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Wednesday, April 24, 2013

A Wondrous Gift

I know that as I grew from a child into adulthood that there were those brilliant flashes of insight that came without any rhyme or reason that would light up my life in such a way that they often proved pivotal moments that helped to accelerate thinking and becoming.  Once, when very small, I awoke from a dream in which I had been shown how to ride a bike.  I was all of five years of age and had not been urged to try and ride a two-wheeler.  It was just me and my tricycle.  I loved that thing.  I got it for Christmas.  But its sparkle was dimmed that morning when I went dashing out of the house, skipping breakfast as I ran yelling that I KNEW how to ride a bike.  I hopped on and off I went.  How  on earth could a kid of that age do such a thing?

What caused such experiences like these would remain a mystery in a sense.  Deeper into the knowing, though, I have come to realize that all of this, all of these experiences in my life were akin to pulling back a curtain on myself.  What it has revealed has been one wondrous gift after another.  None of them have been quite so sweet as the sense that we are composed of something more than what our rather stuffy left brains tell us is concensus reality.  We stay boxed into these world views that we are somehow limited when we aren’t.  The challenge is what our senses seem to be telling us.  Everything happens linearly, everything happens a certain way according to what it is we believe is true.  And yet, something glimmers beneath, like some great grey whale of an encounter just beneath the small slip of a boat that is our world view.

There is more.  I am more, you are more.  More than you could ever dream.  And yet, in touching dream, it is all there, waiting for you.

In awakening, all of this has been accelerated and I have been given view after view of things that have been wonderful gifts.  Taken down into the  incredibly small world of atoms and subatomic particles to be shown how the world is threaded with a single needle of purpose and brilliance, and that this needle has two sides which SEEMS to be the heart of duality, but really isn’t was nothing short of an epiphany encounter.  It awaits for the moment when each of us can begin to “get” that our own minds have been playing a trick on us and belief and conditioning has simply come along to codify it, to cast it into some concrete monolith that does not really suit it.  Or us.

Last summer, sitting quietly on my front porch looking up at the night sky I felt that familiar pull into that grey whale of an experience.  The curtain was pulled back for me to view and a voice that was not a voice spoke and showed me yet again how it is we are composed and revealed in sparkling clarity a mystery which has lain at the center of this talk of the dual current that moves up our bodies and fires off the flame of awakening; Shakti and Shiva, the yin and yang.  The dual serpents of kundalini.  In simple terms I was shown how the energy moves up through the body….less as a linear current and more as a presence.  But for simplicities sake, lets take the old school approach and say it was a current.  This presence within me showed how awakening is not just promised for each of us, but is actually insured by HOW we are actually designed neurologically, energetically, physically.  In that one moment, it was explained why the left brain controls the right and why right brain controls the left, and how this is significant for us in our evolutionary spiral.  I am not widely read, but I do pick up things here and there as I pick from the buffet of information out there and I have simply never come across anything quite like this.  Why not?  Perhaps somewhere, there is some dusty scroll that contains this information, and if it is mainstream, I have yet to hear of it.  But in understanding this insight into how the current of the TWO moves through us in a very specific way, a new world emerges where the very design of our being is turned on its head.  How can we be the broken beings so often mentioned in old books that seek to explain why life is so hard and trying?  We just never really understood what was at the root of all of this trial.  It wasn’t some angry god or fate or any of that, for this one simple insight that came last summer to me that erased all of that.  If what I saw or came into knowing is to be believed, the world is in fact entirely misunderstood by some of us and the realization emerges that we simply have been seeing it all wrong.  This insight is nothing short of a grand epiphany, and if it has not been spoken of before, it will help many to realize how it is that the energy of awakening can lead to the enlightened state.  Without dogma or myths or beliefs, but a very simple mirroring effect that is at once in the energetic template of our etheric being AND in the physical body as it also points or shows very clearly that reaching into the crown for the highest vibration is actually not some elusive thing, but a VERY physical thing and that it has been created entirely by design in each of us.  All of us.  Personally, I think such a realization is actually cause for celebration.  

This insight is one of many and I am not giving away the store because I have these and others like it teased out of the ether over the last seven years of my awakening experience in the form of a book I am working through that I hope to bring forth for what it is worth for those who like to chew on substantive material.  At least I think it is of substance, and someday soon, you will get to judge for yourself.  It isn’t that this post is about specific insights, but HOW such insight can literally change how we view the world and how we understand who and what we are within it.

