spiritual practices

Everyday Magic: the culmination of 45 years of reflection on the nature of reality

Eve Neuhaus Leave a comment

It really is. I know not a lot of people think about stuff like this, but I do.

Today I put up a video of the presentation I gave to a couple of audiences on the subject over the past couple weeks. The video isn’t perfect even though I recorded it quite a few times. I wanted to do it one more time but Tom convinced me that it’s better with all the mistakes. “It’s more human,” he said. Good point. It’s not AI.

So, the presenatation is an exploration of the metaphor of the caterpillar dissolving into soup in order to become a butterfly, offering tools and understandings for navigating the liminal realms into which humanity seems to be dissolving.

It runs about 45 minutes. Take a look and tell me what you think.

Everyday magic

Eve Neuhaus 3 Comments

Look! I’m doing an online presentation that you can sign up for using the link on the picture. It’s an extension of the ponderings I’ve been doing on my blog in recent months. See you there?

Type the word “magic” into the search on my blog to get an idea of what I’ll be talking about.

Use the link at the bottom of the description to sign up.

Link:

https://allfaithsseminary.org/interfaith-programs-and-courses/mysticism-studies/?v=eb65bcceaa5f#SeekersCompass

Peace, love and magic: some reflections on transitioning to fourth and fifth dimensional awareness

Eve Neuhaus 8 Comments

The dawning of the Age of Aquarius

A couple weeks ago, in response to a friend’s distress over the heart-wrenching news, I responded, “Maybe we’re moving from the three dimensional world into the fourth and fifth dimensions.”  

I said it lightly—and, sadly, I doubt that my friend was any less upset after I said it—but I do take refuge in the thought. It gives me comfort to imagine that, as the world as we know it becomes less and less sustainable, there’s more out there than meets the eye. 

After sending the idea into cyberspace, I spent the week reflecting on how such a shift might unfold. I stopped listening to the news, I focused on internal work, and I reflected on how the 3-D world might intersect with the 4 and 5 dimensional worlds.

It’s an area that’s interested me for as long as I can remember. Even as a child I had extraordinary dreams. I’m prone to synchronicity. I was more at ease in the world of make-believe than in the real world for many years. I love fiction, especially fiction with magical elements. Speculative and science fiction appeals, too, as do the edges of science and philosophy. It’s where I usually go, along with increasing my time in meditation and contemplation, when the world is too much.

So, for a week or so in mid-July, I paid more attention to my posture and my breath, I meditated more, and I tuned into the cosmic hum more often. Instead of the news, I listened to archetypal astrology—Richard Tarnas, Heather Ensworth, and Rick Levine—and I took lots of time for reverie.

In 1969, when the Fifth Dimension told the world about the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, astrologers believed it had already been happening in fits and starts for a long time. And the sun did shine in the late 60’s and early 70’s—for a little while anyway.

A whole generation of kids and young adults valued peace and love over money. I was in my late teens then, and I was completely swept away by hippie values. I still am. It’s heartbreaking that the promise often attributed to Jimi Hendrix, “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace,” hasn’t yet happened.

What astrologers are saying these days is that the transition to the age of Aquarius, which is indeed upon us, involves a major shift in consciousness, a change in essential values, and ultimately, a move from focusing on gathering goods to generating good.

Whether any of us alive on earth today will live long enough to enjoy such a world seems doubtful to me, but I see great value in releasing the expectation that life will return to the state it was in when we grew up. Opening one’s heart and mind to some of the infinite possibilities the future could bring seems like a much better option than hanging onto a vision of reality that’s crumbling into the past.

I love the idea that our perception of the measurable world will soon be enhanced by a greater understanding its more subtle aspects, as well as its place in the greater, less dense whole. 

The pull of the three-dimensional world 

Imagine my surprise then, when, in the midst of my dedication to exploring higher dimensions, the 3-D world intervened with an invitation to appreciate, if not acquire, a genuine treasure. 

Tom had recently come into a small inheritance. At the time, that money wasn’t three dimensional at all—it was some numbers on a screen. It occurred to me that rather than putting it in the bank, we might make it more productive by buying a building here in Cordes-sur-Ciel. Tom could move his little chocolate shop there, and an apartment or two would provide us with some income. I took time out from my reverie to look at what was on the market.

Who knew a magnificent piece of untouched old Cordes just 200 steps from our front door would immediately turn up? Such an opportunity! Unoccupied for 50 years but clean and sound, the owner had maintained it more or less as a memorial to her parents. Embossed wallpaper, plump feather beds, wool mattresses, lace curtains. And an old bakery.

Tom’s shop would go in this room. That’s a kitchen behind it. Perfect.

It is very, very charming, a magical place.

Filled with stuff like this.

And that that ancient bakery!

Of course there are more a few black holes that would need to be dealt with, like the low wooden shelf or seat in the downstairs bathroom that I thought might be a well. When we lifted the top off, layers and layers of newspaper, paint, and rust showered down. No point in looking in.

But it would be possible for someone to live in that house almost as is. Some plumbing would probably have to be done, but the first floor has 25-year old decent wiring and lighting. The bedrooms are delightful as they are, and so is the upstairs bathroom. A temporary kitchen of some sort could be set up, though the old wood and gas cookers, gems themselves, are there.

With tax and fees, the house and bakery would cost roughly 100 000€. Tax is 950€/year. So appealing! I almost couldn’t resist.

The morning after we saw it, however, the weight of the project hit me. We live so lightly now: small house, very small electric car, and everything we need in walking distance. 

Why would I even consider taking on a huge stone building, no matter how beautiful it is?? Then I realized how much of my mental and physical energy had already gone into that place over the last three days! 

I went back to listening to astrology and contemplating existence outside the confines of time and space.

Beyond the confines of the 3-D World

Einstein identified the fourth dimension as time, already a stretch to envision as a dimension, but the fifth is even harder to understand. Our civilization is so thoroughly engrossed in the gross world of matter that we can barely imagine it. Subtler worlds, if our physical science-based understanding gives them any credence at all, are only very slowly being discovered. Ganesh Baba often pointed to the discovery of electricity when talking about increasing understanding of subtle energies.

On the second day I spent with Ganesh Baba, he drew a diagram on a paper napkin that he told me encapsulated his entire cosmology. In brief, in an endless cycle, consciousness creates matter, and matter evolves into consciousness. 

(To align with the yogic teaching that good posture is essential to conscious evolution, he placed “Homo Erectus,” meaning having a straight back, above “Homo Sapiens.” The spine running up the center is replicated in the human body as the chakra system.)

Ganesh Baba described eight fields functioning in eight dimensions: matter, energy, space, time, life, mind, intelligence, and consciousness, each more subtle than the last. He identifies the fifth dimension as life. Indeed, neither time nor life is understood very well at this point of human evolution, and mind is an even greater mystery.

The Cycle of Synthesis is an attempt at a 2-D representation of an 8-D cosmos, a fractal universe, microcosm in macrocosm and vise versa. It is not static—rather, it is constantly in flow, twisting and turning, expanding and contracting, in an infinite number of directions, smaller and smaller, greater and greater, replicating itself in an infinite number of manifestations, each one connected to all the others.

As in a Moebius strip, the twists in the helix at the center of the drawing indicate shifts from one dimension to the next.

Passing through them is like water going down a drain. The water turns more and more quickly until suddenly it’s somewhere else. I think the transition human consciousness is going through is like that.

It’s interesting to consider that the perspective of the lower dimension is always subsumed into the perspective of the higher one, as when a point becomes a line, a line becomes a square, and a square becomes a cube.

If the point moves, a line exists. The line moves into a square, and the square moves to become a cube. Move the cube, and time exists. But beyond that?

What comes first? Consciousness or matter?

In most non-Western perspectives on existence, consciousness precedes matter. Even in the bible, God creates the earth. Assuming that only what can be measured is real is a recent twist in human understanding. It’s a limiting conception, though certainly a useful one in the practical world. If the great god of civilization, Science, wants to survive the coming twist, it will have to let go of the shores of time and space and greet the coming age of immeasurability with curiosity and eager anticipation.

