In Stillness Breathing.
Spiritual Practice brings us to The Breath.
These are Virtual Flying Lessons.

First you will need a map.  The Map is your Mind.

First Lesson:
Trace your feet pressed togather on a poster paper size sheet.
All but the Baby Toe - trace around it -
and separate the toes in the creases.
Trace firmly all around both feet, connecting where the heels touch at the bottom and where the Big Toes or the Front Inner Balls of The Feet meet at the top.

Second Lesson:

Place the image on the wall before you at arms length and look into that Space.  Do this step after each section.  Look at it for up to 20 minuites.  You are effectively looking down your throat, or up through the bottoms of your feet.  Get the feeling of yourself, your balance point, being suspeneded over the Grand Canyon somewhere.  We are going to have to find that point.  The point of balance is the most mystical issue of our world.

Third Lesson:

Place The Cross on the feet by using a ruler to draw a virtical line between the feet, separating them, and a horizontal line stretching from the base of the Baby Toes.  Do Lesson Two.  Look (for this you can easily imagine) at the repulsive image you have been seeing there from the past.

Lesson Four:

Use a Square to find the Center Point with the two points at the Baby Toes and the Third on The Virtical Line.  Now that you have the center of the geometry it is time to notice where that is on a Woman who seems very much alive, not dead.  Press the tips of your index fingers and thumbs together and place them flat on the image, with the index finger pressing into the meeting of the Horizontal and Virtical Lines and the Thumbs at the place where the Heels are pressed together.  Now trace along the  sides of your hands in that area, one had at a time - unless a friend helps you.  Do Lesson Two.

Lesson Five:

Draw a Lower Horizontal Line an 8th of an inch Below The Center of Geometry and a Pyramid on the Horizon an 8th of an inch away from the 45 degree angle to your right.  It helps to know precisely where Your balance is on the Horizontal Line.   Forward is the Sky and Below is the Earth. Lesson Two.

Lesson Six:

Visualize The Body by Drawing in Breasts and the Lower Thighs (to the Knees) just where you can see them.  The Breasts would fit in the contours of the index finger imprints.  The Thighs could also be a straight line - where the tendons would run.  Isn't it kinder and more beautiful to see a Living and Sexy Babe than a dead guy hanging there pathetically? I mean, look at it - there is a female body there, whether you have male hands or female.  And it takes a lot of shere imagination to draw a dead guy hanging there.  There are no natural lines depicting that illusion.  You'd have to make it up.  You can actually See the girl there!  Just do the Second Lesson again and see for yourself.

Seventh Lesson:

Build The I Ching Wheel using as the radius the length of the Horizontal Line of The Cross stretching across from the base of the Baby Toes.  The Center of the Radius is at the Point of the Square on the Virtical Lines and is where The Clit is.  Place the 8 lines/houses only outside the Feet from the circumference of the circle to the edges of the feet. Calculate the 64 Archetypes around the I Ching Wheel.  Do the Second lesson and now let your eyes expand in a soft gaze from the center to the wheel.

Eigth Lesson:

Expose the Law of Seven after identifying the precise points at the center of the two front balls and the heel balls (1-4-2: right foot/8-5-7;left foot).  But instead of connecting the points with straight lines, use your imagination to see how the energy might flow between those points.  The Mind can identify the points, but The Body flows.  The Practice will eventually help you find the Serpent of Adrenaline energy resting flat under the feet, drawing that energy up through the body in a coherent way.  Honestly notice the way the energy runs to show the Jad Stalk spurting at the Baby Toes,  The Sides of The Babe, and The Apple surrounding the area from Horizontal/Virtical point to The Center of Geometry point.  Breath 3 points in to the Apple, 3 points out to the Center, 3 points up the Stalk and 4 around the Balls...then begin again three up to the Breast...Do this while doing Lesson Two for another 20 min.  Keep practicing.  It might take three years, but once the breathing virus hooks you, "spirituality" will have a whole new meaning.

Ninth Lesson:

Add the Twelve Astrological Seasons by placing a smaller circle inside the I Ching Wheel at the width of the first digit of a Baby Finger.  Now the 12 Season Wheel is set off from the I Ching Wheel by 2 degrees. It is said that the 2 degree difference is what allows Life to enter our Maya.  Ezekeil saw wheels!  You may also connect the 12 locations with straight lines that connect every fourth point.  Now see the whole space again.

