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Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Suffering Buddha

I am writing this book. It began as a journal to help me to make sense of events that were rapidly unfolding, taking on new dimension.  One page turned to twenty. Twenty turned to two hundred. Two hundred grew to six.  In the midst of all of this, its become  massive undertaking of knowing how to manage all the information in a way that is easy to digest.  Recently, I found myself changing the beginning of the book.  Not in a significant way, but in a way that I realized would bring some clarity to a work that I was feeling wasn't clear enough.  I realized that I had assumptions that weren't being communicated simply enough, a real problem for me sometimes. As I was doing this changing, some things emerged in a rather simple way that helped push the effort into a direction that made things seem very simple.  All of these shifts can bring about other interesting events that are entirely synchronistic. 

I wound up in the library. I was waiting for an appointment that was the next street over, and since I  had a few minutes, I walked the aisles, pulled to one direction.  Instead of assuming I knew what might be up, I dispelled any notion of what might be there for me, if anything.  I tried looking for books in case this was an encounter that was going to actually involve a book. After doing this, I just told myself to stop any expectation and let whatever happened happen. My hand went to one book and pulled it off the shelf.  Instead of looking through it, I just checked it out of the library and then quickly went to my meeting. 

That was yesterday.

Today I cracked the book open.  I looked at the introduction and saw that the author was a psychotherapist who was also into buddhism. The author was writing the book about desire and suffering.  Howe he dealt with the issue I found amazing.  He was writing about how Buddha was all about dealing with suffering, and how this is connected to desire.  He quoted Freud, explaining that he believed there was an "unbridgeable gap" in the self that keeps us going for the things that ultimately wind up making us suffer.  Desire naturally has a role to play.  What I found, though, was entirely astonishing to me.  There was seemingly no awareness of what it is that actually causes suffering. Desire was pointed to, yes, but it only went so far. It was as though the inquiry stopped short of actually dealing with WHY we suffer.  Of course Buddha said its expectation that causes suffering, so that makes sense, yes, but hold on a minute.  There is more.  Why aren't these great minds able to get down to the core of this?  What is this unbridgeable gap in their own perception and conceptulaizing abilities that is keeping them from getting into the real meat of all of this? 

I sat there, reading, amazed. It was as though some bomb had gone off inside.  These people really don't get it. They are talking all around it, yet aren't getting into it.  They talk of the gap, but they don't consider what it is that is causing this gap.  Freud didn't do it, and Buddha spoke only of expectation.  WHAT CAUSES expectation?  I knew the answer, and yet had this been hidden all this time before everyone?  I considered maybe we weren't ready yet.  Perhaps it was just a threshold we had not yet traversed. As I thought about all of this, the book I am writing came back into startling clarity.  The difficulty I had been having with it for a while now involves this very aspect of what causes suffering. It isn't desire, and it isn't expectation alone.  Expectation is only the outward appearance of the phenomenon of suffering. Something is deeper still that supports this expectation.  What causes the expectation to begin with?  Maybe this all sounds like a rhetorical argument, but really it isn't.  There is a pearl buried right in front of us. Its time we pluck it from the sand.  Perhaps we can begin to do something more material with it in our lives, and for those experiencing awakening, I think it offers a real benefit for a range of people.  Without going into the gory details, it has to do with being overly materialistic.  That is, our tendency to believe matter gives rise to consciousness instead of matter emerging FROM consciousness. When we can slip into the slipstream of this broader consciousness, what I call Waveform Awareness (which ties us neatly into the particle/wave duality in physics by the way), we stop thought and stop the usual forms of thinking and begin to be more like a sense organ in a still larger body.  We begin to plumb the infinite.  This is the essence of Awakening, of kundalini. From there comes all of the energy effects, the discomfort, the sense of blockage or bloating in the body which is really just the energy,  beginning to understand this "new" world of energy, and how we are part of it in a vast and wonderful way.

This helped me to understand that not everything IS obvious to people. In fact, people can suffer as a result of this lack of awareness....and in a sense, books will only go so far.  What we need are kind words, compassionate acts, and the knowing that we can all help in our own way in this field of understanding and life. We can help each other realize what we really already know.  We can do this because we are all part of the other. We are each dreaming different parts of a still larger dream....one part reminding the other part of what it already knows what it is.  

This has helped to move the work forward in a substantive way, and I hope that it resolves in the work in a way that will help us all be better able to conceive of this in a broader way....

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

A New Earth


As I drove from my home in the blue ridge mountains into an area called the Piedmont, I was given a view of just how incredible this world can be.  The rolling hills of the blue ridge gave way to a very different kind of landscape, one which I knew for years before moving back to the gentle mountains of my home.  As I drove on thoughts moved through me as my drive became like a moving meditation.  Powered by gnosis, the brilliance of awakening showered me with questions and considerations about the nature of the world, of reality, and how we are able to see what is around us.

The big question was over what world we live in.  Is it really as solid as it all seems, or is it like some suggest, an illusion?  A dream within the divine?  As I thought about the old notion of how we see and respond to things, I was reminded that some very much see the world in a very matter of fact way.  Like a large canvas, we have seen what others have seen for aeons.  In the picture I snapped as the day was waning over the first big ridge of the Blue Ridge on my return to them, there is not a person to be seen, or building.  Was this the same sight that the Shawnee and Cherokee saw hundreds of years ago?  Or, is it possible that while there is a place we all agree upon as being the same place, still resolves differently for those who are able to see into some new dimension?

The suggestion was nuanced.  It was so packed with everything that it felt like a giant closet of possibilities.  There is an earth, but she is evolving.  We are evolving and we pick up on new things as we do. And as we do, the earth literally does change, does offer up a new version of itself, realizing itself through each individual's eyes and hearts.  This place was a series of earths, all depending on who is doing the perceiving.  What I sensed rising deep within is that every moment is like a flower blooming.  As each petal is pushed back by a new one further inward, we see something new.  But we don't just see it, we feel it. The added dimension is in feeling, in consciousness itself.  This alters everything.  Dirty city streets can resolve into hidden paradises.  The same old mountain range becomes a new range never seen before.  The dimension of knowing, feeling, seeing, and being, all merge in that moment to create a new synthesis and as that happens, it feeds back into us with wonder, joy, and awe.

I wrote recently about an experience I had early on before I had my first full-fledged awakening in which I felt myself drawn into the world of plant life.  All of life changed in that moment.  Before, I had seen the world in a certain way, almost like an outsider, not fully connected.  With this new experience, everything did change for me as I felt the pulse of life all around me locally and remotely. While I had had the notion that plants were intelligent creatures, much more aware than we gave them credit for, I hadn't felt it.  It was an experience in what I can only call direct cognition.  There was no way my senses could apprehend all of this, but my soul could.  This was the new dimension of awareness, and it changed how I saw all of life forever.  Suddenly the world was more than just a hive of activity.  It had a soul, it had a presence, it had a life beyond what most presume to think they know.  I stood in my back yard then, kids over for a birthday sleep-over, and we burned a bunch of sticks for a nice bon fire  As I watched the flames lick up into the sky it felt as though some invisible line had crossed overhead in the heavens.  I knew I had changed irrevocably.  It was at once a little sad and a little scary.  What on earth was I embarking?  it felt undeniable, impossible to change.  I was on this new ride and there was no changing it!  The heavens had clicked off in some new direction for me.  A new timeline, a new probability was forged in that moment.  Since then, life has been nothing but a series of changes and challenges and hurdles.  In her slumber, the earth awakens as if on cue as do we all.

As I drove up that long mountain from the Piedmont back into the Blue Ridge mountains, it became ever clearer that the world indeed resolves into countless earths, a collective earth, the earth as she is, and the earth as we all participate in.  All versions were valid.  One layer was the same earth, other layers were also the same earth, but different versions or aspects of material just waiting to be picked up on.  It was possible, they said, to see the world anew and to be utterly changed by it.  We are all doing this.  We are coming back to the earth as a very vital part of our lives, and this is a good shift to have happen in this day and age.  Its as if the old pagans are coming back for another round of worship, and this time its with the stamp of an expanding knowledge that includes quantum physics, string and brane theory.  The world becomes so many things because its limitless.  Why, it asked, would I consider that we were limitless while the earth remained the same for all?  That's because it too is limitless and just like us, is also evolving in its own way.  For a brilliant moment I held all of this inside of me and it felt so full, so hopeful and perfect, that I felt like I had seen a view no one else had before. Within each of us is that bud that is waiting to open up.  As we open, so does the earth.  Yes, we see more of what was always there, but in seeing it, something happens.  Something is changed.  There is a stamp made upon the species, upon the earth.  Earth is reminded of who she is in fullness when we can begin to see it and feel it.  We are reminded of what we are when her life force fills us as our first mother, and cradle of life here on this blue orb spinning through space.

