Book Excerpt 3

This excerpt, from the book I am writing, is from the beginning of the work describing the events that led up to my awakening.  I had about a six month period of unusual events that took place prior to the more complete and continuous flow of energy through my system.  These events took place beginning in 2006.

Not long after this, in early September, I had an experience where I felt as though some kind of message was being sent to me, but I could not make out exactly what was being communicated. This then gave way later to what I can only describe as a feeling of melting into a state of love and compassion. I felt as though I was being softened, or melted.  Along with it came a lot of emotion.  I was  moved to tears by the breadth of this feeling.  I became aware of a man and woman standing beside me, in the room with me, but they were not visible.  I tried to figure out who they were, but their presence was so obvious, so certain, I was left wondering just what this was all about.  As I looked into the area where it felt like they were, I felt this unfolding sense of love and joy.  For as off my rocker as someone might have thought I was, this was one of the clearest and most simple and sublime feelings I had felt in a long time.  I wondered what this all meant. My mind sought to describe, or explain it all as my feeling self soaked it up.   It felt like something was giving way inside, as though some barrier was falling.  Given how my life had been, this was a welcomed change even though it was not something I could not explain or put into any context that sounded sensible in ordinary terms.

Over the next few months I began to notice some unusual things, all mostly occurring when I laid down to sleep.  I began to see lights projected onto the walls, lights that looked like phosphorescent glows, lights whose source I could not determine.  At one point I tried shining a light through a window, thinking that perhaps that it was some distant car light or street light.  I found that the light could not reach the places where I had seen the glowing lights.  A shelving unit stood in the way, and try as I might, nothing rational made any sense.   None of this caused me too much alarm in the sense that there wasn’t a feeling of anything being scary.  All of this seemed like odd phenomenon, for sure, but absent an explanation that made any sense, I went about life as usual.

Then, in mid October, as I worked in the studio, I felt a sudden growing sense inside of me that I was somehow on to something.  I couldn’t explain it any more than that, but it was a very clear feeling, and it was one that reminded me of other instances in the past with brushes with what some would term nonordinary reality.  It was as if some trap door had opened beneath me cognitively and a whole stream of information was rushing in, but at first I wasn’t even aware of just what this stream was.  I kept feeling as though something inside of me was trying to tell me something, and I began to feel the first stirrings of what I would later know as an Awakening. 

This feeling was like a sensual, even erotic passion flowing through my entire being.  It was simple and very straightforward.  It had an innocence and directness about it that was hard to ignore.  It felt sexual, but it had a unifying quality to it which gathered my focus and attention in a way that served to bring me to a place where I began to feel the energy turn into thoughts, an experience that was nearly identical to my memory of the vision.  The presence in the storm emeged first as a powerful energy, and out of this energy came thoughts, and from the thoughts came words.  It was very much like  how a flower blooms first from a bud into a fully formed flower.  It also very much felt as though my imagination was connecting or interfacing with some powerful energy that I sensed deep down was the truest thing, even if it didn’t originate in the mind but the feeling end of my being. I felt as though my mind or awareness was being informed or aligned to this energy, but it wasn’t so strong at this point that I considered it much beyond anything but my active imagination, or an inspired moment.  Because of my work as an artist, I am used to being in the grip of a new idea, and follow the stream of inspiration wherever it might lead.  Within this, I felt a stream of knowing that focused on nature.  It brought with it a knowing that nature has a flow of passionate feeling energy,with it came the utmost certainty that plants felt the yearning for embrace that humans feel, that this was the very pulse of all life, that this pulse of life is in ALL of nature.  This served to animate all of life in a yearning to create, to become.  This continued off an on throughout the day until I felt compelled to put it to word. Once I had completed my work for the day  I sat down to my computer tand wrote.  I had a stream of words that poured out of me so fast, it was hard later for me to believe that I even wrote what I did as fast as I did, all with no edits. For some reason I typed in the time and waited for the words to come.  I was shocked to find they came so quickly, and glanced at the computer clock to see how much time had transpired.  The piece as written is below:

The Yearning

The fields are wet from rain after the corn has been harvested.  Trees slowly turn from green to yellow, then gold.  The air cools and the mind thinks back on days when life was brimming over and the air was thick with the smell of pollen.  The same corn, now nothing but stubble, stood gold and green with tassels swaying with the breeze, releasing its sweet nutty smell.   To some it was just a delightful thing  that marks the passage of seasons.  To me, its more than that.  It speaks of life seeking its own, making itself over; a new generation.  A yearning, a leaning toward the wind in the hopes that Nature will take care of Nature, and carry its life giving sweetness on the air to waiting seeds, waiting for that breath of life, that germ of passion that makes the flowers grow, and makes life turn ‘round once more in the endless cycles this world is known for.

Seeds and plants and pollen, all lean into passion in ways we can scarcely imagine.  For this is the glue that keeps life going.   For them, it must be pleasurable, a passionate act of giving, a release, an immersion into a mystery far older than our own known seasons, our own individual lives and experiences.  For this is the gravity that pulls them, moves them to continue.  How can it be any other?  Why then would life seek to replace itself through an act as perfunctory as the dropping of an apple from a tree?  No, the drop of the apple is not perfunctory, or a second thought, but part of a yearning to become, a part of merging with some larger dance.  If trees can’t feel this, then why continue?  Why go on?  Perhaps in measures we can only guess or imagine, there is some divine spark of wantonness, of passion and pleasure bound up within their shells of being.  How can it be any other?  Perhaps there is a secret life these rooted beings feel that is beyond our ken, beyond our too quickened ways.  We have been “beyond” these beings for so long that they are now “just plants.”  And yet, they are more.  They will speak if only you will listen, and they yearn to tell of this ancient dance, this incredible desire and passion bound up within every cell of their being, so it pays if you will only listen.

