What Keeps Us

I often say a lot about no methods, no techniques because of what I have experienced.  Now you could say "that was his experience, perhaps he is just different" and what I think my interest or focus has been for so long is with the source of meaning, the meat of spiritual experience, which has, for me, always been about reaching down into the roots of a thing.  When we do that, we know the essence of a thing, the REASON why breath work works....which isn't because of a notion of why we think it works, but because of a fundamental oneness with its essence.  Robert Heinlein the sci-fi writer penned a great term in one of his books Stranger In A Strange Land, which was about a half human half Martian who came to earth, a term which he called "grok."  To grok, even though it was never really defined by the main character, it was defined by his keeper or surrogate caretaker, Jubal.  He described grokking as knowing something so well that you become the thing, you merge with it in a deep fundamental way.  The sense of seperatness dissolves when one "groks."  For me, this spoke to that merging into the thing, sensing it on an energetic level, an intellectual, and emotional level.  In moments like this, your physiology can change.  You can feel your reactions TO a thing (an event or happening or conversation) but then there is also a direct one to one interaction that winds up with you literally walking in the shoes of another.  Doing this is an act of empathy, yes, but it also goes beyond merely reflecting on how a person feels and putting ourselves in that place.  In this case, we still reflect on how we would feel.  What I am talking about is that there is no distance between the two.  Doing this, though, understanding it for what it is, take experience.  You either have loads of faith that it is so (and this certainly works!) or you observe the phenomenon over and over enough to where you realize that this is not mere reflection but something  deeper.  I say "deeper" as though it is something that we do not normally get at.  The truth, at least in my experience, is that it is always here.  We do lots to block it out, that we aren't even aware of.  It is so easy to do, so effortless, that we most often experience these moments of connection when we are no longer guarded, when something very slight, is open within us.  Most often, we do not think of it as being open to the world, but open to our our thoughts.  Most often, this is in moments of reverie, and we associate this as being alone with ourselves.  This is the potent moment, though, the crack in our facade that lets in the light.  We often assume our own light is ours and ours alone, perhaps not realizing that the light that we feel, that burst of inspiration, is also what connects us to the universe, and to more things, to the infinite.  We miss this because we think we are this definate soap bubble of a self with clearly defined edges when in truth, this soap bubble, while real, is existing in a hyperversal state, which is my way of saying that we are in truth multidimensional.  The only thing keepind us from sensing into this hyperversal state, our own multidimensionality, is this particular reflection within where what we are is known as part of everything else.

Identity has been a challenge for us in this regard.  On the one hand, it gives us a sense of being separate, of being Bill or Tom or Lisa or Ali.  Each is their own person, yes, and yet, the energy that fills all of us is like the waters from a vast ocean.  The water that we swim in was swum in by the dinosaurs, was a part of vast frozen glaciers, was also floating in space, locked up in meteors, billions of years ago and has itself lived many lives before becoming a part of us now.  What is in us is us in the same way that we are both the wave upon which we ride as cosmic surfers of a sort, while also being a particle of water that is part of that vast wave.  When we cease trying to differentiate between the two and just let them BE that I sense we get closer to our most natural nature. Not too much rational, not too much irrational; perched, balanced on that wave.  Here, we realize we are BOTH and trying to tease out which we are is a bit of a fools errand that keeps us locked in our left brains, a type of energy that is good for some things, but it also serves to actually break the energy that helps to build the waveform of phenomenon.  If you wonder about this, this goes all the way down to the most fundamental parts of your awareness, and when you master the no-thinking state, you begin to feel this wave begin to build.  When you put your rational individual focus into the moment, it collapses the wave effect, which is precisely what happened during the now-famous double-slit experiment that shows how phenomenon at the small level behaves different from when it is being observed as opposed to when it is not.  If you want an interesting tutorial on this watch the great animated videos of Doctor Quantum who helps to explain it quite well what is at work

Then there is this video that sums up a lot of quantum collapse, which is phenomenon at the very small level...as it relates to the term or concept of Entanglement.

 

This is getting off topic a bit, but it speaks to the definite state of superposition I experienced in my waking state, observations made while watching what happened when my own consciousness changed states from the "particle" or left brain state to the right brain, or the waveform state.  It is here, I am saying, that you have an entry into the world in a very different way.  It is as if you had a razor blade and held it out in front of you and found, much to your amazement, that in attempting to cut in the air, that you actually do, and what you see in that gap is the essence of things, and what you see behind that veil of appearances is a very different world then the one you see with your eyes.  In truth, there may be no way to literally cut open the fabric of the world in this way, but you can glimpse it with your own awareness.  To do that requires that you slip out of the part of your awareness that is part of the particilized form of awareness and allows yourself to slip into the waveform of awareness, which is the part of your awareness most of us do not often tend to use, so just using it feels different, strange, or weird.  We are so used to feeling as though we are in fact in control over what happens that we feel strangely when things begin to happen in a different way, and it is this "different way" where things get really interesting (if you are interested in the mind's broader capacities and the root of how things work here inside ourselves as well as in the universe).  Physicists tend to say that none of the phenomenon observed at the atomic level winds up being something that is observable in larger phenomenon, but I think that you do.  I think, though, that they simply have not been good at being able to use their own awareness as the key to peek behind the curtain or veil of all of this weirdness happening enough to see that what has been happening at the atomic winds up in their own bodies (and what is in your body you do have access to, at least theoretically), and also winds up as part of your own awareness even if you aren't aware of it. I know that sounds contradictory to you, but if you consider that you have a subconscious, maybe you will understand how it is that a lot slips past us on a moment by moment basis and isn't even registered in awareness.  We think our senses are so good, but we are more than our physical senses, and when you awaken kundalini, you will see this quite easily in the form of what the Hindus call Siddhis, or abilities.  This is evidence of the change that is taking place in awareness.  these abilities exist because consciousness, absent the physical apparatus, is not picking up on information entirely beyond itself.  How can that be?  The answer is in the wave.  But it is in this waveform awareness that your own awareness can become a sensory tool, which is very different from what many scientists are used to doing so the tendency is to discount what we do not receive from our five senses. 

When you get to a place within your own awareness where you are experiencing the broader picture, events begin to take on a very different quality.  People, too.  Your life will change in a subtle and important way, and it is this subtlety that results in big change, if you allow it, to happen.  Since your awareness has changed, you are free to observe more information that had been cut off from you.  You now observe that since you have so much more energy flowing in your body that this energy is not in any way tied to your breath because there is so much of it.  But before all this energy came into your awareness, you may have found that the only way you could become aware of it was the way everyone is told it is regulated, which is by breath.  Well yes, you CAN regulate it by breath, but not because breath is itself the energy.  Do you see?  That is a small but important difference.  For me, when I realized that this energy was coincident with breath, for instance, I was able to see it for what it was and use that as a way to move energy when I was in a less than open way to the energy.  Perhaps too breath work can help you to understand the linkage between feeling and the energy and how when you relax and move into reverie, this energy flows more naturally and feels better, blissful even.  But we so often think its because of our own thoughts that this is so because we never really get to see anything beyond our own thoughts and their effects.  

This is the result of a simple missidentification of phenomenon that happens.  It seems perfectly reasonable for something to happen for a reason that we think we have observed, except that our reason may well be based less on what is true (what actually is) than on what we THINK is true.  And what we think is true is subject to how we feel most often, and this is based on our backlog of prior experience, reason, and all the rest.  It is also subject to our negative karma, which our reason and feeling are certainly governed by when we are less than aware, or observing of what is going on.  And this way of going back and comparing is a slip, a glitch.  It is based on an old model of reality and this does not always allow for the flexibility to embrace What Is.  What Is is such a tricky thing, isn't it?  It is so clear, so certain.  You spend your whole life with this sense of purpose and it all will come unravelling in a moment due to a feeling you have within that is itself not in full alignment with your divinity.  Your divinity is itself wedded to the universe.  It cannot be any less, you see?  Being who you are is the hardest thing when you have the dross of karma filling your eyes telling you that god does not love you, or that you are ugly, or not good enough, or that you wont amount to anything.  All of this, silliness!  Moving down deep, you will reach that rich bed of you, that deep soil, that wellspring of the infinite within you and in that moment, there just wont be any doubt.  But until you dissolve the ghost of the past, it will certainly haunt you and tell you all those scary specters are real.  Whatever they happen to be.....that you are not loveable enough, good enough, or worthy.  All of this will reflect into the world....it will reflect into your work no matter what work you do.  As a physicist, you might be trying to prove that you are smart and god's gift to science after feeling as though a parent didn't honor your greatness to the level that you thought you should have gotten. So all of this hard work, it doesn't come from your heart, but from your fear.  Now, maybe in the old world, this might be enough of a riding crop moment enough to keep you rushing forward into one discovery after the next, and certainly it might even bring you to great places.  But when life strips you bare of your life, you will have just your heart and the the heart of Creation looking back at you in a moment of clarity that comes with the moment when all bodies die.  You will have learned an important lesson, but it will have been learned out of the flow of duality.  The reason why you are here, you see, is to erase all of this HERE.  When the vibration is raised elsewhere, well that might be good for heaven, but not for the karma that remains here.  Tied to this plane, you are destined to keep coming back until you can in this moment realize what must be brought, person by person, into this world.  

