Using the Power of Myth To Unveil Everyday Wonder with Zamirah Jazwierska

[00:00:00] Welcome, this is Josh Rees with Mile Hi Church in Lakewood, Colorado.

[00:00:06] Thank you for tuning in to our podcast today for more information about our church.

[00:00:11] Please visit our website, MileHiChurch.org

[00:00:15] And at this morning we are all going to celebrate the gifts within and to become enchanted or maybe even re-enchanted with our own nature.

[00:00:29] Around 1765, her so, an English boy would stride out from his home in solo and walk across the river through the hills of Surrey as they were known then on a 7-mile John Teach Day.

[00:00:47] And one summer morning he was sontering along in the Peckham Rye Park when he looked up into an oak tree.

[00:00:55] And up in that oak tree, he saw that it was filled with angels.

[00:01:02] He said he described it as being a tree radiant and joyful and filled with glorious light.

[00:01:10] He said it was bright and jellic wings, be speckling every bow like stars.

[00:01:18] And so in his excitement he went home and he wanted to tell his mom and his dad about this experience in the park.

[00:01:26] And when he began to speak to them, his dad thought he was lying and actually began to hit him and his mother had to intervene and to save him from what would maybe have been a severe thrashing.

[00:01:41] Bright and jellic wings be spangling every bow like stars.

[00:01:48] This boy was William Blake.

[00:01:52] One of his first reported mystical visions in a lifetime that would be filled with visions and he was this innocent wonder struck boy, accessing the mystical world and meeting, meeting the cruel reality of a world that had cast the mystical from its heart.

[00:02:14] Throughout his life he knew a world of imagination and he felt that this was the true world.

[00:02:21] In fact, imagination in his regard was divine life itself.

[00:02:27] And that the world of the industrial revolution was sorely missing the mark.

[00:02:34] In a letter he wrote to Reverend Dr. Trussler in 1799, he said the tree in which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.

[00:02:46] To the eyes of the man of imagination nature is imagination itself.

[00:02:55] As a man is so he sees, as the eye is formed such are its powers.

[00:03:05] How many of you have been touched by the words of William Blake and the imaginal world that he so beautifully described perhaps, maybe even unknowingly to see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower to hold in finitian the palm of your hand

[00:03:24] and eternity in an hour. Or maybe you've come across this one, if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is infinite.

[00:03:37] See Blake saw myth, mystical vision and nature itself as vehicles for conveying cosmic principles and spiritual development ways of communicating profound spiritual teachings and philosophical ideas.

[00:03:53] And he was on a lifelong mission, a mission to unveil the mystical to those who had lost touch with its reverence, to those who were crescendoing the massacre of nature and favor of industrialization, to a world that was essentially thrashing the mystical from their own experience.

[00:04:18] Some of the story has been adapted from a podcast called The Emerald which I highly recommend and you can hear it there, and you can also read more about William Blake if you move into Tobias Chirtens biography which is entitled Jerusalem.

[00:04:35] But what stands out to me in Blake's quest is that I think it's so relatable in our world today. He saw being born in the Industrial Revolution and that it was an invitation to bring back that inchantment with the mystical within.

[00:04:56] He saw that that was his mission and I don't think that's too far removed from what we're asked to do today.

[00:05:04] But what has resulted in our years of separation from that sense of mystical within are disconnect with the spiritual and the ethereal realms.

[00:05:16] What has resulted is that we find ourselves hungry and thirsty for that experience of our own souls, for that sense of enchantment that comes from being connected with that divine spark within each one of our hearts.

[00:05:35] And there are signs of that in the world today that we are hungry and thirsty, and we can see it in the way that things are showing up.

[00:05:42] Anybody watch the opening Olympics and you saw Lady Gaga taking the stage and what was written on the side of that stage on Shantay in Chanted.

[00:05:54] And the theme of the Olympics is world unity. We are hungry for this interconnectedness to experience this connection with all of life and with each other.

[00:06:08] And then, this last couple of weekends you might have might have seen if you were out there exploring that there's a musical festival known as tomorrow land that was celebrating its 20th anniversary in Belgium.

