Unlock your mind, fling open your heart and walk into a fresh day, every day anew, with the curiosity of a child. (Photo: http://www.natureandforesttherapy.org/gallery-2017-liminality-workshop.html)

Nature is good for you! Check out the ANFT programmes, retreats and refreshing forest blogs! Click on logo above. (NB. Something brought to my attention just now - so no vested interests!)

Or check out article on elephant journal

It is great to feel good! Nothing much good can come from feeling lousy: so make it your motto to recharge on goodness and find a fitting mantra that does exacty that. Go stand in the midst of goodness, your grandbabies, your dahlias, the blustery heath, or just on your proverbial (or actual yoga) mat and breathe deeply.

The practice

For this practice you need vigilance and the courage as well as awareness/awakeness to check in with yourself on a regular basis. Say 3-5 times a day? (The Islamic prayer routine might be onto something there!)

You can do this practice from home, all year round, this coming year, no need to book in advance: step right up and join in! Your ticket reads: how is my spirit doing today? Your ticket collector, the heart, will punch it with a: super douper! Why not?

Also being down in the dumps is super douper. Also grief. Also endings. Also dying…. But these clases are maybe more for the advanced practitioner.

A bit of theory

Goodness is not something bestowed upon us from above. God =good. What’s in an “o”? A warm embrace! The more oooooo’s the better! Oh? Is great. Oh?! Is fine. Ooooh… is delicious. Oh, oh… is wonderful. Circle yourself discover the limitlessness of this circle and feel a little dizzy by its endless loop. That’s how stuck you can get on yourself! And that’s not the way up and out into eternity. The goodness that works is the work we’ve accomplished. It’s to dig in the dirt, to fan up the smoke, to wait patiently for the silver linings of the clouds.

There comes a moment when you want to break free - from yourself. Once out of the confines of this little self, some of us get lost (in other selves) or surrender to the dark night of the soul, which may last half a life-time or more. All good. But then there is also a time to get a move on. Some of us want to ascend, aspiring for a greater union, a more meaningful meaning. We can do this by ourselves (with a little help from our Ascended Friends) or we can do this together. Both have their merits. The latter is a more sociable method and worth making more available to our brethern.

Let’s talk about the sexes

In the grand scheme of things, there is little good we can do with free will unless we practice reciprocal love. In the meantime, we each can be getting on with loving ourselves, but it just isn’t the same thing. It may begin with a loveable I (loveability factor tested by one I and another) but the proof of the pudding is in the loving of eachother (or eventually, each other loveable I).

There is an esoteric truism that explains the division of the sexes (and the beginning of a sense of separateness amongst our kind) as a manifestation of an independent I that finally could “go places”(instead of hanging out only in Eden, in a timeless bubble of the Creator’s Will).

In order to prompt the function of selectivity, discrimination, choice, i.e. sense of direction into the future, the longing to unite was played off the difference that had come into being with the male and female variant of man. This gave laws of attraction and procreation, or time-lines along which to slowly advance into the matter of gravity, darkness and creative power.

We have not really come very far since then and have slipped off course, quite a bit, here and there, but on the whole there is still a movement working through us (of Sophic quality) that believes in the power of love: a creative force, be it poured into progeny or new cities.

An impression of the centre of the utopic community Matrimandir, at Auroville,near Pondicherry, in the district of Tamil Nadu, India; built to help “understand the spiritual extreme, the material extreme, and to find the meeting point, the point where that becomes a real force."- The Mother

Sex in Utopia?

Half the work at hand, now, is to understand where I, the self begins and ends. This work will show you there are only ever lines leading in and out, proving you are one neuron in a vast network that must cooperate to make any sense at all. It may be necessary to coccoon yourself every now and then, for as sense of self-containment and the self-rule (and immense responsibility) that comes with it. The majority of us, however are stuck on that level (even in love with it!): escaping into drugs or virtual fantasy or make-believe. Is the love around us real? Is the castle of our own making our home? And who's going to tell you what's what anyway? Where is that twin-soul you could trust?!

There is a movement within the evolution of mankind that is undermining all our trust. There is a kind of (often unintentional) "thorough breeding" happening, around the overly-valued criteria of the ratio and intellect or other systems of promised security. This can give entire generations of very coccooned individuals (with autism as an ultimate defect). At the root of it is always an imperfect love, irreciprocal, blind and smothered by fear and despair. Nicholas Roerich was adamant about the bane that is despair; and his yoga can help to remind one never to neglect that carbuncle of soul-fire that gleams and festers still, when it feels like your heart has grown cold.

Never settle for survival. Push on through with the will to love.

The only heaven on earth, the foundations of any Utopia, is found in love, and when it comes to concrete community building (mini closely-knit dynasties, which have a certain foothold, on certain secure - high and dry, somewhat removed, hence stable - mountain ledges) it will begin with a simple sum or one and one is two. There is more power to be had in a partnership bound by the physical (i.e. sexuality, eroticism, sensuality and many of its modified but still earthy practices) than many a spiritual science is able to convey convincingly. It's all in the Kama Sutra, but a deeper understanding yet, means going to older sources still. Or deeper within.

Akhenaten and his family