Is that getting crazy existential?  I hope not.  It strikes to the center of all of this.  It has an unrelenting heart.  It is unrelenting simply because of the high vibration that creation holds.  It does not bend to you because it is what it is.  Why should god seek to change for you?  Why would a parent seek to change themselves when they have reached near-perfection?  This advanced being did not get to where it is by stooping.  When I say this, understand that God will not come to your level.  In order to keep the divine order, you have to accept this great force into your heart.  It is like asking God to make life a series of shortcuts for you while you go about never really learning what it is you were here to realize.  What loving parent would do that for their children?  The hard part is in its unbending nature because in being that way, it invites you to a still higher place within yourself.  Through a series of travels and journeys, you work hard to seek that light that is already within you, waiting.  It is the greatest of conmpassions.  All you have to do is let grace into your heart and keep it there.  Slowly, bit by bit, the path of this will show you the way to be.  You need not know the answers, for by holding this vibration, it will be its own homing device for the divine.  

I was told early on by a guide that he would be there with me the whole way.  I need only call on him.  But he explained that I had to find that place within me where I could find him.  I would not be able to find him when I was stuck in some hard place.  There was a very specific path within and it was a path that we all know.  It seems as if it is buried deep within you....perhaps so deep that it gets lost in your awareness.  But in reaching that path, the ghosts of the past naturally begin falling away.  Now, notice I am not giving you a technique for how to do this.  Perhaps you could make one up.  It would be perfectly valid for you to do so if it takes you to the place within that is so essential.  Perhaps it begins to learn to breathe, which itself helps to bring in life force into your awareness.  As you do this, more awareness builds.  Perhaps it is incremental.  But the curious thing is that as you achieve these places within, you never lose them as a capacity in your being.  Also, the curious thing about belief is that if you have an investment in it, it will have a reality.  This is why in hypnosis it is possible to reach a very deep state of relaxation by simply hearing someone snap their fingers because they suggested to you moments before that you would do this.  In this deep state of suggestibility and willingness to follow what another person says that you do it.  There is nothing magical whatsoever in the snapping of the fingers.  What is magical is your ability to manifest such a deep state of relaxation by putting your belief in the possibility that it will happen.   

So to change things in your life, you can do the same thing.  You can tell yourself that you are going to start replacing the old memes or things that you tell yourself that leave you feeling cold or left out or less than what you consider optimal.  Whatever it is, you can consciously seek to replace it with a different thought, a different recording in your head.  This will work as the subconscious is highly suggestible.  Feed it enough positive energy and change will certainly take place.  Gently feel yourself plucking out the old thoughts like weeds and imagine their roots gently giving way from the soft and fertile soil of your being.  There are better plants to have growing there.  Over time, with persistence, you will find the landscape having changed.  When you reach places that are hard to change, ask yourself why this is so.  What is it within you that seems to be resisting.  Then ask to be shown why this is so.  Somewhere, the answer lies within you.  If you allow your rational mind to step back some, you will allow the limitless potential of the irrational mind to enter in and do its work.  Together, these two aspects of your being can deliver you to ever increasingly better places within.  But it is something that you will want to do.  Wanting it badly enough will supply you with the forward motion to make it happen.

What keeps us from all of this is ourselves.  But it is also ourselves that keeps us on the path to finding it, too.  Which do you prefer?

Waking Experiencer?

The events that led up to my awakening were two issues that I felt were overhanging in my life that were big questions to me.  At the time, I thought that I could settle a nagging sense of uncertainty I had about both of them.  It was, at the time, something I considered to be a kind of house-keeping kind of move.  I had gone through life with some big questions that I felt were unanswered and I was seeking to try to reach some sense of either closure or better insight.  One of them served as the trigger point for an awakening process.  I have since read that some say you cannot know what causes awakening, but I have been a careful observer of my own process, which has come from years of my own inner search since age nine. I know that for me, the events that led to my awakening were pretty clear and actually obvious. I have searched through documents, most of them simply popping up in random searches that have pointed to the very same aspects that were present in my awakening.  Sure, I think that this is such a broad thing, often mysterious, but I think if you are honest with yourself, in 90% of the cases, there was some deeper sense of yearning, searching for something. When I awoke I thought how I had not asked for this.....and yet, as I go through my life from an early age, I was fervently seeking the great secret that lay before me.  I KNEW it lay before me.  Once it came, I felt the tension in that cord go slack.  I might not have known CONSCIOUSLY what it was I was looking for in a precise way, but even in 1984 during my days in college I observed that the point in altered states was the accumulation or awareness of greater amounts of energy.  As this energy threshold or capacity rose, I noted, all kinds of things began to happen.  Inside each of us is a dynamo that is not fully engaged in awareness, and as the clutch is engaged, it sends the wheels turning.  Once this begins, you are simply never the same again.  Two event were playing on my mind as I decided I wanted to clear up some things that had bothered me for a while.  I wasn't getting any younger, and I prided myself on an examined life, so it was time to do something about it.  The joke was on me on this examined business because awakening has taken me to levels of self examination I simply wasn't brave enough to do or did not think I had the means to do.  And it's the unexamined stuff that stands in the way of the divine.  If you do not realize or know how this is so, someday you will. 

One of these had to do with a startling experience that came into full 360° view one Saturday night in 1984 when I was sitting in the living room of some friends while away at college.  In it, I found myself sitting atop a grassy hill looking out across a sweep of majestic mountains.  Something was about to happen, I knew, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.  As I looked down at myself, I realized I was no longer the me I had left in the living room of my friends in 1984 and was instead bare-chested with long black hair flowing down my shoulders.  I was sitting in the same position as I was in 1984, but instead of orange shag carpet (wince), I was sitting in a soft grassy spot looking east.  Feeling a sense of powerful presence behind me, I turned to look around to see a giant storm moving at break-neck pace towards me.  This began my initiation into sacred vision space where I was catapulted into a world no less real, perhaps far more real than anything I had experienced up until that point, which was where all who had gone on vision quests had returned from and who carried some form of insight into a challenge, question, or problem in their lives.  I had been catapulted back into the 1800's into the mountains near what is now called Yosemite National Park.  Less a recall of a past event, this singular encounter had all the makings of a warp in time, one that would have bearing on my life today in a world that the beings in that sacred vision space explained, would come to pass when the "Great Wheel has come full turn."

I was eighteen, white, somewhat aware of native American culture to some extent from some books I had read (my Mother had some books lying around while I was growing up and I took an interest in the concept of the world hoop of Black Elk and the modern medicine man Rolling Thunder).  But for as interested as I was, I was poorly prepared for being thrust into this world.  In what I would later learn was a Thunder Being vision, I was told about a day in the future when I would be reborn as a new person, that the earth would be sick and be in need of cleansing.  I was told things that would come to pass, and I was taken into the sky, merging into the body of the Thunder Bird to performt a purification act.  I say "act" because this was not a ritual.  It was a direct action involving the earth and the energies of the Thunder Beings.  After this stunning experience, I felt as though I was left to make sense of this sudden interface with this culture, its ways, and what seemed to be an important message to me about this future world and time.  I would have several other memories that filled in some gaps, such as a council lodge meeting wherein the name of the People was spoken, which did help me to find the culture that this vision belonged to.  After having read up on the Thunder Beings, I saw how in some cases, the Thunder Beings from one group was quite different from those of another group.  How was I to make sense of all of this?  What was the core message that I was being told in this vision?  What did it mean for me?  The truth was, after some twenty years, I felt as though I had reached a kind of stalemate in understanding.  I had spent years trying to track the culture down using this one word I heard spoken in the council lodge, all to no avail.  One linguist even suggested that it sounded more like Japanese than Native American!

