The Rainbow Bridge

St. Porcine

2008-11-18T09:27:00.000-08:00

Ok so I had an interesting string of Pig conicidences during and after my Dream Teacher Training week in Seattle that wanted to form into this little squealing story. I had just started dating a much younger woman who happened to also be born in the Chinese year of the pig 12 years after me and we were joking about it after we got together as two pigs on a blanket listening to a free jazz concert under a sky full of pink piglet clouds. She came over that night and we had some fun foreplay when I sang her a pig song and we played with a big pink squishy stuffed animal pig that I had. The next week I was in Seattle at Mosswood Hollow retreat center in the foothills of the Cascades for the second week of my dream teacher training. It was one condensed waking dream with lots of bleed between dreams and reality especially in relation to my cabin mate Jerry. On the third day, Jerry and I were sharing our dreams over breakfast and it turned out that our dreams were very similar, both involved fishing and pigs. I had dreamed that I was with several guys who wanted to go out fishing but I was bored by that and I went off on my own and walked out on the water. That right there should have been a lucidity clue but I was only rational enough to believe that I had to walk really fast to keep from sinking. So as I’m racing across the top of water, I see two white pigs swimming towards me and I walk around them because I’m afraid they will try to bite me. Jerry’s dream starts with him fishing with a deceased father in law who was an alcoholic and who he had a difficult relationship with. He walks back through some long grass and discovers a litter of baby pigs. The sow is across a road and he is afraid some carless drunken fisherman will accidentally squish the piglets so he goes to his car and gets out a bag of limestone chips and puts them around the pigs to make a path, a circle of protection.
When we joined the main circle, Robert Moss asked us if we had any shared images from the previous evening’s dreaming and so Jerry and I shared our overlapping dreams. Robert, always the compendium of ancient mysteries, explained that in Biblical times and in the Eleusinian mystery school in Greece, there was a cleansing ritual where demonic spirits were put into pigs. People would jump off of a cliff into the sea with a pig in their arms and the demon soaked pig would then be released to drown in the sea, taking the offending demons into the deep with it. We did a dream theater reenactment of Jerry’s dream that morning and got more information. The fisherman theme took on a Christian savior element and the pigs took on a sacrificial element with an Egyptian tinge after the person playing the limestone chips spoke and told about Egyptian coffins being carved from limestone.
I had been having another weird thread of dreams and coincidences for the first two days around the Egyptian black cat faced Goddess Bast that was coming to a head that day as well. It began with an actual black cat on the property that I first met after I had a vision of her in our first shamanic journey getting into a blue lake of healing and healing her wounded right leg. Right after that journey, I went off toward my cabin and a sweet little black female cat jumped up on the trunk of a red car in front of me, demanding and then reveling in my petting. Of course she had a nasty open wound on her right leg. The next day I was picked by another dreamer to play Bast in her dream theater and I brought through messages from the Black Cat Goddess. Slowly this theme had developed into a sense of a negative energetic connection to a ancient Egyptian/desert djin spirit. The theme that week was about psychic boundaries and energetic protection and cleansing, so Jerry and I did some ritual energy cleansing and chord severing and decided to finish off with a visit to a nearby blue lake of healing to re-enact the Eleusinian Pig Mystery in a playful imaginary way. Jerry had changed into a T-shirt with an Orca on it which sparked me to share with him on the drive to the lake a dream from last year’s dream teacher training involving an Orca whale. I was in the pool that I used to swim in on swim team and I was feeling great sorrow as I held the dead carcass of my childhood dog , a chocolate lab named Penny, in my arms. Then an Orca swam by and devoured her remains and then the pool wall fell down leaving a big opening to the bright sunshine outside. Of course, when I had shared that dream Robert Moss he launched into a story about the Orca shamans of the Pacific Northwest and how their specialty was helping the spirits of the dead cross over.
I had been at this lake 3 years earlier, when I was at a weekend workshop on Dream Healing through the Energy Centers with Robert . I stayed an extra day and walked all the way over to and around the lake and halfway around a black dog with no tags came walking up to me and then followed me the rest of the way around the lake and then down to this public beach and then left. Robert Moss had just shared some stories the previous day about how he used to have a big black lab and how friendly black dogs often showed up in his life as good omens. So I had us return to that same beach for our ritual that that cosmic Anubis dog had led me to. Jerry and I held our imaginal demon filled pigs and ran into the clear cool blue water to release those old energies. Right after we got in, a male chocolate lab with no tags came bounding over the hill and jumped into the water to swim with us. We played fetch with him with a stick for a while and several times he seemed to be seeing something in the water and biting at it as if he was guarding us, keeping those dark energies we’d put in the water from trying to get free.
Robert had explained earlier that the dream healing temples of Asclepius which were connected to the Eleusinian mysteries were full of dogs. People would go there and sleep in the temples until they had a healing dream which involved a dog or a snake. That night I had a dream where I was involved in a ceremony. A man was wheeled in on a hospital gurney with a white cloth over it. Another man came around to the head of the table and then turned into a giant snake and appeared to devour the man on the gurney. But I could see it was a simple magic trick and the man was really down below behind the curtain. I commented to the woman standing next to me what a poorly executed trick this was. We could see the sheet flapping from the clumsy transfer. Then I walked down this hallway and was briefly transfixed by a painting on the wall full of Egyptian black cat headed goddesses and pyramids and ankhs. At the end of the hall was a kitchen, and the wife of the man who was just “devoured” came up to me franticly asking what had happened to her husband. I told her in a booming theatrical voice that “Matter can be neither created or destroyed, only changed in form. So your husband is out there somewhere! We can’t give up hope, it’s all that we have!” After she left somewhat placated, the woman who was next to me and who knew the truth started laughing at my dramatic overacting. We ended up rolling on the floor laughing at the bad roles we had to play to get by, sort of like we were starving actors living on the margins trying to eek out a Hollywood existence. I titled that dream “Bad Actor” and it encapsulated the dark energy I had shed in that healing blue lake. That part of me that would use spiritual energy for manipulation and control of others rather than for healing.
The next chapter happened after I returned home to Madison. I was at this outdoor concert with my Pig sweetie and we fell into an intimate conversation. She was sharing a recurring fatiguing illness that she had been dealing with for six years and I told her the story of the Celtic shamans who were weak and ill while they were taken by the faeries for seven years. This was an initiatory sickness that familiarized them with the world of spirit and prepared them to be healers, bridges between this world and the next. I also told her about this past life memory I had had glimpses of for a while of a lifetime in India where my wife and three kids died of Cholera. After burning them all on a pyre by the Ganges I went up into the Himalayas and spent the rest of that lifetime meditating in a cave and making some progress toward enlightenment. I was beginning to think that she was that past life wife. Later, we went to her place and I noticed a quote on the wall that I liked. She went and got the book that it was from Cool Mind Warm Heart by Steve Roberts, and I did a quick bibliomancy, opening it and random and reading the first passage my eyes alighted on. Imagine my delight when the first sentence was about how every seven years the cells in your body were replaced. The gist of the paragraph was about seeing illness as a gift and it even used the phrase “joyfully cremated in the fire of love” to describe what was necessary to live in this spirit of eternal gratitude. Of course to me this was a big GOD inspired underlining of the importance of our conversation earlier that night.
She lent me the book and I read it right away the next day and imagine my squeal of delight when I got to the chapter titled St. Porcine (St. Pig) which bore a striking similarity to the dark heart of my Egyptian cat tale. The author describes a recurring past life memory where he was an abbot who learned how to do an energy trick to make a bowl constantly fill with fruit. This miraculous slight of hand has everyone worshiping him. He has become addicted to this adulation, even though he knows it is based on trickery and manipulation. He lives in secret shame of his lack of godliness. Then a 13 year old shows up at his monastery who is the embodiment of the pure saintly devotion he is lacking. He is deathly afraid that if this radiant teenager stays around for long he will be exposed for the hollow charlatan that he is and his gig will end. So he keeps setting up the rules so that the forgetful, blissed out William gets in trouble. He disciplines him in progressively harsher ways hoping that he will run away. Eventually, he banishes William to the outdoors in the middle of a snowstorm and he freezes to death. The abbot breathes a sign of relief, but then William starts appearing to all the other monks in their dreams, spreading love and healing. The abbot becomes terrified afraid again that his treachery will be unmasked. So he resorts to an inquisitional ritual that was said to trap a soul in astral limbo for 1000 years. He cuts Williams’ body into pieces and feeds them to their pigs. Then he worries again what will happen if the monks eat the pigs, so he has all the pigs sold to an itinerant butcher. Of course, it isn’t long before he begins hearing tales of miraculous healings that are taking place all across the land and he is hired to look into it. He realizes that all of the people who are experiencing these healings have eaten pig meat from that itinerant butcher, and then ends up getting credit for the miracles because the pigs all came from his monastery. But fear and shame still haunt him and eventually he uses his psychic powers to give himself a terminal illness so he can die before his reputation is tarnished.
The book was written by a recovering alcoholic and its theme of letting go and blessing everything resonated deeply with me. Unfortunately, that whole story was preparing me for the next day when the pink cloud dissolved and I was informed that my blossoming PIG lover was moving on. Luckily, we managed to avoid any demonic drama so that no actual pigs were sacrificed in the crafting of this story. In fact, we have remained close friends, and if you happen to be walking along a certain astral blue lake of healing in your dreams, you just might see our shiny white demon free pig spirits swimming happily beneath your fast moving feet.