The Hindus often speak of the abilities that come with awakening as those things that we ought not tarry around, but to keep our eyes fixed on the star of our greater becoming.  In a sense I agree, but you know, if we all did that in our lives, nothing of any substance would be brought forward.  Consider a gift that you have and consider having someone saying that you ought to ignore that ability or gift in favor of something more.  Perhaps, dear reader, all of this, all of life and everything in it is that something more and we, locked into rigid conceptualizations of HOW we think things need or should be,  miss the boat on the golden glints in the sands of our journey through this experience which could bring such fulfillment to all of us.  Think how the world would be had the great composers of music followed the promptings of the yogis of old and simply kept their discoveries and creations a secret.  What if Monet had simply chosen to set his brushes aside and instead just looked at those haystacks and ponds and smiled.  For him, perhaps an epiphany, but for the rest of us, a poverty. What if Carl Jung had simply chosen to keep his insights to himself?  What if Jesus had chosen to remain silent in the desert and kept to sawing wood and being filled with the Holy Mother of Spirit as she ducked and dove within the Father as he remained entirely mute?

When we choose to use our gifts for raising ourselves up selfishly, perhaps some tarnish comes to our souls.  Perhaps our own vision is diminished even as we seek to look far.  But what if, like children, we act upon our insights and choose to share our basket of goodies with the rest of our friends and thus make the world around us richer?  What if Edgar Cayce had chosen not to dream and speak in his dreaming?  And what if the great orator and mover of hearts, Martin Luther King, had chosen not to dream?

Dream. All of you.  Make them big and be daring.  Be full of possibility, and plunder the great wellspring that is your infinite self.  Do it shamelessly and often.  Be willing to just give it all away on a moment’s notice if you must.  The world needs more of you.  The world needs it like a thirsty man who has crawled through the desert needs water.  We thirst and hunger for it even as our reach may move beyond our grasp.  This has always been the way it has been.  And yet, we move forward, sometimes inching, sometimes bounding.  At a certain point we will find ourselves no longer struggling and crawling on hands and knees, but dancing ecstatically,  arms raised to sun and moon and to that compass that criss crosses the sky of our becoming.  It will always point both heavenward and earthward.  Inside and outside.  The moment we think it is “out there” is the moment we are moved to see what is within us.  It isn’t one or the other.

So dream big.  Pull back the curtain.  See all that you can see, and share your basket.  Do not fear your ability or gift, whatever it is.  You are one of us.  All of us.  And you need us as much as we need you, if only to remind us of that one important insight that could be yours and which will become ours and which could serve to move mountains in the most surprising of ways.  You really never  know.  So dance like you mean it.  Ecstatically.

The gift is what each of us is.  We are each reminding each of us what we are.  Some will seek shadow while some will seek light.  I suppose all of it will prove to be of some benefit in ways we can scarcely imagine.

So try to imagine.

The Calling

You rest within your breast
a gentle wave of bliss rippling through
a world opens up
it is just like this
from birth to death
moments of utter clarity
punctuated by uncertainties
and frailty until it all converges into one
and empties into the great ocean
that is the All.

You are the guiding light
the higher call to my wonderment
and match to my flame.
Subtle
understated
and tsunami-like.

I have turned in circles
round you
seeking to plumb the depths
and have had reflected to me
what still remains.

Death remains.

Beyond this death,
a new life
a new breath
a new chance
a calling beyond
and within
exploded beyond all convention
and laid entirely open
cosmic T-cells
ready to take any form
from dust to brilliance
from smiles to stones
and a million other things.
What it can be
is what anything might be
or would dream to become
or never even guess.
It is a new start
like Adam and Eve
wiser and willing to eat of every tree's fruit
and know no shame
nor division
within themselves
or in each other.

I cannot say or guess
what tomorrow will look like
except that it will entirely surprise me
and move me beyond any sense of expectation
that moving wellspring to the infinite.

If I might
the calling moves in me
and begging me to grasp your hand.
I do not know where tomorrow goes
or what new yesterdays will unfold
but I do know
I want to be that better man
the new man
whomever he happens to be.
I suppose he can be anything he so desires
since freedom was granted him
just as everyone else has.

So come,
let me wash these sheets of all our dismay
and scrub away all memory of
the unwanton past
and be just like children
trampling our shame
and giving up everything
for what could be
will be
as we feel moved
heeding the call.