So it was during the Summer of 2006 that I began writing a letter to an elder of the Lakota who I thought might be able to provide me with some sense of perspective.  I wrote five drafts of that letter and found myself with a great sense of hesitancy about it, but could not pinpoint why.  As I stood there getting ready to finish up my work in the studio for the day, I looked at the fifth draft sitting on my workshop stool.  I went to the computer to check email before closing everything out and closing up the shop.  As I did, I found myself doing another search for the Thunder Beings before leaving for the day.  On the front page there were the words of a different Lakota elder that had caught my eye.  All of my hesitancy evaporated.  I felt a sense of certainty about this man, and I felt something close to kinship somehow, and if not kinship, then the awareness of a person whose heart was generous, and a mind that was open.  This was not a rational thing, but a feeling thing. He felt familiar somehow, or if not familiar, I felt comfortable enough to contact him.  Curiously, he had his phone number and urged anyone who wanted or needed to, to contact him.  Perhaps it was because he was telling about a vision he himself had had and was conveying that in a speech before a council, perhaps it was his warmth, or my perceived sense of receptivity.  I had gone for years wondering who on earth would even listen to my unusual story of a memory from a past life speaking of the future in a time when I would be reborn as a white man instead of what I was in the past.  In the life as the Native man, I had gone up into those mountains because of the impact that the Whites were having on my culture.  The vision spoke of the death of my people, and no doubt, this was very hard to take.  I could feel the pain that this man felt over everything that had taken place. I knew the anger, the frustration, the deep sense of hurt and betrayal.  I understood the stereotypical terms often used in westerns where the Indians would mutter something about "speaking with forked tongue." Now, or then, it was real. I knew the anger that those in the Native community might harbor or still harbor towards whites. This was what tangled me up so much in the past; would I have believed some white man coming to me telling of a vision from the past after what so much of his own kind had done to my people?   It was in speaking to this man that a great weight left me, quite unexpectedly.  It was a weight I had been carrying for years, one which had grown heavy and one which I had gotten used to carrying.  I just didn't realize just how lighter letting it go would feel. I also did not realize it was enough weight to leave me feeling as though I was suddenly floating.  It was a healing of a division in me that sparked the fire of kundalini or awakening, a process that unfolded over six months and did not reach "full blown" status until early February of the following year.  Those six months, though, were marked by a whole range of phenomenon that are all classic awakening symptoms, something I would only piece together later.

I later found an article written by the elder who I had originally wrote the letter to, and it helped to explain my hesitancy, or so I have come to believe.  This man spoke openly about the need to keep Whites out of their ceremonies, to keep their culture as pure as they could, to preserve what it was they had left in order to continue to build their sense of community and spiritual roots.  This was completely understandable, it wasn't as though I harbored any ill feelings in this regard. I realized, though, that he might have wound up being more guarded with me and this might have censored him in ways that I did not find with Sydney Has No Horses, the man I finally spoke to. In the end, though, it turned out that I really didn't need anyone to tell me the meaning of what this was all about.  That wasn't what took place at all.  What I needed was something else.  I seemed to need someone who would listen to me, to hear me, to let out all those years of frustration, a kind of confessional of some kind.  I just wasn't aware of how badly I needed this.  Before I could belong to myself, I felt like I needed someone who would not think I was some weirdo, but someone who does belong even if the particulars were a little unorthodox.  It wasn't like I was wanting to become Native American again.  I just wanted to untangle a little bit of this so I could find a greater measure of peace or to understand any purpose that it might have.  Several years after this event, however, my awakening would take an unusual turn and the vision of the Thunder Beings would come back into sharp focus in a way I could not have imagined, in a way that was entirely beyond my current willingness to consider.  This took me into the very source of who the Thunder Beings are and why they are here as archetypal images in our visions and dreams.  That, however, is another story, best saved for another day.  

I was also seeking to clear up an issue concerning a dream I had had about being on board an extra terrestrial craft as a young teen. This was experienced as a dream, and it was also in the wake of some sightings of craft in our area. In the dream,  I was being taken on a tour, I was told, and was with a bunch of other people who all looked like they had been taken out of their living rooms for a sudden look around.  Children, adults, nothing stood out except the striped red and blue shirt on a boy slightly younger than me.  As we were being taken through a door into another part of the craft, I noticed that there was a hole in the floor where there was a giant set if turbines that moved.  I stepped out of line and took a look at this device.  I noticed how it worked and thinking in terms of ordinary jet technology I thought that it could never work.  A being which was standing next to me explained simply that that was not how the device worked.  The key lay in an entirely different method which struck me as exotic technologically.  The dream, though, was incredibly vivid, and after having stepped out of line, I went back into the line as we went into another part of the craft and thus ended any recall that I had about the rest of the dream.

Perhaps because of this dream, which took place on the forward edge of what would become known as a U.F.O. wave so large in our area that it would later be noted on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, that I began to have a lingering curiosity or wondering about what it all meant.  During this same time I had two sightings, one with a sibling of things in our night sky that defied normal explanation, and another several months later with a craft that was so close its outline could be seen against the night sky and looked like it was strung up with Christmas lights.  When I read about UFO sightings where they use "Christmas lights" I smile; I saw the same thing on that night.  In the first encounter or sighting, we watched as two very brilliant balls of light merged in the sky.  Some have offered that this was ball lightening.  The only thing about this explanation is that what we observed was a very slow process that took over half an hour to complete whereby two large brilliant objects very slowly moved across the ridge of the next row of hills until they merged.  The two objects also pulsed in a rhythmic and coordinated way.  That is, they both were pulsing in the same repetitive series many many times over.  One brilliant pulse followed by three smaller pulses, with one much dimmer pulse and a slightly larger pulse, all repeating over and over perfectly for the twenty minute encounter.  The two objects moved slowly across the sky and emitted not total silence but what I can only describe as the sound similar to a rocket without the Doppler effect.  This light was brighter than the full moon.  You could read a newspaper by it.  Once the objects merged and grew brighter, I walked into the house.  My sibling who had remained outside came into the house explaining that soon after I had left that the light went entirely silent and then shot across the sky at a very high rate of speed.

Years after the incident, I would read about close encounters and the very odd world of the people who see things in the night sky.  It quite frankly raised more questions than it answered.  It was a kind of cosmic rabbit hole of sorts that led me to read such books as Communion by Whitley Strieber among others.  Instead of answering questions, it raised others, and they were of the kind that I did not like.  All of this actually made me feel spooked.  I had met a man who had had an encounter where he had details of a device "downloaded" into his mind for possible use later.  His and my notes were curious in how they matched.  I would read about devices that many abductees would feel urged to build that operated on the same set of principles I saw at work in my dream.  The thing that bothered me was that abductees most often learned of their past "missing time" as the result of dreams that were described as being "screen memories" for more involved encounters with nonhuman beings.

I held strong to my sense that I had simply not had any physical encounters, but I was a little freaked out to be honest.  I was freaked out because these encounters were not enjoyable.  People described feeling like they were like lab rats, or were held against their will.  So during this same period of time, I went to an online community to read up on other peoples' experiences to see if there was anything that could help me to settle this nagging uncertainty once and for all.  Once I mentioned my own experience, I didn't get curious looks but people who stepped forward and described similar things.  It left me more in the dark for a bit.  What was the nature of all of this? Something was telling me that all of this was within the realm of dream.  I had no memories of being taken.  None of what I had seen was the least bit troubling to me.  As the first pieces of awakening began to trickle in, I began to sense something about a large part of this group of people; they were all experiencing a realm of energetic experience that verged on awakening.  There were instances of time slips, odd anomalies concerning time.  Other had a stronger than usual sense of precognition and intuitive abilities. This was a group of people I sensed were all in some way on the verge of something, and as awakening slowly trickled in, I began to sense this more clearly and began to understand that this phenomenon of the visitors may well be one that is not entirely physical, but which occupies a different class of space or reality.  This would explain why not a single person has had a single physical artifact taken from their many encounters aboard ships.  This could explain why so many of the encounters happen at night (although not always).  this might explain why so many encounters mirrored vivid out of body experiences wherein people were floated out of bed on blue beams of light into what seemed to be ships in the air with beings that seemed to be from another planet or world.  Experiencers, as they are called, often described how they would see ghostly apparitions, or step into future events through unknown means.  Some of the encounters were more like astral projection than anything physical.  Some sported scars or marks made during their abductions.  Some described marks that would appear.  I had a couple of these marks appear on my own body during awakening and it got me to thinking.  Isn't it just as possible that all of this is powerful psychic phenomenon being translated into very specific terms, i.e. extraterrestrial encounters?  I am not here to somehow seek to downplay any one's feelings in regards to their own experiences, and I am not one who plays the hysteria card (which is to say I do not think this is all just hysteria).  But my own intuition tells me that many people that were part of this community were on the verge of awakening.  Is it possible that their experience was in some way co opted or interpreted in a way that focused the phenomenon in a given manner much like how a dream can change in relation to how we feel about the imagery that it contains?  When we overcome certain fears, for example, in dream, the images that most often emerge as emblems of that fear, or symbols of those fears often change forever as a result of this emotional and cognitive shift.

