Dias Perdidos

El trueno y las nubes trajeron un aviso de paraíso. Atravesaron el velo de la noche y llegaron jugando con el alba. Atrás quedó el calor opresivo de los últimos días. Se quedan casi en el olvido mientras el cielo juega con luces y estruendos, coquetea con llover, y acaricia mi cuerpo con brisas frescas de días perdidos.

¿Acaso serán estos los días perdidos, los que no viví, los del exilio? ¿Será por por esto que estos relámpagos huelen a olvido recordado? ¿Será por esto que esta lluvia viene sin estar, y humedece la tierra sin caer? ¿Será por eso que en este día vivo sin estar aquí, recuerdo lo que no viví, y te abrazo bienvenido en la ausencia que nunca fue y en el vacío que me llena a plenitud?

Are They Still There?

Today, there is no volcano in my view.
No people.
No path.
No city.
No hum.

Today it’s just the fog
holding and dissolving billions of worlds.
They have become more clear and solid.
They exist within me, and without.

The word showing an external reality is no longer dead.
It’s the gate keeper who is dead.

Who, then, punishes the archangels?
Or do they exist inside me in caravans?
Do they exist in my grandmother’s room,
collecting dust and gathering consciousness of little children?
Does the manticore fly?
Does the unicorn travel on solar paths?

Is the man in the cross still there,
looking at me with those eyes,
asking me if I know that I am there
nailed to the same cross,
to this creation of my mind,
unable to move and going everywhere at once?

Don’t Fight the Monsters of the Sleeping State—Awake!

Do not worry about the quirks of your personality you think are imperfections. They are just modalities of the human expression, and their value is only a function of the environment. What is considered a good virtue is a vice in a different society, and vice-versa.

When we are in the sleeping state, we have different degrees of so called “negative” qualities. However, none of them are real when the light of the supreme consciousness rises in the awakened being. Don’t waste your time, therefore, in correcting all “imperfections.” This is an unending task. This kind of self improvement is all about chopping off heads of Hydra one by one; two new heads come up for each one you take out.

Work, instead, towards the waking state. When you wake up, all the problems of the dream vanish along with the illusion that your true self exists in the dream only.

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For Lack of Mastery, Humanity Became Enslaved

One day, the gods came together and reflected on the power humans had over creation, and how they were growing in wisdom and knowledge under the light of fire.

These were the times before the first dawn. These were the times before the sun first appeared to light the expanse of heaven.

The fire was the companion of humans in that long, long night before the first dawn.

But the humans did not know the secrets of fire; how to light it, how to keep it, how to control it.

One day, the humans let the cold of the night to kill their fire. They were now powerless and hungry, and the cold of night was slowly erasing the future of the human beings. They were to die like the darkness before the coming of dawn.

The gods of that time knew that the age of humans was coming, and that humans were going to govern the earth as the sun will govern the heavens.

The gods conspired.

They exchanged words.

They became of one mind.

The gods decided to enslave the human race. They send to the humans the fire breather, and eater of fire.

She who forges fire in her womb came to men, with a message from the gods.

She told them to open their bodies, at the solar plexus, and take their hearts out. To offer their hearts to the gods, in exchange for fire.

For as long as they open their bodies, and offer their hearts to the gods, the humans will have fire.

The tribes of men agreed, because they were cold, hungry, and afraid.

This was the beginning of the Slave Gods, and the demand for sacrifice.

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Slavery has not ended, and we are being fleeced.

The institution of slavery has not ended yet. It has always been part of our civilization. The institution of slavery as it existed at a particular time here in America is not legal anymore, but that’s an instantiation. Slavery, the forceful use of people for labor, continues. It’s just changed from physical chains to psychological chains. It affects almost everyone. In order to participate in this society, you are forced to conform to certain things. By labor, I don’t just mean that you have to find a job and go to work. I mean that you have to produce, in your body, certain substances that are created by negative emotions and secreted from the pores and glands. In addition, your body is made to transmit signals to each other to create these substances. These signals are communicated through the masses by facial expressions, speech, and lately through memes and short thoughts and phrases. We are made to mass produce a limited number of reactions of anger, frustration, and mockery—all for the benefit, not of you, but of the Great Magician. I’m not just talking about socially negative emotions; what you would call “hope,” “love,” and anything else that is automatically produced in you—adrenaline, anxiety, fear—all these are called negative emotions.