Monday, April 22, 2013

Healing Karma


The concept of the wheel of karma is one that seems to many as an inescapable cyclic phenomenon, a cosmic merry-go-round that leaves us locked in lives that wind up doing the same things over and over. For people who have had recall of past lives, one issue often emerges that is curious and telling, which is that from lifetime to lifetime, there are themes, recursive patterns that exist in one life into the next.  Much of these patterns are attributable to karma.  Some might be tempted to say that these are merely issues that the soul has to work out, so it naturally comes up in a myriad of ways. True, but these issues have a rooting in the soulself and they must be worked through if the portions of that soulself is able to fully realize what and who it is while here in this world.  Upon death, we are each returned to that realm of knowing, but we must enter back into the same world yet again all with the same backlog of material that must first be cleared up if a clear view of this soulself is to be seen, felt or known. For negative karma, this is the dross that filters and distorts our vision.  As a result, too, some "themes" are simply very difficult patterns in the self that recur and then become like deep grooves over lifetimes.  This, though, is not a linear process entirely, but is dynamic. The issue of time only plays in the old paradigm when you only see evidence for one motion through time which for us is forward from new to old, from ancient past to distant future.  This, though, is not how things work at all, and what one does in one life can have a very real effect on all other time lines, all other lives.

From your own perspective here now, you have already lived as a merchant in what is now called Lithuania in the twelfth century A.D.  That life, for you now, has already been lived.  And yet, there are countless other possibilities that are every bit as valid as the one you remember.  In the same way there are countless eventualities in the present that you know now.  All of them are real, and yet only one of them can you know at any given time.  If you only realized how you hopscotch from one line to another moment by moment, it would show to you the rich bed of possibility that exists for you.  Knowing this is one tool in the toolkit of releasing karma.  Being able to go into the past to help effect a release is an important tool that can change how you feel RIGHT NOW.  It might seem entirely imaginary and impossible, but you can begin to do this work right now through the use of dream suggestion by suggesting to yourself that you are going to embark on a series of adventures in your night-time dream scape where you will begin to encounter your past self in time in the dream world and begin interacting with it.  I know this is possible because I have done it and I know the effects that it can bring.

Perhaps most central to releasing karma is getting down into your beliefs and feelings about things.  This will be a very accurate mirror for a host of things and to know it requires a degree of self-reflection and some honesty.  The problem with karma is that it is born out of an impulse to turn away from our divine or essential natures.  When I say divine, I do mea the higher self that is not merely you here now reading this but a deeper bed of awareness that exists in potential and can be sparked into motion.   You can dissolve karma not merely by atoning for what lies in the past, but through a method that is even more simple.  Atonement is a technique which can do it, but there is not some rule that atonement must be the way.  This is a tricky little wicket simply because for so long this is how we have chosen to view karma.  It is all very much steeped in a sense of good and bad, of right and wrong.  This is very dualistic thinking and it will breed a distorted view of how things are.

Jesus was fond of saying that you will know the kingdom when you become like children.  In the gnostic texts he does one better and says you must be like children who take the garment of shame and learn to trample it.  Which is a way of saying that you are not shamed by your nakedness.  And certainly, the process of shedding karma feels like one is becoming very naked.  Perhaps vulnerable.  Surrendered.  WHat I found in my own experience was that this was very much on the mark.  Letting go of some past karma is not about saying you are sorry or going out and atoning by paying restitution.  The debt is not paid in this way.  The debt is paid when you are able to forgive yourself for feeling the way that you did.  That may seem way too simple, but consider what takes place when you forgive yourself.  When you forgive yourself, you are actually involved in a process of coming closer to the divine itself.  You let go of a hard feeling in order to be freed from it.  This letting go is total. Forgiving someone does not always result in really letting go.  Forgiving someone are words which can be bound by social convention not spiritual conviction.  I have known people who were very quick to forgive when in truth, they really harbored ill will or bad feelings.

To forgive means you let it ALL go.  All pieces of it.  You are the universe, and the universe is unflinching in this; it must be cleaned up, nothing left.  We are beings that are notorious in how we will forgive in piecemeal amounts.  We seem to LIKE to hold onto grudges and perceived slights.  We will often identify with slights even when they are entirely unintentional. The forgiveness I am speaking about is directed at yourself, and when you do this, it changes you.  If you do not feel a change, a total and complete release from whatever it was that you felt had held you captive emotionally, then you may have only been going through the motions.  This forgiveness, seemingly elusive, is so simple that when it does happen it is almost too easy. We are simply making it too hard on ourselves.  In fact, I have observed that people prefer to keep their hurts in check since they have defined them for so long that they fear being without them.  This is simply more crazy feeling and will keep you from the truth.  It will keep you in obsessive behavior, in hurt and drama until YOU choose to let it go.  It is like trying to win an arm wrestling match and you realize you just have to stop always having to win.  Sometimes the way to win is to simply STOP and let go.  Perhaps we see releasing karma as this, which it very much is.  It is like a death, but like all death, it is immediately followed by a rebirth into a new life. In this situation, you do not have to give up your body, you just give up a small part of your behavior in the deal.

