I had an unforgettable experience in Brazil many years ago. It was my second trip there. The first trip was made in desperation to find healing but it brought me so much more than physical healing that I decided to return, hoping to experience the magic once again.
I was in my room when I heard English being spoken outside my window. Something compelled me to hurry outside to meet the foreigner before he was gone. I learned that he had come to Brazil for healing just as I had on my first trip. We quickly became good friends and spent much time together; we would often sit together long into the night, under clear skies. That part of Brazil was elevated and the air was cool and dry at night. The stars were spectacular. We could see all of Scorpio and the Southern Cross.
My friend had experienced both physical and emotional trauma. Expressing himself was a form of therapy — he just needed someone to listen. So, I would listen to him for hours, day after day for weeks, without ever becoming bored or even tired. On the contrary, I felt suffused with a refined, rarefied energy. I gave him my undivided attention, occasionally feeling inspired to say a few words which emerged without effort or forethought. My mind had become still and I was fully present in the timeless now. I became aware of a presence. I thought at first that the presence might be a spirit being, but the presence felt familiar; there was a sense of self. And yet the presence encompassed my friend, as if he was also myself, literally. I was mystified.
The next time I spoke with my spirit guide, he was already aware that something important had happened and was quite excited about it. When I told him about the presence I had felt in Brazil, he said that I what I had sensed was not a spirit guide. Rather, I was beginning to become aware of the divine presence that is everyone's essence. He said the reason that that Presence feels like self is because it IS self. At the point of Source, the Self and the Infinite are One. What starts out as a relationship between oneself and Great Spirit becomes an awareness that there is only One Self.
Years before, when I made a pilgrimage to Rishikesh, India, I came to love the greeting Namaste, which in Sanskrit has the meaning The divine in me recognizes the divine in you. It is found in the Vedic literature, which dates back possibly 8,000 years. I understood the concept of Namaste but I did not experience the truth of it first-hand until Brazil. I believe that the circumstances that lead to awareness of Presence were years of spiritual practice combined with a strong intent to be of service. I had fervently prayed before leaving on that second trip for the opportunity to help someone. It was not only that I wanted to give something back for the healing I had received on the first trip but also that I had come to recognize that I was too self-centered in my consciousness; I had become aware of what a great burden that is to carry, and how my preoccupation with myself had cut me off from Great Spirit. As a solution, my spirit guide had strongly urged me to Put yourself in the service of others. It doesn’t matter whether you are effective or ineffective. You need to get out of yourself.
Great Spirit heard my prayer and brought me together with the foreigner for our mutual benefit. We became dear friends and I would later visit him many times in his own country. As my guide said, when you give it is returned to you — that is how life works. Or as The Beatles, who also visited Rishikesh, sang, And in the end, the love you make, is equal to the love you take.
My spirit guide, whom I spoke with many times through a trance medium, introduced himself as Sun Bear, which he described as a multiplicity of spirit. I understood him to mean that he was speaking for an oversoul composed of many souls who had lived as shamans, in the sense of linear time. Sun Bear chose to present an aspect of his being to me which had only recently completed an incarnation, perhaps to better relate to my circumstances, but perhaps also because he was especially proficient at the complex process involved in communicating across dimensions. One day he appeared for a short time, saying in a weak, strained voice: I can’t stay long. You live in a refracted dimension. We can come only when energetic conditions are favorable and they are not favorable at this time. But I have enough strength to say a few words.
When he was alive, this aspect of Sun Bear was named Vincent LaDuke. He was an Ojibwa Native American, born in Minnesota in 1929. He had minor roles in some TV series like Cheyenne before founding a community in Spokane named the Bear Tribe. His daughter, Winona LaDuke, was the Green Party candidate for Vice President of the U.S. in 1996 and 2000, running with Ralph Nader.
He also wrote several books, including the prophetic Black Dawn, Bright Day.
The main objective of Sun Bear and other members of his collective of consciousness is to help us who are incarnated to become aware of our divine essence and to thus to become sovereign.
Late last year I was watching a video of a channeling by Australian Blossom Goodchild of an entity named White Cloud. In that video, White Cloud asked his audience to look into Blossom's eyes and feel his love. I felt his presence across space and time. It was my guide and friend Sun Bear, but projecting another aspect of himself into our dimension to support us. We are not alone in our struggles here on Earth during such difficult times. A spiritual host has our backs, acting as agents of Great Spirit, who loves to use agents, including each of us if we are willing.
Your eyes are not only organs of incoming perception, but also the windows of your soul through which you can interact with the souls of others, as White Cloud does. Close your eyes and mouth and breathe deliberately so that you can hear the air as it flows through your nose and throat. Find the balance between deliberate and automatic breathing. Feel the life force behind the breath. Feel that presence, that vibrant aliveness apart from your thoughts, which have ceased, and apart from your self-absorbed ego, which subsides when it cannot talk to itself. Now open your eyes and cause them to shine with your presence.
Having activated this higher function of your eyes, a new world of possibilities is open to you. Your eyes can pierce the illusion of separation. You can truly commune with others as your presence encompasses them. And with them you can also beckon Great Spirit and gain access to the infinity and eternity that surrounds you. At the point of Source, the Self and the Infinite are One.
