Independence Sunday 2010

"Oh children of humanity, why have you corrupted tender Love, who gazes far into my depths and flows forth in works abounding? Because She flows within me, from Her in turn flow the living waters. She resembles a budding branch, for, as a virgin's embraces are most tender because of her integrity, even so Love's embraces are more tender than those of any other. But now She mourns, because audacious men tear her to pieces with their evil grumbling. Hence, She flees from them to that height whence She came, and weeps because Her children, whom She suckled at Her fertile breasts, fall sick and will not be cleansed from the corruption of their flighty minds.

O wretched humanity! Why do they take on themselves the misery of alienation and exile, tearing themselves away... She is always ready... Yet they separate themselves from the Bride, whence they are darkened and shadowed by clouds as if they had ruptured heaven."

The Holy Spirit as Caritas (Grace/World Soul)
St. Hildegard von Bingen, 1098-1179
thanks to Barbara Newman, translation

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Welcome to the New Earth, welcome to my new blog.

What is the New Earth?

It is perhaps a place you’ve never seen before, but only because you did not open your eyes. It is the world that is real, it is truly your home. It is this radiant globe upon which you live and die, more times perhaps than you wish to recall.

New Earth is not the planet as you know it now, not the troubled place that makes you doubt your own survival and fear the loss of your dearest companions. No, never that, no more than God was not the God of true Light and Love.

New Earth is the world of safety and joy. There you may live and love as you were always meant to be known and loved, as your home before time and space were invented for you by your great and celestial Soul.

New Earth is the world before something went wrong.

Something did go wrong, didn’t it? Yes, gentle one, sadly that is so. You live in the dread of whose fault it was, and the only certainty you know is that you have suffered too long.

Indeed, you were never meant to suffer at all. So the end of suffering is still to be found.

They say that death is the great healer, but this trick you have already known. There are parts of you that dwell happily now in the higher vibrations, heavens they’re called, reunited with friends, immortal and secure. But these sides of you did not know the New Earth during their times in the physical, they waited for death to release their suffering. So let us not assume that dying is what you must do in this time around.

We’re not a fan of apocalyptic predictions. We know from experience that there is a Heaven on Earth that calls you to not only survive but to thrive. Peace, love, and beauty, these are yours to know. Why, because you did a good work, you came to deserve? No, it's simpler than that. Because peace, love, and beauty are from your true nature, indeed they ARE you.

Earth has been patient, and Earth now must change. But She does not want to leave You behind! There is so much that must go, that is true: fear, pain, and loss, disease, hate, suffering and more. But never, no never you child, daughters and sons of the Earth that you are.

You and all those whom you love, She begs you to stay. She implores you through all of us who have glimpsed the Way, to change yourselves just a little, believe and transform. The Earth dreams to give you Herself, upon whom to live and love, forever more.

This baby must not be thrown out with the bath water! So how can your most honorable past be delivered to its rightful future, without inviting the discontinuity that so many call death?

Perhaps the path of your pain and sorrow may yet be revealed to have been but a detour, the longer route that caused you anxiety but was always and is still taking you Home. A little healing here, a little adjustment of attitude there, and the light at the end of the tunnel will come into view.

Is it possible to heal the past as well as the future? Perhaps the past can become perfect if the future is new. Or the past is adjusted when the future is changed. Yes, this and more. All things are possible for the love of the New Earth, that glorious place you were made for and are returning to now.

Did we mention that time and space were invented by you?

Yes, time and space are constructed by You, the you that you are still becoming and will again know. Because your Soul was too great for the awareness you were growing to know all at once, you had to have a plan, a treasure map Home. Therefore you told stories, and subdivided the specializations of your eternal Soul, which knows how to give love and to grow in every situation it may find itself.

You were wonderfully successful in splitting the facets of your great eternal identity across many lands and many lives, but truly these are but the many plays of light cast on the walls of your fabulous Earth home, shining as it does from your radiant gem Soul, which remains the One which knows the True Love, the Love that is and was always Home.

Welcome Home.

Did you not know how great was your Soul? That you were once not bent but tall, that you were once not dark but bright, that you walked as the gods and goddesses of the Light? Do not trouble yourself now for what appears to have been lost, for all will come to be seen again in due time. There are but a few more steps to walk home, and your own treasure map will show you the way.

