​Past Over
 
By: Reverend Levity
 
It’s March 9th, 2016, and humanity has reached the proverbial fork in the road.
 
We must choose today whether or not our future’s cultural consciousness and the basis of our physical and metaphysical existence will be rooted in The Old Way, or A New Way.
 
What is The Old Way?
 
Look around—what themes do you see present in the world and in our personal lives today? Sacrifice, Pain, and Slavery. The same themes present at the first Passover.
 
Why are we in so much pain and bondage? What is missing in our every day lives that keeps us in captivity?
 
The answer is Spirit.  We have spent centuries rebelling against religion because it deserved to be rebelled against, and because of that we have created a world that is materialistic and unloving.
 
We have kicked Spirit out of our lives and now Spirit is trying desperately to get back in. It’s begging to be present in every single thing we do and are because without it we are sick and tired and suffering. We are working jobs we hate and sacrificing our health and happiness, but for what? What is it we want but can’t let in unless it hurts?
 
In the past Spirit has used pain to wake us up. Why do you think Spirit chose the plagues and the sacrifice of their first-born sons to wake up the Egyptians? We manifest physical pain, and mental pain, and spiritual pain to drive us closer to our God because we won’t get down on our knees and draw nearer to Him unless we are desperate. So we unconsciously manifest situations that break us, we crucify ourselves in an attempt to know God. The old world, the world that is begging to be left behind, is the world that says in order for our hearts to open they must be broken open through pain because pain is HOW. WE. LEARN.
 
So what’s the other option? What is the other way we can learn to let Spirit in if not through pain? The answer is love. And this isn’t an original idea; 2000 years ago a man named Jesus marched into Jerusalem just before Passover to deliver this same message. To tell everyone that there is a better way to know Spirit that doesn’t involve sacrifice and slavery and pain. But humanity wasn’t ready yet for this message. Seriously, we weren’t ready, that’s why Jesus’ last words to us as he was being sacrificed on the cross were, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Have you ever tried to tell your kids something they weren’t ready to hear? They literally can’t hear you, and then they do the exact opposite of what you sought.
 
Well, now, here we are, 2000 years later…
 
From “Illuminata” by Marianne Williamson:
                 I used to think I was not religious, and perhaps I was not. I didn’t like what organized religion had done to the world; I still do not. I have come to see, however, that true religion is internal, not external. The spirit within us cannot be blamed for the blasphemies carried out in its name. What some have done in the name of religion, projecting their neuroses, even perpetuating evil on the world, does not make religion as a mystical phenomenon invalid. In fact, nothing could be so relevant or necessary in the world today, as that we might carve out an inner kingdom for ourselves, dwell there with God and be cleansed.
 
                 Secularized organized religions have become, in many cases, as calcified as other institutions that form the structure of our modern world. That’s why they are accepted here, and also why they are rejected. Our religious institutions have far too often become handmaidens of the status quo, while the genuine religious experience is anything but that. True religion is by nature disruptive of what has been, giving birth to the eternally new within us. It is subtly revolutionary, for love by its nature is radical and ecstatic. It’s a force by which we burst out from what is old and calcified, into a higher mode of being. The internal experience of true religion is the process by which the human being breaks out of bondage into full, free spirit. Within that freedom, there is no consciousness of slavery, not respect for any structure that seeks to limit or control us.
 
What does The New Way look like?
 
Freedom. The opposite of slavery is Freedom. And in this NEW WORLD freedom does not come from a God above who sets us free, it comes from a God within who allows us to set ourselves free.
 
The New World still involves sacrifice, but it’s a new kind of sacrifice: the sacrifice of our comfort zone in order to be free. If we want to be free its up to us to live free, and to consciously bring Spirit to Earth through us so that the act of Sacrifice isn’t painful and bloody, but rather a beautiful surrendering to the good coming to us by a God who provides (Jehovah-Jireh).
 
Side note: In several metaphysical interpretations of Passover, it is said that Egypt represents the diaphragm in the human body. If Spirit lives in our breath, then the diaphragm is the place where Spirit dwells in our body. If you know me personally you know that I suffer from chronic pain throughout my entire body, which is caused by a contracted diaphragm.  For a decade I’ve described the pain by saying “It feels like my ribs are enslaved”. The cause of this dysfunction is that I’ve spent my entire life breathing shallowly from my lungs instead of from my diaphragm. No one can fix me. There is no cure outside of me. The ONLY cure is that I must learn to breathe from my diaphragm. No one can breathe for me. I must learn to breathe for myself. I must bring my breath (aka Spirit) into my body to set myself free. Spirit has been trying to get into my life this whole time, ya’ll, and I’m the one keeping It out.
 
So anyway, back to us: Are we ready yet? Are we ready for a new paradigm where Spirit is everywhere present?
 
Right now there is a battle being fought.  Literally right now. Do you think it is an accident that you are here tonight? We have a job to do! We have a choice to make.
 
It’s the Old Way vs the New Way, and we have to decide whom we want to win. Instead of Slavery and Sacrifice do we want to live in Freedom and Love? Spirit, like we, is both perfect and imperfect, and trying its hardest to evolve through us. Can we let it?? If we can then we need to pray for the Old Way to Passover us, here and now.
 
