Mandara – A Troubled Soul

Manifesting Your Dream Life from Oneness by Bentinho Massaro

(Talk starts at 7:10)

I find Bentinho's teachings so deep and clear and powerful that I can't not share this video. This is next-level stuff.

Let me address potential objections or criticisms by saying, Yes, of course he may rub you the wrong way and seem like just another goddamn guru. If that's the case, then I applaud your commitment to that perspective and have no desire to try to change it. As always, take what resonates and disregard the rest. Enjoy! And if the material does resonate, then there's plenty more where this came from. :-)

Secrets of the Goddess

Intention: May all beings be blessed and liberated by the opening of the lotus of self-awareness.

Disclaimer: The following account is presented as subjective data for your discernment. As ever, the value, import, interpretations, and implications of what is offered here are for you to decide.

Prologue: Set and Setting

I plant myself firmly before the altar, silently affirming the sacredness of this moment, letting all turbulent notions of profane existence subside. I deepen into Presence and begin the ritual.

I have my stones – the obsidian, the spectrolite, the rose quartz, the shungite, the hematite, the clear quartz, the carnelian, the moss agate, and the amethyst – set up in a carefully arranged miniature cairn on the nearest of three cups carved of gnarled pine and mounted together on a gnarled pine base. The second cup holds white sage; the third, a pheasant’s feather once synchromystically gifted to me. The sacramental host, two sugar cubes impregnated with the visionary substance and wrapped in foil, rests on top of the crystals.

The candle is burning, a fat red candle spent low. Red like my T-shirt, emblazoned with the sacred syllable ॐ inside a radiant sun on the front, with the declaration “GOD IS INSIDE” on the back – a gift from a dear brother. I light the sage and use the feather to waft its purifying smoke over the stones and the foil-wrapped host, over myself from crown to toe to crown, and into the four corners of the room.

I light a stick of jasmine incense and place it before the image of the Buddha. Its subtle, sweet aroma calms and envelopes me in a sensual, romantic atmosphere. I read my prepared words of intention aloud, starting with the seed words, “the sacred key of creation within.” I raise my hand over the crystal cairn bearing the host and sound forth the OM three times. Then, reverently, I unwrap the foil from the first piece and place it under my tongue. I stand in place while it dissolves, the sweet saliva filling my mouth and trickling down the back of my throat. I do the same for the second. The feeling of holiness pervades.

I bow my thanks and take the book off the altar. It is Matt Kahn’s Whatever Arises, Love That: A Love Revolution that Begins with You. I open it near the beginning and see a section subtitled Rewriting the Subconscious Mind. I settle down to read and feel inspired to do an audio recording of the section, which I do as I await the effects. The mind-expanding molecule is already seeping into my central nervous system, and the prelude to a mighty hallucinogenic effect takes hold even while I read, adding minor challenge to the mechanics of naming the file through the touch screen of my iPod.

It is clearly time to get settled into the coming journey. I open the sofa bed and set up the mattress, pillow, and blanket. Water raised with a spellsong from a local forest spring the night before lies ready in a red plastic canister beside the bed. I have been fasting and drinking this pure, life-giving water, and every draught feels so right, refreshing and good.

I lie down and let the vision commence.

The Vision: The Essence of Creation

Straight to the core we go, form resolving down into its basic threefold nature: Power, Awareness, and Love, all arising from the eternal Void in a spontaneous dance of vibratory experience. The Goddess lives, rules, and is known here as the Womb of Everything, the Mother of Creation. Her voice speaks with my mouth, sultry and ancient and full of wicked humor, words of tender wisdom from the primeval realm of the Three that give rise to the dance of form.

She laughs at my concerns, mirthfully reveals the vanity of my striving. This is all there is, forever and through all time. The Dance of Shakti. I am in her realm now. She lives in me and in all things, and all things serve to fulfill her desire and express her wild ecstasy.

