On Friday, July 1, the day of the new moon, partial solar eclipse and other assorted influences described here by Rick Levine and Jeff Jawer, I was sitting at the vet's waiting for my dog, Lily Bear, to be brought out after a night's stay at the kennel. A woman sitting about four feet down the bench received her dachshund, Annie, before Lily Bear arrived. A few moments later, Annie got off her owner's lap and crossed the bench to where I was sitting. Her tail was up and wagging, so I began to raise my hand from the bench to offer the back of it for a sniff. Very abruptly, Annie bit me.

Annie's owner grabbed her and said, "I'm so sorry! I should have told you she can be nippy!" She hurried off to pay her bill and was gone.

The bite was on the middle finger of my right hand. On the left side of my finger the skin wasn't broken, but on the right there was a deep puncture wound. The vet cleaned it up and put a band-aid on it, muttering something about how it might have hit a vein and how it might hurt like hell. "But it should be okay."

Lily Bear was brought out and, as I paid for her stay, the receptionist mentioned that she'd been bitten many times and it never came to anything.

But two hours into my shift at the chocolate shop, which began about an hour later, I was in such severe pain that I closed the shop and called the local urgent care center, which was, unfortunately, closed. So I figured I would ice the wound and go in the morning.

Events moved quickly the next day. The urgent care center sent me right to the ER. An infection had already followed the tendon in my finger into the palm of my hand. At the hospital, I was attached to a machine that began pumping antibiotics into a vein in my arm, an orthopedic surgeon showed up, and x-rays, an EKG, and volumes of blood were taken. Since I had eaten breakfast, surgery couldn't be scheduled until 4 that afternoon. It was my first surgery, and, for the first time in my life, I was given general anesthesia.

The surgeon made two incisions, one along the inside of the long finger next to the puncture, and one across the palm. The tendons were debrided and a drain placed in my palm. The surgery took about an  hour, they tell me.

I woke up a while later and was wheeled into the hospital room where I would stay for the next four days.

The story isn't over yet, though I've been home another four days now, but what strikes me about the sequence of events is how strongly aligned they are with current astrology. How much more aligned can they be than this?

while listening to Ganesh Baba on my iPod...

For several days I've been working on a project that took all my attention for most of every day. There was a day a few days ago when I sat down to meditate at 8:11, but meditation wouldn't come.

Meditation isn't something you do; meditation comes. Christian Pilastre

My head was full of facts (nice facts about chocolate, but facts nonetheless) and my body full of adrenalin. I was late starting, so I skipped the stretching and wiggling part of my routine and the rapid exhale cleansing breaths and went straight into long, slow deep breaths. Over and over my mind was drawn back to the same mental pathways I had been using all day. Once on those comfortable tracks, other thoughts of similar vibration flooded in.

Recognizing and accepting that my head needed extra time to empty, I patiently returned to breathing consciously and refocusing on the third eye and listening to the OM again again. It was well after the 11 minutes passed before I was able to move beyond the day's issues. I missed the pleasure of knowing and feeling that I was part of a worldwide phenomenon. There was a time when I'd have been hard on myself for missing the opportunity, but over the years I've learned not to judge myself - or others - so harshly. We're all evolving at our own pace.

I probably sat for 20 minutes before I unwound sufficiently to be relaxed and receptive, which is the key to real meditation.

Then the vision of a world built on love returned. At first I saw people and animals interacting in a landscape of lovely soft hills, like the ones in South Wales. Around each person, each animal, and each feature of their surroundings was a swirling cloud of changing colors. The colors moved in and out of the center of whatever they are massed around, concentrating at the center, dissipating at the edges. As they shifted, they interacted with and affected the colors of nearby swirls.

When I sit for 11 minutes at 9:11 every evening, I go through my crea routine (from page 61), set the stage quickly with a thought - tonight it was "getting there from here"- and then slide easily into taking ten or so of the longest, slowest, deepest breaths I can take - it's like getting into a pool and swimming. When I get to the end of an in- or out-breath, I usually pause and listen. Pranov, the OM, rushes in between breaths.

As I breath consciously and rest in the OM, I focus my attention on the area just in front of my forehead above my eyes and at the forefront of my brain, the third eye. Baba's name for the energy center there is the gyral center, which is very fitting, since, with sufficient attention and appropriate action, the spinning of the gyral center will take you into other dimensions.

