Fractals occur naturally in every scale of life from the inconceivably large to the microscopic, and as I have always said, one needs to observe their surroundings and marvel at this amazing natural phenomena. Paul Bourke, a computer scientist at the University of Western Australia, started documented intriguing fractal patterns spread across the world, using Google Earth.
Bourke looked at the different landscapes and areas across the globe – from mountain ranges, rivers, forests, sand dunes to wetlands – and when zoomed out, these landscapes formed replicating fractal patterns. For example, if you look at a leaf, the veins bifurcate into even finer veins and they subdivide once again into even finer veins and this entire surface of the leaf resembles fractal characteristics.
The same principle can be found in rivers – tributaries branching off the main river, and so forth, following a similar pattern until you get down to the smallest springs. Even the ridges and mountain tops add to the amazing texture of each landscape, branching in and out in such extraordinarily beautiful patterns.
It’s unbelievable and beyond our imagination that how Earth is brimming with fractal patterns, its a fractal world we are living in!
“The method of repression is to not express. If you feel angry, you don’t express it. You suppress it, you don’t allow it to come out. My method is quite the contrary. If you are angry, express it.” ~ Osho
Catharsis is a powerful tool for accessing and releasing pent-up emotions; a process of healing, cleansing and purification that affects us on both, emotional and cognitive level.
Originally, the term was used as a metaphor in Poetics by Aristotle to explain the impact of tragedy on the audiences. Catharsis was also used in psychotherapy practice – Freud & Breur described catharsis as an involuntary, instinctive body reaction for example crying.
Reenacting scenes from one’s past, dreams, or fantasies helps the person bring the unconscious conflicts into consciousness and eventually experience catharsis. With increased consciousness comes more relief and positive change (Moreno, 1946).
According to Moreno, catharsis helps to reunite the separated (unconscious) parts of the psyche and the conscious self (Kipper, 1997). Some common examples of short term, everyday acts of catharsis are crying, laughing, anger, or tantrums.
A beautiful video to explain Catharsis and how it can be triggered unexpectedly
When we practice these releasing methodologies systematically, we can reap multiple benefits. Some obvious benefits are deeper connect with the self, anger management, self-confidence, feeling of empowerment, behavior management and glowing skin.
Healing benefits of Catharsis have been used and spoken about in literature, theater, healing methodologies, spiritual sciences, cultural rituals, medicine and psychology.
Mechanisms of Catharsis
Throughout life we are taught, especially men, to not express how we really feel. Osho in his book, ‘Nowhere to go but in’ said, “Women are less insane than men and if men too can weep, they will not go insane.”
Catharsis presses a series of trigger points that releases the vented up emotions in the human body, unconscious mind and subconscious mind. For instance, when we feel anger, and we have vented out the emotion of anger on the person responsible for the same, we still have traces of anger in our mind. This, knowingly or unknowingly, creates a bubble of emotions, that keeps getting collected.
These emotions manifest either in forms of expression or in the form of a disease. Janov, an American psychologist said “if infants and children are not able to process painful experiences fully (cry, sob, wail, scream, etc.,) in a supported environment, their consciousness ‘splits’, pain gets suppressed to the unconscious and reappears in neurotic symptoms and disorders in later life.”
Using Osho’s dynamic meditation process to release emotions
Osho’s dynamic meditation is based on Catharsis – a way to break old, ingrained patterns in the body and mind that keep one imprisoned in the past, and to experience the freedom and peace that are hidden behind these prison walls.
“My method is to express everything that is inside. If there are special problems, moral problems, don’t express it to someone else. Express it in a vacuum. So my method starts with expressing everything that has been suppressed.” These are the different stages of Dynamic meditation –
Step 1: Chaotic Breathing
Stand in an open space, close your eyes and start breathing chaotically. We are doing this for 10 minutes. Breathe in whichever manner that suits you, but ensure it is not systematic. Fast, vigorous, with pauses, extremely slow, just keep breathing chaotically. The reason for breathing chaotically lies in the fact that when we breathe systematically, we cannot awaken our suppressed being. We need a hit, a blow that would cause some disturbance.
