Divine Alignment

Divine Alignment is not something outside of you.  It is what you already are in a sea of potential other alignments and states. it is without limit, but seeking the highest within is where divine alignment can be found.  You ARE divine, you see.  You do not reach for this, you reach within, you dig deep into a simple and fundamental place.  It is there, I promise you, beyond all worry, fear, self loathing and other things.  It is your most basic nature, your most natural state.  it may not seem that way since all you may know is what you have seen and felt here on this planet and in this life.  But there is more, and you are in the midst right now of learning and discovering what that something more is.  Otherwise, you would not be here reading this.  Something brought you to this place, to these words. 

All my blessings to you in your journey to remembering or realizing what it is that you are.

The Power Of Tantra - An Introductory Exercise For Men

The power of Tantra is contained within the power of your own mind and essence.  When you can allow your own mind to be fully present with the energy of your sexuality, energy flows.  Connected to this is what happens with the body.  Certainly your body will respond, but the key in all of this is in keeping present and going slow.  Men most often fall into a trap about their sexuality and it leads to most problems we see between men and women in their intimacy.  Men simply go too fast.  Men respond very quickly to sexual energy perhaps partly due to how we have evolved.  The triggers are slipped much faster.  It is expedient, yes, but also an empedement to tantric experience.  Being able to keep the energy in your awareness as a man and then allowing yourself to stay in the moment without speeding ahead to the desire for the conclusion, will potentiate sexual energy in a whole new way. 

If sex is like striking a match, imagine striking that match VERY slowly.  Literally imagine seeing it being struck in slow motion and keep that image in your mind.  There is a huge amount of energy that is being missed when you rush, and you also can leave your partner wondering what just happened.  And this is quite easy to do, so by keeping things extremely slow in your mind you can actually begin to feel the energy in sexuality being stretched out, and as it does, its fuller potential can be realized.
The best practice is to begin without a partner if you are a man. 

One very good way is to imagine everything in your mind as having been slowed way down.  Zoom in on your hand and where it goes, and keep it amazingly slow.  By going into it in this way, you can keep your mind focused on the moment and not jumping ahead.  Savoring the moment allows you to feel the energy that is present and it also keeps you more in your body.  When, as a man, you are wanting to rush forward, it is very likely you are not fully present. Your mind is actually situated somewhere else.  As an initiating force, you can leave whomever is with you in the dust.  Put your awareness in different parts of your body and feel for example your hand stroking her leg.  Do this slowly, and feel what your energy does when it touches her.  Remember that match striking?  It strikes in slow motion; the fire emerges slowly but powerfully as the match stick runs down the side of the striker, which is her body.  If you do this you can feel how just a touch can be elevated to something that is like worship…..because that is just what it becomes.  This is the lost path to the spiritual practice that is tantra. Allowing your own energy to rise without expending it in one furious rush to an end-point is the name of this game.  Doing this first within your own head is a good prelude to learning how to do it with a partner.

Being able to hold onto your energy is actually where tremendous energy can arise in tantra.  We think that tantra is this freeflow of energy between one person and another, and it is, but realize that men and women are right now at something of a mismatch in many ways when it comes to the different stages of sexual arousal and what each needs in order to build up in the right way to a pitched level of bliss. As a man, keeping back the floodgates is important.  If you are an initiating force, then so too do you need to learn how to manage your own energy properly.  You can do this, and practice will show you how.  If you are getting too excited to soon, the answer is in learning to pull back some, to allow the boiling water to come to a simmer. The energy is always going to be there, the universe is full of it, so it isn’t like you are ever going to run out, so allow yourself this time to take the time. 

One important first step in tantra is learning how to take the time needed inside your own head and body first.  It is possible that you might not even find this approach very interesting as you find your mind wanting to race forward, but if you continue down this path in this way, you will not touch upon tantra.  You will only be touching the outer petals of it, which are the most obvious ones most everyone knows about. A lot of this is in unlearning some things that have become habit that we don’t even think about or reflect upon.  This is especially hard for people who prefer to act and think about it later.  I am not asking you to become so reflective of yourself that it ruins the moment, only that by developing more of this sense of restraint at the right times will result in greater control and better syncing to your partner in an even deeper union that will come once you stop leaping headlong into the experience in a way that might feel natural to you but may not feel natural to your partner.
When you become more present the energy will also change.  Women can pick up on this.  Women are incredibly sensitive to these things on balance, especially if they are tuned into your energy, which most women are.  They are naturally intuitive and so by allowing yourself to dwell more in your body and less in what is going to come next, her response will be different.  Being comfortable with yourself is key and being able not to feel the ingrained shame and taboo that is so often centered on sexuality will help significantly.  This is not a mountain you need to reach the peak of in one day, but is a worthy exercise that might take some time for you to see results.

So let your mind go wild, certainly, but in building the energy, hold it back so that you can slow down and be in the moment. Then, allow the wild horse to pull you forward with yourself having a firm grip on the reins.  Take your time, be present, and once everyone is on the same page, you can let those horses run free.  Before this happens, being aware of your breathing can help keep you in your body if those horses want to slip from your hands.  This is not about lessening desire or somehow decreasing the passion in the moment, it is learning one aspect of how to contain and potentiate energy.  This is what you were made for, and it is time to begin using it for helping to bring heaven to earth.  It is a noble effort!

This is just a taste, an element of practice that you might try considering.  Much of it is all done inside your head and then connecting it into your body.  When you can slow down and be more present, you also signal greater confidence.  Confidence is not about bravado necessarily, but simply being comfortable in your own skin.  Sexual intimacy has many pitfalls for us, so it is not always easy to be authentically confident as a result of our being easy in our own skin.  The thing is, if you can give up proving anything or doing anything and just be with yourself and your partner in a comfortable and easy w ay, things of this nature will be much easier.  You will begin to sense the seemingly more subtle elements of the energy that is within you but that often gets scattered in the moment. Don't let life turn your basket of wonder over so the fruit of your essence goes falling all over the place.  There is no rush, no worry.  If the person you are with is a good match for you, she will be someone who has patience, is herself also not in a rush and is willing to savor the moment that you are seeking to find and know. 

Being present is a tricky thing for us.  We are so used to planning and strategizing that winds up taking us out of the moment.  This practice means full attention.  Where your attention goes, so does the energy.  You can build significant energy in the moment by mastering this, or at least letting it teach you.  By being more present in your body, you also create an environment with your partner who is very sensitive and can feel your presence or lack of it most often than not.  Honor this sensitivity and become the thunderbolt who knows how to freeze itself and then gently tease out limitless energy from that frozen pulse of bliss moving through you. She awaits you, she awaits this.  She seeks to return to you what is hers and which in turn is yours.  In this cycle of energy rotation and movement lies the divine and the heart of tantric practice, or at least one aspect of it. 

Scary Spirits and Kundalini

I thought in honor of our Hallows Eve, I might talk about fear for a bit. 

When we rely on the words of others, the teachings of others, we become bound by those things.  Most often, we are unable to think authentically for ourselves.  Our teachings can even say we do not have a way to discern truth save by the words handed down by us, and yet what has been handed down to us bear the marks of those who have interpreted, translated, and even altered some of these documents over time.  We know this is the case because of cross-referencing many documents that are versions of the same old story.  Like the Bible.  The problem as I see it is that we expect that our old books to have somehow been handed down to us without a single inch of spin put on them by others.  And yet, so many of these books were received through the spoken word.  Someone sat down and wrote them down.  Someone else copied the text, spoke it, and yet another wrote the words down as best as they could remember them.  So we have VERSIONS of the same story often in many different books.  If we are seeking literal interpretations, that gets to be pretty hard with all the versions.  I don't even want to get deep into translation issues because the truth is, its tricky.  Jesus, for example, spoke in Aramaic, which is itself a highly contextual language.  This means that something can be taken many different ways if you don't fully understand just what it is the person is talking about.  Imagine someone trying to explain a mystery to you, a deep spiritual reality for which there are not words to adequately describe.  The kingdom is like a mustard seed.  The kingdom is like a thief in the night. The kingdom is.....you get the idea.  He was seeking to describe a reality for which there were not really good words, yet he tried.  The result is, you have to seek this thing and experience it yourself.  If you can't think for yourself and rely upon old texts, the problem is you are relying on someones understanding of something that is thousands of years old.  The language could be very different.  We all know language changes over time, and it actually changes quite fast.  Sometimes in just a few generations words can morph and change.  The way we use the word sin today is different from the meaning that it had two thousand years ago.  Today, sin carries with it a sense of judgement, but in the world of two thousand years ago, it was quite different.  Sin was anything that caused you harm.  Getting angry and taking out on others could have been a sin.  The point was to not do harm to yourself.  Nowadays sin seems to suggest a judgement that could send you to hell.  In the old days, allowing yourself to harm your spirit meant it coarsened your perception of the divine and thus kept you from the light that was within you that is divine. 

