A few months ago, I [Lihi Be] stood on a stage in New York City and performed slam poetry for the first time. The scene was hosted by Nuyorican Poets' Cafe at the Bowery Poetry Club, a small, legendary room where decades of poets have stepped up to a microphone and turned their inner worlds into sound.
It's the kind of place where language has history. where words have weight, where the air still feels charged from the voices that came before.
I remember standing there, waiting my turn, feeling my heart beating in my throat,
which surprised me.
I’ve spoken in front of rooms before. I’ve guided workshops, taught movement, led breathworkjourneys where people open parts of themselves that are tender and alive.
Holding space for others doesn’t scare me.
But this was different.
This time, I wasn’t holding material space; I was the material.
A poem I wrote alone earlier that morning was about to leave the page and hit the stage, entering a room full of strangers, not through dead ink, but through my living breath, my voice, my body.
Until that moment, "poetry" was something I wrote, never something I performed.
When I published my book, The Self, Reframed, it felt like a big step outward. Suddenly the poems were technically "public." Someone, anyone, could order the book, underline a passage, carry a piece of it into her own life.
Butt even then, there was still distance.
The page protected me.
Readers meet a poem alone. They can pause, reread, close the book, throw it in the garbage disposal, flip the switch, make acid-free wood pulp that washes out to sea... That meeting happens quietly, inside their own interior worlds.
Shame? We refuse to limit ourselves
Slam poetry is different:
Spoken word removes the distance. When one performs a poem, there is no safe distance, no page between the room and the I performing. My breath carries my language. My nervous system becomes part of the delivery. My voice, my pauses, my trembling chest -- all of it becomes part of my poem.
In some ways, it feels easier to be naked than to perform one's own poem, in the woods, with someone you love, in front of Mother Nature, playing pretend it's Adam and Eve in a Sumerian garden.
I was in New York for a series of gatherings -- one of them a nude experience I was hosting with the Füde Experience: a roomful of naked people exploring embodiment, mindfulpresence, the simplicity of being in our bodies without the usual layers of social armor.
Standing naked in a room with others didn’t feel nearly as vulnerable as standing on this stage.
In fact, being naked felt surprisingly simple. Source: a poem is a different kind of naked (seeds of the self)
"No bikinis! Cover up those shameful bodies...or you are headed for hell!" - Loving Christian
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Lihi Be (Benisty)
AUTHOR: Lihi Be (Benisty), teacher of somatic self-inquiry, breathwork, movement, teacher, mentorship, poetry, summer retreat leader, author of The Self, Reframed. She leads a dynamic blend of somatic practices to navigate emotional landscapes. She is profoundly committed to the poetic art of self-inquiry through breathwork and movement. Her teaching is distinguished by her ability to weave these elements into a cohesive practice that respects the complexity of the human experience. Her poetry serves as a reflective mirror, deepening the themes she navigates in her somatic work and offering an additional avenue for connection and self-discovery. She lives in Los Angeles, California. (Substack, Instagram, FÜDEin LA, Amazon, Facebook, Omega Institute, lihibe.com)
What does Buddhism have to say about "time"? One thing's sure, there is anionic time called the Eternal Now. There is only now, and there only ever has been now.
But that is hard to understand until one experiences it then it suddenly seems obvious. Ask Eckhart Tolle. He experienced it and wrote The Power of Now with just one message for the world, talk after talk.
Ram Dass on LSD saw love
Ram Dass (Harvard Jew turned Hindu Dr. Richard Alpert) wrote the classic Be Here Now, having also realized this truth about time. There are wonderful stories in ancient Indian texts about time that say that time is NOT simultaneous. It is relative. It differs from plane to plane in Buddhism's 31 Planes of Existence.
Ancient India understood that time in terms of kalpas (aeons) explained by akasha devas (space entities). It moves differently in heavenly worlds, lasting so much longer than our time -- but possibly happening at the same time. Time will feel very long, even eternal, in other worlds, on other planes. But though that much time may move that slowly there, it will not simultaneously move that way on earth.
Whoa, perhaps too much thinking doesn't pay and I should just be attentive to now and accept.
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The ancient Vedas speak of time travel?
One Vedic Sanskrit tale speaks of a king and his daughter who were visited by ETs and invited to visit their world/planet. They boarded a vimana (UFO), flew there very quickly, enjoyed a day there, then asked to return home. They were told they could be returned home, but a great deal of time would have passed on earth while they were visiting. When they returned, everyone they ever knew would be long dead and forgotten.
But this is all I have to say about time. I learned it in college as an anecdote in the social sciences. I laughed at how backward some human societies can be until I suddenly realized they were right. We were wrong and we had always been wrong. You know how we say time is an arrow moving from left to right?
We can, and often do, picture time like a boat moving west on a river. The boat relentlessly move from the past (on the left) through the present (in the middle) into the future (on the right). That may all be true. What this society saw is the opposite of what we see, and that is:
Which way am I facing in the arrow of time?
Where are we standing on this boat moving through time?
WEST'S ANSWER: Of course, we're toward the front of the boat, in the driver's seat, looking forward into the future, the present all around us, and the past vanishing into the distance behind us.
THEIR ANSWER: Of course, we are in the back of the boat only ever looking backward into the past. We can never see the future (other than with premonitions, omens, or exhibitions of psychic power) because the boat hasn't gotten there yet (and of course never really does because everything always stays in the present, which is all there is).
What time is it? - Look carefully.
But, we might argue, what about the past? I'm always living in the past, except for the time I "spend" (metaphorically like a limited amount of money) living in the future.
