Just Your Everyday, Run-of-the-Mill Apocalyptic Shamanic Breathwork Journey, Part Two...

In my previous entry, "Just Your Everyday, Run-of-the-Mill Apocalyptic Shamanic Breathwork Journey, Part One...", I laid out a little background on this entry. In one way, I've been a little fearful about writing this down and speaking publicly into my breathwork vision experience. As I said, it's a dilly...

I don't personally know anyone who isn't shocked and dismayed about what's happening in the Gulf and the very real sense that it is a tipping point of some sort. If it isn't at least a tipping point in waking people up to what we are doing to ourselves, then there seems very little hope that anything will wake us up.

As I prepared for my breathwork journey, the news around the spill grew worse. It turns out there are three leaks from the well, not one, and two of them are from casing failure and damaged strata far below the ocean floor: Scientists are now saying the amount of oil leaking in the gulf could be 3-4 times more than admitted by BP or the US Government; Tremendous amounts of methane gas is being released along with the oil, which has the very real possibility of creating huge "dead zones" in the gulf, and spreading who knows where. Last,  because of the "doomsday scenario," they can't shut the well down because of pressure buildup and the danger of underground blowouts in the rock formation. There are more disasters waiting.

What does it all mean? We don't know. Uncharted territory.

In an earlier breathwork vision several years ago, I was shown planets all over the universe who were not able to move in into higher awareness that had literally killed themselves off, and was told by "Spirit" that we had very little time to shift. If we didn't, our fate would resemble the other planets who had committed species suicide.

In this new breathwork, which happened just last week, I was "shown" that we have exceeded the tipping point where we had an opportunity to save ourselves: that we have passed the last opportunity to salvage our existence on the planet. At first, I was overcome with grief around our stupidity, then I tried to get out of the vision, looking for some way to escape, some way out of the vision that was being presented to me.

I couldn't.

Then, finally, surrender. I just let go. I still carried the numbness from the vision, but rested in surrender until the music finally took me out of the process. I then created a mandala (the illustration at the top of this entry) of what the planet might look like should the "doomsday scenario" take place. For the rest of the day and early evening, I was literally in shock.

It wasn't until later that evening that I was able to find some resolution around the vision: I had to "shift my perspective," stand in another place and view it from a different angle. What I found was this:

What if the shift so many of us have been working and preparing for doesn't look anything like we've imagined it? Existing stages of consciousness never really know what the newly emerging stage is going to look like. What would the effect be on the universe if 6.8 billion souls were pretty much dumped into the sixth "Bardo" at the same time? Sometimes referred to as the "store-house" consciousness, or the aggregate of consciousness which administers and yields rebirth, what impact might that have on consciousness itself? What impact might that have on the shamanic consciousness of death and rebirth?

From this point of view it is because the store-house consciousness, while being originally immaculate in itself, contains a "mysterious mixture of purity and defilement, good and evil" that the transformation of consciousness can take place and enlightenment can be experienced. In this analysis, mental and physical manifestations are nothing but discriminations of Mind and all aspects of the first seven physically enumerated consciousnesses are just the reflections of the store consciousness.

Maybe this is the shift, and maybe we are the ones we've been waiting for. Maybe it won't look anything like what we thought it would look like. Maybe we need to move out of this "little picture" consciousness, walk over here a few paces and look at it from a new perspective....

Hey, I don't know. What I do know is what we're doing isn't working on so many levels.

Partial image of mandala image by Gary Stamper

Men Are Hurting

It was my distinct honor this weekend to emerge a group of men from the Integral Warrior Men's Process. I was asked by the men and by their friends and family to furnish them a copy of the welcome speech I gave before the men self-initiated men themselves as Integral Warriors and Shamanic Priests.


Here is the text of my presentation.

There is no renewal in the universe without a preceding loss. Even the sun is dying every moment. If anyone tells you that you can be reborn, saved, go to heaven, or be born again,  and does not first speak to you very honestly about dying, do not believe them. You cannot be reborn to the new if you aren’t willing to die to the old first. There is no such thing as a “prosperity gospel.” Death and life are an eternal embrace, two sides of the same coin. It is the one common theme in every initiatory process, in every initiation rite. Any initiation process that does not teach this mystery is not an initiation at all.

There's an old blues song by William Bell called, “You don’t miss your water until your well runs dry”…Unless a man has been involved in the human struggle, he probably won't know what is missing in his life, because we can only miss what we have experienced. Not only is classic mens' initiation sadly missing from modern and postmodern life, but postmodernism has completely deconstructed the initiation process.

