Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Thanksgiving alignment poem

The mind would explain what the body enjoys,
by false starting plans for more carnal poise.
The heart will align what neither can meet:
the spiritual life in a sensual treat.




Friday, November 19, 2010

Why I'm Tired of Apocalypse Theory

Going on and on about the nature of evil is like discoursing endlessly about the influence of a dead end street to be avoided at the commencement of a glorious and long awaited cross country journey. It is only interesting in the first few moments of venturing forth to make certain that the wrong turn is not taken. I'm sorry, but darling, there is so much more ahead for us to share and see.

My apologies to Vladimir Soloviev, but you know you didn't enjoy that last decade of life as much as you could have.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Vision: Self-determination is a God-given right!

Many blessings on this Veteran's Day to all those who give themselves in part and whole to the causes of true liberty. May the ways of peaceful resistance become ever more illuminated and practicable in this abundant world of many Buddhas, Christs, and countless daily saints.

Please enjoy this trailer of Margarethe's fabulous film about me and my friends, which debuted in Telluride on Jutta's reincarnated birthday and in Rome on mine. I know that the movie offers a subjective and necessarily condensed view of their lifetime, but not only is it based quite faithfully on many quotes, I feel that the director was very spiritually guided to make the experience most resonant and touching. From the opening fanciful scene - "That is the sun! That is the sun!" - I wept gratefully, for appearances of Apollo have become most significant to me ever since a certain return to the wellspring of Greek ideals and the time of Plato.

I know not the details of the German source material nor the latitudes for translation, but Hildegard's statement that "Self-determination is a God-given right!" is most beautiful and relevant, since it is indeed the sacred right of the immortal Soul as given us by God to determine our own past life selves, even as we gather each our present life supports for entering that future of the coming Heaven on the Earth.

Blessed be both One and All, for blessed is the One in All!

=>=>=> Vision: From the Life of Hildegard of Bingen


Tuesday, November 2, 2010

A day for the rest of us

Happy All Souls day!

Also known as The Feast of All Souls, or The Day of the Dead, this commemoration for those spirits who have yet to attain the beatific eternal vision of God follows All Saint's Day, which commemorates those who have. Primarily observed in the Roman Catholic Church, this is the time to pray for those loved ones in purgatory states whose attachments to sins which occlude heavenly knowing are still being cleansed.

You know, the rest of us. :-)

For most, physical Earth is a difficult school where the bliss of conscious alignment with the soul's path comes and goes. One of the great symbols of God's promise for a new perfect life is the rainbow. Heading into last weekend, for the first time in my life, I observed from out an airplane one of the fruits of the combined efforts of divine and human will. As some travellers will recognize in the photo below, it is possible to see at least one complete circular rainbow around a plane's shadow when cast upon clouds from light from above.



The timing of my notice of this phenomenon had great personal meaning, as harmony with the soul will invite synchronicities that make one feel at the center of all creation. This specialness effect was further enhanced by the incredible observation that the rainbow was centered on my exact seating location, behind the right wing! Since I believe that God creates and works within physical laws, I had no spiritual conflict in wondering what meteorological effects could accout for such a glorious vision. Friends didn't know, so we speculated a bit wildly on what manner of miracle my digital camera had recorded, and what new day it might herald.

It was a special weekend.

The crowning lesson in humility then came to discover on the internet (just google "rainbow around plane shadow", how easy is that?) the extent of this everyman's everday miracle. The circular rainbow is always there! For those would would notice, it is called a Glory. The mechanism of formation is not entirely clear, anymore than it is for any rainbow, but it has to do with water vapor acting as prisms in the air at the width of microns.

But what of my seating position, was it lucky coincidence to be at Glory central?

The most beautiful thing to know is, the Glory is ALWAYS centered on the observer. In fact, if it were possible to see the shadow of your head when you witness a rainbow from the Earth, you would find it is at the center of the great arch which beckons before and above you. The friend or stranger who observes next to you would actually be seeing their own rainbow, shifted slightly to their position.

