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Eight Signs You may be Experiencing a Spiritual Awakening

Spirituality

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January 16, 2014

Eight Signs You may be Experiencing a Spiritual Awakening

Spiritual awakening is a slow and sacred process of transformation, when you realise the importance of connecting with the inner power and listening to yourself, instead of what the world tells you to do and become.

Authenticity is what you seek, and befriending your inner demons is what you strive to do.

“Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” ~ Miles Kington

Here are 8 signs you may be experiencing a spiritual awakening

1. You’re more in touch with your spiritual foundations through transformative meditation:

You realize, as Jung noted, that “the experience of the Self is always a defeat for the Ego.” And through the seven primary chakras you are becoming one with the cosmos, receptive to stimuli to which, in the time before, you were insensate.

You’ve felt the powerful kundalini energy rising up from your roots, passing through the sacred waters of the sacral, basking in the fire of the solar plexus, breathing in the vital breath of the heart, absorbing the ethereal voice of the throat, pouring through the dissolution of the Third Eye, and spilling up and out like a mighty fountainhead into the greater cosmos.

2. You are beginning to want more freedom and less stuff:

Your heart is not heavy with materialistic burden. You understand that ownership-based love can never be true love. You realize like Osho said, “Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.” And although there are some people in the world who are so poor all they have is money, you continue to love without expecting anything in return.

You have frequent, overwhelming episodes of appreciation for the abundance the natural world has to offer. Like Gandhi, you live simply so that others may simply live.

3. You realize that the door to your prison cell is wide open (and always has been):

seeing-the-light — Rumi, “Why do you stay in prison when the door is wide open?”

You have a growing propensity toward breaking mental paradigms, stretching comfort zones and thinking outside the current box. You have a tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than from fears based on past experiences, and you are constantly attempting to recondition any and all preconditions.

You enjoy each moment, relishing, in carpe-diem-ecstasy, your bountiful freedom. It was Rumi who asked, “Why do you stay in prison when the door is wide open?”

4. The world is a playground, and you are on recess:

You don’t take yourself too seriously. You realize that, though hard work is necessary, sincere play is paramount. You understand that play is the only way that the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.

Your sense of humor has become your safety net. You understand that sincerity is primary and should always trump seriousness. Like Nietzsche wrote, “The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play.”

5. You have acquired the counterintuitive practice of relishing in your mistakes:

We all make mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes we make are huge, like overeating, or putting all our eggs in one basket. Sometimes the mistakes we make are small, like eating too many beans, or making a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

But you appreciate the strange flukes and foibles that knock you off course or lead you astray. These can be setbacks or stepping stones. It’s up to you which. But you have discovered the capacity to use them as stepping stones.

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog painting by Caspar David Friedrich

6. You have an overwhelming feeling of being connected with others and nature:

You realize, as Aldo Leopold did, that “The land is not a commodity that belongs to us; it’s a community to which we belong.” You are becoming more aware of your connection to the community and cosmos. Your ego-centric tendencies are fast dissolving into eco-centric magnanimity.

You realize, as Darryl Anka surmised, that, “Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want, and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”

7. You understand that the journey is indeed the thing:

You’ve discovered that most of your pleasure comes not from your achievement of a goal, though there is some pleasure that comes from that, but from the process of achieving that goal. It’s not just that you are on a journey; it’s that you are the journey.

You are not simply crossing the bridge from animal to Over-man (Nietzsche’s Übermensch), you are the “bridge” itself. Indeed, you understand – from balls to bones, ovaries to marrow – that the glue that binds finitude with infinity is the human torn between being both an animal and a god.

8. You’d rather be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie:

You embrace the pain that comes from knowledge and laugh at the bliss born out of ignorance. You accept that pain is a side effect of doing what you love, knowing that pain is merely the hard center of love that must be embraced, softened and transformed into wisdom.

You have an appreciation for truth that trumps any amount of pain or suffering that’s necessary to achieve it. Like the Dread Pirate Roberts says to the princess in the Princess Bride, “Life is pain, princess. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.”

Image Source:
Spiritual Awakening
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog painting by Caspar David Friedrich
Spiritual Awakening Image
Spiritual Awakening Art

Saving Gaia: Disassembling the Man-machine

Issues

Gary Z McGee

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January 12, 2014

9

resurrection_of_gaia — Resurrection of Gaia

“Nature has neither core nor skin: she’s both at once outside and in.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Wild nature and human nature are both becoming endangered species. As other species die all around us, lost forever in the biological ether, we seem to be quite fit in our survival. Indeed, we even seem to be prospering. But it is now becoming apparent that there’s a glaring sickness at the heart of the human condition: we’ve confused the survival of the fittest with those that kill. And so everything dies around us while we prosper.