I have less hope for the other worldwide religion of our era, the Economy, and its god, Money. I can easily see Mr. Moneybags falling off the edge of the earth to become a monster. An idea that particularly struck me during my studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute is that as dominant mythologies shift, for example from the “pagan” religions to Christianity, the old gods are forced underground, or off the edge of the earth, where they’re perceived as devils. It happens every time.

In Ganesh Baba’s model, following the downward arrow on the left, consciousness condenses into matter. Then, as it evolves back toward its source, more and more of the whole becomes comprehensible. As well as being reflected in the human body as the chakras, the Cycle of Synthesis mirrors Indian theory of the Yugas, a cycle of epochs in which the understanding of subtle things recedes as the earth moves away from the center of the universe, and increases again after it reaches its nadir and moves toward the center again.

So, if, as many astrologers are now saying, we are moving out of the Kali Yuga, the period of least understanding, into an era in which subtle energies will become more apparent, we will have to learn to navigate in the bio-psychic and intello-conscious fields in Baba’s diagram, the dimensions beyond space and time.

One way to do that is to begin by paying more attention to the interface, the twist, the liminal place, where fourth and fifth dimensional events show up in the 3-D world.

That’s why the dramatic incursion, in the form of that very attractive, very large three-dimensional stone house, into my fourth- and fifth-dimensional musings struck me. It was magic. That opportunity came into my physical world via a current of synchronicity. Its appearance overrode the laws of time and space, and I was very nearly beguiled.

What’s next?

Now, I’m on the lookout for magic. I’m asking a question before going to sleep, hoping for a response in my dreams. I’m actively looking for coincidence, actively seeking synchronicity.

So it was that I noticed some writing in blue chalk on the cobblestones of Rue Saint Louis as I walked Mocha one morning this week, when I had just begun this essay. The message is a little hard to read, but the words are in English, even though I found it in our beautiful French village.

Rue Saint Louis

PEACE AND LOVE

It’s still the answer.

Getting through hard times: a timely message from Ganesh Baba

Eve Neuhaus 26 Comments

Last Friday a friend and I went Emmaüs, the big thrift store in Carmaux, an old mining town near here. All thrift stores are magical, but this one has a particularly good record.

I headed straight for the bins of old framed pictures. I was hoping to find something to hang in a niche in the bathroom. I found it, and I also found this:

It’s a framed, hand-painted postcard. The delightful Indian gentleman riding right out of the frame is Ganesh Baba, the scientific psychedelic kriya yoga guru. He appeared in my life late in 1979, intending to stay three days. Instead, he stayed in my orbit for three years, staying three days at a time, until the dream was over.

Now, he roared back into my life on a motorbike to remind me of his core message.

Ganesh Baba was the real thing. Look him up. The Wikipedia entry is good though outdated. There is a newer, much more explicit book on Ganesh Baba and his teachings available now. Written by another student of Baba’s, Keith Lowenstein, it’s called Kriya Yoga for Self-Discovery.

Baba’s essential teachings can be encapsulated into four actions. He reminded me in my meditation today is that practicing the four will get you through the hardest of times. The full system is more complex, at least eight steps if not twelve. But the first four are what’s needed today.

Posture

Hold your head high, your spine straight, rib cage open.

There’s a reason the military and the old aristocracy made the straight back essential. It changes your perspective, among many other benefits. Your spinal cord is your antenna.

Reconnect with the physical world.

Breath

Your breath is your connection to the life force. The more air you can breath in and out, the better you will feel.

Reconnect with the biological world.

Attention

Practice controlling your attention. Meditation does this particularly well, but any serious practice, spiritual, mental, or physical. can achieve it. Those who can direct their attention are better able to maneuver in worlds beyond the physical.

Reconnect with the mental/psychological world.

Mantra

Using a mantra, a sound or phrase repeated internally or aloud, is a time-tested method for changing one’s vibration. Now more than ever, the world needs humans to raise their vibration.

OM on the in breath, OM on the out breath is simple and potent.

Reconnect with the spiritual world.

That’s it, and it’s enough. Practice each one separately and do them in combination and all together. It’s efficient and effective.

In fact, it’s magic.

