The following was inspired by the last two online Dave Oshana events, “Déjà Vu: How Many Times Have You Done This Before?” and “The Challenge of the Dying Light in the Final Moments of Life on Earth.” They are not transcripts but paraphrases, combined with my own thoughts and interpretations:  a Horsley cover of an Oshana tune, including improvisatory riffs & new lyrics.

Part One: The Dead Zone

“I sleep in the daytime / I work in the nighttime

I might not ever get home”

—Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”

A Twilight Zone of Strange Attractions

On an island in Finland, a gathering of souls is experienced, not through words but through a feeling, an impression in the bodies, an impression of entering the zone. A space is created that allows for clarity. One of the ways clarity arrives is via an absence of people. There are no people here, for seven days and seven nights, deeply immersed in Nature. After a while, one begins to hear the multidimensional hum of life force.

Like Neo, following a white rabbit into a noisy night club, I was called to the island by a question: the question of why I am here, in this life. The answer can’t be found in the world: the matrix only tells us who and what we are not. The language of the heart cannot be conveyed with words, symbols, or soundbytes. What I am engaged in on this island is reaching a state in which every cell in my body jumps with joy and cries “Yes!” Someday, perhaps, that song will go on forever.

The space beyond that Finnish line is a space for reconnecting to the force that brought me there. It is the same force that once brought me out of the womb, that caused my parents to conceive me. It is in the nature of my body, which belongs to the Earth. But it is buried beneath many layers encrusted upon me by a society that is not designed for human beings. When those layers are removed, they give off stinky toxins and can cause bad behaviors.

Someone who is released from a dark dungeon after spending his entire life there should not be expected to be on their best behavior.

 

 

The Signal

If the ship of humanity goes down, we all go down. If neurons in the brain (or the gut) contract and fail to fire, my muscles go into spasm and the whole body collapses. Collectively, we are moving into a state of entropy, disappearing ever-deeper into fantasy worlds. To pull out of the nose dive, the life force in all of us needs to start communicating with itself. Distribution of energy and awareness, via embodiment. All the parts awakening and connecting, as within so without. Awakening by connecting.

We all have particular characteristics, a natural way of functioning. We all have a natural self and an unnatural self. We struggle daily with our unnatural identities: which emotions to suppress and which to simulate in order to be socially accepted. But when we lie to ourselves like this, we split ourselves in two.

We have been programmed not to see the truth we are seeking: there is a character inside each of us, hiding the truth from us. Souls with multiple personalities, we seek answers in all the wrong places and then shrug our shoulders and say, “I dunno.”

Though we may only realize it in rare moments of déjà vu, we have all been here before. These moments of intense feeling and presence on that unpeopled island take us to the edge of knowing, into a twilight zone of strange attractions. They allow us the time and space to drink slowly of ourselves, to tune into a signal which we rode into existence.

This signal is trying to organize, harmonize, and mobilize us.

 

Course Correction

Neurons are designed to transmit whatever they receive, however discordant. This makes them easy to manipulate. As neurons, we must learn to discern.

If we develop the discernment not to react to a particular sound that is inhospitable and antithetical to life, the discordant note ceases to bounce back and forth between us, giving the neurons a clear, open connection. This allows for a very subtle change, a course correction. The discordant virus can then dissolve and be no more.  

“Resist not evil”: perhaps the most overlooked saying of Jesus, because the hardest to practice. That quality of non-reactivity, of grace, is a natural effortlessness that declines to participate in or propagate what is discordant.

Grace allows a neuron, through non-reactivity, to propagate the harmonious carrier signal of the surrounding neurons. Adhering to the principle of good comedy, Dave (the island emcee) makes something that is only partially conscious register, in an epiphany of recognition. This allows for a coming together of souls, a communion of consciousness that brings collated information together. It requires a different mode of reception-transmission to feel and perceive this communion. We are jamming in the name of the Lord.

Unlike psychotherapy, which often takes decades to cover a very small distance, this jamming is how formerly conscious beings become conscious again. It requires feeling the quietness on the downside of our heartbeats, entering between the spaces, into a death-like dimension.

On an island in Finland, a gathering of souls is experienced, not through words but through a feeling, an impression in the bodies, an impression of entering the zone.

 

Part Two: The Thing You Call Enlightenment

“I changed my hairstyle / So many times now

I don’t know what I look like”                

—Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”

A Dream of Dave

In 2000, the story goes, Dave got enlightened. The myth of enlightenment is that an individual loses his ego, after which his shit smells of roses and he never has to have sex again. The truth is simply this: Dave experienced a major change and now some of us are interested in that change. This may be because we are connected to whatever happened to Dave in some way. You are connected to that thing you call “enlightenment.” Your idea of Dave is “enlightenment.”

Dave underwent a change that couldn’t be described, and then he went off in search of an image that would be identifiable to others. The image that came to him was “enlightenment.” The word is ours, not Dave’s. The image is a dream image assumed by “Dave” to communicate with us in our dream. To deliver the message that will wake us up from the mind-spell of linear time, Dave has to infect our thinking until we pop out of our minds. Copy that? Infect our thinking.

Waking someone up from a dream means becoming one of the characters in the dream, in order to be recognized and heard.

 

 

End Game: the Many Iterations of Humanity

In spiritual circles, people spend a lot of time looking upward, grasping for the sky. They don’t spend so much time looking downward at the earth. Without the requisite grounding, however, our upward aspirations are doomed. There is a discrimination against nature in our culture, and in spirituality. There is a split within us between reality and image.[1]

When Dave looks at me, he sees many versions of me, like images between two mirrors, extending to infinity. His aim is to gently blast through the countless layers until he lands on the other side, and touches down with that soul.

He asks me to look at how I am situated now and how I am moving. Five seconds ago, in another dimension, perhaps another me was moving and situated in exactly this way. In that other dimension, the other me is now doing what I will be doing here, in this dimension, five seconds from now. In just such a way, throughout many parallel dimensions, humanity may be destroying itself and recreating itself, over and over, as in a video game.

 

Dissed of Illusion

I like to think I do not scare easily; but some of the things Dave has been saying lately have infected my dreams and turned them into nightmares. The transition from false beliefs to reality is disillusionment, an uncomfortable process.

If I contemplate my death, as I do daily, that my time here, on this earth, is running out, I may experience a visceral jolt. If I expand that outward, to the thousands of generations before us, to humanity in its totality, I see it reaching its end point, too. I once dreamed such a thing: the panic, horror, and despair among human beings when they realized that the entire species was dying was indescribable.

Dave recently said that, when humanity destroys itself on this level, there will no longer be any way for the human spirit to incarnate. This idea is in Strieber’s The Key, a book I once considered the most profound work I ever read, but which I now see as dangerous disinformation (even if true).  Is Dave infecting my thinking with impossible, Elon Muskish scenarios so my thinking mechanism burns itself out and my awareness drops out of the simulation, into the desert of the real?

If so, will he even still be there for me to thank him? Will I?

 

Part Three: When the Spirit Pops

“Transmit the message / To the receiver

Hope for an answer someday”

—Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”

The Dying Light

Dave says that our whole life is determined not by our thinking but by our sensations, and that sensations are the movements of the human spirit in and through our bodies.

This, presumably, is what he means by our natural self. For us to drop into our natural self, we first need to feel safe and secure, warm and comfortable, appreciated, accepted, non-threatened. That felt-sense of who we are goes all the way back to the womb, our fundamental experience of existing. So what exactly does it take to get us into this state?

Recently, in the past two or three years, I have noticed that whenever I am with someone who describes an accident they had and the wounds they suffered, I feel it viscerally in my body, as if it were happening to me in that moment. Mirror neurons, affective empathy. As parts of the human race, it is impossible not to feel the pain and suffering of others.

This is the challenge of seeing the dying light of humanity. It is inseparable from seeing humanity’s light. Awakening is no picnic.[2]

Seeing the end of all this, the end of our life and of humanity’s, may free us up from the pressure of other people’s opinions, but it does not reduce our capacity for pain; far from it. The human shit pile does not smell like roses. But still, we must breathe deeply of it.

 

Life During Wartime

Despite the inhospitable circumstances on this planet, Dave says in some sense we chose to be here, in this war-torn zone of the dead. Do I believe that? Not really, but I live it. When I work in the thrift store, I choose to enter willingly into a difficult, often unpleasant environment to deal with lost souls seeking a bargain to ease their pain. Fortunately, one thing I can always offer is a good deal.

