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GREETINGS fellow dream animals! Welcome. This podcast is place where silence grows a tongue, words turn into dharma bells and astrology is understood as a mystical practice more suited to poetry than psychology.
To make the podcast more spacious and digestible there will be five dharma bells breaks followed by 30 seconds of silence. At the end of the podcast, you’re invited to join me for a few minutes of devotional chanting.
If you’d like to learn more about my Astrodharma readings and online Mentorships, please visit my website: astrodharma.org.
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Lately, I’ve been seeing the bulk of the world’s melancholy as a symptom of slamming between dead sleep and egoic posturing and “loneliness” as the work of a time-tethered mind untrained in “divine pauses,” and the otherworldly joy of relating “as awareness to awareness.”
Conversely, “happiness” is revealing itself as a commitment to living in liminal fields: straddling dreamtime with animality, personhood with boundless being, “separate somebodyness” with the momentarily disorienting, but ultimately sublime, sense of being an eternal soul appearing in God’s dream.
Wellness, it seems, is a byproduct of mystical sobriety.
This, of course, takes practice. When the dream turns solid we all need a few handy, go-to prayers. Here’s mine:
Hold me in your timeless glory and let the whole human story take a rest.
After just one recitation of this prayer, I quickly see past the “thumbs up” demeanor of the personality in front of me and remember who I’m talking to: Mind-on-a-countdown, exhausted, trembling and longing to be immersed and reabsorbed into the ocean of Being.
This craving for timeless refuge is not just healthy; it’s divinely ordained. The hairy headquarters of identity was designed to be submerged into a steamy pool of Presence.
Fine. But how do we balance Aries “selfing” with Pisces reabsorption? How do we walk, “mad enough to be mortal, sane enough to disappear?” Short answer: practice fields.
Souls need containers in which to evolve consciousness. The most basic container: the iobody/mind. But containers also take the shape of relationships, ego-arousing “practice fields” that provide real time feedback as to how we’re inhabiting consciousness. These practice fields come in three basic shapes.
1) The merciful witnessing of mind (commonly called, “meditation”)
2) Soul-savoring communion (commonly called, “love”)
3 Selfless service (commonly called, “work”)
These are the stage sets on which souls break the spell of egoic automation and balance the gravitas of orphaned ego with moments of timeless absorption.
In the throes of meditation, relationship and service, egos learn how to soothe their survival fears and manage their reactivity. Step by step, lifetime after lifetime, we learn to weave the world’s evidence of separation with the eternal atmosphere of soul: the essence of happiness.
Should we succeed, the victory will not be just for ourselves, but rather an offering to the billions of time-tethered souls numb to the ageless innocence flushing through them like water through the gills of a fish.
To work these practice fields elegantly we will need guidance and support. This, too, comes in three flavors.
1) Inspiring mentors
2) Incisive teachings
3) Allies in awakening
Or, in Buddhist language: “Buddha, dharma and sangha.”
Ask yourself, which practice field am I most active in? Is there a gap that needs to be filled?
———30 second Dharma Bell Break #1———-
Perhaps you’re pained by the absence of teachers, teachings or community in your life.
Consider the possibility that this pain “chose you” for a reason: to motivate you, perhaps, to offer these practice fields, in your own imperfect way, to others. To prod you to more consciously harvest the teachings embedded in your waking dream, then to share them with others so the teacher archetype can begin to flow through you.
Not the teacher type? Careful. In urgent, elder-parched times like these, we must remember: Teachers are not special or exotic. Teacher and student flicker back and forth in everyone and even if you wind up teaching for the rest of your life, you will never be a teacher. You are awareness, itself, playing a theatrical part for as long as it’s in the Tao.
Teacher or not, the important thing is to harvest wisdom from the signs and symbols of your everyday life. Not sure how to do that? Perhaps this autobiographical example will give you a running start.
The Babies Have Gone Silent
Recently, my wife and I were walking along a city sidewalk when we encountered a mother on a bike with two babies- one seated on a bike seat in front, the other behind. Waiting for the light to turn green, we stood speechless as these two babies, lost in a hypnotic trance, sang in perfect unison together: a mind-altering angelic induction.
This unexpected rapture went on for about thirty seconds. Then the mother started to complain about how many red lights they had encountered that day. Instantly, the babies went silent, then they rolled away.
What stunned us about this experience was how simultaneously ordinary and miraculous it was. It was so dream-like that it instantly slipped out of our memories. Neither of us spoke of it until the next morning, when I recounted a night dream.
We were ambling along a paved road winding through a lush rainforest in northern Australia when we noticed movement up in a tree. Hovering next to a cascading string of white Trumpet flowers was a full-grown, naked woman with vibrating wings floating like a humming bird from flower to flower.
As soon as she spotted us she sighed, then floated down directly in front of us, retracted her wings into a T-shirt and pants then started walking away.
