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Love and Life: Lead Me

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When I flew out to the Strawberry Festival in February, in the early afternoon before Lauren’s concert, I was led by her heart into visions of the crucifixion. Waves of compassion washed over me as she sought a path to healing of that violation.

What a beautiful promise, beloved. But that experience belongs to an era that is coming to a close.

The mechanisms of that transition are evident in the construction of reality that I elaborated in “Mass and the Structure of the Void.” Time is permeated by a personality – the Christian God of Unconditional Love – that seeks to empower mutually fulfilling relationships. Seeking to avoid change, selfish personalities bound themselves to space, creating the material experience. The effort was self-defeating: love reaches inexorably into this realm, bringing out what can be redeemed, leaving mass to tear apart the personalities that conceived it.

This understanding is the shield that allows my heart to penetrate the darkness. Time and again, when confronted by those seeking to intimidate me, I open my heart and light pours out, driving the corruption away.

But all that I can do is gather the elements that are harbored within my Beloved. All of time and space lives within her. Thus, last week, she came to me as Prajnaparamita, the feminine field upon which reality flows forward. Seeking to anchor herself to the outcome that I serve, the deity prompted me to enumerate her expressions. Babbling about “being just a boy,” there followed a list: woman, love, life, meaning, joy, truth, time and space.

And sacrifice.

In examining her, I glimpsed the precursor reality, a reality assaulted by those that sought to corrupt her. I witnessed her tender resolution to allow that impulse to be expressed. Eve in the Garden appeared as the echo, recognizing that Adam needed to minister to the serpent. Rather than surrendering naively to its blandishments, Eve acted intuitively, taking its evil into her so that it could be redeemed. Just so, in that era before time and space as we know it, the Divine Feminine received evil into herself.

We are her medicine.

This has driven sexual consummation out of our visions. Having received the Tree of Life, the occupants are resistant to the disruptive force of orgasm. Rather, they wish to take harbor in her, encouraging our intimacy only to the degree that it facilitates a search within her for the Good. Our anticipation of the joy that follows orgasm was countered by the demand that rather we begin to harvest.

As it is described in Revelation 19, “For she has dressed herself in White Linen – white linen standing for the good deeds of the saints.”

This is my work – to look within her, using fingers and skin and muscle and all the rest of the organic assemblage to call out from her what will gratefully honor the harbor that she provides. To dress her in gratitude. To stabilize the intentional field while her generous heart organizes it into glorious raiment.

Just two nights ago, then, when she came to me as I lay down to rest, my heart surged within my chest, and I realized “It wants to be with you. You take better care of it than I do.”

Lead me into you, beloved. It is the only reward that has, any longer, meaning to me.

Sixes and Sevens

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This month Ecstatic Dance LA starts its seventh year. Next month, I start my seventh decade. That could be an a coincidence, but I find an odd meaning in that parallel.

The Hindus chose seven chakras and the Holy Books have seven days of creation. Understood correctly, the two are related. I look back at the last three decades and I see the chakras progressing through the heart (seat of wellness and social trust), throat (seat of social expression), and third eye (seat of personal realization). Looking forward, I pray that my seventh decade will lead to divine manifestation.

In entering its seventh year, Ecstatic Dance LA has no other path forward. Until January, I made the trip down from Ventura twice a month to join you physically on the dance floor. In February, facing financial ruin and suffering from a premonition that disaster was about to befall us, I stopped. It was only a month later that the doors closed and the dance became a virtual experience.

That may be frustrating for many of you, especially those that rely upon physicality to engage reality. The body has its perks, but also pitfalls. Confronting its dominance during the dance, over the years I did my best to raise consciousness. Sometimes the response was grateful; sometimes incredulous; sometimes hostile.

Ecstatic Dance merges personalities through music and movement. Through physical contact, we facilitate that merger, negotiating control and surrender. If Ecstatic Dance is going to survive, we must see beyond the physical metaphor. We must reach up into the divine realm, knocking humbly at the gates of love, and allow it to temper us as we merge in the realm of spirit.

I hope that you will join me there.

The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe and Its Lessons for Today: An Interview with Daniel K. Williams

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In the form of an interview with Daniel Williams, Millennial offers the most sympathetic articulation of the pro-life stance that I have encountered. The experience of the original activists – proponents of the liberal theory of universal human rights – is typical of the experience of the Pharisees confronted by Jesus: any attempt to use law for moral ends allows hypocrites (such as the fiscal libertarians of the GOP) to suborn those impulses.

