The Underworld of Sacrifice

DREAMING AWAKE
6. The Underworld of Sacrifice

I find myself in Mexico, for reasons I can’t explain … and still don’t know. It’s as if a strange, dreamlike trance has brought me here. After leaving Peru, I had planned to stay in San Francisco and the Bay area for some time. But I spent a week feeling completely disconnected, drifting through my new environment, and watching, like a spectator of a film noir, as all my plans for where to stay and what to do came crashing down. I began to feel an uncanny resistance – or not exactly resistance, but more like a sadness in my heart that I could never live in the US again after a 20 year exile – and I just knew I had to leave. I also knew that my life in Europe had come to a close, and I did not want to return – so I was in a weird limbo of uncertainty. I sat on park benches watching people carrying on with life, going deeper into my own feelings of anxiety, until they settled and cleared. I asked in meditation to be shown what my next step is, but didn’t get any answers. So I sat with the silence. The next day two friends from Berlin and one from Romania mentioned Mexico in their messages to me, and there was an ad from Interjet for a flight from SFO to Cancun for $60 that came up several times in my Facebook newsfeed for no reason, which all seemed too strange to be mere coincidence. I decided to take it as the answer I had been waiting for; I booked the flight, and left two days later.

Awakening through the Global Crisis

We are loosing the battle. But this is good news, because the battle cannot be won, on its own terms. The battlefield only reveals our own folly and despair. To enter the battle is to abide in a polarized world of anger, blame, hate, and conflict, a world of duality conjured out of a dream of separation. Its foundation is fear. And the only way out is through integrating our own shadows, which comes from embracing the fear to the very limits of its discomfort, in order to transcend it. Only then is it possible to get up and walk away. And walking away isn’t an escape; it is a real engagement, in whatever form it may take.