There is another reason for my wondering this, but it is one that did not come until I was digging into awakening trying to find some explanation for the phenomenon.  I had not yet hit upon kundalini as the explanation and was instead reading the Gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi when I came across a couple of books that dealt with a curious constellation of phenomenon that were identical to the modern abduction phenomenon.  This phenomenon was being described by Jesus to one of his disciples and it outlined how a certain type of being called an Archon normally appears to humans.  The Archons come in threes.  They appear and strike terror into their human subjects due to their countenance being like a lion (they are actually described as looking like an "aborted fetus").  Once they strike terror in their subjects, the humans become paralyzed and are unable to move.  It is then that they are "taken by theft."   These beings, it is explained, try to appear as though they are like gods, but are not.  They utilize a form of synthetic reality that was called "HAL" that seems to create the appearance of events that are not entirely real.  These same beings have tried to interbreed with female humans in creating a hybrid race of the two.  All of this, by the way, is in the Nag Hammadi, particularly the Hypostasis of the Archons and the Apocryphon of John.  If you are the least bit familiar with how the abduction scenario, you know by now that all of these phenomenon are entirely coincident with the Archons of Jesus' day.  In fact, there is an interesting article written about how all of these phenomenon mesh together by the Gnostic scholar John Lash HERE.

What I have inferred since then is that the experience of the bridal chamber, which is awakening, is itself a powerful protective force that keeps such intrusions at bay.  It seems that as one awakens, ones susceptibility to beings such as the Archons goes away or fades.  I do note that within a years time of my own awakening, I knew of four other people who were going through awakenings who were visitors to this online community.  All of them I suspect were having phenomenon taking place over years that may have seemed like "visitations" but had all the hallmarks of etheric, rather than physical encounters.  Is it possible that before awakening we might move through a territory where our own growing field of energy is in some way co-opted by others in some way, but that upon awakening serves as a kind of protective field from additional intrusions?  Is it that we are like children with new perceptual powers, but just don't know how to deal with them, do not know how to break out of the old conceptual barriers and thus remain in a kind of hinterland half way between awake and asleep?  is it possible that these transition points are ideal locations for anything that feeds off human energy? 

I used to be a little freaked out by all of this, to be quite honest. However, over time, it has become clear to me that all of this adheres perfectly to the Law of Attraction.  Whatever we have not resolved in ourselves, persists energetically and like attracts like.  Something begins to happen, though, once awakening reaches a certain level.  I am not of the mind that there is a clear point of awakening, even though there are all points where we all feel the movement that feels serpentine up the spine, I simply do not buy that this is IT.  I exhibited all manner of symptoms directly tied to awakening that presaged the more obvious awakening.  It is why, I insist that our understanding of awakening is not as complete as we would like to think.  We approach awakening in the same way that we spiral through our lives.  Life is not a point A to point B experience but a series of cycles within cycles within still larger cycles.  We exist in eternity wound within the appearance of time.  As such, there is not one point where awakening is, but rather, I suspect, we approach it and certain symptoms occur when the necessary thresholds are met that will incur other phenomenon such as rising of one force or another, or hearing things, feeling flushes of intense heat, tingling on the skin, in the energy centers, vivid dreams, loss of appetite, increase in appetite, change in the production of bodily fluids, hormonal changes, and a long list of other symptoms anyone can read about on a site dealing with the symptoms of kundalini.

My earlier sense was that these folks were all preawakeend, or in a place where with the right threshold or experience, awakening could dawn quite easily.  It is a sense that you can pick up on quite easily and there are plenty of symptoms to support such an intuition.  But until that time comes, it seems that people are caught in a middle land of sorts.  Lash explains how the Gnostics were themselves involved in awakening kundalini in this quote from his site:

The lion-headed serpent of the Gnostics is called by magical names such as Ophis, Knuphis, and Abrasax. In the occult anatomy of Asian mysticism and Yoga, this reptile is known as Kundalini, the serpent power. Gnostics who practiced Kundalini yoga were called Ophites, from the Greek ophis, "snake." This cult was condemned by early Christians as pagan "snake-worshippers." To the mundane and uninitiated mind, the Kundalini serpent can only be conceived by crude literalization. To Gnostics, the lion-headed serpent crowned with solar rays was not only the image of the Lord Archon, but also of the source of spiritual power that allows human beings to resist that entity.

Until one comes into full embodiment of the kundalini force, one can be susceptible to forces that may approach such forces in a similar manner.  In my own experience I noted that an entity had been associated with someone I was aware of and had a connection to.  through the awareness brought on by the force of kundalini, super normal vision made it possible to be aware of just what was going on.  All of this defied normal reason, and I often thought I was going crazy, even though I KNEW without a doubt on one side of the equation that everything I was seeing and experiencing inwardly was in fact the case.  What is worthwhile noting was how the being or entity that had been associated with this person was not able to approach me or come close in anyway due to a field of protective energy that I seemed to be endowed with.  Within this energy, there was simply no fear.  Even as the creature attempted to menace me, I was unaffected.  I felt a powerful field of energy propagate outward from my body that gently pushed this being away as I prayed to this being that it needed to learn to create its own energy, to know its place in the universe, and its connection to the Source.  As a result of that experience I learned that while we may have something on our side that aids in creating protective effects, we can also wind up side stepping the necessary inner work that is also necessary to fully embody awakening.  Yes, it is present, yes it has its effects, but like anything, we still remain subject to those aspects of ourselves that remain unhealed and which leave openings to other intrusions into our own inner etheric sheaths, which I suspect is the entry point for these beings.  they do so through those openings where fear resides, or some past hurt or some other trauma that serves to tear our own inner fabric and keep us divided within ourselves.  When we heal these divisions, nothing matching the energy of that division may enter.  Period.

What is hopeful to me is what Lash has dug up about the Gnostics, which include Jesus, in terms of the protective nature of awakening:

Gnostics taught that nous, the spiritual intelligence endowed in humanity, could be blocked by the Archons. This occurs through Archontic intrusion affected by a kind of subliminal invasion at the level of thought and language (i.e., mental syntax). But nous could be reinforced through accessing the power of Kundalini, an ecstatic current that normally rests dormant in the human body. In his monograph on the Archons, I. S. Gilhus notes that "the erotic strategy is the most important means used by the pneumatics to save the lost light." (p. 51) Pneumatics is the Gnostic terms for humans who pursue the path of psychosomatic illumination, the key method of Gnostic religion. Pneuma, "spiritual force," is developed by cultvation of nous, "higher intelligence." But the Archons present a blind field of resistance to this process: in short, they rely on humans remaining ignorant of their inherent spiritual potential.
When Kundalini is raised from its dormant state, higher intelligence blossoms, and there are other effects as well. Gnostic sects such as the Ophites practiced the communal raising of Kundalini to produce an protective envelope against Archontic intrusion. In effect, they held Kundalini, the sexual-spiritual energy locked in the body structure, to be the main instrument of defense against the Archons. The Dialogue of the Savior, NHC III, 5 (85), contains this exchange:

Judas said, "Behold, The authorities (Archons) dwell above us, so it is they who will rule over us."
The savior said, "It is you who will rule over them. But only when you rid yourselves of jealousy, and take on the protection of the Light, and enter the nymphion (bridal chamber)."

The savior-teacher is emphatic that we have power over the Archons, but he also makes it clear that some human failings impede the use of our power. The Greek word phthonos may be translated as "jealousy" or "envy." Gnostics considered envy to be the signature of the Archons, as well as the key human failing that makes us vulnerable to their intrusion. "The protection of the Light" comes through activated Kundalini, often described as a lightning-like tide of electrified light that pours through the body. "Nymphion" is a code word for the ambient cell of psychophysical protection generated by high levels of Kundalini. Sir John Woodruffe, the great transmitter of Hindu Tantric wisdom to the West, directly identified the practice of Kundalini yoga (raising the serpent power through the channels of the spine) with Gnostic rites of "serpent worship." (Shakti and Shakta, p. 191 ff.) Buddhist scholars such as E. A. Evans-Wentz, J. M. Reynolds, and H. V. Guenther have made similar observations, but Gnostic scholars have not reciprocated because they do not look outside their genre to understand the theory and practice of Gnosis.

We are all on the spiraling path, all each in our own way in our own timing.  We are all approaching our own greater becoming each and every moment, and yet in each moment there lies the potential for it all along, which means that choice is there, rather than some destiny; we move moment by moment by virtue of freewill just as our own soul essence whispers what we surely have known all along but have kept at the periphery of our waking awareness.  What happens today bears on tomorrow, and as we reach those clusters of events that help us to reflect in just the right way and to resolve the old barriers to held us divided (which the Gnostics write about!) then the door is increasingly opened to the channels opening in our awareness that allow us to realize who and what we are in still broader dimension; we awaken.  