This felt like a real expansion of something, and while I do poorly to explain precisely what happened and the amazing richness of it (none of this was an academic mental exercise as I was experiencing it as it all unfolded much like some kind of real world multimedia presentation that was also a classroom exercise in learning about reality and the world around me), what happened was so significant in its own simple but complex way that it resulted in a kind of snapping back of consciousness.  I actually felt a kind of fear or shadow following the next day.  Once I realized this was some kind of egoic compensation, I relaxed and everything normalized.  I wondered if others do this and I thought surely they must. It made sense to go easy on ourselves, to simply watch as all this happens, note, but not get too caught up in it.  Its almost like when one old layer is removed, we tend to pull out of in a reflexive way.  We are funny creatures....on our way to the promised realm.

The world can resolve into a wonderful display.  The world, changing and shifting inside of us is the world that is shifting outside of us.  How beautiful is that?  And coming over the mountains I saw this vast expanse of forest that went on for miles and slowed the car down long enough to snap the picture above.

I hope that as you notice the world changing right in front of you, you can feel into this and sense the great possibility on offer in such moments like these.  Every moment seems packed with them, like seed pods waiting to burst and become.

Nemasté

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Everything Is Energy

(Note:  I am still working on this piece---there are some structural issues that will be dealt with soon enough, so apologies in advance....)


Everything you see around you is made up of energy.  Physical matter is energy.  Light is energy, and so is the rest of the EMS (Electromagnetic Spectrum) which includes things like radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, gamma rays, etc.).  Your thoughts are energy, and your consciousness is a part of this whole universe of energy.

When you give someone a smile, you are actually creating a transfer of energy.  When you talk, its a transfer. When you pay someone a compliment, that is a transfer. When you do work and want to have that work turned into something that you can use to trade other things with, that too is a transfer. All work is based on a transfer.  The way we notice this transfer is through money most often.  We have coins and bills that our governments issue that serve as the symbol for work done.  Its a system. Within this system are banks, and they take money and invest it so they can create more energy from your own energy.  They pay you interest while they promise to keep your energy safe.  When you do what they do, you are taking out a loan and you pay THEM interest.  More often than not, the system is slanted towards the banks.  They aren't in the business of making a small amount of money, they like to make as much as they can get.  This has had some pretty ridiculous consequences due to human greed, which is pretty common a thing in the world.

A long time ago a man became incensed at what was happening at the Jewish temple in regards to the bankers, who were called money changers at the time.  These money changers had been allowed into the temple in order that they could do trade with the people who came to worship and pay their tithes, also called tribute back in the day.  Now in the traditional story as told to modern day Christians, its made out that the man who was so incensed over this, named Jesus, was upset over the blasphemy of doing trade in the temple. It was a way of degrading the sacredness of the temple. I am here to tell you that what Jesus was upset about was in truth a little different, and it was probably enough to get him killed.  I have written about this before, so bear with me as this goes a little deeper than just a historical example.

Jesus was upset because what was happening at that time was that the money changers were doing something in the temple that was unfair to the common people.  The money changers discovered that if they hoarded the money that they were empowered by the temple bureaucracy (Pharisees), it would mean more for them in the exchange.  You see, the Jews did not use just ANY money to pay their tithes.  They believed that money from Rome was essentially pagan money, with a pagan image on its front.  It might have been a  pagan leader or some god or goddess.  As a result of this, Jews had a coin minted called the half shekel.  You may have heard of the shekel before, used to speak colloquially as money.  Well, they Jews used the half shekel for this way of paying tribute. It was a silver coin, and farmers would come into town to pay tribute and would trade something for this coin.  It was some form of real object that they could carry into the city such as a goat, or baskets of grain. They would give the grain or goat to the money changers and they would get coin in exchange. The problem was that since the money changer were hoarding the money, it meant that it was more rare and anything that is rare winds up costing more money. This all meant that people were paying more energy into the system than what they were used to getting out.  This became a form of tax upon the people.  One year a farmer might pay a goat for the shekel, but under the hoarding scheme, they had to pay two goats.  It was unfair, and what Jesus was doing was pulling back the curtain on some rather shady dealing in the church.  While it was a kind of blasphemy, it was simply unfair. 

Money has been the source of manipulation for a very long time.  In our own country we didn't have a cohesive form of exchange until Lincoln instituted a government currency in order to pay war debt. For Lincoln it was a boon because it meant he could print his own money out of thin air. Before that time, there were numerous currencies issued by numerous banks all across the union.  What Lincoln did was to put to use a provision in the Constitution that said the Treasury can do this. He decided to do this after going to a bank in New York to ask for a loan.  When the loan was with some ridiculous amount of interest (about 30%), Lincoln said thank you no and went home, unsure what path to take.  One of his advisers explained what the Constitution said and he took the bold move out of necessity and no one got upset (he thought the people would get upset). His scheme allowed him to not only pay for the war, but allowed him to do so without debt attached to that money.  This was a pretty fair form of exchange.  As long as you do not flood the market with too many dollars, you keep the value of the money at a decent level.  Once the Federal Reserve got in the act of making our money, they stood to make huge sums of money, all in as opaque a fashion as one could imagine.  It also spawned the growth of other central banks all over the world.  Could these banks all be owned by a select elite few?  Is our own Fed tied to the IMF?  Certainly the IMF is deeply connected to the U.S. system, and these are all just banks.  People want to give them a more lofty designation, but this has all been a scheme to make them look governmental.  They aren't.  They are private banks with very private agendas, with entire governments on the line which are beholden to them.  Considering how energy works, do you think this is a good way to run an economy?  In the words of  Bruce Hornsby, There's Going To Be Some Changes Made....

What follows is the last speech a British politician Christopher Story gave before the House of Lords before what some have suggested is a highly curious death.   There is some problems concerning banking, the U.S., the E.U. and Britain along with Ireland and Scotland.  When viewed in relationship with the videos that follow of Lord Blackheath, there are some interesting lines that appear to connect back to the Federal Reserve, Chinese gold, and general banking corruption on the part of our own Federal Reserve, which many have suggested is a bank who has ties to other banks throughout the world, most notably those banks that operate like the Fed, which are banks that loan money to corporations and the government.  They effectively create the money out of thin air.  When you consider that for the last few years Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas in the House of Representatives has been pushing a bill that has been gaining great popularity in both houses of Congress to audit the Federal Reserve (forcing it to open its books for the FIRST time EVER in its 100 year history), and the moves that the Fed has been making lately in trying to make its image look better (there has been unprecedented outreach to the likes of 60 Minutes which was given the opportunity the last few years to do an "expose" of the Fed ---which was anything but) by perhaps inoculating itself some in the minds of the public from even having such a bill come through the Congress for such a move of transparency.  With so little known, but so much suspected about what these banks have been up to (such as funding wars on the opposite side from the U.S., funding the Hitler regime (see Prescott Bush and his involvement in banking and also overthrow of the U.S. through a very real military coupe here), you would think some transparency would be good. Now, on the heels of a very hushed up story about billions in U.S. bonds being sold, a story you will get at the end, the following videos begins to suggest that all of this could be part of a global empire that has reached a point of near-collapse if they are found out.  The hope, I suspect, is that the U.S. dollar can be crashed (its close to that already) and then the banks can step in and suggest an alternative to our bad currency, which will result in what happened in Europe, which was a common currency. Bear in mind what Story has to say and then consider that there are people who are wanting to get their hands clean of a whole bunch of money, which was very likely drug or black money, all made in illegal ways which would not benefit the company (as Blackheath calls them) were the truth of it to get out. This is of course conjecture, since the deeper truth has not yet been found out, but parts of this global money scheme is beginning to show through and while its big and while none of it is being reported in the mainstream press (you should not be surprised since media is corporate owned and also serves similar interests to it even if the very banks do not own a stake, the same group of elites do and they are all in it with a common interest, and birds of a feather fly together....)


Now bearing in mind what Christopher Story said in this, his last speech, consider what Blackheath has to say about what he has uncovered.....


It gets even more amazing, perhaps unbelievable when Blackheath drops yet another bombshell on the House of Lords in this speech, from November of 2010.  Remember the issue with the amount of gold owned because it will come up in the story as told by Benjamin Fulford to David Wilcock. 



