Living Your Mythic Edge – Robert Moss

We begin where ancient and Indigenous wisdom tells us we need to start any day: by paying our respects to the sacred powers that open and close our paths in life. The Gatekeeper is one of the most important archetypes that is active in our lives. He or she is that power that opens and closes our doors and roads.

In many traditions, it’s customary to make an offering to the Gatekeeper when embarking on a project or a journey. The offering required of us may simply be to check in and show a little respect.

Trickster is the mode the Gatekeeper — that power that opens doors in your life — adopts when you need to change and adapt and recover your sense of humor. If you are set in your ways, and wedded to a linear agenda, the Trickster can be your devil.

If you are open to the unexpected, and willing to turn on a dime (or something smaller) the Trickster can be a very good friend.

At the start of our journey together, you’ll discover:

• Simple rituals to honor the Gatekeeper
• A powerful visualization to help you recognize and re-vision your blocks and move beyond them
• Guidance on how to recognize and navigate by personal omens
• Instructions for keeping a personal journal as a magical diary, a log of your dreams and encounters with everyday oracles (a place to dialogue with your deeper Self — and a powerful oracle in the making)
• A fun, fast way to share your stories with a friend that makes it easy to offer helpful feedback and guide each other to take appropriate action
• Homeplay exercises for working some ancient oracles, like putting your question to a book (bibliomancy) and to your dreams (dream incubation and oneiromancy)

This week, we’re going to learn how to navigate life by Nine Rules for Kairomancers, and one more just for fun:

1. Whatever you think or feel, the universe says YES
2. Synchronicity multiplies when you’re in motion
3. We live in the Speaking Land; there are oracles all around you if you will listen
4. Life rhymes
5. Every setback offers an opportunity
6. To find ourselves, we may need to get lost
7. The spirits want to be entertained
8. The passions of the soul work magic
9. Look for the hidden hand: invoked or uninvoked, gods are present

And the extra rule, which may be most important:

• Don’t leave home, or return home, without your sense of humor

We’ll also do some fun exercises and shamanic journeying to discover:

• What’s playing on your inner soundtrack
• What attitudes are you carrying which are traveling ahead of you, shaping events, and encounters that lie around the next corner
• How you are likely to respond when the raw power of an archetype next irrupts into your life

There are two basic ways to approach oracles…

The first way requires you to set a theme or pose a question for the oracle. In ancient times, this frequently involved lengthy preparation and significant cost — ritual purification, animal sacrifice, pay-offs to priests. Today, you might put your question to a psychic, or a preferred divination system like tarot or I Ching, or your dreams.

You can also take your question to the world by agreeing with yourself that whatever pops up in your field of perception in a certain period of time will be a response from the oracle of the world to whatever is on your mind. This is one way to play what Robert calls Sidewalk Tarot. The second way to listen to oracles is to let the world set a theme or pose a question to you. All this requires is readiness to receive, and to allow enough space in your mind and in the physical structure of your day to notice what the world is giving you. This is a second way to play Sidewalk Tarot and the results can be fascinating. The theme the world is putting to you may be more interesting than the question your ego put to the world.

This week you’ll discover:

• How to put your question to the world and receive guidance on a life theme
• How to let the world put its questions to you, by scheduling unscheduled time to pay attention as you walk in “the forest of living symbols that are looking at you”
• How to listen for your daily kledon, a favorite oracle of the ancient Greeks that works well on any day
• How meaningful coincidence multiplies when you are in motion, traveling outside your familiar rounds or going through a major life transition
• A very lively synchronicity game by which we’ll construct a new community oracle, swapping messages we’ve received
• Suggestions for looking in a tarot mirror to understand how you’re handling (or failing to handle) a life situation

If you’re confused about what’s happening in your dreams, you’ll find that if you walk your dreams in the world, what pops up around you will offer a commentary. At the same time, the dream you’re carrying may light up your world, bringing different things into focus.

