Adam’s Peace

Edit: By the way, for those of you reading the feeds only, there’s more information in the comments.

The Tag

Slade has tasked me, as well as several other people, to respond to a tag that he has created.

The tag is designed to get his readers to stop and think about their relationship with money, and to install a healthy relationship.

This is a very object-oriented exercise, but as most people out there don’t program computers, I’ll leave the technical jargon out of it.

The task at hand is to personify your concept of Money, and identify its human qualities, then to create a new concept of money that you can have a healthy relationship with.

Old Money

Several people have already taken part in this tag, and have described their old money as the filthy rich, who care nothing about individuals, only about its own appearances. I can certainly see that as a good description of money, as far as most of society sees it. I tried to visualize Money in an Armani suit, teasing me with the promise of riches if I could just feed his ego, yet never quit delivering.

It didn’t work. That wasn’t my relationship with Money at all. It was close, but not close enough.

Instead of an Armani suit, he wore torn, old rags. Instead of feeding his ego, I had to feed his addiction. Old Money, to me, is a drug addict, and I got as much out of him as anyone can expect to get from a drug addict. He talked cool and made promises, but all too often, I saw him slumped in a corner with a blank stare on his face, with all of his dreams torn and shattered, in peices on the floor around them, as he had to scavenge them to get just one more fix and fight one more craving. He wasn’t even happy to be high anymore, he was just deathly afraid of the withdrawal, and his few lucid moments were spent gathering the resources he needed just to fight off another craving. His addiction was becoming more and more expensive, and he couldn’t function normally any more… I was there to enable him to keep up his addiction, and he loved me for it, but he couldn’t repay me in any way, not even emotionally any more.

New Money

Slade’s experiment really opened my eyes… Who ever thought of personifying an abstract concept like money? After identifying what I saw money as, I began to work on finding a new Money who I could have a relationship with. I don’t care about the gender, or their appearance… What I’m looking for in the personification of money is a person who doesn’t need me, but enjoys my company. I want someone who can teach me, but isn’t too proud to listen to my arguments either. I want someone who can take a joke, but who can also realize the seriousness of any situation. Most of all, I need Money to be responsible, patient, and responsive. I’m tired of the blank stares for extended periods of time, punctuated by panic and chaos… I need someone vibrant and alive, without being excessive.

I found a martial arts teacher. Jujitsu, to be precise.

His Lessons

His first lesson to me was to see money as more than just an abstract concept, which flows through some abstract economy… See it as a force, which I can direct. It flows through me, and it flows through everything around me. I can be stubborn about how it flows, disrupting its currents, and slowing it down, or I can relax, be responsive, and speed up its progress. He told me that money, like water, is stagnant and diseased when it is still, but vibrant and alive when it flows. Hoarding money causes it to go stagnant, but if you let all of it go, then when the lean times come, I won’t have anything to support myself… Keeping it in motion without letting it slip away is a great balancing act, but if we understand how to keep it flowing while in our hands, then it is nearly effortless.

He also used an analogy of opening a door with two knobs. If I pulled on the knob closest to the hinges, then I’m wasting energy just to get the door in motion. If I pull on the knob furthest from the hinge, then I may have to pull further, but the door will be much easier to open. If I seek money closest to the storehouse of money, i.e., the corporations, then I will have a very hard time getting that door open, but if I go away from that storehouse, and find my own unique handle, then the door opens much more easily.

He also told me to program, since that is my strength… but don’t force the programming, let it come. Simply keep myself in the right position, ready to act, comfortable, and when a problem presents itself, sidestep it and push it where it needs to go from behind. If the problem attacks me, move its force, so that it stops being a problem.

It is all a lot to think about, and I have many lessons to learn, but this new Money has promised to give me lessons that are only barely out of my reach, and as I master them, I will have the ability to apply them more thoroughly than I thought possible before.

Physically, New Money is a white male, skinny and toned. He appears to be in his mid-thirties, with smile lines accenting his eyes. He has an air of confidence that comes from within, rather than with what he gains from outside of himself. He never acts out of desperation or fear, but he is always calm, happy, and at peace, even when he is gathering energy and showing off his lightning fast moves and feats of skill.