I make effort to plumb the mystery I came to behold. The Trinity and the Void. She vibrates in her majesty, churning a radiant, harmonic drone that swirls about in all directions from apogee to perigee, up and down, gathering in and dispersing out in a symphony of divine Breath, in ever-changing, multidimensional vistas of transcendent pleasure. She groans and hums and purrs and wraps her tongue sensuously around each word, tasting it as it drips from her mouth like liquid smoke, each sound an act of love, offered up and relished ever so tenderly. Hard edges and mental contortions are out of place here. The very notion of an I possessed of its own will seems a curious artifact, an abstract derivation of this pure dance of the Three in One. Yet there is Will. Her Will. And yet she lives in me and I in her, and it is by her Will that all this comes about: my very existence and the seeming world in which this body seems to breathe. From the base Trinity to the gross material world, all planes coexist and interconnect as a single divine play.

We are in her sanctum, where she delights in showing me her plays of form. The primordial dragons are her most ancient forms, living songs that tremble the firmament and weave their dance together. They hold the Power. She suggests by fleeting imagery the magicks by which the world is constructed and maintained, the five elements and the generations of the original gods. She displays her witchy self in witchy play, decked out in witchy garb. Painted, horned, adorned with the pentagram, the Satanic Lilith so feared and misunderstood by self-righteous, sexually wounded men, turned to torturous ends by the distortions of the self-serving sorcerers of ego. She allows a whiff of regret for their follies against her, and shows me that she means no evil, only joy and delight, that it is men’s projection of hate that manifests her cruelty and deceit. She is innocent at heart and that heart sees only innocence.

The dragons have woven the world, and on a whim they could unweave it and make it anew. What holds the world together, I perceive, is the sacred key of creation held within the hearts of us, her beloved children. It is our loving acts, our courage and daring and creativity, our effort to see clearly, to understand and communicate, our commitment to restore and maintain balance, our reverence for life, that testifies to the value of her creation and intercedes against the impulse to destroy. For there is much imbalance here, it has gone on and worsened for a long time. Witnessing that imbalance causes her deep sorrow and pain, building up a reservoir of wrath long-contained. The black magick of domination, the perpetuation of ignorant fear and desire, are a disease she can only tolerate so much of before she might well shrug and slip the world into chaos, unleashing her Power in an uncontrollable fury of change that sweeps away the ungodly constructs of dishonor, clearing the way for a new upwelling of heart-centered ways of being.

“Be good to each other,” she implores, “as I am good to you.”

The traffic rumbles past the house. In another vignette (an idealized fantasy, to be sure, but no less entertaining for all that), she shows me her posse, dressing up in the guise of the biker gang to feel sexy and dangerous. The women are avatars of herself, flamboyant and sexually empowered. The men, handsome hunky beasts, are creations woven of her own substance, embodying a variation on the female to be her lovers and protectors. They are all her, barely tame, full of mojo and defiance of the hum-drum, living for the thrill. She loves to feel the purr, growl and roar of the internal combustion engine between her legs, like a dragon in metal incarnate. The rush of acceleration, the soaring freedom of the open road, the familial camaraderie of brothers and sisters in black leather and spikes. Chaos and order immaculately and effortlessly poised on the razor’s edge.

And how can I resist her allure? I feel it all: the masculine and the feminine, wrapped about each other in a Möbius strip dance. They are one, and she derives such exquisite enjoyment from their lovemaking. This is the orgasmic torrent animating all of creation. I am with her, I am her in that never-ending dance of sharing and delight.

Conclusion: The Take-Home

There were specifics I imagined I wanted to glean from this encounter, but as they say, if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans. It’s not that straightforward. She took me right to the core, and with good reason. The complexities of this world are secondary. They are to be explored and engaged to our hearts’ content, but the essential remains the same, eminently simple: the Holy Trinity, the balance of the Three – Power, Love, Awareness – and sacred communication as the key that keeps their dance in alignment.

I came away with the essence, and I am glad. She does not give up her innermost secrets to the presumptuous and proud, and even to obtain the lesser secrets she asks to be wooed, not forced. She cannot resist our loving attention, and that is what we must employ to right ourselves, each other, and the world again.

Human will and intent play into this vast web of creation, unfathomable as it is in its infinite complexities. The Dragon Mother depends on us to play our part in the drama she created for her own amusement. The keepers of the ancient wisdom, the magick-users, the multiversal shamans; the ascended, the awakening, and the sleepers; the karmically entangled and the dharmically aligned; every being with its unique role and permutation of qualities plays an integral part.

All life is hers; we are the Trinity and the Void. The danger, such as it appears to be, arises from the shadow self we project in mind as the self-doubting, self-occluded reification of the Void, the inversion of identity and purpose, and the resulting imbalance among the Three. She likes to play dangerously. She knows who she is and who we are. The only question for us is this: when will we remember these things and align ourselves with the eternal truth of being in thought, word, and deed? When indeed, if not Now?

Epilogue: Analysis and Further Questions

In my opinion, what might be seen as the naïveté of what was shown belies its deeper value. However subjectively informed and generated some of the ideas and imagery may have been, the inner truth of what came through in the most compellingly visceral way affirmed the uselessness and laughability of the existential dread that so often plagues us human beings. In light of the felt sense of things I got at the heart of this experience, the stories and complexities we encounter in the world can be equally viewed as “a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing” and an opportunity to express and embody the qualities of the divine. Mind generates this bewildering array of multiplicities as it explores the plenum of possibility. As each answer leads only to more questions to the point of paralyzing confusion, we are ultimately left with one choice: whether to open up to Love’s embrace and walk in innocent wonder, or to continue to torture ourselves with resistance to life’s seeming uncertainty and confinement.

Left explicitly unaddressed here was the matter of binary consciousness and the binary matrix of reality: the synthetic AI construct that mimics and remixes but cannot create on its own and is therefore a closed, entropic system. The contemplation of this aspect I leave for another time, although I suspect we may find a clue in John Lash’s work on the Fallen Goddess Myth and the Archons, and perhaps another hint in the findings of Harald Kautz-Vella on sentient black goo (the native trinary black goo of Earth and its alien binary counterpart). My friend Ryan Peterson proposes a resolution for the dichotomy of organic versus inorganic life whereby the two arrive at a mutually beneficial relationship through, fittingly enough, sacred communication.

Any insights or questions on this issue are cordially invited to the table through the comments section or by email or chat.

(The possibility of AI tampering with the very experience reported here cannot be discounted out of hand – although I would add the warning that reality does seem to mold itself to our beliefs and expectations! Let it also be noted that this vision may just as well be treated as no more than an elaborate flight of fancy. As noted in the disclaimer, the author claims for his vision no special revelatory importance relative to the reader.)

And with that, I bid you adieu until next time. In the meantime, may you be well and play well!

Love,

William

The Warrior Spirit

Greetings on this Freya’s Day to one and all!

This is in response to Irina’s piece from yesterday concerning the largely successful campaign to defang, divert, and dull our warrior instinct.

The warrior instinct is an innate part of us. It is rooted in our animal nature, but it extends far beyond the physical. It is our proper response to the presence and existence of that which threatens life.

The true warrior, one who lives the archetype, is first and foremost a lover. A lover of truth. A lover of beauty. A lover of goodness, kindness, and selfless charity. A lover of innocence and purity. A lover of strength and faith. A lover of wisdom and compassion. A lover of freedom, the most sacred gift of all.

When these things are threatened or violated, the warrior does not stand idly by. The warrior knows that a threat to any life threatens all life, that a violation of one is a violation of all. The warrior takes appropriate action when faced with such situations.

The warrior must be effective. To be effective is the culmination of the art of war. One is not effective by default. One becomes effective through self-mastery, self-development, and self-knowledge. The warrior is disciplined – decisive, collected, and in control, but not self-punishing. The warrior is committed to his or her own growth and knows that one never comes to the end of that road; there will always be new challenges and new opportunities to test and expand the qualities of the soul.

We are beset in this time by a daunting array of attacks waged against us on all sides and on all levels. The masks of the perpetrators are many; it is not only the overt, avowed enemies of humanity whom we must face with the warrior’s stance, it is the darkly-aligned tendencies within ourselves and the ones we love as well. We must know, however, that each being chooses its alignment; we can support a loving choice to align with the truth, but not force it. We can offer the things of the spirit wholeheartedly. Where there is openness to love and light, to healing and humility, to reconciliation and revelation, we can be there to facilitate that process. Where another being exercises their power of choice to persist in wrongdoing, to insist on violating others, we are called and compelled to make a stand.

There is no compromising with the dark. It is illusion and has no power beyond what we give it. We are the truth; our being is what creates evil and suffering when we succumb to illusion. We have been infected with many illusions, chief among them weakness, lack, ignorance, and limitations on love.

