Reaching Out From The Inside

We have been convinced that what exists through our physical senses is all that there is and to not trust our feelings because they are the result of some chemical soup that evolved out of some odd propensity for matter to chance upon making life. This is the body of the world, and without its soul, it is a corpse.  Just as we look out onto the world of appearances, the body of the world, we can reach into ourselves and feel the soul of the world.  It is there in just the same way that the body is, except instead of sensing is or apprehending it in the way we do with the body of the world, we do so through our inner senses.

It is so valuable a thing to trust your feelings, to trust how you feel and to trust the part of you where the universe will come streaming into you in a whole new way. Certainly there are some hard feelings, some crinkled edges, and some skeletons rattling around in the midst of who you are, but those things are dwarfed by the remarkable world that seems to wake up within you, that comes streaming into your awareness once you realize you can feel not just the body of the world, but its soul, too. It is here that you do just what Peter Gabriel wrote about in his song In Your Eyes when he says "I reach out from the inside."  He is certainly a modern Gnostic in his own right.

It is here within you, in your ability to feel that you will tap the soul of the world.  This is the collective consciousness of the race, but it is also all of nature, all of what we know and do not yet know that is part of the body of the All.  When you realize that this portal exists in you, the world will live in you in a new way.  When I say that, realize that you already feel it, you just haven't sensed it in its most obvious of ways so that it grabs your attention as being something more than just your own feelings.  Once you experience this, you will be on a road toward trusting what you feel and it will naturally have a way of guiding you forward.  This is why all awakened teachers most often explain that what you seek is not outside of you, but is within.  All of it.  Awakening will bring this as the two currents held at arms length for so long are finally brought into union and what some call kundalini activates within your awareness.  The two loose ends of the universe have now been connected and a current begins to flow within you that leads you to feel the shimmering presence, the very essence of All That Is alive, awake and aware in this very moment.  This will be a blooming within you as something inside of you gives way like hardened soil softened by the rain of your intention, your ardent question "Is this all there is?"  And the landslide inside of you can begin at anytime that you are ready to lessen the divisions within you that have kept this awareness at bay. 

Trust your feelings even if they give you trouble or seem to betray you.  This wont happen forever, these betrayals.  They are a temporary condition, and soon enough the land will slide away as the soft soil of your soul unfolds.  It is like you are a book with pages that themselves have pages.  Your mind unfolds like this book as a seemingly hidden character or quality of yourself and the universe appears seemingly for the first time in a great moment of terrible revelation.  The terrible part will simply be there as the scum rests on the surface of a pond, but which will very soon be churned and refined as the waters of your being grow crystal clear and resolves brilliant.  The garden hose carries some dirt within and you must allow the energy to flow.  The universe has a way of clearing you out so the water of its soul can run bright and clear.  In just this way, you will learn to trust your feelings because they are the entryway to the infinite. 

Why Feeling Is Key In Awakening

Most of the problems people have in an awakening are related to holding onto an old accepted structure within the psyche that actually has served to LIMIT the awareness of the divine pulse, what I call Waveform Awareness, which is just like the particle/wave duality expressed in physics.  I write about this in earlier blog entries as a way to simplify how this works, realizing that it is a system, a method for understanding (but which is free from dogma and which applies to observable phenomenon).  We use the individual self as expressed through ego to hold firm to our old ways of being, not realizing that we just need to be different, we need to learn to FEEL differently.  But there is stuff underlying why it is we have trouble with feeling so deeply into the Infinite, in the the Waveform Awareness that is our birthright.

You are composed of a huge number of karmic attachments which kundalini serves to help you to release.  Everyone who has gone through kundalini will have had some degree of experience with how this intelligent energy moves to do this. Gopi Krishna himself went through a terrible time because of these egoic structures that resisted the flow of the Infinite in him. It created night terrors, pain, and anxiety.  He feared he might even die. I know these issues all too well, having been through them.  What changed things was my awareness of letting go of my attachment to old karma.  Self esteem issues, fearing not being loved by others, all of which served to distort the truth inside which is that we ARE perfect, that we ARE loved (we are this love), and the way to the Infinite wasn’t through some outside agency telling us we were okay but tapping the Infinite, the Waveform Awareness.  If you have all these emotional issues running around inside of you, they will block your awareness of them.  You can glimpse them, certainly, because kundalini does this, but until you pull the plant or karma out by its roots, it will continue to grow and cause you problems.  Your awareness will keep going to the issue, unresolved in you as it is, instead of being free to focus on the bliss and beauty that is your own soul.  The problem about feeling is that our emotions can get in the way since they rest alongside the channel to the infinite, which is our feeling centers.  These attachments have a life within us, almost like a subroutine in computer code;  it rests there until activated and then will run through its routine until it is done, ready to be activated by the right code/event.

