Written by Ari Bouse
It doesn’t take an acclaimed climatologist or gifted psychic reader to know that we are living in between the tides of old waves and new shorelines. Nobody really knows where we are going, not really. Truly, life is a mystery, but the unknown tidings of change reads like a foreign language. The future is unsettling for everyone. As the old world is fading further into the rearview mirror, the road ahead is simultaneously uncertain, not without its unpredictable ebbs and flows of chaos. The planet may be on fire, but out of the ashes, the phoenix rises. I like to think of this mythical creature as good medicine for meditation on the sacred feminine energies of life. The moon, starry night ceilings and playing music, to name a few playful feminine expressions of forms. Yet, I have come to see life as one big surprise birthday party. Or like Forrest Gump’s mom said, “life’s like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.” From that vantage point, it appears these internal fields offer more acceptance and less suffering, on the inside at least.
Additionally, the shamans of yesteryear called the matrix we are currently living in a hellish nightmare- even if cleverly cloaked in a Wizard of Oz like illusion. Our Indigenous ancestors recognized the sensuous Universe that we all belong to. Also, keep in mind that the Chinese symbol for crisis and opportunity is one and the same. There can be no yin without yang, no male without female, nor light without dark. If you look around beyond a cursory glance, notice the opposites of the same coin abound. In the tragedy of death, there is the romance of rebirth. Every breath we take to sustain life also leaves behind the wake of a dirge. It’s not about us and them, pro-life or pro-choice, democrats or republicans, rich or poor or black or white. Fighting the dark is just as stupid as fighting someone with different political views as you, although I can appreciate that kind of stupidity. Mad money is thrown at people to swim in that pool. Thankfully, the new age and paradigm we are moving into is about we and us, including self-awareness and self-expression within all that. How do we honor our Diversity Within Unity? How do we express our different forms within a unified field of interconnected oneness? Ah, such is the paradox of life. Might as well say yes to it.
Yes, we are living in confusing times. Of course we are because confusion is part of life. And we humans have been behaving in confusing ways for quite some time now, as in ways that are not in alignment with Nature. But then again, in much the same way as the mysterious places shorelines are- they are neither land nor sea but both. Shorelines reflect the sacred intersections of the spaces in between. Consider people who identify as non-binary, play with their fluidity of gender expression- or even transgender folks. These folks are merely expressing the shorelines of their souls. This is somewhat akin to the way a biracial person or person of mixed race, or a person getting in touch with a past life that matters might. You don’t have to pick and choose one side or the other. Like Dylan sang, “the line it is drawn, the curse it is cast.” Even where one side might appear dominant, there is some expression of minority. For example, the use of pronouns are a form of self-expression that, on a deeper level, are reflective of the soul’s desire to go beyond the 3-D realm. Again, what we are talking about here is the intrinsic identity of the soul and how it feels it needs to express itself. That’s why dreams are such an important vehicle for souls to travel. Moreover, lucid dreaming gives us power over our dreaming process, and what we might want to consciously co-create in our waking lives.
More importantly, every soul has multiple or sub-personalities living within their being. Just ask my wife when those different pieces come out and she calls me Sybil. I could get defensive or offended like my old self has done at times. But now I see the humor in this viewpoint, and even embrace it as an integrated gestalt of my humanity. Humor gets us to look at things differently and hopefully lightens us up. And people need to lighten up. On the soul level, we get to know ourselves on a deeper level. Most of who we are is a hidden, unexamined self that is formless and energetic. Regular meditators and people who consistently practice yoga and the internal martial arts tend to know this experience, although that is not always the case necessarily. Artists, athletes in the zone, dancers and people who have experienced peak experiences have sensed their soul’s recognition as well, even if the fleeting encounter quickly became lost in translation.
Furthermore, when the psychologist Carl Jung talked about the bisexuality and androgynous nature of humanity, he captured the sentiment using the terms anima and animus. Simply put, every man (animus) has a woman (anima) within his being and every woman (anima) has a man (animus) in her being. Most of our sexuality and its expression has nothing to do with sex. How do we make love with this sensuous Universe? It can be as simple as walking out in Nature and noticing a masculine aspect of yourself in a fiery red squirrel or the feminine contour of roots of a tree growing deeply into the underground. Maybe you see your reflection in a pool or water that awakens a new version of yourself that you didn’t notice before. What colors do you feel like wearing today? Am I the only half century old man that likes to play with his lightsaber in the backyard on a cold dark night? My sense is that there are other humans out there that like to walk around barefoot in the grass, along a sandy beach or gaze at the stars to connect to Heaven and Earth. What do you see out there?
Looking back when I was a kid on the playground, I acted out my humanity in different ways by chasing girls, listening to their gossip and watching them double dutch at recess, and playing tackle football, pretending to be a race car or truck, and king of the mountain with the boys. Little did I know that I was trying on different faces of the ego by clowning around in the classroom to see the garden variety of human reactions. These were all ways that my spirited behavior served to wake people up, myself included. Even in Kindergarten, I remember climbing as high as I could above the top of the slide and doing ‘cliffhangers’, by discovering the joy of hanging onto the railing, letting go and then falling to the ground and hitting it hard. While I enjoyed the shock jock value of the reactions of my peers, I loved the physical feeling of the blow, and then getting back up for more. Something in me intuitively knew that my constitution could handle it. But if I was someone else, I would have broken limbs, ribs and the like for certain.
Finally, the most significant and memorable out of body experience I remember (during my youth) was when I was playing High School football and I was running down the sidelines while carrying the ball. There was one guy in front of me, so I dipped my shoulder to deliver a blow, and then spun out of his tackle. Somehow, I kept my balance and could taste the end zone. But unbeknownst to me, I was in the dark about a guy that had been tracking me on angle pursuit. As soon as I spun out of the tackle, bam! The oncoming defender gave me what we call in football terms a ‘decleater’ by knocking me clear off my feet and on my ass. Nothing dirty about it, a clean hit in any era of the game. Flat on my back, my soul had left my body and I wondered if I was dead. Thankfully I wasn’t, and after a few deep breaths, got my bearings, got back up and went back to the huddle for the next play. I’ve the wind knocked out of me before and since, but not like that. Little did I know at the time that I was experiencing a form of soul travel and disentanglement from form, in a way that released my spirit. As I look back, the beauty of that moment was I was graced with the surprise of the winds of change. Something novel happened to me that I have since come to see as another unexpected pleasantry that I did not foresee in the script, if you’ll pardon the pun.
Text © Ari Bouse
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Thank you Edge of Humanity Magazine for publishing my writing! Also, for the readers, and participatory audience and co-creators at large- my deepest gratitude Folks . . .
Exactly! Thank you for your comment taurusingemini.
Reason why this world is out of whack right now, is because of the, imbalanced state that the planet is in, and, we humans, are, a huge cause of that, we keep on, taking from nature, so greedily, unlike how those, other species only kill, because they need to live. That’s why, the globe is, raging mad, with all of the, natural disasters (wildfires, earthquakes, tsumamis, etc., etc., etc.), and, until we can all, learn to, coexist in peace, with others who are, different than we are, until we can, respect all things living, there will be, more of, Mother Nature’s wrath that comes, our way…