White-Hot Heart Currents

That title is playful — every day is full of gratefulness for me and I certainly don’t confine it to conventional holidays like our American Thanksgiving. So, I don’t seriously mean that the gratitude I’ll express here is “early.”

I want to give thanks today to two specific individuals, and their fields of connection, that have become increasingly important in my life and in Linda’s and my work.

The more visible alliance, to date, is with Ken Wilber and his Integral Institute and Integral Spiritual Center. Of course Ken’s prominent endorsement of Linda and me and our work is itself a great gift. Yet, especially after this last Integral Spiritual Center Retreat in October, I see this alliance growing stronger. Ken has fleshed out his Integral vision in ways that make more room for our particular contribution, and likewise contribute more to our own work. Both Linda and I came away excited at what the future may hold between Integral and the White-Hot Way. Very excited and hopeful.

The second alliance is I expect much less obvious, which makes me all the more happy to speak of it openly. It has quietly been growing in what I have called, in a much earlier post on this blog, the Global Living Lineage. In our time, all traditions, teachings, and transmissions appear to be functioning in a single great Lineage collective. More and more practitioners not only move from one teacher to another in a single stream or tradition at various stages of their journeys, but from one whole tradition to another, and then back, and then combine two or more in elements of their discipline and investigation at various times, and so on.

This particular connection in the Global Living Lineage is with the ancient line of Indian yogis that gave rise, in the later 20th century, to what we now know as “TM” — Transcendental Meditation.

One aspect of the connection is well established and has been growing for years. I’m so happy to acknowledge this: The one modern school that has contributed by far the greatest number of extraordinary teachers, mentors, and other awakened practitioners to the Waking Down in Mutuality work — and to my spiritual success in human terms, therefore — has been TM. By far! I won’t name names here because some people might prefer not to be spoken of in this way, for whatever reasons. Some have also contributed much for a time and then moved on to other pursuits, having enriched our work enormously.

Another aspect of the connection is just opening up. I don’t know what will come of it, but I feel it’s important to state it openly now — even if nothing else develops than what already has. It’s quite simple: I sense a specific blessing being directed to Linda, me, and our total work including the Waking Down in Mutuality network, from Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, guru to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of TM.

That spiritual perception has in turn led me to ponder the possibility that Brahmananda and other unseen lineage ancestors in his line may have had and may continue to have an active, if invisible, role in directing so many of their extraordinary living proteges into our work and community. Who knows?

In any case, to both Ken Wilber and the remarkable men and women associated with Integral Institute and Integral Spiritual Center — including, by the way, many Waking Down and White-Hot Way participants who are ardent students of the Integral approach — and to Brahmananda Saraswati, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and others in their Saraswati line of gurus, I happily give great thanks today.

As far as I can tell, despite or maybe simply along with all my limits and liabilities, I continuously transmit the White-Hot Being-Force of the divinely human Heart of Reality in all directions, to all beings.

As far as I can tell, I am the first such adept — “sat-guru,” in the Indian yoga tradition; “revealer of the radiant truth of Being” — to manifest this particular transmission in the newly emerging, post-hypermasculine format that I call “21st Century Enlightenment.”

This is my primary “work.” It involves no effort yet strangely, curiously, entails a tremendous, ongoing sacrifice. I can’t possibly explain that. But I have to say it nonetheless. This work is endless. It never stops, never falters, never flags. It is always continually refining and evolving itself. It is an utter mystery. I have to constantly conform my human body-mind and life to it. It’s always “tightening the leash” on my options and choices, even when opening new vistas and potentials.

My beloved Linda is my wife and divinely human consort in the blessed tantra of this work. It’s the main thing we are “doing,” whatever our body-minds may be engaged in under the conditions of daily living.

This simple essential fact of life is not yet well understood or appreciated, even in the still very young sacred culture that I’ve been privileged to be “founding father” to.

As Linda and I ripen from the earlier stages and activities of our divinely human adulthood into divinely human maturity, I expect this simple essential fact of our lives, and its implications for others, will become much more obvious to many. And many of them will advance and mature into this kind of divinely human work, or callings very like it, themselves. Something like this is already implicit in the living presence and blessings of many of the teachers I have trained, or who have been trained by those teachers in turn in our youthful lineage.