There is no method of the breath in this step, no yogic breathing, we aim to break the pattern. Osho says, “If you are angry you have a different rhythm of breathing. If you are in love a different rhythm of breathing. If you are sad, again there is a different rhythm of breathing.
If you are relaxed, a different rhythm of breathing. When your state of mind changes, your breathing changes immediately. So if you change your breathing, your state of mind is affected immediately.”
Step 2: Expression
In this step, for 10 minutes, express your emotions or whatever comes to your mind freely, not to someone just in a vacuum. Let it loose, vent out your emotions in the most natural state that comes to you. If you feel like weeping, weep loudly, if you feel anger upsurging, scream and take out all your anger or violence to the sky/vacuum.
Gradually over the weeks, as you bring out the repressed and suppressed emotions, you would notice older issues and feelings coming up. Osho said, “It is not only that your mind expressed them. Your body expresses them. For the first time, you become aware that your body has many repressions to express.”
The second step is a little time consuming and would take a while to manifest completely, but ideally within three weeks, one can expect to do it smoothly. Once you master the art, a feeling of space will be created which will unfold within you and you will feel relaxed.
Step 3: Activating the sex center
In the third step, we will chant the sound ‘Hoo’. The sound is not the word who, but it is the sound, ‘Hoo’. For ten minutes now, just lose yourself in this sound and keep chanting it. ‘Hoo, Hoo, Hoo…..’ keep going on. Different sound effects us differently and activates different centres of our body. For instance, LAM is the sound of the root chakra, Hoo is the sound that hits and activates the sex center in our body, where all creativity lies.
Osho says that sex energy is all that there is. Everything is born through it and when we have sex, it moves out and leads to biological reproduction. When it moves in, it again creates and reproduce, in the form of spiritual transformation or rebirth. After a few weeks of practice, you will be able to feel warmth rising from the sex center through your spine to your head.
Osho said, “And once this energy begins to move from your spine toward the head, you will have a different view about yourself, a different outlook, a different dimension. Once this energy reaches the head, it can be released from the head. Normally the sex energy is released from the sex center. That is one pole of our being. The opposite pole is the head. If the sex energy can be released from the head, you are transformed; you are a different being.”
Step 4: Relaxation & Meditation
The last step is relaxation or meditation, where you can lie down and fall dead. When you reach the fourth step, you are already so exhausted that relaxation comes easily. There is no technique to it.
In this deadness you will witness a feeling of true bliss. In the process, you have released all anxiety, pain, thoughts and tensions and what now remains is a pure form of meditation, free of any adulteration of any emotion.
There is a dire need of catharsis in these times when stress and tension has become a part of our daily life. Being peaceful is not enough when deep down suppressed emotions and restlessness is still lurking within you.
When catharsis is combined with meditation, feelings can be vented appropriately, which can bring about emotional harmony and balance.
Dying is a mystery, and many of us fear it. But, much like the thrill of discovering self-love, death, and our relationship to those hours slipping towards darkness (or as is more famously known as, ‘out towards the light’,) becoming familiar with and meditating on how we feel about our own deaths can be a huge release.
It’s like coming face to face with ourselves and finally giving ourselves the permission to let go. Think of how powerful this could be; meditating on dying and experiencing that release, (hopefully) decades before the actual events arrive.
Think of the things we might accomplish! The extra love we might give. As with self-love, understanding death and embracing it every day is to embrace life.
Here are three Buddhist versions of Dying
What happens when we die …and to help begin that process.
Extracts from Dying Well, by Geshe Tashi Tsering, Chenrezig Institute, Queensland, transcribed and edited by Tom Vichta from a teaching to the Amitayus Hospice Service, Mullumbimby, NSW, in April 1995.
“At the time of death, the winds associated with the four elements (earth, water, fire, air) deteriorate, until those elements can no longer act as a basis for consciousness.”