After having life-changing experiences during my first two visits to Brazil, I travelled there a third time, hoping for more encounters with Great Spirit. I believed that there was something special about the town where people came from around the world for healing, that made such encounters more likely. To this day, I believe that the energetic environment of that town facilitated the extraordinary events I experienced there. That town, Abadiania, is said to lie on a bed of crystals, which is said to be the reason the healing center was located there. That alone could be the explanation, but energetic conditions are determined by many things that vary with location and time. Sun Bear specifically mentioned astronomical factors.
The second evening I was there, I walked into a bistro which was owned by an Irish man I had met on my first visit. By this time he had married a Brazilian woman and they had had a baby together. The menu was appealing: healthy, organic. The place was so popular that it was buzzing with conversation; every table was taken by foreigners who were all socially engaged. As I stood there looking at them, no faces turned toward me; no one invited me to join them. I felt melancholy, having come all that way to meet them but not finding an empty seat.
As I stood there, I remembered how special this town was and why I had returned to it. I closed my eyes, relaxed, and felt the Presence. The words came into my mind, It doesn't have to be this way. I felt a surge of energy within and my mood abruptly shifted. I now felt light and exuberant. When I opened my eyes they were shining, and the world seemed different; I was still in the bistro but was on a new timeline. I placed an order at the counter and stepped out to the dark patio along the street where no one was sitting and sat at an empty table, just to enjoy the night air under the stars.
Suddenly, while sitting there, I had something like a premonition. I actually heard a voice in my mind say: A friend is on the way. I knew what was happening because it had happened before. But this time, I fully trusted it and sat there calm and confident. (Some call this faith; I also call it positive expectancy.) When my meal was ready, I savored every bite. After finishing, I got up and walked over to the adjacent Internet cafe and wandered in to see if I might recognize anyone sitting at a computer. No. I walked back to the open entrance and stood there for a few minutes, enjoying the moment. I was staring ahead into the night when into my field of vision, out of the darkness, appeared a face. At first I didn't recognize him, but then he greeted me by name.
He was a man I had met during my first visit two years earlier. He had not been back to Abadiania since. By this time a table had cleared inside the bistro so we sat down to talk. It was hard for me to contain my enthusiasm, both at meeting my friend again against such great odds, and at having witnessed another premonition come true. We talked for a long time as he told me what he had done since our first meeting. He had travelled the length of the Amazon in homage to Mother Earth. He believed that the Amazon Rainforest were the lungs of our world. There was a moment when I realized that I was sitting at the best table in the Bistro as I listened to tales of the Amazon, when only an hour before I had felt like an outsider with no place at a table. But this was only the appetizer, so to speak, and was followed by a peak life experience which cannot be described adequately in words.
I have not returned to Abadiana since, for two reasons. One is that my peak life experience there could not possibly be surpassed, in my estimation. My cup was already filled to overflowing. More importantly, I understood that place to be a power spot (as the shaman Don Juan Matus calls them). It was like a school for me. After three classes in an ideal environment, I had learned how to beckon Great Spirit in any place and at any time. Whether Great Spirit responds depends on the quality of one’s being, which is cultivated over time by one’s choices in the illusion. Great Spirit responds to selfless acts of courage, generosity and even humor. Such acts are not made to enhance the ego, or with the expectation of reward, but rather are gestures made with a feeling of gratitude for the gift of life and as assertions of being: This is who I am.
I am "Husband of Moonlight", of the Tanima tribe, and thankfully I am married to NucMedNinja. When you are outside someday, find a nice clear and clean space somewhere and seek out some soil and take a handful; lift it up to your face and breath the air that comes from it, smell the earth, and remember that each of us has within our bodies the same elements as the earth. We are the earth, and the earth is our grandmother, the wind is her breath. Never forget it and respect her and all the other life she creates, wherever you go. She will shine upon you and your life will be enhanced every day.
I understand not returning after an experience has reached the pinnacle of your expectations. When I was a teenager I developed an obsession with the NHL team the Detroit Red Wings. For several years I watched or listened to every game. I made a goal, a bucket list thing if you will, that I would be at Joe Louis Arena in the crowd the night the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup. This is a tall order for a lot of reasons: they'd need to be the team that won the Stanley Cup, and it would have to be a home game. Plus I was not from a background that had access to season passes (and was out of state). But in 2002 on a whim and a prayer, I drove up for Game five of the Stanley Cup Finals against the Carolina Hurricanes with the series led 3-1. There were absolutely no tickets available at will call. At any price. I walked across the street, ready to drop it, but I had this thought to be as close to the arena as possible. A man came up to me and we chatted for a bit. Then he told me he was Aaron Ward's cousin (a defenseman for the Red Wings who had been traded to the Hurricanes) I recognized which player that was immediately since I watched or listened to every game. I made some joke about Benedict Arnold. He said he could get me in. We had to go through a service entrance in the back but he knew the guard. Of course the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup that night. It was ectasy in motion with all the red and white confetti and Oh What a Night playing. The funny thing is I haven't even watched ice hockey since that night...I don't get the feeling the Detroit Red Wings will win the Stanley Cup again anytime soon, and they've moved out of Joe Louis Arena. Guess I took my shot and got it...