Recovering from Trauma:

A Deep Ecology Approach to Real Change

       There is much ado in the mental health field these days regarding trauma informed services.  As it was back in the 70's and 80's regarding Transactional Analysis, it is now the fad, alongside "evidenced based practices" and the use of pharmaceuticals to cure everything from depression to bad boy and girl behavior. 

      
This is the day of budget cuts and quick fixes, folks.  An 8 week therapy cures you.  Cures you of what?  This is the question I ask, and you should ask also.  In our modern day disease model of behavioral issues, we isolate the individual from the context of the culture he or she lives in, and do not look at the bigger issues.

Now, of course, many system's models theorists say, "why sure, we use the systems models of behavior to induce change.  It's the way to go, it gets you funding from the insurance companies because it is ‘evidenced based.'  Everything is evidenced based in this day and age, but who is doing the evidencing?

     
"What?" You may quirk.  "Are you saying that we should not have therapies that are based on evidence?"  Well, aside from the research showing evidence that there is no objective observer separate from the results of the experiment.  A particle is only a particle when it is observed, otherwise it is a wave.  So, there is no "objective" article out there distinct from the "subjective" eye reading this page and turning a light wave into a page.  Subject and object are ultimately one, at least according to the physicist Heiseberg (Talbot, 1991).  Take some hallucinogenic mushrooms one day and watch how these words come alive and begin to dance.

What makes that view "wrong" and your normal concrete view "right?"  Nothing more than your opinion.  And, opinions are nothing more than thoughts.  They arise, they play their magic, and then they sink into the deep well of Mind to rest until they are called back into their industrious play.  So, your view is actually your opinion in line with what the mainstream says you should see.  It is that dictate that determines what is right and what is illusion.  Talk to a Pygmy and she'll tell you about a completely different universe.

      
Evidence is not separate from the condition of the evidencor and the evidencor is not separate from the culture of which he is a part.  In other words, how you see this article and the way ways that Mother Culture taught you to see this article determine how you see this article.  If you are a good scientific type, you're probably hearing a little old lady's voice in your ear, "sweetheart, don't pay attention to this crazy man.  He's taking you down the wrong road.  Would I, your Mother, tell you a falsehood?  Mm?"

Now, if you are a left brain analytical scientist that believes in an objective world in accordance to the dominant ethos of evidence based methods of inquiry, you're going to tell me this article is "bullshit."  And, for you, that's correct. That's ok.  Your perception of my article being "bullshit" is based upon your conditioning regarding what is truth and what is illusion by the dominant culture.  It is not objective fact.  Indeed, I would tell you that the more inclusive Mother Nature could teach you something different, as She taught Heisenberg, Bohm, Pribram and some other scientists (Talbot, 1991).

Now, here, I must speak a warning.  In saying this, I'm not advising that you begin thinking that your thoughts are central to the universe, as the New Agers state.  "We create our reality," your ego might say.  No!  Your ego's thoughts are like waves upon an infinite Ocean containing other waves.  Your thoughts influence the waves around you, and the waves around you influence your waves.  But YOU, that is, your ego, does not command the universe.  The idea that it does is nothing more than more self-centered arrogance.

You are more like a cell in an infinite Being than you are the entire Being.  Yet, each cell of your being contains the knowledge for making a "whole new you."  This is the idea behind cloning.  You are a holographic reflection of all Being, for in you the All is mirrored in its totality (see Hall, 1999).  In other words, my warning is that you not see your ego as being IT.  Saying your ego is "IT" is akin to saying that you clothed is your truth.  No, you naked is your truth, your clothing speaks a lie.

In similar fashion, it is in your deepest nudity that speaks to Meister Eckhart's statement, "When God gazes into the creature, He sees Himself and no one else."  But, again, to think that God sees Himself mirrored in one of your ego's thoughts is to be delusional.  God only sees Himself mirrored in Infinity, which by definition cannot exist side-by-side with its self.  Hence, Infinity is in you.

This is why the Hindus the concrete world we see Maya, or Illusion.  The illusion of our modern day is that we exist separate from the world "out there" with us safely nestled "in here."  We and the world are one.

As such, trauma is an aspect of the universe.  Ask any antelope being chased by a lioness.  Hence, we are products of a "Big Bang" in which all things explode out of a singularity.  The process mirrors birth.  As a baby is separated from his mother's body at birth, we, along with all creatures, are separated out from the primordial "soup" existing prior to the beginning of time.  But, this beginning of time resides eternally inside ourselves hence, in our infinity, we continue to exist in the state we were in prior to the Big Bang.  We are eternal in the depths of our being.  Or, as Christ says, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.  Heaven is on Earth.  You no longer have to wait for it.

So you are at once living in a traumatic world and exist in peace.  Regarding trauma, the holographic nature of this issue is spelt out beautifully in Glendennings (1994) Hello: My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization.  Trauma is written into the nature of modern day human interactions with Nature and with each other.  The same dynamic that creates global warming and the devastation of ecosystems creates warfare, spouse and child abuse, and school systems that are based upon funding requirements more so than caring about the well-being of children.

Ok, when do we start saying "no" to trauma and what do we do to reduce it?  First, you have to begin seeing the patterns in all facets of our modern world.  Second, you have to identify the controlling cognitions and belief systems behind those patterns.  Primarily, those thought and belief systems have to do with our need for control and domination in order to survive and to prosper.  So, the agency has to control its staff in order for profits to occur and the school has to control its children in order for funding to keep the schools open.  If that doesn't happen, people loose jobs and could starve to death.

So?  What would happen if people began making their own food, getting themselves independent of oil, and began being truly family oriented, meaning family spends time with family and family members have to begin relying on each other to make a decent living?  What if we began saying "no" to work hours above 35, or running around like a chicken with her head cut off to get the kids from this or that sports match. 
                

What if we truly began spending time with our kids?  What if we looked our wife or husband in the eye and have a heart-to-heart talk?  What if we really bit the fig leaf off that Adam and Eve put on?  What if we start seeing each other for who we are....and meeting that "who we are" with love more so than shame or indignation? 

Can we do it?  Do we have the guts?  In some ways, I think we find it easier to do battle than surrender our vulnerability to love.  But, can we do it?  Hey, we might choke up the first couple of times we truly looked into the eyes of another....but we can do it....and perhaps we are at a crisis point where we must.

References

Glendinning, Chellis, My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization.  (Boston, MA: Shambhala

Hall, Burl B., Sophia's Web: Understanding the Unity and Diversity of Religion, Science and Ourselves, available through http://authorhouse.com/.  

Talbot, Michael, The Holographic Universe, (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1991).

Dingy metallic green

Shouts the barren coloration of modern man

The stagnation of grey saturates

The hospital room

Where monitor, alone,

Registers life left in the patient.

Zoe screams Her plea

For Her daughter to reawaken

Murdered by the apple of Corporate Vanity

Her poisoned lips await

Her lover's kiss.

Nature is us.

Nature is the world around us.

Nature is All...

And...She is Nothing

Nature is the Self...

Seek Her and She shall never be found.

Why?

Because She is, ultimately, what's looking.

            As a writer, be it of poetry or of academic style writing, I sometimes find it frustrating when I'm not able to present words or ideas in a clear enough way to where I can inseminate the birth of an "ah-ha" moment in the reader.  Some of this comes about due to my ideas being foreign to many, and some it comes from my abstractness in language.  For example, to the mainstream, a verb is a verb and a noun is a noun.  In my "holographic" way of understanding, a verb is a noun.  Hence, when I discuss my favorite subject, Woman, I am discussing this topic from both a verb and a noun level, neither of which are distinct.  As such, my words may be perceived as being of sexual content, whereas I might just as well be talking about the process of cognition.

Why?  The answer is simple, and can be put in theological terms:  "As above, so below."  In a nutshell, this is what holographic means.  Holographic means that what is above, in Heaven, is below, on Earth.  In human beings, what is above the belt is below the belt.  What is in Mind is in the Genitals.  Hence, I am said to conceive this article, which is a feminine function.  The Father of this article is my absorption of various puzzled faces that emanate from when I write or speak.  Indeed, I can hear one of my friends and coworkers, Julie, saying, "Burl, I don't know what the hell you're talking about."  Through this statement, Julie is a founding father to this article.

           
Life is intercourse.  The dance of "yin" and "yang" are cosmic.  The Sun shines forth nestled in His embryonic womb of Space and enters into the Earth's Oceans and sacred Gardens.  Then, wa-la, we now have birds, bees, and coconut trees.  Similarly, these words are vibratory frequency waves that enter the pupils of your eyes and are then translated into words by a form of calculus known as Fourier Transforms (Talbot, 1991).  This seminal input will then either create an "ah-ha" moment, or a moment in which you say, "this man is nuts."  What was fathered and conceived in Julie's Psyche was the latter.  The dance, itself, though, is the same as the dance occurring for you right now...be I a nut or an interesting eccentric. 

           
Now if you stare into the pupil of an eye, you will see complete darkness. No light there.  Yet, the pupil drinks light like water and conceives an image.  If you were in an altered state, then the image you would conceive would be different.  Just as a baby comes out looking like mommy and daddy, these words are going to be conceived via the relationship between these words, the Sons of my Psyche, and your Psyche, their Wife.  So, if you're reading this while taking some potent LSD, you're going to conceive something totally different than when not.  Indeed, this article may only make sense to you if taking LSD.  Otherwise, you might respond with a crunched up face like Julie's and proclaim, "What the hell are you talking about?"  If your taking acid, you would probably respond, "wow!"