Other Abstracts

This exercise has prompted me to examine many of the other abstract concepts in my life in greater detail. Reading the comments on Slade’s blog about other people’s experiences in this area has also led to greater thinking, and I’m at the cusp of a decision.

Many years ago, I performed an experiment where I created a pantheon of gods, based partly on my limited understanding of the Greek and Roman systems, with a heavy polarity between good and evil as a throwback from my then-recent experiences with Christianity. The gods began acting on their own accord, after I had named each of them, which leads me to a concept of “Willful Invention.” Many people recognize this as the Law of Attraction, as Intention Manifestation, or as Magick… What if we aren’t limited to influencing things on the physical and spiritual planes, but that we can also create real deities?

My Path

Now, I don’t want to start a new religion… That isn’t my purpose. I could, however, provide a framework for others to work out their own personal pantheons of the abstract entities working within their own lives. Just as with this experiment with Money, we could change our relationships with these abstracts, and even change their basic qualities.

Jung has identified several abstract concepts that are easily personified, in the form of the Anima/Animus, as well as the Shadow. It may not be wise to change the behavior of these integral parts of our own psyche, but we can change our relationships with them, understand them, and learn from them. There are plenty of external abstract entities out there as well, such as corporations and institutions who we can personify so that we can talk with them directly and understand them… Maybe a corporation really isn’t soulless… Its soul simply isn’t listened to.

I’ll continue this experiment in the comments section… Please, join in, because, as Money has told me, a weight carried by many is easier to handle than the same weight carried by only one.

I just wrote about my spiritual history, and the cusps that have lead me to where I am now. I’ve been on the move for most of my life, searching for something outside of myself, in the past and future. I have finally found what I have been looking for. Inner peace is here and now.

The post that I wrote two days ago, on how I could not find that sense of peace, nor a sense of anything else, was indeed the calm before the storm… and the storm is only beginning. It prompted me to travel my past, to understand why I came to where I am now. It prompted me to travel my future, to understand what I am doing now. These last two days, I have retraced the steps around the world that I have made as a soldier.

I know guilt and sin. I am not a perfect person. I know peace and forgiveness. I am whole.

After writing on how I didn’t have a sense of peace two days ago, at how vague the whole experience was, I was strongly compelled to write to Slade and Jeff to ask them for help. The email that I sent each was short and simple, explaining that I didn’t know what to do next… They gave two different replies, and individually, they do not equal what they had both come up with together.

I had the energy… Slade provided me with the method to use that energy… Jeff provided me with the direction to apply the energy. I realize that this seems a bit vague and ambiguous, but I’ll explain shortly.

My life purpose is to bring peace to everybody… Since taking on that purpose, I have started this blog in the hopes that I could bring peace, so that I could find peace myself. I realize that I had it backwards, and I knew at the beginning that it was backwards as well… Peace is not found outside of yourself. However, the clues to finding peace could indeed be external.

Take care of your body, for it is your vehicle to finding these clues.

Take care of your mind, for it is there to find the riddles behind the clues.

Take care of your environment, for it is the tool through which you experiment, to work through these clues.

Take care of your spirit, for it holds the key to unlocking peace.

Without your body, mind, environment, and spirit, you can not find the door within yourself that leads to peace… If one is lacking, then peace can not be obtained.

Take care of your body the same way that you would make a sword… Give it good ingredients, or the foundation will be corrupt. Stretch it, beat it, and strain it, but also let it rest… If you do not apply enough stress, it will be weak and soft. If you do not let it rest, it will be brittle, easy to break. Eat healthy food and exercise often, but do not push past your limits.

Take care of your mind the same way that you take care of your body… Give your mind good information and challenge it with puzzles. Avoid the bad, such as uninformative television and fear-based propaganda. Read books, write, and pick up a hobby that makes you think, such as the currently popular Soduko puzzles. If you are addicted to TV, and don’t want to give it up, watch trivia game shows and informative documentaries, such as those found on The Science Channel. Play as well… Letting your mind rest helps it to sort things out. Of course, also get enough sleep is important as well, but too much sleep can cause just as much trouble as not enough.

