words to accompany me

I am here now, all I have is now. All I have are words to accompany me. The words pour forth; they witness the loneliness, the solitude of bitterness. They have become the wanderer of an earth.

I am always trying to be there. Looking out across the mountains in complete depth. To be inside and outside in complete calm. Disappear.

I am here now, all I have is now. All I have are words to accompany me. The explanation, the handbook for the would-be witness. I can let the words out, let them stand out. They can become the script.

This can be my place of worship, this can be my church. Deep in the core. All planets across the sky. My landing strip: Mercury, Venus, Earth?

I am here now, all I have is now. All I have are words to accompany me. The library I mention in my will, the testament of no-choice. I can scatter the words behind me. Little seeds that fall on fertile ground.

IanSmith©2007

End of an Era

Huge and numerous gas pockets were blown open in the lairs of the animals, precipitating volcanic eruptions and earthquakes in the slowly cooling earth. The magnitude of the disturbances caused the axis of the world to shift, bringing the poles to their present position and producing the last of the great Ice Ages.

Lemuria was the first to be affected, losing much of its territory as it began to sink into the Pacific. In Atlantis the area of the Sargasso Sea, off the west coast of Cuba, was the first to go under water. The rest of the continent was broken up into several large islands with many canals, ravines, gulfs, bays and streams. The temperate climate rapidly changed to a more torrid one.

With the upheavals, the initial migrations from Atlantis took place in small numbers to the east and west. The earliest settlements were in the region of the Pyrenees Mountains in France and Spain; then later in Central and South America. The movement of the Lemurians was primarily to South America. The land of Og , along the Pacific coastal area of what later was to be southern Peru, was occupied. This was the beginning of that mysterious tribe of Indians known as the Incas.

From this time on, although material civilization rose to great heights, there was a growing unrest among the Atlantian People. In a land of plenty, strife rather than peace became the rule. The altars came to be used for human sacrifice by those turning away from the original concept of the One God. Sun worship became prevalent. Only the dedicated inner core of the Children of the Law of One remained firm.

Low standards of morality, sex indulgence and perversion became rampant. Poverty and hunger were widespread among the peasantry and working classes. There was a deteriorating of the physical and spiritual bodies, just as there was a wasting away of the mountains and valleys into the sea. In spite of material advancements, inner decay was to bring diversion and finally annihilation to a proud, wicked, and adulterous people.

The second important land change came long after the first, around 28,000 B.C, and resulted in the submergence of many large islands. The Bible gives an account of it in the story of Noah and the Flood.

Lemuria vanished into the Pacific Ocean. Some of its inhabitants fled to the safety lands of lower California, Arizona and New Mexico, where they established the brotherhood of Mu in the land of “Mayra”. For the Atlantians it was the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one unsurpassed in many ways.

Source: Edgar Cayce’s story of The Origin and Destiny of Man.

Pythagoras

Pythagoras represents the eternal Pilgrim for philosophia perennis -- the perennial philosophy of life. He is a seeker of truth par excellence. He staked all that he had for the search. He traveled far and wide, almost the whole known world of those days, in search of the Masters, of the mystery schools, of any hidden secrets. From Greece he went to Egypt -- in search of the lost Atlantis and its secrets.

In Egypt, the great library of Alexandria was still intact. It had all the secrets of the past preserved. It was the greatest library that has ever existed on the earth; later on it was destroyed by a Mohammedan fanatic. The library was so big that when it was burnt, for six months the fire continued.

Just twenty-five centuries before Pythagoras, a great continent, Atlantis, had disappeared into the ocean. The ocean that is called Atlantic is so called because of that continent, Atlantis.

Atlantis was the ancientmost continent of the earth, and civilization had reached the highest possible peaks. But whenever a civilization reaches a great peak there is a danger: the danger of falling apart, the danger of committing suicide.

Humanity is facing that same danger again. When man becomes powerful, he does not know what to do with that power. When the power is too much and the understanding is too little, power has always proved dangerous. Atlantis was not drowned in the ocean by any natural calamity. It was actually the same thing that is happening today: it was man's own power over nature. It was through atomic energy that Atlantis was drowned -- it was man's own suicide. But all the scriptures and all the secrets of Atlantis were still preserved in Alexandria.

All over the world there are parables, stories, about the great flood.

Those stories have come from the drowning of Atlantis. All those stories -- Christian, Jewish, Hindu -- they all talk about a great flood that had come once in the past and had destroyed almost the whole civilization. Just a few initiates, adepts, had survived. Noah is an adept; a great Master, and Noah's ark is just a symbol.