It is within you to remember what is real and right. Let yourself feel and consider a little more now. If you had a great Soul, it was because you had a great Creator. The Spirit that made you is calling you now.

The miracle of Love is that it never left you. Remind yourself this: “Even though I feel disconnected, yet am I always connected, and sooner than I expect will I see it too”. The loss was not of your place but of you. You lost the feelings and thoughts of being Home, of being your own Soul on your own precious Way.

This loss led to the confusion of doubts and fears, reinforcing the beliefs that weren’t really true, but which many who wanted your power repeated to you. You obeyed and withdrew, became defensive, your neighbors did too. Regrettable speech and actions followed, continuing as habits, addictions, and lifestyles that blocked out the Source which nonetheless never stopped pouring out its endless pure Love for you.

Pessimists lose. Blind faith remains blind. Rebels risk war. Gentle skeptics will recognize truth.

In one perfect moment, and then more and more often, you will see the Love that never left you. You were always a part of a great network of kindred souls that became separated in awareness but never in experience. Much can become new by redefinitions, by repositioning, by turning in place to the sun instead of the moon. The moon cannot grow the flower which knows to wait until day to bloom.

Focus on what works for you in every place you must be, then synchronicities light the way which becomes very smooth. Though there is much that will remain dark and cold, in the people and places you cannot change so much as pray for, direct sources of love become abundant for you on your return to New Earth.

More and more of the best friends await you, those to whom you can speak freely your awakening heart, mind, and soul.

Many are the inspired ones such as my self, who would be so honored as to shine a little more light on a great map, just to help you find your own unique and beautiful way Home. Find what works for you, believe and transform. The whole of the universe is singing to you, there are so many words for this one lovely song. Come home, little one, we kept your place ready, we’ve been missing you.

If my words to this song of the universe touch your heart and Soul, then I might believe you have allowed me this honor, to be just a little further along in describing the New Earth to you. For the joy that is mine is to guide more friends like you home. A cosmic docent if you will, that could be my role. Step this way now if you choose, for it is always your choice. But truly, there are wonders beyond the current imagination yet to behold.

Have you heard of how artists will seek a great Light for their paintings or photographs? Many will rave about the quality of light in a place that is special to them, perhaps evoking a certain time of day too. For example, some might talk highly of the light on the coast of New England or the Mediterranean, and strive to record it with brushes and cameras. Or perhaps it is the light that has already been recorded in their soul which makes an artist immortal, like the light of a painting by Maxfield Parrish, whose works defy categorization and touch countless hearts on their first view.

The Light of the New Earth is like that. It is special, for it is suffused with a love that is infinitely gentle and deep. It goes to the core of your Soul and shows the way home, for it is based on the cooperation that created the Universe long ago and still does to this infinite moment. The tiniest voice inside of you which said at the dawn of creation and just this morning, “won’t you please help me to love, I just want to love more”. That is where everything starts, for everywhere this voice goes it is answered a glorious “Yes!” by so many more voices, and thus it is carried along. True, not everyone says Yes to the tiniest of calls, but someone somewhere always does, and it is to those you must go, to see your way Home, by the Light of the perfecting Love.

Love is not so hard after all. Just very, very, very vulnerable. Ask and you shall receive, sooner or later, in the corridors of time. No means no, and yes means yes, so go to the the yes however small that begins and continues your own journey Home. It could be as delicate as a flower that only you saw, but that flower was waiting for you to be found. Or a dream half-remembered that gave you a hope that was nowhere in sight, but someday, trust yourself, that dream will enter your life.

So this is how you built up your Earth, this most glorious of worlds that you too often do not recognize, by a technique whose power you forgot in your fears that you were not loved. It is time to return, by the sentiment that is expressed in such prayers of humility as “Not my will Lord but thine”. Do not fear this technique, for it is not more of the domination that you have so long suffered from. The Lord’s will is your own, for the Creator in you will show the way home.

The New Earth is calling you now.

In the year 2010, the holiday that is known as Independence Day in my birthplace of some United States (purportedly united I’ll say, for it is a most ambivalent place, and we are playing no favorites in the Light of New Earth) did fall on a Sunday, July 4. On this 1 day 234 years ago, a Declaration of Independence was unveiled to be signed, to create a New Nation, under God, with Liberty and Justice for All. In this grand gesture many could hear the tiny voice of an ideal to love, and so a great arc of history began.

