Looking Beyond Our Chrysalis Moment

15 Apr Looking Beyond Our Chrysalis Moment

Namaste everyone. Welcome to the call. Welcome to this auspicious time. This time we know we were born for. This time of monumental global transformation. Welcome.

Take a deep breath. The initiation is beginning. We have entered the Chrysalis of transformation. We are cocooning in our homes. Finally occupying the places that we live. Forced to occupy ourselves. NOW the transformation begins.

What an amazing moment in history! This moment when the whole planet is realizing we are interconnected. Where we are all facing the same threat at the same time. The first time in history there has been a plague where we have had global internet connection and moment by moment information.

This is just the beginning of the initiation. There is more to come. This is our preparation, the time we are given to ready ourselves to meet the challenges that are coming. The time when we hunker down, clean things up, practice our yoga and meditation, purify, and fortify ourselves to become better human beings, worthy of the gifts of this earth.

Today is Easter, one of many spring religious holidays happening around this time of year. Easter is a promise of rebirth after the dark night of death, the resurrection of Jesus from the tomb. It coincides with the spring, when nature is rebounding from the darkness of winter.

Easter actually gets its name from the Pagan spring holiday known as Ostara, named after the Goddess of the Dawn, Eostra, who oversees the budding plants and fertility of the Earth, also known as Astarte or Ashtoreth. Her feast day was the first full moon after the spring equinox, while Easter is always the first Sunday after the first post equinox full moon. So Eeostra heralds a new dawn, brought on by the feminine.

The 40 days before Easter coincide with Lent, a time when Christians make voluntary sacrifices of their excesses in order to come closer to God. It is these sacrifices that are said to invite God’s grace.

Interesting that in a time when few people do that anymore, we get a virus that forces us to cut back on our excesses, forces us to go inside, forces us to STOP.

It is also the week of Passover, and this holiday remembers a time when the Egyptian pharaoh held the Jews as slaves and a plague was leashed upon the land, just as we have a plague washing over the earth now. Passover literally means that because you had the blood of sacrifice over your door, the plague would pass over your home and spare you from death. Jews hold remembrance of this time by eating bitter herbs and unleavened bread, a reminder that there was hardship on their road to freedom from slavery.

And soon the Muslim religion will begin Ramadan, a month long period of prayer, reflection and community, with a practice of fasting from sun up to sundown each day.

One of the things all these traditions all have in common, is that the period preceding spring’s rebirth is a period of voluntary sacrifice, of hardship, or difficulty. Winter precedes spring and the darkness of night precedes the dawn. Even in the Hindu tradition, it is said that Shiva rewards austerities and personal sacrifice.

We have lost the concept of willing sacrifice in the world, refusing to accept limits on or anything, and the result is that it has been visited upon us by this virus.

We refuse to control population, and we are visited by deaths. We refuse to stop pollution, and we are sent into a lockdown. We refuse to help the homeless and the poor, and now realize that if they get sick they can infect everyone. We are all in this together, and the virus is proving it.

So the virus has come to teach us some powerful lessons. What would this virus say if it could talk? I’d like to play a 5 min by Amz Choudhury that speaks about this message of stopping.

Letter from a virus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Jej2w-YnjY&t=26s

So we have all been forced into the chrysalis in order to stop. The caterpillar consumes 27,000 times his weight in food, until he becomes too bloated to move. Then the chrysalis forms, curtailing his freedom, and his whole world is turned upside down. Like the caterpillar, we have over-consumed, and now we must cocoon, while our world turns itself upside down.

In a rite of passage, the initiate is often bound and blindfolded before the initiation begins. Josepeh Campbell talked about being trapped in the belly of the best as a part of the Hero’s journey.

But inside the chrysalis a miracle occurs, and Easter is the time of miracles. It’s going to take a miracle to heal this planet, and I believe, despite the way it looks right now, that a miracle is occurring. People are working together. They are creating. They are appreciating each other in a deeper way.

And to that end, I’d like to play a little song by Chris Mann that acknowledges those on the front lines.

Thank You Frontline

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGKFVMgjrPc

Now let’s get back to the caterpillar.

Inside the chrysalis, tiny imaginal cells begin to appear. They are so different from the caterpillar, they first get attacked, but continue to appear in greater and greater numbers, growing stronger and more organized, while the caterpillar is dissolving into a nutritious slime. Could that be why money and politics have been seeming so slimy lately?

In the chrysalis the imaginal cells make new connections, even as we are connecting now, from points all over the world. As they arise in greater numbers, they begin to organize, into the pattern of the butterfly. As the butterfly grows, chrysalis becomes transparent – meaning its still there, but you don’t even see it, until at last the butterfly emerges.

