This is the Time . . .

by Carlotta Tyler

We are entering a period of profound change characterized by increasing instability.
This change is happening on a planetary as well as on a personal level, illustrating the wisdom: “As above, so below.”

Many individuals are resonating, at a cellular, emotional, psychic level, with the harmonics of the most profound shift in the alignment of our solar system in several millennia. This a major process, yet it has remained virtually unnoticed by the news media.

Older traditions and cultures foretold this time as a shift in nature, in mind-set, in power dynamics around the world. The Mayans, consummate astrologers, were the most precise. Their five thousand-year solar calendar, now in the Museum of Natural History in Mexico City, ended on August 19, 1987. On that day, Buddhists all over the world gathered to meditate on world peace. Other indigenous people had been tracking the start of the paradigm shift for millennia. The Aborigines in Australia, North American tribal peoples, Indus Valley and African traditions all tell of this time, when a several thousand year cycle will end and a twenty-five year window will open, presaging the next several thousand year cycle.

Since thought manifests and humans are among the few species we know of who can focus thought energy, we have been given the task. In short, how humans envision the next cycle, these older wisdom traditions tell us, will determine what form that next cycle takes. 2012 is said to be the closing of that window. However, recent consideration of the Gregorian Calendar, where nine years were removed by Emperor Constantine and Pope Gregory, among others, has cast doubt on the accuracy of the dating of the twenty-five year window. Some are saying that 2003 is the true closing of that window and that the Age of Aquarius has already begun.

The last cycle, the Piscean Age using an astrological lens, was one characterized by human domination which resulted in a lot of aggression, conquest and war as a solution to differences. The predominant organizing thought form of society became “father right” or “patris-archy”. Domination overcame more egalitarian ways of life, religions defined the rules and governments enacted the controls. So the Huna of Hawaii succumbed to Christian Missionaries, the Celts, Goths and Saxons of Western Europe were overcome by the Holy Roman Empire, the Hyssops and other nomadic veldt peoples were subsumed by what became the Judeo-Muslim traditions, the Minoans were wiped out by nature and the Greeks.

This time also saw the development, organization and effective operation of nation-states that built knowledge-rich communities that fed, educated, governed, transported and bonded millions of people. They also degraded the environment and diminished the cultural value of the other half, females. As a consequence, we have whales desperately beaching on Cape Cod because the Navy is bursting their eardrums with undersea sonic booms. Our water supply is compromised from underground nuclear testing, DDT and road salt. We have sea currents and tectonic plates shifting, melting ice caps and pre-pubescent girls having sex boys to be popular.

Many guides, called by some “Star People”, were born into this time to help effect this shift. New souls are coming in with advanced sensitivities and cognition, called by some, the Indigo Children, they have been observed to self heal from Aids by African health care workers, to be rapid learners by Chinese and American educators. It is said that the 24th chromosome, non-operating in most of us, is functioning in them.

Some signs of the Paradigm Shift: Meltdown

• Tieneman Square, where insurgents used the new fax technology to take their revolutionary aims to the court of world opinion, thereby co-opting government hierarchy.
• The fall of the Berlin Wall, the result of a change in the mind-set, the acceptance of a critical mass of the people, not from a Summit Conference of leaders. A critical mass, incidentally, is 23% according to the MIT Media Lab, a visionary collection of quantum physicists whose work receives my careful attention
• The implosion of the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church: The epidemic of pedophilia came about as a direct result of the decision to write the women out of positions of authority within the Church.
• 9/11: The ‘shot across our bow’ by international terrorists, thought to be Muslims seeking retribution, perhaps, for everything emanating out of the West since The Crusades.
• The excesses of the Bush Administration: continuing to shift the fruits of a productive workforce to the already wealthy, denuding our natural resources, dissipating global good-will with a unilateral action-plan, further draining the Social Security account, repeatedly lying to a trusting nation and laying a crushing debt upon generations of Americans to come.
• The Shifting Plates: the Tsunami in Southeast Asia, the Earthquake in Pakistan, the continuing instability of the planet’s mantle resulting in major movement of the tectonic plates. Look for more shifting, not less as “The Ring of Fire” encircling the Pacific heats up.

