A hectic weekend at my little cottage and a wonderful example of how we all vibrate to each other. I was chasing links to Armageddon and reliving lots of dark thoughts from my childhood. My poor Mother spent her whole life trying to find forgiveness from God when as far as I could tell she never did anything that needed his forgiveness. That hellfire and brimstone talk from "saved" preachers like Billy Graham and now his son Trent Graham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Graham#Criticism who is quoted:
"The Bible tells us that God loves us and He cares for us. He's provided a way for us to be with Him in heaven, and that's through faith in his Son, Jesus Christ."(CNN, April 18, 2007)
"The god of Islam is not the same God of the Christian or the Judeo-Christian faith. It is a different god, and I believe Islam is a very evil and a very wicked religion."[1]
"We need to confess our sins to God, asking for forgiveness as a nation and seek his wisdom in what we should do in the days to come, especially the president."(CNN, September 14, 2001)
"I believe that God created one man and one woman. He gave sex to us, God did, and sex is to be enjoyed and is to be used within the bounds that God created . . . In sexual behavior outside the parameters that God created, we're at high risk, and we're seeing the evidence of this with HIV/AIDS. We're outside of these parameters, and we have a huge global problem now."[5]
"And I think we're going to have to use every—and I hate to say it, hellish weapon in our inventory, if need be, to defeat these [terrorists]. But let's use the weapons we have, the weapons of mass destruction if need be and destroy the enemy."(CNN, September 14, 2001)
I spent this weekend caught up in the old fight inside, was I evil, because I dared to question this God, Jehovah, who demanded things like "Blood Covenants"
Decades ago, I saw a metaphysical movie that wonderfully illustrates the alchemical power of love. In "The Enchanted Cottage," a homely, self-effacing maid and a blind, crippled war hero fall in love. She blossoms into an attractive, self-confident woman and he into a charming, handsome country gentleman, both happier than ever before.
Oliver and Laura ascribe their transformation to the legendary enchanted cottage, but one day, its spell is broken by the pitying comments of people who see them as ugly and broken. The magic disappears until a magnificent tone poem played on piano by a composer friend opens their eyes to the true alchemy in every life: the beauty and music of love.
Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn't it? Yet this is exactly what happens in romantic love. The world is suddenly beautiful, and we laugh open-heartedly in joy, walking on air. In Buddhist psychology, this is a state of "attraction." Its opposite, "aversion," disenchants us from love.
Life is precisely what we make of it, isn't it? Love resides within each heart, waiting to be recognized as the transformer that it is: an infinitely powerful vibrational expression of the One Word, literally the "uni-verse." This transcendent viewpoint, with its singular quality of attraction, makes it easy to love without conditions or expectations, and to forgive and forget what is said and done by others, if we so choose. Love, a tone poem, makes life beautiful and harmonious.
My still, small voice has always claimed this, so I am delighted to share with you some recent proof of it. According to the HeartMath Institute, the higher frequency and shorter wavelength of love spirals through the strands of our DNA and, by interlacing more amino acid "coding" sites, awakens us to who we are meant to be and really are. Not only does love raise our frequencies of vibration, by resonance it attracts to us more light. We are healed and made whole by the musical vibrations of love, which transport us into the divine and draw the divine into us.
To me, the secret of the "en-chanted" cottage is that each of us is building one of our own with the quantum energies of thought, word and deed.
So, what is the house of your soul like? What mottois written on your front door, and does it need to be rephrased? Have you swept the cobwebs from each nook and cranny? Perhaps it's time to clear away what does not belong and to place fresh flowers on each table, bringing joy to yourself and all others who enter in.
But what do we do when a guest is unkind and leaves us feeling angry or hurt? Finding myself in just this position recently, I asked the still, small voice of my soul for insight and was told that no matter what the cause, discord's only healer is sympathy and love; giving these to everyone disentangles us from the anger, misperception and separation that confuse our minds and blur the truth.