These will all be auspicious developments. They will facilitate even greater empowerment, liberation, integration, and blessedness for many people than our earlier personal and collective work has so far made possible.

This simple essential fact of Linda’s and my lives, then, is worth taking note of. The democratic principles of awakening and awakened mutuality, to which we ourselves are utterly committed, will not be jeopardized by the cultural innovations these shifts will make possible and natural.

On the contrary, our awakening democracy of the Heart will only flourish all the more. And many others will notice similar simple essential facts of life in themselves and in one another.

Then the vision of mutual devotion that I have articulated for many years will become, more and more, a living reality. And the supercharged genius of Being will flower in, as, and through numerous individuals, couples, and communities, and in all kinds of cultural, artistic, scientific, and spiritual forms. This will in turn instigate, more and more obviously to many participating and observing, an era of liberated evolution.

I’m proud to have “turned the Dharma wheel” that opens the possibility of this white-hot, post-hypermasculine epoch of liberated evolution. It’s not about me, or Linda and me, or any one or group. Rather, it’s about each and all, and All.

Yet it won’t come into full flower automatically. And that’s why such matters as the simple essential fact of life I’ve proposed here need to be articulated, considered, taken note of, evaluated, and, if found authentic and real, appropriately taken into account by each and all concerned. I feel all of our greater divine, archetypal, and mysterious natures struggling to find a purchase in the increasingly well-prepared soil of our awakened humanness.

It’s time to let our Heart-sunlight shine with all its possible splendor. This time around, we won’t forget we have feet of clay. Should anyone happen to, in awakened mutuality someone else will be there to remind them, and to tether them to our common ground again.

Crucial for Linda’s and my work — and even for our health, at this point — is to clarify what are our strengths, stick to them, identify our weaknesses or liabilities, stop engaging them, acting them out, or attempting to fix them, and in the process figure out where and how we need help…and ask for it.

As it happens, one of the auspicious elements of our marital compatibility is that we’re both consumed by a vision to make this wonderfully liberating and empowering White-Hot Way and Waking Down in Mutuality work available to everyone on the planet who is or can soon be ready for it.

At the rate that “making available” process has been going for its first 15 years — I like to call it “Right Notification” — we and our most kindred-hearted friends will likely remain at best an odd cultural footnote, a marginal event in the marginal world of “spirituality,” for a long time to come. Not a desirable outcome.

But you probably know that wise axiom about doing the same things and expecting different results. For different results, different actions are required.

Someone said to me the other day in a private consultation, “It’s hard for me to ask for help.” I instantly felt outed. Me too.

One way I need help is in transforming what I do and how I do it, so that I can focus on writing, publishing in many media, and most effectively notifying prospective recipients of, the liberating, prophetic heart of my teachings. (There’s also at least one book of Linda’s that’s been dying to be born for years.) And so that Linda and I can find, move to, and properly empower the type of sanctuaries or sanctified, transformational places our work needs for its next evolution. Such places, rightly developed and maintained, can potentially accelerate and streamline the fullest possible realization of those teachings on the parts of far greater numbers of people than we presently see embodying or even being attracted to this work.

There’s a treadmill we’ve been on for a long time. We’ll stay on it as long as we have to, to survive and keep doing our work as best we can. But sooner or later we will find people ready to be on fire with us, and ready to work closely with us, to take our own White-Hot Way work a great quantum leap forward while continuing to collaborate closely — better to say, symbiotically — with the Waking Down in Mutuality network.

More soon.

Today, or technically yesterday, Linda and I approved what we feel is the loveliest book cover we’ve ever had for one of my books. Many thanks to Michael Sanborn for his work helping design and execute the new cover for GREAT RELIEF. We’ll have copies out sometime soon, within about a month I think.

To continue on themes I have been addressing in recent posts: our friend Genpo Roshi took the Integral Spiritual Center Retreat #3 participants into new and dangerous territory in his next rendition of his “Big Mind” voice dialogue process — the voices of damaged and disowned male and female sexual identity, and even that of sexual perversion. Heavy stuff.

As it happened, just yesterday a client/student mentioned she had gone to one of Genpo’s Big Mind weekends not long ago, where he commented that any voices we disown sooner or later come roaring back big time, wreaking havoc commensurate to the degree they’ve been stifled, suppressed, silenced.

