Sunday, December 29, 2013

The Book You Had Always Wanted to Write

Edward Burne-Jones - Arthur in Avalon
There comes a time when you realize that you are the book you had always wanted to write.

That doesn't mean it's a masterpiece, necessarily; just that it is the one you so desperately needed to write. The one that had been pounding on the walls of your own ignorance for so long, pleading to be free. The one that shook the bars of its cage, crying out that it had learned its lessons, and that further incarceration would serve no purposeful end. Yes, that book. The book of your life.

It is in circulation now. Available from the Library of Babel (which is adjacent to the Palace of Mirrors). This book is organized into sections and chapters. It is illustrated, it is footnoted, and perhaps most important, it is indexed and cross-referenced. Oh yes, and self-published, of course.

And this book-that-you-are randomly opens to pages that somehow speak rare truths to the hidden moments. Leafing through the dog-eared, marked-up pages of this book, held as it in your psyche, you realize that it has two great themes.

One of these two great themes is the healing power of love, but there's a plot twist; it's not the love that others' offer that heals you, it is your love of them and of this life itself that heals you - from the inside out. The other great theme is clarity of mind. What do I mean by clarity of mind? Can you remain motionless, inside a house on fire, as the flames consume all that is not truly you. That's what meditation really is. What do I mean by clarity of mind? If you knew that everything and everyone you ever loved would be turned inside out in front of you, would you still choose to love? Yes?

Well, this is how such books come to be. Written in blood, on pages of desire. Bound with breath, and stitched with conscience. Yes, this book. The book of your life.

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Straw Dogs

Edward Burne-Jones - The Wheel of Fortune (1883)
Life is bittersweet. But I want more.
Lately, I have been particularly unimpressed with humanity. But I want more.

I am grateful for every day I am allowed here. I am grateful for my circumstances, however challenging at any given moment. I understand that whatever circumstances I find myself in constitute the portal through which I will journey on to the next adventure.

I am grateful for love, however fickle, and for health, however fleeting. I am grateful for time, however ruthless, and for clarity, however revealing.

Don't whitewash the nature of existence with some paintbrush of faux spirituality.
Embrace this life in all of its multicolored richness, in all of its wildness.

We are straw dogs, and the goddess is the fire that consumes us. She is us and we are her.
We are the flames that consume the straw dogs we imagine ourselves to be.

This is the truth.

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Tears and Laughter

Man Ray - Glass Tears, "Les Larmes" (1932)
The flow of tears is a great river. It never runs dry.
Although its current cannot unmake your wounds, it will cleanse them.

Furthermore, this great river is an excellent means of accelerated travel.
If you surrender to its current, it will deliver you on-time to your next appointment.

And yes, if you follow it all the way, you will eventually arrive at the sea.

Laughter is an endless thunderstorm. Rolling, roaring, its every paroxysm causes the sky of your imagination to shudder and open wider. Its torrential rains wet the parched, cracked lips of the earth you are, and nourishes the roots of who you are becoming. With every thunder clap, freedom from fear (the truest freedom) takes on an ever more tangible quality.

And then there is the space in between the great river and the endless storm, it is simply called "peace." But this peace is not a neutral state, it is not the absence of either or both. It is ever-pregnant with these twins named "tears" and "laughter."

Yes, peace is the mother that carries these twins in her womb. She gives birth to them, and then watches over them while they play together in the garden of how-it-is-now.

Whenever you find yourself lost or beaten down, remember that one of these three is always within reach, that each leads to the other, and that all three work together to bring you into a brilliant new reality.

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Saturday, December 07, 2013

Mandela & the Seemingly "Impossible"

Free Mandela Protest, Berlin 1988 (Photo Credit: Gabriele Senft, Wikipedia)
"Gandhi rejects the Adam Smith notion of human nature as motivated by self-interest and brute needs and returns us to our spiritual dimension with its impulses for nonviolence, justice and equality. He exposes the fallacy of the claim that everyone can be rich and successful provided they work hard. He points to the millions who work themselves to the bone and still remain hungry." - Nelson Mandela, 12 Mandela Quotes That Won't Be In the Corporate Media Obituaries, Common Dreams, 12-6-13

Mandela called freedom from poverty a “fundamental human right.” Mandela considered poverty one of the greatest evils in the world, and spoke out against inequality everywhere. “Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times — times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and wealth accumulation — that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils,” he said. He considered ending poverty a basic human duty: “Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life,” he said. “While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.” Six Things Nelson Mandela Believed That Most People Won’t Talk About, Think Progress, 12-6-13

I don't read obituaries. And I don't write them.
But Mandela the legend will never die, so I will say this -

Mandela was a strong man, a visionary, an evolutionary. And he stood tall in a dry barren place, and declared, "This is a riverbed." "No," they bellowed, "this is a desert." And they called him dangerous, and mad. And they built a cage around him. But he refused to lay down or shut up. "This is a riverbed!" "No, it's a desert!" 