I don't have a fascination of these Archonic beings, though.  I have a fascination with what brings us closer to our divine natures, what breaks the bonds of our limitations, and old awareness.  Do we do this through a perfunctory understanding of what awakening is and its protective nature?  No.  I don't feel that awakening can in any way be brought about as a result of a rational process at all.  Just as emotion is often perceived as irrational, so too does the awakening force transcend our habituated tendency towards resting in our left brains and sparks both hemispheres into action in awakening.  Latent portions of the brain begin to mirror the phenomenon now taking place as it happens.  We would like to think its all JUST energy, but everything I have experienced so far has shown that everything happens together; body and soul are married and thus one is experienced because the other is capable of experiencing it also.  It isn't that we are JUST spiritual beings, but that we are here wedded to duality for  a PURPOSE which is to bring heaven and earth together.  Married.  Just as we marry soul to body, we marry heaven and earth together.  Father Sky, Mother Earth.  Shakti is often seen as the world of the physical, the manifesting of creation, the great womb of creation.  She is filled to the brim with her consort, the initiating force, and they cycle one into the other in a harmonious circuit of creation that is the very essence of bliss.  This is the bridal chamber, the nymphion as the Gnostics term it.  All of these things are themselves images that seek to put to word and into analogous form what exists in a more primordial manner, a pre-existent state, which just so happens to be where both the "father" and the "mother" exist.  They are not begotten, but are the unbegotten begetters, which is to say they are before form and manifestation, the deities if there ever were any. 

My interest in our reaching a place as a race where we can get beyond the veils of our own ignorance to see and know what is.  As the dross is removed, as the force of awakening clears and cleanses, we have the opportunity to live a life unlike anything we may have known previously.  We emerge as if out of dream, an old dream with many nightmares, ones which we began to question. Is this all there is?  Is this as good as it gets?  Is there something I am somehow missing?  How do I resolve this nagging sense of uncertainty about these events in my life?  How is it that I can reach a state of greater peace within?  Do I just accept how things have gone, or is there a better way?  What IS that way?  These are the fateful words of a seeker turning within and setting free the chains that hold her and him to what was illusory. 

Perhaps there is something more waiting for you on the other side of all of this.  We will each find it in our own time, in the moment when the choice is made, when the turning of the soul shines brighter than our rational mind and our limiting beliefs do.  I remain hopeful for our clan of humans here.  We ache too much for a better world for it to be anything except that. 

Presentient Awareness

I have been trying to get this into word.

Today, in the bathroom, it came to me as I pondered it.  I guess it wasn't so hard....I just couldn't pluck the words for it.  Not that it matters so much, perhaps. But let's see if I can explain this.

When I awoke, I awoke to the trees sighing all around me.  All of life was alive with this energy, I just hadn't had its energy in me enough for it to offer me the awareness needed.  It isn't that you use some new facility in the brain as much as the energy seems to awaken the pathways necessary so that the awareness of the energy has a way to express itself.  I think the physical universe has the capacity to speak or mirror this awakening energy.  It is like the soul of the world.  It is in everything.  SO when I awoke, the world awoke with me.  Something was in everything, in every single atom and I was aware that it was looking at me, aware of me just as I was aware of it.  I know this may sounda little wild, but it is true.  It might seem a little psychedelic in a way, but perhaps only because psychedlecis might open doors to this sense of sentience in all things. 

Every single aboriginal group has expressed the living character of the universe.  Its not just dead matter.  Today, thinking about WHAT to call this, it came.  It is Presentient Awareness.  This is to say that all things are living, just not with blood and bone or nervous systems.  Regardless, this does not lessen the fact that on an energetic level, everything is energy and everything contains intelligence.  We humans think its got to go a certain way, we need proof and machines that will tell us what we think we already know, while the machines are biased in a given direction due to the bias that created them.  A tellescope will not show you the soul of a star, only its light.  It will not show you what you are unprepared to see.  When the deck is loaded, you take the card that is dealt and then say how true the card is even though the deck can only tell you about kings, queens, jacks and jokers, aces, hearts, and spades.  It wont tell you about all those other things.....

All matter has Presentient Awareness.  That is, it is sentient, but it is in a presentient state.  Prior to being a complex organism.  It is not sentient in the way we so often think it is, but it is nonetheless alive.  I think you can see how energy orders the universe.  In its own way, seemingly "dead" matter will assemble into amazing patterns.  It is not without order, without a sense of mindfulness of a sort, a logic and method in the madness.  When you look at the MOST curious spacing of our planets in our own solar system, you will see some pretty amazing coincidental happenings.  Some say its JUSt what matter does, and yet it is this ordering that obviously has some kind of a hand in helping bring life into being.  So is there something that presages life that is in a sense intelligent?  When Bohr and Plank looked at the world of quantum effects, they came to the conclusion that things really weren't AT ALL what we had supposed.  All of matter was composed of mind, Plank said.  All matter is energy, and there is a curious interaction taking place when our own minds get in on looking at something (it changes the outcome).  There is also the evidence for something within matter actually being aware, somehow, that it is also being observed.  Take the double slit experiment.  Or the measurement problem.  These things preclude a mere  materialistic view of the universe as the rule of the day.  Matter and events also follow our own thoughts, so even this seems to be at least a glancing blow against the idea of a purely materialistic universe. 

I say there is presentient awareness.  It is here.  It is now.  It is IN you.  And you heard it here first because I just made it up.  For you.  And everyone else. 

Awakening

Awakening is like the dream you dream
so real
alive
full of magic
and life
wonder
and power.

As you awake,
as the world comes flooding back
you loose your grip on it
bit by bit
as you come back to your senses
and your senses tell you
the wonder was wonder
but not real
just a feeling
a marvelous dream
that transported you
to other worlds
which felt so real
yet your rational mind
says "not."

Awakening is like this
except upon awakening
your senses do not slip down around you
but slip down away from you
as the inner master holds on
to that one slip of golden wonder
and does not let go of it
until it thickens
and builds
and grows into a flame
as the pages of waking
and turned to fire
and your life becomes
an epiphany
a dream
that does not end
but continues
endures
and carries you on its new wings
in waking
on earth
as it is in heaven. 

This is the secret of awakening.
You can point to all the magical movements
and breathing exercises
but my heart knows that THIS
is the sacred nexus of the divine within
and it has far more to do with the dreams
of children
who dare to dream of other worlds
that get carried into this one.

If you want to taste awakening
then carry your dream wonder
into waking
and in waking
you will know
just what I mean.

Fear = Door

Next time that you feel fear about something, I want you to tell yourself "my fear is a doorway."  For as hard as that fear seems to you, keep thinking how it is a door.  Begin visualizing that fear, no matter how hard, is in truth a door.  Keep thinking that way.  You don't have to go through the door yet if you do not want to, but begin cementing that in your mind at least for now.

then, when you are ready, approach the fear.  Approach it with inquisitiveness and curiosity.  Is it really going to kill you?  Maim you?  Perhaps if it is a grizzly bear, perhaps yes, it could certainly kill you, but what I am talking about is something that grips you in the chest and gives you that pulse of adrenaline, something that tells you that you have reason to fear.  We all tell ourselves that fear is a good thing because it helps us to keep safe.  And yes, in terms of that grisly bear, you are absolutely right.  Having been face to face with a bear once, I think you have to proceed with wise caution and care.  However, I am not talking about this.  I am talking about something that has to do with an event that is in your past that you are now bringing unknowingly and only half aware into the moment so that it splashes its fear coloring onto everything that you see that you think is probably a good fit for the paint of fear. It could be something so far back you don't even have a memory of it, but it is no less accessible to you because of this (if you can feel it, it is right where you are!) I was talking to graduate students a few weeks ago about this, how fear is the one things that holds us back from so much.  Looking at the group I could sense all sorts of different fears within them.  We are all this way, you see, and we also benefit greatly by conquering fear because it also conquers and quiets our past too.  I said that if you were a kid and saw a man with a bald head and a grey beard lift up a child and beat him on the street, you could easily grow up to secretly fear such people who remind you of that past traumatic event.  Without knowing it, you would go on to paint people, however subtly, with a brush that does not fit them, but fits how you feel, regardless of the facts.

In meditation, in inner work, we can sometimes rub up against these fears.  As can often be the case, our consciousness can project what I think of as a dream image in front of our awareness.  It is essentially the same as a dream image.  It is simply a container for something that has no form.  We give the feeling form and thus our minds can work with it.  We see something in our mind's eye that feels scary or strange that we respond negatively to.  Often, we shrink back, or we demonize it.  We see it as bad.  We put it outside ourselves.  We objectify it.  We put it outside of ourselves even though it is not outside of us.  It is very much inside of us.  It is HOW we are choosing to see something.  In inner work, this can get slippery sometimes for the fact that we can be seeing something that we are not fully resolved with.  In not being resolved, we also may be inflexible in our willingness to move it around our perception and our fuller faculties.  Maybe we see a goblin, a demon, or a wall.  Maybe we hear a noise, dream of something, or feel some sense of menace.  For as much as we may think that the object is outside of us, the fear is not.  It is us, and it binds us into a relationship with the object of our fear in a way that keeps that relationship active and limits us.  It is a curious truth that when you overcome a fear, the phenomenon connected to the fear can change entirely.  Some part of you also changes in the process.  For the better.  For instead of allowing yourself to be robbed of energy by feeding your vitality into fear, you are free to feed it into asuredness, confidence, joy, happiness, or bliss.  When you resolve something like this, you no longer have a block about it, but you have a channel for energy to flow.  So then, fear ceases being a wall or insurmountable thing, but a doorway.  For you.  For your energetic self.  So if you do work in meditation, or in mindfulness, thinking this way can be not only cathartic, it can be another tool in dissolving blocks.  

