December 21, 2012

One World Ends, a New One Begins

Hello my friends, I am writing to tell you that yes it is true, a world is ending on 12-21-2012, a pattern that we have all been playing out for the past eleven thousand years perhaps, at least since recorded history.  This world has many names and is going the way of the dinosaurs.  It has been “ending” since what many in the New Age Movement celebrated in 1987 as the Harmonic Convergence but what I have come to call the Vibral Alignment.  It is officially over on Friday.  Sigh of relief.  The qualities of this world can be seen in the catastrophic mayhem, ingorance and confusion exhibited by one tortured soul on Friday, December 14, 2012.  Also by 9-11 and the many slaughters of innocent lives that have happened over the last few millennia.  Yet, despite what seems catastrophe, devastation, madness, and perpetual sadness, and yes, it is to be sure, there is an underlying truth of Oneness and Basic Goodness, as evidenced by the heroics of one teacher who gave her life to save the lives of all her school children on Friday and the compassionate loving goodness that resides in all of us.  And this basic human goodness and heroic quality is within us all.

One of my profound root teachers, a Seneca Elder who no longer lives in our world, but does indeed advise from the realm of spirit, called this world the Fourth World of Control and Separation.  Her name is Twylah Hurd Nitsch.  Her Seneca name, Yeh-Weh-Node, means “She Whose Voice Rides on the Four Winds.”  She brought to be me and countless others the profound and common sense teachings of truth human goodness, in other words a way to be, to live with confidence and dignity in our world.  Her home on the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation was the fulcrum of her sharing from her kitchen table, living room and 12 post and beam teaching lodge in her backyard, the ancient teachings of human basic goodness; she gathered people together from all four corners of our world, of all races, spiritual paths and walks of life. 

Twylah Nitsch, who many of us lovingly and respectfully called Grandmother Twylah, or Gramma Twylah, or Gram, was the lineage holder of the Seneca Wisdom, a role her family fulfilled since the 1770s; the Seneca are the philosophers of the Five Nation Peace League.  Gram was also the keeper of the teachings of the Wolf Clan Teaching Lodge, which offered to the world the wisdom, philosophy and the prophecy of our earth, its history and all its creatures.  Her core message, its essence if distilled down, is the same as other spiritual paths, religions and earth teachings -- that we are all One, and we have lived out this life and many lives to experience being physical on earth and we are here to remember our unity and reclaim our universal oneness.  This is what is happening and fulfilled in what the Mayan calendar inscribed on stone for 12 -21-2012. 

 

Gram was not shy about sharing.  She taught what her elders, her grandparents taught her.  I remember one story of the immense respect her Grandfather Moses Shongo, a great Medicine Man of the Seneca, shared with her.  He place her on the counter when she was a young one, maybe nine years old, eye level with him and gave her a teaching, saying that she is equal to him and thus they would meet eye to eye, heart to heart.  This message stuck with me.

Grandmother Twylah was both a talented dancer and jazz musician, having even played with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.  In her elder years she taught many of us who came home to her, the Cycles of Truth and Pathway of Peace.  She was a consummate storyteller and I vividly remember her telling the story of the Great Peacemaker, an awakened being, what Buddhists would call a Buddha, and Christians would call a Saint.  His name is Deganawida and he came to bring his people, known as the Haudenosaunee, which would eventually become known first as the Five Nations, then the Six Nations (or Iroquois Confederacy), into a place of the Middle Way, a peaceful co-existence.  This is an example on earth of a peace and unity that is possible between human beings.

As Gram told this story of The Great Peacemaker with a sparkle in her eyes and a beautiful all pervasive sense of humor, I knew he had what is known as Christ-Consciousness or Awakened Mind.  The story opened my heart and always made me cry; it was a visceral experience.  In the path I walk today, Shambhala, a lineage that goes back to The Buddha, teaches that all of us are imbued with Basic Goodness, that is what we are at our root, and that basic human goodness and an enlightened society is not only possible but what we all long for in our hearts and minds, and what is already present. 

