On "Being Positive"

This whole idea of being “positive” grates on me.

For years I have studied harder than anyone else I know, have put myself through various practices to push myself, to break through.

Then when I return to a dying place at Home Farm, I worked within the system diligently, probably contributing in more areas than anyone else. And still they can’t hear, won’t share, won’t listen to anything new.

And then I find tools that enhance the breakthrough and actually DO SOMETHING instead of just repeating ideas. And I am suppressed.

So I cry out to the Heavens “HELP ME! WHAT CAN I DO?” And I keep going quietly. Some FEW get it and start this path themselves.

And my pain and frustration became so bad I chose to leave for one year, but in that year I see that there is WORK to be done. It can’t be avoided once you have a solution and see the PROBLEMS.

So I come back to live among these sleeping mean-spirited Old Cycle phonies, because I feel guided by the Spirit of Vitvan, not just a man called “Vitvan,” but that VITVAN or the One-Who-Knows that sleeps in each of us. I expect to be misunderstood and disabused by these idiots who daily degrade the High Frequency Field they rattle around in with their prattling about gardens, and pretty mental pictures.

And so they feel threatened. They cannot stand having any LIGHT shining upon their ineffectual ways. So they kick me out and turn vicious.

And I’m not going to accept that phonies and bullies and incompetents should be allowed to squat and squander all of Vitvan’s hard work. So I FIGHT BACK.

Of course I am angry. And I am offended on behalf of Vitvan’s Work, his Helpers, and all those enthusiastic sincere students who ran up against this blockade of STUPIDITY that runs rampant at Home Farm.

And then I rediscover my Soul from the iboga work in Costa Rica, and now I know what all this spiritual mumbo-jumbo is about, and how simple it is. That SOURCE is in us and we are born with it, and I know HOW to get it back...

I can outline the Problem clearly, and I have answers.

The solution is clear:

Reason does not work with Unreasonable people living in a private world where they are the “righteous ones.”

A contractor knows that before Renovation can begin, there must be a Teardown and Demolition of the old and rotted-out structure. Fact of Life.

And yet, what I hear is that I am “negative” because I see it clearly and am willing to take up a plan that starts with naming names and calling for a Tear Down of ROT.

I hear the vague idea that there is a “positive” way. If we just keep hoping, the answer will come. WHAT IF the answer HAS COME? Are you waiting to get YOUR answer? Are you waiting for someone else to come in and do the clean-up work (no doubt summoned by your “positive” attitude)?

WHAT IF, after all one’s asking for help and answers, and finding some, that after all these years of INTENTIONALLY trying to help and get answers and being POSITIVE in my hope that answers and help would come, it finally comes. And it says:

GET OUT A BIG HAMMER AND TEAR OUT THE ROT. THROW OUT THE RASCALS. STOP DEFENDING AND MAKING EXCUSES FOR MEDIOCRITY POLISHING THE OUTSIDE OF THE CUP

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Bit by bit negativity has crept into Home Farm. The function of the Field is to stir one up and release their negativity. It chugs along in the background.

The problem is that once a Vitvan or an Anita was gone, there was no spiritual Source strong enough to keep clearing away the accumulating negativity, until it gradually built up to where the good intentions of mediocre students wasn’t enough to keep the ship on an even keel, and Darkness set in. The amplified egos of the “keepers” became projections of their private worlds, and Home Farm became Marj's “MY Home Farm.” The Murrays and Wetmore assumed, because they had squatted there so long, that they were somehow “essential.”

When one has put in many years of their hopes and good intentions into an idea, and it disappointingly turns sour, it is a blow.  It feels like an violation and an invalidation. They are repelled away by the Positive force in the Field who pushes them out for their own good.

But you leave feeling abused, like a victim. HOW could something you gave so much to be revealed in the last act to be rotten at core? Was this all a joke?

Victims need to realize that there is nothing wrong with them. They are forced out by Dark forces. But they have been burned, and psychologically wounded.

To recover fully, abused victims need to confront their abusers, and take back that part of their Soul which was stepped on. It may not be fun, but it’s healthy, and for those on the Path, it must be done to make the Self whole again.

Home Farm is a microcosm of the systemic rot being revealed planetwide. But my dharma, and I believe your dharma, has made it your microcosm. Think globally, act locally.

Remember the Alamo! Take back Home Farm, for all of us, for the future. Don’t let the Dark Lord steal another Sanctuary.

Psychic Middens

(submitted to Resonance Aug 2011)

The local park just up the hill from Home Farm, Great Basin National Park, puts out a magazine called The Midden. They explain to us:

“A midden is a fancy name for a pile of trash, often left by pack rats. Pack rats leave middens near their nests, which may be continuously occupied for hundreds, or even thousands, of years. Each layer of trash contains twigs, seeds, animal bones and other material, which is cemented together by urine. Over time, the midden becomes a treasure trove of information for plant ecologists, climate change scientists and others who want to learn about past climatic conditions and vegetation patterns dating back as far as 25,000 years. Great Basin National Park contains numerous middens.”

