Wednesday, June 01, 2005

weekend with Tlakaelel part 2

These are my initial impressions:
The "loft" room is the 3d floor of Kapulli Chaplin. It's a very large room (30' by 50'? I'm bad with distances) with wood flooring and exposed wood rafters, through which are woven branches. There's a lavatory tucked into the corner by the stairs. Skylights in the ceiling, couches, carpets, backjacks. A pile of blankets in the corner (later I learned they're for covering the sweat lodge). An altar between the far windows, with a glow-in-the-dark plastic skeleton in one window and a skull in the other (flat halloween-type decorations).
Maestro Tlakaelel (MT) is a little rotund man who walks with a cane and wears his long grey and black hair in a french braid. His face is weathered and round, and he does not look nearly 90 years old.
We started the first talk during the blue hour (when bunnies come out) and it rained & thundered starting immediately, so some of the words were obscured (both in translation & in Spanish).
The first story he told was that 8 years ago he was sick, and his students took turns caring for him every night. One night he woke up paralyzed, and saw beautiful flowers everywhere. He prayed to the Creator, saying that he had helped many people in his life, and prayed for many, and never asked for anything for himself or even for his sick mother. And now he was asking: if it was his time to die, he wanted to die, not to linger on paralyzed. He felt someone touch him, and thought it was Jose (the same Jose at the weekend) but it wasn't. Jose put his hand on one side of MT and the spirit hand was on the other side, and the healing went on for hours. When it was over, Jose had the gift of hands-on healing, and was able to teach all the other students in the Kapulli (the Mexican one, not the one in Chaplin). Later on, MT was in Germany and talked to someone about a Japanese healing method called Mari Kari, which is supposedly the same as Reiki, and that was what Jose had learned from the spirit that night.
The next story MT told was that he went for a walk on a moonlit night, and saw that he had two shadows, but there was only one moon and no other light. When he stood still, one of the shadows danced around him, and eventually they both danced. When he started walking again, one of them went away. But a few times the second one has returned.
Then he told a story of a collective vision at the Mexican Kapulli. Seven of his students were practicing native songs, and they heard a noise like someone walking on the building's tin roof. They kept singing and the sound moved and became like someone running around the outside of the building, and finally like someone inside the building. They lit some copal and the smoke revealed the forms of spirit children. The spirits did not like the copal and left.
Tlakaelel says there is no division between the physical/material world and the spiritual world. Without spirit, the material is nothing. Belief is necessary. Everything is a process--birth, life, death.
MT explained that all energy comes from space--and this is not fiction or fantastic. All ancient cultures worshipped the Sun as their father--not a god, but a font of energy. When the sun goes away in winter, the plants, animals, humans, Earth all rest. This is a time for people to be in their houses and learning from their elders. Between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the seeds begin to wake up and grow as the sun's energy returns. The tiny antennae-like leaves point to the sun and gain energy through photosynthesis, and grow more leaves to get more energy. The plants absorb not only solar energy, but steller/galactic energy--stars, galaxies, planets. When the sun is balanced, we feel good, and everything we do has more energy. This isn't fantasy, that all original Earth religions were solar religions. Even in the Catholic church they have the Santismo, which is something like a gold disk that lives in a box and the priest takes it out and blesses the people with it. The Santismo represents the sun! (I used to be Catholic and I don't remember anything like that--only the box the host was in. But my husband was an altar boy and he said it sounds familiar, but it's not called the Santismo up here in New England.) This sort of thing is what the priests (he calls them "guides") of Tlakaelel's religion will teach. Right now he has 15.
Tlakaelel went on to say that most history we learn is wrong or incomplete, written mainly in response to wars, and written by the victor. Jesus said we are all children of god (hermanos). Great spirit, creator, grandfather, mystery, all that exists...and we are him. Cosmos=creator=us. He used a Nahautl term pronounced like "moyo koyani" which means "that which creates itself" (here I thought of the serpent that eats its own tail). Moyo Koyani is above/beyond time, because time is only in this (physical, material) dimension.
He urges us to think for ourselves, submerge ourselves in the essense of the cosmos.
We are going through a special place in the cosmos. New energies are entering the world. New people (like Indigos and Crystals and Psychic children, and that poor mermaid baby I suppose). It's a positive force. People are changing.
In answer to someone's question about her life path, he said that before we pick a path, we see many and try many.Some we see more clearly, and some seem very similiar. But all the paths are really just a very wide road leading to our destiny. We go back and forth from one side of that wide road to the other as if it were many small roads. But no matter what, we get there. Enlightment=illumination. All we see is part of the path. We should identify with the cosmos. We are not cosmic, we are cosmos. We are all one.
Ometeotl.
(that was 7 1/2 pages of notes, and it all happened on Friday night, 8 Men.

No comments: