You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
– Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed.

I woke with fragments of a dream. A dream that confirmed the knowing of bodies that feel the blow; the dread, wrath, and fear. We didn’t need it confirmed, but it’s now crystal clear. Those, in their intoxicated vacuous soulless state, who try to fill their bottomless hovel of a heart with power, money, and control of it all, have no capacity for grace or love. They have not an iota of adoration for the guiding ethos of a higher dream. A dream hijacked over and over through millennia by the ones who crave and usurp power. It’s a very old story; the difference is that now the destiny of the planet is at stake. Alongside a mean agenda to shred civil society, the willful misinformation and denial of global warming is a hideous crime and primordial sin. 

In my night dream, reluctance pulls. I must stay hidden in the crowd. But the urge to move is greater. I walk toward a platform and microphone. I have to say something. I wobble with each step, vulnerable. Words dissolve before reaching my tongue. I keep moving. I stand before a Senate Floor, a Parliament, Knesset, Federation, Duma, before the .01% faceless power players … appealing. From beyond the platform I look out to a grey, thick, fog rolling in. The last begging words that surface into pre dawn darkness, “I ask you to reconsider.” Awake. Move to the meditation mat, light a candle, soften into the grief, feel moist eyes, and breathe. Breathe – feel – breathe….

Mindfulness of the breath, sub kaya pati samvedi. All body – through (strive-mastery) – wholly feeling. (Anapanasati Sutta) Be mindful within breath by entering through direct feeling inside embodied experience. This is the feminized version of mindfulness. The patriarchal version is more toward an abstracted, clinical, disembodied watching that maintains the observers subtle, superior gaze. Both seem to have a place. But to simplify and fast track; the first has the pitfall of entangling, but has the potential to lead into the emptying intimate gestalt with it all; the nourishing Eros of embodied completion. The second lifts us from the mess, but tends to leave us empty and prone to falling into aloof disconnect, spiraling the self-structure into an endless need for affirmation. I set up my mindfulness stall and sell you techniques so I can be seen. (I am not judging. I have the craving need.)

The point is balance. The reclamation of the lost feminine within us all is vital. She is the instinctive knowing of the sacred interconnection of all things. She is the power of the imaginative that births the creative. She relates through participation, bounteousness, and collaboration rather than dominance, withholding, and control. She is the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World. We have to actualize her power to offset this tip into psychopathic shadow patriarchy with its mission to destroy the life-giving creativity that it wants so badly. But it cannot have what it craves to control. When you don’t know or trust anything beyond ego walls, you can’t enter the tender pathways of love. Putrid patriarchs can’t get filled, so they have to grab. They have to control women’s reproductive rights, squash the joyful freedoms of the LGBT community, and push back POC into dungeons of white fear cages. Shadow Kings can only plunder and sell nature through their sadistic prostitution of Eros in faceless shopping Malls, (abetted by our sleepy collusion.) They have nothing of beauty to give.

But, she, the Anima Mundi, the Sacred Feminine, Mother Nature, has enduring power. You will know her energy coursing in your veins as outrage, courage, and the unending intent to be here for everyone, regardless. You will know her by the anguish you feel at the desecration of our ecosystems. You will know her by the insistent voice within and around you that speaks, that shouts out, refusing to collude any longer. So accept the full impact of what is felt. The disturbance and the nightmares that haunt are the barometer of what the deeper soul already knows; the threat is real and deadly. 

From therapeutic process we know the body remembers everything. When we are threatened, trans-marginal stress is activated. That means the usual coping mechanisms that subdue intolerable feelings, are breached. When that happens, the pain of devastating wounds to sensitivity from early on (baby and preverbal), are activated. The abandoned unformed agony held in the body, can, in a finger snap, spin into a self-other harming fest of paranoia, rage, frozenness, and suicidal hopelessness. The self-structure, losing all sense of ground, can spiral into a disorientated fog. We need to remember that the tweeting President Elect, through his daily rants of idiocy and abuse, displaces the inordinate pain held within his shattered soul by projecting it onto our collective body. In doing so, he ignites our shared trans-marginal stress over and over. So, be mindful, be steady. Hold your ground.

We are not victims, receptacles for the pain of Shadow Kings. We, as the resistance, are awakening the power of soul. We must invoke her rise, her power. Allow her voice to come through, even in the face of the vulnerable, wobbling, walk to the platform. As I grew up, I had no voice. I hardly knew I existed. As a teenager, I once painted myself as a wisp behind an ill-fitting mask. I was someone who hid, until her voice started to rise. Ironically, the real catalyst was the excruciation of misogynistic monastic Buddhism within which I had encapsulated myself. There, her subdued voice, shaped within a prayerful mode, began its ascent. I sensed its power, its clarity, its depth, and ultimately, her ancientness.

She, as primordial intelligence, now urgently calls. She, the immune system of the planet, formidable Mother Nature, is about ready to roll over us. But, for a few more geological seconds, she begs us to come to our senses (literally), to feel her pounding heart, her awe-inspiring beauty, to desist from destruction through the passionate work of sacred reclamation. I believe, I suppose, that she, and us together, have brought our selves to this terrible mirror so we can fully study the reflection of our ego madness. Like the handsome portrait of Dorian Gray, hidden in the attic, so alluring, but only to be unmasked as the terrible, twisted sadist, there, underneath all along. How appalling to finally see the depth of our world’s soulless shadow grown over such a long time. But, let’s now finish here, scrambling around in the swamp of nightmarish trolls.

Last summer, in the gentle green pastures of England, Kittisaro and I met Anne Baring for tea. Five o’clock cake and tea, poured from a proper teapot into china cups in a hobbit land of cricket lawns, cottages, and pubs along the Chaucer pilgrimage route. Anne is a hero. She, as author and teacher, has produced a vital guide for our times in her magnum opus The Dream of the Cosmos. Anne expressed dismay that a Trump victory would shatter the higher dream of the whole world. That stark reality has come to pass, and her worst fear is now ours. But I’m wondering about a deeper intelligence beyond human fixation. Yes, a shattering will happen. But that shattering will also take down the false, which is the idea of a dominant and superior person or people that can take it all. What we are witnessing, I believe, is the last desperate stand of a colonizing, racist, misogynist, ego driven mindset that will ultimately fail because the false simply cannot endure.

We must quicken its demise by resisting its dangerous agenda, by organising to bring down its monopoly, and by continuing to midwife the new world struggling to be born. We are the midwives. We have to make sure the higher dream of humanity, the dream of our soul, is not still born, that the emerging child is not crushed under the feet of a fetid and jealous patriarch. That voices heralding the child’s arrival are loud and clear. It’s an endless journey, no doubt, but we must hold the faith. As the great man, Rev. King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Dedicated to Aloka – Petrus Willemse (Zimbabwe) Dec ’56 – Jan ’17