Jack Ruby and Other Talismans

It's been a winter of challenges, yes even in so-called paradise (AKA Maui). Unusually inclement weather - wind, rain, cool days and nights, and water choppy and too cold for comfortable swimming. Recurrent cold/flu virus attacks, mutating weekly, for months on end. Bouts with parasites persisting from last year's travels in India. Wrestling with future alternatives in the quest for a home with budget balance...

In mid-April, our evening entertainment turned to watching video replays of presentations at the conference held in LA by Project Camelot, entitled, "Awake and Aware 2013: Time Travel & Other Worlds." Meanwhile I was reading 11/22/63, the Stephen King novel about travel back in time to undo the Kennedy assassination. In that quest many obstacles intruded along the way; the hero discovering, "The past is obdurate." The book is reminiscent of Groundhog Day and Rendezvous, both dealing with multiple replays of the past until "you get it right."

My phone log began to reveal a few repetions of the following:

Jack

Ruby

(Jack Ruby, for those two young to remember, was the assassin of Kennedy's assassin, insuring the past would remain silent on that plot.)

Ruby was a young woman wanting to buy our ruby-red car (a 2001 Acura Integra). When she showed up to have a look at it, I said to her, "Ruby, meet Ruby." The week before, the first person we showed the car to said it should have a name... like "Ruby."

This sequence also recalls the movie trailer Ruby Sparks, where a novelist's character creation (Ruby) comes to life as part of his life.

In the midst of all the above, the past - or in this case, the future scenario of selling the car - proved obdurate more than once. After feedback from the first two buyers, we decided to get some basic bodywork done to hammer out the worst of the dents on both front fenders: relics of past accidents in California by Osnat's twenty-something son and daughter. The very next day after the work was done, she drove to an evening event - a channeling session by an interdimensional comic named Karton - and came out to the parking lot to find a fresh dent in the rear bumper; so we had to return the next day to the body shop to deal with that.

The next day, she drove to a healer in the afternoon, up a rough dirt driveway. The healer announced that the stubborn parasites (persistent since India) plaguing Osnat's system all winter had survived her attempted purge and were beginning a new life cycle. On the way out she drove over a rock and suffered a flat tire, which meant another trip to town and another costly repair, dragging down our morale and making us wonder what forces were arrayed against us in preparing to leave this enchanted/haunted island. Following the tire repair, a talisman appeared in the tire well of the trunk: a large button from an ancient sweater of Osnat's from years past.

Coming out the other side of this gauntlet of clues and omens, to our final week before we had to  fly away, the King book was finished, the parasites back in remission. But Craigslist fell silent, and the car remained unsold.

"Time is an illusion," Bashar reminds us. "All points in space and time are linked together. When you find that inner excitement in one experience, and then another, it will turn out that those experiences must be connected." Awake and aware, in the pause between anxiety and excitement, we await the next signpost on the way back home.

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Postscript, next day: Osnat passes her driver's test. At the DMV while awaiting her license I see my former yoga teacher on Maui, Ruby Amarshan. In the evening we go together to the Karton session, and in the same parking lot where the previous week someone dinged the rear bumper, I bonk my head on the hatchback and realize it's not staying open: the hydraulic struts are shot. Yet another obstacle to selling the car...
I go stressing into paranoia mode, while Osnat remains optimistic down to the wire: "Something will show itself." On Wednesday we plead our case at the used car lots, put notices on bulletin boards, relist online, and formulate backup plans for car storage on Maui.

After meeting with my friend Rick to play chess, drum, and discuss car options - in the chess game of life - I'm too burnt out even to go drumming for dance class. Instead, on the way down the highway towards home, my phone rings and a guy says he wants to see the car. I detour to Kahalui to meet him there. On seeing the red Integra his eyes light up. A classic sporty car, he owned a '95 model, wanted one again. Dents, struts, no problem. This is the car he wants. Cash in his pocket. Let's do this, tonight.

