashes and Snow web site, “A whale sings not because it has answers but because it has a song.” Perhaps it is as each of us embraces our responsibility to find answers to the most important issues that lie before us that we will end up finding that song which is itself the answer: a song of Love given by the great God of Life to enlighten us and inspire others. And perhaps singing with awe and gratitude from our heart in harmony with the universal harmony is much more important than any answer we could ever articulate with our wondrous yet limited minds.

BEING PART OF THE ANSWER

2007-05-10T15:48:00.000-07:00

We used to speak of federal budgets in terms of millions. Now its billions. Corporations used to take profits in the millions. Now its billions. Because the number is being thrown around a lot, it is easy to become numb to the immensity of how much money a billion dollars really is. Did you know it would take almost 32 years to spend a billion dollars if you spent one dollar per second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 32 Years! A billion dollars is an utterly mind boggling amount of money.

Right now we are spending billions and billions of dollars on war in Iraq while many people in America are living in poverty. Countless Americans are one hospital visit away from bankruptcy because they can’t afford health insurance. I know. I just had a $44,000 dollar hospital bill.

Just think of all the good we could do to improve the quality of life in this country with the money that is now going to weapon manufacturers. Just dream a little while of the innovative educational programs for our children, of social services including medical care and affordable housing to help the poor, of improvements to city public transportation and city beautification, of help to small-scale, organic farming that enhances soil health. Think of how quickly we might have major breakthroughs in clean energy sources if a billion dollars was put into research. What if a billion dollars worth of grants were given to artists who have a vision to beautify their communities through public art that lifts the human spirit and creates atmospheres of hope, Love and happiness?

What if the policy of American politics was to create a country where life is so good that other countries would want to emulate us in our wisdom and compassion, in our creative ingenuity and commitment to quality of life for all—now and for generations to come?

Each of us makes a difference. Much more powerful than a political vote is a value vote. What I mean by value vote is you deciding to hold, talk about and work towards values for the common good of all, values that enhance the greater good of the earth. When we enthusiastically hold the right values we automatically become part of the answer.

IN CROATIA

2007-05-02T14:07:00.000-07:00

(Poems written June 2006)

Here on the balcony, windows wide open,
the blue sea warming in a hot sun,
the little sea-cooled breeze
playing over my sun-hot skin,
with birds singing in the pine trees
and the palm trees,
with fig trees green and swelling
their hard, green fruit,
and cherries red on the limbs,
with peaches ripe and falling,
with dates, and goat’s milk
and oats and nuts,
I drink in the gifts of limitless Love
loving me to be a gift of Love,
blessing me to be a gift of Blessing—
and the whole thing slides
into the good dream of Love
shifting time and space,
for all the windows are wide open
and angels fly in and out with ease,
as earth becomes heaven
one heart at a time.

ON A BALCONY OVER THE SEA

Who is this who returns and relaxes
open in bright colors,
in the gleaming glories of God?
Who is this who sails blue seas
of the skies with cloudy sails;
who glides as a dove through
wide open windows?
Whose eyes reflect the morning light
as they lift their vision to distant mountains?
Whose heart sings for the joy of singing
such Love into the pool of the world?

PERFECT SILENCE

Perfect silence is perfect listening
the whole soul relaxing
into an ear,
the body, wrapped in glass,
freezes soundless:
the universe without a quiver
melts in Light.

THE SUN KISSES MY BODY

The sun kisses my body.
The breeze flutters on my skin
and trembles inside me.
The sea gurgles against stone..
The earth is pine-fragrant and simmering.
The birds seem inspired
and the bugs excited.
Early this morning, on the terrace with my eyes just opening,
I was surrounded by swallows.
Any day that starts like this
has got to be good.

ON A DAY LIKE THIS

2007-04-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

On a day like this
someone has blown summer
into town.
I believe cherry trees
are white-clouding the earth
somewhere...
And angels
are singing and sighing
unheard enchantments
with love-sick birds
in blue air today,
awakening minds
back into that ancient
wildness
known for centuries
to bloom
in breasts.