You are a bundle of these little routines alive in you.  Most of the ones that cause you the most trouble are ones that you have shoved down deep into your subconscious.  This is the nature of trauma.  In fact, if the trauma is severe enough, you will even forget about the events of the trauma for months, even years.  This is a protective element of your psyche, but it also means that some things can remain submerged for a long time, or partially submerged, with the person being unable to get at the material enough to deal with it, or to know its even there.  Awareness is key, and kundalini can help drive this.  It is equally true that you don’t have to know that a given trauma has been released.  Sometimes something just falls away, you feel it as it happens, and you focus on how good it makes you feel as whatever it was is now gone for good, taken out by its root. The problem is that feeling is not rational, and kundalini is not about anything rational in the normal sense.  Its about the infinite.  Its about everything.  Under its broad sky, you can feel all the other people awakened on the planet.  You can feel into the past as if it were the present and feel the countless pilgrims and followers as they prayed and leaned into the currents of kundalini.  The mind and ego seeks to know, but the soul resides in everything and so identifying this or that issue or problem just isn’t a concern to the soul.  Merely forgiving it all to reach the All is what its all about.  Inner peace, joy, and bliss.  As the individual learns how to be effected by this larger self, this Infinite Self, it is like a child learning from its parent how to be. It slowly molds and forms that self so that it is in a better place to channel the power of the Cosmos.  It can’t do this as effectively with all these subroutines or issues at work within the self.
Many people will feel fear over kundalini as it washes over them.  The fear is not the kundalini, the fear is the person reflecting their own fracturing in the face of such a powerful energy.  Uncertainty arises about whether it will take them over (yes it  will) and like a lover, it seeks to entirely seduce you….but you cannot be seduced if you are hanging on for dear life, fingers clenched at the edges of the river as this mighty force seeks to wash you away.  “But everything I know will surely be washed away if I let go!”  cries the ego self.  And it is true.  All that it held dear WILL be washed away, and yet, the self will remain because individuality is as immortal as the soul.  But the ego does not know this.  It fear extinction.  Many will experience nightmares, all reflections of their own fears exaggerated and highlighted by the presence of kundalini.  Little surprise that kundalini will release vast amounts of the fear drug into the body; adrenaline.  When this began ina whole new way in my own body, it was extremely hard.  I had no other choice but to sit quietly as all I wanted to do was to leap out of my own skin.  Kundalini was teaching me how to conquer fear.  It took a while.  Slowly, though, desperately, even, I found a path to bliss even in the midst of the harshest environment, which was fear, all highlighted by adrenaline.  You see, the adrenaline served a purpose; it was like a microscope making all my small unnoticed fears obvious to my waking mind, to my very being.  No more ignoring it. Just as I had experienced a long march of all of my more obvious worries and fears in the beginning of kundalini through dreams about all the things in my life that got to me, so did adrenaline ferret out my more subtle fears that remained lurking.

In a situation such as this, you either hold onto the feeling of fear and the adrenaline continues, or you let go and realize that there is nothing to do but let go, to surrender.  This was like boot camp, Surrender101 for me.  There was nothing to do to wrestle with this fear…..no…nothing to do but to let go.  I developed imagery that involved me sitting in a boat, allowing the tether to the dock to simply go.  Rudderless, I allowed the ocean, which I envisioned as being kundalini, to just take me.  When I did this, when I began to think about things that were tied to the vibration of surrender, things got easier.  I was using the powers of spiritual alchemy to make a change in my physiology.  As a result of this, I was found a pathway for turning fear into bliss.  The vibration of fear contains within it the seed of bliss. We can turn on bliss in our bodies by removing the fear that lies dormant in us.  When we conquer the fear, the path lies open to feel the rush of the Waveform, the Universe in our bodies, both etheric and physical.  It was around this time that I began to have profound openings of my heart that were nothing short of amazing.  As I watched as each one of these happened, I realized each of them was based in choice.  None of this was really mysterious.  Something in me that was not rational nor mental was choosing to open to the universe.  I can only describe it as being a profound desire to open to the universe, like a woman surrenders to her male counterpart, allowing him to come into her, to move all through her, to fill her with his presence and bliss.  I knew that this was the feminine side of kundalini and of my own awareness that made this possible.  This is where understanding the dual role of the masculine and feminine characteristics in the psyche can aid one in an awakening.  Little wonder in out male dominated society that we have such problems embracing the universe in such a deep and profound way.  Maybe we just don’t know how to utilize this very feminine aspect of our being to aid in its happening.  Some people might even feel like it makes them less a man, or a woman might feel it makes her less a woman to bring her masculine characteristics forward in order to balance things in the face of an awakening.