And then after he had spent almost three decades in that cage, the river came roaring in, and blasted away what they had built around him. And he stood tall, welcoming that great river, with a heart that had not been imprisoned for decades even though his body had been. 

And as the river roared through, he grew taller and taller, until like the Colossus of Rhodes, he dominated the landscape. But unlike the Colossus, Mandela does not have weak knees. His monument will not be brought down when the earth shakes. Mandela will endure.
 

I read Long Walk to Freedom, in my forties, as I prepared myself for what was coming in this tortured nation of ours. I urge you to read it. 

You will never again look at the seemingly "impossible" in the same way. 

Nelson Mandela's First TV Interview (1961)



See also "We Undertake That We Too Will Do What We Can to Contribute to the Renewal of Our World ..."

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Doris Lessing: "It is the Storyteller, the Dream-Maker, the Myth-Maker, that is our Phoenix ..."

Doris Lessing (Photo Credit: Roger Mayne)


Doris Lessing on writing, books, education, life:

You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer. (The New York Times, April 1984)

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge (All Things Considered NPR, October 2007)

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever (Writers on Writing, 1986)

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."  (Golden Notebook, 1971 Edition)

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it. (A Small, Personal Voice, 1975)

The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise. But the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us -- for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative. That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities? I think it is that girl, and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us. (Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, December 2007)

If you resonate with the content of this site, and would like to support my work, all four volumes of my Primal Reality quadrilogy (listed here in reverse chronological order) are available from Amazon.com in both soft cover and Kindle editions:
-- Richard Power, Author, Speaker, Yoga Teacher (RYT500)
https://soundcloud.com/wordsofpower/

See Also

Richard Power's Primal Reality Quadrilogy Available Now from Amazon.com

Great Song: Life and Teachings of Joe Miller - Available Now Via Kindle (Amazon) and Nook (Barnes and Noble)

Sunday, November 24, 2013

The Night I Met Nietzsche and How I Journeyed On to Behold the Triune Goddess


Dionysos riding a leopard, 4th-century BC mosaic from Pella
I started reading Nietzsche at the age of eleven. By the age of fifteen, I had devoured his entire body of work, and absorbed its nutrients into my psyche. He was my first "guru."
Edvard Munch - Friedrich Nietzsche (1906)
Nietzsche initiated me into philosophy (as Yeats had already initiated me into poetry). He taught me to wield the sword of mind in the service of ravishing beauty and ruthless truth. He gave me the strange medicine I needed to survive my journey to the surface of the earth.  I had, after all, been born in hell.

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster," he told me. "And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you." (Beyond Good and Evil)

But it was not until many years later, in my thirties, that I actually met Nietzsche. In a "dream." It was the 19th Century. His time, not mine. We were both visiting Vienna.

In a grand ballroom, with waltzing in the background, an older gentleman came up to me and said, "Have you met Heir Nietzsche yet? Oh, you haven't? You must, you simply must!"

And he led me to a small circle of people nearby, and brought me face to face with Nietzsche. There he was. Looking up at me, staring into an abyss. With blood orange moons in his eyes, and that mane of a lion in his mustache. And there I was looking down at him. Staring into an abyss.

Then I realized, wow, here I am with my first guru, the great warrior philosopher, the savior of my adolescence, but now he was younger than me, frailer than me, smaller than me.

I wanted to put my arm around him, and offer him the solace of my friendship.
I wanted to protect him, as he had protected me.

Waking, I could feel the distance that I had come already in my life, and I saw how I had moved beyond where Nietzsche had fallen. I could feel all his profound insights, and all his brilliant autopsies, I could feel all of his genius. And I vowed to protect it, to keep it sacred, and to someday somehow celebrate his unspeakably sublime message.  

"The 'Kingdom of Heaven' is a condition of the heart - not something that comes 'upon the earth' or 'after death,' he wrote, "the 'kingdom of God' is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come 'in a thousand years' - it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere..." (The Antichrist)

Looking back on that night I met Nietzsche, from this vista twenty five years or so farther on into the vast wilderness,  I can trace the timeline of my life so clearly.

That dream encounter was one the great demarcation points.

Within the Embrace of the Triune Goddess

For me, all of Nietzsche's works are laid out on an arc between two great revelations.

