In meditation, he finds meaning

In meditation, he finds meaning

Published: June 28, 2005

Blaze Compton contemplates the big questions at his Mindfulness Practice Center in Dayton. Tom Ballard/News-Register

By DEE DUDERSTADT
Of the News-Register

It was the 1960s - the dawning of the so-called "Age of Aquarius." The Beatles were cool, students were choosing to make love rather than war and the peace symbol was becoming an entire generation's emblem of nonconformity.
Blaze Compton, now a 56-year-old Dayton resident, came of age during that period. And it put an indelible mark on his thinking.
He has always emphasized the spiritual over the material. In fact, he has dedicated his adult life to seeking spiritual enlightenment.
"What is the universal presence we feel?" he asks. "It is a reality beyond this mind, beyond the thinking mind," he asserts. "It is a kind of contemplation dealing with an incomprehensible direct experience beyond perception."
Compton has found meaning in meditation, and has made it his life's work to share with others. To that end, he has established the Yamhill County Mindfulness Practice Center at 6995 S.E. Webfoot Road in Dayton. He can be reached there at 503-864-4682.
Devotees meet there at 7 p.m. the first and third Mondays of each month for meetings that are open to all interested members of the public.
Compton serves as the group's "sangha." The title marks someone who has attained the first stage of awakening under the teachings he follows.
His aim is to help people have experiences rich enough to be physically apparent, "not just emotional or perceptual."
Compton said he has been deeply interested in meditation and spirituality since childhood.
As a first-grader attending a Catholic school, he recalls a priest posing the questions, "What is being?" He said it became a lifelong quest for him, and he has found his answers through meditation.
"I spent time with the Maharishi and learned transcendental meditation," he said, speaking of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of Maharishi Vedic University. "He told me to go out and teach everybody that the essence of health lies in the benefits of meditation."
But he said transcendental meditation is just one of the forms he is versed in.
"I originally studied Vadanta," Compton said. He has also studied various forms of Buddhist meditation, including Zen and Nagda Rede Yoga, he said.
According to Charles S. Prebish, author of "American Buddhism," elements of American culture began to develop an interest in Buddhism - especially Tibetan Buddhism - about 10 years after the end of World War II. He said the so-called "Zen Explosion" really took off in the late 1960s, which coincided with Compton's late teens and early 20s.
Originally from Ohio, Compton saw Army service during the Vietnam War, sharing a life-altering experience with many of his contemporaries. He got married in that period of his life, but it didn't last.
He moved to Oregon in 1986, following his ex-wife out to maintain contact with a daughter from that marriage, then 10.
He has since remarried. He said he is living a simple life in Dayton with his new family, consisting of a wife and daughter.
Compton said he has studied under a variety of teachers in a variety of settings over the years.
At one point, he said, he entered into a "master to novice" mentoring relationship that dictated maintaining a subsistence lifestyle.
"We lived off miracles," he said. "The work we did was about energy, being in the moment."
Recently, he has been pursuing more conventional studies. He said he just completed a bachelor's degree at Western Oregon University and has been offered a teaching assignment there in the fall.
"I want to have a solid background in scientific research methods as they pertain to meditation, especially brain research, so that I can represent meditation as professionally and as scientifically as possible," he said.
He is teaching meditation on a volunteer basis at the Oregon State Penitentiary and Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem, and has been asked about developing a program for the Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla.
Meanwhile, he is helping develop what he's billing as "one of the world's largest databases of published, peer-reviewed, scientific research on the psychological and physiological benefits of meditation."
But he's not making any money doing any of that. So how is his family getting by?
"I make a little money writing crossword puzzles for a specialty TV guide out of Atlanta, and Laura and I clean the Cozine House in McMinnville once a month," he said. "Other than school financial aid, that's it."
Living simply is something he practices as well as preaches.