To hear this poem recited click here: www.beingloved.net

Brain Bleed

2007-02-16T22:58:00.001-08:00

I recently had some serious bleeding in the back of my neck that traveled through my spinal fluid up into the covering of my brain. I was in the hospital for 9 days. Oddly, the most marked immediate result was first unconsciousness, then a radical loss of short term memory, and yet the longer term result of this experience has been just the opposite, an awareness and remembrance of what is most important in life: human kindness, loving others, forgiving from the heart.

I have spent this time of recuperation creating the “Seeds of Love” project, (www.seedsoflove.net) an audio visual presentation that can be viewed for free on the internet. Being rather, “spaced out,” for some time, the technical work was difficult. I found myself repeating certain aspects of the project over for days, and ending up as technically mystified at the end as I was when I started. But something good came out in spite of all this, an expression of remembrance of what is most important in life.

I worked in the hospital for 6 years in the 90’s, playing music for people, serenading them, and learned from these beautiful souls again and again that Love and kindness are the supreme values in life. It takes the dying to show the living what the highest values are. My recent experience has only deepened this conviction.

May we all “get it…” that what the merchants of the world keep telling us is so important, (the cars, the clothes, the right makeup or toothpaste), is all so unimportant in the end, and what is truly important has always been here, right under our noses, reaching out for our attention, asking us to come join the feast of life by paying attention to simple kindness, heart-felt gratitude, and the supreme gift of genuine Love that unites us to each other, to the good Earth and the infinite reaches of the Sky, and to the miracle and mystery of the essence of our own Being, this wondrous Love.

Never give up

2007-01-22T22:27:00.000-08:00

Wouldn't the greatest failure of God be if He could not be with a soul in its madness, in its self-created hell? If a soul’s doubt, remorse, and self-incrimination was too great a barrier and someone was able to isolate themself forever from a Love that’s just too perfect, to high, to free to ever relate to. And God, in the end, had to stop caring, because the soul in its hell just wasn't worth the Divine grief. For when you love and can never be with the one you love, isn't that the great pain? So God's pain would be too great if He continued to love each one, to care, to long for every soul to return to its rightful place in an ever expansive bliss of endless Love and beauty.

So His heart would have to close, His defenses go up, and God would be trapped in the most subtle and damning trap of all, the hardening of the heart to protect itself from its own pain. And God would cease to be fully alive, just as we become numb when we give up, when we are at last afraid to Love no matter how much it hurts.

But isn’t this the meaning of Christ’s descent? God can be and is with us, everywhere, in any kind of madness, in the greatest dark, all our bitter disappointments, and the most unimaginable pain, no matter what.

There can no failure of God’s Love. There just can’t be, because if God cannot be with us everywhere, then there is no perfect Love. And if there is no perfect Love, there is no perfect Lover. And if there is no perfect Lover there is no God worthy of the name.

Never give up. Never give up the dreams that make you alive. Never give up what is most important to your soul and the soul of every human being. Never give up your highest ideals. You are never beyond hope. You are never beyond the reach of Divine Love. Never. Never.

And if you have given up what is most important to you, let it be past tense, because everything can change, right now. It is all in what you think, in what you have accepted as real. Don't let being half alive, calloused and dead in your defenses be your reality. You don't have to, you know. If you decided to give up, you can also decide not to. You can decide to recover your child-like joy in being alive, your courage to continue to hope for the highest and the best you know: just because you are loved by a Great Love that truly is perfect, unfailing, forever with us, caring, bearing the pain with us and in us. And you are the lover as well, awaiting to awake to the full potential you have to radiate Love, by the kiss of that Divine Love that is the unwavering Source of existence and the pure quality that alone makes life worth living.

Never give up. Never let cynicism triumph over joyous hope. Never let yourself drift away from everyone who is most important to you. Never give up your highest destiny and truest purpose. Never, never, never give up.

2007-01-03T15:09:00.000-08:00

THE ALMOND BRANCH TREMBLES AND BLOOMS

The temple of God is the body,
perfectly designed to express the Holy.
Every sense, purified to its essence
conveys its inmost nature:
clean Spirit being in clean flesh;
clean energy moving gently.
Every instinct is for opening
and the delight that brings happiness
and peace.
The ecstasy arises in both holy places
at once. God is in His temple.
Everything cries its sweet cries.
Clothes fall from the soul.
It awakens in nakedness.
The almond branch trembles
and blooms

2007-01-03T15:04:00.000-08:00

THE OPENING

The Great Love, flowing smoothly,
opens the heart.
Words from sweet lips
convey the nature of Heaven.
Gently the Spirit soaks through.
The veils soften and grow thin.
The opening comes
from the Holy side.

