David Rivers and David spero - The Dance of Stillness

Exploring the Nature of Spiritual Awakening

Featuring Master Charles Cannon, Dr Richard Moss, David Spero, and Swami Shankaracharya

Tandava Press

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ISBN: 0646560670

ISBN-1 S: 9780646560670

Cover Design by David Litwin and Pure Fusion Media Edited by Jo-ann Langseth

National Library of Australia Catalouging-in-Publication Data Rivers, David Michael.

The dance of stillness: exploring the nature of spiritual awakening / by David Rivers.

ISBN: 9780646560670

Spiritual life - New Age movement.

Tandava Press

www.tandavapress.com

Dedicated with great love

TO MY DAUGHTER,

Zoe Isabella.

• MASTER CHARLES CANNON
• SWAMI SHANKARACHARYA

First I would like to thank my beloved Mother, Irena, for demonstrating to me the deepest devotional love for the Divine.

Deep bows also to Erin Beard, for her invaluable assistance in transcribing these interviews with such precision and care, as well as for organizing the itinerary of my USA travels and interviews. Without her, this book would not have happened.

Many thanks to Jo-Ann Langseth for her superb editing as well as for her thoughtful feedback and encouragement, also to Maria Sam Josepher, Rosanne Parker and Tony Cartledge for their generous and enlightening editorial assistance and feedback.

To the Synchronicity Dove Foundation, thank you for financially backing this book and thereby expressing faith in the Principle of life, over and beyond any particular personal manifestation of Life.

To Master Charles Cannon I offer gratitude from the depths of my soul for making such a book possible and for the endless love, support, and patience he continues to extend towards one and all.

Finally, I wish to thank Sri Paramahansa Ramakrishna for teaching us all that its okay to be God Mad in nondual awareness and utterly lost in devotional love to the supreme energy of life we call Mother. You are the very essence of the Goddess Herself, and it is with love that I lay this book at your lotus feet.

John C. Woodcock PHD

David Rivers and I met over the internet. He wrote to me after finding his way to my little book: Making of a Man: Initiation through the Divine Mother. I felt an instant liking towards him and we began a correspondence, during which he told me about a book he was writing - this book. He sent me an excerpt which I read avidly, eager to commune once again with kindred souls. In the middle of all this a sentence he wrote to me jumped out: Say, would you be interested in writing a foreword or something of the sort ?

Its an odd experience to simultaneously feel a jolt of excitement in being invited to write (I love writing) and a strange puzzlement concerning the nature of his invitation. Was his invitation a momentary impulse that he might later regret (Say, would you ...); did he receive a deep intuition in that moment; was he just looking for someone to fill a few pages; did he recognize a fellow servant of the Mother? Was it a whim? So it went on.

These fluctuations in my own importance and unimportance flowing from his strange invitation went on for a while and then settled down. I then felt that the seemingly casual, even offhand quality of his invitation had left me free to examine whether in fact I had anything to say, unencumbered by expectations from David, or me. So I wrote back to him saying just that: I will read his book and see if I have anything to say.

Now, having freshly read Davids book, I am about to find out, as you will, if I have anything to say.

There is a tidal wave coming! Many feel it. There are differences about the degree of imminence but not about the magnitude of it. The four men - five actually if you include Davids introduction - that you are about to hear from in this book are among the advance ripples. What they experience as present Reality still lies off in the future for most of us. But it is coming.

David Rivers, Master Charles Cannon, Richard Moss, David Spero, and Swami Shankaracharya are initiates into the future. They have each been initiated into what we are destined to become - must become, for the sake of our species, and Earth Herself. In this way each initiate has brought into our ordinary reality an embodied vision of what we each must become.

There is a big difference between transmitting a vision as a prophet does and transmitting an embodied vision, as these teachers do. I was thrilled to read how much emphasis each man gave to bringing the fruit of his encounters with Kundalini /Mary / Shakti/Kali/The Divine Mother/Unitary Consciousness into the context of ordinary lived life. The moral weight each gave to ordinary life even while carrying the deep wisdom that ordinary life is expressive of the One, conveys to this reader the certainty that they have indeed been initiated by the Divine Mother who is Life, who does not despise Life, but loves Life in all its aspects.

This crucial feature of the interviews - the descriptions of the journey towards uniting the greatest spiritual wisdom with the most ordinary aspects of daily living - may serve to open up an inquiry about the significance or otherwise of the fact that we have a book by a man about men being initiated by the Mother. A question could be raised: where are the women ? In response to this possible objection, I would like to remind us how we have arrived at this juncture in history, where nearly everyone agrees that our separation from nature and just about everything else including ourselves has reached a nadir. There is almost universal agreement that the destruction of our Earth, the ugliness of our creations, the pandemic mental illnesses, addictions etc. and the damage to future generations all spring from this felt separation.

And we know that this separation is a fundamentally masculine endeavor. We also understand that it has become so one-sided because of a long history of devaluing the feminine. I know this is not news and I also know it is not news to state that both men and women suffer from this separation today. However, it is my strong conviction that the spiritual tasks of men and women towards healing this horrible separation are fundamentally different, though related.

As primary carriers of that masculine power to separate, discriminate, dissociate from living processes, men have the responsibility to find a way back to Life once again. This Way is through the Divine Mother. As you will read, the primary act of each initiate, if one can call it an act is one of surrender.

Sadly, just as many women today it seems to me, are also separated from the Mother, from living processes. How many women for example consider the monthly period as an inconvenience? I have even heard women welcome hysterectomies in the spirit of: well I dont need it any more. I have my kids!

The task of returning to Life once again for a woman involves being reminded of who she is, fundamentally. This is a different task to that of men who must learn to surrender to that which they are most afraid of: Life. For women, it is a coming home. For men, it is a transformation into a new kind of being as you will presently read in this book.

In a world dominated at present by a one-sided masculinity, men who are looking for something else, who need guides as to what to do, who know that the system is bankrupt, need a book such as this, showing how the process of surrender works, what its various inflections look like, what the outcome can look like in terms of new thinking, new perceptions and new morality. This book satisfies on all counts.