Living Revelations

& The Great Striptease

I’m stealing The Great Striptease from Tereza Coraggio of Third Paradigm who has a way with words. I like it in juxtaposition to Living Revelations which was the title of an essay sitting in my drafts folder.

The Great Striptease and Living Revelations will conger very different images - while pointing to the same thing: we are in an unraveling.

If you perceive events happening in the world through a religious or wisdom-tradition filter, you may see prophesy being fulfilled, those traditions, confirmed. However unsettling and wobbly things look, these times fit with larger narratives and so perhaps may deepen your faith in them.

Hindu Cosmology, Hopi Prophecy, Mayan End Times and Christian Revelations are a few examples of traditions that prophesized about these times.

Absent such framing and larger narrative you may struggle to find meaning in the undoing, feel untethered from the world you thought you knew and find yourself having to piece a cohesive explanation together on the fly. Where someone else sees confirmation of a faith tradition - the profound and sacred in play - you may see chaos; something profane and vulgar has been unleashed and is causing chaos.

One person’s revelations is another person’s striptease.

With this as backdrop, we also know the future is not written in stone. Each of us is a sovereign-self with our own agency, and we effect one other and the larger world. Fractal bits in constantly shifting, kaleidoscope-like patterns.

The world conditions us and in turn, we condition the world. That’s assuming we are clear on our sovereign status. That assumes we have not been co-opted by programs, propaganda and the many forces behind capture who are happy to use us. (Even if we have, we are free to break free and re-establish connection, re-awaken to who we are.)

While at essence we are all equal and made up of the same animating stuff of life - in a practical, embodied basis, we show up to various degrees.

We all know the experience of being with people who seem to be more here. More present. More alive. They give off a bigger signal or frequency. They will attract more attention as a result - both positively and negatively. They reflect for some, more of what is desired, for others, they reflect a threat.

It is the content of their being we are responding to - not their credentials or worldly status. Qualities of intelligence and integrity, perhaps courage and self-authority. Their inner being conditions everything around them and their presence naturally creates a contrast to the distorted world, making it easier see things we could’t before. (Catherine Austin Fitts was one of the voices that helped me grok the extent of manipulation in government decades ago.) In short, they help wake us up.

So the outer world conditions us and we, in turn, condition the outer world.

Whether we are viewing current times through a religious lens - living through Revelations and prophesy - or through the lens of a world degraded into a cheap show, our interpretation depends on our inner conditioning.

Prophesy may be the result of Divine communion (given at a particular time and place) or it may be a tool of manipulation; a means of stifling human expansion via a fear-promoting fixed story, designed to limit our sense of agency as participants in the world. It depends on the source of the prophesy.

Alternately, a striptease need not be vulgar; it can be elevated from a bawdy ruse to extract dollars into something creative and skillful, an expression of sensuality and connection; fully informed by those finer aspects of human beings.

In other words, the profane can become the sacred in the right hands and vice versa. It all depends on what or who informs them. Depends on what or who is interpreting them.

There is no universal ‘This is what this means’ map for the whole shebang of human experience.

And that’s a good thing. We are free to choose. Are we victims of old stories, doomed to certain outcomes, or can we as living beings, here and now, do something about our future?

The essay in my draft folder wasn’t about biblical prophesies per se, but rather the reflective nature of our world. The bible and Revelations are part of those reflections. As more and more people glimpse the extraordinary levels of deceit layered over the world - which spans our known history - the more it loosens its hold as a shared reality, fragments cut loose, and while that creates instability, it also create possibility.

I’ve written often about the role identity plays - and the understandable difficulty we encounter when identities are caught up in distorted structures. How teasing ourselves out from them might feel like a kind of death (cause it kinda is) to the self who adapted to them. We may not think of our many identities as roles we are playing to navigate the world. It would be easier to let them go if we did.

Instead we tend to think of them as who we are. Even the more stable identifiers like one’s nation-state, ethnic ancestry or religion are additions to whatever that animating life-force is. None of them are who we are at an essential level though all are part of the experience of being our selves. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with these identities, particularly when they serve you, serve others, and bring connection and care.

If you think about your many identities - it won’t take long before you note the ones you could slip easily out of (a career you’ve outgrown, a hobby, a dietary preference (vegetarian to meat-eater)) versus the ones you’ll hit a snag on. Some identities are clearly more ‘fixed’ than others. Gender, up until recently was a pretty fixed. For many it still is. Even while that’s orienting in a life, it’s hardly the whole story for a multi-dimensional being.

Some are more emotionally charged. (Try telling a mom her kid’s dumb.) Some - like holiday hostess - are rarely donned, taken out of the closet for occasion and then quickly discarded once the guests have left. (Oh, good.)

All of this is natural to us, we move in and out of them. The point is, we shed some identity-garments easily, others feel more like our very skin.

I was thinking about the ongoing atrocity happening in Palestine and how despite a whole world watching we are seemingly unable to do anything to stop it. Alliances and peace plans happen in the background but the US has mostly ignored them, in favor of supporting Israel - no matter how insane they behave.

If you’re reading that and mounting a series of mental “But, but, but…” to justify what’s happening, I want to say, I understand. I understand good people think supporting Israel’s government - no matter how egregious or anti-human their actions - do so not because they are uncaring but because they believe a narrative that is fully weaved in to the deepest fibers of their identity.