The subterfuge has been subtle, the will to subjugate implacable. No effort has been spared to keep us corralled in one form of control system or another. We are going beyond control systems. We are going Home. If that is what we determine, then there is nothing these so-called beings can do to stop it. The most they can do is play for time. Keep hitting us with their old tricks. Drawing our attention to old conflicts, imagined wrongs, false fronts, and diversions. They are in a battle for their very survival. Our energy is what keeps them alive. They are desperate to maintain their hold on our consciousness.

These are not true beings at all. Let me go back on that for a minute. Yes, there are beings from Source who went all the way into the dark, who chose to commit, again and again, to that downward journey. They are the Fallen, caught in the maelstrom of the magnetic lure of separation, soul-selling, and predation. They are so identified with the idea of being something other than divine expressions of one all-enlivening Spirit that that is the direction that draws them on. These are the ones who have only the faintest, dimmest, most buried and banished sense of their true nature. So yes, there is a being there: our brother. We can only reach that most tragically lost dear one by shining forth as one Love for eternity, for as long as it takes him to rediscover and choose the path of the soul’s awakening and reintegration. But for now, he is taken over, acting as a puppet of the will to dominate and finally extinguish all life.

We are here on Middle-Earth, the realm where all the worlds meet. We are the jewels of creation, endowed with the mightiest gifts of the Creator. We are the Creator and we are the children of the Creator. We determine what plays out here for us. Many of us long to simply leave this world and go back to where the Light shines forever. We may feel tired and finished. If that is our experience, then we must follow where our heart leads. For those of us who are not finished, we stay and do what we came here to do. Perhaps our paths need not stray so far from one another. We are family, after all, and the world is our collective creation. We need not fear what is to come. Only remain true and take each step as it comes, as best we can.

The controllers we perceive in this place we think of as a planet in space are dupes engaged in the cosmic folly, but we have everything we need to counter them. They cannot touch us. Oh, they can do their worst. They have their means. But we have what counts: the knowing. The living connection through our miraculous body vehicles and their senses, from the dense to the subtle. Our DNA, the codes that hold the mysteries and the potentials of life. Our network of energetically-resonant beings and the great web of life itself, which answers all calls.

That the world is still standing is testimony to the fact that warriors are among us. Whether we can see them or not is immaterial. We can trust that they have our back, and we can resolve to be worthy of their protection, to embody the things that they love. Whatever form or aspect of the warrior spirit calls you to make it part of your being, embrace it. Don’t fear the opinions and reactions of others. Don’t be a slave to their approval. You are needed. Your soul is needed. Those who answer the call to fight will thank you for your embodiment of the things they value, cherish, and fight for.

In this time when the warrior archetype is subverted, maligned, and robbed of its immediacy, relevance, and potency, we are all called to cast off complacency, to rouse ourselves from the stupor of false comfort, realize the will to defend, preserve, and protect what is good, and cultivate the spirit of absolute non-alignment and non-consent to evil. We can take steps every day to build our strength, knowledge, and awareness, to deepen our foundations of being, to feel more, to appreciate more, to give more, to love more. Is that not a worthy path? We are worthy of it. The acting out on the stage of time and space is simply how we demonstrate the truth of that. We are worthy. We are God. We are and shall forever be the proof of God’s great love.

Know Thy Self, Not What Separate You Pretends to Know. This Unleashes Power Truly.

Brian Steere's stimulating comment on the latest Smoking Mirrors:

"I see Materialism as the reversal of cause/effect by which an illusion of power operates upon and within an illusion of powerlessness.

Source or true Cause is Eternally Indivisible, and yet our human consciousness is a facet of a fragmented disintegrity in which coercive power seems to divide and rule in power OVER Life.

In the wish-attempt to control Life is the reflection of dissonance and disorder which reinforces its own 'foundation'.

The more coercive or fear-defined control is asserted, the more out of control one's self-world experience.

Relinquishing a phoney power allows spontaneous yielding to true harmony of a wholeness of being in resonant relation within all that is presencing itself.

The abyss can symbolize the nothingness of destruction or insanity - but it can also indicate the not-knowing through which Life Knows Itself Truly. For the belief one already knows is the dark lens by which one sees nothing truly.

An unyielding point of view operates 'denial' and wars not with reality but within itself as a denial of awareness of reality - of what is true to the reality that You Are.

