Calling Our Spirits Home: Gateways to Full Consciousness
Chapter Ten
The Pilgrimage Home
My companion and I are sitting in Steamers restaurant at a corner table. Tall windows on either side allow cool light to enter the premises. It is another grey winter day in the English seaside town of Brighton. The sea along the shoreline across the street reflects the color of the clouds above. Yet, way out on the horizon a spot of bright white light can be seen breaking through the clouds briefly to touch the sea and then…vanish.
We are finishing the last bit of our wine, a French vin du pays, that we found suitable for our late lunch. Gazing out of the window, my eyes come to rest on what has been called an English phenomenon, one of the seaside piers built during Queen Victoria’s reign. The West Pier’s pavilions were built in a style of architecture that combined oriental opulence with Victorian gingerbread. Having been casualties of World War II, these two damaged queens are kept at a distance by gates and boards at the entrance of the pier whose signs warn “danger” and “keep out.” Yet, as I sit here I can imagine the pier in its heyday. Brighton was, after all, the stomping grounds of Beau Brummel and other dandies of the time.
The pavilion at the end of the pier resembles a large conservatory fallen on hard times. From our distant perspective, its ornate toothpick of a structure, once white and now peeling to a mossy grey, appears too fragile to hold up the terraced onion top. The grey light finds a clear path through the absent windowpanes from the seaward side of the pavilion.
Well gone are the Victorians promenading West Pier. The far pavilion now plays residence to flighty occupants. My companion and I find our attention drawn to a resurrection, movement joining with the hustle bustle of pavilion memories past. We become so entranced with the sight that we move our chairs closer to the window, prop our feet up on the heater base and order more wine. Some of the pavilion occupants are simultaneously rising to the dance floor of the skies. They begin to perform their version of the waltz, which is somehow crossed with a Texas line dance. Just like a line dance, others see the apparent gaiety of it all and fly to join. Some come alone. Some come in smaller flocks. Yet, somehow never missing a beat, they all move right into step. The joining continues until the blackbirds number into the thousands. The dance pattern resembles a horizontal figure eight in the sky and moves gracefully with the ebb and flow of eternity.
We begin to wonder about leadership in this gathering. Where is the leader? In the middle? At one end or another? No, the leadership exists in the oneness of the movement and each member of the dance is a leader. It’s a perfect example of entrainment. As one being vibrates at a certain level, another naturally seeks to join, feeling that vibration. The movement is the alignment of vibration, and the higher the vibration the more beautifully transporting the community becomes.
As we watch, we live in the trance of the moment and find ourselves talking of the divinity of our own lives. An oldie goldie from the ’70s plays in the background and we are reminded more and more of our identities⏤ yesterday, today and tomorrow.
The sky outside is getting greyer and greyer with the setting of the sun. The song ends. The dancers abruptly descend at hearing the last notes. They move quickly to their roosts for the night to await the dawning prelude of the next daily dance.
The Essence of Our Paths
Up until our individual odysseys Homeward, we are probably most in touch with our essences when we are young, before the world has interfered too much with its expectations, or we have been given too many lessons to learn. Some of us are able to stay true to that essence from our early days forward, but I was not. Mine was a path that took me into slumber and then into wakefulness and wonder. Although, I will have to say that I sometimes received whisperings of gifts that were submerged. I also knew that the particular life road that I traveled was part of the learning I was meant to have and what I am able to share with others. This is what makes us each unique in what we have to give. So, perhaps I was true to my essence after all.
Before I reached puberty I knew something of my true path. I longed to write, even though I had not written. And I saw a grown image of myself in a nun’s habit. This unlikely picture came to me though having had little introduction to religion and certainly not to Catholicism! (My Southern Baptist grandmother would have risen up from her grave, I’m told.) When I mentioned this to someone, she suggested that, as a young girl perhaps a nun was the only concrete image I had of a woman being in a spiritual life.
Some thirty years later, it took my initial experience in a southern Utah desert with Don Américo, who energetically opened my heart and closed off the insistent logic of my mind to reconstitute the longing for Spirit within me. It took a dream of Eugene O’Neill that I had while in Peru to unconsciously draw me back to writing, not even knowing what it was that I would write. So it is that as I am moving toward the cusp of my crone years I turn back toward community after my own meandering seeking⏤to bring Home what I have gleaned on my own journey in the form of this book, still knowing that the journey ever continues.
