Ancient Baptismal Bowls

In the “Sacred Relics and Icons” section of this website are recent images of fifth and sixth century baptismal bowls preserved at archaeological sites. You probably know that Christianity was vastly different then. The divinity of Jesus was a hotly contested topic. The practice of full immersion baptism of adults was in general use. Each of these ancient bowls had fallen out of use and had been abandoned.

I decided to restore these ancient bowls and began to explore them by getting inside one of them some years ago. To my surprise, the bowl immediately came alive and offered me a powerful blessing not dissimilar from my own baptism experience as an adult in my early fifties. However, there was an important difference. The ancient bowl offered an almost overpowering female energy, an effusive blessing which was generous, gentle, quiet, and soft. Each of the bowls presented here offers a variation of this blessing.

You may discover that each time you sit with one of these recordings the blessing deepens and deepens. These wondrous energies date back to the origins of Christianity.

Experiencing This Website

Recently I have been updating this website and I want to offer new visitors guidance about the use of three sections of this website.

First, I want to look at the Healing Gifts. Hundreds of people use this section of the website every year from North America, Europe and to some extent from Asia. The foundational offering in the ‘Healing Gifts’ are the brain-stem healings. These are meant to calm you, to ground you, and to locate you in your body. I suggest you listen to them as a meditation. They have no information or ideas. Rather, these are silent, energetic offerings of a process to calm you and grow your awareness.

Second, a new section called Sacred Relics and Icons offers an experience of merging with sacred structures. It's pure experience within a process of communion. No information is presented, only a silent emanation which will slowly embrace you.

Third, a new section on the website has been posted in the last few weeks called Earth Healings. Each is witnessed by Sasa Petejan. We offer you an opportunity to also witness these remote healings at natural disasters. I use news photos and maps to identify the destruction and then I locate the souls of the dead. Energetically, I visit with these traumatized souls and help them ‘home’.

A Fourth Short Talk About The Invisible World

A Third Short Talk About The Invisible World

During this talk I summarize my experience inside the invisible world. I also summarize my point of view about the efficacy of prayer.

I hope you have the time to watch this entire half hour. Its one of the best of my talks of the last thirty years or so.

A Second Short Talk About The Invisible World

The first talk summarized my motivation for wanting to enter the invisible world. This second talk is about how I learned to navigate inside the invisibility.

I hope my voice is clearer and stronger for you in this talk. Sometimes my advanced age is a distraction.

I am trying to be simple and direct about a topic that is burdened with a lot of nonsense.

A Short Talk About The Invisible World

This is a thirty-minute talk about my recent book “Into The Eye Of God.” It was recorded on Zoom early in a cold morning in Northern California toward the end of 2023. The talk takes place within a group energy bubble which we call a consciousness container. Please join us within our bubble.

You do not need to read the book to understand the talk. Further talks in this series will be posted.

Another Death Anniversary

June 1 is the death anniversary of my first teacher. Gussie Feldman died in the late afternoon of June1, 1955. Seventeen years later, I was thirty and her student Harriet Feldman held a telepathic ceremony during which Gussie’s final wishes were made known to me. As I approach another death anniversary, I recapitulate the sadness and the loneliness of her death.

A Short Talk About "Activist Mysticism"

Last week, I gave a small talk about my first book, Activist Mysticism. It is a collection of talks given during a decade of teaching to diverse audiences. I tried to express in words the unspoken, and I needed a context which might give coherence. Well, the context is in the poem at the beginning of the book.   

I am returning from pilgrimage.

I traveled tens of thousands of miles. Literally, in fact. Not mythical. I had spent a great deal of time on airlines and at airports,

I bring you blessings from Al-Andalus.

I traveled to southern Spain to the great mosque at Cordoba. Nothing happened at that mosque to speak of. I was in search of what was unspoken. I was in search of some hint of the Sufi saints. Then the poem goes on.

I bring you fire from Berat

Berat is a city in Albania where Sabbatai Zevi is buried. And then the poem goes on.