At an early stage in all of this, I began to be aware of presences in my field, all that resolved into very vivid beings that would show up from time to time.  One of these I felt was someone whom I thought of as my zen monk.  He would come into my field of awareness and he would rest calmly asking me quite clearly what I was doing.  I explained I was trying to find this better place within me.  He said there was nothing to do, that the work had already been done.  Countless adherents, he explained, had sought over millenia to find this place, this vibration, and now was the time in our development that all we need do is step into the blueprint laid before us.  Bit by bit, I got the idea. Feeling into this field that was the universe of consciousness, I was aware of every being that was awake like some point of light….all perfect, brilliant, pulsing and aware and serving to feed into this larger awareness. I was even aware of still more that were in the wings awaiting the perfect timing when they too would awaken.  In a moment I could feel how the planet was waking up, that there would be far more people who would undergo this experience.  

We were all individual and yet also part of a Collective Consciousness greater than the sum of its parts.  Here, there was no question; here, there was nothing to do but to soak it all up and let it reform and shape us.  Fear only served to get in the way.  Slowly, ego was pushed to the back of the bus and a different kind of driver took its place.  The need to know where we were going began to diminish.  In fact, the less “I” knew, the better.  By learning I was already attracting events without having to do anything materially, I began to understand that a new arrangement of self was possible that was built on a trust of this larger set of elements that is our divine birthright. I also realized that what I attracted followed by belief, my feelings about a whole world of things.  the key was in changing those feelings so that the universe would begin to reflect back to me events that would be more beneficial to me in my present place in life. To do this meant letting go of a number of things, like self worth (or lack thereof). It always revolved around learning to love myself better, to allow myself to feel what I had refused through feeling all my life.  Somewhere I believed I was not worthy of this love that was inside of me.  The universe was ready to show me its love, and I WAS this universe!  This wasn’t selfish love, but self love, a very important distinction.  Its very much about  growing up spiritually, and about not being so hard on ourselves that we prefer to marinate in crisis and pain instead of joy and love.  When I was able to begin softening these ideas and beliefs, how I felt changed.  And events around me changed.  More and more, unusual and amazing events came into my life unbidden, but secretly wished for, most often in the most amazing timing that its hard to believe.  But unlike C.S. Lewis, who maintained that suffering was God’s way of helping us to grow, I realized in a moment that the suffering wasn’t even necessary.  Suffering was merely the result of all of the memes ABOUT suffering at work within the self that kept the divine bliss at bay.  Remove that, and the universe comes rushing in.  I promise you.  Learning what is eating at you this very moment...all of the material you have pushed back lifetime after lifetime that does not serve you, does not make you happy or content is the journey.  You are on this journey now.  You are not here by accident. 

Feeling is key, but in order for feeling to work well, emotions that are built around hurt and trauma must be forgiven and surrendered.  Being able to no longer judge, to realize that the imperfection is perfect in a way, the shadow dissolves in the face of a still brighter light of the soul.  But without being able to feel into this new world, we remain stuck in the mind and ego, two parts of the self that cannot and will not feel.  They can only analyze.  Using them in awakening is a bit like picking up a screw driver and proclaiming its the screw driver that unlocks the universe.  It is you who does this, and you must use the tool for a very specific purpose.  Beyond that, though, the tool has limited use.  Use it for what it is good for, but do not mistake it for the end-all be all.  The ego is perfect for sitting at the back of the bus, not shunned, but allowed the place it should be in, which is no longer front and center.  the mind can turn on the great mystery of this experience, but it will never plumb its depths.  It can’t.  But your deeper Essential Self can.  And will.

Nemasté

What The Yogi Teaches

“You cannot live by feelings and emotions; you have to live by your intuition and consciousness.”

—

Yogi Bhajan

I have said before that emotion and feeling is the language of the universe, it is the one element that causes the universe to align quickly to what it is you believe, through feeling.  It is not by mind but through feeling that one grasps the infinite.  When one is able to make peace with their feelings that are misaligned with their higher self,  a natural alignment begins to flow and the All is felt in the moment.  Sadly the Yogi is not entirely correct, and perhaps only a perceptual problem, but words have power for they focus the mind.  Words are things, but how we use them determines our vibrational frequency.  Being careful about words is being careful about what one knows and has experienced as the arbiter of what is meaningful.  I know that this sounds very pedantic and stuffy.  But if you think about words and how we ascribe meaning to them, some interesting things float to the top.

