A New Temple
A New Temple is the completion of a three-month psyche project. It is a short, small book of poetry, dreams, visions and animal spirit messages. It is a quest for healing ancestral trauma and it is dedicated to my bloody, muddy ancestral mothers who made their entrance in the middle of my life and said, “You wanted aliens, but instead you got us.” It is available here.
A form of cord cutting is becoming a new creature. This book was a quest to heal and to honor my mothers by building a temple with my words. Their blood is my ink. Completing this was a form of soul recovery. Now that it’s out of my system, my psyche has more room to play and imagine and create something new.
The book itself is 5 x 7 inches and 54 pages long. A New Temple begins somewhere in the middle and the rest is a visual journey through dreams, visions, poetry and animal spirit messages. Below are some pages from the book.
What happens to hearts while dreaming:
He said he would call me later that night while we were both sleeping, because in dreams our hearts disrobe themselves of muscles and tissues and details of life and they become entangled in light. Light, he said, that twists and forms shadows of every thing, and the shadows of things are not really things, but fragments of things that care for nothing but love.
The Black Tapestry
I found myself in a dark void, surrounded by a primordial and formless space. At first, I thought I had lost all my senses. Everything was deep black and soundless and there was no gravity. I was a floating consciousness with no home. This is limbo, I thought — or maybe I just knew and didn’t think any thoughts. I seemed to understand things without processing them. This is intuition. This is clairvoyance. This is my third eye. Out of the void, a bolt of fabric came into view. It was also black and began to slowly unroll itself before me. A velvety, onyx-colored cloth expanding to the edges of my perception, until it became what I knew as my sole existence. All at once, an invisible hand started embroidering symbols and archetypes and allegories. I read the fabric from left to right — stitch by stitch — I was witnessing my life from birth to now. An orphrey of multi-dimensional imagery. Each symbolic stitching embodying a multitude of history and emotion and language. And the colors — such vivid hues of violet, orange, crimson and pink. It looked like something my long-lost ancestral aunts in Mexico might have sewn. But even though the colors were bright and festive, I was quickly overtaken by grief and discouragement. By now, the invisible hand had finished its work midway through the fabric, leaving almost exactly half of it blank. What lay before me was an unfinished tapestry so deeply embedded with neglect and loss and scarcity — all of which were at this moment so foreign to me. I wanted out of this vision, and hurtful reminder of where I had come from. My shapeless consciousness grew hot with shame, and pulsated with anxiety that spread outward into nothing. This must be how stars die, I thought. No, This is how stars die. I knew. Then came a gentle cooling. I was reminded — telepathically — that what I was seeing was my past. The other half of the tapestry still remained to be embroidered. They said it would be stitched by my own hand and with only the values and experiences that I wanted for this life. Symbols of love and animals and friendship and nature and art and freedom and magic, and these simple words do no justice to the rich power that lies behind them, because just like the embroidery they are a prism. Multi-faceted and pure light. An energy of such high vibration that it could only belong to the Gods. And as I began to accept this as truth — in the core of my being — my sadness gracefully morphed into rapture and gratitude and passion. This was an invitation to stand at the helm of my life. And I took it. And my own black velvet tapestry is just one of infinite tapestries eternally unfolding across the universe — a divine display of all the soul journeys that embark onto unknown space and create something beautiful.
“For all the supernatural lust in your eyes: BELIEVE”
Dream Journal, August 2, 2011
Disclaimer: I was 27 when I had this dream. I feel like anything written or experienced in your twenties should have a disclaimer.
I was walking the streets of San Francisco, sometimes it was Oakland. Irrelevant though, because it was acting more like an old lover. Acting as if it had forgotten me, never loved me, moved on to better things. Still, I stepped onto every curb and turned every corner trying to remember what drew me to fall in love in the first place. There was a boy, like there always is, and at every crosswalk we met. I tried walking in front of him, tried leaving him behind like so many had done to me before, but somehow we kept crossing paths. My destination/destiny became a broken-down bookstore where Spacewaves was performing. Suddenly, I knew his name was Camus and that he was their new drummer. I said, “Fine. You can have me.” Then, I dragged him into the bathroom and made out with him, like I was drunk, but I wasn’t. Not even on love, I don’t think. I left him there and as I walking out, a stranger with an Indian accent, stopped me and said, “Don't be afraid of Camus. Rule him the perversion in your life. For all the supernatural lust in your eyes: BELIEVE.”
Note: When the Indian stranger said “perversion” he also said “purpose,” like at the same time.
Visual: Mind Voyages I
Here’s a gif I made of what I see when I meditate, attempting to traverse space consciousness.
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
— Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe
Wormhole wonderings and other things
An ad hoc list of what’s been happening:
YouTube: #MeditativeMind soundscapes
Reading: Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman's Guide to Reality Selection (while staying grounded in this reality)
Internet: CIA Electronic Reading Room, Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process + Vice, How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA
“Brain change willed is as close to magic as we’re going to get.”
Workspace:
We installed a new, larger window in my home office. My first thought: “View is about to get expansive AF.”
Message from meditation:
“One channel only.”