Being unable to look clearly at the experience of spiritual ascension results in pitfalls for the individual which can draw in fear and can stymie you.  It can be a challenge enough as it is to surrender to such a powerful experience as awakening in order that it can come into your life and work the greatest change within you.  It was hard for me when I was not completely surrendered.  I struggled.  Ego was certainly in the way, and it felt like a giant vise was crushing me!  This went on for days, weeks, and months, until I learned how to simply slip out of the grip of this vice-like effect.  Once I did this, only then did I realize that it was my perception that was creating it.  My own fear, my own ego, was limiting my experience of this very powerful and divine force moving in my life.  What seemed like a brooding gorilla in the corner turned into a brilliant rush of color and light the next.  It all had to do with belief and an unwillingness to surrender to my higher self.  Until I did that, I was locked in a egoistic struggle with my lower self who wanted to remain in charge.  By letting go, it was as though parts of me slipped to the back of the bus and no longer was involved in driving the bus.  In order for me to know something more, I had to let go of what I thought I knew. I was standing before a potentially expansive reality while holding my eyes part way shut.  Something had to give.  I gave up.  I gave up and began to trust.  When I did that, my experience changed dramatically.  But until I did, demons and spirits abounded. 

Even today there is a rising tide of fear about the sheer number of awakenings happening.  We are at a critical point in our history when the race itself is primed for this flow of divine energy into the planet.  And yet, it is sometimes met with fear.  It is met with fear because it seems strange, and yet, all of the things that are described as being a "false spirit" or what some call a "counterfeit spirit" actually match the movement of the Holy Spirit.  It seems strange only because it has been so still for so long.  Many people experience the Holy Spirit in just the way that it is now expressing itself in church meetings, and yet there is great fear that this might be something to be afraid of. 

Part of the fear issue is the whole serpent subject.  In the book of Genesis the being that deceived Adam and Eve was a serpent.  What many do not realize is how important the serpent is in many cultures, including the Muslim faith, Judaism (and by definition Christianity), the middle East, India, Tibet, China and Japan.  So prevalent is this serpent imagery that it is in every single culture and religion as an important and significant element having to do with vital force, life force, and divinity. 

In Christianity, the Seraphim were described as being fiery serpents.  These beings were the ones who were closest to God and were described as having three sets of wings that enabled the angels to surround the brilliant glory of God. It was Moses who was commanded to raise a fiery serpent in the desert, to make it of a metal that would resemble the sun.  It was the Egyptians who honored the serpent as being involved in the spiritual force of the soul that would often be seen emerging from the third eye of the Pharaohs. 

Currently there seems to be a movement afoot to help bring spiritual awakening within certain parts of the Christian church.  This awakening is conferred by touch from those who have themselves been awakened.  The result of this transfer are the very things observed within the Church as evidence of the Holy Spirit.  This is shaking and jerking, laughter and speaking in tongues.  When you look at the earlier versions of this expression of the Holy Ghost moving, you can see what I am talking about.  The Shakers and the Quakers were so called because they found that they were able to get closer to Creator through an ecstatic form of movement that facilitated the flow of the Holy Spirit or Ghost.  If you read about the church meetings of the Shakers you will see how the entire congregation could feel the movement of the Holy Ghost as a very real force moving through them.  Some of the movements of the Shakers were described as being like dance, and this is not surprising because in many other cultures ecstatic movement has always been connected to reaching these exalted states of being where one feels connection with the divine realm.  Some might call it the spirit world, while another might call it heaven.  We are different, but we are each describing the same thing.  And yet, even when the evidence is so clear, people shrink back in fear.

I read a quip someone made about having gotten this spirit moving in them, and at first she described it as heavenly, but it soon turned sexual, and it was at that point that she decided it HAD to be something of the devil.  This is interesting because in early Christian texts the force of awakening, of the Holgy Ghost was described as being the Bridal Chamber.  This was so-called because of the incredible bliss that it conferred on the initiate.  I say "initiate" because one certainly seems to enter into this holy awareness of the divine that carries with it such incredible power that it floods the person with unending bliss and ecstasy.  So yes, it does flow through ALL of you, which means that it has a sexual component.  But this does not mean that it is bad or evil, it merely means that you are now like a string vibrating in sympathy with a still higher vibration. It spares none of you, and it requires a good deal of surrender and trust to alow its divinity to flow through you in this way.  It is we who have the problem, not the deity, you see.  Somewhere along the line we turned this bliss into something dirty or bad when in fact it is the lightening like shaft from the divine.  It is little wonder that so few have experienced it in the past.  It was simply a forbidden thing to feel such closeness with God. 

Early Christian mystic St Teresa of Avilla wrote about her experience with awakening in books, one of which was titled The Interior Castle.  In it, she described the route through her being that the divine current moved in order to reach its pinnacle in her awareness.  She described this process as being like moving through seven crystaline rooms, each with different characteristics.  Each room was like a ring and each ring or room got closer and closer to the core of one's being until you reached the place of perfect union with the divine.  This, coincidentally, is a near-perfect description of the very means by which awakening happens in the Hindu tradition where the divine force moves from the root chakra into the crown.  Certainly on a technical level they appear different because one flows upwards and one flows from the outside inward, but the effect and number of centers, or room, is the same.  I will point out that before I even knew that this was kundalini that was moving through me, I experienced the same effect that Teresa described of these centers as being like rooms.  I had a heart clearing once that left me feeling like  I had a vast room opened up inside of me.  It literally felt as though I had this very big empty room in my heart.  It was a very unusual feeling!  "Wow," I thought, "how is it that my heart enter feels so expansive, so big?"  It felt like a giant meeting hall.  Not very different at all from how Teresa described it five centuries earlier.  But in our uncertainty and lack of faith in the divine, we ascribe all kinds of problems with this way of understanding the divine.  Understand, this is all completely without any real physicality.  It simply isn't about physical space, and yet, we seek to make sense of a spiritual reality by ascribing or attaching very physical descriptions to it.  This is the best we can do in order to explain or convey this great mystery moving within us.  If we seek to be didactic and rigid, we can entirely miss the point, or subtle drift. 

Clearly, the kingdom is NOT a mustard seed, and yet Jesus had to use something from the physical world to describe a nonphysical reality.  It is just like trying to explain something from the fourth dimension by using the tools found in the third dimension.

For the poor woman who ran in fear of her sexual feelings in the midst of awakening, she might have found that this fiery power would have moved through her and begun to cleanse her spirit of any hitches and issues she had in relation to divine union, what was called the bridal chamber by the early Christians. Its energy would have continued to move through her and brought her to the same levels of ecstasy as Teresa described.  It served to draw Teresa into a singular relationship with her God.  For her, she spoke lovingly of Him and used both God as father and God as son interchangeably.  She could not wait to die and meet them directly, she was so fond and enamored of them while she was in the flesh.  But even in her own life, she found that this union drove a hard bargain; she had to choose within the bliss a very refined position in regards to it. This is the same force as has been described by the Hindus as Sublimation which involves moving the more sexual energy into the higher vibrations of the light body or spirit in order to reach ever higher levels of pure ecstasy. This is akin to riding the tiger as the Hindes describe it; you take this powerful force that could tear you apart and by balancing upon it with perfect grace, you are able to reach a place of wondrous union within.  And just like the Hindus, Teresa explained to her sisters that all of this force was not felt as coming from outside, but came through the diamond-like realm of the core self or soul. "The kingdom is within you" Jesus said some fifteen hundred years earlier, and what we are all finding is that this is true. 

So seek you the kingdom within. The only way you can do this is with a one-on-one encounter with the divine.  Either you trust that your soul will guide you or you don't.  If you slip into fear, then the result, as we have often seen in nearly all awakenings, is that this fear will create shadows and issues for you that will trip you up.  It will breed energy which attract more like it.  Simply let the fear go.  the way you move through the realm of spirit is by the steering wheel of your intention.  If you steer into the ditch, then you will feel derailed and lost.  Keep aiming for the highest and trust that you do indeed have a connection within that allows you communion with the deity, the divine, with your greater nature in context with the divine order.  You are a child of the Creator, nothing can undo this.  If you fall for the fear, you fall from the Creator, pure and simple.  If you fall for all of the descriptions of Hell and Purgatory, then you fall for something that is not in your highest.  There is no need to fear what it most natural in you, for you were made to be an instrument of the divine on earth.  Harness the many horses of your nature, both physical and spiritual, and you will find, by grace, your way. 

