The Vibe Box

A few days ago, after a particularly tasty evening with my wife Chameli, I place this post up on Facebook Before going to bed:

“I have had many many fantastic teachers in my life. A super abundance. No one and nothing comes close to the woman who is now asleep in my bed. My wedding ceremony has become the sat guru, the salvation, the muse, the crack through which the divine shines through.”

When I woke up the next morning, there was the usual like offerings of people who liked the post as well as observations. One man had the vulnerability and courage to post this on facebook:

“Thank you Arjuna for this sharing, I feel like [I'm] in adjoin of a choice which is between feeling envious of what you have and I don’t, or instead to choose that ‘I want that too,’ and, as you show, it is possible….

I was touched.

Over the next days, I got several more messages like this from men: vulnerable men, honest men, rare and courageous men. They came in as private messages on Facebook or through our website, and they all said basically the same thing:

“I read your Facebook post. I want what you have. Show me how to get it.”

So, friends, here it is. The small guide on how to worship a woman, and why it’s the wisest thing that a man can do. First of all, lets pop a few very understandable doubts that you might have. I’m familiar with all of them.

1. “I’m wounded and hurt in my relationships to the feminine.”

So am I, dear brother, so am I. My parents divorced in a hard way when I was four. I grew up alone with my mother. She did her very best to provide for me, but she was miserable and insecure. By the time I started to have relationships with women for myself in my early young adulthood, I learned that I had a mountain of resentments, fears and separation in my relation to the feminine.

2. “Arjuna, you’re lucky. You’ve got an incredible partner. I’m together with a woman who’s not like Chameli.”

I really don’t have the essential answer to that doubt or question. It certainly could seem to be the case that I’ve been lucky in finding a fantastic woman, but here’s how it happened for me. I’ve had a lot of less lucky connections in my life. I’ve veteran my impart of the scheming side of the feminine: the victim, the rageful, the revengeful. A few weeks prior to meeting Chameli, my wife, a touch deep and profound shifted in for myself, which I judge can budge for anyone in the same way.

3. “I don’t have a partner at all, and I sometimes doubt if I’ll ever meet anyone.”

Being with a partner where worship is not flowing, or not being with a partner at all, are basically two aspects of the same circumstances: you’ve had an intuition or a glimpse of the possibilities of feminine like, and you want more of it. The solutions are the same.

4. “I feel my heart is closed down. I live in my head a lot, and I wouldn’t even know what worship was if it broke into my house at 2 o’clock in the morning and held me at gunpoint.”

That’s where the whole thing starts for all of us, when we realize that we don’t yet know how to like. And that’s that the huge question that you have to consider, dear brother: “Is that okay with me?” Never mind how much money you make, or how many friends you have on facebook, no matter how nice a house you live in, or no matter how huge a car you drive, no matter how impressive your partner’s bust size, or how much you meditate and become spiritual… have you loved for real, in a total and undefended way? If not, and here’s where you have to be honest with yourself, is that okay with you? Is it okay to die one day without the heart’s gift haven been completely given?

Eight or nine years ago, I came to that question in for myself, exactly that, and I learned that the answer was, if I was was raw and vulnerable and uncomplicated, that it was really not ok. If I died one day without having completely loved, it would not have truly been a life well lived.

Many many years ago, I went to Bali for a vacation, on my own. I met up with some other young travelers there and we hired a Jeep to take us on a tour of the island. We drove up right to the highest point of the island, where Tourists don’t usually go. Our guide took us to one of the most sacred temples. It was surrounded by a huge brick wall with an ornate entrance. After removing our shoes and wrapping scarves around our heads, we stepped together through this entrance. Inside, there was a small courtyard and then another brick wall with another entrance. After more preparations of lighting incense and giving offerings, we stepped through the second entrance. We were allowed to go through the opening in one more wall, but that was it. All together there were ten walls around the deity in the middle. Hindus could go beyond the fourth wall. Devotees of that particular deity could go beyond the fifth wall, and so it went on. The only people allowed to approach the deity directly were those who had given their lives completely and really to its worship. All else could come a small closer, a small closer, to the innermost beauty, but not all the way to the center.

I’m not a huge believer of the worship of statues, but there’s a gorgeous symbolism to what I saw there, because a woman’s heart is just like that. At the essence of every woman’s heart is the divine feminine. It contains everything that has ever been gorgeous, or lovely, or inspiring, in any woman, anywhere, at any time. The very essence of every woman’s heart is the peak of wisdom, the peak of inspiration, the peak of sexual desirability, the peak of calming, healing like. The peak of everything. But it’s protected, for excellent reason, by a run of concentric walls. To go inwardly from one wall to the next requires that you intensify your capacity to devotion, and as you do so, you are rewarded with Grace. This is not a touch you can negotiate verbally with a woman. She doesn’t even know consciously how to open those gates herself. They are opened magically and invisibly by the keys of worship.

If you stand on the outside of intimacy–avoiding connection and vulnerability, all you have available to you for fulfillment, like many other unfortunate men, is pornography. For a cheap price, you can see her body and stimulate yourself in a sad longing for deeper like.

Step though another gate, and she will show you her outer gift-wrapping. She’ll look at you with a certain twinkle of her eye. She’ll answer your questions coyly. She’ll give you just the faintest hint that there is more available.

Step through another gate with your commitment, with your attention, with the small seedlings of devotion, and she’ll open her heart to you more. She’ll impart with you her insecurities, the way that she’s been hurt, her deepest longings. Some men will back away at this point, they realize that the price they must pay to go deeper is more than they are willing to give. They start to feel a responsibility. But for those few who step though another gate, they come to learn her loyalty, her willingness to stick with you no matter what, her willingness to raise your children, stick up for you in conversation, and if you are lucky even pick up your dirty socks now and then. And so it goes on. You’ve got the gist by now.

Somewhere around the second wall from the center, she casts the veils of her personality aside, and shows you that she is both a human being and also a portico into a touch much greater than that. She shows you a wrath that is not hers, but all women’s. She shows you a patience that is also universal. She shows you her wisdom. At this point you start to experience the archetypes of women, who have been described as gods and goddesses and mythological figures in every tradition.

Than, at the very center, in the innermost temple itself, all the layers of your devotion are flooded with reward all at once. You learn the very essence of the feminine, and in a weird way that is not exactly romantic, but profoundly sacred all the same, you realize that you could have got here with any woman if you had just been willing to pass through all the layers of initiation. Any woman is every woman, and every woman is any woman at the same time. When you like a woman completely, at the very essence of her being, this is the one divine feminine flame. It is what has made every woman in history gorgeous. It’s the flame behind the Mona Lisa, and Dante’s Beatrice, and yes, also Penelope Cruz and Heidi Klum. You learn the magic ingredient which has lead every man to fall in like with a woman.

When you learn how to pay attention to the essence of the feminine in this way, you fall to the floor in full body prostration, tears soaking your cheeks and clothes, and you wonder how you could have ever taken Her, in all of Her forms, for granted even for a second.

So just a couple small questions remain, dear brother. First, do you get what I’m talking about? Does it jive for you? Does it make sense? And second, if yes, how are you going to get from where you are now to being able to the full capacity of your heart to like for real? I’ll be glad to impart more about this with you as we get to know each other better, but here’s how you get started.

First, do what I did, and make an altar in your room dedicated to Divine Feminine. Place only symbols of the feminine on it. I have a painting called “The Annunciation” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Google it, you’ll know why. I have a statue of Quan Kin. I also have a stone shaped like Yoni, and a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. Populate your altar with anything that reminds you of the feminine, and spend a few minutes of the day in worship. Yes, worship. Adoration. Devotion. Offer up rose petals. Offer poems. Hell, offer money. Offer everything, and beg her to reveal her innermost essence to you. This will work miracles whether you’re single and coming up to meet the right woman or whether you’re already in relationship and long to meet your woman in a deeper way.

The second way to get started: make a practice, a discipline, of telling your woman, or any woman, 10 times a day a touch which you adore about her. “I like the smell of your shampoo.” “I like the way you laugh.” “The color of your eyes is so gorgeous.” Of course, you need to keep it apt. You can go as far out on a limb as you like if you’re in relationship with a woman, but with anyone else dredge up the gates. Keep you communication apt to the gate number that you find yourself at. Appreciation the curve of a woman’s breast, for example, if she happens to be the cashier at the supermarket, would equate more to harassment than worship.

So here’s sufficient to get started. Of course, there’s a lot more we can say about this. Feel free to post your observations below, and I’ll use them as the foundation for future blogs.

If you’d like to join The Deeper Like retreat-at-home, which teaches couples and singles how to bring the quality of awakening into intimate relationship, register here.

Read more: Spirituality, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Path, Spiritual Practice, Spiritual Living, Spiritual Awakening, Spiritual Journey, Living News

Oliver Stone may be a nut job, but he has certainly made some wonderful movies. Of late but, he seems to be moving from his typical like of whacky conspiracy theories to rather more hideous ones.

Stone’s newest project, a Showtime documentary entitled “The Secret History of America” will, Mr. Stone claims, place Hitler “in context”. Stone desires to make sure that our understanding of Hitler does not remain a product of “the Jewish dominated media”, as he claims it has been.

I am all for expanding our understanding of even the most terrible events in history. In fact, it is those events, including the Holocaust, which are most often addressed in dangerously over-simplified ways. But in some way, a filmmaker who describes his work in stipulations reeking of Jew-hatred does not seem likely to make any constructive contributions on this issue.

Of course, that was this weekend. Mr. Stone is turning apologetic, issuing statements in which he says he “made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am wretched and I regret. Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry”.

Which is the “real” Oliver Stone? Is he the conspiracy theorist who resents the mythic power of Jews or the contrite artist seeking to bring deeper understanding to one of the darkest moments in human history?

My guess is that he’s a bit of both. But because he simply calls his words a “clumsy error” and refuses to explore how they are really part of his ongoing approach to world events, one in which some evil external break down is always pouring decent “small people” into horrible circumstances, I suspect that we have not heard the last of such claims about Jews from Mr. Stone.

There is no doubt that we need fuller explanations of the Holocaust, more sophisticated than those which invoke a demonic individual, Hitler, at whose feet all blame can be laid. In fact, to the extent that Stone demands a wider picture of accountability — an appreciation that there is plenty of blame to go around in a world which stood largely silent as millions of human beings were murdered simply because of who they were — I am with him. The list of those who bear responsibility should grow, not shrink, with the passage of time. That is what it means to be increasingly morally sensitive.

There is also no doubt that the Jewish community would do well to more completely appreciate, articulate and memorialize the horror of the Holocaust for people other than Jews. This is crucial if for no other reason than that it is only when the Holocaust can be remembered as a tragedy for all of humanity, that we can expect all of humanity to properly dredge up it.

None of that will be accomplished by minimizing the only one of its kind horror of the Nazis’ “Final Solution” to the “Jewish problem”, and certainly not by those, like Mr. Stone, who spread some of the central underpinnings of the methodology which fueled the hatred which led to it.

Oliver Stone is no Nazi, but both his work and his words imitate a touch far more sinister than one clumsy error. They imitate deep and long-held hostilities of which Mr. Stone should be ashamed.

Let’s hope the next Hollywood influential who desires to present a new angle on the Holocaust, can do so without resorting to any of the motifs and myths of those who perpetrated it. And let’s hope that those new tales help all people to appreciate that all suffering is epic, when it happens to those about whom we care.

Read more: Hitler, Oliver Stone, Anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Judaism, Religion News

By Omar Sacirbey and Alfredo Garcia
Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS) Muslim American groups and the American Civil Liberties Union are demanding the FBI turn over records relating to agency guidelines they say permit the FBI to collect and use racial and ethnic data.

The groups allege that the Domestic Intelligence and Operations Guide, an FBI policy blue-collar published in 2008, gives FBI agents the power to map and investigate communities based on ethnic behaviors and lifestyles, cultural traditions, and “ethnic-oriented” businesses, even when there is no evidence of criminal activity.

While the guidelines don’t mention Muslims specifically, opponents say they are used nearly exclusively against Islamic followers. Critics say such policies are not only unconstitutional, but ineffective, and often neutralize-productive.

“It drives a wedge between the police and the communities they are sworn to serve,” said Michael German, an ACLU lawyer and former FBI agent. “The FBI should be focusing its efforts on people it has a factual basis for suspecting of wrongdoing, not targeting communities with race-based investigations.”

Rather than profiling, the FBI would be better off establishing cooperative and open relationships with Muslims, since they are in the best spot to detect radicals, critics say.

Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group, agreed.

“Law enforcement has an valuable job to protect us and should do so by focusing on legitimate leads and credible intelligence of actual criminal activity and threats,” said Khera.

On Wednesday (July 28), FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee the current guidelines are “effective,” adding that membership in a particular religious or ethnic group was not “in and of itself” sufficient to justify FBI surveillance.

“There are segments in the Muslim community who do not necessarily want the relationship (with the FBI) to work out, but ever since Sept. 12, 2001, we’ve reached out to the Muslim community, and if you talk to leaders in that community, you will find that relationships are very excellent,” Mueller said.

Read more: Islam, Muslim Racial Profiling, Muslims Profiling, Muslim Americans Profiling, Muslim Profiling, Fbi Profiling Muslims, American Muslims Profiling, Fbi Racial Profiling, Muslims Racial Profiling, Fbi Profiling, Religion News

t flooding in more than a decade continued to besiege many areas of the country.
Floods this year have killed at least 928 people with 477 missing and caused tens of billions of dollars in hurt, the State Flood Control and Drought Prevention office reported. More heavy rains were expected for the southeast, southwest and northeast parts of the country through Thursday.

About 30,000 residents in Kouqian town were trapped in their homes after torrential rains drenched the northeastern province of Jilin on Wednesday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Water started flooding the town after the nearby Xingshan Reservoir and the Wende and Songhua rivers overflowed and rescue crews were delivering supplies by boat and moving people to higher ground, state television reported.

Flooding has hit areas all over China. Thousands of workers sandbagged riverbanks and checked reservoirs in preparation for the makings floods expected to flow from the swollen Yangtze and Han rivers, an official with the Yangtze Water Resources Commission said Wednesday. He gave only his surname, Zhang, as is common with Chinese officials.

“Right now, the Han river in Hubei province is on the edge breaching warning levels,” Zhang said.

The Han is expected to rise this week to its highest level in two decades, Xinhua reported. The flood threat was greater than usual because the Yangtze, into which the Han flows, was also reaching peak levels, it said.

Workers were prepared to blast holes in the Han embankment to divert flood waters into a low-lying area of farms and fish ponds, from which more than 5,000 people were evacuated, Xinhua said.

Although China experiences heavy rains every summer, flooding this year is the worst in more than a decade because the flood-prone Yangtze River Hand basin has seen 15 percent more rain than in an average year, Duan Yihong, director of the National Meteorological Center, said in a transcript of an interview Wednesday posted on the Xinhua website.

“Rains should start to slow down in August, but it is hard to predict now what exactly will happen, said Duan. “We have to be vigilant and meticulously monitor the weather … do a better job of forecasting.”

Thousands of rescuers in central China’s Henan province searched for survivors Wednesday after a bridge collapsed from heaving flooding in the Yi River over the weekend, killing 37 people with 29 missing, Xinhua reported.

Floods have also place China’s massive Three Gorges Dam to the test. On Wednesday morning, the dam’s water flow reached 1.96 million cubic feet (56,000 cubic meters) per second, the largest peak flow this year, with the water level reaching 518 feet (158 meters), Xinhua said, about 10 percent less than the dam’s maximum capacity.

Chinese officials have for years boasted the dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, would end centuries of devastating floods along the Yangtze.