           
The process by which you conceive these words; and the process by which people conceive babies are one.  Furthermore, the conception of the universe is no different from the way we conceive a baby and the way we conceive these words.  For example, in the Stanzas of Dyzan it is written (Iyer, 1988, p. 84):

""The last vibration of the seventh Eternity thrills through Infinitude.  The Mother swells, expanding from within without, like the bud of a lotus.

The vibration sweeps along, touching with its swift wing the entire universe and the germ that dwelleth in Darkness: the Darkness that breathes over the slumbering Waters of Life.

Darkness radiates Light and Light drops one solitary ray into the Mother's Depths. The ray shoots through the virgin egg, the ray causes the eternal egg to thrill and drop the non-eternal germ, which condenses into the world egg.

            Then, the three fall into four.  The radiant Essence becomes seven inside, seven outside, the luminous egg which in itself is three, curdles and spreads in milk white curds throughout the Depths of Mother, the root that grows in the Depths of the Primordial Ocean of Life.

The root remains, the Light remains, the curds remain; still Oeahoo is One."

The egg then begins to divide exponentially.  This is mirrored in the Bible's  Genesis 1:2 where it is written,

"And the Earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the Deep (feminine Tehom)....and God said, "Let there be Light."

 After Light is born, a division between Night (Unmanifest) and Day (Manifest) occurs after which the universe again divides exponentially at each stage (process).  Similarly, in the Hindu Rig Veda it is written (Doniger, 1981, p. 25):

Darkness was hidden by darkness in the beginning;

with no distinguishing sign,

all this was Water. 

The Life Force that was covered with emptiness,

that One arose through the power of heat.

Desire came upon that One in the beginning;

           that was the first seed of Mind."

Water in myth equals life.  In the beginning, life is undifferentiated.  As such, in embryonic development, there is no distinction between Mother, Egg, and Fetus.  Daddy comes along with sperm loaded penis and unites with egg, and then divisions begin to occur.  The egg first divides in half and then divides exponentially both in utero and after birth.  After birth, we call it life stages and, ultimately, for people like myself, aging.  To make it kinder, I always put it in terms of us being in a stage of unfolding potential which occurs in relation to the environment.

The process of unfolding in utero and out of utero are one.  Indeed, our relation to Nature is the same as our relation to Mother.  So, by our polluting the air, our bodies are being affected because Mother and Child are not two beings.  Likewise, in the highest mystic states, there is no distinction between how a fetus relates to his mother and how one relates to God / Nature.  For example, one of Hindu Upanishads reads (Campbell, 1974, p. 54):

"It is below, it is above, it is to the west, it is to the east, it is to the south, it is to the north; it is, in fact, this entire world...And truly, the one who sees this, thinks this and understands this, takes pleasure in the Self, is joined to the Self, knows bliss in the Self; such a one is autonomous.  He has unlimited freedom in all worlds."

We and the world are one.  This is a loaded statement.  From the natural standpoint, we have hair as the Earth has grass.  We have limbs, as trees have limbs.  We have a heart that beats in a rhythm that is one with cosmic rhythms.  When we gaze upon the trees, the grasses, the foxes and deer, the mountains and canyons, the sea and the land, the stars, planets and empty space, we gaze upon ourselves.  We are Nature.  We are a composite of cells that are a cell in the planetary and cosmic body.  We are not Kings of this Earth, or this Universe, we are a part of it, and in being a part of it, within each of our cells is the Infinity of our Mother's body.  This idea is beautifully imaged in Deepak Chopra's (1993) Ageless Body, Timeless Mind where the reader is lead on a guided journey into the world beyond her surface skin (p. 42).  As the reader proceeds through the journey, she soon finds the atoms in her body are contained in emptiness as vast as intergalactic space.  Going even further, she soon finds herself with depths and potentialities that extend into infinity.

The beginning of the universe is where you are and where you are is everywhere and nowhere.  In your deepest nudity, you are infinite.  And in Infinity, both time and space end for Infinity exists side-by-side with no one, nor does She have any sense of time or Herself.  But, in this statement, this means that we are being conceived, not in any times past or future.  But, here and now.  This moment is the big bang where God speaks His desire, "Let there be Light."  That word, Light, places you in front of this computer screen, reading this writing containing my thoughts, which are now your thoughts, and thinking these reactive thoughts that you are doing right now.  In reading these thoughts, they become ours and we, me and you, become wed in a cosmic dance of infinite proportions.  You and I are one.  In that realization, we both exist before time and space in that in our deepest being, we are timeless and spaceless beings.  Though your ego may perceive me as a billion miles away, in your nudity, I am closer to you than your nose is to your face.  Hence, the dreaded end of time and space is nothing to be dreaded....for it is here, now and always.  Can you let go of your time ridden ego enough to go there?  Going there does not end creation.  It does nothing more than speak to the Creative Process.  As Ramakrishna sings (Hixon, 1992, p. 204):

"More than Creator and Creature,

 Mother is pure Creativity

 Beyond any notion of duality

 Universe and Father God

 Are thrilling glances

 From Her seductive eyes

 Eternally pregnant with Ecstasy,

 She gives birth to Manifest Being

 From Her womb of primal awareness

 Nursing Him tenderly at Her breast

 Then, playfully, She consumes Her child.

 The world dissolves instantly

 Upon touching Her white teeth,

 Attaining the realization

 Of Her brilliant voidness."

So, when you have an idea for a photograph, a story, or a solution to the problem, know that you are taking part of the Creative Process and are that Creative Process.  As far as rebirth....well, the fact is, every second you arise wet from your Mama's belly and hence every second is a rebirth.  You shall never die for in your Infinity you shall never end....either in space, or in time, for this moment is spoken in Infinity and Infinity is always here and now.

"Ok," you say, "How does this help with bills, an economy that is ready to explode into oblivion, an environment that is deteriorating daily while we continue to dump garbage into the air and the water, wars upon wars, and deteriorating school systems."  Then, with a fiery face heated by blood red anger, your voice rises, "Plus we have family systems that in the best of scenarios barely see each other on a day to day basis, a monetary system that at best isn't working for the majority of us and, at its worse, is nothing more than an illusion based on "offs and ons" in a computer bank.   How does knowing I'm infinite, and that I mirror the entire universe, really matter when my daughter is at-risk for being raped, my son isn't getting an education because he is not of the upper classes, my wife is depressed, I feel anxious because my car is ready to be repossessed, and, though I work 60 hours a week with insane demands for productivity, I just can't make my bills.  And, then there is insurance.  I have no way to pay for medical bills mounting to well over $7,000 while I have inadequate health care because big money insurance companies are going to buy the politicians into denying me a decent system of care.  These guys in Washington are playing dice with this stuff while my life goes to hell in a hand basket.  Plus on top of all that, I just read where we're lucky to have an atmosphere in 100 years, which means my grandchildren and their children may fry from unprotected sun rays.  And, you want me to go into ‘la-la' land by showing me I'm infinite?  Dude, what planet are you on?"

Ok, good point, you are speaking to how powerless you truly feel.  Thanks for sharing.  First, I would say you are not powerless and have the entire body of Nature behind you.  I would then venture to say that understanding the problems that you are describing in the light of what I'm saying above will speak to an understanding of the mess we are in and hence will aid to solutions.  Understanding the holographic, or mirroring, nature of the creation myths with your life helps you to understand the mirroring of the political, environmental, social and business worlds.

None of the issues you illuminated are separate from the others, nor are they created by separated systemic pressures.  Your daughter's potential rape relates to the environment being raped by a growth gone wild mentality (which also mirrors cancer).  Having to work 60 hours a week just to make bills while having supervisors coming down on your back because of productivity requirements are also not separate issues.  Labor literally gets "fucked."  Life is about control and domination.  Man (The System) on top, in control. 

Furthermore, when your kids are in school, especially if they are of lower working class or lower, they are more likely told to line up, shut up and do as they are told.  Why are they told this?  Control.  But, isn't questioning a good thing, according to Socrates?  Well, not if you are a system that wants you under their thumb.  They, the powers behind the scenes of the corporations and the politicians they control, do the "line up, shut up, do as your told" standard for the same reason they are hell bent on genetically engineering everything from chickens to workers.  They want you to produce for them in a standardized fashion.  Creativity be damned. To help that along, they also keep you "fat, dumb and happy" with processed foods laden with all kinds of chemicals, computer games, and television news shows (such as Fox) that are meant to keep you at the intelligence level of a retarded jack ass, and internet entrance screens that shows Brittany Spears with enough make-up on her face to win a chemical war.

What the folks that design all this want is to keep you mesmerized into the consumer mentality.  And, they don't want you to question that for questioning means they don't get what they want from you...to slave and consume for their profit.  When do you say, "NO!"  You are not here to perform for the Man, meaning the System...you are here because God and Nature deemed you fitting to be here and you, in your truest Nature, are the Truth and the bullshit the system has you going through is nothing more than a lie. 

