Saturday, January 28, 2012

Nature and the Human Soul Conference Day 4, Sunday, Jan 22nd

Sunrise Sunday Morning



Iona Mass in the Cottonwood Pavilion Tent

Nature and the Human Soul Conference
Day 4, Jan 22nd 2012 Sunday
Bill Plotkin and Fr. Richard Rohr
Hyatt Tamaya, New Mexico
1,000 Attendees from around the world

My Notes and Musings 

7am Iona Mass with Fr. Richard Rohr. Beautiful ceremony. This was the first time I took communion and felt the meaning of it. The sunrise walking to mass was astonishing. Everyone was noticing it coming up.

9am Bill Plotkin

There is a crisis at the end of each stage. The crisis at the end of the Wellspring (stage 5): you've been using the form/craft and one day you wake up realizing the delivery system walls are just too small. What you have to do next will feel like a betrayal of your teachers. Fear of being absolutely humiliatingly ridiculous. Because you have to go out on your own limb. But, you know you have to do it.

The truth is, you leave home at the beginning of every stage. Stage 6 means leaving the home of your teachers/mentors. Stage 6: Artisan in the Wild Orchard

We all have our unique fruits that want to come through in stage 6 (in the beginning, we'll feel like a fruit!)

The passage into stage 6 is called Induction. Time to assume full obligation of cultural leadership. Creating new cultural forms. Healthy culture evolves. Has to keep evolving. 

The never before seen ways and gifts in culture come through in stage 6.

Antonio Bachato poem "You Walking"
"You make the road by walking"

Task: create and implement innovative delivery systems.

There are people who are primary doers and people who are primary be-ers. (Western society tends to have  a bias toward the doers)

Task: the advanced cultivation and integration of the 4 selves

Bill Plotkin's new book that he is working on is about the nature-based map of the human psyche and he is thinking of calling it "The Wilding: The South" 

We're each born with a whole self. But often we just embody 1 of the 4 facets. We get a free ride with that one, the others, we have to work with to integrate and develop. The one that is the easiest for us is opposite to the one that is hardest for us. Each self corresponds with one of the 4 cardinal directions.

North: The nurturing and generative adult, healer, spiritual warrior, make things happen, leader, protector, benevolent. Knowledge lives in the North (there is a bias toward this one in Western culture)

South: The Wild, indigenous, magical, sensual, emotion-loving, erotic, one, in the body, knows "I am from Earth - my body in particular is completely at home in nature" 

East: Innocent sage. Innocence and wisdom are very closely related. Wisdom lives in the East. Innocence: pure presence of being. Trickster and fool. Non-attached (not detached) sees the bigger picture and is able to lighten up and have easy conversations with mystery.

West: In love with the sacred darkness. Sees that dark is as sacred as light. Its a profound place to live in. (There is a bias against this one in Western culture) Read Rilke's "Love Poems to Darkness"

We start developing our facets. By the cocoon, we need to be in conversation with all 4 facets. By stage 5, we need to be online in all 4 facets. By Stage 6, we need to be able to integrate them all and be in all 4 facets at once.

[I'm not entirely sure which facet comes easiest for me and which is hardest. North and South both seem fairly neutral - with some things coming easy and hard alike in both of those facets (nurturing, generative easy; leader - difficult; south feels very familiar. The fact that one is opposite the other should help though. My guess would be that the West comes easiest to me, which would make the East the one I've had to work the hardest to develop and this makes sense. I've been working on lightening up, not taking things seriously and becoming more at home with not taking myself seriously and being able to be a trickster or a fool. I wish Bill had said more about the west - guess I'll have to buy his new book when it comes out! But darkness has never seemed like darkness to me, and, yes, I guess I've always had a pull to it - which would make sense too with my enneagram 4, but who knows. I bet Bill Plotkin's easiest one is the West too because he told that story about Death telling him on one of his vision quests that it wouldn't have a conversation with him anymore unless Bill embraced Death's wife, Joy.]

