Inviting Flow, and Temporal Density.............

Finally I'm alone.  I spend my winters and spring now running a "ladies boarding house".  My duties range from being a cleaning lady to a guide of souls, with the major emphasis on being a cleaning lady.  Perhaps in the future my art intensives, whereby people come to 5 day workshops and stay here in the process will provide a living..........but for now, I'm just glad to have a livelihood.

So now I confront a  Tucson summer, which is a little like confronting the strenuous and internalizing life of a Minnesota winter.  The heat, like the extreme cold, flattens everything.  Yesterday it was a mild 105 degrees, and it will not vary much until the Monsoons come in late July.  It is not without its beauties, but it is strange to not be travelling, to have this self-chosen solitude.  But I need this time of reflection, and I am devoting it to seeing what is inside me artistically. 

One of the advantages of being in my mid 60's is that I just don't give a damn any more about so much that tormented and constructed me before.  The joy of "deconstruction"!  I'm completely allergic to the art world, which never made much sense to me anyway. Do I care what people think of my work?  No,  but I do hope it can "emanate" something, even if its on an unconscious or  aesthetic level, emanate something that has its source in the divine thread that began it.   

As I write, I remember a woman I met once who created banners that hung in churches.  She lived at Findhorn, and the dyes for her banners were derived from flowers and herbs there, what she called "colors and gifts from the Devas".  As the banners faded,   she felt they were emanating a kind of spiritual fragrance, a healing power.  I like that.

I'm inviting Flow.  Like many, I find my mind so distracted and fragmented by the demands and  habits of "too much" that it is hard to contact the pregnant, dark, Silence from which the voice of the Divine speaks, from which our inner life is endlessly being sourced.  It always comes back to Gaia.   Religion, philosophy, all of it seems to be less important to me these days, my gratitude and appreciation for the privilege of living on Gaia, being a part of Gaia, is meaning enough.   Let my work in whatever form praise the Earth, from which all our stories arise, and to which they return. 

And if I am not walking in the cool beloved  woods of the dappled North Country this  Solstice, well, let me celebrate the strange beauty of the desert I am living in, those creatures of the fierce sun at its Zenith and the blessings of the cool nights.  

I found myself thinking of John Steele, as I try to clear the debris away from my creativity. Looking back, I see how many, many times I have been blessed by meeting people who set me on my path, who gave me touchstones to illuminate the way, and too often, I didn't even notice at the time.  

I met John Steele in 1989, at the Symposium on Art and the Invisible Reality at Rutgers University, sponsored by Dr. Rafael Montanez Ortiz.  I wish there was another such conference!  I presented a performance piece called "When the Word for World Was Mother", and not too long after John kindly sent me his amazing book Earthmind: Communicating with the Living World of Gaia, in collaboration with  Paul Devereux and David Kubrin.  An important book, to me, an important book, period.  

John J. Steele is an aromatic consultant, archaeologist, author and visionary.  His work, whether with aromas or philosophy, engages questions about the nature of memory, time, consciousness and being. He has worked with Terence McKenna and Paul Devereux (The Dragon Project).   Steele  explores Vedic culture, Kali Yuga,  geomancy and what he calls "geomantic amnesia", geobiology, time out of balance, shamanism, the effects of geological formations on human consciousness, cross state retention, and the importance of sacred sites and spaces. EARTHMIND explores ways of interfacing with the earth for planetary healing. And Planetary Healing is also our healing.

 In a (now unavailable)  collection of audio seminars, John Steele gave us an overview of how geomantic traditions worldwide, from the Aborigines of Australia to the Stones of Salisbury  have influenced human awareness, psychology and ways of life. He explains how sacred geometry can grant us access to "Present Time", the great and infinite place where silent knowledge flows into our consciousness unrestricted by the objects that surround us, and in many ways, "own us".

"The memorial capacity is the key to the strength of a computer, and our computers are valued by their increasing capacity to store memory.  There is an emphasis upon the acquisition of memory that can be stuffed into a computer..........What happens after a while is that the system becomes constipated by too much hoarding of memory.  This hoarding of memory (in human terms)  sets up a kind of psychological density, and as the system becomes clogged it becomes brittle.  That is to say it cannot react quickly to crisis situations because it is overloaded with information."

"The density of objects in the environment creates a corresponding density of memory necessary to record objects, and this density of memory creates temporial density.  Temporal density is a function of memorial density and memorial density is a function of object density.  You will notice that those cultures that have the fewest objects live in the dream time.  You look at the Australian aborigines with their minimal object array and you see that they live in a completely different time frame. The Bushmen the same.  As temporal density occurs it sets up this extended unconscious array of time - time is generated."

A while back I wrote an  article about Geomancer Sig Lonegren  (who also profoundly, and with utter serendipity, set me on my path many years ago) in which he commented that he believed the great Megalithic structure of Stonehenge was a "last attempt" to retain right brain, or "dreamtime" consciousness as human culture, with the continuing advent of language,  began to change during the Neolithic.  In a sense, he was perhaps  saying that the capacity for  greater contact with "the collective mind of Gaia" was gradually being lost.  Perhaps it is now time to regain that mediumistic capacity in a new way.  

I feel John Steele, and his colleagues, and Sig Lonegren............hold the key to something so important in understanding our place on the planet, and an ancient and arising paradigm that is essential.   I'm saddened that they are so little known.

And for myself, confronting the internal life of a long desert summer........May I open a Flow this summer as I create new Earth Shrines, new and yet repeated, endlessly repeated like a chant.......homage to our Mother Earth.  

"We live in the time of Kali Yuga.  Kali is the Goddess of the dissolution of time and structures.  She clears the way for those impediments of evolution that have arisen.  The Tibetan translation for "Kali Yuga" means literally the  "dregs of time", the bottom of the barrel of time.  Time has acquired such "temporal density" that it can actually be felt in the body.  And the definition of "Temporal Density" is that we have too many units of events in each day to fully or effectively assimilate them.........Another aspect of Kali Yuga   which is related to temporal density is that there is seasonal disequilibrium.  The climate and the seasons go out of whack."

John Steele

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‘Earthmind: Communicating with the living world of Gaia’ by Paul Devereux with John Steele and David Kubrin 

 "The authors make much of the effect on mind of the electromagnetic properties of the Earth and its rocks. They believe that communication with the Earthmind or anima mundi can best be achieved at sacred sites, facilitated by the crystal structures within the dolmens there. However, the authors believe there are hopeful signs of a revival of belief in paganism and in Earth’s spirituality, which would contribute to lessening our desecration of our planetary home. The key to such a consciousness revolution rests, in the opinion of the authors, with acceptance of the existence of a universal field of consciousness and our spiritual integration with it – what Peter Russell (The Awakening Earth)" described as the Gaiafield and which Devereux calls Earthmind.

for a great review:   http://greenspirit.org.uk/bookreviews/2013/05/earthmind-communicating-with-the-living-world-of-gaia-by-paul-devereux-with-john-steele-and-david-kubrin/