Some Signs: Evolving
The alignment of the planets in our solar system has presented us with several important and mysterious events. In May of 2000, all of the planets were in alignment with the Sun. This phenomenon had not been seen since the time of the birth of Christ. This alignment was what The Wise Men followed to find “the new Messiah” of the Christian tradition. On the 8th of November of 2003, a unique alignment of six planets formed a Star of David. I interpret the two overlapping triangles as the joining of the masculine with the feminine, since the upward pointing triangle imitates the male energy in organizing hierarchies of intention and the downward pointing triangle, used over time to symbolize female fecundity as the life force for forming communities. In China, this triangle is called the “Jade Gate”, the source of all pleasure, to men, and “the chevron” in Marija Gimbutus’ interpretation of ancient petroglyphs, in “The Language of the Goddess”.

There’s Hope: Metta-view
The next meta-cycle is foretold to be expansive, love-based, with all life forms vibrating at an intensified rate, helping the planet heal to another plane entirely. Called the Age of Aquarius, you may note that some in the entertainment industry were tuned in to this a while ago, in the 70’s Broadway hit and movie, “Hair”.

Sign Up: For Positive Change
Hey, we didn’t get to this linear, logos-worshiping, dualistic, causal, materialistic, female-demeaning worldview by accident. It took millennia and considerable revision of thought forms to enforce a hierarchy where females were distinguished by their absence, where competition and war was the answer. It took chutzpa to instill counter-intuitive concepts such as a trinity of male deities, virgin birth, the Burka and priests in satin and skirts. It took an establishment intent on removing essential female functions. With the advent of physician-assisted birth, test tube babies and in-vitro fertilization natural female functions have been co-opted. Women in this model are in danger of becoming obsolete, like hula-hoops, Edsel cars and girdles. Now that “womb envy” has been overcome by artificial insemination and Viagra has overcome waning penile tumescence, don’t you think it’s about time to bring in our voices to set the world aright?

So, are you committed to do your part, to speak your piece, to support positive change?
Speak up. Speak out.
The world is waiting for the authentic voice of women and girls.

Copy only with attribution. Thank you.

WHY DOES THE GLASS CEILING PERSIST?

At a recent convocation of alumni in the School of Public Policy at Harvard University, a handful of international women leaders spoke in glowing rhetoric about the future of women in leadership positions and what the women there needed to do to become “a player”, to quote one. One participant said,” I'm tired of hearing about the promise of the future. While a few of us have advanced to upper levels of decision-making, why haven't more of us made it to the top? Why does the glass ceiling persist?" Indeed, forty years after passage of the Civil Rights Act that included females in access to education and job advancement , barriers to women's full acceptance, as leaders still exist. While females constitute fifty-one per cent of the population and forty-seven percent of the workforce, only twelve percent are seated in Congress and two percent head Fortune 500 corporations. These numbers have remained steady for a decade. And the pattern does not appear to be improving in young industries. Women were barely two percent of the CEO's leading the dot com revolution. Considering that women constitute fifty-five percent of college graduates and nearly forty-five percent of professional school grads, what is blocking women's advancement?

BLAME IT ON BELIEFS
Ancient, deeply embedded and largely unconscious beliefs are getting in the way of women's progress today. The way people think about one another, the values we hold, the world view that tells us the way things are supposed to be are found in the major religions of the world. Universally among the major faiths, females are described as "less than" and subordinate to males. Further, women have been defined as "purdah", "unclean", not fit to speak in The Temple. These beliefs, ingrained in childhood, are at the core of why women are finding it difficult both to be accepted and to believe in the "rightness" of their being at the top, or the “rightness” of another woman as president.

DEEP AND ANCIENT ROOTS
Where do these beliefs come from? All of the major religions carry a defect message for females. The Judeo-Christian tradition defines females as less valuable than males. Each day an observant Jewish male awakens to thank God he was not born a female. In Orthodox temples women must sit apart from men and are not allowed to add their voices to the service. In Christian tradition, Eve is blamed for the fall from grace that resulted in expulsion from Paradise. This creation myth justified male domination, ownership and control of females and the concept that this was the divine and natural state of the human species. The lowest ranking Buddhist monk outranks the senior ranked Buddhist nun. Muslim females over the age of menarche must fast an extra week during the month-long ritual of Ramadan because they are considered unclean when menstruating. In the Hindu tradition, girls are subject to arranged marriages, their families must produce expensive dowries and, until recently, widows were expected to commit ritual suttee, throwing themselves on their husband's funeral pyre.