Gerard Maley Hopkins, poem about everything in the world being unique. Relationship between soul and spirit. "As Kingfishers Catch Fire"
"What I do is me, for that I came"
That life is relational.
A human can't play their instrument until they go through initiation into adulthood (and they have to be integrated in all 4 facets to do this)
The being we all dwell within is Soul.

Elderhood
This stage feels vaguely familiar because you're moving back into the east hemisphere, the being half, you were here once already in childhood.

Beginning to give up the striving and the making things happen of the 4 previous stages of life you have been in: 3,4, 5, and 6

Stage 7: master in the grove of elders. Confirmation of mastery of your soul work, celebrated for developing your own forms and bringing gifts into the world.

Retirement is an ego-centric western phenomenon "We don't need you anymore" message. "Now I get to have a good time finally!" sadly, you weren't doing that all along then when you could have been. 77% of Americans HATE their jobs. "You mean, you weren't having a good time all along?"

In healthy culture, the highest status are the elders. In our western culture, they are the lowest.

The original sacred meaning of crone is wise woman, magic. The word has been wrecked in Western culture. 

Crowning - a kind of royalty to someone who has had an adult life of mastery, gender unspecific. 

In terms of your conscious intent, leaving, being tugged to leave the delivering soul work beyond in a sense. Going to cosmos-centric. Experiencing yourself as a member of the entire universe. Pulled by larger context to the work of caring for the soul of the world (not focusing on your soul work so much anymore)

Our soul work doesn't stop at crowning, its so in our psyche by this stage, that its on auto-pilot so the energy that had been used for keeping that going can now be redirected.

Tasks: Now you are paying attention to:
- Defend and nurture innocence and wonder of children (in ways even initiated adults cannot)
- Mentor and initiate thespians and wanderers (some adult's soul work has also called them here) Think of true elders as birth control!
- Mentoring adults whose soul work iso in the elder's general realm
- Guiding the evolution or transformation of culture. They get together to guide it and are called a council of elders. In a healthy culture, the politicians and united nations would be elders and they wouldn't be elected because they would be ignited. Not elected, earned, grown into!

How do we maintain the balance of human and more than human world? Elders are looking out for this balance. Speak with voices of great authority and everybody respects them.

Stage 8 - Sage in the Mountain Cave, implies a place outside the village, but pyscho-spiritually they are in the mountain cave. Their consciousness has shifted to the cosmos. The goal-oriented ego has surrendered attachment to outcome. It happens, like it is taken away from us.

There are no developmental tasks in stage 8. The universe carries the tasks. Both children in stage 1 and elders in state 8 don't have tasks. Its the opposite of naming in childhood; as elders, in a way, we forget our names. We return to stage 1, but now with the consciousness of whats going on. 

The sage is the human archetype of stage 8. Its the wildest human being. Lives a life of spontaneity. Role-transcending vivacity. Moved beyond the active leadership of stage 7. A humble hermit consultant.

When you come into the presence of stage 8 elders, you are in a wild place. There are galaxies in the elder's eyes. Elders can only answer questions from the largest possible context. Presence of stage 8 elders in society have ceremonies stoked by elders. 

Universe tasks for stage 8:
To tend to the universe. Keeps universe from being diminished. Elders anchor the capacity for ceremonies of whole community that keep the universe going.

Tomas Berry, stage 8 elder, Sharing wisdom. There is a universe because existence communicates itself. 

Presence of elders coordinates human realm with cosmological realm. Evokes experience that human is integral, bound, controlled and given by earth. An enduring imaginal presence even after death. "When they're gone, then they're everywhere"

Final passage is Death.
Who dies? book by Steven levine

Who dies based on what stage the person is in when they die? In stage 8, nobody dies - what's ending has already merged with the universe, but the universe suffers a great loss.

Gifts of the stages:
Stage 1: Luminous presence
Stage 2: Wonder
Stage 3: Creative Fire
Stage 4: Mystery and Darkness
Stage 5: Visionary action and inspiration
Stage 6: Seeds of cultural renaissance
Stage 7: Wholeness
Stage 8: Grace

Each gift does not go away; it gives birth to the next gift.

"Wholeness in the world supports the presence of grace"
We begin in innocence and end in grace.