So, now the question becomes, "how much longer do you live this lie?"  Do you continue to fiddle while the Earth burns?  Do you allow your granddaughters and sons to slave and be raped because you had your eyes closed?  Or, do you wake up and do something?
 

"What shall I do?" you may cry.  Listen to your heart.  Listen to the cries of the world.  Open yourself to the pain within and without.  Feeling is the first route to wellness.  You can't keep going around it.  You have to go through it.  The pain that you are dead to is the pain inside of you as much as it is the pain of the world.  To resurrect back into life is to feel again.  Furthermore, realize that Mother Nature and Her children are not separate beings. If Mom dies, we all die...and that includes your children and loved ones.  It's plain and simple.  Though they may be silent in their unknowing, your future ancestors cry out to you.  Listen to your deepest Wisdom, for it is from the heart of your gut that She cries out in their unborn voices.      

References

            Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974).

            Chopra, Deepak, Ageless Body; Timeless Mind, (New York, NY: Harmony Books, 1993).

Doniger, Wendy (Tr), The Rig Veda, (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1981).

            Hixon, Lex, The Great Swan: Meetings with Ramakrishna, (Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1992).

            Iyer, Raghaven, The Jewel in the Lotus, (London: The Pythagorean Sangha & Concord Press, 1988).

            Talbot, Michael, The Holographic Universe, (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1991).

Terrorized by Love's quest for Truth

He cries alone at night,

Nursed only by

the scar ridden words of External Sayers.

"To life," he cries

Sipping his chemical compound

of battling photons

Quiet and alone, lost in a cloud

He chokes for breath in the vomit of his silence,

blinded to the brilliant bright darkness within

Saturated in fear ridden silence,

His journeys go without,

into the world of chemical illusion.

His in-dwelling Muse cries alone

Her needs untended by his external thrust

All he sees are lies

Manufactured by the corporate Machine,

The Nazis of modern day

Need no ovens and gaseous showers

To keep him at bay

He doesn't have to work,

Through thinking for himself

So he decides to take the easy road,

And remains a slave

Thus, his cries are silenced

In the Liar's domain

Truth having been defined for him

Through what the News Anchors say.

Emerging in this moment

From between

rounded thighs...

...I drip in wet torrents

A gushing rage of waters'

Salty scents

Carry the chocking aroma

Of deathly decay.

She...the unnamed Fate

Of all being,

Shouts the recognition:

Life's infinity is known only in death.

Dancing the Inner World
Do We Dance or Do We Die?

Burl B. Hall, MA

"It may be that he be desirous to join us in the Inner Choir where the Soul joineth hands and danceth with Sophia, the Divine Wisdom." - Jacob Bohme

          Ever since I was a little boy, I have felt that the bodies of girls and women were sacred.  Nor did I ever see girls or women as inferior in any way to boys or men.  As a young boy, I would refer to a woman's presence as a scent because there was a radiating essence that appeared to stream in heat waves from the female body.  While I breathed it in, it appeared to enwrap me.  However, this scent, or, perhaps more appropriately, presence, did not have a smell, though the scents of the body and/or of perfume did become part of the overall sense of presence.  I continue to sense this to this day.  I sense presence in men, also.  But, it's different...not as enwrapping.

          As an adolescent, I often noticed how the atmosphere changed when I was around a group of boys, who were then graced with the presence of a girl or girls.  The overall feel of the group changed drastically.  It was like putting sugar into coffee.  The "taste" of the group would become something else entirely.  What was important in this observation is that what changed was the overall energy within a place because of the entry of a woman's presence.

          Much of this perception of a woman's presence was due to my having an imaginary woman friend at the age of 5 (Hall, 1999, 2009).  When I envisioned this woman, I perceived her as literally having a power greater than all the exploding stars in the universe.  There simply was no end to Her, for She was a manifestation of God.  As a child I didn't put it that way because at the age of 5, the Woman was what She was and there was no calling Her anything.  I didn't know about exploding stars then, and am only using that analogy to help the reader understand the massive presence I felt when around Her.

           Most people would laugh at all this as a silly childhood fantasy.  Perhaps you are too.  Yet, I'm here to tell you that it is my Imaginary Friend who is the author of this article.  Indeed, I would state that my Friend in Her nakedness is Imagination, and that includes a child's imagination.  As the Hindu Ramakrishna sings (Hixon, 1996, p. 204):

"More than creator and created, Mother is pure Creativity."

         I am but an empty vessel serving as a transcriber of Creativity's creations. This body, this being, and these typing fingers are generated by Imagination and Imagination writes this article.  So, this is my response to those who say the Woman is a figment of my imagination.  The Woman is my Imagination and not a figment thereof.  It is I and you writing and reading this article, ultimately, that are figments of Imagination. 

         Imagination taught me much.  She is the one who taught me the "facts of life," and continues instructing me regarding these "facts."  By this I mean that much of my learning about the spiritual depths of sexuality came about by intuition and dream imagery.  As such, many of my friends wonder where in the world I get my ideas from.  The answer is, Imagination.  My Imagination?  Well, my Imagination is not distinct from the universal Imagination just as my index finger is not separate from the rest of the body and has, in each one of its cells, knowledge of the entire body and what's beyond the body.

        In addition to appearing to me as a child, the Author of this writing visited me in dreams as an adult.  These dreams were extremely potent, and She sometimes used the shapes of male and female genitalia to teach me about me, Herself, and the entire universe.  For example, in teaching the "facts of life" through dream imagery, the Woman taught that the primary difference between humans and animals was not intelligence, the use of tools, or the ability to reason.  Rather, the primary evolutionary development in humans was in the placement of the vagina, which allowed for face-to-face intercourse.  Animals primarily enter the vagina from the rear, whereas we humans can enter and allow entry lying or sitting face-to-face.  Being face-to-face allows eye contact and more intimacy.  It allows for greater connectedness and can be used as a religious practice, as evident in practices of sacred sex such as Tantra.  This amazing distinction should cause us to ask:  "if our evolutionary purpose is Love, then how well have we as a species met our task?"  This is not a question I'm going to give an opinion on, nor am I going to tell you I KNOW the answer.  You must listen to your own heart on this.

          One of the primary traits of Goddesses is that they truly aren't shy about their "private parts."  For example, in a dream I refer to as the "Rainforest Dream," the real Author of this article stands naked in an oval clearing of short golden grass at the center of a forest.  This short golden grass is surrounded by a thinner layer of long golden grass.  The layout, when drawn out, reflected the shape of a woman's genitals.  The long golden grass formed the "lips" of the vulva and the surrounding forest became the externalized body.  The external body of the Woman, then, was manifest Nature and She was the unmanifest Nature through which the manifest Nature unfolded.

            In other words, the dream and, indeed the entire universe, unfolds from this Woman's body, i.e., Imagination.  It unfolds, ultimately, from center to periphery which, as I came to find out, is exactly the way a person unfolds from egg to fetus to baby to child to adult.  According to the dream, the universe evolves the same way...from center to periphery...yet the center in the dream was the vagina, which is in a much different place from which a human woman's vagina would be.

            This dream was loaded with metaphors that took me deeply into the fabric of existence.  For example, the Woman existed in an interesting relationship to snakes, who dangled from a tree directly across from me, and who made their presence known through intense eye contact and darting forked tongues.  Today I realize the forked tongues were reflective of duality arising out of unity.  As I'm processing this, I recall many of the Cowboy and Indian stories where the Native would confront the White man's lies by saying "you speak with forked tongue."  By "forked," they meant lying, yet "forked" also refers to divided.  It is well known by those versed in the science of the mystics that duality, reflected in the forked tongue stemming from a unity, is an illusion.  It's a lie.

              Yet, there was an even more subtle message to the dream than what I'm discussing.  To uncover that message, I drew the relationship of snakes to me and then to the Goddess. I found in that drawing the shape of a triangle, the basic relational shape of ovaries to vagina.                                                                    

              When I drew this out, it appeared as if the Goddess is "down," meaning below the snakes and myself.  However, in the dream, the Goddess appeared to me as being "upwards" or perhaps even higher from us (She was also seen as the dream's center).  This is just how my mind saw it.  In any woman, ovaries are upward and inward from the vagina, not the other way around.  So, the question is, why is the relationship of ovaries to vagina the same in the dream yet there was a perception that the Goddess, in the spot of a vagina, was upwards or higher than myself and the snakes?

               This question was answered in another dream of mine, occurring a few months after this dream.  In that later dream, the Woman appeared sitting upon a window ledge, naked, and had Her right foot placed upon a treasure chest.  The Woman sat on this ledge with Her left foot dangling towards the floor.  Her legs were slightly parted.  As She opened them further to reveal Her genitals, She stated, "Be as you were in the beginning."  As I thought on this imagery upon awakening, I realized that the movement into the Woman was upwards and inward.  I also realized the process of birth was just the opposite, down and out.  If we draw out the geometry of this relationship, what we have is the Star of David, as well as the Hindu Goddess Mandala.