2007

2007-01-02T12:11:00.000-08:00

January 2nd, 2007

The beginning of a new year is a traditional time to reflect on the lessons of the past and proclaim a new beginning based on hopes and aspirations. New cycles with new dynamics—hope springs eternal in the human heart. It must, for how can we exist with hopelessness? With hope comes fresh waves of inspiration to persevere through difficulties, to find ways to move strongly towards our deepest desires, our most ingrained longings and dreams. To truly live, we must arise out of the ashes of grief and insist on the highest and best we know.

There are some things that have always held sway over the human heart, since the beginnings of mankind creating a recorded history. These are spiritual qualities such as Love, peace, harmony, a sense of connectedness with higher, purer states of being, kindness, forgiveness, compassion and beauty. No matter what the cultural expression or era, these divine qualities have remained the same.

To be fully alive we must overcome all self-imposed and cultural impediments in order to be personally in touch with the supreme eternal qualities that reign over existence itself. How can we know that these qualities are supreme? Because they always have and always will elevate mankind to be its healthiest, most life affirming and inspiring state of being.

My wish for us all is that we will move out of the shadows of a greed-based social system that will inevitably self-destruct into the light of a Love-based system of mutual care, of finding ways to increase the quality of life for all based on simplicity, the opening of the heart, awareness and thankfulness, contentment and peace. We need a huge shift. God, through increasing natural catastrophes, will force us to change if we will not consciously embrace it. I pray that more and more of us find the courage to break out of current social patterns, wake up, and demand Love, beauty and goodness to become foundational for our lives.

Frogs in hot water

2006-12-23T15:36:00.000-08:00

BLOG

I’ve been out of America for the greater part of seven years. Coming back is always a huge culture shock for me, this time, perhaps the biggest. Most people know about the frog in the water analogy: you can’t put a frog in very hot water, but if you slowly warm the water and let him adapt, he will stay in the water until it cooks him. One advantage of “being away” is I have not been part of the warming of the water here in America. I’m not a frog who is “used” to the changes that have take place. They smack me in the face. Here are some of the shifts I have seen, ones I feel we should all be very, very concerned about.

1. The overall quality of life has dropped: less smiles, much less happiness evident.
2. Much more stress and way too much sensual stimulation, which creates a general inner weariness and dullness I see in many people, including the young who should be so fresh and happy.
3. Corporations have taken over America. In case you didn’t know, it is inherent to the corporate structure that they have to grow bigger to succeed. The big fish eat the little fish, then each other, until only a few super fat fish are left in a barren sea.
4. Advanced business brain washing: its cool to be a full on, consumer. Use it and throw it out: spend, spend, spend, and don’t take the warnings of the scientific community too seriously. Nature can continue to absorb our consumerist way of life. Let’s expand it. Let’s make the whole world like us.
5. Debt: the “average person” is deep in debt, (thanks to our “friendly” credit card/banking systems), full of anxiety and trying to keep up an appearance that everything is ok.
6. We are hyped on technology: so much “communication” so little being deeply known, completely heard.
7. The wealthy are obscenely wealthy, the poor are obscenely poor and the middle class is debt ridden, full of anxiety, and perhaps trying to convince themselves that it is a “high quality life” to be entertained by the “rich and famous” on monstrous sized TV screens.
8. Massive loss of trust in the Government due to lack of Government transparency and accountability. For example, why haven’t the huge questions about 9/11 been responsibly addressed and answered? The rest of the world wants to know too. Why have so many “witnesses” been issued gag orders by the U.S. Government? Why the Air force stand down orders? Why the massive failure to follow FAA regulations? Why no investigations? Why no reprimands? Why the market run on put options on the Airlines that were hijacked just before the attacks? Why no investigations? Why are WTC towers 2, 3, and 7 the only steel skyscrapers in history to fall because of fires? Why has investigative reporting on these issues been repressed by the corporations who own the major media? And many, many other valid questions.
9. Out of control corruption: the scariest being in the intelligent agencies, (how many do we have now?) FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, DEA, Homeland Security, etc. Second scariest, Corporate greed…
10. How much our government looks after the fat fish (mega corporations) and how little is being done to improve the life quality of normal working people.
11. Freedom of the press becoming something of the past. The Big Fish own our newspapers and media and control how we see the world to a much larger extent than most Americans realize.
12. The shift in what America now represents to the rest of the world and how hyper patriotism is not viewed as supporting American values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all, but about supporting American Corporate power. An individual’s heart’s intent may be patriotic, but we better wake up and realize that America is no longer seen as the land of the free. Most normal people in the rest of the world are not against real freedom, but against their cultures being transformed through massive brain washing by corporations who want to create a super-materialistic, consumerist, business centered life-style all over the world, until everyone is as debt-ridden and stressed out, greedy and corrupt as us.

