Trusting What You FEEL

Posted on May 25, 2011 by Brad Silberberg
Quartz Crystal

Hold a quartz crystal and trust what you FEEL.

We got an email from a stranger about our TC Energy carafes page on our website.  The woman commented that she was thinking of buying one and had found our site in a websearch.  She wrote that our site had more information about the sacred geometry vessels than she had seen elsewhere and thanked us for putting it out there.  She also had a question: Our link to the movie “Water- The Great Mystery” now led to a page that said the video was no longer available.  The woman wanted to know if we knew where she could buy a copy or view it elsewhere.  When I tried the link myself, the landing page literally said, “This video does not exist”.  As often happens for me when I web-surf for metaphysical, natural healing, or spiritual info, when I typed in the name of the water video into a search engine, one of the hits was a “debunker” site.

 I’m always curious as to what these folks have to say about spiritual, healing, or metaphysical things and have learned to read their words dispassionately instead of getting mad and yelling at them through the computer screen.  I’m willing to listen to their point of view to understand where they’re coming from.  This time it was a white woman in Africa who calls herself “Skeptic Detective”.  She was calling into question new research in the movie on water’s ability to “remember”, referring to it as “pseudoscience”.  She also bashed Dr. Emoto and his work, calling it “highly interpretive and open to bias”, suggesting that it should be entirely discounted.

 While I agree that Dr. Emoto’s work with exposing water to different spoken or written words and freezing it may not hold up to strict scientific study criteria, (Does EVERY drop of water that was sent love look that pretty when frozen, or is he just showing us the best photos?) it does point to matter’s reactivity to our consciousness, a point increasingly shown through experiments in the field of Quantum Physics.  No, it wasn’t her picking on Dr. Emoto’s ground breaking work that really got me this time, it was when she went on to refer to Ch’i and life-force energy as “mythical” and wrote that “the efficacy of homeopathy and acupuncture have no basis in reality”.  She spouted the dangers of listening to “authority figures” and yet mostly quoted other people.  None of what she wrote was based on her own experience.  I had to laugh.

 Now this lady describes her qualifications on her webpage as: “…working mom, the editor of a leading online African IT news site.  With a growing sense of wonder at the beauty and simplicity of the natural world she tries to keep her eyes (and her keyboard) firmly targeted on the truth.  Angela dedicates most of her free time to smacking quacks, debunking chain e-mails and exposing myths.  Whenever possible she pursues nerdy activities such as reading and playing role-playing games”.  Yep, I thought, that makes her an authority all right!  I wondered how many lab experiments she had ever done and if she belonged to the African Role Playing Working Moms Water Investigation Society, but what really hit me was if she had ever paid any real attention to that natural world around her.  I was also struck by the fact that much of what is now part of our culture’s “science” would in times long past have been referred to as fantasy or heresy.  Did electricity exist before people knew of it as the motive force that runs much of our modern world?  Of course it did.

 I once saw an IMAX movie about elephants.  There had been a terrible drought on the game preserve and the herd was on the move looking for water.  At one point, they came across the skeleton of a dead elephant.  Several of the elephants from the herd circled around the bones and gently touched them here and there with their trunks.  As I watched in awe, the voice-over said, “Scientists don’t know why the elephants do this…”  How stupid those scientists are, I thought.  I had felt the retained patterns of energy and consciousness in the teeth and bones of different animals (Including my own and my brothers’ baby teeth—Yes, my mom had saved them.) and I knew what the elephants were up to.  They were checking to see whose bones they were, mourning, and saying goodbye.  I could never prove this, but I knew it implicitly to be so.  I have seen elephants in the wild and they are tremendously loving beings.  I saw and felt it.  Elephants move the bones of their kin to “graveyards”.  They bury their dead.