             In modern days, the upwards pointing triangles are reflected upon by academic contemplators as masculine and point one towards transcendence.  This makes sense in light of the penis, which does indeed point upwards when erect.
            However, as the Goddess taught me, the penis exists in relationship to the vagina and points upward because the movement of intercourse is upward and inward.  "As you were in the beginning" signifies prior to birth, i.e., within Her, which is upwards and inwards.  It is during intercourse that we often lose any sense of ourselves and can cry out nothing more than "O' my God!"  This is because we lose all sense of ourselves in the ecstasy of unity.  What was two becomes one.  Hence, the forked tongue of the snake is in its ground unified.  We are not truly split by our sexuality, but rather provided a way to enact and celebrate our unity.  It turns out that, rather than choosing "either" yang "or" yin, we both find our home and fulfillment in the hexagonal center where both/and reside together.

          The downwards pointing triangle, according to many intellectualized esoteric philosophers, reflects the feminine, and speaks to our fall into duality through our entry into the world.  Hence, a newborn's first "trauma" is separation from the mother and, for the remainder of his childhood, this separation from mom is his primary objective.  This entry into the world could be the origin to the idea that that we are born in sin, i.e., into division or duality...hence we speak with forked tongues. Yet, our sin is actually an illusion, for what we don't realize is our unity with Mother Nature.  Nature means Self as illustrated in our utilization of the term in sentences such as, "it's not in a man's Nature to be alienated."     

          The down and out triangle is reflected in our culture's emphasis on the philosophy of dualism, where one thing is pitted against another and we experience extreme separation to the point where many psychologists say that we are alienated.  Hence, we are "down and out."  Yet, there is hope.  In ecstasy, be it in meditation and moving upwards and inwards into the Psyche, or in intercourse, as in Tantric sexual practices, one enters a state of unity and experiences bliss, or in the experience of intimate contact with Nature and seeing one's self as one with Her.  

            The Woman in essence was confronting the basics of what culture was teaching me, and is teaching you.  I was 43 at the time of the dream, so She wasn't really instructing me about the basics of feminine genitalia as one would get in a "facts of life" lecture.  Rather, She was taking me "deeper" into the sacred Feminine and the Masculine, and my true Nature, which ultimately brought my mind into a deeper realization of the cosmic meaning of the Goddess in the universe and in myself.  The beauty of this dream was that it helped me to realize that natural process and human process were not two.  Interestingly enough, though the imagery in the dream was of feminine genitalia, I was also taught about the cosmic function of the male.  Yin and Yang always go together. You can't meditate on one without meditating on the other.

            This dream was multifaceted in its teachings and implications for my life.  It was soon after the forest dream that I gave the woman the name of Sophia, meaning Wisdom (Hall, 1999, 2009).  I later found out that my process of naming the Woman was reflected in Ende's classic, The Never Ending Story where the "hero" has to give a Princess (the Queen of Fantasia, Imagination) a name in order for the story to continue.  So, my experience was revealed to be a specific happening of a never ending story.  My hope in writing this article is that you get an inkling of the same relationship to the sacred universe that I have been gifted with by my Beloved Sophia.  In other words, I hope you feel related to the greater whole and can read sacred texts such as the Bible, the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching and even Snow White and the Wizard of Oz as being manifestations of your story.

             As Ende's work (The Neverending Story) showed, how we name our Goddess and God is according to who we are.  As such, I chose the name Sophia for two reasons.  First, the name means Wisdom, and reflected an intuition regarding the Greek Goddess of Wisdom, Athena, who I learned about in Middle School.  As my 7^th grade teacher, Mr. Hanaford, talked of Her, I intuited that Athena was a woman because women conceived and Wisdom, by definition, conceived thought.  This is the precise message to the dream.
            So here I am in the 7^th grade and Sophia-as the intuition in my mind-was teaching that gender and sexuality were not so much about product as they were about process. Furthermore, the intuition signified that the process above the belt (i.e., conception of thought) is analagoes to the process below the belt (i.e., conception of a baby).  As an adult, I realized this is the same as saying "as it is in Heaven, so it is on Earth."

         I also learned to put all this in perspective when reading various sacred writings, including the Bible's Genesis 1:27 which states humanity is created "male and female in the image of God."  Male and Female are more verb than noun in my mind....or, rather, what we see as "thing" is actually reflective of process.  Hence, you and I-and everything else-are  created male and female in the image of God, which means Genesis is not about a historical movement, but is written in what is called "sacred time" or timelessness...it happens here, now and always.  Soak up the rays of the Sun one day, allow your cells to open to Him.  You'll get what I'm speaking of.

I further realized my story related to all Scriptures, myths, and fairy tales, in that these can all be seen as pointing to deep human processes occurring within us and within all of Nature.  As a Christian mystic states of the Virgin Birth of Christ, "Of what use Gabriel, your message to Marie, unless that message is delivered to me?"
          Now in stating this, I can hear some of my analytical and literally minded  psychologist friends point towards the statement saying that it exhibits some kind of womb envy.  Or that the virgin birth denies sexual conception.  I would respond that these types of statements are done conceived under the philosophical umbrella of dualism, where all is separated out and is a reflection of where our culture has gotten itself into trouble.  We speak with forked tongues.  In other words, my counseling friends are caught up in a destructive philosophy called dualism, whereas I live in a holographic world in which the part mirrors the whole.  Heaven is Earth, and Earth is Heaven.  As above the belt, so below! 
            Furthermore, virginity is associated with emptiness of mind in mystical literature.  Hence our becoming empty of ourselves is our becoming virgin.  It's like our tendency to identify a forest untouched by man's saws as a virgin forest.  Hence being empty of ourselves is to be full and unified, and not cut up into pieces or cut off from our greater source.  Being virgin is being of Zen Mind.

          I also named the woman Sophia because I was angry with Christianity and truly wanted to make peace with the religion, and hence within myself.  Ultimately, I found my anger as transcending Christianity--an impulse to call into question the foundation of our modern world of which modern dogmatic Christian interpretation was a mirror image.  Calling the woman Sophia helped me to make peace with the religion because She was foundational for the religion.  Christ, for example, was seen as the incarnate Sophia or Wisdom of God.

           Why did I call into question Christianity and ultimately the entire modern world?  For many reasons, not the least of which being that I felt that many of our modern theorists, televangelists, politicians, and so on want to convert others to their way of thinking through self-centered self righteousness, or for a profit made at the expense of those to whom they were selling.  I also distrusted many of our current fear-based practices to get folks to conform.
           In Christianity this manifested as a threat of hell's fires whereas in the work place it would entail the threat of being fired.  Since we have allowed ourselves to become dependent on political systems for our livelihood, being fired means loss of income which means a painful death through starvation and homelessness.  Most importantly, I disagreed with the practices that lead to the suppression of women, people of color, and the overall political use of the religion to overtake tribal cultures and to suppress anyone who wasn't white, Christian, and male.

           My anger was a reflection of why Sophia had conceived me.  The anger I felt served as a motivating impulse, a Father, for these blogs and just about all my writings.  I had been born into this life to confront the anti-evolutionary and hence anti-feminine world of the Patriarch turned Corporate Head and to begin seeing the patterns that link the Roman Empire to the British Empire to the American Empire to the more secretive Corporate Empire.  Well, we have gotten better, some say, and we should be quite thankful.  With a smile on their face, they will tell you there is no more slavery, people have cars, televisions, and, overall, we have it good. 

           That's a pile of bull shit.  Keep a cow well fed and entertained and she makes for easy slaughter.  Secondly, as Deep Ecologist Daniel Quinn (1995) states, our technology has stopped our ability to evolve.  This thwarting of our evolution began when we became civilized.  While we have cars, jets and computers, we ourselves, are more likely to be fat, dumb and drugged into thinking we're happy.  Thirdly, slavery does exist throughout the world.  Businesses in the United States are quickly moving into the route of slavery through the killing off of unions, worker's rights, etc.  Furthermore, if you studied the lifestyle of a girl working in a shoe shop in China, or a Mexican migrant worker in Texas, you might have no inclinations to say slavery DOES exist in these modern days.  We just don't call them slaves because we made slavery illegal.  But, I say it is what it is.  Call it migrant work all you will.  It's slavery.  And, what's worse is that they have the lower classes screaming for the heads of the migrant workers because they are taking their place as slaves.  The problem isn't the Mexican migrant workers. The problem is the people running the economic system and our allowing them to do so.  The Devil laughs loudest when he gets two groups fighting over something he orchestrated.

          So, do we have a revolution and begin a different style of economy and government?  Absolutely NOT.  Look what happened with the communist revolutions in China and Russia.  The Communists became the aristocracy and reflected the lyrics of the song "Won't Get Fooled Again" performed by the rock group, The Who:  "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."  Communists and capitalists are one.  So, another political revolution is the last thing we need.

           What do we need?  I say what we need is reflected in the dream.  We need to balance our external rule with our internal. In conceiving a baby, the male (external) enters the female (internal) and together they conceive a baby which has traits from both of them.  Just so, WE need to approach the world from a Lover's stance, more so than a rapist, and realize that in our interactions with others we are impacting more than just the subject with which we are interacting.  In wording it this way, I'm thinking that we have to rethink how we interact with everything, not just other people.  We also have to look at our interactions with the environment.  Do our actions spell a control and domination ethos, a rape or a disempowering, or do they spark an evolution from within to without?  Do we continue to rape the land, or do we enter into loving relationship?  These are the questions we need to ask ourselves as we interact.  Going the route of politics is useless.  The politicians are bought and sold prostitutes.

