River crossings are tricky.
Rushing, turbulent waters, slippery rocks, no visible footing, no hand rail, no assurance you’ll make it to the other side.
Back in the 1960s, every Western I ever saw about people headed West to a new life had a scene where the pilgrims came to a scary river crossing. One wagon always got swept downstream, affording the cowboy hero the opportunity to save the damsel in distress. A few oxen usually drowned as replacement sacrifices instead.
River crossings are also symbolic.
Back in my early spirituality days, I read a wonderfully inspiring book called Brother of the Third Degree written by Will Garver in 1894 at the height of the Golden Age of Occultism. In it, the young hero, Alphonso Colono, born into a Mexican family with connections with the Illuminati (ie. the White Brotherhood), sails to Paris to undergo various initiations and trials of spiritual preparation. Among other tests, in a thrilling moment of self-abnegation, he agrees to a non-sexual, “pure” marriage with his soulmate Iole.
At the time, I was uplifted by this book—in particular Alphonso’s high-minded sexual sacrifice. Now, with so many veils of spiritual illusion ripped from eyes in the past few years, I look back on the boy’s decision and think, “Poor kid. Crippled by spiritual dogma about the flesh, driven by false teachings that divide heaven and Earth, he will thus, forever, keep heaven at bay.”
Of course, back in 1994, a hundred years from the book’s publication date, there I was, crippled by the same divisive notions, congratulating myself on my own purity of mind and body.
Sigh.
But back to river crossings
There is a scene at the end (spoiler alert!), when young Alphonso takes his final test, which is to lie down in the bottom of a canoe (dressed in white garments, of course), fold his hands serenely across his breast, and be cast off one side of a wide river to—by faith in a Higher Power alone—guide his canoe safely to the opposite shore where angels, as well as his beloved Iole and gathered members of the White Brotherhood, await.
The only potential fly in the ointment (aside from no oars or paddles), is the thundering waterfall just downstream, where a watery abyss awaits to engulf and destroy him should any doubt or other impure thoughts enter his mind during the crossing.
When I read that passage, I remember putting myself in Alphonso’s sandals … imagining myself as the initiate. In my mind’s eye, I was a spiritual hero—sailing effortlessly across the river—alighting in the Promised Land on the farther shore with no problem or issues whatsoever.
I was reminded of that story this morning as I lay in bed in the early dawn’s light, hands folded gently across my breast, embracing the deeply felt sense that life—nature’s principles—love itself—was buoying me up, carrying me safely over the troubled waters of our current time here on planet Earth.
Eyes open, dwelling fully in my body, thoroughly aware of the pulse and power of the life force in my cells, profoundly awake to the currents in the medium called “love” moving through me, I played modern-day Alphonso—consciously releasing all my fears and concerns about more mandates, economic collapse, war, the nuclear capacities of China, the Great Reset, additional pandemics, AI, and whatever else the global elites have in store for us in these last days of negative control.
I let it all float away … downstream … out of sight and mind. The vision of the long-planned, yet doomed reality of Total World Domination that will never come to fruition. A reality that cannot happen, for the simple reason that LIFE itself won’t let it.
Yes, we are currently experiencing a great and rapid slide into totalitarianism, mind control, insane power politics, absolute corruption, social fragmentation, sexual confusion, mayhem, madness and general demoralization. It’s the Last Days of Pompeii, the Fall of Rome, the Sinking of Atlantis and Armageddon all rolled into one. Humanity appears to be trapped within a single fragile canoe, racing downstream towards The Waterfall of Doom, with no paddles, no oars, and no possibility of hope in sight.
Not true.
That’s just the propaganda message being pushed on us day and night.
Don’t listen to it.
The science around entropy is … um … just plain wrong
All my life I’ve believed the science … the science that says entropy, above all else, will win in the end. That the finale of the universe won’t happen with a bang. But with a whimper as everything expands into cold, dark infinity, the stars drifting ever farther and farther apart, until there isn’t a whisper of connection, communion, light and love left.