 What really makes me wonder about the self-appointed “debunkers” is how we as a society have largely come to no longer rely on our own senses and personal experience of the natural world.  We spout facts and repeat “wisdom” we have read or heard without question.  We continue to stuff our bodies full of chemicals that make us feel sicker because someone else told us to.  We take the word of “scientists” who sometimes manipulate the facts to match their hypothesis, myopically look at only the material aspects of matter (like Western or Allopathic medicine) or turn out eventually to be just plain wrong (swine flu epidemic?).

 I know Ch’i or life force exists because I can FEEL it flow and move within and around me and I no longer deny that I do because I can’t “prove it” by making someone else feel it too.  Do crystals, seashells, and structured water have an energetic effect on my body, mind, and emotions?  Of course they do, and I still believe it without lab-borne proof because they are part of my everyday experience of Life.  I have seen auras and Spirit Beings with my own eyes and realize that there are whole unseen worlds around me that “science” does not yet have the technology to image or measure.  I have a relationship with them every day.

 I encourage all of us to continue to expand the use of our senses and draw our own conclusions about the things that “science” cannot yet “prove”, for “science”, ultimately, is a belief system, based on certain “facts” that are just assumptions about the natural world that reflect our current level of consciousness.  (Bloodletting was once cutting edge technology—no pun intended.)  As “Uncle Henry”, one of my Native American teachers once told me, “A healthy skepticism is a good thing to have… but never let your skepticism get in the way of your education.”  Lack of physical proof of non-physical things does not mean they don’t exist.  (My Spirit Guides agree!)  What if we only experience what we’re open to?  The world of energy and Spirit is knocking on our door.

 It is so important now as the Evolution of Creation breaks down our old institutions for each of us to draw our own conclusions about spiritual, metaphysical, and healing matters while remaining open to new information and experiences.  It’s about learning to trust ourselves again after being taught for so long that everyone else is right.  It’s also about taking responsibility for making our own choices and dealing with the consequences in self-love.

 So… Hold a lot of crystals.  See if you can feel the life force and consciousness of that bug on your kitchen counter before you toss it (Alive, please!) back outside.  Notice any subtle felt differences between that organic apple and the conventional ones.  Sit and tune in to your Spirit Guides and Angels, or feel the love that a tree or houseplant has for you.  It’s a different way to think and a different way to live.  Are you up to it?  We’re here to help.  Not to validate your experiences for you, but to marvel at them.

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Listening to Just One Radio

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

As we heard from our friend and astrologer, Rick DiClemente, in his workshop at the Mesa last Friday, Uranus in Capricorn is urging all of us to let go of the old junk and listen to our “God-self”.  That may seem really hard to do right now.  Things have continued to be increasingly crazy out there lately with more extreme weather (Has it seemed Biblical?), political figures in scandal, worries about reprisals from Al Qaeda, yo-yoing gas prices, and the yo-yo’s at work.  Add in a few friends and family members in crisis and it can feel overwhelming.

 Maybe you’re sensing some of this more directly as Creation continues to make us more sensitive to Allness, the emotional, spiritual, sometimes physical, and often painful experiencing of the thoughts, emotions, energy, and consciousness of everything and everyone else around– all at once.  This can be very disturbing and distracting to say the least, but there is hope.  Each of us has the ability and opportunity to tune in to the voice of That Which Created us for comfort, strength, and direction.  It may not come to you as a sound you can hear, but rather a felt sense of connection, reassurance, resolve, and knowing.  Maybe you’ve already experienced being in this stream of energy and love from time to time, but have found it hard to stay with it these days when things erupt.

 When we experience ourselves exposed to the cacophony of Allness we have a natural protective tendency to shut all of our little perceptual doors to the noise and hide.  Imagine being in a room with all of life’s “radios” blaring all at once, all playing different broadcasts at the same volume.  Country western over here, rap over there.  Talk radio, football games, and oldies all competing for your attention.  Wouldn’t you want to block them all out?  That’s what experiencing Allness can sometimes seem like.  But what if one of those radios was tuned in to “The God Station”?  Could you focus on hearing the song of just that one above the din?  That’s what we’re being challenged to do right now, focus on the beautiful music of Spirit above the static and noise of chaos, trauma, and everyday life coming from the Allness.  In order to do so, we first have to recognize that we’ve already heard that “music” at the moments in our lives when we felt loved, fulfilled, empowered, or at peace, even for just a fleeting second, and remember the sensation of it.  We can then remind ourselves of just what it is that we’re “listening” for and allow our longing for it to lead us back.