[00:06:23] And the theme this year was the elixir of life and look at the stage they created to honor and create a mystical garden of roses from which we could dance and connect and reenchant our souls while being immersed in the music.

[00:06:40] This very stage has some 43 fountains embedded within it, 230 speakers, a thousand custom LED lights and 3,136 video tiles.

[00:06:55] And each day there were 15,000 on the crew that tended this mystical dance garden.

[00:07:03] And over those two weekends 400,000 people showed up to experience this elixir of life in this garden while fabricated yet calling out for that experience of enchantment that can be found when we move and dance enjoy with one another.

[00:07:24] We are hungry and thirsty to feel this sense of a chantment. And when they built this stage you know what their guiding principle was from idea to realization. They're doing it. They're doing it.

[00:07:38] And have you seen? Have you been on YouTube and seen this video from the two cellos? Two cellos is a group of these two Italian guys who are brilliant genius mystics of music.

[00:07:50] And if you go on YouTube, which I highly recommend you do a little dance later and check it out, you can go there and you'll see this video opens with all the people arriving in Victorian dress.

[00:08:05] And they are coming up to the theater and all-prem and proper and distinguished and they're filtering in for a night of cello.

[00:08:14] And the concert begins. There's this lively Victorian tune and then it begins to slowly shift and build and grow and intensify. The horse hairs begin to fly from the bows as they go at their playing.

[00:08:35] They're thunder struck. Yes, and then they catch fire. They catch fire and they explode with the wildness of ACDC's thunder struck. Yes.

[00:08:52] All reservation drops away into bliss. However, you might check out the audience at the completion. The Victorian folks are clutching the pearls at their neckline covering their eyes, sitting in with shocked faces as they sit in silence.

[00:09:20] They don't have almost no what to do with that taste of energy and expression that has emerged as they have been connected. They have since they have felt the divine spark that's being expressed through these two cellos. Unfiltered.

[00:09:40] Un adulterated. There it is. Like being thunder struck. So connecting with the enchantment within our soul, that divine nature that feeds us, it quenches our thirst for the mystical, our thirst to know ourselves as expressions of the divine.

[00:10:04] And that which enchants us guides us closer. It leads us back into that source of lightning itself to source.

[00:10:14] Joseph Campbell, a great teacher of mythology said, if you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you and the life you ought to be living is the one that you are living.

[00:10:28] Wherever you are, if you're following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, that lightning.

[00:10:36] And you enjoy it all the time. So let's explore together this morning three practices that can guide us back to enliven into a waken our inner worlds because the excess of that mystical experience always comes from within ourselves.

[00:10:57] And as we know, the first one. Well, I don't know if as we know yet but we're going to know. As we know in a minute, the first one that I want to explore together is the power of myth.

[00:11:10] The first talking point, mything and action and we can thank Dr. Patty over here for this title, mything in action.

[00:11:18] Isn't it great? Because when we are using the power of myth to guide us back to our souls, we are getting in touch with the fact that we are always receiving guidance, always receiving support, always receiving messages from life itself, from spirit, from God.

[00:11:42] And when we get in touch with that, we can see we can look at life as if it were a living oracle. So the first one being the power of myth.

[00:11:53] As you look around, you see that we are in shrine with mythic stories, everywhere we look, that there are symbols that serve to point us back towards and myth speaks to us because it is a language of the soul.

[00:12:11] Myth speaks to us then at that level of the soul. Kamala Kapoor, who is an author from the Hindu tradition writes in her Ganesha Ghostal Lunchbook.

[00:12:22] Mythology of the world is one gemstone whose manifold facets are created and polished by different cultures.

[00:12:32] It also says myth, it lumens aspects of the same mystery. You see to be open to the messages of myth is to be open to the mystery.

[00:12:45] Myth points us back to ourselves when we are open to it you have heard that saying what you seek is seeking you, room he said it so did a lot of other folks.

[00:12:55] Life is orchestrating to support us on the journey but it can be hard to trust that sometimes.

[00:13:01] It's hard to trust that when we are in the throes of challenges, when it feels like there is shadow and darkness that we are wrestling with.

