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….