Take care of your environment by keeping it clean and orderly, and by maintaining and strengthening your relationships. Don’t be afraid to cut off relationships that are harmful or abusive, but don’t be afraid of gaining new relationships either. Manage your relationships judiciously as well… Don’t take responsibility for other people’s thoughts, since you can’t control what goes on in their head, but do recognize how their thoughts and resulting actions affect you. There are many, many self-help books out there that are devoted to finding equilibrium with your environment, whether it be financially, romantically, or organizational.

Take care of your spirit… There’s a tricky one. More than anything else, spirituality is subjective. There is no single right answer for everybody… but at the same time, there is no wrong answer either. The best advice that I can give everybody is to simply pay attention. Just like you can’t not communicate, and you can’t not practice, you can’t not grow spiritually. You can, however, slow down to the point where it seems like you’re standing still.

Taking care of the mind and body may seem to be concentrating on opposites… Taking care of the physical and spiritual may seem to be exclusive as well… but it is only when they are all together that you can find peace. Just as many depictions of the tarot card Temperance show fire being mixed with water, it is through combining the earthliness of our environment, the fieriness of our spirits, the airiness of our thoughts and the watery needs of our bodies that we arrive at a whole being… (I’ve heard it described before, by a computer engineer explaining a diet plan he hacked together, of all sources, that in its most simple terms, the human body is simply a highly inefficient water pump. Appropriately, the tagline on the diet plan is “How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition.”)

Now, I’m a big fan of cycles… but dwelling on them really hertz… (Please, pardon my puns.) If I do finally write the piece of fiction which has been stuck in my head, it will contain 21 books, of seven stories retold three times from the same person, as his past present and future. The world is made up of cycles, from the changes of tides every six hours, the day/night cycle, the lunar cycles, and even the yearly wheel, cut into quarters with spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Even the sun has a cycle, with its magnetic field being twisted and bent every eleven years, finally settling into a new equilibrium. There is a 20,000 year cycle of ice ages and warm periods, and even our view of the heavens have a cycle, as constellations move over hundreds of thousands of years.

Fortunately, these cycles serve as a good way of dealing with the different elements of ourselves. A full moon can remind us to accept the bounty before us, and a new moon can remind us to be more giving. If you can’t run, then learning how to walk might be more appropriate… If you can’t combine the spiritual with the worldly, or the mental with the physical, then you could work on them in cycles, shortening the length of each cycle until they overlap.

Having all of the pieces together doesn’t guarantee inner peace, though… It only makes it easier to find, and easier to maintain. That is what I realized yesterday, with the help of Jeff and Slade. Having your body, mind, environment, and spirit in tune gives you the energy to push forward into a state of peace, but without knowing how to apply the peace, or having a direction for your energy to go, peace eludes you.

Slade’s response was that I act in the present only. I can plan for the future and remember the past, but I can only act now… I can only be at peace now. (What he wrote was much longer than what I’m putting in here… but the parts that weren’t specifically saying to live in the now were specific to my situation.)

Jeff used divination to find his part of the message… He pulled three cards, The Hermit, The Sun, and The Hierophant, and aligned them as he did in a recent spread… The Hermit was on the bottom left, the Sun was in the top middle, and the Hierophant was on the bottom right… I was represented by both the Hermit and Hierophant, with the Hermit being myself now, and the Hierophant being who I’ll be when I’ve reached my goal.

That gave me the means to work, and the direction to work towards. I realize that the Hierophant has made a pretty bad name for himself… Thoughts of persecution at the hands of the Inquisition spring immediately to mind, but the Hierophant has another side to him, especially when you leave out the prejudice that both those dealing with him, as well as the Hierophant himself, seem to enjoy.

The purpose of the Hierophant is to bring spirituality to the world at large in practical terms… The Hermit simply explains things whenever you are lucky enough to find him, but you don’t need to be lucky to find the Hierophant when you’re looking for him, since you always know that he’s firmly entrenched within his palace of gold spartan cloister.