[00:13:10] But have you ever experienced those signs as you are going about your life? It's that free book caddy that's little book libraries that sit along the side of the road and you are something inside you says,

[00:13:25] you are not in the book but you are like there is something in there for me so you go over there and when you open it up and there is a book in there inviting you to Scotland to visit with the faith folk.

[00:13:38] Just as an example.

[00:13:41] There are things that catch your eye again and again and again and again and when they catch your eye for the third time, I call that the divine wake up call.

[00:13:51] The divine wake up call when you are like this thing has come around like three several times countless times.

[00:13:58] I begin to pay attention to what that message is. This week I did a little experiment.

[00:14:03] I am a thrifter which means I like to go to seek the diamonds in the rough in the thrift store.

[00:14:09] And I like to go there and usually I'm not going there somebody said to me, I'm break they said, I don't go with a list I go within hour.

[00:14:17] Brilliant. Brilliant. So you go to the thrift store and you see what's there speaking to you.

[00:14:25] This week of course as I was meandering around and preparing for this talk, guess what just was right there on the shelf.

[00:14:32] Myths and legends right there it was only 499. I think it was half price too.

[00:14:38] Deal. Deal. So those things that are meant for your soul find you. They find you.

[00:14:50] So Sharon, Sharon, Blackie writes in her book The Enchanted Life, unlocking the magic of the everyday.

[00:14:56] Whatever journey we imagine ourselves to be on, myth can inform our sense of what is possible.

[00:15:02] And the naval us not to just cope with life's challenges but to live more intensely and to live more richly with the world.

[00:15:09] The key is that we stay open and the key is is that when we start to get in the trance of the mundane world, when we start to get distracted, when we start to get pulled away, when we start to fall deeply into fear, the trick is to open back up again.

[00:15:26] You know one of the things that really gets me off course that gets me way off course in life is to have to put together furniture.

[00:15:36] So anybody had to well I recently have been on quite a life journey and that I have been my nest is emptying.

[00:15:44] My beloveds are moving across the sea, one of them's here.

[00:15:49] And in that I am downsizing. I'm actually cutting my living space in half.

[00:15:54] And with that there was another reason to go to the thrift store. I had bags to release.

[00:15:59] And with that though I found myself now with a little closet size bathroom.

[00:16:04] And all my things are on the floor in a pile. And I thought to myself, well we could do something about this.

[00:16:10] So I am possibly one on Amazon and I said oh that's pretty and I ordered it and it came to my house.

[00:16:15] And I opened it up and I put out the thousands of pieces on the floor and it was a very impulsive buy.

[00:16:21] It was like oh that's cute that'll house the thing since so here it was.

[00:16:25] So I started putting this thing together in the hallway.

[00:16:29] You can see a picture of how this started to go up here.

[00:16:35] And I know I also it was under the impression this would take you know 30 minutes and then I'd have that dopamine hit of yes.

[00:16:42] This thing looks so good and my stuff's now organized and a nice simplified fashion in my bathroom three to four hours later.

[00:16:49] I was sitting there. And so I spread these things out on the floor and this is what they gave me to put this together.

[00:16:59] This is the tool.

[00:17:01] This is what's in that package that right there seeing we took a picture of it so you can actually see it.

[00:17:06] It was this size, it's the very thing itself and a 41 page booklet that was just the English part.

[00:17:15] After three to four hours I called my daughter Maddie and I said who actually is genius at doing this stuff.

[00:17:20] I said I need some help and she came on the scene she goes, why is it upside down in backwards?

[00:17:28] And I said it was true we had an assemble it and you know what the funny thing is is in the very end.

[00:17:34] It's an even fit in my bathroom so my stuff's still on the floor in a pile because I am possibly didn't even measure or think to measure to see if this cute thing would actually function.

[00:17:44] In my world but in the essence of it all I had I was struck, I was actually thunder struck by the idea that often I am trying to put together the things of my life using worldly sized tools.

[00:18:15] And the truth is we don't have to use worldly sized tools to construct the pretty things, the wonderful things, the walk, the very walk of our life.

[00:18:27] Because what we have available to us at our fingertips are mythic, mystical, spiritual tools and they are vastly unlimited and they have no size.

