Image: Israfel's Trumpet

I am just outside New Delhi right now, working in one of India’s “Silicon Valleys.” It doesn’t take traveling to the other side of the world to make you meditate on the human condition, but it does help.

I often see in snapshots and here is my picture of the day:

A well-dressed Indian man standing on the curb, gracefully smoking his cigarette while jibber-jabber-yakking into his cell phone. He is set aglow by the slanting morning light careening off the cement dust and motor-scooter exhaust swirling around him. He stands, confident and strong, like a God surveying his creation. Two women in saris, banana yellow and radiant teal, waft by him, angelic faces the color of dusk-lit earth. Just beyond the glowing man, on the other side of the street, a long strip of temporary houses line the road; houses made of thick branches and plastic sheeting – a tent town of 100 parents and children, the workers building a brick wall along the road. The women squat by makeshift hearths, cooking tea for the men while the children run giddily up and down the mounds of grey sand piled here and there. In the back of my throat I can taste the dust kicked up by their game, the dust that fills the air everywhere here. The children are gleeful like my children. This snapshot is bordered by two immense bougainvillea trees, two cascades of fuchsia blossoms framing each side of the image.

What I see in this is a planet brimming with living creatures, each doing its best to survive and to work itself into the next level of security and comfort, each eating the earth and making tools of the earth and eventually becoming earth. From smoking man to cooking woman to the bees buzzing in the bougainvillea and mosquitoes prowling for just one taste of any of it, to the malaria parasites in the mosquito waiting to be ejected into Shangri-la, each of us moves day by day, surviving, and if we are luckily placed in the system, or strong, or a little more ruthless than the next being: thriving.

On it goes across the face of a tiny blue-green marble spinning through the outskirts of a medium-sized galaxy, dancing among hundreds of billions of galaxies. Simultaneously religion is the most unimportant and the most crucial thing in this picture. For we are adrift in energies not of our own making, energies we cannot comprehend though some us try, energies which bring us into life, give us sustenance and suffering throughout our lives, and that tell us it is time for us to become earth again, goodbye, for now.

And so we drum together.

I leave you with this poem by the 12th Century Sufi, Yunus Emre:

We encountered the house of realization,

we witnessed the body.

The whirling skies, the many-layered earth,the seventy-thousand veils,

we found in the body.

The night and the day,

the planets,the words inscribed on the Holy Tablets,

the hill that Moses climbed, the Temple,

and Israfil's trumpet, we observed in the body.

Torah, Psalms, Gospel, Quran --

what these books have to say,

we found in the body.

Everybody says these words of Yunus

are true. Truth is wherever you want it.

We found it all within the body.

Jon Stewart: Amos With Fart Jokes

Every now and then I see the Holy Spirit rise up and I get amazed, thrilled and spooked all at the same time-the way you are supposed to feel when the Holy Spirit comes near you. It happened Thursday when Jon Stewart interviewed Jim Cramer from CNBC, calling to task Cramer and other television financial reporters for not working harder to uncover the financial crisis before it wrecked the economy. If you have not seen it, and all of this week’s Daily Shows leading up to the confrontation, you see it by clicking here. And you can see the nauseating extended interview with Cramer where he, for some reason, tells the truth about himself and CNBC by clicking here.

In the Hebrew Scriptures (the “Old Testament”) the prophet Amos cries out disparagingly:

“Hear this word, you cows of Bashan…you women who oppress the poor and crush the needy and say to your husbands, "Bring us some drinks!" …The time will surely come when you will be taken away with hooks…”(Amos 4)

Amos is speaking to the well-coiffed country-club ladies of his time; the prideful, narcissistic, empty-headed, trend-setting, fashion-forward wives of the CEOs, hedge-fund managers and AIG executives of ancient Israel – the respected, highly successful men who swept up the nation’s riches while the workers (the producers of the wealth) went without shoes. The wives live beautiful lives with but one simple task – to be pretty and entertaining while heaping praise on their husbands and on the economic structure that sustains the pretty cows' lip-glossed existence. When Stewart makes fun of Jim Cramer and CNBC financial “reporters,” he is calling them the cows of Bashan. There's a lot more in this text, and he's not indicitng women as the bone-headed biblical literalists of our time would claim. Amos is talking to any nicely dressed synchopant, which describes all television financial reporters.

Jon Stewart is a prophet dressed in new clothes. Prophets are always dismissed and ridiculed by the power elite, and this is why in our time, as in most times, the prophet arrives in the form of the Fool. The Fool’s job is to attack the power elite with humor. The prophets’ job is to bring down those in economic power who are wreaking destruction on the land and to call the people back in to the state of shalom: balance, peace, right-living. It is an amazing thing to behold, and who would have thought it would be beamed in from the home of fart jokes and censor bleeps: the Comedy Channel? The Spirit works n mysterious ways.

