CALLING IN THE CIRCLE
There is a group of us, the Special Ones. On this planet. We have been here for a long, long time. We all know who we are; yet for many of us, that knowledge is just an inkling. We know that we are different but we do not know all of who we are. We have not worked out all of the details. It takes a long time and a lot of hard self-work to uncover our identities. It has taken me years and years, and I am still learning. This site may assist many of you in discovering your completer identities.
What has become clear to me recently is that we, the Special Ones, are meant to come together again. At this moment in history. We are meant to re-form The Circle. Thousands of years ago, when we came here, we were together, and we will rejoin because we are meant to change the ways the human species lives on this planet. We are meant to bring forth Circle of the EarthTM.
Briefly, Circle of the EarthTM would be this: In 40 to 100 years, much of the human species will destroy itself as a part of our mother earth's process of healing. If we can and do survive this--and that is by no means certain--we will attempt to form a new mind/spirit reality.
Central to it, synonymous with Circle of the EarthTM, will be a new calendar. This calendar, closely allied to the earth and its powers, will organize time on the planet and regulate all human activities. The calendar is described in another of our books, The New Calendar Book, and will not be discussed here.
Many in the New Age Movement, like most in our society in general, are too dependent upon their thoughts at the expense of true knowing. They read some higher consciousness book about this or that all-knowing system by this or that all-wise guru or channeler and substitute these rational thought processes for their own direct experience of what is real. Thoughts are words, and words are an abstraction. They talk about what is real rather than being what is real. Being it, knowing through one's own experience, is much simpler than all of the rational crap that just confuses things. Knowing (SEEING) the earth's energy and hearing (SEEING) the Natural Rhythm of the Universe tell us all that we need to know.
Now, when we SEE, when we experience the marvelous unity of the universe which pours down here to earth as this energy of love, we will experience the schizophrenia that exists here in human life, and thus the schizophrenia that exists in each of us. We will experience the gigantic split that exists between the spiritual reality--that which is really real--and the insane, disease-producing, loveless, out-of-contact reality created by our presently constituted collective societal consciousness. Between human power and the powers of the earth.
No wonder so many of us--and the more sensitive and gifted we are, the more so--feel sickened by, and contemptuous of, the world of "normal" people around us. We are not a part of that world, and yet, it is what is called real, sane--REALITY. We cannot avoid it; we are constantly bombarded by it. As we all know, whenever we enter a mall, drive down a highway, interact with a clerk or official, turn on the Internet, go to a party, flip on the TV, go for a job interview, read a newspaper, or talk to most neighbors, we are in a foreign land. In Berkeley, Sedona, Kansas City or Podunk. It doesn't matter. Why? Because in any human interaction, the level of interchange is always limited to the level of the participant of lesser consciousness and intelligence.
This is the alienation of those who don't belong here and never should have been here.
Circle of the EarthTM thus will be an entirely new reality. By "reality" I mean the base, underlying borders of what is sane vs. what is not sane that are collectively perceived by a human society and thus--usually unknowingly by the participants--control all human thoughts and decisions. A reality is a matter that cannot be changed, improved or reformed. It is a matter that can only be obliterated. Because we are not dealing with anything that can be defined in human "problems" and words. We are dealing with the totality of social definition. Thus, the issue is not violence in the media, or drug addiction, or affirmative action, or abortion, or nuclear families, or equal treatment of women, or outdated economic theories of continual growth, or crime, or the environment, or the dishonesty inherent in a culture based upon advertising, or dysfunctional relationships, or abused children. The issue, as it always should have been, is sensitivity. Awareness. SEEING.
Thus, what must be removed is insensitivity. Dullness and stupidity. Anything less leaves the reality intact. Which is no change. And so, we have the failed attempts at revolution in the past that at the time seemed like great successes, but turned out to be nothing in the long run. Most recently, the revolutions of the 1930s and 1960s. These revolutions were political. They dealt with superficial political and social changes. But they left reality intact. They continued the old insanity.
In addition to Circle of the EarthTM, we are presently being offered two other alternatives for a spiritual future: the New Age Movement and Judeo-Christianity. But we must ask serious questions about these two groups. Do their practitioners SEE? Do they support the old reality or the new reality? Do they really "make contact" with other people, themselves and with that which is called "The Silence"?