The Day Before Everything Changes: Reflections on Friendship and Exile

Eve Neuhaus 18 Comments

I’m sure there are many reasons not to post the penultimate chapter of a work in progress before publication, but sometimes it feels to me as if the piece itself is begging me to get it out there now, on its own.

The chapter, “In the Company of Friends,” takes place on the day Austria gives up its independence and becomes part of Germany in March 1938, the day before Hitler marches triumphantly into Vienna, warmly welcomed by most Austrians.

I am posting it the day before Trump’s second inauguration.

The process and timing of writing Two Suitcases has always been more or less outside of my own volition. The parallels to events in the US aren’t something I look for and work at adding to my story. It’s the other way around. The story refuses to tell itself through me until the unfolding events push it to be told.

Those of you who’ve read Red Vienna or followed my blogs will be familiar with the characters and setting—I hope the chapter is meaningful even if you haven’t. Take the trouble to read it to the end, even if meeting the eight characters all at once is confusing. Don’t let the names of the Viennese foods trip you up either. They’re all described earlier in the story.

In brief, the young people in the group who come together in the chapter are all Social Democratic activists. For the four years covered in the second volume of Two Suitcases, they’ve been working underground to keep their vision of a kinder, more thoughtful, more equitable world alive. As Austria capitulates, most of them plan to go into exile.

Chapter 52

In the company of friends

Friday, March 11, 1938

early evening

Vienna

Gisi can hear the sound of Austrian State Radio everywhere as she hurries over to Max’s workshop, a covered bowl in a basket on her arm. There’d just been a radio announcement that the Plebiscite on Austrian independence had been canceled. Chancellor Schuschnigg would be making a major address to the country any minute, and Gisi wants to be with Max to hear it.

She’s not alone. Within the hour, nudged by a phone call or a knock on the door, everyone else in the group decides that they too would like to listen to the Chancellor’s speech in the company of friends. 

At his shop, Max and Leo move a big table close to the best radio, and the others bring eight odd chairs and stools to put around it. Near the table’s center is Gisi’s bowl of Kaiserschmarrn, its sweet fragrance surrounding it, a jar of applesauce beside it. 

Toni is warming some rind souppe on the coal stove. Its beefy aroma soon fills the little workshop and drifts into the store. On the workbench is a collection of bowls, cups, and spoons that Max brought down from his apartment, along with his last three cans of pickled herring.

Gert slices the loaf of black bread she brought and is putting it on the table when Hugo enters the shop with a smile and a swagger. 

“Look!” he cries when all eyes are on him. He pulls a bottle from his bag. “Slivovitz! A full bottle of everybody’s favorite plum brandy! What is there to save it for?” Eight glasses and cups are quickly found and filled.

Leo contributes a block of Bergkäse cheese. Felix, looking apologetic, sets out a bit of butter, an almost empty jar of honey, and half a jar of Powidl.

“What do you expect?” he asks. “I’ve been imagining leaving my home every day for weeks. Why would I have any food there?”

The crowning glory of the table is an Obstkuchen, a buttery cake that Anna baked and decorated with dried apricots and cherries as the rays of a canned peach sun. 

Felix is the last of them putting soup in his bowl when Max calls out, “Listen! Schuschnigg is about to speak!” as he turns up the volume of the radio. The music, a symphony by Beethoven, stops abruptly and the dignified voice of the Chancellor comes through.

“Women and men of Austria,

This day has placed us in a tragic and decisive situation. I have to give my Austrian fellow countrymen the details of the events of today.

The German Government today handed to President Miklas an ultimatum, with a time limit, ordering him to nominate as chancellor a person designated by the German Government, and to appoint members of a cabinet on the orders of the German Government. Otherwise German troops would invade Austria.

I declare before the world that the reports launched in Germany concerning disorders by the workers, the shedding of streams of blood, and the creation of a situation beyond the control of the Austrian Government are lies from A to Z. President Miklas has asked me to tell the people of Austria that we have yielded to force since we are not prepared, even in this terrible situation, to shed blood. We have decided to order the troops to offer no resistance.

I say goodbye with the heartfelt wish that God will protect Austria. God save Austria!”

