Spiritual Cowgirl

I’m a big fan of The Devi Mahatmya (The Grandeur of the Goddess) – a 700 verse Hindu scripture about the Great Goddess. It’s no His Dark Materials, but it gets the divine mojo flowing in an antediluvian sort of way.

Why do I adore this primordial Go Go Goddess myth so much? Well, for a few reasons. The first reason reaches back to my college days. The night after I started reading the translation, I had one of the most intense dreams of my life. And for nights afterwards I was high-fiving divine feminine archetypes like every body’s bizness – I’m talking butterflies, bees, blood, fire, tongues, swords, lionesses, snakes, and on and on She oh so epiphanically winked. Needless to say, it was a heightened time for me (and my poor roommates), and therefore I have always credited The Devi Mahatmya for slipping my subconscious its first red pill.

A few more reasons I turn red for this text: it’s a religious, yes, a religious scripture about the Goddess saving the world and the poetic verse positively swoons with divine heat, humor, and wisdom. Here’s a brief synopsis:

Once upon a time, demons were busy destroying the world. The male gods were not strong enough to stop the demons, and it looked like planet earth was about to take a not-so-pretty nose dive, until the gods suddenly “remembered” there was a Great Goddess. The male gods prayed to her and begged her to save the planet. So, the Great Goddess gathered her many weapons in her many arms, and, well, saved the world. Like 3 times. While the male gods watched helplessly from the sidelines. Ahem. After the goddess kicked some major demon ass, the gods sung her praises for an ever.

One of my favorite scenes from the text is when the most evil demon of all, Raktavija, was refusing to die. Every time the goddess Durga stabbed him with her sword, his blood hit the earth and turned into a thousand more demons. How annoying. Durga apparently became so pissed that out of her skull popped the raging goddess Kali who solved the messy problem by guzzling down the blood of the nasty demons every time Durga stabbed them. Talk about grrrl power!

OK, but here’s a Tantric Hindu myth I just read about in Daniel Odier’s book Desire, that’s even better. Seriously better. So, instead of demons ending the world, a gargantuan linga (phallus) is destroying the planet – wreaking havoc on mountains and streams and villages and humans and animals. The male gods are fighting the massive penis but to no avail – it’s still hammering away – totally screwing up life. The gods again suddenly “remember” (sigh) the Great Goddess and pray to her to help save the planet. She obliges not by fighting the penis with weapons, but by rising to the sky and slipping the giant phallus inside her. The phallus experiences so much pleasure that it stops destroying the world and all is saved.

Now if that’s not a red metaphor for saving the planet right now, I dunno what is!!!

What myths tempt your world red? Don’t have any specific ones? How bout creating your own?

“The resurgent interest in esoteric spiritual traditions and the wisdom of more ancient cultures is not an indicator of a return to the past, past patterns or ways of thinking, but rather of a species-level refocusing on Consciousness: a review (as distinct from repetition) of our previous spiritual and philosophical inquiries, methodologies and creative directions: integrating and incorporating still-relevant ancient knowledge, reminders and techniques as a base, benchmark and platform from which to spring forward into undiscovered fields of knowing and being.”

-Alan Sasha Lithman from An Evolutionary Agenda for the Third Millenium: A Primer for a Mutation of Consciousness

There is such a unique shift in my body, mind, and world when I’m in a state of gratitude. It’s like my cells turn into sparkly pink cupcakes and my heart puffs up like it’s supposed too and my perspective loans reality majesty, elegance, awe.

I bow my head to the utter simplicity of a power so great and life changing. I thank the Universe for providing me so many opportunities to experience gratitude.

Then I spank my own bum with a Sarah Ban Breathnach book when I think about how freakin’ long it’s taken me to climb aboard the gratitude gravy train – a movement the spiritual arena has been chugging for decades.

This makes me sit back and wonder just how many popular spiritual ideas I’ve nodded to but not really tried to tango with because they’re just so, well to be quite honest, damn common. Boring. Duh. Take Joseph Campbell’s famous quote “follow your bliss”. This phrase when first heard was profoundly moving…for my parents generation. But if you walk up to most people my age and tell them to follow their bliss they just might slap you. Or roll their eyes. Or smile, swivel away, and order another saketini.

I’m realizing that as cheesed-out or over-used as some of these spiritual maxims have become for us, when faced with the spirituality aisle at Barnes and Nobles we gotta try to distinguish our spirit’s wolf whistle from our ego’s snort.

So I now send energetic thank you notes to the universe all ze time – for my friends, family, snails, Joss Whedon, and the inventor of Hitachi vibrators. For this one seemingly ordinary tree outside my window that provides my workspace with such green vibrance (I swear it waves at me). I thank my organs, my veins, my nervous system, my skin for doing a job well, one more day. I kiss my shower head for giving me warm water. I hug my steering wheel when my car starts. I’m grateful that all I have to do is walk down the street to purchase rainbow chard. I’m grateful for the local farmers, the soil, the elements for creating such a yummy veg. I’m even grateful for my credit card.

