Find your enthusiasm

What i perceive of my experience is this:
Since time immemorial, a war has been raging.  A war between opposites.  A war between yang and yin.  A war between the sexes.  War between the rational logic of the alphabet and the irrational intuition of the Goddess, War between the divine Language of God and the living, breathing artwork of Mother Nature.  Winners would triumphantly win and losers would pathetically lose, and ages would rise and fall, but nothing lasts forever and the pendulum was forever swinging back and forth in this Eternal War, the War of Opposites: Duality.

And so it goes.

Long ago I chose to deny my own creative life in order to pursue money.  It made sense.  It was the practical thing to do.  It's what my parents did.  I was just following instructions.

I strictly obeyed the alphabet.  I denied myself the pleasures of the Goddess.  I rejected the magical beauty of the world and my own artistically creative contribution to it.  I got a business degree.  Investments and derivatives.  It made me sick.  I had to cross the globe and go deep within myself to find healing and get well.  I'm still healing.  The sickness of materialism is consuming our planet's ecology, destroying our health and cutting our spiritual connection -  to higher dimensions, to God, and to one another.

And materialism is not to blame.  Materialism is just the natural consequence of logical thinking.  Logical thinking comes to the logical conclusion that physical reality itself is the cause of biology, which is then the cause of consciousness and intelligence and self-awareness.  Logical thinking thus comes to the conclusion of a materialistic universe.  A universe made up of matter.

It's not true.  The universe is made up of fields.  And the fields themselves are ultimately made up of pure consciousness.  And no, it's not particularly logical.  The universe isn't logical.  Trouble begins when we use language to describe the universe, because language must be logical to make sense, and so we always end up using logical languages to describe illogical universes.  The map can describe the territory but the map is not equivalent to the territory.  Language can describe reality but these descriptions are approximate.  Language provides valuable descriptions of reality but there is a limit to any truth revealed through mere description.  Beyond that limit, truth can only be revealed through personal experience, and the only true experience we can honestly claim as our own is breath and posture.

We perceive dense fields as though they were matter.  We ourselves are composed of dense fields, which we ourselves perceive as matter.  Matter is congealed energy.  Gross.  But its true.

I can only speak for myself.  I am a nonmaterial being incarnated into a material universe and its totally fucked me up.  I'm being completely serious.  I have lots of friends who are also nonmaterial beings who have also voluntarily chosen to incarnate into this physical dimension, knowing that they would forget their true nature and be at risk of falling into heavy karma due to their forgetting.

And yes, sad to say, it did happen pretty much to all of us.  We fell into total ignorance and suffered terribly under the delusion that we were not spiritual beings, but only material beings.

We are waking up to the truth.  We are spiritual beings having a human experience.  I spent most of my life not knowing that I was a spiritual being.  I am so fucked up over it i cannot bear to look at myself.  But I have no choice.  Being born makes me look at myself, and look at my shadow.  My shadow is my yin, my terrible secret shameful dark yin.  My tender, vulnerable, badly traumatized femininity is really just pathetic unmanliness, right?  A 'real man' is a winner, and as I encountered and integrated my feminine shadow I became a loser.  The victim.  A real man is a monster, so better not to be a real man.  Better to be a victim.  Only now do I see the pattern, and seeing patterns is what makes them dissolve in the solvent of pure awareness.

It had to be this way.  How could I know the Tao without knowing yin?  Do we ever desire real victory without first suffering a sense of defeat?  How great can Greatness really be if it does not have humility?  The greatest civilizations are the ones that take the greatest care of their most vulnerable citizens.  The greatest leaders are the ones who take the greatest care of their most vulnerable followers.  The greatest beings are the ones who take the greatest care of their most vulnerable parts.  To taste the Way we must know both greatness and shame, worthiness and unworthiness.  Only from this place of total depravity and acceptance and forgiveness do we heal and become whole.  Without the experience of darkness the light would be unforgiving in its brightness.  The experience of darkness is what teaches brightness gentleness and compassion.  It is only through forgiving our own hated flaws that we learn to have compassion for the hated flaws of others.  The light is the thoughtless murderer of darkness, and must learn to move slowly, gently, with compassion, forgiving the darkness for being terrified and defensive.  This is all taking place within our own body, as the mind digs into its own physical contents and discovers everything it is ashamed of.

And so as brightness tolerates and accepts darkness, darkness loses its fear and loathing of brightness, and the war becomes a dance, and opposites learn to relate in a healthy way.  And in the body, yang relates to yin as the inbreath relates to the outbreath, and the incredibly bright, analytical thinking mind encounters the shameful, embarrassing behaviors of the instinctive feminine body with its terribly repressed needs and consequent toxic mental neuroses, without judgment and with total unconditional love and acceptance.  We love what we like about ourselves and we train to love what we don't like about ourselves, through forgiveness.  All is forgiven, and thru forgiveness shame transmutes into grace.  True health can only grow out of total forgiveness of the past.

This takes place within the microcosm and the macrocosm, within the body and the society and the civilization.   If it happens anywhere it happens everywhere because the universe is a fractal hologram.  The body is the universe.  In healing myself I am healing the world.  This is the teaching of tantra.

And so my healing journey led me to rebel from the alphabet of logical thinking back to the arms and legs of the Goddess.  But just reaching for her doesn't mean getting her.  She's not easy.  She's ephemeral.  I ignored her for years in my pursuit of the learning of the alphabet, sure that somehow it would lead me to happiness, and She watched me, feeling neglected, and now I want inside the temple and She insists on brutally purging my psyche of its unconscious and unseen insecurities through initiation by fire before I am allowed entry.  The Goddess looks at my shadow and mocks me, forcing me to see what I refuse to look at.  She forces me, and there's nothing to be done about that, nothing at all.  It's called teaching.  Thank you world, Mother Nature, humbling teacher, thank you for these hard lessons 'cause I sure don't learn from the easy ones.

So its funny.  God is ultimate compassion and the Goddess is this pitiless teacher.  Just another perspective; don't send hate mail.  God accepts me just as I am but the Goddess insists I change!  Of course, though - it makes sense.  God is eternal.  The Goddess is change.  That's the whole point of life the universe and everything.  Change.  Change is the purpose of the universe. 

We win the war with a healthy alphabet and a healthy Goddess.  That's the point, people.  On a long enough timeline, loving everybody, forgiving ourselves,  and adoring life itself is simply cost effective.  Recognizing that creative expression is what God made us for reorients our lives.  We are in the world to Find our Enthusiasm.  The voice in our head that keeps us safely in the prison of the same old story starts taking naps, and gaps in the same old story start to appear.  We are all extraterrestrial, nonmaterial beings who have incarnated into physical reality and its fucked us all up.  Our job is to remember the truth of who we are.  We  need to find our enthusiasm and forgive our flaws. The war is inside us.  We are making the longest journey humankind has ever made.  We are making the journey from our heads to our hearts.