Everything is vibration.  Words have it too, but words are vessels.  I can use the same word and get five different meanings out of the same word, all with very different energies.  Its about intent, you see?  I can say “Oh that’s KILLER!”  and we know that I am saying how great something is.  But a killer is also someone who is pretty off, off enough to go on a rampage, right?  Just as we have associations built into words, associations can also lead you absent a deeper knowing into areas that are not so aware of just what it is that you are talking about.  Sometimes the problem people have with the New Age movement is that some words and their use can be vague.  Or feel vague.  When something is vague, it can have a range of associations.  When you do not understand something fully, you can assume things about something that just isn’t so, and it can lead you more into your own illusions and misunderstandings because of the vacuum of meaning, and instead of clearing things up, it only leads to still more misunderstanding as we seek to insert what we believe or feel into the mix. This happens all the time in religious texts because people are bringing what THEY believe, and this is very much built on the Law of Attraction, you see, as we seek to find those things that match us, even if they in truth do not (we often wind up MAKING them fit).  Very often people will want the given religion to serve where they are instead of being served by the teachings to bring them to a better place.  Meanings get corrupted from their original intent as a result of this, and so you can see just how difficult it is for a religion to serve us (one reason why Krishnamurti sought the pathless path which eschewed ANY religion as a result of this thorny problem existing in human nature which is the tendency to move from truth to some distortion of it which winds up reflecting the person’s own collective distortions about how they feel the world is when in fact its just about their own unresolved feelings and notions that have blinded them from the Source of all being….which is beyond all religion, and beyond all words even!). The teachings of some great person or teacher then gets bent to the uses of the individual, you see. This is as it should be because we will always do this, probably as long as we have these distorted lenses of perception at work within us.  We will always seek to find what is meaningful in the moment, and what we find meaningful is based more on our current awareness in the moment, where we are, and those lenses that we have at work in our perceptions.

One very good example of how this all happens, I think, is the gospel of repentance as it has been accepted by mainstream Christianity.  I wont go deep into this, but it has to do with how texts are translated.  Repentance has to do with changing one’s mind, but it also has wound up meaning a lot of different things, which are about punishment and doing bad deeds (and the problem here is not with the deeds but the feeling and thinking that lead to them…deeds are a symptom of something still deeper).  Even the scholars agree that this is so, but what if the followers missunderstood what Jesus meant when he said “Change your way!”  The word “Way” in Greek has an association with the mind, and its entirely possible that Jesus meant “change your mind” as in change how you see things, how you feel about things.  One disciple once asked Jesus how they should treat their enemies and Jesus replied “like they are not your enemies.”  The way you treat others in this situation involves a real change in how you feel, in how you think and react to others.  It is also, not surprisingly, the path to peace.  Considering that Jesus spoke all of his teachings in Aramaic and the gospels we have now are written in Greek, there is enough of a disconnect with the two languages to provide room for interpretation.  The thing to realize about Aramaic is that it is a highly contextual language.  Remember how I used the word “killer!” earlier?  Aramaic is very much this way.  You have to understand what Jesus was trying to get across or you could misunderstand the entire thrust of the teaching.  This is the problem I have had for years with Christian texts from the get-go.  Something bothered me from a very early age about them, and it wasn’t until fairly recently when I began reading some of the gnostic texts that surfaced in Nag Hammadi Egypt in 1945 that a light bulb went off in my head.  Here were texts that were banned by the early church for being heretical. They were ordered burned, and their proponents discredited.  In his article, Rev. Dr. Dave Oester, DD., PhD.  states of the history of the competing viewpoints in the early church:

The Gnostic Gospels have been suppressed for centuries, but when Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code hit the best seller list, people starting asking questions about the man called Jesus. Brown’s novel focuses on the conclusion articulated in Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, which is the pseudonym of Henry Soskin.

Their conclusion was that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and fathered a child. They also concluded that there is a secret society known as Priory of Sion (PS) dating back to the First Crusade and the formation of the Knights Templar as its military and financial front. The Priory of Sion protects the royal claimants of the Merovingian dynasty, because they may be the literal descendants of Jesus and his wife, Mary Magdalene.

In addition, the Holy Blood, Holy Grail proposed that the Roman Catholic Church tried to kill off all remnants of this dynasty and their guardians, the Cathars and the Templars, during the dark days of the Inquisition, in order to maintain power through the apostolic succession of Peter instead of the hereditary succession of Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene was descended from King David and high priest Aaron, thus, all male could have laid claim to both the throne and the office of high priest of Jerusalem.