10:

Find your Face in there.  The Mouth where the heels connect. The Ears at the narrowing above the heels.  The Skull curving up to the Crown point where the Big Toes meet (or where they would meet if your Big Toes were not splayed open).  The Pupils on the lines at the Hips.  The Nose above the Center of Geometry.  You almost certainly will have to draw a number of these patterns to find a Face that you can feel comfortable looking at You!  Now that you have your Head On you are ready to explore the territory!

Foundation: Practice

The Root Center of The Human Design System is the foundation of the formula. We are talking generally about adrenaline energy and what we experience as Stress in the world. We are sandwiched between Stress and the pressure of Questions. Stress is what they used to call Kundalini! To know how to work with the energy of stress is to get deep down into the practical issues of being a human being. This is why I have come to think of The Root Center as the Center of Practice. What is your practice? What do you actually do to care for all the basic issues of being human, burdened by real energetic issues that you cannot change just by thinking about them? What do you do to deal with the pain in your feet and your knees and your hips and your elbows and your hands and your shoulders? Since you are in the world you have to experience actually doing something about what troubles you. In old language: start praying! Here remember the important irony of learning to rest in the mind.

Let me remind you again that we are talking about Religious Problems and how those problems can practically be resolved. I think Religion is the best word for The Human Condition, of Man/Adam, or The Patriarchy. Religion has a reputation for being about repetitive disciplines of mind and body. I no longer think the issues of Religion and Spirituality are so different. One of the funniest jokes, to me, is the way 12 Steppers talk about what they do as being about Spirituality and Not Religion. But then, there comes the slogan: "Keep Coming Back, It Works!" That, right there, is Religion. We repeat things. We have empty rituals that we can fill with a sense of spirituality. Religion just is The Empty Ritual that humans need to fill their life with the meaning they call Spirituality. If you are part of the 12 Step Program and don't go to meetings, you neither have a Religious, never mind a Spiritual experience with the 12 Step Program. You have to go to the meetings to know what I mean. You cannot think your way into Spirituality, you need a Practice. You are Human: You are Religious and you basically have Religious problems, even if all those problems belong to other people! If you don't have Religious problems, some Jew or Christian or Muslim or Communist Chinese, Person all around you, does - and they will mess with your real life! Or, someone around you will commit suicide or homicide, just to remind you that you have to keep thinking and worrying about these issues.

The issue becomes, given these constraints, is: What are the practices that we need to complete the issues of Religion? What can we do that will satisfy our Religious concerns as Human Beings? Here is my answer, Religiously speaking.

1. Dance

2. Song/Instrumentation

3. Theatre Improvisation

4. Yoga

5. Gathering Spirituality

6. Meditation on The Bardo

These six practices will do us well into the future and to the end of The Human Condition. And recognize what I am saying, Religiously, that every educated Human Being on planet earth Should be involved in these practices as a matter of daily life.

Dance. Now think of Dance as the foundational practice for people lost in The Human Condition. In this way we establish as practice the recognition of being in a world where energy just is a thing. We are standing on what we experience as hard energy. And by the time you get to be Human you must deal creatively with the way the feet do meet the ground. Think about the concept that our feet never really touch but are mediated to the ground by a electric current - that is just a little thicker than String. Now imagine that this current of energy can really be seen as The Law of Seven. I just can't get into the details of that here but beg you to look at an image of The Enneagram and then See your feet inside that pattern. Look! Your right heel is on #4 and your left heel is on #5. Why didn't The Gurdjieffian's fail to show me this obvious relationship! Has no one else in the world noticed that Human Feet simply are an expression of The Law of Seven on The Enneagram? But I will have to save an exploration of these details for the next chapter when we can base a BreathWork practice on it....Dance. Let me even provoke everyone now. I say that Dance is so basic that we should not be listening to anyone who wants to be taken seriously if they cannot demonstrate a Dance Practice. Show me how you dance! I want to see it! If you have something to say, let me see your dance, or stay quiet and chop broccolli. As a dance practice it is important to keep a few simple principles. Every piece of music is a whole experience that must be complete in itself. This means if you are dancing with someone in contact improv you let them go at the end of the song. You may pick it up again for another song or two at the most, but don't cling! This is Dance as Practice! If you want to pick up chicks I recommend expressing your dance practice in play at the local bar, like The Drafthouse.

Be Here

Consider what happens when it does. You will discover awareness. You will be Native and you will know black Africa. You will be Homo sapiens without forgetting The Body: that is, Biology and Chemistry, and also Objectivity, Geometry and even our Trajectory. We are talking about Genetics, and the fact of "I Am" - when The Body as Microcosm is recognized in Relation to the Macrocosm we call Being (which I spoke of in the Third Chapter).

