Growing up... side by side instead of up and down.

Hope and Love were a lovely parakeet couple I adopted some years ago. They were my perfect pets, small, beautiful, vulnerable and happy and above all, talkative. We’d chat a lot and developed a tender relationship, they were so sweet and adorable in their birdy way!
I was fascinated with their life. When I understood that they were a couple and the eggs needed a nest, they got a wooden box appended to their cage, with a lid & a hole connecting to the cage. I followed all the stages of their breeding; was touched by the “naked” tiny bodies of the seven or eight eggs that hatched. Hope, the mother, let me touch her and them. We spend very tender moments together. The babies were growing under my eyes so fast, getting “dressed” in gorgeous green, yellow, light blue, white and blue feathers. Love, the father, would take his turn lovingly feeding, grooming them and cleaning the nest. And both, father and mother would take care of each other’s and their babies “nits”.

As the babies were growing up, the nest started becoming too small for nine or ten birds. It was time to leave the nest, but the babies were not willing to leave the comforts of it. Their parent’s feeding and caring were too good to give up. Plus, it was really warm and cozy inside, so, why should they leave? Peeping through the hole, the world out there didn’t look attractive. Cold, rainy at times, they would have to fetch their own food and water. You got the picture!

Yet, one morning I hear a strong wing-flapping, bird screams & thuds inside the nest. I go outside to see one of the babies expelled violently through the hole, tries to fly away, grasps the cage wires and gets “stuck” there shaking in fear and… bleeding! Yes! Father had hurt the baby to bleed to force him or her out. It was his “now grow up and fly away” command. I had to find a separate cage for the babies to be on their own, then give them away or free them. Love would not let them in his house anymore.

Isn’t this a very familiar picture of our human conditioning? However, not only is it true at the personal level, but at humanity’s level as well. I heard comments about our present situation, “we are going back to the Middle Ages”. That’s no news! Hasn’t humanity lived under a Medieval system so far to this present moment? With an elite at the top holding power and resources, slaves or “sheep” at the bottom serving them, clergy in between to brainwash them so they keep calm in face of their extreme hardships, and last but not least, soldiers all around to “protect” them (the elite of course!). To top it all, that father figure that it was thought to be there to organize it all, guide us, protect our rights, heal us, etc. etc. seemed to have either vanished or transformed, never fulfilling its expected mission. However, that was the Piscean Age. Today, we, the children, have already discovered that we have been deceived, the brainwash doesn’t work anymore. Especially since the Holocaust, there has been a huge insurmountable crevasse. It turned out that on the one hand, the evolving masculine energy, the new “father figure” is kicking us out of his “nest”, and on the other hand, the feminine energy is getting stronger, the vulnerable baby inside needs to “grow up” and learn how to “fly” on its own.

What is this all about? So far, humanity has relied on someone up there, the “father” to “feed” us, to “care” for us, to tell us what we can and cannot do, to protect us, to make the laws that would guide us on the right way. So, most people had adopted the dictated lifestyle, “métro (auto), boulot, dodo” (+screen, in the last century). We have believed what we were told and took it as “dogma”, just because of the assumption that “Father knows better” and He would save me from trouble if I do what I am told, because He is supposed to look after my wellbeing. ‘Big Brother said it on TV, so it’s true’ and after all, that’s the way we’ve done it for millennia.’ Right? Guess what? Go back to the Medieval system and find the answer.

What are the tools that the “Father figure” masculine energy has used over the ages (Middle Age so far) to maintain the up-down system? Fear. Numbness. Emotional paralysis. Remember the medieval castles, fortresses and ramparts? They used to protect the town from invaders. Today, fear is the perfect wall. It has built security blocks at airports, it has built walls, stone and firewalls, and all kinds of them, from xenophobia and hating the “other” to keep it away, de facto segregation, gentrification, to horrific wars. If we don’t know fear, we haven’t lived on this planet! Numbness is the perfect tool to submit people. We are numbed by ignorance in educational systems that misguide us and discourage our learning skills and critical thinking. In order to succeed in the exams, we need to give the “correct” answers. Numbed by dogmatic religious beliefs, as well as ageless dogmatic conditioning in all aspects of life. And we should obey because it is written somewhere. However, the most modern and sophisticated tool to overpower people is drugs. The older reader remembers the summer of 1968. Do you remember Kent 1970? Governments everywhere realized that thinking young people are “dangerous” to the status quo. The solution to that is easy. Let’s benumb them! And all the while let them feel happy about it. Yogi Bhajan name it ‘cold depression’, it is nothing other than emotional paralysis. Very simple principle: No emotions, no reactions. There are probably people who are still free from fear, numbness and emotional paralysis and still others suffer various degrees of those. However, with a global perspective, those are a tiny proportion. There might be a too big generalization, I agree. The purpose is to broaden the perspective and help us envision the big picture. We are growing up. We are waking up. Do we know who we are? What does it mean to grow up?

Now, in the Aquarian Age, the feminine energy is rising up to the surface. It’s not about gender identity or choice, although it is also manifested in that. Homosexual people are ahead in their achievement of balancing masculine and feminine energies. They even seem to be better at successfully raise children especially when the couple has a neat balance of those energies. At any rate, in general, men have evolved to acquire more gentle ways (they take care of household chores and babies), and women more assertive ways (they take work positions that traditionally were reserved only to men). It is about energy shifts towards less polarization. This means that we are following a tendency to level energies. Although, there are unexpected implications that we are still figuring out. It’s nice to have a husband who takes care of the baby while mother works, and it’s nice to have a wife who works while the husband goes to school, right? These small-scale changes, like a domino effect translate into society and into humanity at a very rapid rate, and keep provoking unforeseen transformations. People look for more compassionate, ethical and gentle ways of doing business that benefit everybody and that are sustainable for the earth. Like my baby birds, we have this new freedom challenge, but are still inside this patriarchal cage, hanging on to the wires, shaking from wonder and insecurity, looking for a way out.

