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Friday, June 22, 2012

Beyond Belief

Everything that you are in your psyche is a collection of values that are based in belief.  The curious thing about belief is how little we actually bother to learn the root of any belief.  Everything about my experience with kundalini is about shedding those beliefs which have limited my experience.  The beliefs I held were also a mirror of my own karmic entanglements. Subtly and overtly, my beliefs moved and turned in me, effecting my thinking and informing my reactions and feelings.

Karma is a curious thing. Its like belief in how blind it is. It shares a lot with belief in that it is often accepted without conscious awareness and is carried without being aware of it, and yet it has governed so much of what we say, do or feel.

It's also curious that sometimes you can shed a karma by being willing to look at how it has blinded you.  The effect karma has is that it makes you see only what the karma is about.  So lets say that you feel like someone doesn't love you.  You believe this is true, and the source of this karma has to do with self esteem, which goes back to self love.  As Alison Neville, a great teacher and writer in her own right once said, all karma goes back to self love.  No matter how far afield it gets, the trail always leads back to self love.  So in this inability to love yourself and know yourself to be perfect and lovable, you then see how someone has a deficiency in their behavior. You SEE it as deficient, and you see this as reflecting on you.  This deficiency in another reflects on you, so this must mean that they do not love you.  And so off you go believing this is true while all along you have not looked more deeply at why this is so.

I was one such person. I had some bad experiences as a very small child.  A baby, actually.  This affected me so that I didn't bond properly with my mother. I grew up angry at her because of something I didn't get.  I was wounded. When I was able in the midst of my awakening to step back far enough, I saw a very different picture.  Instead of merely trying to connect the dots to make my own weird picture of life, I began to understand that life was hard back then and my mother was doing her level best with a very bad situation.  It did affect how she felt to me, it did affect how attentive she was with me.  Yes, yes, yes, to all of it.  Yes.  But it did not mean she did not love me.  In truth, she cherished me.  I was her youngest, the one who was perhaps having the hardest time making sense of all of this that was happening. So I grew up with this feeling of separation, of having been treated different, the whole nine yards.  In truth, I was not able to simply love myself and know I was okay.  If I had, I might have been a bit happier.  I might feel less wounded.  In truth, I saw what I wanted to see.

Belief is the same thing.  It is taken on almost automatically without regard to questioning it or giving it any kind of road test.  We don't stop for one moment and consider why it is that we have religions and countries full of people who believe that we are dirty or fallen, sinful, or that certain aspects of our own creative beings are bad.  Like sex.  Its dirty.  Its only to be used for procreation.  Anyone want to hazard a guess as to why this notion was promulgated in the first place?  Is it any surprise that there was a demonizing of the old religions which were based on seeing the god and goddess within each person?  Here, the highest sacrament was Heiros Gamos.  All of that went away when Christianity came along. There are similar strains in the HIndu tradition as well.  There is this attitude that sex is bad.  The man who translated the Bhagavad Gita As It Is has expressed this view quite clearly when the book was published  in the early 70's.

An awakening will challenge you top to bottom, tip to toe.  Nothing is left alone.  It keeps pushing.....returning you to a more natural state. But as long as we fear any aspect of sexuality or any aspect of our selves at all, we just wont "go there."  You have to be willing to examine your beliefs from the most subtle to the most overt.

Writing in my book, I explain how we have a triadic being.  While we have a dual energy system of what could be called masculine and feminine currents, we also have a processing system for that energy that is based on the fact that we have three brains in one brain. Yes.  Three.  We have a part of our brain that is identical to a reptilian brain.  If you look at this part of the brain it is no different from any other reptile in shape and proportion.  This is the part that is capable of processing a certain range of experience.  These are what we would consider our base instincts. This is the fire of pure sexual energy.  On top of that brain is a mammalian brain that is identical to most mammals across the earth.  This part of our brain deals with higher order expression and experience and allows us to feel kinship, togetherness, and compassion.  It is in this part of the brain that we bring up the energy from the reptile and refine it.  But concurrent with it is still this very pure energy that is streaming in from the cosmos, so unless you either deal with it or ignore it, it remains a challenge if your beliefs tell you that pleasure is bad or wrong, or even sinful.  But in the latest unfolding, we have what is called the primate brain, and this is the part of us that makes us, so we are told, so different from all the other mammals.  We not only thing about the clan or family group, we are able to reflect on the inherent good of something for the whole.  So instead of small groups, we can contemplate how something might affect a nation or world.  This is the most abstract part of the brain's processing capability (at least this is what we suspect thus far), and it is here supposedly that we are able to realize the higher range of experience of the cosmos in our crown, in our forebrains.  Here, we have a mirror of the higher forms of bliss. Its a step up in this three step ladder I am talking about.

In the energy body there are these same corresponding octaves as well as seen in the root, heart and crown.  These are perhaps some of the most central of the seven in many respects.  They all ultimately go together as a unity in order to draw all energies upwards into a higher realization. We say the lower energies are less somehow, but this is only due to bias and belief.  Its also karmic.  Without the root, we do not feel the power found in the crown.  Without the crown, we cannot know the power of the root.  But in denying any of it, we turn a blind eye to its importance.  Its in bringing the entire energetic self into a unity that we realize the fullest potential of our beings.  This is based in bliss.  If you have beliefs that feeling this kind of bliss is bad, then there are naturally some hurdles that will befall you.  Even the seeming lower base energies are all important in the overall unity. Without them, the bliss of kundalini simply would not be. It would instead be something of a corpse, a being with a half life. When we seek to sideline one aspect, we create more problems for ourselves. We limit our fuller experience. While the power of awakening will fuel a great flame in our spirits, it will only reach but so high or only so broadly.  By not bringing fear into it, you are free to experience it in its fullest dimension.  You are free, then, to return to what we were before all this demonizing began and the sacrament of heiros gamos was experienced in its fullest.

From the moment kundalini touches you, you experience the very essence of union.  Shakti does not have to travel upwards to meet Shiva in the crown. They are already connected from the very start.  Their union IS the bliss as it travels upward both literally and figuratively. Its only in pulling them apart that kundalini stops. But once begun, no human WANTS it to stop.  This is the Divine Marriage and it begins within the self. The self is healed and brought to a place of unity first.  Not after something else happens outside the self.  The universe must be known for what it is first within you, and then from you, it will unfold. From this seed, the universe is planted and grows anew. This is how the world is healed, one person at a time. It is not through conquest, or through manipulation.  It is not by having a crutch of any kind, be it a religion or family or any of the rest. You are like the orphan spoken of in the gospel of Philip that inherits the world.  And indeed you do.  But first, within you this great mystery must unfold or else what you have is a corpse.  Seek the kingdom first. It is within you. And it is first by making the left the right, the right the left, making the female into the male and the male into the female (Gospel of Thomas).  It is here, in this unity of the self that the true healing takes place. 

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