           The overall suppression of the Feminine is more than the suppression of the females in our culture.  Rather, it is the suppression of the inner worlds of people and all of Nature.  Hence, we have horrid practices such as genetic engineering whose basic goal is to suppress evolution.  Nature for us is externalized.  We think of Nature as birds and bees and coconut trees.  Not so!  She is the Labor of Nature and She is what produces. And, She is all that.  She is also the Inner World, the Divine Essence of all things, and as anyone knows from embryonic development, embryos unfold from center to periphery.  That same type of growth happens within human beings and within our ecosystems.  While there may be an externalized seminal occurrence that initiates the growth, the growth itself occurs from the inside out.  In fact, our control and domination ethos with the objective of unlimited growth (the definition of cancer) is the destruction of the body in which we live.  Like a cancer patient whose cancer was initiated by food additives, if the woman dies, so does the cancer.  We are no different in our "growth gone wild" world that we live in.

            The growth gone wild mentality through control and domination is maintained through the standardization and control of products, animals and people.  For example, in schools the order of the day is to "line up, shut up, do as your told."  What are you told to shut?  Your mouth, and your mouth is the vagina of the mind.  This means we shut up the speaking of our truth.  We keep our baby under our skirt, our Logos hidden away where he won't be killed.  As our educational system stands, we are nothing more than rapists and murderers of the Soul.  Just as we rape Nature, and have such an issue with rape in our culture, so also we rape our children in school through the use of standardization.  This is how it is that "no child left behind" came to mean "no financially rich child left behind."

            Standardization means our children are not allowed to be who they are.  The mainstream school system serves in suppressing and getting under control the inner world of the child.  This is one way in which we suppress evolution.  This suppression is done through standardized education with the dream of standardized children in a standardized world. As above, so below for within industry and farming everything, including food, is standardized.  Do some research into food production institutions such as Monsanto to see how this happens.  We live in a world filled with Frankenstein monsters made by mad men in white coats working for sociopathic corporations.

            In myth, as I mention in "Revealing Revelation" this process of inhibiting evolution is often reflected in a woman or Goddess having to go into hiding, or placing Her child into hiding, due to a ruler wanting to kill that child because he is a threat to the ruler's power.  Why is the child a threat?  Because He's not standardized.  For example, Mary had to take Jesus into hiding while Mariam had to send Moses down the river into the hands of the Egyptians in order to keep them from getting slaughtered.  And, why were they going to be slaughtered? Because, the Divine Child is a threat to the powers that be....He is not of the status quo and does not act according to the dictates of the Man.  And where does He come from?  From the Woman, be She in the form of a human woman or the Psyche.  Why?  Because, Psyche is the Inner World of all of us and by controlling Her, the powers that be control what we produce.  Hence, the labor movement, as we see in this day and age, has all but been murdered because they wanted rights, decent pay, and a future for their children.

          Furthermore, the Inner World is brought under control to do the service of the master.  For example, in the Bible's Book of Proverbs, Sophia complains of being beaten by men in the city.  As our inner world, She still is being beaten.  This insight is as true today as it was during the times before Christ.  Anyone that identifies the problems immanent in our modern society is often attacked, ridiculed, and called names.  That beating of the Inner World is our beating, for our Inner World is what most speaks to who we are according to our Nature.    But to speak our Truth, our Sophia, is to receive abuse.  How long do we keep this up?  I personally think we are at a breaking point.  We need to do it now.  The choice is now to evolve or to die, i.e., go extinct.  The question you have to ask yourself is do we care enough about our daughters and sons to say "no more!"  For their sake, I think at least some of us need to "shit or get off the pot."

           Where is the answer to this dilemma?  Do we look to a new political movement?  That sure hasn't work over the course of the past 6,000 or so years.  Let's return to the dream for a moment.  By the age of 45 I thought I had this dream figured out.  But, just yesterday I thought long and hard as to the implications of the relationship of snakes to Burl to Sophia.  The snakes and I existed in the same relationship as the two ovaries exist in a woman's body in relation to her vagina. Ovaries contain unfertilized eggs....the unborn.  They are potential children nestled in the body of a potential mother.  It's all about potential.  You see?  The dream was telling me that not only have I not been born yet, but I hadn't even been fertilized.  I am still a potential being.  My evolutionary potential has not yet manifested.  And, the snakes?  Could they be the Kundalini, the Serpent Goddess and God that when awakened ultimately takes us to enlightenment? 

             This is an extremely important point.  In our culture, as most of us know, we are primarily Male centered.  Hence, we are caught up in linear logic, and think that time is primarily a linear movement.  In the West, which is really male dominated, we also have a "growth gone wild" mentality which sees growth, the evolution of corporations, as a never ending process, which is akin to looking at a penis and saying that it extends into infinity.  However, as anyone who has meditated on the shape of the infinity symbol, "∞", realizes, Infinity is much more rounded and curved than it is linear.  Furthermore, if you draw the symbol and shift your focus, the line that cuts across making the symbol look like a sideways "8" will disappear and the symbol will take on an oval, feminine shape.  Hence, the symbol reveals that what appears divided is united as a flowing wholeness.  This is REALLY important for us to realize in this day and age which is marked by dualistic thinking.  But, it's also important to realize that the infinity symbol does NOT deny duality, for it curves around and intersects in the center, which makes it appear as if there are two circles.  The divisional function of the Male in sex and Psyche is not denied in infinity, but embraced as a function of the wholeness.  Hence, the first act in creation is division, be it of a fertilized egg, or in Scriptures across the world where Light is divided from Dark (Yang from Yin).  What appears divided is united. 

          In Tantric Hindu practices, the Kundalini is said to lie sleeping at a point (chakra) below the genitals.  It is then awakened and moves up the body through 6 other chakras.  After reaching the point above the head, a person is said to know no more difference between this and that.  One enters the "Kingdom" of God.  At this point, one reaches the Absolute and returns changed.  That is, if one chooses to return.  Once in meditation I felt that the world around me was in my mind and that my mind was everywhere.  In other words, I moved beyond my localized eyeballs and tapped into a Mind that was greater than mine and in whom my thoughts existed in context with the room and everything else.  My experience was very much similar to mathematician Rucker's (1984) line in an imaginary conversation (p. 143):

"There is no motion in spacetime.  Your Mind, such as it is, extends the length of your span.  More truly spoken, Mind is everywhere and you have no mind at all."

When your energy moves upwards and inwards, you achieve total unity with the world outside and the world inside, to the point that they collapse into a unity.  Indeed, at this point, there are no private thoughts for thoughts float about the room one is in as the room is found in one's mind.  The experience is very much like the Native American Navajo chant:

"The mountains, I become it,

The forest, the stream, I become it."

There is no distinction between matter and mind and, indeed, matter becomes known as the same essence as thought, and is thought interpreted by the senses.  As Christian mystic Meister Eckhart puts it:

"Does the Soul wish to know the nature of a horse, or a man?  She creates and image."

Neurologist Karl Pribram (Talbot, 1992) realized this.  He states that the screen or page you are now reading is a wave floating about through space which is then translated into perceptions of objects through a type of calculus known as Fourier Transforms.  In other words, what you are seeing is created by the information in the wave in relation to the condition and abilities of your senses.  If you change your senses, you change what you see.  Take an hallucinogenic some time.  If you saw things as you did on an hallucinogenic all the time, then this is what you would define as real and the world you now see you would call an illusion.  But the world you are now reading is as much an illusion as the world you see when tripping.  In other words, there is no "subject - object" split as believed in by modern day scholars.  As the Hindus say, the objective world as we see it is Maya, or Illusion.
          Furthermore, the world as we see it is only a partial, very miniscule segment of what is actually out there.  Our illusion is to think that this seen, smelt, felt, and heard world is what is real.  It is not. What we see is akin to a drop of water in an ocean.  What is out there is an ocean of information that your senses are taking in, interpreting, weeding through, and turning into an image, smell, tone or feeling.  It's the same with your thoughts.  Your thoughts are frequencies of waves that your brain interprets in the same manner it interprets the waves outside of you.

            Ancients all over the place knew this.  The Keres Pueblo, a Western Native American Tribe, called their version of Sophia "Thinking Woman" meaning that She was the generator of thought and that the universe itself is a thought.  The Kogis, another Native American tribe living in South America, also state that their Goddess, Aluna, generated this universe through Her thoughts. Does science agree?
          Depends on who you talk to....old ways of thinking die hard.  Yet, as the 20^th century physicist Heisenberg puts it, "the world appears to be more of a thought than a machine."  Hence, we could say that the Word made flesh of the Bible is you, the screen or page you are staring at, and the rest of the world.  Interesting that world minus the "l" is Word, don't you think?

          To summarize this long blog, if we as a species are going to survive, at least a portion of us need to move beyond the politics as usual scenario.  By politics, I mean our current reductionist, standardized, controlled, and dominating ways of doing science, economics, governing and so on.  In moving beyond these traits, we must integrate the Feminine and the Masculine, for it is only through intercourse that new life will unfold.  We also must confront the abuse, demonization, and the masculinization of the Feminine.  The Feminine must be realized for what it is, the container of our evolutionary potential.  And the Masculine must be realized as the spark to that potential unfolding.  What scares us about that power of the integration of Feminine and Masculine is that evolutionary change is death to what we are now.  The Fate and Mother functions of the Goddess are one.  In order for us to evolve, we need to let go of, or die to, what we are now.  If we do not do this, then our children will have no future.  It's that plain and simple.

