ORIGINAL BLISS

Being in Amusement

Once upon a time... a long, long time ago...

there was a period in my life when I started having intense and frequent intuitive revelations and premonitions.

Our spiritual senses; clairvoyance, clairsentience, telepathy, etc... are natural gifts that we all have, but we forsake them and let them atrophy because we let our physical senses wear the pants during our living experience.

So although "psychic" phenomena wasn't really new to me, my abilities became so dominant in my life that it kind of scared me. I didn't have names for what was happening... I didn't have control. I couldn't turn it off or on. It would blindside me at inconvenient times.

Rather than seek out a psychiatrist ~ who would have medicated me and suppressed these valid skills ~ I decide to attend some classes to understand and direct it for myself. If you ever watch Psychic Kids and A&E, they do this for youngsters who are "out of control" psychics.

The classes I attended taught many tools for centering and owning your beingness in life. They offered a safe place to explore these abilities... to let them out of the closet and play.

One of these tools was called "Being in Amusement"... and I am amused when I confess I had forgotten all about this tool until very recently.

I have gotten sooooooo caught up in being serious! All of my life has been serious business that must be brought under control and managed. Seriousness is a heavy energy. It is like being cloaked in a fog... with an ominous fog horn sounding in the background. With seriousness comes worry, fretting, effort, rigidity, and overall "poopiness".

"Being in Amusement" is a Zen Buddhist / Sufi way of living your life. Zen and Sufism use humor and laughter in viewing and dealing with the human situation and themselves. As Thomas Moore points out in his book "Dark Nights of the Soul," Zen Buddhists and Sufis can see irony in the most serious situations and their laughter frees their compassion and liberates them from worry.

As I look at some of the heavy situations that dance around me, I am looking through the dark glass, lightly. "Where can I find the irony in this?" "How can a be in amusement as I move through and past it?"

This week I have found some amusement. It has lifted the cloak from around my heart and put a smile on my face.

Namaste,

C H E Z

Dear Diary....

I am craving good times, with good friends...

 

here are some notes on a new meditation technique I am practicing...

 

I liked this list of "25 Things Every Woman Should Know" that I found in Elle and decided to save it forever and add some of my own.

My favorites: #9, #12, #24

and my own: "Trust in your faith and remember who you are."

 

I have been craving living water as much as I do air to breath...

 

I have been reading Keats...

 

and Oscar Wilde...

 

I have so much to say, but don't have the language to say it.

So I lay it all down in you,

in paint and in glue.

 

In symbols only my soul understands...

 

and ideas that I don't want to forget.

 

Namaste,

C H E Z

Theos Ek Mechanes

"In some Greek dramas, a god showed up out of nowhere to cause a miraculous twist at a crucial point in the tale. This divine intrusion was referred to as theos ek mechanes, literally "god from a machine," because the symbolic figure of the god was lowered onto the stage by a crane. In modern usage, the term is Latin ~ deus ex machina ~ and refers to a story in which a sudden event brings about a resolution to a problem."

Rob Brezsny

"PRONOIA is the antidote for paranoia - How The Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings"

I found this little nugget during my morning hunt for inspiration while the coffee was brewing. It reminded me that I need to leave room on my stage for God to drop down from a crane.

Can I get a little drumroll with my divine intervention?

Namaste,

C H E Z

 

Image Transfers

 

I had this dream.

It lasted all night.

I was creating image transfers;

finding images of families, of couples, of dancers, of beautiful people. Some of them were in settings of nature, some at parties, some alone and thoughtful.

I layered them with my brush of gel medium.

One coat.

Another.

Then another.

Until they were frozen in that time and place.

Then I bathed them in a pool of warm water, loosening them from the setting that they had grown comfortable in.

I methodically peeled the setting away from my chosen one.

I trimmed away the remnants of that other place, sometimes removing the people they had been with, then I lay them in a new setting... maybe alone, maybe with new people.

In my dream, I did this over and over, taking my subjects from one life and placing them in another. Did I think the life I created for them was better? Did I ask if they minded?

One of the images before me was a movie. The people were speaking to each other. It wasn't a happy conversation, some kind of dissatisfaction and dissonance. But the woman was beautiful in her anger... powerful... she deserved a better place, one with more harmony.

I layered her with my brush of gel medium. She was like a fly caught in a web. Once captured, I bathed her in my warm pool and extricated her from the discord.

"Where are you taking me," she asked.

"To a better place," I replied.

"But I wasn't done with that other place yet."

 

 Good thing it was only a dream...

...

Namaste,

C H E Z

The Way of the Mystic

Imagine that the world is a great circle. We alight into our human experience on its surface unknowing and uncaring of any god’s existence and begin walking the circumference of this plane. Like a giant wheel, this circle, and at some point during our journey on its rim, we happen upon a spoke that represents a particular religious faith.

Being born in America, our secular culture exposes us to the spoke that represents Christianity.  Easter brings a bunny and decorated eggs with the mention of a man who, though crucified, was raised again. Christmas summons a visit from Santa, presents if you are “good,” and another, “oh-by-the-way, it happens to be Jesus’ birthday.” God gets a shout out when one pledges allegiance to the Red, White and Blue. The Academy Awards arrive, and here’s Jesus again, called upon in thanksgiving because he enjoyed that blockbuster so much he gets the credit for every winner’s win.

As many as 76% of Americans are formally exposed to this spoke called Christianity upon arriving in the home environment. Our parents teach us the simplified tenets of their faith, lead us in our bedtime prayers, and guide us into a church for more formal teaching. Some of us, disenchanted with the contridictions and hypocrisy we find there, reject all things "church". Some of us actively engage in acquiring this theologic knowledge until we are asked to step fully into that belief structure of our own accord and apply those teachings to our life. There we sit, at our particular spoke on the wheel, content just to have a designated space on the surface.

But there are some of us who hear a calling that emanates from the hub of the wheel. A faint tone at first, that resonates at our core, stirs the soul, and refuses to release its pull. Exoteric structure and fundamentalist dogma no longer fulfill us. We intuitively yearn for something more. So we turn inward, toward the hub, penetrating the rigid membrane of the circle to enter the realm of the esoteric.

We travel the path of the mystic.

We turn away from rules and into the possibility. We don't find solid, pat answers. We make discoveries, which lead to questions, which lead to more discoveries... and more questions. The mystic yearns for the personal experience of divinity. We seek to embrace it, contain it, to walk with it through our daily lives, and shower it into the world we greet there.

As we move inward toward the source at the hub, we begin to take notice of the other spokes on the wheel. Where the view from the outer radius of the exoteric revealed only the vast differences that divide the spokes of different faiths, the view from the inner radius reveals their similarities. The mystic sees the underlying unity in all spiritual paths and realizes that the closer we move to the hub, the less the externals of religion matter. We see that every religion was born of a mystic and they all point us in the same direction.

The exoteric realm cannot be disregarded. Often times is the first place where our foot meets the path, where our flesh meets the soul. It is a fertile ground in which the seed of our spirituality can be planted. Once planted in this ready soil, Source calls us to deepen our roots into the richer, vaster Kingdom within. The deeper our roots, the higher our branches reach to the heavens and the more vibrant our blossoms grow.

Namaste,

C H E Z