Time Traveller

I dreamt last night that I had traveled through time and was meeting my past self as a 17 year old waiting to get on the bus.

How I managed to get back to that particular place and that particular time seemed like a miracle.  As I walked up to him I realized I didn’t know what to say to him, but there was a sense of very real urgency in all of this.  I had landed in this place standing in front of him moments before he would be on the bus, surrounded by people, and on his way to the next place. I was going to talk to him even as I walked up to him I didn’t know what it was I most needed to say. He saw me as I walked up to him and there was this odd moment where he thought I was someone else he recognized but realized I was not him and this led to a still more sudden realization of who I was a split second later.  I was going to talk to him, there was no question about it.  I felt the moment pressing down on me as though I had one page in a book to read and once I did that, it would evaporate from my eyes….

I held his face and said calmly and quietly that I was him…..but from the future.  I knew he would not freak because I knew he used to think about this stuff when I was his age. :-)

The one thing that I knew to tell him was how to see the woman he was in love with, and that if he waited here for a few moments more, he would be able to see her. The message was to love as much as you can.  I could have taken lottery numbers or news of impending war in our time, but in that moment the only thing that mattered was how to help him seize the day and honor love.

A Great Blog On Awakening

I came across the following blog recently and I think it is so well written, so clear, so considered and nondogmatic that I think everyone should know about it.

With the rise of awakenings on the planet, in perfect timing, there are as a result many voices rising to write, blog, create in various ways, with the force or power of awakening serving as their inspiration.  It is also not easy to do, or to do well.  I am constantly caught between crawling inside the microcosm of it seeking to describe every detail to being exploded out into the macrocosm of it and being completely at a loss as to what to even say or do.  I feel like I am circling the fire and trying to explain something that no one else sees, and yet once you see it, you KNOW it and cannot fully describe it at all.  Others who write about it often wind up with very similar sounding language or descriptions.  Our words very often are best when they are simple, straightforward, and sometimes poetic.  I can remember feeling into this and plucking out the word "essential self" only to find it was later used by so many in the community of the awakened.  Similar language abounds amongst those who are not broadly read in the older traditions, or even the newer ones for that matter.  This comes about because it is right...and we all all dip in our own ways into that vast pool of the collective that bears to us a thread of commonality.  Many voices, one voice.  

I give you:  Adapting to Grace.

The Love Level

You enter the world without an expectation of what love is.  No divisions.  Perfect.  A clean slate.  But.  Then love begins to be identified as being associated with certain people.  Love becomes a thing.  A thing you associate with people and things.  A chink in the armor grows and here the karma flows.  Perhaps it is made to do just that; to let in the secrets of the past, the hidden things that must be dealt with if we are ever going to get this thing right.

As long as love is for someone, it is something coming from our own set of expectations, and these will always be limited.  Just is.  So love is limited.  Since it is coming from us, it is also colored by our own projections, what we believe in our limited way what we think it is or can be.  We are then looking to another to fill the void.  We inch closer to something great and terrible.  We inch toward the end of the road where love is FOR something.  It isn’t about anything though. We are not a void.  This is the terrible lie we have told ourselves and we utterly believe it.  It seems that love is for or about something (it HAS to be, right?  Isn’t that what love IS?) , but it is a current so vast and unstoppable that it flows through all our kinks and contortions.  It just is.  It flushes all the dross along with it so we think it is ours.  It is the universe.  AND it is us.  It is way more than what we think it is, and it is an “it” that is not outside of us but is the very stuff of our souls. We were stamped by it, marked by its presence, made to recognize it when it comes like the thief that steals our clothing in the night, which makes us utterly naked to ourselves. It steals away our shame and shows us that all this piety and purity is a false-sense that we have clothed ourselves with.  Divine love first makes wrecks of us in truth, until we get back on our feet and begin following a different star.

We believed in the rigid intoning of long since dead priests and monks and mendicants because we told ourselves we did not know ourselves.  We needed a professional to get us there, and yet those professionals were the most lost of all souls because they believed they knew only made their conceptual corridors all the more rigid. And so you have to be careful even with me when I tell you what it is….because in truth it is only something you can know directly, but when you have gotten it, it transforms you from caterpillar to butterfly.  Until that happens, it makes a wreck of you.  What seemed a process of demolition was in truth the unbending character of love as a force.  It will not apologize to you or soothe you.  It will come into your life and it will wash away everything that does not belong to your soul that is not serving knowing ‘it.”  And this isn’t even done because it wants to get rid of all the dross that is not necessary in your life.  It does it the same way that the wind will knock limbs out of trees.  It didn’t do it out of spite or even intention.  It did it because of what it is and has always been.  And when you recognize this, then you can submit yourself for such cleansing and realize it is just what you need to do to more properly align to it and realize that where you align and feel it like a power like no other are the parts of you that are moving in harmony with it.  What we mistake it for is how we choose to express it.  Yes it makes us kind.  Yes it makes us want to be generous and considerate.  But you see, it is more than how it makes us respond.  It is a sentient force somehow….or SEEMS so, and perhaps it is only the force of the blood coursing through the veins of God/dess and we, like tiny cells somewhere in the kidney or skin take it to be some great presence that we want to idolize and personify.  It is a great mystery. Like the wind. We cannot see it, but we can feel it, and in feeling it, we can learn how to become it….and perhaps harness it.  But in harnessing it, we get a by-product don’t we?  And that is fine, perfect, wonderful to have this by-product, but for now I am pointing to the source.