 I bring you truth from Skopje

Skopje is in Macedonia where Nathan of Gaza is buried.

So, what is this all about? I'm in an ongoing conversation with Jesus of Nazareth, Ibn Arabi, Sabbatai Zevi, Nathan of Gaza and Jacob Frank and to my teachers Gussie and Don Manuel. This is ongoing. It never stops.

Your challenge is to learn how to listen. I'll give you an example of it. I was invited by a young man to visit him in Southern India maybe 15 years ago or so. I went to his ashram and was with him for about 10 days. He insisted that I sleep in his bed, and he slept on the floor next to me in his private apartment. Otherwise, I didn't see him much. One day when it was getting to be time for me to leave, he came to me and said that he had a gift, a teaching for me.

We got together at the fountain inside the ashram. It was hot and there was a lot of mosquitoes. Milling around us were a bunch of his American devotees. They were asking him questions. They wanted to know, who I was, what I was doing at his ashram and why he and I were spending time together. Finally, he dismissed them as if they too were more mosquitoes. As we were sitting at the fountain, he told me a story about an ancient village in that part of Southern India. The story was simple. The villagers were disturbed by some kind of negativity and decided that they needed protection, so they created two energies situated at the entrance to the village. These energies protected the village. The story ended and my host was quiet. The heat was really bothering me and so were the mosquitoes. It was time for me to get out of the sun. I remember walking away not having any clue what was going on.

On the long plane ride back to San Francisco I still had no clue. And then sometime later, I don't know if it was a month or a week, in the presence of a negative energy, I found myself replicating what this guru had described. I can replicate that to this day. And I can do it very rapidly. When I replicate one of these energies, it remains in place if I anchor it in place. Or I can return and dissolve it when it's no longer needed.

What is that all about? I have no idea what it's about, except to say that I was given a teaching, an instruction, and I carry that teaching.

I'm now a carrier. This guru is a carrier from his teachers. The individuals I talk about in this poem are carriers from their teachers. These teachings are available. None of them is lost.

Activist Mysticism is an invitation to understand that there is an immense amount of hidden teaching if you can learn how to listen, how to be open, how to receive it. None of it is obvious and none of it is hidden.

I have memorialized this teacher without giving his name. I'm not sure he would have liked me to give his name. He's now dead and I have preserved this teaching.

Within the pages of this book, there's a lot of gifting. Some of it is simply to help you with your understanding, with your awareness. Some of it is more practical. None of it is about the material life. There is nothing about self-help. There's nothing about psychology. There's nothing about medical issues. It's other than that. It's about the fire. It's about the fire of God.

I learned how to listen at a little brook in a remote mountain area.  I would sit and listen to the noise of this brook. And the noise changed seasonally depending on the snow melt. It was a remote place where I was undisturbed. I would go and listen, sometimes once a week, sometimes three times a week. It was a two hour drive each way. and then there was a hike to the brook. For a long time, nothing really happened. Finally, I stopped hearing the brook. I would arrive, sit down on one of the rocks and listen to the noise. Then there was complete silence. And the silence went on until I started to get cramps in my butt or legs from rock sitting or the winter chill would get to me. I would come out of the silence and resume listening to the noise of the brook and then slowly get up and leave. What I learned was never obvious and never immediate and I have teachings gifted to me from that brook.

You don’t need to understand what you are learning. You don’t have to explain it. You don’t have to remember it. You won't forget it and when you need it, it will be there for you.

Sacred Relics and Icons

Recently we added a new section to our website called Sacred Relics and Icons. As we visit more of these relics and icons, we will be adding more videos.

Here's what happens. As video is recording, I'm addressing the relic or icon by ‘dancing’ inside its energy field. I ask it to wake up, to come alive, to remember why it was created and what it is capable of offering. As the video continues you may experience a more intense or embracing emanation and you may want to allow yourself a greater vulnerability in the presence of its healing gifts.

Try not to understand or analyze these recordings. Each video presents a mystery which will remain a mystery. Each energy is faithfully reproduced and will become more nuanced with repeated viewing.