References

Hall, Burl B., Sophia's Web: Reclaiming our Wholeness in a Divided World (Sophia's Web Publications, 2009....for those interested in a copy of this book, please contact Burl at burl_hall@yahoo.com for pricing regarding either a printed copy or a DVD.  The old version of Sophia's Web is best bought through http://authorhouse.com/ ).

Hixon, Lex, Great Swan: Meetings with Ramakrishna  (Larson Publications, Burdet, NY 14818).

Quinn, Daniel, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, (Bantam/Turner Books, New York, NY, 1992).

Rucker, Rudy, The Fourth Dimension:  A Guided Tour of the Higher Dimensions, (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, MA, 1984).

This lavender eye shadow

Highlights the labia to my eyes

They sure beam a sardonic smile...

Don't they?

At you...maybe...perhaps

Sweet baby boy?

Oh, look, your hope is up!

Ohh, you do so want me!

Say "pretty please!"

Sweetie, I laugh aloud at your plead.

Why, of course you can have me!

Just pay three ninety three.

For your delight,

Above this thin lace,

My coach adds a sensuous depth

To eyes appearing tirelessly dead.

I am your fantasy Goddess

Cover Girl of the month

Take me home with thee

I'm just four thirty three.

Ah, make sweet love to me,

I...the non-living sugar

The essence of your life

I'll cry in ecstasy at your every command.

Dead to my self

I am dead to you

No baby or man shall ever drink

Milk manufactured in these medically implanted breasts.

Listen to the horrid laughter as you suckle

From the lower pit of my fiery gut

Die hard, you stupid, slumbering fool

As this unreal Earth of yours becomes

Boiling bubbles baked biochemically into bioengineered blubber.

15 hundred miles to the molehill

Growing fast, its destination: death

The body fires all its defensive weapons

The cancer shrinks, laughing back.

20 hundred miles to the molehill

He continues to grow restlessly

Relentlessly destroying everything before and after

Anything left? 

Naught except burning craters of simmering slush.

30 hundred miles to the molehill

The host's body weakens

She coughs and dredges bloody vomity sweat

Black flies bite with orgasmic glee

She sweats forth a horrid scent.

50 hundred miles to the molehill

Feeling the feeding frenzy,

She gasps Her last breathe

Heart thumping loudly

Desperately trying to feed

What little is left.

90 hundred miles to the molehill

A stench of death overtakes her sweet scents

The cells that once supported her

Now silent in their colorless, lightless sleep of depth.

Nothing Old and New reigns as queen

She, the Mother of All, breathes life from death
Mothers' Daughters' roll into fetal position

As Mama's vagina opens inwards, towards the depths

The Flowering shouts a new Light:

The Father shines, He, the impulse to Life.

Her heart beats once again

And swirls into a loving dance

Heaven sings Her timeless song,

Is this the author's or God's intent?  I, for one, am not sure, for I am not one to mind-read and have only guesses regarding John's motives.  Nor do I KNOW God's intent, for that intent may change from one person to the next.  However, I do think that a holographic movement is revealed in the Book of Revelation that we have to take a serious look at.  In saying a holographic movement, I am speaking of a repeating trend in history that has been occurring for at least the past 5 to 6,000 years in which we have been ruled by the outside inward by the likes of Ceaser, Nero, the Pope, Kings, Queens, Corporations, Presidents and so on.  In this article, I will flesh out how these movements in history are reflected in the symbolism of "Revelation."  I also believe that much of the book has been used by the "powers-that-be" to keep a population of people in check, and as we shall see, has hindered or suppressed the evolution of humanity.  That's right.  I'm saying the interpretations of the Book are geared towards suppressing the evolution of humankind.  Moreover, I'm suggesting that the book is warning against the very types of people that are misusing it to hinder our evolution!  Indeed, those who are thumping the "Book of Revelation" the hardest are some of the ones most deeply nestled in the arms of the Anti-Christ.  Their domination tactics are born of fear, not love.

While many Christians speak against evolution, the majority of Christian mystics, as reflected in Underhill's classic work (1990), define Christ as the evolutionary potential of humankind.  This makes sense in light of His being identified as the "Son of Man,"¹ and the incarnate Sophia (Wisdom) of God.  He is what is within us as a potential waiting to be born.  Jesus, himself, foretells, "The works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do." (John 14)  Why would anyone desire the suppression of evolution and the emergence of the Christ-Spirit in humanity?  Or, why do we desire the suppression of our evolution?  Good question to sit with at this time in your reading. 

My guess would be that evolution is a threat to the powers-that-be, and it is a threat to us.  Evolution requires--indeed demands--that we die to who we are.  As Jesus Christ died and was resurrected, we need to die to who we think we are and be resurrected.  Can we let go to what we have attached ourselves to? 

Who are these external powers that I speak of?  I'm not sure if we can pinpoint any one person or group. Megre, in his series of books regarding the Siberian recluse named Anastasia, says that these powers are held by a few Priests unknown to church or "Man".  Some of the liberal political commentators, however, suggest that the powers-that-be are an elite group of bankers who are calling the shots.  Personally, I would say "yes" to both groups, while also saying that it's bigger than those two groups and must include corporate heads and heads of state.  Even these power-mongers are subject to a pervasive cultural delusion that Man somehow stands outside of Nature and is empowered by God to manipulate her for his sole gain.  Furthermore, allegations of blame for priests, bankers, politicians, and corporate moguls don't account for how our conditioning has placed the anti-Christ squarely within our own Souls.  It is there and there alone that we must confront him.

One of the reasons for our not confronting the anti-Christ within ourselves is because we have allowed ourselves to buy into a lie that the Corporate Powers have used to condition us to think we are dependent upon THEM for survival (through control of electricity, oil, and so on).  So now we don't see any way out.  Well, there is a way out, but to take it means to begin changing from the inside out (e.g., through meditation) and the outside in (e.g., by gardening, eating local organic foods).  Evolution requires that we make drastic changes.  If that means we will learn to romp naked once more in order to learn to control our body temperature, then that is what it means.  Indeed, it is well documented by Buddhist masters in Tibet that we have the potential to sit buck - assed naked in the snow, and wind up melting that snow upon which we sit perfectly at ease!  "Wu - We!" as Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching would say!  Wouldn't you love that kind of power?  Yes, what I'm saying is that the power is within YOU.  If a Buddhist master can do it, so can you!  To get there, you are going to face the difficult task of moving past all your conditioning.  You will need to die to be resurrected.  This is evolution.

The thesis that evolution has been suppressed is brought forth beautifully in the work of Deep Ecologist, Daniel Quinn (1995).  To paraphrase his thesis, we humans, beginning with the agricultural revolution, have stifled our evolution by our technological advances and have not evolved since the dawn of civilization.  This suppression of evolution has occurred by our working towards changing the environment to meet our needs rather than our changing to meet the demands of the environment.  This process has caused us to devolve for we have allowed ourselves to become progressively fat, dumb and lazy through the propagandized bullshit of television, sensationalist magazines and commercial radio.  This idea regarding the suppression of evolution would make sense in light of the Hindus belief that we are in the age of Kali Yuga, or Dark Age.  It also supports the teachings of the Native American tribe named the Kogis, hidden, until recently, in the mountains of Columbia for the past 400 years or so.  These very wise people state that we are the walking dead, which means we aren't a living, evolving being.  This also supports the thesis of the Icelandic Poetic Edda, as reflected in Campbell's (1949) classic, Hero with a Thousand Faces.  This piece actually predicts the decline of the human species with ecological catastrophes manifesting upon the Earth (p. 374):

"Brothers shall fight and fell each other, and sisters' sons shall kinship stain; Hard it on Earth, with mighty whoredom; ax-time, sword-time, shields are sundered, Wind-time, wolf-time ere the world falls;  Nor ever shall men each other spare."

          Compare the words of Jesus Christ from Matthew 24:

"And Jesus answered and said unto them, ‘Take heed that no man deceive you.  For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.  And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of war: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet."

If you are an American, can you remember a time we have not been at war?  The Revolutionary War, the Spanish-American War, the war against the Native Americans, the "Cold War," WWI, WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, the assorted wars in the 70's and 80's, Iraq (2 times), Afghanistan (2 times)...and so on and so forth.  "Wars and rumors of war," the Man says.  Meanwhile our technology has allowed us to be masters at destroying life upon this Earth through an undeclared war on Nature.  Who is behind this?  We are!  We are because we have surrendered our power, and any hope for our children, to a pile of sociopaths.  And, we have BECOME those sociopaths.  But, most of us are more the followers than the lead for we are akin to fattened cattle.  We are much too conditioned by delighting in the ready made grain set in front of us to realize we're about to have our throats slit.

Who are those sociopathic leaders that John refers to as manifesting the head of The Beast and that I'm referring to as the cattlemen ready to slit our throats?  This Beast is not really hard to see at all.  He is in the form of Bush, Obama, The Bankers, or The Corporation, whether that corporation manifest in the form of church, synagogue, government or industry.  Or, if you dare see his face, sit and watch television for 30 seconds and the Beast will reveal himself in the news, commercials, and cheap productions.  Yes, I am including Fox News and CNN, whose goal is to keep you entertained at best, or enthroned in fear at worst, to make you easier to slaughter and hence become easily manipulated.