For there is a secret power. This power is secret not because of some plot or arrangement to keep it secret, but because human beings don't have the ability to SEE it, to feel it, to experience it. And isn't this true for the majority of people in the New Age Movement? And doesn't this give it a tendency to lack depth and focus? And isn't this true of most leaders of Judeo-Christianity? And doesn't this prevent them from understanding the universality of all things?
New Age folks, God bless 'em, are always smiling and happy. Walk into any New Age bookstore and you enter a land of pink stuffed animals and cotton candy. Of healthfulness, and miracles, and success. I have often wondered: Don't these people feel any kind of jar when they exit, when they open that bookstore door and find themselves once more on the cold, hard street? Are they completely oblivious to the disease all around them?
Recently, I heard the congressional leader of the Republican new deal for the extremely rich say that, in environmental matters, "human beings have been erroneously portrayed as the bad guys." The only argument that would convince this man not to emasculate environmental protection laws is if we could produce scientific data that ever-increasing production--and that increase will be great in third world areas in coming years--will seriously threaten the well-being and survival of the human race. He himself will present detailed studies showing that environmentalists are alarmists, that the nature world does not matter to us except as a relic of Romanticism, and that we can all inhabit a modern, technologic, urban utopia.
So the environment argument rages, with each side presenting its extensive data of irrefutable facts. But this seems to miss the point: the argument isn't a rational, scientific one. It is a moral one. The evidence therefore is intuitive; it's feeling; it comes from within. Yet, if we examine the teachings of Judeo-Christianity, we find that it contains a serious omission. There's no Commandment which says: "Thou shalt love, revere and protect our earth and all living things." There is no biblical sanction for this. Rather, God promises Noah:
And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.
Genesis 9:2
For many Juedeo-Christians, and for many, many centuries, they could believe that they were given Biblical permission to do as they pleased with this planet. And yet, what the Earth tells us, what the Spirit of the Universe tells us, is that things are seriously out of balance. And that the human species is seriously out of balance. That there is a lack of communication between ourselves and the earth, ourselves and other species, and between one human being and another.
Circle of the EarthTM thus proposes this: What in this new millennium shall be the ruling organizing principle (reality) of the human species? The old organizing principle which is thoughts, thinking, economics, science and politics of the mind? Or the new organizing principle that must come if we are going to survive? The spiritual understanding of the heart that is non-verbal, which tells us that we are all part of the same universe, that WE ARE ALL ONE.
In a trance state, in order to really understand things, we must make our minds a blank. Remove all thoughts. Then we can reach the level of SEEING, of real knowing. Yet how many urban Westerners (or New Agers) can do this? How many can even understand it? Western civilization has been governed since the time of the Greeks by the powers of rationality. The powers of the brain to figure things out, analyze -the power exclusively human to arrange and control the world. And so successful have we been at this, that this power dominates not only masculine-dominant western culture but Asia, Africa and women. Thinking has become a major method of avoidance for most of us, an addiction. Thinking not only tightens the muscles of our heads, it keeps us out of touch with the only thing that is real, the present moment.
Circle of the EarthTM would be most profoundly a new force or principle by which we would perceive and organize time and space. Unlike our present one which is defined by the part of us that is a mental process called thinking, but one which is defined by the part of us that is intuitive, knowing of the spiritual. That knows on a non-verbal level the meaning of the words: WE ARE ALL ONE.
When I sat down to write this, I asked myself what am I trying to accomplish? I knew that I needed to be specific about this if I was to accomplish it. And the answer came back that I wasn't trying to sell books or promote an organization. I asked myself, Greentree, what response do you want from your readers? How do you wish that they would respond? And I guess it would be something like this: A person would read this book and then send me a note saying: "Greentree, I have read your book and I understand what you see. I, too, see the same things. That we are all one. That I am a Special One." And then we would all come together as a unified group and, as a unified group, direct and cooperate with the energies that are manifesting to change the world.
Thus, there is a long process called Circle manifestation. Manifesting the Circle. Bringing it forth into evidence and flowering. The first step is the idea. That idea is known and shared by many people. But, for some reason, I have been directed to write it down. The next step is to promulgate the idea, pass it out to other people.
That is when the process of Circle formation begins. By one person making contact, through the idea of Circle of the EarthTM, with other people.