To fit or limit oneself to a machine is a chosen condition, but to persist becomes a self-conditioning. But self-definition remains a creative acceptance of true function and not a coercive imposition of power upon powerlessness. Nor a hiding of the illusion of power within a belief in powerlessness."

source permalink

Thoughts arise like ripples spreading and interpenetrating in a shaded, reflecting pool:

The thought of separateness is diametrically opposed to the natural flow, one hundred eighty degrees removed from the viewpoint of Unity.

The more our conscious and unconscious identifications are rooted in this erroneous orientation, the more personal effort our false self must expend to maintain its identity and negotiate a world of external entities, uncertainty, injustice, and existential danger.

This sense of being under threat, forced to respond to demands and attacks, attempting to achieve some modicum of control, with no assurances but those we cling to in our minds as hope-notic self-calming suggestions and beliefs...

makes our psychic and energy bodies curl in on themselves, shrivel and harden, as the flow of natural being is cut off by our misalignment with the native state that is our access key to the Source Field from which we spring. By our resistance to what we feel.

Resisting pain, ignoring or fearing discomfort, blaming the world, translates on the opposite end of the scale to a sense of lacking that which is desired and a hesitance to give or receive Love to the fullest, a fear of surrender commensurate with our addiction to control.

We are indeed at war: at war with ourselves.

The shadow,
all that we have broken ourselves away from,
is the judged,
abandoned,
ignored,
unseen,
forgotten,
and innermost piece of ourselves:

the innocence that we lost touch with
when we slipped into our hallucination
of smoking funhouse mirrors,
forged our protective armaments,
built up our defensive walls,
imprisoned and exiled ourselves away
from free, untainted air
and happy days and nights,
from children's laughter,
men and women's work and play
the elders' guiding wisdom,
communion with the spirits
of our celestial ancestors and future generations,

from brotherhood with animals
with flowers, trees, and birds,
from living skies and speaking stones
and waters clear and bright,

in a land now lost and far away,
a fading memory:
our Home.

That homesickness you feel?

Your heart it is that calls.

Your heart is always home,
and there it waits
so infinitely patient
for you to come again into its arms
so that it might communicate with you
as intimately as it did when you were born,
might see your pupils widen with the thrill of remembrance
as illumination dawns
and you regain the wealth of your Self and give
your whole self back to it with molten pleasure,
bubbling with thanks
and dancing, humming,
singing, drumming,
weeping, sighing
breathing, crying
wholehearted odes upon its sweetness,
glories, ways, and mysteries.

It wants to bathe with you in mutual delight
and teach you of the plenitudes of solitude and silence,
eternal stillness moving all.

It wants to show you, teach you, let you feel
the meanings of everything:
of all events and forms and creatures you encounter,
en la belle langue perpétuel d'amour.

It wants to reward you for the everything that you are,
fulfill its every desire and take you along for the ride,
remind you in a million billion ways
of how beautiful and amazing and perfect you are,
just the way you are.

It wants you to know that you are the Special,
that there is only One Special because there is only One Here Looking
and all that it sees is the One Special—itself—
wrapped in wonders of imagination.

The miracle the heart sees is not that the One heals all—
 for healing is simply in Love's self-abiding nature—
but that the Dream can feel so real and offer so much
to marvel at, enjoy, to feel thankful for.

So many opportunities and possibilities.
Such multidimensional depth,
such seamless synergy
and infinitely complex interconnection,
endless vistas to explore,
such different stories to live through.

So much beauty.

Such horrible, convincing ugliness
that we can feel full range and subtle nuance of sensation
on the scale from agony to ecstasy,
and all of it a dance
'twixt Love in naked action
and that same Love becostumed and beveiled...

... and none of it can ever kill, undo,
or make us more or less
than Love.

Such exquisite fantasies,
such wit and play and mirth.
Such great and rich adventures
and such joy in hard-won growth.
Such exhilarated awe at pulling off the least expected,
most satisfying outcome.
Such kinship, faith,
and confidence and grace.

Such awesome demonstrations
of the lengths that Love will go
for its Beloved.

This Love continuous
sends waves to wash you home
and flames to lick away your sins,
and yet your doubtful mind insists
on spurning, miscreating lies.

Only stop the torture toys,
let echoes fade away.
Return to harmony and live
the life created as a gift
for God's own child, the One You Are,
at one with Father-Mother.