So the first element to fade is the element of air affecting the eyesight which begins to fail and giving the dying the sense of sinking beneath the earth.
Secondly, as the water element begins to take over, the person stops exhibiting signs of water such as saliva and sweat, their inner visions taking the shape of mirage-like water on a desert horizon. Their ears begin to fail and they are no longer able to hear sounds, their inner visions of ‘smoke puffing up into the air.’ As the fire element begins to diminish the person is unable to discern who is around them as the body loses its warmth as the breath weakens and the sense of smell diminishes.
The body then loses its ability to move and as the air element fades, the person stops breathing – meaning, in ‘earth’ terms, that that person is dead. The sense of taste is lost. The person is able to regain consciousness as the wind-energy and mind power linger, but if the spirit decide to leave, the four elements dissolve entirely and the body is no longer able to function.
As the white ‘drop’ that came from the father when the body was conceived travels down from the crown chakra, the inner vision is that of radiant white light. Then comes the red ‘drop’ from the mother, ascending towards the heart chakra. Both drops reach the heart chakra where the wind energy resides and the person experiences radiant blackness, when all thought forms finally cease.
“As one starts to become conscious again, the “clear light of death” manifests. This appears as a clear, luminous, vacuum-like, empty sky – a completely clear, open, radiant vacuity.”
At this time, the person has the opportunity to comprehend emptiness and the true nature of reality and is able to stay in the clear light for two to three days, even longer as long as the body is not disturbed.
It’s not until some time after the clear light that the actual moment of death occurs, when the red drop exits as blood through the nose, and the white drop exit through the genital opening. The degree of grasping, craving and becoming determines the karmic pattern of the person and where they will be reborn.
Dying According to Sogyal Rinpoche
“When the red and white essences meet at the heart, consciousness is enclosed between them. As an outer sign, we experience blackness, like an empty sky shrouded in utter darkness. The inner experience is of a state of mind free of thoughts. The seven thought states resulting from ignorance and delusion are brought to an end. This is known as “Full Attainment”.
When the person becomes slightly conscious again, the ‘clear luminosity’ dawns – or the true nature of mind, otherwise known as Buddha nature. Next comes the luminous bardo of dharmata, or landscape of light. You take on a body of light, with sound, light, and color shimmering all around you.
If you are unable to recognize these for what they are, they will collapse into mandalas of peaceful and wrathful deities which can be quite scary – but as with each stage of this ‘bardo’, or transitionary stage of death, it holds within it an opportunity for enlightenment.
Apparently there are forty-two peaceful deities and fifty-eight wrathful ones in the original Tibetan Book of the Dead, and ‘unfold over a period of days.’
The next phase is called ‘union dissolving into wisdom.’ A brilliant display of light surrounds you. This is the manifestation of the five wisdoms, the fifth (a green light) only attainable when you have reached enlightenment according to Tibetan Buddhism.
If you don’t attain liberation here, the lights dissolve into an array of something similar to peacock feathers, and you move on to the next phase.
Now comes ‘wisdom dissolving into spontaneous presence,’ perhaps likened to that of the Akashic records and the soul’s access to them, including the six realms of samsaric existence and the deities. The lure of your previous lives in the samsara are likely to be what (habitually) draws you back in to the patterns of karma, and again wrap you in delusion, determining where you will be reborn.
According to Sogyal Rinpoche, writing on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it is our belief at this point that we are separate to these realms as we simultaneously view them that causes us to miss liberation, and that actually, if we saw our own true radiance as one with them and a part of theirs, free from the illusion of duality, then we might be able to break free from the swirls of karma and rejoin our own intrinsic radiance once and for all.
Extract from: Introduction to Tantra: The Transformation of Desire by Lama Thubten Yeshe, edited by Jonathan Landaw, Wisdom Publications, 2001, pages 99-116.