 We can use our awareness to check in at times of turmoil, see if we’re still on the beam, or have allowed our focus to drift off the frequency.  Through our attention and intention, we can gently pull ourselves back when things go out of balance.  The trick here is to push our senses through the noise to lock back onto that beautiful song of Creation again.  You may have to do this quite often at first; resetting whenever you feel slighted, alone, defeated, weak, resentful, or mystified by the ignorance of others.  Over time you’ll be able to keep that one door to the Divine wide open and hum right along, no matter what is swirling around you.  This is something REAL to practice and you can tell where you are with it by the way you feel.  It gets easier…

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Saying “YES!” to Life

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

Late yesterday afternoon, we had an unannounced visitor to The Mesa.  We had only just arrived ourselves, having done a drum making demonstration for the Academy of Lifelong Learning in Steubenville, OH in the morning and spending the first part of the afternoon procuring groceries for our nearly empty fridge.  I was getting something from our pickup truck when a car I had seen drive past our building circled back and pulled in next to me.  Out jumped a man in a cowboy hat and western boots.  I wondered if he was “Eddie from Arizona”, who had called over the weekend about coming to The Mesa but had never shown up.  No, he wasn’t Eddie and he lived, in all places, here in Burgettstown.  When I told him that we had just arrived ourselves, he said that there were “no accidents”, something Kate and I knew very well.

 “Hal” was probably in his mid-forties, very outgoing, enthusiastic, and extremely polite and respectful.  (He kept calling Kate, “Ma’am”, much to her discomfort.)  He had just heard about us from his physical therapist, someone whose name we didn’t recognize, and came straight over to see if we were open.  “Hal” was so excited to have found us and The Mesa that he could hardly contain himself.  He proceeded to tell us all about himself and how he had been a “partier” who had had an awakening.  He had been studying martial arts and was having strong experiences with directing and using ch’i, or life-force.  “I just don’t know what to do next,” he lamented, a statement we had heard from so many who have walked in our door.

 “Hal” was bright and delightful, and I while I wanted to just stand there and listen to him, I knew Kate and I needed to start getting our dinner ready so we could host our Tuesday night healing group, scheduled for less than an hour away.  As much as I wanted to multitask and work towards moving along to the healing center as we talked, there was something compelling about our interaction that stilled me.  I could feel an unusual electricity and had a sense there was more to our meeting than met the eye.  No, it wasn’t an accident “Hal” had walked in at that moment and I was watching for what our friend and mentor, Rev. Norma Edwards, would call a “teachable moment”—not for “Hal” but for myself.

 As he was telling us about looking for advice and direction for his new path in life, “Hal” remarked that as a child he had been repeatedly told “NO” and rarely allowed to fully experience life.  He had come to a conscious decision to let go of “NO” and say “YES!” to life.  In his enthusiasm and desire to shine out to us, he reiterated this idea several times.  I found myself reminded about the conversation Kate and I had been having as we had driven to The Mesa just minutes before.  I had commented on my own recurrent avoidance behavior and tendency to say “Yes, but…” to different things that I wanted to be doing in life without really knowing why.

 Surely my parents had also told me “NO” quite often and I had come to internalize something from it that occasionally stopped me in my tracks, I thought.  In fact, I had become acutely aware of all too often finding myself unconsciously shaking my head “NO” to thoughts or ideas about things that might benefit me.  It didn’t feel like I was doing this nay-saying out of fear, but with all the healing work I had done to that point, I still didn’t have a handle on why I was increasingly shaking my head.