It’s not just Jewish people who do this of course. Many Christians maintain blind support for Israel because it’s linked to their faith; Israel plays a key role in a story they too are tightly woven to.

I’ve written about what I see as the two sides of faith here. The whole point of which is to tease out the primary intuition of faith from the form/structure/expression that follows that intuition.

They are distinctly different. When we tease the two out, there’s a bit more wiggle room. And doesn’t this mire of misery need a little wiggle room? If we don’t collapse the intuition aspect of faith with a form (religious institution) - then we can hold our faith steady even as we question the institution. It’s the same for a country, we can love our country (the land and people) and challenge its government.

We really need to be able to do that, since institutions and governments are so often corrupted.

I’m not a Jew or a Christian though I am a person of faith; I intuit a unifying, loving intelligence behind and through the world. (Despite appearances). Since my faith is not tied to any particular religion or doctrine, I have no snags there. Which puts me at both an advantage and disadvantage; I don’t have to unravel and tease out those identity-bits, and I don’t know the challenge in doing that either.

I’m not saying it’s easy. And I’m not interested in interfering in someone else’s relationship to the Divine. I respect faith. Still, criticizing a country doesn’t make one anti-patriotic any more than criticizing a religion makes someone a non-believer.

The world emerging will now will necessarily move beyond these superficial reductions that served to quell inquiry. It already is.

I think it’s fair to say that basic human outrage and compassion for the suffering of other human beings - in this case, Palestinians - has been subsumed by fixed narratives around Israel. Narratives that threaded in accounts of God and religion, prophesy and how the faithful should behave. Narratives that claimed a certain version of history and clamped down on competing versions.

No matter how you view it, somehow good people of faith can’t stop supporting killing. That can not be sane.

I won’t name the stackers I respect and admire who can’t tease this one out and who continue to perceive Jews and Israel as the true victims. I know they believe what they perceive; that the state of Israel is under a great threat; that its survival is paramount to the future and should be protected at any cost. This view is usually tied to their faith-tradition.

I would humbly reiterate - as someone who shares a deep respect for faith - that faith is not the same as the structure or religion (or in this case, the country) that wraps itself around it.

Faith as a cover that justifies mass-killing, can hardly be called loving. And isn’t the intuition of a loving Creator the original impetus behind faith? If one’s faith-tradition requires they stay silent to crimes against humanity, what sort of faith is that?

Anti-semitism had been a linchpin narrative that’s controlled much on this planet and in its ‘untouchable’ assertion that by simply questioning Israel’s government, this equates to being anti-semitic, it may be the most successful control mechanism psy-op we’ve ever seen.

Anti-semitism did not appear as an organic recognition of a persecuted people. It was an intentional construct to weave a story and interpretation of history in a certain light in order to advance an agenda; in order to squash questioning and vilify anyone who didn’t agree with it.

This is not to say anti-semitism doesn’t exist. I’m certain it does, and should be called out, of course. However, hatred for certain groups is not unique to Jewish people - pretty much every group has had its enemies.

As we witnessed with the more recent anti-vaxxer and climate-denier stigmas, the point was to insert firewalls in our minds. Anti-semite preceded them both as a controlling-mechanism; its success would naturally spur repetition and application for other inconvenient questioning.

If you’re not allowed to question something, we know, that’s a blinking, bright neon red-flag.

If this triggers you, I’m sympathetic. And yet there’s always an opportunity present when we’re triggered because it means there’s an identity-snag in play.

Much of how we interpret these times comes down to identity and whether we see ourselves as Christians or Jews, Republicans or Democrats, free-thinkers or compliers. Interpretation is the result of a complex mix of what’s informed us, and much of that has been manipulated and distorted.

Underneath all that is our essence, which wants to shine through and connect to all beings.

That essential us is wanting to come in. It needs room. If it’s bumping up against an identity that won’t budge and blocks out its larger presence, difficulty is inevitable. You need more room - old identity garments will have to come off.

If we won’t call out atrocities for what they are in order to stay connected to a faith-story, maybe that faith-tradition doesn’t deserve us? The sacred has indeed become the profane if this is what it demands. It’s time to tease faith out from that faith-tradition.

Faith doesn’t requires anything other than an open heart and desire to align to love. When we find we are imperfect at it - over and over - we deal with ourselves. We don’t attack others. We simply aim to do better; to grow our own light.

As the shredding of this old world continues, corrupted institutions will fall - religions among them - and faith will endure. It’s a built-in feature of humans. We don’t need corrupted structures to abide in faith. We’re long past the old playbook of ‘pay, pray and obey’ as Paul Wallis puts it.

The Universe is demanding change. Radical change. It’s all around us. We deal with that by being honest with ourselves. Watch where you’re triggered, where you insist on being right - this is an identity attempting to hold on (it’s not really you) to a world no longer holding.

We are living revelations. Living as revelations to one another.

Whatever identity-cloaks we’ve been wearing that no longer fit, let’s have enough faith in ourselves and each other - in our goodness - to drop them. Let’s elevate ourselves, perform our own great striptease - transforming the profane into the sacred - and take them off.

Thanks for reading. Comments, as always are welcome.

And your support is much appreciated! ❤️

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