After our wanderings, some of us may find that we never really needed to leave our original places…that those places actually served us after all toward our universal grounding. Such was the case with artist Grant Wood.
I found the answer (to how and what to paint) when I joined a school of painters in Paris after the war who called themselves Neomeditationists…They believed an artist had to wait for inspiration, very quietly, and they did most of their waiting in the Café du Dome or the Rotonde with brandy. It was then that I realized that all the really good ideas I’d ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa.[i]
Pilgrimage translates into ‘going to the Source.’ While this going may take us on varied travels⏤geographically, culturally, mentally, emotionally and spiritually⏤it is ultimately the trek inward and then the reflection outward that fully inflames our connection to Spirit.
Answering the Final Call
Any of us who are moving toward Light eventually come to the point of reckoning. But not, perhaps, the kind of reckoning that usually comes to mind. It is actually the final Call that we are asked to consider, symbolized in the Judgment card, the twentieth of the Major Arcana of the Tarot. As Priestesses and Priests build toward the climax of their days here, they are bid come by the angel’s horn. They are invited to rise up naked from their old dwelling places and metaphorically gather together toward an even larger life, though it may not seem larger in the living of it. Nor is it easier in the ordinary sense.
The twentieth trump has been called the card of the regenerated Self, not in the Christian sense of resurrection in the flesh, but in the sense of a new being discovered within the present physical body. This new being, in turn, was the one capable of understanding the final lesson of the Major Arcana: not a lesson about heaven, but a lesson bearing the very mundane name of the World.[ii]
In the twenty-first trump and the final great secret of the Tarot, the Feminine Spirit is depicted as the Goddess nakedly beautiful “flanked by symbols of the seasons, bearing the rods of power, dancing the dance of life.” She is the symbol of creation and re-creation, a reincarnation on earth.[iii] At this point in the journey, we must decide once again if we have the courage to continue. It is the devotional practice of those who hear her plea and answer her Call to turn away from their sweet solitudes and to merge toward humanity in service to the World. For many of us, it is a difficult reckoning to re-enter the places that we left some time ago, and re-entry has its own special art.
Kenosis
In the movie version of Out of Africa, Karen Blixen said that God must have made the world round so that we could not see what was waiting for us over the next rise. As I am making my own Pilgrimage Home, I can ask myself, had I always been able to see what was beyond the horizon would I have continued on my way Home? I would have to answer myself with an unequivocal “yes,” even knowing that mythological dragons swim those seas. There is an agonizing yearning within me toward the deepest and highest living of Connection. I have found that this yearning requires of me the diligence of intense surrender to what the Divine may bring. To do otherwise is a refusal of the Call.
A few years ago, a companion and I were camping in the beauty of a Colorado mountain forest. During a night of profound discovery and ceremony, we explored the true track of our lives and those things that could keep us from it. In the early morning hours we were making our way back to our campsite, the songs of coyotes an appropriate backdrop. As I was getting ready to retire to the tent he asked me, “What are you afraid of?” Catching me in a fearless moment, my answer had just slipped out, “Nothing.” “Nothing?” he had questioned. I had paused for some time and finally said, “Actually, there is something. I’m afraid that I won’t get to do what I’m here for.” My answer surprised me just as much as it did him. I had not realized that I was harboring that fear, or even that I had something specific to do. But perhaps it is a fear that most of us harbor even though we may only have the fuzziest image of what we are here to ultimately contribute.
The Greeks have a word, kenosis, which means emptying. Indeed, it is through the practice of kenosis that we are provided a continuance on our journey that ultimately shows us the way Home. One of the greatest gifts we can give our Selves is to understand the ways in which we practice illusion and the transitory nature of life. If we do not actively seek an understanding ourselves, someone else will give us this disguised gift. We will be forced to look at our hopes and those things that we think we have been promised and realize their transient properties. While we can kick, scream and blame others, we would be wiser to accept these insights. We could rather realize that this natural law is a vehicle we can ride toward Truth. The imminent spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff knew this law well and had it inscribed over the door of his Study House in Fontainebleau, France.
Remember that you came here realizing the necessity of struggling only with yourself and thank anyone who helps you to engage in this struggle.