 After listening patiently for nearly half an hour, we had to tell “Hal” that as much as we were enjoying our conversation, we had to excuse ourselves.  “Hal” apologized profusely for delaying our dinner and vowed to return to The Mesa soon, excited that he had found kindred spirits who might advise him.  I could feel myself split between wanting to continue our conversation and our healing group commitment; the dichotomy between wanting to stay in the moment vs. prudently preparing for the future.  I knew that prudence very well and was willing to admit that I had often held back in life, telling myself I was doing the best that I could at the moment.  As “Hal” was leaving, I found myself wondering how I would ever be able to get all those “NO’s” out of my head and open to living fully.

 As I was cooking our dinner, salmon on the grill, I thought about how I might change my inner operating system to let go of the “NO’s”.  How engrained it must be that I sometimes literally shook my head at my own thoughts, I mused.  Then an idea for a simple little healing came to me.  We had been using Kinesiology (muscle testing) extensively as a communications channel to negotiate change with our otherwise silent inner selves.  It is a kinesthetic cue that can shift emotional, mental, or behavioral patterns; body sensation coupled with just the right suggestions being the key.  What if I we could teach my inner ME to allow itself to say “YES” instead of “NO” by gently guided head movements coupled with the right “conversation”?  It seemed too simple to actually work, but worth a try.  I asked my Guides about the idea and was given confirmation that it would be effective.  I intuited that it would be better to try it when we got home instead of within the healing group.

 When we got home, I laid across the bed with my head near the edge so that Kate could easily reach it.  I muscle tested myself about saying “YES” to life and got a weak or “NO” response, indicating my inner resistance to the idea.  I then checked on specific areas of my life, and found that while I was open to saying “YES” to certain things (teaching, running The Mesa, etc), I got negative responses for saying “YES” to art, making money, and (surprisingly) “healing”.  I asked Kate to do two movements for each statement I would make about saying “YES” to an area of life, the first time rocking my head side-to-side, “NO” fashion, and then gently guiding me to nod my head “YES” as I repeated it.

 Kate did as I asked and the process seemed to be working.  When I muscle tested about each statement a second time after guided nodding, the response had changed from negative to positive.  I could feel energy moving in my body, but at that point the process hadn’t yet produced any profound sensations or emotions.  When Kate helped me give the nod to healing however, I found myself inhaling and exhaling deeply several times and my body relaxed.  After that, every muscle test statement I made about saying “YES” to a positive aspect of life resulted in an affirmative (YES!) response and I could feel the inner shift rapidly expanding.

 When I woke up this morning, I felt much more open, expanded, and optimistic.  The sensation of my new state of consciousness was even a bit disorienting.  When I got out of bed, I was up and walking before my awareness could catch up with my body.  My inner self was ready to go!  I feel different and the positive muscle tests are holding firm.  While I can’t guarantee that my little healing method would work for anyone else, I’ve written about it here in the hopes that it might inspire others to find new ways let go of our societal “NO’s” and fully say “YES!” to life.  We’re here to assist and support you as we all make this journey together.  It’s time.

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It’s All in Your Point of View

Posted on May 3, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

Whatever you may think about the killing of Osama bin Laden, the timing of his death was remarkable.  It occurred only hours before the end of the Second Day of the Universal (Unity) level of the Mayan calendar on May 1st and the beginning of the Second Night on May 2nd.  Its proximity to the zero point between Dark and Light was breathtaking.  Although our country acted alone, this moment was a disorienting but unifying event for the whole world, a bit like the events of the 9/11 attacks that started the manhunt nine years ago.  As President Obama told the world about what had been done, he stressed the unity that we must undertake in order to have a peaceful and safe world for us all.  Once again the world had been unified by darkness, exactly the kind of thing one might expect upon entering back into Night.

