Monday, December 31, 2012

Babies Don't Come with Insructions

     Yes, as the title says, babies do not come with an instruction manual, nor the rest of a child's upbringing all through to adulthood, just like marriage, relationships, friendships...  
    The first time I had a baby, I was twenty-one, and going home from the hospital was scary.  The second time I had a baby, I was twenty-seven and not scared, but still I made little mistakes once in awhile.
     I put my baby, when he was a few months old, in a sleeper that I had not washed yet.  I did not know that the flame retardant chemicals can cause a severe allergic reaction.  I should have known to wash it first.
     He got an awful rash on his hip, and I had to take him to Dr. Mac.  She said it was the sleeper, and she prescribed cortisone cream.  It got better.
     I just thought of that, because I saw a post about keeping chemicals off of babies.  
     I shared a picture of my sons to show they made it to adulthood.  Now, it is up to them to find their own way.  I will always offer help, love and guidance, but now it is time to let them learn about life, and hope that it will never be as crazy as my life was.

The Lantern

At dusk, I followed the light of the lantern,
that lit the tavern door.
I heard another seeker's despair, under the new moon's dark downpour.

And in the warmth of light I heard you laughing, drawn close to the wine.
And once more I longed for you,
your singing, a nightingale divine.

Inside this prison, felt not alive,
and I needed air to breath, to strive,
And, out at sea drowning again,
in this whirlwind I am in.

Out to sea, like broken glass,
no ship to hold, ah but alas,
and once more the moon shone,
the water's light I found you on.


Friday, December 21, 2012

Unnecessary Glorification of Suffering

     I agree with Marianne Williamson, that there is too much glorification of suffering.  If we focus on the crucifixion and not the resurrection, including our own suffering, we miss something.  I believe in the resurrection.  I know Baba followers don't for the most part, but I am not a traditional Baba follower, and I do believe in the resurrection.
     I also believe in Christmas in the Course in Miracles sense.  It is the birth of Christ our brother, and our own birth in the Holy Spirit.  
     I too have had a dark night of the soul, but that is not where I choose to dwell, and I do not demand spiritual points for this, a ridiculous notion in my opinion.  However, I do feel that the pain has brought me to read books like Return to Love, while a Course in Miracles was just something I was brought by a friend to, and it really made sense, so I kept coming back, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous.
     I thought all my past which I wanted healed would suddenly be cured, but it is not like that.  It is still difficult, not a magical or sudden cure.  I know though, that the light is somewhere at the end of this tunnel, my physical eyes and metaphorical eyes as well. I know someday, maybe when I die, I will finally heal.  I do not know.  One day I think I have found all the answers and it all makes sense, and then I will get sad again or angry or resentful, so I am far from enlightened in some ways, but I am enlightened in that I know that this is illusion, and all that exists is love, and this suffering is nil.  It is bullshit.  I can meditate, clear my mind, and this pain is meaningless.
     I believe in the resurrection in my own life, because I almost died near Easter in 2003.  I was in intensive care in the Loris hospital and then at M.U.S.C. in Charleston, where I spent Easter Sunday.  I could have died, but I was supposed to live for a reason, perhaps for my children.  I feel God let me live, gave me another chance.  And, that it was Easter, is no coincidence.  Nothing is, really.
     All that is is love, Heaven, God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit thought system.  When I say Jesus, I mean Jesus, our perfect brother.  
There are many names of God, all are perfect, and He hears them all.  We all have our own God of our understanding.  What matters most is what they call in AA, step 11, a couscous contact to God through prayer and meditation.
     So, now in the spirit of Christmas, I celebrate the birth of Christ and my own birth in the Holy Spirit, oneness, and the innocence of the Christ child is our own innocence reflected back in this new birth, this newness, not to be construed with 'born again' in a fundamentalist sense, but a new life in oneness.  And, forgiveness or corrected perception, which is synonymous with forgiveness is atonement.  The Course in Miracles uses Christian terminology in a more eastern type of philosophy, and words like atonement have a slightly different meaning.  This way, the western mind, whether Christian or Jewish can understand. I have known a few Jews, including Marianne Williamson, who I do not know personally, but is Jewish, who had very little problem with the idea of Jesus.  I guess, deep down, people from Jewish backgrounds really want to love Jesus, a Jew himself, our brother once again.  On the other hand, I knew one guy, who was really into A Course in Miracles and kept coming to classes, but he said, "I'm Jewish, so I cannot relate to the Christian terminology."  But, even he really accepted it.  According to the story, Helen channeled Jesus, and dictated to Bill throughout the writing of the book.  This happened in New York City in the '60's, but I do not think the book became available until the '70's.  Return to Love by Marianne Williamson came out around '92.  I am amazed how enlightened people were compared to me, back then, looking back, even though I was at the '69 Darshan when I was seven years old, spent time with Mehera, and was in India when I was twelve, singing on Mehera's porch and again at twenty-five during problems in my marriage, when I was a young wife and mother.  Happy Birthday Dearest Mehera J. Irani, Meher Baba's Beloved, tomorrow.  Tomorrow is also my son's wedding day, but I will unfortunately not be there, because he is living in Peru.  (Just found out my son David's wedding is postponed, just to be accurate.)  {note added on December 22, '12}
All my love and happy holidays, my beloveds.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Cougars and Paint Brushes