If you begin to look at your education, and how we went from a moment from high anxiety before tests to the relief of anxiety after the test, only to come back to more anxiety, then you will notice that the higher you go up in your profession, the more you continue with that, fear–anxiety release–fear, over and over until your whole being is a machine to manufacture that state. What does the Great Magician get from that? Power, energy, control over the masses. At this point, the Great Magician is not interested in controlling the individual. If you set up a small shop selling vacuum cleaners, you will want to go door to door. But if you have a product like Coca Cola, you don’t sell to a person—you sell to demographics. “We have young, African American males.” “We have old second- and third-generation Latinos. How do we get new ones?” The Magician is thinking bigger than that, and not of countries anymore, but of corporations.

The fleece of the sheep the Great Magician is whatever makes up your identity, your emotions, and the output of your machines: the adrenaline, fear, and paranoia prevalent in society. A few can escape, because the Great Magician doesn’t even want to control small groups. He is not interested in the few black sheep. If you create a liberating movement with several million people trying to be free, he will crush it down. Either he will introduce something seemingly innocuous that will end up diluting the essence of the movement, or he will give you drugs or sex or something to weaken you; and if that doesn’t work, he will come down on you with strength.

What are the consequences of liberation? You are free from the support of the Great Magician as well, so when you free yourself, you find yourself in the jungle, and there are other dangers out there. Therefore, you have to become a warrior, and you have to become a hunter of power, and you have to know that death can come at any moment.

(Excerpt from Teachings of a Toltec Survivor)

What to do when faced with the cruelty of humans.

A reader asks:

What happens to animals that are tormented/abused by humans? What happens to their souls?  What about those people? My heart is often so heavy, I just don’t understand. I can feel it all and it’s challenging to shift out of that. I know we are somehow all connected but I don’t feel like I want to be connected to that. Why does it happen? Just feeling very sad at the moment. 😥

Those who suffer because of empathy and compassion, move humanity to higher awareness.

All humanity suffers the consequences of the cruelty of those who torture and oppress. Those of us who move away from the gross actions of humans, pull the mass of human consciousness in the direction of evolution and refined awareness. It is like a huge ship in the ocean, which to change course needs steady pressure in the desired direction. At first, the pressure doesn’t do anything, because the mass of the ship is so large. However, the constant pressure does make a slight shift, and this shift moves the ship on a different course. This is how the compassion of a few can affect the course of the whole of humanity.

The key is to have compassion for the suffering, while at the same time rooting our consciousness on our higher aims. To fall in despair and hatred for humanity, simply plunges us into the dross of the masses. This does not move the ship in the direction we desire. On the other hand, to become indifferent to the suffering is to disconnect our intent from the momentum of the ship.

We need, then, to stay anchored to the suffering of the innocent through compassion, while pulling on that force to the desired direction by rooting our higher attention in the higher good.

In this manner, not only humanity changes course, but the beings who suffer also are moved with us in the direction of evolution.

Mama Spider

It is said somewhere that the mother spider, when the hunting has not gone well even after building the perfect tapestry of a thick, sturdy, heavy and sticky cobweb, she still manages to feed her children. They wait, somewhere unseen and protected. She walks towards the center. She lays down. She wraps herself up with her own string. Once she is completely covered, the way she would bind a fly, she taps on her web. She taps a signal designed to tell the children that there is game. The tinny little children come running. They need to feed this night or they won’t survive. They come to the mother and they begin to devour her, not knowing it is their mother. Thinking it is just an insect, just another nurturing bundle, they open her up. They go inside her belly and eat her from the inside out, devouring her completely.

