The apocalypse, the God Body, and the village healer

The sun recedes into a ball of fire through a yellow haze of smoke that has drifted down the east coast and I want to talk about our aliveness and this fear of the end of the world. We will all be risen again on the Day of Judgement, Christ said, instigating gun heaving hermits and pious old ladies alike to predict, and subtly perpetuate, this road to an apocalypse.

In the old days, before Christ came, before the missionaries and the white countries committed genocide, there were tribes who lived with the land and there were village healers, or shamans, but they lived among their people. Christ came within a torn society, an elevated society, in between years of Jewish patriarchy, when the Romans dealt in coins, and out of the patriarchal oppression of the Old Testament showed the path to salvation. It involved morality being key to ascendance, and the kabbalists might say, who curiously, though dealing in Jewish lore, incorporate the wisdom of Jesus, that his story, the centrality of his light, and the shadows between devotion and doubt that represent his twelve disciples, describe parts of the self. The entire story of Jesus is a parable on the alchemy of healing and breathing into one’s own God Body, ascendance in this life, being risen from the dead, from darkness.

It wasn’t this wisdom, however, that the tribes needed. Christ came about and even heralded the millennias of the rise of the individual, the breaking up of the tribes, of sharing the load of life among others, and so the secret kabbalistic wisdom of Christ is about coming into the God Body, but it is an afterward, a lonely path, where the individual is the last choice. In the times of the tribes, there was not this loneliness and there was this great heaving synchronicity with the earth when we were part of the food chain, when we hunted and grew for survival, and there were other tribes to contend with in peace or in war—these great ethnically tied, extended family groups, no matter what community living co-ops and bake sales we cook up, that are gone forever. I don’t know why they had to go, for it prefaced also this dire mudslide into what the Christians moan about, a veritable apocalypse, which is really a bitter irony. That our turning away from the cycles, discovering our own light—electricity—creating these huge money-driven societies in which the leaders are not responsible for your spirit or at all in concern of it, has brought us to this post industrial world where the storms are greater, the land more parched, invasive plants invade the sacred regions, and rivers have been polluted, forests cut downs, and people parade about in front of banks or broadcast at children’s museums the coming of the sixth mass extinction. It’s a bitter irony to me, that the Christ who would bring about balm for the ‘end’ is also the preface of it. Though it is not Jesus’ fault, it is the lust for society and conquest, even human nature itself, that might be at fault. There is no knowing. But I am on the journey of the God Body, the only ascendant journey left, with the tribes gone, having been since I left home at seventeen a person of exile. Whenever I’d go ‘home’ to my family— a house that soon crumbled—I was always in a rage, and when I’d leave I’d act my rage out upon the world, or through my connection to the others, and pacify my heart with drugs or sex. That was long ago and since then I have braved my own hells, and come upon the only journey that matters to me, devoting myself to the alchemical practices of being deeply embodied, demystifying the mysteries, and letting go of everything that I considered part of myself that was a reaction to other things.

The Christian Missionaries came and spread the word of Jesus, but the tribes people did not need it. The world of striven apart individuals might need these words of kindness and servitude, where the mystery of individual ascendance has all but been completely misconstrued, but the tribes did not need it. They were already elevated, in their way, through pantheistic Gods, and their participation with the earth. True, the individual may have been subdued or within the womb of the whole, yet they were the stewards, and perpetuators of our earth. They prayed to the Gods, invoked spirit, and with their lives and practices not only lasted through eons of time themselves, but watched over our Earth, and knew her ways and her needs, deifying the elements, and thus proclaiming them sacred—air-earth-water-fire. That is until their genocide led to the widespread submission of the land under yoke of industry and spirit became blown out the body, like the holy spirit, for recoiling afterward in hushed churches, where one goes to contemplate the shortness of life and death, while the connection between soul, body and earth fades away into the metaphor of mysteries. The breaking up of the tribes led to the exile of individuals, and the lonely road of the soul.