A major voice that I’ve been reluctant to own and permit to speak — using Genpo’s language here of “voices”; as you may know we talk of “broken zones” or “broken-off zones” — is that of the Prophet. Not the Kahlil Gibran version either.

I am recognizing more and more soberly that I cannot risk silence or mincing of words any longer. That I have some things to say that are not even well understood in the community of teaching and practice I have founded, much less in the larger world. And that, if I am to make a potentially crucial contribution, I am not at liberty any longer to evade, shirk, or postpone this responsibility to speak up.

I realize this may be a confusing statement for some. You may be hard pressed to imagine how I could have been failing to speak up all this time! However, once again it’s very late at night or early in the morning. So for here I will just say that these prophetic communications have to do with the deeper meanings of such key phrases as “White-Hot,” “post-hypermasculine,” and the social, political, and cultural, as well as philosophical, implications of what I see as true healing of the Spirit/Matter split. And oh yes, a theme I’ve touched upon here on the blog site: the grave dangers of the still almost universally unrecognized “Achilles Plexus,” even in and among the leading edge leaders in the world today, never mind so many leaders who are content to remain mired in the sensibilities that elect, follow, and pay them.

I initially titled this post “Propheteering” but it didn’t sit well. Money is another discussion, and the allusion of “profiteering” seems beside the point here. “A Prophetic Vise” says it better (though the audial allusion of “vice” is hard to ignore). Traditionally, those who have something prophetic to say often try their best to evade the call as long as they can. It can be disruptive; people can really misunderstand and react, and so on. The rock says, “This could get messy and painful. Don’t do it.” But the hard place says, “It’s gonna get messier and more painful if you don’t do it than if you do. And for a lot more people, potentially. You aren’t at liberty to refuse this call, this calling.” Thus, the prophetic vise. Very hard rock, very hard place.

To be continued….

Before I open this one up — and it’s going to have to be brief, an appetizer rather than a meal, to be followed up on very soon — a quick note about our now-not-physically-with-us friend Art Pierce. He did call at least one other of his friends in the Waking Down in Mutuality network, to let him know he, Art, was going into surgery. I’m glad I wasn’t the only person he reached out to. Even so, I don’t want others of us disappearing into medical crises without the network being alerted and the protective prayers of some very great Hearts being activated.

Michael Sanborn is working on one of our mutuality websites and tells me that it might provide the kind of daily forum where many of us will naturally be going to find things out, including urgent news of this kind. I surely hope so!

I promised, re the lessons I’m taking from Art’s sudden death, to step forward and speak things I’ve been holding back and not saying, or mincing words on. Tonight — it’s one a.m. — I’m just going to say a few things quickly. I’ll come back to this theme soon. It’s central to my life now.

For a very long time I’ve been gently urging our community to make more room for the divine, spiritual, archetypal dimensions of our “divinely human” natures and identities. One of the effects of the long years of necessary “down” work has been a kind of fixation in our ordinary, even broken humanness. It tends to make precious little room for the extraordinary qualities of our true and total realities. I think it’s also a continuing reaction to the inflation and arrogance of others who’ve gone the opposite route, and to whom we’ve been exposed — gurus and masters who’ve proclaimed egolessness, proposed to be “beyond karma,” and lorded their extraordinariness over others in profoundly, sometimes abusively, disempowering ways.

So, tonight, I’ll just simply say this much: I’ve got a raging case of “Adept’s Foot.” For quite some time Linda and I have noticed that, in conditions of apparent relaxation and repose, my feet and toes start twitching, shaking, moving around. I remember Adi Da talking about how his feet were alive and so he’d often be moving his toes and feet quite a bit. And I felt that way about my feet too; never tried to do anything about it. Seemed like a natural enough symptom of, shall we say, excess embodiment. More life than the body naturally wants to stay still with.

But then I noticed it was happening in Colorado recently, at the third Integral Spiritual Center retreat, hosted by Ken Wilber. And there were times when my feet were doing their thing — which is not entirely involuntary, but it’s not easy to stop either — and, it dawned on me, “Hm, this is probably getting onto film.” (They always have four cameras going at their events!) “So whatever this little syndrome is, it’s going public….”

