Have you noticed? What used to “count” no longer does? Bob Dylan’s refusal to even acknowledge his “Nobel Prize” in literature is the latest testimony to humanity’s explosive wake up to the pretentious and/or corrupt nature of the matrix veils that, thanks to the internet, we now cheerfully rip apart and expose like the film projections of the Wizard of Oz. Remember that? The Wizard had Dorothy and her friends bamboozled, until her little dog Toto surprised him from behind.
Toto feels uncannily similar to my dog Shadow.
And wouldn’t you know, what I emphasize in life, more than anything, is shadow work. Jungian work. Work to make the unconscious conscious. Work that brings the darkness to light, by encouraging the subtle awareness of the inner witness, that underlying silent calm dispassionate presence that acknowledges and honors each usually nasty “projection” onto another as it emerges from the deep, and then takes that projection back, integrates it within a fuller, deeper comprehension of self. In this way, we both expose and unify our conflicts and contradictions. As Walt Whitman put it, “Do I contradict myself? Well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes!” Thus my favorite definition of a crone: “She who eats her own shadow.”
Dylan’s seemingly contemptuous attitude towards that which most people still revere is not new. Doris Lessing, who gifted crones of my generation way back in the ’60s with our “bible,” The Golden Notebook (1962) and then continued on with “The Four-Gated City” (1969) and other remarkable and prescient cultural penetrations, had this to say when she received her Nobel Prize in Literature back in 2007 (listen to the end; hilarious final remark). She did not attend her award ceremony, due to “illness.”
Once we begin to see through the veils, we cannot go back. Which accounts for our initial difficulty in being brave enough to move close enough to actually see. Who wants to rip apart all that has been holding us in place our entire lifetimes — and for thousands of years? Who wants to take off the tight little conceptual helmets that limit our thinking our imagination our love?
“It’s simply not possible! My identity will be destroyed!”
Yes, your “identity.” Your “identity project.” Your “resume.” What you have painstakingly built up over a lifetime to bamboozle other people, to make them think that you are something! “Yes, I am something!” We say to the mirror in a quavering tone, trying to get ourselves to believe it. Or maybe, we hear back, “You are something else!” as my mother used to say about me. “Who do you think you are?” I hear her admonish, scared, no doubt, about what might happen to me if others found out.
Well guess what, Mom, nothing happened!
I’ve lived outside the matrix for nearly five decades. I not only survive, I thrive. Follow me and others who have seen through 3-D bullshit to a multidimensional universe, one in which we all survive, and thrive, together, beyond the prison of “belief,” each one a highly individual unique self gifting to all the others who we really are — all of our beautiful passion and intense focus, funneled into highly specific talents and skills galore. Each of us, leading the way home — to our full selves. As Mom used to also say, “It takes all kinds.”
Can you imagine the abundance, the vitality, if everyone did that? If only 5% did that? Can you imagine the contagion? How this sorry world would explode with joy and laughter and relief?
It’s not just “peace” that we’re after. That’s too passive-sounding, namby-pamby, righteous. We’re after total, full on, kick-ass celebration of the ongoing miracle of our own and others’ aliveness, endless creation, pulsing through us in waves, larger and larger, a nuclear tsunami of love and light igniting our re-membrance to this magnificent planet and through her, to the mysterious cosmos as a whole.
We are the universe, breathing! In each breath we take, let us sense the vastness moving through, expanding, contracting, conscious, aware, prescient, and applauding.