The answer to how do we get from here, this collision-course existence, to there, a world built on love, comes slowly, over days of meditation.

We get there by doing what we're doing: millions of us are sitting together for 11 minutes a day envisioning the new reality, creating it consciously in the light of the highest good; and we get there by living as if a world based on love was already our collective reality. Instead of physical gifts, gives gifts of attention. Pay attention to where your attention is going. Notice the vibration.

When Ganesh Baba noticed that one of us was being insensitive to the general vibration, the ambiance, he would say, "Don't screw up the pitch!"

Don't screw up the pitch.

In today's world it seems pretty clear that the great myth we all believe in is the economy. As my father used to say, "The Mighty Dollar is our god." He was right when he said it in the 1950's and he'd be even more right now. The bottom line is indeed the bottom line.

What if the bottom line was love? What if love was the main myth, the most valued, the way goods are passed?

Relationship would be more important than acquisition. Love would be our currency.

What we pay attention to grows. - Ganesh Baba

The first definition in the dictionary for the word currency is "the metal or paper medium of exchange that is presently used"- money - but it is also "the property of belonging to the present time." To be current is to be up to date. Time, like a river or like electricity, moves in a current. A current, like the passage of goods, flows.

So currency in a broad sense is a very interesting concept: the warp of space and the weft of time coincide in currency. Currency refers to the Now in the Tollean sense. How telling it is that our civilization values physical currency so highly and has gives so little value to currency in time - when currency in time is the key to such treasures.

Live it light. Only a touch. It is all right here. - Ganesh Baba

What if love replaced money as the medium of exchange in society? Good relationships would be more important than things. We would take care of one another and share whatever we have instead of holding onto it. Being rich would mean being in good relationship with the entire environment: family, neighbors, animals, plants, the earth itself.

Once again, John Lennon had it right:

A few years ago, when the economy was failing all around us, a surprising thought came to me: Tomorrow's currency is love. The idea arrived with such force that I had to consider it then and it came back again and again, even though the phrase didn't make much sense to me at the time.

The first night of my 11.11 meditation, the thought came to me right away. My mind would have been happy to analyze and ponder it, to take it apart etymologically, historically and philosophically, to stay with it for the entire eleven minutes, but I chose not to follow any of those enticing pathways. I pushed it aside in favor of a quick wish for a world built on love, listening to the OM and sinking into silence. After the meditation, I was left with a series of questions. How would such a world work? Could it work? How can we get there?

The following evening, I began with the thought of a world based on love again. Images of people relating to one another in loving instead of warlike ways, of unraped landscapes, of harmonious interchanges with animals, arose.

On the third night, the vision took form fairly rapidly but it was less detailed. In fact, its details were veiled in airy color, as if washed over with watercolors. The colors, which were varied, soft and lovely, flowed and changed as people and animals moved and interacted. The changes in their colors in turn affected the colors of the landscape. It all blended together harmoniously in a softly swirling fractal pattern. Afterward, it came to me that I had seen a version of the "fractal world of rainbows and scales iterating about us endlessly" that Ganesh Baba describes and I write about in The Crazy Wisdom of Ganesh Baba.

http://evolutioncult.com

I realized that to live in a world built on love our senses would have to be much more finely tuned than they are in this world. A world built on love would be based on intuition and inspiration rather than hard sense data; on metaphor, symbolism and ta'wil rather than literal interpretation. Creation would arise more directly out of resonance and likeness. Thus the question that came - but how would we make a living? - was answered, good will provide goods.

By last night, the phrase "love as currency" began to makes sense to me, but I'll have to let those thoughts incubate until I have more time to write.

For several nights now I've been taking part in the New Reality Transmission worldwide event in which thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe millions of people are meditating on a world built on love for eleven minutes, at 11:11 (EST), for eleven days, beginning, of course, on 11/11.

Each evening I settle into a quiet place where I can sit comfortably with my back straight - or, as Baba would say, my antenna aligned. As I get settled I wiggle a little to loosen up, and exhale rapidly a number of times to clear my lungs, sometimes using my arms like chicken wings to help pump out the air. Then, relaxing more and more deeply, I take about ten of the longest, slowest breaths I am capable of taking, the out-breath roughly twice as long as the in-breath.

