mandyjw

Raided Daddy's book collection. Looks promising. https://www.amazon.com/Occult-Christ-Mystical-Secrets-Christianity/dp/1888767502/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+occult+christ&qid=1567970926&s=gateway&sr=8-1

@Moreira I don't think the romantic aspects are distractions, rather they add to the richness and beauty of life. Not that they can't become distractions, though. In my opinion the potential for distraction is more about choosing one religion as true above another, or getting caught up in other people's interpretations and dogma, or identifying oneself as being a follower or a member of particular tradition. The message I have found is the same truth that flows through all religions, pointers to oneness and suggested ways to experience it.

Easter egg in a dream last night, Cinderella's pumpkin carriage. All these stories and myths point to nonduality and with crazy synchronicity sprinkled throughout them. Do we realize how pagan our beloved stories are? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella Life is stranger than fiction. Life imitates art. "One day the gentleman visits a fair, promising his stepdaughters gifts of luxury. The eldest asks for beautiful dresses, while the younger for pearls and diamonds. His own daughter merely begs for the first twig to knock his hat off on the way. The gentleman goes on his way, and acquires presents for his stepdaughters. While passing a forest he gets a hazel twig, and gives it to his daughter. She plants the twig over her mother's grave, waters it with her tears and over the years, it grows into a glowing hazel tree. The girl prays under it three times a day, and a white bird always comes to her as she prays. She tells her wishes to the bird, and every time the bird throws down to her what she has wished for." To read later. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41/41-h/41-h.htm

I'm pretty immersed in studying this currently. One of the key insights of my awakening is that fairytales are real. Crows, trees and stone structures literally played a big part in waking me up. I started intuitively practicing a kind of "witchcraft". It goes deeper than devotion or gratitude, but that's how it begins. My opinion is that the traditions of paganism, wicca and witchcraft suffer the same limitations as Christianity, in that in their modern accesible surface forms, they can be a like a house of mirrors and full of distractions. What's really unfortunate and problematic is that a lot of the attraction to Wicca and Paganism often comes as a sort of rebellious reaction to Christianity and it's influence on society and culture. From that partially misunderstood place of motivation many distractions and impurities arise. I was raised Christian and extremely devoted to Jesus as a kid, so I've traveled through the path of Christianity. I sometimes like to criticize Buddhism for lacking a certain spark but one must say that it's not as deceptive and distracting as other religions and traditions. The very best thing to do to begin with is to take it to its bare bones and study from someone who doesn't profess to follow any religion, tradition or identify as atheist. Like Leo or many of our modern teachers today. All religions lead to the same place. If you've tasted enlightenment and have visited there, you'll be fine studying any tradition you want and you'll be able to sort out the relevant pointers and connections. The more you learn the more duality collapses in this sort of beautifully orchestrated dance of history, myth and tradition. The thing I truly love about paganism and witchcraft is that they give nature the focus and emphasis that it deserves. Trees are incredibly important key elements in Buddhism and Christianity, but they are easily overlooked. Nature doesn't just assist in clearing your mind of thoughts and teaching you how to truly listen. Nature speaks.

Love itself is not selective. Someone or something can seem to reflect "our" love more strongly and guides us in the way we need to go. Sometimes when we feel strong attraction to someone or something we need it in order to learn a lesson about ourselves. Sometimes strong attraction occurs because someone embodies or knows something that we don't and we can mistakenly think that they will make us whole when in reality, they point to something we need to grow and embody in ourselves.

I believe that the need for material things is made into an addiction because of a disconnection from nature. We do have a need to appreciate material things, and nature fills that need in an expert way that takes us deeper to the realization that the "material world" is not as it seems. We also have a need to create, garden, hunt, gather, craft, build, etc. When people are disconnected from the ability to create with and observe nature it naturally comes through in over consumption. It's not something to be shamed or demonized, just understood. There's an inherent unmet need that many people in cities don't have a way to meet. We have not and will not evolve past these needs.

Last night in a "dream" I had this sensation of pain and intuitively expanded my consciousness beyond but still including the body. Then it was shown to me that a rose petal and a teardrop is the same shape, and that they symbolize outward movement from their source. Then I knew/thought that they were representing sensuality and I thought how we associate teardrops and rose petals with the feminine because senses and sensuality are a gift of the "feminine." The senses, like the teardrop or rose petal lead us back to their source.