While we plunder and horde, the world becomes more and more depleted. While we go through the culturally prescribed motions of conquer, control, consume, destroy, repeat; the world goes through the motions of dying. The irony of this is that eventually we too will become depleted, and we too will die, as nature is a finite resource (although gargantuan in its capacity) that needs time to replenish.

Yin Yang of World Hunger by Deevad — Yin Yang of World Hunger

Because of this we are approaching a bottleneck of cataclysmic proportions. On the one side is the man machine, fueled and ruthlessly efficient at taking. On the other side is nature (to include human nature), fuel itself, and exhaustibly giving. Daniel Quinn created the concepts “takers” and “leavers” in his novel Ishmael that reflects this dynamic quite well.

The man machine takes, stockpiles, and then takes some more. Nature gives, renews, and then gives some more. But nature is not an infinite resource. It takes time to renew itself. And the man machine is consuming faster than nature has time to replenish its resources.

The concepts “nature” and “human nature” are interchangeable here. The man machine is made up of aspects of human nature, but is not itself human nature. The man machine is a cultural accumulation of old bad habits passed down and spoon-fed into new bad habits, decorated with a plethora of unhealthy ideologies and mental paradigms rooted in parochial ignorance. It uses stopgap dogmatic rigidness and fear-tactic ruthlessness to keep itself entrenched.

It has become a “machine” because it has become heartless and inhumane. The irony is that it is held-up by billions of people (takers) who have hearts, who have human nature, who love and hunger and hurt. But this is also the beauty of it: that it IS held up by people with hearts who can, at any moment, shrug away the outdated, unhealthy world view of the man machine, and adopt a new healthier, more holistic way of being and becoming (leavers); a mature way that strives for equilibrium between nature and the human soul; a way that teaches us to, as Gandhi once said, “live simply so that others can simply live.”

The tragedy of our times is that we (society) live and die for the man-machine. Instead of the machine being a tool for us to use, we have become a tool for the man-machine to manipulate. The tragedy of this is that life itself has become bureaucratic, which brings about absolute decay and crushes the independence of the individual. No less vividly, is its effect on all order of things – from the ecological and economic, to the psychological and spiritual.

When it comes down to it, we are made of the earth. We are the earth’s highly evolved conscious organs. Our eyes and brains are extensions of her miraculous biology. Our knowledge is her knowledge, and we have a duty to her. Why are we burdened with this duty?

Because, as the most powerful animal to have ever been born from her, we have the capacity to know that we know, and therefore the power to destroy. This power can knock us out of balance with nature and alienate us from each other, or it can bring us back into balance with each other and the biosphere.

This power gives us a responsibility to maintain a balance between nature and the human soul. Her soul is our soul. We must become caretakers of that soul instead of destroyers of it. That is why disassembling the man-machine – the heartless, exploitative, and deeply violent monster that we, as a culture, have created – is so important.

Image Source:

Yin Yang of World Hunger by Deevad

Resurrection of Gaia by Billelis

Life and Death

Magic Mushrooms: A Catalyst for Human Evolution

Juan Pablo Hern

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January 12, 2014

15

Magic Mushrooms: A Catalyst for Human Evolution

It was a glorious morning in late August when me and my friends went mushroom hunting in the meadows in the outskirts of my place in Mexico. We searched in the patches of tall grass left uneaten by the cows that looked at us uninterested while ruminating. Hidden inside these tall patches of grass, there were large bodies of cow dung.

Mushrooms feed on cellulose, that is why they grow there. Cellulose is broken down by the cow’s digestive system to facilitate the growth of mushrooms, and it is the excess of nitrogen in the soil around the dung that keeps the cows away from eating the grass.

We collected the mushrooms filled with a mix of veneration and enthusiasm and then proceeded to a nearby forest where we ingested them.

I had taken a couple of psychedelics before, but nothing had such a strong effect as these mushrooms. Gradually, geometrical patterns of previous unseen hues and of complicated shapes twirled and tinkled.

My body felt a bit like rubber and I was yawning a lot. Everything seemed to breathe and was alive and conscious. When I went into a deeper stage, there was no longer an “I” but a “we” – me, my friends and the forest became a single unity, rejoicing in the mystery of existence.

Even though the effect of mushrooms has now long faded away, the insight that I gained from the experience is still with me: I carry it around as precious wisdom. It was a life-changing experience. It really was!