The lowest level of flight of the lonely soul involves grappling for the ego, quick pleasures, individual power, and the riches of this world, but the higher path involves breaking the breaches of the indiviudal, a path of returning, deepening with the body, the earth, centering, and realizing that power is in sight and connectedness. That that is ascendance. It’s not becoming a wraith or rising bodily up to heaven as Remedios did in A Hundred Years of Solitude. It can only be achieved through living out the lifetime. The tree of life symbolizes this deep and sacred path, drawing out of Malkuth, the muck of earth, and unfolding toward Kether, which is something one can only feel close to, but not embody without walking into death. Yet, that is all of our end roads.

There is a relationship between body and morality. It may not have always been there, this need of tying the two together; it used to be a given. Jesus says do unto others as you would have done to yourself, but he doesn’t explain why—why? Because we are all connected is one mild way to put it but another way is that it has an effect on your body, your quality of life, how long you live, and whether or not you experience ascendance. The tribal healers, the medicine women, the shamans, they understood this, and the way they healed the people of their ethnocentric tribe is hardly possible today, for their treating of people was so incredibly multifaceted, from a spirtiual-emotional-body level, simply by knowing all the people who came to them, combining herb lore with an understanding of way of life and the intricacies of the person. For it is not only strong medicine that heals but the way one thinks, how a person acts to his or herself, and others, who they let in and why, and the down-reaches of moral code—these all have bearing. And the subtle things we do against ourselves, or that call darkness or untoward situations to ourselves, or illness—these are all doorways into the psyche, and teachers. And the village women knew this too and would talk to the people, soul to soul and this was a way of healing. Yet, in our world, in which one must pay for treatment and it is all divided—the doctor, the dentist, even the holistic doctor peddling homeopathics, none of them will be your confessor, and confessing is what people need to heal. We do confess to doctors of the failures of our bodies, our fragilities, and what we get in turn is a crucification with the disease—we are given pills to regulate disease, or radicalizing surgeries, and many other things, and do not acknowledge the whole person whose body is speaking to them, and needs only to have revealed a gentle returning path to the self. It is no wonder the body is sinful when the response is to punish and crucify. But once you get your body ‘covered’' and then you go to a priest or a rabbi to tell what is on your soul, the answer will be different, not messing with the muck of the body or the beats of your heart, but purely theoretical, and this can have a strong healing effect—as stories heal—however, the divide between body and soul remains so firmly in place that healing can only go so far.

No, the only way to deeply heal the self now must be done by becoming the spiritual healer for your own self. By becoming the God Body, and living in it, and deeply honoring the house of your soul. This means diving deep into the psyche, dragging skeletons out of the closet, having it out with inner demons, laying bare all self destructive habits, naming and metaphorizing the unconscious, so one can honor physical reality, the body, this earth, and then deepen this reality through translation of metaphysical into the physical—choosing holistically what one eats, how one sleeps, and weighing the state of your heart with sympathy. Our chosen relationships are our reward in this life, as our inner work gets done. Our relationships are the battlegrounds on which our health, fortitude, and the depths of what is in us gets revealed, dumped out, and transformed. Everything else in this society—fame, money, notoriety—is all a ruse and a deflection, away from reconciling with the deep self and establishing lifelong love relationships, and meaningful practices in your days. Otherwise you are at the mercy of how those worlds keep afloat, and maintain their legitimacy, your life and meaning being woven with it. When I was younger no one’s eyes were bigger than mine for notoriety and fame, because I knew myself very gifted, and I felt all that would be a natural compensation. But, perhaps I am too ‘touched by the Gods’ as they say and the body-tremoring results of my deep self-destruction led me down, alone, into the depths of my psyche, a result of heartbreak and hurt stemming from unbridled, insane, and wild desires that I could never find satiation for. I was driven inward, not wanting to show my face. But I do now, now that I’ve gone through my rings of hell. Now I know that my path in life is spirtiual, but not how religious adepts are spiritual, how people of the body, the tribes were spiritual. I don’t see the use of spirit that divorces you from the body, for I want to be in mine, drinking in it, and exalting, shape-shifting and transmuting. It is the deepest life.

As for the apocalypse, I don’t believe in it, and I intend to live out a long life and see through all the yellow hazes that come.