That kind of self-”outing” prompted me to feel and inquire into it more closely. And when I ran my feelings about it by both Linda and another person, they instantly responded with big green lights. Which encourage me, in turn, to share my interpretation with you too.

“Adept’s Foot,” for me, is an itch that has to do with my Heart-transmission, my understanding of the esoteric mystery of a truly embodied divine Self-realizer/transmitter’s feet — coming out of the ancient traditions of India, where as you may know much has always been made of the guru’s feet. I won’t try tonight to address why it’s hard to bring up such a subject in this wonderfully democratic culture of Awakeness that I have proudly spawned. But I will simply say, my adept’s feet are twitching a lot because they don’t have their own ground to stand on — or their appropriate ceremonial “footwear” for the conduction of a force of white-hot Heart-Transmission that is just all backed up in me.

What I sense it is going to take for the syndrome to be relieved is pretty big. More on all that later. And I assure you, it’s not just “about me.” It’s about all of our divinely human natures, identities, and optimal destiny-realizations and contributions. But it is also about me, quite personally.

Which leads to that other nifty little image: “Clark Kent without a phone booth.” That perhaps says a bit more about the immensity and intensity of what I feel is almost totally backed up, and backing up more all the time, in me. For better or worse, the kind of “phone booth” I need is not something I can find on a street corner downtown. It has to do with by far the greatest, most potent, and in some ways incredibly challenging even to me, revelation in my own process this year, 2007. It is the vision of sanctuary and what I see as an urgent call to divinely human community and communities. So, this too is not just about me. It’s about all of us and the whole world too, and our place and actual, material places in this world. But it also is about me, in some very personal ways.

During this 15th anniversary time of my Awakening, and 10th of the appearance of my first public publication, “Waking Down,” it’s time for me to share more about how I understand all this. Much more.

So, kindly stay tuned. And feel free to let others know that there may be some volcanic rumblings going on in the White-Hot Heart Currents blog.

Thank you for listening!

A couple of days ago a longtime Waking Down in Mutuality practitioner and for some years now, also a Mentor, Art Pierce, called me. In his typical terse way he informed me that he had suddenly been diagnosed as having a perforated ulcer and was going in for surgery. Of course, he was not looking forward to the surgery. But he did not appear overly concerned. Presumably it was going to be a relatively routine medical procedure.

Art also asked if I would let a few of our friends know, and I said I would. i regret to say, other events of the day consumed me, and I forgot to do so.

This morning I learned first that the operation and ensuing procedures had failed, and that in fact Art was on life support and that, after his wife Dee and daughter Melina got to his bedside, he would soon be taken off it. A little later Dee informed me that in fact Art had died earlier, at 7:30 a.m. Pacific time, before she and Melina reached him.

Art was in his early seventies. He had health complications that, as it turned out, had worked fatefully against him. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he ran out of time in this life.

He also had realized a witnessing quality of Consciousness at least twenty years ago, long before he came into contact with my work. And, for all his odd, crusty quirkiness as a character, after his Second Birth awakening Art became a wonderful, trusted, and much beloved Mentor to others in their own awakenings and transformations.

i was talking with Michael Grossman, one of the Waking Down in Mutuality teachers, and he described how a single comment from Art had served him enormously years ago. Another of our awakened participants wrote me later in the day about how Art had mentored her with great care and wisdom, and how much she treasured his kind service and loved him dearly.

I’m titling this post “Celebrating Art Pierce’s Life” but I actually don’t know that much about his life. I just want to celebrate this man, this particular human being, who’d had — I do know this — such a longstanding passion for what really matters and what really means something in a human existence. Art was an iconoclast. He had a stubborn streak. Just recently we had a bit of a workout. I’d communicated something that, quite apart from any intention of mine, pushed some of his “authority issue” buttons, and we just had to work our way through it till we were done. He didn’t think twice about letting me know how he felt about whatever it was. I don’t even remember at the moment, except that it was something I was indicating to a group of people, and I’d had no idea anyone might take such issue with it. But, in his completely Art-esque way, Art was passionately dedicated to both his own true autonomy and the real nitty-gritty of mutuality. And sure enough, he helped me see how I’d failed to communicate in a way that honored him and the others as fully as I should and could have.

