Freedom's Dream

Wednesday, August 20 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

"To the Vilda'aa it marked The End of the Known World. To me it promised a new beginning."
— The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy

I had a dream last night.

I dreamed I was on a large prison campus, large enough that it seemed like a small city. 

As I stood there, watching prisoners and guards and at least one politician walk by, all dressed in civilian clothes, I knew something that none of them did: This prison campus had no walls, fences or gates. Anyone could leave at any time if they opened their eyes to the truth and made that choice. 

In the dream, a friend and I had made that choice.  

I remember kneeling on the lawn in front of some official building, going through the contents of my backpack as I decided what to take with me and what to leave behind. I remember now only what didn't make the cut: a variety of maps, articles and documents that linked me with my past. 

When I woke up soon after, I was both exhilarated and disconcerted. 

Absolute freedom does that. We both long for it and are disoriented when we get it.  

The irony is that, as my dream demonstrated, we all have it. All of us. Always.  

But it's our choice whether we claim it, whether we act on it...whether we open our eyes and heart to a truth that has always been present, to a choice we have thus far declined to make. 

As my dream also demonstrated, our past is often a big part of that prison.

How often do we view and thus limit our choices through a prism of the past? How often do we assume that the way something has always been done proves that it's the best way, or the only way? How often do we let the burden of our past slow our awareness of the present and hinder our walk into the future? 

For me, one of the most powerful scenes in my novel The MoonQuest remains the coronation, where Crown Prince Kyri is directed to throw all the jeweled accoutrements of the old king's regalia into the fire as he and his subjects-to-be chant, "The past is passed. We let it go." 

Only when all that has encumbered Kyri to the old reign is consumed in the ceremonial flame is he ready to chart his own course as monarch. 

Later, King Kyri honors his father, now a simple subject, by kneeling before him. His father pulls Kyri to his feet. 

"Do not bow to me, my son. I stand here as the past, and you must never worship the past. ... Set your sights on the future by seeing to the present. Don't, I beg, let your vision linger longingly on the past. Let it go, my son. Let it all go. ... Let me go." 

Of course, the past is not without value. It's one of our greatest teachers.

Yet we not only condemn ourselves to repeating our mistakes by ignoring the past, we condemn ourselves to paralysis by residing there, by refusing to recognize each new moment as its own life with its own imperatives — imperatives that must be informed by the past but not directed by it. 

Of my Ten Rules for Living, the first two speak powerfully to that concept. 

Rule #1: There are no rules 
Rule #2: What works today may not work tomorrow  

Only by stepping away from the limitations of "how things have to be" and "how things have always been" can we free ourselves to step beyond our known world and into the limitlessness of our infinite potential. 

Only be seeing the prisons we have created for ourselves can we recognize that nothing but our own choices keeps us locked within them. 

Only by daring to see the truth of our innate freedom, can we live all the wondrous, as-yet undreamed-of gifts that our freedom has already granted us. 

In my dream, I tell my prisoner friend that he, too, can be free, that there is nothing to keep him locked away. I then invite him to leave with me, to walk out of the prison city and be free.  

Won't you be that friend? Won't you leave with me? Won't you walk with me into the freedom that's already yours?   

Photo by Mark David Gerson: "Flying Free," Mission Beach, San Diego, California

Song & Spirit of Liberty

Wednesday, August 20 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

The United States was founded on a break with the past, on the notion that a fresh start could be the spark that ignites a new world of liberty and freedom. 

That America hasn't always lived up to that ideal doesn't diminish freedom's call. Nor does it diminish the powerful symbols of liberty and of America's potential that continue to move and inspire freedom-seekers around the world.

As you meditate on this image, inspired by the Statue of Liberty, the Declaration of Independence and the Liberty Bell and by my 2005 "Freedom Trail" travels and writings, remember that freedom is your choice, that liberty is your birthright and that the prisons you have built for yourself have no walls, fences or gates.

In this moment, you are as free as you allow yourself to be.

Art by Mark David Gerson: "Song & Spirit of Liberty (#62)"

Cosmic Puberty, or Living Radical Evolution

Monday, July 7 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

A version of this article first appeared in the July 4, 2006 issue of my inspirational newsletter.

You're not going crazy.

I know it feels that way sometimes. It certainly does to me.

One moment you feel fine, on top of the world. The next, something pushes you into a depression or despair it's difficult to pull out of. Or you feel yourself sinking into a morass of apparent meaninglessness and purposelessness.

Old patterns -- addictions, even -- poke and prod at you, demanding to be satisfied.

Intense fatigue or other strange physical symptoms kick in, for no conventionally explainable reason.

You feel as though you're going crazy.

You're not.

Then what the @#$&%!?# is going on?

It's what I call R-evolution, short for Radical Evolution.

Our humanoid ancestors had the luxury of millennia to evolve from cave to condo, from simplicity to sophistication. Even for our grandparents, evolution was a subtle process, barely discernible within a generation, let alone a lifetime.