The Blonde in the Mirror

2008-09-10T18:48:00.000-07:00

4/19/08 Dream: I am in some sort of sexual contact with my ex-wife and then we separate sort of embarrassed by our weakness. Then I am looking at the computer thinking of her e-mail and then thinking “well, this happens.” Then I am withdrawing from the place and she is talking on the phone as I float towards the door of what is an unfamiliar place. I am surprised it is not our house and also surprised that she doesn’t see me as if I am a ghost. I feel that she senses my presence though and she is talking to someone on the phone about me. I become lucid and I decide to leave and fly out through the screen door, but the screen sort of gets stuck on me and wrapped around me making a grey haze out of my vision.With effort, I peel it off from my face and then everything gets Technicolor bright. I look back at where I was, a white apartment building in the 2nd floor apartment. As I turn around and float away, I feel very light and free and the sun is shining and the sky is blue and there is this song playing “It’s a beautiful day” Like the U2 song, but slowed down and done reggae style like Ziggy Marley. I am sort of surf flying and I see and think of my best childhood friend and windsurfing buddy Kyle. I think “I can go anywhere” and get excited and then think “It’s no fun to travel alone” and my spirits sink a little. Then there is a big train going by, and I grab the surf board from under me and it turns into a big bag. I fly alongside the train and it quickly becomes night. I look up into the starry sky and I a start wishing I could travel through a Stargate and I spin the bag fast in circles above me to try to open a wormhole but it doesn’t work. It does light up different constellations as I spin it though, and one which lights brighter than the others is the constellation Pegasus. I am flying faster and faster, matching pace with the train and then I find myself in a building with a high ceiling like a train station. There are two young boys that approach me the older around 5 and other around 3. They are playing some game together but I am not interested in it and I sort of shoo them away. There is another boy sitting at a table. I still want to try to go to the stars again and I fly up with that in mind but I lose speed quickly and hit the ceiling and slowly float back down. As I float down I notice a large mirror on the wall and instead of seeing myself reflect I see that I am a blonde woman which is surprising. I do not like being a blonde woman so I imagine myself as a kung fu master and see myself flipping and kicking gymnastically in the mirror briefly before I wake up.
A month later I am in a workshop with Robert Moss in Chicago and, after sharing the dream we decide to do a dream theater with the intention of dreaming it forward and paying more attention this time to the blonde in the mirror and the two boys. I pick a pretty blonde woman Lisa to play the blonde in the mirror and when it comes to her part, she gets a strong message to step out of the mirror and improvise. She tells me that she is the feminine that sees me and hugs me. And then the people playing the two kids are likewise inspired to run over and let us know they found some wonderful dinner digging in the garbage. We go together as a little family unit to the Pegasus and there’s room for all of us to get on and take off to the stars. My new bumper sticker for the dream becomes: “My dream family is just a sunbeam away!” Life starts to rhyme later when I meet a woman online whose screen name is Sexy Bodhisattva. She responds to an incomplete online profile of mine that consists only of a lucid dream where I travelled through a wormhole and became a whale like creature on an alien planet. Her hair is bordering on blonde and her real name turns out to be Lisa and she has two boys 5 and 3. She is also crazy like me for dreams and synchronicities and one of the first that brought us closer together is that she posted a giraffe dream and waking synchronicities that flowed out of it on her blog http://www.emotiontoolkit.com/journal/ within days of my own Remembering Giraffe entry.

Remembering Giraffe

2008-04-28T20:20:00.001-07:00

A couple months ago I had an intensely emotional dream that later resonated with waking reality in an interesting way. I am in the home I lived in as a teenager, which was a magical Spanish style house built in the 1920’s that I visit frequently in my dreams. In the dream, Joe Sommerness is standing in the middle of the sunroom. Joe was a friend in high school who also struggled with addiction, but who lost his battle, committing suicide in college by gruesomely shooting his heart out with a shotgun. His shocking death was a turning point in my recovery and is at the heart of the novel I've been trying to write for the last 16 years GUT: Nuts and Bolts. He is surrounded in the dream by bloody rotting pieces of what I slowly realize is a dismembered giraffe. I am filled with rage and I yell at him "What are you doing leaving this rotting mess in here? All the bacteria is going to infect everyone else!" it ends with me howling a final ultimate threat, "I'm going to call your mom!" I realized when I woke up that that sunroom was where my family surrounded my ghastly drug addled self and did the heartfelt intervention that led to me going to treatment. I was really surprised by the Giraffe as this was a totally new addition to my shamanic dream animal pantheon. So a couple of weeks later, when a friend Duncan was presenting a video at the local Institute of Noetic Sciences meeting on Marshall Rosenberg’s non-violent communication and the e-mail talked about “Giraffe language” I knew I had to follow that long necked synchronicity. In the video he presented, Marshall had a hilarious way of explaining his radical approach to defanging our language. He used jackal and a giraffe handpuppets to comedically illustrate the difference between the violent divisive language of the mind and the healing unifying language of the heart. I discovered that this language of the heart is called Giraffe language because the Giraffe has the largest heart of all of the land mammals. And then to top it off, at one point in the conversation I looked behind me and was surprised to see a little stuffed Giraffe that some child had left perched in the window sill of the Friend’s meeting house. I got the crawling feeling that I was being stalked by Giraffe! So at the end of the discussion when Duncan invited us all to a Giraffe gathering the following weekend at a place nearby called Bumpity Road I was there. It was a wonderful group of big hearted seekers stretching way up high to get that yummy hard to reach green. While communing in the sun filled meeting room with that circle of green and growing people, I felt parts of my heart that had become infected lately with the bacteria of resentment and judgment towards the addicts that I work with fill with antiseptic compassion. In the radiant glow of the springtime sunshine, in the loving company of the Bumpity family, I remembered Giraffe.

Scott Free...the right glove of the Father: Black...Whole

2008-03-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

One of the things I want to track with this blog is the play of coincidence, large and small. Here is a funny small one: Last weekend, I manged to fulfill my yearly ritual of losing one of my winter gloves. I keep them stuffed in the pockets of my winter jacket, overflowing precariously, and inevitably one falls out at some point. Luckily this year it happened at the tipping point into spring. I did all the requisite footwork of backtracking through my weekend and inquiring into all of the safe places it could've landed, but I had no luck, no glove. Then, at the end of the day Monday, as I was walking to my car from work, just after my cold right hand made the thought of my recent loss flash into my consciousness, I noticed a haggard looking glove sticking straight out of a chain link fence. I went closer, and was surprised to see that it was a right handed glove of the exact same make as the one I'd just lost, a Scott mitten. It had been wedged in between the post and the beginning of the fence, and it took considerable yanking to pry it loose. The only difference between this glove and the one I lost was that this glove was XL instead of L. So one way I interpreted this cute little whisper from the universe was that my right hand O' the father power which has always been more problematic for me was healing and expanding to the degree that I am going to need more space for it. My second thought was to send out a beam of gratitude and healing to my frustrated soul glove partner who wedged the glove into that fence. I imagine them losing their left glove and giving up hope after a desperate search for it's lost partner. I see them in a fit of indignant frustration wedging the lonely suicidal right one into a permanent grief filled salute to it's absent better half. I love imagining it this way, the poetic unity of a deathly gesture of protest against the meaningless cruelty of a hopelessly unpaired universe leading mysteriously, circuitously, to a happy rebirth ending. One glove abandoned in sorrow and doubt, being transformed through happy accident and magical re purposing into a faith (and hand) warming emblem of grace for me. This little glimpse into the sweet interconnected singularity at the center of everything, the story of this black glove whole, gave me just the boost I needed to snap me out of my winter post-divorce doldrums. UPDATE: Writing this inspired me to give that glove a wash last night and it was, to quote a favorite line from a Peter Mulvey song Thirty "as dirty as a mitten in a winter street"! By the sheer volume of street that leeched from it, I think the more likely story is that someone lost that glove and it got tromped through the street slush for a bit until a psychic passerby picked it up and put it in that prominent place hoping to facilitate a tearful reunion with it's owner. But then I came by and did a little shamanic slight of hand to pad and warm my own sad story! If that is the real story, I can only hope for an even exchange where some other anonymous matchmaker finds my glove and runs it up some flagpole where it is sighted with joy and surprise by the forlorn owner of my pilfered mitten. Then on some dark icy future day we'll run into each other in some cosmic parking lot and notice we are a mirror image of lopsided Scott gloves. Then I hope we can forgive each other and exchange our lost fostered gloves for a better fit.