But many others heard only opportunities for the limited self, for their ears were deafened by the roar of manifest destinies that knew only to crush and to conquer. And so the light of Old Earth continued to run red with blood.

Fortunately, there are no official meanings for the colors of the American flag. For some the flag is red with blood or anger or war. For others it can be something more tender, such as the red of the true heart that gives a red Rose, so gently as to not prick the finger of the beloved who receives the heavenly scent from one heaven sent. And the dark blue of the flag would seem to point to an evening sky abundant with stars to guide, signifying the light of those who have been there and returned, to speak of the lands of the New Earth so verdant and flush with nature’s pure love.

Abundance is key, for to be truly that voice whose will is with God, you must expect to enter worlds that are already full. You must embark upon shores where you have no power but the hope to meet one whom you love, and there you ask that you be given a gift to deliver as gently as the red rose. Your willingness to become someone so tender and new is what changes the world.

With the willingness to love must come the question which so many fear to ask or be asked. Am I good enough to love? This is the vulnerability, to ask the question upon which your very existence depends, and to not know the answer until the one for whom you arrived steps forward to answer, so sweetly and vulnerably in their own turn.

The answer is Yes.

You can never fully expect the one who will give the answer you need, because you’ve never been to a new place before, at least not in this form. But when you can surrender your heart to “Not my will but thine”, then you can hear the reply that was always for you. You will see the one who was meant for you, and you will begin the new partnership in whose resonance and love you will hear the Voice of the Universe answering forever more the both of you.

“Oh Yes! dearest Ones! You were more than good enough to love. You are the Great Souls who have returned to us. We expected you, we missed you, we love you both so. Stay as long as you desire, and please, do, make yourselves here a Home!”

In the relationships of love you will know you are Home. The New Earth is so very, very, very full.

So when the night air of July 4 celebrations fills with fire and smoke -- for that is the tradition it seems -- I have to wonder, with what I know now. Fireworks were invented in China long ago, and used to celebrate many things. Truly they can be wonderful. New Year’s in Germany is called Sylvester for example, and I remember fondly watching from one of tallest apartment balconies in Nuremberg in the early 1980's, seeing the city skyline at night light up with many small fireworks. That trip was just darkened by our visit to Dachau on the way from Munich, to the camp and the gas chambers and the ovens, to those unbearable places where the small voice was overruled with disastrous results.

So many beloveds were lost.

Nie wieder! -- Never again! -- is just one rallying cry on the way to New Earth. But if the cry does not become tears, if it turns to war, you’ll know you are again lost.

I have seen the rosy Love Light of New Earth, I can speak of its truth and how much it is here. It touches my heart, it makes my eyes fill. I cry now more in one week than I have in a whole year. I cry with gratitude for what is, I cry with pain for what was, I cry sometimes to just cry and become someone new. “Not my will but thine” is my duty and choice, for when sacred tears flow, there could never have been anything more real.

And then the precious new/old realities arrive, heralded by the little voices that bring joy, ancient lost friends I cannot yet see and barely hear or recall, some who joke about how they call me the crying saint now. So tears turn to laughter, and I’m made whole in one small step giant leap once again. Strength to carry on, to let you know too, gentle reader, the ways of the New Earth that are calling you now.

A dearest friend in a dream once said to me - she looked like my mother outside my elementary school, but she was more - she said, pointing to the sky and then to her heart, “We have a saying where we come from. There’s enough room for a dream out there, and enough room for a world in here”. She was just one of my guides to the New Earth of Love, but she held a great Light, for which I will be ever grateful and shed more tears, whenever the time is right to remember her wisdom which she is so glad to share.

So back to the night sky, of this current July 4 weekend, and the festivities of just last night. My boys 3 and 5 complained of the noise, and I could smell the smoke. I didn’t see many fireworks because the younger child pinched his finger hard in the stroller just as we were about to go down the hill to the bay where they are launched in our town. We went to the emergency room and the x-rays were fine, thank goodness, so we got back in time to miss the show. And I had to wonder, why did things happen that way?

(Always ask why, to find the New Earth, for nothing occurs without some meaning of Love)

I intend no disrespect to the old ways, and I know that the Earth is incredibly strong and merciful. She has tolerated much for her lost children to find their way back to being made whole in the love, and incremental improvements are always celebrated. But I do dream of the day when July 4 will be celebrated by the seeing of the lights in the sky that were always there, coming from the clouds that nature made, with great peals of Love that might boom in the hearts that need to be cracked open to let in more God. Call them angels or sylphs, extraterrestrials or deities, it matters not, for every culture speaks of those that can fly.