What I do believe, because I know it, is that, if I am here for anything, it is to make meaningful connections, and that, the more connections I make, the more sense my life makes. And it does seem to be accumulative, like a circuit board being illuminated.

Dave says the revolution we are waiting for is a revolution of the blood, a movement away from a fear-flooded nervous system to a state of non-reactivity in which I can look the other—even the devil himself—in the eye calmly, and say, “How can I help you?” I am certainly getting some good practice in, though as far as I know I have yet to meet Satan.

Dave says that when the spirit pops out, like a banana from its peel, our inner war ends, but that following the spirit doesn’t mean becoming a model citizen. It is a matter of timing, he says: there can be no pushing. Only the spirit that is unfettered by fear can move freely and spontaneously and deliver itself on time. This certainly echoes my sense that, for all my efforts and visions and achievements, my life has essentially been a game of waiting.

 

Samurai Gospel

Eventually, I suppose, we all get to feel the fate of humanity resting on our shoulders, because there is only one set of shoulders for it to rest on. We all get to connect with every other soul “out there,” without sucking up the “bad energy” into ourselves, as clear channels for eons of shit to pass through. After that, who knows, maybe roses will bloom.

Dave says all Samurais fall on their swords in the end. He says there is no good news because we have all come here to die, but at least we do not have to die in vain. Even if this iteration of human existence fails and ends in destruction, he says, the how and why of it will be saved, and passed onto the next. This makes us like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: the only cup we get to drink is a bitter one. It is definitely not our first choice, but it’s the only one we have, so at least that makes it easy, even while unimaginably hard.

Based on this reasoning, everything leads not to death but to resurrection. Eventually, in some far-off iteration that is happening right now, as we speak, the human race will jam together.

 

Postscript: “I Don’t See Any ‘Method,’ At All, Sir”

As a method, Dave removes himself. No Buddha, no killing, no you or I, only the road on which we meet.

This method makes this blog post a sort of involuntary involution, a turning in on itself, into the downside of its own heartbeat to beat the drum of its own death toll. It is not about Dave but nor is it about me, exactly. It is about the connection between & betwixt the two, the vesica piscis, the threshold of the image he created (was created out of the residue of him) for me to pass through, like the mirror that swallows Thomas and spits out Neo.

Trying to assemble this self-disassembling machine forces me to recognize how little I understand what I am writing about, and by that token, how near or far I am to what does understand. It challenges me to bridge the space between the me that stares at the surface of the image and says “I dunno,” and another me—however many layers in or universes away—who passes through it, without a ripple, as a pure sensation of knowing.

Apocalypse—now.

****

[1] I recently answered a question, regarding the financial cost of Oshana events. I include it here because I suspect it may also be a stumbling block for others: It is important to remember that money is never only money; i.e., when we think we cannot afford something, or something is over or underpriced, there is a whole matrix of beliefs, values, and assumptions within which that judgment is occurring. My current perspective is that what occurs on that island in Finland, on Oshana retreats, is so far beyond financial remuneration that it is reminiscent of the stinky rich trying to buy their way into heaven: Dave puts a (reasonable) price on the priceless. At the same time, I do use my own solvency or lack of it as a gauge as to whether to attend, or have in the past, because money can also be a measure of our rootedness in our lives/the world, which itself can be a measure for our readiness to access the higher-deeper dimensions of existence (admittedly, the illegitimately rich are rarely ready). I feel that my current position of just earning enough disposable income to attend the retreats is not coincidental, but a measure of having got my priorities straightened out. It’s the material foundation for real transformation. 

[2] Awakening means turning the body into a dowsing rod that points to water, deep below the earth. It means letting our spirit lead us, and that entails entering into conflict with the life that society, other people, have decided is right for us. It means being sensitive to all the distortions that have been inflicted upon us and that we, in reaction, have inflicted upon others and on ourselves.

Next Dave Oshana online event, March 8th, 10 am Pacific Time: Merge Point 2020: The Deepest Way Possible to Come Together!

Unrelated addendum: