Once and for all -- who are our ancestors? (and what I mean by "wisdom field")

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When I pray to the ancestors

I am not praying to my grandfather

Although he might be included.

Ancestors includes everyone who lived before us,

They include guardian spirits I have never met.

But the hard part for most folks to wrap their heads around is,

Our ancestors are not just human.

You might not be able to do this,

I mean, to take this in,

But it's like this. (101.)

Our planet is alive.

It is brimful of life,

Even though the human race has

Squeezed it like a sponge

And decimated it's living spirit

In checkerboard fashion,

Basically, made war on nature

And the physical planet,

Intentionally, willfully, mercilessly.

But life, the great spirit of life prevails

As the main wonder of this world.

And that spirit of life which infuses everything,

Is very, very, very old.

It is so old that it is rather meaningless

To think about how old it is.

And it is very good at recycling and renewing its life force.

What is living about this planet

Assumes infinite variety,

But it isn't just biomorphic.

The life of the planet is, indeed, a spirit, an energy

That animates creation.

Is a tree more alive than a rock?

Is a rock more or less alive than a cloud?

This is a moot question

Because with energy,

We are talking about a field.

We are talking about waves, pulses, vibration.

The life-spirit in rocks that are alive to me

Is impossible to measure.

And it vacillates from being animated

To being dormant.

Life on this level requires being receptive

And being willing to fully engage with creation

Which is charged with an animating agency

That has been variously named throughout the ages:

Soul, spirit, elan, the ether, even consciousness.

Whatever we call it, it is what vitalizes the universe.

It flows in and out of everything

And through everything like a subtle wave.

Matter is not solid or inert.

It is energetic and it is vibrating.

The same goes for us.

Sometimes we are animated

Other times our life-force is withdrawn, dormant.

When we are animated by the life-force

We tend to see life

Where we might not have noticed it before.

Does that mean that perception is subjective?

Yes, human perception is subjective.

That is why we invented science,

To try to stand back from all of the phenomena we observe,

And try to set up some rules about how things work

In a laboratory setting,

And creation is willing to play along

Up to a point,

But you can't isolate creation from creation

Without affecting its nature because

Everything in creation is entangled with everything else.

Some things more than others.

I once used the example of a block of concrete

In a construction site VS a riverstone.

And I used that example because I have experience with both.

When I was journeying once with the mushroom

I found myself relating to a riverstone.

The riverstone and I were relating to each other.

That is to say, the river stone was aware of me.

How is this possible?

I simply lack the ability to explain how it is possible!

The mushroom sensitized me

So the stone was able to reveal its

Own kind of awareness to me.

A block of concrete, on the other hand,

Is somewhat removed energetically

From the vitality of creation.

One time I dreamed that my father and I were scuba diving in a swamp.

He dove first and was under for a long time.

When he surfaced he removed his mask and said,

"There is more concrete down there than in New York City".

It was soon after that dream that I started carving

A series of 16 "sidewalk sculptures"

From fragments of sidewalks that I wrestled out of various landfills.

The whole time I was carving

I was imagining myself trying to escape a high-security prison

By scraping at a 3 foot thick wall with a spoon.

Creating those sculptures was liberating for me

But a secondary result was

That I sensed that each sculpture,

Some of them quite simple,

Was no longer inert, nondescript and sterile

But alive and in creation in a way that it wasn't

When it was in the landfill.

That was my perception.

You can argue with me

That nothing about the material I used was "energetically" transformed

But I know otherwise

And furthermore

That perception has been shared by others

Who have seen these sidewalk sculptures.

One was stolen years ago

And eight have, I dare say, mysteriously, disappeared.

There are only seven left.

I like to think they have found their way

Into the world as living examples of concrete

That has undergone a kind of soul-retrieval.

(This is important work if we consider

That concrete production worldwide

Consumes 16.5 billion cubic meters of water globally a year.

That confirms what my father reported in my dream

When he dove into the swamp,

That there was "more concrete down there than in New York City.")

I have learned to trust my experience.

I think it was the mushroom that taught me,

In an initiatory way, to trust my perception,

Just as I learned to trust my conscience many years ago

To avoid the draft.

When we perceive via the heart

That is a very different kind of perception

Than when we perceive via the head.

I have written about heart entrainment

(Ten years ago that was a new idea. Now you can google it.).

Let's return to the question of Who are our ancestors?

Ancestor means "fore-goer". One who goes before.

I like that, because it isn't just who "comes" before

But who "goes" before.

That fits my notion of who our ancestors are.

They not only precede us, but they go before us.

In other words they guide us.

Time is not linear except as we are conditioned to experience it.

Just as creation is a field, and energy is a field,

So is time.

We live our lives in a time-field.

I like putting it this way:

The past is the "past", because there is more past in the past

Than future.

And future is future because

There is more future in the future than there is past,

But time is multidimensional and fluid.

So, our ancestors, who are tapped into this time-continuum

(That is a field of elements of past and present and future)

Are also tapped into a knowledge-field

And a wisdom-field that is kind of the cumulative reservoir

Of all lived experience.

Jung was coming close to this idea

When he introduced us to the Collective Unconscious,

But ancestral wisdom is more than that

Because it isn't just psychic,

It is also nature, and it is

The living planet.

And now we should talk about love.