 My bucket list of videos is limited by restrictions on video cameras. At this moment we are continuing to record in the Balkans and Italy.

Into The Eye Of God

I hope by now you’ve had a chance to read my new book, Into the Eye of God. In this blog I want to write about a comment from one of my readers. She said that I hadn't explained what the sacred is. So, I will try again.

I'm talking about my experience. I don't have any other basis for conveying what I mean by the sacred. The key here is my experience. That is the sole basis for my writing. With that in mind I have been trying to find words for what's essential in my experience of the sacred. Essentially the sacred is to me, a great silence. It's an absence of sound. In fact, sound disturbs my experience of the sacred, so I prefer to be quiet and in a location that is as noiseless as possible. However, natural sounds, wind noise, bird noise, don’t disturb my experience of the sacred.

The sacred is an extraordinary emptiness. Paradoxically, the sacred is also incredibly rich, vibrant, alive, active, dynamic and fluid in the midst of its silence and emptiness. It is constantly changing in ways that are a continual surprise to me. It's not just quiet and empty. It's a rich, complex, and lively terrain filled with multiple dimensions or realities or realms.  

At the time in my life when I left the ‘spirit world’ I explored what I refer to in my new book as God's Eye. At first, my exploration of the sacred was for my own amusement and curiosity. I discovered that I know how to voyage in the realms of the sacred, a knowing without knowing I inherited from my mother’s family. I also discovered that I learn all sorts of things as I explored.

The sacred has an intelligence with rules and systems. But it is without purpose, point or direction. It simply is. Early on, I realized that the sacred was not obligated to me or anyone else. All activity is entirely independent of my wishes or anyone's wishes. And then unexpectedly, the sacred may take an action that is an intervention in human affairs.

The sacred never agreed to listen to me or respond to me. It never agreed to pay attention to my prayers. My reverence is not based on anything the sacred has or hasn't done for me or anyone else. My service has no payoff or payback. I'm writing this from inside the sacred. Hopefully, as you read, you can sense my experience of its magnificence.

Ghosts At The New Year

Perhaps 30 years ago, I was in the mountains of southeastern New Mexico. It was cold and snowy that first day of the new year and I was traveling with Tim and Cara Collier. We visited a neglected cemetery, long abandoned, in which were buried German POWs from World War Two who had died at a nearby prison. Their graves were marked and unattended, dozens and dozens of them. I recall being unhappy because I was under-dressed and confused finding German POWs buried in New Mexico.

Then I noticed that the cemetery was full of ghosts.

 The ghosts are the souls of the men who had died a traumatic death. For an hour or more I lingered, visiting with these confused souls as I shivered in the cold mountain air. It was my task to explain that it was time for each soul to go on. There was no need to continue, confused and wandering at the cemetery

 I gently nudged each soul into what I experienced as a white light and witnessed each soul as it was absorbed within the light. I simply waited until all of the souls had been absorbed and then I left the cemetery with the Colliers.

It's that time of year for me to visit another abandoned cemetery.In the last ten years I have made these visits with another of the Colliers, JR Collier, but he died recently so I may be going alone this year.

A Relationship With A Tree

It may be that you have an interest in developing relationships within the natural world. My particular interest has been in cultivating relationships with redwood trees, old growth redwood trees. It's important, by the way, that you are somewhere which is not electromagnetically polluted. You must get away from microwaves and you must get away from cell phone service.

 Let me now describe the mirroring process with a tree. If you're patient, it becomes clear that you and a particular tree, have a resonance with each other, a recognition without explanation.  Residing in this resonance creates the opportunity for witnessing a delicate, intuitive process of just showing up at the tree with a respectful focus.

 Relationship with a tree is not like a relationship with a human. A tree will not project on you. It doesn't have intimacy issues and wants nothing. So whatever fears and suspicions and hesitancies you have about a relationship with a tree, is really what you're bringing.