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Finding faith

Finding faith

Published: November 20, 2007

By DEE DUDERSTADT
Of the News-Register

Few have stood in a dense grove of trees, gazing up at the stars on a clear, crisp night, without feeling overwhelmed by the majesty of nature.
For native peoples, including Native Americans, such experiences have always carried a very special and spiritual meaning. And their nature-based spiritual paths have attracted many outside followers in recent years.
So-called "Earth-based" religions are practiced by up to 30 percent of the world's population, including an estimated 307,000 Americans, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.
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Count Mark Freeman of McMinnville is among them. The 54-year-old, an electrician by trade, calls himself a spiritual seeker.
He doesn't spend his free time surfing sports channels with a remote. He spends it teaching a form of spiritual healing called Reiki, serving as a sweat lodge facilitator or leading a peace circle.
He was raised "quasi-Christian," as he puts it. He attended the Baptist church in his early childhood in Ohio and the Methodist Church later, after his family moved to Florida.
Freeman feels he is just embarking on his current, very different spiritual journey. But he's more than willing to share what little he knows with fellow seekers.
"I have been searching as long as I can remember," he said, beginning with meditation in his youth.
After graduating from high school, he became a vegetarian and began traveling the country looking for someone who could guide him on a journey to deeper spiritual understanding.
He studied with Ken Keys, learning the principals of Buddhism. He also studied yoga and committed himself to helping the hungry and needy wherever he found them.
Then, he said, he backslid for a time. He put his search for spiritual discovery on the back burner and adopted a more traditional, self-centered lifestyle.
"Karma forced me to take a look at myself and get back to it," Freeman said.
What he calls "karma" came in the form of truck accident suffered while working as an electrician in Saudi Arabia. He spent two minutes and 54 seconds clinically dead before being resuscitated, he said, and it remained touch and go for a time afterward.
"It was a state of euphoria," he said. "I knew something had happened."
Once the picture of fitness, he now struggled with physical activity. That led him to re-evaluate his priorities.
After completing his assignment in Saudi Arabia, he returned to the United States and headed to Santa Fe to see some friends. He liked the old Southwestern city so much, he stayed on and went into business with a local electrician.
While in Santa Fe, he met a woman who would first become the love of his life, and later, after the romantic relationship ended, his spiritual adviser and best friend.
Today, he devotes all of his free time and energy to pursuing his own spiritual journal and helping others pursue theirs. And Reiki, a form of spiritual healing emerging from Japan, is his primary vehicle.
Reiki involves channeling spiritual energy through the hands to help heal those suffering from physical, emotional or mental problems. It resembles the laying on of hands practiced by some fundamentalist Christian churches.
He has also crafted a sweat lodge out of willow branches and covered it over in the traditional style of native cultures. He incorporates earth practices of Celtic origin with Native American influences.
He said he is not posing as a Native American when he functions as a water pourer in a sweat lodge ceremony or facilitator for a peace circle. He said he is simply finding his own faith and taking his own path.
"We create a place where the spirit may manifest," he said. "I am of this land."
Participation in his sweat lodge and peace circle are by invitation only. He invites inquiries at worldtree@macnet.com.
Vern "Soaring Eagle" Halcro, a marriage and family counselor with a background as a child psychologist in public school systems, is another local practitioner.
He has four spirit allies on his totem, the eagle, wolf, butterfly and jaguar. They give him guidance and provide inspiration. He feels he came into this incarnation to help others.
He began training last winter in African shamanism, and quickly concluded he needed to reconnect with his own ancestors first. He first returned to Montana, then back East, tracing his ancestry.
"Tapping into that energy, maintaining that connection, this wisdom, this energy, is incredible," Halcro said.
"The inner life is manifest in the outer world. I felt somehow different in my body, deepened into this spirit."
His inner transformation has led him to look to help others. He is putting his principal focus on men, saying their feelings are often neglected in our society.
Halcro is hoping to get an encounter group going to help men explore their spiritual feelings and have life-affirming experiences. The group will offer instruction in drumming, movement, dream interpretation, going on spiritual journeys, connecting with ancestors and developing spirit guides, he said.
One must learn to "set the intention and give it to spirit," he said. The response will come when the time is appropriate.
"It's a gift that comes anytime and anywhere," he said.
Halcro said this represents both the culmination of his life's work and "a preparation for my own death."
He urges those interested in connecting with a deeper self within themselves, and in others, to call him at 503-560-0817.

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Pagans count selves among the faithful

Pagans count selves among the faithful

Published: January 16, 2007

Silverstar Red Crow of McMinnville's Toad House and the Peace Garden prepares a simple feast of cookies and spice tea to honor the Yule Festival. Red Crow describes herself a practitioner of "shamanism in the Red Witch tradition," which she said embraces a "socio/magickal family belief structure." Tom Ballard/News-Register