     It was a gorgeous day today, here in the south, warm and sunny.  I went to the hardware store for supplies, including white enamel and brushes for touching things up, like corrosion, and I found the most beautiful arts and craft brushes made of pony hair.  
     At first I just bought a set of just three, but later walked back and exchanged them for a more extensive set.  I am dreaming of all the beautiful things I can do with the brushes if I just get some colorful paint.  I could paint on paper or wood.  Most of my furniture and walls, I have already painted all over, well really mostly the kitchen.  I would like one wall a heavenly blue, but I imagined painting porcelain dolls and things, you know quaint stuff.
     A guy no more than twenty-five looked me up and down.  I was wearing my skinny jeans and combat boots with my Kelly green sweater.  Also, I had my hair in a ponytail and had earrings and green eye shadow.  Maybe I was just standing out too much.  I am not a cougar anymore. 
     No, those days are over.  Now I am over fifty, over the hill, fifty-one, legally blind.  I am more like a grandmother now, even ask for a senior discount if I'm short on cash.  No, I am not a cougar anymore.  I never really was, and I suppose I still could be if I wanted to, but my psyche is changing, as I run wild with the wolves, as in Women Who Run With the Wolves, I have become a bit of a lone wolf.  I lost my tribe years ago in a sense.  Some of us dropped out of the sky to the wrong family, the wrong religion, the wrong everything.  I feel I did.  I feel I belonged to someone else, somewhere else, and never found my lost tribe.  Oh, my children are my tribe, and although I know this is a textbook narcissistic symptom, but I feel like my kids are a part of me, my people.  
     A guy who knew my son David, saw me for the first time and said, "you look so much like David."  That was a compliment.  Sometimes people think my kids are my brothers.  Well, so much for self-flattery.  On to more important matters of the day.  Namaste.  

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Stop with the Lie, Don't Be One Way this Day and...

     OK, so I got talked into going to see a movie I hated, Flight, don't get me wrong I love Denzel Washington.  I Just don't like manipulation.
OK, I know some need help, but where were you friend when I asked for help, when I offered help?  Don't give me this crap now, please.  I get it.  I really do.  But, I've been that route, been down every route, and just when I was getting on track.  I had ordered Return to Love by Marianne Williamson, because finally my mind is ready to wrap itself around the truth of the only thing I ever knew that truly made full sense, A Course in Miracles, and then I am proselytized to with twelve step crap.  I am only mad, because I have been there done that, and it is a load of crap. 
    I was beginning to see clearly, and this just stood in my god damn fucking way.

     

Saturday, December 15, 2012

The Right Thing to Do

     Sometimes doing the right thing can feel so bad, so wrong.  Just because it is hard, that does not mean it is wrong.  Sometimes when you have to make a change, because a certain situation is not serving anyone, especially you, you have to break the viscous cycle.
     I have been on a viscous cycle, a few in my time, and perhaps there was something I was getting from it, at the time.  Finally something snaps, and you think, "I don't want to do this anymore."  At least that is my experience.
     There are levels of how bad the cycle could be, speaking in duality terms, which is really not real, but you know what I mean, I guess.  One might even get some pleasure or purpose or excitement, as well as some basic need met in a certain situation, but then one might say one day, "I want to do things different.  I want to pave a space for something in my life, that I am not leaving space for, because I am cluttering it with these patterns I have lived for years, because they are what is comfortable to me, what I am used to."  It could even be a self-esteem issue to some degree, or maybe just staying in one's comfort zone.
     I feel like I am at one of those crossroads now, where I have to make changes.  Change is hard.  I used to find it almost impossible, until I 'got my head on straight.'
     I think we all have an inner guidance, but sometimes it can be helpful to seek the counsel of a wise and trusted person, who is on the spiritual path, to help show the way with their powerful bright light.  We all have a bright light, the crown chakra when aligned with the heart chakra, like a silver thread that goes all the way from the root, through the sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye and finally the crown, which is white or gold.
     If I have the peace of God, then I am never alone, never empty, but whole.