Just as with the Hermit, I’ve been wandering around searching for knowledge, and I have been trading answers in exchange for questions to ponder over… I have helped many people, on an individual basis, but I wouldn’t stick around to see the results, or to offer any follow-up help. I was hard to find, and it was often random fate which allowed me to find the people to help.

Now it seems that my direction is to become the Hierophant, however the role plays itself out. I’ve got my golden palace spartan cloister here in the form of this web site, with a contact form that is well guarded from spam, and public message boards in the form of comments; as well as a couple of back doors in the form of instant messengers and forum private messages, for those who know where to find them. (The keys to those back doors are not on this website… That should be enough of a clue for those who have followed me so far.)

So, what is the role of the Hierophant? To be an easy to find source of inspiration, who takes complex or spiritual ideas and simplifies them into worldly knowledge, and who can be a stubborn jerk at times. I promise that I’ll only be stubborn when it really matters.

Oh, and the Astrological basis for the Hierophant is Taurus… mooo.

The one thing about a Hierophant is that he attracts acolytes. I don’t want acolytes, I want people to go out and spread their own message. The best way to help me is to not be a “yes man,” but to go out and use your own words… Argue with me and point out what I’m doing wrong… Be my friend, not what you think I want in a friend. If you haven’t already, go out and make your own blog and write about what you feel is important. Stop waiting and just do it. Yes, you. Go, make a blog. Now!

Since finding the role, the means to fit within it, and gaining the energy and discipline to follow through, I’ve found a measure of peace far greater than I’ve felt before. Welcome, everyone, to Adam’s Peace. It isn’t a place, it is every place. It isn’t a time, it is every time.

What follows is a record of the major spiritual cusps I have gone through. I am putting them in chronological order, for lack of a better way to organize them.

My first real spiritual experience was when I was six or seven years old. My father brought me out to an abandoned schoolyard, which was slowly turning into a more manicured park by the nearby residents. It was fall, with a full moon, around 8 at night. My dad stood me in a circle on the basketball court, where we had a clear view of a nearby hospital. He started guiding me through creating a sacred space within that circle, then he asked me to choose a window from the hospital where I felt that someone needed the most help. He guided me in forming the sacred place into a cone, and extending it to the full moon. We drew energy from the moon down to us, then moved the cone to go into hospital room that I selected.

I don’t know who was in the room at the time, or what happened to them. I found out later that the floor I selected was where the intensive care unit was, because nearly ten years later, that same room that I selected was the room my grandfather was placed in after major neck surgery. (He was in hospitals after that surgery for six months straight, then would go in intermittently for the next five years until his death a year and a half ago.) I have tried to remind my dad of that night, but he denies remembering it. I have other clues that my father was a closet pagan, such as when he explained that witches were people in a different religion, who were just as good as any Christian. Though my dad denies remembering that night, and has not confirmed ever having been pagan, he has never denied that the events of that night could have happened, nor has he denied being pagan.

This taught me what my heritage is.

About ten years later, when I was 17, I performed a spiritual experiment. I’ve already written about it in the post, More Hard Questions, so I won’t go into too much detail here. At this time, I had been an active member of the LDS church for about five years, and I was starting to get restless, wanting to understand more about spirituality. I created a pantheon of gods, which gained a life of their own the more that I gave them details and personalities.

This taught me the subjectivity of our spirituality, the power of creation, and it was good practice for speaking directly with spiritual beings.

Afterwards, I went on to become a Wiccan… This was also when I joined the Army. I’ve never had a steady group of people to learn from, either because there were none around who had the time/energy to teach me, because there were none who I felt comfortable with, or a myriad of other reasons. I studied alone and over the Internet for the most part, and practiced very little for myself, mostly only for dire needs. I learned how to help other people at great distances, though. I learned how to appeal to those who needed their egos fed without them attaching themselves to me. I learned how to get people to help themselves, though I actually did very little other than identify meanings for symbols, manipulate energy, and use intuitive divination to help them.

I did have one cusp, though… Though parts of the story goes back a long ways, it effected me during the time where I was practicing Wicca in the Army.