This week, you’ll be guided in how to walk in the liminal space between sleep and awake. This twilight zone of hypnagogia is where your creative and psychic gifts come richly alive, if you let them. It’s a great launch pad for lucid dreaming and a place to develop what dream yogis and other adepts prize as continuity of consciousness.

You’ll also learn how to open a safe space where you can share your dreams with friends inside or outside this community, receive helpful feedback from different perspectives, and be guided on what action you can take to bring magic from the dreamworld into your waking world.

This week, you’ll:

• Visit the Cinema of Lost Dreams where night movies you missed will play for you
• Develop the practice of walking a dream in the world and getting a commentary from what’s going on around you
• Deepen your practice of keeping journals of night and day and sharing dreams in a way that leads to effective action to bring guidance and healing from the dream world into everyday life
• Learn how to spend more conscious time in the creative space between sleep and awake and embark on adventures in lucid dreaming

Jung not only invented the word “synchronicity”; he lived by it. He was constantly alive to the oracles all around him. When he worked with a patient, he followed patterns of wind and water over the lake, the appearance of a fox on a wooded path, or a green-gold flying beetle at the window. He came to believe that each of us travels within a “circumambient atmosphere” charged by the usually unacknowledged archetypes that travel with us, generating synchronistic events.

Mark Twain is famous as a humorist, sage, prolific author, and profound student of the human condition. He was also a lifelong student of synchronicity. “I once made a great discovery,” he reported, “the discovery that certain sorts of things which, from the beginning of the world, had always been regarded as merely ‘curious coincidences’ — that is to say, accidents — were no more accidental than is the sending and receiving of a telegram an accident.” He was more than an observer of coincidence; he used it as a daily source of guidance and actively experimented with inviting synchronous events.

In this class, animated by stories from two tremendously creative lives lived in the consciousness of oracles around us, you’ll discover how to:

• Recognize the archetypal forces at play in our energy fields, and how symbols that live in your mind have magnetic effects
• Track how our emotions generate events through what is called the Pauli Effect, named for the quantum pioneer who helped Jung develop his theory of synchronicity
• Grow your daily practice of listening to the Speaking Land
• Discover with Mark Twain that a setback may truly be an opportunity, and that you need to notice what is showing through a slip
• Experiment with what Mark Twain called “mental telegraphy” but we might now call mental texting
• Awaken to what it means in your life that — as Jung and Pauli came to believe — there is no real separation between mind and matter

When we’re seized by terrible emotions of rage or grief in our own lives, we can choose to try to harness the raw energy involved and turn it — like a fire hose — towards creative or healing action. You may know already that on a path of transformation, you reach a point where you break down or you break through, and sometimes the breakdown comes before the breakthrough.

The story of the Descent of Inanna to the Underworld is seen by some groups today as the model for a woman’s journey to the depths to meet and integrate her shadow side. The myth does not explain clearly why the Goddess chose to go down seven terrifying levels to be hung on a meathook in the realm of her dark sister Ereshkigal.

We do know that she did this of her own volition. It was a choice she made freely. We know also, that after she came back, she forced her unwilling consort Dumuzi to make the Underworld journey. So this is a story for men as well as women — and maybe scarier for the men.

This week, you’ll discover how to:

• The gifts of your wounds
• How to draw creative fire from the dark places of initiation
• Ways to draw courage from the Goddess of many faces as she descends to the Underworld in several myths — including that of Amaterasu, the Japanese Sun Goddess, and Psyche in the Greek story.
• Jung’s shamanic initiation in the Underworld journey now unveiled in The Red Book

We live by stories. Our first and best teachers, in our lives and in the evolution of our kind, instruct and inspire by telling stories. Story is our shortest route to the meaning of things, and our easiest way to remember and carry the meaning we discover. A good story lives inside and outside time, and gives us keys to a world of truth beyond the world of fact.

Consciously or unconsciously, our lives are directed by stories. If we’re not aware that we’re living a story, it’s likely we’re stuck inside a narrow and constricted one, a story bound tight around us by other people’s definitions and expectations. When we reach, consciously, for a bigger life story, we put ourselves in touch with tremendous sources of healing, creativity, and courage.