We can sense the intuition that what is, just is, has a spontaneous connection to what we know as these bodies where the here and now is identified. Consider that the here and now is really a dimension. Matter appears as these biological/chemical bodies at a moment in a process. The here and now, in that sense, is not everything, just everything that is aware! It is better to locate the atomic and the particulate with other dimensions. I want to stay focused on how an understanding of this sixth stage in the process can help us better understand our Human Condition, our Religious problems. We sense the irony of existing in a consciousness field that contains both the challenges and threats as well as the answers and solutions! Remember the story nature of our Human nature.

This post is only just begun. We shall have to get back to the here and now when I return from The Gathering - 2009. Who knows, I could become caught up in yet another adventure in this time of Company formation. Who are the Colorful Company? What is their role? Let's wait and see.

...The last section was written a month ago. We are still in the here and now. We have not gone anywhere nor have we done anything. That does not mean a lot of stuff has not been going on - where we listen and see that it is so. But remember that we are talking here about our human religious problems and the means of overcoming those problems. Each of these 10 insights represents a category of human knowledge. Each category is devastating in its wholeness. Anyone coming in to the world could live out their whole human existence happily within the confines of any one of these systems. But now we have a way to understand their interconnectedness based on a material process we may call the prenatal sequence. At this stage in the sequence the spleen system is built: Instinct and intuition and taste. This just is the whole sense of "having a body". This just is the nature of Awareness. Awareness is only valid in the here and now.

I found an excellent way to confirm that awareness belongs to the animal kingdom. Sit next to a cat and just watch its ears while at the same time you study your mind. The cat is never for an instant preoccupied with its own thoughts. Watch its ears. If it were thinking it would not always cock its ears when you scratch your chin. Its consciousness is simple awareness resting in what we call the here and now. To be conscious is to think. Consciousness is only relevant to awareness at the level of enlightenment and endarkenment.

The Native/African consciousness is an expression of homo sapiens who never left The Garden. We can begin to sense the foolishness of human behavior from the standpoint of the development of other centers. The world of Western Secularism (that is the fulfillment of Christianity as shall be clarified) tends to "put the body down". All this talk of mind over matter and the value of civilization and transcending limitation comes from a consciousness that thinks of the body in a subservient way. Understand, we see this acted out in our history: the denigration of the body for the sake of idealism. The Native/African is scarcely above the animal and so can be treated with disrespect. So we tend to think.

And we disrespect The Body because we think we can transcend the body. We are mentally preoccupied with going to heaven when we die, or with ensuring the possession of a piece of land (as though the whole planet we not the land we seek). The prodigal search for experience can only come to a proper conclusion when we remember ourselves (those of us who are "not" Spleen bound) and come to our senses and return in our minds to the body where paradise resides among us. Native people never seek paradise. They live there all the time. And we must acknowledge, with understanding, the terrible wrong doing of driving a native people from paradise to live in desolation. We have yet to come to our senses. Now that we know that, whatever paradise is, we are there. It is time on a Global scale to return to The Native center of spirituality. It is time to remember that the Native among us already know how to be here now. Hindu's and Buddhists and Taoists can all get sentimental about enlightenment, but the rhetoric all comes down to an acknowledgment that The Native/Africa represent how we as Homo sapiens really think about The Here and Now. that is: The Body.

Consider one more implication. As human beings we deal with the issues of shame and guilt and blame. We will surely continue to live under the pressures of shame and guilt, but blame is precisely excessive. Blame is excessive! No human deserves blame! Not Hitler, not Pol Pot and certainly not the lawless man, George. Now grasp the irony of our human situation. Blame is an energized issue, unlike guilt and shame. (Remember: the mind/shame; the body/guilt; the solar plexus/blame.) When we look at the sequential structure we notice that the consciousness/awareness trinity leaves us with The Body as the final resting place for The Mind and The Solar Plexus. It all comes down to what happens in these bodies. How we think and how we feel must be experienced, as a result, in The Body.

It has become my way of thinking that to be a human being is to be burdened with the issue of blame, like original sin; and until we all collectively find a way to transcend blame we are stuck with it no matter what level of individual enlightenment there is. No human being gets out of the blame game. We either overcome blame and help others to think the same, or we wallow in our chronic human pleasure of passing on such nonsense. Just try to stop blaming, in speech and action, and recognize how delicious blame is to us. Honestly, we don't want to stop blaming because blame is really what makes us human in the first place! To end blame will be to complete the whole human experience. Well, all is well that ends. What we can experience is the great spiritual battle to actually overcome blame among us. Give me a better explanation for why men always go to war and why they feel justified and why they find pleasure in killing the enemy! I know, I want to kill the enemy myself! Think Friend! There is no enemy! But I can still experience the strange male-human pleasure of arguing against the enemy in another mans way of thinking!