While I was growing up, my father would take a weekend every once in a while to walk through the deserts around Phoenix, AZ, where I had grown up. While I was an infant, or just before I was born, he was taking a hike around the base of a small mountain, and he started to feel compelled to walk to a certain point. As he walked, he came to a small valley, where people had dumped a lot of their garbage… Old tires, mattresses, and the like. Among the garbage were two large stones, one red and one black. My father explained that by this time, he only had the barest hint of conscious control over his choices. He felt compelled to pick up the stones (about 50 pounds each) and start carrying them up the mountain… About three quarters of the way up, he found an outcropping of stone that formed a very shallow recess, just large enough for these two stones to sit comfortably. He placed the red one first, and returned with the black one. As he was carrying each stone, he felt as if he were carrying a living being, first its body in the red stone, then its soul in the black one. As he placed the black stone in its spot, a small piece fell off, about the size of two fists knuckle to knuckle, and my father was filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude. He was allowed to take the piece of black stone with him, as a gift… The stones where a Kachina, the literal spirit of that mountain.

I retold that story one night in a chat room for pagans, and when I finished it, I felt the weight of that mountain around me, and the Kachina told me that the gratitude and gift that was given to my father also extends to me… A man who follows Shinto, Japanese ‘paganism,’ was also in that chat room, and sensed the change in me… He clarified to me that I had a gift to speak with spirits.

September 11th, 2001, also served as a major cusp in my life, as it did for many people.

After that point, I stopped following Wicca primarily, and I became more of a Universalist. I became an ordained minister and helped the people who didn’t have an organized religion to support them, such as the various groups of pagans, or those who were far from their religion’s “church.” After leaving the Army, I moved to a region where the people who were not members of the dominant Christian sect were very well hidden, so my opportunities to minister were few and far between.

Identifying my life purpose was a very important cusp, though it wasn’t based on spirituality. It did, however, lead to another very spiritual cusp.

This one comes from Jeff Lilly. He was also facing a cusp, after visiting the native American tribes of South Dakota, as he had a vision where he couldn’t figure out the symbolism. At the time, I was just starting to apply my life purpose, and I was changing my blog (which was hosted at askTrina.com at the time) from a place to answer random questions (such as why the sky is blue, why printers jam, etc.) to one of personal development and peace. Jeff asked me for help in figuring out the symbolism, so I did what I could. As Jeff was driving home from work that day, he realized the meaning of the symbols, and found my reply email waiting for him with the same explanation.

Jeff’s vision of the Sioux tribe related to his relation with the chief and his wife, and the interpretation showed that, while he loved the wife and the chief, as he wasn’t part of the tribe, the love could extend only so far. Please read both of his articles, as they are among his best.

It was a cusp for me as well, because of the knowledge that I gained from helping. As Jeff points out with the interpretation, the Native American traditions are one of reverence for their ancestry… If I’m to follow their path in any way, I must do it by following the path of my heritage. The same goes for Eastern religions, whose traditions are also those of reverence for their ancestry. In fact, there are very few religions that do not have reverence for their ancestry as one of their principles…

I seem to be at another cusp now… I’m a Universalist; I revere all religions, and even the lack of religion. I feel, though, that I have just seen the surface of each religion, and as long as I keep my distance, I can not experience their depths… If I were to take a cue from Jeff and use a language analogy, it would be as though I have compiled a catalog of the world’s languages, and only identified the most common nouns and verbs. I can communicate with all of them, but I’m not fluent with any. I may always have an ‘accent’ when it comes to religion, but I think it is time to learn one and know it to its depths.

Looking back at the cusps that have lead to this one, I see that my heritage clearly is in European shamanism, especially paganism, and even if I choose a religion that is not my heritage, it would point me back to paganism. I have learned that my strengths are in communication, intuition, and creation. I also have spiritual allies, including an America mountain, a European elf, and an Asian spirit.

The question is, which branch of paganism do I choose? I am done with Wicca, and I have ideas for others to pursue…

Before I make my decision, though, I have one issue to resolve. I must know if I was right or wrong… My issue will appear in my next post.