An Open Letter to My Tribe

Let us speak for a moment of the choir to whom we are preaching:  Somewhere along the way, we stumbled onto something that tickled our insides in that magical way that only ontological truth can -- whether it was Castaneda or Ram Dass, Lao Tsu or LSD, something stirred, and we found ourselves suddenly seeking.  We worked our way through the requisite spiritual curriculum, dabbling in Watts and Watson, McKenna and Melchizidek, Gurdjieff, Arguelles, Pinchbeck and Braden. 

We delved deeply into the realms of psychedelic exploration from, if not every which way, at least a great big bunch of ‘em: we sipped of the sacred vine, we engaged the wisdom of the mushroom, we navigated through our astonishment in the presence of the machine elves.  And even now, we dance naked on the Playa, we Ujayi breathe our way into temporary states of Samadhi, we observe sensations, retain our seed, douse our insides with ORMUS, Shilajit and Reishi spores; we speak the same language, fluently, and yet, we're still bound by the very same third dimensional shackles as those who sleep, oblivious to the magical multidimensional wonders that we know, and so soon will they, as they are we, just as you are me. 

"I have no choice but to stay present because the future's too horrifying and the past is too embarrassing."  --James Mathers 

And while Jimmy's words are woven with wisdom, and the present moment is all there is, it is in the prickly arms of this embarrassment that our transformative magic lies.   

It's precisely our fear of looking stupid, foolish and ugly that keeps us from evolving our consciousnesses as quickly as the moment now requires. Our self-consciousness is our current Permian event; our pride, our potential extinction.  Now, more than ever, we must do our work -- the grueling, messy, scary kind that's anything but the fluff of New Age magical mind-stuff, of intending sun-drenched sparkles and rainbow-speckled dolphin pods.  

I'm talking about the real-deal, down deep n' dirty, in the trenches of our darkest, ickiest, ouchiest wounds sort of inner excavation that doesn't brandish the glossy sheen of positive thinking, empowered languaging, fun fur, free love, or fire dancing, all of which have their place, and still aren't any sort of replacement for the often agonizing unearthing of core patterning that keeps us from truly loving ourselves, truly loving each other, and showing up as our biggest, brightest most authentic selves, in service to each other and the planet. 

I don't care how much Chi Gong you practice, how much Sanskrit you memorize, how much peyote you keep down or how closely you follow the Thirteen Moon calendar.  It's our inner work that's going to bring about the experiential shifts for which we are jonesing, and The Shift we are now being called to integrate and to embody. 

We, of Unity Consciousness and expanded minds, of wide open hearts, visionary perspective, art and magic, we must pave the way for our others in the deliberate unraveling of our self-consciousness.  Let us trip, slip, fumble and bumble our way to this mass awakening that is so near, that is here, crouching behind that oak tree, smiling, waiting for us to cut the crap, to get real, and to move up and out of our wounding so that we can float higher, higher and higher still on the collective clouds of our knowingness, our limitlessness and our every biggest, brightest imagining.

Image by Vlad Nikitin, courtesy of Creative Commons license.