A number of years ago I had a manuscript I was thrashing through that sought to convey my insights into the awakened state. I had worked on the project for years while in an awakening process. Friends kept telling me that the manuscript looked more like three books, and that, it turns out, was just the problem.
One morning while getting gas on the way to taking a friend to the airport for her return home she asked if I didn't have another book I was wanting to write. I explained that I didn't have another book and that I was focused on this one manuscript. My friend, though, is a gifted psychic, and she kept pushing the issue. I wasn't in any mood to be considering another book while trying to finish the first one.
"My guidance is rarely wrong, Parker, and it's saying you have a second book in the works." She was right, of course, but I hadn't mentioned this to anyone at that point. I confessed, "It's just an idea at this point.." to which she said, "That's the book! My guidance is saying that you should work on that one because that book will be more widely accepted, and will help you in getting the second book, which is your first, read by more people." It took time for me to consider this. I had been working for so long on this first book. I spent another year editing the first book, nearlt destroying its comprehensibility, and then just set it aside just to take a break from it.
In the mean time, I began teaching at a local university in my chosen field of art as thoughts of this second book began to percolate up to the surface. I considered that my friend Ali was right: this book had in a way already written itself in its most basic form. It had played a key role in my awakening process, and even more, I have become convinced since then that the events surrounding my initial awakening process took place in the way they did in order to open my eyes to the core content that such a book could convey.
To explain this better, it is easiest to describe what took place in those early days as I was trying to figure out what on earth had happened to me. This takes time, but it also helps to show how the things I would discover later were contained in materials that were once hidden from most everyone for about 1600 years.
Awakening came at a time when I felt as though I had reached an empasse in my life. I had a couple of overhanging inner issues that had me tied up in knots, unable to reach any point of resolution about them. These were issues related to my own spirituality and my own destiny here on earth. Without going into detail, let's just say that I felt stuck regarding a few key spiritual events in my life, one of which involved a past life that itself tellegraphed the notion that in a future life I would go on to do something that would somehow be part of a shift in human awareness, one which would be part of a global event involving the earth as a gestalt consciousness, and humans, in an effort to get to a better place. This prophecy was rooted in First Nations prophecies about a Day of Cleansing, since my memory from my past life was of a man who had a vision about this day in the future when Earth would be swept up in this spiritual and physical event.
From my place as my present self, now a white man, I felt like I was at odd ends with being able to understand what this series of past life memories meant for me today. These memories lay like a burning ember in my pocket and I was finally left feeling frustrated, angry, and guilt-ridden over not having been able to figure out what the implications of this revelation made when I was 18 years old were. I had resolved to reach out to a Native holy man, a pipe holder of the Oglalla Lakota, to see if he could offer any advice to me. I wrote five drafts of the same letter and wasn't able to get my story any more clearer to this man. Something was wrong, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Why the hesitancy? I remember staring at that final letter as it sat ready to be mailed, and me swearing to myself that I would just go ahead and mail it, resistance be damned! It was then that I did something that was akin to a random act, a cosmic coin-toss; I checked my email and then did another web search using a central theme of my past life memory, which was a vision from that other life (having to do with the Thunder Beings). I wound up getting a result I had never seen before, and found myself reading a transcript of a speech another Lakota man had made about his vision which he had had that was related to my own. Further, this man did something you hardly ever see, which was he included his phone number for anyone to call to discuss the issue with him at greater length.
Something had happened in those few minutes while reading his account: I felt comfortable with this person even though I was just reading his transcript. I realized that all those drafts hid some sense of ill-ease about following that path. It felt like the universe was offering up a solution in the elleventh hour. I jotted his number down and promised that I'd call him.
I did call the next morning. I had hoped to find someone who could offer me insight into this very unusual situation I was in, which had to do with how to unserstand a memory from a past life that was part of a vision quest. What actually happened was something quite different. As I spoke to Sydney Has No Horses, I found that a giant tightly wound spring began to unwind within me. I felt like I was confessing more than asking advice. No, this was all happening completely different from what I had expected it would. And that was exactly the point!
Sydney did offer some advice, but it wasn't the answer I thought I might get. He suggested that I needed to go search for another vision in order to get clarity. He offered to help, even. At that point, though, something quite miraculous was taking place within me: a weight that I had been carrying had been lifted off of me. I literally felt eighty pounds lighter. I was walking on clouds...and all of this was completely unexpected.
This, I knew, was the first in a long string of "releases" of emotional material. This first act of release dissolved a long-standing inner division within me. It led ti an experience where more innexplicable events began to take place, and each event, in turn, led me to awakening.