Even our animal brothers make it clear that juniors need elders ….Humans and animals are imitative and mimetic. Several Years ago National geographic did a special on elephants, focusing on at a pack where all the elder bull elephants had been killed. The younger bulls, who had not developed tusks, began acting out, crushing cars, knocking down fences and huts, damaging crops, and more. The solution? Older bull elephants were helicoptered in to the herd, and because they would charge the younger elephants, trumpeting and bluffing, the younger bulls stopped acting out.

In the human realm, using archetypal terminology, if there are no kings, warriors become brutal, magicians behave as charlatans, and lovers are soon addicts.

Young men do not become responsible men without boundaries and identity.

We are not a healthy culture for boys or men. Not the only reason, but surely one reason, is that we no longer have a culture of elders who know how to pass on wisdom, identities and boundaries to the next generation. Most men are under-fathered and over-mothered – now even more in an age of single parents. We are a society without fathers.

We’ve created boys who never grow up and want to marry mothers instead of wives, and girls who want securing and affirming daddies instead of risk-taking partners.

The current older generation of men in the United States has, to a great extent, not been mentored by their own fathers. They were usually given necessary messages either in quick male style or translated through the experience of women. Women have been training boys to be their version of men, or men who have not been mentored have been modeling at a teenage level of development. Neither is what we need.

Men can only pass on what they themselves know. They can only lead their sons and daughters as far as they have gone. Men who lost their fathers at an early age may do fine with their own sons up to that age, and then often lose self-confidence in their parenting abilities.

The patterns of failure in young men are staggering and frightening: Level of depression, suicides, drug abuse, alcoholism, and violence are all exponentially rising. 94% of all inmates are male. Men live an average of 7 years less than women, suffer far more from ulcers and stress-related disease than women, and are more likely than women to die from the 15 leading causes of death.

Over 80% of all suicides are men. In the 20-24 age bracket, males commit suicide six times as often as females, and over the age of 85, men are fourteen times as likely to commit suicide as women.

Men are hurting.

For the past twenty years we’ve been told our education system favors and is based on success of boys, but the results appear to be exactly opposite. Women are surpassing men in leadership positions, valedictorian addresses, graduation rates, jobs after graduation, and now, even saleries.

In his book, “The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit” – Joseph Chilton Pearce say we have 5 brains altogether and that they build on one another at years 1, 4, 7, 11, and 14-17. at each of these milestones, there occur brain surges where all past experiences are stored and secured, or myelinated. He reasons we transcend each brain stage by being around models of higher brain functions, and if there is no modeling, neural pruning occurs and millions of brain cells die off. This is what’s happening to boys of all stages who don't have the next developmental stage modeled for them.

Despite postmodernism's search for unisex everything, feminist denials, anger at maleness in the past few decades, and even men’s doubts about themselves, the grand nature of the male soul is self evident. We like it, hate it, we fear it, we disseminate it, we push against it, we take it for granted.

So many people are so angry at Patriarchy, or false male power, and rightly so, that it makes them afraid to recognize the good power and the good passion of men. We have all found love at the male banquet. Maleness is half of the mystery, and if we do not enjoy it, we are missing half of who we are, whether we are a man or a woman.

Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette have found that the characters in male myth, legend, and story – the universal images that attract men – invariably circle around four constellating images, which some call archetypes or ruling images. Images of a king, a warrior, a lover, and a magician or wise man, seems to be four parts of every man, our primary fascinations, the major quadrants of our souls…..they challenge us, they fascinate us, threaten us, and yet we are unable to totally ignore them. When we do, or when we over identify with one or the other, they invariably take on dark and compulsive sides. But the mature man honors and integrates all parts of his soul. They seem to naturally balance and regulate one another, and they make a man whole and Holy. It has been called the very shape of masculine holiness.

Each of the men that have gone through the Integral Warrior Mens' Process have completed the four initiations, called in and claimed their king, their warrior, their lover, and their magician, so that none of them dominates the others, but rather, balance each other in perfect masculine harmony.

This is a remarkable achievement in that, historically, most cultures only affirmed one or two parts of a man - usually the Warrior or the Magician. Our job today, as Integral Warriors and Shamanic Priests, is much more difficult because we must affirm, educate, and validate all four archetypes, letting them simmer and grow together to create a full man. Now we need enlightened and transformed magicians, lovers of life and beauty, and strong non-violent warriors to produce truly big-picture men - or kings.

In the Emergence weekend, men who complete the Integral Warrior Men's Process, will self-initiate one more time, proclaiming their gift, as men in service, to the world: they will emerge from the process in front of their family and their friends, as Integral Warriors and Shamanic Priests, and claim the big-picture masculine that is every man’s birthright who is willing to die to the old and be reborn to the new as these men will have done.

Note: Much of the information, and even some phrases were taken directly from Richard Rohr's book, Adam's Return: The Five promises of Male Initiation. Get a copy. It's excellent!