 Let's go forward here. You have been witnessing, experiencing the presence that develops between you and the tree. A silence emerges. Now you can offer relationship to a tree. Be patient and free of expectation. We know instinctively how to mirror, how to imitate. Over time, if you're fortunate, the tree will respond to your mirroring by becoming a mirror of itself. And then it reflects what it has received.

  At that point, you must relax into the back and forth and experience the tree’s offering, itself, as it's seen by you. If you're not anxious or greedy, the mirroring back and forth will proceed at an unpredictable pace. It can be slow; it can be rapid. It can be disrupted. I've had the process disrupted by tourists wanting a photo of the tree.

I have engaged in this process now for three decades. I learned it after I fell in love with California Redwoods. There is one more step here. It's possible for me as a mirror to magnify the intensity of my mirroring. By doing that, I change the quality of the energy that's flowing. It becomes more intense, more refined. Over time, I am changed. So is the tree.

Spiritual Development

This is a transcript of a talk I gave in April 2017 weeks before a week-long retreat I held at the Ratna Ling Conference Center.

Two weeks ago I had spoken to you in very candid terms about the current state of my teaching and I also talked about really what I'm open to with the group of you. Which is that I would like to be available to help you pass through the veil and stay there. To help you to live within the sacred. Because of the quality of the material world we live in, it's the kind of issue that in your life, you really need some facilitation. That's what I really would like to do with you. That requires that you get your life in order. You have to live a life that doesn't stress you and doesn't distract you from what's important and at some point, you let go of your focus on feeling better. You have to feel good enough so you can let go of being focused on that. Your life has to work well enough and you have to get healthy enough and get yourself emotionally in a condition where you can just let go of it because you're okay.

Your life is a platform for you rather than an obstacle. It has to be like that. It has to be a platform for you. But that's not what our culture is about. That's not what the spiritual subculture is that we live in. I know I'm asking something a bit odd. It's a bit challenging to ask you to just get your life in such a state where it supports you rather than always trying to somehow get yourself together. That's a lot to ask.

I'm noticing how much older I'm getting in terms of my stamina. I've got real stamina issues and I have real difficulty speaking and hearing and I have to come out of my quiet to communicate with you. And it's increasingly difficult for me to come out of my quiet. I said two weeks ago that what I'm doing with you is finite. Don't think this will go on for some extended future. There is no extended future for us. It's limited. My wife has been increasingly vociferous about me not doing Ratna Ling because she knows it's too hard on me to lead a retreat by myself for a week. It's just that way at my age. It's too much. I find myself really tired after these teachings. It takes a lot out of me and it takes a lot for me to get ready to do this. I'm asking you, whatever adjustments you have to make in your life that you might otherwise make five years from now, if you can, make it now. There is no five years from now.

Each of you needs to become more embodied than you are. Way more embodied. There has to be a more profound embodiment. Far more profound. Take on some practice. Keep doing it until it doesn't have an impact on you until you're done with it until you've gotten that benefit. Do it as a practice so that you devote your time to it. Don't do it because it feels good. It's not about feeling good.

Embodiment is about connectedness. When you get to the deeper levels of embodiment, it's about Earth connectedness. It's about really allowing yourself to become the animal you are. What is an animal but a being that is Earth connected? And you will naturally connect to the stars. That'll just happen. At this point in your development, you don't have to pay attention to that. That'll just happen to you. That's it. Your species wisdom will just naturally connect you to the stars.

At some point, your species' wisdom will take over. And your embodiment will increase exponentially. You won't have to work on it. You have to get to that point where your species wisdom comes forward. You're trying to develop a practice until your species wisdom takes over and you're deeply embodied in ways that you can't imagine right now.

At some point in your practice of embodiment, species wisdom will come forward. It will grip you. It will take you over and "instinctively" you will find yourself more and more embodied, which is to say, Earth and star connected. And I want you to get to that point because then your experience of the sacred takes on a whole different quality that you can't imagine. You can't imagine it because you have no experience of it. I want you to have that experience of actually living within species wisdom, not as a concept but as your experience.

A Sense Of Place

In the fall of 1986. I rented an old twelve room house in the hills of Sausalito, California. Its second-floor windows and balcony had lovely water views. Hundreds of monarch butterflies stopped at my front garden in springtime and the back garden was frequented by a bobcat. Its main room was large enough for Friday night group ceremonies.  I took to walking the waterfront, late at night and again early in the mornings. Often, walking along the bay I would enter a mysteriously foggy realm accented by a mournful foghorn.

Europeans had arrived in Sausalito in the 1820s and soon began the displacement of local people and destruction of its shoreline. Indigenous burials at the edges of tidal areas and shell mounds above the tide line were understood as nothing more than obstructions to development. Vacant stretches of waterfront were drained and infilled; marsh became yacht basins.

Like many old port towns along San Francisco Bay, Sausalito once had a Barbary Coast. Its downtown restaurants and hotels hosted gambling, prostitution and drug sales. Beaches and marshes hid nighttime drug smuggling. Outlaws like ‘Buckskin’ Frank Leslie had a safe heaven. Artists, poets and musicians were also part of the mix as well as fisherman, merchants and railroad workers. During the Second World War, the waterfront was home to a thriving shipyard which employed 10,000 workers. Sausalito’s most notorious mayor, a retired underworld character, used her office to promote low budget tourism which offset the loss of revenue as the town slowly reformed itself.

Healing this waterfront of its negative synergy of disturbed native burials, violence, hatred, and assault was beyond my training and experience which had been limited to individuals in face-to-face encounters. I began by offering my usual healings only on a larger scale. Twice a day, I visited an area of the waterfront and offered it a healing. First, I would offer a vibration of love which I projected from my eyes or abdomen. Then I tried kindness. I had better success offering the color red. Finally, I settled on a purple-colored energy after I absorbed the negativity of an area into my lower abdomen. This was a slow process which continued for three or four years. I never did succeed in restoring the waterfront to what I imaged was its pre-contact vitality: it had been too damaged. I did remove its toxic energies so walking the waterfront now does not distress me. But the healthy and vibrant land and water described in the writing of Sausalito’s first European resident, Richardson, is lost to us.

Inside of my frustrated struggles with the toxicity of the waterfront was my disappointment with my limited skills. I needed a traditional teacher who would accept me as a student. So, I began to search remote rural areas of Mexico and Peru. Unexpectedly, when I was on the verge of giving up my search, I met Don Manuel Quispe who immediately took me as his student. Don Manuel taught me to evoke powerful spirits who lived in the high mountains of the Andes.

 Back home in Sausalito, I focused on Mt. Tam., a rather diminutive mountain compared to the towering granite peaks of the Andes. My frustrations with Tam, and then my frustrations with Mt. Diablo and Mt. Vision were the beginning of my coming to terms with transplanting the Andean esoteric tradition of communing with mountain spirits. I discovered that each of these mountains near San Francisco were disturbed by large cell phone, microwave and radar towers, a disturbance unknown to Don Manuel. The resident mountain spirit hides from this electromagnetic pollution, so evoking it and its network of mountain spirits is arduous. Today, I live under Mt. Burdell which has a large communications tower at its peak. I can summon its spirit from hiding only for the duration of a ceremony of communion and gifting. Otherwise, its spirit is hidden.

I commune with the high mountain spirits of New Mexico and Texas which I began visiting about twenty-five years ago. These remote mountain peaks are free of electromagnetic pollution and readily welcomed me when I awoke them from their slumber and reestablished their mountain spirit networks. Today, I continue these mountain spirit relationships as well as with a mountain spirit in the Andes; physical proximity is not important.

A Consciousness Container

Traditional Andean culture was rapidly fading during my study with Don Manuel. Young people were moving to the cities and Anglos would likely invade remote Quechua villages when the government built roads to increase tourism.  Of course, Don Manuel was aware of the dangers. Like the Tibetan lamas, Don Manuel wanted to preserve his teaching by training an Anglo who would introduce the traditions of Q’eros Shamans to the West. I was selected by Don Manuel who, in dream-time, gradually informed me of my new responsibilities.

The Q’eros region, a very remote area high in the granite mountains of Southern Peru had extremes of weather and was suffering long term drought. It had yet to be mapped and was free of roads, electricity and phone service during my travels there. Q’eros had a unique consciousness which nurtured and held me in a gentle, yet firmly supportive embrace. Its high vibrational ceremonial quality encouraged the spiritual practices of villagers and their priests.  

Traveling in remote Q’eros was not unlike Alexandra David-Neel’s descriptions of visiting remote areas of traditional Tibet in the 1920s. The similarities led to Tibetan lamas visiting the Q’eros priests early in the 1990s, a meeting arranged by another of my teachers, the anthropologist and Andean Shaman, Juan Nunez Del Prado.

Back home in California, I needed to create an equivalent of Q’eros energy when my training with Don Manuel had concluded. I selected a remote spot in an area of scrub and forest free of overhead electric wires and cell phone towers. It is north of San Francisco on a ridge above an ocean beach. Here I began weekly visits to create a highly refined energy for ceremony. It would need to be vibrationally higher and more intense than the land was naturally, with more sparkle and glow. I was cautious at first not wanting to impose myself. At each step in this process, I would wait for the land and a nearby water spirit to signal their approval.

My process was simple. Greet the land. Wait for a response. Mirror back its response. As the land became more responsive, I would mirror back its response now with added energy from the beach and ocean. Then I noticed that this newly emerging energy was being held within an area formed by the ocean beach, the nearby creek, and surrounding ridges. As weeks turned into months, I continued to mirror the land and slowly raise the vibration of the energy I mirrored back. This back and forth continued until I had raised the energy to a high-level awareness, held within the land. I now had a supportive and relational arena for my healing ceremonies.

Each week when I arrived at this venue, I was greeted and welcomed. This remote spot with its natural boundaries was holding a unique consciousness, what I came to call a consciousness container, which was noticeably different from the larger ridge line. I would renew it weekly.

Now this consciousness container has become self-sustaining and independent of me! It is relational and supportive with a unique and independent character. Its qualities remind me of Peruvian cloud forests on days when the container is enveloped in coastal fog. Always, I am ‘seen,’ witnessed and held in its rejuvenating embrace, its kisses and hugs.

Recently, a forest fire decimated the area just outside the container. The larger area was closed off for months because of fire and intense smoke. When I was finally able to return, the consciousness container was hidden and unavailable. But three weeks later, it had revived itself. Lately, the container has been stressed by drought. But now we have had a return of seasonal rains and consciousness inside the container is more relaxed, a reminder that this container is land based.

Our Spiritual Intelligence

I've talked and written about spiritual wisdom, the bedrock of the world's great religious and spiritual teachers. At other times, I've talked about simply being open and listening to what wants to be known. What I've been trying to get at is a sense that I've had for many years that we have inherent spiritual capacity, spiritual knowing wired into us as a species.

Each of us has a hard-wired capacity to be kind, to be empathic, to be reverent. Each of us has a hard-wired capacity to be fully aware and alive in the current moment. Each of us has the capacity to be helpful, to be useful, to participate, socially. Yes, each of us has wired into us, a spiritual intelligence that we are born with. It's obscured by our culture which is cognitively oriented, by our technology which creates an overload of stimulus, and by our intense focus on ourselves, our wants and needs.

I have suggested that in order to reclaim our spiritual intelligence we need to open ourselves to relationships with the natural world. If our attempt to be spiritually aware is based primarily in meditation and yoga, what happens for Westerners is a heightened awareness of our internal experience, which doesn't necessarily cultivate our spiritual intelligence. When we are absorbed in our relationships with the natural world, something else happens. We get outside of ourselves and come to respect what isn’t human, not just because it serves us, or because its collapse endangers us. Just as important is to have respect for what is precious, on its own terms.

