Gathering the 9 of the Earth

Like a good jazz riff all I can do is find my own story within the masonic one and see what music it makes.

As a child, from my earlest school age I attended a jewish yeshiva. This means that my natural inborn spiritual insights wrestled that particular rigidity and developed great affection for the underlying ripeness of instruction from old stories like these.

Perhaps at 6 or 7 my graceful experience of god came full blossomed against what the teacher was instructing. One of the key principles I paid attention to was his warning never to utter the name of god except during prayer. So in common speech the word of this 4 lettered god went from hashem- which just means the name- to adonai when in prayer. What was this magic thing called prayer that allowed me to speak the unspeakable? How peculiar.

In writing as well the name of god was not the real name but was represented by two yods- the tenth letters of the hebrew alphabet- which makes me smile when I hear about Enochs two pillars. Those letters look like pillars, and on them are instructions that lead one to the unspeakable through all the square doors of the human mind.

Part of me now recoils that we spent so much time on the stupid doors…the laws, the order of the services and we never made it into the sacred triangle. Where was the heart, the juice, the refuge? Why didn’t the prayers make me feel better except to know that I had been a good boy and said them?

I knew before they told me the name of god cannot be spoken. This isn’t because some punishing deity is offended or because we aren’t allowed into that presence but for some secret secret that only following the 4square laws opens. It took me years to realize this. To realize what I knew all along, that one lives god. His name isn’t spoken simply because that puts that force outside and not in the center.

What I loved about the early teaching on th epolitical correctness of ‘god’ was the obvious tension never spoken that builds between all those square rules and passageways and that which just IS.
How many paths have I gone down…too many, where either the rules or the love/surrender was out of balance- one focused on making the other its shadow. Only through the kan and li teaching have I been able to rest inside those two pillars and enter the triangle where my Beloved god is and return to the place I started.

Perhaps that is all I hope for…to learn to recognize and enjoy the tension between this embodiment and the mysterious. The named and the silent.
To discover inside the tension the center of who I am now. Barry

Yes. A great title…eating god. Alchemical work was the first that really encouraged me to digest my experiences more than classify and respond to them as the polarities of the mind. Lower chakra higher chakras. This is a sin, this is a virtue.This is an aversion this is an attraction.

The word fear jumped off the page of your exploration and that does seem to me the opposite of alchemy/love. Fear pits me against myself.As this happens over and over then what strategies are there? Yes, digesting the smaller pieces, I agree. I tend to want to eat the whole enchilada and scare myself silly,of my own shadow, but that’s me.

When I began kan and li work I was holding onto a safe marriage with grown kids, a successful business. Now I am divorced, happily on both sides, have mature kids and am just tying up ends to leave the country of my birth and begin anew…business, partner and land.

My point is by eating the little things I have taken bites out of the bigger scarier ones. Instead of concentrating on moving from someplace inside of me that I have aversion too to a place I am attracted I have had to invest more in the center.This is because the pain gets greater and greater the more change there is. There is more at stake, more life and fear…well fear, he is one slippery bastard. Barry

A discussion of fear is well put for not only my intimate personal time but for the planet as a whole. Of course,thank you, I accept there is no getting around fear as a valuable and needed ingredient in our soup. Without it I would be unbound and not discerning enough to recognize caution when caution is due.
The fear I am wading through doesn’t feel like my fear. Or rather it feels like my fear magnified exponentially by other forces that lurk on the edges of my Mind. I am not thinking of me as victim here as much as forces I have agreed to harbor out of ignorance.
FOr example the fear I discover in my bones when I breathe here at this point in my development feels ancestral and out of my control. WHat I mean is I easily go to an overwhelm place when encountering it and just nibble as Wendy said on what it is I can digest.This fear feels like fear of just plain being in the body.
While I am in the kan and li to move and awaken to this level I find myself making offerings to certain past human stories stirring in my blood. I can’t tell at times whether I am making my boundaries stronger and more individuated by doing this or more porous and prey to the powerful emotional forces of this past. I just return to smiling and simple orbital circulations though as my small mind cannot contain what my shimmering body can. I guess trust as a virtue is being grown.
This ancestral work connects to the other fear that I am facing which is of truer more authentic expression of my inner ‘healer’ in service to others. It feels more than something locked in my own and family’s skeletons… something bigger I have avoided facing since I knew myselves on this deepest level in relation to others.
WHat I mean is the move I am making in my life isn’t finding resistance in any of the immediate relationships like in the past. No screaming father, no unsupportive partner, no dependent child. Even the government is supportive with visa etc. One would think I should just be gliding into destiny. But there is only the clearing away of one struggle and waking to the more real one. WHy does this fear cripple me? What karma am I facing here?
These are the questions I face and am grateful that inner alchemy has appeared as tool extraordinaire.It is slow. It is many deaths and all that brings. But I guess what strikes me as personal and I pray universal…for me to have made the moves I am there is also a lot of grace supporting me. A grace that is also more than me and magnifies my virtues and not just my fears.
I don’t want to think in a ploarized way, or respond like that at least, but to whatever degree there is this magnification of fear and doubt there appears to also be something that wants to be born. Maybe it is all the same force in the end but damn it feels like a warzone most of the time.
At least that is what I see as I peer out of the bunker. Barry

I am being reminded often of this piont. Look at nature is there one creature the life force did not provide for, and did not give it the tools to prosper. Does an animal need to look any where but with in him self for the answer to his prosperity.