There are those who know beyond the shadow of doubt the way to New Earth, a land that is already populated with so many more friends than we ever knew.

Ah, but then there is the pain of this life.

The technique of manifest destiny by force, by not asking but masking the tiny voice, is the tragedy that has played on far too long and too wide. Forcing a relationship can never work, the worst case becoming evident when one party wants the other dead. Oh, you can certainly steal something they might have shared had you asked the right way, keep it all to yourself. But what is left to take by force is an empty shell. Your soul is already gone from that place, and only another who still loves can be found in the ruins for a new friend.

If only my United States had truly declared an Independence of the Soul, way back on July 4, 1776! Then the New World would have been truly discovered. This land was already full, staffed with so many new guides and beloveds. Like my 5 year old child likes to say, the world is full of friends who just don’t know each other.

Holocaust expert and author David Cesarani states that "in terms of the sheer numbers killed, the Native American Genocide exceeds that of the Holocaust". For all the shock to the World Soul that was sustained by World War II, for all the continuing damage of the Crusades, for all the symbolic portent of the fall of Tibet and other peak cultures told or forgot, this devastating fact here at home just blows my mind and renders my heart.

But I know it too, I know that all is not lost, by simple gentle reminders such as how many of those who communicate with spirits today have Native American guides. The sheer numbers must have been vast for there to be so many friends who endured, visionaries who forgave, the ones who held on to love.

They shine the way still, the Way to New Earth.

Do you know the story of Ishi, the last Yahi? It is a very good story, it is furthermore true, and it remains a turning point in the recognition of the Native American plight. It continues to be a tale of how very much the New Earth is calling you, for it is a great door on more hope that is both old and new. It comes from a lineage of soul stories that have touched more people than ever knew from whence came the love.

It is time to reveal more of the soul lines that show the way to New Earth.

In the push of civilization from East to West, the coast of California was reached finally. By the beginning of the 20th century, the native Yana people of California had been reduced to one last group called the Yahi, and the Yahi had by a series of massacres been reduced to one lone survivor who came to be known as Ishi. This name is not his true name but only means “man” in his tongue, for Ishi’s people were killed before Ishi could receive his adult name by the proper ceremony.

Ishi was a shaman, a medicine man, by nature if not by as much nurture as he should have received. Wounded healers, they are called. Ishi was a keeper of the Souls of his tribe, and so he agreed to survive the massacres, to follow spirit advice that he might emerge each time safely from hiding places, so he could remain behind to send his slaughtered kin each on their proper ways into the afterlife.

Sending the dead home usually meant guiding them into the Earth. Shamans do not fear underworlds, and know that deep in sacred ground await many more friends. I have been there myself, at night I have slipped down into the planet and been given tours of so much more than I can recall consciously. There are fantastic new worlds of hope and love, gestating safely for the future in the womb of our planet.

I can picture it clearly, that whenever a human connects with their love of the Earth, a grounding cord drops as deep as their heart will allow, and friends of humanity (shamanic beings, magical lizards they might appear) gently plug these our lifelines of the hope for the future deeper still. Ties to nature is one way that we survive as a race to see the New Earth.

In 1908 Ishi’s job was done, all his kinfolk were dead and sent to the next world. And so, broken hearted but still serving Great Spirit, Ishi asked where he might go next. The answer came, to enter the world of the dreaded white man, and find the new friends there who will help tell your story and carry on the great work.

Friends of your soul can be found on all sides of the conflicted world; do not give up the journey of Tikkun Olam, reassembling the face of God.

So Ishi allowed himself to be captured and taken like a specimen, a curiousity, to ultimately live at the Berkeley Museum of Anthropology for the rest of his life, excepting one summer at the home of anthropologist Thomas Talbot Waterman and his family. Waterman and his colleague Alfred L. Kroeber staked their careers on studying Ishi, preserving his knowledge and way of life, and even taking him out to see the city and theatre and everyday people and events of this strange new culture that had decimated his own. Not every white man was to be feared, as Ishi met women and children and families in homes.