I use mantras with my breath practice. Ever since I learned it from Baba, a simple OM on the in-breath, OM on the out-breath, has been the core of my practice. Sometimes I sing the word to myself as I breath, going up and down the scale, or to some melody, but more often I just listen to my inner sound.

The syllable OM represents the primal vibration, the sound of the Big Bang behind space and time. Our ears cannot possibly hear it - but our bodies do sing, some more loudly, some very softly. The body's song is not respected in today's world; we call it "tinnitus." I call it my personal OM and I find listening to it immensely peaceful.
I revert to OMing in one form or another between periods of trying other mantras that have come to me from here and there over the years.

Currently, I am using abundance on the in-breath, surrender on the out-breath. I don't use the word, I feel the idea; it's vibrational.

When I am begin the slow, rhythmic breathing that I try to maintain through rest of the meditation, I think about a new world built on love, a world where the currency is love instead of money.

Each evening the thoughts that come to me when I set that stage are becoming clearer. I've been taking a few notes after each meditation. Over the next few days, I'll try to find the time to put some of those understandings here too.

It doesn't matter how close to perfection you are now; it matters that you are headed in the right direction.


I attribute this comforting quotation to Ganesh Baba, but, to be honest, I don't know who said it. Baba's soft, comforting side was one I knew well, but it's not the side he shows in his writing and it emerges only rarely in the recordings I've listened to. What he does say about perfection is almost always about the importance of striving for it.

The statement arrived in my consciousness one morning some months ago as I stretched my leg and back in the mahamudra. Baba was watching from his picture on the altar.


Deeply engaged in the practice, I was attending to my body's subtle and not-so-subtle responses as I inched closer and closer to closing the circuit when the thought came.


Yogic and tantric lineages use the term mahamudra -"high" "gesture"- for practices they consider most central to their teaching. I've been practicing the Kriya mahamudra for more than thirty years, sometimes more, sometimes less. Over the years it's improved, but my 60-year-old body, while built very well for carrying babies both inside and out, was never not perfectly aligned; and my mind, which leans toward being in charge and being right, is not inclined to focus on weakness.

For many years, I always felt not-good-enough about the physical aspect of my practice - however much time or effort I put in seemed not-enough. Only relatively recently have I begun to able to override the constant vague feeling of guilt by giving my full attention to the practice itself, a big step.

When the new thought arrived, my last underlying feelings of inadequacy faded away.

We are all imperfect; there's no more point in dwelling on our weaknesses than there is in dwelling on our strengths. It's ego both ways.

Baba tells us that conscious evolution is about using humanity's specific gift of free will to strive for an ideal state in body, mind and spirit. Accepting what is as it is, the feminine side of the practice, is as much part of the ideal as inching forward, the masculine side is.

"It doesn't matter how far from perfection you are; it matters that you are facing the right direction now."

Eve Neuhaus

About a week ago, during that very intense grand cardinal cross, I heard Jon Young telling stories about his recent visit with a group of Kalahari Bushmen in Botswana. What struck me, other than the tragedy of what "civilization" has cost the human race, was that the Bushmen appear to only have two rituals: a greeting ritual, and what Jon called the spontaneous gratitude dance.

Every time a member of the community feels grateful, he or she does a happy, shuffling and shaking little dance. Whenever someone does the dance everyone nearby joins in and pretty soon the whole group is dancing. Jon showed video footage of the gratitude dance a few times, notably when a bottle of very special water was presented to an elder.

Earlier the same day, a friend leading a solstice ritual reminded us of the Haudenosaunee belief that the only reason for humans to exist is to say thank you, that the proper use of free will is to complete the natural circle of giving by giving thanks to nature and spirit for providing.The main understanding I took from my research on the grand cross was that whatever transpired in that time was likely to have a lasting impact -and there I was reflecting on the extraordinary power of gratitude twice in one day.

At the time I was preparing for a radio interview about The Crazy Wisdom of Ganesh Baba, trying to decide which of the 4 P's described in the book (Posture, Prana, Practice and Presence) I wanted to emphasize in the interview. I decided that the one that interests me most at the moment is the third, Practice, or conscious action, paying attention to what you pay attention to. What we pay attention to grows because we are shining the light of consciousness on it. What could have a more positive impact on the world than paying more attention to gratitude?