 Now at this point you might be wondering what this has to do with energy.  With money being a simple exchange of energy, and with the manipulation of this energy happening whereby the deeds of a few result in bubble economies (with the banks KNOWING when the bubbles will come and thus can insulate themselves from losses!) then you can perhaps begin to realize that as the currency in your country slowly goes downhill over generations, you might realize that this "inflation" is actually in truth deflation.  Its a deflation of the value of the currency.  YOU do not have any control over this.  This is a huge power play by people at the top, and is one reason why we need to become more proactive in making sure that our monetary systems stay OUT of the hands of those huge banks made to look like government institutions.  These are, after all, the money changers reincarnated.  Okay.  So back to the meat of this pretty fresh story unfolding before our eyes.....

The next link is to an interview with Benjamin Fulford who used to write for Forbes and who quit due to growing censorship.  Fulford wrote financial material that put him in constant contact with heads of corporations and heads of state.  In the wake of this interview and other stories of the exact same seizure of bonds on the Italian border, there came a wave of top level bankers' resignations (here in the U.S.!) as well as here and here (these are all VERY current AND each story cites "turmoil" or some other "row" as being the reason!).  This all gets very interesting, and begins to lend credence to the thesis presented by Fulford in the form of his own experience with these elite families in Asia, that this comes down to a very large banking cartel who has controlled vast amounts of wealth....just as many of the conspiracy "theorists" have said all along, and who have been exerting huge control over every aspect of life.  Its a long interview, but it serves an interesting purpose which is to provide a historical backdrop to the movement of wealth over a long time span as well as providing some credence to what Blackheath says above regarding the amount of gold owned as being more than what was previously reported.  Myself, its not so difficult to imagine that the amount of gold mined would be kept entirely secret.  After all, didn't the biggest diamond mining operation in the world secretly keep diamond production DOWN so that it could create the illusion of scarcity for their own benefit? What would happen if we were to find out that gold was more plentiful?  It could be used to back currency more easily, doing away with the notion by some in the U.S. that we could not use gold to back money because there isn't enough of it. Realize, also, as an aside, that when Kennedy ordered  silver certificates to be printed, he was assassinated two day later.  Lincoln who created his OWN currency instead of a bank controlled currency also wound up killed.  By removing the gold standard, it also frees up a bank to print as much as it deems appropriate since it is no longer pegged to a valuable metal.

Here is the Fulford interview

Now after all of this, what do you think?  Something is unraveling in high places, and with a recent admission by a member of a European Illuminati group that yes, the Illuminati do indeed exist, and yes, they ARE secretive and DO control vast sums of wealth for power and control, there is a growing sense that the Illuminati has gotten far from its roots as those who help to illuminate the world.  Instead, it has grown into a power structure hungry for control.  Is it possible that those in high places are beginning to wake up some?  Time will tell, but I am hopeful that all of this leads to the outcome I thought would come years ago when I began first seeing the outlines of this system coming into view.....which is that the global awakening would spread even to those places where power is wielded quietly and even secretly.  So remembering the song by Bruce Hornsby, maybe there will be some Changes Made....in us and the rest of the world.


I have great hope that goodness will prevail.  But to do this, we must take our power back!  Money should be in the hands of the treasury again and regulated very carefully to keep anyone from the banks out of the process.  It must be entirely transparent since the light of day keeps everyone honest.  Right now the system is anything BUT that. The answer is transparency, not opacity.  In the U.S., this is entirely opaque.  The Fed makes money on printing money by essentially generating debt to which the U.S. is answerable.  This helps the Fed tremendously, which is nothing more than a private bank very VERY private dealings and business.  I will say clearly that any time ANYTHING is allowed to run in secret, very bad things result. Lawlessness, graft, corruption, and worse.   We tell ourselves that this doesn't happen in OUR government, but that's pretty naive and ridiculous even on its face.  IN the wake of the Second World War we brought over Nazi scientists, not just the rocket scientists, but also the Nazi doctors who were engaged in mind control experiments.  This was all done in secret.  Its umbrella name was MK Ultra.  You can look it up.  It was one of the worst chapters in American secrecy to date.  But secrets protect themselves, and our government has kept things hush hush by invoking the State Secrets Act, something that was itself born out of an outright fraud since what was being invoked was to protect wrong doing on the part of the government having to do with the military at the time.  What I am saying is that we have plenty of proof of what secret programs and secret meetings have done to democracy.  This is the money of the American People, and it affects what we can buy or afford when debt goes too high.  We spend too much, and we leave a terrible debt hanging around our necks.  By allowing secrecy to fall, we can keep people accountable.  I for one do not believe that a country survives on secrecy.  Neither did, apparently John Kennedy, as he spoke so presciently in this address:

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Time for some changes to be made.

This is where you can learn more about the effort to pass the Bill to audit the Fed.




In the midst of the coldest of winter, with snow just a week ago blanketing everything, the earth turns ever closer towards the sun in the promise of warmer days.  This is the time for giving life a running start, a foothold for the next generation.  One of the first experiences that I had with kundalini was a feeling like I was being taken into the secret lives of plants.  I wrote a piece that poured out of me incredibly fast, a mere four minutes, that described how all of life had within it this yearning to become, that the same force that animates us and moves us in creative circles isn't just something that humans feel but that all of life feels.  I had no impirical evidence for why this is so, I only had what the Greeks called Gnosis, or knowing.  I KNEW it. I knew this because I felt it incontrovertibly. There was simply no question to my being that the stuff of the universe had a magnetic or gravitational quality to it, and it was this force that caused the seasons to roll 'round and life force to move in  cyclical fashion.

Many years later, while undergoing a rather hard time in the midst of what kundalini was churning up that I went out into nature and brushed my fingers across the pollen stems of a chestnut tree and felt a burst of bliss explode through my body.  Was I psyching myself out, or was I feeling into what was present in the tree as it created within its body the substance that would be carried by wind and by bees to the next tree, fertlizing the other and making for new life.  This was a revelation reborn in the moment.  Of course this was so, I realized, for I had been shown it a few years previous in my first experience with kundalini.  Plants yearn as do we, feeling the force of life in them as it wakes up in the seed, as it pulses in the pollen and seed pods of plants. This was the stuff that made life happen.  It was a fundamental principle of all life.  It was born from the very foundation of matter.  This force was in every atom, every particle that IS.  As more and more particles unite to form ever more complex structures, the intelligence of the universal being makes itself increasingly more manifest in the present. This continues in still larger more complex forms from cells to animals, plants, communities, nations, worlds and the cosmos.....whether sentient or non-sentient.  It was an underlying principle.




This year, I chose to buy heirloom seeds as I have been doing in years past. I hear a lot of concern about what technology is doing with GMO's and how these are a threat to the natural order built upon millions of years of progress. I suppose I can do my part in keeping these older non-hybrid life forms alive by planting more of them.  From them, I will be able to harvest seeds that I can keep for the next year and the life that will spring from them will be the same as what I had the previous year, which is a wonderful continuity to experience.  I encourage anyone who is concerned about how our reach technologically is going beyond our ability to grasp, to do the small things that can keep the culture of a sane world alive. The makers of Wild Turkey whiskey, for example, very recently explained that they will use no GMO corn.  The explained that much of their whiskey must age for ten to fifteen years. They said that if a problem with a strain of corn that they may have been using crops up in the mist of their business, it could spell the end of their business just for the fact that the corn being used in their product today wont see the market for another fifteen years.  If there is a problem with it, they might not know it until all their inventory is affected, and this, they explained, was too much of a risk for them to take.  In the same way, we all might not know the larger risks involved in introducing these new life forms to the planet.  At the bottom of this lies the need to control the genes contained in a given plant.  These plants have a patent which also means that they can be controlled and owned by the company producing them.  It also means that the seeds you get form such a plant may not "run true" and may result in still wider consequences when crossed with other varieties near the plot of corn or soybeans. 
So just a few days ago I got a mixture of seed starter material, a mixture of sphagnum peat moss and some nutrients that will hold water while the seeds germinate and give them a rich bed for starting. 