PERVASIVE AND POLITICAL
The religious roots of the "patris-archy", or father-right, male dominant system is both global and political. As Shelia Collins writes: "Theology is ultimately political. The way human communities determine good and evil has more to do with the power dynamics of the social systems which create the theologies than with the spontaneous revelation of truth."

The major religious credo and traditions constructed a worldview of male primacy and provided a justification for the "natural order" of the subordination, the invisibility of women in society.
Stephen Lewis, U.N. Special Envoy for HIV-AIDS in Africa when commenting on the disproportionate numbers of females being infected with AIDS was recently quoted: “Why was it only in 2003 that a U.N. Task Force on the plight of women in Southern Africa was appointed? Why did it take until 2004 to form a Global Coalition on Women and AIDS? Why have we allowed a continuing pattern of sexual carnage so grave as to lose an entire generation of women and girls?” This is a core question. Why, indeed!

It was not always this way. God became male, eclipsing the pre-existing balance of an earth mother goddess and her male consort, during the great migratory movements of Indo-Aryans out of the glacial steppes and into the Mediterranean and Western Europe in the 18th Century BC. By 200 AD, Christian doctrine had firmly established a male-based hierarchy in a creation story that told us that, not only had God created man first, but He put him in charge. In Genesis "man shall have dominion over" and "subdue" women, children, animals, and the fishes of the sea . It is not a great leap from this male-dominant platform, which forms the basis for our belief systems, our laws and our customs, to the fact that men continue to head 98% of the public and private sector organizations in the world.

From the taproot of religious tradition, a pervasive negativity spread. A negativity that defined women not only as subordinate to men but in their very essence, flawed. Aristotle's idea of the utopian society described women as fundamentally unfit to lead. Christian theologians from St. Augustine to the Inquisitors saw women as a temptation of the devil and corruptors of men. Sigmund Freud said that females were incomplete males whose identity formation was stunted by penis envy. Piaget, an early childhood education researcher, labeled girls at play as passive because that was their nature, while boys were seen as taking initiative and risks for the same reason. Until the latter part of the Twentieth Century, women and children were the legal property of the male head of the house in North America. In many parts of the world, these laws are still in effect. Is it any wonder, with these beliefs ingrained in childhood that men are finding it difficult to accept women at the top and that women have difficulty seeing themselves as leaders in arenas of decision-making.

BLOOD RITES: BELIEFS AS A BARRIER TO LEADERSHIP
The application of these beliefs on a day-to-day basis set a pattern whereby women and girls were considered defective, a burden, their natural functions a defilement. . The most pervasive and least acknowledged is the issue of menses. What sets the scene for cultural taboos is the fact that the female of the species bleeds on a regular, monthly cycle when not pregnant or ill. The culturally proscribed traditions that separate females from the company of males generally do not attain the cultural clout of taboo until the female attains menarche, or bleeds. The separation is based in Judeo-Christian and Muslim tradition on the interpretation of that natural act as rendering the woman unclean. Menstrual blood is seen as defiling to the male, endangering his strength, making his weapons and tools useless. Blood rites are common in Muslim, Christian and Jewish traditions. All prescribe purification rituals for females after menarche and childbirth. The fact that females bleed and do not die resulted in a critical distinction among all societies. Women were either honored for their procreative powers, or they were debased for their biological function. In most modern cultures, women's biological functions have been used as an excuse for denying them full participation on the world stage.

The Performance Issue
A Gubernatorial candidate in New Hampshire, Arne Arneson, was asked by a male voter in the audience: “That was a great speech, but don’t you think the fact that you have a period one week each month will get in the way of your being an effective governor?” Arne's response was an example of a politician's quick wit. "I'm glad you think my performance here tonight was exemplary. I’m menstruating right now. Imagine what I can do the other three weeks." She did not win election but she won the hearts of the women in the room.

