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Prayer for You
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Seven Unsung Wonders of the World
according to Rob Brezsny(Please note: When I recommend books as I do below, it's only because I believe in their usefulness for you. I'm not advertising them.) 1. LUCID DREAMS. The lucid dream is the True Grail. It's an ecstatic gratification of the seemingly impossible quest to be both awake and asleep simultaneously. At the pregnant moment when your conscious mind manages, against all odds, to be born inside the dream stream, you're in the best of both worlds. All the supercharged sensations and thrillingly surreal alchemy of the astral realm are available as usual, but you can also respond to events with concentrated bursts of willpower imbued with noble intention. Further clues: Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge The Lucidity Institute's Web site 2. THE TAROT. Because of its appropriation by fortune-tellers and New Age airheads (almost as sad as the theft of Christ by the fundamentalist Christians), the Tarot remains one of the world's most unsung holy texts. Anyone who has delved into its mysteries has discovered that its wisdom is richer and more inexhaustible than the Bible, Upanishads, and Koran combined. Further clues: Paul Foster Case's book, The Tarot, and his organization's Web site. I'm not a fan of Aleister Crowley, but the most beautiful and symbolically accurate Tarot deck, in my opinion, is the one designed by Frieda Harris under the counsel of Crowley. It's called the Aleister Crowley Thoth Tarot Deck. 3. MENSTRUATION. I don't mean to downplay the discomfort that many women experience during their time of the month. Our culture's deranged addiction to a hammering rhythm that pays little homage to natural cycles ensures that menstruators are always out of step. In a well-balanced world, though, menstrual huts and moon lodges would be a fixture in every community. Everyone, both men and women, would enjoy at least four days a month when there was no business as usual: when we could bask in the healing grace of eternal time. The physical and emotional changes proffered by menstruation would not be resisted and denied, but would be a springboard to drug-free shamanic travel -- excursions to the other side of the veil that would revitalize the soul. Further clues: Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World by Judy Grahn The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light by William Irwin Thompson The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove 4. THE NEW, IMPROVED GOLDEN RULE. The old formula goes like this: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's a noble sentiment, yes, but also a bit selfish. It implies that the motivation for being nice to people is so they'll return the favor or recognize you for your praiseworthy kindness. Compare it with this: Commit anonymous acts of generosity for people who can never repay you. In my opinion, that's an even more golden Golden Rule. COROLLARY: THE SECRET HELPERS AMONG US, the anonymous saints and adepts of love, who perform more valuable service than all the well-lauded popes, philanthropists, and media heroes combined. For all we know, they are disguised as fourth-grade teachers and pet shampooers and television repairmen. (Note: That publicity hound Mother Teresa was not one of them. See Christopher Hitchens' expose, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.) Further clues: The Bible, Hebrews 13:2: "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." 5. SEX-POSITIVE FEMINISTS. They're the lascivious revolutionaries who know that the craftiest way to bring about the extinction of the Stinky Old Boy Network (also known as the "patriarchy") is to nurture the wild mind through erotic play unmediated by the dour superego. All hail Queen Susie Bright, the Supreme Genius leading this genre. Further clues: Susie Bright's Web site Books by Susie Bright: Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression Susie Bright's Sexual State of the Union Sexwise Editor, Best American Erotica 2001 6. THE MYSTERIOUS NOT-ALWAYS-VISIBLE BEINGS WITH WHOM WE SHARE THIS PLANET. Virtually every culture before ours has known of a class of beings that are both physical and spiritual, and yet not quite either. They have been called by different names in various places, including faeries, nymphs, satyrs, gnomes, daimons, elementals, and djinns. The ascendancy of materialistic science drove them out of sight for two centuries, but in recent decades they have begun returning to our awareness in the guise of aliens and angels. Welcome back, friends! We missed you. Further clues: Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality: Understanding Otherworldly Encounters, a tenderly shattering book that is sadly out of print. Excerpts from the book can be found here and here: http://www.deoxy.org/p_daimon.htm http://www.deoxy.org/soulbody.htm COROLLARY: CROP CIRCLES. The mass media engage in so much aberrant behavior, it's hard to decide which of their omissions and perversions are most egregious. But at