There are a number of tomato varieties that I am trying, one of which is considered near extinction.   It looks like a large red pepper, and is said to have been a favorite in gardens a hundred years ago.  Perhaps since it wasn't a hybrid, it had little commercial appeal for companies that wanted a lock on seed stocks.  The great thing is that I can harvest a hundred or a thousand times the number of seeds from this variety to give to friends who might be interested in trying this nearly extinct variety.  I am also trying two itallian varieties. One, which comes from Rome, looks amazing, and sold out the last time I had a garden.  I was able to get a packet this year by ordering early.  I put my order in just after Christmas and I am excited to see the results. I also have one variety that looks like it comes from the old world.  I have not seen one quite like it before.  It grows quite large and is said to have great flavor.  All of this will be a gift from the earth and a partnership between my effort and what the sun, soil, and rain will provide.

There was a time when we spent less money and had a greater ability to save and set more resources aside.  In our present economy, everything is provided for us.  We do less work at home but have to work more in the office in order to pay for all the things we have.  Getting back to the earth is a simple way of building riches for me. It also has another consequence, which is that as I work close to the earth, I can feel the pulse of life all around me.  It helps me keep in touch with that first experience that kundalini brought to me.  And as I have my first bite into that much anticipated ripe tomato, the taste will be tangy and sweet as I consider how life seeks to make more of itself in an enterprise that is entirely creative.  This is a wonderful way to marry grounding with the cosmic. 

As the days get longer, and the winds bring bitter cold, I know that behind this wind is the changing of the seasons, and as the winds of March and April enter our world here in Virginia, warmer days are ahead as my heirloom peas make the first entry into the garden because of how they can tolerate cooler weather, followed by lettuce, onion, then squash, eggplant, then corn and beans and tomatoes....and as I consider what to grow I see how certain foods were esteemed above others for their practical use.  Beans and peas could be dried and kept without refrigeration both for seed stock as well as food for the following year.  What couldn't be dried was canned.  While I don't like canning all that much, I do see how certain things do well canned.  Some things need to be eaten fresh.  Tomatoes do well fresh or canned. Salsa, spaghetti sauce, as well as stewed tomatoes for any number of stews and red sauces. All of this, a gift from the force that brings new life to us on a moment by moment basis and renders those who can heed its force, wonder-filled.

I hope you can partake in the seasonal turnings of earth's wheel of life, even if it means planting a few choice vegetables in a planter for the deck or patio.  Tomatoes do well in planters, and squash can grow in their viney way all over the place if you have the room for them.  Zuchini can be prolific and well worth the investment in time and effort. In the link below is the company I use for heirloom seeds.  They are family owned and grow only natural heirloom varieties.  They have expanded their seed stocks to plants from other countries such as Asia for those with a taste for something different. 

Baker Creek Seeds

There are other companies that deal in seed stocks of heirloom varieties.  There are clubs and loose confederations of seed swappers that are done less for profit than to keep old seed varieties alive. Seed Savers is one such group.  You can also use a web search to find still others.  If interested in those varieties that will produce the same progeny s what you planted, you will want to look for non-hybrid, non GMO varieties.  These often get the blanket term "heirloom" although there are some hybrids that are considered heirlooms because of how long they have been used.  Hybrids are just a cross of two different varieties that will create a single generation effect.  In the case of a tomato from Burpee, for example, you might get a beefsteak hybrid that grows nice big fruit.  You save the seeds and plant them the following year only to have small plants that make cherry tomatoes!  These are perfectly good to eat, but is an example of how in order to get the qualities of both plants, you have to cross the varieties over decades in order to get a stable "true" stock that will continue to make the same type of plant and fruit emerge in your garden.  GMO's however result from a gene being inserted into the plant for a given effect.  The gene could be from a goat, or any number of life forms, and for who knows what effect.

Keeping it close to the earth with what the wisdom of millions of years has brought us strikes me as a very good way of going forward!  Here is to a great spring!  Its just around the corner for those of us in the northern hemisphere.

Friday, February 24, 2012

You Are Magic

I promise that ever single word of this is true, and I swear that if you take this to heart long enough, you will see real change.  Its magic.

The universe responds to magic.  People respond to magic.  Especially small children, because they ARE magic.  They have this moving through their veins and haven't yet shut it down.  Its one reason why people look back on their childhood as a magical time....because it was.  And it can be so again.  Its just a matter of knowing how to feel, what to let go of.


What Your Magic Is

Inside of you is a wellspring of living energy.  The sneaky part is that its you, and its  the universe.  This can trip people up, people like me who want to understand everything in a rational way, but its not something you can rationalize.  So used to individuality and ego, we want to be able to divide the universe and us into neat boxes.  The problem with that is that its a form of separation, and separation kills magic.....until you can learn how to solve that sense of separation in you.  The reason for this is because the universe is designed to work best when things are connected.  Once you see behind the curtain of the universe, you not just know the connectedness, of WHAT is connecting everything, you FEEL it.  And in feeling it, you ARE it.  There is a very special dynamic that takes place between your individual self and your magical self.  When the individual is in the "flow" of the magical self, really amazing things can happen.  The trick, though, is all in feeling.

Your magic is a feeling.  Its such a simple and basic force, its not even thought.  Not a form of thought that you are used to experiencing.  Its a motivating force in all truth.  It is love, it is passion.  It makes events happen, and it makes children smile and people crowd around you. It can also make people crane their necks as they walk past.  We are in fact designed to recognize it, even if we don't know what it is we are "looking" at.  Our broader awareness, our very own magical selves can pick it up.  Sometimes from miles away. Some people have had this happen over thousands of miles.  Magic has no mass, so according to the laws of physics and currently understood, can travel as fast, perhaps faster than the speed of light (which makes it a time traveller, which is kind of cool, and THAT is another story better saved for later!).  Your enthusiasm, your openness, your passion, is all part of this magic.
When you can align your feelings with your beliefs, you can actually cause events to happen that are entirely amazing.  Magical even.

People who have been gifted with an Awakening have this energy unlocked in them, and it causes all kinds of interesting things to happen. I think its time that we understood all of this a little better.  I don't think I am the first person by any means to talk about this.  We have had self-help gurus talking about how we can impact reality with our thoughts.  Shakti Gawain, a student of Jane Roberts' work concerning how one creates reality, wrote a book called Creative Visualization.  Her book taught people practical methods for imagining an outcome they wanted to have happen. They were very good for how visual they were because when you can visualize something, you can better believe that it could happen. This is, in the words of all the self help gurus, an important step in helping your own inner magic move the mountain for you. While I have used Gawain's techniques in the past, I can safely say that the method I emplyed wasn't a method anyone created, and in each case my magic worked perfectly and brought me all of the things I wished for.  I wished for acceptance to the undergraduate and graduate school of my choice.  In each case, I wound up only applying to only one school and got into both.  Now mind you, I didn't have stellar grades.  I was not bolstered by the fact that I had a nearly perfect gpa. I didn't.  Not at all. The wish allowed me to buy a house instead of rent, and it also allowed me to support my new family.  All of these were part of my wishes, and it was as simple as thinking about how much I wanted these things to happen. Once I wished, I simply didn't think about tit all that much.  I didn't obsess over it.  Now that I have had an awakening, I have these really wild coincidences, what Jung called "synchronicity" which goes beyond being JUST coincidence.  Some of my events, which are outlined in the book I am working on, seem to suggest a kind of dialog between the infinite self and the individual self.  Some of these events are the result of inner guidance, while some are the result of my own thoughts. I used to read the self help gurus who said the world is a mirror of my thoughts, but for some reason, I just wasn't seeing the connection.  Now I do because the events that happen are so frequent that I can actually track HOW the events change based on where I am in my life. As I begin to deal with old unresolved anxieties or fears that hold me back, I see that the shape and character of these events change.  So as they say, the universe does mirror us.  Certainly I can see that.  But the thing I want to underline is that its all magic.

You Are Now Free To Practice Magic (promise!)

This is a special place in time.  A few hundred years ago, you could be killed or hanged by the tribunal for practicing magic.  Now, though, its not just allowed, but encouraged.  The simple rule to all of this is that while you can certainly use your magic for things that are not in the highest, the far more productive approach for your own soul is to always seek what is in your highest.  We may not always know what that highest is in the moment, but life is a process, not a sudden arrival.  Be easy on yourself and know that things will continue to brighten layer by layer.  That we are freer than we ever were to approach these things without the fear and demonizing that has gone on in the past by religions that saw magic as a threat to their own power, we can actually reclaim our spiritual birthright.  By falling for the negative, you are simply falling for the intended purpose that such demonizing sows in the mind which is doubt, uncertainty, and fear.  By keeping people in this mode, you keep them from feeling the brighter side of magic, and the truth is that for every light, there is a shadow. It not something that is divided out but is rather something that is part of the other.  Somewhere we sought to divide these things out and it led to a fundamental misunderstanding of how reality works.  Divided, it made for a great way to control people and control power.  By healing this little tear in the fabric of our collective, we can bring shadow and light back together, which is the true reality.  The point in all of this is not to marinate in the shadow, but to keep it close so it can be transmuted.  If you deny something, it drops deep into your innner self and it emerges, always, as dysfunction.  It will arise as an unhealthy fascination with shadow.  By bringing shadow into the light of day, we can actually heal it.  Most of shadow is fear anyway, so being a magical being, that shouldn't be terribly hard.