Let’s pray:
 
Breathe into your diaphragm.
 
Father-Mother God, Holy Spirit, Great Consciousness, The Trinity, The Divinity, Whatever it is that you call Source. (It is your mother and your father and It knows your voice when you call to it, so call it whatever you want).
 
Divine Consciousness,
We come to you now, March 9th, 2016, Reno, Nevada; we come to you, your modern-day Alchemists, to say to you, that we choose The New Way.
 
We use the Free Will that You have given us to claim our freedom, our love, the dreams you have given us to manifest.
 
Instead of painting the blood of the lamb on a doorway, we wear our hearts on our sleeves. We live our internal life on the outside, to show people the path of vulnerability and the path of love. We wear our hearts on the outside to show that there is nothing to hide; there is nothing to be kept in bondage because we are free, and we are ready to claim this freedom.
 
Holy Spirit, we invite you onto Earth right now; we invite you to take over, to become everywhere present in our lives. We give you our choice and our freedom, right now, we proclaim it.
 
Out loud say,
I allow spirit in.
I choose love.
I choose freedom.
I surrender.
 
The only thing left to sacrifice now is the past.
 
In gratitude, we thank the past. We thank the pain that has taught us and brought us to this moment. It made us beg for You, and for that we are thankful. We honor it, and we release it in love. Right now all the karmic ties to the past are being healed. The chains that have surrounded the Earth are banished, and the energetic field that protects us is healed.
 
When Jesus marched into Jerusalem, the people yelled “Hosanna!”, which means save us.
 
No matter whom you credit, we are ready to be saved.
 
We surrender our hearts to You, Divine Spirit.
 
The past is over; we Passover.
 
And So It Is,
 
Amen.

On March 9th, 2016, a group of mystics called The Alchemists gathered together to explore the deeper, metaphysical, and ever-relevant meaning of Passover. Through guided meditations, music, and hilarious but powerful sermons, The Alchemists stoked the transformation of the individual, and guided the way out of captivity and into freedom.

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We used the footage from our Free Hugs Campaign to make a music video for Mark's original song "The Love That You Are". Please share! This video will make you smile, and want to hug someone! #AlchemistMovement

By: Joseph Daylover
 
For all of my twenties I shunned the idea of the service.  Fresh out of grad school and teaching part time, what I valued most was lying in the grass by the river or hanging with comrades, not working to have adult things.  I didn’t have health insurance, a nice car, or take vacations, the things of the full-time working world.  Instead, I worked toward working as little as possible, stacking up a few part-time jobs onto three, sometimes two days per week.  You can get away with this as a part-time college prof, a life of stipends and spontaneity. 
 
As a teacher I was decent, but I cared more about things that didn’t make me any money, Writing and Theatre.  My only problem was that I let my idea of work get tied up with American capitalism, the grind, the herd, as they say.  Working to have things.  Like Tyler Durden says, “we work jobs we hate, so that we can buy shit we don’t need.” Much as I love books like Fight Club, I overate on the idea, believing work to mean servitude to an unchallengeable system.  Why work for that? 
 
My thinking started to shift when I read “The World’s Religions” by Hustom Smith.  The chapter on Hinduism describes various Yogas, or pathways to God; among them are Knowledge, Love, Exercise (Yoga), and Work.  Wait—work?  As a method for knowing liberation?  Wasn’t work a conspiracy to serve the selfish elite, a greedy machine?  Smith explains, karma yoga (knowing God through work) means, “you can find God in the world of everyday affairs as readily as anywhere.”  Moreover, “he who performs actions without attachment, resigning them to God, is untainted by their effects as a lotus leaf by water.”  Hold on a second—I could work for service to God and not the ruling classes?  The Bhagavad Gita says, “...do this an offering to Me.  Thus you shall be free from the bondages of actions that bear good and evil results.”
 
So it seems that with work we become caught up with personal reward, likely to stoke the ego, materialism, all that jazz.  But with service, our duties carry a sacred force which fulfills others in service of God.  This equals the shift from the finite to the infinite self.  My old stance of “fuck the machine” meant I was stuck in the finite, in empirical reward or loss.  With an eye toward the infinite, I saw how much my life revolved around service in fact.  While working part-time, I helped found and build GLM, this very Theatre we’re in.  Most work here is volunteer, done in service of art, of patrons, among other things.  I also rewrote my Master’s thesis into a novel; wasn’t this an attempt to serve readers an entertaining tale and worthy ideas?  I had helped build a garden out back.  You get the idea. 
 
Everything is service, but that is a choice.  So I chose to become a better teacher, to see the divine in talking about how to write proper conclusions, to foster true connection when responding to my student’s essays.  Obligation became purpose, a mission to serve the divine.  In doing so, I found a truer vocabulary, a vocation within the campus confines.   Admittedly, it’s hard to find vocation in most jobs, to not resent the idea of service in the culture we live in.  The demands are great, and the true rewards are not advertised.  The machine is real, but we choose whom to serve.