As we come into relationships within the natural world, oddly, what happens is that we remember our spiritual intelligence. We remember a way of knowing free of our intellectual and personal preoccupations, our short sightedness and selfishness. Remembering our spiritual intelligence is crucial right now, so that we can behave in ways that truly respond to our planetary crisis.

Remembering my spiritual intelligence began fifty years ago at a remote spot at the Delaware Water Gap. I was sitting at a creek listening to the sounds of snow melt. It was early spring, birds were chattering, and I was alone and quite confident that I would remain alone, undisturbed. I lost track of time and became absorbed in the sounds, the bubbling and gurgling. After a while sound stopped and time stopped, and I fell into a deep state of emptiness. It was a first for me, sitting on a rock feeling alive and empty in the natural world. I repeated this experience weekly, sometimes twice a week, always in the same place. Sometimes I changed rocks. The seasons changed, the snow melt disappeared, and the creek quieted down. But it's still spoke, it's just that the tone change. And most times that I sat there; I fell into a deep state. Whatever I thought I knew, I no longer knew. I was simply open to whatever this little creek was saying because it seemed to be speaking to me. And oddly, I seemed to be able to comprehend and to respond to its communication as it varied by the season.

After I had fluency in my communication with this creek, I started a communication with wind and with clouds and with a pair of hawks. Now I have communication with hummingbirds in my back garden. Intimacy with the natural world, my experiences of its mysterious presence, my deepening intimacy with my spiritual intelligence, gifts me with an ever more surprising knowing.

An Awareness Which Is Not An Awareness

Recently I have read a few of the remarkable books of Alexandra David-Neel. In one of her books, “Initiations And Initiates In Tibet,” I found a discussion of what is described as the state of awareness which is available to the most advanced meditators. In this advanced state, the practitioner experiences a non-state, an experience of non-experience.

For me, this is the state I enter when I am open to the ‘inside of silence.’ I have also met this state ‘inside’ the sound of a bubbling creek which is how I first met this state of non-awareness.

No technology will open this non-awareness for you. Rather, it is a spontaneous opening during which all perception ceases. Afterwards, you might try to describe or characterize this non-experience or you might decide not to talk about it.

Have You Noticed?

Early one morning I was having morning coffee in an RV as I looked out onto the high desert landscape of northern New Mexico. We were camped out at Chaco Canyon, one of my favorite pilgrimage sites. That morning I gave a first talk about a topic which I have returned to many times in the last thirty years. My point was simple, as least it was for me. I suggested that the ‘sacred’ is important to us and we are important to the ‘sacred.’ In other words, we and the ‘sacred’ are in relationship.

At this moment of pandemic, our collective fear and anxiety impacts each of us, our children and our pets and our collective fear also impacts the natural world. Have you noticed that trees, birds, creatures of all sorts feel our fear and shrink from us.  Nature is defending itself from us because we are frightening in our collective fear. Nature, a visible manifestation of the sacred, is now less available to us as we are less available to nature. Have you noticed?

Pilgrimage To Palenque

When the great warrior king of Palenque died, his son had Lord Pakal placed in a sarcophagus deep in an imposing pyramid. On the upper facade of the pyramid, visible after ascending multiple steps is inscribed an extraordinary event in the long reign of Lord Pakal: Teotihuacan’s victorious army, fresh from its conquest of Tikal, had marched from Tikal to Palenque to pay homage to Lord Pakal.

On multiple occasions, I went on pilgrimage to the tomb of Lord Pakal. On one occasion, I was alone with him deep in the dark, airless dampness. The guards had gone and the pyramid was closed that afternoon. I sat on the stone floor insisting I was not claustrophobic. Lord Pakal offered me a transmission, a gift whose dimensions would only become apparent years later. Some hours passed. I had become cold, weak with fatigue and in some odd way, full, as if I had eaten too large a lunch. I managed to get back up the interior stairs of the pyramid and stopped on the upper platform, disoriented, in the late afternoon heat and bright sunlight of lowland jungle.

An out of season storm flooded Palenque that evening and the next day local roads were flooded.