In this class, you’re invited to journey to an extraordinary place in the Imaginal Realm to deepen your understanding of the myths you’ve been living, and to claim the power of stepping into a bigger and braver story.

You’ll be able to:

• Identify stories you inherited — from family, from ancestors, or other lives — or constructed for yourself earlier in your life, the stories you need to leave behind definitively, or re-make
• Find the myth you’re living now
• Put yourself in the place where the Big Story of your life can seize you. It may be an expansion of your present story, like the unfolding of wings. It may be a myth you did not recognize as your own, until now
• Open a personal portal to the Akashic Records — and perhaps the limitless field of nonlocal mind — to which you can return for further adventure and discovery and contact with master teachers in any field that calls you

Part of the secret logic of our lives may be that our paths constantly interweave with those of numberless parallel selves. The gifts and failings of these alternate selves may influence us, when our paths converge, in ways that we generally fail to recognize.

Connected in a multidimensional drama, this may generate events in both our lives that will appear as “chance.” Yet, the hidden hand suggested by synchronistic events may be that of another personality within our multidimensional family, reaching to us from what we normally perceive as past or future, or from a parallel or other dimension.

When you experience déjà vu and feel certain you’ve been in a certain situation before, you may be close on the heels of a parallel self who got there before you. Serial dreams, in which you find yourself returning to people and places not on your current event track may also be glimpses of a continuous life your parallel self is leading in a parallel world, in which you made different choices.

Physicist Brian Greene speculates we all have “endless doppelgangers” leading parallel lives in parallel universes. As Active Dreamers and kairomancers, we learn how to bring gifts and lessons from a parallel world into this one.

In this wildly exciting class, you’ll discover how to:

• Recognize serial dreams may be glimpses of continuous lives you’re living in other realities
• Examine experiences of déjà vu as clues you may have experienced something in a parallel life that is now converging with this one
• Journey into a parallel life to dismiss old regrets and claim gifts and knowledge from your selves who made different choices
• Effect a quantum shift in your present life

A kairomancer (a term Robert created) incorporates the name of Kairos, a Greek god who personifies a kind of time that is altogether different from tedious tick-tock time. It’s that special moment of jump time when more is possible than you imagined before. Kairos is the time you must seize by the forelock before it’s gone.

To follow the way of the kairomancer, you need to trust your feelings as you walk the roads of this world, develop your personal science of shivers, and recognize you know far more than you hold on the surface of consciousness.

You want to take dreams more literally and the events of waking life more symbolically. You need to take care of your poetic health, reading what rhymes in a day, or a season. You want to expect the unexpected, to make friends with surprises, and never miss that special moment.

This final week, you’ll play wonderful new games and bring alive more of the kairomancer’s way of conscious, creative living.

You’ll discover how to:

• Keep Your Edge
  To create is to bring something new into the world, and that involves risks. The greater powers that support your life draw closer when you’re willing to dance on the edge. Everything interesting happens on the boundaries.
• Honor the Gatekeeper, Dance With the Trickster
  Make a personal ritual at the start of every day to honor your Gatekeeper. Be ready to turn on a dime — or less — when the Trickster comes into play. Affirm life.
• Marry Your Field
  Do what you love, give your best to that, and trust the universe will support you.
• Bring a New Story From Every Day
  The Kabbalah teaches we must find our story, tell our story, and have our story received. This is an assignment you’re now well prepared to fulfill every day.
• Take Care of Your Poetic Health
  A talent for resemblances is essential for a kairomancers, as the Greeks said it was for a good dream interpreter. Notice recurring symbols and situations. Observe what rhymes in a day or a life.
• Remember the Time Is Always Now, Except When the Time Is GO
  All times — past, present, and parallel — are accessible to you Now, and may be revisioned for the better.
• Choose Your Attitude
  However difficult your circumstances, you always have the ability to choose your attitude and this can change everything, including the health of your mind and body and your experience of the world.