In our own inner work we too have to dig into psychic middens. First we encounter our own personal history of hurts, flair ups in the solar plexus, weepings of the heart, and so on, and if one is honest and can keep digging...and digging.... eventually we get thru much of it.  But then one hits a new deeper level and we see that even the very substance out of which we are formed is composed of millennia of suffering. Some traditions like Buddhism explain that we are composed of recycled “atoms” and you might even have some of the enlightened atoms of the Buddha in you!  Chances are, alas, they are far out-numbered by the atoms of fools, dolts, and common plodders like you and me!

So the midden just goes deeper and back farther. As you work through your own probationary work you discover it is a bottomless well. Does the suffering and stupidity ever end? Not in any foreseeable future.  So what does one do?

Spiritual alchemies see the cosmos as a great undifferentiated Light Mind substance, that delights in an endless game of sub-dividing Itself, androgynising, chasing Its own tail, and compressing each little vortex of Light into a packet of matter. Thus the Light gets locked up due to Its own orgy of Self-upon-Self sex, as it were. This involutionary tendency creates the inertia of persistence, the urge to survive.  In the psychic realm this means old crap hangs around century after century. The first undifferentiated Light was called a Chaos, meaning it had not taken on form yet; this latter locked up Light is called a Confusion. “Con” meaning together, so Light fused together. Light stuck. Islands in the Tao.

But the other half of the Process is the “evolutionary” or expansive Return, wherein the I AM and Its basic Light Mind acts as a dissolvent on those inbred twists of matter, and slowly releases their yummy matured-in-the-bottle gunas back into the cosmic stew. Hurrah! Release and some happiness are the by-product.

So how does the above philosophical side trip help deal with our own psychic middens?

Because if you persist and dig deep enough into your own pile, you will finally strike gold, find the underlying fountain of Light Mind from which it arose. With this sustaining you, you can now take on the midden of the race psyche. Simultaneously to discovering how much greater the problem of our pollution is, that we are all knee-deep in shit, is finding the Ally of the dissolving Light. When we grudgingly accept that our separateness is only seemingly so, then we are all in this boat together. Hey I’m not saying I want to share a lifeboat with you all, but here we are! Boy is it tough to surrender your separateness, even if it doesn’t really exist!

In his instructions to newbies to the Work, people who were gingerly pulling back the veil on the hidden “peacocks and jackasses” in their psyches, Vitvan advised to avoid getting swamped and overwhelmed. Raise your forces, get ‘em out of those lower centers where you will be stirred by all the flotsam and jetsam out there. But later on, after one had toughened up a bit, and was ready to become a Light-worker, he said you had to turn around and get right back down there in the fight, and untwist that confused Light matter. Take it head on.

I’m finding that the best method is to let your Ally (the dissolving Light) do Its job. It will unravel those Gordian knots of twisted up Light knickers. All we have to do is to stand in the Beingness of that Light. Trust It to do what needs be done. Vitvan mocks (gently) the narrow humanist mindset which humans are needed by the I AM to get things done. Aurobindo says it this way, that all things are done by the Divine, for the purposes of the Divine, without any necessity for humans to approve or understand.

A spiritual school should operate by different principles than human-made corporations. It should walk its talk. Have you seen the bumper sticker: “Want to make God laugh? Tell Him your plans.”

When things heat up, people get stirred up, and their stucknesses pop out like warts. They get resistant. They get nervous as the ground shifts beneath them from the dissolving Light. They want to hang onto old ways, to persist.

We need to find the balance between surviving as a community without getting strangled in committee thinking, and letting the Divine Light do Its Work upon each of us.

“Seek ye FIRST the Kingdom of God, and ...all these things shall be added unto you.”

What is The Product?

Scientologists (Hubbard) saw things as agreements, contracts, products.

We all trade in life with others. We sing for our supper. We provide a product. We need to be able to define our product to find our market, so we can find where what we offer is valued, is useful, so we can survive, eat, and keep on keepin’ on.

What is my product? What do I offer and sell? Where is my market?

Leslie Stevens once said I was an “explorer.” That is, I don’t stay in one place for too long because my “rush” is knowing something new. Thrill junkie. Lover of those “Aha moments.” Gnosis. The orgasm of the light bulb going off over the head, and the “Oh NOW I see” glimpse of the next step up the misty mountain. With all your getting, get under-standing. That is, what is “behind” this level, behind the Wizard’s curtain...then behind that curtain? 

What is at the “end”of the search is WHAT was at the beginning. Where Alpha swallows the tail of Omega. WHY did the perfectly balanced Plenum, a crystalline body of All potency, fracture Itself over and over, only so that each part, born out of balance, would then try and find its way Home back to balance? That, by definition, Truth is Remembering (re-membering, putting the pieces back together).