The symphony resumes. No one says anything—they’re all in shock, though surely the announcement was inevitable. 

Max rocks back and forth on his chair. 

Gisi feels her tears rising. 

Anna’s anger shows in her eyebrows and trembling lips.

Hugo begins to speak a couple of times but stops. 

Beethoven’s music fills the shop.

Finally, Hugo raises his glass. “May God, or fortune, or whatever you believe in, protect us!” They each take a sip of the brandy.

Max looks at the table. “Let’s not waste this beautiful meal. Eat!”

“Wait,” cries Gert, “I have another toast.” She raises her glass again. “To friendship!”

Anna adds “And peace!” and they drink again.

Max glances at his empty glass. “Hugo, another round?” and Hugo pours out the last of the brandy.

Leo starts the toasts again. “To solidarity!”

“And to a kinder, more thoughtful, more equitable world!” adds Toni, and the last of the brandy is gone.

With bittersweet slowness, one by one, they pick up their spoons and begin to eat the rich, warm soup. 

After savoring her second spoonful, Gisi speaks. “This is so good, Toni. But why did you make it today? Rinde soupe, especially with so much meat in it,is Sunday fare at our house.”

Toni smiles ruefully. “I made it for Leo. Before the Chancellor announced his resignation, I was planning to take it over to his place. I thought, I thought…” she stops and looks at Leo, who has already finished his soup and is wondering if there is more. Now he looks at her, his companion for so many years, and his eyes fill with sadness. She continues, “I thought it might be our last meal together—for a while, I mean—or our last meal in Vienna. Oh, I don’t know what I mean.”

Anna looks around the table. “It’s true, isn’t it? This will probably be our last meal together for most of us.”

“You aren’t the only one to feel that way,” Hugo says. “It’s why we all came.” He picks up a plate and fills it with cheese, bread, and several pieces of pickled herring. The others follow, until nothing is left at the center of the table but the sweets.

Suddenly, flickering light pours through the small window at the front of the shop and the boom of chanting voices shakes the room. Max runs to look out. 

“It’s our neighbors,” he says, returning to the table. “Marching with torches and chanting Heil Hitler.”

“Oh, God,” Anna replies. “Why is it always so hard to believe the worst until it’s staring you in the face?”

“Listen,” says Gisi. “I have an idea. After we’re done eating…”

“If anyone can still eat,” Anna responds.

Gisi looks at her. “Try,” she says. “When our stomachs are full of this delicious food, I want us to do an exercise I did in one of my psych classes. Max, do you have some paper and pencils here?”

Max, his mouth full of bread spread with butter and Powidl, nods yes and points to the workshop.

“Anna, since you’re not going to eat, why don’t you help me out by finding the paper and cutting or tearing it into pieces about as big as…” she pauses to think, “as big as an Ausweis.” 

“I’m eating,” Anna says, picking up a hefty piece of herring, putting it in her mouth, and chewing it slowly. “But I’ll do it later.”

The light and sound of the marchers fades into the distance.

“I suppose Miklas is in charge now that Schuschnigg has resigned,” Hugo muses. “Though Hitler probably has a successor in mind for the Chancellor’s position. Or maybe he’ll be Chancellor himself.”

Gert puts down her fork with a clatter. “Let’s not talk about it, Hugo. Let’s not talk politics for once.”

Hugo looks surprised and a little hurt. “Okay, what should we talk about then?”

Gisi is ready. “Let’s talk about the exercise I want to do.” She smiles as brightly as she can manage. “My professor gave us the assignment to make a list, in order of importance to each of us personally, of the five things we think matter the most.”

“In what sense?” asks Gert. “Do you mean things like money and housing? Or actions like pleasing your parents or doing work that makes you happy?”

“Yes, all of that, as well as qualities like patience and perseverance and generosity.”

“Okay, I’m ready to get the pieces of paper,” Anna gets up. “How many will we need?”

Gisi wrinkles her nose. “I think four per person will do. Max, can you find us all pencils or pens? Shall we do my exercise before cutting into Anna’s beautiful cake or after we eat it?” 

“After,” says Felix, starting to clear the table. No one objects.