And it is done. We enter the home stretch clear and free. Rick channels pithy wisdom by way of congratulations, worthy of a bumper sticker:

"Patience is often required when surfing life in the now."

[previous trials and tribulations of Buying a Car on Maui]

2012 Solstice Reset

This channeling knows no other dreamtime but that of the now, in the making, in the celebration of self which is all, of the act which is any act, of the words which are any words, of the motion which is ongoing however one might attempt to slice it into two or more segments of frozen time, time nonetheless beats on, wings and thunder.

Again the chorus speaks, the deal is struck, the provisional makeshift tent of the world circus is erected on the dusty square around the fountain, the gypsies arrive and the banksters retire and the camels smile in their dry dung aroma.

Again the lines diverge, converge, swim in the undulations of a greater force. Again and again, I come to surrender my own dissatisfactions, the larger failings, the grievous state of affairs of affairs of state, to come home to this always this and only this moment in time no time between you all you and me not me to face the mirror of understanding which stands under the banner of All-That-Is.

No new god or religion, this sense remains provisionally attached to a conscious being who happens to pass by here long enough to get a read from the oscillating compass, the fluttering timepiece, and reckon where next the wind might buffet everything in its merry way.

Towns thrashing in the surf of the ages; silent apocalypses rendering all miraculous in the morning of the new day. Again the surf rises, and again the volunteers encounter and override their own resistance and fear, to join the incoming tide.



With the following I offer snapshots of three spiritually-oriented events I was privileged to attend, marking this solstice season:

Sitting with Claudio, Lemuria

The place was packed on the 21st, the morning of the world UNIFY meditation set to raise the planetary vibration by the power of mass intention. The usual speech was given to bring to our busy minds the peaceful acceptance that we are already universal consciousness, universal being itself, no other separate self except in our illusions, or for temporary entertainment. We are the ant, the papaya, the billions of galaxies.

Beware the gurus in pointy hats and clown suits. Beware the hoary traditions thousands of years old, in which women are excluded from positions of power. Beware the fixations on this or that name of "God," the names themselves becoming idols of prejudice, limitation, separation.

The new world is the world we awake to any and every moment, the world available to us even if we forget or refuse to be aware. Any categorization of it as a new religion or belief system is fraught with inaccuracy, shades of contentious interpretation, endless commentary; so we must trust our individual expression of it to others as needed, in the new moment arising, spontaneous and therefore honest and direct - even if words themselves can only approximate direct experience, understanding, realization.

Activation with Kartron, Ha'iku

Inspired to manifest our highest possibility in the crystal light grid of electromagnetic resonant frequency in the star chamber of the god-gate vortex, azure-blue forty-four feet high and forty-four feet across to channel the necessary energies of transmutation overseen by Archangel Michael and St. Germain, a half-dozen of us came together on a rainy Ha'iku night preceeding the 1:11 ascension time of the solstice itself, bypassing the prescribed Mayan movement meditation on inverted triangles to activate the torsion magnetics of the soul template to anchor the eight-minute transmission for three months in which humanity will solidify on earth what has been brought from heaven...

The delivery is English arch and comical, Monty Python meets Kryon the Interdimensional. Yet the critique is incisive, uncompromising impatience with powers manipulating earth and life itself, their time now finished and due to fade away, as we take courage to banish them, refusing their overtures, consigning them to prison or exile as consequences of their own dark choices.

We are the warriors of light, the initiates of god-training, who must embody and act upon the heavenly decrees of those who have gone before, those who watch from above and those committed over eons to see the fulfillment of the paradigm of harmony set to replace the paradigm of discord and chaos and worse, coercion and falsification of life's innate imprints for the wellbeing of all.

Zikr with Leilah, Makawao Union Church

This knowledge of soul unification is mystic-old, from the Sufi seers and spinners and poets, so we celebrated in large concentric circles and singing this practice of oneness with the spirit of all, Al-lah, but one of the names of all-that-is. The time come for the world of oppression and exploitation and separation to end, a separation or rather integration of that ruling paradigm into a new flowering of old wisdom.