There was the revelation he began with, in which he articulated the Apollonian and the Dionysian, two great opposing forces within the human psyche: sacred and profane, orderly and anarchic, chaste and lustful, light and dark, straight and stoned.  And there was the unfinished revelation he ended with, in which he had just begun to articulate the Will to Power as the engine that drives all human life. The exploration of these revelations (and how they play out for the artist and the mystic) had consumed much of my life until the demarcation point signified by that dream.

But for the next twenty years or so after, my journey into the wilderness led me deeper and deeper into a vast region of the psyche ruled by the Divine Feminine.

This is the region that Nietzsche had glimpsed in his tragic love for Lou Salome. But she had other appointments to keep, and could not take him there.

It was in that long stretch of the inner Gobi that I fell into the embrace of the great Triune Goddess.

John Bauer - Freja
And it was within that all encompassing embrace that, for me, the ceaseless struggle between the opposing forces of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, as well as the Will to Power itself, were brought into balance. They continue to play out, but now they play out within this greater context.

The great Triune Goddess has three aspects: Mother, Lover and Warrior, and these three aspects womanifest in countless names and forms, in all stages of life (e.g., both maiden and crone) and in all aspects. She is both Kali Ma, the Dark Mother, and Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Bright Mother. She is both Freya, the Blonde Lover Goddess and Morrigan, the Raven Warrior Goddess. She is the great goddess Tara in all twenty-one of her emanations.

She is the truth of the ancient future trinity.

She gave birth to us, she sustains us, and she is devouring us even as I write this note. And the greatest of her names is whichever one arrives on your lips in the moment, whether that moment is one of dire extremity, sublime pleasure or simple peace.

Yes, Nietzsche's bones lie far behind me, high on a promontory, in the vastness of this wilderness. Generations of broad-winged vultures have served as their guardians. Bleached in the blazing sun, those bones emit a brilliant light in the indigo blue of the desert night. But his laughter traveled on with me, and still permeates the swirling pillars of this psyche-temple.

"I know my fate," Nietzsche declared, near the end. "One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth ... I am no man, I am dynamite."  (Ecce Homo)

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Monday, November 11, 2013

Mysterium

Leonor Fini - Voyageurs au repos,"Travelers at Rest" (1978)

Grateful for another 24-hour cycle of life.

Grateful for food, shelter and clothing.
Grateful for relative health and freedom.

On this day.

Ever-present with the suffering of sentient beings.
Ever-cognizant of the potential for suffering in one's own life.

On this day.

Leaning forward into the mysterium that is the path of love and awareness.

Yes.

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Written

 
Edward Curtis - Invocation (Sioux)
What is, is. What isn't, isn't. 
What has been, has been. 
What wasn't, wasn't. 
What will be, will be. What won't be, won't. 
All of it is written. 
Some of it is written in stone, some of it in sand. 
Some of it is subject to change, some of it isn't. 
The best of it is written on the wind. 
Too many of us miss it.
-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com. 

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Vultures

Salvador Dali - West Side of the Isle of the Dead (1934)
If you want to arrive at utter stillness, sink into the heart's ceaseless beating. 
If you want to hear the voice of the silence, sing from the heart's core.
 If you want to drink soma, pour from the deep pools of the heart's emptiness. 
This heart is not "something" inside of you. 
It is not the Anahata chakra or some bundle of emotions. 
It is the lotus blossom of creation itself. 
If you want to journey to the end of this endlessness, follow the vultures. 
That darkness ahead is actually a blinding light. The sun itself is its shadow. 
Look deeply into that blinding light and you will see the universe with new eyes.
-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com. 

Saturday, November 02, 2013

Palden Llamo Knows What Chen Quanguo Doesn't

Palden Lhamo, Protectoress of Tibet
You cannot silence the voice of the silence. -- Richard Power 

China’s ruling Communist Party aims to silence the voice of the Dalai Lama in his Tibetan homeland by tightening controls on media and the Internet, a top official said on Saturday. The party’s top-ranking official in the Tibet region Chen Quanguo vowed to “ensure that the voices of hostile forces and the Dalai group are not seen or heard,” in an editorial published in a party journal called Qiushi ... China has worked for decades to control the spread of information in Tibet, but some Tibetans remain able to access non-official sources of information including from exiles abroad by using radio, television and the Internet. But the party will attempt to stamp out access to such sources by creating party cells in some websites, confiscating satellite dishes and registering telephone and Internet users by name, among a host of other measures mentioned in the article. China vows to silence Dalai Lama in Tibet. Agence France Press, 11-2-13

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Anais Nin: "Ordinary Life Does Not Interest Me."