Or, perhaps I am wrong.  Perhaps the Beast is as Anastasia says to Megre (2001), a handful of Priests who are running the show.  Personally, I think by pointing the fingers here and there does not allow us to realize the variety of the expressions of the Beast.  Most importantly, we don't take responsibility for The Beast in ourselves and look outside of ourselves for his hiding place.  This is why Sophia (Wisdom) made our fingers such that when we point our index finger outward in blame; we have 3 pointed back at our heart.  This is how Mom reminds us that we are responsible.  Yes, the Beast is everywhere...including inside you.  He has taken us over and laughs heartily in the blood baths that he creates in the forests, in the oceans, in the air, on the battlefields and upon our brothers and sisters, as well as within us.  Indeed, we are just like Nero, the the great Roman Emperor who fiddled as his city burnt.  Similarly, as our planet is dying due to OUR greed, our politicians, bankers and corporate leaders are fiddling and we, being the good boys and girls that they want us to be, are fiddling right along with them.  How much longer will YOU and I fiddle as Gaia (Earth) is being destroyed?

Let's discuss what keeps us fiddling as the Earth burns by reading a little David Bohm (Bohm and Weber, 1985), a brilliant physicist whose ideas support  many many of the mystics in both the East and the West (Hall, 1999, Unpublished Manuscript, 2009).  Bohm identifies two primary modes of Reality, the Manifest and the Unmanifest.  The Unmanifest is an infinite Ocean of Energy containing an infinity of potential upon which the Manifest, the world we see, rides like a wave.  So, what we think is real is but the surface of this Ocean.  Our mistake, or what the Hindus call Maya (Illusion) is that we don't see that the Ocean is infinitely deep and contains an infinity of possibilities.  Hence, we are living an illusion and are scared to death of confronting that illusion because we are attached to what boils down to an hallucination.  As Bohm states (p.68):

"Yes, it's the insight that does it, you see, the insight is not you, right?  The insight being supreme intelligence is able to rearrange the very structural matter of the brain which underlies thought so as to remove that message which is causing the confusion, leaving the necessary information and levaing the brain open to perceive reality in a different way.  But at present it's blocked, the conditioning blocks us, because it creates a pressure to maintain what is familiar and old, and makes people frightened to consider anything new.  So, reality is limited by the message which has already been deeply impressed on the brain cells from early childhood.  Now the insight actually removes that message, that part of the message which is causing the block."

Ok, so we're scared.  What are we scared of?  I personally think it's death for to bring forth the new is to die to the old.  To be resurrected, you have to suffer the cross.  In our current way of living, as I have been pointing out, we have surrendered our power to the politicians, corporate heads, and so on.  We have surrendered to Ceaser because Ceaser sweet talks us.  But, he's a liar.  Are we ready to reclaim our power?  I'm not sure because I don't think we understand who this Beast is both within ourselves and without.  Let's start our disclosure of the Beast with his number," ‘666.'  David Fideler in his remarkable 1993 book called Jesus Christ: Sun of God (p. 11) reflects on ‘666':

In Hebrew Kabbalah, the names of the Intelligence of the Sun and the Spirit of the Sun were designed to equal 111 and 666 respectively.  Like 888, 666 is an important musical number, for .666 is the ratio of the perfect fifth, the most powerful harmonic interval.  

        The question is; why would John use "666" as the number of the Beast if it's a solar number and a powerful harmonic interval?  I would venture to guess the following hypothesis:  (a) the number was turned into an evil, as evolution was deemed an evil, in order to control the masses and maintain power in a few hands; (b) the number came to represent the Male-Solar (left brain, rational thinking) consciousness gone absolutely crazy in its need to control and to rule that has resulted in pollution, deteriorating health, the destruction of ecosystems and rampant warfare, and (c) the number reflected the number contained in the spelling for the Roman ruler, Nero...the fellah that fiddled as Rome burnt. 

Let's start with Nero.  In ancient days, numbers and letters were equated.  This was true for the Hebrew, as reflected in Leet's (1999) classic work, as well as the Greek reflected in Felder (1993).  As such, the numbers to Nero's name in Hebrew came out to be "666," which would explain why the number was deemed evil.  Nero was a major persecutor of Christians, hence he was the anti-Christ, or anti-Christian.  For example, the following is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero.

Most scholars^[192][193] , such as Delbert Hillers (Johns Hopkins University) of the American Schools of Oriental Research and the editors of the Oxford & Harper Collins study Bibles, contend that the number 666 in the Book of Revelation is a code for Nero,^[194] a view that is also supported in Roman Catholic Biblical commentaries.^[195][196] When treated as Hebrew numbers, the letters of Nero's name add up either to 616 or 666, representing the two devil numbers given in ancient versions of Revelation and the two ways of spelling his name in Hebrew (NERO and NERON).

Does this mean that I negate the other hypothesis I have just made?  No!  First, Nero was ruler during a period in which modern civilization was well entrenched, and in which the primary rulers dictated by the human ego, which came forth from the male, or the solar consciousness.  Now, anyone who has stayed out in the sun too long realizes that while the sun is life giving, too much of it creates sunburns at best or sun poison at worse.  It is also well known that the past 4-5,000 years have been the rule of the male, solar consciousness and may also be the hallmark of what the Hindus refer to as the Kali Yuga, or Dark Age.

Regarding the solar masculine and lunar feminine, it is also interesting that during the day you can see up close but not very far away, while at night you can see stars existing light years away while having problems seeing up close.  The feminine dark gives one a more macroscopic or holistic point of view, while the masculine light gives one a more microscopic or analytical/divisive view.  We need to balance these for being Male centered means being short-sited, as evidenced by our lack of ability to think 7 generations ahead regarding our actions.  Or, to be mostly Feminine in ways of thinking, as I am, means one can write articles like this, which exhibits integrative and universal thinking, while having a hard time with the specifics, like tying shoes.

Next, let's get into one of the most written about images in "Revelation" which many Christian women have used to identify the Feminine Face of God:

"Now a great sign appeared in heaven, a woman, robed with the sun, standing on the moon, and on her head a crown of 12 stars.  She was pregnant, and in labor, crying loudly in the pangs of childbirth.  Then a second sign appeared in the sky; there was a huge red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, and each of the seven heads crowned with a coronet.  Its tail swept a third of the stars from the sky and hurled them to the ground, and the dragon stopped in front of the woman as she was at the point of giving birth, so that it could eat the child as soon as it was born.  The woman was delivered of a boy, the son who was to rule all the nations with an iron scepter, and the child was taken straight up to God and to his throne, while the woman escaped into the desert where God had prepared a place for her to be looked after for twelve hundred and sixty days."

In the commentary at the bottom of the page in the New Jerusalem Bible, it is noted that the woman is the people of God, and the boy is the Messiah.  Of course, you could ask, who are the people of God?  Are they Catholic, Protestant, Right Wing, Left Wing, Hindu, Buddhist, or even Muslim?  The answer, in my opinion, is "yes."  My personal belief is that ALL peoples, including the A-Theistic, are God's people and God reveals His-Her self to people in accordance to their individual tastes and temperaments in relation to their religious affiliation.  Ramakrishna, translated by Lex Hixon (1996), states this beautifully:

"The sensitive Mother presents various preparations of fish to her hungry children-plain and bland or rich and spicy, depending on their tastes and powers of digestion.  Just so, the Mother reveals various spiritual practices.  This child enjoys every one of Her delicious dishes without exception."

So, in my humble opinion, the verse in Revelation does not hold up one religious institution or personal belief in God up over the others.  As it is said by Ramakrishna, God creates the various belief systems in accordance to the taste, temperament, and culture of the people to which He and She is interacting.  All of us are people of God.  Furthermore, metaphors are designed to have layers and layers of meaning according to Moses de Leon, Hebrew scholar and author of the Kabbala's Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment (Matt, 1983).  Revelation is no different.

My personal belief is that Woman, the Inner World of ‘Man' is the container of the Christ.  He is what we can become and hence is a threat to the status quo.  The idea of a Goddess or a woman having to hide a child from tyranny is true throughout the world religions.  It is mostly true within ourselves for the fact is, if we were to speak "God" from our hearts, we would be deemed evil by the masses, including a good portion of the Christians.  In other words, Christians have become modern day Neros and would be the first to stick Jesus Christ back up on the cross, and us if we were to be at the level of evolution that He was. 

Furthermore, the story of having to hide the Divine Child is all over the place in Scriptures.  This is why Mary had to take Jesus into Egypt due to Cesar's wrath; Miriam had to send Moses down the river into Egypt in order to keep him alive, and so on.  The story of the Mother and Child in hiding even transcends the Bible.  In Greek myth, for example, Rhea is said to hide Zeus from the wrath of His Father, Cronos, who feared being usurped. 