Here & There

Our lives are so often focused on the pursuit of things that we can miss something important that has to do with a very simple way of understanding that governs perception and thinking, and then, by extension, belief.  It is the idea that we are after something.  What are we going to do today?  What will we focus on?  Certainly, life is made of that.  You go to the store, you run errands, you pick up the children, you pay bills.  You DO things.  Life is more than just these things, and much of the discontent that we feel is bound up in this feeling of "Is this all there is?"  We have fallen for the idea or perception that we are out to GET something.  Now bear with me....

When you apply this to spiritual work, you create a false dichotomy when you think that spiritual work is in acquisition.  You go to a teacher, you read a book, you do a practice, a method, a technique.  The only problem is in how you have situated your awareness.  It is outside of you.  It is "out there" to get.  This feeds into your spiritual work.  The realm of spirit and energy is in some other realm, some otherworldly place that you will work to find yourself in.  Heaven is in the afterlife.  be a good obedient person and follow the rules, do the things that will make life here good for you and others, run your errands and turn the other cheek and seek grace, love, and you will do fine.  In a limited sense, there is value to this, importance.....but it also misses the point.  So focused we have become on object-based relating to the world that we miss that the deeper spiritual work is not a movement outward, but a movement inward.  That might seem so obvious, so simple, and yet, even in moving inward we wind up moving outward by seeking to reach something, which is itself a misperception of how to get to the meat or marrow of what you are.  It is so simple, deceptively simple sometimes.  It means being able to be full of grace and the willingness within to be led to this beautiful place within.  It may be the case that many of us just don't know the path to this place within.  See?  I said path. I made it a going, a journey.  Language is hard, for it has arisen out of object-based relationships.  This is not something that is outside of you, not a something....it is all that you are, including your conditioned awareness that seeks.  Be still.  Become quiet. Be ready for a mystery to bloom within you.  You don't need to know how it works.  It could be said that no one knows because it is what we are.  It is our most fundamental nature.  Not a thing but what we have always been. The trick is in knowing how to feel, at least for me.  Once you get the feeling right, which is opening up and surrendering, it becomes much easier.  Effortless as long as the mental and egoic part of you remains inactive long enough.  The cork in the bottle of your cosmic genie self is the mind and ego.  When you lay them aside, the universe of this genie rushes out with great force, wonder, power, and beauty. 

All of this is a creation, a great boundless creation that has emerged out of primal consciousness.  When I say primal, I do not mean primitive.  Primal as in prime. The origin.  When you realize that you are a part of this prime consciousness, that the act of creation that brought all of this about is tied directly into your very being, everything stops being the way it was a moment before.  There is nowhere to go, nothing to do, only something very simple to realize; who you are beyond all the rush and tumble of the day to day.  As all of that moves around you, stop and imagine that you are not moving but that the world moves around you.  I know this may sound somehow ego-centric, but it might help you to glimpse something important.  Everyone is going at the same thing you are; realizing who they are.  When you do this you can bump up against this rather interesting awareness of how wherever you go, there is a central point that does not move.  This is your soul, your higher self which is both in and out of time, in many realities all at once.  For it, it is IN things, in this creation, this drama unfolding (and countless others too) and yet, it has its own central point which is not space-based but is consciousness based.  Time and space fall away in a certain sense as the self resolves into a point of pure awareness.  All lifetimes are tuned in, experienced, and yet the soul is aware of being in a central "space" which is its own awareness.

You are a chip off the old block.  You are your soul and it is you.  Through it, you are connected to still "higher" or more expansive realms of awareness.  All of these resolve back into pure awareness.  Each one has its central point and out of it flows its many selves.  You are like this, are learning to be this.  You will grow into your own awareness of yourself in still broader terms.  The world wraps itself around you.  You are in many places all at once, as in truth you are multidimensional.  You need only step along the path that is no path that leads to awareness.  You do not have to go anywhere to find this.  It is not in a book or even in my words; it is in you to know.  The gateway to understanding what this awareness is is actually unlocked by your imagination.  I will tell you uncatagorically that imagination IS the gateway to realization.  We use imagination as if it is an unreal thing....as though it is something that is of little consequence, and yet it is the soul's creative ability that creates your life in a moment by moment basis.  You are the director of this play.  The scenes move and dissolve all around you.  You certainly walk and talk and do things, and yet all realms are available to you.  You are not a prisoner here.  You are a genie in a bottle.  You can dare to let that part of you out.

Yes you participate in the creation here, what some label illusion.  But it is for now real and serves an important purpose.  It is here to aid you in knowing who you are.  It is, however neutral.  It is not out to get you.  It merely follows what you think and feel.  Take responsibility for yourself and you will find the old dependant life you may have lived begin to dissolve.  New events spring up around you as if by magic.  This IS the magic for which many were not understood. Change the story inside and the story outside also changes to reflect a different vibration of awareness.  Heave is not a place to go to, but is current in your feeling, your imagination, and your thoughts.  To consider that you must DO something to get there is itself a kind of trap.  You might get there by taking that route, for your intent may be strong enough that you create that eventuality.  However, it is available to you right here and right now because you ARE heaven if you are willing to mirror it in your awareness.  To do this requires shedding old notions or beliefs.

Letting go of what you thought was important will naturally tend to free up that genie in you that will come forward in direct proportion to how you let go.  It is IN you.  Realize who you are.  When you do this, what you thought was important gets reframed by what is.  I learned this during my time in the wilderness as I call it.  I was getting my life back together after a series of seemingly unfortunate events.  I found myself one day lying on a cold slab of concrete with a house all around me and I was in utter bliss.  I needed so little in this place.  I really became very simple.  With such simplicity, I was not constantly going for this or that.  I was content, happy, content with a current moving through me that was purely divine. Heaven was there on that cold slab.  Heaven, I knew could be in every moment no matter how seemingly difficult it might be.  Over and over I had come here and had become enmeshed in the creation as if it was the whole story.  Over and over I had glimpses beyond the wall, and I kept coming back, searching, digging deep, over and over.

All of this now is an accumulation of something.  A yearning,  a desire to know.  I sought far and wide. Some in meditation, some in crying for a vision, some through ritual and magik.  Sometimes it was simple and unencumbered by belief or dogma. Now the wheel has made full turn in my life and a spark is kindled into a flame.  All of this is turning around me, so busy and seemingly important. And yet, the purpose is in helping me to realize who and what I am.  I am this central point of awareness that is in and out of time.  I am learning to tap this higher self and as I do, it helpes me to release material that is no longer necessary that was a condition of belief or of maya as some would say.  This is the illusion, which I call creation.  The purpose of the creation is like Picasso's saying that the purpose of art is to lie to help you to see the truth.  And so it is with our lives here.  I am a central point always. When I slow down and realize this, the awareness enlarges and I am suddenly feeling something again that is so certain and so strong.

When you can feel this cnetral point of awareness, it feels as though the world is turning around it.  It is the same effect that you get when someone films a movie by holding a camera and points it at themselves as they walk around in the world.  The one constant is the person being filmed and the world looks like it is moving around them as they remain almost stationary.  Try to feel into this from time to time and if you feel a curious sense of energy moving through you, an excitement, a flow, it could be a sign that you are on to something.  it is easy to lose because the world demands so much attention through the five senses, but as you keep at it, you will be able to feel it more and more.  This is not a race, darlings, this is your "journey" as you watch the world move around you.  But this is not as passive an exercise as you might think.  Let that notion go for a time so you can feel into it.  It is another station of awareness that can help you a lot in relating to your surroundings in a new and very useful way.  As you feel into this you connect with this higher self awareness.  You might even bump u against other versions of yourself, or find yourself learning things about yourself that you had not known about previously.  It can be a simple and very private experiment that you can do that can lead to a more expanded form of awareness.

