Remember Mikey?

“Let’s get Mikey, he won’t eat it, he hates everything”

Now do you remember Mikey?

It speaks of some new cereal called Life that’s supposed to be good for you. A new serial or series of events that are supposed to be good for you called Life. Mikey is this cute little kid with a frown on his face that supposedly hates everything the world has to offer. When he’s offered Life itself he likes it and his frown turns to a smile. He hates everything in this world, but he loves Life.

It’s my story in a 30 second TV commercial. Honestly, I just could never get into any of the occupations this world has to offer, or much of anything else everyone around me seemed to be “into” so much. It wasn’t for lack of trying, I just wasn’t into any of it for some inexplicable reason. I’ve literally hated this world for the better part of my stay here and it has hated me right back, yet I have stayed. The reason I stayed is because I was offered a new Life… Resurrection.

There is no Life in this world, but it IS the initiatory gauntlet thru which we must pass to win the approval of our new tribe. What you are willing to go thru for your own people determines the membership and mass of your tribe. The greater the mass of your tribe the greater your “pull” in universal matters. The weight of your decisions affects politics at a universal level.

If you want to control the universe you must contain the entire mass. Mass is us… the people that inhabit the universe. In order to do this you must win their approval by election, or passing thru the gauntlet of initiations according to the customs of the tribe you have chosen. This means that containing all tribes in one or a universal tribe is going to be about the hardest thing any individual can possibly attempt. A gauntlet means you have to make it from one end to the other, fighting your own prospective tribe the whole way. Your whole time here is going to be a fight for your very Life… not because you like to fight against your tribe, but because you love Life.

IF, and only if you make it thru the gauntlet, your tribe will accept and support you. At the same time they are testing your will, you are testing theirs. Do they have what it takes to contain you without restricting your full expression of Self? If they can’t, they’re not your tribe.

If they accept you and you accept them, it will be out of mutual love of one for the other. In running any gauntlet you and your tribe have been thru hell together. This is where both Love and Life originate in Humanity. Love is the glue that binds the Universal Brotherhood of Life and it is only produced by the natural means of going thru hell together and making it out alive. Making it out alive means with a whole new tribe, for the death we suffer from now is having been separated from our former universal tribe. Death is the separation between you and your own people.

One thing you gain from your tribe is their secrets, their knowledge and understanding of how Life works. I cannot even begin to expound how much I’ve learned since reconnecting with my own people thru shamanic practices. They even taught me what being a shaman or priest really means and how to perform those duties. Duty is replaced with Love when they show you just how much you mean to them. Not only in functional terms of how indispensable your service to the whole is, but just how much you mean to them for having the faith to stick it out with them the whole way thru the worst hell imaginable.

When armed with knowledge the real service to your tribe is understanding, which they will help you with. You must choose what is right for your tribe out of love for the whole tribe, which not only includes you, but literally IS you. The choice I’m talking about is whether to reveal or re-veil the knowledge you have been given. This is where your shamanic service comes into play, it allows you to be moved by your tribe, and thus move them according to the will of the whole tribe.

Is revealing said knowledge going to help or harm? If it is going to help then it gets revealed, if it’s going to cause more harm than good, it gets re-veiled in a new mystery. At some point there is a sweet spot between what to reveal and what to re-veil. I’m finding out this is done thru the Arts, and while I’ve still got a long way to go to be truly skilled at it, my chosen art form is clearly Storytelling. I have apparently tasked myself with figuring out what we’re all up to here and telling it to the very same people that ran me thru a death gauntlet with terminal intent.

This involves both a revealing and a re-veiling. Figuring it out reveals it, putting it into a story people can understand re-veils it in a language my whole tribe can understand. This means a new world because what had lost all meaning now has meaning everyone can comprehend in their own way. The veil is still there, but we can now see thru it to the meaning behind it. Life has no reason to live without mystery. It is the very thing we live for, to look for new life approaching on the horizon, to be pleasantly surprised by what’s behind every corner, to search for the secret treasure hidden in the plain and ordinary. We live for adventure, and adventure lives for us.

I have come to figure out that what I hate is death, what I love is Life. I live for the mystery… “my story”. My story is about what we have been thru together, and how we all fell in love thru the most unlikely of circumstances. My story is about a people that have created a world that supports each and every one of us in pursuing our passionate love for Life, because Life is US. If we aren’t passionate about we’re doing, there is no love… if there is no love there is no Life.

I’m a man of mystery, full of mystery within and without because I love a great story. I also love chasing a mystery that could change human history. Isn’t that why we’re all here, chasing the future with the past trying to figure out why both keep running away?

Thank god Life is a circle, if they run far enough away from each other eventually they’ll meet again… after enough time has passed to heal even the deepest wounds of the Human heart.