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Soul on Fire

As I mentioned in the last post, our awareness has begun to expand. Individuals are again taking responsibility for themselves. In doing so, they may find creativity in ancient abilities that will see us into the coming years, abilities that are becoming more and more prevalent.

Peter Calhoun is one of these. He wrote Soul On Fire about his experiences. Rather than expound on what he and his wife Astrid have done, I’ll let him give you some hints. His website is www.petercalhoun.com.

Entering into Ecstasy

“Our destiny as human beings is to enter into ecstasy. This is accomplished by achieving a conscious union with All That Is. A number of people today have achieved partial ecstasy, but this is only in group highs such as some religious ceremonies, listening to a symphony orchestra or attending a rock concert. On the individual level, it is sometimes achieved through the runner’s high or edge sports such as rock climbing, auto racing and white water kayaking. Soldiers on the battlefield have been known to experience great ecstasy, but who wants to wait until their lives are imperilled to receive Enlightenment?

But such euphoria can only be experienced under rigid or very limited conditions, and it is but a shadow of true ecstasy. When one has once experienced partial ecstasy, there is little taste for anything else. It always leaves one hungry for more, and the only recourse, for one not engaged in spiritual practices, is to keep reproducing those same conditions. This is not always that easy.

My decision to start an apprenticeship program was to offer a means of achieving that total ecstasy in the only way possible, which is through union with our Conscious Creation – to discover that there is a deep awareness in all of creation: the animals and great trees, the mountains, rivers, canyons, the desert springs, the wind and the fire, and, as I discovered in my numerous trips to the red rock country in the Four Corners area, in the stones themselves, with which I’ve had some of my most loved communication.

And this unity consciousness includes one another! How could it not? Some of you have remarked to me how Astrid is totally present with everyone she meets and is always laughing. And you wondered how she is able to be like that so much of the time. I’ve said that it is her sheer joy and elation of being one with our conscious Creation, with all life on this planet.

Astrid has said to me, “You shouldn’t write such things about me because people would have expectations, and I’m not always like that.”

I’ve pointed out that she has achieved a level in which this is her normal state of consciousness.

“That doesn’t mean you are always like that,” I said. “No one is. When you deviate from that, you always return quickly to that place.”

I told her that when she is in that place, she is a manifestation of the Goddess. And it enables others, especially women, to see their own higher reflection in her.

When an ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church, I was given the directive to teach the Father God, and yet, ironically, all of my direct encounters with Deity, including but not limited to those described in Soul on Fire, have all been with the Devine Feminine. In those encounters, including with Artemis, who is the goddess of nature magic and the Earth Mother, as well as the Cosmic Mother, which has happened on several occasions, I was told that in the years ahead there will be an increasing number of women as well as a few men such as myself who will be manifesting the Goddess in her many faces.

When Artemis Huntress came to me three times in my lucid dream, I knew I’d better take note, and it was on her third visit (there’s that magical “three” again) that she told me accurate things about my future that did come to pass. She also said, “You will bring many back to the Earth Mother, for you are the Servant of the Goddess.”

So it was inevitable, I suppose, that my future partner would be a manifestation of the Goddess.

Recently, the Dalai Lama made a startling statement. He said that western women will save the world. I believe he was speaking a profound truth. Man, today, will have to let go of their egos and learn to step aside and share or even turn over the helm to enormously talented women emerging in every field. To refuse to do so, as some seem committed to be doing, is to become shipwrecked as a species.

Another reason for my offering an internal apprenticeship program is that the time in which we are able to make changes in our lives is rapidly coming to an end.

There will continue to be opportunities for growth on this and other planes, but change can occur only in the context of linear time in which we have no memory of our cumulative past.

We’ve come here not only to bring light to this world but also to change those aspects of ourselves that do not serve us. The vast majority of those persons who live lives of materialism are souls who have given up on themselves – souls who have realized on a level the conscious mind can’t fathom that in the present life and previous ones they continue to fail to correct those aspects of their being they came here for. Of course, those who use their wealth to uplift the masses or help to heal the Earth for the Greater Good are exceptions.”

Intricacies of Life

Written on December 26, 2009 by Rob in Mother Nature

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In plant/animal/human relationships, plants seem to be considered on the low end of the totem pole. Yet maybe they can be considered in a different light. What if what Darwin saw as survival of the fittest was not really competition, but cooperation? What if we allowed ourselves to be open to a greater awareness of what goes on around us, including the plant world?

The following is excerpted from an article by N. Angier of the New York Times:

“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said.

Plants can’t run away from a threat but they can stand their ground. “They are very good at avoiding getting eaten,” said Linda Walling of the University of California, Riverside. “It’s an unusual situation where insects can overcome those defenses.” At the smallest nip to its leaves, specialized cells on the plant’s surface release chemicals to irritate the predator or sticky goo to entrap it. Genes in the plant’s DNA are activated to wage systemwide chemical warfare, the plant’s version of an immune response. We need terpenes, alkaloids, phenolics — let’s move.

“I’m amazed at how fast some of these things happen,” said Consuelo M. De Moraes of Pennsylvania State University. Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues did labeling experiments to clock a plant’s systemic response time and found that, in less than 20 minutes from the moment the caterpillar had begun feeding on its leaves, the plant had plucked carbon from the air and forged defensive compounds from scratch.

Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

Enemies of the plant’s enemies are not the only ones to tune into the emergency broadcast. “Some of these cues, some of these volatiles that are released when a focal plant is damaged,” said Richard Karban of the University of California, Davis, “cause other plants of the same species, or even of another species, to likewise become more resistant to herbivores.”

Yes, it’s best to nip trouble in the bud.

Dr. Hilker and her colleagues, as well as other research teams, have found that certain plants can sense when insect eggs have been deposited on their leaves and will act immediately to rid themselves of the incubating menace. They may sprout carpets of tumorlike neoplasms to knock the eggs off, or secrete ovicides to kill them, or sound the S O S. Reporting in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Hilker and her coworkers determined that when a female cabbage butterfly lays her eggs on a brussels sprout plant and attaches her treasures to the leaves with tiny dabs of glue, the vigilant vegetable detects the presence of a simple additive in the glue, benzyl cyanide. Cued by the additive, the plant swiftly alters the chemistry of its leaf surface to beckon female parasitic wasps. Spying the anchored bounty, the female wasps in turn inject their eggs inside, the gestating wasps feed on the gestating butterflies, and the plant’s problem is solved.

Here’s the lurid Edgar Allan Poetry of it: that benzyl cyanide tip-off had been donated to the female butterfly by the male during mating. “It’s an anti-aphrodisiac pheromone, so that the female wouldn’t mate anymore,” Dr. Hilker said. “The male is trying to ensure his paternity, but he ends up endangering his own offspring.”

Plants eavesdrop on one another benignly and malignly. As they described in Science and other journals, Dr. De Moraes and her colleagues have discovered that seedlings of the dodder plant, a parasitic weed related to morning glory, can detect volatile chemicals released by potential host plants like the tomato. The young dodder then grows inexorably toward the host, until it can encircle the victim’s stem and begin sucking the life phloem right out of it. The parasite can even distinguish between the scents of healthier and weaker tomato plants and then head for the hale one.

“Even if you have quite a bit of knowledge about plants,” Dr. De Moraes said, “it’s still surprising to see how sophisticated they can be.”

Soul on Fire

Intricacies of Life

Mist Beyond