The view of menstruation as a barrier to women's performance is not limited to the man in the street. This misperception is held at the highest levels and influences succession planning on a daily basis. When asked why women were not advancing to top levels in his organization, the CEO of a communications industry giant, replied that his Board of Directors and stockholders would hold him accountable if he advanced a candidate whose decisions would be unreliable for one week out of every month.

Access Issues
These comments reveal the belief that women are essentially flawed and biologically unfit to lead. This belief appears to be widespread among males. If it is also widely held by top organization decision-makers, still predominately male, it would explain the persistence of the glass ceiling and, if unchallenged, will constitute an invisible barrier to women's access to positions of leadership for some time to come.

Beliefs underlie behavior and arise from early cultural conditioning in our families of origin, in the traditions held by our ethnic communities, in the tenets taught by religious faiths. Beliefs can be seen at the root of the current under-utilization of the other half of the global brain trust. Not only are U.S. women gaining degrees, an education differential favoring women is a worldwide phenomenon. So, too, is the phenomenon of exclusion of women from top management positions.

In the U.S., when women first gained access to higher education and advancement in jobs with a future in mainstream organizations, they were told that they lacked the experience and credentials for management. Now, nearly forty years later, women are still being told to wait. But women are not waiting. Women-owned companies increased over 400% in the last decade and created more jobs in the U.S. than the Fortune 500 corporations. Women are leaving corporate America at twice the rate of men. This trend is seen in Europe and Southeast Asia as women entrepreneurs are the majority of the new business enterprise.

The extremely competitive business environment forces transnational firms to select carefully from among the very best knowledge workers available. The opportunity cost of prejudice, of rejecting women and limiting selection to men, is much higher than in previous economic environments. Corporations cannot afford the loss some of their best and brightest human resources because of largely unconscious beliefs that limit their use of this substantial resource. As Fortune succinctly stated, “No company can afford to waste valuable brainpower simply because it’s wearing a skirt.” (18:56)

It is at the level of beliefs that our work as societal change agents must take place if we are to guarantee that our nieces, daughters and granddaughters receive the rights and privileges that accrue to their brothers, fathers and cousins.

To dance on the crest of the next wave, to regain balance in a world depleted by the absence of the authentic female voice, we must examine the beliefs that underlie behaviors that limit full utilization of all of our human resources.

I Woman Culture and Society,Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, ed., 1974, pg. 3, 70. Women anthropologists who found that every culture they studied were patriarchically structured.

II Collins, Shelia, quoted from Merlin Stone's When God Was a Woman, 1976, pg.66.

1 The Civil Rights Act of 1964
2 Genesis 1:26, The Holy Bible.
3 Competitive Frontiers: Women Managing Across Borders, Adler, N.J. & Izraeli, D.H. Pub. Blackwell Business, UK, 1994, pg. 23.


Carlotta Tyler

Re-Membering: Before the Eclipse

by Carlotta Tyler

Our work with women in weekend retreats has been deep and powerful.
One lens that they respond to is this one, shared with you all on the cusp of a time of radical change and call to consciousness for women.
See this as a context for what’s going on in the US election process.”

There was a time, in the long, long ago
Before we knew why there were eclipses,
Or why things went “thump” in the night,
When people dressed in the skins of animals.

You could see, there was a difference.
There was "the self", and there was" the other".

“The self”, who ultimately wrote it all down, could see that
"the other” swelled up every nine moons and gave forth a new tribe member,
Both "the self" and "the other".
This was seen as Powerful Magic.

When “the self” hunted wild boar in the forest and was gored,
“the self” bled and often died, was lucky if maggots set in.

"The other" bled every cycle of the moon and did not die.
This was seen as VERY Powerful Magic.

At the dawn of civilization there were only two responses to this essential difference.
One response perceived the universe as benign and egalitarian,
honored the cycles of nature and understood the creative life force as complementary, the conjunction of two powerful energies joining the masculine and the feminine.

The other was a "dominion over" response that established "father right" as the primary form of social organization and the male as “better than” the female.