The Collapse

Click here for the origin of this image

Dear Drummers,

Welcome one and all to the next boom-boom-whacka-whacka-thump-tikka-takka-thump- drumming gathering. If you have been wishing you’d finally make it to a drum, turn those thoughts into life-loving action and join in this week for what will be great deal of lighthearted fun. Well, lighthearted for the first 93 minutes or so, and then…well, I’ll get to that.

Some days I write a really smart, insightful letter to you that lays out a stunning, imaginative plan for the upcoming drum. And then I erase it because it’s all a bunch of insincere crap. Today is one of those days, and I have to go back to being honest, which always scares me.

The past few days I’ve noticed that my dreams have been overwhelmingly anxious. I wake up having been chased around by wild-haired women who bite me all over with razor sharp teeth, or I wake up after driving fast along winding mountain roads, with those three guffawing yellow-toothed murderers trying to run me off a cliff. I began to realize that these dreams are otherworldly translations of the ambient anxiety upon which we are all floating these days – worry over the economy, job losses and the future. I personally welcome the change that we are seeing – a forced move away from panting consumerism that is so destructive. But I admit to wishing everything was back to “normal” with my house ballooning in (false) value, and being able to refinance again and again to feel (falsely) ever-richer.

The collapsing economy is, in essence a collapse of cultural mythology. What we all “bought into” is collapsing under us. It does not matter if you welcome this new world or fear it; we are all in the collapse together.

So I wrote a really smart letter and laid out a wonderful plan, and it was all so spiritually hip except for the fact that I had completely ignored what I had been told by the spirit world earlier this week. I ignored it because I was afraid of it - afraid of doing what I was advised to do. Finally after far too much typing of brilliant, flat and meaningless drivel, I came back around to saying yes to the advice.

When the mythic structure is collapsing, it’s even more important to drum, for two reasons. First, the drum catches you, cradles and embraces you. Second, the drum reminds you that you are not really falling, but changing, which certainly can feel like falling. So the drum is a great help right now, a necessary tool to help us remain grounded, calm and focused on what matters most. Coming on Friday just to let the drum hold you – that is reason enough to make your way to the group.

After that 93 minutes or so of drumming we will head into the ceremonial part of the evening involving some shamanic activity that I’d rather not do, but I trust it has a healing value or it would not be made so present to me this week. Time after time when I am resistant to what the spirit world asks of me, and when I take the courage to move against that resistance, to melt into trust, I have found that there is a healing involved. I think the spirit world wants to offer you that kind of healing, so I’ll do what I can to follow its advice this Friday during the ceremonial part of the evening. As always, you’ll have the complete freedom to participate in whatever way feels true and right for you.

But we will begin the evening with rambunctious, rowdy rhythmocity, moving toward sublime, supine (but not sub-prime) soulfulness.

Welcome fellow travelers in the landscape of the inner body! Welcome adventurers of the soul-scape! Welcome one and all!

Jaime

The Two Imaginations

Image: Karin Basel

Dear Drummers,

Lately I find myself lost in this recurring reverie: Me, reclining on a sun-drenched, padded, chaise lounge by the glittering blue swimming pool in my Los Angeles back yard, typing the next episode of Law and Order SVU or Dirty Sexy Money on my laptop, a frosty Mojito and shiny cell phone on the table next to me, a bevy of eager interns nearby, ready to meet my every demand. When I jolt back to my dim and frosty Minnesota reality, I understand that this daydream is about achieving some kind of great success by working with my imagination, which I have spent so many years refining.

Once again I am reminded that there are two kinds of imagination.

When we gather to drum, we enter into the sacred imagination. This is the imagination as described by philosophical giants like Henry Corbin, who drew a distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal. This imagination is the bridge, the ladder, the clearing in the woods, the amber-lit hollows of the heart – whatever image you would like to describe it by – where we go and where the divine comes to meet us. It is the place where we transmute spiritual states into physical states; in other words, where wisdom comes into our awareness and then into our body and into our actions.

Much of modern culture would make light of this meeting place, calling it mere self-generated fantasy. Yet for as long as humans have stood on two legs we have sought out and entered the sacred imagination in order to make meaning of our lives on earth, and to help us see through the pain and limits of our existence. Whether you are aware of it or not, I believe this is why you come (or wish you had come!) to our drumming gatherings.

But neither is entering the sacred imagination as grand as some would make it. The truth is, the sacred imagination is a gift – a Grace – bestowed on each of us that come into this world through a human womb. It takes no special skill, no special blessing to commune with the sacred imagination any more than it does to have a beating heart or filling and expelling lungs. This is why I try to keep our ceremonial work together as free of mystical mumbo-jumbo as I can. It’s why when I sing, I don’t use words.

