Crossing the Rainbow Bridge: Entry via the Stargate

Tesseract, pentaract or hexaract? crop circle at Cley Hill, Warminster, Wiltshire 'inspires one to journey to the edge of knowledge'

We’ve heard a lot of talk recently about entering the Fifth Dimension. Not exactly mainstream media, but you know what I mean: it’s been in the visionary blogs, the music, the crop circles. They, most visually, are our guides to this next rung on the spiritual ladder. This is our Stargate, the next stop on the celestial tour: our starmap imprint sent to guide us across the Rainbow Bridge.

I know, you’ve heard Rainbow Bridge used as a metaphor for crossing ‘over’, i.e. leaving this mortal coil, abandoning your family and friends on earth and becoming one with the Great Spirit. As one aging body which fondly remembers the ’60s, that thought is paramount in my understanding of signs we are being shown right now — this 2010 season — in these so-called End Times. And, goodness knows, with earthquakes in Haiti and Eureka, African drought, world temperature extremes and the Deep Horizon oil spill, we are being shown death in no small measure. No-one explained, however, in those wonderful and awful predictions mentioned in so many religious and spiritual disciplines, that this is potentially a time of joy! We are being given pointers to show us how to express our personal joy. I think that’s what it’s about.

The eclipse from Easter Island: photo by Stephanie Guisard

Last weekend, July 11th, stargazers in the southern hemisphere experienced a total solar eclipse. Totality was visible throughout a massive swathe of Pacific Oceania starting midday in the northern Antarctic, through the Easter and Cook Island chain, (Mangaia in particular) and ending at the point of dusk on the west coast of south America. Observers from the North — not treated to an iota of this spectacle — flew to Pacific atolls in French and American Polynesia while locals in Chile, Argentina and the Andes gathered to witness varying shades of totality as the moon’s shadow all but obliterated the sun’s disk. The path of totality crossed the Pacific from west to east, over Cook Islands, Easter Island, the waters off Tahiti, and ending in southern parts of Argentina and Chile as the sun set and its movement through differing time zones inspired dramatic pictures.

Northern hemisphere lineup at dusk

The northern hemisphere has had its own drama too. Comet McNaught may have sunk below horizons in the north before July 4th weekend, but we are being treated right now to a fine evening array as, just after sunset, three major planets, Saturn, Mars and Venus, line up in the western sky with first magnitude star Regulus in constellation Leo — the brightest star to sit almost exactly on the ecliptic. Jupiter alone shines brightly in the East shortly before dawn as a ‘morning star’.

What has this to do with moving into the next dimension? using the Stargate? you may ask.

A lot of centuries’ erudition has impressed on us the need to die first before we get to go to heaven. And in the belief system of most of humankind on planet Earth, that’s still the way of it. But there is the tiniest chink of light — the one streak of hope and delight — shining through a crack in that Stargate telling us Heaven is Here, Now, if we know where to look. Problem is, we’ve been looking in the wrong places.

Yes, we have read our spiritual texts — after all, biblical renditions, Vedic literature, the Quran are profuse on the subject of inspiration — and we are indeed beginning to ‘look to the heavens’, to seek to foster an awareness in ourselves outside our normal preoccupation with bodily sustenance and functions. But we may still be missing the point.

The Stargate beckoning us across the Rainbow Bridge isn’t up there. It’s in here.

Many indigenous cultures have kept ancestral knowledge alive through the time-honored oral tradition: a means often scorned by the ‘capitalist culture’ of the First World as inaccurate, lacking in practical application and unrealistic. In a world of big business, big oil spills and big gas-guzzling machines, such derision may have an audience. But thankfully some of us no longer feel so driven — as we were, for example, in the ’80s — to mow down hectares of trees to plant oil-producing crops, to grub up precious hedgerow habitat to farm pesticide-fed food because it’s ‘cheaper’, or to tolerate maltreatment, even extinction, of our dependent subspecies (the lesser animals) as expendable, predacious or edible. Our determination has brought some awful revelations — one might cite the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, war, famine, plague, and death — and incentive for us to change horses, and so, at the eleventh hour, we may be learning.