A few people escaped the calamity. With them, all the secrets that the civilization had attained survived. They were preserved in Alexandria.

Pythagoras lived in Alexandria for years. He studied, he was initiated into the mystery schools of Egypt -- particularly the mysteries of Hermes. Then he came to India, was initiated into all that the brahmins of this ancient land had discovered, all that India had known in the inner world of man.

For years he was in India, then he traveled to Tibet and then to China. That was the whole known world. His whole life he was a seeker, a pilgrim, in search of a philosophy -- philosophy in the true sense of the word: love for wisdom. He was a lover, a philosopher -- not in the modern sense of the word but in the old, ancient sense of the word. Because a lover cannot only speculate, a lover cannot only think about truth: a lover has to search, risk, adventure.

Truth is the beloved. How can you go on only thinking about it? You have to be connected with the beloved through the heart. The search cannot be only intellectual; it has to be deep down intuitive. Maybe the beginning has to be intellectual, but only the beginning. Just the starting point has to be intellectual, but finally it has to reach the very core of your being.

He was one of the most generous of men, most liberal, democratic, unprejudiced, open. He was respected all over the world. From Greece to China he was revered. He was accepted in every mystic school; with great joy he was welcomed everywhere. His name was known in all the lands. Wherever he went he was received with great rejoicing.

Even though he had become enlightened, he still continued to reach into hidden secrets, he still continued to ask to be initiated into new schools. He was trying to create a synthesis; he was trying to know the truth through as many possibilities as is humanly possible. He wanted to know truth in all its aspects, in all its dimensions.

He was always ready to bow down to a Master. He himself was an enlightened man -- it is very rare. Once you have become enlightened, the search stops, the seeking disappears. There is no point.

Buddha became enlightened... then he never went to any other Master. Jesus became enlightened... then he never went to any other Master. Or Lao Tzu, or Zarathustra, or Moses.... Hence Pythagoras is something unique. No parallel has ever existed. Even after becoming enlightened, he was ready to become a disciple to anybody who was there to reveal some aspect of truth.

His search was such that he was ready to learn from anybody. He was an absolute disciple. He was ready to learn from the whole existence. He remained open, and he remained a learner to the very end.

The whole effort was... and it was a great effort in those days, to travel from Greece to China. It was full of dangers. The journey was hazardous; it was not easy as it is today. Today things are so easy that you can take your breakfast in New York and your lunch in London, and you can suffer indigestion in Poona. Things are very simple. In those days it was not so simple. It was really a risk; to move from one country to another country took years.

By the time Pythagoras came back, he was a very old man. But seekers gathered around him; a great school was born. And, as it always happens, the society started persecuting him and his school and his disciples. His whole life he searched for the perennial philosophy, and he had found it! He had gathered all the fragments into a tremendous harmony, into a great unity. But he was not allowed to work it out in detail -- to teach people he was not allowed.

He was persecuted from one place to another. Many attempts were made on his life. It was almost impossible for him to teach all that he had gathered. And his treasure was immense -- in fact, nobody else has ever had such a treasure as he had. But this is how foolish humanity is, and has always been. This man had done something impossible: he had bridged East and West. He was the first bridge. He had come to know the Eastern mind as deeply as the Western mind.

He was a Greek. He was brought up with the Greek logic, with the Greek scientific approach, and then he moved to the East. And then he learnt the ways of intuition. Then he learnt how to be a mystic. He himself was a great mathematician in his own right. And a mathematician becoming a mystic is a revolution, because these are poles apart.

Osho, Philosophia Perennis, Volume 1, Number 1

I have left barren landscapes behind me, stony hillsides without trees, desert valleys without water, they are behind me now. I stumble onwards with only the wind as a reminder of what lies before me. It brings the scent of rain and of living things and with it an energy that strengthens the core of my being. As I look up to the sky I see a small dot growing larger. It is a living thing! A small hawk hovers above me and I hear its high mewing call. It has been long since I heard the sound of a living creature and it is like music to me. It glides away east toward a distant ridge of hills and hangs in the air, waiting for me to follow. I look back; a dark evening is falling on the barren landscapes behind me.

Ayahuasca — The Fashionable Path of Awakening?

“Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.” These words were spoken by Krishnamurti in 1929 as he dissolved the global spiritual organization that had formed in order to promote him as the new Messiah. As I witness the growing popularity ayahuasca, I hope we do not turn this medicine into a Messiah that has to come to save us. Although I see ayahuasca as a powerful tool of individual and planetary awakening, I am also seeing it evolve into a spiritually-sophisticated brand that we wear and glorify. As any trend becomes more popular, authentic original impulses are replaced by unconscious conformity: we follow trends as unquestioning groups, rather than as conscious free-willing individuals.

The New Yorker recently published an article on ayahuasca, calling it the “drug of choice for the age of kale”. The author narrated her only ayahuasca experience, in a Brooklyn yoga studio, next to a “thumping dance club”. The article makes no mention of the rich cultural diversity of ayahuasca traditions or the countless stories of ayahuasca-assisted personal transformation. However, I thought her association of ayahuasca with kale was spot-on. Ayahuasca may be answering the call for a global paradigm shift, yet it also fulfills an obsessive craving for wellness, detox, and healing. Plant medicines can be powerful catalysts for healing, when approached with individual and social self-awareness, and these two forms of awareness – of ourselves and of our society – are difficult to cultivate when we do what the cool kids are doing. What we can do is learn to discriminate between self-expression and imitation, and between the authentic desires of our hearts and the chatter of our minds. Are we acting from our core or simply being blown around by the cultural zeitgeist?
When to take ayahuasca?

These distinctions are absolutely necessary. Powerful tools can be misused and have damaging effects. My original inspiration for writing this article was a botched iboga ceremony that left me so traumatized that I was forced to accept that 1) there were some highly irresponsible and reckless shamans/healers out there and 2) there were highly irresponsible and reckless individuals like myself naively attending ceremonies without proper awareness. I’ll save the details for a future article, but I will share that I experienced an abyss so unbearably painful that my only wish was for it to end, without caring what came after this end. I understood the torment of suicide. These realms of consciousness are real. I share them here not out of masochism, but to emphasize the importance of preparation, discrimination, and intuition.

We can sharpen our skills by coming back to the basics: set and setting. Set – why am I here? And how do I really feel in my heart of hearts? Setting – do I feel safe? Do I trust this environment and the people around me? It is crucial to critically evaluate the shaman by their “fruits”: what type of life has this person created for themselves? How do they relate to their family and partner? How do they relate to their assistants and workers? Have the workers been there a long time? Are they happy to work there? These questions reveal a lot about what kind of person the shaman is, and therefore what kind of shaman they are.

We also need to de-romanticize our understanding of shamanic traditions. We crave for more natural, organic lives, for health, and for wisdom, so it is not a surprise that we fantasize about Amazonian tribes and their psychedelic brews. But our colorful projections have consequences and can reinforce racist, neocolonial dynamics. Not all medicines are appropriate at a given time or compatible with a given person. Indigenous peoples are born into tribes, whereas Westerners self-select into their tribes. Not all shamans heal; some throw curses; others do both. And I have yet to meet a shaman who calls themselves a shaman. Shaman is a word from Siberia popularized by Western anthropologists to categorize a wide variety of seemingly related spiritual practices.

Our interaction with indigenous medicines is not a one way street – with us simply “gaining wisdom” from them. As any quantum physicist or modern anthropologist will tell you, observation entails participation. It’s a two way street: the massive influx of ayahuasca tourists to the Amazon impacts local economies, culture, and healing traditions. In addition to our own healing, we need to remember that indigenous communities have their own healing to do. Are we operating as co-creators or are we imposing ourselves on them? Am I giving as much as I am taking? And where is all this ayahuasca coming from? This is not a question of shame, but of awareness.

The reality of indigenous peoples is not a Jungle Book fairy tale. Their cultures are steadily declining in the face of consumerism, missionary activity, and the rape of nature by oil pipelines and industrial super-farms. Ayahuasca tourism is a booming industry in much of the northwest Amazon and its reality is more nuanced than we like to think. Explore the backstreets of Iquitos, Peru and see for yourself the shadow side of the Western appetite for healing.

Please don’t mistake my words for pessimism. The intention that infuse these words is for renewed awareness and courage. Charles Eisenstein writes that “no optimism can be authentic that has not visited the depths of despair…no despair is authentic that has not fully let in the joy.” The world is not ending. It is only changing, as all things change. Stop, breathe, be gentle. May all beings be happy and peaceful.

by Félix de Rosen

Félix de Rosen is a free spirit who aims to catalyze conscious planetary evolution. His long-term vision is to organize sacred arts festivals and create spaces of trust, spontaneity, and transparency. He was born in France, grew up in the US, and is learning how to let go and relax. He is currently based in California.