Anais Nin (Photo Credit: Irving Penn)
A Spy in the House of Love. First Edition, 1954.
Profound insights on creativity, intimacy and life from the great Anais Nin:

"You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this."
― Anais Nin,  A Spy in the House of Love (1954)

"I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry."
― Anais Nin, Diaries, August 22, 1936 Fire

"Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!"
― Anais Nin, Diaries, Oct. 21, 1934

"Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous."
― Anais Nin, Diaries, Winter, 1931-1932

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."
― Anais Nin, Diary of Anaïs Nin , Volume One 1931-1934

"Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art."
― Anais Nin, February 1954 The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 5 (1947-1955), as quoted in Woman as Writer (1978) by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, p. 38

"The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness."
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5, as quoted in Moving to Antarctica: An Anthology of Women's Writing (1975) by Margaret Kaminski

If you resonate with the content of this site, and would like to support my work, all four volumes of my Primal Reality quadrilogy (listed here in reverse chronological order) are available from Amazon.com in both soft cover and Kindle editions:
-- Richard Power, Author, Speaker, Yoga Teacher (RYT500)
https://soundcloud.com/wordsofpower/

See Also

Richard Power's Primal Reality Quadrilogy Available Now from Amazon.com

Great Song: Life and Teachings of Joe Miller - Available Now Via Kindle (Amazon) and Nook (Barnes and Noble)

Friday, November 01, 2013

Joan Didion: “I Know What 'Nothing' Means, and Keep On Playing.”

Joan Didion (Malibu, 1976) Photo Credit: Nancy Ellison.


Profound insights on life and writing from the great Joan Didion:

“I know what 'nothing' means, and keep on playing.”
― Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do... on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there...”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

"Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?"
― Joan Didion,  Run, River

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
― Joan Didion, "The White Album", in The White Album
 
If you resonate with the content of this site, and would like to support my work, all four volumes of my Primal Reality quadrilogy (listed here in reverse chronological order) are available from Amazon.com in both soft cover and Kindle editions:
-- Richard Power, Author, Speaker, Yoga Teacher (RYT500)
https://soundcloud.com/wordsofpower/

See Also

Richard Power's Primal Reality Quadrilogy Available Now from Amazon.com

Great Song: Life and Teachings of Joe Miller - Available Now Via Kindle (Amazon) and Nook (Barnes and Noble)

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Nothing More, Nothing Less

Imogene Cunningham - Black Lilly (circa 1920s)

It is a blessing to awaken in the depth of the night, in that long embrace between the first kiss of midnight and the final cry of dawn.

You can "meditate" without "meditating." You can hear the darkness and see the silence.

Turning heart/mind in upon itself, you will realize that you are nothing more than a cup, and nothing less than a chalice.

And that you hold nothing more than a shimmering emptiness, which is nothing less than the whole of the throbbing universe.

Yes.

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com. 

The Fiercest Place

F.E. Church - Twilight in the Wilderness (1860)

Vast expanse of space. Rich soil of psyche. Not two.

No real division between them. Only the silken thread of the dream weave. 

Walking amidst this multitude, I wonder how many know? How few? 
And of those few who do know, how many choose to live this truth from the fiercest place? 

How many choose to journey along the exquisite trail? 
The one that leads into the wilderness and beyond. 

Few. So few that you can hear their footsteps. 
Even when they are going back the other way. 

Which ever way you are going, listen. The silence of this wilderness has information for you. 

There is medicine here. Made just for you. 

Don't leave it behind.

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Without Flinching

Odilon Redon - Je suis toujours la grande Isis! Nul n'a encore soulevé mon voile! Mon fruit est le soleil! trans.
"I am still the great Isis! None has yet lifted my veil! My fruit is the Sun!" (1896)
There are two kinds of greatness. 

There is a false greatness. The history books are rife with it. 

False greatness becomes entranced with its own story. It fuels itself with the delusion that it is a masterpiece of its own making. But in relation to the crushing weight of reality, it is only a brittle and shallow thing. And in the end, it is reduced to rubble. 

True greatness does not live in a state of delusion. It does not fall for its own story. It arises out of nothingness, subsists in nothingness and returns to nothingness. Fullness within emptiness, emptiness within fullness. True greatness can watch itself be incinerated from within, without flinching. 

Great love, great beauty, great promise all lost in the self-perpetuating fire of the void-plenum. Yes, true greatness can watch itself be incinerated from within, without flinching. Knowing with an existential certainty that there is a greater beauty, a greater love, a greater promise yet to come, and that, yes, these too will be incinerated in turn. 

The great ones laugh when there is every reason not to. Choose laughter. Choose greatness. The heart that beats in you is the throbbing heart of the universe itself. All creation is loss. All loss is creation. A glorious, ceaseless shout ...

-- Richard Power
 
My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Fallen

Pablo Picasso - Woman with Raven (1904)
A great tree has fallen in the forest of this life.
Countless poems vanished into silence as it crashed to the earth.