I want to say, I have steered clear of politics my whole life. I write about human happiness from a spiritual perspective: discovering our true nature, getting “deprogrammed” and returning to our natural state of openness, and loving happiness. I feel compelled to start making political statements because, from my perspective, the changes in America over the last seven years are so profound and so dangerous, that everyone of us has a profound responsibility to wake up and speak out. If we don’t we will continue to trade our remaining sense of social fairness and freedom for a false security that blinds and binds us all the while we are being sold down the river by greedy corporations and the politicians they evidently own.

I know this is a slanted perspective. Thankfully, it is not the whole picture. It is a dark underbelly that has become more and more mainstream. But there are times when we must look at the negative in order to see what is actually going on in order to free ourselves from it. Personally, I much rather write about love, beauty, adventure, and the freedom of the human spirit: you know, the good medicine we all desire.

Fellow frogs, can you feel it? We are already in very hot water. If you value happiness and social freedom, then please be one who wakes up, stands up and speaks up. Let’s not become so used to the way things are going that we fall into such a stupor of stress and depression that we buy the lie we are powerless to do anything about it. There is nothing so powerful as an awake and free person. Get out of the water before it boils!

Photo Gallery

2006-12-15T14:06:00.000-08:00

I now have a professional photo gallery. It is a work in progress with some wonderful features, such as search that allows you to not only find an image by topic, but by feeling or quality, such as love, grief, awe, mystery, etc.

Most of the images come from my 7 1/2 year odyssey, traveling all over Europe in my little car, photographing beauty.

If you enjoy lush color and beautiful forms, take a look at: http:www.blakesteele.ifp3.com.

Wishing you all happiness in being your truest, most loving self,

Blake Steele

Yahoo!

2006-12-15T14:04:00.000-08:00

There is a great secret to life. Actually, of course there are many. But one of the most profound regarding human happiness is this: I am everything I love. In other words, I am the essence of everything I love to experience.

What this means is that which causes us to love someone or place, or thing is the quality of feeling it brings. Not on a superficial level, for that fails to engage our true self. But when we experience or know something in a profound way, that person, or place, or thing has caused us to touch what is most deeply within us, and what is most deeply within us is the essence, or true nature of who we actually are.

We engage our own essence and at that moment of joy are at home in happiness. But our conditioned mind projects this essence of self wholly outward into that which has caused us to know the light of ourselves, and we don't get the realization, we don't grasp the lesson.

What is the value of this truth? It is beyond estimation. Why? Because when we realize we are the feeling or quality what we love gives us, we find the pathway to our truest and happiest self. Does this mean we withdraw from life and just "enjoy ourselves?" No, it shouldn't. What it should do is allow us to stay more centered, more at home, less subject to manipulation, less a victim of world systems that prey upon human blindness. It should help us realize our own divine nature, connected to the infinite Purity and Beauty that is our Source, our Lover, our destination... In realizing this, so much fear melts away and hope floods us with the Love that is the truest essence of us all.

Photo

2006-12-09T15:54:00.000-08:00

An Invitation

2006-12-09T13:57:00.000-08:00

I created an extensive on-line spiritual festival for personal growth in real Love and joyous freedom. It is free. Drop in and take a meander through many pages of inspiration, beauty and find the spiritual tools for real growth just right for you.
www.interhealing.net

Love is the meaning of it all...

