MYST – Beyond faith and time. We are quickly moving toward societies which will be truly free. It may seem to be not so, with the wars that persist, but there is only one way that things can happen! Children of the 22nd century will look upon the wars over religious beliefs and social structures of our current societies with wonderment. For them, looking into the mind of 21st century homo sapiens will be equivalent to how we feel looking at a geology map of earth before the continents drifted into the current positions. We have no concept of the evolutionary leaps in store.

Angel Falls

When water flows over the edge of Angel Falls – it travels nearly 1000 feet to the ground below, turning ito a mist. This is what is happening to our collective rational mind. As a species, we are the water going over the edge at Angel Falls – we are truly being mystified.** ** The hermetic view of the elements was mystical. Air was magical, full of imagination and spirits. Water was the link between air and earth, above and below. Earth was ground of creation like a womb or matrix. There a lot of ways to interpret what your brain tells you when it perceives a man ‘dressed as a girl’. ** I may touch on a few of them here, as for what your other organs tell you, well – we’ll have to explore that on another page… Please be aware that when your brain talks to you about putting things in a rational gender category, your heart is also willing and able to talk back! I like to treat my brain as an authoritarian power tripper. Think of it like your heart is the voice of you as a child again, who wants to talk back to that authority figure (your brain) and say, “Excuse me teacher. Bollocks to you! I have ideas of my own.” ** I remember the first time I ever noticed a man dressed in drag: I was working as a busboy at Mario’s of Windsor, a pretty fine downtown Windsor, Ontario steakhouse. I was in grade nine and had never been exposed to anyone even remotely cross-gendered. I was in the main dining room and I looked over to a woman sitting at the bar in the lounge. When a combinations of clues revealed it was a man, I felt overwhelmed. It seemed like a hallucination. When a man recognizes his anima, a triad is created: he is the masculine conscious subject who relates to the immanent feminine conscious subject and the transcendent feminine anima. This structure becomes a complete quaternity through the emergence of the transcendent masculine, the Wise Old Man. Likewise, when a woman recognizes her animus, a triad is created: she is the feminine conscious subject who relates to the immanent masculine conscious subject and the transcendent masculine animus. This structure becomes a complete quaternity through the emergence of the transcendent feminine, the Chthonic Mother. In both cases the result is a “marriage quaternio” which is half masculine and half feminine, half immanent and half transcendent. (Jung) – from Pythagorean Tarot

I feel that societies treat those who vary from the polarized gender paradigm in an embarrassing way – still living in homophobic fear. The old paradigms of gender, the old religious and political constructs – these rationalities, these beliefs are dissolving. Your own children and grandchildren will prove this to you as they turn their backs on systems that destroy nature. Why not support them as they rebuild and redifine our sacred connection with each other? The people around you who are glbtq (gay | lesbian | bisexual | transexual | questioning), or third gender, transgendered, two-spirit – these people are an exemplary part of the new paridigm. I teach my children by example, that all boundaries between humans exist only in the mind and that making differences and judging people is not the way to be.

Coniunctio

Alchemy of Sex Royal Marriage: Coniunctio — the Union of Opposites Mystic marriage is exquisitely described in the story of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The two poles of Spirit as Will, and Imagination merge in an interaction which bring new creations into being, blending the two poles. Solomon means the Wisdom of the Sun; Sheba means ‘seven’ and reflects a seven-fold process of sacred love:

1. The Quest

2. The Awakening of Love

3. The Attainment of Knowledge

4. Detachment

5. Unification or Blending (mystic marriage)

6. Annihilation (becoming lost in God)

7. Divine consummation.

Coniunctio is an alchemical term for the unification of opposites, a transcendent symbol of the Self, embodied psychic totality. The queen is the body, the king is spirit, and the soul bonds them together as a hermaphroditic being. This spiritual marriage is an inner process that happens once we master the problem of unconscious desirousness. The magical potency of sexual union has excited us from the beginning of time. The male partner is the hero or higher man. As in myth or ritual, the marriage is the “cause” or “prototype” of the world’s fertility — of all creative life.