You are making a choice  of letting go of that which stood in the way of you and it. It was not uncommon for me to find myself forgetting completely about whatever the issue was that had dogged me for so long because the sheer joy, wonder and good feelings that I felt when in the presence of this divinity was many thousands of times better than any of the old arguments, problems, dramas or issues.  If you look at cases where people who have experienced clinical death, every concern they ever had simply goes out the window as if it were a puff of smoke.  The sense of peace and love is so total that they actually don't WANT to come back.  Death, in this way, is not some dark scary experience, but a meeting of the divine, and this is something that when we are touched by it, we are never the same.  Curiously, those how have died and those who have awakened through kundalini all share similar characteristics once they come back to earth.  There are heightened psi abilities, there is a growing sense of wanting to be of service, and an awareness of that great oneness which everything is a part of.
Seeking forgiveness can serve to release you, but it is not the asking forgiveness that frees you.  What frees you is the mere presence of the divine.  Nothing false can exist in that great light and so is often the case, old patterns begin to drop like old dry leaves.

The way out of karma is simply exiting an old feeling.  By making peace with it at the deepest levels of you, there is no place for it to root or grow.  It is pulling the karma up by the root and it simply cannot thrive in you anymore.  Most often, people just prune their weeds instead of dealing directly with them.  Doing this keeps the karma in play because your position in the feeling is still the same. What is wrong with the karma is how it keeps you from flowing into the divine current.  That is all.  You cleave to a position about something, who knows what it might be, and then it solidifies in your awareness right alongside ego, which keeps it in play for lifetimes if need be. There, it is waiting for you at the docks as you return from your voyage into the afterlife.  Like old luggage, it is sitting there beside you until you open the latch and begin digging into it.  How long this will go on is up to you.  It is yours and no one elses.  Sure, the karma is what makes you feel like someone hurt you.  Certainly someone has done something that made you feel a certain way, or did something you thought was mean or terrible, but you had a choice in how you responded every step of the way.  No one makes you feel any sort of way.  You choose this.  Every moment you are making choices like this and only when you take responsibility for your feelings and cease making others responsible for how you felt, you actually get closer to shedding karma and can begin to feel very differently about something such as an early childhood trauma involving, say, abandonment.  It is only here that you are able to see the issue for what it is.  Only in this place of honesty that you can see it for what it has been all along and let it go.

I will give you an example.

When I was an infant I had a father who contracted cancer and he was dying the moment I was born.  He wound up having a year and four months with his family before his body gave out and he died.  During this time my Mother was having to deal with the reality of having to care for four small children, one of whom was in diapers.  She was on edge, she was worried, she was grieving her husbands demise probably before he actually ever died.  When he got towards the end of his life, she spent her days caring for him until he was gone.  This was a pretty formative time for me and I grew up with a deep sense of anger at my Mother.  I actually had a hard time understanding why I was so angry at her.  I knew it had to do with those early days. This anger lived in me until about four years ago.  That would make this an anger that dwelled in me for about 43 years.  By going into the anger I found that the anger was not the original feeling.  It was hurt. I was hurt because I felt like I did not get what I so needed, which was her presence, her love, her Mother love.

What I was able to do was to use my rational mind, the Observer, to step back and really look at my life closely.  Surely, my Mother DID love me.  Yes she was out to lunch, and yes she was probably not as attentive to me in the way I wanted or needed.  But this was how life was.  She was doing the best she could and I believed this was because there was something wrong with me, that I was not lovable or dear to her.  Once I was able to untangle my identification through ego with all of this, I began the process of healing this, but it all began when I was able to go deep into the feeling to get past the anger. No, anger was merely a by-product of all of this. What I was able to see was that this was merely how life was.  I had in truth not been abandoned.  I had chosen to come along at a very challenging time.  Perhaps I could just as easily have seen myself as an adventurer who was willing to step into the breach at a time that would test me in every conceivable way.  My karma, then, was very much tied up in HOW I was choosing to see and respond to the world. I suspect that many early childhood traumas of this sort could be cleared up in much the same way.  A parent has to move away to work in a new location before sending the family to be with him or her.  The child thinks there is something wrong with him or her, for why else would the parent choose to go away like that?  By knowing the fuller story, we can often gain a perspective that we never had but simply assumed based on HOW we are rather than on how everything was.  But HOW we choose to respond IS our karma.  Erasing it is an act of self love.  Not selfish love, not narcissism, but a willingness to do that which will bring you closer to the divine.  Always this presence of the divine if felt as the most intimate part of you touching the most expansive part of what you are, which is the universe.