[00:18:43] And we are beyond the worldly size.

[00:18:46] And so you cultivate these tools, we all cultivate these tools through the use of our prayer and our intention and our practices.

[00:18:56] And through those practices we begin to gain that sense of trust that I am always supported.

[00:19:02] There is always what I need coming when I need it.

[00:19:06] And I need to be able to get out of the way that I have to work through in order to get that principle that prayer embedded within my consciousness.

[00:19:20] As we stay open to receive the messages, however, we begin to see that life is that or living oracle.

[00:19:29] So word oracle comes from the Latin word, a raculum which literally means a divine announcement.

[00:19:39] So we stay open. Ernest Holmes wrote, the person who can throw himself with complete abandon into that limit the sea of receptivity.

[00:19:48] Having cut loose from all apparent morings is the one who will always receive the greatest reward.

[00:19:57] Modern day mythologists, Dr. Martin Shaw, encourages all of us to find that authentic voice of our souls by being awake, being open to receive messages from the mystical, from the mythic, from the language of our souls.

[00:20:14] Which he includes is folklore and initiatory encounters with wilderness.

[00:20:19] Speak, he says, from the Dervish of your heart.

[00:20:24] Speak from your deep enchanting sea.

[00:20:28] Which brings us to the second practice this morning, which is to re-enchant ourselves to touch our souls by looking to nature as our guide.

[00:20:39] It begins by awakening, or maybe re-awakening, reverence.

[00:20:47] Looking with reverence, it's about moving from that idea of considering the sun as this flaming ball of nuclear fusion to realizing the inherent brilliance of this bright star that sustains our life.

[00:21:02] It nourishes us in and life in us.

[00:21:06] But to also look beyond its physical makeup to the mystical meanings.

[00:21:10] If you were living in the ink and tradition, you would have believed and known yourself to be a child of the sun.

[00:21:17] An expression of the love between the cosmic mother and the cosmic father.

[00:21:25] In fact, you would have seen yourself as a permanent kiss between them.

[00:21:34] The Peruvian wisdom teaches us that if we cleanse our perception by knowing ourselves by re-awakening to that sense of us being children of the sun each and every day,

[00:21:47] we let go of the heavy energies of life.

[00:21:50] Which they call Hucha and become re-enchanted with our divine nature by looking for that guide within nature.

[00:21:59] Two years ago, this very weekend I had the opportunity to accompany Dr. Patty on a pilgrimage to Peru and it was a blessed journey.

[00:22:09] It truly was a blessed journey and our guide, Jorge Luis Delgado, who is this mystic and he's written several books that I encourage you to check out as well.

[00:22:18] He shared a daily practice that I want to share with you now.

[00:22:22] Each day upon waking, you remember who you are as a child of the sun and he would put his hands into this triangle and he would hold it up to the sun and he would look between his fingers seeing that light coming through and bringing it into his heart.

[00:22:42] He would breathe with father's sun and recognize the shining light and love within his heart.

[00:22:51] So he guided us in that.

[00:22:54] And he said that you can allow this love to awaken within you.

[00:22:58] It's like taking a shower each day to shower your inner light with love.

[00:23:04] And over time, you will feel lighter.

[00:23:08] You will feel enchanted.

[00:23:11] It is said in the Andean legend and myth that when a child of the son of which we are as humans, when we wake up fully to the higher consciousness of love, then we're able to share love fully.

[00:23:26] And that when this happens, a cosmic hummingbird comes to hover over the crown chakra of the person symbolically tasting the nectar of that love.

[00:23:41] Then, flapping wings of joy, father, son and mother, earth.

[00:23:47] And they give thanksgiving to this person for waking up to become to share perfect conscious love.

[00:23:59] Isn't that such a beautiful image?

[00:24:02] I'd even invite you if you wanted to take that image this week of the hummingbird into your meditation.

[00:24:09] To as a way of connecting with your own soul, with reenchanting yourself with that divine nature and feeling it, that endwelling presence through using that symbol in your meditation, that awakening to conscious love.

