The Red Book

A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark

Sera J. Beak

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781118040911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Red Book is nothing less than a spiritual fire starter-- acombustible cocktail of Hindu Tantra and Zen Buddhism, Rumi and Carl Jung, goddesses and psychics, shaken with cosmic nudges, meaningful subway rides, haircuts, relationships, sex, dreams, and intuition. Author Sera Beak's unique hybrid perspective, hilarious personal anecdotes, and invaluable exercises encourage her readers to live more consciously so they can start making clearer choices across the board, from careers to relationships, politics to pop culture and everything in between. For smart, gutsy, spiritually curious women whose colorful and complicated lives aren't reflected in most spirituality books, The Red Book is an open invitation to find your true self and start sharing that delicious truth with the world.

CHAPTER 1

Light the Match

Set Your Intentions Free

 

 

So how the hell do you start igniting your divine spark? Well, first and foremost, start by setting your intention. Your intention is the energy, the electric charge, the awareness you bring to every aspect of your life. It’s the force that lies behind everything you do, the fuel for your fire. Your intention helps create the pathway for your experience; therefore, setting it ain’t no trifling, careless thing, but a responsibility, one not to be taken lightly.

Intention is big. Countless are the spiritual books and teachers that discuss, in great detail, just how we should set our intentions (check the resource section for just a few that I find helpful). But here in The Red Book, I want to keep it simple, by asking you to use intention in a way that helps you give more conscious direction and divine spark to life’s ordinary and extraordinary moments.

Setting your intention is a bit like offering up an invocation to the universe. You place your desire out in the world, as an energized thought, a pregnant idea, an open prayer. You envision how you would like to be, to feel, to progress. So let’s prime your spiritual engine right now. Begin by stating—and I mean this literally—how you would like to interact with this book and how you would like to connect more deeply with the eagerly awaiting universe. Take a deep breath, and slowly let it out. Relax your body, quiet your mind, and let your intention rip, speaking either out loud or internally, or writing boldly in a journal. It might sound something like this:

“This is my intention. I intend to begin igniting my divine spark, consciously. I intend to really know who I AM. I intend to creatively express myself, as authentically as possible. I intend to explore what the divine means to me and what I mean to the divine, to stare straight at the contradiction that claims that the divine is both within me and outside of me, and laugh. I intend to make the red approach my own, to pay attention to my intuition, and to absorb only the spiritual material inside and outside this book that aligns with my divine self. I intend to intend more. I intend to be discerning yet have an open mind and heart and a fantastic sense of humor throughout this whole weird, sticky, delicious process.”

Brava! You’ve rolled the cosmic dice. This is beautiful and good. This is juicy and right. If there’s any more or less you’d like to intend now, please do it. And keep doing it. Anytime, anywhere, and about anything—from the sacred to the profane, the glorious to the mundane, and everything in between. Just make sure you use positive phrasing and avoid stating your intentions in the negative; for example, not “please don’t let me screw up this new relationship” but rather “I intend to be healthy and loving in this relationship.” No matter what the intention, be sure to state it from your heart.

You can state your intentions every morning before you get out of bed; it’s like applying an all-day moisturizer for your spirit: “I intend to be divinely aware and connected today, no matter what.” You can sing them in the shower: “I intend to follow my gut on this business deal and make it soar.” You can let your intention move through your body during a yoga class: “I intend from now on to be healthier with my eating and exercise habits, and to love my strong, sexy body.” Or set it when you take a stroll in the park: “I intend to genuinely smile at every thing and every body I come across.” You can set an intention for the coming day, week, year, or lifetime, or just for the moment you are in right now. It’s really that simple. If you don’t have a specific intention to set, just sit still, check in with your heart, and start sensing how you would ideally want to feel in your job, in your personal relationships, in your body, in your life, in your relationship with the divine. Hold these feelings strongly for a moment in your mind and heart, and then release them, breathe them out into the world.

This is the divine gist: Setting and holding a clear, strong intention for how you would like your life and your self to unfold, be the intention specific (“I intend to find a great parking space”) or universal (“I intend to tread lightly on the planet and make the world a better place”), helps you wring the most divine juice out of every situation, so you become less dependent on the doing and more able to enjoy just being.

Sound good? Excellent. Now let’s talk about the Big G.

