Thoughts on "From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother's Warning"

This evening on Link TV I watched the documentary "From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother's Warning." It was a film about the South American indigenous tribe, the Kogi, who are believed to be the oldest existing civilization in the world, linked as the filmmaker Alan Ereira said, to the high civilizations of pre-Columbian South America. The filmmaker recounted bits of his extraordinary journey encountering and interacting with the Kogi, detailing the way this very old culture is struggling to continue on in spite of the vastly changing modern landscape.

More interesting to me than the visual juxtaposition of the native culture with the encroaching modern city, machinery, and the grave robbers of ancient burial sites, was the way the Kogi remained calm, reserved and yet confident in their assessment of modern man's destruction of the planet. Without arrogance they referred to the people of the so called advanced societies as their "younger brothers." They were able to let in a few members of the West to be able to deliver the message that became the documentary, yet they consciously kept the outside influence to a minimum. While some people may see this as backward or superstitious, the vast majority of their people were slaughtered in the 1500's by Westerners who simply wanted their gold and their bodies for forced labor. Today, the Kogi see the descendants of that legacy literally destroying the planet, observable to them in the form of polluting machinery and the disappearance of the glaciers in their area that feed the rivers and support all life where they live. Without traveling abroad, they knew from their ancient wisdom that man had cut down too many trees and extracted too many minerals from the earth. They predict the emergence of incurable diseases and the ultimate destruction of the planet if things do not change drastically. In spite of this, they remain steadfast in their own belief that they are protectors of the planet, tending to all life. It was after much consideration that they decided to be filmed, not even knowing what a camera was, in order to deliver their message. These people are living and existing on this planet right now, even as we are accessing the internet. I think it is truly worthy in our own spiritual explorations to consider them deeply, and ask what it is that we can do in a reality that is so radically different from the one they exist in.

The filmmaker Alan Ereira, when asked in a Link TV interview what we in the West can do, suggested that we might donate to Tairona Heritage Trust, which supports the purchase and protection of sacred land for the descendants of the Gonavindua Tairona, including the Kogi, who are truly a threatened people who face the destruction and usurpation of their land by governments and paramilitaries. But more importantly, he said, was that we need to change our ways. Which means not simply throwing money at the problem and breathing a sigh of relief, but actually transforming our own lives so that we exist in a more harmonious relationship with mother Earth.

The Metatron's Cube

Today I worked on putting some more information into my Metatron's Cube information page. Metatron's Cube to me is a truly amazing geometric form to behold, and though it contains the readily identifiable Star of David, it is composed from geometric relationships that preexisted religion. Looking at the figure, too, reminds me of the Buddhist concept of interdependent arising, in which all things are connected and depend upon everything else for existence. In order for there to be an up, there must also be a down. In this way, the Metatron's cube for me created a bridge between Abrahamic traditions and Eastern philosophy, suggesting that there are fundamental truths which are not owned by any one religion.

Meditation/Energy Work Aid

If you are looking for tools to help in acquiring a relaxed state of mind, listening to soothing music can be a simple method. There are those who would say, don't let listening to music become a crutch for your meditative practice. I would agree, but still, there are times when listening to music just feels right and be the perfect tool for going into that altered state you're looking for. If you don't want to buy any new CD's try Pandora, a free online radio station generator, and create a station centered around some soothing instrumental, electronic, or new age music, like the Jonn Serie station for example. Another streaming radio station I tune into when the server is working properly is called Bluemars. When it comes to doing energy work or meditating, the streaming radio stations offer more variety than a single CD, and while they won't get scratched like a CD, they still can become repetitive over time, which may or may not be a factor for a sitting or reclining practice. Still, they have been useful for me, and on the occasions I feel I need a little extra help for achieving a calm state of mind, I tune into one of my favorite online radio stations.

Dream Synchronicities, Saturn Returns

In my last post, I mentioned all of the difficulties that my girlfriend and I have been facing in the last two years. Our birthdays are one day apart, and we just celebrated them in April. I am leaving my Saturn returns time, and she is just coming into hers. This period is generally seen as between the ages of twenty eight and thirty, and is the period of time when Saturn returns to the same location it was at the time of your birth. It is generally thought to be a time of upheaval, turning inward, coming of age. I have always viewed astrology with skepticism, but we have experienced some interesting coincidences of late around this subject which I feel are important to consider.