Three days after speaking to Sydney I experienced a state of nonduality. In a quiet moment I felt as though some presence was opening up to me, had suddenly become plain. It was quiet, soft, and beautiful. It melted me as it explained how I was part of everything. This was family, a kind of joke because thus family included everything: the rocks, trees, the air, and the subatomic particles that made all of this seem real. I was plunged into an awareness not of division or seperation, but of belonging, of a state if being that was fundamental to our existance here....and I had missed it all these years! I was 42 then, and all of this journey was leading up to this one simple realization. Something in me began to melt, to let go, to soften, which for me was a necessary precursor to the steps that would be presented to me as if by happy coincidence. All of this was taking place in just such a way that it would be seen as a necessary precursor that would be later described in books I would read that came from earliest Christianity.
About a week and a half later, a friend who I had been emailing offered me a meditation technique he had been using for years that would play a crucial role in my awakening. I hadn't mentioned my experience with Sydney nor the state I had felt rise up within me on that second week of August of 2006.
I began using this meditation method and found within just a few days that some interesting things were happening. I checked with my friend, Brett, about it asking, "Is this normal?" To which he exclaimed, "It's working really well for you, Parker! Keep going!" So I did. Within about ten days I had suddenly become suffused in a brilliant white light. It was an event that lasted only a few seconds because of how the phenomenon wouldn't last if I turned my rational left-brained processes on in order to try and examine it. This served each time to collapse a wave of phenomenon that could only take place when using a part of my awareness that didn't analyze but instead experienced directly, without the usual rational processes we have become so used to using.
The earth didn't shake, I didn't even feel any different after this brilliant flash. I had even considered that someone had played a trick on me and had flashed the lights on and off in the dark room I was in. The only problem with that was that the switch that had to be used to do that was an older style switch that made a loud click, which could be heard throughout the entire house. That hadn't happened. One aspect of this meditation was how aware I was of the smallest of sounds. I soon realized that whatever this was, its source wasn't with the lights being turned on. This was, instead, an inner light, and this was my own Road to Damascus moment. I didn't understand what the implications would be, but itcwas important that I perceive this energy as a white light (some who awaken can experience it along a spectrum, all related to sensing great energy).
After this took place, I entered into a five month period of high-strangeness. There were all kinds of strange things happening. I would see things and hear things that seemed real but weren't physical. Was I losing my mind? I kept quiet about what was happening. It occurred to me that I was losing my grip on a familiar part of my mind while beginning to grasp or encounter, through unusual means, another part of my mind and being altogether. I was curious, but cautious, too.
By October, I experienced what I now know is described as a "kundalini flash" where it felt as if all the lights within me came on. The flash is that the energy comes on but soon wanes afterward. In that state, which lasted about four hours, I felt how I was able to grasp information that was encoded into the substance of reality, which I experienced as a form of living information that I felt I could tap into and translate. It was like downloading information from a vast living consciousness that contained information about anything you could imagine. I sat down to write some of what had happened to me, albeit in allegorical form. I wrote about how all of life seeks completion through an act of union, of begetting, which is expressed sexually, but which has a nonphysical component that is a part of our deepest creative impulse: genesis of new life, new awareness, a greater becoming. I titled the piece "The Yearning" and went on to experience an amazing synchronicity just after writing it. It was the first of many.
I posted the writing a few days later to the online forum where Brett was a member, and he shot back a comment that would lead me further down the rabbit hole. He explained that a passage in my piece sounded just like a passage in the gospel of Thomas. I was completely unaware that such a book even existed. Brett explained that I could read it online and provided a link to it. In reading it, it made little sense to me. That is, until I found the passage to which he was referring, which, as it turned out, was an often-quoted passage that pointed directly to nonduality and awakening. This passage is found in saying 22 of the gospel in which it states, " When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and female one and the same...."
It was a shock. How had I managed to communicate these same concepts in my own words that had existed since earliest Christianity with the implication being that these were the private teachings of Jesus? The only problem was that this all took place within a state of mind that had flashed before me that day in October of 2006 and now I was back to my old "normal" consciousness. Little of the book made much sense to me, though. It was like someone had held out a breadcrumb and was teasing me with it so that I might go deeper down that rabbit hole. It also served to illustrate to me how incomprehensible teachings like this one were to ordinary minds. To understand it all, you had to attain a certain light within mind to grasp it. The attainment of this light, I would learn, was the power of a deeper knowing, or gnosis, that was beyond most people's grasp because of how most people use their minds. This light could not be attained by way of old methods of rational grasp, but through a poorly understood means native to each person. Less about grasping, it was a cessation of chasing after ideas in a rational way, and the beginning of learning how to activate latent powers of the mind which then opened the channels in consciousness to the part of us that exists beyond time and space. This, these so-called "Gnostics" who considered themselves Christians, referred to this part of us as Sophia, Pistis, an indwelling quality we all have for knowing and wisdom. With it, one no longer needed teachers to tell them what was or was not true, because this knowledge existed organically within themselves.