The Gnostics was the flip side of the orthodox Christians. The winners always rewrite history to match their version of events. The same was true when the orthodox sect dominated the Gnostic sects. Rewriting history was easy; anything that Emperor Constantine opposed the bishops rejected from the Council of Nicene in AD 325.

The Gnostic writings suggested lost knowledge about Jesus that was not included in the formation of what we call the New Testament today. These writings suggested the human side of Jesus and that revelation was not acceptable after Jesus was finally elevated to the level of a God in AD 325.

This Gnostic biblical version presented a totally different side to the teachings of Jesus that included the early Orthodox Church policy of bloodshed, corruption, and the genocide of all other Gospel accounts of Jesus not approved by them. In these nearly 100 gospels, too many accounts showed Jesus was just a man that violated the accepted stance of the Orthodox Church.
The debate erupted in a showdown three centuries later when bishops met at the invitation of Emperor Constantine, who provided them with shelter and food. This was the first Council of Nicene where the bishops were told by the Emperor what teachings were acceptable and which were not.

History notes Emperor Constantine as the man who unified the Christian Church. However, this unification had a price. Emperor Constantine ordered any writings in disagreement with the official view destroyed. Huge bonfires lit the evening sky, as Gnostic scrolls were set aflame, much like the Nazis attempt to eradicate the Jews in Germany. Constantine’s unification process meant death to all that presented anything contrary to the official position of the Orthodox Church.

Prior to the Council of Nicene in AD 325, the structure of the orthodox Christian sect had no formalized doctrines and no physical church buildings. They were competing sects among all of the other Christian groups. They took their name from Emperor Constantine, the Roman Catholic Church, meaning the Roman universal Christians. As a reward for supporting the orthodox view, Emperor Constantine gave them their first church building a year later.
Source:  http://www.ghostweb.com/gnostic.html

Since words themselves are vessels for meaning, being able to discern the meaning is important, but if you are talking about something as mysterious as what Jesus was likely talking about, its easy to miss the point entirely.  This is where FEELING comes in.  When  you can FEEL into the message, the gold will always shine in the sand.  Always.  Something in you entirely mysterious yet attuned to the abiding spirit of the thing will show itself not through hearing words always but through feeling.  But how is this? How do we KNOW what someone is trying to say is what we think it is? Behind the words is the intent.  By using your infinite self, without competing static from the earth-bound individual self, you can navigate through feeling.  The thing though, is you have to be able to overcome all of your biases, all based perfectly well in your feelings about how things are or should be, and are all bound up within FEELINGS which themselves are unresolved and which turn in you, keeping greater awareness from happening.  You are getting static from the individual self and it can keep you from glimpsing the broader realm of experience.

I suspect that Yogi Bhajan meant to not let your unresolved emotions to rule you.  I do not know his teachings, but when I feel it, I sense a certain semantic problem….a quibble on one level, but there is an aspect to this that isn’t quite on the mark and goes to understanding all of this, which is untangling the emotional threads that are karmic from your true nature as an infinite self which also FEELS.
Feeling and emotion are so close to one another.  Emotion IS feeling, the ACT of feeling most often, while feeling does not always involve emotion as we think of it.  Pleasure and bliss are things we do not think of as emotions, but they certainly are feelings.  The connection to the Universal Self, the Infinite Self, is through feeling and tends not to be tied up in emotions that are raw, unresolved, hurt, or otherwise. The feeling of the Infinite Self is itself settled within its own bliss and pleasure.  It is perfect, it is not dual, but unified. The smaller self, the individual self reincarnating here on earth is itself dual.  It is the soap bubble awareness that I have written about before in the Particle/Wave duality that is our experience here. So in a sense, Bhajan is correct.  Don’t let your raw emotions rule you.  However, the channel through which you experience your emotions is the same part of you that glimpses and experiences the Universal Consciousness, the Infinite self!

So how do we keep from being tripped up by our emotions?  That, dear reader, is the subject of another blog entry and I hope that you look into it to find out what I have to say because there isn’t much being discussed on the planet right now about how to deal effectively with karma, which for me are those unresolved emotional issues that have tripped us up perhaps from the Beginning of your entire journey on the planet!  This issue is where Awareness is coupled with Grace in a process of relinquishing what may have been an attachment to something that has done little else but cause you trouble and hurt.  Time to surrender the world of this for something far better….

Just as a historical aside, look for my blog Did Jesus Live In India? which looks at a man who had been crucified and who taught in a very similar way to the historical Jesus who lived in India with a woman whose name was Mary.  In fact, there is a grave stone that shows the nail marks in the feet of this individual that are consistent with how the Romans placed the feet together.