The Vajra Body
“Just as the gross perishable physical body is pervaded by the ordinary nervous system, our subtle vajra body is pervaded by thousands of channels (nadi) through which flow the energy winds (prana) and drops (bindu) that are the source of the bliss so vital to highest tantric practice. Once we have made contact with this clear, conscious body of light through meditation our gross physical body will no longer be a problem for us as we will have transcended it.”
At that point, the attainment of a light body deity becomes a reality, and a central line opens up, breathing the wind from the crown, all the way to the base chakra and throughout each energy wheels that runs along our spine.
The fundamental consciousness present in our heart chakras, although the multitude of ‘temporary’ or ‘tourist’ thoughts, present in our many lives interrupts and confuses the intrinsic and beautiful purity of the continuous mind or soul.
When our channels open up during death, we have the opportunity to experience the continuous mind free from the interfering ones, yet many people do not take advantage of this. A life spent practicing meditation can aid in recognizing and taking full advantage of this beautiful experience.
At the time of our death, all physical problems, anxieties and mind patterns end, like a feeling of running through some bramble-laden woods in the middle of the night, only to break from of the brambles and be lifted into the sky where a shining and never-ending light resides.
If we make the most of this, we can obtain ‘extraordinary penetrative insight.’ The wisdom of emptiness obtained during meditation and the opposition of the ego, or illusion of separation, gives rise to the free channeling of the subtle mind and pure winds through our energy channels during life.
This is much like what occurs when we also practice tantra. Tantra is the practice of exercising the life force, sutra is the ego-centric ‘I’ view concerned with duality and separation.
In short, the more we meditate and practice tantra, or the visitation of this pure and subtle mind that honours emptiness in life, the better prepared we will be to have a ‘controlled’ death or passage through the bardo where we are able to then be reborn in the place we want, or better yet redirect our passage into that very emptiness.
To have an ‘uncontrolled’ death is to suffer extreme confusion during the process of death and therefore have an uncontrolled choice of where one wishes to be reborn and the cycle of karma never ends.
Some of us are lucky and are either born knowing how to self nurture and self-love, or are mindfully taught and learn it from someone along the way. But for the rest of us, happiness is often a mystery to be unfurled, a mirage in the desert, and something continuously out of reach, no matter how hard we reach for it.
For the introvert or empath particularly, living in the materialistic box-culture we’ve created, where we have our little (struggled for) slice of ‘heaven’ (often a cramped and cut-off from nature-space), only venturing out to buy junk food from the store, meeting others to escape reality with drunkenness, or perhaps timidly (and hedgingly) showing up to support groups and libraries just so that we can hide from our (usually denied) sense of loneliness.
Sounds dramatic, I hear you say. But it wasn’t until I left the big smoke of the city to volunteer at a meditation retreat centre that I realized how detached I’d really become. OK, so we have work. That can give you a sense of community and belonging.
But often the companies we’re working for are questionable in the imprint they’re making on the world and others. It’s rare that we are equally morally clean in our work (think ‘right livelihood’ – Buddha’s 8-fold path), on the same wavelength as all of our colleagues, and consciously practice loving speech, intention and pure action such as working to better ourselves and the world around us.
With that in mind, here are 6 reasons that living in a commune (that prays and works together), or on a retreat can teach us the tools to be happy, tools that we might introduce into our daily lives and help ourselves heal for good:
Structure
For some, we may not have had a proper structure to our lives since school (if we were lucky enough to have gone, despite the indoctrination it may have given us). Either we haven’t worked, or our hours have always been haphazard. Structure and routine is actually incredibly important when it comes to happiness. Just as a child feels safer with a structured day, so do we.
And that doesn’t mean we can’t be spontaneous. How we react to a routine can often teach us a lot about our shadows (do we rebel against it, does it stress us out, do we beat ourselves up if we miss one section of our day or do we become control freaks?), and it can also help us feel loved.