Friday, December 14, 2012

I Realized What Bothered Me

     Recently I got a resentment, which is not unusual, but it took me a while to figure out what really bothered me and why.  What bothered me, I guess, was that when I was at any type of open program at the Meher Center, when people got to talk, that no one ever asked me in all the years and years, since I grew up at the center since I was five, just turned five, and had parents who met Baba and had special permission to build a house on the center, why or how my parents came to meet Baba, how old I was, what growing up at the center was like, especially in '66 before they all came.  No one ever asked me anything.
      I know in the Course in Miracles, no one is 'special.'  The thing is they all act like they are so important and special, singing at programs, working at the center.  It seems everyone has a holier than thou attitude towards me, and treat me like a I am to be shunned, and exclude as well as ostracize me.  I do not really care, and I know I am not a conformer, but it is not like I am a bad person, who does bad things, etc..
     So, I have just given up.  They do not want to see me, know me, hear me, and I feel this way mutually now.  It is like you grow up at the Baba Center, and everyone assumes that that is a privilege when really there were many draw backs to that.  
     My parents built and payed for the road that goes from Patterson Drive into the Center through my mother's house, Sheriar Gate House, and they just have their special keys to that chain, because they are very important, but they are so not interested in what my family was ever doing there, or why.  It is the strangest thing.  It is so strange. 
     The picture shows right to left, my late father, Lyn Ott, my sister Mimi and me in either the late '70's to early '80's.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Love Holds No Grievances (a Course in Miracles)

      There is something to be said about unconditional love, whether you believe in it or not.  It does exist, but not usually in romantic love.  Love never dies, or is killed, not if it is real.  Many times romantic love is finally killed, and well it should be, because romantic love has expectations, romance, sex, 'specialness,' 
a Course in Miracles term, a term which, when I use, is underlined in red, because in the world or the average dictionary, the term does not exist.  "Love holds no grievances."  ACIM  
     We all know what this means.  Many years ago, I made the worst decisions of my life.  Some may have suggested other decisions.  But, we all know where we fully went wrong, and I do as well.  A psychic predicted everything that happened, and yet, I still followed the progress of what was to come.  It was as though I was under a spell, and I could not help myself, but with knowledge and know how, I could have made better decisions.  I was a mature woman, a mother, a divorcee, but still I made stupid decisions based on ego, etc..  Some want to know where my new age learning began.  I wish it were with Meher Baba, and as much as I love Mehera, his beloved, and her part in my life, my marriage and my children, with all her love and kindness, it came later than that.
    It came when the pain was too long and too great.  It came when I was tired, tired of trying to carry all that baggage on my own, when nothing could take away the way I felt.  
     I was bringing up two kids alone, and I found the I Ching, astrology, the Course in Miracles, yoga, meditation, Reiki, which I became a master of, and I learned about what Jung talks of, 'the shadow', myself, my dark self, the self that society may or may not accept, where I was liberated from the need to be spiritual, to be what others expected, and then only then could I be myself.  That is why I love the book Women Who Run With the Wolves so much, because I am not Mehera, and I am not perfect and I was exhausted, sick and virtually tired of being perfect.  I could not do it anymore.  I had to be everything I am, and not just one part, I had to be parts I did not even know.  
    Now, I no longer have to pretend to be anyone or anything, but who and what I am, and that person, woman, she-wolf, canine lupus or canine rufus, that free spirit, is who and what I am today and am proud, a brave, a squaw, a warrior, medicine woman, artiste, craftswoman, home maker, administrator, mother, friend, sister, daughter, dancer, singer, teacher, scientist, all things I am, but I am no longer what you try to make me be.  Not ever, ever again.  The cost to my soul is too great.  The suffering too severe, the emergency too dire.  Here I stand before you, and I am.  I just am, for love holds no grievances towards myself or anyone.

























































