 The very next day, Kate and I went to a “town meeting” arranged by Washington County Community Action Services in an effort to help our Burgettstown community unite to help itself.  The program had started late last fall with 50-60 people attending the initial meeting.  Many of the attendees with special interest axes to grind who showed up initially to demand someone else fix what they saw as wrong with the community quickly lost interest after being allowed to vent about it.  Under the direction of the well-meaning women from C.A.S., those of us who continued to attended were divided up into committees to work on specific areas of interest to us.  Sadly, attendance dwindled with every subsequent meeting and the committees got smaller and smaller.  People realized how much work it would take to do what needed to be done and were stymied as to how to motivate their neighbors.

 We suggested to C.A.S. that it might be better if the few of us who were still attending sat in one big circle to talk all together and it was decided to re-invite the community to join us in another group discussion about our area.  We theorized that people who had not been part of the previous meetings would join in if they knew about it.  A limited C.A.S budget provided for advertising that consisted of putting flyers on pizza boxes from the local carryout and on the checkout stands of the little grocery store in town as well as mailings to 150 local businesses.  It wasn’t cheap or easy to get in touch with our community, scattered over three townships and Burgettstown proper.  With high hopes, we pulled up at the Burgettstown high school parking lot at the appointed time, but the scarcity of cars made us wonder if we had the correct location.  We walked into the meeting to find only three other community members and the three women from C.A.S., this from a community of 9,000 people.

 Doing our best to remain upbeat, we wondered out loud about ways to get the community motivated to unite and attend, lamenting that the levels of apathy and resignation in our area are reflections of the very conditions we are seeking to improve.  We told our neighbors that the situation is similar to what goes on at The Mesa at times and a microcosmic reflection of what is transpiring macroscopically in western Pennsylvania and the world.  We mentioned that we had been working on the issues of motivation and inspiration within our own lives earlier that very day and had recognized that good or bad, those energies come ultimately from within, whether we see it that way or not.  We went on to suggest expanding the concept of “Think globally, act locally” to start with our inner selves.  Ultimately, we all left the meeting shaking our heads, agreeing that our neighbors were unmotivated likely because they felt powerless, disenfranchised, and passed over for what they saw as their share of “the good life”.

 This morning, I woke up to face completing the writing of this little story.  I had been writing in circles late into the night, trying to pull several elements together but not really getting anywhere with it.  I was dreading having to finish it to meet my self-imposed deadline for this email.  Just thinking about this one task reminded me of all the other things that I needed to get done and I quickly found myself in the midst of an expanding downward spiral mood.  Kate sat with me as I talked about it all and then a familiar question came into my mind.  I knew I avoided things that needed to be done to further our cause at home and at The Mesa, but why would I put off what was to our benefit?  As I talked it through with myself out loud as Kate listened, a picture began to emerge with the help of a little Kinesiology (muscle testing).  I put off those important tasks because I didn’t want to do them, not because they were hard or I wasn’t capable, but mainly because I saw them as not being fun.  Don’t we do things that are fun for us without hesitation?  What was at issue here seemed merely my Point of View.  I wondered if and how I could I change it.

 Wasn’t it fun to have clean dishes, for instance?, I asked myself.  Couldn’t that result turn dishwashing into fun?  My inner self agreed.  Wouldn’t it be fun to have our accounting work done on time?  Yes, that would feel great too, so couldn’t doing the books be seen as fun?  Yes, of course it could.  As I worked through the issue I recognized that I had learned from my parents and childhood experiences a fundamental pattern of seeing the world that had caused me to approach certain tasks with dread that I might otherwise enjoy.  What I had been required to do was never made into fun.  Had it been, I would have jumped to the task.  Was this pattern negatively impacting my energy, emotions, and life outcomes?  Surely it was.

 I asked my inner self if it could change its Point of View about “things that need to be done” so that they might be fun and found it eager to.  At the moment it was simply without any clue as to how to accomplish that shift.  Knowing how creative that part of me is, I asked it to invent a new way of healing for itself to shift its perspective using this new information and I could feel it happening on that odd unconscious level I have become familiar with.  My mood instantly lightened and I felt better about what I knew needed to be done to help myself, my family, and others.