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the heartbeat of the Universe, to match your nature with Nature”.
Joseph Campbell

Crop Circles: the new communications medium
Gradually over roughly a decade, the Crop Circle phenomenon caught the public eye. At the end of the 1980s a small following predominantly in Wiltshire, constantly ridiculed and misreported in the press, announced mysterious (and mystical) overnight appearances in ripening summer crops.

Now it’s worldwide.

Sixth dimensional cube (hypercube) or Hexaract at Cley Hill, Warminster

Sophisticated designs have become infinitely more complex, embedding code and displaying supreme care in laying inner swirls of undamaged layered wheat and barley. In latest designs, as at Cley Hill and at Guys Cliffe, Old Milverton, Coventry, Warwickshire, these layers are used to give extra dimension to the design. It is no coincidence the Cley Hill formation is called the hypercube. It is the closest anyone has ever come to creating a fourth dimensional geometric form in essentially a two-dimensional drawing. The layered crop and the deliberate care with which it has been folded creates an optical illusion of a tesseract – a hypothetical cube in fourth-dimensional space. Its supreme success is that this illusion is visible only from above. And yet, when used as a graphic to focus on for meditation, the design catalyzes amazing changes in perception. A new video compiled from old footage from Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ is worth watching for his delightful explanation of the tesseract.

The tesseract has a theoretical connection with the mid-May oil seed rape formation at Wilton Windmill whose binary code translated as the mathematical theorem known as Euler’s Identity. Euler’s formula, expressed as the equation (e ^ (i * Pi) + 1 = 0), exists and is provable, but for several years nobody knew what it meant. The tesseract is provable as a geometric figure, but, because it exists in the fourth dimension, nobody (human) has yet been able to create one. Julian Gibsone, director of the Cropcircleconnector DVDs, describes this crop formation as inspiring a ‘journey to the edge of knowledge’.

Old Milverton crop circle July 10 reminiscent of Basil Spence 'crown-of-thorns' rood screen

Following hard on its heels, but in common with this season’s use of ancestral strongholds to display 21st-century phenomena, another complex and multi-layered formation appeared near Coventry on July 10th at Guy’s Cliffe, Old Milverton. Its siting near a medieval chapel, ancient caves and a castle mentioned in the Domesday Book is not accidental.

Basil Spence crown-of-thorns rood screen in the Gethsemane chapel at Coventry

It has been seen both as an amazing piece of crop art and as a representation of the ‘crown of thorns’ screen designed by Basil Spence for the ‘new Coventry cathedral’ rebuilt after WWII.

The phenomenon has become a movement; its messages strengthen a growing number of people who are choosing a spiritual path. People who meet inside the formations describe feelings of peace, brotherly love, and display kindness and shared belief with one another. Farmers, rather than banning people from walking in their crops, are increasingly open to allowing visitors inside formations — so long as they approach via the tramlines — and donation boxes are becoming commonplace.

The movement has been hugely encouraged by an electronic presence: much interaction and shared opinion is generated by groups on the social network, Facebook. They include Crop Circles Index, a recent multilingual addition providing great CC resources; another group, ‘Report a Crop Circle’ attracts 2,910 ‘FB members’, encourages communication on crop circle discovery, meaning and speculation along with related solar phenomena. The much-vaunted Crop Circle Connector website has a reputation for being first base for reporting new formations and its homepage has a forum for discussion. It also has a Facebook page of 3,473 Circle Chasers with daily interaction. Croppies no longer function as isolated eccentrics rushing from pub to pub between field sightings. Croppiedom has hit the mainstream.

Huge neolithic stronghold, ancestral hilltop monument nurturing its 21stC offspring in the amphitheatre below

As if to emphasize this new status, the Cley Hill, Warminster circle site, like most 2010 chosen locations, has huge ancestral stronghold connections, stunning views, and is described by Julian Cope as ‘significant to a powerful Neolithic race.’

Unlike the Hopi or the Maya, the English are nothing if not an urbane and modern First World race, supremely disinterested and disconnected from their ancestors, in dire need of reconnection, it might seem. Crop formations in recent years — and particularly in 2010 — have invariably been sited within the precinct of an ancient stronghold. A hint perhaps?