Her sacrifice allows the children to grow into adulthood, to live one more night so they can go and hunt. So they can go and have other little children who would devour their mother.

Mama spider. Mama spider.

Weaving and forming. Teaching and feeding.

Out of your bowels we ate.

Out of your spirit we grew;

to hunt one more day,

and tomorrow.

So was the spirit of my mother, even when I did not see her.

From the depth of her corpse, I grew and came out.

The ladies of fate always seemed to be weaving a strange web around my mother: strange happenings, magical, astonishing and weird. A teacher in a school for poor children, she took it upon herself to help a child who reminded her of my younger brother. She didn’t know why she felt compelled to take him under her wing, to buy him a pair of shoes, to bring groceries to his mother. It was pure compassion, or motherly love springing from unknown currents in her soul. She wanted to take care of him and protect him. She brought this little boy to play with us. We took an instant liking to him. I took him outside to play soccer, to meet my friends, to talk, to be one of us. With his confused eyes full of wonderment and restrained joy, this boy joined us for a moment in our lives. A few months later he disappeared from our lives. He became a ghost, a shadow, a memory––like so many people in El Salvador, never knowing why, where, or when they went.

Years later, my father was in exile. Death squads came after him, and he managed to escape. One day, my mother was coming out of the school for rich kids where she was also teaching (she always worked at a rich school for the money, and at a poor school for the government pension). She was about to get into her car, when two cars with tinted windows blocked her in front and behind, and men with dark glasses came to her with even darker motives. They told her, “Ma’am, you’re coming with us.”

Those simple words filled her spine with a chill. She knew what was coming next. She knew. She could almost experience the ride in the back of their car. She could almost feel the boots on her face. She could predict the raping and the flame. She knew the cutting of the nipples. She knew the breaking of the teeth. She knew of the brutal interrogation of “Where is he?,” “What else do you know?,” and “Where are the others?” She knew the longing for death. She knew it was all coming to an end. She knew what followed. That time line was flowing right in front of her, and she was just about to be carried away in its current.

Her body paralyzed, she couldn’t move. It was just the coldness of certain death for her. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t react.

She only could say, “Me?”

“Yes ma’am, you’re coming with us now.”

Once again she repeated, “Me?” and the “Come with us” was the only answer, with a hand grabbing her by one arm, leading her to a sequence of events that were long ago written, and nothing at this moment––nothing, no one––could come to her rescue.

She was in that space where we found ourselves so many times in that jungle, when reality had become so hard, so heavy, that no escape is possible. No light, no hope, no brilliance seemed to exist, just the pulling into heavy hardness. This was the harshness of reality. And here she was, knowing that all she could do now was to follow this thread.

At this moment, at this exact moment, the driver of the car in front comes out. Dark glasses. From some remote whisper of awareness, she felt she recognized him. One day, a year or two before this, she went to the house of the little boy she had taken under her nurturing love–because he looked like my brother perhaps, or compelled by unknown oceanic depths. She had come to see the mother of the little boy that day, a year or two ago. She brought the child’s mother some food, shoes, shirts, love and compassion. When she was leaving, the father was approaching the house. The father of the illegitimate boy, in a suit and dark glasses said to her “Ma’am, I know what you’ve been doing for my son and I want to thank you for everything. For the love you’ve given him.” It was a brief encounter. She left. He went. And here he was now, again, same dark glasses and suit, driving a car for men of money and death, looking at the woman that was about to die under torture. There he was, telling the other men: “That’s not her. We’ve got the wrong one. Lets go.”

They left, and the specter of death vanished, and the lightness of being filled the flesh of my mother; tears coming out, of pain and joy; but more than anything, tears for having recognized the silver and red threads of the tapestry being woven by fortune.