Imagine that. If it were not for being planted here on the surface of Earth, if we were say angels or sylphs of a material that blocked the light's passage as our denser bodies do, we would observe each one of our shadows below cradled perfectly in a circular spectrum of the living light.

Such ubiquity is truly the mass miracle! Each of our lower selves grows ensconced its own vase, this agar of luminous and colored perfection we call a reality. Each human consciousness creates its own quantum sphere by the grace of God's light from above and within. Mother Earth upholds our lower selves thus cocooned in that spectrum of love, affording us the priveledge to be so good to ourselves and to others that heaven becomes our new home, that place where shadow and light are combined, and the real becomes manifest in this purgatorial illusion that too many suffer when all were called forth to enjoy.

For each other's deliverance to Heaven on Earth, let us pray now.


Monday, November 1, 2010

Strawberry Karma

Today November 1 is All Saints Day, also known as All Hallows or Hallowmas, a Roman Catholic holiday to honor all saints known and unknown. This refers to all those individuals who have attained the heavenly beatific vision, which is the eternal and direct perception of God. The holiday dates to the 8th century, when the Pope moved a feast for saints from the spring season of Pentecost to the fall season around Samhain, the Celtic celebration of the harvest and ancestral spirits. Our modern holiday of Halloween is fixed to the night before All Saints Day, with the name coming from a shortening of All Hallows Evening, the evening before All Hallows. Oh the logic of history!

I can very personally sense that my soul guide Hildegard of Bingen has attained that eternal and direct perception of God. She is often called a saint, even though she was never canonized and remains “only” at the level of beatification, by which the Catholic Church acknowledges a spirit’s ascension to heaven and ability to intercede on another’s prayerful behalf. From the heartfelt 1997 semi-fictionalized biography called “Scarlet Music” by Joan Ohanneson, the back cover promotes Hildegard as having “shattered stereotypes of women, of saints, and of God for all time.” Ah yes, this will become increasingly clear, I can say with a smile. So in this season of celebrating ancestral spirits and spooky weirdness, let’s have some fun talking about what a saint’s karma looks like, shall we? It’s a scoop fit for a tabloid in heaven, so remember you heard it here first!

This is the story of Strawberry Karma, and it is remarkably true. I discovered this curious thread of history just last week before Halloween, when a mutual friend of Hildegard’s found me in the grocery store. That is to say, when in 1997 I discovered my own connection to Hildegard, I was sitting next to a woman on the subway and a voice in my head said “talk to her about Hildegard”. So I did, and was delighted to find that she believed in reincarnation and had discovered her own past life as a Venice nobleman while on tour in Italy singing the Ordo Virtutum, playing the part of Humilitas. Thirteen years later this year, as Hildegard has ascended again so prominently in my consciousness, I’d been recalling this woman and asking the universe to see her again. One evening after work, after thanking Hildegard for guiding my life, I went to the market to buy such things as strawberries and meat and cheese. This woman called me out after us not seeing each other in years, though she had been on the mailing list for the annual autumnal Mystical Art and Talent Shows and had not forgotten our prior associations. She said for some reason she felt called to Trader Joe's that night, despite not particularly needing any supplies.

We renewed our friendship and mystical connection, this friend of some good karma and I. She was excited to note from me the Boston opening the next week of Hildegard’s new biopic “Vision” by Margarethe von Trotta (more about that in another post, for it has many wonderful scenes, though it can make it look like we enjoyed a New Age resort back then). I was delighted to hear that a friend of hers was behind the Ordo Virtutum performance I’ll be attending soon after that, serendipitously timed as it was to the film’s opening.

When I left her she was fondling a strawberry rhubarb pie of remarkably low calories; oh do enjoy it I encouraged her. I didn’t explain that my friend Marjie in London, who knows me so well and knows herself to have been Jutta, loved to bake rhubarb pies for us in the perception that it was a favorite back in Germany. But what of the strawberry I wondered? Not my London friend’s favorite, but to be certain, I loooove strawberries now. I have fond memories of strawberry fields picking forever throughout my life, I’ve packed them on dates as veritable aphrodisiacs, and the vulnerable latticework of external seeds endears me to their sweet ineffable charms. I’ve since learned that though oft regarded throughout history as a lowly food, the native people of my own Massachusetts state prized their succulence and referred to them as berries of the heart.