“Max, is there water down here? I’ll wash these plates and we can use them for the cake,” Leo offers. 

A few minutes later the group settles down to make their lists, some at the big table, others scattered throughout the store, Max at his table in the workshop. Silence settles over them like snow. 

Gert is the first to finish. “What shall we do with our lists when they’re done?”

“Put them on the table where everyone can see them,” Gisi answers. “There’s a second part of the exercise coming.”

When all the lists are finished and everyone has read theirs aloud, she says, “Now, on your second piece of paper, write down an action anyone can take to create a world in which the ideas or things you most value can be realized in their largest sense. For example, to promote the value of ‘Peace on earth,’ you could write ‘try to always be kind’ for the second round.” 

“I get it,” Toni says. “I wrote down ‘my friends’ as a personal value, and I can think of dozens of ways to would promote friendship generally, like ‘appreciate everybody’s uniqueness’ or ‘think of others before yourself.’”

“That’s it. Try to make the action as universally useful as possible.” 

An hour later, and after another round of the exercise, Felix is picking up the plates again. Every crumb of the cake is gone. Hugo is copying out the same list eight times onto eight pieces of paper. Each of the friends signs their name eight times. 

Before they hug and say long goodbyes, they each have a copy of the actions tucked away in a safe place.

Take care of the old and the young, and those who have less than you  –  Gisi

Keep your sense of humor  –  Max

Be ready to let go. Remember what really matters  –  Anna

Hold your head high  –  Leo

Believe in magic  –  Gert

Breathe  –  Felix

Choose kindness  –  Toni 

Hold onto your vision of a better world – Hugo

Such a Dream

Eve Neuhaus 9 Comments

While I was staying at my daughter’s place in California, I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down this dream.

July 12, 2024

I had such a dream.

In the dream, I owned a huge, rambling, falling down house, though some of the rooms were still good. A woman in her forties of North African or mixed-race descent—with light brown skin and beautiful curly black hair—came to the door with her teen-aged daughter. A group of other women and girls, all in long dresses, were with her. She explained to me that they could fix up my house, and I invited them in.

Room by room, they created a series of magical spaces full of color, filled with marvelously compelling furniture and objects, and cloths draped everywhere, each one unique. I went looking for my own room, and I found it, spacious, airy, comfortable, elegant. Oddly, I realized that the room was an illusion, even in the dream, but I loved it anyway. Next to it was Tom’s room, his piano in the middle of it. I knew he would be pleased.

I walked through room after room until I came to the end of the house. Through the window of the last room I could see a jumble of metal stairs and incomplete infrastructure, piled up, all in ruins. I realized it was part of my old house.

I set out to look for my own room again, but it wasn’t there. Instead I found a sort of throne room where all the women were sitting. When I entered, the head woman approached me, drew two longish sticks from a pot, and gave them to me. They were tipped with large cannabis buds.

I was happy but still looking for my room when I woke up. The place was vivid in my mind, rich and magical like Arabia of old or India of pre-colonial days.

I’m still feeling happy.

A few days after the dream, I had my best birthday ever, filled with family, friends, and food.

A few days after my birthday, Joe Biden stepped down, and Kamala Harris stepped up.

I hope dreams come true.

Just when you’re not expecting it…

Eve Neuhaus 2 Comments

Three days ago a friend suggested I join a Facebook group I’d never heard of, the Dull Women’s Club, so I could read some of the wonderful stories ordinary women from all over the world have posted. After about half an hour of reading, I dashed off an introduction to myself and my quiet world here in rural France. Who knew that a couple days later that post would have so many likes (12.5k this morning) and that it would lead to having contact with so many remarkable women? What an incredible experience.

I spent most of the next two days responding to the comments. I wanted to respond to every single one—so many of them touched my heart so deeply. What’s amazing about the stories is their ordinariness.

My teacher Alice O. Howell‘s book The Dove in the Stone is subtitled Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace, and that’s been my path ever since I first read it. I even facilitated a long-running discussion group about the book at my dining room table on Thursday mornings. But even though I was exploring the book every week and had a reasonable understanding of it, I can remember the exact moment that its importance sank into my bones.

