The Animal Us

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

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

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!

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THE SECRET LIFE OF BIRDS

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?

Bringing Sex and Everything Home

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.

The Two Trees

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.

Lost in Mental Facsimiles

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.