One branch of Hildegard’s fame is that of personally cataloging plants and minerals for their spiritual healing properties. She was not the first of course to do this, but she did have a knack for exploring and popularizing in original ways those energies that were about to come into greater recognition, and previous to her the knowledge of flora had been rooted in Greek and Roman classics which had become increasingly mistranslated and misapplied. Hildegard’s treatises on plant medicine are consulted by herbalists to this day, but she was at times deplorably subjective in her assessments. Thus she inflicted upon the valiant strawberry a disservice for which a dear friend of our mutual soul would later pay the karma referred to by this blog entry’s title.

Because Hildegard saw a snake among the strawberries in a garden, she decided that strawberries were too easily contaminated by evil and thus poisonous for human consumption. As her fame grew in the late 1100’s, this remarkably narrow prejudice single-handedly caused the noble strawberry to go out of favor in Europe for centuries.

Oops!

500 years later, the North American strawberry (Fragaria virginiana), enjoyed and esteemed by wiser natives, was regaining favor among the colonies for preserves and desserts. In 18th century Europe, the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus was harmonizing with the mission of his soul friend Hildegard, updating the gospel of plants and minerals with new scientific sensibilities, not beholden as she was to the Roman Church but rather aligned to Uppsala University. Unlike the sexually repressed Hildegard – oh let us not malign her for it, because she was so honestly fond of her charges and appropriately loved God more than the flesh, having been given to the church as little girl and knowing no other way to be – Carolus was wed, married to the daughter of a cousin of none other than the great mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (did he attend the wedding?)

When Carolus suffered a gout so painful that was he said to consider not living, his wife Sara recommended to him the strawberry (genus Fragaria of the rose family Rosaceae whose blessings to humanity extend without end). Something about the high mineral salt content of the fruit (which is actually not the fruit but the engorged stem head of the seed receptacle, for around each seed is the ovarian flesh which constitutes the true fruit, scientifically speaking) cured Carolus’ gout. So grateful was our romantically inclined botanist (his first paper was on plant genitalia) that he evangelized the strawberry for the rest of his life, and lived on a diet of strawberries alone for some stretch of time to demonstrate their nutritional wholeness (exactly how long seems lost to history, but I'm certain he enjoyed the period).

And so my friends, that is the karma to the strawberry deva which my soul family has so happily paid, that I might enjoy this luscious fruit with a lover to this day, as you are as well encouraged to do. I will leave as exercise to the reader, and bemused fans of Freud, to piece together what Emanuel would term the correspondences, for what strawberries in Heaven refer to on Earth. ;-)

As for the place of Humilitas, queen of the virtues, to those who would accuse either Hildegard or myself of being too brazen in revealing the secrets of Heaven, I defer to the definition of humility that my great teacher Lazaris taught me. (This becomes most appropriate on this morning of November 6 as I finish tweaking this post, since Lazaris sang to me in a dream, yes, sang for the first time ever.) Too many prize humility as a tool of subjugation, to keep one’s self lowly, and that’s not what it is at all. Humility is the willingness to see things as different from what you expected, thus does it counterbalance trust and open the doors to miracles in realities that are personally created by your own expectations.

In every day terms, humility would certainly indicate the willingness to admit when you are less than what you thought you were, but as well the courage to declare when you are greater than you ever knew. And of this you may rest assured, gentle reader, by the immortal Soul that enlivens you, you are so very much greater than you ever knew. The Saints are merely those who have developed this knowing ahead of others to lead the way and call the suffering home. Following All Saint's Day is November 2, All Soul’s Day, the day for the rest of us who have not yet attained that eternal and direct perception of God which the ascended enjoy. Together we will get there, my human friend, and by the peak lifetimes and moments that you and I are invited to humbly reclaim we shall find ourselves already more than halfway Home.

Blessings to you all, in this season of the harvest and the Ancients’ New Year.


*()*|*()*|*()*|*()*|*()*|*()*|*()*|*()*