A Yang Warrior must have a clear guidance system to make his way in the world of Yin, and the vast majority of men and women have been cut of from their natural connections. This separation comes from many sources–
- Institutional religions that teach us to look to other people for divine guidance
- Governments that teach us to fit into the mold
- Schools that teach us to obey mundane orders and forget our natural tendencies
- Addictions that cut us off from knowing what is good for us
- Toxic relationships where we are bound by guilt
- Media that encourages us to chase that which will never make us happy
- Science that insists we are all made of random atomic billiard balls
If you do not have a clear understanding of the purpose of your life here on earth, of the divine forces which created you and everything, of what it is that you should value, then you cannot possibly make good choices about what to DO while you are here. And this is the principle Yang Function. We all need to know how to BE, that is Yin, but we also need to know what to DO, and that is Yang. If you think about this it makes sense. A warrior is valuable only if he follows commands, and those commands are delivered through an internal guidance system, and we have all been severed from our own internal guidance system.
Schools, churches, government institutions, and the media work first by severing your divine connection and then by replacing your guidance system with their own priorities. When you were younger you chased the dreams that were placed before you. They were the dreams of your parents, your neighbors, your teachers and your country. You were encouraged to pursue the goals that were laid out in front of you. You were encouraged to get good grades, get a good job, and build a life based on the model of the American “nuclear family.” You were rewarded with praise and recognition when you made advances in this direction. If you did not fit into this mold, you were diagnosed with some disorder, like depression, or ADHD, or dyslexia, or whatever. You were told by the authorities, your doctor, and your parents that you were defective, and then you were medicated so you would sit quietly in the class room and not cause any trouble.
I remember in fourth grade I was at an Episcopalian day school and we were told by the priest in our sacred studies class that anyone who was not baptized would be doomed to suffer eternally in hell. I was only in fourth grade and my internal guidance system rebelled against this lecture about the importance of the sacrament of baptism. I asked “what about the Amazon Indians?” I was naturally fascinated with the Amazon rain forest as a child, and I had learned a little bit about the people who lived there, and to me it sounded like heaven. I thought why would God create “Amazon Indians” only to damn them to hell for not being baptized. I objected and was sent to the principal’s office for being unruly.
Something inside me broke in that moment. I did not believe what this man was telling me, but every authority I knew, from my parents to my teachers, was holding this man up as the authority of God, and I did not know how to reconcile this. I was never told that I could listen in my own heart and hear the voice of God within me. I was told the opposite, that only crazy and dangerous people thought they could hear the voice of God inside themselves. We were not taught to seek the voice of the divine in our hearts. Instead, the only source of divine instructions comes from a dusty and incomprehensible book that was written in another language 2,000 years ago, and only dusty incomprehensible male priests were able to instruct on the meaning of this book.
It was these institutions that the Master Teacher Jesus Christ was rebelling against when they crucified him. Then these same power institutions, such as the Holy Roman Empire, usurped the name of this spiritual master that they themselves had killed. The divine connection of the individual directly to God that we all used to access through sacred plants and rituals was severed two thousand years ago, and human institutions became the surrogates for the divine. The world was taught that the word of God was delivered to the world only through the infallible pronouncements of individual humans, like the Pope. Anyone who stood in the way or disagreed was branded a heretic, and heretics deserved to be burned at the stake.
No institution in the world has brought more death and destruction to mankind than the Roman Catholic Church. This basic historical fact has been obscured, and it is very difficult to see, because so many people believe that this institution is here for the service of the Divine will in a sea of sinful humans. But we are now learning that Pope Pious XII enjoyed cozy diplomatic relationships with the Nazis and the fascists of Italy, and stood by while Jews were deported from Italy for execution in Germany. Before that the Church presided over the genocide of indigenous cultures in South America, it stood behind the inquisition, the crusades, slavery, and the extermination of millions of women who were branded as witches for offering knowledge of healing and illumination through sacred and medicinal plants.
Even today we are discovering the horrific sexual abuses by Catholic priests of young children, to which the establishment turned a blind eye. But so ingrained in our culture is the notion that this institution stands for the will of God, we still line up for our crackers in the communion line, receiving holy communion in the form of a sterile starch cracker right before announcements and donuts.
Back in ancient times, communion with the divine within came in the form of sacred plants. These powerful entheogenic plants exist throughout the world and give a direct and personal connection to the divine within us. Experience with the Indigenous people in South America teaches us that they know everything about the plants in their environment. With our prejudice against them, we assume they did not know about the power of these plants unless we have direct evidence that they did know. A more accurate frame of reference would be to assume they knew and utilized the power of all of the plants in their environment unless we have direct evidence that they did not. And more than this, they still know today far more than we know.
Their concoctions of poisons alone, for hunting for instance, are amazing. They combine plants to create poisons to kill very quickly small birds, to cause large animals to continue bleeding when shot by arrows, to make monkeys fall out of trees. They have drops that they put in their eyes that give hunters greater visual acuity. They use frog venom applied in small burns in the skin to increase immunity, energy and good luck. They know how to mix plants for all kinds of medicinal effect. Ayahuasca, or Uni as it is called in the Western Amazon, has been known and used as a source of communion with divine realms since time immemorial.
In Africa they have Ibogaine, in Egypt they have the tree of life, in the western deserts they have the Sanoran Desert Toad and Peyote, in Mexico, Northern Europe and the Pacific Northwest, they have psilocybin mushrooms. These plants exist everywhere and they open the door to divine connection. These divine plants were well known in ancient Greece, and when Jesus offered communion to his disciples at the last supper, you can bet that the “wine” and “bread” he served were in fact powerfully entheogenic.
But people with divine connections cannot be coerced. We see this in our own culture when the US Government started the war on drugs in the late 1960s after the psychedelic revolution that started on April 19, 1943 with Albert Hoffman’s bicycle ride. People were waking up to another way of seeing themselves in the world, and this new awareness was spreading like wildfire. Hippies were burning their draft cards and rejecting the mandates of the power structure in this country. Once a person has a direct experience of the divine and sees himself in the eyes of the other, it’s very difficult to persuade them to go to Vietnam and drop napalm on innocent people.
And so the war of drugs was initiated by the criminal Richard Nixon, and all research on psychedelics stopped for fifty years.
The first step to waking up and starting your path as a Yang Warrior in this world of Yin is to see what was stolen from you. This does not mean you need to take a plant medicine at all. There are many Buddhists who spend hours connecting to the divine through prayer and meditation. There are many others that find it in communion with nature. But the first step on this path, is to realize that you need a new guidance system.
Spencer Space 