We had a huge house in California then, very different from the little one we live in now. One or two of our five kids were always in college then, causing a major drain on our finances, so I cleaned the house myself. One day I’d climbed up to dust a high shelf and I was thinking about how to present the next chapter in The Dove and the Stone the next day. I picked up a small vase and was turning it in my hand to get the dust out of the cracks when it struck me.

Our big house

The understanding hit me in the heart like an electric shock and then rippled through my body. This is it. This is what I’m here for, to see the sacred in the commonplace. I had to climb down and make a cup of tea.

Our little house in France

So, when I came across the Facebook group filled with introductions to ordinary women my heart filled with joy. For the second time in my life I felt that I’d truly met my tribe. (The first was when I was 12 and went to an art and music camp for the first time.) But this time the tribe is hundreds of thousands of women.

Suddenly, as a result of the opportunity of meeting so many people through the facebook group, Red Vienna, is selling well, and lots of people are reading my blog.

On top of that, I found an outstanding narrator to for the audiobook version and her first sample arrived in my mailbox this morning.

I cannot express my gratitude. It’s over the top.

A useful practice in times of change

Eve Neuhaus 31 Comments

In the middle of this very very hot, very very dry summer, when we would stay inside our wonderfully cool little house all day every day, Ella, our lively little cat, was eight months old, and Mocha, our sensitive and often reactive dog, was ten years old.

One day the shit hit the fan.

Mocha was on her bed, sleeping lightly. Ella came flying into the room, skittered across the wood floor, attacked the dog’s tail with one flying paw, claws fully extended, turned, and zoomed out of the room. But Mocha was ready. Suddenly the dog had the cat cornered under the coat rack, and her jaws were closing around Ella’s ribs.

I shrieked, shouting at Mocha in my fiercest voice, pushing her away from the cat, and sending her to her bed. There was no need really; Mocha knew where to go, and as usual, she seemed genuinely remorseful.

But the incident was over the top for me. All afternoon, I stormed around, imagining the quiet home in the country I’d find for Mocha, designing in my mind the sign I’d hang at the vet’s and the Facebook post I’d write. I was done with her, this difficult, traumatized animal who’d shown up in our lives just when we arrived in our idyllic new setting four years ago. Despite some good progress, she still terrorized tourists, lurched and bared her teeth at moving wheels of all sorts, and snarled at children who approached her uninvited.

I’d had enough. Which picture would I choose for the ad?

Meanwhile, Ella was fine, relaxing on her chair next to Mocha’s bed, stretching, washing herself.

As these things go – more and more frequently it seems – when I sat down and opened my computer, there was an offer to watch a short series of videos on working with sensitive animals. Needless to say, I watched them.

For a little over a month now, I’ve been practicing a new form of meditation that I learned from the series, which is about James French’s Trust Technique. After 40 years of practicing more or less the same technique I’d learned from Ganesh Baba, I feel like I’m being offered a promotion. The open-eyed, focused Buddhist-style practice French uses takes the inner skills I’ve honed all these years and redirects them outward, slowly refining my awareness of my own state of mind and Mocha’s. I’m only on the second lesson of the paid series, and my relationship with her has changed.

I haven’t replaced my Ganesh-Baba-style kriya yoga practice with the new practice – I do both; they enhance each other – and I look forward to both my private practice and my twenty minutes of meditation with Mocha with renewed enthusiasm.

Based on Reiki, the trick to meditating and eventually cooperating with animals is to master moving into a deeply peaceful state of presence easily, a stillness without thought, that they find comforting. Now, using my attention increasingly skillfully and progressing at Mocha’s pace, I’m learning to communicate that peace to her. She likes it very much, and so does Ella, who regularly volunteers to join in our experiments.

Today, as I drifted back into ordinary consciousness after a particularly satisfying session with both dog and cat, it occurred to me that the skills I’m gaining may be very useful in these increasingly chaotic times. I’m practicing being undisturbed by passing cars, by Tom passing through the room, being unruffled by feelings of failure or frustration, detached from thoughts of the future and the past. I sit on the floor next with Mocha and Ella, breathing softly, fully present.