“At the time of the 13 Baktun and 13 Ahau is the time of the return of our Ancestors and the return of the men of wisdom.” Maya prophecy

In England, there is no Merlin figure any more, no ancestral role model with white flowing beard to bring ancient knowledge to the people. The Maya in Guatemala, on the other hand, keep a living record — in the person of Don Alejandro Oxlaj, ‘Wandering Wolf’, Grand Elder and Day Keeper of the Calendar of the Maya, 13th generation Quiche High Priest and Head of the Continental Council of Elders and Spiritual Guides of the Americas. The spiritual welfare of the 21st Century Maya of Guatemala is in his hands. He is charged with the duty as primary keeper of the teachings, visions and prophecies of the Maya. While the Maya have no autonomy recognized by the government of Guatemala, their culture is strong and deeply rooted in their historic prophecies. One of their most potent ones expresses the need for all peoples from all countries to come together to help save the earth:

“Those of the Center, with their mystical bird Quetzal, unite the Eagle of the North with the Condor of the South; we will meet because we are one, like fingers of the hand.”

In their view, behavior of human beings all over the world has to change: become more in tune with life on Planet Earth. It is our joint responsibility. Their invitation from the Indigenous Race is extended to everyone, to help rescue human life, save the planet and thus inherit a healthy future for ourselves and our children.

If there were ever such a tradition in England, it has long been forgotten. True, there are hints of ancient lore: that Arthur will rise again when his people are in their hour of greatest need. But it pales by comparison with the strength of combined Mayan tradition.

Perhaps this is what crop circles are doing for the people of Britain. Britain was once Great. Britain was once a force to be reckoned with. Britain saw the Roman presence evacuate in AD420. It held off the Goths, and yet allowed in the Angles, the Saxons and Jutes; eventually Normans. In the mingling, we seem to have lost some of our ancestral connections: our connection with the Land. And it is this synchronization with the spirit of place which crop circles seem to want us to recognize: to tune once more into earth energy, that sacred electromagnetic force which our ancestors recognized, understood and held sacred. If we allow ourselves to tune into our planetary ‘garden’, we are half way towards understanding that feeling of joy which Mother Earth extends to us; wants to rekindle in us.

It has been said that joy is the stargate through which we may reach that ‘promised land’: that sense of place and comfortable being when we are at one with our spiritual home. In esoteric tradition, joy lifts the vibration of a person’s resonance and as one’s vibratory level increases, as one vibrates at a higher frequency, doors begin to open that were closed before. Things happen miraculously, events fall into place. A laugh, a smile can open that door, that stargate.

So, if this summer is the summer we start to ascend– we may already have risen a level. If we can see/experience the tesseract, it’s already happened. Then the next level, the fifth dimension, is also attainable, just a step farther. If we focus our intent: practise meditation, make it part of our life. By revving up our joy vibration, we get to speed up the process. As Joseph Campbell says, atune our nature to Nature.

The aperture which joy opens for us now is the stargate to the next dimension: across the Rainbow Bridge, it’s only a peal of laughter away.

Like the Buffalo, Heading into the Wind

Last of the harvest

Equinox is approaching; light shines for fewer hours; the Earth’s northern hemisphere cools. A hinge on the doorway of the seasons swings to a close.
Time reaches the halfway point between solstice and solstice; it pauses, giving all of us equal hours of day and night at once, at one. There is still hope. Then the door closes.

There is definitely a feeling of closure around right now. In turbulent times we resort to gathering in of faculties, pulling in the feelers after a tentative burst of faith and hope that the world would change overnight. Did we believe that by our being blasted with Cosmic Rays, messages from ET, a flurry of spiritual internet (and out-of-planet) communication, that we might find a quick fix, a rescue remedy to reach the Promised Land? After the pinnacles of 09/09/09, three eclipses, admonitions to prepare for a Life Change, a Planetary Shift, Shift of the Ages, there now seems a finality to each day, a touch of chill descends at night. The summer of 2009 gently pulls down its curtain and allows us to retreat from the elements, to enter our caves for the winter.