By DEE DUDERSTADT
Of the News-Register

A profusion of steeples, spires and crosses reach for the sky in McMinnville, but these symbols of our nation's dominant Christian faith do not reflect the full range of spirituality among the county's population.
That range includes Earth-centered faiths that first began to reach the public eye in the 1960s under labels like New Age, Pagan and Neo-Pagan.
What adherents have in common are a rejection of traditional worship practices and a desire to get closer to the environment and the Earth. Some refer to themselves as witches, pagans or shamans, while others reject such loaded terms.
"Pagan" comes from the Latin term for "country dweller" or "villager." It has traditionally been used to describe people, often indigenous tribal people, not embracing Christianity, Islam, Judaism or one of the world's other major religions.
It has sometimes been applied even more narrowly, as has "heathen," to anyone outside the Christian faith. Because it carries connotations of being primitive and uneducated, it has long been considered derogatory.
However, it has been embraced by many practitioners nonetheless.
The Witches' Voice newsletter, which can be found on the web at www.witchvox.com, estimates that there are a million practicing pagans in the United States, out of a population of 300 million, and 3 million worldwide, out of a population of 6.5 billion.
Religious sociologist Helen Berger, author of "Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo-pagans in the United States" (University of South Carolina Press, 2003), considers those figures high. She estimates there are between 200,000 and 400,000 U.S. practitioners meeting her definition.
Either way, the count includes Silverstar Red Crow of McMinnville. She terms herself a practitioner of "shamanism in the Red Witch tradition," which she said embraces a "socio/magickal family belief structure."
Born in Southern California in the 1950s, Red Crow began her spiritual education early. She said she learned to meditate before she was out of diapers.
She traces her pagan roots through her parents. Her Native American mother, Sarah Noble Goodspeed Sortomme, and Norwegian father, Richard F. Sortomme Jr., were both dedicated to the concept of Earth-centered worship, she said.
"Understanding who we are genetically enables us to understand what we can become," Red Crow said.
She said the spiritual journey she has embarked on is aimed at finding her personal place in the universe. "It's all about belonging in one form or the other," she said, and her spiritual beliefs and practices have grown out of that.
A self-described artist, writer and teacher of metaphysics, she attended Thomas Jefferson College, now known as Grand Valley State College, majoring in anthropology and modern literature. In her metaphysical pursuits, she has studied with Master Hamid Bey, Baba Ram Das, Alan Ginsberg and others.
Red Crow made her home in Santa Fe for 16 years.
In 1994, she moved to Carlton with her husband, Mark Dragonfly Freeman. They operated Silverstar Gallery and the World Tree Prayer Network, originally called the Pagan Prayer Network.
"WTPN's participants are from many traditions and faiths," Red Crow said. "Many of them are Earth-based spiritual practitioners, which include indigenous shamanic practitioners, Reiki masters, Pranic healers, faith healers and magic practitioners from traditions representing five continents. Some people have estimated that the network reaches up to 90,000 people with its daily requests."
Red Crow and Freeman continued their spiritual outreach by founding a church in 1996.
"Church of the World Tree was founded to protect and preserve shamanism practiced in the Red Witch tradition," she said. It became affiliated with the International Assembly of Spiritual Healers and Earth Stewards Congregations on April 26, 1998.
Six years ago, they moved to McMinnville and opened "Toad House and the Peace Garden," billed as a "teaching center and gathering place." The cooperative is the focal point for Rainbow Charities, which is dedicated to serving Earth-based and indigenous communities.
The charitable organization arm Children's Angels extends its reach far enough to support orphans on the Standing Rock Reservation in Cannon Ball, N.D., for example. However, its main emphasis is local.
Through its Soldier's Angels program the organization also sends gift packages to troops serving abroad
Red Crow said she and her husband offer hands-on-healing and counseling services. She said they also conduct birthing, naming, marriage, same-sex commitment, fasting and funeral ceremonies, the latter known as walking-on ceremonies.
While the number of pagans continues to grow, ignorance and prejudice continue to plague its practitioners, Red Crow said.
She said she has received many death threats over her open espousal of her beliefs, but does not hold the threat-makers in contempt. "I am a peace ambassador," she said.
"We honor the Earth as the mother of all life," Red Crow said. "We invite people of many faiths to come together and share positive feelings, all revolving around reverence for our Great Mother.
"We do not discriminate against any particular belief structure or faith. We maintain an abiding respect for the Earth, our elders, tribalism, diversity, devotion and in-depth personal inventory."
Red Crow describes pursuit of peace as an integral element of her beliefs. "It's all about taking responsibility for thoughts, actions and deeds," she said.
"Thoughts are things," she said. "You put a thought with power and intention into the universe. Once it is given, it can never be taken back.
"If it is negative, it comes back on you with all the force you sent it with. If it is positive, it floods your life with harmony and peace.
"Each person must take complete responsibility for everything thought, said and done, without exception. If you spew hate, hate will be the nest you settle into every night. We have a responsibility to be positive, to make a positive mark."
Red Crow, Freeman and their circle planted a peace pole on Feb. 7, 2002, emblazoned with the word "peace" in 13 languages. The 20 foot pole is topped with copper and painted green, considered the color of healing.
The pole is the focus of a weekly Peace Circle, where she and fellow adherents gather weekly to pray to the Earth Goddess for peace.
"Toad House/Peace Garden events are Earth-Centered, celebrating the Creatrix Goddess in all of Her forms, as our Mother," according to its website, found at www.toadhouse-peacegarden.org.
Red Crow termed her faith "matrifocal." She said it stresses power-sharing across gender lines, but "honors the woman first in all things," because the woman is the "giver of life."
Natural rhythms of the seasons and lunar calendar play a big role in her practice of her faith. She said that is true for pagans generally, as these natural cycles reflect the human cycles of birth, life, decline and death.
"A true pagan lifestyle is very arduous," Red Crow said. "It isn't all fun and games."
Each year, she said, "There are eight sabbats, 13 full moons and 12 new moons a year," each to be marked and celebrated. And doing so can lead to ostracism by others, she said.
But she is undeterred by lack of support and understanding, or even tolerance, from the population at large.
"I love this life, all the drama, angst, pain and the ultimate states of joy," she writes on her website. "This work is my passion and feeds my core-spirit."

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