The great tree's last vision was of a beautiful white raven,
Which took off from its highest branch, with no desire to return.

Moments later, the tree fell of its own weight, never to see the mountains again.

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Written In Sand

Rene Magritte La Liberte de l'esprit, trans. "Freedom of Mind" (1948)
Seeing into the future course of someone else's karma (whether near term, intermediate or distant) is often a saddening experience. Particularly, if that person is a beloved friend, and the emerging course of events has altered the course of your interactions with that beloved friend. But there really isn't much that can be done with such information. You can't "save" anybody from anything in that way. You can't save someone you love from a bad choice they are on their way to making, particularly in affairs of the heart. You can't show a person how they are being played, unless they have already begun to see it. 
No, in general, you are not allowed to share such information directly. 
And even in those rare instances where it is permissible to share it directly, e.g., if the person asks, typically, if you share what you see it, you will only hasten them on to embrace those unfortunate choices you have seen them make in that possible future. AND even if the information does thwart some unfortunate choice or another, it may well lead to unforeseen and perhaps even worse consequences for them, and either way it will probably result in you being resented sooner or later, for meddling or wrongly influencing events. 
So all you can do is stand open, and breathe, and share what you can with that beloved friend, on the margins, and in the ether of prayer. And yes, hope it dawns on them - THIS DOES HAPPEN sometimes. Of course, it is also true that very little is actually written in stone. Most of the future is written in sand, and often shifts and takes on new shapes, yes, for better, and worse, and both. All you can really do with such a siddhi is respect it, and hold it open, and not abuse the privilege of having it. All you can do is breathe, and live with an open heart, yes, always love unconditionally. Sometimes (most of the time) unconditional love is the only message worth communicating.
-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Inside the Fire

Leonor Fini - Les aveugles, "The Blind Ones" (1968)
After all, desirelessness is not the absence of desire, that's just another one of those false memes that have strangled mystical teachings for thousands of years (East and West), Desire IS life. Desirelessness is just exercising clarity of mind from inside the fire that is desire. Because, you see, there are two types of desire. One is grounded in emptiness, and the other is grounded in a little pretend self. One is a fire that liberates all it touches, the other is a fire that simply destroys. 

The desire fire that liberates all it touches allows all your other loves to flow, in truth, and yet is not threatened or diminished in any way by allowing them to be recognized as what they actually are and remembered as what they actually were. It does not have to hide or restrict. 

That road ends in utter radiance. 

But the desire fire that simply destroys compels you to re-image your other loves until they are all something other than what they really were, and something less than what they really are. And then once it finishes re-imaging everything else, it begins re-imaging itself. 

That road ends in ashes all around. 

Can you allow yourself to have your desire and still see the truth of things? Or does your desire warp reality to fit the shadow of its flame on the walls of fear? 

Each of us must choose, and it is in choosing that we define ourselves. 

Do you choose to remember or to forget? Do you choose to only remember what is convenient? 

Choose? Ah well, choicelessness is another challenge to ponder ...

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

A Wheel In Motion

Salvador Dali - Wheel of Fortune, 1978
Consider this. A wheel in motion doesn't just turn.  

It returns. Ceaselessly.  And yet, as it returns ceaselessly, it is also moving ever forward. 

Indeed, the wheel's ceaseless returning is the very way it moves ever forward.

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

New Release: User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality

Here is the Introduction to my new (ninth) book, User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality, available now from Amazon.com:

By “User’s Guide,” I mean a text that makes vital information accessible, to help you get the most out of some enabling technology, a text that explains that technology in a way that empowers you. In this instance, the technology is your own extraordinary incarnation, with its numerous vehicles and powers.

By “Human Incarnation,” I mean the journey from the first breath to the last, the span of an individual lifetime, all that befalls us between birth and death, and in all our bodies (i.e., physical, mental,emotional, energetic and spiritual).

By “Yoga,” I mean a methodology by which those of us willing to dedicate ourselves to practice can cultivate healing and conscious evolution in all our bodies.

By “Primal Reality,” I mean the miraculous power and beauty of human existence in its totality, from our basic animal needs to the highest states of human consciousness, all of what and who we are in our utter nakedness.

The book is divided into four parts, “Part I: Divine Nature, Human Experience,” “Part II: Human Nature, Divine Experience,” Part III: “The Aghori Within,” and “Part IV: Mapping Primal Reality.” Much of the content in these sections is transcribed from a series of seven talks on “Mapping Primal Reality,” delivered at the San Francisco Theosophical Society Lodge between August 2012 and April 2013. Interspersed between these four sections, I have included small groupings of three or four “Epiphanies,”as well as a larger such grouping of “Epiphanies” at the end, to provide further experiential context for the main exposition.