So look, your fear can become a door.  At any moment, you can stop shrinking back and just enter.  When you do, when you let go and just go, the nature of whatever that things is can change.  to do this requires grace because by grace, we can let go down to our very roots.  Ask for the help of god or some god or deity if you have to, whatever it takes to get the job done!  If it works, I say use it!  Belief is a powerful thing.  But isn't it time that you stopped worrying on that bone?

Yes, fear can be an opportunity to know what is real.  In vanquishing old fear, you do not turn a blind eye to what is real, you simply realize what IS real.  Your fear is not some insurmountable wall.  It is a doorway. 

Dream Boost

A few days ago while I was at my health food store I came across a product called Dream Boost.  There were free samples and after reading through the literature included, I was intrigued enough to take a sample. 

Dream Boost is a suppliment that is supposed to help one achieve restful sleep as well as more vivid dreaming. I normally do not need any help in this area, but I am always the curious type. 

What is Dream Boost?  The literature states that "Dream Boost is an all-natural dietary suppliment developed by the Upstate Dream Institute as a sleep and dream enhancer.  taken at bedtime, Dream Boost's patent-pending formula optimizes sleep cycles for restful and restorative sleep while increasing dreaming ability, vividness, and recall."  The literature also states that it is 100% natural, non addictive, without grogginess or other side effects and is safe for regular use. 

What is in Dream Boost?  Well, melatonin, for one.  It also has several vitamins amd minerals and metals such as zinc, magnesium, vitamin B-1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9 and 12, along with vitamin C,  and D.  It also includes mugwart, wild lettuce, passion flower, green tea, and Vincopetine.   It does not contain milk products of any kind, nor gluten, sugar, preservatives, or artificial colors.  It is a compressed pill that looks just like a B vitamin. 

Two pills come with the sample and one to two pills can be taken as a full dose.  I took one pill last night and did experience some rather vivid dreams, but will reserve any discussion about what I found until I have tried this for two nights.  I am not endorsing this product, just pasing on what I have experienced first hand. 

I'll let you know more about this in the next day or two.....

What Can't Be Known

You cannot grasp what you are while seeking to grasp another.  You cannot grasp another when you do not know yourself.  What is unmade in you will itself project itself cinematic, out onto others and is itself a lie that we tell ourselves that in no ways illuminates the truth of what is.  I say "what can't be known" as if it can't be known, which isn't entirely true, but true until your own blinders are removed, until the competing material alive within you ceases to be identified with.  I have written numerous times about this, have experienced the results of this phenomenon in my life in many ways, and it comes down to how ego identifies with what is in the past and seeks to keep it alive in the present through projection.  Even as ego is active, in full belief that what it has settled on is true, it most often muddles things for the fact that ego is a reflective part of the psyche.  Why do I say this?  It takes what it knows and applies it to the present.  In order to do that, it must reflect on the past in order to make a judgement about the present.  Ego, too engaged in the moment, can misjudge, misinterpret what it thinks it sees.  When you are in a position of making determinations about what it is you think you see in the present by basing it on your memory banks, you are no longer engaged in the moment, but reflecting.  It is in reflecting that we unwittingly or unknowingly project.  It is natural, it is part of our survival instinct, and all things being equal, it has allowed us to survive and thrive as a species.  It has also caused us to bring past bias into the moment.  This is why reson or logic CAN be a very helpful tool in overcoming the biases of the past.  By ceasing what you think you know, which is based in how you FEEL, you can stick to the facts.  Ego will often blind you to the facts, to what is.  I have seen this taken to outrageous degrees where someone who is compassionate and caring is suddenly turned into a monster or devil or worse.  This, all courtesy of unresolved fear and ego driving the bus.  As you may know from my writing, I do not consider ego to be some demon to be destroyed, only that we have allowed it too full a reign in our psyches.  Unwittingly though, ego is certainly involved in the act of projection, and it keeps us imprisoned in our inner world, in what I would call a reality tunnel that has been part events of the past and part who we are and less what actually is. 

Carl Jung was all over this, and it is a well known phenomenon that happens when we are not reflective enough, or settled inr healed within. What is not settled remains like a loop of energy in our souls, what we might call karma, and it runs recursively within and will make us see and do what we don't really see and do not wish to do or be.  It owns us.  We are its prisoner and we cannot see beyond the wall of its own illusion lest we break free from it and all of its effects.  These are nearly identical words used by a disciple of Jesus in his lesser known gospel, the Gospel of Philip (Nag Hammadi). Through intention.  Sometimes it is by way of what we might consider catastrophic means, but those catastrophes are merely the very lever against which we move our perceptions. And sometimes others must do it for us simply because we become so unbearable in our insistence that things are as our beloved loops say we are.

I have seen this play out over and over in my life, and for a time it was a mystery as to how to correct it.  How do I clear up what is in others who seek to persecute in me? By releasing what remains in me.  It was often the case that I was blamed for things that I had never done.  It became easy for others to pin them on me.  Afterall it made perfect sense; I was dreamy and forgetful.  But it made me a target for others' frailties.  In some cases, it resulted in amazing distortions of what was true or real.  And that is not to say that there weren't distortions on both sides of the fence.  It is a reality of our becoming that has many pitfalls.   I have had great scurrilous things  told all in the name of these blind loops.  Persecution energy.  But most of it comes about as a result of a lingering guilt that we carry within us from lifetimes of living.  If you were ever a leader of masses of people, it is easy enough to have done things in your best effort that backfired and wound up hurting others, resulting in a guilt, a weight tied around your neck and some of these rest upon us for lifetimes until we face them and find resolution. How do people get to the place where they are willing or able to look past what is true to embrace their own inner hurt and lack of resolve within the divine?  "It is each person's journeywork, not yours, theirs, and your work is to stay straight ahead and know your own truth lest you get caught up in their own maya or illusion" is what this abiding presence whispers.  I admit that in the past I have not always listened.  The greatest compassion is the one we pay ourselves, though, for when we can do that for ourselves, we naturally can do it for all.  We think that in doing it first for others that we are somehow being noble and selfless, except that this rarely seems to work as it leaves behind the fragments of karma and maya turning within it.  We serve others so they may approve of us, may reflect upon us as somehow good. Silly!  We were born good.  We have no need to prove it.  BE it.  Don't get lost in such denizens of pretense and illusion.   This kind of thinking turned me from running a business that should have been about the sheer love of creating but instead became an instrument for seeking approval in at least a small way.  If I was successful in making the business provide, then it MUST mean I was worthy of approval or good.

Oh my.

And so, when I awoke, I lost almost all interest in my business, which was built on something that could not last, that was not enduring to the soul that I am inside.  I turned around one day to find that I was lost in something that I had begun with love and care and passionate energy.  Like a metal that had a small impurity in it, the weakness within resulted in the metal giving way and the whole thing breaking down.  It is something that simply cannot stand.  My studio was like a temple.  I entered the realm of its possibility with grace and focus, but I also unknowingly brought in a burning desire to prove something.  Creation does not seek to prove anything.  Ego does that.  Creation only seeks to be.  So I lost all interest or desire in this enterprise until I was able to reorient myself and ask myself what the deeper reasons were for doing this kind of work.  It had to be lain upon a foundation that could support it rightly and not seek to borrow stones from another;s form of approval.  We become responsible for anothers' happiness and in keeping that bit of power, we must be perfect or else if we trip or fall or act human, we will certainly have hell to pay.  And this is so.  We have no business holding others' power, and yet we do it all the time.  It emerges as codependency of one form or another. 

So who I am will be seen as not as it is but as others are.  They will believe in these illusions and it will be their own doing, their own karma, and their own path.  In their own struggle, they will say and do remarkably hurtful things, but it is the greatest of compassions to let them alone to be because no one can help another who is caught up in this way.  We help ourselves, we take responsibility for our own stuff and do not seek to put it off onto others.  This is the greatest compassion; letting others be who they must be.  Straight ahead, lightening like, for me, it is all direct because of what I am in my soul.  In that place, there is no equivocation, doubt, or uncertainty, and I strie to become more and more like him and less of what has been as I compare the template of me with the me I will become.  In so doing, what I will be when I reach that higher self will be more than it is as I glimpse him now.  In this way, the self and soul vaults itself through vast places of awareness. One extends beyond the other as the other pulls the other along with it.  They are like two joined by a rope who leap frog using the rope of their being to vault each other into still unknown territory.  I am not sure I can even explain this, except that I know that this is true.  My higher self will be more by what I do here, and yet what I become will be more than he is in the "present" of the infinite, since he does not exist in time, but straddling it.  And it isn't even just a matter of my own limited perception.  We will each become more than we could become on our own.  If the smaller self expands, it expands the higher beyond its own comprehension.  Leapfrogging in this way, the essence of time and timelessness is embraced in an emerging new way.  The last time I did this, I went back into time through dream to speak to my younger self.  I awoke in the morning to find that something had shifted, something had changed.  I felt different, I was different because I had stepped back into time through the dream world and contacted myself to urge myself to do something that was the core of what he most needed to become.  It was a small thing, and it was about love.  the message was simple, not complicated, and perhaps because of its simplicity, it rang in his heart.  It made a change.  This is one way that we can change our lives.  Robert Monroe, author of books about out of body experiences spoke of encountering future aspects of himself and how those future selves sought to help him along where he was.  But in so doing, the future self changed their own "present" by enriching the past.  Jane Roberts, a writer and channel for the personality Seth described how Seth and Jane were two aspects of each other, that Seth was like a future self, while Jane represented a past self, and yet, through their interactions, their work together, Seth helped Jane to develop more, to learn to use her abilities which meant that the self she would become would not be Seth as he was when he came through her to write books while Jane was alive, but a different self partly as a result of their interactions.  The soul, weighing nothing, is not bound by time.  Bodies, full of mass, are more difficult to move through time.  And perhaps we will unlock the secret to physical time travel, but until then you can travel through time through dream quite easily.  This is but one way that we can effect great change even when that change may elude us. 

What we see in the world is a composition not just of what is, but of what we have projected.  As we do away with those projections, we can come to what is true and real.  the path to this is overcoming karma, which overcomes maya.  What overcomes maya brings one closer to the divine within.

My Religion Is The Mystery

No religions contain me
I see religion in bird flight and water song.  I see the truth manifest in everything, even if it must be called religion.  for even there, yes, the truth cannot help but emerge potent, fertile, and alive but here, it is most often managed, clipped, and carefully trimmed, lest its great lusty power and love and wonder overpower those who have sought power within its chambers and effects.  For whatever reason, we seek to lessen the life of the one true religions through lessening it in our created religions.  For reasons of control, ego, and hubris.

It is enough to rest the mind and heart upon mystery and let that great Way be the way that defines it all and informs the path.  Out of such voluptuous possibility does what we are emerge, and what we are is like some ancient religion before religion itself was born.  God waits for us before all religions, in all religions, waiting on us to know the contiguous truth in meaning that is at once a part of them and entirely independent of them.....but also in the sacred text of the atom, the bird, the wind and the spacing of the planets.

I am not pagan or orthodox, my religions is the word mystery unspoken and ineffable. I know that as I tease the stories out of its great circle I lessen it in a way and point in a direction other than it is, while still seeming to point within the circle.  My religion is the presence I bear, which none may enter and who none will know.  Mine is a pulse of passion that carries infinities and carries each home and reminds us why we are here.  "Mystery" it whispers in the ancient language.  "Mystery" it urges as flame licks each heart and soul, as like brush-fire its  presence spreads and becomes a living presence in each life and in each hand.

Even before I awoke to the flame lifting me and settling me deeper into my nature I knew mystery and reveled in it.  Before the foundation of earth was this mysterious religion alive in my soul and no foundation may contain it or define it nor seek to control or channel it.  Perhaps this is why it is just this strong, irresistible, beautiful, wild, free, and sure.  It is the only thing in my pocket and I may seem a beggar for how little I own.  But if I seem to own it, it is only that it owned me from the beginning. It resolves my vision into piercing lights, for when this penetrates the fog of unknowing, it brings gnosis into being.  Its very presence vibrates souls awake, is the essence of becoming, the sweet nectar of the heavens.  It is the great marriage of a force that moves and pulses through all life and being.  It moves through empty space and fills it, and the dance of the Two become One even in the broadest of ways which go beyond our effort or ability to contain or define.  What is in me is in all others and like an emissary from the light I am only here to remind you that this is so.  All it seems to ask is that you touch the beauty within you so that you may see the beauty in the universe.  We all resolve into searchlights and tender spaces waiting to be filled with that same light. 

Mystery itself is not some generic, not some faceless thing, but is instead a face with countless faces.  It is all faces, all definitions in such wild profusion that it is like lions watching zebra running past.  they are so made to confuse the lion so all they see are stripes.  It isn't that Mystery cannot be touched or known, but in touching it, you are only touching one point upon an infinity of them and seeking to define the earth by defining one spot you have grasped in your front lawn will hardly every do or reveal what is there in such utter profusion in its entirely.  No, there is this way to Mystery which is not about grasping but about letting go, of letting your hands rest open as all the earth of earth moves through them in an instant, as every river and ocean flows assuredly through your hands.  Everything that is is present as a distillation, a delicate wine made from starlight and toadstools and laughter and all that has ever been.  Consider how you can feel the Essence of All and there you will touch upon what this delicious Mystery is.  So as countless beings rest upon the rim of our world watching these past decades, assembling from all over the universe to witness this rare event, I am aware that we are not alone, and while they are quiet in their watching, they are themselves not entirely silent.  In the same way the flowers and trees tremble as they feel the power shifting on the planet.  What will happen?  What eventuality or probability will be chosen in a mass way?

How you come to it is your own story.  I know my own, and my own will bear my own journies' essence.  I am my own, and what I have been defines what I am in still larger scales, and I am but one fleck within an ocean of golden flecks that dance like dust upon the light of the great infinite powers.  In being aware of the life that I share with All seems to make the difference and keeps me from only knowing myself as one and keeps me awake within my profusion, which quite naturally is just what this mystery is......and in that moment my soul comes closer to it like a lover bids one to be closer, to dissolve the divisions within the heart, to be simple like a child, and to forget all that defined the hurt of the past in order to realize some greater fulfillment.

In such places the future selves come in profusion.  I explained to my daughter the great mystery in how this happens and how amazing it all is.  In every life there are a profusion of lines which are parallel lives running alongside the one you know now but represent paths taken that you here in this focus do not yet know, but are just as valid as any other.  As one awakens, one feels the presence of the future self looping back to the old self in order to effect change and greater fulfillment in its own home channel or time.  Once it touches upon the past, it changes what exists in its present, and the future self becomes more than it was.  And through this interaction, the past self is also changed so that once the past self catches up with the future self, that past self is different from what the future self was when it sought to go "back' into time to retrieve and inspire itself.  Endless possible presents are spawned in our moment from making changes in whether to go to the store now or later, to bigger more seminal moves, like where to go to school or whom to love.  All of these lines exist nonetheless even if we do not ourselves see them or know them, but it is possible to know them through the great profusion that is this Mystery.

The moment that Mystery is grasped, it becomes Phenomenon.  It cannot help but be this.  It is how it is.  Mystery is itself a great potential ocean of energy that IS manifest, but remains in its totality.  If there is to be any kind of "god" then this is it.  It is a great unnamable thing, itself aware and alive, but in ways beyond anything you might or could imagine.  It is the totality of the All and yet in that totality, it is more.  Many would lie to personify it, but there is no person as you or I would know or understand.  And yet, there is an approachable presence, its just that it chooses to be so damned profuse that it is in everything, IS everything.  It is like THE most advanced being there is, and who has situated itself into everything simply because it IS everything. It is the great cosmic busybody, alive and aware within every leaf, stone, star and smile.  Its volume is incomprehensible, but approachable, beautiful and wondrous.

There is simply no way to slap a bumper sticker or slogan or religion on that.

So I don't even try. 

Shining Moment

Your darkest hour was, in actuality, your shining moment.
For, in the authenticity of your emotional experience
was your key to your liberation
from the pattern that keeps you rooted
in the pain of separation from who you really are.

- Rasha

Beloved

Image Credit: Vera Kratochvil

With one simple forgiveness
we find ourselves in the warm velvet night
star-filled
ringed by the moon.

A place where no human foot
touches
but souls do enter.

This is the ancient path
 to  soul
a vast storehouse
inconquerable
full
of distilled light
from stars.

All these lifetimes it might be
or seems
waiting for the hand
that finds the catch
the tender release
of the door
that lets loose a realm of wonder
an endless sea of light.

Entering,
it is as though it is a
forbidden temple
forgotten throne
filled to overflowing
with  desire,
yearning,
and sacred fire.
What bears such wonder as this?
By whose hand is this conferred
as the hand pulls open wide
the doors to the world of the beloved.

Emerging,
this is the bridal chamber
the secret channel to the mysteries
what will you do
when you are one
and find that you are two?

The Maker
the Architect
stands silent
and present
within
in every beam
brow
shutter
and arch
every slab of mortar
and in every creak
and groan
a storehouse bursting at its seams
with golden grain
where no earthly lips
may touch or taste
but whose soul may consume
endlessly.

No words can contain
nor move the heart enough
to equal this pleasure
joy
wonder
and resplendent bliss.

Here you speak in epiphanies
as earth and heaven shudders.
Here your soul rushes as rivers
an ocean awaits your continuous arrival.

Here you look upon the Holy of the Holies
and realize for anyone else
it would be heresy
so it been kept secret
for the time
when it comes
when a hand finds itself grasping
the worn latch
the ancient lock
the forgotten key found
to discover the whole of it waiting
trembling in that moment
for what surely must come
and can now no longer be denied.

All that came before is slowly erased
books of wisdom defaced
leaving nothing but parchment empty
and a world unspeakable
unwritten
but etched upon all that we are.

There are no words to contain this tender escape
or the love that floods
a river of fire
carrying us each
where the beloved awaits
a heart afire
with a twin light brightening the night
with a star of earth now lit
on earth
as it is in heaven.

The stores of the soul
are but a breath away
for each of us,
a silken veil is all that is left
but so arduous a journey!
Let no one seek to shake you
from this holy ground
no doubt
or shadow
move you from what is yours
and mine
and all the rest of creation
as the sacred gift
of awakening.

Before opening those doors
life was like a dream
that we thought was waking
and in waking
discover a still deeper realm of being
as a ramshackle shed
is turned into the temple of our most high
and revered
where the beloved greets us
and pulls us in
to its wonder of wonders.

We are like beggars
looking for our next meal 
when we find this store house within
and cease our looking
and begin our loving
which has no beginning
and knows no end.
Princes and Princesses
all emerge from such places
and are adorned with the nectar of the gods and goddesses
as all we thought valued turns to dust
before the great golden flame of such simple things.

We leave the storehouses
but the storehouse never leaves
but abides
its great secret
upon our lips
as our life becomes a constant prayer
as we make our way
from one great mystery to another
new worlds cast like seeds upon fertile ground
as new trees grow in this garden of Eden
and we stand unafraid
and free.


Image link

Conflicted Delusion

The hardest thing for some is to remain true to who they are and what they are inside.  I spent years with a lingering sense of doubt about myself, and in this lingering, there was a reflection that attracted a perfect foil for this.  It served as a perfect teacher, an entirely unbending one, but one nonetheless. The difficult part is in seeing how the universe is helping us to grow in the midst of what seems attacks against our very essence by those unable to see or know our inner divine.  The attacks are themselves self created and part of the drama of our delusion. 

The hardest thing perhaps is remaining true to this because we want to keep people calm, happy, or not to step on feelings.  So often we put ourselves last when we should be first.  That may seem like a selfish thing to do, but in putting ourselves last, we have also said to the universe that we do not matter, and in so doing, foils have been sent our way that will reflect this perfectly.  We will have invited others to show us their most broken or hurt part of themselves, and it is known that these parts almost always seek to project their fear or hurt forward in such a way that whatever the frailty is that causes the pain, they wind up believing the fault is in others instead of themselves. 

Until and unless we can abide by our own compass point, sharing the compass with another wont work.  There will be something out of alignment for both them and us.  It will be something that cannot stand, that will result in imbalances no matter what.  A house divided against itself.  So with the best of intentions, there can be the worst of problems.  Until you can decide that the divine within is the single most important part to follow, not just the belief of another who is actively engaged in their own process of cleaning up their own insides, there will be hitches projected outward which we will point to others as the culprit.  We are the culprit.  The great coil of karma is unwinding and this will be turned on its head.  How long will it take to undo the march of thousands of years?  There is no them.  There is only us.

Men must suck it up, be the strong ones, and women the core of compassion and tenderness.  In creating a world like this for ourselves, we have divided out those aspects that reside within all.  Women rob themselves of the natural aggresiveness that was always theirs while men are robbed of their courage to feel and to be sensitive.  It is a house divided against itself.  When we allow the archetypes that once served to heal to rule, they can also serve to divide us simply becuase they were simply a tool.  When there is man and woman instead of human beings, we have a problem.  When we step into the collective consciousness of humankind, there is not a man and a woman but a rich voice made up of all voices. No archetypes present in any significant way save for what we seek in dreaming, waking or asleep.  We are as one voice with many currents and tones.  When we seek to divide, we divide ourselves.  We are here, I believe, to heal the division.  Even Jesus was said to have come to heal the division that had happened in the Garden of Eden.  This saying, spoken by Philip in his gospel, speaks to the reality that Eve and Adam are One and that all attempts at making them one or the other or above another or different from another is the very spark of division.  Within each of us is the first woman and first man.  We are this.  Only this.  Anything else is Maya, illusion, and conflicted delusion.  When one is one aspect and the other another aspect, we have lost it.  We have just sought to grasp the wind.  Silly human!  Be still, and you will know the wind as it was meant to be "grasped."

When kundalini rose, it did not rise with the masculine and feminine dancing around each other.  Its message to me was that their very force was interdependent and when in union, were not two but one.  Whatever existed as a desire to see one and then the other was itself the very force of division, which is situated, structurally at least, in the left hemisphere in our great ability to see differences, parts, pieces.  This is an approach that is great for identifying where a health problem may be emerging, or in knowing how to fix a car or to pick up a leaf, but it is not a way to know how to BE the merged cosmos.  This kundalini, which is not a force or a spirit, is what we are.  For me, I know it is the future self looping back into me in the same way that I have looped back in dream to other times in my life which now seem encased by the past in order to effect ripples of change that have moved through my life.  the future is changed by moving into our past, and this intelligence, this force which entered my awareness was itself an advanced form of what I shall become.  And yet, as I was seeking to explain to my daughter today as we sat talking about how he day went, timelines are very complex things.  The moment a future version of me loops back here to effect change, the future self I will become when it reaches the same approximate point where that future self cam here will be different.  An infinity of lines will have been created just as limtless probable presents, pasts, and futures are being created by every act and decision made.  It is duzzying in its complexity and implications.  This should help you to realize how amazing creative energy is, how boundless and vibrant that it can be.  It is.  But this energetic presence, I know for myself, at least since its emergence, has always been the very essence of union.  to consider that one falls away from the other is not even a consideration since the reality is that life tiself does not know anything BUT the union.  Life force, all life, IS the result of their union.  to go into one being separate from the other is like the mind seeking to play a theoretical game with itself pretending as though it CAN divide them out and pretend to know what the result would be.  I wont even play that game because it is like trying to say that there is a day and night.  Sure, there is a time when the sky darkens and when it lightens, but there is not a point where the two are entirely separate.  they are always joined by infinite gradations of dusk.  they belong to one enother the way a carpet is woven into itself, how silly it is to say "this is where the rug is the masculine strands and this is where there are feminine strands."  they are of a piece and the function of the rug or day and night are because they are of that piece. 

The world may not understand you, may not know what you are or who you are, may even pretend to not know and seek to paint your world one way or another, but in this quiet and calm place of your own wisdom, you reflect into yourself gently and knowingly.  Your power does not exist in others, but in yourself.  Validation by another is itself a form of slavery, a gentle velvet slavery which will, in the right moment, reveal all of the frailties that encompass its making and own karma. Many are made blind by it and will seek their own truth, and they must be free to do so. Even those who seek to make of others what is actually all their own. 


What we say matters.  How we say it matters.  Turning a blind eye to our own words and deeds is itself a blindness that we have played at for eons.  Even as we wind upwards into awakening, this delusion persists.   Even telling ourselves that we are awake and thus different is itself a form of delusional thinking.  We all do it.  To reach that place where such delusions cease is perhaps what we sense is enlightenment.  Getting there is less a destination as it is a continual process of becoming. Like night and day, each moves slowly and gradually into one another.  Evening takes hours to fall, and it takes hours for the dawn to come.  When all of life is a circle, it is silly to say that there is any one point where something becomes another.  They never were not part of one another.  the world hoop is itself always whole, and this was what eluded Black Elk.  He thought he had to heal the world hoop, to heal his People, their hearts and the world.  What he did not realize was that the hoop is only a hoop.  To heal means we must move around this hoop, it means that we must shift our perceptions, our perspective on the wheel.  As we do this, we life from all sides.  We ourselves become more whole in this process, and this image does a very good job of defining just how we are in life. All of life is this circle, and it really is silly to try and make it into a straight line process because it isn't.  Your left brain will allow you to see that you ARE making a line as you walk through your life, but to make it a point A and B thing is folly because we know this is not so.  It is a becoming.  Always.  We make the path as we go, but that path winds upwards. 

When you are clear in all of this, when you ask that the earth show you the truth, just by placing your hand upon it, it will shake.  This is just how powerful our own inner truth is.