CHAPTER 2

The Beaming You Who

Gods, Goddesses, and the Blind Man’s Elephant

God. The word is just so damn loaded. It’s endured thousands of years of misuse, and all too often dredges up notions of my God versus your God, or some robed, bearded white male scowling at us from up in the clouds, or some big, approving deity every gushing sports icon or rock star thanks when they win the Super Bowl or a Grammy. Or it brings up that foreboding and vaguely uncomfortable feeling you used to get back in Sunday school or Hebrew school. Or maybe it’s a name that caused you to roll your eyes during a philosophy class or a progressive political gathering or a dinner party. For the young and hip, the culturally liberal, or the religiously tired, the concept of God, well, it’s rarely thought of as a pleasant thing. But who or what is God?

Rumi, the luminous thirteenth-century Persian mystic and poet, explained humankind’s confusion about God by way of a famous story, known as the parable of the blind men and the elephant. It goes like this:

A community of blind men heard that an extraordinary beast called an elephant had been brought into the country. Since they did not know what it looked like, they resolved to find the animal and obtain a “picture” by feeling the beast—the only possibility that was open to them . . .

One man felt the elephant’s trunk and declared the creature to be like a water pipe. Another man brushed the elephant’s ear and stated that the creature was like a fan. Still another man touched the tusks and found the creature to be sharp. Another man rubbed the leg of the elephant and declared the creature to be like a pillar, while the last man felt the elephant’s back and believed the creature to resemble a throne.

This, explained Rumi, is exactly like the various human beliefs about God. All are absolutely convinced they know exactly what it is, yet none can see the big picture and thereby realize that each of their beliefs illuminate part of the same essence, the same overarching energy, the same big honkin’ divine pachyderm.

And so it is for you. Explore spirituality for about ten minutes, and you can’t help but come face to face with a whole crazy plethora of ideas about the Big G (God). It’s a mad mix of possibility that can be at once exciting and daunting, intriguing and incredibly confusing. From uptight, judgmental, fear-based definitions of the divine to sappy, glossy vanilla-pudding incarnations and everything in between, there is no end to what people (and teachers and books and classes and yogis and priests and your massage therapist et al.) can mean when they utter the G word.

The Red Book takes the it’s-all-the-elephant view. The divine manifests through all forms (as well as the formless) and therefore has an untold number of faces. In the Hindu faith alone, there are around 300 million active deities, not to mention special rocks, mountains, rivers, and other geographical features, all of which are believed to be individualized faces of Brahman, the absolute, limitless, infinite Being or Ultimate Reality. In Hinduism, your ishta deva (“divine face,” or deity of choice) can be the one you grew up with or the one you are naturally drawn to later on; it doesn’t really matter, because in theory (in practice, it may not always be so easy), there is no right or wrong deity or spiritual practice because essentially all Hindu deities and practices lead back to the same goal: the divine, or Brahman. They are all merely different streams feeding into the same river.

Going Godless

Several eastern religions and philosophies do not specify any sort of god at all. Buddhism emphasizes the abstract idea of nonbeing, which is more a state or condition than a thing. Taoism embraces the Way, in which all of life is believed to be permeated by the ultimate formless Tao, or Source. The Way of Tao is a flowing, dynamic relationship to this life, created through intense inner concentration and various methods of wu-wei, or nonaction.Both of these amazing traditions (which each encompass several sects and schools of thought) highlight the importance of quieting the mind through meditation, staying present, practicing nonattachment, being instead of doing, going with the flow, and accepting where we are right now—all very important ways to help ignite your divine spark and all of which will get much more attention later in this book.

Mystics from every tradition have experienced this kind of Oneness, beyond the pesky details of a strict interpretation. It is a complete taste of the divine that unites rather than separates—and this deliciously profound experience comes from cultivating and trusting their inner experience, not from debating theology and pinpointing external differences. It’s an experience of being connected to everyone and everything in the universe to such a degree that peace and nonviolence are the most natural things in the world. (This is exactly the kind of spiritually unifying idea that inspired Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the current Dalai Lama.)

All of which adds up to this point: When you’re exploring spirituality, be aware that authentic divine truth never separates people from each other, countries from each other, religions from each other. There is no right text or correct religion that you must believe, at the expense of all the others. There is no absolutely right God or path or practice. As modern mystic Ron Roth believes, anyone who tries to convince you that there is one right path clearly isn’t all that convinced themselves. If a tradition or belief system or teacher expands your definition of the divine, gives it some fresh air, an empowering makeover, a more accessible and body-tingling reality, drink it up. If another’s definition of the divine makes you feel like burying your head in a bag of Cheetos or urges you to burn this book in your oven, then spit it out.