And then it is felt.  It is this incredible surge of energy so strong it knocks you flat.  It makes you grow nauseous.  Not because it is sickening, but because it is stronger than anything you have ever felt, and your physical body has a little trouble translating the etheric energetic flow now moving through you straight from the center of the cosmic universe (think of how aware we are now of the great central sun of our own milky way galaxy right now as our solar system dips into a place where we are out of a dust cloud and receiving more direct radiation from the center of the galaxy—-it is warming the entire solar system up as the ice caps on Mars are now all gone and the earth and Neptune and Saturn all show definitive signs of warming…it is like that….this force flowing from the center of SOMETHING ineffable and mysterious and great).  And as you flow and loosen the kinks within, it only grows stronger.  It is coming out of you.  Not because of anything happening; simply because of what you are. You are now no longer resisting it, no longer keeping your finger in the dyke to keep back the rush of its waters (which would surely wash away all of your carefully constructed life….which is perhaps the point….yet we resist without even knowing it)  You are touching on the infinite within and it is waking up inside of you. It is so undivided your mind simply cannot make sense of it.  You really ought not do that.  Let it be.  Watch it like a cascading river in front of you.  It is a torrent that simply must be.  For as long as your mind will let you, let it be just this.  It seems to WANT to be here like this….but this is just my own observation….it may not even care…it may be so utterly unconditional that this is beside the point.

Then, learn to harness it in your highest. Not the easiest thing to do.  It is a hard task master because it has NO side.  It simply IS.  It takes no side.  This is hard for our delicate egos to deal with.  And yet, it is what it is.  It could not be what it is so perfectly if it were divided out in the way we’d like to make it.  So you learn that this is like the tail of a very powerful tiger straight from the multiverse.  You can move with it, or you can get dragged along. Eventually you learn to ride it and let it take you where something still larger seems to be needing to go.  You look at the wreck of a past life and you leave it behind.  Its sheer force bids you to forget; do not even bother picking up the wreckage because it would only remind you of that old world where you were so perfectly perched and so utterly dead to yourself and the rest of the world.  You only know this AFTER it flows through you and changes you because it is unbelievable what THIS will do to you.  It seems big, and it is, but it is also very small.  It is the mustard seed.  It is bringing heaven to earth. Just by letting it flow, you are doing this.  You are changing the terms of engagement here on the planet, and it is the most goddamned awesome power and no force in the world is going to stop it because it is flowing through YOU and YOU are sovereign now.  You are your own freed soul.  Lifting above the mists, above the clouds, you see something for the first time with the eyes of your heart that tells you that there is a different way. It bids you not to be afraid of joy and bliss and pleasure. Forget those people who say those who seek pleasure are weak.  Those are lost hard souls.

Our very nature is to be bliss.  We forgot that in the Garden.  We ran from the Source of bliss and are only now returning in great numbers. You then wind up seeking forgiveness for all your efforts at trying to control it or fit it into your conceptions of what it is.  Because it was like water, it naturally filled your life to the extent that you let it.  But that wasn’t all that it was or is. he more you let go, the more it can show you what it is, and the more you let it be, the more you feel it.  In feeling this, the more it fills your life no through kinks but in greater flows.  This will not satisfy everyone you meet.  Love becomes like this wild thing that is part of everything and we are used to partitioning it off and saying this is for Lucy, this part is for Tom, and this is for my car……because I love my car.  Or money.  Or sunsets.  But it is just flowing as it always has.  When you can let it be like that, it will do something remarkable.  Then when you can let it flow and BE in you, its wildness and power can be felt less as for something as what it always has been.  If you can let it flow in your life, then the fountain will never lessen.  You will have become it.  A living reflection of its mighty power.  It has the ability to utterly change you.  And make you into love.

Its not easy talking about this because it seems to almost trivialize it as well as make it seem terribly ambiguous.  It just can’t be described better than it can be experienced.  Yes it sparks inspiration. Yes it drives creativity to new heights.  Yes it drives greater love that fills lives.  It transforms lives, mostly your own.  After a while, it just seems impossible to even explain.  Just come to the edge and slip quiet into the water at night and swim its deep currents.  Once there, you will never wish to get out as our voices rise into the stars at night and our movement merges into one greater movement that shows us that home was always within. Even as we journey there together.

Chakras and New Awareness

I would like to expand your awareness a little today.  Breathe deep if you have to and be ready to consider something new.

Consider that a lot that we know has been handed down to us.  We tend not to trust our feelings or our own awareness or capacity to simply know.  So I am going to offer you this one treat and ask that you carry it within to see how it helps you to see anew. When you consider that the world is not set in concrete and that your own thinking need not be either, can you be free to see more broadly.  This is the cutting edge of your being.  One thing that we have been told by those who have come before is that the chakras represent a gradual migration of the soul into ever higher realms of awareness.