There is need for this new User’s Guide to Human Incarnation.

We misunderstand so much about who and what we are in this extraordinary space between our first breath and our last. Human incarnation itself is the spiritual path. At the moment of birth, we are not dropped into exile from the life of spirit. Quite the contrary, we are dropped into its greatest opportunity and, potentially, its fullest expression. This physical body is not a curse, it is a remarkable instrument of divine will, adorned with extraordinary faculties and capacities, e.g., the senses, the mind, the sex organs. Seekers should view them as siddhis, rather than as impediments or distractions.

The personality that develops in relation to the world around us is not a prison to be escaped, or some monstrous impostor to be slain, it is a magic mirror in which we can see divine playfulness reflected in human folly, and divine nature reflected in human virtue.

This life is a laboratory in which we are, individually and collectively, researching the chemistry of ignorance and intelligence.

Physical existence is not a limitation imposed on our spiritual life, quite the contrary, it is an exercise in freedom, will and expression that is highly coveted on the other side of the veil. This world is where the action is. Our life is of vital importance.

Human incarnation is divine revelation.

There is also need for an articulation of the Yoga of Primal Reality.

Yoga is not a methodology for uniting human and divine, or resolving the human into the divine, it is a methodology for realizing the union that already exists between human and divine. Yoga is a methodology for reveling in the truth of who and what we are, i.e., pure being (Sat), consciousness (Chit) and bliss (Ananda).

This being-consciousness-bliss is our spiritual reality. But our material reality is one of animal needs, ego, creativity, desire, and so much more.

These are not two distinct realities. They are not separate. They are not at odds with each other. They are one, and they are our PRIMAL REALITY, i.e., the full spectrum of divine nature in human incarnation, all of it, from flesh to spirit, in light and darkness, from birth to death, in joy and sorrow, all of it. This Yoga of Primal Reality embraces all of it.

For me personally, this particular book is like some extraordinary cliff from which four mighty rivers pour into one deep,rolling sea.

The first of these four rivers spans the fourteen years I spent in apprenticeship to my “Yoda,” the legendary American sage Joe Miller, as well as the twenty-one years since his death in 1992. I have spent these years since his death, integrating what I learned from him, and expanding upon it in my own voice and from my own perspective.

The second river is the knowledge and experience that flow from a decade-plus healing journey, under the guidance of a brilliant somatic psychotherapist named Staci Haines. With her, I went on a quest into the hell realms to retrieve those chunks of my heart and psyche lost during a childhood shattered by profound abuse. (I will share this story sometime down the road.)

The third river began as an offshoot of the second. As Staci and I began to peel away layer after layer of trauma, and I began to get in touch with my real feelings, my real thoughts, and my real body, I realized I needed some auxiliary avenue of exploration.

In addition to our weekly hour together, I needed some further outlet in which to stumble toward embodiment.

So I walked into a yoga studio south of Market Street, and took a noon hour class in Ashtanga Yoga, and as I was lying back in Supta Baddha Konasana, somatic information began to rise up from my opening hips, and I knew that this powerful practice was going to become an integral element of my healing process. And so it was. For several years, I studied with the infamous Larry Schultz, a.k.a. the “Rocket Man,” who Prattabhi Joi had playfully christened the “Bad Boy of Ashtanga.”

Larry taught me so much. He taught me to curl my toes up in Downward Dog, he taught me never to go longer than seventy-two hours without yoga. “Don’t lose the burn,” he said. And in that studio crammed with sixty or seventy people on mats, he saw my first full Urdhva Dhanurasana and called out to me from the other end of the space, “BE U TEA FULL, Rich.” (No one calls me “Rich,” ever, but Larry got a pass.) Yes, I had survived and kept my sanity through the power of a warrior heart, and that evening on Folsom Street, my warrior heart found its home, and I found my signature pose. Back bending is heart opening.

The fourth great river emptying into this spectacular canyon, and further deepening this new sea is the current of knowledge and experience that flows from the Shamanic dimension of the psyche.

Like the river of Hatha and Tantra, this fourth river branched off from the river of Somatic Psychotherapy, and took on a life of its own, as all of the Wild rose up toreach out to me on my healing journey. Yes, the trees, the rocks, all that slithers, all that flies, all that scurries on four legs. Much of this opening occurred in the forests of Sonoma, and there were also profound initiations visited upon me on the Big Island, and on Kaui, and in Yosemite, and Death Valley, and at Uluru.

I will just tell one of these stories here.

A decade or so ago, I visited Hawaii. The islands surprised me, and seduced me. The visit provided a forward impetus into the new Shamanic understanding that had already begun to open up for me in Sonoma, in Yosemite,and in Death Valley.