Letting go of karma is letting go of HOW you feel.  By allowing yourself to surrender and let go your old postures and positions, you can change the very composition of your being.  This is a life changing kind of event, and it can happen over and over many times.  Once you are done with all of the methods for getting you to the place of feeling the divine, all you really have is a simple and sublime experiencing of this force inside of you, a realization that it was never outside of you but was there all along. You had simply been blocking it from view.
The curious thing is that often the dropping of one karmic thread can lead to a cascade of other threads slipping away.  It gets easier to let them go.  You begin to realize that THAT wasn't so bad at all, and now you feel lighter and you no longer have that old issue to worry about. You are FREE.  It can lead to a kind of hunger for doing more.  One drop leads to another drop and before you know it, you have filled a giant jug up with all of this stuff.

Ask yourself how you can choose right now to think and feel differently about something in your life.  Is it possible that you could benefit from a different perspective in all of this?  And if you DO go for a different perspective, be sure that you allow anyone giving you their perspective to be heard.  Give them the benefit of the doubt because most often we discount the very truths that will set up free by taking on a different perspective.  Am I saying that releasing karma is merely a change in perspective?  Well, in a fashion, YES. People who see things differently or respond to things differently will simply feel differently about the exact same event or issue, so yes their karma will be different.  Consider especially those people who are not effected in the same way you are with the same event.  Let them be a teacher to you, let their perspective inform your own.  A wise Aristotle said that the mark of a wise person was that they could take on ideas and not entirely buy into them in order to try them on.  Being able to have this kind of neutrality and openness to things being different is a very important first step to cleaning up the mess of karma since karma IS changing how you respond to things.

I know; many people want to say that karma is what you do.  In truth, karma is what you ARE.  If you feel like mosquitos should not be allowed to live, you will quite naturally find yourself killing as many of them as you can.  All of this is based on a belief.  If you believed that all creatures deserve to live, you will find yourself resisting killing the mosquitos and moving indoors or putting something on that drives them away.  So karma is itself how you are and how you are will govern how you behave.  If you change how you are inside, your behavior will also change.

This is a simple and direct means to unravelling karma in your life.  By letting your rational mind to step in when emotions get high, not to mask your upset, but to see things in an unemotional way, you can be better equipped for seeing things less as you are and more AS they are.  Then, after that, you are ready to sidle up to the great divine and feel into this great wonder that we are all connected to.

A Higher Order


It is true that when you awaken, you begin to feel things from the inside out.  Instead of a focus through the sense only, a rich world begins to emerge and it is the inside of things.  This can be very unsettling in the beginning.  Charged with the energy of kundalini, everything seems so charged with meaning.  Certainly, life takes on greater meaning in the face of greater awareness.  This is true.  It is also true, though, that ego will tend to want to put meaning on things that may not be entirely productive.

Yes, when you think of something, it has a way of happening.  Over and over and over.....countless incidents take place that show you that this is so.  There is a very different kind of order at work in all of this and the mind seeks to make sense of it.  Quite natural.  But as humans we have this tendency to want to insert something into a phenomenon that feels right to us but is actually based more on what we think is right than what actually is.  As a result, our understanding of a given phenomenon in awakening changes as we change.  It is pretty natural, expected, and kind of elementary. This is the same impulse that resulted in our believing the world was flat, that the earth was the center of the solar system, that we could not go faster than seventy miles an hour in a railroad carriage or else all the air would be sucked out (yes, this was a belief held back in the day).  We think how silly all of this is now, and yet, I ask you, what remains in our world views that are the product of this same kind of thinking when it comes to how we think the universe and reality work?  Maybe it seems silly or superfluous to say this, but when it comes to what happens in awakening, it becomes, at least in my experience, very important.  Quantum entanglement or particles, rising up through a chain of phenomenon resulting in the most peculiar things happening at larger scales....scales that the quantum physicists say does not or cannot happen.  And yet, when you step off into the weird world of awakening, this certainly happens and with great regularity.  So it begs the question.