Ram Das spoke about desire and Tantra in Grist for the Mill:

“The issue of Tantra is often played with by people who desire sexual gratification. And they try to have their cake and eat it too. But in truth, when you desire to have a sexual relationship with another person, the arousal process and the gratification is reinforcing that desire. The only kind of truly tantric sexuality that is possible is between two human beings who are so rooted in God that there is no preoccupying desire for the other person as ‘other.’ Then you use the physiological process of body interaction in order to awaken the energy to move it up through the chakras. But that is only when there is no preoccupying desire whatsoever in either partner. Short of that, just be honest with yourself, sexuality is sexuality, its not Tantra. The true Tantra is basically the relationship between Radha and Krishna, between the seeker and the Mother where you open your soul and become both the lingham and the yoni; you are both penetrating the universe and drawing it into yourself. Because the soul is neither male nor female. And when you have identified yourself as a soul going to God, the sexual dance starts to lose its pull.”

The magic wedding means a unification within oneself — uniting body and soul and giving birth to spirit through rebirth. This produces the philosopher’s stone, a God-image, much like the mandala. It means going through a search and quest , an exploration of soul by spirit for psychic fecundation. The heart is the throne of God in man. There are three types or phases of conjunction:

1). The spiritual self confronts the shadow, withdraws its projections and faces itself without a mask. Insight is gained through introversion, introspection and meditation on desires, emotions and motives.
2). Reunites spirit, soul and body under the symbol of the Chymical Wedding, full knowledge of the heights and depths of our own character. Insight is applied in practice; spirit unites with material reality.
3). The Tao of unification of opposites, stable inner security through union with all potential or the archetypal world. Soul merges in spirit and there is an identity between psychic and physical reality.

Androgyny, the marriage of masculine and feminine qualities in one organism, is another symbolic expression of wholeness or psychic totality. It is a refined form of the hermaphrodite, which Erich Neumann says, “by virtue of its own synthetic being has overcome the primal situation, above it hangs the crown of the self, and in its heart glows the diamond.”

Mythic Dimensions

Shiva and Shakti; Krishna and Radha God and Sophia; God and Shekinah Joseph Campbell called myth “a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs.” The significance of Shiva is that he is the reconciliation of all opposites.

Shiva Shakti

He is both creator and destroyer of all form. He is terrible and mild, good and evil, eternal rest and ceaseless activity. His consort really is only a part of himself – his ‘power’ by which he creates, sustains, and destroys. In the Shakti cults of power, the ‘power’ itself is worshipped to the exclusion of Shiva himself. This power is the active, committed side of his nature. Shakti is the essence of bliss, love-power. In the full figure of Shiva, male and female principles are united. Or, he is shown as half male and half female. His primary symbol of worship is the lingam, or phallus, which is always erect. Lingam and yoni together represent the totally of Nature and all created existence. The lingam is a naturalsymbol of supreme creative power. The Tantras teach there is a lingham within each yoni, reminding of our inherent androgyny.

In ‘Sexual Secrets’, Douglas and Slinger say, “Knowledge of Shiva, the Transcendental, permits passage through the doorway to other worlds. Identify with the vital mind energy of Shiva during tantric love-making. This will eventually cause an experience of transcendence beyond your normal worldly role or limitations. Shiva is experienced as a penetration into the depths of space, as being pulled out into the universe, beyond all knowable things and events.” Those who experience this are described as heroic, enterprising, skillful, persevering, talented, contented and firm-minded. Through the intimate union of Shiva and Shakti in ecstatic delight, the Jiva, the individual soul, becomes freed from the bondage of past lives. Then the couple can truly soar to the heights of liberation.

This is symbolized as the serpent power kundalini, or in the west by the Cadeusus. The twin serpents twine together and open the center way, which kindles a mind-expanding then transcending influx of power in the top chakras, the Third Eye and the Crown.