Here’s the thing, my attitude of gratitude does not cover up what is seemingly “wrong” or seriously dark or just totally yuckmeister about life. I’m well aware of the nastiness around the credit card biz and health care and current politics and social injustice and environmental devastation. My gratitude does not coat my reality with vanilla pudding (despite the fact that it turns my cells into happy little sweet cakes), but if I work at it and allow it too, it does afford me the ability to see through life’s mirror.

For a basic example: Sure, I could easily cry and moan about the evilness of credit card companies and my current debt – or I could pull one over on the darkies of life and instead of griping, thank the hell out of this weird little piece of plastic that allows me to buy organic groceries and pay for my dance classes and donate to a few wonderful environmental causes and write about the divine feminine without a steady income.

In the past few weeks I’ve tried to be extra conscious of any negative thoughts or feelings or fears I’m having and once I sense those suckers, I write em down, sit and meditate a little, then scribble out the positive side to these seemingly negative things. Jut to be clear, this practice doesn’t feel like the “think positive” new age cliche, because again, I don’t look away from the dark - I’m just also searching for and naming it’s de-lighted twin. And as soon as I make this balanced shift in my perception, I experience a sigh so deep, so lovely, so powerful that I swear Goddess and God are getting it on inside my heart.

And I’m so utterly grateful I can feel this.

And I’m so utterly grateful you can too.

Of course, in your own way, through your own practices.

If you want.

But oh how the universe wants you to want this…

Two Giant Fat People

God

And I have become

Like two giant fat people living

In a tiny

Boat

We

Keep bumping into

Each other

and

L
A
U
G
H
I
N
G

-Hafiz translated by Daniel Ladinski in Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West p. 171

Now for a light academic tongue bath brought to you by a dutch historian of Gnosticism, Gilles Quispel, who can be found in Jeffrey Kripal’s book The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion. FYI, Jeffrey Kripal is one of my academic mentors and Gilles Quispel was BFF with the psychotherapist, C. G. Jung.

Quispel shares 3 major ways of “knowing” in Western Culture:

1. Faith - a way of knowing the world and your self via religious community, authority figures and religious doctrine like holy texts which are believed to be “revealed”.

“Revealed” meaning once upon a time ago the goods came straight from God’s mouth to a man who wrote the wisdoms down. And we can be sure that the men writing down the words of God weren’t filtering, or politically motivated, or power hungry, or well-intentioned, but a bit tired that night, or misogynistic or sexually confused or from a dysfunctional family, or basically a product of the culture they lived in. And then these holy words have been translated about 9 times till we in English speaking lands, could read them. And we all know nothing gets lost in translation. Uh huh. Except cute Bill Murray.

2. Reason - a way of knowing through such things like logic, analytical thought, linearreality (I think I just made that word up), and empirical data to help you arrive at “the objective truth” of things. Hence such things like the scientific method.

Quite honestly I’m surprised people still believe there is such a thing as “total objective truth”. We know that when an object is perceived it changes on it’s most atomic level…even our thoughts are able to change scientific experiments in a slight, but now quantifiable degree. And quantum physics tells us that we mostly see or don’t see reality based on our internal lens that we (and society) have created due to past experiences and too much T.V. and probably some really bad sex.

3. Gnosis - a way of knowing that’s based on intuitive, visionary, or mystical knowledge. A knowing that is based on direct personal experience.

Ah, the Red approach. The way of knowing I kept fighting against in my grad school days because it wasn’t a way of knowing I could easily footnote (footnote 34: vision in which Kali chopped off my head, again) or share with my colleagues (till I met Prof Kripal).

My gnostic revelations provided new insights about the religious and spiritual truths I was studying and helped ignite my divine spark. My intuitions helped me experience the heart of the material and not get so stuck on the technicalities.

Now what’s wrong with all this? Well nothing really, but gnosis also slips the divine into a silky nightgown of the subjective and this spontaneous dynamic ever-changing way of knowing freaks out not only many academics and scientists and priests, but many of us as well because it doesn’t offer external stability to rest on (or get lazy and disempowered with) and it points the power of creating reality and meaning and life right back to you.

But I’ll tell you what this way of Gnostic knowing does do, in my subjective experience – it makes the divine drool.

In heat.

In love.

In you.

Of course, all 3 ways of knowing are important and often make for a sweaty threesome. I illuminate the Gnostic way of knowing in my work because it needs some serious TLC after being banned from the spiritual bedroom within most religions and western culture. It now needs some frisky action, some serious play.

So how do you know?