The suppression of Woman is the suppression of the Inner World, or the Feminine, which contains the evolutionary potential of humankind...the Golden Egg.  As I discuss in Sophia's Web (Hall, 2009), I would equate the Feminine with David Bohm's Unmanifest Implicate Order as reflected in Talbot (1999) in that She contains the seed for change.  The eggs that Woman holds in Her ovaries, be they of the mind / psyche above the belt (heart and brain) or of the womb below the belt, is a potential usurper of the powers-that-be.

What this means is that the women's liberation movement actually played into the hands of the powers of the anti-Christ, for the movement (a) brought cheaper labor into the workforce because women are notoriously underpaid in relation to men which allowed for the rich to become richer and (b) allowed more children to be raised by institutional settings, which are those most challenged by the evolution of Humanity for it spells the end of the institution.  If you think hard enough, you can see this trend of the Political and Corporate Powers getting more power over you and your children.  For example, in the old days, both men and women were at home....though they had different chores. Being on their own meant they could raise their children as they deemed fit, which also meant that children were more apt to evolve because they also had healthy foods and had to work and play instead of sitting in front of computers while snacking upon a box filled with sugar coated cereal.  Then economics made it to where the man had to leave the home to work the factories, which left children fatherless.  Then, women were also brought into the workforce, which has allowed children to become parentless or, more appropriately, parented by the Corporate mentality of the government and industry. 

The overall thrust of modern "man" has been towards greater standardization and control.  Hence, Woman, as the agent of Creativity (i.e., Psyche) is a danger and needs to be controlled by standardized educational settings with standardized testing and, ultimately the prayer for a standardized kid that plays the standardized games of the standardized corporate powers who are murdering the Earth by standardized farming and manufacturing practices.

Standardization is an interesting twist to the male intellect since it's the male that is responsible for diversification, and is the agent which makes it more likely that we humans survive.  Diversity, within the species and in Nature (as Permaculture Gardening enthusiasts realize) increases the chances of survival.  As my wife states, there is a sense of justice behind the fact that plastic, the agent of much of the standardized world, is causing a reduction in testosterone in boys and is leading to increased sterility as well as increased feminization of men.  Perhaps The Man will get what he wants, after all?  A world of clones. But, it appears that this cloned world would be without men.  For what purpose would they be made?  Cloning is probably a much bigger practice than what most of us realize.  Corporate giants such as Monsanto and ADM are out to create such a standardized world through cloning.  The result of such practices is to standardize farming practices which then result in less diversification and thus increase the rates of mass extinctions of species.

So, evolution is today being suppressed by Corporate giants such as Monsanto and is being suppressed by other standardized practices.  Now, if the Messiah, Son of Marie that "Revelation" and the New Testament speaks of, is the agent of Evolution, then what does that make those that suppress and kill Him?  Remember all the fuss about the idea of evolution when it was proposed by Darwin?  What an uproar!  The idea is continuing to be fought by right-wing Christians.  Why is teaching evolution so dangerous?  Is it truly that it speaks against God?  Or, is it that it could spell the end of the power structure as it stands?  My personal belief leans towards the latter, for evolution entails the death of the old structure and the birth of the new.  In other words, I think the Right Winged zealots have been manipulated because the powers-that-be don't want us to evolve.  They wish to remain in power by keeping us suppressed.  This is also why they want so desperately to control evolution as evidenced by gene splicing and cloning. 

Yet, there is hope.  The Bride of Christ, Jerusalem, the New Earth, is right before our eyes, but we don't see Her for our eyes are blinded by the Beast.  This Bride has interesting measurements, and could never make it as a Playboy centerfold.  She is said to be 12,000 x 12,000 x 12,000 stadia which equals 1,728 billion stadia which divided by the foursquare nature of the city equals 432 billion.  Quite a Lady!  432 is a fascinating number.  For example, The Poetic Edda (Campbell, 1990, p 92) states:

Five hundred and forty doors there are, I ween in Valhall's walls; Eight hundred fighter through each door fare when to war with the Wolf they go.

540 x 800 = 432,000 which in Hindu Puranas is the number of years to our current Kali Yuga or dark age, which is a piece of a Great Cycle or Mahayuga of 4,320,000 years which is to end in a universal flood.  Fleshing the importance of this number further, the website http://carnival.com/432 states:

The best precession number is 25,920 years because harmony or the music of the spheres tells us this is how long it takes to complete a full earth cycle through the 12 night skies of the zodiac. Divide this number by 60, the number that best defines "time" also known as the ancient "soss," and you arrive at the number of 432. This makes 432 a sacred number, encoded in many myths and sacred structures including the Bible for millenniums.

It may be that modern music has become out of tune with this number, 432, as reflected in the following from http://carnival.com/music432:

The international standard of tuning is 440 Hz = the note "A". set in stone by J.S. Bach when the correction to 432 is made, the others notes of the entire octave display a multitude of Gematrian ancient sacred numbers that are astoundingly relative to astronomy, sacred geometry, The Bible and other mysterious literary works such as the Bhagavad-gita and exact longitude and latitudes and hundreds of pyramids and other sacred sites.

Reasons to change the standard of tuning from 440 to 432:

1. Harmonically aligns to astronomical time count of Precession of the equinoxes, 432 X 60 = 25920
2. The original Stradivarius violin was designed to be tuned to 432, it is the most precise instrument ever constructed by humans.
3. 432 is found at countless ancient sacred sites
4. Harmonically aligns to astronomical time count of Precession of the equinoxes, 432 X 60 = 25920
5. The original Stradivarius violin was designed to be tuned to 432, it is the most precise instrument ever constructed by humans.
6. The most important of all is when the correction to 432 is made, the others notes of the entire octave display a multitude of Gematrian ancient sacred numbers that are astoundingly relative to astronomy, sacred geometry, The Bible and other mysterious literary works such as the Bhagavad-gita and exact longitude and latitudes and hundreds of pyramids and other sacred sites.

   Jerusalem, oh what an image John paints of Her.  A four-square city with mined diamonds lining Her streets.  Do we honestly imagine that Jesus would choose an object (a city) over a subject (a woman) for a wife?  Does Christ value the product over the person?  I don't think so!  Witness his rage in throwing the money-changers out of the Temple.  In my humble opinion, we could have been more like the Hindus here and came up with an image of a human woman as a reflection for the Goddess, worthy to be spouse of the Son of God.  I know my wife is deeply insulted by the four -square measurements and the jewels that have been stripped from the Earth by rape.  The fact is, the human body mirrors the cosmos, just as Jerusalem is seen as mirroring the cosmic dance.  Hence, a Goddess in human form would have made a wonderful image for the Bride of Christ.  Joseph Campbell, (1997, p. 104) realizing the sacred relationship of the human to the universal, states the following:

Moreover, as I learned some years ago from a popular handbook on physical fitness, a man in perfect condition, at rest, has normally a heart rate of approximately 1 beat per second: 60 beats per minute; 3,600 beats an hour; in 12 hours 43,200 and in 24 hours 86, 4000.  So we hold this measure in our hearts, as well as in the manufactured watches on our wrists.

Ultimately, The Beast, the Anti-Christ, who is the anti-evolutionary principle in our lives, is the principle of devolution.  He is the murderer of the Christ.  The Beast is at work every time we refuse to walk a mile to meet a friend or when we leave to get groceries while whining, "It's too hard to plant my own!"  How many doctors warn us of this style of life, while themselves driving about in Mercedes Benzes?  Yet, OUR choice, not the choice of the experts, priests, or politicians, is nothing less than Life or Death.  As Satprem (1990) realizes, alongside the Christian mystics, the evolution of the species is inherent in each one of our cells.  But, then, so is the principle of Thantos, or Death.  Which do we allow to unfold?  Aren't you tired of the Beast and the dead metallic and plastic world we've created?  If you are, can you allow the Divine Child to unfold from within yourself?  As Christ says, "you will do more than what I do!"  Are you brave enough to withstand the drama of the Beast as you unfold your latent power?  If you are, then will you join hands with those of us working in disciplines such as Deep Ecology, Eco-Psychology, Sustainable Living Movements, the Spiritual Disciplines that do exhibit a deep love for you and are able to kindle that remarkable potential that lies within.

Bohm, David and Weber, Renee, The Enfolding-Unfolding Universe: A Conversation with David Bohm, in Wiber, Ken (Ed), The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes, (Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, MA, 1985).

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987 (Harper-Collins, San Fracisco, CA, 1997).

Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1949).

Hixon, Lex, The Great Swan: Meetings with Ramakrishna, (Larson Publications, Burdett, NY, 1996).

Leet, Leonora, The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah:  Recovering the Key to Hebraic Sacred Science, (Inner Traditions: Rochester, VT, 1999).

Payne, Richard J., Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1983).

Quinn, Daniel, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, (Bantam / Turner, New York, NY, 1993).

Satprem, The Revolt of the Earth (Institute for Evolutionary Research, New York, NY: 1990).

The New Jerusalem Bible, (Doubleday, New York, NY: 1990).

Underhill, Evelyn, Mysticism:  The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, (Doubleday, New York, NY, 1990).

Fierce flames of infinitude

Flirt with decaying cells

Arouse, entombed memories

Of Love once crucified

Angels blare Sophia's Song

Disintegrating despair

The walking dead crumble to dust

Messiah!  Conceived again.

Seething seas of boiling blood

Resurrect this heart of Man

Marie's labor...no longer vain

Adam arises again.