Tough Medicine

A work truck with an attached trailer drove by. Roped to the side of the trailer was a large teddy bear. Seriously.

I'm reading an extraordinary work by Active Dreaming creator Robert Moss, whose marriage of dreamwork and shamanism delivers a resounding "YES!" in every line. The Boy Who Died and Came Back might be a template for crafting a fully awakened life, using a lot more than whatever percentage of our gray matter is currently online. 

One of Moss's recurring themes, in his dreams and waking life, is communion with our animal kin. Even if we aren't familiar with animal totems, or don't consciously subscribe to the idea that animal medicine can support our growth, strapping your stuffed bear to the outside of a truck is symbolic of the way we live: divorced from introspection and wisdom, fearful of solitude or change, and suspicious of non-linear forms of healing — all of which Bear signifies.

The joy of how Moss lives and teaches is palpably freeing; each creatively named mini chapter is overflowing with dream wisdom and transformative ideas, amusingly presented by someone who understands the cosmic truth that Life is eternal, and the more we connect across realities and beyond belief systems, the more we expand our opportunities for Divine humor. I experienced this often on my awakening journey, which is only one reason Moss's work rings with verity for me.

I began cawing to crows and listening to their replies more than twenty years ago; together with Bear, Panther, and, of course, Snake (the ultimate symbol of transformation), Crow/Raven is one of my power animals. For a time, during my time out of mind, Deer was a companion, too.

Let's welcome our animal teachers home; they have much to share if we're willing to listen, as do the plant and mineral "kindoms" (that's kingdom minus the "g", illuminating how we are all kin; note how Kindom also contains the word "Kind").

Healing — and medicine — is only painful if we believe it needs to be. When we ingest the insights other realities and companions offer us, transformation can be uplifting, even wondrous — regardless of our physical state of health. I know.

I'll be delving deeper into Robert's work and where we are on our collective journey in the September issue of my inspirational enewsletter, What Shines, out next week!

Back to the Future

I'm riveted by the futuristic tour-de-force M.D. Waters has showered on our evolutionary synapses with her twin suspense novels, Archetype and Prototype, in which the protagonist clone displays more humanity than many of her human counterparts.

These are apt reads for now.

While we've transcended our Armageddon apprehension and traveled beyond the tide of history, the past can still be instructive. Since a number of ancient civilizations were quite enlightened compared with our own, it behooves us to ask, "What happened?"

Prolific researcher and author Barbara Hand Clow posits an extraordinary scenario concerning humanity's regression, split from Nature, and imminent return to wholeness in The Mayan Code: Time Acceleration and Awakening the World Mind.

Based on the work of scientific historian D.S. Allan and geologist/astronomer J.B. Delair, she hypothesizes that not only did a cataclysm circa 9500 BC plunge us from unity consciousness into duality and survival mode, which is still encoded in our limbic brains, but that the reconfiguration of the world at that time created tectonic plates, forming a planet with 20 faces: an icosahedron. She writes, "Icosahedrons are one of the five Platonic solids, the geometrical shapes that are the basis of how matter is formulated. In other words, Earth transmuted into sacred geometry 11,500 years ago."

These words electrified me to the core: an ancient cellular memory trigger.

We can only perceive the true nature of power through understanding the power of Nature. Clow states that until we return to the symbiotic relationship with Creation that we once enjoyed, we will not fully inhabit a World Mind, because this unity extends to all life on earth, not just humans.

Caroline Casey touched on the same theme in her radio show, when she spoke of how "respect trumps fear" in the natural world, and discussed the way animals metabolize trauma by trembling, which frees them to resume their normal behavior. Synchronistically, just prior to her show I'd caught the final moments of another program, on which the guest was discussing EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), a technique that enables people to reprogram their brains from trauma.

Kenny Ausubel, co-founder of the Bioneers Conference, suggests we try biomimicry: see Nature as teacher rather than resource, and ask, "What would Nature do? How can we wed human ingenuity to the wisdom of the wild?"

From Egocentric to Ecocentric

What does respect for the natural world look like? Marine acoustician Michael Stocker gives a stunning example of a man living on the Hawaiian island of Molokai who helped a beached shark return to the ocean. The Samaritan explained, "I like to swim out to a distant rock. There are a lot of hammerheads in the water, and now I've got credit."

This is a remarkable perspective compared with the more typical separation and fear to which we're accustomed — and a shift that is becoming easier to embrace as we draw nearer to what Clow calls galactocentric consciousness. She prophesies that within a decade we will transcend our reliance on technology as a means of mass communication and become a truly telepathic global society, just as "primitive" people were many thousands of years ago. Since I've always maintained that the Internet is our precursor to global telepathy, her words were a gratifying substantiation.

If the implications of an ancient reconfiguring cataclysm cause your circuitry to go haywire, download this: paleoscientific research indicates that "early humans showed no signs of being aware of the existence of the four seasons until 10,000 years ago." The cataclysmic event created Earth's variable rotation — or wobble — which gives rise to climatic changes. Our planet Herself underwent a trauma and ever since, she "trembles", bringing us the phenomenon of seasonal shifts. As above, so below.

Clow writes, "I believe the tilting axis inspired a preliterate scientific revolution that we are decoding in our times. The axial tilt changed the way we receive light on Earth…Megalithic astronomy, as well as indigenous astronomy, suggests that the Light is more potent and transmutative for humans during the equinoxes, solstices, and new and full moons. Perhaps that intentional attunement awakens cosmic intelligence. Perhaps a new evolutionary form began when the tilting axis cracked Earth open, as if Earth were a cosmic egg ready to hatch in the universe."

The ultimate key to coming home to ourselves as One people, one destiny, ready to rejoin the Universal collective, may lie in what peaceable cultures have always known: from the pain that cracks our hearts wide open, compassion and kindness flower. Naomi Shihab Nye's poem Kindness eloquently expresses this "proper dose of poignancy," a universal salve not salvo.

Changing the weather of our hearts alters the climate of civilization. It's a subtle shift we're quite capable of making as we travel at Light speed into the Age of Aquarius. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, we've had the power to return Home all the time — but we must discover it for ourselves.

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