You are magic.  Remember this.  Just HOW you feel can steer the universe in interesting ways.  It will follow you word for word, belief by belief.....  You can use this feeling inside of you for great work.  It can bring you things you could never have advertised for and gotten a better result (I promise).  The more you can surround yourself with this very infectious and positive energy, the more the world will form itself around your own special magical self.  When you wish for what you want, make sure that you feel how you feel.  When you wish, does that feeling you have feel real clear or do you have some moemntary hesitation?  Do you feel guilty for wishing for something, even if its something you KNOW you need, but feel guilty for asking?  IN cases like this, you will need to clear up that feeling.  Its a roadblock, and it will confuse the energy going out into the universe....well...it wont confuse it...but it will SEEM like its confused.  This approach requires that you be clear about how you feel.  Realize also that if you have some unresolved issue within that you don't know about, it could easily be mirrored in the thing that gets manifested.  Do you remember the stories about the leprechauns or the elves that when caught, had to give you a wish?  And in every instance, while the wish was granted, there was always some unintended consequence attached?  I suspect lurking in those stories is this idea that we DO have stuff inside of us that can serve to bring such unintended elements in a wish, and part of that are those issues within you that you may not even be aware of.  So the great thing in all of this is that IF that happens, pay attention to those troublesome elements.  Note them and realize that they reflect something inside of you.  You might wish for a ton of gold and get it, but you might also wind up having a horde of mongolians on your tail, seeking to steal it.....!

But you are magic, and as you utilize this very magical property within you, the ability to dream and wish big and have it come to pass, you can begin to see just how remarkable all of this stuff is (pssst:  one little catch; you have to believe its possible....that is the price of admission with this approach!).  You can utilize the techniques that all the gurus have been teaching since it will all work of course, because its really just about wishing and focusing on that for a moment and then letting it go. Some might have more elaborate methods, but as long as it focuses your attention and intent, that is really all you need.  All of my wishing was the result of a very quick but very clear moment of feeling just how much I wanted the basic things in my life.  Because I don't think being greedy is good, I asked for modest things, things that would help me in living a more fulfilled life.  Of course, what fulfills one does not fulfill the other....so we are all unique in this respect.

But you are magical, and the more you can bring this font of enthusiasm and joy into your moment, the more powerfully it will work for you in bringing you all the mountains that you need.  People have known about this magic for a very long time.  Even Jesus spoke about it, but his words on how magical it was got a little lost in translation....he said "Seek and you shall find, ask and you shall receive, knock and the door shall be opened."  He also said that when you are aligned properly with the spirit when you ask for a mountain to move, it will move.  Some of the old texts did not take into account that Jesus spoke Aramaic and when they got written in Greek, some of the nusances were lost.  Hidden within the Aramiac translations is a nearly perfect description left by one of our old masters about how the magical approach works, and it involves your feeling enthusiastic, joyfull even about the prospect of having the event happen, and then making sure that your own beliefs about the possibility of the event taking place are in alignment with their actually happening. Again, if somewhere deep inside you have some unresolved conflict about getting a ton of gold, well, you will probably have trouble getting it.  Afterall, for as improbable as a ton of gold might seem, Jesus was talking about something even more improbable; literally moving a mountain from a mere wishing!  In my book Waking The Infinite (yes I am STILL working on it) there is a section about the old translations and what Jesus was saying about the language of the cosmos, which makes the cosmos respond to your magical wishing!


That's magic.  And you are IT!  I know it sounds nearly impossible to some of you that this could actually be, but its a great secret.....and to touch it you need to let go your old stodgy notions about how boring life is, how plain and NORMAL life is....because as long as you do that, you are merely mirroring more of the same.  Consider an enthusiastic approach for a few weeks and watch as things begin to change.  Some things will be immediate, others will take a little time, but be patient, its worth it!  Ok, lunch break is over, and I hope that I have filled you with some inspiration for your trek over the next few days.  As the season swings towards spring in the norther hemisphere, there is a sense of perrential hope as life brings forth new life.  It a very hopeful time....and magical too!

Nemasté

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

In The Garden

Many cultures on this green earth have this notion that humans have some glitch, some failing that makes them less than divine, a reason for being relegated to the backwater of some failed world. It expresses itself in a number of ways, but it comes up, in all truth, as a self loathing  behavior.  Gurus will express how this place is a backwater spiritually, and priests and priestesses will espouse how this is a less than enlightened world or place.  Others will speak of how we tripped ourselves up by eating some fruit we were told not to do.  Then we felt shame as a result of our nakedness.  We are a fallen species, somehow coming up short in the eyes of our deities.  This sense of falling short crops up from time to time in various traditions, and we need stories to help explain the feeling we have, and we project outward our own sense of failing.  I don't think we ever fell short.  We simply felt a disconnect between our individuality and our undivedness, unable to tap the larger sea of awareness that is inside of us. So we made a God or Goddess responsible for creating a standard which in truth we ourselves could not reach.  The glitch, all along, has been in perception, in awareness.  The sea of feeling has been there all along, we just have missed it, and in missing it, have believed it was somehow taken from us, or that we did something that made it go away. 

While the stories help to explain the feeling, its a projection of what we think is wrong, and while the thinking is correct in the sense that something has been wrong, but what has been wrong is not some great failing in our character, but our inability to tap our larger sense of belonging.  All that ever happened was we felt separate through our focus on individuality, and through an over emphasis on ego, which is a natural result of over identifying with ego.  We lost that connection to the divine that we lived in all the time by not being able to balance our two modes of awareness and expression.  Its not something that we lose like we lose a ring or a note or a shoe.  We simply forgot where it existed.  Having forgotten, we began to think it lay outside of ourselves.  This has been the fatal flaw, if there ever was one, and while it sounds serious, its simple to get back to because its inside us.  Its always been with us.  We just forgot where it was.  We forgot how to feel. We have spun all kinds of stories that make sense to us for why we might have lost it, but the answer has always resided within waiting for us to realize where the glitch was.  Its so simple a thing that we have spent lifetimes trying to find it.  Its like the absent minded person looking all over for their keys when their keys are right in front of them.  We think someone took them, that some vast conspiracy intervened.  We merely forgot. 

Its interesting that when you feel bad, guilt, or shame, the force behind kundalini will go down.  It can even stop completely.  The shame or guilt causes a disruption in the divine flow for those who do have kundalini.  Giving in and letting the bad feelings go restores the garden of bliss within.  You are again at one-ness with the divine.  It is a tantric experience, this connection, and because we have issues in feeling this good, we have sought to make such a feeling taboo.  Different cultures go about it differently, but the result is always the same it seems.  Its no surprise that we have connected our brokeness with our sexuality also because its our sexuality that is a gateway to bliss and wonder and joy, one of the very gateways to this sea of feeling, our touchstone to the infinite.  Having blocked our passage in this way, we have erected hurdles that we have felt were insurmountable.  Its true that we do need the divine to help us out of this, but the divine has never been something standing outside of us.  When a species has lost its way to its most central form of unity, its not unusual for all kinds of problems to arise as a result of the repression that comes with not knowing how to deal with it.