Synchronicity is not well understood and these events come in grand scales during awakening.  We want to say it is the universe speaking to us, or God, or any number of things.  But were we to understand what is behind this phenomenon, it would pop the lid off of how we see and view the world.  And ourselves.  It would place our sense of magic back into the place where it belongs, for certainly synchronicity is part of a larger animal that I do feel we have been chasing for some time and have attributed it to "magic" simply because we have not understood it very well.  What I am saying is that what we call magic is a hitherto misunderstood phenomenon (and I do not speak of slight of hand or card tricks, no).  This is the kind of magic that reveals how a shaman who needs the flower from a plant that only flowers in spring can walk out in the dead of winter and find the plant s/he needs in that moment to help heal someone.  These are kind of unexplainable events, minor miracles, really, that reveal a side of the world that we mostly don't understand. In understanding it, though, you begin to get a broader view of how the world CAN and DOES work....a world a good bit more different from the one we are used to thinking about.
We want to attach to our bliss to some deeper meaning simply because it seems so meaningful.  And yes, it is meaningful, but perhaps we have put too much onto it.  What if bliss was itself simply a state we were always meant to inhabit and that in so being, it becomes like the air we breath; it is what is.....there isn't so much a mystery about it, does not mean anything world shattering but is simply the way we were originally designed to be and feel once we got in line with ourselves a little more.  Bliss may just be the inevitable result of letting go of so much pain and suffering in our being and choosing to do something else.

Those who awaken enter into this hyperversal kind of universe where things begin to act and behave differently.  Yes. My daughter asks me about awakening from time to time because she is curious as I suppose anyone might be,  and I do seek to explain it in as simple and straightforward terms as I can without coming to any definitive conclusions, only my current experience at the time.  I do this because someone once said "and you will do even greater things..." and I think this is good advice.  As I do explain, I also let events in my life unfold as they should and she sees evidence of these odd events all around me and so she is able to witness them as odd coincidences that stop being JUST coincidences.  The luck on this only goes so far before it begins being statistically important, you see, and in this way she is able to glimpse at least its outward effects in our day to day.  We are working and responding differently, or at least with a slightly different awareness which is making the difference.
This awareness also can drive strong currents of energy.  When I awoke I was aware that I could feel someone's thoughts and feelings as if they were my own.  Even stranger, this was a person I had never met.  She lived in another country.  As my awakening unfolded, I began to believe that the universe had paired me with this person for some greater work or for some significant purpose.  I had eyes open enough to begin to see that all of this was not always happiness and rainbows, at least not what those who were saying about the phenomenon I was experiencing, which they called twin rays, twin souls, and soulmates.  If what they said was true, then things should have been of a higher order.  It was increasingly clear to me that we are all so very human while beginning to touch on the infinite within...and that unless or until we made the changes in our earthly selves, we would remain soaked or steeped in all of our old karmic accounts.  We would live lives that revealed an even greater fracture than before perhaps because now we at least knew there was something more.  Awakening is only as good as you make it.  It is not an escape out of being human, although many humans escape this world through it.
It took me a number of these soul connections before I would see and know just what this phenomenon was all about.  What we take for the bliss is still itself very much tied to karma.  We make the mistake sometimes that we are suddenly on the fast track to knowing when we awaken.  I say mistake because even as we are more enlightened in some ways, we still have the clothing of the past clinging to us and this material keeps us from seeing clearly or perceiving what is.

I wont say doing this is easy.  It is perhaps the hardest thing, and yet when things are hard or challenging, the greatest reward is often hiding in the wings, ready to emerge.  And so, beyond the forever of these deep connections lies a still deeper level of fulfillment that will I think radically change the very nature of our relationships here on this planet.  In many ways I sense that these relationships have the potential to become something that we have simply never experienced before and are thus a bit like speaking a dead language when we try to explain them.  So much gets lost in translation simply because we probably need to all get to this place so we can form new words, new ways of explaining or describing this new reality.  It is possible that it is a radical jump in our collective awareness and as a result may not be fully understood by anybody when someone DOES speak up and tries to explain it.

Until then, we will mistake the draw to these soul connections as though they mean something deep and important.  We will attach meanings that may not be suitable to them, and in the process we can run the risk of missing the boat on what is on offer here for us.  it is hard, though, to step out of our old conceptual boxes because those older boxes began to feel so comfortable.  Like any belief, we take up the standard of this new idea and make it our own even if it is not entirely on the mark.  This is one reason why I am not very big on tradition.  Tradition is great in some respects, but it also has been a wasteland for distortion and misunderstanding.  We gobble up what our ancestors deemed important without really looking at it or examining it. We seem to lose sight of the possibility that it is our responsibility to fashion our own traditions that are more up to date with who and what we are.  When quantum leaps occur, it has the tendency of putting is way out in left field and that can be a very lonely place.  We might even try to migrate back to those old familiar realities or boxes.