Five months later, after having been guided to activate my third eye in a short meditation, I felt a blast go up my spine. I wasn't in meditation at the time. I was awake and going about my day. No yoga postures, no tongue on the roof of my mouth, and no mantras. It felt serpentine, as if a snake was moving up through the trunk of my body. It felt like the muscles in my torso were being zapped by an energy that pulsed upwards, first one muscle group, then the opposite, causing a gentle contraction of my body muscles along with a softening of them, leading to the serpentine sensation. After this took place, everything changed. The lights were back on! My body was responding to the intense energy. My body began producing fluids in an effort to shield itself from what it took as an irritant. I had developed nausea and diahrea which came and went. Prostatic fluid flowed constantly. All aspects of my endocrine system appeared to be hightened. A new chemistry in my body took hold. My senses were more acute, I caught a knife that had slipped from my hand while chopping vegetables one day. My hand reached down below my hip to grasp the handle of the falling knife. I realized I had never been able to do that before. I had never been able to speed my consciousness up that fast so that physical action seemed to pass along slower than usual. Further, this wasn't a one-off. I exhibited greatly improved reflexes and psychic abilities.
I found that I could feel what other people felt. I could hear their thoughts at night, and I could see objects and scenes from a great distance. In one case, I had glimpsed inside the apartment of someone on the online forum I mentioned earlier and found that out of the 24 distinct impression I had, all but three were entirely on the mark. I was able to describe the hallway outside this person's apartment: which direction out of the elevator I had to go to get to the apartment, where the door was in the hallway, the sconces lining the sides of the walls, the type of colors in the carpet and the colors of the walls. I could see the entire apartment and was able to identify where the windows were, their size, and the fact that they were casement windows whose frames had been painted black. I saw two bedrooms, one was nearly empty while the other was in active use. This person had not at any time described her apartment (I checked) before. I knew she lived in an apartment. I knew she lived in Cannada near Toronto. I knew she had a cat, and she was a very private person. I had never been to Canada, had never discussed with her where she lived. Up until this time, she was just another person on a message board.
I only knew about my accuracy with these impressions because, like a scientist, I contacted this person and explained that I thought I was getting impressions of where this person lived. I asked this person if they would take part in an experiment to see, and after I listed my impressions, I was told that most of them were entirely on the mark. Yes on the sconces snd thir shape, color, and spacing. Yes on the hallway carpet, the lication of the apartment in the hallway and the layout of the apartment. How could this be?
The energy continued to build and I was aware of two pillars of energy in my body. On my right side, I felt an energy that was concrete, logical and linear. It lacked emotion. I thought of it as "The Man." On the other side of my body I felt an opposite energy. This was fluid, holistic, nonlinear, and had a great capacity for feeling. I called this "The Woman." After about two weeks following the "rise" of the energy, I could feel these two forces begin to merge along the center-line of my body and awareness. The experience was orgasmic, but it didn't arise physically. This was energetic. Out of their union came an energy which was a synthesis of these two. Lifted by bliss, this energy I called "The Child" because of how it arose out of the union of these two energies which were like man and woman. Through this union, incredible energy of mind and consciousness had flowered. Once the energy of this "child" was operative, I found much like the day in October had been, that I just knew things. I didn't know how I knew them, I just did. I performed a series of experiments when it was possible where I had received information that could be independently corroberated. When I was able to get material like that, nearly always what I had picked up on showed a high degree of accuracy. In each case the material I picked up on was about things I didn't know anything about. This pointed to this, for me at least, was not a flight of fancy or imagining.
When I saw how the energies were relating to each other, I realized that this pointed to a triadic quality in human consciousness. Was there a tradition that dealt with a trinity? Christianity did, but their Trinity was clearly an all-male arrangement, so Christianity was out. Were there other traditions that might explain what I was suddenly experiencing? At this time I recalled how I had that run-in with the gospel of Thomas the previous year and wondered if I could see it with new eyes?
I began reading Thomas and this time, it was like an entirely new book. Words lifted off the page, and I kept seeing passages that seemed to be describing just what I had been experiencing earlier. Was it coincidence?
I read on. I read the gospel of Philip and it was there that I found the smoking gun: "Those who say Mary begot with the Holy Spirit are in error. They do not know what they are saying. When has a woman ever begotten with a woman?" My jaw dropped to the floor: here in plain words was the knowledge that the Holy Ghost was a feminine principle that led to divine union. This was precisely what I had described in my journal how two energies birthed a third in a state of orgasmic ecstacy. A little while later it was described: a female virgin and the father had entered the bridal chamber and out of it had walked the Christ!