Just emptiness.
And yet everything life has taught me in this body this lifetime gives me the exact opposite message. A mother bears down in the last agonizing moments and the child crowns and is born. Tender shoots of grass push up through hardened concrete. Life appears in the most inhospitable of places, on planets of methane and spaces near absolute zero. The mandate of life is growth and evolution … not devolution.
Greater intelligence and expansion. More, more and yet more!
Yes, stupidity and contraction occur. But they do not last. They are simply part of the overall movement of expansion and growth that relentlessly continues. That will always continue. Forever and ever and ever. Because that’s what life does.
I marveled, lying in bed this morning, thinking back to Alphonso’s initiation, recognizing that it is not faith in a Higher Power that guides the canoe safely over troubled waters. It is the absolute recognition that LIFE never stops. Never doubts. Never relents in it’s ongoing ongoingness.
Life itself desires to experience the new shore waiting on the other side of the river, just as does the human heart. Life/love hungers for more expression of life/love. New pathways. New dimensions. New creations. More, more and yet more!
The spiritual message pressed to me in Garver’s book, that the body is the problem that needs to be transcended—which exact same message was pressed to me by the religion I was brought up in and then every New Age spiritual teaching, workshop and book I ran across—was a disempowering, even crippling, distraction from the real truth: That life/love/body/spirit are all the same thing, made up of the same stuff.
To separate one from another is an actual impossibility. The only place the illusion of separation can occur is in the mind. In a simulacrum of reality. In a separate matrix that is dead before it is born because its essence is death itself. Entropy. Disconnection. Empty nothingness.
I thought back to all the years, the decades of spiritual seeking, the thousands of hours of meditation, the yearning, the seeking … all the effort to be better, to be purer, more loving, more spiritual, more Godlike, higher, more enlightened …
When all the while I was already love.
My body was already love.
I was already the ongoingness of life itself. How could I possibly ever become what I already was?
We are all, indeed, caught in a river crossing
It is dangerous and slippery. Passage and safety seem uncertain. It is a fraught and fearful time. And in fraught and fearful times, the least safe place of all to dwell is in the mind.
Unfortunately, I have been taught—we all have been taught—to count on the mind. To depend upon it while at the same time seeking a Higher unseen Power that can uplift and rescue us. We have been assiduously trained to focus beyond the body, away from life. To close our eyes and meditate and float between dimensions, finding bliss in brief moments of escape. We believe that if we can just get up out of our bodies and get out there, that, somehow, we’ll be safe.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Unlike the mind, the body never lies. It always tells us the truth of what’s really going on, both within and without. The heart, the gut, know before the mind has a clue. And that’s because the body—the heart, the gut—is life itself. Love itself. Aligned with life/love. Connected with the river. Aligned with its flow, resolutely aiming towards greater, positive evolution. Life seeking to experience more, more and yet more!
Coming to the realization that my body is my safe place has been a shock. Coming to the realization that the answer to my fears and worries is diving down and in to consciously rest in the sensed power of embodied love has proven difficult to accept … with my mind.
And yet when I rest in my body and feel the love—and the enormous, unstoppable grace of it—I am filled with the knowingness that this is home. This is safe haven.
This is the canoe that will carry me across strange violent waters to a new shore.
A great yearning for the New Heaven and the New Earth has arisen in humanity’s heart. And yet to create this new place, to have this new experience, we must first and foremost realize that the New Heaven and the New Earth are one and the same. The New Earth is the new heaven. (Maybe we should start calling it the New Hevearth. Or maybe the New Earthven?)
Honoring Earth as we do heaven, ensures our alignment with life. Ensures that our choices, as we cross the river, are choices designed to enhance and protect life.
And if life is what we are aligned with … if life is our acknowledged guide and partner, what safer hand could we hold as we wade through the cold, rushing waters, daring the Great River Crossing of our time?
With much love and aloha ~
Cate