Obama and Hillary embody the Astrology of 2012

2008-02-15T20:45:00.000-08:00

OK, so for those of you who don't follow astrology, the astrological energy underpinning the big shift of 2012 that has everyone atwitter with expectation is a square between Pluto and Uranus (90 degree angle). If you want to know more, read Rick Tarnas' wonderful book Psyche and Cosmos, and get the bigger picture of how the outer planet aspect cycles have coincided quite precisely with archetypal waves of planetary change throughout the history of civilization. The last period when Pluto and Uranus were in a “hard” aspect (conjunctions, oppositions and squares) was the conjunction of 1964-1968, and we can look to that period to get an idea of dramatic change tsunami that is fast approaching. We have just entered within the 10 degree orb of influence of this building energy, so we are getting our first glimpse at its potential future influence. And it appears that our first taste of this coming cosmic conflict is taking place through the squaring off of Hilary and Obama in this democratic primary race, each of whom embody in their astrology one of these two planetary archetypes.

After a misty eyed moment of inspiration watching the Yes We Can music video for Obama that's been electrifying the Internet, I finally got off my butt and dug deeper into the astrology behind the two Democratic contenders and I was amazed at what I found. I use the nodes of the moon as a central focus in my astrology readings. They help pierce the veil of the personality and get down to the core soul energies that are really running the show. I highly recommend Jan Spiller's book Astrology for the Soul if you'd like to know more about the nodes. The south node is associated with our past lives and the north node with our current soul’s desire. Generally, when we are moving in the direction of our North node, there is energy and support from the universe and our projects go smoothly. This is because things are juicy and new and our souls are excited. Conversely, when we operate from our old soul habits and return to the familiar territory of our south node, it's harder to be passionate about our projects, and they tend to be dead in the water energetically. Those old hat roles bore our souls and our projects tend to fall flat. Now, because the nodes are always opposite pairs, it's easy to look at them as I just have, as diametric opposites with the north node positive and the south node negative, but of course, on the soul level time doesn’t exist. And in Vedic astrology, both of the nodes, Ketu, the dragon’s head, and Rahu, the dragon’s tail, are considered problematic. I think this is because both being stuck in old roles and projecting towards future goals can throw us out of the fullness of the moment. The Ideal then is a balanced, flowing both/and approach where we use the experiences and gifts of our past incarnations but we make sure to apply them in a fresh new direction. Our current personality then can act as a rainbow bridge, unifying all of our past and future incarnations into one big kundalini dragon filled flowing moment of soul. It is with regard to their capacity to achieve this ideal rainbow bridging synthesis where I see the biggest difference between Obama and Hilary astrologically.

Obama has the south node in Aquarius, which is ruled by Uranus, the planet of lightning like revolutionary change that first came into our consciousness in 1781, just after the radical birth pangs of this nation. Archetypally, it is associated with that same energy of liberty, equality, and brotherhood. So while Obama’s current personality may still be a little green, he has the deep Aquarian soul knowledge that we desperately need at this point to recreate unity, democracy, and community in this country. And he has his Sun, Mercury, and Uranus all in Leo, the sign of his north node, with Uranus actually conjoined to his North Node. The sun shining bright in its sign of rulership gives his personality the Leonine courage and strength it needs to successfully bring forward his Aquarian soul wisdom and lead us through this next great wave of Uranian Change. I believe that if we can empower him to lead, there will be crystal clarity around right use of power and fidelity to democratic principles that we have not seen in a long time in this country, if ever. I believe that he will use his position of power (Leo) to empower the collective (Uranus).

Hillary, conversely, has her south node in Scorpio along with the Sun, Mercury and Venus. Her Venus, the planet of the heart chakra and the ruler of her Taurus north node, is in its detriment in Scorpio. It is also in a tight square with Mars and Pluto, the two rulers of Scorpio. So her personality structure, her Plutonian heart of darkness if you will, tends to prevent the full Taurus flowering of her soul’s desires, keeping her mired in swampy Scorpionic power plays based on never ending cycles of resentment and retribution. Politically, she brings with her a cabal of old guard political figures that would most likely populate her cabinet, many of whom have shadowy pasts and blood on their hands. Pluto, which came into our consciousness in 1930, is associated with the energy of that period, the black hole vacuum of worldwide depression that set the stage for the will to power and control of Nazism, Fascism, Communism and Corporatism that culminated in the great struggle for world dominance of WWII. The atomic bomb shows the lengths that Pluto is willing to go to for power and control. Pluto rules by fear and threat, fighting cold wars marked by shadowy abuses of power and undemocratic old school solutions. Look to the Godfather or the smoking man and his group in the X-files for how Pluto “takes care” of its problems. Hilary’s support for GATT and NAFTA are examples of her tendency to support these kind of undemocratic Plutonic power structures. On the positive side, as long as it’s used for a higher purpose, Hillary’s dark Kali energy could be very helpful right now as that kind of vicious tenacity is the only language that the crusty old Republican guard seems to understand. Ammachi’s sanctum sanctorum at her Ashram is occupied by Kali.

So, while both Pluto and Uranus bring great change, the methods to their change making are quite distinct. Pluto is more secretive and behind the scenes and unscrupulous, Uranus is more transparent and collaborative and principled. Pluto’s tends to be more reactive, trying to achieve its transformation by force, power, and control while Uranus is more proactive, inspiring others to join in a liberating collective vision. The Pluto Uranus square of 2012 will take place with Pluto in Capricorn and Uranus in Aries. I suspect that one of the major conflicts of this period will be between corporate (Capricorn) power (Pluto) and the freedom and rights (Uranus) of the individual (Aries). Again there are parallels to our two democratic contenders. Hillary is much more tied into and beholden to the old political and corporate power structure, demonstrated by her support of the Iraq war and her 6 years on the Wal-Mart board of directors during its pivotal tumorous growth period. Obama, on the other hand, has more grassroots support and authentic connection to the collective as evinced by his Opposition to the Iraq war from the beginning and his chosen legal focus fighting for people on the fringes as a civil rights attorney.

I think in an ideal world Obama and Hillary would share the ticket, and perhaps even create the template for a whole new dynamic of shared power and collaboration between President and Vice president, an enlightened co-leadership. We have actually have a template for that kind of co-leadership in the Bush/Cheney axis of stupidity/evil. We just need to flip the script. Instead of Bush’s dry drunk rage and stupidity slowly destroying our tenuous web of shared humanity, we can have Lightning Rod Obama with his brilliant inspirational oratory, weaving a new unified world community and igniting a new dream of peaceful interbeing. Instead of Darth Cheney running the Death Star from his shadowy bunker, we could have Kali Hillary doing her own heavy hitting behind the scenes for the cause, chopping crazy talking heads and leading great counterrevolutionary enema purges to wash out the truly evil shits still clinging to power in Washington. But then I looked at the synestry between Obama’s and Hillary’s charts, and the program that I use gave them a number of 95 percent tension (lots of “hard” aspects) and only 25 percent harmony (not much in the “soft” aspect category..trines, sextiles). I haven’t been using that program for long, but they have the highest tension between two people that I’ve seen so far. So I worry that there will be a lot of mud-slinging and debilitating hard ball attacks over the next several months that would make such a creative unified solution impossible. This is all tense energy, but it’s also a tremendous amount of energy, and if they could harness that dynamic friction between them and honor each other’s soul energy, I think that they could transmute it within the container of a sacred committed running mate relationship and be quite the archetypal Uranus and Pluto duo. But if that’s not possible I at least pray that we don’t end up with a smoke filled Plutonian backroom full of super delegates overruling the popular vote, deciding the race for Hillary, and reopening our old wounds of disenfranchisement and division. So, though my Heart of Aquarius longs for Obama here in the rarified air of Aquarius, I hope and pray most of all for a clean fight with a minimum of shadowy antics and negativity which leads to an integrated solution that we can all rally behind by convention time. And I pray that that integration will create a foundational building block, a block that will give us all a step up towards the quantum leap of 2012.