R. Gordon Wasson, an American author and ethnomycologist, played a vital role in spreading awareness of the existence of psychoactive mushrooms to a wide audience. He, like me, was profoundly touched by his first experience with magic mushrooms. It steered his life towards the study of the relationship between mushrooms and humanity (ethno-mycology).

He soon discovered that the magic mushrooms, that can be categorized as psychedelics, have a long and important relationship with mankind. For example, the Aztecs and Mayans incorporated its usage in their rituals of worshiping, divination and even, just for the fun of it. Similarly, the people of Siberia had a religious relationship with the mushroom Amanita Muscaria.

Here in Mexico if you take a look at the 100 peso bill, one can see how the usage of these mushrooms are incorporated into the culture of the inhabitants before the Spanish came.

A statue of Xochipilli can be seen on the bill, sitting down, in ecstasy, displaying ominous wise eyes. He is the Aztec god of art, games, beauty and flowers and on his skin we can see the image of various entheogens used by the Aztecs, like the mushroom and other ethnobotanicals.

Wasson got hold of an essay by Richard Shultes, an ethnobotanist and a psychedelic pioneer, where he described the existence of magic mushrooms and of people who were using them in a ritualistic manner. He went to Mexico to pursue the validation of his thesis.

In Huatla, Oaxaca, he met the legendary healer Maria Sabina and attended one of her healing ceremonies called velada (roughly translates into evening event) where he experienced the “childrens” as Maria Sabina called them with affection.

Teonanácatl: The Secret History of Magic Mushrooms (Ignite Baltimore 6 - Michael M. Hughes)

Gordon Wasson receiving mushrooms from Maria Sabina

Wasson then published his findings in Life magazine in 1957, featuring him on the cover. This was the moment when the existence of these mushrooms gained attention by the general public. It subsequently sparked interest among many hippies and psychonauts, who traveled to Mexico in pursuit of these magic mushrooms.

Wasson also postulated that an ancient drink called soma, was actually made out of a magic mushroom. As we can see from the following quote, it seems to have given the drinkers many insights and made them have some sort of metamorphosis:

“We have drunk Soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the Gods discovered.
Now what may foeman’s malice do to harm us? What, O Immortal, mortal man’s deception? (Rigveda (8.48.3))”

Soma is important because it is a crucial source of inspiration for the people who wrote the Vedas, ancient texts that originated in India, making up the oldest scriptures of Hinduism (around 1st century B.C).

The other thesis is described in the book “The Road to Eleusis” (having Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD and C.A.P. Ruck as a collaborators). He makes the hypothesis that a drink called ‘kykeon’ was similarly made out of a fungal parasite of barley called ergot (it contains LSA, the precursor of LSD). Similar to the Soma, this drink allowed people to peek into the after-life.

Eleusinian-Mysteries-greece — The Eleusinian Mysteries were initiation ceremonies held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at Eleusis in ancient Greece

This drink seem to be used during the Eleusinian Mysteries (initiation ceremonies held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone based at Eleusis in ancient Greece). We do not know much about it since it was a well-kept secret and those who divulged the core ritual received death penalty. What we do know, is that this festival was a fundamental part of the ancient Greek culture.

Terence McKenna, another mushroom enthusiast, also hypothesized that the Eleusinian Mysteries took place under the effect of some substance that came from mushrooms (although he thought that they were some sort of Psilocybe kind). He said that the mushroom was not only a part of ancient cultures, but the very reason behind our advanced cognitive capacities.

His theory is often referred as the “Stoned Ape Theory of Human Evolution”. He theorized that the Homo Sapiens stumbled with the species Psilocybe Cubensis and started ingesting.

The effects of the mushroom that address fundamental facets help us become Homo Sapiens by modulation, our sense of ego, for example, promoting social bonding; similarly, language, could have triggered something in our psyche that allowed us to reach a fundamentally higher level of communication.

Nowadays psilocybin, one of the main alkaloids that most magic mushrooms have, is being researched for its medical uses. Research has shown that it can certainly help patients with terminal diseases come to terms with life. Also, it can help get rid of depression, anxiety and other unnecessary psychological habits.

Psilocybin research with depression patients (english with german sub)

Microscopic-view-of-mycelium — Microscopic view of Mycelium

Mushrooms are truly wonderful beings. What we usually consider to be a mushroom, for example, the ones we buy in the supermarket, are actually just their fruiting bodies. Their purpose is the dispersing of spores in to its surroundings; but if we look underground, we find that under the fruiting body there are complex networks of interlocking tubular cells called mycelium.

They grow from the mushroom’s spores, and quickly become a happy community of selfless cells that work in harmony towards their goals.

