The Good Bunny and the Bad Guru
Theme: Magicians Reporting for Duty
Week 7: in which we can't miss the sharp contrast between the very good bunny and the very bad guru
Beautiful Magicians,
What a wild week.
For me personally it was another week of wacko computer issues. The second screen went black and stayed black. Email did wonky things. I couldn’t save pictures. All is resolved as of two hours ago thanks to the commitment of computer John. No one else has touched my computer for over thirty years. So John came to the house again today, wrestled first with the computer and then with Dell, and for some icing on this technology cake, had to talk to Spectrum to update the modem.
But at last, all is well. I feel such relief.
But I now have a limited window to write this Notes from the Field. And I really really want to write this one. Because an amazing contrast happened this week. One I feel tells the story of how we got where we are.
It is the story of the Good Bunny and the Bad, very very bad, Guru.
The Good Bunny is obviously Bad Bunny. Did you watch the halftime show of the Super Bowl? I did not see it live because I have not had a television since 2010. And I have not missed it. Not for one moment. Things that happen on TV that are massive cultural moments are always recorded and available on YouTube. So an hour or so after the game, Bad Bunny’s show was available.
I watched it not knowing much about Bad Bunny. I know he’s the #1 selling musician in the world right now. And I know he won the first ever Grammy for an album completely in Spanish. And I picked up that he’s a fluid kind of guy in the clothes department. Which is always fun.
What I didn’t know is that I would be stunned by his show. The music was superb.
But the real magic was the history lesson.
What do you know about Puerto Rican history? I confess I didn’t know much. I knew that my country ignored the suffering of the Puerto Ricans after the Maria hurricane. I was appalled by the president (who from now on in this newsletter will be identified as DIC or TIC, it hurts to even type his name), when he threw a roll of paper towels at the crowd mocking their pain.
But now, thanks to Bad Bunny, I know a lot more. Because Bad Bunny gave us a history lesson. A brilliant, powerful history lesson filled with joy, music, pride, and love while also telling an unblinking story of the suffering of the land and the people caused by colonial power stripping the land to extract massive profit from sugar plantations.
In short, he told the story of sugar.
I realized this when I caught the word Hawaii as he sang. At first, I wondered why Bad Bunny was talking about Hawaii. But then I remembered the story of the last queen of Hawaii. Queen Liliʻuokalani ruled from 1891 until the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom on January 17, 1893.
I know a wee bit about her because Kahu Lahela, who has led seven prayer intensives with me on the ancient Hawaiian forgiveness prayer practice of Ho’oponopono, told us Queen Liliʻuokalani’s story as part of a yearlong mystery school in 2022. Lahela gave us quite the Hawaiian history lesson and even took photographs of the rooms in the Hawaiian castle where Queen Liliʻuokalani was imprisoned by American business men who wanted to build massive sugar plantations on the islands.
We were shocked to see pictures of this elegant regal woman who knew Queen Victoria, as we were told that the sugar executives wanted to hang her. Hang her. They didn’t. But to ensure her people had no communication with her, they locked her in two rooms with blacked out windows in her castle. The only way the queen knew what was happening to her precious country was by reading the news her young assistant slipped to her by bringing her fresh flowers wrapped in newspaper.
Scroll ahead to the Lahaina fires in 2023 and sugar rears its ugly head once more. Once the executives had stripped all the profit they could out of Hawaii, they abandoned the plantations, and wild grasses began to fill the empty spaces. Wild grasses are highly flammable.
The Lahaina fires are the direct result of big sugar exploitation of the land and the people.
So when Bad Bunny said Hawaii as he walked through the impressive sugar cane field created on the football field, I understood that he was telling a global story of the harm done by colonial power.
The next day, I began to read emails between Jeffrey Epstein and Deepak Chopra that are at long last being exposed. At first, I was shocked. Isn’t Chopra supposed to be a great spiritual guru? Hasn’t he made a fortune on supposedly brilliant spiritual books? Books my friends purchased and quoted and praised.
I read two of his books because people I respect recommended them. And I thought something was wrong with me. Because to me they felt flat. Cold. Very mental. The logic seemed contrived. The conclusions didn’t feel solid to me.
But I didn’t say anything because, well, he was Deepak Chopra, the great and mighty guru.
Who was I, one small writer, to throw shade on his brilliance. So I didn’t. I just skirted the issue when his name came up.
But when I read his appalling interchange with Jeffrey Epstein, everything fell into place. I am not crazy. My gut was absolutely correct. It was picking up on something unseen, something invisible, but something real.
I won’t make you suffer through the longer exchanges. They’re disgusting. In a nutshell, Deepak praises Epstein’s ability to pick up girls. And Epstein tells Chopra to “learn from the master.”
This sentence sums up the depravity and conscious dishonesty. Chopra writes: “God is a construct, cute girls are real.”
Sit with this. If you can bear it.
In eight words, Chopra tells the entire story and purpose of patriarchy.
First, he affirms what I’ve been studying for the last eight years: there is no male god. There never was. Think about it for five seconds. If god is a creator, how does god create the world with no wife, partner, or feminine energy in sight. All the new patriarchal religions had to come up with some pretty wacky stories about how male gods birthed the world and other gods and goddesses our of their leg or head or other impossible part of their body.
So “god” is an idea created by men and used to control and abuse. As Chopra so clearly says, god is nothing more than a “construct.” An idea. So he knew this all along. And yet, he travelled the world promoting his unique ability to teach us how to work with that construct.
And then, if that weren’t disturbing enough, read the second part: “cute girls are real.”
It’s sickening. In four words, he unmasked himself as just another male spiritual leader on the make.
And he’s not the only one. As an author in conversation with publishers, bookstore managers, religious leaders, and conference and retreat creators, I unfortunately know that Deepak Chopra is not an anomaly. His exchange with Epstein is not rare. It just rips the mask off.
It reinforces that the work I have been doing for the last eight years—starting with the announcement of prayer artist in 2018, then dropping into bone-deep memory with arrival of mystic witch in 2020, and finally settling into nonnegotiable purpose and focus with the capstone of firekeeper in 2024—is sacred. Holy. Comforting. True. Real. And very sweet.
And I promise you it’s not a construct. It’s not an idea codified in texts written only by men. It’s a tangible memory of the way we lived before patriarchy. And the way we can and must live again. It’s right there in my closing mantra:
life is fragile, handle with reverence.
The key word is reverence.
Deepak Chopra could not have traveled to the pedophile island if he had reverence for women. For girls. For life itself.
I had thought I’d be showing you signs in your windows today, but my computer is only now willing to work with images. So I’ll save them for next week.
But perhaps the sign that rules them all is Bad Bunny’s massive billboard that closed his show:
THE ONLY THING MORE
POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE
And that’s why Bad Bunny is the Good Bunny and the famous guru is, well, not.
Life is Fragile, Handle with Reverence,
Janet
PS: If you’ve been reading me these past three years, you know that my legacy project is The Witch Sequence. Next month, we open the first of 3 Prequel events for the final gift of Dragon. If you were in ART 4,5, or 6, you should have received an invitation this week. I have not been able to recreate the outlook groups for ART 1-3. So if you feel Dragon calling, visit this initial version of a landing page for ART 7.
Be sure to read the prerequisites. And don't panic. There is time to complete ART 5 on Divination and ART 6 on Reverence in Feb and March. Lots of people are doing that right now. The links to order those intensives on demand are on the landing page.
If you have any questions, email me.
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