There is no world for you to go to ; you already are there.  It is IN you.  Nothing "out there" has first existed as some condition of your being.  Heaven is not out there, the spirit world is not out there.  It is all inside of you.  "Seek ye the kingdom within" was his admonition, and he knew of which he spoke.  You might have visions of burning bushes but they all emerge from within you.  Reality here is a group creation that is sustained by all of us, and yet while some have certain notions of how it works, you can find it behaving in very different ways.  You can ask and you will receive.  Sometimes, often for me, it comes right to my door.  Much I have bidden comes to me because I now know that I do not have to do in order to be.  If something is needed, it can often come through means other than my own doing.  How it works is simple.  It is in you.

The joy is in you, the wonder and love and creative fire and fulfillment.  The quality of all of it is up to you.  How you color it, how you choose to gloss it, is all your own making.  Heaven is a moment by moment choice and the realm of spirit is all around you.  You do not need to go anywhere, simply realize who you are.  This also has the curious effect of helping to eliminate suffering, too.  Our purpose her is to simply realize who we are.  And when we do that, the scene changes and we are on to the next round of lessons.  Some are unable to remain in their bodies.  the vibration is simply different.  They match something else.  And it is okay.  It is as it should be.  We overcome the world when we overcome the glitches in ourselves that have kept the truth from us.  None of this is some rule-based world but a very simple realization of what is.  And what is is what you are.

All points are accessible from where you are.  All space warps around you as can time and other things.  What will you see, what will you experience with such knowing in you, now bursting out all around you with a joy born of the great eternal child in you?  Until then, I offer my blessings to you for a rich and fulfilling experience.

Gabriel

I am something of a fan of Peter Gabriel. His words touch upon the essence of this experience and speaks plainly and beautifully of the spirit of knowing.

So here is a live performance that is one of the best available of his work.  I know it might be beside the point, but it is a good one, and we all need a little music every once in a while.

Fear & Kundalini

From time to time I notice the search terms that are used to find the site.  All of it is an anonymous, just so you know, and from time to time I notice some things that show up from time to time.

I have written about fear before, and how this affects our experience of awakening, also known as the force that we call kundalini.  It is very easy to see this as some outside force coming into us, and I know how this can create fear.  There are many accounts about this experience of fear.  I don't know that I am so good at explaining how to eleviate your fear, except to use myself as an example as well as to mention how others have dealt with it.

Fear is a funny curious thing.  It is like a creature that stalks us at the edge of the wood, and the more we give in to it, the more it has us.  The more it has us, the more we are IT.  The way out of fear is by simply letting it go and doing what we can to see things differently.  Sometimes, this is achieved through a simple act of acceptance.  Other times, it might mean facing fear, and other times, it is by way of some other method.  But whatever the means, it is all very useful and productive for you because fear fragments while its opposite, love, unifies. Our purpose I believe is to seek love and know ourselves in our highest possible light.

For me, in the end, dealing with fear was a simple letting go.  This letting go led to still more surrender, and surrender pretty well became the path.  Whenever I was most succesful in reaching the divine within was when I surrendered the most.  It is very much is like falling back into someone else's arms whom you are not completely sure is even there to catch you.  It isn't that trusting in the universe is a noble trait, it is more that when you DO trust the universe to catch you and support you, it has a way of wrapping itself around that need or hope or belief or want.  If you can be clear about this, like a crystal clear stream whose depths can be seen in the most certain of ways, you can be assured that it will do as you need.  Let nothing intervene between your hope and its manifestation, and it will cohere to your intent as you had hoped for it.  It has to do with what you believe and how you feel, which also includes the material that is shoved off to the side for the time being.  All of this creates an energetic snap shot and all of that material is used to create the picture, the projhection or manifestation.  I have likened manifesting to being like channeling the energy of the divine through you like water through a garden hose....except we have bits of dirt, our karmas that cling to the insides of this hoese.  We get upset when that water comes out muddy, but its just the karma mixing in with the divine, and HOW you ask and pray for is also the sum total of all that you are in your energy body and being.  If you do not like how things are turning out, you need only begin to get curious about what is inside of you.  I promise that it can be a wonderfully liberating experience and is THE work we have set before us.  Once we can refine ourselves in this way then we will see what we want and what is manifest as being much closer to one another.  Time to let those old issues fall away.  They were hitchhikers to your happiness, ultimately derailing your trip and sending you into uncertain places where you asked yourself each time "Why on earth do I always wind up in the swamp lowlands of my being like that?  Why do I always respond the same way to that stuff???".  This is the language of the cosmos and of every realm you will enter into in countless lives and realities, so being able to catch the little slurs in your cosmic speech will help you greatly in helping to bring you what you want, need, and ardently wish for (and I for one can attest that once the barriers are removed it can happen INSTANTANEOUSLY).  Knowing this and using this in the simplest childlike way will mean that good things become automatic.  There is no need to fear unless you have a need for fear.  And only then does it have you.  Like a dog who senses fear, it only reacts when you yourself allow yourself to feel into this place.

Kundalini is a powerful force that wells up within your awareness.  So big and strong it is, it can seem as though it is crashing into your life.  Certainly this appears to be so.  And perhaps there is some truth to this perception, but it does not change the fact that if you see it as part of you, the going gets much easier.  Consider for a moment that you are way more than you have up to this moment realized.  Larger parts of you might well seem as though a force as moving from the outside of you to crash into your life like some powerful rhino seeking to charge you.  But this is only because of how you choose to perceive.  If you let go of the fear and stand before it as it seeks to charge you, watch what happens.....or what doesn't happen.  You are an immortal child of the universe, so nothing can truly hurt you.  The unknown has a way of changing, too, depending on how you relate to it.  As long as you see it as a force form the outside, it will remain this way. There are certainly plenty of outside voices that seek to place fear and uncertainty in the path simply because they themselves are uncertain.  Do you wish to mirror that uncertainty, or do you wish to mirror something more productive?  In the end, it is a choice that you alone make.  If you are honest with yourself and keep your eyes open you will find that awakening is not some strange spirit, but is native to each culture that exists on the planet.  It has filled the pages of books written by Christian mystics as well as Hindu adepts.  It spans the globe and is not the property of one religious path or faith.  In the end, like surrender, following your own instincts will serve you best.  When you are ready, you will be ready.

The path becomes easier and also miraculous once fear is lain aside.  Your experience can broaden and your depth of feeling can also emerge in degrees.  Your own capacity for inner knowing will also be unleashed as your own intuitive capabilities are naturally allowed fuller rein.  Love unifies the self.  Fear fragments.

So you might want to ask yourself the nature of your fear.  You have this genie inside of you that can guide you to the deeper parts of your feeling and if you allow yourself to be led and sink down into it with the curiosity of a child, you might just wind up feeling the root of your fear.  It is in the root that we are most successful in resolving old issues that have remained troublesome for us.  This is the great work that we do for ourselves, an essential honoring of the divinity within all things.  We pull back the layers of fear, which I tend to feel is the illusion some teachers speak of in order to reveal our more fundamental natures.  If it helps, think about what it was like to be a child.  It is in that simple curiosity that the mind is not swayed one way or the other, but is so full of curiosity and wanting to know how the world works.  If you rely on your old biases, you can color your awareness so that it makes it hard to know the truth.  The truth is in feeling your own sparkling possibility.  We know that when we have people imagine being like children that our brains actually change as we become naturally more creative and open to things. So much of being a child is about being open, but as we grew we also took on the fear and bias that was the world.

The result of fear is that it draws more of itself to you, which is what I'd like to say the fear in others.  Then, what you have is a landscape or a portrait of all the people in your life that are assembled in your life due to, in part, with this fear. This also attracts lower level entities as well, the dark-eye dogs of the spirit world.  These are not dragons to slay even though some would say that this is what we are to do.  We simply forgive ourselves for not understanding, for not remembering that we are limitless and thus, shoould have NOTHING to fear.  I don't even mean a boasting belicose kind of bravado, but a very simple quiet certainty about where your roots lie in the garden of the divine.  Once you do this and allow yourself to sink deep into yourself and felin into that place where these things lie, you can begin to get to its roots.  I promise you have to open yourself way up and allow yourself to let go completely of its roots.  When you accomplish this, it will change you in an instant.  It also never comes back.  Whatever was spent in fear is now turned to bliss.  It is like having the hard drive of your soul getting riddled with viruses that slow its functioning down.  Once the energy flow is restored, you could not believe why you spent so much time on fear or hurt or pain.