2006-05-14T04:46:00.000-07:00

Life just breaks down when we fail to live in Love. I have never seen Love harm anyone. Love certainly opens our hearts, but it always is the failure to Love that wounds us. Many people are afraid of Love because of this. But that only makes the problems worse. To live in Love is to refuse to side with fear, to be willing to open up our wounds so Love can heal us and bring us home to the radiant roots of our Being.

Just think of whatever touches you most deeply in life. What kind of response comes from you when you are touched on your deepest levels either by a person, a song, a work of art, a place, an idea... Is it tenderness? Is it inspiration? Is it Love? We love whatever touches us in this innermost tender place because Love is what lives there.

There is a quiet revolutionary awakening happening all over the world. People are discovering that we really are Love in our most essential nature. Clouds may blot out the sun, but they do not extinguish or affect it in any way. The sun just goes on shining in full strength because it is what it is. So the ideas, emotions and defense mechanisms of our heart in no way affect the reality of the limitless Ocean of Love that gives everything existence. Limitless Love just is. It is the life-giving force of attraction that holds everything together from a molecular level up. It is the wisdom that gives all things form. It is the most complete expression of Being. It is the law and meaning of Life.

It is natural and healthy to live in the inspiration and goodness of Love. Love frees us from painful neediness, loneliness, and the grief of feeling separate from the infinite beauty that is our source and our home.

May this revolution of Love continue to open people all around the world and carry us beyond the repressive shadows of man-made religious traditions back into the spiritual radiance of real Love that first gave religions their birth.

May the fear-based divisiveness and power based dominance of the old political, religious and cultural systems melt away in the increasing awareness of common people everywhere celebrating their recovered innocence, their emerging beauty, their unique gifts, their expanding freedom to be real. May we be the sexy, spiritual, intelligent, creative beings we ultimately are in the wisdom and life-giving nature of real Love.

Article by Blake from the InterHealing Community
www.interhealing.net"

Poems

2006-05-14T04:30:00.000-07:00

ANOTHER POEM ON THE LAMB OF GOD

There is a tender,
shy-eyed wisdom
that seeks to pour
her silver waters
of ecstatic rest
into the open, glass vase
of an empty soul.
There is a velvet flower
that only unfolds
in the effervescence
of these waters.
There is a drop of dew
on the lip of that flower
mirroring angels
in all the earth and sky.
There is a shy-eyed face
hidden in everything.

ON THE FREE MOVEMENT OF CREATIVE WISDOM

There is an ecstasy
in open-hearted rest:
the blue breezes of day
sweep through unhindered
by stones;
the silver waters of wisdom
flood through
quietly, wetting everything--
or come as a flash and spurt
shivering the belly
and the bones.

ROSE BREATH OF THE WEST

Why not live every day
in ecstatic emptiness,
in Eshoo's flowing fullness?
This sweet gentleness
of rose breath
is God's rest:
It is the mitzvah of the Hebrews,
the flowering grace
in Francis's holy bosom--
it is the fragrant, unwavering flame
around which Rumi twirled.

GOD IS CREATIVE GENIUS

God is pure, creative genius:
what else can I say about this One
but that?
When God wells up,
floods down,
envelopes in silk,
trickles through the naked core,
the images flow:
seeking to express
the transparency of the shiver,
the soft blow of rose breath
in blood and warm bones.

FALL BACK, YES! DROP IN

We can always keep accepting,
always keep emptying,
always let the rose breath blow.
If a rat builds an muddled nest
in the mind, in the tight belly,
let the wind carry it away.
If a cold stone drops,
let it tumble in a warm river.
If a worm eats into your apple,
throw the apple in God's press:
its golden juices will flow.
It is Eshoo who ever
keeps blowing...
O freedom!
O velvet delicacy!
His white wind,
(this movement
of unmoving light...),
is everywhere and always!
So open up soul
and fall back,
Yes!
drop in.

