Carl Sagan Toked

After verifying the credibility of this piece, I am happy to share with you this epiphany. So nice to know I'm not...


"Scientist Carl Sagan smoked pot. "He believed the drug enhanced his creativity and insights," wrote Keay Davidson in the *San Francisco Examiner,* quoting Sagan's biographer Lester Grinspoon. "If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense," Sagan said, "or that we can become one with the universe, I may disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say 'Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!'"

Forward and Past

I am so fortunate to have gone to a northern California summer camp in the 1960's and 70's called Camp Beaverbrook; I don't know why people laugh when I say that, but I was able to return to that hallowed ground last weekend and re-connect with a youthful, empowered part of my self that I am most grateful to integrate into my adult life.

I was at camp from the age of 8 to 15, for three weeks a summer. They were the happiest days of my childhood and the time I looked forward to all year long. No parents, no chores, expect K.P. and keeping your bunk clean...great friends to be made every year and others to reawaken with. Once puberty hit, camp became about who you'd sit next to at campfire , or who might ask you to dance on Saturday night. I felt my first love at camp, and my first heartache when I never heard from him again after camp!

Last August I Googled my camp and lo and behold, found a Yahoo group site with a 160 members! At the time I joined, the site had been up for two and something years and there were 4000 posts of memories and pranks and stupid camp song lyrics. And photographs! Since that time, I have been looking forward to the weekend now past, when a few dozen of us came together on the same land and had a camp out. Great food and drink, silly camp songs and campfire skits, walking through the hills to the old riflery range...a few intrepid spirits even went for a creek walk!

Of course things have changed there, Beaverbrook closed in 1985 and became a RV campground a few years ago. Things look different, but the sensory aspects of scent and sound and sight are still evocative of a halcyon period 35 years past. I've dreamed of camp for as many years and am so happy and grateful to have made that dream come true. Who ever said you cant' go home again didn't have a Beaverbrook, a place of the child where my spiritual roots are dug into ground as sacred to me as any I've ever walked.


Namaste`,
Connie

Love

There is no greater power on Earth than LOVE. It lives in your 4th chakra which includes your heart, your lungs, your breasts...don't ever stop loving. Stop thinking. Put your mind in your heart.

Don't ever be afraid to open your heart one more time. If it breaks, it's only cracked open further and bigger to give more love. Forgive those who have hurt you. Remember those you have loved you. I walk on this earth, knowing that I am loved and that I am a whole being as a result. Blessed be. Glory be to God.

Goddess

I dreamt last night that I sat at a table with a man and a woman: soul guides. They instructed me that now was the time to decide what my next artistic creation was going to be. I told them I had been thinking about creating goddess wands...stick with beads and fetishes to help empower women in the type of Goddess that they most relate to...i.e., Goddes of Love, of Home, of Healing. The guides eyes lit up and they said, "this is what you must do".

I am blown away by the level of Divine Guidance I receive.

For this I am very grateful.

Namaste`
Connie

Words of Wisdom

Words of Wisdom from Sri Swami Satchidananda.

“Clean Up Your Karma”

“When you encounter your karma, you have to go through it. But remember, it’s not there to bring you suffering. The pain that you go through when purging out the karma is wanted, because without that pain you cannot clean up your karma. So, if we know that the suffering is for our benefit, we will welcome it; we will happily undergo it--we won’t deny it. Pain is not given to you by somebody else. What we sow, we reap: we are the cause for our pain or for our happiness. So if pain comes, accept it. Say, ‘It is going to wash off my karma. It’s going to scrub away my karma.’

God bless you. Om Shanthi, Shanthi, Shanthi.”

Spiritual Madness and Redemption

It was into the shadows that I descended back in February when I set out to find what part of myself needed healing. I had been pulling the Black Panther card from Jamie Sam's and David Carson's Medicine Card deck for at least a year. The black panther was part of the Caddo tribe culture in the bayous of Louisiana, with her medicine of facing our fears and dark behaviors. "Darkness is the place for seeking and finding answers, for accepting healings, and for accessing the hidden light in truth.

She was a silent night stalker, waiting patiently for an initiate to seek out her protection for ventures into the darker recesses of the psyche and personality. She was the courageous totem/guide who took me into the depths of a spiritual madness that characterized a passionate foray into the realm of sexual obsession and she is the totem/guide who brought me back out again. Granted, I was temporarily broken and battered by the painful end of that particular adventure, but ultimately, I am DEEPLY GRATEFUL for the lessons I learned, the profound healing of old and buried wounds, and especially for the protection of grace in the form of Black Panther Medicine.

Namaste`

Phoenix

Like a phoenix rises from the ashes, I'm at least conscious enough to know that I am in the process of healing. I see myself amid the ashes at this point, but gaining headway everyday with a good measure of peace and calm.

I began the Bhagavad Gita on Sunday evening and have found great comfort there. I have created a new mantra for myself that keeps me focused on God, which is the essential point of the Gita.

All that I need dwells in me.
All that I am dwells in my heart.
All in my heart dwells in God.
I honor my Godly self.

The Gita also teaches that to do our work without attachment to reward is the way to keep ones focus on God. I do my work because it is what I do, not for gain or ego or reward. This is a novel concept to our western minds, but it's a goal I'd like to attain.

I've been saying for years now that my purpose in life is to learn the lessons of the human form, regardless of how many life times that takes. The ultimate goal however, is to be set free from the birth-life-death cycle and be absorbed into the "God" consciousness that is infinite Divine energy in the universe. If I'd found the Bhagavad Gita before now, I would have known that my theology is Hindu.

WHO KNEW, HINDU?

For this I am deeply grateful.

Connie