The truth as I have seen and felt it  is that finding the garden within is merely a breathe of fire away.  Breaking the seal, the fire spreads all through you as you feel the bliss pour through your body, is one important way to reach back to a place of deep feeling, of bliss and joy.  When we realized we were separate, we immediately felt put out of the garden where it didn't matter that we were naked.  It was, however,  a pretty crappy feeling, so it had to have some pretty dramatic events surrounding it in order to justify all the bad feelings involved. We have convinced ourselves since that God didn't want us, that we were put out for not doing as instructed.  All that we did was we did not continue to keep our earthly awareness on God.  Its that simple.  And God, Goddess, All That Is, doesn't hold any grudges.  Whatever God we conceived of back in the day has more to do with our own preconceptions of what a God is than what God is. If you want a clue into the love of the deity, consider the love a parent has for a child.  No matter what that child does, the love of that parent remains.  Its unconditional.  And we, as imperfect as we are, are able to taste what the love of a god might be.  But even that gets messed up and distorted with ideas of how we can never truly know the love of a god because we are such simple and broken beings.  The deeper truth is that we are born of this deity and have its truth swimming all through us.  Our individuality, though, can serve to block awareness of this higher range of perception.  We have to want to surrender to what this love is, the simplest and most fundamental force in the universe.  It is this force which I was shown years ago that holds the entire universe together.  It is literally coded into every particle in the universe.  This is why Adam and Eve are so important.  They are the archetypes of our own inner masculine and feminine.  When you can bring these two fields of energy into a unity within, you will feel the pulse of the universe.  Every atom, every electron, every life form, every cell, is ordered around the yin and yang. All along every form, every particle, every person simply wants deep down to be drawn into entanglement, into unity.  Our individuality, though, seems to keep them apart.  Separation is the death of our bliss.

The entire universe is held together, glued as it were, with this force of attraction.  The entanglement of photons is the same entanglement of souls, and when our physicists examine what entangled photons do, we can see the exact same result in people who have themselves become entangled within the world of the quantum field of the infinite mind or divine awareness.  We all are brought into relationship through this force.  It also brings mere matter into a complex relationship with itself that can bring forth life.  None of this is chance.  Its part of an integrating principle of being, of all existence.  When enough entanglement can happen, given the right set of circumstances, life blooms out of what some would say is a simple merging of all the right compounds entirely by chance, except its not by chance, but by design. Life is itself another expression of creativity.  It is the result of simpler forms uniting to create something still larger, grander.

When we can heal the separation within, we are more available to this larger field of awareness and being.  This is not a destination, but a process of becoming that has no end.  If you seek an end-game, you wont find it.  Life is a  journey, and if there were some end point, the universe would stagger under the eventual force of stagnation, which would be an eventual result of such an end-game.  There are still larger and larger dimensions, all without end, infinite in scope, of becoming, a still larger scope of feeling through realization.  As we realize our connectedness, we reach into still larger realms, still larger dimensions of connection to ourselves as infinite beings. As we spread out into that vast web of awareness, we begin to realize it is a thread with no end as we seek to further integrate still larger aggregations of being and awareness, realizing in still larger scopes of reality.  We are simply growing into what we already have been, always were, but always with a growing awareness which brings growing perception and fulfillment.  There is truth, though, that through our individuality and through some basic limits to our physiological mirroring of the infinite, that we bump up against a sense of being individual, but we mistake that individuality as separate. 

I think the truth to all of this is that we feel shame and sadness over our imperfection.  This "gentle" loathing leads to some rather punishing behavior.  It leads to hellish experiences as a result of feeling so cut off from everything.  The thing is, though,  if you knew the love of the divine, you would realize it was all a silly misunderstanding.  We are unconditionally loved, cherished, by that which is our broader being, the Source of all Life, whatever form that might take.  I think understanding your true relationship with the divine is important in understanding just how close the divine is to you.  In this moment, in each breath.  It is always You who have sought to set yourself apart from the Source, for the love of Source is so grand and perfect, it would never seek to put you outside the realm of its love and affections.

I think in all truth, our perception of time messes us up here.  It give us a feeling of seperataness in events.  This grows into still larger things, or feelings of the distinctness of everything.  Its an easy step into separation and sadness from there.  And shame and all the other things that go along with this.  If you have had a transcendent experience, you very likely felt like time was a bit irrelevant in a sense.  INSIDE of time, it seems, is a still larger truth about time, which is that it expands outward in an infinite way, what many who have had a near death experience describe as an expanding present, or an infinite present, or simply a feeling of the infinite.  Outside of our physical perceptions, I think that there IS no time, or time becomes less and less important as a way to experience reality and thus falls away.  Many who have had kundalini awakenings have themselves expressed how all of this awakens them to a deeper perception of time.  Yes, there are all these linear events happening here, one right after the other, but there is a deeper sense that there is something more. 

I have written on numerous occasions about the great benefit of realizing that you can see across all time or in that expanding present.  If there is no time, your soul exists in perfection, already complete in a sense, yet always in a state of becoming in a realizing of what was already there, a process that is itself, I content, the very act of becoming aware to your own divine being and higher self.  Becoming more aware in this way will open you to a greater awareness of yourself as already complete, perfect, and alive in a sea of love too wonderful to perhaps contemplate.  I say this because we have so much grief and shame and guilt over ourselves. The thing though is that what is causing that grief and bad behavior is the fact that we are so cut off from everything.  We forget who and what we are.  The path back to the garden is by becoming naked again, and not feeling shame.  Your sexuality is an expression of a very profound creative impulse.  Gurus and sages and other aspirants from every possible tradition on earth have been able to harness this energy which is itself just the divine bliss flowing through you for incredible work.  In the end, its all the same stuff.  The fact that we would feel such shame over our so-called "Animal" impulses just shows the disconnect we have with what the divine has brought us, has made for us. Certainly, we do need to be good and thoughtful and compassionate.  But when you ARE full of compassion, you aren't going to use sexuality as a weapon, or to hurt someone.  You wont.  You will BE this divine love so powerfully that its much more likely that people wont understand you and will think you strange (like all awakened leaders).  But it wont be a force for hurting others.

Our fall from grace was simply a feeling like we were not good enough.  I think it was ego very likely that was involved in it.  We slowly fell away from the divine pulse and then blamed ourselves for not being good enough....which is in a way true, but not a good enough reason to stay outside of the love of the divine, which isn't experienced as some objective deity but is the energy snaking through you, setting you on fire, making you wake up and come alive in the midst of an awakening.

The Hopi Indians have this story about our distant past.  They explain that we used to have this opening in the top of our heads that connected us to the whole of the universe. We were able to sense and feel through this opening in a way that we no longer do as well.  They explain in this story that we slowly had that connection lost while being physical.  Its interesting that there wasn't an effort to inject a sense of failing in this story, but instead seems much more matter of fact. Still, we need explanations.  The sense remains in so many cultures that we somehow got cut off.  My sense through my experience is that all of matter has been encoded with the divine within it.  As individuals we have free will, and this can lead to a sense of being separate.  Perhaps its possible to simply feel into our swirling world of atoms and cells, all busy utilizing the field of attraction, as a way of learning to tap this lost world of our belonging.  As it is in each particle, it is within us.  We yearn to be part of something more, of something larger.  We know we are more, but we also have this individuality that seems to compete with it.  Perhaps we are just trying to get the mix right, to find a way to harmonize the yin and yang, the small self with the big self, to bring the infinite into the moment again so we might feel more connected. Until then, we look outside ourselves until something comes along that makes us look inside in a way we may have never done so before.  

Awakenings are, I think, an opportunity to step back into the garden, to heal this rift in us, this ancient shame we have had whose ONLY purpose has been to keep us sealed off from the divine.  Whatever the problem is, whatever the bad things done, none of it matters in the face of this perfect love.  And if you can FEEL this perfect love, it will transform you.  You will suddenly come in from the cold like some prodigal child who realizes s/he never really needed to be out there to begin with, and all this time could have been partaking in the great bread of life.

We aren't dirty and fallen.  We just think we are.  We have spun stories that have kept us marinating in this sense of fallen-ness  It has brought a veil of forgetting and illusion upon us, a legacy that we have chanted and sung in our churches and temples for thousands of years.  We are not walking very close to the garden wall and we just have to realize that the wall was never put there to keep us out.  You are amazing, and beautiful.  Each soul is a perfect diamond.  It has such stunning facets, is so excruciatingly beautiful you just would not believe.  Looking into the heart of the world, you will feel a nursery planet full of children who years to be with their parents, to feel the love they have been missing all this time, to feel the pat on their heads that says that all is okay, that YOU are okay....and good enough.  It does not good to hide in shame of how powerful this energy is.  Its what the universe is, its what the Deity is, so why deny it?  Why not revel in it?  It bring nothing but bliss and wonder.  Its a bit much to take, I will admit, but I think this is just getting used to 24/7 bliss.  This is the healing of that old wound in us.  C'mon.  Come be a part of the family.  You deserve it.  Every particle, every atom, every cell and planet and person and galaxy is worth it.  Its all beloved.  We are all slices from that great bread of life, infinitely divided, yet indivisible too.  Its both.  And its wonderful. We aren't one or the other.  We are BOTH individual and infinite. Perhaps its time to learn to balance the two, to bring them into synthesis.  And perhaps this synthesis is the healing of the self....which bring the yin and yang together into a unity and when that happens, kundalini emerges.  But that too is one step in a still larger spiraling stairway.  It goes on and on, and as you step upwards, you slowly but surely shed the old notions and rise or ascend into something truly marvelous.