The difficulties we have faced and are facing definitely seem to coincide with the Saturn returns pattern. But even more interesting has been that perhaps nine months ago I began to create artwork making use of the Metatron's Cube. Around the same time my girlfriend was creating magnets and a painting with honeycomb motifs. After experimenting with the Metatron's cube, I discovered that the hexagon it creates can interlock with other Metatron's cubes in the same way that honeycombs do.

Flash forward to March 28, the day of Earth hour, when people around the globe shut off their electricity in solidarity with Mother Earth. My girlfriend had a dream the night before of holding planets with a crystal moon and hexagonal shapes spiraling through the planet. On the 28th, I had a very rare and powerful out of body experience during my energy work/meditation practice. It was not until later that afternoon that we learned of the Earth hour concept and decided given our experiences in the last 24 hours, we should participate. We set up a small alter, lit candles, and placed crystals around them. We also set out a couple circular sprouting trays which we had just received from Amazon a week ago and at that point had our first trays of mature alfalfa sprouts. I placed a crystal sphere into the center of one of the trays. After an hour of meditation during Earth hour, I looked at the trays and realized that in the plastic was a very distinctive hexagonal pattern, made up of smaller triangles that formed hexagons, paralleling exactly a stripped down Metatron's cube pattern. The crystal sphere seemed to be the crystal moon of my girlfriend's dream and the planet with hexagon patterns was the sprouting tray. This occurrence was just under a month before our birthdays, and almost exactly a month before the person we provided foster care for was taken unexpectedly out of our home. The next day my girlfriend and I went to a crystal store in town and discovered the aragonite mineral, which has irregular hexagonal crystal forms, and and picked up a piece for her as an early birthday present.

Then today, May 7th, one day after our two year anniversary, all of these occurrences and processes came together. When I was posting a lens about the Metatron's cube, I discovered that Saturn has a permanent, distinctive and unexplained hexagonal cloud pattern at one of its poles. There again was the planet and hexagon theme of my girlfriend's dream, and it just so happened that this planet is Saturn. I can't help but think that there are some really important things going on right now.

Tranforming the Past and Opening to New Energies

Running in parallel to the surge of spiritual energies coursing through my body that at times are peaceful and inspiring and at other times painful and violent, the last two years have proven to be filled with moments of hope and excitement surrounded by great challenges and upheaval. My girlfriend got quite sick right around the time she moved into my tiny studio apartment in Longmont Colorado. We were in and out of the hospital multiple times within the next few months. A mis-diagnosis in the ER landed her a host of health insurance difficulties, including losing coverage for certain treatments, in spite of the fact that her physician wrote BCBS to clear up the matter. Then in September of 2007, her mom died unexpectedly before she could go into emergency heart surgery. My girlfriend and I had scheduled a vacation time to her home town in Monana which ended up being the very time we traveled there instead for the funeral, which the two of us arranged with some help from her brother who was temporarily back from the war in Iraq. She and I then moved to Montana, and since then have been making a living doing art and foster care for someone with developmental disabilities. The individual we took on, we found out later, was a pathological liar and ended up breaking, among other things, one of my car windows. It was difficult having him in the house, but we created a routine that made it manageable, and allowed all of us to do things we enjoyed. He lived with us for ten months, until his family, without warning, and for highly dubious reasons, pulled him from our home. After taking care of him for going on a year, he was literally taken out of our home a few hours after we received a phone call. This happened just over a week ago.

I believe that my meditative practice has served as an anchor during these chaotic times, and I believe that it will continue to do so in an uncertain future. This is a time of great transformation in our lives filled with peace and tumult. What we choose to do with our time right now will very directly shape our futures. Every choice we make has a consequence, even the unconscious and automatic ones that make up our daily routine. Though I would like for the shifts that our society and that each of us are going through to be peaceful, I believe there will be much apparent difficulty in the coming years as we are forced to confront the collective karma of denial, addictions, unhealthy attachments, and fear. It is my hope that we will emerge stronger, wiser, and more compassionate, as the result of what may very well be a function of a global kundalini transition.