Draw up a routine with space for spontaneity and special treats, and get creative with it! Make sure you include a balance of spiritual/self-loving serious practices, such as meditation or an hour set aside for a weekly bath with flower petals and relaxing music, social and communal activities such as attending a community gardening group, and time for projects that can develop into the future, such as having a weekly driving lesson (yes, at the age of 30 I still can’t drive), or one hour of cycling a day to hanker to your dream of cycling to France and back (it will come sooner than you think if you start now.)
Diet
Usually these retreats, if not a juice fast or food-related retreat in the first place, are health conscious and designed to give your body, mind and soul a bit of a detox. I’ve found that, when you’re surrounded by people and there are no other choices, you generally do just that. There’s no time to sneak junk food or sugary snacks because you’re surrounded day and night, and even if you did remember to, perhaps you’d choose not to anyway.
With all that meditation and yoga, or just plain good vibes, you realize you don’t need that crap in your body, and that the reason you might cram that stuff in the first place is because you are lonely and bored and because no-one is watching.
On retreat, because meals are communal you don’t really have a say when it’ll be ready or what it will be, you learn delayed gratification and to better appreciate your food. You try things you never usually would and like them.
You take time over your food and eat with a smile on your face because it’s been prepared with love rather than a rushed, got-to-get-some-stodge-in-my-body-otherwise-I-won’t-be-able-to-keep-going kind of intention. You don’t shovel, but marvel at the food on your plate and experience a deep gratitude for it.
Sacred Space
You can learn ideas of how to make your own space at home more sacred and geared towards a loving existence, and remove the negative images or symbol present in your personal living space. Or perhaps you realize that you don’t need most if not all of your personal belongings and can downsize to a van and whizz around Europe rather than carry on your mundane existence surrounded by shiny but perfectly useless stuff.
You can honour your shared space as well as your private space – enjoy communal areas with a sense of belonging yet still have the choice to retreat into your private room at the end of the day and be surrounded with solely your own thoughts. Just as it was when you lived with your family, but with people who are (mostly) on the same page as you and want to be there.
Balance
Again, as Buddha says in his teachings, the middle way is probably the best way to enhance your spiritual path and enjoy life. Not shut yourself up or become a hermit or ascetic, but not submerge yourself in pure health-harming pleasure, either.
With the retreat or communal way of life, we can learn to become balanced; not doing the same thing repeatedly as many forms of work will have us do, but leading varied and balanced lives.
This is the art of happiness, and it can be easily achieved with practice. Are you forcing yourself to do too much of one thing? Are you letting yourself do too much or being too hard on yourself?
With structure, you can ensure there is balance, and where the usually unavoidable section for ‘working or working meditation’ is, make sure that, as you would in a community, are doing something for the good of the whole as well as yourself.
Healing
As with all communities or retreats, often the thing you signed up for is not the best part you get to enjoy. The little extras I’ve already mentioned such as steam baths, yoga classes and communal dining can be ten times more satisfying than the course of work you came there to do. An inevitable thing that begins to happen, is that you can begin to heal. Meditating with others, for example, is quite a different experience to meditating alone.
With others, you become embraced. You create vibrations and do things without words that can excel to grand-scale healing if everyone lifts high (or goes in) enough. Of course this depends on the intentions of the group, but it is possible, and it is the future of our world.
In a community, you are appreciated for your own individuality and unique light and loved for it. You are treated as vital, you add different flavour and skills to the group, and are shown direct evidence that You Are Enough. Just your existence is worthy and an achievement in itself. When we are given the permission to slow down, we are able to see reality – and ourselves – for what it truly is.
Community
And finally, an expansion on the last few points really, you enjoy the benefits of living with a deep sense of community. You have many mirrors to learn from throughout your day, and so are in an intense form of cleansing, having opened the door to your spiritual path and with the protection of a temporary tribe you are able to lovingly shift yourself this way and that until you interact in a more mindful and loving way towards others.
You can get to the point where you’re able to be comfortable with others yet have your own space, and enjoy interconnectedness in action, something quite rare when you don’t have the choice about who you’re interacting and sharing space with.