So we are all the imaginal cells transforming in the chrysalis. We are watching the world as we know it dissolve before our very eyes. We are watching our systems fail– our political systems, our economic systems, our health care systems. Our leaders are failing us so we can become our own leaders. That is part of growing up.

Our economic system is collapsing because it supports the few at the cost of the many– and we all know it, but we’ve been helplessly trapped in it as the only system there is. But new systems are being born as we contemplate forgiving debts and offering things for free, handing out checks, extending sick leave and unemployment, and getting everyone tested regardless of whether they can afford it. We’re a long way from achieving that, but it is miraculous that it is moving so rapidly in that direction. New systems are arising where people are helping each other, innovating, connecting in new and different ways.

Miraculously, we are cleaning the air, lowering pollution, and nature is rebounding. It’s quiet enough to hear the birdsong, and dark enough to see the stars at night.Fish are swimming in the canals of Venice and the skies are blue in Beijing and Delhi – where more people die each year from air pollution than from Covid-19.

As we cocoon, we are pulling inside ourselves, to make contact with our core, where all the chakras are found like hidden jewels, steps to uplevel our consciousness. While the quarantine is an inconvenience at best and terrifying at its worst, it is also bringing us a gift – a period of time out in which we can change.

Renewal

So today is the day when Jesus emerged miraculously from the tomb. In the Pagan tradition, the Green Man springs back again after his sojourn beneath the frozen earth, the Goddess of the Dawn, brings new light and fertility.

And though we aren’t ready to end the lockdown just yet, we can celebrate today as a day of rebirth, of release, of freedom and transformation. But even as the chrysalis becomes transparent and the faint outline of the butterfly can be seen, we can’t forget these lessons of the chrysalis. The lessons of our meditation, our sacrifices, our disciplines. They are meant to stay with us, to sustain us in what lies ahead.

For we must remember that with each painful contraction, we are getting closer to giving birth, and indeed something new is being born.

The old systems of power no longer work for the larger whole. The. top down organizing principle in which one person, usually a man, is head of everything and calls all the shots and tells everyone else what to do no longer works and we have to stop playing that game, no matter who we elect as president, prime minister, or any other head of state.. One man’s decision to allow the rainforests to burn, or to roll back standards on auto emissions, can bring about the death of us all. That system can no longer stand.

The old structures are collapsing. They were formed from the top down hierarchical organizing principle, which I call the love of power. I believe we are instead shifting to an organizing principle based on the power of love, a web of connection instead of a chain of command. A society based on love organizes around compassion, cooperation, collaboration, peer to peer networking, ecology, and peace. Only through these principles will civilization become sustainable.

The new era is grass roots, and self-organizing. It’s more egalitarian. People are urged to act from compassion, not greed. 40,000 people volunteered to go to NYC and fight corona, risking their lives. People are offering things for free. Unpaid bills are being forgiven, even our tax deadline is postponed, now there’s a miracle!

The power of love sees us connected in an intricate web of life. It’s a world where the homeless are housed and educated, and everyone gets health care. Where nations cooperate and help each other out. Where we take actions for benefit not for profit. Where we curtail pollution and let the earth grow green again.

We can come together with what the world needs now, and the following video will touch your heart.

What the World Needs Now: Berklee College of Music students from their own homes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QagzdvzzHBQ

This is what the game is changing into and the sooner we help it move in that direction, the sooner we’ll emerge from the chrysalis and beginning to fly.

Every initiation has a challenge. To truly make it through the initiation into the next era our collective challenge is to create a miracle. But the miracle doesn’t happen simply by our own efforts, for as Einstein has said, we don’t solve our problems with the same mind that created them.

We open to something larger, a larger intelligence, the plan of evolution that has solved many problems like this before. We become, as I said co-creators with the divine, and that is what teaches us to create miracles.

My friend Neal Rogin says, “We don’t need to raise hell to change the world, we just need to lower Heaven.” I believe we are here to co-create Heaven on Earth.

So in this time that is left of our sequestering, what do you want to do? How can you use this gift? And can you trust that there is an intelligence that is giving humanity just what it needs so it can to go where it needs to go?

Open this day to the possibility of a miracle. See the miracles that are all around you, the miracle of spring, the miracle of love, the miracle of forgiveness. Think outside the box.

It always takes disruption of a system to get it to change. But in the time of disruption, things are far more responsive to what’s new.

This is indeed a time of fertility, one that could be showing the first tender shoots of a new spring for humanity.

CLICK THE VIDEO SCREENSHOT BELOW TO BE TAKEN TO THE REPLAY:

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