I spend next to no time here, now, just being.
I ruminate and am sad about the past, or I worry and am nervous about the future. I more or less ignore the present -- except when meditating, practicing mindfulness (sati), or listening to the Dhamma, the Buddha's Teachings.
Time travel will confuse us more
The truth is, if we think about it, even when we are "living" in the past or future, we only ever actually do that NOW. We don't go back to the past, and we don't actually "go" to the future. Those are just designations, so that the only time we ever are when we look is in the present. We are not present for the present, but that's where we actually are. Virtually, we're wasting away in the imaginary past or imaginary future, being imagined right NOW. But where are we on that imaginary boat in the example?
That's right, they're right. We've been wrong and haven't been seeing it correctly. We are not in the front part looking forward, and we certainly aren't in the driver's seat (controlling all that's coming at us). We are being carried along, not knowing where we're going, and only finding out after the fact.
I'm bored being here now. Let's talk future.
It could well be that this "now" business is not just a designation. Like a book or album, all time may already be. The story might already be set but we just haven't read it or heard it yet. So we imagine we have perfect freewill and will find out as things transpire.
Time exists, but how it exists -- not as a natural and integral part of the universe, but an artificial and imposed screening device -- is the real question. In a book, there is no time. It is all there all at once. In reading it or flipping through the pages, we create a kind of time or sequencing, ordering, stacking. We can read slowly or jump around very quickly, but wherever we go (in the book), there we are. When? Now. Only ever now.
This is the first paradox of time: Our attitudes toward time have a profound impact on our lives and world, yet we seldom recognize it. The authors' goal is to help reclaim yesterday, enjoy today, and master tomorrow with new ways of seeing and working with our past, present, and future. Just as Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences permanently altered our understanding of intelligence and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink gave us an appreciation for the adaptive unconscious, Prof. of Social Psychology Philip Zimbardo (infamous for his Stanford Prison Experiment) and Dr. John Boyd’s book changes the way we think about and experience time.
Astropyre (video); text by Dhr. Seven, Pat Macpherson, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Catholic converts drew stories to colonial priests
The Aztec religion is a polytheistic and monistic pantheism in which the Nahua (Nahuatl, the indigenous language of Mexico) concept of teotl was construed as the supreme god Ometeotl, as well as a diverse pantheon of lesser gods and manifestations of nature [1].
The popular religion tended to embrace the mythological and polytheistic aspects, and the Aztec Empire's state religion sponsored both the monism of the upper classes and the popular heterodoxies [2].
The codices were made by Catholic priests
The most important deities were worshiped by priests in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), particularly Tlaloc and the god of the Mexica (the tribe from which the word "Mexico" derives), Huitzilopochtli, whose shrines were located on the Templo Mayor ("Main Temple").
Their priests would receive special dispensation from the empire. When other states were conquered the empire would often incorporate practices from its new territories into the mainstream religion [3].
The Great Pyramid of Cholula, also known as Tlachihualtepetl (Nahuatl/Mexicano for "Constructed Mountain"), is a complex located in Cholula, Puebla, Mexico. It is the world's largest pyramid (by volume) and archeological site of a pyramid (temple) in the world confirmed to exist on Earth today [1, 2], not counting massive artificial "mountains" in Bosnia, Buddhist Indonesia, Cambodia, and China, California (not lake but possibly on Colorado), Missouri (Cahokia), dark Alaska, which is four times larger than Giza, and Pyramid Peak. The adobe brick pyramid stands 82 feet (25 meters) [3] above the surrounding plain, which is significantly shorter than the Great Pyramid of Giza's height of 481 feet (146.6 meters), but much wider, measuring 984 by 1,033 feet (300 by 315 meters) in its final form [3], compared to the Great Pyramid's base dimensions of 756 by 756 feet (230.3 by 230.3 meters) [4]. This holy pyramid is a temple that traditionally has been viewed as having been dedicated to the feathered serpent (naga) god Quetzalcoatl [5]. The architectural style of the building was linked closely to that of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, with influence from the Gulf Coast evident as well, especially from El Tajín [6]. More
In common with many other indigenous Mesoamerican civilizations, the Aztecs put great ritual emphasis on calendrics, and scheduled festivals, government ceremonies, and even war around key transition dates in the Aztec calendar [4].
Public ritual practices could involve food, storytelling, and dance, as well as ceremonial warfare, the Mesoamerican ballgame (precursor of football, soccer, and basketball), and human sacrifice (a tribute to appease bloodthirsty gods of military service and slaughter) [5].
The cosmology of Aztec religion divides the world into 13 heavens and nine earthly layers or netherworlds [6]. The first heaven overlaps with the first terrestrial layer, so that heaven and the terrestrial layers meet at the surface of the Earth, where we are.
The celestial entities of "shining ones" (sky devas)
Each level is associated with a specific set of deities and astronomical objects. The most important celestial entities in Aztec religion are the Sun, the Moon, and the planet Venus (as both "Morning Star" and "Evening Star") [7].
Convert or die: Become Catholic
After Conquest by Spain, Aztec people were forced to convert to Catholicism, and the two religions syncretized.
In this religion, your black magic blood sacrifice will come from a scapegoat, who is the God Himself disguised as a human to pay Himself a ransom for your eternal soul washed in blood: You have to accept it, or we'll kill you. And let our priests molest your kids because they don't have wives. The Vatican orders it. Don't worry. His Mom is very nice and will do lots of favors for you.
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