Come on out of the cold rain.  Its just not worth it.  You are already perfect, and the company is really fine.  Its time that you know your divine parentage which is not separate from you at all.  Never was, save through your belief and shroud of shame and sorrow.  The secret is in feeling.  And its waiting for you, as it waits for all of us.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Practice Element

The power of your awareness is in the present moment.  Buddha had something to say about this I think.  And its true.  From the present all things flow.  Even when it seems we have come from the past, its in this moment NOW that all power flows.  Your power flows out of this moment.  When you begin to worry about what other presents might bring, you fall out of the flow and you begin to worry.  This is a habit.  Breaking the habit is done with the first step. 

Being mindful of the present is an ongoing challenge, but its a pretty easy one.  I simply means that you are mindful of where you are.  If you begin to worry about something that hasn't happened yet, you are robbing yourself of the power to fuel greater awareness by putting that energy into something that can't be changed remotely.  The future is shaped in the present.

So when you find yourself worrying or getting uptight about something, I want you to think about how you ceased being in the present.  Think about how you need to bring it all back into the moment, and as you do, you will begin to feel your stomach loosen, your jaw relax a little more.  There is something you can do that will put your whole body and mind into a state of deep relaxation.  Its very simple, and it works wonderfully.

Breathe in and out four times while holding one nostril closed, then switch so you repeat four breaths in and out on the other nostril.  Breathe gently, be in a place where you can clear your mind and feel the calming effect settle around you.  If you do this gently and slowly, I think you will find that the result at the end of this very simple breathing exercise is going to leave you feeling very relaxed and ready to focus on the here and now, not on yesterday and tomorrow. 

You can use this technique anytime you need to calm down.  It might be a little odd holding one nostril, but not so much so that people will think you are weird (weird is ok). 

I have used this with students who needed calming and it works great.  I'd love to hear your response from trying it. 

Nemasté

Parker

Sunday, February 19, 2012

The Matrix

In the movie The Matrix, you can find the fundamental idea that the world is not as it seems.  Within the world that the Cohen Brother's created, we find that the world of human experience is at the crossroads of technology, perception, and just what is reality.  By essentially "hacking" into every body, every mind, on the planet, an alien force is able to derive energy and sustenance from us in what  one of the characters of the movie describes the human as being essentially a battery.....a form of energy.   The thing is, the world can be one of these lower life forms seeking sustenance, or it can be one where we take greater control of ourselves and what we put out for thew world to mirror.  That is right.  The world is one big mirror.  People are attracted because they have the same energy.  They don't even KNOW they are attracted.  Some of it is based in very negative stuff, some very positive.  The world shows us the images that are us.  Nothing is accidental.  If you ask deep enough, you will see that everything is following a set of parameters and even expectations, and beliefs about what is and is not possible.  The matrix has you, especially if you cannot conceive of something more uplifting than what was in the Matrix movies.  We do not win the world by fighting.  We win by releasing and following the divine flow.  Its actually completely opposite from what you might have been taught.  You have to WORK hard at all of this.  No, you have to release those inconsistent beliefs, those things that do not reflect your own inner alignment with your divinity.  But to see the world change, you DO need to be engaged with something of a process, yes. 

So the matrix movies was about this sense that the world was not quite as it seemed.  I would argue that the world of violence and fear need not be, and that includes the fear that seems to be part of the characters who are struggling against this machine world, a world devoid of human feeling.

Now what I find so interesting is how in many aspects this is actually quite true, that the Matrix movies reflect a certain sense that things aren't quite what they seem.....but that this view also is steeped in the shadow of aggressive behavior, fear, and frustration. as well as the sense that things have all gone awry and that the reality is perhaps scarier than the fantasy being fed to us.  This is a dark world with a weird green cast.  Its everything that the natural world is not.  The Matrix movies are a reflection not just of a sense of truth but also of the truth of where the people who conceived the tale were at as well.  As a result of this, we find that the effort to change one's world view, or to change the world must involve some physical struggle, with guns, cars, and explosives.  Everything actually mirrors the energetic of the Cohen Brothers, their investors, and the viewing community at large since we all buy into it in one way or another, either by buying a movie ticket or watching a video of these movies.

I would like to suggest to you that the truth is that the Matrix is anything and everything you can imagine.  When it comes to spiritual energy being focused in a reality like the physical, there are a set of rules that are the foundation for our having a common and predictable experience.  But within this predictability lies a range of movement which is the result of our forming of the events that move atop this unchanging foundation.  We can choose shadows and guns and bombs blowing up or we can choose to shift into bliss and let all of those worrisome things drop.  We do not even NEED to war with anyone to change this world because when you simply shift your vibration and remove your limiting beliefs about hwo you THINK the world works, you actually change that world.

I know.  Its not sexy.  It doesn't have seven car crashes in the first five minutes but its even more heart stoppingly amazing because of how this world will make you feel.  I will suggest to you that an Awakening is about union of the self.  This means union of all sides of you, which includes your shadow portions that might lead you to darker places, but once unified with your higher self, these parts are actually transmuted in a sense, balanced against the light side so that its now no longer just dark but a rich tapestry of being.  Likewise, the chemistry of fear, which is mirrored as adrenaline in your body, is likewise balanced and thus transmuted through the application of the mirror dopamine.  You see, these chemicals in the body are actually mirror chemistry for the spiritual, energetic or nonphysical state within you that has started all of this body chemistry.  Your body is a mirror of this energy and will respond instantly to fear by building adrenaline that gets shot out immediately.  But when you gain control over this system, you become its master and what you learn very quickly is that by balancing adrenaline with dopamine, you create an amazing cocktail of ascendancy chemistry that will leave you breathless and alive!

Experiencing adrenaline is not enough.  Adrenaline alone will strip you down very quickly.  Its very hard on your system.  If you do not learn how to add dopamine into your body through controlling your energy, your thoughts, and thus your body, you will simply feel the fear molecule at work.  What you need to do is to learn how to balance the two, fear and bliss together.  People who jump off bridges and from planes do so not just for the adrenaline rush, but for the mixture of the adrenaline AND dopamine that go together.  Dopamine gives a feeling of well being in the midst of the rush of energy.  Without the dopamine, you simply feel fear.  On the other side of this chemistry is just feeling dopamine.  If you just feel dopamine, it will bring a great sense of peace, but it will also bring an amazing sense of innactivity, a desire to withdraw from the world, or from life.  It quiets you, makes you blissed out, yes, but it also lacks a certain dynamic quality.  In the world of awakening, with the surge of dopamine, you need a surge of something else to help bring up the volume across the board and keep balance, but balance at a whole new level.  Thus adrenaline and dopamine are for now the mirrors of our inner spiritual chemistry, which is itself what alchemy is all about.

Now if you have followed me thus far, you are now just at the beginning stages of something pretty big, which is how you conceive your reality.  If you can overcome your sense of needing to fight against the order of chaos and darkness, you will find that it leaves you. Its energy simply no longer mirrors your awareness and belief.  Does this mean that there isn't something going on with chaos and shadow elsewhere?  Certainly not.  It goes on, sure, but you do  not need to take part in it.  You can heal this in your experience, and as you do, the world will also be healed.  HOW you feel is a big deal in all of this because the world, just like your body, will follow your feelings and beliefs.  If you carry the consciousness of fear, you will actually find events that are fearful happening in your life.  You will LOOK for fearful things, you will be ATTRACTED to fearful things and your energy field and awareness will be directed towards fear.  Your body will reflect this by shooting  more adrenaline into your system.  Depending on your own physiology, this could be intense or very under the radar, perhaps even hard to notice, but still the adrenal response is there working in a more subdued way, depending on the intensity of your experience.  Most people have no control over their physiology unless they utilize meditation or mindfulness. You can shift alot in you very quickly by simply being PRESENT.  By limiting how far your drift out of the moment, you can limit your natural tendency to think about what has not yet come to pass and then worry about how what has yet to pass might go awry (that's fear at work).  All of this is nothing you can control, so worrying about it is a waste of time.  You might feel its important, and thus its importance warrants worrying about it, but you are wrong again.  Worry will only breed an energetic that will serve to drop you into a shadowy world like Neo's.  You don't need that.  It can be much more blissful and light-filled.

