I look up it is turning fall. Halloween is in the air and here we are mid October. No matter the wish and hope, the world clock turns and the next season looms. Time here moves!

Every year in September I go through a mini-depression as my unconscious awareness feels fall and sees winter and knows the days will be endlessly long and all of this before the harsh and relentless greying of November. We are walking into the rough season for me and yet my reclusive heart longs for the shorter days and finally some evening dark. I have even less need to go out. I love the in-between spaces between day and night, full light to full dark. I like that maybe it’s about hiding in shadows, or watching other shadows…and a few days into it and I”m fine.

Choosing to be aware and leading a life with full awareness of myself in space and time is a big task. So many distractions, everywhere, all of the time. So, the path has decidedly become more Earth based for a minute, to find my footing. A much more mystical path, filled with spirit certainly not form. A form of magic if you will…

Shhhhhhhhh, I am starting to feel like the 30 second bell has sounded on how long we are allowed to talk mystical stuff, before they go after magic and call people witches again. You know, teachings that show us the way towards sovereignty rather than being a pin ball pushed through life by a paddle controlled by some “forcibly attended organized path”. So I’ll remind you that for the most part, the spiritual search is about self-empowerment, learning to be accountable to self, family, acknowledging your responsibility in word and deed. A mouthful and a lifetime walk.

A long walk that most find too hard to do.

So most find someone to walk behind. And a lot of them stumble into cults.

I was recently stuck on listening to a cult podcast. There is so many now! This one was about a self help group that podcaster’s parents got caught up in and eventually drug him into. His story follows the teacher, and the followers still in it, and others grateful to have gotten out. He talks about what it was like to have the gift of running your mouth selling the lies yourself and the slow dawning realization of how many you have hurt. He began to see that the teachings and the company were more interested in numbers than results, yeah baby self help, or cult, same shit different day month and year. And like all of those cult models formed in those years, it looked and was advocated as strictly a business, self help as long as your bank account held out. And, “you better be at tomorrow nights meeting, oh and bring 3 others with you”.

It certainly looks like a brush with a cult can be a great teaching devise. It is surly scattered through out humanity’s experience with life.

So many humans are looking for validation and are doing it by joining groups, and allowing themselves to be swallowed up, hook line and sinker, I get it. But still, this type of personality intrigues me. ” I don’t want to know or question, I want to be shown and led”. I can’t imagine a life where I had to buy what anyone said or be forced to be a yes man to someone’s over blown ego, although, you see it all the time and worse was watching myself join in, while it was going on around me while living in a free country. A slippery slope if you don’t keep your eyes open. Thank God I opened mine.

So for me, I am back to my own meditation chair in my own room and communing with my own energy. The energy I manifest for myself. Being sold a story of someones belief system or a “system”of any sort being better than mine, just isn’t reality. The entire challenge of waking up is in realizing no one can tell anyone how to live. You come to that yourself.

Each of us must come to the idea of what is “right”. Why else give us free will and tell us we must act like carbon copies of the human in front of us or next to us. We must be ourselves unrestricted, to uncover the gifts we have been given, releasing our inner power

But you have to live your life to do it!