The purpose of our drum gatherings, as I see it, is to simply prepare an environment wherein you can feel safe to drop any resistance or fear you have to opening your own pathway into your own sacred imagination.

What is the other imagination? Simone Weil referred to it as the imagination whose purpose was to create filler for the cracks in our psyche from which Grace would normally arise. That is, for me, a hugely powerful phrase, and it answers the question of why I devote my imaginative skills to our drumming community rather than writing Dirty Sexy Money. Television, far above all other skilled, artful mediums, exists to fill the cracks in our psyche, to plug the emerging openings where Grace would enter into our life.

I believe that, for you, coming to the drum is an act of saying no, for at least a short while, to the many forces that pour out filler onto your soul-scape. I pray that my friend, the amazing TV writer and producer of Dirty Sexy Money, doesn’t read this, or my chances of getting into that sunlit chaise lounge will be vastly reduced. But I’m not saying anything he doesn’t already know. And to be clear: I love and need some imaginative filler in my life as much as anyone! For me the important issue is the balance between the two imaginations.

So, we gather this Friday to boom-ba-boom-tak-tada-tada-boom-ba-boom our way into the imaginal, where we may ask for a little bit of Grace to seep up through the cracks in our inner soul-scape and teach us how we should live in wisdom. Welcome one and all! Welcome newcomers and welcome old-comers! Welcome!

See you soon,

Jaime

Another Great Awakening

Kathryn Abernathy, "Mandarin Morning" See more of her amazing work.

Dear Drummers,

I want to extend a warm invitation to all of you to join in the groovelicious rhythmocity this Friday! But a special welcome to anyone who is new to the group and anyone who has wanted to attend but has been a bit shy about it. There are a LOT of new people right now and that makes for a wonderful energy. If I have not said it out loud, please know that I always admire anyone who seeks out our drumming community and takes the step to attend, because everything in our culture makes it far easier to withdraw from human company and from spiritual seeking than to move toward it. I think you will see very quickly that this is an open, welcoming conglomeration of human spirits. So, welcome!

This is the time of year that we in the Celtic Shamanic tradition start talking about the goddess Brighid, who is associated with the emerging springtime and the surfacing of new life from frozen winter. Brighid is a major figure in the Celtic pantheon; a mother goddess and divine force of healing and creativity. You can get all kinds of inspiring understanding of Brighid from a million web sites and from that absolutely stunning new book by Jaime Meyer: Drumming the Soul Awake. (What a masterpiece!)

Do you see, as I do, that on a national and global level, we are in a time of awakening? I believe you all are attracted to drumming, at least in the way I facilitate it and the way our group embodies it, because you feel a kind of awakening happening, in the world, and in you, and you want to understand it; you want to call it forth and feed it. You want to nurture the Awakening.

This Friday we will drum up a cornucopia of hot grooves and cool moves for about 90 minutes. Then we will enter into a ceremony of feeding the spirit of our drum. If you own a drum, it’s a great time to bring it. If you don’t, please don’t worry, the drum is an object but it is also a spirit that accompanies you and a metaphor upon which you can pleasantly ruminate. This Friday, the drum is the voice of Brighid, the one who sings to us to awaken what needs to be awakened. So if you want to, bring a drum, rattle or any ceremonial object. And if you want to, bring an offering—anything biodegradable. Examples include herbs, flowers, tobacco, and poems written on small pieces of paper, liquor, chocolate, nuts, fruit, and seed. But no meat, dairy or eggs.

Bruce Levine wrote a heady article for Z Magazine this month called Fundamentalist Consumerism and an Insane Society. His point is that our entire culture is insane in its worship of stuff over anything else. I agree with much of his thesis, and especially like his use of the word “Fundamentalist.” The media revels in funny stories about wacky religious ideas and religious wars, but the real (and truly destructive) fundamentalism in our culture is consumerism, which rarely gets a serious treatment. The awakening we are feeling now through the economic crash is a cracking open of our fundamentalist consumer culture. Time will tell whether we actually peer into that wound and heal it or put yet another Band-Aid on it and go dancing and drinking.

Below is an excerpt from Levine’s article. I believe our drumming serves as an antidote - as a healing force (as a song from Brighid) - to these six “assaults” on us by the consumerist culture.

It is difficult to protect oneself from the slow death caused by consumer culture. Human beings are every day and in numerous ways psychologically, socially, and spiritually assaulted by a culture which:
· creates increasing material expectations
· devalues human connectedness
· socializes people to be self-absorbed
· obliterates self-reliance
· alienates people from normal human emotional reactions
· sells false hope that creates more pain

I leave you with what has become a famous poem even in American culture by: Rumi

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don't go back to sleep.