You have to believe in yourself.  Again, not egoistically, but certainly.  You have to know that you are beautiful, not in spite of someone else who does not share your view but because you can feel the part of you that touches lips with the divine within.  Search for that and take great joy and pleasure in that place.  It is where all authentic healing springs.  I cannot underestimate that enough.  Feel into your bliss ever deeper and ask what it is that you need to assist in removing.  This is a strip down to the last, and you mustn't feel funny about standing naked before the great sea of bliss which is your primordial home.  Jesus, in a lesser known text (gnostic) said to followers who asked how they were to reach the kingdom, he explained that they were to trample their shame like children trampling a cloak on the ground, naked and without shame.  Then, when you do this, you will know the kingdom.  It is certain that the kingdom, as expressed through the lesser known "heretical" documents of the early Christians also called Gnostics, that the kingdom was awakening itself.  You can perhaps appreciate how far we veered from the original teachings, and how we each can wind up in the lesser places of ourselves.

We all need forgiveness.  We need to not be judged.  Wouldn't that be so nice to have in life all the time?  People who only want us to improve instead of wanting to play whack-a-mole?  It's the fear of being judged that can keep some people in their holes hiding out and flying under the radar.  But this was not something that was meant to hide for any reason but to arch its great heart to the sky.  Step into the light and feel the wonder that is you and that is the universe!

All my greatest wishes for you, to you, in your journey on this marvelous planet.

Layers

This experience is one of layers.

The Light Body is seemingly switched on, and with it comes awareness.  With it is a churning effect of the energy of awakening. 

At first, I felt the material fall away quite easily.  These were like the dry buds of a flower. I could feel the energy helping me do this.  I did not have to do anything, they just went.  I was keenly aware that if I was to do anything, it was to observe the things that were being sent on their way.  I recognized them, blessed them, and they were gone.  Just like that.  I could feel myself lighten more. I could feel channels within opening up.  I felt clearer.  Happier.  The energy could be felt deeper.  I felt like something was burrowing into me.  Through the layers. 

I am not one who believes in a process, but I know that this can be very much a process.  I do not contradict myself.  The authentic opening is a process, yes, but in seeking to apply some outside process or method, this does not work necessarily. What works is letting go. This is what it is all about.  The more you can do this, the better things have been.  It is said that the energy must go from root to crown in order for the energy to be raised properly.  Once kundalini or awakening stirs in you, I think it is difficult to not have it change you.  So changed, how can things ever be the same?  the yeanring, the ultimate one, is the love of the divine.  It pulls you along on an ox cart at first through endless towns and experiences until the ox cart becomes a chariot and sets you down by a vast ocean.  This is where it all began, this is where it all begins.  The problem with cleaving to some method or teaching is you could miss some important points.  For example, Awakening does cause a stirring, but it is not always linear.  it is not always so orderly.  It can be orderly, but it can be just what it needs to be, you see?  So trust.  Also, as it goes from root to crown and clears out on its first complete pass, it can begin all over again.  This is just the outer layers. You go deeper and deeper each time.  So on one pass you might have some trouble with one chakra or center in the body in the release of associated energy or karma or knots in that chakra only to find that once the course has been run, you are back in that same chakra again.  What happened?  Didn't I just win some great victory in my life letting of of this material months before only to wind up back in the place again?

Feel into yourself.  Ask yourself if this is the same chakra or the same issue.  In each chakra there are many layers.  Like an onion.  As you work along, you might even have images of layers.  I did.  I had image after image of layers surrounding people, like dense cloaks, many layers. The trick was to burrow down through them all.  Like ripples on the ocean, there are rings or layers.  So do not feel defeated if you wind up in the same place again.  The trouble or issue wont be the same as before.  It will be different.  It might be associated by virtue of what that center aligns to energetically, but it is like a series of dimensions or rooms one nesting inside the other.  Layer by layer you do this releasing as you come closer and closer to something miraculous. Outward these rings expand in ever greater or broader dimensions, into more refined territory of being.  Each layer has the chakra energy flowing or shining through it and yet each layer will have different material.  This is all your awareness.

This is how it is.  This is not a race, it is what you are.  As you move along, you refine more and more.  It is endless.  It is infinite.  There is no end to you, there is no end to this.  There is nothing but a great adventure awaiting you.  It is a discovery of your authentic self. 

So let yourself peel back.  Let those veils or layers fall away.  They are petals that no loner carry life.  Let the suffering of your soul no longer be.  This, I remind myself each and every day.  I hum it in my mind, I think it, I am absorbed by it and am absorbed into it.  It is my prayer, a constant state of being and seeking.  Always returning to the inner self, to the self beyond time and space yet existing within it.  This self is absorbed by love and is love.  The path through this is forgiveness.  When you can forgive yourself and no longer point to something outside yourself as the cause, you will speed along.  Accept your part, and when you do, you will also trigger awareness of what you are as divine. 

Whatever path you take, whatever you believe or decide is true, I wish you the very best of journeys. 

The Coming of Gnosis

I didn't know what was happening to me.  Its name blew right over my head.  I was consumed by this thing, it was consumed with me.  Instantly I knew things....as if intuition had been opened and the shut off valve was lost in the dark. 

I lay there in the bed at night, the warm and cool currents pulsing through me in what I could feel was a type of rhythm. Someone said no, it is a flow....but I felt it as a pulse.  Always a pulse from one moment to the other, the same as how all energy is expressed as infinite potential from zero point to infinity.  My awareness, I knew, made the size of the pulse possible.  The pulse was infinite.  I had no idea how to get to the infinite but I sonsidered it was by way of a very different method.  Like an empty head.  Let the universe step in and do the work.

I was drenched with this powerful desire. This was so strong it changed my understanding of what Buddha had said that all desire is a path to suffering.  True, desire, born of negative karma will always create suffering, with that I wholeheartedly agree.  But buddha said nothing of what happens when desire is released from its negative karma irons.  What then?  I think I will have to hold that jewel in my pocket for a while longer.....

I had seen many years ago during a [artial out of body experience a woman standing by my bed.  As I began to project outward I saw the roof of the house open up to the sky.  This sky was not the night sky even though it looked like the night sky.  Each dot, each star, was a soul, and it was looking down on me.  What I felt as I opened up into that starry sky of souls was this flood of energy which I recognized as being the same as I felt on that night. It was so strong, it was scary.  It seemed SO much stronger than anything I could have imagined.  Part of me was saying I had to trust this, that this was the universe.  It was so strong that it was hard to keep focused on what I was doing.  As I fell back into bed, I saw a woman beside me.  She was near my head and I observed how her whole body was made up of a network of light.  I felt her calm presence for a while and then drifted into sleep.

Lying in bed with this light shining through me I saw the image again and knew that this was how all people are ordered.  This was the light body.  It is made up of endless strands, some so small that they cannot be seen.  It is as though every single atom is connected to one another and up from there still larger strands are there to help bridge ever greater organizations of matter and energy into a matrix that is the living body.  These lines crossed and criss-crossed.  At each point there was a burst of energy, and as this fibrous bundle grew in complexity, it created ever larger forms of energy lines until the chakras are formed. 

Lying there in the night I was shown how these lines of force naturally merge in the center line of the body in the same way that nerves or veins went from the smallest to the largest. Energy organized itself in accord to vibration in the body just as the main chakras contain an over riding vibration that makes up the totality of our experience of the cosmic life force in our awareness here on earth.  There are two currents that exist in everything and the universe was built on this.  It is the yin and yang.  You will see it in how energy operates and you will see it in magnetic spin and orientation of physical bodies in space, via gravity and electromagnetics.  It is present in our consciousness and in the consciousness of all matter whether sentient or not.  This simple principle is what ties and holds everything together.  It is in you.  Bringing into your awareness the knowledge of the two polarities leads to integrating them in the body.  It changes everything around you.  Mountains will move if you but say move.  There is more for us to know, to anchor, to become.  It is all waiting for you within you. 

Two currents merge into one larger current at a point in the light body that is in the brain.  This took longer to see, years in fact.  The two energy bodies that are on each side of the body switch and as they do, the cross, creating a powerful point of connection in the brain area, near the crown.  This cross is energetic, but it has informed out nervous system and brain so that one hemisphere directs the opposite side of the body.  This is the point of merging that creates the circuit in the body.  This integration of the circuit is what is necessary to all life.  The two cannot be unhooked from one another as they are a totality within the other.  Your body reflects that. 

Gnosis came and continues to come.  Knowledge can be yours.  You need only empty your mind so that it can be filled. 

