Life Force - Survive – Instinct

Red Serpent is one of the 20 aspects of our environment celebrated in the Tzolkin (soul count) 260-day calendar. The glyph image is clearly a snake: scales, squinty eyes and all, with an incongruous full-lipped mouth. All the days named for animals also invoke gods with their characteristics, so Red Serpent is both earth-bound reptile and a divine incarnation of the instinctual, cold-blooded snake whose long, legless form is echoed in all of nature, from the sticks we use to erect shelters, to the lightning ribbons in a stormy night sky. Phallic? Indeed. This passage through the Red Serpent’s energy is the sex talk of the Tzolkin calendar. The glyph’s prominent mouth is a reminder that even as a Serpent is a strong visual of male genitalia, this wavespell is also a stream of wide openings that are easily vaginal, oral, to be entered and emerge from in deeper peace. Oh my.

We often assess cold-blooded reptiles as emotionless, unfeeling, and it may be true that without beating hearts their life force is too smooth to create surges of drama, inner storms. But any observation shows how keenly aware, focused and alive these animals are: ready to spring or flee or turn invisible against marbled rock, they are so aware of the threat of death that they live on the edge of it, endlessly in survival mode. This is true, especially, of snakes – legless, undefended coils, relegated to ground level. Instead of warm blood, the snake carries venom, is liquid toxicity and the threat of death. As mammals, we don’t have that metaphorical burden, that rigid alignment with poison, and are also lifted away from the earth and its seismic pulses by our limbs. Sprung higher into the air, able to defend our body core with our arms, legs, distanced from the ground and full of thoughts that come with higher visioning and altitude, we have grown detached from the basest aspect of existence: will I have to kill to save myself?

Returning to the invitation that the next 13 days be an extravagant celebration of sexual urges, kundalini surges, we can note the traditional view that the serpent resembles and represents a phallus. So do skyscrapers, but a snake is usually prostrate on the ground and so we are honoring in this time the dormancy of a man’s sexual vigor as much as his ‘strike.’ At a broad crossroads in human civilization, perhaps incorporating the prophecy for great change of 2012, we are noticing the true demise of masculine destructive urgency, that need to sexualize culture with constant goals of erection – overbuilding, amassed materialism, isolated towers of those hoarding their wealth – and emission – the spillage of everything from blood in war to media sensationalism, unstopped toxic flows.

Man’s nature is not patriarchal overlording, and this moment in the Tzolkin is an underscoring of that remembrance. Man is the procreative seed, the warrior who finds his way into the goddess temple for blessing on a path of sustaining life. Man visits the feminine divine through sexuality, makes his deep offering, is replenished in turn by her receptivity: she is without the high walls, dangerous obstacles that he meets routinely on his hero’s quest. Man is the Red Serpent, vital, close to the earth in deference to the feminine divine who dwells there, is humble without any means of offense, only a defense structure of killing so as to not be killed.

We must remember what men are, and what they offer, which is that they have the means to protect women with their instinctual survival mechanism. They are otherwise still, steady, laid bare and open in the sun, on a rock that grounds them and is where they make their offering to earth and sky. Once men are thinking, extended upwards on limbs into the stratosphere of the mind, plans, ideas – they lose their connection to the female, and the memory of being protectors is clouded by all the other visioning. This is the dilemma of modern times. The Red Serpent wavespell is not modern, is primal, is a recalibration back to base instinct of survival through sexual union where men and women lay close to the earth, not upright and arid, and feel the emanation of the sacred maternal heart beat rise through them.

We forget we are life and death beings, are busy with electricity that seems like eternal enlightenment even if its overuse ultimately robs us of the safe house of our earth’s atmosphere. But we are life and death beings, and we are reminded now to choose to be naked and embrace over all other impulses. This is not an invitation to meaningless sex, more violations. It’s an invocation of god through sensuality and closeness to another that dissolves those limbs that push us apart, leaves only snakelike motions in each partner, and ultimately prayer through a man’s ability to penetrate skin, bone, flesh, into darkness, past his own orgasmic death, seeding life.

So we add boundless divinity to our libido urges – our desire to have closeness, tenderness, relaxation, release. It’s true that we can achieve this feeling of peace and connection to the gods through meditation, yoga, dance. The question is only whether our entire civilization would be cleaner, more honest, and more interdependent if we prioritized the communion of lovemaking through bodily connection. It might be so, if we recalibrate our fears of intimacy and the ills we have experienced through poisonous snakebites of sexual abuse, toxic betrayals – if we can dare in the next 13 days to grow beyond the limitations of our sexual history and into wholeness again.

