unresponsive

the cat meows

i have no answer
so tired, so empty, so worn

the fire cracks

soon every tree
will be burned up

appetite lags

a christmas cold
piles on to this aching back

all is scattered

friends drift
from this borderline behavior

homeless next week

will i rally
to the call to travel

or give in

to the winter's
frozen development?

the cat meows

i have no answer
but this:

god has left me

a windy mind
filled

with ruinous self-doubt
and then forgot

to close the door

today

and the time is upon us, now is forever
tomorrow is just one of yesterday's dreams
--John Denver


well hallelujah for the sun's return
as this darkness in turn must give way

a long year of slipping health and confidence
losing what muscle mass i had

while moving a half dozen times
including again

today

i enjoyed snow covered indian country vistas
rolling by on the way to the dentist

and to pick up a load of stuff
which is going to stay in my car

until i figure out what to do with it all
as i try to turn the corner

on making central america happen

it might simplify my life
if someone just stole the car

i know affirmations are important
i learned that last week

after telling god in anger
that if he wanted to take down my plane

to go ahead
and then having the plane hit by lightning

so today i turned back to my breath
and stopped thinking

which along with an hour lunch over green tea
helped my mood tremendously

and i am grateful for a friend
for whom i felt love

today

PSA

The two-hour youtube movie, Thrive: What on Earth Will It Take?, is highly recommended for transformational perspective in these times.

Prophecy

With a day of wind, and even promises of some snow, a new month greets us. It is now December of 2011. I wish to explain the critical importance of this month, according to the prophecies of ancient Japan, which were the singular reason I relocated to New Mexico nearly 30 years ago.

Back in the early eighties, I was drawn to a spiritual practice called Kototama. It was the study and practice of essential sound vibrations, as understood and transmitted through ancient Shinto-rooted traditions in Japan. My teacher, Sensei M. Nakazono, had brought the teachings to America around that time. Ours was a land and culture he was apparently not personally fond of, as it contradicted his old-school style of living and its serious focus on the highest values of humanity. Yet he came here nevertheless, out of his inner sense that modern Japanese society was completely closed to its own ancient wisdom.

In the practice of Kototama, there are 50 sacred sounds, which when arranged in appropriate order, allow the completeness of human capacity to manifest. By voicing each sound vibration, the corresponding universal energy is manifest--individually, and eventually societally. Sensei was greatly encouraged by the symbolism of the American flag, hopeful that its 50 stars meant that, if anywhere, this country would be the place of manifestation of a new and better society. He thus tolerated the relative chaos of our society, out of respect for the openness of social structures which might allow for such transformation.

It was a tall order for his students. To even maintain attention (while seated without chairs on the tatami mats of the Kototama Institute) for oft-rambling weekly three-hour lectures was a chore. To practice sounds on one's own time took a subtle discipline that is hard to describe, except to say I don't know that there are more than one or two people who continued to do so over the many years hence.

Most of his students came anyway for acupuncture training which, while somewhat based on the Kototama Principle, functioned independently of the sound practice. Making sense of oriental medicine, as taught through such a unique blend of traditions, was quite enough of a challenge for most students. Understand that these were also times when acupuncture was barely legal in but a handful of states in the US.

There was a wide range of success in the school's graduates. A number of us needed years of recovery to regain inner balance, after the strict and often esteem-crushing curriculum. The style of teaching was so devoid of positive individual recognition that it was normal to internalize a certain judgmentalness. It seems to me that those who came strictly for acupuncture training did the best, opening their practices and getting on with successful professional lives. Those of us who took the spiritual aspects seriously had to struggle with its many apparent contradictions. Intellectualism, in terms of either the medicine or the chanting, was decidedly unhelpful.

After my commitment to the Kototama contributed to my hospitalization for mental illness a few years later, my association with it was all but eliminated out of necessity for maintaining my own life. Yet slowly as the decades have passed, and society has played out its utter moral collapse, some of the wisdom of those early teachings has become clearer. Perhaps out of the same desperation that brought a conflicted Nakazono to these mountains, I began to revisit the practice in recent years. So much info has come through lately that I have even considered teaching what I have come to understand. The question has been whether I can bring enough compassion to the task to pass on something other than the massive suffering inherent in the tradition.

And whence comes such suffering? Is it inherently a martyr's path to hold onto the truth of human dignity in a world hellbent on violence and destruction? Is going against the grain of civilization an obligation for a true seeker? These questions have led me to explore practices promising a deeper integration of true principles, such as Nonviolent Communication, wherein all violence against the self is unlearned, along with all violence toward the world. In some ways, NVC has helped illuminate the previously-unclear nature of the dimensions described in the Kototama teachings. I am thus grateful to my NVC teachers, even while that movement also reckons with issues such as integrating its idealism and its economics.

Economics have become ever more pressing to humanity, an arena full of koans. Whether one is a libertarian conspiracist, an Occupy activist, new age guru, or one of the former middle class of this country seeking to hold onto some shred of the American dream, choices are becoming stark.

The truth is that the evils of capitalism, previously exported over many decades around the world, are now coming home to roost. With passage of a law in the US Congress just yesterday, many face arrest in a society in which all of us are now threatened with indefinite arrest without charges. Many are taking to guns for self-defense, amidst an increasingly rogue state teetering between repressive authoritarianism and potential anarchy. Homelessness is rampant, and inflation of prices of basic needs is accelerating, amidst war and looming economic collapse worldwide. Formerly stable social structures are disintegrating, as everyone scrambles to find where they might ride out whatever the coming transitional times we are rushing toward will look like.

Was it such a different era when 30 years ago I read Sensei Nakazono's translation of the Takeuchi Documents? With the murderous end to the social movements of the sixties, and the beginning of the Reagan/Bush reign of denial-based rule, the writing predicting our current social condition was certainly on the wall.

The documents I read were an adjunct to the Sensei's more formal texts on the Kototama. They were purported to be from ancient scrolls guarded for generations by the Takeuchi family in Japan. They were a written source of ancient wisdom held in secret amidst the materialist juggernaut of modern civilization, which was bent on destroying all traces of the previous civilization. In bringing forth this information, you can thus see why my teachers called their publishing company Third Civilization.

There are reasons to be skeptical of the documents. They are associated with the neo-Shinto movement in Japan of the World War II era, which sought to glorify Japan's past. This includes the Koso Kotai Jingu temple in which the documents have been ostensibly guarded for 90 generations, and at which it is said Jesus Christ himself is said to be buried. Whether one can consider such documents on their own merit amid such irrationality is an open question.

The documents were translated in part by Sensei Nakazono, and include a number of ancient alphabets as well as drawings of the Earth's continents and their movement across eras. They also describe important events in world prehistory, including the changing of the current of civilization to its material direction over many generations.

Amidst all of this background information, I would like to write here that the documents state that the current of civilization changes again, this time from materialism to a new order of civilization not described.

The date for this change is December of 2011.

Many ancient traditions have asserted these days being the end-time of historical calendars. Whether this is another date supporting such a worldview is for each of us to determine. Reading about such matters 30 years ago, they offered hope for a time that then seemed quiet far away.

That time is now.

Regardless of the origins of such information, I must assert that it is high time the corrupt old order--that I personally have lived under for as long as I can remember--give way. 48 years ago last week an increasingly liberated President John F. Kennedy was murdered by the forces of domination, who have been ruling the world from the shadows since. I stand with my physical and spiritual ancestors in watching the vampire powers fizzle away in the light of a new day dawning, and declare their time is up.

At age 48, in this quiet way, I am now revealing what I know, as honestly as I am able for your consideration. May the world find its full healing. May all beings be free.