The Hawaiians, a Polynesian warrior people, had enjoyed one thousand years of feasting, fornicating, hunting, fishing, surfing and fighting – before the bible-thumping, gun-touting Anglo-American exploiters destroyed their way of life with ant-like relentlessness. I visited Kauai, the oldest island (3.5.5 million years) and the Big Island, the youngest island (0.75 million years). These islands told me secrets …

In the heat of the day, hiking a coastal trail on Kauai, my companion was up ahead of me, around the bend and out of sight. I heard a strange female voice, cackling and cursing, coming toward me, from a distance farther on. “Get away from her! She’s a criminal,” the voice shrieked.“You and all your people are criminals!” Whoever it was up ahead was accosting my companion. In a few moments, around the next bend, I was face to face with an insane old hag with a small white dog. But she did not curse me, or cackle at me. “You can drink it, she said loudly, but not shouting anymore, “It won’t poison you.”

Several days later, on the Big Island, leafing through a book on Pele, I read that although she was best known for taking the form of a dark, exquisitely beautiful young woman, she also occasionally manifested as an old hag with a small white dog. Of course, for many years, I had been drawn to the image of Pele, the beautiful dark goddess of the volcano.But I hadno idea she would sometimes take the appearance of that old hag with a little white dog. Pele had indeed come to me.

“You can drink it,” she had promised, “It won’t poison you.”

So in the text, all four of these currents are present: experiential knowledge of Shiva-Sakti Yoga and Vajrayana Buddha Dharma, a powerful healing journey into somatic psychotherapy, a deep embrace of Hatha and Tantra, and a Shamanic awakening to the voices of the forests, mountains, deserts, and oceans.

All of these rivers had been separate flows, but here they empty into a vast inner canyon to become one rolling sea, and I have named this sea, the Yoga of Primal Reality. It’s not another system, not another school. What I offer is a unique perspective, a vision, some practical insights, and what I hope is some new and empowering language.

Every hour of every day, we lurch closer to oblivion, and the future is urging us to rescue our selves, our civilization and our natural world. There is only one way to perform such a rescue, and that’s from the inside out, one conscious breath after another, one loving heartbeat after another, one embodied asana after another, one moment of authentic prayer after another, one moment of authentic meditation after another.

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

A Great Peace Has Descended ...

Dorothea Tanning - Self-Portrait (1944)

A great peace has descended. In this wilderness.
The space between. What was lost. And what is yet to be.

The reverberations of such tenderness roll on until the end of time.
The rays of such beauty travel to the edges of space.

A great peace has descended. In this wilderness.
The space between. What was lost. And what is yet to be.

As the great wheel turns. Ceaselessly.
The medicine flows. Between center and circumference.

In this wilderness. A great peace has descended.
The space between. What was lost. And what is yet to be.

Only truth. Only beauty. Forever.
The medicine flows. Always. Only love.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

True Power

Odilon Redon - Cup of Mystery (1890)
The power of the Buddha is the power of abiding in stillness even as you are consumed with fire. The power of the Christ is the power of moving forward with an open heart even as you are betrayed and forsaken. Gautama Buddha was not a "Buddhist," Jesus Christ was not a "Christian." The legends that surround those two men are not what is most important.

Furthermore, it is irrelevant that Jesus and Gautama were male. Buddha and Christ are gender-neutral terms. They are synonyms, really, for the Clear Light, for SAT (Being) CHIT (Consciousness) ANANDA (Bliss). And as such they apply to both male and female humans.

It is simple awareness and unconditional love that make you a Buddha or a Christ.

Not gender, not supernatural predestination, not the tall tales of those who make their livelihood off the legends.

In this life, each of us is called to realize our own Buddha nature, our own Christ nature, our own true nature. Are you running from your own true nature? Or groping toward it? Are you settling back into it? Or struggling to keep yourself apart from it? Are you straining to avoid the consequences of what you will see if you look unflinching in the mirror of your behavior?

The power of the Buddha is the power of abiding in stillness even as you are consumed with fire. The power of the Christ is the power of moving forward with an open heart even as you are betrayed and forsaken. Nothing more, nothing less.

Live this.

Thursday, September 05, 2013

Its Like Will Not Be Found Again

Gustav Moreau - Night (1880)
The future emerges from the darkness. It is a mystery.

New Moons are for beginnings.

Welcome this opportunity. It beckons you to feel for the wheel, and move with it.

Within you, new life is awakening.
Be tender with it, and invite it to sing; it knows a song that you have forgotten.

There is medicine in this song.
Don't just drown it out with some lesser tune.

ALL is fleeting. And that which is seemingly the most fleeting is perhaps the most vital.