[00:24:28] And that brings us to the final point of Enchantment which is to initiate an inward revolution.

[00:24:36] Life conspires or conspirels to take us deeper into expand us wider in our growth.

[00:24:45] Withinward revolution, we spend time with our inner selves, Joel Goldsmith writes in the Thunder of Silence.

[00:24:55] We shall receive God in consciousness within our inner sanctuary or temple in that secret place of the most high, which is found in no other place, but within ourselves.

[00:25:14] We get thunder struck by the divine when we sit in that stillness, and we commune in the silence.

[00:25:34] We never wonder why he entitled that book the Thunder of Silence.

[00:25:40] According to legend, during his quest for enlightenment, Sadartha Gwatama, who would become Buddha, was meditating under in the hot sun.

[00:25:52] And in the Buddhist tradition, of course, it is thought that all of us have a Buddhist nature within that it is our quest.

[00:25:59] It is our spiritual development to awaken that Buddha nature within ourselves.

[00:26:04] But hearing was sitting in the hot sun, and he was so absorbed in his meditation that he didn't notice the intensity and the danger of what was going on around him.

[00:26:14] Seeing this, a group of snails, since the danger that he posed to his condition.

[00:26:21] And in an act of selflessness, the snails crawled into his head to protect him from the sun's harsh rays.

[00:26:28] Their moist bodies, providing a cooling effect that shielded him from the heat, allowing him to continue his meditation without distraction.

[00:26:36] One faucet of this myth is that the snail's actions represent the ultimate sacrifice and devotion.

[00:26:45] And another facet is that they also symbolize selfless service and the devotion to a higher cause.

[00:26:57] And yet one more symbolization from this is that they represent the cyclical nature of our journey into knowing our Buddha nature.

[00:27:10] That's cyclical journey. You know when we fall down and get up, when we have those patterns repeating in our life.

[00:27:16] And often it feels as if they're taking us backward that we're going back. I'm not here again, right?

[00:27:23] That's how it feels sometimes. But that we keep in mind with the heart of compassion that if we allow it, it catapults us closer to that enchantment of the soul.

[00:27:35] To that knowing of our divine nature, should we be open to it? Should we hold that intention on this life's walk?

[00:27:44] That each revolution of the learning draws us more in and expands us into that spiritual awareness of the Buddha within.

[00:27:57] And so this myth is one of many stories that illustrate the Buddha's journey to enlightenment. The trials, the support that he received along the way.

[00:28:09] But it also reflects those broader themes of Buddhism, the interconnectedness of all things.

[00:28:18] The pursuit of our spiritual awakening, but also the compassion, the compassion with which we walk the journey to and within our own soul.

[00:28:33] In the Spanish language when you meet someone, one thing is I absolutely adore about it. When you meet someone, it is customary to say incantata enchanted.

[00:28:46] Incantata, or incantata, in the masculine ending, which means I am enchanted to meet you.

[00:28:54] My prayer for you, for each one of us, is that when we greet ourselves, when we address our very own soul, it is with that very essence of incantata.

[00:29:16] The more we cultivate the sense of incantment within, the more we can share it when we meet one another.

[00:29:24] I am enchanted to meet you. We're going to close today with a chamber prayer.

[00:29:35] And right now I'm going to invite our practitioner prayer partners to begin to make their way to the edges of the room.

[00:29:43] And as they are doing that, I want you to understand that a chamber prayer is a type of prayer where we are all speaking and praying together into the room, creating this field of prayer in which we can be immersed in which we can embody and feel and know that in dwelling presence.

[00:30:05] We can feel that energy in the room. So your job here and the sea is to simply relax, to breathe, and to receive taking it all in.

[00:30:19] As we move into the prayer, the prayer that I am holding in my own heart is that you feel thunder struck by the incantment of the divine spark within your heart,

[00:30:34] within your own being. And with that we are going to take a deep breath, move within and begin to pray.

[00:32:15] And as with such gratitude, we say thank you. Thank you spirit. And so it is.

[00:32:31] Thanks for listening to the Mile High Church podcast. This podcast is made possible by the generous contributions from listeners like you to make a donation. Please visit MilehighChurch.org.