And when we come to the conclusion, as you clap your hands together, that blame can be overcome in the awareness of the here and now, then we will experience the completion of the human condition. Blame is the enemy. Blame is evil. Blame is the devil and the great satan. But when we come to know, as you clap your hands together, that there just is no blame - then what of evil and the devil? Those who have overcome blame in their way of thinking have already returned to paradise. But since we are human beings we want to celebrate such an experience, and make a big deal out of it! We want a great movie and we've got one. Without all this drama the human experience...wouldn't be. So let's get on with the drama - and all you wimpy new age people can start raising your voice in spiritual rage against the perpetuation of machinery made to kill the body. I think it is time for us to see a demonstration of spiritual/mystical rage against the enemy. I am not a pacifist. I am Against War. All the emotion of my erotic and violent male existence is utterly committed to fighting against the enemy and killing him! And I want to see it in my lifetime. My children have no interest in this tired old religious patriarchal stuff. This battle is for us old men (those born before 1962) to see through. The Kids are here already.

I wonder where the real center for The Gathering is, when it will be called from Israel? Perhaps some Native people know. Wait and See.

Stage five: The Tribe Today!

Elijah says The Ego is Homo sapiens! And Homo sapiens is also Growth And Decay! These together lead to Continuity and that which continues in Manifestation!

This chapter is to me the critical essence of what we need to hear in White America, unless it's too late for this experiment. Let me admit the obvious first. I come from possibly the longest line of Christian Missionaries representing what we may call today American Zionism. White people in America, by this definition, are in cahoots with Israel in some way that may be mysterious to them, but which certainly makes them lost Jews, at least. It just doesn't occur to them that the Palestinians and the Muslims of the world are going to "make it into heaven to be with Jesus". They may not even know anymore that this dogma is behind their support of Israel, but its there. I have come to accept that I truly am a white American male protestant christian. Let me just caricature my position, since I studied it well from the position of being raised in India. Living in India, but "really from America", where people are partial to Jesus so they don't need to be threatened quite so. American Zionism threatens "the lost" with Jesus and Political American Zionism dominates the current global system with oil to the dollar bill, (and fire from the skies, and a bar code, and a military machine). But if not for missionaries like me our system would completely lack meaning today. White American people today have no idea what to do because they have lost a sense of the story they are in. The Jews already did this under Hitler - they quit being so attached to a spiritual fulfillment of Abraham's conversation and just picked up weapons again and fought back into power. What I am trying to tell you is that I have a voice that is not conditioned by inferiority. Today I am on top of the world and I get to be the one to tell you how you should think. I can come into your village and your little nuclear family and talk to your kids and tell them that you all need a change of mind. You need to be converted. I mean it. I am ready to take persecution to be on the front line of telling ignorant white America that they need to be saved. Irony. Now I'm talking like that to White Christian, and especially Protestant, America. If I didn't have deluded DNA I would think myself crazy. (It's ok to be crazy, you just suffer it.)

Let me begin by pleading for understanding. I am pleading here for an understanding of Islam that I hold with zeal and passion, all by myself right here in white America. Here is what I think about Muhammad's Knowledge. Yes, peace be upon him - in terms of the completion of the vision of Islam. But don't think you know what I'm saying yet. Of course, understand that this is my argument. And I hope I am ready for the challenge from those who wish to argue. Bring it on. Try to change my mind.

I must confess that I had a series of serendipitious experiences that contributed to this delusion - that I am somehow connected with the spirit of Muhammad. It's really a whole story that I don't want to tell, but enough to give you the impression that when it comes to arguing about Religion, that's my job. I want to put all the Jesus people in their place: pick up some wood for the fire and hang out! Get off your higher order stuff, all your storytelling and personal experience and self knowledge and philosophy, and work all that out right here in a real village, which means local community. Give up your desire to go to heaven and be here with WE! And then you will experience Paradise!