I know that seeds seek and yearn and hope and dream; dreams perhaps that are so different I could never scarcely imagine or see them for what they are.  And yet, it seems inescapable that these creatures, ancient as all of life here, yearn for the touch of pollen upon their seed pods and enclosures, waiting patiently for the bee to carry their spawn beyond them into other regions where others await the touch of the life giving sparks that enliven and awaken a new generation.  Even the warming caress of sun and drenching rain is an act of divine providence, or giving in a wheel that knows no end and no beginning.  Quiet and still, these beings mask their greater inner lives.

So even we do these same things, even we make this dance of longing and yearning, so old and ancient that its root can escape us as we are caught up as if in some whirlwind, some deeper dance both of passion and letting go as we give ourselves to life’s great mystery, to its passionate embrace, and longing that brings us to this place, this wonder filled state where our minds and bodies and hearts are excited beyond the normal trebling that life gives or provides.

To touch my eye with your eye, to touch smile to smile, or hand to hand, we join in this ancient dance, this passionate longing for life seeking to complete itself, and in so doing, complete ourselves.  Round and round we turn, like stars upon an endless wheel that rolls and ducks and sways in the lost night of time.  We are carried one by the other, some by our imaginings, some by the reality, but always by the same glue that keeps life turning turning back and forward at once, calling to the roots of what it was to the heavens of what it will become.

So as our hands embrace, our smiles merge, as face becomes face, and eye becomes eye; as flesh becomes flesh, we excite in this dance, this subtle movement first tentative, then more certain as we are gathered by the compass of its certainty, of its need to move as it moves, which is ever forward into endless days and tomorrows.

We came here as boundless beings who knew neither limit nor touch, and followed down into narrow pathways into minds of earthlings, like spirits on a cosmic voyage, we entered the world of limit and pain and loneliness, only to be called back by forces that were brought to bear in this world, moving us through realms of limit and bounding to that greater reminder that this is a dance of mystery, passion, and love.  In this love we touch the infinite, wrapped in that which pulls and grabs us like hawk talons grasping talons in a spiral dance of yearning, moving us one step beyond this one, seeking the divine, seeking the infinite.  10/13/06   -  7:30-7:34 p.m.

After I had finally put this to word, had saved it on my computer, I turned to leave the studio.  On my way home, I suddenly found myself driving past the turn onto our road to the house.  Acting on sheer impulse, I kept driving into town, just a few more miles.  I didn’t know why, but it was a spur of the moment thing. I wound up in a convenience store. I got something to drink and was standing there wondering why I ended up in this place.  I turned to look at the magazine rack.  Everything on the display was full of monster trucks, guns, weight lifting magazines, and all sorts of things I wasn’t interested in. I kept looking, though, and at the end of the rack was a spinning card rack that obscured the rest of the magazines behind it.  I peered around this display and saw in the far corner, completely obscured from normal view, one magazine on science.  I reached for the magazine and began leafing through its pages. In its center, there was a story about plants and the seeds they produce.  There were photographs of very small seeds shot at high resolution, and they were amazing to look at.  The story was how seeds get carried around, how their shape helped them to be dispersed, and how their pollen was spread, how the pollen itself was shaped so that it clung to objects, how it would ride the air for miles in the hopes of drifting into the waiting funnel of a flower, fertilizing it. I saw the phrase pop out at me from the page:  “When it comes to seeds, its all about sex.”  My jaw dropped.  Only hours earlier I had been writing about all of what was being described on these pages. I tucked the magazine under my arm and headed home. This was what would become the first of countless synchronistic events that would become a fixture of this experience.

During this time I used a technique a friend passed on to me which involved utilizing the healing effects of our own energy field.  I found much to my surprise that in rather short order that someone was turning on a light very suddenly while I was meditating, something that always brought me out of the experience.  I learned that I was causing something to happen inside of me that would account for these bursts of light, something that my friend who gave me the technique described as riding a quantum wave.  He wrote back to me excited saying “This is the experience of the quantum wave, and when you become aware of this happening, your attention in the moment serves to break that wave!  It’s a very tricky thing, I will grant you, but if you can learn how to ride this wave, it can be very healing!”

Not long after this, I  began to see strange phosphorescent markings on the walls at night. I began also to hear distant voices talking or singing, and these would keep up until I mentioned something about it, which always caused the particular voice to go away, to be replaced by a different one just days later.  These voices were always in the background and I could never make out what was being said.  None of this worried me too much since nothing about the phenomenon would suggest anything negative.  When I was younger I had heard voices on a few occasions and had lived in a house that had had a ghost that made breathing noises (which WAS strange).  The voices I heard were mild in comparison, so nothing about this part of the experience stirred any deep anxiety or concern. 

My dreams during this time began to take on a depth and intensity that was noticeable.  In one dream I followed a mountain stream to its headwaters where I found a temple. I knew right away that the water  was my spirit-this is one of my oldest and most dependable symbols in dream.  As I stood in this water I could see its colors swirling around me, bearing streams of light around me and filling me with a feeling  that  felt familiar but I didn’t know from where. I wound up feeling, instead, very curious about where this was leading, and if this was something that was somehow imaginary.  Being an artist, I wasn’t a stranger to the imaginary, and while what I was going through was miles from anything I could have come up with normally, I went along with it without any fear or significant apprehension.  

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