The public was fascinated, and the story of Ishi became a powerful new watershed for native American dignity and rights. The public consciousness was forever changed, as it slowly dawned what been lost in the cost of a manifest destiny led by the men of greed and fear. An entire race of rare human beings, rich in their stories, accomplishments and loves, had been reduced to the traces of what one gentle individual whose name was not even Ishi could bring a few scholars to understand in those twilight years of the Native American genocide, which had spanned centuries.

The legacy of Ishi’s courage, and that of those who came to love him against the tide of their own culture, cannot be underestimated. In 1915 Edward Sapir, a Jewish American linguist of rising prominence, came to California to study Ishi and his language. It was a powerful experience, capping the years of study he had already done on the vanishing native languages of Oregon and California, under the sympathetic direction of his great mentor Franz Boas, who has been called “the father of modern anthropology”.

Sapir’s name you may recognize in the startling hypothesis he devised with colleague Benjamin Whorf. Oft enthusiastically quoted and, like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity arguably over-applied, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states more or less that a language and the culture which it encodes will determine the cognitive limits of a people. You can’t even think or feel what you cannot describe.

This incredibly powerful philosophical position captured the imaginations of millions, and paved the way for the new generations of subjective anthropologists, who would immerse themselves in a culture to become forever changed. From this tradition of such heart-open powers have come the new shamans of the western world, including the debatably fictionalized but immeasurably influential books of Carlos Castenada, and the mind-bending world-healing life works of Michael Harner, Hank Wesselman, and so many others.

The spirits of those slaughtered live on, for the love of New Earth is ever dawning.

The story of Ishi was recorded most faithfully and popularized by none other than the wife of Alfred Kroeber, Theodora, who never actually met the great native man. From her husband’s notes and comments she compiled the book “Ishi in Two Worlds”, which was not published until 1961 after Alfred Kroeber's death. Many more books and movies have followed and will continue to, because the story is so deep and still does not end. The daughter of Alfred and Theodora was none other than the great American authoress Ursula K. LeGuin, who also had not met Ishi but shows the mark of a great Soul lineage.

(I note through my tears as I write this, that Ursula was born on my birthday which is the feast of St. Ursula, and in the same year as Michael Harner. Is that what I do from my soul for you, gentle reader, I make the connections?)

Writing since childhood but published only since the 1960’s, Ursula K. LeGuin is celebrated as one of the most influential science-fiction fantasy authors the world has ever known. Coming from her strong intuitive senses for native mythic storytelling, cross-cultural human rights, and archetypal spirituality, her works such as “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Earthsea Trilogy” have guided generations of dreamers and seekers. The titles alone are legendary, subsuming fantastic journeys of self-discovery that include characters who change genders on distant planets, and heros who integrate the shadow self to take back their power and fulfill destinies that recast the world to a much better place.

Though Ursula broke many barriers, including writing from such a strongly feminine perspective, becoming the first science-fiction author to keep her female name was not her achievement. More creditable for that bold statement is Zenna Henderson, who influenced Ursula greatly with her tales of The People, a Shaker-like gentle tribe of extraterrestrial refugees who keep their psychic and spiritual traditions secret in modern America, occasionally revealing themselves to someone they trust, including a new state-supplied school teacher. Zenna began imagining this after being assigned to teach Japanese children in an Arizona internment camp during WWII.

But one of my favorite firsts of Ursula K. LeGuin indeed comes with her story “The Lathe of Heaven”. From it was made the first science fiction movie for PBS, American public television, which had previously considered sci-fi beneath its literary reputation. “The Lathe of Heaven” is about a man who goes to a therapist with a most unusual problem: what he dreams the night before changes all of reality. Since the therapist is changed along with everything else, it takes some clever proving to demonstrate he is not crazy. The therapist then becomes greedy to use this power to remake the planet into a better place, which backfires in an apocalypse that is intervened upon by turtle-like guides from higher dimensions, who reset time to allow our hero to live the life he would have always dreamed of for himself, one of love and personal peace.

I digress of course, but there are so many transcendent themes here that I become enamored with the future and past of New Earth. There are energies of inspiration which have always been with us, from the gentlest and most powerful of ancestors and myths, to the popular works of visionaries living among us today.

The world may be after all, a very good place.

Let there be peace on Earth. Let the God in you bless.

Please, for the sake of you and your friends who just haven’t yet met.

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