In the weeks and months that followed dreams would become more vivid, downloads of information would come, knowing filled me.  I would find many years later how in the Hindu tradition that they have the same energy I saw on that night mapped in extreme detail.  Ancient knowledge filled me, setting up a store house built on the flow of gnosis from this deep source within.

Sacred Man

You want to know who he is so you may find him to make him yours.  He is the sacred man, the lover of your soul, the brilliant creature that will bear you to that place where all your dreams will come true.  But you should not look for him outside, for he is not there.  He is instead living in every man, but often lies so deep that he is not known in our world. Living in each man is the sacred man, and his flesh makes up the flesh of each man, regardless of what you think he is or is not. 

Just knowing this is enough to bring him out. He has been hiding for a long time.  In fact, he has been hiding just as long as the sacred woman has been hiding.  This is the condition of the world.  We are all this.  We are all one family of very scared people who have grown to fear love. To be love means you have to open up, and this is very scary indeed.  We have reasons galore that illustrate how opening only led to hurt.  We tell ourselves in the silence of our empty beds that opening up in this way is dangerous and must be avoided at all costs.  Even those who espouse opening up themselves are fearful of the hammer coming down. We are a world of fearful people who have their finger on a bottle that holds a genie inside.  We might KNOW that the genie is inside, and we might even SAY that we need to let him or her out, but in truth, it is easier not to.  It is safer. Just yesterday I was discussing the world of energy with some people involved in medicine in order to highlight how important I think it is to bring compassion to the medical field even in the face of this tendency some have to view people more like machines that need to be worked on.  the lesson in it was not to become attached to patients.  If you care too much, you will only hurt.  So the world grows harder and more caloused by the day.  These people remarked that I ought to have a show that talked about all of this.  I explained that I could read energy, that we ALL could....and that in seeing it, it might help people in the medical profession in many unseen ways.  I responded by pulling back, of feeling a twinge of fear.  if I had a show like that, I considered, people might think I was just a kook.  My fear is in not being understood. Fear.  And it bars us in some way from love.  Not love from others, although this certainly can happen, but from the one love that matters most.  I wont even say that this is a love that is us, even though it is.....it is more like the force that causes rivers to flow or the wind to blow.  It is wild and it is free and it is also powerful. It is freely given and spreads out through a garden like sunshine drenched on every leaf.  Why, the sun does not deicde which leaf will get to feel its touch.  No!  It is freely given.

And so we need to be more like this.  We need to come out of our shells, wake up and see that it is a new day.  Surely.  And when we do this I think we want to naturally support the very best in people instead of pointing to faults or shortcomings.  The Sacred Man has a gaze that burns all of that away.  It is just too much of a time waster.  In Him lies a great pulse of life that will shine through everything and will be one part of the knitting back of our world.  His voice will be in the stars at night, and his warmth will be like that of the sun. you will feel his shower of photons upon you, each small particles of realization of how things must be.  He carries a dizzying pulse of bliss that begs to be released.  He is a lover beyond words.  He is startling in his approach and swift in his decision. His touch is perfect and his gaze is steady.  But the only way he can be is if you too are anchored in the same kind of place.  It is a funny thing; he can be all around you, but you will only know Him when you yourself wake up to what he is already within you. 

He is one half of the world that we know.  He knows he is not the whole world and honors the other half.  He does not have to fear making mistakes.  He is utterly without actions that could lead to such things.  He has resolved into the most basic and fundamental of ways to be.  He is pure radiance.  Enter into his light if you dare, or feel his radiance falling all around you.  He seeks the other half of what he knows that he is growing to become. 

His presence is in every quivering leaf, every brook, deer, apple and dust mote in the stillness of space.  His essence is found in everything that is, that ever existed, and while you may go look for him as a singular entity, you will be captured by his multiplicity, perhaps confounded by it.  Each man that is carries him in him.  Are they the same?  This is difficult to explain.  We are all individual and universal.  He is certainly there in an almost parental way to us, but he takes so many forms.  Somewhere the essence resolves back to an origin as his many faces spread out like a vast tapestry.  How each man is serves as the filtering device that colors and shapes how his face has come to be known.  He can be many things, and his waters run deep and mix into so many different currents that it is enough to cause the mind to boggle.  What we know of him, though, is largely fragmentary in some respects, for he does not yet exist in totality on the planet.  there are those of us that are learning how to channel his presence so that he may bring what is his own gift to the world.  When you stand before him in this way when he is being brought into the moment, the world changes into a magical place.  Even as a woman who can channel the deep currents of her own sacred She brings a new caste and color to a room or world by her simply being Her, so too does this Sacred Man light up the room.  he is quiet and unassuming.  He can even go unnoticed if you don't know what to look for. 

But for those who can touch their own masculine within that is the Sacred Man, there comes ripple of energy so purely made of bliss, so potent and expectant and ready, it is as if a curtain is suddenly pulled back on the world.  It is little wonder that we have wrapped stories of gods around this man.  We do this to try and capture something that is transcendent.  In doing so, though, we also lose it. The story becomes more like a bookmark; it is a reminder of what we all know deeper down as the story of our own souls.  As we begin to remember, we also tend to tease him out of the cosmic matrix of being.  He shows up.  He glistens in the light.  He is made new by our expectation or intent. And there is nothing more rewarding for those who know how to bear him to this world.  It isn't even that it is a point of pride.  It isn't about that at all. There is no pride in it.  There is bliss.  this bliss is so strong it literally bleaches out all of the heavier considerations as all goes to white light.  He will eventually resolve back into forms that have no form, into light, then a golden glimmer, and then nothing.  Nothing, I say, except feeling.  He goes back to the primordial beginning of beginnings.  He is there like a King with his Queen. 

This is a part of what the divine is in all of us.  He ripples and grows within the awareness of the Collective Consciousness of the race.  He is turning and growing in strength as one by one, men will learn of his great secret, which they will find are their own secret.  this secret will become manifest moment by moment.  A new way of being will be revealed when the time is right.

The Life Of A Book

Books are funny things.  They hold something of value between page one and the back cover, are incredibly challenging to put together, require numerous edits, go from great to terrible at the tip of a hat, and then wander back into wonderful just as mysteriously sometimes....and on top of that, the book has to be put into a process where it is "shopped" to various publishers.  Some of the greatest books of all time had dozens of rejections.  These stories are legend.

I took the step recently of finding someone who I think is well suited for helping me to polish this book so that it can have the greatest chance of being accepted by a publisher.  It is a daunting task since when I presented the manuscript to the editor she explained that because my margins were wide and my font and spacing was small, what had been a 350 page edit job with 350 pages remaining after the clearing away of material still resulted in my having a 500 hundred page book given a standard "cut" or size.  I swallowed hard and decided I wasn't going to let the applecart get upturned.  So I need to now cut this work down in HALF.  Again.

Amazing.

This book has been a lifework in a sense.  It has charted my awakening and has been there for the discoveries made along the way that I think will help bring more depth and dimension to our understanding of the process of awakening.  Maybe that is a bit of hubris on my part, but there are some key elements that I am pointing out in the book that I think will help us all in getting a slightly better grip on all of this from the beginning as well as the deeper waters once we are ready to begin the process of shedding the dross, of letting go and "doing" what it is we most need to do, which is learning to love and BE love.  This means being able to surrender.  Reaching new heights certainly involves this as part of the catalyst towards powerful change.  So I am hopeful that I can go back into the book as it is and extract the most essential and trim this down even more.  I am mulling the ways to do this now in an unhurried way.  I don't want the book to be trimmed down to the point where it feels clipped or too short.  Whatever it winds up being in the end will most likely need to be an entree into other books on the same subject.  The first book really needs to knock it out of the park, though, if you are going to get another book published anytime soon.  the truth is, there are thousands of books that wind up not being accepted.  The case must be made for why this work is so special that it deserves to be on the shelves of hundreds of thousands of people across the world.  It is that kind of daunting. So you do your best, and whatever happens happens.  For me, the focus isn't even on that right now.  I am more focused on honoring the process I went through and developing it into a story that helps to point out important aspects and elements of the awakening process.  This need not be something that is out of the reach of regular people, and it isn't -  given how many people are waking up today.