If we insist on remaining attached to what we have been shown to be non-existent, our journey here becomes stalled. Our shadow sides emerge. We become those parts of us that we have been ashamed to own and call ourselves. In their tirades, we can embrace rather than reject them and quiet the scared children they are. Our shadows only roar from those dark places when we experience fear. Clasping our own humanity in our arms, we can warm each other and call each other allies and continue in our Pilgrimage Home.
Although there is no abortion of our Being, we must die to who we thought we were, or have been and stand ready⏤a hollow vessel waiting to be filled. This is kenosis and what readies us for our final work. As challenging as it may at first seem, it is our work to bring what we know from the realms of non-ordinary reality to manifest in ordinary reality. In a direct proportion of our abilities to do so, our service will be to hold energy for the World and act through that heart wisdom.
The Timeless Measure
In the movie The Grand Canyon, the two main characters are sitting on the curb at a service station. Simon is a tow truck driver and Mack is his customer. They are passing time while Mack’s car is being attended. Simon asks, “You ever been to the Grand Canyon?”
“I always meant to go.”
“Get yourself to the Grand Canyon!”
“Beautiful, huh?”
“It’s pretty all right. You can sit right on the edge of it. You know, I did that. I did everything. I went down in it. I stayed overnight. But what got me was sitting on the edge. Those big old rocks. They’re so old. It took so long for the things to get to look like that. It ain’t done either. It’s happening just as you’re sitting right there…When you sit on the edge you realize what a joke we people are. What big heads we’ve got thinking what we’re going to do is going to matter all that much. It means diddly to those rocks. It’s been a split second that we’ve been here. The whole lot of us! And one of us? That’s a piece of time too small to give a name. Those rocks were laughing at me, I could tell. Me and my worries! It was real humorous to that Grand Canyon. You know what I felt like? Like a gnat that lands on the ass of a cow that’s chewing it’s cud next to the road you ride by on at seventy miles per hour! It’s small.”[iv]
It has been some minute form of a split second. We are small. One of the great, if not final, lessons we may hope to learn has to do with the impermanence of all that exists within a certain permanence and who we are within that vastness. To take the final leg of the journey we must surrender into a knowing that nothing is probably as we think we know it, except the eternal flame that fires in our hearts. If we can take the intimate knowledge of illusion and transience with us back into the World, then we can relax into the moment and release any attachment we may have regarding what ‘good’ we may do. This intent is the chariot we can ride. In the words of Jimmy Buffet, it’s about “every now and then.” Everything changes, just at different rates. It takes the courage initiated into a Priestess or Priest through their own private journeys into the Underworld and its particular brand of resulting wisdom to be able to stand in the strong humility of service. It is the role of the modern-day Priestess or Priest to release their Spirits into the World-community after initiation so that others may experience the sparking to ignite their own special purifications.
So it was in the midst of The Grand Canyon that Simon came along at just the right moment to tow Mack away from a dark street and dangerous encounter with some kids who thought respect was embodied in a gun. Simon said he was just doing his job, but his act touched something in Mack that began to form within him a deeper life. While out on a run, Mack’s wife came across an abandoned baby in some brush and brought it home. What else could she do? At summer camp, their teenaged son was walking with a girlfriend when he heard a young boy crying and went to console him. The young boy looked up at the older boy with big teary eyes of gratitude.
It is all happening just as we are sitting here even though it may seem as though the movement is still. It is often the little things we may do, not even understood by others and perhaps not known or even acknowledged, that often make a true difference in the branching of someone’s life.
The Willingness to Engage
Knowing that our own Pilgrimages are never fully over and being willing to openly engage in our own struggles in itself is a service of courage to humanity. In this way others witnessing the wrestling we go through may begin to open their own eyes if they choose to see.
Tearing at the verge of psychic upheaval himself, Dominic is a thoroughly radiant-hearted psychologist whose self-inflicted containment weighs him down, but perhaps not for much longer. At a talk he gave on psychospiritual healing at an association meeting, he urged fellow therapists to raise the level of their love. In remembrance, he guided them in a meditation that led them back to the time when they decided to become psychotherapists⏤what inner values brought them to those individual decisions and how the experiences felt. As they came out of the meditation this formerly stiff-bodied group had relaxed. Their voices, previously clipped and business-like, softened as they shared their experiences of re-living those usually long-forgotten moments that had set their life courses. They bemoaned how often they had lost focus, due to such things as managed care and diagnoses; on the very entities that they had based their life paths⏤the people they serve. Since Higher Consciousness draws us to what we need the most, Dominic’s own dawning awarenesses led him to plant a seed in others that may well flourish just as he reinforced fertile ground tilled within the courtyard of his own temple. Perhaps his reminder may serve to begin creating a mutually supporting community that brilliantly holds the love of their choices unwavering in their hearts.
