William Henry on Cave Paintings in India

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

A few years ago, I asked if religion could survive first contact. Answer: It probably already has done, if we include indigenous medicine practices reaching all the way back into prehistory. The recent discovery of alien looking beings depicted in ancient stone art in India has rekindled debate over just what indigenous peoples have been painting on stone walls. According to archaeologist JR Bhagat, these ancient paintings accord with local legends about something that sounds an awful lot alien contact and abduction.

There are several beliefs among locals in these villages. While few worship the paintings, others narrate stories they have heard from ancestors about "rohela people" — the small sized ones — who used to land from sky in a round shaped flying object and take away one or two persons of village who never returned.

Many not human-looking beings and things that look like flying saucers have been discovered in cave paintings and these have given rise to questions about alien contact. But are these beings from other planets or other dimensions or, perhaps, both? Graham Hancock addressed this most recent discovery on his Facebook page the other day:

Aliens from other planets coming here in high-tech space ships? Or visitors from other dimensions? http://bit.ly/1oWXhn4. A few years ago when I asked Amazonian shaman Pablo Amaringo what the flying saucers were that he saw in his Ayahuasca visions, and painted in his extraordinary art (http://bit.ly/1oKnVfW), he told me they were vehicles for entering and leaving the spirit world. When a shaman speaks of the spirit world he's not far from the quantum idea of a parallel universe. I think the UFO and "aliens" mystery documented in rock and cave art all over the world may be MUCH more mysterious and intriguing than many believe. In my opinion these phenomena are real, but precisely WHAT they are remains to be established.

In my estimation, many of these otherworldly beings may indeed be from other planets and other star systems, but when one is moving through fourth dimensional space (or fifth, or sixth, etc.), the distance between worlds might not be so great. Some of these strange looking beings may be Earth energies, which again, are not third dimensional beings. We see them when we pierce the veil in some way.

Hancock has also explored the idea that there is some correlation between ufology, faerie lore, and shamanic experience. He makes a very convincing argument, one that really connects a lot of dots for me.

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Creating Clarity of Heart - Working with Air

Air is the visionary in transformational processes showing us how to engage the power of our vision through the clarity of our heart. Working with air is a way to cultivate keen perception and insight allowing us to see doubt for what it is and step over it. Working with Air trains us to show up exactly as needed without excess or scarcity. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, for the new series, Working with the Elements. This week she explores how we can work with the element of Air to cultivate the qualities of uniqueness, re-visioning, and storytelling. In a world where energy stagnation and suffocation lies at the root of human illness there is big medicine to be found in the working with air to cultivate and speak the truth-that breath of fresh air that clears what suffocating and brings hope and rebirth.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Creating Presence and Autonomy-Working with Earth

Earth is the teacher in transformational processes showing us how to engage the power of the heart through our strength of heart and to make things manifest. Earth is the element of manifestation and without your body you wouldn't be manifest. Our body is our earth element. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, for the new series, Working with the Elements. This week she explores how we can work with the earth element to cultivate the qualities of grounding, place, presence, and sovereignty. In a world where isolation and loneliness fuel depression there is big medicine to be found in the ability to work with the earth to create a sense of belonging, connection within, and interconnection with the larger reality.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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What is Soul Theft?

Soul loss can occur quite naturally through sudden fright or situations where one fears they will die. Soul theft is an unnatural cause of soul loss in which one person is responsible for stealing a fragment of another's soul. Soul theft leaves a person fragmented, as with all soul loss, and often listless and fatigued, losing appetite and strength, feeling restless and inadequate, depressed and helpless, or withdrawn and without motivation. Soul theft is not something of the past in the days of sorcery and superstition. "Today we experience intentional soul theft by skilled individuals or serial criminals as in the past," explains host and shaman, Christina Pratt, "and unintentional soul theft, by people desperately struggling with their own soul loss, like parents, teachers, healers, and young lovers." Join us this week and we explore the true nature of soul theft, how to repair it, protect yourself from it, and to make sure you aren't doing it yourself.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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Graham Hancock Sums It Up

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

This interview is brief but, as ever, Graham Hancock shows the elegant fluency with his material that make all his talks and interviews compelling. This is a very worthwhile summary of his research into a possible lost civilization, sometimes referred to as Atlantis. They also discuss TED's war on consciousness, the whole sad, sorry saga of which can be found here.

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What is Spiritual Integrity and How Do I Get It?

What does it mean to have strong moral principles and to be whole and undivided in our spiritual life? Many people feel that the fact that they have what they call a spiritual life by definition means that they have spiritual integrity. However, when we look around at powerful spiritual leaders and respected practitioners and see sexual abuse, pedophilia, and all manor of abuses of power it is clear that integrity is as challenging in spirit as it is in the mundane. "The gift of shamanism," says host and shaman, Christina Pratt, "is that it gives us the skills to see what is needed and how to cultivate integrity in our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual lives. In this way we can align our words and our actions, our community life with the values we hold, the truth in our heart with the world we are manifesting."