The truth is, I have been a very visual person for most of my life.  I have had trouble with words.  they have been so limiting to me....I can say so much more with an image. that old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is entirely correct.  But now I have to make words say what I so need them to say.  I have to turn myself inside out and remake what I am and make it come off effortless.  It has to be a masterwork regardless of who picks it up to publish or even if I wind up self publishing.  The bottom line here is I believe in what it is I am doing so much that I am willing to do all of this just in order to get the story out in front of you.  If I can go at it that way, then I willhave the oomph to push this to where it needs to go.  For now, it is my story.  I often think how I would write it so that if one of my children were to undergo this, what would I want most to tell them, to impart that would help them the most? In a way this book Is for my children; for all of those who lean into the unknown in order to feel the breeze of the new filling them.  If I am going to do that, each mark and stroke will have to matter while keeping my own authentic voice.  

It's a mystery.  But it is the only one that satisfies me, brings me focus, salvation, aid and hope.  It is me turned into a message written on the cave wall, the stelle, the papyrus or in the stars.  It is going to be just what it needs to be and it is now time to take this to the next level and seek to give the book its voice even as I take away parts that keep it from feeling ponderous.  You really can say too much.

As Fall gives way to Winter, I pray for clear eyes, clear skies, and a nice warm bed where I can sit for hours on end with this great secret of a book until it is finished and as good as I can make it for what it needs to be.

Good night all of you....

A Radical Thought

When you read up on the experience of non duality there is a state of awareness that exists where you become aware of a vast endless ocean of a place, some have called the Tao.  This is known and commented about and the accounts are all pretty much the same. It is a formless kind of place, immersed in feeling and beyond all material existence.  This is a place of pure potential, a vast ocean of bliss.  In the works of the Savaists it is often referred to as an ocean of milk, so called because it resembles a field of orgasmic energy out of which all phenomenon flows.  This shows up in the iconography of the Hindu Shiva who has a small fountain coming out the top of his head which is in truth a seminal projection. This semen flows most often either onto the mountains where it flows like a river in small rivulets to the sea or is sometimes flowing over a small altar that depicts the masculine and feminine forms together as one.  This is so depicted because of how the energy of the cosmos feels. Because most people who experienced this were men, it has been quite natural for this depiction to have the associations that it does.  This is why also that there is this idea that seminal fluid is actually distilled into pure prana and allowed to rise up through the spine to the brain.  This is perhaps the most impossible of feats since medicine has established, without a doubt, that the nervous system and the vascular system do not cross.  It is described this way, though because of how it FEELS.  It FEELS like this fluid moving up in the body.  In fact, some practitioners (even today) teach the process of something called sublimation, which they believe is the transformation of seminal fluid into pure pranic energy which can then be used for healing and other work involving ascension.  While the specifics of this may be way off base, the essential sense of it is correct because while this is most certainly NOT seminal fluid (or cervical fluid for that matter) but simply an energy so potent that it FEELS like fluid moving in us that it gets described in this way. This should tell you how powerful and tangible these energies are, and when you feel it moving in your own body, you would swear that this is indeed the case.  Regardless of what you believe, even if you DO believe that you have seminal fluid running up your spine, you can work with this energy as it presents itself to you through visualizing it in just about ANY way that allows you to relate to it on a personal and visceral level, and since prana is itself intelligent, it will respond to your thoughts and feelings.  I am pointing this out because we create all kinds of images for a phenomenon that is entirely nonmaterial.  This, as you will see, is an important point to bear in mind as I move along.

This realm is one where there is no action.  The energy is like a highly distilled substance, a great inexhaustible ocean of energy from which we draw.  There are those who say there is nothing to do here other than to merge into the deity beyond the deity,  and that is that.

I am accustomed to digging into these things and feeling them out and asking new questions and seeking answers we may have missed.  I was once a heyhoka, a term used to describe someone who had had a dream or vision of the thunder beings.  What was so important about the heyhoka was how they struck to the center of things to ferret out their core essence.  Their hearts and souls were the lightening striking that cracks open reality and reveals in that sudden flash of knowing the center of how things are.  As an artist, I am always asking what is at the core of things?  Where does an idea emerge and how is it aligned in terms of its larger expression in the world?  We have the capacity to see in these ways, and for me it means reaching that place where things become startlingly simple and direct.  For me, some things really are very simple. Most of what we see in the world is a jumble of misunderstood things, covered in illusory matter or distortions.  How do we dig deep and find the gold lying deeper within? As an artist, this fits in very well with what I do, which is asking questions about tradition and why we choose to accept the forms and images and symbols that we do. Lying at the core of symbols is also consciousness. How we align to certain imagery also explains a lot about how we are aligned to the divine.

I seriously do feel that all of life is ordered on the yin and yang principle and as such, even the smallest particle is itself a twin of a larger form of consciousness which is itself twinned.  This twin is the yin and yang, the feminine and masculine currents that run straight through everything.  I say masculine and feminine, but these forces grow so broad that they could constitute forms that would not appear to us as being the feminine and masculine we are used to knowing here on the planet.  I would argue that this force is what gives rise to everything and so the deity itself is not some dude hanging out in the hills or clouds but is the very essence of the divine circuitry that requires a continuity with these two poles in order for it to work.  think of it like a magnet or a battery or an electrical circuit.  The energy cycles from one pole to the other.  At no point are these two forms really separate at all even though they give rise to phenomena that might seem distinguishable to our very dual perception and egos which are very good at the task of identifying, sifting, and drawing out one object from a vast field of objects. Conversely, this is why when the ego recedes, we are able to experience vast forms of consciousness and where we can touch the Tao or this ocean of vast potential.  So given this sense I have, I have something for you to consider and see where it takes you.

This vast realm of potential energy is much like the masculine in a way.....it is this pulse of pure energy that seeks some resolution or manifestation.  It is seeking the other side of itself, which is the feminine pole of itself.  In many stories, we often tend to think of a male deity form as existing in this place, somehow separate, off in the mountains or in the clouds.  This notion is not entirely out of place, even if it is itself something of a distortion of the facts.  But for the sake of understanding or relating to this vastness, consider that this sea of milk is indeed the bliss of the masculine.  There is nothing to be done here, certainly if you believe in the way that many have offered thus far. There is nothing that happens here, though, for the endless energy is in a sense incomplete, not yet reaching its fullest potential.....it is just endless bliss and that is good in its own way, but there is more to the story and this is where a very radical thought enters in.

Consider that the essence of all creation is to experience fulfillment by learning to create.  The act of creation is something that marks humans as special, as beings that have evolved to realize this capacity in their natures. But even on the individual level, if you understand the creative impulse, you will know that even in your own self, in your own body, you are bursting at the seams with the yin and yang energy entirely involved in the engine that is the very source of all creation.  Ying and yang energy in you, and in me; in all of us?  Yes.  Even in your brain, which is part of the massive system that helps to store, retrieve and then generate new ideas, you must first have BOTH the left and right hemispheres in your brain working in unison.  The left is very different from the right, and yet without them both we are not as effective creators. 

We know that when people are being creative they activate centers ALL OVER the two-lobed brain.  And these two lobes are VERY much mirrors of the masculine and feminine.  In fact, we tend to refer to them as the masculine left and the feminine right lobes.  If you know how the divine feminine works, there is nothing that could not be a better mirror for HER than the right brain.  And yet, without her partner, the left brain, who can take things apart and put them back together, who can see the tree instead of the forest, this VERY masculine left lobe is able to take the vastness that is the feminine and help to make some sense of it in a form-based way.  It is kind of interesting, too, that the feminine takes what the masculine provides or contributes, breaks it down in the same way that the ovum breaks down the sperm in the woman's body in order to utilize HIS contribution in the creation of new life. A very similar thing happens even in spiritual work, and as you dig into this you can feel the essence of it like a cord holding all of these very beautiful beads on a necklace.  You might be dealing with physical life which appears very different from creating an idea, but the principles are very much the same in ESSENCE. 

BOTH masculine and feminine are in on this act of creation in this magnificent engine that IS creativity.  It happens in our bodies when we make new life and it happens in our bodies when we are creating some new idea.  The effect is the same, or at least VERY similar.  What I am getting around to telling you is that the very radical thought here is that while we all can experience the Tao of endless potential, it is like admiring the feminine or masculine all by themselves.  You are gazing or marinating in only ONE side of a very vast and powerful cosmic coin.  I argue that in order to know divinity both within and "without" we have to go from potential to manifestation.  I say that when we do this we have made the full cycle from one end of the divine consciousness to the other.  Potential without manifestation is "useless" in a way.  Feel inside yourself.....it is a calm quiet place. 