Cadeucus

Krishna, the eastern Dionysus, also embodies the same ecstatic mind-expanding state of spiritual liberation. He is eternally entwined with his consort Radha in blissful union. A western equivalent is the Gnostic myth of God and his mystic Sophia, divine Wisdom; also in the qabalistic version, God and Shekinah, the Bride who bring Kether or the Holy Spirit into Malkuth, or embodiment. Thus, are married Jews advised to make love every Friday night and bring Shekinah into the household by sharing their marital bliss. Normally, our attention is attracted to the world through the mind and the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Once all the senses have been completely sated, there is a paradoxical shift toward the Void state. In order to realize our true self, we have to invert our attention and enter the inner realms. To do so, our attention must be collected at a point from where the soul can enter the regions beyond. This point is the seat of the soul in the body, located between and behind the two eyebrows. Anima/Animus – the Syzygy In the creation myths of many cultures, Primordial Wholeness divides into polarized aspects.

The Syzygy indicates this archetypal coupling that is echoed in Tantric Rites, where one aspect is never separated from the other. In the “impersonal” aspect of lunar experience, the Great Goddess is never separated from her masculine Son-Lover. One implies the other for wholeness. They exemplify the soul-spirit relationship. On the “personal” level of lunar experience we find the tandem of anima/animus. They are the contrasexual component each human carries within. These soul figures embody our latent capacities for expression and realization of the traits normally reserved for the opposite sex. Thus, the animus leads a woman to the outer world and promotes her ability in focused, rational thinking; the anima guides a man through the inner worlds of relationship, according to Jung. This is the level of psychological “complex” where there is a blending of archetypal realities and individual experience. Thus, the imagery of anima/us is based in archetypal symbolism and in childhood memories of “significant others” of the opposite sex. This includes parental attitudes and behavior, grandparent’s influence, sibling, first-love, and cultural expectations and norms — all those things that go into our own unique “love map.” It take the elements of fate and destiny and combines them in a personal formula. Anima/us represents the balancing of masculine and feminine traits in the individual. This balancing is a form of coniunctio, or sacred marriage, a union which produces the magical child which is the higher self. The animus is the masculine personification of the soul. He carries both a transcendent spiritual aspect and a personal aspect. He is shown in the magickal symbolism of Yesod: a beautiful, naked, muscular man. On the archetypal level anima/us is equivalent to the Taoist Yin-Yang concept, a system which embraces a non-combative play of opposites, a circulation of soul. Anima and Animus are potential guides to the depths of the Unconscious, which is why they are acted out and emulated in Tantric Rites. They form a bridge between the divine and daily life. They are factors which transcend consciousness, so in a relationship which seems to have everything going for it, there can be friction (or “animosity”) produced by unconscious forces operating below the surface. Most of these troubles stem from projecting the anima/us image onto our love ones and maneuvering them into fulfilling our expectations — or trying to. Internal conflicts come from the split nature of anima/us we experience in modern life. This revolves mainly around the gulf between the Spiritual and Sensual aspects of the inner figure. A man experiences the split between holy Mother and the erotic goddess of his dreams. For example, the spiritual animus might be projected onto the figure of a wise old man, a ghostly lover to whom a woman goes in fantasy, or an idealized brother/sister relationship devoid of sexual options. The sensual animus might be imaged by darker gods of impersonal sexuality, phallic or obscene — more practically onto “bad boys.”. In any event, the animus represents the woman’s need for creative expression. The more fully she can manifest this trait, the better her inner relationship to the animus becomes. He provides her with inner light, not inspiration which is a function of her anima nature, core of her Self. Anima/us excite those feelings of longing, awe, fear of the unknown, and incomprehensibility. The transparent power of love can appear as a possession by another, against which rational thought has no protection. It is the motional-sexual level and its projections coupled with the libido generator of tantric rites that fuels sacred sexuality — the quest for the Beloved, in its myriad forms. ———

SENSUALITY & EROTICISM:

The Sixty Four Tantric Arts

The western world has no equivalent to the Kama Sutra, or Perfumed Garden — ancient manuals of sacred sexuality from the east. What we do have is fetish, perversion, pornography, and a manic stampede for achieving as many orgasms as possible. Sexuality in America is still regarded largely from a Puritanical, rather than joyfully aesthetic perspective. Religion has attempted to constrain and suppress it practically into oblivion, separating it from spirituality. In the East, both men and women studied the arts of sexual ecstasy and enhancement. They acknowledged the Divinity of the Feminine element in a variety of Goddesses. The Kama Sutra listed a variety of arts which contributed to one’s desirability. They include: the arts and sciences, singing, music, dancing, writing, drawing, painting, sewing, reading, recitation, poetry, sculpture, gymnastics, games, flower arranging, cooking, decoration, perfumery, gardening, mimicry, mental exercises, languages, etiquette, carpentry, magic, chemistry, mineralogy, gambling, architecture, logic, charm-making, religious rites, household management, disguise, physical sports, martial arts, herbalism, etc. We could add digital photography as a modern art. The Art of Love requires all these arts and skills for its support and enhancement. Knowing a wide repertoire of sensually and intellectually pleasing arts is another means of self expression.

Creative Visualization

Creative visualization is practiced in Tantra and Magick for the purpose of deepening concentration and awakening the inner sight, and adding effectiveness to any ceremonial working. It can enhance our sensuality and sex lives even when we are not actively engaged in sexual expression. Visual types find it easier to sustain inner imagery at will, but all forms of inner perception (audition, feeling) actually come within this function. The most fundamental forms are geometric and arise naturally from our anatomy and physiology. In India, the tried and true Tattwa system is used to improve concentration ability and elemental attunement.

The Tattwas consist of five forms, which correspond approximately with the elements, and specific colors:

1).Akasa, Spirit, Dark or Black, Oval or egg-shape;
2)Tejas, Fire (light), Red, Triangle;
3).Vayu, Air, Green or Blue, Sphere;
4) Apas, Water, White or full-spectrum, half moon or Crescent;
5).Prithivi, Earth, Yellow, Square

These geometrical constants have a relationship with physiological reactions, i.e. they were discovered perceptually before their source could be identified. The spontaneous perception of geometrical, wavy, or star-like forms comes from the presence of phosphenes in the eyeball. They can be seen by pressing the eyes softly for about 10 seconds. Release the pressure and look at a white surface. Images will appear. Phosphene means “to show light.” Sensory deprivation or all kinds of heightened awareness can stimulate their appearance as scintillating points. We literally “see stars.” This combined, with our neurochemistry creates the internal light show. It can also be induced electrically. There are 15 phosphene patterns, or hallucinatory constants, linked to specific frequency ranges, or brain cycles. They may be artifacts of information-processing between eye and brain, or interference patterns created by the circular pattern of nerve fibers on the curved surface of the eyeball. They give objects in the line of sight a shimmering, dynamic, elusive quality — a magical aura. Phosphene patterns are influential in the development of art, making the eye responsive to dynamic illusions. They form a recurrent, intrinsic source of inspiration with a pervasive geometrical-rhythmic structure. They are easily seen in hyper- or hypoarousal hallucinatory experiences, or whenever the lights are dim and threshold of consciousness diminished. They are abundant in the mandalas of Tantric religious art as ritualized hallucinatory form constants and rhythms.