Gay Luce is the Director of Nine Gates Mystery School. She has been a seeker of Higher Consciousness all her life⏤long before it was understood at all in Western culture. She has initiated herself many times over to become a Priestess. A more gentle and open facilitator of spiritual awakenings I have yet to meet. Perhaps it is because she had often been misunderstood by others during her own journey that she is so supportive and patient with those Seekers who come to her. Her mother, who was an atheist, had little tolerance toward hearing of Gay’s Pilgrimages and the joys they brought, just thinking her very “odd.” Shut down to sharing what was so important in her life and feeling greatly criticized, Gay found many sticking points and a general state of uneasiness in her relationship with her mother. But her mother was becoming old, ill and expressed a fear of dying. The love of a daughter for her mother prevailed for Gay, notwithstanding what unpleasant occurrences may have passed between them.
Some years prior, Gay had become a Sai Baba devotee.[1] During one of her stays at his ashram in India, she brought out a photograph of her mother that she had brought with her from America. She left the image there on the altar praying to Sai Baba to soften her mother and help her in her dying process.
After her return from India when Gay next visited her mother, her mother shocked her by saying, “Last night I was laying down and Sai Baba came in and talked and joked with me. Do you have a picture of him?” Trying to hide her surprise, Gay brought out a picture of Sai Baba that she carried with her and put it on the television set. During Gay’s previous attempts to relate her devotion of Sai Baba, her mother had automatically cut her off. Strangely, now her mother was not only open, but exuberant toward anything having to do with him. During another visit, Gay’s mother referred to Sai, “You know, we talk to each other all the time!” Gay later heard her mother speaking out loud in her bedroom to an entity Gay could not physically see, but could well sense, “Love is the only thing of value in this life. I can’t help loving people! Oh Lord, it’s so beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. I don’t know why I didn’t see you earlier!”
Not long after that, Gay was at Fetzer Institute for an event. She found herself walking the Dromenon, or labyrinth.[2] “I’m not a real Dromenon walker, but then I knew I was walking it for my mother and that she was dying.”
At a circle gathering, Janine told a similar tale of renewal with her own mother who suffered from the debilitating dis-ease of rheumatoid arthritis the majority of her life. Her mother’s condition had gotten to the point that she could barely get around, she was in such pain. Nothing worked to improve her condition. In compassion and love, Janine intervened. Like Gay, she never mentioned her actions knowing full well her mother would not understand her methods should she be aware of them. During daily meditation, Janine began the Tibetan Buddhist practice of tonglen, or giving and receiving, holding the intent of healing for her mother. In tonglen, the practitioner receives the suffering of others through compassion and gives to them whatever is needed⏤peace, healing or happiness through love.[3] Janine would bring herself to a state of deep meditation and into that compassionate heart space of the Bodhisattva. Having first worked with any disowned part of her own Self, she then began the same practice with her mother. In her mind’s eye she saw her mother in front of her and energetically saw any physical, emotional or spiritual suffering that her mother experienced. Then, Janine would open wide her own heart and breathe into herself her mother’s black, sticky suffering, dissolving it in her heart and breathing back into her mother the absolute light of love. Not long after Janine had begun her daily healing practice, she went to visit her mother and was surprised to find her out in the garden digging in the dirt and moving easily⏤something that had not happened in a very long time. Her mother happily related to Janine that it mystified the doctors, but her arthritis was suddenly in remission! There it remained for about a year until her mother’s need to act through her dis-ease once again manifested.
If any of us would become misguided in our service it might be to become too invested in someone else’s path in the sense that they have to heal, whether the healing is emotional, mental, physical or spiritual. In particular, we are leading ourselves astray if we begin to think the other person’s inability or unwillingness to heal says something about us⏤like we have not done enough or are not good enough in our support. We would begin to do ourselves a disservice to think that we could be the ultimate guru who turns the tide when others always maintain their own choice of Path.