Until we reach deeper levels of surrender, for example, these connections will seem to be the cats pajamas, but once you have touched something new and different that vibrates at a whole new level of energy (emotional, mental, and spiritual) then it is hard to believe that those cats pajamas could ever be improved upon. But they can.  And they will.  To find it we merely dig up and root out what remains that keeps us tangled up.  Sometimes it means thinking big being fearless and seeking based on a deep inner compass which we each have.
When we do that, we will awaken anew to a higher order than what existed just a moment before.  It is entirely possible that we know less than what we do not know, which is to say the universe is a mighty big place and maybe we ought not prejudice ourselves by what we firmly feel is what we DO know.  All of that is subject to change....not  ideas or concepts but ways of being.  Because this all dwells in the collective awareness as well as the individual, we can actually affect a sea change by reaching these higher state in ourselves.  It will wind up being spread around even if no one awakened person ever spoke peep about their experience.  Through the collective it would simply spread.  In days, months or years.....it would eventually find the cracks in the facade and would work its way in.

The Dance of Tantra


I will admit that I used the title to grab your attention.  When we think of the word tantra, it sound exotic, a spiritual way to feel sexy, or maybe a sensual form of spirituality.  Unfortunately, tantra I think is being utilized in a way that helps sell workshops on how to be a better lover, but maybe not always a better person.

I will keep this short and sweet.

Beneath what you feel is what has been overlooked.  What is overlooked is what it yet to be resolved.  What is not resolved turns in you and is your master.  Most people simply do not have the awareness of what lies deeply lodged in them.  Sometimes they need the awareness in others to point it out.  Sometimes we have seen it but ignore it or do not see it for what it is.  But as you do the work to surrender all of your junk, to die to what you were to be born to what you can be, your experience of energy will absolutely change.
It will be like layers of old clothes are taken from your body as you return naked but intensely alive.  What was removed was what you thought defined you.  And for a time, it did.  Your hates, your dislikes, your fears, your worries, your concerns, your hopes and dreams (often driven partly by some fears and worries!!) all come off of you and what remains?

You do.

So your experience of what you think tantra is will change dramatically.
I have discovered how sexual energy can actually be sublimated fear and rage.  Really?  Yes, really.  But its not easy to get to, but its always there if you look at it.  Look at HOW you feel with your sexual energy.  really be honest with yourself.  Do you ever feel an edge of fear?  DO you ever feel an edge of rage for some reason?  Do you tell yourself "Oh, that's just my animal nature coming out," or "It's only natural to want to pull hair or rip off clothes...."  Look more deeply into this.  FEEL into it.  Do you feel yourself expanding or do you feel some part of you contracting?  Do you feel sexual energy as sexual tension that has to be released?  There is something deeper down.  We can get so drawn in by the draw, the yearning that this energy drives in us.  But the energy is not like some perfectly sacred thing that is perfect.  it is only as good as our insides.  We are like a lampshade that has any number of smudges and darkened regions that when cleared allow the light to shine through without any struggle to see or know it.  The sad thing to me is that tantra is so often sold as a sexual experience when in truth it is a path of liberation that only comes about when you are willing to remove all of the old lenses that have made it seem so raw and even hard sometimes.  At first tantra might lure us through lust, but it wins us through bliss.  Not just yearning, but a yearning that is like a river that flows into larger and larger tributaries and then opens out into a sea and then vast ocean.  It is hard to know sometimes where all of this will lead, but if you want to know where you are, observe your yearning and how it makes you feel.

It was once explained that tantric temples were themselves entirely empty and plain.  They might have had incredible depictions of sexual love on their outsides.  They might even have sensual sculptures as one enters.  The central areas, though, were plain and remarkably empty.  Perhaps that might serve as a clue to what lies ahead in this journey.

Part of the answer lies in death.  Death, you see, is the soul of surrender.  Implied in it is a form of surrender that is ultimate.  In dying, we give up all investment in what has come before in order to know what lies ahead.  By conquering our fear by simply allowing ourselves to allow what is inevitable to be, we die.  We die to what we conceived of or were.  And the truth is, we can die many many deaths in any day or week or year.  Most often, we cling to life over our fear of death.  When we embrace death, not actual physical death, but the soul of what death is, we are transformed.

In releasing the fear we have of our ultimate death you can also begin to free yourself from the fear of other forms of death, the ones that actually make the biggest difference in your life.  By learning to be fearless and to live in the present, you overcome death.  You do. It isn't that you become immortal, it isn't that you will continue to live in your body.  No.  Your body is designed to live a certain time and then return to the earth.  It serves you in the same way that a petal serves a flowering tree.  The petal will soon fall and become the earth even as the tree continues to live and grow ever larger.  Your soul is like this tree.  It lives on forever.  Countless lives, realities, worlds.  You may not see it or know it.  You may not have to, either.  That isn't the answer.  Knowing about a past life isn't as important as being able to surrender all that hung you up in that past life and that also hangs you up in this one.  As you remove these barriers to becoming, you also open new doors to perception, memory and awareness.  It is just that simple.  Your higher self knows the many lives you have lived, yes, for THAT is important to it.  What is important to you is that you get this one right.  In so doing, you do a service to all the selves that you are....that you have been and shall be, for even as you release fear of death, you also open up new possibilities in living.  You begin to realize that you are just one of many bodies, lives, experiences.  Suddenly the picture broadens because your perception also broadens.  Here, fear of death begins to wane.  We each cease the grasping to the material that held us and which kept us powerless through fear.