 Physics teaches us that what you perceive depends on where you are standing, your frame of reference or Point of View.  In order for us to help our community and unite our world, we need to find ways to change our Point of View with respect to doing the inner and outer work that needs to be done.  Out of Darkness can come Light.  Maybe we can turn it into fun.

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Trauma Gains Interest: Painting a Board

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

As the pace of the Evolution of Creation picks up speed with the approach the end of the 2nd Day of the Universal level of the Mayan Calendar on May 1st, it seems like more and more is being heaped upon us as we try to just get through from one day to the next.  We’ve been hearing from people who are feeling despondent and wanting to hide.  All of the new stuff like rising gas prices, turbulent weather, and people acting out their anger is just the tip of our icebergs.  Under the water line is the accumulated trauma of our lives.

 The problem is that trauma gains interest (“…compounded daily!”) if we don’t find ways to forgive ourselves and others, heal the damage, and let it go.  Every time we consciously or unconsciously relive the unresolved hurts, mistakes, misfortune, and missed opportunities of the past we add a layer of energy onto toxic psychic structures of staggering emotional weight.  This build-up process reminds us of a story that appeared on some long forgotten TV show years ago.  It was a “human interest story” about a man with an unusual “hobby”.

 The man’s hobby wasn’t all that far from his work.  He was a house painter by trade, and his claim to fame was that every day he gave a set number of coats of paint to the same wooden board.  In so-many years he had put so-many thousand coats of paint on it.  The board started out quite small, but over the years had grown greatly in size and weight from the myriad coats of paint, applied one thin layer at a time.

 Imagine carrying a board like that around under your arm every day of your life.  With only the first few shellackings it wouldn’t have weighed very much, but after a couple of zillion coats of remorse or resentment “paint”, it would be much bulkier and heavier.  Wouldn’t it wear you down to tote that around day after day?  So too with our emotional baggage.  Creation is urging us now to put our boards down and stop carrying the weight of the past.  We are finding many surprisingly simple and creative ways to help our inner selves let go and forgive.  With a little work, it’s a gift we can give ourselves every day.

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Give Me a Sign

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Brad Silberberg
Mesa Creative Arts Center sign board

Our yellow Mesa sign

A little over a week ago, we held a Native American drumming circle in the Mesa Medicine Wheel.  I relaxed and tuned in as we drummed, sensing a deep connection with the Wheel and the Earth below me.  Some crazy things had been happening at The Mesa and I felt an urge to ask the Spirits of the Wheel for a signal from the Universe that we were on the right track and doing what was in accordance with Divine Plan.  Now this was something I wouldn’t normally do, in that I have come to have great trust and faith that we are watched over, guided, and diligently following our spiritual path.  After reminding myself of all that, I silently asked that I receive some kind of sign in the next day or so, something so distinct and unmistakable that I could not rationalize it away.  I thought for a moment about how the sign might arrive and then released the outcome into the sound of my drum.

 The very next day, we received a letter in the mail from a woman with chronic problems we had not seen in several years.  We had given her many healings and counseled her without charge, but she stopped coming to see us, saying that we were “trying to teach (her) things (she) didn’t want to learn”.  She wrote that she had been in New Cumberland WV to try to collect a debt from an acquaintance.  She had mustered the courage to knock on his door, but he wasn’t home.  As she turned to leave, she was astonished to see a Mesa Creative Arts Center sign (just like the one at the end of our driveway) laying there in the grass.  She remembered that one had been stolen from where it sat on Rt 18. five or six years ago and informed us of its new location.  I was flabbergasted as I read the letter.  I hadn’t simply received a sign.  It was– OUR SIGN!

 The envelope had contained an additional note, indicating that the woman had waited a few weeks to mail the letter.  We wondered if our sign was still there or if she was making the whole thing up to get our attention again.  It didn’t really matter if we ever got our property back.  I had gotten exactly what I had asked for.  It was so literal and happened so fast I had to laugh about it.  (My Guides have a real sense of humor.)  I was also struck by the fact that the letter had to have been mailed before I made my request.  It was already in motion.

