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How I spent my winter vacation…            
Michael Beckwith, Incan magic, and 2010
 
 by Michael Abedin
 
Ceremonies are a way of celebrating – and facilitating – big transitions.  The energy of the celebration joins with the energy of the event being celebrated and creates true synergy.  It’s co-creation, in its purest sense. 
The arrival of a new year is one of our biggest celebrations.  You can go with Champagne and fireworks, but if you really want to co-create, try going to a desert full of trees designed by Dr. Seuss and joining a Peruvian shaman in the center of a sacred sanctuary while he blesses the new year under a blue moon.
Oh, and prior to that, meditate for four days with Michael Bernard Beckwith.
 
Southeast of Palm Springs, on the border of what’s now the 800,000 acre Joshua Tree National Park, a retreat center was dedicated in 1954.  Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and one of his sons, it manages to look retro and futuristic at the same time. 
            Yogananda walked these grounds, and so has the Dalai Lama and a Who’s Who of spiritual leaders and seekers – including Michael Bernard Beckwith, founder and spiritual director of the Agape International Spiritual Center, situated a couple of hours west of Joshua Tree in L.A. County.  Beckwith and his wife Rickie Byars Beckwith came to Joshua Tree to say goodbye to 2009 and greet the New Year with a few fellow co-creators – about two hundred of them.
            Beckwith, like Austin All Natural contributor Joe Vitale, was one of the supposedly overnight sensations that came out of the hit DVD The Secret, and it gave both of them the boost into international prominence they deserved after years of excelling in their fields.  Beckwith founded Agape in 1986 – his congregation affectionately calls him “Rev”, and his credentials in The Secret were simply “Visionary”.
            A real visionary doesn’t just see visions, he creates them – and a good visionary can create them out of nothing.  Here’s the actual itinerary for the four-day Joshua Tree retreat: 6AM – Meditate.  Yoga, breakfast, meditate.  Lunch.  Meditate, dinner, meditate – 10:30PM.  
There’s a lot of something on the way to nothing in a meditation session with Michael Beckwith, though.  Seeing the Rev in his trademark Mandarin-collar suit in front of Agape is one thing.  Seeing him in sweats in a small sanctuary designed according to sacred geometry by another visionary – that’s something else altogether.
Rickie sits on the front row a few feet from her piano, ready to sing.  The love and the chemistry that flows between the two of them is part of the Agape experience – two amazing artists, creating a vision that brings them closer to spirit.  It’s a walking, talking, singing witness to the elusive original meaning of the Greek word agape, a love that encompasses all aspects of love. 
 
The three-step program.
The Rev doesn’t teach you how to meditate.  He meditates with you, a brother on a journey where neither one of you really knows exactly where you’re going, how you’ll get there, or what you’re going to experience on the way.  His formula is pretty simple:
·        Set an intention – a new intention creates redemption
·        Breathe – breath is the talisman of awareness.
·        Listen, with your inner ear – the one that lets you hear God.
 
Listen to me very carefully, he tells you at one point, as if I were about to tell you the greatest secret in the world – that’s the level of attention you want to keep when you meditate.
            So you set an intention, an elaborate one – chairs here, flowers there, pictures on the wall.  You breathe, you listen – and suddenly you notice you’re clenching your fists and tightening every muscle in your body to keep from running screaming into the desert.
“Where’s your attention, “ Beckwith asks from time to time, and you grab it and try to wrestle it back into your body, but there’s not much room, what with that elaborate intention and all – and it hurts. “Clench your fists,” he says, “and tighten every muscle in your body.  Then let go, exhale, and relax.” 
Indeed.  He’s on to you, you think, or maybe you’re on to him – but it works, and you decide to let that elaborate intention go.  It was way too complicated, and it hurt.  You replace it with something he said earlier, and the session gets easier.  Your attention still wanders, the Rev still asks you where it is, but it gets easier to bring it back, now that it has a bit of room to stretch out.
The new intention is pretty simple. Be aware – then be aware that you are aware.
Listen, in other words, as if you were about to hear the greatest secret in the world.
 
Mind fasting.
The purpose of meditation, it’s explained on Day One, is to pay undistractable attention to Reality, as opposed to reality.  The small “r” reality is full of distractions, though, so you eliminate them – you use mind fasting as a way to get to mind slowing.  If the mind suddenly jumps to spin cycle, or starts to agitate – well, as the Rev puts it, just look at it as a way of getting the dirt out.
The ego’s not gonna like this, though.  It’s job has been to keep you alive, to give you an identity that differentiates you from other tribes as a tool of survival.  It sees transformation as annihilation, and it sabotages you with distractions to keep you stuck in a sequential string of nanoseconds, instead of timelessness.  “The ego asks what’s next,” Beckwith explains.  “The soul asks what’s now.”
Here are a few mind fasting tips from the Rev:
·        Assure the ego, even if what you tell it isn’t true – things are always subject to change.
·        Make it inner play.  Go full out, like a child, with no attachment to outcome – the outcome is already here, waiting to pop out.
·        If you make a mis-take, do a do-over.
·        When you catch a moment of awakened awareness – a divine and perfect idea in consciousness – sing its song, dance its dance, live its life.
·        If it goes, you bring it back – a million times, if you have to.
 
Eventually, he points out, your practice will become a way of life, not a quick fix. In the meantime, though, don’t worry.  Worry has no transformational value, and you can’t worry your way into an answer in Michael Beckwith’s universe.  Worry is just a rehearsal for what you don’t want.
            What you want, he tells you, is to return to the pristine part of you that’s never been hurt, to live in a field of infinite possibility and awesome power. 
It’s a place where magic can happen.
 
The medicine man.
            Magic happened on New Year’s Eve. 
Directly beneath the tall metal steeple of the sanctuary, in the center of the ceiling, there’s a geometric grid of multicolored glass.  Directly beneath that is the exact center of the octagonal room, and that’s where Wachan constructed his mandala.
            Wachan is an Incan medicine man from a long line of medicine people, born and raised in the high mountains of Cuzco, Peru.  Gold and corn were shared among his people as a sign of enlightenment – and gold, corn and flowers were in the mandala he carefully constructed in a cloth with the help of his wife Martika, a keeper of sacred songs, and his daughter Shiqwarkenti, born in the Temple of the Moon in Cuzco.
            Each person was given a small package of sacred tobacco wrapped in red cloth, and each person placed their old and new intentions in the tobacco and carried it outside to the fire, where it was placed with the mandala as the first act of the new year while a halo circled the blue moon – and Orion’s sword.
            Before leaving the sanctuary, Wachan brought down a blessing to Pachamama, the Earth Mother.  Ha lla lla – I am here, I am with you, I am all.  Kristin, who lived through an earthquake or two in California, leaned over and whispered. “Did you feel that?  That was about a level two or three earthquake.”
            In a field of infinite possibility and awesome power, the Earth was blessed – and the Earth moved.
            Magic happened on New Year’s Eve. 
 
            www.agapelive.com