My product is that there IS NO product, only the movement of the Spirit, which is likened to a wind. You can’t bottle the wind. It keeps on moving. You might say, as I do, that of the 3 aspects of Divinity, Create-Preserve-Destroy, I see the middle element as primary, the Skambha, the pillar that has the oscillating poles. The oscillation passes through the PIllar, IT remains. While we call it “preserve” which sounds static, Its real job to keep balance by letting each side have its turn. So it restores balance by unbalancing either pole when its turn is over.

My job is to undo things, to point out how no one particular aspect is sufficient. To be like an entheogen, to dissolve, even to the edge of destruction, but to then regroup and recrystallize. To engender the god within, by challenging and undoing part of the protective carapace that the god has formed up over itself as it over-clings to any one role.

This is the action of the original Spirit, which we liken to Fire. Fire heats and excites, which our systems like, feels good. It’s the "warm" in warm and fuzzy. Too much Fire burns, and we don’t like it.

Yet everyone seeks excitement when there is too much same-old. Books, movies, stories of adventure, forbidden love, danger, that is, we are thrilled by Fire when it takes us to the edge of almost being undone, and then, we re-organize to a higher level. The love-adventure story seems to always end where the hero-heroine overcome danger, and finally rush together for insanely mad sexual union, the promise of ... of... what? Next, it’s kids, boring job, disappointment, careers, bog down in same-old. Now it’s time to repeat the formula: excitement, have an affair, conquer new countries, launch new products, eat new food, new product... all in an endless circle some believe is “progress.”

I have no answer to that. But I have figured out that my product is to be a catalyst, an acuator (note the spelling), a representative of the Fire... and a "troublemaker," endlessly pointing out what is wrong and not living up to the specs of the Plan. At first people feel like you are liberating them, as you are, by saying the unsayable, the unfriendly, the critical. So a shy quiet guy (like one we know) is prodded by me over some years into realizing that he has just been cruising along, and things are no longer "good." He slowly gets up the courage to make a change. But now he is back to “hiding in plain sight” the telling phrase he applies to himself. He admires Braveheart on film, has his guns, his stock, but does not feel the URGE to stand on the front lines.

They loved Thom Paine when they needed a catalyst to get the revolution going. They hated him when they wanted to go back to business as usual. 

Vitvan knew what the product was. We have seen over and over how he warns that one would fall apart, how Love would be your undoing. Of how to get to that moment of the Father glorifying you on the cross, you have to pass through the suffering of being undone. The God-drug will make you feel awesome, but you will die in the Process...

If we have a job, it is to cooperate with the Wind of the Spirit, a warm halcyon breeze at times, or a hurricane of destruction. It’s all in the time cycles Hari.

The symbol of the ruler, “god on earth,” is the scepter, or wand, or more precisely decoded, the Skambha, the Pillar who supports ALL but keeps the system in balance by not letting any faction get too strong.

So the role of the catalyst is to remove stuckness, and to monitor that process. Ideally we want to produce enough excitement that the lemmings can dream on that their ego fantasies are just about to be fulfilled. But then to disabuse them of holding onto an objectified image of the Moving Tao. This is a thankless job, and very tiring. I want rest too, but cannot find the “role” that doesn’t seem like a cop out, or feels like going back to sleep. You can tell old man Ralph got tired of his job as trailblazer; he says near the end that he just wants a place to end up his days in harmony, like Dr. John. I’m sure, after a life of healing, fixing, guiding, instructing newbies and groupies, who keep repeating the same old mantram of “I know how it should be,” and “I’m right,” they get tired of tending the Flame, and want to rest.

But that is where we are at. Rekindling the Flame. People get stuck, and they resent you pointing that out, pushing them to break through. Then they feel some release and excitement so they tell you “do it some more,” by which they mean, you do it to them, and they will passively submit. You do the work on their behalf. But then, when they feel better from the release, they want to go right back to being comfortable, attending ladie’s lunch, watching football games, and feeling confident about “having all the answers.”

My model is the alchemical process. The necessity for the Secret Fire is therein the big secret, hidden in plain sight...

Well, that sets my goal for today! Will watch The Good Wife and immerse myself into the Mythos again: the seeking of Balance and Redress (scales of Justice, which of God’s chosen roles will prevail over another?), the conundrum of Love (once loved husband, still loved children, tempted to new love, excitement mounting), the so often unsatisfactory way “justice” works out, because anyone can see that almost no one is entirely bad; even Colombian drug lords love their wives and kids too.  So the story cannot resolve these issues, only keep tottering on the edge of excitements, puzzles to be solved, the celebrations of winning (happy vagina mouths eating and drinking), then corruption, feet of clay... I like the emotional churning, helps me dredge up feelings for housecleaning, but at the end of the day, it is still Chinese food... I am hungry for more existence, yet tired of the same meals.

Doesn’t “gnosis” sound like fun?