At this point then in the journey, Priestesses and Priests may find that there is another side of willingness to engage⏤that of those around them. More than likely, early in the Spirit Path each of us experienced a Separation from what no longer fit externally. It may have been a job, a partner, friends or religion-of-origin that we allowed to fall away from our lives. As we dedicate our Selves to the deeper life and relentlessly clear what masks our core, we begin to increasingly vibrate at higher and higher frequencies. By the time we are ready to step into the void of surrender, what we once thought a far-off dream becomes the reality. We experience the face of the Divine gazing back at us as Lover and we find our Selves merging with One. We are no longer our Selves at all, but Unity. We will find that Unity is a sword that can spear our sweetest fruits from our most hidden branches. At the same time, it seems to cruelly slice away from our lives what would keep us from Unity and our ultimate service.
While some of those who have been engaged with us will find this vibration compelling and travel alongside us, others who had been engaged with us up to a certain point will spin off. This is true even if they wish to engage with Unity themselves. But they still find themselves helplessly driven away through some fear, not yet ready to square off with the demon that holds them hostage. In fact, whatever demons still exist in either party of the relationship become exacerbated and demand attention. Lesser and greater Personality non-attributes will rise up. Any tendencies toward any type of pettiness, massaging of old hurts, addictions, abuses and other psychological unbalancings or spiritual malaise will surface with a vengeance in the parties’ behaviors.[v] The parties that welcome and grapple with the demon will dissolve her and move through to wholeness. The parties that do not recognize the demon’s shadow and are overwhelmed by her can well spin off into the dark place of spiritual madness. All is not necessarily lost there. Some believe in taking the long road Home. In that dank dungeon, the prisoner’s madness may well swell to a crescendo that allows him or her to break free and feel their feet more firmly grounded.
So perhaps as another form of initiation, Priestesses or Priests will find themselves tested with yet another and deeper Separation that leads to the greater Unity. While on the one hand we may cry grievously for our losses, we can trust this unfolding, not even understanding the greater meaning of it. Just as we may do certain things for others and keep them secret, so does our Lover do so for us. It now becomes our job to be very much aware of who remains with us, standing firm in their willingness to move through any stickiness, and also who the new are who find their ways to us. This is the community that will nurture us in our ever-deepening journeys and support us in our expansions beyond our brittle cocoons. This is the community that helps to hold the energy for us while we venture out into the World-community. Our Lover is forever sustaining us, being our strong foundation. Most of us also find that the sustainment of incarnate arms loving and nourishing us adds to the levels of our foundation.
Regina Sara Ryan and her husband of twenty-five years have long chosen the communal life because they want their life to reflect their spiritual practice. Regina has found something wondrous in coming together with a group of like-spirited people, noting how with two people you can share a similar vision, but with more it becomes magnified. Relating her experiences she says, “It’s also like putting a bunch of rocks together in a tumbler where you have to adapt. You have to be rubbed raw sometimes in the way in which human beings just rub each other. By the same token that creates a tremendous internal heat that can be used for practice. Not only is it used as a way to go deeper in each relationship, because when you start having conflict that’s the place where you start going deeper, but it’s also a place where you get to see the Ego in all her glory! I want this couch here and I demand it! And we’re ready to kill over where to place the couch in the living room! This is something you start to face when you live with one other person, but imagine multiplying that by five or ten. Then, saying we are living this way because we want a kind of inner practice that transcends that type of limited, possessive territoriality! We also want the joy of communing.”[vi]
As we rub each other, hard jutting edges can be smoothed away so that what eventually remains is the same as timeless stones that lay at the bottom of a moving stream, tumbled and polished allowing the waters to run easily around and under them. If they were somehow lifted from that stream and cast upon the shore, whoever they came in contact with would marvel at their rounded, clean nature.
There is a real courage in the willingness to engage deeply with another person, and even more so with those who actively seek out communal living. For thousands of years, this mode or similar modes of co-habitation were the norm, and tribal counsels helped those involved to expand their views of themselves and others. Yet, in our ‘modern’ society that has instilled the archetype of Rugged Individualist, those flocking to a variety of self-help and support groups are seeking that same age-old wisdom that can be found in a larger group of like-minded similarly visioned people. There are other even braver souls who choose intentional community, finding even deeper living there. As we happily merge with our Selves, a partner and larger community, we can find a special kind of surrender of expectation that makes us realize that we are all empty vessels waiting to fill each other in joint seeking of the larger Universe. Our Divine Lover holds out this authenticity as a possibility for each of us. It is we who individually direct our life journeys to that end ¼or not.