Googlemancy

2008-02-13T10:57:00.000-08:00

Ok, so recently I dreamed I was floating outside a trailer full of people singing kirtan with words about manifestation. I was looking at the underside of the trailer where there were rainbow wave interference patterns that danced along with the music. They were beautifuly entrancing. I then floated down into a peacful temple garden in front of a wooden statue of a god or goddess that I couldn't quite identify. When I turned to look around the area a black and gold cobra was right behind me poised to strike, and before I could react, it bit me in right in the balls! I pulled it off but I looked down at the fangs still lodged in my nuts and thought, "I'm full of cobra venom...FUCK!" Later, while I was sharing that dream with my dream group, ’d received an e-mail from a fellow dream teacher in training who had just moved to Bombay. So I decided to do some “Googlemancy” and I googled golden cobra + Bombay and the first hit was this article about a musical fundraiser to preserve an ancient holy spot.

He explained the significance of the sacred spot: "When Lord Chaitanya first adopted the outward dress of a sanyasi monk he travelled down the east coast of India to the holy town of Puri, accompanied by Nityananda Prabhu, who broke his bamboo sanyasi staff and threw it into a nearby river, protesting that God Himself should not have to carry a staff of renunciation. There is a prediction written hundreds of years ago that the wooded island where this pastime took place would be a source of spiritual strength for multitudes of devotees and that Jaganath would come to live there.

A holy man living on the island recently had a dream of a specific tree in a distant village from which Jagannatha would be carved. Upon reaching this village the holy man and his group saw that this tree was being worshipped by the villagers. On enquiring he was informed that the tree had been planted hundreds of years ago by an associate of Lord Chaitanya who predicted that one day in hundreds of years time someone would come and ask if the tree could be used to carve deities of Jagannatha. The villagers had been waiting for this day for generations! As if to further confirm that this tree was actually for Jaganath, a golden cobra was discovered sleeping on the tree the morning after it was ceremonially felled. A golden cobra is said to appear very near a 'Jaganath tree' that is seen in a dream". The link between seventies pop stars and a sacred spot in India may seem tenuous, but the plan of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu for the worldwide spreading of the sankirtan movement can involve every single man, woman and child - each of us in our own special way.

So it was wild how this mysterious post tied together all of the elements of my dream: the kirtan singing, the wooden statue and the mystical golden cobra…Someday I’ll have to go to Jagannatha temple in Puri and see what magic happens. For now, I'm honoring the dream by diving deeper into kirtan music and keeping a watchful eye out for venomous ball biters....Also, the golden and black cobra recently popped up in an interesting way in Tom Kenyon's book the Magdalen Manuscript which I got for Christmas. According to this channeling, the golden cobra was the symbol of the Isis cult that Mary Magdalen was initiated into. She used her sex magic training to help Jesus raise his kundalini and charge his KA body up so that he could do what he did. I much prefer this jucier version of how Jesus raised his game. The book also mentions that in Indian Tantra the black and gold cobras are the two kundalini serpents spinning the chakras, the two currents ida and pingala that when turned up the spine and raised to the crown enlighten us with liquid singing starlight...

The Rainbow Lodge of Robert White Wolf

2007-06-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

I had been a fan of Robert Moss’ shamanic dream chronicles for years, but the first time I met him in person was when he came to Madison to promote The Dreamers Book of the Dead. He gave a talk at Meriter Hospital on “Dreaming with the Departed”. White haired and silver tongued; he was a magically charismatic personality. He spoke of his childhood, where 3 near death experiences and years of debilitating illness catapulted him deep in the spirit world. He talked about how we could visit our deceased loved ones in dreams because we travel to the astral plane where they are each night. He talked about the basic mechanics of the astral plane, where what you think is created instantly, just like in the movie What Dreams May Come. On the astral plane imagination is king. So one of the biggest gifts we could give to loved one’s who’ve crossed over but were stuck was to help them creatively imagine themselves onward. At one point, he talked about the potentially destructive impact of people who died with addictions, where their lower astral body tended to hang around the living, trying to still get its addictions fed by proxy through the living. He told the story of a man with lung cancer who he saw clairvoyantly smoking for two generations of deceased smokers. The Narcotics Anonymous Day of the Dead dance was tomorrow, and I was feeling my former recovery sponsor Robert Lujan around me, wondering how his spirit was getting on after passing away under bad circumstances, overdosing in the midst of a relapse on heroin.

After Robert passed, my wife Kathleen had a dream that he was riding a spirit horse off into the sky. Riding home from the funeral service, she heard on the radio that there were wild horses running up and down the train tracks on Madison’s University Avenue, right in front of the VA Hospital. The police were trying to subdue them, and no one knew where they had come from. This seemed an appropriate send off for Robert, a Vietnam Veteran and Apache who had both a strong tribal connection to horse culture, and a strong destructive pull towards the dark “horse” heroin. Kathleen later created a quilt based on this dream. Shortly after she’d started on the quilt, I found a beautiful rainbow colored art horse from a series “The Trail of the Painted Ponies” which had 3 silhouettes on its side that looked just like Robert going up in flames. The horse was running on a path of stars, a blue green milky way. So when I was talking to one of Robert Moss’ assistant teachers Karen McKean after the talk, and she had on an elaborate horse pendant, and she said that Robert Moss was doing a weekend workshop on Making Death your Ally which started the next day, I followed the lightning path of coincidence, cancelled all my plans, and signed on.

The next morning, when I arrived at Karen’s house off Hwy B in Oregon, I was touched by how close it was to Tom’s house on Hwy A where Robert Lujan’s spirit fire had burned for 7 days following Ojibwa tradition, 9 months earlier. As I drove down the long driveway and looked out at her two horses and the rolling gold hills, I had a flash of déjà vu, and I remembered a dream I’d had recently of a very similar landscape. In that dream, there were three giant rainbows in the sky, and I felt a great peace and calm. Today however, my heart was leaden, and the weather was grey and drizzly, so there was little hope of a rainbow. I went in and found a seat and a few minutes later Robert Moss arrived and said “All right who’s the shamanic guy who took my seat?” Apparently, I had stolen his favorite spot, facing the western door, the doorway into the spirit world on many medicine wheels. After doing some shamanic songs to raise the energy, we went around and introduced ourselves and I talked briefly about Robert Lujan’s death and my desire to help him complete his journey. Robert Moss took one look at me with his piercing clairvoyant vision and said that Robert’s energy was all wrapped up in mine. He said that we would have to do something about it as that wasn’t good for either of us.

He had the class take a break and he cut a golden apple in two halves which I was to hold over any spots on my body where I felt Robert’s energy attached to me. Then I was supposed to find a spot outside to lay those spirit soaked apples where elements could finish the job. I had hip pain in my right hip since just before Robert passed which started after a 49 day juice fast. Robert’s hip replacement and the opiate painkillers that he had to take for the pain had triggered the old demon of his addiction which made this the most likely spot of attachment. I held one half of the apple over my right hip, and the other half on the left side of my belly where I felt constricted, and I walked down to the far edge of the property. There was a concrete structure there with a small waterfall coming off it that fed a dark stream that snaked up the edge of the property. Next to it was a metal box with a high voltage warning on it. When I had been there for a while and it felt right, I put the apple on top of the high voltage box, imagining Robert burning in the electric blue fire of the star horse. I came back up to the group and asked about the waterfall and river and was told that it was a sewage treatment stream. How appropriate.