In the Upanishads, the sacred Hindu texts from the seventh-century B.C.E., the divine is often referred to as neti neti (roughly translated, “not this, not this”). This term suggests that divine truth can only be found through the negation of all thoughts about it. In effect, the only way to get close to describing the divine is to describe what it’s not. But the absolute opposite is also true: The only way to describe the divine is to describe everything it is (which is, uh, everything). So even though it’s nearly impossible to capture God in words, sometimes it helps, especially at the beginning of a conscious relationship, to find a word or feeling that helps you to focus your experience of the divine. (Brilliant astrologer Rob Brezsny, author of Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia, encourages people to create their own name for their experience of the divine. My favorite of his is “The Booming Ha Ha.” A couple that I’ve created are “The Wiggling Wow” and “The Beaming You Who.” But let’s focus.) For you, the divine could be a specific deity, Buddha nature, the God of Western religion, your higher self. Or the divine could be a bit more abstract and faceless concept, like cosmic energy; something closer to home, like nature or life; more of a feeling, like a deep intuitive tingle or a profound sense of calm; an emotion like love; and so on. Choose any, choose all. Whatever it is, deepen your relationship to it. Get up in its face. Allow it to be an open concept; allow it to be free; allow it, even, to be you.

The Big G, with Breasts

There is one luscious aspect of divinity that deserves a bit (well, OK, a lot) more attention, given how She wears red better than any other and is a huge inspiration for this book. The Goddess. The Divine Feminine. The Big G with Breasts. The one who has, religiously speaking, really gotten the shaft. And this planet’s only now beginning to realize that nobody puts Mama in the corner.

For well over two thousand years, patriarchal (that is, male-centric) belief systems have ruled the day. (They still do, but things are changing faster than you might think.) These dogma-based religions favor control over letting go. They tend to separate rather than unify, monopolize spiritual experience and distrust unique paths that differ from their teachings. Many patriarchal belief systems have taught that this world and our natural human state need to be largely rejected and transcended in order for us to truly know divinity. These belief systems have often found women to be inferior (given their “lowly” connections to the earthly cycles, their unpredictable emotional wiring, and their curvy, tempting bodies) and sexuality to be dirty, a distraction, even a sin. Of course, the biggest oversight in religious history may be patriarchy’s failure to acknowledge that despite all our so-called sins, heaven can be found right here on earth; that God moves in love (and meaningful sex), not fear; and that body glitter makes the angels whistle.

Although many of these dogmatic religions have become slightly more receptive to both the divine feminine and women in general in recent centuries, history still leaks into the present, and many modern women have difficulty aligning their sparkly spirits to these male-based traditions. To say the least.

Enter the Goddess. As you probably guessed, most female-centric spiritualities like Wicca (and those that are more earth-centric, like the Native Americans’ and those of many other indigenous cultures) tend to be more life-affirming; they value the earth, the body, sexuality, the cycles of nature—in fact, the entire messy, exhilarating, dramatic human experience and all material consciousness—as positive, as invaluable, as nothing less than divine.

Sound good? If the Goddess comes knocking on your spirit’s door, by all means, invite her in for pie and wine. She might look like the courageous and fierce Egyptian Isis, the astounding Greek athlete and huntress Artemis, or the brainy politician and warrior Athena (also Greek). She could be a sensual lover like Oshun from the Yoruba religion of West Africa, a sacred pipe carrier like the Sioux White Buffalo Woman, a fearless Egyptian warrior like Sekhmet, a promoter of prosperity like the Hindu deity Lakshmi. Goddesses can be sexual gurus, healers, fertility helpmates, intellectual muses, musicians, teachers, dancers, farmers, businesswomen, protective mothers.

Many ancient goddesses (and their modern reinterpretations) emit a salty, sensual flavor. They also tend to be moody and dramatic, delight in collapsing opposites, and can be a unifying powerhouse of divine oomph—an oomph that can’t help but add a little glitz to your life while promoting a much-needed attitude change for this planet. And like most faces of divinity, these goddesses could really use a postmodern boost. So invite them into the twenty-first century. Allow them into your life, your bedroom, your workplace. Feel free to rediscover, re-create, and remember. If the old interpretations or forms don’t spark your insides, allow a whole new goddess to be remade, through you.

Mother India

Indian culture, perhaps more than any other, is absolutely soaked in goddess worship. Care to hear how the mighty goddess Durga and her bloodthirsty female entourage ...