The world will conform to your feelings.  Your body will conform to your feelings also.  Your beliefs must change if you are to feel a more expansive state of being, or to break out of old beliefs that have served to limit you.  These beliefs can have any number of origins.   Some could be about not having enough in life and the resulting vulnerability that this drives.  The truth though is that this is not something that exists in the world but that exists in you first.  The world is merely reflecting it back to you.  If you feel like you are not worthy of love for some reason, it could be that you wind up with any number of issues related to your self-esteem, mental and emotional state, even body image issues.  You might feel disempowered as a person and as a result, you are never able to rise within your company beyond a meager place.  You might be self employed and find that while you DO experience success, its always with something that comes and steals away your success in some way.  The market goes up only to come down.  You make a nice chunk of money only to see it nearly evaporate the following year.  If you change how you feel and believe, you can change the results of the events that rise up around you.  The world is your body.  And like your body, it will respond perfectly to your feelings and what you put out.  If you begin to shift your awareness away from lack and loss, you actually open your field up to the possibility of attracting something different.  You can even have competing beliefs that express themselves at different times.  I know it may sound a bit crazy, but the self runs the show and when you give yourself permission to think and feel differently, you will be amazed at how quickly events can change in your favor.

Your world can begin to resolve from a shadowy place to a much better place.  It requires constant maintenance so that your feelings stay in the straight and narrow and do not wander off into negativity or fear.  This is what is meant by the straight and narrow.  By doing this, you project all the right kind of energy into your reality so that it literally fills with all the right events that will bring you lasting fulfillment.

When you Awaken kundalini, this effect is increased many fold.  This is what is behind the numerous numerical "syncs" that people talk about, of the odd synchronicities that happen with people who are awakened. It is actually the energy of life force helping to bring events into reality all the faster.  In some cases, the effect can be instantaneous.  You can be thinking of something one moment and be experiencing an aspect of it in the world the next.  I can't begin to tell you how often this happens to me now.

Some examples, which are outlined in the book I am working on:  I have the impulse to go to the nearest body of water.  This feels like an inner command.  Its odd, but I follow.  I go to the nearest body of water and wind up on a walking path, wondering why I was there.  I walked up to a tree that was near the water and then walked around it so that I was very near the shore where this lake was.  There, over a very large limb, was a post that had a small plaque.  This post was entirely obscured by a large and long low-lying limb.  I had to select THAT tree to go around in order to see the plaque. On this plaque I see a quote from a philosopher whose work I did not know.  The philosopher was Teilhard de Chardin.  The quote was how once we learn to master the power of love, we will have learned to master one of the most important  essential forces of nature.

Ok. I noted this, and felt like I had come to see what I had come to see.  I then drove from the pond to someone's house where I saw a book sitting on a table when I came in.  I opened the book and there was a quote from Teilhard de Chardin.  How odd I thought.  Ten minutes after that first happening!  Then, later that day I was in a friend's house and wound up looking in a corner of his room where I saw some videos.  Amongst the videos was a book by Chardin!  I borrowed the book and found most of it to be of little interest.  I flipped the book open to an odd page and found myself on the very page that had the quote from earlier in the day.  As I read these passages, I read about how all of our energy is reflected in a spiritual realm,that we are learning to harness the power of this love to help drive the world forward.  That was one synchronicity.  Not long ago I was thinking how I needed to get a new display for my glass work for shows and fairs.  Five days after this a woman calls me out of the blue and asks me if I would like to buy a barely used display which is made by the same company that made my old one.  The woman had noted that I had this type which a fellow potter had left at her house and never came back for, and she tracked me down two years later to ask if I'd like to buy it.  Normally these cost about $1200.00  I can't afford that kind of money with the way the economy has been.  She offered it to me for $100.00.  Two weeks later, I was thinking how I wanted to paint my mailbox.  The problem was the one I had was plastic and would not take paint very well.  A few days after this, two young men walked up my drive to explain that they had knocked down my mail box.  The came and replaced it for me.  I was able to paint it with wild designs like I had hoped.  The new mailbox was carried to my door.  In another case I sent an email to a local community college's head of curriculum development and explained how I had teaching credentials and a large studio that could handle a number of students.  I was hoping to possibly create a cooperative between education and the industry of art.  As I was exiting the email application I saw I had received an email from someone I had met a year earlier explaining that there was an opening for  teaching positions at two nearby schools.  One of them was at the same community college I had written to.  I wound up getting both jobs. 

I can go on for pages about these odd "syncs" as we call them, but after a while, its just so much stuff.  The bottom line here is that the universe is responding, sometimes IMMEDIATELY to what your thoughts and wishes are.  If you have a competing belief, its possible that your wishful thinking wont bear fruit.  If you are open to the possibilities, the possibilities open to you.  You are the universe, the universe is you.  You are here to learn that the Matrix can be anything you dream it to be.  It can be a dark world with machines and bombs or it can be a much brighter place filled with possibility and opportunity.  If you think that the environment is too tilted against you right now, then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  You have to be able to dream and imagine the possibilities, free yourself from competing beliefs that might keep your imagination from coming true, and then dream big.

Dealing with limiting beliefs is not impossible, but requires realizing that they are there, that they reflect, most often, an unresolved emotional state or karma.  Sometimes these are merely a feeling that the impossible isn't possible....like maybe its silly to even try, or that such thinking is pie in the sky.  As long as you think this way, it will BE this way.  You wont take the exercise seriously and it will simply be a waste of time.  And if your competing belief is that its maybe all silly, then it will offer you the evidence that it is so.  You wont even be able to see the other side of the coin before the competing stuff is mirrored and keeps anything unusual or interesting from emerging.  The trick here is to suspend disbelief in more than just a figurative way.  I have seen all kinds of exercises mean to clear the mind of these competing issues and I think they all can work because they all employ INTENT was the first mover.  Intent is really a biggie, but then you also need to be willing to see things differently.  One system has you imagining what you want by putting them into colored balloons and letting the wish go up and away so this wish can get working in the universe.  It can be a lot more direct if you don't use imagery.  If you send up a balloon, who knows how long that might take.  If you realize the universe can respond immediately, then the wish doesn't need to get very far out the door before the universe is forming itself around it.

The Matrix can be anything you want.  There are layers and levels to all of this, and it requires getting clear on any competing memes bound up inside of you.  Resolve those, and you are free to begin navigating the universe in a different sort of way.  Instead of the world happening TO you, it happens more BECAUSE of you.  If your world has shadows, you might want to look at that carefully.  But dealing with shadow isn't with swords and armor.  Its by letting the attachment to shadow go.  Just let go.  Let its vibration drop away enough so that more constructive vibrations to show through and predominate.  Its important to examine your feelings.  If you wish for something but wind up with something less than excited, ask yourself what the origin of that less than excited happy feeling is from.  Underneath it will likely be some unresolved hurt or a feeling like maybe you aren't worthy.  All of this is mere self-esteem issues, a lack of self love.  When you love yourself, you don't ask for things that will be bad for you.  You will naturally orient your life events towards more positive outcomes.  You don't always need to know right off that there is a problem, but you will very likely FEEL it.  You might not KNOW what it is, but that is okay, you don't need to know.  Your feeling will help you to relate to it if you are open enough.  By orienting yourself in this way, you actually begin the dialog in the same language of the universe.  FEELING.  Its not words, incantations, or any of that.  Its FEELING.  If you can express your wishes in a pure joy and happiness and excitement over having them be fulfilled, the likelihood that they will happen as you envisioned has just increased  a hundred-fold. 

As you begin this process of self reflection, you will very likely discover still deeper layers that need to be examined and those limiting feelings released.  As you do, you are on a path of inner alchemy that will build steam.  Releasing just one big issue from your insides can be enough to trigger a flood of energy into your body.  This was very much how I awoke.  I had what amounted to a log-jam inside of me, a kind of computer subroutine that was on infinite loop and was eating up hard drive space.  When I deleted that computer code, the hard drive was suddenly freed up to contemplate and FEEL a whole other world.  I awoke, and began feeling into the Collective Consciousness of humankind.  This was a game changer.  It's a world changer, for as you change yourself, you also change the world.  Sound impossible?  This dynamic feedback is exactly how these systems work, and in a future post I will cover healing the world.  Its not just possible, but it happens every day.

Nemasté.