More than any other practice I can think of, taking on the essential human responsibility of giving thanks as Haudenosaunee saw it has potential to create just the shift in consciousness the human race needs right now.

And the Kalahari Bushmen have known how to do it forever.

So I've been doing the spontaneous gratitude dance for about a week. My dance isn't exactly the same as the one the Bushmen do, but my three grandsons picked it up instantly, not only dancing whenever I did but starting their own dances whenever they felt grateful. It's a little silly, of course, but a little silliness coupled with a lot of gratefulness is just what the world needs.

Try it. It works.

Two friends and I sit by the fire together on the full moon.This month the full moon coincided with Dia de Los Muertos which falls just after Halloween, which is its turn replaced the more ancient Samhain. In most cultures marking this particular turn of the year, the veil between the worlds is thought to be thinnest, allowing easy contact with the ancestors.

So we welcomed the ancestors to our fire and we listened, pads and pens in hand.

My first guest was a very tall thin woman with bobbed hair and elegant clothing from the 1930's. I asked her what we needed to do to prepare for the coming transition. Her response:

Just release it all - let go - and you'll be provided for. Everything is already there but you don't see it. There is enough if you believe there is enough. Only the ones who who believe there is enough will not have enough.

We have always provided and we will continue to provide if only you can see what it is we are giving.

You are facing in the wrong direction. Face the sun and the sun will give. The cycle goes on even into another phase: a phase of forthrightness, of courage, of listening, of giving, of patience and of generosity.

Your job is to give back what has been given to you. Offer up your gifts to the sun. What you worship you become. Become light. Transform those around you through the power of light and love, and laughter.

Have no expectations, have no preconceptions - they will only cause pain.

The new phase will be a relief. The way you live now is so much harder.

It will be like getting off the train and sitting in the meadow.

Relax, release, regenerate.



Our second meditation brought a truly venerable guest to me: Ananda Mayi Ma, whose picture graces my altar. She stood quietly until I asked a question about my yoga practice, which I put many hours into at this time of year over the past three years, but haven't this year. Is it enough, I asked? She replied:

The practice is enough. Nothing more is needed.

Sitting.

Being present.

Breathing,

Waiting patiently.

It is enough.

Practice is always, every moment of every day.

Remembering god, remembering the spark of god in everything, feeling god in you and seeing god around you.

It is in the eyes. Look into the eyes when you speak and the god in you will speak to the god in others.

Become god. We are all god.

OM.

OM.

OM.

Breathe in the present.

Breathe out the past to create the future.

In - out

In-out

Every breath creates past, present and future.

I am between the breaths.

I am you.

OM.

OM.

OM.

You may call me Mother.




As we sat waiting once more, I noticed my friends busy writing while I still stared at the fire. Then a figure rose from the flames, a fire woman, flaming clothing, flaming hair - fierce, frightening.

The fire cures the clay. You are clay. You are earth. If the earth burns, the clay will be hard enough to hold the water.

If the earth is to go on, we will be waiting.

We will hold you as the fire of transformation sears you.

Everything changes. Hold on to nothing

no thing

no idea

no plan

no hope

no earth

no sky.


I am the Queen of Fire.

Kali

Ereshkigal

Hellfire

leading to

purification

strength

dignity

power

wisdom

en LIGHT enment.

Called or uncalled, I am with you.

Check it out: The Crazy Wisdom of Ganesh Baba: Psychedelic Sadhana

This press release took me all day to write, but in the late afternoon it went out to over 60 local media outlets. I got two responses right off: an automated response from a reporter who's in Morocco for a month (sounds nice!) and a call from another who wondered if we might hire her nephew. I think we'll get some buzz out of it though.

Press release:

Frank Zika brought the new door over today so we could see it in place and choose between several inserts. He does amazing work!

Here's the shop as it looks today. Its last incarnation was as part of a furniture store that took up much of the block. I've done drawings for what the front will look like - a new glass door and a radically different paint job - but it won't be done for another few weeks.


To get our plans okayed by the health department we're adding an ADA-compliant bathroom, a three bay sink and a mop sink, replacing the old carpet with linoleum (the expensive kind, too - they wouldn't accept our lower cost choice), putting in new wiring and a new ceiling, air conditioning and more.


This will be the retail area. It's small, just 20 x 30, I think. Behind the interior window there's larger area where we'll be doing packaging, shipping and storing the chocolate.