It might be clearer now why I say there is no use of fighting the old, because it is fading away as the masculine energy is toned down and the feminine energy is validated. Either we cannot trust to follow the dictations of the father figure or he completely disappears from the scene. We are in limbo. What we really need is to search and discover what to do with this new energy balance. Unlike I did with my baby birds, a new “cage” is not an option. The only option is to fly free. The only option is to take responsibility. We are ready to design a new organization for humanity that is in agreement with the leveled energies, working side by side instead of up and down. We start realizing that we need to live in agreement with those inner changes, to be coherent.  We are ready to create new ways of being, new ways of doing, new ways of learning, aimed at the wellbeing of all, including the house we live in, the earth. At the present stage, learning is crucial. So far, we relied too heavily in what we were told by others, TV and other media, scientists, professionals, specialists, people with a paper certifying their knowledge or rank. We sadly discovered how easily we were lied, misled, misinformed, and plainly duped. It seems that nowadays the best way to learn is through silence, introspection, intuition, meditation and soul searching, and first hand research. It is time to rely on the creativity of our feelings. As the old saying advises, “follow your heart”.

Mocking the monster

It shouldn't be news for those who know me well how deep my emotions could get. Lately, I've been profoundly affected by our present collective situation. But also touched by the anger, cynicism, mockery, fear, and laughter the monster arouses in people around me. I have personally reacted to some events with laughter, because otherwise I'd be in tears for the daily display of absurdity and viciousness of the present situation. I try to ration the news even though I can't avoid them for a long time when our safety may be at play any minute. However, I'd like to make a fine distinction between the person and the character, between mocking the person and mocking his actions.

Both the actions and the reactions sadden me, and at the same time the situation looks so ridiculous to me considering the age we live in, that it provokes my laughter. It seems to me that I am watching a play, that this situation is a comedy in the large stage of life, a work of Salvador Dalí, a cubist canvas from Picasso. Surreal. Dismembered reality. All of the sudden, the actors are speaking, no! not Greek, it would be too similar to the three languages I speak. Chinese! There is nothing I can make up of it.

And still, I can't pass the mockery against the person. It is obvious that the guy is an ignorant, lives completely unconsciously asleep, and therefore has become the perfect puppet. So oblivious of reality he's more a character in a puppet's show than a real life individual. But mocking a disabled person is not funny. It doesn't make anybody better, as we already confirmed. He should inspire more compassion than anything else, because he can't really do better. Like Ajahn Brahm once said about difficult people, it's better to have the attitude of "the guy hit his head when he was a child, and since then he's been like this". His case is pathetically pitiful. It bears repeating. But remember, his conditioning, the way he is -after hitting his head in infancy and such- is not his fault. So laughing at that or at his ignorance wouldn't be fair. I once had someone laugh at my ignorance and my feelings and it didn't seem fair because I didn't even know that there was something to be ignored. And about feelings, one can do very little except observe them and not to act upon them. Can you see what I mean? If a person has a disability, a mental condition or disorder, one should have compassion, because those are already a hardship and the origin of much suffering for oneself and those around.


Having said that about the person, it is impossible not to reject, one way or another, the actual actions of the character, his lavishly aggressive and often denigrating utterances, his wicked decisions, his malevolent designs, his elitist and unjust orders, his divisive intentions, his quarreling mood, his service to money makers, and all the rest. Is he aware that he's pushing the anger button? I'm not so sure, because he seems to be only concerned about the 'me, myself and I' side of life, worshipping himself by debasing others. Is he aware of the consequences? Probably not. Considering that social media tailors your pages to show you what you want to see, and his TV is certainly tuned to the channels that revere him (obviously, he can't stand watching anything that states otherwise), he doesn't even know what is really going on.


If you agree about the grotesque of this situation, it is in our reactions that we should be constructive, never destructive. The solution is not so much about eliminating the problem, but rather creating an innovative replacement that dissolves it naturally. Again, remember Ajahn Brahm's re tale of the Buddha's timeless story of the "Anger Eating Demon".
The more we lash back to the problem, the bigger it gets, the more we fight it, the stronger it gets. The key is to concentrate that energy in building the world we want to live in, and the old will crumble down on its own. For this task, fear, anger, cynicism, suspicion, mockery and lack of respect for the actors and their followers actually waste the energy necessary for building. Also protesting has its limitations and may as well consolidate conceptions and positioning by antagonism. Voicing dissent should be intentionally planned to attain a specific target (like showing the numbers), but all efforts shouldn't be spend on it.

Do I really know what I want to substitute for this reality? Have I identified my passion about something I want to create, build, give birth to, generate, germinate? Do I have room and time to follow my passion and make it happen? Are there other people I'd like to join to make it happen together?  It's time to concentrate the energy, avoiding the scattering of it in demonstrations of heated emotions that can only add to the problem and even worsen it. We have infinite possibilities in front of us now. I think we should take advantage of the momentum and take off. Carrie Newcomer has a point in her popular song "If not now, tell me when".