November 28, 2021

 For the past month, my meditations have mostly been focused on developing the belly center. For the first time in my life, I have been able to maintain focus down there. The belly has been my most problematic center, probably due to my fixation as a Three on the Enneagram. Threes are constant doers, performers, but their actions are false and don’t come from the depth. It’s the same way with meditation; I tend not to have access to the depth of the belly center. There has historically been a block between my heart and belly. I can get about midway to the belly center and then encounter the block. The belly feels blank, almost numb.


This may be changing. It’s interesting that a lot of father issues have come up as I sink into the belly center and allow myself to open to it. These started with my biological father and continued to God the Father. It’s interesting that I have encountered God as Father in my meditations and He shows up as a gentle corrective to the so-called toxic masculinity of my biological father. There is something very simple, down to earth about these encounters. I feel like this is my personal teaching, the way that Being is showing up as part of my own healing process. If I allow it, Being will show me the way. Being will naturally unfold, lead me where I need to go and help me to overcome delusions and misconceptions and help me to heal old wounds.


God the Father shows up in my belly and simply is. This simply isness is in itself healing. Nothing needs to be done. All is here. All is attuned to me. The old hurt and misconceptions can be revealed and fall away. This feels akin to the wisdom of non-doing.


Perhaps as a result of these ‘meetings’ with God as Father, I am seeing how relevant Christianity is to my process. Christianity, unlike the Diamond Approach, is concerned with ‘sin’ and atonement. It sees all of us as responsible for each other. It is about humanity and the inherent, irrevocable bonds between humans and all living things. ‘Sin’ is just the Christian term for karma. I see how Jesus died for our ‘sins’; i.e., his death was an expiation of our collective karma. And it wasn’t just a “one and done” and it wasn’t just something Jesus did. We all need to do it, it’s all of our sin. We all need to atone even if we didn’t have anything at all to do with the sin. It is still our sin.


Another way of viewing this is through the Western pagan lineage. I don’t know a lot about it but I do know that sacrifice was a big part of its belief systems. Often, someone was sacrificed for the good of the community or to maintain/restore order to the natural world. Blood was an offering, an acknowledgement of the cycle of life and death. Life comes from death and death from life. The sacrifice of life/blood was freely given, part of our debt. So, not so far away from Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, right?


And it’s possible that I have personal experience of such a sacrifice, if my recovered impressions of a past life have any truth. You may recall that one of the impressions I had was of being pledged to an old god, a god of life and death. He appeared green and moss-covered in my vision and claimed me as one of his own. It was a sort of pledging, I guess.


You may also recall that one of my impressions was of my death at the hands of the man I call Griffin. Griffin took my life and then his own as a sort of mercy killing. Only today, I understood that another way of viewing this was as a sacrifice, a sealing of the agreement between myself and this old god. My (and Griffin’s) blood spilling on the earth was part of this contract between life and death, life and death inextricably linked, one thing.


The result was rebirth. Here I am again. Alive in a body once again, continuing the cycle. The cycle is an old one, perhaps eternal, who knows. But the interesting thing about it is that it’s not equal. The evolution of life and consciousness is a seed within each death and rebirth. Life arises out of the death renewed and reinvigorated. Life learns, grows, attains wisdom. Life and death are enhanced by greater understanding, greater consciousness, greater awakeness.


In dying, all things are renewed. This is perhaps a lesson for our day and time with the mass extinctions occurring and so much dying surrounding us all the time. What is lost? Maybe we’re gaining far more than we could ever know? I don’t know, of course. I may never know but it strikes me as one possibility. (Although I am not arguing that we shouldn’t do everything in our power to prevent the wholesale death and destruction that climate change is bringing our way.)


I see how religions merge and diverge through time, much like a river. Paganism flows into Christianity and Christianity flows into Islam and Islam and Christianity (and other religions) flow into the Diamond Approach. This is much more than an intellectual passing along of knowledge; these lineages are alive within us, filling us, guiding us, pulling us along like the current of a river. Many different religions live and breathe within me, some of them have yet to be born. Many beings live and breathe within me, some of them yet to be born. It could be crazy-making but it isn’t. Being/God has a natural order, a natural revelation, a natural unfolding. If we are open and allowing, it will show us the way.


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