Now here is where I go crazy. For example, yesterday I was running and heard some drums so I ran excitedly to whirl among them. As I came up an elder white woman was complaining and inquiring as to the legality of the situation. It was a drum class for kids. After they went through the technicalities I took it on myself to give her a lecture in front of the kids about the important relationship between drums and valid local community. Where there are no drums there is no way. And the point is that we live in an extreme of isolationism today in white America. You can't even meet girls on the trails anymore. They are all indoors texting people around the world to get a date. But I have to go into some Detail before I can really express my anger about what is going on today in America. Let those with understanding be empowered.

Homo sapiens consist of circuitry. Electromagnetic circuitry. There is other stuff, but there is also circuitry. And there are three broad circuits that compose what we are. We are Collective and we are Individual and we are Tribal. These are all important and we are not in any position to judge our own qualities, but to embrace what we are. The Collective consists of everything we can think of as logic and reason and detail, but also everything we can think of that is emotional, like pornography and violence, lust and blame. On one side we have our reason and on the other we have our yearning for new experience. Individuality was also a mutation that really made us Homo sapiens. We differentiated to individuality, the integrity of the individual illusion of a self. We are self conscious creatures. We want to know who we are: who am I? We need information to feed our need to know who we are. Individuals need two things, information and comfort. With enough information and comfort the individual can make it in this world. But deprive an individual of meaningful information and they can commit suicide the way cells do for other reasons. But Homo sapiens are essentially Tribal creatures.

We may be here to give expression to literally everything that has the potential and the possibility of coming into the world. But we do not escape the surrender into the world once we are here. I am not one with Allah as long as I am in form. Ok, so the sound of Allah is difficult for white people. Let me make it plain. Allah pertains to the god of the patriarchy that would force us into Tribal relations. It is my opinion that there are 10 different Religions that we Homo sapiens must acknowledge. Islam is the key to dealing with The Ego. White new age rhetoric about the ego is bad talk. It won't work, anymore than denying the validity of Muhammad's Knowledge. Islam is here to stay.

To me Islam means that to fulfill my destiny as a Man I must live in Tribal relations, which really means committed local community. There is a part of me that needs a sense of a people, that, does not exist in white America. There is a negative streak that goes through American Zionism that perpetuates violence and blame. And the way it does this is by denying the validity of The Tribe! This is the point of this chapter. You can tell White American Zionism is in trouble by how its old people are dying. Check it out. The old people are not talking with the children. What I mean is, old people and young children are not spending their days together, not as a special event, but just as what Tribal people do with their children. They leave them with the elderly and go off to work! Listen, when the old people and the children are segregated you have the death of a whole culture. The thing is, this is not very new in America. We have been getting isolated since the Puritans first decided the Indians lived in a bad way. Every generation of white America is educated increasingly to deny Tribal desires. The language we use shows how we feel about living Tribally. If we are new age philosophers you would say the tribe was a stage in human development that we no longer need. If you are just a new ager you will tell people to get out of their egos. If you go to Iraq, you get to kill Iraqi's, who just are manifestations of The Ego! If you read "a course in miracles" you will be completely confused about the ego, and only Muhammad's knowledge will be able to help you.

To relate to the true family, that is The Tribe (not the white american family: an illusion in an illusion), we need zeal and passion and force. So, finally, here is my plea for restoring white America to the spirit of Islam. Identify a local area, say alpine to iris and broadway to 19th. Go through a 10 stage process of building a village right out of those people, by getting them to make sure they take care of their own old people, first of all. Local people must return to the need to take care of their own old people. The Tribe will follow. If you build it, they will come.

My ego is lonely in white America. When I miss my girlfriend I begin to realize that what I really lack as a white man is authentic tribal experience. We don't even know what this means today. We have to begin by confessing that the collective has tried to dominate our tribal desires long enough. But I think The Gathering experience is as close to authentic tribe in white America today: because of the meaning I attach to it. But The Gathering in America is still only a Voice for The Tribe, for the restoration of The Tribe. We are not a Tribe as The Gathering in America. Those of us who live in the spirit of The Gathering feel something about being lost in Babble-on.

Finally, it has become my way of thinking that money in the future is based on local economies. What are we doing with the people around us to make something that can be traded with the world in Mecca? The Global Trade Circle: Mecca! Imagine the road between Jerusalem and Mecca - for the tribes of the earth to make pilgrimage together. You could go to The Gathering in Israel "alone", but you need A Tribe to make it to Mecca. Hey white kid, where's your Tribe?It doesn't exist: go find a tribe. And not with people from all around town. Live in a Tribe. The irony is that I am obviously talking to myself. But I still haven't given up hope for some kind of colorful company who can dance and instrument and play and stretch and gather and sit down.

Thinking