I am going to suggest to you that this is just not so.  But in order for you to know this for yourself, you have to give it a chance.  A good chance.  So here goes.

Yes, you have chakras.  Yes, they have different frequencies of vibration. As a result of this certain issues or characteristics tend to migrate to those chakras.  It is the Law of Attraction.  Like attracting like.  Simple.  Straightforward.  But who says that the crown chakra is the penultimate of our experience?  Our ancestors have.  Why buck tradition. right?  Well, consider that awareness changes, expands, over time. Just like the universe is said to expand. You are going to have to allow your old biases to be set aside for a moment to consider something truly remarkable here.  It can have a deep impact on you if you let it. So be like a child for a moment.  Consider there is something amazing yet to discover. 

I have used Thales the Presocratic philosopher before in explaining a sense i have about the way the universe is ordered, which is that everything that is has its higher expression.  Everything that is is energetically, like a cone.  Yes, a cone.  This cone expands outward into larger and larger scopes.  Thales, who I quote once said "All things are full of gods."  It is my feeling that he meant the same thing; that all things have their higher expression, and that the atom or quark has its own god.  I don't mean god or goddess in the usual way we are used to thinking of it (as something outside of us) but rather that we ourselves have our own higher expression of ourselves in eternity.

Now I know this might be a hard one to grasp for the first time. So I will suggest to you that time itself is not quite what we think it is.  Sure, we experience it in the way we normally do, which is a linear progression where events follow each other in a neat and orderly fashion.  Certainly.  However, the bigger picture is that our time is itself a subset of a still larger expression of time as an ever expanding present.  People who have had NDE's (Near Death Experiences) have all expressed their sense of this Present as eternity.  Jane Robert's Seth also spoke about this Present and that time itself is largely illusory.  It isn't that it isn't real.  It serves a purpose, but it has a way of going by the wayside to a certain extent when you reach into higher forms of consciousness.  You aren't stopping time here, it still marches on. However, you can begin to glimpse different aspects of time.  You can see into the future.  Time can slow way way down or speed up unimaginatively fast.  This is not just an a trick of the mind. it is how we choose to perceive it.  So there is more to time than just what we have here.  And in the same way, there is more to you than meets the eye.  there is a god and goddess within, a larger expression of yourself which you can and will encounter as you move along this road to higher forms of consciousness.  It is a given. It is not some egoistic illusion where you hope for some grander form of your ego existing, no.  It is just what is.  Your consciousness expands "outward" as you are ready to experience that part of what you are.

The same is true for your energy system.  The root chakra is thought of as the denser of all vibrations.  But this is not true.  Neither is the crown the ultimate in human experience.  The reason why this is so is because each part of you, each particle of your being and awareness has its higher expression.  The root chakra, then, is made up of layers.  I recently mentioned them in the post a few below this one as being the Hindu concept of the Sheaths.  Or layers.  Like an onion.

So what I want you to try is to feel deeply within all levels of your being to tap the inner divine in you.  the crown certainly has its role to play in this, but so does every other part of you.  the chakras are like highways for broad currents to flow but you also have countless smaller vortices's or chakras all throughout your body.  In fact, if you were to see them as I have seen them, you would know that the body is a vast webwork of energy lines that get so small that they resolve into a kind of glow.  Leylines of the self, let's say.  But this energy system is also nonlocal, which also means for the physicist that it has not one location in space time.  It can be anywhere and everywhere.  This is part of precognition and intuitive insight.  Here you are, and you are everywhere.  But your awareness and focus tend to be a bit limited, so this will take some focus in order to being streaming it in.

What keeps you from experiencing the divine union in anything other than the crown is your own focus.  So begin focusing gently on each center and see or feel how each center is itself connected to the divine.  This isn't something that is hard to do because it is in truth what you are.  What will keep you from glimpsing the divine at each level are your own blinders, your own shame or guilt or lack of self esteem.  The plus in all of this is that by focusing and doing this little piece of work, you also wind up clearing out your inner attic of any unnecessary material. Your own inventory of junk that is best released.  And as this happens, you feel the divine ever more clearly.  this then leads to still greater awareness and this can lead to a cascading effect within you.  All you have to do is to consider it a possibility.  That, and you may have to lay aside what you thought you knew for this radical thought I am offering you.  I promise you, it wont lead you down some primrose path.  If you are honest and let the junk go free, you can begin to glimpse this reality.  To do so means embracing all that you are unconditionally.  You are worth this moment "in time" to do this.  And if you are easy with yourself, you can begin to glimpse the reality that these words contain.

So no technique or method; you know the way.  It is native to you.  Just be quiet and feel your energy.  Let it flow through you and just let yourself float.  Feel each center begin to lighten and shimmer as its great truth is revealed. Feel into it.  Do not think.  Just be.  that is the best technique I can give you.  The way to this awareness is what you are deeper down.  So let yourself go deep.  Feel the shimmering energy within you and don't try to make it do anything.  Just let it BE. 