Later, we went on our first shamanic journey, riding the steady drumbeat through the base of a tree into the underworld. Robert’s native name was White Wolf and I saw a white wolf right away who lead me along, scaring off hell hounds and disgruntled lost souls with his fierce barking. Then I came to a great cauldron, inside a large sweat lodge. The cauldron was being stirred by Robert’s grandmother and my own grandmother. Inside the cauldron was liquid electric blue singing starlight. Robert was lying down here and we poured this singing starlight water over him, turning the table and returning the favor for years of him pouring purifying lodge water for me. I thought of Kevin, preparing Robert’s body for cremation in the traditional Ojibwa way by washing him down with cedar water. As Robert gathered strength from the water pouring, the white wolf began running very fast in circles around our group. Sun dogs, full circle rainbows, began shooting up around us with dolphins now spinning in circles and making more and stronger rainbows. Then Crazy Horse came in and we were outfitting Robert for his journey onward, dressing him in ceremonial garb as an Apache Warrior, his true self. A horse was brought in for him to ride, a beautiful rainbow spirit horse. The journey ended and we were told to go hold a tree and ground the energy. I went out front and held a small tree, while Karen’s two horses watched me with some interest from their enclosure. Later, Robert Moss talked about the need for Robert and I both to get into the electric blue fire together and I wrote a letter inviting him into the fire.

“Robert, I love you. I wish I had gotten closer to you on the earth this go round, but I know we’ll share the stage again in this infinite play. I am so grateful for all of the healing, teaching, and inspiration you brought me. You taught me so much about selfless service and community building. I know that you feel that you lost everything you taught us at the end, but nothing can take away all the light and love that you brought us before you got lost again in the shadowland of addiction. I am honored that you’ve allowed me to help you return to the light and let go of your regret and your dense energy shell. I know that you are trying to help me by blowing up my computers, you Windigo, helping me stay focused on Kathleen’s healing during her own dark night of the soul. I believe that I have the energy and support that I need and it’s time for both of us to resurrect ourselves to a new level of liquid singing electric blue firelight. I thank you for the elegant beauty of this process. Let’s jump in the fire together, and die into the light!”

My homework was to take a bath and rub myself down with bath salts to continue to release Robert’s energy from me, and to find a special object for tomorrow to serve as a container for Robert’s dense energy body. I got home and bathed, repeating over and over again an entity healing prayer I learned in my energy healing school Inner Focus: “Dear Robert, You are healed and forgiven, You are free from pain, suffering and the vibration of the earth plane, You are one with your own Higher Self, You are surrounded by Love, You are surrounded by Light, Go now with Jesus to your place of perfect expression, Go now in peace.” I had a long dialog with Robert, and my heart overflowed with gratitude as I shared over and over with him all of the joy and beauty and healing he’d brought to my world. When I was done, I found a piece of wood that I’d had on my dresser for a while that was shaped just like a hip bone. Then I took a crystal that I had gotten in Inner Focus that fit at the end of the wood. Then I looked in a leather bag that I had made as a kid in Indian Guides (Where I was Crazy Horse) that was filled with old coins that I’d collected over the years. Amazingly, there was an Australian one (Robert Moss is from Australia) with a Ram head on it (Robert Lujan was an Aries) and the date on it was 1952, the year that Robert Lujan was born. It fit neatly into a notch in the piece of wood. That night, I woke up after a few hours of sleep and couldn’t get back to sleep. I felt Robert’s spirit close by me and continued to dialog with him. He was concerned about Jenny and the kids. He also wanted the lodge community and the healing work he was doing to continue, and asked me to lead a ceremony around the 1 year anniversary of his passing with people from the lodge to help them let go of his energy and renew the bonds of that community.

When I got to the workshop the next day I asked Karen for something to attach the crystal to the wood and she had Crazy Glue, (of course!) which worked well, and I had a perfect container for Robert’s dense energy body. We broke up into small groups and shared a dream with each other. I didn’t have one from the night before so I shared a recent one from my dream journal which started in the basement of a childhood friends house whose father and brother both died of heart attacks within 6 months of each other when we were in high school. In the dream, his dead brother was sitting in front of the TV with a lead helmet on, and I wanted to help him get the helmet off, but his mother said that it was necessary for his protection that he keep it on. Then the scene shifted, and I became lucid and I was flying in front of a giant cathedral. There was a big upside down Jesus on a cross. I turned the cross right side up with my mental intention and after I did, I suddenly heard the most beautiful gospel choir music, which I listened to while flying around.

After sharing our dreams, each group did a group journey into one members dream and my group chose my dream. The four of us journeyed together, touching each other gently. I returned to the dream with my friend’s dead brother and realized that it was my magical child with the lead helmet and we turned the helmet to gold by radiating love and sunshine at him. Then the white Pegasus which my magical child rides came and took us to the cathedral where we met the white haired resurrected Jesus, who had come down off the cross, and went inside. The same people from the lodge journey yesterday were there except this time the liquid singing starlight fire water was in my crystal bowl and Jesus and I continued to pour water to purify Robert’s energy. He was laying in a baptismal pool and there were Salmon eating away at the dark energy clinging to him. There was a full gospel choir and their tones filled the cathedral and uplifted our spirits. After a while the Pegasus flew to the bell tower and began flapping it’s wings powerfully, flapping away the dark clouds from the sky. The dolphins came and spun their sun dogs opening up the rainbow portal in the ceiling of the cathedral. Sitting Bull and Geronimo came in at the end with the spirit horse and Robert, adorned now with a big headdress of eagle feathers, got on and flew through the rainbow portal. I got up and blew his energy into the crystal and put it on the altar. We had a short break where I ate some strawberries and when I came back into the room the sun had finally come out after two days of grey and rain. There was a prism in the window by where we journeyed, and it was making small rainbows all over the place where I was just laying. The rainbows had come after all! We did four more journeys later that day focused on helping the dead imagine themselves onward, one for each of the four elements. At the end of the workshop, I wrote a song to honor Robert our fallen Rainbow Warrior.

Rainbow Warrior

Rainbow portal opening above your head
Rainbow soul know that you are dead
Dolphins spinning aloha joy to your soul
Sundogs for a white wolf showing you the whole
HO HO HO Rainbow GO GO GO Rainbow FLOW FLOW FLOW Soul

Bubbling fountain of healing and peace
Baptised purified all your grief released
Let me pour water for you this time
A choir of liquid singing sizzling starlight
HO HO HO Rainbow GO GO GO Rainbow FLOW FLOW FLOW Soul

A Rainbow Loge is waiting for you tonight
Jump in with me into the electric blue fire
Burning true blue to soul smoke pink and green
Rising to the white light transformed homing
HO HO HO Rainbow GO GO GO Rainbow FLOW FLOW FLOW Soul

Lay down your pain shed your dense energy haze
Let white wolf shake off all of Black Dog’s daze
Rainbow warrior take your crazy spirit horse and ride
Rainbow warrior flying across the sky
HO HO HO Rainbow GO GO GO Rainbow FLOW FLOW FLOW Soul

Check in your medicine bag go buy a pipe of light
Put on your celestial rainbow robe and take flight
Pegasus strong wings will take you to your next life
Tri-Star Orion or the Orient you decide

The next day I after work I went to bury the talisman with Robert’s energy at the base of a tree as was suggested. I went out to Cherokee Marsh with the intention of burying him near the bench with the vista looking to the sunrise in the east. I figured that this would help him move away from the house and the lodge. It was getting dark when I arrived, and when I got to the bench there was a young couple sitting there. I walked by and down the path a little and realized that there were only small trees for a ways. The first big tree that I found was an oak with two trunks. There would still be a view of the sunrise from the higher branches of the tree, and I thought that looking out at this young couple in love was appropriate. Robert passed in a lot of heartache over his relationship so this would start him off in a new direction, moving towards a renewal of love. I dug a hole as deep as I could with my little garden trowel and as I put the talisman in and covered it over with dirt, a series of military jets roared overhead. After singing the Rainbow Lodge song, one of the women at the workshop had come up and gave me the name of a woman named White Eagle from New Mexico who led Rainbow Lodges and who came up to do Solstice ceremonies, like Sun Dances without the piercing, in Northern Wisconsin every year. I contacted her through some e-mails and read an article by her describing the Solstice ceremony and how the central tree that they tie up to is a split tree with two trunks. I thought of Robert’s physical scars from piercing at the Sun Dances, and the emotional scars he carried from a violent childhood and the war in Vietnam. I wished and imagined for him a kinder, gentler life in his next incarnation, one where his gifts and dreams were nurtured from the beginning so he could grow a healer without so much wounding.