Saturday, December 8, 2012

I Can Choose Peace

     If I had known years ago, all I know today, it would have saved me a lot of time worrying and suffering, as well as drama.
     When the Course in Miracles talks about enlightenment, we are not talking present God realization necessarily, but about seeing less illusion or realizing it is all illusion, thus suffering less.  This is not to say that one does not suffer at all.  Too many religions, including Baba followers' interpretation of his teachings, are focused on suffering, equating this with spirituality.  This is bullshit, pardon the expression.  I can choose peace over my suffering.  I have a choice.  We all do, even those with mental illnesses to some degree, have the ability if they are open and willing to learn, to control one's thinking.
     Eckhart Tolle says, "your situation is only your thoughts about it."  If you change a thought, move a muscle, everything can be seen differently.  You may also say this little ACIM prayer: God, help me see this differently.  Also, I am never upset for the reason I think.  And a very wise person once said to me, "all suffering is caused by lies you tell yourself."  That helped me a lot.
     Now, I would like to bring up the ego.  Of course, in order to survive we must have an ego in a Freudian sense, but I am not talking psychology, but spirituality.  The ego, once hysterically trying to run the show, control, etc., is a dangerous thing.  We run to it, to save us, but it is our own worst enemy, causing us to attack, accuse, resent, be selfish, jealous and all other character defects.  The best way to function, for a better life and good fortune, is through innocence.  If we look at life through the Holy Spirit thought system, and stop separating ourselves from God, we can be happy.  If we can look at our brother or sister, even those we cannot love, through heaven, love and the Holy Spirit, we can see differently, through love.  Then, our problems are still there, but perhaps we can deal with them differently, without all the complications of the ego.
     I hope this is helpful to someone.  It certainly has been to me.  In '96, a very hard year for me, I only owned one book, Marianne Williamson's Return to Love, based on A Course in Miracles.  I hope to get that book again.  The library for the blind does not have it, but I would like to just own a copy, a print copy.  At the time, I was in so much pain and had zero coping skills, although I did stop with my son, going across country, in Columbus Missouri, to talk to a counselor I either found from a hot line from the motel, or the phone book.  Still, once I landed in Colorado, I kept trying to read this book, but it just was not sinking in.  My mind was too laden with so much stuff.  Still, something about the book, kept causing me to gravitate to it, and read it anyway, bits and parts.
     For me, it took a long time to come to a place of any true understanding of the principles of A Course in Miracles, when in my forties, I finally began studying in a class, and still am.  It has helped me so much, I cannot even begin.  I hope some of this is helpful.  Love and namaste.  Shanti, shanti.

Monday, December 3, 2012

Suffering vs Peace

     While everyone, or most people have suffered from one degree to another, mentally, physically and all have handled it differently, some needing medical intervention and some not, our suffering does not define us.  That is unless that is what one wants one's definition to be.  
     I am not my story.  I may have suffered, maybe still suffer, and may yet to suffer, but it is not what or who I am.  If you build your whole existence around your past, present or future suffering, what is that?  Dead bones.  I have suffered too, even in a clinical way at times.  Does this mean that I think I suffered more than anyone?  NO!!  Does it mean I am that, that I identify with my pain?  Absolutely not!
Do I think it is bringing me closer to God?  I have no idea.
     All I know is that I can choose peace now and anytime over anything else.  Recently, I was so worried about my younger son, I literally was physically and mentally ill over it.  Still, even then, I could have chosen peace over that.  I have a choice.
     I realize many people have emotional imbalances, even me, but I do not center my life and identity around that.  I choose joy and happiness.
     Sometimes I think Meher Baba followers put way to much emphasis on suffering, like it is a part of the religion.  I find this somewhat unfortunate.  Most people have suffered at one time or another.  The truth is that enlightenment brings less suffering, because the enlightened individual knows that it is just illusion.  Baba followers do not like this concept for the most part.
     Truthfully, I am tired of people wallowing in self-pity.  I have done it, do it too sometimes, but when you think about it, it is such a major turn-off.  It is like, 'I have such a hard life...  I suffered the most...'
     I am half blind and I do not carry on like this.  Frankly, I am getting tired of it.  I know someone close to me who is constantly suffering over everything.  I feel like saying, "for crying out loud, get over yourself."
     There are soldiers coming back with injuries and PTSD and people have died in war camps, and people have lost their homes in storms, and people have had their child die of cancer.  Wake up and smell the coffee.  As Phil Collins says in a song, 'oh, think twice, it's just another day for you in me in Paradise...'
     The other thing that really annoys me for lack of a better word, is 'specialness,' which in A Course in Miracles does not exist.  No one is special.  My parents met Baba.  I spent a bit of private time with Mehera and corresponded with her, even grew up on the Meher Center and my mother still lives there with Meher Baba's permission (in a house my parents bought, built, and payed for, as well as the road they built that everyone uses, and the land, which the center selfishly and incredulously wants for themselves, even though I have no house.  Screw the Meher Spiritual Center).  This does not make any one of us special.  When I hear people talk of their 'special' relationships with the Mandali, Baba's close ones or household, I want to...  I will not say, but I guess you know where I am going with this.  I am sorry if you find me irreverent, but this is where my spiritual training, post Baba upbringing, has brought me, and I do not understand the old ways.  My ego will never be invested in these types of things.  And, yes I choose peace.  If you do not like hearing the truth about the center, that is your choice.   I still choose peace over resentment and anger. In fact a lot of people will not like a single thing in this blog, but that is alright too.