Tuesday, July 1, 2014 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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The Marion Zimmer Bradley Problem

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Hat tip to The Wild Hunt for this morning's disillusionment. I had been blissfully unaware of this controversy. Even though I have never been Marion Zimmer Bradley fan, I am well aware of her influence in both the fantasy genre and the pagan community. So learning that she was both an enabler and perpetrator of child sexual abuse is a little rough.

This is all the more painful because Bradley is, in many ways, a feminist icon. She introduced the divine feminine to a generation of readers and she paved the way for other female authors. The irony for me was all the more unsettling as moments before seeing this post, I had been reading yet another story on the never-ending sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and puzzling over whether there is more of a problem there than elsewhere. The Church, of course, says no and they're probably right. The larger problem is the ability and determination they've had to conceal it, creating an overarching abuse of power for which the entire institutional framework is responsible. But, there's also a kind of metaphorical power to the idea of such an incredibly patriarchal institution being responsible for the prolific theft of sexual power. We almost expect them to rape women and children. Representatives of goddess energy far less so, but there we are.

Many years ago a friend lent me her copy of The Mists of Avalon specifically because she knew I was deeply invested in goddess mythology. I didn't get far and promptly gave the book back. In retrospect, I can't honestly say why it didn't connect for me. It just didn't. But I've always respected the book's reach and power to touch lives.

I can still vividly remember how I felt when I learned that there was a Mother Goddess in ancient mythology. The one woman play presented at my college was terrible. The theater was nearly empty. The handful of women's studies majors around me, who were seeing it for credit, were falling asleep in their seats. I was transfixed by the power of realization. Suddenly the world -- things I felt and even things I had written -- made more sense. It was an organizing principle for me in a way that no other religion had been, neither my Christian background nor my Buddhist practice. In time my first goddess altar replaced the Buddhist one. I read and I read and I read. So, although I found Bradley unreadable, I well understand what a cool drink of water her writing must have been for people everywhere who were rekindling, as I was,  a memory of the divine feminine.

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Why Can't I Find a Healer?

Have you been working on yourself and your suffering for 20 years and its still not fixed yet? Wounds, whether physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual, all define the healing that they need by their very nature. You wouldn't treat a broken leg with cold remedies. Nor should you treat soul loss with talk therapy or a need for healthier boundaries with pharmaceuticals. We need to not only find great practitioners, but to match what the practitioners offer with the true nature of our wounding. "Our wounds tell their own story," says host and shaman, Christina Pratt, "and that story is also describing the path necessary for healing." Join us this week as we explore what's yours to do on your healing journey, where you do need to ask for help, and how you know that your help really isn't helping.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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TED and the Diploma Mill Yoda

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

How did this squeak by TED's rigorous screening process?

By this I mean a TEDx talk written up in this feel-good piece in Mother Jones, a publication I thought had fact-checkers.

Ironwood State Prison resident Steven Duby served as MC for a bill that kicked off with Budnick interviewing Sir Richard Branson about the importance of, yes, second chances. (Branson once spent a day in "prison," he said, for failing to pay taxes. His mother was able to bail him out by mortgaging her house, Branson added, but not everyone has it so easy.) Among the acts was Illinois therapist and motivational speaker Sean Stephenson (above), who held the prisoners rapt with his tale of overcoming adversity. "When I was born, the doctors told my parents I would be dead within the first 24 hours of my life," he began. "Thirty-five years later, all those doctors are dead, and I am the only doctor that remains!"

Obviously, I agree that it's lovely that TEDx put together an event for prison inmates. I even agree that Sean Stephenson is a good speaker with an inspiring life story. But he is not a doctor. He admitted as much when he agreed to remove such verbiage from his website. My original post and our exchange in the comment section can be found here. Yet here he is, in the spring of 2014 still calling himself a doctor.

Chopra and Sheldrake

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Try saying that three times fast.

This is a really compelling discussion, the kind you'll want to listen to more than once just to catch all the nuances. The first focuses primarily on Sheldrake's explanation of morphic fields. The second gets more into the unproven assumptions of scientific materialism as set forth in his book Science Set Free, aka. The Science Delusion.

Deepak Chopra and Rupert Sheldrake have both been major targets of the New Atheist protectors of all things scientistic. The details of their disenfranchisement by TED and its super secret science board can be found here. So of course I find particularly delightful Chopra's recounting of a debate with Richard Dawkins at about minute 9:00 in the second video. Add that to the growing list of Dawkins's strident assertions that fall well short of the mark.

Also in the player is an interview with Sheldrake's wife Jill Purce on the power of chanting. Enchanting! More information can be found here.

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The New Age and Spiritual Integrity in the New World

The Human Potential Movement arose out of the fertile soil of political unrest and a deep desire for meaning and truth in life...and the vague but growing understanding that our more ancient shamanic ancestors lived a way of life in which using their human potential was considered "normal" and expected of adults. The movement inspired good work rooted in the belief that humans have within them the potential to make new choices, learn new skills, and to manifest an exceptional quality of life. And there was a fork in the road of the Human Potential Movement that became what we now call the New Age Movement. Join host and shaman, Christina Pratt, as she explores the ways in which shamanic life is distinctly not new age, how the new age is rooted firmly in the Old World, and why the path of the New Age Movement is not the path to that exceptional future in the New World we live in today.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014 at 11:00 AM Pacific

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