I know; some want to say that this is merely ego wanting to get in on the act by creating something, but first I would say no it isn't and yes it is.  Ego is ALWAYS there, even those who believe they have squashed it like a bug. This is the error.  But beyond ego is also something more.....and it is here that we can know our creative potential in a much broader and much more empowered way.  It is also very beautiful if you can go at it like a child.  Don't worry if ego is in on it.  Ego is always there.  It always will be.  It is just one tool in your vast toolbox of parts.  It is not any more important than any other aspect of yourself and as long as you know how to use the tool without worshiping your tools like the end-all of who you are, you are in a very good place to go into this next "field" of being in a more mature and wise way.   I am going to suggest as an aside that this potential must then exits in all life, even non sentient  since it too is part of a divinity that is at its root creative.  What I am going to suggest to you is that up until you feel into this vast field of bliss, all you are feeling IS potential.  You are not feeling what the deity or Creator felt when it brought this vast field into actualization (or some part of it) You are only experiencing it in its state of rest prior to manifesting (or creating).  Because we are "it" in miniature form,  as individuals carved from the larger block of the divine, our task is also to draw off this energy in order to create. When potential energy meets intent, manifestation begins its FIRST leg of manifestation.  To reach full manifestation or creation, itmust also move through the feminine.  The feminine must be brought into this, and the feminine is so often seen as that force that births the world of things into being.  She is alone able to bear the spark of the masculine into its fullest potential.  Without her, "he" is merely up in those clouds very frustrated, very full of potential, and certainly probably more than just a little frustrated!   I say this in a joking way, but also in a very serious way because when creation is short circuited, frustration emerges as a very natural result.  When you look at epochs where one sexual characteristic predominated you also see a drift into distortion and even madness.  We NEED both sides of the coin in order to realize the fullness of divinity.  We NEED to create.  Creating is NOT just an egoic activity but can become what it was meant to be; a fulfillment of the divine presence.  How it happens depends on what is being created.  In some cases you may be creating on object, a book, a poem, art work, a business, a family, an idea, or a new way to assemble a motor or a theory on how something in the world works. All of this is creative....just as all of life is creative.  But we do not know the full scope of creation until we ourselves take this bliss field and make it into something.  We do this all the time to form events and to bring all of our existences into some new day or level of fulfillment.  Divinity, I say, is not complete until this is done.

When we create we bring intent into the great mystery of the feminine.  It is in her energy that we can imagine vast realms or possibilities.  Her body is the world of phenomenon, she is the Mother of the world.  So as we bring this abstract form of bliss into the world, we are entraining the masculine into the feminine currents and the result is an explosion of ideas and inspiration.  In the same way that your own inner inspiration follows the balancing of the left and right hemispheres of your brain as we have learned that the brain has to do in order to invent and to become inspired, and just as the two hemispheres of the brain mirror the masculine and feminine aspects of our dual natures and the seemingly dual nature of the cosmos, we are effectively dealing with powerful energies that can help us to bring new forms into being.  This same cycle of manifestation can be seen in how babies are made in the physical, but it is also rooted in our bodies, our brains, in how the positive energy moves to the negative, how the hot moves to the cold in thermal dynamics, and how events are created through the circular energy that moves from the inception to manifestation.

Our understanding of divinity is incomplete until we learn the full circuit that this energy flows or follows.  As the two dance and move one through the other in what seems a dual movement, the truth is that the entire world is supported by endless cycles of this dance happening at very small scales and very large ones.  I am of the mind that you can see the result of their presence in all things.  It is a center point of the creator that is buried in everything.  It is a point with no point but many points, a giant dizzying hologram where one piece cleaved from the whole contains the entirety of the whole in its smallest most seemingly insignificant drop or sliver.

Here is where this act can be your teacher, so follow carefully......

What you create is not necessarily ascended master material. In fact, there is a lot that we have done in creating that has brought terrible nightmares.  We have certainly created this, but you see, it is a gift that we have that we can do this.  This is just how important freewill is, and you can learn from what you create by stepping back and looking at the ramifications or results that your own creations have had.  It is true that what you create will be a snap shot of all that you are in this moment, of what you are capable of conceiving and as a result, the material that you have not yet refined in yourself will affect HOW you create.  THis is the tricky part, because in the same way that a clod of dirt in a hose will color the water coming out of it, so too does your own unexamined and more subconscious material color what you create.  Until you bring awareness of these things, you are caught in a cycle of creating with what that dirt clod offers and attracts.  You create, and that creation itself has a magnetic quality attracting all manner of things.  If an artist, what you create will naturally attract a certain type of viewer or person to it.  The life you create does the same thing. If you do not like what you see in your life, look deep within because there is something there that is effecting what you create, even if it is not intentional.  Philip in his gospel (found in 1945 in the Nag Hammadi scroll cache) said that these things in us make us do what we do not want to do and keeps us from doing what we want to do.  So true.  And thus, what you create will be a mirror of all that you are right now, examined or not.  The trick here is to develop awareness of ourselves, to see beyond the dross to what could be or at the very least that there could be something different.  When you reach this place, you are in a perfect position to begin the work that will enable your own consciousness to glimpse broader realms of your own being and of the divine cosmic order.  As we do this, it is as though we realize that it is we who are spinning the web of our lives and can better be able to heal and make the change which will bring us closer to creator which also has the benefit of highlighting the creator within us all.  So no matter where you are in all of this, you are creating the web as you go.  If you can step back and learn from your life and what you create, you can learn to create anew.  You can utilize the world and your place in it for great learning opportunities.  to do this means you have to be very honest and also humble.  If you are headstrong and feel you KNOW how things are, you will be less open to what may have ben eluding you, the blindness that sets in around each of us at each and every moment so long as the blinders stay on.

The thing for me is to realize that this circuitry is right here and right now.  It gives me pause.  WHat did I create today?  Did I help others to help themselves or did I use misplaced compassion to get them to a place I thought they needed to be based on my own set of rules or operative directives?  Did I do what each great teacher does, which is to remind others what was already within them to know and then be a source of inspiration, or did I just parrot a bunch of techniques or traditions just because someone else says that is the way things are?  No matter WHAT I do, I will always be making decisions based on who and what I am.  In this, I can be or do no other.  I am also a being both limited and limitless.  What do I choose to create?  I have a certain span of time here on the planet.  What does my own ego find important? What does my higher self say is important?  How does all this mesh?  How do I strike a healthy balance between all these parts so all of me comes along with no part discarded but healed and brought into its higher realization?

Thales the Presocratic philosopher said that all things are full of gods.  I very much feel that he was expressing a deep truth to the workings of consciousness and the world which is that even in the tiniest thing, there is a larger expression throughout many boundless realms and realities.  If it is true that time is largely illusory, and if what I feel is true, then time spreads out like a vast blanket and we can only touch one point in the physical at one time (at this time).....and yet by looking left or right I can see what other portions of this blanket offers. Perhaps an atom has endless manifestations just as do we, that EVERYTHING that IS is bound up in this fulfillment cycle that is the very basis of creation.  I know that might be a bit much to take in especially if you are used to thinking about humans being the only ones with self determination, a soul, or the ability to reincarnate.  But what I see in the universe is that everything is of a piece.  It is all connected and it is the essence of this connection, of what lies within it that serves to connect it to everything else that is a consistency within all of creation.  THere are no exceptions.  Of course this is what I perceive, what I sense in the Tao and beyond. For as crazy as it may seem, I cannot discount it, and I rather think Thales was right and that he was not taken to idle speculation when he had so few things to say, which makes what he did say all the more important to at least consider.  And once you open your mind to this vast realm of possibility you are standing at the headwaters of a very powerful river which itself leads to an even more vast sea which in turn opens into an ocean which is touched upon by the boundless realm of space.  So as I create, those creations must then have their larger expression through the conical nature of consciousness.....creation which expands outward, or spirals outward and upward.

Buddha was fond of stating how what we do in life matters, what we create in each day is important.  I think he is right.  I think that the act of joining the field of potential to meaningful and conscious creation is the very model for knowing the divine.  For as much as we might want to discount one aspect in favor of another, they are all connected and move evenly together. When we do this, when we bring awareness to what it is we are doing here, we also shed some light on our own actions and thinking that go to make up the divine circuit that moves from intent or potential to manifestation or realization.  I don't think they are complete without each other and just as the particle and wave in physics expresses an aspect of the same thing, so too does potential and realization suggest the completion of the universe in one seemingly insignificant drop.  So the world unfolds like this wonderful canvas and we get to create upon it!  What do I get to create? What juiciness awaits?