We bring to rebirth in our practice together the knowledge of inner truth, which connects in spirit all things and all beings. Our voices resonate with gratitude for such spirit, for the divine manifestation that we enjoy in this temporary stay in the garden of immanent splendor. Our prayers are our voices and swaying bodies, our joined hands and hearts. Our feet step the codes of grace and commitment, marking the journey not outward or away, but circling the territory of the sacred which we share.



And what of that supposed phenomenon, this world-staged upheaval and transformation, the signal to new time or no time?

It fades with the world it claimed to recycle, giving rise to what comes instead.

It brings nothing in its wake recognizable as a suitable replacement, because that very standard of replication has been relegated to the settling basin of the hourglass.

It ceases control as the objects and subjects of that ill-gotten bargain opt out for clearer arrangements, direct dealings over the trade of those tokens we value in advancing the game forward.

Projects multiply, sources corroborate, invitations beckon, dead ends sprout weeds, fallow fields grow what they will, and the chorus takes another deep breath before the chant of the new day.

Paradise Alive, Revolution Afoot

Here in Maui nearly a month, and difficult to generate any impetus to create something other out of the bubble of suburban comfort, experiential paradise in the outer and inner realms: loving relationship, nurturing warm ocean and air, sunshine and earth, ample drumming and social opportunities, fresh local organic food, time to work on paying jobs and our own projects. The first week, true, posed challenges settling in. We had to futz with furniture arrangement, household supplies, wireless upgrades, computer glitches, phone plan options, car registration, assorted errands in mall-ville. On the fun side of daily life we've been reacquainting ourselves with familiar places and people: sampling beaches with good snorkeling, taking walks on our neighborhood streets interlaced with golf fairways, attending zikr, kirtan, and 5-rhythms dance, and playing drums and percussion at drum classes, dance classes, beach jams, house jams, jungle jams.

Rising out of this swell of material contentment is an inner thriving, yet striving to create more, a reaching out and connecting to glimpse a bigger picture, at risk of contamination by endless conspiracy and unraveling, threats to peace and well-being, real or imagined. At every point of input is a questioning, a partial truth with another truth on its darker side, or a lighter truth hidden by the walls of projection. There is a risk of sheer reactivity, of responding in kind, of feeding polarity by leaning on one side or the other. Equanimity holds the balance, either with a balanced, classic "liberal" view, or a radical vision beyond dualistic assertions competing for attention.


The natural world serves as the testing ground for what is real: flowing currents, blowing breezes, burning sun, lava and coral, with its attendant life forms that judge our actions as valid or remote by sheer comparison. Last week we were escorted in turn by a couple of turtles for an extended swim along the coral: one turning suddenly to eye us face to face; the other, a six-foot giant, content to match us stroke for stroke for a full half and hour. Today the turtle that appeared out of "nowhere" under our plasticked noses lay mute and stone-still on the bottom, nestled in a trough of old coral, only blinking to signal its questionable hold on life. Was it poisoned, injured, dying? Scared, or bored? Or just napping, extending the long moment before its next brief breath? What story unfolded that eluded our imagining utterly? On the sign to the beach was depicted a cute couple lounging on the sand: monk seal with flipper on the leathery turtle by its side. So, missing that lost love?

In other news, we hear the revolution is afoot. Monday will reveal its truth or fantasy, forewarning or false lead. Or radiation about to bloom, sending us all to doom. Or, ascension at hand, holographic transformation an act of divine will. Or, more of the same mass diet of concocted terror, machination and mounting control, the mad dreams of a dying elite. Or, back to the basics of suburban life, outfitting the kitchen, walking the dog. Or, greeting the new sun each day with a smile, stretching the body under its unbending rays of glory.


The beauty is, there is considerable choice in the channel to tune to, the show to create. One, two, a network and multitude at a time. At the speed of coral, turtle or seal, flower or sunset, slow shared meal.