You are able to see the direct effect that humans have on each other. Especially if you are meditating together, you become a group consciousness, and when someone is acting with less-than-good intentions, the rest of the group know it. We can consistently reflect and work towards balancing not only ourselves but also the group dynamic, healing within a circle of community spirit.
“Shamans… Those ecstatic technicians of the sacred.” ~ Erik Davis
The shamanic dance over the abyss is a cyclic donning and discarding of archetypal masks, an evocative rendering of otherworldly rapture made worldly. The shaman is a sacred conduit, the impossible bridge between thought and imagination and back. The shaman reveals the power between worlds, unveiling God.
Indeed, stripping God naked in order to disclose “Her” golden ovaries and nurturing womb. Or, equally as powerful, in order to expose “His” greedy-perfect hands and overreaching, aggrandized anthropocentrism. Doctors of the sacred, surgeons of the numinous, shamans are the ones stealing fire from the gods and bringing it back to warm (or burn) our hearts.
The shaman is shatter-happy in his/her ability to walk the tightrope between animal and Overman. Determined to temporarily scramble the self in order to conjure awe. Deeply ineffable while intermittently attempting to make things effable. The shaman is stopgap eloquent, slapdash meticulous, and otherworldly evocative.
The shaman’s cognitive toolkit hacks common awareness, unplugging us by plugging us back in, making us privy to wild visions that transform the way we see the world. Everything is a tool for ecstasy. All things are mechanisms for higher thought and heightened states of awareness.
But here are a few of the more common modes of shamanic evocation.
The Coyote Way
“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
Coyote is there at the edge of the desert, eyes burning like peyote buttons, turning boundaries into horizons. Coyote serves to test the boundaries of possibility and order.
Trickster-perfect and animal-sincere, Coyote hides between the lines (and between the lies) drawn by culture. Testing boundaries and stretching comfort zones by measuring the awesome flexibility of the cosmos against the inflexibility of humanity.
When a shaman taps into the Coyote’s powers, the soft underbelly of the human conditioned is exposed, revealing the vulnerable insecurity at the heart of what it means to be human. The coyote way is a celebration of fallibility and an exoneration from perfection.
As human beings, we are prone to mistakes, and we’re more often wrong than we are right about the way the universe works. And so the way of the coyote is a powerful way of humorous forgiveness in the face of our own fallibility. It is a way to take back our personal power (search for Truth) from the clutches of the illusion of power (false authority).
A shaman in the throes of Coyote evocation is the personification of what it means to get power over power, a showy and symbolic display of how the power of humor (being okay with being a fallible creature) trumps the power of seriousness (not being okay with being a fallible creature).
A bone-deep sincerity is the medicine gained from such shamanic reengineering. The kind of authenticity that crushes self-serious agenda and aggrandized cultural affiliation. A little amoral humor puts immoral power and moral righteousness on red alert, thereby resolving the power equation.
Shaman as Coyote openly declares to the world, “You can have your moral high ground or immoral low; I’ll stick with my amoral middle ground, and astonish you all!”
The Crow Way
“I believe that if I can sit out there long enough those crows, the trees and the wind can teach me something about how to be a better human being. I don’t call that romanticism, I call that Indigenous Realism.” ~ Dr. Daniel Wildcat
Behold! Crow is black & white, perched on a triple-edged sword. He blinks twice and calls himself Megalomaniac. He is between worlds like no other creature. Smart, cunning, and able to fly over all happiness and all melancholy.
His moon-eye sees the light. His sun-eye sees the dark. And his shadow is the grayest thing in the universe. But the Middle Gray is the sacred source of all wisdom. Even the Norse god Odin sought council about the ways of the world through his two crows, Hugin and Munin (Thought and Memory).
When a shaman taps into the Crow’s powers, the heavens widen and the abyss cracks further open. The shaman recognizes Crows intelligence, cooperation, deviousness, and sociality, and further sees a reflection of the human condition within them.