@Zigzag Idiot I like the angle of contemplation, thank you. Last night I was looking out the window at dusk and saw a bird flitting around, but I'd never seen a bird move so sporadically. It was a bat. Another joined it and I watched them fly around my backyard for quite a while. I decided recently to get some candles and start using them for intention and meditations. Can't have any paraffin shit, it has to be real beeswax. A few weeks ago I found a cigarette lighter on the playground I took my kids to. I don't like to touch things like that but I knew I couldn't leave it on the playground. Yesterday I realized that I needed a lighter for candle magic, and remembered that I already had one. Then I saw a Facebook post of an abandoned exploration group I'm a member of. The entire thing was sychronistically channeled. I'd share the photos but they aren't mine to share. Someone had been doing spell work in an abandoned house somewhere with red and white candles, red chili peppers hung over a mirror.On the mirror was written "She only comes when your stone cold sober." Under the mirror was a table with a pile of red and white stripped peppermints and 3 of clubs card. There was a "Maid of the Mist" hat hung up and "Autumn Eve" written on the wall. This morning I got up before 5 and went to light a candle for Dr. Pomroy. Or the raven. I wore by bright red jacket and it was chilly. I picked some white flowers and held them along with the candle as it burned. Today is a special day, I've been looking forward to all summer. I found an old calendar page in a Narnia book of my husbands. He had a daily Lord of the Rings calendar and used the day for a bookmark. It was September 6, The Return of the King. On the back I drew a forest with an apple tree with mushrooms growing around it. I believe I understand the meaning of the prediction now. On my walk a crow was making an awful sound or call deep in the woods. I stared at the faulty streetlight as I walked and it came on brightly. Before I left I went to the old apple tree, the one with a bone that lies beneath it. I took the biggest ripest apple. It was good. On the way home I went by the river and the mist was coming off it and it was stunning. A heron was there and flew ahead of me as I walked. I've never seen a more graceful bird. The way they move is otherworldly. I always wanted to write. When the world is such a magical beautiful place, it fills you up. It's fills you up to such an extent that tears of love leak out of your eyes. It fills you up and it overflows into art of all kinds.

"The Scarlet Ibis" was a story that I really loved. I read it in freshman English class. I couldn't remember much about it, but I especially remember the illustration for it, of the swamp in our textbook. It was a watercolor painting and I loved it. The poem kept coming up in my mind so I read it again tonight. A feast of emotion, symbolism and synchronicity. The vivid descriptions of nature, the red, green, white color symbolism, the symbolism of Fatherly masculine grace, the lightning, the rain. The best Easter egg of synchronicity is this, "Finally I went back and found him huddled beneath a red nightshade bush beside the road." http://whs.wsd.wednet.edu/Faculty/Zobel/documents/TheScarletIbisText.pdf

16 min in the star of David. Upward triangle masculine, downward feminine. Then he draws a symbol for the grail path.

Last night I dreamed of a huge MASSIVE raven sitting directly in the center of Pomroy's step pyramid and it was staring back at me. I was terrified in a fear of God kind of way. I keep thinking of the way CS Lewis describes Aslan. https://tollelege.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/terrible-and-beautiful-by-c-s-lewis/ https://grimfrost.com/blogs/blog/hugin-and-munin-the-duality-of-your-mind Hugin and Munin, clarity and paradise.

@Natasha I'm so sorry for your loss. The best advice I've ever heard on dealing with grief is that since death is an illusion, we must look for our loved ones where they are and not look where they aren't. You really can see them in the sky, or a flower, you can feel their timeless presence and they really do leave little signs for us. That said, grief and loss are meant for feeling, just like love. When we see through the loss and grief to eternal love, we see what a window death can be the nature of God.