The idea that there is only one center that is touched by god or goddess is itself a form of separation. Prime Creator is in EVERYTHING, so it makes perfect sense that its presence can be sensed in the wind, in the water, in the glisten in an eye, and in every fiber of your being.  So let those fibers speak to you.  Let yourself listen for a while.  And let me know how it goes.  :-)

Knowing

As I lay in bed I felt it come over me, this self turning into itself, something I cannot quite explain, only what can be experienced directly.  Like a bud which blooms as a mystery is revealed from within that is also without. A stillness that is not still, a broader being in a vast ocean, floating within an ocean of potentiality. I told you there was no way to really explain this.  My mind turned to those who do not know this.

Nietzsche once said that the people thought those mad who danced because they could not hear the music.  For ages we have been stuck in this place, destroying and killing our own kind because of something we thought was madness in them because we did not hear the music or knew what they knew. Certainly Christianity was this way, but it goes deeper than that.  Science is set up in similar ways.  It all flows out of a rigidness within human nature, an inability to expand awareness to consider that maybe, just maybe, there is worth in the seeming madness of others.  Women were branded witches in what we call the Dark Ages.  They had old folk knowledge of how to heal, or may have had a glimmer of inspiration, this life of this Bud which rests within every single soul on the planet.  And yet, so tightly shut, they do not know.  Certainly as I awoke, I tried to explain to those around me what was happening to me.  I was only a mile down a hundred mile journey.  It is hard to know the bigger story when you are so fresh into it.  One part of me cautioned me to keep quiet, that I would end up like all the people branded witches, misunderstood for the beautiful thing they were or would become.  I had kept no pretense about being different, even from the beginning.  Everyone knew about this who was close to me.  I was told that I needed to get a grip on myself, that I was to blame for the ills of others.  Every person who abuses is most often a claimant to victim hood.  This is both a projection of their own insanity onto the world which in my case was like living in a world gone mad.  But it wasn't that I was immune, for I had been led to just such a place by my own insanity, the part of me which kept me from the divine knowledge of who and what I was curled up in this bud.  We all so identify with our neurosis that we cling to it and will not let go of it even though heaven awaits.  This was my case.  But I was willing to let go. I let go of the madness around me, stopped subscribing to the sickness which had gripped our kind for so long.  I had children and all of this worried me greatly.  I had to find peace that one of them chose to go a different path despite facts and reality shining right in front of him.  We greatly love our neurosis and will cling to it to the very last.  All we can do is pray for those who continue to suffer, because trying to tell them about the music and way we dance is like speaking madness to a madman.  And even though mad, those around this madman will believe the words spoken which are distortions of the truth.  We will march to war for this conviction, and we will abuse children by asking them to take sides when there should never be such a side taken.  When se seek to demonize one another in this way, we empty life of its promise and all who are touched by this are touched by the death of the soul, a leaking away of the very life force that will invigorate and awaken the self to a still larger awareness of what it is.  Out of self loathing and hate, we empty life of all that makes it special, miraculous and full of wonder.  Those who watch this process believe in it, cheer and push it on, as they seek to reinforce the part of themselves which mirror all the death that they see around them.  And each life is diminished by this and the war against awareness lives another day in the hearts of those who fail to see the light or the music which plays just beyond their range of hearing.  But it does not change that there is a symphony of wonder playing just beyond their ken.

But just so you know, this most certainly comes through with a bearing on ego.  Certainly.  I make no bones about it.  But neither do I pretend in the fallacy that ego dies.  If you read my blog, you know where I stand on this.  There is a lot of delusional thinking it seems in the world of awakening stil, and it is okay. People will be ready when they are ready.  Until then, ego awaits its true unfolding in the self.  There is more to understand, to be aware of.  Until then.....

When we set ourselves against such forces of our own making, of the grinding turn of darkness in the world, we make ourselves an enemy of the dark as we awaken to the warrior of light within.  Every great leader so awakened has tried to relay this fundamental truth to the suffering of humankind and have all met terrible ends.  Until the madness is stopped and healed, this goes on.  But the bud rests within each of us, and it will take a deft hand and a kind heart to help it to open.  The only thing that will urge it into bloom is a special type of love of which the loves we know on this earth are but a hint  or glimmer of in this great symphony of a world that exists just beyond most people's reach.  The reach is not without, but within.  the path to it is through awareness.  It is a willingness to see all of our foibles, our missteps, our misconceptions and seek honestly for a better way.  It requires confessing our sin against ourselves and the divine that dwells within all.  The divine is not conferred by good action or deed, but is inherent in ALL.  It is not a gift bestowed upon those who do right.  It is not a reward. It was freely given in the beginning when our souls were new and we were untried.  Even then was it there and even now does it rest withing every single particles, within every heart and mind, each animal, insect, and thing that is here.  We live within the body of the divine and some of us are just waking up to this incredible fact.  Even in science, in physics have they been saying for a century now that the matrix of all matter is mind, that everything is part of an intelligence, a holographic seeding of the universe with something so incredible, we have simply thought it too grand the believe.  Or see.  And in choosing not to see, we have turned from its reality to the false reality of the insanity that has filled our lives.