One month later, Karen started an ongoing group for people who had been through one of Robert’s workshops. I had had three lucid dreams since then that were related to this experience. In the first one, there was a short narration that said that I was in Borneo. I was walking through a city, and then by the ocean with more thatched huts. People were speaking another language, and I groaned with the knowledge that I’d need to learn another language to live here. I went inside a hut and I noticed a rug on the floor and realized that it was a doorway. I put my hand through it and tried to open it, but I couldn’t open it. I was kneeling on it with all fours and suddenly it gave way like a trap door and I was falling through a shaft. I thought of “Door in the Floor” as I fell and I became afraid that I was going into the underworld without my helmet of protection and I hit bottom and a fiery spirit screeched at me and I freaked out and went into a different scene. In the second dream, I was walking in a forest and I came across a black dog in a wooden cage. I realized I was dreaming and I flew around behind the cage and the back was open and I signaled to the dog and flew towards train tracks where a train was going by and looked back and the dog was flying after me. In the third dream, I was walking further down the same train tracks and realized I was dreaming when a bunch of elephants were coming towards me. There was water to the left and there was a polar bear floating on some ice floes. I flew over by the bear and it turned away from me and turned into a white dog. I gave up on the polar bear and flew up a ways and then flew down into the earth and swam downwards until I reached the same spot as before. It was filled with burning spirits and lakes of fire and I was able to stay for longer this time. I was still scared, chanting the entity healing prayer for protection but forgetting the words. I could feel the disturbed thoughts of the souls who were trapped there closing in and crowding by own, until I woke up suddenly.

After sharing our dreams we did a short initial journey. The polar bear that had avoided me in my dream came close to me this time and held me in a warm bear hug embrace. I shared this with Karen and she said that one of Robert Moss’ most significant power animals was the white bear. I’m sure I picked this up through reading all his books over the years, but I wasn’t consciously aware of it, so it was a nice confirmation. Later we journeyed as a group into the final dream in my series. This time the elephant was a white elephant and it and the white bear came with me as I flew into the earth and into the underworld. When we got there the white elephant trumpeted loudly with its trunk, which quieted the disturbed wailing and got the lost souls to pay attention. The pits of burning fire were for purification and didn’t burn when I dipped my hand in them because I was fully in my light body. They only burned off lower vibration thoughts and feelings. I bent over a red flaming pool and saw scenes in it of war and violence from different lifetimes of mine. The white bear held me in a tender bear hug while I watched the savagery. The lost souls gathered around me and watched with empathy, resonating to the dark scenes. Then suddenly, Kwan Yin emerged from the pond on a white dragon. She began to sing beautifully and soothed all of our souls. The last thing I saw was the red eyed face of a hell hound that melted with Kwan Yin’s singing into a gentle white dog which I ended the journey petting. After the group, Karen said I had to come with her up to the house. We walked up the snowy driveway to her house and lying curled up in the garage was her white Samoan dog McCloud, looking just like the dog I’d just seen and petted in my journey. I sat and petted this white wolf and the line between dreams and waking reality blurred completely and in that moment everything connected and wove together.

I had one last lucid dream that completed this series. After realizing I was dreaming while sledding down a snowy hillside, I flew up and spun, which erased the scene. I waited for a few seconds and in front of me appeared the black granite names carved into the Vietnam War Memorial. I was drifting downward, reading the numberless names as they scrolled by. I continued to fall downward through a large tunnel lined with red bricks. After descending for awhile, I came to a spot where many tunnels shot off horizontally and and this crossroads, in even redder bricks, it said “Hell”. I drifted down on of the side tunnels and through a wall and into a small area with the burning red pools and black lava rocks. Immediately, a great light emanated from my heart along with beautiful choir music which was the same sound I had heard in my most healing lucid dream where I felt myself drawn up into liquid singing starlight and dissolving in ecstasy. This time, though, that beautiful harmony was emanating from within me. I floated over to a soldier soul who was pacing around in the corner in circles hyperventilating. I was able to hold him and calm him with the light and harmonious singing, and I was about to take him back up the tunnel with me when my cat meowed at me to pet him and woke me up (that selfish creature!) In 1989, Joe Beavers who had been a friend of my brother and I for our whole young lives, died when he feel asleep at the wheel and drifted off the road. My brother and I spent two days talking to him via a Ouija board, and one of the things that came out of that which was confirmed in a thousand big and small ways afterward was that my last lifetime ended violently as a tunnel rat in Vietnam. To be able to come full circle now and help a fellow soldier and a lost part of my own soul out of hell and to the light has been the greatest miracle of my recovery.

Peace, Love, and Recovery, Rev. Michael Dinan

Picking up the Slack: An Addict's Journey (from the anthology Radical Spirit)

2007-05-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

My name is Michael and I am an addict. When I first made that statement over nine years ago, it felt like a shameful straitjacket. It choked in my throat as I coughed it up in a cloud of noxious cigarette smoke at my first Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Over the course of my recovery, the edge of judgment in the word addict mellowed. It slowly changed tone and became instead a soulful liberation. I scrutinized the rest of humanity through this lens of addiction and found them all qualifying in some respect. Now the phrase sounds to me more like a gentle observation of a universal truth on a par with the noble truths of Buddhism. Simply substitute addiction for attachment and it translates: anyone still manifesting in a clunky 3-D body should be under suspicion of suffering from some degree of addiction and could certainly benefit from the twelve-step yoga of letting go and yoking their ego to its soul source. How many king and queen babies today have been weaned at the military-industrial teat and can't be pacified by anything short of total remote control from a cushy sofa?

In Tibet, there is a class of beings called the Hungry Ghosts that are said to haunt the lower astral planes. They have tight, tiny mouths and giant, grumbling bellies and live in a constant state of dissatisfaction because they can't ever eat enough to be full. Our human attempts to eat our way out of dissatisfaction end just as dismally. Born free, we slowly morph into Borg Teletubbies. Drug addicts and alcoholics are simply the most exaggerated and dramatic examples of this phenomenon, the personified shadow of our culture's materialistic end-of-the-millennium binge.

My fellow Gen Xers and I became teenagers in the "me decade," the greed-fueled eighties. Cocaine blew egos out of all proportion, creating corporate rapists whose toxic waste was the only thing that trickled down to the people. A whole wave of former hippies caved in to materialism and became yuppies. Even the music was shallow and mechanical, full of pyrotechnics, hair spray, and soulless synthesizers.

The spirit and meaning that were missing from my formative years became my empty belly and started me on a gut-level quest for spiritual enlightenment. Before I became conscious that this was what I was seeking, though, I followed the vampire pack's lead and developed a taste for blood. I sucked my unfair American share of resources and built myself a plush technological and pharmacological coffin. Coming out of the shadows now, I feel the need to settle my account and give back the only gold I have, the story of my soul's growth. Before recovery, I was a numb petty thief lifting energy from everyone around me with increasingly obvious sleights of hand. Now, after turning myself inside out and finding my silver lining, I am a creation of my higher self. Thanks to many years of the Divine Mother's intervention, starting with my real mother dragging me to treatment literally kicking and screaming, I am finally picking up my slack and giving back, lending a healing hand to my community.

I will start my soul's story with a couple of war stories that bookend ten years of slacking away from the trials of my life through extensive self-medication. I first started drinking at age eleven over an unrequited obsession with a girl. I had pined for her quietly for several years only to find out through the sixth grade grapevine that she thought I was "too weird." This was in line with a general consensus that had been building since I learned to speak. When I found out she had a crush on a more "normal" boy, I quickly became his best friend and understudy. He drank and smoked and fought. A good mimic, I picked up those things quickly. But my young love was not convinced by my acting trick, and my sense of freakishness deepened.

Drinking was successful, however, in helping me fit in better, and quickly changed from an act into a habit. In a loud, inebriated crowd my weirdness could easily slip under the radar. And if someone did confront my strange behavior, I finally had an excuse: "Well, I was just drunk! I wasn't myself!" The next ten years were an odd odyssey: I drank a lot, smoked a lot of pot, ate a lot of acid and mushrooms, and got a lot weirder.

Then one day my charade ended. A fellow weirdo from Duluth whose bizarre sense of humor had made him a hero to me shot his own heart out with a shotgun. At the same time I lost my first true love, the first woman who saw all of me and loved me, who embraced my strangeness and called it genius. I was such a numbed-out zombie from all the drugs I was doing that I couldn't feel the wave of grief washing over me. Without a way to get out, my emotions turned psychotic. I began fantasizing about dying accidentally. I wanted to die, but I couldn't bear the thought of being remembered with anger or pity through the stigmatized lens of suicide. I began praying for a happy fatal accident that would set me free but let me keep my vanity intact.

Then, in the depths of my depression, a strange alchemy promised to turn my leaden hopelessness to gold. A woman in my poetry class was going through a hell parallel to mine. She, however, was dealing with her tragedies completely cleanly and lucidly, and, not surprisingly, writing much better poetry about it. Several synchronicities led me to believe that she was the light at the end of my tunnel and could save me. I began focusing all of my poems at her.