Nutrients and cellular compounds travel along these tubular networks to help the growth of mushrooms, aimed at the abortion of further nutrients. Yes, but why would a mushroom put so much of its energy into producing a substance that has no benefit to it?

I like to think that it is their gift to us, in order to open our mind and heart. It is the realization that we can be like mushrooms, to work as a community, that’s what we learn when we eat them. Rather than being separate beings from one another, we are fundamentally united: Interdependence is more important than independence to archive realization in a broader scale.

Our actions spread like spores do, let us put some good vibes into it. The cosmic sacrament with magic mushrooms is available to us as a gift from the mushroom kingdom, let us be ready for it, let us allow the mushroom to give us their wisdom!

References:

Richard Schultes
Grodon Wasson
Terence McKenna
General Mushroom Knowledge

Image Source:

Maria Sabinas Picture
Mycelium
Mushroom Drawing
Eleusian Mysteries
Starry night
Amanita muscaria
Magic mushrooms

Behind the Mask: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Spirituality

Gary Z McGee

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January 11, 2014

7

Behind the Mask: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

“We have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is fully known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.” ~ Joseph Campbell.

The bridge that spans the gap between finitude and infinity is the human torn between being both an animal and a god. This is the ultimate challenge on the path toward self-actualization: the counterintuitive balance that must be maintained between honesty and hypocrisy, the ruthless acceptance that the perception of reality is inherently a metaphor for reality.

The price of admission is a commitment to the constant realization that we are eminently fallible creatures crammed with delusions, base emotions, biases, and holier-than-thou tendencies, on the one side; while also reveling in the exact uniqueness of our improbable being and magnificently enigmatic propensity toward god-like creativity, on the other side.

There is hypocrisy inherent within the human condition, sure, but there is nothing saying that it cannot be sincere. Sincere hypocrisy is an act of credo qua absurdum, embracing the absurd. Man can, in one breath, admit that existence is inherently meaningless and, in the very next breath, deny that meaninglessness as meaningless and affirm his existence as meaningful.

“To acknowledge untruth as a condition of life,” wrote Nietzsche, “this surely means resisting customary value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that ventures such a thing, just by doing so, places itself beyond good and evil.”

If, as Isaac Newton wrote, “I have seen further than others by standing on the shoulders of giants” then it behooves us to don the masks of the great heroes who have gone before us in order to see further than they did.

The art of mask-wearing is akin to standing on the shoulders of giants. I’m using the term “mask” as a symbol that metaphorically represents the act of “standing on the shoulders of giants.” But, and here’s the rub, each mask is meant to be broken.

The most important mask to break is the first one. If the first mask is not broken, then the Shadow remains in an unconscious state.

By breaking the first mask we force the Shadow into conscious awareness. One of the more important lessons learned by self-actualized people is the recognition that the primordial self consists of a menagerie of personas and sub-selves, each with the power to wear a plethora of masks.

This includes shadowy persona and ‘dark’ sub-selves. Like Jung wrote, “Everyone carries a Shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it becomes.”

And so the bête noire ‘the black beast,’ the arbitrariness of self, must be discovered rather than ignored, must be embraced rather than suppressed, and must, above all else, be forced to move in a new way, through a new passage.

A sacred turning in you turns the universe. And so, a sacred turning of your shadow transforms the shadows.

One should not shun the shadow for fear of being immoral. Nowhere is it written that one cannot be both compassionate and individualistic, both humble and daring, both stable and rebellious, both respectful and insurgent.

Balance and moderation in all things is the key, especially with the Shadow. But even balance and moderation must be tested from time to time in order to discover New-chaos, which can eventually be transformed into New-order.

Like Louis Herman wrote, “By accepting the inevitability of our shadow, we recognize that we are also ‘what we are not.’ This humbling recognition restrains us from the madness of trying to eliminate those we hate and fear in the world. Self-mastery, maturity, and wisdom are defined by our ability to hold the tension between opposites.”

Breaking the first mask humbles the shadow. It frees us to move on to the next “mask,” to leap onto the next “giant’s shoulder.”

We don’t do this because we want to walk the path of the giants, necessarily, but because we want to learn what they have learned, and then see further than they did. The knowledge gleaned becomes a sacred tool that we can place into our “sacred tool bag” for use on our own unique path.

With the Christ-tool we move this obstacle. With the Buddhist-tool we remove that obstacle. With the Nietzsche-tool we leverage this obstacle against that obstacle, thus removing both obstacles. The more sacred tools we use, the clearer our path becomes. The more shoulders of giants we stand upon, the further we see.