So listen to the song, and taste the medicine.
It was made just for you, and its like will not be found again.

New Moons are for beginnings.

The ending will come soon enough, why not savor a few more moments within the mystery?

We cannot control any of it.

Wednesday, September 04, 2013

3 A.M.

Pablo Picasso - Les toits de Barcelone dans la clair de lune,
trans. "The roofs of Barcelona in the moonlight" (1903)
 Waking at 3 a.m. 
Night itself is the goddess.
Turning on my side to meditate.  
Silence is music. Emptiness is beauty.

You are So Much More than Some "Soul" in a "Body" Living Out an Incarnation on a Straight Line ...



Edward Curtis - Pima Burial Grounds (1906)
You are so much more than some "soul" in a "body" living out an incarnation on a straight line from some point in the "past" to some point in the "future," whether you see that journey as a one-off event ("Christian" concept) or a cycle of returns ("Buddhist" concept).

You are so much more than any of that. You might as well compare the Grand Canyon to a shallow ditch, or Victoria Falls to a garden sprinkler.

It would be more accurate to say yours was a "body" within a "soul" rather than the other way around, but it still cheats you of the amazing truth.

You are an utterly unique point of radiant flame, not separate from the one star whose energy fuels all life. You do not have one "body," you have five or seven (depending on the system you reference), and each is just a sheath, like Salome's veils.

They do not hide your naked beauty, they highlight it in subtle hues.

The breath, the senses, the belly, the heart, the mind, these limbs, your sex, so many siddhis are already yours. Cherish this. Live this truth.

-- Richard Power

Power's eighth book,  Humanifesto: A Guide to Primal Reality in an Era of Global Peril , is available now in soft cover and Kindle versions, from Amazon and elsewhere.



One Foot in the Light and the Other in the Dark

Graffiti of 2PAC in Ipanema, Rio De Janeiro.
Photo Credit: Mary C. Salome/Wikipedia
"Perhaps I was addicted to the dark side / Somewhere inside my childhood I missed my heart die ... / Remember me, as an outcast outlaw / Another album out that's what I'm about, more / Gettin raw till the day I see my casket / Buried as a g while the whole world remembers me / Until the end of time ..." -- Tupac Shakur, Until the End of Time

A spirituality that does not embrace the shadow is a feeble, stunted thing.

Walk with one foot in the light and the other in the dark; you will need both to journey into the wilderness of truth and beauty.

The Yin and the Yang flow into and out of each other, they cannot be siphoned off and separated, together they shape the circle of life. Evil is that which has fallen outside the circle of life; it is not dark, it is not Yin (and it typically disguises itself as "light" anyway).

A spirituality that does not embrace the shadow is a feeble, stunted thing.

Walk with one foot in the light and the other in the dark; you will need both to journey into the wilderness of truth and beauty.


-- Richard Power

Power's eighth book,  Humanifesto: A Guide to Primal Reality in an Era of Global Peril , is available now in soft cover and Kindle versions, from Amazon and elsewhere.



Even If You Know the True Price ...

Gustav Klimt - Beethoven Frieze: Longing for Happiness Finds Repose in Poetry.
Right wall, detail. (1902)

How do you choose to live your life? How do you choose to love?

After it is all over, and the jackal-headed god weighs your heart, he will not add in what your best friend told you to do. The scales will only report on how you lived, and how you loved.

Is your love some imagining of the way it once was? Or do you embrace love as it presents itself to you, here and now, on this path? Is it easier to simply re-write the moment and pretend it is all something less than what it is?

Do you argue with unconditional love, because its very freedom threatens the imaginary structure in which you have enshrined your self-image?

And what is your relationship with poignancy itself? Is it something that you stumble upon now and then, and relate to awkwardly, and only for as long as is required of you? And do you then rush off to immerse yourself in the agenda that you have drawn up, unwilling to accept that you do not have to choose between them? Or is poignancy a state of being that you have stepped inside of, and vow never to leave again, no matter what the price?

To feel, to truly feel, and revel in that realm of feeling, boldly, with laughter and tears, yes.

Are you willing to declare beauty when beauty arises before you, even if you know the true price of such a declaration? Are you willing to become an expression of the tenderness you feel, even if you know that very tenderness is an all consuming fire?

How do you choose to live your life? How do you choose to love? After it is all over, and the jackal-headed god weighs your heart, he will not add in what your best friend told you to do. The scales will only report on how you lived, and how you loved.

To feel, to truly feel, and revel in that realm of feeling, boldly, with laughter and tears, yes.

-- Richard Power

Power's eighth book,  Humanifesto: A Guide to Primal Reality in an Era of Global Peril , is available now in soft cover and Kindle versions, from Amazon and elsewhere.