Today we are living out the last days of this patriarchal worldview

As we try to balance our planet and our organizations.
People the world over are noticing the essential imbalance of this original split.
Truths previously seen as sacred are being questioned.
Deeply embedded assumptions & largely unconscious beliefs are being examined.

The way forward is being forged by you and me.
What a wonderful time to be living!.

Copyrights, 2000, Carlotta Tyler

Painful chapters of my story, Friend or Foe?

We all have a story, a chronicle of many chapters, divided into happy, unhappy or outright traumatic events. The memories of the difficult events in our personal history tend to become the obstacles, negative thought patterns and limiting beliefs that influence and rule our lives.

Although an event may have happened years ago, its shadow can still reach into the present in the form of fear, anger, or other expressions from the vast landscape of human emotion. Isn’t it interesting that a chapter of a story that happened two decades ago stays alive for so long. What is its link to the present? The Science of Awareness and Meditation answers that question by examining the functioning of the human mind and the thinking process.

The mind is our personal database where all events and situations that happened to us are stored. All day, the mind collects information through the senses and stores them as new data. Thoughts are the result of this mechanism of the mind. The activities and sensory impressions most prevalent during a given day will be reflected as the thoughts that go through our mind.

If, for example we fall in love and spend time with a new special person, we are likely to have a lot of thoughts about relationships, memories of past love, desires, or maybe worries for the future. A weekend of feeling lonely on the other hand can fill us with thoughts of fear, solitude or memories of abandonment. The rule of thumb for the mind’s functioning is: what you feed the beast is what you’ll have to digest. If the food is heavy, the digestion is likely to be heavy too.

We have the possibility to influence the content of the thoughts by choosing activities and the company of people that make us feel happy and inspired, but we have no control over the mechanism itself. The mind keeps generating thought after thought. It is a natural, ongoing occurrence that cannot be stopped willfully.

A trauma of the past can easily get triggered by a situation in the present through the mind’s process of storing and comparing data from its database. The ensuing thoughts about that past pain come in randomly and uninvited. They often linger or may become overwhelming and they can generate emotions that are very unpleasant. Through thinking, the event of 20 years ago is kept alive and fed new energy - almost as if it were happening all over again.

By understanding the habitual thinking mechanism we come to see that thoughts are the primary reason why the painful chapters of the past don’t lose their grip on the present. Since we can’t stop the thinking, how can we ever be free of the pain?

It is again the Science of Awareness and Meditation that offers an answer. During the practice of Meditation one notices that thoughts are coming and going while sitting with closed eyes. At times there will be many thoughts flying through at high speed, at others they will be like a slow wave flowing in and out. The Meditator learns to watch thoughts without engaging with them in any way. A crucial initial realization of Meditation is to see and experience that thinking is going on and thoughts are being produced, but they are not me - I am the one watching them.

Human conditioning has us believe that thought is our identity. We think that a thought going through our mind is equal to reality and truth. A thought triggered by a familiar situation, like: “I am being abandoned again” and the action of shutting down emotionally seem to be one uninterrupted process. In truth there is a thought like “I am being abandoned again”, then there is a space, and then there is an action being taken. If we develop the ability to notice the space between thought and action, and then learn how to extend that space enough to actually pause, we come to realize that we have treated the thought as if it were the painful truth happening again, right now, when in fact we are reacting to a memory.

Knowing that the thought, as painful as it may be, is not me nor my identity, but a memory that presents itself as the reality, gives one new choices and strength. We can now choose to go down the path of repeating the pain by identifying with it, or we can realize that right now a new situation is happening. If we are able to stay with the circumstance that is happening here and now, we are likely to find out that it has nothing to do with the old script that got triggered.

In other words, when we develop the ability to watch the thoughts without identifying with them as “me” or real, when we can see them as the result of the mind’s thinking process rather than as our identity - We can then free ourselves from old pain and learn to experience life as a fresh and new adventure every day. Imagine the lightness of living without the burdens of past pain or negative conclusions!

When we stop identifying with the thoughts and the pain of the difficult chapters from the past, they are no longer experienced as obstacles in the present. Rather they become signposts - friendly reminders to stay rooted in the practice of fully living the present moment and exploring what it has to offer. These signposts then become great gifts!

Marie-Lou Kuhne Millerick