HOW WOULD IT BE?

HOW WOULD IT BE?

PART 2: A NEW MOUNTAIN

 What if when the children of Israel came to meet their God in the desert, after experiencing multiple traumas: after nine plagues of darkness then the death of the firstborn, and the wailing of mothers in the night; after being trapped before the red sea, huddling with their terrified children as they watched, the black tide of Pharaoh’s chariots, descending from the hills, coming to slaughter them; after the fearsome miracle of violent winds and the sea peeling open and them running through the mud, trying to help the children and old ones, with seething waters leaning in above them and then suddenly crashing in behind to drown the screaming horsemen, that instead of then meeting their God on a burning mountain with thick darkness and shrill blaring horns… they were greeted with an angelic feast? What if beautiful beings walked amongst them, comforting them, laughing with them, celebrating their deliverance from 400 years of cruel enslavement?

And what if Moses never left them alone to climb into the dark and meet God, but stayed, and walked amongst them, showing kindness, encouraging them, speaking God’s fathomless Love? What if the earth never violently split open and swallowed them for wildly celebrating that they were at last a free people? What if they were so joyous that they just had to throw off their clothes and dance with the passion of children for all that had just transpired? What if angels danced with them, laughing uncontrollably in the bliss of their deliverance? What if God never shook the earth to make them tremble, threatening that if even an animal should touch the holy mount it must be stoned, but rather came to them like a wind of Light, gently waking all sleepers with lightness of being, with ecstatic music, in refeshing showers of Love, creating gladness in every heart, comforting the wounded, melting away trauma, singing Love into their bones?

We know now that fear can never birth peace nor lasting goodness. Only Love makes us free and open, compassionate, forgiving and true. Did God need to learn this: or is it us, the ones who continue to honor ancient stories that create suspicious divisions and fear of the divine, dividing humanity and propagating pride? The warrior era, when tribes savagely fought each other to survive, is long gone. We need new stories for a new world so we can live in a profound peace, with hearts wide open to all mankind and the One Pure Source of Existence that is forever harmonious and beautiful, holding 100 billion galaxies in One Infinite, Open Heart: loving all people, cherishing all people, in all people… forever.

REALIZING THE HIGH LAW OF LOVE

WHAT IF LOVE?

What if people start realizing that Love is the higher law and potential of Life and that Love’s nature is always, always, always, to set people free of fear, free of “what they might think” free of constricting self consciousness into the awareness of the harmonious beauty, miraculous nature, and gift-giving of all existence? 

What if the habit of competition: of it is us verses them, drops off in the Light of the nature of everyone seeking the happiness of everyone, so that not only are we free of insecure self-absorption in order to expand in freedom, but everyone around us is… and we live in a world where everywhere we go is home? 

There is NOTHING stopping us from this shift except habit and fear. The more people who have the courage to break out of the corporate habits of competition, the faster this shift will happen. 

How silly to wait for the world to change to make us happy, when all along happiness comes flooding in when we change in order to contribute to the change of the world! Yes! Yes! The Great Yes! and laughter!

THE GODDESS IS PRAYING YOU

My dream of you is of beauty,
with your shy and silent heart,
and the divine quiet I sense
in your deep and curious eyes,
gazing upon me with wonder,
receiving me, a man who
loves you more then you can know…
receiving you into my heart and mind
as the sweet medicine you are… woman.
The Goddess is praying you even as you
are praying her, loving her sweet quality
of Love, & her wild, innocent freedom
that I can see in your eyes
when you are most vulnerable.
If you should melt open suddenly
your light would lift me
into the soft, invincible strength I am,
unknowing and in constant amazement
because of beauty, beauty, beauty
singular and clear, shining in your
naked strength.

Sexual Health: The Sacred Door To Paradise

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Albert Camus

For thousands of years humanity has repressed its own sexual nature with taboos, projected judgments and all manner of fear based punishments. This has created repression on one hand and reactive selfish lust on the other. Repression and addiction are the two abuses, or ditches on either side of the road of healthy reality. The really tragic thing is that this central road, that is so little known, consists of all that is natural, innocently pure, vibrantly life-giving, beautiful, and normal.