And We Call Her Home
Beyond communal living, Regina’s entire life has been directed toward the One and has culminated in a book, The Woman Awake: Feminine Wisdom for Spiritual Life.
I had from very early in my life a sense that there was a way to live that was Ultimate. There must be a way to live that true purpose. My attempts to do that were determined by the culture I came out of⏤for me, the Roman Catholic culture. Within that paradigm, becoming a nun was the highest thing you could do⏤giving your life to God. I can’t say I actually knew what God was. We don’t have that defined, but I do think we have a bodily intuitive sense of something Ultimate. That’s what I hungered. What is the heart longing for? Not finding an external environment that creates the Perfect. There is no perfect work. There is no perfect place. There is no perfect relationship. There are no perfect children. But, there is a place in which one is deeply at rest with the nature of reality. This is the paradox that we are at peace, we are at one with God. Yet, because we are incarnated we still have this longing. You see that in the great mystics.
Finding the Divine Mother as the all-pervasive archetype because it is She who births existence, Regina experienced a limited definition of the Feminine Spirit within her own original cultural paradigm. Knowing that there was something more expanded she found it necessary to look at a variety of manifestations of this archetype. Divine Mother is not only motherly, she has many faces. In her Seeking, Regina found within other cultures and embodied in real-life women qualities that impact the World in complementary ways such as the Artist and The Warrior, those who find their counterparts in the male god archetypes. But searching within the male god archetypes from Greek and Roman mythology who have generally shaped Western culture, we can find no counterpart to Divine Mother and a softer, nurturing Feminine Spirit. The closest we may come is Hephaestus the craftsman and inventor, but he was rejected and banished from Mt. Olympus. While possessing the gift to create, he was also held bound by a clubfoot. He was the most unhappy of the gods.[vii] We have somehow forgotten that the very religion that greatly fashioned our present patriarchal culture had one of the most feminine-spirited men as an icon ever documented⏤Jesus of Nazareth. For these very qualities he was well loved. At the same time, he could be the Warrior and stampede the temples when he saw sacrilege being performed. For which of these qualities was he crucified? Or was it because he dared to integrate both the Masculine and Feminine Spirits?
As Regina said to me, “In Hinduism, Shiva is vast emptiness and Shakti is creation that shows up in that vast emptiness. Surrender to the Feminine is the simplicity of surrendering to what is next without imposition of rational controls, codes, systems, beliefs, doctrines, expectations and judgments. It’s relaxation into what is ‘So-ness’ of existence.” Since all souls are really feminine in the face of the Divine, it is this honoring that Priestesses and Priests learn within themselves and can then surrender to in the spaciousness of others.
The Grail we must search for is the key that allows a Presence of the sacred invisibility that has been Woman and the unlocking that will allow Man to soften into his own femaleness. The seeds of our salvation are the Priestesses who stand for who they are⏤the Feminine in all her manifestations⏤and the Priests who show up in these ‘forbidden’ inner sanctums that nurture them, all embodied in One. During a gathering with a Yaqui medicine man, I asked how we could bring our men to release their fear of their own Feminine Selves and Woman. In a roundabout way he answered me. He told me of the Moon Dance that revered the Feminine and the Sun Dance that honored the Masculine. He related how in just a short time the two would be held simultaneously rather than separately. Then, he looked at me, pinched his own bare nipples and said, “There will be no sacrifice.”
The only sacrifice is the one we have mistakenly made, the segregation of our equally powerful sides. The disowning of the Feminine Spirit and the balance it brings to its Masculine counterpart is what is bringing the Web of Life to her knees. The Tao says, “When opposites no longer damage each other, both are benefited through the Tao. Therefore, the wise identify the opposites as one, and set an example for the World.”
This is our work.