Final break out group meetings:

To have a sense of whats possible. Where are you? Where do you find yourself? Continuing the conversation. An affirmation/confirmation of where I've been, where I am, and the possibilities for where I can go. Where is your attention going?

Show up with where you are and where you're at with the best, authentic you. By doing that, you will be helping those you are around be who they are and see the possibilities too.

Challenge: be where I'm at as much as possible regardless of acceptance or judgement.

Not having as much of a problem letting go because there is so much beyond.

Remember your emotional foot print on others - your potential all the time either to project your wounds on to them or to be in the present moment in a healing, authentic space instead.

11:30am Fr. Richard Rohr

There are seeds in the pot at the front of the stage, on your way out take one and place it in the urn as a way of sealing your commitment to this process of development.

[My thought just now, when we make God small, we make ourselves small]

Narcissism. No more time for it.

We are the embodiment of mystery. But we have to fall in love with it and struggle with it. 
Divine Allurement - Brian Swim
Cosmos itself is moving toward salvation. Led toward union. We are the first generation that is aware we live in a still expanding universe. It will go into a retraction, which involves a union, which will only take a few seconds. 

Aetheism and agnosticism are by and large a product that exists only in wester culture. Western culture created it, did not exist in indigenous cultures. 

Trust your inner experience and go into your inner experience. Bill just gave you all a bunch of tools for interior journeys. A lot of us don't know how to go there, don't want to go there, or don't think its necessary to go there (have substituted belonging systems for inner experience that you can then trust instead of the inner experience!)

The people that get bothered by the "forms" in the church are often the ones who have inner experiences so they have experienced the "formless". Its not that they feel compelled to throw out the forms, they just know that you don't walk with either one or the other. You learn to walk with both the forms and the formless. And this is non-dual thinking.

How to observe the natural world and how to be vulnerable and open. When the head, heart and body find freedom in the same moment, its presence and you are capable of unmediated inner experience. And you can go back to the forms with greater understanding and compassion and humility.

Nature is the first bible and the second bible came 14 billion years later. 

1/2 of the world does not have clean water. 

Spent too long worrying about who's in bed with whom instead of who even has a bed!

[Guided walk on my own Sunday afternoon and continued delving into questions. I felt like going to the original wound/abandoned dump pile spot again to say thank you and good bye. When I got there and after I said thank you and sat in silence for a while, there was nothing more to say. It told me to go wander on until I came to something that called me to have a conversation. So I did. Not soon after, a beautiful purple/rose colored round, smooth rock caught my attention. I said hello to it and introduced myself and told it why I was drawn to it. These are the words that came, which I later recorded as best as I could remember them:

Communion with a Rock

Your sparkle in the sun caught my eye,
Your pinkness, new-oldness, 
Your smooth, calm lake basin,
Unwounded, solid moon.
How you are in Earth,
On all sides and underside,
The top of you above the surface, 
Catching my attention.

I ask you if I can take you.
I promise I will keep you.
I promise. I wait.
I hear you say, "Leave me.
Know that I am here,
And there is a chord of connection,
between us, that grounds you down,
Into Earth, as I am. 
Solid. Calm. Unwounded, 
alongside the wounded place."

So, I leave you, rock, here.
I know you in my heart.

What are my tasks going away from this conference?
- Keep meditating
- Do a nature wandering experience at least 3 times a week
- Journaling and listening to voice
- Poetry at least once a week
- Practicing present mindedness in the everyday routine
- Solitude/withdrawal
- Yoga
- Go to meditation centers with others at least once a week
- Hiking/walking
- Dance
- Really avoid low consciousness situations and activities (violent movies, t.v., drinking/parties without a reason for celebration, negative or high drama people, limit internet and Facebook)
- Put self in unfamiliar, place self to be exposed to new things outside comfort zone and conversations with strangers
- Really listen to intuition/voice inside/outside in nature
- Be quiet when I want to speak and speak when I want to be quiet (especially in group settings)
- Positive affirmations to self of self
- Eat healthy, take good care of body
- Gratitude everyday
- Expect to be guided and remember that I am guided!
- Kindness to self and others
- Be where I am authentically as much as possible







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