WISE BLAMELESSNESS

When innocence comes again,
it is called wise blamelessness:
it is the melting away of anxiety,
the flowing openness of God.
It is the sprinkling
of Christ's grace-blood
all over the head and hands,
the throat, the breasts,
the belly, the loins.
It is bare feet in wet grasses
and a yellow flame glistening
in your hair.

DAY AND NIGHT IN CHRIST

The clear mind opens.
Stars pour in;
a glitter of moon light.
The sun arises,
coloring the mind golden and blue.
A silent ecstasy is felt
in light amongst the leaves.

2006-04-07T22:21:00.000-07:00

BEAUTY IS MY WORK

Beauty is my work:
to labor in spirit, letting life spill into words
which might move your mind
in ways that release that light
I'm love-drunk for: the light of the truest you,
all wet with wonder--fresh I mean--
a wise and wild child shining
through the intricate maze
of your soul; through your eyes,
all awake and wanting nothing but love
and loving; peering out your face,
beautiful with joy like the sun,
innocent as a breeze,
or calm with repose, like a rose,
soft and sleepy on a summer's day.

SANITY'S RHYTHM

When we rejoice
with a child's complete joy
and pour forth our wonderment
in praise
we forget the miserable ones.
It is not possible to do otherwise.
So, we must keep to the rhythm
of ecstasy and compassion:
the first, like rain-slicked petals
slipping into a silky sea;
the second, a gleam of light
squeezed out of dark, hot
visceral organs--love's ooze--
pure in the melt down
of self,
ashamed of its frivolities--
though free
to drink nakedly of whimsy
and forget again.

A POEM IS A PLACE

A poem is a new friend
that was an old lover you'd forgotten.
It is written to be companionable:
even if it jerks you upside down!
It's a spurt and a spout,
a prink and a dazzle—
moistness in your pants.
Or, barking dark in God's light!
a ribbon of silky smoke
unwrinkling in the sky;
a spacious place to pass into:
like a opening soul...
or lithe wind hidden in a stone.
It's a room without walls
and a ceiling of spattered stars.
It's a slow excretion of color in your mind
as the universe in you sings.
It's your own primal voice speaking
from a simple flame of empty silence—
the naked Christ.
*
Enter a poem's heart with your heart.
When you come to its wordy doors,
throw yourself open!

2006-04-07T22:10:00.000-07:00

IN EARLY WINTER

I was feeling down
about the state of my life
when I read an Oliver poem
about barely breathing and thinking
you were alive...
So I went out naked into
a winter's grouse of wolf-wind
and raised my arms up silently
towards the silent moon
and all the stars that praised you
and surrendered open again
as the wind whirlabouted
to bristle my hair and prickle my skin.
Then I turned back indoors
to my cluttered little workshop
which was suddenly a warm and welcome nest,
and brimming with thankfulness
knew I was alive.

Poems from Sweden

2006-03-15T17:35:00.000-08:00

THREE SWANS

The wind howled off the gray sea
in the dim light before dawn:
an autumn wind, from the east,
from Russia, from the step lands,
from the Caucus mountains,
cold and raw. The sea stretched
into a low line of dark clouds,
while the first sign of day shown to the south
on the tops of bonnets of mounting clouds,
warm and gold and reminding me of God.
Suddenly, from the south, came huge sea birds
pumping wide wings, distant and dark,
silhouetted against the wind-ruffled sea.
I watched carefully, thinking they must be geese,
but the porcelain beauty of their bearing
and the graceful turn of the lead bird’s neck,
and the snowy coldness of their feathers
revealed three wild swans in whose presence
I stood amazed, my mouth open
as they flew by in slow, surreal motion,
so close my heart touched
the cool demeanor, aloofness,
and regal distain of their freedom.
And I thought of a beautiful woman
who has wept all week, feeling her
fear of the sun, of human hands,
and open mouths, and suckling need.
I could not wait for the dawn. The cold drove me home
to warm my hands over a morning fire
in a small, empty room.