Linda is just reminding me of another of Art’s wonderful characteristices: he utterly loved animals and living creatures of all kinds. At one point his and Dee’s little dog went missing. Art was just devastated. He had no need whatsoever to maintain some kind of aloof, detached consciousness. His realization was way more truly embodied and natural than that. Art was surrendered into living, into real existence, into real loving and caring for other living beings. He suffered his dog’s disappearance without any buffers and then, when she was brought back to him and his family, he celebrated her return with utter relief and joy. P.S., he reached out to his entire network in mutuality and didn’t try to hide his grief and devastation, or to appear “cool” about what had happened. And he so gratefully acknowledged all our prayers and notified us as soon as the dog was returned.

As I’ve been writing this, Linda and I are also sitting at home, watching Sunday night TV — and feeling into who this man was. Linda broke down remembering one of the sweetest things Art did once for her. A few years ago, when he heard she was going to resume her career as a jazz singer, being an afficionado himself he went through many, many albums of his extensive jazz collection. He then recorded, by hand, hours upon hours of personally selected songs. When he was done, he wound up sending Linda eleven cassettes, full to the brim, both sides packed with songs. He told Linda that he just thought they’d help her in her music career. Linda said, “I was just blown away by that gesture. He had included some of the greatest jazz singers of all time in that collection: Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Vicki Carr, and many others who most people probably have never heard of, but who I knew were among the greatest of the great. I was just so touched by the amount of time it took for him to compile this amazing collection of music for me. It’s something I will always treasure about this precious man and how giving he truly was.”

One of the other senior members of the Waking Down network, who’s quite naturally very psychic, let me know today that she had felt Art’s presence very strongly at one point after his death. And, she said, it was obvious he was, her words, “insanely blissful.”

Mike Grossman said that to him it’s obvious Art just couldn’t bring any more of the depth and greatness of Who he is into this embodiment; so it was time to move on. (My paraphrase.) Maybe so. Makes sense to me. That’s how I see it too. But who knows?

In any case, as his transition proceeds, I invite all of those who know him and who hear of him to celebrate his life and also, to take a couple of lessons from his death.

One is, let’s set up some systems so that when any one among us suddenly faces an emergency like Art’s operation, that person and his or her family know about and can easily get word out to the whole community. Art called me. I’m legendary for forgetting really important things, sometimes at really wrong or inauspicious times. And I did that after his call. I feel badly about it, yes. I should have made a big point of acting on it right away. But I didn’t. And I know me. I shouldn’t be solely trusted with such news.

The other side of this particular coin is, in Art’s situation I have such a strong sense that it was “his time.” If everyone had known he was going into surgery, would our prayers have somehow saved the day, and prolonged Art’s life? Knowing the details of his complications, I doubt it. But we’ll never know.

The way I figure, I can’t change what happened with Art. But I, and we all, can change how communications take place in our network of friends, colleagues, fellow travelers on our path. So, right afterward, this same day, I called another friend who’s now suffering a serious health crisis that had been developing undetected for years. And I asked that he please set up a system with his wife and family so they will know to contact several people in our community network should anything ever go seriously wrong and our community prayers might be needed right away.

On another level, there is a related and yet quite different lesson. And that’s one that death and calamity often teach us, but we are slow to take to heart. It’s simply that we cannot assume we have time. Art certainly wasn’t under the impression he had time to waste. But when he headed for the hospital to get his ulcer operated on, he had I think little or no idea that his life would soon be slipping away.

I started this current series of posts to our blog with announcements of anniversaries that mean a lot to me. Art’s death encourages me to dare even more than I was thinking I would, to speak truths of what I feel and see and sense are real, necessary, and auspicious in my life and our collective work. I’ve been biting my tongue about a number of things for a long time. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be doing that less and less.

When my time of dying comes, I want to be able to look back and see that I gave this life everything I could have…and that I long ago stopped holding back and hedging bets, trying to make sure I didn’t offend or challenge people, fearing the consequences of standing up for my vision and my mission and my passion. The fact is, if I extrapolate out from 15 years of work so far, at the rate things have been going, even if I live to a hundred I will have accomplished so terribly little of what I have long sensed I am here to be, to do, and to leave as my legacy. So the time has come for me, at least, to stand up much more forthrightly for what I am here for. I hope the same is true for you.

Perhaps you thought I was already doing that. Well, stay tuned. And…join me. In your own way, for your own truths, with your own passion.