All of this can be over when you are ready for it to be.  All of this finger pointing, this blindness, this punishment, this hurt.  All of it can go out with the trash tomorrow.  It can be simply left behind and a new way allowed.  It is as simple as the intent to make it so.  Gone is our dizzying fascination with the car wrecks in life, of the hurt and suffering others feel.  We tell ourselves how horrible it all is, and yet we cannot pull ourselves away to look the other way.  We take some grand sick enjoyment in the suffering of others and in so doing, turn a blind eye to our own and the mote in our own eyes as we congratulate ourselves for how much better our own pitiful lives are.

We hold onto our neurosis because we fear anything different.  We hold onto it like some badge of self righteousness that defines our own broken beings, unable to see just how incredibly ridiculous that it all is.  And we go on in this fashion ad nauseum thinking it the only option that we have left to us when all it takes is a little awareness and willingness to see our own shortcomings and forgive them.  For when we do this, it is as though we place a great fulcrum against our destinies and we shift the world that we lived in.  It rocks boats and it causes a shudder to gather 'round each life that it affects, but it is not the end of the world but the beginning of it.  It is the wild cry of the soul seeking to break its old cognitive shackles that have held it for so long.  It is the one cry that makes any sense in a world gone mad.  And those who do are reviled as the ones mad even though they speak the only true sense left in the world.

So if this bud is going to open, it will be because you have been driven to the very edge of your capacity to cope with this dry rot of a world that you have been living in. This is so because the only time we let loose of our insanity is when there is no other option available to us.   But once you do, something in you will turn so inextricably to the truth that nothing else can shake it.  Here, in a place of such great uncertainty, the one thing that remains certain is that the old way is simply no longer working and your own self, your soul, fashions a new way for you to go forward.  And in what may seem a fools errand, will come such wonder and amazement that you too will know the promise that this holds even as you join the ranks of those who hear a symphony no one else hears.  But by then, there is no turning back lest death find you and overtake you one drop by precious darkening drop.  The desperation will have grown so great, the bridges to completely burned that there is nowhere to go but forward into this new life and land.  No paths save the one you alone blaze will be the mark that you were even here at all, and it will be for you alone to know the wonder of it, for this was not made to be shown to anyone except yourself to yourself.  When we break out of the old means of dysfunction that tell us that we are responsible for the happiness of each other will the way forward be better known and the madness of our old ways finally realized.  Until then, it will be like beggars eating dust and thinking it a great banquet.  Any fool can be lied to and believe it. Only once you have tasted the clear waters of this life will you know just how dimly you have seen and tasted of life and the great spirit that is indwelling that has been so carefully hid within yourself that you scarcely knew it even existed.

This path requires bravery.  It is a wild war hoop of the nations, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a soul unbound by what it was told was wrong for a way that is perfectly right.  For most though, in order to taste it, you have to be at the end of your rope.  And when that time comes, the great chasm you see opening up below you will not forsake you when you let go, but begin to support you as it yawning maw transforms into something that could only be dreamed.  Only then will you begin to be a true captain of your soul. Only then will you be overtaken with the knowing of just who you are as a bud beckons you deeper into a world full of wonder and bliss beyond imagining.  Here, you will have died and been reborn.  You will learn the secrets of the true resurrection.  Here you will be filled with knowing which I cannot speak to you about because it is yours and yours alone to face and become. And on that day I shall know the glimmer you have added to the great chorus that is becoming on this planet, that is the collective blooming of knowing that is our one salvation.

The Etheric Sheaths

The Hindus call them sheaths.  I experience them as layers which are not always clearly defined like the layers of an onion. This sense or awareness of layers becomes more obvious as you go through awakening and get some time under your belt with this phenomenon.  The material that you shed is that which has stood in the way of your authentic self being able to be present and more fully known. I know it may sound silly; don't I already know who I am? You can tell perhaps that the statement is very relative. Well yes. You do know who you are. There is also more of you to know.  Perhaps it is as though one day someone gave you a microscope and you were able to discover whole worlds of yourself that you never knew existed.  They were of course there all along, and everything you see is mostly no big surprise, for since it is you, it has a certain essence peeking out from within it that naturally makes everything have an air of the familiar.  Familiar, but also new.  Maybe a distant sense of familiarity,  Sometimes, though, and often for me, every time a layer is removed, it feels like a revelations.  And that, at least for me, is exactly what all of this is; a revelations.  A revealing of ourselves to ourselves.  None of them are foreign, and none strike you as new.....you realize it had always been there...somehow it seems as though some essential part of you is rising to the surface of awareness, as though the stuff that never really mattered all that much is suddenly being sloughed off like a snake skin.  Perhaps no surprise, then why kundalini is so often associated with snakes. There isn't a literal snake in you, there is just some things that have a serpentine sensation when it first rises that could be attributed to being LIKE a snake. A skin that gets shed, an ability to make ones self over, or to renew ourselves. 