The proper approach is that of Jesus on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” That generation did confront their error, seeing many of their brethren convert to Christianity – including Saul on the way to Damascus.

So should we look at the problem of abortion – as a teachable moment that might not change the heart of a desperate woman, but that should change her behavior, hopefully bringing her closer to God as a result.

Williams’ final paean to life also rings hollow in my ears: babies are not priceless because their genetic code is unique. They are priceless because they represent an opportunity for self-clarification of a soul. We do have responsibilities as parents to optimize the conditions of that opportunity. That is best informed by abandoning the categories “pro-life” and “pro-choice” and choosing to be “pro-creation.” Pregnancy should be a conscious and considered joy, not an accident.

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What was the pro-life movement like before Roe v. Wade? In Defenders of the Unborn, Daniel K. Williams, history professor at the University of West Georgia, provides an essential overview of the pro-life movement in this period. Millennial editor Robert Christian interviewed Williams on his groundbreaking book and its implications:

The pro-life movement is often associated with conservatism, but could you talk a little bit about the roots of the movement?

The modern American pro-life movement, which originated in the mid-twentieth century, was the creation of Catholic Democrats, most of whom subscribed to the social ethic and liberal political philosophy of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.  They believed that the government had a responsibility to protect the rights of minorities and provide a social safety net for the poor.  They viewed the unborn as a minority deserving of legal protection, but many of them…

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“Man” and “Woman”

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The driving motivation for the writing of The Soul Comes First was a reading of the Book of Revelation as just what John said it was: a visit to the Holy Mind in which the angels revealed their relationship to and experience of Christ. The difficulty of the writing is that the insights are like the M.C. Escher drawing of hands drawing each other. Genesis makes sense only if you’ve read Revelation, which makes sense only if you’ve read Acts, which depends upon the Gospels, the chain continuing to a dependency on Genesis.

We have to grok it all at once. I’m afraid that I didn’t succeed very well with that problem.

But the insights continue to trickle in.

Genesis 2:7 says [NIV]:

Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

This has been interpreted literally as meaning that Adam was the first instance of the species homo sapiens sapiens. There are those that take a different tack: that Adam and Eve were the sole human survivors of a geological catastrophe such as a major volcanic eruption. But the continuity of the archaeological record undermines all of these interpretations.

Revelation 4 starts where Genesis starts [NIV Gen 1:2]:

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

This is the scene that John encounters: the “Spirit of God” being the corporate body of the angels united under the guidance of Unconditional Love. In John’s vision, there are twenty-four of the former – described as “elders” – gathered around the “one on the throne.” We should understand the latter to be Unconditional Love, which is warded by fearsome beasts that prevent the approach of the elders.

So this is the initial state of Heaven before the investiture of God in the Earth. What comes next in Revelation is the sequence of that investiture: a scroll with seven seals is opened, and selfishness is given dominion over the Earth. Then from among the twelve princes of heaven, twelve thousand are sent from each down to Earth. These are the masculine angels that generate change; the feminine angels are held in reserve until a measure of safety is created.

Paleontology tells us that it took approximately a billion years before that safety was attained. Finally, in homo sapiens sapiens, God recognized a species with the potential to express love.

Genesis 2 starts with God’s reflection on that process. The species “man” was created from the dust of the ground, rising up only through an enormous commitment of intention and attention to the manifestation of the potential for life to receive love. If done too early, the gift would have been wasted: it would have been corrupted by selfishness. So love was held in reserve when the 144,000 were sent down from heaven, and remained aloof for a billion years.

God having spawned homo sapiens sapiens as an animal with the potential to elaborate love, Unconditional Love then breathed itself into one such animal, Adam, making him Man. Love was joined to biology, making it possible for us to escape the brutal practices of natural selection as described by Darwin. Recognizing that Adam should not be alone, Unconditional Love then sought for a mate to share the stewardship of spreading love throughout the world. Thus was one female animal imbued with love, creating Eve – the first Woman.

This is what we celebrate when we call them “First Man” and “First Woman” – not the material superfluity of their physical forms, but the transformation that comes with becoming imbued with Unconditional Love.

How did this make Adam a “living being”? Because one of the forms of selfishness is death. Through the link with Unconditional Love, Adam was freed from that captivity. He acted with fearless generosity. It was in seeking to become God’s equal that our thralldom to selfishness was reimposed.

In reflecting on all the evil we have committed since, I have called it “the great working out through the flesh of our dependency on sin.” Each generation becomes a little stronger, and with Jesus to light our way as an exemplar, eventually love will have its way with us.