A month ago I started losing my body awareness in meditation. Not completely but it felt like I lose dimension and was becoming flat, as funny as that may sound. It stopped happening until today at the end of meditation, it happened again only this time it didn't become complete, didn't really settle out and it felt like clear weightlessness, in the top half of my body at least. During my awakening there was this weightless feeling, especially in my heart that I will never forget. What I did differently during meditation was I took some deep belly breaths. The Wim Hoff method seems violent to me and I have an aversion to it, even if I get great results from it. But a few deep breaths that feel good THAT'S what it's all about. So my new routine will be to lead meditation with deep belly breaths, completely INTUITIVE ones, not trying to follow a method or sustain for an amount of time. Yesterday I discovered the other side of crow brook that flows behind the cemetery and it's magical. There are red and purple mushrooms growing there. I sat on a log fallen across the brook and just watched the sunlight on the water. I'm aware of how clumsy my sore or tight muscles make me when I want to do something precarious. I'm looking forward to studying more about how chairs are not natural and doing some of my work standing and working on imbalances with yoga. Starting to appreciate Sadhguru for this kind of thing. I'm starting to realize more and more how the portal to oneness that really draws me in is visual.

@seeking_brilliance Glad to hear from you! You know that "pure experience mode" is true mediation right? Travel is it's own kind of meditation, for sure. As for dreams all dreams are important, but if it feels significant it is significant. I really like hearing them, the last one you shared in your journal about the woman carrying something was really meaningful to me. Sometimes we can't always know their real meaning until much later.

If you are God there can and never will be any external objective evidence that something is inspired. The more you are purified the more truth or God flows through you. God has been flowing through Leo for a long time, so of course this includes a lot of insights Leo already has shared and comes through in his style. If you are God, there's only one way to check the validity of something and that is through your own gut feeling or resonance with it. This is all part of following your heart and getting in tune with the guiding sensations that are beyond your own limited ego. Your ego is always arguing for your own limitation and in order to do that it has to argue for the limitation of other people as well.

http://www.northernpaganism.org/shrines/iduna/writings/what-we-know-about-iduna.html

Wooooah. Those last three paragraphs though, I really needed that. I had a flashback while reading it to high school when "follow your heart" was my mantra and what I wrote in everyone's yearbook. I really had no fucking clue what that really meant, but that was it all along!

I had a short enlightenment experience in my sleep before the story dreams and a dream/insight that gave me understanding of the star of David, how it's formed from two triangles, one pointing up and one down. I always knew this of course, when I wanted to learn how to draw stars as a child that was the only star I could draw at first. But I never noticed the meaning of the triangle until recently. Funny because I've been studying the occult 5 pointed star and how it represents the four elements and the fifth spirit, and how apples have a five pointed star inside, 5 petals on their blossoms and poison nightshades have five pointed petals. The bittersweet variety, like grows on Pomroy's grave, has purple flowers that turn to green berries then ripen to bright red.

Kundalini energy, the divine feminine suggesting it's in chaos, and not channeled.

I dreamed that there was this boy (young adult) who was starting a business giving carriage rides with horses. I had a very vague relationship with him, I have no idea what part I played in the dream but I observed him and he answered questions I asked. At one point a message in the sky was reveled and he had somehow put it there. It was symbolic but all I can remember was that it was red and white with a red heart. I asked him how he did it and he said he he made it with poisons and chemicals he had lying around, completely unconcerned. All I could think about was what was going to happen to the beautiful land underneath when it rained next. Then the dream switched up and I found that he had some connection with my daughter's childcare and that he was supposed to give her a ride home from a city two hours away and immediately I was very concerned and knew I didn't want to trust her with him, because he was too immature, careless and short tempered to understand her and keep her safe. Then the dream changed and I was with one of my husband's family members and she showed me all the beautiful things she had bought all in the color red.

This unlocked something in me, a reverse engineered kind of understanding. Thank you.

This was really amazing. Lots of connections and Easter eggs. A love of poetry!

I'm not sure I'm going to be posting much for a little while, I just got some inspiration and direction that I've been asking for for a project and I have a lot of other work to catch up on as well. Of course I never know which way the spirit will move me, so who knows. I love you guys, I'd love it if you want to drop by and say hi here.

Mediate/exercise/time in nature/contemplation/self inquiry/connect with the body/runner's high mood elevation, all in one.

@Keyhole @Jonac Atropa belladonna, deadly nightshade.