What I have come to know, in my heart and gut, is that all paths lead to an enlightened community of people on earth walking in union with all sentient beings. There is no separation or division, and never has been.  That we all have as our essence the qualities of wakefulness, of gentleness, of courage, and the living quality of natural intelligence, that there is no separation between us, any of us.  No separation between me sitting here in Starbucks typing this and the gentleman who just sat down to sip his coffee and read The Buffalo News across from me.  No separation between him and the baristas. No separation between them and the farmers who grew this coffee.  No separation between the farmers and the coffee plants.  No separation between the plants and the soil.  No separation between the soil and the worms aerating the soil.  No separation between the soil and the water.  No separation between the waters of the world and earth.  No separation between the earth and our solar system.  No separation between the solar system and our entire universe.  Every bit of everything is in all of us.  We are all one.  Call this what Gram and the Seneca call Swenio or the Great Mystery or God, or One Mind, or Buddha nature, or the Divine, or the Creator, or the Living Christ, or Krishna, or Allah, or Jehovah, or any name we humans for the past eleven thousand years have called the life force that sparks everything that is within all of us.

Now on Friday, 12-21-2012, the Fourth World of Control and Separation is done.  Welcome to the Fifth World of Unity and Illumination.  The Mayans predicted this cosmic shift, chiseled into their stone tablets, and shared the stories orally.  In all traditions, we share the stories of creation and life and death through word of mouth, from one human to another, from one sentient being to another.

Grandmother Twylah affirmed what I had been doing since I was a child, relating to the other worlds -- to the spirit worlds of the ephemeral, to the mineral world of stone people and crystals, to the plant world of trees and flowers and all things that grow from the soils and sands of our earth, to the animal world of the four leggeds, the creepy and crawly ones and the winged beings that fly and give us a sense of a horizon beyond that which we can see with our naked eye or the finned ones that swim and give us a sense of the deep watery mysterious depths of our united soul, or any of the other worlds that I have forgotten to mention.  That is what Gram shared with me and the many others she magnetized to hear these earth teachings of wisdom and innate goodness. 

Gram also was wise enough to bring as many of the wisdom keepers of the indigenous peoples of our earth together in what she called her Wolf Clan Gatherings, having in fact met with the Dalai Lama and his entourage of Monks in 1991, two years before I would return home to Western New York and meet her and eventually live with her and receive a transmission of her teachings.  Her one requirement of the Indigenous Elders was to bring a story of humor and laughter to share with the people.  How like her, her mischievous but very intentional way of teaching and opening us all up.

The Vibral Alignment is about our minds, hearts and cores, all our chakras, and energy points within our bodies, all sentient being’s bodies, the Earthmother’s body and that of our entire universe lining up in one pulsating beat.  We all will vibrate with one mind, one heart, and one being.  Grandmother Twylah gave a teaching of our unity using her hand, telling the story of the Peacemaker, and the story of the Five Nations coming to find a truce and establish a long-held peace of generosity and goodness that exists to this day.  She used her hand to demonstrate that the four fingers closed represent one heart, one body, one mind under one law and closed it with protection and unity of the thumb crossed above the fingers in a fist or knot of oneness.  The Peacemaker’s Message was, “All for one, one for all,” a universal theme in all the great spiritual and earth paths for the last thousands and thousands of years. 

The part that we humans confused, and it was part of our collective learning as we move through all the worlds that Gram has spoken of and written of in her book, Other Council Fires Were Here before Ours, with her granddaughter, Jamie Sams.  We will be confused by the illusion of separation.  We will let ourselves be controlled.  But the possibility of becoming awakened always exists, always has, and by entering the silence, in whatever form we find that quiet place, can we access our truth, our sacred space and our unity with all.  And in that quiet sacredness are other awakened beings both here on earth and off earth in spirit realms and many different forms to help us. 

Now we move into what she taught us about, the Fifth World of Unity and Illumination.  She said imagine that we all we have two lines running from our head to our feet and this connects the physical, earth realm with the world of heaven or spirit; and the other line runs from one hand through our heart center to our other hand, representing our path on earth.  These two lines intersect in our center, our heart.  The Truth Line from earth to heaven, and The Pathway of Peace from hand to hand, representing our Earth Walk as physical beings on this, our precious planet that we share with nearly 7 billion other humans and trillions of other earth forms. 

Gram loved to talk about directions and spoke of the north as the place of Wisdom, the East as the place of Integrity, the South as the place of Stability and the West as the place of Dignity.  She would say remember we are all whole and a circle represents this wholeness.  Gram would remind us that, “United we stand, divided we fall.”

I say  thank you, my dear teacher and friend, Grandmother Twylah for truly your voice is still resounding clearly on the four winds that blow through our world.  I offer these teachings that you offered to us and let them move out from my small dot on this earth to the four corners of the Uniworld.