These layers.  They reside in each chakra center. Many are told that you feel the energy rise from root to crown and you are done. But this is not so. This is just the beginning. The force of awakening continues to move in you.  This is why if you think you have removed an entire layer of material from your etheric sheath, this is just one layer.  We are complicated creatures!  A number of years ago I experienced a heart clearing in my chakra.  During my awakening I knew that the energy was having trouble penetrating that center for some reason.  I didn't know why.  Much of the material that was clogging the heart had been driven down into the subconscious.  Some of what was clogging it came from other lifetimes.  All of this material would be churned up, blessed and forgiven and the center would be opened more and more. The effect for me on the first clearing was feeling an enormous sense of space in my heart. It felt pretty amazing to me at the time. Then, about a year later, I had another heart clearing and opening that was completely different from the earlier one. By this time, I had by this time removed a number of other things from my field of awareness, and now with the heart opening at this new level, the effects were so utterly profound I simply do not have words for it.  What it did for me, though, was to open my soul to the possibilities for feeling on a continual basis. I felt as though someone had hooked my heart into a 1,000kva power line of pure cosmic bliss!  For days after this, I continued to have these heart openings that would cause my body to shake and move.  My head would fly backwards.  I just could not help it.  My body wanted to arc upwards.  I understood in those moments what was meant by kriyas, which are involuntary movements brought on by the movement of kundalini.  Then, a year later, there was ANOTHER heart clearing and opening that was completely different from the previous one that involved a long standing pain I had felt that was being driven or illuminated by the presence of kundalini. Each time this happened, more material was shed. Each time my heart felt different. Each time, there were marked energetic effects that accompanied these clearings, and while I can describe to you how these felt, each was different and I also tend to think each person is going to be different.  Some clearings come reluctantly as the self holds on for dear life.  This can give the energy a completely different quality then, say, complete surrender.  Some energy feels thick and vibrant while others feel incredibly light and buoyant.   How you respond will determine the quality of the energy based on how you participate with it.  Each time there has been a clearing I feel "Ah!  I have finally made it!"  only to realize that this has all happened before, and that this is a steady shedding of old material from my being.  I am, step by step, coming home to myself and the inevitable realization of who I am in the bigger picture.  So, absent having this sense, it is easy to think that with some time under our belt, there is nothing else to do.

I feel that the process is continuous.  There is no arrival, only an infinity of arrivals into the present whereby we are transformed, changed, brought back to square.  Each time a new level or different level and aspect of our complex being is changed.  Forever. And yet, we continue on, deeper in soul, more vital, more joyful, more alive.  Each time these experience seem to put us into contact with essential portions of ourselves that we are just now discovering and whose essence has been tied into the seed or germ of this experience even from the very beginning when things seemed so new and mysterious. We move into the place where we shed this old layer, and it feels like THE release, which it of course is in a way, but once the self settles back ito itself, it is more as though you have just shifted gears.  It is a new gear, yes, but now it is time to start working through THAT gear, revving the cosmic engine ever higher until it is time to shift from THAT gear into a still newer one.  Over and over and over this goes on, and the wonder of this experience is in coming to know your relationship and presence as a divine being with the cosmos which is all interconnected, part of a vast family of being that is just about incomprehensible.  Without the power of love and intuition, I don't know that we'd have the means to wrap our beings around this.  It is a beautiful and wonderful miracle that we do, though.

So feel into each level.  Avoid using the intellect to decide what you think is going to happen next or where you think you are now. Be like a child; be open and embrace the world with as much wonder as you can muster.  Be full of joy that you have been given this life, that it is good enough to simply be happy to just BE. If you can approach all of this in this way, each moment remains fresh, free from weight and burden and there is always something exciting just around the corner to see and explore.  All of this that is happening to you, this awakening, is a good sign, a fortuitous happening.  You are coming into your own.  Instead of building something, though,  it is more like you are tearing something down. How do you build a house by tearing it down?  Only in awakening is this true. Tear it down, burn it down; what remains is essential and important to the soul, to your authentic self.  By removing all that mental jewelry, you can get a better feel for what you are deep down and your relationship with the cosmos, your own divine source of being.

Just let the layers keep peeling away.  Observe.  Observation seems to help in removing material.  The effect of being able to stand back and observe instead of being so bound up in our own little dramas helps in developing the type of perspective that is needed.  It helps you to put things into proper dimension.  Is it really important that someone doesn't like you?  Is it really important that someone is bad mouthing you?  Is it important that someone doesn't like you?  Really, it doesn't.  And the Observer in you can help you to stand back from all the drama in life and find what it important.  What is important is the sheer presence of awareness, the illuminating quality of your own being without regard to position or idea, belief or identification with who said what or how.  Here, you can feel your authentic self, here you can step back and feel yourself become very quiet in the moment.  Suddenly, all the wars and struggles in the world feel like a vast carnival ride.  They have been going round and round like this for ages, and they will likely keep going around like this for ages more. Enjoy the ride, learn what you need to learn or want to learn, but the Observer allows you the ability to laugh at this ride and step off, and begin the process of shifting into a different dimension of experience. 