I realized I had finally lost my grip when more misinterpreted synchronicities convinced me that I was meant to go windsurfing in a thunderstorm and get struck by lightning so that I could die and be revived by one of my roommates, Phil. Phil was a big clumsy welder with five minutes of half-hearted CPR training from me, which I distantly remembered from a few drunken summers as a lifeguard. My belief was that I would win a near death experience and the love of the poetess, and everything would be rosy. The deeper reality was that I was getting more than a bit impatient waiting for a happy accident to kill me. I was starting to force God's hand.

Thankfully, the storm I thought was coming for me never arrived. I wrote a poem called "Manic Depression" that began with a manic plea for the poetess's love and ended with me alone, floating in a limp wind on a gray lake, no bolt of hope in site. The poetess liked the poem, but was not impressed with the desperate show of affection. My self-destructive bent had been dressed up and veiled in myth and mystery, but its basic energy of "I'll kill myself if you won't love me" hadn't been refined much since I was eleven. She eventually told me to stop calling. I had never reached this level of desperation and rejection before, and it was the straw that broke my slacking back and brought me to my knees, ready for treatment.

I want to stop talking about the problem now. Any more would be wallowing, because here I sit, happily writing this, due solely to a continuous string of miracles. Too often when people relapse and leave the recovery community they are written off with the proclamation that "they just haven't hit their bottom yet." I understand from my own experience the ego-stripping gift of these tragic bottomings, but I think it's just as common that the missing link in recovery is a positive spiritual experience that lends a glimpse of a higher top. So, in the interest of balancing the scales, from here on I will focus on my peak spiritual experiences. They are the lightning life that surged through me in recovery, and brought my heart back from that dead gray day at the lake, shock by shock.

First off, my drug-addled, malnourished body had a long way to go to reclaim optimal functioning. Not much spirit would be able to enter me until I did some major internal housecleaning. Over the first seven years of my recovery, every cell in my body, with the exception of those of my brain and spinal cord, was created anew. This is the physical underpinning of the seven-year itch, and why year seven of recovery is known as the "second surrender." My nervous core may still have a predilection for electric intensity, but cell by cell I've built a new temple around that center. Now my high-wired fanaticism is transmitted through tissue that wants to live and manifests as a passion for purification instead of a lust for self-destruction.

Before I got clean, I canvassed for Greenpeace, rabidly attacking the corporate status quo for their poisoning of the environment.

At the same time, I created fantastic and elaborate justifications for the hazardous waste I dumped into my own body every night. I was an artist who suffered from too much genius and lucidity. I needed to do some neural pruning in order to communicate with the sheep. I believed this until I got my first D– in college and realized I'd dumbed myself down a little further than intended.

In recovery, I began to realize that any change I wanted to make in the world had to start with my own body. I have eased the toxic influx by eating more consciously, eliminating pesticide-laden meat, and buying organically. I have cut back on refined sugars and high glycemic index carbohydrates, which keep blood sugar levels on a vicious roller coaster. Research has shown that limiting them helps to quell the raw, thoughtless, physical cravings for the quick sugary fix of alcohol that can happen in those blood sugar troughs. Exercise has also helped me maintain the momentum of my physical recovery. In my first year clean, I ran a marathon, which led me to finally quit smoking. It was just too difficult to smoke with all that bouncing up and down. Also, I have returned off and on to the pools of my youth to let loose my frozen rage, thrashing steadily away from that gray lake of depression and toward a new clarity.

A year and a half into recovery, I went on my first fast. After seven days, several enemas, and some intestinal cleansers, I lost a few pounds of God knows what that never came back. That fast got some toxins out of my vision too, and my purified eyes began to see a blue-green aura around me and every other living being. Later, I learned this is the etheric body. Since then, I've tried to go on four-day fasts at every seasonal transition to give the fat cells that are still saturated with waste a chance to spit their poisons out.

As my body started to function again, I became more and more able to come out of my isolation. At my lowest point of addiction, I wanted desperately to be adored for my songs, but I was so painfully shy of performing with my guitar and harmonica that the only audience I could stomach was the pot plants growing in my closet. The only emotion I could show was anger, which drove everyone close to me away. I had truly become a Hungry Ghost, unmoored from the human race. Thankfully there were other formerly ghostly souls who reached out to me at meetings and began reeling me in with their unconditional love and compassion. They spoke knowingly of the same hell I'd just come out of, but somehow had regained the ability to laugh and smile and hug. After attending for a while, I learned the mechanics of this transformation and started putting those principles into action. Meetings brought me an instant community when I most needed it. It became the family I never had, the family who really understood me.

For the last several years, I've participated in a sweat lodge circle of recovering people led by my sponsor Robert, an Apache pipe carrier, Sun Dancer, and "windigo," something like a sacred clown. Those sweats have helped me pray and sing more openheartedly, my soul pouring out through my skin's crying pores. The first round of hot steam starts with prayers to the worst off in the world, people in constant physical pain. Slowly, through the next three increasingly scalding rounds, our prayers circle back to our community, our families and loved ones, and finally ourselves. At that point of utter exhaustion, there's no energy for frivolous prayers, only the terse truth of what we really need. This practice has given me gratitude and lessened the narcissism that is the hallmark of addiction, and the truth behind the joke, "How many addicts does it take to screw in a light bulb? One, you just hold the bulb and wait for the world to revolve around you." I have learned how to surmount this selfish tendency and be responsible to the larger world from Robert's pure-hearted example in the lodge and beyond it as a father and counselor.

One major way that I've been able to put my gratitude into practice has been to work to help others get clean. For several years I worked as a drug and alcohol case manager at Hope Haven, a six-week residential treatment center right upstairs from Colvin Manor, the halfway house where I spent my first up-all-night white-knuckled nail-biting coffee-guzzling chain-smoking dysfunctional-relationship-clinging year of recovery. In the last two years I've been working for Community Housing and Services as a case manager in their PTO program. In the PTO program, I work with the same homeless addicted population but for a much longer period, up to two years. The two-year length of the program is crucial because of a phenomenon called post acute withdrawal, or PAW, that goes along with chronic use. Long after the drugs are gone from your body, your chemistry is still hobbled. You don't feel pleasure. You can't sleep right. You can't think straight. Emotions swing from extreme overreaction to a dull flat line. A lot of people give up in this limbo because they feel worse than when they were using and suspect that they may be permanently damaged. They need a lot of cheerleading and advocating to help them have faith that these things can change.

At Hope Haven and in the PTO program I've worked with the worst-case scenarios: the homeless and hopeless revolving-door cases, the angry resistant probation and parole referrals, and those with major mental health diagnoses in addition to their addictions. It often feels frustrating trying to get past their defenses. For these people to let down their guard and become fully conscious, they must come face-to-face with the worst human and institutional horrors of our twisted age: rape, incest, war, murder, racism. People in this population make slow progress and often take a long time to blossom and stay clean; many die trying. But periodically, I have gotten to watch one crack open, and there is enough hope and beauty in those scenes to satisfy me that I'm right where I should be: lending a hand to those making the leap of faith into recovery. Being able to come full circle and help others in this way has given some much needed meaning to the self-inflicted wounding that I endured.

The recovery process is similar to a long shamanic journey. In shamanic cultures, the call to shamanic healing is precipitated by a grave and mysterious illness that takes the initiate to the brink of destruction. This dismembers the ego of the initiate so they can be rebuilt as a healer, a go-between with one foot in this world and one foot in the healing world of dreams. From this stance, illness, addiction, or even a suicide can be seen as potential gifts. But it takes a lot of time and healing to redeem them and find their hidden meaning.

The deepest gifts I received in my own years of shamanic dismemberment were when I gained lucidity in dreams. With regular dreams you strain your brain and groggily recall the experience after awakening. In a lucid dream, you are right there in the moment, feeling with your whole dream body the exhilaration and ecstasy of being free from the restrictions of 3-D reality. You can fly and melt through walls. You can experience the spirits of departed loved ones. You can experience past and future lives. You can fulfill your wildest sexual fantasies, disease and guilt free. You can change or create whole scenes with a thought, painting rainbows across the sky or creating an instantly audible symphony with just a flick of intention. These were the experiences that I was seeking as I tripped through chemically induced hallucinations that mushroomed out of my control. The lucid dreams I sometimes experienced as a child came back once I stopped blotting my consciousness out with drugs and alcohol. I quickly became a dream junkie, sleeping as much as I could, seeking my next hit of vision.