TEDxHunterCCS - Andrew Sherlock - Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

The more masks of ancient heroes we don, the more sacred things appear. The world becomes a giant playground of interconnected, sacred knowledge, and it’s all ours for the seizing. Our individuation unfolds into godhood. Our self-actualization is at hand. And what do we discover? The more we know, the more we realize how much we don’t know. So we better cultivate a good sense of humor.

Image source:

The Journey begins, by Parablev
The Shadow

Reuniting Psyche with Cosmos: Opening the Archetypal Eye

Spirituality

Gary Z McGee

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January 6, 2014

14

“We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.” – Brian Cox

We are not born into the world; we are born of it. We are of the earth, born out of her. Adam means “red earth” implying that man is bound to the earth by blood. Similarly, “human” refers to humus, which takes us back to the soil. The Incan word for “human body” was alpa camasca, which means literally, “animated earth.” Everything about our bodies, from bones to ovaries, is a part of the earth.

Only superficially can we separate cosmos from psyche. The problem is we have given into this superficiality. The only way to break our servitude to the superficial is to reawaken our primordial self and renew our connection to the prima materia, the formless void preceding the perceptual split of psyche and cosmos. We must reunite the human soul with cosmic nature.

Bill Plotkin said, “When we become alienated from soul – our inner nature – we lose respect for outer nature, resulting in the pollution and degradation of the environment.” This is the quintessential hypocrisy of nature and the human soul: that we are born from nature and yet we must transcend it, or perish.

Since the dawn of mankind we have struggled against a hostile world. Human beings are rather inadequate animals, aside from one dramatically unique thing: a very large frontal lobe.

This is the only thing that has gotten us where we are today; a species that seems hell-bent on destroying its own world.

It’s almost a catch-22. We could easily use the excuse that we need to keep controlling nature or we die. But this doesn’t have to be the case.

The very thing that got us into this mess, the frontal lobe, is the very thing that can get us out of it, and back to a healthy equilibrium with the biosphere.

Through meditation practice we become more adept at adapting. We become more adept at seeing reality the way it is: interconnected.

With enough practice we come to discover that our third-eye, the frontal lobe, the ajna chakra, has been closed off to the heart.

With even more practice we get to a point where new strategies for living in the world become manifest: Instead of controlling nature, let us have a relationship with her.

Instead of consuming everything around us, let us seek moderation in our appetites and regain a sense of sharing. Instead of rampant competitiveness and expropriation, let us embrace moralistic compassion and lean towards a healthy equilibrium with our environment. Like Allan Watts said, “Nature is always differentiated unity, not unified differences.”

“Man,” wrote Blaise Pascal, “is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges as the infinity in which he is engulfed.” Indeed.

But perhaps through meditation and the opening of the third eye –what James Hillman described as the “archetypal eye,” that implicit form of intuitive intelligence that is capable of recognizing the rich synergy of patterns at work in both the subjective-microcosm of the individual and the objective-macrocosm of the cosmos – we can turn the tables on our incapacity for seeing reality the way it truly is.

When the archetypal eye opens, we see that the cosmos is constantly interrogating itself through random mutation and impermanent change. We see that God is interrogating herself. We come to realize that we are not merely a speck in the cosmos; we are the entire cosmos in a speck.

At the end of the day, God questioning herself to the limit is you, and you questioning yourself to the limit is God. We are not merely egos in bags of skin that need to be force-fed the divine, rather we are walking aspects of cosmos.

We are God. Not only is this disposition beyond theology and ideology, it is beyond atheism and nihilism; it is beyond good and evil.

It brings us to a transcendence of meaninglessness and absurdity, and into a state of uncertain gaiety and a unity with all things that is meaningful and humorous in itself. The question is can we get the majority of us aware of this unity before it’s too late.

Alan Watts speaking on the state of the world and what is wrong with our culture –

Image Source:

Akashic records
Third eye
Image 3

Fractal Enlightenment

Eight Signs You may be Experiencing a Spiritual Awakening

Here are 8 signs you may be experiencing a spiritual awakening

1. You’re more in touch with your spiritual foundations through transformative meditation:

2. You are beginning to want more freedom and less stuff:

3. You realize that the door to your prison cell is wide open (and always has been):

4. The world is a playground, and you are on recess:

5. You have acquired the counterintuitive practice of relishing in your mistakes:

6. You have an overwhelming feeling of being connected with others and nature:

7. You understand that the journey is indeed the thing:

8. You’d rather be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie:

Saving Gaia: Disassembling the Man-machine

Magic Mushrooms: A Catalyst for Human Evolution

Behind the Mask: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Reuniting Psyche with Cosmos: Opening the Archetypal Eye

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