Many cultures of ancient tradition take this time to go inward spiritually. Eastern philosophies turn from waning light without and focus on the light within. Autumn lecture tours by gurus and autumnal spiritual retreats abound. Others in the West find solace in working to consolidate one’s own projects, to take stock and assimilate knowledge, insight, light gained over summer.
For a writer this should be a glorious time: more access to internet and computer hours to satisfy even a librarian.

This writer is a gardener though and the gardener in her demurs. Doesn’t want to let go of the light; the feeling of summer still warm on the skin is seductive, there is a longing for a reprise, a need made more poignant by the last rays of the sun, the gathering of swallows.

Not all of us, however, may like grasshoppers flee the wintertime. Change is often a call to the human urge to move on. We need to heed the call.

Fall was traditionally – and in some places still is – a time of migration. Food supplies dry up with shortening days, earth has given her all: the wise move on. Swallows, songbirds, geese are the last in Europe to leave, while their fellow residents still gather in the harvest: human farmers barley and wheat, animal residents nuts and berries. In the Pacific NW mammals of the old regime are urged by primeval instinct to move to winter grounds. Wolf, elk, bear, caribou, mountain lion and moose all have to find more food, shelter, winter quarters.

Farther south there used to be buffalo.

Heading into the Wind

Now with little territory of their own, bison (political correctness of terminolgy goes with manipulation of animals) have nowhere to move. They are herded like other domestic beasts, subject to humanity. We are now trying to do the same with wolves.

The Wolf, unlike the Buffalo, is fighting back. There is a current initiative to overturn Washington’s recent shortsighted alteration to the Endangered Species Act.

They say our only way forward as a Race is to follow our inner urge to move with the times. That we should trust our guidance by our Higher (inner, wiser) Self to bring us out of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves and our planet into. The Earth is, after all, reaching out to show us how to do it.

At autumnal equinox, the beauty of light, growth in its final stature (before the fall) and abundance of fruit, prolific increase in bird and vegetable kingdoms, all give us hope to nurture us through the winter, to protect us from wilds of weather and wind. As well as gathering in the harvest, we are being asked to ‘gather into the fold’, to foster in ourselves a spirit of endurance.

Mountain lion, cougar or Kelly's Cat, wild cat is a survivor

In all older traditions there was one totem animal that embodied endurance. Russia had Bear; Norway, Sweden, Finland have Reindeer; Central Europe (used to) have the Wolf; North Africa and the Middle East the Camel; Central Africa the Cat; both Americas had the Eagle. But in addition to Native American’s respect for Eagle, his admiration went out to Buffalo.

When all of surrounding humankind is packing up tipi, provisions, families and goods to find winter hunting grounds, following migrant animals was a way of life. It more often than not included hardship and trek over difficult terrain to get there. Death, survival and jubilation on arrival were common in both man and animal. Native American wisdom says that animal teaches Man how to live.

When all else failed, the buffalo headed out from sunny summer plains and through what seems like insuperable odds, braved wind, hail and snow to reach better ground.

We are being asked to do the same. Human nature has the power of endurance, the intellect and spirit to survive and ensure survival. Along with our fellow earth residents, we have an obligation to care for both summer plains and winter feeding grounds. Without our care, they won’t be there next fall.

Buffalo hooves are not made for concrete

We as a species are being asked to hold firm to what we believe. That we should show gratitude for the gift we have been given of this unique planet. That heaven-on-earth is as we make it. Nature will help, but we have to want to cooperate, not bully her into it.

We as a species are being asked to become custodians again: to care for our home like responsible animals; not trash it like hyenas and wild dogs: This is no longer simply wise; it is a necessity. Like the animal kingdom, we are being asked to look after our territory for ourselves, for our children, our families, our piece of the planet, and in combination with others, the planet as a whole.

This project we are taking on will not be easy. But we have been genetically engineered to overcome our past and endure its consequences. The journey will have its pitfalls. We may not arrive as we started out. But we will get there. If we do it together.

In order to get there, though, to make sure we reach our goal, by immersing ourselves in transition from medieval to superstellar species we, like the Buffalo, may have to head into the Wind.