SUNSET #1– GOTLAND SWEDEN

The skies are electric, and hanging so huge
they threaten to fall and crush me
into the earth. Thick, juicy rainbows
hang down regularly, like fingers of God
dipped in colors pressed from wild flowers
in warm meadows to the south.
This is my first sunset on the eastern shore.
The sky is purple and burnt sienna
and dusty gold like wallpaper in a classy salon.
The cold sea turns violet, with riffles of dark
wind-ruffled shadows.
Gray clouds curl like decorations on Greek pillars,
their bellies raw and red, rouged and rubbed,
loosing their gray veils of mist
enwrapping two rainbows, running down like liquid color
into the color-filled sea.
Minutes after the dropped sun extinguished the show,
the full moon arose like a radiant face,
open and pale, rising from the darkening sea
like an innocent woman, a virgin, softened
by the ecstasy of just loving her.

DEATH

The gray swan rests her tired head on the ice
and closes her eyes to the snowy wind.
Something warm is glowing deep within her feathers.
Quietly, something like a small bone breaks in her heart.
Stirred by the pain, for a moment she opens her eyes,
and they shine like light in the ice.
Wings open just above her body
and she feels the old rise of freedom.
Slowly, her eyes darken
and are covered with snow.

pio's place

2005-02-26T02:26:00.000-08:00

pio's place

THE GREAT LOVE SPEAKS

You who are sleeping in a beautiful Love
what are you thinking, how do you see?
I am thinking the moon and sun,
a wild bird’s eyes and the hum of a bee,
while you are thinking of computers and cars,
new shoes and meeting some guy at a bar.
I am dreaming you have colorful bones
and can rattle your hands through beams of stars,
and how you are taking your beggar’s cup
and tripping along on a blaze of stones
are dipping it deep in my river of gold,
while you are dreaming of the last lie you told.
Life in my ears is everywhere singing:
the chatter of sparrows, the clatter of reeds.
You heart is silent, except for its needs.
Open your hands over your heart,
the secret sun shines, the liquid gold flows,
the naked child stands in the wind as it blows,
and all the stars dip from the sky through its mind:
when will you awake to all you will find
when your soul from your dream
like a hand from a glove
comes out into view
in my beautiful Love.

pio's place

2005-02-26T02:23:00.000-08:00

pio's place

Reflections in a Puddle of Mud Concerning A Long Winter

It has been a long, dark winter here in Sweden. The horses stand dumbly in the mud and ice staring at nothing. The birds seem a little desperate at times. I have been alone a lot and can feel something of the soul dark these northern people suffer.

But today little clouds like puff buttons on the costume of a clown are drifting along merrily in a carnival blue sky. I'm longing for the first real sign of spring. What a celebration that will be in my soul-land: all that lime green freshness sprouting and singing.

Though it seems there is more winter to come, the birds have already become cheerier. I think they can feel into the nature of things with a more poignant sense of where the seasons actually are. I'm hoping for the heart of the world to break open soon and realize the secret sun of Love that never falters beyond these clouds, but then I'm an incurable dreamer.

The Asian Tragedy

2004-12-28T05:51:00.000-08:00

What to do regarding what just happened in Asia? For most of us in this world we attempt to be present through the media’s coverage. We are not there to bury bodies, to provide water and food, to console the devastated who have lost everything. What to do? What to do? We can send money, and we can pray.

And what shall we pray? One prayer seems like such a small flame to hold up amidst the dark of such immense human suffering. God help the victims and the helpers. God be with the souls of those who have been suddenly released from their bodies. God help us all. I wonder how many feel bitter at the mention of God? Isn’t God the one who gets blamed for natural cataclysmic events? Isn’t this an “act of God” as the insurance companies will call it? God is tending Galaxies millions of light years away. Can’t God prevent such things? How can one believe we exist in an infinite sea of Love and yet live in a world with such suffering? Why is it the poor and the children who so often are affected the most by natural disasters? How can we believe in mercy in the face of heartless devastation?

These are the cries of grief feeling its own helplessness.

Sadly, perhaps only events like these can soften the hearts of humanity and bring us closer to the true values of life and the importance of helping each other. Perhaps it is events like these that will cause us to ask other questions, such as, what would the world be like if Love were the highest value in everyone’s hearts, thinking, intents and actions all the time?