The Tzolkin has a means for us to shed our fears as if they were snakeskin. We enter in this wavespell a column of ten portal days that are indeed the slithering through of one last dead layer of skin that has bound us too tightly in our recent growth. The teaching here is that as painful as it feels to see what we no longer have use for, we must revisit it one last time as it leaves us. We are in one sense at our superficial worst in this passage. But every portal day is a gateway through obstacles that have routinely plagued us, halted our true liberation, so for every scale of skin scratching at us uncomfortably, chafing the soft new layer underneath, there is an opportunity to also feel the freedom so profoundly on its way to us. The Red Serpent of the glyph has full lips like a Hollywood screen siren, that suggestive opening where it could randily eat its own tail. When we go through the portal days, we are also entering the cavity of the feminine body, and as much as being a profound death, it also feels like home; the discovery may be that they are the same place.

Sex is like this. In the arc of a lifetime it’s initially uncomfortable and feels like breakage, but becomes the teaching for how to be the most bare, revealed and raw before the eyes of god and a human who is god’s channel. Our ego dies, we dare in this culture of distance to hold each other close, penetrate deeper than skin level, dissolve into each other. We need more, we need it to be remembered for its divinity. In order to survive, to have life force, we need this nakedness in body and soul. So we’ll be working, each of us, towards the resurrection of loving one another through primal impulses, instinctual vibrancy, hunger.

It totally fucks up everything our civilization prides itself in for 13 days, because in the First World we don’t allow ourselves to be ruled by this natural law. As nature has its moment, sexually activating us, so do the demons that want to keep us dressed, harnessed in layers of fashion, seat-belted into commutes, stuck in an office chair or ever upright and in our heads. Use your poison reserve skillfully, not killing your lover but the guards who hold the key to the prison door.

Jose Arguelles chose three words to describe the Red Serpent. Its power is life force, because even as we assign images of death by lethal snakebite to the serpent, it’s really just asserting its right to live. When we have the Red Serpent’s power for ourselves, we are also driven to be fully alive. It’s an intensity, a density of conviction that we belong here, are not going to quit or be sent away to versions of an afterlife. It is an attitude, the hood of the snake expanded or the fangs bared. It’s life force like a police force – a patrol that has been delegated power to keep you living. And again, rather than embodying that as raised fists, protective armoring, an angry demeanor, we show our energy for living most forcefully by bold union with another. This is the revolution, the reversal, of the wavespell. We prevail by loving each other past thought and reason, where physical force is in the name of true heart expression and thereby a healing.

The action of Red Serpent is to survive, and I will offer the French derivative of the word: ‘to live under.’ If we survive, we live beneath the stars, our concept of god, and deeper than all superficiality. If we survive, we live close to the earth’s core to be steeped in the sacred feminine. We search for underlying truth, dig into secret histories that have been in darkness, not at the surface. We live also under each other, supporting our partner in life as we would in sexual union, willing to be a foundation for their ascendance towards the heavens. Other survival – money panic, relational greed, the slew of ‘over’ indulgences we covet – is living under the thumb of some noxious Big Brother, so choose your plan for getting through this time, burrowing under it, wisely.

The essence of Red Serpent is instinct. We will feel what to do in our gut. We won’t be able to consult our heart because for this passage we won’t have one. We will be in the precursor to it, though, what began the evolution in that direction, which is the way we can feel another’s energy and comfort level through our own sensitized skin. When we later love from the heart level, courageous and compassionate, we will still be awash with this renewed skill of knowing sensually what another is experiencing in their body. We will love them more deeply because we have become attuned to their discomfort and their ease, each in phases. Allow your instinct to direct you to your own safety, as well, and away from dangers you would usually be numb to.

Remembering Yellow Human –

Last Wavespell’s Learning

It’s good to be human, after all. We are at a stage in world transcendence where it is both humbling and ennobling to own our human nature, our human condition. If you reflect back on the last 13 days, you are sure to see you did nothing ‘wrong’, were in fact led to be in greater integrity than ever. There was instead a natural stripping bare of the primary illness of being human – a free will that enslaves others. We can redefine the term to mean the freedom within to channel divine will, unencumbered by other congestive energies.

There was congestion, though, and a persistent cough, if your human body was overrun by the dark side – a shamanic death invited so we could more resolutely shine illumination. Swine Flu, commemorating a farm animal never represented in the Tzolkin count, must be a reflection of too many humans acting like pigs, or what we pretend pigs are (selfish, sloppy) in our projection of ourselves onto them. If we act like humans, how do we act? We protect the lower life forms and revere the sacred spirit equalizing us all. If we were weakened in this window, it was a reconfiguration back to skeletal needs and longings. If we noticed new strength, it was probably towards being primal. Yellow Human offers wisdom and influence, so we saw sources to submit to for learning and growth. We ceded our will, after all, were free to say, ‘Maybe I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.’

Maybe it’s like driving: the freeway is faster, monotonous, unnerving, while the highway takes us gently back to source with its natural setting, lets us ascend. We are growing up, as a species, into the heights of light force and a big picture visioning.