Designing with Myth

http://www.uptous.org

StoryTeller Consciousness

from Ascent of Humanity, by Charles Eisenstein

Over thousands of years, the creative play of story-telling has come to enslave us, and we have lost the storyteller's consciousness. Finally we are awakening, as the effort to maintain the pretense overwhelms us. We cannot maintain the story any more. The story of linearity, the story of separation, the lonely story of a discrete self marooned in a world of other. The story that we are not storytellers, not authors but mere reporters, describing what is, reacting, managing, controlling. We are awakening from that story now, the story that we are not the authors of our world and of our lives.

Indeed it is in our personal lives that the enslavement to unconscious stories has been the most devastating. We live in a fabricated world of interpretation that we mistake for reality. We live in a world of judgments and imposed meanings. Maybe Dad shouted at me a lot, and since I was three I made it mean that I am bad. She left you, and you interpreted it as a betrayal, and made it mean you are unworthy of love, and so you find yourself holding on, manipulating, controlling. We live in our stories, which then create events to justify themselves and strengthen our enslavement.

Rituals & Pragmatics

*** intro 2b added here ***

ref. spiral dynamics, trans-post etc. regression to green/purple or yellow/turquoise memes ...

This is from Starhawk, sent on her newsletter list on 5th June 2012, a good example of a very pragmatic use of ritual!

The Venus Transit is today--this blog post is also up at http://starhawksblog.org/ where you can see the picture of the Wisconsin State Capitol and leave comments, love Starhawk.

A beautiful, wild and windy day here in the Cazadero Hills—the day of the Venus Transit when Venus passes directly in front of the sun, a sort of Venusian solar eclipse. It’s an alignment that happened eight years ago—and not again for another century or more. Coupled with a lunar eclipse last night. I’m not much of an astrologer, but those who are say this is a potent moment for calling in the energies of harmony, nurturing and love, the return of the Goddess. Goddess knows, we need those energies! For today is the day of many state primaries, and the kickoff of the summer election season.

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But I want to talk about what we can do energetically. If you are an ultra-rational sort who doesn’t believe in the woo-woo stuff, here’s where you can stop reading and go do something productive with your day.

But I will say this—whether or not you believe this can influence the larger world, this kind of magic will help shift your own energy.

If you find yourself spinning off into cycles of fear—anquish—despair—fear, this will help! And if you have more positive energies of your own available, you will be more effective at all the practical things you do.

So if you’re with me, let’s work on shifting the energy around all this. Why should we quietly lay down and suffer under their toxic thought-blanket? What would happen if a whole lot of us used our intention and focused imaginations to shift the energies? And why not use some of the energy of this transit—energies which will continue to flood in over the next weeks.

So here’s the idea—a simple meditation you can do alone or in groups, when you have a spare moment or when you find yourself spinning off into those vortexes of impotent rage, stop and do this:

Visualize drains for all the negativity, the fear-mongering and the lies. Like little spinning whirlwinds, spinning counterclockwise, dust devils sweeping up the miasma of the psychic smog, spindles gathering the toxic wool and spinning it down back to earth, down to the fiery magma below us to transform back into pure energy.

Release that energy, and ground. Touch the ground, absorb some good, healing energies from the earth, and draw in what you need for your own work and well-being.

Then visualize a clockwise spiral, a rising vortex of compassion, love and hope. You could imagine spinning it around some symbol of justice and freedom—personally, I find the Statue of Liberty to be a potent Goddess symbol.