All that has changed.

We are experiencing, in this lifetime, a revolutionary overhaul that is unprecedented in human history.

We are morphing into a new species.

You could call it the New Human, although that's not truly accurate, because where we're going transcends much of we have come to know as human.

In effect, we are stepping into our Divine Selves, into the Gods we have always been, but only as a potential.

That potential is now being realized. Not for everyone, perhaps. But for those who have made that choice, however unconsciously, that's what's going on.

Exciting? Yes.

Miraculous? Absolutely.

Fear-provokingly uncomfortable? Without a doubt.

We stand in a place of transition.

Increasingly, our old ways of living, coping and feeling secure are not working. Even many of the New Age paradigms we have grown into in recent years seem out of place, dysfunctional, wrong-minded.

We are, as Gregg Braden put it a decade ago, walking between the worlds.

Who we were is outmoded. Yet who we are becoming is not yet ready.

Remember that awkward period in early adolescence? You were no longer a child, yet seemingly far from adulthood. On top of that, your physical and emotional bodies were doing all kinds of weird and wacky things.

Welcome back to puberty. Cosmic puberty.

You're experiencing peculiar symptoms and your emotions are volatile. You're beginning to think and act in ways that are foreign to you and others. Your likes and dislikes are shifting, as are your passions and priorities.

Even the face staring back at you from the mirror seems disconcertingly unfamiliar.

In this twilight zone we now occupy between our human and divine selves, cognitive disconnect is the norm.

Our human minds struggle to control our lives in ways that our divine intelligence considers unnecessary.

Our human mind has expectations. Our divine intelligence has none.

Our human mind tries to figure out and understand, functions our divine intelligence regards as irrelevant.

Radical Evolution, or "ascension" as some would term it, is not about moving into deeper understanding. It's about moving away from understanding. It's about abandoning any need to understand and moving into a place of permanent mystery...divine mystery.

Yet we're still wired to function in human ways. Or, rather, our divine electrician has begun the rewiring, but it's a massive job. And the transition is as weird and wacky as was puberty.

That's not reassuring to the human self, which feels as though everything familiar is breaking apart.

It is. One glance at the headlines is all it take to see that. Plummeting real estate prices. Soaring gas prices. Crises in the credit world. Floods, fires and financial failure.

Our minds and bodies are doing their own version of that same dance. Sometimes, the dance isn't graceful or pretty. Sometimes, it looks more like struggle.

Think of the biblical Jacob wrestling with the angel.

That's the essence of what's going on for us: our human wrestling with our divine. The human seeks to hold onto the perceived control of knowingness. The angel, on the other hand, represents all that is free, and therefore free of control.

All that is free is the mystery. For, along with its other implications, freedom frees us from having to know, to understand, to place in context.

As we move to this next level -- a step that is gargantuan in its steepness and implications -- we are leaving behind more than we can begin to imagine. Not in the physical sense. Not even in the emotional sense. In the human sense.

Much that has defined you as human is being squeezed out of you -- in that spin cycle I wrote about some time back or, perhaps better put, in an old-fashioned wringer-washer. And as each new space is freed up, more of the divine that you already are is entering in to fill that newly created emptiness.

Put another way, it's like the child (Peter Pan) who resists growing up, leaving childish (but not childlike) things behind to make way for the adult. In this case, it's not the human adult but the divine adult that is coming through...sometimes, or so it feels, like a steamroller.

No wonder you're in emotional crisis at times. No wonder you feel as though you are dying. No wonder signs and apparent synchronicities refuse to be interpreted.

Nothing is the way it was or ever will be again. Nothing can be understood in the old ways. Nothing can be fixed in the old ways. Nothing can be controlled. Period.

There is only one magic pill, and it can be a tough one to swallow.

It's called surrender.

Yet it's the only way.

All we can do is move through our cosmic puberty with as much grace as we can muster.

All we can do is surrender...to the mystery, to the freedom, to the divine that is taking over our lives, our will and our beingness and launching us into an era we cannot predict, anticipate or understand.

See yourself as a baby bird pushing through its shell. The shell is your human construct. You are breaking through that now. It is breaking down now. The bird is emerging, regardless. And it will fly. You will fly. And life on the other side of that shell is nothing you have ever known before.

You are stressed by all this. This is natural. Your human self is in panic. This is natural.

Know that you are neither dying nor going crazy, though that is what it feels like. Rather, you are experiencing radical evolution. You are becoming the divine.

Stop wrestling the angel and, instead, step into the angel. Become the angel. Become the god, your god, the god that you are.

~ For tips on how to use writing to help you move through these r-evolutionary times, visit my other blog, The Voice of Your Muse or check out The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write and/or The Voice of the Muse Companion: Guided Meditations for Writers.

Image: "Wrestling the Light" by Ivan Chan