Just as in "The Enchanted Cottage," keeping the doors to your heart open and clear will allow the love in the Light to heal and transform you with its magic. None of us can run or hide from the mirrors in our houses, as they exist for our benefit. Rather, let us be receptive to everything, excluding nothing and pulling every experience into our "core star," or soul, as energy healer and atmospheric scientist Barbara Brennan advises.
This is how to "walk between the worlds," teaches spiritual leader Gregg Braden: by integrating All That Is, we transcend duality and become whole through the union of opposites.
Let us all "enchant" our cottages with love to create a bright new world on Earth. What better plan for peace, already settling so deeply across our love-resonant planet!
Judith Pennington is an internationally published writer and author of The Voice of the Soul: A Journey into Wisdom and the Physics of God, a critically acclaimed book on the step-by-step evolution of the soul and consciousness. Visit her website, www.eaglelife.com, to sign up for her free e-newsletter and paid-for e-zine, OneWorld, whose open debut issue includes a fascinating exclusive interview with Barbara Brennan on the stages of our expansion into higher consciousness.
Keep the doorways to your heart open, look around you today and observe the way love paints the pictures of your enchanted world -
And here is the original trailer for the 1945 movie "the Enchanted Cottage"
Alchemists are often characterized in modern times as bumbling would-be wizards at best, greedy charlatans at worst. They’re portrayed as fumbling hopelessly in cluttered laboratories, unenlightened madmen trying to turn lead into gold. The reality is more complex, of course.
Alchemists were up to plenty of things, many of them having to do with relating to the natural world—and understanding its processes of transformation and transmutation—in philosophical and spiritual dimensions that transcended traditional religious thinking, both Christian and pagan, and preceded modern scientific thought. The whole “lead into gold” thing was but the most lucrative of the alchemical —or hermetic—practices in the eyes of the monarchs and rulers. Alchemy’s material prima as Peter Lamborn Wilson writes in the recent collection Green Hermeticism: Alchemy and Ecology, “can be found ‘on any dung hill.’ Hermeticism changes shit into gold.” It’s an image memorably realized in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain wherein the thief character takes a dump in a fancy bucket, and Jodorowsky, playing an alchemist, distills those fresh turds into a hefty chunk of golden bling.
Although this is about gardening, I think it belongs under spirituality. And today is Good Friday, the day they crucified Jesus, and on Sunday he rose from the dead. And Mary Magdalene found him in a garden, and at first she mistook him for the gardener.
Title: 'Mary Magdalene Approaching the Tomb'
Artist: Gian Girolamo Savoldo
Date: 1535-40
Incident shown: Mary and the other women (not shown by the painter) approach the tomb on Easter Sunday morning, at dawn. They have brought the spices and perfumed ointment with which they will anoint the body of Jesus. But Jesus' body is gone. Mary's grief and confusion overcome her, and she weeps. Then she hears a sound behind her, and turns to look.
Bible reference: John 20:11-16
Comment: Here's the interesting thing. It is very early in the morning, and at the left of the picture dawn is breaking over the horizon. But a much stronger light seems to be coming from behind Mary's left shoulder, lighting up her whole body. Her cloak is shimmering - Savoldo suggests the light behind her is stronger than even the light of the sun - and of course the viewer knows that this light is Jesus, resurrected.
http://www.danbrown.com/media/magdalene.html
The Gospels place her at the crucifixion, watching from a distance. She might have remained a minor character in the story, except that the Bible says she was the first witness to Jesus's resurrection -- therefore a critical figure in the Easter story.
In John (20:16), the weeping Magdalene mistakes Him for the gardener. "Jesus saith unto her, 'Mary.' She turned herself and saith unto Him, 'Rabboni,' which is to say, Master." But after telling the disciples what she has seen, she's never mentioned again in the Scriptures.
The pure wonderful joy of planting a seed and watching it take form and life and then blossom.
And know, without a doubt that nothing ever dies. Ever.
Synchronicity is increasing exponentially in my life. At times I feel magical as if I am a magician and control the music of my life. It feels good.