Through Crow’s powers the shaman transcends human limitation. The crow way is a celebration of wit and cunning in the face of manmade rules and outdated laws. It is a way to steal wisdom from the moon, and fire from the sun, and to gift such creative boons to the people. Shaman as Crow is a mighty spear, piercing the womb of the universe.
Like Ted Hughes poetically penned, “When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white. He decided it glared much too whitely. He decided to attack it and defeat it. He got his strength up flush and in full glitter. He clawed and fluffed his rage up. He aimed his beak direct at the sun’s center. He laughed himself to the center of himself and attacked. At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old, shadows flattened. But the sun brightened -It brightened, and Crow returned charred black. He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black, “Up there,” he managed, “where white is black and black is white, I won.””
The Thunder Way
“No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk
Thunder Shaman is there at the edge of the storm, thunder-bow like a lightning rod in his/her wild hands, the transformative personification of the Thunder Gods. Thunder crashes through, testing the fragility of the human spirit in order to make it more robust.
Lightning-perfect and tempestuous, Thunder pokes holes in all the outdated ideologies and bloated ways built up by culture, and then laughs as the torrential rains sieving through the holes, washing away the old to create more fertile “land” for the new.
When a shaman taps into the power of thunder, the ego is put on notice. The superego is forced over the edge of the fire in order to yield antinomy, the union of opposites. The shaman becomes personified Humility, puncturing certainty with swift circles of signifying. Thunder shaman’s duty is to humiliate the tribe’s certitude, forcing it to recognize that knowledge exists in a fundamental relationship with not-knowing and a background of mystery always remains.
Thunder shaman is Paradox incarnate, revealing how, as Louis G. Herman said, “The mother of all boundaries is that between the human being and the rest of the natural universe.”
The medicine gained through Thunder is a deep understanding of rebirth, a heightened sense of eternal reoccurrence. The thunder way provides a sacred space where high humor and high humility can coalesce into the courage necessary for the tribe to face change with fearlessness and honor.
Like Edward Abbey said, “We need wilderness because we are wild animals. Every man needs a place where he can go crazy in peace once in a while.”
The thunder shaman provides this place for his/her people. A place where the people are free to bend the rules and laugh at laws in order to improve the cultural functions of both.
Shaman as Thunder brings storm and renewal, amorally unknotting human complacency and immorality and then rearranging the energies of this unknotting into what is needed and moral.
The Mirror Way
“Reality, it seems is multiple, and tightly coupled to perception. The conditions of perception can be varied within a broad range by a variety of psychedelic technologies.” ~ Diana Slattery
Anti-Narcissus stands over the edge of Mankind’s Pond in full acceptance. He is headless. His “face” is everywhere and nowhere. Ego surrenders to spirit when the ego-seed is planted into the neck-hole of the Headless Narcissist. The Narcissus flower that blooms is the “face” of the cosmos: sober, reflective, and in full shimmer.
When a shaman taps into the power of the mirror, the infinite interdependent reflection of the cosmos becomes personified. The eye through which the human tribe sees the universe becomes the same eye through which the universe sees the human tribe.
The shaman becomes Mirror Man; Looking Glass Man; Enlightened Echo. The mirror way is a salute to Rumi’s wise words: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” Shaman as Mirror is a sacred ricochet, bouncing macro off micro, ether off cosmos, and finitude off infinity.
The medicine gained through the way of the mirror is a numinous inner-flowering, a sacred resonance with all things. Through the shaman’s mirror dance we see how we are but one tiny blue dot in a mighty universe, but how we are also the entire universe within a tiny blue dot. Our perception of cosmos transforms the cosmos.
Psyche creates cosmos and cosmos creates psyche.
Like Chief Seattle wisely said, “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”
Osho’s dynamic meditation is based on Catharsis – a way to break old, ingrained patterns in the body and mind that keep one imprisoned in the past, and to experience the freedom and peace that are hidden behind these prison walls.
ou become aware that your body has many repressions to express.”