I call the members of Circle of the EarthTM co-creators. That is, it is not created by any one person. It is created by the Circle. However, in order for us to be co-creators, we must think as one mind. This "one mind" is larger than my mind, or your mind, or anyone's mind. How would this process work, how would all of our separate minds come to an agreement that is one mind? A consensus? By listening to each other. And then by contacting the intuitive knowing that is larger than we are.
However, in order for this to work, there needs to be a certain basis of intuitive harmony among us. That is, we need to agree in general about the larger patterns of things because we are at the same level of understanding.
So, I shall attempt to present some ideas that we Special Ones should agree in general upon. And by the time you finish reading this book, you should know fairly clearly whether you would like to send that note.
But, too, I must warn you. What I in fact tell you about myself will not be the truth. Or the entire truth. This book is a kind of "put out a feeler to you since I don't really know you." You could be a Special One, or you could just think that you are smarter, angrier or crazier than me. And I don't have time for that crap. If you are a Special One, I do want to meet you. But that will come later, when I have made contact with you. And never, never, never in a book.
I have always been a Special One. I did not ask to be. At eight, on our black asphalt driveway, I would play with the dead mice my father caught in traps under the kitchen sink and enter their world of sickly, sweet-calling death. My parents worried because I wouldn't fall asleep at night. What they did not know or see were the spirit beings I was looking at in the dark corners of the room that moved across the ceiling.
I observed the adults -and the other children as they played and hollered around me. And I thought "what are these people doing? Why do they behave this way? Why can't they see each other? Why are they so out-of-touch with themselves? Why do they continue to talk about nothing?" And the other children: they had already forgotten. They did not know it and they would certainly deny it but they had already become their parents. They had already donned the requisite public story. And saluted the king, and parroted the common gossip of their peers, and bought the regulation toothbrush and soap, and believed what they were told to believe by those who thought they should believe it. And how could they already forget? Where we had just come from? And the promise that had been given to us about life? And the magnificent harmony and beauty of this earth?
And I felt sad and at the same time blessed. For when I was young, I was optimistic. And I really did believe that it was only a matter of time. That one day everyone would understand and the world would be as it should be.
But as I grew older, I began to lose hope. And that depressed me. And so, I gave in, and became like them. I became more and more one of them. And my optimism and love were taken over by anger and disappointment. And a certain resignedness to being a part of "the shit of the world." As one of them, I could now teach and write books. I now allowed myself to communicate on their level. When, if I communicated on my level, there would be nothing to say. But, in order to do this, to act like them, I had to give up a part of myself. A part of myself had to die. And I grieve that. I grieve and mourn what I have given up to be one of you. And I lost some of the power that I had when I was younger. I am not the shaman that I was.
But there is more to it than that:
There was a day that I grew up
And could no longer see the sun.
And the trees that grew behind our house
Turned brown, and then were all gone.
And time will not come back again.
And robins leave the spring.
But in my heart I'll always know
Where I learned to sing.
So I am no different now than ever. I still do know. My heart has grown cold and I am tough. But, if you are there, if you can see me, if you can make contact with me, I can make contact with you. Underneath this hard, officious shell, I am still in Cincinnati, the one who saw Goddess in the woods by the creek, who went to Europe on a hostel trip at 23 and wrote:
Everything happens to me
And nothing happens to me,
Because I see too much.
God and Mother will protect us Special Ones on our long journey. I came here eight thousand(??) years ago from somewhere else. And for the first 500 years, I was an animal. We have been here too long for this to amount to nothing. We have been here a long, long time. And now we are ready."
| ADAPTED FROM OUR CIRCLE OF THE EARTHTM BOOK THE NEW ARTIST BY Abe Frankel GREENTREE |
Biographic Information
Abe Frankel Greentree was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and grew up there. He attended a college preparatory school, Oberlin College and received a doctorate from Ohio State. Later he got an MA in Creative Arts at San Francisco State, trained at the Jungian Institut in Zurich, the San Francisco Gestalt Institute, and taught for the University of California. Thus there was always the expectation for him to follow a normal path like everyone else. But when he was in his twenties, he had written: "Everything happens to me. And nothing happens to me. Because I see too much."
At 14, while lying in a field alone looking at the sky, he had his first transcendent experience. A space seemed to open in his side, the sky rushed into it and, for a moment, he was one with the sky. Afterwards, he lay there with the peace of knowing. Of seeing that which is like our understanding.