And, as she tells the tale, the magic of the Kindly Ladies becomes entrenched in our consciousness, and our words. And so the mother spider weaves a thread. A chance meeting one day, a voice heard another day… moving… changing… Creating a knot here, a thread there. And so it went, this tapestry of light. My mother, always silent; always absent; always inside her cocoon of happenings; always surrounding us as we devoured her. Always giving. Always threading. Whispering. Silent. But providing the legs and the thread and the moving.

 

http://thetelling.libsyn.com/the-kindly-ladies-mama-spiders-invisible-story

 

Rage, impotence, and despair.

She was youthful and strong, as her name implies. Her big smile and thick glasses seemed to radiate her mirth all over the lecture hall in our philosophy class. Bright and curious was her intellect, and from the first day of our college days we became part of a small but tight group of friends. Those were the times of fascination with Marx, Jung, Benedetti, and Ramakrishna; the times of walking about in sandals and native cotton shirts; the times of basketball hoops on Saturday morning; the times of beer and a slice of pizza; the times of listening to Silvio Rodriguez when listening to Silvio would get you killed. Those were the times of hope.

We had an intrinsic and thus unspoken trust in our integrity; and surrounded by war and torture, we acted as if we believed the times were changing. We saw the world and history as if we were sure any day now it was going to reflect what we felt in our bones ought to be.

Perhaps drunk with that idealism, she one day pulled Guillermo and me to the side. She did one thing you should never, ever do. She told us of her role in the rebellion. Yes, we were all on the same side, in mind and spirit. But to actually tell someone you were an active agent, that you were connected and knew people and took action, was a death wish. It was to rely too much on the loyalty of those who had not taken an oath. It was to rely on their presence of mind, their integrity, and their ability to keep silence. It was to risk your life to loose lips, fear, torture, and changes of heart.

“I’m putting my life in your hands by telling you this,” she told us. So I did the one thing you should never, ever do if it is not absolutely necessary. I told her what I could never tell anyone, not even friends, family, teachers, or lovers. I told her of my involvement, so that my life would also be in her hands.

It never crossed my mind that she would betray me, or I her. Neither ever thought Guillermo would ever do anything to put anyone else at risk either.

We never did. What I didn’t suspect was the depth of her nobility.

After, came the time of deep peril, and the years of exile. A gulf of time and experiences later, after not seeing any of them for years, I was sitting with Guillermo with pizza and beer between us. He told me then of the time, after I had seemed to dissolve into the obscure exile outside, when he was walking the streets of San Salvador with her and another poet of the old gang. I could only imagine the laughter, the heartfelt joviality in every intellectual reference, the reminiscence and satire about all things current. I imagined in his account more of what I had missed for so long, until the army barricade stopped all. Then came the usual yet dreadful “show me your papers” and “what are you doing here?” and “where do you live?” Maybe they expected to be let go with just remnants of the brutal chill in their hearts, or perhaps they expected to be allowed to leave without a watch or a wallet.

But this time the servants of the oppressors wanted more. My male friends were made to sit on the sidewalk, machine guns pointing at them by men with cold in their eyes. She was taken behind the bushes, and the soldiers took turns raping her. His face was full of tears as he recalled the moment, and his impotence was a cold blade still lodged in his heart. They were both sitting, unable to do anything but cry as they heard one hijueputa after another violate our gentle friend, who had lived so happily for the good of others.

When they were done, they decided not to kill her, or any of them. They left them there, on the sidewalk, with their laughter and curious intellect forgotten. She approached them from the back. She saw them in tears of frustration, rage, and impotence. She knelt beside them and held them both, next to her bosom, and consoled them.

“She consoled us!

And seeing that scene in my minds eye I became awestruck by the force of her, whose love and force are so whole and all pervading that even across time and space continues to heal this heart of mine of all the rage, impotence, and despair.

I still cry. I still rage. Over this and many other things, I cry and rage. But I no longer despair because I always now feel the eternal embrace of Her, who nameless and formless has all names and all forms, and who one day took the form of my brave friend, whose name I swore once not to reveal, to console the hearts of the impotent men who were forced to watch the horror of man over the beauty of the Beloved.