the top of the list is their bizarre refusal to devote even a ten-second soundbite now and then to the astounding global outbreak of crop circles. These sculptures, which appear overnight in growing crops, are fantastic mysteries of the first order. Some are undoubtedly hoaxes committed by intrepid human jokesters trudging around farmers' fields from 1 to 5 a.m. with boards and ropes. But the intricate perfection and mathematical precision of many others are difficult to attribute to such crude, hurried efforts. Further clues: http://www.angelfire.com/wa/dsmUFO/cropcircles.html Mysterious Lights and Crop Circles, by Linda Moulton Howe excerpt here Crop Circles, by Lucy Pringle Article, pictures, and interviews Pictures 7. THE FANTASY OF APOCALYPSE. The looming threat of the end of the world in a thousand ways, from ozone depletion to viral pandemics to stolen Russian nukes to a comet making a direct hit, serves us well: because more than any other wonder of the world, it commands us to make concrete the terrifyingly beautiful truth that we are all one. Further clues: This is an excerpt from Rob Brezsny's The Televisionary Oracle The apocalypse has been our totem. It has been the ultimately powerful and sacred taboo, the most terrible and the most valuable thing, the superhuman profanity on which all life depended and against which all values were tested. Shadowing every one of our personal actions, the apocalypse has been the fascinating blasphemy that wouldn't shut up unless we were all very, very good. We've fallen down before it, believing in it more fiercely than any other secret. We've agreed to be possessed by it, to be haunted by its image above all other images. Nothing else has had more deadly life. We've loved the apocalypse because it has been the most supernatural nightmare in the world, the only nightmare that has ever threatened to change all life on Earth instantly and forever. It's the dark and precious god, the promise of a revelation that would redefine the meaning of all history. And yet how few of us have ever stood next to the magic body of a nuclear bomb or a vial of anthrax, breathed in its smell, touched it, communed with its actual life? How few of us have actually seen any of the hundreds of species that are going extinct at a rate unmatched since the demise of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago? How few of us have actually measured the shrinking ozone layer or seen the rapidly melting ice of Antarctica as greenhouse gases warm the Earth? The presence of these things is rumor and mystery to most of us, like Christ and flying saucers. We hear stories. At night our dreams have turned the apocalypse into the philosopher's stone, the ark of the covenant, the alchemical gold, the magic body of the messiah, the potent drug from the beginning of the world, the ecstatic and shocking moment of religious conversion. In our deepest darkest juices we have been alive to its divinity, as we are alive to any god that offers the brilliant and blinding flash of irreversible illumination. We have believed in the apocalypse because it has seemed to reveal what it is to melt back into the dangerous light that's as pure as the sun. Let's call the apocalypse a love that has been too big for us to understand until now. Let's say it has been the raging creative life of a cleansing disease that has wanted to cure us so it didn't have to kill us. Let's say it has been the last judgment that promises not to come true if we can figure out what it means. And we have figured out what it means. It's our apocalypse. We're the ones who made it, all of us. We've loved this apocalypse so much we imagined it could happen. We created this apocalypse so hard that it came alive and possessed us. We turned the apocalypse into our bodies; we gave messages to chemicals in our brains to make dangerous images of the apocalypse, messages to nurture and worship and flash those images through our nerves. The apocalypse has been the most beloved thing to us, because as we've all together imagined it our brains have been burned with the true hallucination that we are all one body. When we've fantasized the apocalypse returning us all to the primal ooze, we've remembered that you and I are made of the same stuff. The apocalypse has freed us to imagine that we all live and die together. Until now, we have needed the apocalypse. Until now, we have needed the apocalypse because only the tease of the biggest, most original sin could heal us. The apocalypse has been a blind, a fake, a trick memory we're sending ourselves from the future that has shocked us better than all the anti-Christs and AIDS and UFOs. So bless the fear, beauty and truth fans. Praise the danger. Let the great ugly power fascinate us all one last time, fix our terror so precisely that we become one potently concentrated ferocious imagination, a single guerrilla meditator casting an irreversible spell to bind the great Satan apocalypse. There will be no apocalypse. |
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© 1995-2008 -- Rob Brezsny. All rights reserved
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