When I was a very young child I had a dream of water flowing down the drain and someone speaking to me and telling me it was "the coriolis effect", remember this. I can't tell you how this has stayed bright and shining in the fore front of my brain. Never fading after all these years, the memory is clear and intense. I have watched countless swirling hurricanes on radars swirling with the energies of enormous power. New research shows that with the spin of the coriolis effect the hurricane eye becomes a perfect pentagram. Magic at work.
And tonight I follow links surfing along to discover this and find magic and my coriolis effect -
Born in Geneva , Switzerland in 1962. As early as 9 years old, Mr. Haramein was already developing the basis for a hyperdimensional theory of everything he called the "Holofractographic Universe." This Unified Field Theory was developed based on a specific geometric array which he has found to be fundamental to creation. This theory has now been presented to the scientific community, and his scientific papers will soon be followed by a DVD and a book for the layman entitled "Crossing the Event Horizon." E. A. Rauscher, Ph.D. (Nuclear Physics and Engineering, University of California at Berkeley). Dr. Rauscher was a nuclear scientist and researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at Stanford Research Institute, Professor of Physics at John F. Kennedy University of California, research consultant to NASA (space shuttle program) and the U.S. Navy. Dr. Rauscher served on the Congressional OTA Advisory Committee, and has been Delegate and advisor to the United Nations.
In this extraordinary DVD presentation, filmed live, Nassim will take you on a fantastic journey through the history of the evolution of humanity, pointing out inconsistencies in our concepts of physics and the rectification necessary to produce a true Unification process - one that unifies the four forces of nature, biological evolution, and even the occurrence of consciousness. Astonishingly, Nassim also demonstrates that this new all-encompassing theory seems to have parallels with ancient codes left in documents and colossal monuments around the world. http://www.crossingtheeventhorizon.com/ http://www.theresonanceproject.org
The Temporary Triumph of the Light before its Obscuration
Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week. Holy Week recounts a complex and meaningful series of mythic events which lead to the Resurrection on Easter Day. Palm Sunday represents a preparation, a setting up, for the Resurrection to occur. As Gnostics we may differ from the mainstream in our interpretation of these events, as to whether they are literal history or strictly symbolic, or something in between. What is important for us to focus on is that these events recount an interior experience of archetypal dimensions. It does not matter if the events of Holy Week are historical or purely mythical; they have a deep and archetypal meaning to the Gnostic soul. The series of events in Holy Week, beginning with Palm Sunday, describe a process of our own apotheosis and psychological transformation. Blind belief in historical events is not going to transform us; we must cultivate an experience of this archetypal reality. For this reason we celebrate Palm Sunday not as a commemoration of an historical event but as an archetypal mystery and another step in the process of psychological and spiritual transformation.
This story is one of the most Paradoxical in the New Testament, and for that reason, one of profound, personal meaning for the Gnostic. The Gospel story tells of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. He rides upon the colt of an ass, a donkey, just as Mary, his mother, rode a donkey into Bethlehem. People lay garments in his path and wave palm branches in celebration. The Revelation of St. John the Divine describes a contrasting image of an archetypal figure on a white horse. “...and behold a white horse, and He that sat upon him was called Faithful and True.” We can contrast the archetypal reality of the Saviour upon a white horse with the humble figure of Jesus riding on a donkey. The people who cheered Jesus in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem seem to have seen beyond the humble appearance to see the archetypal reality of Jesus. Yet this insight is short-lived, for some of these same people later yelled “crucify him;” They were expecting a worldly and terrestrial king who would throw off the yoke of Roman rule. And so the Light triumphs only for a brief time before it is obscured by the archons of the world. Much has been written concerning the political forces and machinations that may have led to the crucifixion of Jesus, yet this is not really the concern of the Gnostic. Our concern is with what this contrasting of archetypal and terrestrial images, of spiritual insight and worldly expectation, might mean to us in our present situation as Gnostics in the world. The Gnosis is not and will never be a political movement, for it transcends any such boundaries to penetrate to the very core of human experience and consciousness.