By Our Own Trails
I was alone walking up Smith Ravine Road enjoying the wind through the tall pines, having parked my car at the turn-off to the road. The hiker’s guidebook had said that the trail would be intersected by private property, but the trail would pick up again about two hundred feet above it. There the fenced property was in front of me, just as the book had said, with a sign that distinctly said “Keep Out!” and some even lesser friendly remarks underneath that. From where I stood, I tried to determine where the path started again. But it was beyond my sight. I started to climb the steep embankment thinking there was a slight trampling of the grass that may pass as the path, but decided that wasn’t it and slid my way back down to the road. Disappointed, I started to walk back toward where I had come, when I did see a well-traveled trail. I crossed over to it and followed it for some time as it got smaller and smaller until it stopped completely. Again feeling hindered in my progress, I retraced my steps and headed toward my car when I spotted another track that seemed to head in the right direction. Picking up an interesting looking piece of driftwood to take home, I followed it and it, too, disappeared into the woods.
We will get to a point in this Pilgrimage Home where we make every attempt to find the trail. We even bring trophies back that indicate that we have been on the Search. But the trail only leads so far and then, peters out into the Wilderness. From there we must blaze our own trails. No one else’s will do.
Perhaps it will one day lead us to the Grand Canyon. If it does, we can sit on the edge and feel a certain magnificence in the realization that we are tiny particles revolving in the whirlwind of time. We can know that just as grains of sand built the Grand Canyon, collectively we are the very nucleus that vibrates Life’s form while the Divine swirls Eternity.
[1] Satya Sai Baba was a present-day Indian saint believed to be the reincarnation of Sai Baba of Shirdi who died in 1918. Satya Sai Baba displayed such siddhis or miracle powers as healing, ESP and the ability to manifest objects out of thin air. He was a man of deep compassion and God-knowledge who used his gifts in service to humanity. The majority of the time he resided at his ashram Prasanti Nilayam located northeast of Bangalore in India. He passed out of this world in 2011.
[2] The Dromenon is an ancient European maze, much used by the Celtic Druids as a walking meditation and initiatory practice. Dromenon comes from the words Dru meaning Gate and Neme meaning Heaven. As Initiates, walk the twists and turns of the Dromenon it takes them to the center, and into the core of their existence. Dowsers measuring the auras of walkers prior to entering the Dromenon and after exiting, note a large increase in the expansion of the walkers’ auras after their exit.
[3] Note: The reader may learn more about tonglen from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche.
[i] “Sunbeams” column. The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas, November 1998. 48.
[ii] Walker. The Secrets of the Tarot. 130–131.
[iii] Ibid. 134.
[iv] Directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Grand Canyon. Twentieth Century Fox, 1991.
[v] Regina Sara Ryan. The Woman Awake: Feminine Wisdom for Spiritual Life. Prescott, Arizona: Hohm Press, 1998. 356.
[vi] Interview with Regina Sara Ryan, March 11, 1999.
[vii] Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1989. 219–220.
All events described in this book are true. Some of the names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
Bio
Carla Woody is a spiritual mentor, writer and visual artist. She is the founder of Kenosis, an organization based in Prescott, Arizona, supporting human potential since 1999 through life enhancement coaching, retreats and spiritual travel programs working with Indigenous leaders and healers in the US, Mexico, Central and South America. In 2007 she founded Kenosis Spirit Keepers, a volunteer-run 501(c)3 nonprofit organization to help preserve Indigenous traditions threatened with decimation.
Table of Contents
Part I. THE NATURE OF THE JOURNEY
Chapter Two: Awakening to Consciousness
Part II. INVOLUTION
Chapter Three: Cultivating Mindfulness
Chapter Four: The Masks We Wear
Chapter Five: Things Buried Deep and Tended Well
Chapter Six: Bootcamp for the Soul
Part III. EVOLUTION
Chapter Seven: The Seasons of Our Times
Chapter Eight: Staying in the Field
Chapter Nine: The Un-Namable Sacred
Chapter Ten: The Pilgrimage Home
Permissions: The author has given great effort to locate copyright holders of any material other than her own that have been quoted in this book, and regrets if any have been inadvertently overlooked.
Calling Our Spirits Home: Gateways to Full Consciousness
Copyright 1999 by Carla Woody. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be directed to: Kenosis Press, P.O. Box 10441, Prescott, AZ 86304, info@kenosis.net.
Also by Carla Woody:
Standing Stark: The Willingness to Engage. Read in Illumination Book Chapters.
Portals to the Vision Serpent. Coming soon to Illumination Book Chapters.