There is something powerful in our intentional gaze it seems.  By being quiet you can allow something still broader and more powerful to enter your life and make for interesting change.  Good change.  There is no loss, here, only a gain, which I know sounds paradoxical, but you will very soon see and know intimately what I mean.  And it may be that some layers are like fragments of a still larger layer.  I say peel away what you can, let drop what is ready to drop away and do not worry about it.  You are, after all, in very capable hands. Trust and surrender. Peace comes as we remove those things that were a barrier to inner peace and bliss.

Energy will come in pure streams of heavenly bliss that might leave you shaking and amazed.  Energy may course through your system in a turbulent fashion, bringing up precognitions, visions, and insights.  It can bring a sense of unity in your being and thought.  Life suddenly resolves into a perfect holographic diamond where the light of the prime creator shines.  But whatever your experience, even if it is hard, is YOUR experience, and just because it is at variance with what someone else may have described does not diminish your experience one iota.  Claim it, wear it joyfully and if it too must slip away later, then so be it.  

What began as a writhing feeling moving up your core may turn into something that feels like the wind the next go-round. In another round, it could feel thick and hard.  It might get pushed into other centers, while in others, the density feels completely different.  In one layer things may feel quiet while in others there is a brilliant shimmer happening all around your awareness.  Sit back and watch.  There is plenty reason to trust this process. Do not be afraid, keep moving and know the bliss you feel comes from the Prime Creator. You are this being inside of you and digging deep, you will find it.  I know this sounds like heresy to some, but I tell you it is true. But this god/goddess self is not some grandiose being (well maybe it IS grandiose!), it is most often quiet but profoundly powerful.  But trust and Observe. I think you will feel a real sense of amazement in what more could be coming along for you! 

Love

I was asked recently what I thought love is and I admittedly was not up to it.  I am not up to it because it is a dizzyingly broad word and takes in so many different perspectives and ways of feeling.  I think, though, that that is not a bad thing, it just does not make talking about it especially easy because of its broadness.  When something is so broad it also has the capacity to contradict itself, or seem to. Love is the biggest contradiction to humankind I think for the simple reason that the finest form of it is so completely unconditional and humans, so often, are steeped or conditioned to be conditional.

I am sitting with you and you and I are sitting by a small river.  We are talking about this concept of love and we have been at it for days.  Literally.  We keep coming back to this one spot because of the perspective that it gives.  Here, nearest us, the waters are calm and move by gently.  When you put your toe into the water, it is pleasantly cool with eddies of warmth from the sun shining on the slow surface layers that slowly tumble and mix with this lazy river.  And yet, to our right and just several yards away is a small creek that is rushing like mad and making a lot of noise  making its way into the river.  As we look down the river a little further, we can see how the slow river turns into rapids as the depths become shallows near a sandbar. It is a whole different world over there since the water moves so differently than the calm quiet current near your toe touch.

But, we have been talking about this for days and it is clear; the small creek is also the river but does not KNOW it is the river until it enters into it, or becomes it.  The creek never knows it will be that river until it is.  Only then will its being be changed and its own being is changed in that instant of merging into that something larger.  And this is how love can be in some people's experience.  Some love is furious like this creek, but it can be also limited in scope, too, until something comes along, or IT comes along and finds itself emptying out into a still larger waterway.  The creeks likes to move fast and hot and hard and perhaps even drop over large rocks and make a lot of noise in the night.  That, I insist, is love even though it moves into a larger current that redefines itself. It is still the same water that dropped out of the heavens and is seeking its way to the ocean. It is the same everywhere that water flows.  It is all love even though it gets expressed so differently, so broadly.

If you think that love is only this calm peaceful river that gives calmness and solemnity to the creek's mad dash to the Source, consider that even this river will very soon, in the not too distant distance, suddenly be all a-shiver in rapids its own self. A calm deep and ancient river can itself turn into a frothing tumble of a gorge.  Never underestimate the power of love to change and transmute.  It is so important and so big that it simply wears many different faces or masks.  It has to.  Even we take love and turn it into all kinds of things.  It becomes our own and we bend it to our will.  Being water, it does what it always has done; it follows its level and the path of least resistance.  It isn't that it is lazy, but incredibly efficient.  It seeks I think to remake you.  And if it not a seeking, then this is just what it does.  We say love is kind, gentle, tormented, or even obsessive, but it is just what we do with it in our hands. There is a miller five miles up the river who uses water to grind grain. How odd that seems as we sit with our feet steeped in its cool flow.  But there it is.  Love has so many faces, uses.  It is the current of all life.  It gives rise and form to everything.  Don't ask me to explain why I say this is so.  I prefer not to get into the quantum mechanical stuff just now....

The woman who shows love to her child is nurturing and loving to that child. She brings the baby to her breast and holds that baby and looks deep into its eyes as her own essence is shared and beamed into that child in the form of her great love.  And only moments later this same woman will lie with a man who will be hungry for her body and fiery essence as well but in a completely different way.  In the same fashion, the father who is gentle and kind to his daughter will show flashes of passion to his wife or lover.  The same river runs deep and gentle or torpid and wild. It all folds into itself.  Only we seek to divide it and say it is this or that.  Instead, we do little to ponder its great mystery and prefer to erect taboos and barriers because we ourselves cannot be trusted with certain kinds of love, only in certain instances.  Love, though, will guide if we but allow it to.  Clearly, clear-eyed and carefully and aware. 