What these contrasting images can mean to us is both deeply personal and cosmic in scope. The story of Palm Sunday can stimulate the recognition that there exists a royal archetypal reality behind the earthly reality of our own lives. Sometimes it shines through onto our worldly stage of existence -- we have our moment of glory -- but often it is obscured in this material world. We often suffer revilement and condemnation when we do not meet others worldly expectations. The palm branches that we receive on Palm Sunday might, therefore, represent the recognition of our own and each other’s triumphal light and royal spiritual heritage.
The triumph of the Light before its obscuration is an expression of the divine, royal Selfhood within each one of us, that is so powerfully obscured by mundane and conventional reality. There are times when we want so badly for that light to shine out of us, for it to be recognized by the world. When the only vehicle for expression is the ego-personality our strivings to be seen are usually in vain. Personality actually comes from the Greek “persona” meaning “mask.” While in this terrestrial incarnation, we are like the Count of Monte Cristo in The Man in the Iron Mask; our behavioral gyrations and efforts to have others recognize our light only serve to convince them that we are egotists, madmen or charlatans. Often we create a false glamour that is not our true Self; we put on an entertaining song and dance act; we live a lie and shine forth a false light: or we simply forget about our light and live our lives as if it had never been.
When we are not anxiously attempting to show forth our light, we are often acting in fear of the consequences of letting our light shine. We either turn down our light or turn it off completely, so that we might pass unseen through this world. Yet, “Within a man of light, there is light, and he lighteth up the whole word. If he does not shine, he is darkness.” This is the sham, the cover up, that we are either parading a false light or hiding our light beneath a bushel. The issues are not safety or creative self-expression, the core issues are authenticity and consciousness. We must be conscious of who we really are as spiritual beings and not let either fear or love of the world pervert or hide the authenticity of our own true Self. We must not let ego-inflation or an arrogant and false playing down of ourselves deflect us from the authentic role we have in the divine archetypal drama behind the background of our lives. Just as Gandalf and Strider, in the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein, remain conscious of their spiritual and royal origins and destiny while they pass behind the scenes in obscurity until the time that they must uncloak themselves to the dark powers of the world, so must we be conscious in our spiritual work, neither shirking our spiritual destiny nor running after the accolades of the world. Our spiritual light can never really be seen in this world, for the eyes of the world cannot see it. “The images are manifest to man, but the light in them remains concealed in the image of the light of the Father.” (The Gospel of Thomas) If we live our spiritual lives consciously and authentically we will be hid in that Light whatever befalls us in our mundane lives.
On the mythological and archetypal level of reality , we have our eternal and real parts to play out. Behind the appearances and scenes of our mundane lives, we participate in a mystical and archetypal play of cosmic dimensions. Occasionally we recognize each other for the parts we play in the divine drama, yet even beyond this, we are archetypal and royal beings with the capacity to enter that realm of consciousness where we are flames of the Divine Light dwelling together in love and unity, embracing and merging without physical touching or separation of flesh. It is when we do not recognize or we forget our true royal Selfhood, when we are lacking in self-esteem and fearful, that we have problems with others. To recognize our own light we must recognize it in others. We must begin the process of Holy Week by seeing through appearances to the background of spiritual and archetypal reality within ourselves and others. When we have and can hold onto this insight and not let it be obscured by worldly expectations, then we will know even as we are known; we will recognize the pearl whether it is anointed with balsam oil or cast into the mud.
Yet this recognition brings with it a great sorrow. It is as if we, as some extra-terrestrial explorers, had to leave some of our closest kin upon some far-flung outpost of the universe until we could return for them. When we returned for them they did not remember that they were alien to this world or that they were kin to another race. All our efforts to remind them brought criticism, scorn or ridicule. Sometimes, at their hands, we were even put to death. This is not to be taken literally but simply as another story by which we may grasp the existential and paradoxical reality of our worldly existence. By remembering who we are and becoming authentically translucent to that reality, we can serve to remind others of who they are and from whence they have originated as well.