It is the same with tantra.  It is the same with a smile.  It is the same with food.  The same with music and a billion other things.  They all change.  You change.  It is marvelously simple and direct.  And the way to making this road smooth is to know that you are more than just this one self, or life.  As ego slips away, something more slips in. Your larger or expanded self has more and more room to simply be.  Before, it had been crowded out.  Now there is more room for it to express itself.

Then, the old sexual draw becomes something lighter and more wondrous than ever before.  We are each here, knitting heaven and earth together.  When you can face death head-on, those countless deaths to what you thought were ideas and investments that were so important but now no longer matter, you touch the essence of this path.  It is not for the feint of heart, but we were all born with radiant hearts and souls.  So how about we let in that light?

Healing Through The Quantum Field


Who knows the basic principles involved in bringing your life into full focus for effective manifesting of what will bring you fulfillment?  Who knows when these principles are put into place and when do they work?  Who knows the "cycle" of manifestation that actually tracks and moves an event from "inception" to full manifestation?  And who knows about the one key to bringing all of this to bear into your life in a way that is meaningful and effective?
I will give you a hint, but it wont be the kind of hint you would have ever expected.  It lies within both your psychology AND physiology.  Within the very atoms in your body, you have the ability to do things that some consider impossible.  The principles are simple, straightforward, and require a fundamental shift in your thinking, feeling, and being.  Can you achieve this?  It is up to you and you alone.  All of it is carried within your own cosmic vehicle.  The only thing that keeps you from tapping it in the way that you would like lies in your psyche.
This is one big reason for doing the "work" required to get yourself to a place where you can experience the fundamental shifts that can occur day to day and moment to moment.  The other clue or hint in all of this is that all of what lies ahead as challenges are all entirely self made.  Want to be a self made woman or man?  Well, here is your chance.

I am of course baiting you.  Normally, I do not use such catchy words and phrases, but in this case, each catch word or phrase is entirely on the mark, honest, and supported by direct experience in an environment that has shown over and over how you can unlock your potential and find greater fulfillment.  But to achieve this requires you to be different.  To feel different, to think different and to allow yourself the means to get out of your own way.
There are many ways to this goal.  There is not any one magical trick or technique because the truth is, like all techniques, they only work if you put belief behind them.  Do you remember the people who were healed by Jesus who exclaimed in amazement over the change that took place within themselves in a moment?  And do you remember what this man was said to have said?  he explained that it was their own faith, their belief, that healed them.  If you believe enough in it and if this method or belief system does not put up more roadblocks than it takes down, then you have a very good chance of it working. This is just how broad a thing this force is.  It literally underpins the movement of atoms and moves up through a little understood chain of effects or forces until it meets you squarely in the moment and place that YOU are in right now. As a result, this force may not always bring you lottery numbers, but will bring you the things that you most need for the NEXT STEP.  Without achieving those next steps, you wont ever get to the lottery or to the life your rational mind tells you is the one that you want.  And curiously, too, the moment you reach this place, it may also have the effect of erasing any concern for the old hopes that you had and MIGHT send you in a different yet much more fulfilling direction.  This is not to say that you WONT achieve your greatest dreams, only that in the process of making the changes to align you to your highest that some priorities may in fact change.  So be ready for that.  And be ready to be led.  By a higher power.  Your own inner power.  And this power links itself up in web-like fashion to the rest of the cosmos.  Truly.  And THAT dear readers, is a fine place to be!

THIS is what I am working on in my book, what one student said was the most critical to him when it comes to books about awakening:  keep the mumbo jumbo out and explain how all of this adheres to physical principles at work within the universe.  The miraculous itself will in some way adhere to physical laws in ways we may not entirely expect, see, or know. This is my task for my book Waking The Infinite.  It is my sincere hope to spell this out in ways that stray far from dogma, bias, and our need to sometimes mythologize a phenomenon that we truly don't always understand completely.  And yet, from time to time, we do have those individual who can bring the information forward in an ever-increasingly clear way so that it can be understood not through dogma or belief only, but through other channels of being.  These other channels will often be the lost or forgotten parts of you that is the missing link in bringing you a life that is full of fulfillment.....whatever that looks like to you.