I have worked in sales for about four years now, and yes I still have a soul.:) Most Likly because I do not work in car sales.:) Talk about the subtle understanding of manipulations the guys that have been doing sales for years can see manipulation coming from a mile away. If you get the chance to work in sales do it, if you are open you will learn so much. I am about the end of my run with it but have learn much. You can start to see the importance of polls, building consensus, and affirming decisions you wanted them to make, making them feel accepted. Trust your instincts accept your self. I could write a book on manipulations of fear, but there are so meany already out there. If you would like to see natural sales watch your kid convince you to let them do some thing, did they take no for an answer.:)

yaba daba do, secret chanting of the buffalo lodge.

peace be with you.

Wendy,your passion and courage is stimulating. Kvetching is in my blood. It is the source of all jewish comedy. But I recognize this patience of the Fool, the child and the dwarf. Like Dog says we are all provided for so yabba dabba do.

I want to share a fairy tale I took part in this spring in China with Michael’s Chi Trippers. I have needed more and more time and distance to chew on this but your mention of dwarves shook my memory back to those caves.

The Setup-

Once arrived at the mountains of Huashan the timetables for cave dwelling shifted from our initial reservations. I was to stay at the cave site for one and possibly two days out of four. As things worked themselves through I stayed for all 4 days and nights. It was the highlight of my trip, the highlight of my cultivated practice,and probably the highlight of moving on this planet.

The Cave-

The cave that took me in was a social one. It was large, perhaps topping at thirty feet in height and another thirty in diameter. Among the 5 or 6 caves available, the taoist monk in residence maintained his services at this altar. AS a result, its energies were circulating by the time I arrived and the space used to human interaction.

On the first night with bowed head I offered myself to the cave, a bit cowed at applying my own practices to the unique resonance of these stones. What if I were to offend or stir up forces I could not defend against? Those distracting seeds had been planted in stories that had circulated.

This shifted quickly. What I noticed was the cave didn’t pay any attention to me until I showed up. Showing up meant doing my thing naked- without apologies and with as much respectful noise as I make.

I danced. I opened up sinew and tendon to each corner of the cave. My eyes darted both inside and out of this being, up down and all around. It began 4 days of plugging in and asking tough questions, facing my own reflection and seeing beyond.

On the third day there was to be a changing of the guard. What I mean is Michael was guiding ten more pilgrims on a rainy hike to replace the first batch of cave dwellers which I was one. I didn’t know if I would be allowed to stay. My hesitant one night commitment over the internet months before seemed silly considering that only after two days did I get properly introduced and entrained to the energies of cave, mountain and monk.

I spent that early fog laden morning practicing deep healing chi kung without clothes on the highest ridge above the cave. The sound of chinese tourists screaming with exultation or pride of their climb echoed from the far cliffs.

Back in the cave I waited for Michael by napping on my wooden cot. I set myself to dream by asking the cave to show me its origins. What after the dust settled was the source of this. It was not a linear question as it had layers upon layers of meaning for me. Mostly I was searching for some unifying vision that I could digest. Something not too chinese and therefore leave behind. Where was I connecting too? Where is my new earth?

The Dream-

This cave had a large statue possibly 15 feet tall. As I slept I moved in the dream to its right side in an inconspicuous corner. From out of the dark, in front of me appeared a large round hole. I peered in. Seated were small dwarfish people, actually not dwarves a la Tolkien, but bald people. More like the elderly who appear wizened and childlike as they age.

“Come on down.”

I shifted on the edge,dizzy awash in a wave of terror. I woke. Michael walked into the cave with the new group wet and worn from the hike. I stared blankly into space unable to give voice to my deeply unfinished business. Unable to ask for more time- imagining Michael would ask me to make room for another, I surrendered to the group and what was to be. I wasn’t surprised that my staying was not even an issue brought up. I had work to do getting back to that edge.

I spent the next couple days deeply in practice of communication through movement, prayer, chanting, bell ringing and being. On the last night on the pathway outside I stared up at the stars as every one else slept.That quasi meditative exploration took life in the yin of the night and I called upon those earth people.

The message-

I walked to the edge of the hole in the earth and climbed down its spiralic sides. There they were seated, waiting for me or maybe just being. It wasn’t with words but with images and feelings. I saw the planets, the milky way the origins of…the center of kan and li practice deriving from a great distance. A gift. A sense of universal inclusion.
And time…in the center there was no time.

The lesson-

The center. Patience. Inevitability. Unfoldment. Safe refuge. Dare to become the furthest reaches of who I am. Not only was there not a mountain I was leaving as its origins were of the universe but there was no time slipping away even though the night was moving through its course and my time in the mountain was nearing an end.

I must let the telling of this grow through me. If you made it to the end, thanks for witnessing, barry