Around China, a total of 875,000 homes have been ruined, 9.61 million people evacuated, and 22 million acres (8.76 million hectares) of crops ruined in this year’s flooding, according to the state flood control office.

China’s worst flooding in recent years occurred in 1998, when 4,150 people were killed, most along the Yangtze.

Read more: Untreated Disasters, World News, China Flood, Slidefullscreen, Flood, China, Fatality, World News

Editor’s Note: Huffington Post Religion has launched a scripture commentary run, which will bring together leading voices from different religious traditions to offer their wisdom on selected religious texts. Next month we will have Muslim commentaries for Ramadan, and in September Jewish commentaries for the High Holidays. Each day this week we will have commentaries on the Gospel featuring reflections by Rev. Jim Wallis, Dr. Serene Jones, Dr. Emilie Townes, Sister Joan Chittister, and Rev. James Martin, S.J. They will all be donation their meditations on the same passage from Matthew 7: 24-27, in which Jesus says:

²⁴All then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. ²⁵The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. ²⁶And all who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. ²⁷The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell — and fantastic was its fall!

A house built on rock, or atop sand? The metaphor has immediate resonance, even for those unaware that this domestic imagery comes from the Gospel of Matthew. In tumultuous times, we take fantastic comfort from our concrete slabs and steel girders — not to mention social constructions like wedding ceremony vows, legal agreements, bank accounts, or our physical or military might. We entrust these “rocks” will keep us high and dry. Or we do, at least, until they fail.

A decade has now passed since the dissolution of a supposedly sure foundation in my life — an nearly 20-year wedding ceremony. I’m a typical liberal Christian: I’ve always believed that “covenant making” was the bedrock of life, regardless of the sexes of the couple swearing their undying like. When I said my wedding vows at age 24, I completely believed my husband and I could keep them till fatality did us part.

Our inability to do so set off a quiver deep inside me, a crumbling of my foundations. We had built our relationship on our shared faith in God. If this wasn’t sufficient to weather all storms, was there any foundational truth I could stand on? Wasn’t everything I thought stable really sand?

In the throes of my dissolving life, on a particularly hot summer night, I raged aloud at for myself and at God. On my knees trying unsuccessfully to squash some ants who’d set up shop at the base of my trash can, I cried out, “Some fantastic Christian I am, huh? I can’t keep my wedding ceremony together, much less my house clean!”

To my fantastic bolt from the blue, I imagined St. Paul was there with me, leaning against the refrigerator door, “You’ve got this ’sure foundation’ stuff incorrect, dear heart. No vow you can make will last forever — not wedding ceremony, church membership, or national loyalty. Humans are too fallible, fickle, finite, and fearful to pull it off. The only promise that matters is the one God has made to you — the vow to like you regardless. Forever. No matter what.”

As I started to rebuild my life under the cloud of being a “divorcee,” I thought often of how, and why, I’d envisioned St. Paul visiting me on that August evening. Reckon of the world in all its teeming, quotidian messiness, gently held by a God who promises to never turn away from it no matter what follies we pursue, what havoc we make. My own crumbling foundations were nothing compared to this kind of promise. I started to know that this was not just a promise God made to me personally, but to the whole world. God will always continue to pour out abundant mercy and grace — this is the rock-solid foundation.

Does knowing this free us from all responsibility? Hardly. We are still called to keep our promises, to care for our world and for each other. We must try to live pubic and private lives that are based on strong moral conviction. But when stock markets crash, when oil spills into the ocean, when wars spin out of control, and yes, when wedding ceremony vows are broken, we do well to dredge up that God’s like is our rock. Knowing this, we’ll have the courage to pick ourselves up and try again (and again), because we can rely on a touch that is unimaginably stronger than the shifting sands of our successes or failures.

Ten years on, I don’t regret my divorce, but I still grieve it. But with Paul and Matthew as my witnesses, I know I stand with the world on a firm foundation.

Read more: Christianity, Matthew 7:24-27, God's Like, Divorce, Matthew 7 24-27, Matthew 7, Matthew 7: 24-27, Jesus Parables, Religion News