Religion, which is supposed to represent the Divine Creator, is the worst offender. Just look at the repressive, fear-based moralistic codes, behavior, thought processes, and even the dress-codes of all “Orthodox” believers: whether Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian Catholic, or Protestant. What a paradox. These people all believe they are the ones who most truly represent the Creative Being who lavishes the Universe with sensual beauty and has designed the human body to be so utterly sensuous, ecstatic, beautiful and pure. These people sincerely believe that they somehow are mirroring the divine mind and nature with their repressive, fearful, and judgmental natures.

This repressive/addictive pattern, so deeply established in our collective psyche, has far reaching implications and effects. Sex is the divinely designed life-force energy. This means, the Divine Source of all has dreamed it up. We have been conceived through sex, developed inside a woman’s body, and issued into this world through her sacred yoni. Our first instinct for survival is to find our mother’s soft breasts and suck milk from them. These are formative instincts and experiences to our very being and survival. They are hardwired inside us. The body/mind system instinctively knows all of sex and embodiment is beautiful, life-giving, desirable, healthy and good — and is therefore delightful. When the mind is turned against this instinctual knowing with feelings of fear, wrongness, or shame, there is a devastating twisting that happens in the human energetic constitution. And when this twisting is made sacred… well, what a mess!

With men a repressed sexuality ultimately leads to both the degradation of women and a secret addictive desire for them. Turning your mind against your own instinctual intelligence and nature most often leads to violence born of frustration on one hand, and the crippling of guilt, shame and fear on the other. A repressed masculine can easily turn these deep inner conflicts out onto the world, onto others, onto all those different, into class warfare, into violent wars.

With women, men’s repressive influences have resulted in a loss of knowing how beautiful they really are as feminine faces of the Divine, taboos about being in touch with their own healthy, ecstatic sexual natures, social typecasting, all manner of fear-based restrictions, being typecast by men’s fantasies, being classified and judged by shifting social standards of beauty, and in the case of reactions against all this, swinging out of feminine receptive and nurturing qualities into aggressive masculine ones.

These facts cannot be denied, and that they have far-reaching repercussions must be realized and faced. Because of this alienation from natural healthiness we suffer, all of us suffer. In a very real way our deep archetypical yearnings for a lost paradise are connected to our longings to regain a primal innocence of being, to live as fully spiritual/physical people at peace with both our sensuous and spiritual natures.

How do we regain wholeness is such a world when a love of innocence is construed as pedophilic; a man’s love of the feminine form is typecast as being pornographic; a desire for sexual healing and health for the unmarried has no socially accepted outlets?

We must create new patterns together, with clear intentions, and have the courage to manifest in our own lives whole new ways of being: fully natural; wholly healing and happy; gloriously free. A few examples would be the naturalization of tantric massage as a healthy outlet for those not in a committed relationship. Also the naturalization of nudity on all beaches and places of swimming. It doesn’t take long acclimate to natural nudity with its inherent instinct for naked, open honesty as well. Also, wise women giving sexual/spiritual training and initiation for adolescents that connects their newly awakened powerful sexual drives to their deeper instinct to surrender open to Life itself — in all its highs, depths, mystery and divine dimensions.

Let’s create a new world, a sane one, a spiritually naturalized one that embraces all of Life with Love at last. Let’s break the patterns of this insanity we have “normalized” for so long that the natural feels unnatural and the unnatural natural. We know now — don’t we?— that this is just not right and doesn’t work. Let’s begin where we are to change things and let sanity grow.

TO CRUEL, ASTONISHING NATURE ALONE

Nature alone, apart from the Great Love,
is not kind. She can be abundant…
of this there is no doubt. I presently live
amongst her ample bounty here in Greece
where pears are dropping off trees onto the stone
streets, but this is not so
for many black skinned brothers and sisters
in Africa who are currently suckling bloated children
on dry breasts and sit on burning stones
staring at the burning sky.
There are many places where the human body
is mere mosquito food,
the human eye just a glistening fountain
from which flies drink.
Nature is not a kind mother, but wildly neurotic:
for she can softly coo to us of sublime beauty
in the golden light
which she splashes over our skin
when she disrobes for night,
or as she silently rolls from starry dark
into the yellow blaze of day;
and then turn and drown us in an angry river,
or burn us with a blazing mountain,
or beat us down with hail.
She gave us our body, and she will take it back,
turning it into slime, into a fecund mass
that slowly drips from its eye holes and bones.
I love Nature, though she has almost drowned me
in wild seas, almost fried me with lightning,
almost swept me away in the brown froth
of violent rivers.
If I did not sense some higher nature
coming through myself to love her
into kindness, to gentle her down,
would I love her truly?
I see many of her symbols:
the broken seed, the worm and its wings,
the fruitful trees that drink from dark roots
even as they lightly scratch the face of sky.
And yet, apart from the young Life of God
moving through to open me
I would not learn faith from her,
but the cynical despair so prevalent
within the darker circle of her rough arms.

URI’S BLESSING

November 5, 2009, Blagoevgrad, Bugaria

I had just lost a lot of cracked corn
to my landlord, because it is normal
to take what you can from any pancaked drifter,
and not to think of another,
but smother them with smiles…
until money comes into the fray.
And it’s a fine contest
to be waged on any country day
to get the last penny, to beat the other down,
because what is fair
is no concern, nor part of the rules of this game,
but rather, how much
is in it for me, and can I become crafty enough
to clamp it down and drag it in?
I shook off my shock and rise of rage
and walked to the park
where Uri, the accordion player,
sat every day, singing out his heart
for a few coins so worthless they are nothing
but a nuisance in the pocket
of those who passed by with their
minds obviously in avoidance modalities.
And Uri saw me coming and called out my name
for I had sat with him times before —
I mean just trying to be a little more
than another passing shadow.
And there was blessing in his voice
for it came from an open heart.
I put a handful of coins on his box and he was so grateful
that he blessed my name again and again,
speaking it with the warmth of affectionate Love.
Though the language he spoke
was without meaning in my ears,
yet it rang with music and shown on that cold day
like the sun’s warmth deep into my mind.
I let him know with gestures I was leaving.
So he said many words of Love upon me, and hugged me.
The smell of a traveler was in his rough coat:
countless fires, misty mornings, frost and damp earth.
Then I gave him an envelope of money
just because I had lost so much
and refused to let the old fear of want win…
and I wanted to bless this man
and remember with good his leathery face
and gravely voice, like those of the poor everywhere.
He looked in it… and his eyes watered.
And I saw in them at that moment
his suffering and the greatness of his loneliness,
and the mystery of Love.
He could not speak at first… but his eyes
glistened with emotion, and he embraced me,
crying out my name to the birds, to angels…
to the wind.
Then he kissed my hand and hugged me
again, and again, until a prayer suddenly arose in him
that transfigured his voice, for it held
the secret power of those who suffer scorn
and still love: And his voice had gained the strength of millions,
as for a moment time stopped
as he cried out of his heart for the poor of the world
who refuse this dark called selfishness,
and dare to live with open hearts —
to receive what little Life gives that they might survive
this day, and yet turn, and give,
bestowing a blessing, and giving again.
And in that moment he became something other:
a holy man, a prophet in rags: innocently unaware
of who he really is: the great God in rags, the Holy in disguise.
*
I believe Uri’s prayer has changed my Life
for good, for good… for Love’s good.
May his prayer reach you.
May his prayer bring you Love.

THE GREAT DANCE

There is a dance. Its movement is the wheeling stars,
the thrash of trees in a gale, the weave of swallows,
the surge of rivers and tides of the sea,
the silver flash of a fish, the ecstatic play of dolphins.
It is the movement of hands to heal bodies and hearts,
the tender touch of one finger, the slow way a flower bud
lets go and softens,
the magical movement of a man’s fearless strength
and a woman’s twirling freedom melting
into something that trembles alive, softer then flowers.
I love it when you let everything fall away
and become the dance of sky,
Earth, sea in arms, hips, whirling legs — the dance itself in flesh.
Your eyes are sky. Your mind the magical mirror
in which a god or goddess gazes
with innocent eyes and weeps and laughs,
so in love with stories, with dramatic games!
Oh… may I read this book of Life to the world with you:
may we sing it, chant it, dance it, sculpt, it, act it — write it into being.
This is the way of beautify growing to transform all things.
This is the final triumph of insubstantial dream
becoming clouds of ecstatic birds,
the lick of a lion on the face of a lamb, the eyes of children
as windows to the face of God.
We are dying into Pure Being: melting, settling in:
we are awakening.
This is the Way of Love’s wild, creative happening.
This is the birth of a great and beautiful Freedom.

Blake Steele