 Still, we were curious.  So this week we took the back roads over to New Cumberland, following an internet map and the vague instructions we had received in the mail.  At first we couldn’t find the street in question and none of the locals we asked knew where it was.  We followed our intuition and finally found the street where our sign had allegedly been sighted.  As we drove up the narrow hill, the steep bank on the odd-numbered side made it hard to see down into the yards from the truck.  Very few of the houses were numbered and we couldn’t locate the address we had been given.  I decided to park the truck at the entrance to the street and proceed on foot to take a closer look.  It was pouring down rain as I walked up the hill, peering gingerly over the bank.

 Suddenly, there it was, the yellow sign Kate had painted long ago.  It was laying flat on the side of the bank amidst all manner of junk, still in fair shape after so many years.  I leaned over and picked up what turned out to be only the front half of our hinged sign and walked it back to the truck.  We had our sign and solved part of a lingering mystery.  The name of the street where we found it wasn’t lost on us either: Straight St, which made a sharp ‘V’ with Commerce.  The streets were very close together and nearly parallel, but Straight Street was, well… the high road, and considerably so.

 “Yum Gwan Azin.”  Be steadfast (straight) on your path… and be mindful what you ask for!

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Spiritual Abuse

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

Kate was in the kitchen yesterday when sudden movement caught her attention.  A bird landed on the table in front of the window and then quickly took off again.  Kate got enough of a look at it to recognize it as a Rufous-sided Towhee.  We always consider that creatures of Nature show themselves to us for a reason and knew that there was some message it wanted to convey to us.  There was nothing in Ted Andrews’ “Animal Speak” books about Towhee, so we looked on the web.

We couldn’t find anything directly about the spiritual meaning of Towhee on Google, but one person talked about its behavior.  Towhees are ground feeders who jump backwards to scratch the ground and uncover insects to eat.  “So,” we thought, “Towhees uncover things…”  The next thing we looked at was a blog that came up on Google, but a “word find” showed the word Towhee didn’t appear anywhere on the page.  Puzzled, we looked over the latest entry on the blog, where the writer was talking about being questioned about her focus on what she called “spiritual abuse”, a term we had never seen before.  She wrote that she’d rather not waste words defining it, because Wikipedia had already done a better job than she could.

Intrigued, we looked at the entries on the web.  So there was the message of the Towhee, uncovered for us to see.  As we looked at the definition of spiritual abuse, we recognized that it is not only practiced by leaders of fundamentalist religions.  Many New Age gurus, non-religious “spiritual people”, followers of Nature-based religions, religious lay people, and others were also slinging forms of this abuse.  We had just experienced it ourselves through criticism of how we, as non-Indians, engage in Native American customs as part of our chosen spiritual path and teach them to others.  It was also a reminder to us to be vigilant on our path and in our own tolerance of the spirituality of others.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_abuse

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The “Allness”

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Brad Silberberg

We’ve just passed through (Mon/Tues) the low point of the 1st Night of the current Mayan calendar cycle.  Has it been as intense for you as it has felt to us?  We’re now on our way back towards the light and the dawning of the 2nd Day on 4/14 and it’s time to stop and turn our attention to the energies of Creation because something new is happening.  It’s a little hard to find just the right words for it, but is has to do with the connectedness of all that is.  It’s like Creation is intensifying the feeling part of connection.

Now, we’ve been hearing a lot of talk lately about “Oneness” and “Unity Consciousness”, but this is more about an aware sensation of the presence of every tiny bit of Creation, all at once, all the time.  We’re calling it “Allness” right now, as it is a simultaneous appreciation of infinite interdependent elements and doesn’t feel like “one thing” just yet.  If you tune in to Allness, you’ll get a different sense of the organization and direction of Creation and your part in it.  It’s a step in our common evolutionary path that will lead us to greater unity.

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