Crow is a liberator, a herald of change. After crow comes the great serpent, also known as the dragon.

I’ve had a serpent coil round my body, and I could feel it squeezing the breath out of me. Yes, again a warning, an effort to encourage you to act. The serpent coils around the tree of life. You are the tree of life. The serpents venom burns. The blood of absu is flaring up in you. It could be bad, could be amazing, that remains to be seen. But you will be forced to decide.

The serpents way is always through the cracks. The serpent always advises that you take the third option. As humans, we tend to be binary thinkers. This goes back to my earlier reference to the idea that we can choose, that we can make our brain behave a certain way. You can no more make your brain behave any special way than you can make a flower grow. What you can do is weed the garden. The brain is a child of nature. It has nature’s wisdom in it.

The third option is the invisible option, or if you prefer the meta-option. You see your mind as filled with ideas, memories, experiences and feelings, and we tend to focus on each one at a time. Allowing some to stand, weeding out others until we feel comfortable again, but with a moments reflection, you can see that all these things in your head form a pattern. The kind of pattern differs from person to person, just like the actual mental content does. But it’s been described as a lotus. Ever see one of those? Huge flower, has radiating petals that spread symmetrically, seem to go on forever. Another example would be a mandala.

Like you were saying, it’s the difference between magic and science. Science breaks things down to individual elements. Magic deals with things as a whole. Exactly. Another good metaphor would be a spiders web, which looks sort of like the human nervous system if you think about it.

You can select your focus based on this meta-pattern. Instead of any one thought or memory, you can see how your entire body of consciousness connects to it, affects it. Instead of asking yourself is it right or is it wrong, you can ask yourself how and where it fits. When you choose from the web, then no choice is confining, choices don’t define you. You establish where they fit in your web.

So when making a choice, don’t focus on how it will affect you now, look at the larger pattern, set a goal and work towards that? Yes, exactly, otherwise life feels like digging in sand, moving each grain with a set of tweezers.

See how each choice fits rather than focusing on which is the right one? Yes. You will never find the right one, because you will never find a wrong one.

She could do either and make it work but she might have more affinity to one of them. Exactly.

Now back to how all this relates to masks. There is a thread in the web, a theme in the whole story. If the thread is healthy, it opens choices and provides strength, like setting up your outer nerves to be fed by the core nerves in your brain. But when you lose sight of the central thread, when the first thread that the spider drops when it starts its web is poorly linked or balanced, the rest will tear and continue to tear. It will feel like it’s constantly falling apart.

So in the whole collection of masks, you personally do have one that is your center. It may not be what other people consider normal. It may make you feel a bit estranged from the consensus, but what is today’s consensus but a sinking ship anyway?

I am totally willing to distance myself from a sinking ship. I don’t want to be pulled under. When you find your heart mask everything else will go as it should.

[Takes off his mask to reveal another mask, then puts it back on again and winks at you.] The secret is that there is no secret. The illusion is that there is such a thing as illusion. The problem is actually confusion. People don’t yet get the joke.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~