When I read that regular meditation increases the frequency of these experiences, I became a fanatic meditator. For at least an hour a night for the last six years I have used special tapes that induce meditative brain waves. I dissolve into the gentle flowing water on the tapes and ride the tones of crystal Tibetan bowls into another dimension. While in that wide-open state, my subconscious is inundated with subliminally encoded affirmations recorded in my own voice and designed to wash my brain of all the sour self-defeating beliefs that I picked up along my crooked way. Through this practice I have gone from having one lucid dream every few months to several a week.

The most powerful I've had resembled a near death experience. I was lying on my face in bed and realized I was dreaming. I first got turned on sexually but I've spent a lot of lucidity satisfying earthly fantasies and I wanted something more that night, so I turned over and was promptly launched through the ceiling. I was sucked up in a giant funnel, like a waterspout leading up to a sea of twinkling starlight that was liquid to the touch and sounded like a huge choir harmonizing perfectly. As I went further, the stars glowed brighter and the choir swelled and the most overwhelming feeling of peace and beauty and my own immensity overcame me. Never had I felt my personal identity dissolve so completely. It felt like I was a galactic symphony of singing stars going supernova. Everything got blinding ultra-white and I freaked out, afraid that I was dying and would be unable to return to Earth. The fear sent me back instantly to my small, solid body, but it took me several hours to feel even remotely at home in it again.

In many lucid dreams I've developed a closer relationship with Jesus, though the Jesus I've experienced has few qualities in common with the prudish rule-making Jesus of religious zealotry. Infinitely tender, he has cradled me like a baby in a pink and blue mist. Infinitely compassionate, he has gently held my hand and whispered in my ear to calm me while I writhed in pain on a dream cross. Infinitely wise, he has come to advise me, enlightened and white haired inside the Great Pyramid at Giza. After two thousand years of bowing to wash his beautiful but singular Piscean feet, many of us are standing up and starting to get to the core of his masterful teaching. We are following his example and getting off our crosses, owning our own divinity, and meeting him resurrected as a friend and equal. As he himself said: "You will do all this and more." In this egalitarian Aquarian age, Christ consciousness is finally becoming democratized.

I felt deeply fulfilled by all of these dream experiences. But then I'd wake up alone, and that desperate empty-gutted eleven-year-old would take hold. He'd tug my sheets away and send me off again in search of a partner to share my dreams with. A partner whose love could heal my deepest wounds and make my recovery feel complete. For the first three years of recovery, I had a tempestuous relationship that cost me a fair share of serenity. After it, I spent a whole year crying followed by two years of meditative and masturbative isolation trying to figure out and heal my part in that relationship's insanity. Finally, at a recovery dance, I met Kathleen Connors. I asked her if she wanted me to "do her chart," a step up from "Hey baby, what's your sign?" and she agreed. I was shocked to discover that she had exactly the same birthday as the woman who drove me crazy in early recovery. Would I be able to get it right this time?

On our first date, we ended up naked, something she was embarrassed to admit to her ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) friends. Moving that fast with a recovering addict was a red flag signaling relapse. But our merger was meant to last, and every time we lost faith and became afraid, some validating magic eased our doubts. After we were together for three months, her cat Pook died. She had adopted her from the Humane Society seven years earlier at the beginning of her own recovery journey. Pook's death was a big emotional opening and it brought us much closer. Six months later, I dreamed of giving her a Claddah ring: two hands holding an amethyst heart with a bolt of lightning carved into it. Soon thereafter, Kathleen had a dream where Pook came to her as a fox zipping up and down the steps of a Mayan temple. The day after her dream, we went to the Whole Life Expo in Chicago and kept running into people involved with Mayan teachings. The first did a Mayan astrology reading and told Kathleen that her Mayan birth sign was Cauac, or purple lightning storm for short. Then, a few minutes later, we found a perfect illustration of her sign: a painting of a giant woman-tornado in a purple dress with lightning filling the sky behind her. Another painting by the same artist was of the Mayan temple from Kathleen's dream. We bought the purple storm painting, and asked the artist about the temple. She said it was a temple in Tikal, Guatemala, and urged us to go there.

Kathleen believed, as I did, in navigating through life by these kinds of magical signs, and she did not hesitate to follow Pook's lead and get tickets to Guatemala. My stormy lightning lady had finally arrived! I had the ring of my dreams made for her just in time for our trip. While I secretly wrote and recorded a proposal song called "Hades Moon," she decided on the name Moon Song Massage for her massage business. Nine months after meeting, under the stars on top of a temple in Tikal, I asked Kathleen to marry me. Legs shaking, I gave her the ring and played her our moon song, and she said yes. We consummated our engagement as meteors blazed across the sky. Then, after we'd climbed down the temple and started back down the jungle path, a fox ran up the trail and right by us. Pook?!

As we got closer to the actual wedding, though, these magical memories began to fade and we started compiling inner lists of all of the attachments and bad habits that the other would have to sacrifice for our love to last. We are both Taureans and stubborn as bulls, which makes our relationship really easy when we agree and near impossible when we lock horns. We got more and more dug into these judgments of each other, and tensions built until, two weeks before our wedding, we saw red and raged. We yelled out everything we hated about each other. Neither of us had ever been so brutally honest with someone we were so close to. After a long, frightening pause, we experienced our second surrender together. Our souls rushed in and we gushed our love for each other. We cried and held each other for hours, both having finally found someone who could love us with all our flaws, as is. Kathleen is a true moon goddess and she has gently massaged my core wound and called my dissociated soul back into my body, tingling from head to toe.

The last key piece in my recovery was the Inner Focus School of Advanced Energy Healing, an answer to the mantra "Ma Ma Ma" that I chanted inwardly for years after my first contact with the Divine Mother through the Hindu teacher Ammachi. The healings in this group of people helped me reclaim my true being. The school is truly a Divine Mother school: the main teachers in my class were two goddesses who complement each other perfectly. Alixsandra, who founded the school, is a big, round, blonde-haired momma who sings in spirit and channels Jesus. Laurel is a smaller, darker, curly-haired Jewish Sufi who leads dynamic dancing meditations and gives inspirational readings from Rumi.

They taught by following the group's energy clairvoyantly, which means the school changed from moment to moment to accommodate the students' needs. We came with the curriculum written on our energy bodies. At first, their clairvoyance made me feel perpetually naked, but thanks to their sweet love and joyful humor, I got beyond my initial shame. I stopped trying to hide my energy-body blemishes and started bringing them into the light for healing. I began to move toward self-mastery.

With each module, I could feel healing energy anchor more deeply in my body. When it first reached my arms and hands, it was so intense and unfamiliar, I was convinced it was carpal tunnel syndrome and I would soon be disabled. Now that I've come more fully unblocked, the energy showers through my body and out my feet, so unless I've got carpal body syndrome, I think I'm going to be okay. In fact, I am beginning to understand how the yogis who experience this energy to the nth degree can be free from worldly addictions. When every pore of my body is soaking in bliss, it's hard to remember that hunger in my belly.

Some of my deepest healings involved the Goodness Process. Basically, you say the affirmation "I am the essence of pure goodness. My goodness has nothing to do with my actions or the actions of anyone else." And then you work to heal the chorus of negative voices that arise to deny this fundamental assumption. It took me straight to that lump of self-loathing that jumped up from my heart and stuck in my throat when I first choked on the word "addict." And for the first time, under the steady love of my teachers and classmates, the deepest layers of that shame and self-hatred began to melt away. It was regaining this basic faith in my own goodness that gave me the courage to make my second surrender with Kathleen.

The image of the addict I once was has been shattered by recovery. After a mystical seven-year restructuring full of bad luck, struggle, and finally love, there's now a totally new vision of me in the mirror. To honor my deepening experience of who I really am, I want to introduce myself as more than just an addict. There is no statement more creative than the "I am" statement. Anything that follows the "I am" statement in your brain is bound by universal laws to eventually trickle down to be created in your life. My first step in the direction of better "I am" statements was when I took the magical name Lightning Mike after many lucid dreams in early recovery where I was hit by high voltage strikes that fried and purified my ego. Now, I want to go one step beyond the twelve steps to a thirteenth step inspired by my Moon Goddess. So I am dropping my baggage of lies and standing to my full height. I am picking up the slack in my spine and introducing a new self: "I am Lightning Mike and I am liquid singing starlight."