Listen, O brothers and sisters, you who have mastered the teaching — If you recognize me, Queen of the Lake of Awareness, who encompasses both emptiness and form, know that I live in the minds of all beings who live in the body of mind and the field of the senses, that the twelve kinds of matter are only my bones and my skin. We are not two, yet you look for me outside; when you find me within yourself, your own naked mind, that Single Awareness will fill all worlds. Then the joy of the One will hold you like a lake — its fish with gold-seeing eyes will grow many and fat. Hold to that knowledge and pleasure, and the Creative will be your wings. You will leap through the green meadows of earthly appearance, enter the sky-fields and vanish. Yeshe Tsogyel Coincidentia Oppositorum These ideas are a path to unfolding the sacredness out of ordinary life, taking ordinary things which may seem ordinary by our familiarity and restoring them to sacredness, and restoring yourself as well in the process. Presence is an expression of beingness, a creator of intimacy. It has to do with being wise in your simplicity. Think back to when someone looked deeply into your eyes, acknowledging your beingness with their full presence. Remember how wonerful and intimate that felt. Allow your mind to be quietly responsive. Expand your awareness with ease, allowing yourself to truly see and be seen. Let your feelings speak through your eyes. Another gift is the integration of polarities within you. Polarity is the loom on which reality is strung, but polarity is also an important alchemical process used in the transmutation of form and energy. The polarities held in relationship, our male and female aspects are coming together in truth. You are the creative field for the integration of the larger pattern of duality. By unification of the male and female polarities within – coincidentia oppositorum – you mirror the divine aspect of this – birthing the divine child within us. You can begin the process by integrating gender polarities within your body. Observe the right male and left female characters. Each day, feel these gender identities within you and begin to communicate with them. Feel them. Move with them. Talk to them. Create and draw images. Take pictures with your digital camera. Make sounds. Use video to free the your energetic body. Allow your body to speak to your mind. What is it saying about these gender identities? What is your mind making of this unification that is occuring within you? Speak it out loud. Dance it outside of yourself. Pray to the greater male and female consciousness and allow them to flow freely through you as you conduct yourself through any daily activity. Take as much time as you need , allow them to flow together, unified in solar androgyny. By doing this you are activating the divine within you. Old perceptions will break away from your shell. Claim harmony, healing and love. Your healing process will accellerate. Drink real spring water in the mountains – let the sun pour into your body to heal the dis-ease. Tell your body how much you love it and have missed this intimacy. Your body will respond with even greater love and healing to your spirit. Once you begin this dynamic you will move quickly from a feeling of separation to an upward spiral of ascension that is undeniable. You are raising your consciousness to recognize a 26,000 year cycle to be reborn into the heart of All That Is. You are giving up what you seem to be, in order to become what you are. Your new alignment ignites the quickening process that transmutes the shadows of the past, including experiences, judgements, thoughtforms, and old patterns that have held you back. You will feel off balance as you experience these unusual quickenings. Your body is becoming less dense. You are becoming lighter. You will now feel any fears and negative images very quickly. You are adjusting to a new energy pattern to accommodate the flow of the language of light. These new frequencies feed on every level of your being. Call in and recognize other companions of destiny. Other beings with the same longing are waiting to meet and acknowledge you – beings who can see you as you authentically are. When you have truly been seen, you feel empowered and remembrance of a shared sacred trust is ignited. Open your intuition to access relationships with guides, totems, allies and guardians. There are many ways to work with these spiritual guides, including guided visualizations, shamanic journeys, and meditation. A useful construct is viewing them as aspects of yourself – remember, there is no ‘other’. As you express more authentically who you are, you draw your true family closer to you. Recognize the eyes and hearts that spark the remembrance of a sacred trust. Cosmic consciousness is not just out there; it is also resonating within you. Be sacramentally rooted where you are. You are made of the Earth! Look through the ‘eyes’ in your feet. Your body is the present focus of your consciousness – through your body all gifts are recieved. The way that you perceive the Earth and your own physical form affects the information you will receive. Earth keepers preserve the harmonic relationship with nature by connecting to the wisdom held in matter. In Latin, mater means ‘mother’. You and the Earth both contain the holographic seed of the new consciousness emerging. Sitting within yourself in the moment in relationship with the earth is the best observatory for the synchronicities about your personal pattern and larger purpose. Take off your shoes. Touch the one Earth. Find a place to dance with the sacred hoop of life. Lay your eyes on the moon at night. Feel the other eyes which are connected to that light at that moment. Feel the harmony of oneness. Contribute your vision as an awakened member of the global rainbow family.

If you are with me this far, remeber you have chosen to take part in this rebirth. As you transform the collective myth, you are travelling both outward and inward on your journey home for yourself and those who will follow you.

bisous, baisemwah