And all around me, there is peace.

The loss of story – further reflections on the crumbling of perceptual boundaries

Eve Neuhaus 7 Comments

When I consider the lessons of our divestment over the past several years, the house on McCollum Street, the house on Park Street, Mama Ganache, a lifetime of acquisitions – I find I always return to the center: what I am, I take with me.

What I am has nothing to do with the things and stories that surround me. It doesn’t need even one suitcase to contain it, much less two. When nostalgia for what I had begins to fill me, wherever I am, I can go to my heart and feel at home with who I am, and that is enough.

Ceiling tile for sale on a street in Morocco

It’s where I find hope, where I can recover that sense of eager anticipation the Hathors recommend in these times of failing expectations and beliefs, the loss of story, and crumbling perceptual boundaries.

One of the seminal books of my hippie years was a typewritten channeled teaching called Season of Changes. I’ve forgotten the details of the predictions, but I’m sure they’ve been borne out or will be soon enough. It was a dark view of the future, full of cataclysm and apocalypse. Written in question and answer format, the last responses concern how to respond to the changes. As I recall, the advice most forcefully given was to practice meditation.

It’s comforting to imagine that more people than ever are doing that, at least in my own bubble. It’s less comforting to remember how tiny a percentage of the world’s population my bubble contains.

But it’s sound advice. When the now threatening storm of storms is full upon us, when that moment of personal and collective apocalypse that we all feel coming finally arrives, it’s the meditators who will be able to hold the rudder.

Storm coming in at our house in Cordes

Meditation takes you to your center, to the center, the one we all have in common. It takes you out of the chaotic whirl of stories to the place of no story, where energy is conserved instead of fueling the miasma of outer experience.

It takes you beyond imagination, beyond the limits of space and time, and beyond the singular focus of our culture on the physical: on acquisition (growth vs. maintenance), on hierarchy (dominion vs. sharing), beyond your own little bit of the apocryphal elephant.

Letting go of the world as we know it, the world of perception, this particular consensus reality, is necessarily heart-breaking. It’s painful to separate from the things and people and stories we love, and love is, after all, what it’s all about.

The tricky part is to connect love to the universal rather than the particular.

And that’s where meditation can take you.

Ninety days outside the Schengen area – sacred geometry in Morocco

Eve Neuhaus 2 Comments

It was in the Nejjarine Museum of Wood Arts in Fès that the thought struck me. The chaos of the crumbling medina, the vibrancy of the souks, the noise, the pollution, the exploding energy of the colors, and the sheer quantity of stuff –

Souk, medina, Marrakech

– is beautifully balanced by prevalence of the purposeful geometry, sacred geometry, everywhere.

That’s why Morocco is so enchanting.

Souk, medina, Fès, Morocco

Doorway, Marrakech Musèe

Wall, Palais el Mokri

Islam takes the prohibition of worshipping graven images seriously, and discourages figurative art. Like all of life, art should be dedicated to God, and God is only describable as essence. Geometry is essence.

Fountain, Palais Glaoui, Fès

Who can resist being centered by such design?

All my years of studying sacred geometry, beginning even before my Ganesh Baba days, and then Dan Winter and most deeply with Alice O. Howell, peaked at that moment in the museum. I stood at the center of a ideally proportioned room surrounded by mandalas, exquisite symmetry, perfect curves, rhythmic repetition, and profoundly satisfying rectangles and squares.

I wanted to take dozens of pictures, but photography was not allowed, so I was forced to confront the serene beauty of that room face on. It was transformative.

Since then I’ve consciously attuned myself to noticing and letting the geometry take me in.

Palais el Mokri

Medina, Marrakech

Palais el Mokri, Fes

Pastry, souk, medina, Fès

Even contemporary Moroccan design uses the elements of sacred geometry to create beautiful calm spaces, as exemplified by our current Airbnb in the new part of Marrakech.

Magical!

Detail, lamp, Marrakech apartment

Detail, lamp, Marrakech apartment

Dining room table and chairs

Dishes

Bedspread

Gate to new apartment building

Light fixture in our Airbnb apartment in Tnine, Ourika