We love food and we love art.  We love each other, and we do so in dizzying degrees and ways.  One way is completely different from the other and yet we all use the same word.  Some people say love while some cross their arms smugly and say "lust" and turn away.  We use love broadly, perhaps to broadly, and yet we know that love encompasses many different states and ways, styles and means.
Someone suggests that love is just and yet love showers upon all good or bad.  Like the sun, love is not withdrawn from any of us.  The worst and the best, so we say, and yet how do we know what is bad within such a narrow picture of the infinite.  How do we know that the worst of us do not go on to do the greatest of deeds in their advanced age in the cosmos.  And would not love itself contradict itself by holding itself back?  When love does that, doesn't it cease being love? And yet, even so, how do we fit it into a world where morality and values and concepts of how to be or should be reigns supreme?  Well, we do what we have always done; we shape and mold love to our uses until we are done shaping it and flow with it.  Then we become it, and that is perhaps when we simply disappear into it in the greatest form of worship that there is.

But I have a secret for you.  I have been holding it back a little because it is the best of all.
All of these things, all of these faces of love merge into one current, and it is within this current that you can stand and feel all of it as an undivided force.  It is here in this place that a miracle has come to me and which can come to you too.  No longer is it something that you just feel for someone.....it is an undeniable force that can no longer JUST be experienced in its small rivulets or streams but as all of it undivided and thus unfocused in a way, yet highly responsive.  A river with endless fingers and pulses, of infinite receptivity and decisiveness within its flowing character.  Felt directly, it is difficult because it is such a revelation.  It could, I suppose, drive some mad who are unable or unwilling to surrender to its one simple and primal truth.  It is the great river that will carry each of us to a vast and endless ocean that is everything.  The only way we can hope to survive is to simply become one with it and borrow from it its own boundless strength.  When your awareness awakens to it, it feels like molten ice flowing through you.  It is dark and light, fiery and cold.  It is the entirety of the universe distilled down into a drop that is at once you and the universe.  If you cant handle the paradox of that, you will miss the river as it flows through you.  In fact, many of us have done just that most of our lives until that one moment when enough of ourselves knits itself back into unity enough to spark awakening and something simple dawns on you that forever grows in depth and dimension.  To flow most free in this river means that you take off all that has encumbered you.  Only then are you most buoyant.

When the sun goes down and the moon rises quietly overhead, you hear and feel the voices of all the people who have ridden in the current of this vein of life and you realize its all that has been and will ever be.  In that silent slip of a moment you are unbound by the time or mortal life and feel the thickening of eternity settling around you with its own certainty.  In such places and times are people undone, taken apart, left to die to the old life they lived and wake up gradually in a new one.  What seemed like sheer violence is now known in a new context as the greatest of mercies, the tenderest way of being.  It means that you can touch the lips of another from a vast distance because this is just how strong this thing called love is.  And even given that, love will itself mix and tumble with the mud of our world and make a dark mix of things until it all resolves back to its pure state.
Love is indeed paradoxical, broad, narrow, hot and fast and slow and warm and cold as ice.  It is all of this just as a mighty river might be.  But even as you experience all of this for yourself, it will always be more and you will always be breathless trying to keep up if you are a knower of souls and a seeker of the Creator's thoughts.  But perhaps, in saying all of this, I have just touched on what I know love to be.  Certainly it is more than just that, but we here have numbered days even though the river does not.

So there is certainly more to say, and because of the many ways of love, I naturally wind up leaving the juicy parts out, but I leave and skim like a stone that does not wait to lunge headlong into the depths but instead skips along on the surface as it touches the many different currents that make up the river that has you casting stones upon its surface.  So suffice it to say that in romantic love there is much more to be known and thus a story that will unfold which will be your own journey to discovery.  I would hate to ruin the surprise near the end.  Perhaps if we ignored all of the rest of love and considered only one of its masks might I be able to satisfy what it is you might be looking for or yearning to know or hear.  Those are like chapters in a book that I have not yet written but are more expressed in the color of my  lips and the flow of my blood and it is carried in my veins like a gentle warm river.  Eventually we ourselves write those chapters and when we do, we have the vast repertoire with which to navigate them while learning to become one with them and stand suspended and transformed both of them and not....curious creatures that pause and reflect as we do.

As all of these different currents all flow back together and into one in your own awareness, you too will experience what this can be as a force moving through your very fiber, that penetrates deep into every crevice and spot you had ignored.  It will sweep you and fill you with its presence and you wont ever be the same.  You will arise thankful in the end that it was so rough with you that it would not bend when you lay crumpled and fearful of its great immense force, willing to stand up once again and seek to know its flow in a new way, with clearer eyes and a richer heart.  You will have been taken back, claimed by the river as you begin dreaming of a still greater world, which is the ocean.  The rest is yours to know and explore, and I leave you as the ocean takes you and a smile spreads across your heart.