Speeding up to walk beside her, I asked her name. Nonchalantly, she said, “Maggie.” Disciplining myself to stay calm, I asked her if she slept in trees. She stopped, looked me dead center in the eye and said, That would be nice, but difficult in this society, no?” Then she turned down a path and disappeared.
As I recounted this dream to my partner, the parallel between the singing babies and the humming bird woman became obvious. We were being asked to let the phantasmagorical become commonplace; to live as grounded mystics stricken with awe even as we worked within the sober conventions of society.
Ever since then, our relationship has been blessed with a new form of mystic slang. Now, whenever one of us becomes reactive and numb to the Shepherding Presence, we say, “the singing babies have gone silent.”
————30 Second Dharma Bell Break #2——-
What happens when the singing babies go silent for an entire generation? When naturally meditative souls with teacher/mentor karma stay silent and under the radar? Simple: the healthy ways of exiting time become more and more inaccessible to the masses.
Meditative reabsorption gets replaced with manic distraction. Entire continents of eternity-parched souls get hooked on cheap dopamine hits via drugs, media, manic distraction and workaholism.
The longer this false transcendence of time goes on, the more viciously addictive it becomes. At some point, society “hits bottom.” An entire generation spirals into self-destruction, mental illness and suicide.
Collectively, this takes the shape of war. Joyless, time-ravaged populations lunge for their final spike of dopamine: the angry deletion of of mind from the face of the planet.
You and I may never know this nadir, but it’s important to admit that the time-ravaged part of us is, even now, feeling tugged in this direction. The longer we stand limply by, lending passive support to the godless habits of mind endarkening this planet, the more vexed and time-sick we, ourselves, become.
For many, going public is the path to peace. Life flows more smoothly once we admit that soul-seeing carries with it a measure of heartbreak and a mandate to guide and comfort the “imaginary others.”
Tibetan Buddhists call this: “The wisdom of no escape.”
———30 Second Dharma Bell Break #3————-
Dream animal
As dark as this time-sick planet appears, it’s actually an affirmation of the timelessness we can’t life without. Clearly, we are dream animals umbilically connected to an overarching Sentience: critically dependent on some kind of otherworldly nutrition.
No matter how dark it gets down here, the predicament of orphaned ego remains the same. In peacetime or war, whatever we say and do is our answer to the question,
How grim and hard-edged does the dream of separation have to get before we commit to an ego-pixilating practice?
What is needed now are smart, psychologically sophisticated practices that jump-start silent seeing and cleanse us of egoic automation.
Enter the Portals to Presence practice.
———30 Second Dharma Bell Break #4———-
The Portals to Presence Practice
The purpose of astro-self-inquiry is to help us wake up as the merciful witness of the specific identity-grasping habits of mind at the core of each of the twelve signs. To that end, I invite you to download and spend one week working with the Portals to Presence chart (see link in the show notes).
Morning and evening, without thinking about it too much, move through all 12 self-inquiry questions, pausing silently for a moment between each one to let the questions reverberate. At the end, settle into 10 minutes of silent sitting. The whole practice should take no more than 20 minutes.
Remember, the “correct” answer to these questions is silent marination-– not mental analysis. Only the merciful witness can dissolve these archetypal identity-grabs, and most of that happens at a subconscious level.
Later, if a specific archetype is strong in your birth chart (or activated by transit) you may wish to spend the entire session going deeper and deeper into one portal.
The journey begins with Aries.
Portals to Presence Questions
1. Aries
What watches the urge to be sovereign and risk personal difference?
Does Presence individuate or blend?
2.Taurus
What watches the desire to ground and build security?
Is Presence established or vulnerable to ruin?
3.Gemini
What watches the desire for variety and change?
Does Presence commit or move on?
4.Cancer
What watches the desire to vulnerably connect?
Is Presence intimate or aloof?
5.Leo
What watches the impulse to shine and be at the center?
Is Presence charismatic or common?
6.Virgo
What watches the urge to edit and improve?
Is Presence perfect or a work in progress?
7.Libra
What watches the desire for harmonious relationship?
Is Presence elegant or abrasive?
8.Scorpio
What watches the impulse to expose shadow?
Does Presence penetrate or take things at face value?
9.Sagittarius
What watches passion for ultimate truth?
Is Presence profound or superficial?
10.Capricorn
What watches desire for professional recognition?
Can Presence advance or lose rank?
11.Aquarius
What watches the desire for community?
Is Presence networked or broken into parts?
12. Pisces
What watches the desire for timeless union?
Does presence commune or go out of tune?
Click here> for Portals to Presence reference chart for home practice
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And so ends this list of astrological koans. May they stroke the head of orphaned ego and catapult you into timeless presence.
Remember: The purpose of this, and all spiritual practices, is to enter the eternity-savoring atmosphere of the soul: the antidote to every fear and the essence of every happiness!
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