I began consuming these books, looking for more clues, to make sure that this wasn't somehow a mere coincidence. Instead of making this all look coincidental, it strengthened my notion that indeed, these Christians were on to something really big!
There was a problem, though. How was it that these books had been decried as heretical by the early church? How did something so insightful fall into disrepute and chased once and for all from the scene of the Christian tradition? That is itself a fascinating story, and this is where my book begins.
I had done precisely what this Jesus had commanded in these secret gospels: when you remove what divides you, you will know the kingdom. I had indeed removed a deep inner division that had been in me for almost 14 years. Sydney played a role in helping me to let go of it. After that, everything began to change. I experienced bewilderment just as described in Thomas, where I attained "The All" or awareness of the true order of the world and of consciousness.
I went on to realize later that what I had was clearly spelled out as kundalini. The knowledge of this latent potential was present in many cultures! This wasn't due to an article of faith, this was a reality that each person faces once they have reached the maturity spiritually to cope with its corrective force (which appears as destructive at first). There was a reason why these teachings were kept silent or hidden.
In every culture where this knowledge emerges there is always an effort to shield ordinary people from it. This is because without the proper preparation, early openings could lead to madness or great emotional instability. It takes time to ripen or mature to where the possibility of awakening becomes a necessity. This becomes part of a process of becoming, growing, seeking, and finding that which has always been there, existing as a latent force of mind that our mainstream cultural institutions seem to do everything they can to distract us from. Instead, the world stands inverted from what it could be. While rare, awakenings have been taking place with great frequency over the last two decades (really more like a 40 year period which has been prophecied). Now awakening is a necessity if we are to bring the change needed to the race as a whole.
The story of how Christianity was formed is an interesting one. There is what the Orthodox sect says it is, but then there is also what other sects had to say. There were numerous inputs into the tradition such that instead of Christianity being a story based on eye-witness testimony, we learn that ALL of the gospels were originally anonymous. Names were ascribed by the church later. The gospels emerge written in Greek, and not a single gospel has been found, no early ones, that were written in the language that Jesus spoke which was middle Aramaic. We do have writings before the gospels and those are the letters of Paul. But instead of making clear an orthodox view, Paul describes his experience in much more Gnostic-like terms. Further, after Valentinus seeks out a direct disciple of Paul after had had also had a vision of the risen Christ is told that Paul had a private teaching which he gave only to his closest followers and disciples. The Orthidx response is pithy: Valentinus must have lied. This, about a man who was revered as an ardent Christian who was in the running to be bishop of Rome at a time when the church was considered illegal by the Roman Empire, a position that really meant putting yourself on the line.
It's an interesting story, and unfortunately, there are big pieces missing because of what Orthodoxy did to itself in order to extract all knowledge of the gnosis beginning in great earnest around 400 A.D. it was then that the Nag Hammadi codices were buried in Egypt, a find that would take place just as humanity was nearing its awakening moment: the explosion of the first atomic bomb and a more sudden collective questioning abouf consciousness itself. The discovery was made in 1945 and included over fifty works from gospels to letters. It took the full library decades before it could be publisged in total. It wasn't until the mid-1970's that the full library was available all in one volume (most of the books comprising the NHL had been published individually as the translation work progressed). Perhaps because of this, and less financial backing than the Dead Sea Scrolls received, it has taken more time for the importance of the NHL to seep into popular culture. Certainly Chatholicism nor its descendant Protestantism have done little to take these books seriously, so it has been up to the more Gnostic-minded of us to discover the treasure that they represent.
The great lesson for me in all of this is that belief blinds us to truth and can do so for thousands of years when authority asserts itself in such a way that people are made to believe that a myth, improperly rooted in reality, is real. It is also a story about how easily we can be fooled to follow a knowing that is incomplete, an effective cosmic dead-end of sorts, a comfortable coral for sheep who must be herded from thought to thought. This has been how the church has reaped great wealth and left its followers believing that they are broken, redeemable only by following one concept of Jesus as Savior, instead of the "heresy" that stated that the Christ is in us all. It is there where you must seek. Even Paul said as much, and he wasn't a believer. He didn't get there by believing it. Afterall, he was persecuting Christians at the time. But like Paul, I was struck by a brilliant pure white light, afterwhich everything changed for me also.
The book will be an effort to bring the one lens missing in examining the Christ drama, which is awakening. It will help show that there have long been traditions all across the world who were describing the same phenomenon, it will put forth evidence for why belief is itself such a poor substitute for direct knowledge and experience and why it is that it is now time to unshakle ourselves from such a deceptive practice. Humanity and its continuation here on the Earth depends on it.
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