The message of Palm Sunday is the recognition that we can become authentically translucent to our interior light of being, which, shining outward, allows us to see through the worldly and temporal reality to the eternal things that are truly real. In the collect for Palm Sunday the Archetypal Self is invoked as Aleph the First and Tav the Last, the beginning and the end, another paradox. In the same paradoxical fashion this translucency to the light is symbolized in the beginning and ending of our terrestrial life. At the moment of birth and the moment of death, it is reported that the skin takes on a strange translucency, as if to give visibility to an invisible and interior light. The young and the old are also closer to the archetypal reality. The old have had a whole lifetime to remind them, the young have not had as much time to forget. The traditional hymn for Palm Sunday includes the refrain “To whom the lips of children made loud hosannas ring.” Children often recognize the archetypal reality of themselves and others, they have not had as much time to forget the spiritual and imaginative dimension of life. The world and other people are more translucent to them. For this reason, those who are awakened to Gnostic insight are sometimes referred to as “little ones.” So we by becoming more authentically translucent to the light within may become more like “little ones.” We can see through the false facade of the world; we can see the archetypal dramas played out; we can see the true royal Selfhood in all of us; we can know ourselves as part of a greater consciousness, who is truly “King of kings and Lord of lords, who is called Faithful and True.”
-- Rev. Steven Marshall
I have discussed the film Knowing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) with many people since it premiered March 20, 2009. Their reactions varied. As most of these people are into metaphysics, and on an intellectual level 'know' we are evolving into higher consciousness, I was surprised by their emotional reactions to the end of the film, the sadness it elicited in them while blowing off the greater message: Rebirth does not occur without total destruction - the fate of reality is such.
If you don't get 'it' at the soul level - that all is projected illusion on a screen, you may never get it. You may talk the talk, but are not programmed to understand the totality of reality. I know we all have the right to empathize with a film, and what the characters are going through, but that's in the 'moment' and should give way to the greater messages, if there are any.
Some people were triggered by the streaming coded messages in the film - while others went to their emotional bodies and became greatly saddened at the end when John (Nicolas Cage) watched his son Caleb, 9, go off on the crystal UFO with the creators. As John falls to the ground, rain pouring down on him, he understands determinism -- it is all meant to happen -- and all will be destroyed by a CME - Coronal mass ejection. On the other hand, it is his son, Caleb, through sign language, who signs, "You and me ... together forever." It's all just experience to be recycled once again in a new script.
This was reminiscent of the final scenes of Taken (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taken_(mini_series) when Allie, 9, knows she must leave her parents - disappearing in a stream of light as she goes off in a UFO with the aliens who created her. Lisa and Charlie Keys, her parents, fall to the earth/ground in grief. Through her tears, Lisa notices something on the ground. It is the necklace with a star she had given Allie - a sign to her that Allie will return one day. The message is not about returning here, but being Taken there as our roles here will soon end.
In both films, we see breathtaking ships as the children leave apparently unafraid and knowing their destinies await. It is the creators who return to move consciousness to the next level in both films. We exist in the hourglass (our class) of time where the children hold the keys to the next reality. Children ... your inner child ... your emotional body or innocence ... letting go and moving on. When you are ready ... you will know. http://www.crystalinks.com/innerchild.html
The ejected material is a plasma consisting primarily of electrons and protons (in addition to small quantities of heavier elements such as helium, oxygen, and iron), plus the entraining coronal magnetic field. (wonderful metaphor I think)
Ellie proposes that we are all just computer code in a holographic universe here to work out some code and then move on.
I agree that we are all in some training, and the training is reaching it's climax. The hard stuff is happening a lot. That's why now more than ever we need to find our own inner light like the children know. She's right the children have known all along.
And then I ran across this wonderful blog, http://surfingthetao.com/