Can we justly blame God for the world’s suffering? I don’t know. The world is as it is. I imagine God could have made it differently: safer, more regulated. Yet I am learning that spirituality is about accepting life on its own terms in order to create goodness out of the stuff of life, and that very much includes events like the world is now suffering. To trust in God is to trust that a wisdom great enough to create the Universe is behind the reality of life as we know it. We are so blind and deaf to the sublime dimensions of the spiritual realms around and within us, and yet when human tragedy stops us in our tracks and calls us to compassion, kindness, and mercy; when the wail of grief reaches us and makes us feel one with all our brothers and sisters of all religions and nationalities, perhaps we are taking one step closer to that place of Love and peace in the midst of a sometimes dangerous and yet always beautiful planet we call our temporary home.

2004-09-21T10:28:00.000-07:00

DANCE IT

What do you long for? What does your heart dream of? Put on some music right now. Dance it.

What is your intention? Why are you here? What is the thing you have come to fulfill? Do you know? Can you guess? Dance it.

Dance a prayer. Dance for your longings to be fulfilled. Go deeper. Dance for the world. Dance your thankfulness for it all, the pain, the wonder. Open your heart and dance it.

Dance your doubts. Feel them fully. Dance it.

Dance your fears. Let them flow through. Why believe them? Dance it!

Dance your discouragement. Dance your despair. Dance your grief at being wounded and human. Dance your anger at the betrayal of Love. Dance it!

Break though. You can you know. You aren’t a slave to feelings or ideas. Dance your no to your no. Dance your passion to be free. Dance your Yes to Life! Be wild. Be crazy. Dance it.

Now surrender. Let your deeper self arise, all that light, all that primal goodness, all that innocence of pure Being that can never be undone. You are alive. You are beauty rising. You are nothing but Love. You are already free. Dance it, child, dance it!

From Rose Breath collection

2004-09-09T13:40:00.000-07:00

GOOD COMPANY ON THE WAY

This silver shiver of life
that passes through me now
burnt as flame in Moses's bones,
and moved as wind through Isaiah's voice;
it softly shimmered as a pale bird
above Jesus' wet hair;
it betrothed barefoot Francis
and became liquid light in Rumi's pen;
it was a rose bud in the breast
of Joan of Arc
and the flame which consumed her flesh.
And there are countless unnamed ones
who yielded open and learned to love--
common folks now famous in Heaven,
who let the gentle ecstasy pour through.

SUNDAY OBSERVATIONS

When the spirit is naked and open
so life can course through it,
then the flash of a woman's thin thigh
is as beautiful
as a quiet discussion of recent history,
or the homily of an old priest,
or the raucous caw of a blue jay
or the sight of birds drifting through trees,
or a dog's restrained, wary speech,
or the splash of river water on a stone,
or the taste of blueberries,
or the writing of poems.

Wild Sanity poetry by Blake Steele

2004-08-31T13:43:00.000-07:00

Wild Sanity poetry by Blake Steele: "PONDERING MY RETIREMENT

When I am old
I want to be an artist
who buries his fiery body in color
in the way a black mole
snuggles into mud.
I want to hunt
for green leaves in paint,
and burn canvas
with vermilion flame.
I want to splash a sky
with those roses
that birth the sun
day by day
and throw golden hair
over your face
with a huge sweep of brush.
I would paint your eyes blue
with my toes
and your shimmering smile
with a glob of paint
on my chin.
We shall laugh
in color,
you and I,
and run down
empty streets at night
leaving wet footprints
on the sides of walls.

Poetry by Blake Steele

2004-08-26T08:06:00.000-07:00

Poetry by Blake Steele: "WE ARE ECSTATIC ESSENCE

What we call ecstasy
is simply life.
The leaves tremble with it
in a warm caress of sunlight,
in cool currents of wind.
It is pain that dulls us
to life's naked shimmer.
Pour out pain
until your soul is empty.
You will sink in silver shivers;
you will tremble in flame.

"

Pio's Place Open

2004-08-23T05:35:00.000-07:00

Hello,

This is an opening of this new blogger site. It is a place to talk about the emerging spirituality that is life-affirming, love-filled, expansive, inclusive, inspiring, and creatively free in real Love. You are welcome to add your comments and insights.

Also, if you want a resource for deep healing work in Love please visit the new on-line spiritual festival and community at: www.interhealing.net.

With you in the wonder of existence.

Blake Steele